Was taken for a nice luncheon to Maxway Café at Winterfeldt
Platz by the personable visiting art dealer from Chicago G.Craig Smith. Mr. Smith has been following my retarded lady
career since the early 1990s when we first met at a reading I did at the People
Like Us bookshoppe.
The great fearless leader of kollektiv CHEAP Ms. Susanne
Sachsse had one of her delightful dinner parties for the visiting literary
scholars Sianne Ngai and Mark McGurl of Stanford University. We were joined by my young proteges Acme
Singt, Christophe DeRohan Chabot and film historian Marcuse Siegelstein who
actually did the cooking following La Sachsse’s secret recipe. The food was heavenly as is always the case
at the famous East Berlin salon of Susi Su.
Mr. McGurl and Ms. Ngai are enchanting and very vivacious. Ms. Ngai will be giving the talk “Theory of
the Gimmick” on Monday January 12 7:30pm at the ICI Foundation. She is a Harvard educated English professor
and has published the books Ugly Feelings, Out Aesthetic Catagories-Zany, Cute
& Interesting as well as essays with such fab titles as “The Cuteness of
the Avant Garde” and “Merely Interesting”.
I can’t wait to hear what she has to say at her lecturina and I’m bringing a cadre of my
interns and young former students. During
dinner Ms. Ngai recommended two books by D.A.Miller
A Place for Us on Hollywood Musicals and Jane Austen and the Secret of
Style.
I took Scandinavian Muzlim jihadist Daniel Hendrickson for
his birthday breakfast to a relatively new café on the canal in NeuKoeln called
California Breakfast Slam at Instrasse 47.
Loved the décor of the joint and the food was American style without
being too chi chi. I had mushroom scrambled eggs that were very fluffy the way I like em with homefries and Daniel had gravy & biscuits. Our waitress was a lovely young Spanish woman.
On Silvester I watched several serials that were sent to me
on DVD including Transparent which includes a small role by my delightful multi
media artist daughter ZacKary
Drucker. Love ZacKery but I didn’t care
for the main characters in this program which involves three grown children of
an elderly man who comes out as a transgendered woman. The acting of Gaby Hoffman(the daughter of
Warhol legend Viva) is superb. I’ve
known lil Miss Gaby since she was a young girl.
But all of the other leads just come across as too sour Apple Annie in
that American TV fashion that tries to be edgy and winds up falling flat. Was also sent an Australian TV show called
Please Like Me with a lead in the form of the ungainly Josh Thomas who is quite unlikeable on
many fronts besides being fugly. In one of the episodes he
calls himself “a 50 year old looking baby” and I couldn’t agree more. Because Mr. Thomas is the writer and star of
this series he chooses only the best looking young lads to play his love
interests. Nice work if you can get it .
. . I much prefer watching the
episodes sent to me of two defunct series The Tomorrow People and Star Crossed
that don’t try to be anything other then mindless escapism.