DENEN MAN VERGIBT

Denen man vergibt

So sorry dear blogina faithful for being missing in fraction but I was on the first leg of tour with the CHEAP/XiuXiu concert installation project Original Sin.

OS premiered late last year at silent green Kulturquartier. Our first tour stop was Duesseldorf so I had to relearn the songs and text plus the configuration of the piece would be vastly different at the FFT Kammerspiel Theater. The last time I was in Duesseldorf was seven years ago touring with Communist Bigamist. This trip my accomodations were exactly the same at Hotel Rubin on Corneliusstrasse. I like Hotel Rubin. Its an olde fashion gast haus where you receive a real key, and not an awful modern hotel keycard.

We had a nice large audience that included art shtars Katharina Sieverding and her husband Klaus Mettig, Eva Birckenstock who will be bringing us to Art Basel and even “Easy Target” Heiko Pfost of Impulse Festival. Heiko has managed to rangle himself a very goodlooking young Polish lover. Hurray for him.

The recent death of Matt Dike of Delicious Vinyl fame has put me in a minor debilitating funk. I first met Matt when he was the DJ of the famous underground groove club Nairobi Room at the Red Sea Ethiopian Restaurant on 3^rd Street and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles. I was going through my dandy baby dyke period wearing pristine vintage mohair suits from the early 1960s. My mode of dressing, and my snazzy skills on the dance floor caught Matt's immediate attention, and he was very sweet and flirtateous with me back then.

In the early 1980s I compartmentalized my various personas and Matt met me in the dapper guise of Kayle Hilliard a name I used for my prose and poetry. Later when Matt saw me as Vaginal Davis he was very turned off.

La grande diva Ms.Vaginal Davis is not everybodies cup of chamomile tea. I was very young then and searching for love, while living high on an exhalted hobby horse. Matt was extroidinarily beautiful with pale transcluscent skin, almondine shaped eyes and lips of vermillion. I was smitten with Matt Dike.

Matt hung out with a group of very sexy stylish black boys from UCLA and USC who were regulars at Nairobi Room when it was at the Red Sea and later when it moved to the bigger space of the Park Plaza Hotel aka: The Elks Lodge. My scrawny girlish figure certainly couldn't compete with the hunks that were in Matt's regular orbit, and I was resentful and jealous. When Matt was doing the club Power Tools I was in a Bad Fashion Show presentation mounted by Beulah Love and photographer Albert Sanchez, and performed at the club with the band Gore Gore Girls. Matt even came to check out the Afro Sisters after we were in Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine. Too bad he saw one of our worst shows. When Matt was working with Tone Loc the rapper, he contacted me to be in the video for the song Funky Cold Medina. I declined so he cast the late Sean DeLear instead.

The last two times I saw Matt, the first was in the early 1990s at an opening at the famed Ace Gallery on Wilshire Blvd's Miracle Mile. I was dressed very similar to the way he first met me wearing a vintage suit and at first he was very sweet and playful.  I was attending the opening with my friend Doug Gordon who was the art director of Tokyo Journal. Doug also designed the covers of two of my Fertile La Toyah Jackson zines. I think Matt thought that Doug and I were an item because he started teasing me, and so I gave it back to him even harder and then he plopped his business card in my wine glass and I flicked some of the wine into his face.

In 2002 after I came back to Los Angeles from touring with Margaret Cho I saw him at Circus of Hooks Bookstore in Silverlake at the Junction. I didn't recognize him at first. He looked like Robert Redford in the 1970s film Jeremiah Johnson with long straggly hair and a Grizzly Adams mountain man beard.  While in the bookstore I noticed him looking at me with a tenderness. Later I found out through some friends that he was a recluse living in his big Edendale house on the top of a hill in Echo Park plus some other disturbing information I won't go into.

In reading one of his obits in Variety I found out that he grew up as a Jehovah's Witness which explains a lot about some of his behavior towards me over the years. My family has connections to the Jehovah's Witness religion as well, but I embraced my religious fundamentalism and used it in my art practise. Matt didn't have such an outlet, and looking back I wish I had been more forgiving of Matt Dike. Who knows under the right circumstances we could have been the great loves of each others life. If not that at least cherished and endearing friends. Once again my rigid stubborn nature messed things up between us.
Goodbye Matt I can honestly say I loved you, and you will always be the man that got away.

Love Camel aka Andrea Novarin has been in Berlina for a month where he is investigating a possible move from London where he has lived for over 20 years. Camel was not featuring the recent Brexit vote and who can blame him? Its was nice having the crazed packaderm in the capital city. Every Doll needs a Camel.

The Camel and I were invited to a very delicious formal dinner party at the stylish Freidrichshain compound  of my lovesexy former Geissen student Christoph Bovermann and his sizzling hot lover J.P.

Young Christoph lives in a charming flat and has a great position with the European Film Academy. His boyfriend JP is a student at the Film School in Potsdam.

I was also treated to kafe und kuchen by sexy young Michael Scaturro at Zimt und Sucker a delightful Turkish cafe on the Hauptstrasse in Schoneberg. Michael is a well regarded journalist and TV presenter who has worked for Deutche Welle and Bloomberg News.

He has been based in London and Brussels, but has always kept Berlin as his main residency. Michael burned out on the full-time corporate journalista grind and is now freelancing, and experiencing a better quality of life back in Berlina.

One of my brilliant exWeissensee students Anne Duk Hee Jordan has been commissioned by the Beaufort Art Triennial by the Sea in Ostend Belgium to present her sculpture piece I Travelled 1.8 Million Years to Be With You. For more info go to https://www.beaufort 2018.be/

Got a nice little missive from Hotsy Totsy Papa Ron Athey . According to Ron the Faultline Bar in East Hollywood hosted an olde school theme night bringing back the legend of the notorious The Stud Pub. It was an authentic biker/cowboy/black&white men together at last event that was packed and fun drenched.

Daddy Ron ran into Marvina at the party. Marvina is the famed dinge queens delight of Los Angeles who was one of the hot stars of my film The White To Be Angry. I utterly adore Marvina. He is probably the sweetest man you will ever meet in this life or the next.

For the fundraiser Spicy Beef Curtains I turned Marvina into a human chocolate ice cream sundae and sacrificed him to the publicum. Marvina was placed butt naked on a table and covered in ice cream, sprinkles, chocolate syrup, candy and whipped cream. We auctioned off parts of his body to the audience to lick and suck. Within a nanosecond he was licked completely nude left with a throbbing erection and dilated nipples. He told me that the sensation of so many hungry mouths on his entire beautiful black muscular body was quite the turn on.  I am very jealous of Marvina as he gets the kind of sexual attention from men and companionship that has always eluded The Doll.

Marvina's dayjob is Special FX Designer for Hollywood movies like the recent Black Panther. I am not a big fan of action movies or special effects riden comic book films. To me its like watching a very loud, jarring cartoon, and I am sorry to say that these multi-million dollar effects don't look real at all to me. I prefer olde school matte paintings and stop motion.

Watched Black Panther with Love Camel at the IMAX theater in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. It was my first time seeing a commercial film in IMAX. I have to admit that seeing a movie at LA's Cinerama Dome is much better then IMAX.

Getting back to the Black Panther movie. To me it scored high as a spectacle of sorts. Watching it I kept thinking I was seeing a hightech remake of Alex Haley's TV mini series Roots, but with less white people. The black cast was very attractive and appealing especially Ms. Lupita Nyongo.

I like Forest Whittaker, but in this role he seemed flat channeling his past performance as Idi Amin. Angela Bassett looked amazing, but her African accent sounded more like a holdover from Stella Getting Her Groove On in Jamaica. The all-female Proaetorian Guards were my favorite bit of schtick.

Love Camel sent me some rare items from his personal collection including some episodes of the famed Playhouse 90 TV show from the 1950s. Jack Palance looked erie and plastic as The Last Tycoon in an adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald posthumous novel which featured Keenan Wynn and very young, girlish Lee Remick.

Looking majorly gorgeous as a humpy barefoot bandit and sloppy murderer was Tab Hunter in the resplendid true life teleplay that featured a lucky Geraldine Page as Tab's older schoolmarmish love interest. The most interesting of the Playhouse 90 dramas in Camel's collection was a surreal take on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness featuring a sexy half naked and histrionic Roddy McDowell, a liver lipped Boris Karloff and a mesmerizing young earthy Eartha Kitt. Fascinating.

I get sick of hearing commentators rave on about quality TV in the cable era. That is so ridiculous. The only time there was any true quality to the telly was in its early days in the 1950s with their live broadcasts.

CONGRATS to my incredible West Coast gallerist Amy Adams of Adams and Ollman and Dan Gunn of Dan Gunn Berlin.  They sold a whopping amount of my latest make-up painting series Forever Amber at the recent Independent Art Fair in NYC.  Not only that but they scoured the four corners of the known universe to find copies of my old rare video films from the 1980s and had them digitalized.  There is no way I could have ever done that.  Also kudos to my child of high high art Jonathan Berger who is responsible for introducing me to not only Amy and Dan but also my fab New York City gallerists Ben & Risa of Invisible-Exports Gallery on the lower east side.

The next few months will be intense for me so you there may be some holes in this blogina as i tackle several projects at once including painting a new series for Art Basel, performing at the Munch Museum in Oslo, teaching a workshop at the Independent Film School in Vienna, searching for an appropriate site specific location for the premiera of Contemporary Vinegar Syndrome, and more touring with Original Sin.