Rising Stars, Falling Stars exploded with a screening of Ken Russell’s nutters version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome’s Last Dance featuring the glorious Oscar winning Glenda Jackson who is now a British MP. The SRO crowd was revelling in the queerer than thou aesthetics of the evening that began with music from the Salome opera and kclavier accompaniment by Scandanavian jihadist Daniel Hendrickson doing a fine George Segal impersonation singing the title song of the Jackson film A Touch of Class. Arsenal Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus was radiant and in a festive mood expertly preparing the throngs clamouring to see this rare cinematic gem. The Arsenal’s 35 milimeter print looked sensational. Shout out to large shvanzed crack projectionist Axel who has such lovesexy nervous energy. Staying after the screening for schmooze and booze while that other Miss Nasty Jackson provided the musical score: Salome Gersch and friend enjoying the film of her namesake, glamorous young German artist Paula!, Uli Ziemons, Europe’s sauciest studkin, Markus Ruff of Living Archive Project, photog&video artist Armin Linke,Guggenheim Award recipient Maria Losier, film historian Marc Siegel, intermedia actress Susanne Sachsse,Piero Bellomo of La Collezione,young Israeli Yony Leiser who is some kind of director, German theatre producer Mia Sullivan, beautiful and exotic Polish/Japanese artist Winston Chieminski, British artist and curator Elly Clarke, lovely Berlin based performance artist Sophia of Plan b., Little Alex of Macedonia who styled Ms. Davis with his Venus in the Garden star Alexandro, modern dancer Assaf Hochman, South Afrikan art shtar Athi-Patra Ruga,Noam Gorbat of the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded power team, booty pie curator Simon Castets,fresh faced art wheeler dealer Federico Vavassori,Manuel Rios, the famed Slovakian courtesan and Bel Ami film studio contract player with Corbin Fisher All American matinee idol Christopher Tavi aka: Josh on a Berlin pitstop before meeting high profile government clients in Switzerland, lifestyle entrepreneur Ben Pundole, original Afro Sister Helen “Hell in Bed” O’Neill aka: Urethra Franklin looking svelte and stylish on her European holiday with a bevy of horny teenage boys at her side. Miss Helen is a hoot and sheer delight. Wish I could have spent more time catching up on her hippy-go-lucky life. Miss Helen is one of my oldest and dearest girlfriends, she is a solid good time Sally who loves to drink and she and her younger sister affectionately known as The Hern! Are always the life of every party. I use to work for Helen at her legendary punk rock boutique on Melrose Avenue in the early 1980s called Retail Slut. Having graduated from UC Santa Barbara Miss Helen was also a major originator of the Ventura Queer Scene that revolved around Homo House I and II featuring such scintillating luminaries as the hilarious,late, great Mrs. Jeffrey Burroughs aka: Thing, who one summer evening in the 1980s when he was an underage stricher got picked up by two big black South Central LA roughnecks who he wound up servicing and accompanying on a liquor store robbery spree, punkette minx Diane Palette who straddled the handlebars of a Hell’s Angel chopper doing the puppy chow on the dudes peterfication while he mowed down Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu—I kid you not!, Delectable Dora of Bates Beach and the new wave haberdashery Wilde Planet who at one time ruled a punk rock empire that stretched from Solvang to Nardcore making her one of Ventura Counties wealthiest but completely generous young proper white ladies, Big Dicque Doug Junior who was a sweet innocent twinky pie hornpig exhibitionist, and the fabulous Bushe Bunny who once fell out of a tree at Blow Job Park in West Hollywood while getting sodomized. Darling Bushe whose real name I can’t seem to remember sadly committed suicide a few years before I left California for Germany. He will be forever missed for his loyal friendship,humour and commitment to radikal queer akshunism. May goddess worship bless his Pagan Druid Wiccan soul.
Miss Helen O’Neill’s next stop on her round the world holiday travels is Istanbul, before returning to Poland for languid fornicating with Krakow’s gangbanging post Rave youths.
I never go out to bars as I don’t drink anymore but I went to this little pub in Mitte awhile back to see kJohnny Blue of the Blue Bros fame workshoping his Living Archive project. kJohnny is a major musical talent, gifted and devoted to his craft. For his Living Archive event he will be taking sound fragments from various films in the Arsenal archive and turning it into a musical soundscaping performance which I think is quite the brilliant idea. No film images just musical P’s and Q’s. His workshop performance the other evening didn’t start till very late so I didn’t get to hear much of it as the space was just too smokey for me and my asthmatic condition to handle, and I had an early morning breakfast meeting with a visiting curator. I am anxious to hear the kJohnny eleganza in June when it gets its official premiera during the Living Archive Festival.
I had a juicy Spring fling with a horndoggy 27 year old Russian named Yuraslav Yeltsin who is related to Boris Yeltsin and is a doppleganger to artist Slava Mogutin, only a bit taller and more muscular. It felt a little incestuous since I have been friends with Slava from the time he first came to the States in the 1990s. I got over my initial qualms to thoroughly enjoy the sizzling sexing with this voracious studly Rusky. Hey at my age I may never get another opportunity to make it with a youthquaker. Its funny that after my little sex misadventure I started thinking about my primary school days. This Russian kid I squired had the same kind of penetrating blue/grey eyes of an Irish lad I had a crush on back in the second grade named Shaun. My first great childhood love was a divine Japanese boy who looked just like the artist Dean Sameshima. Shaun was best friends with a nerdy Chinese kid named Russell Lim who I went to school with from grade school to UCLA. We couldn’t escape each other. Russell and Shaun were both part of the MGM(Mentally Gifted Minor) Program. Shaun on the other hand was one of the few white kids living in my inner city neighorhood attending my elementary school on Hobart Blvd. Shaun and the family a Dutch classmate named Patrik white flighted to the suburbs by third grade. When I was in fifth grade there was only two white families with school aged children in my neighbourhood The Taylor’s and the Smit’s. Edward Taylor was a very talented artist and a total goofball. In fourth grade Edward had an openly gay relationship with a mulatto named David Hayes. They shocked the community by making out with each other and fondling shamelessly, not bothering to hide in the least. The administration didn’t know what to do other then try to separate them. But honey it was true love because they couldn’t be parted. Their parents were called in, and didn’t think it was such a big deal just proclaiming that they would tire of each other which they did after the adults stopped freaking out about it. David’s mother Patti Hayes was a casting agent and a very intelligent and striking radical feminist, who was quite friendly with my mother who at the time was leading a lesbian seperatist organization along with a butch teacher of mine named Doris Tepper. David Hayes was a local TV star on KTTV Channel 11’s Student News program, the station that later became the conservative Fox Network. Edward Taylor’s father was a hippy dippy Robert Redford look-a-like circa the film Jeremiah Johnson. Mr.Taylor was extremely sexy and wore Jesus sandles and had big manly Fred Flinstone feet. The Taylor’s lived in a huge three story house in the historic Harvard Heights neighbourhood that was adjacent to mine. The Taylor’s were a very progressive family who put their liberalism where their penis was and never white flighted and were still living in the neighbourhood when I moved out for Hollywood during my punk rock years in the late 1970s. Edward was a dork during elementary school but by the time he turned into a teenager he had blossomed into a hunk like his hot dad. Edward Taylor left the public school system for parochial school attending the Jesuit all boy prep school Loyola High which was walking distance to both of our homes. I wish I could have gone to Loyola as all the boys at that school were rich and incredible looking. During high school I would run into Edward Taylor in the neighbourhood, and he was always friendly and warm. He kind of turned into a bit of a stoner hesher and even had a beautiful black girlfriend who was as dark skinned as he was blondine.
The other white family still in the neighborhood was that of Steven Smit who in the fifth grade got into a huge knock down slug fest with this thugish black boy named Eric Holder, who the entire school was afraid of. Steven was a very angelic looking white kid with ice blonde hair, freckles and a brush style military haircut. In the early 1970s he dressed very Leave it to Beaver. He, his sisters and parents were complete holdouts from the 1950s. It was very odd. When Steven was fighting Eric he called him a dirty filthy nigger. Our teacher Miss Stevenson was quite elderly and on the verge of retirement and she couldn’t separate the two boys, and had to get a male teacher from down the hall to break up the fight. It was very ugly. Soon after the fight Steven left the school and his family white flighted to the suburbs. I was quite friendly with Steven as he was very cute in a Republican sort of way, we were even pen pals writing to each other regularly for several years after his family moved to Chatsworth.
Actually there was some other white families in my neighbourhood but I didn’t really consider them white as they were from Italy and Argentina. On 12th Place at Western Avenue lived this Italian family who had a son who went to college back east. Whenever he was home his motorcycle was parked in their driveway. He had longish dark blonde hair and looked a little like Joe Dellasandro mixed with Jan-Michael Vincente. He gave me rides sometimes on the back of his motorcycle, and holding his waiste sent a thrill up my spine. The Argentine family of all strapping sons lived on Oxford Drive next to the Pico Pico branch of the public library. The son who was my age was Frank Valentine and he was very sexy as a kid and as he grew older he got even sexier with broad shoulders and a muscular masculine gruff manner. Frank started seeing this Japanese girl who lived on my street named Betty Uyemura. Betty and I had been rivals since second grade. Betty was an overachiever who always got top grades and held all the attention from the teachers. Betty wound up getting knocked up by Frank, who had quit school in the 9th grade to work in his father’s auto shop and later joined the military, got married to Betty and they both moved away to God-knows-where-land.
On the next block Serrano and 12th Street was a gorgeous craftsman house built in the teens, that had the most manicured front and back yard with fruit trees. An elderly German couple lived in this house and they were very mean and nasty to all the children in the neighbourhood except for me for some reason. I think they liked me because my mother was the only one in the neighbourhood who could speak fluent German with them. My mother’s neighbourhood in Louisiana was very multi-cultural with Creoles, Italians and Germans all living closely together. My mother for some reason could pick up languages very easily. I wish I had that talent. Besides French Creole, Italian and German my mother could speak Spanish, Japanese and Korean. The elderly German couple who lived in this pristine house my mother called Adolphe and Eva behind their back. She was very nice to them to their face but actually couldn’t stand them. She felt that they were Nazi sympathizers. Adolphe died around 1973 and then a few years later Ava passed. Their grown children sold the house and a Latino family from El Salvador bought it. Like a lot of American cities Los Angeles had a sizeable German immigrant population.There was another German immigrant woman on Hobart Blvd at 14th street that lived as a barricaded shut-in in her tiny gingerbread looking house. She only came out to invite my mother in for coffee and cake klatch. My mother liked her a little better then Adolph&Eva, but not much better as the woman complained about everything. I think she was just lonely. My mother said this woman must have stayed glued to her window in hopes my mother would pass by. Sometimes my mother would take the long way around on her way to shopping center just to avoid having to chittle chat with the lady. When the woman died she had no relatives and had bequethed my mother $15,000 in her will, but my mother didn’t accept the money so it went to various Catholic charities with the rest of what was quite a sizeable fortune. In the paper it was revealed that this woman who my mother called Frauline Frizzled whose real name I never knew was quite wealthy and owned lots of property throughout South Central Los Angeles,but chose to live in this rather modest house. When my grandmother, my mother’s mother died she left a lot of money to be divided by her three surviving children, my mother, Aunt Florine Corine and Uncle I Like Ike, but my mother was so stubborn she refused that money as well.
My high school Los Angeles High is the oldest public school in the city built in 1873. Famous grads include Ray Bradbury, Dustin Hoffman, and Anna May Wong. The school sits on Olympic Blvd & Rimpau right next to the super wealthy olde money enclave of Hancock Park. Kids who live in Hancock Park don’t attend public school, but if they did it would have been LA High. The only kid from Hancock Park who did go to LA High was this unusual blond haired white boy named John Pluntze. John wasn’t good looking, but he wasn’t ugly either. There was something very charming about him, and he had a seductive personality. I was the editor of my high school newspaper The Blue & White and he was one of my ace reporters. We were friendly with each other but were never really friends. John was very straight and surprisingly was quite the player. I never figured out how he was so successful in juggling so many girls. At lunch time he could be found behind some building on campus in high daddy mack romancing mode. All I can say is that John Pluntze must have been packing some major meat for so many black girls in my school to be that crazy for him. Come to think of it he was carrying around a pretty hefty package. Its not like he was the only white guy in the school. There were a few others but they were raised in deepest darkest Funkytown so they talked and acted very negroid and John Pluntze was very olde school white dude, in fact he was super white. At LA High school there was this one white kid who was on the baseball team and lived in that neighbourhood northwest of the Santa Monica Freeway. He and his sister were very ghetto, and I think they were even Muslims because the sister was friends with my Muslim convert BFF Renita McCain. The other white boy was on the track team and I thought at first he was just a light skinned black boy, but one of his friends who was on the school paper told me that he wasn’t mixed and that his white father married a black lady who was his stepmother and raised him from a baby. Before John Pluntze graduated from high school he caused a major scandal having an affair with a youngish black lady teacher who had been the younger lesbian lover of Ms. Maybloom my 11th grade AP History teacher. I never liked Ms. Maybloom for some reason, and she detested me because I would always challenge her in class in my quiet little polite way that really irritated her. Most of the teachers at my high school couldn’t stand me. Especially Mrs. Marcia Grimmer . Talk about a fitting name for someone. She was extremely grimm and the advisor to the school newspaper staff. She didn’t really know anything about journalism, she was mainly the French teacher, but she got in good with the principle and he made her our advisor. Boy did we ever clash. But I pulled her down a peg when I became the first person in the history of the school district to win first place in the Statewide Journalism competition for news writing, which wasn’t even my forte since I was a features writer. Mrs. Grimmer even discouraged me from entering the competition-some advisor she was. When I won the whole district made a huge deal out of it because it entitled them to get special funds from the government. And I made Mrs. Grimmer look good with the principle, the superintendent of schools and Mayor Tom Bradley. Mrs. Grimmer really hated me when in an article in the LA Times I spilled the beans on how she didn’t want me to enter the competition thinking I would embarrass myself and the school. The competition was really tough and was held on the posh campus of Pepperdine University. I even won a scholarship to attend that school,but because its run by a fundamentalist church I declined. All freshmen at Pepperdine are forced to attend chapel services. The boys at that school were super sexy surfer dudes with smoking bods and huge feet. Their water polo players were the most ultimate dreamy specimens of beefcake alive. Looking back it was really some feat that I beat out all these other wealthier schools in the state. I guess in many ways I did become a journalist, writing for years for the LA Weekly, publishing my own independent publications and writing for many mainstream art, fashion and culture magazines and newspapers. Who would have thunk?
O at LA High School there was also this handsome, tall Israeli boy who transferred to my school from a Hebrew High School on the Westside of Los Angeles. He had the most gorgeous green eyes and was very hairy and smolderingly swarthy and filled with complete sexual bravado. I remember him and John Pluntze were in competition for the affections of all the hottest black girls in the school. Well I think the Israeli won.
I wonder what happened to the Israeli or John Pluntze who I heard went to Cal State LA for college. Considering John Pluntze came from a wealthy Hancock Park family his choice of higher learning was quite uninspiring.
*
The gifted, super masculine ginger haired Los Angeles based artist Patrick Lee has a solo show in New York that opens April 25th at Ameringer McEney Yohe Gallery 525 West 22nd Street NYC 10011. Opening reception is 6-8pm and the show runs till May 25th. For more information go to www.amy-nyc.com
