MILK & HONEY AT THE GOOD LIFE

Hey evrayboday. Last night pretty baby Brian spun records at the Good Life in the financial district? I don't know what the fuck where we were. Somewhere in the circle jerk of inner downtown Boston. A lot of oversized white guys in boot-cut jeans and snazzy Oxfords were hanging out at the bar when we walked in to pregame at 9pm, which I thought was a bad sign, but before I knew it the room was stacked with various style transgressors of every sexual deviance. They're calling this night "Milk & Honey" -which is a little biblical for my taste- but I think it will be successful. Hot lesbian Leah V also spun records and for some reason I really liked it when she played Fiona Apple. No shade.

Brian is always leaning in conspiratorially making deals. Its his look.



HI HATER



Ellen, Tom



Colleen, Emma



Anna



Leah V and D'hana





Oh yeah Marissa went crazy.



Rumor has it that this babe is only visiting Boston from California. What the fuck, WHY? What an epic beauty. I really lost it next to her, I was being so uncool. She broke it down to Iyaz "Replay" and I fell in love with her. Actually.







Nicole, Carly









Cool, c u later.

HERMAN BLUME

I take this message to heart, I really do.

LIBERTY/GLAMOUR

GIVE IT TO ME.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY IKE

Went over to my friends mansion in Somerville last night to wish beauty dude Ike a happy birthday. We ate rum cake and lounged hard by the fire. The thing I admire most about Ike is that he returns home promptly at 5pm every day from his job as a black science reporter and by 5:05pm is sipping an old-fashioned and reading the Wall Street Journal. He is a gentleman.

Marissa, Ben, Ike



Arpy, Max



Pennie, Jeremy, hearthside

ANDREW W.K. AT THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART

On Friday night, Brian and I drove down to Hartford where he was booked to DJ for Andrew WK's performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, America's oldest art museum and Connecticut gentry's oldest social club. Organized by the impressively connected Hartford Party Starters Union, they also invited Ninjasonik, Japanther and Lemonade to perform. The night would have been a totally sold-out success had they charged a cover, but it was free. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I think its tough to describe the night's significance to people unfamiliar with Connecticut society rackets and class systems, however, I will try.

Basically, the HPSU invited Andrew W.K. to headline a concert, so that 800 cool kids could invade the fine art fortress and do their thing in proximity to tens of millions of dollars worth of a world-class art collection. It was a rare opportunity to revel disrespectfully in front of equally rare treasures from every era of history, including but not limited to ancient Egyptian to Benjamin West to Piet Mondrian to Sol Lewitt. I've been to the kind of society events the Wadsworth typically venues, and they are staid, expensive vanity fairs for the region's wealthy and powerful elite. New money isn't even invited to these galas, as is trendy in some other parts of the Northeast. The only occasion for my invitation has been when a generous patron throws me a bone in exchange for my role as up-and-coming artist, for the anthropological delectation of white-haired donors, in awe or in envy of my life as an authentically "exotic bohemian" (If I sound like a rueful ingrate, trust I've always been thankful to eat steak, drink for free and if the stars align, charm some Von Ruthensfocker into buying a painting).

What the HPSU did was almost a complete opposite. They convinced the management to open their doors for free to undiscerning young people in want of fun, with the world's foremost low-culture party animal as the main attraction. No jazz, no foreign dignitaries, no prissy little crudites. The French word "coup" has been thrown around to describe the event in Hartford's local press, because it was a lot like French revolutionaries storming the Bastille.

Luckily, nothing valuable was damaged, although the Wadsworth staff and security were freaked the fuck out and rightly so. I heard tell of a guy lighting up while sitting in the middle of Avery Fountain, and several were kicked out for smoking in bathrooms or entering galleries closed off for the night. I saw a guy push the Giacometti to make room for what was essentially an overflowed moshpit, but it didn't look like the sculpture suffered any real harm. Generally, you think twice before sitting on sculptures or any museum furniture for that matter, but on Friday night kids were lounging left and right, Bud Light and contempt running through their veins. It was a beautiful four-hour-long, real-time, 3-D misuse of a great and venerable culture tomb. In a general sense, it was pop art, but better.

I don't think the Wadsworth Atheneum's reputation will feel any harm due to these offenses at all, I think quite the opposite. They should increase in favor with everyone but Prospect Avenue, Hartford's last stand for the traditional Old Guard. Anyway, the museum is in the middle of a really aggressive public relations campaign as it is, with director Susan Lubowsky Talbott, appointed in 2008 with the task of growing the museum's local impact and turning around lagging visitor attendance. She ought to be applauded for looking over this little bit of alarmingly inappropriate programming. Andrew W.K. ought to be applauded for showing up, giving a great show and for being famous. Likewise for the other performers. The real credit and accolades ought to go to the Hartford Party Starters Union, with Neil Brewer at the helm, for having taken Hartford's most pretentious and expensive rental venue into their sights, and throwing a really amazing all-ages party there for free.

Such willful, subversive behavior shocks the sensibilities because it scandalizes our sense of whats right and wrong in the divided class system, which looks not only to concentrate wealth at one end, but also the provenance of our culture's best art. Whats more, the highfalutin guards charged with protecting upper class propriety demand extreme etiquette when the rest of us pose near their treasures. Instead of submissively cooperating under context, or hosting the event elsewhere, the crowd Friday night said "fuck that" and did what we always do when we party. We got drunk, danced and felt sexy, this time in extremely high style environs.

Friday night was all that or it was just a party, but either way it was magnificently transgressive to see a booming sound system shake the walls upon which Balthus, Dali, Magritte, Miro, Picasso, Tanguy and others hang delicately, usually unmoving, in both senses of the word.

old friend Marshall, Hartford Party Starters Union member



Rizzla spun at the start of the night and in between performances



my boys, Dave, yours truly, Jamie, Skylar, Ross and J





the great hall repurposed for merch booths and cash bar



Ninjasonik, possibly first rap group invited to perform in the museum, my favorite performance of the night



RIZZLA, PICASSO





I think definitely the first ever crowdsurfing at the museum



Avery Fountain, surrounded by cuties



Andrew W.K. meeting local babes in the Hartford Courant Room, "backstage"





fakes



Mel, Mandy!



Ross, Giacometti





breakfast at Goldroc, post after-party which was hosted at the Warehouse, the HPSU's usual home venue (which was also loads of fun).

BEAT ME BITE ME WHIP ME FUCK ME

The last week has been strangely, optimistically inspirational for me, for a number of reasons, not least of which is my impending tax return. Maybe I'll turn the heat back on!

The other night I went to go watch John Waters interview Roni Horn and discuss her new show at the Boston ICA. I didn't really want to go, at first, but my best girl Marissa convinced me that it would be worth the $25 ticket. I didn't want to go because I don't like her work, I have no predilection to be disposed toward that kind of neo-minimalist, anti-sex hostility. John Waters is delightful, however, and his "Art: A Sex Book" with Bruce Hainley nears on revelatory for me in respect to the way I look at and discuss any contemporary art.

As predicted, Waters ran circles around Roni Horn, charming the packed auditorium with perverse wit and informed observations regarding Horn's opaquely foreboding exhibition and persona. I was left wondering, why doesn't somebody give this guy a museum retrospective? He's made a bunch of art, and you know, a dozen or so movies that have each changed humor or pushed it or forever altered the popular culture field. He made an international style icon out of the very least of thee, Divine, something Warhol couldn't even quite do with his superstar queens. I don't know. Indeed, it took this virtuosic conversationalist to make Horn seem even remotely relatable.

Roni Horn came off as above it, inconvenienced, slightly hostile, and tried to avoid any probing discussion as to why audiences are, at this moment, so keen on her work. Here's a lot invested into an artist who might not care less. Oh well. I guess that's what being cool is all about. Walking out, this essentially was the insight I had gained into her work. Its cool to the level of hostility, lascivious, yet somehow anti-sex, a highly skilled purveyor of minimalism personally guided by the king of its previous generation, Donal Judd.

What of it, I went out afterward with Marissa, Samantha and Von and got super drunk.

Then yesterday, I went over to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge and had such a stellar experience. Their new show, Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing in the New Media Avant-Garde, is revelatory. Goddamn! There is so much good work in there right now. Curated by the recently disgraced ex-director of the Rose, Michael Rush, here he fully redeems himself. There are so many art heroes mingling together in the packed MIT galleries; Charles Atlas, Kalup Linzy, Ryan Trecartin, Ma Liuming, Yasumasa Morimura, Michelle Handelman to name only my favorites.

Kalup Linzy

Briefly, the show's curatorial premise proposes that since Marcel Duchamp's famous foray into cross-dressing as Rrose Selavy, the best avant-garde new media has taken up the practice and used it to many varied winning effect. Transvestism is still taboo, it still freaks out norms, and its still innerving to even the most hip among us. After spending a good four hours watching videos, I was generously bereft of the lingering cynicism inspired previously by Roni Horn's depressive, anti-fun androgyny. I would give a million bucks to see John Waters in round-table confab with these edgy troublemakers. He'd be in his element, and we'd all walk away with new verve and new vision.

My absolute #1 style icon of all time, Michael Clark, stars in a video by artist Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan, which should be mandatory viewing for everybody who wants to have a cool life. Everybody bites his style. Everybody. I can't even take away much art inspiration from it, I only derive LIFE inspiration from it-- its that good. Its such a treat to watch it on repeat, I just wish it were playing a larger screen. Then again, I also wish I was in it, up close and personal to Clark's angelic beauty and agility, but that's a whole different story. When Atlas's camera follows Clark dancing through the London nightclub in its new wave grand finale, I imagine a thousand different scenarios in which my life would improve if only I could muster a similar courage, fluid sexuality and presence of body. This is really good art, surrounded on all sides by other fearless corruptors.

My Valentine, Mark Morrisroe

I often think about Mark Morrisroe, the photographer who came of age here in the late 70s and early 80s, whose life and work united a local movement now known as "The Boston School." Since then, the so-called Boston School has had profound influence on the rest of the worlds of art and fashion photography. Morrisroe is acknowledged as the unofficial leader of this group, which includes such luminaries as Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Gail Thacker, Tabboo! and Jack Pierson. Critics and scholars are fond of coining this group's collective oeuvre as diarist photography or autobiographical photography, and most members of this group enjoy very successful art careers today. Their contributions to 20th and 21st century pictures are among the most direct, most empathetic, most emotionally salient and challenging in their often difficult, anti-pure, hard-luck human beauty and pain. The most memorable works possess a social realism, queered, sexy, surviving and abusing substances and emotional peril, violence, romance, Boston, New York, Hollywood, Paris, the works. Nan, Jack and the rest were on an aesthetic fringe pitting everything against mainstream ease to take up with the world in all its gorgeous perversity and loneliness. Thousands of kids have gone to art school and tried to make this work new again, or failing that, just again.

Out of them, I love Mark Morrisroe the most, and here's why: He is the most beautiful. I know this because of all of the polaroid self-portraits he took during his short life. In them I see a wholly erotic and virile young man who also seems fragile and damaged, a cage-like little body which I selfishly recognize and relate to. Its the same way I relate to Arthur Rimbaud's puckish Une Saison en Enfer. I believe that Morrisroe probably thought of Rimbaud too, when he was shot by a john after an unhappy trick when he was just 18, the same age as Rimbaud when he was shot by his abusive gay lover Verlaine, a century earlier. Morrisroe survived and carried the bullet in his chest the rest of his life, incorporating the event into his photographic oeuvre by exhibiting his x-rays and subsequently, enhancing his life story to legend status.

Legend also has it that Morrisroe was possibly an illegitimate son of the Boston Strangler, since his drug-addicted mother supposedly lived in an apartment owned by the man accused, Albert DeSalvo. It is impossible to ever know if this is true, but its dubious suggestion is compelling, portending a life of danger and noir. Indeed living dangerously and in the dark, he contracted HIV in 1986, died in '89, which is the goddamned worst. As we've often learned from cliche, brilliant fuses don't burn very long, especially for gay guys in the '80s.

So, what the fuck am I thinking about this tragic beauty all the time for? I'm trying to sense a legacy or a plot thickening or a spiritual connection to this kind of life's work while I'm toiling away here in Boston. I'm busy working and living my own artistic claim to virtuosic homosexual longing and enduring fame afforded through pictures. While I'm not trying to die of AIDS, drugs or domestic violence anytime soon, I am into lifestyle, urgency, looking good, being fucked for life and throwing it all in for the sake of what you love. To me, his work is a heartfelt rebuke to that ever-encroaching feminist mantra which looks to draft homosexuals as soldiers for the culture wars; "the personal is political." Fuck no its not! The personal is personal! In the course of my life, I can't cede whats most dear to me for political causes, and I don't think Morrisroe would go for that either, even if he'd lived. The message is, stay fringe, where the beauty is visceral and hard won.

This is what I think about in Boston, Mark Morrisroe's spiritual home and my current one. This is what I thought about the other day when I was gazing up at the Museum of Fine Arts Rotunda, painted by my other favorite artist John Singer Sargent, another deceased Boston local. To the left of Apollo's medallion, I noticed for the first time the ancient Greek beauty Ganymede brazenly wielding an enormous erect cock, which for 90 years has been two-timing viewers overhead as the Eagle Zeus's right leg.

Wow! Is this a stretch of interpretation? Do I force queer theory here? I don't think so, considering that Ganymede and Zeus were gay for each other and this is their big dramatic rape scene, after all. The Ganymede myth historically was used to describe homosexual love and relationships. And Sargent? Most agree that he was a closet case, as evidenced by thousands of male nude sketches which seem to serve little purpose other than satisfy his own gently homoerotic musings. But anyway, has no one at the MFA ever noticed this? Why has no one addressed this before?

Well I'm sure it has something to do with academia wanting to protect the legitimacy of Sargent's artistic achievement (already under siege soon after his death by Modernism's macho anti-mannerist agenda) and society wanting to shield his respectability. Apparently family and friends burned much of the private contents of his studio at the time of his death, many suspect to get rid of the kind of gay crap I'm talking about. Nevermind what may only be conspiracy, really, I just think the possibility of an erect dick flying overhead in Boston's most prized cultural jewel is significant and exciting. An American bald eagle's leg composed and drawn perfectly to suggest something else hidden in plain sight via some tricky double entendre is queer, kind of pornographic and totally thrilling.

My valentine, Mark Morrisroe, studied next door at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts briefly and probably passed beneath the Ganymede rape scene, familiar to his own rough life experience, if not so mythic at the time. Also probable is that he was unaware of what I think I see, which is fine too. To me, today, their very different lives are interlocutory. I can't imagine one without jealously recalling the work of the other. Even though the neo-classical Rotunda projects an extreme official politic, what's personal to John Singer Sargent remains subversively personal. Morrisroe updates the rebellious misuse of classical figure study as the original punk rock twink photographer. Walking around Boston, fantasizing, this is like my call to work.

DAS RACIST AT GREAT SCOTT

Last night at Great Scott in Allston, Das Racist performed for the Together Electronic Music Festival. Rizzla last minute DJed for them. Show was hilarious and also transcendent. Yes they rap beautifully. By chance, we met boys Victor, Himanshu and Dap at McDonalds across the street where some dizzy BU student reporter was grilling them on ethnicity and how cool it must have been to go to Wellesley College. YEAH REAL COOL.

BEN





Victor, Dap, Rizzla



KAT FYTE



Penelope





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