john waters ROLE MODELS continued:
page 228- "It's appropriate to be depressed sometimes...Use your insanity to get ahead...Everybody has his or her 'love map' as the late, great, sadly discredited Baltimore sexologist Dr. Jon Money once called our predetermined sexual types. And we can never realy change our love maps, but we can learn to see them coming. A healthy neurotic knows his type can and probably will bring emotinal trouble combined with a powerful sexual wallop."

The entire chapter called ROOMMATES is worth transcribing here word for word...I feel so strongly about the way John describes the presence of art, the personality and life of paintings...here i find myself re-reading the chapter aloud to my father, as we sit upstate among family, awaiting oncoming hurricane irene, just because i am so aware of htat lost magic, (when you read osmeting and have a million thoughts, and write down five of htem,a nd then look at the page two months later and konw you are in love but cant remember the face or any other image or action of that body and soul you were ready to devour)

"I live alone but have a ton of roommates. Luckily, they're not human beings. I couldn't stand the idea of having someone else's belongings around. I don't have the mental space...Mike Kelley is one of my roommates. Yes, the man who made pitiful seem sexy by turning grimy thirft store stuffed animals into heartbreaking, jaw-droppingly beautiful sculptures by placing them on stained blankets on the floor or facedown on card tables next to one another like dead Jonestown suicide cultists. Suddenly a museum or an art galery took on the appearance of a coroner's office displaying corpses of toys after an airplane crashed into Santa's sleigh mid-flight on Christmas Eve...I love how mad Mike's work can make some poele. Isn't that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate? The real naysayers who can't see the reverse beauty of Mike's sculptures or paintings should be outraged because they secretly know that his art does hate them and they deserve it" (243)

--htis last sentiment i love so deeply it even brings humor to pieces i despise, to imagine that htey despise me too, which i already feel, but never acknowledge.

"my roommates need to be illusionists and MIke Kelly certainly is. He's a companion who can make you see something supposedly shameful in a beautiful, hilarious, radical, subversive way." (244)

"according to...Brenda Richardson, [Cy Twombly] can make even the most seasoned art ocllectors and accessions committees seethe in skepticism and rage over his work. My walls and floors are not worthy of Cy Twomblys' drawings, paitnings, or sculpture. Just look up his Untitled (1992) and yu'll see what i mean. NO i dont own it. You think im made of money? but i can fantasize cant i? If I ever won the stupid lottery or suddenly made a fortune with Pink Flamingos being turned into a video game, Cy's sculppture would be my midlife crisis purchase to impress myself...Owning this shockingly ugly and elegant work of art would make me feel young again." (245)

-in describing the catalogy of cy's paitnings 1948-60 waters describes finding a note explaining an offenders added scribble on one piece that should be noted is not by the artist, this catalogue was"...a book i read every work of like was following a mystery novel"
that setniment, of personal discovery, being the detective on a mystery that only u care about- the reason people bring notebooks to museums- almost like visitng prisons for interviews with the accused, is a stunning feeling i need to spend more time desvirining. it is why i write here, and why i get angry at myself for forgetting to.

"You see, Cy Twombly is, quite simply, better htan you and me and has the right to feel superior to all collectors. He should judge us because he makes perfect mistakes and laughs at the concerns of hte moneyed class, who deserve the problems of abstraction." (246)

TShe next few pages are dedicated to interpreting Cy's Drawings, waters makes up amazing monologues that each of hte drawings speak. Of course a filmmaker wiht such an imagination as john waters would have the vocabulary and impulse to assign words to the suggestions of wors written in pencil strokes on teh page, but he really, in citing 5 works, brings a conversation to light. WORTH READING> read this book!!
Next Waters compares Cy to Lee Lozano, who in a 'pathological, cockeyed, sexually political plan' vowed in 1971 for "'art' never to speak to women again...At the end of her life, Lee became ill and had to go live with her parents. But what did she do at the dinner table? BLock the view of her mother with her hands and demand, "Dad, will you please pass the salt?" (251-252)

"I've always said true success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks." (252)

"Isn't art supposed to transpose even teh most banal detail of our lives? Were poetry, garbage and genius ever such a holy mix as they were that rare night in artful Manhattan?" (254)

"I was too stupid to have heard of Fischli/Weiss at hte time, but i bough the book, becasme obsessed by these photographers, and, in what I now realize was a rather unsophisticated review, praised Airports in British Vogue. I went on about 'purposeful mediocrity' being the only 'subtle way to be new' and gushed that I had 'glimpsed a fresh kind of 1990s beauty, over and above the banality of pop or the exasperation of minimalism into a shockingly tedious, fair-to-middling, nothing-to-write-home-about kind of masterpiece'...The ritual, the control, the freedom, and the agony of hte airport now give me back the complete joy of being an art collector." (256-58)

"Being 'not ready' for your show, the ultimate nightmare of both gallery owner and artist, was suddenly art. I love art on the floor...I yell but I'm not mad because you can't really hurt a Carl Andre sculpture. But look out for my Fischli/Weiss! Those eight little pieces of faux scrap wood are so delicate, so quiet, that just looking at them could break your heart and theirs if you're not careful." (259)

"'Your art should just be in your house the way everything else is' Brenda Richardson once told me, and I agree. I love going to Brice and Helen Marden's New York townhouse, where you see pictures, drawings, or rare photographs casually leaning on top of one another on the floor, right out in the daylight. Now, that is elegance." (260)

"but Im atracted to serious rommates, too. ONes that are so smart I usually have no idea what they are talking about when they first move into my house. I don't want someone living with me whose work I can understand. I want an artist who can make me see something amazing from almost nothing—the exact opposite of moviemaking. Richard TUttle is the perfect choice...His bare plywood slat pieces nailed flat to the wall with just one thin side of hte depth of hte wood painted white were so beautiful, so simple, so plain, that I felt exhausted just imagining how complete the arist msut have felt when he decided the work was finished...Here, at last, was art made by someone obviously outside the human condition. As Richard Serra once said to me about Donald Judd's pieces, 'It was never a quesiton of liking his work', it was 'that you could never get over it!'" (261-262)

PLUS- on my John Waters TO DO LIST I sitll have to consume the following cultural items:
•The Bad Seed
•Gregory Green (artist)
•One Arm- Tennessee Williams
•Baby Doll
•Heiner Bastian (art historian)
•Parkett (art mag)
•The problem of reading (esay by Moyra Davey)
•Paul Lee's dirty dishrag
•Films by Armando Bó
•Susan Slade

Now I am currently reading BEAUTY TALK & MONSTERS by Masha Tupitsyn. I found this book because I started internet foraging for Masha, as she was my babysitter, and an interesting role model in her own right. As only the second film enthusiast loose biopic i've read (only a few months after reading role models) i am totally enthralled by this read. My annotations are coming soon, but even funnier are hte annotations I found already scrawled across the pages by a moronic feminist film student, who wrote such things as "i have no idea what happesn in this chapter" for no one's eyes but mine! ohhh the joys of second hand possessions.