Lady Rizo in LA for a few glorious days. Listen to her on NPR here.
Category: Hollywood
Categories
Dog Breath
Benoit Denizet-Lewis has been staying. He’s writing a book about dogs. He has driven from Boston in a huge RV with his dog Casey.
In Northern Arizona he found another big, black dog, a stray he called Rez on an Indian reservation. Her nipples torn from a recent litter, she had a bladder infection and a bad ear but he, with Cesar Millan‘s help, put her back together again.
It’s been very busy at Chez Duncan.
Lady Rizo is in town so we saw her show on Sunday night. Her debut LA show, she had to quickly tailor it for the austere LA audience. By the end of the set she had them eating out of her hand.
Sans follow spot, her work cut out for her, she did a miraculous job. Special guest Moby had the audience rippling with excitement.
Twins had their birthday…can’t remember if I’ve already written about that? Anyway, it was a miserable afternoon (storm clouds) but we had a great time and I cooked a huge feast. They moved out of my house the following day and into their new apartment in Hollywood.
I’ve seen quite a bit of Robby..of course..since then but little of Miles who is busily writing a documentary about (from what I’ve been told) attraction.
I testified downtown at City Hall before the city deputies. Prison Violence. I told them what I had witnessed at the Men’s County Jail. They, in turn, asked questions. They looked at me very curiously, peering over their lecture.
One of them had read the Richard Rushfield piece in the LA Weekly and quoted it.
I left down town, the fierce heat, drove over to Robby’s house and fell asleep on his sofa. I found it all very exhausting.
On Saturday I went to Honor Fraser‘s galleryon La Cienega to see the hightly anticipated Kenny Scharf show. He was in fine spirits. Showing good new work, performance art by Ann Magnuson and a great crowd.
Sam McEwan flew from London. We are all looking old….apart from Honor who just looks more wonderful and chic…wearing Alaia.
“Hodgepodge,” featured paintings, sculptures, and a Cosmic Cavern installation.
The centerpiece, a gaudy customized Cadillac served as Ann Magnuson’s stage for her performance work “Finism”.
First performed in 1984 the piece was fresh, enticing and, of course, very funny.
I liked the picnic table with an atomic mushroom cloud exploding from it that forms a parasol.
“Hodgepodge” runs until May 19.
Wish I hadn’t sold my Scharf. What a moron I am.
Then, rather amazingly, I bumped into Marius Bercea the artist showing next door at the Francois Ghebaly Gallery. He reminded me that we had met at the Cluj Film Festival in Romania a decade ago.
He was just a kid who took me back to his studio.
I remember being impressed, writing about him in my diary, now look at him. We sat outside the gallery and smoked cigarettes and ate doughnuts off the Cadillac parked at the back of the Scharf show.
Lunch with Mike Manning, his super smart sexy boy friend and Fielder. Mike has tiny eyebrows.
Thankfully, since my AA Big Book burning tirade most of my AA friends have unfriended me on FaceBook saving me the time and effort. I think my blog has caused some amusement and consternation…judging by the number of people reading it. Fuck AA LA.
I’ll write at length some other time about my years in LA AA, the cult with a smiley face.
Look at the gorgeous things from the Out of The Box Collective vegetable delivery. The spring flower box. Delicious.
I just put my AA ‘Big Book’ in the trash.
Does this mean I will die? Well yes, eventually.
Does this mean I will drink again? Maybe, but not immediately.
Does this mean that I’ll stop believing in god? Definitely not.
“Like any cult, religion or philosophy, AA leans heavily on the good will and participation of its members. I like the saying “if you like everybody you meet in AA, you aren’t going to enough meetings“. People should not be accountable for ideas, only for their actions. I have never had high expectations of AA, and so they are usually exceeded by the results.
“Faith without works is dead. The book is overrated, Duncan, everybody knows that. But the Love in AA is palpable.”
Dan my friend wrote the above. Men like him initially convinced me AA was good. I was attracted to the nuanced reasoning, the warmth of the members, their ‘spirituality’. I was not wrong, people like Dan were the reason I kept going back.
Explaining AA to the uninitiated is like teaching a baboon how to knit.
Writing this, even now, I can convince myself to haul the AA Big Book out of the trash…that things weren’t that bad, that I should look at ‘my part’, that if only I had worked the 12 steps just a little bit harder. The reason I moved to LA? The reason I uprooted my home, my life…myself? Alcoholics Anonymous.
The comfy Palisade stag meetings, the jolly Rodeo social, the stoic recovery center. I loved UTA owner Jeremy Zimmer’s Saturday morning industry meeting where the producers, writers, actors and directors came to flay themselves before the UTA grandee.
I was rapt by the harrowing story of child sex abuse and violence therapist Sean McFarlane dramatically told when ever he was asked to testify. I watched ‘Big’ Robert gather his flock of new comers/sponsees at the 7am Bank meeting and take them diligently through the twelve steps.
It took five years to see through each of these scam merchants.
Jeremy Zimmer uses his meeting to ensnare and compromise celebrities in trouble. Fellow alcoholic industry folk, realizing that Jeremy is a sick man do not risk leaving the meeting, nor do directors and actors who want his patronage. Jeremy Zimmer is a sadist. Laughing and joking as men cry pitifully about their ‘rock bottom’. The only men he has compassion for are men that mean nothing to him professionally.
Sean McFarlane, perhaps the worst scam artist in the AA SAA organization, effectively getting rich men to pay to sponsor them. Sponsorship is a service supposedly supplied ‘for fun and for free’ from elder AAers to the new comer, helping them understand the 12 steps, helping them understand the Big Book of AA…a sort of bible written by Bill Wilson the founder of AA.
Sean thinks nothing of taking huge amounts of money from naive new comers for his sponsorship services. Sean (pronounced seen) McFarlane, provides counseling as a sex therapist but I have no proof that he has any formal training nor counseling himself, nor support, even a sponsor? If anyone has proof that this monster has any training… please provide it.
Sean oversees the fate of cheating celebrities who routinely fall from grace and into his Wednesday morning SAA meeting… needing their family back, their reputation saved, their need to disguise their pedophile peccadillos… putting humpty dumpty back together again.
Sean thinks he is a very big deal, a super hero, leaping over imagined cars to save his clients from tranny hookers bent on destroying his clients.
As for Big Robert, the multimillionaire ex basketball player…well it turns out that this self-proclaimed AA guru is in fact a compulsive liar who, whilst banging his sponsees heads with the big book bible… is in fact gorging on un-prescribed prescription meds. He routinely tells his group of sycophantic male followers that AA does not ‘shoot its wounded’… which is patently untrue.
I thought, when I moved to LA that finally… I had come home.
It is evident from the 2006/7 blogs that I loved it and it loved me. A family of men and women who could always forgive, would always forgive. Well, that was the first of my mistakes. I was wrong about them. Perhaps when I moved here AA was different, I was different?
AA is a cult. Like scientology it trades on the secret lives of its members. Like scientology it requires devotion. Blind devotion. Like scientology there is a vile abuse of power. Those who want to wrestle the leadership, become gurus, lie and steal… all in the name of recovery.
Most so-called addicts and alcoholics are mental patients with no mental hospital to go to. Look at the beautiful man at the top of this post. His name was Evan Landry. He was a friend of mine. An AA friend. Wow, I was bowled over with Evan, his aggressive, sexy ways… his vulnerability. He served in Iraq, he was an MMA fighter, I saw him fight.
He had a sexy girlfriend he shared with Mike Tyson but wasn’t above going to… how shall we say… the dark side. Well, last night Evan Landry killed himself. Another AA tragedy. Today his friends think it is ‘sad but not unexpected’. They have buried so many friends, their indifference is as unexpected as Evan’s OD.
People like Sean McFarlane will remember him, use his death as evidence that we must never, ever leave AA. His PTSD unaddressed, all he needed (according to his AA friends) was the 12 steps.
Like prescribing leaches for terminal cancer.
In the USA there are a hundred treatment centers where addiction can be fought with the ubiquitous 12 steps… if you have the money. In my experience getting help with any other mental condition is almost impossible. Evan Landry put his faith in AA like so many of us did… but our problems were complicated by AA and sadly may have killed dear Evan and many men and women like him.
I don’t go to AA funerals because they are a sick joke. I might, however, go to this one. Just to laugh at the hypocrites who killed Evan with their medieval prescription for a better life.
I am downtown. Downtown LA. We are drinking coffee in a chic coffee shop.
It is reassuringly sophisticated. It feels like NYC. It feels like a city. Spring Street. Coffee bar. The people who pass by are dressed well and don’t have that Hollywood vibe. The women are not showing off their chests and legs, the boys are wearing well cut pants and have covetable accessories.
Having the car makes life more interesting. I am scarcely at home. I am writing this on my phone.
I had dinner with an old friend on Saturday night. We ate at Bossa Nova then we saw Clash of the Titans 2 at the Chinese Theatre. There were less than 10 of us in the theatre. The film was terrible, Olivia was terrible. Everything about that terrible film that could be said…was said. He brought two young men. They didn’t say much. One was gay, the other ‘in training’. Outside the theatre there was a costume exhibition. We poured over the ormolu costume jewelry Elizabeth Taylor wore in Cleopatra.
We explained to the boys the history of Century City. You know that story don’t you? How Cleopatra bankrupted 20th Century Fox? How the back lot was sold and Century City was built? Everybody should know that story, if they live in LA.
It was pouring rain. Under the theatre, in the parking lot, valley girls were vomiting out of SUVs onto their fake Louboutins. We drove west, we sat together at my club and they drank cocktails. I drank coffee. The boys remained mute.
Not feeling at all combative, I found myself passionately discussing racism and gay equality which quickly disintegrated into a nasty UK v USA argument. At one point my friend told me that if he could press a button and eradicate all Muslims he would. I pointed out that my father was a Persian Muslim and technically so were the majority of my 11 brothers and sisters. That he would have to kill my young sister Rebecca.
How did he feel about that? His genocidal zeal was not diminished.
How come it’s become ok for reasonable men to become so islamaphobic? The conversation further disintegrated into how retarded the Brits were for accepting equality without the word marriage in the equation. It made my blood boil that he would rather have nothing if he couldn’t have the word marriage. Civil unions in the UK seem, to those who have them…just like being married and my friends who have civil unions think of themselves, describe themselves, as married. Anyway, the m word is now being fought for in the UK but more as a nice after thought attached to the equality that we already enjoy. You know how I felt, and people like me felt about that word. Archaic, patriarchal bull shit…antiquated in the secular UK.
Then, this morning, I found myself listening to Democracy Now on the radio as I drove the 101 Freeway.
Van Jones being interviewed.
He pointed out that in the civil rights game played out in the USA…if you are prepared to be arrested for what you believe…and there are enough of you, change happens quickly.
Be seen to fight for what you believe rather than playing the faceless gay equality/marriage ‘incremental’ tactic…employing expensive lawyers and fighting state by state… He mentioned the names of 5 or 6 black civil rights leaders. I got to wondering where our civil rights leaders were? Who are they? Why can’t I name them?
I suppose Lance Black has become a recognizable leader/voice of the gay community but this seems accidental rather than deliberate. It has always been my dream for the gay men and women of the USA that they get the human rights they deserve. But…what are they prepared to risk when demanding those rights? How many windows do they need to break?
There is something weedy and unfocused about the movement. Worse, by articulating this frustration I risk people like my friend telling me that I am letting down the cause. We need leaders, we need direct action. It is the only way the unelected justices (who get the final say) at the Supreme Court will truly understand how important equality is to us.
The system has failed us.
Meanwhile, Justin Bond shared on Facebook a piece from the NY Times about the suicide of a gay man struggling with the notion of old age…amongst other things.
Read it here: gay suicide
Some of Justin’s friends dismissed the piece as worthless. Some of them understood how important it was. Some of them, quite rightly, wondered why the piece was in the style section. Our community wrestles with all sorts of problems peculiar to our people. It is absurd, at moments like this, to pretend that we are just like everyone else. Our generation of gay men, used to unlimited sex, sexual validation, Peter Panism at its worst…has to wake up and acknowledge the wrinkles.
So, it’s been quite a week. A date last night that went really well. Passionate discussions and…well the dogs.
What more could I want?
Categories
Fame Whore
Power and prestige can be just as intoxicating for those who are powerful and prestigious as for those who seek them out…or chance upon them.
Infamy can have the same mesmerizing effect. Mass murderers, on their way to the electric chair, marry formally reasonable women.
The mother/father killler Menendez brothers, still get proposals of marriage from star struck suiters.
I have seen gown adults buckle before the very famous and the not so very famous.
The youth of Hollywood, like so many generations before them, have been levied.
Sexual expediency is a price silently adhered to any deal.
I don’t need to tell you Marilyn‘s story…do I?
It’s quaint! It’s so old fashioned…it’s happening today.
Somehow everybody knows that if you are going to go the distance in this town you better go the distance with whomever has the power in this town.
Many people masquerade as powerful and do very well thank you very much. Taking advantage of those who are want to trust them.
Gays are particularly vulnerable.
It’s best, they are told, for a life as an actor…to stay in the closet.
The closet protects and it taketh away.
To be a young, beautiful gay man arriving in Hollywood for the first time has a million, unforeseen drawbacks that seem, to the uninitiated, like wonderful gifts.
Noticed by rich and powerful men (when you have lived your life in relative obscurity) perverts the course of any fate you might believe in.
There are plenty of fate healers.
Look at him.
Picked from a legion of other boys. He feels special at last.
Boys who would not normally indulge in the crepe flesh of the elderly become their most ardent moisturizer.
Especially for a young gay man who may have been deeply closeted, living in the jet black shadow of toxic shame.
Never realizing his own beauty. His own worth.
Ignorant to the attention he receives as he walks innocently down the street.
Like Dorian Gray, shown for the first time how gorgeous he is…becomes immediately vain and arrogant.
Throws off his mantle of quiet humility and becomes addicted to the adoration of others.
Watching my gay brethren in Hollywood flocking to the shrine of the generously rewarded can be a sickening sight.
Young boys arrive uninvited from small towns in far off states armed with copies of US weekly.
Sitting in the Chateau Marmont hoping for a glimpse of Josh Hartnett or Lindsay Lohan.
Hoping to make everything better, validate and soothe away the pain of a miserable and isolated childhood.
Unless those boys are fabulously gifted, educated or similarly bequeathed the last of their youth is stolen from them by the unscrupulous.
Their talents go unnoticed. Their dreams unfulfilled, their virginity discarded to the most affluent.
Another notch in the bed post.
Get them drunk or worse.
People say, let them make their own mistakes.
It’s very hard to do.
So, the fame whores and the star fuckers line up…pig pink, shaved and waxed for the jovial grandees who take turns like so many commissioned shop assistants on the floor of the biggest meat market in the whole damned universe.
For some reason best known to WordPress my entire private collection of blogs (over 350) suddenly became readable. Past blogs that had been hidden from view.
I am now undoing what was done. Annoying.
Yesterday was altogether the most satisfying day I have had for a long, long time.
Early mornings with the boys, lunch in Hollywood, afternoon with lawyers (more will be revealed at a later date) and finally a spectacular party in the hills. A gay party, you know the kind…the sort that usually terrifies me…but on this occasion was great fun.
It was a cold night in LA and I was the only one wearing a coat. The first time I have been appropriately dressed at that house.
I felt, yet again, as if I had left that judgmental Duncan back in the jail so was free to enjoy the party. This has been a long time coming, this freedom. A delightful French actor to sit with. Many people told me how sorry they were that I had been in jail, that it seemed so wrong.
I was surprised by the reaction. Part of my fear of going there was the fantasy I had that people disapproved…in fact, the opposite was true.
I hadn’t realized that people cared as much as they do. Why is that so hard for me to believe?
Let me get back to privatizing my blog.
Categories
Oscar Weekend
The week before The Oscars can be a great deal of fun.
One really doesn’t expect to pay for anything to eat as one can survive on huge amount of free food given away (largely wasted) at various events all over town: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yesterday was no exception.
I have been preoccupied with my legal situation so I hadn’t really put much effort into RSVPing or bothering to find parties etc.
Do you know who Deepak Varma is? He played Sanjay on Eastenders, a British soap. He’s an old friend from London and we always have great fun whenever he arrives in LA. He has found success at home producing and writing theatre, making movies and getting married.
Filling his life with exciting possibilities.
He’s also working with disgraced ex Prime Minister Tony Blair and Lord Putnam on a project Deepak initiated called Faith Shorts.
Faith Shorts is a global film competition launched by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that provides young people with the opportunity to express their faith through film.
Anyway, he drove to Malibu yesterday for breakfast, primarily to discuss the play I’m writing about The Men’s County Jail.
You know…I haven’t even bothered to think about theatre for years, so it was really thrilling to sit with him and brainstorm. I ‘d forgotten what it was to sit with anyone and act out an entire play and for them to react so positively. How this meeting with Deepak contrasted with my meeting a film producer the day before. Lackluster, bored, unfocused. All the time I sat with the film guy my mind was elsewhere.
I just don’t have the energy to think about film.
After our long, creative breakfast that ran into an equally productive lunch we pulled on our glad rags and headed over to Hancock Park for the first of that afternoons/evenings pre-Oscar events.
The British Consul-General
Dame Barbara Hay
requests the pleasure of your company
at a cocktail reception
celebrating the British Oscar® nominees
of the 2012 Academy Awards®
The residence of the British Consul-General on June Street was the temporary home of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge during their recent sojourn in Los Angeles. It is a large, Spanish revival affair, moorish details, manicured lawns, heated pool and art from the national collection hung randomly around the sparsely decorated interior.
Two rather lovely Howard Hodgkins hung in the drawing-room.
The food was British: Yorkshire pudding and beef pieces with horseradish cream etc.
There were rickety tables set up with fancy British cheeses and chocolate. The garden had been lit with red white and blue lamps. Projected on the wall were the words GREAT and in a smaller font the word Britain. Deepak and I wandered around chatting with old friends, Stephen Daldry and his wife Lucy Sexton arrived with their 8-year-old daughter who was ‘cold and bored’.
I told them that I had been in jail. In fact, I told many people I had been in jail.
What do you expect?
I told Jeremy Hunt, The Secretary of State that I had been in jail. I told Dame Barbara Hay that I had been in jail. I told her how impossible it had been to reach the consulate. She handed me her card and told me to call and share my experience.
I didn’t tell Gary Oldman I had been in jail. I didn’t tell Julia Ormond. I didn’t tell Victoria Beckham (sans David). I didn’t tell Christopher Plummer I had been in jail. I didn’t tell the man who runs Virgin Galactic. I didn’t tell the Christian intern working for the British Consulate.
Victoria didn’t look very happy. She posed for the cameras, this odd long pose, contorting her body, her hand on her hip, her face angled toward the floor, her eyes looking upward toward the camera.
Jeremy Hunt gave a weak speech about his role as minister for culture and how important it was and (randomly) how the film Philadelphia had altered perceptions about HIV and AIDS. He obviously knew nothing about the film industry. He was, however, ‘very excited’ to tell us all about The Queen’s Jubilee and how it was only the second time in British history that a British Monarch had sat on the throne for 60 years.
He was incidentally ‘very excited’ about The Olympic Games.
The Brits who lived here suddenly remembered why they live here when he started waxing about The Monarchy.
Deepak collared Hunt after the speech and demanded to know why the same people who administered the lottery funding at The Film Council now administered the funds at the BFI? He had rehearsed replies for Deepak. He told us that the Brits made too many ‘art films’. So, we talked about arts funding in the UK.
I reminded him that the hit show Warhorse would never have seen the light of day if hadn’t been for the subsidized arts. He said, “That’s a very good example.” Fearing we were being too confrontational his American PR attempted to drag him away. My hand on his shoulder, I told her that we were the people who elected Jeremy Hunt and paid his wages. He looked perplexed.
Stopped in at Starbucks to meet a beautiful Brazilian boy I had met online. More of that later.
The Warner party was fun. Stephen Daldry and Lucy, Max von Sydow, Leonardo DiCaprio, delicious food.
Jeff Robinov (President of Warner Brothers Pictures) said, “What were you doing in jail?” So I told the story again. He behaved like he already knew me, then I realized that I had met him with Sharon yonks ago. When I told Stephen Daldry more about the last few months of incarceration he looked sort of dumbfounded.
The Brazilian joined us after we left Warner. He kissed me outside Serra Towers.
I was too exhausted to schlep over to the Ari Emmanuel’s party. So we drove home with the Little Dog on my lap… replete.
What a frustrating night!
Of course, as time passes and I know that I have to see Jake again…I get more agitated, start protecting myself. Arm myself. Perhaps I am not myself? I just can’t bear the idea of being in the same room as that lying scum bag.
So, yesterday I waited for the storm but none came. It was so hot in Venice that I shed almost everything I was wearing. Robby and I drank coffee in Intelligentsia.
Chanced upon a great art show by an amazing young British artist Paul Insect. Strong graphics, good colours.
Apparently I was not alone…the previous show had been bought entirely by Damien Hirst.
I think I am frustrated because I met someone last week with whom I have a connection but do not trust myself to see again. Will not risk involvement.
So, I spent the day with Robby. He dropped me off in Beverly Hills. Met Matt ostensibly to go see Shame and Q&A with Steve McQueen. Didn’t go. Went, instead to see the Hedi Slimane installation at MOCA. Good crowd. HUGE crowd. Jonathon Brown, Miggy Hood, Gus Van Sant, Jeffrey Deitch..others.
Met cute, well dressed boys. Was not the only man with facial hair.
Boys wore Comme kilts. Girls wore red lispstick. Lots of black and velvet. NYC type crowd. Met ‘going to be huge’ photographer Aaron Stern and the kid who won the last survivor Judson Birza.
The show was hideously derivative. Reminded one of Larry Clark but without the compelling obsession. Black and white pictures of pretty, full lipped boys and girls, urban landscapes projected onto a huge cube whilst a shaggy haired band played discordant music.
Gagosian Gallery showing graphite work by Adam McEwan.
Particularly loved the ‘shutter’ that divided the main space but caused major anxiety for the gallery assistants who had to stop people mushing their heads into this low slung sculpture.
Loved all most all of the show except the work in the upper gallery which was very dull and badly conceived.
Off to shla to meet Nick Compton my South African cricketer friend.
He was co-opted by the most awful drunk in the room. We left.
Then…bad, bad mistake followed Matt to gay party in North Hollywood at some writers house where I bumped into Robby, Miles, Tom, Toby, Fielder and Bryan Singer.
I was the only man there with a beard. Most of them knew who I was and had an opinion.
God help me.
One particularly vile but pretty 21 year old started telling me how to dress.
This rancid, dreary waiter from Utah wearing a ubiquitous plaid shirt…ill fitting jeans telling ME how to dress. I was outraged.
He wouldn’t stop talking.
I said, “When I was your age I kept my mouth shut because I learned so much more.”
Adam Press looked on at me in horror, I know what he was thinking, “You blown your chances with that one.”
Which was true. Nothing he had to say for himself was either interesting or original.
Unlike Fielder Jewett (same age) who is a true original and worth listening to. We left, drove home up the 101 in the pouring rain.
The storm had arrived.
Chunky Black Swan makes her debut in LA. Catch up with her on Monday night In West Hollywood.
The word twat has various functions. It is a vulgar synonym for the human vulva, but is more widely used as a derogatory epithet, especially in British English. The word may originate from Old Norse þveit meaning cut, slit, or forest clearing.
Grapes from the garden. Two bunches the raccoons couldn’t get to.
Hung with Tom Hardy last night.
Apparently he punched the producer of Bronson. Good on yer lad. We used the words ‘twat’ and ‘nonce’.
I was transported.
They are changing the succession laws in Britain. Oh, now I remember why I left!
These proposals change nothing of substance, even if William and Kate have a daughter. All this fuss is about a trivial detail of a succession that may or may not happen in 70 years time. The monarchy discriminates against every man, woman and child who isn’t born into the Windsor family. To suggest that this has anything to do with equality is utterly absurd.
It fails the equality test both in practice and in principle.
In practice it simply means that the eldest child of one family is preferred over all others. Inequality is therefore further entrenched in the system.
In principle all children in Britain should have an equal opportunity to stand for the position of Head of State. Anything short of that is an affront to the principles of equality.
The monarchy is founded on discrimination and elitism. It has no place in a debate over equality of opportunity.
There is so much going on…but I can’t tell you anything. So much...
