Tag: West Hollywood California

Categories
Alcoholics Anonymous Gay

Yikes

I love this picture.  Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud in Wheelers.

1.

Waking up at Robby’s apartment.  West Hollywood.  Feeling like I have a hangover.  I haven’t.  I’m still not drinking.  Waiting for the right moment…but it never comes.  The sanctity of sobriety.

It’s hard after nearly 16 years to think about the right time to start drinking.

A woman I know from the programme called yesterday.  I told her that I had renounced AA.  “How’s that working out for you?”  She pried condescendingly.

I faked a dropped call.

2.

Saturday pre pride party.  Good fun.  The über gays.  The fake NYC producer I mentioned in an earlier post sitting at his table wondering how I manage to surround myself with such beauty.  He looked exasperated.  Staring over at us.

Pride was a great deal of fun.  On the streets.  The floats have not changed for 30 years: muscle boys and drag queens.  Not very inventive.

I stayed at the London Hotel courtesy of my Kuwaiti friends. They pitched up at 8am.  We ate smoked fish and Quiche for breakfast.

3.

Nothing is obvious.  Just when you thought you’d never kiss anyone meaningfully ever again.

I saw you in the bar and knew you were the one.  A brief conversation.  Kisses, glances, then you pissed on me.  That was new to both of us but so damned exciting.  A mouth full of piss.  Then we spent the afternoon talking.  Eating.  Each other.

You left an impression.   Creases in the bed sheets.

4.

Without me even noticing it LA is full of gay men with beards.

Does this mean that they/we are growing up? That men are trumping boys? The aesthetic is not only very pleasing but means I get looked at all over again. I have some currency…if you know what I mean.

5.

I don’t have time to write this very often.  There’s a great deal to do.

I’m helping those boys in the jail, even though they don’t know it.  Meeting lawyers down town who are investigating conditions in the jail.  They seem shocked.  Young lawyers.  Fresh faced.  Idealists.

I try balancing my complaints with a broader understanding of the jail dynamic.  The deputies are not just cruel…they are frightened.  They do not treat the trans population with contempt because they hate gays, they are confused by the feelings the girls bring up in them.

Ernest lawyers ask how I would change things in the jail.  I am always prepared for those questions.

Last week I sat with Senator Ron S.Calderon who is co-sponsoring a bill in the State of California that would basically abolish the situation in which I found myself.  Protocols would have to be adhered to.  States right to decide trumping the draconian Immigration Department.

I drive for hours to get to the meeting and speak clearly and concisely.  I know that I am speaking on behalf of thousands of wrongly incarcerated immigrants.

I go to cities I would never usually visit.  I am introduced to people I would never usually meet.  Immigrant rights advocates, Methodist ministers.  I am familiar with Secure Communities.  I hear terrible stories.  They tell me that ICE operate like the Gestapo.  They spread fear in the immigrant communities, wrecking homes, lives, marriages, separating families, sending children into foster care.

6.

Then, there is the other work.  Kevin, my incredible new assistant, and I…running all over town.  Putting this show together.  Holding things together.

Today I see the doctor.  No good news all over again. I’m sure.

Wish me luck.

Categories
Gay

Duncan Roy The ‘A’ List

Regardless of why I decided to get involved with Derek or The ‘A’ List I’m glad I did.  Our pretend boyfriend scam…it was fun.  Even though I have been portrayed as a smelly old man.

Pretending to be his boyfriend was absurd.   A joke.  I don’t know if that comes across on the show?  That we were faking it?

Occasionally I throw myself back into being ‘gay’.  I don’t have a very gay life on this mountain.  Most queens are totally appalled that I live here, so isolated, away from the urban gay idyl.

Tom calls it my Shangri-La.   Some men love it and for those I hold a special place in my heart.  They get it.  The dream of self-sufficiency, off the grid, chickens and home-grown vegetables.

When I pull off my country clothes (albeit RRL) and slide into something leaner I am dressed for the city.  Whether it is WeHo or Chelsea, Soho or The Marais I am there to be seen, acknowledged and play that peculiar game of being ‘gay’.

I can live two distinct lives, maybe more?

In England my snooty friends called me a chameleon, meaning to insult me.

Surely being able to change ones color to blend in…is rather good?  To adapt and change as the situation requires.

In England, my England I learned to speak with a different accent, merely to be heard.

I am a cock sucking homosexual but I wonder if others see it that way?  What kind of gay am I?

Perhaps my lack of interest in sex makes me less gay, less human?

Remember when I was on Sex Rehab and admitted that the sex I had with men was traumatic?   People wrote to me and told me that I wasn’t gay.  “If Duncan Roy doesn’t want gay sex, he isn’t gay.”

They tried to throw me out of the gay club…for having an opinion.

Meeting the cast of the ‘A’ List was memorable because they have become, in their own way, icons.  For good or for bad.  I met most of them just once. At least three of them have admitted drug and alcohol problems.

I really liked Austin and his husband Jake who I could very easily imagine seeing here or in London.  They are good people.  I like Austin’s authenticity.

The worst of the bunch has to be…Derek.  As you will see tonight (if you can be bothered) I enjoy ribbing him on camera.  I used stock lines, old jokes that an overly sensitive American queen did not find very funny.

When the food arrives I say, “That looks like something that came out of your nose.”  That’s funny isn’t it?  I used it before and my friends laughed.

We hung out a few times but really, his lack of sophistication, curiosity and insight were wonders to behold.  He seems so incomplete.  Derek’s consumption of alcohol masking a sadness at his core…like so many untreated addicts.  A problem that a huge number of gays share but have no intention of resolving.

Derek has no business to be anywhere but where he was born.  Like so many gay men he has been forced into New York by small-town prejudice and an insatiable desire for cock.

A bland, mid-western bag of meat and bones.

He had no truck with history, our history, any history…he knew nothing of the city where he lives, of commerce, politics or God.   Eking out an existence with appearances at provincial gay clubs and gay pride.

Derek lives every moment in the moment, no awareness of where he had come from and no interest in where he is going.

Did he read Eckhart Tolle?  I’m kidding.

The power of now and only now and God forbid that you make me consider anything other than right now.

I am without context.  I am without past or future.

Damn!  This Queen needs a drink!

He is the antithesis of everything the other was.

I looked at Derek as one might a monkey in the zoo.  The gay zoo.  Trapped like a miserable, half naked gogo boy in his techno cage.   Evidence of his genus.  The sub species of gay to which we must all aspire.

Cocktails with orange slices perched on the rim.

Moisturized, combed, overly tanned.  The shrill laughter and meaningless conversation hurt my ears.

I can’t imagine what the viewers of the ‘A’ List will make of me but…we’ll see.  I am old.  I am not Peter Pan.  I have a beard.  I live on a mountain.  I have no sexual traction…time has eroded my usefulness to the gays.

It was an adventure into a life I have only the barest knowledge.  A sociological exercise.  Ripping open the wasp’s nest.

I hung out at bars and in clubs.  I questioned who I was and the choices I have made.

When I was approached I politely declined.  When they spilled their drinks on me I didn’t say a word.

Categories
Hollywood Rant

London Hotel West Hollywood

Really!  What has happened to the London Hotel West Hollywood?

My friends Michael and Yaniv who are visiting from New York very sweetly invited me to lunch there yesterday.

I loved their room which has a nice, easterly view over the Hollywood Hills and a huge bathroom.

Lunch was less charming.

According to the verbose London Hotel website:

“Gordon Ramsay has recreated the Hollywood culinary scene, with dining inspired by the sunny, savvy and social setting of L.A. From his Michelin-starred signature restaurant and casual bistro, to private, poolside and in-suite dining, cuisine is truly superb, highlighting California’s fresh abundance of produce.”

The luxurious appointment that was The London when it first opened is no more.  The faux suede walls, the marble foyer, the topiary…has dated incredibly quickly.

The poolside dining was a disgrace.

The astro turfed roof looks a mess.  It looks unkempt.  The tables strewn rather than arranged.  The staff uniform one step away from Macdonald’s, with the ubiquitous polo shirt and a hideous recent (?) addition…a huge corporate name tag stamped in shiny silver and black plastic pinned haphazardly onto the waitresses grubby white outfit.

We ordered from the polite and attentive young waitress, two salads and one burger.

Gordon must agree that the Devil/God is in the detail.  So, whenever I am in any of his restaurants my expectations are high.   Surely his personal standards should be greater than those he insists of his hapless TV show victims.

Am I being unreasonable?

Like going to the theatre or a movie, when I sit down in any restaurant I don’t go looking for trouble.  I want to be delighted.  Especially when my lunch is being paid for.

Unlike a movie or the theatre, however, when I sit down to eat it doesn’t take much to please me.  I have never walked out of a restaurant half way through a meal whereas I often leave the theatre/cinema huffing and puffing with disgust.

Authenticity delights me.  Generosity too.  Appropriateness thrills.  Detail is everything.

It was an uncomfortable experience.

The table and chairs were crammed behind an immovable planter.  Three big men at a very small table.  We were all a little surprised that the condiments were served in ugly plastic sachet.

We ordered drinks.

My Arnold Palmer was far too tart.   Too much lemon and not enough iced tea.

We had loads to talk about so waiting a little bit longer for our lunch didn’t seem to matter.

When Yaniv’s burger finally arrived the bun was crushed.  It looked cheap.  It looked unloved.  The miserable burger sat forlornly on the plate.  Instead of fries it was served with a tiny cup of chips (crisps).

My skirt steak salad was pathetic.  The undressed salad of various leaves including raddiccio dwarfing the tiny amount of steak.  No ‘abundance of Californian product‘ here.

We thought better of desert.

We ordered coffee.  Yaniv was amused to note that every sugar sachet bar one was empty.

It served as a fitting metaphor.

The experience of being at The London West Hollywood looks like it might be full of surprises but ends up an empty promise.

BTW the London Hotel website ‘poolside lunch’ menu is inaccurate as of 21st July 2011.

We drove to Santa Monica where we met the gorgeous Jeff.  Ate a late dessert on Third Street.  Wandered around the new Santa Monica Place.  Walked to the beach where we watched my friend Armand, as nimble as a monkey, work the rings.

Went home to dogs who were delighted to see me and bounced around crying with pleasure.

Must make coffee.  I have desk work to do today.  Need to write to Jake’s lawyer re iPod incident.

Categories
Gay

Neil Sedaka

7am 4th July. Yesterday I must have walked between The Pines and Cherry Grove a dozen times.

I woke up in The Pines and fell asleep exhausted in Cherry Grove.

Benoit and I went to a ‘media’ party in some huge house on the bay. What differentiated it from any other party was not immediately apparent.

The half naked men and boys looked identical to all the other men and boys at similar parties elsewhere.  I was introduced to the new editor of the Advocate. He too was half naked. He looked at me suspiciously and so he should. I have no interest in him.

By 2 in the afternoon everyone was trashed and the toxicity began to get to me. I kept thinking to myself how much fun Jake would have here. How he would fit right in.

Later that day I met Stephen Macias my ex manager. He is a truly vile individual who fully took advantage of my Hollywood initiation. I will write more about that at a later date.

He looked good for someone with ‘issues’. He told me proudly that he attends Barry’s Boot Camp in LA.

I saw Mark Beard the muralist. He paints all of those Homoerotic murals in Abercrombie and Fitch. He looks like a scull on a stick. My ex Joe helped him buy his huge studio in Hells Kitchen.

Mark’s boyfriend Jim still looks great.

I hung out with Zelcho, Caroline and Todd. We ate lunch at Cherry’s. I kissed a beautiful man who I met waiting for the water taxi.

I thought more about Jake every time I felt uncomfortable. I damned myself because I had inadvertently let one of these people into my life. One of these party boys. Even though when I met him he was merely a party boy in waiting.

Later that night Caroline cooked a delicious dinner and then we met Benoit and his friends at The Top of the Bay ostensibly to listen to Neil Sedaka sing but when we got there Neil looked frail and left with his friends.

He was being bullied by an Easter European woman. He asked her, “Do you like me for me or because I’m a famous singer?”

We chatted for a while about his children and grand children and West Hollywood where he still lives with his wife of fifty years.

Benoit’s politician friend told me his coming out story. Outed at 30, left his wife. Lost his important job in politics. I asked why he hadn’t come out sooner (read get honest) and he said that he didn’t want to lose his family.

Earlier in the day I went to the AA meeting at the Fire House (6pm) where I listened to group therapy and not one word of recovery. The good looking men only listened to the other good looking men and chatted amongst themselves if the speaker was fat, old or ugly.

On several occasions I wanted to get back to NYC. Every man on the boardwalk held a cup brimming with a lethal amount of alcohol. By mid afternoon many men were staggering or slumped or glazed.

The little dog chased a young buck with velvet antlers.

As I sit writing this Neil Sedaka sat with me and told his life story. He is such a delightful man.

I applauded him for not performing last night.

He told me how Elton had given him a second chance. He told me how he had filled the Albert Hall two years ago and he asked if I had ever been in love so I told him about Jake.

He said, “It’s rich material.”

We talked about Carol King, Sinatra, Elvis and Joni Mitchell. It was compelling stuff for 9am on a balmy Fire Island morning.

20110704-092403.jpg

Categories
Hollywood

Eva Longoria

It was a wonderful day yesterday.

Had lunch with Jon in West Hollywood.  Delicious chicken and polenta at Hedley’s.  Great to see him.  We hadn’t seen each other for weeks and had loads to catch up on.  He is in very good spirits.  Business is booming for purveyors of luxury furniture so he is doing very well.

Robby picked me up and we sat in the sunny Chateau Marmont garden and drank iced tea.  Eva Longoria sat next to us.

Met Ryan F and his super sexy new girlfriend Kirsty Mitchell who was once Miss Scotland but is now a very bankable young actress.   She worked with my old friend Billy MacKinnon in his and his brother’s film Small Faces.

We then headed into the hills under the Hollywood Sign where we met Tom D who very kindly let Robby try on the Wolverine talons used in X Men 1.

Had dinner at The Tasting Kitchen in Venice with Anna.  Wonderful food.  I had pork…again with polenta and baked cherries.  Dropped into Gjelina to congratulate owner for sticking to his guns and not let Gordon Ramsey and ‘Lady’ Victoria Beckham bully them into making menu substitutions.

Arrived home late and fell into bed exhausted.  Woke at 5am and watered the garden.  My current obsession.

Robby With Wolverine Claws
Duncan Roy and Kirsty Mitchell

Categories
Gay Hollywood Rant

Gay Pride?

Today the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is burning. Added to the slick of heavy crude oil toxic, jet-black smoke polluting the air we breathe.   The azure, pristine water marred with acrid plumes of shit colored oil.  The marshlands and beaches painted brown, the life there dying because we refuse to doubt our dependence on oil.  It is officially one of the worst man-made environmental disasters ever.

Yet, the massed people of the United States, indeed the world, politely ignored it.  Until now.  Blame is being apportioned, asses are being kicked yet today I will fill my truck with gas and think nothing of it.  I am complicit; I am responsible yet I do nothing.   Nothing.

It is maybe just the analogy I need to explain the human disaster caused by religious based homophobia that causes pain and suffering to those who live in it’s shadow.

Frankly, I don’t give daily thought to the fact that I am part of a community that is routinely demonized just as I choose to forget that hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spew into the sea.  I have learned to live side by side a huge number of people encouraged to hate me and people just like me because of the way we were born and the sexual preferences we have.

Politically I have sat motionless on the sidelines whilst living in the USA.  I have not demonstrated like I did in London, I have not written to my representative in Congress expressing my outrage at how my rights are diminished or devalued.   I put up with things just the way they are because I feel powerless, that I am just one man with one lone voice against the angry mob.

Nowadays I am resigned, whenever I am with men who do not know that I am gay and say things that are blatantly offensive, to keep my mouth shut.    I do not blame myself for their views but as I grow older I am less likely to defend my community or myself.  It simply isn’t worth it.  I am tired of being the uppity gay.

I am exhausted by confronting inequity and hate in my life and I am scared.  Scared that I will not be able to fully defend myself against their physical abuse.

My entire career as an artist has been to serve the gay community.  My plays and films aimed at men like me.  I have been hugely admired (and reviled) as a filmmaker but even my gay friends do not respect that I describe myself as a ‘gay filmmaker’ a gay man who makes films for and about our community.  They muse that I could have done so much better for myself if I had abandoned my principles.  If I had gone ‘mainstream’.

All I ever wanted to be was a gay artist who uses the language and locations of our gay lives.  I am proud to have done so.  I am proud to have served my community thus.

I wonder how much damage we do ourselves in the way that we choose to be seen?  How can we expect those who loathe us to accept us when we do so little to let them know who we are?

What is my part in the public relation disaster that still prevents fellow citizens from owning and celebrating my existence?  What am I doing in my community to help those angry people understand who I am?   How can I expect the mainstream to accept my demands for equality when I essentially live in a hermetically sealed ghetto?

How can I expect my gay fellow travelers to start reaching into their pockets and paying for a PR campaign that somehow celebrates our diversity when all we are seen to want is the right to fuck?

Call me old-fashioned but the love I have for another man always felt far more subversive than the act of fucking.

How do you say ‘I love you’ to another man?  What does it mean when two men say that they love each other?  Having sex with a man is easy-isn’t it?   That’s why we all do it as often as we do..don’t we?  But to say ‘I love you’ to another man is perhaps the most shameful phrase I ever uttered.   My tongue, swelling in my mouth, choking me..rather than say those three tiny words to another man.

I love you.  I love you.  I love you.

What I know for sure about love between men is that others condemn the sanctity of that love.  That I still feel a vague embarrassment when I am seen to hold another man’s hand in the street.

We, as a community, do not promote ourselves as hopeless romantics but as half-naked sex maniacs.  By doing so we have become unwitting witnesses for the prosecution.   By publicly sexualizing everything we do we devalue what we have.  On Facebook the majority of my gay friends are shirtless in their profile pictures.  When questioned why he was bearing his chest in his Facebook profile picture one erudite gay friend said that he was ‘proud’ of his body and wanted to show it off.  It seems like a simple enough answer but is this what gay pride has boiled down to, our very own hard-fought perestroika reduced to this?

It seems so..undignified.

In West Hollywood there is a large poster on Santa Monica Blvd for a gay removal company; two half-naked men carry a small box grinning broadly.  At the premiere LA gay bar The Abbey there is another huge poster celebrating it’s twentieth year.  Three massively built and tattooed men, one of them mixing a martini on the rock hard abs of another; their naked truncated bodies engaged in what may be fellatio.

It was past this very poster out walking one evening last week when I had a full beer can thrown at me that very narrowly missed my head and landed squarely on my chest.  The accompanying homophobic insults are not worth repeating.

I hated the smell of beer on my clothes and the pain in my heart but I hated that poster far more.  It’s as useful as a picture of happy, smiling Jews counting dollar bills outside the Jewish Community Center.

The way we choose to be seen is the way we will be perceived.  I am told constantly that there are thousands of gay men who do not go to gay bars, who live happy lives in monogamous relationships who work quietly and steadfastly beyond the glitz of the gay ghetto but, amazingly, I have never met those men.  I don’t know what they look like.  I have never seen them, been introduced to them.  If I have never met those men then those who misunderstand us certainly never have.

The acrid smoke and crude oil are coming ashore; it destroys almost everything in its path.   If we do nothing perhaps nature will deal with it, break it up over thousands of years so I don’t have to think about it.  But, irritatingly, I am not that kind of man.   I worry about the herons and the oysters and the dolphins.   I am outraged by the incompetence and greed, just like I am every time my community is attacked because we do so little to let them know who we are, what we are, how we are.

Categories
Gay Hollywood Malibu Rant

Renters From Hell

The day started out badly and after getting a great deal better ended with a bang…quite literally.

A friend called me a ‘drama queen’ after reading this morning’s blog.  Thanks friend.  The fact is:  I was sick with a migraine, the first real one I had ever had.  Nausea, blinding headache and dizziness.  Silly me, I decided the best way to solve that particular problem (after writing my blog) was to drive 30 miles to Gold’s Gym and work out with my friend David.  Bad idea.  Hillary met me after the gym to eat lunch at the French Market in Venice.  Bad idea.  My reasoning was that if I could just behave as normal everything would get better.

I am sure that my migraine was actually a combination of stress, high blood pressure and depression.  It followed soon after some particularly loaded conversations.  After I posted my blog the comments came thick and fast.  You guys were all so sweet to support and love me.  The reason I write this blog?   Because you are all there to read it.  To understand, to reach out, to condone and condemn in equal measures.

After lunch I went back to bed and slept deeply.   The phone woke me three hours later… my friends from England  arrived in LA but decided to stay elsewhere.  I can’t say I wasn’t happy.  I wasn’t in any mood for 10 days sharing my life with English people.  Laying in bed feeling so sick, the bathroom floor unwashed.

Woke up to an email from a disgruntled Malibu renter and his blousey girlfriend/fuck buddy.   I knew that we would have some sort of disagreement about the return of the damage deposit.  When he left the house he left it in a terrible state: broken coffee pot and coffee cups, 5 huge red wine stains on the carpet.   Thankfully Jerome was with me when I checked over the house and the moron was forced to admit what he had done.

They were the sorts of tenants who couldn’t do anything for themselves and were constantly summoning me to look at things they could have fixed… like the stove top they locked by accident.   As usual it is the cheap skate tenants who nickel and dime that seem to cause the most problems.   On the first occasion I was asked to go to the house the tenant was so drunk he couldn’t stand up.  I should have chucked him and his lady friend out there and then.   I was embarrassed for him.

When they, rather amazingly, asked to come back to the house I made it so prohibitively expensive… I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it.   The letter I received from them was littered with quotes from this blog.  Well, blog on this bitch!  I was in no mood to deal with bullshit, no mood to be lied to or manipulated and certainly no mood to deal with a woman (not on the contract) the renter had confided in me he couldn’t wait to see the back of.

My anger toward these nasty, cheap people had the affect of shaking my headache and forcing me out of the house.

I walked briskly down Sunset.  I had my hair buzzed and beard trimmed at a barbers on Ivar and began looking for appropriate BEAR WEAR as I now intend, whilst I am in NYC, to attend the Urban Bear Weekend which will be fun-exploiting my tiny celebrity for a bunch of hairy bears and their bear cub boy toys.   A friend of mine suggested the Urban Bear idea as a kind of joke but it looks like a great deal of fun.  This may be my future!

Now all I need is a cub to drag around by the belt loop.

Anyway, by the time I got home it was time to get dressed and head to WeHo for dinner with Spencer my very intelligent British friend.  Over beef burgers and fries trying to understand the cultural DNA of the average citizen of the USA.   My new theory?  That the ‘puritan chromosome’ is not nearly as dominant or as influential in the American genome than the ‘wild-frontier chromosome’.  That the majority of people who live in the USA came from simple European ancestors who, for their freedom, had to combat rattle snakes, bears, hostile climate, native Americans as well as their brutal own.  The threat, real or imagined was always there.

Suspicious and mistrusting by nature these people believe that government is good for only two things PRISONS and THE MILITARY.  White settlers distrust Obama, discrediting his empathy.

After dinner Spencer and I wandered around WeHo and met a couple of handsome cops.  Handsome but dull.  We wandered aimlessly back to the car and outside the Abbey some young man threw a can of vile smelling alcohol at me from a yellow school bus yelling homophobic rhetoric.   The full can hit me squarely in the chest.   I can still feel where it hit me on the sternum.  At first in shock, I grew increasingly angry, then I buried the  anger under a seething fury, quietly determined that ‘they’ can’t hurt me, that they can’t hurt me any more.

‘Drama Queen’ that I am I sank into a pit of man hating quick sand.  I hated the entire crew of my Wednesday morning therapy meeting with their frat house homophobia, their cheating ways co-signed by a dodgy ‘therapist’.   These men miserably attempt to patch up their sham marriages to avoid alimony and see their kids whilst yearning after mistresses, transexuals and sophomoric freedoms.

Categories
Gay Hollywood Malibu

Human being/Human doing

Busy, busy, busy!   Fled, after my morning meeting, to the bank and Malibu and back again.  The misty garden smelling of jasmine and other, sweeter perfumes.  I love the way the garden evolves.  Wood chip paths and great forests of Euphorbia down where the goats will live.

Meeting with lawyer re. company in Santa Monica-where I also bought English chocolate and piccalilli.  Had stove and blender fixed.  Kept an eye on Blankstein grilling via NPR.   Even if it is just political theatre it’s fun to think that this most ghastly of all men-Blankstein is having to play the villain role for all to see.

Goldman Sachs is just another human empire and it will eventually fail as they all do-eventually.  It is the way we do things here on earth.

Human being/Human doing.

The Christian Louboutin party at the Robertson store with the great man in attendance (wearing lilac slacks) was a very friendly, if soulless affair.

‘A’ gays including the poisonous Peter Dunham with his age defying boyfriend the celebrity dermatologist Peter Kopelson-we often take time ignoring one another passing on Runyon Canyon.  Peter Dunham, hideously scarred by acne and HIV, making small talk at the edge of the room with similarly scarred reptilians.  Peter’s talentless, screeching ‘artist’ friend Konstantine Kakanias arrived bound in a flimsy scarf that did nothing to distract from his unusually fat face.   Oh how one loves to loathe.  The most amusing line from Konnie’s on-line resume- Second Prize, International Award for blah blah blah…who the fuck boasts about coming second?

As well as the gays, some of whom I liked by the way-none of whom were wearing CL shoes there was a contingent of Iranian women with huge asses squeezed into badly cut denim jeans tottering around on red soled CL hooker heels.   These dusky gals baying for their photograph taken with Christian who willingly obeyed as only a man can when he is selling most of these women over a thousand pairs of his shoes-each!  It was like a fetish party.  I didn’t recognize any of the women other than the ubiquitous Tracy Ross-saw her at Prada party too.  Dull.

One woman arrived in McQueen but the ensemble was so badly put together she looked like a Michael Jackson Halloween clone.  Sad.

There have been a glut of ‘recessionary chic’ soiree held in small stores across Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, usually with red carpet facilities but there was none last night.  Tomorrow will be the shoe-signing event when Christian signs shoes. My friend Jamie is going, one might want to link to her blog to find out how that went.

Dinner with Peter Scarf at the Mercantile before he went off to drink at some hip club somewhere.

Sweet, late night conversations with lamb head made me content and happy before I slept.  Oh, if only..