Saturday. New tires on the truck, and then a trip up the 99 to Earlimart, Tulare County: farms, sharecropper shacks, RV parks, discarded panties, lost coffee shops, dead snakes in the middle of the road.

A few years ago I was shooting a lot of “erotic themed” stuff. The idea was not to make stuff I thought was erotic but to present things dealing with eroticism. Problem was that I didn’t frame it as explicit documentary and consequently nobody tried to think about what they were seeing. They just tried to jerk off to it.

Here’s a video from the end of that short lived period, featuring transexual Mistress and panty-hose encasement specialist/fetishist Yasmin Ling tickling a panty-hose encased Lena Ramon. It’s always been a favorite of mine because it’s got a whole lot of fetishes rolled into one, and I don’t necessarily understand any of them, except from an aesthetic point of view.

Enjoy

I’m sifting through a pile of audio I’ve collected over the past couple of years for the film I’m working on.

Right now I’m listening to a bunch of drug stories.

They are nearly impossible to form into any sort of narrative. They ramble.

Every drug story is basically the same. It begins when the person runs out of drugs and absolutely positively has to get some more. The person then engages in some hapless activity or activities that inevitably meet four criteria:

1). illegal.

2). humiliating or debasing.

3). absolutely moronic.

4). dangerous.

Once this is done, they have enough money to cop and get them through until at least the afternoon, maybe even the next day.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Daily cycle.

The stories are always delightfully absurd…at least to someone whose been there and doesn’t find it even necessary to suspend disbelief…but they don’t make for good narrative because they never really end. They just repeat over and over and over again.

And while that existence is really very fundamentally linear, the narration rambles. You would think that after endless repetition an addict would get it down to a system, but addicts are sort pathologically incapable of linear, logical behavior. If they were, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t be addicts.

They also ramble because they really have no beginning and they really have no end. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Here’s a typical story. This girl is living in her rundown apartment with her sort of boyfriend. Her ex fiance (it wasn’t so long ago she had it going on; it wasn’t so long ago the ex fiance had it going on) shows up in a truck he stole from his brother-in-law, kicks in the door, breaks all the windows and beats everybody up. Then he leaves. The cops are on their way. The girl has managed to misplace an eightball and the sort of boyfriend is absconding from parole so they flee to the first place they can think of: their dealer, who lives in a motel near Dodger Stadium. The dealer is sympathetic to their story and replaces her eightball, free of charge.

The fiance knows he’ll find them at the dealers and shows up at the motel soon after. He’s not sure which room the girl, her parolee boyfriend who now has several broken ribs and is covered in blood, the dealer, and their Armenian hooker friend Kiki are all staying in so he starts pounding on all the doors. When he started heading to the motel he intended only to do more beating. Then he realized that they were with the dealer. He changed his mind about beating people up. He just wants some crack.

The dealer decides he is going to kill him and a tense scene occurs in the parking lot with the dealer holding a gun to the ex fiance’s head. Even though he has a gun to his head and is driving a stolen car the ex-fiance won’t leave until someone gives him some crack. Once he gets the crack he drives off.

Half an hour later he returns and pounds on the girl’s door. He wants to smoke some crack with her and with her sort of boyfriend who he beat half to death a couple of hours earlier. She thinks this is a bad idea. A fight ensues.

The manager of the motel never sleeps and is watching all of this unfold on the many security camera monitors. He never calls the cops. Having cops around is bad for business. The ex fiance gets more crack and he heads back to Orange County in the truck he stole from his brother-in-law.

Repeat Repeat Repeat.

This is actually kind of an explosive story. It begins loudly enough in what was only months ago a nice apartment in what still is a nice apartment complex in Los Feliz. The neighbors probably aren’t used to this sort of stuff and don’t really know what to do. They are yuppies who have mid-level jobs in show biz. They also don’t know what to do when the girl, her absconding-from-parole sort-of boyfriend, the dealer, who has somehow managed to break his leg, and Kiki the Armenian hooker all move back in a few weeks later, even though the place has no windows and no door. Surely they suspect something is amiss and maybe even are bothered by it ’cause it’s probably fucking with their yuppie tranquility.

Maybe they decide it might be good material for a screenplay.

Then there’s the business in the parking lot of the stadium way: a cracked out maniac pulling up in a stolen truck (what other kind of truck could it be besides stolen?) and starts pounding on everyone’s doors. It’s 4 in the morning but no cops are called. Then there’s the business with the guy having a gun to his head. That’s followed by the business of the guy returning in the stolen truck and banging on more doors. Still, no cops are called.

Bad for business.

Cops were called to the first scene, and presumably arrived to find an empty apartment in shambles with the windows smashed and the door kicked in…obviously a drug scene (I’d been in that apartment. Trust me. It was a drug scene). Maybe they even found the misplaced eightball. But no cop did a “note to self: Keep an eye on this place”…

Repeat Repeat Repeat.

There’s a secondary cast of characters who all do their best to try and ignore the obvious. Example: the brother-in-law in Orange County. The ex fiance had been doing really well and was a successful guy and then in the course of a year tops, everything goes down the toilet. And he looses about 60 lbs. And he is agitated all the time. And he doesn’t sleep for days on end. And stuff is always being stolen. “Gee, what do you think is wrong with Jerry?” “I think he’s upset over the breakup.” “Maybe there’s a job for him on your construction site” Brother-in-law gives the guy a construction job. Week goes by. One day the guy doesn’t show up for work. That same day a bunch of tools are discovered missing from the job site. Guy shows up 4 days later looking like he’s been on a crack binge. Repeat Repeat Repeat. “Gee it must be those crackheads” Read: “Those OTHER crackheads. The imaginary ones. Not my wife’s little brother who denies he’s a crackhead”.

The ex fiance sells the truck for crack. The brother-in-law reluctantly fires him. Eventually he hires him back.

Repeat Repeat Repeat.

The lady behind me in line at the corner market had two black eyes. There was a really cute white rasta girl at the lavanderia. I think she’s new to the neighborhood. I just did my almost daily run around the reservoir. I will be clean 11 years on April Fools Day. I am now going to listen to more crackhead stories and see how I might edit this audio into something with narrative. I’m glad I only need to listen.

1996. A German photographer whose name I’ve forgotten had done a series of photos of people with eggs coming out of their asses. He was doing an exhibition in LA and wanted a live model doing the same. My German housemate Frank was always on top of things when it came to the Berlin art scene. Plus the guy was willing to pay $100 and Frank needed the money. He volunteered.

This all came up quite suddenly so there was no time for preparation. The morning of the show, Frank, Betty and I were gathered in the kitchen of the house we shared debating how best to prepare the eggs so nothing would go wrong while they were lodged wherever eggs end up lodged after you shove a dozen of ’em up your ass.

Someone we knew actually had experience at this multiple eggs in the ass sort of thing. We hunted around for his phone number, called, and left a message on his voicemail.

Back in the 80s I’d had a girlfriend from England who had learned some tricks involving eggs and vaginas while traveling through Thailand. We’d played around with an egg back then and I seemed to remember it was hard boiled. This was going to involve more eggs and a different and tighter orifice, but I still reckoned hard boiled would be best.

Our expert friend hadn’t called back. The hard boiled approach was making sense to the three of us. We boiled a couple of eggs and then let them cool. Frank shoved them up his ass to practice shitting them back out. He was a little worried that he might tighten up in front of the general public at the gallery. Everything went smoothly. Someone went to the Armenian market down the street and bought a dozen eggs which we boiled up and then stuck in the freezer for a while to cool. Afternoon rolled around. Frank gathered his eggs, called a cab and headed out.

Frank had been gone for maybe an hour when our expert friend called back.

“Whatever you do”, he said, “make sure the eggs aren’t hard boiled”.

He explained why. Apparently a hard boiled egg can shrink and split off from the shell. When it comes to withstanding pressure, raw eggs are the only way to go. A dozen hard boiled eggs shoved up your ass was a disaster waiting to happen. Any sudden moves or a nervous tightening of the sphincter and Frank might end up with his colon and asshole sliced to shreds by shards of egg shell.

I figured we had to warn Frank. We didn’t have the number of the gallery and Frank’s pager had been turned off due to non-payment. The only option was to head out to the gallery. My car stopped running a month earlier and I was too broke to get it fixed, so Betty was gonna have to drive.

Betty imagined herself the Queen of LA. She believed she was the hottest up-and-coming fashion stylist on the West Coast. The only thing that was holding her back was clients’ lack of imagination. She was about 75 lbs overweight, dressed in her usual outfit of ratty men’s Calvins underwear and dirty wife beater. She was jiggly in a bad way and usually pissed off at various indignities she imagined she had suffered. She was desperate to be hip and important.

Heroin was trendy at the moment. She claimed she’d been taking it. She claimed she’d been doing heroin with every celebrity rumored to do heroin. Social Distortion was big at the time. “Yesterday I did heroin with Mike Ness” she said. What she didn’t know was that Mike Ness had been clean for nearly a decade at that point. Even if she did learn this, she would insist that Mike Ness was lying about being clean. This would double her reputation as a person in the know. Not only would she be known as a trendy person who did trendy drugs with trendy people and lived on the edge in a trendy way, but she would be regarded as being so in-the-know that she knew things only those not-at-all-in-the-know thought they knew.

Heroin was trendy. Avante garde art involving eggs and assholes was not trendy. Betty refused to drive to the gallery to warn Frank about the hard boiled eggs.

“No way will I be publicly associated with someone who shits eggs for an audience.”

“But it’s in Beverly Hills,” I said.

“Even more reason not to go,” she replied. “You might not give me any respect but people in Beverly Hills know me”

“But it’s art,” I said.

“That’s not art. That’s just gross. And it’s totally not stylish.”

“Well, if the eggs break and cut up his asshole it’ll be your fault.”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to have people who know me and respect my style discover I know someone who shits eggs in public. That could ruin my career. Besides which, if you weren’t such a fuck up, you could drive there yourself.”

Betty got dressed and headed out. She claimed she had important fashion things that needed doing. What this generally meant was that she was going to drive around aimlessly for hours or maybe head to the mall so that we would all think she was doing important fashion things instead of spending the day sprawled on the sofa in her dirty underwear watching TV. She would return around 5 or so, always with a bucket from KFC. Maybe she would tell us she’d run into Jennifer Anniston and they’d spent the afternoon together. Betty had styled Jennifer Anniston for some magazine — maybe it was TV Guide — and, she said, they’d become the best of friends. She often told us Jennifer would come to her looking for advice on how to be stylish, or the Brad Pitt situation, or other celebrity related issues.

I had nothing to do, as usual, so I headed out to the corner Armenian market to buy a 12-pack of Meisterbrau.

Frank was on his own.

Betty returned on schedule with her bucket of KFC. She got back into her dirty underwear and sprawled out sullenly on the sofa to watch TV. I headed to the Armenian market and bought another 12 pack. Frank returned an hour or so later. He managed to shit the eggs without incident and the exhibition was a huge albeit controversial hit. He reported that assorted well known persons were in attendance, including a handful of fashion types and several important celebrities known to be cognoscenti of the cutting edge of art.

Betty refused to believe any of it. A week later a gossip column in the LA Weekly confirmed Frank’s story. Apparently it was indeed fashionable at the moment to be in the presence of someone who publicly shit eggs provided they did so in a gallery setting. Presumably it would be even more fashionable and stylish to actually know the person shitting the eggse. Betty knew in real life she’d never be invited to such an affair and was steamed that she passed up an opportunity to attend. She struggled for an excuse. She said she’d spent that afternoon hanging out with Jennifer Anniston. She said she considered taking her to the opening but wasn’t sure that a nice all American girl such as Jennifer would be able to appreciate such cutting edge stuff.

Liberty

On Valentine’s day, the Senate approved a prohibition on the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill. The Senate voted 51-45, largely along partisan lines. (Apparently torture is a conservative value).

Presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, himself once a victim of torture and an outspoken critic of it, voted against the bill.

When asked about this during a CNN interview, McCain explained that he voted against the ban on torture by talking in great length about what a terrible thing torture is, and reiterating the reasons why it should never be used, sentiments I and many others happen to agree with…In other words, he explained why he should have voted for the bill banning torture…but he voted AGAINST it.

One of the problems with the straight talk express is that it’s just talk.

Liberty no. 2

You would think voting in favor of torture as a means of pandering for votes while being an outspoken critic of torture would cause a moral and ethical dilemma, but one of the things we’ve learned about politics, especially on the right, is that there are no morals or ethics.

USA, Inc.

One would think that this would make a difference to people. It probably would if they cared to know it, but Americans have an unhealthy distrust of knowledge. We are, for reasons I cannot begin to understand, willfully stupid, ignorant by choice.

There’s an article about that in Saturday’s New York Times. It’s titled Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?. I’m gonna excerpt from it here.

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”…

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture…Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge…

Now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

The author of seven other books, [Ms. Jacoby] first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits…

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

Unbeatable Prices

A major part of John McCain’s economic policy is to make permanent the Bush tax cuts he vehemently spoke out and voted against (and it is indicative of American ignorance and desire for instant gratification that we should opt for a $200 tax refund in exchange for lower wages and/or loss of jobs, foreclosure on our mortgages, a tripling of prices at the gas pump and the resultant increase in the cost of food and consumer goods, etc., even when the math clearly shows considerably less money in the bank account after the deal is done). McCain could explain away this contradiction as a function of time: he is human, after all, and humans change their minds and/or make mistakes, although you’ll never hear a politician admit that. There is no way to explain voting for torture and then speaking out against torture in the same day, unless, of course, McCain were to confess to being a unethical hypocrite who will sell out his principles for a vote, (provided, of course, that he even has principles).

Hope

No hope.

This is what hate looks like:

Hate comes from fear. It is not always so crudely expressed as in these photos, but hate is hate no matter how sophisticated the expression. A politics that depends upon fear to stir up votes and consolidate power ultimately brings us this:

It’s a politics that depends on the eradication of hope.

The Republican Party utilizes a carrot-and-stick approach in the desperate attempt to retain power. The Republican carrot is nostalgia. The stick is fear. The fear that results in the hatred depicted above, and a nostalgic yearning to return to an idealized past that never was. Even if it were desirable (and it’s not), it’s an impossibility. There is no way back machine. The only direction you can move in time is forward.

The Republicans’ is not a conservative platform but a reactionary one. Reactionary noun: A person who vehemently, often fanatically opposes progress and favors return to a previous condition. adjective: Clinging to obsolete ideas.

Samples of the results of Reaganonimics so championed by John McCain:

We democrats need to remind ourselves not to engage in nostalgia. We cannot roll back the clock to Bill Clinton’s presidency. All that we’re likely to recapture of it is the next Newt Gingrich and the divisiveness that led to impeachment hearings over a blowjob.

We need to focus on where we go from here and not how do we get back to a time before all this happened.

My poor, naive, misguided 8 year-old-neice who doesn’t know any better has this sign hanging above her door.

I think perhaps our children are telling us what they want from the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we listened to their ideas rather than those of some crinkly old war mongerer? Sure, McCain has plenty more experience than my 8-year-old-neice…but my 8-year-old-neice has better ideas.

I am of the opinion that spiritual principals cannot be applied selectively. Spiritual principals are not conditional statements.

There’s the bit in the 10 Commandments that says “Love thy Neighbor”. It’s not qualified in any way. It doesn’t say “Love the Neighbor provided thy neighbor is white, heterosexual and espouses conservative values”. It’s unequivocal.

I also suspect the word neighbor is not meant to be taken literally. I don’t imagine it means “Love thy Neighbor but fuck the guy two doors down or all them n*ggers in the ‘hood or those goddamn illegals.” And, ya know, it wasn’t written for Americans either. There were no Americans to write it for three thousand years ago.

I suspect it was meant for all of humanity.

Here’s what that commandment doesn’t say: “Hate thy neighbor, Fear thy Neighbor, Deport thy Neighbor.”

Here’s something else, too: If a spiritual principal is not conditional, it cannot be conditioned upon reciprocation. It doesn’t say “Love thy Neighbor provided thy Neighbor loves you back.” If your neighbor hates your ass, let that be his problem. Your job is still to love him. That doesn’t mean you need to like him. Love is not like to the nth degree. In fact it’s completely unrelated.

Will electing John McCain who preaches 100 years more unjust and unjustifiable war in Iraq and an economic policy that ensures more people will live in poverty and despair increase hate? Yes. These are politics of fear. Will electing Barack Obama eliminate hate? No. But of the choices offered us, it is by far the largest step in the right direction.

There is NO excuse for apathy.

This is the stretch up and down Sunset Blvd 3 blocks in either direction from my apartment on Super Tuesday. My polling place was 3 blocks away at the Sleep EZ mattress store. Surrounded by mattresses were 6 polling booths — 4 Democrat, with lines in front of ‘em, and 2 Republican, which were empty. I understand this story was repeated all over this part of town.

Between my polling station at Sleep EZ and my work 5 blocks away were two other polling stations — one in the alley behind the Sumi Ink Club studio and another 2 blocks further down and across the street in the Salvation Army hospice and women’s shelter.

My neighborhood is traditionally a Hispanic neighborhood although it has become rather hipster infested and the houses on my side of Sunset are not cheap. Census data has it 62.5% Latino, median income $28,651, 28% below the poverty line. Unemployment is at 7% (that would probably be the hipster musicians).

Barack Obama has not been polling well with Latinos…Nevertheless, Echo Park seems very much like an Obama neighborhood. There are Latinos for Obama posters everywhere. I stopped to take a shot of the Hope poster on the electrical box outside the Lavanderia, and the burly Mexican guy who runs it came out and told me that it was better from the other side where the door handle didn’t chop off the “H” in hope. All four sides of the box had the Obama poster; he’d proudly festooned his corner of Sunset and Coronado.

The guy at the fish taco joint with the Latinos for Obama poster behind the register wouldn’t take my money when I tried to pay for my tacos because I was wearing my Obama button and told him I was photographing all the Obama stuff I could find in the neighborhood that day. No free fish tacos for Hillary supporters, though.

The only Hillary sign I spotted was a xerox flyer on a lamppost outside the liquor store reminding us that she’d voted for the war. The next lamppost down, next to the Escrow sign, reminded us that Obama didn’t.

Here are a couple of important stats: about 71% of Obama voters indicate they’d be happy to vote for Clinton, and vice versa. And Obama and Clinton each won about 5 million votes yesterday. John McCain, who basically swept the Republican primaries, won about 3 million votes. The Democrats are voting in record numbers this year. That is a great thing.

The fact that Hillary polls so much better with Latinos than Obama is a bit worrisome if you are an Obama supporter because McCain also polls well with Latinos (he wants to recruit more for his proposed 100 year war in Iraq). Latinos tend to be more cautious voters - conservative in the true sense, which is not necessarily the opposite of Liberal. Obama is a very “new” candidate. Perhaps the next few months familiarity will help. Obama handily won a number of traditionally red states yesterday, states that used to be democrat in the pre Reagan days, and the Democrats need those states to win a general election. Obama also does really well with independents, as does McCain, and Hillary does not. The independent voters have decided the last few elections, and they’ve picked Bush.

Whether it’s Barack or Hillary, the next administration is going to have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Tomorrow we’ve got a chance to help elect the first African American President, which would make history, or to select the first female Presidential Candidate (and another old white guy for President), which would make history on a much smaller scale.

Tomorrow we’ve got a chance to put a Democrat in the White House, or not.

Now it’s time to make a pragmatic decision as much as an emotional one.

I’m lazy, it’s late, Brad Listi says it nicely in his blog and so I’ll save myself some trouble and just quote him:

“Do you want the Dems to win in November?

If so, vote Obama.

Think about it for a second:

Hillary polarizes. Big time.

Obama does not.

Hillary wins the nomination, and what happens? She pulls the Democrats, the dyed-in-the-wool Dems, but who else?

Independents? Maybe some.

But McCain does very well with Independents. Indies are his bread and butter.

Republicans are fractured right now, and about the only thing that can unify them is the prospect of another eight years of Clinton. A Hillary candidacy will send the Republicans rallying around McCain, and McCain will defeat Hillary in the battle for Independent voters.

Obama is a true phenomenon, and the Dems would be foolish to miss the opportunity to nominate him. You can’t manufacture this kind of thing. He is a once-in-a-generation candidate, and he is hugely, hugely popular among Democrats, Independents, and, yes, some Republicans.

Obama is the only candidate—-the only candidate—-with the chance of winning a landslide in the general election.

He can do it. We just need to believe it, and vote for him, and turn the page.”

***************************************************************

Remember the last time a bunch of ya’ll voted with your hearts and picked Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore? Gore won the popular election by a tiny enough margin that Bush was able to fudge it in Florida and take the electoral college. If 1/10 of those folks who voted for Nader in Florida had voted for Gore, we wouldn’t have war in Iraq. We wouldn’t have a mortgage crisis and the largest deficit IN HISTORY. We wouldn’t have the right wing supreme court we now have, itchin’ to take away a woman’s right to choose. We wouldn’t be torturing a bunch of people in Guantanemo.

If you wanna have a woman lose to McCain just so you can say “finally, we nominated a woman”, like nominating a woman at the expense of Roe vs Wade is a worthwhile trade off…maybe ya’ll should think again.

I’d be happy to see either Hillary or Barack in the White House. I also believe the only one who stands a chance in the general election is Barack. I would vote for the homeless guy on the corner over McCain. At least if you give him a beer he’ll stay out of trouble.

I don’t trot out the dirty pictures much any more. No matter what sort of statement I tried to make, if a photo has nudity it seems the audience feels obligated to try and jerk off to it, and I need a better reason than befuddling a bunch of would-be masturbators.

Lust 4 Lace is a good reason. Yeah, it’s dirty pictures night as LACE resumes their legendary Valentine’s Day Party, but it’s dirty pictures night in the place that brought us Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and has been at the forefront of new art here in LA.

Three of my short films will be part of a series curated by Margie Schnibbe (aka Vena Virago of Vivid.alt fame) and David Burns, and featuring films by Buck Angel, Skip Arnold, Franco Castilla, Charong Chow, Tyler Hubby, Selene Luna, Eon McKai, and a host of others.

My three films are “Hello” which features a naked, tattooed, very pregnant and somewhat confused girl doing pretty much nothing (it’s minimalist porn), “A Good Time” which features a panty-hose encased woman being tickled by her transexual mistress, and, finally, “the Pig”, which provoked one disturbed would-be masturbator to write “This is disgusting. Either that or it’s an art film” and another happier one to comment “Finally! David Lynch has made a gay porn!”

From the press release:
Organized by artists David Burns and Margie Schnibbe (aka Vena Virago) with Peter Bolton & Carla Hart, Lenora Claire, Chad Clark, Robert Crouch and Christine Nichols, Lust 4 LACE celebrates the grand tradition of years past and all manner of delightful debauchery by creating a night featuring explicit, naked, juicy, tasty, slippery, slimy, crunchy, gooey, sexy, voyeuristic, fetishistic live action animated narrative squishy hand-made video, live art and musical performance (DJ sets by John Tejada, Henry Self and Robert Crouch), not to mention kinky crafts with JP Craft Captain sponsored by Babeland

ABOUT LACE
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), a nonprofit contemporary art center located in the heart of Hollywood, is internationally recognized as a pioneer among art institutions. For three decades and counting. LACE has curated and produced art and events that inspire the public imagination and engage with timely issues that shape local and global life. www.welcometolace.org

Additional support for LACE and its programs comes from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Getty Foundation, Jockey Hollow Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Morris Family Foundation, Stone Brewing Co., and the members of LACE.

Ya’ll come down and enjoy the smut! It’ll be a great way to celebrate Barack Obama’s victory in next week’s primary!

The homeless fat guy has been on the corner just about as long as I’ve lived here. He’s mellowed some over the years, which is a good thing, ’cause he was really aggressive at first, and that was a drag.

The homeless girl has been on the corner just about as long, and at some point over the years they became a couple. Other homeless people come and go. Some, like Tony Pony, die. Others end up in jail, or somehow move on.

They’ve stayed. They look after the corner. It’s their home. They keep it clean. He sweeps it every morning. They’ve got their milk crates they sit on, and after he’s finished sweeping the corner he reads the paper. At night he listens to ball games on the radio.

She’s been drinking a lot more than usual this past year. She’s pretty much a mess, even by her standards. He looks after her.

She disappeared in November. I asked him if she was okay. He was really worried. He’d called the jail (she had a couple of open container warrants) and the hospital, but no word. It seemed to throw off the whole dynamic of the corner. There were less homeless than before, but there seemed like more because the group was busted up and it was every man/woman for themselves.

And then after about a week he told me he’d gotten word she was living (and drinking) in an alley somewhere down by Kaiser. He was glad she was okay but felt like a fool, he said.

Pissing down rain a couple of weeks ago on a Tuesday night. She came into a meeting, sat quietly in the back. When it’s over we walk back to the corner. She didn’t really want to go there, but she’s following me and that’s where my apartment is. She said she is from the Carolinas. She’s been in and out of meetings for 20 years. She used to have a place out in Highland Park. She said she didn’t want to drink that night, but I think she just wanted out of the rain.

She’s had it with the fat guy. Yes, he looks after her. Yes, she depends on him to an extent. But while his concern as expressed to me was very genuine, their relationship is pretty fucked. She says when she’s trying to sleep, usually on the sidewalk, he keeps her awake all night talking about how big his dick is and rubbing up against her. They got into a fight and he stole her blanket. When it’s two o’clock in the morning and they’re all alone in their alley, he does not treat her very well at all.

She says there are no shelters or rehabs for her, ’cause she’s from out-of-state. That’s bullshit, of course. The truth is more likely that she’s not really thinking about cleaning up. She’d like a roof over her head, but sobriety is not a price she’s willing to pay. So she’ll settle for a dry alley where nobody keeps her up all night telling her how big his dick is.

We get to the corner. She ducks into the liquor store. I said good night and continue home.

The next morning she’s drinking. The next evening she’s gone. The fat guy doesn’t seem worried this time. He’s still on the corner, says hello every morning. He has a new and better radio.

Hopefully she’s found a new corner or an alley someplace where she can pass out drunk every night without getting molested.

It’s a cold, wet winter this year. I’m glad I have a home.