You Make Me Feel

We're living in an era now of sanctimonious meanness, where facts and figures get shaped into propaganda and then tweeted out like confetti thrown up into the air to celebrate the end of everything you counted on as being good and right and true.  Every idea and person you thought of as foul and innately wrong is now out of the shadows and staring you right smack-dab in the face.   All smiles, like Pennywise the Clown, except in dress-clothes, standing in the Oval Office while the Pennywise-in-Chief signs yet another executive order that yields yet another rabbit-hole that yields yet another moral and fiscal and ethical black-hole.  It's a process.

Where do you go when the rabbit-hole calls?

I'm finding myself going to the TV.  To a show called Pose, which is on FX Sundays 9 PM.  It is an incredible thing to behold:  a reenactment and gorgeous aggrandizement of a time, in the late 1980s, when disadvantaged, working-class people took control of whatever they could take control of, and found a way out of the black-hole of their era by creating a rainbow path to beauty, irony and cold-hard revenge through fashion and art and kindness to each other.  Pose is about drag balls created and performed in crumbling theaters in NYC, where groups, or houses, of like-minded folks transform daily life into deluxe versions and revisions of what could and should be.  Mostly comprised of African American and Hispanic gay and trans people, these houses become families, and these families become legends through competitions based on categories like Dynasty and executive realness, and at the end of each night beautiful and victorious drag-queens leave with wagons full of trophies.

It's all about hope.  "Hope," of course is a complicated and sometimes even meaningless 4-letter word now, and it's losing, well, its hopefulness, even as I write.  Pose concentrates on a parallel late-80s era of about-to-be-hopelessness, not only when drag culture was finding a way to nourish and grow itself into Rupaul-ian heights, but also when you-know-who was building those towers and opening those now defunct casinos.  Like Athena sprouting from the head of Zeus, our Pennywise-in-Chief has sprouted from the spleen of Ronald Reagan, a gasbag god using Reagan-era bromides to finally cut to the chase, conservatism-wise:  hate, pure and simple, without any of that twinkly-eyed "City on the Hill" bullshit.  And Pose examines that stuff too, so that we can see a world in which the elite control the conversation and yet the powerless become the norm.  That's where the hope comes in for me: witnessing all that glorious drag-queen effort in creating a world where everyone can feel free to roam and strut and pout and preen and know there is another place to get to, to flourish, beyond that goddamn black-hole.

All with a Ryan-Murphy eye on style and stylishness, reverberating with the disco evangelism of Diana Ross and Sylvester and the like.  The look of the show is reality once or twice removed, with silky, sulky lighting and the icy loneliness of the streets dissolving into the purple heat and light of the balls.  Pose is the thirtysomething for this era, a zeitgeisty, high-end, hour-long drama that transcends its pop status by embracing its characters and finding authenticity beyond its initial demography.

Jennie Livington's Paris Is Burning is the ur-text of course.  She's even a consultant on Pose.  But Murphy uses Paris Is Burning's cinema-verite as a jumping-off point into a dream-world and a reality that intermingle without losing the power of either one.  The very first scene in the pilot lets us watch as the House of Abundance clan mops up historical costumes from the Metropolitan at closing time, and then after the caper wearing these items to a ball.  It is the very essence of taking back the power, done with enough of a lighthearted sarcasm and love to make it all seem breezy and triumphant.  That's Pose.

I love every character on this show and every moment and setting they inhabit.  While there's quite a bit of melodrama, there's never camp, except in the climate-controlled environments created by the queens and their houses.  It's a prime-time soap as church, as manifesto, as a form of transcendence and survival.  Every character in Pose is necessary, vital and real.  Especially now.  I've never considered a TV show as such a necessity before.  Watching it is becoming my way out of both rabbit- and black-holes.  It is a retreat in the right direction.
  

Drag without Drag

 

 

Drag can be a drag sometimes, a rote activity performed because it's "drag," not because it's exciting or unique or funny or astute.  Drag-shows (the ones in gay bars, on Logo, and a lot of other venues across the entertainment spectrum) can become as one-two-three as old-school stand-up routines or kitschy sing-alongs, so self-conscious and people-pleasing you want to push a dollar-bill at it all and then walk away.  I've been to, and seen, a lot of those kind of shows, with lip-syncing queens acting all busy and fierce in shiny costumes that seem worn out as much as the music and poses.  Drag to me is about an off-kilter celebration of what you are trying to emulate; it is askew and yet also somehow straight-on, judgmental enough to make a statement but also lovely enough to rise above the judgment and make a statement about the inevitable worthlessness of every situation, the absurdity of trying too hard to be somebody in a world that usually just does not give a shit.

 

So with all that said, ladies and gentleman:  Candace Devereaux, as performed by Fred Armisen on Portlandia.  The inaugural episode of the fifth season of the sparkly, slapsticky, on-target sketch show features an all back-story segment (framed hilariously by an innocent newsletter writer stumbling into Women and Women First, wanting some bare-essential information to put into the neighborhood newsletter, and Candace and her partner Toni [played to perfection by Armisen's eternal sidekick Carrie Brownstein] taking it as a major opportunity to tell their story and have it written down).   From this mini-movie, we discover why Candace and Toni wound up in feminist bookstore obscurity.  What I really want to celebrate is Armisen's exactitude and total love for Candace, in which Ms. Devereaux is given to us as an early-90s career woman fiercely focused on being the top dog in a book-store-chain empire overseen by male chauvinist pigs.  It is probably the funniest 30 minutes I have seen on TV in recent years, specific, dynamically stupid, calmly over-the-top, kind of like Armisen himself.

 

I've seen this episode now about 10 times.  Whenever I feel down or troubled, I go to it.  It makes me lose it every time, especially the gorgeous dance sequence, when Toni and Candace have a dance-off to Snap's 1990 classic, "I've Got the Power" in a fluorescently-lit happy-hour club.  What could have been a drag in this scene turns into a revelation, as Armisen performs Candace's early-90s machinations through a series of horrible and glorious dance moves involving posing like Murphy Brown and pulling her hair away from her face like a super-model with the fan just turned on.  It's all red-hot-camera-sessions, arrogance, and power-envy, blurring into a sort of caricature that isn't a caricature:  it's a portrait, a tribute.  Armisen really seems to love being Candace, inhabiting her life and skin and facial expressions with the ease of Meryl Streep doing a Hungarian accent.  He slips into the guise effortlessly, and then finds huge amounts of joy in playing through her hilarious, professional rages ("We have a story to tell.  So listen.  And WRITE IT DOWN!!!"), her man-hunger, her appetites that seem formed from intense personal politics as well as trends bullet-pointed in a 1992 Cosmo article.  Candace has no shame or remorse about it:  she is goddamn sleeping her way to the top!

 

I think a lot of the credit has to go to the director of the series, Jonathan Krisel.  He is the perfect documentarian for drag.  He lights, photographs and edits this episode with the deft, hilarious care he does in all the other Portlandia episodes, giving both Armisen and Brownstein a stage on which to be totally stupid and perfect.  There are scenes in "The Story of Candace and Toni" that seem to be mocking and/or paying homage to great 80s and 90s glossy thrillers like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, and a number of Demi Moore vehicles where she played a hot executive in search of either a lover or a killer or both, all of that simulacra fashioned into a love-letter to Candace's persistence in being Candace, her flourishes, her furies, her wonderful Candace-ness.

 

This is the kind of drag I'm talking about:  dumbfoundingly on-target, effortlessly silly, and a tribute to what is being mocked while mocking without any reverence or fuss.  And it is so hilarious I can't stop going back to it to find some other morsel of joy. 

 

Candace Devereaux for President!

 

  

Massive Heart Attack

 

 

I Am Divine is a new documentary about probably one of my favorite artists who ever walked the face of the Earth:  Divine.  This picture does him justice:  glamorously monstrous, beautifully horrible, and yet a kind of defensive innocence glitters from his eyes.  Mockery and sympathy contend with each other in the way he presents himself.  I refer to him as "him" because I think that is what he always wanted:  the masquerade did not change who he actually was; it was only a device to show how fucked-up and beautiful everything is. 

 

Divine, or Glenn Milstead, is one of those penultimate figures in my life.  He was punk, queer, down-home, sloppy, stupid, sarcastic, bombastic, crazy, lovely, and so on.  I first saw him via VHS, 1985, when I was an art-school dropout in Indiana, washing dishes for a living, dropping acid, smoking Salem Lights and eating Little Debbie's Oatmeal Cream-pies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It was Pink Flamingos, and what a terrible and glorious introduction.  Simply iconic, Divine wore clownishly femi-nazi make-up (created by the genius Van Smith), tight-fitting ball-gowns, and brandished a pistol in the cold air outside her junkyard trailer.  She had a posse of tragicomic misfits that somehow seemed completely pleased with themselves, arrogantly mean-spirited, selfishly unaware of their own joke and yet completely committed to it.  Divine in the movie is total woman, dolled up and pissed off, ready to eat dog-shit at any moment, incredibly proud of her own demonic nature, and yet also chatty and sweet with those of her own kind.  In short, she was a lot like the white-trash folks I had grown up with, only glazed with freak-love, popping out of the ordinary nastiness because Glenn Milstead (and John Waters of course) had willed this beautiful monster into being to lead the way toward the Abyss.  Waters gave Divine a universe to be pissy and mouthy and elegant in, a brown ugly landscape of muddy hills and brambles and broken-down cars, and Divine graced that pit with an angry otherworldliness.  She was a goddess creating her own origin myth while shoplifting chuck-roast in between her legs. 

 

 

In I Am Divine, John talks about the day he and Glenn first saw each other, in high school.  They were both seventeen.  John's dad was dropping him off at school, and they both spotted Glenn waiting to go into school.  Glenn was dressed in preppy anonymous clothes, John says, and he was definitely trying to camouflage himself in normalcy, but obviously could not hide what John calls his "nelly-ness."  John's dad quietly noticed Glenn too, according to John:  his dad's face got stony, angry, right at the moment he spotted Glenn.   

 

Glenn could not hide his "Divine."  Even if he tried really really hard.  And so he eventually understood instead of hiding he would need to scream and flail and display his "nelly-ness" to the point people were afraid of it, afraid of his power.  And God did he have power.  In Pink Flamingos, in Female Trouble, in Polyester, and even in Hairspray, Divine was something never seen before or since:  all fury, all horror, and yet completely real, down-to-earth, hilarious, intelligent.  He didn't create a character (John did that); he created an atmosphere of self.

 

At the end of the documentary, Glenn's agent talks about seeing Glenn dead in his motel room in 1988.  (Glenn died of a massive heart attack in his sleep.)  That day he died was going to be one of those penultimate moments for Glenn:  he was going to start a stint on Married with Children, not as Divine, but as another character the writers had created for him.  And that character was a man, which made Glenn very happy.  The agent narrates what she saw that morning:  the Married with Children script carefully placed on his nightstand, his bed-slippers next to the bed, the suit he was going to wear laid out on a chair. 

 

And Glenn in bed, gone from this world.

 

"He was beautiful," the agent said.

 

The poignancy about that whole scene is his preparedness, his optimism, his work ethic.  He was dedicated to finding ways of turning people's heads inside out. 

 

That takes a lot out of you.

   

Female Troubles

 

 

Last week I wrote about all the media furor over Miley's fucked-up cheerleader/porn-star drag at the MTV Music Awards, satirizing and taking seriously Miley's attempts at Madonna-ness:  "[Dancing around like a stupid slut at a trailer-park prom] is her art.  She has become the neo-neo-neo-Madonna.  Madge almost thirty years prior did a rolling-around-on-the-floor-in-a-wedding-dress stunt on the VMAs that got her in 'hot water' too.  And remember her glossy, awful Sex Book?  Remember her flaunting her "transgressive sexual power"?  Remember Camille Paglia?"

Well somebody sure did remember Camille Paglia.  She was enlisted to sum up the whole tragic Miley debacle in Time Magazine.  Camille even got her name on the cover.  Damn. 

And the essay she wrote has a mummified unintentional self-parody to it that seems stolen from an outtake of Waiting for Guffman.  Camille chastises Miley for being "disgusting" and "artless" and "crass," while canonizing Madonna for all her artfully executed hijinks, the Original Genius Bad Girl.  The peak moment in Camille's essay in Time comes right smack dab in the middle, when she kisses Madonna's ass so magnificently you just cannot believe your eyes:  "Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mic while singing 'Like a Virgin'  at the first MTV awards show in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.  But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove."

I remember that "Like a Virgin" stunt, and it wasn't in any way "sensual" or "profound" or an example of "trained modern dance."  And Marlene Dietrich or Bob Fosse were nowhere in the schtick.  It was just the slutty, stupid, young Madonna rolling around on the floor with a microphone stuck up to her mouth, singing "Like a Virgin" as if she were drunk and throwing a sleepy tantrum.  Her singing voice was pretty sad, just like Miley's, as both young ladies were focused primarily on trying way too hard to push buttons the way young and slutty people often do.  Which makes both preeminent moments in pop culture, Madonna rolling around on the floor, and Miley rolling her tongue outside her mouth, hilarious.  Just plain god-awful funny.

Which brings me to Divine, the goddess both of these gals seem to be referencing, intentionally or not.  Divine, who passed away in 1988 of heart failure, was the star of many John Waters' films, but the one I love him in the most is Female Trouble.  In this highly stylized and completely enjoyable romp from 1974, Divine plays Dawn Davenport, a morbidly obese teen-aged runaway who grows up to be a white-trash superstar addicted to both drugs and fame.  (Ring any bells?)   In the movie, Divine sports many uniquely fabulous looks, including the two in the photos above:  a see-through wedding gown and a strappy sequined pantsuit number.  Both these looks would definitely be at home on the MTV Video Music Awards stage, whether worn by Miley, Madonna, or Gaga.  But more importantly, it is the way Divine acts that brings to mind what is missing in both Madonna's and Miley's oeuvre.  There's a bit of angry tragedy in Divine's portrayal of Dawn, a maniacal need at the core of her performance.  Divine plays Dawn with an un-ironic gusto that supersedes vanity, and therefore a true picture of something depraved and ravenous and hilarious is revealed.  She makes the horror of Dawn's spectacle turn into a sort of wild beauty. 

Miley didn't.  Madonna didn't either.  Camille wants to critique Miley on the grounds of "high art," but really it's a different kind of art and territory on which Madonna and Miley and other pop provocateurs should be judged:  drag.  And Divine set the standard.  He provoked and performed with a sense of abandon and yet with no need to please his audience.  He seemed completely intent on finding a way out of popularity and into a sort of grandeur beyond "art" or even "fame."  He mocked "art" and "fame" with his smart-assed yet authentic display of desire.  Divine was punk, outsider-art, pop-art, low-art, high-art, and decadent Weimar-Republic, all rolled up into one horribly beautiful package in Female Trouble. 

He is actually what Camille calls the "superb precursor."  Madonna was simply aping feeble imitations of Divine at 10th remove.

To read the Camille's full and hilariously fusty essay about Miley:  Camille on Miley in Time Magazine.

Cash in Hand

This past weekend I went to two social events that seem worlds apart when you think about them, and yet when I experienced them I got a weird epiphany from the juxtaposition.  The first event was a fundraiser for Visionaries and Voices at the Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky.  The second was crashing a friend's bachelorette party at a drag show downtown. 

I don't know how to put this without sounding horrible, but I always get the creeps when I go to fundraisers of any kind.  Not because charitable acts of giving are taking place, but because of all the machinations and strategies that seem to have to take place just so you can court rich people into underwriting your thing.  In the movie Friends with Money, one of the characters, who is down on her luck, points out the bold-faced irony about benefits by asking her rich friend why doesn't she just write a check and not have to go to silent-auctions/awards-presentation/etc.in the first place, saving the non-profit organization a lot of time and money that they could use to actually do the work they are supposed to do.  And her rich friend just looks back at her totally befuddled and pissed off:  "Because that's the way it's done."  End of story. 

And so it goes. 

It was great to see the artists Visionaries and Voices helps dancing and showing off their art last Saturday night at the Carnegie, and the small-talk was fine, but there was also this feeling that after the auctioneer turned off his microphone and the staff took out the trash, and everyone got what they wanted or didn't get what they wanted, the world would be sliding right back into status-quo mode.  Charity is weird like that.  It allows people to feel good in the moment and do a little something, and then forget about the whole complicated mess and move on.  It's all noble and wonderful, and yet fundraisers keep on happening and the world does not really progress that much.  Without them, though, nothing at all would happen.  "Because that's the way it's done."

Drag has that same feeling of inevitability and futility, but the drag-queens always get the joke.  They seem to understand that what they are doing is both vitally necessary to their own mental health, while completely acknowledging that the activity of drag does not change a mother-effing thing for their stations in life.  They are pretending to be people they aren't, but also are creating the persona they need in order to feel alive.  In that off-kilter mix of self-congratulation and self-knowledge and self-deprecation comes a sort of enlightenment that's sad enough to be a torch song and funky/freaky enough to go 100% trashy disco.  There's a joy in the irony at a drag show.  A truth shines through the machinations and strategies, and I think that's why Saturday night I felt more comfortable and alive  watching Mystique strut her stuff as a supersonic Missy Misdemeanor Elliott grabbing dollar bills from audience-members' hands, than witnessing acts of charity.  In the charity format there's no counterbalance, no wicked whisper, just a sense of do-gooding that yes is wonderful but also kind of momentary and self-congratulatory.  In the drag format, the artists gets the dollar-bills directly, that evening.  Cash in hand.