Ozzy Contin

Ozzy Contin had been clean for five months when he morphed from retired rock star to aspiring performance artist. His band, Having Unprotected Sex (formerly On Coke until the suits at the label made him change it), was on what appeared to be permanent hiatus. His first art piece was a video in which he was sworn in as an International Art Star, taking the oath of office with his left hand raised and his right hand on a copy of Salvador Dalí’s 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship…

A Dry Proustini (in which Beauregard Coverdale makes an appearance)

Kicking out the props is not for everyone.

J and I met over a game of darts at The Wobblie Wonk. She kicked my butt and emptied my wallet. Later that evening while licking her clit I slid the second and third fingers of my right hand into her cunt and asshole and found the fourth finger of that hand entering a hole the likes of which I had never before encountered. Much later, in an aside, she confided, “It helps in processing interstellar vapors.”

Before leaving the next morning J told me she was an exo-musicologist doing postdoctoral work and asked me to meet her in Bushwick that evening to hear an ensemble I had never heard of that featured musicians on kithara, crychord, and chromelodeon. Most nights we went out to hear music, and afterwards we went back to my place.

We dated for six months and neither of us had an occasion to reference this hole again. It did, however, play an important role in our lovemaking. Oral and genital stimulation of the hole triggered the most intense female orgasms I have ever been witness to.

According to J: “There are three essentials for concocting the perfect Dry Proustini. First, use a top-shelf gin like Plymouth or Magellan. Second, add in two hundred micrograms of Clear Light. Third, use only freshly baked madeleines for dunking. And always remember that one Dry Proustini is enough.”

The only person in my world I introduced J to was my uncle Paolo, a critical theory intellectual who was involved with the Situationists in ‘68. He makes odd connections that seem perfectly obvious once you stop to think about them. Over lunch at A.O.C. on the day he and J met he compared the Occupy Wall Street protesters to Jerry’s Kids from a vintage Muscular Dystrophy telethon. He called them Michael’s Kids. I believe he meant Moore. He even sang, “Look at us we’re marching/ Looking at us we’re squawking/We who’ve never marched or squawked before.” He enunciated “marching” and “before”, with an extreme old-fashioned New York accent, as “mawching” and “befaw”. J cracked up laughing at his performance.

When I saw Paolo the following week he was in high spirits telling me about the scandal stemming from his uncle Beauregard’s will. Beauregard, my paternal grandfather’s older brother, was the black sheep of his generation of the family. In 1936 he went off to Spain, ostensibly to fight the Communists with the Jefferson Davis Brigade. He actually spent most of his time in Madrid cafes seducing young Phalangist soldiers. Once the United States entered the war he stayed on in Madrid with the OSS, and later on he joined the CIA where he stayed until retirement.

Beauregard, I learned from Paolo, was one of the pioneers in the field of holography. He made dozens of holograms but he never tried to have them shown in a gallery. Given the content of many of them, not only would they have offended public decency at the time, they would also have gotten Beauregard fired from the CIA.

The most scandalous ones consisted of holograms of men’s anuses before and after sexual penetration. His working title for this series was Assholography. Each pair of holograms had a name, and many were purported to be of people famous in the art and literary worlds, such as “Allen”, “Truman”, and “Andy”.  Beauregard’s estate contains letters from all three that seem to indicate a sexual connection with him.

Now it appears that Beauregard’s Assholography show is going to be mounted -- isn’t that a funny word to use in this context? -- at Wastrel Gallery on 26^th Street, thanks to the intervention of Beauregard’s niece Laurel, the co-executor, along with her sister Lisa, of his will.

Laurel is commonly referred to as “the evil sister”.  Lisa is “the good sister”. Beauregard’s death prompted Laurel to venture out of her lair in the Idaho Panhandle. For the past three years she had been hiding from the feds who want to question her about the activities of her 501(c)3 organization. The Columbine Foundation proclaims in its mission statement that its goal is: “to put a handgun in the locker of every school kid in America”. After losing its tax-exempt status Laurel changed the name of the organization to The Columbine Brigades and disappeared into wack-job country.

Paulo agrees with my contention that the political dispersion in our family resembles no other family so much as the Mitfords. Paulo, like Jessica Mitford, represents the far left. Beauregard, like Diana Mosley, represents the far right. I’m still not sure which extreme Laurel is on, but whether of the left or right she is the most extreme one in the entire family.

My site piece titled “Whirlpools” consists of a dozen fifty foot long steel tubes four feet in diameter that have been embedded in the earth, each filled with a different color paint, with the contents set in motion by wind-generating equipment that simulates whirlpool-like motion…

After Franz Hals

I made this sketch in 1987 while sitting through a boring meeting at work.

Cunt.

The Hidden Origins of Wal-Mart

Last evening after work, while waiting for a friend at The Wobblie Wonk on Rivington Street, I had an extended conversation with a 62-year old Scotsman named Fergus McWilley. Sporting dark blue early Roger McGuinn sunglasses perched on the tip of his nose and dressed in a vintage black and white Harris Tweed blazer, a pair of red velvet bellbottoms custom made for him by Mary Quant (in one of her rare forays into men's fashion), and a classic tone-on-tone white high roll dress shirt from a long-gone Carnaby Street shop, Fergus looked like he had just stepped out of a fashion shoot circa 1966. Here's one strand of his exegesis. He was telling me about being a scholar, specializing in the history of magic, with reciprocal library privileges at Hogwarts, where he stumbled upon a heretofore hidden history of Voldemort's family, including extensive narrative purporting to be about Voldemort's previously unidentified descendents, the best known of whom is Sam Voldemort, who emigrated to the U.S. at age sixteen. Disguised as a muggle, he established a dry goods store in Arkansas. Around the time of the World War I anti-German hysteria he changed his name from Sam Voldemort to Sam Walton, and the name of his store from Volde-Mart to Wal-Mart. Fergus ended this portion of the conversation by asking: "Now, if this is true, is it any wonder that Wal-Mart treats its workers so shabbily? How would you feel working for a miserable pittance and knowing that all of your hard and underpaid labor is just going to further enrich the descendents of You Know Who?"