| |||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News  PeoplePolitics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon People is sponsored by Lexus - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the
People home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon People Nothing Personal People Feature Nothing Personal Brilliant Careers Nothing Personal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
I'd rather eat tacos with Daniel Johnston than swordfish with Damien Hirst
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Nov. 11, 1999 |
Halfway through my second glass of wine I got decidedly obnoxious and started running up to people who were wearing absurdly eccentric personal costumes and screaming, "WON-derful to see you again!" and kissing them on the cheek. I made a lot of new acquaintances; never once did one of them doubt we had met before. I clung to the lapel of an eerie albino art collector in Nazi spy regalia for a while, abandoning him to chat up an ascoted British cartoonist and his titsy blond date one-fifth his age. Another adult Barbie in a tight little black Versace suit ran up to her husband, an industrial designer with a country-western mustache who I had been randomly haranguing. She grabbed his monogrammed cuff and whispered about a glazy-eyed edifice of a Liz Smith woman in a black muumuu who was staring into middle-distance nearby. "Honey, we met her in the Hamptons last year," said the blond date, but she had an accident and doesn't remember meeting us at all! Isn't that a scream?" I encouraged a scruffy French songwriter with an unkempt goatee and a long black leather coat to sing me one of his songs:
An elderly woman was only too happy to relate how she'd found the hand-woven fabric for her eye-stopping get-up in the village of some remote Indonesian hill tribe and had her tailor make her the fetching she-sherpa ensemble with matching fez.
"How's your ex-husband?" remarked an unwelcome guy with Einstein hair shaved into inexpert whitewalls over the ears, a Rip Taylor mustache and a filthy tweed suit covered with various disease ribbons. "I have only had two husbands," disabused the elderly sherpa, wilting Tweedle Dum with a flip of the high-hat, "both of whom are dead." It was all very kicky; the people were sort of interesting in a tragic and expensive way, but I got the murky feelings of spiritual squalor when I met the promoter and he told me that many of the people in the room had found out about the event and had frantically e-mailed him, begging to be on his list, sending lists of all the lists they were on, in order to prove that they were listy enough for the event. The dish I got from one of the P.R. photographers is that the entire event was orchestrated to generate enough torque to draw a celebrity, in this case, Jocelyn Wildenstien, the art- In any case, Hirst is a wily one, a fun and clever git with the visuals. I find his stuff very toothsome and exciting in a shallow kind of way, which is pretty much all he intended it to be -- good, chunky shock-pop comestible to the rich, the dumb and the apathetic alike. But it ain't sincere. I saw Daniel Johnston at the Knitting Factory the other night. A friend of mine gave me a Daniel Johnston CD a while ago, telling me he thought I'd love it. I generally don't like much rock n' roll. I can appreciate the value of it, but chord- I did love Daniel Johnston, though. Part of his mystique is the fact that he is one of Jesus' sensitive souls. Johnston, a Texas phenomenon, has been institutionalized periodically; some say for agoraphobia. It seems, from his music, that he suffers from being too much in love with women who haven't had anything to do with him for years. He seems to have a kid's clumsy heart; his romantic pains and misadventures have the vivid life-or-death mortification of fifth grade.
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |