Thank you to my (very) old friend The “Lady” Bunny for having me on the podcast to discuss many aspects and politics surrounding the big farewell to Queen Elizabeth II. The good, the shady and everything in-between.
2015, a hot July afternoon in Portugal, my longtime friend Marcus Leatherdale and I were digging for memories in some of his old boxes — packed away many moons ago in New York City. Invitations to parties from Andy Warhol, notebooks with appointments to shoot everyone from Keith Haring to Debbie Harry for the original (and cool) Details Magazine emerged — all great fodder for the new biography of Marcus we’ve begun: What’s Left of Leatherdale.
As the afternoon waned and the arid heat started to mix with a protracted silence and many nose-fuls of New York City dust, we reached the bottom of the last box to find a crumpled envelope containing some kind of plastic sleeves and colour transparencies. We took the mangled stack to the window, and there he was — a young Robert Mappelthorpe, the same one from Marcus’s infamous black and white, in living colour, looking straight at us.
Meticulously conserved, restored and now printed larger than life — these never-before-seen images are available to see (and buy) at Roman Zangief – 40 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10010 • 28 March – 7 April, 2017.
We launched the NYC version of the book which includes newly discovered photos, (with my snazzy Wigstock image taken with the fabulous Candis Cayne) and previewed the stage play with my opening monologue, featuring actor JD Cerna. Sold out room, enthusiastic crowd at BGSQD…everyone’s very grateful!
14 May 2016
9/11.
I don’t believe the ‘official’ story.
I will never support the perpetual war and criminals that sprang out of the fall.
Please don’t wave your flags at me,
or tell me how God is on our side,
I don’t have a side.
I have an intellect, and a conscience.
-MLB
The usual relentless stentorian bombast of the ‘McBillion tickets served!’ aside, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival left me generally underwhelmed.
A recent conversation with a bigwig producer in NYC about the dumbing down of our society, and the mediocrity of the agora gave me pause.
The thought of having to re-word & re-submit that funding application o-n-e m-o-r-e t-i-m-e gives me agida.
Other than the shrill of January, September is perhaps my least favourite time of year. If according to Rimbaud, “Spring brought the idiots’ frightful laughter,” September brings their precocious Christmas chatter. ach-em.
But then, this budding playwright wanders into Mr Barr’s London Literary Salon, and a talk with fellow expat New Yorker John Lahr – probably the only living man qualified to speak on a grand, global scale about acting, performance and theatre. He reads and discusses his new book: Joy Ride.
“Part of the theater’s big magic is its ability to exhilarate; […] to put us beside ourselves, to banish gravity, to call out our most buried feelings, to make the moment unforgettable, to kill time. That’s its joy ride.”
“If we need better plays—and we do—we also need better audiences.
Quoting Tallulah Bankhead to a would-be actress: “If you want to help the American theater don’t be an actress, dahling, be an audience.”
“Theater is an artisanal industry in a ethnological age. Everything about it goes against the grain of our distracted, fast-moving cultural moment. A play requires an audience to work […] in a film, the audience sees what the director wants it to see; with a live production, the audience must take more responsibility…”
Quoting George Bernard Shaw: “The play was good but the audience was terrible.”
Quoting Fanny Brice: “There’s no director who can direct you like an audience.”
“Terrorism makes a spectacle of absurdity, in which pain unmakes the world. Theatre, which attempts to understand our pain, makes a spectacle of meaning and coherence.
Now, more than ever, theatre is not only a demonstration of courage but an engineer of it.”
Thank you, Mr Lahr. You saved me from September. I’ve always relied upon the strangeness of kindreds.
-MLB
