Mmmk.
Since it’s Raymi who tagged me I’ll do it: eight things about me that are the truth.
By “truth” I mean that which forms the placeholder between the lies…
And by “lies” I mean the explanations I offer for my behavior.
1. When I was little my imaginary friend was Bambi. Then it was Sterling Fassbinder. Now it’s either Donnie Darko or Heidi Klum, depending on the occasion.
2. I was a born again Christian for a little over a year, starting when I was twelve. I got into it in part cuz I had a crush on the ringleader, a curly haired Irish Canadian piano prodigy who walked around wearing a long, pre-Columbine trench coat and gigantic black combat boots that had “Do you have a problem?” written in neon purple ink on the left and “Why not try talking to God?” on the right. He had a magnetic personality and soon a bunch of the school’s most eccentric people were going to his non-denominational church’s Wednesday nite youth group. A few years later I lost my heterosexual virginity to him, but back then it seemed that sex was the furthest thing from his mind. He was horny for souls… His father drove a large, wood paneled station wagon and diligently picked each of us up and dropped each of us off. At the youth group we sang songs, read bible verses, ate junk food, and ran around playing games…it was a place where we could be kids and adults at the same time…I loved talking about the things we read and trying to figure out what they meant. My mind was starving—real words and real ideas kept me up at night, filled with happiness. I grasped the theology of evangelism—to me it was not a religion of restriction, but a religion of joy—of standing under one roof, singing and dancing and feeling that sense of overwhelming thankfulness for one’s smallness, the understanding that we are all prairie dogs, we are all pigeons feasting on garbage, we are all blades of grass about to be clipped.
3. In eighth grade two of my so-called best friends were their usual mean bitch selves to myself and another friend, and rather than take it like I always did and consider myself happy that I had somewhere to sit at lunch, I instead started a rumor that they were lesbian lovers. I had no idea the notion would spread like mustard. I confided to others about the secret relationship that I had become privy too and before I knew it there was a chorus several heads deep making fun of them in class and in the hallway. I used the word “disgusted”, over and over. I said things about them so brutal that they could only be the product of self-loathing. I secretly feared that deep down everyone saw through my posturing and KNEW…they knew I was the one who was really gay, I was the one who was really staring at my friends as they got changed in front of me, I was the one who was wishing I could touch them in the pool, under the water…
Eventually the rumors swirled so violently that they sucked my two ex-best friends into the eye of a whirlpool, from which one, an already tough swimming champion, emerged relatively unscathed but the other, a delicate and insecure blonde girl named Sara, was broken and ashamed and scurred and ended up going to a different high school that was an hour away in the mountains.
4. When I first moved to Brooklyn I made sticker art and put it around Greenpoint, Williamsburg and the LES. That's where BRANDTRUEBOY comes from. It was a word I put together that I thought looked good on stickers. I set about turning it into a series of “ferreal faker logos”. One of the designs I came up with back then was the drawing of the two girls that you can see on the bottom left side of the site. Actually, it’s not a real drawing—a friend of mine used Photoshop to remove everything except the outlines on a still from a girl on girl porn flick. I like the idea of a representation from which all reality has been sucked out. My friend collected and modified hundreds, maybe thousands, of porno stills such as this one in the months leading up to his breakdown.
5. Glowing white rock has always had a profound, nearly sublime effect on me: massive concrete blocks protruding from the highway, the columns of the Capitol building on a class trip to D.C., the steps of the Met Museum, the city of Jerusalem, Christs Church in Oxford, at dusk...
6. Andy Warhol was my father. He knocked up Joe Strummer in front of a blown-up copy of
Diamond Dust Shoes.
7.
I’m selling out for free.
8. My favorite foods are bagels, day old Lasagna, hash brownies, cold, raw spinach, plain M&Ms, sour peach gummy bears and Advil liquid gel-caps.
The six people I tag are:
rayradiothe pantsthe dollunratnkremember, no tagbacks!!
