A Tale of Twin(k) Celebrities – Part Two: Gossip and Cultures of Admiration

It is amazing and sometimes frightening how the internet led to a whole new symbiosis of ordinary people and celebrities. It is bit too simple to reject celebrity culture in total as an immature idiocy of people who should “rather get a life”. For a majority of people the life they are able of getting is neither glamorous nor very exciting. And in all cultures people create heroic figures or sacred ancestors to extend the rather humble range of their existence. Why shouldn’t we? Of course this fragile bond with people one will probably never meet in person, or at least not really get to know, needs some caution and some cultivation like any emotionally charged relationship that is basically founded on imagination and projection. The perversion of celebrity culture as stalking is a sign for this specific culture gone utterly wrong; the stalker is a danger for him/herself and his “star” because he/she does not know and does not admit that his/her relation to his/her star is only a fantasy. By calling it fantasy I do not want to indicate that fantasy is nothing. Fantasies are powerful and productive. There is no life, at least no meaningful or fulfilled life, without fantasy. Still, fantasy has its own rules. Even though there is no relationship that does not include a certain amount of projection, a stalker mixes up real and fantasy relationships in an unhealthy way. He insists on sharing his everyday life with the star as if he were his spouse. He follows this person to force him into such a relationship. Yet a fantasy relationship is based on distance. A stalker does not respect this distance.
In the World Wide Web we can observe the ubiquity of a kind of gossip that is always about to transform into a paradoxical form of communication, long distance stalking or virtual cyber stalking. By speculating and commenting on any private, physical, sexual detail of the celebrity the fans do not respect any boundary or distance, as the distance in this case is a matter of the medium. Probably only a few of those posters would go as far as to inspecting their idol’s garbage or spending whole nights in front of their houses, but in the safety of global anonymity, protected by their arbitrary aliases, the users show the demands, the pretended intimate insights and even the jealousy of spouses. Does this cyber stalking pose an ethical problem that is somehow similar to actual stalking? This is very hard to tell. As I assume that no celebrity is idiotic enough to read all the gossip sites speculating on his/her body hygiene, sexual orientation and genital size no one gets actually hurt or threatened. Also his/her reputation does not really suffer as the status of such gossip does not inspire any belief.

I am not writing this to impose any moral judgment on internet celebrity gossip; the numerous and hilarious examples I am going to quote in the following post prove that I am obviously a consumer and sometimes even a contributor to this messy phenomenon. I do not consider myself to be extremely disturbed, and I have a life, but at different periods of my life I find myself devoured by some celebrity cult or another. It all started with rock stars at the age of 12, I was one of the biggest Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger fans alive, and even before that with my relentless and quite erotically charged admiration for Spock, and I mean Spock, not Leonard Nimoy, at the age of 11. Teenage celebrity cult is of course no anomaly, but it occurred again at later stages of my life, to my own amazement. The quite mature and intellectual pat of me watched this other part plunge into something many would consider infantile if not pathological at any age beyond 30. This did not, however, prevent me from indulging those crazy periods of fandom that after some time usually come to a natural halt when different important business takes over, a new and “real” love enters my life or my fascination for my idol is simply fading.
This was the case when in my thirties I was for a few years very smitten by the Australian rock star Michael Hutchence, singer of INXS, as a new version of the Jaggeresque sexualized rock star. After visiting a couple of concerts, – once I even travelled to London to see one, but also visited a friend, the good thing about fan culture is that it gives you the energy and courage to do things you would normally not do, often putting you into interesting new situations that in the end have nothing to do with the star, anyway, – after all this experiences and being aware of the fact that I was an intellectual woman in her early thirties, and not a screaming teen, I decided to finally get to know my star.
Now, many people claim that this is the one thing one should never try, meeting the idol in person, at least not if one wants to stay a fan. Precisely because fan culture is a matter of projection one can only end up disillusioned. Stories are numerous about the deep disappointment of the fan when realizing that the person he knew as a huge phantasmagoria on the screen turns out to be a surprisingly little man. In those cases the admiration does not survive the brutal shrinkage of the projection, in both meanings of the term. Still, as a good, well-informed fan I know the body height of my idols. So I was not shocked by the fact that Hutchence, when I finally did meet him in a hotel in Vienna, was a rather small and most of all extremely thin man. I managed to talk to him about world politics for a while that felt like half an hour and probably lasted about ten minutes. He informed me that he was financing resistance groups in East Timor and even exclaimed “Fuck the Indonesians!”, one phrase I do remember well, as the Australian accent is not always easy to understand. After a while it became fairly clear to me that this man might be charming and weirdly attractive in his own right, but seemed almost like another species, with all his ticks, his extremely short attention span and a personality marked by frequent drug abuse. After it was over I was not disillusioned but slightly numb and puzzled. After all, it was not this one meeting, but a far more tragic event that brought my fascination to a natural halt. I liked to think that it was the Indonesian secret service that staged such a miserable scene of auto-suffocation going wrong in a Sidney hotel room 1997. I tried to give my fandom a closure by writing an essay (in German) that can still be found online. http://novak.department.at/novak/australia/sternenschicksal.htm

I do in fact recommend meeting the star in person if possible. One should put one’s fantasy to the test; one should be ready to destroy the spell, or put it on another level. Is it possible to change from fan to friend? I don’t know (even though I managed with one of my early idols in Vienna, the amazing performer and film director Mara Mattuschka whom I admired as a diva on stage when I was a twen, and who is my friend today), but in any case this would mean ending one’s career as a fan. And this willingness to take the risk of a personal encounter, however clumsy and brief, is also one of the reasons why I could never choose a dead idol. I do not look for the analogy of a sacred ancestor but rather for the analogy of a Greek hero. I want to be able to follow his adventures. I did not fall for Kurt Cobain, but I liked his music a lot. When he decided to put the barrel of a gun in his mouth at the age of 27 he did not become an angel of Rock ‘n Roll heaven for me but someone I lost interest in immediately. Is that cynical? I don’t know. I just do not like to mix fandom with nostalgia. I need to give my odd habit at least a certain form, a culture. As I am a writer and an artist I am fairly sure that my periods of celebrity fascination are not, or not only a matter of regression but a form of inspiration. To me the star is a muse. And any artist who ever had a muse knows that she lives in another sphere and cannot be forced to contact by will. This is also the reason why my fandom usually takes on a creative character. When I had a period of fascination for both James Spader the actor and Alan Shore, the character in the TV show “Boston Legal” (my web name Lana Erosh is an anagram of this name), I started to write fan fiction. And this blog might be my new creative way to handle my most recent obsessions for twin(k) idols.

It is after all a sad and trivial theory that fans are just lonely people who need to fill up the gaps of their life with invented relationships to people they don’t even know. In my case I like to think that I am simply hungry for as many, and most of all as many different types of relationships as I can have. The relationship to a celebrity, a distanced hero, does not replace any other relationship. I do have friendships, sometimes love relations, I have all sorts of relationships, why not also this one? And I am educated enough to give quite honourable examples from cultural history. I do not need to compare myself with a screaming teenager; I’d rather think of 19th century gentlemen who spend quite some time and money on their fervent admiration for an opera diva, an actress or a ballet dancer. In those high bourgeois days high culture was pop culture; and the frequent attendance of opera and theatre was as much of a sexually charged ritual as any rock concert is today. And isn’t it significant that this strictly male culture of sending one’s favourite opera diva flowers into her wardrobe, also without any hope of becoming her lover, does not suffer from bad reputation but is well respected as a sweet and romantic gentleman’s culture, whereas female fandom that only came up with pop culture, with Elvis and the Beatles, is considered immature and even pathological if it goes on beyond adolescence? Well, well, I smell gender trouble there.
As a woman I nevertheless identify myself as an admirer of the Proustian type. I follow my idol with a mixture of distance and fascination. I am erotically smitten by (in my case usually) male idol, no doubt, but I am not blinded by my admiration. Like any artist I am very much into detail. I follow the work of my idol like a Proustian character who goes to hear his Diva sing every evening, but sometimes also criticizes her for a bad performance; because only he has the right to do so, only he knows her so well, and knows how good she can be if she is at her very best.

To be continued …

Female Fan Site ?

"And with a little gay porn boy it was a resembling story. Before I discovered him, I wasn’t much interested in gay porn. From time to time (very seldom) I watched such videos but always remained indifferent. There was nothing to become a part of my erotic fantasies that’s why I preferred reading to watching. But one day, when I had nothing to do, I just typed on YouTube something like “young boys kissing” and started to watch the videos, one after another… they were so numerous (these videos), but there was only one among them that really touched me and made my heart pounding. It was a scene from Every Poolboy’s Dream. I watched maybe 20 or 30 times how Brenty (that’s how I call him now) seats on a sofa, leaning his back against another boy’s chest, then lets him take off his undershirt and offers himself for the numerous kisses… His hands, his face, his neck, his nipples and his cat eyes (I also noticed that his eyes were cattish) – his entire body was so tender and beautiful and his movements so magically slow and gracious that for me it was not a porn any more (it was obvious that it was a part of a porn movie), it was a dance of passion and beauty, a fascinating fandango, performed by a God of Love."

This was a quote from a mail an amazing fan of Brent Corrigan wrote to me. She lives in Kiev, with husband and kids. I hope that our email exchange will flourish as it had so far. I just post this -- interrupting my tale of twink celebreties for a moment, -- to address fans who are interested in any sort of exchange, not necessarily ON Brent but maybe around him. It is amazing enough to get to know people, women, girls who have the interest in a gay porn actor in common. Already this fact in itself is amazing enough.
I was still unsure if I should get involved in this as my personal interest got a bit more critical, complex, “adult” than it used to be a year ago. Also I noticed that for a while BC had contact with me (I put him on an art show in Vienna and wrote about him for the catalogue), but then stopped responding. I asked him about his opinion about a female fan site, he did not respond, but mentions it proudly in his chat on Unzipped.net
“BC: Ha! I have a ton of female fans of all ages. They are about to group and start a fan site I think. It's a big compliment to know I can reach beyond the usual demographic.”
http://blog.unzipped.net/2009/05/exclusive-brent-corrigan-chatting-saga-continues-episode-ii-of-iithe-fan-questions.html#more
In the next section my question is being posed (with a slightly disappointing answer but that is another story).
Well, maybe I am too full of myself, and there are other fans who want to start something; if so I would also like to know. If this was about my initiative that I discussed with a woman in Berlin who is very busy though, and wants to stay in the background, I would have preferred a more direct form of communication. To me, it makes a bit of a difference if as a fan or rather a participating observer I have personal contact with the person of interest or not. I am a critical observer; and as I am also working in the field of film and performance I like to give my opinion about the style and direction of artistic production. I like to extend this to porn, why not? Why not review it like any other filmic form?
Anyway, that’s where I am at now as a rather adult and therefore maybe atypical “fan” who had brief email contact with her “star”.
So write me.
I will not publish your comments if you tell me not to do so.

A Tale of Twin(k) Celebrities. Part I

Diese Zusammenfassung ist nicht verfügbar. Klicke hier, um den Post aufzurufen.

Between a splash and St. Petersburg

So, how come I posted that clip of Brent Corrigan dancing in a New York Club on Youtube -- with the help of Dewayne in San Diego, thank you DeWayne,

http://dewayneinsd.blogspot.com/2009/02/splash-nyc.html

It was November 2008 and I was stuck in St. Petersburg, no, not Florida, Russia. It’s one of the hardest places to work in as a free lance artists and scholar. I don’t know so many places that I also tried to work in, but this one for sure is not easy, specifically if you are let down by your collaborator and your colleague accidentally had purchased a 3-day instead of a 7-day visa. Good thing was that I had internet access in my room, anyway, I can only recommend the Old Nevsky House to any daring traveller who thinks he/she needs to see the winterpalace and the maze of backyards, the marinskij or the nevsky prospect (just make sure to talk Russian, as people you meet in the streets usually do not really like to speak or understand English).

This was my island of comfort, and there I checked brentcorriganinc.com and saw an announcement of an appearance in NYC, a city I love, even though I visit far too rarely (the usual, financial reasons).

So there I was under a heavy cloud of November fumes in the middle of Petersburg, contemplating and surfing just for fun if it would be possible to hop across the atlantic just for one night in a club in Manhattan. The flights would have been astronomical, both financially and duration wise. And if I remember it right the connections (a lot of changes on the way!) would have been via Sibiria and the far East. Well, I had already an amazing flight Vienna-Moscow-Petersburg (financial reasons again) with changing in Moscow, taking out the luggage, going by a bus to the other airport (from Sheremetyevo international to Sheremetyevo national, and I can tell you, that’s a big difference) standing in line hardly awake to be let onto the Russian soil (which is holy, as you know) and then waiting 5 or 6 hours half asleep in the middle of all those early morning travellers and a young guy suddenly reappears in camouflage uniform after you have closed your eyes for a while; but the plan to go to NY would have been yet another category.

So I went on skype and contacted my dear Tribeca based web artist friend Ursula Endlicher

(http://ursenal.net/), she does the most amazing projects between web and performance, like impersonating websites, dancing html butoh and knitting colourful wigs representing the link architecture of major sites such as Microsoft and google, but that is another story), and she said, hey I am busy and I sadly gave up.

I had this stupid idea that this would be the occasion to talk to Brent about the article I was about to write about him (and wrote meanwhile, for the catalogue of the exhibition “The Porn Idenity” in Kunsthalle Wien, http://www.kunsthallewien.at/, catalogue to be ordered at the publisher http://www.vfmk.de/). The text is in German though, still planning to publish an English version online.

Anyway, that plan would have been utterly unrealistic, as Brent was actually eager to get to another party, as one gossip website insinuated after the event. I don’t blame him, in NYC one party is never enough.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First things looked dim in gloomy Petersburg, but a few days later, the day of the event in fact, Ursula said she will grab a nice gay friend and go to that club, Splash, video camera in hand. And she did. The place was packed, and, as she noted as a participating (you can hear some if her enthusiastic outbursts on the clip, she has a world shattering way of laughing than is utterly contagious) but still critical observer, everything tipped a bit to the commercial side. The autograph moment after the dance, also documented by her camera (but not posted (yet)) was short, she did not get close to BC.

Encounters with celebrities are tricky. I mean, BC was/is not HER idol, but mine. No idea how my experience would have been if I had been in her place. I guess it would have been similar, but I would have pushed my way closer to the stage. On the other hand, BC is not yet a star in the classical pop star/Hollywood star kind of meaning (maybe he will be, maybe not). People say that meeting your idol always is a big disappointment. I don’t know. But I assume that you have to make a transition from one mode to another. From a distanced object of projection, an image, an embodied idea if you will, to actually meeting and talking to a person. In a way you will meet a completely different person; and not everyone is ready for that (usually the star IS NOT).

Brent claims that he is very approachable and judging from my online contact with him I think this is true (And mind, I am not a potential model!).

For whatever reason he was not on that day in Splash. My friend Ursula filming in the middle of the crowd did not cross the magic line. She just filmed a little idol in motion, doing something he is an amateur in (dancing) for professional reasons (promoting his fame within the gay community and his dvd production).

That’s a funny and charming mixture, and very contemporary; I could go on with Paolo Virno’s ideas of virtuosity as phenomenon of the new post-fordist economy http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm

where you mobilize even your plain human resources such as humour, common sense and good conversation to extend your market value, a situation that creates a completely new blend of amateur and professional agency, but I stop here.

Getting Started

So I am posting from a strange place in central Europe. And this is my first entry. I have been contemplating to blog for a while. But I was always afraid that I would lack a mission, a topic, a community, a goal.

Well maybe that's what it will be all about, about the very lack of a simple theme, a simple goal, an identifyable community. I will be an observer, sometimes an observer who participates, sometimes an observer who is just puzzled.

My background is art, philosophy, film, politics, lots of things. But at the moment I am quite busy with two, no three large blocks of research (I always loved that kind of nouvelle vagueish title, "two or three things I know about her")

1) Science Fiction (literature and film) in the context of a profound change in the very definition of what it is to be part of the human species

2) Eroticism, Porn and Sex in the age of web 2.0

3) Dance, Performance and Multimedia art production (also on a very pratical level)

So you may not know me, but I am the one who is interested in those topics and many more. And who knows that they are somehow linked.

Well, I could actually write in German, its my mother tongue. And I might sometimes.
But I am sort of obsessed with the united states. Obsessed, worried, puzzled, longing. An intense and stange relationship, sometimes fuelled, sometimes calmed down by actual visits.

So I use the language that is understood by the whole transatlantic spectrum.

I like the loose format of the diary, the casual report of ongoing events, both biographical and topical, or about the very mode how they are being linked.

So I want to make a rather private confession at the end of my first post. I am around 40, I am female, but the inspiration how to write a blog (on a level probably much more personal than I intend to be) came from a person much younger than me, and actually inhabiting a world very far away from my own. I have been following the blog of San Diego based young gay actor and adult film producer Brent Corrigan for a while. That has been some kind of Inspiration.

brentcorriganinc.com

I wish him all the best for his testimony in the harlow cuarda trial today
You can follow the ongoing events there

http://handjtrial.blogspot.com/2009/02/harlow-cuadras-trail-day-1.html