Last night, Michele made me post-Thanksgiving dinner with homemade stuffing! She put in ingredients like mushrooms, it was awesome. Michele is a really good cook, she told me it was a result of having been married. This surprised me because no matter how long my mom was married, she never learned how to cook hahaha. When I grew up, my father would make elaborate meals on Sundays and my mother would boil macaroni and cheese the rest of the week.
Also, Michele was telling me she wanted to make sure I got Thanksgiving dinner. I'm not sure what she meant exactly but it was nice that someone was thinking of me-- sort of bizarre, actually, in a way. During the night, we were discussing other people's motivations-- people we know. Why does so and so do such and such? My guesses were always cynical and involved people having ulterior motives and plans to pull mean tricks. Michele would guess that maybe someone was motivated to do something because they liked me or her. "LIKE?" Doesn't she know that nobody likes ME, haha. Or so I've been told.
Michele and I are both really into the mini-series of documentaries running on Ovation right now about Warhol. She went to art school and has been an admirer of Warhol for years. I actually was never a fan and was pretty uninformed about him (AM pretty uninformed, I should say). I think I saw the Valerie Solanas movie and that was most of what I knew. The new documentaries though go into the Silver Factory period, and I was surprised by how many weird things about Warhol corresponded with weird things in my own life. Warhol is such a god to people that I want it clear I'm not trying to flatter myself comparing myself to him. It was some of the weirder aspects of him that I see relating to my life. He was an artist doing well in painting and advertising, then suddenly one day he decided he was making "films" and therefore he needed "stars." All of a sudden, he's deciding who is a star or not. I had been a cartoonist working in animation then suddenly I was doing public access with Amy Poehler and Jake Fogelnest. Why? I never met Edie Sedgewick but I've known a FEW Edie Sedgewicks, if you catch my drift. It felt like every character in Warhol's "films" corresponded to a character from my own history, haha. Well, except for Taylor Meade. And his "screen test" series of films-- that's my show! In the docs, Mary Woronov or somebody comments that while the rest of them found the screen tests boring, Warhol was fascinated by them. The theory was that he had so few real conversations and made eye contact so infrequently that these films were his one chance to really study a person while conversing with them. That has always been a major function of my show in my life. If you talk to someone on camera, you can study their reactions, you can go back and check it later. I wonder if public access tv had been available to Warhol if he might not have done his "films" as a "tv series" instead.
It got me to thinking about maybe doing things differently. Either maybe I should find a way to make money off of this as Warhol did, or else maybe I should stop having "stars" altogether and go back to just doing projects I can do myself or with Jacques. Because after all, this tv show has gotten me death threats, and Warhol's "film" culture ended up getting him shot by one of the very women he was trying to help!
If I had to guess which of the women I work with might be most likely to shoot me, I would place Michele far down the list. She has one of the most comfortable apartments in the world and two of the best cats-- Romeo and Jubilee. In fact, we shot some catnip footage with the kitties last night. The two of them fight and hiss but after having some catnip, they got all lovey-dovey!!
We also shot a new Carmen Mofongo clip of her explaining how to make Carmen's Coquito, which is the single most delicious alcoholic beverage of all time. Perhaps the most shocking part is that Carmen prefers to NOT use Puerto Rican rum!!! You'll have to wait for the video to come out to learn WHY.
I had gotten there early and was calling people to see if anyone had time to talk to me while I was waiting for Michele, and so I ended up talking on the phone with Checker Phil for a few minutes. He had spent Thanksgiving with the Trachtenburgs and he said Tina kept talking to him about me or something-- it sounded like it was a good thing? not sure haha. I guess it's better to be talked about than not! Anyway, it would be fun I think to have the TBurgs on for a sit down interview with a few interviewers and multiple cameras. Rosie just told me yesterday that in 2 weeks she's off from school so I want to see who is in town in the time Rosie is off. Of course that is the holiday season so it remains to be seen if ANYone will be in town then.
Haha I didn't know that Edie Sedgewick left Warhol to be Bob Dylan's love slave, or that Dylan and Warhol were rivals. People are all crazy. I waste so much time trying to understand everyone's motivations in my life when I should just realize-- people are CRAZY. Don't expect them to make any sense, and then you'll rarely be disappointed in life.
