cult-ure
/ˈkəlCHər/
noun
noun: culture; plural noun: cultures
1.
the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. "21st century popular culture" synonyms: the arts, the humanities; etc. a refined understanding or appreciation of culture. "men of culture" synonyms: intellectual/artistic awareness, education, cultivation, enlightenment, discernment, discrimination, taste, refinement; etc. 2. the customs, arts, common beliefs, social institutions, dogma and systems of indoctrination among a particular nation, people, or other social group or sect.
As a tool of mass societal engineering, as well as influence upon the imagination of the individual, culture is more often a mechanism of the propagandist than the individual. Indeed, the modern myth of culture is a symptom of the epidemic of civilization, a collective condition which leads us back to the cardinal principle of politician, priest, and animal trainer alike: cultivation.
Cultivation is domestication, and domestication is control. Culture is a myth; a construct used to wrangle the divine spark of the creative spirit and slow its evolution. Destroy the myth of culture within, before it destroys you without.
For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay! Hannah TutorJim Mazzocco
Sierra MatzRick AndriolaGus Romero IVDavid MacDowellFolkicideRF PangbornSHOGGOTH AMENTA
Steven Lee MatzDead Star
Gus walked out of the station first, the rain was still pouring hard on the lit-up night. A thick mist was visible in the neon filled night, almost all the roads were nearly barren save for a couple of passing ground cars and late night workers. Although Gus enjoyed the night time more than the day, he didn't like it too much when it rained. His coat could only do so much when the weather got really bad like this, but he supposed it wouldn't be too bad tonight considering he was mostly gonna be driving tonight.
Senny walked out of the station with a slightly annoyed look on his face, Gus could already tell what his partner was thinking. "Lemme guess, we gotta drive to the Cafinite Night Dine for a few refills for the night first, right?" Senny flipped a 150* credit coin to Gus and walked out to the car where the downpour seemed to be at it's worse. Gus whistled at the coin in his hand, "I guess a few is not the right word for this case." Gus walked over to the car and pulled out his I.D key, the lock beeped and clicked open for him while he looked around to see if there were any cars or other vehicles around the parking grid. No vehicles of any kind were coming nor going, so he and his partner were ready to head out for the night. "Hey Gus?" Senny asked while he pulled out a CigRet for him. "What do you think about the homicide?" "I think it has a lot to do with all that political crap, you know Sen?" He flipped on the wind shield wipers and pulled out of the parking slot, he pressed a button on the wheel and the rear-view mirrors were adjusted accordingly. "I would bet you anything that it was most definitely a hired hit, and the trail is being covered up to pin the blame on someone else. Hey, maybe the order could have come from someone up in the high table." He drove out of the grid and activated the car's Siren I.D for their night-shift. "Gus, the high table thing might be a little far-fetched for this. I could see your point if it was a commander or admiral or someone with high rank in the corps, but as far as we know this was just another homicide and the victim was only related to someone of a high rank." "Well it's possible the culprit had threatened him and any person that was of relation to the victim. I mean, don't you think this could have something to do with blackmail or some other kind of scandal for anyone in politics or the army or some such thing? I think it might be." "The members of the high table work to balance the economy, stabilize our society, and build our culture. They're not mobsters or some secret government with a conspiracy to enslave everyone, or control everything we do in the world." Senny was starting to think that Gus was spending too much of his free time watching documentaries on conspiracies and sleepers from other galaxies, and he wondered whether drinking might be better for him at home or not. Gus knew a lot about the high table of Prime-Star, and he was well informed on the current state of the system, as well as the political history of the stars. But he was also too quick to judge a case when someone was threatened or even murdered because of supposed propaganda or any other crap. There was no doubt in Senny's mind that this was an exception to some of Gus's profiles on political related homicide, but he was still a little annoyed about having to hear it so much and Gus could see that. The Night Dine practically bloomed in the headlights and the aroma of Cafinite and some baked goods flowed out the front door, a man wearing a lift uniform walked out of the Night Dine and popped a sleep away pill in his mouth. The two detectives pulled up to the lot and turned on their C.P.U’s (City Patrol Updaters), and stepped out of the car. Both of them quickly getting drenched in the downpour pounding the entire city, with their coats not helping much in keeping them from getting a little cold. The night was young and glittered with sparking lights in the rainy, misty city. It was time for those cups of Cafinite and a few other things to keep the two going tonight.
Sam Matz
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
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For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay! Blake LavergneRick AndriolaSierra MatzJim MazzoccoAdam De VilleGus Romero IVDavid MacDowellSteven Lee MatzRodney McGillvary
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
 For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing. Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay! The Closetby Stephen Queen It was day. Alex Kistler brought the last of his moving boxes into his new apartment. Caleb had helped him with the couch and heavier furniture earlier. There was a closet right by the front door which he hadn't noticed when the property manager showed him the place. Bonus!, he thought to himself with a smile. He hung his one winter coat in there, rolled his vacuum cleaner in as well, and called it a night. When he woke the next day he set everything up and organized his new place. After that he went for the vacuum but upon opening the closet, he was surprised to find it completely empty. No vacuum. No coat. I could have sworn I put those things in here, he thought. But Alex was constantly misplacing and losing things, and dismissed the confusion as his mind playing tricks on him as a side effect of heavy marijuana use. He left for his night time job. He came home late that night and decided to throw his three pairs of sneakers into the closet by the door, out of the way of everything. He went to bed. When he went to put his sneakers on the next day he found the closet completely empty. This not only shocked Alex, but angered him. He searched every inch of his apartment and car, but found no sneaker, vacuum or coat. "What the fuck is going on?!" he shouted as he kicked at the air. He was quite embarrassed going into the "Shoe Show" with only socks on his feet to buy new shoes. That night, before bed he put his Monopoly board game into the closet, as an experiment. The next morning - empty closet. He inspected the closet for some loose panel or trapdoor. Nothing. He made a video with his phone of him putting some old clothes into the closet, and videoed the opening of the empty closet the next day. But all of his friends that he showed thought it was a lame, unthought-out joke. He couldn't prove that he didn't empty the closet himself. He put nothing in the closet for a week. This is when Alex was greeted by friendly, hungry, stray cat. He gained the cat's trust with a bowl of milk and managed to wrangle the cute little feline into his apartment. That night he put the cat into the closet with a bowl of milk. The next day he hurried to the closet door. He pulled the door open to see a strange landscape as far as the eye could see, with no sky. It was dimly lit by what seemed like a red fire. In the distance, he could see human figures being mutilated and torn apart by horrific creatures that were certainly not of this world. He couldn't believe his eyes, and tried to shut the door, but that's when a clawed hand as big as Alex's head reached from inside the doorway and clutched his neck. The hideous, goat-like, horned head that he saw next spoke to him in a low-pitched voice that sounded like an animal speaking English. "We've been waiting for you." And then Alex was pulled in, and the closet door shut behind him. THE END...But not for Alex. Jim MazzoccoSierra MatzGus Romero IVRick AndriolaTo Purchase A Piece Direct From The Artist Click Here JoKaRF PangbornFolkicideDavid MacDowellSteven Lee MatzWhat Is Art World?The established order of the museums and galleries is crashing. Their light and influence diminish, and all that is left are memories of what once was. What was once the heart beat of society has become commercialized and commodified under the parasitic cultural umbrella of Art World. To understand it we must go back to another time not long ago, when the creative class had been wrangled into a self-policed gulag with the dregs of the upper class, always working towards some semblance of community or organization. Both ultimately did increase, which increased work. The harder and faster they worked, the more work there was to do; so, they handed the reigns of their economic and creative infrastructure over to gallerists and consultants. Galleries had begun as a tool of the age of enlightenment, they functioned as kind of cathedrals to art, where the wealthy and the learned could fully absorb if not appreciate the art. For in those days works of art were thought to have an almost supernatural quality and most were of the opinion that one did not need to understand it, but the mere act of being in its presence was thought to have effects on ones temperament, intellect and wellbeing, and in fact we still see this today where paintings or prints often adorn hospital recovery rooms. Many galleries became more interested in representing a groupthink aesthetic which left little room for creative individuality, all in the pursuit of the bottom line. This bottom line turned many such establishments into dens of vipers, the gallerists and consultants metaphorical (if not literal) foxes running amok in the proverbial hen house, and many a patron were in fact parasites and predators. The exact history of the decline of the creative class is difficult to pin down, but its effects are not. Many were and still are forced to work odd jobs for very little, sweating in kitchens or sitting solitary under fluorescent bulbs in windowless gray cubes most of their waking hours (most of their lives), trying to hear silence through the ever-present hum of mechanized garble. Executing precise movements on a keyboard to manipulate the obsolescent sigils of commerce which had no real value to them, subconsciously panicked by the typical pervasive multitude of life anxieties, just so they could pay exorbitant entry and exhibition fees to the galleries to pursue the vision they had for themselves and the world. All the while pitted against a hostile dynamic complex of simultaneous coercion and persuasion perpetrated by a twisted and decadent system ruled by elitist politics and various allegiances, they have been taught to accept by that most laughable of institutions Art School. A constant force-fed rounding up of the herd is provided to us courtesy of social media, propaganda or the wholesale dissemination of the state condoned archetypes. All of which conditions us further still and we accept the chains of credit that has condemned the majority of the creative class to the corporate console, and ultimately their own imprisonment within the 9-5 system of NO THINK. Would they have done this if instead they could have pursued their visions and dreams unencumbered by the imprisonment of a forty-hour work week due to the greed of the galleries? Not in use as cogs in their machine? Their art free of societal or commercial programming and fabricated goals, just so it can hang on the gallery wall and hopefully be bought? All these mentalities and attitudes of careerism and capital gain have become the heart of Art World as they have so many facets of commerce and industry. Subsistence, at the very least for the true creative class/The New World Creative (NWC), was what Art World claimed to provide to any hard-working artist. Such a luxury would be welcomed (but much like the proverbial carrot which is so often dangled in front of the horse, it is seldom delivered and only saved for the chosen few) compared to the luxuries afforded us through working within this system until now. At present time creative minds are transformed into information-processors and satellites for agendas of artistic substitution. We have Devolved into serving machines; processing pop culture reality into binary code and computer logic data, and regurgitating it back into our Art. We are used more and more as either translators or the human avatar of the machine, that is, as interfaces between computerized systems. Too many of you are led by the nose of what is in vogue! Society in large is divided into labels and sectors; police, doctors and most gallerists are identical in their regalia, their speech is scripted by other administrators of the program, they are expected to do their work starting at X time, ending at Y time, and resting at Z time so they may continue to operate efficiently. The same expectations, with respect to what produces the result, are placed on every aspect of society and we are supposed to be actors in the commercial that is meant to define us. Make no mistake: you and I are little more than pawns to the upper echelon of this established order of things. Our art is looked upon as trinkets, baubles, or pretty pictures to decorate the courts of the modern aristocracy. To them we are merely workers, our work little more than objects for their amusement! Art World uses artists, artists don’t use Art World. It is not any single isolated institution, it is a unified system of relationships between elements and systems. Those who claim that Art World is a "neutral tool" or that it is an accumulation of independent galleries, museums, public events and institutions to be picked through selectively, fail to realize that the symbiosis of the system itself is a metaphysical whole. That it is an expression of organization, and therefore can only direct itself toward higher order, increased centralized control, and the inevitable degradation of the true creative class which it undermines and represses at every turn. In short, it has been reduced to little more than just another commercial industry. The metabolic flow of the market must speed faster, fueled by the martyrdom of the visionaries and seekers who are too often kept at the bottom of the pyramid in this life, only to be lionized after their deaths by the same pretentious greed mongers’ that once chased them from their galleries all in the pursuit of total collectability. It is in this way that they build their next commodity, for every story you hear of an artist which was never understood in his or her own time, but which became wildly popular in death are all examples of created markets. Our art can always be more valuable, but it can never be valuable enough. The first wave of this manufactured market mediocrity comes before us presented under the guise of the avant-garde, touted by critics with labels such as challenging or complex. We are told in so many words that if we don’t understand or like it, it’s because we are too shallow or just too stupid. It turns art into a pseudo-intellectual parlor trick which purports itself to be revelation, critics and the moneymen jump on the train and a market is created. Collectors and the media follow suit, and the vocation of the artist is further trivialized by this rich man’s game. The role of artist has now been neatly defined within the modern caste system of the hive-mind as a high-end loafer because of these tactics of trivialization. It is fast becoming a subcultural program which no longer computes in the greater scheme of things, and that which will not compute will not survive. As for our work, so our play: both are a communication of our individual realities, our own world, not Art World. To be silent or uninterested is to be complicit. To apply their lens to your narrative, or worse their narrative to your story is anathema to not only the ethos of the NWC but to the creative spirit in general. Our mission is to free ourselves, not just from the restrictions imposed upon us by this obsolete system, but to destroy said system. We are starved for the next wave of real seers, prophets, poets, and madmen. We must once again become the authors of our dreams. The internet has become the God surrogate for many a man, woman, and child. This cybernetic deity disperses crowds and clears streets, it keeps people lethargically chained to a screen. We now live in a post-physical era, inside our devices, estranged from our physical environments, displaced in a self-imposed corporate/governmental collective imagination. Never projecting, forever receptive and submissive to the commercial, capable of little more than high tech voyeurism. This is not the case for everyone. There are many of you who say: "We want to live, to be here, now”. I tell you that if that is the case, you must realize that now is the time to put your xeroxed zines on the shelf, they are worthless in our current age of quantum communication and interconnection. We do not write zines, we chart new course in cultural engineering. The printed page is dead! A relic of a bygone era which in no way suites our current societal fusion of ourselves into our technology. If one wishes to affect change within the Leviathan of Western society, even if it is on a cultural level for it is this level which accounts for the base of what is to come, then one must create a lighthouse amidst the pixilated binary reefs of their illusory world. In fact, the accepted art of any era always has a kernel of foreshadowing of what is to come, the art of the underground ultimately works through the influence it holds over the next generation and in this way affects an equal if not greater change ultimately, which brings us here. The glow which now surrounds you is the medium in which we operate. We are the agents of change, the guides of aesthetic transubstantiation. The New World Creative is all of us, forever! -Steven Lee Matz Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative. 
All Artists Are Murderers
We come in all shapes and sizes
Some parents put a drop of paint thinner in their children’s cereal, ultimately the art of death plays out wonderfully. Some children emotionlessly murder animals, worshipping the sacred art of mass mutilation. Slashing and scratching at vulnerable wounds. Stabbing and violating our private sensitivity into a choral uprising of macabre grotesque. Too scared to kill yourself? Kill the Art Elite! Afraid of authority? Piss in their flavor of the month coffee pot! Kill your Corporate Art God’s and toss your Greedy Greedy Gallery idols violently into the volcano of disgust. You’re an artist with a strange wonderful mind. A mind that the elite simultaneously worships and detests. Your imagination has the power to trigger massive chaos in their streets. Use your weapon’s wisely with surgical precision. Pull that trigger. This is a war of Good versus Evil. Don’t just make them laugh, make them piss blood in their pants with embarrassment. Tired of getting your ankles bitten by false promises? Drop kick that little fucking dog straight out of their stained glass gallery window. Did your condescending art mentors tell you what to do? Shame them so badly in the public arena, that they run in shame toward the nearest bridge. And before they jump to their demise, look into their tear stained eyes and silently whisper “FUCK YOUUUU.” The only time that you should apologize, is when you deeply regret not killing them sooner. You’re an artist, and surely you must have zero doubt. YOU are a cold blooded murderer. Own it. Some Murderers are methodical with their weapons. Painting something so focused, to emotionally manipulate society’s feeble mind’s so precisely, that you make them resort to unconscionable acts of transparency. We walk amongst a sterile and vampiric cabal of cannibalistic tag alongs. You are only a commodity and a cash machine in their eyes. Being the producer of dreams to those so unskilled to manifest any, you must bash their brains so violently with truth and indignation, that their selfish motivations ooze from their stubborn pores. Hold up your art as a mirror, so they see how unapologetically disgusting they’ve treated you. And in kind, make them melt into the puddles of disrespecting puss that they always were. You have the power. You have always had it. They were only holding you back until now. So here we stand blood soaked and brazen. An army of Artist’s so ruthless and unwavering. Never forget what brought us here. Never forget the shame and lies and piss that they put into you, to silence your voice. Never forget the rules and the cages, and the long promised wages that they never intended to pay. Their entire existence was placed solely here to kill rape, eat and kill you. Once they see that they killed the chef, they’re banished to eat shit art until another rises. Enjoy the wait, bitches. We have always controlled the pay. Murderer’s come in all packages. Some come to maim without ever intending to kill. Their corporate masters perpetuate the rebel, but never follow through with the promise. Be Authentic. Rise above and make an example. As you slowly walk out of the gallery, after killing every mother fucker in the room, you are redeemed. No-one will ever call you a fake, or a phony. For their throats will be slashed with the sharp reassurance to never doubt you ever again. You were born to Kill. Embrace your destiny and indulge in your passion. This isn’t just blood sport. This is WAR. Let the massacres commence!
David MacDowell
January 16, 2019
For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay! Jim MazzoccoSierra MatzStyxxoplixGus Romero IV
To Purchase A Piece Direct From The Artist
Click Here Steven Lee MatzDavid MacDowell
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
Welcome to the final Third Friday of the year 2018. It has been a year of major growth, triumph and tremendous success. From Emerge and The Exploding Digital Inevitable, to the conclusion of our Spotlight series, this year has been filled with milestones and breakthroughs, and we thank every creative and patron who helped make it possible.
As the year 2018 draws to a close, we take but a moment, not so much for retrospection on the past year, but rather to glimpse a projection of what is to come. We look to 2019 knowing that our mission is to continue in this Golden era of artistic innovation, rejuvenation, and reinvention. As well as to embrace and subvert the methodologies of authority in art; from aesthetic ideology to censorship, from dogma to propaganda and beyond!
For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay! Jim Mazzocco
To Purchase A Piece Direct From The Artist
Click Here Styxxoplix
To Purchase A Piece Direct From The Artist
Click Here Steven Lee MatzFolkicideSierra Matz
To Purchase A Piece Direct From The Artist
Click Here Gus Romero IV
To Purchase A Piece Direct From The Artist
Click Here RF PangbornDavid MacDowellJoKa
The Censor Art campaign idea kinda hit me recently (spurred by the upcoming ban of "adult content" on tumblr) about how much art, and nudity, is unnecessarily censored these days on all social media platforms, as well as culture. The watering down and lack of acceptance of body parts as universal as nipples is just silly and pointless.
So instead of being able to have my art censored, I'm censoring with my art. -JoKa
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
We began the Artist Spotlight feature in January of 2017, our aim was to document our peers, those whom we found truly inspiring and unique. We wanted to present a plethora of technical and philosophic approaches. A monthly exhibition which would stimulate, motivate, and illuminate.
Over the past two years we have had the opportunity to work with a roster of truly incredible and visionary artists, and in staying true to our initial vision they have encompassed many disciplines and walks of life. We had absolutely no interest in attempting to represent merely an aesthetic, as is often the case with so many galleries and collectives, rather we wanted something which took us on a journey into their worlds. We determined from the beginning that each artist would have creative control over their individual Spotlights, and, as a result each Spotlight is unique to itself and the oeuvre of the artist’s work. Presented below are the 23 Spotlight artists, of whom we can absolutely say, without any hyperbole, are among the finest working in their respective fields today. These are some of the creators who are working tirelessly to affect the paradigm shift in culture which we call the New World Creative. It has been our privilege to work with them in order to achieve this undertaking, and now we are honored to share their work with you here in our final addition to our Spotlight feature: Retrospective.
For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Spotlight viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay! 2017 Spotlight ArtistsJanuary
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Balloons
Excerpt 1 By: JT LeRoy Found in the new editions of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things published by Harper Perennial Read by: Steven Lee Matz |
Balloons
Excerpt 2 By: JT LeRoy Found in the new editions of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things published by Harper Perennial Read by: Steven Lee Matz |
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Stuff
by JT LeRoy
(Read by Tatum O'Neal from The Best American Non Required Reading)
by JT LeRoy
(Read by Tatum O'Neal from The Best American Non Required Reading)
Thumbnail art in this section by Hannah Tutor
Laura Albert won international acclaim writing fiction as JT LeRoy. She is the author of the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, and the novella Harold’s End, with illustrations by Cherry Hood. She is also the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. Cinema Eye, the organization that recognizes outstanding craft and artistry in nonfiction filmmaking, cited Laura Albert in Author as one of its 2016 list of Unforgettables: the year’s most notable and significant nonfiction-film subjects.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.
November
Folkicide
A punk musician by proclivity and an artist by inevitability, Burnie Booth began creating his primitivist collages as album covers for Folkicide, his performing moniker since 2007. Folkicide’s music, an acoustically violent folk driven exploration of extreme pessimism, despair and the nightmare of existence found a logical visual extension in the piecemeal medium of collage.
Tired of bothering his artist friends for album cover art, Booth assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. It juxtaposed Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall with ‘80s Warner horror comics, along with snippings from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, Booth continued assembling collages now numbering in the hundreds.
Eschewing digital in favor of original source materials, Booth gets his imagery largely from estate sales in his native Kansas City (preferably on the final day when items are 75% off their original price), gifts from friends and other oddities he has acquired over the years. Favorite visual elements come from the aforementioned Warner horror comics, books on primitive man, Medieval art and Hare Krishna promotional material. Images are sliced and glued in a manner designed to invoke feelings of unease and existential dissonance but yet are often tinged with a deliberate element of humor: like H.P. Lovecraft whispering in the ear of a nitrous oxide intoxicated and X-Acto knife armed Hieronymus Bosch.
Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. A Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery was produced by local filmmaker Mikal Shapiro in 2013. His art is also to be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.
Tired of bothering his artist friends for album cover art, Booth assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. It juxtaposed Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall with ‘80s Warner horror comics, along with snippings from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, Booth continued assembling collages now numbering in the hundreds.
Eschewing digital in favor of original source materials, Booth gets his imagery largely from estate sales in his native Kansas City (preferably on the final day when items are 75% off their original price), gifts from friends and other oddities he has acquired over the years. Favorite visual elements come from the aforementioned Warner horror comics, books on primitive man, Medieval art and Hare Krishna promotional material. Images are sliced and glued in a manner designed to invoke feelings of unease and existential dissonance but yet are often tinged with a deliberate element of humor: like H.P. Lovecraft whispering in the ear of a nitrous oxide intoxicated and X-Acto knife armed Hieronymus Bosch.
Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. A Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery was produced by local filmmaker Mikal Shapiro in 2013. His art is also to be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.
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Special Thanks: Seven Vegas, Ron English, Jim Mazzocco, Heather Bosch, Nickholas P. Michell, Alexandria Romero, Sierra Matz, Tatum O'Neal, and Mary Rutelidge of Federal Heights.
Third Friday
December 21, 2018
Exclusively at Rogue Gallery
December 21, 2018
Exclusively at Rogue Gallery
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.
Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay!
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.
Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay!
Styxxoplix
Sierra Matz
Jim Mazzocco
Elvin Armando
Gus Romero IV
Steven Lee Matz
Jeremy Lampkin
David MacDowell
Dead Star
Vibrant colors and neon lights, so much to take in at the vastness of the city. He stood there in the sky of sight and sound unmoving, as though he were molded by the stone and metal he stood atop of.
Staring down on the entertainment district of the city, he listened for the location and name of his foes. Wind blowing like a mighty hurricane past him, but he does not stumble. Lightning crackling in the sky like a shooting star, but he does not flinch. Thunder booming like the mighty bang of the suns, and his resolve and spirit booms and burns at the might of the universe surrounding his embodied form.
She is looking at him again, like a guardian angel from the heavens. There is no one there, yet at the same time, there is someone there.
Why is it that something as beautiful as her wishes to aid him and watch him? Why must she accompany him, as if to be some kind of voice of wisdom to a dark deity of injustice and vengeance? Why did she choose him? Why?
The roof was slick and slippery from the heavy pounding of the night time rain, but Zylo was only a towering black and red clad idol. A deadly harbinger of the storm, and an even deadlier adversary to those who worship the long dead.
"They don't need to die, they need guidance, Zylo," the angel said. Zylo didn't turn to her when she spoke, instead he stood still like he's been doing. Mute as ever, one can only wonder of what it is the angel find's so divine of what Zylo is. "Divine is not the word that springs to mind for one such as you, don't fool yourself." Perhaps not...but there are no other vanguards like him. At least, not anymore.
"Don't be so glum, you'll always have me by your side." She was right about that, and he didn't like her for being right. "No... you like me for being beautiful, don't you?" He stood there unphased by her remark, although he could feel his heart skip a beat. She was the only one to make him do that, and he didn't like her for it. "I don't mind if you don't like me, because i know you kind of do." She giggled a little bit, teasing him as though she were a child. He let a slight smile form on his face...but only a slight smile.
Senny sipped from his mug of cafinite. Having filled out his report on the incident at Century's Rise, he was convinced that this was a homicide case ready to blow all over the news in a matter of minutes. His superiors were trying to keep the press off the trail for as long as they could, but he knew this was gonna be the big topic for the next morning. They found bone fractures, vital organs torn, a concussion, and even bullet wounds all over the victim's body. Though they had yet to I.D the victim, he was concerned this was someone of importance to someone important. Someone high up in power, high on the food chain, high in command...in Valhalla.
Just then his partner showed with a digital form filled out, most likely the I.D of their victim, and a cup of chili.
"We got it," he said. A very grim look was written all over his face. Senny looked at the form to find that he was right; this person was someone of some importance.
"The victim's name is Randolf Vill," he said. "Born in Winter Haitus on Citi-Star, spring star date 83LX. Only family was his brother Gorden Vill, former high commander of the InterSekt Marine Corps, who is now President of Prime-Star. As you no doubt saw, the victim had bullet wounds all over his body. And it makes me wonder who would be dumb enough to do that?"
"Or smart enough," Senny said. His partner gave him a look of curiosity. "I mean, really Gus. Who would use a slug thrower anymore when they could use plasma? Or a P.O weapon? Guns with bullets are easily traceable, maybe that's the point? Maybe we're being played for idiots by someone who likes to screw around with anyone in peace keeping or some kind of law enforcement?"
"Or maybe it could be a hired hit," Gus said. "You gotta remember, Senny. When congress passed the Act of Justice and Swift Execution, one of the things to go was the use of cyanide laber rings. Which back then, was another means for anyone who liked keeping their hands clean, to hire and ‘fire' any employees they wished."
"Employees to anyone high up or underground was basically another word for slavery in their business," said Senny.
"Well...slavery isn't the word I would use," Gus stated.
Outside of the station sits a discreetly nestled Repulser, lights dimmed but not offline. He sat in his seat puffing some Vapor from his lit CigRet. "Hey Jerv, you get the Mic-Buggee working yet? It looks like those two are finishing up with the reports about now." He said with a slight cough from the Vapor. Jerv took a sip of some liquor as he was nestling some of the wires together.
The Mic-Buggee was a little beaten up from years of use, and in some spots glittered a small film of dust from being locked up in a storage compartment. Some of the lights on it were faint, there was also an unpleasant whirring and grinding noise it would make when it was running. This piece of junk might as well have been scraped and melted down for some other use. Even if it was converted into some parts for a garbage burner at least it would be more useful and reliable then some half busted spying bot.
Jerv looked up at the flickering lights on the bot's forehead, they were so weakly lit that you could only see a tiny bit of color. He frowned at this and resumed nestling the wires, hoping that the bot would spring a little closer to life than what this miserable excuse was.
A spark jolted out of one of the ports in the spy bot's chest and nearly shocked his wrist, he swore in a startled manner and hit his head on the side of the Repulser.
"If you weren't drinking, we could be listening in on what's going on in there right now, instead of you blundering up with that piece of junk's faulty chip's and circuits."
Edmond was getting impatient with his partner and his attempts at making a repair job on a bot that should already be in the trash by now, and he really wished his publisher would have given them some proper spy equipment instead of this...thing. They had a job to do and right now they have to play mechanic instead of fulfilling they're journalistic duty, getting a big story for all the solar to hear.
Suddenly, the bot flickered on and made what sounded like trumpet sounds, indicating that it was finally functioning and ready for work. Jerv grinned while Edmond stared in bewilderment, he got the thing running like some kind of miracle worker. "How did you do that?" He asked in awe. "A little booze can help when you don't want to over-think what you're working on, maybe you should try it sometime Ed." Jerv grinned smugly, like he just won a million dollars in a game of Mine. It was about time for them to get to work.
-Sam Matz
Staring down on the entertainment district of the city, he listened for the location and name of his foes. Wind blowing like a mighty hurricane past him, but he does not stumble. Lightning crackling in the sky like a shooting star, but he does not flinch. Thunder booming like the mighty bang of the suns, and his resolve and spirit booms and burns at the might of the universe surrounding his embodied form.
She is looking at him again, like a guardian angel from the heavens. There is no one there, yet at the same time, there is someone there.
Why is it that something as beautiful as her wishes to aid him and watch him? Why must she accompany him, as if to be some kind of voice of wisdom to a dark deity of injustice and vengeance? Why did she choose him? Why?
The roof was slick and slippery from the heavy pounding of the night time rain, but Zylo was only a towering black and red clad idol. A deadly harbinger of the storm, and an even deadlier adversary to those who worship the long dead.
"They don't need to die, they need guidance, Zylo," the angel said. Zylo didn't turn to her when she spoke, instead he stood still like he's been doing. Mute as ever, one can only wonder of what it is the angel find's so divine of what Zylo is. "Divine is not the word that springs to mind for one such as you, don't fool yourself." Perhaps not...but there are no other vanguards like him. At least, not anymore.
"Don't be so glum, you'll always have me by your side." She was right about that, and he didn't like her for being right. "No... you like me for being beautiful, don't you?" He stood there unphased by her remark, although he could feel his heart skip a beat. She was the only one to make him do that, and he didn't like her for it. "I don't mind if you don't like me, because i know you kind of do." She giggled a little bit, teasing him as though she were a child. He let a slight smile form on his face...but only a slight smile.
Senny sipped from his mug of cafinite. Having filled out his report on the incident at Century's Rise, he was convinced that this was a homicide case ready to blow all over the news in a matter of minutes. His superiors were trying to keep the press off the trail for as long as they could, but he knew this was gonna be the big topic for the next morning. They found bone fractures, vital organs torn, a concussion, and even bullet wounds all over the victim's body. Though they had yet to I.D the victim, he was concerned this was someone of importance to someone important. Someone high up in power, high on the food chain, high in command...in Valhalla.
Just then his partner showed with a digital form filled out, most likely the I.D of their victim, and a cup of chili.
"We got it," he said. A very grim look was written all over his face. Senny looked at the form to find that he was right; this person was someone of some importance.
"The victim's name is Randolf Vill," he said. "Born in Winter Haitus on Citi-Star, spring star date 83LX. Only family was his brother Gorden Vill, former high commander of the InterSekt Marine Corps, who is now President of Prime-Star. As you no doubt saw, the victim had bullet wounds all over his body. And it makes me wonder who would be dumb enough to do that?"
"Or smart enough," Senny said. His partner gave him a look of curiosity. "I mean, really Gus. Who would use a slug thrower anymore when they could use plasma? Or a P.O weapon? Guns with bullets are easily traceable, maybe that's the point? Maybe we're being played for idiots by someone who likes to screw around with anyone in peace keeping or some kind of law enforcement?"
"Or maybe it could be a hired hit," Gus said. "You gotta remember, Senny. When congress passed the Act of Justice and Swift Execution, one of the things to go was the use of cyanide laber rings. Which back then, was another means for anyone who liked keeping their hands clean, to hire and ‘fire' any employees they wished."
"Employees to anyone high up or underground was basically another word for slavery in their business," said Senny.
"Well...slavery isn't the word I would use," Gus stated.
Outside of the station sits a discreetly nestled Repulser, lights dimmed but not offline. He sat in his seat puffing some Vapor from his lit CigRet. "Hey Jerv, you get the Mic-Buggee working yet? It looks like those two are finishing up with the reports about now." He said with a slight cough from the Vapor. Jerv took a sip of some liquor as he was nestling some of the wires together.
The Mic-Buggee was a little beaten up from years of use, and in some spots glittered a small film of dust from being locked up in a storage compartment. Some of the lights on it were faint, there was also an unpleasant whirring and grinding noise it would make when it was running. This piece of junk might as well have been scraped and melted down for some other use. Even if it was converted into some parts for a garbage burner at least it would be more useful and reliable then some half busted spying bot.
Jerv looked up at the flickering lights on the bot's forehead, they were so weakly lit that you could only see a tiny bit of color. He frowned at this and resumed nestling the wires, hoping that the bot would spring a little closer to life than what this miserable excuse was.
A spark jolted out of one of the ports in the spy bot's chest and nearly shocked his wrist, he swore in a startled manner and hit his head on the side of the Repulser.
"If you weren't drinking, we could be listening in on what's going on in there right now, instead of you blundering up with that piece of junk's faulty chip's and circuits."
Edmond was getting impatient with his partner and his attempts at making a repair job on a bot that should already be in the trash by now, and he really wished his publisher would have given them some proper spy equipment instead of this...thing. They had a job to do and right now they have to play mechanic instead of fulfilling they're journalistic duty, getting a big story for all the solar to hear.
Suddenly, the bot flickered on and made what sounded like trumpet sounds, indicating that it was finally functioning and ready for work. Jerv grinned while Edmond stared in bewilderment, he got the thing running like some kind of miracle worker. "How did you do that?" He asked in awe. "A little booze can help when you don't want to over-think what you're working on, maybe you should try it sometime Ed." Jerv grinned smugly, like he just won a million dollars in a game of Mine. It was about time for them to get to work.
-Sam Matz
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
Uncomfortable Truths
This month’s artist eschews digital in favor of original source materials, culling his imagery largely from horror comics, books on primitive man, Medieval art and Hare Krishna promotional material. Images are sliced and glued in a manner designed to invoke feelings of unease and existential dissonance yet are often tinged with a deliberate element of humor: like H.P. Lovecraft whispering in the ear of a nitrous oxide intoxicated and X-Acto knife wielding Hieronymus Bosch.
Growing up in the greater Kansas City metro area, his aspirations were focused in the direction of music. Shortly after high school he formed his first band called Big Toe, which was a part of the hardcore scene in and around Lawrence, Kansas. In 1991, he moved to Seattle and began playing in The Moogs, all while working a day job as an exterminator. He would soon marry and, in 1999, he and his wife moved back to Kansas City.
Eight years later he would begin working under the moniker of Folkicide. A largely DIY undertaking, he opted to forego the normal route of hiring a commercial designer and assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. Juxtaposing Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall, 80's Warner horror comics, and snipping’s from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, he continued assembling collages, now numbering in the hundreds. We are proud to present to you our November Spotlight on the art and music of Burnie Booth, AKA Folkicide.
Growing up in the greater Kansas City metro area, his aspirations were focused in the direction of music. Shortly after high school he formed his first band called Big Toe, which was a part of the hardcore scene in and around Lawrence, Kansas. In 1991, he moved to Seattle and began playing in The Moogs, all while working a day job as an exterminator. He would soon marry and, in 1999, he and his wife moved back to Kansas City.
Eight years later he would begin working under the moniker of Folkicide. A largely DIY undertaking, he opted to forego the normal route of hiring a commercial designer and assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. Juxtaposing Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall, 80's Warner horror comics, and snipping’s from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, he continued assembling collages, now numbering in the hundreds. We are proud to present to you our November Spotlight on the art and music of Burnie Booth, AKA Folkicide.
The Occult Aryan Eroticism of Madame Blavatsky Revealed at Last
Crowley Crumbling Before the Majesty of Lovecraft
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Recorded and mixed by David Moore at Merriam Shoals Studio May through October 2013. All songs by Folkicide (ASCAP) Copyright 2014.
All songs were composed and performed by Folkicide (ASCAP).
Recorded and engineered by David Moore at his Merriam Shoal Studio here and there between July and August of 2011.
Recorded and engineered by David Moore at his Merriam Shoal Studio here and there between July and August of 2011.
Burnie Booth
A punk musician by proclivity and an artist by inevitability, Burnie Booth began creating his primitivist collages as album covers for Folkicide, his performing moniker since 2007.
Folkicide’s music is an acoustically violent, folk driven exploration of extreme pessimism, despair and the nightmare of existence. He feels his music has found a logical visual extension in the piecemeal medium of collage.
Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. In 2013 filmmaker Mikal Shapiro produced the Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery. His art will also be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.
For more of his art follow him at: www.facebook.com/Folkicide
For more Folkicide music: folkicide.bandcamp.com/music
A punk musician by proclivity and an artist by inevitability, Burnie Booth began creating his primitivist collages as album covers for Folkicide, his performing moniker since 2007.
Folkicide’s music is an acoustically violent, folk driven exploration of extreme pessimism, despair and the nightmare of existence. He feels his music has found a logical visual extension in the piecemeal medium of collage.
Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. In 2013 filmmaker Mikal Shapiro produced the Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery. His art will also be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.
For more of his art follow him at: www.facebook.com/Folkicide
For more Folkicide music: folkicide.bandcamp.com/music
Cover art by Styxxoplix
Aid ‘em and Revo Denim… The culture of western civilization in the past century is a lie. Kill your heroes, bury your idols, and desecrate the graves. Art history is still a lie, and the galleries are far worse than dens of thieves. Now is the time to make sure you have something real to say. Don’t seek your voice in the candy-coated bubble-gum matrix of Art World, Book, Movie or Music Land. Transcend ‘em, know ‘em, aid ‘em and Revo Denim.
For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Third Friday viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.
Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay!
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.
Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay!
Steven Lee Matz
Jim Mazzocco
Sierra Matz
David MacDowell
DONYE! 12" x 12" Acrylic on Canvas
Gus Romero IV
RF Pangborn
Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.
Cover Art By Hannah Tutor
A sense of duality: the poetic and the profane, the sacred and the salacious, the masculine and the feminine permeates the work of this month’s artist, whose main vehicle of expression is the written word.
Laura Albert first burst onto the literary scene as both spectacle and spectator, when her first novel Sarah was published in 2000 under the pseudonym of JT LeRoy, it was met with both critical and cultural acclaim. Sarah, a beautiful, brutal, and phantasmagoric account of a young, gender fluid, male truck stop hustler (lot lizard) was said to be a semi-autobiographical account of the life of its author JT LeRoy. Which it was, his voice, channeled through Laura’s hand.
The voice of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy was born of Laura’s conversations with Dr. Terrence Owens via a crisis hotline in the late 1990’s. She had been calling crisis hotlines for years by this time, always as a boy, and at this point it was her major avenue of emotional, mental, and spiritual exploration. This would be the incubator for the germ of what would become JT. From the first call there he was, fully formed and crystalized. When Dr. Owens asked for a name Laura said “Terminator”. She would later state that: “He was my respirator. My channel for air”, and it was through her conversations with Dr. Owens that she would express herself and explore the avatar of Terminator.
When Dr. Owens identified continuity problems in Terminator’s thought processes, he suggested that writing would help. What initially resulted was Balloons, a story in which a presumably adolescent boy collects the balloons that the heroin he buys is packaged in. The use of language in Balloons has echoes of Rimbaud in its ability to clearly create a visual image within the mind’s eye of the reader. It was more than fiction, it was poetry. Populated by phrases like: “No one knows about my collection, and I won't tell until The Time. I've had my plan forever, and I can't just go buy balloons; they have to be special magic balloons, baptized by saliva, made holy by the fear of getting busted with them, and transformed to the sacred by all the desires floating in the tension surrounding them. Our sweat, our fear, and my love.”, and “I feel myself getting lighter as branches of balloons spring from every limb. I tell them not to cry; I must rise for their sins. I am the Lord's outcast and will face him for all outcasts.” it was much more than just a work of art therapy and the first tangible proof of its author’s genius. Upon delivering this piece of writing to Dr. Owens office Terminator’s counterpart Speedie was born (complete with a cockney accent). The avatar of Speedie would become a crucial mechanism of something that was quickly snowballing into an endeavor which would blur the lines between the art and its creator. Ultimately calling into question the very archetype of the artist, and the expectations placed upon that role by a media driven consumer culture. At the same time questioning the status quo on a woman’s role in the literary and artistic realms of American culture, as well as those of people on the fringes of society, and in so doing tackled a plethora of modern taboos that few if any other writers were talking about at the time. Her writing was, in hindsight, extremely prophetic and incredibly ahead of its time. Today we take issues of gender identity and sexual assault for granted, we have open discourse on these problems and feel that we have a greater awareness of these things, but in the late 90’s and early 2000’s this was not the case. Baby Doll, another early piece, is the story of a boy dressing in his mother’s clothing in order to seduce her abusive boyfriend. It would be published in the compilation Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire.
It was on the heels of this story that she, or rather Terminator, was offered a book deal for a memoir. Laura refused the deal not wanting to misrepresent her fiction as memoir. At this point she stopped writing altogether.
A few years later she would write Sarah, which was published not long thereafter under the name JT LeRoy. Soon a cult of personality was springing up around the work of this new force of American literature which demanded that they see their idol in the flesh. It was with the help of Laura’s sister in law Savanna Knoop that JT would indeed become flesh.
Over the course of the next several years many more events would unfold which would blur the lines even further between fact and fiction, drawing Laura and her inner circle further into the realm of celebrity, and later infamy. Two more books would be born from her pen via JT, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Harold’s End, a movie was made based on the former title starring Asia Argento.
In 2005 an article was published implying that JT LeRoy was in fact the invention of his manager/handler Speedie AKA Laura Albert. More articles followed on its heels and she was quickly labeled as the architect of literature’s most elaborate hoax. A hail of controversy followed which generated even more press, Antidote International Films, Inc. filed a lawsuit, accusing her of fraud for signing a contract as JT LeRoy. She was viewed as a pariah, her name and work were attacked and defamed by a media machine which had no concept of art, let alone sympathy for an artist that they hardly understood and couldn’t commodify. But this was not the end for Laura.
She worked as a writer on HBO’s Deadwood, and wrote a slew of articles and screenplays, mostly under her real name. In 2012 she served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival; she also attended Brazil's international book fair, Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where she and Alice Walker were the U.S. representatives. Brazil's Geração Editorial re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura Albert's name, and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale). (1)
When all is said and done, the way that the work of this artist was initially presented was and is an extraordinarily revolutionary piece of art far ahead of its time. Of course, as exciting and beautifully bizarre as the JT mythos is, it is merely the cherry on top when one sits down and actually reads the work. Included at the end of this feature is the first chapter of the New York Times bestseller Sarah, we encourage you to read it. We have also included the trailer for Author: The JT LeRoy Story, it is a must see and a terrific companion to this feature as it explores our subject in much greater detail than we can go into here. We are very honored to present to you our October Spotlight Artist: Laura Albert.
(*1-Excerpted from Laura Albert Wikipedia)
Laura Albert first burst onto the literary scene as both spectacle and spectator, when her first novel Sarah was published in 2000 under the pseudonym of JT LeRoy, it was met with both critical and cultural acclaim. Sarah, a beautiful, brutal, and phantasmagoric account of a young, gender fluid, male truck stop hustler (lot lizard) was said to be a semi-autobiographical account of the life of its author JT LeRoy. Which it was, his voice, channeled through Laura’s hand.
The voice of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy was born of Laura’s conversations with Dr. Terrence Owens via a crisis hotline in the late 1990’s. She had been calling crisis hotlines for years by this time, always as a boy, and at this point it was her major avenue of emotional, mental, and spiritual exploration. This would be the incubator for the germ of what would become JT. From the first call there he was, fully formed and crystalized. When Dr. Owens asked for a name Laura said “Terminator”. She would later state that: “He was my respirator. My channel for air”, and it was through her conversations with Dr. Owens that she would express herself and explore the avatar of Terminator.
When Dr. Owens identified continuity problems in Terminator’s thought processes, he suggested that writing would help. What initially resulted was Balloons, a story in which a presumably adolescent boy collects the balloons that the heroin he buys is packaged in. The use of language in Balloons has echoes of Rimbaud in its ability to clearly create a visual image within the mind’s eye of the reader. It was more than fiction, it was poetry. Populated by phrases like: “No one knows about my collection, and I won't tell until The Time. I've had my plan forever, and I can't just go buy balloons; they have to be special magic balloons, baptized by saliva, made holy by the fear of getting busted with them, and transformed to the sacred by all the desires floating in the tension surrounding them. Our sweat, our fear, and my love.”, and “I feel myself getting lighter as branches of balloons spring from every limb. I tell them not to cry; I must rise for their sins. I am the Lord's outcast and will face him for all outcasts.” it was much more than just a work of art therapy and the first tangible proof of its author’s genius. Upon delivering this piece of writing to Dr. Owens office Terminator’s counterpart Speedie was born (complete with a cockney accent). The avatar of Speedie would become a crucial mechanism of something that was quickly snowballing into an endeavor which would blur the lines between the art and its creator. Ultimately calling into question the very archetype of the artist, and the expectations placed upon that role by a media driven consumer culture. At the same time questioning the status quo on a woman’s role in the literary and artistic realms of American culture, as well as those of people on the fringes of society, and in so doing tackled a plethora of modern taboos that few if any other writers were talking about at the time. Her writing was, in hindsight, extremely prophetic and incredibly ahead of its time. Today we take issues of gender identity and sexual assault for granted, we have open discourse on these problems and feel that we have a greater awareness of these things, but in the late 90’s and early 2000’s this was not the case. Baby Doll, another early piece, is the story of a boy dressing in his mother’s clothing in order to seduce her abusive boyfriend. It would be published in the compilation Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire.
It was on the heels of this story that she, or rather Terminator, was offered a book deal for a memoir. Laura refused the deal not wanting to misrepresent her fiction as memoir. At this point she stopped writing altogether.
A few years later she would write Sarah, which was published not long thereafter under the name JT LeRoy. Soon a cult of personality was springing up around the work of this new force of American literature which demanded that they see their idol in the flesh. It was with the help of Laura’s sister in law Savanna Knoop that JT would indeed become flesh.
Over the course of the next several years many more events would unfold which would blur the lines even further between fact and fiction, drawing Laura and her inner circle further into the realm of celebrity, and later infamy. Two more books would be born from her pen via JT, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Harold’s End, a movie was made based on the former title starring Asia Argento.
In 2005 an article was published implying that JT LeRoy was in fact the invention of his manager/handler Speedie AKA Laura Albert. More articles followed on its heels and she was quickly labeled as the architect of literature’s most elaborate hoax. A hail of controversy followed which generated even more press, Antidote International Films, Inc. filed a lawsuit, accusing her of fraud for signing a contract as JT LeRoy. She was viewed as a pariah, her name and work were attacked and defamed by a media machine which had no concept of art, let alone sympathy for an artist that they hardly understood and couldn’t commodify. But this was not the end for Laura.
She worked as a writer on HBO’s Deadwood, and wrote a slew of articles and screenplays, mostly under her real name. In 2012 she served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival; she also attended Brazil's international book fair, Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where she and Alice Walker were the U.S. representatives. Brazil's Geração Editorial re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura Albert's name, and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale). (1)
When all is said and done, the way that the work of this artist was initially presented was and is an extraordinarily revolutionary piece of art far ahead of its time. Of course, as exciting and beautifully bizarre as the JT mythos is, it is merely the cherry on top when one sits down and actually reads the work. Included at the end of this feature is the first chapter of the New York Times bestseller Sarah, we encourage you to read it. We have also included the trailer for Author: The JT LeRoy Story, it is a must see and a terrific companion to this feature as it explores our subject in much greater detail than we can go into here. We are very honored to present to you our October Spotlight Artist: Laura Albert.
(*1-Excerpted from Laura Albert Wikipedia)
The Laura Albert Interview
Steven Lee Matz- I would like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to speak with us. One of the aspects of your story that I personally find the most inspirational and thought provoking is the use of not one but two avatars (JT and Speedie), as well as the cast of characters that you would create to populate their lives. Which leads me to my first question, did the personas of JT and Speedie emerge fully formed or did you consciously develop them?
Laura Albert- Terminator was Terminator from the moment he first spoke to Dr. Owens – there really was no conscious thought-process to create him. But he emerged after many years of stories of boys like him. When I was a child, in my mind at night, I would hear and see stories of children in crisis, usually boys. Sometimes they would go into my dreams, but most often this would happen before I would fall asleep. Sometimes they’d keep me up, or they’d wake me up, and I’d be crying. Sometimes the kid would survive and sometimes he would die. And in the daytime I would play with my dolls and play out the scenes and situations that I had watched at night.
Terminator arrived fully formed, but a lot of stories had preceded his. As for Speedie, she was the advocate I needed to protect Terminator, and then JT LeRoy. At the time I was morbidly obese, my food addiction had taken over. It was a way of numbing myself, a behavior I had learned since childhood – and like any addiction, it is a progressive disease. It was self-destructive but also an effective way to keep people away and to mute my sexuality – which was problematic for me because of the sexual abuse I had experienced as a child. But I felt myself as a morbidly obese monster. And our culture tends to view and treat morbidly obese women this way. We are something to be feared, as if contagious. We wear our “disease.” Only recently has our culture begun to see different-sized people, ethnically- and gender-diverse people being represented in media in any form. Speedie allowed me to step into a persona who could be a fearless and effective advocate for my work.
There is a gender bias in how a woman is allowed to express herself. Men are deemed passionate and forceful, but when women express themselves in exactly the same way, they are labeled emotional, hysterical, ranting, or even bitchy. When women go after what they want, they are manipulative, whereas that same behavior in a man is admired, he is a go-getter.
Speedie allowed me to not give a fuck. To step out of my toxic shame and be someone who was OK being other people’s bête noire when needed. Because an advocate was also needed to set boundaries where JT LeRoy was being appropriated or taken advantage of. It’s as if I bifurcated myself: There was that aspect of me, “Terminator/JT LeRoy” who would give it all away, and then the Speedie being who was a fearless protective warrior. Making her Cockney was a version of the fearless Brooklyn women I grew up with, who would say it like it was – they were opened-hearted and generous, but knew how to go to war as needed. Speedie’s accent also gave me another layer, her own mask, and an essence of street punk that loaned her power. Speedie didn’t “know her place” as a fat woman who was not cute or pretty, who did not wear fashionable clothes or have a designer handbag. She carried shopping bags, and she was supposed to shut up and be ashamed. But Speedie was punk as fuck, and like me, she did not give a shit about that stuff. Even though it was painful to be mocked.
The truth is, people liked Speedie, she was funny, generous, and free. At the time, no one complained about Speedie. And she allowed me to move beyond the shameful identity of a fat woman in a thin-body-biased culture. But there was no publicist, no agent, no manager, so when Speedie needed to set a boundary, she was the one who had to do that. She had to not care if it made people angry. And that fearless boundary-setting helped me learn to say no in my own life. To not be a people-pleaser. When you feel you have no right to live, it is hard to ask for what you need. Or to set boundries. As a child my body was not my own. I did not know what proper boundaries were. I learned over time, I was in foster care, in a group home, and I learned a lot there. But Speedie really helped me. At the time, I also had a baby. I would do whatever I had to do to protect this spirit that had come through my body. Speedie had that momma bear fuel in spades and helped me be an effective advocate for my young son, as well as for JT LeRoy’s books. My novel Sarah was born out of me not long after my son.
What is interesting is that, after I was “outed,” people for the most part assumed right away that Speedie was Laura. I think that is a very sexist reaction – a lack of imagination on their part as well. They even pushed aside the fun times they had hanging out with Speedie, and focused on the times when Speedie set limits on their inappropriate behavior that they probably felt ashamed of. Speedie was the one who said, “No, you cannot give drugs to JT” and “No more plying drinks to JT” and “OK, press is over.” They always wanted to push for more. Savannah as JT wanted to go off and party, and Speedie was constantly having to be a sort of den mother. It was awful to be in that position, but was a helpful skill to learn.
Laura Albert- Terminator was Terminator from the moment he first spoke to Dr. Owens – there really was no conscious thought-process to create him. But he emerged after many years of stories of boys like him. When I was a child, in my mind at night, I would hear and see stories of children in crisis, usually boys. Sometimes they would go into my dreams, but most often this would happen before I would fall asleep. Sometimes they’d keep me up, or they’d wake me up, and I’d be crying. Sometimes the kid would survive and sometimes he would die. And in the daytime I would play with my dolls and play out the scenes and situations that I had watched at night.
Terminator arrived fully formed, but a lot of stories had preceded his. As for Speedie, she was the advocate I needed to protect Terminator, and then JT LeRoy. At the time I was morbidly obese, my food addiction had taken over. It was a way of numbing myself, a behavior I had learned since childhood – and like any addiction, it is a progressive disease. It was self-destructive but also an effective way to keep people away and to mute my sexuality – which was problematic for me because of the sexual abuse I had experienced as a child. But I felt myself as a morbidly obese monster. And our culture tends to view and treat morbidly obese women this way. We are something to be feared, as if contagious. We wear our “disease.” Only recently has our culture begun to see different-sized people, ethnically- and gender-diverse people being represented in media in any form. Speedie allowed me to step into a persona who could be a fearless and effective advocate for my work.
There is a gender bias in how a woman is allowed to express herself. Men are deemed passionate and forceful, but when women express themselves in exactly the same way, they are labeled emotional, hysterical, ranting, or even bitchy. When women go after what they want, they are manipulative, whereas that same behavior in a man is admired, he is a go-getter.
Speedie allowed me to not give a fuck. To step out of my toxic shame and be someone who was OK being other people’s bête noire when needed. Because an advocate was also needed to set boundaries where JT LeRoy was being appropriated or taken advantage of. It’s as if I bifurcated myself: There was that aspect of me, “Terminator/JT LeRoy” who would give it all away, and then the Speedie being who was a fearless protective warrior. Making her Cockney was a version of the fearless Brooklyn women I grew up with, who would say it like it was – they were opened-hearted and generous, but knew how to go to war as needed. Speedie’s accent also gave me another layer, her own mask, and an essence of street punk that loaned her power. Speedie didn’t “know her place” as a fat woman who was not cute or pretty, who did not wear fashionable clothes or have a designer handbag. She carried shopping bags, and she was supposed to shut up and be ashamed. But Speedie was punk as fuck, and like me, she did not give a shit about that stuff. Even though it was painful to be mocked.
The truth is, people liked Speedie, she was funny, generous, and free. At the time, no one complained about Speedie. And she allowed me to move beyond the shameful identity of a fat woman in a thin-body-biased culture. But there was no publicist, no agent, no manager, so when Speedie needed to set a boundary, she was the one who had to do that. She had to not care if it made people angry. And that fearless boundary-setting helped me learn to say no in my own life. To not be a people-pleaser. When you feel you have no right to live, it is hard to ask for what you need. Or to set boundries. As a child my body was not my own. I did not know what proper boundaries were. I learned over time, I was in foster care, in a group home, and I learned a lot there. But Speedie really helped me. At the time, I also had a baby. I would do whatever I had to do to protect this spirit that had come through my body. Speedie had that momma bear fuel in spades and helped me be an effective advocate for my young son, as well as for JT LeRoy’s books. My novel Sarah was born out of me not long after my son.
What is interesting is that, after I was “outed,” people for the most part assumed right away that Speedie was Laura. I think that is a very sexist reaction – a lack of imagination on their part as well. They even pushed aside the fun times they had hanging out with Speedie, and focused on the times when Speedie set limits on their inappropriate behavior that they probably felt ashamed of. Speedie was the one who said, “No, you cannot give drugs to JT” and “No more plying drinks to JT” and “OK, press is over.” They always wanted to push for more. Savannah as JT wanted to go off and party, and Speedie was constantly having to be a sort of den mother. It was awful to be in that position, but was a helpful skill to learn.
When an artist is being commodified, there always needs to be someone who makes sure they are treated like humans. That is why people have managers and agents. There needs to be someone willing to be the gatekeeper, to require respect. If there is no one like that, then they will not feed you, they will not give you breaks – but they will often supply drugs to keep the party going, to make the artist more pliant.
Speedie was also mocked for asking for what is basic on any promotional tour, the food we needed: apples, almonds, soy milk. Fuel to keep us going through long days promoting their film, which we were not being paid for. It was not even close to being over the top, like some requests that rock stars have been known to demand. But as soon as I was outed, it was framed in a greedy grabbing way, because they saw Speedie as me, and anything she asked for, suddenly loomed larger. It was funny to me that people like Asia Argento – who had long lists of demands for hotel suites, stocked bars, drugs, and who got paid a fortune for wearing clothing she claimed to detest but had JT LeRoy wear, while of course not sharing any of her endorsement payments – had the hypocrisy and nerve to make fun of Speedie for daring to ask for water, organic apples and almonds.
When an artist is being commodified, there always needs to be someone who makes sure they are treated like humans. That is why people have managers and agents. There needs to be someone willing to be the gatekeeper, to require respect. If there is no one like that, then they will not feed you, they will not give you breaks – but they will often supply drugs to keep the party going, to make the artist more pliant. I could not afford to hire an outside person, so Speedie was that gatekeeper. And it was only resented after I was outed in the press. How dare I be both the advocate and the exploited beloved talent?! I had to be one or the other. So it was easier to take the route of unconscious gender bias and procliam, “Laura WAS Speedie and she is a monster!” And it was easy to parlay Speedie to the cliché role of cunt. And because they saw Speedie in my body, while JT was presented in Savannah’s body. The being of Terminator/JT, all the vulnerable mischievous sweetness of that being, as well as all the writing, was from me. But that was quickly dismissed, leaving me, Laura Albert tagged a “manipulative cunt.” Which is another word for publicist/manager/agent – woman.
After having been outed, I have traveled by myself to book festivals, I have been a judge at film festivals, I opened the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story around the world, and I have given lectures, talks, workshops – but it is hard for me to summon my inner Speedie. She is there, but it is only when I feel really taken advantage of that she will come storming out to set a boundary. I am still learning how to be an advocate for myself in a healthy way. I know many women struggle with this balance. I want to be liked. But how do I protect myself as well? Also, I am sensitive to the point of being gun-shy about those accusations – that if I ask for what I need, I am that cunt Speedie. Plus I no longer have that boundary of fat around me. I was 320 lbs. My body is normal-sized now and I feel much more vulnerable.
But now I am available. People can come to hear me talk about the work and I can meet with them without the firewalls I had. It was awful for me, when people wanted to talk about what the JT LeRoy books brought up for them, and they were faced with a JT LeRoy who could only sit there and nod. Savannah had not had the experiences I had. She once said to me that she wished she had had real trauma happen to her, like Asia and I had experienced, that she felt embarrassed about her privilege. And she was not able to respond to the fans who wanted to connect around the issues I had so fearlessly explored, because she had no clue.
But now I can make myself very available. When I read, I will sit with every fan until they say all they need to, or the venue closes. It is a very moving and healing experience for me. And it sure took a long time for me to be ready to do that in my own skin.
I know there is a gift beyond my writing – the added bonus is the complex way I presented it. It has fostered more awareness of sexual and psychical abuse, gender variance, addiction, obesity, etc. In 1995 Dr. Vincent Felitti ran an obesity program at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. But he had a 50% drop-out rate, just when those quitting were losing up to 100 pounds. “As we interviewed almost 300 of the dropouts, every other person spoke of having childhood sexual abuse; most of them seemed to have been waiting to tell someone after hiding it for years,” Felitti said. “They also often mentioned verbal and physical abuse and other traumatic experiences such as watching their mother being beaten."
This reveals how we are only at the tip of an iceberg in our exploration of what is now called developmental trauma and its fallout. That’s why the more stories people are allowed to tell, in whatever manner they can, the better.
When an artist is being commodified, there always needs to be someone who makes sure they are treated like humans. That is why people have managers and agents. There needs to be someone willing to be the gatekeeper, to require respect. If there is no one like that, then they will not feed you, they will not give you breaks – but they will often supply drugs to keep the party going, to make the artist more pliant. I could not afford to hire an outside person, so Speedie was that gatekeeper. And it was only resented after I was outed in the press. How dare I be both the advocate and the exploited beloved talent?! I had to be one or the other. So it was easier to take the route of unconscious gender bias and procliam, “Laura WAS Speedie and she is a monster!” And it was easy to parlay Speedie to the cliché role of cunt. And because they saw Speedie in my body, while JT was presented in Savannah’s body. The being of Terminator/JT, all the vulnerable mischievous sweetness of that being, as well as all the writing, was from me. But that was quickly dismissed, leaving me, Laura Albert tagged a “manipulative cunt.” Which is another word for publicist/manager/agent – woman.
After having been outed, I have traveled by myself to book festivals, I have been a judge at film festivals, I opened the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story around the world, and I have given lectures, talks, workshops – but it is hard for me to summon my inner Speedie. She is there, but it is only when I feel really taken advantage of that she will come storming out to set a boundary. I am still learning how to be an advocate for myself in a healthy way. I know many women struggle with this balance. I want to be liked. But how do I protect myself as well? Also, I am sensitive to the point of being gun-shy about those accusations – that if I ask for what I need, I am that cunt Speedie. Plus I no longer have that boundary of fat around me. I was 320 lbs. My body is normal-sized now and I feel much more vulnerable.
But now I am available. People can come to hear me talk about the work and I can meet with them without the firewalls I had. It was awful for me, when people wanted to talk about what the JT LeRoy books brought up for them, and they were faced with a JT LeRoy who could only sit there and nod. Savannah had not had the experiences I had. She once said to me that she wished she had had real trauma happen to her, like Asia and I had experienced, that she felt embarrassed about her privilege. And she was not able to respond to the fans who wanted to connect around the issues I had so fearlessly explored, because she had no clue.
But now I can make myself very available. When I read, I will sit with every fan until they say all they need to, or the venue closes. It is a very moving and healing experience for me. And it sure took a long time for me to be ready to do that in my own skin.
I know there is a gift beyond my writing – the added bonus is the complex way I presented it. It has fostered more awareness of sexual and psychical abuse, gender variance, addiction, obesity, etc. In 1995 Dr. Vincent Felitti ran an obesity program at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. But he had a 50% drop-out rate, just when those quitting were losing up to 100 pounds. “As we interviewed almost 300 of the dropouts, every other person spoke of having childhood sexual abuse; most of them seemed to have been waiting to tell someone after hiding it for years,” Felitti said. “They also often mentioned verbal and physical abuse and other traumatic experiences such as watching their mother being beaten."
This reveals how we are only at the tip of an iceberg in our exploration of what is now called developmental trauma and its fallout. That’s why the more stories people are allowed to tell, in whatever manner they can, the better.
Laura & Savannah Knoop
What was it like for you, both emotionally and artistically, when Savannah Knoop took on the role of J.T. and he became a living person?
I saw JT take over Savannah; it didn’t take long before he was really just stepping into her when she had to appear in public as him. For me it was validation of JT’s realness, that he could be channeled in this way. I did not see Savannah, I saw JT when we were out in public. When we got back to our hotel room we would have to decompress. It was a process. Me letting go of Speedie, and she of JT. But they had moved into us, so it was complex. The same when an actor is given over to a role they are playing. Some do not let go of it for all of filming and some even after. The role River Phoenix played in My Own Private Idaho deeply affected him, and there were destructive behaviors he continued after his role ended, which led to his tragic death. Likewise, I think Argento was attracted to the role of Sarah in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things because it tapped into her identity of both victim and victimizer. And she apparently did not stop playing this role with others, particularly the boy Jimmy Bennett who played her abused son, and whom she later slept with while he was still legally a minor.
I saw JT take over Savannah; it didn’t take long before he was really just stepping into her when she had to appear in public as him. For me it was validation of JT’s realness, that he could be channeled in this way. I did not see Savannah, I saw JT when we were out in public. When we got back to our hotel room we would have to decompress. It was a process. Me letting go of Speedie, and she of JT. But they had moved into us, so it was complex. The same when an actor is given over to a role they are playing. Some do not let go of it for all of filming and some even after. The role River Phoenix played in My Own Private Idaho deeply affected him, and there were destructive behaviors he continued after his role ended, which led to his tragic death. Likewise, I think Argento was attracted to the role of Sarah in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things because it tapped into her identity of both victim and victimizer. And she apparently did not stop playing this role with others, particularly the boy Jimmy Bennett who played her abused son, and whom she later slept with while he was still legally a minor.
I did not identify as female in a vast majority of the time spent in my body or my thought. There was no language for that. The term gender variance did not exist. And transgender was a scary word, it was still being viewed as a mental illness... Writing as Terminator/JT LeRoy allowed me the freedom to create when gender variance did not yet have a name.
You began writing at the suggestion of Dr. Owens, because he said that it would help JT with his continuity issues. My question is when you would write at that time, would you be fully immersed in JT or were you able to keep different methods between Laura and JT?
Dr. Owens told Terminator he should write, and starting with “Balloons,” Terminator was writing. It was all drawn from my own life experiences and feelings, and from things that had happened to people I’d known. I wasn’t really writing from my imagination, not in the way that a genre writer does, saying, “OK, I am making a character up.” I was writing in a voice that had its own way of using what I had inside me. I was writing when I was a ward of the state in foster care, I had won scholarships to go to college. But a writing teacher – who I very much loved – at that time would not allow me to write in a male voice. She forbade it. I was writing stories of abuse, kids who were going through physical and sexual abuse. My issues. I begged her, I said to her, this is the only way I can explore this stuff in fiction, with a male voice. But she had experienced too many young writers making a mess when they wrote in the voice of the other. She thought, best write what you know first. I had no way to express to her that, even though I presented as female, that was not my inner life. I did not identify as female in a vast majority of the time spent in my body or my thought. There was no language for that. The term gender variance did not exist. And transgender was a scary word, it was still being viewed as a mental illness.
To be forced to write in a female voice was too exposing to me. It felt shameful and disgusting. Remember, ever since I was a young child, I had had the release valve of telling stories in a male voice. I very much wanted to be a boy, but my body was in no way masculine. Being chubby, made it worse. I had breasts early, which I detested. After writing about sexual and physical abuse with a girl protagonist in college, I had a break down, I dropped out of school and had to go to a hospital. I would not write about these themes, these issues in a purely female voice for almost thirty years. But now I am able to write my memoir. Writing as Terminator/JT LeRoy allowed me the freedom to create when gender variance did not yet have a name.
Dr. Owens told Terminator he should write, and starting with “Balloons,” Terminator was writing. It was all drawn from my own life experiences and feelings, and from things that had happened to people I’d known. I wasn’t really writing from my imagination, not in the way that a genre writer does, saying, “OK, I am making a character up.” I was writing in a voice that had its own way of using what I had inside me. I was writing when I was a ward of the state in foster care, I had won scholarships to go to college. But a writing teacher – who I very much loved – at that time would not allow me to write in a male voice. She forbade it. I was writing stories of abuse, kids who were going through physical and sexual abuse. My issues. I begged her, I said to her, this is the only way I can explore this stuff in fiction, with a male voice. But she had experienced too many young writers making a mess when they wrote in the voice of the other. She thought, best write what you know first. I had no way to express to her that, even though I presented as female, that was not my inner life. I did not identify as female in a vast majority of the time spent in my body or my thought. There was no language for that. The term gender variance did not exist. And transgender was a scary word, it was still being viewed as a mental illness.
To be forced to write in a female voice was too exposing to me. It felt shameful and disgusting. Remember, ever since I was a young child, I had had the release valve of telling stories in a male voice. I very much wanted to be a boy, but my body was in no way masculine. Being chubby, made it worse. I had breasts early, which I detested. After writing about sexual and physical abuse with a girl protagonist in college, I had a break down, I dropped out of school and had to go to a hospital. I would not write about these themes, these issues in a purely female voice for almost thirty years. But now I am able to write my memoir. Writing as Terminator/JT LeRoy allowed me the freedom to create when gender variance did not yet have a name.
Savannah Knoop & Bono
Were there any other personas that you wanted to experiment with or bring to life during the JT era of your work that you never got a chance to?
JT represented a kind of culmination, the most elaborate expression of a defense mechanism. My methods for containing and responding to my own trauma had become so deep and reflexive – and they were so intertwined with my own drive to write and communicate and testify to what was happening – that everything finally coalesced or condensed or distilled into JT.
JT represented a kind of culmination, the most elaborate expression of a defense mechanism. My methods for containing and responding to my own trauma had become so deep and reflexive – and they were so intertwined with my own drive to write and communicate and testify to what was happening – that everything finally coalesced or condensed or distilled into JT.
Laura & William Patrick Corgan
Who are your main influences artistically?
I have been getting to know Sheila Heti, and I very much appreciate how she discusses her process of writing, how honestly she explores what she wishes to write about. It intrigues me how she fearlessly writes very personally, as in her latest book, Motherhood, but she does not call it memoir, she moves it into the realm of fiction, which is hard for many critics to accept. They pass personal harsh judgments about her actual partners even though she states them as fictional. She cuts the lines thin, but that is her right as an artist. Yet it seems to upset many critics, even though it allows her to protect people’s identities and merge her characters to explore a deeper truth. Her writing structure has a collage-like form to it, and that has been wonderful for me, to study her wonderful craft and discuss it with her.
I go back a lot to the wisdom of Oscar Wilde, who saw himself go from being the most celebrated writer of his time to being imprisoned, sentenced to two years hard labor, because his behavior was deemed immoral. Oscar Wilde said, "A critic should be taught to criticize a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author. This, in fact, is the beginning of criticism." The author eventually goes away, but if the art is any good, it stays. That's why people still read Homer and stage Aeschylus, while knowing almost nothing about those authors. Focusing on the author rather than the art is like throwing away the banana and eating the peel. But in our society, authors are commodified and merchandized just like their art is, so naturally people get confused... That is why I am concerned when people start focusing too much on the creation of JT LeRoy, and confusing it with an actual hoax, which is something that falls apart very quickly because there is no substance behind it – it dissolves like cotton candy. I wrote real books of fiction, which sustained the fiction of the JT LeRoy persona. To again quote Wilde, "We have no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work."
What is wild in this day and age, with very little new creativity under the sun, is that most people now celebrate how I was able to do something new within the boundaries of fiction, of art itself. Of course, a few still want to quarrel with me for how I chose to present my fiction. And like was done to Oscar, some need to demonize and even criminalize me. When the lawsuit was brought against me by Antidote Films, they actually presented an inch-thick binder of why CRIMINAL charges should be brought against me. I had not stolen money from anyone, or mispresented any funds, but because I would not let them co-opt my story, they wanted to frame my fiction as criminal. The judge quickly threw that out, recognizing it for the sham it was. But this is dangerous, this need to control the way fiction in ART is presented. My fiction has a felt authenticity with issues that very much need to be explored in the realms of fiction and non-fiction. I hear from people all over the world, who are grateful to find a voice and story they recognize as true. Much the way J.K. Rowling captures so authentically the emotional truth of Harry Potter and his magical world, that people have been known to injure themselves trying to shove their way through a brick wall to catch the Hogwarts train, at the now playfully labeled “Platform 9 3/4” at Kings Cross Station.
One trend we need to be vigilant in guarding against is the assault on artists and the way art is being corralled into “fake news.”
The writer George Saunders has spoken extensively about the peril of confusing the fabrications an artist creates within the realm of their art and the specter of news reporting and politics. There is a very big difference, they are very different domains. Saunders discusses the danger of taking artists who play within storytelling and making us part of the general problem of lying and “fake news” as a threat to our society. Saunders says, “It’ll start to become a general distrust of artists and intellectuals… the Trump movement started saying everything was fake news. That’s an example of the kind of the line-blurring that happens when an anti-intellectual program is in place… This movement is going to come after the intellectuals, in some form or another. That’s what these movements do.” Saunders reminds us about the importance of the freedom of the imagination, which again is very different from “fake news.”
I think everyone needs to read this quote from him: “(Fiction) trains us, in precision of thought and expression, and more importantly it reminds us there’s a part of the mind that is very expansive and intuitive and empathetic, that is as real as any other part of the mind. And when you’re doing a work of art or when you’re receiving one, I think you’re reminded at every moment, that way of thinking is real.”
That’s right. And there is a contract that we enter into when you pick up a book that says “novel.” You consent to that... process.
I am very excited by artists who have different sized bodies, of various races and ethnicities and genders and ways of identifying, and who now have platforms to tell their stories.
Lena Duham had a huge impact on me. I stopped wearing shorts at age twelve because I did not see anyone with chubby thighs wearing shorts on TV, in any magazines. The fat girl was the joke, the sidekick. Lena changed that fearlessly. I see so many millennials expressing pride in their curves, while there is still so much messaging that thin is best, there is also a growing counter culture, that is fast becoming mainstream – women can feel pride in whatever way they want to express their bodies. When I was a kid, a girl or woman who was overweight would be mocked for daring to have pride in her body. There are models now that are gender variant. I am also collaborating on projects with photographer Christelle de Castro, a gender-non-conforming lesbian. The writer iO Tillet Wright has the rare and exquisite gift of peeling back layers of identity and showing how we carry not just our stories but our forebears with us in forming our identities – with none of the usual one-dimensional blaming or hostility. There are so many artists who in the past would not have been invited to the table. They no longer have to fight quite so hard to be heard, and it’s about time that a broader spectrum of representations became available. I remember when I was a kid getting Seventeen Magazine, and no one in that mag looked like me or expressed anything I was experiencing. They were selling a narrow ideal of beauty and identity – and if you do not find yourself represented, it only compounds the isolation and loneliness.
While they still have to deal with bias and educate people, it is not the uphill battle that it was. All of this gives me so much hope. On TV, we are not watching stories where we as an audience are trusted to care about characters you never saw on TV before. People of color, trans people of all races, body sizes, older women – I love how some TV shows Trojan-horse it, like Orange Is the New Black. It starts out ostensibly about a blonde-haired blue-eyed wasp, but next thing you know, we are caring about characters very few white male old-school executives would ever risk allowing to be protagonists of TV shows. There will always be a demand for escape shows, like Housewives, Kardashians or Bachelor type shows. But people also want to see people they know, who we are.
This is what excites me.
I am also very inspired by music that in the space of a song can take us on an emotional journey. The Smashing Pumpkins are back, and their show blew me away. Shirley Manson is a powerhouse and explores complex issues in her songs, if you pay attention – it’s devastating.
I also am very taken with the band Big Thief. They remind me of Mazy Star meets My Bloody Valentine, but they are very much their own thing.
Author: The JT LeRoy Story
Above are the American editions from HarperCollins. Find the books in your favorite format by clicking here.
Laura Albert won international acclaim writing fiction as JT LeRoy. She is the author of the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, and the novella Harold’s End, with illustrations by Cherry Hood. She is also the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. Cinema Eye, the organization that recognizes outstanding craft and artistry in nonfiction filmmaking, cited Laura Albert in Author as one of its 2016 list of Unforgettables: the year’s most notable and significant nonfiction-film subjects.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.
Sarah
By J. T. LEROY
CHAPTER ONE
Glad holds the raccoon bone over my head like a halo. `I have a little something for your own protection,' he says, leaning down over me so close that I can't help but stare up at the brown patches of skin that mottle the pure whiteness of his face.
`Glad, you look like you're sharecroppin' out your own private patch of cancer,' some of the lot lizards would tease him. But I know the truth of it. Glad told me himself. It's the Choctaw in his blood. That's why he's got good medicine. That's why he's a good pimp for a lot lizard to have.
`These patches of brown be the In'ian in me, making themselves known,' he tells me over a trucker special breakfast at The Doves Diner: a huge mound of hollandaise eggs and thick-as-a-Bible persimmon pancakes. I know he wants me to work for him. His stable is known for being the finest from coast to coast. Glad's little bits don't have to stand outside the truck stop like other goodbuddy lizards usually do. Truckers call in to arrange their appointments months in advance. All Glad's pavement princesses dress so comely in the most delicate silks from China, fine lace from France, and degenerate leather from Germany. If you didn't notice them wearing a raccoon penis bone necklace, and if you didn't know what that meant, you'd never know they were actually male. Most of his boys are either runaways rounding up some cash before heading out with some driver one of these days, or they are like me, have family working the main lot. Nobody bothers with Glad's boys. Some of the lizards say it's because he pays off anyone that would ever have a say. Sarah told me it is because all the ex-con truckers make sure they have Glad's finest boys to look forward to and the local law wouldn't want to start no riot by depriving felons of their sweet reminders of the penitentiary. But I know it is because of the raccoon dick.
He holds it over my head.
I lean down and let him slip the rough-cut leather cord around my neck. I always see Glad's boys in the diner, fingering their coon pricks in a real show-off way. They never have to pay their checks. I always hear the waitress saying when she puts in the boy's order, `It's for them two of Glad's with the mountain man toothpick.' And a bill never comes.
The lizards say Glad just pays their tab like any sugardaddy. Sarah says all the waitresses secretly are in love with Glad and his boys so they don't charge them. But Glad tells me it's neither. `They know most of their business is hungry tricks that work up their appetite after a visit with my boys, and they count on my boys leaving their tricks in a generous and lavish mood.'
`This better than a policeman's badge,' Glad says as he adjusts the necklace over my black sweater. I knew he was going to give me my bone today, so I borrowed a black sweater from Sarah.
`Gettin' boned today is what I heard,' she called from inside the bathroom of the little motel room one of her regulars on the green bean run pays for. I knew she was soaking in the shower.
`I don't care how cheap the room and the hoe, a woman needs a soak same as a coal miner.' She clogged up the drain with wet menstrual pads and towel-lined the shower rim to add an inch or two to her bath. She sat in the corner huddled like an orphan in a flood with the shower pouring down. `You'll be soaking your pump knot in here too once Glad puts you out.'
I went through the always half-packed plastic attaché case and picked up her black sweater. I pressed it to my face and inhaled her familiar scent of stale cigarettes and alcohol ineffectively masked by powder-scented air freshener.
`You better not swipe my leather skirt,' she yelled over the shower water streaming down.
I leaned into the Sheetrock bathroom door. `I'm going as a boy,' I shouted.
I heard her make a `that's what you think' laugh. I kicked the door and it shook harder than I'd meant. `You ain't the first person to kick in this door.' She laughed and I felt relieved she didn't come after me, but more than a little pissed she didn't even take me half serious enough to try to whip me. It's 'cause she's in her soak, I told myself. I could smell the baby powder scent of her bubble bath and felt excited to come home after a long night of trucker lovin' and deserve my soak just like she did. She never let me use her bubbles. `Buy your own when you work your own!' she'd tell me when she'd see me fingering the bottle covered in pictures of naked baby bottoms.
`I'm coming home with some of my own bubbles!' I shouted into the door.
`And leave the keys till you pay me half this rent.' Her voice raised some and that gave me a tinge of pleasure and fear. I grabbed up the black sweater and opened the front door. I walked back over to the Sheetrock bathroom door and said as loud as I could without yelling, `You don't even pay for this room your own self, but since I'll be making more than you As a boy, I'll kick you down some change.'
Then I ran. Heard her pulling herself up before I finished. I slammed the front door and didn't even look back once.
`This bone stands out nice against your sweater,' Glad says after he is done adjusting it on me.
I turn and look in the plate glass and there it is, on me, yellowish white like tobacco chewers' teeth. I always wanted to glide my fingers along its curvaceous lines.
`Shape always 'minded to me like half a waxed moustache ... how they get it in their women's privates is all but beyond me,' he says with a snort, and some unswallowed Kentucky coffeetree drink sprays out at me.
I carefully wipe the Kentucky coffeetree spray off my face. I've heard truckers talking in low voices how Glad is known to have murdered a few drivers that did his boys a bad turn. He did it with his coffeetree drink, some in the know say.
`It would only be a Yankee with no manners or sense of self-pride that would hurt a young defenseless boy trying to make a night's wages,' I once heard Big Pullsman Todd say between forkfuls of his Wellington of king salmon with truffle mashed potatoes. `Yankee drivers,' about ten other truckers swore and spit in their spittoons that were fixed directly a foot and a half to the sides of each of their booths. Most would usually miss and make spattered lizard designs on the fake marble with sparkles in its linoleum.
Every now and then a trucker would sit in the diner and boast of busting up a faggot goodbuddy.
They didn't notice how the room went quiet. I heard it said that one northerner sat there laughing, wearing one of Glad's boy's raccoon bones around his own neck. He didn't look up from his medallions of chicken fried Ahi when the boy came in—face bruised and misshapen like a sat-on plum, Glad at his side. The boy nodded in the Yankee's direction. Glad sent the boy into the arms of Mother Shapiro, the den mama, to one of his caravans he kept for the boys with no homes of their own.
I heard that the noise got louder as everyone made a show of acting real regular so they could claim themselves so engrossed in the conversations going on, they never noticed anything foul afoot.
But everyone heard the song. It has its place in the middle of the jukebox, an inconspicuous number as any: 24B. The A side is worn out skipping 'Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.'
Everyone made a show of not watching Glad walk real slow, through the swing doors and into the kitchen. Via the open order station window, everyone pretended not to be looking at Glad taking off the leather thong around his neck and removing one of two identical leather pouches he wore next to the hugest raccoon penis bone anyone had ever seen. Bolly Boy stopped checking on his tuna-noodle souffle and took the pouch from Glad. It was well-known Bolly had once been one of Glad's boys, but retired when he fell in love with a john that drove a custom. He swore he'd be true, but he was so used to giving pleasure to all the truckers he was sure his pledge would be in vain. But Glad fixed him with a job as a chef and paid for chef lessons, so Bolly Boy could stay chaste and still deliver pleasure, which made everyone happy. Bolly's sous-chef, Paxton Maculvy, was another one of Glad's who retired when he fell in love with the faces the drivers made when consuming the creations Bolly made. 'No trick ever rolled his eyes to heaven like that when eating me,' Paxton sighed. So Glad sent him to chef school, but on account of Paxton being illiterate, he dropped out and studied with Bolly in the truck-stop kitchen instead.
The Yankee never noticed the corners of all the truck- ers' eyes following Paxton as he strode over to the jukebox and used a special key to open the box up. If Bolly hadn't been such a great chef, the northerner might've had a chance to take a break from his side dish of liver with crème fraîche strudel. He could've taken note of the subtle hush in the diner as Paxton fingered his coon penis bone with one hand while press- ing the buttons to put song 24B on for ten continuous plays. If Bolly had been less of a chef, the Yank might've done more than just hum along unconsciously to the old TV song theme blasting from the juke. He could've recognized that, like an Indian war whoop warning before the attack, the Davy Crockett song was being played. If the calf liver reduction sauce on the fresh corn ragout had been a little off, he might've got the mental picture every trucker had in the diner. Davy Crockett in his raccoon hat. He might've lit a wet rag out of that diner and escaped with his life.
The place almost jumped when Bolly himself, with his raccoon prick hanging almost in the Yankee's face, bent over to set down with a thud a pecan flambé and lit it up with a flash at the man's table. Before the Yank could protest that he had ordered no such thing, Bolly whis- pered in his soft voice, 'This, sir, is on the house.'
The Yank never would've thought that was the last conversation he would ever have in this world. Every- one's eyes were pretending not to be on the flambE, so the steaming brown coffee mug Bolly casually placed next to the pie was paid no mind. And only the folks that knew what was in Glad's leather pouches knew that it was the steaming brown mug that would do the Yank in and not Bolly's work of art pecan soufflE. Though again, if Bolly had been less of a chef and the souffle not as dense, yet airy and so sweet you couldn't help but roll your eyes to heaven and give a praise of thanks, well, the Yank could've had a chance to notice that the coffee had a distinctly strange flavor to it. If he had been a local he might have recognized that he was sipping on a coffee substitute made from the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree used by poor miners. If he had been a botanist he might have known that unless those seeds and leaves are roasted to a crisp brown, they are as poisonous as a deep mine with a broken vent. The Yank had to sip his coffee against the richness of Bolly's desert. Somewhat immediately he started to get a stomach cramp, but there were still pecans, shiny in their sugar web, to be fished out of the white goblet, so he ate greedily through the discomfort.
The talk got extra loud as the truck driver from up north wearing a stolen love bone too tight around his neck paid his check and left for his truck. Everyone noted, as they watched him climb into his cab, that the man was bowed over some, rubbing his stomach as if it were a genie lamp.
The Department of Health and the sheriff made a visit to the diner not long after they found the northerner's stiff body curled up in a fetal position in the back of his vomit-festooned cab. He was pulled off to the side of the Interstate for a day and night before the highway patrol found him. It was the raccoon prick bone around his neck that brought the sheriff in and the crumpled napkins saying The Doves Diner that brought in the Health Department.
`Glad, you look like you're sharecroppin' out your own private patch of cancer,' some of the lot lizards would tease him. But I know the truth of it. Glad told me himself. It's the Choctaw in his blood. That's why he's got good medicine. That's why he's a good pimp for a lot lizard to have.
`These patches of brown be the In'ian in me, making themselves known,' he tells me over a trucker special breakfast at The Doves Diner: a huge mound of hollandaise eggs and thick-as-a-Bible persimmon pancakes. I know he wants me to work for him. His stable is known for being the finest from coast to coast. Glad's little bits don't have to stand outside the truck stop like other goodbuddy lizards usually do. Truckers call in to arrange their appointments months in advance. All Glad's pavement princesses dress so comely in the most delicate silks from China, fine lace from France, and degenerate leather from Germany. If you didn't notice them wearing a raccoon penis bone necklace, and if you didn't know what that meant, you'd never know they were actually male. Most of his boys are either runaways rounding up some cash before heading out with some driver one of these days, or they are like me, have family working the main lot. Nobody bothers with Glad's boys. Some of the lizards say it's because he pays off anyone that would ever have a say. Sarah told me it is because all the ex-con truckers make sure they have Glad's finest boys to look forward to and the local law wouldn't want to start no riot by depriving felons of their sweet reminders of the penitentiary. But I know it is because of the raccoon dick.
He holds it over my head.
I lean down and let him slip the rough-cut leather cord around my neck. I always see Glad's boys in the diner, fingering their coon pricks in a real show-off way. They never have to pay their checks. I always hear the waitress saying when she puts in the boy's order, `It's for them two of Glad's with the mountain man toothpick.' And a bill never comes.
The lizards say Glad just pays their tab like any sugardaddy. Sarah says all the waitresses secretly are in love with Glad and his boys so they don't charge them. But Glad tells me it's neither. `They know most of their business is hungry tricks that work up their appetite after a visit with my boys, and they count on my boys leaving their tricks in a generous and lavish mood.'
`This better than a policeman's badge,' Glad says as he adjusts the necklace over my black sweater. I knew he was going to give me my bone today, so I borrowed a black sweater from Sarah.
`Gettin' boned today is what I heard,' she called from inside the bathroom of the little motel room one of her regulars on the green bean run pays for. I knew she was soaking in the shower.
`I don't care how cheap the room and the hoe, a woman needs a soak same as a coal miner.' She clogged up the drain with wet menstrual pads and towel-lined the shower rim to add an inch or two to her bath. She sat in the corner huddled like an orphan in a flood with the shower pouring down. `You'll be soaking your pump knot in here too once Glad puts you out.'
I went through the always half-packed plastic attaché case and picked up her black sweater. I pressed it to my face and inhaled her familiar scent of stale cigarettes and alcohol ineffectively masked by powder-scented air freshener.
`You better not swipe my leather skirt,' she yelled over the shower water streaming down.
I leaned into the Sheetrock bathroom door. `I'm going as a boy,' I shouted.
I heard her make a `that's what you think' laugh. I kicked the door and it shook harder than I'd meant. `You ain't the first person to kick in this door.' She laughed and I felt relieved she didn't come after me, but more than a little pissed she didn't even take me half serious enough to try to whip me. It's 'cause she's in her soak, I told myself. I could smell the baby powder scent of her bubble bath and felt excited to come home after a long night of trucker lovin' and deserve my soak just like she did. She never let me use her bubbles. `Buy your own when you work your own!' she'd tell me when she'd see me fingering the bottle covered in pictures of naked baby bottoms.
`I'm coming home with some of my own bubbles!' I shouted into the door.
`And leave the keys till you pay me half this rent.' Her voice raised some and that gave me a tinge of pleasure and fear. I grabbed up the black sweater and opened the front door. I walked back over to the Sheetrock bathroom door and said as loud as I could without yelling, `You don't even pay for this room your own self, but since I'll be making more than you As a boy, I'll kick you down some change.'
Then I ran. Heard her pulling herself up before I finished. I slammed the front door and didn't even look back once.
`This bone stands out nice against your sweater,' Glad says after he is done adjusting it on me.
I turn and look in the plate glass and there it is, on me, yellowish white like tobacco chewers' teeth. I always wanted to glide my fingers along its curvaceous lines.
`Shape always 'minded to me like half a waxed moustache ... how they get it in their women's privates is all but beyond me,' he says with a snort, and some unswallowed Kentucky coffeetree drink sprays out at me.
I carefully wipe the Kentucky coffeetree spray off my face. I've heard truckers talking in low voices how Glad is known to have murdered a few drivers that did his boys a bad turn. He did it with his coffeetree drink, some in the know say.
`It would only be a Yankee with no manners or sense of self-pride that would hurt a young defenseless boy trying to make a night's wages,' I once heard Big Pullsman Todd say between forkfuls of his Wellington of king salmon with truffle mashed potatoes. `Yankee drivers,' about ten other truckers swore and spit in their spittoons that were fixed directly a foot and a half to the sides of each of their booths. Most would usually miss and make spattered lizard designs on the fake marble with sparkles in its linoleum.
Every now and then a trucker would sit in the diner and boast of busting up a faggot goodbuddy.
They didn't notice how the room went quiet. I heard it said that one northerner sat there laughing, wearing one of Glad's boy's raccoon bones around his own neck. He didn't look up from his medallions of chicken fried Ahi when the boy came in—face bruised and misshapen like a sat-on plum, Glad at his side. The boy nodded in the Yankee's direction. Glad sent the boy into the arms of Mother Shapiro, the den mama, to one of his caravans he kept for the boys with no homes of their own.
I heard that the noise got louder as everyone made a show of acting real regular so they could claim themselves so engrossed in the conversations going on, they never noticed anything foul afoot.
But everyone heard the song. It has its place in the middle of the jukebox, an inconspicuous number as any: 24B. The A side is worn out skipping 'Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.'
Everyone made a show of not watching Glad walk real slow, through the swing doors and into the kitchen. Via the open order station window, everyone pretended not to be looking at Glad taking off the leather thong around his neck and removing one of two identical leather pouches he wore next to the hugest raccoon penis bone anyone had ever seen. Bolly Boy stopped checking on his tuna-noodle souffle and took the pouch from Glad. It was well-known Bolly had once been one of Glad's boys, but retired when he fell in love with a john that drove a custom. He swore he'd be true, but he was so used to giving pleasure to all the truckers he was sure his pledge would be in vain. But Glad fixed him with a job as a chef and paid for chef lessons, so Bolly Boy could stay chaste and still deliver pleasure, which made everyone happy. Bolly's sous-chef, Paxton Maculvy, was another one of Glad's who retired when he fell in love with the faces the drivers made when consuming the creations Bolly made. 'No trick ever rolled his eyes to heaven like that when eating me,' Paxton sighed. So Glad sent him to chef school, but on account of Paxton being illiterate, he dropped out and studied with Bolly in the truck-stop kitchen instead.
The Yankee never noticed the corners of all the truck- ers' eyes following Paxton as he strode over to the jukebox and used a special key to open the box up. If Bolly hadn't been such a great chef, the northerner might've had a chance to take a break from his side dish of liver with crème fraîche strudel. He could've taken note of the subtle hush in the diner as Paxton fingered his coon penis bone with one hand while press- ing the buttons to put song 24B on for ten continuous plays. If Bolly had been less of a chef, the Yank might've done more than just hum along unconsciously to the old TV song theme blasting from the juke. He could've recognized that, like an Indian war whoop warning before the attack, the Davy Crockett song was being played. If the calf liver reduction sauce on the fresh corn ragout had been a little off, he might've got the mental picture every trucker had in the diner. Davy Crockett in his raccoon hat. He might've lit a wet rag out of that diner and escaped with his life.
The place almost jumped when Bolly himself, with his raccoon prick hanging almost in the Yankee's face, bent over to set down with a thud a pecan flambé and lit it up with a flash at the man's table. Before the Yank could protest that he had ordered no such thing, Bolly whis- pered in his soft voice, 'This, sir, is on the house.'
The Yank never would've thought that was the last conversation he would ever have in this world. Every- one's eyes were pretending not to be on the flambE, so the steaming brown coffee mug Bolly casually placed next to the pie was paid no mind. And only the folks that knew what was in Glad's leather pouches knew that it was the steaming brown mug that would do the Yank in and not Bolly's work of art pecan soufflE. Though again, if Bolly had been less of a chef and the souffle not as dense, yet airy and so sweet you couldn't help but roll your eyes to heaven and give a praise of thanks, well, the Yank could've had a chance to notice that the coffee had a distinctly strange flavor to it. If he had been a local he might have recognized that he was sipping on a coffee substitute made from the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree used by poor miners. If he had been a botanist he might have known that unless those seeds and leaves are roasted to a crisp brown, they are as poisonous as a deep mine with a broken vent. The Yank had to sip his coffee against the richness of Bolly's desert. Somewhat immediately he started to get a stomach cramp, but there were still pecans, shiny in their sugar web, to be fished out of the white goblet, so he ate greedily through the discomfort.
The talk got extra loud as the truck driver from up north wearing a stolen love bone too tight around his neck paid his check and left for his truck. Everyone noted, as they watched him climb into his cab, that the man was bowed over some, rubbing his stomach as if it were a genie lamp.
The Department of Health and the sheriff made a visit to the diner not long after they found the northerner's stiff body curled up in a fetal position in the back of his vomit-festooned cab. He was pulled off to the side of the Interstate for a day and night before the highway patrol found him. It was the raccoon prick bone around his neck that brought the sheriff in and the crumpled napkins saying The Doves Diner that brought in the Health Department.
A great specter is looming over the art world: the specter of Inter|Sekt. For far too long we have watched the artists of our generation turned into a disposable commodity, bought and sold by the galleries, stifled in their expression by the tastes of the art consultants who purchase pieces on behalf of financially minded clients who want a "solid investment".
They have been amalgamated into schools, said schools are a device of gallerists and art historians to divide and conquer the creatives and free thinkers.
For we live in a nation which thinks itself to be free yet is not, they expect the same of their artists.
Our culture has been raped and plundered by the upper echelon, picked apart and sold by the same greed mongers who claim to be it's patrons. The tool which has most effectively stunted the growth of modern American art in particular is the clever indoctrination of this idea of schools to not only the art student but anyone whom even reads a brief survey of the history of art sees that it is broken up into these categorized schools; the philosophies of these various sects creates conflict, division, and ultimately destruction of the morale and submission to the established order. Thus rendering the creative spirit confused and useless.
This helps curb the rebellious spirit of the average citizen outside of the art world in other spheres of society.
Art history is a lie and galleries are dens of thieves!
Inter|Sekt is not destroying the schools or the galleries, we are simply showing you they were never real, at least not in a world outside of that constructed by academics to sell text books to art students.
The reign of the gallerists and art consultants is over when you want it to be.
From the ashes of the indoctrinated schools of every form of art shall arise The New World Creative.
-Steven Lee Matz-
They have been amalgamated into schools, said schools are a device of gallerists and art historians to divide and conquer the creatives and free thinkers.
For we live in a nation which thinks itself to be free yet is not, they expect the same of their artists.
Our culture has been raped and plundered by the upper echelon, picked apart and sold by the same greed mongers who claim to be it's patrons. The tool which has most effectively stunted the growth of modern American art in particular is the clever indoctrination of this idea of schools to not only the art student but anyone whom even reads a brief survey of the history of art sees that it is broken up into these categorized schools; the philosophies of these various sects creates conflict, division, and ultimately destruction of the morale and submission to the established order. Thus rendering the creative spirit confused and useless.
This helps curb the rebellious spirit of the average citizen outside of the art world in other spheres of society.
Art history is a lie and galleries are dens of thieves!
Inter|Sekt is not destroying the schools or the galleries, we are simply showing you they were never real, at least not in a world outside of that constructed by academics to sell text books to art students.
The reign of the gallerists and art consultants is over when you want it to be.
From the ashes of the indoctrinated schools of every form of art shall arise The New World Creative.
-Steven Lee Matz-
The inter|sekt manifesto
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