If you can make it there ...
David Migicovsky
BY BRUCE LABRUCE
I'm so glad the plane didn't crash last week on my way back from New York,
because both Anne Heche and Michael J. Fox were in first class. If we'd
gone down I would have been relegated to a microscopic footnote in all the
newspapers.
Just imagine Heche, the gay deceiver, the bisexual menace who so recently
dumped her famous dyke lover, and Fox, the diminutive expat Canadian
stricken with Parkinson's disease, who has taken over from Christopher
Reeve as the celebrity charity case du moment (not to be uncharitable) --
both lost. Would the media have even noticed my modest demise? Unless, of
course, I'd been the sole survivor. Then I would have earned a few
headlines, because as we all know, survivors are among today's biggest
stars.
New York is mad crazy these days. It's rebounded with a vengeance from the
prudish clampdown of Mayor Giuliani's heyday (the stern dictator with the
presence of a concentration-camp commandant is now sidelined with cancer)
and is careening at breakneck speed toward a new era of ambition, excess
and greed that's making the Gotham of the '80s look like a yoga retreat.
I guess I can't really use that analogy anymore, considering that in these
despicable times even despots and craven materialists practice eastern
religion. My director of photography, for instance -- who's shot videos of
Sting and Willem Dafoe practising yoga -- attends the same class Madonna
does when she's in town, performing a different set of positions from her
usual repertoire, her bodyguard plopped on a nearby mat.
I wonder how long the spiritual inclinations of these fat cats would
persist if their gurus asked them to give up all their worldly possessions?
But I suppose their new-found religiosity would come in handy if they were
all going down on a Toronto-bound plane.
So there I am at the Ford model party upstairs at Lotus, Kate Moss spinning
in the background (records, that is). I won't realize it's a Ford model
party until the next day, mind you -- I'm wondering why there are so many
tall, vacant-looking young girls wandering around in a haze -- but I'm in
attendance nonetheless. You see, I've come for the after party for fashion
photog Terry Richardson's new show at the Alleged gallery, but the really
exclusive party is up on the second floor and if you're not in the VIP
section at a New York club, you may as well not be there at all. Terry, of
course, could get me up there in a nanosecond if it weren't for the fact
he's so famous he doesn't even bother to attend his own parties. (Plus he's
currently sober.)
To gain access to the upper echelon, first you have to negotiate past the
gorilla at the top of the stairs. My friend Earsnot, the young black fag
graffiti star I'm hanging with, doesn't think it's a problem. With a
legerdemain known only to native New Yorkers, we're in within seconds. It's
kind of like when Obi-Wan Kenobi breezes past the stormtrooper by using the
Force in Star Wars.
Inside, we hook up with Snot's other famous graffiti-star friends, the most
noteworthy of whom is Dash, whose tag is SASE. Dash is a dashing young
trust-fund kid in his late teens with a mane of blond hair and big
tattooage. He looks like a very cute, scraggly little rent boy. He's
already married, to a Sicilian girl whose family owns a restaurant in Soho,
but they have what is called an "open marriage." Apparently getting married
young is very in these days in New York; if you throw a Gucci loafer, you
are bound to hit a 23-year-old divorcee.
After we leave the party, I tag along with the graffiti boys, who cut a
swath across the island of Manhattan, stopping traffic at will, "racking"
(their term for shoplifting) and leaving their tags with fat markers and
spray paint on every conceivable piece of real estate in their way. Two or
three of the boys will stand around nearby with their arms in the air,
shielding the graffiti-ist from the watchful eyes of any cops who may be
cruising by "jillsing" them. They've all been in jail at one time or
another for their art, which of course confers status.
A few nights later I run into Dash and his wife at a Japanese restaurant
and invite them to a little party at a bar called Passerby, in Gavin
Brown's trendy art gallery in Chelsea. After chatting with a few
luminaries, like one of the guys from Pavement, who is a huge Canada-phile,
I'm invited into the bathroom by Dash and his wife on some dubious pretext
and end up doing an ad hoc photo shoot of them having sex. Such is the
current state of New York.
About a year and a half ago I wrote an article for a New York magazine
about how Toronto was overtaking New York as the sex capital of North
America. Now, with New York finally slipping out of Giuliani's grasp, and
Toronto under the thumb of our own Giuliani, Chief Fantino, we're once
again falling behind.
Add to the mix the cleaning up of the city that the potential Olympics may
bring, and we're right back to square one. So to speak.
>>David ========>
--
David Migicovsky, Evil Overlord of ACF
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