I’m back to worrying about the world of publishing and books and how to put the frosting on it the right way so maybe it looks like a shoe and somebody picks it up and bites into it to find out if it really is a shoe or just cake and by then they’re already eating it. I really shouldn’t say “just cake” because it’s easy enough to make a shoe that looks like exactly that but doing the same thing with cake requires all sorts of sugar trickery.
In a way it feels like cake is the marble of our time. I was looking at some 19th century Italian busts where the carver creates the illusion of a diaphanous, transparent fabric resting against, and defining the contours of, a human face while the entire thing is made of a single piece of opaque marble. Something like Giovanni Strazza’s The Veiled Virgin – it wasn’t that one exactly but one close enough to it
But my point is that we don’t go to salons to see the newest innovations in cast or carved sculptures anymore – illusions of weightlessness, life, fluids in motion or, above all else, the sublime personification of one specific granule of the human condition. When we want to see that kind of stuff now there’s a few different shows and it’s all made of cake and unlike the marble you can use all the colors and different opacities and surface lusters and anything else as long as it follows two rules: 1) you can’t tell whether or not it’s the thing it looks like until you actually cut in to eat it and 2) you have to be able to eat all of it.
Anyway I don’t think it would really benefit me in any way to make a book that could optically trick people into mistaking it for a cake – once you bite down expecting frosting and just tear off a little scrap of paper with your teeth or maybe only leave imprints in the thicker cover material you most likely won’t be in any mood to read the whole thing from cover to cover and recommend it to your friends and family.
I don’t especially like cake except for a couple that I’ve made with odd ingredients. That sounds really vain – pound cake and pineapple upside down cake and the one with marzipan on it are also always good. I mean I don’t like the big sheet cakes people get from grocery stores for short birthday parties in either schools or grownup office jobs. Those cakes kind of look like books.
What I’m trying to get at is that I’ve known since I started writing all this a year and two months ago that from a publishing perspective it could never work as the story of some guy’s life because even though the people who do end up reading it say that it’s great and it works it’s too much of a hardsell to people who aren’t reading it yet or haven’t been told to by their friends or especially people who might potentially publish it.
An idea I had to do the thing I’m actually talking about, making this theoretical book look more appetizing to strangers, was to reorganize everything into a book a book about collective living. It’s at least more of a relatable thread than “things that some guy experienced” and it does seem to run through all of the pieces that already seem to have the broadest appeal in terms of being about things that existed that more people would like to hear about.
I had this idea after the research project that led me to write about a San Diego artist’s space called The Loft. When I first started chasing that story I thought it was going to be about a yoga sex cult squatting in an abandoned building – only the very first part turned out to be true. There was a yoga sex cult but they were in an entirely different, legitimately rented building that had many other threads of things that I am interested in running through it: mostly underground music and comic book culture.
Anyway this story isn’t going to be about an underground art adjacent collective situation at all. It’s about a thing that happened in an art installation that was designed to simulate an imaginary history based on culty and CIA drug experiment mythos. It’s also a tiny bit of a gossip about a famous person you have no doubt already recognized from the pullout photo if you’re into that sort of thing which probably has the widest potential for making strangers want to read this and is what I should have led with.
I can’t seem to get past this compulsion to proverbially shoot myself in the foot – it’s probably something that I’m subconsciously lying to myself about being “artistic integrity” when it’s actually just ego. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it yet. The elephant is already in the room.
Anyway in 2010 I was living in Los Angeles and constantly biking around and had just discovered that my EBT card could get me into all of the museums, including LACMA, for free. I think that it was during the time that Christian Marclay’s 24 hour film The Clock was constantly screening there and I was going to the museum all the time so I could see all of the movie divided into more digestible portions of one to four hours at a time.
Maybe I’m mixing that up though. I mix up details regarding broader timeline a lot because my brain has decided to disregard them in favor of inanely specific individual details. What I can say with certainty is that my friend Caryl from the Rockaway had advised me to go check out an exhibition by her friends Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe called Bright White Underground that was in an iconic structure called the Schindler Buck house close to LACMA.
https://www.artforum.com/events/jonah-freeman-and-justin-lowe-2-195328/
Now that I think about it things would make more sense if this exhibit wasn’t running concurrently with The Clock because I went to go look at it and hang out in it to kill time on a handful of occasions and if The Clock was showing I probably would have been killing time watching it instead because it was different at different times of the day while this installation, except for variations in natural light, was static.
The concept of the piece was that they made up a scientist character who was designing and testing a psychedelic drug called Marassa for the CIA and also throwing big socialite and art adjacent parties in this house that revolved around everybody taking the drug and the vibe had gotten a little culty before it all fell apart. In case you didn’t click the link and read about it yourself the more specific conceit of the piece was that the house had sat empty and gone through significant decay since those events and it was full of manufactured artifacts like party photos and fake book covers and boxes of the drug.
My favorite part was a diptych of sculptures fusing entheogenic cacti with natural crystal formations on a pair of pedestals. They looked like cast aluminum to me but I’m by no means an expert and it seems more plausible that they would have been made with the emergent technology of three dimensional printers. They were in plexiglass boxes that prevented anyone from actually touching them so for all I know they could have been cakes.
They probably weren’t cakes. I doubt that anything in this story was literal cake but some of the details I’m about to reveal could be construed as belonging to a genre of portraiture called “cheesecake” – sexy lady pinup paintings and photos and what not. I happened to be in the exhibit at the same time that Olivia Wilde was shooting a feature for Flaunt Magazine with a photographer named Yu Tsai.
https://www.flaunt.com/blog/people-olivia-wilde-film
I didn’t know that her name was Olivia Wilde at the time. I did somehow know that it was the main actress from the recent Tron reboot called Tron : Legacy. I’m very bad at recognizing famous people’s faces so the only way I could have known that was that somebody either leaving the exhibit as I walked in or crossed paths with inside must have mentioned it to me.
If you’ve never lived in Los Angeles there’s a thing that happens there that whenever famous people are out in the wild word travels about it in hushed tones the way people usually inform each other about newsworthy national disasters or high profile deaths. I guess that probably happens everywhere it just happens more there because there’s more famous people and people who came there specifically to see famous people.
Maybe I’m spending too much time explaining a thing that everybody already knows about and should instead be doing a better job explaining what things like punk houses are in other pieces but it was something that struck me as a novelty and surprise while I was living there. I didn’t expect people who looked like they would never speak to me under normal situations to suddenly tilt their heads in my direction and say:
“Oh, the girl from the Tron movie is inside there taking pictures…”
I guess the thing that unites this style of communication with the other phenomena I was describing is the solemn weight with which this information is shared as if doing so were a kind of civic duty that takes precedence over age, class, race or any of the usual social divisions that will cause people not to acknowledge or speak to each other. There must be some places so full of famous people that this doesn’t happen, or only in extreme situations like the re-emergence of a well known recluse, but I’ve never been to these places as I’m not a famous person.
Maybe there aren’t – after all there are hierarchies in all things and we still share this planet with monarchs whose personages, according to written accounts, go nowhere without being announced.
My sister had told me that the girl from Tron was an honest-to-God Princess but I never did enough research to be able to say if this still is the case, if it ever was, or rather if such status was terminated with a divorce or something. I only learned recently, when I went to share the following anecdote on a celebrity gossip subreddit, that her name was even Olivia Wilde.
Coincidentally before this random encounter I had gone to see Tron : Legacy in the theaters because I was interested in the Daft Punk soundtrack, in the style of my favorite Italodisco composer Giorgio Moroder, and because I was especially fond of the original. I loved the hand animated light effects and thought it was intriguing that the female lead of a Disney film would share romantic kisses with two different male leads in rapid succession – especially because the plot had established a clear imbalance of power between human “users” and subordinate “programs”.
I didn’t like the new one. I’m an unapologetically curmudgeonly naysayer of modern CGI effects and thought the signature light works were underwhelming in comparison to how they’d done things the first time around. I’ve read plenty of well reasoned essays about how this opinion is elitist claptrap but I grew up with movies featuring the stop motion effects of Ray Harryhausen and am unlikely to come around to “team progress” anytime soon.
I also found the plot a lot more forgettable. Olivia Wilde must have shared a romantic kiss with someone but I can’t even remember if it was the old one or the young one or, more importantly, which character would have been committing a flagrant abuse of power under the revised lore and new categories.
She seemed fine in the movie – like a well placed specimen of some celebrated midcentury furniture design that always looks exquisite. When you have an Eames chair you become accustomed to the object’s self suffiency and emotional range. In a well appointed corner with a colorful rug of handwoven wool underneath and a confusing mirror on the papered wall behind it the piece literally screams power and style. In another room entirely you could show one being disassembled and destroyed by proper looking men carrying efficiently packed cases of effective tools and it would instead speak to larger ideas within the death with dignity movement.
From that there’s simply no end of twists and changes to extract an entire philosophy with underlying conversations centering the value of things in baldest possible form and it feels that where would be very little, if anything at all, too obstinate to be gracefully served to your audience by using these wondrous Eames chairs.
Anyway I got a little excessive talking about the near sentience of these chairs and the point was that Olivia Wilde, clearly a professional, stepped up and fulfilled her role on an artistic level comparable to one of these celebrated bits of furniture. She was fine. I saw no flaw but the script unfortunately felt less than generous to all the intrigue and other statement pieces the arts and wardrobe departments had delivered and it all just, as a movie, settled into a dull coin devoid of interest.
I would have no notes for her. My issues would be with a legion of creative artisans who are no doubt above Ms. Wilde’s pay grade and absolutely above my own as a simple ticket holder.
I have some uncertainty about whether I actually saw her posing in the exhibit which has begun to feel disconcerting. The reason for this is that I’ve come to realize this entire experience was treasure and one always wants a full accounting of their treasure. Sadly I exposed myself to the published photographs while doing research on the subreddit for this ensuing minor bit of gossip and thereafter could never say if I was remembering physically passing her as she posed in one of the many messed up rooms or only combining my much more recent memories of looking at those photographs with the ones I had of wandering those same rooms several more times even and distinct from this time.
It’s not the most comfortable question. Did we perhaps look directly into each other’s eyes for a passing glance – the stuff dreams are made of? Did we do no such thing – the stuff dreams are not made of? These little details bother me because once upon a time the blonde actress who gave Spider-Man cake in one of the earlier MCU versions said that I was “cute” in a Polish Dinner Theater. I have every reason to believe that the cake in this scene was, in fact, cake – it certainly had been made to look like it.
I’m sure you could see how this would be tortuous. It might have been best for me all around if that first encounter had never happened at all but coming from it and realizing that such things do potentially happen left me with no choice but to agonize over whether or not there had been a shared glance in the destroyed house with the girl from Tron.
I thank all of you for your extreme patience and am now, finally, getting to the gossip – the thing that this story is actually about. Once I had spent enough time in the exhibition I walked back outside and began to unlock my bicycle. One of those huge production buses or trailers had been parked outside the Schindler Buck House and a heated negotiation was taking place on the sidewalk in front of this craft services behemoth mere feet from where I was now unlocking my bicycle as slowly as humanly possible.
I sussed out the details rather quickly – the young brightly dressed woman with red hair and a perpetual service smile was clearly Ms. Wilde’s handler, or manager or agent. Someone who looked after her affairs and interests when she could not be present or to do so would have been untoward.
The short, slightly slimy seeming man in cargo shorts and vests filled with different lenses and flashes and with an impressive camera around his neck was clearly a photographer. Based on more recent pictures I assume this would have been Yu Tsai but I can’t fully guarantee it as another name was credited as camera operator on the motion video produced at the same time as the pictorial – Sergio Bautista.
Two things worth noting are that I had perceived this photographer as having both a soul patch and an Italian accent but these could simply be unsavory stereotypes my memory projected onto him based on his impending behavior. The issue at hand was that, in a flurry of commands and poses, he had been able to convince Ms. Wilde to bare a single breast, nipple and all, for a single photograph.
You’ve got to remember that this type of behavior from photographers, the constant and aggressive pushing of established boundaries, was not yet being critically questioned in 2010. The colorful downfalls of Vice Media and the American Apparel mogul Dov Charney would be along very soon but the party was still going. Favored photographer Terry Richardson publicly boasted about sexually assaulting every single one of his young, attractive female portrait subjects and this was somehow “perfectly fine” and “high art”.
Whichever of the photographers had captured the breast he considered it his and earned in fair combat and was airing his arguments as to why he shouldn’t have to delete it now that the actress had reconsidered and retracted any permission to use it:
“I got a tit, ok? That’s it! A tit! If she was showing her pussy I’d say something… A tit’s nothing! Last week I shoot Leonardo DiCaprio nude in the catacombs!”
His opponent was calm and even keeled – the very picture of graceful power:
“Well he is male and older and has been acting longer. This would not be his first time doing full frontal and the industry will treat them very differently. She is a young actress who has just made a movie with Disney where there is talk about a sequel! Furthermore this would be her first shoot with nudity of any kind and it could seriously shift her perception by the production company. There is no version of this conversation where you do not show me yourself deleting all copies of the photo in question from your camera…”
Around this time they both started to notice that I was still somehow unlocking my bike and my ears were clearly slavering over their conversation as if they were a pair of cartoon wolves in Zoot Suits and it had just transformed into a seductively walking roast chicken. Ever the protector Ms. Wilde’s champion whispered something into the photographer’s ear and they climbed onto the privacy of the production vehicle and very pointedly closed the door.
At that point I had everything I needed to discover the resolution for myself. Recently with renewed interest I viewed the pictorial and video where the proof was in the pudding – not a nipple in sight. It seems possible that he could have made secret copies that he later sold or traded but I’m not especially active in Olivia Wilde non consensual nude trading circles.
A big part of what made this all so compelling to me was that I started to really dig into the memory and research the particulars at the same time that all the Don’t Worry Darling drama was going down with Olivia Wilde, Florence Pugh, Shia LaBeouf and Harry Styles. I truly had no idea that she was the same actress who had done Tron : Legacy over a decade earlier and was surprised as anyone in my gossip group when all the puzzle pieces came together and the story turned out to be about the same person everybody had been talking about for the past few days.
Like everyone else I wasn’t able to escape the brutalist circus of the very public Depp v. Heard trial. It pulled me in as if the ringmaster Mr. Dark from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes brought me there personally to pay testament to the horrors within his Carnival. I think I had what was generally the rational reaction to the Industrial Light & Magic from Depp’s legal team.
While Amber Heard was clearly a deeply unsympathetic witness to the jury her relationship with Mr. Depp had obviously been an ongoing case of mutual abuse between a toxic couple. Depp said as much himself on a voicemail message which was constantly either ignored or said to be “taken out of context”.
What seemed most absurd was the way the “shit on the bed” myth grew traction despite the recording where a drunken Depp asks multiple members of his staff if they would be willing to squat in front of Heard’s bedroom door and defecate on the floor so that he may later terrorize and gaslight her by insisting it must have come from the dog.
How was that ignored but the exactly zero evidence that the “turd” was “Heard’s” became the shot heard round the world?
Of course my opinion was neither the popular one nor the Official Findings of The Court and any dissent on the “Heard Bad” conclusion would get you mercilessly harassed on any platforms by legions of “SparrowBros” that almost certainly included bots. I wasn’t particularly interested in either of these famous people who had treated each other horribly but I could smell the shifts in the wind in the discourse around female survivors of intimate partner abuse and it was extremely troubling.
It felt like it was happening in slow motion and there was nothing we could do to stop it but the change was instantly palpable. Online hordes of misogynists, emboldened by the verdict and masquerading as “men’s rights activists” were gearing up to harass and debase any women coming forward with allegations against a man regardless of circumstances. It affected women of every walk of life and immediately had a chilling effect on the calculus every victim must go through to determine if raising this issue will only bring more trauma instead of closure or justice. The intensity has been dialed down but it is very much still with us.
All of this drifted right into the Don’t Worry Darling drama and with Amber Heard used up and at rock bottom Olivia Wilde became the next target of choice for the trolls and name callers. I never watched the movie as I imagined it wouldn’t have been very good and I didn’t particularly like the way Wilde referred to Florence Pugh on the “Miss Flo” recording. It was never that I particularly cared about Amber Heard, or saw her as a paragon of virtue, as that I really didn’t like the trend wave most of the people attacking her seemed to be riding on.
Mostly I wasn’t buying Shia LaBeouf’s “receipts” that “proved” Wilde was lying about the circumstances around his removal from the film. He had a single recorded phone call of her encouraging him to stick on during a moment of uncertainty. He strikes me as the kind of “high maintenance” talent that would demand these kind of pre-game car chats on nearly every day of filming.
As he was the one recording and keeping them he can show us what is most beneficial to him and any other recordings where the tone of the conversations changed – where maybe his constant demands for long sessions of one on one “method acting” that made Pugh extremely uncomfortable finally had a cumulative effect and Wilde chose to cut her losses and ask him to leave the film. If such a conversation existed and was recorded he would almost certainly delete it and we’d never see it.
I’m not really 100% on this theory and I do like some of LaBoeuf’s acting quite a bit but, in the spirit of my “Burzum Shirt” essay about separating the art from the artist, none of his methods seem particularly safe, sane or consensual. He also strikes me as the kind of person who compulsively needs to reinvent the truth for himself every time he finds a piece he’s not particularly comfortable with. This isn’t based on anything more than the fact that I’ve known people like this and I feel like I see similar traits.
While I was unsure of Wilde’s behavior at the time I was also uncomfortable and disgusted with a lot of the online discourse around her. In the larger cultural context the sudden retrieval of a personal memory where a female colleague was defending a younger Wilde against a sleazy photographer and sexist industry felt like a sudden breath of fresh air in a room full of carbon monoxide poisoning.
That’s really it and that last bit is basically “the point” even though it took me way too long to get here. I’m kind of embarrassed I spent so much time rehashing tawdry bits of a trial I never wanted to see in the first place but that’s how they get you. I can only hope the wholesome and more innocently amusing portions make up for the tired arguments that crept in.
I’m sure that at least one reader will find their way here who disagrees with me on some of these points but while I usually encourage comments and engagement I really don’t want to argue about those particular things anymore. This will probably be my only “celebrity gossip” piece as it’s the only time I ever happened across some and I have no idea what I’ll be doing with whatever comes after this.
It probably won’t be cake.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 