Fred & Judy Vermorel
- Thread starter martin
- Start date
The Vivienne Westwood bio was very enjoyable, just the sort of thing I needed to tuck into.
The second section is very good, I like how he just talks about himself and gets carried away with himself. A sort of mild ranting style which feels very off the cuff and spontaneous, going off on his various tangents.
I've never really considered punk in the way he tells it, as a much more top down thing almost, totally driven by malcolm and Vivienne. It's a good fresh perspective, basically writes the kids out of the story.
And now I'm 150 pages into situationist detective story and it's even better. The level of detail hed goes into and again, putting himself into the story at any and every opportunity. Really good rant at one point when he talks about how "Mr fashion" doesn't have a wikipedia entry yet Taylor swift has 10,000 words... Our 5 minute Internet history attention spans that version and Adolf were on about the other day.
The second section is very good, I like how he just talks about himself and gets carried away with himself. A sort of mild ranting style which feels very off the cuff and spontaneous, going off on his various tangents.
I've never really considered punk in the way he tells it, as a much more top down thing almost, totally driven by malcolm and Vivienne. It's a good fresh perspective, basically writes the kids out of the story.
And now I'm 150 pages into situationist detective story and it's even better. The level of detail hed goes into and again, putting himself into the story at any and every opportunity. Really good rant at one point when he talks about how "Mr fashion" doesn't have a wikipedia entry yet Taylor swift has 10,000 words... Our 5 minute Internet history attention spans that version and Adolf were on about the other day.
Yeah, he gives you that sense of doing all the research and all the dead ends. Reminds me of Gordon burn a bit, but also different, cos he's not trying to make big sociological points and it's not "hallucinatory" in the way burn could get. But has a comparable intensity about it.
Good tip cheers.
Good tip cheers.
Fred vermorel gets more and more interesting
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Factory Records: FAC 2.16 'Pornucopia'
The Master Discography of Factory Communications Limited, Too, Once, F4 Records, Benelux, US, OFNY, America, Australasia and Ikon/FCL FAC numbers
IdleRich
IdleRich
I have been reading this book too, it's great. Not quite finished but still wanted to talk about it. Was at the beach today and my companions may have been a little put out that I basically ignored them all day cos I was reading the book.
This guy Michael Whittaker who is one of the main characters in the book is fascinating to me. He says how little is known about the guy - except by FV of course, who managed to buy some of his erotic drawings on ebay and also tracked down all his personal effects which were bundled into a suitcase by one of his friends after his death. I thought to myself that the book was written a little while ago and surely there would be more about this guy online now, after all he was known as "Mr Fashion" for decades, designed the costumes for countless famous tv shows and hollywood involving massive stars (was oscar nominated for one even) and I think acted in a few bits and bobs too, owned what was described as the UK's biggest modelling agency, was friends with loads of stars and big names and royals and organised revues and events all around the country for all kinds of people including the queen mother... but yeah, he does have a wikipedia entry now but it is minimal to say the least. I really thought that no-one could escape the internet these days, especially someone who at one time was such a big figure. Makes you wonder what else is out there.
This guy Michael Whittaker who is one of the main characters in the book is fascinating to me. He says how little is known about the guy - except by FV of course, who managed to buy some of his erotic drawings on ebay and also tracked down all his personal effects which were bundled into a suitcase by one of his friends after his death. I thought to myself that the book was written a little while ago and surely there would be more about this guy online now, after all he was known as "Mr Fashion" for decades, designed the costumes for countless famous tv shows and hollywood involving massive stars (was oscar nominated for one even) and I think acted in a few bits and bobs too, owned what was described as the UK's biggest modelling agency, was friends with loads of stars and big names and royals and organised revues and events all around the country for all kinds of people including the queen mother... but yeah, he does have a wikipedia entry now but it is minimal to say the least. I really thought that no-one could escape the internet these days, especially someone who at one time was such a big figure. Makes you wonder what else is out there.
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woops
is not like other people
Solve this problem by having no companions
IdleRich
IdleRich
One thing I found quite interesting is the way how, at the end in one of his many digressions that digress into something else you get Fred Vermorel talking about David Seabrook (who wrote All the Devils are Here as discussed in the WAYRRN thread and who also wrote a book about the Jack the Stripper murders called Jack of Jumps and so on*) and this felt very odd cos, from reading their books I formed an impression that both Seabrook and Vermorel are weirdly similar... both obsessive and pervy, smart and cynical and both employ a method of writing around a topic and, in fact, writing around the topics around that - which ultimately brings out the original thing in a way that is reminiscent of negative space artworks, or maybe just how when you look at an object it's the light that reflects from it that you see and which tells you about what the object is rather than the light that is absorbed by that thing.
But with Seabrook and Vermorel on the case together, it's like one of those books which has Sherlock Holmes and Superman trying to solve the same mystery, except probably a bit more low key and cut price than that, maybe Watson and Clark Kent are following the same trail with no chance of their more feted other halves appearing and saving the day.
But really there is just a bit of overlap. In my experience of books when two famous characters from different universes are forced together, what normally happens at first is that they clash and they end up arguing or possibly one arrests the other or something; it's always frustrating, you're screaming to yourself as you read it "Come on 007, listen to the Doctor, what he is saying sounds crazy but trust me he'll be right in the end" and then ultimately they do team up and the two heroes form one invincible and beautiful team.... though let's be honest, such stories are never any good cos they're just cheap cash-ins, they are never actually written by the original writers. But my point is that, in this book, you just get the very start of it, you are expecting FV to lay into Seabrook, and you hope that maybe one day they will team up, but sadly even the first thing never happened cos poor of DS managed to die before this crime fighting duo ever managed to get off the ground. What a terrible shame!
*I know that everyone who is actually interested in this at the moment already knows perfectly well who these guys are but I'm annotating it for posterity or something. But writing it out now feels really weird as though I think that everyone here is really stupid and can't remember really basic stuff such as "what book they were reading yesterday" for any amount of time. I´m reminding myself in fact of one of those US tv programmes that recap stuff all the time? Do you know what I'm talking about? US tv shows are incredibly frustrating cos they say the same stuff again and again and again, it's particularly weird when they are on in another country cos the US shows have adverts every two minutes and they recap after every advert, and when a US show is on Portuguese telly which only has adverts every ten minutes or so it's a really very odd to watch cos what happens is that there will be a new development and then, presumably, on the programme as it was originally made for US telly there was supposed to be an ad break, but there isn't one in Portugal so it just carries on, but the first thing they do on the US show on returning from the break is a recap, but it sounds completely mental if you're watching it here cos they say something, and then they just say it again, literally straight afterwards as though they are certain you have learning difficulties, and that's what I feel like now....
But with Seabrook and Vermorel on the case together, it's like one of those books which has Sherlock Holmes and Superman trying to solve the same mystery, except probably a bit more low key and cut price than that, maybe Watson and Clark Kent are following the same trail with no chance of their more feted other halves appearing and saving the day.
But really there is just a bit of overlap. In my experience of books when two famous characters from different universes are forced together, what normally happens at first is that they clash and they end up arguing or possibly one arrests the other or something; it's always frustrating, you're screaming to yourself as you read it "Come on 007, listen to the Doctor, what he is saying sounds crazy but trust me he'll be right in the end" and then ultimately they do team up and the two heroes form one invincible and beautiful team.... though let's be honest, such stories are never any good cos they're just cheap cash-ins, they are never actually written by the original writers. But my point is that, in this book, you just get the very start of it, you are expecting FV to lay into Seabrook, and you hope that maybe one day they will team up, but sadly even the first thing never happened cos poor of DS managed to die before this crime fighting duo ever managed to get off the ground. What a terrible shame!
*I know that everyone who is actually interested in this at the moment already knows perfectly well who these guys are but I'm annotating it for posterity or something. But writing it out now feels really weird as though I think that everyone here is really stupid and can't remember really basic stuff such as "what book they were reading yesterday" for any amount of time. I´m reminding myself in fact of one of those US tv programmes that recap stuff all the time? Do you know what I'm talking about? US tv shows are incredibly frustrating cos they say the same stuff again and again and again, it's particularly weird when they are on in another country cos the US shows have adverts every two minutes and they recap after every advert, and when a US show is on Portuguese telly which only has adverts every ten minutes or so it's a really very odd to watch cos what happens is that there will be a new development and then, presumably, on the programme as it was originally made for US telly there was supposed to be an ad break, but there isn't one in Portugal so it just carries on, but the first thing they do on the US show on returning from the break is a recap, but it sounds completely mental if you're watching it here cos they say something, and then they just say it again, literally straight afterwards as though they are certain you have learning difficulties, and that's what I feel like now....
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william_kent
Well-known member
I'll make a confession here - I've read all the "Jack The Stripper" true crime books, except the stupid one which posits some Welsh nonce as the murderer ( it was made into a BBC programme which I've watched and I was resolutely unconvinced by the theory put forward, so I feel no need to pay the silly 'collector' prices the book commands on eBay ), and, in my opinion, the Seabrook ( both 'All The Devils' and 'Jack of Jumps' ) and Vermorel books are the ones to read - Seabook's "Jack of Jumps" is, frankly, an amazing display of misogyny and misanthropy and yet remains a compelling read, similar to the fascination that can be gained by turning over a rock and watching the insects scatter, or picking at a scab and watching the pus ooze, a remarkable probe into the seedy underworld of early 60s London - after reading that I read the Vermorel book and it is the perfect complement, and as I might have mentioned before, Fred Vermorel manages to inadvertently solve the jack the Stripper case, at least to my satisfaction ( spoiler alert! it may not be true, but the pimping and horsey fetish angle actually seems likely, a bit more believable than the unofficial met line that the killer was so prodigiously endowed that a blowjob was the cause of death of the victims )
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IdleRich
IdleRich
No way! And yet... it does make a strange kind of sense... in fact, it kinda fits together rather neatly...
IdleRich
IdleRich
blissblogger
Well-known member
Here's a piece Fred wrote for the missus when she was editing the Village Voice Literary Supplement
FANTASTIC VOYEUR
BY FRED VERMOREL
Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography
Village Voice Literary Supplement, November 2001
There was a metal fire escape up one side of her house. At the top was a black emergency door with a bar, the kind you find in cinemas. Such doors could be jimmied open. But was it alarmed? I often climbed to the landing outside this door and made a nest, camping on the iron slats. Sometimes her cats passed below and looked up at me. Would they tell? Sometimes she passed below, wheeling her bicycle for nocturnal sorties. Squatting there, refreshing myself with sandwiches and tea from a flask, I would listen to her dwelling as a lover sprawled over her body, detecting her heart.
Like everything else today, biography is about celebrity. Creating it, celebrating it, knocking it. We have little time or taste anymore for that forgotten genre of modest reckoning, where "nonentities" could find publishers and publics for nothing more or less than life lived—a few lessons learned. For example, M. Vivian Hughes's A London Family, 1870-1900 is so reserved, so populated by the humdrum and homely, that when the one big event happens—the death of her father—we are as devastated as she means us to be. Today, you need a line to fame or power to make you sexy: J. Edgar Hoover's lieutenant or Diana's ex-bodyguard or ex-boyfriend.
Two things intervened to change the face of biography: the celebrity industry and popularized psychoanalysis. Both are offshoots of the Romantic movement, which, as one American scholar put it, is the big bang of modern culture.
The Romantics invented modern celebrity. Byron and Napoleon were exemplary Romantics with a flair for news value and "human interest" stories: revolutionary, volcanic, excessive, restless, sexually voracious with "unusual" tastes, hovering between lunacy and inspiration—the emperor riding to battle with Young Werther in his saddlebag; the poet dead in a quest to liberate Greece (decked out in Michael Jackson generalissimo camp). Byron was a showman and self-publicist who knew how to blend his biography with his art into a seductive mystique in which—and this is crucial to Romanticism and to contemporary celebrity—deeds become synonymous with the "work," the personality inextricable from the individual, the individual rooted in the legend.
The foundational Romantic text was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Rousseau began with the assertion that here, for the first time ever, was an autobiography that gave it all away, told it all. The killer ingredient, which sold the book for over two centuries on a whisper and a nod, was Rousseau's confession of sexual masochism and his recollection of the childhood spankings that provoked it. Aside from this, Confessions is 600 or so pages of dissimulation, self-contradiction, treachery, special pleading, innuendo, raving, revenge, and lies. But what gushes out is the overwhelming "presence" of Rousseau himself: the paranoiac, the plaintiff, the pervert. The scandalous incoherence of precisely this person, no better, after all, than he should be, behaving badly, just like us in fact: real, really here.
It wasn't long before behavior itself became considered an artwork—think of Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, the Beats, Kurt Cobain, and innumerable rock stars, or most modern artists since Duchamp. Think of the way van Gogh's slashed ear has become as much an artifact of his oeuvre as Sunflowers. Such genius-type behavior was a script to follow to whatever bittersweet closure: despairing suicide, or sudden death in pursuit of the ineffable. There's some debate about which of these INXS singer Michael Hutchence achieved, but, discovered dangling from a hotel door with a stiffie, he was an instructive illustration of that key Romantic invention, the full-time genius, who, as Sartre quipped, is a genius all the time, even in the morning while cracking open a boiled egg.
Cue Freud. Psychoanalysis is an intensely Romantic psychology, especially in its crowning fable, the unconscious—code for yet another Romantic sublime that can only, with caution, great delicacy, and $X an hour, be approached by trained and sanctioned specialists with access to privileged knowledge. The record shows that psychoanalysis was eagerly seized on from the start, and became fused with popular culture from around 1915. Hidden motives, repression, fantasy, and catharsis were the hot topics from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams to Rodgers & Hammerstein, which then transferred to Hollywood and screens worldwide.
Psychoanalysis equally became the paradigm for biography, which began to seek out the youthful traumas that haunt adult destinies, courted childhood, dwelt on the novelties of sexual repression and frustration, and narrated itself increasingly as the peeling away of layers of self-deception all the way down to an "inner" truth or self—down to those unconscious desires and dirty secrets even saints entertain. It was Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians which in 1918 started that now ubiquitous trend of dishing the dirt on the great and the good, trashing Florence Nightingale among others, with "a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined." Lytton's brother, James, was the British translator and editor of Freud.
This practice is nowadays de rigueur. Witness Albert Goldman's Elvis, a nerd's revenge, or a biography of the sculptor Eric Gill a few years back that "exposed" him as an incestuous sexual monster and drew calls for his works to be removed from public places, or recent biographical revelations of Michel Foucault's gay sadomasochism, which certainly put a new twist on Discipline and Punish.
From Rousseau's buttocks to Freud's couch to the tumbling chairs of Jerry Springer . . .
(part 2 to follow)
FANTASTIC VOYEUR
BY FRED VERMOREL
Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography
Village Voice Literary Supplement, November 2001
There was a metal fire escape up one side of her house. At the top was a black emergency door with a bar, the kind you find in cinemas. Such doors could be jimmied open. But was it alarmed? I often climbed to the landing outside this door and made a nest, camping on the iron slats. Sometimes her cats passed below and looked up at me. Would they tell? Sometimes she passed below, wheeling her bicycle for nocturnal sorties. Squatting there, refreshing myself with sandwiches and tea from a flask, I would listen to her dwelling as a lover sprawled over her body, detecting her heart.
Like everything else today, biography is about celebrity. Creating it, celebrating it, knocking it. We have little time or taste anymore for that forgotten genre of modest reckoning, where "nonentities" could find publishers and publics for nothing more or less than life lived—a few lessons learned. For example, M. Vivian Hughes's A London Family, 1870-1900 is so reserved, so populated by the humdrum and homely, that when the one big event happens—the death of her father—we are as devastated as she means us to be. Today, you need a line to fame or power to make you sexy: J. Edgar Hoover's lieutenant or Diana's ex-bodyguard or ex-boyfriend.
Two things intervened to change the face of biography: the celebrity industry and popularized psychoanalysis. Both are offshoots of the Romantic movement, which, as one American scholar put it, is the big bang of modern culture.
The Romantics invented modern celebrity. Byron and Napoleon were exemplary Romantics with a flair for news value and "human interest" stories: revolutionary, volcanic, excessive, restless, sexually voracious with "unusual" tastes, hovering between lunacy and inspiration—the emperor riding to battle with Young Werther in his saddlebag; the poet dead in a quest to liberate Greece (decked out in Michael Jackson generalissimo camp). Byron was a showman and self-publicist who knew how to blend his biography with his art into a seductive mystique in which—and this is crucial to Romanticism and to contemporary celebrity—deeds become synonymous with the "work," the personality inextricable from the individual, the individual rooted in the legend.
The foundational Romantic text was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Rousseau began with the assertion that here, for the first time ever, was an autobiography that gave it all away, told it all. The killer ingredient, which sold the book for over two centuries on a whisper and a nod, was Rousseau's confession of sexual masochism and his recollection of the childhood spankings that provoked it. Aside from this, Confessions is 600 or so pages of dissimulation, self-contradiction, treachery, special pleading, innuendo, raving, revenge, and lies. But what gushes out is the overwhelming "presence" of Rousseau himself: the paranoiac, the plaintiff, the pervert. The scandalous incoherence of precisely this person, no better, after all, than he should be, behaving badly, just like us in fact: real, really here.
It wasn't long before behavior itself became considered an artwork—think of Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, the Beats, Kurt Cobain, and innumerable rock stars, or most modern artists since Duchamp. Think of the way van Gogh's slashed ear has become as much an artifact of his oeuvre as Sunflowers. Such genius-type behavior was a script to follow to whatever bittersweet closure: despairing suicide, or sudden death in pursuit of the ineffable. There's some debate about which of these INXS singer Michael Hutchence achieved, but, discovered dangling from a hotel door with a stiffie, he was an instructive illustration of that key Romantic invention, the full-time genius, who, as Sartre quipped, is a genius all the time, even in the morning while cracking open a boiled egg.
Cue Freud. Psychoanalysis is an intensely Romantic psychology, especially in its crowning fable, the unconscious—code for yet another Romantic sublime that can only, with caution, great delicacy, and $X an hour, be approached by trained and sanctioned specialists with access to privileged knowledge. The record shows that psychoanalysis was eagerly seized on from the start, and became fused with popular culture from around 1915. Hidden motives, repression, fantasy, and catharsis were the hot topics from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams to Rodgers & Hammerstein, which then transferred to Hollywood and screens worldwide.
Psychoanalysis equally became the paradigm for biography, which began to seek out the youthful traumas that haunt adult destinies, courted childhood, dwelt on the novelties of sexual repression and frustration, and narrated itself increasingly as the peeling away of layers of self-deception all the way down to an "inner" truth or self—down to those unconscious desires and dirty secrets even saints entertain. It was Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians which in 1918 started that now ubiquitous trend of dishing the dirt on the great and the good, trashing Florence Nightingale among others, with "a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined." Lytton's brother, James, was the British translator and editor of Freud.
This practice is nowadays de rigueur. Witness Albert Goldman's Elvis, a nerd's revenge, or a biography of the sculptor Eric Gill a few years back that "exposed" him as an incestuous sexual monster and drew calls for his works to be removed from public places, or recent biographical revelations of Michel Foucault's gay sadomasochism, which certainly put a new twist on Discipline and Punish.
From Rousseau's buttocks to Freud's couch to the tumbling chairs of Jerry Springer . . .
(part 2 to follow)
blissblogger
Well-known member
After the war, the explosive growth of mass media accelerated and amplified celebrity, improving on Romantic devices in a number of ways. Take spontaneity, which dissimulates the distance between an artwork and the experiences it provokes. A Romantic artwork is really only there as provocation and ruse to catapult our "selves" out of humdrum states and reach greater heights, or depths, or whatever else seems weird, dizzying, and naughty. Equally with those Romantic artworks we call celebrities: We annihilate distances—geographic, cultural, pecuniary—in a sleight that brings these alien and inaccessible beings "into our lives." Hence the production techniques (camera closeups, mikes, and F/X that capture every breath and tongue tremor) that "produce" such audiovisual hallucinations as Madonna or Michael Jackson and allow us to gaze into the very eyes, to get right inside: up to the very eyelashes and pores, checking the backs of their hands for sweating as a sign that they might be lying, assessing their trembling buttock cheeks for beads of tumescence. This "persona production" renders every inkling and breath of presence up front, here and now, in your head, in your bed: Madonna's voice, throat, tits . . .
They are so real, these intimate strangers, so unbearably, overwhelmingly familiar. We are inducted into their lives, lured into their houses, enticed by their opinions; we meet their kids, learn all about their sex lives and their ailments and favorite colors and favorite songs.
How does celebrity exert such fascination? If you jettison the childish explanation of talent and the mystical one of charisma, and focus, as I did with Judy Vermorel in our 1985 book, Starlust, on the other side of the equation, if you talk in depth to the consumers of celebrity, if you consider music fans, for example, as consumers in a consumer environment consuming products that happen to be music stars, and map their desires in their own terms, you realize that celebrities are blank screens onto which we all project our fantasies.
This is what celebrities are really rewarded for. A celebrity's "act" readily spills from "real life" to "screen life" because there is no distinction to be made here between private and public spheres. In fact, a celebrity's raison d'être is to erase such distinction. Celebrities are made-up creatures, fictions from the very start and to the very end. We own them.
Sometimes I pressed my ear to the door and heard distant comings and goings. The gist of events and conversations, uncertain threads and emissions of her and her brother's lives. Explosions of hoohas, pounded stairs, slammed doors, flushing cisterns, music. It was as if they were putting it on to fascinate and tease me. Listen here, Fred! What is this noise here? And that one?
The most interesting bios weave the writer-as-obsessive into the text until the biographer and the obsession become part of the story. Sartre's psychobiographies took this over the top, from Tintoretto (the most convincing and shortest) to St. Genet. Genet was apparently so stunned by Sartre's biographical avalanche that he never wrote another word and was ungrateful enough to call his biographer a con ("cunt").
Less flamboyant are Walter Kaufman's Hegel: A Reinterpretation, which lovingly settles scores and guides us through a labyrinth of receptions and misunderstandings to make Hegel's project comprehensible, and Greil Marcus on Elvis Presley (Mystery Train and Dead Elvis), which certainly tells us more about Greil than Elvis, but then the writer has more to say than the singer.
The irruption of the author into the picture occurs equally with biographical novelizations like In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer's Marilyn (but Mailer is such an all-male schmuck he loses the plot whenever Monroe needs to become "female" and can't even understand why, to his chagrin, she'd prefer a Clark Kent like Arthur Miller to a Superman like Mailer), and, more recently, Gary Indiana's book on Versace-killer Andrew Cunanan, Three Month Fever. Such "factions" force us to confront the artifice of the biographical project and the fragility of its "facts."
There is also a sensuous and flirtatious aspect to biographical research: breaking seals and confidences, untying ribbons from bundles of documents, raising the dust of strangers' lives, dealing and unpacking other people's intimacies, deciphering their photos . . .
All games I played while researching The Secret History of Kate Bush, an absurdist experiment to see how far the rock bio could be stretched without snapping. I adopted the persona of a mad professor so obsessed that he traces Kate Bush's genealogy back to the Vikings. And I also stalked the woman, as a phenomenological acting out of that uneasy and twisted boundary between fascination and obsession. Oddly (or perhaps not), the book became the bestselling bio of that singer. But what most struck me was how straight were the readings people made of this text. I still find discussions on the Internet debating whether "I" was "really" obsessed with Kate Bush, as well as allegations I not only had an affair with her, but that while researching her life I ran over her cat.
Far from running over her cat, I seduced both her cats, Zoodle and Pywacket. I'd watch her let them out the door at night and coo them over to my hiding place, where I'd stroke their grumbling fur. Her cats were my Trojan horses to carry the smell of the hand I caressed them with back into her house, into her very lap.
Relevant here is the work of performance artists like Sophie Calle. Calle is known for randomly following people in cities, examining the sleeping habits of strangers she invites into her bed, or posing as a chambermaid and scrutinizing the property and lives of hotel guests. Calle's work is interesting, though it may be a cop-out that she protects her intentions behind avant-garde rhetoric and trades in high art rather than commercial discourses—which would be a more dangerous strategy. More suggestive, because more troubling and tentative and unsupervised, are the explorations of Oreet Ashery, a Jewish female performance artist who disguises herself as Marcus Fisher, a male orthodox Jew, and penetrates Orthodox Jewish communities and other milieus in that persona (www.sexmutant.com).
The cutting edge of such work today, the agenda that biography needs to address, is the phenomenon of the stalker. This is where the contradictions and fantasies of identity and desire are most tested and exposed. The stalker refuses to be intimidated by the "celebritariat" and its massive security apparatus, disrupting the celebrity economy by voicing the unspeakable and demanding the impossible (the impossible which is, however, promised over and over). There is an accelerating momentum here, from John Lennon, who conspicuously threw every shred of his soul on the market and was duly "consumed" by a fan, to the awesome global presence and mass-produced intimacy of Madonna. Madonna, who had the effrontery to play the little-woman card while having the stalker Bobby Hoskins jailed, and refused until forced by threat of imprisonment to attend court because she would thereby fulfill Hoskins's fantasy of contact with her. "We have made his fantasies come true," she complained. "How? By sitting in front of him." Madonna "felt incredibly violated": "That day I looked into his eyes he became even more real to me." What a delicious subversion of celebrity.
The morning John Lennon was shot I woke suddenly around 4:15. Numbers were flashing through my head: a phone number. I jotted it down on a pad. Turned over but still couldn't sleep. Around seven I turned on the radio and heard the news. A few days later, out of curiosity I rang the number. Kate Bush answered.
They are so real, these intimate strangers, so unbearably, overwhelmingly familiar. We are inducted into their lives, lured into their houses, enticed by their opinions; we meet their kids, learn all about their sex lives and their ailments and favorite colors and favorite songs.
How does celebrity exert such fascination? If you jettison the childish explanation of talent and the mystical one of charisma, and focus, as I did with Judy Vermorel in our 1985 book, Starlust, on the other side of the equation, if you talk in depth to the consumers of celebrity, if you consider music fans, for example, as consumers in a consumer environment consuming products that happen to be music stars, and map their desires in their own terms, you realize that celebrities are blank screens onto which we all project our fantasies.
This is what celebrities are really rewarded for. A celebrity's "act" readily spills from "real life" to "screen life" because there is no distinction to be made here between private and public spheres. In fact, a celebrity's raison d'être is to erase such distinction. Celebrities are made-up creatures, fictions from the very start and to the very end. We own them.
Sometimes I pressed my ear to the door and heard distant comings and goings. The gist of events and conversations, uncertain threads and emissions of her and her brother's lives. Explosions of hoohas, pounded stairs, slammed doors, flushing cisterns, music. It was as if they were putting it on to fascinate and tease me. Listen here, Fred! What is this noise here? And that one?
The most interesting bios weave the writer-as-obsessive into the text until the biographer and the obsession become part of the story. Sartre's psychobiographies took this over the top, from Tintoretto (the most convincing and shortest) to St. Genet. Genet was apparently so stunned by Sartre's biographical avalanche that he never wrote another word and was ungrateful enough to call his biographer a con ("cunt").
Less flamboyant are Walter Kaufman's Hegel: A Reinterpretation, which lovingly settles scores and guides us through a labyrinth of receptions and misunderstandings to make Hegel's project comprehensible, and Greil Marcus on Elvis Presley (Mystery Train and Dead Elvis), which certainly tells us more about Greil than Elvis, but then the writer has more to say than the singer.
The irruption of the author into the picture occurs equally with biographical novelizations like In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer's Marilyn (but Mailer is such an all-male schmuck he loses the plot whenever Monroe needs to become "female" and can't even understand why, to his chagrin, she'd prefer a Clark Kent like Arthur Miller to a Superman like Mailer), and, more recently, Gary Indiana's book on Versace-killer Andrew Cunanan, Three Month Fever. Such "factions" force us to confront the artifice of the biographical project and the fragility of its "facts."
There is also a sensuous and flirtatious aspect to biographical research: breaking seals and confidences, untying ribbons from bundles of documents, raising the dust of strangers' lives, dealing and unpacking other people's intimacies, deciphering their photos . . .
All games I played while researching The Secret History of Kate Bush, an absurdist experiment to see how far the rock bio could be stretched without snapping. I adopted the persona of a mad professor so obsessed that he traces Kate Bush's genealogy back to the Vikings. And I also stalked the woman, as a phenomenological acting out of that uneasy and twisted boundary between fascination and obsession. Oddly (or perhaps not), the book became the bestselling bio of that singer. But what most struck me was how straight were the readings people made of this text. I still find discussions on the Internet debating whether "I" was "really" obsessed with Kate Bush, as well as allegations I not only had an affair with her, but that while researching her life I ran over her cat.
Far from running over her cat, I seduced both her cats, Zoodle and Pywacket. I'd watch her let them out the door at night and coo them over to my hiding place, where I'd stroke their grumbling fur. Her cats were my Trojan horses to carry the smell of the hand I caressed them with back into her house, into her very lap.
Relevant here is the work of performance artists like Sophie Calle. Calle is known for randomly following people in cities, examining the sleeping habits of strangers she invites into her bed, or posing as a chambermaid and scrutinizing the property and lives of hotel guests. Calle's work is interesting, though it may be a cop-out that she protects her intentions behind avant-garde rhetoric and trades in high art rather than commercial discourses—which would be a more dangerous strategy. More suggestive, because more troubling and tentative and unsupervised, are the explorations of Oreet Ashery, a Jewish female performance artist who disguises herself as Marcus Fisher, a male orthodox Jew, and penetrates Orthodox Jewish communities and other milieus in that persona (www.sexmutant.com).
The cutting edge of such work today, the agenda that biography needs to address, is the phenomenon of the stalker. This is where the contradictions and fantasies of identity and desire are most tested and exposed. The stalker refuses to be intimidated by the "celebritariat" and its massive security apparatus, disrupting the celebrity economy by voicing the unspeakable and demanding the impossible (the impossible which is, however, promised over and over). There is an accelerating momentum here, from John Lennon, who conspicuously threw every shred of his soul on the market and was duly "consumed" by a fan, to the awesome global presence and mass-produced intimacy of Madonna. Madonna, who had the effrontery to play the little-woman card while having the stalker Bobby Hoskins jailed, and refused until forced by threat of imprisonment to attend court because she would thereby fulfill Hoskins's fantasy of contact with her. "We have made his fantasies come true," she complained. "How? By sitting in front of him." Madonna "felt incredibly violated": "That day I looked into his eyes he became even more real to me." What a delicious subversion of celebrity.
The morning John Lennon was shot I woke suddenly around 4:15. Numbers were flashing through my head: a phone number. I jotted it down on a pad. Turned over but still couldn't sleep. Around seven I turned on the radio and heard the news. A few days later, out of curiosity I rang the number. Kate Bush answered.
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