Hi!

I think this is a record for me–I’ve gone ten (10) (TEN!!) months without writing one of my world [in]famous website lifestyle reports. Why would I do this, when I can barely fit everything I want to say in a two-to-three-month’s tale?  Part of the reason is that it’s been a weird time since February when I last posted. It’s been more of a time of working on long term projects and trying new things than of showing a resolved and polished product to the masses. And then, as Fall (my favorite season, please don’t tell Spring, Summer, or Winter!) approached, and I was finally getting myself geared up to get to writing, the lead-up to the presidential election happened. And then its tragic results. Let’s put this bluntly: I am in despair and utter disenchantment with the world and us people living in it. I have been finding it difficult to see meaning and purpose in what I’m doing on a larger scale, particularly as my outlets have diminished in correlation with my lack of enthusiasm and direct participation in the gallery system.

But the good news is that I’m great at compartmentalizing and I can be a master dissociater, plus I have been blessed with a default joie de vivre when I’m not focused on being pissed off or depressed, so in the small picture, I’m still thriving! Also, since I have so wisely (accidentally) diversified my “portfolio” of disciplines and genres, my creative “career” has remained afloat over the past ten months with some cool fashion and design projects [Shout out to House of Larréon for retaining me as head designer!] as well as some music gigs, group exhibitions and even the sale of a fine art masterpiece or two. So, don’t anyone worry about me—I’m doing fine!

One of the things I’m proudest of that I did in this period is my performance in June of Eulogy at Julie DeLano’s “Mother Monday,” a performance series Julie curates and presents at Superfine in Dumbo.

I don’t think Eulogy is the best thing I’ve ever done, but it is definitely one of the most daring—a piece that I was so immersed in emotionally that it still makes me uncomfortable to try to resolve what happened that night at Superfine. This feeling is unfamiliar to me as a self-proclaimed artist/entertainer, because I usually consider that my job as a person on a stage is to palatize my experiences and emotions for the audience to “enjoy” consuming to some degree. Eulogy was raw and unpalatized and featured a steady stream of my own real tears. It was scary and a little humiliating, but when it was over, I felt that I had done something new for me and had given the very intimate audience something powerful to connect with. 

What is Eulogy? It is a performance piece in two acts in which I earnestly eulogize the parents I once knew and face the demise and complete dissolution of our relationship. I read from an essay I wrote on this topic and intersperse the passages with related costume changes and songs. At the beginning of each act, Jim Andralis and I wear our House of Larréon Tearaway Tuxedos, Jim sings one of his songs & tears away the tux, then I tear into the misery of my life with my parents as expressed through prose, song, and hi-fashion. Over the past 10 years (Happy 10-year anniversary of the Thanksgiving that set it all off!), I have struggled and dealt with this loss in different ways, and, though my parents are alive as far as I know, part of how I cope with their betrayal of my love for them is to consider them dead and gone. It has been easier to focus on my anger and hurt, so to lean into all that was wonderful about them before we separated, as I do in Eulogy, was new and extremely painful. Will I ever reprise this masterpiece of musical theater? The good news for the weak of heart is probably not. I plan to revise and finalize the script, though, so if anybody is interested in reading it sometime in the future, I MIGHT be willing to share it.

But look! I also did something fun!

I had a cool little gig with the prestigious New York Review of Books creating some of those line drawing illustrations we always see in literary periodicals that fill in the empty space between copy. I’ve been plagued with a love for the standard parquet floor pattern—kind of like Bert and his love of paper clips?—for as long as I can remember. I made a lot of work in the late 90’s using this parquet floor pattern, double stick tape and leaf transfer (like gold leaf but in woodgrain patterns and solid colors) that I’d looted from the printing place next to my studio after they closed and left a bunch of shit behind in their abandoned space. I was returning to that body of work recently with some new pieces… 

…when the opportunity arose with NYROB, so I came up with some simple pen and ink drawings using the same basic motif.

I was pleased with the whole experience, except I wish my drawings could have illustrated the big ol’ feature Hannah Gold wrote about my friend Kathleen Alcott’s entire body of literary work in the October issue, 2 months after my big time to shine! 

Though I have mostly been working on my own and keeping to myself (professionally, at least), I have had a couple opportunities to exhibit my work in the past several months. I have my favorite recent piece, “Then and Now (Checkerboard Study #5)” on view in the Pierogi 30^th anniversary group show up thru December 21. 

It’s such a great show full of nostalgia for me of the great art and exciting Williamsburg art scene that started (as far as I’m concerned) with Pierogi in the mid-90’s. If you are reading this before December 21, 2024, then go on over to 394 Broadway, 3^rd floor to check it out. If you are reading this in June 2025, then please come over to my apartment in the East Village and kick my ass until I agree to update my website already before the next entry ends up being as long as this is about to be!

The other notable show I was in was Design Dysphoria, a cool queer art/design show in a pop-up space in Bushwick. Liz Collins, Grace Whiteside, Erica Sellars, and Jeremy Silberberg organized it, and I was thrilled to be able to show my 2019 piece “Then and Now (Fruit)” in a fruity context surrounded by tons of sleek, inventive, whimsical, and gorgeous decorative art objects in one big gay-ass display of queerness and beauty. 

Other than these outings, my work has mostly been saved for my own gaze as I make it and for the gazes of those who visit me in one of my two studios (that I don’t really have). Yes, I have 2 non-studios at the moment: my classic East Village studio/home that is really a bunch of shelves and my kitchen table and the other one in Dumbo that I borrow from time to time from my dear friend, artist Alex Gorlizki. Alex is an extraordinary artist I met in the 90’s when he was brought over from England by some curator friends of mine to be in their group show of British artists at Art in General. We remained friends, and Alex ultimately moved to New York, got married, etc. and maintains a studio in Dumbo where he creates and plans his elaborate collaborations with artists in Jaipur, India. All of this extraneous information is not to make a potentially short story long but to explain why Alex travels a lot and is away for spells that leave his studio empty and available for me to use with his generosity. The studio is filled with Alex’s beautiful and inspiring work, but the huge, well-lit table is cleared for me, upon which I have been able to hack away at that big long-term piece I’ve been working on since 2021, “Then and Now (Everybody Loves Flowers #4)”. I realize that sitting alone for hours and hours hunched over a table sewing tiny sequins one by one onto a massive swath of natty old linen is not everybody’s idea of a good time, but for me it is bliss. If you have ever experienced me with a halfway even temperament in the past 10 months, you have Alex to thank, because this work keeps me sane. And with this time at the studio, plus a month coming up at Yaddo this February/March, I can actually imagine that this monster will be finished someday!

Meanwhile, much like Broadway’s “Ol’ Man River,” my life as a dog musician just keeps rollin’ along! Our songwriters’ group has been meeting steadily, so I continue to write at least one new song a month. And I’ve had a couple gigs at which to test them out, including a sweet one at the Branded Saloon headlined by  Jim Andralis where I debuted my catchy new upbeat song “That’s My Jim!” with a spontaneous singalong/chant-along with the audience that warmed the heart. The chorus:

That’s my Jim
Some say he’s an angel
Oh, I know him well
Come see him shine
That’s my Jim
You know he’s my dream come true
I bet he’s got enough love for you too
But he’s all mine

More semi-recently, I debuted another new composition, “Smoking Song,” at Susan Hwang’s Bushwick Book Club, held at Howl Happening. This edition of BBC joined forces with the Evergreen Review and had us writing songs based on essays, poems, and stories published by Evergreen. I found inspiration in Younis B. Azeem’s essay, “One for you, one for me,” which is about how people who smoke find themselves arbitrarily thrust together as they meet outside on their smoking breaks. (It’s about other things, too, but this is what I latched onto.) The piece made me think of my many years working as an art handler and how much I smoked back then, basically just so I could have the breaks from work. I used some poetic license for the song and made it seem like I was never friends at all with anyone on the crews I worked with—I did make some friends & you know who you are! But it really was a mixed-up group that we had little control over, so there was the feeling sometimes of making do with who we were stuck with, particularly during the 2 years when I was actively in the closet (roughly ages 30-31 when I was out to myself and the select dudes I was doing it with but keeping it a secret from everyone else). This verse expresses that scenario the best:

These guys work with me, but they don’t get me
We work together and shoot the shit
I’m in the closet, but one of them’s onto it
Now he’s suggesting that I suck his dick

Check the SONGS TO READ link if you want to read the full lyrics to these songs.

And speaking of songs, I am now on Spotify (and other streaming services)!! In 2006, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis commissioned me to record an album to be included in CD form in the catalog to accompany my retrospective show there, “Artist/Entertainer,” curated by Shannon Fitzgerald. The CD is the only place the recordings were technically available for these past nearly 20 years, but now almost all of them are-or-will-be there for you to stream whenever you want! I recorded the album with Jim Bentley at the Fort in Bushwick with an amazing roster of musicians including Jim Andralis, Bridget Everett, Stephin Merritt, Janet & Randy Kennedy, Alex Mutrux, Kenny Mellman, Christy Davis, and more! LD Beghtol was the official/unofficial producer of the album, and listening to it now, you can definitely hear his influence in the early-aughts indy style of many of the tracks.

The track that’s gotten the most track-tion is my duet with my sister Janet, “(I Couldn’t) Miss You More,” 

most definitely because of the heavily featured and highly beautiful ukelele part played by Stephin Merritt. I love that track, but guess what? I also love “Getting Rid of Today,” 

“Take me Back,” 

“We’ve Been Together Too Long,” 

and “Shopping for Dresses,” my duet with Jim.

My hope is that I can get some money together here & there and make some recordings of my newer songs to add to the mix, but in the meantime, please give those old chestnuts a listen!

But hold up—did somebody say Jim Andralis? One of the most exciting and rewarding artistic achievements for me in these past 10 months was the release of Jim’s fifth (5^th) album, “Ghosts”. OK, the artistic achievement was really Jim’s, but this album is so good, and it’s been so heartening to see it reach so many new listeners and fans! Has it been because of my beautiful harmonies as a Syntonic, most notable on our duet “Manhattanhenge”? Is it because of my beautiful album art and design?

Did the world stop and take notice of Jim’s musical mastery because of my costume design and de facto choreography for the big release show at Joe’s Pub?

No, of course not—that’s on Jim! But it did feel good to be so immersed in the process and to be part of that dream team that made “Ghosts” and its release concert so intensely beautiful and soul-enriching! 

You will see that I put my money where my mouth is when you observe that I included the opening track to “Ghosts” on the Spotify playlist I created for New York’s Museum of Modern Art with my friend & Larréon muse, Bridget Everett for MoMA’s “Mixtape” series. “Mixtape” is a cool project that MoMA Magazine has been doing where they invite New York musicians, writers, authors, and apparently middle-aged bourgeoning étoiles des artes to tour the museum matching songs with some of the artworks that catch their eyes. It was a new, fun way for Bridget and me to hang out and a very enriching and invigorating artistic experience to boot. Check out the article & our playlist HERE. 

Now, when you think of Bridget, you probably think of Larréon. (No? Well please just pretend you do for the purposes of this segue!) And when you think of Larréon, you DEFINITELY think, “I NEED TO KNOW THE LATEST LARRÉON NEWS!!”

Well, I will tell you this: every single (well, technically one single) 1953 Singer 301A home sewing machine in the atélier has been humming these past many months!

When were the Tony Awards? A long time ago, right? But I still remember the stunning House of Larréon his n’ hers red carpet looks I designed and made for power couple Tommy Kriegsmann (ArKtype, producer of Tony award winning Illinoise) and Shanta Thake (Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center, former director of Joe’s Pub). 

Shanta’s look was a first for me—a full-on glamorous taffeta gown, made from the end of a bolt of unusual & gorgeous, flocked silk taffeta I found at a thrift store in the Berkshires. The main part of this gown is made from a single piece of fabric—draped, wrapped, pleated, bunched, and lovingly sewn together at a single zippered seam! (Then I added straps, facing, lining, etc.)

Tommy’s look started with a Todd Snyder tuxedo that I embellished with luxurious silk patches, mostly from the archive of Todd Oldham’s custom prints and designs from the 1990’s. I made a tie for Tommy the same way with a vintage bowtie from my collection and scraps of vintage silk patched on. 

The tie didn’t make the cut in favor of a t-shirt silhouette underneath, but look out for it at future formal affairs attended by Monsieur Kriegsmann.

But what of Bridget Everett, my muse? Was she forced to go naked all this time? Oh, no. House of Larréon has kept Bridget draped in luxury as she has gone press-crazy promoting the third (3^rd) and last (for now!! If you would like to help save it, please sign THIS PETITION!) season of her magnificent HBO show Somebody Somewhere. I’ve been designing and sewing and styling my heart out to show the world that this queen is gorgeous, and you should all watch her on TV!

Some highlights have been the following:

The “Sophie Fucker” made from chiffon and yards and yards of 20” fringe hand dyed by Todd Oldham and donated to the cause.

The Tequila Sun-Smize, inspired by the classic cocktail… 

…this gown delights with enough red, orange, and gold tulle ruffles, if ungathered, to circle my apartment 5 times, a silver lame asymmetrical “rim of the glass” neckline, and a jaunty tulle “cherry” playfully perched on one shoulder. Here, Bridget is photographed for PAPER Magazine by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. No sooner did she wrap this shoot, though, than she ran the Sun-Smize on over to New York’s Beacon Theater to wear in her sold out Bridget Everett and the Tender Moments concert there!

For more demure daytime situations, we at the atelier decided to put our heads together to make something sweet and lovely for Bridget to wear on the Live with Kelly & Mark show:

Now when it comes to silhouette, we at House of Larréon love to innovate and experiment, but we do have a policy that we rely on when it really comes down to it: if it cliterally ain’t broke, cliterally don’t fix it! So, many of the new looks we made for Bridget’s Somebody Somewhere press events borrowed from a design that House of Larréon debuted in 2013 in the form of a 2-piece convertible ensemble, classily dubbed “Pussy Flowers”. This design has resurfaced over the years in Bridget’s bright jersey “Larréunits” press looks for the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, her “FDS (Frosty Da Snow-Bish)” look worn in many “A Murray Little Christmas” shows and on TV in “Joe’s Pub Presents: A Holiday Special,” several slinky spandex versions, and now an array of beautiful new ones made from a variety of luxurious silks:

Now, when you take those harem pants, unzip the crotch, and turn them over, you get a sexy little bubble hem cocktail mini dress, which is what Bridget wore to the NewFest and for her appearance at the New Fest and on Late Night with Seth Meyers

A few other Pussy flower variants I made for Bridget are…

…the “Gee-Von-She,”

“Shock Treatment,”

…and “Pussy’s in Pastels,” a shiny silk shantung confection that derives its color-blocking from a classic Pierrot outfit and can be mixed up and reversed in as many ways as Bridget’s imagination allows!

A happy surprise was when I was hired to style a photo shoot of Bridget’s for New York Magazine’s Vulture . I proposed making a glamorous gown crossing the aesthetics of a classic Hollywood Marilyn Monroe with Jennifer Beals’ iconic Flashdance torn sweatshirt look. The art director decided to run with the Flashdance thing & leave Marilyn behind, so all I really had to do was tear up a sweatshirt & make some earrings to kind of summon the early 80’s Flashdance vibe. Andreas Laszlo Konrath took some stunning pictures of Bridget in this look (with hair by Rheanne White and makeup by Bruce Dean):

I was still stuck with this Marilyn/Flashdance idea, and I still haven’t really achieved what I had in mind, but I did get halfway there with the look I made a more casual 2-piece look for Bridget to wear in Jim’s Ghosts record release show at Joe’s Pub:

Back to Bridget and her press! I’m circling back to this, because some of Bridget’s press ends up turning into my press, too! I got a big and very tender shout out on Bridget’s interview with Teri Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” on the New York Times’ “Modern Love” podcast, and on my favorite network, Turner Classic Movies’ podcast hosted by Ben Mankiewitz, “Talking Pictures,” to name a few.

I’ve also managed to milk my fame as the origin behind Somebody Somewhere’s “St. Louis Sushi” motif once again with a little piece on the Rhode Island PBS’s website that tells the story of how I developed my recipe and how it ended up on TV! You need to know this, so please go read it! Bonus: they printed my complete recipe!

Oh my Lorde, we are almost at the end of this! Hang in there for 5 predictions for the future:

• I predict that I will have a beautiful unique work of art in the Postcards From the Edge silent “auction” to benefitVisual AIDS. The sale of works goes online on a very special day—my 55^th birthday, January 25^th, 2025! Each work is priced at $100, and I can’t show you what mine is, because you’re supposed to go into it blindly & get what you love, perhaps hoping that you pick a fancy artist or somebody you know you like. If you want to find mine, though, you won’t have any trouble recognizing that it’s mine, and that’s my only hint!! 
• I predict that I will have an item up for auction at the Joe’s Pub benefit gala on March 10^th. Keep an eye out for details!
• I predict that you will buy my newly printed T-SHIRTS! The new color combos of my classic, best selling designs of “I’m a Larréon Girl” and “Shit Motherfucker Goddam” have JUST DROPPED! Please go to my SHOP to shop!

• I predict that at the end of January, I will start a 10-day WRITING residency at the Wedding Cake House in Providence, Rhode Island.  This is the first residency that has ever accepted me as a writer, and I am so excited to get there and get cracking on a new chapter or two for my big multi-genre memoir, More Than You Need to Know About an Artist You’ve Never Heard Of. I forgot to mention that I’ve been hacking away at the book, and have finished the first draft of Chapter 5, “How to Get Hung,” the one about my history and experience with art as a career. In fact, for my last prediction, I shall forecast that
• You will read this excerpt from More Than You Need to Know About an Artist You’ve Never Heard Of, Chapter 5: “How to Get Hung”

Soon after the call, Marcia came to my studio. She beat James Elaine, in fact, and was my official first studio visit in that crazy space.
 
This studio is the one to which I refer in the beginning of this chapter—the one where I befriended the ultimate “bad painter” who really wasn’t a bad painter at all but whose feelings I hurt trying to be funny by calling her one. The studio was a small, partitioned space in a big, old fashioned industrial loft on Lafayette Street in SoHo, run by a woman named Meadow. As tiny as it was (maybe 125 square feet?), this studio did much for me in the early part of my career, largely because of its convenient location in relation to most of the art world which was centralized around SoHo at the time. Both the Drawing Center and The New Museum were in walking distance, so it was easier to lure them and other galleries in the area to come over for a quick look at the work of an inexperienced young artist such as I than if I were stationed somewhere that would require a subway or taxi ride. I personally could not afford to rent a studio of any size, and I had not even considered getting one, but, in one of their mystifyingly supportive and generous moves, my parents paid its $225 a month rent for a few years until the loft was sold, and I had to move out. Later, they paid for my studio in Long Island City, Queens, where I stayed for about a year until the deal for my current apartment in the East Village became available to me, and I bought it—with my own savings for the deposit and a loan from my parents for the rest. (Please refer to “Why Me?” the introductory chapter to this book for my acknowledgement of PRIVILEGE.)
 
During that visit, Marcia stayed in my studio with me for over an hour with questions, conversation, and thoughts about my work. She told me of a couple of shows she was working on in which she wanted to include my work, spoiled me for all future studio visits, and started a friendship that lasted until she died twelve years later. Marcia’s love for me and support of my work were the original forces that got me to feel invested in my career and hopeful for the future. My instincts about the art world told me that I did not belong in it, that it was too humorless and full of itself to be a welcoming place for me. But to feel aligned with and supported by Marcia Tucker helped me to imagine that it was possible to succeed there on my own terms. Even though we were not always in constant contact, Marcia was like my Dumbo’s feather, giving me a feeling of security when it should have been obvious that I was testing the limits of what I could achieve and what was really good for me. When Marcia died in 2006, the feather disappeared, and the smokescreen dissipated. Marcia represented a rare point of view in the art world that made it feel tenable to me: she curated, wrote, and programmed without regard to fashion, trends, or money, but for ideas, intelligence, and soul. Now that she was gone, the fantasy was over, and I could no longer ignore the nagging sense that had been getting stronger for years—that I was in the wrong world, and I was stuck there.

Thanks so much for reading these few 4,726 words of my newsletter if you did. I know it was long, but that’s just my way. Also, it’s been 10 months, so I really just let myself go hog wild! If you didn’t read it & just skipped to the end, you missed a lot of jibber jabber, musings, useless information, and poorly taken photographs—are you sure you wouldn’t like to reconsider?? 

Do YOU have something to say to ME?  Send it on over, and I’ll read it, too!

*P.S. and by the way, Gregory Kramer is a wizard when it comes to solving website problems & stuff. He helped me spruce up and unkink this old dinosaur, and I could not be happier with the results! Contact Greg thru his website if you’re interested in hiring him for your website needs!

Oh, and please follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube if you are so inclined.

Thank you, and good night.

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