{"id":2707,"date":"2011-11-28T09:20:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T09:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/28\/filthy_christma\/"},"modified":"2024-11-29T15:00:37","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T20:00:37","slug":"filthy_christma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/28\/filthy_christma\/","title":{"rendered":"Filthy Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

As usual, there\u2019s a bit of press<\/strong> here and there in the build-up to John Waters visit to London to do his Christmas show at Royal Festival Hall next week. (I\u2019ve had the tickets for months already.) This article in the Financial Times<\/i><\/a>, of all places, is one of the better I\u2019ve read lately \u2014 some new tidbits, some insight, and apparently written by someone who knows Waters work well enough (or has bothered to look into it well enough) to go a little deeper than the usual recycled PR.<\/p>\n

\u2018He has swiveled again from the salacious to the jokey, and it occurs to me that this is what Waters does: confront the audience with something transgressive and render it unthreatening and comical. He relishes words like \u201ccreepy\u201d, \u201chideous\u201d and \u201cfilthy\u201d, but makes them sound like good, clean fun.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

John Waters on the couch<\/a><\/h2>\n

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. From the <\/i>Financial Times Magazine<\/a>, November 18, 2011.<\/i><\/p>\n

In a rare at-home interview, the cult director opens up about being a \u2018happy neurotic\u2019 and why he\u2019s a capitalist now<\/b><\/p>\n

I arrive in Baltimore with three sources for my preconceptions: Nina Simone (\u201cOh, Baltimore\/Man, it\u2019s hard just to live\u201d); The Wire<\/i> (count the expletives before the opening credits); and the cult films of John Waters (which boil down to \u201clock up your children – this place is full of freaks!\u201d).<\/p>\n

Nothing on the drive from the city\u2019s Penn Station to Waters\u2019 house fits any of these images. The cab takes a neat, wide avenue past handsome old mansions and a better class of apartment block to a compact, low-slung house on a side street. \u201cWe have edge here, but it\u2019s about neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood is like its own country,\u201d Waters observes as I walk in with the photographers: \u201cIt\u2019s almost like you need customs at each boundary.\u201d<\/p>\n

He began life 65 years ago in a nearby suburb, Lutherville, and has spent 21 years in this house, perplexing a film industry that does not know how to classify someone not from Los Angeles or New York. The city is getting over its inferiority complex, Waters says, attracting \u201ckids from New York\u201d with its music scene and affordability. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing here what you can get for your buck. As they say, we make a dollar holler. That\u2019s a Baltimore expression,\u201d he adds with a dash of civic pride.<\/p>\n

Few people embrace preconceptions like Waters, who revels in the clich\u00e9d tags attached to him, from \u201cPope of Trash\u201d to \u201cPrince of Puke\u201d. In 17 low-budget films since 1964, including Pink Flamingos<\/i>, A Dirty Shame and Female Trouble<\/i> (\u201cA high point in low taste\u201d), he has courted notoriety by featuring an excrement-eating drag queen, a suddenly sex-crazed suburban mother and a chicken crushed by a copulating couple. Yet the taboos are always broken with a wink, as well as terrible overacting and a lot of dancing. So Hairspray<\/i> could be turned into a Broadway musical that grossed more than $250m, then be remade as a PG film. Cry-Baby<\/i> was similarly repackaged, though less successfully, as \u201ca sexy musical for the whole family\u201d.<\/p>\n

Waters is an accommodating provocateur, and ushers us into a living room that feels overheated. Bookshelves line the walls but they are not enough. The coffee table, desk and side tables are heaped with books, as is the replica electric chair in the hall. They range from Taschen art tomes such as The Big Butt Book<\/i> to Jean Genet paperbacks and a Hungarian translation of Tennessee Williams with a pulp fiction cover. In one corner sits a doll from the horror spoof Seed of Chucky<\/i>, in which Waters appeared. It feels like an eccentric professor\u2019s study, or a carefully curated exhibition based on the life of a fictional character.<\/p>\n

Waters sports a pale striped shirt buttoned to the neck, a linen jacket and a pencil moustache that is much darker than his greying hair. He pulls out an instant camera and motions us into a pose. \u201cI take a Polaroid of every person that\u2019s ever been in my house \u2026 from the phone man to the worst night I ever had,\u201d he explains. He takes just one shot. \u201cNobody can see [it] until I\u2019m dead and they\u2019re [all] dead,\u201d he says cheerfully as he files us away.<\/p>\n

I have come to talk about Waters\u2019 one-man Christmas show, which he is bringing to London\u2019s Royal Festival Hall on December 5. Sitting cross-legged on a red couch, one pale blue canvas shoe resting on a coffee table, Waters says \u201cpeople choke\u201d when they hear he is doing a Christmas show, but insists there is nothing ironic about it. \u201cI\u2019m trying to open up new questions such as, is Santa erotic?\u201d he says, a half-smile on his face, eyebrows arched. I can see the direction his show might head.<\/p>\n

I ask what Christmas was like when he was growing up. He recalls his Catholic mother, now 86, taking him to midnight mass, then sidesteps into an anecdote about Glenn Milstead – the boyhood friend and cross-dressing muse he named Divine – coming to the service in drag. Waters\u2019 stage shows are carefully scripted, delivered from memory, and these rapid digressions come across like a compressed rehearsal of one of his soliloquies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI liked Santa but I would get confused as a child whether I was supposed to pray to him or William Castle [the B-movie director], or Jesus,\u201d he says, before skipping to another thought about \u201cliving cr\u00e8ches\u201d – Christmas cribs re-created with real people. \u201cThey\u2019re begging for Diane Arbus to come back from the grave to take a picture of them. What parent would give their child to be baby Jesus, with straw and candles and mules that kick \u2026 ? I\u2019m telling you, I think living cr\u00e8ches are some of the most horrifying things.\u201d<\/p>\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

Waters has been doing stage shows since the 1960s, when he appeared at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and toured campuses to promote his films. \u201cWe were starting out in colleges, which was the only market, really, for midnight movies. I came on stage dressed like a hippie pimp. Divine would come out, rip a phone book in half, and throw dead mackerel at the audience.\u201d If they had the money, the pair would hire an extra to wear a police uniform and pretend to arrest them: \u201cDivine would strangle him to death – and the movie would start.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking of Christmas in London, I ask whether Waters has seen any pantomimes. He looks puzzled. I try to explain the genre that combines fairy tales, audience participation and washed-up TV stars in women\u2019s clothing. \u201cIs there scat in it?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n

Mores have moved on and audiences are harder to shock, and I ask what counts as transgressive today. \u201cTransgressive is not trying too hard,\u201d he replies. \u201cThere are always new things that startle me.\u201d In Spain, he says, he heard about \u201cballoonies\u201d, or people with a sexual interest in balloons. \u201cI really don\u2019t get it. But maybe I\u2019m being stuffy. It\u2019s safe. We should encourage that kind of behaviour. No one gets pregnant at a balloony party.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has swiveled again from the salacious to the jokey, and it occurs to me that this is what Waters does: confront the audience with something transgressive and render it unthreatening and comical. He relishes words like \u201ccreepy\u201d, \u201chideous\u201d and \u201cfilthy\u201d, but makes them sound like good, clean fun. \u201cI think when people come to see my movies or read my books or come to my Christmas show, they want me to take them somewhere they wouldn\u2019t go. And with me as their guide, they never get mad, because I\u2019m not saying you should do this. I\u2019m saying, isn\u2019t it amazing, human behaviour?\u201d<\/p>\n

With his books never out of print, his films on Netflix, children going to the Broadway versions and Waters narrating the part of Jessica the Hippo for Animal Planet<\/i>, I ask how he likes life in the mainstream. \u201cIt\u2019s great. It\u2019s the final irony in my life,\u201d he answers. \u201cI think we need a new vocabulary, because [now] everybody wants to be an outsider. When I was one, no one wanted to be one.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has mixed feelings about gay culture becoming mainstream: \u201cI miss it \u2026 I\u2019m for gay marriage. I don\u2019t want to do it, but I certainly think people should be allowed to, and I wouldn\u2019t vote for anybody that would be against it. But at the same time, why do we have to be good now? Why can\u2019t we be villains in movies?\u201d He says it\u2019s good that more people are able to come out of the closet, but adds: \u201cI wish some gay people would go back in. We have enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The subjects he explores in his films, including homosexuality, racism and rebellious youth, have not always been recipes for uncomplicated happiness, but Waters describes himself as \u201ca happy neurotic\u201d. He adds, though, that he will never retire, because \u201cthen I\u2019d have time to be nuts\u201d.<\/p>\n

He took a one-man show, This Filthy World, to Australia and New Zealand in October, and in recent months he has served as guest curator at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, worked on a book, exhibited in New Orleans, taken part in events from the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee to the Venice Biennale, and provided a Vincent Price-like cameo for the video of \u201cThe Creep\u201d, a comedy hip hop song featuring Nicki Minaj. Still, he says (a little defensively): \u201cFriday night I went out, wildly had a party until five in the morning with a bunch of friends, so it\u2019s not like I\u2019m a workaholic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a lot of plan B, C, D, E, and F in effect,\u201d he adds. What\u2019s plan A, I ask? \u201cPlan A is to make movies. The one thing I can\u2019t do right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

He finds himself in a cinematic no-man\u2019s land. Hollywood studios look only for blockbusters, while the demise of art-house cinemas makes investors reluctant to finance independent films. The last half-dozen films he made cost between $4m and $8m, he says. \u201cNowadays, [backers] want it to cost $500,000 to $1m. I can\u2019t do that because I have four employees. I can\u2019t work for nothing for two years. I\u2019ve done that. I can\u2019t be faux underground.\u201d<\/p>\n

A planned Christmas film, Fruitcake<\/i>, was shelved in 2009 when the production company folded. Waters still hopes to make the film. The plot – boy runs away when he\u2019s caught shoplifting, meets runaway girl raised by gay men who\u2019s searching for her birth mother – \u201cwould be incredibly commercial\u201d, he says, straight-faced.<\/p>\n

US censors gave A Dirty Shame<\/i>, Waters\u2019 last film, an NC-17 rating in 2004, classing it with adult films and severely limiting its commercial prospects. Waters is still fuming: \u201cDumbbell censors are easy. You use their quotes in the ad. Liberal censors are much harder to fight,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Television now offers more creative freedom than film, Waters argues. \u201cThere\u2019s certainly worse taste on television than I ever did. People have seen everything today \u2026 At the same time, I think young people are still having fun. I never think my time was better. I think they\u2019re having the same amount of fun because it\u2019s something new to them. They\u2019re down at the Stop the Wall Street thing, which is, to me, hilarious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long before Occupy Wall Street<\/a>, Waters was fond of protesting. \u201cRiots are fun. I hate to say that, but in the Sixties I went to all of them. I was a Yippie. I was a Weathermen hag.\u201d One of his youthful protests was a \u201cBurn the Bank of America\u201d rally, but now he banks with his former target. \u201cI recognise the irony of it,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

He now believes in capitalism, he says, \u201cbecause the more success I have, the more people I have to hire,\u201d and he is embarrassed to think that he marched against the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (\u201cNow when I look at it, it\u2019s the most gorgeous architecture\u201d). Will the counterculture win, I ask? \u201cCounterculture won some things a long time ago. Counterculture\u2019s in control. I\u2019m the insider. I\u2019m the establishment. I\u2019m not struggling,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n

For Waters, culture has always been tied up with music, and I ask what he is listening to these days. He puts on a pair of black-framed glasses and goes to his desk, handing me CDs from one of several large stacks: Beach House, a Baltimore indie band; Die Antwoord, a self-described \u201cfuturistic rap-rave crew\u201d from South Africa; and Duffy, the soulful Welsh singer-songwriter. Waters himself has released an eclectic compilation of Christmas songs as well as a Valentine\u2019s collection called A Date with John Waters<\/i>, but says another album looks unlikely as there are few record stores left in which to promote it. He still prefers to go to record shops and cinemas rather than streaming music and films at home. \u201cI\u2019m an old person,\u201d he shrugs.<\/p>\n

If he were starting out now, would he make YouTube videos? \u201cNo, because I don\u2019t want to run an ad agency,\u201d he replies. The video for \u201cThe Creep\u201d, seen more than 45 million times, \u201cwas good for my street cred\u201d but made him little money, \u201cand if you make something on YouTube that becomes a huge hit, you get offered a job at an advertising agency, not to be a film director.\u201d<\/p>\n

Television, however, appeals to the man who describes The Wire<\/i> as the best thing on TV since Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/i> (which ran on CBS from 1986 to 1990). A TV Christmas special remains an ambition for Waters: \u201cIt would be funny, but it would pay tribute to [the genre] and do it in a new way, like Lil Wayne singing \u2018Little Town of Bethlehem\u2019,\u201d he muses. \u201cI could make it au courant<\/i>, and at the same way, respect the traditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is time for the photographers to do their work, but Waters has not finished his show. \u201cI just got some art through,\u201d he says, gleefully handing me a limited edition glass ashtray with the words \u201cWalden Pond\u201d at the bottom. Next comes a crucifix-shaped lighter, then he takes us upstairs to see a new acquisition. He points down, near the skirting board, and I see that what I thought was an electrical socket is a miniature trompe l\u2019oeil<\/i> painting by Douglas Padgett. Back downstairs, as he poses in front of a faux-marble bust he \u201cfound in the trash\u201d, he draws my attention to a collection of pewter architectural models called Buildings of Disaster, including the tunnel where Princess Diana crashed, the motel where Martin Luther King was shot and the Twin Towers.<\/p>\n

As we prepare to leave, Waters says the Polaroid that he took of us will be archived with his films when he dies, in the same place as the works of Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood. It sounds a little like the communists who arranged to be buried near Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, I remark. \u201cOh, I\u2019ve already bought my grave plot. It\u2019s in the same graveyard as Divine. We all bought them there. Mink [Stole, the actress who appears in all his feature films], Dennis Dermody [the film critic], Pat Moran [his best friend in casting]. It\u2019s like Disgraceland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will it be a lavish headstone? \u201cNo. I like Pasolini\u2019s; he had just his name and the date. He\u2019s my mentor in gravestones,\u201d Waters laughs. Tasteful, then? \u201cYes, I think gravestones should be quite simple.\u201d Some jokes, he adds, just don\u2019t age well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As usual, there\u2019s a bit of press here and there in the build-up to John Waters visit to London to do his Christmas show at Royal Festival Hall next week. (I\u2019ve had the tickets for months already.) This article in the Financial Times, of all places, is one of the better I\u2019ve read lately \u2014 … Continue reading “Filthy Christmas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultracultural"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2707"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74557,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions\/74557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}