Liza

David Gest got his ass kicked by Liza Minelli. Damn! That is fucked up yo. That Sally Bowles popped you upside the head so many times!!!!! “WILKOMMEN BIENVENUE WELCOOMMMMMMMEEE!!!!! Smack!!! Smack!!!” Obviously the marriage was a weird one from the start, having a strange publicity stunt feel to it, like Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson’s bizarre tryst in the early ’90s. For all of their nuptial nuzzling, every kiss and tickle was recorded in practically pornographic detail, there was also a lot of unsettling unsexiness built into the couple’s dynamic as a public persona, as most tried and tried not to picture the Gest-Minellis as a consummated union.

Not to say that there is anything unattractive about either of them really, it is just the sum of their parts don’t seem to add up to a heterosexual number. Gest seems gay from the get go, he has a wide receiver feel about him. Liza is Liza, as will be always. She is elemental. Anything she does is a surprise to no one. She has a kind of celebrity that is almost bulletproof. Few are capable of it, and there is no sure formula to get yourself to that point, besides having a rock hard fan base, truly bizarre personal habits/points of view/fits of rage/marriages and re-marriages, with spousal abuse thrown in for good measure/unforeseen and foreseen tragedy, inarticulate but striking roles in gay culture, a legacy of drug use, possibly not only your own but growing like a vine all along your family tree, custody battles of not just your own children but of yourself, incredible, undeniable talent, a tendency to drop in and out of show business for years at a time yet remain a star always.

Eminem is sort of that way, he is untouchable, as is Courtney Love, who is forever compelling and beautiful, yet feared for her unpredictability. But they are incredibly creative and prolific artists, and people love their work as well as use their personae as iconic symbols of the tortured artist. However, Liza is the only one who can really say that she has all these characteristics in spades, and she is second generation of this type of showbiz miracle. She is the kryptonite to scandal, because we would expect nothing less of her. Her family is the cornerstone of diva insanity to which no one can compare.

I consider iconic insanity the very best kind of crazy. It is what my dreams are made of. That kind of fame is real, legitimate, profound, because it is of the individual who is true to their purpose, who uses the life they have been given just as the talent that they fairly or unfairly possess, with artful, imprecise abandon, wild life, not as in preserves and game licensed, but like the Bananarama song, “This is the wild — life. It’s the wild life (WILD LIFE!).” However, these are not the perishable ‘wild child’ archetypes that flit about Hollywood, getting into brawls and insincere lawsuits with other feral youth, unlikely anyone named Colin or Corey. These are the eternal, interminable, untamable, unstoppable – whose publicity firms are working overtime not for damage control but for maximum damage exposure, as they are more exciting not for that which they create, but for what they destroy.

The wildfires raging over California darken the sky and spray ash all over Loz Feliz and remind me of the human drama that is the most exciting show on earth. There are some of us that burn too hotly and threaten to wipe out entire communities with the flame that blazes within our own asbestos hearth, but when we are contained within the eye of the societal lens, we are the brightest of stars.

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