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: Outside Counsel

By Bill Altreuter

I've always wanted to go to a party like this, even though it sounds absolutely horrible:

"The space was probably a hundred feet on either side - 'major real estate, of course', as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved using Vanity Fair-ish clichés.) She and Abramovic smothered one another in hugs and kisses. I meanwhile blanched in fright: I?d just caught sight of two of the other guests, who, alarmingly enough, turned out to be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed (O great rock god of my twenties) stood morosely by himself, humming, doing little dance steps and playing air guitar. Periodically he glared at everyone -  including me - with apparent hatred. Anderson - elfin spikes of hair perfectly gelled - was chatting up an Italian man from the Guggenheim, the man?s trophy wife and the freakish-looking lead singer from the cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner. The last-mentioned had just come back from performing at the Pompidou Centre and wore booties and tights, a psychedelic shawl and a thing like a codpiece. He could have played Osric in a postmodern Hamlet. He was accompanied by a bruiser with a goatee - roadie or boyfriend, it wasn?t clear - and emitted girlish little squeals when our first course, a foul-smelling durian fruit just shipped in from Malaysia, made its way to the table."

It's from an essay by Terry Castle about Susan Sontag and the whole thing is worth reading. I'm on record as not getting Sontag.  No doubt she was a great genius, but the point of what she writes about ultimately seems to be hermetically sealed in her own mind. She's not trying to make a persuasive case about anything except, possibly, the superiority of her own aesthetics.

(Via Metafilter there is an alternate account of the party here.)

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on December 13, 2010 (boomark / email).