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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - ELBOWS, FLAMING INFANTS, VOMIT

John Waters looks really old. He has practically no hair left and his signature creep-o moustache is hanging on for dear life. He was wearing blue pants with a black pinstriped blazer draped in a red scarf like the total homo he is, and the other night he spoke for over an hour about dead film stars' elbows and burning babies, which is another total homo thing to do. If you're John Waters. This was a preview for his show "Rear Projection," the reception for which is this evening at the

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Marianne Boesky Gallery

. Not many people laughed at the same stuff that I did during the talk, which made me believe that we are indeed soul mates. I'm pretty sure I caught, and held, extreme eye contact from Waters several times--but I always think that about everyone.

One of the best stories or anecdotes or whatever you call those hilarious little things that Waters says, was about his trip to Cannes last year. He and a female friend were commenting on how almost every movie in the festival had a puke scene of some sort and often contained the phrase "personal journey." He went into detail about how his friend was like, "In movies, whenever a female character is traumatized by something, why do they always show her barfing? I've never barfed from being upset!" This all led into a slide show of an art piece that Waters did showing people barfing in movies. The last slide in the series was a close-up of barf, and he went on about how amazingly hard it was to find a close up of just barf, with no people, in a film. I was beaming at this point because I knew exactly what film the barf was from:

Wild at Heart

.

Waters closed the night by telling us that "Contemporary art hates you," and he's glad that it's sort of a snobby, private club that not everyone gets. He said that he pretty much only buys art that makes him upset and that will make his guests feel uncomfortable. Then at one point during this rant he made a noise that sounded like "RRRRrrrrrRRRRR."

KELLY McCLURE

(image courtesy of Marianne Boesky Galley)