White Trash Art: ennui

Left in a box for 10 years, sold at a garage sale. Left in a box for 10 years, sold on Ebay. Left in a box for 10 years, posted in a blog...

So several years ago I had this brilliant idea to start a greeting card company that featured awkward photos I bought in lots on Ebay and added smart-assed and ironic captions to. Like so many of my other super-awesome ideas, I didn't do any of the work and didn't fulfill my lifelong dream to be a thousandaire from my totally cool hip company that only caters to super-geniuses and creative megaminds. So, I didn't get my artist's loft in Soho that was one big giant room, littered with massive half-finished canvases and featuring some rad ass urban view like the posterior of a incandescently lit up advertising sign for Pall Malls. Alas.

They are labeled "7-30-77 Wedding Susan Beuder Ray Olson Trinity Lutheran Church Miriner (?) - Reception Church Basement."

If only I had dreamed up Awkward Family Photos at that point, I'd have been a thousandaire at least 2 times over. I hope they made it, Susan and Ray...

"The Great Dancer"

12x16 acrylic,ink on vellum

Born into a gilded fairy tale of high society royalty akin to what F. Scott Fitzgerald spun into "The Great Gatsby", pretty little Edie had a successful attorney father and a beautiful socialite mother who's dowry was plucked from the ample fortunes of the Bouvier empire. Edie chirped and charmed her way through childhood with dance and French lessons from the finest schools in NYC. Beautiful teenage fashion model Edie was a much sought after piece of ass among uber rich titans of industry: her dance card was cluttered with names like Joe Kennedy Jr., Howard Hughes, J. Paul Getty, and later the married Secretary of the Interior Julius Albert Krug.

Back home, "Big" Edie Beale was having troubles. She pursued a singing career, and had a questionable relationship with her piano accompanist. Her wealthy husband hit the bricks, leaving Big Edie behind in the summer cottage for a new wife and a Mexican divorce. The Bouvier family money had been absconded with by Edie's brother, a dirty drunken and abusive bastard nicknamed "Black Jack". Black Jack Bouvier, notably, was the father of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - who, along with her sister Lee, ended up with the lion's share of the family trust. Big Edie's health began to fail. Little Edie moved into the Grey Gardens summer cottage in the Hamptons to be with her mother.

Little Edie suffered from alopecia and her hair began falling out in clumps at some point. When she left NYC at age 35 she was unmarried, a failed actress, bald, publicly screwing a married old man, and likely suffering from major psychiatric problems (a relative said that he witnessed her climb a tree and set her remaining hair ablaze). She would not be invited to many cotillions from now on.

The two Edies lived in near isolation among their former stinking rich peers. For thirty years the house crumbled around them as they sold off pieces of jewelry to stay alive. Legions of cats and raccoons joined the family and had the run of the house. Little Edie dreamed up choreographed routines and pieced together costumes for grand floor shows from her imagination by picking through old clothes in the attic. She pirouetted and tap danced around piles of cat shit and rotting garbage as her mother laid on a mattress upstairs - living on canned pate and pints of ice cream - singing along to her old records and dreaming of lovers past.

By the mid 1970's the neighbors had enough of the collapsing hovel up the block. Out of the kindness of her heart Jackie O swept in to have the home brought up to code and avoid having her aunt and cousin embarrass her any further by becoming homeless. Likely much to the former first lady's chagrin, the whole kerfuffle brought enough attention to the two Edies that a documentary crew saw the opportunity to film the train wreck that their life had become. The two aging beauties were paid a small amount of money to be filmed in their "cleaned up" home for a few months. Raccoons picked up where they left off, deconstructing an entire wall during the course of filming. A cat was filmed taking a shit next to a huge commissioned oil portrait of Big Edie in her charmed youth. A camera swept past Big Edie's feet, highlighting a horror show of long yellow old person toenails set against a mattress blackened with filth and piles of animal diarrhea within inches of the old woman. The two argued and reminisced, planning birthday parties and impromptu recitals in these surroundings, oblivious to the squalor.

With the release of "Grey Gardens", Little Edie got the big break she had been after for 35 years. The film is mesmerizing. As Little Edie prances and coquettishly flirts with the film makers, one can draw direct correlations of her theatrical every day musings to both "Sunset Boulevard" and "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?" Oddly enough, it's hard to decide if the Edies are truly absolutely fucking koo koo, or just denied any sort of tangible survival skills by their privileged upbringing.

Little Edie's signature 'do-rags, constructed of towels or old sweaters to cover her chrome dome, have become a favorite look for some of Hollywood's more famous wealthy ragamuffins (think the Olson twins, Nicole Richie, or any other anorexic pseudo-star you've seen donning a kerchief on her head in the last 3 years). She has become a rock-solid American cult icon.

Big Edie died not long after the film as released. She reportedly received none of her promised fee for participating. Little Edie died in 2002, still being cared for through the kindness of others - and with a few loyal "fans".