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The News Tribune, WA
May 23 2005
Elegantly `wasted'
JEN GRAVES; The News Tribune
Photo: AARON HARRIS/AP FILE
Eric Bogosian talks about his 2002 film `Arafat' at the Toronto
International Film Festival. At left is actor Elias Koteas. Bogosian
got his start on the New York punk scene.
Photo: AARON HARRIS/AP FILE
Eric Bogosian talks about his 2002 film `Arafat' at the Toronto
International Film Festival. At left is actor Elias Koteas. Bogosian
got his start on the New York punk scene.
Eric Bogosian's most recent stage role was Satan, and this did not
surprise anybody.
He wore a Gucci suit and testified in Judas' defense in this spring's
off-Broadway courtroom play `The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,' in
keeping with the caustic, raunchy and dangerous characters he's
personified in writings and performances since the 1970s, when he
rose to prominence as a hero in New York's punk clubs.
No one would ask the 52-year-old Bogosian to play a teetotaling man
happily married for 25 years, who spends evenings cooking, tending a
vegetable garden and asking his teenage sons about math class.
It would probably destroy his career if everyone knew that's who he
really is.
`I don't even know why I'm friends with him - he's that dull,' joked
Warren Leight, Bogosian's friend of 25 years and a playwright and
screenwriter for `Law & Order: Criminal Intent.'
Leight suspects the bad boy of performance art to be a secret
Prevention magazine reader who has far more in common with the people
who hate his work than anyone would imagine.
`We'll go to Knicks games or Yankee games and I'm shouting
obscenities, and he's worried people are going to think ill of him,'
Leight said. `He's a mensch. This is a guy you'd be happy to have as
your next-door neighbor grilling for you on the Fourth of July.'
Bogosian, who on Tuesday will read from his new book `Wasted Beauty'
at University Book Store in Seattle, cops to the gulf between his art
and his life.
In the book, a middle-aged doctor has an affair with a brutally
exploited, heroin-addicted model as his fitful momentary escape from
his longtime marriage and kids.
`I feel bad for my kids, because the day they read this book, they're
going to see the negative sides - the days I was thinking, what if I
walked out the door and never came back?' Bogosian said in a phone
interview that interrupted his work on a graphic novel. In the
background, the blasting sounds of progressive-rock band Rush filled
his New York office.
`I guess it's human nature to say, `What if I just tipped the whole
thing over and walked away?'' he said. `I feel so blessed that I have
my wife and my children, but I wonder what it would be like to just
get an apartment in St. Louis under an assumed name, and deal crack.'
He gets out the hard living in his art.
`Talk Radio' first brought him to national attention as the shock
jock Barry Champlain. Oliver Stone directed the 1988 movie, but
Bogosian wrote it, based on the true story of an acid-tongued Denver
radio host gunned down by neo-Nazis.
His Obie-winning one-man shows include the growling titles `Pounding
Nails in the Floor with My Forehead' and `Drinking in America.' His
first novel, 2000's `Mall,' was
the story of a speed freak on a rampage in a shopping center. His
explicit short-story series `31 Ejaculations' appeared on Salon, and
in 2003 he played the thug mobster Eddie Nash in the Val Kilmer movie
`Wonderland' about the 1981 murders involving porn star John Holmes.
He also wrote the cynical play `SubUrbia,' which became a 1996
Richard Linklater movie.
Testoserone Addicts
Bogosian himself was a fugitive from suburbia. He left Woburn, Mass.,
to study theater at Oberlin College, after which he high-tailed it to
New York.
Most of his characters are testosterone addicts, and almost all his
fan mail comes from college guys trying to impress him, said Amanda
Moran.
`They'd write what they thought would appeal to Eric, and we were
always like, `Oh, god, look at this,'' said Moran, who was Bogosian's
assistant from 1994 to 2002 and remains his friend. `But the people
he'd be responsive to are people who have been doing his work in
Poland.'
Bogosian is an organized and gracious anomaly in a line of work that
rewards chaotic behavior, she said.
`He'd be doing four shows at (the New York venue) the Knitting
Factory, and everyone is drunk and throwing beer bottles and women
are sneaking into the dressing rooms, and then he's able to turn
around and broker a heavy deal for himself writing a pilot,' Moran
said.
Bogosian's most recent brush with the law was a simple road rage
incident around 10 years ago when, fed up with unmoving traffic, he
jammed his car into the one ahead of him in the Holland Tunnel. He
apologized to the other driver, and they worked it out.
But his dark personas are not entirely an act. Before marrying
theater director Jo Bonney in 1980, his life was full of fighting,
drinking and drugging, glimpses of which mutate into panoramic views
in his creations.
`He takes basic impulses from basic situations and spins them out,
and says, if you took this thing you really want, and took it to the
nth degree, this is where you'd end up,' said Jill Rachel Morris, a
Touchstone/Disney executive who first booked Bogosian in a one-man
show for the regional theater where she worked in Baltimore.
`Buried in all that, if people are really paying attention, is a
great deal of compassion,' she said. `He has real compassion about
what people do to get by, how people get through the night. He's
talking about people you feel you know, and you feel and fear you
are.'
In `Wasted Beauty,' the model Reba is based on Gia Carangi, a cover
girl who shot to the top of the profession, became a heroin addict
and, in 1986, was one of the first American women known to die of
complications from AIDS.
`This is a theme I've wanted to explore - when beauty is a problem,'
Bogosian said.
Men heap abuse on Reba, the type of beautiful woman who attracts a
particularly ferocious brand of misogyny, Bogosian said. (As an
Armenian American whom critics called the perfect `oily, greasy'
choice for Satan in `Judas Iscariot,' Bogosian said he is accustomed
to being judged by appearances, too.)
Crudeness with a purpose
Since watching the World Trade Center explode in close view out a
window in his office building, Bogosian has retreated a little from
political crusading.
`I really didn't want to hear my own yapping mouth in the middle of
all this,' he said.
He might yet do an angry one-man show targeting the Bush
administration. The shows are not monologues: Bogosian, a master of
impressions, assumes a lineup of often unseemly characters.
But he sees his crudeness as a sharp object pointed at deception and
social injustice, not a tactic for shock's sake.
Bogosian's depth and commitment have seen him through the transition
to elder statesman of performance art, a position similar to elder
statesman of anarchists, said his friend Leight.
Going straight all those years ago has delivered him a full midlife,
Bogosian said.
He works in his office days, then goes home to his family the nights
he's not performing.
`Somewhere along the line, I came to understand that you can't be in
two places at the same time, and it's fine to give lip service to
this notion of loving people around you and having them in your life,
but you have to actually do it if you want it to happen,' he said.
Morris, the executive, remembers Bogosian's phone call when her
father died. He urged her to come over so that he and Bonney could
care for her.
`I have no doubt in my mind that in any dark night of the soul, Eric
would show up,' Morris said.
And he would know the territory.
WHAT: Eric Bogosian reads from `Wasted Beauty'
WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday
WHERE: University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., Seattle
ADMISSION: Free
INFORMATION: www.bookstore.washington.edu, 206-634-3400
http://www.thenewstribune.com/ae/story/4888524p-4481802c.html
May 23 2005
Elegantly `wasted'
JEN GRAVES; The News Tribune
Photo: AARON HARRIS/AP FILE
Eric Bogosian talks about his 2002 film `Arafat' at the Toronto
International Film Festival. At left is actor Elias Koteas. Bogosian
got his start on the New York punk scene.
Photo: AARON HARRIS/AP FILE
Eric Bogosian talks about his 2002 film `Arafat' at the Toronto
International Film Festival. At left is actor Elias Koteas. Bogosian
got his start on the New York punk scene.
Eric Bogosian's most recent stage role was Satan, and this did not
surprise anybody.
He wore a Gucci suit and testified in Judas' defense in this spring's
off-Broadway courtroom play `The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,' in
keeping with the caustic, raunchy and dangerous characters he's
personified in writings and performances since the 1970s, when he
rose to prominence as a hero in New York's punk clubs.
No one would ask the 52-year-old Bogosian to play a teetotaling man
happily married for 25 years, who spends evenings cooking, tending a
vegetable garden and asking his teenage sons about math class.
It would probably destroy his career if everyone knew that's who he
really is.
`I don't even know why I'm friends with him - he's that dull,' joked
Warren Leight, Bogosian's friend of 25 years and a playwright and
screenwriter for `Law & Order: Criminal Intent.'
Leight suspects the bad boy of performance art to be a secret
Prevention magazine reader who has far more in common with the people
who hate his work than anyone would imagine.
`We'll go to Knicks games or Yankee games and I'm shouting
obscenities, and he's worried people are going to think ill of him,'
Leight said. `He's a mensch. This is a guy you'd be happy to have as
your next-door neighbor grilling for you on the Fourth of July.'
Bogosian, who on Tuesday will read from his new book `Wasted Beauty'
at University Book Store in Seattle, cops to the gulf between his art
and his life.
In the book, a middle-aged doctor has an affair with a brutally
exploited, heroin-addicted model as his fitful momentary escape from
his longtime marriage and kids.
`I feel bad for my kids, because the day they read this book, they're
going to see the negative sides - the days I was thinking, what if I
walked out the door and never came back?' Bogosian said in a phone
interview that interrupted his work on a graphic novel. In the
background, the blasting sounds of progressive-rock band Rush filled
his New York office.
`I guess it's human nature to say, `What if I just tipped the whole
thing over and walked away?'' he said. `I feel so blessed that I have
my wife and my children, but I wonder what it would be like to just
get an apartment in St. Louis under an assumed name, and deal crack.'
He gets out the hard living in his art.
`Talk Radio' first brought him to national attention as the shock
jock Barry Champlain. Oliver Stone directed the 1988 movie, but
Bogosian wrote it, based on the true story of an acid-tongued Denver
radio host gunned down by neo-Nazis.
His Obie-winning one-man shows include the growling titles `Pounding
Nails in the Floor with My Forehead' and `Drinking in America.' His
first novel, 2000's `Mall,' was
the story of a speed freak on a rampage in a shopping center. His
explicit short-story series `31 Ejaculations' appeared on Salon, and
in 2003 he played the thug mobster Eddie Nash in the Val Kilmer movie
`Wonderland' about the 1981 murders involving porn star John Holmes.
He also wrote the cynical play `SubUrbia,' which became a 1996
Richard Linklater movie.
Testoserone Addicts
Bogosian himself was a fugitive from suburbia. He left Woburn, Mass.,
to study theater at Oberlin College, after which he high-tailed it to
New York.
Most of his characters are testosterone addicts, and almost all his
fan mail comes from college guys trying to impress him, said Amanda
Moran.
`They'd write what they thought would appeal to Eric, and we were
always like, `Oh, god, look at this,'' said Moran, who was Bogosian's
assistant from 1994 to 2002 and remains his friend. `But the people
he'd be responsive to are people who have been doing his work in
Poland.'
Bogosian is an organized and gracious anomaly in a line of work that
rewards chaotic behavior, she said.
`He'd be doing four shows at (the New York venue) the Knitting
Factory, and everyone is drunk and throwing beer bottles and women
are sneaking into the dressing rooms, and then he's able to turn
around and broker a heavy deal for himself writing a pilot,' Moran
said.
Bogosian's most recent brush with the law was a simple road rage
incident around 10 years ago when, fed up with unmoving traffic, he
jammed his car into the one ahead of him in the Holland Tunnel. He
apologized to the other driver, and they worked it out.
But his dark personas are not entirely an act. Before marrying
theater director Jo Bonney in 1980, his life was full of fighting,
drinking and drugging, glimpses of which mutate into panoramic views
in his creations.
`He takes basic impulses from basic situations and spins them out,
and says, if you took this thing you really want, and took it to the
nth degree, this is where you'd end up,' said Jill Rachel Morris, a
Touchstone/Disney executive who first booked Bogosian in a one-man
show for the regional theater where she worked in Baltimore.
`Buried in all that, if people are really paying attention, is a
great deal of compassion,' she said. `He has real compassion about
what people do to get by, how people get through the night. He's
talking about people you feel you know, and you feel and fear you
are.'
In `Wasted Beauty,' the model Reba is based on Gia Carangi, a cover
girl who shot to the top of the profession, became a heroin addict
and, in 1986, was one of the first American women known to die of
complications from AIDS.
`This is a theme I've wanted to explore - when beauty is a problem,'
Bogosian said.
Men heap abuse on Reba, the type of beautiful woman who attracts a
particularly ferocious brand of misogyny, Bogosian said. (As an
Armenian American whom critics called the perfect `oily, greasy'
choice for Satan in `Judas Iscariot,' Bogosian said he is accustomed
to being judged by appearances, too.)
Crudeness with a purpose
Since watching the World Trade Center explode in close view out a
window in his office building, Bogosian has retreated a little from
political crusading.
`I really didn't want to hear my own yapping mouth in the middle of
all this,' he said.
He might yet do an angry one-man show targeting the Bush
administration. The shows are not monologues: Bogosian, a master of
impressions, assumes a lineup of often unseemly characters.
But he sees his crudeness as a sharp object pointed at deception and
social injustice, not a tactic for shock's sake.
Bogosian's depth and commitment have seen him through the transition
to elder statesman of performance art, a position similar to elder
statesman of anarchists, said his friend Leight.
Going straight all those years ago has delivered him a full midlife,
Bogosian said.
He works in his office days, then goes home to his family the nights
he's not performing.
`Somewhere along the line, I came to understand that you can't be in
two places at the same time, and it's fine to give lip service to
this notion of loving people around you and having them in your life,
but you have to actually do it if you want it to happen,' he said.
Morris, the executive, remembers Bogosian's phone call when her
father died. He urged her to come over so that he and Bonney could
care for her.
`I have no doubt in my mind that in any dark night of the soul, Eric
would show up,' Morris said.
And he would know the territory.
WHAT: Eric Bogosian reads from `Wasted Beauty'
WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday
WHERE: University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., Seattle
ADMISSION: Free
INFORMATION: www.bookstore.washington.edu, 206-634-3400
http://www.thenewstribune.com/ae/story/4888524p-4481802c.html