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John Waters still wants to shock, but affluence is good, too

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 13, 2008 - I felt John Waters' moustache.

But more about that later.

Late on the night of Saturday, Oct. 11, in front of the Tivoli Theater in the Delmar Loop. the usual crowd - young, tattooed, pierced and punked out - lined up for the weekly midnight show. At the entrance was a large poster for that night's movie, "Pink Flamingos." The poster featured a tall, bulky transvestite, her body bulging out of a garish full-length dress, her face made up in a white fright mask, a pistol in her hand, her eyes like bullets.

The poster was emblazoned with a quote from a 1972 issue of Daily Variety:

"One of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made."

On the same evening, 12.4 miles to the southwest of the funky Loop, in bosky Sunset Hills, a well-dressed crowd of patrons of the arts had donated a minimum of $150 apiece to Laumeier Sculpture Park to mingle and munch macaroni and cheese with the director of one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made. John Waters, tall, very thin, was dressed in a black suit with gray storm clouds hovering around the shoulders. A moustache as slim as the tail of a rat slashed across his face in a thin black line extending past the corners of his mouth.

With an exuberant smile, he told the assembly that he had toured St. Louis that day and had found it surprisingly like his hometown of Baltimore. That was a compliment.

"And I love this park," he announced. "I want to make a horror movie here. The sculpture kills you in the woods."

The occasion was the opening of a show of 65 art works - sculpture, photographs and collages - by Waters in the gallery at the park, which is off Rott Road west of Lindbergh. The pieces as a whole are unpretentious and cheerfully sordid, and they reflect the same themes as Waters' movies - among them the ways in which celebrity and tackiness often go hand in hand. He is also fascinated with the way we celebrate (celebritize, if you will) aberrant (and abhorrent) behavior.

That theme is illustrated by the silicone sculpture called "Playdate," which features Charles Manson and Michael Jackson as great big toddlers on the verge of committing some act - the mind reels at the possibilities - upon one another.

"Creepy, isn't it?" asked Waters, who took me on a tour of the exhibition before the opening. "Dark humor comes from the things we fear."

As we are walking through the exhibition, I told Waters that "Pink Flamingos" was the midnight show at the Tivoli, and he said, "Did you know that 'Pink Flamingos' plays uncut on television, on the Sundance Channel? Shocking!" He grinned.

It is, at least, surprising that the movie is on television. Full of crime and perversity, it stars the corpulent transvestite Divine as the winner of a contest to show who is "the filthiest person alive." She wins, in part, by snacking on dog feces.

"At least it's still illegal in England." He smiled, and you could almost - almost, but not quite - hear him add, "And thank God for that." An infant terrible has to be very careful about becoming too much of an infant adorable.

Beginning in the late 1960s, John Waters rose in approximately 20 years from being a suspicious-looking guy hauling movies like "Mondo Trasho" and "Multiple Maniacs" around the country in a suitcase, showing them at cafes and on college campuses, to being a suspicious-looking guy hosting press junkets for movies like "Hairspray" and "Cry-Baby," movies that played in mainstream theaters and that would inspire Broadway musicals. Waters has lived the American dream as it warps for artists - it took him roughly a generation to go from cultural outcast to a minor hero of the art-world establishment, with works that sell for tens of thousands of dollars and can be found in the homes of collectors down the hall from the Warhols.

At 62, Waters seemed at ease in the transition. He likes being affluent, and becoming the kind of icon of pop culture who is asked to participate in a promotional campaign by a hip clothing chain. (Gap asked artists to come up with ideas to get out the vote, and John Waters' contribution is a star-spangled red-white-and-blue campaign button that reads, "Vote Twice.")

As we toured Laumeier's galleries, Waters took particular delight in playing with the interactive pieces: an Etch-a-Sketch self-portrait with an attached magnet that can fill in and expose his bald spot, a colorful collage of the numbers "7734" that he spins upside down to reveal the word "hell."

"I went to Catholic school," he said. "Writing that number out and then turning it upside down was the first dirty joke I ever learned. I was 6."

On the whole, Waters' art is confrontational but not mean-spirited. It can be potent. For example, one piece simply shows the titles of two movies: "Dr. Doolittle 2" and "A Knight's Tale."

He explained, "Those are two totally undistinguished movies that nobody really likes and nobody really dislikes. But your perspective changes when you realize that those were the in-flight movies scheduled to be shown on 9/11."

Waters describes himself as a conceptual artist. There is little craftsmanship in many of his photographs, which are simply pictures taken off a television screen. One, "Lana Backwards," is a series of shots of Lana Turner leaving a room in various movies. The rear view of the siren of the screen half a century ago was obligatory wish-gratification for heterosexual male viewers, gratification movie directors made certain to provide.

Another is aptly titled "Liz Taylor's Hair and Feet." What, he asked, does it say about us that we see only those parts of the actress, and yet we recognize her?

"I'm trying to get you to see movies differently," he explained. "You watch movies. You see art."

His long, thin moustache, which he said he "stole from Little Richard" -- presumably he meant the idea, not the actual thing -- is conceptual too, at least in part.

As he led me through the exhibition of his assaults on all things clean and pure and organic, I kept looking at the moustache. I wasn't sure if it was real. It looked just too tackily perfect, too well-defined. Finally, I asked him. "Do you actually have a moustache, or is it all grease pencil?"

"Not at all," he said, seemingly surprised that anyone would accuse him of total artifice. "There's a moustache. Want to feel it?"

We were clearly in the middle of an impromptu performance piece, and I wasn't going to succumb to failure of nerve. "Sure," I said, not sure at all. Hesitantly, I ran my finger along Waters' upper lip. The moustache was mostly eyebrow pencil, but my finger also bumped over tiny tufts of hair.

There was something there. Not as much as there might appear to be. But there definitely was something there.

Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, has also been a long-time reviewer of movies.

Harper Barnes
Harper Barnes' most recent book is Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement