Megachurch Foreclosure Party

A Sunday evening poetry reading in Los Angeles turned House of the Rising Sun

I heard the downtown LA venue now hosting an exhibition called What A Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, was previously owned by Justin Bieber, who had purchased it to house a megachurch he was on the brink of opening before it all fell through the trapdoor that leads from Epstein’s island house to the sea. And there is such a door, and you can observe a photograph of it yourself in the files or just below this passage. And I’ll never apologize for logical digressions that help bend the air trapped in narrowing whistles. Blow and adrenochrome into the ocean. And it’s rumored that Disney cruises stopped on Epstein island for children’s snorkeling trips. Marina Abramovic is featured in the exhibition, among others. What a wonderful world. When asked to read there, I noted the tender password or decoy poem in the exhibition’s title and that the ask came from a familiar and trusted curator friend who runs the series Hard to Read, and said yes. When I decided to read from my ongoing series on the travesties of child stardom, it was before I learned of the Bieber connection. There isn’t enough church in the universe to disentangle the souls of the victims of Hollywood Babylon (all of us with souls on earth to varying degrees) from their abusers or overlords. And the etymology of “church” suggests house of the lord, and you are in their house worshiping backwards more often than you realize.

Now adjacent the ‘luxury’ apartment complex, APEX, this run-down Venetian style Variety Arts Theater turned vessel for artworld wonder, was swarming with eager bodies, thousands maybe, over the course of the Sunday event, and reading among them, with them, in a room draped in red velvet, felt seance-like, and not unlike having entered a house of worship, sensations intensified by the fact that the date was February 15th, the anniversary of the death of my father, which has become a fainter and fainter annual agony over the years in that I rarely have time to stop for death the way death kindly stopped for him. So I read and played poem fragments in audio-color in silent dedication until we could imagine being children again, auditioning for talent agents or our own parents’ affections, for school admissions officers, for teams and camps and cliques and groomers and handlers and self-respect not withstanding if we made it, there were consequences, increased expectations. You could end up like Bieber, in a persistent and persistently mocked or trivialized shambles of talent and fame, needing Jesus to help clean your owners’ money and being usurped by pagan poetry.

I reveled in reading about the plight of those like him in the town the invents them. I played seven unrepentant minutes from my digital notebook and made us listen in silence in the dim red room as if parishioners in a broken church. Church is such a vulgar-toned word already when you really hear it; it sounds sinister and like a bad gargling noise coming from a weary body before it sputters out. Include the “mega” prefix and you get an impoverishment of vulgarity so effective at its defects, I had no choice but to announce them. The sound element contained a litany against Ellen DeGeneres that boasts “a child star hates to her coming, a viral kid hates to see her coming.” I was at the nail salon a few weeks ago and a woman in the industry divulged to me the casual invites she’s received to orgies hosted by Ellen. You hardly have to ask if you carry the right frequency in this town, the secrets are always seeking you, lucid and eager to be lapis and laughed with, and you’re always there. My church is one of close listening, an acuity that feels like reading with the ears, confrontational, intimate, and inevitable overhearing of what can never be unheard or silenced once it has your brief attention. So I gave Justin a piece of his wish before performing any of my own language, a found sermon. It seemed effective, ascetic, like music in my body and parts of my dad singing and apologizing for his role in the cycle I now write about like it’s abstract or objectifiable when it’s just my experience ruining different subjects who I try to defend since they can no longer defend themselves coherently. A nation of false prodigies sold into soft prostitution.

Some friends were in the audience and we wandered the ghost theater in a stupor together for an hour or so, before settling in a basement bar where the crowd smoked indoors while we sipped Evian and snacked on olives and bubble gum. Just around the corner, someone cosplayed a ravaged club heaux cosplaying a hooker. All around the building Louis Armstrong was singing in delight and dismay, threatening demolition of the hype beast spirit with his vibrato. We discussed grief, decanted some. Two guys who seemed giddy and disoriented, one carrying a full bottle of wine, walked up to us to compliment the reading and offer notes: that was a lot of audio though, before giving us all daps and stumbling off, the only review I need — exuberant, honest, proof that my desire to withhold in the service of close listening, my intention that evening, had succeeded just enough. They didn’t want to listen, but they didn’t leave. Disclosure kindly stopped for them. And moved on. When you’re invited to join a social experiment, don’t be too gentle. A sign for a Miley Cyrus show called “End of the World” adorned the wall just behind us, an Alec Baldwin doppelganger (mostly in the hair gel) I’d been noting aloud as such for a while looked over and smiled like he’d heard me and approved. A whimsical, chimeric smile. That phantom thread unraveling. And we dispersed like sweet embers, into the body of fire horse.

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Here’s the audio I played for the occasion. A wave of lightly edited notebook selections Ellen crests into all gaudy and guilty. The wine-drunk homies never lied, it’s a lot of audio.