Terra Incognita

(Yes you can watch this webonaut on y(ur)t).

#1 It all began (in as much as anything can be said to begin at any particular time) with Desmond Is Amazing. I'm sure his video with Michael Alig, scenester/killer extraordinaire, and Glam Ernie popped up on youtube because I was starting to seriously explore the gender bender craze and not because I was exploring the storied history of The Scene That I Helped Build--because I remember I kept thinking, so surprised, as I delved into, Alig wow, he and I must have had lots of mutual friends. Anyway, this is the video that popped up at that particular time



and this is The Scene That I (And Anyone Ever) Helped, (Or Ever Will Help) Build.



You can see by the ruckus in the comments under the Desmond one that all the fuss wasn't JUST over him being a 'drag kid', but over his being exposed to drug culture by a convicted killer (Alig).

#2 Actually, it is possible, even likely, that the particular video didn't just pop up but rather that I found it searching youtube about Desmond because I read some commenter on some rightwing channel complaining about how he was being raised. In any case, two things about my initial encounter with this video are salient atm.

The first is that reading the comments it was the first time it really hit me that so many of these conservatives really cared, They cared about this kid and insisted on finding out what was going on and they weren't going to let it go; that is to say that because he's a child they felt responsible for him. And I couldn't help but have the utmost respect for them even though the situation with Desmond was just over the edge for me; it wasn't immediately transparently morally unambiguous. After all I Helped Build That Scene.

The second is that after a bit, I realized I might actually know Glam Ernie even if I never knew Alig, but not from The Downtown Scene Of The Late 80s Into 90s. From earlier. But before I get into Ernie, I ought to say some things about the topography of that scene.

#3. The Limelight

The Limelight, the club where Michael Alig reached the apogee, then nadir, of his glory days, is not downtown per se. It's on 20th and Sixth (I say 'is' because the building still stands just as it was and you can't walk by it without thinking of it as the club, and also because the gym facilities housed in it of late had wound up refashioned as Limelight Fitness (according to wiki, though this seems to have closed during lockdown.).

'We', however, were said to get a nosebleed when we went north of 14th Street, and we were, more than even just Lower East Side, Loisaida. So Limelight wasn't downtown, it was midtown, and it wasn't east either. And I just wasn't interested in the concurrently emerging sister scene at the Limelight, although for instance Impala, the lighting designer at the Limelight, was 'one of us'.

I especially wasn't interested because I did my clubbing from the time I was fourteen until I was seventeen and I did it heavy duty, it was a life, and I just never was able to see any nightclub scene as something I wanted to repeat once I got settled into college. BUT if Limelight had been 'in the nabe' I would have gone there once in a blue moon, as I did Pyramid, The Ritz, and other clubs. But it wasn't so I didn't.


But I can't say I was UNaware of the 'Club Kids' scene that Michael Alig was at the hub of and that was apparently so famous, even though I never heard of Club Kids before the 'deep dive' that amazing Desmond/Alig/Ernie video plunged me into that day. 'Club Kids' were essentially the neon people and their pink drinks I wrote about here. 'Our' scene was gritty; the new high gloss people started coming in '87 as more and slicker cafes, restaurants, and yes, clubs, started opening up 'down here'. And there was a lot of crossover but the synthetic space age nature of the newcomers, their futuristic aesthetic simultaneously harking back to 70s disco cum glam was 'a thing' as the Millennials call things. It was very clearly 'a thing' down here.

So, no, I never actually went to the Limelight. And I never formally knew about Club Kids, the epicenter of which you can see paraded about on mainstream tv in the video below, until that day this 'all began'. But I knew. I was aware of them, and often referred to them as 'art school kids' and 'fashionistas'. They all seemed more neo-disco than post-punk to me, and this too when grunge was coming in. Think about that.

4. Glam Ernie

You can glimpse Glam Ernie in the I Feel Pretty section of that last video and when I saw the Desmond is Amazing video I really couldn't tell if Glam Ernie was who I thought he might be. For despite bearing an uncanny resemblance--but it was so long ago-- and sharing the name Ernie, and despite it being obvious that Ernie could have wound up in that life, Glam Ernie's facebook page said he went to FIT (where I had considered going after high school and did take a couple of credit courses at age 38).

But I knew Ernie from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an undergrad student and I was a graduate teaching fellow from 1981 to 83. He was not my student but tbcd on that front; the point atm is that I thought it could be Ernie but I've been fooled too many times by coincidences like this on the Internet because there are just too goddam many people on it. The other thing was I didn't really see why 'my' Ernie would have been running a youtube channel with a convicted murderer let alone have made that particular Desmond video, although I figured he could, but I didn't really know why he would. People do change but...

So I got to know a lot more about Desmond and Michael Alig at that time it 'all began' than about Ernie because ,since I couldn't find anything that showed that it was the same Ernie, I kind of just shrugged him off as a peripheral character. But then last night a Todd Grande video came up about Michael Alig, which I watched and which was how I found out Alig died on Christmas Eve of 2020. That bothered me because it was as though Alig had become embedded in me somehow.

It also made me look again at Glam Ernie and on his facebook page for Father's Day I saw his parents were Mexican, which while I couldn't remember which Latino, I knew he was in fact Latino. Also on a facebook post for his birthday last year, I saw he was three years or so younger than me, which would be about right. So I was really starting to think c'mon you gotta at least ask this guy if he went to the University of Pennsylvania before FIT ffs.

But then when I saw the happy birthday from Annabel, before I even looked at her page and even though her last name's different, I knew I wouldn't have to.

Here is a music video that Ernie--who I share seven facebook friends with (and not a single one from the University of Pennsylvania because I don't have any remaining contacts from those two years of my life)--made with someone I share 36 facebook friends with, in honor of Michael Alig's passing. Caveat: don't turn it off until it turns itself off.

5. And here is why Ernie became the partner on a youtube venture with a convicted killer who'd just been released after 17 years. It doesn't explain why he made that video with a child mimicking taking ketamine in front of a poster on the wall about drugs, but it explains a lot about the rest. The problem, the paradox, is that the more it explains about the rest, the less comprehensible Ernie's participation in the Desmond video is. And the pathos is that it would be so easy for me now to just ask him.

That theoretically it would be so easy. But it isn't. And that is truly pathetic.

5a It is truly pathetic because Ernie and I were members of a little world at the University of Pennsylvia that revolved around a woman named Faiza. She resembled Anook Aimee, was the daughter of the Egyptian ambassador to Belgium and his German wife, married an alcoholic Vietnam vet from Pennsylvania coal country who she met when he was on leave in Cairo, spoke four languages completely fluently and none truly native, wore tons of aquamarine eyeshadow that matched an oversize sweater draped in turn by a Palestinian scarf, was eternally finishing her PhD on Francophone literature, was fifteen years older than me and a hardline Marxist who could never, not for one second, not be an aristocrat, and was very proud that her uncle married into the Egyptian royal family and 'absconded with the royal treasury to finance the socialist revolution'.

She was my best friend for those two years and so a lot of that time for me was Faiza's world. She couldn't not create a salon of all true freaks, expats, and outsiders from the hard left or not, who ever passed through the Department of Romance Languages or the Arab Students Organization and met her criteria. Calling cards were in her blood. The callers had to have a certain flair and/OR be dedicated to her causes. It's difficult to say what the criteria were, but Ernie and Richie and Annabel--who had been her students--met them for whatever reasons, and so there we were together in Faiza's world.

And there he is now. He and Annabel, who last year went together to...

Egypt.

After all these years.

tbcd

We will now take a detour from Glam Ernie, Faiza, and the Club Kids murder of 1997 but trust me, I'm not done with it.

Today on facebook a massive list of pages that have been sent to me for liking popped up. I could barely recall any of them but I went through them and liked a lot of them and stopped at one from a couple of years ago called Justice For Shanda. I wasn't surprised that I got it for liking or commenting on something else about Shanda Sharer because I've lived with her and her case since the day I found out about it. But when did I find out about it?

I must have found out long, long ago (in cyberspace terms of time) because I distinctly remember the majority of my original research being via articles. So it had to be both before True Crime videos were a truly flourishing cottage industry and before I got into the doubtless bad habit of privileging video over print for getting information.

It was definitely before the 'Trump phenomenon' because that's when I found out about the extent of the ravages of the meth and opiates soaked wasteland heartland (not to say the girls were on drugs that night) that the MSM was hiding from me because globalization was hunky dory. But just about when I found about Shanda Sharer, I'm sure I can narrow it down further but atm I don't know. Only once I did she could not be unseen.

She was a twelve year old middle class white girl in Indiana who was kidnapped and brutally murdered by four teenage girls, none older than seventeen, because one of them, Melinda Loveless, was jealous that she was involved with her lesbian ex-girlfriend.

I didn't really understand how a twelve year old middle class girl in Indiana in 1992 even got involved with an older teenage lesbian, let alone a two timing one. But the murder was absolutely horrific. Because Shanda just wouldn't die.

The father of one of the four murderesses was an engineer but the other three were working class and all had very troubled upbringings. I suspect there was an element of class hatred toward Shanda but it was still unbelievable to me that four teenage girls, especially teenage white girls in the suburban Midwest, which I suppose I thought was supposed to be something like what I saw on tv in the 60s from 50s reruns like "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best", could possibly have committed such a heinous and pointless crime.

What I found out today on the Justice for Shanda facebook page was that about two years ago Melinda Loveless was released on parole. She was the instigator, the mastermind, and main culprit of the whole thing and the last to be released from prison. From the last time I looked into this case, I knew that she was training dogs for the handicapped in a special prison program, that she was repentant, and that she had been in touch with Shanda Sharer's mother. This I knew from a video.

I knew that Shanda's mother couldn't forgive her, in large part because of the protracted nature of the horror inflicted on her twelve year old daughter, but that she could accept that she was repentant and had a right to do work with integrity in prison.

But not to be released.

(Edit: she actually donated one dog a year in Shanda's name saying it was what her daughter would have wanted, but later on said she no longer believed Melinda was repentant and feared for when she was released).

* * *

In many ways I sat out 90s popular culture, once I started withdrawing from the downtown scene in 1992. Music-wise, I heard in the background, like wallpaper, that the 90s was a time of chicks with pianos. Or anyway near them, but they never drew me in. And so I only really became familiar with them later, much later perhaps, if you will.

1992 was the first year I taught high school. I started in mid-October, in mid-semester. The beginning of that year, January, was the time of the murder of Shanda Sharer and the time when Tori Amos' album, 'Little Earthquakes' was unleashed.

I mean released.




Yellow bird flying gets shot in the wing
Good year for hunters and Christmas parties
And I hate and I hate and I hate
And I hate elevator music
The way we fight
The way I'm left here silent
Oh these little earthquakes
Here we go again
These little earthquakes
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces
We danced in graveyards with vampires 'till dawn
We laughed in the faces of king never afraid to burn
And I hate and I hate and I hate
And I hate disintegration
Watching us wither
Black winged roses that safely changed their color
Oh these little earthquakes
Here we go again
These little earthquakes
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces
I can't reach you
I can't reach you
I can't reach you
I can't reach you
I can't reach you
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Give me life
Give me pain
Give me myself again
Oh these little earthquakes
Here we go again
These little earthquakes
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces

Ernie never quits, apparently. Just scroll. (Seems you have to sign in to Twitter now to view anything).

https://twitter.com/ErnieGlam

(And it is Ernie Glam, as I originally thought. Don't know why he's Glam Ernie on fb. Now I have to go back and correct them again. )

Here's a recent interview with him that's very telling in so many ways. And in others completely mute.