On September 18th, 2006, Kate Bornstein appeared on the Chicago-based LGBTQ comedy podcast, Feast of Fun Podcast #390 – A Fate Better Than Death, to discuss their book, Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws. In talking with Fausto Ferños and Marc Felion, they briefly discussed my performance work.
“Marsian hails back to a long tradition of artistic fools, who twist the culture around well beyond the regular artistic way of twisting culture around to a point of impossibility and absurdity that makes you rethink all of reality”
-Kate Bornstein
From the Feast of Fun Podcast #390 – A Fate Better Than Death podcast intro:
A lot of young people are seriously bummed out. So much in fact, that many of them, especially GLBT youth, want to take their own lives. Writer and humorist Kate Bornstein found this out through meeting people in her lectures at colleges and universities and from doing her live shows. Because Kate got a sex change twenty years ago, ze considers zirself a young woman. ZE? No that wasn’t a typo. Kate prefers to refer to refer to zirself in a whole new gender neutral pronoun: “ze.”
Bornstein’s writings bridge the gap between all gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans and queer people, between man and woman, between old and young and between popular culture and academia. For the past couple of years, Kate has been collecting thoughts on what alternatives do people have to killing themseles and put them together in a deeply touching, hysterical book: Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws. The book reads like a How-To “Dummies” manual mixed with anecdotal advice from a person who’s been there, mixed with a wonderful sassy-dark humor.
From the podcast:
FAUSTO: I want to touch in really quickly.. You give thanks to a lot of interesting people in the book [Hello Cruel World] including our friend that we have in common, Marsian De Lellis..
KATE: You know Marsian?
FAUSTO: Oh, he’s a big part of the past of our show and he’s been a guest a couple of times. And I wanted to know, what has Marsian contributed to your life, because he’s sort of been a student of yours and a friend..
KATE: I would never say he was a student of mine, per se. He studied me when I wasn’t looking. But Marsian taught me a wilder side of artistic expression that I’ve never really allowed myself. I’m much more of a sedate kind of person and Marsian is anything but sedate and he just tickles the hell out of me with his puppetry.
FAUSTO: It’s pretty hysterical. He did a performance, a dream sequence where was portraying Michael Jackson..
KATE: Yes!
FAUSTO: ..before and after the plastic surgery..
KATE: Yes!
FAUSTO: And he had twelve different people on roller blades coming out from between his skirt and then [one of the performers playing nurse Debbie Rowe] went up to Elizabeth Taylor, who was in a wheelchair and said “You’ve been a very naughty girl, Elizabeth, I’m going to have to call you E.T. from now on” And then [she] put an E.T. mask on Elizabeth Taylor.
MARC: He’s wacky.
KATE: This Marsian.. Marsian hails back to a long tradition of artistic fools, who twist the culture around well beyond the regular artistic way of twisting culture around to a point of impossibility and absurdity that makes you rethink all of reality, That’s what I like about Marsian. And he does it with style.
FAUSTO: ..And with passion and conviction.
In The King of Pops New Clothes, a reclusive pops star’s drug-fueled attempts at being loved through personal reinvention go horribly wrong when his public and private lives collide. The King of Pop’s New Clothes existed as both a live performance with projected video at the Columbus Drive Performance Space at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as a video art piece that screened at Randolph Street Gallery.
The Feast of Fun podcast (formerly titled Feast of Fools) is a Chicago-based talk show hosted by Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion that showcases celebrity guests, artists, musicians, actors, and members of the LGBT community and those who support them. A typical program will include one or more of a number of features, including roundtable discussions, unusual news and social trends, LGBT issues, comedy, music, food and cocktail recipes, or interviews. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Fausto Fernós created the Feast of Fools in 1998 as wacky artists variety show in Chicago, Illinois. Feast of Fun grew out of an audio blog to promote the live show