THE TRUE STORY OF SUANNE SACHSSE, MARC SIEGEL, AND FRIENDS (1999-2009)

The actress Susanne Sachsse was in Los Angeles in the summer of 1999 touring in Heiner Müller’s Berliner Ensemble production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui when she met Marc Siegel, a PhD candidate in critical studies in film at UCLA and a tearoom sex activist, and fell in love. Marc was already planning on moving to Berlin on August 25th and had already rented an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg just two blocks away from where Susanne lived with her husband and two children, the twins Salome and Richard. In Los Angeles, Susanne also met Daniel Hendrickson, manager at the Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica and Marc’s lover since 1985 when they were students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Daniel started a relationship with a male actor in Arturo Ui before he moved to Warsaw in 1999. In preparations for his move, Daniel secured the contact information for Adam Budak, then curator at Bunkier Sztuki in Cracow, who Daniel and Marc had met through their friend the art theorist and critic Douglas Crimp a couple years earlier. Douglas’s writings on AIDS, specifically his essay “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” originally published in 1987 in the art-theory journal October for which Douglas served as Managing Editor since the journal’s early days in the late 1970s, helped keep a generation of young intellectual art-fags alive, as Marc and Daniel once remarked to their friend Tim Blue, who they had met while living in San Francisco in the early ‘90s when Tim was a bartender at Splendido’s, the upper scale restaurant where Marc waited tables. Moreover, Douglas’s writings on AIDS, alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1990 University of California Press book Epistemology of the Closet contributed substantially to the development of queer theory and, along with Douglas’s activism with the New York chapter of ACT-UP, made him such an awe-inspiring academic superstar that Marc and Daniel were giddy with excitement when they finally met and befriended Douglas in the spring of 1995 when he was a Visiting Professor in Art History at UCLA and living at the Ravenswood Apartments on Rossmore. Unbeknownst to Douglas, Marc and Daniel, the German pop theorist and writer Diedrich Diederichsen, who they would later meet in Graz in 1999, had also stayed at the Ravenswood a few years earlier when he was a guest professor at Art Center in Pasadena. During the shooting of Silhouettes in Berlin in October 2009, Diedrich learned from the internationally acclaimed Blacktress Vaginal Davis that the Ravenswood had previously been owned by Mae West who used the penthouse as a place of sexual retreat for her and her black lovers. Though he had known of Vaginal for many years, Diedrich came to appreciate the drag artiste even more after having seen her in the starring role as Juanita Castro alongside Susanne as Fidel in Ronald Tavel’s production of his own 1965 play The Life of Juanita Castro that was performed in Berlin in Podewil in 2001, the year which marked Vaginal’s first performance in Berlin thanks to Susanne, Marc and Daniel’s invitation to collaborate on a piece called CHEAP JEWELRY that paid homage to the American underground artist Jack Smith and the Brazilian singer and actress Carmen Miranda. Susanne met Vaginal in the summer of 1999 at the Count of Monte Cristo II (formerly known as the Daughter of Rosie O’Grady), a dive bar in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles where Vaginal hosted an opening night party for the joint premiere of both her film The White to Be Angry and Bruce LaBruce’s film Skin Flick. After having worked with her in Berlin, Vaginal introduced Susanne to his friend Bruce, who he had known since their days as homocore ‘zine makers in the mid-1980s and who Susanne did not meet at the Count of Monte Cristo II even though they were both in the same small room, when he was looking for a Berlin-based actress to star as Gudrun in his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich. While shooting her second film with Bruce, the 2008 Otto, or Up with Dead People, Susanne met and developed close friendships with the Berlin-based make-up artist Tan Binh Nguyen and the Parisian artist and actor Christophe Chemin who collaborated with her, Bruce, Vaginal and CHEAP, the artist collective she co-founded with Marc and Daniel in 2001 and with whom she created CHEAP klub in 2002, on Bruce’s first theater production called CHEAP Blacky which premiered in HAU 2 in 2007. Susanne invited her friend, the Israeli artist Keren Cytter, with whom she had made the video Der Spiegel earlier that year, to the premiere of CHEAP Blacky where Keren became so entranced with Christophe’s striking presence and singular talent that she asked him to work with her on the video Les Ruissellements du Diable (The Devil’s Streams) in 2008. Susanne had met Keren at the first Forum Expanded, the section of the Berlinale dealing with the connections between art and film that Stefanie Schulte Strathaus founded in 2007. Stefanie had been a close friend of Susanne’s since at least 2003 when Marc had programmed his first film series at Kino Arsenal, now known as the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art. When Stefanie organized a touring retrospective of the Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin’s work in 2006, she not only gave Susanne and Marc the opportunity of seeing The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and of meeting Guy after the screening, but also invited them to a private luncheon in Guy’s honor sponsored by the Canadian embassy. Stefanie had met Guy in 2003 at a friend’s party during one of many visits to Toronto. Guy had heard of Bruce’s The Raspberry Reich but only got an opportunity to see it after Stefanie gave him a DVD on his visit to Berlin in 2006. Guy and Bruce admired each other’s work and not only discussed their mutual cinematic obsessions on film festival panels, but also found themselves drinking the same ice wine at numerous Canadian embassy receptions. In 2008 Susanne presented Zazie de Paris with the CHEAPy Jayne County Transatlantic Underground Über Alles Award. Susanne had first met Zazie, the theater actress and chanson singer, years earlier at the Berliner Ensemble and later invited her to perform at the final CHEAP klub in 2002 with Daniel as her accompanist, and asked her to play a special role in her directorial debut Stoffel fliegt übers Meer based on Erika Mann’s short story at Theater an der Parkaue in 2006. The music was composed by Tim, whom Susanne had met over a bowl of soba noodles at the West Hollywood branch of Mishima restaurant in Los Angeles in 2001 when she accompanied Marc and Daniel back to Southern California so they could pack up their storage unit and complete their move to Berlin. Tim and his brother John drove down from San Francisco to catch up with their expatriate friends and were so inspired by CHEAP’s plans that they eventually decided to move to Berlin themselves. In Berlin Tim began making short films that he initially grouped together under the title of Ghost Boxes and gave as gifts to friends. Stefanie was so impressed by these films that she selected them for screening in the Forum Expanded two years in a row. During that same visit to Los Angeles in 2001, Susanne, Marc and Daniel were invited to Vaginal’s Koreatown apartment for dinner with Jennifer Doyle, the professor of literature and visual culture who had moved to the city shortly after Marc and Daniel’s departure in 1999 and of whose work and friendship with Vaginal Susanne had heard, but who she had never met before. While Jennifer lived in Los Angeles, she not only became close friends with Vaginal, but also collaborated with her and artist Ron Athey, who was also at the Count of Monte Cristo II on that evening in 1999 but who Susanne did not meet, on the performance festival Platinum Oasis in 2000 and devoted Chapter 6 “White Sex: Vaginal Davis Does Vanessa Beecroft” of her 2006 University of Minnesota Press book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire to her. Douglas’s scholarly work and–later–friendship had been very important to Jennifer since at least the time in the early ‘90s when he served as a respondent to one of her first academic papers presented at the Whitney Museum at a time when she was still one of Eve Sedgwick’s graduate students. Marc officially responded briefly to both Jennifer and Douglas’s papers at LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World which took place at Arsenal and HAU in 2009, an event that also brought together Susanne, Daniel, Stefanie, Tim, Guy, Bruce, Tan Binh, Christophe, Diedrich, Vaginal and the underground filmmaker Wilhelm Hein, among others. Marc and Susanne first met Wilhelm at the premiere party for CHEAP JEWELRY in 2001 in Prater. He had come because of the live appearance of Ronald Tavel, but became fascinated by Vaginal as well. In fact, he collaborated with Marc, Susanne and Daniel on the expanded cinema queer parties they called CHEAP klub and traveled with the group to Poland in 2002 when CHEAP was invited to perform in Warsaw by Ula Sniegowska from the Ujazdowski Castle and in Cracow by Adam. The last page in the CHEAP book, which Daniel and Tim designed and which was published in 2005 by b_books, the Kreuzberg bookstore, press and artmaking collective and the context in which Stephan Geene, Nico Siepen and many others have produced significant cultural works over the past decade or so, features a poster with an image from Jack Smith’s 1963-65 film Normal Love that Ula designed for CHEAP klub’s Polish tour. b_books has some of the best books in Berlin and Vaginal loves books and she often sends them as gifts to Susanne’s children, Salome and Richard, on their birthday. In 2008, she sent Salome Jane Austen and Richard Moby Dick.