Category: essay
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Deals with sexual assault and suicide -
Michael Carmen Pitt
I knew I would have to get into the meat of this before beginning to explain why what the media have done is wrong: yes, I know the stories about Michael being hard to work with and being a bit of a dick. I haven’t worked with him, but I’ve come across plenty who have – none of them had a bad word to say about him. Take that for what it is worth, but I am aware I have a bias. However, I will note that plenty of them said this in the captions of their Instagram posts, not as some huge declaration to defend someone. They were simply discussing how much they enjoyed their work.
Of course, the people who have relished trashing and essentially trying to destroy his career (you may think I am exaggerating, but I really do think that’s the aim of at least one of them) have a bias too. A poisonous, spewing one.
One person who is particularly delighted in trashing Michael is Elaine Liu of LaineyGossip. Lainey takes great pride in her profession of spraying hate everywhere, and with Michael, she did it whenever he showed up for a professional assignment or at any awards ceremony. He didn’t have to do anything but breathe for her to dedicate paragraphs on how he was “extra pouty” and gross.
To be honest, this wouldn’t have bothered me so much except for one thing: Lainey has a “rule” (I use that term very loosely) that she has happily broken when it comes to those she hates (Heath Ledger was another victim. God knows what he did to make her hate him so much, but then the same applies with Michael). The rule is she won’t post “sad smut.” This includes mental breakdowns and addiction issues.
Yet she happily broke it to write a blind item about Michael and another actor (for the sake of privacy, I am not linking this. Google will guide you if you absolutely must know) in which Michael had a breakdown and was suicidal. It was awful for Michael to have such a private and horrible time of his life exposed, apparently, for mockery, given that the other actor was spoken of as an angel.
In terms of co-stars, there’s John Cameron Mitchell, who has become bafflingly angry at Michael after many years of seemingly being his friend. Michael even kissed him at an industry event in front of his amused partner Jamie. I honestly find Mitchell a disgusting phoney. I hope this answers the question one of his buttlickers asked when I made an angry comment at Mitchell online; this here, asshole, is my entire fucking problem.
Which leads us to the one who, despite being anonymous, is frightening and has caused the most damage: French Girl.
For years, whenever Michael was mentioned anywhere, she would show up to share her completely bullshit story: that Michael had stalked his friend and co-star in the Dreamers, Eva Green. At first I found her mildly irritating and occasionally funny (she would suggest him for blind items that clearly weren’t him).
Except others did believe it. They passed it on. When Michael had to believe hospitalised last year, filmed strapped down like an animal, while most people were sympathetic, others brought up French Girls’s fairy tale as a reason to hope he never came out and he was just a sucky, white actor anyway who got lucky (I guess those great reviews for his work wrote themselves). “I hope he stays there forever,” “Good,” came the hateful diarrhoea. It was sickening to me as a fan and someone with her own mental health and addiction issues. But most of all, because anyone could find out it wasn’t true by just reading the captions on the evagreenweb instagram. Although run by a relative, the captions are written by Eva, and she’s spoken with nothing but kindness and love about him. She does so in interviews, too.
How are people so deliberately THICK!?
As awful as what the others have done, what French Girl has done is libellous and damaging. She deserves to be sued for it. But Michael doesn’t seem the type to bother with Internet rubbish. French Girl is not alone in say libellous things about him – Uproxx apparently considered him the Biggest Douche In Hollywood – this was before Weinstein was outed, btw. But even so, the article accompanying this hilarious claim essentially amounted to a guy being mad Michael wouldn’t play with him. It was immensely childish, but Uproxx saw it as proof that everything bad that had been said about Michael was true.
I should add, at this point, another writer for the site prior to this wrote about how nice Michael was on the set of Boardwalk Empire, how he knew the crews name’s and greeted them every morning.
You can probably guess which article got the most attention.
At the height of his antics, Robert Downey Jr had many sympathetic articles written about him. They argued that he was troubled, he deserved sympathy and not hate. Which was true. Maybe because it was a different time, people seemed more willing to be, well, nice.
However, no one, it seems, cares to do so for Michael. When the disgusting assholes at TMZ released the video of Michael being wheeled into an ambulance, all articles simply gave an overview of his career and his apparent difficult behaviour that cost him the role of Jimmy Darmody on Boardwalk Empire.
Apparently, only some deserve sympathy and understanding.
So, since the media won’t do it. I will.
Michael Carmen Pitt, you deserve all the love and understanding of your issues. I’m sorry you haven’t received from the industry nor the media. I hope you know this small group of fans have your back.
Always. -
For every star in heaven
There’s a sad soul here today.
– Queen, Long Away.
…
The end is here at last.
I know it’s the end because I don’t care anymore.
I don’t care who my actions will hurt. After all, they don’t care about me.
I heard it and knew it the other day “fuck her.” I’m an epileptic. He meant he didn’t want anyone to come home and look after me.
He meant if I fell and broke my neck, he didn’t care.
He didn’t care if I died.
Mother just sat there quietly, as always.
Sister. She lit the flame. She never said sorry.
I’m sorry to the online friends I have. The people I loved who never knew me. Rami. Michael. Chris. I hope we meet some day.
But this sad soul is joining the stars. My only friend. The end.
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When is an Impossible Dream a Dead Dream
I spent a good portion of this evening typing up my entry for the Impossible Dream collaboration. I will eventually post it, if only because I made the effort to write it up on Cheetah Corona (my Corona electric typewriter), to I feel I shouldn’t waste it. A lot of ideas of mine get abandoned and wasted, which brings me to what inspired me to write this.
While it is nice to vent my feelings on all that seems impossible to achieve in my life as an artist and as a person, I also found myself excavating some unpleasant thoughts that I try to ignore a lot of the time.
It was not a pleasant excavation.
The biggest discovery? As a creator (writer, artist,delusional buffoon, whatever you would like to call me), I feel my window of opportunity is, at best, nothing but a tiny crack lit by sunlight on occasion. I’m nearing 40, I have little money, no connections to open any doors in life, and my struggles with mental illness and – more recently – epilepsy mean even finishing a project is difficult. Depression tells me I can’t do it, that no one will like it, why bother because I am useless. Anxiety is the sane tune played in Paralysing Fear of Mockery. Epilepsy is often triggered by stress, which all of the above bring on.
The best I can often manage are a few mediocre drawings of people I admire and abstract vent pieces. Writing happens in dribs and drabs. Most of it remains hidden.
I create so little of value, and I feel my dreams are dying along with whatever skill I may have posessed once. But I have nothing to move on to. I already know ordinary jobs are like being trapped in a cage to me, a cage that drives me slowly mad. No matter how good my coworkers and boss are, it feels the same.
I’m stuck here in a hole I dug for myself. I often ask what will happen to my work after I die. And the truth, save the few that are better than average, is they’ll be heading to a landfill one day. And that will be when I am truly dead. -
To sum up: mainstream feminism has become an ugly thing I just can not relate to anymore.
I’m tired of women walking away from saying/doing bad things men would be torn apart for. And this isn’t a “what about the men” tangent. It’s an “equality should mean just that.”
But somewhere along the line feminism lost sight of its goal of being about equality. I still identify as a feminist, but one who believes in true equality, feels that mainstream feminism has let POC and poor women down badly, that it constantly encourages bullying over “wrong opinions”, and has serious issues with bigotry in general that it refuses to address. It’s 2023. Feminism should be better than this.
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Why I Make Art
I meant this as a response to [other person’s] post, but it didn’t go through, and all attempts to write it as a new record on the site wouldn’t work either. So copy and pasting from a writing app. If it doesn’t work I’m giving up and fucking off again.
I started creating because I liked to draw. It really was that simple. It was the same with writing, the only subject at school teachers and other students said nice things about. My drawings were “stupid” and admittedly, it’s not my greatest talent. Do I even have a great talent? Probably not. Few do. My original ambition was to act, but my father did everything he could to make sure it never happened. People told him I was good at it, but he just wouldn’t have it.
My point is that not everyone gets the chance to even find out whether they could ever get anywhere at art. I’ve made a tiny bit of money from it. I’m dirt poor. I buy art materials bit by bit because I can’t afford actual sets of decent materials. I buy camera joblots to get 35mm cameras (most are broken). If I really cared about attention, I wouldn’t waste my pitiful income on any of this stuff.
But I can’t lie and say I don’t want to make money from it. That I’d like to hear I make good stuff. That I’m not a talentless loser.
But life doesn’t work that way. I have no connections in the art world that could ever help me. I often think of my great aunt – a truly wonderful watercolourist who died completely unknown. I lost the one piece of hers I had. It was beautiful.
How many beautiful pieces of art were seen by no one? Too many, I imagine. Too many.
Bloody Roses 