MEET JEN COLLINS
Pop singers, hospitalization, puking, bleeding, degrading pornography and donuts: these themes recur in the work of Jen Collins. A Google search reveals she shares her name with dozens of women around the world. Among them: an incest survivor who pens X-Files fan fiction and teaches erotic composition, a Tasmanian real estate agent, a masseuse who specializes in myofascial release techniques, an English job-finder who provides entrée into the hotel industry, a character in a 1970 kids’ movie called Wacky Zoo of Morgan City. But she is none of these people. None of them is Kitty Bukkake. There is only one Kitty Bukkake. In the haystack of Jen Collinses, Kitty Bukkake is the needle.
I should know. I was there when the alias Kitty Bukkake came to her. It was after a midnight discussion of fake Japanese sex practices and readings from a volume of autobiography called Now You Know, written by the rubbing-alcohol-swilling wife of a former Massachusetts governor and presidential also-ran. Jen took to the name and in no time Kitty emerged as an Internet Aphrodite, a blogger whose readers found her by searching “bukkake,” not “Jen Collins.” Searching the Web for bukkake was a growth industry then. It’s since leveled off but it’s left a claque of readers loyal to Jen’s blog.
I had known Jen for some time before that. When we first met she was tangoing down a runway wearing a bra made out of two fried eggs, sunnyside up. That was in Boston, when her hair was dyed blonde. A photograph of Jen in the fried-egg bra appeared in a free monthly dedicated to pretending Boston’s dullest street was its most exciting. In the photo she’s leaning back while a palooka half-dressed as a fry cook paws her naked thigh with an oven mitt. Theirs was a breakfast mambo, sexed-up entertainment for a city where brunch is the highlight of the weekend.
Jen lives in Los Angeles now. It was a wise move. If Boston can contain someone like Jen Collins, it hasn’t proven it yet. Boston is the kind of place that forces people to leave. It builds up their immune systems then expels them like antibodies, scattering them through the air to combine with antigens unknown in New England. It can be a painful, even ugly process, if the accounts of witnesses can be relied on. I picture Jen being shot out of a cannon from the middle of a traffic rotary in Somerville, Massachusetts, wearing that fried-egg bra with its red gingham straps, landing on her feet on a bridge over the L.A. River.
Jen Collins was introduced to me as this chick who did an act where she imitated Céline Dion singing and eating Snack Pack puddings until she threw up. A performance artist, in other words, who really barfed up the pudding, she didn’t fake it. We met at a bowling alley where I’d already had a couple of drinks. Spurred by our mutual irritability we hated each other right off. I can’t remember what changed that. Something did, and we became fast friends. Maybe her talent for breaking into a Boston accent (or more accurately a Medford accent) at strange moments won me over. If it wasn’t that it must have been my fascination with someone who had performed in a theater piece loosely based on Oscar Wilde which took place over many hours in a hole in the ground. While other people’s attempts to impress a crowd with their arty bullshit struck me as shallow, I thought Jen’s time in the ditch revealed a real depth of commitment.
The difference between her version of performance art and some other versions I’d been exposed to was that in Jen’s the merely technical or the schematically political or the explicitly autobiographical or the just plain pretentious and boring had been eliminated in favor of something more disturbing and funny. Take the Céline piece. Jen incorporated the way people really feel about Céline Dion (and how they feel about a lot of other things) into her performance without turning it into a bogus political statement or a gooey examination of the various issues surrounding eating till you puke. Not that it wasn’t gooey, but no one else would have done it that way.
Similarly, in Jen’s video “Beautiful” she is able to portray Christina Aguilera as the blood-soaked love child of Dee Snider and Marie Antoinette without justifying this descent into the mire as a proclamation or a shaken fist. It’s up to the viewer to decide to what extent her performance is about performance, about the female impersonation of the female, about the physicality of the body in an age where glossy surfaces have effaced that, or just about acting out and being naughty. Statements of purpose often seek to justify playing around in the mud anyway and Jen hasn’t bothered with them.
Mud. Unfortunately when I think of Jen Collins I think of mud. Once Jen and I were at the Frontier casino in Las Vegas on a Monday night, which is mud-wrestling night in the western-themed bar there. Mud wrestling was a feature of life in the Old West that is overlooked in standard histories of that era but the Frontier is making sure tourists at least don’t forget about it. I don’t think we knew it was mud-wrestling night when we arrived. Once we’d settled in for a drink the hooting of the large, redneck crowd and the big video screens over the mud pit inside the bar’s corral made mud-wrestling night burgeon in our consciousness, where it began to loom and even dominate.
Jen was wearing a silk dress she’d just bought at a BCBG outlet store on the California-Nevada line. Even so, after a few free drinks she began to jockey for position around the pit and soon we were pressed against the corral where the mud flew. We saw bikini-clad women flailing in three inches of slime, competing for cash prizes while a fat-comic emcee humiliated them with greasy comments that made the mud look clean. He repeated the term “finger-bangin’” into his microphone until it became the crowd’s mantra.
As the hapless contestants in the mud pit tried to throw down, the emcee began to badger Jen, encouraging her to join in. The casino provided a bikini, he said. All she had to do was go to a room they’d set aside for the purpose and change into it, and then climb into the ring. Jen put her chin between her index finger and thumb and looked toward the ceiling. I pictured myself holding her purse while she vied for glory in the corral. Win or lose, a drubbing in a public mud bath couldn’t fail to exert a strong pull on a woman who called herself Kitty Bukkake, who’d puked on chocolate pudding in front of an audience, who’d peed in a bucket in a video for Paul McCarthy. The mud wrestling had been going on for a couple of hours by the time we got there. Let’s face it, Jen said, there’s probably pee in that mud. I could tell this meant nothing to her.
I was torn. I knew two things. I knew Jen would defeat her opponent. The competition wasn’t top-notch. In fact it was soft and woozy, and Jen is a marathon runner. And I knew I didn’t want to hold her purse. I was surrounded by a herd of Las Vegas good ol’ boys driven wild by the sight of mud-covered females and eager to stampede. Holding the purse would not only make me look like a sissy, it would put me at a disadvantage when the crowd lost control, especially if I had to take pictures of Jen in the pit during the frenzy.
The emcee continued to implore. With Jen’s resolve weakened he foolishly let down his guard and made a tactical mistake. He told us that by order of the Nevada House of Representatives photography wasn’t allowed in the bar on mud-wrestling night. I wouldn’t be allowed to take pictures of Jen grappling in the corral. What’s the point of mud wrestling, Jen wondered, if they won’t let you take pictures for your blog? The emcee indicated a bald man with a mustache just then grabbing a camera-phone from an onlooker’s hand. If I tried to take a picture his assistant would take the camera from me and destroy it, he said. Next the emcee confessed that post-bout the muddy wrestlers were led to a parking lot out back and sprayed with a hose. The hose was administered by another of his assistants. Neither could that be photographed. Nevada State Congressmen were very strict.
The parking lot hose-down, possibly the worst way to catch a cold, decided it. Sadly, the four-hundred dollar prize we could split, Jen’s half for pinning her adversary, mine for holding Jen’s purse, would not be ours.
We left the casino that night through a lonely corridor lined with waterfall jungle displays, like wildlife cases in a museum devoid of wildlife. It was late and we were beyond wondering how this plastic vegetation fit in with the casino’s western theme. Jen jumped into one of the grottoes. There are pictures of Jen there, they ended up on her blog. In this life you have a choice. You can either jump into the fake jungle or get hosed-down in the parking lot. We’d made the right choice. And I didn’t have to clean mud out of the rental car.
The constant trying-on of different personalities — Céline, Christina, mud wrestler, drunken jungle girl — is for some reason usually seen as a hallmark of the postmodern. As the years recede since Madonna writhed with a lion in a gondola (not even a Las Vegas gondola), it becomes apparent that this never-ending reinvention of the self is a burden.
It’s like a marathon, an endurance test, and as I mentioned Jen runs marathons. If marathons are endurance tests, then as far as I’m concerned they’re about pain. While the constant reinvention of the self is an attempt to please people and to hold their interest when their interest is waning, when Jen does it it’s an interrogation. The fun and the laughs stick in your throat, like in the project she’s working on now, “Death Rattle,” about everybody’s slow race to the finish. Jen recently revealed on her blog that when she was twelve she wanted to change her name to “Silver,” Silver Collins. This mingling of the dopey joy of self-reinvention and its protracted slide into pain seems to me what she’s after.
For a while Jen has been threatening to perform a piece called “All Night Long,” in which she sings that Lionel Richie song in some lonely urban setting all night long. Did she say she wanted to do it in the guise of Nicole Richie? I can’t remember. Maybe she’s too busy cutting her way in a pirate outfit through the Paul McCarthy videos she appears in these days to find time for “All Night Long.” But I think she should do it. It sounds like a one-woman version of The Simple Life, grueling, obvious, repetitious, exhausting and funny.
— A. S. Hamrah, Brooklyn, July 2005
Photos: Julian Hoeber
