Narcissister Organ Player

- Hello. - Hello.

What is your-- What is your name?

Narcissister.

I feel like I'm ordering to a drive-through.

You don't take that off. You're gonna leave that on?

So we can't see who-- It's very inventive.

Can you say something about what your mother meant to you?

Yeah, um, I mean until she passed away,

I mean, that was the primary relationship in my life.

Yeah, it was with her.

- Narcissister, darling. - What's that, darling?

She's a kind of crazy, disco performance art.

She pulls things out of her pussy on a rotating platform singing "I'm Every Woman."

He'll love that, won't he? He'll love that.

We got Marilyn Manson out.

There's nothing interesting said, but his date that he's with

is insane.

Uh, she's wearing a dress,

and in the dress, uh, the crotch is cut out of it.

-So her vagina is fully out. - Mmm.

- So, let's talk about it. - Okay.

-About the name? - Yeah.

So, I wanted to pick a name that in some way

pointed to the fact that I'm a person of color, a woman of color, a sister.

So I had that in the back of my mind, and um--

What is your ethnicity, specifically?

My mother was a Sephardic Jew from Morocco.

And my father was African-American from Watts, from L.A.

And I come from a family of intellectuals.

There are always dictionaries around.

So I started flipping through the dictionary.

The word "narcissist" jumped out at me.

It contains this idea of sister,

or sisterhood, concerns beyond self.

But I think, also, it was this idea

of actually ironically looking at myself

more deeply as a character with a mask

than I could without it.

If I feel there are two things

that have been my clear callings in life,

it was to be a dedicated, involved daughter.

And to do my work as an artist.

Make sure the tripod...

Okay. Tell me when you like the height.

-No higher than that. - Okay.

It could be a little bit lower so it doesn't get lost.

Okay? How's that?

Um, could it be just a hair lower?

Roll it to where you want.

Like there. Then there's no way that I'll lose it.

Okay.

I'll keep you out of it then.

Yeah. Usually I do that, all right?

'Cause you're tired.

That's all right. No, it's not bad.

Probably just a little tired, that's all. Understandably.

Okay. Hungry, performance,

part one, take one.

Bonjour, madam.

Your table is ready.

Thank you.

When I was really young, one of my favorite games to play

was that I'm an older woman and I had one of my mom's old purses,

and I would ask for the ends of her checkbook.

And I had a bunch of really heavy keys.

And I-I would sort of pretend that I'm this older woman

who has all these possibilities and dates.

And I was busy and I was traveling.

And I decided to change my name to Kathy Winters.

That name just sounded white and it sounded blonde,

and it just sounded perfect

for this woman that I wanted to be.

I remember my mom asking me about it at the time.

I would say to her, "When I'm older, I wanna have my own car

and my own house and my own money."

And I was just observing that she didn't have this kind of power

that I very much wanted for myself.

Bob, my hair is falling.

Oh, I can see. Yeah.

All right. Okay, we got speed.

All right.

Hungry performance, part--

Close up on her.

In front of her as if you were there, yeah.

- Um, Hungry performance-- - A little more this way.

-Great. - Hungry performance, part two, take one.

Um, start with some of the masturbating as well.

And action!

Check, please.

In elementary school,

we were playing in the playground,

and this little kid, this little white boy,

called me a "nigger."

I couldn't-- I didn't even know what it meant.

But I knew it was something he wasn't supposed to say to me.

I was feeling that I wasn't fitting in

and that he named it for me.

I was very aware of my lack of a clear reason not fitting in very early.

And a lot of it somehow centered around my hair.

My mother, she didn't quite know how to style or deal with my hair.

And I would try to figure it out on my own.

I grew up in Southern California

where it was, like, white women with blonde hair.

Even though my mother had dark hair, she was a white woman.

I mean, she looked like

a very attractive, white American woman.

She wasn't at all. But that's how she looked.

And she had this long, black hair.

And I loved brushing her hair.

It was just I wanted so much to have straight hair and she had it.

And so I would just brush her hair like

almost like it was this idea that it would be, like, mine, my own hair.

In 1972, my family moved from New York City to La Jolla, California.

My father had been offered tenure at a university there.

And he thought that La Jolla would remind my mother of Tangier

and would be a beautiful place for me and my brother to grow up.

One of my earliest memories with my mom

was outside our house on Poole Street.

We were on the brick walkway

under the pepper tree at the top of the stairs.

She was wearing peach-colored denim bell-bottom pants

that had a peach-colored denim braid

running up the outside seam as decoration.

I remember seeing her stretching her hamstrings, naked,

with dad in their room in the back of the house.

And I saw her from the back.

I saw a white tampon string hanging out from behind.

I remember delicious homemade food.

Pizzas, French tarts,

whole wheat bread that she made herself.

Fruit cobblers with fresh cream.

Rolling filo dough, carefully brushed with butter

we melted in a small orange metal pot.

She would encourage me just to put my hands in the-the bowl

to knead the dough, and to taste things.

She was incredibly sensuous to almost an embarrassing point.

She just would insist on eating with her eyes closed...

savoring her food.

I remember finding her hair in the food sometimes,

baked into the bread.

I remember finding my parents' Joy of Sexbook

and climbing high to the top shelf to find it.

And her diaphragm in a drawer and her old bras and panties,

and bead necklaces and various pouches

and things that smelled like incense.

I remember the healthy lunches she would pack for me that I felt ashamed of.

I remember she liked to put her hand

with her gold bracelet from Morocco

under my shirt and rub my chest with sweet, kind affection.

An awkward way she would wipe herself after peeing,

and the gold bracelet on her wrist as she wiped.

She always had flowers in our house,

and she always had candles lit.

And she loved wearing silk.

She was a poet.

- This one? -Just that first paragraph.

"The fig opens wide.

The pink, fleshy mouth, all its little white teeth showing.

A fleshy pink mouth wide open,

offering itself in spite of itself.

Open your soft body, offer the sweet pink meat.

Long enough were young thighs kept closed tight."

She would write about her longing for North Africa,

about my father.

I remember her combing and smoothing Dad's Afro with an Afro pick.

She stood above him while he sat in a chair.

I remember her waking us up and saying,

"It's time to go to the beach."

I remember my mother experiencing xenophobia

in a popular diner in town

and us never, ever going back there.

I remember Dad pulling her bandages off after she had had a surgery

and how dramatic and emotional she was about how painful it was.

I remember the portraits of her from Tangier,

how they were in the musty, tall cabinet by the phone,

and I would pull them out and marvel at them.

"Wow! That's my mom."

And she would smile and say,

"Yes, they were taken in high school

by a fancy French photo place, Studio de France, in Tangier."

I just couldn't believe that was her.

She was just as beautiful as the blonde La Jolla girls.

Just as beautiful as the Marilyn Monroe poster on my wall.

I remember her telling me later

how fake and fabricated Marilyn Monroe's beauty was

and what an unhappy life she had had.

Pickup shot for tongue, and one...

"Floating over her head, sun, moon, beyond reach.

Longing for empty space,

she is suddenly gripped by a gigantic pain of nostalgia

for North Africa.

Yes, far away, long ago North Africa.

The rip of hot demented winds annihilating forms

returning dust to dust,

fulfilling the promise of nothing."

My mother's childhood in Morocco was complex.

Her family had the trappings of well--

a Moroccan maid, a seamstress, and a driver.

And yet the father's business was failing,

and they had little money.