Role Models

Waters — the Pope of Trash, director of Pink Flamingos, the man who made Baltimore safe for filth and turned transgression into an art form — writes essays about the people he admires: Johnny Mathis, a Manson girl he believes has genuinely rehabilitated, underground novelist Jane Bowles, a strip club owner in Baltimore, a lawyer who defends death row inmates, Little Richard. The selection is the entire argument. Waters's role models are people who refused every available category — too strange, too committed, too completely themselves to fit anywhere the world had prepared for them — and who built their lives around that refusal with total conviction. The most P&P book about taste as politics ever written: the argument that what you love, and how completely you love it, and whether you love it without apology, is a form of resistance. Waters has spent sixty years proving that being enthusiastically, defiantly wrong by the standards of respectable culture is one of the most serious things a person can do. Every DoCR workshop is downstream of this argument.