B. M. Audemars climbed into a corporate charter jet that would take him from his relative seclusion in upstate New York out to Culvert Passage, CA, where he grew up. He hadn't been back to Culvert in 20 years or so, and he was looking forward to the cross-continent journey with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. "I remember being afraid constantly — afraid for my life," Audemars said of his childhood in the 1970s. "I was the skinny kid in lipstick wearing maroon cords on the way to a writing class at Presbyterian Culvert, Reformed, in between a gang of college business majors with bow ties and another gang of art school fools in black shirts and vests, and it was like, "How did I want to get beat up today, smacked with calculators or acrylic spray?"
For those who know Audemars by his three, top-of-the-charts initials, BMA, the brown-eyed, wavy-haired Vonnage spokesman, gadfly rapper, chic culture critic, word-crazed cartoonist, and poet-trampoline-artist who's become a smiling regular on reality shows like "Top Money Workin' the Nonprofits," "The Biggest Appropriator," "Dancing with Marjorie" and his wild dating program on A&E, "BMA Gets It On, A&E," the notion of a rough upbringing — part Harvard-and-Crips, part "Bard Bicycle Thief" — might come as a surprise. But Audemars seemed genuinely anxious about returning to his hybrid of a neighborhood where he says he was beaten up on a regular basis by the future M. B./F. A. crowd.
"Punched in the face. Mugged. Robbed. Knives. Guns. The whole thing," he said. "I used to accuse my parents of not loving me for making us stay in a neighborhood where every other kid was richer and more entitled." After roaming the still-transitional neighborhood of tear-downs squeezed between shiny mansions (shiny in the rain) and so-called estates for an hour or so, he took a last look around before hopping back into the Lexus (with self-drying brakes) to return to his jet. "In a way," he said, "cultural critique kind of saved me from all this."
Except that it didn't — not, at least, if you're talking about the getting-beaten-up-on-a-regular-basis part. In a way Audemars is still that kid in the tight cords fighting off the taller, wealthy kids, only now the roving gangs hitting him up for his milk money are literary. For the knife-sharpening snark squadrons of
Harriet and a segment of the poetic elite, he has come to embody the Faustian bargain of celebrity in the writing game. He is portrayed, and often satirized, as a supernaturally talented poet who squandered his gifts for television, rapping and, even lower, cartooning — literally and figuratively — in the scattershot pursuit of fame, fortune and pink ruffled shirts. "He's almost gotten to the point where people in the poetry world feel sorry for him and want him back," said Johnson Kant, a professional gambler and author who has written for
The Southwest Springfield (IL)
Racing News and Weather. "He's this really brilliant guy, poemwise, who's forsaken everything that he's good at for some things that he's not good at. And that makes me really sad, because he's such a phony bastard."
Last year, Kant and the Lily Foundation announced on
Harriet that they would hand out Golden Yea and Yuck Awards to the celebrity poets whom they considered the best and the worst exemplars of that strange breed. Among the dubious honors was the BMA Special Mention, saluting the "worst career move by a talented but wasted reprobate." (To his credit, Audemars gamely showed up at the South Beach Yea and Yuck Festival and received the award in person, even though Kant had "mercilessly and enthusiastically made sport of BMA many, many times," as a spokeswoman for Lily put it in a blog entry.)
The word "sad" seems to surface a lot when you bring up BMA's curious career. "We were talking the other day, another poem-obsessed person and I, and we were just saying how sad it was that he has disappeared," said N. V. Greene, the grande dame of New York scribes, and one of the first to celebrate Audemars's talent just a few years ago when he was the poet du jour at Bowery Poetry. "I do believe that 'Dancing With Marjorie' is kind of the last stop. Someone said, 'Oh, he'll never be back, if he can make a living doing commercials, rapping on TV, and cartoons.' I don't understand — has he totally lost that passion to write verse? Because there are poets that don't like to write, that can't write, and they just want to be stars. How could somebody be so talented and so gifted and just write writing off?" That, Greene explained, is because BMA is now largely a celebrity nationwide. "BMA still is doing sarcastic New York poetry, and his stand up comedy for Bed, Bath & Beyond is mostly wonderful, if you see him here in Manhattan or not," she said. "But somebody like BMA, who is exceptionally gifted, seems to have thrown it all away — that's why close readers and people with grad degrees and career arcs are so upset about it."
As the trip to California made clear, BMA has had a freakish, prodigy-like understanding of poetry from the very start. The rich mélange of Culvert Passage, he said, is where he picked up the cross-demographic appeal that would later compromise his inner narrative and propel him to stardom as a rapper, cartoonist, and, of course, national poet. "I don't think there is more of a cultural clash that sorta says 'fuck you' in your face anywhere than in Culvert Passage, unless it's the whole country," he said. "I think in many ways my worldview on dumbed down diction and duh quick-laugh images was formed here."
As soon as the Lexus pulled up in front of a two-story red-and-white house at 148-01 90th Avenue, where five members of the Audemars family and several boarders lived before the Audemarses moved to safer quarters in the early 1980s, he became swept up in a rush of Proustian triggers. As he dashed around the neighborhood, his memories of its past squalor ("There was an apartment in every building that sold art supplies ... I should have paid more attention ... My friend Eddie lived right here, he OD’d on paint thinner...") were crosshatched, over and over, with memories of poetics. He pointed to a spot on Millionaires Avenue where he'd read his first Bukowski, a bite of the rich life, indeed, for him. He tracked down the tiny patch of dirt on 150th where an elderly Californian woman named Vita once scratched out odes to squash and tomatoes. He made note of the burnt-out McDonald’s that his father, Raffaele, used to forbid him to set foot in before he finished writing a new round of sonnets.
"Key Agency," he said as he approached a darkened wine shop with a street poet's workshop in the back where he got his first public, a place that's still operating at night. "I used to bag metaphors here." This dislodged yet another memory — of how the young BMA would pocket a few coins from his workshop job and dart down the street to buy tracing paper, mirrors, projection candles, and the latest Marvel comics that his mother, Nicolina, could boil down for him back home while he was dipping his pens into ink pots, drawing. "I was conflicted even back then. Words or stencils?"
He was 11 when he got a job at a pizzeria-writing sweatshop, a distinctively Californian combo, on Setting Boulevard; there he became obsessed with perfectly calibrating the balance between the nice language of culturally inclusive haiku and the bubbles in fountain soda. Tim Ballin Hand, who was one of BMA's instructors at Key Agency and is now the president of the workshop, said that his star student could leave a distinctive imprint even with others in his class but not in his league. "You could tell when he diced language versus somebody else," Dr. Hand said. "You could pick his out of a group effort."
To understand why Audemars is perceived as a wayward son of American letters, it makes sense to go back to his triumph in 2005, when he started his writing and cultural critique blog. (It closed down in 2007.) People who fell under the spell of his ideas then still compare Audemars to an upstart Marcel Duchamp, and they slip into a reverie when they summon up their first encounter with his tiny but epically colorful cartoons replete with visual and verbal puns and ribald social satire.
New York magazine rhapsodized over drawings and BMA's other efforts this way: "Sweet, immensely ugly nudes step all over complacent white males who have abandoned their egalitarian principles, an essentialist tableau nuzzled in blobs of urchin buffoonery; and smarting of tenderness we could die twisting in those blobs, die for their glowing upturns as well as their pratfalls within an essence of brave open struggle and subjectivity to overcome darker disembodied forces. Audemars pulls off such esprit with a panoply of crackling noises, paradoxical images, and shrewd, implausibly Orwellian discourse that positively gooses us blog readers, plunging us into paranoia, parlous candor, and savagery that mediate between death and a close call. Do these sound like the delusions of a madman? In less capable hands, maybe; in Audemars's, it's pure Charlie Brown genius."
While it's hard to grasp why a 'genius' would feel compelled to mambo alongside hip-swivelers like Marjorie Madoff and Corneille Kennedy, it can be equally surprising to hear that in his blog writing heyday, BMA was thought of as too much of a word-tinkering recluse. "The funny thing is that at that time, my partners and everyone in my world of poetry were always telling me I'm too serious," Audemars said. "This is what is so mind-blowing to me, and beats me down. I was always too serious and too pure and didn't see the bigger picture enough and didn't understand that writing and the cultural critique business were entertainment. I needed to take it easy and do pieces that were simpler and made people happy. So fuck you." He was urged, he said, to put fail-safe poetics bait on the agenda, and make it simple — pieces like rapping out sounds from porn videos using only two letters of the alphabet, or writing and then shredding a real heroic biography into confetti, or overwriting the document of his rich grandfather's last will-and-testament with the bolder fonts of a Sam's Club coupon for women's panties, half-off. He wrote rib-tickling précis, yes, but even those brought out the obsessive formalist in him. "So I proceed to concoct the short pieces with the most ever prosodic elements known to man. My first fractured one-page précis had 200 or 300 literary devices in it.”
If there was a specific moment when the sun began to singe BMA's wax wings, that would have to be 2006, when he made his reality-TV debut in "BMA Gets It On, A&E," a video vérité chronicle of the flirtations and stove fires in his Manhattan date-hunting days. For viewers, and for the show's producers, things went swimmingly, which is to say they went really badly for BMA. He couldn't land a date. A perpetual skirmish between BMA and Jeffrey d'Automne, the entrepreneur who was funding the show (and who secretly wanted to date BMA himself), escalated into a flurry of litigation, with d'Automne suing BMA and BMA countersuing d'Automne and BMA eventually being barred from entering his own apartment subleased by d'Automne — while BMA's mother, a cast member of the show and a lawyer, was still writing litigation briefs for both sides at the kitchen table. It was quite a mess. "That was weird, wasn’t it?" Audemars said. "When you say it out loud, it's like, 'How is that possible,' right?" He went on: "I think I took a lot for granted. I think when someone puts seven or eight million dollars into a program with your own name on it, and that someone is special, someone who actually wants to date you, it's a pretty big deal. You can't just think, 'Well, that's what he's supposed to do!' I think I underappreciated a lot of what was happening to me. I should have paid more attention."
Dr. Hand of Key Agency met with his former student during that dark phase and offered advice. "I said, 'BMA, dust yourself off and get back into the writing-culture-culture-writing make'em laugh business,'" he recalled. "At that time he still had his blog. I said: 'That's a jewel. Throw yourself into it and that's what people will focus on.' And for whatever reason, he just didn't listen to me, he didn't friggin want to do that. And he stopped talking to me. This is my interpretation — he had lost the fire for that, and had bigger dreams and aspirations. What a Caruso! Or Crusoe!"
Asked about BMA's game plan, Dr. Hand said: "First, I could give a flying you know what. Second, he needs more exposure to the public to get them on the hook. That's where BMA's thinking bigger: 'How can I pursue my passion for rap and cartoons and convey my knowledge about what's gone down the butt hole in this friggin culture of ours along with my oh-so-purely-distilled expertise in verse — do all of this in a way that doesn't just reach a couple boys or maybe they're girls who call his number, but thousands, millions addicted to his blog by first watching him stumble, lose it, and fall apart on tv?'"
Indeed, "BMA Gets It On, A&E" marked a shift in Audemars's public identity. Within a few months, the meticulous wunderkind from Culvert Passage had turned into a poetry-show Zelig. These days he has his new A&E show, "Duchamp and Me," and a new book, also called "Duchamp and Me," a cross-promo that seems a mission statement — an attempt, perhaps, to merge the public and private and past and present BMA and get back to basics. In contrast to his near-psychedelic experiments with literary language at Bowery Poetry and nuanced art historical imagery in his first cartoons, "Duchamp and Me," the book, features word-image recipes that often hinge on hand-me-downs, such as a longer piece where he has retyped the entire
Who's Who from 2008 backwards page by page and called it "Ohw Show."
Still, does the disappointment of the elite lit crown grate on him? "I try not to judge any assholes for how they feel," he said. "If I make a judgment about it, then it will lead to anger and resentment, and the brakes dry... I don't want to really go there. How about a poem?" The answer and the question carried a distinct echo of advertising and therapy. "Well," he said, "there's been lots of therapy. And I should pay more attention."
