BRANT WATCH

A much-bruised, unidentified youth dodged yet another expertly flung baseball at the Brant compound’s Peg-A-Fuckin’-Ginger celebration, held annually since 1985, for reasons that no one fully agrees on. “I seem to remember a ginger prick we came across on the beach in Cannes,” Patriarch Peter I surmised, “one of those real gangly bastards, all ruddy cheeked and meek, with body hair like a bunch of fire ants. He kicked sand in my face, so I thought: Why not organize an event in which everyone throws lead-weighted baseballs at these fuckers?” Peter II took home top honors at this year’s edition, racking up 4 black eyes, 6 broken ribs, and 3 subdural hematomas. Florence + the Machine played a 6-hour durational cover of Simply Red’s “Holding Back The Years” organized by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who later admitted to being ignorant of the event’s specifics.  Harry, as usual, abstained—not out of ethical concern, but because “I throw like a freaking girl,” he said.

Moments after his mistress Fernanda Pokum brutalized the cabana waitress at bottom right, Patriarch Peter I’s volcanic temper erupted on the chin of Argentine playboy Ju-Ju Palacho, who had just (jokingly, he assured) mentioned that the Patriarch’s “budding manbreasts” would one day “make perfect ski jumps for dainty, miniature leprechauns.” After his initially timid left hook, bystanders reported that Patriarch Peter I straddled Ju-Ju in the sand, delivering one punishing blow after another and generating a frenzied scene that “was like some shit out of Silence of the Lambs,” according to one witness. Hours after the violent outburst the pair had already made amends, and were spotted sharing a two-strawed Zombie on the patio of Fernando’s, St. Bart’s go-to spot for top-shelf novelty cocktails. The renewed friendship was likely the result of obvious financial  and interpersonal considerations: Patriarch Peter I is a majority investor in Yo No Lo Creo!, the oft-sued franchise of outpatient penile augmentation parlors that Palacho founded in Buenos Aires.

Patriarch Peter I poses with a steely-eyed Leonardo DiCaprio at the Brant Foundation’s Mother’s Day Pig-Flaying. ‘Leo’ wears a rumpled blazer from Target X Ralph Lauren’s Great Gatsby collection and a Newsies 20th-anniversary commemorative cap; he flaunts goatee micro-cultivation courtesy of Sim-Jook Industries. “I’m not surprised that so many well-known individuals turned up here, despite the supposed holiday,” Patriarch Peter I said. “I’ve always held that celebrities are birthed by the Universal Collective, arriving here on earth through the vaginal canal of fame. They are, essentially, orphans. It’s a sentiment that Warhol would have approved of.” The shock-haired contemporary art icon was well-represented at the Pig-Flaying, with previously unseen selections from his “Death & Disaster” series, including silkscreens of Balinese castration mishaps and a Honduran blimp accident. 

Harry, wearing a crotchet-embroidered baby-T designed by Ryan McGinness, stretches a recently waxed arm around billionaire Alan Lindehamm, erstwhile art critic and director of the vanity project, Penis Over Manhattan, whose quirky dual focus (vintage Tiffany lamps, and East Indian sculpture depicting tumescent male genitalia) has earned him the title of “most unpredictable art maven on the East Coast.” (Lindehamm rose to notoriety last year for an essay, entitled “I’d Rather Give Myself A Drano Enema And Then Punch Myself In The Face With A Dead Rabbit Than Go To Miami Basel,” in which he lambasted the “hangers-on and poor, groveling dumbfucks” who were “turning the once-proud fair into an orgy of slutty non-socialites with tons of student debt” and “shabby journalists who don’t even have health insurance” who “I hope will drown themselves in the ocean quickly so that the real people can go back to doing what they do best: Making and spending money.”) “I wrote that article as a considered, passionate thinkpiece,” Lindehamm said at the Brant Foundation. “After people got pissed off, I cleverly went back in time and recast it as social satire. I don’t see why no one understands that.” Lindehamm wears a suede Member’s Only jacket and a pair of color contacts expertly modeled on the eyes of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Anton Kerbunkle III, 7, and Davis ‘Skipper’ Rhoades, 6, watch as employees of Quik-Mexicans-Now! (the contract-hire labor force that recently erected the Frieze Art Fair) tend to a series of roasting pigs on the south lawn of the Brant Foundation. The gruesome food sculpture, a clear homage to the oeuvre of Francis Bacon, utilized Corten steel stakes designed by Richard Serra, and a proprietary barbeque sauce curated by Cyprien Gaillard.

“I wanted to look like a werewolf all hopped up on, like, Blink-182 had just, like, went fucking punkwild on my shirt and ripped it to shreds,” said Harry, photographed here at the Met’s Annual Sad & Wealthy Ball. “The crazy thing is that this is, like, a $19,000 one-off T, so the little scraps I cut and threw out could probably have fed a fucking family of Guatemalans for a few months.” The Brants were only a few of the A-list celebrities who got “punkified” for the hotly anticipated Met gala. Anne Hathaway, for instance, may have found a cure for her plummeting popularity: Wearing a sheer chiffon skirt, she showed off her platinum-dyed pubic hair, which had been artisanally shaved into the shape of an anarchy sign. Carey Mulligan sported a Chelsea girl hairdo and a henna face tattoo advertising the underground band A Million Dead Cops; Sarah Jessica Parker went edgy and referential by dressing as Dead Nancy Spungen, wearing little more than an XXL t-shirt soaked in actual lamb’s blood. Guests were thrilled to explore the exhibits that are part of the Met’s current show, “fRom cHaOS TO couTURE,” which is underwritten by Hot Topic, Dorito’s, and Vita Coco; the show includes a life-size replica of the infamously nasty CBGB’s bathroom. (“Don’t tell anyone,” Debbie Harry was overheard whispering to a friend, “but I just took a brutal shit in there.”) Fall Out Boy performed at the event, joined by Richard Hell and Iggy Pop for a set entirely composed of Crass covers. “I would say I’m ‘punk as fuck,’ yeah,” Peter II told a reporter. “I once punched a Barney’s salesgirl in the face for failing to separate my purchases in the bag with those little in-between layers of crinkle paper. I’d say that’s pretty fucking punk.” Patriarch Peter I attended the Sad & Wealthy Ball dressed as G.G. Allin—“something of a personal hero,” he explained, enigmatically, while adjusting the reins of his leather-and-metal scrotal harness.

Harry and Peter II provide emotional back-up for Eunice Prask, center, at the Horshance Foundation’s bimonthly support group for former Renaissance Festival staff and participants. “It’s a long fucking road, excuse my language,” said a visibly shaken Nat ‘Pip’ Huckins, the Foundation’s press agent. “I look out there and I see just waves of archaic frills; bosoms squeezed into hellish bodices; lurid patterns that would make Robin Hood and his Merry Men fall into a deep, deep depression. And the headgear, the fucking headgear—there I go again—the braided forehead necklaces, the goddamn feathers everywhere…” Harry and Peter II have known Prask since the late ’90s, when they attended the same survivalist-themed summer camp outside of Greenwich. “I kick myself for not noticing the signs even then,” Harry said, squeezing Prask’s arm to remind her that he’s still there, and always will be. “It started small: those Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett paperbacks, the amateur lute playing. We just never thought it would end up where it did—a full-time job playing M’Lady Trucklefeathers out in Crossford, New Jersey, slowly losing her hold on that dividing line between fantasy and reality…just like Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters.” Prask, for her part, is committed to recovery; when pressed, she will admit, shakily, that unicorns “probably do not exist.” She appeared absolutely beatific during the closing performance by Joanna Newsom.

It was hard to stay upright at the 10th Annual Cinco de Mayo and Inspi(RED) World AIDS Fundraiser, held this year at the jewel-dappled Skronkquist Hotel’s Venetian Orgy room, in Montauk. “I slipped on somebody’s puke,” explained Paul “Titties” Goober, star of Showtime’s Gigolos, pictured here at the bottom of a veritable Brant pyramid. “It’s fucking amateur hour in this place. You’d think people could calmly celebrate Mexican awesomeness and decry the brutality of AIDS without turning into, like, tequila-spewing asshole fountains.” Stretching a pencil-thin calf across the torso of “Titties” Goober is carpet empire heiress Paula “Jackie” O’nutsausse, still recovering from a price-gouging PR disaster in 2007 in which O’nutsausse Textiles grossly overcharged for AIDS Memorial Quilt materials. Peter II and Harry participated in a joint Win-A-Date-With-The-Brants auction, going for $10,500 to an anonymous Korean bidder via telephone. At the event, 3ball MTY performed a medley of selections from Rent, and Patriarch Peter I participated in a comedy skit which involved Jennifer Rubell rolling him into the world’s largest burrito; he appeared visibly distraught for the remainder of the evening. “I’m going to have gaucamole in my ass for days,” he explained.

The brothers Brant made unlikely but stylish diplomats during a two-day cameo at Estonia’s National Reindeer Refuge, a wildlife heritage site located roughly 45 miles from the capital of Talinn. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves personally invited Harry and Peter II to act as cultural ambassadors at the First Annual Pro-Austerity Bonanza, an elite event organized to counter the recent wave of blowback against the academically influenced policies which have successfully eviscerated most of Europe’s economies. “We have done everything right, and now it’s time to celebrate that,” Ilves said, to scant but enthusiastic applause. “In the following years I plan to balloon the expense of higher education, privatize all natural resources in Estonia, and bring our medical care up to the high cost, low quality standards demonstrated by our friends, the United States. I also hope to build many more prisons, perhaps by importing some minorities, which we can then imprison.” Harry looked visibly perplexed during the duration of the proceedings, and admitted that he only agreed to come in exchange for a tailoring session with Viga Broonsvn, the Antwerp-trained designer known for inventing the popular genre of “shrunken Nordic clusterfuck.” Peter II shocked a gaggle of elderly ladies by relaying an anecdote about the time he accidentally tweeted a photo of his penis to the Prince of Monaco. Sigur Ros performed their new song “Iiiiiu Plik Hiiii*__@aaa” at the event, with accompaniment from the Estonian Castrati Chorus. 

“I’m like a sugar pixie in Donut Land!” giggled Harry, excitedly palpating his clavicle amidst the high-art confectionery of Kenny Scharf’s latest installation, “There’s A Hole In The Middle, You Know What 2 Do With It,” mounted in the ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home, the upscale Manhattan branch of Pier 1 Imports. “Kenny’s like a magician of whimsy,” Harry continued, visibly frothing at the corners of his mouth. “He’s a maestro of wowza fabulosity. Kenny makes me want to, like, put on a tutu and get on a rocket to Neptune or something. God. I feel diabetic just standing here.” The centerpiece of Scharf’s commission is a 37-foot plastic-and-Plexi alien with laser eyes, a moving tongue, and Martian genitalia fashioned from edible taffy. Making room for the massive, kinetic sculpture was no easy feat; ABC Carpet & Home was forced to reposition their in-house sitar player, as well as cancelling a proposed anti-fracking poetry slam helmed by Mark Ruffalo and the Dalai Lama’s vegan sous chef. Scharf was delighted with the V.I.P. crowd of collectors and museum patrons, who mingled effortlessly with a tight-knit cabal of scruffy New York legends who have known the artist since the ’80s heyday, when Haring and Basquiat ruled the scene. “I saw this guy and I totally thought he was homeless,” chuckled Don Rubell. “And then I realized he was important.”

Peter II with XR3908, far left, yet another iteration of his slightly inferior doppelgänger from rentaslightlyinferiorlookingperson
tomakeyoulookbetterincomparison.com (this one cross-bred with genetic material culled from Gavin Rosdale), and performative erotic acrobat Gerardo Villechaize, center, grandson of Hervé Jean-Pierre Villechaize, best known for portraying the character of Tattoo on Fantasy Island. The trio is celebrating the launch of Look3Vita, the new omega-3-impregnated bottled water created by Richard Prince, Chelsea Handler, and Pepsi-Co in partnership with the Dr. Bronner’s Soap Company. Peter II showed up slightly late to the event as he was dealing from the fall-out of CNN erroneously naming him as a ‘person of interest’ in the Boston marathon bombing. He wears a limited edition silkscreened scarf from Nate Lowman’s “The World’s Fucked Up, So Fuck You” series, this one featuring newspaper imagery from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. “It tastes a bit fishy,” Peter II said, after sampling a tumbler of Look3Vita, “but I think the health benefits probably, like, make it worth it.” XR3908 concurred, nodding his head, but then failing to stop nodding his head, until security personnel were forced to remove the defective equipment from the premises. 

The buzz was literally earthshattering at last night’s launch for the new Jimmy Choo X Skittles X Dom Perignon collaboration with Australian ex-model and downtown gallerist Emerald Fitzgerry (right), held at Baka Baka dumpling emporium on Little West 12th, the fabled members-only club overseen by a peculiarly fashion-forward branch of the Yakuza. “The awesome thing about this is that it’s a bit unclear as to what’s being celebrated,” fawned Harry, wearing a dyed pigskin blouse from Givenchy. “Is it a candy? A champagne? A pair of shoes you drink champagne out of, while eating candy?” Emerald Fitzgerry, meanwhile, fielded literally endless questions from journalists about the calculatedly outrageous exhibition at her L.E.S. gallery, Cox: The current show includes photographic silk wallpaper by Olivier Zahm, visible from Delancey Street, with a pattern that is based on film stills from 2 Girls, 1 Cup. “I think art is like a beautiful butterfly that, no matter how wild or crazy, and even if it’s a butterfly that is into unhygienic sexual acts that would make most Germans blush, should still be allowed to, like, fly toward the sun,” Fitzgerry said. “And plus this is really just distracting from my new project with Jimmy Choo, Skittles, and Dom Perignon, whatever it is. I think it might be a folding bicycle. Or maybe a diaphragm.”