Today on the Scroll: Self-styled internet celebrity shows her paintings of other people; comedy actor best known for not making it creates his own surreal life.
Lauren White is hosting her first art exhibition on Tuesday night, an event that does not seem all that unique, if only compared to how she’s been exhibiting herself for the past seven years.
Raymi the Minx is the name of the blog White started on November 28, 2000, when the Blogger service was young and confusing, but then so was she. A Grade 12 student at Streetsville Secondary School who worked part-time at Home Hardware, she adopted the name “Raymi” from her alter ego main character in a “crappy, pretentious story” she wrote at age 14, called The Last Minx. She first used the handle on the Vice message board.
And then she finished high school and had saved up $2,000 from working at the hardware store and moved to Brooklyn to intern at Vice magazine and then 9/11 happened and then she went back to the hardware store and then her then-boyfriend inherited his dad’s house in Rockland, Maine so she went there for three months, but it felt too much like The Shining.
“I was 19 years old and I felt like time was running out,” she explains. “It was a horse race to be something. Become something.”
And downtown Toronto has been the main setting for that experience ever since.
Mind you, all of this is chronicled in the 5,094 posts in the occasionally Not Safe For Work archives of raymitheminx.blogspot.com. But getting Lauren White for an online chat to recap her history was a bit easier than reading through it all, even if much of the story has been told in pictures.
Those pictures, particularly the ones where White photographed herself in various states — but never entirely undressed — distinguished her from locals who thought weblogs were primarily about words. And not that there wasn’t typing, arguably following in the tradition of her grandfather’s first cousin Jack Kerouac, except the daily onslaught of autobiographical images continues to fall somewhere between the work of Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman’s self portrait and Natacha Merrit’s early subversion of the camgirl.
Well, whatever exactly it is that she does, Raymi the Minx was the first person to do it that you could actually meet. And buy something from, too.
Raymi’s paintings, on display at the Crooked Star (202 Ossington) from Jan. 8 until the end of the month (view in this Flickr photoset), are dominated by the familiar cast of skinny celebrities bent on self-destruction (with a Saddam Hussein and a Kim Jong-Il thrown in for even worse measure).
While the idea of Angelina Jolie, Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie paintings may sound trite, a different perspective is provided from the brush of somebody who’s been running their own personal equivalent of TMZ all millennium long.
“I put on weight when I went on antidepressants and drank a lot,” Raymi IMs. “The only way you can feel in control is if you lose a ton of weight. So now I’m losing it, and the pictures of myself are like a sickness. I am reassuring myself that I am skinny, as long as I am standing the right way.
“And also to show what I am wearing. It’s content, too.”
Being her own curator puts Raymi on the receiving end of approaches from readers who’ve developed their own interpretation of her pursuit of existential stardom. “They are nervous,” she writes. “And then I am nervous. I get really ‘nice.’” Messing with the perception that her default mode is wild.
However, unlike the typical tabloid narrative associated with a 24-year-old starlet, there’s no speculation necessary on how Raymi the Minx ended up this way, since it’s all been documented. She’s always been in control, except when she wasn’t, but she won’t ever deny that she craved this type of fame.
How exactly one cashes in on it has yet to be calculated, although she’s already sold a few paintings, has self-published books (including one called Marketable Depression), and money can allegedly be made for being famous on the internet.
And yet, Raymi doesn’t feel beneath the idea of being somebody else’s muse.
“Basically, if some rich eccentric dude hires me to just hang around and amuse him, inspire him, I would take that job.”
A MID-30s HIRSUTE JEW WANTS YOU TO PAY ATTENTION TO HIM, ALSO
Steve Markle rang in 2008 by posting his first set of webisodes to YouTube, promising a glimpse inside his mind, where he dreams about meeting God and romancing Hitler, among his other everyday anxieties.
Markle’s finest 72 minutes, though, came with the 2004 documentary Camp Hollywood, where he chronicled the broken-down dreams of fellow youngish Canadian actors auditioning for pilot season while staying in the same cheap motel as noir journalist Gary Indiana and other hard-luck sorts.
The success of Camp Hollywood got Markle out of an $85,000 debt, along with a deal with SCTV vet Dave Thomas to turn the idea into a scripted comedy for Global Television. Two years and 200 rewrites later, there was no show, so what’s a 36-year-old funnyperson to do when it doesn’t look like he’s going to get any further with the schtick about not trying to make it?
You can see the exasperation in Inside Steve’s Mind, from the establishing shot that identifies the ROM Crystal as the Centre For Psychotherapy, to the droll depictions of his own subconscious. (After racking up a few thousand views, the first episode “Smells Like Love,” where he falls in love with his own feces, was yanked by YouTube, citing inappropriate content.)
Markle ran for mayor in the 1997 municipal election, earning 1,244 votes to fellow doofus candidate/EYE WEEKLY columnist William Burrill’s 1,421. His father and uncle were responsible for designing the recently salvaged Sam the Record Man sign. And even with the experience of living in Los Angeles without an income behind him, he’s spent $10,000 on production costs to give this online video thing a real shot.
“I do feel anxious about where my career is going right now,” Markle confesses via email. “It’s weird, I’ve always been a very introverted person, but at the same time I’ve craved the spotlight. I suppose I’m not alone, though. YouTube receives 65,000 new uploads every day from people like me who are trying to get noticed. Kind of depressing when you think about it, all of these desperate people reaching out for anonymous approval.
“Still, I find it oddly satisfying to receive encouraging messages from faceless YouTube users with names like mamalovespie99.”
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