Pigu da 了

'He was nothing but a 17-year-old hustler, and a stupid one at that,' he scoffs, Jackson Pollocking my face with egg salad. 'He contracted gonorrhoea and he must have given it to dozens of people because he didn't have it seen to for weeks. It got so bad ... 'On an adjacent table, a bubbly young woman begins guffawing noisily with her boyfriend. Anger seethes and leans closer into my tape recorder. 'It got so bad,' he repeats, shooting her a vicious glare, 'that he literally had pus dripping through his pants. Oh for God's sake...'

Now she's laughing her head off. Her face is red and shuddering, she's hooting and banging the table. And with her every burst, Anger's fury mounts - he winces, his jaw clenches ever tighter, until finally he snaps. 'Right, I'm going to tell that fucking bitch to shut up!' And he squeezes out of the booth, this tall and fuming 75-year-old, half-dragging the tablecloth with him. He stomps over to her table and barks: 'Do you think you could possibly keep it down?' The glee drains swiftly from the poor girl's face. 'I'm trying to do an interview over there and I can barely hear myself think! You really are very loud, you know, you have a very shrill voice. In fact,' he jabs his finger at her, 'you have the ugliest voice I've ever heard in a woman!'

With that, he returns to his salad, his breath shaking, and tucks himself back in. 'That told her. The bitch. Now, she's made me forget what we were talking about. Oh yes, gonorrhoea. So, anyway, by the time he had it treated his tubes were terribly scarred...' And that is legally where his anecdote must end. To name the star in question would invite a ruinous libel suit.

Though he gives the appearance at times of just an ill-tempered peddler of unsubstantiated gossip, Kenneth Anger is in fact an artist whose influence on modern culture has been immense. As the author of the iconic Hollywood Babylon books (volumes I and II), Anger not only swung open the gates to a world of gossip in which our media now wallows, he coined a title so classic that, like Catch 22, you needn't have read it to understand what it means. The venereal A-list rent boy has all the hallmarks of a vintage Babylon tale - a huge star with a sleazy secret, lashings of Schadenfreude and the graphic relish of 'dripping pus', a typical Anger flourish. But Anger is firstly a filmmaker, one of the most important of the 20th century - gossip was only ever a sideline. Throughout his career he broke momentous ground with his short art films, pioneering both gay cinema and MTV in turn, a 'trashy channel' he can now hardly bear to watch. A leading light in the American underground, alongside Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner, Anger was the first to use pop songs instead of a traditional score for his films. His use of jump cuts and sound were a

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