“Dad’s inside, self-flagellating with a two-foot hunk of Etruscan salami,” Harry tittered, referring to Patriarch Peter I’s perennial bout of son-shame during the Brant Pondering, Consciousness-Raising, And Philanthropy Institute’s annual Totally Wasted ATV Rodeo. “It’s a pity, because this is for charity. And okay okay yah, boooring, there was that cousin who lost her legs, but they put them back on. Mostly. And if they hadn’t, she would have gotten those fucking sweet bionic ones, and probably run in the Olympics like some kind of goddamn cyborg champion.” Harry, rudely jerking the accelerator, proceeded to drive his quad up the face of the bronze Urs Fischer thumb permanently installed on the Institute’s front lawn. The bitchy prerogatives of gravity had other plans: The proud boy-scion, squealingly trapped beneath the revving motorcycle, the engine’s oscillating pressure driving into his stomach and causing an unfortunate, Bruce Naumanesque fountain of mimosa to periodically eject from his lips.  

 “I’m not riding this year,” admitted Brant family hagiographer and Gagosian wealth-fluffer Therek Assberg, photographed above in a dashing Yves Klein blue trench from Burberry’s Mary Poppin’s Man-Slave line. (”Help...me...” wheezed Harry, in between eructive blasts of mimosa, while an intern from BFA captured the moment from several flattering, and unflattering, angles). “I agree with the Patriarch in thinking that a ritualized day of binge-drinking, followed by a basically lawless, course-less race on throbbing, motorized death-machines, is not the wisest course of action, even if it is all to raise funds for kids with cancer, or spastics, or illiteracy in Nigeria or whatever.” That didn’t stop Assberg from cheering on the festivities from the sidelines, joined by couture horologist Bevis Frondpoot, pictured to his right, who would, later in the booze-sodden dregs of the afternoon, suffer minor burns when an ATV piloted by Kiki Malark, the visibly drunk 11-year old daughter of hedge-fund gardener Dingus Malark, veered out of control, morphing into what observers described as “a satanic fireball on four wheels, coaxed on by the winds of a malevolent and uncaring fate.” Despite minor setbacks, the Brant Institute happily reporting a donation-after-expenses of $412 for Up On Your Bootstraps Young Gent, a series of "three-quarter” houses in East New York. 

"It's basically a modern-day update of the classic Tarzan story, with a gay-disco twist and a socialite-murder subplot. Plus set in Central Park in the middle of February," explained Harry, shudderingly groaning through the third of three tree-limb pull-ups during a press day for Nature Boi,the short feature he wrote, starred in, and co-directed with NYU sophomore Blinky Turducken. Coyly waving off insinuations of Franconian dilettantism--the film is only one of a suite of side projects he's currently involved with, including a line of calorie-free hummus and a collection of gemstone-studded peacock harnesses--Harry assured reporters that Boi is "more than just a story about a physically superb young gentleman strutting and strolling around a park for 52 minutes while occasionally performing calisthenic exercises and washing his armpits with great big fistfuls of snow and doing, like, awesome cartwheels before meeting a beautiful yet somewhat feral teenage DJ hiding, forlorn, beneath a symbolically-loaded hot dog cart." 

The Brant family tree is large, it contains multitudes, with no branch perhaps so gloriously malformed as the one occupied by Darius Brant IV, shown at the right above during the clan's annual Duck & Fuck Low-Down Hoe-Down. Darius has, since 1979, resided in Brantsville, North Carolina, population 12, where he proudly produces self-proclaimed "trash assemblages" incorporating deer antlers, Chevy hub caps, and "all the lovely mucky shit dredged up on the cusp of the Wackahooka Dam."  

"I won't lie," Patriarch Peter said, "my cousin makes me slightly uncomfortable. But it's a discomfort that I choose to wade into, slowly; and like the cold, cold ocean, which performs its slow, frigid creep up your leg until arriving at that crucial groiny midpoint--where all your sense-receptors scream Abort! Abort! Abort!, but you still commit to going onward, shriveled and in great testicular agony--what I mean to say is, well, I find Darius's way of living both off-putting and deeply fascinating, as in titillating without a direct sexual edge. I'm going to stop talking now. But one unrelated word of caution for any non-smokers sampling the cornbread cooked by my niece, Daphna: It's got tobacco in it."

"We don't stray far from the maternal bosom when we're down here," Harry continued. "It's scary. Teeth are scarce, violence is plentiful. Supposedly civilized people go completely feral. Last year I saw Richard Prince castrate a pig, only it turned out to not be a pig at all, but a--"

"These people are the salt of the earth," interrupted Stephanie Seymour, muting her son by gently suffocating him in the swell of her plunging neckline. "Please consider purchasing work from the Brant Family Research Institute of America's Sad Appalachian Poverty Auction, which goes live on Paddle8 in twelve minutes." 

The Duck & Fuck Low-Down Hoe-Down earns its dual name for obvious reasons: An extravagant hunt, followed by a late night dance party DJed by Simon de Pury. "Simon plays those sultry deep cuts, the real no-nonsense baby-makers," Darius purred. The evening, per usual, culminates with a kinetic performance by one of his so-called TrashFuckers: A large creature hewn from car tires and refrigerator parts which hobbles and gyrates unsteadily before belching fire and collapsing into a heap of rubble. Also per usual, the barn becomes engulfed in flames, to be rebuilt to exacting specifications in time for next year's festivities. "We might lack sense," Darius said, urinating into the conflagration while invited media feverishly snapped photos, "but we don't lack money."

"There definitely wasn't a brawl," confirmed Deputy Sergeant Inspector Lisper Tucker. "There may have been a shovey-dovey, a bit of a tickle pickle. Maybe even some rubbery fisticuffs and a little old-fashioned slap-pappy. But a brawl? That's simply tabloid doofery, and I wouldn't trust it more than a tin nickel." Tucker was referring to reports that Peter II, Harry Brant, and Davina Margoza (above, in red), had been engaged in a bloody tussle on Collins Avenue during the opening days of Art Basel Miami Beach, described by the Post as "an orgiastic spasm of hyper-violence ripping the pleasant palm-tree facade apart" and leaving the art-world crowd who witnessed it "slack-jawed, appalled, and struggling to make sense of their new normal." 

What has been confirmed is that Peter II and Harry were on their way to an Emperor Nero-themed fete at Miami Sedition, the new ultra-luxe property owned by the FitzGibbit Ultra-Luxe Holding Company. The hotel--famously designed by a Dutch ex-starchitect who intentionally blinded himself following the project's completion, citing the fact that, having achieved spatial perfection, he no longer needed to experience space--loomed in the Miami sky like a wart-speckled Brutalist refrigerator, and the Brants sedately skipped down Collins with a coterie of publicists and journalists corralled by Gagosian gallery wealth fluffer and Brant family hagiographer Therek Assburg. At this point they were reportedly accosted by a "small gang" of city locals, who surrounded the posse and began chanting "FoToLo Go Home" (invoking a popular Miami slang term meaning, roughly, "Foreign Tourist Losers") while dousing the hapless Brants with fishbowl-sized cherry Freeze-A-Ritas purchased at Liquor Lounge.

"Harry and Peter II reacted with the poise and bearing befitting the nuevo-royalty they embody," Assburg later said during a hastily assembled press conference at Soho Beach House's newly launched Erotic Unicorn cafe. "These are two boys with dreams and ambitions--including, but not limited to, a line of skin-bleaching products for Asian women; a new iPhone app that enables you to organize and curate your friends using a proprietary algorithm designed by a renegade M.I.T. computer scientist and not, contrary to earlier reports, modeled on mid-century eugenics research; and a boutique hotel in which the rooms are actually small clouds that guests just sort of simmer and dissolve inside of. My point is, these are not two young boys who would engage in physical violence with Miami thugs while dressed as members of Emperor Nero's court, and to suggest such a thing is not only ridiculous, but insulting." 

"It's not like I want to be the next Hans-Solo Obrist," [SIC], Davis 'Pritchard' Brant said at a mimosa-drenched morning press conference for "#BULGINGCHAPS", the new erotic-Western-themed exhibition he's staging at Upper East Side gallery Jade Willow Pandemonium. "But I figured I'm already curating all the time--I'm curating my lunch, curating my Ello friend list, curating the little assortment of whimsical figurines I keep on my bedside table, the tiny glass elephants and wooden shoes that bring me such joy upon awakening--and so I figured, why not curate an art show?" Why not indeed, answered J.W.P. megadealer Prebus Frankman, the real estate tycoon-cum-dealer who also moonlights as a highly opinionated critic. (Readers will perhaps remember the dust-up over the publication of his 2013 Times rant, "I'd Rather Punch Myself In The Face With Boxing Gloves Made Out Of Diseased, Raw Chicken Than Suffer Through The Debased Shit-Slog of Miami Basel Again," after which Frankman was photographed profusely during ABMB, seemingly enjoying himself, with nary a chicken-glove in sight.)

"#BULGINGCHAPS," which is sponsored by Phillip Morris and Boy Butter, will prominently feature seminal pieces by Richard Prince, including the controversial new series in which he appropriates profile photos of cowboys from Grindr.   

"I'm the purple-fuggled, hirsute Mayor of Brainsplosionville, about to literally give birth to a child-sized version of myself, who will be hung like a moose and fantaaaaaastic," squawked Therek Assburg, the chemically enhanced Chief Wealth-Fluffer for the Gagosian empire. Assburg is photographed here with winners of his Instagram-based Rave Wit' Therek (TM) promotion, sponsored by Facebook and Ello, the anti-Facebook, along with WhatEvahGuvnah, the newly launched anti-Ello. A dozen lucky partygoers scored an all-expenses-paid trip with Therek to Twelve Lightning Bugs, the Pasadena, CA-based experiential festival billed by promoters as "Burning Man for people with a 401k and no scabies." The Brant brothers, while originally included as a major component of the package, were unable to attend due to previous obligations to My Little Lady, a girls' finishing school in Oxford. 

"The trip hasn't been quite what I expected," admitted Dasha Zurnovika, a contest winner who had spent 49 hours and six layovers flying from Moscow in order to "let [her] soul-harmonies twang and twitch to the beat of Assburg's magnificent technicolor ravecoat." What, exactly, was lacking? "Therek was super cool for the first, like, twenty minutes of the week. But then he started misquoting Charles Bukowski, and sort of punching himself in the face while talking about Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, before stealing this anarcho-lesbian's bike and pedaling out into the desert. So, yeah, we haven't seen him in five days, which probably means he's dead?" 

Larry Gagosian did not return phone calls regarding the whereabouts of his prized employee. Meanwhile, G'DayEdwardSnowden.com is the new anti-WhatEvahGuvnah.  

"It's about giving back to everyday people--the schmucks, the normals, the dopes, the ordinaries," explained Therek Assberg, Professional Wealth-Fluffer for Larry Gagosian. Assberg is photographed above at a Dayton, Ohio Applebee's, one of the stops on a 2014 road tour organized by the international empire of galleries in a self-conscious effort to "introduce salt-of-the-earth Americans to the wonders of Art." The initiative thus far has involved Assberg serving artist-designed cocktails at various suburban chain restaurants (here he carries pomegranate tingle-fizzies concocted by Richard Phillips and a free-trade coconut water mocktail by Ed Ruscha). "The thing about Americans is they're not as stupid as you'd think," says Assberg, who is also using the road tour to promote his self-published book, The Sassy Girl's Guide To Being A Boss And Retiring To Chic Heaven. "Most of them think that art is just, like, Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade. We're here to tell them that art is a lot, lot more--that art can be someone's semen, slowly drying on a brick wall. Or a walrus carcass filled with bitcoins. Or a set of directions explaining how to change a car tire, written in Aramaic and buried in a golden box in an undisclosed location in Kansas. I met an old lady in Pittsburgh who asked me, 'Therek, what IS art?' And what I did was I just held up a mirror to her face, real close, and I said: Take a good look, old lady. Take a good, good look." 

Gagosian's cross-country initiative will conclude at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas, where the silver-haired mega-dealer will co-host a pig roast alongside Alice Walton. 

"It's fucking Land Art meets Abercrombie & Fitch, biiiitches," squealed Harry Brant, mugging for the camera beside a field in Southampton. A bit of explanation is, perhaps, in order. While recent stories confirmed Patriarch Peter I's acquisition of Walter de Maria's East Village home studio, most outlets have kept mum about a more controversial purchase: Harry's wholesale purchase of the minimalist icon's 1977 Earth Room, formerly installed in a loft on Wooster Street. "This dirt was just fucking sitting there, doing nothing," the young Brant explained, "so I was, like, why not activate it?" The resulting performative artwork, which Harry has alternately dubbed Earth, Life, Love or Walter de Marialloverme, was documented by David LaChapelle, who plans to show the suite of images at a winter pop-up shop collaboration between Paul Kasmin and H&M. 

Meanwhile, rumors that Patriarch Peter I intends to convert de Maria's former digs into a Dash Snow-themed day-care center have yet to be confirmed. 

The Sun Gods poured their golden elixirs liberally over the fecund lawns of the Brant Compound on Mother's Day, blessing the inauguration of "A Trans-Commercial Poesy," a new exhibition of work by Colombian wunderkind Oscar Murillo. Harry, above, is photographed with Hannah Rotshchild Barronness Complacencia, the 17-year old C.E.O. of the tween fashion-blogging empire I'm Special You're Special Now Smile ©. "Mom went to some shitty store like ABC Carpet & Home and just bought  $90,000 of pillows," Harry giggled. "It's like goddamn Coachella out here, except we've got these pureed-caviar cannoli instead of, like, hash brownies." 

Here, an elderly guest eagerly Instagrams 18 Wheels (My Father Was A Truck Driver, He Drove All Night But Still Hugged Me Like A Little Bunny), a new site-specific commission by Murillo composed of a tractor trailer previously owned by the Colombian trucking company ChupaCalle, Murillo's father's employer for a period of 2 months in 1978. The truck was sawed in half by a team of 90 of Murillo's friends and family members from Colombia, who were flown in for the project, which involved delicately bisecting the vehicle using the simple plastic utensils that Murillo remembers using at his childhood birthday parties. (The 12-week process was captured with Go-Pro cameras that were Duct-taped to the workers' heads, with the resulting footage edited into a new work, Watch Me GoGo, projected inside the compound onto a block of synthetic cocaine).

Therek Assburg, freelance wealth-fluffer for the Gagosian Empire, awkwardly holds hands with Swedish death metal pioneer Kaillie Koenig. "Another impeccable day in the realm of Patriarch Peter I," Assburg confirmed, wearing a bandanna artisanally impregnated with blowfish kidney oil. "I think Murillo is a geeeeenius, personally. This tops the project where he had those 8-year olds play kickball on raw canvases, with paint all over their feet, and then sold them all before they'd even dried. The paintings I mean, not the kids." Koenig, feverishly molesting an e-cigarette and muttering Masonic imprecations under her breath, was not as pleased. "Sure, these muppets are happy now," she hissed. "But let's see how they're skipping when the hellfires rain down, the locusts nibble their ear canals, and the rivers--of fundament, pure fundament!--turn their pleasure palaces into skeletal husks of decay." ("Someone needs a martiiiiini," Assburg tittered).

A fabled springtime event at the Brant Compound, initiated by Patriarch Peter I in the glorious year of 1978: The ceremonial "hurling of the cow chip," in which a dessicated hunk of bovine excrement is flung across a field, its crumblings later read like tea leaves and used to make pivotal decisions regarding the Patriarch's stock portfolios.

Above, a painting by Murillo from the Brant's own collection; bought for $800 when the artist was still an undergrad, it has since been valued at anywhere between $900 and $1.9 million, depending on Leonardo DiCaprio's mood. "I just love how Oscar has updated the tropes of Basquiat in such an innovative way," Patriarch Peter I explained. "It's international, it's cosmopolitan. Like, mierda, that's a foreign language, because I don't even know what it means. It's probably Spanish, because Oscar is from Puerto Rico or Nicaragua or something. And TURD SANDWICH, think about it: Existential. Basic. Raw. Gritty. We normally have this piece above the dining room table in Greenwich and it's a great reminder--of existentialism, and rawness, and grittiness." 

Murillo himself didn't make much of a public appearance at the Brant opening, preferring to remain in the basement-level bar with his two longtime "French Fry Girls," a Belgian duo who he hires to dress as French fries and accompany him to press-related events. Journalists from publications whose names did not start with the letters A, F, M, or O were allowed into the sanctum and given the opportunity to ask two questions, provided the questions themselves did not exceed 140 characters. Murillo, in his signature fashion, occupied himself by juggling Twizzlers while pondering his responses. He snorted to comedic effect in response to a demurely anxious reporter from the Greenwich Art Times, who had asked him to "explain where his inspiration comes from." After rolling his eyes performatively for a period of 30 seconds (during which time the French Fry Girls enacted a series of ballet-inspired cartwheels behind him), Murillo approached the reporter, coming so close that his nose was pressed against her forehead. "Listen to me," he whispered. "When you've gone back in time 28 years, and been born in Colombia, and then moved to London, and bled your genius out onto the dirty floor of a studio for a few years, and worked as a janitor somewhere, while at the same time not at all considering how this whole 'worked-as-a-janitor' thing will be spun into pure fucking gold in a press release used to sell your genius-spasms to people who have never cleaned a toilet bowl in their lives, then--maybe--we can have a conversation about this."

"Gravity is soooo déclassé," Harry squeaked, literally 'light on his toes' at the Tribeca Amex Dom Perignon Film Festival's 'Documentaries of Privilege, Privileges of Documentary' showcase, thanks to the Armani Subtle-Jet (™) integrated into the back of a limited-edition shrunken pygmy blazer from Dior. "I'm still getting used to the mechanism," he admitted, noting that the overall effect was akin to a "persistent wedgie, but with undertones of terrestrial liberation and, like, a glimmer of what birdies might feel when they fly around on a pretty day."

Harry was most excited, of course, to see an advance screening of Dear Africa, We Love You, a film produced by Brant hagiographer and Gagosian wealth-fluffer Therek Assburg. The film (which opens with a controversial, 12-minute shot of Harry embracing an albino giraffe) was completed over the course of six charitable trips the Brants took to Nigeria, where they visited villages, dispensing fashion- and art-related advice to children who were literally starving for such knowledge. "It was so fricken beautiful," Harry confirmed. "Though I got a bit Michael Jackson-y some days--like, mask and gloves and all that--because, you know. AIDS. But oh, I shot a lion, and they let me keep a hunk of his mane! I made a necklace out of it, and now the Whitney is auctioning it off for something or other. Maybe AIDS!"

Peter II shocked the Amex/Dom Perignon corporate crowd by attending the screening wearing nothing but a tube sock beneath his waxed-beaver-pelt trench. "Peter II has a very big heart," Assburg said. "I often had to stop filming because my own torrential tear-downpour was threatening to damage the camera equipment. Or sometimes I had to stop filming to just write down something silly or smart or touching that Peter II had said. Or sometimes I had to stop filming to go buy a new little Moleskine notebook, which is not easy in Africa, because my old Moleskine was already full of notes about silly, smart, and touching things Peter II had said. Or sometimes I had to stop filming in order to make a little sketch of the way the light on the plains was glinting off Peter II's hair just so, refracting off the sculptural plateau that he achieves via careful application of pomade and various molding products." Assburg admits that such distractions often hurt the film--causing him to forget to engage the camera's ON button, for instance. Approximately 94% of Dear Africa, I Love You was later reshot using a green screen in Long Island City. 

“Of course we have a subscription to Oedipus Epic,” natters Harry Brant, reclining in a Cynthia Rowley-inflected lawnchair and clad in a Daniel Buren-striped pajama onesie and silk slippers from Singapore Airlines’ Ultra-Premiere Class cabins. “It costs basically like a bazillion dollars to ship it over from Germany, but nobody does morally questionable incest-y fashion editorial like they do. Nobody.”

Brant Watch spoke to Harry the day that an 8-page Oedipus Epic editorial was leaked online. The spread features Harry, Peter II, and Stephanie Seymour in a series of vignettes inspired by popular coming-of-age-by-fucking-your-mom films such as Spanking the Monkey and Murmur of the Heart. It will appear in print alongside a 3,500 hagiography co-written by Derek Hastings, an aspiring blogger who is also the Brants’ long-time pool boy. (Hastings also recently made waves with the announcement that he’s joining Larry Gagosian’s gallery empire as a ‘wealth fluffer.’).

Brussels-based photographer Frederick Chucklestick conceptualized the shoot; post-production digital retouching was handled over the course of several months by Industrial Light & Magic. “Freddie was basically like, Does anything make you uncomfortable?” Peter II remembers. “We were like, We’ll do anything but sit on a black woman for this shoot. Anything.” That open-mindedness resulted in images like the one above, in which Harry embodies the character of Samiam, Lord of the Peacocks, while his mother portrays Leda, on the cusp of seduction with Zeus. (Peter II thought dressing as a swan would be “too childish.”) “Chucklestick kept asking me to scootch my crotch forward,” Harry laughs. “Connect with the bum, he’d say. Dock your crotch in your mum’s landing pad! It totally reminded me of that one episode of Different Strokes where they go into the bike shop owner’s basement.”

This shot mashes up a variety of pop-cultural influences (“Chucklestick is sooooo fucking postmodern,” Harry says). On one level, it’s a simple portrait of Peter II checking his mother’s scalp for lice while she stares directly at the voyeuristic camera eye, daring it to come and fornicate with her. On another level, it’s a visual rewrite of the Twilight series, combined with the basic plot of Funny Games: Two undead anemic vampire children invade the house of a helpless, beautiful woman, and engage in increasingly bizarre acts of torture and seduction. “You should see the outtakes,” Harry says. “Actually, I wish you could, but you can’t. German customs seized all of them. And when you freak out German people you know you’ve done something right.”

Brant Watch attempted to reach Patriarch Peter I for comment, but when approached near the family’s Greenwich home, he ran away at a brisk trot, yelling that he had “something stuck in his eye” and was definitely “not crying bitter tears of frustration and disappointment at what my life has become.”

“I’ll pioneer, imagineer, shake up some lazyheads,” said Derek Hastings in the wake of the announcement that he would join Larry Gagosian’s gallery empire as a vaguely defined Coordinator of Sycophancy. “I’ve never met a box that I want to think inside. I’ve never encountered chains that could confine my flexing mind-muscles. My modus operandus is all Blam! Kapow! Motherfucker, the sky is purple, and I’m your real daddy!”

Hastings, best known for a recent incest-themed editorial spread in German magazine Oedipus Epic, is a man of many hats. He began his career as an intern at Purple–where his responsibilities included buffing effluvia out of Olivier Zahm’s leather pants–before relocating to a 10,000 square foot East Village loft, where he used his parents’ money to throw lavishly themed birthday parties for NYU undergrads. “Hastings has an enviable talent for attaching himself to important people who basically don’t notice him,” said a frenemy who wished to remain anonymous. “I’ve always thought of him as a turd-y piece of plankton suctioned to a fabulous whale. But not in a bad way.”

It’s Hastings’s paid relationship with the Brants, however, that has truly scorched his name into the book of New York’s elite. (Patriarch Peter I keeps Hastings on a reportedly $12,000/month retainer, leaving him responsible for party chaperoning, make-up retouching, and the occasional advertorial puff piece. In the summer he’s employed as a pool boy at the Brants’ Greenwich compound). “Derek is so cute,” Harry confirms, “and versatile. He’s swabbed up my puke, read me bedtime stories, hugged me and told me it’s going to be all right. Sometimes I almost forget that he has no real life of his own, just a completely vacuous existence flailing among the sad, sloppy seconds of the 1%, paying his own way to fly to Dubai for some despotic Sheika’s dog’s debutante ball.”

“Young Derek will be an asset to my imperial empire,” Gagosian said in a written statement. “His lips were tailor-made by God to kiss ass. He has appropriately nonexistent levels of shame, and his family wealth enables him to seek employment without concern for remuneration. By that I mean I’m not even paying him. Derek Hastings is a golden egg, and I look forward to hatching him beneath the warm weight of my heaving, omnipotent haunches.”

With applesauce stains dappling the front of his Calvin Klein extruded-silk pajama jumper, Julian Schnabel takes a private moment with friend, billionaire, and professional-enabler Patriarch Peter I. "We did it Petie," Schnabel whispered, "we really fuckin' did it. There's like 400 people here, and I bet only 8% of them know that this is all a joke." Those annointed celebrity guests included actor Benicio del Toro, best known for his stirring role in The Wolfman; Debbie Harry, acclaimed for her recent guest judge role on Project Runway Season 3; and the ghost of late, lovable curmudgeon Lou Reed, who bumbled about the Brant compound loudly "hating every fucking thing and every fucking body." 

Peter II, wearing a hand-tailored suit from Stephen Cohen's new Criminal Enterprise (TM) line of menswear, posed with someone's near-sighted aunt in front of Schnabel's iconic Smashed Plate Boogie-Woogie (Requiem for Janet's Face / Bring Me The Head of Caesar, Extra Dressing), 1987. "The plate works are definitely my fav," Peter II explained. "It's like Julian just does not give a fuck. Most people would see all those plates and be like, Sweet, dinner party time! But he was, like, 'I see a specter of destruction, and I shall bring my wrath upon you, vulnerable porcelain detritus of our modern civilization!' It's fucking punk."

Jeffrey Deitch, freshly back from California and excited about his upcoming role as the host of Bravo's Work of Art 3: The Bushwick Years, is seen here with Marxist fashion scholar Arnie "Praxis" Geez. Deitch wears a couture corduroy suit from Thom Browne's Talking Teddy Ruxpin Is Your Friend (TM) collection. The pair are posed in front of Urs Fischer's monumental bronze sculpture, Pain In The Ass, 2003, rendered from a 3-D scan of the artist's prostate.    

"This is my Hurricane Sandy painting," Schnabel said of the piece above, Driftwood Mojo / Hurry Up & Wait / I've Got Some Peanut For You, Puppy, 1980. "This was made decades before the actual event, but born out of a certain telekinetic prescience, as if I could feel the storm in my hands as I worked. It's not the first time this has happened."

Compound guests were thrilled by vaudeville icon and professional impersonator Jimmy DeVille, seen here in costume as the beloved Christopher Walken, who reportedly died in 1982. 

Eddie Schnabel, Julian's younger brother, is photographed here with the 1986 smashed-plate-and-ox-blood masterpiece Song Of Titan / Moon Warrior Abandon / Trim Your Hedge Fund, Sir. "I'm real proud of Jules," said Eddie, a partially employed plumber by training who lives in Astoria and tends to see his elder sibling only a few times a year, at gala events. "Our mom always said, J-Jay, you're gonna be somebody, and look, here he is: Somebody." 

"The tail end of August is the hardest time for these lost souls," whispered Harry, speaking to a reporter from W magazine at the four-day Burning Man Recompression Survivor's Camp, an immersive healing retreat hosted in Jersey City. "They're reading all the tweets, they're seeing the Instagrams, they're remembering that time back in '06 when they just ran fucking free and barefoot all night, on some sort of vision quest, and communed with a gigantic flaming aardvark who was riding a dream-bicycle across the pocked face of the moon. And it just matters that they know: We're here for you now, everything is going to be alright." It's the second year that Harry has volunteered to serve as what BMRSC calls a "flesh-embodied reality anchor"--the terminology itself admittedly a bit of a holdover from the days in which even meatloaf came spiced with LSD. This year, the young Brant's first charge is Delorean Brattle Spracket (born Emily Holliday), an 18-year old "burner" inducted into the hallucinatory West Coast revel by her cousin, who first began traveling to the Black Rock Desert for an American Studies thesis he was completing at Rutgers University. "At first things were pretty chill?" Spracket says, her voice as hypnotically glacial as mostly-frozen maple syrup. "Like, you'd just be hanging out, and somebody would be like, Care for a free burrito? And the burritos were totally guaranteed to be vegan, you didn't even have to ask? And then some dude who back home is probably like a lame dad with a bunch of stupid kids is, like, riding a tricycle around naked in the sand, just totally rapping in some language that hasn't been spoken since caveman times?" (Spracket's spine does a weird sort of shimmy-jerk thing, at which point Harry enfolds her in a "cone of understanding.") Fifteen minutes later, she continues: "But then sometimes maybe some guy would be like, Have you ever read Noam Chomsky?, and you haven't, so you go back to his tent? But it turns out that Noam Chomsky is just sort of like a nickname for his penis, which he's painted to look like a mushroom with a terrifying face?" 

"It feels good to be a role model," says Harry later, still quietly conversing with the reporter from W. "These kids need some grounding. They need what I would call a reality check, or what the literature here refers to as a 'realignment of sense-parameters with the horizon of greater glee.' I mean, look at them: They've been living in a world without any responsibility, without any need to work or earn money or do something of value that contributes to the planet; they're just like drug-addled Bobbleheads, bobbling their way from one party to the next, completely ignorant of how the majority of the world goes about their business, blindly supported by parents--if such a word even applies here, I mean, really--who don't realize what a holocaust of privilege they're funding." Harry and the W reporter step outside to smoke an unfiltered bindi cigarette, a packet of which the anemic Brant has tucked into the mink-lined pocket of his rutabaga-impregnated denim motorcycle shimmers. "You've just got to shake them--not literally, some of them have brain damage--just metaphorically shake them and ask: What is your purpose? Why are you here? Are you a sentence in the story of the world, or even a piece of punctuation, or are you just dead, blank space on the margins of the page?" 

At midnight, Harry's agreed-upon two hour time-donation was up, and he gave a wistful Queen's wave in the direction of Spracket, who was deep into a period of mandated journaling ('text-based gestation of hope-material.') "Id like one day 2 live in Norway and raise cows," she wrote. "To milk their udders in the morning, go for walks at dusk, to have a husband with an unruled beerd and rough viking hands" [SIC.] She looked up from her labors in search of Harry, who by then was merely a dwindling red light entering the Holland Tunnel. He'd been replaced on big brotherly duty by Alan Cumming, smiling sheepishly, carrying a battered Whole Foods bag filled with puppets.

The New York Post caught a scoop this morning (courtesy of Brant Watch) regarding a vitriolic blow-out between white-haired billionaire koala Tony Shafrazi, Patriarch Peter I, and notoriously bad driver Owen Wilson. The scuffle--which ended with pools of blood and hunklets of scalp marring the pavement of 6th Avenue--was the result of a simple text-messaging error. "Everyone knows Patriarch Peter can't use technology to save his fucking life," Shafrazi said, oozing an undefined substance from a gash on his left cheekbone. "You say BlackBerry to him and the fucking guy gets all squirmy, like you just dropped a racial slur on the floor." Shafrazi had been coordinating dinner plans with Patriarch Peter I and Wilson; unfortunately, the latter duo was ensconced at DaVeh'Gina, while Shafrazi was pacing in front of Indochine "like some fucking creep with nothing fucking better to do than fucking burn calories."

The misunderstanding was partially cleared up thanks to a tweet from Wilson ("Chillin at Duh'Vagenius with @PatriarchPeter, bout to be an oyster HOLOCAUST in this piece" [sic]) which Shafrazi promptly responded to ("UFUCKINGDOUCHEFACE i suggest U clear a boot-sized space in your ass IMATINDOCHINE #livid"). Shafrazi hired a pedicab to rush him to the correct restaurant, where he observed a visibly intoxicated Patriarch Peter I assisting Wilson in the 'Slurpy-Slurp Friend Luge,' a Brant tradition in which a dozen fatty Blue Points are quickly ingested, in the manner of a beer funnel, using a scoop-shaped plastic implement passed down from one generation to the next.

Shafrazi, by now so enraged that he was shaking "like a fucking Parkinson's patient on the Cyclone," ejected himself from the pedicab and grabbed Wilson around the neck, reversing the course of the last three Blue Points, which were ejected "high into the air like a geyser of mucus" (according to the Post.) A trio of Italian waiters attempted to restrain the boisterous gallerist, to no avail. "You ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER fucking leave me waiting in front of the wrong fucking restaurant," Shafrazi bellowed, "and you'll be deader than your fucking career. You'll be reincarnated as a retarded dog, and you won't even get cast in Air Bud 6, you fuck."

By the time the carnage had ended, some twenty minutes later, six anonymous diners on the sidewalk patio had been killed. Patriarch Peter I fled the scene, later found walking in his underwear toward Chelsea Piers. Shafrazi reportedly broke Wilson's nose seventeen times before being hurled into the street, where a Toyota Prius drove over him and failed to stop, having mistaken his body for a discarded mattress wrapped in black plastic. At press time, everyone involved was pressing charges against everyone else, and Shafrazi was suing Indochine for being "the wrong fucking place at the wrong fucking time."

Here we find Harry, wearing tapered anaconda slurpeets paired with a Venetian-mesh blouse and heel-jacked hog-bladder booties, photographed with Gina Berruchio, hostess of the popular Italian gameshow "Your Mommy's Salami," wearing a new Gerhard Richter X The Jogging dress produced by Uniqlo. The occasion is the first annual benefit gala at the Wonderwheel Center, a Long Island-based institution founded by Lady Gaga in order to promote "intrinsic and explosive wonder-cality in the performing and visual-type arts."  Guests at the benefit--which reportedly "cleared everyone worthwhile out of Manhattan for an entire Saturday, leaving only the shitty and unimportant behind, weeping into the pillows of their own insignificance," according to GalleristNY.com--were treated to various coGAGAborations with the likes of Antony, Marina Abramovich, and Dustin Yellin. (The latter artist's piece was literally electrifying, as it involved Gaga playing a bone-white grand piano whose keys were attached by wires and alligator clips to the nipples of Yellin, who was suspended precariously above a large water basin.) Peter II was woefully unable to attend, as he had previously committed to making a promotional Sweet 16th birthday cameo in Anaheim, California. ("$18,500 to show up, eat some cake, fart, and take the jet home," Harry explained, with a languorous wrist movement of unexplained import.) 

The evening kicked off with erstwhile actor Alan Cumming MC'ing what Gaga referred to as a "wonder-tastic battle between artiste bulls and slavering, testosteroni matadors [sic, from press materials]." Creatives, including Peter Coffin, Matthew Barney, and Sarah Sze, donned frilly 'bull' costumes designed by Rob Pruitt, and proceeded to be taunted, "stabbed," and ultimately slaughtered by James Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. "In Madrid they eat the balls," Dimon cackled, to the delight of a braying front-row crowd. "But here we exercise a bit more restraint." 

Later, a select cream of V.I.P.s were skimmed from the rabble and invited to take part in A Boat For My Lady, A Lady For The Lake, a brand new experiential installation produced by Gaga in conjunction with Punchdrunk and General Electric. The event, as candidly described by the Center's publicist, "is pretty much like Sleep No More except outside, and with fewer people, but with more freaky-deaky Oriental-type shit." Guests wearing thin-china masks were escorted into the woods by a gaggle of "ninja-clown-butlers" who enacted a malleable narrative based on Shakespeare, Law & Order: SVU, and David Foster Wallace's Pale King. (Specific details were scant, as media was not invited to participate.) 

Harry was reportedly lost from the group for six to seven hours, later discovered by a Long Island police officer curled into the hollow of a tree. He was unharmed, but also different, somehow, from that point on. 

This production still for boutique perfume brand Bestial: Indignity: Desire: Bitterness captures Italian motorcross hopeful Lenny Capadappa and Peter II sweatily sandwiching pickle heiress and aspiring actress Lana Porcine. Porcine (whose Facebook page lists "Natalee Halloway" as a personal inspiration) plays the role of a disheveled teen clubgoer being greedily nibbled, poked, and groped by two hormonal strangers who, driven mad by the scent of her perfume, proceed to literally devour her in CGI sequences created during post-production. "It's like a metaphor for how the way we smell can make our lives better," Porcine surmised, though she did express some discomfort and confusion that her character ends the commercial as little more than a puddle of steaming, vaguely human material on the floor of a nightclub, said puddle being greedily lapped at by Capadappa and Peter II, who have at this point sprouted pointed CGI ears and pronounced facial hirsuteness, an art director's approximation of the insatiable lupine yearning triggered by Bestial: Indignity: Desire: Bitterness, which retails for $819 per 10 ounce bottle at Barney's.