8/24/17

VEGETARIAN TIMES

Today was my target date to finish the blog.



This just snuck up on me. Maybe the deadline was more for me: to start another thing. To stop just writing for blogspot and move on.

This has been the way I've reached the most people though. And people still find things through it. So for now I'm gonna keep it online, as an archive. I reserve the right to come back, hide or repurpose any of this obviously.

I've been keeping online diaries since I was 15 or 16 years old. More than half my life. Ditto vegetarianism.



I started this blog in 2007, after an earlier one called WHIM JOB (essays). Maybe or maybe not this is the better name. In a perfect world this ending would matter, people would care. I would care.

I want to make a proper website for my work, and not just the blog.
So maybe that's next. Then write essays, try to get a book deal.

Unexpurgated. Like Anaïs Nin, one of my heroes. Though to be honest I always liked her edited versions. Maybe need to re-read those. Something about faking back into yourself.

I have so many plans! And I never follow through!

- Still, still working on a final issue of Scorcher.
- Two new long poem things.
- Whatever else.

I guess quitting the blog will give me more time to focus on those.

I will probably start a new blog and have it be more essays or something.

A sad creeping dread.
Confirmation of something I willfully forgot a long time ago.

But maybe I've mapped a lot of that out, right here, though.

I'm tough. I've been through a lot. I'm resilient.



You can learn from my mistakes. Remember when I took a long break from blogging because I was so sad, because I felt like I was getting teased and bullied online. And offline. By my own self.

A journal, from me, wasn't necessary. I showed some people a fantasy. Pivot away.

Nothing's done and nothing's solved. I kept hurting myself. I wake up my room mates with my cough.

This blog, yes, and this apartment I've been in for 11 years, yes.
I'm so constant. Stubborn? Lazy?

Remember when I posted about quitting my job to get part time work and focus on being an artist. This was after all the tooth drama had resolved. That would have been in 2010. And so many nice people wrote to me to congratulate me. And then I went right back to full time work.
I've made a lot of bad decisions.

There's no summary. I want to get hired to write a memoir of my 20s (essentially this blog) but in a nicer way. You know?

Remember the last ECLIPSE I wrote about: my tooth broke at NYU and the next day I performed at the New Museum. I often forget that I did that show with a broken tooth. I was working as a receptionist then.



I had some disappointments, some setbacks. I handled them poorly.
I also did a lot of really difficult stuff and I also let people be really nasty to me because I thought I was supposed to. I miss so many people.

I used to feel like I had so many friends. In many ways, I blew it.

I got off track and I thought this blog was the track, would get me back on it, but that didn't work or happen or something. I'm re-learning this. I'm not where I thought I wanted to be. But in other ways beyond where I'd ever hoped to imagine going. It's so funny.

I thought I needed Billy so I made him and became him and then...
I wanted to be something else, approaching me-ish.

Anyways. Thanks for everything and see you around.

accidental over

I spent so much time as a kid thinking about lazers.

At an art opening at a tiny gallery. Crowded room full of teenage (looking) girls. Feeling like I'd discovered an authentic, small, unmapped territory.



But then look at the gallery folder folder and all of the artists are teen Instagram stars with thick press clippings. I mean maybe I'm being uptight. It's like a dream: this is who SHOULD be in these magazines, teen girl artists. The ocean. Right? It's just a very shiny very bright very closed circle. Maybe it's a New York thing.



Overheard a woman at the gallery say "I hated my job, and then I quit and went to India, and when I was in India I got sick and it took me months to recover."

And why not. I mean.

The week filled with OVERwhelming anxiety.
Rolling torrents of thoughts, fears, worry. Nothing quells. It's insane.



Catch my breath.

What if my eclipse revelation was a sad one? One of dissatisfaction? One of regret? The terrible feeling. The being late for appointments.

I don't want to be a person who's uptight. Nor do I want to be a monster, insisting on some fabulous joy for myself, to force my will to power. In cute eccentric queer funny ways. I'm already doing it.

Hot flashes of incompetence, doubt and terror.

Let's be animals about it.

I miss someone.
I was so nervous but now I'm not.

Was it about being late?
Some kind of turmoil. I forget sometimes to worry.

Been accidentally breaking a lot of dishes.

The Eckhart Tolle summary of people who are angry really resonated with me:

“The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so we don't need to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent reason. They have a strong emanation of anger that certain people pick up subliminally and that triggers their own latent anger.“

8/14/17

HAUL

I'm still thinking I want to end this blog on August 24th. Not sure what comes next. I want to do more writing, in a way for more people to see it. And maybe the blog was a good way to do this, then not such a good way. But now it feels like it's becoming a good way again! But I have to move on. Romance Astrology Akathisia Revenge are no longer my main concerns. Really it's just that revenge isn't interesting to me. Revenge was because I was mad at Scott Panther for breaking up with me.


On my Birthday at I took myself to lunch at Zabar's. I sat next to coven of old women talking about buying pharmaceutical stocks. Now is the time apparently. They're not gonna get any lower. They're only gonna go up. This is what you miss if you work in an office or do something with your days. You miss the gangs of older people leisurely having endless breakfast on rainy mid-August Monday afternoons. Placing bets. Flipping through tabloids and crumbling pastries with their fingertips, absentmindedly. Calling out predictions to each other, but not really listening or engaging in conversation. A flock of doomsday sayers. Recommending Israeli genetic stock options. I nursed my gazpacho and rugelach (singular).

I got a copy of The Ambient Century by Mark Prendergast. I've just started to read it. It's a bit like Ambient reading? Ambient criticism? Ambient cataloguing?

I got copy of the Raincoats Odyshape LP. It's maybe my favorite but only because it has some of my favorite songs. I think it's their saddest and most poetic album (so far).

One of my favorite Raincoats songs. I prefer this to the 1994 version, even though that version came on a 10". Which I'm still looking for.

I bought myself a pair of Versace socks, embroidered with a Medusa head, and a pack of blue Calvin Klein underwear.

On Sunday I had a kind of party, I had people meet me at the Metropolitan Barbecue. Merrie Cherry and Charlene performed, which I didn't know they were slated to do, and they were fantastic and I love them.

My lover brought me a hilarious and delicious cake, that said Happy Birthday Down There because he knows how much I loved this picture which I found on Cake Wrecks.


I didn't get a picture of my birthday cake but it was perfect and delicious and sort of flesh- or skin-toned, which I liked.

oh no wait Tyler posted a picture of me and bae with the cake:


I also got a painting from Logan


And I also just a painting from Jiddy last week as a gift for collaborating together on her recent residency installation project. Video coming soon.


I also got a new toothbrush, which feels sort of extravagant. So yes. Quite a haul. So much to carry with me and so much now, to discard. It's eclipse season and Mercury is going Retrograde. And there was an eclipse on my Birthday. I didn't feel it. There's another (bigger? worse?) eclipse at the end of the month.

I saw a kind of weird movie at MoMA Death Ray On Coral Island. Exhausting, in the way science fiction always is for me. I was also very tired and a little bit hungover.


I sort of drifted in and out of sleep while watching. It was tense and gorgeous and relaxing somehow?


Got dinner, got a drink. Went to the Issey store this morning but not feeling quite so flush.
Yet.

What's it called?


Want to be a new thing.
What to carry with me, haul on my back into this next chapter.
Yeah astrology yeah weather. I have my doubts, I got my fears.

Sometimes I lose my appetite, and other times I am so deliriously ravenous that I forget it or sublimate it. Make it a ghost that haunts me.

Things are perfect and yet...
Could be more so. Could be quicker (what couldn't?)
It might be that I've eaten myself sick.

These electric flyswatters just don't seem to work. Which I guess is good, I don't know how I feel about being an insect murderer. It doesn't matter because I'm not murdering them. The fly swatter seems to mostly stun but rarely kill flies.

Is this one of those summers where cicadas come back? Why am I swarmed with insects all of a sudden? Two other things from this weekend:

Birds have been trying to get into my room, too. Hanging out on my air conditioner, pecking at my window screen. Just for one morning this weekend. I don't know why but I liked it. I thought maybe for my birthday.

Also, I saw a dead body. Lying on a gurney, covered by a sheet, sitting outside of a funeral home. I don't know if it was on its way in or out but I saw it and passed by without registering for a few steps.

My stomach ache. Fear. An itch on my neck. I need to eat a salad. Do some push-ups. Write. I wanna write the zine tonight.

Only just organizing. Feel on the verge of some kind of insight. Some slight accrual of perspective.

The Jessica Lanyadoo horoscope for Leo this week said "Just because you don’t know what comes next doesn’t mean that you have anything to worry about."

I have to keep reminding myself of this. I feel that in so many ways I'm in a different place than I was before. Listening to Mahler on the train this morning.

Cooking mistakes. Bad decisions. I regret so many things. And other things I do not regret at all. I'm jealous and sad and I miss people, things, places. Where did they go? Surely it's that they've left. I've stayed out. Some people who've unfriended me. Who've cut me off. Some I know and some I don't. Feel sad but only the shape of sadness. Not actually missing the person or something, just more the principal of the thing.

NOTES FOR JUNKIE DRAG:
The only drag I know is junkie drag and that's no longer socially appropriate. For other reasons. For reasons on the other end. Coming from the other direction. Courtney Love drag.

The epitome of drag, for me is MayGay as  Courtney Love at the Gilman punk prom. I feel like that photo exists in museums somewhere. It's perfect, an invocation of her not just as a goddess but as a person, corporeal. Probably a candy cigarette or not even really smoking yet.

It is so humbling to remember that Courtney Love has a much more developed, committed and rigorous spiritual practice than I do.

Courtney Love has been a Buddhist for many years. She says about Buddhism that "you chant for shit you want, and you get it."

I've often thought of Courtney as a Boddhisattva figure so seems fitting to close this blog circling back to her. But to portray the goddess as pregnant with cigarette in hand. Unthinkable.

The point is I only know drag as it invokes for me the goddess of humanity. Drag that takes itself seriously but with a sick sad humor. One that's in on the joke but only nominally. A drag whose frailty cannot be faked, photographed, measured, conveyed nor performed. A drag of sickness. Now though to be a junkie drag queen is something else I suppose. I've never been either one but as they say it's never too late.

But one wonders could Courtney Love have more to teach us? About survival, ignorance, sickness, desire? The Tao of Courtney Love. I'm not entirely kidding.

If not the literal Courtney Michelle love Harrison Cobain than I mean the figurative Courtney Love. Whatever Courtney Love means to you.

Maybe to you Courtney Love means the Lois Maffeo/Pat Maley band. Whose output is maybe more gorgeous than anything the other homonym ever made.



But that's just the point: is religion or something a useful feeling? Junkie Drag is not sure. Junkie Drag might not care, might have higher fish to fry. Might be shooting up backstage at the opera house.

I wanted to be junkie drag queen, to be both of and beyond. A joke but sad one. Insistent and human but also... glamorous. But mortal.

Is Lana junkie drag queen?



It's not funny maybe I shouldn't even use the word junkie. This might be the next battlefield of identity politics, junkiedom. What's the word? For when you don't have chemical problems in your brain? Neurotypical? I wonder. But then here as ever is the problem that these distinctions don't jive at first either the dharma. I mean no I know I'm getting it wrong I just. Ouch. Stuck on a train underground with a bad headache. Neck ache. Tension headache. I meant to go see Sister Nancy but it didn't work. I got there too late. Am I just writing so that I protect myself? Junkie drag queen says calm down. But not too much.

I suppose my religion is being gay. Alterity.

I'm one of those fags who thinks everyone's gay and isn't shy about sharing that knowledge. Everyone can be gay.

Can just refuse; do something else. Hold ourselves and each other to a different standard. Keep moving the goalposts. Refuse the game. Not of mortality but of competition. Only when a status quo of human beings get on board will this change. Be it Buddha or Courtney or some other kind of nonbelief. Gayness is my way out and through. Someday soon we'll laugh about the time we used to use such small silly words for it.

This isn't the finished essay of Courtney Love or Junkie Drag. Those might be different topics.

I love how Laetitia Sadier so often uses the metaphor of gardening for making music. Growing different crops on the same path. So smart. Ugh. Mom.

Should've said more before. This was all written through last week.

8/2/17

BIDDEN



There’s no new good media now, man. Everything’s picked out for you. Based on conversations your phone overheard you having. Or a song your friend listened to by himself: it will want to sell you the song, put the song in a commercial for you. There’s no news, no inspiration. Maybe find a spiritual text.

I’m tired of thinking about Courtney Love. I’m tired of pointing out sexisme.



The mosquitoes really fucked me up again, you know?
- One left pointer finger.
- One right forearm.
- One left elbow (while I was meditating)
- TWO left knee
- One right ankle

All on Monday morning. All before 7am. Most of the swelling has gone down and I put that sleeping pill gel on it but it’s just making it sleepy for me for my morning commute (great). Gotta get going.



OKAY NEXT DAY

Some updates. I have a wonderful secret. And it's almost my birthday. To finish this blog on 8/24 will be in a good place. How to end it tho?
I think I want to make a book. I want to make a book of me, the real me, but also a book of how I came to be the fake me, and how I got back

Working on the getting back bit, natch. The new zine addresses the topic.

But maybe also a novel.
It's so insane how things work out.

There will be a partial eclipse on my birthday. Um.

Tuesday not so bad only one mosquito bite, back of left hand. What's troubling tho is that the hand was under a sheet. Where do they come from?
Desperate to buy camphor. To clear my room.
But I wonder is it toxic? It ... seems so.

What if it wasn't jittery but focused, dreamy, intense, relaxed, slow?
What if it was a book about other people?

Some day everything good will must need fall apart. To be one with everything.

For my birthday I think I might get up early (very early) and go to meditation.



OKAY NIGHT

I went for a run. A short one - I had to pee.

I'm in the backyard at No Name Bar.
A group of game nerds talking about special moves they'd like to execute.

Is smoking a cure for mosquitoes.
I mean is it a disease?
Can you get addicted to warding off nature? Is that a religion too?
All of them.

All kids talk about is school. It's all they think they know.
Overheard: "At least you're in debt to your parents."

The bartender says I just made happy hour.
They're nice to me because I'm older.
Even if we're the same age -- I'm older.

I just want to sleep. I'm gonna soon, let me finish.

Whys it always sick here.
Whys my vibe fucked. Why'd I Fuck up.
I always choose the wrong thing.
Sometimes, not always.
Sometimes I choose right so many times in a row that I can't event cash in, I know the game is rigged.



OKAY THE NEXT MORNING

I invite you to explore the tags, the keywords. Tell your friends.

As Sister Nancy says in "One, Two"

"Go tell your friend. Y'know? Tell yourself and tell your friends."



Few things in the world have consistently provided me with strength, pleasure, comfort, inspiration as Sister Nancy's LP.

So why this morning worried? Is it my body.?
Is it my infections. My injuries.



Every fantasy includes anxiety.
To some as yet unrecognized, not quite negotiated degree.

OH SHIT THAT'S RIGHT--
I was looking for pictures of fantasy pix of tropic for the blog.

And the computer starting giving me weather patterns.
Which makes sense.



I finally understood that Prada collection.



Weather patterns are the new florals.
The anxiety of luxury (and vice versa).



“The past is over,” Miuccia Prada said about this collection. “I only want to think about the present.”



But how to proceed quite yet.
My heart hurts.
I can't stand to see someone I love in pain.



I wake up and think there's something I'm forgetting to worry about.
Some fatal oversight hanging over my head.

I throw elements of my life (real or imagined) into it but nothing fits yet.
Is this generalized anxiety, is this disorder, is this actually some subconscious anxiety over other material things, dream things, etc.

There might not be an answer yet, we just have to keep moving forward.

Distract myself. For now. It's another name for it.

7/26/17

POWDERED MINT

I think maybe I dreamed it. I keep post it's next to my bed and my desk. The phrase powdered mint came to be written there a while ago. I know I've talked about it and maybe mentioned it here.

Or the notes that never make it here.

I think it's also a beautiful phrase too.

But yesterday Saturday I set myself to task to find some. I didn't try that hard but I went to every Indian spice store in Murray Hill and no one had it. They had loose dried mint, and ground mint leaf, like for tea. The two smaller spice stores swore they had it but then realized they didn't. Had never heard of it. But were polite about it. One store said I could come back and the guy would grind some for me. But no. The their smaller store the guy gave me a pastry as soon as I walked in and swore they had it but ultimately admitted that they only had leaf mint.

The bigger more famous spice store didn't have it either. Powdered watermelon? Sure. Powdered white chia seeds? Of course. Powdered kiwi? Check. I asked one of the guys working there if they had powdered mint and he looked at me as if I was a totally fucking crazy person. Of course not. He said. Mint? No. Shook his head, annoyed at my ridiculous question.

I want it so finely powdered that I just have to add water to make a paste. I want to add it to coffee grounds.
I want to add it to oatmeal overnight with frozen mango paste and chia seeds (black, whole).

But no. नहीं / nahin.

Powdered mint remains for me a pipe dream. I wanted something the consistency of matcha.
Which is what I ended up using instead.

The weekend was good. Quiet. Bored/tired. Full of sleep and errands. Chores. I went to a party with Erin and it was so glamorous and hilarious to be at an academic party, talking and laughing with college professors. Being the date of a Broadway sensation. You know.

The beau and I went to that fancy new Taiwanese restaurant that opened near my house.

I napped a lot and didn't bug anyone. I got I guess sleep.

And now I'm going to the Monster to see Lady Bunny's afternoon DJane set of funk and disco. That's what I want.

Perfect. Utterly. Like Ptown. Early. Mostly an older mostly mixed racially crowd of fags. Rich and poor seeming. Getting down to the classics.



This stuff this vibe used to make me feel gross. Too faggy. I thought I'd be violated here.

But I'm not so cute anymore. Not a chicken any longer. Now I'm turkey. I guess in some way I always as huh.

Lady Bunny wears plays "Macho Man". She wears a bedraggled wig. And why not? It's Sunday evening at a free party at the Monster.

These are the spaces that excite me now. These are the good parties.

And it's not nightlife. It's early and it's death. Old records before sunset.

Let the young have the night.

We guard the sunrise and we guard the twilight.

I get up before the sun to go running.

I dance before sunset. Drinking tequila. With my old gay brothers fathers uncles sisters moms. My sons.

I think macho man was a joke. Now I'm in on it. Now it's so provincial. To even hint at it. We can't talk about masculinity anymore. Not so cavalierly.



This is why I came. Because lady bunny is a serious dj.

Djane.

She comes out to dance on the floor. She's a phenomenal dancer. Of course.

I want to see her solo show.



I feel yeah like at ptown. Old queers. Not all old of course.

Now I'm almost 33. Now I'm an old queer.

I was gonna say the only drawback is that the drinks aren't cheap. But they are! They're two for one. I lost my drink ticket but the bartender was nice about it.

Who has all this energy to dance so much on a Sunday afternoon?

I want to do a Sunday afternoon party. No food no barbecue. But chill music. Weed smokers. Maybe food. Candy. Curated. Give someone $300 for food. See what they come up with.

Make playlists instead of DJ.

Dispense with the frontal cortex.

God Lady Bunny is the best.

I love being in a room of queers to whom disco inferno means something.

They make fun of us. I mean even now that we're assimilated. They think we're weak. We have to pretend to be to fit in. They think we're sad and weak and broken. They think we're distracted. They think we're not working hard or something. They think we're a market.

But we've survived everything. We've always been here and always will be. We joke about death. Dance to songs about disco inferno.

We've seen death.

Who was the one who told you that a) you were beautiful and b) your beauty would fade?



This song always reminds me of Stella Starsky who I saw perform this song in ptown. In her show American baroness at Afterglow Festival She s an archetypal cool genius. If she likes this song it's worth listening to.

You know.

Once, a little over ten years ago, around that time. About that long ago, I went through a disco phase. I was sad. It was winter. Or summer. And disco saved me when I lost hope. Like it does for so many other people.
Okay okay I want whatever lady bunny has. She dances SO MUCH. How cool. What prescription is that.

Maybe I'm due for another disco phase.

Disco is like gay soul music.
But that comparison is fucked up and I'm sorry.



I never thought I would be so in love as I am. I never thought I'd be so rich. I couldn't conceive.
Right. And a piano bar upstairs. How chic and sad.

Our mausoleum. You don't know but in the basement we're still celebrating. We're not sad deep down inside. It makes me think of the new blow song.
About the fire inside.

I like seeing guys in their 50s, 60s feel each other up. I mean it.
The heat makes me so crazy. Like bewildered. The same way the extreme cold does. Makes me an animal.



It was so dark that you couldn't take pictures, in the basement of the Monster. You had to be there, it's kind of genius right. Impossible to convey; I'm not even really trying to.
On the morning of the new moon in Leo I'm waiting for good news. Everyone on the train is a math whiz.

Think about the way it must have affected artists, architects, dancers. A cancer of the faculty, the theater department. Imagine no one was there to tell you how gorgeous precious marketable easy you were. Hey ugly duckling let me get a dime bag and a copy of your demo tape.

We fear going crazy, fear being spied on, fear our robot kids e raised them but now they're unrecognizable and We worry they won't take care of us when we get old.

They'll recycle us. They'll dispose of us.
A kid fucking screaming wailing on the train as if being tortured
I mean case of the mondays.

While people helpfully suggesting ways to rearrange ourselves to better fit into crowded train.
The time of month, the end, when I'm hopelessly broke. Like really.

7/17/17

SEVENTEEN

It's Seven Seventeen Two Thousand Seventeen. Summer is a Device.

Some songs about being 17. Are the Boredoms doing some kind of durational performance somewhere today? I would have loved to see.

What does the candy bar on the shelf say? What does the jewel in the glass case say, when it calls out? What do the actors say? TAKE ME.



The first time I heard this song was in college. I think my room mate freshman year Tommy was playing it. I was only vaguely aware of Ladytron.

I didn't know there was a music video.
The lyrics to this song strike me as particularly true today.
Probably I knew they were true then too.

"say they'll let you know"
that really is how it is.
only a fool thinks they really will let you know.

you know when you're young enough and cute enough.
you know when you've got the job.

or you train yourself to know. but then
or someone trains you, but then you maybe think that knowing is just a quality.



Songs about disappearing.
Trimming.
I took a course.

I bought a new bed. One of those memory foam mattresses that come in a box. I miss a spring mattress. My current one, who's caused me so much pain over the years has been kind to me lately. Or I've found exactly how to avoid the broken springs. I guess I mean what's more important that sleep? "Nothing" PLD says. So I got it. I'm scared.

Trying to occupy myself with novelty/new things. I can't keep running. I can't just wake up every morning and just keep mortifying myself just mortar and pestle self I can't keep just getting up every morning and pasta pesto myself. I just wake up and exercise until I can't breathe and then only then decide how I feel about proceeding.

So now I leave myself just six hours to do a pastry of myself. Window shopping errands et cetera. Not quite unmoody not just yet.



Someone on the train playing a video game on their phone with the sound on.

We're all watching.

My childhood friend and I played Nintendo (SNES and, to a much lesser extent Classic) taking turns. So did my brother and I. I rarely write about this: the obsessive video game playing. Eventually limited to weekends. But the taking turns, the watching each other play video games seems to me a crucial aspect of the experience. Maybe I wish I woke up and played Nintendo today.

Window shopping. The sales and the new collections.

Gaybar autocorrects to crybaby.

I was trying to escape to write there in the shade.



I can't believe I've ruined so much: the world, the environment, my parents' credit. I tried this class mobility thing but I failed. The world wants me to be tough and authoritative but I'm chicken feathers all without one gut.
Try to make it real. But compared to what?
I'm not invited anywhere. I feel myself butchered. Made bacon.
I'm the source of all disappointment. I feel like I let everyone down, in all ways.
Desperate for a friend.

Okay some old guy at the bar asked if I had red hair as a kid. I said no. He said he was trying to picture me with flaming red hair I could get away with it artificially. Yeah I guess I suppose. Something reeks him or me. I was hoping he'd be cool but no. I'm just sweaty and wasted.
Getting fed to bugs. I'm just blood.



What can I withstand. This boredom. This painful anxiety. This uncertainty. Doubt.
Desperately want someone to explain what to do.

I can't tell the difference between the radio and my library.
What's being broadcast to me,
what's me being stalked by the algorithms.
What's me diving in my own past.

I'm so lost I could sell magnetized needles. Just go north, become a girl. Just keep flapping. Eat more, better, smarter, less. Rot while alive. Give yourself a break. Name yourself something good. Strengthen your brand. Convey your value. Add value. Add value. Add value. Blow smoke, cough in my face. Give me a greeting from another planet. Impress me with your tricks. Make your hunger a selling point. Your plumage. Add value.

I wonder if I just should have kept telling you how strong virile sexy human horny valid you are. Should we just have turned ourselves into sea monsters. Should we run into the muck.

How would I support myself without the lie I've been telling, been told etc. the multiple ones. I wish I was the kind of artist (writer whatever) who could just spent the summer making stuff. I can't even spend my free time making stuff. I've been stripped of stuff to make. It's a problem. A class thing? A talent thing? Talent is about class. It's not anybody's fault. It's either nobody's fault of partially mine, to an extent I can't measure and therefore find overwhelming. The unknown factor, solve for x if x is how much it's me making it up, overreacting. Is there another way to act.



People sometimes remark that I look so young. I have two things to say about that:

A) forgetfulness. lotus smoothie before bed
sleep posture
body calls - do you know my instructor?

stay present, get presents
everyone's a hitchhiker.

I mean my friend just stay keyed in
to that box inside. Set your watch by the first heartbreak.

and radiate outward and
make no secret of it.
Where you're from.
Stay sad teen.

B) SNAIL SECRETION. I thought it was gross when I first heard about it but let me preach the gospel to you. It's vegan because the snails aren't harmed and they consent to give the slime (I guess) and it's the consent that also makes oral sex vegan (I guess). But honestly I am a white guy in his 30s who smokes and gets too much sun despite his best efforts and he looks good for his age. And it's because of the snail secretion. The snail secretion and the forgetting, staying sad.

Maybe he just forgot how to age. To grow up. There's a line in BLACKWAVE about how hard it is for queer people to age. And that's true. But something else too. A fear of differentiation.

I've heard some people say that they (some people) are their own best friend.
But I've never believed that, them, those so-called people.
I feel myself sticky sick and unlovely. I didn't make it to the party so I can't expect anyone to come to mine. I can't accept anyone to come to mine.



Do we need a Cinema of anxiety. Music of disassociation. Dance of biosphere collapse.
Make genetic damage into art.
I'm calling you. I called you. I left a message. Add value.

I tried to say how much I miss you. What else. Remember that time we smoked a j by the Vietnamese sandwich place in some and had basil seed juice you had a boom box I think this is the song we were listening to over and over again was:



Walking uptown through the San Francisco fog. I get all the days mixed up. That place that experience is where i still am probably. Refusing cigarettes to all but THE MOST CHARISMATIC junkies on Haight street. Looking for old indie 7"s. I would love to find Sally Skull, old Slampt stuff. You know?

I have almost every record I want though. That was on my list. I've been very fortunate and patient. You get what you want sometimes. If what you want, if you're fetish object is the Heavens to Betsy "Direction" 7" on Chainsaw. Or the Cat Power Dear Sir 10" on Runt. How often do I even listen to those? I keep falling down on the train.



Azealia Banks interview in XXL
.

She says "Everybody’s been narrating the Azealia Banks story except for Azealia Banks." I want to become a book. I mean I want to write a book, of essays, including one about why we should always defend and celebrate Azealia Banks and girls like her. Maybe it should be a fan letter or a play or fanfic. I think she's so great and underrated in so many ways. Her "Seventeen" is maybe better than the original, huh?

Thinking today of being seventeen and how to stay that way. How unfortunate it is to be that way, to have to stay that way.

Truly? I cannot recall being 17. I can remember being 16 and I can remember being 18. There may have been some upsetting jealous teenage feelings during that in-between year. Maybe some of this is what's burnished me or something.

7/11/17

Chaperones

Men tickling each other on the train.



A girl reading a script.
No, a teacher's manual for a language school. What language is she gonna teach? She has a ponytail. Maybe French.

Met for drinks and talked about records. Bands we wish would reunite. For me The Need, Free Kitten.

Department of Health wants me to do a survey on my way out of a gay bar. About STDs or something. I'm not part of this.
The bar was full of drunk straight kids dancing to Spice Girls in a circle. What am I doing with my life.

Really the ultimate reunion tour would be the Spice Girls.

My lover and I took a playwriting workshop this weekend. Subtly awesome, engaging, funny, poignant.

We went to a party Saturday night, GAY HEAVEN which of course came after GAY HELL. The hummus was great and I learned a minor scandal about the GAY HELL hummus. Not a scandal per se but you had to be there.

I got a sunburn and am furious with myself.



I went to an art opening even though I didn't really want to. They were out of beer but I put a maté soda in my bag. The paintings were actually pretty good. Big fucked up abstract oils. Nightmare surreal gore etc.
The soda exploded in my lap on the train.
No worries. No worries. No worries.

I'm coming down to the wire. I want to make a website get a book deal and go on tour.

I want to be a writer in residence at Comme des Garçons.

I want to get out of here. I don't mean New York I mean I've taken up running and (have I mentioned this?) the last time I was regularly running though a neighborhood I was in Alameda and I was ready to get out.

I'm ready for this generation to finish. I'm ready for this time period to wash over me.

Do you want to come with me?

I'm ready for all the TV shows to end. For the movie to come out.

I run through the neighborhood.
Bugs fly into my mouth.



I want to give the feeling, I want to write the feeling, perform the feeling.
I want to evoke the feeling, surround myself with it.
Be with people who feel the feeling.
But do I want to feel the feeling? Not terribly.

This full moon fucked me up and everyone is fucked up. Anyway. It's the time of year when bugs eat me.

I'm not trying to cultivate a character, I want to be in the world. It's both.

I'm so obsessed with this thing of calling someone a loser as an insult. I feel like Beck, a very 1990s feeling: I am a loser. C'est moi.
As if to say what's so bad about being a loser?
It takes all kinds. It's a valid way to be.
Like I can be a loser and still be worthy.

I think I'm fighting the good fight.

I am acting like I can withstand everything. I've put myself there as of to prove that it's a place to inhabit, to speak from.

I mean should I just do stuff? For any reason other than I feel like it?
In a way the mosquitoes flatter me. They think my blood is sweet. And may be they're right.

My logic is as follows: if I don't expect kindness, if I don't demand my own happiness, then every kindness is unexpected. Each moment of joy a form of grace. That's what it is.

All I do is catch myself by surprise. All I do is write checks I can't cash.
Am i waiting for the world to punish me?
Am I angry that the world hasn't yet?
Am I not understanding the ways in which it already has?

I've always been here. I'll stick around and explain how we got here. I'll be the concession stand.



I woke up at 4:30 am. Mosquitoes bit my arm, my thigh, my back, the back of my neck. I didn't see or hear them I just woke up in pain. I put on antihistamine gel which only made it harder to wake up an hour later.

I need a new air conditioner and a new mattress.
A $500 day which I don't have.

Everything's falling apart!

I went jogging and did exercises and that made me feel a bit better.

Trying not to be so fatalistic, to lot focus so much on suffering.

Dressed unusually formal for work.
Unseasonable. Unstylish.
Professional.
Again: trying to trick myself.



A girl on the train filling out s job application by hand. Copying references from her phone and writing them down on the form.

This weather reminds me of the school year, even though by now schools out for summer. It's that-- I keep forgetting about it-- that early summer anxiety. I get it in springtime too. I mean, eternal right.

Something though about summer coming more fully together, some great unfolding. A spreading.

I'm always so excited to see my psychoanalyst when we haven't met for a few weeks but then I get there and can think of nothing to say, I just look forward to the process.

The radio would keep me company. If it had to.

That Björk lyric:
"I want to go on a mountain-top
With a radio and good batteries
And play a joyous tune and
Free the human race
From suffering
I'm no fucking Buddhist
But this is enlightenment"
To me it seems right now to be important that it's a radio. Not a microphone. She's not saying she's singing the joyous tune necessarily but just playing it.
I want to go to the mountain top with a radio and good batteries too but imagining beyond that... I'm not so sure.

Truly riffing. Absolutely boring, like drilling.
Bored as in pierced, cut through.

The girl? Who was filling out the job application on the train? It wasn't even her pen she had borrowed it. How sweet.



Jane Weaver, who are you? I love you.

Being ruined, I mean my sunburn.
Is there a way of being where we don't have a we?

Am I just making my problem everyone else's?
Isn't everyone?
Isn't that all anyone does?

Feel unsettled but don't know if it's just because of the physical pain (my pains!) or because I'm worried about my apartment my mattress my air conditioner. Am I just looking for things to worry about?

Cruising apocalypse.
Something's out of whack. I feel misaligned.
I want to eat salad for dinner.

(And I did, I stuffed myself full of leaves).



Reading about the apocalypse. How things are gonna get so bad so soon.



Chelsea Manning tweet about automation.
So why bother ? Why live the way we do, going to work et cetera?
Trying to imagine the upside here. Of being the ones to inherit heat death.
It seems unfair.
That we'll have to bury everything, see everything burned.

But maybe it's not unfair maybe we're lucky.
How lucky I am to be of the generation that will usher life off the planet.

Maybe every generation felt this.

But now it seems less preposterous to contemplate death, mortality, the end.
Now it seems that those of us are better armed.
Those of us who've known the dead, who've been contemplating death for years.

How lucky we are to be the generation that grows old and senescent at the same time as the planet; life on the planet.
We're the custodians of this next transition.

We're the chaperones.




7/6/17

Me And My Arrow

15 million people in the world and me. AND you.



Went upstate with my lover last weekend. We rushed to Grand Central it was a madhouse. Got to Beacon, got the ferry to Newburgh where we were staying.

So many reasons not to remember. To forget. To sleep.

I've so often wondered if anything was even worth reporting, measuring, relaying, remembering. Blogging.
It's not about documenting it's aspirational. I've packed myself beyond comprehension. I've taken too many mirror pills, supplements, that reflection is impossible. That's how I've survived the pressure to change. By becoming the vehicle itself, for change. Not he driver. The chrome rims.

I've discovered so many good bands. Every Tuesday I download a handful of new albums. Right now Beverly, Whirr, lots more. I can't remember or keep them straight.

I can have this debate with you all b y myself.

So many instances I cannot bridge the gap. So many problems in my life stemming from, exacerbated by my inability to communicate. Or at least that's how it feels.



But there's so many things I need to talk about! And so many things I need to hear, so many things I've yet to understand.
I let a crowded subway car pass. I don't need to bother.

I walked in the muggy night and told my father all of my secrets, the recent embarrassments and shames.

I do and don't want to talk about it but I feel like I've been using myself as an example, hoping other people would too. Maybe it's not the best most universal tool in my kit.

Woke up this morning fired up and ready to write.

I extended my vacation one extra day, one extra night. I was stressed so I stress ate. Stress slept. And I woke up and meditated and feel like I want to take on the world.

Want to disabuse other queers about their feelings. Want to point out how narrow-minded obsessed and dangerously egotistical we've been. My community. The people I'd expect more from. But isn't that what family is for? To teach you to accept someone despite their faults?
Who else can be family.

I've dealt with bullies my entire life. So have you, probably. I've seen and correct me if I'm wrong here, how and where bullies come from.

I've seen someone go from loving me to wanting to hurt me. And then telling me it's the same thing. I've struggled to try to understand that.

I have sympathy for the bullies. So much that I usually just let them be.

But the bully is in me, too. And it's in you too. And we have to rehabilitate the entire world. It's a tough job but...

They say the most beautiful phrase in the English language is "Cellar Door." I disagree. I have two alternates.

I think the phrase "Dress Rehearsal" might be the most beautiful phrase in the English language.

Actually today right now I think the most beautiful phrase in the English language might be "You know what you have to do." I don't "know," personally, myself. It's an aspirational phrase.

But so then to the work. Do I really need to talk about it? How can I proceed here.

I was really feeling the Pride parade this year. Maybe because I saw my amazing boyfriend marching in the parade. But no. Event before he came I was choked up (seriously!) with the feeling of urgent, desperate love. Like many people (or not that many, actually) it feels as though we've reached a critical mass of people who want to share their feelings of exclusion their forbidden love rage and selves. We're sharing over this queer thing more than ever before. And it makes me want to sing or whatever.

But therein lies the problem. It's not enough. The goal posts have changed as they should. And even some of us like myself who thought we were fighting the good fight... it's not good enough anymore maybe. Perhaps it was never good enough. It used to be that my pointing that out (that it's not good enough, big enough to do that obsessively onanistic blind eye pleasure seeking) it used to be that my pointing that out made me an unredeemable asshole. But now I think maybe this criticism is better heard. But my goodness! Not today.

I'm working on a new zine and one of the pieces is about this, this feeling of turning into bully. Having some unrequited feeling go sour within you. To write about being rotten. It's okay.

The piece is about fear. The fear of feeling bad. Feeling bad is nothing to be scared of. Well, no nevermind scratch that. Feeling bad is EXACTLY something to be scared of. Maybe I'm worried that we're designing the future for who we want to be not who we are. Maybe I think I need to catch us when we're being self-centered. When we assume and operate from the idea that we all want the same thing. Maybe I want to be like that snotty little faggot from that Catcher in the rye book and keep us from going out of bounds, falling down, rotting from inside.



But I think I can do better. I don't know about you. I mean I do know about you, of course I do. I know you can do better too. But I'm using myself as an example, for right now.

6/27/17

B0DYH1GH PLAYS THIS THURSDAY 6/29 AT KNOCKDOWN CENTER

In 2010 I started B0DYH1GH with Perfect Li’l Daniel. We’re performing for the first time in over a year on Thursday at the Knockdown Center with two of my favorite bands in New York City: BOILED WOOL & SISTER PACT.

“A DEEP BOOMING LAUGH”

Boiled Wool
B0DYH1GH
Sister Pact

Saturday, July 29, 2017
7:00pm Doors/8:00pm Show
21+ // Tickets $8: http://ticketf.ly/2p5u1Cd

A DEEP BOOMING LAUGH is an evening of atmospheric music by Brooklyn-based bands B0DYH1GH, Boiled Wool, and Sister Pact. Largely inspired by Riot Grrrl culture, the three acts revel in the Sad Girl aesthetic, producing pensive, intensifying music that features gorgeous sound reverberations that resonate within the acoustics of the Knockdown Center, providing an opportunity to collectively explore what diligent and thoughtful music can mean in the present.

I’m only a little surprised, but I feel like a lot of people only know B0DYH1GH from our tumblr. Sort of a joke, an art project.
There’s a really good interview with B0DYH1GH in BOMB Magazine, by Ben Rosenberg from 2014.

We also recently put the entire B0DYH1GH discography up on Bandcamp. In advance of our show this week I wanted to talk about these records.


PRETTY BEAUTIFUL


PRETTY BEAUTIFUL was our first mythtape, and is sort of narrative. To my mind, these songs are us sort of finding our way and forging a sound. We’re basically constructing a number of inside jokes and then telling them until they’re not funny anymore. I’m personally really excited by the ways in which sinister and sweet, child and adult look in tandem when overlapped. I think of half of these songs as unlistenable, and the other half as our legendary pop song hits. On these songs maybe more than anywhere, I think PLD really establishes himself as a beautifully perverted lyricist. I don’t know, per se, what he’s singing about, but I feel like they’re resonant of horror and eros,


BUTTERBAWL


We made BUTTERBAWL for an art exhibition put together by East Village Boys. I feel like we inadvertently spent more time on this material than anything before or since. I’m really proud of these songs, and I find that people react really positively to these songs in a different way from our more pop-oriented material. There was something really difficult and freeing in not working with vocals or song structures per se. I remember writing and recording these songs during a particularly hot spring day (Mother’s Day) in PLD’s old apartment, in the living room, and feeling like we were in a trance. These are the most abstract and ambient B0DYH1GH recordings but I think also the most melodic and accessible, somehow. Good music for fucking.


LILDED GILLY


The lost mythtape! The final unreleased album! These are the songs and mixes that we recovered after a great absence. We recorded at least three or four versions of these songs, as well as many others that didn’t make the cut. These are the ones that we decided should be on the record.

LILDED GILLY, the title, is obviously referencing the B0DYH1GH aesthetic of rapture and confusion. To embellish and obscure simultaneously. To read and forget. These are our most pared-down, minimalist songs, and maybe the most radio-friendly. I feel like this is our master work and I can’t believe it took so long for them to come out, but I really want people to hear this.



On Thursday, we’ll be performing ALL NEW MUSIC which will sound like a mix of mostly the last two records.

6/19/17

REST IN CORRECTNESS

This is the thing I read at Walter Cessna's memorial last Monday. I miss him a lot.
What to wear to Walter’s funeral. What song to sing. How to look. What to serve. How to say to those gathered what I know you all know. How to remind. How to pay tribute. How to remember. How to keep in our hearts. How to bring him with us from now on. How to say goodbye. How to be correct in the future, without him.

How to find him. Where to search for him. If I encounter him again, will I recognize him?

How to stay fukt and fix it. What to capture, describe, photograph, dress up, remember, love. Which pieces to save. How to arrange our selves around him.

How to share. How to hold up. How to position ourselves. How to project our true nature. How to be your self. How to see what he saw. How to incorporate. How to love. How to be as fascinated and in love with the world as Walter was.

How to do what he did. How to let him keep doing it. How to live again, like Walter did. How to be as forgiving as Walter was. How to be as wise as Walter was.

If we’re not ready. If it’s too soon. If it’s too hard, too painful, too unbeautiful, too incorrect too sad too much to reckon with.

What sound to make. What to cry out. Where does it make sense.
What order is there? What beauty to locate?

What song do you want to hear, right now? What fond memory springs forth now.
Who did you love? And where are they now?
If I don’t have an answer it’s because I’m stuck and I am heartbroken and I am asking the wrong questions. The right questions are the ones I haven’t asked yet. The questions that lead him back to us. The question whose answer is Walter. Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you get here? How did you know him? Me too.


6/13/17

READING TONIGHT IN BROOKLYN


BROOKLYN TONIGHT 7PM – reading at Book Row / Better Read Than Dead. Featuring BRONTEZ PURNELL, TOMMY PICO, FRANKIE SHARP, DICK VAN DICK and MAX STEELE. Free! 7pm! Cheap beer! – 867 Broadway <3 <3 <3

6/12/17

GHOST RINGS

“I can tell you stuff / that makes you stronger. /
That lets you forget."


One of the reasons I wanted to start writing this blog again was to write about things I really like and one thing that I like a lot is GHOST RINGS by Half Straddle.


Half Straddle's GHOST RINGS Trailer from Half Straddle on Vimeo.

I saw the show last October at New York Live Arts and I bought the record (compiled from live performances during the NYLA run) as soon as it came out. It moved me deeply and so I wanted to write a reaction / review of it. I think it's probably my favorite record of 2017. I’m calling it early. They're going to tour it again soon. The album is released by 53rd State Press on delicious pink vinyl. Imaginary candy.

There's going to be a record release show June 16th at Pete's Candy Store.

I so rarely feel like I like new music. In that Richard Russell profile in the New Yorker he talks about how people are so stuck in their ways that they don’t listen to new music.
Most people, he suggested, eventually lose the impulse to discover new music, “because of what’s going on in their life.” He went on, “I suppose that doesn’t matter—you can listen to old shit. And that’s O.K. as well. People get a lot from that. But they’re missing something. Because, whatever it is they’re into, that thread’s right there, in something being made now.”
GHOST RINGS feels like new music that I can get into and I don’t get into a lot of new music. I mean this in the best possible way, but “Big Woods” sounds like a mid-90s sort of hip-pop pop admixture that I really needed when I was a teenager and I’m glad to have it now. It’s also the best title for a song I have seen in a long time. I always knew Erin was a good rapper but this song blew my expectations away. There’s a lot here.


Ghost Rings Excerpt, "Hellock's Brimble" from Half Straddle on Vimeo.

I first heard this song when Erin performed it as part of one of her solo shows at Joe's Pub. It stuck with me, especially the lines "It so could be real" and "all the Darkness you can bear".

I have such a crush on Half Straddle and it's thrilling and somehow not too surprising that it became a band, you know? I've already written about the time I saw a girl sneaking into a performance of Half Straddle's Ancient Lives.

Erin Markey leading a riot grrrl band is verging on a wet dream for me. It's a fantasy I couldn't ever declare out loud. And it's so obvious and perfect. Here’s how I imagine it came together: Tina wrote the story and the lyrics and Erin and Chris wrote the songs with her words. I’m making this up/guessing. I’ve been a fan of Erin for as long as I’ve known her and I’ve never heard her voice sound as amazing as it has over the last few years. I think because she’s singing more songs that she wrote. She has an amazing instrument and unfortunately a kind of ceaseless focus. She seems like she can always go more places, vocally. And now she makes songs where she gets to. She sounds amazing on this album and it shows off many (but not all) of her best tricks.

I mean everyone sounds amazing. I love Chris Giarmo. We danced in a Ballez performance together and I think we may have played drag bills together but I’ve seen him perform a lot and have always been intimidated by his talent particularly because he’s also very sweet which I find disarming. The songs they made are really wonderful. Tina Satter's thought process is inspiring and fearsome I was really into this interview she did about the project. It's funny to me that she describes this project was exploring virtuosity, because of course I took this to mean musically. And it is, it's insanely ambitious and technical and riveting and probably really hard to make and execute. But for me the sucker punch, the one-TWO effect here is that behind the sonic experience of facility is the emotional virtuosity. The use of great force and finely honed skill to articulate a frailty, a faltering quality. This skill and force and power of the musical chops are used in the service of describing an emotional experience that, to me, feels like a loss.

You can be strong and you can be beautiful and you can sing better and more wildly and louder than every before but you can't make them hear. You can exceed yourself but you can't make yourself into them. You can show them everything, but they still leave.

I feel cracked open by these songs, dressed up by these songs. Like someone comes to collect you before you go to a nightclub and they have good makeup, the perfect mix to listen to. A bottle of rum. I guess my one critical feeling is that I don't love the phrase spirit animals. I do, though, really love the puppet alter ego characters that the ones in this show represent. They feel like gifts. A sort of avatar of responsibility. Like how I imagine it might feel if your parents give you a car when you're a teenager. Or a pet. "It's a lot of responsibility." I'm a vegetarian; I love all animals. All animal voices. All animal desires. All animal romances resonate with me. I know how the beasts want to be together. I recognize that feeling from GHOST RINGS.

The show kind of feels like it's a secret message, but of course it's not. It couldn't be. It's about Tina and her sister. It's about Shawna and Samantha. And the baby. But it feels beautiful because of how conspiratorial it is. I love that they're not mad at each other, they love each other, but they know they can't travel arm in arm. They know they can't go together so they call out to each other from across the distance.

I desperately want that- a sister. An imaginary friend. A band from scratch. A powerful voice. Gorgeous outfits. A story. The thing of imaginary sisters. That the story is about someone you love leaving, wanting different things. Loving someone and being unable to keep them. It’s not just about sisters. I mean it is but it’s also different.

Like a hypothetical band, a side project, and imaginary project. And because of its putative imaginariness it’s so much better than any real thing, any real band or true human relationship. The fantasy is always so much more perfect than the real thing. And the memory, the story of the fantasy, the songs that incorporate the fantasy and the disappointment of corporeal reality, the band that you make about the story is so much better. It can go anywhere. You can write songs and those can be the story, the heavy lifting.

Listen to "I Love That."

... I mean, yes, sisters but I guess also it’s about drag too. In the sense of writing songs using someone else’s words, someone’s voice, someone’s melody. And singing about a whole other person. Speaking for/as. Imagining a shared understanding. That’s sisters and that’s also drag queens (or what I think drag queens is) but it’s not drag sisterhood. The love that exists outside of time/life, the perfect world of the imagination sister wife. When someone you love becomes everyone you love, when you love someone as much as and maybe sometimes more than yourself.

“8 ways to see us / 9 to die. / It’s all connected / it happens when you cry.”

I haven't cried in many years but when I listen to GHOST RINGS I feel as close to crying as I've come in a long time.

I've wanted to cry for so long and these songs feel like release. Or like cumming. Like when you feel yourself falling, turning inside out. Tiny, intimate, nuanced feelings. Things you'd need to invent a secret language to expressed. They're talking about these feelings and they made a band about them and they're belting. They're harmonizing. They're playing in there there. It's as if an attic room is finally opened and it's so much bigger than you thought, bigger than the house it sits atop of.

When was the last time I felt like this? Maybe seeing Khaela Maricich perform for the first time, sandwiched in between Dear Nora and Mirah. This would have been in 2001? 2002? At the 40th St Warehouse in Oakland. Khaela was performing as The Blow, but very recently. She was still selling CDs with her precious band name, Get The Hell Out Of The Way of the Volcano. And I was about to graduate high school as move to New York, though maybe I didn't know this yet. I felt transitional. Her songs felt like they were in a time capsule to me from the future. I saw a way to see the hard, funny, sad, huge, overwhelming and unspeakable feelings. And to sing them, get through them.

It's not like I'm jealous even. The way I am with so many other things. So often when I love something I think (sometimes subconsciously) "Oh I wish that I wrote that". I listen to music at the gym and I fantasize that I'm the one singing, playing the music. Or I'll see a movie or TV show and wish I was the actor. Wish I was the character. It's a quirk of my narcissism. I was literally raised by performers but I'm also a queer person into art and stuff so we have to read ourselves into the world. But with GHOST RINGS I don't feel jealous. I don't project myself into the music or read myself into the text. With GHOST RINGS I find some part of me confirmed. I find myself validated, reassured. The part of me that didn't know he needed to be seen, spoken, sung and made real.

Something about the size, the shape, the pink record also made me think of this Pussycat Trash 7" I rediscovered this weekend.




6/9/17

WHY I STILL SUBSCRIBE TO VOGUE

WHY I STILL SUBSCRIBE TO VOGUE (US)

Last year I was on the verge of letting my subscription lapse, an then they featured Hari Nef and Juliana Huxtable as the bright young things they are and it roped me back in.

This year it was up for renewal again and because I'm sort of around a lot of magazines for work I thought I didn't really need the subscription delivered to my apartment, but that was wrong.

The new issue features a cute piece about women in theater including NYC's own resident genius Young Jean Lee.

But honestly? I'm obsessed with Princess Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and her TNT column. It's like the bizarro high society Literal Princess version of Fag City / the type of zines I love and want to make. The most recent issue's column begins thusly (emphasis mine obviously). As I read it last night during dinner, the blithe, glamorous, nearly sinister and gorgeous sentence here actually made me stop breathing for a second:
"Texas stole my heart, or maybe I just dropped it somewhere whizzing along those arrow-straight roads, wind in my hair, that extraordinary light bathing everything in a golden hue. I took the plunge with Lacey Dorn, a seventh-generation Texan whom I had met at my cousin's art opening in London, and our first stop was her uncle's ranch near El Paso. There were red mountains on the horizon, a few wonky signposts... and nothing else. The emptiness made me gasp.

A proud West Texan, her uncle gave us the grand tour. From his jeep we spotted coyotes, longhorn sheep, and quail before stopping for a delicious mountaintop picnic. Then he let us try out his elegant white-gripped revolver, which, he told us, "won the West." Turns out we have quite the shooting skills, Lacey and I, even though I hadn't held a gun since I was a child."
Looking forward to more.

6/5/17

PRETTY'S LESSONS

Listening to the indie rock radio Sunday afternoon as I did my exercises.
Prayers for
Olivia Newton John
A legend.
Sick again.

Went in the rain to see the Red Aunts, a band I never really got into.* But if I could rewrite my adolescence I'd have made myself a fan. Just because.

Ooo I'm tired of having spilled myself out so much. So publicly! Unpaid. I've been an intern many times. I don't need to be reminded that my exploitation is essential, lucrative.

I'm the fool. I let my cash crops go to seed. I used to that this was clever, and it was. It still is. I think that it remains a clever gesture: to willfully unfuck yourself. To stay out of the fray: to make a better world. To refuse to play the game. To recognize ill-gotten advantages and decline them, in your manner. When you feel like it. To be the cute boy and to be so uncute inside. To make people uncomfortable by getting real.

It's in a way to counteract the misconception that Pretty is stupid. That Pretty is simple, superficial. That Pretty has nothing to teach us. Pretty has a lot to teach is and not all of Pretty's Lessons are good. Not everything Pretty has to say is beautiful. And that shows us that even Pretty is disappointing, fallible, mendacious.
So who else is? Use the spotlight to highlight ones flaws. Because here's why: that's what it does anyway. Even if you're pretty your failure is demanded. Like that Beyoncé song.



Like any clever gesture it's only cute when it's up to you. Once you get to a certain point it's not a choice but a fact Of the world.

Thinking of global warming. Here in New York the cocaine is polluted.
Do we all have to get trained on Narcan.
Are we all gonna have to riot for drinking water.

I used to love opening bands. I don't have so much patience anymore.
I still want to be one though. An opening act. On a tour.
It has been a dream of mine for a long time.

Hardcore for old people.
It becomes drone music or techno.
It's not entropy-- that's
romance. A fantasy. Old-fashion.
It's that we atomize as things progress.

And what is a golden age, really
but a growing surfeit of reflections?

PLD said he saw this famous fashion designer at the fag bar.
A cute talented famous person and he was star struck.
And I would have been too.
I'm always startstruck. A little bit.

One thing is I love seeing punk musicians, or any artist, who is in their 40s.
It's a similar thrill to see newbies: people decide in performance. That's why it matters.

Writing new B0DYH1GH jams last night.
I'm excited for our show on the 29th.

Come closer.
If my smoke isn't bothering you.
I'm filled with love and chemicals. Compounds. I'm swirling. Who else has water rising?

O I've been so low.
But I still
consistently got high.
That the world’s going to end-- is that really news per se?


Some of us stayed punk.
Some of us still have our seven inches.

Some of us hung onto them.



* It's a lie. I didn't really get into them super deep I always knew about them and was sort of a fan, I guess, from afar, for a while. Honestly the cover of Saltbox is a queer root for me.


I know I must have posted this image at least 1,000 times but this is v much how I see myself spiritually/sexually. Or at least used to, one aspect of me. I guess the kids would say Mom. Same.



When Kerry was touring in Two Tears she'd often play at QxBxRx where I go-go danced and we'd hang out. I begged her to reunite the Ref Aunts. She said at the time she wasn't sure (I'm obviously paraphrasing) that she loved those songs or needed to hear them again. “But” I said “we” (the fans?) “NEED to.” Who was I kidding? Two Tears was great.

She made a cool zine about living in Dubai. The Red Aunts are cool and necessary. Messy, bluesy, fun, mean, cool, slick. Strong, tough, weird, funny. Scary, cheesy. Bratty, grimy, shuddering, wild, rich. Loud.

The set ended with Kerry saying: "We never did encores before and we're not gonna start now." And they didn't. They didn't even play "My Impala '65" which was a minitime bummer.

I crashed early and slept in a cloud of nectar from the Ti plant blooming in my room.