1/21/08

FASHION IDOL: LISA FRANK

We've been over this. It's so boring: socially unacceptable, "not for boys", and thereby forbidden during childhood and adolescence. My parents are pretty cool and would've let me have it, but the kids at school would have flayed me for it. (They beat me up anyway, I should've just gone for it). Now, however, I really do live in a neon rainbow world , forever traveling between the land of dreams, a multicolor sky and the "real world" which is full of delightful animal friends. Now I can have this, can wear it out.

Finally












Dancing to the latest

You may know that showgirls like me often have to work two jobs. One of them I'm quitting because I don't like it. The other is ending but I love it. Discretion forbids me to mention it, but let's say: I work in the art world and not in the boutique gallery selling my soul world. In the DISCOURSE world. Impossibly glamorous people and their equally glamorous assistant speak to me every day on the phone. I have important secret information about future discourses of contemporary culture. My hair is immaculate and I am sneering all the time.

Last night I went to Bobo's house in Queens. Going out of town. Today I'm at work in relative quiet, peace. My days are less packed now, thank god.

Working on writing a new song. Here's how: I have an idea, a small one. Then i have another idea, totally unrelated and equally small. I gather a bunch of unrelated, sort of compelling but not fully formed ideas together and wrap a mental rubber band around them. Leave them alone for a few months. Come back and see if any of them still compel me, or seem particularly prophetic for the time that's elapsed. Throw out the junk. Work work work. Realize that the junk was the really good stuff. Make a song out of only the junk. Sing it live and and figure out what works. Re-write the words and let it sit again for a few months. Work work work. This is why things take so long.

Today I'm going to have a meeting to discuss a movie musical I'm in.
Didn't know that, did you?



A to-do list, notes from this weekend:
  • Buy new flower pot. And soil.
    • And a plant.
  • Everyone gets a silver fan
  • Donate clothes to charity
  • Wash sheets
  • Buy more voodoo oil
  • Vernissage
  • Buy CDs
  • Tell Danielle that ***** said she was cute
  • Make chocolate / cinnamon cookies
    • (no nuts)
  • Email ******* to tell him that I met that author that he really admires and he should take me out on a date to discuss her
  • Buy a long-reach stapler for zines
    • (I bought it, thank god)
  • Tonight for dinner: tofu and kale on toast
  • She says "it's for me, this wet mess"
  • Transfer to iPod:
    • 3 Teens Kill 4
    • This Mortal Coil
    • Saint Etienne
  • Anthony (call him)
  • Pellegrino and magazines
    • (on the beach in the summer)
  • Replaceable
  • "My sense is"
  • "She's a facile thinker"
  • Ask *** out on a date
  • Buy a new teapot
  • "I once went on a blind date with a spinal surgeon and he told me that he got a hard-on every time he cut into a body"

1/14/08

Hero for Us

Friday night Dan and Bobo came over and we made a really nice dinner salad. Dan went off to the East Village, and Bobo, Jenny and I all drank red wine, smoked cigarettes and got dressed up. Danielle wore a neon blue dress and gold shoes and fancy black stockings. I wore my new tight blue pants and my big big shoes. Jenny wore all red and black. We went to Royal Oak to dance to old Soul records. A bunch of friends came out and it was actually the most fun I've had in a while. I forgot that I really like to dance. Lucky. One boy kept trying to hold my hand while we were dancing, which made me slightly less enthusiastic. By that point (two in the morning) they had stopped playing Soul records and were playing weird rave songs. Later we went to the fag bar. Endless.

Saturday I cooked all day. Joanna and I went out to dinner and held each other. I retired early with Jenny and Cassie. Felt alternately as if I was wasting time and investing it. In me! Sunday was a blur. I finished the Lorrie Moore short story collection and began reading Women As Lovers by Elfride Jelinek. Took myself on a date to the Whitney to see the Kara Walker exhibit, an experience that was nearly ruined by the very loud, ostentatious and mildly offensive gallery guide ("Here we see the phrase 'White Man' written repeatedly, Kara Walker is very interested in race, it's... um, important, to her as a Black Woman"). I was really into the Ryan Trecartin movie on the first floor, for a number of personal, social, aesthetic and (let's face it) chemical reasons. Went shopping. Walked 45 blocks, listening to Siouxsie Sioux and contemplating drama. Watched The L Word at the neighbor's house and read myself to sleep.

I gave two weeks notice at my job on Friday. I'm a little worried about what I'm going to do, and a little hopeful as well. Mostly bored of LITTLE feelings.

Thinking of rescues and desire. I guess I can't complain about it, but I'm curious to know what it feels like. A Rescue, I mean. Rescue and Desire, I mean. I need a hero. I don't need to be a hero I need a hero. Someone pick up the slack. Come bring me back to life. Slay a dragon.


1/11/08

Yesterday I decided to make it hurt less.

I went to a really fabulous performance downtown and remembered that I actually have some interests, and maybe the stuff I want to make and share with the world has some use. I can get a little traction here.

Oh, yeah. I realize.


Today I'm giving my two weeks notice at my job. I don't know what I'm going to do yet.

1/9/08

Knuckles, Teeth, Snow, Clouds

Thinking of organizing things by color. All the white I can think of.

In art class in college, my instructor and close personal friend Robin Winters once said that he never identified as white, in any way. Whiteness, he said (he's Irish though I'm not sure its germane or fair to mention this), is the color of death. The Void, nothingness. Emptiness. He had, and now I do, a lot to say about the subject of White. We have a lot to talk about when we're talking about annihilation. But, of course, none of this gets said. White, in addition to being the Color of the Void, is tremendously boring.


PARTIAL LIST OF THINGS I DO NOT BELIEVE IN:
  • Heaven
  • Pilates
  • Revenge
  • True Love
  • Led Zeppelin
  • Meditation
  • Shortbus
  • That celebrities are just like us
  • Fate (seems unnecessarily cruel)
  • "Responsible" cocaine use
  • Straight Edge
  • Marriage, or having children (one or the other please thanks)
  • Eating meat
  • Modernist fiction in general (sorry)
  • Guitars
  • World Peace
  • Writing love songs (or poems, paintings, etc.)
  • The work of Tori Amos (though I'm trying really hard)
  • That NYC nightlife is dead
  • That NYC nightlife is due for a comeback
  • My future
  • Dating as a hobby


That all being said:


1/7/08

FASHION IDOL: SWITCHBLADE SYMPHONY



Susan Wallace and Tina Root blew my mind when I was 13. Their aesthetic combines seemingly disparate elements, and more importantly, doesn't even TRY to make the look seem cohesive.
The very fact that they went with the blonde/goth combination is pretty interesting. Forgive them, if you can, the white-girl-with-dreadlocks thing. Like their music, their look is vaguely Orientalist, sort of Hippie, somehow Goth, and the (what I had always assumed to be calculated) California slob look.

Love it.




1/4/08

Keep On Walking


Aw geez.



This familiar tug at my fingertips.
To run away. To write you!
To call! To talk to you! To convince you!
Remind you about something.


This tug says: We need to renegotiate something. I think we maybe overestimated how awful I am. You are so wrong. I am nowhere near as bad as we agreed. Yeah, we drew up a contract saying "Max Is A Monster". But I'm checking myself in the mirror and I don't think I'm necessarily that evil. This is not "the real me". Or, if it is, maybe it's not so bad.

When I look at my monster face in the mirror, I can't help but smile.