11/29/07

My horoscope says that I should be prepared for Love. For love with someone who is not "my type". This hypothetical threat of love is, further, supposed to change my life. To calm me down (which I need, I guess). I am thinking of the laundry list of boys who I've dated / had crushes on the last few weeks and I am imagining them pulling straws. Poor unfortunate dark-haired guy: I inflict myself on you. I hazard my affection towards you. I'm sorry in advance.

My life feels very painful today and it is not as easy to live as Sontag said. It is, in fact so unbearable, sometimes. I am worried that it will always be like this, that my inability to enjoy anything might be a permanent defect.


Three hundred and sixty five days ago (give or take), I drank a bottle of wine with you in your living room. It was our second date. I put on Stereolab and we laid on the floor. Carpeted and comfortable, but it was freezing this time last year. You had only lived in that apartment, way uptown, for a few months, but hadn't decorated anything. We argued about your parents' politics. You said how relieved you were that i was a good kisser. Instead of saying 'thank you', I said "Well, I've had a lot of practice". In the morning it was too cold to get out of bed.



So unbearable? Maybe.


11/25/07

Earning It

Miss Thing rolled out of bed at ten-thirty, woken by Verdi. Her room-mate's alarm clock. Her throat hurt from spitting up pink bloody foam. From fingernails down the back of her throat. Last night was a full moon. Too much gin was last night. She saw some band play and worked really hard to be nice to her new friends. Miss Thing whistles in the autumn when it gets windy and the breeze blows through the great big hole in her chest, y'know. It makes a sound, and Miss Thing is very sweet to her new friends. This hurts, this is hard, to stay up late. She works, y'know.

In black platform shoes and green sunglasses and her purple leather jacket, Miss Thing walked her chapped-lips to meet Grey. When Grey moves to San Francisco, Miss Thing is going to take over his job as a cat-sitter on weekends. Grey showed her the apartment building and Miss Thing met the cat. Went to brunch, where they drank cocktails made of rum and lemon juice and and maple syrup and they had coffee and Miss Thing only ate toast and butter, for her stomach. And for her head, they both hurt.

Grey walked with Miss Thing down Bedford avenue and they got to Grey's bike, which he can't take with him to San Francisco when he moves in two days. He unlocked it from the streetlight, took the chain and Miss Thing hugged him and they said goodbye. She walked towards the sun and towards the record store to buy psychedelic records.

She has felt sick and broken and stupid for a little over a year. Pretty ugly, nothing really gets her out of it.
And after everything, every muscle pulled and every phone number. After the alternating tastes of someone's spit and someone's soap in her mouth, Miss Thing is starting to feel her own little drum beat. She's sick from smoke and drinking and chemicals. From junk-food and insomnia. She smells like cocoa butter and patchouli, which she burns in a little Santeria cauldron in her room. Religious but not optimistic. So now as December begins and she puts the duct tape on her windowsill to keep the whistling cold out of her bedroom, Miss Thing feels the smallest bit of freedom for the first time all year. Walking through empty parking lots, Miss Thing can see or feel the sad part of good. Or not crazy. These things take time and they hurt and they make her free. Or at least make her feel that way, and who could begrudge her that?


Her mouth hurts, she puts on chap stick.
Wild Cherry.

11/21/07

FASHION IDOL: PEGGY BUNDY

Peggy Bundy is my role model. Images of glamor and images of the working-class were pretty absent from the television I watched so much of growing up. The beauty of the banal, the un-fashion, the house wife, the stay-at-home, totally turned me out. Peggy made it clear that even those without extraordinary talent, inclination or (especially) means could still affect a glamorous lifestyle. Fuck Paris Hilton. Peggy's style is not only possible, but mandatory. She indulges her own basic physical desires (sex, rest, bonbons cigarettes), at the detriment of... nothing. She's a "bad mom" sure but causes no real harm. And to top it all off she does everything in leggings and heels with a bouffant hairdo. This, the aesthetic of bravery and ease, is inspiring.





11/19/07

Piety Pays Off

My friend Lola works for the Met and got us tickets to see Norma on Friday night. It was a completely surreal experience, I had never been to the Opera before. Let alone been backstage. Let alone been in the 10th row of orchestra seats. Hasmik Papian was gorgeous in the title role, and despite the mixed reviews, I was completely enthralled (the pharmaceuticals we ate beforehand to help with out respective headaches certainly helped). Thinking a lot about Norma, the idea of cultural piety and how we use it to justify our broken hearts. Like, take our own very private grieving and transpose it into warfare. What gods am I summoning these days? When we're heartbroken, do we think about mercy? Or do we think about blood being spilled? I generally think first about blood, then about mercy. Now I'm trying to think of neither. Just: not think about it. Piety can, I guess, pay off, but it takes a long time. Lola and I had fancy margaritas after the show, and I went home to watch television and lounge around with my room mate Jennifer.

Saturday, Bobo and I went to the open studios in Long Island City. I saw some interesting work but want to talk about it later. I feel very strange today.


Think I'm getting a cold.

11/16/07

All The Joy Within You Dies




No matter how big or soft or warm your bed is, you still have to get out of it.





We are your parents' worst nightmare.

11/14/07

True Abstractions

Billy and Grey are high and eating Thai food on Grey's couch and watching cartoons. They know how to lounge. Sometimes people talk about not caring what anyone else thinks, but Billy and Grey really do not care what anyone else thinks about them and because of this they look fabulous.

Billy: I feel really lonely.
Grey: Why?
Billy: I feel like I don't even know what intimacy is. I don't know how that is supposed to feel.
Grey eats his noodles.
Billy: Like, I want to have sex with the same person more than once, you know?

Grey: You mean, twice in one night?

Billy: That's not what I was referring to, but now that you mention it, yes.
Grey: Or, like, four times in one night?


Feeling so totally frustrated this morning. In one of those rages, when everything offends me. Every phone call, e-mail, and paper clip is an affront. I guess it helps to sort of realize it, then try to stop it. wish it were as easy as that. I think it is a distinctively Leo tendency towards this kind of resentment. Coming from the "Do it best or don't do it at all" school of thought. Feeling as if I cannot change my circumstances or attitude, I don't even bother.

Okay, now I'm bothering, I guess.
I wish I could just write some dumb song / story / porno / performance and just get on with it, you know? Just get it out. Procrastination is only the word for it if you know what you're running from. I'm avoiding my entire life, everything about it (even --especially-- the good parts). It's been working, I got away from myself, but now I'm really bored.

Last night, went to an amazing event for Maggie Nelson's brilliant book, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Nelson gave a really inspiring presentation and read some poems (though not her own). Wayne Koestenbaum, my idol, read from his new book and suggestively held the microphone. Yvonne Rainer read sex stories from her diary of her teenage years ("No momma, I didn't have an orgasm") from her memoir Feelings are Facts (the title being, as anyone with a personality disorder can tell you, a debatable and thrilling notion). Carolee Schneeman shared reminiscences of her early years in New York, managing to both inspire and completely intimidate me (She did all that when she was 23? Really?). Schneeman also gave a brief and scintillating presentation of her 1995 Vulva's Morphia. Bernadette Mayer read a few hilarious and heartbreaking poems, gorgeously giving us some context for swear words.

One obvious highlight was the characteristically taciturn Kim Gordon, who began her segment at the podium with "Um, this isn't a poem". Gordon read an old written piece about observing a man playing a guitar, then she picked up her own guitar, and played that same sexy guitar performance. Her swagger, prefaced as such by the previous "male" designation of her introduction, was amazing. She managed to recapitulate everything she found so fascinating about the anonymous guitar wanker, and by enacting the same performance, destroy him. She wheeled around in her designer dress and boots, got down on the floor of the auditorium and literally fucked her guitar into shrieks of orgasmic feedback. Eileen Myles read at the end, some really amazing portions of her novel. She spoke specifically about the process of making poems, "being in" them rather than writing them. Two points she made stuck with me: one, about having loved someone, lost them, and then realizing that the former person she was, who had felt that desire, was also lost. Having to let go of the person who felt that desire, and learn to be a new person with new desires. Second, the inherent good of proclaiming one's heart's desire. This is something I've had an inkling about for a few months (various crushes on co-workers, people on the street, postal workers, pets). That simply to proclaim what you want is the point. Whether or not you "get" the object of your affection is ultimately so much less important that the articulation of your desire. Myles quoted someone to whom she had proclaimed her love.

After telling the woman everything Myles felt for her, the woman replied "That's sweet."
And I'm sure it is.

11/13/07

up to the sun

whether or not to die alone forever. I mean, keep dying alone.
Being really sweet and being really nice, even against my better judgment.


I work in the penthouse and I see smoke.



interviews forthcoming.

11/6/07

Aprodite, she got nothing on me

Accepted the cruel reality that I only sleep during the work week. Weekends I become nocturnal. I eat constantly, to keep my strength up. It's barely even food. Just, I guess, caffeine and Tylenol and chemicals and refined carbohydrates. And a steady diet of dancing, boredom, worry, and denial. Multi-vitamins. Green tea.This weekend I had a blast, though.


Friday I spent most of the evening alternately napping and worrying. Mordecai and I went out dancing where this photo was taken. I wish I could take photos of me making out with myself. Saturday was our huge house party. I didn't exactly have what I would call "fun", but I enjoyed myself thoughout the evening. Sunday was spent much like the last few months of Sundays, trying to get a hold of myself. Cleaning, resting. Reading Marjane Satrapi and David Wojnarowicz and Joan Didion and Diana Ross biographies. Gardening, almost.


The point is: it is autumn and I am feeling flexible. So social, in fact, that my memory doesn't serve me so well.


So friendly that my lips are chapped.

Loved the rain in the morning.
I feel really weird about my place in the world. I sort of need a new way to be.
I think I've inadvertently hurt some feelings. But my horoscope says that if I didn't break it then I should just be nice and helpful, but not worry about fixing it. Some egos (mine included) are so ornately fragile. Whatever.

This is making me feel calm, cold, anxious and excited. Totally virginal.
Just like it did when I was 15.


11/2/07

Turn To You

There are few things that the cocaine-dusted voice of Belinda Carlisle doesn't make feel better.

11/1/07

Radical Possibilities of Pleasure, Babe

FAG CITY DANCES TO THE BEAT OF DRUMS WITH SYNTHETIC SKINS.

Friday I went to a birthday party with my room mates. We all looked great. Jennifer and I drank Sake on the subway and danced our little butts off. The "arts community" and the "queer community" in New York overlap in ways that make me question the word "community". At once claustrophobic and inspiring. Makes it difficult to make out with strangers. (But not, I should add, impossible). Saturday I go-go danced at Cake Shop for QxBxRx Halloween party. Fantastic. Jonny Darling and JohnJoseph and I spent the night hanging out in the back room, putting on make-up., drinking free drinks, and chit-chatting as showgirls are wont to do. I felt good dancing. Still working on my "WHY I'M A GO-GO BOY" Essay. I wish I could go-go dance more. Pansy Division was wonderful and I'm amazed I made it home in one piece. Sunday, Sister Pico and I went shopping at Pearl River. Treasures from the far east, miracles, universality. These are some themes of the last weekend.

My jobs are starting to stabilize. I'm interested in writing a lot more, since that little thing got published on pequin.org and I got some positive feedback from my friends. Encouragement is rare, so I need to hold on to it. I'm curious about writing in the continuous present, and how to affect formally pornographic writing, without necessarily being violent. Does that make any sense? I'm interested in how my language can fuck, even if I'm talking, about, say, deep-sea life. You know, baleen. Creatures living with a minimum of sunlight. Bacteria. Hibernation. I want to fuck like feral cats. Bio-luminescence.

Also thinking of singing less. I hate feeling competitive. I want to tell more stories. I know exactly where I want to go but I don't know the fastest, cleanest, prettiest route. Oh, by "where I want to go" I mean:

- Nightclubs
- Bedrooms
- Europe
- Restaurants
- Shopping
- Sane
- The heart of the boy

Jungle Creatures, I'm thinking about. Listening again to house music and thinking a lot about forms of art and writing that circle back on themselves. Loving someone is so painful. To really love someone and be locked out of their heart is just unbearable. So, my thinking is that the art we make should reflect that. We need to make hermetic spaces, like house music (is a hermetic art form-- it exists for it's own purpose and obscures itself). Andy Warhol's factory is hermetic, even to Warhol. We need to make art works that breathe for themselves. I am of course taking about Mary Shelley and when I talk about Mary Shelley I trace this lineage to Marianne Faithfull and then I hope to trace it forwards to myself. If you get my drift.

I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe. I do, I do, I do.