1/29/10

Giant Ball of Rock

So whatever. Here was my Wednesday, here are the tools from Wednesday afternoon:


This is what the dentists have put into my face.

It hurt exactly as much as you would think it would. Maybe slightly less. I'm told that my facebones are soft, so instead of three months, they're hoping for four months before the next surgery. If everything goes well and I heal quickly, then I can have my new tooth fully installed an operational by August. Which will have been a year. In the meantime, I have to give up smoking (forever-- nicotine, anyways) and drinking until my stitches heal. Vicodin is helping.

Yesterday I got a really sweet e-mail from one of my favorite painters, Sam McKinniss. The email said: "This painting is dedicated to you. Yours truly, "Lolita" 2010, oil on canvas, 12 x 14 inches. xo hope your face feels OK."



This really cheered me up, a lot. I totally love this painting. (Obviously). Sam is a really inspiring artist and I am so glad to know him. You guys should all check out his blog and also the cute interview he gave me for EVB.

Also right before I went to the dentist, I saw the new Spring 2010 couture collection from Alexis Mabille. Which is gorgeous and, I think, has personal significance to me (since I just had surgery pretty much shutting down half of my mouth). Mr. Mabille said that his inspiration for this collection is the phrase "Graphic Surgery". Fitting, no?



And I think it is also worth mentioning that Alexis Mabille is Fucking Gorgeous and I want him to be my boyfriend.

(Let me fix yr tie, let me count yr stripes, Tigertown).

Here's a really cute video of Alexis talking about his work. There's a close-up, thank god, on his mouth.

You're welcome.

Tonight is a Full Moon. A really big, special, bright one. I am thrilled about this. I'm not really feeling good, in my mouth or in my heart, but I am excited for tonight's Moon.


one of my all-time favorite song's about the moon:

1/27/10

Do You Wanna Go?

Or, I mean, do you wanna come? Maybe I should say that instead.

Last night was the reading at Dixon Place. I was really nervous about it, and then relieved when it was over. I'm really glad so many wonderful people showed up. Thank you.

Today I'm getting my big implant surgery. At 2pm today they're gonna put a titanium screw in my face bones and I'm really trying not to think too much about it before then. Details TK.

I feel really unsettled. I don't know. It's okay not to know, right?
I think so.

It's so hard to just go with the flow, sometimes. Cause then you wonder if maybe you're sacrificing what it is you want to do. And then you have to do that thing of asking "Wait, what do you want, exactly? Who are you, anyway?" And of course there is no answer for that, not really. Not one you can give yourself. And then THAT'S really scary, for like a minute. But then it stops being scary and before you start to answer those questions, that moment? Hi I am living there for the time being.

So, you know. It's not bad. It's gonna hurt, today. The surgery, but that'll probably be okay, too.


So often there is the possibility for awkwardness and there is the possibility for coolness and sometimes it's the same thing. I'm really into this idea of feeling good, though. I'm starting to notice when I feel good, the way pregnant women notice other pregnant women and the way people with fake teeth notice other people with fake teeth. This must mean something.

Last night on my way to the theater I could have sworn that I passed Kiki Smith on the Bowery. Auspicious signs.

1/26/10

LOVE FOWL

My mom used to run acting classes when I was little and we lived in LA. On Saturdays, she'd teach petulant teenagers about Beckett and my dad would take my little brother and I to the LA zoo. My favorite animals were always the flamingos.



For one thing, they were the first exhibit. They weren't in a cage, they were just sort of hanging out by the front in these little pools. I liked that, they seemed social. Also, they could balance on one leg. They were also, in my mind, "allowed" to pee outdoors. My parents tell me that once, as a kid, I peed in our backyard and when they asked me why I said it was because the fuhmingoes did it. But, of course, they're pink. This kind of supernatural color. Flamingos, both the actual bird and the lawn ornament, are kind of iconic to me. They represent the intersection of nature and nurture, the mingling of human will, technology and capitalist anti-environment, along with the cunning, perfect and wild beautify of nature. The perfect LA conundrum.

Later, I found out that they get their color from their food. I think it's so beautiful to be defined by and identified with what you consume . What you love. To be functionally clear.

"Young flamingos hatch with grey plumage, but adults range from light pink to bright red due to aqueous bacteria and beta carotene obtained from their food supply. A well-fed, healthy flamingo is more vibrantly coloured and thus a more desirable mate." Therefore someone who has consumed more, who loves more, is a better lover, a better mate.

In other news, I'm reading tonight at Dixon Place at 7:30. If yr seeing this and you're in NYC, please do come by.

In other other news, I'm thinking a fair bit about Lady Gaga. I'd been having this really unpleasant reaction to her / her work / her iconography for the last couple months, but was hesitant to say anything about it publicly. For one thing, anytime I said anything less than glowing about her, some faggot would berate me and basically accuse me of "in-fighting" (haven't had much use for that term since our Michigan Womyn's Music Fest protests, right kids?). For another thing, I hadn't really clarified my thinking on Gaga. Some people who I really love and respect seem to have totally fallen for her. (La JJ said that he appreciated her because she was actually making new images). "Maybe" I thought "I just don't get it". But that bummed me out because like Yoko Ono I consider myself a very articulate woman, and an attractive woman as well (right-on). I think I DO get it, or I'm starting to.

Really, what was the big thing that changed my mind was NOT listening to her songs or seeing her perform, or looking at the endless, admittedly beautiful photos and videos of her, styled by the inimitable Nicola Formichetti. He's getting some credit for his work with her, but not, I think, enough. For my money "Bad Romance" was not some watershed moment, that did not make me take her seriously. It's a cute song and a neato video, but if you spend that much money wrapping ANYONE in latex, they'd look freaky too. My big complaint with Gaga was that she was bloodless, there was no pulse, there was no dirt, I imagined that she never sweats and never smells and doesn't bleed. Too much fake blood not enough real blood.

What changed my mind was seeing this really cool new queer art zine called GUARRO, whose first issue (which you can see online, for free) is an homage to Gaga. The guys in the photos here mine Gaga as a site of queer potential. So much ink has been spilled about Gaga being a "gay icon", but I didn't see the connection. Guarro assimilates Gaga into a vernacular of queerness, they've used her source materials, her signature looks, as tools with which to construct a narrative of gay desire. They're use her hair-bow as a piece of language to be repeated, reinterpreted, spoken through accents, rolled around in your mouth.

Last night I was walking to meet a friend and I was thinking about Lady GaGa, and the phrase, "there can be only one" came into my mind. Then, I realized, that as far as Lady GaGa's concerned "there can be only none". The whole premise of Lady Gaga, as I see it (now, clearly, for the first time) is that she seems to feel that she does not exist, has not existed before, that the world has not made a space for her to exist in. This is an impulse which is at least problematic, but in her hands it's very productive. Her ambition and her relentlessness is really her clawing her way into existence. There can be only no Lady Gagas, she is proving (not to us, pop music listeners, not to us, gays, but to herself) that her hunch about the possibility of her existence could be right. The reason she looks familiar, and name drops so much is not, as I previously thought, because she's trying to locate herself within an existing continuum of fashion / pop music. When Gaga says she looks like Grace Jones, it's not because she actually looks like Grace Jones. It is because there is a real paucity of other ways to describe her. Gaga knows, Guarro knows, and her knowledgable readers know that we can only use the languages that we already have on hand. In inflicting herself upon the world's psyche, Gaga is forced to use existing parts.

The rancor I felt was not that I actually don't like her, it was impatience. I was waiting for the Magic Eye picture hadn't become clear yet. I feel like now, I get what she is doing. And though it's not really the same choice I would make if I were in her Alexander McQueen shoes, it is an admirable one. The real lesson of Lady Gaga is not that anyone can be famous, the real message is not that you can even be yourself (no one rolls out of bed in those shoes), the real message is not even that everyone can, actually, BECOME (let alone IDENTIFY) what they want to be. The message is that if you don't at least try, and try really hard, then you're wasting your time.

1/25/10

Believe it

First of all, I'm giving a reading tomorrow night at Dixon Place. Please come. I'm medium nervous about it. I'm reading with the always-lovely Dan Fishback who will be debuting some new text from an upcoming performance piece, thirtynothing. I'm going to be reading the "Postcard from Fag City" piece that appeared in Brontez' zine Fag School Issue #2. I'm also reading a new piece called "OUT WITH CHAINSAW". It's the newest installment of my weird serial memoir Confessions of a Namer. It's pretty long and I'm really nervous to share it so let's see how it goes, yeah?

Had a really nice weekend, after all. Saturday night we went to the super fun That's My Jam! and got groovy. Before that, though, my BFF BOBO and I hung out in the afternoon. We processed and smoked in central park and went to the Museum of Natural Herstory to look at fantastic creatures. Bobo looked mass cute, too:




Obviously I made us go to the African Mammals exhibit and there was a big crowd of people around the Lions diorama. But it wasn't like a family or a class or something, various people who all didn't seem to know each other flocked to it. As I was pondering this, a little girl (she couldn't have been more than five) walked by, sticking her chest out, and screamed "WOOT WOOT! WHERE MY LEOS AT! WASSUP!" and beat a cute little peace symbol formed from her chubby little fingers, against her chest. I thought 'Oh yeah, Leos come to stand by the lion exhibit, duh'.


Also learned a little bit about trees and I just love this one.




Always and forever listening to Deee-lite. I think, for obvious reasons.


Thinking about the potential of Diamond Icebergs Floating In Seas of Liquid Diamond on Neptune.

Also thinking about THIS FUCKING VIDEO:

1/21/10

Lux & Ivy









Lunar Facials

I think the Universe really is providing me with a rare opportunity for growth, and I may or may not be too chickenshit to rise to the occasion. I am working very hard on using my imagination for the power of good. What can we dream up?

Thinking again and more and harder about onomatopoeia, words that sound like what they describe. Like:


Or maybe also something the word "lover", which I've been harping on pretty hard for a few years now. Not because it sounds like what it describes, but because I like the shape your mouth makes when you say that word. When you call me that (you may not be aware of it, I think it's subconscious) you close your eyes a little, like halfway. Forty percent. You look sort of sleepy when you say it, and it makes me (subconsciously, I'm only aware of this thought process afterward, when I write it down) start thinking about you asleep, and being in bed with you.

Gosh, I really like that phrase: "sleepy when you say it".

But like I said, that's not really onomatopoeia. The word "lover", I mean.

Into playing this game with my friends called "Cool Rock Couple" where you would say who you are and who you are hoping to meet. Like, for example, "Mick Jagger looking for my Marianne Faithfull" or "Mick Jagger looking for my Keith Richards" or whatever. It's a really hard game to play in terms of narrowing yourself down to just one, but I sort of feel like maybe I'd be Christina Martinez looking for my Jon Spencer.

"I think it's what really makes you attracted to anyone. I mean, it's pretty narcissistic. It's just because they're like yourself, and you recognize yourself in them. So I think why we're attracted to each other is probably because we're exactly the same."

That's just one way of looking at it, for me. I guess the problem with this game is that it's limiting. But isn't everything? Maybe not. Maybe I am looking at this from a "glass half empty" place because I didn't get enough sleep last night or something.

I don't know. I am doubting myself. This is what I mean about having the opportunity to grow. You can either let the world show you a bad side of human nature or you can let the world show you something that doesn't fit into your world-view and you can change your world-view to accommodate it, and that doesn't mean you're in denial or being stupid or whatever.

I have decided to not worry and I have decided that things are radically different than they were one week, three weeks, 17 months ago, even. Way different.

Pretty awesome night, with champagne, bubble bath, and a immense cat. This morning I was thinking a lot about how my exact feelings, when I let all of this secondary self-sabotaging 2005-ish loathemobile shit go, is a lot like this video. This is maybe one of my all-time favorite things in the world. It's an early video by my friend Richert Schnorr, featuring the crazy talented Miriam Levin, who has since moved on to Europe. This is one of the first videos that they did together, and ultimately lead to the music video / album that I was lucky enough to participate in, GRAPHIC.GLORY. (One of the videos on the album, Wait For The Dawn, is a really steamy makeout scene with Miriam and I. Just sayin).

Anyways, this is one of my perennial favorites. This is me, today.

Rose from REGULARMOTION on Vimeo.


Stumbling upon graffiti: DON'T TEST ME BITCH.

I think everything is going to be good. I understand that I am going to have to participate in this new goodness. I am excited and ready to prove it to you.

1/19/10

DD






double Sarah Cracknell

Sun Square Pluto



Facing, I guess, some difficult truths. (About myself). I am working on a new piece but I don't want to talk about it really (one of the aspects of this transit is a deep, dark, fear of being exposed, and having big doubts about one's creative output) but I will say that one of the lines in the piece, maybe my favorite line is: "The truth turns me on".

That's true. I am trying to hold onto that because from yesterday to tomorrow what constitutes "the truth" is changing. This is a transit about dealing with one's fear of change, and how we need to embrace change. Okay, got it.

Sort of like also described by the theory behind deep frying: "If performed properly, deep-frying does not make food excessively greasy, because the moisture in the food repels the oil. The hot oil heats the water within the food, steaming it from the inside out; oil cannot go against the direction of this powerful flow because (due to its high temperature) the water vapor pushes the bubbles toward the surface. As long as the oil is hot enough and the food is not immersed in the oil for too long, oil penetration will be confined to the outer surface."

As in = NOT GOOD FOR YOU. BAD FOOD. DEEP FRIED. It should work but it can go wrong.

On my way to work this morning I saw a man get hit by a taxi on 6th Avenue. He was sitting up and people were helping him but it looks like it had hit his leg(s). I almost had a panic attack. I am being very cautious and open to new ways of thinking about my life. Very open to dismissing old behavioral patterns.

Really happy that I chose to dress cute today. I'm going to my old friend Marcus' birthday dinner tonight. I love him so.

1/18/10

Hey Mister


I found this when we were walking around this weekend. Motifs show up whenever they want, I guess. They have their own minds. In who's dreaming life are you a motif? What do you think you symbolize for them? What do you symbolize for yourself?

I want you to think about me and I'll think about you and I'm pretty sure we're thinking the same thing but I can't check, I guess, till we're in the same room together. There's that story of Sleater-Kinney practicing in their living room and Carrie and Corin playing guitar and screaming at each other and one of them describes the feeling of a jolt of electricity shooting between their chests as they played the song that would eventually become "Call the Doctor" and I can't find the original article but I wanna do that with you. You know, have that feeling.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is also another anniversary, sort of. Sixteen years ago today my family lived in Los Angeles. I was nine years old and this is just before we moved up north to the Bay Area, which was sort of awful (I can never tell if moving was awful or if adolescence was awful and whether or not puberty would have been better if we had stayed in L.A.). But sixteen years ago today at 4:31 in the morning of MLK Day (which was January 17th that year) I remember being woken up by the earthquake.


It was really scary. The next day, my family went for a walk up to the highest hill nearby, which was part of Occidental College or something, and we surveyed the city around us. There were huge plumes of black smoke, my mom took pictures.



I remember watching television, and there was a woman on the news doing a live broadcast about trying to pull someone from a collapsed building. On the TV, the newscaster was in a red dress and she was kneeling and sticking her microphone into the crawlspace under a building, to interview the person trapped underneath. Then on screen there was a loud rumble and the newscaster screamed, everything was shaking in an aftershock. This was a live broadcast, but it was bing filmed across town. I remember watching this on TV and standing up as soon as I saw the aftershock, and as soon as I stood the aftershock hit our house. It wasn't my first earthquake (probably not even my fourth) but have a really vivid memory of it. But then everything wth me is vivid. These days, at least.

Had a really amazing, wonderful weekend. There's so much I want to tell you about, dear friends-who-read-this-blog, but a number of ideas, philosophies, and legal codes require me to use a modicum of restraint.

I guess the one downside of the weekend was that I sort of avoided my usual feedback-loop project regarding sex, love, gratification, etc. But the upside there is that I guess having a thing to miss, like naming an object of affection, is an ultimately productive, good practice. Like, I think I have an actual crush and it's not on some amalgamation of Scott Panther or the number of very real boys that inspired the fictional character Scott Panther. It was a lot of guys, not one and not two.

I think maybe 2010 is the year I stop fantasizing about fictional characters. I might not be ready for that though. I know I don't feel like a fictional character. Not anymore. Not when the way I feel, right now, about you, is so real.

Here's another way I feel abut you, I wanna show off for you.


I don't even have to do it in a coy way, I can be sort of dirty, too. If you want.



Check out this wonderful product that Sister Pico spied when we went on a grocery shopping adventure yesterday with PLD. I haven't tried this, but it seems like it would make pancakes really easy, right? Except the hard part about pancakes, as you and I both know, is cooking them. Can't put an intuitive sense of timing into a spray can, now can you?. Not yet, or, not a can that I'd probably come across anytime soon, anyhow.

Oh well. It's nice that the Batter Blaster is organic, I guess.


I don't know how it came up but I started thinking this morning about that Parker Posey hairdo moment with the curls. Y'know? Sometimes, maybe cause of the cold weather, I just find myself really thinking about when this was her hairdo.

And then I really get to thinking, like something definitely inspired by the fabulous blog You Look Like They Fucked by Jawn who is a crucial new-wave modern thinker who I know I want on my dodge-ball team. (Who's on yours?)

Like, okay, Parker's hairdo and also:

Miss MJ, right? Who forsook her PDX Peroxide clownfro for a therious theventies downtempo polyester auteur look after moving to LA, right? Or maybe even before, I don't know.

But then that always makes me think of:

The always-adorable John aka Johnny Darling aka Lusty J, who writes a really sexy well-written blog you should check out. He only sometimes wears his curly-girl hairdo. There are precious few photos of it online, so you have to kind of extrapolate from the ones above. You'll have to use your imagination OR take your own pictures of Johnny's hair the next time you see him out (and he's wearing his hair curly-- he doesn't always do it), and then e-mail me the pictures you take of him and I'll post them up here.

Or, y'know, start your own blog.

And so then anyways I'm thinking about Johnny and "People I Know Who Wear This Hairdo Who Are Actually In My Life, Lucky Me" and then I start thinking about:

My best friend Bobo, who I am supposed to see tonight. She almost never reads this blog but if she did she'd be happy I'm posting pictures of her.

1/15/10

the point is that we have secrets

1/14/10

Low Tide


Tonight is a solar eclipse. I get so scared when the Universe is trying to reveal something to me.


We feel so certain that we are in control; we hate the idea that The Way We Know can and will (and maybe should, maybe should not) be completely thrown out the window. I don't know what to think. I don't know where to put myself.

Logically, I doubt that I exist. I know for certain that the things of which I am constituted, the primary basic elements are measures of nothingness, static charges. Maybe someday, maybe even in our lifetime, we'll have a better understanding of these impulses which make us up, but until the Large Hardon Collider is functioning at full power we just don't know too much about our particles. My best guess at this point is that I am not real. Neither are you, but I don't want to be presumptuous. I want to know who you're thinking about when we have sex. Whoever he is, you like him a lot. How can I be more like him? In what quanifiable ways can I make myself more perfect for you?


I feel like a monster. Or if not an actual monster, something close to one. Something really ordinary and real, but which frightens everything around it. Scares myself. I can do certain calculations in my head and on paper (and here, too, I'm working out the math, right now) but until I have a chance to ask you, to check my answers against yours I can't be sure.

I had an inkling, late last night and when I woke up this morning, that I was onto something. I am listening to a bunch of new songs, over and over again, finding their ways to me through various methods of divination (my soul sister La JohnJoseph sending me an immaculately funky mix CD).

(I wish La JJ and I were still a DJ team. We never took requests but we kept the kids dancing. When we play records people cry, laugh, fall in love, fight. When we play records people meet each other and themselves).


(We play a lot of Shampoo).

I get caught in this feeling in which I'll feel something and then immediately feel guilty about it. LIke I'm not entitled to feel: bad, angry, jealous, lonely. Whatever. Who has time to chastize themselves for this? I want to be less freaky, I want to be less freaked-out. I want to get better at this. I don't want everything to be so fucking special and high-stakes. I want to know that we can, actually, play with fire, without burning the house down.


I want to be stronger.

I want to have something left to give back to you. Over, and over.

On losing yourself. On giving up. On moving (on). On being in love and learning how another person thinks.

Here's an inspiring idea and thought. An inspiring image / video. Maybe my favorite songwriter, Khaela Maricich, performing last month in NYC:

1/12/10

Lay It Down

I remember Samantha and Mason picking me up in Alameda when we were all still in high school and we'd drive around Novato, going to Double Rainbow because it was the only place in town where you could get vegan soy ice cream. Samantha would drive, because Maygay and I never learned (and still do not know). There is one afternoon in particular which really stands out because it was when Mirah's second album Advisory Committee came out. Mason had been talking about it nonstop but I hadn't heard it yet and as we drove through the insanely pretty hills of the north bay I got super emotional in the backseat of Samantha's Honda (the Honda with a bumper sticker that said "I ♥ Appaloosa Butts" -- coolest girl in the world). I think by this point we were almost 18 and had tried, to Maygay's horror, Clove cigarettes. So, djarums may have been involved in this emotional memory but I am remembering the sun and listening to that record for the first time and being really into the phrase: "You don't have to wait until you die".

Mirah was (is) right-on about that.


These are the really amazing pancakes that Ptrick made for brunch on Sunday. Gourmaay.

You don't have to wait until you die. You don't have to wait at all. And you don't have to die.

It just seems clear. It feels like "Oh Yeah". It reveals itself. It's OBVIOUS.


That part, yeah yeah yeah right there don't move. The face you're making at this exact moment, when your eyebrows are a tiny little bit furrowed, like you have an idea but you don't know if you want to say it out loud? The quick, quiet intake of breath like you're getting ready to say something but haven't thought it through yet?

This is familiar. Not cause it reminds me of anything else but because if gives me a familiar feeling. And the familiar feeling is one of knowing the song the DJ is playing, a song that comes on the stereo in your friend's car when you're driving around slurping frozen mint chocolate chip soy iced cream, you recognize the song even though you're only hearing it for the first time, and the feeling is that you know, then that it is a song you really like.

Hey check out this really awesome prize I won.

Side A


Side B

This, I have decided, is magickal glue. I know exactly what I'm doing to do with it. But it's the type of situation where a magician (witch) can't reveal his secrets, where if I talk about it it will jinx it, where I don't want to spoil the surprise. But I know where it's going. The different sides also make me start thinking of Split Singles.

Like, you know. Sharing a record. We'd each get a side, but would be complementary. Maybe we've been pen pals for a long time. Maybe we'll tour the West Coast in a van, play Gilman St., bicker in the backseat and share skittles in the long stretch of farm highway between Bakersfield and Los Angeles for our final night of tour and maybe we'll have something to show the kids who show up, maybe it'll be something familiar, recognizable, something on our bodies that anyone could do.


Wanna hold mine up to yours.

Last night, Bratmobile's song on this record came on in the bar. And today the Heavens to Betsy one is pretty apt because My Secret Really Is True.

1/11/10

Blood Song

Diamanda Galas, icon.







These images were really important to me in my formative years. Diamanda's eyes on the cover of You Must Be Certain Of The Devil pretty much changed my life, actually. And how funny that the record cover above, her self-titled sophomore album, has such wonderfully cheesy airbrushing (and such horribly, beautifully violent music inside)?

E-T-E-R-N-A-L I-N-S-P-I-R-A-T-I-O-N