6/29/15

spending a lot of time on my floor.

spending a lot of time alone.

spending a lot of time in pain. afraid.

don't really know anything.

6/25/15

updates:

- Such a gross thing happened to me last weekend. I made some iced coffee and set it on my nightstand and took a little nap. I woke up from the nap and gulped the iced coffee and walked to the bathroom and as I was walking I realized I had some coffee grinds or something in my mouth so I spit out the little piece of grit in the bathroom sink and it was grit. It was a fly and the fly was alive. I was mad.

- I'm really into teal. I want to wear only teal. My new iPhone case is teal. Maybe I should change my name to Max Teal. I bought some fancy nice new teal clothes this weekend. When I was 13 I dyed my hair teal and my dad helped me. It didn't last long the way things tend not to.

- I'm super excited to be featured on this new website DANDY DICKS (NSFW). It's a sexy website and they are featuring a version of my story "ANGELS" which is excerpted from my new zine DOOR GIRLS (which you can buy HERE -- I'm gonna keep harping on this for a little while, sorry). I want to write more for and about them and am looking forward to doing so. OK!

- Finally, this friday night I am very excited to be part of EVERYBOOTY at BAM, where I will be hosting a reading featuring myself, Kayla Morse and Tommy Pico. You can see the full schedule and info on tickets below. This is going to be epick and you definitely have to come.



After sold out events for the last three years, Everybooty returns to BAM to take over the entire four-floor Fisher Building (including an incredible rooftop!) for one QUEER night that mashes up performance, bands, art, DJs and readings and brings together SPANK, SARAH JENNY and BIG ART GROUP for an over-the-top not-to-be-missed sensational event.

TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW!!
http://www.bam.org/everybooty

A radical night of multi-arts mayhem to celebrate Pride!
++ PERFORMANCES ++
Will Sheridan
Mizz June
The Feath3r Theory
Turnt Up Trifecta (Untitled Queen, Horrorchata & Merrie Cherry with special guest Lady Quesa D'illa)
I AM A BOYS CHOIR
Bianca Dagga
BB Heart
The Incredible, Edible Akynos
The Dance Cartel

++ CONCEPT GOGO ++
Addys Gonzalez
Nicholas Gorham

++ DJs ++
DJ Sean Be (SPANK)
DJ Matty Horrorchata (BE CUTE)
DJ Deputy (XANADUDE)
DJ Sveta Spins

++ MC ++
MC Ariel Speed Wagon

++ PHOTOGRAPHY ++
Tinker Coalescing : Queer Photography
Ned Stresen-Reuter

++ READINGS ++
Max Steele
Tommy Pico
Kayla Morse

++ VJ ++
Kevin Ramser [Honcho]

++ VISUALS ++
Big Art Group

++ INSTALLATIONS ++
Jeffrey Owen Ralston

++ KARAOKE ++
Heather Litteer

++ TAROT ++
Lorenzo Estrella

++ HOSTS ++
Sarah Jenny (Hey Queen)
Jason Roe (SPANK)
Scott Nevins (The People’s Couch)

++ GUEST CURATOR ++
The Brooklyn Community Pride Center
JP Howard
Women Writers in Bloom
Azure D Osborne-Lee, and Joanna Hoffman
Music by Hi Tiger (Derek Jackson)
Dance by John Zullo/ Raw Dance Movement

@BAM_BROOKLYN
BAM FISHER
321 ASHLAND PL
BROOKLYN, NY

Celebrate Pride, Brooklyn Style
#EVERYBOOTY
ART + DJs + DRAG + PERFORMANCE+ MUSIC + PARTY

This event is 18+ with ID.
BAM Fisher is a wheelchair accessible venue.

6/24/15

Notes

Ashtray art. Make art of ashtrays. It's the last vulgar thing to do, really. Anything can be an ashtray.
A person could be an ashtray.

I'm not just trying to console myself. I really do think success is sort of silly. Selling out and all that. Attention. I think it's a little... Immature. This artist this person I really like said something recently about how in order for them to realize their artistic vision of the world or something, they need a lot of lonely and power and fame or something. And you know far be it from me to question anyone else but I don't know if I need those things for myself. I certainly don't think I need them.



But even in general. The big gift of being a person is that you get to know this shit right. The like, fallibility. Everyone's a person. Even movie stars. Even celebrities in Hollywood and inmates in jail. Anyone has it. So it seems like on one hand to know that and then to know some other truth.aybe I'm stubborn. Or something

Boards of Canada. So obsessed right.



Most private thing I'm willing to admit: I don't believe in God. Is that fucked up to say.
Most private thing I'm willing to admit: I don't believe in secrets.

Saw Blonde Redhead perform, they were pretty fantastic, I must say, but didn't play "Here Sometimes" which I'd hoped they would.



I feel like that, here sometimes. I'm trying to be both a person and not a person. The negative aspects of both and the positive aspects of neither.



Drinking a lot. Not a lot, just often. Smoking a lot and often. Eating poorly but trying to do better. Something is making me sick, I don't know if it's the medication or what but I am gaining weight, a little. Which is okay I guess. What bugs me is that my body feels weird I feel bloated no matter what I do or do not eat. I feel better. Maybe it's from over eating. It seems like everything is either too much or too little. I can't focus.
“A firm sense of one’s own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity. One form this takes can be called engulfment. In this the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or anything or, indeed, even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his autonomy lays him open to the dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity. Engulfment is not simply envisaged as something that is liable to happen willy-nilly despite the individual’s most active efforts to avoid it. The individual experiences himself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuous, desperate activity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love… It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation. The other’s love is therefore feared more than his hatred, or rather all love is sense as a version of hatred. By being loved one is placed under an unsolicited obligation.”
— R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
Like I am a broken system of rewards and punishments, stuck on punishment. Honestly making time to paint my toenails the other night, which I am very glad I did, took me days. That's not a social interaction. It takes me a long time to write back to people. It takes me a long time to do anything. Sometimes it takes a long time.



This is the Le Corbusier house where Ann Demeulemeester lives and works. Worked. I went to Century 21 this weekend and they had a bunch of AD from when AD was still designing AD on sale but even marked down 75-80% it's still outrageously expensive. But like who really wears Ann Demeulemeester anyway, you know? Patti Smith? That's not saying a lot. PJ Harvey did that gig for the Ann book launch at DSM with Patti and that was kind of cool, but even PJ at this point... Apparently the new designer for Demeulemeester, Sebastien Meunier is a genius so maybe it will be one of things that it doesn't have to always be so cult-ish. Maybe it'll get better and cheaper with time. There's already a new cheaper (allegedly) shoe line? Why am I worried about this when I need to be worried about paying bills on time.

I wish it was my job to worry about this more.

6/14/15

It's Brooklyn LGBTQ Pride today and it's also Puerto Rican Day. I like Puerto Rican Day because it was the setting for one of my first queer experiences in New York. In 2005 when I was 20 I met a really cute boy at a nightclub in the East Village and we hooked up and the next day we walked to the train station together to say goodbye and he is not white and were holding hands and wearing our nightclub outfits in the big crowd of people celebrating and I was worried, you know, if we'd get negative reactions from people in the crowd but we didn't. We had our sweet goodbye moment at the train station in midtown and it was one of the first times I felt like New York was like the place where that was possible.

6/9/15

Everything I touch I ruin

6/8/15

Me Never Being

Thought about dragging the TV the big one I promised to get rid of (and then never did anything about) into my room and hooking up the sega genesis. One last time. And having a night like I would as a kid, playing video games. I had been to the video game store and I am going to try to sell the sega and the nintendo and all the games etc. and it made me nostalgic. But I haven't played them in years. I still have a gameboy.

I had two glasses of wine at the Howl gallery space, which used to be the La MAMA Galleria. I was there for the closing of the Lydia Lunch show So Real It Hurts. She performed her spoken word piece Conspiracy Of Women which has just been reissued.



I remember looking high and low and eventually finding a copy of the original CD in the late 90s, when i was first getting into Lydia Lunch. This is amazing, she was and is amazing. It was literally a trip to see her perform this work, in 2015, in a gallery on the Bowery, for free. It was sort of updated, of course. The list of occupations, wars, genocides, terrorism and atrocities has grown. At one point she was talking about pop stars Courtney Love or Madonna or wait-- and then she pointed to herself and said "I'm Lady Gaza. Get it?"

This is an example of an increasingly rare experience I've been having where I think "I am so glad I live in New York. This is totally worth it." Because I got to see Lydia Lunch perform a mindblowing set for free on a Friday evening and get drunk for free it was fantastic. All I had to do was sacrifice my sanity, my youth, my future and my memory for ten years hacking it out here but it was worth it as it so rarely is, increasingly rarely. But still meaningful.



Anyway I sat next to Stephen who used to run QxBxRx, it was nice to catch up. The performance was amazing. Lydia Lunch is truly like Cher to me or like David Bowie or Judy Garland. I mean I'm into any of those people, but the way people worship some artists or celebrities as icons, I feel about Lydia Lunch and have for a long time.

When i turned 17 i was so upset because I thought: I'm washed up. By this time Lydia Lunch had already started Teenage Jesus and I haven't done anything.

You know who else worshiped Lydia Lunch apparently is Courtney Love. But lots of people did. She is iconic. I mean she does have what she said the devil (who is certainly a woman) blessed her with: "a celestial body and the face of an angel." I realized how influential this piece was to me, seeing it tonight. The way she talked about the Big Bang, and how violence and chaos is the nature of the universe. At another point she said "Y'know I hate fuckin' God. Because God was the first cop. God was the first cock." The way she used sarcasm but not necessarily for humor. It wasn't about applause. She did not like the applause. Right after the show she grabbed her purse, headed over to the merch table and lit a cigarette and started hawking CDs and posing for photos. I met a friend of Stephen's who was saying that when he saw her perform it originally in 1990 he felt like he immediately wanted to know everything about her work. She's incredibly charismatic. She's cute yes. But she's also compelling. She's hyper-verbal and confrontational but not in a way that's, like, mean spirited? She's hostile, sure. She talked about that she said "Hostile?! You have no FUCKING idea. NONE." Walking away from the microphone, in front of it (out of the light) and into the audience. I think so much performance art in theater and music and whatever kind of came through this, either directly or indirectly. She's in this weird position. She's outlived the thing, she can remember it. She makes these connections. It was scintillating. It's no secret that I have not been feeling very good lately but this was really heartening and made me feel a bit better.

I came home and watched Lovelace because of Vogue magazine. I got a basically free subscription through the reward points my corporate bank "gives" me, and this month Amanda Seyfried was on the cover. The artocle talks about how the really great serious actress moment of Seyfried's career, so far, was Lovelace, but people didn't see the film when it was in theaters. It's actually pretty great. Seyfried is fantastic, Sharon Stone is wonderful as she is at literally everything. And who else is in the film, playing a slightly older, sad wizened porn actress? Debi Mazar.



Just saw one of the mosquitoes flying around my room, one of the big ones that bit me so many times Friday night. I think, like, 8-9 different bites. Terribly painful. I woke up swollen, rummaged through my nightstand for antihistamine gel and put it on. IN the morning there were just tiny little bite marks. Hard like pimples. All over my body. But still I slept for 11 hours on Friday night. The mosquitoes ere silent. The one I saw this morning was silent too. Big and red and quiet.

Out of my window I saw a teenage boy get arrested across the street. The cops were handcuffing him and his friends he was with kept asking something like where's the weed though? The cops have been on the corner all weekend. Last night when I was going to the city I saw a pair of white people painting a mural on the chicken shop. I wonder.

I went to a bunch of art openings, and they were pretty okay but nothing too special to write home about. I want things to be better. The Kim Gordon show at 303 Gallery is great. The group show at Rachel Uffner is fantastic, go to those.

I feel like I am a crazy person. Sometimes (like today) it's not so bad. It just feels like a dull ache of dysfunction. Other times it feels very hot and urgent.
And shameful.

I don't know what's wrong with me. How every thing keeps stimulating this nerve, the nerve that reminds me how worthless I am, how horrible, how unlovable, how fundamentally shitty and bad and deserving of pain and punishment I am. I can't map it out -- I don't know what this is about, where it came from, how to assess it or change it. My analyst asked, last week, if I was in pain. I said yes. He said are you in pain right now? I said yes of course. He asked what it felt like.

How, dear reader, do you describe emotional pain? How do you describe emotional pain if nothing even happened?
Isn't loneliness a kind of pain? Isn't boredom a kind of pain? I'm not lonely or bored, per se. I feel very excited and hurt and taut. I told my analyst it feels like I have a fever, like I am on fire. If feels like I am caught in a vise and something has to happen yet I know there is nothing that can happen, so I feel as if I am just stuck in this painful position. My analyst said "Why do I have the feeling that you've been abused?" I can't answer that question. I don't feel abused, I said as much. I said if anyone is abusing me it's me because I'm the one who knows, deep down, how much I deserve the abuse. My analyst said maybe, but it seems like I've been dealing with someone else's abuse. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Then we talked about how embarrassed I am. How I let the crazy out on Twitter and someone got upset and told me to get off line. I think they were trying to be helpful but all it did was make me feel like I'm an idiot for being in pain to begin with. Not only am I deserving of pain, but I can't talk about it because it annoys people and just makes people hate me. Everything is an opportunity for an indictment. Everything is another example of me not being enough, of me being too much. Me being wrong. Me never being right. Me being no one's favorite. Me being no one's pick. Me guilting people into love. Me tricking people into putting up with me, but only for a time. Eventually every body will come to hate me as much as I hate myself. Almost as much-- I'm better at it than everyone else because I have more practice.

After therapy Brontez came over and he brought me a rose which was very sweet. We hung out a bit. Friday I saw Lydia and came home and slept for longer than I usually do. Saturday I hung out with Markey for a bit at the Brooklyn Museum then went to Gag at Metropolitan. Cute boys don't care. I don't blame them. Sunday I went to my group meeting and felt like a loser afresh, did some errands and slept early again. Watched bad TV. Bad books.



I don't know how to wait anything out. Can't something change? Why does everything feel so painful and exclusive and mostly fresh. How can I be so naive, still. Why does it still feel like the first time when I get rejected, ignored, slighted. I have no sense of myself. I have nothing to fall back on. It's not "I don't care if you don't like me because I like me." I don't know that. I don't know or believe that I am worthy. I feel that I have nothing to offer. No ideas. No art. No Magic. Nothing.

6/3/15

Which traps

I don't know how to listen to music anymore.

Molly Pope tweeted recently about working on another of her brilliant new shows, and she said that she felt like she'd forgotten how to listen to music for fun as opposed to when you're writing a show and learning a song.

It's like everything is measured against that: either it's me or it's not. Either I can imagine myself singing it or not. Not just singing. We imagine how it would feel to play that song, to make a dance to it. We fantasize about putting he record on when we fuck. We listen to the song at the nightclub and we feel we are the singer, the subject of the song. I can't listen I can only bleed. I can't stop pumping.



Maybe it's like my frustration with drag, my drag jealousy. Miss Green Eyes. Which I smoked into this thing I wrote called "Sodium" which a remixed version of was published by Blunderbuss. The original mix is published in the new zine DOOR GIRLS.

I can't listen to music except to think how I would perform the song. Even without singing. How I would lip sync to the song, how I would perform it as a drag queen. Where's the ironic subtext of the song. Where's the hilarious shocking messy pathetic edgy fuck-up landmine of the lyrics. Of the attitude: where in the diva is the pitfall, pothole and how shall I express myself but to choose, onstage which traps to fall into and which to fly above.



The thing of I wish I made that. I wish I felt that way enough to make that. I wish I thought that. I can't listen. Anymore or right now. It's as if, as I think I've said before, subjectivity is salt-water. The death-drive of our moment in white supremacist patriarchal capitalism is a kind of nutrition, a nature of insatiability. We call it a tension, we call it balance but the whole thing is rigged.



Justice. She's not blindfolded to be objective she's blindfolded to become inhuman to be above humanity. They should have given her wings, a weapon or something but no she's so old school like with a spinning loom, an hourglass, a scale.



I know it's silly. Or seems selfishly misguided or something. I'm trying to find a way to explain my way out of it. I don't know if I know how to feel. I'm thinking about that scene at the end of Young Adult where she says something like "I need to learn how to be happy" and then the co-dependent person immediately suggests a much more attractive version of reality. Am I so clueless? I don't know if I think so. I think maybe slippery. Maybe less slipper than I realize. Maybe more, sure. But maybe it's behind me.



That clip from that Chicks On Speed record where one of the Chicks is on the phone and you only hear her half of the conversation and she says how sorry she is about missing the Underworld performance. How was it, she asks.