twinkle twinkle blah blah blah etc.

That's entertainment.

Hey kids! Tonight's the next installment of How to Kick People. I'm sure they'll be doing lots of loveable and funny things, which is why I plan on going.

Also, Levin owes me money.

Every Good Boy Deserves Free Beer

PowerHouse Books is celebrating the release of Charles Peterson's* "Touch Me I'm Sick" with a big-ass reception on Thursday night. RSVP this afternoon so you can get free beer and see who's flyin' the flannel.

*Thank you Science Girl for correcting me.

Life during wartime

Thanks to the Great Leader for sending along this photo. This is the view from my living room (and bathroom, and bedroom...). Not to brag, but it's pretty damned spectacular. It completely makes up for the fact that my bathroom looks like the Grozny Holiday Inn.

(N.B.: Those orange-yellow spots are not, in fact, refinery explosions but rather reflecting light, I think.)

We recruit

Bless her heart. In a selfless attempt to supply me with designer underwear, my mother had inadvertently bought me the gayest underwear on the market. From the moment I put these on I would cross the line and become a Tommy Boy.

How I Became a Tommy Boy, over at Languor Management.

Tragedy narrowly averted at Junior League Luncheon

Please DO NOT USE the Icebox Rolls recipe that appeared on p. 154 of the April 2004 issue of Southern Living. Combining the water and shortening as described in the recipe may cause the mixture to ignite, is extremely dangerous, and could result in fire and safety hazards.

Via Poynter.

Anecdotally, Maud Newton, a Southern lady to the core, has indeed served some flamable foodstuffs, but those were intentional, and mostly bourbon-based.

I gotcher Mister Softee right here

Couple injured in ice cream truck turf war:

A years-long battle over a Harlem ice cream truck route exploded into a violent turf war when one couple assaulted another couple, leaving them in critical condition, police said Monday.

No, wait. It's still pretty funny.

Back to life, back to reality

My blogging muscles have atrophied. I need a regimen to get them back into shape.

Of course, DreamHost was tits up for most of yesterday. But when they finally fixed their router, I realized I had nothing to say.

So the move went really well. If I may shill for a moment, if you need to move, and you live in Brooklyn, you should call Moving Your Way. They were truly fabulous and moved my entire apartment (35 boxes, two dressers, a bed, and eighty-seven chairs) in an hour and a half.

I'm in LIC now. If I could find the charger for my digital camera battery, I'd post pictures of the view from my living room. It's just amazing. I can't wait for the next terrorist attacks! It'll be like having front-row seats.

Maybe the Great Leader can email me some--he came by to drop off the royal vacuum the other night.

So, more later.

Grant, call me.

Go read Grant Stoddard's latest "I Did It for Science" column, in which he casts a dildo from his own cock and allows an exgirlfriend to roger him with it.

It's pretty hot, actually.

Da nuh NAH nuh, Da nuh NAH NAH NAH

The countdown to moving has begun. I am 9/10ths packed. I think I underestimated how many boxes I would have--it's looking to be more like 30 than 20. Ah well.

I am positively manic. I cannot clean the apartment for the sublettors until the boxes are out, and lemme tell you something: It is FILTHY. Historically I only clean my apartments twice: when I move in and when I move out. If a dish gets washed or the floor gets swept in between those two times, it's gravy. If I wipe dust off a surface that's NOT the TV screen with a cloth that is NOT the shirt I'm wearing, that's a major fucking triumph.

So I went out to Sunnyside to sign my lease last night and arrived at my management company's office to discover that their power had gone out. My landlord suggested that I use the fast-fading sunlight to look over my lease while he broke into the building next door, which he believed to be the culprit of the outage. Meanwhile, I sat in relative darkness, using my keychain penlight to peruse the lease, and chatted as amiably as I could with one of the neurotic realtors.

"So, ah, you're a realtor?"

"Yup. But also I'm an illustrator." He pointed to a framed drawing on his desk, right next to the unicorn pencil cup. "That's a children's book I drew."

"Really? How...neat," I replied, losing steam as I examined the picture closely. It was the "cover" for his "book," a lovely little tale about anthropomorphic pizza toppings and the pizza on which they live. One of the characters was broccoli. This would not have been *my* first- or even eighth-choice topping. "They, ah, live on a pizza?" I asked.

"Yeah."

The drawing made me nervous. It reminded me of schizophrenic art. There was nothing comforting or educational or cheerful about a story in which talking edibles live in a bubbling and hot cheese-encrusted world.

Meanwhile my landlord came back in and called the contractor for the building next door. "Yes, hi.....yeah, the power's out....ok, so you're sending over the....hmmm.....does the electrician speak English?"

The neurotic realtor put his head in his hands. "That's never a good sign."

Let's hope that wasn't an omen, shall we?

I smell a TV pilot!

Four Free Dogs, One Monkee.

They all get along great except for the monkey and the larger small dog. But I'd hate to spilt them up. Serious inquiries only.

It's a nuclear show and the stars are gone

If, unlike ME, you aren't packing up your apartment for the eighteenth night in a row, you should go to the Coral Room and see Stars, who are supposedly performing there tonite.

And I'm your host, Mary Fucking Sunshine.

Not to continue with the mordant stuff, but today is the 93rd anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire. Go read up, it's important.

Long black veil

You can debate the merits of the writing or the irreverence of the color scheme and design--secondhand suicide: an entirely true story is an amazing, heart-wrenching, engrossing read.

dook dook dook dook!

Drinky Crow Gets a Job

[this is bad]

I'm only just getting around to reading The Height of Disrespect now, and in some ways I wish I hadn't read it at all:

The most telling attitudinal change from the "movement" years is the absence of any influence of feminism and the open disdain for black women. As the authors put it, "Black females are valued by no one."... In the survey of 2,000 teens, who were contacted through 80 community-based groups in nine urban areas, the "play or get played" ethos is equally influential among males and females, along with this disrespect for black women.

When people ask, "Why publicize black kids' problems when many suburban kids behave similarly?" she tells them, "Those kids have many more resources. . . . When our kids mess up, they don't bounce back or go to Europe. . . . When they get caught up in the criminal justice system, nobody says, 'Oh, just give him probation.' These issues are going to have to be dealt with from the inside out."...And dealt with quickly. "Even if, say, just 5 percent of black American kids are represented in that study, are we willing to write off that 5 percent?"

Alright, you asked for it

Hey, while some of us packed for endless hours without any help while nursing the worst headcold of its generation, OTHER PEOPLE ran around at the protest on Saturday throwing soundbites at any Reuters journalist who would listen:

"The thing they all object to is Bush," said demonstrator Reeves [REDACTED], 30. "It doesn't make sense to bomb countries that have nothing to do with Sept. 11."

We come to take you home

You walkin' outta here breathin' is insane*

Man, am I cranky. I'm cranky in new and special ways. I mean, shit like this that would normally just irk me has me shrieking and throwing my stapler. I'm saddled with a number of ill-timed maladies (as opposed to the illnesses I plan for weeks in advance) that are making my already unmotivated self completely torpid. And Moving Day is one week away now. (You'll all be pleased to note that I've hired movers, as one of my coworkers pointed out to me that I am too old to ask my friends for moving help--which is a pisser, seeing as I managed to help, oh, 7 or 8 of my closest friends move before I aged out of that bracket.) I think that I'll return to blogging in earnest after next weekend, but in the meantime, it'll be sporadic.

Unless you all want to hear about the other night when I loudly told a friend, in a bar full of strangers, "Why don't you tell her to take that money she owes you and get an abortion--she shouldn't be breeding."

Yeah, that kinda cranky.

*I AM the muchacha mala.

Prepare to have the worst margarita of its generation

Dale Peck's doing the One Story Reading next Monday. At Arlene Grocery. The drink special? Margaritas.

That's like the trifecta of unpleasantness.

Begorrah!

I would like to note how pleased I am that I come up number ten in a Google search for Drunk Irishmen. My grandmother would be so proud.

I belittle others to compensate for my own insecurities

Something Awful weighs in on The Foundation for Awakening & Enlightenment, whose mission "is to provide useful, up-to-date, pertinent information on rediscovering and living your core non-human mystical soul, finding your own path, furthering one’s mystic and occult knowledge to aid in enlightenment and understanding of one's own path and connecting with others of similar beliefs."

In other words, metaphorical swirlies and melvins all around.

Fuck it

I'm leaving town and buying Merle Haggard's houseboat.

My, I'm large

World's Largest Collection of World's Smallest Versions of World's Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction, via Vidiot.

Queens makes, I takes

Sunday seemed as good as any to go to PS1 and see the Lee Lozano show. It was the first time I've seen her work in person, and it was an impressive study in insanity. Her larger pieces were mostly richly textured studies of tools. Her smaller pieces--cartoonish sketches, ample neurotic notebooks--were a cross between Phillip Guston and R. Crumb. There were many penis-heads and vagina dentatae and breasts with, like, eyes.

Lozano's best known for two of her last works, General Strike and Dropout Piece. In General Strike, she announced her refusal to speak to or work with anyone in the New York art world.

Perhaps she was trying to test the limits of Dialogue Piece, to ascertain whether or not it was possible to confer the value of art upon such activities without in fact engaging in any of the activities properly designated as befitting an artist? Clearly, without the institutions of art buttressing her activities Lozano fell into art-world obscurity, and this suggests that when an artist abandons the institutions of art, no matter how profound and legitimate the artist's desire to merge life and art, the result will be that the "art" part of the equation will become unrecognizable.

I think part of what is shocking about Lozano's withdrawal is the rigor with which she rejected two intimately connected systems: patriarchy and capitalism. By refusing to speak to women she exposed the systemic and ruthless division of the world into the categories of men and women. By refusing to speak to women she acknowledged the impossibility of a life lived outside of the societal confines and projections of gender. By refusing to speak to women as an artwork she also refused the demand of capitalism for the constant production of private property. That she elided the fetishized art object and women was perhaps no mistake, as both share a similar fate.

I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely, that it could get very dangerous if you had no boundaries....

I view it as a self-destructive way of dealing with a very real situation: Women didn't have any power in the art world then, so she decided to just deal with the men, who did have the power. It points up that issue. But it's masochistic also, because she couldn't form dialogues with other women and missed out on the feminist movement of the '7Os, when women in the art world did gain power by engaging and supporting each other.

Lozano's body of work is limited by the relatively short period in which she actively produced. Only since her death has the art world reinvestigated her life as an artist, and it seems, partly because she was so reclusive (and thus uncommunicative of her theories and ideas) and partly because she was so clearly a Class-A nutter, that she is regarded as a bit of an Outsider, or in the best case, a mystery. I didn't come away from the exhibit feeling as though I understood Lozano or her work any better, but I did feel intensely intrigued by it all. It's worth reading all the articles I've cited here before you go see her show, which I recommend doing if you have the opportunity.

Meanwhile, as I was meandering around the galleries, I recognized the man strolling behind me. It was John Frickin' Bartlett. Two things sprang to mind: a) I wondered what the Harvard sociology major, no stranger to dropping out himself, thought of Lozano's work; and b) My God, he really is a babe.

Anyhow, we left PS1 and wandered around my soon-to-be neighborhood, past the loft where the Talking Heads recorded Fear of Music.

We had coffee at a cafe where I found my new favorite zine: neighborhood Boy. It's published by a fourth grader and his sister who apparently live in LIC. The cover story of Issue 7, titled "neighborhood Guinea Pig Gives Birth in Store Window!", features the greatest observation ever: "It was really nasty when they came out beause they had sacks on them and the mother ate the sack and the umbilical cord and the placenta. My friend Max almost barfed and had to go home." Also in the issue: "Terminator 3 (The movie I can't see)," in which the author states "Violence in movies can give you nightmares, but kids are desperate to see violence, violence is our dream. This goes to show parents that they should let their kids watch what the want. Of course they would let you read the BOOKS because that's READING!"

Reading neighborhood Boy made me simultaneously immensely happy and completely untalented. I wish I'd thought to have a zine when I was 10.

Now I'm off to the podiatrist. Sometimes I wonder if I'm destined to become a nun--it seems like it's the only profession in a which a woman can wear sensible shoes.

The lipstick on my shirt says we're too sweet to die

Apologies for the silence. (Or, conversely, enjoy the silence while you can.) I'll be around this afternoon, after I hit up my doc for some "back pain" medication. ~wink~

I come down I come down like a monkey*

Hey, are you too broke to see the Mekons tonite? (Actually, only the Catholic Workers are more broke than I am, but follow me here.) You should come down to Hank's tonight and see The Live Ones! Starts 10-ish. I'll be there.