Hey Pretty

Folk Art For Thursday (I'm OK. You're OK.)

Ugh. Stanford.

Myself and (surely) all of you good folks use Google "products" all day, everyday, for free. It's that free-ness and ease that makes them seem unlike products, unlike the mastheads of our largest, most influential media corporation. Well, this chipper dame is the head of new products or something. And (not to be crass, but...) since she's the only hot chipmunk blonde in her ENTIRE INDUSTRY, Marissa Mayer (that's her name) has been doing a lot of public appearances for Google, becoming, you know, "the face of." Now, I don't want to be catty or undermining of young women in powerful positions. She is clearly brilliant and ambitious, but also TERRIFYING and so ICE-Y. And there's all this stuff about cupcakes, like she loves cupcakes and talks about them all of the time. I don't know the first thing about computer engineering, but I know all about this grim, moldy mass-cultural cupcake obsession (read: cupcakes, particularly those from chi-chi cupcake bakeries, are all the rage with low-class dumpster people).

Now, I went to the Morgan Library the other month. And it did not escape my notice that the place was chockablock with the stuff of late nineteenth century poor taste, in A&P parlance, de Medici-ed Out. If, a little inconsistently, the folks in Silicon Valley have been our rail titans, then Marissa Mayer's brand of poor taste is worth noting, unpacking. Read it for yourself; here is a profile from San Fransisco Magazine. They mention the price of her apartment in the first paragraph.

Misty

While doing a little bit of Brit-Brit research, reviewing the 1999 Dave LaChapelle spread from Rolling Stone (you know, the one with the phone and the bed and the tricycle and the shorts that say "baby" on the butt), I came across Miss Aguilera's cover from the same year. I was shaken, not only by the yucky, yucky line, "Guess What Christina Wants," but by the ALARMING similarity between young Christy Aguilera and young Christy Meth-Genius, our all-time favorite Intervention subject/Lucite-shoe-wearer/raver/Arizonan. Beyond that heaviness, can you handle the eau de 1999? That unbuttoned denim mini?! Lawd.

Don't Eat! Watch This Double-Burger Slideshow!

I had a whole wheat english muffin and some carrots for lunch, but I read this while I nibbled (sadly).

Disco Bloodbath: The End

I may have mispoken earlier when I said that Bebe Zahara Benet should win RuPaul's Drag Race. I was really just trying to say that she was a fierce competitor and stood a great chance at taking the whole competition. I didn't really think she was going to take it.

But as I tend to speak things into existence, last night, Bebe took the crown as the next great drag superstar, with Nina Flowers as runner-up. This upset me for a number of reasons. I think there was a certain amount of politicking (Bebe hailing from an AIDS ridden country in Africa, etc.) and perhaps a little bit of sexism (for lack of a better word) towards Nina's more androgynous, sometimes even masculine, interpretation of drag. Deep down, I really felt Nina was going to win. She deserved it, if only by a slight margin.

While both are fierce, and amazing performers, and brilliant always-on-point illusionists, Bebe maintained this (yawn) delusion that she had to do everything with "dig-ni-tee" and "ree-spekt," which is all well and good until you remember you're a 6 foot 3" man in a leopard body suit and a ginormous wig. Home girl got all Lucille Ball "waaah" when they dumped water on her, made her kick box, and even when she had to compete in a "vogue off." Christ woman, this isn't the search for the next drag amabassador to the UN.

Nina Flowers, however, worked every challenge they gave her. Dunk a bucket of water on the bitch, make her fight one-on-one with a Krav Maga expert, it don't matter, loca! Bend her, break her, anyway you need her, Nina handled everything with charisma and humor (which I guess I find more admirable than dignity and respect). At the end of the day, she would have been a much more fun MC for the Absolut "Real Fruit" Tour this summer (the main prize in the competition).

Ironically, I think RuPaul failed, as Tyra does (every. single. time.), but in the exact opposite way. While Tyra claims to be searching for high-fashion, she always chooses someone with (debatable) "personality" and approachability (read: the pretty girl from high school, never known for much else). RuPaul wanted an entertainer, approachable and personable, and instead chose a high-fashion Cameroooooon Barbie.

Below are two performances from the ladies in question. Both are flawless and entertaining, but ask yourself which one is more engaging and crowd-working at the end of the day.

Aural Triptych For Monday Night: A Dream of Amy Winehouse's Efforts in St. Lucia

Nobody Understands!

The putzes at The Sun are talking about how the putzes at Island Records are displeased with Amy Winehouse's progress on her third album. Husband in the chokey, junk and crack habit spiraling out of control in chilly Camden, Amy took a page from the A&P handbook and jetted to St. Lucia for a few months to record some I-LAMB musics (as if traipsing about in ballet slippers weren't sign enough that she's a big fan of ours). El man dislikes the "sharp turn" toward "reggae" from "vintage soul," and the dark content of the tunes, mostly about her dopesick codependent marriage. Are they nuts?! I can't look at the same bouffant and the same costume and listen to the same songs again. Back to Black sold 11 million copies. It was god damn ev-er-y-where and we loved it but that was then and this is now and all I want is an Amy Winehouse World Music record about suicide pacts and free-basing! Plus, Petrova got a miraculous listen a few months ago and said the stuff she recorded en Caribe is brilliant and just-right-for-now. Island records is a mess in need of CONSULTANCY. Why do incompetent peoples run things? Why don't I make millions of dollars?

Best (and Worst) Thing (Going for This Week)

This one's for Pillow and RR--loves.

Best (and Worst) Thing (Going for Monday)

Memphis, Tenn-a-key was the featured destination on last night's episode of Man v. Food, that show on the Travel Channel about a winsome, roadtripping bulimic dude. They stopped at Gus's (saintly, genius, nothing-compares fried chicken), The Rendezvous (famous and mediocre BBQ), The Arcade (old and quaint spot with awful food, service and prices), and The Kooky Canuck (originally, the Big Foot Lodge), the scene of his big binge, the central premise. This restaurant specializes in a cartoonish 7 lbs. "contest" burger, cookies the circumference and depth of skillets, and 34 oz. cocktails (for $9.99!!). It is foul and dangerous and terrible, a den of shame with a totally inexplicable Pacific Northwest theme. And I have become OBSESSED with their website. Pages and pages of snaps. The most miserable people and that damn burger.

Happy, Possibly Dirty, Thoughts For Sunday

Hearting Junkies

There's a photocopy of a poem on the wall of my bathroom, eye-level, across from the toilet—
John Wieners' "Act #2, For Marlene Dietrich"—

I took love home with me,
we fixed in the night and
sank into a stinging flash.

1/4 grain of love
we had,
2 men on a cot, a silk
cover and a green cloth
over the lamp.
The music was just right.
I blew him like a symphony,
it floated and
he took me
down the street and
left me here.
3 AM. No sign.

only a moving van
up Van Ness Avenue.

Foster's was never like this.

I'll walk home, up the
same hills we
came down.
He'll never come back,
there'll be no horse
tomorrow nor pot
tonight to smoke till dawn.

He's gone and taken
my morphine with him
Oh Johnny. Women in
the night moan yr. name.

I first read it from my father's old (but pristine) student copy of Ace of Pentacles. He had written about these beat (and post-beat?) guys as a graduate student in the middle sixties, which was pretty revolutionary and prescient, because the work was quite recent then (I believe the date of "Act #2" is 1959), and, through music and youth culture, the junky, lonely, discreet and isolated in the poetic world of the 50s, was about to become the smashingest of icons. Incidentally, Papa Able would become a music writer, a poetic confidant of icon-junky Lou Reed, usually so gruff and snarly with journalists (what can I say?--we Ables have a way about us...). So, I inherited this text along with some knowledge of the musics that followed suit from Dad-sums. But it was personal experience that brought me to love those lines--"1/4 grain of love" and "Oh Johnny. Women in the night moan yr. name."

Last year, Pillow saw a high school boy of mine, a lanky, sweet awkward kid who had been in a noisy, awfulish band and loved me way too much for his own good (at seventeen, I swooned over guys that ranged from indifferent to cruel, not ones who sniveled at my doorstep). She said he was badly off, looked pretty strung out, and I know he's friends with a bunch of junkies and I know that Memphis can be an ugly, dead end town and when I heard this affirmation that he was a junky I was stricken and I figured it was hopeless because he never had anyone in his corner except for useless wastrels (and junkies).

Seven years ago, before we'd even been introduced (though I guess it didn't really work that way then), he made me a mixed tape wrapped in a 50 Cent bumper sticker and gave it to a friend to give to me. The first track was "Blank Generation" (what a tale of 2002!). I forget what the others were, because, as I said, the boy didn't stand a chance with me (I probably neglected to listen to the whole thing). It's not that I wasn't in love with him--I remember exactly what I wore the first time I went to see his band play. To be honest, I still love him. I love him as a ghost (a thing I have a real talent for). I think about the song. I think about the length of him, his dire thinness, his tight, dusty pants, his mangled, paper t-shirts, his unwashed hair and loafing stoner friends and the brooding, stiff way he put his hands in his pockets and the chipping concrete of his miserable front porch and how he never had anything to say to me. I think that IN EVERY WAY, he was beholden to past icons of junk, to the East Village Richard Hell of his song choice or Lou or Iggy Pop or Kurt Cobain (or...droves and droves of others). When he bought these certain clothes and records, did he imagine that he was bound for the source experience, the "good sick." Probably not. Maybe one led to the other (your taste in clothes and music really is that powerful), but no one makes any official decisions about these things before they happen like "stinging flashes."

A few years later, I had been dating an addict. It was shortly after we broke up, back home from a long and heavy sort of adventure, that I read "Act #2." He, that troubled (but kind), much-too-old-for-me City ex-love, was "Johnny." But then there were others. Others with whom love was conflated/afflicted with drugs and drink. Others who were cold, who left me "here. 3 AM. No sign," who gave affection fractionally. And myself, who romanced (romanticized) these bastards, sometimes was the bastard, leaving (with the morphine). Lately, this bit, myself in the poem, rather than a stream of boys and men remembered, has seemed more meet. This spectre of junk (as well as liquor and cocaine lushness), indivisible from our notion of 'cool,' has had a deterministic grip on me for some time. These are powerful aesthetics. They led me to that high school kid before the drugs took hold, and in subsequent years they married the drugs, the substance and the style were as one. The drugs and the places one chose to be and a superficial means and method of attraction to people encouraged sloth, carelessness, UNhealth, self-harm, lowness, apathy and histrionics.

I've been drifting, roaming, over the territories of my bad choices and, essentially, the way Rock n' Roll and New York (and Berlin and London) looks (looked). And I've neglected to mention that I never did junk myself. It was my one absolute, and we used to joke about it, me and Pillow and Pet and RR, that it would be the next step, the FINAL SOLUTION [read: with bad actor's German accent]. My incomparable mother, like a Cassandra from the front of those crashing, naive sixties, warned me to never get mixed up with two things: cults and heroin. They were the living deaths of her generation. And I saw it around me all of the time, and it was scary and dangerous and very, very cool. And I was never quite cool enough for it, cool enough to graduate from the stupid, chattering cokehead shallows. And thank goodness I guess, one so naturally prone to pensive and agoraphobic spells as I, may never have recovered once I'd begun. But the not doing it, couldn't shake the loving how it looked and the living on its fringes and the poem that was so evocative.

I could ramble on, but I'll probably just keep repeating myself.

(Oh—but here's a thing of note, a sort of hilarious missive from 1986, a year of much crystal-toting recovery.)

"I bought some dry shampoo and a caftan from Forever 21 today and it's changed my whole outlook."

I haven't washed my hair in four days, and the AUTHORITIES approve.

Verses

Anyone who is too young or too "cool" to appreciate this needs to sit back and have a serious listen:

"River of Dreams"
Billy Joel

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it's too hard to cross

And even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening
And I stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find what I've been looking for

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the valley of fear
To a river so deep
I've been searching for something
Taken out of my soul
Something I would never lose
Something somebody stole

I don't know why I go walking at night
But now I'm tired and I don't want to walk anymore
I hope it doesn't take the rest of my life
Until I find what it is that I've been looking for

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To the river so deep
I know I'm searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind
In the middle of the night

I'm not sure about a life after this
God knows I've never been a spiritual man
Baptized by the fire
I wade into the river
That is running to the promised land
In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the desert of truth
To the river so deep
We all end in the ocean
We all start in the streams
We're all carried along
By the river of dreams