June 2013
2 posts
March 2013
3 posts
January 2013
1 post
December 2012
0 posts
Heartbeat
Ann Magnuson
But what did Jobriath sound like? Mick Jagger doing Ethel Merman doing Axl Rose doing Elton John doing David Bowie doing Mick Ronson producing Chopin’s next album if Chopin was a glam-rock fairy alive in 1973.
November 2012
3 posts
“I was temping at the New York Public Library, the big one, with the lions out front; I was assisting a research librarian named Arnold Hathaway in the Rare Literary Manuscripts collection. I had to wear white gloves to work in Arnold’s department, naturally, since on a daily basis I helped Arnold lift and display and file rare papers and manuscripts of long-dead but very famous authors whose work had suddenly been chosen to come out of Archives for an advertised public viewing. That was Arnold’s chief responsibility at the library, to curate the new exhibitions, which changed about every six weeks or so. I was extremely intrigued to have a job that involved the mandated use of a fashion accessory—I thought of the gloves as a costume piece that helped me get into character as a temp who worked in the Rare Literary Manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library—and I couldn’t help that the gloves, which were soft and slightly shabby in a vintage way, with a dainty mother-of-pearl-button at each wrist, made me feel like a person from a dressier, more formal and romantic time; truth to tell, not as much Mr. Darcy or Algernon, as I might have expected, but more like the pencil-skirted, red-lipped models out of the pages of a 1959 Harper’s Bazaar. Also the gloves made me think of those old movies set in New York of the fifties and early sixties, where young starlets like Hope Lange and Barbara Parkins were seen running around clean, gleaming midtown Manhattan on glamorous lunch hours from their office jobs, wearing smart suits, pillbox hats, spike-heeled pumps and, yes, white gloves, while gloriously made up in matte red lipstick and penciled-on eyebrows, and just generally popping off the screen in super-saturated Technicolor.”
—Here I was content to believe I would have to thumb through my well-worn copy of The Music of Your Life whenever I wanted a hit of Rowell fiction, resigned to the idea that he’d published that single volume of stories and then gone silent. But behold, a new selection, excerpted from a forthcoming novel no less, People Come and Go So Quickly Here. That’s something.
October 2012
1 post
August 2012
5 posts
Someone Like the Edge of Firework
Alan Cumming
The Met began their Summer HD festival this fine evening with a screening of The Enchanted Island, a Baroque mash-up conceived by Peter Gelb (as Anthony Tommasini notes) but concocted by Jeremy Sams, who wrote the English-language libretto. And oh, the libretto, she is a fresh steamy mess (sorry!) that borrows plot elements and characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Too on the nose at times, a smidge corny at others, and, yeah, “chatty.” But luckily that mostly matters not! You are forgiven for playing Dr. Frankenstein, when assembling your monster from some exquisitely lovely musical corpses. Despite some production missteps (Caliban is costumed like some sort of pro-wrestler?) and a bulky run-time, there was more to enjoy sitting out on the plaza tonight than to pick at, especially the performances by Joyce DiDonato as Sycorax and Danielle de Niese’s Ariel. Also, on the plaza watching the screen, you can totally stretch and move around and change seats and even slink off to the street for a smoke break when the deployment of arias in the first act becomes unwieldy, and which are actions frowned upon in the hallowed halls of the opera house.
But on the subject of mash-ups, I’m grappling with my rationale for obsessively listening to Alan Cumming’s “Someone Like the Edge of Firework.” I am not insincere when I say I’m glad he was the one to string together Adele, Gaga, and Katy Perry into a Top 40 assemblage that is not unlike the Voltron of earworms (from the German Ohrwurm, apparently? You learn something new every day on the internet!). Is it the hint of his Scottish burr or his restrained delivery that keeps the whole enterprise from going pear-shaped? Unclear. As with Enchanted Island, ambition and execution are the metrics on which to judge (and where, if at all, the joke is situated).Thankfully he didn’t try to shoehorn one more element, like “We Found Love,” into the mix. That would be the aural equivalent of topping your hot fudge sundae with a big blue ball of cotton candy.
July 2012
4 posts
I don’t agree with you that Jackson [Pollock] was painting atomic fission; I believe he was painting the labyrinthine circuitry of the human mind. And, of course, Jackson was Sebastian, wasn’t he? He was not only the great martyr of modern art; he was that martyr. Sebastian! To give the martyr who was, it has been said, before his conversion the beloved of the emperor Heliogabalus, a hard on-on in Paradise! Profoundly gay. Meanwhile, is there any such thing as a form of sexual activity that doesn’t either lead to death directly, or lead to contemplation of it in some way? It’s as if they were right after all, that playing with yourself will drive you crazy. And another thing hit me with stunning force that afternoon about Sebastian and faggots. Do you know why Saint Sebastian was so popular in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance? He was the protector against the bubonic plague—the Black Death! Does that not add a new and utterly eerie dimension to the configuration? Anyway, I got the poster of him and brought it home. I think it belongs in the Gay Pride Parade on a banner next to Judy. In the Salute, Sebastian stands next to Saint Rocco; I think he makes more sense standing next to Judy, replacing Punch. You carry Judy and I’ll carry Sebastian. You sing ‘The Man That Got Away’ and I’ll sing ‘Full Moon and Empty Arms.’
Sex and death, dear, sex and death—you can’t get away from their conjunction. As somebody said, Age comes, the body withers: mere anarchy is loosed upon the tits and ass—and that always reminds me somehow of the single flower growing out of the girl’s asshole in The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado.
—Odette O’Doyle, from James McCourt’s Time Remaining.
[N.B.: If anyone were to record an audio book of TR, it would need to be Justin V. Bond.]
Blondie vs Philip Glass - 'Heart of Glass' - @daftbeatles MASHUP
In the wake of a long, rather sweaty weekend that managed to include both #LadyBookClubbing and #MeditationClass along with more spontaneous activities, I find myself contemplating the age old summer question: Was wird aus einem Wochenende Schlafzimmer Freund werden*? Whatever the answer, I’m currently living for this mash-up of Blondie and Philip Glass.
June 2012
2 posts
Oh the peaks and valleys of experience between a Friday afternoon and a Sunday night! But! I wanted to mention, since it is worth maybe doing so, that author and poet Wayne Koestenbaum was at the MoMA this past Friday afternoon for their Lunch Poems series, to talk about Frank O’Hara.
Impish and engaging, dressed in a pair of white jeans, a pink shirt, and blue and white blazer that was very Hamptons A-Gay meets Fred Schneider (but mostly in a good way, like, academic-rock star summer chic?), he read his way through selections of the distinguished author’s poems which he interspersed with assignments, prompts for the inclined assembled to write their own Lunch Poems, and also pithy highbrow observations interjected as winningly as cocktail party chatter, including a bit about the poet and his connection to his time and his work’s timeliness—I believe the phrase was “the bottled air of the now” but I could have mis-heard—and also about that one dust jacket photo that is dreamy to the utmost.
Koestenbaum read “Naphtha,” pointing to the line towards the end of the following verse as an indicator of O’Hara’s cheeky self-assessment:
how are you feeling in ancient September
I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway
how can you
you were made in the image of god
I was not
I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver
“I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver.” Indeed. I don’t remember being struck by it when I first read Lunch Poems, I must’ve glossed it, but now I can’t shake it.
Of course I am always a sucker for the end of “Steps” which remains forever perfect:
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
Isn’t it just? Even if it is not your actuality now maybe it has been or will be? Still isn’t it just? I’ve often believed so.
April 2012
4 posts
It’s not that I’m wrong, you’re just not asking the right question.
March 2012
1 post
February 2012
1 post
January 2012
2 posts
My sister has a very accurate, if often baffling, memory. She emailed me today this link, saying “I remember vividly sitting on the subway with you as you read this, back in the balmy summer of 2001.” It is true, it was balmy, and we were taking the train to Coney Island. Though why I was reading the Daily News is a question lost to time.
Regardless, In the Annals of Headline Poetry, “Arm Lost In Farm Horror” really is evocative, no? I guess that would stick with you.
December 2011
2 posts
There is no way to not sound braggy about this but that short piece that ran on Metazen has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and I’m a bit stunned and humbled (stumbled?) so there you go.
November 2011
2 posts
October 2011
7 posts
September 2011
6 posts
August 2011
3 posts
Phantom Friend Syndrome
Sometime during college we diagnosed a condition we named Phantom Friend Syndrome. It is (likely) relevant to mention this was first experienced when some permutation of our extended clique was on psychedelics. It was the panicky moment of being less a thing, like in the way one might—being high—constantly check one’s pockets for a set of house keys, or a wallet, or whatever. (Tickets! Money! Passport!) Where are these grounding items, that connect with a reality that is currently in a ridiculous state of trippy flux?
Phantom Friend Syndrome (PFS) would strike, and we’d do a head count, but there was still, despite solid numerical proof, a feeling that someone was…gone. Someone who we thought was there before, or should be now? Some key ingredient missing from the mix, like tasting a recipe constructed from memory and finding it lacking, but unable to name the lost ingredient. The supposed phantom friend could never be correctly identified.
The odd thing is that it still occurs, sometimes but to a lesser degree, when the right combination of us get together, like isn’t so and so here to…oh I guess not?
Which is nice, in a way, to think that even if you cannot be present (like at an upcoming wedding, say, two of which I will be missing this fall) you might be the phantom friend, your presence felt even in your physical absence. Even if you cannot be named outright, there is a psychic friendship residue clinging to the proceedings.
