“O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear
Culturewatch
Men and Women
“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”
..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?
“Old Violin” & Hate Songs
Anger is an energy. Per Johnny Rotten and Richard Meltzer, though I couldn’t recall where/when Meltzer mused on animus in rock ‘n’ roll attitude so I asked him for a steer…
I’m sure—I know—I’ve said it…and things much like it…in lots of places over the years, but I couldn’t give you a GPS on it…it’s just in multiple creases and cracks in the rock-roll road.
I’m sure I’ve said, specifically, that SECOND-PERSON HOSTILITY is an omnipresent aspect of rock all the way back to its Delta Blues origins, much deeper than anything as benign as “attitude”: I dislike, detest, abhor YOU. Add gender hostility to the package (usually, but not always, as “misogyny”) and you got one throbbing heap of reliably functional HATESTUFF.
Anger isn’t quite the same…no…but…well…good luck in your search.
Willie Pep: Knockaround Guy As Boxing Genius
Willie Pep got locked up a lot, mostly for gambling in the streets and driving too fast, which did nothing to dim the luster of his legendary boxing career. He was the people’s champ, and the people, too, gambled and went over the speed limit and got locked up.
Leave Me Alone
Pictures
..A series of drawings in a sketchbook. In the various pictures, Leila is drawn in blues and purples, while the girl she loves is drawn, usually, but not always, in reds and pinks. Sometimes the girl she loves looks a lot like Leila, but her (Leila’s) face is more angular, she’s a little taller, she’s got a femme fatale look to her while the girl she loves is more conventionally pretty, Leila has a heart tattoo on her right thigh while the girl she loves has a butterfly tattoo in the same place, Leila has big tits and the girl she loves has small tits, or medium-sized tits, usually they are both wearing a slutty little dress, both girls are haunted but Leila is undeniably more so. In the first few pictures, Leila is walking alone on the beach, smoking. In both pictures she’s smoking, actually, and in one she also holds a gun. Like some kind of femme Mersault, a thotty existentialist. She stares out at the horizon, and yet her gaze is rapt, as if she’s staring at nothing, or into the abyss. In these pictures, she is heartbreakingly alone, as if she’s arrived at the end of the world, like the girl in La Jetée.
Wound Up Wrong
“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)
Should I keep reading “Enlightenment Now”?
Should I be good? My therapist insists I could.
Simply read, NOT “read into,” Enlightenment Now.
Poem with Snow White, Don Lemon, and Madonna’s Face
Even a mirror
can adopt the Male Gaze.
Berlin
…Now, literally all I want is to be hot and famous. I want power. Not power over people, but the power to act, to provoke desire that expands my capacity to live. This is not the lesson I’m supposed to learn, but I’ve always learned everything, including my lessons, a little askew. If someone were to say, what has living your life like this gotten you so far?, haven’t you always been like this, even before your transition, in one way or another?, I could only say that it’s led me to dark and beautiful places. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me on a spiritual level: for instance, don’t I need a little Hierophant in my life, an internal structure, a system even? But I’ve never been able to fit myself into a structure, a system. Maybe that’s the Capricorn in me. I don’t care about astrology, but I like any spiritual idea in which the universe is speaking about me, or in which I am speaking the universe.
There were things that happened
Jackie Curtis
In 1970, my apartment, four rooms on the 6th floor of a building on 12th Street and Avenue B overlooking a fried chicken joint everyone called Nodders, because junkies, whose habits made them crave sugar and salt, would hang out there during the day, nodding out over paper plates of fried chicken and cups of Coke. The place didn’t have a bathroom because the owner, an old Greek guy who wore a white shirt and a white apron and a chef’s toque, got tired of dragging overdose cases out of the single stall and calling the cops. He didn’t get rid of the nodders, however. They made up more than half his business.
I furnished the place completely off the street.
Standards (& Stadiums)
Stanley Corngold’s evocation of his first time in Yankee Stadium reminded your editor of a Q&A with another Brooklyn boy (and friend of First). When the late Jules Chametzky was in hospice last year his son, Rob, asked him if he’d ever seen Willie Mays play when Mays was in the minor leagues. Rob recalled their exchange at his father’s Memorial…
Chasing Kareem…Becoming Kareem
Thelonious Monk with 18-year-old Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the kitchen of the Village Vanguard, New York City, March 1966. Photo by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
Happy Valentine’s Day
[an excerpt from something new]
.. Yesterday, before heading over to Amal’s to get tattooed, I sent an email to Heidi that contained an email address, a password, and the contact info of three people: Benj (who’s been my editor at First of the Month since I started out as a writer), Mike, and Rebecca. I don’t mean to be morbid, I said, but I want you to have access to the account. It’s where I’m going to be sending my unpublished writing, the manuscript I’m working on, whatever I don’t release immediately into the world. If something happens to me, I want you to share the account details with these three people.
..It was one of those days where death seemed right around the corner, felt as certain as the ineluctable arrival of a new season (a secret winter within the heart of my summer), where everything felt like a prefiguration of death, a native language spoken by death, a whisper from somewhere else: from the void? Who the fuck knows?
This Met is Mine
Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery became a haven for Black Atlantic artists in the 70s and 80s. A current exhibit at MOMA chronicles work first shown at JAM and includes art by Lorraine O’Grady. The author of the following post was born long after JAM’s moment. He encountered O’Grady’s work on the campus of the University of Chicago. It launched him on a trip that took him back to the playful start of his own art-life…
I came across one of the sixteen diptychs that make up Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album—(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley—in the the Booth collection.
