Magazine Necrophilia and Booze

Bryce Digdug and JunkThief recreate Marlene and JFK

at Caeser's Palace's 1960 New Year's bash

• "John Varley once said the penis is obsolete. He was half right. It would be more accurate to say genitals are obsolete."

Though I'm not sure I agree with that, certainly not the first sentence, it's a provocative opening line from Other magazine's current issue with the theme "Bad Gender" that was the focus of my Saturday night. Late this afternoon I phoned up the ever "at the meat of it" Bryce Digdug , the genius behind JudyMeat, and invited myself to join him and a friend at Writers with Drinks at the Make Out Room, sometimes called a part of the "apex of the Bermuda Triangle of Mission District Night Life " (with the Latin America Club and Doc's Clock completing the two other points of the pyramid of pleasure).

The event served as a fund raiser for Other magazine that bills itself as a chronicle of pop culture and politics for the new outcast. I'm not sure if we shorty chasers qualify as part of that new circle of marginalization, but I think we should form some 12-step program for all of us skyscraper dudes to kick our low to the ground obsession -- Rid-a-Runt or something of the sort. Bryce had raved about this event from a past appearance, and we got there early enough to nab a front row seat as evidenced by the shot above where we felt like Marlene and JFK having prime rib dinner and catching the Rat Pack for $5 at Caesar's Palace to herald the new year of 1961. The night could not have been better with an incredibly diverse menu of published writers that ranged from a street-wise Bronx girl to a poet to a girl recounting her sister's college years' struggle to distinguish the line between love and sex.

The two high points though were computer/sex trade geek Kyle Machulis and Clifford Chase who read a passage from his book Winkie about a male teddy bear arrested for terrorism that manages to give birth along the way. It was a mixture of Kafka, The Lonely Doll and CNN headline news all along the way. Winkie was grotesque, bizarre and deeply moving all at the same time. It didn't hurt that Chase and Machulis were both cute as buttons to boot. But above all, it was a thrill to be introduced to the brilliant and bizarre emcee Charlie Anders who opened with a disco security alert monologue and managed to weave in tales of the reality show Who Will Be America's Next Zen Master? among other little gems. You sort of had to be there to get all of it, but her website gives you a sense of what was there. Since I don't want to lose a front row seat for July 's show I hesitate to promote the event too much, but it will focus on "magazine necrophilia" by celebrating magazines of yore that have since bit the dust. Much as I love the blogasphere, I can think of a number of long dead 'zines that I miss and look forward to being there after Independence Day. Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone headlines that show. Just after my visit to New York was ready to have me write off this burg as a cultural backwater, I was thrilled to have such a jewel in my own neighborhood.