The Magpie in the Willow

We've enjoyed having Willow drop in over the past couple of months with her supportive comments.

Now she has come up with a great idea -- a virtual writing group through her Magpie Tales. Ours will appear on schedule Tuesday, February 16, and we hope to keep up with the weekly challenge. Write a fictional post about an object in your possession or do the same with one of Willow's offerings. A great idea, and I look forward to the others' offerings come Tuesday.

Drunk Deaths Anniversaries

Just in case you think we have been implying that Chicago is the only place where great artists fall on drunken ruin, I point to this great post about the Centennial of the death of O. Henry. As our beloved Bowery Boys point out "He may even been drunk here" in the above image.

Some Things Manage to Return

Much to my surprise, over the weekend I heard from the creators of the literary blog Wood Coin who were making contact with authors who had appeared in the literary magazine of the 1970s to 1980s, CENTER. It was especially surprising to hear from or about something where I was published three and a half decades ago when I was a teen. The piece was, if memory serves me well, called "A Spin Around Town" and was the first piece of fiction I had published and for which I received payment. Ten dollars, again if memory serves me well.

CENTER was published by Carol Berge, whom I think I heard speak on campus and gave great praise to me at the time as a "promising, emerging voice from the prairie." Adding to the headiness of being published was hearing complimentary letters unexpected places that included Lucerne and Tierra de Fuego. I was said to learn that Carol died in 2006 but pleased to find the above linked site to her life and work.

When I spoke over the phone to Rich Bachelor while in Portland last fall, he mentioned that his blogging was preceded by publishing 'zenes -- real words on real paper. Sometimes I regret the passage of such publications and literary magazines and mix tapes. And then I will think that I will abandon the blogging and return to real writing again. In the meantime, I'll check out more of Wood Coin and try to track down that first published piece that I know is somewhere in my troves of ancient script.

Ascots 101

Mayor Newsom often drops by the Junk Plex for Sunday brunch and recently asked me to help raise awareness of appropriate use and tying of the ascot. He was so impressed that I now conduct a course every other Tuesday afternoon at the Mission Branch Library to help keep our youth looking dapper.

Thanks to Huntington Sharp III, who knows a thing or two about ascots, smoking jackets and gay cats, a recent "story" I wrote about ascot tomfoolery is featured in the current e-newsletter of Redroom. And if you have not checked out my Redroom page, head over here.

Thanks, Mr. Sharp.

Sweet 16 - Let There Be Jewels!

This afternoon I went to the 84th birthday for George Birimisa who leads the intergenerational writing group I've been a member of for nearly nine years. George is a pioneering gay playwright and coeditor of the book Return to the Caffe Cino, an anthology and memoir of the theater where he and other ground breaking writers launched their works in the 1960s.

Jewelry seemed to be in abundance as gifts at this year's event, and, as you can tell, George shares my fondness for eccentric headgear, though he tends to favor the brimless crowns of a heretical sodomite priest as opposed to my fedoras, porkpies and flat caps. Obviously it was a room filled with a galaxy of blog stars, including Bryce Digdug (center) and Jim (right) of The Blue Elephant. Before the party, I helped Jim load some of his videos of recent peace and reproductive rights rallies. Jim, some may recall, had a popular video here when he house/cat sat while I was in Catalonia.

Happy Sweet 16 George!

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.

Don't Mutilate My Mink

Tonight at dinner with my writing group at the Baghdad Café (which we sometimes dub the Algonquin West), I was interested to learn the varying level of awareness (in part due to Saturday’s post here) about Neil Hannon and the Divine Comedy. Some had gone so far as to explore his YouTube videos, such as the stunning "Sunrise", the finale of his Fin de Siecle, the sort of song U2 might cut if they were…oh, I’ll hold off on my U2 barbs for now.

Based on the few comments and many more emails I’ve received as a result of that post, it seems that all my female friends are rushing and gushing to buy CDs and my gay male friends think I’ve lost my sanity. They are even more brutal when I pull out my (I have to admit completist) Mark Eitzel/American Music Club. Sorry, Kylie, Madonna and Whitney and their ilk just don’t sing to my heart or pocket book.

Now, don’t think I don’t have my female musical muses that range from Vashti Bunyan, Nina Simone, Francoise Hardy, Nico and, on the right day, Ute Lemper. The recent increased interest in Divine Comedy made me pull out her release Punishing Kiss which was sort of a cross over disc, and I saw her at Davies Hall during that tour. Half the crowd walked out around the time her piercing voice sand Nick Cave’s "Little Water Song," a really brilliant murder ballad sung from the perspective of a woman that was being drowned by her lover. I was going through a particularly nasty break up then, and it spoke to me a little to closely – the sentiment was that “you may be killing me, but you’ll never be able to be inside my head or soul.” Listening to Punishing Kiss 3/4ths of a decade later, it sounds comfortably distant and 50% brilliant and 50% goofy and click ahead to the next track. Ute could potentially be in my top 10 list because she is willing to belt out so harshly, almost a Weimar Joplin at times, but then she will go into these over affected, Al Jarreau on crack mannerisms. But she can be hilarious at times, and I will never forget her self-introduction of “I come from Berlin, that little scar of a city on the arse of Europe.” And revisiting Scott Walker's epic 11 minute "Scope J" in a post-9/11, post-Tilt world gives it much greater resonance.

Thinking of women that I’d add to that list, I was reminded of Cristina Monet or just Cristina who was the grande dame of No Wave and the Norma Shearer of Ze Records back in the early 1980s. Well, I’ll be darned, she is the first beloved artist that actually stumped YouTube. I have her two complete LPs from Cristina (1980) and Sleep It Off (1984) that opened with the killer track "Don't Mutilate My Mink", and I think her version of "Ballad of Immoral Earning" is my all time favorite. Those tunes, especially on the latter LP, are very much where I was at that time -- all downtown angst channeling Weimar energy. She had one of the best Christmas tunes of all time, "Things Fall Apart" as well as a mean, snarling cover of "Is That All There Is?" that pre-dated P.J. Harvey's version by a decade or so. But it does not seem that there will be a behind the music until I become CEO of VH1. At least there is a fansite out there for Cristina. If you really love me, I'll burn you a CD of my favorite of her tracks

In the meantime, I am really wanting to take a blogger/youtube, et. al. holiday this Memorial Weekend. Time for Proust, friends, haute Japanese cuisine, gardening and exercise. Oh, and brushing up the Castilian and Catalan.

That Winter

(As many of you know, I've been in my intergenerational writing group, a primarily LGBT -- actually just plain old G -- though recently being about 20% straight. I've also just started a 9-week writing group with author/poet Louise Nayer. Both have been useful, and I've gotten back on the wagon of creating something other than the vlog/blog scratches and scribbles. To merge those two worlds, I've sharing the prose poem below that has received a decidedly mixed response. I'd appreciate feedback.)

The horrible dream never came true.

So you tell yourself that you never saw it – our entire neighborhood in flames, all the children trapped inside.

Tiny fingers reaching through broken glass and iron bars hot as a sizzling grill.

No water left on earth to fight the flames, only blood and Coca-cola sputtering from the corner hydrant.

Even the ghosts had abandoned us.

You told me that the world had become too big and young for you to put up a fight anymore. You preferred to live in a secret kingdom under a red toad stool. Everything was so easy to control down there away from the sun. I enjoyed drinking from tiny tea cups with you until I realized I could do the same on my own and not hear you reading your list of regrets. I still smell the fungus left from that winter we spent down there.

Do you still tell the story of dressing up like your dead brother to revive your mother’s imagination? Then she ran away with your brother and left you with her pearls to contemplate.

Some nights I see my ancestors pushing their rag carts through the streets of Vienna, dead men’s clothes picked off that layer that separated them from the bones. They could see glistening Aryan hair in the windows of the city’s grand homes, marble blue eyes staring out at them and believing the gas lamp glow was enough to warm the brown eyed baby with matted hair in the rag cart.

I almost see them tonight as I look out from this restaurant, distracted at times by the worrisome, hacking cough of the waitress, her hunched shoulders appearing to carry the meal she wishes she could serve. I sense fire and tiny hands reaching from her throat, wanting to place her palm on my forehead, wanting to quiet the dream.

Maybe it’s there -- two walls of fire merging, and the rains return.