Drew Cushing

2011-01-01T10:55:00.001-08:00

Setting a new site for an old or rather long on going project called Vassar Boy. Look for more details to come. But a quick teaser. A novel about Vassar College in the mid 1980s with my particular version of reality.

2010-12-28T13:53:00.000-08:00

Another year ending. A walk through the snow to the lake and around in my new snow boots. Nice to know even at 40 below my feet will be warm. A quiet frenzy of days without work and tasks to do.
Trying to find my creative space after a year of job madness taking all of my time and energy.

Nailed a few barn boards back on the gray barn. Maybe get another year out before residing. I miss the warm weather when I can beat away the day murdering vines or clearing brush. Shoveling snow somehow does not quite do the same. Though plenty to shovel.

2010-11-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

January 15th 2008

Fabulous foggy morning. An elegant skateboarder slaloming down McAllister into the mist. An almost invisible city hidden below Nob Hill. A brisk and cold morning walk imagining more than a century ago when my walk from Alamo Square over Nob Hill to the Tully's at California and Davis would have been an adventure.

2010-11-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

Colony Room Distilled - The Beginning of the end for the beloved New Langton 10-28-08

The week before Emily's reading, she and I attended the Colony Room to scope out the scene. After a delicious dinner of Sushi and something not quite yet tofu at a delightful hole in the wall Sushi place in the Castro we slid down 18th to Folsom and other to New Langton. Baffled at first by the space (I thought we were in the same New Langton I knew but that it had received some kind of extraordinary renovation stripping out the bare fittings it had had) until the director explained it was new and the old space was adjacent and accessed through a barely finished hole in the wall I was none the less enchanted by the corrugated walls and vertigo inducing ceiling.

Despite the huge volume of space, the scene felt warm and intimate. A trick of the red glowing light perhaps but a welcome feeling none the less.

On the back wall a video projection, universally ignored. Scattered through the room, a spare crowd. On the left a bar light by hanging barrels turned lamps (my mother with her passion for electrifying everything would appreciate the work) on the right the Alice in Wonderland passage to Langton past, behind a red Toyota pick up truck with a white camper roof housing a portable still, the source of that evening's special cocktail. A kind of anti-moonshine (or anti-freeze), it was Makers Mark bourbon run through the still until it lost all color but retained that sickly sweet bourbon flavor. Vaguely reminiscent of holiday sweet, it would turn out to be a drink that stayed with me well into the next day.

More social than performative, the evening turned into an unexpected delight. Perhaps it was the smallness of the group or the moonshine but somehow the we're all in this together feeling led to an easing of some of the usual art/social anxiety and awkwardness. After admiring her from afar I had a wonderful chat with Ann Colvin..

2010-10-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

Great weekend. Friday night Yoga. Saturday Kevin Killian's reading at Margaret Tedesco's (read all about it on Dodie Bellamy's blog here: http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/2010/10/lost-and-found.html?spref=fb).

More Yoga this morning (my body almost feels human again after weeks of endless days no Yoga). A drizzly Divis Farmers market (nicely free of dogs and strollers). A Cafe Fore afternoon. A meander through Cookin' (Judith in rare form but stock a bit spare). A stop at the cheese shop and a visit to Parish Trust who've expanded back and added eyeglasses...

No sign of anything at the new Bi Rite location next store...Hope something soon though the perfectly preserved relic there now is a nice tease peaking through the windows.

2010-10-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

Check out Howard Junker's post from Litquake. One correction. We all got on the bar and read. I read Between (posted here now -- see the other TAB_

2010-07-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

How Boring! No Post in Almost a Year!

As bad as my blood letting but both are back. I will start putting new work up here as it comes to life.

Back in Dodie's workshop and finding some small windows of time again so a promise I might even keep.

My Morning Cleansing Walk

2009-08-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

-- Post From My iPhone

Eilene Myles Reading

2009-08-19T16:50:00.001-07:00

-- Post From My iPhone

2009-07-27T21:07:00.001-07:00

New Langton Arts Needs Your Help

Right Now!

Over the years, you have been a committed supporter of New Langton Arts (NLA), its mission and its arts programming. Your enthusiasm has allowed NLA to thrive, since 1974, as a strong presence in the San Francisco arts community, as well as in the national and international art world.

However, today New Langton Arts' continued existence is in serious financial jeopardy and it appears that the organization’s days are numbered unless we get immediate support from people like you.

Due to a troubled economy and reduced foundation and individual giving, NLA is at a point where its current revenues are insufficient to meet its required base-line operating expenses. Programming has been halted and expenses have been eliminated or reduced to the extent possible.

NLA desperately needs your financial help to cover remaining expenses over the next two months as the Board explores potential options to insure NLA’s prestigious legacy and archives.

Over the last 35 years, New Langton Arts has contributed to the lives and careers of artists, curators, performers, spectators, patrons of the arts, critics and writers. Its past has been celebrated, but its future is unsure. Please help us secure NLA’s legacy.

In these difficult economic times, we ask you to please reflect on what New Langton Arts has meant to you over the years and to donate what you can. At your earliest convenience, please send a check to:

New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Please note that the Board plans to host a “town hall” meeting in the very near future. For details about this meeting, please continue to check NLA’s website (www.newlangtonarts.org) and this blog http://newlangtontownhall.blogspot.com/.

Please feel free to forward this email to anyone who you think may be interested.

We thank you for your attention and for any donation you are able to contribute.

2009-06-27T11:49:00.001-07:00

Happy Pride!

2009-06-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

The second in the BentBoyBooks Bar Series is now in the world. "Beau Soir" by the amazing David Christensen had its making in the months up to and in Pride. At Friday's shut out A's v. Giants game I gave Howard Junker the first copy and then distributed more at Emily Wilson's superd and super exclusive opening/birthday party at front porch. Yes, you do wish you were there or even could have been.

BentBoyBooks is now on Facebook so if you are too friend us, we're lonely.

http://www.facebook.com/bent.boybooks

2009-05-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

After a week of cool cloudy mornings perfect for my gardening, today is sunny and bright. And it seems the sunshine brings out the lawn crew who are serenading me with sweet summery sounds of lawnmowers, trimmers and other mechanical devices designed to tame the wilds of our corner.

2009-05-07T06:52:00.001-07:00

A Woodpecker across the way in an old apple tree doing his thing. I'd been hearing him all week but only tracked him down this morning. Just after this shot he swooped off into the wood behind with a big cry.

An amazing amount of bird activity here all day but especially in the evening approaching eight o'clock at the end of the Canfield lot along the stream. Last night we heard but did not see a beaver slapping the water with his tail and swimming back under the old bridge up to his dam.

Last of the daffadils for this year. Always later in Norfolk but still very welcome.

Day Lilies in the old chicken coop foundation, my gardening project for this May visit. Gone are the blackberries (Ralph wondered in his English Muffin loving way if we might not want the blackberries to make jam.) Soon go some opportunistic shrubs and locust trees.

Budding blossoms on an old fallen down apple tree we now call the apple hedge.

2009-05-01T19:46:00.000-07:00

And so below notes from an archive. Off to Connecticut for a Spring fling after my day of leading 18 people on a community day project for Levi's 501 day. We painted the second floor of an ECS SRO on 6th street. Before and after photo to come after I upload this weekend.

Been having a great time reading lots of poetry from the recent readings. Looking forward to my break and then a return and the soon to be finished next Bent Boy Book Bar Series. This one from David Christensen.

2009-04-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

2009-03-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

As Spring struggles to spring in fits and starts of wet and wonder, I am in the midst or making the next BentBoyBooks Bar Story. The second in the series is by SF writer David Christensen. Look for a wild wonderful trip through our fair city's fantastic history of wild indulgence. Be sure to send a note if you want to be included in the limited distribution.

Re-reading Elements of a Coffee Service (Robert Gluck). A lovely re-discovery of why I love Bob and why I thought it worth a trek cross country just to be in the same writing program he taught in.

A lovely show at Margaret Tedesco's 2nd Floor Gallery all about Curt McDowell. An amazingly intimate space to be with the work and not something to miss if you can. The current is through March 29th. The text, a free ranging treatise on power, persuasion and please is a must have in its crisp white acid free limited edition.

Hoping to meet Minnette for drinks at sunset above the bay (her place) to celebrate the Irish by drinking moderately and eating well from the Ferry Building fare (market and shops). If you think an artist perch above the bay with the best garden ever in the city (sorry Bob)and have an interest in writing send a note of interest, we may be resurrecting a workshop soon.

2009-02-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

Plants on my fire escape:

Ground Morning Glory - Convolvulus mauritanicus

Lamiastrium - Galeobdolon 'Variegatum'

Abutilon - megapotamicaum 'Pink'

Snowstorm Giant Snowflake - bacopa

Snowstorm - White Bacopa

"Dusty Miller"

2009-01-24T18:24:00.001-08:00

My best Where's George ever:

One Dollar Bill, Serial# L4708---6L Series: 2003A
This bill has travelled 2,544 Miles in 148 Days, 22 Hrs, 16 Mins at an average of 17 Miles per day.
It is now 2,542 Miles from its starting location.

Good to know some money is moving in this nasty new economy.

2009-01-24T18:24:00.000-08:00

2008-11-22T19:34:00.000-08:00

I think this is a monthly effort. Evidenced by the frequency of my actual posts.

Been a busy fall (are they ever not?). Holidays are upon us with a magical transformation of power and new energy of activism and engagement I haven't seen since the late 80's and early 90's. If history (as promised) repeats itself, then the club scene should soon be exploding with innovative and exciting new spaces, events and venues.

Not sure what the new "new" economy means for any of us. Personally it is odd to have escaped the flames of bankruptcy to land at a company in good states and a good company (Levi Strauss & Co). Though even Levi's has had both layoffs and been hiring as business changes. I think it is really true that while we are subject to and part of history we all do not experience it in the same way.

One thanks is for the falling oil prices. Not meaningful to a no car walk mostly SF lifestyle but a big impact to a CT Homeowner heating with oil (my and my partners very bi-coastal other part of our lives being a country home in the coldest corner of CT).

And so after a month no mention here of the Mad Malka Salon (Tuesdays in a secret palace on the far side of the Filmore hill) or the latest Bent Boy Book or the next in the Bar Series from another SF Writer or even good gossip about boys and bars and sex. Disapointing? Yes, a little. I'll as I often promise try to do better.

BTW Rita Moreno is a very sexy 71 with some serious slither moves including a full body recline on a piano. God knows at this rate where the new 30 will land but assuredly past 40.

And with that the end of this post.

2008-10-22T20:30:00.000-07:00

A Curiousity

Cat Killer

Compulsion

Composition

The polymars performed their role admirably. The adhesive held. The future became present and the present opened up into a party. And the party was plentiful.

Good and plentiful. Land of plentiful. And the plentif plead for the wisdom of the dead and the dead rose up and so aroused, sought the santuary of souls in the solice of summer.

Hot stuff. Heady and rough, it was good sex.

2008-10-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

Colonizing the Colonials (some more)

You can make a world of difference!

National Clandestine Service Career.

The work of a nation. The center of intelligence.

CIA

Only the police seemed to mistake the New Langton and the Colony Room for a party. They appeared in their lumbering slow insistent investigative way to break up what they thought was an illegal rave. A quick look into the nearly empty space with a modest sound system and nary a glow stick in sight revealed their error and they moved on down Folsom toward the loud pulsing sound of parties permitted or not.

Not an underground club or even an edgy location in the now mostly lofted South of Market, New Langton is assuredly an art space (gallery, performance space, studio, whatever). The rough walls can't disguise the planned artifice of this reenactment/restaging of the infamous London drinking club. The "raw" quasi nineties performance art space only heightens the artifice of this self styled performance of social scene and milieu and at the same time deflates it a bit.

Being in a performance space prevents the kind of forced dialogue between social staging and performance that might happen if this project were to be put into a real bar or club, say the old Press Club on Post or the Redwood Room. In that setting the artifice would be another layer put on the artifice of the existing space with its own organic life. Of course those are not spaces of social and artistic discourse where art and alcohol and all intertwine. San Francisco is difficult that way. The social scenes are disparate, the watering holes unrelated to the arts patrons make or don't make. Despite best romantic efforts at restaging or inventing we have neither the pub/club drinking culture nor the gentle salon society to tie together a like scene.

But then this was before Emily Wilson appeared. (That amazing event's description coming in the fullness of time...)

2008-10-20T20:07:00.001-07:00

Colony Room Distilled

Despite the huge volume of space, the scene felt warm and intimate. A trick of the red glowing light perhaps but a welcome feeling none the less.

2008-10-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

This week's suggested strategy for prying out a story or some such:

Celebrating the collapse the consumer economy and the fall of finance, tell a story using the tools, devices or artifacts of commerce. Tell a story of buying, selling, paying or getting paid. Or tell a story using the ephemera of commerce (receipts, credit card slips or statements, bank statements, price tags etc) to be your form or anchor or inspiration. Keep it to a page or a little more and bring it to share.

2008-09-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

Amazed by all things Dodie, I am a delighted devotee of her new. The post on I was especially impressed by her post on Bhanu Kapil discussion around a short selection from Elizabeth Grosz's *Chaos, Territory, Art,*. Reading Dodie's recounting and analysis, I feel like I was there and glad i missed it all at once. Check it out here.

The theme of the actual and theoretical seems to be a common theme with the Non-Site Collective's last few events. It is nice to see the personal and practical and actual come up against the analytical creating a practical problem of thought and emotion in one of these discussions. The comfort of the ether is no better than the comfort of the "real." Pushing them together seems more important than ever in these times of segmentation, stratification and isolation from our eco system be it social, economic or environmental.

2008-09-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

Officer Down

Officer down
Fell like a feather
Wrapped in leather
Red and blue colors spread for you
Face white and true
A flag unfurled
His body curled
A mighty fall
The silent call
The grieving widow
Shattered grief
Almost a relief
An outline against the gray
Endless day
Folded flag
Body bag
Empty pillow
Feathers fluffed
Candle snuffed.

2008-09-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

And so again at an unintended interval.

Still struggling to find the time to learn to crochet to become my own hyperbolic artist. If only I'd known I would have insisted my grandmother teach me to knit along with all those other essential social skills I learned at her knee such as the nuances of lineage and snobbery in America. Amazing how a carefully managed mutt like state can permit Mayflower credentials for America's old families and for those oh so annoying French, Charlemagne. Oh to think what she could have done with ancestry.com when all that came from polite visits and studied reviews of ancient records. Too bad the Queen Mary didn't have frequent sailor points or what not. Not that her correspondence and friendship with Red Skeleton wasn't some kind of reward.

Since my failure to crochet, I have been doing my best to be social and art social.

Did a lovely drive down and around the coast with my dear friend Jan (publisher for Red Wheel Weiser). Hit some of the highlights and low lights and learned of Bonnie Doone's tasting room move to the middle of Santa Cruz and discover some new wines from the new tenant.

Also am developing a wonderful habit of Martini's and dinner with Minnette (though might get disrupted by a workshop.

I even finally managed to get to a Non Site event with the reward of re encountering old friends without any scene attitude or anxiety. What a delight!

Tonight a night off to pay bills and like, not such a delight.

But I persist in the delight of now and will continue as best I can to continue to make work and update this. I may need to breakdown and invest in technology...that being my way of paying the bills I know better than to buy it.

2008-09-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

Writing a Hyperbolic Poem

A
Single
Syllable
One at a time
Added to the line
Makes this hyperbolic
Crocheting words into wool
Wound tightly into skeins of yarn
Knitting on this page an un-flat shape
Linear and dimensional at once.

2008-09-14T22:22:00.001-07:00

And so in search of a new bag I nearly bought the Super Hybrid from Hideo Wakamatsuo but then the very helpful sales girls (no other possible term for these giggling Japanese women) showed me the next generation model coming in November. Not as sleek as the Super Hybrid and of course more expensive it did have a seasonal essential for San Francisco, a built in rain coat (for the back pack).

At the begining of my outing it was easy to defer but now November seems very far away...and of course Black (obvious and the RIGHT choice but still), Red (just so tempting but wearing requires more planning) and Silver (too hard and will just get nasty looking I think). And so bagless (well I still have my slowly decaying now officially ancient Hideo Wakamatsuo and my other various back packs) I meandered around finally landing back at the Muddy Waters on Church. A nice energy and I almost got a little writing done.

Hyberbolic writing and theory coming soon. Also the verdict on my effort to sell my non-levi overpriced denim to one of those soon to be Yelped about fancy re-sale clothing shops on Market street.

2008-09-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

A Saturday of cleaning, tidying, and purging. Too many books not wanted by the awful Aardvark hastily dropped at the ever welcoming Out of the Closet. Another bad brunch at Cafe Flore (food slightly better than the sea of ugly and banal filling in and out), will I never learn? To the Mission tomorrow in search of energy and life and perhaps a new bag from the fab Japanese designer (I just can't be another Chrome clone or a would messenger in custom Timbuk2 and my last Tumi was just too much bag so again I go to toward to slightly kinky and assuredly Kooky Japanese designer Hideo Wakamatsu.

Tonight a quiet effort at to dos post Ashtanga Yoga and pre-dinner/video in. Still working out the hyperbolic as a theory of being. But soon wisdom will poor forth from here.

2008-09-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

And so the circles keep closing in.

Love Dodie's discussion of blogging and time and real writing. I think perhaps when I am at my best I do not write at all but simply record the news from Mars sent via radio waves.

Kevin's play tonight preceded by a truly perfect meal with the ever amazing Emily Wilson (one of the few people who can keep me present enough to enjoy dining out and still be attuned enough to know the right artisan cocktail choice and perfect after dinner Pinot Grigio to split).

The play and scene themselves and even marvelously so. Too much to describe now but as I process as I am still processing the hyperbolic art and coming to an articulation of so too will I process Kevin's pink and Jocelyn's furs and Anne's paint and all the rest into something more than a sentence.

But Minnette there too and a wondering when I will come by for that much vaunted Martini. And almost an arrangement for Tuesday. If it works it will be a perfect day and a dream of days to come.

And so with this post of not enough, I persist.

2008-09-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

Finally to the Frida Kalho show at SFMOMA. Crowded but not crazy but very annoying the blockades of people shifting their gaze from the electronic tour device to the art and back to be sure they got it as instructed.

I had a good general sense of Frida Kalho before seeing the show but was really amazed by the layers of performance and engagement between her life and her work and range and depth of the work. We certainly do bury our interesting women behind their artist husbands be they Frida or Yoko.

So nice to see our lovely city part of the positives of this short marvelous life and career. Especially nice too to see the self conscious claiming of a particular Mexican/Hispanic identify in these times of melting merging and/or eradicating of identity. Might sneak back one more time before they clear the walls.

Also caught Half a Life the Chinese contemporary art show. A very clear window into the soul of post Mao China with all of its unsettled and unsettling qualities. Reminded me of the stories of Chinese Performance Artists risking their lives in expressions of their conditions be being sealed in concrete, floating in a bubble in Hong Kong Harbor or standing on melting ice with a noose around the neck. As observers, one might think that these visual artists would have a less dangerous relationship to the work but then after the fat grandson, the almost bobble head like repeated sculptural figures and Pol Pot like pile of heads and scary fabric woman again pink and the feather man there is the sculpture by Sheng Qi, My Left Hand showing the missing finger he cut off and buried in a flower pot before leaving China so that he would leave something of himself in China.

All that in the afternoon and then home to nurse my summer sniffles (hate this heat and do too much cold to compensate I think).

Today I managed to retrieve a recent online art purchase from the ridiculous Clayton Street Post Office without too much trauma and still have enough energy to get to Flore for much needed coffee and some brunch. Still struggling with the new menu. Tried to recreate my old favorite of smoke salmon arugula and scramble eggs with mixed success. But fortified, I did manage to make my way to Margaret Tedesco's to see and buy some art. I told her that I had not been there before but since then realized I had but in the dark and from another flow entirely.

Lovely to see some secrets that I coveted but will have to view at the museum I am afraid and to score some super deals on a couple of Anne McGuire pieces. Also just nice to spend some time with Margaret whom I always see and say hi but have little conversation with. All part of my fringe of the fringe identity which I have decided to unfringe. (A lot due to so much gay club life partying and mainstream working all these years...there is only so much time for partying, sex, work, writing and being artistically social and that is what gave.)

Tomorrow my Sharper Image reunion (I hope good material to finish or start a story) and then Dodie's curated show which ties so well to with my Kathy Acker piece, At the Altar. I may try to find a way to share with some of the folks.

OK. Time to start the Party...

2008-09-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

And again back, not quite a month. Shamed into trying harder in part by the conversation at Dodie's last workshop/party at Minnette's fabulous diggs.

Tempted a little by first Thursday but too hot to dress and look lovely enough and even a little by the Asian Museum Burning Man Tea House fest, I instead did a modest bit of Pilates and meandered home to catch up on things like this.

Still adjusting to my new job and hours and such I find my writing time more readily available offline and old fashioned in notebooks (adorable Japanese notebooks which are a serious fetische for me). All of which is fine for my stories and poetry but very behind the pace of a blog.

Especially by the time I get around to transcribing/posting. Could be weeks or longer. After work and the gym or what have you and cooking dinner (yes obsessive local organic slow food with often complicated variations of my own inventing) there is very little time to be boring and sit at the computer. Especially with a boyfriend I actually rather enjoy spending time with and having conversation with.

And so all the endless excuses and explanations. Not so very interesting and not really of consequence.

But rather than transcribing my 8/22/08 notebook entry entitled Package It Up: Blogging on Paper. So counter intuitive and yet here it is... I will write briefly about the that experience and then move on to the truly recent.

On 8/22, the extraordinary Jennifer Blowdryer hosted a totally fun reading event at Dog Eared Books in which my workshop buddy Stephen Boyer read and someone I did not know of before Brontez read along with Jennifer and a poet MK Chavez (whom I loved too and have to chase down to read).

I loved Jennifer's reading of the new version of The World's Laziest Secretary but I think she was wrong about the illustrations, the original ones are better but only now and not probably when they were new. Glad I got this brief visit with the rapidly slimming rising M. Blowdryer as see was booked up and then back to New York before I knew what happened.

So Stephen was lovely of course but he feels like a kid brother chasing many of the insane party pranks I did (and well yes, sometimes, still pursue). But Brontez was a surprising breath of fresh air and a flirticious delight before during and afterward. I only wish he would make more of Fag School #3 (sold out everywhere!).

And so then on to last night.

An incomplete gathering (Dodie, Minette, Emily, Maize, Anne, Drew, Masha, and Stephen) but lots of fun local and sustainable food (was this a reference to the Slow Food Nation event? Minette wore here apron...) Of course we are all converted one way or another. Emily who nearly went with Coco or Drew who loves the food hates the people or Dodie with her love hate of Rainbow...

A dive into deep dish pizza, some serious vodka and wine and we were off. Between the garden and view and the feast and wine and our determined good mood we managed to have a lovely party and read a little too.

Despite my anxiety and ongoing frustration with my place (or lack there of) in the experimental writing scene, I found an incredibly warm welcome for my latest work from the group and felt a shared empathy of frustration with Dodie and the limits of the scene, no matter how exceptional it may be.

2008-08-18T19:59:00.000-07:00

Another effort at some frequency with this again.

On the Howard Junker front, it seems he is stepping down from Zyzzyva after twenty five years. An amazing achievement, Zyzzyva and one that I hope will persist albeit differently under yet to be determined new leadership. I guess I better get my check and matching contribution in soon. The new leadership may not be so personable.

On other literary fronts, I am digging back into Charles Olson having written a bit too obscurely, according to Kevin, Dodie and the workshop at least, into a recent bit of writing I am excavating him with the help of MAPS NO. 4 and the MAXIMUS POEMS.

On the the past job front a marvelous manic Sharper Image reunion coming up that promises to provide material for many a story to be told.

On the curious connections from that world a prep school connection discovered through Linked In (a generation off) but enough detail (during the war and on to Amherst) to spark a few recollections. The 1940's school paper from my Aunt borrowed and never returned by that fat algebra teacher. And the whole John Knowles concept and the prep school novel as genre. Of course my writing of the Loomis Chaffee school is still too kinky for most audiences.

On the customer service front, drugstore.com is writing a comic monologue for me that I will soon edit. Stay tuned.

Upcoming, Blowdryer event at Modern Times Thursday. Trannyshack retirement party on Saturday. And I'm sure much more, I am missing by omission or intent.

2008-08-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

And three months later...back to this again.

Been a busy summer full of surprises from a wonderful Pride and after to a lovely visit to CT with sweet summer breezes and beautiful boys. Work life has been less fun with time having dulled the shine of the new job. But it is a jog and for that I am still grateful.

Recently a I passed along a discount offer on Levi's jeans via email, a bit of spam that got a few curious responses:

From Howard Junker, Editor, ZYZZYVA:

they probably have a matching gifts program so be sure to remember us, hopefully before you write your will.

The do, Howard, and I will...

From a friend:

Hello, how are you? Are you still with Sharper Image? Thinking of you.

Guess he missed the part of the email that said the Levi's offer was from my new job and the news that Sharper Image is no more.

Been a quiet writing summer for me in part from a lot of stress with the new job, a longer walk in and an earlier start ending my mornings at Tully's and most recently working weekends and long days on an extremely frustrating project. I have been again doing Dodie's workshop as well with some work coming out of the experiments and a couple of pieces getting some work there but have also been thwarted a bit by the schedule disorder and somehow managing not get slotted in despite asking. And so this is a small pleasure to return to. Oh, yes a new Bent Boy Book out of to few and out to more soon (pending some more printing, assembly and mailing).

Some seasonal picture updates coming soon.

2008-05-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

The fog of Daily City along with the cool afternoon air send me dreaming of adventures to come and adventures already had.

Learning the Levi way and loving it. A feeling of becoming that is amazing and unexpected.

Loving my new walk down Pacific. The city and bridge merge over the crest of Russian Hill and at least in the 6 something AM fog become something out of Sci Fi. So far I've failed to capture on film (if only I could draw I would draw it. That and the flat aspect of these new streets and alleys hold me in a manic rapture on my walks in. I even adore my 1972 (really has the tags and everything!0 cubicle.

Soon to morning my carefully folded and washed waiting to depart other jeans. The Versace's from when Gianni still graced the world. The Lucky's that were so luck when clubs were where you partied with your two thousand best friends. Calvin's from even before. Chip and Pepper and more Chip and Pepper because American made meant LA. And DK's Pure because beautiful and organic and hot were all values I could embrace. Left are my two pair of Levi Premiums because if they didn't cost a lot I didn't want Levi's and my ass still looks great in them. And now to join them Levi's of all stripes even a one of kind pair of 501's that I look good in!

2008-04-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

Return to Writing and Art Tee Fizz

See below an announcement from Anne McGuire about her new show at Marjorie Wood Gallery. It is a really great show. Lots of fun clicking away on the stamps revealing the postcards. I too attended the show at the Soap Gallery and encountered Karla Milosevich and her daughter there but not Dodie. Parallel experiences of art and all.

Hope you enjoy this show by these two very talented ladies at the marvelous Marjorie Wood Gallery. X.O. Drew

The MARJORIE WOOD GALLERY ANNOUNCES THE OPENING OF AN ONLINE EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY ANNE MCGUIRE

"From Anne McGuire," works on paper by and from Anne McGuire

accompanied by an essay, "Anne McGuire's Stampede," by Dodie Bellamy

on view, online only, now through May 31, 2008

at THE MARJORIE WOOD GALLERY...

http://www.marjoriewoodgallery.com/exhibitions/mcguire/index.html

______________________________________________________

"Here are a few of the works on paper I've made over the years, mainly postcards. I am inspired by the beauty of postage stamps, and try to incorporate them into the theme of the card. It is also important to create a personalized work of art for the addressee. Many of my postcards have been damaged, wrongly delivered, thrown away, and will never be seen again. That is okay by me, as I enjoy working with these materials, in addition to my usual, electricity-bound and less frequent mode of work, videoart."

---Anne McGuire

______________________________________________________

ANNE MCGUIRE's extensive research has shown that it takes one day for a postcard to travel from mailbox to addressee within her hometown of San Francisco. She would like to stress, as did Len Lye in his 1937 industrial film "Trade Tattoo," it still pays to "post early."

DODIE BELLAMY is a novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor, known for her non-traditional use of sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling.

______________________________________________________

FOR MORE INFORMATION

2008-04-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

Torch Torture

Tried to watch the torch and protests from the balcony of my Embarcadero office with its lovely view of the promised route. No torch but lots of protests. Not alone in being duped the Secret Service guys downstairs were also out on their balcony cameras and guns at the ready.

2008-04-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

Spring Blogging

I am returning this blog to its original stated purpose and writing more intently on and about writing. I will use links and references to connect to other projects and things of interest that may come up. An old idea resurfacing in a digital age:

DrewZin' (rhymes with crusin' & boozin')

"When the world was made flesh, synax became slaughter." Tolmoe-The Perverisity of Personal Perception Part II

DrewZin' is periodCAL-Californian MAG-of Queer Text

Compact (but not a compact per se)-fits in the back pocket of a pair of LEVI'S-Economical-Free B-4 11. Fun and friendly.

Contents Issue 1: Lady excerpt Page 6

"I seek sensation. To touch is to feel. To taste is to tempt. To see is to seduce. To hear is to hunt. To perceive is to pervert. In a freeing I affirm my humanity in acts of affection."

One of my possible projects. As ever I have too many and do too few. I believe without checking that the current list includes (order of typing, numbers for reference only):

Next Narrative: SF Stew--Writers Engaging with New Narrative
Voluntary Queers (Short Zine like book of Drew's Poetry) After Aaron Shurin
Drewzin' as described above
Collected Experiments--Drew's writing from Dodie's workshop
Organizing and submitting (a forever neglected pastime that when I do actually engage with has a reasonable amount of success)
Participating in the writing community (readings, sites or non-sites, etc..)
And a whole slew of things on notebook pages stacked on my desk

New job coming up soon. Change in the Spring air. Things beginning again. A happening of happenings. Perchance to dance.

2008-04-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

Japantown

Cherry blossoms in bloom. Festival starts next weekend.

Pardon our construction
A boy to make of
Love to
Butt
Recant

And so another wild and wonderful weekend.

2008-04-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

Super Flat - Forever and Ever

I just put my Murakami essay up here: www.superflatforever.com in honor of the New York show. Check it out if you haven't yet.

2008-04-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

April 4th Blog Entry (composed on my ancient PALM and transfered to my computer this morning)

R came to see my new soon to be old office yesterday. Gave him the whole tour. Did a quick bankruptcy shopping tour of the store and then walked home. Ran into Colter on the way home Post and Mason ish on his way to the 49 Geary opening. First Thursday. I had completely forgotten amidst all the recent chaos. And absent an event highlighted by someone I wouldn't pay so much attention. But oh so important in the local art scene. Glad to hear he is working and has upcoming shows. Forgot to mention the Next Narrative project when he asked about writing. Perhaps an email follow up. And maybe it is SF Stew after all. Had forgotten about the clever title but there it was in my latest little green Japanese notebook.

Read my packet of information for my new job and it became even more real. Now I am plotting out my commute and my new schedule. Where will writing and exercise and all that fit? Change is.

2008-04-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

A Call for Next Narrative

I have been promising a project (to myself mostly) about New Narrative. Not a history project (though that is something in need of being written if for no other reason than to create an official version with which to engage) but an interaction with New Narrative by writers whose work comes out of the New Narrative world.

My interest is personal and particular. I studied with Bob (Robert Gluck) at SF State and then in his private workshop (post Small Press Traffic). I was also part of Camille Roy's post Bob workshop for a number of years and am still (whenever she has them) an active member of Dodie Bellamy's workshop. This past fall in Dodie's workshop I began writing about an un-dead Steve Abbott's encounters with Dodie, Kevin and Drew (this Drew). I quickly became interested in this way of engaging with New Narrative and am interested in other writing that is doing this.

And so my call for what I now calling Next Narrative with the intent of making something that collects this writing (in print or online) to be called "Next Narrative: Writers Engaging with New Narrative."

Post or send comments and queries and let the evolution begin!

2008-04-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

Thursday

Past hump day in every way. Success on the job front. From gadgets to blue jeans. An amazing job journey that takes its next turn in a couple of weeks. Look for my tell all tales of more than a decade inside the temple of toys for big kids.

Did a dry run of walking directly to Market (past our lovely City Hall and Asian Art Museum) and down our main street. About half an hour to Lotta's fountain. Another ten minutes to Tully's now I will just have to see how long the now left turn takes. :-)

I promise new Spring pictures to come soon.

2008-04-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

April Foolin'

Having barely survived a turbulent Muni ride this morning (bruises only I am pretty sure) I am now watching the sky light up from my perch at Tully's and day begin for our busy little business world.

Did anyone else see the Gmail custom time? Hysterical and both subtle (gmailers only) and a sign of gmail's arrival.

Decision made on the Valentino. Back it goes. Not perfect and when he is perfect there is nothing else like wearing him so why compromise.

Farmer's Market today (and every Tuesday). Feels like forever since I've been. I hear rumors of Early Girls and other heirlooms. So much to buy so little time to eat.

And so almost every day...

2008-03-30T17:27:00.000-07:00

Sunday Sundown

In the end the sun triumphed yesterday late in the day and then today all day. But an icy breeze! BRR.

Hatha Yoga this morning finished the cure of my tortured neck. Just different enough in its flow from the Ashtanga class that I am always just a little lost. Though last night's Ashtanga class was full of Spring with a light almost ticklish air.

A mostly domestic day waiting for the much delayed R to return from his latest trip. Cleaned windows even! (And managed to not drop anything on the church goers below...).

Just finished a gay manga, "Yellow." Read just like anime shows. Delightful! Bought but have not yet read Jocelyn Saidenberg's "Negatvity." From 2006 I think but I have been very lax in keeping up with much of the writing scene that that is new for me. It is all part of my imaging that time does not pass and my feeling that all of experience and time is a flat level surface upon which I exist outside of linearity. Despite the persistence of that belief (too strong?) or feeling, I am again like any good self reformer determined again to engage. I am intrigued by the Non Site Collective. And despite having managed to not get to any of the events yet, I think it will be an opportunity to re-connect. (I just have to read a lot to get caught up and appear learned enough to not feel or appear excessively ignorant).

2008-03-29T13:31:00.001-07:00

A San Francisco Saturday

A cloudy day turning almost sunny in the afternoon din of Cafe Flore. Still a threat of cold and an idea of rain (but only if you're unprepared and followed the forecast).

A pretty boy or two but nothing to match the promises of the past and the future. A more serious crowd today engaged in urgent conversations about pressing nothings, re-reading homework for exams to qualify them for a future in something full of opportunity and adventure.

A million directions and distractions pulling me from my writing projects. Do I really like my new Valentino blazer or do I want to return it and buy something else? (Or do I really just want to buy more and more fun clothes to fill our magically re-done closet with fun fabulous expensive clothes I never find occasion to wear like those magnificent Jean Paul Gautier pants?) Should I start with a call for my would be Next Narrative project or prepare a lengthy treatise on it? What about making another little book? I am long overdue with that project (as am I on the updating of my little online projects). And then there is the whole job anxiety. So fraught and full of complex tensions and concerns (much more difficult than shopping where the questions are only does it look good and can I afford it). But no more writing of that with the devil being in the details and the hounds in full cry the game will go until it ends fur flying.

My cricked neck ( a consequence of tension and unchecked allergies) is slowly undoing itself. This afternoons Ashtanga will either advance the healing or leave me crawling home from Club One, I suspect.

My first comment on a recent post from a French blog on a digital video camera. Still unwrapping the connections and perhaps the mystery will never reveal itself to me.

I wonder sometimes if my not every day posting is a failure in this space. It appears to often be the discipline that others demand of their blogs but not one I can imagine managing. I find a certain solace in having a larger gap between posts present the immediate opportunity to do better next time.

Sun still struggling, clouds winning. Off to the writing I am still writing about.

2008-03-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

St. Patrick's Day in Connecticut

No green just the leftover grays of winter. Melted snow and ice and lots of sunshine. Just at freezing here in Norfolk making for an icy walk through our fields.

At last amidst my job hunt and R's frequent trips to the various odd corners of the continental US we are enjoying a break together. A few house plans (hanging curtains in the living room, some trim painting) but mostly just down time away from the fray.

All is well in the house except for ever present invading lady bugs who have an abiding affection for R, buzzing him with puppy like passion.

2008-03-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

Another gorgeous San Francisco Spring day...it almost made daylight savings not a trauma. Definitely an energy in the air and the city full of folks crawling out of their winter caves in search of something. Castro was abuzz with familiar and fresh faces at Flore. In the familiar, Aaron Shurin and a slightly tipsy Long Wu and in the fresh faces...well if a good story comes on any of it I will of course include it something written and available to the select few.

Am a bit dreading the week ahead and completely excited about the next week back in Connecticut. Still dealing with the work chaos and find a new something to pay for this fabulous bi-coastal literary clubbing lifestyle of mine.

Getting clearer on the New Narrative project/s I am proposing. I think David C. is right about the need for a history but I think first is a New Narrative reader that focuses the conversation. And if the synergy is right then that creates a foundation for my Next Narrative project. I think my first step is to propose the contents of the reader and vette it by the survivors.

2008-03-06T08:10:00.001-08:00

This one is really from today live from the corner of California and Davis. The sunshine is almost too intense. That time of year when the light and dark contrasts in these downtown corridors turns the streets into crazy caves without the revelation of truths Plato might portray.

A lovely birthday yesterday: skipped off work early, went for a walk with Ralph, ate caviar and drank champagne. Apart from the getting older faster I think a birthday everyday is an idea whose time has come.

Curious about Dodie's opening/chapbook show but Saturday night...and where is somewhere out on a 23 (street or avenue). Requires reading a map. When I claim to only inhabit the 49 square I exaggerate. My miles are fewer and my excursions to the true limits few.

Soon I will fully articulate my Next Narrative project and make it something in the world but for now off to a pretend play day working but not at work. :-)

2008-03-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

Blog Notes

Writing small bits of verse as a kind of careful construction of language to build a composition on.

Lots of little and large projects flying through my mind, all in various states of undone ness. A brief break from the manic job search has reawakened my compositional self. A welcome return to a flow of energy that had been stopped but also the unleashing again of the mania, the unstoppable and dangerous energy of urgency and panic. A good leash held by my own hand might yet contain me. And now again back to the job hunt push. A marathon with few favorable landmarks and no clear indication of a finish line in sight.

Oh, the finish, the surface, the fine polish of it all. And again I am yes and yes and...

More notes to come in this slight system of writing and then not writing in the way that I can and cannot see the keys as I am typing.

I believe that the future is in the doing and undoing of it all. There is not more to say than what has already been said but still I cannot imagine a better way of doing this than the way I am doing it now looking at the windows cut out of the other walls and then the stone made into to towers of hope and cages for the offices of workers going to and fro along the streets of this idle urbs this might forty nine square mile of manic more. A law becomes an observation when its truth is undone by the undoing of its truth by the poets pretense of becoming more than a scribe for the beings above that do not tell the truth but only invent it again from the sounds of something more than silence.

2008-03-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

Friday February 29th --- again tech limbo

Another effort to bog today to regain that mad manic feeling of creative happiness. A conflict with the Bruce Boone talk tonight (just adjacent but not enough time to get there).

It will work out...Got resume paper to bring a hard copy to the event tomorrow. Picked my shirt and tie. A little polishing and ironing when I get home tonight.

Dinner with David last night. His boyfriend's bought a Chestnut Street clothing store and David is duly decked out in March Jacob looking a less plump and more prosperous self. And in good generous spirits which are contagious. Wonderful divvy Ethiopian food at Club Waziema, some literary gossip about the folks we know/knew in the SF experimental and/or gay writing scene.

I told David about my Next Narrative idea sprung out of writing about Steve Abbott. He suggested a book about New Narrative, perhaps an oral history.

I too have thought of this but manage to talk myself down out of infinite concerns including my ability to execute and the sheer time commitment of such an undertaking. And yet it gnaws at me. I imagine this is how Kevin got started with Spicer. Perhaps it might begin by writing what I know or think I know of the period and then identify the places where I can discoverer more information (people & archives) I think.

David is right when he says no matter how small it may have been or ephemeral the idea and the influence is still strongly felt and continues to reverberate through the writing scene.

I will begin with some notes on what I know and some inquiries to the people I know. And then this thing will or will not have a life of its own.

2008-03-06T07:45:00.000-08:00

Really from Feb 23rd but stuck in tech limbo...

More Oscar Blog-

A quick role call: Kevin & Dodie of course. The always delightful Anne Mcguire, our very own porn star Stephen Boyer (performing under another name or names I think), Maize our Oscar expert without watching any of the films, Masha aka Georgette (who knew!), Emile W. impersonating his female self the artist still known as Emily Wilson, the late arriving dlightfully disruptive Minnette Lehrman and yours truly Drew angry hair and all.

During: lots of off and on screen dialogue mostly unrelated. More conversation even than during a movie at the AMC 1000 on Van Ness. A little distracting from the central premise but then it was almost the incidental excuse for a gathering. A few heated exchanges over politics and agenda. The balance perhaps not quite right with the impervious Oscars at the center of things and group not quite complete but no explosions or irreparable damages done amazingly just some reinforcements of ideas of each other I think.

Kevin's postmortem for fanzine was a nice archiving of it all in a flattering but true light.

Other post mortems suggest the show was a bit flat and not so much fun which affirms my remaining feeling that this peculiar engagement with this year's bloody bunch of Oscars was the best way to be with them.

2008-02-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

An amazing evening at the Asian Art Museum with the brilliant and beautiful Emily Wilson. Her blue eyes are a sea of inspiration.

I am again writing on my Palm in a effort to be able to blog without hauling my laptop around.

Two topics to cover:

Asian Museum with Emily Wilson.

Oscar Party with Kevin, Dodie and the workshop crew.

Asian with Emily.

A Thursday night adventure. An almost empty museum except for a cologne saturated tourist from some less scent sensitive region who we just couldn't seem to escape amidst the Buddha's and Chinese paintings. We only managed to escape him by dashing out around the stairs and by the Koret where there was some kind of Kabuki thing happening. Fleeing the attention to artifice and action required by that (I flashed back to the But I'd dragged R and a once special boy too ruining the Sunday afternoon mood and possibilities and Emily just couldn't) we slipped into the Drama and Desire show from the Edo period.

Fabulous and flat and so modern seeming. The drama better than the desire with the frightening exaggerated penis's penetrating the teeny tiny vaginas. I was completely with Emily in not wanting any of that. The opposite of sexy. The bits of horror with crazy dream demons and the detached head were nice though.

The scholar rocks (the original suggestion in my invitation) were weird reply for both of us with some variation. Other works by .... Zahr were at a gallery Emily has recently been at and I had seen a single huge example at the De Young outside the small modern gallery section. At the De Young I had found the concept and result intriguing. Here outside the gallery I felt the same for the pair there but inside I found the rocks next to the sculptures to be a degradation of the art, a lessening of the intensity of the aluminum imagining of nature. And the city of stainless steel kitchen equipment, some on how being a commentary on the Chinese workers and the golden mountain migrations was just too much assembly and too much concept at least at the moment. But the discussion and consideration it provoked for both of us was perhaps an indication that this would be an invasive work that might continue to suggest itself into our consciousness long after the viewing. I certainly agree with Emily that oddly but accurately that the glow of the pieces captured the glow of the city in certain lights. that the Oz like sparkle of it was an achievement, a capturing in this steel sculpture some of the etherealness of the city by the bay.==

Ah but Oscar--so much noise and such an intense shortened enacting of the entire workshop experience in all of tis good bad and ugly was a bit overwhelming. More to come....

2008-02-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

Year of the Rat

Looks like a good horoscope for this old snake after all!

Details pasted below for the link challenged.
Not sure how but I lost the little cursor thing so I can't tell where I am until I type. Too annoying to continue. Maybe later...

Snake Ratings

69% (10 favorable, 1 neutral and 1 unfavorable month) This year promises to be a vast improvement over the last one. You are likely, for example, to experience exciting mental stimulation. If you use your brains you can produce some very good results in most areas of your life. Almost every month will provide opportunities, although you might want to take it easy right after the Chinese New Year. Next year should be even better, so you should take time to make plans and begin projects to be completed then.

Snake Career

The fast paced energy given off by the year of the Rat creates a dynamic career environment for the Snake. This spark of energy could inspire the Snake with new and creative ideas resulting in many opportunities. However, in order to take advantage of such opportunities, you may have to take some quick and decisive action. If you are bored with your present work situation, this is a good time to seek greener pastures.

Snake Relationships

The good vibrations that the year of the Rat gave off to your career sector should overflow into your relationships. Your most memorable moments this year will be the intimate ones shared with family and friends. An active social life should be fueled by the almost endless energy of the fast-talking and highly social Rat year. Single Snakes have a wonderful chance to find love and romance, or maybe just one great fling.

Snake Health

All the energy spent in your career and relationships could have a negative impact on your health. Your best bet to stay healthy could be to get in plenty of exercise and engage in some of your favorite leisure activities. You may also be able to further reduce your stress levels and increase your health levels if you are a little bit less secretative with your family members and friends.

Snake Wealth

Your finances seem to be on track to make some healthy improvements. If you have suffered some financial setbacks, you may be able to make a monetary comeback of sorts in the year of the ever-resourceful Rat. Attempt to steer well clear of expensive purchases, especially impulse buys. You will most likely suffer from buyers remorse right after making a large purchase. Under the Earth element, conservative investments may show some profits.

2008-02-08T07:55:00.000-08:00

A Cold Foggy Friday in February

The Chinese New Year began yesterday. A week earlier than last year (gotta love that lunar calendar). Year of the Earth Rat. Haven't yet dared to check how that looks for me but if Friday morning yoga turning to spinning (rats on wheel) is any indication it could be another year of living in "interesting times."

Personally I am liking the new semi-season of Lost. It seems to have recaptured the complicated mystery without slipping into super complex hard to follow or accept plot turns. Not so much that Eli Stone that follows. Yes for the SF setting and a little for some of the cast and concept but that weird composite San Francisco that doesn't quite exist (some actually shooting and then filling in of backgrounds). Maybe it will grow on me.

Been days and days of not writing sending emails and getting reconnected in avid pursuit of a new job. A bit like a diet or new exercise plan it is a painful start but slowing easing into a rhythm. Striking how much alike my two selves really are and how many abilities cross over when I let them. Perhaps I will find a way to be famous in one or the other or both lives.

Too cold in this darn Tullys to type. Time for a refill!

2008-02-05T07:38:00.000-08:00

Super Tuesday! Ballots in my bag ready to be delivered. Two phone calls a day every day for the last two weeks from the Barack Obama folks got us off the fence and firmly in the Hillary Clinton camp. Last night when I explained that to the Obama caller she had the temerity to call back to apologize. What is it about these people that they don't get it. LEAVE ME ALONE!

Given my track record on such things I will no doubt be voting for Obama in November. Ah, politics.

Nothing like a little sunshine to improve moods and dispositions. A little more warmth wouldn't hurt either.

Terrible drought of writing not for lack of things to write but for lack of time and psychic space. I don't recommend job hunting unless you have to, which I do. Takes a lot of creative energy this inventing/reinventing of the self.

Just picked up the new Instant City. Looking forward to checking out Blowdryer's interview of August Bleed. Might make it to CCAC to hear Dodie's lecture tonight. Torn (mostly because I loathe getting to there from anywhere).

Farmers market today. I think vegetables for roasting and such. Love the hemp bags we got for Norfolk and now here, perfect for groceries and the farmers market and easy to stuff into my overstuffed back pack. Light and super strong. Will try to find the source and recommend it.

Next Narrative is a bit on hold with all this job strum and drang but not forgotten. Except for fear on onslaught of material I almost think to put something in Ampersand.

2008-02-01T07:02:00.000-08:00

Friday Morning at Tullys. Dry and not too cold. Mostly because I wore my new cute Cole Hahn rain boots and Iceberg black down jacket. Nothing like being prepared for a cold wet winter day to stay it. Can't quite get used to the new crowd of boys serving the coffee here. The girls were prettier and much better at it. Ah well, change...

New Sara Brightman and new Lost last night. So much new in a world of repeats. New fennel recipe too. A new day dawning...

Time for a refill a new habit that I will likely soon drop.

Almost finished with Andy Quan's Six Positions. Been an interesting arch. I was completely in love with the writing and the book at the beginning and then about 3/4s of the way through it felt OK but not so exciting. I am anxious to see how it ends and then settles in. Likely to get more of his writing but a little less urgent now than I was at the beginning when I found his work to have more affinity with mine and the prose of Aaron Shurin.

On an entirely superficial note I also wanted him to be prettier. While we all lose are charms in the end or even sooner the sex positive gay writers I admire never quite seem to be as hot as their writing would seem to suggest. Of course what readers I have no doubt feel the same way.

Supposed to be another rainy weekend and will probably be a quiet one hiding from the chaos and saving money in fear of impending disaster. Can't wait!

2008-01-29T08:07:00.000-08:00

A semantics of erotics, an exploration of a nation obsessed. Is this the beginning of the end of an entry? I am enjoying another icy morning at my Tully's table overlooking the corner of California and Davis reading Andy Quan and staying away from the office as long as I can. Too too many to dos and too too much upheaval in the world. Oh for some simple eros, some pure passionate compelling distraction to replace a cold winter day with the deep heat of desire.

2008-01-27T18:40:00.000-08:00

Put up my winter picture from Norfolk of the school house in snow. For those who don't know the school house is next to the house that Ralph and I renovated (with a tiny bit of contractor intervention ;-> see our shutterfly site for more details.) The School House finally got lifted up, straightened out and reshingled (the original shingles from the house) this past spring. Bill Dobbins then stained in before winter (thanks again Billy!). A future guest house we hope.

A light rain today and a decent brunch at Sparky's. A couple of good finds at Advark Books (did a decent shelf clearing the other week so maybe OK...). One an Andy Quan collection which is so far delicious. I knew his work from other places but missed this 2005 collection.

The MILK staging of the Castro continues and the subtle bits of staging are a delightful discovery. Can't wait to see how it all turns out. If I can get my phone not to have another nervous breakdown I will upload some pictures of these crazy signs and "restored" facades.

Missed Anne's movie. Blocked by an arc. Noah you really should watch where you park that thing!

Seriously too too too much rain to do anything. But did get these very fun cute Cole Hahn series G boots to keep my feet happy and dry. Secretly 50% off which I only discovered in reverse sticker shock at the register. Not classic retailing for sure but made me glad I'd gone with the upgrade from the Rockports.

Watched Sybil (the movie with Joanne Woodward & Sallie Field) last night. Had seen it on TV years ago. Still great after all these years. Just want to know how to get a therapist like Joanne Woodward. Send suggestions please.

2008-01-24T07:30:00.001-08:00

Happy Thursday. 24 degrees in Norfolk, CT according to my little weather channel icon. Sounds cold but assuredly feels balmy compared to our arctic SF weather this week. BRR. Though not as much rain as expected. That has something to do with a breakaway front wondering around like at a drunk in the street according to Ralph who read it on SF Gate. Drunk weather doesn't seem like a good idea at all.

Another busy morning reviewing and revising my get a job tools. Bleh. Work getting work.

Hoping to make it to Anne McGuire's Adventure Poseiden The- from Anne:

As it was meant to be seen - END FIRST!

(My version is a precise cut-by-cut re-edit, from end to beginning. . . .)
at - ATA, 992 Valencia St
on - Friday, Jan. 25
in - the PM 8:000
for - 6 slim dollars

If you did not get to see it back in March at SF MOMA,
this is your chance!

Please go to link for more info:
http://www.atasite.org/calendar/?x=2770

Listened to the new Kylie CD X all weekend. Got the deluxe edition with a great DVD extra of a video and an interview. The video is an amazing Kylie meets Madonna, meets David Bowie, meets Marc Almond meets the Pet Shop Boys meet Dalida extravaganza. And the interview is articulate and interesting.

2008-01-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

Started adding books to Good Reads. Prompted by a surprise invite to be a friend from Velcro aka Judith followed by another from Donal. Adding by author has me discovering a few unread titles from writers I thought I'd completely read (looking forward to that).

On reading front, the discovery of Bob's Sex Story in an old Gay Sunshine Anthology on a rainy MLK Day has prompted me to dive back into the lush land of Elements of a Coffee Service. Nice young Bob picture in the back too. Amazing to think it came out 11 years before we moved to San Francisco. 1982, I was still playing Boy's Games in prep school creating material full of sex and violence. Oh those halcyon days.

Am getting more and more excited about doing a project around engagement with New Narrative writing and writes. Now the trick will be to find time and means in the midst of my paying job chaos and collapse. I am almost ready to describe the project in detail. One I do that I think it will begin to have a life of its own.

All for now.

2008-01-16T07:44:00.000-08:00

A warmer Wednesday. No fog today. An entirely new crew (save one) at Tully's. Seems to happen every time I am away for a while.

Just finished some edits to Boy Brothel. Next back to my Steve Abbott piece and the possible New Narrative project.

Later today I will have my quarterly bleeding. A delightful bit of barbering required by all that lovely inbreeding over the centuries that made me the delightful impoverished aristocrat I am. If I were a visual artist I would find some way to install the remnant blood somewhere. Maybe I will ask Donal to photograph it for me sometime. I think it would look well with his other work.

And of work there is forever drama and trauma in the bad business of making a living but also some new intrigue. If only I could not take it as seriously as I do and must.

Back to stealing a few more minutes of morning...

2008-01-15T07:28:00.001-08:00

Fabulous foggy morning. An elegant skateboarder slaloming down McAllister into the mist. An almost invisible city hidden below Nob Hill. A brisk and cold morning walk imagining more than a century ago when my walk from Alamo Square over Nob Hill to the Tully's at California and Davis would have been an adventure.

2008-01-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

After Xmas and New Years, both spent in a mostly snowy corner of Connecticut. A lovely winter wonderland vacation from my paying job and one from which I didn't want to return. But alas money must be made or the world would not go round and round. So here I am back in SF at my Tully's pushing the limit of lateness in arriving at my glamorous office to make money for my company and me.

No resolutions but some better intentions for 2008. Most to do with being more focused and diligent in my pursuits.

A happy start on the publishing front. "To Sex a Story" is to appear in 580 Split sometime later this year. More details to come but got the contract yesterday and will send that and my bio off this weekend.

Thinking of trying to do a zine of writing about or in relationship to New Narrative by writers who came after New Narrative, perhaps calling it New Narrative. I have recently been writing about Steve Abbott and think perhaps others have material that engages with the living and the dead of this truly San Franciscan writing movement. Again more details to come as I try to figure out how and who and what and all that.

2007-12-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

A little SFMOMA on the way home last night. Wanted to be sure to catch the Joseph Cornell before heading East for Xmas. Also did a quick check on the Olafur Eliasson frozen car thing,

The Joseph Cornell is quite an extensive exhibit spanning his entire career of boxes (mostly), assemblages and collages. Not always as interesting as the noisy commentary cards (who writes that junk?) but interesting and enjoyable for all of the lovely carefree chance coupled with the careful craftsmen like building of them. The care of the truly devoted hobbyist more than the artistry of the "Artist" seems to be at place here. That coupled with the fabulously messy studio pictures helped me to overcome my natural resistance to such highly touted important work. I think they look like fun to make and might be an interesting project for me (or some variation perhaps online not unlike Bell Book and Scandal but more built from the material without the existing underlying narrative driving it).

The frozen car which is supposed to be all about cars and the environment and global warming was just silly. What an effort and then to put a freezer in the museum to house it? The frozen heart of the institution? Pretty (though hard to see that with the noise of the annoying art people seriously discussing it in the room--Are you going to write about it? Yes. Beautiful, really I think. Yes. I like it, don't you. Yes, important I think.) But it didn't make me think of cars and the environment at all. I thought of old fashioned frozen dinners that came on actual aluminum trays and those old ice cube trays with the lift handle for breaking the ice out. The only environmental thoughts I had about global warming were what is the carbon footprint of this folly?

2007-12-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

Height of the Holiday Season. Especially cold in SF these days. Wearing all those sweaters I think I really don't need here.

Being my usual schizophrenic self about writing, moving back and forth between embryonic new work and ancient but ongoing projects. The impending end of the year always increases my sense of urgency to accomplish something. Often resulting in a small publication. Not sure I will manage it this year but a few days left still to do a little manic publishing before I am off to Norfolk for the Holidays.

A pleasant surprise on the submission front. Following Dodie's suggestion I sent something off to 580 Split and just heard that they will be publishing "To Sex A Story: A San Francisco New Narrative."

Back to my latest project, "The Boy Brothel."

2007-11-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

An almost too perfect Fall day. A soft wind down of a Sunday afternoon in Cafe Flore.

Incredible to think how storied a history there is in this once used car dealership turned cafe. Most recently I've found Cafe Flore mentioned along with many long gone landmarks in Steve Abbott's writing. I have been busy collecting and reading his writing and am now on his last book, The Lizard Club which is so delightful that I do not want it to end. Abbott is an essential New Narrative figure having named the movement and done a great deal to codify its tenets in his Soup magazine. Along with Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone, Abbott wrote poetry first and then came to prose as part of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing.

These poet's relationship to language is I think an important aspect of their New Narrative writing's relationship to language in their fiction. As important as the counter impulse to the dictates of LANGUAGE POETRY, I think.

2007-10-21T17:18:00.001-07:00

As you can I am still struggling with my good intentions of frequent posting and my endless list of other to dos. And so far other to dos are more often than not winning. (Insert some vague promise to do better here).

A quick follow up note: Shelfari is so far just lingering in the background not yet deleted but also nothing I am doing anything with. Probably I will delete the account but I can even commit that much to it at the moment.

But back to the project of this blog if it can be called that, writing about writing.

Almost no change in the participants of the workshop from Summer to Fall makes it feel like a lovely long continuation from then. I have put in a few of the past assignments/experiments we have done as a group and am going to continue to post these with the goal of getting all of them (or at least all of them I can find) up online.

The last two assignments were:

1) Take a moment in time in a story and slow the moment down extending it out as long as possible.

2) Write a story in 60 words (prompted by the number of folks presenting the next time according to Kevin).

On the arts front, I attended the opening for T.V. Honey at the Silverman Gallery on October 11th. Curated by Larry Rinder (another Dodie connection/intersection), this video and drawing show was interesting and a totally fun opening. So unlike most of the literary events where everyone seems incredibly uptight and weird. Always a struggle at an opening to engage the art and be social, this was particularly difficult for the Lynda Benglis and Joan Jonas pieces which required a strong commitment that a few folks including Colter did make. But the work was really good and lots of folks. Nice fresh space in the now completely gentrified Dog Patch. Is there anywhere still rough in the city?

Upcoming this weak is Chris Komater's Geary Street show which I am very much looking forward to. Check it out here:

2007-09-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

OK so now my address book is getting spammed by Shelfari

Not easy to avoid inviting everyone you know even if you know they don't want to know or want to read what you read. Not so good and that you seem like one of those annoying people who spam all their friends. So far OK finding books to add but no perfect. Something other than relevancy is at work if the book is not currently available (or maybe not available on Amazon). For example, an author search for Steve Abbot puts a bunch of authors with Steve and or Abbott in their name ahead of many of his older books when he is clearly the closest author match for his own name. I have not done any review writing or other adding comments or notes and am too new along with my Shelfari friends to have a good feel for how much worthwhile reading I will discover this way.

2007-09-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Blowdryer is a Stealth Marketer for Amazon!

OK so maybe my favorite puck rocker/writer/performer/personality isn't really a stealth marketer for Amazon but she did get me to sign up for Shelfari which as you can see from the link is by Amazon. I guess it should be no surprise that Amazon would own a site for listing your books and recommending books to others. No wonder the buy the book option takes you there. Still apart from the rather aggressive hand over your address book and we'll invite all your friends effort to add folks to the site so far it is kind of fun adding books. And Miss Blowdryer has often steered me well in the book department. If it works out, I'll ad my little book list here.

Off to my office to work now. (That other kind of work that pays for everything else I do.)

2007-09-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

Experiments from Dodie Bellamy's Workshop

I've been meaning to put up some of the experiments from Dodie's workshop for a while and am now finally getting to it. I will continue to update these as I did back through my emails and find old ones. I will also put up new ones from the fall workshop.

Dodie's Original Description of the Workshop

Most weeks students will be assigned a short take-home writing
experiment which they will share with the class the following week.
Assignments will range from cut ups to exploring bodily sensations.
Assignments are geared towards the class dynamic, so they may
eventually drop away or they may continue for the duration of the
class.

Some of the Assignments by Email Received Date

Nov 21, 2006 4:00 PM

Write your earliest memory/memories.  You may do whatever you want
with this, but things to consider:  what was your relationship to
language back then and thus your relationship to perception?  Does
the memory have words or is it purely sensual?  How does the memory
come to you?  In clarity, flashes, blurry bits?  Do you tap into an
earlier form of thinking?  How solid is reality?

                      Jan 31, 2007 12:42 AM

Slow down time.  Take an event that happens very quickly and extend
the moment for one to two pages, double spaced.  Bring copies for all.

                      Feb 7, 2007 12:40 AM

raw data of sense experience

I've attached the exercise again as a Word file, in case you misplace
the handout.

from
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

Definition of qualia:

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers
over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem
to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases,
I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective
character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each
state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the
term 'qualia' (singular 'quale') to refer to the introspectively
accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.


Examples of qualia:

(1) Perceptual experiences, for example, experiences of the sort
involved in seeing green, hearing loud trumpets, tasting liquorice,
smelling the sea air, handling a piece of fur. (2) Bodily sensations,
for example, feeling a twinge of pain, feeling an itch, feeling
hungry, having a stomach ache, feeling hot, feeling dizzy. Think here
also of experiences such as those present during orgasm or while
running flat-out. (3) Felt reactions or passions or emotions, for
example, feeling delight, lust, fear, love, feeling grief, jealousy,
regret. (4) Felt moods, for example, feeling elated, depressed, calm,
bored, tense, miserable.

A tale about qualia:

The literature on qualia is filled with thought-experiments of one
sort or another. Perhaps the most famous of these is the case of
Mary, the brilliant color scientist. Mary, so the story goes (Jackson
1982), is imprisoned in a black and white room. Never having been
permitted to leave it, she acquires information about the world
outside from the black and white books her captors have made
available to her, from the black and white television sets attached
to external cameras, and from the black and white monitor screens
hooked up to banks of computers. As time passes, Mary acquires more
and more information about the physical aspects of color and color
vision. (For a real life case of a visual scientist (Knut Nordby) who
is an achromotope, see Sacks 1996, Chapter 1.) Eventually, Mary
becomes the world's leading authority on these matters. Indeed she
comes to know all the physical facts pertinent to everyday colors and
color vision.

Still, she wonders to herself: What do people in the outside world
experience when they see the various colors? What is it like for them
to see red or green? One day her captors release her. She is free at
last to see things with their real colors (and free too to scrub off
the awful black and white paint that covers her body). She steps
outside her room into a garden full of flowers. "So, that is what it
is like to experience red," she exclaims, as she sees a red rose.
"And that," she adds, looking down at the grass, "is what it is like
to experience green."

Mary here seems to make some important discoveries. She seems to find
out things she did not know before. How can that be, if, as seems
possible, at least in principle, she has all the physical information
there is to have about color and color vision -- if she knows all the
pertinent physical facts?

One possible explanation is that that there is a realm of subjective,
phenomenal qualities associated with color, qualities the intrinsic
nature of which Mary comes to discover upon her release, as she
herself undergoes the various new color experiences. Before she left
her room, she only knew the objective, physical basis of those
subjective qualities, their causes and effects, and various relations
of similarity and difference. She had no knowledge of the subjective
qualities in themselves.

Attached Assignment

From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze

by Katharine Wolfe

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=382

In the Critique of Pure Reason, as Daniel W. Smith explains, the form given to the phenomenal through reflection of the transcendental is what Kant calls the "object = x."[8] This is an empty form that only receives qualitative specifications when related to a multiplicity of phenomenal qualia held together through mental operations. White, thin, and sheet-like bark, dark-black knots, and a thin trunk, for example, are synthesized together mentally to form the object known as a birch tree. Moreover, Kant claims it is such a synthesis that allows the various qualitative impressions had of the birch tree, the sun, one's own hand, and more to be shared between the various faculties. It is because of this synthesis that the same qualia present themselves when, for example, I imagine a birch tree as when I conceptualize one. Pushing Kant's claim further, it might be posited that this synthesis is also what allows each of our various senses to present the same object to us such that when I put my hand to the white sheet-like bark of the tree, the feel of the bark indicates it is a birch tree I am touching, just as the visual appearance of its knots and leaves likewise indicates.

-------------

Perception's requisite of a sensible unit of measure, encountered in the aesthetic comprehension of the beautiful, sets up a path to the sublime. This two-way relation between the mental faculty of imagination and the sensible world opens sense experience to constant variation as new units of measure emerge. Thus the constancy of a shared sensory world is called into question. In a sensible world of constant variation, what could be constantly the same not only everywhere and for everyone but even for our own senses and faculties? Here, the sublime comes crashing in. The sublime is a mode of aesthetic comprehension occurring precisely when one experiences the harmonious relation between one's various faculties and senses being overturned. Indeed, an experience of the variation of a sensible measure is only a minor form of such loss. It can happen not only that sensible units of measure vary in accordance with the phenomena but, moreover, that for a particular phenomenon there is no commensurable measure. Further still, insofar as it is a sensible unit of measure that is necessary for the synthesis of empirical parts in accordance with an object-form, an experience of the sublime is one in which there is no synthesis. The parts cannot be counted, and a form cannot be produced.

----------------

According to Deleuze, it is from these ashes that arises the new kind of relationality indicative of James' radical empiricism. Whereas a traditional empiricism understands the empirical as the domain of discrete parts, at the heart of James' philosophy is the contention that relations are not derivations of a mental operation upon the raw data of sense experience, as Kant asserts by way of his account of syntheses. Rather, relations are themselves immediately sensed. Indeed, they are only sensed. Brian Massumi captures this insight in James: "relationality… registers materially in the activity of the body before it registers consciously" and thus "we do not run because we are afraid, but we are afraid because we run."[31] Immediately sensed relations, then, are of a world wherein, to follow the terms Rancière takes from Flaubert, the pearls not only individuate themselves but string themselves together.

Indeed, the pearls only individuate themselves in this very relationality. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is helpful here. He offers as exemplary the phenomenon of two contrasting colors appearing side by side, each intensifying each other and generating their value in this, such that, as Claudel writes,"a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more red."[32] Deleuze himself offers just the image Rancière employs to crystallize his reservations about the political potential in Deleuze's philosophy; the image of a wall composed of 'loose, uncemented stones.' Such an image emphasizes the import of interrelations to the being of the phenomena, yet these interrelations do not form a whole fusing parts into a proper and immutable place. Rather, they form a whole world of individuations existing only in relation with others.

-----------------

A wall of "loose, uncemented stones," in contrast, is a whole world outside this domain insofar as to divide these stones from their relations is to alter their nature. This world is the world of the percipiendum, that which must be perceived. Just as yellow and blue vanish from sight upon reaching a critical point of proximity with one another, changing in nature to produce green, relations of critical proximity produce every discrete element available to perception. 'Imperceptible' individuations constitute the perceived, and the perceived here forces itself upon our body just like a color so bright one cannot turn one's eyes from it.

September 17th 2007

Again--here is our assignment. It's based on our very interesting
discussion we had at our last session. Kevin's theory that all great
writing is reacting against something. Masha's discussion of writing
against various popular lesbian modes. This will be a two part
assignment. Here's the first part. Think of some writing that you
hate/dislike/that bugs you and write a page or two as much as
possible *in the mode* of what you dislike. The point is to explore
what you dislike from the inside. I'll give the second part of the
assignment on the 25th.

2007-09-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

Writing Against/Writing Toward (Last Workshop of the Summer-Tuesday 9/11/07)

Last night's final workshop wrapped up with a discussion of writing against or in opposition to other writing. Sparked by Masha's expressed discomfort with writing that seemed to offer her no place in its specific landscape and her written reaction to it, the conversation spanned techniques and strategies such as appropriation and collage and motivation writing against something else. Kevin suggested that no good writing or art came without being against something else.

As the conversation moved to specific discussions of what some members of the workshop wrote against, I found myself wondering what I wrote against or if I even wrote against anything. It seemed to me that my absent career and near complete non-publication argued for a strong anti-something aesthetic but against what exactly, success? Or did I write toward the past in a misguided study and pursuit of the elusive New Narrative?

And then in my pun to Stephen suggesting he inappropriate instead of appropriate I realized what it is I write against. I write against imposed limits on ideas, forms, content in writing. I write against the coy allegedly edgy experimenters who are oh so daring while risking nothing. It is the real risk, the danger suggested in New Narrative of putting the self, the body, biography into story without the safety of plausible deniability that drives me. It is this impulse that I write toward and the writing that is safe, contained and otherwise un-bloody that I write against.

2007-09-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

And an elegant evening was had by all...

A most musical and manic weak. Mama Mia with La Blowdryer who brought me the most delightful gift from her sojourn to Mexico and then an only in San Francisco opening night at the Opera. The season is certainly in full swing with lots more excitement to come and many more hard choices to make. Had to miss Kevin Killian's new play to attend the opera and will no doubt face more difficult choices to come.

Tonight is the end of Dodie Bellamy's summer workshop but despite dire warnings of no more to come (an oft repeated threat I think) the fall workshop begins in two weeks. The fall figs are in at the farmers market. The corn is past its peak if Sunday's sample is to be believed but the dry farmed heirloom tomatoes and luscious stone fruits are still filling the stands. Hard to really believe that we have an off season here but it will come eventually. Until then happy eating.

And so what does this have to do with New Narrative and Experimental Writing? Perhaps it is the personal in the composition. I am reading Steve Abbott's View Askew and delighting in the descriptions of visits to Stonestown Shopping center as performance and thinking about the way for a time the New Narrative crowd seemed to blur the borders of being and creating. (At least in the stories written down).

So Mama Mia was fun but not nearly the supercharged music and dance fest Missy Blowdryer and I wanted it to be. After nearly being sucked into the sticky floored all you can eat buffet at China Moon we found a delightful if not so very spicy Thai restaurant, Lalas, at the foot of McAllistar. Jennifer, suffering a bit from a family inflicted vacation cold, led me through the delights and travails of her Mexican adventure which seemed much more authentic than my not so long ago Spa fest courtesy of my boyfriends company. After dinner we were ready for a rollicking sensory sensation as the ads for Mama Mia seemed to promise.

Alas, perched up in the balcony we had to peer down at a good half an hour of plot building exposition with not so much singing and dancing. The music and dancing picks up as the show continues and does finally hit its stride with the big wedding party. But it is a longtime coming and the odd straight humor and weird quasi morality play plot had both of us longing for something a little queer or kinky. (If you're reading this JB, I owe you a dinner for this one.)

Now the opera was something else all together. Tough for the performance on stage to compete with the show before, during or after in the audience. Lots of green and blue gowns which I read the next day are the color institutes colors for this year. The luxurious silky mossy olivey green being driven by the Eco green trend and the liquid luxuriously light wet turquoisey blue driven by something else. The guest of a corporate sponsor (can't say who here), I attended a reception at city hall before (complete with Samson and Delilah themed dancers and lots of champagne) and a fancy dinner afterward. This was apparently the young trendy crowd as opposed to the old dowagers across the street.

Personally I loved the opera though I do agree with some of the criticism of Samson. I was saying all evening it was a very Cecile B. Demille sort of production and then the next day so it was described in the reviews. More on this an perhaps some edits to this post soon but off to the office now.

2007-08-27T19:08:00.001-07:00

Steve Abbott on New Narrative

New Narrative is language conscious but arises out of specific social and political concerns of specific communities. It may be foregrounded as in the work of Luisah Tiesh, Shirely Garzotto, Robert Gluck, and Judy Grahn or more buried as in recent work by Leslie Scalapino and Aaron Shurin. It stresses the enabling role of content in determining form rather than stressing form as independent or separate from its social origins and goals. Wiring which makes political and emotional (as well as linguistic) connections interests me more than writing which does not.

Steve Abbott, Soup Intro , SOUP 2

New Narrative marks an emotional moving forward. What Grahn and her feminist precursors Pat Parker, Alta and Sharon Isabell do in writing, graffitists do in painting: traditional subject/object boundaries blur. New Narrative shatters linearity , proceed by flashes, enigmas, and yields to a florid crying-out-theme of suffering-horror. Unlike the abject, however, which can't go "out" because it has no real self to go out from, New Narrative bridges out in its suffering-horror feature, to a future. Formalisms implode, stagnate. Where New Narrative parts with the older literature of the abject(Celine, Kafka, etc.) , is in its communal and political grounding.

Steve Abbott, Notes on Boundaries, New Narrative SOUP 4

2007-08-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

A Brunch Encounter

Bob (Robert Glück) came by our table at Cafe Flore to congratulate me on Bell Book & Scandal saying many nice and insightful things as he does so well. During our brief (chat our food has just arrived and Bob was on his way out) Bob asked who had put it together. In the course of my answer a series of connective loops emerged.

Chris Komater of course as Bob's once boyfriend. But then Emily Wilson (Chris's friend) whom I had met in Camille Roy's workshop (Camille one of the Bob's son's Reese's mothers) and one of the heirs to Bob's legendary workshop(s). Emily with whom I now participate in Dodie Bellamy's workshop (Dodie being an early heir/part of the original workshop scene at Small Press Distribution when it was a bookstore and mattered in the lit scene in SF. And then of course following David Christensen with whom I shared many of Dodie's workshops and an admiration for the whole original New Narrative crowd including Bob and Kevin Killian all of whom David discovered on his own unlike my drifting in through the SF State MFA program where I first met Bob.

And the connections within this set of people: shared projects, books, exhibitions and all part of the scene that sometimes does not feel as tightly bound as this encounter suddenly made it seem to me.

2007-08-17T15:57:00.001-07:00

Bell Book & Scandal

I began by writing plays or I as prefer to call them, performance texts. I had the good fortune to work with directors and actors who understood and supported my work, sparing me the complete loss of control writers often experience with writing for performance (live or recorded). Even better on a few occasions I was able to direct my own work and on the rarest occasions perform the work as well. And still I could not control what the writing became in the performance and had to muster cast and crew and props and sets to bring the work to an audience. And so I stopped writing performance texts and began writing stories. In these stories I try to create something dynamics of performance writing by appealing to a broader array of senses and sensibilities.

Until recently I have used the language of the stories as the sole tool to create this effect. In Bell Book & Scandal now showing at Marjorie Wood Gallery I've added pictures. In this case the language is simpler and the story depends upon the presence of the images for its complexity. Please check it out.

2007-05-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

The Spread

Tight blue carpeting, smooth slates at the split level entry, plastic laminates adorning the kitchen, light Scandinavian woods accenting white walls, and a colossal stone fireplace at the center stretching up to the two story high ceiling.

A thin cotton bedspread, a primary blue. Flat glass panel windows, spare elegance, marred only by the dead and dying flies. A solid wood door easily latched. The blond down dappling his ass, almost white with wonder.

Showering together, toweling off turning to jerking off, buckets of come and laughter. His lips pressing to mine. Awkward kisses. More giggles. Hard again, an attempt at penetration. Ouch. It hurts. Stop he says. But then he pulls me back to try again, until it's a perfect fit. My dick in his ass and he loves it, begs me for it. Tiny tins of Vaseline in every pocket, a dab will do you. Dry lips the ready response.

We don't talk about it, just do it every chance we get, in his room, in his father's study, even in the locker room at the club. We are wild, reckless and careful all the same, ready to pull out, zip up and compose ourselves in an instant. Boyfriends forever at fourteen, with acres of woods and secret places to play and hide. My parents glad to have me somewhere else. His father, never home, at work or off rebuilding another Porsche. His mother, happy to let us play outside while she plays rubber after rubber of Bridge.

Out of touch in the decade and more I have been in California living my gay life, my world and his collide again -- and he is there in a shelter magazine -- one of hundreds piled high on our San Francisco living room waiting to be dissected for useful art, helpful hints, design suggestions -- guides to renovation and restoration.

For years, my boyfriend of a dozen years has burned to restore his family's summer cottage in Connecticut. Over those years we've collected magazines with articles that might relate to the project. When we finally began designing the renovation, we had already become experts on all things construction. Still we bought shelter magazine after shelter magazine until we could only manage the magazines and continue to use our living room by cutting them up and keeping just the articles we thought we might use. Even that was a struggle to keep up with. The pile of magazines to be trimmed and sorted into folders always growing.

The issue of Dwell sat on top of the pile with a picture of a dock floating out on a lake that looked remarkably like our little dock.

I flipped through the magazine casually wondering what in this bastion of the modern could have anything to do with our historically sensitive restoration of an 1820ish Connecticut Cape, when I saw the spread.

At first I thought it was just a house like his, an architect's split level my mother called them. Very modern and expensive, she would say with obvious disdain. Self righteously rigid in her aesthetics, my mother has little patience for anything new and no patience for the modern at all. Colonial and traditional are her design mantras. The house I grew up in, a 1973 Garrison Style Colonial Revival, was her happy compromise. Traditional colonial lines with modern conveniences and, most important of all, enough square footage to give the children their own quarters.

As I turned page after page, I knew it was the house -- his house. The trees were older -- a few missing, the pond more of a swamp, not dredged in years but there still.

The house, opened up and spread wide, the pictures of our pleasure palace, the fort of our childhood, our sanctuary on the mountain, nestled amidst the old orchard, unfolding in a pornographic portrait of understated elegance.

Page after page of pictures. Each room exactly as I remember it and not at all the same. The style, high modern, late mid-century, a style I couldn't name then, only intuit, is undiminished in its simple beauty. The rooms are fresh, clean. Restored? It must be, though to me it is as though time has stopped and it is now then again, when we were fourteen.

But familiars are missing. The burn in the kitchen carpet from when we tried to make a romantic dinner while his parents were out. The sagging wood panel not quite covering the secret stereo. The smoke stains on the white fireplace stones. The cum stains on his sheets.

I turn back the pages to the article and read in earnest. The spread is half a dozen pages, filling the heart of the magazine, but is not an ode to young love or the perennial story of 'partners' renovating a house in Connecticut carefully encoded so as to not actually say gay. Called "Next Generation Modern," the story is about him growing up and reclaiming his family home. Bought back from the bank after his mother's death, brought back from years of deferred maintenance, rescued and restored, the house is testament to a new tradition of preservation focusing on twentieth century architecture. The love of the modern nurtured by those who grew up in its bounty.

I smile thinking, well done, and then, on the last page, mentioned in passing in the text but filling the final picture, they are there. A woman and two blond boys looking just like their father posed in front of the great white stone fireplace, a perfect portrait of suburban surrender.

What had made him change from the frisky fourteen year old rebel who would never join his father's firm, to the successful executive in the story? What had happened to the light lean blond boy who was going to be an artist and move to the city? Had he even gone to RISD?

I put away the magazine. The careful description of the ideal suburban home, decorated with simple modern elegance by the young blonde and beautiful wife of the handsome young executive are a false freeze, an ice storm overpowering the warmth of my memory.

So much time has passed that I'd almost forgotten us. But now, we're rewritten and undone. You forever fixed on those pages, in that new old house. Those pictures and those people more real than the night under the blanket in the back of your Dad's not quite restored Targa (just the top to go) when you whispered under the engine's rumble, "I love you."

2006-05-13T18:22:00.000-07:00

Porn Star Poet

Scott O'Hara-Frank O'Hara

Brothers Gay

Porn Star/Poet

So they say.

Wouldn't you know it.

Those Irish boys are so randy.

Without a priest handy, who's a boy to do?

Not true?

Not brothers?

Separate mothers?

Identities lost and crossed.

Conflated like a couple of nineteenth century Jacksons,

Plowing their fair share of America's fruited plain.

Is this a case for Eliot Ness?

Or maybe Herman Hesse?

Be well read in poetry and porn.

Know the twain of brain and brawn.

Each an O'Hara's spawn

shared but not paired,

In life and art,

In poetry and porn.