Summer Mix Tape, 2007

Summer summer summer! Click to download!

1 - Spritz!!! Spritz!!! -- Minus the Bear
2 - If You Can't Say Love -- Visionaries
3 - This Ain't No Beach Party -- Cruiserweight
4 - No Ordinary Love -- Deftones
5 - Stop Acting Like You Know More -- Peachcake
6 - Give Me Every Little Thing -- The Juan MacLean
7 - Back in the Day -- Erykah Badu
8 - Belleza -- Charanga Cakewalk
9 - Cha Cha Cha -- Jimmy Luxury
10 - One Evening (VV Mix) -- Feist
11 - In My Arms -- Mylo
12 - Pin Your Wings -- Copeland
13 - Lotion High -- Greenskeepers

You can make yourself a CD insert with this cover I made--the photo is from the miserably hot F Train platform on 23rd Street.

See how good I am to you.

New Haircut(e)

Some Happenings

-I got a new phone. Now what will I do come September when this class action lawsuit goes through?
--I got a new haircut(e). It's a Mohawk, basically. Emphasis on the 'mo.

--We went to the Pride Parade today. There were so many churches. Oy. Who knew the gays went to freakin' church so goddamn much?

--Someone walked up to the syrup stand and asked me: "What is a petri dish? I heard about it on the radio."

--Kip wants me to place a $350 order from Prevail Sport, whose catalog I stole from my PO Box. (I don't think so.)

--Kip and I are going to Tennessee next week, plus Dollywood. Be jealous.

--Quote of the Week goes to Alice, at VUE: "When I went to the allergy doctor, someone had a dog in the waiting room. At the allergy doctor! Don't you think that's not something you should bring to the allergy doctor?!?! OH, and GET THIS, his name was Peanut."

Greenmarket Photo

My friend David Bivins, took this photo of me and Andrea at the Greenmarket. I had forgotten he took it at all--people take pictures of us all day, of the stand, of the table, of their wives and sisters standing behind the table with me. But this one is special.


Check out the rest of David's pictures on his Flickr. He rocks. I'm amazed at how he manages to make regular, everyday street scenes look like movie sets with flawless lighting. His pictures do what pictures are supposed to do--make you notice things.

from Orange

We’re pushing our bikes up this giant hill, and the bugs are swarming around our heads. Hot Southern summer, with salty beads of sweat around our brows and upper lips. Slapping our necks with our dusty hands, smashing black gnats. Sometimes one will fly into your mouth. But we don’t care when they do. And when we get to the top of the hill we find a beat-up old cassette tape, cracked open and spilling its threads of sound onto the pavement. And we unwind the tape, a huge, hundred-foot string. And we snap it in half at the middle, tying the pieces onto the seats of our bikes, and ride back down the hill, watching the glittering of who knows what on cassette flowing behind us like a tail, like a stretched-out wish, like a thin brown destiny.

We’re driving a beat-up white car through a rainstorm at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of Mississippi—or maybe we’d made it to Alabama without seeing the sign, or maybe we were still in Louisiana. And the rain is coming down so hard that we can’t see the street in front of us. And we’re both thinking tornado warning for upper and lower Alabama, but we don’t say it out loud. So for three hours we travel what adds up to be forty-two miles on the low-shoulder freeway. We pass a few cars parked on the side, determined to wait it out. And in those three hours, the loud, wind-shaken hours, we don’t speak. I squint, my eyes low along the top of the dash, and he drives, tapping the gas pedal, not braking, easing on, rolling back toward home. Then, crossing the state line, we see the brightness of the morning. I look over at him, he stares ahead.

We used to take drives out to nowhere on weeknights. He’d smoke and we’d put a mix tape on and take turns talking. About what we wanted to do when we grew up, even though we were sixteen and didn’t know what we wanted to do when we grew up. And didn’t really care. And what we wanted to do would change every few miles, every few minutes. And we were grown up already. We’d pass rusted farm machinery, crumbling frames jutting out of the browning grass, leaping out of the dirt. Out near the deserted factory that you’d ride past if you went far enough. He’d take pictures of me in front of it. He wouldn’t let me take pictures of him, he said he didn’t like his picture taken. I wouldn’t smile because I knew what we were doing was serious. And he knew it was serious. And so he didn’t ask me to smile. We didn’t have to pretend. It was too hard to pretend. And mostly it still is.

You Know How it is with Power

Manuel wrote to me:
You know how it is with power--you can't hang on to it.
Yeah, I thought, just like
love and beauty and weather and
dandelion puffs and free space on your hard drive.
And rivers and borders and good intentions
and every other fucking thing.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

Today Kip and I are off to visit Jennifer at the new Circus Amok office/storefront space. How very exciting. We managed to trade some office space for a couple of short performences/happenings, which is fabulous. Don't you love to barter?

Then I have to deliver syrup to Egg, a charming, cozy, delicious, friendly, warm, affordable, happening breakfast spot in Williamsburg. If you go, and I think you should, be sure to bring several of you, so's you can try different things. For one, the "country ham biscuit," which their menu describes as "country ham from col. bill newsom's hams in princeton, kentucky, served on a biscuit with homemade fig jam, grafton cheddar, and a side of grits." How can you pass that up? And that's fig jam from Beth's Farm Kitchen, a Greenmarket institution, by the way. Tell Maggie, at Egg, that I sent you.

We're also going to see Elizabeth Streb's company in their most recent Slam Show, and then of course, this evening, how could you forget, THE TONYs.** This year, I don't really care, except that Cristine Ebersole has to win for Grey Gardens, and Kiki & Herb have to win for "Best Special Theatrical Event." It would be nice to see Vanessa Redgrave win for "The Year of Magical Thinking," even though she probably won't, and the play is somewhat problematic--and I am still one of Joan's disciples.

And thank Witold for this game, which he described as "dumb, but highly addictive."

**Updated: The TONYs sucked. Kiki & Herb were passed over for--no joke--a ventriloquist act. And the rest of the show was about the boringest I've ever seen. But Fantasia sang toward the end, and she blew the roof off.

Solves All Problems of Life*

*courtesy of Mr. Tumminia

Literary Queers Paint Town Pink, er, Purple, uh, I mean, Drunk

Rob & Ted, the editors of the shit-kickingest anthology, From Boys to Men, were in town over the weekend for (among other things) the Lambda Literary Awards, where the anthology was nominated. (We lost to Love, Bourbon Street, an anthology about Gays/New Orleans/Katrina, which is a good book to lose to, if you have to lose.)

Kip and I had planned to meet them for beers at the Dugout--which quickly turned into beers at the Dugout, followed by a walk/limpish gay run in the pouring rain to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, where we had a shot of tequila, margaritas and a very un-weight-watchers-friendly dinner. I had the crackermeal catfish, which was fabulous. Plus a bit of the gluey (but still good) rice and the broccoli which served as the accompaniments.

Curtis was also there, who I know from my days long ago with Jason, and it was nice to spend some actual time with him--the last time I saw Curtis he was running through the Greenmarket to somewhere. Also with us was Vestal McIntyre, a writer also in From Boys to Men, and the author of You Are Not the One. Vestal instigated the tequila at The Cowgirl. But he is fabulous. And lovely, and funny, etc.

Then we ended up at The Eagle.

Ted wrote in his post about the evening, "We saw some amazing, somewhat unpleasant couplings," and I think that's the best way to describe what we witnessed. We also talked about some crazy-ass-shit that you might do if, say, given large amounts of cash. $10,000 kinds of things. There were other dollar amounts thrown around, other crazy ideas, but I have forgotten them. $10,000 might be a lot of money--but I'm not telling you what one would have to do to earn this money. (It might be less, in reality. How can one know such a thing?)

I so rarely "go out" anymore--what with my seventeen jobs and, oh yeah, that novel I'm trying to write--so this was especially awesome evening.

Some kind of night, right?

(PS - I stole the pics from Ted.)

Bubbles on Broadway

After the market today, I was driving down Broadway heading to Brooklyn. Just as I crossed Prince Street, a man selling automatic bubble makers stepped into the crosswalk and pointed the plastic pistol into the air.

It was a long, hot, tedious day at the market--the kind where people ask you inane questions all day and then don't listen while you answer them, and thus have to ask you a similarly-worded but nonetheless equivalent question immediately following. For example, take this exchange, which happened no less than three times:

Customer: "Do you have Grade B maple syrup?"

I point to the bottles, jars and tin cans displayed on the table.

Me: "Yes, I have it in all the sizes you see here."

Customer: "Do you have it in this size?"

Me: "Yes."

Customer: "Do you have it in this size?"

Me: "Yes, I have it in all the sizes you see here."

Then there were the fiddleheads, which, by the way, (for the last time,) taste a little like asparagus and a little like an artichoke. They look strange--one of those seldom-eaten vegetables that are purely local, purely seasonal, and which drive the tourists into fits of surprisingly dynamic repulsion. I like selling them, for the most part, but it never fails to surprise me that people are so plainly--so shamelessly--shocked to learn that there is something in the universe that they've never seen or heard of. I can't help but imagine these people at the dawn of time, or witnessing Galileo's revelations. Such rousing unveilings that their crainiums just erupt.

So. Back to this bubble-gun pointed in the air.

I watched as the bubbles began, small glassine spheres drifting first up, then across Prince Street, lifted by the warm subterranean winds of the city. Then the pedestrians, forty--fifty, maybe seventy--of them, stepped off the curb, and walked directly into the peculiar, soapy wave of bubbles, like a school of fish. People reached their hands out, bursting most, but some of them had flown just out of reach. And for that moment--even my windshield was beginning to slick over with dozens of exploded bubbles--we waved our hands in the hair, stretching, smiling, our city-edges sanded off. We were loosened.

Then the light went green and I stepped on the gas.