the man who forgot to rock

I had become the Man who Forgot to Rock, and to remedy this situation, visited my favorite used CD shops and bought Green Day's American Idiot, and what you see above. Those are from "Long in the Tooth" on Sansom Street.

Are Green Day as despised as they were in the nineties? I like them. American Idiot is menacing and caustic, and it rocks, and it's topical without being preachy. Plus I love anything with a savor of narrative, and this seems to be a rock opera or concept album with recurring characters.

(Because I'm thrifty, and not clever or bold enough to steal music I am always late to buy stuff, waiting till I see it at the used CD shop).

Streetcore was also a good investment. I guess there is a bit of dead wood on it, like a bloated live version of A Message to You, Rudy, but All in a Day is a lot of fun and Strummer's cover of Bob Marley's Redemption Song is lovely. The album has an open, rangy, collage-like feel, which must be at least partly because other people had to finish it up after Strummer died.

What can you say about the Pogues?

I generally drift toward heady, moony music like Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, and Grizzly Bear:




That's Grizzly Bear at the Electric Factory. Lovely vocals, very spooky. I've seen a ton of great concerts this year so I guess I'll be posting my year's best soon.

World Fantasy Con, dawn redwood porn

Above is the bark of a dawn redwood, a tree which qualifies as a living fossil, like the coelacanth, in that it was considered extinct and only discovered in the last century by a Professor Zhan Wang--more on him later. The dawn redwoods on the campus of San Jose State, and San Jose's terrific collection of contemporary art, were two of the best parts of being in San Jose to attend the Last Drink Bird Head book release party.

For those unfamiliar with World Fantasy Con, one publisher told me it is the Frankfurt Book Fair of the genre world. This was my first--a great time to reconnect with Clarion teachers and fellow students, see people I send or might send stories to, make friends, carouse, and discover new writers. The first Outer Alliance World Fantasy Con dinner took place in the lobby bar on Friday; I hope this becomes an annual tradition.

Some new (to me) writers I heard read are Jesse Bullington and Saladin Ahmed--their readings were funny and smart--and W. H. Pugmire, who read a sonnet at midnight on Halloween that brought down the house. (The Bullington reading was his first ever, I think, which is exciting). My friend Kater Cheek read a story she wrote at our Clarion.

I have to post these signs on the doors to the vendor room, which I think are an homage to Magritte (?):

Friends have pictured Halloween at World Fantasy Con as a wild revel of costumes and disguises like the Masque of the Red Death, but almost no one dressed up--except for some steampunk fashionistas who crashed the con to serve tea and exotic 19th century snacks and show off their couture. I was more grateful for the tea than I can say.

I knew that the genre world was friendly and welcoming, but was not prepared for such extraordinary hospitality as I received at WFC. The guys who ran the con suite really took care of us and the parties were great--I consider myself a partyologist and can tell when a party is particularly well-planned.

Because I had such a nice time, this post must be very boring, so how about some more dawn redwood porn:

The ancestors of this dawn redwood were discovered in China in the 40s by Zhan Wang, a naturalist, conservationist, and inspired teacher of dendrology and forestry. Here's a quote from the pdf. I just linked to; it will give you a sense of Zhan's Indiana Jones-like panache:

The Central Forestry Experiment Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry appointed Zhan as the Forest Administrator of the newly founded Forestry Survey Department in 1943; he worked in that position until 1945. In this post, he led the first field expedition team to explore the forest resources of Shennongjia, Hubei (Hupei) Province in southwest China–known to the scientific community as a remote, dangerous and mysterious area (Liu, 1993). The trip was triggered by stories that the Shennongjia landscape may have hosted the ”Wild Man,” a legendary humanoid primate. Zhan’s report clearly rejected this hypothesis, but, meanwhile, concluded that the area is very rich in species and more complex than any other part of China. Today, this region is viewed as a "hot spot" of plant diversity.

There are dawn redwood fossils in North Dakota dating from the Miocene. To have them growing in North America again is quite a comeback. Thanks, Zhan!



(At the time of my writing this, Zhan Wang has no wikipedia! I tried all the alternate spellings. The person who writes and posts an acceptable first draft Zhan article will receive a stuffed penguin in the mail from me.)

These redwoods are the only photos I have from the con that are decent. They are a photogenic species. Hope you dig.

the spookiest place in Philadelphia

Eastern State Penitentiary is a great example of good intentions gone to hell. The Quakers believed that if law breakers were given enough time in solitary they could commune with their inward light and it would heal them. Charles Dickens visited the penitentiary when he came to Philadelphia and thought the Quakers were out of their minds. He was right, of course--many of their inmates went mad. This is a rare example of the Quakers being wrong about anything. When they went wrong, wow.




I was a production assistant for an independent film that shot at cool crumbling historic sites all over Philly. The film was never released and for that we can all be grateful-- unless you admire the much-maligned nazi sluts from outer space genre.

One of the sites we shot was Eastern State. This was the first time I was inside the (intentionally) frightful fortress walls of the place.



This was before Eastern State was stabilized and opened for the public. The ghosts had the run of the place. I do not consider myself particularly sensitive to the spirit world but I have not been in any location that gave me such a terrible feeling of hopelessness and despair. It is possible that this feeling was nothing more than my febrile imagination dwelling on what I know of the history in the presence of this architecture of confinement.



Even so, I know a terrific ghost anecdote from an actor friend of mine that took place during the performance of a play at the penitentiary. One of the cast was down a corridor listening for his cue. He felt a hand slap down on his shoulder and brushed it off, thinking someone was telling him it was time for his entrance. He realized he was alone. After the play the other actors asked him why he had come on so early and thrown off the scene.

The prison is now one of the best-interpreted historic sites in the area. There's a terrific audio tour narrated by Steve Buscemi with input from some of the inmates and guards.

Here's Al Capone's cell:



And I'll leave you with one of the terrific art installations you can see when you visit. The day tour is great, and the haunted house--Terror Behind the Walls--has been rated top in the nation. Happy Halloween!

daruma for Jane

A daruma is traditionally given to little boys in Japan, though increasingly there are "princess" darumas for little girls. What you see above is a bastard Western version of a daruma that I made from a Mini Munny. Look at the image on the screen below to see a bona fide daruma:




Next to it is the Mini Munny--here just a doughy homunculus awaiting an identity, which it will receive in a tickley encounter with some dry erase markers from the white board in my kitchen.

Since a daruma is just supposed to be a head only, I should have ripped the body off and thrown it away to make the daruma more accurate to itself and to the occasion of my geographic separation from my friend Jane. She is moving away--losing her is like losing a part of myself, or several parts of myself. An elbow, ear, and prostate, for example. Think how that would feel!




Mini Munny dolls come with a surprise accessory--Jane open that and enjoyed the virgin surprise. It was glasses! Synchronicity at work!

When you get a daruma, you are supposed to color in one eye while thinking hard about a wish. When the wish comes true you color in the other eye. There are a lot of darumas out there with no depth perception. If Goonies had been made in Japan, the whiny kid who wanted his wish back would have been fiercely erasing the eye of a daruma instead of kicking coins around the bottom of a wishing well.




When you think of it, the angry, wish-kicking boy at the bottom of a well is a pretty good metaphor for our civilization. But the well would have to be an oil well, to symbolize our oily foods, oil-dependent transport, and oleaginous entertainments. I drive a car, so I am in the same metaphorical well I have placed everyone else in.

With its body and movable arms, Jane's is an action daruma. Possibly the first. Perverting one Asian tradition has whetted my appetite, so I may make a sand mandala next and affix it to the ground with spray glue. Death to impermanence!




Seriously, I hate impermanence and resist the notion that accepting it is good for me. It's healthy and natural to rage against any dying of any light. In Japan, if your wish doesn't come true, you may take your one-eyed daruma to a temple to be burned, in a ceremonial surrender of your wish. But, American for better or worse, I will not surrender my wishes without a fight--or at least a long, adamantine sulk.

I wrote "daruma" on the back of Jane's, as you can see above, so she would remember what it was--memory being our final grace against impermanence. If I were a kabbalist, the name on the daruma would animate it to do Jane's bidding--kicking down obstacles and scooping up wishes in its giant doughy arms.

rose hips and a witch in the family

I had always thought of my grandfather's second wife as a kind of a morose beatnik--she wore black and got my grandfather to put on turtlenecks and grow a goatee and did up his house in a Roger Corman Spanish medieval style with huge metal lanterns and a real halberd leaning against the mantel. All that might have suggested a darkness of spirit beyond mere goth affectations but we mistook it for ambiance.

It was only after the divorce that Vera's occult interests surfaced--in the form of a curse or threatened curse on my family. It would be neat to know more details of this--what tradition did she employ--did she do it herself or hire an expert? Technically none of us believe in curses but I know more than one of my grandfather's descendants has been a little spooked by it. In this Vera chose an excellent revenge. Real or not, I am thinking of her and her curse today. It is always better to deal with negative emotions in a constructive and open way, but if Vera foresaw the way her maleficence would embed itself in my family's consciousness she was comforted. To that I say, good on you, old girl.

It was from witchy granny Vera that I learned that roses have hips. She took rose hip supplements among a host of other botanical tinctures. This morning I walked into the back garden of the house where my camerado stays when he's in the city, and saw a bobbing bough of roses and hips above my head. The rose hips looked delicious, like crab apples, so, curious, I took a bite.

And spat it out. Though the texture was pleasantly appley--a rose is an apple's cousin--I think rose hips aren't in season yet. Maybe after the frost? The one I sampled tasted like an unripe tomato; the juice was unapologetically bitter and I understood why many believe rose hips to be poison. Because they are loaded with nutrients and abundant in gardens it would be nice to learn how to prepare rose hips. I found a recipe for rose hip mead here and for rose hip jam here.

The Call of the Wild

I walked across Birnam Wood to meet a friend at the diner and listened to the last chapter of The Call of The Wild on my headphones. Jack London may be more unsentimental and heartier than Hemingway. Call's hero, Buck, is a dog who lived a plummy Edwardian life before getting shanghaied into a dog team. He has ongoing rivalries with other dogs on the team, and owners of varying characters. His penultimate owners are a woman, her brother, and husband. Insights and ironies fly as London reveals the personalities of this doomed trio--opening the the last quarter of the book with a tragi-comic existential grandeur that, judging from London's reputation as a pretty-good writer of dog stories for kids, I had not expected.

Buck's final owner is a tender, stoic superman who would make Ayn Rand blush and giggle. The temptation to give away what happens in the last chapter is killing me, but I will say only that every rugged queer boy will find it inspiring, particularly if he is a student of William Burroughs.

A fascinating aspect of the book is Buck's ability to project his imagination through epochs of evolutionary time--or draw on the collective unconscious--to become the occasional companion of a shaggy human ancestor. London may be using these episodes to think about how man and wolf domesticated themselves in tandem, but the device is so unexpected and weird it casts a lovely lurid glow over the whole narrative.

outfest and giovanni's room

In Philly we do the Pride thing in the spring; it costs ten bucks and you are corralled on the waterfront with all the other Prideful. We do Outfest in the fall, as a street fair in the Gayborhood; it's free and it's a nice way to welcome the season and connect. This year I ran into local gay speck fick writer Steve Berman and got the books and magazine you see above. Steve is the editor of the quarterly Icarus, with that beautiful cover, and the annual Wilde Stories--I read Hal Duncan's lovely stories last night and today, and they helped me answer the question that recurs in my mind with the baleful regularity of Poe's over-exposed corvid:

Can speck fick be as deep and useful as the valorized lyrical realism that lays exclusive claim to the title "literary?"

with a resounding yes.

My chief goal in Outfesting this year was to attend the Giovanni's Room bake sale:



I did not find the peach but met some Daughters of Bilitis who had baked everything you see above--there was a lot more than what I got in the picture and some of it was vegan. The chefs were cool: they said I could come to their book club as long as I wasn't just coming to mess with them.
I thanked them and I also thanked them for being leaders in advocacy and tending the wounded brethren during the darkest days of AIDS. No, I didn't actually say that last part, but I feel it, so I'm saying it now: Thank you, Sapphic Saviors.

I had some kind of healthy fruit loaf because I am a health nut; it was terrific, and cost two bucks but I gave them five. Is there no end to my goodness?





When I was an embryonic queer boy coming into town to see art films with my writing class friends the sign above was for me, and I am sure for many others, a signal fire for a place I wasn't sure I would ever visit. I was a religious fanatic and though protestant aspired to sainthood. On the other side of the warrior princess was a naked Arcadian youth waving a flag. (I couldn't get a shot of him on Sunday because the store was crowded). The youth on the sign looked like a wholesome, innocent ganymede, and I suppose I saw in him an idealized alternate self.

That's the second story at Giovanni's Room and it represents what the internet can never entirely replace: a meeting place consecrated to queer minds. I heard Samuel Delany read by that hearth and afterward talked with him. I am pleased Philly still has a queer reading room and book shop, and grateful that the community is mobilizing to help Giovanni's Room pay for the repairs to their wall:




which are completed, but not yet paid for. Iconic queer bookshops are disappearing all over; I hope we can save ours.