can i hotlink to your images? ARTS, mindtroll

How's the world? The world's pretty cold today. But I have "extra hot" turkinpippuri (pictured here; a Finnish candy that's like a salty licorice filled with hot powder), and I have a cup of tea, and I have an elderly senior computer overheating in my lap, so I'm not complaining.

I feel like the following paragraph should qualify for this week's ARTS, even though it's a hot mess 'cause some of the things to Attend and Read and See and Think are all mixed together. So I'll just give it to you straight, which is how you told me you liked it when you texted me at 4AM. Therefore:


I went to see Brett Saxon play earlier tonight at Goodbye Blue Monday, a great Bushwick venue. After his songs, which are getting more beautiful and complex each time I see him live, another wonderful artist played: Kim Boekbinder. Please go here and listen to Gypsy (and other songs also) right now. These songs were very good and Kim herself looked magical because she had on 289347 different sparkly pieces of outfit. You should also think about donating, if you like the music. There's an option so you don't feel like a mooch. I hate it when you feel like a mooch, silly monkey.

naked lady pictures, "feels like 8° F," and other bullshit

SoHo days don't happen often, because we're not the type to go shopping in places where the clerks look sour as Twang Pickle Salt, and because it's nearly impossible to find a good cup of coffee there without also running into a) huge, disaffected crowds, or b) disco beats that make drinking said coffee unbearable. But today, Rohin and I had a bit of good luck.

We went to see the Ellen Von Unwerth Fräulein exhibit at the Staley-Wise Gallery on Broadway. The exhibition, small compared to the epic cinderblock of a book put out by everyone's favorite purveyor of trashy picture books Taschen, was beautiful: the images span von Unwerth's career but in general tend to hover somewhere around classic kink. They have a fantastic, humorous sympathy to femininity that doesn't feel forced (see "Booty Call" on the left). Enjoyable to go see, but sadly it was in its last day at the gallery: otherwise I would tell you to go see it.

Afterward, on the recommendation of one Bookseller Diva, we got lucky with a disco-free, decent coffee. And then we walked until our toes felt numbish, but got inside before they turned itchy, "a sign of frostbite" according to Rohin (this may or may not be scientific). Later, I'm going to cook dinner for some friends and then we will probably go dancing (purely functional: kinetic energy helps a body remain warm). I'm pleased with this day and OK with the idea that the draft I've been working on for awhile now may not actually go anywhere.

ARTS: Some upcoming things and some contemporary things.

Attend:

• Poetry Time at Spacespace. I will be reading with John Sakkis and John Coletti on Saturday, January 16th at 8PM. Brandon Downing will project video. You can expect good times and poetry sympathizin' homies.
• TypewriterGirls Take Over New York at the Bowery Poetry Club on January 17th. These Pittsburgh poetry-performance juggernauts are always putting on awesome-sounding events that are too far for me to attend, and they're finally here in NY so I'm sure as fuck going. Please come with me. Let's make it a poetry weekend.
  

Read:

• You should read the new 6x6 from Ugly Duckling Presse. It features Emily Carr, Julia Cohen, Natalie Lyalin, Lee Norton, Dan Rosenberg, and G. C. Waldrep. Can you believe this is #19 in the series? And as gorgeous and cheap as only 19 can be (forgive me that; I just remember myself at 19). But seriously what's not to love.
• Garrett Burrell's chapbook The Plague Doctor, which once sold out both its runs, is now available on the internet and you should read it. It is newly accompanied with illustrations from local man Paul Tunis of Death By Orphans fame.
  

Think:

• Consider for a minute when you get on the subway and yammer on loudly about someone's sports-team-sweatpants-tucked-in-boots combination (hypothetical!) (maybe!) that that person might speak your obscure Nordic tongue. This happens a lot in the city. The city is like the internet, that way -- people say curious un-thoughtful things without regard. While I never hope that the internet becomes a police state, I do hope that people in life can think about the implications of what their words convey.
  

See:

• The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. This movie is full of Terry Gilliam weirdness, and as a prop-and-outfit enthusiast I have to say the costuming, by Monique Prudhomme, is fantastic. Here is an interview with her. The movie is in limited release right now, and for some goofy reason I went to the movies for the first time in like a million years (since I saw Let The Right One In). The flick is a bit heavy on the "rescue the little girl" motif, but it handles it in some unconventional ways and the little girl herself (a gorgeous Lily Cole, wow) is quite headstrong. Also, Tom Waits is in this movie, which is a good thing.
• This amazing shot-for-shot Lady Gaga parody made entirely with, from, and around just stuff in someone's house. As my friend Ellen said, "I'm sad I didn't make it."

And that's your ARTS for the week.

sorry if my blog feels a little like self-help

Sleep? Or not? I am a human zombie today. But it's so early! It's only 1130 in the PM and I don't normally get to sleep for an hour more. So instead I'll boast about my present to myself: I got home to a wonderful package in the mail, from Action Books, containing Lara Glenum's Maximum Gaga and Hiromi Ito's Killing Kanoko. Super excited about these both. I've been, well, not "sick of poetry" but not exactly in a state of supercreative fervor either. I'm running on vapors, basically -- now and again, there's a shudder of something fancy, but overall my the bulk of my vehicle is not propelling forth. So I'm using this opportunity to read.

Now, "The Passion of Lovers" is playing on the record. This is probably my favorite Bauhaus song. Tomorrow is Friday and I'm not fucking around -- Friday is the best. I'm going to put together a brilliant outfit ("Casual Friday" allows for a lot of creativity) and Be Optimistic.

Finally, New York: I will be reading at Poetry Time on January 16th at 8PM. The series takes place at Space Space in Ridgewood. Once they put up the details on the web I can tell you who I'm reading with, but for now, that's all I got. The reading happens at 8PM, at 390 Seneca Avenue -- closest to the DeKalb Avenue L stop. Poetry Time is probably my favorite series in all of the city and I'm super stoked. And you should know, too, that something else is in the works, some big fat um, intra-transcontinental events which I shall also announce here when I know their purpose and origin. When I know their velocity.

2009 in review

At the end of 2009 I peeled off my eyelashes and shed my gold dress and sat down and didn't cry.

I had a bad good year. I had a lot of serious, uncomfortable changes and realizations I wish I had not had but that were necessary to have. I started a great little job and curated a year of Bushwick Reading Series. I got in with the wrong crowd and got in with the right crowd. I met a lot of rocking individuals and individual rockers. I attended many concerts and had a great time at them, and I discovered new favorite bands. I practiced yoga. I realized my limit. I came to a reconciliation between my ideal and my actual body. I figured out I would leave New York if something asked me nicely enough. I founded a Twitter. I drank my first Cosmo. I tried fondue. I reexamined old photographs for inconsistencies. I wrote a small chapbook. I enjoyed the cold. I moved to a factory. I read some amazing books and found new amazing authors to marvel about, and I met many authors I admire.

I feel tired, but not too tired to smile, and look how beautiful the world is, outside.

for the perfume hater in all of us

I don't know if you know this about me, but I am a perfume nerd. I wear only a little bit at a time, and mostly for personal edification only, and generally I don't go for department store junk. But I am amazed what a perfumer can do, how the layers of a scent can unfold with weather and with time. For instance, my L'Air du Desert Marocain smells completely different in the summer (dry and spicy), fall (spicy and vanilla-y), and winter (weirdly masculine); I prefer it in the summer and fall, actually. Anyway, this fascination with olfactory subtlety gave me a good reason to venture out today, despite the sideways snow and all its ill effects. So, Eve, Aaron, and I finally visited Christopher Brosius's CB I Hate Perfume shop in Williamsburg.

I'll let you guys guess if this shop is:

A.) Beautiful
B.) Good-smelling
C.) Well organized
D.) All of the above

The selection there is just amazing -- I don't know why I never made it there before, why I only read online about the scents, because no matter how good your imagination is, it can do no justice to actually smelling the peculiar, artful blends that Brosius creates. I'd experienced several of the ready-to-wear absolutes before, but the individual accords were all new to me, and they alone took us like an hour to get through. It seems to me that many of them are just Brosius playing with scent memories: there's Wet Stone, which smells like water but with a slightly harder, metallic-yet-earthy edge; there are many food scents, including Cheesecake, Mulled Wine, and Roast Beef (which was kinda gross, and totally accurate). And the smoke scents are just beautiful: Burning Leaves smells like smoldering maple, smoky yet somewhat sugary, just on the verge of caramelizing. One of the accords was labeled "You Know This..." which prompted us to pick it up and immediately try to guess. Eve called it out, but once she did, it became obvious what the scent evoked. Mr. Brosius himself was there, and so was his old dog, who gave the meanest grandpa face when he got back in from his short walk in the snow.

If you are looking for a weird gift to give someone for the holidays, and you know approximately what they're into, please visit CB. I walked away with three (pictured): English Novel, a blend of (I think) smoke, parchment, vanilla, and ink. It's similar to CB's In The Library, but I'd already had a sample of that. And I got two others, but they're gifts so I won't reveal them here.

Post 180: Wherein I Arrange Your ARTS

Lots of things happened since November 15th.

- I moved
- I got acquainted with my new job

...being the two big ones. I have been slowly unpacking my very visible boxed and bagged goods into my mouse-hole of a room. I now live in an old doll factory; my bedroom has no windows, so I sleep a lot when I sleep. But I've been managing to make it comfortable, I think (and by this I mean "cluttered in the way that I like"). But still -- still. Moving and jobbing are no excuse to not continue with my palatable list of ARTS -- attend, read, think, see. Did you know that some have called ARTS the best thing on the internet? Some have been right.

Attend:

• Cellist Valerie Kuehne at Small Beast, a weekly cabaret curated by singer/pianist Paul Wallfisch at the Delancey. You should know Valerie from her performance with Brett Saxon at At-Large's reading a few months back. Several of you commented to me about how you got an instacrush on Valerie and her dread-flinging. How is that not a reason to go? That's tomorrow, December 14th.
• Projection: A Reading Series, curated by Zachary Pace at Center for Performance Research, "features text projected beside the reader to produce a unique sonic and visual experience of the literary arts." Nick Flynn, Jason Schneiderman, Diego Baez, and Joseph Fasano will read on Wednesday, December 16th. I like the CPR; we had some rehearsals there for Autumn's piece right before the &Now Conference. It's in the lower level of Brooklyn's first LEED-certified residential building, the Greenbelt.
  
• Jason Helm at Literary Death Match. J. Helm read an exuberantly filthy piece at Bushwick Reading Series this past weekend -- at the reading with Franklin Bruno, Farrah Field, and Joanna Penn Cooper. If you missed him, here is your chance to renew your interest in good fiction. Thursday, December 17th at Bowery Poetry Club -- and it's free, y'all, so don't go fussing about how you don't have any cashmoney millions.

Read:

• Dude, read Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature. This book has been recommended to me multiple times, but the extremely rocknroll Eve Bates brought me a copy of it to consume last week. This is the best book ever. Yes, it's that good. It's funny, like you wish you were. It's poignant, but not unbelievably. Wilson's prose is perfect for train rides, long stationary waits outside a door that you're hoping will open sometime in the next six hours, and laying in a bed you should unclutter or at least cover with a sheet, etc etc. I'm not sure why it didn't make a bigger splash when it jumped into the pool of fiction, because like an overly fat aunt drunk on Buttery Nipples, this book has both the bulk and personality.
  
• Like a strange bird on a warm day, Nicolle Elizabeth has landed on anderbo.com; you should get on that, if you didn't already.
• If you're into niche perfumers, and even if you're not, Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume gave a really interesting interview last year at Basenotes. Apparently he is a synesthete, and that makes smells tangible for him.
  

Think:

• Think hard about New Year's resolutions. Why do we make them? What is the appeal of making spur-of-the-moment promises, in a drunken furor, that will probably go unfulfilled? It would be best to begin thinking of it before the stupor, the malaise of the holidays, really sets in. I think making a plan would be best. I don't know about successful resolutions, as I've never made one. I wonder what kind would be easiest. It's impossible to attempt a total overhaul, but maybe something simple, with an expiration date (organize my closet by 1/15/2010) or something gently longterm (finish Infinite Jest by the end of September).
  

See:

• The video for Video Phone, by Beyonce, featuring Lady Gaga. Ok, the song itself is kind of not B's greatest, but the video is super interesting to watch for "the gaze" and the way they ironically and non-ironically play with it. Also, the men with camera heads are nightmare-inducing. But overall it makes me think of this:
• Beehived Finnish bombshell Laila Kinnunen's funny, theatrical version of "Hernando's Hideaway," from 1967. She acknowledges the idea of being watched, both on video and in the song lyrics, and she punctuates the song with appearances and non-appearances. This is a strangely modern take on the music video and yeah it's from the 60s.