Tonight is my 10 year highschool reunion, and while most people will spend the night remembering the good 'ol days, and reflecting on the carefree days of yore, the days before marriage and children, I am preparing to make a hilarious appearance with my bestie Heidi, and then I plan to leave out and go hang with the folks I really want to see.
Today I tried on my homecoming tiara, and looked at some totally horrific photographs of me from a dance freshman year. A hilarious dress from the 60s that I'd found in a thrift shop in Minneapolis, white tights, electric blue platform shoes, NO makeup, and horrible skin. Let's NOT remember the good ol days. I mean, let's remember them, but like all good things, only in moderation. I got through one box of photos from highschool theater and Junior and Senior prom, and then I was all, "I'm out."
I will enjoy my time tonight seeing everyone I forgot about and people who I'm sure have forgotten about me. We will all awkwardly talk to each other while eating stale pretzels and drinking flat sodas. Then we'll all write on Facebook about how we had the best time ever and how it was great to see everyone, and then we'll wake up, but the top will still be spinning. IT WAS ALL A DREAM!
Just kidding. Have fun tonight everyone, whatever you may be doing. I love leaving because it makes the return that much sweeter. I hope your babies look like monkeys.
This year has made me feel like I'm 20 years old again. It has been nothing but insanely fun and bizarre adventures from asking a cab driver to "drop us off in the alley behind the Double Door" on New Years Eve to my experience last week in the isolation tank. Everything in between, too many adventures to remember, but the ones I do remember make this year, this summer, this time in my life, in all of our lives, exciting again. It's that new life smell. We're all almost 30, some of us are closer than others, and while every once in awhile, we feel the overwhelming pressure of the fact that we are almost 30, we seem to have forgotten, or at least made the decision that what we are doing right will not be what we're doing in another 30 years, and this idea, to me, is totally comforting. I can get all of my 20s out of my system in the next two years because as soon as I turn 30, things will be different for me. For you. For all of us. Our lives with change, but it will be ok, because we are not meant to stay this way forever.
Why.So.Serious??? On Friday, I went to see a preview of my friend's performance piece. It was so different and inspiring to see his work in person, and not just as a photograph, or as some kind of an oral history lesson. Previously, I had a hate-hate relationship with performance art for many years. It wasn't until I took the time to hear everyone out that I began to understand it, and then...I started to like it. After I liked it enough, I loved it so much I wanted to marry it. It seemed to me like the purest form of expression. More expressive than even some of my favorite paintings. ESCANDALO! I understand that art in any form is a deeply personal and intimate thing, and if you make something out of anything, paintings, sculptures, words, yourself, you form a relationship with your creation. Sometimes when it's over, you want to immediately destroy it, but then there are the times you make something so special, you can't let it go. You dig your fingernails in and the next thing we know, you're living in the Misty Mountains, and asking a furry footed midget, "what's taters Precious?"
What I love love LURVE about any sort of performance art is the impermanence of it. Art museums are tombs for artwork. Sure it's fun to see Monet's "Water Lillies" or Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," but what else? Most people I see wandering through museums pass right by all these incredible pieces, and I can see them mentally checking it off of their list. There isn't any emotion, no connection, no immediacy of a situation. So what?
I saw Marina Abrovomic at the MOMA in New York doing a show called The Artist is Present. One part of the piece took place in the middle of the room, and you could wait in line to sit across from her and stare at her for as long as you wanted. She did this for about 2 months. If you didn't see it the first time, you will never see it again. Ever. Chris Burden stood in a room and had someone shoot him in the arm. Ladies and gentleman, one night only.
A few days after seeing Matt's show, I started thinking that what I love about art, and why I intend to spend the rest of my life in a relationship with art is because I am in love with the impermanence of it. Even if I were to have Matt perform this piece again, it would never be the same show. Seeing the same pieces hanging in the same places in the same museums is tedious and boring. What makes these adventures so exciting is the fact that we will never ever do them the same way again. Last night, I got into some hood rat stuff with my friends, ended up in some awful bars, drank some truly foul liquor, and then somehow made it home. That night will never happen again. Even if I went to every single place I went to last night, in the exact order I arrived, it will never be the same. Routines are necessary, and I understand that. I have them. I indulge them. I hate them.
To find the absolute adventures for the rest of this year, we should, like any great performer, act as if we are unaware of an audience. This is our time to be free. Take a chance to laugh out loud if you think it's funny. If you think I'm a dramatic idiot who looks too far on the inside too much. Do it. I dare you. Have emotions in public and share them with people. Speak words you actually mean, and make art in any form that will degrade and someday turn to yellowed dust in someone's alley. Art shouldn't be forced to last forever, and we should feel sad for paintings locked in museums. They are ghosts of ghosts who cannot die. Create to destroy.
Until then, our adventures continue, and if we're all going to be seen together, we need to all be seen wearing these.
Tomorrow I am taking a dip in a salt pool. A friend of mine at work was telling me about her experience in the isolation tank and it sounded like what I want part of my own personal pan-Heaven to be like. I understand why it seems weird. It is totally weird. You get inside of some 8' X 4' tank and float in the dark for an hour. You're completely alone with whatever is going on inside your gourd piece and there is nothing to distract you from anything! ZOMG!
My main reasoning for this dip trip is that I can never relax. Anywhere. I go on vacations to beach resorts and I'm on my phone, reading magazines, reading news feeds, commenting on goddamn Facebook status' while I'm supposed to be Kentucky frying my skin off on some nice ass beach zone. I drink gallons of espresso all day long. I need to chill and normally I can't. Shit up top gets real real fiery and intense and I need some isolation. I also love being in the water whenever I can be, so, while this isn't the beach, it's water and I'll be floating my ass off for an hour, and when I get out, I hope to return at least once a month for the rest of my life.
Since I'm going to be experiencing some weird solo MIO times tomorrow, I wanted to let you guys in on the biggest piece of trivia about me. Save it for the future when there is one Jeopardy show dedicated to me and Trebek is a robo. Final Jeopardy.
My favortie book of all time is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. One of the greatest novels of anyone's time. I remember trying to find a copy at somewhere gross like Borders and it was listed under "Horror." I called that bookseller a "horror," and wrote a letter to their corporate offices!!! Just kidding! I wrote that H8 mail to Phaidon! I digress. Here is a man, Dr. Frankenstein so lost and tragically marred by the events of his life that he becomes obessed with the creation of this monster. It's a situation not unlike the call and response attitude associated with the triple dog dare. Or really any situation when you want to do something, people claim impossibility, and then just to prove to them that you can do it, you do. The success of your endeavors is always a personal journey and no one can convince you one way or the other. Frankenstein brought inanimate pieces of human wreckage to life, and then immediately had creator's remorse. He destroys himself and the life of the thing he creates and I want to hug and punch at the same time.
At the other end is the monster her creates. A thing so horrible and grotesque that even it's creator shrinks back in disgust after he's realized what he's done. The chapters where we are first able to get inside of the mind of the monster we find it out, homeboy got mad problems son! Can you even imagine it? You wake up and you're made out of pieces of other deadzos??? You probably smell terrible, you look like something somebody barfed up, and you were ever so cruelly gifted with enough cognitive ability to recognize these things. The monster lives inside of his head and a body that terrifies all those sensitive ladies and children dickin' around Geneva.
Both Frankenstein and his monster live in a populated world, but neither of them can exist inside of it. The only way they can be anything is if they forget about the rest of the world, and disappear from it. We all go down together, me and this book that is. I would run into a burning building to save every copy I have of this thing.
I'll be thinking about it all day tomorrow afternoon when I am floating away on inside of a Space Tank.
I used to love knowing everything about music. I was in a bunch of shitty bands when I was a teenager, I sang my ass over all over the theater, I stayed up every sunday night to watch Matt Pinfield's ugly bald ass talk about the Portishead, Tricky, and other random 90's bullshit music that I still like, because let's face it you guys, those were really the days. The fashion was impeccable, we all had great hair, and the music we listened to was vastly superior to that of today's non-stop fuckery.............................ZOMG you guys! I am totally J/K!!!! I will give it to a few 90's bands, but let's just say that I am thankful for art school because without that we wouldn't have our Crystal Castles, Of Montreals, and Vampire Weekends. Take your parent's money and run foolies! That. Is. WHAT'SUP!
What's really up, is that it's summer, and summer means summer jams. While Gawker's talking about all the songs they wish would burn and die forever, I'm talking about crazy great jamz that we need to be listening to on repeat all summer long because we work hard and we deserve to drink 15 beers after work with our crazy friends, listen to the prime cutz of summer, dance in our kitchen, scream along, and then have our yuppie neighbors call the policia because, let's face it, these assholes are mad they had a baby and can't hang anymore. We are worth it in '010.
These are my picks for what we should be screaming to the DJ at Berlin through that anti drunk person song request fence they put up. Don't they know who I am(the gay in the fur at the door always remembers my wig)? Some of the videos wouldn't let me embed their asses, or they don't have a video for....THE REEEEEEEEMIXXXXXXXXXX!
Royksopp Feat. Robyn "The Girl and the Robot" I'd like to call this one the suprise jam that I initially thought wasn't that good, but the more I listened to it, the more I liked it. You can watch the video here. Nothing is more appropriate that the love between a girl and her robot. Mmmmmmmmmm....inter-intelligence romance.
Dragonette "Pick Up the Phone" Richard X Remix I literally have been listening to this song on repeat every morning on my way to work. It is my personal theme for the Euro-trash Starbucks on Rush and Walton. It's the kind of jam that keeps my sunglasses on inside of an already poorly lit room. The non-remix video is here.
Discovery "I Want You Back" I was at work a couple of weeks ago, and this song came on, and I was all, "Wait, this is...is this? Wait, a Jackson Five cover?" This is a Vampire Weekend side piece, and one that I would listen to on repeat all day errrrrryday if I could. Jam.Of.The.Year.
Also, here's a video of some dumb son of a bitch dancing his azzz off in his anti-girl zone. Greatest hits include: Star Wars Poster(I watch Star Wars literally once a week! Maybe he's my boyfriend!), dancing with his kitty kat, a boomerang. You're welcome.
Katy Perry "Electric Feel" MGMT cover I can't help but like this broad. She looks like the blow up doll version of Zooey D, and she is boning the grossest man alive, yet, I still find myself listening to her effin' songs all day long. I love MGMT, mostly because they look like gross coked up hippies(PERFECT FOR MOM AND DAD!!!), and this was my jam of last year. Ms. Perry's version is like a nerve pill for the soul on a hot summer day.
If you're curioso about what your brain looks like on the inside when you're tripping ballz, here you go. I would. With just about everyone in that band.
Beyonce feat. Lady Gaga "Videophone" I know this song is not knew, but I am hypnotized by this video, and the song is the perfect slutty girl jam at the club. B's videos are like a stripper dance class. You watch them enough and you can pop dat azz like her in NO TIME! Also, Lady Gaga is a terrible dancer, so if you are not that rhythmically inclined, just jerk your body around and make weird hand motions like Gaga. I serve it up like a bitch on the Price is Right.
La Roux "In For the Kill" Sometimes late at night on one of the international news channels my non-cable gets, they show music videos. It's like MTV 2. Kind of. I happened upon this gem one night, and now it is in my constant rotation. I am so into this chick that cut all the rest of my hair off so I could look like her. She. Is. Perfect. She has awesome hair(now I do too!!!), she dresses like a weirdo, her songs are musically complex, and she has awesome hair. When I was at Berlin during Pride and this song came on, I. Lost. My. Life. I want you to just go watch the video, so check on it here.
Gossip "Love Long Distance" Beth Ditto's voice is a cause for jealousy. No, wait. What really makes me jelly in the brains, is that Alexander McQueen loved her and made her an entire collection. R.I.P., but still. It's my turn. Pasenmelo. Roller Sk8s. Keytar.
Katy Perry "Waking Up In Vegas" Remixzzzzzzzzz Again with this one. She makes me want to quit this blonde hair and go dark again. This version here is the Roscoe's edition "Dance Remix." Duh. We like to dance. The Calvin Harris remix below is way better, but who are we kidding? I will dance all day everyday to every hot track I hear.
MSTRKRFT "Love in this Club" REEEEEEEEEMIX! This. Is. The. Best. to listen to at 7:30AM on the way to work. It really jacks you in the brains and fires your shit up to sit in your office all day. Or, like me, answer phones while dancing to hot tracks like this! I dare you to try not to chair dance when you're listening. I just took a break to do it.
Finally, this one's for you Dr. Sharp. I am gonna miss yo azzzz when you move to Texas, but now I will have a new place to road trip to with my wife. I love you like the glitteriest rainbow evs, and I wish you all the best of the best. Fax on boo!!!!
As always, thanks for reading, and please enjoy these jamz responsibly.
Happy Gay Pride ya'll. Get into hoodrat stuff with your friends, drink gallons of fruity bullshit in a glass, dance your ass off to terrible music, and wake up in a gutter full of glittery puke.
This is a photo of my dad from last Christmas when my sister and I were home. I know I can always count on her for doing shit like taking photographs with her phone because in my mind, I am still using a rotary phone, checking my pager, and using a dot matrix printer.
This past Sunday was father's day, and I failed to call my old man, so I decided that I would dedicate this blog post to how awesome my dad is, and how much more awesome he is than your dad. SUCK IT EVERYONE ELSE'S DAD!!! I'm J/K you guys. Dads are awesome for reals.
My parents are both nerds, but differently. While my mom was reading us Mythology books, and learning us real good about the Civil War, my dad was indulging OUR inner nerd and letting us chillax with all of his dinosaur books. My favorite book was the one that, through pages and pages of awesome illustrations, mapped out the evolution of beasts that once roamed the planet, and it looks a little like this. AWESOME!!! I still love that book's greasy guts. My sister and I were encouraged by our dad to embrace our nerdiness, and even though it took a while for us to realize that we're still way cooler and more interesting than most girls we know, we're not afraid now to let the nerd flag fly. Just this afternoon, I was meeting with some friends about a gallery project I'm going to be working on, and we were eating this backyard smoked jerky, and I was all, "This looks like that shit Luke was eating when he crashed into the Dagobah swamp." What? Nerd. Alert.
My dad's accomplishments with his children are many, and they include, letting us listen to hilariously tragic folk music which, as a young Gaga in training, I loved. He taught us about music, taught me how to play guitar, taught us about the badasses of science fiction cinema and literature, and ultimately, these few things taught us how to roll with any kind of person we came in contact with which, as I have found in most every place I find myself these days, is an amazingly valuable skill. Talking to everyone and making them feel like you're actually paying attention to their boring asses at their boring ass parties is a skill I can attribute to my father. THANKS DAD for teaching me how to transport my mind to another dimension while looking like I'm totally interested! It's harder than you all think. J/K. It's totally E-Z! Watch for it the next time you're boring me.
My dad also, as I am sure most girl's fathers did, stuck it out through my annoying Tori Amos and dirty rock chick phases. He handled it when I turned thirteen and felt like leveling every building I walked into and out of. If I could give you an image of what it was like inside of my head when I was thirteen-eighteen, I would say, just pick any image of any explosion from ANY Die Hard movie, and there you have it kids. Shit was gittin' oh so real up in there. I was in my room constantly playing Siamese Dream over and over again, marrying Billy Corgan in my mind, lighting black candles and pretending to call the corners. Shit, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was written FOR ME! I was the queen of mopey shit and writing in my diary about boys. It was just one episode of My So Called Life after another. I was like, so totally Angela Chase minus Jared Catalano, and that dead angel chick.
The best part about parents, and I imagine the best part about being a parent, is that your renegade asshole teenagers will one day grow up to be intelligent well-spoken humans who make all the years of teenage fuckery worth it. I may still listen to Tori Amos when I'm alone, and I may have a "moment" everytime I'm in a car and "1979" comes on, but let's never do any of that again please.
My dad is awesome on so many levels and whenever I am home, and we get into serious conversations about anything, nerdy or otherwise, it makes me proud to tell people about my family, or have them meet my family.
I hope you had the bomb Father's Day dad, and I hope you did some grillaxing and some drinking of fine single malts. Thanks for reading my blog, and for supporting every avenue I have pursued in my young life. I appreciate having you as my dad errrrryday of my lifes!
I work with a woman who is like my drunk Chicago mom. She's told me before that she's my Chicago mom, and while she sort of is, she absolutely is not. She is like my older drunk Chicago friend. You can never have too many!!! Maybe you're already wondering where the effzo I'm heading with these rather vague statements. Patience precious, I'll elaborate. My drunk Chicago mom is cleaning out her house, and she is unloading her collection of awesome hats from the 40s, 50s, and 60s on me. Every day when I come in to work, there's a new one for me. It's like Christmas. She also praises every crazy outfit I wear and tells me we were separated at birth. These are lifestyle affirming compliments, and I appreciate every last one of them.
The more hats I get, the more excited I am to wear them, and then I start thinking about all the opportunities women have to express themselves through their clothing. Ladies be shuffling down the street looking a mess with their Crocs and pajama jeans on, and wonder why they can feel my side eye from miles away??? It makes me wish that my friend Kevin and I would have really gone 100% on our show entitled, "WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?!?" Only I would have added "THEFUCK!?" I'm not saying that everyone has to walk out the door looking like Betty Draper...oh wait, that's exactly what I'm saying. Every day and every where you go is an opportunity for an outfit. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a ballerina because I was obsessed with the Nutcracker and the outfits were AWWWWEEEESSSSSOOOOOMMMMEEEEEE and not because I gave a shit about having some greasy queen in spandex flip me around the stage.
Ladies and gents have been wearing and making hats as fashion and function for centuries, and while I understand that I'm not going to persuade any women to look like they give a shred of a shit about their appearance through the medium of le BLOG, I like to think that I maybe I can. THROUGH DOING!
I've been in love with the work of Philip Treacy since I learned who Isabella Blow was. He custom designed all of her hats and if no one cared who she was as a person or what she did, we all cared and knew her for her outrageous style, and her ability to literally wear anything and still make it look like it was meant to be worn exactly like she did.
What made her powerful was that she wasn't afraid to make fashion choices that may have felt ridiculous or ugly to everyone else, and what made her vulnerable was that she wanted so desperately to fit in, that she would do anything for attention. We can talk all about her tragic life and end of said life when we're playing Mall Madness in my room later. In the meantime, let's talk about this: I believe the purpose of fashion is to scare the shit out of every person you pass on the street, but also, to stir up a maestrom of jealously because secretly, when they're at home looking through their closets of polos and Tori Burch flip flops, they wish they had something, anything, that would make people look at them the way they just looked at you.
My collection of ridiculous hats pales in comparison to Ms. Blow's, however, now that it is growing ever so rapidly, I feel the overwhelming need to kick things up a notch. BAM! I now belong to the school of silly hats. We've all accepted that our lives are far less formal day to day than they were fourty years ago, but that doesn't mean that we have to call that whole idea a bitch and keep dressing like slobbering idiots. The art of dressing doesn't have to sound so formal and academic if you just take a look at what you're putting on, and then think about what it looks like when you walk down the street, into your job, to a party, to the bar, to buy drugs from your dealer, the list could go on FORRRRRRREEEEEEVVVEEERRRRRRRR, but you get the jist. People are looking at you because you look like the bum on the corner of Rush and Walton who is wearing fifteen pairs of sweatpants rolled up to his balls. No. He. Didn't. Ohyeshedid.
I direct my criticisms towards men yes, but I will come down hard on women also. We've come a long way baby(Thanks Virginia Slims), and I know that we can all wear pants and work corporate jobs, and fly our asses around the cuntry in our G5s, but let's get serious. You're still a woman. Your feminine charm should be exploited at all costs!!! No one's going to take you more seriously because you wear a power suit to work(unless it looks like this) Don't take it over the edge and dress like the hot ho on the stroll either. Together we can find a happy medium where we can look feminine, have the best job, make more money than our male counterparts, and not look like we're giving $5 blowjobs in the breakroom(I mean, if that's part of your five year plan on your way to the top, then by all means, get.it).
After much rambling(I've had a distracting weekend) and gnashing of teeth, my point to all of this is that you shouldn't be afraid to dress up in public. Dress yourself like it is a lost artform, and you're one of the pioneers that has been given the task to bring back the excitement and drama that can come with. You shouldn't be afraid to dress well or even a little eccentrically because at the end of the day, you are not afraid, and everyone else is trapped in the closet. If you live in an accessories closet like I do, just roll around on the floor until something sticks, and then leave the house! Living in an ethnic neighborhood also helps. People are not afraid to roll their windows down and yell, "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT??!?!?!?!?!" I only speak from personal experience.
