Natural Looking

This nice young woman Stacy took Natural Looking photos of me, and I'm going to put one on here. The idea was if I ever wanted to attempt to internet date again, I could look warm, friendly, and vaguely my age - my whole approach to anything on the world wide web is to look hard and campy, and this is for two reasons. 1. My whole oldy worldy idea of visual imagery is that I want to have a picture a weekly paper might use to promote a gig I am having in whatever town I'm visiting. 2. Why the fuck would I want strangers to know how I look when I'm naked, with a pot belly, slumped over my laptop in my kitchen?
"I would never know from your web presence that you're sweet and generous" my friend Brian said, or something equally complimentary. That got me to thinking. Not just about what I'm going to order at the half off clearance sale at Torrid.com, as usual, but about how yes, I AM so sweet. So Kind. You betcha. The people have a right to know!
But before I could get my apathetic ass in gear and look sweet and kind on the internet, I read this article about people who do Trolling, I think its called. They just go on the internet and find information and ruin your entire life. They are ominous rationalizing sociopaths. Why do I want these people to know me? I don't. Occasionally some young man send a mesage to my Music/Comedy site on MySpace. To put it tactfully, he finds my figure enticing. Do I want to be that young man's bit of strange? I've been a bit of strange for so long, my friend. So very long. So no, no I don't. I find it much more convenient to reply as if I'm Luticia Baldrige, aka Miss Manners, and 70 something rather than 40 something. 40 very something.
"I do not use instant messenging or even text messaging much. 'do you like it doggy style?' is not an enticing social gambit. Internet prostitution is a lucrative business, and I neither endorse nor oppose it, but it is not a business I'm in."
This wild swing, from my hard campy web highly posed stuio shots and gag songs to a fuddy duddyish shut down, is so much better than letting a 20 something stranger get in a dig at me, mentally or physically. OK, now I'm uploading the natural photo.
OK, now I'm going to have my hair straightened. There is a limit to natural. Animals in the wild are natural. Pigeons are natural. Predators are natural. Cognitive dissonance is a human construct.

Regular Joes

I believe its the year of the Regular Joe, who can be male or female. In my neighborhood, I've been noticing a nice trend - instead of a pack of 8 precious people who look  like they wouldn't talk to me if my hair was on fire, especially then, there are girls whose outfits are not quite perfect, men boisturously chatting, and like that. 

I'm also basing this thesis on the heat wave. Its been too hot to go out here so I'm doing numerous domestic routines, like listening to my cassette tapes and albums. Also cds. I got rid of two Lee Scratch Perry cds, but that has nothing to do with him being or not being a Regular Joe. Being a visionary and mentally interesting has exempted him from all theories for life. 

My albums, though....I just listened to a Grace Slick album. It was ok to hear once, but now I can get rid of it because I only have a certain number of pristine album slip covers, which of course I ordered from the collectors paradise, Bags Unlimited. She is singing.....about some various men. How cool they are, the fleeting nature of their beings, and oh their black eyes. Yeah I know those tiny black eyes. Like Andy Griffith in Face in the Crowd black eyes, cutting to the corner to check how their soulful seeming verbiage is working. 

Then on the album there is some extended jamming, better by far than most of the jamming I've been subjected to, but still jamming. Then she throws in, like, half a verse from "Go Ask Alice!" at the end to remind the live audience of a great song she wrote once. This is all because Grace Slick had to end up in Marin. Marin is not a place for regular Joes. Then she had to go to AA, but they were not bums or even probably sports bar alcoholics. They were French men playing covers of Robert Johnson songs, twitching their expression moodily. This was not a good way for Grace Slick wind up. I have never been welcome in Marin. I myself do not welcome Marin. This older gentleman in the park the other day, Sodu, reassured me that if I was in Big Sur or  Monterey or Marin for THREE MONTHS they would relax and be friendly, but I do not have that kind of TIME. 

So I am getting rid of the Grace Slick album, just throwing it out because I cannot sanction the use of an album slipcover on it and that's the only way I could donate it to a hapless trapped street vendor. Now next I put on a Loretta Lynn album. She had/has (dead yet?) a hellish life, due partly to the times and the good ole boys. But these Good Ole boys, though they drank and betrayed and promised and vanished and used everybody in sight at times, were still not French guys screwing up their face soulfully while they, yes, replicated a song by Robert Johnson, a late African American whose pain they all aspire to copy the tuneful part of. They were just assholes, or acting like assholes at the time. I am keeping that Loretta Lynn album.

Check out my new podcast, thanks to my audio partner David Hornbuckle:

Blowdryer86.podbean.com, Rob Shapiro and Jeff Dickinson are on it so far. 

EV Comix Opening

This image came out sideways, it's my favorite from my new comix zine, by jim smith - the Gallery Opening was a smash, Juggernut performed his winning number "A Woman's Ass!" on the sidewalk with loud Run DMC Era Beats, wearing a shoddy nut costume, then Moonshine sang the theme song to "Unicorn Planet", prefacing it with a folksy introduction. The children seemed a lot less scared of Moonshine, and even chanted the story and song along with him intermittently, in an entranced manner.
Mary Reilly, frequent blogger and zine contributer, read on the sidewalk, rapid poetry from her rapid mind, and Jen from the Fools did two soothing acoustic numbers. Touchingly, Jen looked at me like "Is it OK now?" and "Is one more number OK?" and for that 5 minute interval I was the administrator for a small patch of sidewalk. Now if I was in Art Graduate Theory I might say I was reappropriating public space, but the Grants just aren't rolling my way, people, so I won't bother to say that. Plus I would have to spell it first, and I can't use spell check effectively on here.

nothing is happening

Finally, a pet peeve, the base of all blogs. So I have been a bit down and susceptible to accepting bullshit, at least for a half a minute longer than usual. I was walking over to Sal's at 7th Street and Avenue A to get an Iced Coffee and sit in the park. This fellow B A was there, he had been there a couple of nights ago as well. Basically, he got a large settlement, about $100,000 or maybe more, for getting bashed by the police in the Tompkins Square Park riots in the 80s. Clayton Patterson taped some of the cops doing things on that riot day, and wouldn't give the video over to the Court or the NYPD, and as a result his footage gave a few people who got whomped big bucks in a settlement. Now B A has never thanked Clayton for this. What he does is stand on that corner every night, taking photos, especially happy if there's a brawl, and put them in the Villager. That's fine, but....

The other night I was taking my friend Popcorn somewhere for a snack and was jokily complaining about the short hours the street vendors keep, because I'd had a donation and had to leave it in there area. My friend Jim Flynn was there, a young guy who did this amazing book Stranger to the System letting people tell their own stories that lived in the park and the East River park. 

"I'm not responsible for that!" B A responded, meanly, energetically. I had become the man, because he has no funnybone and cannot perceive me clearly.

"I'm taking my friend Popcorn for a snack" I continued.

"Why don't you take her to Sal's?!" he queried rebelliously. Well Sals has been there forever and has egg creams and hot dogs and coffee and newspapers, but the point he was making was that I was just an upscale newcomer and Sal's was valid because the proprieter is an old man and from the old Polish days and has hung in there as the neighbhorhood transitioned into being one full of NYU students, small dogs, and small children. What a dick.

I could respond at length, but then it turns into "No, I"M more valid, or as valid! Oh, I know - I know about the longstanding egg cream vending!" and that is ridiculous in the middle aged. Anyway half of society is pretending they have it better than they do and the other half is competing to expound on their huge amount of bad breaks. 

So then anyway when I was walking past him by myself, well, first I  got my huge Iced Coffee, then I handed him a little card flyer for something I'm having, and it really is just something, a get together, a bunch of art, local kids, a remote genuis across the country represented in a very small manner due to a couple of drawings I fished out of a stack in his closet, and its going on for 6 fricking hours five blocks away. I also gave him my related zine.

"It's summer, but nothing is going on."

"My show is going on" I  pointed out.

"You know what I mean" B A replied. Yep, got ya. I am not going on. Nobody doing things on Thursday is going on. Everything that was going on was 20 years ago, probably male. I stupidly gave him a zine after he attempted to hand it back to me as if I were a common solicitor. Now why did I do that? That zine costs me a dollar per, much more in time and effort. He had already let me know I was nothing going on. I will NEVER get that paticular dollar back. I know that. He will never get back any kind of mojo back but middle aged complaining and I hope that Jim Flynn flies flies away safely to the land of current life. Go. Go now.

Sarah Perry Stout

This is some work by Sarah, who is curating our East Village Comix Sampler art show at Snake Monkey Gallery, NYC, on June 5th, from the generous hours of 5pm - 11pm. There will also be a kids section launch and Moonshine will sing the theme from Planet Unicorn.

Explanation

When I'm in the LA Area, I frequently try to get to my favorite store, Back Lot Movie Memorabilia. Right next door is a wig shop with an on site wig stylist. I bought a country style wig there and had it purposely teased on site, then tipped the wig attendant, because NYC is such a tipping economy, new york socialism, that it's hard to restrain myself from ever tipping with my last dime.
I got to go with a A New York woman to the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park the other day, and she introduced me to the B Line. The A Line had about 48 people in it, the B Line, where you can order a drink, an ice tea, or ice cream for your pooch, had only one person in it. I got an ice tea, she got a poochini. She let me try the non dog food top, the dog got the rest. It was like being in a New Yorker cartoon for about 45 minutes, but actually when I asked her for her email and/or phone, which I do with practically everybody, she was startled. "I don't usually give my email to people like you," she accidentally said. What a minor social gaffe. Neither of us could make a full recovery from that one. Then she had to go because her dog was too ashamed to relieve himself with my and my friend Fu around. We made the dog too excited and self consious. Yet still I had the evening, and we walked all the way down third avenue to the Bowery Poetry Club, where we discontinued to be socially anamolous. If anything, I was one of the least exciting and stimulating people there. Its odd how ones fortune or charisma can turn on a dime. My charm didn't return until possibly Tuesday, days later.
One needn't always be compelling, however, far from it. Fu is moving to Berlin soon, and we had a few hours of our platonic palling around. "You two put out a really strong weirdo vibe when you're together!" our friend Aric once commented. Poor old Fu had to unload years worth of half hearted collecting and hoarding, dating from around the time nobody wanted albums anymore and couldn't even see a time in the future where anybody ever would, and they were all over the street, the used book stores, everybody's apartment, for a quarter, a dollar, for free if you took them away. He realized that his "Rappin' Rodney" album has no value, but maintains illusions about Red Foxxes filthy live set. I got about 10 Sandy Nelson albums, one of them was so mediocre that I donated it to the tranny who sells things in front of Love Saves the Day on 2nd Avenue and 7th Street.
That Tranny, who has a southern bum for a lackey, is still ahead of me in the stuff game because I've given her about two albums, a cd, and a literary journal I thought it would be good for her to have on her table, but I have gotten, most recently, 3 small French plates and a set of elbow covering non-gloves, black stretchy material that is glossy and dotted with rhinestones. The day I got those I put one on right away and Helen, a cabaret star, pointed out that it exactly matched my hair flower. She was right. Black with rhinestones. So in sync. I like everyone's style.

another hovercraft

Hoovercraft Drawing by Jim Smith

I thought that in the future we would have hovercrafts, and also be wearing uniforms. Jim Smith sent me a couple of drawings he'd done of hovercrafts, because......I asked him to.

Goods

Yesterday I had three toddlers over here. Later at night, I picked through my clothing archives and found that a red suede skirt and brown fringe suede jacket I got at a swap meet for free were too wierd and/or small for me to ever wear. Then I tried on two pairs of shoes I got from Torrid, and even though I paid $5 each pair to have them stretched on 14th Street, they were narrow at the toes. I asked my roommate The Know It All if I should even wear the shoes for an hour and she said no, because if your shoes are not comfortable you cannot be extremely sparkling (to paraphrase her). I also found a men's shirt I got from someplace thinking it was a cute look, but the shoulders sagged past my shoulder line and also there was a little bit of chocolate I'd spilled, mysteriously, on the INSIDE part of the shirt. Maybe I wanted to get to the chocolate so badly that I had put the shirt on inside out. Not sure.

So I had these items, and today I gave them to this regular bum who had a small table besides him, on Avenue A, because the other guys who vend things hadn't arrived yet for the day. I told him to make sure they got it, the regular bum is way too immobilized to sell anything. I think I might give him a wooden cane to see if that helps him stand up one day.

Then I went to the fair at the Children's Workshop school, saw my friend Darryl face painting, and she gave me a drawing and some writing for my Comic Zine. In the drawing is a woman putting a blindfold on a man. The writing is desperate, she wonders if she'll ever leave the LES. I covered up the drawing and read the sharpie diary entry quickly, due to the children in line waiting for their face painting and the child whose face she was painting right then. She started out face painting badly, and by half an hour later was pretty good. I quietly gave her a thumbs up. 

I saw a little girl I babysat yesterday, her hair was messy and she was sitting in a tent. She's good natured. Her mother said Darryl was raving about my last book. I agreed that it is a good book. Babysitting for this wave of people, 10 years after my last babysitting time, will be very different from people who are more priveledged in a way that can make me accidentally scare them even though we're trying our best to get along. We're equal, this new wave and I. We're good. The old crew was goodish but it was confusing, though it helped bail me out of a bad depression and there was love there too, on both sides, sometimes being in a subservient position around people who find out that I am also a sharp tongued writer can lead to betrayal or imagined betrayal. I never set out to betray but writers are ruthless, said Victor Bruce Godsey once. I think I put 3 lines in a poem about my new neighbors and how they had good cheese in their refrigerators, how the new playground was for them. Not much but it put another nail in my employment coffin, probably at a good time. 

At the Children's Workshop I got 4 videos to show little kids, the Black Orchid and a sappy Dolly Parton cd for myself, a kind of art with black cloth and gold bamboo, and some bland rice balls I gave to pigeons in the park. I sat in the part and read the Microcosm Press manifesto while 2 sets of people sat down at a small piano and sang and played. 

On the way back to my apartment, the street vendors were using two large plastic tubs I secretly donated another day, and had all the new things I secretly donated today as part of an extremely neat and organized display. If I could cry softly at little touches, I would have cried. Lets see, so my financial tally for the day is: $11.50 I spent at the Children's Workshop, one piece of art for my zine and gallery show. Good one.

Goodness had Nothing to do With it

I went to an AA meeting yesterday, for a beauty treatment. I am not an alcoholic, though of course I have OCD tendencies, like looking at every single item on the Half Off Clearance section on Torrid.com, putting certain ones on my wish list, checking to see if anything isn't necessary, then wondering if I can possibly not order anything so reasonably priced at glamorous and well fitting, or giving myself a little deadline to order, or, frequently, getting a teensy wild feeling and just ordering anyway. Also, apparently, if digression were booze I would indeed be guilty of over imbibing.

No, I'm not an alcoholic, though there is cruelty and addiction in my forbearers, as well as an overwhelming sense of passive non resistance, a sort of "go with the foe" waywardness that I often fall into. Its just that I went to Earth Day and the library with my mother, we had a nice time but it made me unaccountably tired due to my middle aged period and generally constant experimental state, and I had to lie down and read a bit of a novel. Then I realized just how bright the novelist (Maynard & Jennica the book is called) was making this character Maynard, how alarmingly well spoken he was, so I got a talent blast, then I went to meet somebody for the first time, somebody who managed a person called Wavy Gravy. You would think that, being called Jennifer Blowdryer would give me an automatic affinity for people involved with, say, a Wavy Gravy or a...oh I can't think of that other visionary hippie ensemble's moniker right now...not Captain Beefheart, another one...but it is not so. We stirred up an air of mutual dullness, then parted ways.

I went to the closest Thrift Store, Out of the Closet, and again managed my addictive tendencies successfully by realizing that I didn't need to try to squeeze into any of the frocks and that although they had Join Me and Wake Up Sir on their shelves, two books I know for a fact I could give to somebody and they would consequently enjoy them tremendously, I didn't have to buy them just to give them to the perfect reader for that particular book in the future. I imagine myself a tutor, mentor, curator, and part time librarian, but if you look at my taxes it has none of those titles. So.

Triumphant, I walked five doors up to ReRuns, which is my favorite thrift store in the world because of the family that runs it. ReRuns is owned and operated in Berkeley California by a large African American family, helmed by Wayne, who has a lot of strict rules regarding the general operation. You can NOT donate to the store. For awhile, you were permitted to sell them items for a quarter each, if they were not STAINED, WRINKLED, or smelling like CIGARETTE SMOKE. You could only do this at one pm on Fridays though. The last Saturday of every month is Free Day, you can take whatever you want, from I believe 9am until noon - or is it one? See, I feel as if I am irritating Wayne already. He then closes up shop until 2pm, because he needs an hour to restock with all new inventory.  Did I mention already that it is my favorite thrift store?

So anyway, as one would caution a freshman scribe to NOT BEGIN a paragraph, I strolled into ReRuns but I could tell that Wayne was tired. He is good and smart and wierdly artistic, same as myself but wildly different due to race and gender seperation, due to about a hundred things really. He said I'd been away, it was nice to see me back, and I agreed. I had been in NYC, it was nice to BE back. There were about 3 OCD looking pickers sorting through things in the Everything For A Dollar store. I know that the family doesn't want to answer any questions about how they are doing, business wise, or why did they close the Everything for Three Dollars store down the block and are they making it, so I was speechless for a moment, trying to think of a follow up. 

"I was working for a hoarder" I volunteered. "I've been doing some reading about it."

"It's a disorder" he replied quietly. "I was in a hoarder's place" he continued. "There was no room to move, things were piled up everywhere."

"I've been doing some reading about it." I repeated, inanely. "They call that 'goat trails', those little spaces they have to walk in."

He took it in, still looking quiet and tired. I was in a strained mood, from not connecting with the Wavy Gravy handler. Not everybody should wear a gag hat. I for instance do not even wear gag hats. I will wear innapropriate attire, short skirts, too much cleavage for my age, but that is because I am going for a BLOWSY affect. I am trying to bring back the word BLOWSY.

"She says she's opening up her mail now" I continued. With this kind of self educated creative mind that Wayne has, on top of the fact that he's not that interested in talking to me in the first place, I figured I would skip the part about how I can't save anybody just get them to help themselves a tiny bit more possibly from lavishing them with caretaker love and good examples. Plus it is the female gestalt, at least mine, to surround facts and answers completely by context until nobody but another woman or gay with the same brain has a clue what the H - E - Double Toothpicks I am getting at, so I tried to bypass all that patter.

"I opened up 7 years worth of her mail!" Wayne looked a little bit impressed. I picked through a little of his inventory, pulling a plastic toy with no head out of a lucite box.

"Everything in that box is free" he told me.

I picked up another toy, strange like they all have been these last 29 years or so, some grey plastic figure with tiny legs who actually could stand up on his own when I placed him on the counter. I moved the toy near a couple of shoes on a bureau, sizing up how it looked there. I told myself it would be absurd to bring it home. I told myself it was not my place to position toys in another person's place of business. I put the toy, reluctantly, back in the box. I opened up a top bureau drawer that I know is their women's lingerie and underwear drawer. I had just brought them, on 25 cents day, a pretty nice purple corset that is way too small for me. I bet that got snapped up right away.

A widower gave me the corset, though I'm not clear if he divorces each one or really marries any but the first, it doesn't matter. He says that because he is unusual (this widower, not Wayne at all speaking here), he can only get girls with something wrong with them. This second wife had some odd physical configuration, cerebal palsy, a hairlip, I don't remember, but she also had a deadly disease and they talked on the phone the day before she died.

"You were the only one who was ever really nice to me" she told D, or something like that.  After she died he spent a year in bed, not washing, not moving, not eating, and shriveled up. Now he can walk and eat and is back with the schizophrenic one, his life partner through a default combination of sex and kindness and convenience and I'm sure love of a type, but he wanted somebody flashy to have that dead woman's clothes, and carry on the flash. Well she was smaller than me, so though I adore the Donna Karan sunglasses and the wildly shedding rabbit fur coat, that corset didn't fit by about a good foot, but it was a great find for somebody at ReRuns I'm sure.

In that underwear drawer I found an pair of orange nylon underpants that originally hailed from Mervyn's, the store tag was still on them. I am no treasure hunter. They were once, according to the extremely faded store tag, $2, but here I was getting them for $1 plus tax. Still I had to buy something. Maybe in the end we just can hope for Harm Reduction. Plus I got a pair of 'tap pants' type Victoria Secret undershorts, size medium, as I've been slimming down quite a bit. I would NEVER have tried them on in the store, under my skirt.

The ReRuns mother, of Wayne and his at least I believe three sisters, and grandmother to their kids of course, is sometimes manning the counter and an OCD middle aged  Chinese woman goes there probably every single day and picks and picks at the items and once I saw her crouching down and the mother said wearily but firmly "You can NOT take your clothes off in here!", a reasonable boundary, but the  Chinese woman could not resist, she crouched down with an odd compulsive smile like expression, and took off her shirt, and shoved the shirt on anyway, and I could tell the Grandmother was experiencing a mild and continuing hell. I WILL put something on, say a pair of pants or a skirt, UNDER a longish skirt, or a dress OVER my t-shirt and pants/skirt, but NOT if I can tell that would strain the fabric. 

My Macrocosm is your Microcosm and I RESPECT that unless you have been EXTREMELY unreasonable and worked my last nerve.

Marco

Finally I am blogging. Well I blog on Myspace but only every several months, usually when I'm angry. It has to be angry about something petty, in my mind. I have my own private rules about many many things. Tell you what. My acquaintance Marco, who is so damn trendy that he has a three year old and wife and is living in France, suggested I start a travel blog. He is right. Marco and I never hooked up. He could see me clearly in some way, and when this poet introduced us, in a room at the Chelsea Hotel where Marco was assembling a vintage Harley piece by piece, he knew that we would somehow collude, but it was not a sexual collusion, it was a periferal thing, he was always looking for something or somebody or someplace hotter and he found it again and again I believe. I was never looking for anything, just floating along, my mind jammed with millions of tiny thoughts, but I definatly felt like lunging and clinging now and then. We kissed once when I was on stage, or rather the front part, of Lower Links Hall in Chicago running a Smut Fest. It surprised me. I was just leaving to go to the back stage that I forced them to create for me after I arrived and did a hit of Ecstasy I got from the Baron Von Blumenzack, who was foreverafter very merenary with his hits of ecstacy, I only got half of one months later and it did me no good, but that's probably for the best. Ecstacy is just good to take about 5 times in your entire life. That's because I only did it five times in my entire life, and so it must be a good methedology.