middled aged women are wilding

I noticed some odd decade or so ago that women in their, say, mid to upper 40s were quietly talking about suicide. It was sort of around the time in Manhattan when middle aged white women were getting randomly assaulted in the street - punched in the stomache, hit with objects, one day a stranger socked me in the mouth at the corner of Astor Place. When I mentioned it the other women had their brief shocked stories.

Now, if a bunch of teens went on a group assault spree, they media called it Wilding. Which sounds fun, except it plainly wasn't for at least one of the parties involved, the private citizen trying to get from point A to B in a peacetime society before getting whomped with a concrete block, raped by a chuckling posse, taunted and jostled. What a waste of a term, Wilding should be a dance and pop tune, like The Tantrum or the Hustle. 

Today on the news, as I lay in bed with my eyes a tiny bit shut, I heard three news items that sounded like women were reinventing the wilding. In the first story, a woman successfully combined the two trends of suicide and random violence when she jumped off the third tier of a mall and landed on a 17 year old boy. Whoa, what a way to go. I guess it was time to check out, but she was tired of just telling everybody she was fine. She was 52.

Another woman today committed a complex form of suicide by cop, i believe in Bayside. Nothing too good happens in Bayside, Queens, its like the movie the young couple rents out at the beginning of a horror film, except its our entire life. This 48 year old woman was banging on her landlord's door, and pumping up the gas in her flat. when the police came to her door, two of them, she charged out with a kitchen knife and stabbed one of the cops three times. They shot her to death. He'll be ok, more or less. 

Then a lady called 911 because she didn't get enough shrimp with her special order. It was supposed to be the humor relief part of the news, but they did play the phone call and she sounded really pissed, a lifetime of rage, a strategy to cope. It is possible to hop from moment to moment of a day using indignation rage and complaint. Her voice sounded, oh, i'd say from 46 - 57. Maybe I'm wrong here.

East Village Comix

I put out another EV Comix Zine with Sarah Perry Stout. Its the silliest least practical thing to do so of course being my naturally extremely guarded self its my main talking point. Last night Sarah Darryl and I went to PassOut Records and saw some punk bands, plus Mike Diana had an exhibit. I've heard his name a bit, turns out he's this comic book type artist who caught some court cases in Florida for obscenity. A couple of people were filming him but I was conversationally bellowing a couple of feet away so I hope they had a good recording system. Thank you, thank you all so much for supporting me with your tax dollars so I can go to shit like that and do a zine. And also watch a LOT of television - for so many years I missed out with no cable, and now I'm already  up on the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency on HBO - people from Boston are taking short bus trips to catch some of the relative psychic warmth in Brooklyn and NYC. I wish I had some stacked up incubators with cable piped in that they could all catch a nap in.

Hollywood California

I'm actually in Glendale, California. This is not my most successful trip to LA, though I've got another week and of course life can change on a dime. I'm staying with  my friend Jim Smith, a broke cartoonist. In the abstract, he's not as broke as me, because I owe about $16,000 to credit cards, and Jim doesn't have a credit card.  So he's really less in the hole than me. 

My friend  Burt drove me back to Glendale today after I enjoyed a blanketless night on his vinyl fold down couch, and he was playing 80s music in the car.  I missed the 80s and 90s music, well every music except what i find out about case by case. One song, he pointed out, was by Concrete Blonde. He said they had a song where the chorus was all about being Stuck in a Whole in Hollywood. That song and many other pop culture references made him want to move to LA. Burt may have the exterior of a more reasonable person than I appear to be, with my unkempt hair and current stress rash, but the fact is that songs and Bukowski books on how really horrible life in Los Angeles is compelled him to follow his dream and be right at the scene of the reference points. Yep, Burt is an artsy type,  one of what somebody recently referred to as my probable artsy friends. 

I saw Popcorn last night, she met us at a bar without a name I recall. I had two glasses of red wine. They played the Cramps because Lux Interior died yesterday. I got two forwarded emails to that effect. This did not increase or decrease the existence of my stress rash. I'm on a morid tip due to a writing job, so I checked to make sure that the LA Cornorer's Gift Shop is still open, and it is - I'm going on Monday! Then I'm going to camcorder Burt at the Ha Ha Cafe in Noho! Here's a picture of the terrific queen who used to man the helm at Backlot Movie Memorbilia, which was closed down on Hollywood Blvd to make way for a W Hotel. I bought about 55 $3 lobby cards from him over the years. "What do you collect?" he'd ask. "The Gabors" I'd answer. He promised to remember me. But of course though I meet hundreds of people a year and remeber nobody I remember him, not the other way.

Now I'm watching On Demand on Jim's tv, its an autopsy special - now up to the part of the Sid and Nancy story - the woman voice over artist has upper class lock jaw. Nancy's corpse looks great. Nicole Simpson's body looked good too. You bleach your hair and eat very sparingly, stick to simple black garmets, and yep you'll have be a helluva goodlooking homicide victim. Nancy, in the footage they showed, had a British accent and said she had an IQ of 172.

I notice a lot of career drinkers have genuis type IQs. They manage to drink down the brain cells until they're about the same as me, which is probably upper or mid 130s, except that they'll have more canniness towards matters like estimating spatial relations or home repair.So if Nancy lived I might have a few guesses as to what she'd be up to - hopefully home repair, not some stitch and bitch club, skull and crossbone booties make me want to hurl.

Its raining and there's no umbrella here. My arms are itching. A Thai delivery menu is behind e on the couch. Some people who write badly are not aware of that fact. Sid Vicious' mother bought him his fatal hot shot. See how you can put a petty fact together with a historical one, and get a bit of a noir sound? Class is over. Get the hell out of here and don't come back until you have some Thai food for me.

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.