November 2007 Archives

After making me listen to Daughtry on her walkman, my mom goes in on the 2007 American Music Awards:

"Chris Brown" [who, after seeing this christmas today, she is now in love with] "is the new Michael Jackson."

"Nicole Scherzinger is like Celine Dion, but better. Her voice is just so pure."

Mom's in town and has already described someone wearing too much make-up as looking like "a hooker." Kevin, meeting her for the first time, described her as "old world meets new world," which is pretty accurate. My amazing cousins Kelsi and Ana are in town, too, along with their parents - fam reunion cause my little cousin is graduating from sound engineering school, where he is learning to blow-out speakers with all brands of Mexican deathmetal and nu era industrial and grindcore, for serious - but I haven't seen them yet. According to my mom, Kelsi, who is 15 and wants to write about music and who I absolutely adore, is currently rocking a faux Harajuku look, complete with asymmetrical / chopped-up hairdo and legwarmers. This is a switch from last year, when she was full-on Evanescence goth with a little punk edge.
Family is awesome.

I realize I am late in listening to this whole Trill Fam album (too busy sweating Freeway), but how are muhfukkas gonna have a track called "Materialistic Bitch," verbally smacking a gold-digging lady, then have a track called "Leave the Tags On," about wanton materialism? REALLY? COMO SE DICE "DOUBLE STANDARD."

It's not a thru-and-thru terrible album though. Beats by Mouse are hot to death, and I love Boosie's helium-huffing Magoo voice. His voice sounds like he is three feet tall and/or a wood nymph with chipmunk cheeks.

I also think these lines in Big Head's "Politician Networkin" track are super funny:

"In the summertime it's hot so I shirtless hustle
Niggas hatin' so they pop slow to murk this muscle"

Memo to all Gowanus and Boerum Hill residents, and those Park Slopers who walk down 4th Avenue towards Atlantic to get to the subway: my favorite bodega, on 4th ave and Dean street, closed a few months ago, much to my sadness. It was the only Mexican bodega for miles - the next closest is down on 4th avenue at 16th street, and that's fucking far - and I used to get nopales in a jar there, and rounds of Mexican chocolate for cocoa that I would inevitably end up eating before I ever made cocoa, and I used to flirt with the bodega guy in TERRIBLE Spanish. I miss it.

Now there is a deli there. It is stupidly one-worded. It is called "Canteen," and to build it, they used those gigantic ugly cheap fake bricks that are currently marring urban landscapes nationwide and, to me, are the face of gentrification.

Last night Kevin, our beloved neighborhood bartender, told me that not only is it overpriced, the guy who owns it is an AUSTRALIAN who lives in MANHATTAN.

I am boycotting it on principle. If you have any investment in this neighborhood not going to shit and your rent going up astronomically because a bunch of fucking rich Manhattanites want to build even more yuppie enclaves for when the stadium comes and the rich people price us all out, you will boycott it too.

CANTEEN. Fuck you Canteen.

Dudes, Fader homies just posted up this exclusive Strokes film to go along with their 50th issue. I care about <> that much about the the Strokes and the film is shot in Warholian pseudo-art "no sound, gritty film quality," (aka "I am being lazy but will still get over because you think i am cool") but I think this video is valuable for when I publish the next issue of my fanzine, Modern Haircutz 'n' Pageantry. (Web version coming Spring '08.)

Faded radio returns to east village radio this Friday. Tune in Tokyo. But if you try to touch my nipples with out asking, I'll smack that. In a way you will not like.

Mon review del Kellz, the official, readable version. Just jammed it out today.

Lacking any viable Saturday nite dance-action, me and my man-friend checked out "Southland Tales." The new film written and directed by Richard "Donnie Darko" Kelly, it notoriously stars the Rock and was booed at Cannes, but last night, it wasn't wanting for any Angelika art-theatre audience. Post-film, a lively debate about the nature of The Rock's face ensued: His face is too perfect. Could he have had plastic surgery? "It's perfect, but it's expressive, too. If he'd gotten plastic surgery, he'd be able to move his face less." Maybe his features are so chiseled because he works out all the time. Maybe he does face yoga in between bench presses. Or it's natural because when he's lifting weights, he crunches up his cheeks and his face gets stronger, too. Answers: TK.
The film itself was a true descendent of "Repo Man," in that there are revelations/apocalypse subtones hidden under alien/quantum physics themes, and the script meanders for most of its two hours before it actually reaches a plateau of vague cohesion. The basic plot: In 2005, terrorists nuclear-bomb Abilene, Texas, leading to WWIII. America, jingo-ier than ever, re-enacts the draft and sends troops to Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea. Meanwhile, we run out of oil, so this band of sexually deviant mad scientists (including the midget lady from Poltergeist) creates this tidal-wave energy-generator called Liquid Karma, that will control all cars remotely via the power generated by the ocean. Liquid Karma is also the name of a highly addictive mood drug administered to G.I.s, one of which Justin Timberlake plays excellently, donned in ugly black goatee and giant eye-scar. Meanwhile The Rock plays an Arnold Schwarzenegger-type - a former actor with Republican ties, who's married to the daughter of the candidate for Repub VP in the 2008 election. The Rock develops amnesia, starts fucking a porn star / pop singer named Krysta Now (hit song: "Teen Horniness is Not a Crime"), and decides to make a film about the end of the world, which mysteriously starts coming true. [Classic movie line: "I'm a pimp. And pimps don't commit suicide."] Additionally, The Rock's character is being chased all over Los Angeles by two cop-brothers, played by "The guy who plays the lead jock in all the American Pie movies," according to my man-friend. Also, Wood Harris (Avon Barksdale from The Wire) and Amy Poehler from SNL have an amazingly hilarious side-plot as a nationally famous spoken word duo, Dream and Dione, who are in a Marxist rebel group called, of course, the Marxists.

Seriously, I have no idea what the movie was about, but it's an incredibly zeitgeistical work of war-era art, maybe the most relevant and on-point one I've seen in eight godforsaken years. It's delivered in the kind of chaos we experience every day - CNN screens with five tickers flash every five minutes, internet interludes, the paranoia of being spied upon, etc. It also plays to Kelly's apparent obsessions, continuing themes he introduced in Donnie Darko: The fragility of the space-time continuum, his penchant for shot-out eyes, and a stupidly '90s soundtrack that includes The Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Blur, Radiohead, something-something. He also shoots the most brilliantly depressing, onscreen song-and-dance number since the lung-cancer scene in "All that Jazz": wherein Justin Timberlake's character, the Iraq war veteran, shoots himself up with Liquid Karma and recalls what happened to him in Iraq (as deigned by his subtle facial expressions), as he dances through a video game arcade among beautiful, busty blondes, and sings the refrain, "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier," which segues into the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done":

Over and in, last call for sin
While everyone's lost, the battle is won
With all these things that I've done
All these things that I've done

You must see it.

Later in the night, I was bit on the palm by a spider and my entire hand swelled up. If it turns purple or develops streaks, I'm going to the hospital. I'll keep you posted.

R. Kelly's show tonight was the best arena show I've ever seen. The finale was Kells in a white suit with coattails and a grip of frontrow audience folx onstage stepping, singing "Happy People," then a "Happy People" medley: "This Christmas" theme song, then "Joy & Pain," then the "Love Boat" theme song (!!) then the theme to "Welcome Back Kotter" (!!!), then, as a gazillion sprinkles of silver and white confetti rained down from the ceiling, New Year's Eve style, he went out on the theme song from "Good Times." I thought my heart would burst open with joy. At the end of a three-hour set that included at least the chorus from most of his hits, it was genius. He thanked us for supporting him through thick and thin over 17 years, perhaps knowing this might be his last tour for a time (trial TK), and exited like the true maestro he is. I was elated, mesmerized.
One thing that was interesting - hearing his songs all back to back like that - as he's gotten older, his songs have gotten younger - he was writing grown ass ballads in the '90s, and now it's all kidz-bop and rap hooks, jeep beats for anony club-sex-uppin and rain-making (also in a medley - "I wanna sex you up" - also in a medley, after "Make it Rain" - dude comes out in purple hoodie w/guitar, purple light cast on his shrouded face - in throwback to Prince's Purple Rain, he says, "Dearly Beloved... we are gathered here today... to have sex. Do you think I can make it rain?" w/ guitar solos.) He's 40 or whatever but did all his mixtape hooks - "Promise," "I'm In Love with a Stripper," T-Pain's "Shawty Snappin," "We takin over," - which are his biggest hits of the year. Oh except for "Same Girl," which he did not sing, but instead had one half of the arena sing his part and the other half sing Usher's, for the entire 5-minute, complicated song. It was kind of a disaster, but at one point Nick was like, "this is actually experimental." Like theatrical performance art.

More later - there's too much to process. It was a show in three movements, with crazy props and lots of sex talk. Two videos, no guest stars (who needs em?) and a cigar and a cane encrusted in swarovski crystals that he waved around like an erect penis.

tomorrow I will tell you about his interpretive /ridiculous "Zoo" dance - which he started laughing at midway through - yo, he knows exactly what he's doing. It was like rated-r community theatre.

We missed J Holiday, saw three songs by Keysh - "Love," a cover that i can't remember right now (Prince? Madonna? someone like that) and "Let it Go." It's crazy - the first time I saw her perform, she was at Nokia Theatre wearing a pink Juicy tracksuit and all alone on that stage with a mic. This time, she was super highfashioned out (high-waisted shorts, silver gucci boots) and had 9 dancers and a routine and a full band. She's come a long way. Her merch sucked though - the t-shirt was total H&M graffiti style, like kinda bootleg and not that interesting. The t-shirt I got at her "The Way it is" tour is black w/her name on it in glitter, and has a heart with a silver glitter dagger through it, exactly like the tattoo that covers most of her upper left arm.

Audience people kept yelling for Ne-Yo, which was awkward. But not as awkward as the woman who screamed, "I'm 13, Kells, come and get me."
The alleged reality, the elephant in the room like fat joe, the non-reconcilable possible-truth.

This just came on the itunes playlist - holler at early 2007. I'm struck with how smirk-inducingly hot and how unforgivably shitty it is all at once. Did Freeway write Young Hot Rod's lyrics? Cause there's some kinna cute barbs in there, i.e. "My protection is goons with guns with condoms on the barrell," but YHR sounds so unenthused, like his mom (50 Cent) just told him he couldn't go outside before he cleaned his room (got on the mic). MOM (50) I AM SO SO SOOOO OVER IT. He even makes hype-ass Free sound bored. Maybe Sha or whoever produced this made them cut the vocal track at 8 am. Through his hungover, cotton-wrapped booze-headache, Young Hot Rod is thinking about how many girls dissed him last night at the club. Freeway, a non-drinker (devout Muslim) is thinking, "Sha, I didn't mean EARRRLLY literally." Also: "I could be reading the Qur'an right now. Instead I am wasting it in this booth with you bozos. Hot Rod, act like you care."

Yo, there is no Fader radio tonight on account of the Fader dudez are in turkey comas in various cites across the Eastern seaboard, but feel free to listen to last week's episode, which I have dubbed "Faded radio" on account of the embarrassingly obvious Coronantics popping - and flagrant stories about Moby's godlike omniscience. And also, me and Nick are going to see R. Kelly and Keyshia Cole* play the Nassau Coliseum (fka marine base) on Strong Island tonight, where hopefully Kellz will do some interpretive "Trapped in the Closet" medley and we will attempt to glean exactly why his publicist of 99.12 years quit suddenly with the press release that read, "He crossed a line." I looked at her daughter's myspace page earlier - she is young and cute and I was like.... yeah. Either that or homeboy asked her to lie on the stand. Kellz, what a hot mess. Like Murph sez, when Kellz ends up MIA (locked up or buried or Hughes-level agoraphobic), folks & friends are gonna come out of the woodwork with their crazy behind-the-scenes stories: "It'll be like when Elvis died," Murph told me.

*(No Ne-Yo - unceremoniously dropped from tour after 2 shows - which frankly is fine with me, having seen him perform thrice on last winter's Scream tour and not really feeling his new album, oh blaspheme blaspheme blaspheme.)
(Keyshia's new album is not that hot, either, but ol girl is a terrific live performer, a half-step off-key and wholly-emotionally-in-it in that same way Ms. J. Blige is, and I cannot resist the old stuff - "Down & Dirty," "I Just Want it to be Over," "I Changed My Mind," "I Thought You Had My Back" - That shit is soul-candy for the overly romantic and too-oft-spurned-and-burned, heart-food for the tender-but-fierce, of which I am all, I think. Keyshia is the realness, the realest, and that's why ya love her. And it's not that she's not in her new album - it's just that the producing and songwriting is in-the-box booty, like her execs were scared she wasn't gonna reign in the grown listeners, so they had to mime like she was Mary - I'm lookin at you Darkchild, who recycled the beat, tone and melody for "ENough Cryin" (MJB) right into "Shoulda Let You Go" (K.Cole).

I love Keyshia Cole. But damned if I can't watch her reality show this season - it's way too fucking depressing - I had to turn off last week's episode after the part where her sister Neffie goes to the ob-gyn to see if she has AIDS from her drug-using manfriend, and then finds out she's actually pregnant with her fourth child by said druggie boyf, and she's crying while driving down the hwy cause Keysh (who is meanwhile talking dudes and drinkin margs with her girlfriends beachside), hasn't called her... I'm like... it just feels invasive and exploitive, honestly. Like keep the focus on Keysh and leave the sad intimate micro-details of her family to privacy. That's how I feel. But I hope they're getting paid a shitload of money.

guess what i am super obsessed with my job right now, which is editing the newly relaunched hotness that is VIBE.com, designed by my posse for lifer Huny Young, holler at her if you need some hot design and please don't hesitate to pay her a shitload of money. Anyway, I'm also super obsessed with Junot Diaz, the author, who is like a better Jonathan Lethem (no dis to Jonathan Lethem) insofar that he is obsessed with comics, rap, New York, and being awesome. So there's an interview w/him up on our site right now, and I am in love with it.

sorry this is effusive yet non descript, i am at work and trying to post this then bounce so i can go home and unthaw my tofurkey.

So my friend Charlie aka PANTHER is up for video of the year on this MTV2 Subterranean show. Most likely it will air at 2 am, because MTV now treats all videos like softcore porn, and refuses to air them during prime time - it's their dirty secret, their Skinemax, their UNCUT - but you should go vote for Panther, because it truly is the best video MTV2 has on their roster. See below:

Charlie himself is an au courant of techno-R&B. Spits jibberish, gets mad into his own deconstructionist-drama with a little "I skipped my ritalin today." Though when I saw him and Joe Kelly a few weeks ago at Studio B, they sounded like psychedelic Brazilian jazz, Flora Purim style, and looped. El dopeness.

Ivy Queen stays killing the acrylic game.

1. As much as I love Gossip Girl, yo, could the harajuku-backgroundness of the sole black girl* and the sole asian girl on the show have gotten any clearer with this last episode? It was bad enough before, but for their first speaking lines on the entire series, they talk in unison at a sushi party where they were like dressed up as Stefani-ani background fan-kickers, complete with fanny packs, possibly. I hope one day they go postal and wench-slap Blair Waldorf and take Nate on a sexy date to the old Coney Island or something.

2. I KNOW you been watching Friday Night Lights. The dude who plays Santiago, Benny Ciaramello, is on some Mayan apocalypse mystic shit on his myspace - his profile song is Philip Glass, and his top friend is the Kabbalah, and he references 2012 like thirty times. I don't really know what else to say except - yall should read his myspace blog. When his character inevitably goes ballistic on Buddy Garrity, Lila Garrity or Tim Riggins later in the season, all I will be able to think about is how he is "the great wizard, and all the known universe shall know thy name."

Don't sleep on the Mayan apocalypse. My abuela was a Mayan healer, a curandera, and she could right fix up a headache just by flashing you the stink eye.

* [barring jessica szohr, who plays vanessa, and is 1/2 hungarian, 1/4 african american and 1/4 caucasian, shout to her future husband dee.]

Friends:

A. TONIGHT tune in to East Village Radio online for Fader radio from 6-8 pm EST, where I am now officially the resident intern from another mother (did that work)? Along with my Power Fader homes Petey Pablo, A-Wags, Samtowne and Peach Schnippz, I'll be repping VIBE, ensuring the girl-to-boy artist ratio is balanced, answering IMs, taking requests, and inventing new, disgusting, graphic, vulgar and wholly inappropriate ways to refer to the infallability of my coochie.

B. On Monday, the new and improved and totally readable and awesome VIBE.com launches. I have been trying to get this done for a year. And we finally did it. Fuck to the yes. Check it.

3. 16 year olds today are cooler than they were in the 1990s.

D. I went to see Moby DJ last night (um, kind of by accident - i actually went to see alex and chris and ronnie DJ) and now my eyes hurt. There was a lot of fake-raving going on, and a lot of bougie meatpacking district douchebag muhfuckas there to approximate it.

Gigantor mama deadline comin up in two days and I ain't got shit for concentration, what with the cats running around, presenting their needs to me like they're human babies, and what with the glockers aiming heavenward, and the squeal of tires, big shit poppin w/the mini warring dope boys round the way but what is this, summer? Isn't it too fucking cold out to be shooting at each other? Wintertime is Ramadan, time to stop the violence in observance of nature. It's always so strange because they are all so little, the boys, the gold-toothed one hollering constantly, "hey ma, what up beautiful" and my spurn, "I'm old enough to be your mother." "I'm 28." "You're not 28." "I'm 25." "If you're a day over 20 I'm shocked." etc and then all this dumb side bullshit, the one lady walking up the block all hunchbacked who's aged in reverse from her provider - he gets younger as she gets older - the lady who's 40 maybe but looks 75 and has perfected her subway spange game, beggin for coins in the sweetest meek voice like a cat's mewl, but then when you see her on the block, game face off, she's all crackling and huffing down cigarettes, carbon mono-nic-fitting thru her barest necessities, racing up the sidewalk like those pant-suited power-walking bitches at the mall in my hometown. Or the dude looks like a lady strung out and kicking it outside the bodega in tight denim pants and aerobic high-top sneakers always, his long wavy blonde hair sometimes augmented with eye shadow and sickly coral pink lipstick. He is a nice fellow though. A little off, his head cocks funny, but nice. And the sassy ass, cool ass 14 year old girls from down the block who won't even give anyone the time of day and they are so cool. I'll tell you what though people are poor but it could be much worse. I'll tell you something else, i love it here, have for the past three years, and if the spate of new restaurants and crappy deli bodega cafes around the corner fuck up the whole neighborhood, I kinna have to blame Jay-Z.

(more at Fans for Fair Play, an organization of basketball fans opposed to how ill and shitty BK will become after Ratner and Shawn Carter dump their Nets Arena in the heart of downtown, bout six blks from my apt)

Mom called last night at an inopportune time - 11 pm on a Friday, you don' wanna know what kinda trouble I was into - and I didn't answer. I called her back an hour ago. She was en route to mass, so couldn't speak at length, but wanted to tell me my older cousin, Consuela "Susie Q" Escobedo Weidenbaker Charest, in her late 40s, had a defibrillator and surgery and her heart couldn't take it. She didn't make it through the night. She leaves behind her husband Tom, her son Aaron and a newborn grandkid whose name and gender I don't know (I have 400 immediate family members, am related to all the Escobedos in the land, and my memory tends to cease after 2nd cousins). Mom took it in stride. "Life is hard," I said, cause I didn't know what other non-dumb sentiment to proffer, since I'm not a crier so much, at least now that I'm popping these seratonin reuptake shitses my shrink slang me. "We have such a big family we have to be prepared for these things," mom said. "There's a memorial service in the morning. She didn't want a fuss. She wanted to be cremated and immediately buried. I'm going to pray for her at church tonight.

"But I talked to your Uncle Joe [mom's oldest brother, born in 1920] earlier today. He's doing great."

"Uncle Joe will outlive us all."

Y'all, Pete "NEW NEW YORKA!" M. and Samhain and Schnippz had me on Fader Radio last night down at the EVR studios and decided that my live-radio shit-talking game is EN POINTE, based on the copious amount of IMs they got saying "YO TELL THOSE DUDES TO LET THE DAZZLING WOMAN SPEAK AGAIN" {paraphrased; also possibly exaggerated}. So as of today, I am officially the Fader Radio intern. Every Friday from 6-8 (listenable on el internetz) I will be talking shit on the mic and answering IMs and taking requests and repping as hot mic ambassador for this blog, my myspace and facebook pages, and VIBE. (Ya know, it's all love among mag staffs.) Oh yea and Dewar's (official sponsor) and Corona LIght (house wine). Last night they played Cam'ron, Yeasayer, Gucci Mane and Vangelis, so you know you gotta listen, even if you just tune in to the last 20 minutes while u wait for Mark Ronson's accent to come on after us. Thanks mucho to with superfriends and power homies PETE "Echo Parque to Nueva York" M., RUBBER BAND SAM, and SCHNIPP-DOGGA for givin me my big break. WHAT!

honorable mention: Ms. Keyshia if you nasty

got their toes done up wid their fingernails matchin

DUDES WATCH FROM :52 to 2:30 of this video! CW IS SCORCHING MY TV ON THE INTERNET GAME RIGHT NOW! DAN HUMPHREY! woooooo

HELLO FRIENDS! I am like ridiculously busy right now (case in point: launching new website (this fugly-ass thing is not it but stay tuned), launching niche website for fake-awards show / VH-1 talking heads package stamped w/ VIBE Awards, writing whatever Sean Fennessey wants me to write, friendly sparring with El Jefemanica, writing mondo gigantor piece for which I have done literally 9 interviews in the last five days. I almost thought I missed this weblog's four-year anniversary but I guess it's not for another week. Not sure what kind of birthday we will have. Maybe i will publish my entire catalogue of personal diaries from 1984-2004, uncensored so you can see how often I meta-self-consciously reference the movies Heathers ("if you wanna fuck with the eagles, you gotta learn to fly") and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me ("WRITE IT IN YOUR DIARY") whilst writing in said diaries just to entertain myself, but oh wait no cause FUCK A MEMOIR. Seriously, if you haven't jumped out of six airplanes, formed a virtuous non-profit organization, or discovered a treasure map on the back of the Constitution (word to my fave actor Nick Cage aka Omega Man Jr.), YOU DONT NEED TO WRITE A MEMOIR UNTIL YOU'RE 80. That "Elizabeth Wurtzel Goes to Yale Law School" shit drops like a piano off a fire escape. Norman Mailer's Godpiece shoots blanks. You don't gotta cash in all your literary chips before you're old enough to buy bodega Sparks with your Utz sweet'n'hot, nahmean.

An ironic stance to purvey on this vessel of internet-age confession-booth, I know ... and I digress. Here are remarkable things of the past week:

1. Halloween.
Historically lacking passion for the holiday, yet feeling mildly more festive this year than most, I halfheartedly cobbled together a costume from items already existing in my closet (a garment rack, really): a traditional Mexican dress and earrings. Some flowers in the hair, a banging fake monobrow painstakingly applied with three kinds of eyeliner and voila! Frida Kahlo. My man friend graciously agreed to go as her infidel husband Diego Rivera and made a scarily realistic beer belly by strapping a bunch of LRG all-over print hoodies to his stomach with duct tape. Shout to his gameliness; I don't believe the post-BBC fake-fat was all that condusive to dancing. The DJ played house and he hobbled all night. Also, people kept coming up to me and speaking to me in Spanish - I guess the authenticity of my costume gave me away? Which was crazy, and awesome, cause no one ever guesses I'm Mexican; people always think I'm Jewish, I don't know why. Racists.
We ended up at Max Fish at four in the morning with Nick, obviously. He was dressed convincingly as Soulja Boy. Dante Ross was a Ramone.

2. The following day, I became terribly ill and could not leave my bed for two days.

3. The Klimt exhibit at the Neue Gallerie is small but worth it. Includes the famously "most costly painting ever auctioned," that portrait of some bougie Austrian dame, which is huge and beautiful and well crafted and blindingly gold and, once you get past the razzle-dazzle, imparts a decent semblance of emotion. That beautimous Austrian dame is trapped in her own damn bouge. Her eyes implore, her wealth imprisons her.
B. The reason all of Klimt's portrait-ladies have after-sex flush in their cheeks is revealed: enough sketches of voluptuous femmes fondling themselves to fill three entire Neue Gallerie hallways. He had a second calling as a gynocologist, that is if they had gynocology in the late 1800s (fuck, why don't I know that?).

2. Damien Hirst's Shark-in-formaldehyde thing, now in dead residency at the Met: I went in thinking it would be a load of hyped up bullshit, and went out thinking not so much. The best part: when you stand in front of the shark's face, it feels like you're underwater, about to be swallowed up. But when you walk around it, there are all these gross holes stuck into its flesh and it's hanging by thread through its fin, and as a fear factor, it's impotent. See: Francis Bacon. (MY ARTICULATE POTION IS SLOWLY EKING AWAY, PS, AND AFTER THAT I SWITCH OVER INTO "GIRLTALK" PRETEEN SLUMBER PARTY MODE BEFORE I EITHER A. PASS OUT OR B. FREEZE YOUR BRA. AN FYI, IN CASE YOU THINK SOMEONE IS GHOST-WRITING MY BLOG.)

3. Finally went to the feminist art wing at the BKLYN art museum. Judy Chicago's dinner party is a feat, but beyond that, here is my review: "I Can Has Vaginaz?"

Seriously, some curator over there is straight entrenched in body politic like it's 1991 - other than the terrifically conceived porcelain-crafts hallway, virtually every piece in the whole feminist wing focuses on some form of blood, body, flab-rolls, magnified vulva, or hologramically manipulated pubes. I did find a couple things to love: a 30-minute video piece splicing old black-and-white movies to create a classic love-dumped-revenge narrative, and a giant photo of a woman on a motorbike with her head thrown back and her mouth open like she was about to swallow the whole sky. But I feel like for a feminist wing - the first - in a semi-major museum, featuring a large-scale, precedent-setting, important work of feminist installation art, they didn't think too much beyond shulamith firestone and "I'll take a menses-on-the-rocks with a twist" kinda '70s thought. Disappointing, like when you found out Gwen Stefani had no discernable personality.

The good thing, tho, is that now they have a ton more women interspersed throughout the regular part of the museum, which is just as important as having a specifically feminist wing - maybe moreso.

Ok friends. It's after midnight on a school night. Candy-and-soda high over. Slumber party winding down. Mom came to the basement to tell us to stfu ("GIRLS GO TO SLEEP IT'S THREE IN THE MORNING!!"), crushes have been revealed, two girls have had a catty fight that can best be described as a power struggle, another girl has locked herself in the bathroom crying - probably from the sugar crash. The girl who came over with the strawberry shortcake sleeping bag has been asleep for an hour already. Now it's time for the bad girls to get their beauty rest. This includes me. 'Til the morn... Good night.

this is something i started writing about 50/kanye/chesney and never finished. I'm not going to - the moment is dead - but it's a sketch. It was supposed to be an interrobang column on el horca (aka pitchfork media, a popular website for reviews of new music) and then got sucked into the annals of my computer.

JUST WHO I AM: POETS AND PIRATES b/w JUST WHO YOU ARE: MARTYRS AND MAGNATES
By Dr. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

New York City, as my friend Chris pointed out recently, has become a formidable haven for "rich white yuppie dads" - real estate prices stay rising, Black businesses find are uniting against gentrification in Harlem, the heart of Brooklyn will soon be gutted in the interest of a subpar NBA team. In Fort Greene, down the way from my apartment, right down from Fulton Street Mall on the corner where the legendary Beat Street records used to live, a tower of octagonal shaped condos is being constructed, and it looks like death. And I keep hearing 50 Cent's excellent "I Get Money," a song whose ornery stock-market hubris makes him the de facto king of Nueva York as it completes its soul-destroying trek upmarket.

I had a dream last night, that I was watching a show, a rapper performing some enthusiastic but questionable performance, and while scoffing at dude's weird naivete, in the dream, I thought, "Has living in New York made me conservative?" So following the lead of Lindsay Lohan, Kenny Chesney and the Europeans, I took a little sabbatical recently in order to get my mind right, kick a couple of habits (smoking, coconut water, season 1 of A Different World), and shore up for the inevitable long winter of cold nights and half-assed albums and bad industry parties with free cocktails that do nothing but strip away the superstar façades of my favorite pop musicians (T-Pain has no pores; T.I. is a hobbit).

And while I was away, the following things died: crack rap*, hip hop, the music industry, country music, "the love," non-ironic American-made electronic music, the housing boom, the radio, the album, the cassette tape, the devan, PERL, analogue television and whatever-whatever.

I have seen Kenny Chesney perform live in concert one more total time than I have seen Kanye West or 50 Cent. Part of this is by no fault of my own - I have a flagrantly country-loving companion who forces me to attend such large-scale spectacles. And I grew up in the West, cowboy country, and so my tolerance for shitkicker's music, as we called it back in Big Wyo, is heightened. On one hand, my citified ass forces an "otherness" on it - I see it, probably elitistly, as a sociological curiosity to cope with the backdraft of my odd/Cheney-foreshadowed upbringing. On the other hand, Kenny Chesney is just one fucking awesome dude. He's most country in the way he knows - and yearns - to get away from city life, the grit and grime and capital of a place like NYC. But Chesney is way more Jimmy Buffet than Johnny Cash, crooning romantically or playfully about the Virgin Islands where he lives, rocking a sleeveless tee and cowboy hat and pelvis-thrustin like the best drag queens and Elvis.

TO BE CONTINUED

* Lie to rest whether its veracity was an invention of feckless suburban progenitors, heavily boner-ized by its fantastical otherness. Cause I read somewheres that crack rap is dead.