Love Sex Fear Death: Can It Go Viral?

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was one of the more shadowy cults that sprang up during the 1960s. Much of its notoriety derives from a description by “Ed Bloody Sanders” -- as Timothy Wyllie, the principal author of Love Sex Fear Death, referred to him during the “Sabbath Assembly Ritual and Salon” held at Anthology Film Archives on October 4th to promote the publication of the book  -- of ties between The Process Church and the Manson Family, that Sanders was forced by legal action to remove from the U.S. edition of the book but which later appeared in the U.K. edition. 

The large auditorium in Anthology Film Archives held a sell-out crowd of mostly young hipsters, Goth fanciers, and fringe media types. Adam Parfrey, whose Feral House published Love Sex Fear Death, was the agile Master of Ceremonies for the evening.  The Feral House catalog is jam packed with controversial books on topics ranging from Nazi occultism to CIA mind control operations to sleaze sex paperbacks of the 1960s. Parfrey initially outlined the course of the evening, and then kept the performance on track even while incorporating a slight change in emphasis during the closing question-and-answer session, when a number of former Process Church members chose to speak about their own experiences in the cult.

Following this introduction there was an enactment of The Process Church Sabbath Assembly Ritual, consisting of hymns and recitations invoking Jesus Christ, Satan, Jehovah, and Lucifer. The Sabbath Assembly Band performed the hymns, with vocals anchored by the powerful metal-goddess voice of Jex Thoth. “Sacrifist” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge led the inter-hymnal recitations.  Following this Ritual, Adam Parfrey again took the stage to introduce footage from a documentary about The Process Church that was directed by William Morrison of the band Skinny Puppy. Most of the footage consisted of Timothy Wyllie talking on-screen. Adam Parfrey then introduced Timothy Wyllie, who in the next segment was on stage flipping through a slide show and talking. I found the slide show and recitative far more compelling than the film footage. Timothy is a larger-than-life individual and the framing of the film tended to minimize his gravitas. I would have shot him talking while sitting at his drafting board, and shown more of the graphics he created while he was art director of the Process Church publications, as well as the inimitable, otherworldly art works he has created in recent years.

The closing segment of the evening, which was less planned, consisted of a number of former Process Church members talking about their own largely positive experiences in the cult. The one exception was Malachi McCormack, whose spin on the cult was decidedly more negative. It was interesting that while Timothy Wyllie talked about Mary Ann de Grimston, the cult’s leader, being mauled to death by a pack of dogs at her post-cult animal sanctuary, Malachi McCormack talked about her dying of emphysema. Timothy stressed Mary Ann’s inner circle as a matriarchal cult with Robert de Grimston as a marginalized figure, while Malachi talked about a more dyadic leadership, at least until the latter days of the organization. I would eventually like to see a more scholarly examination of The Process Church. Perhaps Feral House will one day publish this.

Can Love Sex Fear Death go viral? The team promoting the book is filled with alternative world heavyweights. Nonetheless, it remains a long shot. A book tour hitting the most attractive locations is attracting a large audience from among the quite narrow segment of people who would typically be attracted to something like this but it is not breaking out into a wider demographic bandwidth. The wild card is the film. If it attracts a lot of mainstream media attention a larger book tour could possibly snowball the book into becoming a bestseller.

The big question I took away from my reading of the book and attendance at this event is as follows: What was the true nature of the “inner cult” Mary Ann or Mary Ann and Robert de Grimston presided over? My surmise is that it was at least somewhat derivative of the teachings of Aleister Crowley. This suggestion was perhaps triggered by the two young men (early-to-mid 30s), obvious occult lodge types, who were standing behind the crowd waiting to go upstairs into the auditorium, one of whom said to the other: “Ah, there are the sheep being prepared to be led to their slaughter.” I was the only person who heard them. I smiled and said to them: “I’m a friend of Timothy’s.” These two were neither part of the show nor part of the audience, but I think they are somehow connected to the successor of the magical lodge embodied within the The Process Church. That night I had the worst dreams of my entire life, in the course of which I was being tortured and dismembered over a long period of time. A couple of days later a friend pointed out to me that this is the result of my not believing in that particular set of gods.

Hopefully, whatever happens with this book, Timothy Wyllie’s oeuvre -- including also his other books and his painting -- will go viral. He is one of the most important artists and writers of his time.  You can explore his creative world at www.timothywyllie.com.

The World is a Giotto

1.

Art is the opiate of the masses.

2.

Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their canvases.

3.

There’s no business like art business.

4.

Paintings are a girl’s best friend.

5.

Art is just a four-letter word.

6.

Give me liberty or give me art.

7.

All’s fair in love and art.

8.

There is always more art.

Retrospective

About an hour after I read your latest email message my email logon got corrupted for the third time, and I once again lost all stored messages. I'm told that it was the Antichrist's Windows 95 operating system. It was the crowd though that prompted Ellen to lean over and ask: "Have we joined the Kiwanis?" I replied: "No, we joined the Shriners. At least we get to wear those cool fezzes." About ten minutes before the raffle a block of about a dozen tickets was found on the floor. An announcement was made that these tickets had been found, and of course the honor system would be used to give the tickets back to their rightful owner. That reminds me of a story a former Monitor Company colleague told me. A friend of hers was tutoring a seven-year old inner city African-American girl for the first time. The girl said her name was Portia, which Kristen's friend at first thought was a very amusing and innovative Shakespearian name for the parents to have come up with. But then she asked the girl how her name was spelled, and the girl replied: "P-o-r-s-c-h-e". Ellen's college friend, Chris Dickinson, a very tall and good looking gay blonde actor in some ways bears an uncanny resemblance to Butthead, a fact that has been mentioned to him by more people than he would ideally like to recall. Time to pack up the computer and go home. Then: the gym, dinner, work.

I’m puzzled by the timing of the arrival of the test message. It has to be one that's been hanging around for several weeks. Best as I can piece together it must have been stored in the Outbox of my cc:mobile program one or another time I couldn't dial in and then recently made it into the aether. Last time I used cc:mobile though was Sunday, which just confuses the situation even more. I woke up with a migraine and decided I needed to pound some of it away in the gym before getting back to presentation preparation. I have a client from Banque National de Paris coming in this afternoon, so it's not going to be a particularly productive day anyway. The Bills lost to Miami, putting the Colts plus the winner of next weekend's Bills-Chiefs game into the playoffs. The Nigerian Nightmare sounds absurd, appalling and a diversion (though not a pleasant one) from what you need to get done over there! It's a great vignette for you to drop into a piece of fiction, though. Yesterday after the meeting with First National Bank of Maryland I got to take a short walking tour of a lovely part of Baltimore I'd never seen before. Did you know that Bal'mor has its own Washington monument? The neighborhood around the monument has some very good art galleries, antique stores and early 19th century houses and churches. It was pretty beaten down fifteen years ago but has been pretty thoroughly restored. Just heard an announcement over the intercom that our email server is going down in a few minutes, so it's over and out for now.

Ellen realized you must have really been ill when I told her about your recent minimal alcohol consumption. A similar pattern of consumption tells me when she is really ill. Are you still in steady recovery mode? When do you get back from Budapest? "Hyper-hedonistic consumption" sounds like fun to me! My own tolerance for post-modernist fiction has diminished. There are a number of writers whose works, if I were in my twenties, I would have devoured but given my preferences now I've either not explored at all (David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollman) or find unreadable (Mark Leyner). You may recall at the time my having told you the story of Emma mistaking my voice over the phone for that of her new boyfriend and telling me all of these Tim Mahoney horror stories, and then telling her boyfriend the story, and upon hearing my name his asking her if I went to Columbia in the late sixties. I however didn't describe to you any of the antecedent relationships. I recall one occasion when my brother, then seventeen, and his girlfriend, sixteen, came to visit Apartment 42 (as it was widely known) and later claimed they couldn't understand anything we were talking about. We weren't even trying to be willfully opaque. I will reply to the rest of your message when this crushing headache and looming deadlines recede bit.

Sorry about the "charm" material. Too often I write before I think. You are most certainly not a fraud. You (not "one," but "you" specifically) are not capable of being a fraud. You are not rotted and polluting within, as you phrased it in your last email. The content of this back-and-forth is of course skewed to what is going on with you given my guardedness. In conversation I usually instinctively react to honest confrontation as one would to a mortal attack, but I am, I think, much less prone to do so in written exchanges. I have on a number of occasions written more revealing stuff about myself in emails to you only to erase those passages before sending the messages. The erasures are probably prompted by my worries about the strength of the firewall between written and spoken communications. One of the later erasures revolves around inventing a new product: self-folding socks. These miraculous items were made possible by combining two relatively new technological advances. Microminiaturized buckyballs empower the socks to fold themselves and fuzzy logic chips enable them to unerringly find their mate. Imagine the smile on the face of the poor harried TV commercial housewife when she dumps her laundry basket of socks on the table and presto, like magic, they rearrange themselves into perfectly folded pairs. I had a curious dream a few nights ago: I was in your apartment, and I don't know where it was. You had poured us both shots of tequila. I took a sip and it was very smooth. I asked you to pour a shot for Ellen, who was there but offstage. While I was speaking Ellen walked by us, went to your refrigerator, and took out and opened a large bottle of beer, without saying anything.

Other encounters today included a brief one with Chloe, who I know vaguely from various neighborhood coffee shops and the gym. She is a Smith grad, spoiled, demanding, and a writer. One day several months ago she asked me to watch her laptop for a few minutes. The screen being in my line of vision I couldn't help reading about how surprised she was at her transformation into a slut. Yesterday in the gym Chloe was riding a stationary bike and called out to me as I came in. I said something about not seeing her for a while and she said she doesn't go to Limbo any more. We talked about other coffee places and she said she spends her time now at Cafe Pick-Me-Up (which seems somehow appropriate). Hey, are you familiar with that slightly cranky conservative commentator with his own inimitable take on the former communist world? Here is a short transcription of his latest tirade: "You see, your Vladimir Lenin was a true gourmet, he liked his human flesh tartare, boiled, pan fried or grilled. The big schism in International Communism came about because Trotsky was strictly a tartare man and Stalin insisted that human flesh should only be eaten boiled with potatoes. This was a grisly version of Jonathan Swift's little end, big end conflict.  Now your Chairman Mao, he took things one step further, deflowering twelve year old girls in the evening and having them for lunch the next day, served with snow peas and water chestnuts in a spicy Sichuan sauce." This guy would be a natural to replace Pat Buchanan on CNN when Pat runs for president again in 2000.

Linda and I approached the house from the back. In order to get to the door we had to navigate on all fours through a crawl space. In places the crawl space became too narrow to pass through so we were unable to proceed in a straight line. When we eventually got to the door I noticed that had we approached from the left we would have been able to walk upright virtually all the way and would only have had to stoop down slightly at the very end. I asked Linda why we didn’t approach the door from that direction and she said: “Oh, we never go in that way.” I'm glad the funding situation sounds more optimistic, though working through to April without a break and enduring the entire Azeri winter will no doubt be less than amusing. Vienna would certainly be a lovely interlude. I found especially funny the phrase "incest as a means of negotiating sexual subjectivity." To your point, what exactly is "early modern incest" anyway? And (I wonder) what would "neo-Futuristic incest" be? Perhaps some totally twisted episode of the Jetsons? The night after reading your last email, Monday night it was, I dreamed I was walking in a semi-industrial neighborhood down a path surrounded by goldenrod, ragweed and other pollen producing plants I don't know the names of, mentally composing a letter to you on the noxious effects of pollen (as if you weren't all too intimately familiar with said effects). One way or another I'll keep you informed about the playoffs, though I have to tell you, I don't have a good feeling about the final outcome. The next paragraph was written last night but the stupid remote server wouldn't pick it up.

The American Idol Complex

The insidious process of voting for "entertaintment" (deliberate typo) favorites pre-selected by lowest-common-denominator media companies (such as Fox) and then "crowning" the winners has brought about an even further dumbing down of our already previously quite dumbed-down culture -- Think of this as "The American Idol Complex."

That Was No Pussy

Yesterday evening I overheard this very funny conversation between two veterans of AA meetings while I was having a hot cider at Think Coffee on the corner of Bleeker and Bowery. I was reading and trying my best to be unobtrusive. The older guy, in his 50s, is an actor. The younger, in his 40s, is a photographer. They initially talked about AA. Much of the rest of the conversation was about women and what women are like. Both are kind of jaded and cynical and were making comments about things they don't like about younger women these days. After the conversation had gone on for a bit the older one started talking about how in days of yore women weren't hairless down there and that "if you ever saw a shaved pussy you knew it was no pussy, it was a man's asshole." It was all I could do to keep from busting a gut laughing.

Chase Community Giving

The hand in the Chase Community Giving logo looks suspiciously like the hand that recently looted the U.S. Treasury of many billions of dollars. I guess the "Giving" part is a manifestation of trickle-down economics? 

Trash Can Art

This was stuck onto the trash can downstairs from my apartment on the corner of Clinton & Delancey.

Junkie Du Jour

Junkies can be funny to watch. Today's junkie with dreads was swaying back and forth in front of the Burger King on Delancey Street. A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. Both hands were cradled around a large partially eaten corn muffin he held in front of his torso just above waist level. Every few seconds he would lift the muffin a few inches toward his mouth. Then a look of confusion would radiate out from his eyes and he would lower the muffin again. He really wanted to eat some of the muffin but it appeared he couldn't figure out how to make that happen given the lit cigarette already positioned between his lips.

The Invisibly Greased Palm

(The fictional) Abe Jackemoff, former head Republican lobbyist honcho of the K Street Project and current penitentiary inmate, was caught on tape: "We've taken Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, grafted a greased palm onto it, and created The Invisibly Greased Palm, which is just another way of describing how the Republican Congressional majority (which will return by 2012) operates."  


Ron's note: The Democratic Congressional majority is certainly no stranger to The Invisibly Greased Palm.

Halloween Costume

This is a reprise of a November 1, 2007 entry from an old (and abandoned) blog:

While walking home last evening I found a piece of paper on the sidewalk on my block that proclaimed:

THE TRICK

Accepting Jesus

Christ is Lord

THE TREAT

Eternal Life

...Well, this little encounter enabled me to visualize my fantasy Halloween costume. One year I would love to get dressed up as Giordano Bruno carrying the stake upon which he was burned (in 1600), with little bursts of flame popping up around my feet with every step I take.

For anyone who might be interested in reading about Bruno's works I recommend as a starting place "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Frances Yates, who was a Reader in the History of the Renaissance at the University of London. My copy of the book is a Vintage paperback edition published in 1969.

Jessie

Jessie is without a doubt wild and wondrous.

Schadenfreude

Real Estate Scum make a tempting target for some of our baser emotional responses.

A Very Short Story

This is an alternative riff off of one paragraph in Chapter 2 of To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers:

The Inadvertent Auteur

Sometimes reality turns out to be even more exciting than we anticipate. Take for example the following recording I made right before Will picked me up last night.

Prom night for the Brearley School Class of 1982. Tape recording Made by Patricia Wilkerson:

"After we close CBGBs Charlotte and I are going to take darling Bobby and Will to my father's corporate suite at the St. Regis. What our hot macho studs don't realize is that they are going to put on a little mutual cocksucking exhibition for us girls. That's what these handcuffs in my bag are for. And what Sweet Charlotte doesn't know is that the proceedings in their entirety, including the scrumptious Charlotte sandwich Bobby and Will are later going to devour, will be captured on film. Cinematography is courtesy of Rafael, daddy's chauffeur, who was reluctant at first. But eventually he decided it was not in his own best interests for daddy to learn that he has been getting sucked off at least once a week by his employer's innocent-looking daughter ever since the day she turned twelve. Rafaelito fell for my act: 'Oh daddy, he MADE me do it. I was so MORTIFIED and SCARED. Can't you teach him a lesson.'"

This is like the description of a church picnic compared to what actually happened. The others were all pretty wasted by the time we rolled into the suite. Daddy’s partner, Jackson Phipps, made sure nobody else would be there. I still have a photocopy of Phippsy’s NAMBLA membership card, so he always does his best to keep me happy. Rafaelito, dressed in a tux, greeted us at the door and brought us drinks – Martinis for Will and Bobby, an Old Fashioned for Charlotte, and grapefruit juice for me. I’m Straight Edge, at least with regard to alcohol, and besides I thought I needed to be in control.

The first surprise of the evening was discovering that Will and Bobby needed no encouragement to start getting down to business. We had barely gotten settled when they were making out furiously. Soon their trousers were down and they were on the floor seriously gobbling each other’s dick. Rafaelito was manning the Super 8, cutting back and forth between the boys and Charlotte. Her panties were down around her ankles and her left hand was thrumming away on her juicy clit. I found myself slowly getting more and more excited as I sipped demurely on my grapefruit juice. Time had almost stopped.

But then I was jolted out of my reverie when Rafaelito motioned to me to take over filming duties. This was unscripted but I sensed it was going to be good. The next thing I knew Rafaelito was in the scrum with Will and Bobby, his tongue probing hard into Bobby’s asshole. Charlotte’s eyes were glued to this ménage. She was moaning loudly, and her prom gown was starting to get soaked with her own cum. Charlotte now got up, as if in a trance, and joined the grouping on the floor. She had pulled a dildo out of her handbag and was now ramming it up Will’s asshole. I noticed that my panties were starting to get a little moist, but since making art is more important than having sex I kept on filming.

Rafaelito had now taken his pants off and he was slowly guiding his uncut eight-incher into Bobby’s ass. Bobby began writhing and quickly shot a monster load into Will’s mouth. Will, who still hadn’t come, now disengaged himself from Bobby’s mouth and pulled Charlotte’s dildo out of his asshole. He grabbed Charlotte, pinned her on the ground, stuck the dildo up her asshole, and started to eat out her sopping cunt, all the while ramming the dildo home inside of her ass.  Charlotte was screaming at the top of her lungs as she came at least a dozen times. Rafaelito pulled out of Bobby before coming and shot his load onto Charlotte’s stomach.  I zoomed in on Bobby lapping up Rafaelito’s jizz while Will continued yodeling in Charlotte’s canyon. The activity kept up until daylight, and I captured it all on film. By the end of the evening my prom gown was soaked in my own cum. Rafaelito, I’m sure, knows he will pay dearly for his dereliction of duties.

Re-Testing The Low (After Egon Schiele)

This piece is from the "Mr. Market Re-Calibrates" series (with a bow to James Grant, whose latest insightful book is titled Mr. Market Miscalculates). I put this collage together a few weeks after the S&P 500 index reached an intra-day low of 666, which has not yet been re-tested. The drawing is my laughably imprecise attempt at copying one by Egon Schiele... Last night I tested the new sketching pencils I purchased while out walking earlier in the day by doing a quick drawing that I subsequently titled "After Oscar Kokoschka." There is a series of "After Drawings" in the works.

Brad Pitt Update!!!

I came across this yesterday afternoon in Tompkins Square Park.

A New Snarky Epitaph

The subject of this one isn't dead yet, but he will be at some point:

Epitaph for Dan Rather (aka Damn Blather), Newsreader

He never met
a teleprompter
he didn't like.

Escape Artist

The sonnet I posted yesterday -- the last one I had written -- was composed while walking around during lunch hour sometime in late 2006 (I seem to recall). I wrote it down when I got back to the office. Imagine my surprise when the first couple of lines of a new sonnet popped into my head this morning. A rough draft is now complete:

                   Escape Artist

A mixed assemblage emphasizing paint

Unlocks a window into further gloom;

It tells a tale of madness and constraint,

Of soaring flights and falling off a broom.

Is that a whiff of sulphur in the air,

From someone’s leaky cauldron, on display?

It stains the nostrils, hampering your fair

And balanced appetite for work and play.

So raise your tarnished chalice and declaim

To angels and blithe spirits found on high

That no mere trace of matter will remain

Of those who gravely hunger for your sigh.

This multiverse is stranger than it seems.

Unbind those stays and ship out on the beams.

As The Vessel Burns

Abhorrent love retains a festive air

in hindsight's shadowed glow. But once the glare

intrudes too far to ever be concealed,

a second skin of wisdom can get sealed

too tightly, unless penances are made.

In essence, memory becomes a trade-

off in this exchange of dreams: Cheating death,

while keeping their psyches crossed, their twinned breath

discharges fragrant spoor into the ground.

Rain whips the conjoined lovers; a hell hound

growls nearby. The music of the spheres turns

dissonant, as the vessel slowly burns:

Tracing this mystery back to its sources

requires tact, and a knowledge of corpses.

Roll Over John Lennon (And Tell Kurt Cobain The News)

ROLL OVER JOHN LENNON (AND TELL KURT COBAIN THE NEWS)

Fabio is a sixty-year old visual artist who lives and works in a loft on Forsyth Street. He was born in San Francisco, came to Manhattan in 1966 to attend Columbia, and has been living in downtown Manhattan since the mid-70s, first in Soho and later on the Lower East Side.

Gerard is a thirty eight year old composer who lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Suffolk Street. He was born in London, moved to Manhattan at eighteen to attend Julliard, and then moved to the East Village, originally to a squatter building, in the early 90s, right after graduation.

It’s Happy Hour at The Wobblie Wonk on Rivington Street. As “I Wanna Hold Your Hand at the Hotel California” begins to ooze from a satellite radio station, Gerard and Fabio, who had been sitting silently next to each other, begin talking.

G: Fucking Beagles really suck… Fucking boomers really suck… Why has this bar started pandering to empty nesters from the ‘burbs who have just bought brand new pied-a-terres in our once dangerous neighborhood?

F: I actually don’t share your disdain for the new arrivals. They can be amusing to talk to, if somewhat limited, although you’re right, their music does totally suck. But junkies are way overrated as neighbors. I’m rather happy they’ve gone somewhere else to nod off and overdose.

G: But don’t you object on a cultural level? Isn’t this music extremely painful to listen to?

F: That’s a different matter. Boobus boomerus, whose geographical range extends from North America to Europe and Japan, is closely related to boobus americanus, the species of human being first identified by H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, and only found in the United States.

G: ’Cuz who needs a CD by Billy Joel/Is dat all yuh get faw yaw munnnney…’ 

F: Isn’t it curious that the Greatest Generation spawned the Lousiest Generation?

G: But you’re a boomer aren’t you?

F: No. I am in the same age cohort as the boomers, that’s undeniable, but by all standards of taste, civility and intellectual orientation, I am most decidedly not a boomer, as the term is popularly understood.

G: The most typical examples of your boobus boomerus I ever observed were a mom and dad in their late forties or early fifties out to dinner with their ten year old son at a now defunct barbecue restaurant on Varick Street. This was about ten years ago. Dad had a receding hairline and a greasy ponytail. Mom was soft and flabby and wearing clothes that, given her body type, showed way too much flesh. Both of them were wearing Birkenstocks over their dirty feet. Mom and dad were on one side of the booth swaying back and forth Kumbaya style as they serenaded their embarrassed offspring with an off- key rendition of Sweet Baby James’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”

F: Who along with his astonishingly bovine ex-spouse won a Crummy Award for Most Ludicrous Honky Cover Of An R&B Classic for their emetic version of “Mockingbird”.

G: I want to blow up the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and sample sounds of the explosion in the last movement of a symphony. That little cunt Rhymin’ Paul “Fifty Ways to Leave Mama Pyjama And Still Boring After All These Years” Simon was “elected” to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That’s about as valid an outcome as George W. Bush’s “election” in the 2000 presidential race. All communiqués to the media about the bombing will be from The G. G. Allin Liberation Front. He should be in the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not wankers like the aforementioned or fucking Elton John and the cocksucking Bee Gees.

F: Or is it “….the fucking Bee Gees and cocksucking Elton John?” But in any event I would advise you to save your Semtex for a less risible target. Especially since that twelve-tone composition of yours, “Roll Over John Lennon (And Tell Kurt Cobain The News)”, would make you an obvious and highly visible potential suspect.

G: I saw your friend Jennie Lee in action at Verlaine two nights ago.

F: Jenny Lee is a real Action Faction throwback. What was she up to?

G: Minding her own business, sitting at the bar, when this young hedge fund type, quite full of himself, sat down next to her. She let him buy her a drink and they talked for a few minutes.

F: Let me guess. Jenny Lee, who can charm the skin off a snake while constructing formal logic problems in her head, accidentally aroused certain urges in young Mistah Hedgie.

G: Who leaned into her like he would lean into Jamie Dimon when closing on a bridge loan for a buyout. He put his arm across her shoulder as he said: “You are sooooo fuckable.” To which she smiled broadly and sweetly replied: “I am sooooo fuckable.” Then she grabbed her glass of Campari off the bar and emptied its contents in his face as she snarled: “But not by a swine like you.” And sat there laughing as he dashed off to the gents to try to get the Campari off of his $2,500 pale gray Thom Browne suit.

F: That encounter was no doubt caught on video with an assist from someone on the bar staff. My guess is that it will appear in her upcoming show at Pattie Wilkerson’s Wastrel Gallery on 24^th Street. Young Mistah Hedgie’s face will of course be blurred beyond recognition or substituted for. The working title of Jenny Lee’s show is “Provocations.”

G: Darts?

F: A splendid idea.

G: Two games, double or nothing, a hundred dollars a game?

F: You’re on.

On How Yogi Baksheesh Acquired His Name

Mimosa O'Toole, seated in front of her old ThinkPad, yawned as she realized there was nothing more to transcribe. She logged onto kexp.org and began sipping from the oversized mug of espresso on the tray table to her left. Opening up her teacher's autobiography at the beginning, waves of desire washed over her as she read for perhaps the thousandth time: "Becoming an Enlightened Master was so blissfully easy that for the first couple of weeks I actually half-doubted I had become one. Here's how it happened: Marie-Louise picked me up while I was having country sausage for lunch at au Babylone and took me back to her six room flat on rue de Varennes, just up the street from where Edith Wharton used to live. After a couple of glasses of Calvados she fucked my brains out in all sorts of imaginative ways for the remainder of the afternoon and evening. As the sun was just about to come up she whispered a mantra in my ear and made me repeat it 108 times. Afterwards, laughing mirthfully, she announced: 'Voila! You are now Yogi Baksheesh, Spiritual Advisor to the Exceptionally Evolved.' And so I was." Closing the book, Mimosa recalled the words Yogi Baksheesh said to her as she was leaving his studio two nights ago: "When I was twelve, my grandfather Friedrich, an astrophysicist, who was on his deathbed, said to me: 'We change universes far more often than a reasonably hygienic person changes underwear. The problem, if indeed it is such, is that very few of us have even the faintest notion, except perhaps in dreams, that this is occurring.'"  Well, Mimosa reminded herself, speaking out loud one of the transcriptions from yesterday morning’s meditation session: “This life is just one of Y-1 variant traversals of N plus-or-minus X dimensional space.” She concluded silently: “And now it’s time to go to the gym.”

An Aside + A Song

I've just come up with a way to describe my current trading strategy in the tax-deferred account -- I am swing-trading stocks I would buy and hold if I were a buy-and-hold investor. About half an hour after the market opened this morning I sold 200 shares of a financial stock I bought three trading-days ago (and can therefore now sell with incurring a "trading violation" -- but when the profit-potential if significant enough I have been known to incur a "violation" -- it's okay once in a while but they'll fuck with you if you do it too often) for a net profit of $254.95. I thought the market would crash and burn today but instead it's climbing like a motherfucker. That being the case, since my other holdings are more than holding their own, I think I will take the rest of the day off. I don't particularly enjoy trading stocks, although I will confess to manic rushes on particularly good days. I suppose I will check in on the BlackBerry throughout the rest of the trading day and make any necessary or desirable adjustments, but I am not inclined to make myself sit in front of this screen any longer than I have to on such a lovely autumn afternoon.

I wrote the lyrics for "A Concise History of Hip Hop" in three stages: 1) The first two stanzas were written in 2006; 2) The fade-out chorus was written in May 2008 in John Stanford's living room while he was working out the arrangement (which took him about half an hour); 3) The auto makes were added to fade-out chorus as an ad-lib when we were performing it on-stage at Cornelia Street Cafe in September 2008. Two versions of the song -- one in the "studio" (such as it is) and one live -- are streaming on the Jersey Petroleum website (www.jerseypetroleum.com).  With that:

A Concise History of Hip Hop

Hippity-hop to the chop shop
To grandma's house we go
YO!

Gonna waste that bitch
Gonna steal her crack
Gonna stuff her corpse
In a gunny sack

The pipe is cooking
My hos are hooking
The cops are looking
And I am booking
In my Bentley

The pipe is cooking

My hos are hooking

The cops are looking

And I am booking

In my Lamborghini

he pipe is cooking

My hos are hooking

The cops are looking

And I am booking

In my Alfa Romeo

Beauregard Coverdale

I totally forgot about this character. He somehow dropped out of the main line of the narrative. Looking through an old, recently-recovered blog just now I found this entry from July 1, 2007:

A tiny piece of my novel To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers has come together over the weekend. This section is about the great uncle of Dr. Lisa Coverdale, who was featured in a story in The Velveeta Underground. Beauregard Coverdale, as a young man, fought with the Jefferson Davis Brigade in Spain against the Communists. Actually, he spent most of his time seducing young fascist soldiers in dive bars in Madrid. During WWII he was an OSS officer managing a ring of spies inside Germany from a penthouse in Lisbon. Beginning in the late forties he seduced a wide assortment of men prominent in the arts and politics in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and photographed them, or at least some of their body parts. In the sixties he was one of the pioneers of holography. But since he was employed by the CIA he never pursued a professional career in the arts. After his death Lisa's sister, the evil Laurel Coverdale, who was the executor of his estate, brought his works into the public realm. As it turns out, old Beauregard, who was a pure top, liked to photograph the assholes of his conquests before and after having sex with them. And then many years later he created a number of pieces he referred to in his journals as "Assholograpy".  Laurel Coverdale is the Executive Vice President of the Columbine Foundation, whose mission statement reads: To Put a Handgun in the Locker of Every School Kid in America. Laurel's prep school classmate, Patricia Wilkerson, agrees to mount the first show of Beauregards's work at her Wastrel Gallery space on W.24th Street. The show consists of before and after photographs and holograms titled: "Truman" (Capote), "Allen" (Ginsberg), "Andy" (Warhol), and "Roy" (Cohn).

Sic Semper Tyranus

Has the New York Times once again been scooped by a smaller and nimbler rival?

Pass Around Party Bottom

These were posted on a construction wall on Ludlow just south of Houston sometime within the past several days. It is hard to choose a favorite phrase. At the moment I am leaning towards: Princess of Power Fisting.

Beginning of "Aurelia" - a New Sci-Fi Story

Please keep in mind that our narrator is both very full of himself and a bit of a dolt:

I was licking Aurelia’s clit and she was coming hard as I pressed on her G-Spot with the index finger of my right hand and moved my middle finger deeper and deeper into her asshole. When the fourth finger of my right hand found and slipped inside a hole I had never encountered before in other women, Aurelia screamed for what seemed like ninety seconds and I knew I was in completely uncharted territory. After Aurelia came at least thirty times, a number she volunteered later, we fucked vaginally and anally, but I was not permitted, at least not that night, to fuck her in the hole whose name I didn’t know. When we paused Aurelia lit up a joint, took a deep hit, and passed it to me.

“If you’re wondering, its function is to alleviate through elimination some of the more noxious interstellar gases one can’t help taking in.”

“I was wondering about that. How could I not?  But what I’m more curious about is why you chose me.”

“One. You’re easy. Two. Even though you may not know it yet – but it’s possible you do know it – you’re every bit as much of an alien as I am. And if you didn’t know it before you’ll certainly know it by the time I leave.”