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.”