The Precocious are Deserving of our Praise

"Over the years, homoeroticism has probably ghostwritten more rap shit than Jay-Z and Mad Skillz combined, as the logical by-product of a cultural investment in the dick that runs deeper than vaginas (see Saafir's "Worship the D"). But in mainstream hip-hop, actually being gay is relegated to life either "on the DL" or as a spectator/dick-rider. Which may be why the making-gay of DMX's musical signifiers happens on Xiu Xiu's Fabulous Muscles, enabled by a white suburbanite for whom spectatorship is existential."

Rajiv Jaswa is the future of music writing.

"Of the composers I heard, the one who seem best poised for a major career is Nico Muhly, twenty-two-year-old, spiky-haired, healthily irreverent student of Corigliano’s at Juilliard... On a recent afternoon, he enjoyed motets b William Byrd, Khia’s salacious hip-hop track “My Neck, My Back,” John Adams’s “Chin Gates,” and Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung”—the last for a school paper."

Nico Muhly is the future of music.

Mayflowers

What happened? I can't quite say. It was a dark spring... I read a lot of books about war and suicide and the bubonic plague. I had to finish a play. I dropped ambition like an old and weathered hat and took up a hostessing job at a pizza place next door to my house. March and April are always the worst time of the year for me. People put on their tank tops and I try to further stuff myself into sweaters. Both food and sleep make my stomach turn. I hide in the movie theaters on the nicest days, the only thing I craved was soft-serve ice cream from trucks, which I have almost always detested for making me rather ill. One of my roommates moved out taking all of our furniture and the TV and for two weeks there was no replacement roommate or furniture so I placed my desk in the middle of the empty living room and spent the days sitting there working on the play or thinking about terrible things. I was reprimanded at the pizza place for looking sloppy, ("Try to do something with your hair," said the owner) and then again for "acting distracted" ("Try to leave your personal problems at home please.") After nearly nine months in my apartment I am still sleeping on the floor. Simply put, I had lost the desire to share my dim existence on the computer because it was boring and full of ill-will. Sometimes the world around you forms corners and it takes a long time to figure out that you can't fit in as a round person. I was growing corners and have returned until triangles develop outside and I will seek another repreive.

Anyway I really decided to write again because of the two comments posted. And to those in question I apologize for not having attended any of your gallery openings because I wanted to but had something. I also have finished the play more or less, which will be performed August 1st and 2nd at HERE Center for the Arts, double billed with some interpretive dance about Puerto Rican identity that I have nothing to do with. I also wanted to write about Cuba, but it was so complex -- I mean I have written about it, but pages and pages too long to belong on a weblog. It was partially Cuba that threw me into a temporary madness. The best description I could give would be a recommendation to read The Sheltering Sky and Orwell's essay on Makarresh. One item of note was that I got busted by the feds, an experience that I've also written quite a bit about that will hopefully appear in some other venue some day as well, along with the account of a discotheque inside a cave, the day a man with acne scars bought me guarapo and an inquiry into the worst thing I have ever consumed, misleadingly entitled a hamburger. The only statement I could put simply is that it was the country that made me most patriotic while simultaneously landing me on airport shit lists, so that (thus far) I've been thoroughly searched every time I've flown since returning. There's something rather satisfying about being classified as a political threat in the current climate, I must admit.

I am once more acclimatized and I hope I can win back your loyalty and trust. I realized when I started changing my Friendster profile every day that it was time to do this again.

Oh do you still read this?

I'm sorry. One day it will be resurrected from the dead. Va na fe...