This guy just reached inside my heart and gave me the talk I really, really needed when I was 14. Not some bullshit celebrity spouting platitudes, but a real-life person handing down truth – and power. Thank you, Dan Savage, for the wonderful It Gets Better project.

Spotted last night while hoofing it home over the Williamsburg Bridge, 2 o’clock in the morning and ridiculous with whiskey, energy drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, shattering the darkness with drunken bellows of “CAN YOU DIG IT?!”

Sometime last year, I was watching a documentary on Martha Graham and pretty much blown away by how she was pushing dance in a new direction. Her friends and colleagues were interviewed, putting together the pieces of her life and how she approached her work, and one of them said something that’s stuck with me ever since – commenting on how she could get in the heat of an argument or other tense moments, “she wasn’t going to curb her reactions because out of those reactions came dance movement.”

Faced with a stack of bellydancing DVD’s and not sure where my moves are within all those hours of technique tutorials, I’ve translated this to: start by dancing wrong.

I’m very fortunate to live in an apartment where I can push all the stuff in the living room to one side and have a nice chunk of hardwood floor to slam around on – who needs dedicated kitchen space, anyway! – and I started by taking all the stuff that grabs my puppet strings and throws me into AHHHHH MUST DANCE mode and making a playlist out them. Then, going for Sleep Chamber – Velvet Acid Christ – Royksopp – seeing what my body wanted to do with the music, how it wanted to interpret the sound into movement. Right now I’m working with Dead Can Dance’s “Oman” from 1994’s Toward the Within to get the hang of the horizontals of pelvic and chest circles, which feel like the ultimate base for everything else – getting the hang of these two moves, even better in tandem, feels like unlocking the door to everything else.

Other things on repeat lately: Maduro’s “Temple Steps” which came to me via Shakra’s Industrial Strength Dance Workout, and Madonna’s “Frozen.”

Good gods, 1994. Remember when everybody was just pissed about the new, slow, “progressive” sound? Before Napster hit the fan?

Three thoughts:
1) The Mustaine-Hetfield schism will be raging on 60 years after one or both parties have died;
2) Tom Araya is the world’s largest imp;
3) We are all Jersey.

For the record, I would have died and gone to heaven if I’d gotten to see the band during the Puppets era. The reason we hate them so much is because we loooooooved them so much.

The whole thing is here.

(Via Illogical Contraption.)

Went down to Philly on Friday night to house-sit, make new friends with some PIBs freshly arrived from the west coast, and wander my old stomping grounds. I really shouldn’t be surprised anymore at the odd turns gentrification has taken, but it was still jarring to find a Whole Foods plopped down scant blocks from Harry’s Occult. The grungy little Kater Street townhouse that was my home in 1998 is gone, replaced by a brick monstrosity still swathed in scaffolding.

South Street actually kind of reminds me a little of Melrose Ave in LA – a small swarm of stores, all selling the same flashy disposable club fashion. Much like what happened to the Limelight, nothing special or unique. And while the raucous drunks of Fat Tuesday’s are poised to survive a nuclear holocaust with their blue cocktails and relentless techno, the streets were oddly quiet. It’s changed, and not just in a “the goths are all gone!” kind of way.

Tattooed Mom’s is still there, a balm of jack and coke in the middle of all this dubious nostalgia. I love the back room on the second floor.

The baroque propriety of a mid-seventies suburban living room – covered in graffiti. It’s like something popped straight out of dream logic, like an abandoned house that the neighborhood kids are partying in, leaving their territorial sharpie pissings, but the actual furniture left alone instead of being smashed into firewood.

And they haven’t gotten rid of the bumper cars. Yay.

Another highlight: dropping into Halloween while the soundtrack to A Chorus Line was playing in the background. Nothing like checking out a mouthwatering display of 80’s-deco Alexis Carrington earrings to the caterwauling of “Tits and Ass.”

One of the most uplifting spiritual transgressions I’ve ever beheld was at NYC’s infamous church-turned-nightclub, the Limelight. Leaving key pieces of the religious iconography intact, this was a place where a DJ spun from the pulpit, bands played on the former altar space, and the tortured Christ figure was replaced by a mannequin covered in tiny discoball mirrors, arms spread out in benediction over the dancing crowd below. A pretty cool backdrop for the usual moonlit vices…but also, a creative and beautiful riff on Catholicism. Too drunk, sudden breakup, the drugs taking you strange places, whatever your drama, get yourself off to the side and alone and look up at that silver figure overhead, no bloody hands and pleading eyes to guilt you towards the next direction, but brightness shining from every inch of the human form…everything’s gonna be all right.

That, and IT WAS A NIGHTCLUB IN A CHURCH. How goth as fuck is THAT?!

Well, guess what. It’s now a mall.

An upscale mall. There will be no more VIP parties in the choir balcony.

Seriously, I wanted to retch. All of the darkness and excitement paved over in the most noxious way possible – with SHOPPING!! Shop-shop-shopity shop! Doesn’t matter we just lost one of the really cool places to wear all this junk to, must keep acquiring sparkly things!!

And they did such a masterful job doing it, too. The checkerboard floor, the recessed lighting, everything so tasteful and sanitized. Pure Disney.

It’s not like there’s anything particularly special or different in here. No Patricia Field or Betsey Johnson – OK, not like that would make it all better – but it’s Marilyn Monroe posters and candles and rhinestone jewelry and things you can find in a bazillion other places all over the country. Generi-chic.

I’m pretty sure this used to be the Geiger room. It’s now a salon.

The main reason I gave up the Chateau is so that I’d have more time to write fiction. And that’s still true. But there were some other smaller reasons that went into that decision. One of them was that if I’m going to have a small chunk of time to spend searching for something, I’d much rather blow it on music. The discovery of new favorite songs is one of the things I live for.

And that’s what was going through my mind as I was walking through “The Limelight Marketplace” – how fucked up it is that our culture would rather go shopping than dancing.

So Dave Mustaine has an autobiography that just came out, and last week I found out he’d be on Fifth Avenue today. I was under the impression that he’d be doing a reading, and the spectre of Dave channeling the power of his prose was too tempting to resist, what inflections his voice would take on when hitting the inevitable passages about James Hetfield’s various assholisms. Seriously, what an incredible soap opera it’s been, Metallica vs. Megadeth. This is some of the best music that’s ever been made, period, surrounded by gargantuan egos and animosity that’s been simmering for decades. And Dave’s snarling stage persona, honed from years of arena shows, taking the podium at the Midtown B&N? How could I not attend?

Unfortunately, it turned out to be just a signing. Bleah. I went in anyway and was halfway up the escalator when I heard a guy yelling. OH MY GOD! DAVE! DAAAAAAVE! OH MY GOD! DAVE! And what timing – not ten feet away as I hit the top, that mop of strawberry-blonde hair walking over to the signing table. I tried to get a pic of him in these genteel, literary surroundings, but the staff were pretty zealous about no cameras, and no standing around gawking at him, and really not being able to have anything to do with it at all unless you were buying his book and lined up in the cattle chute.

I found out that their zealousness didn’t extend to locking the Rockstar Room’s door. Not that Dave Mustaine’s toasted panini sandwiches are earthshattering news or anything, but I really hate it when people get all velvet rope about photography and whatnot. It immediately puts me in the mood for transgression, however mild and ridiculous.

It was really tempting to dash in and grab one of the half-eaten cookies and go find the OH MY GOD! DAVE! guy and hand it to him and tell him “Dave Mustaine has just eaten half of this cookie!” just to see what he’d do. Also, that 1990 Rust in Peace longsleever was right there for the grabbing by anybody headed for the bathrooms. (No, I didn’t. That’s not cool.) Rather dumb that nobody in the entourage thought to pull the door shut.

Good to know if I ever end up penning a runaway bestseller and my rabid fans storm the local bookstores in demand of my dulcet tones, that this is the kind of lurid backstage debauchery I have to look forward to.

Tonight Stray cracked open LIMBO, and after about eighteen minutes of giant spiders, hanging corpses, and hair-trigger beartraps, it most definitely pays off everything planted in this trailer. It’s creepy, smart, and vicious. The simplicity is deceptive – nothing is what it seems, and no punches are pulled when mistakes are made. The haunting graytone landscapes, the eerie soundtrack, the only guidance: Keep Going Right. I cannot WAIT to see where it goes.

Right as I’m typing this, I’m watching the intro for Prototype. Zombies! New York! Copious amounts of blood! This one’s looking pretty good, too

Selling jewelry at Artists and Fleas and all the fun people who came up and chatted and bought stuff. Watching old Wilkins Coffee commercials on YouTube from when Kermit the Frog was a sadistic bastard. A long conversation down to Philadelphia over how women get tagged with special words to demonize their sexual freedom. My family in central Jersey, a very fun sitcom to make guest appearances on. My aunt gave me a giant book on the history of fashion via Vogue and I now have an adorably kitschy 70’s flowery pillowcase from my cousin.

Stumbled into a tangent of utter calm coming off 195, trying to find the way to my aunt’s house from memory. (Haven’t made the trip up from the south in forever.) I took the wrong exit and ended up on county roads with a speed limit of 50mph, with names like Old Stone Tavern and Stagecoach. The overall terrain was familiar, but I’d never been through this part of the neighborhood before. “True Faith” shuffled up next on full blast and this was the part where I was supposed to pull over and remap the route, but instead I let myself get lost for a little bit, just until the next song, shooting past monster country houses and hopeful little produce stands and tracts of farmland where the trees opened up into vast swaths of neatly tended green. Breathing in the air, and letting the music flood through me, and following the curves of the road toward the next pastoral scene, and no more consciousness than that. Pure bliss.

It is very, very unsettling to be writing an explicit sex scene between a death metal witch and an L.A. glam magician involving a delightful male striptease when all of a sudden, one of my cats decides to walk over the keyboard right as the condom’s getting rolled on.

And it’s not even Pollywog, the glam kitty! No! It’s Bella, the monster! The one you really don’t want to have your genitals around!

She has gone on to find a worthier target: glittery hair flowers. Good. Now, back to hitting thesaurus.com for better words than “turgid.”