Required Reading for Any Existential Mary

Friends,

When I call you Mary, you know what I mean, right?  Like, “What’s up, Mary?” Snap.  Gay lingo.  Once when I was cashiering we were all counting out our $$$ at the end of the night, and I’m so thankful I work in a gay-friendly environment with many GLBTQIA (M) M=Mary co-workers and I kept calling everyone Mary–like pass the white-out Mary, or does anyone have change for a ten, thanks, Mary.  My Mary dialogue-mania-addresses included one co-worker who is heterosexual, and another queer cashier said, “He’s not a Mary!”  And then we began the etymological search of the queer origins of the word, Mary, and someone said it came from Alice in Wonderland.  Or Wizard of Oz.  Or something like that.  And they said it with such conviction and were also from the “I’m a friend of Dorothy’s” generation that I believed them and halted all research right then.

Where were we?  Ah, existentialism.  I will leave out most of the details here, but since February 1st of this year, with the exception of ten days, I’ve been recovering from a variety of things. Don’t worry, none of it life-threatening.  I thought I was pretty healed up, until I came down with a cold a few days ago on the heels of a thrown out back.  So I’ve found myself spending a lot of time sick in bed reading, and feeling existential. Sickness makes a person existential, (as does playing countless games on Lexulous via Facebook with the wonderful poet Dorianne Laux–my Lexulous partner!) In my reading, I came across this that I must share with you. It is written by James Baldwin. If you’ve never read anything by James Baldwin, please do. Start with Another Country. Or Giovanni’s Room. Or Anything. You’re really not going to go wrong with anything James Baldwin.  Another Country is one of my favorite books of all time. What can it mean you ask to be a favorite book?  It means I was listening to Another Country on audio while in my old art studio, because I love to listen to things while I draw, and I was so engrossed I could only put down my paintbrush and sit wrapped in my winter coat hunched over my drawing table listening to James Baldwin’s words in astonishment. There is a suicide scene in Another Country, that when I heard it, made me think about all the things we have to imagineas writers and the suicide scene is so AUTHENTIC you can’t imagine how James Baldwin did it–made a person know what it would feel like jumping from a bridge…Without further adieu, I give you James Baldwin…

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963.

I read that and I think–that Mary James Baldwin had his finger on the pulse of anything I need to know about anything.  The conundrum of life?  Earn your death.  There’s a million ways to do it– and I guarantee you none of them are wrapped up in being a self-interested schmuck and most of them have to do with being engaged in bravery with all humankind.  I will leave you with some photos.  I began painting my literary heroes as ducks awhile back, (don’t ask why– I can’t really explain it beyond the fact that I think it’s probably that I’ve been obsessed with the benevolence of ducks for sometime, or in other words I believe they earn their death nobly!)  because I love ducks so much and to me to be a duck is the highest honor. That’s how I found myself trying to draw James Baldwin as a duck.

Also, be warned Marys who are passionately confronting the conundrum of life– the FBI reportedly had a real thick file on James Baldwin.  Guess they weren’t too keen on a queer, black, man telling the truth.  I made this painting about Baldwin’s FBI file.  Tootles, Marys–Go F%$ck Sh**t up. xo, Ali

San Jose’s Lame Because You’re Lame

Sister Spit’s second show was at the Latino art space MACLA, which is currently showing work from comic artists including Jaimie Hernandez from Love and Rockets! It was quite exciting to gaze at some Maggie + Hopey panels while waiting for our eleven beloved audience members to arrive. And they were beloved, beloveds – we knew that Sister Spit’s first ever show in San Jose was going to be a tiny one, so I had the audience introduce themselves to us and I introduced us to the audience and thusly a great friendship was born! Of course our performers are such professionals that they BRING IT whether the theater is seating 11 or 1,100, so the show was super fun, and afterward we learned where our elusive queerdo audience is hiding – in their basements! San Jose is a basement punk show city! A sweet girl named Juliet handed me a DIY calender put out by the direct action group SAN JOSE’S LAME BECAUSE YOU’RE LAME. If only we’d known! That’s the thing about an underground – it’s underground! After the show we booked it over to Psycho Donuts, which is so famous that even Barack Obama eats their wackjob pastries:

See? We felt absolutely presidential. I got a Bananarama which was a chocolate-covered custard filled job with weird banana slices on top that were weirdly stiff and chewy. People ate Lucky Charms-encrusted donuts (special for St. Patrick’s Day), slightly stale key lime pie donuts (truly all the donuts were slightly stale), donut fries that come in a paper boat with jam and custard dipping sauce, hamburger donuts impaled with bacon, and some sour berry donuts.

We continued our culinary tour of San Jose with a stop at Pizza My Heart, which I love for two important reasons: 1. The dude who started it is from my hometown, Chelsea, Massachusetts, and it is rare for anyone to escape that place and do something meaningful with their lives. 2. It is the same pizza recipe as the magical Spiritus pizza place in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which means it is not only super yummy, it gives me body memories of riding a bicycle in a bathing suit past John Waters on Commercial Street. I insisted that someone on this tour who is not an alcoholic drink the green beer and Kirk Read happily obliged. We engaged in an intellectual discussion about whether the Michael Jackson donut – chocolate with powdered sugar – was racist. People already were up in arms at the irreverent pastry purveyors for naming one of their donuts Bipolar. I love donut controversy! Tonight we are at Rock, Paper, Scissors in Oakland! All ages! C’mon, kidz!

Every culture has a fried dough OR Sister Spit Tour is a food adventure on wheels

When in San Jose, do as the Josers do. I learned that in my Ancient Civ class in 11th grade which is how I ended up traipsing through the San Jose State University arts-dining-culture district tonight after the Sister Spit show. Ali Liebegott stayed back to ‘watch the van’ which probably meant obsessively play her moves on Lexulous so Kirk Read, Michelle Tea, Yony Leyser, Myriam Gurba, Amos Mac, Blake Nelson and I decided to run not walk to two destination snack joints. Psyho Donuts (see tequila sunrise donut above) has a sexy/psychotic nurse aesthetic while selling outrageous donut concoctions such as the Hamburger Donut that had a freaking strip of bacon in the middle of two sweetened buns complete with sesame seeds. Or the Lucky Charms Donut that is covered in its namesake cereal in honor of St. Patty’s Day. Kirk Read found this place after we landed at San Jose’s Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) where the show was staged.

That’s the first thing I do in a new town, he said in that sexy voice he has.

“Look for the donut shop?” I asked.

Walk a 5 block radius, he answered.

And so he called me while I was setting up the Sister Spit mini-mall (aka our merch tables) and asked what kind of a donut I wanted. “Apple fritter is my favorite,” I told him. Well, of course you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting Ali Liebegott eating a donut or talking about a donut or getting a frigging donut tattoo so he took mercy on BOTH of us and brought back a couple of donuts which he handed to me while I was counting starter money. They didn’t have ‘regular’ donuts, he explained and unearthed the lucky charm donut (below) and the key lime pie donut.

Ali was absorbed in MACLA’s Jaime Hernandez exhibit so pretty much I polished off both myself. FLASH FORWARD TO WHERE OUR STORY LEFT OFF…

The 8 of us finally stumble upon Psycho Donuts and, fearing it closed for the night, let out a tremendous crescendo of ‘OH NO’ and the naughty/psychotic nurse working the cash register gestures for us to use a different door. Silly Spitters! The place was a like a bakery marinating overnight in a Spencer’s Gifts, you know? But how could we not buy almost a dozen donuts among us? Michelle went crazy on a banana concoction. Amos snatched up 5 giant donuts for his roommates who, he promised, would gorge with him and then look shamefully at the box. How wrong it all was but felt so right. This is what I imagine plays in the background after Amos’ binge.

What better to chase your donut bender than with PIZZA? Michelle insisted that Pizza My Heart is incredible pizza with a recipe cajoled from another famous pizza place that I have forgotten and, you know, it was a pretty great slice. Kirk Read was the only one who partook in a pint of GREEN St. Patty’s beer that the professional young men working at Pizza My Heart were slinging.

And now I am in a carbo-sugar-green-icing coma.

Until tomorrow,

xoxo Gossip Burl

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LESBIAN SEAGULL? FAGGOT DINOSAUR?

WATCH THIS VIDEO, THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS FOR ENGLEBERT HUMPERDINK, AND THEN I NEED TO HAVE A WORD WITH YOU.

TO ALL MY LGBTQ & HETERONORMATIVE  ALLY SEAGULLS–I HAVE A TASK FOR YOU!  IF WE CAN HAVE A LESBIAN SEAGULL, CAN’T WE HAVE A FAGGOT DINOSAUR?  I’M OFF TO TAKE COLD MEDICINE NOW AND THEN TO OUR SHOW IN SAN JOSE TONIGHT!

Deadline APRIL 15th, 2011

email all submissions to Ali Liebegott at friendofducks@hotmail.com

please put FAGGOT DINOSAUR SUBMISSION IN THE SUBJECT LINE

Fellow writers & visual artists (or both!) I’m writing to you because I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of chapbooks/zines I’m calling ARTISTS AMONG ARTISTS. ISSUE 1 is entitled Faggot Dinosaur. Basically, I wrote a poem called Faggot Dinosaur and sent it to a poet friend to read and he wrote me back an email and to my surprise he said, “I wrote a faggot dinosaur poem inspired by your faggot dinosaur poem.” My impetus for this zine/series is to have writers communing together in an instantaneous non-hierarchal creative way without worry about publishing industry stuff, etc. That is why the deadline submission is such a quick turnaround time. I would also like submissions from visual artists. Please submit a jpeg of a drawing you’ve done inspired by the title Faggot Dinosaur. Color artwork is fine. Make sure jpegs are at least 300 dpi. The only stipulation for these submissions are that all poems and artwork are entitled Faggot Dinosaur, & of course, that you’re not a crazy homophobic person taking the name faggot in vain. I’ve attached my own poem below so you can have an example. Please pass on to anyone you would think would be interested. Excited to see your work and thank you for being in the world! xo Ali

Faggot Dinosaur–Ali Liebegott

It’s hard to believe there’s anything left to find

on this karate-chopped, wrung-out planet

and just as I say this, beachcombing lovers

pick up shards of china from a sunken ship

and a father lays down his metal detector

on the 50 yard line of a high school football field,

to dig up a nickel so old it’s now worth a dime.

In a dinosaur park in Maryland, after only five minutes

a seven year old discovers the humble jawbone

of the sweetest, dinosaur that ever lived.

The dinosaur was a meat-eating juvenile

but I pretend he was a cardigan-wearing painter—

the effeminate friend I never found in my own youth—

and that I lived with him in a time where dinosaurs could be faggots

and faggots, missing links

in a warmer era when people weren’t assholes

because there weren’t any people.

The Secret Sister Spit Heirlooms.

Sister Spit’s heirlooms are not totally secret  – anyone who’s been in the van has likely had these busted blue boxes from Tiffany’s thrust at them with the plea that they sign what has become our very sentimental, strangely high end Guest Book.

In 2007 Sister Spit had a sort of lousy, low-turnout show at the Echo in Los Angeles. As it was booked sort of last minute we didn’t get the spiffy inside room, we got the sloping cement driveway-esque backyard, cloaked in chain link fencing, containing a couple trash bins, lacking only a pit bull chained to his water dish to complete the ambiance. We sent a hat around to the sparse but loving crowd assembled, and the writer – essayist – thinker Sandra Tsing Loh, who had already done us the ginormous favor of reading with us that night, tossed in the hat a $150 gift card to Tiffany’s. It had been hanging out in her wallet since her wedding and she was like – whatever! Someone else threw in a Starbucks card, infinitely more usable. What in the world would Sister Spit get at Tiffany’s? We can’t have nice things!

As it turned out, we didn’t have to worry about which luxury item the tour would suddenly own. $150 doesn’t get you very far at Tiffany’s. We could have either a handsome, shiny key fob to dangle the keys to our all future renal vans from, or we could have a leather-bound journal in that iconic Tiffany blue, with silver-edged pages and a lovely ribbon to mark your place plus with enough left over to buy the most slender, elegant pen in the world, also in that bright robin’s egg color, with a little golden band inscribed with Tiffany & Co. in case we ever forgot where we got such a thing. This is like the Capri 100s of pens.

So the idea is, at the end of each tour we go back through our journey, city by city, and remember what weird and memorable thing happened, and we record it in the Heirloom. The bizarre catch phrases, the oddball admirers, the crazed moments when all contact with “reality” was deeply severed, all of it gets recorded. And then everyone who traveled with us gets to make their own little entry.

A glance at the entries made during Sister Spit’s ill-fated but ultimately glorious European Tour include ‘Thank you, Paris!’ – something we enjoyed saying so much we kept saying it. Who wouldn’t! ‘I’m not a driving machine!’ was spat by our surly Slovenian driver, Sabine, who certainly was much more of a drinking machine than a driving machine. Another noteworthy Sabine quote is, ‘I’m not lost, I don’t know where the fuck I am!’ The phrase ‘Full Sex’ we learned from our British mates Em and Emily – I guess that’s what going all the way is in the United Kingdom. ‘Rape Face’ was actually a pick up line a drunken and obviously problematic English man used on performer Kat Marie Yoas. Um, it didn’t work. Neither did the pick-up line another soused bloke through at poor Kat: ‘I love your shitty perm.’ Are British men just all a bunch of wankers or what?! Kat’s curls are natural! Geez. ‘I stood out like a tit in a dick factory’ was a charming saying gleaned from our sweet UK friends, as well as ‘My brain s a tit rag.’ It’s what you say when you’re feeling wicked dumb. Tit rags in the UK are basically The National Enquirer but with a bunch of topless women on every other page. Who hasn’t felt like that before?

Said writer Rhiannon Argo in her Euro-tour entry: ‘Every stop was a surreal adventure.’ Notes reference the pancakes with maple syrup our hosts at a squat in Bristol prepared for us, the amazing secret English garden tucked in the back of the home we stayed in Sheffield, and the time our meek UK driver Emily almost got punched by a soccer hooligan for driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Brighton! There was the charred, dry corn fit only for pigs and cows that we bought on the streets of Llubjlana; the Slovenian street fashion magazine that snapped our pictures as we hung out smoking in the town square, the Easyjet flight that was in fact incredibly difficult. How our Berlin show was filled with drunken hipsters from San Francisco. The foxy butch carpenter named Christ (for reals) who just happened to be working at Shakespeare + Co. when we arrived for our show, and who kindly nailed a shelf to the wall for us to hang our projector!

Notes from Fall 2009 will remind one of Beth Lisick’s obsession with the jingle for the Toffifay candy commercial from the 70s. It’s quite catchy. This spurred a general obsession with Toffifay that was indulged on the last night of tour, when we had a decadent candy + tarot card party in our hotel in Indianapolis. Beth’s entry references the great time-killing road game, where you place the word ‘anal’ before the name of the cars around you, to great hilarity. ‘Anal Tribute, Anal Marauder, Anal Torrent, Anal Tundra, Anal Fit, Anal Caravan, and on the final day, when we thought there could be no more, ANAL TIARA!’

Anyway, the real point of this post is – there are only 7 blank pages left in the Sister Spit Heirloom! We need another Tiffany’s leather-bound baby blue journal! Someone offered a journal from Nordstrom’s – NO! IT NEEDS TO BE FROM TIFFANY’S. Sister Spit has such deep dirtbag roots, it is truly lovely to have in our possession a luxury diary to record our experiences. It is a metaphor for something that Sister Spit itself has taught me – that anything is possible. Anyone who comes to any of our Spring 2011 shows with a Tiffany’s notebook for us will be given free entry! And a kiss on the cheek! And a cocktail or whatever! Okay, the van is here to take us to our kickoff show at Mills College! Thank you, Paris!

Dairy hangover

It’s not unlike a riproaring drunken hangover, the dairy version. I basically binge-ate a shit-ton of Pauline‘s pizza and followed it up with a goddamn homemade ice cream sundae because didn’t Steven Tyler say “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing”?

It should be noted that I recently purchased some Cole Haan aviators from Nordstrom Rack – or, as I like to call it THE RACK – and I don’t look unlike the photo above these days with my unwashed hair and unwise accessorizing. I need some Crest whitestrips to get that gleam, though. Too many years of teenage wasteland smoking made me sadly jaundice in the tooth region.

ANYWAY, the reason I’m here is twofold:

1.) What are some solutions for a dairy hangover besides avoiding dairy which I am obviously doing as of…now.

2.) We have our first Sister Spit show tonight at Mills and some of us who live in San Francisco were remarking that it feels like we’re not on tour yet because we’re at home doing things and running errands and then WHOOPS you forget you have a Sister Spit show that night. In fact, a slew of Sister/Mister sister-misters are heading to my apartment in an hour to climb in our newly acquired van named Priscilla. (I don’t name the vans. They come that way.)

What cliff hangers do I have to offer you, my fine feathered friends? Things like…

Will we get our iPad 2 before we leave the Bay Area??

Will I book a hotel in Milwaukee anytime soon??

Will we find a venue for a second Minneapolis show in April??

Stay tuned to find out this and more on…RADAR THE BLOG…
xoxo,

Gossip Burl

 

Hot Dogs & Donuts: Best Friends Forever

I want to show you a picture of my memory.  It’s here on the left.  Perhaps, you’re mistaking it for a drooling, alcoholic moth…but no, in fact it is my memory.  Much of the reason my memory is in that condition is because I’ve toured nationally with Sister Spit on four different occasions.  Fourteen years ago I left Brooklyn and joined Sister Spit’s Inaugural Tour.  Picture me then: 40 pounds lighter, no gray hair, and often wearing a green bowling shirt. 1997 was the year of the bowling shirt before you judge!  We rambled across the country in two broken down vans– one smoking, (literally, the engine and everyone inside) and one non-smoking van.  Since 1997 I’ve quit smoking and taken up donut eating.  I’m very excited to eat as many donuts as possible all over this great country and Canada.  Canadians– do you care for a donut?  Vancouverians will you appoint a donut ambassador to bring me around your fine town?  The only thing that makes a donut better is when you put a hot dog in the middle!  It’s EXTREME JUNK FOOD.  When I lived in Brooklyn I often went to the King Li Bakery in Sunset Park and got the Creamy Bun with coconut shavings and Hot Dog Donut Friend.  If a person wanted to keep pushing the envelope they could put a hot dog inside a donut and then an overflowing ashtray inside the hot dog, and cradled inside the ashtray a sobbing divorcing couple!  Fun!  Extreme!  Don’t stop with the donut.  I just got a donut tattoo and look forward to getting a hot dog tattoo.  In fact, one of the lovely writers on this Sister Spit tour, Myriam Gurba, already has a hot dog tattoo!  I trust people with hot dog tattoos implicitly.  Maybe we will all get a tour tattoo.  In 1999 I got a tour tattoo with Michelle Tea.  Nomy Lamm did them hand poke style on a dog-haired couch in Austin.  We got tiny moonshine bottles with hearts coming out the top like bubbles.  That pretty much summed up where we were at that point in our lives.  I will begin pressuring my tourmates immediately to get a hot dog inside a donut tattoo.  Tomorrow is our first show at Mills College at 7PM.  A firm handshake to the first person who brings me a donut at that show: Glazed and apple fritters are my favorites.  But I’d never shun a jelly donut.  Kisses, Ali

 

RADAR- It’s a lifestyle.

We here at RADAR headquarters often toss around the concept that this is more than a series of literary events and services for writers. NO, we say as we pick the cat hair out of the coffee , it’s really a lifestyle.

RADAR’s annual Sister Spit: Next Generation literary performance tour embarks tomorrow, Wednesday March 16 at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Our lifestyle for the next 34 days will include some of the following:

* wet wipes

* desperate morning searches for the nearest Starbucks while we reconcile the incongruity between our collective caffeine addictions and our politics

* creative ways of taking in fiber

* celebrating the throngs of amazing queer and queer-loving people we’re meeting all of the US and Canada

* looking up restaurants in each city that have previously been featured on No Reservations or Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives

* resisting our Tour Manager‘s desperate attempts at forced ice breakers (GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, BTW.)

 
We, RADAR Productions staff and artists and the entire Sister Spit tour, hope you’ll join us for the next 34 days on our blog and at our shows! We’ll see you in your town.

xoxo,

Gossip Girl