Hirsute Pursuit – Every Fiber of Your Being Says, "Thank you, sir." from Harley Phoenix on Vimeo.

Thanks to Spotify, I discovered the band Hirsute Pursuit last week. Holy shit if it’s everything I wanted in a music group. Beats reminiscent of Coil and Throbbing Gristle with explicit gay sex layered on top. Whereas Coil explored the mysticism behind gay sex magick, Hirsute Pursuit is all about the carnal and the power dynamics of gay sex.

After discovering Hirsute Pursuit, I Metroed to Santa Monica to see the 30th anniversary screening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet while listening to them. As the train passed Santa Monica College, I was presented with a certain dilemma. With beats, moans, groans and mutterings of “Thank you, sir,” and “Open your pretty pink hole,” happening in my ear and these college-aged lads entering the train, I was quite aroused by the time we got to the terminus.

Goddamn, that was a great train ride.

From the auction block to the wrecking ball, our house is sold to the dozer. Our house is dust, wait for the wind to sweep it all away. Our house is dust, we never held the deed anyway. — Milemarker, “The Installment Plan”, Anaesthetic, 2001.

I always thought Milemarker referred to all-ages clubs when they sang about their house in “The Installment Plan.” These clubs were their homes, their families, their livelihoods. But with gentrification these clubs were eradicated and the families were forced to look for other places to live, to breathe their music.

I was at the Smell a lot from 2003 to 2006, nights filled with watching the Mae Shi, Manifolds and whatever local noisy band was playing. Hell. A night’s worth of entertainment for $5 was a helluva bargain. Even though they were strict about their no-alcohol policy, there was a dive bar next door The Jalisco Bar where you could get cheap beer to fuel a night of manic convulsing dancing. Even though I hadn’t been to a show there since 2006, I still consider it close to my heart, a place where I grew up musically in my 20s.

So when The Smell owner Jim Smith posted this demolition notice on Facebook this past weekend, it broke my heart a little:

It’s like “The Installment Plan” coming to life. The Smell is started a GoFundme campaign to help fight the demolition. Perhaps now the chorus of the song might come true?

Now I stand atop a rubble pile that once was my home but I have saved a brick each time I watched a building fall to dust. And I will build my own house with the bricks I’ve kept throughout the years, on the installment plan.

Apparently the owner of the buildings don’t want to demolish them right away. He just wants that option just in case in the future.

What you see here isn’t merely a blob of darkness. Look closely, and you will see an empty movie theater.

I saw the new Yorgos Lanthimos film The Lobster, and I guess thanks to A24 Distribution it was being shown at a cineplex in Torrance rather than me having to schlep to some art film house in Hollywood or Santa Monica. It was pretty jarring and fantastic, not as disturbing as Dogtooth. Although the final scene really had me squirming in my seat.

It’s a far cry from the mess that was X-Man: Apocalypse I saw Friday night. It is not a good movie, and the fact I saw it in 3D which caused the images to lose their sharpness made it even more disappointing despite not expecting much in the first place. Michael Fassbinder and Jennifer Lawrence were pretty bad in it, and the awful dialogue they had to recite was even worse.

IKEA is filled with ghosts, ghosts of furniture past with a reminder of former lives and former homes. It’s not that old furniture I once owned are there — those items have long been discontinued and what remains on the showroom floor have those ghosts that creep into my mind. There is the discontinued coffee table I had in my old Los Feliz bedroom, a glass-top rectangular table with rounded edges that was discontinued about a decade ago. Now they have a smaller circular table that I never would have bought in the first place. There is the small table lamp that looks like an ice cube, the particular duvet cover design from the Echo Park house.

That Los Feliz house was amazing. My bedroom big enough to fit my twin bed, a couch, coffee table and my desk. The Echo Park house up on the hill with the great views.

Walking through IKEA I was filled with thoughts of what was and regrets with where I am now and what could have been. What more I could have done with those spaces, with that life and what is glaringly lacking right now. Maybe it’s appropriate that off to the side on the way to the As-Is section right before you get to the cashier is where you can pick up some rope.

Then she went upstairs again, locked her door, put coal on the fire, and, swooning from the heat, felt the boredom pressure down heavier upon her. She would have gone downstairs to talk to the maid, but decorum would not allow.
— Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (tr. Geoffrey Wall), Penguin Classics, p. 60.

Puis elle remontait, fermait la porte, étalait les charbons, et, défaillant à la chaleur du foyer, sentait l’ennui plus lourd qui retombait sur elle. Elle serait bien descendue causer avec la bonne, mais une pudeur la retenait.

Chatting with Madd today, and she told me to play the lottery so that I can win next week, so we can go shopping. I would shop exclusively at Alexander McQueen and Rick Owens and be a walking avant garde canvas and look ridiculous to people walking by but they have to take me seriously because I will say, “It is art.” We will buy a house along the ocean in Malibu, and when a storm tears the house in half we will move back to our loft in Downtown LA eating cakes while working with our trainers and wearing ridiculous shoes and eat everything in our way. Und vacation in Berlin und play wit all ze pretty boys und girls.

After years of absence I feel like I’m finally coming back to myself, returning to the stranger that possessed my body for years and years and years and evicting him forcibly. Nothing seemed to feel right, nothing I read, nothing I wrote, nothing I did. But opening up the past seems to be just the elixir needed to reclaim my body. I miss the old uniforms, the knee-high boots, the fishnets, the coats, the yearnings, the lusts, the visions from heaven, the fantasies, the commingled scents from other boys filled with the desperation from isolation. The memories remain, hollowed chrysalis husks that crumble to the touch, mere ephemera that disintegrates in the wind.

Last night, Ben and the Tran-Kaisers came down to the South Bay to do an abbreviated version of STEAK AND CAKE. Since Damon’s was out of the question, I picked a family-owned steakhouse in Redondo called The Bullpen. The decor was reminiscent of Regal Beagle from Three’s Company. It was no tiki a-la Damon’s, but it was pretty nice.

To be honest most of the evening was a blur. Since I don’t drink very often, the three Sapphire and Tonics I drank allowed me to be completely disconnected. I know there was cheese toast, rib eye, baked potato, salad. I know that everyone was very pleased with the quality of the service. I know that the inscription on my cake was well appreciated by the staff of The Bullpen.

My only complaint was it was over way too soon. I got home by 8 so The Grandmother wouldn’t feel bad. I was slightly hungover by 9. And that’s it!

This morning was my normal weekly Sunday manse cleaning. There was some more birthday cake eaten. And that’s really about it.

It’s 37. It’s prime. I’m over it already.

No, seriously, what the fuck is this?

I get that as we grow older, so does unwanted hair grow in odd places. I’ve dealt with white nutsack hair, with white nostril hair. But look at this. A white nose hair! Nose hair? Other than witches, who grows hair on top of their nose? All I need is a fucking wart, and my witch hag chic look will be complete.

A lot of people love Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me. I mean, they REALLY love it, and you don’t have to go any farther than the book jacket to see evidence of this. “The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, [sic] and beautifully redemptive,” Toni Morrison writes while proclaiming that Coates has filled the void left by James Baldwin’s death. Toni Fucking Morrison! James Motherfucking Baldwin!

This is an important book. Coates talks about growing up in Baltimore knowing his body was in jeopardy everyday, that his struggle in life was to keep his body from harm. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease” (p. 17.) It’s a very compelling 152 pages and enlightening in his struggles with life as a black man.

Between the World and Me is a letter to his 15-year old son telling him that as a black boy, “you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know (p.71.)” But that is part of the problem: a premise that is very personal being written in a very impersonal way.

Reading this feels like reading a longer think-piece in the Atlantic, New Yorker or New York Times, one that straddles the divide of being purely academic and being made for public consumption which is about as impersonal and antiseptic as you can get. Since reading does bring out all of my shortcomings, they are once again exposed in my utter hatred for long think-pieces. Usually I end up reading two paragraphs of these pieces and start screaming, “Where is the fucking editor?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” before throwing a tantrum and moving on with my life.

I suppose it is a talent to take something that should be very personal and have it come off as impersonal as possible. Knowing how vital this book is especially now as we’re being awoken to the still omnipresent racism that exists in American society, I just wanted it to be written better.

Don’t worry. I already know I’m a terrible person, and by not completely loving Between the World and Me proves I am a completely reprehensible creature.