Slideshow: 'Ugly Man' US Tour, Part 2 (of 2): NYC/LA, May 29 - June 2, 2009

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Lambda Literary Awards, CUNY Graduate Center, May 29, 6 pm - 10 pm
* Photos swiped from Homo Neurotic dot com
See a gallery of many more pictures at Homo Neurotic dot com


The Violet Quill


Author Edmund White


Poet Mark Doty


DC


Author Michael Lowenthal, author Scott Heim, Unknown


Unknown & author Andrew Holleran


Author Christopher Rice (third from left) & unknowns


Cocktail party: Kate Clinton


Cocktail party: Felice Picano


Cocktail party: Edmund White


Bookforum Party, gallery, May 30, 7 pm - ?


Author Simon Van Booy, Author/editor/publisher/d.l. Tosh Berman, Harper Perennial boss Carrie Kania










Author and 'The Rumpus' mastermind Stephen Elliott, Author/editor/d.l. Justin Taylor ('Maximum Etc'), DC, Author/d.l. Mark Edmund Doten ('No more teenagekicks')


Stephen Elliott & Justin Taylor





Skylight Books, June 1, 7 pm - 9 pm
* photos by Joel Westendorf
Somewhere in and around these pictures are sculptor Jason Meadows, writer Jennifer Krasinkski, sculptor Evan Holloway, artist John Williams, poet/critic Bruce Hainley, honorary d.l. Julie Stephens, author/d.l. Mark Stephens, author Rachel Kushner, artist Aiko Hachisuka, artist/writer Sheree Rose, author Benjamin Weissman, poet Amy Gerstler, author/d.l. Bett Williams, Author/d.l. Sean Dungan, escort Rod Hagen, impresario Norman Frisch, artist/designer Joel Westendorf, author/critic/d.l. David Ehrenstein, author/editor/actor/d.l. Ken Baumann, a.o.



















Book Soup, June 2, 7 pm - 8:30 pm
* Photos by Joel Westendorf
Somewhere in and around these pictures are author/publisher/d.l. Tosh Berman, artist/performer Lun*na Menoh, 'Bookworm' host Michael Silverblatt, David Ehrenstein, author Bill Reed, artist Lecia Dole Recio, filmmaker Erin Cassidy, author/d.l. Ariana Reines, author/artist Trinie Dalton, artist Matt Greene, author/editor/d.l. Hedi El Kholti, d.l. Tomas, artist Joel Westendorf, a.o.










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p.s. RIP: Hugh Hopper. So there's the rest of the tour-related stuff I have on hand, and the coast is now clear. I want to alert you folks in the NYC area that the great guitarist/composer Chris Cochrane (aka distinguished local Chris) will be performing in a trio with percussionist Jim Pugliese and keyboardist Evan Gallagher this Sunday starting at 8 pm at ABC No-Rio, and attendance is highly recommended. Hit that link for all the practical information. I didn't do a whole heck of a noteworthy lot since I last saw you, so I'll just cut to the quick now with the added tidbit that today's p.s. is being accompanied by the latest audio episode of Skullcrushing Hummingbird, a wondrous weekly radio show manned by the blog's own Winter Rates. Use that link if you want to sing along. ** Simone, Hi, welcome to the blog, and thanks for the rich Michael Fassbender accompaniment. Take care. ** Tomas, I've spent a tiny amount of time at Java Detour for long forgotten reasons, but you've nailed what I remember. I used to hang out a bit at a different WeHo coffee house, name forgotten, smaller and grungier and probably no longer existent, which was just down the block from A Different Light, which probably isn't existent anymore either. Oh gosh, I'd have to dig my Gaitskill book out of my still unpacked backpack up in the loft bed area to tell you my favorites, which feels strangely daunting to me at the moment, but I'll remember to when I go up there when I fish clean socks out of a drawer a little later on. Oh, you should have seen the/my characters who showed up at the Shakespeare & Co. gig, whoa. I was hoping to show everyone pix of them and it, but the person with the camera bailed out on a promise to send them. ** Flit, I liked the pic of that Esteven guy best, predictably. ** Marcus Whale, Greetings, M. ** Orestes, Hey, man. Lovely to see you. What are you busy with right now? Have you been able to write? ** Stan_cz, Oh, yes, that makes complete sense re: your interest in crime fiction, and it's surely true that having grown up with the detective/ crime thing being so ubiquitous everywhere I could look, there was a kind of early over-saturation that has lead to a kind of general disinterest. Interesting. ** David, SOS Medicins, right? I forget whether it's mentioned in 'Sicko' or whether I've mentioned it before, but doctors still make house calls here. You call and ask at any time day or night, and I've had to do that a couple of times, and a doctor comes right over. It's so civilized or something. ** J. Campbell, Hey, man. Thank you a lot. Oh, and I've been slowly (in my current traveling/ jetlag/ overcommitments-impaired fashion) reading your novel and admiring it very much, so more gratitude for gifting me with it. ** NB, I couldn't get the etsy.com site to load. Hope that means nothing more than that it's massively popular this morning. I'll try again later. Yeah, obviously, it doesn't matter whether you're writing stories or the novel. The cart should lead the horse and all that. That's what I believe. Well, I hope the mysterious weirdness inside you starts leaving you alone. I'm all ears, if you need me. ** GV, Hm. Granted, I'm coming out of bad jetlag and not at my best, but I'm not finding the growing holes in your story all that engaging. I mean that you came here out of admiration for my "novel" Ugly Man, and that you found Luka's post 'coarse' and 'obscene' when, of course, it was Little Miss Muffet compared to the coarseness and obscenity in Ugly Man, etc. I get all that, and I know I'm supposed to be amused and intrigued and curious to either solve your puzzle or become some version of myself who would have fun playing this game of yours, but it's just kind of making me irritable, to be honest. That's the problem with fake comments: they lack gravity, and, without that, the insincerity of the endeavor starts feel, well, 'aggressive', in your words. So, I don't know. Maybe you should either 'come out' as whoever you actually are or just drop this. ** Wolf, Hey, pal. I missed you. Yeah, I was never much into Faith No More, I will admit, although I do like Patton and his subsequent stuff, of course, and the idea of watching him reinsert himself into the FNM context is a quite interesting idea. Cool you nailed down the tickets, not to mention that the Nickster will be on board. Hey, love you Wolf, big time. ** Bernard Welt, Me too. The mac and cheese was the only one that made me want to unleash the mighty snake. I hope I'll see 'The Gang's All Here' too. Been meaning to forever. And, yeah, 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg', sure. I also remembered the South Park movie and Honore's 'Les Chansons d'amour' and a few other musicals I'd forgotten, so I'm not entirely not a queen, it turns out. Oh, yeah, Perloff's terrific, a fine person. I think she was just one of those people who already look middle-aged when they're in their 20s. That review you mentioned must have been of 'Safe', right? ** Franny, Hey, welcome to the blog, my new friend. You're very, very kind, thank you. I might be back in NYC to work on a theater project before too long, but I don't know if I'll do any events then or anything. I'll let you know. So, yeah, tell me about you and yours so I can get to know you. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, that clip is from 'The Gang's All Here'? I've seen that many times, but I didn't know the context. That scene or parts of it used to be a common component of the psychedelic light shows I saw as a teen. Very nice piece on 'Breakfast on Pluto', which I don't think I'd ever read before. Thank you, sir. ** Chris Stamm, Hey, man. I'm very glad to see you. Did you manage to get that record of yours out and about? ** SYpHA_69, Oh, no sweat about Lambert. What he does just isn't in my personal realm, you know? Anyway, I've lionized guys with a lot less talent than he's got, trust me. The Williams Twins, anyone? Your feeling of being on the verge of a nervous breakdown concerns me very much, obviously. Can you go ahead and get a recommendation for a therapist now and not wait until you see the doctor? Call him and ask for a reference or something? It might be good idea. Don't just suffer, man. ** Casey McKinney, No, I just fucked up the gender thing. It was Eastman that Silverblatt knew. I mean he might have known Rafelson too, I'm not sure. Oh man, my heart and everything else goes out to you about the stuff with your mom, you know that. So what now? Are you going to need to keep watching over her? It's so fucking complicated. Do tear yourself away with a Paris breather if you can. You need some peace, French or otherwise. Love to you too, man. And some to Robin as well. ** Dan, Hey, Dan! ** Christopher/Mark, Yeah, strange about Rafelson. I looked him up on imbd and found out that his most recent work was directing 'The Lionel Richie Collection', yikes. He has something in development called 'Pretty Little Hate Machine', which I hope has nothing to do with the similarly named Nine Inch Nails album. ** Marc, Do youtube one of your gigs for our sake if you can. I like the sound of the video projections addition. It all sounds great. The book tour went pretty well, I think. I'm probably not the best judge, but I was happy, and, yeah, the book's out. Take care. ** Mark, I haven't read Harry Stephen Keeler. I just copied and pasted that first link, and just from the couple of excerpts on that page, I'm pretty sold on his writing. Really, really interesting voice. Do you have a suggested book to start with? And your description of the Ahern book has me all intrigued as well. Would an excerpt make for a good post here, do you think? If so, and if you don't mind, pass something along. Thanks. ** Math t, Yeah, maybe that's it about Excel because trying to negotiate and use it on my lowly iBook was frustration central, but I totally get the appeal as you describe it. Your interest in doing that is close enough to my list-making fetish that I can taste the water in my mouth. So how was that 'Showpaper' thing? I didn't know about The Hostess Project. It/they do some very cool stuff. ** Steevee, Hey. I think I'll see 'Up' in the next day or two, so I'll pass on my thoughts when the deed is done. ** Thomas Moronic, Snippet will be highly anticipated, or, rather, already is. The radio play: It's close to being set to go. I think we have one or two more read throughs and refinement sessions to go, and I think the plan is to record it in late July. It's wound up being mostly written by Catherine with me basically just writing my own speaking parts, and I have to learn to pronounce a bunch of French sentences phonetically since I have to transition from being me into being a French character based on me at a certain point. Like I think I've said before, it's based on our theater piece 'Un Belle Enfant Blonde', although it's a completely different work. It'll start off as what will sound like Catherine conducting an interview with me about my life, and then it goes into a kind of haywire reenactment of one incident from my life. It's hard to explain. Anyway, we're close to doing it. Thanks for asking about that, man. ** Kier, The phone thing is tricky. Are you sure you can't get a sim card or something to make your phone work over there? You might want to look closely into that. Otherwise, yeah, there are pay phones, although they often seem to be broken in my experience. When I was there, I just used the hotel phone to make local calls, but I wasn't paying for the hotel expenses, so ... Will you be hanging with Richard a lot? Maybe you can get messages through him and use his phone when necessary? ** Stephen, Hey, man. Oh, I would absolutely love to have that Day your proposing. Consider it done as soon as you send me the stuff. Gosh, thanks! I understand you're job hunting. (Good old Facebook). Good luck with that. What kind of job are you trying to get? ** Oscar B, Is that not, like, the worst thing ever? I mean not having saved the right version of your piece? That's happened to me with my new novel twice, and then there's that next fifteen minutes of thinking 'fuck it, I quit,' and then just getting back on the horse with a sigh. Yeah, anything I can do to help on the residency if I can, ring my bell. Best of luck on the presentation today, and then you're straight off to Venice? Will I/we get to see you while you're there? I'm very curious to hear how the Biennale is this year among the many other Oscar-y things. ** Tigersare, Hey! Wow, it seems like the encounters between Bradford Cox and the d.l.s are ongoing. I hope he doesn't think the blog is stalking him. I've seen the listing about the Cosmos record, and of course it will be in my possession asap, but I don't know much at all about Richard Davies. That's fascinating. How cool that he and Pollard are simpatico. Have fun everywhere you go, Guy. Oh, I just saw the late breaking comment on your flyer. It is a pretty thing. Everyone, check out the flyer Tigersare made out of one of the other day's porn rescue mission victims. Way to work a sweater, man. Nice. ** Killer Luka, Thanks a zillion again for the majesty yesterday, Luka. Your efforts seriously paid off, obviously. Lots of love from your pal behind the scenes. ** Misanthrope, Maybe Adam Lambert and Susan Boyle should get together and record a cover version of the old James Taylor/ Carly Simon chestnut 'Mockingbird', what do you think? People who get really drunk all the time scare me. I can't be around them. It's too stressful. I think it's a holdover feeling from my good old insane alcoholic mom days. So bear hug, man. Excellent that you're back into the novel. Yeah, I hear you on the fear of losing the voice. I get that all the time with mine, and it takes a while to get the voice back under control, but it happens. Yeah, excellent. Oh, no, I don't remember you telling me about that incident you've remembered. Yikes, man. Yeah, do go into detail about it anytime you want if it would help out at all. Leo's head does look like a pumpkin now that he's, uh, filled out. It's gross. ** Note to Winter Rates: This is the point where your show -- which was killer great, btw -- ended, just to show you how long it generally takes me to do this p.s. ** Alan, Hey. Yeah, I didn't think they'd let you look at the scrapbooks. They are pretty fragile, I guess. I just made them for myself in the moment so I went for the easiest method of using rubber cement to put them together, which I guess is the worst possible glue you can use in terms of the archival. It's cool Marvin showed you one. Marvin (Taylor) is the head guy at Fales, and a wonderful fellow. I think the scrapbooks should probably scanned at least before too long. It's hard for me to imagine them as art books. I mean, they were just things to help me write, so I can't see them being of all that much interest. Of course I don't even remember what would be in those files you looked through. It's all a blur, but I'm really glad they held some interest. Yeah, it's awfully great of you to care about that stuff. No, ha ha, no hair or blood or anything of mine or anything like that in my archives, or I don't think so. I think there's some pretty curious stuff that fans sent me over the years in there somewhere. I'll write to Marvin about the blog CDs and let him know they're worth keeping and all that. Yeah, I mean, thanks for spending all that quality time with my things, man. If you have any questions about anything, and if I can remember, I'd be more than happy to tell what I know. ** JW Veldhoen, No tears from me. I'm just trying to get the red out at the moment. I don't even know what If and Seven are. I've been over here too long. Do you ever think about dildos? ** Amccartney, What or where is this Paris residency you applied for again? Man, I sure hope you get it. Oh, sure, I'll totally talk your book up to POL. The person to send it to is the man in charge, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens. I don't know if he reads the mss. directly or has readers read them first. I think with English language books, he has someone else to do that. If you could tell me when your book is submitted, that would be best, so that I can do my recommendation when he has it in hand. But if you don't know when exactly that'll be, I can talk to him about it anyway, of course. Oh, you're teaching in the summer. Well, increments it is then. I'm in that boat too. And that's great about Hedi putting a piece in the great Animal Shelter. Awesome, Alistair. Take care. ** David Saa V. Estornell, Hey, David. No, I haven't met with Gisele yet. We were supposed to yesterday, but she was too crazed leaving town for the next gig. And I haven't watched the 'Jerk' things yet just because I'm so slowly getting myself organized after my sleepless hell of days, but I will in the next day or so, and I'll let you know, of course. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Valentine. What a strangely appropriate or inappropriate (?) name for the guy. Nice name too. I only know one person named Valentine, and I'm sure it's not the same guy since mine is a big art collector and TV producer named Dean who is most likely not your type. Lee Pace. Who's that? I'll go find out. I like arms too, but I like them like I like my guys -- skinny. Yeah, Yury is a nice name. Those bracketing y's are kind of sweet. He's a little better. He went to work today, and hopefully he won't come limping back home after a few hours. My day was, mm, uneventful. Took care of Yury, wrote a little tiny bit, emails, downloaded some music, put together a couple of blog posts, blah blah. Today might be better, if I can help it. ** Winter Rates, Oh, I alerted you above about your show's conclusion. I loved it. I did really like the Circulatory System track, you were right. Tons of good stuff. Like, mm, I'm not that into Juliana Hatfield, but her cover of that Stones song was the first time I ever thought it was a good song. I liked Movius Mix. Who's that? Etc., etc. Envy on your seeing that Melvins 'Houdini' show. Did they even play that last weird percussion track live? Have a total blast at the beach house, pal. ** Squeaky, Did I already do a Self-Portrait Day: My Objects of Desire? Hm. If not, that's a no brainer, isn't it? Yeah, man, don't overwhelm yourself. Staleness is Satan or at least Satan's retarded brother. Trim, trim. Lots of love. ** Paradigm, It's a fine thing to see you, man. I'm very sold on 'Samson & Delilah'. It sounds incredible. Yeah, I'm watching the local movie listings to make sure I don't miss it. I think things with the book are going pretty okay. It's true that I try not to think about it too much, and I just try to be really grateful for the good that happens. My publisher and agent are happy, and they would know better. The novel's been stalled out for a while, and I'm finding my way back into it, and it's been hard, but I'm not discouraged yet. It hasn't been summery here at all. It's been raining and cold almost every day. It's very strange, really. So I haven't had any great weather's input into my life or work yet. It's gotta happen any day now. Best of all luck getting past the previous newspaper experience and into the new one and newness in general. So, all in all, has it gone well so far with the last issue, do you think? ** Paul Curran, Sure, I'd love to catch up in London, and let's plan on it. By the 2nd, most everything should be in place, and I should be somewhat free and on my own during at least part of the day, so let's figure out what's best as the time approaches. Are you free most of the 2nd? What's your schedule? ** Pascal, Will Oldham, interesting. I really should do that SPD idea I just mentioned up above if I haven't done it already or even if I have. Could be positively startling. The Dempsey Day would great, man. The 'not sure what people will think' aspect makes it even more exciting. Hope you had a good swim. ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Computer science, interesting. You're like that guy who used to appear at the carnivals at my elementary school wearing a coat full of hundreds of pockets, one of which you could reach into for a dollar or something, except much better and much more cerebral in your case. Well, I'm glad to hear the novel is piled up in preliminary form somewhere, and I'll only nag you about that when I get particularly itchy. In the meantime, I'm all about this radio comedy show. Nice, very nice. Any hints or anything? ** Gotta go. That took three hours and forty-seven minutes to do. I usually don't pay attention. So, yeah, I guess go ahead and have a look at the souvenirs from my tour if you feel like it, but don't feel obliged or anything. I'll go do some stuff too. See you tomorrow.