I didn't know much more about straight pr0n, but I did know who Sharon Kane is, especially since she's done a lot of tranny stuff. Long story short (too late!), I just discovered that she's in Wet Palms, the gay pr0n soap opera which my company co-produces. Naturally, I immediately asked the producer of the Tim and Roma! (who, in classically incestuous fashion, writes Wet Palms and co-writes gaypornblog.com) if she's ever been on the show. And if so, when. And if not, if she can be. And if she can be, if I can interview. Because, you know. Fangirl.

Have I mentioned the tininess of the world lately? The first movie I saw her in was Sharon and Karen, which was one of a handful of tranny pr0n titles carried by the Video Zone in Fresno. (I can't find a picture of the box online, unfortunately.) It was also the debut flick of Karen Dior, who I didn't realize died last year. Later that same year—in the New Orleans Hustler Store the day after Xmas, to be precise—I stumbled upon a movie directed by Karen starring an acquaintance of mine from way, way back. Sometimes I think I was fated to be in this business.

12:12pm

There was a class at the Citadel last night that I've wanted to attend, but given the upcoming weekend, I decided to give my health a fighting chance of improving by staying home and resting. After an evening of eating hot and sour soup and watching Six Feet Under with Collette, I feel even more ill now than I did yesterday. Whee.

12:45pm

I don't know if I'd call it a bright side, but at least one's mind does vaguely interesting things when sick. Like, I just keep thinking, does she know i'm blonde and single now?

11:19pm

the trouble with rising above it is that the air gets thin. close to the ground, below the smoke, under the radar, i'm so close you'll never see me.

11:51pm

My temperature over the last week has been 98.2. Now it's 97.1. I have no idea if that makes sense or not.

sometime after midnight

   why do you affect me?  why do you affect me still?
   why do you hinder me?  why do you hinder me still?
   why do you unnerve me?  why do you unnerve me still?
   why do you trigger me?  why do you trigger me still?

Our company has an annual holiday party, and a newer quote-tradition-unquote is to create a video for it. No, not pr0n. Last year's can be found on the Tim and Roma! page under 12/24/04. (Direct RealMedia links: 56K, 150K, and 350K.) Though it's still up in the air, Tim is talking about doing a Studio 54 tribute. As Aleister points out in the Wikipedia entry, it's ironic that Studio 54 was operated by a "flamboyant, publicly visible and openly gay" man and his "retiring, straight silent partner," since that pretty much sums up the ownership of this joint.

Adding to the irony is that Tim wants me to be Debbie Harry, specifically doing "Call Me," presumably so he can live out his Richard Gere/American Gigolo fantasy. I'm rather thrilled by the idea, though odds are he doesn't know I've already documented my Blondie connection.

So, yeah, I guess it matters a little to me.

1:35pm

Speaking of things that matter, that genuinely matter, from Poppy's Livejournal:

Rescue team apparently got into our house. Got 14 cats and the snake; are going to try to go back for more. I don't know which cats or where they are. Hoping for more info soon and will update as I can. I feel like a man who has just been pulled back from the edge of a deadly precipice. Thank you all, again, for the help. We still have a long, scary road ahead, but at least there is hope.

Meanwhile, according to the final sentence of what can be best described as a backhandedly-positive review of Good Advice for Young Trendy People of All Ages in the East Bay Express, I'm some sort of hub:

With chapters on dominatrices and hip mamas, the transgendered and the incarcerated, drugs and plastic surgery and fabulous hair, it's scenesterism's love letter to itself, and if you are one of the titular YTPs, odds are you know at least one of the contributors (Ariel Gore, Bucky Sinister, Sherilyn Connelly, Lynn Breedlove, Clint Catalyst, et al.) personally.

Mark my words: they're going to get away with it, they're going to win, they will never be held accountable. Like Kurtz's ruminations about the horror of the enemy in Apocalypse Now, we lack their will.

I canceled on Retool & Grind tonight for health reasons, but stopped in the Haight all the same to pick up some new fishnets and stripeys from New York Apparel. While there, I tried on some vinyl pants that didn't fit. See? Life goes on.

Collette finally heard from a certain friend of hers from New Orleans. He was out of town while Maddy and I were there last December, so we've never met. Anyway, he was in That Place last week, The Superdome, describing it as "three days of unimaginable Hell." It's now been declared a biohazard zone:

A single shoe, in a child's size, is overturned in a mash of food wrappers, vomit and a tampon. The visitors cringe at the thought of a barefoot child and hope the shoe was just an extra that fell from a suitcase.

People escaping the floodwaters have said they grabbed everything they could and fled.

But at some point, before evacuating in buses and helicopters, they realized they had to lighten their load.

One boy had to leave behind his Xbox game and his Batman sleeping bag.

Someone else left behind a book of Hindu scriptures. Someone else took comfort with a girlie magazine, and someone else with the book "Sister, Sister" by Eric Jerome Dickey.

In spite of that, but I keep thinking that what would make being in there even worse is the fact that I probably wouldn't have my notebook and a pen—and if I did have my notebook, it would be waterlogged. So I couldn't even write about it while there. I mean, yeah, someone was able to bring a friggin' Xbox along, even though there was no power and no teevee. (When I was a young whelp, I can imagine having wanted to hang onto to my Atari 2600.) Somehow, though, I just know something would have happened, and I would have been stuck in Hell with no way to record it. Or, if I'd been able to bring it in, I would have had to leave it there, yet another journal of pain lost.

11:01pm

Google loves me: this page is currently result #8 for "superdome unspeakable horror."

Had to give my show a miss. Dead air on Pirate Cat Radio right now. I doubt anyone's noticed.

9/2/05
9:15pm
Sometimes I think that of all the bizarre shit I'm into, all the things that define me as a unique individual and not just one more carbon-based lifeform (and we all have such things), my fondness for noise music would strike most people as the weirdest. Seriously. You go kittycorner from here on a random night and grab a random pattern from a random movie and bring them over here, their reaction will range anywhere from "Eh," to "Wow!" You do it tonight, and I promise you all but one will say "What the FUCK? This isn't music! It's noise! It's like nails on a chalkboard! How can anyone listen to this? I can't stay here."

(two other m2f trannies besides myself, and one f2m, have i ever seen this many at a non-queer event?)

It's alien, it doesn't fit with what we were raised to think of as music. Nothing in our culture leads to an appreciation of noise, especially harsh noise. There is some precedent in ambient music—recordings of ocean waves and the like. Hell, you can buy 'em at Target. Their ostensible purpose is relaxation, for soothing infants and drifting off to sleep. Noise, however, tends to reward--nay, demand more active listening. Though even the harshest of it can be used as background music; I listened to Merzbow for the majority of my first day at Nakedword. But there's so much more to get out of it if listened to deeply. Well, most of the time, anyway, and the hit-to-miss ratio is a lot higher than in pop music.

(later)

They're treating him like a rock star, this longhaired Japanese gentleman sitting behind two Mac laptops, one of which sports a MEAT IS MURDER sticker, sending out what feels like a metaphoric mixed signal as he produces a noise which sounds like the deepest, darkest abbatoir. Maybe it's the sound of souls as they're ripped in that place, the distorted vibration of a spirit as the blades tear through. It is the sound of what those people in the Superdome went though, the universal tone they produce, the soundtrack of their pain an agony stripped of its ability to drive insane, leaving only its power and shock, tempered by the ever-present fact that this can be turned off, walked away from, a completely voluntary act.

(my god there are some seriously hot girls here.) (temple and i met at a noise show)

Anyway, audience members cheered and hollered and everything. For the first five to ten minutes, a cheer would go up every time he layered on a new sound. Some people really know their distortions. ("It's the one that sounds like a recorder in a wind tunnel! Right ON!") A roomful of grownups watching a man sitting at a couple computers. That is either the power of the sound or the power of our celebritarian programming.

Classic confusion when stoned: did I just think about what it would be like if it happened, or did it actually happen?

Saturday night I opened for Lynnee at The Dark Room. Typically underattended opening night show, with one unexpected face in the crowd, but it was fun. Afterwards, Lynnee and I went back to his place an talked until three in the morning. It's good to know we can still do that.

5:01pm

Fresno's late, great Woodward Park Drive-In. I only ever went there once, an ill-considered double feature of Alien3 and Patriot Games. I call it "ill-considered" because both movies were too dim for an environment like that. Of course, that isn't really the point of a drive-in, is it?

Though I sometimes wish that I had been born a decade later (not so I'd be younger now but so that the social conditions which made it possible for me to come out as a tranny would have existed when I was a teenager), I do often wish I could have been around for the golden age of the drive-ins. Alas. Life would have been so hellish for me the rest of time, it's definitely just for the best. At least I can read about it, and even watch the intermission clips if I want. A friend of mine originally turned me on to Something Weird Video's Hey, Folks! It's Intermission Time series back in the early nineties. I've been into this sort of thing for a long, long time.

sometime after midnight

Sick. With a cold. All of a sudden. The fuck?

9/1/05
10:00pm
First floor bar, Divas. Or, as I still tend to think of it, The Motherlode. I'm here because the world is ending. Unspeakable tragedy is happening just a few timezones away, in a place which is still fresh in my mind, my memory and my freshly scarred heart. The empire is crumbling—or, at least, it should be. But it probably won't. There are so many ways it can be traced back to Bush's decisions, but why bother? It won't matter. They'll point at a blue sky and call it green, accusing anyone who claims otherwise of partisan politics. If they can weasel out of the Downing Street Memo, this won't touch them.

The noblest thing the survivors can do is dance on the ruins of the fallen empire. When my luck runs out, when I'm trapped in the rubble of the collapsed building or driven like cattle into a concrete-and-astroturf Hell which would give Bosch the screaming wiggins, I can only hope that someone else is wallowing in whatever sleaze they can find. That is a celebration of freedom. Only when America's consensual prostitution is open for business will we deserve to endure as a nation. Now, to explore.

10:15pm
Okay, not much to explore. That kinda figures.

Not sure what I'm hoping to find, really. Being in a place like this is an inherently passive activity. Action is generally more than I want. Really, with all due respect to my friends who believe in such a thing, nothing would be more false than me praying right now. It violates my own personal sense of logic, fails to compute on a fundamental level. It would be a hollow gesture, which is worse than an evil one. At least evil has the courage of its conviction.

Sure, I could go to the Lex from here. To what end? The same level of untouchability with the polarity reversed. Here, I am the object of desire; there, I am the unfulfilled desirer. Why not be where my own frustration is lessened? Try to gain some power from the consensual objectification? True, there are a few cute trannies now and again—I note with bemused interest that the girls I find attractive tend to be the ones with least amount of obvious facial surgery, and are primarily white—but I'm not why they're here. Genetic girls? Puh-leeze. That's not how the game is played on this particular field, folxen.

Images on the bar teevee of the Superdome, the manifestation of a purer and deeper suffering than Americans ever thought possible on their own soil, even after The Great Overshadowing. And the word "Katrina" in a thousand different iterations, affecting Maddy more profoundly than few besides myself can grasp, for that is her birth name, the name to survive the legal rechristening a few years back, and though she never had a problem with it before, she now wishes it was something different, perhaps even that her legal name outside of this fictionalized meta-world was Madeline, though if it was the hurricane would have been named Madeline as well, 'cuz that's typical of the physical universe's sense of humor—the Big Bang was probably the spittle from some transcendental being's whoopee cushion, and it was all downhill from there.

Exactly.

12:17pm

Christa Faust is auctioning off a deluxe numbered edition of Revelations, a collection of apocalyptic stories by herself and Poppy, Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale, David Morrell, F. Paul Wilson, Charles Grant, Whitley Strieber, Elizabeth Massie, Richard Christian Matheson, David J. Schow, Craig Spector and Ramsey Campbell. It's signed by all them, and Christa will personalize it further. All proceeds go to Poppy and her cats. Please bid early and often.

4:09pm

Speaking of national tragedies, I nicked myself while shaving yesterday morning. It looks like a red, offset dimple. I've tossed around the idea of using liquid eyeliner to make it into a faux beauty mark. Or not.

We were told we could go home at half past three, but I'm sticking around. I'm going to a noise show at the Great American Music Hall tonight, so I'd just have to turn around and head back downtown anyway. I had the foresight to bring my ticket along (go me!), so there's no practical reason. Sure, I wish I'd grabbed that pot brownie I got from c0g's mom in Bolinas, but, well, that's not worth the extra trip, especially when last night my car got what will surely be its final less-than-$3-per-gallon fillup last night. I could always drive home then take the train out to the show, but, um, please.

That said, I'm trying to convince myself that I need to start taking the train to work. What the hell, my gym is closed, what else am I going to do with myself in the morning? And let's not forget the old chestnut: I'll have more time to read. Yes, of course, those are most superficial reasons possible to do the right thing, but since when has the average human had any other motivation? Why else would benefit concerts and charity fundraisers be necessary? We're all being generous now—well, a lot of us—but it won't last, even though the need never truly goes away.

5:44pm

I don't know why I'm thinking of this right now (well, actually, I do), but do you know what I hate about doing acid at night? Keeping track of the volume on the stereo. It's so difficult to tell when it gets too loud. I know that between -50 and -40 is generally safe on my system, even late at night, but it's still hard not to worry. It helps that I'm usually playing ambient/noise stuff which isn't as jarring as rock music would be, but the anxiety is still there.

Equally annoying this past weekend was the return of a sound I haven't heard in a few dozen moons: The Blair Witch Mouse. When I first noticed it from inside/behind the kitchen cupboards, I brought Perdita over and let her do her thing. Which was to look up at me with an expression of curiosity as to why I displaced her, and walk away, all while the Mouse was pinging and scratching like mad. Turns out Perdita isn't much of a mouser. Oh, hell. Maybe it's time to start considering a second cat, one with more of a killer instinct. They could keep Perdita company during the day while I'm gone, which is a good thing. On the other hand, I don't want two cats. One is plenty.

Anyway, I was hoping the Mouse wouldn't make its presence known while Collette and I were tripping on Saturday night. Naturally, it did. During "A Saucerful of Secrets," the fucking rodent. Collette adjusted to it easily enough—she has six cats and a vast menagerie of small green things in cages, not to mention live chirpy crickets to feed the aforementioned caged green things—but I was irrevocably distracted. Fucking rodent.

I am a lone wolf
I always was and will be
I feel fine
I am resigned to this
I am a lone wolf

Got my cares
Wrapped-up all nice and neat
In my suitcase
I'll take it down the street
To a place with plenty of space for me
I am a lone wolf

I am a lone wolf
It blows my mind
That people wanna try to get
Inside my tired head
I am a lone wolf

I am a lone wolf
Nobody needs to get too close to me
You'll only see this truth
I am a lone wolf

E,
"Lone Wolf"

Except it's not happening to my flesh. The power in my neighborhood went off around eleven last night, so I had to use a flashlight and a candle to prepare to go to sleep in my comfy, dry futon with my cat curled up beside my head. And yet, I felt inconvenienced.

Children slept in waste. Cocaine vials littered the toilets. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers.

The Louisiana Superdome, once a mighty testament to architecture, had in the space of a few days degenerated into unspeakable horror for 20,000 of New Orleans's weakest and poorest.

The sanitation gave out early, and the dome soon filled with the overpowering stench of human waste, made worse by the swampy heat.

"There is feces on the walls," Bryan Hebert said. "There is feces all over the place."

It doesn't help that I don't like large sports arenas in the first place, and being inside an enclosed one sounds awful under the best of circumstances. Being in there now...have I mentioned that I grok the suicides?

The Superdome itself is finished, though. Even if they repair the damage, it would be like (if I may stretch a previous metaphor) building a mall on Auschwitz. The place is haunted. It's been used as a shelter before, but nothing remotely like this. It's all over, folks.

2:14pm

Maddy heard from Poppy—she's safe and sound. (Poppy, that is. Though Maddy's certainly doing better now as a result.) She's in Mississippi without power or cellular reception, but it's a fair sight better than being anywhere near New Orleans right now, seeing as how Hell is bubbling up through the Earth.

sometime after midnight

From Unimatrix Zero to Divas to The Lexington to Bender's. I'd like to think that's a full evening.

Chupa, whom I haven't visited in a long time, said the effect of seeing me blonde when she'd always known me to have black hair made her think of Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway. That's the second time I've been compared to Patricia in that movie—Cindy did so after seeing this picture—and, once again, I'll take it.