Mother's Little Helper

I'm not in New York right now, but if I were I'd check out Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts before it closed on the 19th.

Frank O'Hara, "At the Old Place"

Joe is restless and so am I, so restless.
Button’s buddy lips frame “L G T TH O P?”
across the bar.  “Yes!” I cry, for dancing’s
my soul delight.  (Feet! feet!) “Come on!”

Through the streets we skip like swallows.
Howard malingers.  (Come on, Howard.) Ashes
malingers.  (Come on, J.A.)  Dick malingers.
(Come on, Dick.)  Alvin darts ahead. (Wait up,
Alvin.)  Jack, Earl and Someone don’t come.

Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming cha-
cha-cha.  Through the urine and smoke we charge
to the floor.  Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide.

(It’s heaven!)  Button lindys with me. (It’s
heaven!) Joe’s two-steps, too, are incredible,
and then a fast rhumba with Alvin, like skipping
on toothpicks.  And the interminable intermissions,

we have them.  Jack, Earl and Someone drift
guiltily in. “I knew they were gay
the minute I laid eyes on them!” screams John.
How ashamed they are of us!   we hope.

---

Lifted from Andrew Epstein's post on the Orlando massacre, Frank O'Hara, and the legacy of gay nightclubs.

SALVE NARCISO NEGRO

Curly Myrick, "It Be's That Way"

It do.  (Shout out to Kenswil!)

(One day I'll post something on this blog aside from links and songs but honestly I don't even know what I'm doing with this thing. You know what, though? IT BE'S THAT WAY.)

Only built for internet linx

1. "Farming simulators placate a need for a collective and organized past as an alternative to contemporary chaos." WOW @ ME NEXT TIME. Speaking of black farmers: they (we tbh) out here.

2. In defense of cliques.

3. Nicholas Hume-Brown at Slate rolls up his sleeves and digs into AllRecipes - apparently the world's most popular English-language food website - and makes a condescension-free broccoli & cheese casserole.

4. While walking through a village on the east coast of England this past winter, I thought of Southern California. It wasn't a palm tree or a free-range chia seed pudding what done it, but rather a low-slung bungalow with a wide, green lawn. With California in the midst of a housing crisis (to say nothing of our water situation), what will become of one California's most enduring icons, the single-family bungalow?

5. "Those black people who make their way into the business are heavily concentrated in stereotypical roles. This has meant sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs, often meaning reporting on black people. By contrast, there are very few black journalists writing about politics and national security, international news, big business, culture (as opposed to entertainment) or science and technology – they are essentially absent from large swaths of coverage, and even more sparsely represented among the ranks of editors. This is not a trivial matter, or a subject of concern solely to journalists: the overwhelming whiteness of the media strongly but silently conditions how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world."

6. Some fun media shade: Politico going in on Salon (featuring Glenn Greenwald doing what he does: tying every-fucking-thing back to Hillary Clinton and her intergalactic Eileen Fisher car coats or whatever).

7. I just discovered an excellent podcast called Racist Sandwich, wherein "chef Soleil Ho and journalist Zahir Janmohamed interview chefs and purveyors of color and tackle food's relationship to race, gender, and class." Their name comes from an incident which gave me one of my favorite images found on the internet (see above) and you can listen to their first episode - featuring Bertony Faustin, Oregon's first black winemaker - here.

8. Remnants of Los Angeles' Little Italy.

9. Vice Dean of the Committee on Strategic Alumni Technology, Estimated salary: $294,664

10. "'All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,' he said. 'Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.'"