transmissions from a compromised antenna

For those in NYC, my friend Jessica Ryan has organized a benefit for the Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective this Wednesday. Benefit will take place at 7:30 pm at the Cake Shop. That's 152 Ludlow in the Lower East Side.

As Jessica writes: "Raffles could win you a fake chocolate cake autographed by Amy Sedaris and other sweet prizes or get your Valentine a real cake at the bake sale. Enjoy musicians, comedians, poets & a ventriloquist all performing to honor the Love of the Single Mom."




I have a class so you won't see me there until a little later but I hope some of you can make it.

Back in New York and everything is gray or brick brown. It took an hour and a half for the cab to get me home through endless BQE traffic. I came home and ate and passed out into a sort of coma and only now, some ten hours later, are the myriad things I need to do taking form and reality again. Things are good, though. New Years in New York should be amazing this time. Many friends will be here. Year of the snake, I hear. Auspicious...

Huge Decompression party in the Queens Museum of Art last night. Costumes were just amazing and people very beautiful. It was great to see my friends from the Hungry March Band playing in the park out back: a meeting of two subcultures that fit messily but well together. Of course I was lame and didn't really put a costume together because I've been working and working on my writing instead of sewing myself a giant furry red bunny suit or whatever. We all have our priorities.

One of the nice things about this party was its location in an art museum, so you could always take a break from the scene and just look at the art. Two standouts were Yue Minjun's "Symbolic Smile" paintings and the to-scale model of New York City:



As far as the Yue paintings, I'll leave it up to you to imagine the feeling of leaving a dancefloor full of gyrating people in full-body fishnet outfits or chainmail and then to stroll through halls where pink-skinned Chinese guys grin grotesquely from every canvas. Like most incredibly focused artistic projects, Yue's methodology is extremely simple and her message powerful and yet somehow, simultaneously, ambiguous. I chatted with a museum guard for fifteen minutes at one point (she was very bored) and asked if the museum, perhaps, picked the paintings to go with the party? I mean, the resonance seemed almost too strong to be a coincidence. But the museum hadn't planned it.

The to-scale model of New York City is mind-bending, and everybody who loves the city needs to see it. I spent a few hours in the viewing room—it's the size of a movie theater—identifying all sorts of patterns in planning I'd never noticed before. The apartments along Central Park East and West, for instance, are taller than the buildings on all the avenues further out so they form a sort of wall around the park. I also noticed several gated communities north of Brighton beach that are surrounded by vast moats. Someday I have to visit those. A model of godzilla was charmingly approaching downtown Manhattan from the sea.