fuck bingo
I spent Saturday afternoon in my studio, listening to back episodes of Diet Coke & Lilith's House of Snax while I stapled, folded, and trimmed around 200 zines. I'd just finished my new zine (more on this later!) and I still had about 100 copies of Lex Icon that still needed to be assembled before San Francisco Zinefest the next day. I was driven fully insane by the frequent jams of my long-reach stapler, but I'm sitting in the studio now, and the work table is clear for the first time in months, ripe for a new project.
I dropped by the festival's opening party Saturday night when I was done, and found—to my disappointment—that the party was being monopolized by interminable games of bingo, played for Zinefest merch. There were dozens of presumably interesting people in attendance, but virtually all of them staring at either the announcer and their microphone, or at a little plastic bingo board. I had been offered a board on the way in, but I declined it, saying (before my brain could apply a veneer of tact to what was already coming out of my mouth) that I "fucking hate bingo".
And I do; fuck bingo. No shade—ok, some shade—to the organizers, who needed a mechanism to give away a limited quantity of free stuff, but bingo is not conducive to having a conversation. If everybody's listening to one person, nobody's saying anything. Unless, of course, they, like me, are a hater.
The happy ending to this story is that I identified a couple of other haters by their hushed grumbling, and we shuffled outside to drink Modelo Especiales on the sidewalk and talk trash, like the lovable zine-making dirtbags we are. I expressed to my compatriots that I felt a little bad for very publicly eschewing the rest of the party, that I was being a spoilsport, but one of our number—
Mukethe Kawinzi, who is amazing—said (with a flourish) that we were being iconoclasts.
I felt buoyed. I realized that I was channeling my design uncle Mike, who is incredible at going to boring parties and befriending the handful of really cool (but really bored) people in attendance. Why play a shitty game for prizes I don't care about? Why follow rules that don't suit my aims, the consequences for which are exactly nil? I'm applying this lesson to every part of my life. Wherever I go, the people I want to meet are the people who are done playing whatever game we're being offered.
buy my shit
My new zine, George Costanza Is A Beautiful Transsexual Woman, is finished, printed, folded, stapled, trimmed, stacked, and after an enthusiastic debut at San Francisco Zinefest, is available for you, beloved reader, to order.
I'll properly write up the concept and process soon but: this zine is very personal to me. Maybe just as much as Lex Icon, which was literally a sex memoir. I realized as I was putting it together that the reason I (and other trans people, based on the responses I have been getting) see latent transsexuality in George Costanza is because he embodies the sort of profound self-dissatisfaction that characterized my pre-transition dysphoria. The writing for this zine consisted of me finding lines George had spoken that I personally had identified with, and arranging them in a rough narrative order. It is, in a sense, autobiographical.
To invoke the cliché:
"he just like me, fr"
This zine is perhaps the most beautiful object I've ever made, and a leap forward for my print-making. I understand things about my process now that I'm really excited to show you, and to carry forward into future projects.
come see me
Now that I've finished a zine, I'm spending a lot of my time rehearsing for my next solo show on the 15th of September. I'll be debuting some songs I've never played live, I think.
I love playing music live, and I can't believe I spent about five years not doing it. The EP I released in December was recorded in haste just before my first time back on stage, and there's so much I didn't know about those songs because I hadn't played them in front of people. Those songs are so different now, and so much of the music I'm gearing up to record soon has been informed by the work of trying to use it to connect with an audience. Come see me play, and you'll be helping me finish my new batch of songs.
check this out
- Avery Barron (who I met last weekend, on the periphery of another art festival) is writing retrospectives on significant albums in her life, starting with Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
- June Martin (who has made me cry on several occasions) has a new short story out called Dating After the Death of God
- This essay from the creator of weird web phenomenon One Million Checkboxes, tickled my brain in that special "people are doing something legitimately cool with computers" way that I don't feel that often anymore
- I finished Henry Hoke's Open Throat last night and I was astounded; the couple next to me at the wine bar where I like to do my reading heard me involuntarily say "oh fuck" like twice in the last forty pages
💋