Miguel Bosé

This song by Miguel Bosé is called Amante Bandido, and you can look that up if you want to know what it means.

As a kid growing up in the 80's, this was one of the few songs of the era that I was able to listen to without getting an earful of mama's admonishments. She was a true Reagonite and believed that most American music was Satanic. Ever the loyal son, I bought into the fear as well. Latin music was totally fair game, though, so I didn't worry about burning with the Devil when I listened to Miguel Bosé. Instead I fantasized about rubbing my penis on hia painted belly:



So he ends up turning into Indiana Jones, as far as I can tell, but what's that Jim Henson creature that he also plays? Is that his alter-ego? I honestly have no idea what the fuck is going on in the video. Library Drama, Action Adventure, Muppet Fantasy--this video is everything and nothing all rolled into one.

Single, Sole, Solitary...

Only child syndrome or single child syndrome, or bratty bitchiness. Call it what you like, we probably won't notice, although if we do we'll never forget it.

See, we (only children) are often in our own little bubbles, even when we're in a group of people we can withdraw into our imaginations, voices in our heads, images, or distractions: the grain of the table at the restaurant where our friends are celebrating a birthday; the smell of the wine; the smirk on so-and-so's face when he said hello to you. It's very easy to get distracted from the activity of a group when you spent your childhood making up your own amusement.

What I'm trying to say, although not as articulately as I'd hoped, is that while we can completely disconnect from a group environment, we often pay obsessive attention to the details of that environment...when we decide to, in any case. We're always paying attention, maybe not to you but to your outfit or facial expressions or tone of voice or the color of your hair. Maybe we're thinking about what we ate earlier that day. And yes, sometimes we're paying attention to our good ol' reliable thoughts.

Our attention is obsessively tuned to SOMETHING. It's just not often the something that everyone else is tuned to.

Easter is Love and Understanding

Of course on Easter Sunday mama called. I was worshiping my inner self at a Yoga class, though, so my phone was off. In her lovely message she said:

Alex I was calling to say hello and for you to have a happy day on this day of resurrection when our Lord Jesus Christ died for you--

Click.

I couldn't listen anymore. I just couldn't. Don't preach in voicemail messages, people. Just don't. Any parents out there reading this, don't preach. Don't leave messages for your 32 year-old children telling them what to do, what to eat, how to behave or how much Jesus loves them. Your children already blame you for all their problems. Don't make them hatechu.

Or maybe your kids wanna be kids forever and they're into that preachy shit and you like to enable them. There's nothing wrong with enabling another consenting adult. Last night I bought a homeless man a bottle of wine. It was good wine.

And by the way, only zombies rise from the dead. Don't let Jesus in your home, he'll bitechu.

Róisín Murphy Knows Me Better

Here's the video-gram I just received from my wife, Róisín Murphy. It's called You Know Me Better. And yes, dress-up is our favorite game.

Christina Aguilera Lyrics

Finally, the lyrics to Christina Aguilera's Ain't No Other Man. I've been hunting for these for quite some time.

Trust me, if you've ever heard the song, you might want to strap on a pair of depends before watching below....

Safe Chemicals

Okay okay okay. I need your help. Let's increase awareness. Ready?

Chemicals created throughout the 20th century were introduced into all the products and much of the food (and consequently the air, dirt and water) without much knowledge about their potentially harmful effects.

And now, decades later, we realize some of these chemicals (DDT, PVC, et al, et al) never should have been used. Some caused birth defects. Some take eons to degrade. Some mix with others and produce super chemicals, and by "super" I mean really toxic. Our bodies carry a chemical load that human bodies didn't carry a century ago. Man-made chemicals. (Remember the stories about rocket fuel toxins in breast milk?)

The NY Times's Science section published an article about "Green" chemicals. Companies are rushing to make environmentally sound chemicals.

Right.

From a marketing standpoint, they need to do this in order to keep selling their poisons, er, products. The companies making the green chems will pitch them to consumers and governments as benign, and many in our generation will fall for the ads, and then our grandchildren will conduct research that proves these green things are venoms. The business cycle does only cares about the human body to the extent that those bodies shop. Short of causing sudden death, anything goes when it comes to new products.

A note: I'm interchanging "products" with "chemicals" here because, well, these new green chemicals will end up in our products--in plastics, on food, in our IKEA furniture.

So please please please, be a voice against this naive, baby-boomish idea that we can make good, wholesome chemicals. Promote the idea that the best way to live, is to live with what we've got, with what already exists in nature, in the QUANTITIES in which it exists (plants make CO2, but too much of it kills people and glaciers, so...). So talk about this issue. Mention it with kindness around the water cooler so that your co-workers remain informed and aware, and most importantly, help your co workers focus on the truly benign way to live: sustainably, with as few chemicals in your life as possible.

Here is the NY Times article.

Electricity

One of my favorite pastimes is living without electricity. I refuse, for example, to use pneumatic chisels in my stone carving class, opting instead for the hammer-and-chisel-struggle of centuries ago. The only way to appreciate MichaelAngelo is to work by hand.

As with stone, so with bread. Bread you buy at the market is most likely machine-made--even the organic loaves. People making bread at home enjoy the satisfaction of watching the bread rise inside the sanitized compartment of a bread machine after the dough has come together in the same bread machine or--for a more rustically modern feel--in a food processor. That mixing a dough in a food processor is somehow a concession because, after, all, you're not using an automatic machine, or buying a loaf from a market of mass-produced foodstuff--that's atrocious. I never want to be one of those people. I prefer mixing the dough by hand, feeling the gritty clumps of flour stretch and stick and gather together, binding with moisture. I need to know how the dough feels, to smell it, scrape it from underneath my fingernails, watch it rise, and most importantly: to hear it rise.

If something can be done without electricity, I prefer any method of making any thing that is independent of machines or electricity. The more independent the better. To live without electricity is to live fully. My favorite moment out of all my thirteen years in New York City was the summer of 2003, when there was a blackout spanning several days. I ate fresh fruit and coal-fired pizza. I spent the day painting and conversing with my boyfriend without having to wait for commercial breaks or the quiet of late nights when most everybody else is asleep. I don't hate electricity, however; I simply sometimes choose to ignore it.

But I don't own a bicycle.

Watered-Down Drugs

The Associated Press probed the US's drinking water and found traces of pharmaceuticals in almost every single city where water was tested. We've known this for years, though. Toxins in, toxins out. We take pills, we pee out chemicals, the treatment plants remove our urine and feces from the water, but not all the chemicals, and the "clean" water gets pumped back into our rivers, reservoirs, water tables. That same water then makes it back through the tap. Brilliant, isn't it? We're drinking a watery concoction the effects of which are "not yet understood."

We are a a highly creative species, always making things out of what we find on earth. The thing is the Earth is completely interconnected and finite. It's essentially a giant terrarium. Anything we create, anything we put into our terrarium, stays there for quite some time. It has nowhere else to go, so our chemicals, be they drugs or pesticides, perfumes or natural flavorings--they all end up stuck within our terrarium. They end up in our water, our soil, our oceans, our air. They find their way into the bloodstreams of animals, even the human ones.

Here's the whole article. Enjoy.

Spring Skin

Here come the calves. Oh New York City is warming up again and people are showing their skin. Today on the E train was a ball-of-dumb wearing shorts. It’s too cold for shorts, but damnit if I didn’t stare at his calves for an uncomfortably long amount of time. It’s all I could look at on the entire train. Reading A People’s History of the United States was out of the question. It was all about dum dum's calves. Dumb for wearing shorts when it's too cold, but God bless him for being such an idiot.

His calves were out of shape, medium thickness, pale brown, and as hairy as a pubescent boy’s chin, and damn damn damn--after the sexlessness of winter, I wanna fuck those calves. Oh yeah. Lube them up and rub my dick all over them. Kidding of course. Of course. Of course.

This time of year, one exposed body part is all it takes.

Happy almost spring, New Yorquinos!

Love,

The Calf-Master