April 2008 Archives

Today, someone posted this comment on my old LiveJournal, which I abandoned months ago:

Subject: chow calamity spreads across the globe.
All greetings...
I faith that chose the set segment of it for asking your inconceivable, if not, sorry.
I do not least many times go to the forums. And my, my assuredly is what is:
How do you deliberate on how sober the question of charge increases, and whether it is practical broad shock,
the actuality that already incident, namely: Rising grub charges has transformed subsistence into an global gclosednmental issue.
Riots pull someone's leg erupted in Egypt, Haiti and Bangladesh in excess of soaring subsistence tolls.
People fought one another in excess of bags of rice in West Africa.
The causes and the solutions to the grub turning-point are complex.
Iif not tough and you prepare your conception on this, suit rejoin, I am unundoubtedlyably interested to listen to your conception.
Tthank you
P.S. Sorry for my english.

1. I haven't quite processed the Sean Bell verdict.  Still, I'm struck by this article in the Times, and this paragraph:

“Some in the media seemed disappointed, they wanted us to play into the hoodlum, thug stereotypes,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We can be angry without being mad.” And while many onlookers shouted their support, others admitted restlessness and a yearning for something more.  [italics mine]

2. Did you know that Israeli settlements pipe untreated sewage into Palestinian refugee camps?  I didn't either.

3. Thinking a lot about the food shortage, about the film King Corn, about the Cheese On Bread song Cornfields, Cornfields, and about my slow re-ascent into psuedo-veganism.

4. Angry that Obama is talking about Reverend Wright again.  Please, stop it.  Please, just shut up.  Please, why can't everyone just shut up?

5. I found a mix CD that Max Steele made me in 2006.  It's really good.  I am really thankful for this music.  Special thanks to: The Spinanes, Navy, Helium, Sonic Youth, Anna Oxygen & Broadcast.

6. I found a mix CD that Casey made me in 2006.  It's really good.  I am really thankful for this music.  Special thanks to: Mew, The Evens, Tegan & Sara, Toots & the Maytals, Fugazi & M.I.A.

7. I found a mix CD that Chris Maher made me in 2006.  It's really good.  I am really thankful for this music.  Special thanks to: The Chromatics, The Slits, Dear Nora, Bratmobile, Best Friends Forever & Yoko Ono.

8. Ardi thinks I should be a litigation attorney and he's probably right.

9. Still sort of convinced that love and beauty will always be bourgeois indulgences until widespread institutional suffering is conquered.  Still unsure what to do with this hunch.

10. Also convinced that art makes things better.

11. Impatient with art's pace of improvement.

12. Wondering what I would do if I took a year off from my life, and dedicated all of my time to making more concrete, actual change.  Wondering what that would look like.  What that would be.

13. Half of my life has been after my Bar Mitzvah.

Love
Dan

No one is allowed to hit me.  No one.

Just in case you were wondering.

Love
Dan

I just got home from the opening night of Squeezebox: The Movie.

Here's a list of things I can't believe I didn't know:

1. What Squeezebox was.

2. That Mistress Formika can sing.

3. That Jackie Beat can sing.

4. That Mistress Formika and Jackie Beat can both sing really, really, really well.

5. Who the Toilet Boys are.  (!!!!)


6. That I've never seen Jayne County perform!

7. That Jayne County is still alive!

8. That Jayne County is the best rock performer on the planet!

9. That Jayne County looks and acts like Edith Massey!

That's the end of the list.  Debbie Harry performed too.  She is so fierce and economical.  The night ended with Mistress Formika singing "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine.  For those unfamiliar with the song, imagine this, being sung by a beautiful drag queen with enormous blonde hair:


I am forever changed!
Love
Dan

I dusted off a very old performance for the closing of Rapture Cafe last night.  I don't think I did a very good job, or a good enough job.  Two old friends more or less told me to my face that the piece was cliched, and that wouldn't sting if I didn't agree with them! 

No more risks!

On the bright side, The Forward has paid me all sorts of wonderful compliments.

Love
Dan

My friends are beautiful.  Experience Dream Bitches.


Love,
Dan

The super said I look like I'm from the 18th century.  Hilary said, "No, you look like Edgar Oliver."


He used to wear pants like mine.  I can't believe I'd never heard of him. 

Love
Dan

Google Alerts just alerted me to this comment, left on the MySpace page of bitchy gay figure skater Johnny Weir:

Just wanted to let you know that I was on a college visit and my host took me to a Dan Fishback concert... and he mentioned that he was a fan of yours and I got pretty excited... Ha ha, I think I was the only other person in the room that knew what he was talking about... It totally made my day. :)

This tickles me on so many levels, none of which I have time to explicate.

Love
Dan

My solitary Passover has been easier than I thought it would be.

I ordered Japanese food and read Exodus.  When Exodus got repetitive, I read more Kushner essays.  Then I watched a Harry Potter movie.  And called my family.  The combined effect of these stimuli is a general awareness of my Jewishness, my dedication to radical progressive change, and my shaky-but-consistent belief that art can somehow accomplish that change. 

The funny thing about Exodus is that it's preceded by Genesis.  And in the last chapter of Genesis, the Jews are totally welcomed by the Egyptians, and the Pharaoh goes out of his way to accommodate the wishes of Jew Joseph.  It's a happy story.  The chapter ends.  The book ends.  Then a new book begins, and suddenly we're screwed!  The lesson?  DON'T GET COMFORTABLE.

Something just fell in the next room.

Something sounds like some kind of monster.

This, too, feels appropriate.

Ardi is coming by later, to watch some kind of Jewy movie he found.

I'm glad.

It would have been, as they say, enough.
Love
Dan

Though I am heavily doped up on prescription pain killers, I find myself boldly alert, eyes wide open in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and finally flicking on a lamp to devour Tony Kushner essays about socialism and sex. 

Now down the ladder to the laptop.  Awake.  Dazzling.

After the Six Points meeting tonight, I took Gaby out for coffee, and we dissected my project budget.  Gaby's advice kept getting better and better until I was riding a monster Organizational High.  Everything seemed so eminently doable.  Doability makes my brain flicker.  I'm still seeing sparks.  I feel like I've been drinking Sparks.

I might not be able to travel home for Passover.  After neglecting my daily yoga routine for a few months, I seem to have strained a bunch of muscles in my neck.  It's pretty intense.  I shouldn't even be typing this.  Passover is the only holiday I care about.  I want to be with my family.

I also had to postpone Monday's Faggots practice for the thousandth time.  Singing (loudly) and playing guitar simultaneously felt a little premature.

Hopefully I'll be guitarable by Thursday.  Rapture Cafe, my favorite place to linger, is closing.  When I moved to New York, I imagined I'd find places like Rapture everywhere.  Radical queer coffeehouses with stages and bitchy baristas and difficult books and people who know yr name.  Like Cheers, except everyone reads Judith Butler.  But such a place didn't exist!  The only gay coffeehouses were in the West Village, and they were all boring and creepy.  When Rapture opened last year, I thought: FINALLY.  And now it's done.  I'm freaking bummed about it.  Anyway, I'll be performing on this last night of Rapture.  I'm performing at, as it were, The Rapture.  Along with Glenn Marla, La John Joseph, Max Steele, and others whom I know less well, but whose talents I suspect will wow me.  We all go on after Karen Finley.  But, then again, don't we ALWAYS, IN A WAY, IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING, "GO ON AFTER KAREN FINLEY?"

I'm a little freaked out about these painkillers.  They don't "kill" the pain, per se.  They just make me FEEL DIFFERENTLY ABOUT the pain.  I know the pain is happening.  It just doesn't hurt.  I imagine this is what it's like to be on anti-depressants.  You can still acknowledge the sadness.  It just doesn't hurt you somehow.  It's like you're in a fishbowl, inside of a larger fishbowl.  Theoretically, I'm just taking these pain-changers to make me feel better while my body naturally heals itself.  ("Naturally," along with another drug which I understand to be steroidal.)  I hope this works. 

The pain itself, undrugged, worked as a sort of cast.  It prevented me from moving.  This, too, felt like a pretty good healing system.  My body was telling me, "LIE STILL," and I'm sure, if I complied, it would heal up in time.  I just don't want to comply.  I don't wanna!  For Further Reading, See: Arrogance, Imperialism, American National Character, Energy Policy, Global Warming, Ethanol.

I've been thinking a lot about different modes of performance.  My most successful full-length performances have grown out of smaller bits that were originally intended for club/bar audiences.  For drunk people.  I'm thinking, more and more, that a piece is only worth performing if you can do it for people who are wasted, and still make them pay attention.  I'm not necessarily obeying this rule with my current project, but I'm thinking about it a lot, and expecting it will inform my re-writes and production plans. 

I had a nice conversation about my career the other day, with someone who I trust a great deal.  He was talking about my current project, and basically said, fully aware of the silliness of his own suggestion: "Why can't this show be more like Please Let Me Love You?"  The answer is, of course, "Because it's not."  But I'm glad someone asked the question anyway.  It's helpful to think about the way I used to do things, and how past methods can inform what I'm doing now.  Thinking about:

• music
• scaffolding
• hidden things
• things that appear out of nowhere
• a shadowy figure lurking in the background
• a bullseye
• acting

Okay.  I'm starting to get sleepier.  I want to take a picture of a Thing that Lippe gave me.  But I'm too tired to do that.  That's a good sign.  Maybe I'll fall asleep soon.  I need wear myself out more.  (Thinking about that sentence hurts my inside place.)

Other things, in list form:

1. I'm fascinated by this article about China/Tibet.  It suggests that the Free Tibet movement has only hurt the Tibetan people, and that the popular strategy of public protest/shaming is futile when directed at a totalitarian government.  It is a logical argument, and pisses me off in its Probably Trueness.

2. Hebrew school friend Emily continues being publicly rad.

3. I've been listening to the music of soul sister Matt Katz, who's been making demos on the laptop I sold him.  That man can do anything with a synthesizer.  He's writing these epic, epic disco jams, the way Joni Mitchell would write disco jams.  The production is so gay.  The songwriting is so classic 70s.  The voice is so R&B.  None of this congeals in ways you'd expect.  It's all a shock.  There are too many contexts for this music to make any sense.  It sort of just doesn't.  It's exceptional.  It's an exception.  I once wrote that Matt is "the missing link between Tori Amos and Toni Braxton," and I stand by this claim.  On top of it all, he's not just writing exposition - he's crafting these hilarious and heart-breaking short stories.  His lyrics are so concise.  I love this:

Now we're both working men.
And you can understand
How important honesty is
In this economy,
And you can give yourself to me.

It's like, "Oh, by the way."  Zing.  Matt's one of the only people I know who can incorporate commerce and Marxism into a love song without seeming preachy or even necessarily knowing that he's doing it.  I love that the gay men in Matt's songs are WORKING.  I love that they're salesmen.  I love that they live in a world of transactions.  I love that Matt knows what a transaction truly is.  This is folk music, even.

I'm starting to get that feeling you get in yr stomach when you're past Tired, and yr about to go Crazy.
Brain still on.
I'll try breathing slowly.
Or something.
I'd take a pill
but I already did.
Pills.  Maybe I'll give birth to a pill.

Speaking of which (Those who share my taste in theater will notice the circularity of this entry.):


Love
Dan

Disappointingly (and unsurprisingly), my old college newspaper just endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.  This endorsement has been covered by the mainstream national news.

I wrote a weekly column at The Daily Pennsylvanian for three years.  My relationship with the paper and its staff was very love-hate / Beatrice-Benedict.  I'd walk into the office for my obligatory editing sessions, and the boys in charge would jokingly condescend to me as the token Radical Queer Anti-Man Ballbuster that I was.  I would, in turn, make fun of their small dicks, metaphorically and non-metaphorically.  We all laughed, and we all pretty much meant every word.  It was a lot of fun.

The DP was often accused of being anti-woman, or at least disproportionately male.  This was true.  When they finally chose a female Editor-in-Chief, she was systematically condescended to, with posters all over the office dedicated to "words she doesn't know" and "mythical creatures she's never heard of."  The magazine ran cartoons with rape jokes.  It was really gross.  But I helped a lot of people with my pulpit, and I don't regret the compromise.

I don't know why I'm rambling about this.  Oh yeah.  The irony that they're now supporting a woman for president, even though that woman is an admitted liar who will not substantively change the way our country is run.  Some people like the way things are.  People at Penn like the way things are.  In the words of Gawker (my whole body shuddered when I typed that), or whoever Gawker is quoting, "Shut up, College."

Love
Dan

ps: Ah, memories.

My body has been in all sorts of limbo lately, and so it feels entirely appropriate that Deb Margolin is premiering a new play:

I'll let the videos speak for themselves.

BEHIND THE THRUST: Part One


BEHIND THE THRUST: Part Two


KIMYA & UNDERTHRUST: I Like Giants


KIMYA & UNDERTHRUST: Tomorrow



Love,
Dan

In my dream last night, I was having a business dinner.  Someone was missing - it was a boy I used to like.  His absence made me nervous, so I finally asked Rebecca Guber where he was, and she said, "Oh, he had to cancel - he's having dinner with Miranda July."  The rest of the dream found me pacing the back-alleys of a distorted Times Square, being jealous, wishing I was having dinner with Miranda July, wondering what she'd order, wondering what I'd order, wondering what we'd say to each other, realizing that the situation itself felt like a Miranda July story.

I woke up in a cool girl's apartment.  I'm at Oberlin, in the library, eavesdropping on collegiate conversatons about Freud and how "everyone wants to skull-fuck" some girl.  More later.
Love
Dan

Woah.

More soon.
Love
Dan

I'm folding laundry and watching this insane episode of Degrassi TNG where Paige and Ashley start a rock band for a talent competition, and Ashley (who has never been raped) writes a song about getting raped (based on stuff she read on the internet), and Paige (who has been raped (I think)) gets really angry.  Paraphrased:

PAIGE: I didn't mean you should go on the net and write something you know nothing about!

ASHLEY: I'm allowed to imagine!

PAIGE: NO YOU'RE NOT.

Can you believe this is a real TV show for KIDS???  I love Canada.
Love
Dan

1. I went to Dibs & Liv's house last night to eat dinner.  I slept over.  Their cat woke me up at 6:30am and cuddled with me until I had to leave.  I totally understand cat people now.

2. Today, Schulman invited me to lunch at the cafeteria of the Conde Nast building.  I've heard about this cafeteria, in connection with "The Devil Wears Prada," which I've neither read nor seen, but I get the idea, and so, as I looked at people eating, I fantasized that they were all terribly ambitious and terribly insecure and terribly cut-throat and vicious and weak and scared and tender.  I looked like this the whole time:

and Schulman looked like this:

1. We made dinner.

On Saturday evening, after Underthrust rehearsal, Dave and I met up with Matt Katz, who was going to drive us to see Joseph perform at Sound Fix.  Before we even got to the car, Joseph called us to tell us that Sound Fix had been shut down by the cops for some unknown reason.  So we picked him up and went to the grocery store.

Dave had a Manwich.

Joseph contemplated margarine:

Matt took over my kitchen with the million ingredients necessary to make marinara sauce.  It was really nice.

2. Women in the military are "more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire."  I know.  Read about it here.

3. I went to a vigil on March 20th, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of this stupid war.  Does the war feel unreal to you?  Does death feel unreal to you? 

3.1. I started watching "Six Feet Under" for the first time, and so I've been thinking a lot about funerals, and how we need physical rituals in order to understand abstract paradoxes like death.  I think we need this kind of ritual on a national level as well.  I remember early 2003, before the war started, and how I hated everyone except my activist friends.  I mean, we were working so hard to express our dissent, but others who shared our perspective were watching "Sex in the City" and shopping.  "How can they go about their business?" I kept asking.  "Don't they realize how serious this is?"

3.2. After the war started, but before I graduated, sometime between March and May, 2003, Michael Moore came to speak at my university.  The hall was packed.  People were cheering.  Everyone seemed to agree with him about everything.  I was like, WHERE WERE YOU!!??!  IF YOU FELT THIS WAY, WHY WEREN'T YOU IN THE STREETS?!  WHY WEREN'T YOU AT OUR PROTESTS?!?!  WHY DID YOU DO NOTHING?!!?!?!?

3.2.1. Watch this clip of Michael Moore and Wolf Blitzer.  Moore demands that Blitzer apologize for not investigating the lead-up to the war.  Blitzer has no idea how to respond.  I am still waiting for every mainstream reporter in the country to stand up and say, "This is my fault."


3.2.2. Check out this incredible Bill Moyers documentary about the media's role in allowing the war to happen.  It's called "Buying The War."

3.3. After the war started, I stopped going to anti-war protests because I disagreed with their message.  "Bring the Troops Home Now" felt insane in 2004.  We had demolished their country - how could we just abandon it?  So I moved to New York, became an artist, and tried to dedicate my life to social activism - to making people feel connected to each other, and hoping that that connectivity would spiral outwards, and maybe, just maybe, contribute to a larger sense of global responsibility.  In 2006, someone told me that he sponsored an African orphan because of my song "The News Today."  "Okay," I thought, "Maybe this is working, kinda, a little."  Still, I have always felt that I did something terribly wrong by not becoming a career activist.

3.4. At that vigil on the 20th, I felt so radically connected to every human being on the planet, by the simple virtue of standing in a crowd, by mourning in a group, by hearing stories of pain, by participating in a ritual of outrage.  And suddenly I realized why no one seemed to care about the war, back in college, when I hated everyone.  They didn't care because it didn't seem real to them.  Because nothing seems real unless it encounters your body.  Because you only feel connected to a war thousands of miles away if you DO something - if you feel the rain on the tips of your ears at a protest, and feel the desire to go inside, and then realize that you're not going to go inside, that you're going to stay put, that you have to stay put, because of something bigger than you that you don't understand and don't have to understand.  I have forgotten this, because I, too, have not been standing in crowds, not standing in the cold, not performing a ritual of outrage.

3.5. I wrote a play about this.  It used to be called The Last Chanukah, but now I think it's called You Will Experience Silence.  We had a reading on March 26th, at The Center For Jewish History.  I learned a lot from everyone who came.  I had a wonderful time.

4. Underthrust is dancing with Kimya Dawson on Sunday, during her show at Webster Hall.  Kimya knows how to make global horror seem personal.  I think there is no greater skill.  I'm excited to support that magic with my body.


Love
Dan