so two brief things that i hope to have time to elaborate on later – but right now i just need to get this up before i forget, as i promised a friend i would add a new post to The Rambles AKA My Crappy Blog section of my website by last night, which didn’t happen. so i made an executive decision to retroactively modify my use of the word  ”tonight” and give it a more figurative, less literal, meaning; so that when i said “i’ll make a new post tonight” what i really meant was “i’ll make a new post whenever, but probably sometime this weekend, or before monday, or something.”

i can do shit like that; it was my pledge/promise. i feel totally Justified.

but two things!

so there are some bars to which i am deeply indebted, for a number of reasons. for instance, some bars have five-dollar maker’s mark; some bars let you smoke (hardly any now, though, and i suppose that’s why they’re precious, since i wouldn’t want all bars to allow people to smoke, anyway); some bars are reliably not packed & annoying even on fridays & saturdays, but still somehow manage to stay in business; some bars have outdoor patios which are lovely.

and some bars let humans do cool events there for free.

so i had two experiences this weekend with Bars To Which I Am Indebted & Of Which I Am Enamored for that particular reason:

1. Ding Dong Lounge hosted a brilliant event yesterday/saturday called May Day, an all-day-into-night small press/zine expo that also had a line up of readers/performers. i was fortunate enough to be included in that line up. but the day overall was wonderful, and i thoroughly enjoyed hearing people’s work, handling people’s very exciting publications (that sounded dirty &/or creepy, although i didn’t mean it that way), and meeting good peoples. the organizers run their own presses, including Fractious Press and Kaboom! Press.

and here’s a link about the event: http://maydaydingdong.blogspot.com/

the folks who work at Ding Dong are also some of my favorite peoples. i’m just saying.

2. Botanica Bar hosted an event of my friends’ & my devising, laboriously entitled “3people + Laundry Party Public = People Doing Stuff at Botanica Bar.”

okay, so the formula/equation part of it was added pretty much at the event itself, but i think it still counts. i think we were billing it as “people doing stuff at botanica bar” and then explaining that it was 3people & LP public. but these are just details…i don’t think anyone cares but me, about the actual math. but i care. and my caring will somehow, somewhere, have an impact. or something.

3people consisted of theater artist Julia May Jonas, poet & editor Jocelyn Burrell, and me. we all did new stuffs, so it was totally Fresh and Raw and Dynamic and Innovative and Groundbreaking and all those adjectives that make art sound fundable. the bar was blissfully empty except for people there for the event and the bartender (not because the bar’s unpopular, but because people generally don’t start arriving until 9pm, when karaoke starts at botanica. the karaoke DJ at botanica, by the way, is in my opinion top notch). Botanica let us use their elegant & sumptuous backroom (uh, sumptuous by cool dive bar standards, natch), so we all felt very cozy & cared for & authentically nyc-dive-barry. okay, no one said that, or expressed anything like that at all, but i feel like putting words & thoughts in other people’s mouths, without any justification or basis at all. because i’m in a rush, which causes me to make sloppy summations of events (like, you know, capturing a mood for the evening,which should never be done in a sloppy fashion, but i’m doing it anyway. i Fail.).

and then we moved into Laundry Party Public portion of night, after an invigorating intermission, and poet & fiction writer Bushra Rehman read, and Derek Chung presented his Volunteer Crew presentation, and writer Nina Sharma read, followed by Warren Tong, and Torrey Townsend, and Quincy Scott Jones.

and it was a lovely night, although i sadly couldn’t stay for the karaoke starting up, but i think i can (this time) quite safely & accurately say that people overall were Inspired & shit.

cheers to all the cool bars.

my friend Tom Connors & i made a music video to submit to the CAAM/KSW/Locus DIY music video contest. the music video is for the bantercut song “everything is going right”; bantercut being a now bicoastal band that includes bassist Jim Espinas, guitarist Ian Johnson, and me.

Jim & Ian made a video for another bantercut tune, “when it’s cold.”

the video with the most views by March 3rd wins a spot in the 28th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, produced by the Center for Asian American Media.

Oh the Potential Honor; the Potential Glory.

Please to visit www.asianamericanmedia.org/videos to view “everything is going right”, “when it’s cold”, and the other videos in the contest.

& if you feel so inclined, please rate the video after watching.

If you’re innerested, please to visit http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bantercut for more information about the bantercut album.

If my calculations are correct (and my use of the word “calculations” is perhaps overreaching since I’m talking about basic arithmetic, here; but in the age of newfangled technological devices like “calculators”, I’m fairly impressed with myself when I can count to ten without assistance), there are nine days remaining of 2009. Which means there will never again in my lifetime be double-aughts following the first digit of the year.

(or in anyone else’s lifetime, lessen someone figures out that whole immortality thing in the next 900 years without humanity extinguishing itself first, which I suppose someone very well may; a thousand years isn’t all that long, after all.)

For some reason, my brief encounter with double-aughts after the first digit of the year, and the end of this brief encounter, mean something to me.

It occurred to me a little too late to really consider exactly what it is that the double-aughts means to me, or why I might miss it, but I’ll speculate here, briefly, and then move on to discuss exactly what it is that had me wide awake four hours after drifting off, when I could have actually slept in today and gotten a full night’s sleep (whatever that means), had my body only permitted me to indulge.

So, a brief speculation on the Significance of the Double Aughts.

Hrm, well, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, there is a lovely symmetry in the two zeros between the first and fourth/final digits of the year; not only a symmetry, but a space, a breath, between the chaos of the years…

(okay, I’m enjoying totally overanalyzing this: I live for this shit!)

So, the two zeros in a sense hold the center, provide an anchor of serenity and space in an otherwise tumultuous world of concrete value and cold calculations -

The Double Aughts represent a sort of breathing space, the eye of the storm, an opportunity to write a stabilizing force, a  counterbalancing neutrality, into each day.

Now, we will no longer have that reassuring serenity and breathing space written into the code of each day.

Now, I suppose, we are fucked.

(I don’t really think we’re fucked, not any more than we usually are, at any rate, but it seemed like a nice, snappy way to end my Speculation on the Significance of the Double Aughts.)

And now I believe I had told myself I was going to arrive at the thoughts that had me awake earlier than I intended this morning (nothing particularly exciting or revelatory, so please don’t get your hopes up) -

Well, since I spent so long on an unanticipated bloggery detour (the speculation on the significance of the Double Aughts), I will make this next bit very brief:

I have been thinking of late of two themes, possibly titles, for a series of work — could be two series of work, or they could combine into a single series. And by “series” I mean a series of scenes, or short pieces, or maybe just a single play. I really don’t know, only that I’ve been mulling over it for quite a while now, and found myself thinking about it of late.

The two themes are: 1. catalog of Failure; and, 2. the excavation series.

I use “failure” not in a pessimistic way, but I find instances of failure so much more interesting than instances of success; I find I generally learn more from failing than from succeeding (using the words “failure” and “success” in the fairly traditional, obvious sense; not the “oh I thought this thing was a failure, but in reality it was a success because x,y and z happened as a result”), and failure also makes for some funny shit. Also, Failure tends to make a Human that much more relatable. Not that I’m anti-success: go success, it’s awesome. But I’m talking, here, about ideas for something I’m working on. This is nothing new, I’m just thinking about it – perhaps I’m drawn a bit too much to silver linings, here, I don’t know. We’ll see.

The Excavation Series is something that could be entirely different or could be, as I said, part of the same thing. In any case, these are two ideas I’m tossing around, as the final days of 2009 continue apace.

And I suppose, before the year is out, I will do some end-of-year accounting, & take stock, & express bewilderment, and gratitude, and pissed-offedness, and all sorts of things, to properly review the last year from my own, Totally Self Absorbed Perspective (TSAP).

also, i have mentioned it before, but to remind myself, even: a friend and i now maintain an equally irregularly updated blog, jealous gods. sometimes i post there, usually when i’m feeling less inclined to visit whiskey.

i know! i thought i was the only one who actually visited whiskeyandacigarette (dot org) from time to time, but apparently: I AM NOT ALONE.

it IS kind of eerie. how can i feel confident in spilling my rambling, incoherent guts knowing full well that another Human is actually reading along, every so often? i tell you, it’s unnerving.

so how do i know? what is the evidence?

i actually got a NON-robo piece of hate mail just 6 days ago! here it is, in all its totally Human glory:

so why are you back all of a sudden? we’ve gotten used to your neglectful ways regarding the practically defunct Whiskey and A Cigarette, and now we’re expected to set aside our theatre desires to make room for your triumphant return to Playground-hood? and even start marking our 2009 itineraries for a De Young Museum event?! my advice: get employed, get main-stream, and forget your unique, poetic and even at times poignant individualism. comic-rockstar, my ass…

thank you, anonymous hate mail sender. now i will have to actually update the totally outdate hatemail page on this site.
in other news: i’m participating in a series of new play readings! including my own! in North Beach! i’m a bit frightened, and am still writing the script, but i will be joined by theater artists extraordinaire Acquenetta Summers-Wong, Leon Goetzen, and Dan Weil, who will make me look good. November 6th and 8th (series runs November 1 – 8).

other playwrights on the bill are Adam Chanzit, Christopher Chen, Ignacio Zulueta, & David Bernbaum.

i’m participating along with dozens of other APA artists in ksw’s 10th annual APAture festival – holy shit! can’t believe we’ve gotten to ten. this will be the 8th one i’ve attended in some fashion – every september since i moved to this godforsaken city by the bay…

(ahem: i don’t really think it’s a “godforsaken city” but “godforsaken city by the bay” has such a lovely ring to it; i do loves me some sf.)

my friend & writer/blogger claire light is liveblogging at apature! this is very exciting. visit it now and read the blow-by-blow apature commentary.

i’m performing as the apature featured artist in performance/theater on wednesday, september 24th, at intersection for the arts (446 valencia, bet 16th & 15th sts, sf). also performing are Robin Sukhaida, Irene Faye Duller, Rogel Camba, and LIKHA. i’m performing a sort of Frankensteinian abomination incorporating elements from some of my older pieces, and some newer pieces, and a totally new narrative framework that will be premiering at apature – it’s an experiment, and i’ll probably be reading from the script in the totally new parts – but it should be fun.

APAture 2008 graphic design (left) by Michael Yap.

a friend of sorts tells me they can see me conducting experiments with alcohol, and after feeling somewhat offended by the crappy quality of the photographs on the site, i concede that this kinda remark is justified, given the one-dimensionality i seem to have achieved in certain quarters, with certain people.

a part of me weeps inside, while another makes a mental note to perhaps one day change the domain name of my website.
and in other news, cary tennis, in his salon column, has one of the more succinct & unpretentious writerly identity statements i’ve seen in a while:

Because, of course, like many other writers, I hate myself. I just fucking hate myself. I hate my writing. I hate my writing. I hate my writing. I hate my fucking voice in my head. I hate all the voices in my head. I wish for nothing so much as silence and contentment, but I have to keep talking because I believe if I keep talking I stay alive. If I stop talking, I die. That’s how it is. So I hate my fucking self, but I can’t stop talking and I can’t stop writing and I can’t stop these fucking voices from rehashing funerals from my childhood and visions of Christmas dinners, because I think if it stops I’m a dead man. It’s all in there all the time hashing itself out. It’s a life form. Language is a life form. Language, speech, imagination, it’s a parasitic life form that burrows in and takes over.

And of course when I look at what I’ve written, I hate it. It’s a bunch of fucking garbage! So what’s new? Am I the only fucking writer who hates himself and hates his writing? Hell no. It’s a sport. It’s a national anthem. It’s a way of life.

It’s our way of life.

indeed. anyway, that’s all for now.