cardinal rules

Hello to all you howling wolves out there (and the silver bullets that love them)! I just got back from a five-day stint in Los Angeles with varying motivations behind it. Here’s the first glamorous, old-Hollywood historical attraction I visited:

BEHOLD: THE TIKI THEATER XYMPOSIUM. No need to wipe your glasses, because you read that last bit correctly: XYMPOSIUM. IS THIS PRINCE’S PRIVATE SCREENING ROOM, with that? What a fiendishly perfect commercial descriptor. (Related update: My apartment, the artist formerly known as the Terrordome, has been similarly renamed after the mythical Greek ceremony at which the central philosophies of love were decided, only, like, if it were possible for that event to be pornier than it already was.)

As I found out, there wasn’t anything particularly Xocrates-level revelatory about Los Angeles’ last extant den of forbidden sensuality/filth videotapes, unless you count a small TV to the right of the main screen on which an unctuous DVD menu repeated itself listlessly, over and over and over over over. Look at me when I say this to you: I had never been so turned on in my entire life. Nah, but I wasn’t there for any untoward purpose except paying my dirtbag respects to this fossil-establishment, so please know I was xymply charmed by the whole affair in the end. I wonder if that menu is still recursively beaming itself into the Tiki, steadfast and unselected, as I type this to you from back in Greenpoint.

Despite its flagging perv culture, I also liked the rest of Rose Angeles so much that, one morning, while in line buying my customary breakfast of two Diet Cokes, I didn’t discompose a woman with blonde dreadlocks coated in inexplicable tinfoil when she marveled over how “WAY CUTE!” she finds the dark-ass ad campaign Coke is doing at current. The idea is, you pick a carbo-sludge fizz product that says, like, “Father” or “Pal O’ Mine” or “Rat Whore” on the packaging, then give it to whoever the indicated party is in your own animal life. She peered at my cans (this encounter, despite this clause, did not also take place in the porn theater). They read “BFF” and “Buddy.”

“Are those for someone you love?”

“I think so?” I said, clutching the sodas. Then I went back and pounded them one after the other by the pool of the Hollywood Downtowner Motel as I affectionately tried to make sense of The Changing Light at Sandover. Like I said, L.A. ruled. Now that you’ve got the full Californian smut/beverage report, how else is it going? Well…

– CHECK OUT MY NEW SKATES AND YOU TELL ME. (No one is allowed to sing the song. I am deadly serious about this.) Try to tell me these aren’t exactly the tightest rollerskates you’ve ever borne witness to and I will just breeze on by you in them all like, “My condolencesssss…” Also, dudes, do you know how clumsy I am? Do you understand how many legs I’m going to break, not only from trying to jeté in these immaculate motherfuckers, but from the classic physical comedy sitcom trope of, like, stepping on one in the dark in my hallway and being all, “!!!!” with my arms akimbo and windmillish before I crash into a disassembled (albeit stylishly leopard-printed) heap? Do you also understand that I don’t care and welcome the opportunity to put these on the ends of my crutches if I have to? I’m enchanted, guys. Feeling mad “Boy About Town” about this new development.

– I wrote an essay for Rookie that lends itself to an egregiously high number (at least two) of Velvet Underground/Lou Reed allusions, if you’re so inclined to make them, which, save for the title, I’m mostly not.

– I’ve also been writing record reviews for Rolling Stone every now and again. You can find a selection here. Dads only; I’ll be checking Coke cans at the door.

– PLUS TOO a short story in the form of a sestina for The Hairpin. It can be both, right? It is. It’s called “Just 4 Kydz Fun Zone” and it’s about a guy in a rat suit.

– I made this post chiefly as a letter of intent, because I’m going to propose marriage to Schoolboy Q. I lied when I said the first thing I did in California was get way too jazzed about watching an indecent DVD menu on loop. First, I listened to “Los Awesome” approx. 7,208 times while I jumped on the bed of Room 12. I always feel so gold in motels. I bumped my head on the ceiling and I didn’t even care or stop!

– I’m reading Middlemarch and basically writing my official memoirs in its margins. Or, I was, until I left my idiot copy on a Phoenix-Burbank connection! Some acerbic flight attendant is probably making fun of my annotations as we speak. And who could blame him, when I distinctly recall making one that said, like, “Marriage vows as mutual imprecations? Foreshadowing…for all of us?” Whatever, Earth. I love writing these kinds of masterful, trenchant analyses of high littra-cher and you can suck my left rollerskate about it!!

Anyway, don’t let my hott radical views sully your impressions of Middlemarch, since it’s heaven if heaven were a book. As I wait for my replacement copy, I’m reading David Mitchell’s new deal, The Bone Clocks. A lot of the symbolism up in is expressed via these stellar confetti and butterfly motifs, like a metafictional rave/seven-year-old girl’s birthday party, except WAY more ominous (/entirely 100 percent just as ominous?). You can bet I’m wild about it. READ IT WIZ ME!

– I went on a research trip to the Spring/Summer 2015 Styletime Conference For Fashionable Wellness, where I took in the Jeremy Scott and Proenza Schouler shows, then presented my findings in Dazed & Confused.

– As I hang around the postbox pining for the return of the mack (George Eliot), I’m using this downtime to write not my official memoirs, but an official (this, only in that it’s being published by Grand Central next year) book of essays. It’s called Action—as in lights, camera!! I FELL UNDER THE GLITZY SPELL OF HOLLYWOOD V. HARD, you guys, and am publishing an account of my hardscrabble life as an aspiring menu-selection starlet. Really: It’s a collection of the sorts of essays I write for Rookie, but for adults. Specifically, for Adults—please see the photo of the first stop on my book tour at the top of this post.

All right, then. UNTIL NEXT TIME, lupine loves of mine.

X ARS