Just Like This Train
Canadiana, Readings, & February's Angel-of-the-Month
About ten years ago I was living with my lesbian mermaid-cowgirl sister Christy Gast in a fifth floor walk-up in Chinatown. The bottom two floors were a methadone clinic. It had no heat (yes illegal, etc., —but it was a steal and nobody wanted to fuck it up.) I slept in a tiny laundry room that I painted indigo, (listening to Blue of course,) and covered the washer/dryer with a velvet curtain. I used a “stipend” from my recent fellowship at the Robert Rauschenberg foundation to get a personal trainer and spent the winter as a recklessly poetic slut, staving off the cold with a succession of lovers and bottles of whiskey while Joni Mitchell played on repeat, until it became the very air inside our floor-through loft. I used to count lovers like railroad cars—I counted them on my side. Lately I don’t count on nothing, I just let things slide…
I’m returning to this quasi-Canadian reverie while preparing for a couple of events in Toronto. First, I’m on a panel at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, talking with a group of artists and librarians about a series we’re doing, an initiative of the library and the journal PUBLIC.
ARCANA: A DIALOGUE. 6pm— Thursday, 15th February 2024, Fisher Library, 120 St. George St., Toronto.
Two nights later, I’ll be reading my Carpenter’s-themed Science-Fiction story “For All We Know” on the occasion of my mystic conceptual art sister Christine Davis’s exhibition “The Incandescent (or the second attempt at understanding)”
FOR ALL WE KNOW 4pm—Saturday, 17th February 2024, Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave, Toronto.
If you want to get a drink and generally love your life, join me for Candystore’s viewing party Dilf-O-Vision, —tomorrow, Tuesday February 6th at the Parkside Lounge, 7:30pm, 317 E. Houston St, NYC. The “special guest” is the inimitable Jake Brush. Buy your tickets here!
Also, please mark your calendars for Tuesday March 5th, 6pm, for a new year Valid Until Sunset book event at the NYU Center for the Humanities, where I’ll be in conversation with David Deitcher (another Canadian!) who is celebrating his new book on Montreal gay pornographer Alan B. Stone. (More on that, and much else, in the next transmission!)
It is now my distinct pleasure to introduce the February 2024 Angel-of-the-Month:
