• DOWNLOAD | KATEY RED “Sissy Clap” 2009

Vanity Fair wrote about the New Orleans “Sissy Bounce” scene this morning and I have been out-of-my-mind obsessed ever since. Urban gay subcultural moments like these have historically become either isolated to their respective corners (as in the underground ball scene) or decentralized from their gay roots (as in the heterosexualization of disco), but part of what makes Bounce so exciting is the fact that straight club-goers in New Orleans and elsewhere are openly championing the music — and regardless of how gay you thought the Village People were, you’d have an impossible time heterosexualizing this.

Katey Red — a transgendered woman and former prostitute who is essentially a godmother of the sound — describes the beginning of the Sissy Bounce scene as we know it:

Katey, who is 6’2” and performs — and looks damn good — in short skirts and heels, was the first of the openly gay M.C.s to get on the mic and get recognized, back in ‘98 at a hall near the infamous Melpomene housing projects, where she grew up. “At first, I was a bit scared,” Katey said of performing. “I know a lot of the boys listening didn’t like homosexuals. But I got over my fright. And they liked my music so much, they was like, Fuck it.”

Think about this for a second: a transgendered woman decided she was going to become a rap star in front of young men that looked like this — and she actually did it. Things done changed in the hood, people.

Here is, perhaps, the latest case of intellectual property theft: Last week on Saturday Night Live, Jennifer Lopez unveiled the first two songs from her forthcoming album, Love? — which was dropped by Epic/Sony last month and will find a new home, presumably, soon. Tucked away in the set design, Lopez was flanked by a logo that we can only assume intended to set up the visual identity for her new record: On the kickdrum and elsewhere, a heart merged with a question mark.

If it looked familiar to many of us, that’s probably because it is. My friend and former bandmate, Jonah Matranga, has been using this symbol for years. It’s found its way onto albums, posters, T-shirts, and stickers; he has it tattooed on his body. In other words, Jonah’s use of the design is well established, whereas J-Lo’s appropriation of the logo is — well, not so much. So he’s putting out a call:

I’ve been told that you can help out by sending photos of ways you’ve used the image in your life, after you found it through my music. So, if you have a tattoo of it, or you’ve made drawings of it, or you have anything at all that shows the many ways the little heart-question has gotten out there, I’d love to see it, and so would the lawyers. You can post your pics (or links to them) here, or send them via any number of internetty ways, or just mail ‘em to me.

I have no idea what will happen from all this, but it seems as good an excuse as any to gather this stuff together and remember the power and fun of making stuff and putting it out into the world.

Also, the new songs she played kinda sucked. But that’s neither here nor there.

GPOYW: Things Were So Much Simpler Then Edition. This is me, roughly sixteen years ago, standing in front of ABC-No-Rio when you could still buy heroin from dudes on the corner whispering, “Black death!” into your ear on the Lower East Side. Because it was 1994, I was wearing a backpack, a red windbreaker with the Embrace album cover silkscreened on the back, and a winter cap — even though it was probably spring. (On my feet, most likely, was a pair of canvas Israeli military shoes that my friends and I were kind of obsessed with at the time. We called them “Vegan Warriors.”) I was 20 years old, I made a living by publishing a fanzine, and my rent to live in Manhattan was $300 a month. Salad fucking days, people.

Photo: Brian Maryansky

• DOWNLOAD | THE FINN BROTHERS “Anything Can Happen” Everyone is Here, 2004

Think about the last time something bad happened to you. Without even thinking about it, I can tell you that your friends and family said at least one of the following three things:

• “It was meant to be.”
• “Everything happens for a reason.”
• “I guess it’s your karma.”

Now think about the last time that something good happened to you. Without even thinking about it, I can tell you that your friends and family said at least one of the following three things:

• “It was meant to be!”
• “I told you everything happens for a reason!”
• “You deserve it; it’s your karma!”

I really hope that I’m not the first person to tell you this, but somebody needs to spread the word: It was not meant to be, everything doesn’t happen for a reason, and there is no such thing as providence or intellect when it comes to cause-and-effect. These are only expressions that we use because, for some odd reason, we are obsessed with finding explanations for the way things happen in the world — even where there are none. We pass these stock phrases for insight, when in reality the truth is less sexy: There is no grand design waiting for you to fulfill your invented destiny. It’s probably better that you get used to this idea now.

Last month, while working with some young people here in New York, a high school senior very casually mentioned that she’d probably be dropping out of school soon. “It’s my destiny,” she said.

I looked at her cross-eyed. “How is that your destiny?”

“Well,” she explained, as if she’d done so a million times before, “both my parents are dropouts, so it was kind of just meant to be.”

That’s not true, I told her. There is no such thing as a predetermined end in life, and even when it seems that way, what you do still makes a difference. Your parents are influential, but they are not necessarily instrumental in the path that you choose to take. “What you are calling destiny,” I argued, “is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

In the end, she seemed to have a revelation. “I have power in this,” she said. And I agreed.

But last week I discovered that this student dropped out of high school, and it’s been bothering me ever since. She relinquished her power to the dominant American fiction that we perpetuate every day, and honestly, right now I’m kind of angry at everyone who has ever lent their voice to inflate the power of this myth — the idea that we all submit to an irrevocable fate. There is simply no way that I can encourage young people to actively engage with their ambitions if the rest of the world is simultaneously sending the message that we have no control over our lives. It’s a terrible lie, and it needs to stop.

Photo: Lyam

• DOWNLOAD | TRAVIS “Colder” The Boy With No Name, 2007

This is the view outside my window as of three minutes ago. I saw the snow-covered trees and said out loud, “That’s beautiful.” Then I ran to the other side of the apartment, grabbed my camera, and preserved the image. With condolences to beach-loving folks everywhere, I can assure you that would never have happened in the summer.

“Whispery posts” are de rigueur, but I’m gonna call this a “real talk post” because — real talk now — it bothers me that a blogger, of all people, thinks it’s OK to call another blogger that he’s never met a “touchy self-centered prick” over a post that was not nearly as touchy and self-centered and pricky as the response it received. It was like, “Hey, Pot. What do you think of Kettle?”

You’ll notice I’m not posting links to any of the offending posts, and that’s deliberate. I didn’t really sit down to write about a Tumblr feud that doesn’t even involve me because these isolated things blow over and they’re totally unimportant in the Big Picture™. It’s just that reading Pot’s digs at Kettle gave me some pangs of discomfort over the way we talk to each other on the Internet — depersonalizing one another with the artificial separation between “online” and “IRL” — and as someone who has spent most of his adult life trying to write as a means to connect with other human beings, it makes me sad to think that some so-called writers are trying to disconnect and then burn every bridge around them.

It reminded me of that time in 1993, when I was a nineteen-year-old kid with a fanzine, and I decided to trash a band I didn’t really know as a means of entertaining myself. I thought I was being “clever” — which, I guess, is what we called “snark” in the early ’90s. Anyway, the issue had barely come back from the printers before I regretted it. Unlike Pot, it didn’t take long before I realized that my response was way overdetermined, not as clever as I thought it was, and arguably unnecessary. My own Kettles didn’t deserve it.

So I learned my lesson seventeen years ago, and even though I’m admittedly into being the center of attention — you pretty much have to be to do anything in my lines of work — I try to achieve that regularly without being a dick. In his rebuttal post, of course, Pot accuses Kettle of wanting attention, and charitably adds, “I am completely willing to give you attention; I lose nothing by it except the followers who hate long posts.” But this is not totally true: I was a follower who loves long posts — obviously! — but he lost me for entirely different reasons. He lost me because it’s sadly banal to call someone out for “being a dick” by being an even bigger dick, and maybe also because I’m tired of listening to detached kids in Saucony sneakers trying to debase sincerity as maudlin whimpering. Even Lil Wayne can’t stand that shit.