Who Cares for Feminism, at Pacific Standard

Dietrich sings him off in her last film role. Legend is, they were never even in the same room together when this was made.

Votary.

Sound + Vision

In order of my introduction, roughly, though honestly just what I remember: 1992. At home, my parents' tv. A meeting by way of death.

1994. Cassette cut-out from the $2 bin at Newbury Comics. This wedged on the back of side B. Wearing lipstick to school for the first time that fall.

1997. Burroughs dies. My friend Andy shaves my head. This becomes the song of the summer:

1997. Dropping out of school the first time. A boy who put it on and made dropping out seem even more sensible.

(He played this next, as if to drive the point home:)

(Not wrong.) 1998. First song at the truck stop strip club. We have to/get to play our own CD's. I bring along the Rykodisc Sound + Vision box set.

(If I was more religious about the reference I was going for, though, it would've been this:)

And the next song. They sang along:

1998. Winter solstice on repeat for ages...

...then the flip side, giving me the name of the place I wouldn't know was a place until I was sleeping there down the street from a Turkish-run brothel a friend worked the phones at, in the winter of 2006.

We skip around a lot. Because I know I had this by then:

And when I felt like I could get away with it, I closed out one of my sets dancing to this:

And so I loved:

1999. We (me, the girl I was in love with who wasn't really a girl, and the girl she was in love with) found out about this, and it changed everything.

Our love directed looked like something someone else could have (for him), too. I went to see Todd Haynes give a talk at nearby Amherst College and had the idea to ask him what he meant by the green brooch and the faeries. I did, but I can't tell you what he said back. Things began to speed up.

I started writing, or trying to write, about the future. I have one professor who humors me. (He plays sax.)

2000. I fell for a girl who had a webcam who wanted to put Bowie in a movie about her and the future. She sent me a camera. I failed her (on the movie) but it was never a question: of course she let me keep the camera. This was what she told me to listen to:

We're supposed to see him at Roseland Ballroom – the boy who put on Low, the girl in love with the one who wasn't just a girl anymore, me – and he has laryngitis and cancels (“It’s the first time I ever had to do that in my career") and so we do other things, like eat sushi on St. Marks and spot Deborah Harry in a club which will all have to do in the meantime. I buy this in a bin in the East Village.

I make webpages and stay up late a lot that year, sometimes with this:

2001. I'm here in the room. If there's only one song I see him perform, this will do. (Forgive us, we didn't know about YouTube yet.)

He's a fixture now. Nothing is new. Everything with us. No one owns him. A boy can crush my heart around this and the boy won't own it, it's still mine:

I can hear this with fresh ears on a train from Hamburg to Koln and know it's going to be part of something I haven't imagined yet:

I can fall harder for someone because we love this and it won't hurt me:

Here's what I've had on rotation the last day (to be played at maximum volume). He's yours:

at Kansas/Missouri State Line