TONIGHT!!!

Tonight's the monthly event I host "Fireside Follies" out at Brooklyn Fire Proof. Not only is this the third month I've done this with Mike Lala, but it's also our 'holiday edition'. We have a stellar lineup and there's a very special surprise guest coming as well! Come out and be corny for the season, see and hear something amazing and drink your face off with your pals and get merry and all that.

Stick n' Poke!!

Andrew Smith, promoter/writer/renaissance man and myself got together last Thursday at his Greenpoint loft, where he gave me an ole fashioned stick n' poke tattoo. The wonderfully talented Emily Poole, photographer and web-designer for Knickerbocker Circus Publishing was there to capture the magic.

Andy and I met after I went to one of his Knife Fight parties and knew he was onto something really cool. It turns out I had been to one of his infamous shows before (with this guy, this girl and these girls over here). This little fact didn't surface until Andy and I put on a nice show at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg as part of the Noches de los Artistes series he did over the summer. One cool motherfucker.

Finished product (as you can kinda see) is a triangle with the numbers "973" on there, my old area code from Jersey. Special thanks to Andy and Emily! Andy will be reading at the next Fireside Follies next month and has promised a new true-life tale to dazzle us with.

The L Magazine Interview

Mike Lala and I got interviewed by the L magazine, a weekly NYC culture mag. Awesome!

Updates!

Last weekend was the annual RVA Zine Fest and as usual it was amazing! Special thanks to Nicole Harris and especially to Liz Canfield for making me feel so damn welcome. If you're in Richmond, be sure to stop by and visit the Wingnut House, where they're straight up doing some amazing work in the community there. Pictures are to come soon....


This weekend brings chaos. Friday night I begin filming a short video art piece with a few people. Saturday is the WFMU Record Fair and then of course the inaugural reading of Fireside Follies! Finally, Sunday I'll be teaching a workshop on zines at Baltimore's DIY Fest.
Ready? Let's do this.

Fireside Follies!!!

This is the new monthly series I'm curating with my buddy Mike Lala. We also got press for it from the Brooklyn Eagle and FreeWilliamsburg. Yay!

"Wait, Where Are You Going?" IS HERE!!!

Release Party is Sunday, October 7 at 7pm
at Brooklyn Fireproof
120 Ingraham St.
Brooklyn, NY
L train to Morgan

California

Here's some pictures I took when I went to do readings in Cali last month. As you can see, it aint hard to tell why it's called the Best Coast.

Hippie Hill San Francisco. A crackhead wanted to give me his pipe. I said no thanks. Then I went barhopping on Haight Street with two random people.

Pettibon's Bungalow. I stayed in the other bedroom.

UC Berkeley. A nice little spot tucked away.

Gorgeous view from Pettibon's sun deck. I dug LA a lot, I got so much work done and caught a tan at the same time.

Killadelphia First Friday and Notes on Pork Roll/ Taylor Ham

The Eastern Seaboard Showcase Part 1 went down on Friday, to a good-sized crowd at the Philadelphia Center for the Book pop-up store on South Street and S. 6th. I read with the talented Sarah Heady, Angel Hogan, Hailey Higdon, Matt Zingg and Michael Lala, the only fiction writer of the bunch. The guys and I stayed with photographer/poet Brandon Lake in South Philly and celebrated with style and class as per usual.
Besides Tattooed Mom's, which Mike and I drink at everytime we're in Society Hill, we ate at South Philly's best diner the Melrose Diner. The waitresses here are the best. Also, I ate this:



Definitely my favorite breakfast food ever, only available in the Philadelphia area and all of New Jersey. This is Philly/South Jersey's brand.

This is the North Jersey (and maybe a few NYC locations as I haven't found) brand, called "Taylor Ham". The difference between the two brands is in amount of spice, but really in nomenclature and will forever split the state. That and the whole difference in population and urban planning.

Best Email Ever!

I got this in my inbox today. No words (which at first led me to believe his email was hacked) in the body or subject line, just this. Seriously the best email ever. To be referenced by a master, now that's some real shit right there!

Blood n Pudding Release Party Video!! or East Meets West

I read this the night I returned from Cali, taking a red eye back to make it in time for Katelan Foisy's release party reading that night. This was at Bluestockings Bookstore, a really cool spot in the Lower East Side.

West Coast- Best Coast!

My California mini-tour came and went in almost a blur, even though it was 7 days of fun and sun. I don't think I've ever been treated so well as I was out there, and have tons of people to thank:

-Otessa, Davey and everyone at House of the Dead Rat in San Jose (seriously, a punk house 10x cleaner than my apartment)
-My Oakland people for putting the reading on at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley and the crowd that showed up!! Specifically thanks to Tomas Muniz and to Elwin Cotman for comin out.
-Devri Richmond and Ted Nava from Book Soup for bein such sweethearts.
-Last but especially not least, my West Coast mentor Ray Pettibon and the wonderful Aida Ruilova for being the epitome of Los Angeles hospitality.

Dancing Days

Much has been going on as of late. I read to a packed house in both Cambridge and back in Brooklyn, two days in a row last weekend. Tim Gager's Dire Reading Series is pretty amazing, bringing tons of people out even without any flyers, which to me says a lot. The Midnight Special was also amazing, packing Northeast Kingdom's Den. Thanks to all of those who read, came out and took pictures. Mike Lala and I will be curating/hosting a monthly series there starting in October.
The Philadelphia Alternative Comics Expo, held at the Rotunda, was Sunday and I went with the lovely Caitlin McGurk. Like everytime I go to Philly (which is about once every other month now, sometimes more) I was not disappointed. There were some incredibly talented artists there.
Next week I'll be in sunny California, reading on the 17th at Pegasus Books with some fantastic Bay Area zine writers.


Then down to LA to read at Book Soup. The event listing is on Book Forum's website, which is A-Okay in my book!

The Midnight Special

Join me and Katelan Foisy, Caitlin McGurk, Mike Lala, Allyson Platy and Matthew Zingg on Saturday, August 7 at 7pm. Fine literature, good hooch.

Dog Days of Summer

July is slipping through our fingers, leading us into the brutally hot days of August. Of course, all East Coasters know how unusually hot it's been (especially in the Big Apple) but that hasn't slowed me or my partners-in-crime down at all!

Updates:
The next reading I'm curating will be at Northeast Kingdom on August 7 at 7pm. Lineup and flyer to come soon.

Thanks to the wonderful people of Baltimore who came out to see Numu Collective at Hexagon Space during Artscape! Also, big props to Rachel for giving us the show and Keri for the crash pad. Thanks also to the gentleman who screamed "Die hipster scum!" at us from his car as we did the walk of shame back to the car the next morning. You're right up there with the gentleman who threw his drink at me at South Street Seaport.

I did get to go to my beloved Wawa though! (Philly Cheesesteak and Egg Hoagie= Breakfast of Champeens)

Hey Cambridge, remember me? Well, I'm back on August 6 as part of the Dire Reading Series.

I'm also doing a reading with Tomas Muniz (of "Rad Dad" zine fame!) and Hollie Hardy, among others at Pegasus in Berkeley, CA on August 17. Tomas is the man and we read at Book Thug Nation a few months ago when he came to the East Coast.
Meanwhile, half of the Philly/NYC collab is finalized...
Two other big things are in the works.....details to come!

New Things.....and KNIFE FIGHT!

Hell yes!!! Andy Smith is more or less the man and I and everyone else are excited to read tomorrow at Pete's. Please join us!

New Things:
-Look out for a Philadelphia/New York collaboration coming in early September.
-Artscape in Baltimore is next weekend.
-Victoria Cho is a force to be reckoned with!




An Old Thing:

Summer Reading List

Here's my list of what I plan to read this summer now that it's official:
(Updated June 30; read titles are bolded with new title in italics.)
Anais Nin's Diaries, Vol. 1 1931-1934
The Ice Man by Philip Carlo
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Three Musketeers for Alexander Dumas
Imperial Bedroom by Bret Easton Ellis
Paris Review's Summer Issue
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Pere Geriot by Honore de Balzac

What are you reading?

Recent Updates

I curated/hosted a reading last night in Bushwick's (Brooklyn) Northeast Kingdom. It was a smashing success, despite a last minute change in venue. Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us or read, especially Rydell Bixby who came up from Richmond, VA!! We had 30 people show up, filling up the lounge, and people really dug it. Hooray for Bushwick Open Studios!!

Meanwhile....
-I will be curating several more events in the next several months besides the ones I have listed in the "Readings" section. One will be a midnight reading at a secretly disclosed location in North Brooklyn in an industrial park.
-I've also been asked to curate a show at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center in late October as part of their "Book Art" show. Come the fall, there will be a reading series in place as well. Stay tuned!

Virginia Is For Lovers

...and apparently me, as well. Despite the usual irritations that come with traveling to anywhere by bus for longer than an hour, it was a wonderful trip and a great way to end my Northeast/Mid-Atlantic "tour". This is the second time I went to Richmond to read and as always everyone was super friendly and receptive. Bought some VHS tapes at Plan 9, got my Drinky Crow tattoo touched up at Heroes and Ghosts Tattoos, wrote a ton and read the following:

Latest issues of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books
Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho AND Less Than Zero
David Boring by Daniel Clowes
The Adventures of Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey

Go RVA!

Friday Videos!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5YebZ4BAUs
I watched this originally for the part where Bugs pretends to be a beautician. THEN I saw the end...

In Honor of Mother's Day

I'll be in Baltimore on Mother's Day reading at Cyclops Books and Music. My mom was my best friend and biggest inspiration. Here's to you, Ma!



Portrait of a Working Class Feminist

In college when I finally decided what to focus on, I surprised myself. I took an English major and a Women’s Studies minor. I read pages and pages of feminist theory and stacks of novels by female authors from around the world. After school, I wound up working in fundraising for domestic violence shelters in Boston for a short period of time. But I never wrote anything personal with a focus on women or feminism of my own accord merely for the sake of writing. In fact, after school I never finished anything literary at all until I had been in New York for a year.
Then my mom got sick again. This time the pain was worse than ever. Numerous cat scans and tests showed nothing. At the age of 66, with a medical history of cancer in the breast once and in the colon and small intestines twice, I knew this would not end well. After showing initial symptoms and developing infections from bed sores, we learned she had a large tumor in her stomach. There was nothing to be done except to make her comfortable. The pain medication killed her senses as well, as I watched her once a week slowly stop making sense. I knew it was coming. She was transferred to a nursing home and I began packing her apartment on weekends when I could escape New York and return to my hometown in New Jersey.
One day I received a call at work from my older sister telling me our mom was dying. I knew she had been dying weeks ago, months in fact, but now the time was close at hand. I took a bus from work in the afternoon to the hospital and stayed with family at her bedside until evening. After signing the release form for her cremation, I left to go back to Brooklyn, knowing I wouldn’t be at work the next day. I didn’t even set an alarm. The call from my sister came at 8:30. She had died at 2 in the morning. A retired nurse who died in the middle of a nurses’ strike and then lockout, attended by temporary nurses. I spent the next few days at my old apartment with my former roommate, who also lost her mom to cancer, and then my best friend’s new apartment in Staten Island.
The first night I was at his new place, we raised our drinks and I toasted “To Ma, the symbol of matriarchy. The symbol of motherhood,” and we clinked.
What did I mean by that? Death makes me think about life and about what I knew about my mother’s life. That made me think about gender and class inequality, poverty and abuse, as well as charity and strength, independence and stubbornness.
Preferring to pack my mother’s things myself, I stumbled upon a box of personal effects, a potpourri of papers and small items from various family childhoods, among them my mom’s. I took pictures of several items and turned them into a zine (The Silk City Series Supplement- Issue 3 ½.) What made me stop, sit and bury my head were the letters to Santa from my older siblings. They all started off “Dear Santa, I hope you’re not sick this year.” I thought of stories I heard of my aunts and uncles giving gifts and food to my mother for her kids after she had divorced her first husband. I thought of her pointing out on the way past our family cemetery plot,
“See those buildings back there? This is the Totowa section of Paterson. I used to live back there in public housing. Did I ever tell you I was on welfare?”
She wasn’t on it long. I had known the details for years, even before my freshman year of college when I did extensive interviews for projects. Seeing those letters made me lose it. Writing had helped me get through this so far and then further after she died. When she did, I knew I had to write about her. Her life from the very beginning was filled with hardship, no doubt. But she didn’t complain about her situation.. She was tough enough to roll with the punches and play both parental roles when necessary. Strong enough to do what she wanted.
My mother was born in 1942 in Paterson, New Jersey, the oldest of three born to a railroad switchman and housewife. Her mother would die 11 years later of cancer, leaving her eldest daughter to assume the role of mother. Despite his job and involvement in his railroad union, the family was poor and her father an abusive drunk.
“One April Fool’s Day I switched salt for sugar for Daddy’s coffee. Oh man, did he beat me with the belt for that one. Sometimes I’d get it for no reason.”
Sometimes it’d be canned ravioli for dinner. Sometimes a mayo or ketchup sandwich. Relatives took the kids on vacation and helped when they could. The city was largely working class and racially divided. My mother took her brother and sister to a movie theater in the black part of town after being warned repeatedly not to.
“They sat behind us and stuck gum and pins in my head until we finally left. Then when my father found out I got a beating.”
She of course grew up to be a typical “bad” teenager. Hating school, she played hookie, drank and dated a gang leader before eventually dropping out and working full time to support the family. Among her jobs were modeling gigs for wholesale fashion. Like many women from her time who didn’t go to college, she married young and became pregnant with a son. She soon gave birth to a daughter as well (one year later.) Her husband was a manic depressive and violently abusive. She luckily earned her GED during this time, while she kept leaving and coming back to her husband. There were no shelters for battered women at this time. Police often simply told husbands to “Take a walk around the block and cool off” when wives actually spoke up.
She mustered the courage one day to finally leave, knowing she’d never be able to remarry in the Catholic Church she loved so much. Then came welfare, family assistance, nursing school at night, night shifts, dating and eventually meeting and marrying my father and giving birth to me at the age of 41. My father’s fluctuating employment status and lack of involvement as a stepfather and later a father became evident quickly. Meanwhile she worked at a run down Catholic retirement center, Little Sisters of the Poor, for low wages, as is often the case with Catholic health centers. Soon the fights started and the pair divorced in 1986. Luckily my father would never stiff my mother for child support, like so many other fathers did. We still struggled, but my older siblings spoiled me when she couldn’t. When babysitters were abusive, she switched to working nights and cleaning houses. After siblings moved out, I became the quintessential latchkey kid.
While I loved my father, my mother was my role model and my learned behaviors were here personality traits and quirks. She married and then divorced again, unable to see eye to eye on where to live. Then after high school, she developed cancer in her colon again. She had it once, when I was young. I remember visiting her at the hospital at the age of 6 to find her hooked up to oxygen. It returned 6 years later in her breast, but this was much more serious. A surgeon at a reputable hospital botched her surgery, resulting in infections and a slew of problems and hospital visits for the next two years. She lost her entire colon and a majority of her small intestine and soon had a permanent colostomy bag and nightly IVs. Soon she was on disability. No lawyer would touch her case, claiming you could not beat the hospital in court. We moved a lot, but luckily somehow she still kept her health insurance.
In windows of good health, she did what she loved, fixing up the front yard (she improved every apartment we rented), delivering food from the local Catholic Church to the worst blocks of Paterson and running her own small pet sitting service to make cash. Social Security on its own wasn’t enough. She refused to take food stamps and Section 8 rent assistance had a waiting list several months long. When she died, she died broke. For a while I was upset about this, not that I wouldn’t inherit anything, but that she was never able to retire comfortably. Then I realized something. She could have become an R.N. or gone to college and made more money. She wasn’t perfect. She didn’t save wisely or handler her finances (neither do I). But she was comfortable with what she had.
I asked her one day years ago why she got married to any of her husbands.
“For money. For financial stability.”
“So nobody ever told you to go to college or keep going in school?”
“No. It wasn’t thought of as important.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you could do anything you wanted?”
“No.”
“Ever hang out with any hippies back in the day?”
“Me? No! I was too busy raising kids and then raising kids and working.”
But she could have taught those hippies something. When my father or stepfather got on her nerves, she gave them plenty of shit, which was fun to see. She took none of my sass or anyone else’s and did what she wanted. I’m lucky. In her own right, my mother was a true feminist and didn’t know it.

Freedom of '76

That's me in the hat, reading an essay of mine called "Places to Pull Your Pants Down in New York City." Word up to James Generic at Wooden Shoe, my Broadset Collective peops and Mike Lala. Also on hand was Brandon Lake, Philly-based photographer. (He did not take this picture. James, luckily had his iPhone!) The essay will be published soon on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood's website, as I read it during their reading series at Happy Endings bar Friday night on Broome Street in Manhattan.

Friday Videos!!!

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Just saw this last week at dinner. Hilarious the first two times around!

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Apparently, most people don't find this as funny as I do?

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A Couple of Quick Things:

- I have back to back readings this weekend. First is Mr. Beller's Neighhborhood Friday night (location TBA- UPDATED: LOCATION: Happy Ending 302 Broome St. LES NYC). I'm also reading Saturday night with New Jersey's Broadset Collective and parter-in-crime/kick-ass poet Mike Lala in Philadelphia at Wooden Shoe Books on South Street. I plan to read a bit, walk around South Philly, eat copious amounts of cheesesteak and bring back Wawa-brand junk food and pork roll. Hopefully I don't look like a hot mess such as the last two times I was there. (Note to self: shower in am). Killadelphia, you have a special place in my heart.

- This is late, but issue 4 of Alexandra Hoefinger's zine "Granny Mansion" is out! It's a really cool, poignant zine about living in a house with 3 grumpy old grandma's in Ridgewood Queens. Ali is a zine librarian at ABC No Rio with me and is crazy supportive and rad in general.

-Friend Jordan Michael is reading tonight as part of the week long series "Overstimulated" at South Street Seaport in Manhattan.

A Lovely Email!!!

This just came into my mailbox. I wrote this for an open mic and for "We'll Never Have Paris." I'll be performing this and a new personal essay at "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood" Friday night, April 30 (most likely Happy Ending on Broome Street, Manhattan). Mind you, this is the full text of the email:
"I found Eric Nelson's, "Young, Dumb and Full of Ink" textured and exquisitely engaged in the throes of pathos. It seems there is some DNA strand found in the male species that impels young men to tattoo their girlfriends name, typically on the upper arm. I was lucky enough or cursed enough not to get a tat while in the Navy - the only one on my ship. When asked by my shipmates I simply replied that a tat would need to hold some strong personal meaning to me and I had yet to find it. Nelson's essay resonates and is insightful, a bravo performance!"
Best,

Chris"

Thanks Chris!!!

Friday Videos!

To start this blog off, every Friday I'll upload a few choice video clips:


"You'll be whistling zippadee doo-dah outta your assholes!"


"How much for the gun?"


Because I'm still a little white trash...