by Mike Albo

Hey how was the movie?

No they’re good, they’re asleep! They were totally fun. No, it’s not a problem at all. Not at all! It was my pleasure to spend time with little Jacob and Marlie and be Gay Uncle Mike, ha ha ha!

Oh! Look how late it is. No it’s not a problem! I just have to be somewhere in 3 minutes, but there are a couple tiny things I should mention to you which I will do while I put my jacket on and grab my things and that is that I have to replace your tea kettle. I know, I am so sorry! And also just really quickly this is so much more minor than it sounds but Jacob has a severe third degree burn on his forehead and Marlie may be blind in one eye.

But they are OK! Ha! It actually sounds worse than it really is! It’s actually sort of a funny story. Ha, see, well, I came over with the idea that I would make these Indian cookies — I mean Native American cookies — with this really cute set of Native American cookie cutters that I got on Etsy? They’re so cute — you can create cookies in the shape of ancient symbols of the Sequoia, and Cherokee, and Navajo….

So I went to show them a video on my PowerMac about the Navajos while I prepared the organic corn meal mush and I didn’t realize this at the time but I kind of accidentally logged on to my Xtube account without really noticing and then walked away so they unfortunately sort of saw a few minutes of “Asian Creampie Fist Sluts” and learned the words fuck, shit, cunt, slut, porn and also some racial epithets and of course Jacob and Marlie are just so brilliant and observant so they just started running around the apartment saying their new words over and over ha ha! So cute!

And I was trying to turn off my computer but I was also boiling water to make the cornmeal mush but didn’t realize that your teakettle is electric (duh! I’m so dumb! Duh!) and doesn’t really need to be heated on the stove so there was a small, VERY small fire, which I put out immediately but I unfortunately also didn’t realize that the fire had heated up the native American cookie cutters and covered them with this molten plastic so when I picked up this one particular Navajo symbol it really burned my fingers and I flung it into the air and it flew through the air and hit Jacob in the forehead and essentially burned the symbol into his forehead.

And the symbol is that of. And the symbol is that of. And the symbol is that of the Navajo “whirling log,” which is a sacred image of an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles? Which yes, does, yes, look like a swastika, yes, it is a swastika but isn’t technically a swastika because it actually originated, as we know, as a native American symbol before it was usurped by the Nazis!

But don’t worry! Because immediately when it happened I called Peter? This nurse practitioner guy I know who lives near you who I occasionally have sex with? And so he rushed over and treated the burn and Peter says there’s a fairly, probably, somewhat a good chance that the 3rd degree burn will not permanently leave a scar. Of a swastika. On Jacob’s forehead.

It may look more like a pinwheel!

And Marlie’s dislodged eye doesn’t look so bad!

Oh! See, after the whole Jacob thing, Marlie was crying so much so I dissolved a little Ambien into her cran-apple juice just to calm her down and go to sleep? But I was still so really stressed out so Peter, that’s the nurse guy, he is, you know, so caretakery, and says hey, let’s calm you down and have sex and I was like, “OK!” and so we did it in your bed (safely of course, I always have safe sex, even when I am drunk and on Ambien which I was) and then afterwards we were taking a shower and I was drying off and I look over and see that Marlie must have been having some kind of Ambien-induced sleepwalking state because she had crawled out of her room and into your bedroom and grabby-grabbed our used condom, which was unfortunately still on the floor and she had it in her mouth and was choking on it but only like for a second because I ran over and gave her the Heimlich maneuver which dislodged the condom but unfortunately also popped out her eye?

But don’t worry! Because it turns out luckily Peter just finished his residency at the eye and ear infirmary and just popped it back in so her left eye looks a little crossed right now? But Peter said if you just keep a cold compress on her eye for the next two weeks CONSTANTLY then it’ll be ok.

But she may have Syphilis.

Well, see unfortunately Peter ends up being kind of a big jerk and informed me that HE may have Syphilis. (Some medical professional, right?) So now I have to get tested. And well there’s really like only a 40% chance that Marlie may have contracted syphilis too, so just in case, Peter gave me a few penicillin quick-pouches of powdered formula so you can give that to her just for prophylactic reasons in the morning for two weeks as well. Just be sure you ALWAYS keep that cold compress on her EYE.

Everything else is pretty much cool!

Oh, and your hamster kind of burned in the fire too. I’m really sorry.

Oh, also I peed in your French Press. Weirdly. I don’t know why. Those Ambien can be strong!

Well, um call me tomorrow. Or I guess text me?

Previously: ChicLeaks: The Wikileaks Fashion Cables

Mike Albo is a writer and performer who lives and loves in Brooklyn. He is also a founding member of the legendary downtown NYC naked glittery dance troupe, The Dazzle Dancers.

Photo from the Seattle Municipal Archives.

Subject Lines From Recent Barack Obama Campaign Emails Arranged In Sequence As The Tracklist Of A Country Music Concept Album

If you’re on the mailing list for the Barack Obama re-election campaign — and if you ever signed up for anything with the Obama people during the last go-round, you almost certainly are — you’ll notice that their increasingly more frequent missives all demonstrate an impressive sense of messaging, particularly if you compare them to the administration’s actual sense of messaging, which is considerably less intriguing. Which is to say, the subject lines are a thing of beauty: brief, insouciant, and just vague enough to inspire curiosity in the recipient (or at least confuse him or her into thinking that they are part of a continuing conversation with a friend). Somehow simultaneously generic and meaningful, they are the kinds of phrase that would make excellent titles for a suite of connected country music songs, and, taking ten of the more recent ones, we have arranged them in the order they would appear if such a project actually existed. Yes, it is a slow day. Anyway, here is Barack Obama’s Made In The USA.

1. Decided Something Today

2. What They Won’t Say

3. Backstage

4. You’ll Like This One

5. Keeping Track

6. Tonight

7. Something Happened

8. Fixing What’s Broken

9. Made In The USA

10. Not The First, But The Last

It has been fifteen years since the most recent novel by Robert McLiam Wilson, the uproarious Eureka Street, was published. If you have not read it, you should. Meanwhile, the rest of us are waiting with increasingly less patience for a new one. Robert McLiam Wilson, where are you?

The Groupon IPO filing is delightful! It’s an enormous, amazing business.

We increased our subscriber base from 152,203 as of June 30, 2009 to 83.1 million as of March 31, 2011.

We sold 116,231 Groupons in the second quarter of 2009 compared to 28.1 million Groupons in the first quarter of 2011.

We grew from 37 employees as of June 30, 2009 to 7,107 employees as of March 31, 2011.

That’s incredible! Also? Net loss, before taxes, for all of 2010? $456 million. They lost $146 million last quarter. So yes, last year they lost more than half the value of this year’s planned $750 million IPO. Sure, some of that was acquisition, but… what??? (Also: $750 million equals just about one year’s worth of operating expenses there.)

This is a company that already sold shares to third-party investors for $946 million in cash. (Where did that go? “Almost all of it went right back out the door, to employees and early investors.”

(Also? The outgoing CEO’s pay? “At his own recommendation to the compensation committee, Mr. Mason’s base salary for 2011 was reduced to $575, effective January 1, 2011.” Eh, he also has $10 million in common stock, don’t worry about him.)

You have to live in Hamburg or Chelsea (London) or SoHo (New York) or Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Köln or the like to have a Taschen book store, because they like being fancy. (The rest of you must make do with the website.) But behind the books that cost $1500 and the piles of bountiful, oversized photo books — many of which are delightful! The revised Helmut Newton book really is incredible — are extremely affordable titles by the publisher-purveyor. Their “Basic Art” and “Basic Architecture” series are usually priced at $9.99, which surely has to be at a loss. And they’re great for us who know a little about a lot, but really didn’t ever get a grasp on Giotto or Schiele. The architecture series also consists of enjoyable little primers, from Calatrava to Gropius. Eerily, most all of these books are exactly 96 pages. But it’s their “Basic Genre” series that really excels.

Obviously their book on African Art is by necessity a breeze-through toe-dip, but you’ll walk out knowing (and appreciating) things you’d never known about. I found the book on “icons” particularly cool: looking at how representation of religious figures changed over hundreds of years seems key to looking at paintings now, paying attention to what’s “flat” and what’s “dimensional.”

And while in the store or on the website, you are free to either enjoy or completely avoid the rather intense naked books! Taschen is reasonably famous for The Big Penis Book 3D and The Big Book of Breasts 3D and they’re extremely popular but I… I… well, I guess I’m more in need of learning about Frédéric Chaubin’s documentation of Soviet brutalism than I am in brushing up on the various shapes and strangenesses of genitalia. Your mileage, it may vary.

I guess I will say that if you grew up Mormon or otherwise separated from nakedness that there is a wealth of information for you in those pages.

But Taschen’s real value is in doing other kinds of things that no one else would do — like a glorious republication of Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. The reproduction is entirely done from the hand-painted originals, and at $39.99, it’s a bargain, since one of the last remaining originals went for nearly half a million dollars not long ago.

And? Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? It is a 1112-page excavation of Kubrick’s own crazy excavations, devoted to a film that was never made 40 years ago. How great is that?

Even without a dollar in my pocket, as so often happens, I find store-browsing delightful. Getting to play with the books that I’d never pay top-dollar for is like a crash course on the history of some of the most famous photographers, things you’d never get to see unless you have access to the Conde Nast archives. Treating Taschen like a browsing library works just fine.

Note! The Beverly Hills and London stores are about to have a big bargain basement sale! Starting June 17th: “thousands of slightly damaged and display copies from TASCHEN on sale at bargain basement prices, 50–75% off.” Why, I’m slightly damaged too, that sounds perfect.

This post is sponsored by American Express Membership Rewards. Visit the American Express on Facebook at facebook.com to view all the possibilities with Membership Rewards Points.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case American Express; advertisers do not produce the content.

Somehow we have not talked about the disaster that is the reduction in hours of New York City’s small claims courts. (The shortened hours of criminal courts are their own disaster, but that’ll probably have to be undone, as it’s illegal to hold people longer than 24 hours without seeing a judge, and you know that’s going to happen regularly.) Night sessions at small claims now happen just once a week, on Thursdays. Also, it’s chaos down there. In this case, it’s all Albany of course, so you know that you should be suing Andrew Cuomo over this eventually. So the headline “Despite Cutbacks, Night Court’s Small Dramas Go On‎” is technically true, but actually, those dramas are barely going on: decisions now come a month after trial, court dates are pushing into a backlog and this is a bad use of our resources. One of the richest cities on earth and we can’t even agree to pay for vital services? Oh wait, I know! Let’s privatize the courts!

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Remember the Telephone Book

Remember the telephone book?
It once enjoyed pride of place
in many a kitchen, in many
a breakfast nook, huge, warped
and yellow, its spine out of joint,
thicker than the Pentateuch and Septuagint,
thicker than the Ramayana, vaguely
scrofulous and antiquated even after having been
just unwrapped from its cellophane sleeve.
You would reach for it, retrieve it
as one would pull something fully formed
from wet loam, heave it up on your knees
and it would flop open on your knees,
obscenely. In its white pages you could always find
the number for one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
or the street address for Clara Aufklarung;
there were blue pages for the offices
of governance in their domed enclosures;
and its yellow pages told us how to contact
the sellers of tiles, bricks, porcelain insulators,
and household crockery. And now? Well then. It seems
the telephone book has gone the way
of the top hat, the nosegay, the automat, the rules
for auction bridge, the Hobson Jobson
dictionary, and the plays of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan. Some printing concern,
likely in New Jersey, is printing them still,
at night in a hidden maze of districts,
in a factory powered by steam engine;
and a shadow courier service is bringing
them around to you; but who will have
the heavy, self-serious
telephone book? You can see them stacked
like yellow cinder blocks in lobbies,
clumped in a master-block by shrink wrap
beneath the dark mail slots, the useless
blue cucumbers of the night, green mummies
sleeping in the ice house of eternity. A few days
later, someone just as discreetly
takes them away to an as-yet undisclosed location.

Famous Androids

The Flute-player by M. Vaucanson
is one. The Chess-player by Kempelen
is also celebrated, that clock-work
visitant that stunned the Sun King’s court.
There was the miniature reaper
who swung his scythe in the field
beneath a walnut shell, and then
the Lightning Concubine, ablaze
with jewels and beauty, a mechanical
cat purring in her lap. It is
the Age of Enlightenment. In the aspen grove
where the wild strawberries grow
like a bundle of nerves in the gentle rain,
blushing in the penitential waters of the sun shower,
the ball-joint doll in petticoats is sitting
on a lichen-covered boulder. And on
the leafy ground where white-capped mushrooms
like small bells are growing all around
a brass alarm clock is ticking. New friends
come for angel visits, fireworks explode
above the reservoir and brilliant ferns
hang their bunting over crumbled fountains,
the girls are dressed like peasant girls
for lunar new year, the Day of Good Intentions
and the chiming of the Clock Symphony
violet on brick house fronts and green shutters,
a mechanical rose opens on a gold-trimmed flag
spread across a marble-topped sarcophagus.
What time is it in the forest?

Samuel Pepys

I was reading Samuel Pepys’s Diary
on the train, and as I read I noticed
something: that I was sleeping
when he was sleeping, and waking
when he woke. And then too I found
that I was garbed in richest
suit of pearl, like Samuel Pepys,
and furthermore I found that when
Samuel Pepys lay beside his wife
abed til late into the morning
I too lay beside my espoused.
With tailors at work on the quarter-deck
cutting yellow cloth into the fashion
of a crown, he is dining on a lobster,
on dozens of little oysters, and on
partridges and sparrows, and marrow
bones in a dish, a dish of prawns
and cheese, a loin of veal, two dozen
larks, anchovies and a neat’s tongue…
and so am I. He sends for a cup of tea,
he hears a sermon, gets news of traitors
being quartered; you have rued
sly with wonder and dejection these daily
entries. While he is being garbed in his suit
of lavender and pearl, like some beautiful
creature of the sea, the berry-sized samples
of a man’s small life are ripening:
presents, rich fur, carpets, cloths of tissue,
and sea-horse teeth, perforce what makes up day.
Divide it from its essence like a tissue
of sparks above the black plums of fire.
You must echo your sad, real experiences
somehow, shards of a large glass globe
in the brown and fallen leaves. Samuel Pepys,
I know that, someday soon, you will read
the story of my life, as I read yours,
immersed in details. Monuments will rise then
from amaranth and stand again, be reinhabited
by phantoms, the fragrant spired leaves
that are touched and touched again
later by the same hand.

Geoffrey Nutter: “I’m originally from California. I live in NY (well, currently Iowa, but only temporarily and not for much longer) and teach poetry classes at NYU. My most recent book is Christopher Sunset, published by Wave Books in 2010.”

For more poetry, visit The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Things Jonathan Franzen Likely Finds Cowardly, In Ascending Order of Their Convenience and Cowardliness

by Mike Barthel

51. Pert Plus

50. Rhyming dictionaries

49. Fencing

48. Lifetime achievement awards

47. Air freshener

46. Autoplay

45. Supergroups

44. Grade inflation

43. Urinal cakes

42. Sherpas

41. Flag football

40. Fabric softener

39. Greatest-hits collections

38. RSS readers

37. Rain gutters

36. Combo meals

35. Graphing calculators

34. Thinsulate

33. Mattress pads

32. Being likable

31. Forever stamps

30. Half-and-half

29. Stuffed animals

28. Dry-humping

27. Snorkels

26. Porta-Potties

25. Sympathy cards

24. Absentee voting

23. Cafeterias

22. High-speed rail

21. Bicycle helmets

20. Rental cars

19. Cheat codes

18. Park benches

17. Sunglasses

16. Cruise control

15. Elevators

14. Cantilevering

13. Baby photos

12. Rest stops

11. Catheters

10. The two-state solution

9. Pivot tables

8. Luck

7. Iteration

6. Constructive criticism

5. Compassion

4. Epidurals

3. Torque

2. “Undo”

1. Remembering your dead friend fondly

Mike Barthel also likes birds but so what?

It has been a LONG TIME since we have had some Robyn up in here. That changes now. Enjoy! [Via]

You know what you need in your life? Awl pal Michael Idov’s interpretation of the G.G. Allin campfire classic “I Kill Everything I Fuck.” Trust me on this one. [WARNING: The song has some bad words in it.]