Another one from the Scandinavian Sade. Enjoy. [Via]

★★★★ A chainlink fence on a schoolyard caught so much sunlight it was nearly opaque. The sky was pale clear blue; there was still some yellow in the trees. Dressing warmly was necessary and sufficient. With basic preparations in place, there was no need to wear gloves or put up a hood. Helicopters flew above the river, shiny as beetles. Fine, clean white cirrus clouds switched to purple as their background turned lemony.

As the number of L train commuters begins to approach the outer boundaries of the laws of physics, one might wonder how developers think they could funnel more people into the narrow tube that connects “North Brooklyn” to the place where all the jobs are. If you were a developer, though, you would ask, “What if they were going the other direction?”

And now we have a looming Bushwick office boom, according to Crain’s, with buildings like the old Schlitz factory on 95 Evergreen Avenue described by developers as “cool, sexy and strong”:

At least four big builders have rushed into the neighborhood in recent months and are now in various stages of converting former industrial properties into about 750,000 square feet of office space for the city’s expanding tech and creative industries. … Jim Stein, a senior vice president at Lincoln Property Co., a real estate investment firm based in Dallas, said businesses not only will go to Bushwick, but they also will pay rents on par with Dumbo, the borough’s priciest office market.

Ridgewood seems far away now, but think of how convenient it’ll be when you’re commuting to Bushwick.

Photo by Powell Burns

by Lacey Noonan

Dost thou seek literary representations of the pleasures twixt flesh and fur, astute and curious reader? For sooth, it is all here in this twisty text and more…

I caress Starla’s front, the elegant and shapely pelt that knows the ways of love. With idle fingers, I stroke up and down her stomach, smirking a sexy smirk.

She’s a big lady and knows how to please a man. Starla’s bosoms heave, she shimmies her round hips under the water and I feel her legs spread ever so slightly. She licks her simian lips. Her throat clicks. And her velvety coat strokes me in return.

I stopped questioning many days and many more miles ago how her hair could do this. Whether from ancient woods magic or intergalactic science, it doesn’t even matter. It’s too good. You don’t question the means when the results are your wang getting the Royal-Penis-is-Clean-Your-Highness treatment so hard it’s like you’re the Queen of England but for glands and not englands.

“Your hair is loving me up proper, what you say, Hammer, proper.”

“Very delightful, delightful human male unit…” Starla looks down at me with sultry eyes. Her long eyelashes flutter, demure. Her dimples widen like crescent moons. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, her two fingers dance up and down my back. The pond water is cool and I shiver. Not without pleasure.

“What should we do to celebrate?” I ask, my voice a mere murmur blending with the air around us. I slide my hands down her stomach into the water. I find her hips and trace the lines inward to her feminine center.

“Cele — brate?” she says, her voice going up.

“Our getting back together. Our first fight. That’s big,” I say. “What are we gonna do?” And then my fingers dip quickly to the top of Starla’s sasquatch pussy. She breathes in quickly. Shocked. “Let me in there. I want to celebrate in there. The VIP room.”

“I am conceptualizing,” Starla says.

“Oh yeah?”

“It involves the recent past.”

“Oh yeah?” I mumble. I’m not really paying attention. I’m occupied with her clitoris, rubbing her luscious little bump in cross-patterns. Flicking it with my thumbs. Pearl One. Flick Two. I am a weaver of dreams.

“It involves trees.”

I snap out of my Bigfoot clitoris-induced hypnosis. “Trees?” I say.

“Affirmative.”

And with that Starla picks me up and leaps from the pond. The water comes off her like a waterfall. The air is chilly. The air is silly.

“But don’t you need to cool down?” I say, cupped in her body. “Water… Heat… The song of your people…”

“I am no longer in estrus,” Starla says.

“What the what? Estrus?”

“My time,” she says. “I am no longer what you humans call ‘in heat.’”

“Oh? Does that mean — I mean… you’re not… you know… horny? You don’t want…? Is that why you didn’t want to go in for the deuce with me right before I went psycho? Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo?”

“It is not like that, Jay Jason. My physiology is not like that, I mean to express. It is simply not my time. My time requires cool-down periods to prevent overheating and damage to my system. I am extra-concupiscent during my time, that is true, but it does not mean that I am not willing or able to perform sexual congress with my carnal systems at other times.”

“Nice.”

Starla carries me through the woods. We come to a tree. It is large.

“Hush now, let us not speak with audible words, but with our bodily units and parcels.”

“Okay, baby.”

Starla hoists my body like a doll and plops me on a branch again, my crotch as high as her head. Instantly my dick springs to life.

“The tree of life,” I say, legs dangling playfully. “Nice.” My dick hardens harder than any old branch could ever hope to be hard. Dumbass fucking trees, nice try.

Starla bends forward and takes me into her mouth. Her lips are soft and warm. They squeeze tightly around my cock. Like her body hair, it’s as if her lips have a mind of their own. They wobble and wiggle this way and that, undulating across the head of my dick and down the shaft in magical waves of pleasure.

My toes curl. I tilt my head back and I let out a moan up into the leaves. “Ooooohh woogie woogie woogie wooooo…” I moan, almost falling backward off the branch.

Starla laughs and keeps me from falling by locking her lips around my dick. I laugh too.

Everything feels too good not to laugh. We’d come through the eye of a needle. At that precise moment, I had no idea things were about to get seriously weird and more fucked up than a rodeo in a retirement home, but we’d survived my stupid wild outburst and here we two were back living the high life once again like Steve Winwood fisting two cans of High Life.

Starla deslurps her mouth from my mighty branch with trails of saliva, like when you pull up a slice of pizza and the cheese just gets longer and longer. My dick sproi-oi-oi-oings back and forth.

“Come,” she says. Nay, commands.

“By myself?” I ask. “Just like, by thinking of it? Wow… what an idea…” I say. I try to think sexy thoughts and make myself jizz. It’s kind of hot. I think of wonderful women, of bums beyond belief. It’s sunset over the desert dunes, there’s a harem full of women in robes with delicate filigree, like slaves and such — imported from all over the globe, given as tribute to me, some oligarch’s spoiled son. It’s raining, Greenwich Village, 1962, a young ingénue in a mackintosh huddles close to me in the doorway of a shoe repair shop. It’s the future, post-apocalyptic, drones in the sky, roving zombie hordes hard on my heel, a young mother in a skintight futuristic outfit and with dark, supple eyes reaches her hand to me from the closing door of a fallout shelter, closing, closing, closing so, so, so tight, will I get there in time? Women, babes, chicks. I think of entering a lady, any lady, all ladies, of opening them up like the door to a harem tent or a shoe repair shop or a fallout shelter and of licking to life joys untold between their legs and the ecstasies undiscovered within…

“No, that is not what I meant, human male lover,” Starla says and jumps up on the tree next to me, folded over on her haunches like a Queen of the Apes. “Come. I want you to meet my people.”

Excerpted from I Don’t Care if My Sasquatch Lover Says the World is Exploding, She’s Hot But I Play Bass and There’s Nothing Hotter Right Now Than Rap-Rock (…Because It’s the New Millennium — Book 2), which is available in ebook and paperback wherever fine books are sold.

Photo by Sam Churchill

Among many other things, the New York Times Magazine photo critic and author Teju Cole is an art historian with an M. Phil. from Columbia. Recently, he gave a talk on photography at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. The packed lecture was held at the Mozaic restaurant on Jalan Raya Sanggingan, the main drag in Ubud, which is a resort town of some thirty thousand souls smack in the middle of a paradisical jungle that looks like something out of a Rider Haggard story; attendees were served martinis and beautiful hors d’oeuvres.

Seydou Keïta was a great portraitist. I mean… I don’t know what you think of African photography, but this is a city in West Africa in 1956; a young couple goes into the studio and says, we’re in love, take a picture of us. Look at the way her bra strap just falls off her shoulder, and they’re both so incredibly beautiful (Yeah, breathes a lady in the audience); and that was what Seydou Keïta was about. It was not about the ethnographic gaze. Even as much as I admire someone like Cartier-Bresson… he comes to Bali and takes ethnographic images of Balinese people in their native dress, or whatever. But when people are taking pictures of themselves, the gaze is always different; very often it’s about their presence and about their dignity.

About a decade after him, in the late 1960s, Malick Sidibé, also from Mali… he’s all about the people who are listening to James Brown, to American rock and roll, r&b, there’s a little bit of Black Power, some bell-bottoms, very cool glasses; so he’s very focused on the Malian youth… There’s something about his composition that is a bit wilder, a bit more on the fly; they’re doing the Twist; he’s using a flash instead of natural light.

The reason these kinds of images are so important is that very often we have to deal with this idea that there’s no modernity in Africa. And even today, when you see American TV for example and you want to see something about Africa, all you see is sort of, National Geographic images of villagers in grass skirts, you know. I’ve never seen anyone in a grass skirt, and I lived in Africa for seventeen years…

Raghubir Singh was very strongly influenced by Cartier-Bresson, a good friend of Cartier-Bresson, but they had a falling out because Cartier-Bresson said: Eh! we cannot do good work in color, you know; it’s too lurid, it’s too cheap. And so Raghubir Singh says: I’ll show you.

And so he goes all around India and he makes these amazingly vivid and complex images. Over there, there’s a flash that has that lit up that green door, perfectly framed; that statue which is in the middle of a busy park in Kolkata; there’s a bus, and the people on there… you see that guy over there? Leaning over into the car… Everything. Everything belongs. Everything is part of modern life.

So there’s this kind of radical acceptance that is very often a part of the most interesting photography: What the eye sees is a worthy subject.

The road to a post-imperial global culture is lined with harebrained undergraduates, but luckily for us all there are formidable, inclusive and gifted figures, like Cole, who are leading the way there for real. Before our talk, he had also given a vivid interview about his book, Open City, and the complexities inherent in a historicist reading of colonialism:

When I did my first master’s degree it was in African art history, and when I did a second one — when I went to New York and I went to Columbia — it was in sixteenth-century Flemish Art… How do people in Indonesia feel about the Dutch? Yyyeeeeah, those guys…

But in the sixteenth century, the Dutch were under Spanish colonialism. So the art I was studying was anti-colonial vernacular Dutch art that was aimed at putting pressure on the Spanish, to leave them for home rule. So history is like, a real motherfucker, you know. You never know what angle it’s going to come at.

A bit later we sat down to lunch on the stone terrace of the Indus restaurant in Ubud, which overlooks a deep jungle gorge dotted with resorts and temples. Just as my tape began to roll, a pretty, rather hippie-ish Australian lady of about seventy-five dashed up to Cole; she was beside herself with excitement, exclaiming: “How lucky am I? That I could catch you… I had no idea about you before, and now, I think you are one of the most interesting human beings I’ve met!” He smiled and shook her hand; thanked her, asked her name.

“Brenda!” And soon she was telling him her whole life. “Because I’m old… and I’ve stayed married to one man for forty years.” It was sweet, albeit a little difficult to follow. “… and you’re talking like a man who knows it all!”

He laughed shyly, with real delight. “Thank you very much.”

The topic of global culture was the obvious one; wasn’t this what we were participating in right now, here in the jungle? So I began by asking about the shared world of literature, something Cole wrote about very movingly in Every Day Is For the Thief, his novella about a young Nigerian man returning to Lagos after a time in the United States.

What you wrote about “the universal culture” struck me so much. I mean, I came all this bazillions of miles in honor of that exact thing. All these people are here just for this… and it’s like…

It’s a worthy way of spending our money and spending our time.

It’s so much better than any kind of identification that is imposed from outside. So for example, if somebody is queer, and they meet other queer people and they share struggles, fine. But there is actually something much wider and more flexible to me inside art, than in race or religion, because of the capacity for surprise.

Because that Australian lady does not share my world: what she grew up with, her assumptions about life? I mean, you know?

Yes.

When she was a young girl she was not thinking, you know, “I’m going to have a moment where I’m communicating very closely with some young black guy from Nigeria.” No. No, you don’t imagine that. And that’s what art makes possible. My audience is not young black men in their thirties, who’ve gone to university; I mean, I have a lot of them, but it’s not necessarily my “target audience.”

Is there a target audience?

There isn’t! That’s the point.

When I was growing up I learned that some people would be comforted by the fact that I spoke Spanish, or just neutral, while some were weirded out or put off by it, but like… I am always just the same on the inside. So my strategy about this was always like okay, what are you bringing to this narrative so that I can —

— unpack it —

— figure out how to talk to you?! Let me just figure out how to talk to you.

Because you just walk into a space as an American woman, interacting with people, but you don’t know what they’re carrying with them… either they’re hispanophiles, they fetishize the culture: Oh, Latinos are cool!

Exactly: All these things? The same thing for African-Americans. Oh: You’re so cool! Or: I’m afraid of you! Or: Wow, you’re like the President!

Right… it’s sort of like this space where it’s very hard to be just an ordinary and neutral human being.

Yes. That’s why I love your book so much, because it’s just so effortlessly that.

When I was talking about representation earlier, that’s what I meant. You don’t always have to announce: a black man. It’s like, a person. And then according to how the narrative flows, that person has dimensions to them that could be racial, or their sexual identity…

The curry lunch arrived, in half a green coconut each: the rice molded in a perfect pyramid, and served on leaves cut up into complicated designs, like origami paper. So pretty. I looked up to see that Cole had taken out his phone, in order to take a photograph of his lunch! I was so thrilled that I forgot to take the lens cap off my own camera; he reached over and kindly removed it while I’m all, Ah! Oh man move over Don DeLillo, because this is insane.

What do you think about owning art?

I think it’s a fine idea.

Do you think a regular person should be able to own, like, a Vermeer?

Those are two different questions. For example, I am just at the very modest, fledgling beginnings of being a collector of photography. And I think it’s great; it’s good to live with those objects.

And I’m interested in contemporary art made by Africans, and by Americans of color. Will I ever be able to afford them? I don’t know, but when I think of people like Wangechi Mutu, or (Julie Mehretu or people like that, that stuff is cool, it’s funky, it’s contemporary and they made it last week, and it’s really got a lot of thought and feeling in it… and it’s digested all the postwar history of American art, and made something fresh and new out of the immigrant experience.

[…]

But when someone pays $160 million for a Rembrandt or a de Kooning… I don’t even know what’s going on there. Is it only acquisitiveness? I don’t know what kind of feeling they have for the art… Maybe the question should be: someone who privately owns a Vermeer, there’s some in museums, they’re very nice. Some of it can be in private ownership, it’s okay, it’s part of the circulation.

What it’s our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain value for overlooked work… So to do the kind of writing around that work, the celebration of that work, to give an account of how that work functions in the world: to say, here’s this photographer from Mali, here’s this sculptor from Nigeria, here’s this Honduran filmmaker, we’re doing this festival of Brazilian film. You know! Those things.

I’m talking about this not as a fiction writer but as a critical writer. Some of our work is to look at the overlooked, to draw attention to those worthy things. The question is not always about what people are paying $50 million for, but the stuff that is only fifty thousand, only ten thousand, and getting that stuff into the museum space and have it be what it needs to be, to write books about it, to get it in the syllabus.

It’s funny to think we can have that power, because in the ordinary way of looking at writing — any kind of writing — it’s not important work, it doesn’t make a lot of money.

No. In a lot of EU countries there is a set amount in the budget for culture; in Scandinavia it might be like one percent, and then when the government says no! we can’t spend so much, and whether they take it down to .95 percent or back up to 1.1 percent, they always put a few million into culture. Because that’s just what we do; we’re not animals! But in America we’re always in such permanent conflict; countries like the U.S. should not have trouble funding culture… It’s true that you have to answer the question of what should be funded.

There’s a universe in what you just said, though: what does that mean, “We’re not animals”?

Well we are animals. We are anxious animals. The word “civilization” has been used oppressively. It has been used in the cause of racial supremacy, for example.

But every human society has brought expression to a similarly profound and high purpose. Our societies all go back thousands of years: Aztec carving, gamelan music, nineteenth-century European art, Chinese painting… every contemporary human is connected to extremely profound and elevated forms of artistic expression. And not to foster that is crazy. And that’s why I say: We’re not animals. We’re not just eating and drinking and material needs.

So is it possible to be post-colonial without being entirely anti-colonial, in some sense?

I would certainly say I’m anti-colonial. The core, fundamental impetus of colonialism — we’re better than these other people, and we’ll show them how it’s done — if that was all colonialism was, it would be problematic, but understandable. But no, it’s like, we’re going to come here and take their stuff, and then teach them a few things in the process. Colonialism was theft.

However, that does not absolve everybody else of the responsibility for the things that happened after colonialism… Even though we’re formed out of theft and destruction…

Inevitably; we are the products of sin.

We are the products of sin. Nevertheless, we have to be alive to where we are, to who we are… The work of functioning together in this complicated space is something that we just have to do.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This piece originally misstated Teju Cole’s graduate degrees. We regret the error!

Hahaha, just kidding, you’ll get plenty of that in every single public space — and plenty of the private ones — you pass through from here until Christmas finally comes. I was waiting on line in a deli yesterday and Frank Sinatra’s take on “Winter Wonderland” was playing and I suddenly remembered being in the exact same deli the year before right after Thanksgiving and hearing Christmas music and thinking to myself, “Ugh, this again.” And here it is, a full planetary rotation later, another fucking Christmas on its way and I’m still not dead. What are you going to do? A positive person, pressed with this question, would answer, “Embrace it,” but I’m not a saucer-eyed idiot. I’m going to go with the compromise position of “Suffer through it,” which is convenient in the sense that it is the way I deal with every other aspect of life already so it doesn’t require any additional effort on my part. Those of you with a more active spirit, however, are probably inclined to do everything in your power to reject the season, with its forced cheer and false happiness and empty sentiment, and for that I salute you. Here’s a song that is as un-Christmassy as they come. Enjoy! It doesn’t get any easier from here on out.

★★★ The morning clouds could neither control nor yield the sky but held on, diffusing the light to white-gray. A fire drill sent the children spilling out of the music school: the third graders bundled in their heavy coats, the middle schoolers hunched up without. Down by the Flatiron the sky was clear; the clouds that had been uptown were still there, over the shoulder, but the sky was bigger than the island after all. Sunlit stonework and the blue behind it lay reflected in the face of the phone on the desk by the window.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Performing Revolution for a More Luminous World

Rebels are singing lullabies at the palace gate
when children surround the king’s bed and tickle him
to death. In the square, cheering crowds
rally around an eternal flame.
Air force jets scramble to disperse clouds
and navy submarines troll the deep ocean
searching for bioluminescent life forms.
Past fascinations with vampires are decried.
Censors speed-read library books,
whiting out metaphors for evil.
The prison workshop tings as inmates
painstakingly repair burnt-out light bulbs.
Firefighters battling a five-alarm blaze
cry in their helmets. Pink-cheeked and sweating,
scholars debate interpretations of the sunset
while students commandeer telescopes
to spy on quasars and pulsars and galaxies.
Insomniacs occupy the asylum grounds
with hundreds of milk jug votives.
Patients stare from windows,
certain the sky has finally fallen
and those are stars writhing in the grass.

Elizabeth Onusko is the author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor, which won the Bryant-Lisembee Book Prize and will be published by Red Paint Hill in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Best New Poets 2015, and Slice Magazine, among others. She is assistant editor of inter|rupture.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Matt Siegel

Peer-reviewed journal articles with fancy titles have been devoted to her work: “Trans/positioning the (Drag?) King of Comedy: Bisexuality and Queer Jewish Space in the Works of Sandra Bernhard”; “The Mouth that Launched a Thousand Rifts: Sandra Bernhard’s Politics of Irony”; “‘Without You I’m Nothing’: Sandra Bernhard’s Self-referential Postmodernism.” At twenty-seven, she beat out a slew of established actresses — including Debra Winger and Ellen Barkin — for a role co-starring with Robert De Niro in Martin Scorcese’s King of Comedy. Her one-woman shows have received accolades from highly regarded theater critics. Her Grammy-nominated stage show-turned-film, Without You I’m Nothing “directly inspired” Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She’s published three books, essays for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone, and three music albums. And then there are her thirty-plus infamous appearances on David Letterman’s late night shows and a five-season stint on Roseanne. This is what I might’ve said to the educated, worldly, in-the-know thirty-year-old (straight) man who recently told me he had never heard of Sandra Bernhard. And still, he might have responded, “Wait, who’s Debra Winger?”

The other week, Bernhard ambled into the glass box studio devoted to her new SiriusXM show, Sandyland, fifteen minutes before start time. She was low-key and pleasant when greeting her producer, Lisa, who mentioned possibilities for upcoming guests: New York City cable-access queen, Robin Byrd, and Prince protégé, Apollonia — to whom Bernhard partially dedicates a cover of Little Red Corvette in the closing of the stage version of Without You I’m Nothing. There was more talk of former Interview editor Ingrid Sischy’s upcoming memorial service (“a smart, fucking direct lady”), a Marc Jacobs “thing” Bernhard did two nights prior (“He was very happy with it”), and recent interactions at the launch party for face-of-Bravo Andy Cohen’s new SiriusXM channel, Radio Andy, the “home” of Sandyland (“I was reading Gayle King to filth! She didn’t even know I had a show!”). Finally, Bernhard thumbed through some possible talking points for today’s show, handed to her by Lisa — those images of particularly unsettling Halloween costumes from a century ago that you probably saw in your Facebook feed a few weeks ago. “If you’re over twenty-five and you’re still dressing up for Halloween, you need to get some sort of help immediately,” she said, unmoved that her show was starting in 3–2–1. An excited woman’s voice came over the loudspeakers: “Buckle up and take a seat on the Sandyland Express!” Then Bernhard’s breathy, almost mocking pre-record: “Are you ready to take a trip with me? I’m going to take you all over the globe, and intergalactically, too, occasionally.”

Talk radio calls for a host that can effectively weigh in on any subject, and go on engaging tangents, which has been Bernhard’s bread and butter since she came into the public eye in the late seventies on The Richard Pryor Show, whose head writer, Paul Mooney, was Bernhard’s comedy mentor. Mooney toughened Bernhard up early in her career, preparing her for the emotional rigors of being a woman in comedy, especially in at the time. “Never let them see you crying, Bernhard. That’s what they want,” Bernhard recounted Mooney having instructed her when I interviewed her in 2013. “His advice to me was always, ‘Shed your skin like a snake. Every time you get up on stage, shed your skin.’ The deeper you go into your psyche and emotions, the better you’re going to become as an artist, and I’ve really tried to keep that as my moniker all these years.”

Mooney was the day’s call-in guest, and Bernhard’s affection for him was clear. “Mooney, what I’ve always loved about you — you haven’t stood on ceremony and you never cared about what was politically correct at the time. You always busted through the shit, honey, because honesty is the best policy.” One gets the impression that this is also what Bernhard loves about herself. “But it is the policy, honey,” Mooney retorted. The word “honey” is a staple of Bernhard’s and Mooney’s vernacular, a refrain inserted in every available spot throughout their conversation. The term of endearment is flexible and can be used affectionately, condescendingly, or just as a place-holder depending on the tone and context. One of Bernhard’s best (condescending) “honey” moments took place on a 2006 episode of The View when co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck jumped on Bernhard for describing then-first lady Laura Bush as “medicated.” “Honey, look. First of all…” Bernhard began. “Don’t ‘honey’ me!” Hasselbeck cried. “‘Honey’ yourself!” Joy Behar ended up walking off the set.

“Everybody knows and pretends they don’t know,” Mooney continued. “They just wanna know if you know. Everybody knows, honey.” What, exactly, everybody knows, I don’t know, but Bernhard and Mooney have almost certainly had this conversation before. “Yeah, exactly,” she said. “They want you to be the first one to dip your toe in the water to make sure it’s not acid. Once they see it’s safe to jump in, they may jump in with you, but until then, they’ll stand on the shore and look all befuddled and frightened.” When the show ended, Bernhard got on the phone privately with Mooney. Before hanging up, she said, “We got into the real shit like we always do, honey.”

Bernhard’s name has often been attached to phrases like “no stranger to controversy,” or “never one to shy away from controversy,” though actual public controversies incited by her are few and far between. A 1988 appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman with then-best friend Madonna teasing about the nature of their relationship was less controversy than it was fodder for the gossip mill. More interesting were Bernhard’s solo guest-spots on the show where she would blast in, cocksure as ever, making Letterman visibly uncomfortable, once referring to him as “Miss Letterman” and telling him not to “throw shade” at her (and this was in 1991). “Paris is burning!” she announces, referencing the documentary to Letterman who, in response, asks the audience if anyone had any idea what she was talking about. As the Interrobang put so well: “Their improv was a Late Night Rom Com. Sandra was outrageous and hip. Dave was the Midwestern corporate manager who lit up when she was near. It was Barefoot in the Park for the eighties. The more they sparred, the more viewers thought ‘don’t they know they are in love?!’”

In 1992, Bernhard posed for the cover of Playboy, which the author of a Mother Jones article that same year who named her “the most controversial comic in America,” took her to task for. “I thought it would be ironic to do if we had complete creative control and crossed all kinds of sexual barriers,” Bernhard replied. “I think it’s really important that a woman that is not a cliché beauty, who hasn’t been manipulated by men, or altered herself surgically, be presented in a really beautiful, sensual, forthright way.” A year later, Bernhard’s character on Roseanne comes out as gay, making her one of the first openly gay television characters; while there wasn’t a whole lot of hoopla surrounding the coming-out, just by virtue of playing that role, Bernhard’s reputation as controversial was sustained.

Bernhard’s brand of controversy is better thought of as artistic provocation. Her aforementioned 1990 stage-show-turned-film Without You I’m Nothing explored the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality at a time when such work, especially in the mainstream, was scarce. To attempt to sum up Without You I’m Nothing in a few sentences will ultimately prove fruitless. Everyone from film critics to academics in women’s studies, performance studies, and even musicology have their own interpretations, which is a testament to the work. Bernhard did not pose as a politically correct hero, but, rather, placed herself, as part of American culture, under the microscope. (Indeed, were the film released today, she would likely be crucified in the current political and cultural climate.) The film takes place in a supper club with a disinterested, predominantly black audience, Bernhard inhabiting different characters, some black, some white, some gay, some straight. At the end of the film, a black woman, the only remaining member of the audience, who Bernhard has since explained to be her alter-ego, scrolls “Fuck Sandra Bernhard” in lipstick across a table cloth. A 1992 Vibe interview titled “Sandra’s Blackness,” opens by saying that “Sandra Bernhard is different from other white performers who admit to a black influence. She wears hers on her sleeve like a badge of honour — and then often uses it to make fun of white people.” One will find this complexity throughout Bernhard’s portfolio because her outlook — well, to quote her in Without You I’m Nothing: “My father is a proctologist and my mother is an abstract artist. That’s how I view the world.”

It’s Bernhard’s world-view, her ability to be the “Cassandra — warning of the ridiculous, the hubris, the troubles” as John Cameron Mitchell once said of her, that makes her forever relevant and intriguing. Andy Cohen, who had been a longtime admirer of Bernhard’s work, utilizing her talents at the now-defunct Trio network and, more recently, in semi-regular guest spots on his Bravo talk show, is delighted to have found a permanent spot for her in his latest venture at SiriusXM. “Bernhard was first at the top of my list to build Radio Andy around because she has a unique and singular voice that’s perfect for radio,” Cohen says in a written statement. “She’s one of the few people in the world that I could listen to every day for an hour talk about ANYTHING. She’s creatively firing on all cylinders with her take on life in NYC, politics, culture, history, and Americana. The show has become appointment listening for me and people all over the country.” Bernhard, for her part, says she is “doing what Andy hired me to do.” Besides that, she has nobody to answer to when it comes to Sandyland. “Darling, if I get hired on network television to host a TV show or anything like that where there’s a bottom line you have to toe, I’ll be open to notes, but this is not that situation and they’re not paying me that kind of money, so nobody gets to weigh in.”

Those permitted to enter Sandyland, which Bernhard describes as a “funny, off-beat salon,” are the people who have joined Bernhard and Mooney in the figurative deep end. And they’re definitely not right-wingers. “I don’t want anyone on the show who I don’t see eye-to-eye with,” she said. “This is my agenda and I get to do what I want to do and I want smart and funny people and musical people and great people…There are plenty of other places for people to go where it’s the typical, it’s the predictable.” (Earlier that day, she remarked, of the notoriously Republican Everybody Loves Raymond actress, Patricia Heaton: “She’s not coming on this show, honey…and she was all over me like a cheap suit!”)

As she navigates the waters of host and interviewer on Sandyland, which can be challenging for someone who is used to being the guest and interviewee, Bernhard has, on a number of occasions, called herself out for over-talking her guests. She says that she’s trying to temper that, but “sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes you want to keep it going and sometimes you need to do that, and sometimes you’re excited.” But because Bernhard only invites guests who she finds stimulating — and, if she knows them, likes — the audience is privy to an often-ebullient, sometimes-hyperactive Bernhard. In a recent episode with friend and New Yorker writer Hilton Als, Bernhard moves from Oscar Pistorius to astrology with no beat in between. “This man has bamboozled everybody; I don’t know what’s up with Pistorius. I feel so bad for that woman. They had some hot thing going on and the shit just got crazy and you know he got violent. He got sexual and violent and killed her. What sign are you?”

A Washington Post critic once noted that it is Bernhard’s speaking voice, “the way it comes out…that aggressive-erotic-ironic intensity, that larger-than-life hauteur,” that has always been key to the Bernhard experience, which is why she translates so well to radio. “You must hear Bernhard,” the critic notes, “to really get it.” On the radio, among friends and respected guests, the hauteur is well placed, and she is driven by a wholeheartedness that is especially evident when she introduces or signs off with that day’s guest. In the case of recent guest, former Supreme Mary Wilson, Bernhard easily accesses the emotions of her childhood self listening to the Supremes for the first time with her older brother. In our 2013 interview, Bernhard told me that she “grew up in Flint, Michigan, and would listen to Motown on the AM radio. I was there and it took me there, and it has always taken me there.” In her sign-off with Ms. Wilson, she pays earnest tribute to the singer: “You’ve given me, the listeners, so many years and hours of beautiful music and I see from being with you that this is going to go on and on and on, and we adore you and love you. Thank you for everything you’ve given to me personally and to the world.”

This upbeat, warm, peppy version of Bernhard, which was, before, presumably, mostly reserved for friends, is a refreshing take on the once-referred-to-as “Doyenne of Disdain.” Bernhard, who for many years seemed unable to restrain her penchant for intimidation and bitchiness to her performances, radiates warmth and fun. You want to be in her presence — a sharp contrast to the person depicted in a 1998 profile in New York, “The Bitch Is Back,” where the author informs Bernhard that “some people really dislike her.” (She did not disagree: “Being nice is bullshit. Being real, being concerned, being passionate, loving, all comes from very strong emotions. Being nice is a weak emotion. It’s not even an emotion. It’s just a weakness, period.”) But Bernhard is nice. Even the use of her nickname Sandy, instead of Sandra, nods to the good-time, accessible Bernhard. “I am having so much more fun. I don’t feel like I have to say anything to prove myself. And when I feel like going off on something, it’s genuine and it’s because I’m in the moment, and it’s just fun to go off on it. I don’t want to argue. It’s empirical — I know what I know and I believe what I believe and it’s been pretty consistent throughout my life and I guess these are the rewards of being a person who’s had a long career.” But it remains that, as once was said about Bette Davis, nobody’s as good as Sandra Bernhard when she’s bad.

Bernhard is famous for her “biting” critiques of hypocritical culture and its current players, which are often masked as fictional accounts with or about those people. In one especially Bernhardian opening of Sandyland, sixty-year-old Bernhard gets downright giddy and chummy with her imaginary squad — a term she has said she hates — of twenty-something “it girls.” For nine minutes, a frenetic Bernhard kikis with her squad, greeting “Tay-Tay” Swift and Bernhard’s new bestie, Gigi Hadid, receiving a shoulder rub from Demi Lovato, giving kudos to Kelly Osborne for being “politically on the freaking edge,” telling Selena Gomez how hilarious she is, hushing the gals while Lorde meditates in the corner, and then checking with everybody to make sure it’s okay to refer to them as “apolitical”: “They’re not committing to anything…except Lena Dunham who’s committing to everythingggggg! Rock on, brilliant Lena Dunham! My god, you’re brilliant and intellectual and you care about all the things we care about and you love everybody! You are a real feminist! No woman can do any wrong! Yayyyyy, Lena Dunhammmmm, who sees things before God! I love you for that!”

If you can’t tell, Bernhard is skeptical about her “squad,” and members of the newer generation of performers in general. “Younger performers are not secure or solid in the way they present what they’re saying. They don’t understand how to go there; they don’t understand the art of communication and the nuance of it. I think that’s part of being somebody who has been in the trenches as long as I have and understanding how to balance the truth-telling and the sense of — for lack of a better word — class, in a certain way. You’ve got to be able to walk that fine line.” Consider Dunham, who certainly considers herself a truth-teller, and in that, has become queen of the public apology whether in a carefully-worded-by-a-P.R.-person statement or a photographed drawing on her Instagram account. A Daily Beast article from last November noted that “at this point, we would need a detailed timeline to keep track of all of the controversies around issues of race and class that Dunham has weathered over the last two years,” and the controversy has remained steady since then, see: Dog or Jewish; Gawker/Jezebel=Abusive Husband; Cosby-Holocaust analogy. Perhaps Dunham’s admitted predilection for oversharing is indicative of her inability to walk the fine line Bernhard speaks of, which does her no favors, and, seems to cause her distress, putting her “to bed for weeks” after reading negative things about herself online.

Both Dunham and Bernhard have made decisions to mostly disengage from Twitter, but while Dunham mewled of lack of “safe space” and “verbal violence,” Bernhard, as she told me in in 2013, comes from a less tortured place: “I don’t wanna explain to the freakin’ stupid masses of people out there that are on that fuckin’ social media twenty-four hours a day, diggin’ around, lookin’ for shit, bored, lost, resentful, angry, tapped out, empty, haven’t picked up a book or listened to a good song maybe in their entire lives, and now they have a platform to go, ‘Blah blah blah.’ I don’t wanna fuckin’ know about it. I don’t wanna engage with these people. I don’t wanna defend myself to these people, so fuck these people; I’m not fucking putting myself in that position. No.”

Dunham recently visited the Sandyland studio for a pre-taped interview, which Bernhard normally objects to because “there’s no urgency and people can say, ‘Will you cut that or will you switch that?’ and it’s like, ‘No. No, this is life. This is how it is. This is live and we want to be real in the fucking moment.’” And that is exactly what Dunham did — Bernhard speculated to Hilton Als on her show recently that Dunham “nixed” the interview “because it was too real or raw” for her. “But you guys love each other,” Als replies. “I don’t — I didn’t feel any love,” Bernhard laughs. As Bernhard told me, Dunham was there to promote her new project Lenny Letter, but Bernhard was not made aware of the promotion until mid-interview when somebody “pushed this piece of paper under my nose that said ‘Lenny Letter,’ and [Dunham] just went into autopilot about Lenny Letter. She had it down: boom-boom-boom. But she didn’t seem all that interested. I’ve met her a few times and she’s always been very respectful, but she is fully into her own agenda. She is like the mouthpiece and spokesperson for her generation and she goes around curating people from other generations and highlighting and spotlighting them. I have not been one of those people so, apparently, I don’t think she relates to me.”

If Bernhard had Dunham’s endorsement, that “highlight and spotlighting,” would it broaden her youth appeal? Probably. But would it mean anything to the young, straight, male audience who probably aren’t among Dunham’s core audience? Prefacing that I had thought about the potential that it might needlessly hurt her feelings but decided that it wouldn’t, I told Bernhard the story of the educated, worldly, in-the-know, thirty-year-old straight man I met who had never heard of her. She cut me off. “Oh, he’s straight?” And in a comforting tone: “That’s why he doesn’t know who I am, honey. He might’ve known who I was had it been twenty years ago and he’d been thirty. Young straight men could love what I do — it’s not narrowcast; it’s not specific to one audience. I understand the landscape of humanity and I have compassion for it. I get people from one end of the spectrum to the next, and that’s what my work has always been about. I’ve lived in every part of the country, I understand this country, I understand how people relate, and it’s not sex, it’s not color, it’s not race, it’s not religion, it’s not sexual orientation. I transcend a lot of those limitations, and I rise above it, and I shine a light on it, and that’s what my work has always been about. Tell that thirty-year-old straight guy to listen to my show. Who knows? Maybe he’ll have a new experience.”

Bernhard’s holiday show, Feel the Bernhard, will be at Joe’s Pub from December 26 through the 31st. Her SiriusXM radio show, Sandyland, airs Monday through Friday on Radio Andy.

At some point tomorrow you will sit staring at everyone around you and wonder how much longer you have to keep that forced grin fixed to your face before you can wander off to some quiet corner and disappear under the cloak of social invisibility that is your phone. (I guess smartphones are good for something after all!) Tomorrow will be terrible. It always is. But right now you are still in the middle of the moment where the sweet anticipation of time off surpasses any actual joy time off brings. Savor it! Wrap your arms around it tight and try to keep that feeling alive in your heart for as long as you can. Because Lord knows you’re gonna need it in the next 48 hours. Good luck, and enjoy.