David Velasco

  • Natural’s Not in It

    I LOVE KATHY ACKER.

    I love that Kathy Acker’s family money came from gloves and a New York butchery.

    I love that in a 1991 interview for the “Angry Women” Issue Of The Journal RE/Search, Acker seems to speak entirely in exclamation marks.

    I love that when the young, pre–Bikini Kill Kathleen Hanna tracked down her idol at a workshop in Seattle, Acker rebuffed her, saying that her brand of feminism was naive (Sexism destroys men, too, Acker told her) and that she should quit writing and start a band.

    She was the hinge for so many of America’s best late-twentieth-century mythologies—Riot Grrrl,

  • Fire Island of the Mind

    IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF Fire Island, Logo TV’s latest burlesque of the evacuated gay male experience, Brandon and Cheyenne buddy up at the Sip-n-Twirl. They drink tequila sodas, margaritas, vodka sodas. They symphonize with the royalty-free music. It’s a perfect night, but there’s trouble. They’re late for their house’s first family dinner. When they walk in, midprandial, Justin, the hairy Alice who prepared the feast, glowers with resentment. Tensions deepen, like lines in lipidless skin. That same weekend, the day after the annual Pines Party (theme: “Xanadu”), the men host an intimate barbecue

  • David Altmejd

    A LOT OF PEOPLE have picked up on the “gothic” aspects of David Altmejd’s art over the years, but I’ve always loved his sculptures for their unapologetic, homespun flamboyance. Elaborate as a Neapolitan crèche or a Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt tableau, Altmejd’s witty diamanté works can stress the horror in horror vacui while also riffing on the placid display styles of Minimalist sculpture à la Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris.

    This handsome catalogue—edited by book savant Isabel Venero and featuring texts by quixotic young writers such as Trinie Dalton, Christopher Glazek, and Kevin McGarry—gives