All Things Pankish

It’s My Two Cents: Telfer, Hickey, The Laughers, Colins, Claire, Nash, Afros

Greetings from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, while I wait for my flight to Albany International Airport.  The latter is international, we think, because of a flight to Toronto once a month.  But Chicago? The wind is cold, the people are warm.  Great town…Listened to a good chunk of the American Song-Poem Christmas comp in Laurie’s Planet of Sound record store yesterday, and can say I am finally in the holiday spirit…

I wonder if Tiger Woods’ groupie wranglers will get more coverage…Am I the last person to have heard about the “Let The Laughers Stand Up!” story-slash-controversy? Fascinating stuff. I fall on the side of the laughers and I guess against the cause of poetry. Either way, I don’t think laughing at a poem with the word cock in it necessarily means one is a lackie for consumerism…Claire Zulkey, an original gangsta in the clever-internet-writing world, is as funny and as clever in person as she is on the computer screen…

Last night I met up again with Robbie Q. Telfer, poet and force of nature.  His new book, Spiking the Sucker Punch, is just out from Write Bloody. It’s so great I wrote a blurb for it! Telfer is also the force behind The Encyclopedia Show. I didn’t know what it was until he explained it…

Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn’t do it for me, by which I meam I don’t think she’s sexy…The end credit blooper reel of Peter Sellers from Being There still makes me convulse in laughter…If Dave Hickey would care to claim his throne as greatest art writer alive, he should claim it now…American bands that matter right now: Spoon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear, My Morning Jacket and…Colin Farrell doesn’t do it for me. I’m more of a Colin Firth kind of mancrusher…

In a recent interview in Stop Smiling, Junot Diaz shouts out “Your Mom’s in My Business” by K-Solo. I like him even more now…Speaking of old school, in Words In Your Face, Saul Williams mentions T-La Rock’s single “It’s Yours” as an inspiration…

Why do graphic novelists, as a rule, act more intelligent than they really are?  Perhaps it’s the closed-circuit of their own scene?…Felipe Rose, the Native American-attired member of the Village People, has a website. Who knew?…Speaking of actresses I never thought Kate Hudson was hot. Beautiful, but not hot…When did people start using the word “epic” sarcastically?…

My advice to new authors: come to New York City and have lunch with Richard Nash. It will be the best $250 you’ve ever spent…Wow: “When Lucas was fourteen, he found out he couldn’t bang his hot cousin, and what a terrific phenomenon resulted from that reproductive urge!”…When will Amy Krouse Rosenthal write a sequel to Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life? Please?…I guess I’m biased, but Brian May and Elena Vidal’s stereo photography study, A Village Lost and Found, is a fascinating gem…

The storm over the Afro Picks! Publisher’s Weekly cover will have passed by the time this goes to press, but I need to talk more as a former trade magazine journalist. Itt was odd and perverse to this columnist to see high-brow art coupled with low-end, racially charged headline…As I Tweeted, this is the equivalent of having Poets & Writers run a Mapplethorpe on cover (NSFW) headline “Gay Fiction Explostion!”…That’s my two cents, anyway…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction, which is out now. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.