Okay, this is a short one. Short and sweet, sweet, sweet. Lots of Major Lazer and deservedly so, so, so.

1. Shiny Toy Guns — “Major Tom (Coming Home)”

2. Shiny Toy Guns — “Le Disko”

3. White Lies — “To Lose My Life”

4. Colette — “Think You Want It (Hanssen Remix)”

5. Clubfeet — “Teenage Suicide (Kap10Kurt Remix)”

6. Amanda Blank — “I Might Like You Better (Blaqstar Remix)”

7. Major Lazer — “Call Mi (Dave Kelly’s Hold the Line Remix)”

8. Major Lazer — “Zumbie (feat Andy Milonakis)”

9. Major Lazer — “Pon de Floor (Mudertronics Remix)”

10. The Glass — “Superhero (Ursula 1000 Remix)”

You have to break a muscle before you can grow it.

Protein is good for the metamorphosis.

If you want to look good, lift heavy things, audition for the Jersey Shore, you have to hit the gym.

I’m hating this analogy as much as you. Most especially the Jersey Shore part.

All I’m trying to say, really, is when things are growing, with a vision, and need viability, you have to change.

The new Whiskey Dregs site will be up shortly and it will be a glorious thing, indeed or your time will be returned to you.

It’s shiny and maybe a little on the commercial side, which might detract from the edge people have always loved.

We are developing on targeted projection — same ways faster, some slower. Part of the vision included an updated site, more flashy and sexy so our content can really shine.

There will be a page exclusively for Angels and Kings news to correspond with our weekly party, every Saturday.

If you want a last, longing look at our site, in its current antiquated volume, go here.

Thanks always for your support.

It’s just 20 songs.

Shocking Blue

1. Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs — “Heads Will Roll (A-Trak Club Mix)”
2. Simian Mobile Disco (featuring Beth Ditto) — “Cruel Intentions”
3. Kid Cudi — “Soundtrack 2 My Life”
4. Diddy “Love Come Down”
5. OK Go — “End Love”
6. Broken Bells — “The Mall and Misery”
7. Hot Chip — “One Life Stand”
8. The Faint — “Posed to Death”
9. Chris Clark — “Love Gone Bad”
10. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings — “Tell Me”
11. Jackson 5 — “I Want You Back”
12. Romeo Void — “Never Say Never”
13. Edwyn Collins — “a girl like you”
14. Iggy Pop — “Lust for Life”
15. Gossip — “Dimestore Diamond”
16. New Young Pony Club — “The Get Go”
17. Shocking Blue — “Love Buzz”
18. Kings of Leon — “Taper Jean Girl”
19. T-Rex — “20th Century Boy”
20. Talking Heads — “Once in a Lifetime”

She wooped everyone's ass on that dance floor.

I’m going to try something new. It’s what I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’ve tried it before but it was experimental and not really worth reading unless you’re into the micro details about coke fiends harassing me during my sets. Maybe you didn’t read that story so I’ll continue.

Since accepting the offer to be a resident DJ at Angels and Kings, I thought it might be fun to write about it and tell all of you what’s on the playlist. This serves two purposes: 1) Maybe you liked that Rolling Stones remix I played and you can’t get “I can’t get no!” out of your head. It happens all of the time. 2) It lets you know what I’m  apt to play. Since you’ll know what you’re getting, maybe you’ll leave that “special song request” for that bedroom blunder you might commit after downing those juicy cocktails. Fair enough, right?

I also want to reveal the many, many, many intimate details of the prep work involved in these events. It helps to hype it up. I won’t lie. Truly and dearly, I want a sharing experience with the revelers since your good times will always come first. There are a lot of events coming up, including industry soirées, multi-media art socials, and reading/parties that will make you feel good to be dirty.

Some time in April, not sure the exact date, The Whiskey Dregs will be hosting a fundraiser (it’s for our first anthology!) with a Sex, ***, Rock and Roll reading/dance party. I’ll disclose Stephen Elliott (Adderall Diaries) as one of our guest readers and more to add in the coming weeks. *Sidenote: I may have subconsciously ripped off Stephen. Adderall Diaries…”A&K Diaries”. See what I mean?

All of these stories — ahem, diary entries — will be available to you in that little category box just on your right (right here—-> then over here /\)

I woke up this morning with the Faint’s “Posed to Death” ringing in my ears and the memory of a skinned, raw rabbit in my hands. It wasn’t bloody, just red from exposed muscle with greenish-blue lines tracing the bunny’s circulatory flow.  I remember, in my dream, grey-ish white rabbit skins, stretching along the wall, concealing any discernable color. Just grey-white. And fluffy. 

Here’s what I found in a dream dictionary on the web: 

“A rabbit stands for sexual desires, fertility , feelings of inferiority, insecurity or anxiety. If you dream of a white rabbit, expect a pleasant experience in the near future. A black rabbit is a bad omen, sometimes it brings news of death. Catching a rabbit in the dream means that you will meet a young person. Breeding rabbits denotes a long life. Watching a rabbit  

being killed: you are sacrificing your ideas and positive qualities for the good of other people. ”

I don’t know. You tell me. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-oh-ah-oh-ah-ah-ah-uh-oh-oh-ah-oh.”

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

I’m Park Slope bound. It’s like returning to the scene of an innocent crime. No evidence. Just blocks of red-brick witnesses, mute and formidable. I’m going to hear a lecture from author,  Stephen Elliott (The Adderall Diaries) on the art of the memoir while he uses his book as an example. It’s great timing considering what I’m feeling now. Reflective and despondent.

It’s 1987. Baby Jessica has fallen into a well. She’s about four years old but I can’t be sure. And she’s blonde, I think. The pictures on Tv show her smiling with a cute little dress on. Her little fingers on hands that muddied from the dirty abyss of some rural neighborhood. The nation’s eyes, ears, and mouths consume the news fed by talking heads from all the media networks.  Dan Rather is on the case. For a while, she was everyone’s daughter. Then she’s pulled out by rescue workers and her captivated extended family return to their scheduled program. Later, we learn that some of her appendages had to be amputated. I’m not sure which ones but my grandmother tells me about Donna Reed and the time the Tv darling lost a leg to cancer.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a well, too but it’s fragments of my soul I’m missing. It reminds me of grinding my teeth while on ecstasy, feeling the chipped grains of enamel on the back of my dry tongue.  Some days that gap hurts the way a phantom limb does. Other times are overcompensated, maniacal dreams when everything is good and happy.

The haunting begins at nine years old. I’m obsessed with ants, which is indicated by several baby jars containing samples from various species. Black ants, red ants, carpenter ants, and even the predatory ant lion, which isn’t an ant at all. I’m very sick and haven’t been to school in a few days but I’m content with my ghost books written by Daniel Cohen.  Depeche Mode’s “Policy of Truth” orchestrates the rhythm of the words I’m reading. There’s a story about Anne Boleyn’s ghost and the one about the specter belonging to the WWI pilot who returns to his sleeping wife while his body burns in the rubble of a dismembered biplane. It was a prophetic vision.

I’m on a train now, passing through the smoke-filled City Hall station. The passengers board without concern of the fire engulfing a building somewhere on the surface. Close to the station is the World Trade Center where the Twin Towers loomed above the neighborhood that once shuddered beneath the buildings’ shadow for three hours on 9/11. People forget about things like that around here; the paradox of most likely and least likely to get over the trauma. It’s unacceptable to continue like a damaged brigade with that smoky memory resonating in your skull. The other passengers already on board, including myself, look for evidence of the blaze but when the on comers sit on the orange, plastic seats, we return to whatever it was we were doing.

Park Slope is a ghost town for me. It’s filled with lots of curious artifacts from my mid-20s although none can be found today. Lots was shed rather than lost. Endless memories parade like a ghost ride from Ozzie’s Cafe to Prospect Park, where I died Saturday mornings, purging the high from my system. If I didn’t meet God then, then I never would and it feels bleak thinking that we’re a kind of hybrid between ant and ape, working for a destitute colony.

I watched a documentary about New York during my first winter after moving to this city. The voiceover man said New York City, despite its enormous population, can feel like the loneliest place on Earth. It took me a long time to realize how complex and profound that statement was. Sometimes it’s self-imposed solitude, confined to your thoughts and memories with one foot in the past and the other in the ambiguous future.

All of the writers from the lecture corner in the red-lit bar. I’m off to the side making excuses for isolation. I was thinking about random things; mostly about writing. It sounds like some clandestine, dreamy horse shit, but whether it’s good or bad, I have to write. It’s because I’m cursed. I’ve been cursed since I discovered what old age and death was.

In my journal, I write on and on and on about anxieties and concerns so no one else has to listen. How many scary thoughts can we share with others until we lose their companionship altogether? No one knows the answers anyway — not even religious folks no matter how convincing they think they sound.

When I’m anxious, I write. To everyone else I might be a fraud but on these skanky pages, I’m liberated and since I don’t like to share, I am my own; unforgivingly cruel to myself and others.

I fear this.

I’m alone in my apartment, listening to the heated air blow from the a/c unit. My girlfriend is gone. She left the trace of her lips in a red semi-circle smudge on my glass. I’m sitting on the couch, thinking of that light beer in the fridge and the cigarette I want to light in the living room. She won’t return until Friday — that’s two days from now. 

So this is domestication, they say. Four bookshelves pushed together with rows of influential books. On the Road, some picture book containing 1,000 classic nude photos, a children’s bible, and a tome about the history of the Third Reich. It’s a nice place. The washer and dryer swirl clothes, clunking in metal barrels, new tiles on the floor, and a refrigerator as beautiful as a 1957 Thunderbird. It’s odd though, these symbols of modern stability. It’s alien. 

I’ve been unable to feel at home anywhere since I was fourteen after I said to my mom that I wanted to live with my dad. She let me. I said I’d be back in three months after the first semester was through. When January came, I told my dad I wanted to move back with Mom but he roared in a way that frightened me. The door closed on that plan and I’ve felt transitory since. 

It’s led to some benefits, however; living recklessly without any determination to stay in one place to make a life. I moved to New York at twenty-two and have lived in six homes throughout Astoria. I’ve loosened my possessions during every move. My life is now contained within seven boxes. 

I’ve been a Fight Club, Thoreau, Kerouac kind of person for as long as I can remember; paraphrasing forgotten quotes from Walden espousing a life without possessions, which would otherwise inhibit freedom. As I’ve become older, this existential voice has decrescendo-ed to a whisper. Sometimes during a perilous run through the gambit of inebriation, that old call is louder. It’s after I’ve spent all my money and drunk memory out of the night that I realize all of my heroes died penniless and unhappy. 

I decide to light that cigarette since I’m still alone. The smoke plumes from the cherry end of the cigarette like a ghost of dubious and historical import. This is what it’s like to be stable and feel at home in a warm environment fecund with love and good taste. It took sixteen years but that’s not to say those weren’t formidable, joyous years. The best moments of my life were recovering after falling flat on my ass many times over. 

I can’t imagine my rebellious spirit will ever diminish. I’m glad I went my own way to get here, discarding all orthodox methods to success preached by a dozen family members. Most of my life will never be revealed to them, which is why I keep a journal. These reflections will be preserved after I’m gone as if everything I lived for and lived to do were in a perpetual state of action — scrawled words admitting my deeds since I couldn’t do it in life.  

The streak of endless nights isn’t over. That kind of zeal can’t be caged; it can only be corralled, tended, subdued. I hope to always feel like  a hand-raised wolf, threatening to chomp fingers as if commanded by an instinctive genetic will.

Man Ray

The Tv flickered chaotic static and commercials for car insurance and sleeping pills. The blue gaze of the television set was beating against the white walls and brown window shades, drawn past the edge of the sill. Except for the anonymous cracks from the wood floor expanding into the frigid air, the apartment was silent. But it was that vision on the Tv that perpetrated my sleep.

I sat up from the couch, unwrapped myself from the blanket and chugged down a glass of water. The cold liquid streamed into my stomach, electrifying a shiver throughout my body. I jumped into bed with Michelle and pulled the covers over us.  Her body felt cold, too but Michelle’s eyes were shut tight against the arctic temperature. The covers had gotten away from her throughout the night. I reached around her waist to pull her into my warm body. The clash of skin exploded through my circuitry, initiating a response of a warm trace of capilaries and veins that began at my sternum, ending at the base of my testicles like a long red river.

I swept the sinewy dome of her breast into the cup of my heand, feeling the hardened nipple like the copula of an ice tower. With the other hand I moved down her smooth stomach, over the belly button. My hand crept down through the entrance of her cotton sweat pants, feeling her bristled pubis and then rubbed her latex clitoris.

Like a newspaper press, I began working both of these erogenous zones, reporting the story of my desires that were printing on my enlengthening penis. I pressed myself against the back of her thigh then dipped a finger into her but my digit reported dry lips; my efforts didn’t arouse her sleeping body. I pulled her pants off anyway and turned her onto her stomach. I began working into her, taking my veined apparatus, poking through her cleft to drill myself through the arid mine of her reproductive system. She didn’t move or even twitch, providing me no assistance for this arduous job. After these  efforts, I pulled her pants back up to her waist and turned onto my side to gratify myself and sleep.

The next morning arose without Michelle because she was still lying in bed, legs akimbo from the assorted positions I had arranged from my failed attempts. I awoke to the bleeting alarm clock in a contorted pose of a miserable masturbatory romance. In the shower, I thought about the day ahead; I imagined my fingers flying at the keys with mechanized precision. It wasn’t a job where thinking was valued. I kissed Michelle’s forehead and went on my way.

I returned later that evening, retreating to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. On the concrete embankment was a disembodied head. It looked a bit like Michelle. I grabbed its hair and took it into the bedroom. There Michelle was, still in her provocative pose — although it wasn’t her fault since I had left her that way. Her eyes were open, jaw slacked in an unintentionally suggestive manner.

Joel Peter Witkin

“Hey look what I found, love,” but her eyes were trained on the arcane pattern of moldy stains on the wall. I shrugged and carried the head into the kitchen, laying it on top of the counter. I looked out of the window for clues of the giftbearer but found the usual suspects posed in different positions inside the apartments across the way. There was the young girl who showered without curtains to conceal the prize of her youth. Another woman washed dishes beneath phosphrous lamps; and yet another sat near a window reading a book. I suspected neither of them had known the secrets of this head.

A coma is all I had considered of Michelle’s condition, which wasn’t so bad since people awake from those…The hadn’t said anything either. Its two hardened eyes were forged in terror sockets as if the refrigerator had been an assailant from its past. Maybe it was the steel door frame that had reminded it of the diagonal edge of a guillotine. I always felt at the edge, too as if my life was the razor end of a decapitation machine; my teeth red with the blood of kings, queens, and mistresses. Michelle was neither of those figures. Sleeping all day was just another expression of her unremarkable existence.

Without a captial figure, a head of government, or moribund plight it had always been difficult to make a decision between the two of us. Michelle and I didn’t have a head of family so we made no decisions together. On the Tv, fictional characters moved freely in elaborate homes inside the black box, wearing exquisite makeup; fucked beautiful bodies. On the tip of my finger, I would feel the rubbery sinew of the remote control’s directional button; designed with the razor angles like an arrow of a dubious compass — up and down.

Pressthebutton. Pressthebutton. Pressthebutton — next show.  7:30; suffer unto a coda of so many evenings of silent wails of boredom and self-destruction. On the screen, bacchanal cartoon characters danced, singing praise for toothpaste, laundry detergent, toilet paper, cereal, drugs. Then static flickered on the screen with a scrambled fury: 7:30. 7:30. 7:30 — next show. Every night followed this moribund routine.

I later purchased a flight to Jacksonville for the next evening. I went to work and notified no one of my destination. There’s no good reason for Jacksonville except that it’s only an hour drive to St. Augustine, which had always been for me a mysterious bastion with a violent history and a haven for terrible colonists from another era.

At work, I suffered bleating chest pains. My heart thumped in my ear and I was consumed by the blurry vortex of unconsciousness. I opened my eyes again to an environment of manifold cables and machinery attached piecemeal to my body. The whole room was alive through me and the lights flickered with the steady beep of my heart beat. A tube ran from the pale visage of my arm into a sack of clear fluid, presumably water.

A nurse entered. Her Russian features told the story of her migration. “Good morning. My name is Natasha.”

Joel Peter Witkin

Of course your name is Natasha.

Her non-regional accent gave away no secrets of her heritage. “You’ve suffered a mild heart attack. We’re going to keep you here for a few days for observation then you can go home.”

“Impossible,” I croaked. “I have a flight I must be on this very evening.”

“You’re going to have to make other arrangements.”

When she exited the room, I disconnected myself from that milieu of death, gathered my belongings and snuck away.

I continued buttoning my shirt outside of the hospital, dangling a lit cigarette from my mouth and then vomitted against the side of a parked ambulance.

…to be continued.