sweetheart redux

Leon Bing is a family friend I used to deeply idolize when I was a kid.  I was too young to know her biography or to have read any of her books, but what I admired about her was her artistic lifestyle, her cool house with the pretty knickknacks and her devil may care personality and beautiful clothes.  I managed to figure out Twitter well enough to get back in touch with her recently, and to ask for this great and enlightening interview, which includes the best beauty tip I’ve ever heard, a must-do for renegade girls!  Ms. Bing is a model turned writer who worked with iconic fashion designer and gay activist Rudi Gernreich in the 1960’s, and later became a journalist for L.A. Weekly, before writing several critically acclaimed non-fiction books.  Much of her personal history is covered in her memoir, Swans and Pistols: Modeling, Motherhood, and Making It in the Me Generation , so our interview focuses more on preferences and inspirations.   ...

The Pretenders' Brass in Pocket I try to approximate the time travel Billy Pilgrim is able to effortlessly accomplish in Slaughterhouse 5 by researching every facet of my memories on the internet.  If I suddenly remember that for a long time I saved a postcard of cats dressed as people in a box of special things for years and years, I look up “postcards cats as people” and voila, now I know that what I’m remembering is a postcard  by Alfred Mainzer.  Three shadows from my past are coming to mind, however, as unsolvable mysteries that I can never find adequate online information about, at this is them: Nardi’s Gay Bar in Pasadena, CA on Colorado Boulevard :  when my mom’s best friend Bill Tunilla was still alive and before his legendary used bookstore went out of business, I spent at least 3 hours a weekend sitting in the little area of collapsing, gray from filth wing chairs in the center of the store, encamped among stacks of books and magazines mom and...

Tim Burton I have been thinking of Tim Burton today; he’s someone whose existence as a creative force I’ve taken for granted the past decade or so, and when I was a kid, like, since I saw Beetlejuice 3 times in theatres in 3 rd grade and then a ton more once it came out on VHS, he was really important to me, as a weirdo in the mainstream making movies for weirdos.  Now, you can spend 5 minutes on a search engine and find such cool merchandise that references the most seemingly obscure details from books and movies, but in the 80’s and 90’s when I was growing up, it was harder and more fun to find merchandise if you were an enthusiast like I was.  Like, to find really cool Sonic Youth stuff, I remember I wrote to the fan club that was promoted in the liner notes of a Sonic Youth cassette tape – weird!  and with Beetlejuice, which used to be me and my mom’s favorite movie, she sent away for a Warner  Brothers catalogue and we bought such cool merchandise from ...

REGRETS I'VE HAD A FEW In second grade I was very unpopular.  My only friends were 2 kids I only saw afterschool when we waited together on the schoolyard for our respective rides home, and one of them was a girl who was nice to everyone, so her friendship was less of a prize.  The other friend was a kid named Jason, so blonde and freckled he was like the personification of a Beach Boys song; there was also a melancholy that clung to him like the better Beach Boys songs that Brian Wilson wrote when he got more ambitious and crazy, and this was because Jason was poor, usually wearing the same red t-shirt 5 days a week.  Oh god, he had a crush on me.  How sweet to have a crush on me, when everyone else made fun of me all day, calling me a Gaylord because I was overly affectionate with girls I admired and being such overly astute witnesses to all my little embarrassments, like the time I had to wear mom’s sagging underwear to school and everybody saw it when I sat ...

Hello There Readers, here is a one-off zine I did called Tomorrow, which I later cannibalized for a short story called Tender Monster Destiny that was published in a long-defunct literary journal. xox Robin

Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about the movie Wizard of Oz feels like they own it to some degree, like it is an artifact from only their own childhood.   For my own part, when I was a kid, the Wizard of Oz used to air on network TV once a year and it used to happen near my birthday, so it was a birthday tradition for me, my mom and her two best friends named Bill (Young Bill and Old Bill) to watch it together on TV as part of my birthday celebration.   This is a particularly poignant memory for me because I loved both Bills, and one I haven’t seen in years and am unable to track down on the internet, and the other one died of cancer in my mom’s house a few years ago, and also, of course my mom and I can't regain the closeness we used to have when I was young enough to get excited over the big deal a network station (I forget which one) made about showing Wizard of Oz.   So this memory of watching Wizard of Oz with them every year is one of those painful poignant stabb...