Mark Allen

I’m tracing an imaginary line between each framed family picture as I brush my hand gently along the wall, slowly advancing up each step in the stairway that leads to the bathroom. The loud sounds of socializing adults downstairs in the kitchen grows dimmer, their laughing voices bounce all around the excess of cozy surfaces in the home—lots of drywall and carpet—and become more and more indistinct the further I climb. Combined with the central air system roar, their voices coalesce to a soft drone once I reach the top of the stairs…straining to peer down the dark hallway that contains even darker doors into the bedrooms, and an upstairs guest bathroom. Being the only 11 year-old at the gathering, I had asked to be excused to the restroom. The husband and wife who lived there (church friends of my parents) told me it was upstairs and immediately to the left. I turn and feel for the light switch inside the only open door to my left. My hand touches a fuzzy surface, mixed with a smooth coldness. Turning on the light reveals the wallpaper to be done in synthetic crushed velvet and foil—all in gold hues. I sit staring into the bathroom before I enter, my hand still resting on the light switch. All the fixtures in the bathroom are fake tarnished brass. The counter tops are bone-colored fake marble, with those too-perfectly imperfect squiggle lines in them like blue cheese. Wall-to-wall carpet spans the entire floorspace, with giant furry brown throw rugs on top of them anyway…also covering the toilet seat and its tank, which hisses slightly. I hear the muffled laughter downstairs getting louder. More adults have arrived. I enter the bathroom and shut the door.

The light…

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What would it be like to be a WFMU DJ on another planet? Let’s explore the possibility, using the planets of our own solar system as examples! We’ll begin with the farthest-away, newly demoted “dwarf planet.” If the four floors (and don’t forget the basement) of the WFMU in building in Jersey City was to be planted firmly on the ground somewhere in the middle of Pluto (a solid 70% rock, and 30% ice), and you were broadcasting from that building, you’d find little light, few friends, and would probably be complaining about the building’s heating system not working right. It would no doubt be remarkably lonely doing a radio show, literally billions and billions of miles away from the “WFMU 91.1 FM East Orange, WXHD Mount Hope, and wfmu.org on the web” that existed for you on Earth as a station ID only…yet now is oh so very far away (overnight shift anyone?). But whatever you do, make sure you don’t step your suicidal outer space self outside onto the deck of Studio A for a cigarette break, or step outside at all, because Pluto’s atmosphere is extremely tenuous, consisting mostly of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane (plus wear a hat, it’s 508 degrees below zero fahrenheit). But, feel free to throw on a long Stockhausen CD and go look out the studio windows pensively—Pluto seems designed for such daydream-y behavior. The glow of Pluto’s frozen methane, ethane and carbon monoxide “lakes” will look stunning from the second story atrium window as well, as they reflect sunlight coming from 3,670,050,000 miles away (give an take a million, due to Pluto’s notoriously erratic orbit path). As for Neptune…

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Ohh…Camille Paglia answered my letter in her latest Salon column (see here for my letter at the bottom, the following page contains her response). I feel just like a 70’s suburban housewife who’s letter was answered in an Ann Landers newspaper column, and then clips 100 copies and proudly dashes around her neighborhood showing everyone. That’s because I am! I love how Camille’s entire column is serious talk about geopolitics, and my letter at the end is gushing fandom for an obscure British comedy from 20 years ago.

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This is part eleven of an ongoing mathematical equation attempting to calculate the current state of Gay New York. As each portion is finished it will be added to the final equation in the appropriate place. The final equation is collected here.

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