"Hello, my name is Eric and I'm a recovering male."

I love the monologue "The Recovering Male" from Eric Bogosian's "Pounding Nails into the Floor with My Head." (Read its here.) (Get the CD.) Key line: "I'm just a man with a penis. And for that I'm sorry."

I'm reading those 3 1/2 pages this morning, because I don't have the patience to watch 8+ minutes of this. Both have the same theme, and both make me laugh, but one is brilliant, compressed writing by an artist, and the other is blather by men who are not artists and who are not trying to be funny. Also, reading that monologue does not cause a mind-rottting music soundtrack to play.

I did watch a couple minutes of that video, which I know you were talking about in the Flower Bird Café. There is a violence against women in this world that is different from the violence against men in ways that are important to address, but that video is too awful to focus us on what matters. There's way too much new-age nonsense about "energy." That's patent idiocy, and a man trying to suck up to women by blabbing about energy... needs some better suck-up lines.

But even if you extract the crap music and the new-age quasi-religion, you've got men apologizing for manliness. But they are not apologizing for their own manliness. They are purporting to apologize for other men, whom they are demonizing. Really what you've got are the insufficiently manly men, who think that by insulting other men, they will get the women.

But they will not get the women, because they are insufficiently manly. And it's a particularly pussy move to group all the manly men together for the purposes of trying to promote unmanly men. The violent, hateful, abusive men belong in a class by themselves, and to group them with all the other men who are more manly than you is self-serving and specious.

Now, take your bogus energy and get out of here.

"Andre Jones and Richard Wise have a 700-gallon trank suspended from the ceiling of their West Village town house apartment."

"The filled tank weighs more than 6,000 pounds and has cost the couple some $200,000 in equipment and service."

How much would it cost to get rid of it? Because that's the calculation I'd do if I were buying that place.

Oh, here's the next picture. Caption:

Mr. Jones, left, and Mr. Wise sitting next to their suspended fish tank. "At night, we sit in the living room and sort of get lost in it, instead of the television set," Mr. Jones said of the tank.

I love the tagged-on  phrase "of the tank." Like there was ambiguity before. You might have thought they got lost in their living room. And I love the implication that this home Sea World makes them superior to peons who watch actual television. Because... why would that be? You can get a big flat screen TV and play a DVD of fish swimming. It looks pretty much like that fish tank these guys have. And you'll have at least $180,000 left to buy 60+ years of cable service.

Then there's this couple, the Wilzigs, who have an aquarium with a lighting device that allows them to choose any of 64 colors to reflect off the colorless fish inside. Posing with his wife on a white settee, Mr. Wilzig said:

"The whole essence of the house was to be push-button color-changing. The apotheosis of that was to take the fish themselves and have them be swimming in whatever color you want."

I was going to say this article should be blogged over at Stuff White People Like, and then I thought about how the Wilzigs, when they had their white friends over, could use their push buttons to make them any color they want. Come on! That would be the apotheosis.

(By the way, Mr. Wilzig looks like a character in one of Eric Bogosian's performance pieces.)

ADDED: "Trank"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Sixty Grit said, "There was a line in BttF2 about 'tranks' and other drug users. Or maybe they spelled it 'tranqs.' Do not know. But I think it is a city thing." Found!

(The police car arrives. The signs outside say "Hilldale - The Address Of Success" but have been altered to say "The Address Of Suckers". The car lands outside a house and the officers open the door.)

Reese: Hilldale. Nothing but a breeding ground for tranqs, lobos and zipheads.

Foley: Yeah, they ought to tear this whole place down.

(The officers press Jennifer's thumb to a panel next to the front door, and it opens.)

Voice: (v.o) Welcome home Jennifer.

(Jennifer is beginning to wake up.)

Jennifer: What?

Reese: You got a little tranked, but I think you can walk.

Well, it makes sense. The fish are presented as tranquilizers. So get a fish tank and get tanked. But that's so lowly. In NYC now, you can get a fish trank and get tranked!

"As far I know, Barack Obama is a reader, hopefully we will have a president who reads history and hopefully is not condemned to repeat it."

Snooted writer-actor Eric Bogosian, hosting the National Book Awards ceremony.

Well, gee, doesn't that make Bogosian look ignorant. Bush is famous for reading history books. He and Karl Rove supposedly had a book-reading contest, and Bush read 99 books in one year.

Look for a new theory, Eric. Maybe the President shouldn't be whiling away precious hours with his nose in a book.

"Men in Speedos in poses customarily taken by women on MTV’s spring break programs and 'Girls Gone Wild.'"

It's performance art -- here in Madison -- inquiring into the meaning of Spring Break.

"I wanted to mix things up,” [artist Tara] Mathison said. “I was just trying to think about fashion and how it relates to art and how pop culture relates to art and how all of these things have the power to make people do things.”

Well, I didn't see it, so I can't comment, other than to say that I think the value of this sort of thing depends on the quality and detail of the performance. There's an early Eric Bogosian video where he -- dressed in jeans and a man's shirt -- dances in the style of a female erotic dancer, and it's quite brilliant and hilarious.