I once saw all of my past lives while washing my face. Each time I splashed water, an image of my former self flashed before my eyes. One image seemed to be a gypsy. I have always wondered about my nomadic upbringing, living the longest in one place for eight years, and living currently with a band of vagabonds in a co-operative house on Girard Avenue. Recently I've fallen in love with a musician who seems to be re-creating music from my genetic history: Beirut. Zach Condon's klezmer-esque, chunky horn, percussion, string-layering, piano magic and incoherent vocal harmonizing — all done by his lonesome — has titillated my spirit.

By engaging viewers with profound imagery of his various obsessions (sex, death, geometry, etc.), Nirenberg keeps each painting synchronously disturbing and hilarious. His oil canvasses are photorealist renderings of stills from homemade horror films juxtaposed against intricate geometric planes. The "Skull Drawings" — a series of tabloid covers with Misfits-esque skeleton faces painted over hot-button celebrity faces — are simultaneously a commentary on unhealthy interest in celebrities and a laughable release from an art world often taken far too seriously. (See some of these at www.myspace.com/nirenberg.) This artist is young, playful, prolific and voracious, unbound by medium or "style."

Wang obsession? That kinda personal. I'd easily say puddin', but my publicist won't let me. OK, I telling you fresh Chinese secret: This summer I become strangely captivated by American Asian entertainers. When I met model/actress Jenny Shimizu at the Philadelphia Gay & Resbian Film Festival, I caught the yellow fever. She may not ruv "wang" but she ruvs Wang! I also pumping Notorious MSG's "Chinatown Hustler" anthem. My fellow yellow bruthas are representing the 'hood by, as they might say, showing all the muthasuckas what's up. I recall the wise Notorious BIG himself once said: "If ya don't know, now ya know." And if you still don't — Google it, baby!"

I recently discovered Oreo by Fran Ross at the library. Her Overbrook childhood (she was born in 1935) is the basis for a Joycean retelling of the tale of Theseus, from her Afro/Euro-Jewish American viewpoint. Her fantastic Black/Yiddish-street-smart inventive language rivals the tales of Ishmael Reed, as well as any Lenny Bruce monologues I've encountered. Ross went on to write briefly for the short-lived Richard Pryor Show, and apparently only published a few other articles before her early death. Then there's Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion — another unique Afro-American woman author with Philly roots, who wrote insightfully of the lives of the (fictional?) black branches of the Quaker "Bye" and "Marshall" families here.