Mead notebook

As Brokeback Mountain gallops across the media landscape, the time is right for another celebration of every ranch hand's favorite gay nurse, Taylor Mead. Star of Andy Warhol's FBI-inciting Lonesome Cowboys (as well as Taylor Mead's Ass), Mead isn't just a master of comic improvisation, he's also a poet – not that the two can't or shouldn't be linked. Onscreen, he's recently been featured in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes and been the subject of the doc Excavating Taylor Mead (tagline: "This is the opposite end of the Robert Evans spectrum"). But busy Mead has also been putting pen to paper, and the result is a sequel of sorts to his 1986 laugh riot Son of Andy Warhol, which was appropriately published in Hanuman Press's trademark mini-mini format. Graced with an introduction by fellow wet wit Gary Indiana, the brand-new A Simple Country Girl (Bowery Poetry, www.yourbookpublisher.com/published_and_publishing.htm) is around 130 pages long and can be read in around, well, 15 minutes. Each one is worth the dollar that adds up to its $14.95 price, listed on a bar code that has the phrase "What in the hell is going on here?" printed in elegant script below. An heir to Wilde, though far less prone to pomp, Mead is a master of direct address. A typical classic:

Everything

Has a right to life

except mosquitoes

and religious people

If you lived in New York, you could see the Taylor Mead Show at the Bowery Poetry Club, where woe befalls all fools who challenge Mead to verbal jousts. Here on the other coast, you can enjoy this book. (Huston)