Broad-Spectrum Valentine's Tips

For those of us who suffer from traditional Valentine's Day maladies like loneliness, depression, wanton drinking and the use of Jeff Buckley records, I present four remarkable personalities, two women and two men, whom you can try to woo at their public events this week. They are old and young, attached and un-, but they are all multi-talents who deserve your attention.

...The first is Abby Gennet. She was profiled in this column last year for her racy and thought-provoking photography; among other things, she did a photo recreation of the New Jersey "Prom Mom" scandal and a series that showed her sitting down to breakfast with a penis. Now, however, she is concentrating on writing songs for her band Slunt.

"Neither my photos nor my music are all time consuming," she says. "I wake up in the morning and see where my energy takes me. Lately I've been waking up and playing guitar like a madwoman."

Since her art is so good, one would expect Gennet's band to, well, suck. But when I caught Slunt at Arlene Grocery, I was treated to engaging grrrl punk in the vein of the Donnas or Veruca Salt with Gennet up front on vocals/guitar, male #1 on drums and male #2 on bass. The best tune was the ode to guy stamina, "Three-Pump Chump."

"That's the first song I wrote and I definitely wrote it from personal experience," Gennet explains. "It's not a man-bashing song. It's more educational, because these things need to be brought out in the open."

Another winner is the double-entendre-fest "My Cat's Gay." AC/DC would be proud; you have to listen to the song very carefully to catch all of Gennet's rapid-fire lesbian references.

Slunt plays this Friday, the day after Valentine's Day, at Continental (25 3rd Ave., betw. St. Marks Pl. & 9th St., 529-6924). The show is part of the club's new "Chicks That Rock" party; other female acts are Blisster, Sit-N-Spin and up-and-coming singer LP. The price is $5 and Slunt goes on at 9:30.

...LindaAnn Loschiavo is another erotically charged lady, but she's a bit more mature; she used to write for Helen Gurley Brown and can be found on many nights hosting society parties at the (now embattled) National Arts Club. On Wednesday, she joins a slew of writers for a "Cupid's Capers" reading in midtown. Loschiavo will present her poem "Exploratrix."

"Three penises helped launch me, fired up/An urge to conquer new worlds, see how far/I'd get before my mirth got flat/The first was Nina?small, sweet hemophiliac..."

Now, it's tough to argue that a recasting of Columbus' ships as phalluses isn't genius. Just as good is Loschiavo's wardrobe, which lies somewhere between Mrs. Doubtfire's and Gwyneth Paltrow's in The Royal Tenenbaums. (By the way, did anyone else walk out on that movie? It was the worst I've seen since Curly Sue.)

Every poem at "Cupid's Capers" is taken from a forthcoming anthology called Touched by Eros. Each reader will do two poems maximum, so there's no chance you'll get bored as the night wears on.

"Cupid's Capers" is absolutely free, with copies of Touched by Eros on sale for $10. (Anyone who buys one is entered into a raffle; the grand prize is a ticket to Kenny Kramer's Reality Tour.) According to Loschiavo, "wines, spirits and love foods" will also be given out gratis. This insanity goes down at a ramona's studio (65 W. 37th St., 4th fl., betw. 5th & 6th Aves., 398-1904) Wednesday at 7 p.m.

...As for finding good men on Valentine's Day, don't think that they're all playing bass in rock bands or debriefing the media about our war effort in Afghanistan. James Rossant is an artist, architect and former professor at NYU, Columbia and Harvard, but his coolest gig is designing cities around the world.

"I did Reston, VA. I did the Lower Manhattan plan from way back when. I did the new capital of Tanzania, Dodoma," he explains. "It's amazing. I feel like all the people who grow up in each city are my children."

Rossant's latest project is an art installation called New York Live that gets unveiled this Friday in Brooklyn. It consists of 10 plastic buildings, each 10 feet high and 4-to-12-feet long, laid out in a room as an abstraction of a city. It's a natural extension for Rossant, who made a name for himself in the art world painting watercolors of fanciful, Dr. Seuss-like cities with towers at impossible angles.

"It's a big space and I needed it to simulate the experience of walking down a street," he says. "There are 'old' buildings, which are red and sort of blocky, and then 'new' ones that are bent and twisted like buildings might be in the future. The idea is that New York is a city of continuous growth and perpetual infancy."

Here's hoping someone plucks Rossant to design the next World Trade Center with "perpetual infancy"?we need some Dr. Seuss in Lower Manhattan. The reception for New York Live takes place Saturday from 5-8 p.m. at five myles (558 St. Johns Pl., betw. Classon & Franklin Aves., Brooklyn, 718-783-4438). It costs $0.

...Finally, whatever happened to zines? Hot media topics in the mid-90s, they got lumped with independent comics and dragged into the mainstream in Tank Girl and Ghost World. Now many of them have not only dropped off the radar (that's not bad?it's where they belong), they've stopped printing entirely. Al Burian, who put out Burn Collector, one of a few well-written examples of the genre, explains:

"Zines have gone the way that a lot of subcultures go when they get that attention, that gentrifying effect where you either sink or swim. All of a sudden there's people who actually want to put money into them and they become glossy magazines or someone sells the movie rights... Then the rest of them can't compete because the ante's up."

Well, Burian doesn't come off squeaky-clean with that analysis. He turned Burn Collector into a book, sold the movie rights and now plays bass and keyboards in a band called Milemarker that does epic emo topped off with feminine vocals. (Roby Newton sings.) Milemarker has been gigging since 1997; they're like a rock Devo with their keyboards and over-the-top, thematic stage shows. On the current tour they're pretending to be sailors.

"We have a nautical theme going. We dress up like sailors, basically, 24 hours a day, and we give out explanatory pamphlets before we play... You know how there were Marines in World War II that got stranded on an island, and years later they got found and they wouldn't believe the war was over? That's sort of the metaphor we're working with, as that situation applies to us being in a punk rock band in 2002."

That's the sort of poignancy Burian brought to Burn Collector. Here's hoping he writes his next issue soon (he says spring), although Milemarker's tour schedule is pretty ridiculous. The band plays Brownies (169 Ave. A, betw. 10th & 11th Sts., 420-8392) this Tuesday with the Panthers and Arab on Radar. Milemarker goes on at 11; admission is $10 and 16-year-olds can enter too. Happy Valentine's Day!