THANK YOU, SUZANNE FIOL

Suzanne Fiol

, founder of

Issue Project Room

, died of cancer on Monday. Issue is my favorite legal venue in NYC -- I've wandered in there and seen many bizarre, funny and beautiful things, including world-famous

Pamelia Kurstin

doing theremin stand-up comedy with

Carla Rhodes

-- and a personal favorite, a bunch of

ornate pagan transvestites

enacting fertility rituals for

Mary Magdalene Day:

a strange passion play with a nearly nude young man posing as a tree for a human maypole dance, all synched up to the sweet sounds of Brian Ferry. Suzanne and

Zach Layton

also let my band Flaming Fire do all manner of fun, obnoxious things at her space -- stuff we could never get away with anywhere else --including

attack her charity Walkathon participants

with megaphones and fire, just because we could. You can go there today and hear These Are Powers

tell ghost stories

. Anyway, Fiol was the greatest. She was bossy, funny, fearless, brilliant, loved to drink and party down. Even while in the late stages of cancer, she worked her ass off to find a huge new home for the venue -- a huge former Elks Lodge

in the center of Brooklyn

-- that may will finally replace what NYC lost when great venues like

Tonic

and

CB's Gallery

were torn down in the condo craze of the mid 2000s. There are lots of snooty, boring places to enjoy avant-garde music, but Issue is uniquely fun, because Suzanne was fun. I'll miss her a lot.