Ragtag grab-bag
More blogging than journal-writing today. Can’t tell the difference? Than you’ve probably just been reading this, my half-assed journal, instead of my half-assed blog over at the Rumpus Room. Journal = self-indulgent ramblings that only Internet voyeurs like you may enjoy. Blog = pithy observations about stuff I read on the Web or movies I watch.
There, that’s my spin on the whole debate.
You know, even in the 12 years or so since I’ve been in high school, I can see that things have really come a long way. Check out this great story about New Orleans’ gay prom. It’s so sweet I’m about to pass out from a hypoglycemic fit. All things being equal, I would much rather worry about finding the right skaterboy to take to the prom, rather than finding the right beard or sympathetic female friend. (Props to Don for the link. Go read his saucy site.)
And for the record, I did not go to my high school prom, even though it was being held at the swanky Plaza Hotel. However, I did go to another prom at the end of my freshman year of college at the highly overrated Tavern on the Green. It was there that I began to really appreciate the charms of the beautiful woman (not my date, but that’s another story altogether) who I would date for the next year-and-a-half. Yes, it’s true. Actual, true love — with a chick! Life is a journey, as they say.
Now that I’m working from home again, I’ve been playing all these CDs I have that I never liked enough to listen to all that much. (Ouch! Did that sentence throw grammar to the wind, or what? You try diagramming it.) so I slap in this Hooverphonic CD someone sent me and suddenly realize that I own the piece of music from the vapor-colored Volkswagon commercial that everyone seems to be scrambling to identify. I guess I was cool enough to dismiss it months ago. By the way, does anyone else think that every under-30 dot-com millionaire is scrambling to be one of the 2000 lucky owners of those things? I bet we see a hundred of them up on eBay before too long, at double the price.
Dave makes a good point about mosh pits:
The fear of having your glasses knocked off and smashed in a pit is easily replaced by the fear of having someone elbow you in the eye and scrape your lens across your cornea. There’s no way to win.
Too true, my friend.
By the way, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I’m seeing skyrockets right this week. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but my fear of the jinx prevents me from saying more.
I forgot how sexy mosh pits are, what with all the jumping and the sweating and the smashing into testosterone-charged punk boys. Being able to safely stand on the edge of a pit while watching a show is just another reason to be glad I ditched my glasses. Of course, I’m still too much of a pipsqueak to really throw myself into the fray.
Last night I went to CBGB’s to see the big Homocorps show. It was hot-punk-boy central, yesirree. It was a rollicking good time, too. Dean Johnson from the Velvet Mafia, who organizes the show, is probably shaking things up at CBGB’s more than anyone has in years by booking an assortment of dyke bands, glam bands, drag queens, and all sorts of others for the Homocorps shows. As Cazwell from Morplay put it, “You wouldn’t see a faggot and a dyke rapping on stage at CBGB’s if it wasn’t for this guy.” I don’t think they see much like the Duelling Bankheads, either. The great thing about putting on a bunch of small acts like them, Cunta Kinte, and my friend Russ is that it really cuts down the annoying lagtime between bands. There were only two or three breaks in the action all night, and lots of raucous fun the rest of the time.
It was great to go see a show again. I’m a big advocate of loud music and jumping around in enthusiastic crowds, at least when it comes to shows in pretty small-scale venues. Despite my profound love of music, I haven’t gone to see too many shows since coming back to New York. I’ve been slowly getting back into the swing of things, as much as my tenuous financial situation will allow, but there’s so many venues to keep an eye on here. It can be a real pain in the butt to continually scan for bands I like, or ones I want to check out.
The drawback to working at home is that it feels like I’m developing narcolepsy or something. OK, maybe it has something to do with the complete lack of structure to my day, and my recent tendency to stay out all night one day and then try to catch up on sleep the next. Whatever the reason, my circadian rhythms are shot to hell. I’m sure I’ll even out eventually, at about the same time I rediscover the discipline to sit at my desk and be as constructive as I ought to be. I bet the first serious deadline I face will whip me into shape.
Design has been on my mind a lot lately, even though most of my waking hours have been spent on more mundane tasks. But design certainly has been a popular meme among the webloggers set lately (see here and here and here and here and here and here), and it still keeps coming back to the old “form versus function” debate that the Modernists all worked themselves into such a tizzy about.
I maintain that I think flashy websites are like cotton candy. The appeal lasts about five seconds, even if they’re incredibly beautiful. Even I can’t read ’em, or if there’s actually nothing to read beneath all the bells and whistles, then I don’t go back. Any web site that’s legible and elegant (and I don’t use elegant as a stylistic term) has my undying loyalty. The web is a flexible medium as far as design goes, which is great. Good design isn’t window dressing, however, and that goes for any medium.
With this site and Rumpus Room, for instance, the design has grown out of specific issues of content or structure. I try to keep the pages consistent so that it’s very clear when someone leaves the pages I’ve worked on. Both sites are text-driven, so I try to make the text as legible as possible, considering the inherent problems of dealing with text on the web. I try to make sure that in a pinch the sites can be read with lynx, a text-based browser. Even the coding is consistent, because I use CSS to format everything. That way, even the guts are developed by design, not just the look.
It’s taken a long time to set them up properly, but now that I have, I could redesign both sites in a few hours. But don’t hold your breath, because I haven’t been convinced that the sites or their context have changed enough to warrant that just yet.
Okay, I learned the craziest thing yesterday, which you may not find at all interesting unless you live in New York or Stockholm. If you don’t, just read anyway. You might be amused or horrified.
There’s a little restaurant here in Williamsburg that I really love called Diner. It used to be a run-down, abandoned old truck-stop diner underneath the Williamsburg Bridge that a couple of guys fixed up a bit — just a bit — and reopened as a fancy little restaurant with rough charm, good prices, a swanky menu, and the best burgers on Earth. It being Williamsburg, the crowd there is fantastically, otherworldly beautiful. I feel like I should carry headshots with me when I go there. It’s basically the concentrated essense of the Williamsburg hipster phenomenon. And not necessarily in a bad way.
Well, it seems that some Swedish businessmen got it stuck in their heads that they wanted a little restaurant just as fabulous to open in Stockholm, so they gave the guys who run Diner a chunk of change to basically recreate the formula overseas. Which means they had to find a building, fuck it up, and then renovate it to make it look like it was restored. But the kicker is — trust me, this is the good part — they were so anxious to get the atmosphere just right, that these Swedes flew over a dozen Williamsburg hipsters to Stockholm for a long weekend to do nothing but sit around in the faux-Diner Diner for lunch and dinner and drinks. Ringers. Brooklyn hipster ringers trying to con the swedes. It’s brilliant. And I bet they still sit around in their chunky black glasses and 70s softball shirts complaining about all the people who moved to Williamsburg after they did. God, I want to be there with them.
Mmmmmmm, oily Turks. A short while back, I read a couple of news articles (no, I’m not going to look for them to give you a link) about a minor uproar over this traditional Turkish event where all these guys dressed in leather breaches, covered themselves in oil, and wrestled each other. Yes, that’s right: Turkish leather oil wrestling. Apparently, the Turks were a bit upset about foreigners seeing homoerotic connotations in this. They claimed that there are no homosexuals in Turkey. Yeah right, just like there are none in Latin America. Anyway, look at some pictures and decide for yourself.
Squeezebox wasn’t that much fun, yet again. I’ve had some of my most fun nightlife times ever there (watching huge bar brawls, Sherry Vine’s Pat Benatar show, lots of cute punk rock boys) but it’s often a bust, too.
The night wasn’t a total wash, though. It’s fun to hang with a new pal who is something of a scenester. One of his friends there turned out to be this superfly woman who worked with me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift shop the summer after my senior year of high school. That was the summer that the first sugarcubes album came out, and about a week after I heard it for the first time and became an instant fan. She recognized Björk and her son coming down the street and into the shop, giving me my one memorable chance to talk to the Icelandic pixie. Damn her, but she looks even cooler and better now than she did 12 years ago. It was a crazy moment last night, though, when we were introduced and both of us pointed at each other slack-jawed for a moment until we each realized why the other looked familiar.
My idol John Waters was also there for a while, but I never got a chance to chat him up, since he was surrounded most of the time by enough fawning groupies already. I usually don’t make the effort to talk to famous people when i see them, even when I love them, because I hate the idea of being just another glassy-eyed fan with nothing more to say than “Oh my god you’re the best ever you changed my life I love you oh my god.” You know how it goes. I met John a few times when I lived in Boston, and frankly I was just embarrassed afterward.
To console myself, I’ve been watching Pecker on DVD with the director’s commentary. In it, John actually talks about how he loves going to squeezebox, saying that it’s his favorite kind of crowd in a club: three-quarters gay people, one-quarter really cool straight people, and lots of punk music to keep the disco queens away. I guess that’s exactly the formula that keeps me going back, even when it’s a slow night. (The Pecker DVD, by the way, also has a great featurette on the really cute photographer who actually shot all the photos for the movie. You should check it out.)
Well, that was a refreshing twelve hours of sleep. that’s what I liked about working at home last time. If I was tired, I could sleep until I was no longer tired. So if, hypothetically, I were to go out one night, knowing I had to get up at five the next morning, and decide to stay up all night wrestling and whatnot with the cute Brit boy who wanted to see Brooklyn before he went home, I could then come home after working a full day the next day and then just sleep for a dozen or so hours until I caught up.
And now I’ll aso be rested up for Squeezebox tonight.
Live vicariously while you can, kids. I won’t keep this pace up forever. I’m just celebrating the first week of self-employment and the onset of spring.