Month: May 2000

Our Heroines

The fun keeps on coming over at the Personalized Village People survey. Check out the results, and don’t be shy about sending in your own response.

I finally saw Valley of the Dolls this weekend, and it was more delicious than I could have ever guessed. The musical numbers! The wigs! The scenery-chewing! The bitchy retorts! The giant plexiglass mobile! The necklace that becomes a bustier! I was speechless. Considering how deeply saturated my pop-culture awarenes is with elements from this movie, it’s amazing that I had never seen it before. I’m glad my first time was at a movie theater, so I could get the added effect of the crowd clapping and cheering at favoite moments throughout.

Swedish Models Are Just Like You and Me

Swedish models and smart porn. Got your attention there, didn’t I? I couldn’t help but chuckle when that picture popped up in David K.’s Diary on Nightcharm, illustrating a remark about magazine ads that make you embarrassed to be gay. First of all, yes: It’s so blatantly targeted to the vain gayboys out there that I used to wince every time I saw it fly by on a bus or peek out at me from a magazine. More distracting, though, is the fact that the model is my friend Jakob, an obscenely beautiful and scruffy swedish straight boy (and a brunette) I met in grad school last year. (He cashes in on the occasional modeling job to supplement the cash from his web design studio.) And since coincidence rules my life, I had been talking to Jakob for the first time in months just the day before I read David K.’s post.

(Don’t get me started on coincidence and the Web. I could write a fucking book. Or at leat draw a sprawling wall map.)

I’ve never wanted to up and ask Jakob if he realizes how trashily fey the ad makes him out to be. I think he’s already embarrassed enough about how cheesy that dye job is.

Mayday! Mayday!

Mayday! Mayday! One of the perks of going to high school on the upper east side of Manhattan was that our outdoor gym classes were held in Central Park. Now, gym class was not one of my all-time favorites (skinny, spastic, sissy that I was/am), but having gym in Central Park often gave me things to pay attention to other than baseball, lacrosse, or running around the Resorvoir (1.7 miles of tedium). I remember one lovely spring day, as I was trying not to pay an unwarranted amount of attention to the rugby scrum, that I looked over and saw a huge crowd of kids actually dancing around a maypole. Braiding the ribbons as they pranced and everything. It was very Hair.

Saturday was a day for greeting the spring in a very Williamsburg way. My houseguest and I went over to Northside to get some coffee and pick up a few hipster knickknacks at the mini-mall, and we decided to stroll over to the waterfront and lounge in the sun on the old piers. As we walked down North 7th toward the water, we passed a half-dozen cute, wiry, shirtless punks who were doing some big spray-paint mural on the side of a building. One of them said, “You mean if we get paid this won’t be graffitti?” 50 feet later, we passed two musicians, one carrying a set of marching-band drums, one carrying a saxophone and looking all hipster-swing-band in his fedora, tank, and saggy Dickies. Hipster swingboy was saying something tot the effect of, “Fuck man, I just can’t wait for all this fuckin’ Internet shit to wear off so fuckin’ everyone will forget about it and fuckin’ go back to normal and shit.” Obviously, he moved to Northside about two years ago instead of just the last year, so he’s engaging in Wiliamsburg’s favorite topic of conversation: How much better it was before. I chuckled not-so-silently. When we got down to the waterfront, we saw that the two guys were meeting up with the rest of their hot-jazz band for practice down by the water. We didn’t stay long enough to hear them start playing, but we eavesdropped while they listened to a tape of one of their shows, and it was cool to watch them wander around with a tuba and warm up. On the walk back to the subway, the punks were posing very carefully for seemingly candid shots in front of their mural-in-progress. One was stretched out in a very Fosse pose at the top of a ladder.