Month: January 2001

A Little Plug

Eagle-eyed New Yorkers will be able to spot a picture of me on page 52 of the current issue of Time Out New York (the 1/25-2/1 issue, with the ski bunny on the cover). Nothing very glam, just an unflattering shot of me addressing the rapt crowd at the last group meeting of the Brooklyn LiveWork Coalition. It’s a great article, actually, with a broad discussion of the issues at stake with this whole crackdown on loft living here in Crooklyn.

It’s been something of a revelation for me to get so involved with this whole thing. I’ve been spending about 20 hours week (you know, during all that spare time when I’m not scoping or working full-time) donating time to the Coalition, and I even seem to have become part of the leadership. It’s a shock to me because this issue has so easily tapped into some real passions of mine, passions I never really know about. I always saw myself as very apolitical, never getting myself into much of a twist about anything. This time around I haven’t felt any doubt or any apathy. Unlike times when I was faced with gay rights issues or presidential elections or whatnot, I really feel charged about the way my neighbors and I are caught in the middle of this time of adaptation in New York. As the city government reacts to the way life in the city has adapted on its own, I’ve realized that I am actually part of a community here in a way I haven’t experienced before. I started out just making sure I wouldn’t get booted to the street, but as I’ve gotten to know my neighbors and other painters, sculptors, musicians, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs and such I’ve realized that I really give a shit about making sure that we all have a way to continue living in a way that lets us unite our work lives with our domestic lives, uniting what might otherwise be disparate parts of ourselves. Not to mention it would be damn hard to pay for both homes and studios where we could really work.

It’s a delicate balance the Coalition is after. We actually enjoy the mixed character of our neighborhoods, and we want to be able to continue working where we live. As much as we want to bring improvements to these neighborhoods, we don’t actually want to see them overdevelop in ways that make it impossible for us to stay, the way things have gone overboard in Soho and Tribeca. Even though North Williamsburg has exploded in recent years, it’s still a long way off from that kind of exclusivity. I think that’s one way that living in Brooklyn may always make things a little easier for us: No matter how much things transform over here, New York’s geography will still concentrate the money and the attention in Manhattan.

We’ll see, I suppose. In the meantime, I have some more meetings to prepare for…

Yes, I Like Cute Guys

I don’t know why, but yesterday’s posts about cute boys seems to have inspired a number of snarky comments from the peanut gallery. What? Did someone not get the press release about me being an ardent supporter of the man-man lovin’? It shouldn’t be such an eyebrow-raiser that I just get all teenage-girly and get wistful about the charms of cute boys once in a while. Time was I used to do that all the time in this journal. Maybe I need to start publishing monthly lists of current crushes again.

I guess it’s my own fault for being all serious and geeky and gripey for the last couple months, talking mostly about work and crisis and my emotions and other boring stuff. Y’all got used to that and forgot that Sparky loves him some lovin’!

Passing Glimpses

In defense of cute boys, though, they really are yummy. I was sitting across from a guy on the subway who was just adorable in an amiable, straight-boy sort of way. Big puppy-dog brown eyes, a sweet look on his face, knit hat, big coat, baggy khakis. We got off at the same stop and I was on the stairs behind him, and I noticed that he was wearing tennis socks with his sneakers, even though we had another snow storm this weekend. Those unexpected glimpses of his shapely ankles as he climbed the stairs were just the perfect detail to top it all off and make me all smiley.

The Usual Whine

Cute boys can be so predictable sometimes. I mean it wasn’t SO long ago that we had our tongues down each other’s mouths and our hands and whatnot on each other’s privates, and it was all very friendly and fun. Would it have been such a big breech of protocol to even say “Hi” when we unexpectedly run into each other while hanging with friends at the local watering hole? (Seriously, just a little local watering hole, not even a gay bar where this sorta nonsense is so common.) I wasn’t even trying to be all cruisy, just neighborly. Yeesh!

More support for my pet theory that all the fun, smart, goofy, polite, cute, clever, sexy guys who I’d actually get along with are having a swinging good time in some kind of hipster homo orgy commune somewhere without me. And without the usual handful of like minds I know of scattered about the place. I say we put together a search party. Who’s with me?

East Side Ecstasy

If you watch any documentary before you die, you really ought to watch East Side Story, an incredible look at communist musicals in East Germany and the soviet Union. Man, it’ll get your heart pumping to watch those men sing about the glories of their tractors, or watch textile-mill ballet sequence. Of course, now that I think about it, you also should make sure that before you die you see such other incredible documentaries as Grey Gardens, Crumb, and Trekkies. Any of those will be a great reminder that reality can be so much more fascinating than fiction.

On a totally different pop-culture note, I’ve found myself talking with lots of guys recently about how they also always thought that Aquaman was totally hot. So it’s not just me. It’s almost weird how often this has been happening, like some great pent-up surge of homosexual zeitgeist blowing a gasket. A friend spontaneously got me a totally hot Aquaman poster by Alex Ross for my birthday. Another announced he’s planning on fulfilling a lifelong dream and getting an Aquaman tattoo. Various other guys, when I’ve started to mention who the hottest superfriend was, beat me to the punch by screaming out, “Aquaman!” This has been even more startling than the realization a few years back that the homos all seemed to have a thing for Boba Fett.

2001: A Spark’s Odyssey

This new year came in quietly but wonderfully, as I stayed home, huddled away from the cold, opting to curl up on the couch with some movies and a cute boy who knows how to kiss rather than give in to the pressure to go out and par-tay with the drunken revellers in the cold. It was a good note to start things off with. It was also nice to have a totally pleasant and relaxing night in the wake of the last horrible month.

I feel some sort of nebulous obligation to do a year-end wrap-up, but frankly that would be dull and redundant considering how thoroughly I’ve documented the year here. All in all, it was OK, with the usual amount of ups, downs, and change that I’ve come to expect in my life. If nothing else, I don’t sit still or settle into routine for very long.

Rather than dwell on the last year — there’s no point, seeing as I still don’t have a rocket car or a sleek pod-home on the moon — let’s think about the next. I don’t like the idea of resolutions, since they’re so easily broken. I like Andy’s idea of using a slogan as a guiding principle for the year, but it’s his schtick, and he already used the best one for this last year: “Less talk, more rock.” I guess the best thing for me, eternally bogged down by an endless list of projects to think about, would be to make an effort to reorder my long-term to-do list. so here, as of Janury 1, 2001, are the things that I would like to make higher priorities on the list:

  • Draw more. And draw to work out ideas rather than just doodle. I hate that I’ve all but stopped drawing. I’ve given up on the one activity that made my entire educational career tolerable. The new UltraSparky backgrounds will hopefully be a good reminder that I should work on more material.
  • Read more comic books. Related to the desire to draw more. Comic books have always been profoundly important to me, but I gave up following them years ago when I was a poor student. Their place in my life became primarily one of nostalgia. Dave and Andy and others have helped me keep up, though, and I’ve discovered another generation of books that really get me excited, and speak to a lot of ideas that I’ve pondered on my own over the years. The superhero genre is still pretty dear to me, and it’s exciting to see the kind of excitement, big ideas, and maturity shown in books like The Invisibles or The Authority.
  • Learn more programming and scripting. I like the stuff, but I’ve been dicking around without actually just learning to write usefull things like PERL or PHP. What kind of nerd am I without that stuff? A poseur nerd, that’s what.
  • Work more, and more efficiently. Who knows, maybe I’ll even look for a regular job that would be a good fit for me. As busy as I usually am, I wind up wasting a fuck of a lot of time, and squandering hours that could be better spent making myself more solvent. (Or drawing more.) I need to get my act together.
  • Stop sleeping around so much. The opposite of one of last year’s goals. Guess how I’ve squandered a lot of that time I mentioned? I got a lot out of my system, and I had an awful lot of fun, but I’ve been really feeling the need to focus again and shoot for quality instead of quantity. (I suppose this is more of a resolution than a reprioritization, but it’s been on my mind lately.)

Wish me luck, kids, and stay on my case if you catch me slacking off.