Author: Dan Rhatigan

Self-Employment Limbo

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.

They Give Us Ikea and Take Our Hipsters

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.

The Most Homoerotic of All Wrestling

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.

Hobnobbin’

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.)

Admit Nothing, Suggest Everything

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.

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.