Category: ultracultural

Scenes from the Talent Show

I Heart the Hazzards More Than Ever Hazzards read hate mail
Faustus checks the mic Charlie's not so gay
Kiri confirms my feelings about the South Jimbo triumphs over adversity

OMG, we had so much fun! Everyone pulled off a dazzling performance, and the audience ate it up. I should apologize to Bob and Kythryne up front, because the pictures I got of them turned out so badly there was no way to even tell what they were. As for everyone else, well…I did what I could: it was a tough shoot from the back row.

iTunesAnd for those of you who are iTunes-enabled, I published an iMix of some of the music I threw together to play before the show. Of course, the Music Store only had about half of what I played, but you can get a bit of the same feeling of being right there in the theater, waiting in gleeful anticipation of heaping helpings of homo!

Plugs

Be sure and drag yourself to Ladies First… tomorrow night. I’ll be taking tickets at the door, so be sure to say “howdy” if we haven’t met already. Like I mentioned before, The WYSIWYG Talent Shows have all been outstanding so far, and this installment promises to be even more fun than usual.

Chris and Andy have been doing a fantastic job of curating and putting on these events, and you owe it to yourselves to see the fruits of their labor. If you can’t make it tomorrow, you can always try again next month when I finally take a stab at telling a story of my own for “That’s SO Gay: Tales of Extremely Gay Gayness.”

By the way, have you been checking out Culturebot? Supporting the WYSIWYG Talent Show is far from the only thing Andy’s been doing over there. It’s really turning into a great source of perspectives on what’s going on in the underpublicized downtown arts scene. (“Downtown” in this sense not being so much about location as about the spirit of it.)

Culturebot

WYSIWYGin’

If you loved Worst. Sex. Ever. or if you’re just beside yourself because you missed it, rejoice! The fine folks that cooked up W.S.E. (with a teeny bit of help from me) are launching a brand new series of blogger readings/performances called The WYSIWYG Talent Show. (You can read Chris’ description until the whole website’s ready.) Yay! First show is on St. Patrick’s Day, and more details will be along soon.

WYSIWYG Talent Show</a?

Best.Sex.Ever.

So Worst. Sex. Ever. was a total hit last night. Way more, I think, than anyone involved thought it would possibly be. Chris was worried that she might not scrape together enough in ticket sales to pay for the lighting guy, but that fear evaporated when we realized that people were lining up outside the door to get in. I think about 40 people had to be turned away, even after peope were let in to just sit on the floor of the space. The crowd was totally into it, and the brave souls who read their sorry tales totally rocked the mic.

I can not stress this enough: the readers were great, and kept us all in stitches, occasionally having us squirm in emotional or physical sympathy. Yes, it is funny because it’s true.

It was also good to see some props given to the kind of bloggers that I’ve been trying to keep up with over the years: not ranty political bloggers or hand-wringing teenagers, but really smart and funny people who love to write and spin a good yarn, and who gravitated to the web as a way to tell stories or vent a little in an easy, no-fuss kind of way.

The whole event really made me think about how much I’ve neglected UltraSparky for a while now, or at least not used it the same way as I once did. that’s all fine and good, because the space is mine to do with as I please, but I guess the point is that I’ve gotten lazy about doing anything with it that I’d like to do.

I started blogging as a way to work on my writing, and it energized me and helped me in ways I wouldn’t have guessed. After a couple of years, though, when I found myself in that spot where I was writing out of a certain desperatin to get a grip on my very troubled head and heart, the notion of maintaining this site for pleasure fell by the wayside. When I got my self back together and got back on track with one extraordinarily special individual who gives me a natural sounding board for my daily musings and whatnot, this site became an occasional chore or memo board.

As Charlie and I kept saying last night, we still have plenty of stories left to tell (and plenty of stories left to experience) but maybe we just need to remind ourselves once in a while that there’s some payoff of some kind or another in making the effort to tell them now and again.

Marked for Life

Step Inside DesignIf you check out the January/February issue of (the not great but not completely terrible) Step Inside Design magazine, you’ll find a short article about typographic tattoos featuring such luminaries as me (with the most ink, in journalism terms) and Dan’l (who inspired the author when she spotted his “happy” tattoo on the bus one day). It’s a nice little article, but now I find myself reflexively cringing at the thought of being part of a burgeoning trend.

I wish there more photos included with the article, because some of the other tattoos described sound truly exquisite. The last time I talked to the writer she was contemplating a book on the subject, so maybe I’ll get to see some of them eventually. If that happens, though, I’m going to have to make damn sure that I can offer something better than a low-res JPG for them to use. Not only does my picture in the article show all the signs of being blown up from a smaller version, but it still manages to show all the freckles and acne scars on my back. I’d hang my head in shame, but that would only draw attention to my back.

Me, some stranger, and Dan'lHere’s a brief excerpt:

“What’s new here is the graphic sophistication and awareness of tattoo design: Both the tattooed and those tattooing them are responding to trends in a visually driven culture. Patrons of tattoo parlors, especially in urban areas, often come in with predesigned messages, printed out from the fonts on their computers. And the younger, hipper tattoo artists are often design school grads, with a broad knowledge of typographic choices.”

I’ve been getting the itch to add another tattooed letter to my set, too. Although I have a loose waiting list of candidates, I keep waiting for serendipity to drop something truly outstanding in my lap. So here’s what I’m thinking: why don’t some of you send in suggestions? Maybe a little collaboration is order this time around/

Send me a picture of a letter you like. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

  • Single letters only no words
  • Don’t think about the whole typeface. Take a look at individual letterforms and consider them as images all by themselves.
  • I’ve been conservative about color so far, but I’m open to suggestion.
  • 3-D designs would be fun, as would interesting handwritten forms. The sky’s the limit, though: surprise me.

My 15 Seconds of Exposure

Now that the Tivo is up and running, I’m able to catch all those back episodes of Sessions at West 54th Street that I attended, but never got to see when they were broadcast. Right now I’m watching the Cesaria Evora episode, in which I can periodically see the back of my head bobbing around. (I was always amazed how still people were during the tapings. If you ever see the second David Byrne episode, you can clearly see Mark and I bobbing and smiling uncontrollably throughout the whole performance. It’s music, ya know?)

I was completely charmed by Cesaria Evora, and couldn’t help noticing how Natalie Merchant, seated a few feet away from me, never mustered up too much enthusiasm, even during the standing ovation at the end. (Well, not that a standing ovation is anything other than obligatory these days, but that’s a rant for another time…) I remember thinking that someone could have been a little less jaded and taken a few pointers on performance techniques.

Junk Drawer

I’ve been menaing to write more about the many exciting or at least mildly amusing things going on lately, but it’s been hard to gather the will to sit and concentrate on the blogging thing. Here are a bunch of quick links that I’ve been meaning to pepper throughout a series of scintillating posts…

The Junk Drawer

  • Art Chantry, Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 is an incredible restrospective of the work of my all-time favorite designer, now showing at P.S. 1. I can’t rave about this enough. The work is fun enough to look at in reproduction, but he does so much with materials and printing tricks that seeing the stuff in person is about a million times cooler. (And they’re using the same title for the exhibit as I did for a fictional exhibit years ago. but I’m not bitter.)
  • Speaking of P.S. 1, I’d like to point out that it’s not the same place as P.S. 122 in the East Village. You really ought to check out what’s going on at P.S. 122, because they put on tons of great theater and dance and performance and such, and it’s their ticket prices are great for what you get. More on this later, because I’m starting to work on a number of projects with them.
  • And speaking of great stuff at P.S. 122, Heather Woodbury is kicking off their new season in September with her one-woman, eight-installment, 100+-character show, What Ever. You really ought to check out her web site, where you can listen to streaming audio of entire acts of the show, so go and whet your appetite.
  • Flaming Fire were one of the guest acts in the Devo Tribute Show I saw last week. They were pretty exciting, and the lead singer was pretty hot, but you must check out their site to see the progress they’re making on their project to have artists illustrate every single verse of the Bible (1079 illustrations complete; 35586 remaining).
  • The Grand List of Comic Book Cliches is funny because it’s true.
  • Typophile: The Smaller Picture is a project that’s building a typeface via collaborative effort over the internet one pixel at a time. (Thanks, Mike!)
  • Gilles Barbier is the artist of a fantastic, witty sculptural installation called L’Hospice that depicts elderly superheroes loafing around in a nursing home. (Better pictures halfway down this page.)