Category: ultracultural

Flotsam and Jetsam from the Weekend

I’m still trying to digest the entire Atlantic City experience. We brought Hugh down there for his bachelor party yesterday, and the whole place was so much more than I ever expected. More trash? More kitsch? More kitsch? More guidos? More people aging gracelessly? Yes, but also more, in a ways I can’t quite put my finger on. It should be experienced, but I thik the less time spent there the better. Maybe. I’m too sleep-deprived and still too overwhelmed to decide.

More elaborate stories and pictures to come. For now, a grab bag of links and random things we found amusing:

  • Since it came up in conversation: the Bullet Time Ping-Pong Game.
  • If you buy a round trip bus ticket to Atlantic City, it costs 27 bucks and comes with a voucher for a 14-dollar refund. There’s no catch, in case you think it’s just a scam: get off the bus at a casino, trade the voucher for a slip form that casino, and a quick detour to the casino floor is all you have to do to trade that in for 14 bucks cash money. A friendly travel tip from your pal Sparky.
  • Smokers should note that you can still smoke indoors in Jersey, and especially in Atlantic City.
  • At one point, we were trying to imagine what it would sound like if Ladysmith Black Mambazo did a version of “Three Is a Magic Number“.
  • I haven’t given much of a thought to the recent popularity of guidoism (there’s no novelty to it I grew up in the thick of it), but it’s hard not to ponder the whole phenomenon in a big Jersey destination spot.
  • Sometimes it’s much safer when straight guys are straight guys.

Fuzzy Elf

And another news brief from the Department of Stupid Ways to Invalidate Stupid Plot Developements in Comic Books:

NightcrawlerNightcrawler never went to the seminary and got ordained as a priest. He only THOUGHT he went to the seminary and got ordained as a priest. It seems as if his mind was being tampered with by some crackpot anti-mutant religious organization. And since it apparently never REALLY came up in conversation ever with anyone, they all just found out and said, “Duh, you were never a priest, blue dude.”

On a similar note, I the only thing I really minded about X2 (which for the most oart I thought was lots of fun, with plenty of nods thrown in to the nerds of us out there who care about whether or not the government is after Franklin Richards) was Nightcrawler. The teleportation effects were great, but the character had nothing of what I always like about Nightcrawler the wiry, wise-cracking swashbuckler with the mischievous smile and furry skin, the one who always seemed curiously sexy. The movie’s nervous, Jesus-freaky version with the goony pants and the brandings instead of the fuzz just left me cold, when not cringing in dismay.

Top Ten Treats

I’m a sucker for work that slyly works in the pop culture heritage that I’ve absorbed throughout my life. There’s a lot of heavy-handed, ironic name-dropping of old TV shows and such out there, but that shit’s just weak. What I’m talking about is stuff that has its own story to tell, its own point to make, but shows a certain amount of playful reverence for its direct or indirect source material.

Writer Alan Moore has always been a particular favorite of mine for just this reason. When I first read The Watchmen years ago, it was like a boot to the head to encounter this mature look at the culture of superheroes that drew on the conceits of the genre I knew and examined them in a new light. It was critical and thoughtful and even playful, but most of all it showed a deep love of comics and comic-book culture.

Years later, his series Top Ten gave me another wallop. It wasn’t trying to reinvent the medium in quite the same way, but instead it created another world altogether, one based on the idea of a city where generations of costumed crimefighters lived and bred and thrived and crowded the place. It was a fun idea, and a fun story, and I loved it. It was a slower read than most comics, though, because Moore and the series’ co-creator Gene Ha packed every panel with so much detail of life in the city of Neopolis that every scene had to be analyzed. They populated the place with new characters, generic supertypes, and all matter of characters from decades worth of comics, movies, and TV, often recolored or recombined in any manner of subtle in-jokes for the nerd crowd. Bliss.

I loved it, but I’d forgotten about what a fun read it was until I grabbed the second volume yesterday and found myself giggling uncontrollably as I digested the artwork again. Here are a few blown-up details. How many characters can you identify?

Top Ten #1 Top Ten #2
Top Ten #3 Top Ten #4
Top Ten #5 Top Ten #6

I’m Mad as Hell

Once again, I’ve managed to see a time-honored classic to which I hadn’t paid much attention, and I was thunderstruck to realize why it has been so highly regarded. As a bonus, I discovered that it perfectly articulated by wielding deadly weapons of satire and cynical foreshadowing a great many ideas that have been oin my mind lately, ones I’d been struggling to force into coherent sentences here. So forget about what it was was going to say, just make sure you get off your buuts and watch (or watch again, if it’s been a while) Network:

Mr. Jensen (a shadowy corporate warlord): You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars!

You’ll find the whole movie chillingly relevant.

Winding Up

A quote I stumbled across that talks about the leap of faith in my desires that I’ve been trying to make lately:

Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own — with whatever guts you can muster.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

What I mean by “leap of faith’ is that I’m admitting to myself that I’ve tried a lot before — leather, wrestling, sex clubs, boyfriends, groups, fast and anonymous fucks, casual hook-ups, topping, bottoming — out of curiosity that encouraged me to see what I liked, but I haven’t always had the guts afterward to go after what I really did like if it meant breaking too far out of the character of myself I’d always played. Not that I’d given up on what I liked, but that I’d file things away as a sort of secret life that I kept separate from my day-to-day activity. Well, what the hell’s wrong with going after what you like and being honest about it? You’re sure not going to increase the odds of finding like minds without having the guts to let them find you.

The Last Thursday Ever

Ah, another exhausting ride on the Kiki & Herb express train to madness. Brilliant as ever, last night’s one-night show at Knitting Factory (also featuring the hot and fun and sassy Scissor Sisters) was a little more off-the-cuff than their twice-yearly productions, but a performance of theirs never degenerates into a simple drag-based covers show. No, a night with Kiki & Herb will always leave you shaky and spent, twitching from laughter and horror and emotional shock.

Last night’s show loosely followed a theme of escaping from the endless grind and put-downs of life. (Very timely, to say the least, and I’m not just talking about this season of Buffy again.) Kiki made a lot of bleak jokes about this being our last weekend ever (“Thank you for spending your last Thursday night ever with Herb and I…What a Memorial Day this is gonna be!”) and they earnestly and ferociously launched into a set pulling together songs and medleys of songs that railed against the ongoing pain and misery of life, and pondering the various ways to escape it: “No More Drama,” “Heroin,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Creep,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Get and Stay Famous,” and an incredible reading of “Howl.” (And keep in mind, this is all incredibly funny at the same time it’s making you want to slit your own throat in a fit of existential anguish.)

Kiki & Herb are not just a drag act, or a cabaret covers act, or a novelty. They’re fun as all hell, campy and cutting and sloppy, but they’re also musical geniuses, and powerful performers. Every time I’ve seen them there’s something — some element of madness or pain or remorse — thay they suddenly suck you into, just when you’re laughing your hardest, and they manage to remind you that the world is a big, hard, messy place with no easy answers and a lot of confused attempts to find some. But at the same time, you can’t leave unhappy when they come on with an excore medley of Mary J. Blige, Wu Tang Clan, and Destiny’s Child, with some Kate Bush tossed on at the end for a note of weary hope.

Big City Dreams

I’ve moved back to a cubicle with a commanding view of midtown, facing northeast from my spot on the 20th floor at 34th and Park. After the dreariness of the last couple of days, it’s nice to take a second and shake the typesetting out of my head by staring off at the East River and the Chrysler Building.

Rooster reminded me of detail from Kurt Vonnegut‘s Jailbird, in which the uppermost room under the spire of the Chrysler Building is the showroom of the American Harp Company. A character sneaks up daily and sits listening to all the harps played in demonstration for customers. It’s kind of magical, capturing the way the spires of buildings like that hold the iconic power that the spires of cathedrals once did.

And then there’s also Vonnegut’s Slapstick, set in the near future, when the King of Michigan rules the area stretching east to the Atlantic and lives in the Empire State Building, in the middle of a largely uninhabited Manhattan transformed into a public park called “Skyscraper National Forest.”

In a more mundane way, Vonnegut’s Timequake reminds me of when I worked by the U.N., blocks away from where he was living at the time. In the book, he talks about how he had a crush on one of the women at the corner Post Office, inspiring him to go into a dusty little stationery store nearby just about every day so he could get envelopes and notepaper to mail off. The little routine seems like a quaint anachronism from an earlier time, except that I went to that store and that Post Office just about every day when I worked in Turtle Bay. I used to stare at the surly, tough women who worked at the P.O. and imagine which had inflamed the desires of that grumpy, frumpy old man.

So many books distill these little parts of the essence I love about New York: Up in the Old Hotel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Low Life, and others. New York has always captivated my imagination so much, and given me such a rush of pride about living here, that I get so excited when I encounter books — fictional or not — that really capture the sense of how I feel about its features and its people and its magic.

A Waste of Time Machine

Well that was a steaming pile of crap, even moreso than I would have expected. It was another one of those movies that had me slamming my head in disbelief as it unfolded so heavy-handedly. The only real surprise was how apalling it actually turned out to be.

I wasn’t expecting much. I already knew that the director decided to junk the central metaphor of the whole story because he didn’t think it was relevant anymore. (Of course not: why should we have any reason to believe that further stratification of socioeconomic groups is relevant these days? However, you might notice that in the new version, it looks like Whitey escaped into underground caverns at the first sign of trouble, leaving only people of color to tough it out aboveground, only to be eventually bred for food. But that was probably just an accident, right? Sheesh.)

The only good bits were the main time travel sequence (same concept as the original, but with the added benefit of some magnificent digital effects) and the first hunting sequence, which did a better job of remaking Planet of the Apes than Planet of the Apes did. (Tangent: Speaking of remakes, wouldn’t Minority Report be more interesting if they just went ahead and made it a remake of Logan’s Run instead of making it seem like a remake? Run, runner!)

Granted, I can be a little fussy about well-considered sci-fi concepts, but when the hot Eloi chick asks Guy Pearce why he would want to go back to the past, all I could think was, “Yes, especially when your hair and your skin tone are so much better in the future.” They gave me that little to think about.

(OK, but to give credit where it’s due, I have to admit that if there were to be such massive nuclear explosions on the moon, I have easier time thinking that it would break up than I do thinking it would go shooting off into space like a big round space ship filled with fashionable astronauts.)

And you know that brilliant question at the end of the original movie, the one to the effect of, “If you were going to return to the past and take three books with you to change the future, what three books would you take?” You know, the great philosophical mindfuck that ends it on such a nice note? No sign of it this time. Not relevant, I guess.

Type Freaks

Yes! Someone finally gets it! Someone understands. This is the best essay I have ever encountered about the peculiarities of the typesetting world, which doesn’t quite exist anymore the way it used to. It’s a strange world of marginalized freaks and perfectionists who always seem to have gravitated toward the profession and gotten stuck there for one reason or another, learning to take great pride and joy in making all those letters look nice.

Continue reading “Type Freaks”

Piss Off, Snobby London!

All week in London, I had to defend the North. Londoners act like the entire northern part of the country is one giant inbred cousin, inexplicable and dull, and slightly embarrassing. You know what, though? I loved my trip up there, and not just for the spectacular company. I’m an urban snob, but I’m not immune to the charms of small, quiet towns. In fact, the older I get the more I think they’ve got it going on. (Assuming, of course, that one has the natural ability to create fun wherever one goes.) Lancashire overall was really quite beautiful, even in the rain, and Lancaster itself was a great little town, pedestrian-friendly medieval-style little burg with just enough modern touches to keep it from feeling too remote. Blackpool is sweet and trashy, just like I wanted it to be. Morecambe is a faded flower, still keeping itself moving along, even though the crowds have moved on. I had no trouble seeing why Paul stays up that way, despite the occasional drawbacks.

Sure, small towns can have plenty of small minds, but cities don’t automatically shield you from those. Small towns can offer the luxury of being able to catch your breath and determine your own pace. If your satisfaction only comes from novelty or consumption (of stuff, of stimuli), then big cities are te way to go. If you can make that move toward producing a life instead of consuming one — a goal I like to think I keep closing in on as I get older — then why not do it with a little elbow room and a little bit less strain on your bank account?