Category: ultracultural

This, That, Other Things

Oh god, it’s happening again. I’ll warn you all right now — you won’t be hearing much from me for a while. This is not a vacation from dealing with the website, this is just a hunch that I’m going to be sitting in my uncomfortable deskchair sweating bullets for a few days while I try to crank out a few projects before deadline. Here’s a few topics for you to mull over and e-mail me about in the meanwhile:

  • I suspected that X-Men wasn’t really that good a movie, but I was so pleased that didn’t fuck it up as much as they could that I wound up really enjoying it. Plus, they got Wolverine right, which was the most important thing in the movie. How much, though, did you have to choke back YOUR nerdy instincts because of the ways they played fast and loose with the continuity of the comic book? (For example, why were Iceman and Jubilee students at the same time in the movie? Why, the very idea…!)
  • New York may not be the best city in the world in everyone’s eyes, but it has its perks. I was riding the Metro in Washington, D.C., yesterday morning, and everyone just looked so boring. Hardly anyone cute or funky or insane in sight. What fun is that?
  • Is it the jinx effect that’s making my life so aggravating right now?
  • I caught about ten minutes of Sex in the City this weekend, a sequence in which Miranda and her impossibly sexy (because of the dork factor that I love so much) boyfriend and she were talking about the number of sexual partners they had. that’s always a thorny issue to bring up with people you date, isn’t it? I always worry that if I tell I may come across as a total trashcan, or some prude who’s passed up even more opportunities than I took. Not that I worry so much about what people think on this issue, but I have my own conflicted notions about whether or not I’ve been too free-wheeling over the last few years. Sometimes I think I have, but more often than that I just regret all the chances I’ve passed up over the years because I was feeling too prudish or too unattractive or too shy.

The Midsummer Round-Up

Woo Hoo! 11 days into July and I finally post! Yes, it’s true. I’m not dead. Hell, I haven’t even been assuming that anyone would notice. If I were really desperate for attention, I might pull a stunt like this, but thankfully I’m not.

I’ve had friends in town for the last couple of weeks, keeping me entertained as I finished up a huge project or two, so there’s been plenty of fun. And plenty of media consumption. some highlights:

  • Chicken Run saw it, liked it an awful lot, have sworn once again that Jane Horrocks will always make me happy and that Imelda staunton will never get all the respect that she deserves in this country.
  • Eddie agreed with me that Tony Shalhoub is one of the most underrated actors in Hollywood today. I can’t think of a single performance of his I haven’t loved.
  • Decline of Western Civilization, Part III saw it, thought it was great, realized once again that I was never angry enough to make a good punk. Of course, the kids interviewed in it seem more lost and apathetic than angry, but that made for a lot of interesting moments, believe it or not. The bands seemed angry, but the kids seemed like they were too beaten down to be that angry anymore. It was a nice take on the scene, focusing on the kids more than the music this time around. Very sad, and also very funny. It remended me, though, of how sexy I find those punk rock guys, even the crusty ones.
  • P.S. 1 is my new favorite place on earth. seriously. Great artwork, incredible building, no crowds. I want to live there. If you come to visit New York, let me know and I will drag you out to Long Island City so you can see it for yourself. If you come before september we can even try out the outdoor sauna.
  • I read the new issue of Paul Baker’s Handbag! Completely hilarious and brilliant, as ever. Paul, I still want to spend the rest of my life with you. Being best friends is fine, if that’s all I can get.

Oh yeah, I also managed to knock out a complete and total redesign of UltraSparky in a few moments of spare time.

Chelsea’s Future

In the future, according to Titan A.E., all that will remain of Earth’s culture will be cargo pants, muscle shirts, and homo archetypes. I know this movie was manufactured specifically for 12-year-olds, so I wasn’t expecting quality, but I was genuinely surprised to see how well they managed to make the hero into a Chelsea muscle twink and make the villain character into his pseudo-butch Chelsea-daddy type. There wasn’t much romantic subtext, thankfully, but I swear that the characters were drawn from pictures taken from circuit-party snapshots. I couldn’t stop giggling.

Film Buff

For such a film nut, there are huge, gaping holes in my classic-films checklist. I blame it on my youthful fascination with trash culture. (Which I still love, but I temper with appreciation of the finer things.) I always pooh-poohed all the greats — the silent films, gorgeous black-and-white masterpieces, taught thrillers — as long as I could get a chance to see something more fun, like Valley Girl or Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Thankfully, I’ve gotten over that kind of short sightedness. Now, whenever I see something generally regarded as a classic, it’s always such a revelation, and I could kick myself for not catching it sooner.

It happened the first time I saw Buster Keaton, who I now regard as one of my all-time favorites. It happened when I recently saw Sunset Blvd. and suddenly realized how many other images I had seen on film over the years (not to mention that whole Carol Burnett skit) had drawn from it. And it happened again tonight when I finally watched the DVD for Notorious that I picked up a while back, thinking that I ought to watch it, if just because it was set in Rio and Duran Duran did that song about it. What a gorgeous movie! Just beautifully done. (And it made me very nostalgic to see footage of places in Rio I had been to when I was there.)

Wow! That Hitchcock guy knocks my socks off every time. Do people know about him?

And I don’t mean to get too faggy — and this is above and beyond, even for me — but did Edith Head sell her soul to the devil or something for that kind of talent? We would have a totally different image of Hollywood glamour if it weren’t for that woman.

I Was Never Punk

I never said I was a punk, so you can’t call me a poseur. I was never good at committing to just one “scene”, since my interests were always so eclectic, although like many disaffected teenagers I went through my skater, New Wave, punk (Ah, 1987 — the year all the Staten Island New-Wave kids went punk…) , rude-boy, and newly-out fag phases before amalgamating them all into the Sparky you all know and get fed up with today.

Anyway, the subject was punk. I went to go see The Filth and the Fury last night, the latest documentary on the Sex Pistols. Although I was never much of an angry, working-class kid, the Sex Pistols really captivated me way back when, and it was easy to see why as I watched footage of Johnny Rotten shouting and snarling into the microphone as he stared wild-eyed at the crowds. I could feel my whole body tense up with excitement. It was also surpisingly moving to hear him talk about his rage and sadness at how Sid Vicious just fell apart once he became a junkie. I guess it’s not very punk for him to get teary during an interview, but I guess he’s John Lydon now and not Johnny Rotten, so we’ll cut him some slack.

Julien Temple thankfully doesn’t take the whole thing too seriously, even though he’s trying to show a more historical view than he did in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Even though a screenwriter pal didn’t think he handled the passage of time well (whatever wanky film-biz nonsense that is), I liked the way he built a context for all of it with a hilarious montage of film and video clips, including a bunch of apropos snippets from Richard III and British TV news. He also kept the contemporary Pistols in silhouette when he interviewed then, which was a deft way to not ruin the impact of all that combustible young anger by showing what they looked like all old and bitter.

To balance things out, today I’m listening to the soundtrack to Hair, surprisingly moving music of another sort altogether. (And back from the days when Treat Williams lived up to his name.)

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.)

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.