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.
Category: ultracultural
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.
The Filthiest of Heroes
I was raised on filth. More specifically, I have been an ardent fan of the John Waters aesthetic ever since I was an impressionable young high-school sophomore. I was hooked even before I finally got to see my first films of his, a double feature of Pink Flamingos and Polyester my senior year of high school. By that time I had read plenty of stuff by and about John, and I was truly devoted to him and his canonization of trash culture. Finally seeing all the movies only intensified things by a few levels.
My appreciation for John and his Dreamland players has never wavered, but finally going to see Divine Trash, steve Yeager’s documentary on John and his early career brought all that giddy enthusiasm right back. In particular, this was the first time I had ever gotten to see Waters regulars like Edith Massey, David Lochary, and Mary Vivian Pierce speak out of character. If you love John — and I know you do — try to find and watch this film. You’ll be grateful just for the chance to watch the woman from the Maryland Film Censor Board go apoplectic as she recalls Divine‘s infamous “rosary job” scene from Mondo Trasho.
The photo above was taken by Stephanie Hernstadt for The Finger. M. J. Loheed, Matt Patterson, Eddie schmidt © 1998.
OK, New Topic.
Spring is in the air. At least that’s one possible explanation for the rampant cruising I’ve been noticing on the streets of New York lately. Another possible explanation (and the more likely, I suspect) is that it was a really good idea for me to finally ditch the glasses look. Who can say? Maybe the boys checked me out before and I just never noticed because I had no peripheral vision, and was constantly wiping greasy dirt of my glasses. Maybe they just made me look dorkier than was optimal. Either way, I have had a real streak of self-esteem-building incidents lately, ones involving really cute guys giving me long, intentional, very frisky looks on the subways and the streets.
Not that this means I have the necessary social skills to take advantage of this new development. I’m getting better, though. Maybe I’ll work my way up to the next hurdle soon: meeting a guy who not only wants to get busy, but also wants to stick around for movies and adventures afterward. And is engaging enough to that I would encourage him to do so.
I’m not holding my breath. It’s easy enough to meet sexy guys and have sex with them, and easy enough to meet cool guys who are a lot of fun to hang out with, but the two factors come together a lot more rarely than I would think possible.
One More Topic
Right now I’m sitting in Cinema Classics, one of my favorite hangouts, waiting for a date, believe it or not. Unfortunately, the mix of the crowd right now has achieved a certain level of comically cliche urban hipness. There’s scruffy writer guy next to me, who’s madly scrawling away in his spiral notebook and reading rumpled activist flyers. There’s the group of crusty-punk bike messengers in the back ranting about human rights, the World Trade Organization, and (you knew it had to be coming) the many, many uses of hemp. There are three groups of Germans. Worst of all is the intellectually pretentious older guy on the couch, trying to impress his blind date with all sorts of masturbatory bragging about how he only goes to see movies at revival houses. When he’s not engaging thin, winsome strangers at coffee shops in discussions on the problems of the modern educational system. Of course, I’m not much better than any of them: I’m the guy tap-tap-tapping away on his laptop, working on one of his many fruitless personal projects. (Namely, my two web sites.)
Movies for Gay Boys
That Gregg Araki, he sure does make a sexy movie. Not to mention pretty goofy and fun. His pop culture allegiances also strike right to the heart of the teenage New Waver that would later become Sparky. Unfortunately, most of his stuff isn’t out (ba dump bump!) on DVD yet, so it looks like it’ll be a while more before I finally get to see Nowhere or Totally Fucked Up (no asterisks for this cat).
Also, check out the ultimately happy story of Rusty. It’s cute.