I Won’t Shut Up, Either

City_Nevers_Shuts_promo.jpg
You’re totally lame if you haven’t gotten yourself to a WYSIWYG Talent Show yet, because they’ve all been really great. I totally admit I’m a little subjective, but that also seems to be the concensus from other people who go. I’m just sayin’, is all.

But next Tuesday’s show — The City That Never Shuts Up: New York Stories — is going to be really special. Why? Because I’m performing, that’s why! I’m going to stand up and declare my lifelong passion for this awesome, filthy, magnificent, loud, delightful place. And not just me! Check out the rest of our ass-kicking line-up:

So take the miracle cure, lame-o! Get yourself to P.S. 122 next Tuesday, March 22, at 7:00!

Calling All Top Models!

Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
Of course, you’re all eagerly anticipating this week’s latest WYSIWYG Talent Show because you know it’s gonna be fantastic as always, right?

Well, there’s something else you can get excited about: being a glamorous model for next month’s all-star, ass-kicking, body-moving, belly-laughing, cringe-inducing, first-anniversary WYSIWYG Talent Show: Spawn. Of. Worst. Sex. Ever!!

For the show’s promo images, we wanna have a few different versions of a close-up of someone’s face making a horrible reaction in response to something that’s happening “down there” (ahem). And we want you, shameless bloggers of the world, to be included in our gallery of horrors. Here are a couple of examples of what we’re going for:

There are two ways you can include yourself in the fun:

  1. Come to this week’s show and let me take your picture before or after the show. No need to get naked or anything, so don’t be shy.
  2. Send me your photos! (Out-of-towners and foreigners — I’m talking to you!) Try to get a good reaction shot of yourself (or have someone take it for you), and send me the full-size original image from your camera. I’ll take care of cropping it and getting the color right to match the others.

I’ll add images to the WYSIWYG web site as they come in, and then we’ll include a gallery of all the images on the site and in the show program. C’mon, play along!

Kiki and Herb Died for Us

Did anybody else get their 2-CD set of the Kiki and Herb Carnegie Hall Show yet? I just ripped open the package and threw it on, and it’s amazing! I’m quivering in delight. I’ve been anxiously awaiting it — especially since I kept running into its producer, who kept giving me updates, and one day even taunted me with the knowledge that he was carrying the only master copy in his bag at that moment. Jerk.

But he was right, it turned out really well, and it was a great decision to turn the microphones on the crowd a lot. I’ve never heard a live recording that quite captures the thunder of an adoring, devoted crowd quite like this. If you were there, you might feel chills all over again. If you weren’t there, you’ll wish you were. If you don’t get it, you probably never will.

But here’s a taste:

Total Eclipse of the Heart — Kiki and Herb, Live at Carnegie Hall, September 19, 2004

Happy Goddamn Holidays.

Happy Goddamn Holidays.
Hey, kids, sick of the holiday craziness? Worn out from facing the horror of last-minute shopping when you’re already burnt out from work? Dreading another get-together with that branch of the family you never liked? Allergic to egg nog? Sick of hauling out the holly or listening to the Dreidel Song? Of course you are!

That’s why you should be sure to get down to P.S. 122 on Tuesday night for Happy Goddamn Holidays. — a Very Musical WYSIWYG. All musical acts, all-fun, all exactly what you need to make through to the end of the season without a meltdown!

Madness Non-Stop

OMG, is it Wednesday already? The 20th? This is normally the point where I would apologize for being lazy or depressed or listless or something, but for over a week now I have been a machine, folks. I’ve barely taken the time to watch Star Trek, let alone order my thoughts enough to do the blog thang.

Last Friday was my final day at the old job (except that I’m now on temporary part-time off-site status while I finish documenting everything I did while I was there), so there was the expected flurry of vital details to wrap up, and the lunches, and the errands, and the paperwork, etc. I’ve had a pile of lessons and grading for class. (Did I mention that I’m teaching a college design class this semester? I am.) Lots of WYSIWYG stuff to wrap up before tonight’s big show, and then a few freelance projects to dive into. This week I started working on a full-time freelance gig that’s had me going like gangbusters, but deleriously happy about it. Lordy! Thank goodness for Halloween-candy-induced warp speed. (Geez, and Halloween is almost here already, isn’t it? I better get started on my stressing out about a costume and eventually procrastinating and then doing nothing and feeling boring about the whole mess.)

But enough about me. Here are some things that you should be doing during the next few days:

Tax Photographs

New York City has been so built up for so long that for all the development that goes on here, it’s common to live in, work in, or visit buildings with a colorful history of use and reuse and reinvention that can stretch back for decades. It’s usually cheaper and speedier to fix up an old building than go through the hassle and expense of tearing it down and building another on the lot, so even in the years since I’ve returned here I’ve seen places almost completely transformed yet still retain some sense of their past. As Luc Sante (who went to my high school, which has its own 90-year-old building) writes in the introduction to one of my all-time favorite books, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, this is a city of ghosts where the old is always showing up among the new.

So I’m totally giddy about a new program that I read about on Gothamist yesterday: the city is selling reproductions of archival photographs of old buildings around the city. Between 1939 and 1941, the city photographed every building in New York City to help with tax appraisal, and now they making prints made from the microfilms of those records available to the public. You need to know the official block and lot number of the property when you order a photograph, but for a 5-buck extra fee they’ll even research that for you. This kicks so much ass I can hardly stand it!

I wish the house I grew up in had been around then, but there are still a few buildings I’d consider ordering:

  • 29 Whitney Ave., in Staten Island

  • 55 East 84th St.

  • 356 West 58th St.

  • 884 Targee St., in Staten Island

  • 1055 Targee St., in Staten Island

  • 82 East 4th St.

  • 87 Clermont Ave., in Brooklyn

  • 222 Varet St., in Brooklyn

A Dirty Raspberry

John Waters and Alan J. Wendl
Tracey Ullman, Selma Blair, et al.

I curated my own double-feature this weekend, checking out two movies about sexual revolution (more or less): The Raspberry Reich, the latest rump romp from Bruce La Bruce, and then A Dirty Shame, the latest farce fest from John Waters. I didn’t intend a themed afternoon, but part of the way into Raspberry Reich it was clearly going to be one, since most of the movie was a tedious rehash of stuff that John Waters has done more successfully (and certainly with better jokes) in the past. It was also a self-described “agit-porn” movie, so it wasn’t much of a leap to consider its kinship to a Waters movie about sexual deviance upsetting a quiet neighborhood in Baltimore.

The Raspberry Reich is the tale of a group of aspiring German revolutionaries aping the gimmicks of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, and they happen to screw each other a lot and quote a lot of radical propaganda along the way. I wanted to stab pencils in my eyes most of the time. No, I take that back: it would have been pleasant enough to watch the gay sex and the punk/camp art direction if I could be spared the wooden dialogue, the pedantry, and the terrible sound quality. I always want to like Bruce LaBruce movies more than I do because I get what he’s doing (and I like subversion and gay porn), but his movies always strike me as being so blunt, with so little energy. Yeah, there’s some good camp, but it falls flat. It’s interesting to watch pornography and philosophy collide, but not when it has to rely on the comic timing or acting chops of porn stars. “Gay is not enough,” as the saying goes, and neither is punk. It still has to come together somehow, and hopefully do something a little more interesting.

John Waters has handled the clichés of revolution before (and more adroitly) in Cecil B. Demented (and even flirted with it in Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble), and even though his humor can be pretty blunt — sight gags and one-liners — he and his casts always revel in the material. Everyone always has fun and plays their parts to the hilt, and often that zeal makes for better performances than traditional acting skills might. His films are like a celebrity roast, somehow managing to spoof and celebrate at the same time. They’re famous for being shocking, but shock always fades over time, and even the earlier, cruder ones still work because they’re smart enough to hint at more than they show. They lampoon both sides of any argument (with more than a touch of sympathy for the underdog), but pretty much leave it to you to figure out who the real freaks are, who goes further over the top in defense of what they believe.

And A Dirty Shame does it again. Sorry, Bruce, it’s not so shocking to show sex in this day and age, especially if you have a jaded audience. What’s pretty outré, though, is to take a subject as highly charged as sex and make merciless fun of it. It’s a movie that’s relentlessly showing, cataloguing, and laughing at every perversion it can think of, and taking the erotic charge out of all of it. It’s not salacious in any way — it’s just having fun with how much we sexualize everything around us, regardless of whether we think all that sex is bad or good. And it’s having a lot of fun with that. The revolutionary part of all this is that it’s daring a jaded audience to take itself less seriously. Do what you want — and as much as you possibly can — but you’re not necessarily any more outrageous than the guy down the street. The revolutionary idea, of a kind that always lurks around and under all the jokes and the gags and the camp in John Waters’ universe, is that we’re all kinda freaky, and that’s good. We can all be sexy, as long as we believe we are. Your perversion isn’t bad, but your interference with someone else’s perversion is. Why shouldn’t we laugh ourselves into epiphany? It’s probably more effective than trying to badger or seduce us into one. Enjoy the ride, and let the dangerous ideas creep up on you later when you least expect it.

Tedious hostage scene
Tedious masturbation scene

Long Live Kiki and Herb

Kiki & Herb Will Die For You

If the conservatives really wanted to eliminate the subversive homosexual menace, the best way to do it would be to blow up Carnegie Hall tonight, where a great throng of us (and a great many sympathizers, no doubt) will be gathered to honor our beloved, bedeviled Kiki and Herb.

Originally, I’d decided not to splurge on tickets for the show, since I had seen them so often from mere inches away and couldn’t imagine enjoying the spectacle quite as much from across a concert hall. When I first heard about this show, though, I didn’t quite realize it was supposed to be not just the biggest, but the last show (except maybe there’ll be a Kiki & Herb Resurrection Special someday). When Andy informed me of this, and mentioned he had two extra tickets, I knew I couldn’t miss such an event, even if I had to experience it from the cheaper seats.

It’s been nice to see the Times giving some press to Kiki/Justin and Herb/Kenny this week. I was startled to see the interview mention the infamous “Last Thursday Ever” show, which remains one of the most visceral theatrical experiences of my life. (It was also the first time I saw the Scissor Sisters, and even though they were fun I still find all the fuss a little inexplicable.) I’m amazed how many people seem to remember being at one of the two tiny, drunken shows at the Knitting Factory that night. I remember all the usual suspects being there — including Glenn, who couldn’t have gotten a better introduction to the terrifying magic of Kiki and Herb — but I regularly meet people who also caught that show and were more than usually affected by its darkness and cynicism, and its surprising call to count your blessings in a troubled world. And the drunken fan kicks, of course, were hard to forget if you were too close to the stage.

As a special treat for those of you who love Kiki and Herb but are sick to death of listening to your copy of Do You Hear What We Hear?, may I offer this brilliant recording of Kiki performing at the Losers Lounge 1996 Nilsson tribute (taken from Simply Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad About the Loser’s Lounge):

Coconut — The Losers Lounge featuring Justin Bond as Miss Kiki DuRane