Category: ultrapersonal

Greek Relics

A week later, and I’ve finally had a chance to unpack from my trip to Θεσσαλονίκη. (I’m procrastinating on the typeface, naturally.) I brought back some lovely souvenirs to remind me of my Greek adventure:

Greek lollipop

Candy is essential for keeping drowsiness at bay during a long conference. These weren’t the tastiest, but they have embedded Greek letters, and that’s cool.

Men's sunscreen

A pasty Irishmen like me would burst into flames if I tried to face a Mediterranean heat wave without protection. When I went to the pharmacy to grab some sunscreen, I had to wade through labels in Greek, French, and Spanish but not English. I selected a nice, strong cream, but the lady at the counter was very adamant that I buy men’s sunscreen. I tried to explain that it wasn’t a big deal, but she finally convinced me that the men’s version was better for the top of the head. (To her credit, there were no signs of pink on my bald pate after a week in the sun.) Mostly,she just seemed a little embarrassed that I might get something packaged for women.

A certain culture of assumed machismo was all over the place in Greece. I was sharing a hotel room with my flatmate Rob, like I usually do, but this is the first time I’ve ever checked into a hotel room and had the clerk automatically assume that sharing a room with another guy was proof enough that we absolutely need a room with two beds. It was the truth in this case, but it caught me off guard that it seemed so urgent to him that no female roommate meant no double bed. Luckily, we got a roomy triple all to ourselves, even if it wasn’t especially chic:

Triple at the Queen OlgaTriple at the Queen Olga

There are newsstands all over the city, and while making one of my many stops for bottled water I picked up some comic books published for the Greek market:

Greek Thing

I had to come all the way to Greece to finally find a book that dared to use upper- and lowercase lettering. See how nicely that works? I wish they’d try it in English one of these days.

Greek Batman

I especially love that even sound effects were translated into Greek. I would have assumed translations were only done using the layer with the black inks, but obviously they reprint the whole thing with the translations. That would have been a lot more expensive before the days of digital prepress.

Ultrasound

Wow, that was a bad idea. I posted a sample image of the typeface I’ve been working on, but I looked at it for a few seconds and realized it looks really, really shitty on screen. It’s slowly — sloooooooooowly — coming together, at least in print, but there’s nothing like a fresh view to send you back to the drawing board. Learning is hard!

(But at least I did really well on my first big essay, so I’m not a total fuck-up.)

Slip It In

Every now and then certain pieces of music will catch me unawares and hit me with an onslaught of memories that had been packed away for a while. Usually, the culprit will be a song that I had one of the mix tapes I thrived on during high school. Like with most teenagers, I guess, music was a huge part of my life back then. It was a way to choose and declare some kind of identity and tribal association. It was a litmus test to see who was on your wavelength or not. It was a complement to heady adolescent emotion. I spent so many hours listening to music then — on my long commute between Staten Island and the Upper East Side, hanging around with friends listening to each other’s albums, and just hanging out alone in my room (probably sulking or pining away for one thing or another, since I was a teenager). Hearing a random track from that time can dredge up exactly the feel of the moment in the most vivid ways, especially when it takes me back to moments I’d forgotten about.

black_flag-slip_it_in.jpgI’d downloaded a bunch of tracks a while ago without looking at what the batch included, and I’ve been slowly working my way through the bunch while I sit at my desk working at night. So I’m sitting there tonight polishing up a few letters (I’ve got 26 lowercase and 9 uppercase so far, if you’re curious) when Slip It in by Black Flag comes on. Wham! A flood of heady, hormone-fueled teenage memory comes flooding back. Slip It In was on one of the earlier mix tapes — number 4, I think, of the 120 or so I’d made by the time I gave up cassettes in the late 90s — and was probably taped off of WSIA, the college radio station on Staten Island. I listened to this particular mix a lot.

Actually, I listened to Slip It In more than the rest of the mix. In a way that only a closeted homo with a neurotic flair for being a goody-two-shoes can really pull off, I didn’t really tap into my churning hormones until I was well into my teens. By the time I finally discovered the simple, intense pleasures of pulling my own pud, my whole sense of sex and self was already deeply mixed up.

For me, Slip It In was like a thunderclap of sex. The whole pace and tone of the song is about sex, and not the polite kind. My first really intense orgasms came while listening to this song over and over, getting off on the sound and the images I put to them. (And I didn’t even know that Henry Rollins was monster hot yet.) What’s fucked up, though, is that I could imagine what I wanted so intensely without actually realizing it. When I was horny, I would think about all these cute New Wave girls I had crushes on — you, like I was supposed to — but it didn’t take long before my pulse was racing and my dick was throbbing to images of wiry punk rock boys in leather jackets and combat boots. If you want to know how fucked up it is to be in the closet, that’s it: happily jerking off to one thing for years without ever even acknowledging it to yourself. And man, did I know some hot punk rock boys when I was in high school and college. So many wasted opportunities! It would have been a lot easier for me, the girls I dated, and probably everyone all around if I had just been able to figure out why that stuff kept popping into my head when I let myself go all those afternoons in my room.

(You can watch the video here, but it really doesn’t do the song justice. In fact, if I had seen the video back then I doubt the song would have become so erotically charged for me.)

My Time of Night

Unlike Sky Masterson, I’m not much of a night owl. I am a big fan of cities, though, and my favorite time to see a city is the middle of the night. I like the play of shadow and artificial light. I like seeing what spaces designed for lots of people look like when they’re empty. I like the stillness. When you know a city’s rhythms during the day, it’s almost magical to see it at night. Sometimes it’s not a good magic necessarily — sometimes it’s like an evil curse of drunkards and litter — but it’s usually quite lovely.

Through a wacky series of logistical mishaps, I went into London last night but my plans for lodging fell through and I found myself having to kill time until the morning train. (Of course, the joke was on me when I discovered that there are trains running all through the night.) I decided to take a late-night walking tour and look for interesting pictures to take and get a feeling for London’s other side.

Desolate StreetEven during the day London’s curious, crazy-quilt layout of tiny streets, back alleys, mews, and side passages leads to a lot of serendipitous discoveries, and they’re even more curious at night. Granted, I avoided the darker alleys and passageways, a little too haunted by visions of Dickensian ruffians in every shadow, but there was still plenty to see. For one thing, the main drags of Soho and the West End are filled with even more stumbling drunks than I’ve ever seen at the same hour in New York. And they all want curry or pasties! Since they mostly seem to stick close to places to get food, taxis, or night buses, though, the streets would be completely empty as soon I turned a corner. Places like Carnaby Street whose shops are thronged during the day were completely desolate. Empty little passages that just look grey during the day glisten a little under the lights at night. It’s lovely.

Caranby Street

Lame-O Is My Game-O

I’d made a secret resolution to pick up the pace around here again, but it was a lot easier to keep when I was home alone for a week bored out of my skull. It’s difficult to string together lucid sentences once distractions from visitors (both social and microbial) start using up one’s free cycles.

In a half-hearted effort to get back on the ball, then, I bring you that least inspired of all postings — the “personal answers to 50 generic questions” meme!

Continue reading “Lame-O Is My Game-O”

Half-Off

I really like it over here. I mean, I like it a lot. Part of it is still the novelty and part of it is how much I like what I’m studying, but there’s also a million little things and big things that have conspired to make these last few months the happiest few in a row I can ever recall having. Life here is good for me — very good, and better than I’d expected — and if any of my contingency plans pan out I’ll be able to make a go of staying over here for a while longer.

The catch, of course, is that is kuh-ray-zay expensive here, even when you stop constantly calculating exchange rates in your head. And I say that as someone living in a relatively cheap town in the UK, and who is used to living in an obscenely expensive city in the US. Perhaps this little sample from a “quiz” urging British tourists to rape and pillage their way across New York will illustrate this point:

Everything in America Is Now Half-Off

Now when you look at that, please remember that a pound is also worth about 2 dollars. So remember to double all those numbers when you do the exchange in your head, and then when your brain shuts down from the horror of it like mine does every day, just try to relax and breathe deeply until the sensation passes.

Luckily, my modest day-to-day life in Reading doesn’t really include any of those expenses. I actually spend next to nothing aside from rent a food when I’m here, but any trips into London immediately make up for the monastic simplicity of the rest of my time. I’ve always joked about how New York you pay a twenty-dollar penalty just for going out your front door, but the joke is a lot less funny when it’s in pounds.

Still, I have so much more to learn before I’m done. And the candy they have here is really, really good.

Christmas Stories

Now that my Christmas-killing cold has settled down into a manageable case of congestion, I’m lucid enough to string a few sentences together without needing a nap to recover.

I was waiting for a touch of cold to hit me. I’d gotten through two changes of season without one, so I was convinced I was in for a whopper. Apparently the climate here suits me. Either that or my seasonal colds really have been psychosomatic all along, and there was no need for one since I’ve been supremely happy ever since I got to the UK.

Captain JackI celebrated the end of term with a brief weekend visit to Bristol to see the good Drs. Paul and Tony, who whisked me off for an afternoon tour of Cardiff to take advantage of the inexplicable burst of sunny weather I’d brought with me. Since I had never seen any episodes of the new Doctor Who series (and I only ever saw a few minutes of the older shows, usually while I waited for Blake’s 7 to be broadcast late at night on public television) or its spin-off, Torchwood, I couldn’t fully appreciate the thrill of being in locations featured prominently on screen, but I at least did my nerdly duty and took pictures:

Torchwood Tower

The gents kindly indoctrinated me into the ways of the Doctor, Captain Jack, and their cronies later that night, so now I have a new avenue for exploring my not-so-inner geek. It figures the Doctor Who franchise would finally grab me once they figured out that cute leading men might be a good idea. If only I had a television.

The end of the term didn’t actually mean the end of work, so it was back for a few more days of productivity after my trip. Hilariously, it seems we’re supposed to have a direction for our typeface designs “locked down” by the time the next term starts in January, and I know I’m not the only one in the group who stills feels a total lack of confidence about being that far along. I guess I’ll have to think about that, too, in between bursts of work on the huge essay I have due the week after classes resume. (Bear in mind, though, that I am totally digging all this type geekery in which I have become so immersed.)

The flatmates and I threw a lovely shindig so we could celebrate the season with our classmates before everyone scattered for Christmas. (I can safely say “Christmas” because we were all raised with that flavor of midwinter gift-giving holiday.) That party set in motion a lovely string of coincidences that led to me hanging out in London a few nights later with some Brazilian and some Belgian pals at a phenomenal Brand New Heavies reunion show.

The Brand New Heavies

I have been waiting for over a decade for a chance to see these folks play, and I was relieved that this wasn’t just some half-assed walk through their back catalogue. They were on fucking fire as they funked their way through old singles, gems off their new album, and even an amazing cover of Seven Nation Army. I have never seen a band coax so many white people into dancing so much. When I went back to crash at my friend Tim’s place afterward, he chided me for never mentioning my love of the Heavies when I visited him back in their heyday, because at the time he probably could have arranged for me to meet their drummer via a mutual friend. Sigh.

I was hoping for some quiet down-time in London for the next couple of days, but I wound up walking for hours and hours again, getting to know a bit more of the city. I finally have the bearings to get from certain key locations to others without a map, or without worrying about following a particular route. I also developed magnificent, firm legs and slightly sore arches from all this exploring. The robust condition of my legs was offset by the achey back I developed from sleeping on Tim’s teeny couch for three nights in a row, but in a city that’s even more expensive than New York I was happy to have any lodgings I could afford.

I finally dipped my toe into London’s gay nightlife, as well, tagging along with my pal Jonathan, who can’t go ten feet without running into someone he knows. We spent most of the evening at a pub called the King’s Arms where I felt really young and slim, but yet still invisible since neither of those things count for much in a roomful of bears. Since I don’t really like drinking, smoking, bears, or crowded rooms it was kind of a long night, despite some very enjoyable company. By the time I left I could feel my cold coming on, so the die was cast for Christmas to cast its usual cloud over my spirits.

After a long, long morning of last-minute errands in London and lots of public transportation filled with lots of holiday travelers, I wanted to crawl under a rock with a bottle of cough syrup and a pillow. I was pretty miserable by the time I got back to Reading, so I was double-extra-happy to discover a long-awaited package from Dave that was filled with three months of comic books. Plus the Super Pets!:

Streaky and Krypto

Streaky is the only cat I can love. I mean that.

Leave it to my bestest pal to find a way to provide me with exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it most. He’s spooky like that. As I was passing out from exhaustion and illness, at least I knew I would have Krypto and Yorick to keep me company if and when I woke up.

Ten Plagues

I was awakened this morning by a completely insane hailstorm that had me worrying about the large windows with the non-safety glass in our flat. It was good to wake up, though, since I had to get into London to do some research. In London this morning, a freaking tornado demolished a bunch of buildings. An unexpected river of blood also ran out of my nose when I was in the restroom at the library. I fully expect a rainstorm of frogs or a tsunami or something to strike before tomorrow.

If It’s Kiki It Must Be Christmas

Miss Kiki DuRain

Now that I’ve been lucky enough to catch Kiki & Herb, it finally feels like Christmas. It was a fantastic show, naturally, but it was interesting to see how the crowd reacted to it. In some ways, it felt like the run they had in the West Village a few years, where a lot of the crowd didn’t quite understand what they were getting themselves into. Like then, there were people in the audience this past Friday that seemed to think this would be just another campy drag show for the gays. As I’ve said many times, calling Kiki and Herb a drag act misses the point entirely: they are a dark, cathartic emotional roller-coaster ride. I’m not sure exactly when the first people walked out of the show on Friday night, but it may have been during the big cancer medley (but definitely before the eco-disaster/suicide medley). Obviously, the theater’s favorite aging, monstrous, heartbreaking showgirl is still doing something right if she’s making people that uncomfortable.

Much to my delight, London felt like a small town this weekend, in a way that New York often did at the times I loved it the most. At Friday night’s show and then walking around on Saturday, I saw a bunch of familiar faces (and considering why they looked familiar, it just goes to show that I look for portraits instead of cock shots on the internet) here and there in the crowds. I saw Herb/Kenny Mellman himself strolling at one point, although I didn’t get a chance to compliment him on the previous night’s success. At the Design Museum on Sunday I ran into my pal Dan from Germany, who I’d also seen earlier int he week when he was in Reading to check out the MATD program for next year. As I learn my way around town, it’s very comforting to feel myself becoming a thread in its fabric a bit.

Justin Bond in Shortbus

I also finally got to see Shortbus, and was again surprised to see people walk out in the middle. So are people in London just more squeamish than in New York, or are they just less likely to read about what they’re about to see? Seriously. This is supposed to be a challenging movie, but I guess some folks were just there for the sex but not the emotional one-two punch.

Shortbus was fantastic, and reminded me an awful lot of the small-town vibe I often felt in New York, not in the least because it was littered with people I’d met, performers I’d seen, and streets I’d walked along over the years. It was a fantasy version of the Bohemian life in New York, granted, but still one I’d tasted from time to time over the years. The last few years in New York were often frustrating because so much more of my energy had to go toward surviving in New York rather than living in it, so it made me a little sad think about how much community and fun had come to feel like a fantasy for me there, instead of the reality it had once been. But there I was, sitting with old friends in a new place, working on another stage of my eclectic, adventurous life once again. So who knows?

Holiday Festivities

Fear not, true believers, I’m still here and still kicking. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks at school doing workshops in greek and Indic scripts, which involved an awful lot of work with a few impromptu social events throw in for mental health.

MATD Thanksgiving

At the last minute, the American posse here decided we didn’t want to let Thanksgiving go uncelebrated, so my flatmates and I donated our generously proportioned lounge so we could invite our classmates over for a some Indian take-out. (Because Thanksgiving is all about Americans and Indians coming together, right?) Even though it’s the one holiday I get really sentimental about, I’d mostly forgotten about Thanksgiving, and in the end I was glad we were able to celebrate it properly. By properly, of course, I mean that it wasn’t about the food so much as about family, and this year my family is effectively the ragtag group foreigners I spend every day with now.

I was beginning to note that Advent seems to be a much bigger feature of the Christmas season here in the U.K., and then it suddenly dawned on me that they need Advent more than we do in the States since they don’t have the day after Thanksgiving to open up the season for them.

I’m also thankful for the generosity of an old pal, who’s taking me out this Friday to kick off the Christmas season in the best way possible. (Here’s a hint!)

I won’t be going home for Christmas this year. Or rather, I won’t be heading back to visit on relatives or friends, since I technically have no home of my own to which I can return. We’re expected to keep working through most of the month-long Christmas break, so I decided that it would be too stressful and exhausting to fly to the States for a few days of madness and sentiment, only to race back and hit the books. I’m sure I’ll have a lovely Generic Midwinter Holiday with the other expats, and best of all I’ll have a few days to just sleep and slack off.