Category: ultrapersonal

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.

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.)

Admit Nothing, Suggest Everything

Well, that was a refreshing twelve hours of sleep. that’s what I liked about working at home last time. If I was tired, I could sleep until I was no longer tired. So if, hypothetically, I were to go out one night, knowing I had to get up at five the next morning, and decide to stay up all night wrestling and whatnot with the cute Brit boy who wanted to see Brooklyn before he went home, I could then come home after working a full day the next day and then just sleep for a dozen or so hours until I caught up.

And now I’ll aso be rested up for Squeezebox tonight.

Live vicariously while you can, kids. I won’t keep this pace up forever. I’m just celebrating the first week of self-employment and the onset of spring.

Swedish Models Are Just Like You and Me

Swedish models and smart porn. Got your attention there, didn’t I? I couldn’t help but chuckle when that picture popped up in David K.’s Diary on Nightcharm, illustrating a remark about magazine ads that make you embarrassed to be gay. First of all, yes: It’s so blatantly targeted to the vain gayboys out there that I used to wince every time I saw it fly by on a bus or peek out at me from a magazine. More distracting, though, is the fact that the model is my friend Jakob, an obscenely beautiful and scruffy swedish straight boy (and a brunette) I met in grad school last year. (He cashes in on the occasional modeling job to supplement the cash from his web design studio.) And since coincidence rules my life, I had been talking to Jakob for the first time in months just the day before I read David K.’s post.

(Don’t get me started on coincidence and the Web. I could write a fucking book. Or at leat draw a sprawling wall map.)

I’ve never wanted to up and ask Jakob if he realizes how trashily fey the ad makes him out to be. I think he’s already embarrassed enough about how cheesy that dye job is.

Mayday! Mayday!

Mayday! Mayday! One of the perks of going to high school on the upper east side of Manhattan was that our outdoor gym classes were held in Central Park. Now, gym class was not one of my all-time favorites (skinny, spastic, sissy that I was/am), but having gym in Central Park often gave me things to pay attention to other than baseball, lacrosse, or running around the Resorvoir (1.7 miles of tedium). I remember one lovely spring day, as I was trying not to pay an unwarranted amount of attention to the rugby scrum, that I looked over and saw a huge crowd of kids actually dancing around a maypole. Braiding the ribbons as they pranced and everything. It was very Hair.

Saturday was a day for greeting the spring in a very Williamsburg way. My houseguest and I went over to Northside to get some coffee and pick up a few hipster knickknacks at the mini-mall, and we decided to stroll over to the waterfront and lounge in the sun on the old piers. As we walked down North 7th toward the water, we passed a half-dozen cute, wiry, shirtless punks who were doing some big spray-paint mural on the side of a building. One of them said, “You mean if we get paid this won’t be graffitti?” 50 feet later, we passed two musicians, one carrying a set of marching-band drums, one carrying a saxophone and looking all hipster-swing-band in his fedora, tank, and saggy Dickies. Hipster swingboy was saying something tot the effect of, “Fuck man, I just can’t wait for all this fuckin’ Internet shit to wear off so fuckin’ everyone will forget about it and fuckin’ go back to normal and shit.” Obviously, he moved to Northside about two years ago instead of just the last year, so he’s engaging in Wiliamsburg’s favorite topic of conversation: How much better it was before. I chuckled not-so-silently. When we got down to the waterfront, we saw that the two guys were meeting up with the rest of their hot-jazz band for practice down by the water. We didn’t stay long enough to hear them start playing, but we eavesdropped while they listened to a tape of one of their shows, and it was cool to watch them wander around with a tuba and warm up. On the walk back to the subway, the punks were posing very carefully for seemingly candid shots in front of their mural-in-progress. One was stretched out in a very Fosse pose at the top of a ladder.

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.)

Fresh Start

The big news, if I haven’t blabbed it to you yet, is that I finally quit my job. Woo hoo! No more two-hour commute (on a good day)! Back to doing freelance work in the comfort of my own home! Of course, whenever I quit a job, I always feel huge pangs of guilt. I didn’t hate the place or the work, just the grueling trip back and forth. Too bad it couldn’t have worked out another way. Oh well, at least I’m free to help out the glamorous world of public television for a few months again.