Category: ultrapersonal

A wish for 2014

It’s pretty common to hear people shake an angry fist at the close of a year, and I’ve certainly done the same. All in all, though, this past year was pretty spectacular for me. Lots of opportunities came my way, I was generally able to make the most of those, I got to do a lot of cool things, and I had fun a lot, regardless of a fair amount of stress. (This was probably the year I became a workaholic once and for all.)

I did a lot of cool things and met some intimidatingly talented people through work, and seized some great chances to do things like come back to New York and look after things going on here. I saw a couple of my old favorite bands — The Specials and Chucklehead — play some fantastic reunion shows. I made new friends, and got back in touch with some old ones. I travelled a lot! (So, so much travel.) It was often exhausting, but also fun to see Manchester, Ditchling, Boston, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Savannah, Stockholm, Guwahati, New Delhi, Bologna, Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Berlin, Paris, and probably some others I can’t remember. I had many feelings, some simple and some more complicated. I stayed healthy, and thought a lot about how I spent a long time assuming that would never be the case by now.

So in all honestly, I just hope 2014 doesn’t suffer too much by comparison. I hope I avoid a few obstacles looming on the horizon. I hope all goes well with a few big projects. I hope I get more time with my folks. I hope new exciting things come my way, too.

Where do we go from here?

I’ve been having a serious dilemma with this entire web site for the last few years. Ultrasparky.org doesn’t really serve much purpose any more, and it hasn’t for some time. At the same time, I don’t want to retire the site itself because it’s been my primary online home for longer than most people have been using the internet. The blog itself — the core around which the site is built — is not a blog anymore. It’s not a log of anything on the web anymore. At best, it’s a place where I dump press clippings for posterity, or write the occasional bit of fluff that runs longer than a tweet.

The things that this blog once gave this blog a purpose — a forum for personal writing, a way of connecting to other people doing the same — are long since dead, killed by the growth of the medium itself. Too may people came to see the personal stuff, but without the context of all the stuff that came before it. The idea of keeping a blog as a mental mood board of things that you like was killed by platforms that made that mode of writing commercially viable and too tightly focused for me to bother with it. The social aspect was the first part to die, really, and the part that can never be resuscitated now that online interaction has moved from blogrolls and trackbacks and comment threads to juggernauts that make it too seductively easy to keep up with people in a constellation of commercial platforms rather than my own little homestead.

I certainly don’t mean to critique social media for this. I am far too avid a user of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, et al. to think they are awful, or even a problem. They make it so easy to do many things, but it does pain me a bit that they all do what they do better than I could ever do here, and they separate a big, messy experience that I once enjoyed into so many splinters of activity.

The means of publishing and sharing ideas, recommendations, activities, or other things on the web have become too mature in their own ways to even make it simple to fold them back into this format, as I used to do with all my side projects that had run their course, like Rumpus Room, the Poseable Thumbs, the Trusty Sidekicks, the WYSIWYG Talent Show, and others. I don’t have the technical chops to fold in activity from my Facebook feed, multiple Twitter accounts, my many Tumblr blogs, and other online presences, nor do I think it would even make sense for that material to sit here without the hooks to other people that make them all work so well in their own spaces.

There is, of course, the divide between the personal and the professional — the private and the public — which is nothing new to lie or too the web, but becomes much more of a hassle with maturity. I think the diplomatic issues about an online presence has dampened the spark of far more of the blogs I once followed than defection to other platforms. I certainly have grappled with it over and over again over the years, and this was never even the place for all my stories even at its most candid.

Still, I can’t bring myself to shut the doors and turn out the lights. I’ve lived here far longer than anyplace I’ve lived physically, and I don’t want to erase or simply archive over 17 years of online output and declare, “That’s that!”. Lasting this long his has been, in many ways, the greatest thing I have ever done, even if the blog and I are only limping along at this point. What should I bother to do here, if no else is paying attention anymore?

I’m certainly not alone in this dilemma. Jason Kottke has been thinking about the death of the blog. Frank Chimero has been thinking about how to defrag one’s online activity and gather it together in one spot again. I would love to see some tools for bringing the richness of my overall online experience back into my own home, but it’s hard to imagine what that would be like, and how it would connect to the older material on this site. But who knows? Perhaps this is the year I can find a way to breathe some life into this old idea.

Psycho Sixteen

In this flyer I made for my friend Lynn’s 16th birthday party, we can see that I was playing aorund with this punky, pre-digital, cut-n-paste aesthetic ages ago. This was 1988 when I was 17, just about to head off to college. Lynn and I both straddled the edge of Staten Island’s suburban-y punk scene, so this wasn’t entirely us being poseurs. You can definitely see the early seeds of the Punk Mince art direction.

Media: felt tip pen, Letraset, Letratone, Apple IIe printouts, cut-n-pasted catalogue photos, and the Xerox machine at my part-time receptionist job at a Catholic retreat house

February

Times Square

Why yes, as a matter of fact I will be spending all of February back in New York City, on IMPORTANT WORK BUSINESS. That’s a much better way to return for a spell than than two years ago, when I had to flee England because of my expired work visa. Going back with a purpose and a fancy play to stay for a month will be much more invigorating.

[Image via Cam Chuck]

Portraits of an aging blogger

Sparky by Male® 1

On the whole, I am not a confident man, especially about my looks or my body. This is slowly getting worse as I get older, and I move further away from an optimum version of my self-image that I never quite achieved, and is now beyond my reach for good. The background of that is typical, tedious, and not worth getting into, but the overall effect is that I generally hate seeing pictures of myself, as they tend to reinforce what I already think. I’m still curious to see them, though, because from time to time they turn out alright, and I get a glimpse of a version of myself that I don’t loathe quite so much. Once in a while, a bit of external perspective makes me think there may be some promise left after all.

Sparky by Male® 3

Last month, I had a chance to meet up with a photographer/artist/restaurateur named Martin, or Male®, as he goes by on the internet, while he was in London. Martin had contributed some great photos to Pink Mince a while back. We’d never met in person before, and he wanted to photograph my tattoos. We got on well enough, so strolled around a bit one afternoon and caught a show at the Barbican the next day, during which he’d occasionally stop me for a few portraits. (If you know me well enough, you can identify the expression I make when I’m self-conscious but trying to look calm, cool, and collected regardless.)

Sparky by Male® 4

It’s been startling to see the results as they’ve trickled onto his blog since then. While I still cringe a little at the site of myself, I don’t actually dislike the composite portrait that is built up throughout the set. A little older, scrawnier, greyer than I’d care to see, but there’s character there, and I tend to forget about that. It helps that Martin’s skilled with a camera, and has chosen moments well. But that considered view from someone else who is seeing me with fewer preconceptions is refreshing. Maybe I’m not such a wreck after all?

Sparky by Male® 6

Ask me again when I’m tired or particularly frustrated and I may change my thoughts altogether, but at the moment I’ll cling to a bit of good vibes. I spend so much time in my own head, where the outlook is often rather bleak, that it’s a pleasant change of pace to look in from the outside. Thanks for the brief taste of self-esteem, Martin!

Continue reading “Portraits of an aging blogger”

Previously untapped memories

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WHOA. It’s astonishing that such a random old ad — spotted on Dionne Warlock — could tap into such a well of memory. It’s not mental memory, really: I can’t really recall anything about where or when I would have seen this ad. Maybe it was in that one random copy of GQ i bought when I was about 13 or 14, or a catalog we had around the house. It’s kind of an emotional memory, I guess. I just remember this feeling of being utterly fascinated by these handsome men, at a point when I was way too young to make any sense of that. I stared at this picture A LOT.

I had a particular fascination with the guy on the left, who Google reminds me was Jeff Aquilon, a dude who is apparently considered one of the first male supermodels. He’s certainly handsome, but in a way that doesn’t inspire the same vivid reaction it did back when I didn’t quite even know what attraction felt like. It’s so weird to be reminded, in a gut sort of way, what that was like.

Oh! But here’s another ad I similarly recall, with a different guy, from the same source:

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I bet I kept these in a scrapbook at one point. I can’t really remember, but I’m sure I must have had something like that when I was a wee lad.

Update: Another! 1983? Sounds about right. These must have all come from the same magazine, and I must have had one from the same time, if not the same magazine. This is really all too vivid.

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Spinsterish but sensual

Have you ever found yourself reading a novel or something, and then stumbled across a passage that resonated so clearly with something that was in your head, or that you’ve done before — OR BOTH — that you almost felt a flush of embarrassment, like some stranger had caught you in the act?

That night I put aside my fiction of former defeats, former glories . . . and began writing a letter. It began reasonably, as a sort of old-fashioned, literary coda to the afternoon. How pleasant to have met you, and so on, the kind of letter no one writes anymore, which naturally has its peculiar charm for the startled recipient. A courtly letter. Spinsterish but sensual. I felt in there brief time we conversed that I was speaking with someone of extremely rare sensitivity, and that you, of course, sensed my physical attraction to you, and were gracious enough to take this in stride, giving me the opportunity to show you the kind of person I am. I know it’s eccentric to come right out with this in a letter, but I have been so moved by your beauty that I, that, at this point everything floundered, I ripped the letter into shreds and started over.

— Horse Crazy, Gary Indiana

Oh, and when I factor in the irony of who recommended I read this, I just want to crawl under a rock and die of self-consciousness. So busted, even if it was unintentional.

For an extra chuckle of relevance (albeit to other things), though, this was in the very first paragraph of the book: “Things commence in reckless hope and die away in stifled longing, not that we had hoped for much from the Staten Island Ferry.” Perfect.

If that’s all found in the first 4 pages, I’m almost terrified to continue.

Modern Prometheus

For lack of a paperback to read during a long bus ride, I turned to Project Gutenberg on my phone and started re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. I had forgotten the set-up of the story, in which a third-party narrator — Robert Walton — encounters the doctor while on a polar expedition. But before that happens, Walton is yearning for companionship and writes this tender passage in a letter to his sister:

I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution and too impatient of difficulties.

Shelley had her own intentions for that sentiment that had nothing to do with why those words are such a kick in the gut to me, but still: sigh.