Category: ultrapersonal

In-flight news

I’m posting from an airplane, just because I can. Every once in a while, it actually feels like I live in the 21st century. In-flight internet access — even for a fee — is the one bright spot in my domestic flights around the US. The Atlanta and Orlando airports? Dreadful chaos. Mumbly, crabby security guys working the lines at the x-ray machine? Punchable. Children? The less said the better. Food? What food?

Actually, there are peanuts. However, there are also new developments of hysterical overreaction while traveling: They won’t serve peanuts in rows 25–31 on my flight because there’s a person in row 28 with a nut allergy. Apparently aggravated by floating nut particles in the atmosphere.

One other travel observation: flying with my pal Emma makes me glad that I’m not pretty, young, and a girl with a charming foreign accent. People always want to chat! I was barely able to handle the over-attentive waiters in the South. Flirty busybodies on a plane would push me over the edge.

Pink Minx

Gay Shame 1

Having grown up with a life-long concern about being perceived as a sissy, largely due to a long childhood being called a called a sissy or being told not to be one, I opted to participate in Gay Shame (this year’s theme: A Festival of Femininity) by confronting my neurotic aversion of wearing pink for fear of looking too girly, and by trying to look like quite a big sissy. I succeeded, and had tremendous fun.

Gay Shame 2

[Incriminating photos from the lovely Mr Green, who wore white, not pink.]

The ladies and gentlemen of the ACLU LGBT Project also wore pink at last week’s Pride festivities, or at least bright fuschia t-shirts I designed for them. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

On the other hand, it was down with drab for do-gooders. The ACLU’s fuchsia T-shirts with green Statue of Liberty crowns: simple yet sublimely multicolored.

ACLU Pride

I still hate wearing pink, but I am quite proud — no, I am quite pleased — to be a big ol’ nancy homo fairy who likes to kiss and hold hands and stuff with other dudes.

And in case you didn’t get it, this post’s title is a shameless reference to Pink Mince, a little zine thing I’ve started publishing. Why haven’t you ordered a copy yet?

Subway Stories

It only dawned on me yesterday that the videos from the WYSIWYG Talent Show were still languishing on our old web server, which is rather a terrible waste considering how much more easily you can handle video on the internet now thanks to YouTube. So without further ado, here’s a clip of me from March 2005, reading my bit at “The City That Never Shuts Up: New York Stories”.

Related:

Table for one, please

I am a pretty intensely introverted person, which can be a challenging thing now and again. As long as I get a little time to myself to regroup and unwind, I’m perfectly comfortable being sociable or doing far more extroverted things like teaching or going out, but situations where I am around other people for long stretches of time really wear me out. No matter how much I treasure good company and enjoy being around interesting people, dealing with more than a few people at a time — or any number of people for a long stretch of time — usually requires a conscious effort, a way of slipping into a different, more outgoing mode for a little while, and then getting some serious rest afterwards. (This, as family members may be suspecting at this moment, is why I always retreat to the solitude of long naps in the middle of holiday get-togethers.)

Continue reading “Table for one, please”

Crap Rotation

I’ve had analog stuff on the brain lately. I may be someone who’s been online for a long time, and who stays tethered to the internet throughout the average day in one way or another, but I’ve always been a little ambivalent about the medium. And I don’t just mean how much I hate building web sites, despite running one (or a few, usually) for such a long time. I guess my ambivalence is more about the culture of the medium, more than the platforms themselves. I’m always fascinated by how the online world changes and surprises me, but I’ve been at it long enough to miss some things that have gotten further than what I liked about them. It was a lot more fun to participate when online life was an immature mess that was in the middle of sprawling outward.

I used to make stuff — actual, physical stuff, like zines and mixtapes and paper and postcards — a lot, and the tactile aspect of that was a huge part of wht I liked. I don’t make so much stuff anymore, and I miss the way I enjoyed the making and the sharing of it. I stumbled into the web because I was curious about this new thing that was emerging, and it was easy enough to tinker with it and feel it out. Throwing up a web page built with Mosaic was also a cheap alternative to putting out the slightly ambitious zine I had been making, so the first pages I made were supposed to be a staging ground for what I’d publish the next time I had a little extra scratch lying around. Then they became a repository for stuff I was posting on discussion groups, and then a repository for what I’d published in my zine, and then Blogger happened and then GreyMatter and then Movable Type and then Flickr and then Twitter and other stuff and it became more and more and now here we are. Now, I find myself constantly expanding and contracting in the online world — testing new things, leaving them when they don’t give me something I like. I don’t really like the endless networks that can spin out in all directions. I like a smaller net with edges that are just blurry enough to leave room for serendipity. I like a bit more community and a bit less…well, a bit less onslaught of everything, I guess.

Continue reading “Crap Rotation”

Et tu, Kim’s?

I was immediately fascinated by this unusual story of how the entire collection of over 55,000 rental titles from the deservedly famous Kim’s Video store has been packed up and shipped to Salemi, a small town in Siciliy that is trying to reinvent itself as a cultural haven. I saw the story late last night, and sent links to it to a couple of friends who might get a kick out of it: one a film buff I know here in the UK, the others good friends of mine who have also left New York after growing up there.

The thought of the Kim’s collection stayed with me until the morning, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason why. I had never actually been a member of Kim’s, and I was rarely a customer. The thing is, though, I always thought of it as a veritable museum of film, and I loved it just for being there. I loved the way the store was organized, grouping films by director or startlingly specific genres. I loved that they rented boldly pirated copies of obscure old and foreign works that weren’t available for general release in New York. I loved that it was useful as an educational resource for me as a film lover as much as it was a store.

I think it was this last aspect that made it seem so perfect to the researcher in me that the collection was shipped off intact. Just knowing it exists somewhere as a body of work is soothing. It’s obvious that Yongman Kim, founder of the store, is a true lover film, regardless of whatever he needs to do as a businessman to support himself. When he was realizing that Kim’s could He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.”

My friend Mark wrote this morning and immediately put his finger on what was so resonant about all this for me. There’s no point in paraphrasing when he summed it up so well, as always:

While there will always be pockets of NYC that resemble the NY of our teen years, in spirit, it seems a wholly different place to me. The most disconcerting thing is that the places that are relocating/shutting down now aren’t just places I used to go, but places that I had identified as being uniquely of NY, but that is obviously no longer so.

It is amazing though that these things and places are being scattered around the world, and not simply ceasing to exist, as if confirming just how valuable these things are, but just no longer valuable to New York or New Yorkers.

Magical mystery tub

I’m reading my way through a stack of old issues of Metropolis (my sister recently handed me all the back issues from my subscription that she received after I left the country in September ’06), and this Susan Szenasy editorial from March 2007 really resonated with me.

I love having a good soak in a a good tub, a pleasure that’s become an acute craving now that I can’t even guarantee a quick shower with hot water in the shithole where I currently live. Oaklands had a pretty spectacular tub, but even that was easily surpassed by the at my friend’s flat where I house-sit from time to time. That one is pure heaven.

I agree with Szenasy’s basic requirements for a good tub: deep, made of metal rather than plastic, with a good angle for reclining. I’d add one more feature that can make or break a good bath for me: natural light. There’s something about a generous flood of natural light — even weak, midwinter British light — that completes the experience for me.

Sometimes a nice, hot bath can be so perfectly relaxing that I struggle with it. I’m so used to being tense and stressed out that I can feel my whole body rebel against the relaxing effects of a long, hot soak. In a twisted way, I have to concentrate on letting myself unwind. Sad, but true.

No public transportation!

No one warned me that there’s no public transportation over here on Christmas day. Once again, I’m forced to admit that for all the deserved complaints that you can make about the the MTA, they still run 24-7. Which means that if I were spending a quiet holiday by myself in New York, I’d still be able to go out and stroll around, have some Chinese food, and maybe catch a movie.

Instead, I’m just glad I thought far enough ahead to buy some groceries, since I don’t live within walking distance of anything to see or do today.

I’m not grumbling about the quiet Christmas part. Not only do I need a day or two alone to unwind and sleep, but holiday madness tends to whip me into a frenzy of misanthropy this time of year, so the more I can avoid it the better. I was hoping, though, to have a lazy day of wandering about town, lost in thought and grabbing some cake and coffee now and then, and taking in the sights. Instead, I’ll just putter about home and watch movies. I may even take a shower if I’m feeling festive and the hot-water seems likely to work!

At least I have a coy of this bit of genius to keep me entertained. So everyone have a great day and a happy new year, and scream real loud!

Grace Jones and Pee-Wee The Dreidel song

Liverpool!

Wow, why didn’t anyone tell me that Liverpool is such a fantastic city? When I was forced to book an emergency appointment up here to get my visa renewed, I just assumed it would be some dreary fringe town: biggish, maybe, but probably grim, and resting on the laurels of the Beatles. Why? Dunno. Instead, I’ve discovered it’s crammed with fantastic architecture and public sculpture and all sorts of grooviness.

Liverpool Waterfront

When I found out I’d need to race up here as soon as I returned from my week back in the States, I gave myself a couple of extra days just to avoid unnecessary stress and possible complications with the visa process. (That was easy and successful, but more on that later.) Instead, this has turned into a grand little mini-vacation that’s letting me decompress after the jam-packed trip to America.

My favorite site for hotel deals came through for me once again, scoring me a cheap room in the surprisingly swanky Adelphi Hotel (past its prime, perhaps, but still pretty lush). While waiting to check in, I wandered off to check out what turned out to be an astounding retrospective on Le Corbusier nearby. I knew it was in the local cathedral, but had no idea there were two of those in town. While it turns out that the exhibition was in the Catholic cathedral (which, frankly, looks like Space Mountain), I first found my way to the ginormous and magnificent Anglican cathedral, which is one of those buildings that you can enter and immediately suspect is architecturally important.

Liverpool Cathedral

(The Corbu show was great, but it’s coming to the Barbican next month, so London folks will get there chance to check it out. And they should.)

Port of Liverpool Building

After my trip to the Home Office today I wandered down to the port area — it’s all very grand, and a bunch of new buildings look like they’ll keep it from just being a well-preserved relic of its golden years — to investigate the Tate Liverpool. Another success! Their current show, The Twentieth Century: How It Looked & How It Felt, is a nice overview of themes in modern art of the past century, and featured a lot of great stuff I’d never seen before, like this luminous Picasso that kept me transfixed for a while, this Bonnard bather, and this tiny gem of a sculpture.

I have one afternoon left before I trudge back to Tooting, and I’m feeling a bit of pressure to find another extraordinary batch of stuff to view. Or maybe I should just wander and see where I end up? We shall see.

Secret World Headquarters

Does anyone have 7 or 8 million bucks they could lend me? I’ve finally found the perfect spot for my secret underground lair: a mile of tunnels deep beneath the heart of London:

tunnels.jpg

That’s room for lots of plans for world domination, guest quarters, and perhaps even a secret submarine dock, or giant burrowing tank of some sort. Actually, if “the air is dry, hot and stale,” it would be perfect for shelves full of comic books and type specimens. Who’s with me?