Category: ultrapersonal

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?

Candy store

Most of my medical stuff happens at the sexual health clinic rather than a GP’s office, so the vibe in the waiting room is always a little weird. In the town where I used to live, this meant there were lots of nervous college kids, sketchy guys, and kinda trashy girls. There are lots averted eyes and people actively trying to state at the telly instead of anything else.

In the middle of London, however, this means that everyone is almost eerily hot, and mostly gay — including the staff. It’s hard to ignore the distinctly cruisy vibe in the room. Even if folks aren’t actively cruising, they’re definitely inspecting everyone else. It’s a totally different kind of awkward, much more like my doctor’s office back in Chelsea in New York.

Is there a socially acceptable way to ask someone out at the clap clinic?

One more thing about Orton

You know, there are lots of other things that have been happening that might be better to write about (Travel and work abroad! Fetishwear spending sprees! The waxing and waning of various flirtations!) but all that stuff always takes so much time and effort that I ought to be devoting to things that actually help pay my bills. But since I’ve just started reading The Orton Diaries on today’s bus/tube/plane/train trip, I’m thinking again about a certain ex and all the similarities between him and Orton’s carefully constructed public persona that just seem too perfect to be a coincidence. And the intro of the book also reminded me that Orton’s diaries and letters are held at my old university, in the library where a certain someone also used to work.

Also, Orton is still really sexy and smart and funny. But kind of a jerk, just like a certain someone always was.

My Aim Is True

schiphol_urinal.jpg

So it wasn’t my imagination. When I was stopping to take a quick leak on my way through Schiphol Airport yesterday morning, I spotted this little thing that looked like a fly in the urinal, except it clearly wasn’t a fly. It sort of seemed like something stuck to the bowl, so I found myself trying to wash it away. I fell right into their nefarious social-engineering trap! What a chump.

Stop men from peeing on the floor. Authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they can’t help but try to hit it. Similar designs have been implemented in urinals around the world, including mini soccer goals, bulls-eyes, and urine video games (seriously). Do they work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

[From Good, via BoingBoing.]

Actually, it’s a pretty brilliant idea, and really not sinister at all. I have to admit that when I first realized it wasn’t a fly or a speck of dirt in the bowl, my immediate instinct was that it was some kind of viral ad campaign, since I’ve been getting more and more pissed off [heh.] about how hard it is to escape ads in public spaces. I’m really pleased this was an intentional attempt to get dudes to do the right thing. (Note to other airports/places with public restrooms: Please don’t try to do this with ads. The urinal cakes with ads in them are horrifying enough. Thanks.)

Prick up your what now?

Joe Orton

I’ve just finished the original book, and am now finally watching the filmed version of Prick Up Your Ears, the biography of playwright Joe Orton. I had a nagging sensation while reading the book that there was a lot about Orton that reminded me of an ex of mine with whom I had one of my more melodramatic relationships. Twice.

Gary Oldman as Joe Orton

Watching the film now, I’m convinced that Orton — and particularly Gary Oldman’s performance as Orton — fed into this guy’s personal mythology, and certainly his kit bag of posturing and affectations. He was, like Orton, a guy from a fucked-up working class background who picked himself up by his bootstraps using a fistful of natural intelligence and talent. Like Orton, he was also sexy as fuck and kind of a smug, self-satisfied cock. I don’t recall him ever mentioning Orton — I guess by the time we’d met he’d moved on to other literary obsessions. Actually, it would be more in character if he’d decided that Orton wasn’t much to think about from a literary standpoint, no matter how much he played up the same kind of romantic rebel schtick.

Growing pains

Now that I’m “back on the market” and “fresh meat” and assorted other euphemisms for single and generally prone to sluttiness, I’m discovering something new about myself. Or perhaps it’s something new about how other guys respond to me. I seem to have cruised into this phase of my life where I’m the age that young guys who are into older guys are into me. It’s not bad, and I say that as someone who’s often into older guys as well. In fact, I’m finding that I’m more attracted to younger guys than I would have guessed, at least if they’re clever and a bit wise for their years. Lately I’ve been finding myself in the company of more cute, interesting guys in their 20s than I did when I was in my 20s. I guess I should enjoy it while it lasts, if I can.

Agri-Aggro

Daisies

Anyone who’s ever done time in the suburbs should have a look at this sharp little essay from the New Yorker about the great American lawn, a totally artificial aspect of landscaping that’s turned into a bit of an environmental nightmare at this point, and has even turned into the focus of various kinds of communal bullying.

Back in Staten Island, where each yard had a postage-stamp size patch of turf that more often than not was groomed better than the average head of hair, we saw a lot of lawn-based hostility over the years. I always admired my parents for not taking the lawn too seriously. I feel vindicated to read that a lawn like ours — filled with its share of dandelions, crab grass, clover, and other “unwanted” bits of flora — is actually a more ecologically viable state of affairs. We never had a lush carpet of homogenous green like the most of our neighbors, and ours tended to be a little less tidy. The neighbors hated it.

To the neighbors on either side of it, the front lawn was practically a fetish. It was a pastime, an obligation, a status symbol. It was also never meant to be touched, except by mowers or fertilizers. Our house had two strips of grass on either side of the property, cut off from the main lawn by the driveway and the walkway up to the door we used. Over the years, those strips were annexed by the neighbors.

At first they just started tending the grass along with their own, but it got a little out of control once they started yelling at my nieces and nephews for setting foot on grass that was still part of our yard. Eventually, one of the neighbors started sending his son out early in the morning to mow our lawn when it got a little unruly. My folks never really minded, since it saved them some effort, but the underlying expectation that they ought to be towing the line always pissed me off. The other neighbors, well, they were just self-involved assholes about the whole thing.

But yeah, sign me up for the backlash.

Thriving Office

I’m in the middle of moving to a quiet little attic (“loft” in the local parlance, but that’s just confusing to people back home who know that the lofts I used to live in meant something very different) in London.

TootingThat’s less glamorous than it sounds, in many ways. For one thing, I’m down in Zone 3, in the far eastern end of Tooting. Saying I’m moving to London is a similar obfuscatory truth to saying I grew up in New York City when it was really Staten Island, which only just barely counts. For another, it’s a total wreck of a place. It’s got a great volume — basically meaning it’s a nice space if you ignore the physical stuff that actually encloses the space — and I have it all to myself and it’s relatively cheap considering that, but as for the state of the way the place was fixed up and supposedly made habitable…well, I have never seen such appalling workmanship in my life.

And I lived in the middle of the projects in Bushwick, in a loft built out by a crackhead.

It will be OK once I hound the landlord about a couple of issues and complete a short list of minor repairs. Also, I’m just enough of a bohemian art fag still to pull off some clever camouflage with color, cheap furniture, and strategically positioned knickknacks and artwork on the walls.

I’m still living in Reading, even though I’ve had the new place for a couple of weeks already. Aside from the condition of the place, I still own nothing but books and cloths anymore, so I’ve been stocking up at the Ikea in Croydon, preparing to make the move. (Incidentally, the strangest part about the Ikea in Croydon is how perfectly it feels like every other Ikea I’ve ever seen. It was hard to remember that I wasn’t actually buying my bachelor-friendly kitchen-in-a-box back in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Except for the food in the café, which — being English — was worse than I could have imagined.) I can’t really move in until I get the broadband hooked up, anyway, since I still need my home to be my office studio until I can find a proper work (and accompanying visa) situation.

What I can say is that a promising side venture is coming together as I continue my happy-go-lucky freelance career. Mr. Moore and I have joined forces to work on type and design projects with one another. Behold! — The Colour Grey! (Nothing to to see at the site yet, since we’ve been too busy with actual projects to deal with out own site yet, but give us a little time.)

The other big summer project will be getting Gina ready for a proper commercial release, hopefully before the year is out. I’m also going to speak at a conference in Cork in July, and do a little teaching in the Netherlands this August/September, which ought to be fun. Very interdisciplinary stuff, which I always love. More later on those, probably.

Wow, I really need to get out of bed and get to work now.