one man’s banlieue is another man’s faubourg

 

Miuria and I share a mutual love—of Polish cinema.

I’m in a bit of a foul mood tonight. I shouldn’t be, as I was having a 7″ party with my new turntable all workday long.  I think it’s mostly because all day I’m supposed to have gone down to Gail’s house. I spent hours packing everything up (and the stuff that my mom had left home that she wanted me to take), went out to catch the bus, and after 15 minutes of waiting realized I had no tickets or cash in my wallet.

I decided that it was a far better idea to stay home and finish the articles that my boss has been wanting me to edit for like two days.

Wednesday was insidiously fun, which is why I suppose working today was a less than stellar feeling (so little sleep!).  I went out to this modeling/art/design/gesamtkunstwerk event that Dayna invited KJ and M. to the night before.  It was in this beautiful mansion in Morningside Heights (reached by a brisk walk through the unsavory banlieue from the Ⓐ). Now this mansion obviously dated from a time when Morningside was far more of a faubourg than a banlieue, and was decorated in hilariously over-the-top postmodern fashion. There was a  pad shower curtain upstairs and a bouquet of tampon flowers in a vase downstairs. While Dayna modeled priceless dresses (one was literally made of spun 24-karat gold), KJ, M., and I wandered upstairs to appreciate the various arts hung around the house.  KJ was telling me that the designer’s proclivity was to use trash as art. However, none of the items seemed the least bit soiled. There were, inexplicably, stacks of coffee filters on each mantel. Perhaps he would voyage to the Upper East Side to find clean trash. I sadly did not see a chicken bone area rug, which would have been far more apropos to the Heights. The playful décor only helped the mansion seem more amazing.

Afterwards, we all hopped the ① downtown. KJ took her leave of us at 14th Street, as she looked incredibly tired.  apparently she had met some people at Disco Down the night before and partied with them all night. Dayna, M. and I continued on to Houston on our way to R Bar, where we knew Kelly was working.

On the way, M. told us about how he was loudly claiming during the party to be the inheritor of the Perrier fortune, which reminded me of the hilarious e-mail exchanges I had with Sarah about being English gentlefolk.  I was supposed to go to Africa couple of years ago but it all fell apart when the government imploded. I’m just going to present these letters because I think their comedy value is self-evident.

Dear Sarah,

[...] I’m going to have to pretend I’m British and it’s 1877 and enjoy all the exploitation :P. Tourism is pretty much the only think keeping their economy afloat, so they can’t really be exploited much more than they have been by Mugabe (I don’t know if you’ve read about his land redistribution policies).

Maybe you could come down to San Francisco and we could do the transcontinental leg together too? I’ll mail you when the tour company lady gets back to me and we can collaborate on creating the ultimate Africa extravaganza.

Also, we totally need to make fake british explorer names!

—J.R. Bostwick, Esq.

 

Dear Mr. Bostwick,

We need stupid hats and khaki shorts… and you need a big handle bar moustache. And we have to say pip pip and cheerio at every opportunity.

I would love to do the san fransisco bit with you too, does the 1299 include the transcontinental flights? Is it possible for your travel person to book my flight with my card at the same time? I know it seems a little like I don’t want to take responsibility for my plans, but I don’t want to fuck it up and end up in Brazil or something. At least, not unless we both get stranded in Bazil together. Which would be funny.

In order to have the perfect british explorer name, in my opinion, one needs two first initials, and an archaic multi-syllabic last name that evokes a feeling of imperial monarchy. Plus a totally useless add on, like esquire.

Amanda told me not to bring back malaria or aids.

I guess we will have to come up with something more creative as a souvenir for her.

[...]

I am considering the lady Mrs Horatio R Crittendon. Because no self respecting english woman would be caught dead in darkest africa without her husband. And no husband would bring his wife unless there were an awful lot of money being wasted on the trip already. Though where mine is, I haven’t the faintest notion.

— Lady Mrs. Horatio R. Crittendon

I miss Sarah. Facebook tells me she had a baby. Hmm. So we ended up at R Bar, chatted with Kelly (not my cousin) for a while at the door, and settled in at the bar. There was popcorn and a dizzying variety of flavors to put on said popcorn, so we took to experimenting. Vance and a few more of Alexandra’s clique were there, and we had a freewheeling discussion that went everywhere from Picard being the ultimate embodiment of truth and justice (certainly, yes) to our future career goals of reclining on chaise lounges in spun-gold dresses.

Mysteriously, it took absolutely forever to get home. M. and I walked around a little bit, going to Lit for a second and then Motor City, but everything was kind of dying down. I got into the Essex Ⓕ stop, and waited for a train for almost an hour. Maryanne had a good nickname for the Ⓕ, she called it the “if.”

I was in no real hurry to get home, so I sauntered down forty-first, observing the trash collectors taking bag after bag of garbage piled in front of the skyscrapers. Luckily, I had my Economist with me. I think by the time I got home at around 4 a.m. I’d read every single article down to the most dry.  I’m even updated on Cuba’s new taxation structure. I also didn’t know that there was a major attack in Afghanistan last week. I like subscribing to news organizations that have their eye a little more attuned to the Continent because it’s way closer to their back yard.

Tuesday was absolute fun. It could have been because I was drinking Stoli on the rocks. It also could have been because the bartender gave me a double for wearing my nice outfit. I was feeling no pain, and ended up being introduced (I think it’s the third time) to Jess. During the night, M. took some hilarious photos (they are on Facebook).

Published:
September 22, 2011 – 6:02 pm
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By A.
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Inscripción en cualquier sepulcro

Dada signage courtesy of the MTA

Dada signage courtesy of the MTA

I know I haven’t been writing in here almost all. I just got home, and it’s about 6 AM. I’m at the point where I ask myself if staying up one more hour will matter and can’t help but conclude that it won’t matter in the slightest.

Met M’s boyfriend Taylor at Penn Station. We went to Williamsburg and got lox at Bagelsmith. Tried to go to the New York Blue Bottle, but it was closed (at 7pm no less!).I horrified the clerk by declaring that the San Francisco one is better.  Went to Academy Records on N. 6th, made some great finds. The first (maybe second?) Acrylics EP. Slint’s Spiderland on vinyl.

Headed back into the city, got coffee at 71 Irving (and one of their delicious green tea lemon cookies). Made Taylor read “And Lead Me Not Into Penn Station.”

Walked down towards M’s theater on Bond Street, made the mistake of wandering into St. Mark’s Books. According to the Village Voice, St. Mark’s (my favorite bookstore in the city by far) was in danger of being shut down. I finally gave in and bought that beautiful edition of Borges’ Selected Poems, along with the latest BUTT magazine. It had a nudie shot of Seth Bogart from Hunx and his Punx. I can’t tell the story here, but I have inside info that Mr. Bogart is an absolute libertine. It’s not an act.

To my absolute delight, I noticed that there was a new printing of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (sp?)’s novel Dictee. Apparently the Berkeley university press reprinted it. A slim paperback, it was marked at $28. Rare indeed. Upon checkout, I asked the clerk if the bookstore was going to close. “Maybe,” he said after a minute or so of silence. “You know, things come, things go. Change. That sort of thing.” I signed my credit card receipt and left.

Taylor and I wandered down Bowery to the theater, then rendezvoused with Yevgeny and KJ to see the timeless classic Escape from L.A. It was certainly—something. Kurt Russell is many things, but a thespian he is not. But still, it is a parade of cult actors: Bruce Campbell as a mad Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Pam Grier as a post-op tranny crime lord. It certainly left me speechless. KJ, M., Taylor, and I went to The Bean, somehow thinking it would still be open. We called friends, to no avail, and pondered our options. To the uninitiated, Friday is the absolute worst in terms of nights to go out. People are peeing on sidewalks, the Jersey/Westchester/Long Island sluts are out in force, and every bar is crowded to capacity.

We decided to go down to Sugar, this all-night diner/bakery on Houston. We had a great conversation about everything from The Vagina Monologues to Ann Coulter. My loyal readers (dare I use the plural?), I just ordered a bona fide USB microphone. Dragon Dictate for Mac works wonderfully, it’s just that this stupid wireless mic sucks. When it’s all set up, it works admirably. However, there’s the times it runs out of juice and it has to be recharged for three hours. There’s the times that Bluetooth interference makes it unusable. In short: fuck wireless.

Oh, did I mention I went to the 50th Anniversary screening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s at Alice Tully Hall (organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center)? Julie Andrews was there and gave a talk before the film. She was married to Blake Edwards, the director, for many years. I was totally starstruck by Miss Andrews. As a child, I watched The Sound of Music countless times. She was so dignified and eloquent. Too bad she can’t sing any more.

I wanted to go to Occupy Wall Street tomorrow, but I just got home and it’s 6am. There is a 99.9% chance that I will wake up at 3pm and read about it on Hacker News.

I miss writing. I miss talking to you, whoever the you is. Sometimes it feels like it’s just me. And that’s all right.

I found an interesting Borges quote to give insight on my earlier work. It’s the last line of the the preface to the revised edition of his first book of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires.

“En aquel tiempo, buscaba los atardeceres, los arrabales, y la desdicha; ahora, las mañanas, el centro y la serenidad.” ["At the time, I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace."]

I’m not sure if the latter is true, but Borges was far, far older when he was revising these works. Obras Completas, which ostensibly contained this preface, was published in 1969, when he was 68 years old. Perhaps if I live to the ripe old age of 68 I will also seek mornings, the center of town, and peace.

I also flipped through a cheap edition of Joan Didion’s diaries. She wrote down this quote from Kirkegaard’s journal that I thought was very applicable to Taylor’s lackadaisical approach to life. Perhaps I’ll go back and get it, but I have a huge stack of books I bought in Portland that are collecting dust. I really want to dig into this edition of Ionesco plays, but I have two more stories in that wretched Canterbury Tales and it’s over. Talk about dull. At one point I realized that I preferred Joyce to Chaucer. That is the ultimate indictment.

My GRE classes are over now, so I think I’ll be home more. Perhaps. Oh, also, the coffee shop that Alexandra works at is going to get shut down and replaced by a fucking Starbucks. (Let’s face it, their coffee was terrible, but the espresso and baked goods were fantastic. Also, it had copious seating, outlets, and nice big windows. I helped put back up the painting in the background of the picture in the New York Times article after someone accidentally knocked it down. At least my current favorite coffee shop, Café Mocha (right off St. Mark’s Place) is unscathed. You know, it’s kind of weird. I used to spend almost all my time in the West Village (the nexus was the Film Forum and IFC), but I find myself in the East Village way more these days. It’s kind of nice that the Second Avenue corridor is a public transit dead zone, which makes it more of a nexus for locals (none of these generalizations apply on weekends, sadly). One time M. and I went to Metropolitan, hoping that if we went out into the boroughs the terrible crowds wouldn’t be so bad. Not true. There was barely any L service, yet every table was crowded.

I wish I could afford to live in the East Village. Alexandra’s new place is fantastically located, with only a couple of blocks between it and Bedlam. It would be like living above Max Fish in the Seventies. Mario told me about this independent film he saw one time from the Sixties where this activist walked around the Mission and downtown, describing in detail how the condo-ification was changing the face of the city. That same activist wouldn’t recognize the Westfield-saturated, sanitized downtown and ultra-upscale Mission that exists now.

I’ve been living here going on three years now, and a lot of my favorite watering holes are gone. For one, Don Hill’s (it was a shithole, but I had some great memories there). The city is changing, and not necessarily in a good way. It seems so odd to say this, but there are eight Starbucks per every square mile of Manhattan. Doesn’t that sound like some statistic from 2001? Who seriously still goes to Starbucks in a city with thriving independent coffee outlets? Perhaps the suit crowd. Who knows.

Anyway, it’s time for me to hit the hay.

Published:
September 17, 2011 – 2:48 am
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By A.
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beware of irene

It’s about 10 PM, and if you didn’t know that a massive hurricane was bearing down on the New York City area, you could rest easy. Right now, there is no wind. The kittens were gamboling in the back yard this afternoon. Today is almost the acme of a summer day. If only it weren’t for the mosquitoes, I could have a nice day outside writing in the backyard.

My cousin with the beachfront condo in Wildwood evacuated to her other house far inland in North Jersey, and I assume my aunt and the kids have gone somewhere safe as well. We haven’t been able to reach them, but I doubt they would stay at home when ordered to leave. They probably are staying with the in-laws who live somewhere in the endless suburbs of South Jersey.

I was supposed to go to see Showgirls tonight with Jason, but I am a bit wary about trusting transportation 8 hours before Bloomberg says he’s going to shut it all down. I also trust Bloomberg 10 times as much as I trust whoever is in charge of New Jersey transit. The transit clusterfucks this winter have evinced that agency’s tendency to shut things down for no reason, with no notice.

There is no ombudsman for NJT, it just does whatever it’s going to do and that’s that. I think I might end up going a little stir crazy by the end of this ordeal. We have plenty of supplies though, so short of the house sliding off the mountain I think we’ll be fine. I feel like yesterday was the germination of MSM mania, but once this thing makes landfall in NYC every news outlet will be about PANIC!

Tomorrow the panic will probably still be inchoate, but the “HOLY CRAP STUFF IS FLYING AROUND” stage won’t be far behind. I think I’m going to be boring and go upstairs to read Chaucer. I want to play some Minecraft, but my wrists have really been killing me this week.

I’ve been doing vocabulary drills nearly constantly. I need the highest score possible. I’m using two GRE vocab apps on my iPad, with a combined 1,500 word bank. I also have some Princeton Review flashcards, but I’m sure the GRE makers take that into account. Once I plow through those, I’m going to be hitting the interwebs to find any list of GRE words I can. Vocabulary is the secret to not being stumped on this test, and I am going to kick ass. You can’t equivocate on the GRE. Either you know the answer choice words or you don’t.

Time to put on Music for Men and dig into some medieval doggerel.

Published:
August 26, 2011 – 6:26 pm
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By A.
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a new sound

I realized I was sick of all the albums I was listening to, so I downloaded a bunch of classics tonight: Bauhaus, Slint, Gossip, Bikini Kill. Things that should have been in my library but for some reason were not.

Watched the Bloomberg announcement about the hurricane. Apparently there will be no subway/rail/anything service starting as soon as Saturday morning. Looks like I’m going to get a ton of painting done!

I got a great idea for a big new one, which means I’ll be hitting up Pearl or Utrecht sometime next week to pick up a big enough canvas to accomplish it. In the interim, I thought of a good idea for this long canvas I got.

Ok, just finished painting. It’s 4:30 a.m. and I’m not tired. I need to try to sleep. Time to quaff a glass of water and hit the hay.

Published:
August 26, 2011 – 12:34 am
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By A.
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walk on into the night

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A lighthouse we visited in Maine.

I have so much work to do tonight, but of course I’m on here. I had my first sort of existential crisis relating to the GRE. Our class went a bit longer than it should have, and I found myself walking up Bowery with absolutely nothing planned. As I was walking, a friend called me and I decided to walk to West 4th instead of taking the R at 8th Street.  On the bus, I felt this impending doom. Perhaps it’s because I’m not quite used to sitting through a 3-hour class  (with  about an hour of work including videos before and after), but I was completely overwhelmed.

Add to that an e-mail from my boss telling me that I need to finish a whole bunch of items by tomorrow, and I was kind of freaking out. I’m still not really sure how I’m going to get all this done. My wrists have really been acting up this week, which makes me really nervous about the writing portion of the GRE.

Still, this class is giving me invaluable information about what will actually be on the test. I just need to be esurient for knowledge, and  hopefully I will get an excellent score. Vocabulary, paradoxically enough, is proving to be one of my largest stumbling blocks. I find it incredibly difficult to memorize vocabulary words from lists or cards. I’m going to have to write some stories and incorporate those words into them. I’ve always wanted to make a New York-esque retelling of Genesis as a parable of the gentrification of Williamsburg.

In the beginning there was Hedge Fund Dad. He created the Aeroplane Over the Sea and The Suburbs, He Turned on the Bright Lights and created the Rio that separates the Pavement. He formed Sun, Must Be The Moon, and Stars. He created the Deerhoof and the Deerhunter.

Okay, that’s not really helping, although I still love the idea of the project. Oh my god, it’s already 1 a.m. and I have gotten nothing done. FML.

PS: Like the new theme? I never really liked the old one, but it worked. This one actually shows the comments, for one!

UPDATE: Instead of doing any work, I made the archives page AWESOME. AND search works! Take that, indolence!

Published:
August 25, 2011 – 9:11 pm
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By A.
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a New England interlude and some drag

I’m back!

This won’t be terribly long, as I have to preserve my wrists not hurting. Yevgeny, Brian (did I mention Brian?) and I took a little three-day trip up to Maine. We were staying in Portland, but made day trips to Camden, ME and Kennebunkport, ME  (home of the Bushes). I want to write something longer about what Maine is like, but this whole GRE prep thing is eating up all my free time.

I put off reading real literature and writing so that I can read medieval drivel (yes, I’m halfway through the Tales) and take endless vocabulary drills. Oh, Kaplan. I start the first of my month-long prep course on Tuesday ($1,200 later, I’d better get a stellar score).

Tonight was rather fun. Went out with Yevgeny and saw Modern Times at this place uptown called Symphony Space (right next to the 96th 1 train stop) that I’d never been to. We hit up Magnolia for dessert, then I met up with Michael. We went with a friend of his to this drag night at Stonewall, which really isn’t my thing (I’ve seen enough drag shows for ten lifetimes), but his friend’s friend was performing. Also, you don’t fuck with drag queen MCs, so of course we had to stay for the duration. FYI, I have every shitty fag song stuck in my head right now. Ugh.

Saturday was a total disaster. I was supposed to see Digitalism (and paid $40 for the privilege), but after waiting for three hours I saw a sign that said they weren’t going to be on until midnight. I was like “fuck this” and took the R down to Michael’s (Taylor was over) where we played MadTV videos on YouTube and played iPad games. On my trip back to the Port Authority, some dude legit puked all over the end of the car. That made my night. I even made an infographic.

I feel bad for missing Digitalism, but I would have been surrounded by a bunch of drunk Westchester and Jersey sluts who were (SERIOUSLY) fifteen. A big group of them were bragging about how they shouldn’t even have gotten in. When I was fifteen, my fun thing to do was to dial in to my best friend’s computer (TCP/IP, bitches) and play WarPath.

Please, please, please, Alexis. Don’t be like those sluts. Don’t be suburban. Don’t be a product. I feel like I am powerless to stop  the tide of banality that is drowning our whole society. Have a mind! Have thoughts! Don’t just be another suburban whorebag in Chucks and booty shorts who think JDH and Dave P are hip.

But really, it is all about hip. Don’t buy regular capitalism, buy hip capitalism. For all of my cynical rejoinders to their parents’ bland obsessions, I’m just buying a different product than regular capitalism. That’s the ultra-cynical but tacit thesis of The Conquest of Cool. But I will be there, doing all the things for her that I didn’t get to do. I’ll take her to the Kelly Clarkson concert at MSG. I’ll take her to Lady Gaga. I’ll do that because I love her. But there needs to be that moment where we realize we’re being sold. Edifices like Terminal 5 and Webster Hall are not for adult, hip people. They are for young, suburban people who don’t know any better (and probably still won’t in 20 years). Hell, my aunt says that she used to go to Webster Hall when she was young. She was probably one of those sluts hobbling down 4th Avenue desperately hailing cabs.

I am supercilious about nightlife. There are only a few acceptable parties in the city. Most of it is awful. I don’t even know if this is about nightlife. I think it’s about instilling the fact that cities (especially New York) are not simply a Disneyland of bars that never close. Cities should be taken seriously. They should not be entered on stilettos in a dress that one’s coochie is about to fall out of.

Well, we’ll see.

I feel totally muzzled on here still, as a momentous incident happened which I don’t think I will talk about here for a long time. Or not. Hmm.

While in Portland I met this guy from Belgium, and right now we’re chatting on Facebook about Belgian and New York bands. That’s the thing about getting home early—you get faked out into thinking you have time to blog, to chat, etc.

I really must get to sleep soon, or it will be morning.

I do love a man who knows what the EFSF is and says “Angela Merkel” in the Continental pronunciation. Pillow talk about the peripheral Eurozone economies’ increasing bond yields, plz? I just like smart people. Informed people. People who don’t jump on the latest ridiculous CNN bullshit bandwagon. I had some wonderful conversations with Brian about, well, everything on our trip. I love talking with him. Ok. Sleep. Now.

Published:
August 22, 2011 – 12:57 am
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By A.
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Saturday comes, Sunday comes, we go

Let’s recap.

I ended up wasting most of my night on Minecraft. I made this huge glass-topped bunker to protect my farm, and then I discovered I had a ton of wheat stowed away in the second house I built. I abandoned that and decided that I wanted to somehow get to the other side of the mountain in the valley I’m living in (in-game). There’s two ways to do that. I could either build a tunnel from one side to the other, or I could build a staircase up to the top of the mountain. (I did both.)

Huh, I’ve never actually posted photos of my Minecraft universe. I can’t fully take credit for how awesome the seed for this world is, I got it from this website that has awesome seed numbers for worlds. Still, I built a lot of things here.

 

Here's the mountain that's over my valley. I have a house at the top.

The entrance to my main house at the valley floor. It's my first hideout from creatures, with a massive mine underneath. You can see my staircase to the top of the unexplored mountain to the right.

My second is up at the house at the top of the north mountain.

View from the window from the mountain house

View from the roof of the mountain house

View from the roof of the mountain house, looking towards the sea

 

I’m very curious as to what’s on the other side of the mountain I’ve been living in since I started the game, so I’ve begun to dig a tunnel that will hopefully end up on the other side of the mountain.

It might take a long time to reach the other side.

I’ve also been reading this anthology called That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. It has such a panoply of queer voices all calling for the kind of change that doesn’t benefit well-to-do whites. There are just so many wonderful, revolutionary sentiments in here that jibe very well with my views, but I want to relate a few here.

Willful participation in U.S. imperialism is crucial to the larger goal of assimilation, as the holy trinity of marriage, military service, and adoption has become the central preoccupation of a gay movement centered more on obtaining straight privilege than challenging power. [ —Matt Bernstein Sycamore, the editor of the anthology]

Another major point of the anthology is that transgender people have been completely left out of the movement for equal rights. One of the writers called it the GLBfakeT movement. It’s totally true.

In one of the sections, which is an interview with Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman who organized the first gay and lesbian experimental film festival (which showed Paris is Burning to its first audience), one of them casually remarked “There is no community.”

Now gay people identify with the power structure that they’re working for. And that identification is a lot stronger than their relationship to each other. So, therefore, there’s no community.

So true. Yet it isn’t all gloom and doom. There were some moments of levity, like in Charlie Anders’ essay “Choice Cuts.”

The problem is that I don’t even know how to start telling you what the problem is. It’s bigger than the one that got away. Even bigger than the one you had last night at Blow Buddies.

The reference to the Powerhouse’s Sunday night fête made me chortle. It’s really interesting reading these stories, most of which were written far in advance of 2004, when the book was published. I’m sure the extremely radical authors of these essays would shake their heads at the passing of the gay marriage bill in New York. Before reading this anthology, I just couldn’t quite articulate why it rankled me so much. Now I know: rich, white gays want more privileges.  Why can’t we focus our energies on things that help the people who are actually at risk in our society?

Because there is no one to speak for them. The poor have no voice in our society, gay or otherwise.

I didn’t want to stay up this late, but it’s almost 5 AM. I read the anthology for an hour or so, then snuggled into bed, but sleep just wouldn’t come. I’m on a really terrible sleep schedule this week. It’s got to end.

I’m going to go up and try to sleep again.

Published:
August 8, 2011 – 12:45 am
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By A.
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the ides of nothingness

So it’s Sunday. I have decided to go nowhere today. To do nothing.

I just sorted through my records and put on Let’s Dance. It’s sort of a Bowie afternoon. I’m also trying out this writing mode in WordPress that’s like WriteRoom. You just write in a big blank window. It’s very freeing. I could even put Chrome in fullscreen and have a completely Zen writing experience.

Jason was saying to me last night and he was saying that I really should write a novel. I think he’s right. I’m barely using my writing abilities at all since I graduated, and they will eventually begin to atrophy.

I have all of these great little snippets of settings, proto-characters based on people I’ve met, and wonderful turns of the phrase harvested from my friends. However, I just can’t think of a good overarching plot.

I hate voice recognition during the summer because I can’t have the fan on (it creates static on the mic). I can’t write like this. Perhaps I’ll go upstairs and turn on the air conditioning.

That seems like an especially wonderful idea, as Mr. Big has shown up at my window and is plaintively meowing. I think I’ll go out on the porch and work on Gravity’s Rainbow. I left my Horrors record at a friend’s, so I feel like I can’t listen to anything but Primary Colors. I’ve also become obsessed with this Spanish violinist/composer Pablo de Sarasate. I downloaded his collected works, which has some fantastic performances.

I did have some other ideas for some kind of amusing projects using web scrapers, but I’d have to learn Ruby. I guess I need to learn it at some point anyway.

Published:
August 7, 2011 – 4:12 pm
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By A.
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I caught a glimpse and now it haunts me

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New York.

Nightlife.

I’ve been going out far, far too much.

But really, what else is there to do?

Cuddle up on the couch and watch primetime television for the rest of my life?

I’d rather be in the box.

I can’t catch you up from then to now in prose. We’re going on that other thing, the thing I’m not good at. But bear with me. I had a week of rather endless partying.

Tuesday. Work, Disco Down.

Wednesday. Work, rooftop party at KJ’s in Ridgewood. iPad SimCity marathon. Fall asleep on roof. Wake up in THE BLAZING HOT SUN. Groggy. Thirsty as all hell. Trekking to the L. Breakfast at Good Stuff Diner on 14th.

Thursday. Work, then wandering around Soho. Got some snap shirts at AllSaints. Then Metronomy at Pier 51 with KJ. Saw a couple of scene people, but was too far into the crowd to wave. Amazing show. Taylor came out, then I met this girl Sandy (sp?). We all had diner at Good Stuff (the same place we’d had breakfast, for unity), with us all totally dehydrated and exhausted from waiting for the concert in the heat. Sandy assured us that we were going to have the most amazing time ever, but she ended up losing her ID and then taking a cab back to Staten Island. We walked to Apotheke, and it was closed. Got the fuck out of Chinatown.

Friday. Work, then rode into the city with my mom and Lisa. They were going to see some kind of jazz thing in Midtown (ugh), but I walked down to Penn Station to meet Michael and his friend Riley Kilo. We ended up wandering into this Korean restaurant that looked like an Apple store that had mated with an IKEA. The food, while a bit pricy, was superb. We wandered down to Best Buy looking for some kind of FireWire accessory for Riley before realizing that Best Buy is a glorified gadget store with no actual computer accessories. Before calling it a night, we went over to Nowhere on 14th Street. I’d been in there briefly, but mostly just to see if I could ask the bartenders if it was named after the eponymous Gregg Araki movie.

We had a few drinks, then in the middle of a conversation about Warhol (what else is there to talk about ever?) this drunk guy tried to hit on one or both of us. I mean, I don’t make a habit of chatting up strangers, but, if you’re going to try to woo someone, wouldn’t you think of at least one thing to say to the target of your affections? They were either absolutely drunk or on drugs. No one can be that boring. Or perhaps it was just that he was from Miami. Hmm.

Saturday. Farewell dinner for Josh at that place on First Ave with the four Indian places that are all trying to pull you in to one of them. Incredibly busy lit-up ceiling with chiles galore. Back to Alexandra’s place, then I had to head out to meet Jason for The Room. There were a ton of Tisch people there, which ruined the vibe. Still, we got to scream obscenities at the screen and pelt it with spoons (don’t ask).

Did I mention Jason turned over a new leaf and now goes to bars? While I am a bit miffed that it took Brian’s cajoling to actually get it off the ground (I mean, who can say no to that man? He has the charisma of a Kennedy.), we went and hit up Eastern Bloc after the filum. In a supreme moment of role reversal, having my contacts in all night had ended up giving me a whopper of a headache, and I had to go home.

Sunday. Movie marathon at Brian’s house in Jackson Heights, with a visit to the diner for Greek delicacies and iced coffees. Our marathon included Samurai Cop, the worst and also most hilarious movie I’ve seen in a long time, and Choose Me, this odd 1984 comedy/drama with Genevieve Bujold. While there, I got invited to go with the two of them to Portland, Maine next week. It should be quite hilarious, as Brian and me are the only ones who can drive. Totally Driving Miss Daisy. In case there was any ambiguity, Jason is Miss Daisy. As he eloquently put it, “Just when you think I’m not dainty enough, I get daintier.”

Changing gears.

My mom’s violin teacher’s son plays in the New York Philharmonic, and was having a concert at this tiny liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. For some reason, my mom wanted to go. She went down to the local Mervyn’s-esque store across the street but didn’t find anything, so I suggested we hop the ferry to the 34th Street Macy’s. I didn’t think she’d bite at first, but she liked the idea. We parked at the Port Imperial terminal and boarded the ferry.

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It took about three hours, but she ended up finding the perfect blouse and sweater. The next day, we drove down there and saw the performance. She even got a picture with him.

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It was a really fun drive. I navigated via GPS, and my mom drove. We even went to this Asian fusion place in Bryn Athn, PA that was good. I mean, I played it safe and got chicken curry, but it was spicy and delicious.

After we got back from Pennsylvania, I went out. At one point we were at this loft party somewhere below Canal. There was no booze and the place looked like it was halfway constructed, but I played this random guy at pool (he was a better player than me, but knocked in the 8 ball). Ah, that was the night of Kelly’s birthday party. It started at R Bar, where I ran into Santiago, who was rather drunk. We danced to Metric, everyone was swapping their shirts, and I kept trying to get the attention of the dipsy doodle waitress that seemed way more interested in chatting with Bruce than taking any drink orders. Oddly enough, Michael and I ended up talking the most to Zach, this guy that seems to have some kind of romantic connection to Kelly. We’d never really talked to him much at Disco Down, but since we were in an empty bar we bonded over a bunch of things. We swapped numbers and all that jazz too. I have no idea what to invite him to though. Hmm.

On Friday night, Jason and I saw this horrible, horrible, horrible movie called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. We were expecting something funny, but it was absolutely terrible. It was essentially a student film that IFC had somehow bought the rights to. Don’t even ask. Here’s Jason scoffing at a Spiderman 3 poster hung up in the upstairs lobby of IFC.

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We did end up befriending this geeky sort of guy who also saw the movie with us, who supposedly was going to add Jason on Facebook.

I also got Skying on vinyl that day. Can’t wait to listen to that. I also got an LP of James Joyce reading from Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses, which amusingly came from the Chico State Public Library. I was like “Aww, the universe is making me think of Molly.”

Which brings us to tonight.

After the debacle of Dead Hooker in a Trunk, Jason and I were rather burned out on movies. We convened at Bedlam on Avenue C, where a musically precocious bartender proceeded to play an all-The Knife playlist (to my delight). Turns out he is also from Sacramento, and he lived on the grid for like six years. He also would go to Aunt Charlie’s in the Tenderloin when he lived in San Francisco. The bar was totally empty, so he was chatting us up.

We got hungry and headed over to Cafe Mocha on First. I’d always had coffee and desserts at Cafe Mocha, but we tried the food a couple of days before and were blown away. My favorite restaurant, French Roast, has been declining in quality over the last six months, and we have been looking for a replacement. We actually ended up meeting the cook the first time we ate there. He was this big, affable guy from Dallas who drove down from Spanish Harlem every day to cook there. When we went back today, we were regaling the two waitresses about Dead Hooker in a Trunk and how it was far, far worse than the uninspired watermelon salad that we hadn’t cared for on our last visit.

We hit up Eastern Bloc.

Bedlam.

Boiler Room.

Even checked to see if Kelly was at R Bar, but all three other bars were unbearably crowded.

We spent most of our night at Eastern Bloc. There was this hot mess of a guy who was passed out with his fly down in the bar. People tried to get him into a cab, but he just flopped out and started lurching down Avenue A like a ragdoll. I stood against the wall smoking in the light drizzle as a few of the fellow bargoers marveled about how fantastically trashed the guy was. I ended up meeting some kind of party promoter who turned out to be from Fort Lee (the town above mine in Jersey). He even chuckled at my Fort Ree joke (Fort Lee is heavily Korean). He told me all about the date that he’d been on that night with some guy that he’d been seeing for a while, which helped to pass the time as Jason ostensibly chatted up some of the guys inside. He said he partied at this one specific place on Tuesdays, so I might go there and schmooze for no reason next week.

Got home, started writing this, and now it’s 5:48 a.m.

Sleep.

Published:
August 7, 2011 – 1:38 am
Author:
By A.
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a martini built for two (levels of reality)

So my voice recognition program got a gigantic update today. Previous versions of the program had what was called the “Golden rule,” which meant that you could only dictate. No editing with the keyboard and mouse was allowed, or it would destroy the application’s map of your document.

They ditched that annoying rule, thankfully. I’m not sure if it’s just that I’m running it on Lion, which supposedly is 100% 64-bit, but accuracy is fantastic.

And, as usual, I don’t really have much talk about. Oh wait.

On Saturday, I went out to see this rather interesting Fassbinder movie called World on a Wire. I got there just as the movie was starting, waved to Brian and Alex, said hi to Jason, and settled in for the three-hour extravaganza.

SPOILER ALERT

I’m not sure if I want to say the movie is amazing, because I feel like that sends the wrong message. It’s sort of amazing in the way that Barbarella is amazing: an overdose of big tits, faux fur and space-age kitsch. Both have a tenuous sci-fi plot that can be related in a couple of sentences to serve as the gossamer thread that holds all the exotic sets together.

Barbarella is about a hot babe who screws her way around the galaxy, ostensibly to destroy Durand Durand, who is building a doomsday device.

World on a Wire is about a man who creates a virtual reality world and later discovers that his world is a virtual reality simulation.

You see? The plots aren’t exactly why we watch these kind of movies, but the fantastical universe that they create often more than makes up for the simplistic plots. The most memorable aspect of World on a Wire is set after scintillating set. It’s ultra 70s modernist, which still looks remarkably high-tech. Still, after about an hour and a half you may begin to wonder why the movie is still going on. Plot is the only excuse for a movie being 3 hours long, and there really isn’t much going on after the intermission.

Also, the main weirdness, for lack of a better term, is that the main character can’t come to terms with the fact that he’s a simulation. Perhaps I’m just strange, but if I found out that I was a personality unit plugged into a massive server farm built to study consumer behavior, I don’t think I’d mind too much. In fact, finding that out would be kind of freeing. I think I’d have much more of an interest to travel, knowing that someone had dutifully programmed the whole world in for me. I wouldn’t go on some kind of quixotic crusade to prove that the world was a fantasy.

My main complaint about the movie was that it was pretty bland intellectually. It never got past the “Nooooo! This world isn’t real!” phase to the far more interesting “But what makes things truly real?” phase. Even when the main character supposedly gets transformed into the body of a real guy, his way of making sure that he’s in the real world is feeling the drapes. Now, perhaps the part about the main character being an expert in the sights and smells of drapes ended up on the cutting room floor, but I think the film would’ve greatly benefited from a “but is he really outside of Simulacron?” ending. David Cronenburg handled it far better in eXistenZ, where after coming out of the virtual reality world Ted Pikul is frantically feeling chairs and smelling the air. He’s horrified by everything because it doesn’t “feel right.” What would something like kissing feel like in the real world versus a synthetic one? We never even are posed these rather obvious questions in Man on a Wire.

However, speaking of things that are obvious, Fassbinder hams up references to the characters’ being “caged.” For one, there’s the increasingly tedious (but sometimes brilliant) shots of characters through mirrors and reflections. It’s great when it unifies characters on screen who are not actually facing each other in the scene; however, it’s terrible when it functions as a needless distortion (in one scene, the main characters talking to his boss, who is obscured behind a big glass sculpture on the boss’s desk). Wouldn’t you crane your neck to see your boss’s actual face or perhaps comment on the fact that you can’t see him? It becomes unbearable when we are treated to a very long sequence where one of the main characters is talking to another through a fishtank. Later, as if we still didn’t understand the symbolism, when the character mysteriously drowns himself in a car, there’s a shot of a fish swimming by. Whoa, that’s like, deep, man.

If we’re really thinking about this, are the characters in Simulacron (the computer simulation of reality) actually caged or controlled? At one point, the main character’s bosomy secretary talks about the personality units (i.e. simulated people) in Simulacron as the scientists’ “puppets.” I mean, the personality units certainly have free will, as the whole point of the simulation is to detect things like future demand for certain products. Those things result from the aggregate free will of all the participants. The world of Simulacron seemed pretty vast. Do we feel “trapped” on Earth because we can’t leave the Earth at will and fly around in space? I think not. All the puppetry and cage metaphors are an insult to the reader’s intelligence. No one is a puppet, and no one is caged.

Regarding the writing, there are a number of lines in the film that just bomb. There’s this one hilarious lead balloon of a line that happens is this doctor is about to leave the room and declares that he is a doctor and that his patients are the number one thing for him. At that point in the film, I leaned over and whispered the equally random “You’re my favorite customer!” line from The Room to Jason, and he chuckled.

Despite my sniping at the “substance” of the film, it isn’t a chore to watch. Perhaps it’s because it was shown with an intermission, but the film winds from absurd set to absurd set, rarely pausing for a moment of introspection before the next cut. There are a few shots that stretch on too long, which I didn’t mind all too much because I got to look longer at the fantastical hypermodern sets and the actresses who seem to do little other than stare blankly into space while exhibiting their décolletage. All in all, there are worse things to watch for three hours. It’s effervescent, cotton candy modernist kitsch in a sci-fi wrapper. Just make sure to brush your teeth afterwards.

Published:
July 25, 2011 – 9:31 pm
Author:
By A.
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