Choire Sicha

Saturday, October 25

A smart suit and a kipper tie, a big arrow pointing to my fly...

My ears are pleasantly ringing. The basement bathroom at the Roseland Ballroom in the Theater District was smoky like a hookah parlor. It's fantastic, big like a Turkish prison: the urinals are mounted on both sides of a 5-foot wall. Watching straight rocker boys pee face to face is just awesome, particularly if each and every one of them is smoking like James Dean.

Neil was kind enough to take me out to the Mars Volta show tonight. I'm always scared to meet people from online, figuring that they'll be techno-schnooks with no social skills. Neil is quite not so. He's fucking great. He reminds me of my friend Kirk in San Francisco (a Scorpio as well, hmm!), but Neil's Australian and super-spastic like myself. The spastic part; I'm really not Australian at all. Anyway, it's a different era now on the internet: real people have weblogs these days, and you meet them and there's nothing to be afraid of. Not that you/we weren't real or were scary back in the day. Except a bunch of you were. Ach. You know what I mean.

Get this: my cab broke down at 7:30 p.m. at 10th Avenue and 23rd Street on my way to meet Neil. Died in the middle of mad traffic. The driver said, oh this happens all the time and encouraged me -- made me -- take another cab. Easier said than done on a Friday night, but finally I hailed this minivan. Suddenly everyone impatiently waiting at the bus stop wanted to know where I was going. So a gang piled in, three odd women, strangers to each other. We were dropping the first at the Javits Convention Center. And I asked, why are you going to the Javits on a Friday night? Turns out she was going to see an evangelical healer. Right here in New York City. A Jewish fellow in fact, name of Mario... Cerulus? Something odd that we thought was Marcus Aurelius. Anyway, she'd once had a bone spur healed by an evangelist, so now she loves to go and watch the healings. The other two women and I were... astounded, and amused, and totally in love with her.

A few hours later, standing (rather sexily) ass to crotch with strangers in the psychotically loud wall-to-wall 20-year-old crowd, I realized that I've made some recent trade-offs in this life. Sure, sure, haven't we all. But I remember the immortal words of Ms. Sheryl Crow: all I want to do is have some fun. Please do remember -- and few of you will -- that I once literally raffled myself off as an internet visitor prize. If you like complex levels of irony, just enjoy this and leave it unremarked upon: nowadays if I leave some stupid snotty comment on someone's website, for instance, inevitably I'm called on some polyblend carpet over it. Maybe I liked it better when everyone just rolled their eyes and thought, oh, that fag again and ignored me.

Well: I'm sure most people still do. Good. I certainly do.

So is there some way I can treat the internet as my playground still, even while I dress for business every day? Or maybe this is true for everyone these days too. Maybe there's no high-spirited sleazy fun anymore. I don't want the reckless stupid era of the internet to end: I don't want this to become corporate rock. Because, as we always say, when you become like everyone else and give up who you are, you end up face down on the bottom of an empty motel swimming pool. You end up boring, and I can't afford to bore myself. Corporate rock still sucks.

And I wanna rhumba. I wanna cha-cha. I wanna play some miniature golf.

It's been nice, if a little unnerving, to write this. It's not particularly well-written, and I wouldn't dream of writing like this for any of my paid writing gigs. This isn't particularly deep; this is just me thinking out loud about "where I'm at," as they say in California, and by tomorrow maybe I'll have figured a couple things out. Just like back in the days when personal weblogs were sort of like public journals. Live, not well-edited, and not, perhaps, all that interesting to the random visitor.

Certainly if you look good all the time, that means you're a model. And modeling's no contribution to the world. Sorry, Naomi. Sorry Kate.

I just wanna have a grand fucking time. And I absolutely am. When I review the system status of my life, with a few notable exceptions, I am vastly satisfied. Loving every minute of it. Grateful. Incredibly thrilled. Perhaps this is all just nostalgia, or maybe I don't want to be boxed in. Maybe ambitious me just wants it all, including the confidence to take the freedom to be a mess and a dumbhead.

Oh -- Mars Volta was fucking great. It's rock and roll, baby: a mess, an unexpected mess, an accident, a delight. ⊕

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Friday, October 24

I who am about to rock salute myself.

I hope I get a black eye or something. ⊕

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Wednesday, October 22

Towards a theory of gentrification: Barbara Corcoran, Brooklyn, and smelly trees and cheeses: Over the River And Through the Sleaze: Corcoran Uncorks, my piece in this week's New York Observer.

(Psst: bonus points to those who get the obscure Sharon Olds reference.) ⊕

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Tuesday, October 21

We have met the enemy and he is us.
conde nast self-portrait

⊕

Sunday, October 19

"Did you know that only 10% of the world is English?" asks topsites on their website translation page.

What a horrorful idea. If 10% of the world was English, the planet would be a ridiculously neurasthenic place, but of course my sex life would probably be a lot more fulfilling -- or at least extant. ⊕