East Village September 2007.

Right about now is my 15th anniversary with New York City. Cheers.


Tompkins Square Hummer.

11th Street Bummer.

Bombardment Of The Senses Part II

I would like to have Joan over for Coronas and taco salad. What would she make of my neighborhood, my building? Would it be enough for her that it is a not-cheap and somewhat coveted locale? Do the words "a great deal...for Manhattan" mean anything to Joan? Could her sense-bombardment cease long enough for her to utter her objections?

The super's assistant, Jacob, who lives in the basement boiler-suite, does the lobby decor at my place. Next to the elevator is "Paisley Ass Crack":




There is no shortage of art, cheesy or otherwise, that makes use of the female form. However, what sets Paisley Ass Crack apart is the ass crack, and the fact that it is paisley. Namely, the ass crack is indisputably the focus and the star of the composition as a whole, and it seems to be an exceptionally lengthy, capacious crack. It could be a spare purse. And, it is paisley. So: why so capacious, why so front and center, and why so paisley are the prominent questions for me there.

To me, Paisley Ass Crack represents the point of compromise between Jacob's design tendencies and what my neighbors and I can bear to glimpse several times a day. Because after several months no one has taken down Paisley Ass Crack. Everything else is gone, including the four foot square Siemens poster featuring a telecommuting family under that cheesy double-vision coating. Now the family eats breakfast. Move your head, now Dad is busy making money and Mom sees kid off to school.

And last December, I came home drunk late one night and tore down the hard-shelled relief-map of Santa's head that had been affixed to the outer door with duct tape. Jacob caught me and protested, claiming to have paid money for it. Right. It had come from the trash just like Paisley Ass Crack, but unlike the crack, it was going to go back there.

Maybe Jacob and Joan could share their interior design experiences.

Hi, City Sqwirl!

It's spelled sqwirl.

And Removing The Box Is Not On The Table?

Guess Malan's Logo.

Everyone's talking (i.e. media trying to create a buzz) about ne'er-do-well Project Runway Season 1 winner Jay McCarroll's lack of doing anything with his newly bestowed life in fashion.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the lack of such pressure for Season 3's Malan "it looks like tree bark" Breton, Malan has opened a little shop right across the street from me, to no fanfare.





He is a small-business-owner-neighbor, is all. I introduced myself. He had the same smile he did on the show, like he was trying to get the last of a chewable antacid down whilst he was so lucky to be talking to me in a Madonna accent.






Perhaps a grand-opening is on the way. He's had the painters-'n-decorators in lately. I know how you feel, Malan! This is his new painted security gate:

















What is it? And how does it represent Malan? Who wants to crash the grand opening with me?

Cloud Or Steam?

Death Toll Mounts.

In ascending order of freshness:


















And (they'll be dead very soon):

Stay Classy, American Apparel.

I guess American Apparel wasn't getting its marketing message across clearly enough with its closeups of underagey, sheer-cotton-covered crotch and thighs in vaguely gymnastic scenarios.

So they rolled out the nippleage slideshow. Sorry, Tom, you are obscured by the light thrown from the nippleage slideshow.














The Star of David pendant is a nice touch.

Hold The Focaccia.

East 11th Street between 1st & A.

Buds Till The End.

East 11th Street between B & C. Two feet apart, same vintage (i.e., pretty fresh).

Worst Weather Combo Ever.

Blustery. Winds gusting at times to more than 40 miles per hour.

Cold. 25 degrees, "feels like 11."

Icy. Whatever rain or snow fell last night is now shellacked to the pavement.

And it's bright and sunny. Sounds good, but 1) it makes the ice slick, and 2) it is blinding.

So you can take part in X-treme sports just by going outside. Just get on the sidewalk and bend your knees a little, and you'll start skating along. You might want to bring some ski poles. Because I'm sure like me you happen to have a stash of ski poles taking up space. I guess it's Special X-treme Sports, because you're blind, too.

Fortunately, all this nonsense should calm down tomorrow night in time for Dodge City, to a balmy windless 23 degrees. I.e., "feels like 23." Now that's the kind of weather you can sink your teeth into, that fires you up and makes you want to live!*

If you have any interest in life, please come join me and these high-quality guests tomorrow night:

Angry Bob
Rebecca Ciletti
Abbi Crutchfield
Emily Epstein
Elon James White

Dodge City
Sunday, Jan. 21, 9 pm
Parkside Lounge
317 E. Houston St. @ Attorney
Between Aves. B & C
F/V to Second Ave.
J/M/Z to Delancey
No cover

*Entering a mixed metaphor contest.

No Happy Fun Time.

Toxins are seeping from my pores. I left work a little early, walked to Chinatown for an hour massage, then had an alternately teary/angry walk home. Blood sugar. Should have eaten something immediately. Of course the large groups of fun-seekers were out in hordes, it being still the holiday season. Of course they like to amble at .000000002 miles per hour in lazy packs of four or more. It's frustrating to live in New York because you can so often feel it is not yours. It gets hijacked by everybody all the time.

Then I come home and my cats start screaming at me. I screamed back. I realized some time ago that I would probably not manufacture babies, in part because the world is a sack of shit and I wouldn't present it to someone I loved, but also because I screamed at Ichabod, one day when he was especially whiny, "Shut the fuck up, you fucking asshole!!!"















Frankie. My longest-term relationship thus far.





























Ichabod. I called him a "fucking asshole."


Frankie is soooo needy lately. Of course she is. She's an elderly lady of 17 with many ailments. In addition to the physical care she needs, she needs my love and affection for reassurance. I am mostly more than happy to give it to her. When I came home tonight, I was needy. The massage and the end of year-ness made me realize how stressful this year has been for me. I wanted one moment when my ears weren't assaulted by some bleating unbidden noise.

Why does Gerald Ford deserve five days of national mourning? And why the hell didn't he come out with his criticisms of Bush before dropping dead? Out of personal or party loyalty? I would have more respect for him now if he had piped up sooner. Was he afraid maybe he would have had zero influence? Wouldn't it have been worth a try? What did he have to lose at age 90 by coming clean? What was the matter with him? Why sit on it?

Speaking of the unevolved, the super in the adjacent building is a hose-aholic. Every day, usually when I am coming home in the evening, he goes to town on the sidewalk with the hose. But not just the sidewalk. Today I saw him spraying the stacked garbage bags. Oh yeah, those bags of trash really need to be gunned down with 20-gallon jet streams.

When I just now looked out my window he was spraying a flattened cardboard box! To make it flatter! A water jet as a trash-smoothing device? How stupid do you have to be? He is wasting so much water, not to mention the entire area is sopping. You can tell he gets really into it too because he won't even stop to let you by. Standing there glaring doesn't do it. One time I said, "Please?! New boots." One morning I was trapped in my lobby while he sprayed my front doorway! I thought it was raining at first and turned around to get my umbrella. This guy is psychotic. I'm calling 311.

Crappy Mood, Don't Care Who Knows It.

I've had a shitty year, and not only that, it seems like I say that every year. I.e., I might be having a shitty life. Yes, lots of people's lives are shittier, but that is certainly not going to cheer me up.

I'm not celebrating the new year. I already know that. I could care less that it switches from Sunday to Monday. Seen that switch thousands of times already.

Not much good happened this year.

I'm skipping the celebration and getting straight to work.

I Go To Staten Island So You Don't Have To.

I went to Staten Island recently to go to a thrift store that had been mega-hyped.

But first. Memories.

I worked on Staten Island for a few months in 1996, as a PA and locations assistant on a low-budge indie film that was my own personal Living In Oblivion. I wrote a production diary for it that I never published anywhere. I will dig it up and post it soon.

I think it was a couple years before that that Giuliani was elected mayor. In the same election, there was a referendum about whether to allow Staten Island to secede from New York City. The outcome: Staten Islanders were largely responsible for electing Rudy, but they failed to get enough votes to leave NYC. I remember wishing that if they elected him, they could also leave and take him with them.

And BTW I just heard that SI is that fastest growing New York City borough.

No offense to Staten Islanders, but I hate it there. It makes me feel unclean. Strange because it's probably cleaner than Manhattan. It's certainly more rural. I think it's the ferry ride that does it. I always think it's going to be fun, taking a ferry across the river to the island, but it isn't. Everyone waits behind the vast glass doors. It's a holding pen that gets more and more crowded until the large digital clock turns to the half hour. When the doors open there is a stampede. You have to carefully calibrate your pace or else trample or get trampled.

When I worked in legal publishing, I knew a nice fellow who lived on SI, who brewed his own beer, and I attended a Halloween party of his once (as Divine*). And at my current job there is a very nice SIer. Please save me from anti-SI bias.

I did hear my very favorite overheard line of all time on the Staten Island ferry, however. A girl told her her girlfriend, in an SI accent, "I would neva, evah, wear leathah in this weathah."

The thrift store, Everything Goes, should be called Everything Blows. It's at 140 Bay St., a few blocks from the ferry terminal. They don't appear to have a web site. Yes, everything is pretty inexpensive. Everything is also pretty ugly. In addition, you have to factor in, in your risk/benefit analysis, that not only is it an expedition, it's one you might resent having gone on. They might have to have mint Puccis for ten dollars or something for me to go back.

There is also an Everything Goes bookstore nearby, which I visited to use the restroom, and it seemed nice, a cozy hippie joint with an open mike, and an Everything Goes furniture store, also nearby, that I did not visit.

The most interesting thing about Everything Goes is that it is run by the members of nearby Ganas, "NYC's most exclusive commune."

How many communes does NYC have?!


*Not just Divine, but Female Trouble-era, post-facial acid scar Divine.












I wish I could say that's me. But I have no photos, sadly.

Substantiating Photos.

It's nice to know that things arrive, if late. I sent both photos at the same time. I wonder what the errant one was doing, out there, somewhere between my phone and my email account, to make it tardy.

American Apparel ad at Houston & Allen. Just over Economy Foam on the corner.


If I were fancy with the Photoshop, you know there'd be something hilaireeous on that crotch.

This is a tiny storefront carved out of Economy Foam, just south and below the American Apparel sign.


It's only two or three feet deep, and contains only a small desk, some insulation bled from the scabied walls, and bad lighting.

I want there to really be a live animal in there, if they are going to advertise it like that.

And finally, the jewel on the curiosity: American Apparel maintains a lease on tiny "Live Animal" (if Economy Foam is to be believed), solely in order to preserve its right to leave up that crotch billboard.

My Post-Work Afternoon.

My post-work errands were fraught with stumbling blocks, but I had a good time anyway.

I got off the M9 bus at Delancey and walked north on Allen. Just below Houston St., I was marveling at this curiosity, but you'll have to find out more about that when I can get a substantiating photo up. I took a picture with my phone but it hasn't shown up in my email and I deleted it from my phone already. I am trying to delete immediately so things don't pile up "in" my phone, but I guess I jumped the gun this time. It's a good curiosity though, and it involves American Apparel, Economy Foam, and a live art installation.

When I was marveling at the curiosity, I heard a loud crash and turned around to see a car rearend another, with glass shattering results. No one was hurt, and I'm not necessarily counting this as part of my "good time," exactly, but the noise did accentuate my marveling of the curiosity in an interesting way.

I proceeded to American Apparel, where I intended to buy two boatnecked 3/4 sleeve shirts, one in red and one in black, and a long purple sleeveless boatneck top that they market as a "dress." BTW the founder/owner of American Apparel was my college boyfriend's freshman roommate. He was an industrious perv then and he's an industrious perv now.

They didn't have the tops in my colors. The saleswoman went on about maybe they are phasing these out, we have like, almost no colors, in almost no sizes, and I said, "Well, THAT FIGURES!" And I started tearing down all the merchandise off the racks, all the flimsy cotton items, in sweeping swoops, five double-tiered rows of them--you know how easily those things fall off the hangers when you're not intending them to? Just imagine how effortlessly they tumbled to the floor en masse when meant to. Like they had been just waiting to do that. Like they were dominoes waiting to be played. Fuck you, AA shirts. I want you but I can't have you, and you're not all that anyway.

Next I headed to Kinko's. On the way I was stopped by a man with a plate of free hummus, felafel, and pita samples. I took one. He launched into an inarticulate, self-published novel about how they had opened a new restaurant, the one right behind us, how they just opened and they serve this and that, you can buy it and eat it, at this new place, despite my just trying to thank him for the sample and move on my way. So I said, "IT FIGURES! You mean this sample ISN'T free? The cost is listening to your interminable blather?" And I took the Middle Eastern food sample out of my mouth. I said, well, getting the sample back isn't free, either! And I shoved it into his gaping maw. That shut him up good.

So I got to Kinko's, and instantly remembered how bad the feng shui is there. It's a FedEx and copy center, but it has the feel of an off-track betting establishment. I waited in line and watched the motionless blue tropical fish in the small tank on the counter. "Is your fish dead?" No answer. People ignore you all the time in this city. My neighbors ignore me when I pointedly say hello. I hope they don't meet up with me late at night getting out of the elevator. Will I have a surprise for them.

"This fish doesn't look so good." I tapped the glass of the tank lightly and waited. Eventually the privilege of asking the guy if they copy DVDs and how much it costs was mine. Silly me, I ask a specific question that's perfectly within the purview of the whole Kinko's operation, how can I expect any kind of information in return? "I can take your order, but we send it to the graphics department, which is at Astor place, so you have to go there to find out how much." So you'll take my DVD, and make me however many copies I want, for a price you are not able to disclose to me at this time?"

"IT FIGURES!"

On my way out, I pushed over a copy machine, really just to see if I could do it (I can!). But no subsequent copy machines, because it was work, and I'm not going to work that hard for Kinko's. As I left I said, "Just so you know, someone was brutally murdered in this space once, I can feel it, and furthermore, that fish is watching you and you better watch out. The fish knows everything."

If You Do Something Revolting In Public, You Might Find Yourself Here.

Call it a coping mechanism.

From now on, if I discover you being brazenly, casually, repulsively inappropriate around me, inside, I will be filled with the silent scream of stifled rage, but outside, I will appear composed as I stealthily snap your likeness.

Call it a bargain compared with strangulation.

The gentlewoman pictured below BLEATS into her cell phone at lunchtime in a busy office district, while repeatedly picking with her fingernails and discarding tiny pieces of something off her legs. With violent concentration, oblivious to the world beyond her loud, inane conversation, and her leg-picking.





My guess is she just went in for a lunchtime wax. At a cheap place that leaves your legs waxy.

My New Veterinary Clinic?

I've been shopping around for a new vet. This one's really close by. And, though it's not among my usual criteria for choosing a vet, this one requires a very unusual system of entry:

Gramercy Cat.

Sometimes the cheap phone cameras surprise you.

The Groupie Bra-Fling Was So Wrong, In So Many Ways.

I chose an unwearable, a black lacy number from my current "collection." That's kind of sexy, right? That I'd worn it? And that I am now too fat to wear it? (You know you've gained weight when...(you gain a cup size)?) And that I am groupie-gifting an item that is useless to me and taking up space? All really hot groupie behavior, n'est ce pas?

The tag was frayed. It was a worn bra. See above. (But only the tag showed signs of wear.)

I wrote my phone number on the frayed tag with a Sharpie.

There was no room on the frayed tag for any information besides my phone number. No "to Vince," no "for a good time call." No "umm, yeah, so, this is Dodge."

The band was punctual. They were the first band of the day to play, at 1:30 pm, on the small stage. We arrived 1:33-ish and they were already playing. It was the middle of a heat wave and the sun was baking. It was yet another odd set of circumstances under which to see my favorite band: Wake n' Roll, on the beach. The early start time and the hour commute to Coney Island meant that all I had time for before departing my home to Rock Out was shower, dress, caffeinate, meet Rev and hop on the subway.

It kind of goes without saying that Priestess "brought it." Hirsute and black-clad, they sweat through their jeans as I worried whether they were properly hydrated in the intense heat. Their passion was not diminished by Coney Island's X-treme weather conditions. Vince was sitting at an angle that allowed some kind of air blower to pouf his voluminous locks into a constantly swirling halo around him at all times, giving his extended drum solo under the blistering sun an extra-hallucinatory effect.

Well, I "brought it" too, and I flung it as well. When they had played nearly all the hits, I got a pang in my stomach, thinking about the bra stuffed in my bag (another faux pas: I think any underwear you throw at a band is supposed to be ripped off your body in the frenzy of the moment, not judiciously plucked in advance from the "will I ever wear this again?" drawer) and the mission that still lay before me.

Which involved tapping the dude in front of me on the shoulder, and yelling "Excuse me, I have to throw my bra at them now" toward the vicinity of his ear. He politely shuffled to the left and I pressed myself against the barricade.

It was a far and high fling I was required to execute. The band was high up on this sheltered stage, and the barricade kept the thin but loyal crowd from getting closer than 30 or so feet away.

It was so hot, and I wasn't properly warmed up. I think I pulled a muscle in my side. The bra sailed into the barricaded-off area in front of the stage, where some guy batted it just as it was about to hit the ground, to give it the extra push it needed to make it to the stage. Where it sat, for the remainder of the show.

I had a nice time eating and drinking and going on the Tilt-a-Whirl with friends after, wondering, but at the same time actually understanding perfectly, why my phone did not light up that afternoon with a call from a member of Priestess.


The guy in the headband is the one I had to tell to shove over.