Archive for January, 2005

Nightmare

After being up all night from insomnia, I got to Philly at 11:15 this morning only to discover that USAirways has lost one of my bags, the one with MY COMPUTER IN IT!! My desktop computer, my backup and about 30 videotapes I have to work on in the next couple of weeks. Great.

I was kind of afraid that the TSA had confiscated it because there was also a bag with a rank jockstrap and a bottle of poppers, in it, so I wasn't very hopeful about getting them back.

I'm staying at my friend Karen's studio and I was supposed to meet her at 5:15 to see Bad Education. I took a much-needed nap.

A delivery company woke me up at 4:30 saying they found my bag and would deliver it between 6 and 10 tonight. I said I wouldn't be home and asked if they could they deliver it somewhere else, I'd get right back to them with the other address. There was NO PEN in an ARTIST'S STUDIO to write their number down. Of course, I forgot it and spent 15 minutes on the phone with a USAirways voice-activated system that couldn't understand a word I said! I called Karen at work to say I probably wouldn't make the movie and she had already left work and her cell phone was not on. AARRGGGHHH!!!

Then I was on hold for 20 minutes with USAirways to find out what I could do. The agent refused to give me the number of the delivery people but assured me it was on it's way. But to where??

Well, here I sit waiting for my bag. I cant leave and I'm fucking starving to death. Dammit!

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Mardis Gras fans

Mardis Gras

Actually, the first two were driving tractors that pull the floats, two others are fathers of kids in marching bands. The rest of them are plain old drunk parade-watchers. The tractor-drivers have always been my favorites but I love them all.

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Mardis Gras

Mardis Gras

I just got back from a couple of Mardis Gras parades. They were really fun. The floats were beautiful, the crowd was rowdy and lots of men in the crowd were very hot and very drunk, as usual. A huge load of beads landed right on my head! Ouch! Hopefully tomorrow, during the daytime parades, I can get some good shots of the guys and not get beat up doing it.

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Drums & Tuba show

I went to a local club called TwiRoPa last night to see Drums & Tuba, a band I like a lot but have never seen before. The space is really nice, but it was very empty. There were only about 35-40 people there.

At first I couldn't figure out why the sound board was on a table directly in front of the stage but it turned out that the opening act was a solo act called Micronaut. He walked up, pulled the table out a bit, lit a couple of candles and started playing. All he had was a small mixer, a weird LCD device I'd never seen before and a couple of pedals. His music was great. It's kind of what I always thought dance music would sound like in 2005. The beats sounded nothing like normal drums and there were a lot of loops with tiny hints of melodies completely distorted. He used some spoken word loops but not enough of them, I thought. There was no singing or samples of fat, black women doing disco classics, thank god. It was pretty much the polar opposite of the collection of Depeche Mode remixes I listened to on the way there and back. On the minus side, there were no real transitions between songs besides some droning noises and the set had no real arc or drama. I'd go see him again, though, any time. I looked him up after I got home and it turns out he's a teeny bit famous.

Since Micronaut only had to pack his stuff into a couple of small suitcases, there was only about a ten minute break before Drums & Tuba began, again with no introduction. There are three of them: a guitarist, a drummer and a tuba player. They were so much bettter than their records, it's almost hard to believe—incredibly powerful. They very obviously enjoy what they're doing, too. It shows clearly in their facial expressions and visual interactions. They play a kind of rock/jazz fusion I normally hate but they give it a hard edge with some help from machines looping, echoing and distorting the instrument sounds. It was fascinating to watch how they did some of the stuff. For instance, the guitarist would play a riff repeatedly and the tuba player would use something to capture it. Then I'd notice I could still hear the riff but the guy was actually playing something else. It was amazing. Things would suddenly start playing backwards or change tone and sond like they were playing on the other side of a huge hall or get really fuzzy. Since the "bassist" was actually playing a tuba and not a bass, he had a hand free all the time to fuck around with the machines. I guess this makes the tuba thing more than just a gimmick but maybe not. In any case they sounded fine and, after five albums, I guess it's working for them. I know it worked for me, so who cares?

The guitarist, by the way, was very cute. Aside from the hotness factor he was also very animated and the most fun to watch.

I'm sorry I won't be in town next Wednesday to see them again. Good luck in Europe, guys.

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Drums & Tuba

Drumsandtuba001

Where have I been?? I just found out Drums & Tuba, one of my favorite bands, have been playing in a club down the street every Wednesday this month. I nearly missed them! I just bought a ticket for this Wednesday night. Whew! Finally, something to live for!

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Down

Pez!I was talking to The Crusher on the phone around 5PM and my host left the apartment. After I hung up the phone I took a nap and woke up around 7:30. I had a cup of coffee and wanted to go back to sleep right away. I couldn’t do anything. The urge to sleep was nearly impossible to fight off but I did it. It was incredibly hard to not just walk back into the bedroom and lie down.

I made myself take a shower which didn’t help much. Then I forced myself to sit at the computer and finish up some banners for Cruising for Sex. By this time it was about 10:30 and I still wanted to just be unconcious. I figured that I needed to get the hell out of the house and headed out to The Phoenix. I didn’t have the car so I had to take the streetcar and walk through The Quarter. I left the iPod home because I figured this wqould give me time to just be with myself without distractions and with no possibility of just lying down and ignoring everything.

I’m pretty familiar with depression, having struggled with it for years but it’s been a long, long time since I felt like this. Let me tell you, this was terrible. It’s as close to suicidal as I’ve ever been. The walk did the trick, though, and I think I have it figured out. (He said, hopefully!)

I’m leaving New Orleans in a week and, for at least a couple of weeks after that, will not really be living anywhere. Money is tight partly because of my ongoing iBill problem which I won't go into now. (I sent out some invoices this week, some of them nearly a year old, so that problem should resolve itself soon.)

Mostly, though. I think the problem is that I’m 51 years old and I’m absolutely not prepared to be an old person. It’s not that I feel old or look bad or anything like that. And my life had been lots of fun, for the most part. I just feel as if I’ve wasted a lot of time that could have been spent preparing for the time of my life when I won’t be able to run around and have a good time.

It’s not like I chose a responsible career or anything which would help me prepare for my future. No! I decided to be a pornographer and move to a different city every couple of years! My god!! What have I done?? as David Byrne once sang back when he seemed talented.

Anyways, I think being so sick for a couple of weeks and having to have “Same-Day Surgery” the other day and having to leave this place before I have another place and really not wanting to even be in this apartment anymore has finally just left me feeling really overwhelmed. I just want to sit and stare out into the air and I can’t, dammit! I will just have to get over it, I guess.

Well, The Phoenix was fun and, I think, just what I needed. More about that tomorrow. Also, I talked to The Crusher on the way home and he was a soothing balm—well, that’s what he would say.

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Reverse Peristalsis

The CulpritSorry I've been kind of quiet lately. A tiny piece of General Tsao’s Chicken took a liking to my esophagus the other night and refused to leave. It rendered me completely unable to eat or drink even a sip of liquid for about 18 hours. Needless to say, I was a bit cranky and not in the mood to write!

This has happened before but never for longer than a few minutes. I went to the local emergency room after a couple of hours. The attending physician, Dr. Camero, was really great. He was informative, answered all my questions thoroughly and asked if I had more, let me make my own decisions, did not talk down to me and was extremely cute. Unfortunately, he couldn’t really help and I had to wait until the next morning to contact my PC who found a GI specialist to treat me.

They had to do an endoscopy to remove it. They numbed me out (very nice!!) and gave me Merced, a drug which is supposed to make the patient forget the procedure even happened. I’ve been intrigued by that stuff for a long time and was kind of excited about taking it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on me and I remember every hellish second. Luckily, the procedure itself worked and I can eat again. My fantasies about a future of eating strained peas through a feeding tube are fortunately going to remain unfulfilled for the time being.

Moral: Chew your food thoroughly.

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The Aviator

The AviatorI sure hope Martin Scorsese gets over his fascination with Leonardo Dicaprio soon. I mean, he’s good and all but I never seem to be able to forget that I’m watching Leo and not a character in the film. Maybe this is my fault but his baby face still gets between me and whatever I’m watching.

Anyways, The Aviator is a good movie but not as thrilling and exciting as I know it could have been. Hughes is a great character and neither his enthusiasm for flying nor his lunacy moved me as they should have. There are a couple of intense scenes about his phobias that work really well. One in which he’s in a public bathroom and afraid to touch the doorknob so he can exit is really unnerving. It’s not something most of us would ever even think about but it brings Hughes to a frightening stop and nothing else matters.

Cate Blanchett IS Katherine Hepburn. It’s fucking creepy, I swear. I was never a big fan of Hepburn’s and Blanchett perfectly encapsulates everything I hate about her. It’s a startling performance. I was aware that I was watching someone impersonate her but reacting emotionally to the character. The sequence in which Hughes goes to Connecticut to meet her family is pure gold. I wanted to stand up and cheer when it was over. Brilliant.

As Hughes deteriorates, his emotional connection with both Hepburn and Ava Gardner, who both care deeply about him, seem to be the only things that can break through his psychosis and move him. The door to the screening room in shich he lived for several months becomes a kind of confessional with those he loves and a barrier against people he loathes. (Unfortunately, the film gives the audience no idea how long Hughes stayed in this one room. If I remember correctly, it was over a year.)

Hughes is a perfect subject for a film and, it might seem, Scorsese. This story has everything, almost literally! I wish it was better. Scorsese is firing on all six cylinders here and his technique is thrilling and fun. The film is stuningly beautiful to look at. The CGI is great, seamless and never a distraction, which would be disastrous in a movie like this. Something is missing, though. Still, I’d see it again.

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Film Criticism

For those of you who care as much about film as I do’after all, I did go to NYU Tisch School of the Arts during the film-heady 70’s:

the film club, Slate’s essential annual e-mail discussion among critics from around the country. This year’s edition is particularly tendentious.

Take 6: 2004 Film Poll which is exactly what it says it is. No interaction but lots of interesting stuff about movies no one’s ever heard of.

They’re both long reads but well worth the trouble. These people LOVE movies.

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The Crusher

The Crusher

The Crusher and I have resolved a few of our differences and things are back to normal’or as normal as things get for us. Personally, I’m thrilled. I don’t know what he thinks and if I asked he’d probably just say to stop being such a fag.

Beautiful tatts by the beautiful Khristian at Mooncusser in Provincetown.The Crusher has had the rest of the sleeve done since I took this pic. When I get some pics of the rest of it, I’ll pass them along.

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Full Frontal Nudity

Family Circus

Here are some hilarious reader reviews of the timeless The Family Circus. You’d better read them now before Amazon discovers them.

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Cemetery

Cemetary
I took this photo of a typical New Orleans Cemetary on All Saints Day. New Orleans Cemetaries are above ground because the city is below sea level. They are beautiful, like being in another world.

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