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Helen Pontani, Angie Pontani, and Peekaboo Pointe
Big thanks to Angie Pontani for her love. She must have liked our ridiculously thorough coverage of the burlesque festival, and invited us to come and see her show at Corio (Weekly, Thurs.-Sat.). And by “invite,” I mean free tickets, which is a big deal considering how completely broke I am these days. Congrats to Murry & Angie: this recession-proof extravaganza was sold out for both the 7:30 and 9:30 shows!
Sandy and Chris at PPS
Happy Halloween! This is Sandy and Chris, employees of Project for Public Spaces whose offices are in Manhattan.
This intervention almost speaks for itself. The Stepford Wives of Orange county are faceless, but their pudenda speak immodestly loud.
Whoever did the bruise makeup on this poster is a genius. Kudos to you my anonymous friend. (Poster Boy, is it you?!)
"PARTYS OVER" graffiti, NYC subway, October 2008
The editor asked me to write more about NYC and less about national politics. So this is it.
We’ve all heard about the vices of city living: gangs, drugs, AIDS, high taxes, poor schools, crowded apartments, and no place to park. What are the virtues of urban living?
by J.D. Oxblood
I’ve been out of town and fairly preoccupied, and am sorry to say that
I won’t be able to make it to the championship bout this weekend due to
a pressing social engagement. However, as it’s between the Bronx and
Queens, it’s sure to be a nail-biter–vicious and epic. As this is
your last chance to catch Derby fever until next season, I encourage
any and all to get out there and scream for your fave.
Tickets here.
http://www.gothamgirlsrollerderby.com/merch/?item=tickets
Kiss kiss,
JDX
No, the picture above isn’t the Old West, or Kansas in the 1930s, or a movie set. This ruined house is in urban Buffalo, 2008.
Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame asks the question: why is it that major macroeconomics texts books gloss over the fact that periodical economic crises are endemic to capitalist accumulation? The discipline of macroeconomics came into being as a reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its purpose as an academic endeavor was to minimize or eliminate the business cycle. The promise of macroeconomics tells us, if we’re smart enough we can think our way out of what looks like a permanent feature of capitalism.
The financial crisis of the last month has given the ultimate lie to the thought that economies can grow without also shrinking. (With two small exceptions in 1990 and 2002 the US has had sustained growth for 25 years. The unwinding of the current asset bubble in housing is the final end of that growth period.) Conservatives fear the business cycle because in a crisis the people look to the government to keep them from starving, and that, they feel, is socialism. This essay by Murray Rothbard puts the free market fundamentalist case eloquently. Liberals are hoping Obama can turn disaffection over jobs into votes, though liberals also are wary of being too gleeful about the impending crisis.
By J.D. Oxblood
The afternoon started innocently enough. One of my bartenders from the neighborhood asked me to accompany her to a wine tasting at the Metropolitan Pavilion just so she’d have someone to walk around with, and between samples of Albariño I was ecstatic to find that a table was handing out samples of Jamon Iberico—the bellota, which, for the uninitiated, is the dried leg of a pig fed on acorns in its last days, and goes for over a hundred dollars a pound. I stumbled out into the fading October light with a nice buzz on. I wanted to go to the anniversary party at Bowlmor Lanes, where I could snap a pic of Michael Phelps for the blog and get linked to Gawker again. My accomplice had an invitation—and Phelps was rumored to attend—and who doesn’t want to kick that guy’s ass at bowling? Or anything?—but she had other ideas. “I wanted to go to this agent panel,” she said, “since my book just came out and I was kind of wondering if it would be worth it to get an agent.” She wrote “The Guide to Doing Me!” It’s a kind of madlib for sexual pleasure, where you fill in the blanks of what turns you on and give it to your partner to ensure that you get done right. “I was talking to this bookstore about carrying it,” she said, “since it would be a great gift book for Christmas. And he said that their biggest seller was the ‘Poo Log,’ a journal for recording your poops. Considering the heights that literature has reached in this country, I decided I’d better tag along. Subbaculture is where you find it.
With the economy making us all feel like it’s Halloween 24/7 out there, let’s look a little closer at NYC’s 365 Halloween and costume headquarters, Halloween Adventure, located at 104 4th Ave near Union Square. This store has managed to stick around for 16 years, growing and expanding to serve the needs of freaks, geeks, Goths, nerds, fetishists, exhibitionists and party-goers all year round. I’d like to say I just went to the store and observed the employees and customers, studiously taking notes and watching them from afar like some urban Serengeti journalist, but alas, that would be a lie. For you see, I am a casualty of these scary economic times, and as a means of self-preservation I took a job there so that I could have a reason to get up and out of the apartment in the morning, instead of obsessing over my non-existent career and meeting with yet another headhunter who is unable to get me a job earning a living wage. So I thought, “Why not see if I can find a seasonal job selling costumes for Halloween? They MUST be hiring.” And that’s exactly what I did. I put on my gothiest outfit and did my gothiest make-up and went down and got myself a job. So here are some of my findings thus far:
1) The economy is bad, but people’s escapist tendencies are in full swing. Even though the store says it’s figures are down from last year, the place does HUGE business. I happen to think that this is going to be the last BIG Halloween for a while, for 2 reasons:
A) Halloween is on a Friday this year. Parties all weekend! More parties = more costumes.
B) This is the last year regular, non-trust-fund, non-Wall Street people are going to be able to cling to the illusion that they have enough disposable income to blow hundreds of dollars on a costume and a night out for a pagan holiday (with economic depressions come piousness. Why is that??? Rhetorical: I’m familiar with the concept that God favors the good with prosperity.) Most costumes start off at around $50 and go up from there. A decent one is gonna run you closer to $100. And rentals are about $200. Even with my employee discount my costume came to $65. And that’s not counting the special modifications and additions I need to make to it or all the drinks that will be consumed.
2) No matter what the weather is like, girls wanna dress like hoochies on Halloween. It is the one day in our culture when women are expected and encouraged to wear as little as possible (We all know the “slutty” thing. You’re not just a nurse, you’re a slutty nurse. You’re not just Marie Antionette, you’re slutty Marie Antionette). This is NYC, folks, not Miami. And this year is shaping up to be a cooooolllllldddd Halloween! I’m working down in the “Adult” costumes and lemme tell ya, these girls can’t find outfits SHORT enough. Except if they’re hispanic and come in with their b/fs. Those guys practically want their g/fs in gorilla costumes. I thought these guys would love to have their girls show off their goodies! With all the white couples the guys wanted their g/fs to dare to bare as much as legally possible; with the hispanic guys, not so much. These guys don’t want their g/fs to look like hos, and they tell them so. Some more forcefully than others.
3) We don’t get a lot of requests for political or current events costumes down in the “Adult” costumes. Maybe it’s just that the political masks are readily found upstairs, or maybe people just aren’t doing the McCain/Obama/Palin thing this year. I’ve heard they’re selling fairly well, I just haven’t seen it. People tend to stick to the archetypes: Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Pirate, Queen, King, etc. My fave this year is Beer Garden Wench. V cute, and you get to try to get your b/f to do a couples costume, and for him that means lederhosen. Priceless.
4) And lastly, the biggest hooligans like the sexy cop uniforms. Go figure.
So enjoy this last big Halloween. Party likes it’s 1999. Because this may be the last good time we collectively have for a while. I’m even predicting a quiet New Year’s Eve this year. It’s scary out there!
Chapter 3:
Sunday, 9/21: The Golden Pastie Awards Show at SOB’s
By J.D. Oxblood
Photos by DJ 13
Helen Pontani, Angie Pontani, Jen Gapay
Needless to say (but I’m gonna say it anyway), I stayed up till 7 in the freaking morning with miscreants and derelicts, and Sunday had a hangover the size of Wisconsin and could. Not. Believe that I was going to look at more T&A. Is there no limit to what a man can endure? Someone has to do it, folks, and that man is me.
The single greatest thing about Sunday’s Golden Pastie Awards was that the audience was full of performers. All the great, hot, sexy women that I’d been drooling over all weekend were there, in the crowd, with the scumbag likes of me. What’s hotter than watching hot women with a bunch of hot women?
Chapter 2:
Saturday, 9/20: the Saturday Spectacular at Le Poisson Rouge
By J.D. Oxblood
Photos by T-Bone Caruthers, Willy G., and Jane Smith
Ruby Valentine
[***3 kisses indicate J.D.’s faves.]
The crowd at the Saturday Spectacular was decidedly older and more well-heeled. And completely sold out. Turns out that getting people to the West Village is easier than getting people to Gowanus—who knew?—and the place was weirdly, if not wisely, laid out to accommodate VIPs at tables close to the stage and standing room only everywhere else. Which is to say that if you didn’t pay the tab or have the connections to score a dope seat, you couldn’t get within fifty feet of the stage. My entourage and I were lucky enough to find a quaint little spot wedged in between the exit door and upstage left, putting us in the path of performers entering from stage left (Trixie Little rubbed up against me! I’ll never wash that shoulder!) and I had the added pleasure of having Jo Boobs sit right in front of me for the first act in her civvies. It isn’t just that she’s so hot, you dig?—like any man, I can get hot pushed in close to a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman on the morning G train—but, this woman is, like, a legend. You can feel it steaming off her. And I am honored to be so close.
Chapter 1:
Friday, 9/19: Premiere Party at the Bell House
By J.D. Oxblood
Photos by Jane Smith
The Love Show
[***3 kisses indicate J.D.’s faves.]
I showed up early and was hit in the face by the smell of wood varnish. The space is brand spanking new and I can’t really figure out why they opened a venue of this size in this location. It’s Gowanus, people, which sounds like something you get from raggedy chicks on Craigslist and might very well be. The walk from the elevated F/G stop at Smith and 9th was like a descent into something from Dante’s imagination. Or Cleveland. You choose. And this joint is the kind of high-ceiling, wooden beam affair where you expect to see moose heads on the wall. And the crowd in the lounge? These are the kinds of guys that make you ashamed to be an American—guys who are used to yelling at each other in somebody’s kitchen. They still reek of Bolognese sauce. They’re so psyched to have a bar in their neighborhood they might never go home. Fortunately, the big room was, in fact, very big, so it was possible to get close to the performers. The crowd was mixed and fairly young—those brave enough to make the trek to Gowanus—with an extra helping of young dudes rubbing up against their young babes with the unbridled optimism of knowing they’ll have something to do with their boners when the show is over. Ah, the fantasy of a threesome. Girls, don’t be upset that your boy isn’t thinking about you; just be glad it’s you he’s fucking. The first two gogo dancers were, um, not much of dancers and less of gogo, but they were soon replaced by a smokin’ hot black girl with Supremes sensibilities, and a big, fleshy redhead who was so generous in spreading her ass for the crowd that I considered trying to take her home and skip the whole damn festival. It would take the entire weekend to work THAT out.
THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE %*&#! COVERAGE OF THE 6TH ANNUAL NEW YORK BURLESQUE FESTIVAL ANYWHERE ON THE INTERWEB!
Roxy Dlight Friday at the Bell House
(Sound of Alka Seltzer plop plop fizz fizzing. A Zippo lighter clicks, lights, clicks shut. Venetian blinds are drawn. J.D.’s voice is heard; a voice scarred by cigarettes, Hendricks Gin, and late, late nights of carousing with half-naked… er, people.)
If I sound exhausted it’s because I am. Tore up from the floor up. Shredded like my mini-wheats without the frosting. My four-day stubble has four-day stubble. My front room is knee-deep in beer and whiskey. I think I may have seen too many boobies. Let me say that again. I think I may have seen too many boobies. The last time I saw that much flesh it was Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Katrina was just the name of a sweet young girl from Kansas who took a left turn at Albuquerque.
You gotta hand it to Angie Pontani—the lady knows how to throw a party. Four days, four venues, eighty-eight acts by my count—adds up to well over a hundred performers—and so much hotness the Devil himself had to go back home to cool off. My knees ache from standing at attention, my [unmentionable] aches from standing at attention, my feet are swollen, my fingers are nicotine- and ink-stained, my lungs are crying out for non-nicotine-flavored air, my liver has straight-up packed its bags and left me—AND it took the dog—my sinuses are about to fall to the floor and I’m pretty sure I raised the GNP of Columbia this weekend. I’ve given out a dozen fake names, and at least four other people have claimed to be me in the hopes of getting free schwag, which basically adds up to a half dozen people thinking they had sex with J.D. Oxblood this weekend, or a half dozen people who don’t know they had sex with J.D. Oxblood this weekend, depending on your point of view. Murray, I told you, that’s confectioner’s sugar, it’s Monday morning, and you need to get the hell out of my bathtub. Anita, you can stop acting drunk, it’s over. Let me call you a car, and yes, I’ll call you. Purrhaps. Scotty, I meant everything I said and at least half of what we did, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.
By J.D. Oxblood Hunter College, Friday night, September 12, a perfect way to recover from lingering Sept. 11 syndrome -- and the endless exploitation of a day hallowly remembered -- roller derby! Hot chicks on wheels! Well maybe, just maybe, some of you slackers out in cyberspace are actually reading these missives, as the Friday night bout was sold out. Folks lined up for hours (well, ok, an hour) just to get a glimpse of the Gotham Girls giving their all with guts and grit. The gym was packed, energy was high, and the all-around theme of the night was just like my last date: hot and sweaty. Read the rest of this entry »
The first great thing I have to say about the New York roller derby scene is this: the Gotham Girls want everyone to come to the party. The pre-party at a bar near the venue was touted on their website — an open invitation — and while I was still patting myself on the back for my uber-super-reporting skills at getting an invite to the after party, I saw the open invitation in the program. You gotta love a bunch of tough girls who want everyone to come and get drunk with them. But here’s the bad news: there’s a reason why you need a “pre” and a “post.” There are no alcoholic beverages served in the basement of Hunter College, and between the metal detectors (read: metal flasks) and the hand searches (read: sniffing water bottles) it’s nigh on impossible to smuggle in booze. And that, my pretties, is the only bad thing I can say about Saturday night’s bout between the Bronx Gridlock and the Queens of Pain.
Are we happy the days of dingy subway stations are gone? (Don’t look at Jay St. — you might think it was the 70s again.) Even if the stations aren’t covered in spray paint, some old-fashioned smart-asses are taking the burden of de-corpratizing the subway on their shoulders to make our commute a little more fun.
This is a jazz band taking a break at Astor Place in Manhattan. It is a perfect example of the spontaneous and organic enrichment of life that happens in a pedestrian oriented city like New York. By interacting with people on the street you encounter culture that broadens your horizons while you’re on your way to work. And it’s completely free — unlike books on tape.
By J.D. Oxblood
Caught the Monday night again at Public Ass. (“Public Assembly is just a stupid name. It will heretofore be referred to, in these pages, as Public Ass. Suits my idiom.) It’s nice to see that in spite of all the gentrification, the old Billburg spirit is alive and well at Public Ass—the bartenders suck. Too cool for school, way too cool to actually pour a drink or care about tips. Amen, my brethren
The less said about Jonny Porkpie’s Fresh Faces Showcase the better — although WordyGirl’s diss on the U.S. of A. was … something. And at midnight I had to get the hell out of there and get me some up-close-and-personal T & A.
Consequently I couldn’t stick around for GiGi’s Monday Night Blue, so so all you’re gonna get is the highlights of the main event. Deal.
Monday, July 7, 2008 marked the opening night of the new Monday Night Burlesque at the Performance Space Formerly known as Galapagos. The act to christen the space, or, to “embooben,” as Nasty Canasta put it, was no other than the now super-famous Julie Atlas Muz. She came on in classic black — eyes big as swimming pools complete with bikini-clad pleasure models lounging with Mai Tais — lost her black dress in under a minute, sucked off a rose in fellatiatic splendor, spat out the petals, spilling down her bare bosom, and before anyone could quite check the turgidity of his member, was crawling across the bar to bathe herself with a bowl and a bar of soap, complete with avid pit and crotch scrubbing. No one does nudity with laughter better than the Muz. She finished with a bottle of vodka upended over her entire body and I half-thought she was going to set her entire figure on fire. Let me be the one to tell you, folks: Julie looks hotter now than she did when I first saw her naked, 8 years ago. That’s some serious deal with the devil, and I think he got took.
This is a pretty cool documentary on hackers in New York City around the turn of the millennium. Check it out.
(Editor’s note: This is the first post by Cultural Capitol writer J. D. Oxblood.)
On Dining with Strangers
By J.D. Oxblood
I live on a small island off the coast of the United States of America. That may be technically untrue, but it’s more true than the truth. I live on the Island of Long, in a small corner that is vastly different from the rest of the island and—like the neighboring island of Manhattan—the rest of America.
This is a story, like all New York stories, about what makes us different, if not exactly special. We live in tiny, tiny apartments and pay anywhere between a third to half of our income on rent. This is alarmingly obvious to New Yorkers, but if anyone’s reading this out in flyover country (that’s right, I said it) read that sentence again. It’s insane if you really chew it over, and yet we do it, year after year. And as I was recently reminded whilst dining with out of town guests, it’s always all about the rent. As my visitors were wondering why we were paying $15 for a cocktail, I noted the address: we’re half a block from Rockefeller Center. Guess what—while the cocktails are weak, the service is crap, the décor is overdone and like something some rube from the suburbs would call “so New Yorky”—these people have to pay the RENT.
I saw one of the waterfalls erected by Olafur Eliasson and the Public Art Fund last night. For a nicely literary review check out Roberta Smith’s article in the New York Times. Sadly, my camera was inadequate to capture the beauty of the art.
A city not only attracts all kinds — people from outside the country who have come to trade or build their fortune, people from the countryside who want the same — it encourages people to develop their persona more actively than in their home community, where the self is developed mostly through the expectations of others rather than from a desire to be seen. Or, to put it another way, in a city of millions of inhabitants, it’s easy to be invisible, and if you want to stand out you really have to work on it.
This cowboy drove his herd down from Maine. The car was parked on 43rd between Lexington and 3rd, so maybe he was rustlin’ up some shares at a stock broker’s ranch. Yippie-kai-yay, dude. Yippie-kai-yay.
I went to check out Oskar Eustis’s production of Hamlet last night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The skies threatened rain all day, and finally delivered just as the play was about to start. It misted more or less heavily until I left, which was thirty minutes into the show.
I kind of feel bad for the actors. They’re the ones who have to suffer the brunt of shame when things go bad. On the other hand, a sense of self-preservation is necessary in all living things. If you can tell things aren’t going right, it’s your responsibility to take up the slack. And Shakespeare isn’t boring! If people are bored the text is not the problem — it’s the production. Hamlet is, in my opinion, the hardest role — ever — for an actor. Hamlet’s indecision has to be rendered by an actor with incredibly strong instincts for nuance and timing or it comes across as mere confusion.
The obvious and avoidable screw ups — when Hamlet forgot his lines in hist first scene, or when Polonious (played by Sam Waterson) got so off track in Act II, scene i you could hear crickets chirping — that I can blame on the weather. But some problems were in the production concept, and those problems aren’t going away even after the rain clears up.
Hamlet is definitely not a he-man or a “decider“. When Claudius tells him in the second scene that his grief for his father is “unmanly” he tells us, the audience, that Hamlet is going to have a crisis of heroism. I was no fan of Mel Gibson’s Hamlet for this very reason: Hamlet is a sensitive boy. But casting Michael Stuhlbarg as the dithering Dane made Hamlet into Alvy Singer, a neurotic bumbler who tosses out one-liners like a borscht belt comedian.
Sam Waterson played Polonius, and as I said above, the rain may have had something to do with his inability to deliver his lines. It could also have been because Richard Easton was originally cast for the part (though in the program Waterson credited as Polonius). Did they have a last minute personnel switch-up? Is this a sign that Eustis’s ship has leaks?
The biggest problem with the show was the direction, which is a little surprising considering Eustis’s reputation. All the actors from the bit-player guards to our hero decided to convey the intensity of tragedy by yelling, from the first scene where Francisco and Bernardo see the ghost to Hamlet’s first soliloquy. If there is one iron-clad rule that all directors who tackle Shakespeare must follow, it is to let the poetry do the work and restrain the actors’ desire to over act. Ironically Shakespeare dramatizes this fundamental truth in Act III, scene ii with the “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it” speech:
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and—as I may say—whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.”
Pray you, Mr. Eustis, tell your actors this. They start the play by shouting, and have no other means to increase the dramatic tension than by increasing the volume of their voices.
