Dirty Bingo in the Meatpacking District

I had never actually been to the Meatpacking District, and it is far more charming than I would have thought: crooked cobblestone streets lined with old brick packing plants and warehouses, now inhabited by obscenely expensive restaurants (including the only place to get poutine in this city) and clubs pretentious enough to make you line up in the red ropes for Tuesday night bingo yet. Our friend was spinning, so we laid down $20 for our bingo card, complimentary champagne cocktail, and buffet of capicolla and mortadella, soft cheeses, and pulled pork on focaccia. Bingo was called by a giant drag queen with great legs, while the balls were handed to her by one of those New Jersey gym rats who only ever works out his biceps. Winning configurations like "erect penis" won prizes like dildos and romantic restraints. We figured out that if we didn't actually mark our cards, we could re-use them for the next round rather than buying a new one. Being a graduate student requires always striking that perfect balance between decadence and thrift.

photo source

Who's more foolish? The fou, or the fou who pays $11 to see Pierrot Le Fou?

There is a lot of keeping up to do in New York. In terms of fashion and money, which we've discussed, readers, but also in terms of Kultur. I can name, like, five painters, and none from the 20th century. And that just does not cut it here. Neither does my taste in movies, which goes:

a) action
b) Dan Ackroyd comedy
c) anti-establishment documentary.

So in the interest of not being such a philistine vis-a-vis my friends (some of whom are from Arkansas, ffs), I went to a Godard film last weekend. Fuuuuck. What overworn French masculinist fantasy. What self-indulgent 1960s experimentation. Breaking all the boundaries of cinema, except the necessity of a misogynist plot line. (But that's just me, right? And has nothing to do with the fact that he married three women of the same name.)

There's a girl. A brunette! And she's kooky. And game for anything. And not your wife. And coquettish. And she embroils you in hijinx. And she's capricious, but not so much that she won't promise "ne jamais te quitter," although she will double-cross you in the end, as is your fantasy, because then you get to kill her, and have her apologize to you in her dying breath.

Spoiler alert, btw. Including for those of you who have not yet watched the most recent James Bond film.

Fashion is my life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Suzanne is in a fashion show and wants us all to go. As advertised on Gawker. Yay! Friend and I get there right at 10 and the lineup is around the block. Boo. I go to buy cigs and when I come back, friend has found some underage NYU students who have just realized they won't get in willing to sell 2 of their 4 tickets to us. We immediately get to the front of the line to join the other two people buying their tickets. Yay! The BITCHIEST GAY MAN IN THE UNIVERSE at the door tell us we can't use someone else's tickets and literally tries to use the velvet rope to sweep us out of the line. Boo. But the other door woman, whom we had checked with first, says that we can, and waves us on. Yay! But then some other door guy -- ok, I will just say that this was the worst organized event ever. While the fashion bitches argued, I quickly pushed friend through the door. (The other two people who had bought the NYU students' tickets never made it through.)

Yeah, that's way more interesting than the rest of the night. I drank. Suzanne's team made it to the second round of the Style Wars. She also sent me this SMS: "Im like fucking dying in these shoes lol!"

More proof that "hey beautiful" and "I hate you" mean the same thing

Guy selling CDs on Broadway: "Hey, you wanna hear some new music?"
Me: " "
Guy: "Hey lady, you're an artist! Come over here!"
Me: "I'm not an artist."
Guy: "Hey come over here! Come on, just for a second. That's not nice. Hey, FUCK YOU!"

Bluestockings

The other day I was in mid-drunken rant when I realized that all the exhibitions I had wanted to see at PS1 had closed the day before, and got really depressed. It's that thing I've mentioned before about never going to stuff here because there's a ton of options (catch that, Kate?), but you have a routine and that routine is bed, work, coffee, books, class, drunk, bed. So for the thousandth time I remade that resolution to get out there and do stuff, and went to see Avi Lewis (hot Canadian radical) talk at Bluestockings (radical New York bookstore). Back in high school, when I had such a big fat crush on him, I never would have been able to converse with him on consumer debt.

Patron saint of riding the subway drunk, midafternoon

Facebook strikes again - this time a 12-year reunion with a friend from high school in Brussels. She's a solicitor now (faithful readers will recognize that this perpetuates my inadvertent trend of only ever hanging out with lawyers), so I made her buy me drinks at the St. Regis hotel. When I arrived she was being hit on by some businessman hotel lothbario, and it occurred to me that I could probably drink $20 cocktails for free every day if I put on some mascara and hiked up to midtown and sat alone at the wood. But then every day I would have to go home and have a four-hour nap. Gawd damn!

Gallery opening

Great - very few pieces, all by local artists, showing their side of Queens, everything crammed in a narrow hallway behind two steel doors on the ground floor of a converted warehouse. A dozen cops were there when I showed up, apparently to bust the crowd of smokers outside (a huge problem, on a deserted warehouse strip in Long Island City). For an eternity, no one could find a corkscrew for the two magna of wine, so friend and I walked around optimistically with empty plastic cups. When someone finally did find one, the bottles were drained before we got any. It was time to leave.

Enjoy the Saturday night rhubarb outside my window. I like how everyone is dressed like P Diddy.

Went and saw a musical

I've been a tourist my own city for the past few days since some out-of-towners are here. I went and saw my first Broadway musical. It was at the Eugene O'Neill theatre. It was called Spring Awakening. It was not so good, but I like to leave the house, and... tick.

I also have to say I liked walking through Times Square, because in my overly urbanized and sardonic life I forget that things like TGIFriday's and fat midwestern suburban families exist and it's nice to be reminded.

The triangle above and to the left of me

In a city this dense, moving (eventually) just a few blocks west of where I used to live actually significantly changes my neighbourhood and day-to-day. Jubilee is farther away, so I go to Gristedes in Battery Park City, which I think is supposed to be kind of yuppie and upscale, but is dirty and annoyingly overpriced. Sometimes I take advantage of Jubilee's free delivery, but usually I feel too guilty making some guy ride over here on his bike to bring me cigarettes and a carton of organic milk.

Also, I now live just a few steps from Tribeca. I guess I did before, but I didn't really explore it much, because it was west of my path uptown, and whenever I did happen to stumble through it, it seemed kind of deserted. Now I've realized that it's cunningly that way - the streets are very quiet, but around every corner there is a fantastic dimly-lit bistro or wine bar or cucina with, nowadays, a spill of tables outside. No wonder the celebs hang out there.

Last night I went to one of those unassuming places and hung out with some lawyers - by coincidence the only non-grad student type I ever associate with here. Probably everybody around us was somebody, but what do I know. We drank wine and tequila until they put all the chairs up and turned the lights on and swept us out the door.

Mermaid Parade

Once a year at Coney Island. I was too busy sitting on a kerb eating a soft-shell crab sandwich and garlic fries to muscle my way to a good view - you know how my version of tourism is to eat my way through something - but I did see the porn star mermaid float and the Mayor of Brooklyn float and the goth mermaids and the Uncle Sam and I won't even mention how wonderfully queer it all was. Travelling in a big group meant spending a lot of time trying to hook up with each other after someone would go to get a hot dog and go missing for an hour, until eventually Suz and I decided to hit the boardwalk and the beach. I didn't have my suit but I put my feet in the water and my feet on the sand - you know how that's 80% of the beach experience for an urbanite anyway - and some guy came by selling cheap Coronas and I basked in the company of some of the people whose invitations I had been turning down for a month in favour of moving. Then I took a sunned-out, head-lolling, open-mouthed nap home on the F train. There is a fab, fab, hot, sandy beach a subway ride away. Shit.

In a can, yet!

Went to a place called the Trailer Park (known for: tater tots) in Chelsea (known for: the gays), and had tater tots and Sofia Coppola champagne in a can. If any of you know where I can buy some cases of Sofia Coppola champagne in a can to keep in my fridge all the time that would be really helpful thank you.

Linguistic irony strikes again

Busboy: ¿Es terminado?
Me: Yeah, you can take that.
Busboy: Gracias.
Me: Thank you.
Busboy: ¿Fue bueno?
Me: Yes, it was.
Busboy: [taking glass] Una mas?
Me: No, I'm done thanks.
Busboy: ¿Habla usted español?
Me: Me? No...

Exeunt

Um, hi. Blog's gone dark, I know. Times are not good; everyone's stressed, everyone's sick, everyone's swimming in the whorls of mental instability that we academics like to masochistically impose upon ourselves every four months. It radiates out from work to time to people to life to health to self. I keep busy staring at the various aporias that every aspect of my life has resolved into: I need to be both here and there. I need to be both with and without him/her/them/that. I need to keep my schedule clear for academic work, which I won't be able to sustain without instead filling it with paid work.

And so, I present to you this commemorative shot I grabbed of the Empire State Building decapitated...



And a decapitated shot of my own, since I look good on Taz coffee and American Spirits.

A trio of star-crossed tourists take their seats

Went to the ballet with some friends from elementary school (I know, right!). With a few glitches: I barely made it uptown by our agreed-upon time, then waited 30 mins with no sign of them, until the ushers stopped letting people through the doors. By the time I got off the subway back at home, there was a frustrated message on my cell: they were lost, about 90 blocks off target in fact, having been misdirected by the concierge of their hotel. 65th and Broadway, not 65 Broadway. WhoTF doesn't know where the ballet is, anyway? (I'm looking at the concierge.) Same place where the Met opera and the Philharmonic and Juliard are. Lincoln Center.

Anyway, they were actually only about 4 blocks from my house, oddly enough. I quickly got us on the train and to the theatre just in time for the start of the second act of Romeo and Juliet. We were way up high, but I loved the 6-storey interior drop to the orchestra pit. I also really enjoyed the show even though the Times had panned it; I don't go to the ballet often enough to not just enjoy it when I'm there. There seemed to be a lot of sympathetic sniffling in the audience, too - but that could have been because of the outrageous pollen levels in the air right now. Even I feel like I have allergies.

(By the way, apparently it's a good thing we went on Wednesday 'cuz on Tuesday Bill Clinton was there along with the rest of the NY leet, and I would have felt even more out of place with my nap breath and wrinkled cords. LA DE DAH.)

Then I took the gals 50 more blocks uptown to Le Monde because god help me if I was gonna set foot in Times Square, where their hotel was, for that post-performance drink. We gossiped and ate, it was good. Turns out everyone we went to school with can now be exhaustively summed up as some concatenation of: doctor/lawyer/married/gay.

SMS highlight reel, vol. 2

Whoa, wait a minute. What is becoming of that pie?

This place is the bomb bomb bomb Holy shitness

Yo, that sucks. Btw, G train is running screwy

I just got out of jail.

Ew. I think I just finished my Gadamer paper...

Oddly mesmerizing, sleep inducing

Omg im drunk in long island.

Wanna do easter?!

Well, it's a very hip hipster queer bar in wilsbrg.

Drop that deuce yet?!

Hey babe. Drunk. Miss u. How u doin? Prob asleep.

I don't have any memory of like the last hour of the party AND i threw up IN BED (also dont remember that).

Shit girl lets ride.

Look left

I think i'm straight-up gay. Blink 3 times if you can hear me.

Give me 5 mins to finish this cereal

End of Weak

Poured rain all day and all night, got no reading done, but I picked up and went to the potluck on the Upper West Side anyway and Grace was her hilarious best and I brought a $20 fruit salad and that woman was outrageously endearing. My situation is dire, but there is always something more and always something next in this city and right now it's all better. I love to you, New York. Good night.

my future ex-husbands The Slackers

There aren't really any words for this past Saturday night in Red Hook, as friend and I discovered while we were there. We barely even know each other, but a coincidence of hometowns and teenage years spent at ska shows allowed for a moment - nostalgia but not repetition, happiness but non self-aware. We exited the cab, waltzed past the line up with our pre-paid tickets, bought a draft, commandeered the men's restroom with two other gals when we realized the line for the women's wasn't moving, then sidled up to stage left just in time for a clear view of the perfect two-hour set. We communicated only in raised eyebrows, every half hour or so, the in-betweens spent dancing? drinking? watching? Must have been, but all I remember is Glen Pine having his way with that trombone, and Marcus Geard beaming because he loves what he does, and Vic Ruggiero talking in that unapologetic Brooklyn accent about the scene "in heah", and about spending the last ten years angry over what we're doing to each other and the planet... then accepting that we'll go out in some kind of blaze of glory, but here is this. He'll be playing. And hopefully, Glen Pine will be smashing my headboard.

Thus slept moi

Went to a play at a little East Village venue called Kraine Theater. It was a play production of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (a philosophy classic) and was very D&D/Lord of the Rings. Okay, it was not bad for a tiny theatre company, but in a tiny venue like that there is no audience anonymity, and so the actors can totally see when you are dozing off in the middle of their, like, big emotional scene.

Next year in Jerusalem, kids

It's Passover, so I just had seder, obvs. I don't know whether that needs an article or not. A seder? Wait - did seder?

My friend was feeling homesick and nostalgic (oh, and Jewish), so invited a couple of us non-Jews over, and really went all out. I helped with the Charoset and washed the parsley for the Karpas. Look it up, Catholics. She walked us through the Cliff notes version of the holiday - reciting the Hebrew phrases and telling us when to drink our Manischewitz. We were delightfully irreverent, I am sure. Actually, there was blasphemy all around: at one point someone asked an obvious question, and she totally ingenuously said "Does the pope shit in the woods?" We all burst out laughing, and then other friend said that would actually make a great New Yorker cartoon - the pope shitting in the woods, and a bear walks up to him wearing a funny hat. Write your own caption.