Filthy puns I got paid to write

I'm feeling good today; I got checked out this morning by a handsome, rugged fireman, which is pretty much the greatest love of all since it is a scientific fact that all firemen are drowning in the poon lagoon. So to actually get noticed by one--well!
Today...I consider myself...the luckiest woman...in New York City. JK. Firemen are NMT (not my type).

So in the spirit of my being awesome, let's all enjoy some filthy puns and wordplays I wrote as headlines and decks and such for the latest Playgirl. (It's our music issue, so there was plenty of talk of rocking out with one's cock out.)

For an article on polyamory: Bang bang bang went the poly; Can you have your cock and eat other ones, too?
For an article on hottie Scandinavian bands: Nordic Tracks; Northern Exposure; and Scan-dalous
For a blurb about a nude Sid Vicious photo: Mind the bollocks, because this punk is showing his junk.
For a blurb about a nude David Bowie screen capture: Old blue eye's one-eyed snake [note position of apostrophe]
For a collection of recycled photos of nude models who look like they might be musicians: Band Members; intro also rhymes "acoustic" with "goo stick" (this makes me cringe almost more than the photos themselves)

That's all so far. Plenty more where that came from, though. Pleeeenty more. Not to mention some of my greatest hits, I should compile those when there's more time.

Flaming Lips at Hammerstein: Words fail!

I love this man so very, very much.

The first time I saw the Flaming Lips play in Iceland in 1999, they converted me to instant fan and I declared it the second best concert ever. Last night pretty much shot directly to best concert ever. I can't believe what an over-the-top insanely magical show the Flaming Lips put on, and to try to describe it would cheapen it (as certainly would one of my crappy cell-phone photos--here's one from someone else).



So just take with you this examp of how awesome it was. Myself and my date were in the middle of the crowd while pretty much every concert effect ever was happening all around us: confetti cannons, video screen, costumed dancers, smoke machine, giant balloons bouncing everywhere, colored lights, streamers, strobes, not to mention that everyone in the crowd had been going bonkers with the concert-issued laser pointers until Wayne asked nicely for everyone to chill it because we'd need 'em for something later, and everyone obeyed (and it was tooootally worth it). I started having difficulty breathing and feeling lightheaded and I told my gentleman caller I thought I had to get out of the crowd, so he very graciously led me out, then my head became even more swimmy and I said I'd better sit down, and then, just like when Curious George experimented with ether, everything went black. When I came to, I was trying to stand back up while my concerned suitor was trying to sit me back down and tend to my addled self. As the band played "Yoshimi," it took a minute to realize I'd totally fainted, due probably to dehydration, visual overstimulation, and fatigue. (Third time ever, first time that no blood from self or a loved one had been in sight.) So we hung out on the Hammerstein Ballroom floor, next to the employee who'd done absolutely nothing during the collapsing hubbub.

Shortly thereafter, a solid-looking guy dropped to the ground unconscious with a thud, was helped up, and immediately puked in a garbage can and onto himself. So I'm going to put this advice out there: don't nobody inclined to have seizures or other such probs come to one of these shows.

Even though my legs were like a wobbly newborn kid goat for the rest of the time, I was enraptured and didn't want to leave. We stood up to witness the best visual bits, and still had a show from the floor vantage point in the form of a very entertaining, very Caucasian dancer, delightedly reveling just several feet away.

Fainting spells! Weakness of the knees! That is some Beatles-concert-level hysteria right there. And the Flaming Lips earned every bit of applause, every WOO, every collapse, and each bit of vomit. So although it might not sound like it, you'll just have to trust me: Best show ever.

Sunday Sunday Sundayyyyy!

Snacktime!

All-too temporary ruins in Midtown

Entropy, it's a matter of course. (Yikes, did I really just quote Bad Religion? Yes.)

I really dig ruins, especially modern-day ruins. So I've been watching with great interest the most modern sort of ruins of all right near my workplace, which very unfortunately for me is in Midtown Manhattan, land of the soul crush, home of the Blue Shirt.

What we have here is a Hallmark store on third Avenue, actually right near another rare Midtown curiosity, a shut-down deli that was temporarily turned into a Haitian political art installment affiliated with Chashama (the nearby art space where on any given day you can walk by and see chickens in the window or some kinda wacked-out bodysuited modern dancers—the latter totally not my thing but still slightly preferable to the usual local fare) and still bears the crudely painted words KRIK? KRAK! under the front display windows.



When you work in Midtown and you long not to, you take small joy from oddities like the KRIK KRAK display, especially ones on the controversial side that jar your attention from the area's main order of business, which is business. But back to the Hallmark store. I first noticed it in early summer, because it still had its Easter displays in the windows when it should've been well into hawking Father's Day doodads and graduation gewgaws. Then I spied a notice posted on the door; the store had been ordered to close for nonpayment of taxes, or some such. Ever since, I've been tracking the slow decay of the window display and wishing for a real digital camera to document, but figuring I'd have one before it was all gone. (NOPE! I didn't magically get a raise! Prob will really soon, though. So it's me & the cameraphone again.)

Over the months the display has gotten faded by the sun, and just generally more and more messy looking, even though no one has touched it at all. How does that happen? Entropy (or my layperson's understanding of one of its definitions, anyway): Things will naturally drift towards disorder, not order. I'm going to use this to explain the state of my apartment. Not my fault.

There's something so post-apocalyptic about an abandoned store with all its goods intact, and for a horror fan like myself who loves a good apocalypse tale, this Hallmark store's eternal Easter was a nerdy thrill to observe.



The other day I noticed folks busily puttering around inside, documenting the store's contents for auction. They're probably going to put about two more banks in that space, adding to the blandscape more corporate imagery in Inoffensive Corporate Blue® and Dynamic Red®, with plenty of Corporate Stock Photos of Buissnesspeople Conducting Business® and People of Diverse Ethnicities Interacting Happily Thanks to This Bank®


...all of which make you (me) want to kill yourself (myself) just looking at them, so that's the end of that bit of Midtown amusement.

Learn the significance of June 11th, 1989.

Hey, this Wednesday I'm going to read stuff in Mortified!

Last time I did this, I read excerpts from my eighth grade diary, with the intro that back then I was very Jersey, very Irish Catholic (and near-bursting with guilt!), and very innocent. This time, I'll be reading excerpts from my ninth grade diary. The only change was that things started to get a little more rockin'.

What occupied young cokane's thoughts back then?

Here is a hint:



If you think this sounds awesome, you are right. You can get tix here and prob should do so soon because these shows sell out.

American Gothic Bro'd Trip

It's 800 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas in the Prius, half a tub of Ricemellow Creme, it's light, and I'm wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

On Wednesday, September 6, Derik and I set out from Clifton, NJ with the ultimate destination of the Touch and Go 25th Anniversary Block Party in Chicago. But being a road trip, it was way more epic than that; this was about gawking at Real America, stuffing our faces, and nonstop comedy. And death was around every corner, but so was life. (Photos by Derik, unless he's in them such as below, making a devilish star sign, and more are here.)



Pennsylvania, homeland of my old man, is a land of Brutality. Mountainous Pennsyltuckey seems to be made up mostly of dismal broken coal-mining and industrial towns, with long stretches of farmland making up the rest of it. My dad used to regale my brother and I with tales of deadly coal-mining follies and the mob-like Molly McGuires, like the time Great Uncle Felix had gotten their Irish up and a few thugs swung him between a train's cars as it went by, for a little warning. On after-dinner walks when we were little, we'd make the old man tell us stories about he and his brothers exploring abandoned houses as kids where they'd encounter Frankenstein or some such monstrosity. And now I just generally get the fear when visiting the state, since PA's inhabitants are not known as the most progressive types.

This brings us to our first and (for me) most anticipated stop, Centralia, PA.



Centralia was your regular mining town located over a fat vein of anthracite when an underground fire started in 1962. Because of the vast amount of fuel, it was impossible to stop the fire without investing billions of dollars, so the fire still burns today as one of the world's top five underground infernos. But although their basement walls and floors were getting hot to the touch and fumes and smoke were rising from the ground, folks were still living in Centralia until the early '80s, when some kid playing in his grandmother's backyard almost ate it after the ground caved in and he was left dangling from some tree roots above the fire. Sounds to me like that kid was a major sinner, but for the townspeople it meant it was finally time to get the hell out of Hell, aka Centralia. The buildings were bulldozed except for the homes of a few people who refused to move. (If the underground fire/ghost town scenario sounds a bit like Silent Hill, it's because the screenwriter based it on Centralia, so we watched the movie the night before we left to get all scared.)

The coolest sight is the closed-off section of Highway 61, which buckled and cracked so severely they had to reroute the highway.



As you can see, it is impossibly metal.



So what's in Centralia proper now is roads and driveways to nowhere getting slowly reclaimed by nature, two cemetaries, and one area with all the bulldozed rubble where the most smoke escapes from underground. You can't even put your hand a few inches into these vents before it's too hot to take.



So that was robo-goth. And remember: you can't spell Centrailia without "entrail." Unless you spell it the right way, which is "Centralia."

Then we stayed with the most rad woman in Cleveland, Jackie, who owns a correspondingly ridunkulous 1940s home decorated midcentury modern plus her own paintings.



She's a teacher, she has a darling dog, she dehydrates apples that she picked herself and makes delicious vegan pies from them, she made us a multi-course meal, and she used to scream for a band that everyone is still in awe of ten years later. In other words, compared to Jackie, I am a piece of crap. I am now a huge Jackie fan.



On Thursday, we went to a double feature at the Memphis drive-in, which is still exactly as it was when our hostess went there as a kid, and exactly as I remember the drive-in, except I wasn't in my jammies and I tragically no longer have my inspirational lady superheroes sleeping bag featuring Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Batgirl.



On Friday the three of us headed to Chicago, and in Wicker Park, met our supercool host Steve, the world's only hardcore vegan straightedge pilot, his other guests, two lovely Canadian sisters, and many other new pals. For the next three days, we crammed as much delicious vegan food as we could fit into our maws.



Not quite pictured: complete and utter post-food-orgy bliss.

For me, who was mostly into terrible music when many of Touch & Go's bands were in their prime, the show itself was secondary, and was more of a social space. I hung out with my other buds from Philly, and ran into a guy from my nabe, pals from Jerse on tour with their band, and another Jersey guy I hadn't seen since high school. Finally on Sunday our gang lingered too long taking like 172 pictures so the broetry wouldn't have to end, which resulted in an all-night drive back to Cleveland.



This leg included an unintentional midnight detour to southwest Michigan and the simultaneous discovery that we had half a teacupful of gas left. We stopped at a closed Pizza Hut for directions, and my two companions disappeared behind the building trying to find someone inside. Well, those two are gone, I thought, but at least they'd left the keys in the ignition. We did get to gas, though, and in the flourescent gas-station limbo, a lesser-known B-52's song drifted in all faraway, and it occurred that the time had been so perfect that maybe we'd really been dead since Centralia. As Fred Schneider, I declared, "You're about to MEET YOUR MAKER!" It's fun to sing anything Fred Schneider-style.

Driving through Ohio in the middle of the night, both other passengers conked out, I had to see what scariness was on the radio...AM radio. At night, even in the most populous places, AM sounds piped in from another time and instills instant loneliness. But when you're driving down an empty highway in the middle of America, and you come across a ghostly religious vocal cross between Julee Cruise and Enya and you can't even tell if it's in English or not, and none of the far-off farmhouses show any sign of life, that is some creepy shit right there. So the driving was awesome.

I imagined having a temporary life on the road while earning good money as a truck driver. I tried to remember the negative parts I'd learned when I did a story called "Mother Truckers" for BUST, but all that came up instead was a romantic vision of myself being an excellent trucker respected by all, never having to be in a tiny cubicle in a flourescent office, staying only in the most wood-paneled vintage Americana motels, somehow having time for sightseeing and thrift shopping, and socializing in authentic bars where everyone drank their crap beers earnestly and no one was ironic (except me sometimes because I couldn't help it).

Monday was our last day, but we still had a visit in Pittsburgh to look forward to, with my good friend known on this blog as Meanieteacher. We decided to spend the night there instead of rushing back. Meanieteacher was my roommate in Dublin, where we got into all kinds of super fun trouble together, and now she's a responsible married homeowner with a wee bun in the oven. Hearing her say "The baby's moving" as we all watched TV was somehow the most surreal phrase of our supposedly grown-up-but-not-really trip, but really touching as well.

Crossing PA again on Tuesday, the potential for adventure seemed limitless, if only we could acquire more comedy albums for the soundtrack, and didn't have to return to stupid-jerk real life. As the light drained out of the day, Derik showed me some sights around and in historic Patterson, NJ, including the abandoned Hinchcliff Stadium.

And then, inevitably, real life resumed, until the next trip.

I say endanger those gazelles!

This is the only news item of late to make me smile. (Thanks to ecs for passing this on.)



MADRID, Spain (Reuters) ‑‑ The world's first ban on overly thin models at a top‑level fashion show in Madrid has caused outrage among modeling agencies and raised the prospect of restrictions at other venues. Madrid's fashion week has turned away underweight models after protests that girls and young women were trying to copy their rail‑thin looks and
developing eating disorders.

Organizers say they want to project an image of beauty and health, rather than a waif‑like, or heroin chic look.
But Cathy Gould, of New York's Elite modeling agency, said the fashion industry was being used as a scapegoat for illnesses like anorexia and bulimia.

"I think its outrageous, I understand they want to set this tone of
healthy beautiful women, but what about discrimination against the model
and what about the freedom of the designer," said Gould, Elite's North America
director, adding that the move could harm careers of naturally "gazelle‑like" models.

Madrid's regional government, which sponsors the show and imposed
restrictions, said it did not blame designers and models for anorexia. It
said the fashion industry had a responsibility to portray healthy body
images.

"Fashion is a mirror and many teenagers imitate what they see on the
catwalk," said regional official Concha Guerra.

The mayor of Milan, Italy, Letizia Moratti, told an Italian newspaper this
week she would seek a similar ban for her city's show unless it
could find a solution to "sick" looking models.

Quality, not size

The Madrid show is using the body mass index or BMI ‑‑ based on
weight and height ‑‑ to measure models. It has turned away 30 percent of women who took part in the previous event. Medics will be on hand at the September 18‑22 show to check models.

"The restrictions could be quite a shock to the fashion world at the
beginning, but I'm sure it's important as far as health is concerned," said
Leonor Perez Pita, director of Madrid's show, also known as the Pasarela
Cibeles.

A spokeswoman for the Association of Fashion Designers of Spain, which
represents those at Madrid fashion week, said the group supported
restrictions and its concern was the quality of collections, not
the size of models.

Eating disorder activists said many Spanish model agencies and
designers oppose the ban and they had doubts whether the new rules would be followed.

"If they don't go along with it the next step is to seek legislation, just
like with tobacco," said Carmen Gonzalez of Spain's Association in
Defense of Attention for Anorexia and Bulimia, which has campaigned for restrictions since the 1990s.

HA HA!
Jerks.

Laborious camping in NJ's bear country

A rainy weekend seemed a fitting ending to this rain-ass summer, but when Sunday of Labor Day weekend turned up sunny and mild, I issued a group text to see who wanted to go camping effective immediately. I recruited two fellow spinsters for the last-minute expedition, and by 3 we were on the road. by 4:30, we were not even through the Holland Tunnel. Ahh, stinky jerkass new York. No better time to get out.

Therese, who grew up nearby in Vernon (home of the now-defunct Action Park, sometimes known as "Legal Action Park" alluding to the injuries that took place there, one of which I witnessed, abandoned Action Park pix here) regaled us with points of interest from her adolescence, pointing out the numerous critters that had been set atop telephone poles on Rt 23, as noted in good old Weird New Jersey.

We were also in the territory of infamous "SPACE FARMS, Sussex, New Jersey!" Anyone who grew up within local TV-ad range of this tourist attraction remembers it mostly as a sad home to captive bears. (I'm surprised they even have a website with an updated but equally crazed theme song.) Tour guide Therese informed us that they were said to have first dibs on local roadkill to feed to their bears.

We were already losing light by the time we got to the campsite, so I dumped off the gals with the tent fixins and turned back to buy some firewood we'd seen advertised about 15 minutes back. I couldn't find the place in the dark and stopped at a pizza place to ask where I could get wood at this late hour, and was told I'd have to go to the other side of the mountain. Realllly. Let's just say that pizza place's parking lot had a few less 2 x 4s and thin panels of wood when I pulled out of there at Wolfgang's getaway speed of 20 mph. Then, after much struggle against the dampness, and with a little help from some flammable Deep Woods Off (for extra cancer!), our hobo fire was born.



As fire-starting butch/ wood chopping butch, I became Colly Hatchet, after discovering that chopping wood with a hatchet is quite theraputic. I didn't realize I had so much pent-up aggression. Wait, I kinda did.



The hatchet became my latest sleeping-bag-side weapon against bears, in addition to the tent/bear-pole, its pointy end facing the zippered-shut door. Because bears use tent doors when trying to access what is basically colorful canvas-wrapped delicious humans. And a 30-year-old plastic zipper will totally thwart their entrance.

I slept badly becuase I was too scared to go to bathroom for what seemed like half the night. Eventually, nature won out, but fortunately in this case nature meant "need to urinate" and not "bears."

But the crap night was all worth it when we woke up to an amazing tofu scramble & potatoes breakfast made by Ms. Reilly.



We hiked a bit of the Appalachian trail, which we accessed the way all thugs do, via the Wu Dot Trail.



And we sang "Private Dancer," because that was the last song we'd heard in the van, which made no sense whatsoever in the context of hiking.



G'bye all, I am on a very exciting road trip to the Touch & Go fest in Chicago, be back next week with many antics to report!

A gay of my own

Readers, I pose this question to you: Why don't I have my own gay boyfriend?

I've been wondering this for quite some time. According to TV and Hollywood, every sassy young woman has her own gay. Most of my girl friends have their own. Some have whole collections of them. Why not me? I edit Playgirl, for crissakes! As far as I can tell, I am enjoyed by numerous gays of my friends. But it never gets to the point where he is my gay BF.

Do I radiate some sort of gay-repellant pheromone? Is it that I sometimes use "that's gay" in the playground sense? And sometimes the phrase "that is gay homo to the max"? Is it that I tend to like music generally enjoyed by alienated young straight men and women (and dykes), and not music generally enjoyed by gay men?

If nobody answers this, it means you're gay and you dont' think I'm fabulous.