Goldfrapp - Strict Machine

Because it's frappalicious

Turning Japanese

The band Alphaville had a great song called Big in Japan with the line “Things are easy when you’re big in Japan” but of course I heard it as “Things are easy when you’re big in your pants.”

I gotta go

Dee Vee

Diana Vreeland, a goddess who moved among mere mortals, wrote a column called "Why Don't You..." for Harper's Bazaar that was a source for insane ideas, because, apparently, some people can’t come up with their own. Among them:

“Why don’t you tie big tulle bows on your wrists instead of bracelets?”
“Why don’t you have your guests autograph a mirror-covered table with a diamond tipped pin?”
and my fave
· “Why don’t you wash your blond children’s hair in dead champagne as they do in France?”

which I always accidentally invert to the much creepier “…wash your dead children’s hair….”

Vreeland fascinates and inspires me the way professional football playing thugs apparently inspire straight boys. She ordered Billy Baldwin to decorate her home all in red, like “a garden in hell”; she created the Met’s Costume Institute; she painted her ears with rouge (is that true? I’ve always heard it, but don’t know and don’t really want to know differently. I retract the question.)

I once had a dream, a nightmare, really, wherein someone corrected me by saying “O honey. It’s not Diana Vreeland it’s Donna Vreeland” and I was overcome with mortification. I have never before or since been embarrassed in a dream, not even the walking-around-Kmart-in-my-underwear ones, but I was there. Thank god it was just a dream. I don’t think I would want to live in a world where such a vivid icon was named Donna.

I gotta go

The Aptly Named Jewel's

In the Tripping the Light Fantabulous post, jason said...
Jewel's? I'd love to hear more....sounds very (new) romantic.

Well I'd love to spill it. Here goes:

I’m not sure either New or Romantic would have described Jewel’s. It had been a hangout for drunken frat boys at some distant past and then morphed into a sinkhole of drunken bikers in the 70’s who then handed the floor over to drunken queers in the 80’s. The main draws were the cheap beers, the loud music, and the blow jobs in the backroom around the pool table. There was often a struggle between the poofs who wanted to play pool and those of us looking for l’amour.

I’m also not sure if every surface in the place was actually painted black or if the patina of filth had turned it that way, but the décor combined with the dim lights meant being able to see who you were sexing was not easy. Of course, that was part, a big part, of the charm.

I was standing in the back during one beer bust, minding my own beeswax when this guy with a big hairy chest came up to me and suggested we should go over to his house. So I pulled up my pants and we did. When we got out onto Decatur Street and I was able to get a good look at him, I was astonished how handsome he was. And he still is.

And that, little chickens, is the story of how Uncle Mrpeenee met R Man.

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I Gotta Go

R Man and I are off to Los Angeles on Thursday for a little road trip. As Dame Shirley Bassey would say, “Wheeee!” I love visiting the southland and don’t understand the snotty attitude here in the Bay Area against it. “It’s so sterile” they squeal, denizens of the deep East Bay who are able to revel in the rich urbane tapestry of Hayward. How can any place that’s produced Colt Studios and Sunset Boulevard (the film and the street) be sterile? Insane, maybe, but not sterile.

Los Angeles has always seemed to me be a conglomeration of idiosyncratic villages. I’m wild for the shabby charm of Echo Park and Silver Lake and the neighborhoods that kind of straggle in between them. And who could say no to the pissy, buffed charm of West Hollywood? It’s like a zip code composed of expensive rentboys.

Mostly, the trip is an excuse for a long drive. For those of you not familiar with the magic that is Interstate 5 from here to there, let me tell you the image of a lush California with surfers frolicking on Annette Funicello-esque beaches is no where in evidence. I’ve driven the long dull stretches of west Texas and this is plenty the same, just with the addition of dusty mountains out past the cantaloupe fields.

Exactly half-way is Harris Ranch, a hotel with a behemoth restaurant that’s probably not bigger than several combined bowling alleys, it just seems that way as you’re trekking off to your table. It’s a working ranch and supplies beef to plenty of the food industry in California so the menu is very meat-centric. Just being in the vicinity compels you to stab things and grunt. Mmmm. I’ll try to take some pictures of my slab o’cow.

I gotta go.

Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love

With Someone Who Knocked You Down on the Dance Floor

Tripping the Light Fantabulous

Maybe it was the poll on Fabulon’s blog asking who was the most fabulous, Pet Shop Boys or Erasure that set me off brooding about music from my misspent youth. So now I’ve been haunting YouTube’s videos of bands that have gone the way of all vinyl twenty and thirty years ago. Punk and electronica and New Wave and New Romantics and New This and New That and New Knickers and all of it so very important to someone I can hardly remember being, except for the music.

I was a big Flock of Seagulls fan, yes, it’s true, I have no shame. Ramones, Pete Shelley (I have three versions of “Ever Fallen in Love” currently on my iTunes,) the Go-Gos, Roxy Music, Soft Cell, B 52s - as long as it was loud, I’d embrace it.

And dancing, or rather, the wild flailing I claimed was my dancing. Interpretive movement for the absolutely graceless, didn’t bother me. You know the incredibly annoying queen thrashing in the corner of the bar with his head down and eyes closed, colliding into anyone unlucky enough to fall into his orbit? That was me and I guess I should apologize now, years later about knocking the beer out of your hand, but I can’t because I still don’t care. I said then if no one is bleeding, you haven’t really been dancing and I stick with that.

I suppose it would have been bad enough had I been some Kylie Minogue sized threat, but I’m 6’2” and my arms are more than a yard long. When I would launch into my dervish routine, I would take up considerable real estate.

My main patch was a dingy, tiny bar in New Orleans called Jewel’s. Do you remember the glory that was Jewel’s? No dance floor, not that that slowed me down and staffed with a fabulous DJ, the late, totally great Doug Bryson. Doug would crank up the bass so far, song lyrics were completely obscured. Imagine my surprise to find out all these years later that Joy Divison had words to their music.

My dear friend, the divine DianefromTexas would simply dive for the sidelines when she saw me winding up for some of my terpsichorean madness, it’s one of the reasons I adore her so. Magda, another long suffering accomplice from those vanished days, would just get behind me and enjoy the open space I would clear.

When Tim, the urban street pirate artiste (http://www.superagentfred.com/ ), recently told us about a mutual friend, Jen, who defended her personal space in a bar from some Dancing Queen by giving her a good stiff bif, it was like a bad flashback. Jen’s on the wee side and so cute, but she’s tough. I applauded her, but secretly shuddered, knowing that it could have been me. Of course, I haven’t cut loose in years, but it could happen. Just don’t start up any Buzzcocks.

I gotta go