leave me a note!

mail me

photo blog

human-scale chess project

poetry project

my paintings

T A N G E R I N E A L E R T

hoi polloi

johnnie utah

newest
archive
diaryland

< - >

SOTU drinking game, 2008 - 2008-01-27
little light - 2007-12-19
hamburger phone - 2007-12-18
why 'grease' is a perfect LA movie - 2007-12-17
recipe: barley treasure - 2007-10-12

2005-06-03 - 11:32 a.m.

so i needed to take a little break from the semi-obsessive documentation of my social life in order to actually lead it for a change. but you knew i could only stay away for so long.

in the meantime, i've been painting, looking for a job, planned two chess games in may and am planning two more for the fall. i went to texas for the first time, learned to ride on the back of a motorcycle, learned to roast a fresh chicken, started analysis, gained and lost a television, saw a river on fire, drank too much coffee.

last night i dug myself out of my rainy-day funk long enough to accompany the surfer girl to a gala opening at the soho grand. she'd done quite a bit of support work hanging the show and it garnered her several invitations to the closed-list champagne reception in the backyard of the hotel. it was a great occasion for people-watching, but i was clearly out of my depth, not wearing nearly enough money to blend in seamlessly. i was amazed to notice that even being virtually awash in free champange did not loosen the clenched buttocks of the fabulous young socialites at the party. after a glass or two of champagne, i began to think that i kept running into character actors from david lynch movies.

i have to reserve a special dose of hipster vitriol for the DJs at the opening. two young men dressed strictly in below-14th-st fashion (rocker bed head hair, black hein gericke leather jackets, mirrored shades, dirty white t-shirts, straight leg stonewashed jeans) had set up two laptops on top of the wheels of steel. i half-expected them to rock a set of obscure german techno or italodisco, but instead they were playing what i would expect at a wedding reception on long island. '96 tears' and 'woolly bully' figured prominently. what's worse, the sound system preiodically seemed to fail entirely and there were several periods of 3 minutes or longer of no music at all.

it's still remarkably cold in new york, considering it's the first week of june, and every time a canadian wind tore through the yard everyone struggled to cover exposed tattoos and decolletage. eventually other members of the surfer girl's entourage joined us and we repaired to the hotel bar. i was relieved to note that they were as crabby about the downtown hoi polloi as i felt. i did only the barest amount of shmoozing and handing out postcards before packing in a cab with the rest of the antisocial painters and heading back across the williamsburg bridge.