September 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Don't Dream it's Over
This song is the carpeted waiting room of God’s lobby. Decorated like an upscale motor lodge, but still a lobby for God, and so of heaven. Trimmings of commerce linger on its edges—the smell of mall pretzels, makeup counter ladies spritzing perfume on passersby. Volatile compounds of minted, cinnamon’d gum displays; the sterilized crinkle of prescription bags. A black town car you’re traveling...
4 tags
1 Gay, 1 Blog Post
We’re going to chat about the show 1 Girl 5 Gays. I know…it’s been on for over a year. But I guess it’s taken me that long to decide quite how I felt about it. And the thing is…I’m still not completely sure. The best I can do is “love/hate”, and that’s not very good, is it?
What contributes to the “hate” part of the equation is pretty obvious, but worth stating nonetheless. I hate that on...
3 tags
August 2011
1 post
4 tags
Notes on ditzes
King Helene once told me that Kristin Davis is the best actress on Sex and the City, because it’s harder to act comedy well, but especially hard to play a character like Charlotte—a ditz—where we’re supposed to scoff at her, yet respect the stakes of her existence enough to be moved by her. This has stuck with me for a number of reasons, one of them being that I find Davis’s character to be one...
July 2011
1 post
4 tags
If you give a mouse a cookie...
As long as someone’s willing to publish something about Lindsay “It’s Just Water” Lohan, I will read it. I used to deny it, and say that “it’s just sad, now” and then go buy an US Weekly with her on the cover to see which exclusive club/VFW Hall/LA County Jail she was stumbling out of that week. But I’m done with the frontin’ and the lies;...
June 2011
3 posts
4 tags
5 tags
May 2011
6 posts
6 tags
Here I Stand in the Shadows
This one is a direct dedication to King Helene.
In high school, my best friend, who—in the grand tradition of my close male friends since kindergarten—turned out to be gay but-I-was-too-dumb-to-realize-it had this thing where we’d sit in the black leather seats of his deluxe SUV smoking Parliaments and belting pop songs together. By ‘together’ I mean to each...
Pro Blush
I find this song to be extra fancy. Elegant and odd.
When I was in the UK for a while, this was for whatever reason a blockbuster on the dance floor. Discotheques stood in for fratty house parties for college students there, so it was the kind of thing where you’d be snockered off of e.g. currant juice and vodka under blinking cruise ship lights, and this song would transform the...
4 tags
...And a Patridge in a pear tree....
This week, I finally broke down and watched VH1s mid-day marathon of “Audrina”. This is what happens when you have Tuesdays off — you and the stoners and housewives watch multiple episodes of a second-string reality star’s spin off show. I’m not complaining, though; it’s just what you do. Anyway, obviously it’s horrible; but in so many ways that it...
Cardiac Arrest
I wanted to say something about how this is a poor man’s “Dancing in the Dark” meets “Boys of Summer” but it turns out this predates those by a good three years, which is impressive, somehow. The dancer at 1:04 is great New Wave punctuation, like a clip art exclamation point (or maybe also a dog’s paw print?)
Also, just cuz:
And why not?:
Generally...
April 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Speed Queens
So, Raja won, big whoop. As you’ll notice in my previous post, I largely ignored her through out the season. She’s like that ultra-type A kid in High School — they’re so far off the charts that the teacher doesn’t even take them into account when figuring the curve. A big what-ever.
But she had talent (although if I did something for 2 decades, I’d be...
2 tags
March 2011
4 posts
4 tags
When You Get All You Wanted in your Wildest Dreams
Girl crush of the moment: Selena Gomez of Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place.” First of all, according to her wiki, girl is named after slain Tejano singer Selena (RIP), so need I go on about what she has to recommend her? How do you get a credential more sterling than that? I was compelled to learn more about her after witnessing her fabulous hair and witty Bacall-like swagger on...
In these uncertain times... →
Some prefer brunettes...
RIP, Ms. Russell.
3 tags
February 2011
1 post
3 tags
DRAG RACE: The Next Lap
My admiration for drag queens only grows the older I become. As my interest in (and probably ability to keep up with, in all honesty) the “now” wanes, I feel the transition to kitsch queen approaching, and I’m OK with it. Drag queens are by nature referential and derivative. But it’s their ability to distill the familiar down to its very essence and filter it...
January 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Kelly's Dilemma
I sometimes feel bad for Kelly Rowland. She’s like the Jan Brady to Beyonce’s Marsha Marsha Marsha. I guess she’s more famous than Michelle ThirdStringReplacement or any of the other various former DC members but she’s still an afterthought, nonetheless. Beyonce’s been in several critically acclaimed hit movies (“Dreamgirls”, “Cadillac...
December 2010
1 post
8 tags
LVP = MVP
With Real Housewives of Beverly Hills my urge is to strip off all the soundtrack hijinks and teasers, tint it in 70s film stock colors and watch it with subtitles.
Their Beverly Hills is a balloon going flaccid. There’s a sense that some deadly combination of environmental toxins and demagogues could render moot all these delicate toile scenes of late capitalism at any moment.
Their...
November 2010
1 post
Fits and starts
Toddlers and Tiaras. My present intrigue is the walk/dance of “glitz” contestants when they’re modeling swimsuits/talenting. It’s sort of like if a catwalk stride went to the rodeo and got filtered through a strobe light. There’s something really distinctive about its etymology—it’s like partly a Beyonce sass/finger wag, partly a line dance heel-toe-shimmy, but then it’s sort of half...
September 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Misc.
On Wednesday night, I caught the premier of Adrian Grenier’s documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, on HBO. It’s a nice enough piece of fluff, ostensibly about a 14 year old rookie pap who’s better at his job than most veterans. But the most interesting part about the whole affair is when Grenier interviews a social anthropologist who offers a couple of theories regarding the concept...
4 tags
Raven, times three!
August 2010
6 posts
3 tags
From Faith to Freedom
Considering that it was recorded during a year-long Ecstasy binge, one would expect George Michael’s 1987 smash, Faith, to be a lighter affair. And in fact, to the casual listener, it does sound like a party; Depeche Mode-inspired synthesized drums pop up in almost half the tracks, and a good deal of it is sublimely danceable. But this is an album about confusion, darkness, addiction and...
3 tags
4 tags
ConTesh
Summer adventures have led to a lot of late night car rides for me—up and down 91, criss-crossing the beltway of highway 90.
I’m big on the scan button; always looking for a sound to narrate the default cultural nostalgia I’m after. On American radio now John Tesh is the man of the night. You can scan your way in any direction you want, but if JT’s on one channel he’s on two, and you will...
3 tags
Boob Tube
When do you say “enough is enough?” When are you no longer watching stupid television ironically, but because you are, in fact, stupid? This is my current dilemma. I consider myself a connoisseur of trash TV, but have recently started to feel pangs of guilt surrounding this indulgence. When it comes to what I read, I’ve got a 2-for-1 rule. For every piece of candy, I make myself finish two...
2 tags
2 tags
Big Yellow Taxi(s)
I miss a lot of things about New York. Street meat, Drakes cakes, subway performers…the usual. But more than anything, I miss cab culture. Sure we have taxis here in Chicago, but it’s just not the same. First of all, unless you live right in the heart of the Loop, you can’t count on just being able to hail one – without budgeting about a half an hour (an hour if you live in the hood.) Then,...
July 2010
2 posts
5 tags
Inside out and round and round
Me and King Helene did the tri-state this weekend in an attempt to soak up some sun, sea and hair gel. We went to Playland (or ‘Rye Playland’ for those outside of ‘the 914’), famously the location for Mariah’s “Fantasy” video, where the spectral presence of the little fat girl is still going strong.
I grew up about five minutes away from Playland so it was a major player in my summers. Ages...
5 tags
Two of Hearts
Kate and Naomi, the two of them as besties, is an impossibly unlikely weather event that, in a compounded form of unlikelihood, stays bound to the sky, day after day. Pantheonic in its aggregation of power, you’d expect quarrels and mortal impacts on the scale of swan rapes, pillars of salt: Naomi hurls a phone that smites an island nation; the fruit of Kate’s cigarette-filled womb is not a...
June 2010
6 posts
4 tags
"I hate spunk" -- Part 2
So I am coming up on one month at my new job. While I would like to say that things have gotten significantly less awkward, they haven’t. However, I’ve become a lot more OK with the fact that they might not . Ever. Which, I guess, is progress.
A big plus is that I like my bosses. (Not necessarily as people –although they seem like very nice people- but as bosses…supervising entities that...
4 tags
Starter Jackets and Shenehneh
What were you watching on Thursday night in 1994? Well, according to Nielsen’s demographic data, if you were black, it was Fox. The then upstart network’s Thursday night lineup was watched by the overwhelming majority of African-American households into 1996. And mine was definitely one of them. I don’t think we ever missed an episode of any of the triumvirate of shows...
3 tags
"I hate spunk" -- Part I
I started a new job on Monday. It’s arguably the best gig I’ve ever had (I jumped ship from what was then “the best gig I’d ever had”, so take from that what you will.) In my less jaded days, I would refer to this as “a keeper.”
I’m at that phase where you’re being trained, but not fast enough, and everyone keeps peaking into your office...
5 tags
Postcoifal
As a little girl, you are awash in varieties of doll hair. Barbie hair in perms to represent animal trainers, stewardesses, nurses; Little Pony hair in a pointless sherbet swoop meant to balance the horse face and Miss Piggy deadeye of the creature it’s attached to. I had something called a “Dolly Surprise” where you crooked its arm like a bicycle pump and it grew crimped hair. When you...
3 tags
4 tags
Little Big Man
I hate clothes shopping. It sucks because I used to love it but then I got fat and yeah, I hate it now. I was hardly built like a male model before, but was thin enough to wear whatever I wanted. I was particularly fond of blazers - tartan plaid, velvet, gabardine…I loved and wore them all. Now, there’s so much to consider (ie. button diameter, lapel width) that I’ve moved...
May 2010
2 posts
3 tags
The Real Houselives of my Lizard Brain
I’m fairly new to the Real Housewives franchise. From what I can tell, OC and Atlanta are entirely without merit. New York is marginal; sort of like the feeling of maniacal jester tears being forced out of a botox-paralyzed face, so, ya know, great, but the sulphuric brimstone smell can overpower at times. I like how Kelly Bensimon’s closest fictional resemblance is the large sheep dog, Max,...
5 tags
Too Gay to Function
Excuse me for the late update, but it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Tyra Sanchez won the The Race (much to my dismay) of course, and has been crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar. She’ll be taking her tired Sasha Fierce act and stank attitude on tour this summer and - who am I kidding? - I’ll definitely be in the audience when she sashays into Chicago. For the most...
April 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Social Studies
I guess Social Studies happened til sixth grade. Maybe it’s what’s been happening my whole life. The first lesson every year was that the three basic needs for human life are food, clothing and shelter. Social Studies was “Molly Pitcher” and a single, neutered Sociology lesson that gestured at certain concepts of demographics and jazzed you up for the different careers you might have one day. ...
4 tags
Screeching to a halt...
Tonight is the season finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Logo, and I am through the roof excited. I have been a fan of drag queens since freshman year of college, when Not Susan and I used fake IDs to sneak into the lounge at Stingy Lulu’s. And my top pics have all made it to the final round, to boot.
The prizes up for grabs include a contract with a major PR agency, twenty-five...
1 tag
4 tags
On Ecto cooler
I really loved an article last year in the New Yorker about Givaudan, the main company that manufactures the tastes you find in processed food. You can’t get to the article anymore, but email me, and I’ll send it to you if you want. It discusses the job of flavorists, who tint our carbonated national water supply and vats of corn pulp with evocative chemical compositions.
Flavorists are...
March 2010
6 posts
5 tags
DRAPE A TITTY: Requiem for an A Cup
Perhaps no other performers embodied the 1990’s as fully as TLC. T-Boz, Chilli, and Left Eye started off the decade encouraging us to practice safe sex by wearing neon condoms and ended it with a concept album about dirty email. Conspicuously relevant content aside, they also gave us some of the decades most sensational celebrity news. (Yes, you can sell 10 million records and go...