Peel slowly...

Randomness (or this is how I spent my summer vacation while the world spun out of control...):

• 500 Pine Party - You can't return home. Even for a night. We've tried, but good attempt.

• Apparently , late-century art school transgressive passion is back in all it's androgynous Cate Blanchet fabulosity.
  

• But then again, so are hipster beer guts. No, No, no!!!

Idea for a reality TV series: Dinner Party Disorder - 2 people are given a mystery ingredient and a celebrity guest list. They are given one hour to clean their place and create a meal using the ingredient. They then have to entertain celebrities for approximately one hour. Merriment ensues. Guests leave. Last 20 minutes features the cleaning up in silence as waves of melancholy wash over the hosts.

• Ed Varga featured for Homo-a-go-go (*which I quasi-attended this year in SF) on Butt.
• Also featured - Sissy Nobby shows you how to do that thing (that i need to learn how to do by Saturday Night)...
• And while we're on the subject of freak dancing, is there such a thing as too much freak

Ways that my life currently resembles a Wes Anderson film:
Working out to Ziggy Stardust on my MP3 player next to a father and son in matching unitards.
Brightly colored zip covers on book jackets in Viet Wah.
The cab that takes me uptown.
A montage of various activities accomplished over the course of 3 months.
Ways that my life currently resembles a Hal Hartley film:
Repetition.

• You can buy shit from Tao Lin on eBay. Don't though - because he's going to teach us how to Shoplift from American Apparel soon enough.
• Finally - a lunatic fringe of our very own...
  

I lost it at the movies...

...to quote the late film critic Pauline Kael. Not that there's any major cultural void with the passing of John Hughes, however you can't deny that he recreated our teenage years (if you were part of last century) and had an impact on modern movie comedy. Time will only tell if he'll be seen as prolific as Capra (maybe - even with cheeze-doodle fare like Home Alone), but he did give us some moments and lines that still come out from time to time. Plus - his protagonists were usually those boho-80's nonconformists and freaks that we were at one time (Ducky does not fall from anyone's tree...) In any case - this is honor of the late mr Hughes, the BratPack mashup:

Beacon Hill Aquarium

More light rail enthusiasm, which will probably soon give away to boredom, and later anger - Beacon Hill's station which is impecibley cute and twee: an undersea world 167 feet down beneath the surface...

If they can put a man on the moon...

...then they should be able to solve [insert social injustice or economic inequity here]. Yes, I celebrated the 40 year old anniversary of the first (staged?) moon landing by having a day of anti-gravity surreal proportions (mostly bad, small hellish bursts], but the highlight was finally getting chance to ride Seattle's own entrance into spage-age transportation... No, not the monorail, sadly - but the LightRail... Yes, finally - our 20th Century urban development has arrived - in the 21st Century Ladies and Gentlemen (applause, applause - ribbon cutting, fanfare, end scene).
Having lived above the tunnel boar-er for a good 5 years, I finally got to go from downtown to Mount Baker in less than 20 minutes flat. I can't tell you how gratifying that was. No stops on every other block. No (intentionally) having to knock elderly grandmother's out of my way to get out the back door. Pleasant arrivals, chimes and a friendly voice advising you where to exit.
The stations are cute in that playful NW post-millenial-design and art-commissioned kind of way - the Beacon station has gleeful sea creatures and Bill Bell's subliminal art in the tunnels is kinda cool (and I realized that one benefit of having the downtown bus tunnels all this time is that the art and design from late 80's makes it all seem like we've had light rail all along for the last 20 years). What made the trip? Having a car full of small children who were loving every minute of the ride and kept reminding us how, even though it's a mid-century too late, our eagle has landed... (PS - photo of my metrocard for proof of concept).

Precious Moments (in History)

I know that in many ways, it's a cardinal sin to go after people who completely do not have any sense of irony (with your own), and I also know that you should not track-back to someone's site unless you're 'pro' whatever freak flag they are choosing to raise at a given moment, but for some reason, I totally realized that this site here will explain everything to you about white people. No need to sign million dollar book deals from your own blog, or hijack the nation's attention through gay-baiting pranks. This site explains everything: Red States, 2004, Mythology, Creationism, Sense of Empire, Decay, Deliverance and Death. It is a symposium of all that is terrible and terrific in this county and exemplifies the true meaning of Christmas.

Sequins: Sequence: Sequinsissential

Ok - the last gasp from the spectacle that was the Jacko Memorial, and no more jokes: I point you to the quote from my more succesful doppleganger below (in his 96 reaction during the brit awards):



...and this quote from Momus:

Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Three major factors will prevent there ever being another one: digital culture and its fragmentation of the big "we are the world"-type audience into a million tiny, targeted audiences; the demographic decline of the "pigs in the pipe" (the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y, who made pop music's four-decade-long pre-eminence possible); and the decline of the influence of the United States...
"I think we're seeing the re-appearance of class and caste. Michael Jackson's fame comes from a cultural period -- postmodern global consumerism -- when the distinction between high and low collapsed. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed French cultural tastes in the 1960s, he found that blue collar and white collar workers had completely different cultures -- classical music for the brain workers, cheap pop for the hand workers. A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson "intelligently", people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him "passionately". But everybody spoke about him. Now that postmodernism is coming to an end, and now that narrowcasting and social networking limit our encounters with "the class other", I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described in "Distinction"."

Sometimes the air isn't so fresh...

Yesterday, while enroute to meet up w/peeps to watch the fireworks, i witnessed a vehicle combust from inside. The driver seemed nonplussed as flames reached up inside his windows, and he circled while talking on his cellphone. It became one of those surreal moments because you can't really explain why someone's vehicle is on fire - and the lack of soundtrack makes the whole thing long and drawn out while each of the pedestrians make the obligatory 911 phone call to give a head's up... I waited to make sure there's no assistance needed (or if anyone was in the car - which didn't look likely at that point), so I resumed walking... and I started to notice the amount of exhaust from other cars well. In fact, the whole city seemed to become this worst representation of global warming (the crappy vintage dautsun with a bad muffler, the obnoxious harley rider with the tail pipe spewing noxious gas)... It was like watching a PSA of all the things that are quickly corroding our planet, later that night replaced with the rocket exhaust of a million illegal fireworks.
In approximately 2 weeks, the Light Rail will start and with it a small victory for the South end that's been continually shunted by suspect transit issues (there's a reason why the #36 is not running on time) and an easier way to get downtown. A little too late as we gulp the last decent air...