St_Patty_2006_22
Originally uploaded by eggrollboy.

I’ve actively resisted dancing and learning how to do it for 29 years and about 9 months. This weekend, I decided to get over my big white self and just try it already.

Me and two old college friends went to Georgetown’s Modern this weekend and I gave it (ahem) the old college try. The bar itself is a sort of 60′s-retro vision of the future with a sunken, hexagonal bar and one of those plastic bubble-chair dealies that hangs from the ceiling. The music was a pretty predictable blend of old-school and contemporary hip-hop, but it got the asses moving.

While I didn’t cure my three-decade-long bout with whitieisitis, I had a pretty good time thanks to my patient friends. They didn’t seem to mind at all that I was a big oaf scaring potential suitors away with his arrhythmic lumbering — and that’s the sign of good friends.

As I was making my way through the crowd to leave the dance floor, two women blocked the exit. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not that they wanted to stop me from leaving. They were way too enmeshed rhythmically smearing their bits together to care who wanted to go where at all. I just sort of stood there awkwardly, trying to figure out if I should push around them or leave a tip, or what, when this guy poked me in the ribs. HARD.

Here’s the conversation, in interview form:

Him: Them hoes, man…

Me: What?

Him: You got tell them hoes…

Me: Tell them what?

Him: Those bitches been knockin’ into me all night, yo, and that shit is bullshit. I mean, I appreciate what they doin’ and all that…

Here, he paused and looked me right in the eye, swaying gently against what must have been a turbulent concrete floor.

Him: … I APPRE-CI-ATE it and shit. But I’m gonna punch them bitches in they face if they don’t quit bumping me.

Me: I see. Isn’t that a little much?

Him: Fuck you. I don’t let a man touch me but once, know what I’m saying, and these bitched been bumping me like at least four times.

Me: Yeah, that’s real shame.

Him: So I’mma punch them bitches right in they face, and you should tell ‘em. You touch them hoes on the shoulder and tell ‘em this motherfucker right here is gonna ball his fist up if they don’t cool out one time.

Me: …

Then the song ended, and he sat down. Once again, I refer you to the title of this blog.

Here’s a few songs I wish they’d played at the club:

These two are from a compilation entitled “The Rough Guide to Brazilian Hip-Hop.”

Roda Rodete Rodiano [Zambo Mix] by Bid/Chico Science

This one’s from “The Rough Guide to African Rap.”
Eye Mo de Anaa by Reggie Rockstone

This mashup was harvested from the wilds of the Internet:
Satisfaction Vs. Up In Da Club by Benny Benassi/50 Cent

You can’t turn around in this town without someone having a happy hour about it. It’s inevitable that in a town with a thriving blog scene, someone would put together a happy hour for people who by their very definition spend too much time alone: bloggers. We need the interaction, but man, the gears might be a bit rusty.

It seemed like a really great idea to me — a chance to meet people with the same obsessive hobby I have, a chance to learn about a lot of people’s blogs and a chance to tell them about mine. Most times I feel like I’m writing in a vacuum, so the chance to tell some people that I’m out there and really into it seemed like a great chance to me.

Kathryn and I-66 put together this month’s affair in a nice little Cuban joint on 18th Street. I dragged my friend Kenny out to check it out, and we had a pretty good time.

In what appears to be an established tradition, I will now list the names of all the people who I had an exceptionally good time talking to. This is a blog tradition not unlike “slam books” which fell out of vogue with fifth grade girls, oh, in the nineties, I’d guess. Now “slam books” are online, and nobody is too old or male to get in on the action.

It was great meeting the real people behind KassyK, KathrynOn, I-66, GhettoDev, RoarSavage, CountdownofV, DCCookie, Diet Coke of Evil, I’m a Girl, Not Yet a Wino, Land Shark, DCBachelor, Harmany Music, EJTakesLife, WonL, and No Pasa Nada.

However — I took exceptional pleasure in speaking with Barbara of Looking2Live and Chris Abraham. Barbara, you are incredibly accessible, down-to-earth, and open-minded, and I suspect you have passed those traits on to your son through either his nature or your nurture.

I read a lot of gay blogs as part of my job, and Chris Abraham is a man who was able to sensitively zero in on the weaknesses and strengths of the gay blogosphere far better that I could have as a semi-outsider. He did this in like ten seconds, and left me and Kenny smiling, but open-mouthed.

In other, related news, I’ve created a stamp to promote this blog. Since I love a DIY art project, I (mostly) hand-made some business cards as well. A small and vocal minority of last night’s attendees seem to have a problem with this. I would surmise that those people enjoy writing their hearts out to the sound of crickets and the laughter of people that already know them. These folks are probably not at all tired of fumbling for a cocktail napkin and a borrowed pen to scribble down their blog name for somebody.

Check ‘em out:

The last time I checked, self-promotion was what you did to direct attention to your hard work. What would KISS be without makeup? Or Muhammad Ali without mouth? These cards aren’t meant to tell people that my blog is good. And I’m not saying that my blog is better than anyone else’s. All I’m doing is giving someone a small piece of paper that lets them draw that conclusion on their own.

I’ll see you sweethearts and shitbirds next month.

The Miss Adams-Morgan Pageant is probably DC’s largest private event, and it’s definitely the most fabulous. And when I say fabulous, I mean all that fabulous implies. . You can’t buy tickets to it publicly, and it sells out every year… and no amount of money or love can help you score a ticket if you’ve displeased the glittery goddesses in charge.

It’s a drag pageant held every Halloween, roughly, and beats the dog-shit out of any costume party I’ve ever been to. My friend from work got me two passes and I represented the hetero community that evening. I am told that quite a few straight people attended, but I met none of them, possibly because all the queens kept shoving them out of the way when they caught sight of my camera. They say that one should never stand between a mother grizzly bear and her cub. The same can be said about drunken drag queens and digital cameras.

I wrote about it in more depth here, but have just come across some pretty awesome pictures on a friend’s hard drive. She and I took these last fall.

“But why would you post photos from last Halloween on your blog in March, Jeff?” is what you may well be asking. The answer, dozen readers, is because I went to a local blog happy hour tonight and kept having to tell people what my blog is about.

And to be honest, I have no idea at all. But I’m hoping all you sweet people I met last night read this post and look at all the pictures, read the post below about the Florida Avenue Grill and the Black Man With a Pistol Hand and just kinda triangulate a thread that ties it all together.

This link will take you to last fall’s photoset from the Miss Adams-Morgan Pageant. This one is the current, newest set. The photos below are from the set I just uploaded. Take a look, tell your friends, and above all else: please link to me, bitches.

And if you’re wondering about the title of this post…it’s also this incredible Bowie song about bitchy, savage drag queens. Listen to it while you look at the photos and wish you had balls big enough to tuck back into pink sequined tights.

You’ve got to be pretty fanatical about your diet and exercise if you’re a person who spends most of his life attached to a glowing, rectangular teat.

If something doesn’t happen soon, I’m going to turn out like this guy I always see in the cafeteria in the mornings: so big my knees have chins, work ID hanging around the neck, holding a plateful of sausage and wearing a t-shirt that says “Bacon is a Vegetable.” I’m fine as it is, but over all this synthetic gym-created muscle is a thick sweater of solid fat that seems baggier and baggier as my 30th birthday approaches.

If a career spent behind a screen is the pin that pops my dream of fitness, the hand that jabs the balloon is my deep, abiding love of soul food. It flicks the drug switches deep in the brain, giving one this glazed, mellow smile after a meal. You get all fucked up and happy as hell. After a good load of fried chicken and collards with ham hocks and sweet tea, all you can do is lay around, and you even have a hangover later.

The problem with healthy food is that there’s no love that goes with it. Nobody in their right mind has ever sat in the middle of a foreign desert and pined for their mother’s wheatgrass smoothies. Green tea and spinach salad are great for the abs and heart, but I swear that diet turns you into one of those annoying people that gets way too into “spinning” if it’s not ballasted with cornbread at least.

Florida Avenue Grill
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

My friend Janey had walked five steps into the Grill to take this first photo. While she was lining the shot up, a waitress was so curious to see what was on the screen that she bumped into Jane, making everyone around them laugh. The guy behind the counter said “Here, give me the camera,” and took a picture of the two of them together, the waitress hugging Jane tight and grinning so wide her ears got wet.

Does that ever happen to you at Whole Foods’ smoothie bar?
I meant to photograph my food for this post, but I was really, really hung over and my body was screaming for eggs, sausage, cheese grits and biscuits with a side of fried apples. Halfway through I thought about photographing my half-eaten plate, but I was really hitting my stride and watching the grill cook do a complex pancake dance, cracking eggs, flipping flapjacks and ladling pure liquid butter onto each serving of grits. Then somebody else served up this massive plateful of chitlins’ and I had to get the rest of my breakfast down before everything came back up.

I love me some soul food, but chitlins’ are fucking revolting. Lots of people love them, but they’ve been marinating in (and processing) pig shit for the pig’s entire lifespan – you can’t clean that flavor out.

So here’s Janey’s plate:

I first tasted chitlins’ at the Florida Avenue Grill. I made it through the smell okay, but I couldn’t bring myself to swallow them, racing to the bathroom to spit them out. When I returned, our waitress and my friend were holding hands over the counter and screaming with laughter. Now she elbows someone, points at me and says “that’s my baby right there” every time I come back, even if she’s up to her neck in orders.

Here she is:

Let’s have a close-up on those nails:

Janey was admiring her nails. She heard Jane’s accent and said “you gonna be around for awhile? Hang on, then, baby,” and rummaged in her purse. She produced a copy of the nail salon’s business card. Is that service or what?

So yeah, I know that you can eat healthier, live longer and look better. And five or six days a week, I practice what I preach. I can make grits and fried eggs at home and I’d like to think that I love myself, so technically the food would be made with love.

But really, how can you make up for someone calling you baby a couple dozen times and serving you narcotic coma-inducing comfort food when your feelings hurt as bad as your liver? You can’t. And that, my dozen readers, is why they say that food has soul.

James Brown and the J.B.s have written most of the funkiest songs on earth, including this gem about the joys of eating soul food with family:
‘Breakin’ Bread’, by the J.B.’s

Moonlight after an ice storm
Originally uploaded by Periapt.

Is it as easy to kill a man with your bare hands as movies and television have led me to believe? Can you really just slip around someone and put them in a half-nelson, then grab their chin and just yank REAL hard and twist their neck ’till it breaks with a million tiny wet crunches and one big snap?

I was out for a run tonight, thoughts rolling like gravel in a rock tumbler, mind racing racing racing like it always does — fertilizing a giant forest of fragile trees growing, growing growing until their roots snarled together and they choked themselves and died only to grow up all over again a million times — as my body thudded sideways through a school of late commuters all moving in lockstep, talking furiously into cell phones and ignoring each other — and then I just phased out of everything altogether.

It got dark, real dark, and I was away from people and cars and lights especially, just me, a giant panting guy with a baobab forest full of screaming monkeys growing up out of his scalp.

A lanky black man lurked towards me, morphing out of the black body of a tree trunk. When I say black I do mean that yes, he may have been of African descent, but his skin, eyes, teeth, head and pants were all the same precise absence of color. His head was elongated somehow, tall like that fucked-up looking Jedi in the bad Star Wars movies and both of his hand were massive, like gorilla hands.

One hand was actually not a glove, but a pistol. That black man had a pistol for a hand. Something in the way he lurched as I came up on him too fast to stop made me think he was going to use it.

I noticed his pistol hand RIGHT as my torso brushed past his and I was terrfiied for a second. The forest in my head vanished and all that was left was a flat disk of scorched earth/scalp.

If I needed to, could I have snaped his neck, then calmly stepped into t he road and hailed a cop car?

I didn’t kill him, in case you were wondering. I’ve never killed a man before, and I have GOT to get my apartment clean tonight. I can see how killing a man would fuck up your whole entire night.

Plus, I think that pistol was a handicap. He can’t help the way his hand is shaped anymore than I can help the fact that a deciduous forest grows out of my brain every ten minutes or so. I just said hi to him and he said “Alright now” to me, and then we were brothers, two men with strange and crippling mutations passing at night.

shootingup.jpg
Originally uploaded by arimoore.

According to movies and television, rock was once electric and not electronic. It was this stuff, this uncontrollable substance that lived up to its own hype in every way.

Everything everyone said about rock was true.

If you listened to it enough, you did start skipping school and making out in cars, heading down a dirt road to destruction while finding your own soul. There was no punk, no post-punk and no post-rock for damn sure — just rock itself, loud, bold and mighty.

These three tracks from the Velvet Underground take me into those days that died long before I was born. Not the day in 1976 that I was removed from my mother’s womb — but born into rock and roll’s influence, with dizzying passions and low lows of my own for rock to come along and play with.

Recorded at a Velvet Underground show in 1969, these three tracks showcase the Underground at the height of their raw, elegant powers. The tape recorder was stored inside Lou Reed’s guitar amp, so the mix is a little distorted to say the least. ‘What Goes On’ is exuberant and ecstatic — it’s a rapid-fire psychedelic explosion, the audio equivalent of pressing on your eyeballs really really hard.

‘Sister Ray’ is 24 minutes long if it’s a second, and a bit of an endurance contest, to tell the truth. It’s raucous and brilliant, and the part where the guitar drops away completely is stunning … but you can be forgiven if you don’t make it all the way through. My apologies for the Real Audio format here. It’s the best I could find.

Here they are for your downloading pleasure:

Candy Says
What Goes On
Sister Ray

Nominees
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

First of all, I ‘d like to thank the Academy for this award tonight – the Academy and, of course, Professor Reginald Washington of Martin University for his wonderful, wonderful invention which has ushered a new age of creativity and celebrity-making, making it possible for more amazing stories to be told than ever before.

Before Dr. Washington’s invention, ordinary, average-looking people had to spend hours alone, sequestered away in dark little rooms behind keyboards and monitors, obsessively writing and rewriting their lives into stories that mirrored classic story arcs and the three-act screenplay.

Back in those primeval days, people used to sacrifices great swaths of their lives to glowing electronic gods, furtively burning their time on earth alone to create their life’s work. Ordinary schlubs with slow metabolisms cursed the sunshine for making them wish they were outdoors as they gulped sandwiches over the sink in their all-too brief breaks from the only work that fulfilled them.

There were two kinds of work back then – work we did for money, and the work we did for our own creative peace. The work we did for creative peace was usually harder than the work we did for money, although that was no walk in the park either.

Creative work was more demanding because it seeped into our own moments of pleasure, forcing us to obsessively document our every experience for “source material.” You’d be unwrapping a Christmas present or snipping your firstborn’s umbilicus and think “I should be writing this down. I could be writing right now.”

That was before Dr Washington’s miracle machine. Thanks to Washington and his team of tireless, brilliant researchers who lobotomized entire species of primates to make the cerebral story extractor possible, none of us need ever miss a sunset or type a weekend away ever again.

Now all we need to do is strap the device snugly around our temples, making sure the cable is plugged into our laptops and the appropriate software is open. By merely selecting the appropriate story filter (album, blog, screenplay, novel) and saying “I should really write this down” while visualizing a key scene from the story, the Cerebral Story Extractor will actually translate your subconscious desires into a palatable, exciting story that can thrill the world – but is nevertheless unique and very much your own.

We can all relax now – and our economy itself is changing to reflect that. We are all fat and happy off of royalties from our own stories, and have all the time in the world to relax and consume the stories of others. There is but one danger: now that we are a nation of simultaneous story creators and producers, we risk reaching a creative event-horizon… where all stories are told by people who have only consumed stories all day long themselves without ever living.

This seems dangerous, but is of little importance now. Once we get closer to the unified story feedback loop, we’ll figure out what to do and do it in a timely fashion. If we did it with the polar icecaps, certainly we can do it with other, more important aspects of our lives.

Thank you all again, good night, and please row safely on your way home.

In its continuing efforts to get me to stay inside it, my apartment is apparently resorting to demonic conjuring and precision-targeted posession. That is really the only explanation for my current state — while I was sleeping the other night, the apartment drew a pentagram over its floor, summoned a violent, fire-belching demon and ordered it to occupy my stomach, upside-down.

Or, the Korean place up the road is due for a visit from either Public Health or Homeland Security. Jesus.

In this clip from a Japanese tv show, a man straps several large bottles full of water and compressed air to his back and rockets himself out over a lake. Every last one of those people in Japan is out of their minds, I tell you.

Not only is the video cool and hilarous, but it may serve as a rough analogy to my current state.