Emmet is my neighbor. He’s a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. His owners found him in a gutter in Louisville, Kentucky, a tiny little neglected piglet crying and dying in a pile of wet leaves. They rescued him, nursed him back to health and it looks like he hasn’t missed too many meals since.

Emmet is the physically densest mammal I have ever seen -he feels like he is made out of warm, bristle-covered cannonballs. He loves having the spot between his little piggy shoulder blades scratched.

I only ever see Emmet on misty, overcast mornings – the kind of mornings that really activate New York’s greyness, the ones that give this grey city some serious character and color. It’s like Emmet emerges from the city’s hazy, sleepy dream state. Nobody else is ever around to see him except for me, my girlfriend, and Emmet’s leash-holders.

We always talk about the South, me and Maggie and Emmet’s people. We talk about how great it is, what an amazing, rich and Gothic creepiness the South has and how we are so glad it runs through our blood. And how glad we are that we moved up here, too.

The South is a spectacular place to be from, but not always a good place to be at. Love the culture, hate the crippling willful ignorance, I say.

But enough gabbing. Here’s Emmet:

Popularity: 5% [?]

This guy is not posing for the camera. He’s posing for the WORLD. I saw him at the Grove Street PATH station Sunday night. He strutted past me and my roommate and coolly struck this pose up against a pillar:

He did it for a good while before my camera came out, too. He just stood there, coolly surveying the platform until the train came.

And it got me to thinking about culture and subculture, and the way we signify our memberships in large, medium, and small overlapping circles. There’s more peacockery and showmanship on the streets of New York (and the surrounding area) than almost anywhere in the world, even though most people are more alike than different. A lot of people use clothing and attitude not to put forward the person that they actually are, but the person they want to be. It’s aspirational, not necessarily reflective.

People run their perceptions of another person — their aspirational outfit — through their own set of prejudices and filters, too. And it’s a flawed system at best. The end result is that nobody knows what’s really going on, and all you have are these clumsy, lumpy mysteries. Most people have a hard time articulating what’s on their mind when you talk to them directly, so how can you tell if someone’s a tool or not just by looking at them?

I don’t know, but man, it sure works a lot of the time. The world is pretty magical that way.

Kurt Vonnegut said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

And whenever I see a person in baseball hat that’s in any position other than brim-forward, cap-on-scalp, I think the wearer is sending a very clear message. They’re saying, all with the turn of a hat:

I am a proud and defiant member of a subculture that places absolutely ZERO value on intelligence. We place so little value on intelligence that we don’t even value the APPEARANCE of intelligence.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I took this photo on the uptown A train this morning — there’s really not a lot else that can be said:

Her t-shirt reads (for Google purposes): “I am having an out of money experience.”

Popularity: 6% [?]

I snapped this on my iPhone last night on Christopher Street while I was waiting for a friend. It’s sweet, sad, and totally bad-ass all at once.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The stranger’s skull was an inverted teardrop set with a tarsier’s oblong, expressive eyes, eyes blast-shielded by chunky, industrial glasses. A chiseled obsidian bowl-cut accentuated an already fashion-forward skull shape fairly dramatically, with a twist: the bangs on the left half of the forehead were cut at least three inches shorter than the bangs on the right half.

His features were delicate, feminine, sculpted by master craftsmen under bright lights and powerful magnifying glasses. A slender slip of a John Waters moustache sat atop his light longbow of an upper lip, its partner shielding a slight soul patch in the same dusty fox-toned hue. An everlasting job-stopper curled down his long, delicate neck into the comfort of a lime-green sweater neck-sheath, subdued neatly under a boxy brown jacket.

What really brought all home, though, was his makeup — faux-flesh-toned pancake makeup, accentuated with blush. But instead of using blush-colored blush … he used a metallic silver.

Sort of like this drawing:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]