THE GREAT GADFLY:

Love Is Where You Take It



I would be lying if I said there wasn't a certain something I absorb in New York that can only be compared to a relative great sucking vacuum of want when I get back home to Chicago. I would also be lying if I said I'm not happy to be back from my most recent visit to the Big Crapple. I would be lying if I said that I did not float effortlessly in what feels to be my natural element in New York, or alternately that I do not feel like Dawn Weiner awkwardly shuffling down the heckling hallways of Chicago Junior High. I would also be lying if I said I didn't think I'd go back to being an energy-depleted, washed-out wraith with racoon eyes and grey skin were I to resume life in New York. I'd lie like a rug if I said I didn't like looking in the mirror each morning and seeing a fresh-scrubbed, pink-cheeked, fresh mug of hot brewed midwestern scowl staring back at me.

I'd be lying if I said I was happy to be back at work. I'd also be lying if I said this job didn't pay for my last trip to New York. Feh.

My weekend was dominated by drinking, Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim, drinking, shouting matches with my bestest gal pal Ms. Renay (who wins quote of the weekend, when a paranoid buddy asked her if everyone was making fun of him: "I don't know, I have diarrhea!"), drinking, a night out at Bowery Ballroom in which the focal point of the evening was upstaged by really bad sex (sic), drinking, a lovely Easter morning visit with my writing collaborator, whom I've worked with for about half a year now but had never met in person before, drinking, New York piz...scratch that; BROOKLYN pizza, drinking, sunny traipses through Park Slope, drinking, and watching Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings in a hungover haze on Sunday afternoon. And drinking.

French hard cider is le shizzle, mon dizzle.

I have a nice set of racoon eyes and skin the color of a cinderblock as a memento of my weekend trip, but for heaven's sake, I wear my pallor with pride and glee. I think of it as an ashen afterglow.

And really, I don't feel as tore up from the floor up as I usually do upon return from NYC - part of this could be because I haven't been out there in a year, and in that year many strides have been made in the city's Pink Lung Crusades, making for healthier claustrophobic hellhole weekending; and part of this could be the relative brevity of my trip - as much damage as I tried to do to myself, those around me, and the city in general, there's only so much wrath one can deal in 48 hours. I don't care if you're Kiefer Sutherland, the options are limited.

I managed to pack in a lot - a lot of friends, a lot of activities, a lot of familiar sights, and [insert running gag about drinking here] - and we even managed to check out the new Christopher Guest movie, "A Mighty Wind", within my first coupla hours off the damn plane. I think I did more things, saw more friendly faces, and guzzled down more happy hours than I have in the past four months combined.

To say I needed this compressed whirlwind shake-up of hedonism would be a lead-weight understatement.

I need to talk about the Matthew Barney exhibit at The Guggenheim for a bit, just to get it outta my system. I'm going to be annoying many friends for a long time about this. Color me whatever shade of artfag cliche you have the crayons to shade me, as I really don't care about the eye-rolling embarrassment I'm causing my future self from my current gushy geekitude: I'm freakin' obsessed with The Cremaster Cycle. What's not to love? Five films filled with demolition derbies, Freemason images, Harry Houdini as portrayed by Norman Mailer, shiny disco saddles, wetbars made outta frozen vaseline, Ursula Andress, limbless athletes who turn into cheetah women, synchronized swimming spectacles, zombies, pretty colors, crazy-ass lookin' birds, people with hooves and goat-faces who have streamers growing outta their belly buttons, punk rawk bands, bees, and uhhh...well holy crap, do you really NEED more than that? Cuz I can go on. Let's just end it with this: Matthew Barney, who appears in all his films, typically in various forms of undress, is a stone cold fox. Bjork certainly agrees - for those one or two folks out there who don't have Entertainment Weekly delivered to their sub-rock dwellings, Mr. Barney is La Bjorkerella's baby-daddy, honey. That's gonna be one lucky, fucked-up, insane genius of a child.

What else can I say, really, except that if you have any kind of chance at all to catch this exhibit and any desire at all to have your life completely rearranged on an asthetic level, you might want to check this thing out. My imagination is chafed from climaxing from three hours non-stop over the weekend. Thank goodness I had the midwest to come back to; I never thought the taste of vanilla could be so merciful.

Saturday night, after some traipsing and drinking and hanging out and drinking and shopping and drinking, we went to the Bowery Ballroom to see a show by one of Ms. Renay's favorite bands of the moment, The Postal Service. I thought they were okay, but not ass-kicking live. They were kind of a keyboard-based Sonic Youth, with multi-instrumentalist band members and a snazzy little slideshow to boot. They were good. That would be my pullquote. "They were good." - Gadfly, Diarrhealand.

What really caught my attention was the opening act, a white-boy electro-schmelectro rapper from Baltimore named Cex (pronounced like The Dirty), who opened his show performing from the middle of the audience...and stayed there for his whole set. He started his act by announcing that he had a migrane..and by the end of his set, he'd dragged us all down to Motrin Village with him. At one point, he ran a lap around the venue and passed me on one of his jaunts - in a spare moment of quick thinking, I dug a lighter from my coat pocket and flicked it at him, thinking that as bad as his BO was as he passed by, I might be able to light him into a fireball of stench, thus putting us all out of our misery. Alas. Now, I'm not the kind of guy who gets off on setting rappers on fire. But hey, when you ban smoking in public venues, these things are bound to happen.

After his performance, I became obsessed with Cex. He was just so passionately BAD, so uncompromisingly AWFUL...he reminded me of one of those off-key people on The Gong Show who get the Jaye P. Morgan thumbs-down within thirty seconds of their attempt to get through a wobbly rendition of "Rocky Mountain High". After a while, I started to convince myself that in a negative-fascination, good-is-bad-is-good kinda way, Cex Was The Funk.

Oh. And I was drunk.

So I went to the merchandise table and there the man was, his stinky self, shucking about five different CDs, including his latest release, which was available in both normal and instrumental versions. Not to mention the album cover, in which he apes the classic image from Bowie's "Heroes" albums in what I'm sure we're supposed to consider a "brazen" stab at "audacity", but really just comes off as geeky and maybe a little precious in a cute(sy?) music-geek kinda way. So I asked to buy his latest. "You want the instrumental version?" He asked, with a disarmingly earnest smile. "Naw, I want the regular one, with the vocals." I slurred. "REALLY?!" he responded, kinda shocked. "Mmmyeargh," I replied affirmatively.

I listened to his album on the flight home yesterday, and while it is not as horrendous as the overall nightmare that was his live performance, I would be stretching the truth a bit to call it anything other than, shall we say, INTERESTING. But then, the first time I listened to "Teaches of Peaches", I made a face and dismissed it as "Junkie Rock". Now it's one of my favorites. And I'm not even a junkie. I hope he gets better and becomes famous, just so schticky writers like me can make a bunch of really bad puns with his name and I can read lots of things like "I Want Your Cex" and "He's Gonna Cex U Up" and, of course, "Stop Cexing Me".

My friends did not share my Cexy bravado that evening. In fact, they thought I was insane for buying his BO-infested product. I reminded them that diamonds in the rough often appear to us as turds at first sight, and that one day I might be saying "I told you so". I also reminded them that I was drunk and could have made far worse decisions then buying a questionable CD for ten bucks.

We made peace. I remain Cex-positive, though that does not necessarily imply that I want that mess poked in my ear anytime soon.

Over the weekend I suggested to one of my friends, who is a fledgling fashion designer, that he should design the logo for his labels in the Lovesexy font. I think he's taking the idea seriously. That would be so HOTT.

There's more to be said about my weekend trip, including the obligatory philosophical diatribe about the social environment of New York vs. that of Chicago, how a restrictive new mayor has changed the NYC social environment, and how there's nothing the puritan vibes of the Midwest can do to ruin the pleasure of coming home from a weekend vacation to find a mailbox stuffed with CDs, magazines, and a fifty dollar rebate check. Ah, home!

To be, I think, continued?




2003-10-14 - Last Haiku
2003-10-09 - Don't Cry Out Loud
2003-10-09 - Sit Down, You're Making Me Nervous
2003-10-08 - I'm Sure Miss Thing, I'm Sure
2003-10-07 - Carbonated Water, Caramel Color, Aspartame

index
archives
profile
Uffish
Jonno
Kiera Bombshell
Wonderboy
Dogpoet
email
notes
design
host

chicago blogs