xtcian

6/28/02 I have several criteria

6/28/02

I have several criteria for the places I want to live: as I've said before, I want a healthy gay population (even though I'm not gay, I feel more comfortable when the queers are around), an indie bookstore and movie theater, and a coffee shop that serves frappuccino-like crap with whipped cream. Bonus points also go to neighborhoods with ne'er-do-well teens on skateboards, really good basketball hoops with nets, a park within walking distance, and either the view of a large body of water or a mountain. Park Slope has all that stuff except the water or mountain.

But after looking at the map, I've hit upon another really good way to pick a place to live, especially in New York: check out the blogs per subway station ratio on the nycbloggers website. I'd say that if you didn't know anything about the town, simply picking a subway stop that has 10 or more bloggers represented is a good place to start.

Looking at the map of Manhattan, a few things are made obvious: first off, the Astor Place stop has a shitload of bloggers (most likely because of NYU) but it's also in the East Village, a place where most of the things I listed can be found. Tons of lesbians, a park, good coffee shops, and two hole-in-the-wall indie movie theaters showing Kurosawa films. I believe the East Village should be abandoned at the age of 30 for health reasons, but it's really great for a few years.

Other places with tons of bloggers: The Lower East Side and my old hood 1st Avenue and 14th St; the flamboyantly wonderful world of West 4th St.; the cool area up near Lincoln Center; the hipsters in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill; and of course, all the folks at my subway stop.

I know it's not a perfect theory there are a confusing number of blogs to be found on the Upper East Side, and my disdain for that part of town has been relentlessly documented. That, and I have no clue what the hell people are writing about over at the fuckin' Port Authority, but there seems to be more there than abandoned porn shops and sickening public restrooms.

But as I said, it's a good start. Bloggers are good people; they are technophiles, extroverts, they pick their neighborhoods wisely, and generally have something to say. Except for those knitting blogs yeesh! Somebody put a cable-knit sock in those motherscratchers, please!

6/27/02 Sometime in the winter

6/27/02

Sometime in the winter of 1987, the much-lauded actor Fred Weller, some other bros and I were walking home from a party in a late-night winter flurry. Some girl was with us and was horrified when we all pulled out our units and began to write our names in the snow. "That's totally disgusting," she said, and without missing a beat, Fred turned around, member in hand, and said, "This, my dear, is why cursive was invented."

It's a memory that occurs to me almost every day on 8th Avenue, where each neighborhood dog has left a curlyque trail of pee-pee that looks like all of them were having a terrible time spelling their names. "Daisy" one seems to read. "Morton" reads another.

Our dog Chopin, who has terrible cursive, eschews such displays as ostentatious and crude. He only pees on solid objects, and always manages to stop before moving on. He also prefers to poop on those big subway air vent grates, but will accept cobblestones, basement shafts, or anything with a lattice-like appearance if nothing else looks promising. Among other things, he hates bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, or any person that appears to be moving much too fast for how much work they seem to be exerting.

They say you take on the characteristics of your roommates, and I must admit, every time I see someone hopping on a scooter, I don't quite trust them; when a delivery guy blows by on his bike, I growl a little and when I walk over a subway grate, I really just want to poop.

Chopin poses, disdainfully, in front of a sidewalk lined with the embarrassingly bad cursive of his neighborhood peers

6/26/02 Michelle celebrated her 30th

6/26/02

Michelle celebrated her 30th birthday tonight, making yesterday the last day the Williams kids (at least this generation) will be in their 20s. That's only a big deal to those of us keeping count of such things, and I'd bet neither Kent or Steve care, having said goodbye to their thirties 3 or 4 years ago. Being in one's twenties, however, was a pretty big deal to me, as I ended up writing about it in two books, countless magazines, and even wrote a movie whose protagonist is writing his thesis on the "Ten Archetypes of Americans in their 20s."

All of which is deliciously ironic, since I don't feel like it was a very good decade in my life. Sure, the beginning was great, being at Carolina and dating as many Pi Phis as I could carry and we had some life-affirming times at both the Purple and Pink Houses – but my relationships with women and my knack for self-sabotage pretty much color that decade for me as pretty clueless. In one of my favorite UNC classes ever, Dr. Richard Lucas demanded that we all sow our wild oats, be as insane and careless as possible, fuck up our lives in the name of spontaneity NOW before we got into our 30s. He said that not to do so would cause irreparable damage. I thought he was being a bit extreme, but I can safely say from this vantage point that every stupid thing I did in my 20s helped me become a better person in my 30s.

Yeah, but you're in therapy and on Celexa for being so anxiety-ridden and miserable!

True, but I also made a feature film, I'm living in the best town in the world, and I'm getting married to one of the greatest women in North America. There is absolutely no way I would have had the gumption or the self-trust to commit myself to Tessa if I hadn't been shown the Wasteland that is Other Women. I thank God for all of my Bad Relationships, because they have trulie Bestowed upon Me the Abillitie and Wisdome to Knowe the Difference.

Michelle holds forth at the nicely-furnished but poorly-run Bona Fides restaurant Tessa and I actually left without paying after waiting over an hour for our food

6/25/02 This was supposed to

6/25/02

This was supposed to be my "Brooklyn day," you know, where I stay at home and get all the little things done that I've been desperate to do for months. I wasn't due to leave for the editing room until 3:30pm, so ostensibly I had the whole first part of the day to myself. I sure as hell did; I slept until 1:35.

Now, this was par for the course in Chapel Hill and Los Angeles, where nothing in my world had much import until well after noon, but these days it seems like a Roman vomitorium-like luxury that I don't really have. So I made the best of things, paid all the bills on the way to Asset and called Earthlink to ask why the hell our DSL modem hasn't shown up yet. Apparently there's two kinds of modems, and well, the details are so dull as to bend one's mind. Suffice to say I've been waiting for the forkin' thing for 5 weeks.

I'm kind of pissed at Earthlink, even as I've been their strongest customer. I signed up for service back in 1995, which is how I got "ecstasy at earthlink dot net" instead of "ghkjsdhf3984e723 at earthlink dot net." Of course, my email address (and probably this website) has been the source of some grief, since people sometimes think my email might be spam from either porn or rave drug distributors. For the record, my email is "ecstasy" because that's the address I had at UNC. And I had "ecstasy" at UNC because my favorite living band is XTC. Plus, I always loved the word "ecstasy," long before the drug fell into favor.

My best ecstasy experience, speaking of which, was a night in mid-August '95 in the French Quarter of New Orleans, tooling around with Sarah Adkins in the back of someone's Chevy. We went to a show where a Japanese rock band/performance troupe was using a snowblower as an instrument. I drank a fifth of Skyy Vodka, danced with 35 strangers on top of a table on Magazine Street, then watched the sun rise over the rooftops of the Garden District. Ah, the crazy mid-90s!

Sarah and I pose behind the French Market in 1995, mere hours before our rhapsodic, MDMA-induced torpor

6/24/02 The Taconic State Parkway

6/24/02

The Taconic State Parkway is a bone-rattling journey that sometimes feels just as bumpy and disorienting as the mud-hole carriageways it replaced sometime in the early part of the 20th century. The 55mph speed limit and the undeniably scarce attention to gas and food make it a bit of a drag to most Americans accustomed to seeing the friendly beckoning of a Taco Bell every twenty miles or so, but what it lacks in amenities, it makes up in charm. That, and I'll just have to get used to it, because Columbia County isn't going anywhere.

I happened upon a website tonight while looking for a link to the Taconic Parkway in the preceding paragraph (I didn't find one relevant enough besides, do any of you click on these links anyway? some of them are quite good) and I surfed it for damn near two hours until my eyes gave out. It's called Forgotten New York, and it's the fucking coolest thing I've seen on the web in months. It relentlessly archives dead Manhattan streets, weird subway mysteries, the elevated trains that would have sped through my living room in the East Village, even a collection of ghost ads on the sides of ancient buildings that may surpass James Lilek's page devoted to the same.

It's relevant today because we went straight from Columbia County to Grand Central Station (in 1880, we could have taken NY22 straight from the Cobble Pond Farms gas station to Grand Central directly who says you don't learn some cool shit on the net?) to scout locations for the 1929 pick-up shots we want for The Pink House. In the film, Oxford (my brother Sean) wins Chloe (Natane Boudreau) back from the bad guy, and a simple scene needs to convey that she has escaped him. Originally, it was to be shot at some docks somewhere, with her exiting a boat into his waiting, loving arms, but Tessa intervened. I said, "How about an old rundown train station?" and she said, "How about Grand Central?"

Of course, little above 20 feet high in Grand Central has changed since 1871 (as far as you know, anyway) so we had a good time putting our thumb and forefingers into joining "L's" like directors do, making sure we can turn Grand Central into another night in 1929. Barring a terrorist attack (there are few better places, in my opinion), it should be a fun shoot.

After getting lunch, we took the subway shuttle to Times Square, but not before passing a curious door, fathoms deep under the busiest train station in the world, marked with an ancient sign: "KNICKERBOCKER." The door was locked, and seemed to lead nowhere. And then, tonight, looking for the Taconic State Parkway, instead I found the mystery of the "door that goes nowhere" on the Forgotten New York page. I love it when things are so deliciously cyclical.

director of photography John Kelleran chats with Tessa about shot placement at Grand Central

6/23/02 Today was a very

6/23/02

Today was a very rich day, the kind of day that is best explained through pictures. If you're on a dialup account, I'm sorry, but you'll just have to wait the 45 seconds or so for these things to waft onto your computer. And by the way, get a real internet connection! You're slowing the rest of us down!

Anyway, we went from Columbia County to Boston and home again, and here's some of the things we saw:

Michelle and Tessa share a laugh after Michelle's 350-mile trek on the Northeast AIDS ride. The closing ceremony featured the mayor of Boston, a sweeping soundtrack, and of course, a rousing chorus of Erasure

above, the three girls before the ride
below, the three girls after the ride

a woman wearing a Carolina jersey sobs in the arms of her son who had just finished the ride. Their family held a sign that said "Shawnelle, we miss you"

back home, Tessa and I finish our garden at 1:30AM, by the light of the full strawberry moon. Crops planted under the full moon are thought to have mystical properties; we shall see