xtcian

5/3/03 Brooklyn, NY I wish

5/3/03 Brooklyn, NY

I wish I could tell you some of the things I saw tonight. I mean, I don't look at it as titillation, or even slightly arousing. For me, it is purely a sociological experience, and though there is a ton of objectification involved, I think sometimes it's not terrible to expose yourself to things that are waaaaaaaay out of your philosophy.

I've seen these things on tape, you know, and always wondered what it might be like in the studio. Well, now I know. It wasn't the freakshow carny-like atmosphere of the other party, but it was its own beast indeed. I don't think I will be doing any of this at my bachelor party, I'm just sayin'.

later on and sobered up: my twisted, intellectual, funny and slightly mysterious friends from the brotherhood

5/2/03 Brooklyn, NY If you

5/2/03 Brooklyn, NY

If you want to sucker me in quicker than a cool drink, just put expansion possibilities on your machinery. And I'm not even being sexual.

Ever since we got the ColecoVision in the summer of 1984, I've been enthralled with the idea that objects could be attached to your machinery, perhaps things that hadn't even been invented yet. The Coleco had an "expansion port" that was this great, unused circuitry slot on the front and the manual promised that one day you could attach a keyboard there and write term papers on it! I don't even know if those things were ever built, but this little gateway to the future was cooler than two nuts sideways.

Much the same could be said of firmware, which is truly remarkable when you think of it. I can update the firmware in our Airport wireless router without even touching it; it rearranges its own molecules via waves in the air. How cool is it to build hardware that can correct itself for the future? It's damn close to human.

Fans of expansion bays and god knows you dorks are out there – should try opening up the new dual-1.42 GHz Power Macs and check out the unbelievable amount of shit you can do inside. I've already installed another CD-drive (which burns at 52x, faster than I can think), three extra hard drives (along with the main hard drive, all named after poets: Millay, Rilke, Yeats and Eliot), and now I'm trying to see what silliness I can do with the PCI slots (since I don't even know what they're for).

Tessa and I are technophiles for sure, but we also have cock issues: we don't see the point in buying anything less than the best stuff, since it will be laughably obsolete in less than two years anyway.

We had a huge conversation about the nature of honesty at dinner tonight Tessa lives by a code of esteemable behavior that I find unrealistic. I live by a unspoken tenet of "getting away with what you can as long as you're not hurting anybody" that she finds untenable. Both are by-products of our damaged childhoods, and it's almost impossible to argue my case without sounding like a snake bastard, but I think we complement each others' hot buttons.

I wish our bodies came with expansion ports allowing for the latest software to be downloaded without all the old software demanding a babysitter. It really would be so much easier to download "NotARacist 2.5" into some people I know, so that they can update to the latest thinking on race issues. I know I'd like a firmware update for my intestines. I'm going to stop writing now.

5/1/03 Brooklyn, NY And a

5/1/03 Brooklyn, NY

And a wub-jub-jubbly May Day to you too! Feeling hung over from our 20-hour day yesterday, we slept until a gazillion o'clock, then walked over to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which is in full estrus regalia. Seriously, you have to see this place this week only – to truly understand what Spring is all about. It's like bottled Spring, concentrated Spring, it's a Spring so potent it needs to be lessened in strength! Dilute Dilute! All God One! OK! OK!

with Michelle at the cherry orchard

4/30/03 Brooklyn, NY I'm so

4/30/03 Brooklyn, NY

I'm so tired right now that I kept typing 4/41/93 in the space above; however, I should say right off the bat that our pickup shoot for the Pink House movie was just about the most flawless day of shooting the movie has yet seen. Practice makes perfect, I guess, but I could have done without the typhoons, the broken bones, heat waves, rage disorders and sociopathic horses of the last two shoots.

We started at 7:45am with a quick shot of Gil Rogers as Old Man Maddox. Originally, he was called Old Man Kenan in the script, but Todd knew someone in North Carolina with that name (from the Kenan Oil family), so we changed it to Old Man Pritchard based on the name of a slave tombstone at our shooting location. Then Old School came out earlier this year with a character named Dean Pritchard (our Pritchard was also a dean), so I decided to go with "Maddox." I got the name from a cool Southern guy I knew at CitySearch, and I liked the "mad" quality of it.

Anyway, we felt like the evil Maddox didn't have enough of a character arc in the movie, so we gave him a quick scene this morning that should round out his character. Suffice to say that the thing he looks at and the thing we make you think he's looking at – are not the same, nor were even shot in the same year. That's the magic of movies, my blog friends.

We spent the rest of the day giving various scenes to our delightful collection of o'er-the-top sorority girls, all of whom responded with aplomb. Michelle's eyes are probably the best unspoken thing in the movie, and Susannah's NASCAR accent will make me laugh until the year 2058. Susannah's hair is also very different from the first shoot in July 2001, so we had to wig her and give her a hat (all of which looked fine). Fortunately, none of the other sorority chicks had changed much, but it is interesting to ponder that they are two years older than they were when the movie started. Perhaps next we'll make a coming-of-age flick shot in real time.

Summer Burkes showed up halfway through the shoot, so I got to include her in a scene, which was a great homage to Chapel Hill past. We had a fabulous roster of extras, grips and PA's, most of which came from craigslist, and they rocked the free world. One good thing about a down economy is that tremendously qualified and cool people are itching for work, even if you don't have the means to pay them enough. This was a lineup I'd use on a much bigger shoot with no hesitation.

Todd and I ended the day man-to-man as we sat on the side of a hill in Prospect Park waiting for the sun to set. Sometimes you get a sunset, and sometimes the sun just sets, and unfortunately, we got the latter. It'll work what it lacks in drama, it makes up in utility.

Utterly exhausted and addled from a day laughing with Rick - Tessa, Todd, Michelle and I went to Blue Ribbon, where George Gilmore fed us lobster, shrimp and bread pudding until we were sated and delighted on a day well done.

Jessica Arinella, Susannah Mills, Michelle Wylde and Karmen Helms don the Beta Chi Mu Wear once more

Rick Gradone checks Michelle in the monitor Vale of Cashmere, Prospect Park, Brooklyn

after sunset, Todd Walker and I wander home past the Grand Army Plaza

4/29/03 Brooklyn, NY I'm going

4/29/03 Brooklyn, NY

I'm going to keep this really short, since I have to get up in four hours to begin our re-shoots for The Pink House, but I just have to ask something.

Rumsfeld announced today that we were withdrawing American forces from Saudi Arabia this year. Let me also admit that I spent most of the year 2002 caught up in an apocalyptic, apoplectic fit that made me move out of Manhattan so I could start sleeping again. September 11 instilled fear in the hearts of Americans so deeply that it only takes a few well-placed stories to get Home Depot to run out of duct tape again, and Bush/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft have committed themselves to a platform of civil liberties so restricted that they have re-written the American constitution so that more dark-skinned people can be held in prisons for longer times without even being charged for anything.

I know the overarching desire for Bin Laden 'n' Company was to establish a "caliphate," or a giant fundamentalist Muslim country stretching across the Middle East. But the immediate purpose of 9/11 was to instill fear into the hearts of Americans, turn our government on its head, fuck our economy, and get our troops away from their holiest sites of Mecca and Medina.

So... I spent a year gulping down Celexa to quell my anxiety. American kids are taught radiation-poisoning drills. The stock market is in a giant shithole. The government has taken away the liberties of normal Americans. And now, we are leaving their holy land.

I mean, if you were in Al Qaeda, couldn't you claim an extraordinary victory? Didn't terrorism work?

4/28/03 Brooklyn, NY Is slacking

4/28/03 Brooklyn, NY

Is slacking dead?

I mention this because I've been working on an article for Salon about this year's crop of graduating seniors, who seem amazingly upbeat about the state of the American economy, and definitely don't plan on "dropping out" the way so many of us did in the early '90s.

I'd guess the early roots of our kind of slacking not counting slack forefathers of the Woodstock generation – occurred with the demoralizing election of George Bush I in 1988, the actual filming of Slacker in 1989, and the implosion of the economy in 1990. Like all great cultural phenomena, it was short-lived: its end began with the jubilant election of Clinton in '92, was mortally wounded by the corporate co-option of "Generation X" in '93-'94, and whatever was left was killed by the Internet explosion of 1996.

I figure my pinnacle of slacking came in the year between summer '94 and summer '95, when I lived on a farm outside Chapel Hill, NC for $117 a month with Ann and Greg Humphreys. Having just co-written a reasonably well-received book, I began writing a novel nobody was ever to see, and as the money drained out, I began walking around town with a certain distasteful misanthropy. I tried to start a band, but lacked the energy by Christmas, I grew so lethargic that I wrote a letter to myself, telling me to lose weight and find a girl by February. The weight came off – 25 pounds – but the girl did not; I had to wait another few months for that.

My own slacking came to an end after I moved into the Pink House; something about being the most responsible bill payer for the first time – kicked me into high mother hen gander. I started writing for the Independent and the Macmillan schoolbook series, and actually had money to buy drinks.

By 1996, you had to have zero motivation or be dead not to get a job at a dot-com, whether you were a programmer, an editor, a writer, or possessed a halfway-decent business mind. Even if you personally didn't have an idea for an internet company, you could have suckled the teat of local portals like we did with CitySearch in Chapel Hill (and Austin and San Fran and NYC, etc). The sheer amount of money I saw change hands in those days was truly stunning.

I largely suspect slacking has died even with the 2nd coming of the Shithole Modern Economy – because it's too expensive to live anywhere interesting without a job. Unless you sleep in a 400 square foot room with two Guatemalan families on the Lower East Side, it is impossible to slack in New York. Even Chapel Hill and Austin have priced themselves out of slackers, and everywhere else, you need a reliable car (which none of us ever had).

Also, the late '90s gave us all artificial needs that we can't imagine living without: at the very least, a laptop, a cell phone, and some way of getting onto the internet fast. Sure, plenty of people don't have those things, but their asceticism is usually earned through luxury. There is also a preponderance of style left over from the dot-com boom that has yet to subside: the kids who would have been slackers back in the '90s now traipse around Tompkins Square Park in Campers and ironic T-shirts from Urban Oufitters. We just like more stuff these days, and in stuff's defense, it is a lot cooler than stuff used to be.

It is a little sad, I suppose. I miss the long, unending afternoons of a slacking summer, and the free-floating, tetherless twitch of a future without engagement but my car actually works now, and I can't tell you how much sweet relief that is.

4/27/03 Brooklyn, NY One of

4/27/03 Brooklyn, NY

One of the last things ever said to me before I went to college came from the mother of Hampy Tucker, one of my best friends at Norfolk Academy. She said, "you'll make good friends at college, but your lifelong friends will always be from high school." I seriously love the woman and always will, but she had been wrong about that. At least so far.

My high school was deeply repressive, a bastion of southern breeding that had been chartered in 1680 off the shores of Tidewater, Virginia a hundred years before we were an actual country. I've been led to believe that we were among the last of the "ignored generation" to pass through those hallowed halls - I never met with any kind of emotional advisor, and I frequently burst into tears at inopportune moments during my years there. Thank god nobody saw me - we were all so emotionally shut down that any display like that would have freaked everyone out PERMANENTLY. It was no wonder that my first kiss happened in college.

Changes in educational style have come swiftly over the years as the baby boomers had children, but Columbine may have woken most snoozing administrators up to the strong pheremonal stench of their students' misery. These days at Norfolk Academy the artsy students are not mocked; there's a line 85 people deep for auditions at the musical. All of which is great for those kids, but I still feel an amazing animosity for the place.

Yes, I know I was blessed, and I know N.A. is the reason I got into any college I wanted, and complaining about prep school in this day and age would have Salinger, if he were dead, turning over in his grave.

Besides, we were never alone. My friends were a tight clique full of weird, surreal, intellectual independents that I still think about every day. But after our graduation in 1985, we saw each other less and less, and by the time 1992 or so rolled around, I hadn't seen anybody in years. We had a bizarre, deja-vu-ish 10-year-reunion in 1995 where we ended up in a parking lot in Virginia Beach with nothing to do, but most of us soldiered on with our lives with the occasional email from lost souls every three years or so.

I think part of the reason is that we never had our "glory days" at 17 like everyone else. Our clique entertained most of our personal success well after prep school, and some well after college. We look upon the early 80s fondly with one another, but when I see pictures of us, I see cake batter: yellowy globs yet to form into anything coherent. It probably didn't help that many of my male friends in my grade ended up being gay, which, back then, made me feel "not part of the club" (and furthermore, I had to get over my weird kernels of homophobia once and for all).

My friends were all tremendous people in their own right: Karyn was the brilliant pianist, Sherry the brilliant singer; Lynn turned me on to most of the culture I still adore; Marcie taught me puppy love while Sharon taught me how to flirt; Steve Shapiro had a surreal, brilliant sense of humor that lingers in my writing even now; and Hampy (now "Hamp" thank you very much) was the heart and soul (if not the car keys) of the group.

We all transgressed each other at some point. I insouciantly left my hamster to die in Steve's care, I annoyingly refused to drive Sherry home after our prom date, and no doubt I took advantage of Hampy's parents' kindness on 400 occasions. At various points in the last 18 years, I thought we were just too annoyed with each other (or me) to bother raising the energy to get back together.

But somehow, the most cranky of us all - my darling Lynn - got a bunch of us to meet in New York yesterday, and while such reunions can run the risk of being demoralizing and awful, I ended up having a pretty fucking great day. Lynn was in the city to see the Throwing Muses, Dawson was in town for her sister's bachelorette party, Karyn lives uptown, and Steve and Hamp trucked in for a surprise. It took about 12 nanoseconds to remember why I like these people so much, and while kingdoms can be built in the times between "we must not let so long pass again," it was deeply satisfying to see how we turned out.

yesterday, in the East Village

1986, in Norfolk, VA