Filed under: personal | Tags: aida chehrehgosha, job hunting, me me me me me, thirty-wonderful, writing
I’m 31 now. Actually my birthday was on Saturday, but things have been slightly out of hand lately so I’m only posting about it now. It was a really good birthday, brunch at my favorite brunch place followed by an afternoon in the park and an evening at a Korean restaurant in suburbia, surrounded by friends and the bright lights of a karaoke room. (I sang “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden” and “Objection (Tango)” and “1 Thing” and “Come Out And Play (Keep ‘Em Separated)” and duetted on “Self Control” and “Black Velvet” and probably sang other songs, too, although right now I’m blanking on what they were.)
Filed under: Uncategorized
It just took me eight tries to remember my WordPress login. Uh-oh.
Filed under: gay, hot | Tags: best week ever, headmaster magazine, new york city, pulp
This video of Pulp at the Reading Festival in 1994 has been on Youtube for a year and it only has 1400 views so far, which is a crazy shame that maybe we should all collectively cry about. It’s so good! And the sound is good, too.
Anyway, I’m going to see Pulp IN THE FLESH at Radio City Music Hall tonight and I am so so so so so excited. I haven’t seen them live ever, and also I haven’t been to Radio City since my largely Jewish sixth-grade class took a big trip (with most of our parents) down there to see the Rockettes. (It took us six hours to get there and the one clear memory I have of that trip is this one girl Lori Carocciola’s mom spent some of the gridlock time by dancing in the aisles when “Rumpshaker” came on the radio. Oh, and that we almost didn’t make it back home because that same girl’s dad had disappeared into a bar at one point and the bus driver wouldn’t leave because we were one person short.)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: headmaster, me me me me me, new york city, parties
Actually, though, the party’s a week from Thursday (the 12th).
We’ll be celebrating the new issue at Kings Cross on the Bowery, just about a block away from site of the seedy nineteenth century male brothel Columbia Hall, which features in the issue. We’ll have cheap drink specials, MR MORRIS (from Rhode Island!) doing the DJ business, and homework.
The party’s on the early side (7-11pm) because the idea of hosting anything until 4am is still so foreign and daunting to me. Which is funny, because it’s not exactly like we’re early-to-bed people. It’s free and open to all and people that live in at least six states will be there.
Filed under: Italian-Americans, Italians | Tags: eurovision, holidays, st joseph's day, zeppoles, zeppoli
It is 72 and sunny and I am about to walk over to Federal Hill to stuff my face with zeppoli (or zeppoles, as people in my family would say.) With no disrespect to Purim, St. Joseph’s Day is my favorite dessert-based holiday. I’ve long believed that Italian-Americans should leave Mr. Columbus alone and adopt this day as their ethnic pride celebration, especially because March could use a major ethnic holiday that doesn’t totally suck (ahem) so I will be celebrating by listening to some of my favorite Italian pop songs, like Gigliola Cinquetti’s “Non ho l’eta,” a 1964 Eurovision winner and also the song that I think Angelo Badalamenti based his entire career around.
After the jump, two more favorites that you’ll probably recognize but which you might not know were recorded in Italian first:
Filed under: gay, movies | Tags: me me me me me, movies, new york times, swoon, tom kalin
This New York Times article from the other day about important gay movies–and specifically the gay movies deemed important by celebrated gay New Yorkers–got me wondering which gay movie has been the most important to me, and I’m slightly at a loss. As a teenager I watched basically every movie released on VHS, and some of them were pretty gay. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was a lot of fun, and Priest was pretty sad, and the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped was my favorite movie of 1996, according to a hand-written list that I found a few months ago. I’ve mentioned here before my love for Robert Altman’s Prêt-a-Porter, and Bound is just generally a really awesome movie, complete with Jennifer Tilly’s voice and lesbian sex scenes choreographed by Susie Bright.
But how important are these films, in the grand scheme of what it means to be gay and what it means for me personally to be a gay movie-lover?
Filed under: hookers | Tags: australia, Scarlet Alliance, Serious World News Stuff, sex trafficking, The Grey Man
You probably know that I try my best not to talk about international politics ever, on this blog but also pretty much in the real world. But the #Kony2012 hysteria–and a backlash so immediate that I actually knew about the backlash before the hysteria–has been really fascinating me for the past week or so.
The story, about Invisible Children, a group of Americans who produced a video calling for military action against a kidnapper in a country that most Americans would never be able to find on a map, gained a lot of traction almost immediately, thanks in large part to the Twitter-going ways of Jesus-loving teenagers in Alabama and also Invisible Children’s tactic of using Twitter to bomb the accounts of certain celebrities like Ryan Seacrest and Ellen DeGeneres,* whose opinions on African militarization are suddenly things we are meant to consider seriously.
But this story–to put it unsympathetically, a bunch of privileged white people go to somewhere far away and use exploited children as a means to feel better about themselves and their white privilege and their frankly rather dodgy organization–sounded eerily familiar. And then I remembered the article I read last month about The Grey Man.
The story of my first-ever attempt at group sex is up now at Salon. I’ve already gotten one (very sympathetic) e-mail from someone else who went to one of the same parties.
Filed under: art, hot | Tags: art, headmaster magazine, matias uris, shameless self-promotion
On Saturday at the party we debuted a brand-new print (a self-portrait!) by Matias Uris, and it is soooooooooooooo lovely. You can find it on the inside cover of the new issue of Headmaster, but now you can also possess it in a larger, more frame-able 9″ X 12″ form. It’s printed in an edition of 20 and it’s on the web shoppe now for just $25.
Filed under: hookers, people from rhode island | Tags: documentaries, providence, sex workers, things that are happening
Tonight at Brown:
Have you heard of Project Weber yet? They’re an amazing group in Providence, RI doing direct service and outreach to male sexworkers in our state.
Come find out more as Richard Holcomb, co-founder of Project Weber, gives us an in-depth look into the world of male prostitution on the streets of U.S. cities and abroad. Through lecture, documentary clips, and a panel, this presentation will cover data, personal and professional experiences with this population, and the barriers and challenges in providing male sex-workers with appropriate services and support. The panel will include Richard Holcomb, one of Project Weber’s fantastic outreach workers, and documentary filmaker Dio Traverso, with SNEAK PEEK CLIPS from the documentary “Invisible”.
