Everything Everything Everything Everything

I made really good time on the 7am Megabus yesterday, so I was in Chelsea by 11. (With traffic, this particular bus usually pulls in closer to noon.) After a visit to Starbucks, whose bathroom served as the site for a moderately dramatic wardrobe change, I high-tailed it to Brooklyn, where I was scheduled to play an extra in a music video, this song running through my head the whole time, of course. Once I arrived at the club I realized how very out of place I was playing an extra in a club scene, because a) I’m not very good at outwardly expressing enthusiasm, and b) I’m also very tall, meaning that it’s even more obvious that I’m not very good at outwardly expressing enthusiasm. Also I had the distinct impression that every person there was already friends with every other person who was there, which, even if it wasn’t true, is the kind of thing that will cause me to smoke most of a pack of cigarettes before sundown. (Generally, I smoke about one cigarette a day, and almost always only at night.)

There was also the matter of my ungodly sunburn, which had gotten to the peeling stage and which left me rather helpless when the director told us to take our shirts off and wave them over our heads. It was really hot in the club, the aesthetic need for a smoky atmosphere prevailing over the more basic desire for air conditioning or fans. So I shed basically an entire layer of skin just standing there sweating. Oh, and I was wearing a leather jacket all this time. Yowch!, right?

After the friend was over I went to my friend’s apartment and sat in his air conditioning reading my book until he came home and we got Mexican food on the ground floor of his building. That new Matthew Perry show was on after the Olympics and boy does that look like the worst show ever, or at least it does when you’re scarfing down a quesadilla and watching it with the sound off.

This morning I debated about whether or not to go back for day 2 of the shoot, because I wasn’t really convinced that my presence was desired to begin with, and ultimately I decided that it would be better if I got some Headmaster work done while I was in the city. Today was the part of the video where the band actually played, though, and also free alcohol was promised, so it was tempting. But I wasn’t sure I could feign even my paltry levels of enthusiasm for two days in a row. So after a detour to Columbia to see the Edward Gorey exhibit at the rare books library—which is so, so, so good, incidentally, and if it weren’t 3:30 am I’d go into more detail than that—I headed down to look at some art.

Scott Hug’s B-OUT show, which is still up in Chelsea, is really good. I actually noted the names of 28 different artists that I wanted to check out—excluding the ones I knew already—which is surely some kind of a record for me.

Then, on my way to check in on Headmaster sales at St. Mark’s, I stopped in at The Hole, which had not one but two incredibly lame shows happening simultanously. One, introduced by a Mickey Mouse with a giant boner, seemed promising but was totally lacking conceptually and also technically. The other, a giant group show wherein people submitted portraits of one another, was kind of appalling. And it’s not just the copyeditor in me, the feathers of which got ruffled Jeremy Kost and Glenn O’Brien’s names were spelled wrong on the labels even though the show’s been up for two months now and surely someone should have noticed by this point? No, the portraits themselves were almost all awful, particularly the illustrated ones which for some reason almost all looked like they were stolen from a high school art class. (Odd, considering that there was more than a little overlap between the names in this show and the names in B-OUT.) But really, did anyone need to see Three Asfour by Yoko Ono or Bruce Labruce by Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny*? No, no they did not. (Exceptions: JD Samson’s faceless portrait, Jeremy Kost’s Polaroids of Sharon Needles, Needles’ reciprocal portrait of Kost, not much else.) The gallery described this as a portrait of the New York scene in 2012, which seemed funny because there were multiple artists (Labruce, say) that I don’t think of as New York-based at all, and also because there was a Dash Snow thrown in there because why not, his fatal overdose was only three years ago after all.

And then I came home on the 9pm bus, which got in at 1 and which left me antsy enough that I’m still awake now…

(*Actually Brian Kenny may have been at B-OUT when I was there; I’m not sure, though, because I don’t recognize anyone, ever, although I’m 99% sure I did see Stanley Tucci on the street. The fact that I’m not 100% sure is telling, though, because I’ve had a MAJOR crush on him ever since Big Night.)