HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME.

I turned 17 yesterday so my friends took me out and we went crazy. We're all in mental institutions now talking to shrinks. OOPS. OH WELL. It was D'hana's seventeenth birthday as well. Every picture below is terrible, everyone is shot in their worst possible light at only the worst angles. Again, oops. Oh well. It was the best birthday in years, though, I must admit.

LINDA IS 17 NOW, TOO.

Katherine came through.

Brandon too

Rachel

rumors and secrets

GABI BARNEZ BREAKING IT DOWN / BREAKING LEAH'S HEART.

MIXED DRINKS, FEELINGS

Hey gang. I was in Hartford on Friday night to hang with my best boys and girls at the Spigot, the standard to which every other bar is measured. Nothing usually can compare. Ross moved to New York yesterday, making this the last chance to catch him in New England, my brother had a birthday, Fathers Day: that made enough reasons to head home for two days.

It was nice to blow through town, stealing quick glimpses of all I've loved. There were several more familiar faces than I expected, making for nice surprises in line one after another.

What was compared with what is now is a tough one no matter how good it gets or how bad it was. It being gone, it qualifies to be longed for. Longing for is an activity at which I excel.

Sutanya

Sky

good morning

EILEEN BRENNAN: STYLE ICON.

Eileen Brennan is my current heroine style icon. She is the most under-celebrated earthy seductress of all time. I'm in love with her. No woman ever did ugly-hot like she did, and still no one seems to know it or care, which is just inhumane. You may remember her from such films as Clue, The Sting, and Private Benjamin. But I love her the most in Murder by Death, the film version of Neil Simon's play starring Truman Capote, Alec Guinness, Peter Falk, Maggie Smith, Peter Sellers and a handful of other notable ugly-hot character actors.

PRIDE ACTIVITIES

Last night for Boston Pride Brian spun at All Asia, for the Queer Women of Color Benefit for GLBT human rights in Africa. It was real good and sweaty and good. Marissa was there making sure everybody was checking their privilege. Abby rightfully rolled her eyes. Oh yeah!

pre-jam lounge fest, who wants to write a young adult novel for teen girls?









RIZZLA

DUMDUMBHANGBHANG

I just slept through the Pride Parade this morning, but as Al and Jillian would say, "2 phat 2 care." I'm gonna proudly loll about my apartment in various states of undress until its time to go to da club, and then I'm gone get into all manner of mishbehaviour.

My, my, all them hoes. A guess: Tremont Street is a sea of gayfaced yo-pros dressed in gingham and bad denim, jealously ogled by a slightly smaller crowd of begrudging daddies in mesh tops and leather. And since its raining, my other guess is that the "don't rain on my parade" and "God hates the gays, hence, rain" jokes are getting a lot of play.

Anyway, here are some pretty girls making a pretty music video!! Watch it!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EVAN

The other night Evan Garza turned 17, and so we all said hay and Riz played him some tunes at zuzu. It was an Extravaganza Elegarza. HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY. Pictured above with Brdr and some dude I don't know.

In other news, Pretty Baby got his latest remix featured on FADER.COM ... FUCKING HUGE. So proud and happy that everyone worldwide now knows and can feel cuntier. Its a mean, psycho, party bitch anthem, which accurately describes the future of sweaty danger music. Get into it now.

THE BENCH

APARTMENT HERESY

Jean-Luc Godard, still from La Chinoise

I've been thinking a bit this morning about the city apartment as creative headquarters, as places to conjure and enact the details of individual waywardness. Actively dwelling as living. More than just a site for preparing meals, socializing, sexuality, rest; as if that weren't enough, for me an apartment has always had to double as studio space, where artworks are conceived of, designed and produced.

The apartment as a leased commodity, however, is also a hugely profitable target for aggressive lifestyle brands with home furnishings departments. A renter's apartment essentially is an empty closet to be filled with consumer purchases, decoratively or to perform labor-saving functions. If you are a stylish, cosmopolitan urbanite then a befitting living space is going to matter, the objects you select express a taste related to your individual style and therefore, the well-designed Urban Outfitters interiors department might matter to you too, for example. Inevitably running into the same set of drapes, the same mass-produced "painting" or Ikea duvet has become an irksome occurrence for me, because I feel these mass-marketed products' subtle influence on the visual experience of private spaces. They color our most intimate interactions, which to varying degrees take on the drab effect of Ikea'd, Urban Outfitted sameness.

What can we expect when apartment buildings are necessary in the first place? Structures are designed to organize populations, compartmentalizing families in gridded city blocks, clothed in architecture, stacked in glorified storage bins holding all of these millions of people and all of their shit. They can't all be unique outward expressions of their tenants. Can anyone hope to fashion an individually styled home-life in this scenario?

Guy Ben-Ner, stills from Stealing Beauty

Most of us certainly think we can, but still, I think most decorating is fairly standardized and cliched, even while trying to flaunt otherwise. This is precisely why I hated last year's 500 Days of Summer so intensely, a piss poor big studio stab at auteur film-making, chock full of rote product placements for the "alternative lifestyle." I won't even go into the regressive gender stereotypes, 50s era careerism and the most trite plot and dialogue of all time. The film stealthily took the bulk of my demographic for total suckers.

The film's most offensive scene was when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character finally scores entrance into Summer's (Zooey Deschanel) apartment, like he's penetrated the inner sanctum, and is so moved by her kooky bedroom nick-knacks that he's made blind to the likelihood that there's definitely some other hot babe with the same indie bullshit tacked up around her near-identical bedroom, probably even in the same building. The scene used a market-proven combo of narrative, soundtrack and movie star performance to intensify only mildly interesting decorating trends among young people into something seemingly revelatory. The effect was revolting.

photo illustration taken from apartmenttherapy.com

So, while I'm thinking about a new apartment that will need decorating in the near future, and probably offended a few readers who really love Summer, Ikea and Urban, I'm recommending three scenes of apartment living which have periodically inspired me to believe that a rented space can be creative, can site idiosyncrasy, can be the physical plant for performing the ins and outs of nonconformist sexuality and socialization. Dramatic scenes aren't "real," they're lifted out of fictional narrative cinema, and Lord knows Godard especially has been enthusiastically co-opted into the "alternative" set's repertoire of signifiers. But I try to remember that Godard was a challenging artist first, and his aesthetics pleasingly persist even if his politics are long since dead, having been overtaken by nostalgia. I sense he had a keenly felt affection for the apartments of France, and saw in them a potential to house radical styles of living, to contain almost his entire oeuvre.

And of course, Michael Clark walking home from the club and then performing an impromptu dance for Charles Atlas's wonderful documentary about Clark, Hail the New Puritan. I love this movie purely because it opens up Clark's home/studio and reveals its DIY, collaborative environment among reject ballerinas, making innovative, joyful performance art, ballet, fashion and punk rock. That is total freedom, living at home.

NIGHT MOVES

SUMMER MISSION STATEMENTS

The goal of Summer 2010 is stability within a constant state of joy and elation. Can it be done? Some things are going to have to change. First, I need cash, desperately. Is this recession over yet? Fuck it never existed. It was a figment of the financial imagination, informed by a horror complex seeded sometime during other people's unhappy childhoods. I will no longer be working for free.

Next, I need new headquarters for rolling out the leisure campaign. This pit I've landed in is creeping overgrown, crumbling down; its like we realized the sinkhole trend a year ago, and its only now starting to catch on globally, but we're a whole year ahead and totally over it. Check. We're moving in a few weeks to sunny Somerville to a third floor apartment from which we can more effectively envisage the necessary means.

Moving down the itemized agenda, burgeoning internet fame needs to expand, materialize and monetize into actual, IRL fame. My lifestyle needs a refresher, a top-off. My influence over public taste grows exponentially with every passing moment. No longer content living as a well-meaning private citizen of the sensual world, I want to sit atop its benevolent throne. The sensual prince in ascension. The days of cerebral banality are numbered. The time of corporal ecstasy stands poised for total takeover. Toss out the cruel dictator. Throw down the father. Seize control. Insist on pleasure for all and good taste shall be the law. We will be in love anew, alive during a new order of love.

TOTAL REBBECCA

JILLIAN ARRIVES.

MEMORIAL GRILL KILL

Yesterday was a bizarre day because apparently Canada is ON FIRE, and the hazy air is floating south and smoking up the Boston atmosphere. There was an ominous glow in the air all day that I liked, that we all thought was due to excessive delicious barbecuing but indeed was from out-of-control forest fires in Quebec. Oh mon dieu!

Anyway, it reminded me of visiting Georgia and the great, heavy, humid smog that permeates and I became nostalgic. A few of us went to Peter's house for really good grilled rack of lamb. Sun dappled through trees in the driveway of his Cambridge home and it was really killer. Leisure persists. Pleasure wins.

Peter manning the two grill operation here.



Jamie



Ryan McGinley took this picture. JK it was easy.



holiday spread