January 2005 Archives

1. I finally finished my thesis.
2. I turned 26—no more quarter-life crisis for me.
3. Jarvis is even cuter than he was last week, as you can see from the photo above.

Debbie Gibson will be appearing au naturel in Playboy's March issue, following in the footsteps of fellow 80s teen pop star Tiffany, who was on the cover of and naked in their April 2002 "Sex and Music" issue. I know she wasn't a singer but Soleil Moon Frye had better stay out of those pages or the 80s will have lost all their innocence for me!

[ via Largehearted Boy ]

So which of the current pop tarts who do you think is going to end up in Playboy first a decade or so from now, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Ashlee Simpson, Mandy Moore or Hillary Duff? The first two we've already pretty much seen naked, but you never know...

P.S. Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now is one of the best karaoke songs EVER. And yes, I know it was a cover but please, we all know she totally rocked the malls like they had never been rocked before with that song. Respect.

From Harvard Man in lesbian mix-up wants satire clearly labeled by Andrew Orslowski:

For a week on their own burpy 'show', [Adam] Curry and [Dave] Winer rebroadcast the adventures of a podcaster they admired, one Yeast Radio's Madge Weinstein.

Madge Weinstein is really a database programmer called Richard Bluestein, who performs the part of "a domineering Jewish lesbian" - firmly in the tradition of John Waters' diva Divine, and a long-line of female impersonators including Dame Edna Everage. He's been recording his own scatalogical skits for a while.

But Curry and Winer didn't realize that Madge wasn't really ... a woman.

Completely understandable though because, you know, in the immortal words of Aerosmith, dude looks like a lady:

[ via linkmachinego del.icio.us ]

P.S. The screengrab from "the great communicator" at the bottom of the article is fantastic. FYNS!

Let me assure you that the only thing better than this photo is an infinity of it—prepare yourself to behold the true apex of animated gifs, The Hasselhoffian Recursion.

[ thanks, Alaina! ]

In case you were wondering what not to get me for my upcoming birthday:

[ via kp3000 ]

Celine Dion! Anne Geddes! Celine Dion & Anne Geddes together! I suppose it was inevitable that these two masters of treacly sentimentality would meet up one day, but I was hoping they would duel to the death instead of joining forces.

Your soul aches now, I know, mine does too, but I promise Merlin Mann's list of five terrible fake Anne Geddes photo shoots will help take the pain away.

motel666 needs a new vibrator because:

I just fucked my Hello Kitty vibrator to death.

I'm not joking. I thought she just needed new batteries, but I put in fresh ones and she's still dead.

Oh my God, I killed Hello Kitty.

For those of you to whom the Kitty vibrator is news, Peter Payne of J-List wrote up a brief history:

In 1997, Genyo designed a product that would live in infamy: the Hello Kitty vibrating shoulder massager, which really is a shoulder massager (trust us—it says so on the package). Sanrio approved this design without batting an eye, and the product enjoyed modest sales in toy shops and in family restaurants like Denny's and Coco's. It wasn't until 1999 or so that people began to catch on to the fact that the Hello Kitty massager had other potential uses, and with amazing speed, they started popping up in adult videos in Japan. The next thing anyone knew, they had changed into a cult adult item, sold in vending machines in love hotels—after all, what self-respecting man wouldn't buy his girl a Hello Kitty vibrator when she asked him for one?

As I pointed out almost two years ago, the mold was broken and Genyo stopped manufacturing the vibrator. J-List doesn't have seem to have them stocked anymore, so if you see one at your local sex shop, grab it—it's history now!

One of my dirty little food secrets is that I don't really like Filipino food; I don't care for the sort of dishes served at the family dinner table, but I do love the sort of food you eat at beer gardens or buy from street vendors.

I haven't been to any of the Filipino restaurants in New York because I always figured they probably wouldn't be serving what I like to eat but Peter Meehan's recent NYT $25 and Under on Krystal's Cafe just changed my mind:

The sizzling sisig ($7.95), minced raw onions and diced pork delivered to the table on a piping hot cast iron platter, is like a relative of corned beef hash from a country where pig is big. At the table, an egg yolk stirred into the meat and onion hash cloaks it with a velvety coating, and a squeeze of lemon brightens the dish.

Like most dishes based on pig's feet, Krispy pata ($5.95), two deep-fried knuckles (bones and all), will never win points for looks. But it won me over. You pull skin, thick and crisp, from the feet and pass it through a soy-vinegar condiment on the way to your mouth. There is warm, mucilaginous cartilage between the bones for the truly intrepid; I am not among them.

The East Village offshoot of Krystal's, on First Avenue near 11th Street, opened in 2002 and has slightly higher prices. On Sundays both locations have lechon—the whole roasted suckling pig that's a staple at Filipino galas—with spoon-tender flesh and crisp, burnished skin. The $7.50 helping from the East Village spot provided an excellent dinner for two.

Perhaps the most exciting part of any food review I've ever read comes a few paragraphs later when Meehan says, "vegetable dishes are a waste of calories you should spend on barbecue." I find this to be a universal truth!

I don't know that I'm up for a trip to the original Krystal's Cafe in Queens, but if you'd like to come stuff your face with tasty pork at the East Village branch next Sunday, I'd be happy to have the company.

[ via A Full Belly ]

I've been using Firefox as my browser for a while now (and so should you, if you know what's good for you) but I only have three extensions installed:

1. BugMeNot to bypass site registration—although the latest version doesn't work with Firefox 1.0 yet so I'm stuck using the bookmarklet instead for now
2. Eliot Shepard's NYTimes Single Page Format extension, which forces the NYT stories I click on to load in single page format by default, saving me one click and a whole lot of time
3. Gina Trapani's About This Site extension, "one-click access to various services that provide information about the web page you are viewing"

What extensions are you using and liking? Share the love, people.

I can't understand a thing she's saying because it's completely in Japanese, but not only does Hello Kitty have her own blog, but she even has permalinks (hi PB!) and a RSS feed. The photos on it are slightly fuzzy because they're meant to be moblogged, like the two in her Halloween entry.

According to NTT Data's press release, they partnered with Sanrio to perk up Hello Kitty Club's prospects a little by offering members the ability to create their own blogs at the hellokitty.ne.jp subdomain of their choice, lots of Sanrio templates and clipart, plus they can lock their blogs and Trackback is natively enabled. More TypePad than Blogspot, wouldn't you say? I wonder how many blogs they've signed up since launching last July, and how many are still active?

Also: this has got to be the one blogging/journaling user group that skews even more female than LiveJournal! Why this thrills me so much, I don't know.

P.S. My birthday is coming up soon, would someone please get me a Hello Kitty Sandwich Maker please? Thanks.

There's a club I joined a few years back, we don't have membership cards or even a secret handshake, but every once in a while the object of our adoration visits our city and we do our best to meet in her honor. If you don't know her yet, you really should make the effort—go on, SFist went and made it that much easier for you just yesterday.

(And oh, if you find yourself in San Francisco make sure to heed her advice and eat at Minako; the food is every bit as good as the reviews say and better!)

The best part of Alex Williams and Eric Dash's piece in the NYT on celebrity weddings and the vendors that love them is the ending:

And even stars who are less than press-shy or freebie-averse have their limits. Mr. Trump, for instance, will handle at least one important wedding-day service himself.

"I'll do my own hair," he said, adding wearily, "unfortunately for the world."

Can you imagine Donald Trump with any other hair?

Would he even still be The Donald, if he changed it?

My friend Elliott Malkin has two short films in the 2005 NY Jewish Film Festival. Congratulations, Elliott!

My Bris—which he put together from Super 8 footage of, yes, his own circumcision in the early 70s—was screened this Wednesday but his Family Movie will be shown three times in the coming weeks:

Sat, Jan 22 - 9pm - Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center
Sun, Jan 23 - 2pm - Walter Reade Theater
Tue, Jan 25 - 8pm - Makor/Steinhardt Screening Room on 67th St

You can see an excerpt from Family Movie here; I haven't watched the entire piece yet, just a few clips, but I will be there to see it on the 22nd and you should too!

From Horror Train:

It was the zombies that got me. Their slight brush on my side of the car brought me back inside my familiar space in the back seat of a taxi stuck in heavy traffic. Outside, these faces pressed to the cab's windows, children's eyes trying to see me as I tried my best to ignore them--these beggars and sampaguita vendors--pretending they're not there, that they didn't leave smudges on the glass, that I didn't hear them saying: "Sige na po, kahit pangkain lang!" And since silence won't work, a quick two knocks on the windows sends them away.

I was so tempted to knock twice, but the train had no glass windows. Nothing would keep them out, but they made no move to touch, yank or even go "Boo!" When we cleared the tunnel, I thought that was it. It was, at best, a guilt trip. But no! The train didn't stop, and apparently we had two more rounds back at the tunnel. Still no changes, the second round. The numbies were still numb, and the zombies were doing their best to be there, but not to scare us. By the train's third entry into the tunnel, I knew what was eating me. There in the darkness was my middle-class hypocrisy staring at me in the face, and once again, I couldn't face it.

Famous-ish ITP alum Jonah Brucker-Cohen (you've probably seen some of his projects already, like the Homeland Insecurity Advisory System, BumpList, or MouseMiles) is a level 15 monster in Everquest! I love this.

(But how do I get Shigeru Miyamoto to ditch princesses Daisy and Peach for me?)

I stumble onto Alex Lencicki's Brokentype every few months and like it a lot each time, but keep meaning to link to it and forgetting. Sorry. I especially like his latest post, so here's an excerpt from it, Celebrity War I:

People still think that the first Celebrity War was sparked by the Cruise/Lohan declaration of sovereignty—that's what they'll end up re-enacting on the History Channel, anyway—but I think it happened before any of that. I think it started way back in ‘oh five with Clooney and Soderberg and that TV show, because that was the first time we realized just how much they hated us.

At least that's what I was thinking about on Manson Night, crouching in eucalyptus on the hill. We had been waiting there in the heat since noon and my legs were cramped so I did some stretches and tried to clear my mind. Serena had a copy of US magazine and a red marker and she was flipping though it and circling faces and then X’ing them out. Our blogger was standing off in the distance composing shots on his digital camera. I was thinking about that show.

Many happy returns of the day to Alaina, for whom making 30 look good is the least of her gifts—she's a delight to know and be around, and makes everything better just by being herself, even cross-continent. New York doesn't miss you as much as I do!

Here is a photo of us from last year outside the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, only one of countless tasty places I've come to love that she's introduced me to:

Kindly ignore the strange white man in the background, and thanks to David for taking the photo!

Kevin Fanning's superb Why God Why is not only back, but better than it's ever been, and I couldn't be happier. I've been enjoying this new incarnation for quite a while and now it's time to share, so here's a bit from My Home Liposuction:

The details of my home liposuction are still emerging. For a while there was a whole bunch of internal debate about where I would actually conduct it. After careful consideration and a few headaches I decided on the downstairs bathroom as the operating theater. Basically the downstairs bathroom and the kitchen are the only uncarpeted rooms, and the kitchen is somewhat of a high-traffic area. I suppose the garage would have been another option, but it doesn’t seem as sanitary.

So at this point I’m basically finalizing my tool set.

It's all good but I'm especially excited about his untitled project, "a story in development, about a woman, her husband, and her blog." I know, I know, but trust me on this? Have a taste and you will likely beg for more.

I noticed Tokyo Craigslist launch a few weeks ago and wondered how it would do, considering that the site is completely in english—is it really going to be used by the japanese, or is it going to be used mainly by resident foreigners? Poking through the site now neither one is the case, most of the posts I'm seeing are from posters in the US. I went through all of the major categories, of course, but since as we all know the most interesting ones are the personals, let's talk about those.

Men Seeking Women, the most heavily-trafficked so far (where by heavy I mean five or six posts a day) brings us such gems as I AM 23 MALE US CITIZEN, U R ????, IN NEED OF CITEZENSHIP? - 23 (CALIFORNIA), Tom Cruise lookalike in NYC seeks Japanese girlfriend - 37, GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR JAPANESE WOMAN TO LIVE AND WORK IN AMERICA ! - 39 (San Francisco), NYC Musician seeks his Yoko!!, and I would like to find a japanese wife younger,sweet & well off to marry - 50 (California/Hawwaii). So yeah, mostly white guys with japanese fetishes.

Women Seeking Men has less than half the posts of M4W. The posters here are pretty varied: japanese women in Japan, some looking specifically for american men (either in Japan or in the US, race not specified); japanese women or women of japanese descent in the US, some looking specifically for japanese men; and korean women looking for japanese men.

Men Seeking Men has only five posts total right now, which I'm sure anyone who's ever looked at M4M at any CL incarnation in North America will find shocking. Two of the five are americans visiting Tokyo looking to hook up, another is a curious 29-year-old who writes, "I have recently heard about bukkake and wanted to know if any of you have some stories or advice to give me about it. I would like to get someone to invite to bukkake in California."

Women Seeking Women is even more pathetic than I expected it to be, only one post! She says, "Ok girlz, I need some help here... if you look like "M" or "Claire" from Sexysappho (dot com) PLEASE contact me ;)" Only one of the SexySappho models (NSFW) is Japanese and she's not M or Claire, so I'm guessing this post was spammed to various CLs.

Many posts on Casual Encounters are from american men visiting Tokyo looking to hook up with japanese women, or american men (usually New Yorkers, but Los Angeles and San Francisco represent too!) looking to hook up with japanese women in their own cities, which is what I expected, but I did find one post from swingers: bi white couple wants asain couple - mw4mw - 49 (oregon) pic. Too bad they're a continent away and can't spell, or they might be getting some hot race-mixing swinger action RIGHT NOW.

Finally, everyone's favorite category: Rant & Raves! Tokyo RNR gets a few posts every once in a while, some pissed off with how Tokyo Craigslist doesn't serve the community: The problem with CL Tokyo is... (TOKYO) ("First and foremost, what in the fuck is it that you people don't get...? It's craigslist *TOKYO*. Would you stupid mother fuckers stop posting such ridiculous shit like your shitty assed two bedroom apt in buttfuck Kansas?!@"), Assholes, be quiet (Asakusa) ("If you want Japan youhave to come here, otherwise, keep your fantasies to your local R&R board. Please. ...If I see you on the train platform I am going to push your ass in front of the shinkansen and you will end up being shitkansen."). The most well thought out post is this heartfelt plea to Craig himself, Re: Is this CL TOkyo, doesn't feel like it! (boston):

well other cities have got spsms, too. but just becuase the overall potings are so few in the tokyo site, it looks like a spam bulletin board. as you said, almost all of the tokyo postings are from japan-geeks in the states or spammers.

basically the japanese people's english skill is limited, and they are not interested in posting ads in english, which, to them, means taking a risk of making grammartical mistakes. (which i don't care about at all as you can tell) don't think this country is same as other non-english speaking countries. japan is definitely one of the few countries where people strongly (very strongly) feel englishly-challenged.

craig, you've got take some actions to prevent spams and/or attract more japanese readers/posters. otherwise this site is going to die sooner or later. craig, you can't just rely on month-to-mouth to promote this site in tokyo. a majority of english-speaking people in tokyo are japan-otaku whose japanese friends (mostly girlfriends) are not capable of reading/writing in english. but there are many other potential japanese CL users out there, and they probably don't have any connections with CL users, or english speakers in general.

craig, you've got to reach out directly to real "japanese people" to spread this site in japan. please try to reach the japanese media and tell them this is a great site for those who want to "actually use/practice enligh"—reading and writing. learning english is always a hot issue there. always a lot of top-selling books in japan are related to how to communicate in english. craig, i'm sure, as a japanese, that is the only way to keep this tokyo site alive. i don't want japan-otaku perverts take it over. i want this site to be a place where japanese people, for the first time, really overcome their negative obsessions about their english skill and fear of communicating in a foreign language... and eventually a place where many english learners enjoy english communication and feel confident in their language skill.

It'll be very interesting to come back to this post in a few months, and then a year, to see how Tokyo Craigslist has evolved and what steps (if any) the usually hands off CL team has taken to change things.

Also I'd like to point out that I typed in manila.craigslist.org and for the first time there's actually something there! I don't know when they're going to officially launch Manila Craigslist, but it's up and running, so pass the word. I've long been wanting CL to come to Manila, Filipinos are incredibly social and increasingly netsavvy and it will be fascinating to see how quickly it picks up. How will the CL staff be able to deal with users who effortlessly, naturally codeswitch between English, Tagalog, swardspeak and street slang? How long till office IT departments start blocking CL at work, the way many of them block all IM clients and Friendster?

Okay, so granted I haven't read very many porn reviews in my life, but still I'm pretty sure that Tim Connelly's completely gonzo smackdown of 1 Night in China in AVN last month has got to be one of the best ever. I mean, come on:

When she first enters the frame, ensconced in something “sexy” and looking to tease, it harkens back to those nightmare moments where you’re slightly drunk in a room, waiting to see what it is you really seduced, and out comes someone who makes you wonder, Is it a man, a she-male—and most importantly, what the hell is that bulge between its legs and what are its plans for me?! Yikes!

The paragraph that had me gasping for air was the eighth one after that, if you'd like to read it. I post all sorts of strange things on here but it's more than a bit much, even for me.

Oh and if you've never heard of the flick in question and you're reading this at work, or have a weak constitution, by no means should you go googling it. Not just because it's totally NSFW—and it is, make no mistake—but because the screenshots for it are in that rare and horrifying category of things you can never unsee, no matter how hard you try, along with goatse, tubgirl and many of the curiousities on rotten.com.

This Thursday is apparently the kickoff of New York's unofficial Cory Arcangel week. Arcangel's work was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial but his first ever solo show in the city, Welcome to my Homepage Artshow, opens that day at Team on West 26th between 10th and 11th. Here's some more about it.

The show includes a number of new hacked Nintendo game cartridges - the work that Arcangel has become known for - and a number of new works in the medium of video. In the former group are a fully interactive Ipod® programmed for the Nintendo® system and an absurdly slowed down version of Tetris®. In the latter group are Sans Simon, a video of Simon and Garfunkel in which the artist uses his hand to hide Simon's presence, and Geto Boys/Beach Boys in which videos by the two eponymous bands are played side by side creating an oddly harmonic synchronicity.

Arcangel, who graduated from Oberlin with a degree in Technology in Music and the Related Arts, came to the artworld through a number of internet based activities. These, in turn, lead to invitations from institutions for lectures and demonstrations, a performative aspect which naturally called for the creation of digital environments. These latter works evolved into stand-alone artworks, frequently exhibited with soundtracks created by Arcangel in collaboration with others, such as Paul B. Davis, a London-based disc jockey. Arcangel is interested in keeping the possibilities of collaboration open, as well as in continuing to reach out to other cultural fields for inspiration, fusing autonomous artworks with temporary and net-based actions. The show at Team, for example, marks the launch of dooogle.com, a search engine which only yields results about Doogie Howser, M.D. Also available is a new piece of software called T.A.C. (Total Asshole Compression), a program which increases the size of any file passed through it.

His Team show runs through January 13 to February 12.

From January 15th to February 26th, you'll can go see his collaboration with Paper Rad at Deitch Projects on Grand & Wooster, it's called Super Mario Movie:

"it is a hacked 8bit Super Mario Brothers 1 cartridge. i will hack the game cartridge and totally reprogram it... so when you put in THIS cartridge, instead of the game, you are presented with a 15 minute movie using all original graphics from the game........."

More on Cory Arcangel: del.icio.us/cory_arcangel, a short piece about his work by Seth Thompson from the May/June 2004 issue of dialogue magazine, Eyebeam reBlog archives from April 2004 (when he was guest reBlogger), his motives and source code for Super Mario Clouds, Eryk Salvaggio's May 2003 interview ("I never really liked or played [Super Mario Brothers]. at this point most of my interest in the game is in the 16 * 16 sidescrolling graphical limitations."), and finally, John Bruneau's excellent Switch | Journal interview with Arcangel from last summer.

Remember Charles Graner, the racist homophobic wife-beating sadist we all know best for getting Lynndie England pregnant while they were serving in Iraq together? Graner is currently being court-martialed for the abuses at Abu Ghraib; check out what his lawyer said the other day:

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments to the 10-member U.S. military jury at the reservist sergeant's court-martial.

[ via Airbag ]

From the introduction to the mormon paq tlhIngan:

As we finished watching yet another fun-filled episode of Star Trek, we found ourselves with little to do besides our mounds of work that we should have been doing. As we discussed Beth's bizarre ability to speak the Klingon language, it suddenly hit us: Why not translate the Book of Mormon into Klingon?

I ask myself this very question every day, people, every single day. Glad to see someone's on it!

[ via greg.org ]

(By the way, if you're interested in learning Klingon there is no better place to go than the The Klingon Language Institute. I mean, come on, they're a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation registered in Pennsylvania!)

The update: I'm done with school but not done with school. My thesis essay is three weeks late and I've not made much progress since the deadline passed; I had just about half the page count done then, in highly unsatisfactory chunks, I don't have much more than that now.

Most every day for the past two months or so I've spent a few hours sitting in front of my Powerbook, watching the cursor blink in and out, in and out, in and out. I can write short emails about my thesis, regurgitating the elevator spiel that I crafted all semester and perfected during the Winter Show, and discuss it with people in depth, even explaining most everything that I should be talking about in my paper, but I can't seem to write it out. And it's really fucking killing me—I have to get my resume and portfolio together (both of which have I haven't touched in three years) find a job, clean my apartment and find a roommate, and I can't do any of these things yet because I have this huge thing hanging over my head.

The experiment: I haven't been writing here (or anywhere else; I can barely get myself to reply to emails these past few weeks) because I've been trying to write the paper. Since that clearly hasn't been successful in the least, perhaps starting to post here again and all that entails will get my juices flowing again?

Here's Tom Coates from earlier today, nailing how I've been feeling, "On forcing oneself to do stuff":

So why does it sometimes seem such a bloody enormous battle to convince oneself to even start doing a piece of work? What kind of stupid fucking evolutionary process ends up with procrastination, paralysis and apparent indolence? I mean, what kind of creature does well in the world by sitting at home in front of a computer for three hours in the early evening trying to motivate itself to write something about set-top boxes?! Where's the reproductive advantage there?!

Stupid bloody world that should make me be this way and then make me neurotic about it.

He got his trio of set-top box posts done within the day so hopefully I'll bang my essay out within the week. Wish me luck?

So how did I spend New Year's Eve, you ask? Why, I was at Madison Square Garden, twenty feet from the stage for the Wilco/Flaming Lips/Sleater-Kinney show, with Kathryn, Meg and Ted. We completely missed Sleater-Kinney (which was to be honest, perfectly fine—I'm not a fan), but got to our seats just as Fred Armisen introduced Wayne Coyne and crew.

And oh, how I enjoyed The Flaming Lips set! Hot, half-naked chicks, giant rabbits, loads of big ass balloons floating around, plus they went and picked happy happy joy joy total crowd pleasers out of their catalog for the occasion. My favorite photo of the night, I took during Do You Realize?:

More photos of the Flaming Lips set here, s'il vous plait.

Wilco was fantastic as well but—please don't kill me, Tweedy fans—I enjoyed myself the most when they were playing covers. It just seemed like they were having more fun with themselves, they were just that much looser, you know? I was happy to see them at a great show but that said, I probably don't need to see them again. Wilco photos in this Flickr set.

Oh, and around midnight I sent out a text message that included the following:

a big fuck you to 2004, the annus horribilis, and welcome 2005, please be good to us all!

Of course, not half a day later not only did I get my frigging period, but it came with horrible, horrible cramps.

Um, 2005, DID YOU NOT GET MY MESSAGE?

So yes, I know I said regular posting and emailing resumed today, but normality will have to wait a day or two more. Sorry, uterus interruptus.

update: I have to get better at remembering to change post status from draft to publish, my apologies. Also: Jim Derogatis reviewed the NYE show for the Chicago Sun-Times, Wilco, Flaming Lips prove they're good enough for the Garden; and Largehearted Boy's got bittorrent links for the Wilco/Sleater-Kinney parts of the show.