Manhattan Offender

Project Runway had another season and it had a finale.

There were a bunch of us together one night and the crowd thinned out to some close friends.  There was this gap in the conversation where you recognize that you all want to hang out longer, but suddenly no one is saying something.  Out of the blue J throws out a sure winner:  "So, Rod.  Do you have an opinion about the Project Runway finale."  

See, J knows what kind of result this will get from me.  A beery spit-take, because, holy shit, "Project Runway had a whole season?"   I'm thinking that if there was a Project Runway season I would have heard something about it.  Someone would have mentioned it on Facebook or something, wouldn't they?

So anyway, a week or two passes, and I'm looking for an alternative to Netflix and Amazon Instant and I'm tooling around on the Roku and I find Lifetime Television and I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah, why not?"  The filler was skipped and I skipped to the finale.  Here is what I learned:

• The finalists were one obvious winner and two other people.  One lady would be cool to do mushrooms with if we were out in the desert, but probably not in an urban environment.  The black gay dude is about as interesting as reading junk mail.  The other lady is the obvious winner.  None of them are from New York like that one that was little and emotional and that one that kinda sexy but had a boyfriend or that one I had over that one summer afternoon that had a stubbly chest and I was kinda skeeved but bored and horny so whatever until I was like, no, really, I'm done hanging, buddy.  Anyway, I think you need that New York ambition represented to keep things interesting.
• Michael Kors was the special guest judge and he was apparently replaced by Zac Posen whose butt I wanna see as he's running out of our beach cottage in some small Costa Rican surf town for a quick skinny dip in calm morning sea.  He's looking back with a winking smile that's projecting telepathically, "Get out here.  It's a beautiful day!"
• Nina Garcia wasn't as interesting as my friends when they used to imitate Nina Garcia which they don't do anymore.
• Heidi Klum looks like a Suzanne Somers character in a movie where a prostitute gets old and goes crazy.  Don't get me wrong.  On her, it's fucking amazing.  Or maybe not.  I really just don't know what I'm looking at.  Is this fashion?
• There is celebrity commentary after the runway show from Kristin Chenowith, Marilu Henner, and Sammi (whom you of course remember from MTV's Jersey Shore).  There were others but I was typing this and forgot who they were.
• None of the collections were draw-jopping, but they were all saleable at Lord & Taylor.  Which makes me think about Lord & Taylor and how they need to start working up their brand name with a really strong private label program and shore up their online operation.  Everyone with whom I've ever discussed this agrees that it is one of the worst handled brands in American history.  It's a great name in what was once a beautiful store filled with crap you can buy in a Cincinnati outlet mall.
• The obvious winner whom you will recognize as such the very second you have seen her does win and it's obvious.

And that is it.  That is all I learned.  I didn't learn anything about fashion or technique or business or people or anything at all.  It did put in motion some thoughts about the type of blog I used to have, and how I've been frozen about putting up new posts now after taking time to put some meat on the bones of some fiction stuff.

See, my voice changed over time.  There was this horrid needy desire for readership that sort of worked and sort of didn't. There won't be much mention of current trends or "things we can all agree upon".  This is probably going to be advertiser unfriendly.  This will be a love letter seeking some other atheist, vegan, gay, liberal, business-minded, lazy activist, psychedelics-enthusiast who enjoys good times.  It will be a public apology.  It will be different than what it was.  The site needs a makeover, but for now it's about the writing.  Style follows form follows content.  And yeah, let's keep the Manhattan Offender.  It's about evolution in the land of the ever-changing.

Okay.  Back in business.  

Obiter dictum: Explaining my Pavlovian response to all matters "San Francisco".

In response to this (strangely):

Anytime I hear someone sing praise of San Francisco, I get angry for some reason. I’ve never even been there, but there was this kid, "Jimmy", that transferred in the senior year of high school that dared to be both smart and popular and rebellious. Dammit, but that was my fucking niche, and I stood my ground and relegated him out of the popular circles. We almost fought once, but didn’t, girlfriends holding us back, “Stop it! Stop it!” By the end of senior year, I was nominated for prom court and Jimmy wasn’t so it all worked out. I didn’t even go to the dance (even though a girl’s parents offered to buy me a tux, but hello? Steve has already fucked her, which means she was already a slut so what did I want with her?) I know through that “People you may know” upper righthand corner ghost on Facebook that Jimmy is bald in a bad way now (not in the acceptable way I am), but I won’t friend him because we weren’t and aren’t.

Two friends of mine are moving to San Francisco, one this month to be a teacher and one next to skateboard or some shit. They’re both bangable (June moreso than July), but I haven’t, which means they are actually just friends. Both have offered lodging if I were to come out (”You’d love it out there.”) but I’d really prefer to go to Europe or Morocco (and I have always had a fascination with Key West).

So when I think of tacos, real tacos without Chamomille-filtered Angus-grade tofu, I’ll go to my local Taco Truck. Or Mexico (despite the risk of kidnapping). But San Francisco? San Francisco can go fuck itself.

So last night I went to Union Square for this "Vermont Victory Rally" last night to celebrate that gay marriage thing and I stood there looking around for like five minutes and, well, there was totally no one cute in the crowd.

It was that sort of crowd that needs to get married for regular "act-shoun", you know?  Anyway, so I went over to Virgin Music Store and was super-thrilled to get the remastered "Check Your Head" (Beastie Boys!), but super-disappointed to not find that European-release Grace Jones album that all my cooler-than-me friends has.  Anyway, purchase in hand, I passed by the Vermont thingie again and the cuteness still hadn't arrived, so I went over to Wendy's and had a Baconator while reading Madame Bovary.

Super Cute Protesters.

Subconjuntioned tone piece II

So I receive this email from someone that has seen my picture on some website or another and approaches me, via email, for NSA sex and, being an open-minded person, I ask him to send pictures of himself, actually "many picture" and he totally did in addition to sort of his whole life story, up to and including his current “openly mutually cheating” relationship, and being polite, I sent back a critique of the pictures, his "poorly lit, very 'self--holding-phonecam' pic” for which the color was off because of the lighting, and, so, he promised (twice and profusely) to get new pictures and send them right away, but regardless, I didn’t have an interest in this person, and really hadn’t expressed one, although there was an interest as to why he seeks the approval of this person whose picture he had seen on a website, but that was explained sort of in his last email asking for one confirmation:  “This is momo, right?”

One day after all of the start-ups become dried-ups and all the domain names have been bought by Berkshire Hathaway and the only websites you see are by corporations, the needy desperate story of the Internet, how we reacted to it and how our interactions were transformed by it, will be written, and it will be the saddest story ever written, except for "Old Yeller".  And maybe the beginning of Bambi.

 

Subconjunctioned tone piece I

Laughing out loud is so not my style, but Thirty Rock was just doing it for me tonight, granted it's been a long week with seeing friends every night and the general pickup in preholiday socializing so it's right here on the tired side that is catching the light of the television glare and sort of just feeling the Liz Lemon vibe, which is the popular answer, but actually it's more of the Jack thing looking at these folks in Middle Wheremerica and seeing them with their boats and their houses and their ownership and thinking wow that would be a great freaking life but then doing the whole, "Hey, that's a life, but is it living?" and so you run off the stage, throwing the mike to the ground and saying the name of your town the way that only those of us who do can.