Category: reveries

25 random things about me

~ jamie ~ 8 Comments

this is a facebook meme that’s currently going around. since i can’t leave well enough alone, i modified it to be “24 true random things about me, and one lie”.

i’m a contrarian. so sue me.

anyway, i’m reposting it here, because i’m lazy and because it was fun to write:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

Jamie’s Modified Rule: There are 24 true random things about me, and one false one. Can you spot the lie?

1. My first home was in a holler in Kentucky. It was at the top of the holler, which is a good thing when no one has indoor plumbing. Our house was one of the few that had plumbing, though only the toilet was inside. The bathtub, due to space considerations, was on the front porch.

2. My first pet was a dachshund that I named President Nixon.

3. My grandmother was a habitue of Chicago speakeasies, where she gained her lifelong habit of drinking only shots of whiskey. With few women in the speakeasies, many men would buy you mixed drinks that were heavy on the alcohol, and she wanted to carefully control her intake.

4. I French-kissed Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

5. Thinking I was bisexual, I married a woman who later came out as a lesbian. After our divorce she remained one of my best friends. No harm, no foul.

6. My partner Kirk and I were married in the home of Hedwig, the Jane Street Theater, by a Unitarian minister, with the reception hosted by Mistress Formika of Wigstock fame.

7. As a child, I was knocked unconscious when my sixth grade girlfriend hit me over the head with a Pepsi bottle. I had two-timed her.

8. Until my recent break in employment and return to school, I had been continuously employed since age eight.

9. My high school nickname was “Flash”. For various reasons.

10. I have eaten: chitlins, cracklins, rattlesnake, squirrel, andouillette sausage (see: chitlins), tripe, kidneys, liver, octopus, eel, sea anemone, possum, and lots of Peter Luger steak. I have not yet eaten sweetbreads. I was also a vegetarian for ten years, and a vegan for five or so of those.

11. I once picked watermelons, for one day, for very little pay.

12. I got braces on my teeth as a high school graduation present.

13. When younger, I could put both of my feet behind my head and walk on my hands.

14. I advised a high school journalism staff that produced one of the nation’s first desktop-published yearbooks, and the editor of that yearbook got a job after high school making twice what I did as a teacher. I also advised the nation’s first CD-ROM yearbook.

15. I have Morton’s Toe.

16. As a child, I was knocked unconscious when I attempted to take a door off the hinges while standing on a chair. The door’s spring closer, contrary to what I thought, did have some spring remaining.

17. I have owned the domain name “queerspace.com” since 1998.

18. I have been in each of the 48 states of the continental U.S.

19. I shook hands with Bill Clinton.

20. My first car was a 1965 Rambler American 4-door sedan. I paid $200 for it, put nearly 75,000 more miles on it, and sold it for $275.

21. Until I moved to Reading, PA, each time I moved was to successively larger cities.

22. As a child, I was knocked unconscious when diving headfirst into the television. I thought Romper Room was a place I could get to that way.

23. I peed in the bathroom at CBGB’s.

24. I once had a burger and a beer with Anthony Bourdain.

25. I have a lovely one bedroom coop apartment in New York for sale.

goodbye florent

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

great photo essay in the times about florent, the groundbreaking restaurant in the meatpacking district, narrated by the man himself.

it’s going away, like mchales, cbgb’s, le madeleine, and any other of the long list of victims of gentrification and skyrocketing rents. much of what makes the city “new york” are these individual places, and each time we lose one we’re a step closer to being cleveland. i’ve been to florent a few times, and always enjoyed myself and had a great meal. the man, a true pioneer among restauranteurs, deserves better.

think about that the next time you hit a starbucks. and i’m sure cleveland is a wonderful place.

but it ain’t new york. at least not yet.

should the legal drinking age be 18?

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

it’s a topic that came up during the last democratic presidential candidates’ debate, which took place at dartmouth college.

of course, the college students’ logic started with “well we can fight in iraq, so why can’t we drink?” not flawless logic, but they do have a point. it might be a better point if they were actually fighting in iraq, instead of buying drinks anyway at an ivy league college with money from the trust fund, but still, not a bad point.

from the article:

“Legal age 21 has not worked. Most people at the age of 21 have already consumed alcohol,” said John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont. McCardell now heads a nonprofit organization started in January called Choose Responsibility.

The group is calling for lowering the national legal drinking age to 18 combined with education about the effects and risks of alcohol.

“The current drinking age has just driven the drinking out of public view,” McCardell told ABC News. “It has meant that instead of drinking in bars or restaurants where there is supervision, it’s happening in dorms and dark corners.”

He argues that young people should be given alcohol education, much like driver’s education, and then rewarded with a drinking license, for which they become eligible at 18.

i agree. people are going to have their vices. might as well have them be publicly acknowledged and supported. prohibition didn’t work in the ’20s, i mean the 1920s, so why would a prohibition of a segment of society that will find ways to drink anyway work any better now than it did then? in fact, because it’s a segment of society rather than all of society, you could argue that it would be expected to be even less successful.

and it is. ever heard of a college student that couldn’t find alcohol if they wanted it? personally i think other countries are far more enlightened on this subject. rather than make the consumption of alcohol a bogeyman, many foreign kids grow up having a drink or two, a glass of wine with dinner, a celebratory belt now and then.

and there’s no mystery surrounding alcohol then. lots of kids, myself included, grew up using alcohol, and i’d bet that the rate of alcohol abuse among that group is lower than the average.

i was 17 when i went to college, and the legal drinking age was 18. i had no problem getting served in bars, without i.d. how? i went to bars for lunch, sat quietly and had a sandwich and a single draft beer at a time when the bar was glad to have the business and could not have cared less who was buying. and then, when i returned at night, they didn’t card me. because they knew me from lunch.

if you want to drink, you’re gonna drink. you’re gonna find a way. might as well bring it out into the open, and stop criminalizing normal human social behaviors. if 18-year-olds are drinking legally, you have a far better opportunity to ensure that they are drinking responsibly, because they will be drinking publicly rather than privately.

memories light the corners of my mind

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i had a wonderful evening last night with our mortgage broker from chase, dinika, and her friend luigi. it had been a long day, and i was a bit tired and slightly cranky, but thankfully kirk was sparkling and witty and carried the day for both of us. we met at the black pearl, had a few drinks (me: newcastle brown; kirk: espresso martinis), finally ordered the much-vaunted lobster roll which was indeed quite yummy, and talked about a wide range of subjects: shanatram, the book dinika loaned us and that we both love; movies; new york living; past and present loves; our lifelines (dinika reads palms).

and kirk and i told the story of how we met. short version: me in south florida, kirk in nyc, i see hedwig in nyc, i leave message on hedwig.com message board, kirk the webmaster responds, the rest is history.

except that apparently wasn’t it. kirk has put his old design for the hedwig.com site up on his site, thestagingarea.com, and after the events of last night, i was poking around that site this morning and found this:

Name: Jamie
E-Mail: picaman_AT_csi_DoT_com
City/State: Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Home Page: https://www.queerspace.com
Date: Mon Mar 22 14:50:12 1999
How you found us: Too much Grain and Brita; I don’t remember
Wrote…
HATAI was the last of 7 shows i saw on my just-ended NYC trip and DAMN i’m pissed cuz if i’d seen it first i would have just seen it again and again. it’s the most amazingly well-done show i have EVER seen….i’m a complete hedwig convert

so apparently i didn’t initially find the message board — i just left a brief message in the guestbook. and truly, if kirk hadn’t been so diligent in emailing everyone who posted on the site, and hadn’t taken the time to make it more than a cursory email, we might never have met.

i wish i had that email, but i don’t. it must have been a great email, though, for me to bother to reply with something thoughtful that kirk then in turn responded to.

and so on.

thanks, kirk, for taking that moment. it changed my life, and all for the better.

t. rex, scruffy the cat, lloyd cole, and the perils of aging

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

sometimes you get little reminders that your brain ain’t what it used to be.

kirk and i had a fantastically fun time last night at joe’s pub in the park. joe is joseph papp, the guy who started doing the shakespeare in central park thing, and his public theater has an adjacent performance space for bands and cabaret and performance artists called joe’s pub, but it’s downtown, and sometimes they produce joe’s-pub-style shows in central park at the delacorte, which is where shakespeare in the park is, and last night was one of those nights.

whew.

that bit of explanation aside, we originally went to last night’s show because justin bond was covering the carpenters’ “close to you” album in concert. you know, kiki and herb justin bond. the combination of justin and karen carpenter being, of course, too irresistible to resist. and he did not disappoint. their registers and resonance sound remarkably similar, and he engagingly covered all those bacharach tunes. also did “superstar” as a bonus, and told a chillingly effective story about being a kid and being forced to play softball. it went badly, and he took solace in listening to the “close to you” album with a young relative, and feeling loved and accepted regardless of his inability to hit a softball. it was a favorite childhood memory, and that relative was in the audience, so it was full circle for justin. a lovely moment.

justin was done, but he was just the opening act. two more sets: a guy doing covers of some guy’s music that i’d never heard of, and a t. rex tribute on the occasion of marc bolan’s sixtieth birthday, which was also the thirtieth anniversary of his death. i never knew that marc bolan died on his thirtieth birthday. wow.

i had no interest in the penultimate set, but i’m a bit of a t. rex fan, and kirk was into it, so we decided to stick around. so glad we did.

the second set turned out to be songs by scott walker. i’d never heard of him, but i’m now a huge fan. he predates the beatles — he’s an american singer who got his start as an teenage expatriate in london in the ’50s. if you can imagine it, his music sounds as if englebert humperdinck did a set composed entirely of leonard cohen songs. fantastic stuff, and the singer, david driver, performed it wonderfully. i’m a david driver fan now, but a bigger fan of scott walker. i love it when something surprising, new and cool gets unexpectedly thrown at you — you gotta be open to that possibility, though.

the evening wrapped up with the t. rex tribute. quick t. rex story from back in the day: when i dj’ed at einstein-a-go-go in jacksonville beach in the mid eighties, there was a huge t. rex poster behind the booth. some kid came up to me and asked, “who’s trex?” pronounced as one word. evidently he missed the period. i told him that “trex” was robert smith’s first band before he formed the cure. so he went and told all his friends, and word spread like wildfire, and suddenly all the black clad youth were requesting “trex” songs to be cool. so i got to play lots of marc bolan, and the younguns were none the wiser, at least for a while.

anyway, the t. rex tribute was so much fun. patti smith did “children of the revolution” — how perfect is that? lots of new york rock royalty performed — here’s a list from the joe’s pub site:

An All-Star Collective of musicians including Clem Burke(Blondie/Drums), Tony Shanahan (Patti Smith/Bass), James Mastro (Ian Hunter-Patti Smith/Gtr), Jane Scarpantoni (Lou Reed/Cello), Dave Amels (Mary Weiss/Keys), Tish & Snooky (Manic Panic/Back Vox), Geoff Blythe (Dexy’s-Black 47/Sax), Rob Youngberg (Honeycomb/Percussion), and Claudia Chopek (Violin) will back a glittering array of special guest singers. Performers who will be singing the praises of Bolan & T.Rex include Sylvain Sylvain and Steve Conte of the NEW YORK DOLLS, Richard Lloyd of TELEVISION, Tony Winner Michael Cerveris, Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Justin Bond (Kiki of Kiki and Herb), Ragga, Robert Gordon, Richard Barone, Lloyd Cole, Willie Nile, Ivan Julian (The Voidoids), Keanan Duffty (Slinky Vagabond), The Bedsit Poets, Screaming Orphans, Justin Tranter (Semi Precious Weapons), and Marc’s son Rolan Bolan and featuring special guest of honor the legendary T. Rex/David Bowie/Morrisey producer Tony Visconti.

ivan julian was especially good — he sang and played the guitar while seated, and it’s been a while since i saw someone command a stage like that. the chair barely contained his energy, and he was a kick-ass guitarist.

and lloyd cole was there, with his son william. william is a great lead guitarist and has perfect emo hair — the kid is going places. i used to play lloyd cole’s music a bit at einstein’s and i sat there racking my brain trying to come up with the song i loved. and it popped into my head this morning. the song i was so desperately trying to think of?

“you dirty rat”

by scruffy the cat, not by lloyd cole. jeebus. i’m getting old.

but “you dirty rat” is an incredible song — one of my favorite einstein’s-era songs. listen to it — catchy as all hell.

anyway, aging brain notwithstanding, it was a fantastically fun evening. gotta do more stuff like that. david driver does lots of loser’s lounge stuff — maybe i should check that out. i’ve always wanted to.

update: hilary, who stage managed the show, has pictures, a detailed set list, band info, and more on her blog. check it out.

my first time

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

using a computer.

yeah right. don’t hold out much hope for that story, bub. i know what you are thinking. i’m saving that one for the memoirs.

anyway, i was thinking about this the other day. or, more accurately, i was thinking about how little i remembered about it, and how i wished i could remember more.

because i truly was a pretty early adopter. even though i was only about 15 at the time, i used my first computer in 1978.

i had a job in a fruit stand at the time. the kind where you sell vegetables on the side of the road, except that the guy who owned it had recently moved us from the side of the road into a proper retail space.

the guy’s name was robert ogden. i’ve googled and come up empty, but this guy was really interesting. i think the fruit stand must have been a tax dodge, or some way to keep his wife, gerri odgen, otherwise occupied, because his real job involved computers.

apparently, if i’m remembering this correctly, he was some kind of consultant, and he took his computers up in airplanes, and used them to survey large areas of land. he was the first to do this, from what i understood.

and one of the large areas of land he said he surveyed was the amazon jungle, for the brazilian government. not too shabby a dude, for 1978.

and the computers he used to survey from airplanes were kept in the back of the retail space, once he’d gotten off the side of the road with his business.

he didn’t have tons of business, really, so i had hours of time to spend in the back, playing with the computers. he didn’t mind a bit–in fact he encouraged it. how lucky was i to have a computer at my disposal, in 1978? pretty damn lucky.

i wish i could remember more about the computer. i’d love to know what kind of computer it was, but i can’t even remember what it looked like. i do remember that he had an enormous floppy drive–either 10″ or 12″–which was a rarity in the days when people used (at best) cassette tapes to store data and programs.

i played a lot of games. i remember a star trek game, which involved typing in coordinates and going to places in the galaxy, and when you got there, if there were klingons or whatever, you typed in more coordinates and shot them, and then went somewhere else. it was all text based, but i think there may have been some ascii graphics involved as well.

and the main thing i remember was that all the software came not on the disks, but in books.

printed. on paper.

so to run a program you first had to type the entire thing in, in the programming language called basic, and save it onto the floppy. and the programs were very, very long, for the most part. i remember typing for days on end in order to be able to play star trek. and you couldn’t get even one character wrong, or in the wrong place, in the dozens of pages you typed, because then the whole thing might not work.

it was a great lesson for me, at fifteen, about focusing and the importance of accuracy, and the rewards of doing things correctly, and the perils of shortcuts and sloppy work. they are lessons i carry with me to this day.

and, while i never learned to program very much, i did learn enough to get extra credit in my first college math class. the flagler college math professor, dr. kearney, met my mom on parent’s weekend, and she told him about my computer experience. so he gave me an extra credit assignment to write a program in basic that did something or other. i don’t think he expected me to be able to do it, because when i wrote the answer down and gave it to him, he was pretty amazed.

and the credit i got made the difference between a “b” and an “a” for the class, which was cool and not the outcome he either desired or expected.

anyway, robert ogden was one of those people who cross your path, and you don’t realize at the time how important they are going to be. it’s not like i became a programmer or anything.

but all that typing of programs must have sunk in, or made some brain cells grow, or something, because i’ve never stopped using computers since. and i’m pretty damn good with them, too.

thanks, mr. ogden.

mosquito trucks, ddt clouds, and me

~ jamie ~ 9 Comments

southern people of a certain age will identify with this, for sure.

when i was a kid, living in a fairly swampy area of north florida, mosquito control was a big deal. in the county i grew up in (citrus), it was probably the main reason to have a government at all, other than keeping the jail open.

mosquito control consisted of a truck that prowled all the county streets and roads on a regular basis. the truck had a tank and a compressor or something, and it spewed a voluminous white fog that would spread through the neighborhood and ostensibly kill all of the mosquitoes. you could hear it coming from quite a distance, so you had fair warning of when it was headed your way.

and the kids in the neighborhood (me included) would hear the truck, and run out into the yard to await its arrival. when it came, we’d run behind the truck for blocks, playing tag and running in the dense fog, running and breathing deeply and heavily until we were bone tired and quit from exhaustion.

geez, louise. had we lost our minds?

or, more accurately, i suppose, have we now lost our minds?

and where were our parents during all this? did not one of them have the sense to tell us not to play in the fog?

wow.

so i was telling this story to kirk this morning, and i got to thinking about it. so i did what anyone would do.

i googled.

and by googling i found out that the thick fog in the late ’60s was ddt, and that louisiana still has to tell people not to run behind the truck, and that errol morris shows the mosquito truck in his movie called vernon, florida.

and i also found out that by googling mosquito truck ddt you can read about an entire generation of people who ran behind the mosquito truck like i did.

i hope that kids today are smarter than we were. i think they are.

and i think that, unlike us, they may stay that way. i think i killed a lot of brain cells over the years, running behind that truck. not to mention what all else might still happen in the future.

ddt. ddt. wow.

fun touristy saturday

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i know it’s wednesday, but i want to tell you about my day last saturday, because it was so much fun.

i spent most of the day with one of my former students, kim, and her husband glenn and her son matthew. kim was my first yearbook editor when i first took over as adviser, so as you can imagine we have quite a history and i have quite a soft spot for her.

hers was the only book i ever put out the old-fashioned way, on paper with hand-drawn layouts for the printer. the very next year, we switched to pagemaker on the mac, and put out one of the first all-desktop-published yearbooks in the country.

but i’m bragging now, and digressing as well.

kim and her family visited new york last saturday, so i met them and i had a bang-up time, doing all the stuff that resident new yorkers never do. like riding the staten island ferry, eating a coal-fired-oven-baked pizza at john’s, hanging out at toys r us and the hershey store, and just walking around times square, which i normally avoid like the plague.

and though i am so not a “kid person”, her son matthew was cool as all hell. all big wide eyes and questions. and he loved the thin-crust new york pizza, so you know he has good taste. i’d have taken him home, but he was spoken for already.

so now i can not go on the staten island ferry, and not go to times square and such for a few more years. but i’m glad i went last saturday.

i had a blast. who knew. must have been the company.

music, back in the day

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

ever wonder why, in your memory, music on vinyl records seemed to sound better than digital cds do today?

assuming, of course, that you are old enough to remember what vinyl sounded like.

as it turns out, you haven’t lost your mind.

it’s not old-fogeyism creeping in, although i find myself saying things like “back when i was young” far too often anymore. there’s a technical reason for it, in addition to the ones you may already know about the wonders of analog and rattle-and-hum.

in an effort to make digital music louder, which is what uninformed consumers who can’t control a volume knob and an equalizer apparently want, labels are mastering music in a way that boosts volume but clips out the highs and lows of the music.

where the detail is. there are physical limitations to all this, and sound detail is lost in the process. there’s an amazing graphic at the linked story which compares the waveforms of a red hot chili peppers song on cd and on vinyl, and that image tells it all.

and, (who knew), some of those crazy younguns like vinyl better anyway.

i may have to go home and listen to my original master recording of pink floyd’s “dark side of the moon”, if i still have it.

pretty cool that vinyl records are on the cutting edge, technologically and socially.

bauhaus was fantastic

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

if you have a chance to see bauhaus on this tour, don’t miss them. peter murphy and daniel ash have lost none of their onstage presence, they sound amazing, they do all the songs you want to hear.

amazing evening.

the nokia theatre, not so great. bad acoustics. plus there’s something odd about walking around with a cocktail in your hand listening to chamber music while awaiting the start of a bauhaus concert.

the crowd was very very odd.
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where i’m from

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’m from floral city, florida, in a small county called citrus county. it’s in northwest central florida, on the gulf coast. i left when i was 17 and, other than visits to my mom when she still lived there, have pretty much never looked back. i did go back twice for high school reunions, which were fun, but those were just one-night visits.

there must be something in the water, though. i’m glad i’m out of there.

even living in new york city, i seem to see lots of negative news about various locations in citrus county. it may be that i just notice them more.

but i don’t think so. the number of odd news items you see seems out of proportion to the small size of the county and its population.

take this latest example, for example.
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rasputina. not bad!

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’d been cranky about going to see this band. frankly, yesterday’s post was more an attempt to kick myself in the ass to try to enjoy an evening about which i was, at best, dubious.

well, who knew.

not only was rasputina not bad, they were very very good. in fact, i’d go so far as to say they were pretty close to brilliant.

i used to care a lot, as faith no more once cynically said, about music. i was a nightclub dj and went out every single night for years on end. but music lately?

feh.
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insane in the membrane

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

a mind is a terrible thing to face.

i have a number of long-standing stories i tell about myself. some of them are on here even. not all, though. as bad comedians say, i’ve got a million of ’em. and, as a bad blogger, so do i.

but i recently got called out, and rightly so, on one of my long-standing stories. and it’s got me thinking about how the brain in general, and my brain in particular, is working.
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the inverness cooter festival

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’m from floral city, florida originally, but that’s just a smaller town than the small town which is the county seat of citrus county–inverness, florida. citrus county (which, ironically, has little to no citrus, at least in a commercial sense) is a sleepy part of northwest central florida. it’s probably most famous for the manatees you can swim with in crystal river, and the nuclear plant.

but imagine my shock when i, having tried mightily to forget the whole place (none of my family and not too many people i keep up with live there), see the city of inverness featured on the daily show with jon stewart.

actually, not the city featured, but its cooter. festival.
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childhood unconsciousness

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

everyone has their backlog of stories. i sure do. i really respect a person who has the confidence to be able to tell a story or two on themselves. a little humility and self-deprecating humor goes a long way with me.

so, in that spirit, i’ll occasionally tell a story or two on myself on here. that way when the probably inevitable senility sets in (both my mom and my dad have alzheimers. poor kirk.) i’ll be able to read these stories (assuming i still can) and say, “my, what an interesting life this fellow had.”

don’t be offended. you gotta laugh. what else can you do?
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