All I want from life right now is a warm night. Just one.
Where I can wear a dress with my thighs exposed, maybe a jean jacket, maybe be warm enough to take it off and drape it over my slingbag. Where I welcome the wind to my face with my eyes closed, cheeks pointing to the sky like bobbing baby fists. Where I can walk through Harlem, maybe over to the East River, and the wind there will be cooler, but not by much, and I can sit on a bench and feel the chills climb my spine as it tousles the strands of my scalp. Maybe it's about 7:38pm, and the sun is just about down, but not quite, and I can still make out Queens in a purple haze. Perhaps I imagine little Italian families preparing dinner in their heirloom apartments across the river, and then I wish I had a big plate of spaghetti.
Once on the 6 train between 33rd and 42nd streets, I peeked up from my book and saw, sitting across from me, a young timid Asian woman asking an old white man for directions to Penn Station. He told her we had just passed the stop she needed to get over there, to the West side. She had missed her chance. She looked confused and just kept repeating, "Trehn. Trehn." The man just kept shrugging and looking around helplessly. She said, "I'll just wait. I'll just stay on the trehn."
I caught the glance of a beautiful young black woman sitting next to them, with a buzzed head and a black RUN DMC t-shirt. She was eavesdropping too. She rolled her eyes and smiled and I smiled back and we both turned our attention back to the Asian woman. The man didn't know what else to say to her. He looked defeated. Then the black woman reached over the man, tapped the Asian woman on the shoulder, and said, "Just get off here at Grand Central, take the shuttle to Times Square, then take the 1 or 2 train down to Penn. You need to get to the West side." The Asian woman looked like she understood, smiled, and thanked her, clutching her little red backpack. She got off when the train stopped. The black woman looked at the silent white woman across from her and smiled. I smiled back.
Point is, I felt the warm night I wanted inside that subway car, and I carried it upstream all the way home.
So yesterday was the hottest day so far this year in New York Mothafuckin' City. It was also the day Zac and I sat outside from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. to be among the first in the door at the Lady Gaga concert. For the mathematically challenged, that's TEN HOURS. It was hot, but it was bearable, because we're both from the dirrty dirrty and we know the meaning of true heat. Yesterday was nothin.
We were sixth in line to get in the door, which totally made the wait worth it. The day before, we went grocery shopping and bought (in true Southern fashion) enough groceries to last us a week. We packed our food and headed out our East Harlem door around 8:30 yesterday morning. We got in line at nine and spent all day talking with other Gaga fans, including a gaggle of adorable Europeans who had flown to the city just for the concert and were first in line. It was a fun time.
And, natch, we were interviewed several times by local news organizations. Here's the video taken by my new favorite reporter, Lindsay Meeks, from the New York Daily News. It's fucking amazing.
I also wanted to include here, for the first time ever, an essay I wrote way back in January after I saw Lady Gaga the first time. It was my inaugural attempt at summing up this amazing artist in 1,500 words or less. I submitted it to Gotham's website but it was too long and never got published. It's still relevant, especially since I just saw her for the second time, and I wanted to share it.
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Don’t you ever let a soul in the world tell you that you can’t be exactly who you are. – Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga is two months and one week younger than me. She turned 24 this March, which makes me wonder if she does all the things that I do. Does she toss and turn at night because she can’t shut her brain off? Does she long for her childhood, when she used to sit on her parents' rug listening to Queen albums, and her greatest worry was what kind of sandwich she would eat for lunch? When she's not touring or recording, does she go home to her parents' Upper West Side apartment and sleep in her old bed? Does she then wake up the next day and eat breakfast with her family around the kitchen table? When she's home, is Stefani Germanotta there? Does she wear cotton pajamas and socks and laugh when her dad tells a joke? In short, is she just like us?
It seems appropriate that I spent part of my 24th birthday inside Radio City Music Hall with Lady Gaga. As I watched her undulate on stage, I asked myself these questions, among others. I had never encountered someone so simultaneously transparent and impossible to read: as she raised her eyebrows and lovingly referred to us, her fans, as her "little monsters," I felt as though she was my best friend in the whole world. I felt like I knew her better than I had ever known anyone. And as she then yelled frenetically at us, demanding that we tell her she's sexy and clap and scream and jump for her, I realized why: I felt that I knew her so well because she has brilliantly filled a niche that no one has filled since Madonna. She has marketed herself as a perfect reflection of a whole generation. If you're lonely, little monsters, just remember that I'll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.
The bass crawled through the room and I felt that I was no different or separate from any other person in the crowd. I wondered as I watched her who she really was, underneath it all. She would tell us she loved us more than anything in the world, and thank us for everything we’ve done for her, and then she would scream at us and taunt us for being nothing more than Fame-crazed* whores who stole her former life from her. She switched so fast between loving and hating us – the people who made her wildest dreams come true – that it was hard to keep track, or to know which sentiment was more sincere. But as a generation who lives in a constant state of Internet-fueled anxiety and confusion because we seem to have too many choices and not enough wisdom to make the right ones, we see that she is our mirror: rough, honest, loving, but (above all) bewildering. We grew up on Tim Burton and Nickelodeon and MTV; give us dark bewilderment, or give us nothing at all.
It’s precisely because she exists as two opposing people simultaneously that Gaga speaks so well to our generation. She is Stefani, the person each of us 20somethings currently is, the nobody walking around the streets of New York, with nothing but a dream and a will; and she is Lady Gaga, the person we all imagine ourselves as inside this dream. Every 20something I know has a Lady Gaga of themselves in their head: whether we want to be writers, artists, singers, actors, or reality TV stars, we all want to be Lady Gaga. We all want other people to worship us for our work. And maybe unlike any generation before us, because our parents told us we can do anything in the world – plus the added element of coming of age in a time when fame is made easy by YouTube, blogging, and a number of other Internet tools – each of us actually believes we can and will become Lady Gaga.
"Hello, little monsters. Do you like my show?" she purrs from beneath a neon-yellow wig and a thick layer of red lipstick, false eyelashes and black eyeliner. "If you don't, I don't care, because you can fucking leave."
The crowd roars in approval. A thousand cameras pop off flashes as Gaga, clad in a skin-tight nude bodysuit fashioned of rhinestones and flashing LED lights, slinks toward the back of the cube-like structure that frames her stage. The stage lights flash white before they drop, and the bass vibrates through our bodies. An image begins to flicker across the three large screens that make up the walls of Gaga's three-pronged world, and supersized digiGaga appears before us in a gorgeous, flowing white frock. We continue to chant and jump as the music climaxes and the image switches to a solid bright white. When Gaga returns to us, she is straddled by a girl with long dark hair, wearing a black unitard and knee-high boots, sticking two fingers down her throat and vomiting blue paint on Gaga's perfect, luminescent dress. Over and over again, she purges through her open mouth while ours gape. I’m sort of like Tinkerbell. You know how Tinkerbell will die if you don’t clap for her? I'll just die without you, my little monsters.
The Monster Ball is genius performance art – along the same lines as Andy Warhol, Patti Smith and David Bowie, it would probably be more appropriately housed in the MOMA than in Radio City – because it's a tool Gaga uses to simultaneously worship her fans, who are both the byproduct and the cause of her sudden rise to fame, and to fight with them. She says, "Fame is killing me," and we believe her. We believe her because we can see it happening. It’s in her face, in her body – which seems to be growing more and more skinny and sinewy - and we can hear it pulsing underneath her scratchy, raw vocal chords. When she says that fame is killing her, she means it both literally and figuratively; it’s literally making her exhausted and ill – Gaga recently confessed that she tested borderline postitive for lupus, the disease that took her aunt’s life – and figuratively it’s slowly killing the person she used to be.
Gaga lies down on the stage and contorts her tiny, lithe body so she is facing us. “Do you think I’m sexy?” she asks us. The crowd’s roar grows to a deafening trill. “I think you’re sexy. When people ask me why I spent all my money on my shows, I just tell them it’s because I have the sexiest fans in the world. But, the question is, do you think I’m sexy?” We scream again. “I don’t believe you!” she screams in return.The reason we scream for her now is because we know that she knows she’s not classically sexy; unlike Britney or Beyoncé before her, Gaga has never pitched the allure of her sexuality as one of her strong artistic qualities. She rarely shows her eyes, often hiding behind dark sunglasses and large hats and sometimes full-coverage masks. She is often nearly-nude, but her nudity never exudes raw, dripping sex like Britney’s did. But it doesn’t matter. In less than two years since her rise to fame, Gaga has sold more than 10 million records and been able to create an entire fan base centered on a singular idea: Don’t be afraid to be yourself.
The reason we little monsters love our Gaga so much is that she is not just a person – she is the never-ending, drug-reminiscent orgasm of my generation. It's like we literally gave birth to her – as if all the young 20somethings in America got together and had a giant orgy, and when we were finished we looked to the middle of the crowd and there was Lady Gaga, laying on the floor, curled up in the fetal position. We have no idea how she got there, but we know she's a part of us, and always will be. We just have to be careful that, like wild primate mothers who prefer to digest their progeny, we don’t eat her right up.
*Uppercase Fame is decidedly different from lowercase fame in Gaga’s world. Uppercase Fame is the ability to proclaim self-worth, which Gaga claims everyone has inside of them, while lowercase fame is the common usage, denoting notoriety or popularity.
Dear friend Hannah inspired me with her latest post, which made me realize I hadn't talked to my city in a while. So I sat down and talked to her. Here's how the conversation went.
Oh, hi New York. Hi. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? I mean, I’ve been here, and you’ve certainly been there, but I feel like we haven’t really talked in a while. The tolls are so high. The tolls are just so fucking high. If you google “toll-free, antonym,” I swear to God “New York” should be the first search result.
I know this. I know this because last weekend I left. I rented a car with two friends and drove to Asbury Park, New Jersey. I know, what the fuck, right? It was for love. Not for, like, “love” love, like I’m going to marry this person love or anything crazy. Nah. But some kind of love. There are lots, you know? Love is the color wheel on the Wheel of Fortune, just more or less annoying, depending on how you feel about Wheel of Fortune. There are, like, 100 varieties, but an infinite number of possible combinations. It can be fun.
Anyway, I drove to Jersey. Actually I didn’t drive. I was drunk. My friend drove. We went down on the FDR, fingered the island on Houston Street, then finally finally fucked the Holland Tunnel to get out. It was good. It was really fucking good. It was cool to be in a car in the city, watching all the drones walk around me. I felt rich, except I know I’m not. I felt like a prince on an elephant in the middle of the dessert, except I know I’m not.
Once we were out, we encountered like a thousand toll stops. Seriously, every 15 to 20 minutes there would be another toll. Why you gotta be like that, New York? Northeast? In the South, there are no tolls. Period. There miiiiiiight be a toll on the bridge to Dauphin Island off the coast of Alabama, but I can’t really remember. Soon it won’t matter anyway because the whole thing will be covered in oil, ugh. But that could be kind of cool, I guess, because it will basically be a huge slip and slide. And who doesn’t love those from their childhood? Weeeeeeeeee!
Toll. Drive. Toll. Drive. On the way back too, driving at 1, 2, 3 in the morning, tolls. Why are you so hard to penetrate, New York? It’s hard to get in, and it’s hard to get the fuck out. Why do you separate yourself like that? I mean, I get it. You’re “New York.” You’re “Manhattan.” You feel threatened, you gotta protect yourself, you feel like people owe it to you to pay obscene amounts just to cross your borders. It’s probably Sex and the City’s fault. Name off all the things you dislike about yourself, dear city, and I promise you I can trace their source back to that fucking show. But whatever. What’s done is done, and it’s a good fucking show anyway.
The tolls are confusing too. It’s not like it’s straightforward, you know? It’s not like “drive here if you have cash, drive here if you have a credit card, drive here if you have that E-Z-Pass shit.” I mean, technically, yeah, that’s how it’s set up, but all the highways in New Jersey I swear to God are like 25 lanes. So cars and trucks and hippie minivans are swerving all over the place, and then there’s us, and we don’t know where we are or where we’re going, we just know we have to pay to get there.
What? Don’t be a smartass. Of course it’s appropriate. Huh? Oh yeah, of course I know I’m using a hackneyed symbol for the crisis of the American youth. I don’t really need you to tell me that. And I really don't need you to tell me not to use the word hackneyed because it's hackneyed! But you know what? There’s nothing new under the sun, New York. Besides, what are you doing that’s new? What shit are you making? I had a dream last night that I got a tattoo of a turtle on my arm and he was wearing a CBGB T-shirt. Fuck you.
Oh, shit, I guess it is time for your monthly bath. Already? Goddamn. I feel like you just had one. OK, I’ll let you go. I’m not mad at you. Actually I’m quite content with you. It worries me. I’ve never been content with you before. Did I change, or have you changed? You look so different to me now, compared to just a few months ago. I should probably be more pissed than ever at you, but somehow I’m not. I’m just like, it’s OK. A cool stream of “it’s OK”s keeps swimming over me as I dunk my head under the brim of summer. I just sit on my bed and strum my guitar and those six strings vibrate with how little I know, and the sound bounces off the walls of my lonely little room, but it’s comforting, you know? I’m just like, it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK. Splash.
Well, I mean, I feel OK, which is what makes me worry and feel not OK. Like a gnawing in the back of my mind, like my old self jumping up and down saying, ‘Remember when you used to be unhappy!? You were so much cooler and more artsy then!’ I guess that’s one thing: New York, you’re the only place in the world where contentment raises blood pressures. Systolic over diastolic, steady climbin', like a bridge over a tugboat where there’s probably a goddamn toll.
Pretty, right? Well it's also how my room felt last night. As a result, I tossed and turned all night, totaling what I approximate to be about two hours of sleep. Because I am a total g'maw and I need at *least 6 hours of sleep every night to function well, I have made the decision every New Yorker eventually makes, no matter how much they insist they "really don't need one."
Tonight, I will venture uptown and buy an air conditioner. Of course I made this decision on the one day a week I also wanted to wear heels to work. So I'll be in PC Richard's in my kitten heels and cocktail dress, lugging around a box that will probs be huge, and praying that somehow I can get it into my apartment by myself.
That's pretty quintessential single girl in Manhattan though, right? I am also gonna have to figure out how to get it in my window, like approximately now, because it's 90 degrees outside right now and my apt is going to be so hot when I get home that I might get the vapors (pronounced: vay-puhs).
Y'all, I am OBSESSED with Lady GaGa. Not only is she named after the song of my favorite band of all time, but she is fucking amazing. She's fabulous and a born performer and she's got the vocal chords to back it up. The best part is that her fame was born the old-school way: running around the Lower East Side of Manhattan performing in bars and just being generally out. of. control. Since I live here now, and I sort-of frequent the same areas she did, I feel strangely inspired by her crazy ass. She makes me want to party, be wild, and live life to the fullest. On a related note, this city is amazing during the summer.
This bitch is the real deal, and if you don't trust my super educated opinion, here ya go.
I think because I didn't grow up in a church-going household, my personal thoughts and beliefs on spirituality have mainly been guided by my own internal compass. I've just always felt certain things to be true, and certain things to be bullshit. I love philosophy and thinking about the big questions in life, and I've always leaned toward more Eastern ("alternative") belief systems like Buddhism and Taoism. So it seems to follow suit that today, for the first time, a psychic read my palm and totally blew my mind.
Today was one of those days that I woke up and had nothing planned. I was going to sleep in, get up, possibly shower, do some much-needed grocery shopping, and spend the rest of the day relaxing and catching up on last week's TV. Instead, I got up, Z called me, and I joined him and J for breakfast on the UWS, followed by several street fairs, record store hopping and vintage shopping. It was at the first street fair that I encountered Sabrina and her $5 insight into the inner workings of my mind.
I've wanted to go to a psychic for a long time, not because I hold some sort of firm belief in their abilities, but just because I wanted the experience. I try to refrain from holding opinions about things until I encounter them firsthand, and this was one of those things I didn't want to write off or believe in without seeing for myself. So I said what the hell and sat down in her tent. Z hovered but didn't listen. Apparently a palm reading is a really personal thing. I didn't know that but it seems to be that way.
First she asked me my name and introduced herself. She had pretty brown eyes and I found myself looking into them without being freaked out by it. She was welcoming and comforting and I felt like I immediately trusted her. She took my right hand and began looking at my lines. She said I had a strong life line and would not die of sickness or injury, but live to be old and die of old age. Good news. She said I would get married in my late 20s or early 30s. She said I was outwardly a happy person, and very supportive of my friends, but that there was a sadness in my heart, and that I was good at giving advice but not good at taking it. At this point, I was like, OK Sabrina, pretty accurate but anyone would probably say those things are true about themselves. But then she started knowing things that she shouldn't know, specifically about my relationship with A, that freaked me out.
At first she said that I was in a relationship, that it had been difficult, but that we were working out our differences. And I was like, no, we just broke up actually. And she said, oh, but I can tell you've had problems before, you've broken up with this person before but you've always gotten back together. Um, yes. Then out of nowhere she said, "But you can reconcile the fact that he's far away. That's not the problem." And I was like, um, what?? She didn't ask me if he was in another city, she just stated it like a fact she had read in a book. She then went on to say that she knows I love him and that he loves me, and that he never mistreated me, but there was some other source of negativity keeping us apart. She said it could be someone in my life or his life who was envious and aiming to keep us apart, but she wasn't sure. She said she could sense the negativity in me, could read it in my face. Needless to say, I walked away from her confused, anxious and (again) wondering if I am making the right decision about A or just leaving because it's the easy thing to do.
Other stuff she knew: that I'm a writer, that I recently moved to New York, that I've been feeling apprehensive about moving here (but, she reassured me, it was the right decision and this is where I belong). She said she saw paperwork/contracts in my near future, that my financial situation would soon be improving and that I would be traveling a lot this year, including a place with palm trees and blue water later this year. Sounds good to me.
I don't know. I walked away wanting to know more, to sit down and talk to her and see what else she knew about me. I was convinced by the end of my 5-6 minute session that she, at the very least, had a bizarre skill for reading people. I don't know that it's an actual "psychic" power, but I do believe that some people are more in tune with the intrinsic nature of things, and are just good at reading people. Actually I think I'm one of those people, just probably not to the extent Sabrina is.
I know my blog has been really heavy recently and that it's probably getting kind of old, so I have some lighter, more exciting news: I bought an amazing swimsuit today at a vintage store in SoHo. I. love. it. I plan on wearing it to the park when I go to lounge in the sun, and also under jeans or with leggings when going out this summer. It's that's amazing.
It's a really low scoopback, which I <3. You can't tell in the photo, but it's also got old-school cone shapes at the bust. Not like Madonna style, but the same basic idea, just more subtle. I LOVE IT. I kiiiiiind of feel like a pin-up girl when I'm wearing it, not going to lie. Can't wait to wear it around this amazing city this summer.
So it's been hot this weekend. Not warm. Not toasty. HOT. Today it was 89 degrees, which is apparently a record high for this time of year. When it's a particularly warm New York night, my singing man is sure to make an appearance. I've pretty much determined, based on all his musical choices, that he's ga ga gay. His late-night serenade last night cemented this opinion.
Lady GaGa - Poker Face
Some things have been going on in my life that I don't feel like talking about. Plus I've been outside enjoying the uhmazing weather. Hence the lack of posts over the past couple of weeks. Just consider it a tiny hiatus. I'll be back in full force (I hope) soon.
