Twilight: Breaking Balls

I'll preface this brief little ditty with the fact that, at TIMES, I have been known to be a conspiracy theorist.  DO I believe that the government is responsible for blowing up the World Trade Centers? No.  Maybe.  No.  I don't care.  Do I think that there are cameras watching me pee in certain public restrooms? Absolutely.  

I am going to throw you out a theory here.  

Although I can't really say I have seen any of these twilight movies, I CAN say that I am somewhat fascinated by the Kristen Stewart Robert Pattinson cheating scandal and kind of have been reading everything written about it.  For those of you that have been chained up in Fangtasia's basement for the last month (or even  just Fantasia Barino's basement), this is what happened.

That girl from the Twilight movies with the dead guys and translucent skin, Kristen Stewart, cheated on Robert Pattinson with her director from Snow White and the Cuntsman and now he's a wreck and he is living in Reese Witherspoon's ranch and she isn't showering and the relationship is in shambles and is over for good.  An age old story.  It is clogging the cover of magazines, social media, and gossip websites all over the world, causing the Kardashian family to be on indefinite suicide watch.

WHAT if it's all A LIE?

A big Hollywood fabrication, just sewn into the tapestry of marketing, publicity, and brainwash associated with the very livelihood of the movie industry.  We all know Tom Cruise is a big homosexual and if you don't believe that then you must also believe that Clay Aiken is a straight man with a wife and thirty children, sitting at home scratching his balls watching the game, slapping his wife's ass, and cerrrrtainly not trolling the internet for illicit bareback fuckboy time behind the rooftop transformers at the Eagle NYC.

I think that Robert Pattinson is a gay little poofter - which I happen to think is wonderful! Fine! Whatever! - and I think that Kristen Stewart is a gold medal muff diver - did you see her in Panic Room people did you SEE??  I believe that this cheating affair was perfectly orchestrated to give the twilight franchise one last push of publicity before the film comes out.  These two actors were contractually bound as a couple throughout the entire thing, the fantasy couple brought together by the film, Edward and Bella together forever... and now that it is all coming to a close, that will have found a seamless separation by the time the movie premieres, and they can go their separate ways with both their careers and personal lives.  The studio no longer needs them to be together anymore to milk them for money, so the moment the twilight press tour comes to a close, their glamorous indentured servitude will have finally left them de-shackled and free to do whatever the FUCK they want.  But naturally, there needed to be an INCIDENT powerful enough to generate headlines.  The cheating never happened.  It was a manipulated Hollywood scene with a paid photographer to accidentally shoot the photo.  Robert Pattinson has been sucking dick since he was in the womb and probably had a mai-tai to celebrate when the studios finally allowed the scandal to break.  And Kristen Stewart just continued to be a well wound little braindead puppet as always.

Ultimately, they will both remain in the closet because that is what good hollywood actors with smart managers do until one of them fucks up and tries to rape a masseur half their age.  But until then, WATCH my prediction unfold.  They will not get back together, and the communication/association between them will cease entirely after the last twilight movie comes out.

Now please excuse me while I go find a life somewhere.


To check out my podcast Midnight Mayhem filled with drag queens, alcohol issues, and other hedonism click here!

Just My Luck

Let me preface this by telling you that I believe there are some people in this world who are naturally inclined toward good luck.  These are people who wake up in the morning and move through their day weaving a tapestry of emotional/intellectual/artistic/professional perfection the likes of which normal people are simply not capable of.  Kind of like Lindsay Lohan in "Just My Luck".  Wait, I never saw that.  Never!

Point is I'm not one of these people.  

Yes, I fulfill all of these facets, but something awful usually happens along the way - like I get spit on by a homeless man or I fall into a subway grate and get trapped in the sidewalk for 12 hours or I shit my pants in Astoria because I decided it would be a great idea to eat at Taco Bell for the first time in 5 years and then visit an outer borough.

This little story was like Person A.

I walked into Duane Reade to buy a bottle of EYE DROPS.  My eyes were irritated because even though I'm supposed to only keep my contacts in for 2 weeks I stretch that to about 2 years.  But I was meant to be in and OUT of that place, wham bam thank you ma'am.

When I got to the checkout and waited for the girl at the counter to finish flirting with the toothless stock boy, check and delete all of her texts, have a 45 minute phone conversation with the welfare office (on the Duane Reade phone), and apply her fabulous Tweety Bird press-on nails - I looked down at the candy.  And there it was. 


A ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL.

I grabbed it without even a SECOND of hesitation and shoved it into my bag.  I immediately went WHITE and got dizzy and checked inside the bag to confirm its existence.  It had separated and there were now THREE bills. THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS.  A strange warm feeling I can only liken to what I imagine smack feels like pulsed through my bloodstream.

"Are you okay, boo?" said the Duane Reade employee, scratching her deliciously well-aportioned lips with her brand new Tweety Bird pinkie.

"YESI'MFINEWHY?!"

Because let's be honest, all of you would react the same way.

And so I waited.  Waited for SOMETHING to happen. ANYTHING!  For the rightful owner to come barreling into the doors in a frenzy begging absolutely BEGGING for someone to return his lost money.  

Nothing.  I paid for my eye drops and I walked out.  

The rationale was simple to me - I tell Tweety Bird, she takes it and pockets it.  I leave it there, the asshole behind me takes it.  The owner will not be back EVER because once you realize you lost 300 bucks in New York City it is GONE.  No questions asked.

My mind was a soup of sounds and colors as I watched the world around me move in its normal flow.  (This is where I sensationalize the moment into some cinematic, life-altering come-to-Jesus moment.)


But no one in the world had, in that moment, any idea of how infinite I felt.  I was briefly elevated into an elite club of people who experience something big that the world doesn't know about - like the moment the lottery is won or the moment you get cast in a humongous Hollywood blockbuster as a starving actor or when Charlie found the golden ticket and for A SINGLE moment in time it was just him and the golden ticket who were there in that moment of euphoria.  


I sat in Columbus Circle for a bit with the money clutched in my hand and just soaked in the moment.  300 bucks is not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things, the amount was not really the point of it all - it was that rare and special feeling, and one that I still recount on days when I feel a little numb.

Or basically every time I walk into a convenience store and happen to give a glance to the candy section.

kim and kourtney take your soul

As humans all sharing a small piece of eternity on the planet together, we are unique creatures with the ability to develop our own idiosyncrasies, dislikes, preferences, and particular senses of taste.  In fact, there is actually only one scientifically proven thing that is unanimously programmed to be hated by the human brain, and that is obviously the Kardashians.


It has all been said and said again, Kim is pretty but she has a fat ass, one looks like an ogre, the mother is a controlling, sociopathic wench and they all talk like they are addressing a five year old who just fell out of its car seat onto the freeway.  We all end every mindless lunchtime or cigarette break chat about them with the same sentence:


"Ugh, I wish they would just go away."


This is what all of you need to understand, once and for all: If you keep TALKING about the Kardashians, they won't GO AWAY. So the next time you want to talk about how useless they are because of their periodic relevance stunts like "domestic abuse" or "failed marriages" bear in mind you are just buying into the brand by discussing it.


To clarify, Kim Kardashian's "sex tape" was filmed on a fucking Hollywood sound stage, her "marriage" was clearly a publicity stunt meant to pump a renewed sense of life into the brand after the show began to get stale, and the 8 other spinoffs they had also got stale.  Their combinations of family spinoffs was more or less decided like the fruits in a motherfucking slot machine, so people got tired.  Now what? I know! A wedding!


And Kim Kardashian is not going to marry Kanye West.  Or maybe she will.  Who cares.  The point is that Kim Kardashian is a succubus and Kanye West is a homosexual man who dresses like he lives off the Broadway Junction stop in Brooklyn.


The more all of you, the peasants, pay attention to them, the more they are going to come out with brands of spandex, housewares, eyelashes, cooking knives, mustache waxing kits, tear-duct regenerators, self-colonic machines, and lactating machines.


So do yourself and us all a favor one last time, please, and that is to act like they are T-Rex's from Jurassic Park - if you don't acknowledge them and just stay still, they won't see you, and they will go away.


And my one apology?


That I had to discuss them now.

The Bottom Line on the Playground Known as Nightlife.

New York City Nightlife.


Everyone in the community has something to say about it, to criticize or embellish regarding its state, or a piece they will endlessly lay claim to.  I asked myself for a point in the maelstrom, the madness, the endless masquerade of excess and circumstance.


So I broke it down for myself in a way that I am content with, whether it can be agreed upon or not.


Nightlife has many quirks, many different classifications of characters, venues, contests, rivalries.   


There are performers who never made it big, some who never will, some who don't want to, some who are about to in a big way.   There are pretty people who are grossly unattractive.  There are ugly people who are inexplicably sexy.  There are both.  And neither.  


In nightlife there are drag queens - some young, some not so young.  Some gorgeous, some busted to shit.  There are drag queens who will engage you in sparkling conversations every time you see them, and some who will ignore you completely... every time you see them.  There are some who are work horses, and some who are show ponies.  Both are necessary and both are good at different things.  Some are famous because they can have you rolling on the floor, and some are famous because you just cannot stop looking at them.


Nightlife stars alcoholics and self-proclaimed prophets, it stars souls deadened and empty, and those full and full of themselves.  There are club kids in their fifties, club kids in their teens, club kids who hate being called club kids.  There are promoters and producers, self-promotional geniuses who are seen as pricks and cunts merely because they understand the tricky, almost intangible art of making everybody know their name.  There are people who are just pricks and cunts.  There are somebodies who act like nobodies, nobodies who act like somebodies.  There are people that crash every party and pull every stunt in the book to get recognized, yet no one cares.  There are people that do nothing and then wake up in the morning to find themselves on every guest list in town. 


There are photographers, some are your best friends, some are your worst enemy.  Some are amazing artists, some are into blind self-promotion.  Some will love you, some will hate you.  Sadly, some forget that they are real people too.


There are bartenders sculpted from clay, have little to say, make amazing drinks, make shitty drinks, put pills in your drinks.  There are some who will ignore you if you don't put down your card.  There are some who will walk you to a taxi because they want you to be safe.  There are gogo boys and burlesque girls of all shapes and sizes, bouncers with bad fucking attitudes and bouncers who ask how your mother is doing. 


There are people emaciated by their emotional lack of social, sexual, and fame-driven fulfillment.  There are content people who want to make art and cool shit with other people who want to make other art and other cool shit.  There are people whose boundaries for hedonism have absolutely no price tag. 


There are people you drink with and greet regularly whose name and face you will forget in six months, and there are some with whom who you will be friends forever.


Everyone has a place, and everyone is essential.  


But the one thing in common between each and every one of these people?  The one element that drew them in and keeps them in the unstable and sometimes self-destructive stratosphere known as nightlife?

Nightlife, at the end of the day, should be about FUN.  


This foreign notion of fun, fun for all, fun because we are psychos and freaks, fun because we don't give a fuck, fun because we live in the most exciting city in the western world... this sense of "fun" is what drew everyone in, what keeps people staying,  what we seem to have regressed from so sadly.  Yes, there are VIPs, and yes there are lists, and all of these things are necessary, but they are meant to keep the machine in a spin cycle... not to indulge an unfulfilled fantasy of high school elitism - a delineation that is sadly and sorely not often made.


And this "fun" is why I have decided all that it will be.  This, within itself.  Those who choose to join me in this, I welcome it.  Those who do not, very well.  We are all different, as I listed above.  We are all entitled to have opinions, to talk shit about each other, we are ALL GUILTY of it.  But hopefully if you did take the time to look at this, like I did to spit it out, then perhaps we can all challenge our conditioned notions of being too good, not good enough, taking a simple thing as a party and its events way too seriously... and remember before we even walk in why we are all there - to have a good time and to make memories, and to enjoy the opportunity we all share to be here, at this point in time.


Time for bed.


Thank you for your consideration.

The Deterioration of Amy Adams

Amy Adams, stuffed into a second-hand crap dress that looked like it came from Sutton Foster's late nineties "audition attire" closet, flitted awkwardly across the screen in a number called "Me Party."  It was an evening showing of the acceptably cute Muppet Movie that everyone was talking about for a minute.


I noticed that Amy Adams, once identified comfortably as America's musical darling, was now a completely different person. 


The difference between then and now?  Then.. she wanted it.


There is nothing about Amy Adams that defines a different sort of struggle than any other delusional, empty actress on the vague and narrow climb to fame.  She was pretty, kept her weight down, looked like just about anyone else in the industry that could play those parts, and could act and sing moderately well.  But she lucked out, had an alliterative name, could pull off a film camera's closeup with the right amount of sleep, contouring, and lighting, and actually wanted it after she finally got it.  This is why she was enjoyable to watch, and what made Enchanted such a fun film.  It was her job to be bouncy, charismatic, and energetic... and our job to be lazy, tired, and entertained during a leisurely evening at the movies.  This very relationship between her and America propelled her into a dizzying maze of the Hollywood shark tank, and into the notoriously brief and deranged status symbol known as "America's Sweetheart."


But inevitably, she stopped caring.  


Once she received the international fame and accolades, she began to suffer from a syndrome associated with any fame-hungry, beautiful stage actress desperate for work in order to feed her ravenous hunger for a solution to her abysmal self-image.  The years of eating dry ramen from the bag and auditioning obscure sixteen bar selections in a shithole LA apartment had finally come to an end as her "struggle to have a cultural experience."  She had the money, the fame, the husband.  So what else was there to do?


Well, she popped out a kid.  Or two.  I think it was just one.  Who cares.  This, of course, peppered between a string of forgettably quirky movies that were just barely worth the effort to show up for.


After this, something left her face.  And while watching her robotic, auto-piloted performance in The Muppets, I found myself let down.  Her pallid, creamy complexion now appeared to be the face of a mother running on very little sleep.  Smoker's lines and crow's feet stretched out from the corners of her eyes, her smile now the widened plasticity of a senior portrait taken after a long night of crying.  Her inability to lose the baby weight was less so a metabolic normality associated with aging and child-bearing, and more of a lack of desire to regain the enviably cookie-cutter silhouette of an ingenue straight off the pages of a Sondheim musical.



But the most disturbing?  Her eyes.  The once happily-dense set of baby blues fraught with a blank sort of concerned apprehension have long since vanished.  It seems almost as though Winifred Sanderson (or Bette Midler from Hocus Pocus) had sucked her soul out, leaving a carelessly vacant gaze that remained unchanged despite happiness, sadness, confusion, standing still, or dancing.  Eyeliner and mascara, yes, of course, but it is difficult to enhance the window to a soul that has seemingly vacated.


While imdb tells me she has a string of movies coming out, doesn't it usually say that with just about everyone on there?  I don't feel like she will ever be capable of a public meltdown, but she will eventually lose the will to be in front of the cameras until she needs the approval again.  One day, after years, we will notice that she has been gone for a while after a slow and pretty fade-out into obscurity - but not, of course, without the accompanying statement loaded with a noncommittal type of sympathy:


"Oh yeah, I remember her in that princess movie... she was soo good in that..."

Shit Nightlife People Say

Here is my little homage to that Shit people say trend that the kids are into this week.

25 Really Annoying Fucking Things about the NYC Subway

If you live in New York or any other desolate, dirty, sprawling urban wasteland then you know that the following things probably ALL happen to you in the span of a week.  Here is a list of some things I thought of that make me want to commit suicide when I ride the train.




1.  When the train is mildly full there is always some asshole with a backpack the size of a goddamned circus tent standing too close to the door while it is trying repeatedly to shut - as he complacently plays Angry Birds the entire time.


2.  The fact that very severe delays "due to train traffic ahead" only occur on days where we have either a job interview, it is your first day of a new job, or you are having a very serious problem controlling either your bladder or your bowels.


3.  Mariachi bands.


4.  Homeless people who smell like a mixture of dead people and a wrestling singlet that hasn't been washed in 25 years.


5.  The asshole who is taking his sweet ass time walking down the platform stairs in front of you - texting, sipping on a coke, whatever - all as you are watching the train you are rushing to catch close its doors and sail away.


6.  Those begging for money whose stylistic choice includes standing at one end of the train car and yelling in monotone a prepared speech that he/she regurgitates endlessly throughout the day "hi-ladies-and-gentlemen-i- don't-mean-to-disturb-your-ride-but-in-light-of-the-holidays-show-some-love-i-am-broke-homeless-looking-for-a-job-seven-kids-just-trying-to-make-some-honest-money blah blah blah etc etc FUCK OFF.  Yeah that's great, it's called finding a job in the "gigs" section of craigslist.  Or trying a bottle of water instead of a half empty handle of Pinnacle Vodka you found in the trash.  I don't know.  The point is, meth is a hell of a drug.


7.  Annoying NYU girls.  You know, the really ugly rich ones that smell like expensive perfume and inflated senses of entitlement?  If I end up going more than five stops next to a couple of them, and they are speaking, I begin devising ways to strangle them with their own intestines.


8. Break dancers.  Sometimes they are validly entertaining.  I sure as hell can't dance like that.  But one of these days the token 12 year old in the group is gonna be sliding down that mahfuckin' pole waving his feet all crazy and bitch is gonna kick.someone.in.the.FACE!  And then we all have to deal with that awkwardness.


9. Actors rehearsing lines from their scripts just a little too vividly, as if ploying desperately for everyone's attention.  It's like dude you're on the fucking TRAIN - I don't give a shit about your "method."  Calm the fuck the down.  You're not Stella Adler.  Go home.


10. Loud black kids coming home from school.


11. People irrationally cramming themselves into a train during rush hour, sitting on each others shoulders and shit, stuffing themselves in like sardines.  Guess I didn't get that post-it reminding us all that there is only one single train car that only runs one single time in an entire day that every single resident of Manhattan has to take.  Oh well!


12.  Falling asleep and ending up in Canarsie.  Or Coney Island.  Or "East New York." I don't know, I've done all of the above.


13.  People who are fully aware that they are too heavy to squeeze in between two people sitting down but do it anyway.  Then they have to rummage around in their bag for five minutes trying to find their half-eaten Buffalo Chicken Sandwich and their copy of "Breaking Dawn."


14.  People who decide that the middle of a crowded train is the most innovative and rational place to break wind.


15.  Those times when you eye a perfectly located seat and you think "sweet how come no one has grabbed that" but upon closer examination realize it is because the seat is covered in an unidentifiable liquid or substance that everyone is too scared to go near.


16.  Tourists who freak out and scream and fall over when the train starts moving - and then it's all like "OHH my god KAITLYN be CAREFULLLL ahhghgh@#$@(@$(@(!!!!!" and then they take 20 pictures and mispronounce "Houston Street" before finally getting off at Times Square.


17.  Guys who do pull-ups on the bars.  Get over yourself.


18.  Out of control children and screaming babies.  Throttle them.  Cut off their air supply.  Just do it.


19.  The B D F line and how its frequency of arrival can be likened to that of Halley's Comet.


20.  That day when you're having an amazing morning and then you swipe your card and get those two green words of despair. Insufficient Fare.


21.  The people who take forever in front of you to buy Metrocards because they are unaware that it isn't a leisurely internet cafe experience for extended use.  People have places to be.


22.  I briefly touched on this one earlier but it deserves its own number - people who eat on the train.  A sensible granola bar, fine!  A bag of cashews, sure.  Not a 3 course meal from Boston Market.  Ugh.


23.  People who smoke electronic cigarettes while they are underground on the actual train.  I understand completely feeling like you need a smoke, but you seriously can't wait the fifteen minutes it takes from one point of fresh air hitting your face to the next?  You may as well attach an oxygen tube to your throat now.  You're fucked.


24.  People who decide that their Droid is actually a Dolby Digital Surround Sound system for the entire train car to enjoy, because them listening to Young Jeezy through their headphones is so out of the question.


25.  The MTA.