American Playboys

So I've had another exciting weekend in the tradition of not really reading or writing. Amazing the things you learn about the world when you don't sequester yourself in your fucking room. What a waste of goddamn time. Social isolation is, along with idle hands, the Devil's plaything. Poor asocial people.

G. is one of the most popular (read: likeable) people in Williamsburg. He knows everyone. And if he doesn't know them, he might as well, because he knows their band, their art, their friend who works for art crating or works part-time at the Gagosian gallery or saw him propose to his girlfriend at Miami Basel, etc.

H. was there last night, and she's going through something called The H. Revolution, which is her new personal event. She broke up with her boyfriend, one of her best friends died (God knows how, I assume drugs or a fixed gear bike accident), she's been in contact with people at Cooper Union, where she didn't get in. She's more full of life than anyone I know. Which means, maybe, that she's a bit self-involved, completely self-interested, self-obsessed, and self-important. And lke most people concerned so hugely with themselves, she has crazy parents and is struggling not be them. Like Jim Harrison in True North, the key is simply to, if you have a crazy family, figure out why they're crazy and try not to act like that. So the self prokect is fully underway in H's case, and therefore the H Revolution. She was wearign a dress from someone named Marilyn, and a girl had asked her earlier in the night, "Is that a Marilyn?" and she said, "Yeah, it's a Marilyn." "It was the most pretentious conversation I've ever had."

Talked with Mark for a while, who has a bit of a wall eye which gives you the sense that he's not very interested in what you're saying. (Secret thought: "He's not even looking at me while I'm telling him this story. He's looking at the chick behind me" etc.) We discussed how bikes can change a person's life. It changed his, it changed mine. Getting doored was a big topic. I made up a story about a guy I know getting "doored" and falling in front of a bus which ran over his band, killing him. Later we were inside looking at a model Lambourgine made out of cut plastic panelling. We both wished the doors were open, displaying the way they open up instead of out. This got us thinking about how friendly a Lambourgine is to the bike messengers and amateur road bikers in Manhattan. No one gets doored by Lambourgines. Ditto Delorians. This led to a story. At the funeral for the "friend" of mine, the black sheep of the family delivers a eulogy. It begins conventionally, "My brother was my best friend," etc. But then he suddenly launches into an alternate reality tangent, in which the door was not an out-opener but rather a Lambourgine door, which opens up, saving his brother's life. He suddenly turns and hits play on a giant projector: "Now, had it been a lambourgine instead of a Bick or whatever it was that took my brother's life..." And on the screen you see the brother riding a bike at top speed down Broadway and then narrowly avoiding the Lanbourgine door. Slow mo shot: the brother looking into the car, and the Lambourgine owner smiling at him, giving him the thumbs up. The bus whizzes by, and the bus driver too gives him the thumbs up, smiling. He turns left at the intersection, and fades into the setting sun at the end 34th Street, going god knows where. Alive! The brother looks back at the awestruck funeral attendees, and then returns to the screen, where the film continues through his brother's successful and happy next few months, before he is finally doored by a car not a Delorian or Lambourgine, and dies in a more violent way, more slowly and cruelly, getting churned up in the gears of a street sweeper but dying in the hospital. With that the brother's euology ends.

Then we met G's buddy, foget his name, who G called a real American playboy. He was funny. They talked about this new film, King of Kong, a documentary about the guy who has the highest score on Donkey Kong. He's from a small town in New Hampshire which happens to host the world's largest classic arcade game tournament each year. People from all over the world come. "They're like rock stars! In that arena, that is. The Kong guy is literally one of the most contemptible people I've ever met in my life. Just a genuinely despiccable human being." He loves his job with AC. He said that when he works with Graham, they each decided "You know what, let's love it. Let's just love life. It's all good! I love it!" He gets huge tips each time out, because he appraoches the customers in a "Listen, I'm right here, right now, here to do anythign I can to make you're day the best day you may have ever had. What...do you need ME...to do for you?"

B and A were at the Lodge earlier. And B's girlfriend, who kept saying, "Guys, listen guys. Let me telll you something. Girls? We just want you to fuck us. That's it. That and to be like a man. I want my men to be a men. A menly men. We want you to buy us thing. And to pay for the check. And to treat us like a woman.... You know, feminism was not such a big deal in France, because it is understood that we, women, are superior to you. There was not all the complication of equal respect and things like this. Because our men, they already respect us, because we have power in society? You know what this means? We are real women, French girls. And we treat our mens very well." Etc. She was drunk and B. said severally times, "Tout calm, tout calm." She was the only girl at the table and loving it, approaching tables full of Americans, excited to enter into a basic dialogue about food and cheese plates. One of us commented on the fact that she'd paid for the cheese plate, not Ben. "Yes," she said. "But this is an unusual circumstance. I am your guest you could say, and I feel it my responsibility to treat you well, especially since I am only girl at the table."

It's true that the smartest people I know are the most adrift, work the "worst" jobs, typically droppped out of college, use drugs and drink a lot, and tend to make music, or to have some involvement in music. They're more independent in other words. Not following mom and dad's lead, like the couple Gavin and I moved on Friday, Pez and (something Persian), who bought their lives at Ikea, who don't seem to have any idea they're alive.

Saw Fog of War and Hannah Takes the Stairs. Both pretty good. Why doesn't she take the elevator though? She doesn't want help? She can do it herself? She needs the exercise? She's claustrophobic?