Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I set my expectations too high. Maybe I’m overcaffienated. But one thing’s for sure:

Autofocus sucks.

Yeah, the title sequence is good, and I was happy to see that the movie wasn’t art-directed to within an inch of its life (unlike another flick about porn in the 70s I could name), but in the end, Autofocus amounts to little more than a director sitting on his ass for two hours, making facile moral judgements instead of giving you the opportunity to care about the characters. I mean, Entertainment Tonight could have made a less cliched piece of tripe.

For those of you considering filmic forms of amusement this weekend, you’ve been warned.

eight zen questions for modern life

Of the 27 people on-duty at Kinko’s, why is there only one cashier?

When does “no cheese” actually mean “no cheese” to a Taco Bell employee?

Why does my keyboard have a greater affinity for Diet Pepsi than I?

Why do people insist on sending html email?

Why does my Windows folder view keep changing long after I’ve set the default options?

Why can’t money buy Bill Gates a good gay hairdresser?

Don’t you know who I am?

How did you get this number?

seven adjectives for a monday at 5:06pm

dreary

bleary

shrill

chill

loathsome

uninspired

fluorescent

Oh yeah: I wrote for someone else again. It’s pure mendacity, but it comes with a paycheck.

You can tell it’s slow around here ’cause I’m tidying up. Don’t get used to it.

My excitement over certain things only reaffirms the fact that I am, indeed, a complete dork.

It‘s kinda weird: just the other day, I was saying how no one really speaks of snipers any more. As a phenomenon, snipers fall into the same general category as flashers, streakers, and those who create macrame.

They want a profile? Try looking for (a) a 40 – 50 year old male with a history of stalking Jaquelyn Smith lookalikes, or (b) someone 20 – 30 with retro tastes that could best be described as terminally hip (and I do mean terminally).

Homosexuals ruin everything.

Well, clueless homosexuals do. Look at Southern Decadence, or Memorial Day, or Halloween: at one point, these were all fun, festive holidays, fabulous excuses to dress up and boogie down. Not to get all essentialist on your ass or anything, but there’s something very special and particular about the way New Orleanians pass their good times, and folks who first threw parties associated with these holidays knew how to do them up right. They knew how to enjoy the moment in that kinda unique way, when the only tools at their disposal were a keg of cheap beer, an amateur funk band, and a old muddy lot in the ghetto.

Now, yes, I understand: change is inevitable. These were good parties, and it would have been impossible to keep them from growing in size and scale. But even with everyone telling two friends, and so on, and so on, the character of the events had been kept intact. They still had that certain je ne sais quoi.

Until last night.

Last night was Decadence Ball (technically, no relation to the aforementioned Southern Decadence, though I’m beginning to wonder if it hasn’t been co-opted by the latter just to annoy me). For years, the Ball has been a full-on freakfest, a celebration of the Ninth Ward personality: funky, dirty, nasty. It’s been held in artist’s studios and abandoned warehouses and on condemned properties, drawing a devout crowd of locals from Elysian Fields to Poland Avenue. But last night, as I walked onto the scene with my two housemates, I was dismayed to see so many Decadence costumes–I mean Southern Decadence now–scuttling around. Gold lame thongs. Oakleys worn without a hint of irony. Tans straight from the bottle. Couples with pupils the size of quarters darting off behind the stacks of unused lumber at the back of the lot, then coming back with pupils the size of silver dollars.

Where were the freaks, the beautiful, delectable freaks? Sure, there were a few familiar faces in the crowd, but not as many as I’d have liked–and of the several I recognized, there were quite a few I wanted to avoid. I tried drinking copious amounts of cheap beer to put myself in the mood. No dice. I left after an hour.

Of course, it’s not just the homers that have ruined it. It’s people like the woman I passed, sporting a mundane ensemble of jeans and a leopard-print t-shirt screaming into her cell phone with a thick yat accent, “Oh my god, dawlin’, you gotta come down here and see dis. Dis shit is wild!” To put it in New York terms, the party’s gone all bridge-and-tunnel, you know. In other words, it’s over.

Maybe I sound bitter. Or jaded. Or self-aggrandizing. Or like an old person waxing nostalgic. But more than anything, I think I sound like Ralph.

The Story of Last Night and How We Did It Up Good
as told by the ghost of Eudora Welty using considerable artistic license

So there I was, standing on the corner of St. Peter and Rampart Streets, just as common as you please, talking to my friend Jimmy-Jay-Jo-Bob, who we all just call Jim on account of saving time, when along comes the only Serbo-Ukranian princess I know, Dmitri, and a certain lady friend, Bettina, who I hadn’t seen in some time. “Well y’all just pass me by like you don’t even know me from Adam,” I shouted, makin’ Jim turn his head and swivel around like my cousin Eugene P. Saucier the Third when he’s prancing around with his bb-gun like he’s gonna drop everything and run off and join the army this very minute. Next thing I knew, Jim had disappeared inside some bar the looks of which I did not like and I was gallivanting down the banquette with Dmitri and Bettina, making sure to keep the pace slow enough so that none of us spilled anything from the plastic cups of alcohol we were carrying that would have gotten us arrested, fingerprinted, and locked up for years if we’d been anywhere else.

Where are you going, Richard, Dmitri asks in this accent like you’ve never heard in all your born days, sounding for all the world like he still had sand from the Black Sea trapped between his cheek and gums. To a dyke rock show, I replied, as though it were something I do every single day of my natural life. We are going to see some friends at the Bombay Club, would you like to come, he asks, knowing perfectly well that I’m wearing sneakers and jeans not fit for a sharecropper and a sleeveless tank top to boot. No, I say, but if y’all come back after your drink, maybe we can head on up to Twi-Ro-Pa for some of that citified dancing music.

An hour later, Ovary Action had finally gotten their act together and were halfway through their set–which should have been signed, sealed, and delivered an hour and a half before–when from out of the corner of my hazel eye that I probably got from my father’s side of the family I saw a long-haired sodomite and his brunette lady companion burst through the door–Dmitri and Bettina had come back! We hugged and kissed as though we hadn’t seen one another in years and then set about the task of starting this party right.

By the time Bitch and Animal took to the stage, we were in a fine state of affairs. Dmitri was being reprimanded by an apparently insensitive, insecure, whiny little babydyke no bigger than a good-sized can of of Le Sueur peas, and Bettina was becoming acquainted with a very stylish, well-bred woman of apparent means and intellect who had recently hennaed her hair. Myself, I was ready to go.

So! Down the stairs we tumbled, against Bettina’s wishes, I think, and into my car, headed to Twi-Ro-Pa, when Dmitri burst into tears like some red-headed heathen just killed his favorite puppy. He said, I’m already feeling fragile, you know, because of this baseball thing (I didn’t know what he was referring to and I didn’t ever get around to asking, so I’m as mystified as you are), and then that stupid minimuffmuncher has the nerve to look at me while I’m having a good time at a dyke rock show and ask why I’m there, as if People With Penises (he says it like it’s capitalized and all) can’t enjoy womyn’s music (I put in the “y” myself). Bettina and I tried desperately to console him as we sped back toward Dmitri’s apartment so he could run in and grab more cash, which he apparently keeps hidden in his mattress, because he says that’s what all good Europeans do. Eventually me, myself, and I managed to jam an American Spirit between his lips and lit it with my fifty-cent Cricket lighter and that seemed to set things right. Amen!

To be quite honest, there’s not a lot to say about the rest of the evening. Twi-Ro-Pa was fancy as always, looking and feeling more New York than New Orleans, with bass speakers that will knock you off your goddamn feet, may lighting strike me dead if I’m lying. The music started out great and we were dancing and Dmitri was buying drinks, which I forgot to thank him for and I’ll have to do next time I see him, but then the DJ decided that “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight” would be cute, and it was for a couple of minutes, but if you’re listening Mr. DJ, half an hour of retro-emo-techno without a single New Beat diddy to liven things up makes people want to tie you up in a burlap bag and hurl you off the Pearl River bridge, on my grandmother’s grave. But rather than risk prosecution, not to mention an hour’s drive to the nearest Pearl River bridge, we departed, and the last I saw of Dmitri and Bettina, they were stumbling into Coop’s for a late night snack.

I swear to God!

You can tell who’s never been through a hurricane before. They’re the ones buying rolls and rolls of masking tape to make giant Xes on their windowpanes, theoretically to keep them from shattering in the wake of flying debris and high winds. But any fool can tell you, unless it’s a category three or higher, there’s no need to bother with all that–and even then, better to board up your windows than to tape ’em. Some folks are gonna have an awfully unpleasant time come Friday, scraping off all that tape goo. Me, I’d rather reglaze a window.

This morning the sky is the same color it was 28 years ago, on my first day of elementary school: dark and gray and green and stormy.

The first thing I learned that day, in that–I kid you not–little red schoolhouse, was that when it rains while the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife. This was not idle playground gossip, it was presented by the teacher as fact. Even though my familiy attended a fairly fundamentalist Southern Baptist church, I’d never heard that before. And I remember thinking, “Well, that’s a bunch of horseshit. Does she really expect us to buy that?”

I like it when the weather’s like this because the world look so unusual, especially the insides of places. They look different, lit up by lamps instead of sunlight at nine in the morning.