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SHAPPY'S ONLINE DIARY:
Monday, October 30, 2006 Today was me and Cristin's SIX YEAR ANNIVERSARY! We spent a quiet weekend at home and had a wonderful fancy Italian dinner on Sunday. I got her some Dog Whisperer DVD's as a gift and she's already watched one of the episodes twice! I think I'm catching a cold. I'm also trying to find a cheap flight from Tampa to Columbus on Dec. 28th and failing! We have a big Urbana show planned on Halloween followed by Bad-Ass Burlesque! Then we have CMJ Music Fest all weekend. Looks like we get to cat-sit after election day. Guess that's it for now. posted by Shappy at 12:13 AM
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Look who got a name drop in the Best of NYC issue of The Village Voice!
Best Place To Be An Art Star Or Just Dress Like One - Show and Tell
During this year's O'Debbie Awards, comedic fashionista Carmen Mofongo showed up wearing a glittery water-bong chapeau while the Voice-crowned "Best Potty-Mouthed Guitar-Slinging Comedian" Jessica Delfino sported a floor-length white skirt, slit to the crotch to reveal her bright red underwear. (Other honorees wore elf ears or a neck brace—as necessity dictated.) As the culmination of another year of the O'Debra Twins' weekly variety show, Show and Tell, appropriate honors were given for "Most Likely to Use a Flat Iron on Their Pubes," "Most Fake Pregnancies," "Best New Lesbo Haircut," "Best Negro Diapers," "Hottest Battered Wife," "Loosest Butthole," and "Best Rash." The "Girlbomb Fisch" honor (a lifetime achievement award of sorts) went to Surf Reality founder Robert Prichard. Just as Surf Reality once did, the O'Debra Twins' "Show and Tell" provides a forum for raw talent and fierce expressions of individuality. (If the pubic hair grafted on to your finger can grow four inches, this crowd will applaud you.) Writers like Moonshine Shorey, Shappy, and Big Mike frequently darken this stage, as do members of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. The O'Debbies are but once a year, but "Show and Tell" happens every Monday at the Bowery Poetry Club; it's one of the few places downtown that still feel downtown. (Silke Tudor)
Manhattan
308 Bowery
View Map
Phone: 212-614-0505
posted by Shappy at 2:14 PM
Sunday, October 15, 2006
FAREWELL TO CBGB's
by Jason Flores-Williams
Ed.’s note: The following talk was delivered at the closing-night party for CBGB’s Gallery, on Saturday, September 30th.
I want to honor this sacred hall of resistance by rallying the troops against the gentrifying herd turning NYC into a corporate theme park. But there are no troops to rally. And if there were troops, we’d have to attack ourselves. Because when you get past the hipster packaging, we’re just yuppies without the cash.
Going to Burning Man, masturbating to anime, reading ’zines and voting Democrat doesn’t make you different from Todd, Ashley and their future banker in the baby stroller. Looking radical but being apathetic makes you a poseur. Doing art for commerce makes you a sellout. And acting smug and pretentious about cultural bullshit makes you an asshole.
You think it matters to a Dominican which version of Whitey moves into the ’hood? Why should anybody fucking care that you can’t afford an apartment in the city? What have you done to make anyone give a shit that you lost your apartment to a stockbroker or your favorite cafe got replaced by a 7-11?
Hipsters are to gentrification what fluffers are to the porn biz: we get the area ready for the big pricks to come in and blow their load. We make everything cute and furry. Our communities, our culture, our country and our world is being exterminated and what’s been our response? We’ve run from the challenge and regressed into adolescence. Oh the joy of being around a 35-year old who acts more smug and sullen than my 12-year old cousin! Oh the joy of hanging out with a 34-year old who talks constantly about cartoons! Oh the wonder of pretending that the world doesn’t exist outside of our little kickball scene! Oh the fabulousness of sarcasm as we step over a homeless man on our way into the book launch party!
We are at the end of a cycle. We’re imitating people and things that happened 40 and 50 years ago. Hipster culture today is harmless culture. And that’s an epic tragedy because being hip used to mean that you were heroic and dangerous. That you waged war on soullessness and greed through art and resistance. That you were passionate and not afraid to show it. Being hip meant that you had dirty sex in dirty bathrooms and wanted upheaval in society. Being hip meant you were intense lower class, not detached upper class. Being hip meant being revolutionary.
But now hipsters have succumbed to the fear and apathy same as the rest of the country. Now we hide in safe and exclusive MFA programs, rather than staying on the outside and creating art that speaks to the disenfranchised streets. Now we wear t-shirts that indirectly mock and in a thrice-removed way comment on the gentrifying, SUV-driving, consumer capitalist yuppie pigs, rather than simply hitting the streets with a banner that says: Go Fuck Yourselves You Sold Out Scum!! Get Out Of Our Neighborhoods You Make Everything Boring and Ugly!!
I question what economic class the subculture comes from these days…Because the first thing you learn in the lower class is that if you don’t stand up and fight, then you get beat down and shut out. That if you choose smug bullshit over passion and sincerity, you get slapped and pushed around. That if you choose trivial abstractions over serious thought and action, then you get marginalized and railroaded. Fantasize and identify more with cool magazines and the elitist art world than you do the evicted and dispossessed, then you yourself will be evicted and dispossessed. Fail to stand up and defend those things that are important to you, then those things get co-opted and destroyed.
Look at tonight. This isn’t a metaphor. You don’t have to draw inferences or study media ecology to see what’s going down. This is the death of hallowed ground. I got off the Greyhound bus from Albuquerque in ‘88, walked straight here from Port Authority with my taped-up suitcase, scored a hit of acid and sat right there on the sidewalk tripping for four hours before a shitfaced sculptor from the Rivington School said I could come to their party and crash on their floor. This is where Richard Hell and Joey Ramone took on The Man. The punk rock values that came out of CBGB’s made me who I am. And now it’s gone. One more chunk of our lives handed over to bourgeois jerks who think rebellion is doing a line of blow in the bathroom on a Friday night.
They say the ’60s exploded because the draft directly affected its youth. Doesn’t losing our living spaces, our jobs, our venues, our communities, our culture and our identity directly affect us? Doesn’t unjust war directly affect us? Doesn’t the pain of living in a plastic country of lies and hypocrisy directly affect us? What are we clinging on to? Was it your dream to be a temp worker in the Financial District, taking the train in from Edison, New Jersey every day because that’s the closest you can afford? Was it your goal in life to collapse on the couch and watch TV every night because the day kicks your ass so hard? Was this how you envisioned your adult life? Did you ever think that you’d be here at the closing of CBGB’s? What’s it going to take for us to mobilize? What’s it going to take for us to engage? And I’m not talking about endless meetings, boring collectives and lameass political correctness—because that kind of uptight political activism has reached its end as well.
I’m talking about getting brutally weird again. I’m talking about doing art that’s beyond co-option. I’m talking about forging new myths. I’m talking about creative resistance that scares the shit out of the rich robots, Sex in the City slaves, stockbrokers, cultural gatekeepers and pigs in power. I’m talking about dangerous expression that’ll make Todd and Ashley think long and hard about moving into the ’hood and exposing their little banker to the new hip warriors of the American night.
posted by Shappy at 11:40 PM
Monday, October 02, 2006 Wow! Cristin and I got to go to the Star Trek exhibit at Christie's auction house today! Somehow our pal Dan Nester got Star Passes and passed them off to us! Cristin kept it a surprize for our 5 year, 11 month anniversary! We got to see and touch everything. We really got a kick out of McCoy's leisure-wear from ST2-WOK. I was holding the sleeve of Scotty's nephew and said to Cristin, "This is the engineering suit Scotty's nephew died in!" and she's like "No, THIS is!" And she pulls out a charred and bloody version of the same uniform! AWESOME! I got to check out Spock's Vulcan Ceremonial robe. They had the Vulcan gong that started the whole battle between Kirk and Spock! Then I saw some of the uniforms from the first series. There I was examining Sulu's starfleet slacks when suddlenly some guy with an accent is snapping my photo! "Local nerd checks out Takei's trousers!" AWESOME! It just kept going and going! We saw lots of furniture from Ten-Forward, personal artifacts from crew's quarters and models of all the Starfleet craft including the Enterprise from the opening credits of Next Generation. The Borg cube, Deep Space Nine, Romulan Warbirds, Klingon Bird of Prey a scale model of the Federation of Planets! Then we got to see all of the Captain's chairs and uniforms! Weapons and interiors of Borg Cube and Klingon warcraft. I actually "beamed" something up much to Cristin's horror! It seemed to me people were pretty much touching everything that wasn't under glass so why not? It's not like I'll ever get that opportunity again! We saw lots of nerds pressing buttons on all of the lighted contol panels from Next Generation. They had a complete replica of the original bridge that they built for Enterprise. I admit I didn't watch that one, but now I need to see the "Mirror, Mirror" themed episode cuz they had a lot of retro stuff from that episode. I just can't believe how much stuff they had! There are going to be a lot of happy fans when this thing is over! I can't wait to see what sells for what! Some guy from ABC News was asking me if I was bidding and I had to admit it was a little out of my price range. But I can tell you this is the auction that all of the fans who can afford to spend that kind of cash have been waiting for! Cristin was crushing left and right at the various Trekkers talkin' Trek! Little did we realize that they were talkin' Trek with Micheal & Denise Okuda the ultimate authority on Trek trivia. We kinda trailed them a little as they explained what stuff was what to non-nerd reporters. I loved it when Micheal was saying fans will treasure and take care of this stuff better than any studio could! I called Ernie afterwards and he reminded me that I'm about to be seen on screen with Shatner, but still, it was cool to touch the sleeve of Admiral Kirk's uniform. The one he defeated Kahn in! KAAAAAAAHHHNNNN! posted by Shappy at 11:33 PM
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