morningside:: back in NYC

I'm back in town, back in school – hitting the ground running. Two months left of this madness, and now it's truly madness. A project deadline on April 1, a deadline for my journal article on April 9, plus two papers for class and all of Ulysses to dissect. Yegods. I hope I can get another site up before this is all over.

Daninel and I were walking through the West Village recently, along 14th Street, when we noticed some bright lights flashing erratically behind us. Coming down the sidewalk were two young women, walking nonchalantly, talking to each other, and they were flanked by four men – one with a camera, one with a light, one with a boom mike and the last with the recording equipment. The girls walked along, lah-dee-dah, and these overweight panchos hustled around them to keep them in range and in frame. Cool, we thought, a movie of some sort.

Only later did it all make sense: MTV's The Real World is back in New York this year.

Got back in town just in time to visit the Gay and Lesbian Business and Entertainment Expo at the incredible Javits Convention Center on the west side. I wouldn't have gone myself, but Daniel had gotten tickets for a panel discussion there that afternoon: "The Marketing of Queer as Folk" featuring the creators and the entire cast.

It was a fairly enlightening discussion, moderated by a Times advertising columnist and punctuated by constant class-clown hilarity from Hal Sparks ("Michael"). For those not familiar with the Showtime series, it's a U.S. extension of a popular British show about a core group of gay people – the first show in America to feature gay characters as the main folks. More than that, though, it's the first TV show in a long time to explore the lives of truly flawed human beings, instead the well-scrubbed market-driven ideals we get in everything from "Will and Grace" to "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." The marketing campaign to launch the show last year also was the biggest Showtime had ever undertaken – an intriguing situation for a pay network marketing to both gay and straight audiences. (Interesting factoid from the panel: a sizeable chunk of the show's audience is straight women, who reportedly find it extremely sexy. All these years men have been getting off watching two women; now women are discovering the reverse situation. A new market for gay porn?)

They announced that the show has been picked up for a second season of 20 episodes. The current season will end in May – they would surrender no clues, despite having wrapped the last show last week – and the second season should start in January 2002. The waiting, I know, is the hardest part.

Oh, and go figure: the kid who plays "Justin" is a dull little snot. Meanwhile, Peter Paige, "Emmett," is a doll.

Wavelengths: The National Network has picked up WKRP in Cincinnati and is showing two episodes each morning. Woo-hoo! My obssession lives on! They're handliong it eight times better than Nick at Nite, which completely botched its acquisition of the show in '99. Somehow, they couldn't license the music heard each time the DJs are in the booth, so they had to cover it up with this really awful instrumental crap. What's the point of a show about a radio station if the music can't be heard (particularly when there are dialogue references to the specific artists)? After a big marathon blow-out, Nick suddenly dropped the show from its nightly line-up and buried it on Sunday nights at 3:30 a.m. until the contract burned out. Now TNN's got it, full-frontal tunes and all.

Wavelengths again: The Duran Duran concert I mentioned in the last edition got me psyched about that rack in my early-'80s pop closet. I listened to the old Duranie stuff, but I felt like delving deeper. Their first album is the best, anyway, because they were still moody art rockers thinking that the synthesizer was a fascinating new tool of expression instead of a mere time and money saver. Simon et al. certainly evolved into a marketing behemoth, but one similar band of that ilk remained shrouded in '80s art-rock obscurity: Japan. Led by the glamorous David Sylvian – part Simon Le Bon, part Bowie, part Bryan Ferry – Japan came and went over the late '70s and early '80s. I recently bought their major-label debut, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, and have been lapping it up in all its moody synthesized glory.



					`Back in NYC` People I know in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from. — A.J. Liebling, "Apology for Breathing" Per a couple of requests, here's a shot of Butler Hall, the building in which I live here in Manhattan. That's the front on 119th Street as seen from the park. I'm back in town, back in school – hitting the ground running. Two months left of this madness, and now it's truly madness. A project deadline on April 1, a deadline for my journal article on April 9, plus two papers for class and all of Ulysses to dissect. Yegods. I hope I can get another site up before this is all over. Daninel and I were walking through the West Village recently, along 14th Street, when we noticed some bright lights flashing erratically behind us. Coming down the sidewalk were two young women, walking nonchalantly, talking to each other, and they were flanked by four men – one with a camera, one with a light, one with a boom mike and the last with the recording equipment. The girls walked along, lah-dee-dah, and these overweight panchos hustled around them to keep them in range and in frame. Cool, we thought, a movie of some sort. Only later did it all make sense: MTV's The Real World is back in New York this year. Got back in town just in time to visit the Gay and Lesbian Business and Entertainment Expo at the incredible Javits Convention Center on the west side. I wouldn't have gone myself, but Daniel had gotten tickets for a panel discussion there that afternoon: "The Marketing of Queer as Folk" featuring the creators and the entire cast. It was a fairly enlightening discussion, moderated by a Times advertising columnist and punctuated by constant class-clown hilarity from Hal Sparks ("Michael"). For those not familiar with the Showtime series, it's a U.S. extension of a popular British show about a core group of gay people – the first show in America to feature gay characters as the main folks. More than that, though, it's the first TV show in a long time to explore the lives of truly flawed human beings, instead the well-scrubbed market-driven ideals we get in everything from "Will and Grace" to "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." The marketing campaign to launch the show last year also was the biggest Showtime had ever undertaken – an intriguing situation for a pay network marketing to both gay and straight audiences. (Interesting factoid from the panel: a sizeable chunk of the show's audience is straight women, who reportedly find it extremely sexy. All these years men have been getting off watching two women; now women are discovering the reverse situation. A new market for gay porn?) They announced that the show has been picked up for a second season of 20 episodes. The current season will end in May – they would surrender no clues, despite having wrapped the last show last week – and the second season should start in January 2002. The waiting, I know, is the hardest part. Oh, and go figure: the kid who plays "Justin" is a dull little snot. Meanwhile, Peter Paige, "Emmett," is a doll. Wavelengths: The National Network has picked up WKRP in Cincinnati and is showing two episodes each morning. Woo-hoo! My obssession lives on! They're handliong it eight times better than Nick at Nite, which completely botched its acquisition of the show in '99. Somehow, they couldn't license the music heard each time the DJs are in the booth, so they had to cover it up with this really awful instrumental crap. What's the point of a show about a radio station if the music can't be heard (particularly when there are dialogue references to the specific artists)? After a big marathon blow-out, Nick suddenly dropped the show from its nightly line-up and buried it on Sunday nights at 3:30 a.m. until the contract burned out. Now TNN's got it, full-frontal tunes and all. Wavelengths again: The Duran Duran concert I mentioned in the last edition got me psyched about that rack in my early-'80s pop closet. I listened to the old Duranie stuff, but I felt like delving deeper. Their first album is the best, anyway, because they were still moody art rockers thinking that the synthesizer was a fascinating new tool of expression instead of a mere time and money saver. Simon et al. certainly evolved into a marketing behemoth, but one similar band of that ilk remained shrouded in '80s art-rock obscurity: Japan. Led by the glamorous David Sylvian – part Simon Le Bon, part Bowie, part Bryan Ferry – Japan came and went over the late '70s and early '80s. I recently bought their major-label debut, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, and have been lapping it up in all its moody synthesized glory.

		The journey:



		Recurrent themes:







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Back in NYC

`Back in NYC`