turkey eve - Wednesday November 22 2000
I just made some clever sexist poetry
and (bonus!) it even rhymes!
Bitching 'bout the glass ceiling,
Through which no chick goes
She's such a hypocrite
Defended by pantyhose.
I'm sitting on the crapper again, pumped up on a particularly powerful cup of office coffee, gesticulating wildly and offensively at the anonymous gentleman urinating just outside my stall when suddenly I realize I'm casting a visible shadow of my hand beneath the stall divider. Whoops! When it comes down to it, toilet stalls really don't offer that much privacy.
This evening I decided to use Flash to animate a robot ("Marilyn Monitor") drawn by Bathtubgirl's designer/driver/handyman/basement-troll Robert. I wanted to see if I could apply my knowledge of Flash layers and tweening to the difficult challenge of naturalistic moving in jointed arms. The result is what you see above. I'm fairly happy with it. The next task is to build Marilyn a dancing partner.
Later on I broke out my paint brushes and did some more work on the acrylic painting that's been languishing since August.
I was undertaking these creative tasks in hopes of staying awake so I could go out tonight to the Viper Room with Linda and Julian to see Lumirova and the Wrong Dimension Band. And though it's true that nothing gets the maintainable internal stimulants flowing quite like creativity, I thought I'd augment the effect by playing Slayer's Undisputed Attitude - not quite at the requisite volume, but near enough for the the task at hand.
Only a few songs into the album came a knock at my door. It was Julian, with Linda waiting out in the car. "What's this music?" he asked. "Oh, it's actually Slayer," I said somewhat dismissively. "It sounds pretty good!" Julian said enthusiastically. (By way of compressing this conversation, though this second part actually took place on the drive to West Hollywood) "That's a really good album. It's all punk rock covers," I replied.
After getting confused by the non-intuitive nature of the intersection of Sepulveda and Sunset, we were heading east down the curvy splendor of Sunset Blvd. It doesn't take all that long to get to West Hollywood this way.
The Viper Room is apparently something of a Bermuda Triangle for the Hollywood celebrity set, and I'd always wanted to see it for that reason alone. The upstairs room where the music was playing was dark and had an unexpectedly mid-modern whorehouse feel to it. Lumirova was on stage doing what I took to be a raucously ironic take on the "Hare Krishna Song" (whatever it's called) but Linda told me she didn't think their intent was ironic at all. It was too bad that this was the last Lumirova song and that Wrong Dimension Band was next. I think I was more in the mood for Lumirova. And the same was true, it seemed, for Wrong Dimension Boy himself. He was dressed up as a turkey, the drummer as a pilgrim, the guitarist as a cowboy and the bassist, Linda's Swedish soon-to-be-ex-husband Matt, as a Pocahantis-style Indian. Despite his ridiculous outfit, WDB had a super-serious look on his face as he belted out his songs. He didn't give himself a sufficient warm-up time before launching into his most passionate tunes "Sweet Vagina Juice" and "Sexpot 23," and his performance lacked necessary raging animal conviction. And then the band only performed for about 20 minutes before quitting.
Meanwhile Linda, Julian and I were drinking $6 beers and talking whenever things weren't too loud. When there was no more live music, a DJ tried to make up for things by playing some vintage funk, but then the bouncers closed down the place anyway. It wasn't even 1:00 am yet.
So we bought a six pack of Sierra Nevada and drove back to my place. At about this time John showed up and we hung out and talked about things like prescription ADD medication for awhile. When Julian and Linda started making out, I resumed work on my painting and John checked his email. Then Julian sort of passed out and John went off to bed, leaving Linda and me as the only conscious people downstairs.