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I mean, could you have guessed that after having the good idea to hold a beer bong contest where round one (one beer) was swiftly followed by round two (two beers) and then round three (three beers) after which contestant number one immediately puked all six beers and the contents of his stomach and maybe a little chunk of his small intestine that floated up in the effervescence from the cans of Modelo injected into his system through a funnel and a hose? I wasn't watching the spectacle (as you can see from my picture, there wasn't a whole lot of visibility anyway) until the last round when I watched the poor man who was about to experience the wrath of a body forced to drink nine cups of liquid in what boils down to just a few minutes in front of a large crowd of spectators. His eyes bulged like Large Marge, I kid you not. Actually, puking was probably the better option. If his eyeballs had popped out of his face and beer gushed out of his eye sockets, could I say that I would have been surprised? Hardly.
Yay Labor Day Weekend.
I saw another of those subway poster reappropriation art pieces yesterday that made me laugh out loud and John was all 'I'm glad there are some things you like about New York.' Of course there are such things and they are kind of all around. They have nothing to do with things in general or in any one thing but about small things. Like the subway graffiti - mustaches on poster supermodels; different commentary on the same advertisement in different places; an abandonded bicycle locked on my route to the subway that I have watched slowly be destroyed over the past few weeks, like watching a time-lapse of a dead animal decomposing. I'm sure that in a few months all that will remain is a broken U lock. I guess that's the thing that is most surprising - that it isn't the New York of the movies and the lifestyles of the rich and famous that make me like it. It's the urban erosion and simultaneous growth that I find so fascinating and enjoyable. And I don't think I'm the only one for whom this is true. It's kind of been the very nature of this place, just as real as the glamor it also touts. We went to the Philadelphia Museum this weekend and they had a bunch of early to mid 20th C American paintings on view and quite a few were New York City scapes either in fact or in abstraction and I felt happy that not only are the details still pretty much the same, but that I am not alone in history in finding them remark-able. 
I walked out of my subway station last night and there was a movie being filmed. This in a place that only several years ago was a dank and scary place - no joke. One time someone leaving the secondary subway access of our stop was pistol-whipped and had his jaw broken; a few weekends ago there were hipsters having a sidewalk sale ajacent to this very site, blissfully unaware of the attrocities of yesteryear. Times really are a-changin'. Anyway, this wasn't just some kids with a camera; it was the whole Hollywood treatment. There were actors' trailers, tents with craft-services underneath, grips with lights and cables, a huge light deflector next to the car where the camera crew was shooting from a camera on a dolly...I guess Bushwick is the new choice for slum portrayal. A place that is still ghetto looking but at least your craft-services won't be raided by gangstas.
I mean, could you have guessed that after having the good idea to hold a beer bong contest where round one (one beer) was swiftly followed by round two (two beers) and then round three (three beers) after which contestant number one immediately puked all six beers and the contents of his stomach and maybe a little chunk of his small intestine that floated up in the effervescence from the cans of Modelo injected into his system through a funnel and a hose? I wasn't watching the spectacle (as you can see from my picture, there wasn't a whole lot of visibility anyway) until the last round when I watched the poor man who was about to experience the wrath of a body forced to drink nine cups of liquid in what boils down to just a few minutes in front of a large crowd of spectators. His eyes bulged like Large Marge, I kid you not. Actually, puking was probably the better option. If his eyeballs had popped out of his face and beer gushed out of his eye sockets, could I say that I would have been surprised? Hardly.
