Night(s) of 1000 Strangers

This weekend was mostly spent hanging out with strangers, but also there were some people I knew around too. On Friday I went to see Smoking Aces which was strange. It's about a Vegas showman (Jeremy Piven) with mob ties and 9 hitmen all trying to kill him. I thought it'd be a more violent, but equally fast-paced and high jinks-laden Oceans 11. It was fast-paced, but extremely stupidly violent (not smartly violent like Pan's Laboratory). With so many wacky hitmen, I thought I'd want to root for one, but they were all so lame and clearly destined for failure I really couldn't get behind any of them. Also the 'twist' (if you can call it that) was so obvious, I got it within the first 5 minutes of the movie. It was understandably very boring just waiting for the characters to figure it out. Anyway, just in case you were considering seeing that (which, even ignoring my review, I highly doubt), please don't. It's not a good movie.

Later that night I met up with Sam and his mom, Pat who was visiting from Chicago. We had a really nice dinner at Blue Ribbon Bakery. Sam said our waiter looked like ramen noodles. I said, 'That's the sexiest side dish I've ever seen!' I didn't say that.


After we said goodbye to Pat, we went to Big Bar where we wrote a really great rap about a thug who has a hard day clockin' peeps and selling rocks and just wants to SNUGGLE DOWN, but his ho is all up on his dick. It's called Snuggle Down. Later, about 15 people entered the nearly empty (and small) bar. One girl sat down at our booth and drunkenly kept telling us that she knew us. At first it was annoying, but then she revealed the touching history of her entourage. They all met at Laguardia Airport this Christmas. They were trying to get to Colorado, but were stranded because of the blizzard in Denver. So this girl just rallied everyone, they rented cars and drove cross-country. Total strangers! And now they hang out all the time in NY! The best thing about the group was its multi-generational flava. The girl's 75-year-old Czech architect dad was there, along with a 40-year-old writer for South Park, a 20-year-old Tisch Film kid, a 29-year-old Kindergarten teacher and a HOT 18-year-old biomedical engineer major at Columbia. It was really heart-warming and they were all super awesome.

Saturday I went to MOMA for this feminist video program in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Video Data Bank. I saw Joan Jonas' Vertical Roll of which I had only seen parts. You can watch it really small on the VDB website. Highly recommended. They also screened Dara Birnbaum's Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman which is one of my fave vid art things of all time.


After MOMA, I went farther uptown to a birthday party with tons of cake and tons of strangers. The cake was delicious and the strangers totally unobtrusive. Fun time! Thanks Noah and Leah!

Sunday was pretty uneventful, save for the awesome brownie sundae Haley and I devoured at The Chocolate Room.


Apparently the strangers theme has followed me into the work week with this morning's return of THE MOST FARCICALLY OUTFITTED HOMELESS MAN EVER. This man haunts me. For an entire week I saw him twice a day on the A/C or F train. He vanished for about 1.5 months and returned this morning to my Manhattan-bound A train. Has anyone else seen him? He wears shoes made of paper, shorts ripped in a jagged 'pirate style,' no shirt, has huge hair and visible dirt on his large stomach. He managed to procure really nice black-rimmed glasses somehow, which supports my hypothesis that he is actually a performance artist of some kind. Also he never smells bad ever, despite all visual evidence to the contrary. He also has the voice of a frog-human hybird. Maybe he's made of a machine! A dirty frog machine with a faulty voice chip. Who knows?!