Entry tags:
NYC Pride, No Really
So, NYC Pride. You know, I don't actually enjoy journaling the events of my life half as much as I enjoy reviewing things, but in this case I feel like I'll regret it ten years hence if I don't -- historic NYC Pride, eve of the marriage equality resolution that lit up the Empire State Building in rainbow colors, parade through Stonewall Place, all that stuff. Alternatively, I may in ten years be of the opinion that this day wasn't all that significant at all, because marriage equality is barely the start of the LGBT struggle/it got repealed a moment later (please no)/more important things happened since/aliens invaded/SkyNet/climate change/bears/other. But I also might regret it. So: New York Pride 2011, the ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
prodigy and thez version. I'm appropriating thez until she writes her own version.
Saturday: We got kind of a late start heading into the city because Z was busy with mandatory errandage and I occupied myself buying awesome sunglasses that I figured I might need, on account of not actually owning shades until then. Yeah, a Californian without sunglasses. Still 20/20 somehow. It's mostly because I keep losing them. Anyway, I did actually wind up wearing them at night because it was the easiest way to... well, uh, not lose them, as they kept trying to escape from my shirt, and looked like I was concealing a black eye or else like an enormous douche. Which is, incidentally, also what you sound like when you open a log ostensibly of NYC Pride with a paragraph about your new sunglasses, so I am going to move on now.
We took the train into Manhattan -- Penn Station was Z's first glimpse of New York City, ever. I think the Penn Station women's room might have actually been one of her first glimpses of New York City. My first glimpse of New York City this time was popping my rainbow dogtag out and immediately getting hit on by a creep outside the Penn Station women's room. So yes, obviously this was her first time visiting any of it, which was pretty cool and would have been cooler if we were capable of following Broadway without wandering off. Broadway is the world's most fucking evasive street. It was trying to elude us. Anyway, all we did was walk around Manhattan a little (I insisted on a nighttime glimpse of Times Square for her, thinking we might wrap up too early for that on Sunday -- ahaha, ahahaha), which didn't seem like a little, but was a little in retrospect, I took her to the Peking Duck House in Chinatown, and we dragged ourselves to the Path train to our Newark hotel. That Ramada Inn had literally the worst beds I have ever slept in, including my dorm room in Cockroach Hall and the various Best Western bedsrelia and I sampled on our way cross-country, but Z seemed okay with it. However, the ice machine wasn't working and neither was the hot water after she was done with it. Maybe it's her fault. Yes, I blame Calamity Z. I have never traveled with her before.
There was also the part waiting for the train from Journal Square to Newark where I first got sleepily obsessed with concrete support beams, then sleepily hysterical, and then just started cackling maniacally like Medic in a lot of pain. But I absolutely never develop a monomania for inane subjects, and I definitely have never cackled in pain or despair, so that was certainly Z's fault also. I give her one star on Expedia, for bad luck*.
Sunday: Technically it had become Sunday long before we got to the Ramada Inn, and a while before the cackling. But anyway, we dragged ourselves out of bed in time to check out and walk to the nearest Path station and hie ourselves through choking masses of fellow queers on the train back to Penn Station. This was the charming point of queer saturation. Everyone was loud, rainbow-emblazoned, and leading rounds of "If you're gay and you know it, clap your hands!" We met a charming babygay couple who had to have been in high school or something, but lost the boys as soon as we got to NYC. Oh well. They probably lived. We ate at a cute Village coffeeshop then set out to find a good parade viewing spot somewhere in the Village, on foot -- which we eventually did, but, okay, I need to make a few comments on this parade.
First, a study in text messages I sent torelia, time-lapsed:
12:37PM: I've never seen so many queers in one place!
8:37PM: We have actually gotten sick of other gay people.
The best, least populated spot we could find in the area was a number of rows back shoved up against the window of an oyster bar, next to a potted plant people kept trying to stand on. We could see the floats and hear the music fine, but couldn't see any of the marchers on foot, which was frustrating. We also stood there for about three-and-a-half hours before finally deciding to give up on watching the entire parade, which while charming and over-the-top and full of attractive people and the Episcopalian Church playing "It's Raining Men," was still going strong five hours in. Also, I heard only two Village People renditions, which was distressing. ("This is the parade that never ends." "Yes, it goes on and on, my friends." "Some people started marching in it not knowing what it was!") Escaping the parade turned out to be sort of an Escape from Greenwich Village endeavor, though, kind of post-apocalyptic and terrifying and only a thin blue line of NYPD really prevented us from all trampling each other to death, but eventually we managed to caulk our wagon and ford the parade somehow -- in time enough to reach a Village art theater so we could see Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which Z had enlisted me to see with her in NYC as part of our plans and we were planning on seeing on Saturday night but for how atrociously late we got there.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams was... weird. Really weird. Admittedly, anything will be weird if you're using it as a much-needed rest for your feet in a darkened theater with 3D glasses after 4+ hours without sitting down, but I am pretty sure that film would've been weird regardless. It concerns the Chauvet Cave and the paintings inside of it, which are pretty spectacular and haunting in and of themselves, I must say, and I do think the 3D added something to the viewer's ability to perceive the space -- the space itself being so integral to the documentary, giving it a strange House of Leaves 5 1/2-minute hallway feeling sometimes, particularly in the long panning shots of the interior with nothing but silence and strange music and chanting for accompaniment. Actually, if there's not already a speculative-fiction House of Leaves-esque story about the Chauvet Cave, I've sort of been of a mind to write one after watching that film. Which, I think, means that Werner Herzog must have accomplished at least one thing. Anyway, archaeology before recorded language and writing is not really one of my primary historical interests, but it's a fascinating subject anyway and getting to hear archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians speak on the subject of the Chauvet Cave (particularly among the limited team allowed to work there) made it more so. Scientists are kind of naturally charming when they're talking about their own fields, anyway, and these no exception. There was also some lovely and haunting footage of the Ardèche and the Pont d'Arc. The postscript was a complete non sequitur involving a rainforest biosphere nearby constructed using warm water from a nuclear plant, and the albino alligators that mutate there, which -- ... well, albino alligators are really cute, so who cares.
So right. After the film. After the film I think we went... walkabout some more, and actually, I'm grossly underrepresenting the degree of walkabout that this weekend involved because I'm not sure how to describe it without starting to sound like The Fellowship of the Ring. The only cab we took was from the Newark train station to the Ramada Inn the previous night, though -- the rest was walking. We did a lot of walking. We did. A lot. Of walking. We did a lot of standing also. Together, we did a lot of standing and walking. My legs had the grace to make it through this without a hitch, but the skin on my feet didn't -- I had bloody blisters by the time we got to Times Square the second time, stopped at a pharmacy for Band-Aids, and carried on attempting to limp on both feet, which works better than it sounds but makes you look like you have a really fun love life. The Band-Aids only did so much, anyway: when I got back home much later that night I took off my socks to find they were both painted with streaks of blood from new blisters. Z wasn't faring too well either by this point, so we constrained the rest of her first-time New York tourism to taking her to an Italian restaurant by Central Park that I like and taking a walk through Times Square to Penn Station again. She took a few pictures of the rainbow-lit-up Empire State Building to send her parents back in Arizona and we planned to go back so she could have her first taste of the Met and getting lost in Central Park in the daytime, but later. The train home was blissfully empty, aside from more of my delirious cackling. The drive home we discovered we like a lot of the same music, she crashed in the guest bedroom, and I had too much exhausted adrenaline to sleep and stayed up making My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic versions of my characters on DeviantArt.
And that was hardly about Pride at all, was it? I don't know how you describe New York City, though, or how one describes New York City at all, especially after you've been there too many times to compare it to things. So I guess I wasn't sure where to work in the funny pretentious cold-chocolate cafe with the honey bread, or the parts of the city that stank, or the parts of the city that had really classy bathrooms that we used, or the shop that sold a porn rag called "Buttman," or all my romantical stories aboutrelia involving the TKTS booth and the Times Square Applebees, or how much agony our feet were in, but then again I guess I just did.
And as for the parade: the first post I made about it, when I got home, was an honest one; I'm glad for my sunglasses. Cool guys don't look at explosions. But while we're talking about not crying behind them or anything and things I couldn't possibly have teared up at -- I didn't-tear-up at the beginning at all the signs thanking Governor Cuomo, and I-didn't-tear-up really hard at the tiny contingent of people honoring Harvey Milk. And every time I saw the Stonewall Pl streetsign a handful of yards away from us.
All in all: an insane, enormous celebration, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and I think I'll give my feet some time to heal before I next go a-wandering with Z. But I'm looking forward.
I know marriage equality is the first yellow brick on our road, and that there are a lot of us the mainstream political gay rights movement have thrown under the bus or sold out straight-up for the holy grail of marriage equality. It's no unqualified We Did It!. But I also know that -- standing in the Village not far from the Stonewall Inn -- the streets hold the blood of many boys and girls who shed it and because of them, a boy and a girl could stand there in 2011 and complain about people trying to stand on a potted plant, and know for just one day of the year that it would be the straight bullies who were afraid right now of us. And for that I have to say thank you. Thank you, everyone from Stonewall, and thank you for fighting the fight that I'm young enough to benefit from. I don't know what else to say. I don't have my sunglasses on.
prodigy and thez version. I'm appropriating thez until she writes her own version.Saturday: We got kind of a late start heading into the city because Z was busy with mandatory errandage and I occupied myself buying awesome sunglasses that I figured I might need, on account of not actually owning shades until then. Yeah, a Californian without sunglasses. Still 20/20 somehow. It's mostly because I keep losing them. Anyway, I did actually wind up wearing them at night because it was the easiest way to... well, uh, not lose them, as they kept trying to escape from my shirt, and looked like I was concealing a black eye or else like an enormous douche. Which is, incidentally, also what you sound like when you open a log ostensibly of NYC Pride with a paragraph about your new sunglasses, so I am going to move on now.
We took the train into Manhattan -- Penn Station was Z's first glimpse of New York City, ever. I think the Penn Station women's room might have actually been one of her first glimpses of New York City. My first glimpse of New York City this time was popping my rainbow dogtag out and immediately getting hit on by a creep outside the Penn Station women's room. So yes, obviously this was her first time visiting any of it, which was pretty cool and would have been cooler if we were capable of following Broadway without wandering off. Broadway is the world's most fucking evasive street. It was trying to elude us. Anyway, all we did was walk around Manhattan a little (I insisted on a nighttime glimpse of Times Square for her, thinking we might wrap up too early for that on Sunday -- ahaha, ahahaha), which didn't seem like a little, but was a little in retrospect, I took her to the Peking Duck House in Chinatown, and we dragged ourselves to the Path train to our Newark hotel. That Ramada Inn had literally the worst beds I have ever slept in, including my dorm room in Cockroach Hall and the various Best Western beds
relia and I sampled on our way cross-country, but Z seemed okay with it. However, the ice machine wasn't working and neither was the hot water after she was done with it. Maybe it's her fault. Yes, I blame Calamity Z. I have never traveled with her before.There was also the part waiting for the train from Journal Square to Newark where I first got sleepily obsessed with concrete support beams, then sleepily hysterical, and then just started cackling maniacally like Medic in a lot of pain. But I absolutely never develop a monomania for inane subjects, and I definitely have never cackled in pain or despair, so that was certainly Z's fault also. I give her one star on Expedia, for bad luck*.
Sunday: Technically it had become Sunday long before we got to the Ramada Inn, and a while before the cackling. But anyway, we dragged ourselves out of bed in time to check out and walk to the nearest Path station and hie ourselves through choking masses of fellow queers on the train back to Penn Station. This was the charming point of queer saturation. Everyone was loud, rainbow-emblazoned, and leading rounds of "If you're gay and you know it, clap your hands!" We met a charming babygay couple who had to have been in high school or something, but lost the boys as soon as we got to NYC. Oh well. They probably lived. We ate at a cute Village coffeeshop then set out to find a good parade viewing spot somewhere in the Village, on foot -- which we eventually did, but, okay, I need to make a few comments on this parade.
First, a study in text messages I sent to
relia, time-lapsed:12:37PM: I've never seen so many queers in one place!
8:37PM: We have actually gotten sick of other gay people.
The best, least populated spot we could find in the area was a number of rows back shoved up against the window of an oyster bar, next to a potted plant people kept trying to stand on. We could see the floats and hear the music fine, but couldn't see any of the marchers on foot, which was frustrating. We also stood there for about three-and-a-half hours before finally deciding to give up on watching the entire parade, which while charming and over-the-top and full of attractive people and the Episcopalian Church playing "It's Raining Men," was still going strong five hours in. Also, I heard only two Village People renditions, which was distressing. ("This is the parade that never ends." "Yes, it goes on and on, my friends." "Some people started marching in it not knowing what it was!") Escaping the parade turned out to be sort of an Escape from Greenwich Village endeavor, though, kind of post-apocalyptic and terrifying and only a thin blue line of NYPD really prevented us from all trampling each other to death, but eventually we managed to caulk our wagon and ford the parade somehow -- in time enough to reach a Village art theater so we could see Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which Z had enlisted me to see with her in NYC as part of our plans and we were planning on seeing on Saturday night but for how atrociously late we got there.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams was... weird. Really weird. Admittedly, anything will be weird if you're using it as a much-needed rest for your feet in a darkened theater with 3D glasses after 4+ hours without sitting down, but I am pretty sure that film would've been weird regardless. It concerns the Chauvet Cave and the paintings inside of it, which are pretty spectacular and haunting in and of themselves, I must say, and I do think the 3D added something to the viewer's ability to perceive the space -- the space itself being so integral to the documentary, giving it a strange House of Leaves 5 1/2-minute hallway feeling sometimes, particularly in the long panning shots of the interior with nothing but silence and strange music and chanting for accompaniment. Actually, if there's not already a speculative-fiction House of Leaves-esque story about the Chauvet Cave, I've sort of been of a mind to write one after watching that film. Which, I think, means that Werner Herzog must have accomplished at least one thing. Anyway, archaeology before recorded language and writing is not really one of my primary historical interests, but it's a fascinating subject anyway and getting to hear archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians speak on the subject of the Chauvet Cave (particularly among the limited team allowed to work there) made it more so. Scientists are kind of naturally charming when they're talking about their own fields, anyway, and these no exception. There was also some lovely and haunting footage of the Ardèche and the Pont d'Arc. The postscript was a complete non sequitur involving a rainforest biosphere nearby constructed using warm water from a nuclear plant, and the albino alligators that mutate there, which -- ... well, albino alligators are really cute, so who cares.
So right. After the film. After the film I think we went... walkabout some more, and actually, I'm grossly underrepresenting the degree of walkabout that this weekend involved because I'm not sure how to describe it without starting to sound like The Fellowship of the Ring. The only cab we took was from the Newark train station to the Ramada Inn the previous night, though -- the rest was walking. We did a lot of walking. We did. A lot. Of walking. We did a lot of standing also. Together, we did a lot of standing and walking. My legs had the grace to make it through this without a hitch, but the skin on my feet didn't -- I had bloody blisters by the time we got to Times Square the second time, stopped at a pharmacy for Band-Aids, and carried on attempting to limp on both feet, which works better than it sounds but makes you look like you have a really fun love life. The Band-Aids only did so much, anyway: when I got back home much later that night I took off my socks to find they were both painted with streaks of blood from new blisters. Z wasn't faring too well either by this point, so we constrained the rest of her first-time New York tourism to taking her to an Italian restaurant by Central Park that I like and taking a walk through Times Square to Penn Station again. She took a few pictures of the rainbow-lit-up Empire State Building to send her parents back in Arizona and we planned to go back so she could have her first taste of the Met and getting lost in Central Park in the daytime, but later. The train home was blissfully empty, aside from more of my delirious cackling. The drive home we discovered we like a lot of the same music, she crashed in the guest bedroom, and I had too much exhausted adrenaline to sleep and stayed up making My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic versions of my characters on DeviantArt.
And that was hardly about Pride at all, was it? I don't know how you describe New York City, though, or how one describes New York City at all, especially after you've been there too many times to compare it to things. So I guess I wasn't sure where to work in the funny pretentious cold-chocolate cafe with the honey bread, or the parts of the city that stank, or the parts of the city that had really classy bathrooms that we used, or the shop that sold a porn rag called "Buttman," or all my romantical stories about
relia involving the TKTS booth and the Times Square Applebees, or how much agony our feet were in, but then again I guess I just did.And as for the parade: the first post I made about it, when I got home, was an honest one; I'm glad for my sunglasses. Cool guys don't look at explosions. But while we're talking about not crying behind them or anything and things I couldn't possibly have teared up at -- I didn't-tear-up at the beginning at all the signs thanking Governor Cuomo, and I-didn't-tear-up really hard at the tiny contingent of people honoring Harvey Milk. And every time I saw the Stonewall Pl streetsign a handful of yards away from us.
All in all: an insane, enormous celebration, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and I think I'll give my feet some time to heal before I next go a-wandering with Z. But I'm looking forward.
I know marriage equality is the first yellow brick on our road, and that there are a lot of us the mainstream political gay rights movement have thrown under the bus or sold out straight-up for the holy grail of marriage equality. It's no unqualified We Did It!. But I also know that -- standing in the Village not far from the Stonewall Inn -- the streets hold the blood of many boys and girls who shed it and because of them, a boy and a girl could stand there in 2011 and complain about people trying to stand on a potted plant, and know for just one day of the year that it would be the straight bullies who were afraid right now of us. And for that I have to say thank you. Thank you, everyone from Stonewall, and thank you for fighting the fight that I'm young enough to benefit from. I don't know what else to say. I don't have my sunglasses on.
no subject
Gabe: "No."