AatomBomb

RoccoInRepose

GratuitousPuppyShot

TurnsOutPuertoRicoIsn'tJustForPorn

It's been a long holiday season here at Casa d'Aatom. I left my day job after six years to pursue something that might actually make me happy once in a while. Turns out advertising sales is no fun at all unless you really enjoy the thrill of it. And even then you end up bitter, botoxed, and incapable of leaving a building without an assistant's help. So I am a free agent. I have enough money to last a few more months, and I'm hunting for someone who wants to give this budding genius a chance at writing copy. I just want to love my job, is that so wrong?

I took the boyfriend home for Christmas, where he gained a more complete understanding of what functional alcoholism means. Then it was off to Puerto Rico to celebrate New Year's Eve. After American Airlines fucked us all day getting there (our three hour flight turned into a twelve hour ordeal that involved both Newark and JFK, and then they informed us curtly that they "don't do pillows anymore"), we finally got to San Juan just in time for an over-priced dinner at the New York steak house in our hotel.

Everyone assured us that the place to be for the best New Year's party was the El San Juan hotel. It is a beautiful historic hotel, worth the price of admission for the lobby chandelier alone, but unfortunately the open bar was in the little nightclub at the hotel. Let's just say we could have gone to Hoboken and seen the exact same crowd. So we rang in the Puerto Rican New Year surrounded by low-cut black dresses and bad heels, gulping down free cocktails. Then we adjourned to the glamorous lobby to ring in the New York New Year (which happened one hour later) with the older casino crowd.

The rest of the week was pure bliss. San Juan is gorgeous, and the amount of construction was staggering. $1.5M apartment buildings spring up just as quickly there as they do here, and they are infinitely more interesting architecturally. Ashford Avenue in the Condado neighborhood is a luxury mecca, no need to shop online for Chanel pumps there. Our hotel, a redesigned Wyndham now called the Condado Plaza, had a bar in one of the pools, seen above. That's pretty much all I need to relax. A trip to the nasty local gay bar (where they drink a hideous concoction of rum and fruit juice called Gasolina out of foil pouches), a wonderful tour of El Yunque rain forest, and a strange night getting lost in Old San Juan rounded out the week. The best part was relaxing by the pools with my lovely boyfriend, drinking and soaking up the sun.

So now we're back, and I have been working on closing the next issues of movmnt and noiZe. I'm procrastinating my noiZe work as we speak! We hired a new hot-shot editor-in-chief, Steve Weinstein, an amazing writer and editor from what I can tell so far. I'm taking a course downtown in Ad Copywriting, and hope to land a job in the next several weeks.

As for blogging? Well, I never know when the mood will strike me. But I do have several loyal readers who make me feel guilty for not posting more often, so stay tuned...

Here's a pic I took from the rain forest, on a clear day you can see St. Thomas on the right:

Porn Godfather Michael Lucas, at the Ascension beach party, Fire Island Pines

TheViewFromMyWindow

I don't know what posessed me to send this pic taken from my bedroom window to Andrew Sulllivan, but he posted it. Although clearly I don't live in New York, as he titled it, since it is a picture of the city from NJ. I love this time of the day, when the sun hits that midtown building just right for about 10 minutes. It's actually much more dramatic in real life.

noiZe#2:TheFlamingBuckNakedPornIssue

Our spotlight for the second issue of noiZe will be Fire Island, the scrappy little sandbar that houses many of the A and B list gay celebrities of New York during the summer.  We did a marathon of interviews with figures like Buck Angel, Peter Rauhofer, Colton Ford, Babylon tour promoter Adam Gill, and circuit performers/decorators RKM. Pick up a copy to try to figure out which ones we were the most drunk for!

The Pines is a very special place to me, I wrote about it once before when we were still known as Circuit Noize.  Yes, momo, I love Fire Island and know how to spell Madonna's last name, fuck you very much.  I guess I'm just a little tired of trying to be astereotypical and ironic all the time.

Here's a snippet of how I feel about my summer home:

Fire Island allows you to experience it in a multitude of ways, depending on where your head is at and what you are trying to get out of it.  For many, it is merely a scenic place to strip down to party and play like it’s going out of style.  For others, especially the long-time residents, it is a very real community of artists, designers, politicians, activists and others who have called this bohemian haven home every summer for several decades or more.  If you are lucky or smart enough to tap into this side of the island, you will discover a form of gay life that is difficult to find in bars or online.  The rich mingle freely with the not-so-rich and all pretension is left in Sayville.  I have had the honor to meet some of the more fascinating members of our community, usually while doing the mundane tasks and activities that a summer retreat demands, like shopping at The Pantry or wandering aimlessly on the beach.  Even the notorious Meat Rack, an idyllic network of wooded paths between the Pines and Cherry Grove where boys gawk and fondle one another, resists the sinister implications of its name.  It’s hard for anyone to maintain an urban scowl in the midst of a place so innocent and beautiful.

RockOn

I am retarded for the sitcom 30 Rock.  When it debuted, I absorbed the first several episodes with a religious fervor, mostly because I work across the street, and even after a decade of living in the center of the universe I still get a provincial rush when I see my world on TV.  Strangely enough, I got the same rush even when I lived in Virginia, watching Letterman.  Like the transgendered, I knew I was born into the wrong casing, and yearned to finally return home to a place I only really knew through a series of Top Ten lists. 

After the third episode, I was hooked for a different reason.  This shit was good.  Tightly written in the trendy reality-esque style that was taken to illogical extremes by Larry David, this meta-meta comedy about the life of a remarkable, scrappy writer named Tina Lemon not only entertained in a major way, it resonated quite loudly for anyone who lives The Life in midtown, and I would imagine even outside the confines of our insular universe that trounces through the global landscape like a self-absorbed Godzilla.  Kenneth the NBC page is reason enough to watch.

So, it is rather exciting to see that they have been picked up for a second season, because the show just keeps getting better.  It's no surprise to me that the ratings story is rather weak, even devoted fans like me are downloading it on iTunes.  It's a good sign that the Donaghy's of the world are finally starting to see past the raw numbers to champion a bit of quality in a world that could sorely use a little.  And is it just me, or has Alec Baldwin made a giant creative leap forward, in a medium that is more commonly known for nursing has-beens? 

BuckingConvention

I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of the Black Party docudrama Schwarzwald - Rites XXVII last night at The Box.  I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable evenings I've had in a long while, for several reasons aside from the free vodka. 

As my boyfriend and I arrived at The Box, I recognized the face of Joe from Joe.My.God waiting outside for the Manhattan Offender.  I'd never had the pleasure of meeting Joe in person, but I recently used his formidable writing skills for the launch of noiZe, so I introduced myself and we ended up chatting for much of the evening.  We all swapped wacky backroom stories, and momo from Manhattan Offender turned out to be as witty and amusing as I expected.  Joe had the best stories of course, the man is a wealth of anecdotal information. 

The star of the evening, though, was Buck Angel, the female-to-male transsexual porn star who has been making a big splash recently.  It's hard to ignore "The Man With A Pussy", as his business card delicately puts it.  He turned out to be one of the sweetest and most interesting people I've met, and we ended up talking with him until one in the morning.  My boyfriend is absolutely fascinated, and is already planning a trip to Mexico for us to visit Buck, who actually put his money where his mouth was when Bush was elected and moved out of the country.  Take that, you Hollywood pussies!  The courage of his convictions is something that Mr. Angel is certainly not lacking. 

The movie was decent for an indie film about a circuit party.  The best parts were the footage of the party itself, interspersed with a nonsensical pagan storyline that occurs in the woods, amusingly accompanied by peppy disco tracks most of the time.  Buck was strangely adorable throughout, looking surprisingly innocent for a muscular bald man with tattoos and a vagina.  He told us after how fascinated gay men were with him, to the point of almost being gang-raped on the floor of the Black Party one year.  Men, as it turns out, are indeed pigs.  Joe summed it up nicely.  He said imagine a room full of the most hardcore sex freaks in the city, men who make a regular habit out of practices such as fisting and bloodletting (the bloodletting scene of the movie was by far the most disturbing - and kind of hot in a wrong wrong wrong way) and then put Buck onstage wearing nothing more than thigh-high leather boots.  It's the one perversion none of them have ever experienced before, and it drives them crazy.  That might help explain why Buck no longer goes on the main dance floor alone anymore. 

All in all, a fabulous evening.  I'm still working off a bit of a hangover (no more gin on long nights. Just no.) but it made me blog again so it must have been pretty fucking special.

Here's a pic of Buck and my angel of a boyfriend:

Aww.

AatomicPortrait

SophiaLamar@DixonPlace