Florent.

If you have never lived in New York, you may not be familiar with Florent. It was a 24-hour diner in the Meatpacking District, founded in 1985, that had to close a few years ago because of a rent hike. New York Magazine ran a lovely homage to the restaurant when they heard the news. Florent was a New York institution, and when its biggest fans found out about its fate, things started disappearing.

Florent has a fervid following that includes (but is not limited to) neighborhood stalwarts, fashion icons, queer activists, famous drag performers, eccentric night owls, club kids, the offspring of club kids, maverick politicians, burlesque dancers, and celebrities ranging from Lou Reed to Sarah Jessica Parker—some of whom, after learning of the restaurant’s impending closure, have developed a nostalgia-induced kleptomania. “The menus, they have started vanishing!” continued Morellet. Wine lists, saucers, coffee cups, cloth napkins, and silverware have also gone missing in recent weeks.

I guess I was no different, but I took something that patrons are expected to snatch as souvenirs at all kinds of venues – matchbooks. They had different illustrations of diner objects on them – a salt shaker, a fork – and each featured a shade of (what I, perhaps inaccurately, remember to be) Florent's signature shade of green on the inside. I took three different ones with me the last time I ever visited the restaurant, intent on memorializing them in some way.

And then, in the confusion of re-organizing during my last move… they disappeared. That is, until the frenzy of making things hit me – I was digging deep in my closet this morning to find acrylic paint, and grabbed a plastic container wondering why the heck I had held onto it. I felt something shake inside. And there they were. I tore into my Florent-green paper, found an empty frame, and now I have a new little friend in my kitchen – one that makes me pause and imagine countless Saturday and Sunday dawns in the 1990s, with gold glitter heels under metal tables, false eyelashes falling into coffee, and cigarette butts strewn into ditches among cobblestones.

Do read the New York Magazine article, regardless of where you live. It's a beautiful time capsule.

Spring/summer 2006 journal

I grabbed this from my bookcase last night; I was bored and wanted to read something. I didn't know until I started reading it that it's my journal from spring /summer 2006.


There is some work in there from my final semester @ Adcenter, stuff I was thinking about, notes from my interview at Naked and other things. It was so fun to read; I scanned a few of the things in there this morning. Here are a few...

When I was brainstorming for this blog! My anonymous commenter will just love that I wrote "richness" on this page.

I didn't write down who said this... hilarious.

Scare yourself once a week; I loved hearing that. I think this was at the planning conference in Miami that year.


It's like opening little time capsules of your thoughts, going through old journals like this. If anybody is inclined to do the same thing (flip through & scan), I'd love to see.

Magneto

I am about to share something very embarrassing. I wasn't going to post today because I would have been making stuff up, and a couple of really cool things are happening this week so I was going to wait for those. Sanithna (happy birthday!) reminded me of this today though, and I think I have to share. Even though it is very, very embarrassing.

When I was 7 or 8 years-old, my favorite song for about 2 months was called Vuela, Vuela by a boy band called Magneto. I guess they were the other version of Menudo or something. I just searched the video, and well... here it is.


Seeing those dance moves and picturing myself being enamored by these guys in my silly youth... well, I hit the ceiling. About once a week something happens that makes me laugh so hard tears stream down my face. This was this week's. Last week it happened twice though (once because of this and once because of a patio furniture incident).

So, I wonder if these dance moves could ever be brought back. Fashion seems to cycle around a lot but I don't know if there is any hope for this Vuela, Vuela material. anyone?

Army of Lovers

I will wait until I return from South America to talk about it; I want to include photos with stories, and my camera cable is at home. But anyway, hello from São Paulo!

I've been in such a good mood here in Brazil that I wanted to surround myself with more related stimuli last night. I remembered watching this video all the time when I was eight or nine years old:


Isn't that cute? I fell asleep with that playing last night.

Onto my point. I then started thinking about all the other videos I had seen when I was that age. All I watched on television in Puerto Rico at that time was a channel called The Box. I have no clue if they had it in the U.S. or not. It was a music video channel where everyone voted by telephone on what would play next. While videos played, you would see the three competing videos on the side, with their vote scores tallying up in real time. It was so exciting for me. I don't think I was ever allowed to vote, but I used to cheer on my favorite videos (usually either R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion or Guns N Roses' Don't Cry) and guess what the winning video would be.

At one point, these videos by a band called Army of Lovers played all the time. People kept voting for them. I had forgotten all about Army of Lovers until the name popped into my head this morning. I remembered enough to search for the two videos I would see all the time, Crucify and Obsession. I found both on YouTube, thank goodness. I started watching them and couldn't stop giggling at how ridiculous they were. catchy, but ridiculous.


The first thing I thought was that the girl in this video looks a lot like this underage go go dancer I see at dance parties in NY all the time. I then thought to myself, "This is what I watched when I was eight years old?"

So, I am curious. Does anybody else remember this band? I looked them up on Wikipedia and read that some of their videos were banned on MTV (but that they were quite big in Europe for a couple of years). Anybody? Ha, I can't stop watching these. They're great.