emilyrems.com

Crime Scene Tape, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

Here’s the thing with the show Law & Order. Granted, it’s rad, it’s been on forever, and if you live in New York, you’ve probably seen at least one or two of your starving artist friends traipsing through the background as extras. All these factors make the show a local obsession, but since it became ubiquitous on basic cable and every episode ever became available on Netflix, the program’s ability to infiltrate our collective unconscious has become a little too intense.

Example #1: While I was sitting in Cafe Deville with my parents, I overheard the following convo:

Young corporate go-getter-girl A - “So, did he ever call?”
Young corporate go-getter-girl B - “Yeah”
Young corporate go-getter-girl A - “So what did he have to say?”
Young corporate go-getter-girl B - “I don’t know. Law & Order was on so I didn’t pick up the phone.

Example #2: Last night LCF was working late and I was out late myself with the gals from work. Got home kinda drunk around midnight and was surprised to find that he wasn’t home, I tried calling him but couldn’t reach him. So I spent the next three hours attempting to fend off the feeling that I was the East Village chick at the beginning of the episode. The one sitting in her apartment, blithely unaware of the tragic events that were about to be revealed to her by two hard-bitten cops with a penchant for inappropriate death jokes. Except I wasn’t blithely unaware. Every Law & Order episode I’ve ever watched has made me acutely aware that urban danger lurks behind EVERY CORNER, ALL THE TIME, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE OR WHERE YOU LIVE. So I was sitting there on my couch last night, drunk and freaking out for hours, waiting for my own ominous episode to begin. I was just getting ready to put my boots on and head back out onto the treacherous city streets to search for my beloved when he walked in the door, sipping a giant Dunkin’ Donuts smoothie. Of course I felt like an A-hole. He TOLD me he was going to be working late, he doesn’t have a cell phone, and the job kept him too busy to call.

In the end, I suppose I could blame my own multiple neuroses for this little spazz attack, but instead I think I’d rather blame the media. Fuck you Law & Order. I’d like to rip you a new headline.

Trader Hoes, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

The only Trader Joe’s on the whole fair isle of Manhattan is a scant block from my apartment, but the crowds inside are so completely aggro, it takes a concentrated force of will to compel me to partake in their bargain basement organic goodies. Entering the store requires the same kind of preparations I would make before getting in a mosh pit. I have to wear boots because my feet always get squashed under the feet and wheels of frenzied shoppers and their carts. I have to steel my will and remind myself that if someone pushes me, I must push back harder. I have to look for gaps in the angry mob, and wait for just the exact right moment to dive in and grab the Odwalla Summertime Lime. and then I must wait on an endless line that makes the Trail of Tears look like an expressway, all the while reminding myself that the fights breaking out between sneaky place-in-line holders and people who have taken it upon themselves to deliver unto all perceived line cutters the most viscious kind of gang justice counts as the floorshow. Yesterday on line, as I was getting towards the home stretch by the cereal, I felt hot breath on my neck before a deep voice started muttering in my ear “This stuff is cheap, but where are the fruity pebbles? Where’s the Cap’n Crunch?” I turned around to see an older, well-dressed gentleman grinning very close behind me. “This stuff looks like Colon Blow…” he continued, in a shocking display of arcane ’80s-era SNL quotational ability. It was here that I made a run for the next available register. Is it worth it? I dunno - that Summertime Lime is pretty fucking good.

Dirty Found #2, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

So, here’s the story. Like, a million years ago (OK more like three) a craaaazay teen girl started IMing my boss because she thought my boss was her BF Kyle. Even though my boss kept IMing her back telling her she was making a mistake, the girl kept being all like “shut up Kyle, I know it’s you” and kept sending my boss increasingly freaky/dirty/scary messages for a couple of days. These IMs were too insane and amazing not to share, so our whole office quickly became obsessed with them, and in my infinite wisdom I sent them off to FOUND magazine and then promptly forgot all about ‘em. Now, three years later, I get an email this morning from the adorable Jason Bitner of FOUND, who has since started a lascivious sister publication called Dirty FOUND, devoted to the seedier side of found correspondence. He says he wants to put the IMs I sent him in the upcoming Dirty FOUND #3! Which totes rules! Hooray! I’m not gonna jump the gun by copying all the awesomeness here, you’ll have to snag the mag for that, but here’s a little taste…

From:
To:
Subject: (no subject)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 16:02:12 -0800 Hey Babe,
Y the hell is u ignorin me? Is u wantin 2 break up wit me o
somethin? I sure hope u is just tired cuz ure really pissin me
off. I really want u 2 come over so than u can c me room n all.
I bought these really cute G’s and Thongs lyke 12 ov m n u shud c
them. R u really the type of guy that i can give a blowjob 2 n
we’s can Fuck or r u just sayin that? well em me bak k sexy o n u
cudnt look ugly even if u tried so trust me u’ll still be the
sexiest guy n skool. Love u lots and c/m

Love Tiff

You can try to tell me that didn’t rule, but I’ll just stare you down and call you a liar, because you so know it does.

Errin, Emily, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

The Spiegeltent gig was packed with cheering fans and amazing lady musicians. LCF snapped the picture above a split second before I smashed the cymbal for the last time on our Ma Rainey cover “Hear Me Talking To Ya” (note the sweaty-sweatband) and minutes before I shakily left the stage and scurried out of the tent and into the beer garden to quietly freak out by the water. I dunno what’s wrong with me, but leaving the stage feels like leaving a car accident. I’m shaken and blinded by the light and panic stricken and possessed by the urge to run far, far away. Then once the endorphins start to wear off, my head begins to pound, and sweat just pours off me and I feel like I’m going to puke or faint or possibly both. This has happened evey time I’ve performed with the band, and I don’t know if there’s any way to make it stop other than to keep doing it until it doesn’t scare the hell out of me anymore. Now that’s it’s over (until next time) , I’m definitely proud and happy we got to play at such a prestigeous event, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be one of those musicians who “lives to rock in front of a crowd.” Even though in this case, the crowd included sweet rad friends who came out to support us, like fellow campers from Ladies Rock Camp, and Jennigirl, and Anya, and drum teacher Caryn, and all the assorted Royal Pink boyfriends. Ahhh, wouldn’t it be grand to be a rock star from the comfort of Errin’s living room? We could send out engraved “Invitations to Rock” to a select few people at a time, and they could call on us, and then we could play a short set and then serve finger sandwiches or whatevs. How civilized!

Discard Your Star, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I totes blew off Rosh Hashannah this weekend to get over being sick and to practice my ass off for the big spiegeltent benefit tonight. Now not only am I nervous, nervous, nervous, but I’m also paranoid that my angry old testament G-d is gonna make me drop my sticks or blank on my transitions, or maybs just forget to write my name in the book of life, causing me to perish whilst on stage. Just goes to show, you can take the girl out the high holy days, but you can’t take the jewish guilt/fear/paranoia out of the grrrl.

P.S. I took this picture in a bathroom stall at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Times Square. This is the info-graphic handily emblazoned upon the little box affixed to the stall wall to alert ladies where to dispose of their bloody pads. But seriously, doesn’t it look like a tacit command to throw your Star of David in the trash? Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get me.

ampitheatre madness, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

My guts are twisted into an icky, burning, pile ‘o’ bile today, so I have chosen to zone out momentarily on this picture I took last weekend. LCF and I were having an epic walkabout and ended up at this weird outdoor ampitheatre on 11th ave over by the Javitz Center. The sun was just fixin’ to set when we stumbled upon this fashion photo shoot. As the model posed and looked bored and aloof in the background, a gang of three hottt BMX kids started doing mad tricks off the stairs. It was pretty rad. Looking at this picture makes me feel oddly chill, like I’m remembering a vacation or something. The whole scene just had a really foreign quality. So many worlds are crammed onto this tiny island, careening past each other, and occasionally popping wheelies.

Public Comfort, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

The weather has been so freaking beautiful this week, it’s hard to do much of anything besides maxin’ and relaxin’ in da park once the work day is done. Washington, Central, Union, Tompkins, LCF and I have been hitting them all. As one can clearly observe in my stealthily snapped photo above, Union Square is especially comfy right now. Maybe too comfy…

Ottos, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

Yeah. Hell yeah. The big news of the day is that Royal Pink will be headlining a super-fine benefit for Alison Duncan’s Green Party campaign for Lt. Governor. Where you ask? Otto’s Shrunken Head aka the coolest bar in the universe, 538 East 14th St. (between Aves A and B) NYC. When you ask? October 12th, from 6:30 to 9:30. Who you ask? Royal Pink, Lucien Kiiva, Drunky Brewster and more, plus of course, some inspiring remarks from Alison. How much you ask? $10 gets you all the rock and roll thunder a human can endure.

Dudes, this is going to be the first time Royal Pink will be trotting out a full set of brand new songs in public. I can’t wait. Seriously. OMG. Plus, Rock Camp drum goddess Caryn is going to be my percussive Mr. Miyagi starting next week so watch out! I might just rock your world someday soon…

Em ‘n’ Han ‘n’ Alex, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I know every season is touted as party-time in NYC, but I like the fall best as far as socializing is concerned. Everyone has just come back from their far-flung summer retreats and people start reconnecting again all fresh-faced and full of sun-drenched stories. Last weekend I went to CT for Han’s baby shower and got to hang with Han and our childhood chum Alex (There we are above). Many other rad peeps who Han knows from MA were there too, and plenty of fun was had by all until a freak tractor trailer accident paired with a sudden torrential rainstorm to thwart all attempts to leave for hours. Then on Monday, there was a big dinner in Queens to celebrate the six year anniversary of Michael and Will’s move to NY, so I got to slurp mighty margaritas with LCF, Alpha, Jeanette, her hubby, Michael, Craig, Alan and Will at the aptly named Los Amigos. Then yesterday, after voting, I was tearfully reunited with Brandy at Otto’s Shrunken Head where she was hosting a weird-ass movie night. The rest of the week promises quality time with the Royal Pink grrrls and with Ian, and that doesn’t even count the weekend! Whew! Never knew I was such a social butterfly ’till all the chickens came home to roost! Hows THAT for a mixed metaphor?

sandler on 3rd ave, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

While all over Gotham, police and fire peeps can be spied in their dress uniforms, making their solemn way to and from the myriad 9/11 memorial services taking place today, I woke up comemorating something else this morning. My little bro Daniel (who now bears an unsettling resemblance to the Adam Sandler poster pictured above) was born 27 years ago today. He and I were very close from the time he was born up until around the time we moved from NY to VA. When we moved though, suddenly our house was much bigger, there were TVs in multiple rooms so we didn’t have to fight over the remote, and he didn’t really need me to babysit him anymore. I was boy-crazy in public school and he started going to private school and then boarding school. Then I went off to college and we never lived together again. Somehow it never really occured to either one of us to call the other very often once we lived apart. Not because we didn’t like each other, we have always just been very different in terms of our interests or whatever, so slowly our relationship mellowed into that of friendly acquaintances who happen to share parents, and who say hi to each other at Thanksgiving and funerals.

For the past five years, I’ve felt bad that my bro’s birthday happened to be on 9/11, and always tried to make a point to remember it more conscienciously than I did before. This year, I emailed him an Amazon gift certificate to his work (since I don’t really know what he likes), and then called him on his cell from my office to make sure he got it. We had a nice, if slightly awkward, convo before we both had to go back to work, and after we hung up, I spent a few minutes reflecting on how nice it was to hear his voice. Then I got an email from him. I won’t paste it here since that would be kind of a skeevy thing to do, but basically he thanked me for the present, told me he loved me a lot, and said he felt lucky to have me as a sister. I was so caught off guard I started crying at my desk a little bit, and had to take a minute to collect myself before writing him back. I’m just so surprised. He’s never said anything like that to me before. It was just really, really nice.

Sidewalk Chalk Madonna, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I’m tossing last night’s noctournal narrative onto the ever-increasing pile of weird kid dreams I’ve been having over the past year or so. In this dream, LCF and I were staying in a big house, possibly with my parents, and we were doing some kind of archeological dig in the yard. As we dug, I started finding all these little ancient mummified kid’s bodies, piled on top of each other in a deep mass grave. I had no idea why they were there, and I felt bad disturbing them, but I figured now that we had dug them up, we couldn’t just re-cover them and walk away, especially since there were so many of them and they were so old. I reasoned that they could be a very important historical find that we could help to preserve, so I gently picked up each mummy, and brought it into the house so animals couldn’t get at them in the night. By the time I was done it was late, so LCF and I went to sleep in an unfamiliar upstairs bedroom. Just as I was falling asleep, I felt a tug at the sleeve of my shirt. It was a little blonde girl, about seven years old, and she had a little dark-skinned girl with her. She said they were two of the kids I had just dug up, which surprised me because they weren’t ye olde at all. They were reasonably clean and healthy-looking, and were wearing blue T-shirts and denim shorts. They complained that they were cold from being in the ground, so I took them each by the hand and led them downstairs to a big couch where I wrapped them in the down comforter my best friend Han gave me. I got under the blanket with them, hoping my body-heat would help them warm up faster. Soon, more little kids started coming into the room, and they all wanted to get under the blanket with us. That’s when I started to panic. What if I was now responsible for all of these undead kids because I dug them up? How would I take care of them? How many of them were there exactly? What would LCF do when he woke up and discovered me with all of them? Would he leave me? Would he help me? Would he make me choose between him and them? Who were these little zombie kids anyway? I wanted to get away from them, but the weight of all the kids trying to get warm under my blanket was crushing me, and that’s when I woke up.

*sigh*

Automat for the People, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I snapped this shadowy pic of LCF outside the new Bamn Automat on St. Marks amid a frenzy of student types fluttering like moths to its Barbie-pink flame. At the risk of dating myself, I was actually excited to see it open because it filled me with fond memories of my dad taking me to the old Horn & Hardart in Manhattan as a little girl. He would give me the change to hold, and I would very carefully survey each and every tiny little window before I finally decided which tepid treat to release from behind the glass. Then he would pick something, and we would eat across from each other in the giant, echoing central area. Unlike ye olde automat, Bamn is very small and crowded and has no place to sit. A quick survey of their greasy eats caused me to leave empty handed, an impulse later validated by Eater, who seemed to think that Bamn was a bomb. Whatevs, at least it’s pink.

TV Sux, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

First let me say that I have never seen the show in the ad above, nor have I ever seen Everyone (Loathes) Raymond. While I do own a TV set, I only use it for watching movies since it isn’t hooked up to anything that could provide any kind of basic reception. So though I’m sure I’m missing out on plenty of good PBS ‘n’ stuff, overall I’m grateful to be spared the latest incarnation of whatever the networks are trying to pass off as their “wickedly funny, irreverent interpretations of family life.” Despite my cloistered snobbery, however, yesterday I had an insanely annoying dream that somehow managed to embody everything I hate about shows like these into one excruciating little package.

In my dream, I was visiting a gorgeous outdoor ampitheater made entirely of dark wood. I was checking it out because LCF’s band had been booked to play there and I was managing them or something, so I was surveying the scene with him while a stand-up comedian dude was on stage, playing to a packed house of very suburban-looking people. To the best of my recollection, his routine went something like this:

“I never realized how few things I actually know how to do correctly until I got married. Now that I’m married, I go to the kitchen to make a turkey sandwich, and my wife will be all over me about how the bread I’m using is all wrong for that kind of meat and I shouldn’t use that knife for spreading mayo, and by the way, I shouldn’t be eating mayo, and I should have gotten the turkey sliced thinner at the deli, and oh-by-the-way my shirt is totally the wrong color for me. There are secret rules to how to do everything, and women somehow know them, but they choose not to spring these on us until we marry them. Honestly, men are just monkeys. Am I right guys? Just a bunch of dumb monkeys…”

The people at the long wooden tables watching this stale, hackneyed act were just shrieking with laughter. I excused myself, sat down in the back, and put my head down, waiting for it to be over. Then I woke up angry. Because I hate humor like this. HATE IT. And it is everywhere, as evidenced by the above ad for this show that I saw later that night.

News flash: women are not strange alien creatures from planet nag. We, like men, all have our own peculiar ways of living our lives. If you happen to marry someone whose household habits don’t jive with yours, alls I can say is maybe you should have given it a trial run first. I don’t buy the whole “men are dumb apes” shit any more than I give creedence to the idea that all women become put-upon, micro-managing harpies the instant they wed. But then again, I’m not married, so maybe I just don’t get it.

THE CRAMPS, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

What better way is there to celebrate this month’s onset of PMS than to go to my very first Cramps show???? The answer is none. They were the main event at the Motherfucker Labor Day Fiasco at Avalon (the deconsecrated church which the diehard among us refuse to stop calling the Limelight) and the show brought sweet rock ‘n’ roll salvation to my weary soul (not to mention my pissed off uterus). The mosh pit was fierce and surging and I was in the thick of it, only about four bodies away from the stage. I even managed to make out with my hot boyfiend in the middle of the pit amidst all the shoving and punching and kicking and sweating and screaming and jumping. Romantical! My feet got pretty well crushed in the melee and my poor Doc Martens got ripped, but it was totes worth it just to worship at the feet of the ever-stoic Poison Ivy. When Lux Interior spit a mouthful of red wine on our heads and started screaming “Let’s Get Fucked Up!!!!!!” the ecstatic rockabilly frenzy that ensued was so ferociously fun, I thought my heart would burst right out of my low cut dress. I was proud and happy that even in my advanced old age, I can still hold my own down front. Just don’t tell anybody how badly I was whining by the time I dragged my battered ass home at 4 AM.

Scarlet, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

So, a nice long while ago, a big gang of about 30 teen girls from the Poughkeepsie Day School came to my office to ask us questions about how we run our mag. Apparently they were inspired by what we do, and wanted to make their own feminist pop culture ‘zine for chicks ages 12-18, since there is nothing like our mag out there for them. They were a cool group, and asked us a lot of interesting questions, but I totally forgot the whole thing until this copy of their finished project landed on my desk today. They named their mag Scarlet, and it’s totally great. Being the sentimental wuss that I am, I actually got a little verklempt paging through it, knowing that what I do helped give these baby grrrls such a clear idea about what they wanted to accomplish. Plus these chicas are way funnier and much more sophisticated writers than I was as an early teen. It took me a loooooooooooooong time to shake out of my humorless, “black is the color of my pain,” writer’s voice (some could argue I never actually did shake out of it) but these ladies, even when they’re earnest, are still fresh and inspiring. I was especially impressed with the page where they took a swing at re-defining the word “feminism” for themselves. God knows after all its been through, the term could use a make oves. I’m just happy that they aren’t too scared of the term to engage in this kind of exercise, considering how many women we’ve had in our mag lately who won’t touch the word with a ten foot pole. Hip hip hooray for Poughkeepsie Day! You guys made my Friday!