Smutty Nose

Tonight was a smut reading at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, a kinky little joint built into what looks to have once been a boathouse. A railing prevents wobbly patrons from toppling over into the boat dock. The Galapagos is located in Fucking Williamsburg, which is like saying South Boston or North Cambridge. The smut wasn't really any smuttier than your standard garden variety literary reading. Those who read fell somewhere in between not dreadful & not terribly exciting. The best one was a story about meeting Luke Skywalker at a convention in Vancouver ("Wow, Luke fucking Skywalker!" "You can call me Mark," said Mark Hamill. "Huh? Oh I get it. Code names."). Couldn't hear the last reader very well because the audience by that point was talking too loud. I sat at the bar beside a poet from Arizona named Francesca, also a recent arrival in the city, had a six dollar beer. The prices here are going to take some getting used to.

After the smut reading was an amateur burlesque show, hosted by a "middleaged man" named Murray who looked & sounded suspiciously like a woman with a fake mustache. I watched the first two dancers, but by then it was getting so crowded I couldn't really see anything, so I left. It occurs to me that I don't believe I've ever seen any "bad" burlesque. I imagine it's possible, but I certainly haven't seen such a thing.

I got to hear a genuine hipster scoff. This happened outside a pizza joint in Fucking Williamsburg. The tightly t-shirted utterer of said scoff was reacting to one guy filming another guy on a bench who was blissfully rocking out on an acoustic guitar, blond mane flailing. I was not two feet away when the scoff occurred. I've witnessed some scoffing in my time, but this was something to behold.

Stenciled periodically on the sidewalks of Fucking Williamsburg is the phrase "I [heart] sweatshop workers."