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Now that it's mid-November, we thought we'd talk about Halloween. Just in time for Thanksgiving. We realize the event is old news by now, but for fear of causing a huge cross-internets media uproar, we didn't want to file our report on time prematurely.

[click on thumbnails and links for full images]

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Lost In Inebriation

The first item under the Halloween 2004 heading is that our trusty, never-leave-home-without-it digital camera was lost, (or perhaps it got stolen, perhaps lost and then stolen) somewere during the Halloween mad hattedness that prevailed that Saturday, swarming through the streets of the Lower East Side and Soho, looking like somebody else or some thing.

The camera was gone. Lost somewhere in the vicinity of an East Village gay bar (naturally). Although we didn't realize it until the next day because we were under happy influences which distracted us from thinking about anything else and resulted in us passing out couch-wise with our jacket and our ankle boots with the 2 1/2 inch heels still on until our partner in crime gathered us up and put us into bed before we were even capable of processing the events of the evening.

The digital camera was a piece of shit, quite frankly. It was the size of the Holy Bible. So it's not the loss of the camera that we're mourning. It's the Halloween photographs that were on it.

The pictures that you see here are courtesy of our friend Alex (seen up top with his lovely friend Sarah), and of the well represented paparazzi (above right), who captured much of the length and dirtyness of the long and dirty night.

The location was a colossal costume party in Nick Denton's Soho loft.

Who We Were Wearing
Here we are dressed as (The) Ashlee Simpson (Lip-Synching Disaster). Can't even tell us apart, can you? It was almost more fun than we could handle. We want to be Ashlee Simpson at every party.

A best friend of Bazima Media pulled off this fabulous costume -- one of the iPod silhouetted dancing people, but a better conversationalist.

This is the kind of costume Bazima Media would think of wearing, but we'd wait until the last minute to try and execute it and so end up with a semblance of a costume; going as us, only with Ace Frehley makeup.

Now we believe that this was the best costume of the night. We're not sure what it was exactly. We're thinking LES hipster? But look at her. Does it even matter? Four Stars.

Everyone Wanted To F Us
We introduced ourselves to a tall Jude Lawish character (sans costume) -- with an accent that may have been Swedish -- because we thought we might have met him somewhere once before. We hadn't, but it turned out that after a brief chat, he approached our man-on-the-street and asked who we were with. When he was informed that we were with the person to whom he was speaking, Jude Lawish suggested that they both take Bazima Media home. Our man reportedly responded by saying, "Uh, I'll run it by her." And then he ran.

There are no pictures of our man-on-the-street, who was dressed as Scott Peterson. It's a shame. The seaweed in his shirt pocket was a nice touch. Nick Denton, seen by several witnesses flirting with Mr. Peterson -- for which he later profusely, gratuitously, sweetly, and quite drunkenly apologized to us -- must have thought so too. At least one witness said they overheard Mr. Denton asking Mr. Peterson if he watches Manhunt. Since Bazima Media is a friend of Gawker Media there is speculation that an indecent proposal may soon be on the table.

Trick or Treat
For his part, our beloved Jonno was playing the role of skeevy porn director (think a young version of Burt Reynolds in "Boogie Nights" with an Aldo Nova wig) like he was vying for the Academy's Oscar votes.

Maybe it was because we were so anxious to be standing face to face with him (--it had been over a year) that we feared that somehow he didn't know who we were, what with the wig, the darkness, the uncanny resemblance to Ms. Simpson, the social lubricants, and what have you. When we first spotted him from across the room and made a B-Line straight for him, he kept saying things to us like, "Baby, what can you do?" and "I think I can do something for you...If you can do something for me." We were thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're a a porn guy, we get it -- it's US!

Jonno remained in character while we kept pointing to our bodacious rack, leaning into his face and shouting, "Do you know who we are?" It occured to us that it might have sounded as though we were asking Mr. Fleshbot if he knew who we were dressed as, but somehow we were unable to articulate anything other than "Do you know who we are?" And he just kept saying, "Baby, I could work with you...". It was retarded.

1 1/2 Stars
And this guy was there. (We knew we recognized him from somewhere, some movie, but we were unable to place him until we woke up with a hangover the next afternoon and a startling, sudden vision of his adolescent face from nearly twenty years ago.) We overheard him saying to his friend as he took off his black coat to reveal more layers of black (presumably not a costume), "Wait. Who's party is this?" The reply came in the form of a short mystery woman with her back facing us. "Nick Denton? The Gawker linchpin? He's the one over there in blackface." Yes, blackface.

Avenue A 4AM Soccer League
At The Phoenix after hours, the stone cold fox formerly known as Young Bradford was sporting a versatile red tutu. One minute it would be proudly displayed around his waist over a debonair white, maybe even double-breasted (memory willfully impaired), suit jacket. We'd turn to look at him a second later and the tutu would be on his head. He kept telling Jonno that he loved us. We suspect it was because we kept yelling "gorgeous!" at him.

Then there was the Avenue A 4Am Soccer League. Not much we can say to explain this one. We remember leaving The Phoenix with a rather large crowd sometime after last call. So it must have been about 4AM. We'd just been outside the bar taking pictures with our camera, so the camera had to have disappeared somewhere in this vicinity. As we walked to the apartment of a friend of a friend of a friend, we saw some fine young men playing soccer in the middle of Avenue A, right in front of The Cock. Did they have an actual soccer ball? We're not even sure. It could have been the head of Christopher Reeve for all we knew.

Soon we were in a taxi on our way back to Bazima Headquarters in Brooklyn, singing "the PEE-SEZ, PEE-SEZ, PEE-SEZ...." The driver was falling asleep at the wheel. The sun came up, along with the realization that our pictures may have been gone forever, our stupid camera in the hands of either a tranny or a sleepy cabbie named Akbar, but that we had the best Halloween ever. If memory serves.