ultranow

breakdancing in gymnastics

kinda as ridiculous as when i danced to taylor dayne's "tell it to my heart" at prom. yes with a girl. unfortunately.

well this is hypnotic

uneven bars developments (1950s to 2005).  oh just watch it.  i'm obsessed with gymnastics so you should be too.  tori amos is the soundtrack if that helps.

this always makes me happy not that i picture myself as oksana omelianchik or okay i do but i also like to watch her make it happen in '85

paul hunt (paulette huntinova) drag gymnastics spectacular

no one can prove dimitri kaspiarovich is wearing pants

men who vault and the men who watch them

it's world gymnastics championships time.  the u.s. men's squad didn't even make the top eight to get into the team finals, though we did place two in the individual all-around.  our women's team is doing much better so far, first actually.  from the preliminaries here are two vaulters who really really really want to do a good job.  so they did 5000 push-ups a day, ran at 20 plus mph at a vaulting horse, launched themselves in the air with angry abandon and landed in some manner.  or possibly they ran toward me with out of control desire, launched themselves in the air and i caught them and we loved and laughed and i was sore for days. either way, here's to you poland's przemyslaw lis and italy's matteo morandi.

a little too

• a little too real
• a little too sad
• a little too dangerous
• a little too beautiful

do not stick it

now i love nastia liukin. she's the most precisely graceful and artsy gymnast on the scene right now, and she has the world championship gold medals to prove it. and i'm sure her cameo in the upcoming gymnastics movie stick it (no it's not about post-its) is really good and dandy and fine and super. but it's just that the whole concept of the movie is so wretched and scary and horrible and i can't help but think of mitch gaylords's american anthem travesty.  please hollywood, do not make a gymnastics movie ever again because with the exception of little girls in pretty boxes and that law & order where this one girl gymnast killed this other girl gymnast with a brick, you will always mess it up.

plus the world gymnastics championships didn't make it to network or even cable tv last time, just streaming video online, and clips days later on the gymnasts' individual websites. while it should be popular it is not, so your movie will fail, worse than the mermaid movie with jojo, which i am too angry at to even link to. damn jojo. instead enjoy this. if you're gay to start, you'll either get ungayed or get really really gay. and if you're a dyke, you'll get much dykier, unless you're an assdyke and not a boobdyke. you'll see.

'70s inventions

in the '70s i mastered bernadette's weird arm thing, made a battlestar galactica mothership replica out of legos, and wrote a letter to jimmy carter asking him if he was still a peanut farmer now that he was president (to which in response i got a color booklet featuring pictures of amy carter giving a tour of the white house - where does her junior sized gold velvet smock dress end and the plus sized gold velvet curtains begin - nobody knows). however i never really invented anything. i wasn't an original. i wasn't the first late bloomer jewboy fagboy nerdboy in the suburbs. i wasn't the first kid to play dungeons & dragons, though i did have the very first edition when it was all booklets, not even books, to guide one along through group hallucinatory adventures.

i did not, unlike someone i met later in college, get famous as a kid actress on broadway for a hot minute for the line "give me the fucking keys", which is pretty damn funny when said by a 9 year old moppet. i did see tony randall at a museum once. you know the most amazing thing about seeing a famous person in public? they're just standing or sitting or talking or eating or doing nothing. nothing is happening. this is because "famous" is an adjective not a verb. they can't be standing there "famousing". if they could, that would really be something.

i didn't star in bad news bears, though i would have been perfect in it. i was only so-so at four square - the lemon drop got me every time. i could only recite pi to the sixth digit after the decimal point - less if i got punched in the face halfway through. i wasn't the only kid to have a star trek phaser squirt gun. i probably wasn't even the only boy who wanted to be nadia comaneci (as seen in the olympics and the leroy neiman series of olympic posters available through mcdonald's at the time), though i did have the best nadia pose in gymnastics class - arched back, hands straight up, i'm perfect attitude. yes that's it. i was the best boy nadia comaneci of the '70s.

no medals. no perfect 10s. no magazine covers. no bela karolyi giving me a bear hug. just me in a pose in gymnastics class at summer camp. feeling good. feeling strong. last night after her perfect short program performance, figure skater sasha cohen said to herself "this is me". i could read her shiseidoed lips clear as day. "this is me". said to herself after a triumph. in the '70s this is me. in the '00s this is me. i am in the same pose. presenting myself to the world. open. accepting. joyous. read my lips. this is me.