Why I write

what I write (for this paper)

By: CAMILLE DODERO

11/15/2006 6:55:43 PM

A SCENE FROM CAMILLE'S PARTY?: Cloud (background) photographed by Michael Manning. Assman (right) photographed by Joel Veak. "Jesus Guy" (left) photographed by Melissa Ostrow. Harmonix staff (center) photographed by Tanit Sakani

One year ago this week, I was milling around a Theater District bar during what marketing types like to call “a launch party,” an opening reception for a clothing store that was essentially a Hot Topic for fake gangstas. At some point during the night, the guy I was with came out of the bathroom, cracking up about a guy who’d just tipped the toilet attendant with a bumper sticker that stated I ♥ ASS. I don’t remember if I thought it was genuinely hilarious or stupid, but either way, I remember temporarily ditching my friend to find this dude: this was someone I should meet.

Turned out, he was a 28-year-old snowboarder who called himself Assman, a nickname he’d happily appropriated from Kramer. He was currently living in his parents’ suburban basement, trying to build up an independent company called Ass Industries whose signature product was a scented line of snowboard-wax pieces shaped like palm-size butts. Two weeks later, I was eating Mexican food with Assman, watching him explain to a bartender why his credit card said “Ass Industries,” and later riding with him in his Assmobile (a Jeep Cherokee marked with his signature stickers) en route to a Revere strip club where we would “critique ass” — all of which would be fodder for an article the following week.

I don’t tell you this to vaunt my lowbrow cred or pretend this required any sort of faux-gonzo bravery. Rather, I tell you because it illustrates why the paper you are currently reading is very different from, say, one of those tall, folded ones: I’m not only allowed to approach perfect strangers who call themselves Assman; I am, for better or worse, encouraged to do so. But aside from the novelty of this particular character and the fact that tracking down people like this is my job, the circumstances surrounding my introduction to Mr. Ass Wax speak to why I found this gnarly skate-rat entrepreneur worth documenting: urinal-side self-promotion is super-grassroots. See, if I’d gotten an e-mailed press release about Ass Industries, I probably would’ve deleted it; with the backing of a publicist, Assman just wouldn’t have had the same . . . charm.

40th_icon What I’m trying to say is this: I’ve personally interpreted the goal of this alt-weekly as a mandate to hunt down the cultures, characters, atmospheres that develop sans communications firms. Like another set of people who distinguish themselves near toilets: the Best Thing Ever, an acoustic trio who last spring embarked on a 14-date “Bathroom Tour,” a string of performances quietly announced on a LiveJournal page and scheduled in restrooms from Portland, Maine, to Allston. Or an underground venue that was not long for this world: the legendary House of Suffering Succotash (a/k/a the HOSS), a rented Brighton house whose basement held nearly 80 live shows from local and touring bands in 11 months. Or a Cambridge company like Harmonix Music Systems, a video-game studio mostly staffed by local musicians, which nobody seemed to acknowledge until this past year, when Guitar Hero made it super-famous (and Viacom subsequently purchased the company). If you’re holding a gun to my head and demanding to know what exactly it is that I’m trying to do, it’s discovering cool shit that happens when no one else is looking.

Certainly a bit of this is self-preservation: when other media jerks aren’t looking, these stories won’t be told elsewhere first. But more important, I’d rather write about things that don’t exist solely for public attention. Call me naive, but I still haven’t given up on pure intentions — I’d rather document creations that are (or at least convincingly seem) inspired by all those other crazy intangibles: desire, urgency, faith, ambition, passion, fear, curiosity, community, rebellion, hunger, truth. Yeah, I’m still foolish enough to believe in this stuff.

As a backdrop for this, Boston does sometimes feel like an airport. Blame it on the city’s educational institutions, its satellite-like proximity to New York City, or the behavioral models of recent traitors like Johnny Damon and Mitt Romney. But few people creatively shaping culture here are from here. Even fewer people plan to stay, and the people who consider themselves home are returning from somewhere else. (Similarly, strangers in Boston always seem to be either unapproachably uptight or very drunk.)

But people in flux are restless. That restlessness fosters an energy, and that energy begets a hungry hustle that sometimes merits its own story. Like something as simple as those strange gray, drippy, brain-shaped painted clouds that kept appearing all over the city a couple summers ago. Some kids complained about the clouds’ spongy artlessness, others loved the tirelessness implied by their ubiquity, and one straight-edge kid in this office even got those globular particles tattooed on his right bicep. (Don’t ask me.) Turned out the person behind the cumulus was a hyper former graf writer calling himself Darkclouds who at the time kept getting fired from bar-back jobs, but was determined somehow to assert his presence in the world with a different kind of drive. (Of course, last I heard, he was in New York.)

You could say that writing about such nuances is not very important in the scope of things — y’know, bolting clouds to street signs or paying bands to perform in your beer-can-littered firetrap of a basement isn’t stopping Greenland from melting. But there’s an opportunity here to work through things like, say, mortality. Take MySpace: specifically, how people who’d lost loved ones used their still-extant MySpace profiles to mourn their deaths. Or exploring what a vague concept like anarchy looks like when a group of anti-authoritarians calling themselves the Bl(A)ck Tea Society gathered in 2004 to facilitate protests against the Democratic National Convention. Answer: a crapload of organization.

Sometimes I think it’s important to delineate worlds most people don’t realize exist — and if they do, they’re surprised anyone has else has noticed. Like the Glass Slipper, Boston’s oldest strip club, where each performer historically sanitizes the stripper’s pole right before she starts her nudie routine. Or Second Life , a now-exploding virtual 3-D environment where fake people make real money by selling fake objects. Or a proud asshole’s baby: Lollipop magazine, a feisty little rock rag that’s managed to survive more than a decade despite the fact that its bitter, gutter-mouthed, proudly smelly editor-publisher has made a point of pissing off everybody he’s ever met. Or Blaine the School, an urban cosmetology training camp formerly in Kenmore Square where many of the sassy students would’ve rather pulled each others’ weaves out than braided them back in.

I like to think about throwing a huge party and putting everyone I’ve ever written about on the guest list. I imagine the anarchists debating unions with the manager of the Glass Slipper. The Assman trying to slap one of his stickers on the Jesus Guy’s sandwich board. The cosmetology-school girls screaming at each other and playing Guitar Hero in Second Life. Darkclouds stickering the fridge. The ex-con sneakerhead trying to get some play from Boston’s first SuicideGirl. The Best Thing Ever covering “Big Poppa” in the bathtub. Perhaps that’s how I know when I’ve found somebody worth writing about: I immediately want them there.

If this party ever happens, I can’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be a fight. But the Flickr party pix would be awesome.

Camille Dodero is a staff writer at the Boston Phoenix.