It’s bizarre – I’m invited to several parties tonight in Manhattan – one features Ice T and the other Vanilla Ice. So it has come to this. After turning into a quadragenarian, I suddenly start getting invited to the kind of parties that I think with my teenage brain that I would have loved to go to when I was in my twenties.
Now that I’m getting on in vintage, I am trying to side with style rather than fashion. To whit I mean that Ice T is a perennial favorite – he never went out of style. In reality, I have side-stepped his recent output including his reality show, I didn’t know that the foreshadowing in his misogynistic anthem 99 Problems (nsfw) had come to pass (he “has a b*tch who has an ass as big as a [1990s] TV set” in the shape of Coco. I’m particular about the year of TV – who would want such a lady with a 2012 TV set-sized posterior – all flat, wide and energy efficient?)
So Ice T never fell from my personal grace. He is a celebrity in his fifties who as far as I’m concerned is stylish. Vanilla Ice, the star of the other party I am cordially invited to, never aspired to grace and never really had any grace with which to fall. At his best he was worst, and I am sincerely hoping that he isn’t singing at the party.
The only trouble with choosing one of these parties is that it might really be choosing between the lesser of two evils. In that they’re both parties put on by people in the internet marketing industry, and they’re both parties in night clubs. My position on night clubs is summed up nicely by Charlie Brooker in his anthology The Hell of it All
– he is a satirical pessimist by all accounts:
“Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.”
Now given that my drug of choice is booze, and really booze doesn’t treat me that kindly these days, I have to figure out whether my dislike of loud and busy places is worth overcoming for the chance to hang out with Ice T. And when I say hang out with, I mean run up and introduce myself and get a snapshot taken with him before his bouncers tackle me. And by bouncers, I mean his bodyguards not his wife’s assorted collection of extreme bodyparts.
After all, the world is my lobster – I’m in downtown New York and I have all manner of mischief within my reach. One popular mischief for me is to ignore the amazing sensations of the bustling city, the museum of modern art just steps away, and to stay in my hotel room at the Shoreham and watch some cable TV with a bottle of liquor.
But I fear that despite not really wanting to go out – what with the loudness, crowds and general cost in both financial and human terms – I will regret not going. And as anyone attending an internet marketing conference knows, fear (even if it is the fear of future regret) is a greater motivator than desire. And it will give me a chance to try out the mythical anti-hangover vitamins that I have tasked myself with reviewing.