It provides a kind of easy, brainless pain, like chewing all the skin off my thumbs. Here in New York, most of the comics and performance artists have taken an extreme swerve and become grossly confessional. An interesting purging, sort of like a self-exorcism. Sometimes it works. And sometimes you feel compelled, as an audience member, to assist the person in finally finishing their slow suicide project.
Spy is a nightclub in New York where models and all the people who want to be around models go.
They all look abusable and overly sensitive. It occurred to me that almost everybody hates models, and they hate themselves just as much, and Spy offers a nurturing place for the hatred between the models stuck to its walls and the comics who perform there on select evenings. The comics the evening I was there started in on the models with a viciousness that bordered on restraining-order alarming. The only people who hate themselves more than models are, naturally, comics, and I suppose this lends a kind of competitive urgency to the banter. The second guy had a terrible, real meltdown.