Rene and Georgette Magritte, with their dog after the war...
So, what's this "Christopher Street" thing all about, anyway?
Well, simply put, "Christopher Street" is the name of my online journal. It's a public journal, free for the world to see. A work of staggering personal insight, yet, because of its public nature, not full of especially intimate details. I mean, anyone can read it, right? That does tend, for me, to lend some parameters to the whole shebang.
There is both a long and a short version of why it's named "Christopher Street." The short version is that I thought it sounded cool.
Pretty short.
The long version is, well, longer.
When I started blogging all those years ago, I started with a service
called diary-x. The software that diary-x used required you to give your
journal a name. This was difficult--I didn't know yet what this journal would
be, where this project would lead. It's like asking for a title for your
autobiography before you're born. The default was "lori-p's diary" but that
just sounded dorky. I wanted to play with the style sheets, though, and wanted
to see what they would look like with a title other than the dorky default, so
I chose the working title "Marigold Sky".
For those who stopped
following the career of Darryl Hall and John Oates after 1984's Big Bam Boom,
that was the title of one of their myriad comeback albums in the 90s. Since
they had just been profiled on Behind the Music the week before, however, using Marigold
Sky seemed a little transparent. So, I moved on.
Next, I flirted with
"Think Too Much", which is the title of one of my fave Paul Simon tunes but it
seemed redundant with my already chosen
(and since abandoned) tagline "some things I think". So I
moved on to a phrase from that song, "Elephant Dance":
Have you ever experienced a period of graceIn the end, a little too...trippy. Onward then. I plowed through some lines from poems I dig ("A Sunless Sea" was just too depressing. Ditto "...and despair"), and other pieces of Pop Trivia Junk ("Trolling for Olives" and "Dancing About Architecture", working titles for what would become REM's Out of Touch and the Angelina Jolie film Playing by Heart).
When your brain just takes a seat behind your face
And the world begins the Elephant Dance?
Finally, it dropped on me, like the satellite that was falling from space that day: Christopher Street. Also a lyric from a Paul Simon tune, but one that is a little less obscure and, well, I think kind of cool-sounding:
Rene and Georgette MagritteOddly, I didn't know at the time that Christopher Street is a real street in New York, or that it was the location of the famous Stonewall Inn, the bar whose patrons started the 1969 Stonewall riots that are widely seen as the birth of the gay liberation movement. Considering my commitment to equal rights for our GLBT brothers and sisters, this is a happy, ironic coincidence. Of course, it did mean that I couldn't register the domain I wanted (christopherstreet.com), but it's all good.
With their dog, after the war
Were strolling down Christopher Street...