"NEO-GRAFFITI 2000" AT AGNES B: HAZE, FUTURA 2000, AND MORE....

Used to be, you could arrive at an art opening "fashionably late" and still get the fuck inside. Nowadays though, as with hot club parties, you either go early or face the prospect of herding outside (where, unless you're smart, you stand around for forty minutes, pretending to decide which of all the night's better party alternatives to pursue, until you skulk away invisibly, secretly thinking you should have dressed better). Getting into places late is hardly even a matter of coolness anymore. Now that everybody's sorta cool and nobody's that cool, party planners just invite way more people than can possibly fit in their venues, then close the door when the party comes to that inevitable crush-point.

So we were glad we arrived ridiculously early-- 7:15, when the invitation said 7 to 9-- for Thursday evening's totally fun opening of the "Neo-Graffiti Project 2000" show at the Agnes B men's store in New York's Soho. It was already crowded, but with minimal fuss we were able to get inside, grab a mini-bottle of champagne, and begin checking out the work on display. The show is small but packed with power, amply demonstrating how, over the last few decades, the street-level vision of graffiti greats Doze, Futura 2000, Haze, Lee, and Phase 2 has mightily influenced not just mainstream art but global culture.

Who came? It looked like everyone. When we left, around 8 (to rush to another party), it was obviously crush-point. Seen inside-- chatting over the inspired, early-evening audio catalysis of Major Force's DJ Takagi Kan-- and outside, which become a scene in itself (because it was a beautiful summer evening), were Giant Step's Jonathan Bernstein, 360hiphop.com's Jon Caramanica, PR wiz Roy Dank, Tokyo Street 2000's Suzi Funahara, Indie 5000's Matt Goias, Platform.net's Tina Imm and Steve Greco, 360hiphop.com's Jazzbo, creative-marketing genius Steve Klein, creative-marketing genius (and art collector) Mike Neumann, artist and art director Ro Starr, and tons of other people on the same tip.

"Neo Graffiti Project 2000" runs through July 14. So if you're in or around New York, you gotta hustle over to the Agnes B store, at 79 Greene Street. And when you're there, look for the special edition stickers that each
artist has created for Tokion, the magazine that's presenting the show along with Agnes B. The sale of these stickers benefits the Tokion Tree Fund, a newly established charity whose goal is to beautify the Los Angeles neighborhood of Union and Alvarado. According to the nice people at Tokion, "the fund was created in the hopes of helping regenerate the area. The project will receive assistance in the care and upkeep of the trees from the local Esperanza Elementary School‚s fifth grade class as part of their science curriculum."

IS GIRL-WATCHING THE HARDEST JOB IN NEW YORK THIS SUMMER?

The biggest job in New York during the summer? Checking out the women! You're walking down a crowded street, or entering a busy store, or climbing out of a packed subway station, and flooding toward you will be hundreds of women, each of whom expects to be checked out.

You guys definitely need to give a special moment or two of attention to each lady. 'Cause she's worked hard to find just the right little stretchy top, the right little clingy skirt, the right little strappy sandals. And you gay guys need to check out the chicks, too-- only instead of fretting like the straight boys about how far you can go in expressing your lust for all the delicious-looking babe-flesh walking around, you're probably more gonna be admiring the thought that went into each woman's choice of proportion, cut, and accessories; which is cool, since women dig that respect. And let's face it, you other women definitely need to be in a steady state of checking girls out, too, so you can stay on top of any micro-developments of summer style and, unless you're some kind of well-adjusted superperson, keep your self-image in line with the competition.

And don't worry if your attention to one hottie happens to distract you from the next one on the event horizon. Hottie #2 does expect your lingering glance when she's maybe five or six feet away (though she'll pretend she doesn't!), but if you happen to be occupied she'll immediately give you another chance-- when, say, her beautifully naked arm floats up to give a casual-though-sexy flip to a few strands of her beautifully cut hair, gently raising, in the process, a beautifully formed breast that is barely covered by a beautifully sheer fabric.

It's work to be there for all these women-- and your brain might register 632 of them on your way to a club, on a Saturday night. But what work could be nicer? Once you're in the club, of course, forget about it. You might as well be in a salt mine!

ANNALS OF CATERED HOSPITALITY: TO TIP OR NOT TO TIP?

We saw something interesting last night, at a store-launch party in Soho, thrown by a style magazine: A cater-waitress had a dollar in a plastic cup, in the middle of the tray of free cocktails she was passing around to guests. Now, we've seen tip cups at hosted bars before, where a guest is happy to know that a flash of green might connect him faster with his free cocktail, but a tip cup on a passing tray was new to us. We're standing around at a party, doing what we were invited to do-- look great and lighten trays of refreshments-- and we're also being asked to dig into our pockets?

Normally, our hearts are with the workers, but this chick struck us as laboring under a deal-breaking misunderstanding about what parties like this are all about. Hosted events are supposed to preclude the idea of money, aren't they? Doesn't the host himself-- in this case, a very nice magazine editor who probably didn't realize what his hired help was doing-- invite us to share in a warm feeling of being taken care of, so we can feel free to celebrate whatever we're supposed to be celebrating?

But we try not to get an attitude about shit like this. We know that manners are constantly evolving-- and, since we go to a lot of parties, that everything is more comprehensible after another drink. So we had another coupla drinks and tried, when that waitress passed again, to get down with whatever fun/sleazy/ballsy vibe she was working from. In our pleasant, sake-fueled, party haze we tried thinking, "Yeah, baby, work that fucking tip cup"-- but our attempt fell apart when we noticed that there was still only one, miserable dollar in the cup, which indicated how little our fellow party guests were feeling this act.

On the way out, we saw our host and told him what a fabulous time we'd had. But as we jumped into a cab, on our way to the next party (for the new issue of an "extreme fetish" magazine), we couldn't get the waitress's pathetically defiant look out of our minds.

STUDIES SHOW: JACK VALENTI CAUSES MOVIE CENSORSHIP

Flick freaks are chuckling over Scary Movie's "R" rating, given its raunchiness. As delicately described in Variety, the movie features a man getting "stabbed through the head with an erect penis," a female gym teacher sporting "suspiciously male nether regions," a guy spewing "an Exorcist-like stream of his, uh, essence," and a chick with "an Amazon-like thicket of... public hair." If the movie had been grimmer or artsier, the same elements could have drawn the dreaded "NC-17" rating, which means no one under 17 admitted, period (which means smaller profits). "R" means restricted, as in people under 17 need a parent or adult guardian to accompany them.

It's not so much that double standards piss us off, or that we're surprised by the underlying assumption here, which seems to be that thinking about sex and violence is more dangerous than laughing about them. It's more that we're curious about why, in the U.S., we're stuck with a movie rating fetish in the first place. The answer goes back to the notorious, so-called Hays office, which in the '20s and '30s, enforced the industry's voluntary (that is, not legally binding) "production code." The code had been formulated in response to supposed public indignance over Hollywood sex scandals of the time. Thereafter, according to one source, "such words as 'damn,' 'hell,' 'nuts,' even 'nerts' were forbidden, as was explicit violence, alternative social behavior, unpunished criminal activity, and even the depiction of men and women in bed together."

Pretty unprogressive, right? Well, most of the Hollywood elite were immigrants and thus on their best behavior-- the appearance of which, of course, didn't hurt business. Code tyranny stayed strong until the '60s, when, as you know, all fuck broke loose. Enter Jack Valenti-- war hero, Harvard grad, successful businessman, presidential advisor (Kennedy and Johnson), and now head of the Motion Picture Association of America-- who officially abolished the Hays office but nonetheless continued to stoke the sanctimony throughout the last thirty years, as he presided over the evolution of the ratings system.

In the beginning, it was "G" for general audiences, "M" for mature audiences, "R" for audiences restricted to those under 16 or 17 (depending on where you were), and "X" for the hot stuff. In time, "M" became "GP," which became "PG" (parental guidance suggested), which split into "PG" and "PG-13" (the latter connoting, according to the MPAA, "a higher level of intensity"). "X" (which came to sound unacceptably scurrilous, once dirty art films found their stride) became "NC-17." Naturally, all these changes were accompanied by a conspicuous public discourse whose drivers (Valenti and the studios) were always more interested in selling tickets than moving forward a conversation about national morals-- a fact we think you should keep in mind during the summer movie season, when you're lining up for the privilege of immersing yourself for two hours in other people's thoughts.