After work on Thursday I went down to White St. for one of the Make Music NY festival shows. I don't know who else was on the roster, but my friend Squick had told me a while back that his friend Nullsleep was someone to check out, so. This particular show was sponsored by a place called The Tank, and they'd gotten a permit to clear out the whole block. On the way there I saw an enormous sweaty orange bodybuilder hassling a mousy, middle-aged woman, possibly his wife, outside of a Chinese pharmacy. He kept jabbing his finger into her purse, which she was holding up to her chest. "You're drunk!" he kept yelling. "Don't tell me you're not drunk!" The music was pretty good (in particular this guy Bit Shifter), but the show itself was merely okay. It was a bunch of dudes playing techno music that they'd tracked on their Game Boys -- not a terribly interactive experience, although they were playing it from the Game Boys to the big speakers that had been set up, and the tracking software apparently had some features that let you improv a little on the fly by hitting buttons on the Game Boy. The crowd, though, was fucking psyched. I haven't seen that many dancing nerds there in a while -- there were frizzy-haired nerds, big-glasses nerds, even a nerd with a stumpy little arm, as you can see in this picture (I'm just off-camera to the right, holding a pink plastic bag containing picture frames and condoms).
Friday I went with Tom and 'Leen and Eve to the Ralph Stanley show at the ol' Bandshell. The man himself was pretty brilliant, but he kept kind of tossing the mic over to members of his band to do one-off numbers from their solo albums, and none of them were really that good -- although all had won Grammys and things, as he kept telling us. It was really cold for some reason that night, too. Ironically, the Celebrate Brooklyn people were doling out, in return for the $3 admission, these little American Express-branded pocket fans, which were both unnecessary, and, as I discovered later on a truly hot day, totally useless.
Saturday Nina and I went over to Warsaw to see Violent Femmes. I hadn't really eaten anything all day, so before leaving her house I slurped down the remains of this turkey sandwich she'd bought like five days before at Sunset Bagels. It was covered in liquid lettuce and tasted sort of funny, but I was so hungry that I didn't care. I started to care pretty hard in the cab ride over, but I managed to not shit my pants until the end of the show, when we scurried out and I was able to void myself, wretchedly, at Matchless. I've never done that before! At a bar, that is. Anyway, the 'Femmes were pretty sweet, although their post-Blister In The Sun material is significantly less catchy. I hadn't been paying much attention to their ouvre since high school, I guess. They played their hits, though -- at the end -- with this kind of teasing, casual virtuosity that was pretty intimidating, musically.
After the show (and the shitting) we walked over to Greenpoint and had drinks at Pencil Factory -- two different kinds of fancy bourbon and then some Sweet Action, which the bartender comped us for some reason. We have sweet, hopeful faces, I suppose. Then we got locked in at The Mark Bar playing The Sopranos pinball, and the bouncer made a point of introducing us to the bartender. "I could tell these people were solid," the bouncer said. We are solid!
On the way ride home, though, around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, our car service car got a flat. It happened without us really realizing it, but all of a sudden we were just kind of crawling along down the BQE at four MPH. Our driver limped us over to the shoulder and we were heading for the closest exit when we noticed a yellow cab tailgating us pretty closely. "Oh," our driver said, "he must want to pick you guys up. Is that okay? Sorry about this." Sure, we said. No problem. Are you going to be okay? We got out of the car and made for the cab.
The cabbie leaned out of his window, though, and started yelling at us. "What are you doing?" he yelled. "You're gonna get killed!" I made a gesture like, what? "You're going to get killed!" he yelled. "Get back in the car!" So we got back in the car. Sorry, we told our guy, looks like he's not going to pick us up. So our car service guy got us off the Expressway and into Brooklyn Heights (the cab zipped off as inexplicably as it'd shown up) and we waited for him to change the tire while it became more and more Blue O'Clock in the sky.
Nina's friends (and former roommates) via Winnie, Randy and his girlfriend Danica, are moving into my new apartment as my roommates! Psyched about this. Like several of Nina's friends, Randy's a Parsons guy, and he makes things; he's come back to the East coast to do an artist-in-residency thing at Eyebeam for the next several months -- he mumbled something to me about enslaving a bunch of interns and having them implement and improve a web site in PHP, kind of creating the machinery of their own oppression. It's a valuable lesson about work. They are finalizing their move-in this evening. I wanted to have cookies ready for them (Eve sent me a powerful good recipe), but I've been pretty busy (and a bit too hot for cooking).
Winnie and Evan and Nina and I hit up Coney Island on Sunday. We lay around in the sun for a while and then did the bumper cars. And then there was talk of finding a scary ride to go on, and I felt like that day was a day on which I was prepared to go on a scary ride -- like, say, The Cyclone. But The Cyclone wasn't running, and so their gimlet eyes seized upon what was quite possibly the worst and scariest-looking ride in all of Astroland, the Top Spin 2. This picture does not do it justice. The thing is some kind of fear engine, and I knew I couldn't stomach it, so, humiliatingly, I bowed out. Nina, in spite of her obvious fear -- and my observation that none of the participants before us seemed to be very happy as they disembarked -- mastered herself and, along with Winnie and Evan, threw herself under the wheels of spinning and gravity. I was very impressed. The thing was sort of nauseating just to see in action. And everyone seemed to be pretty rattled afterwards, but I still feel a little... I don't know, like I should've been able to do it.
Trivia last night at Greenwich Treehouse, unfortunately sans Emma. Nina, Eve, and Tom were there, though, and we zeroed out in style under the name Dragon Magazine. Who knew that the hula hoop was more popular than Barbie?
Tonight... you. No, wait -- tonight, Joan Jett.
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