Brooklend Update

Katina's is closed for renovation. The 12th St. Deli is also closed, also for renovation. Also, The Comanches are gone and the outlaw is gone.

Last Saturday, Eve and Nina and Nina's friend Randy and Randy's little brother and I went up to Union Square for the pillow fight organized by Newmindspace. I was sort of unenthused initially -- I figured it was gonna be the same type of weird, regressive pederasts who go to those "cuddle parties" that are (supposedly) grope-free. And, you know, it kind of was those people. But Nina had an extra pillow, and like ten minutes into it I sucked it up and waded in and it was sort of a good time. Observations: Some pillows hurt when people hit you with them! A lot of people had either very firm, heavy pillows or pillows that weren't terribly cohesive and would bunch themselves up into a heavy mass at one end of the pillowcase. The little kids were the worst offenders when it came to swinging hard. Towards the end of the fight, I ended up squaring off near the outskirts of the fray against four pre-teens and their older brothers, and got pretty well pounded. According to Eve, I had a cheering section chanting "Ghost Rider! Ghost Rider!" in support. I assume that was 'cuz I was wearing the old leather jacket, but Eve thought it might have been because I'm a whitey -- you know, like Ghostface Killah. That's cool, too, I guess.

I was also struck by how many people were taking pictures of the event. It seemed like about a quarter of the participants were armed with cameras instead of pillows. They stood at the periphery -- someone, I think, snapped a photo of me and Nina taking a breather and having a smooch. There're practically 2500 photos on Flickr with the pillowfightnyc tag! Check out the pictures. There really were feathers everywhere.

That evening, after some reading at Tea Lounge, we took a car over to Williamsburg to this rock show at a literal hole in the wall -- utterly unmarked on the outside -- called b.p.m. The band we wanted to see was a New York-based punk trio with a couple of Japanese dudes (and a grating gaijin drummer who wouldn't stop braying into the drum mics) in it called The Spunks, but the evening seemed to be a kind of showcase of a bunch of Japanese bands who were all pretty good and played loud, short sets. The venue was a kind of cave of painted, exposed brick that you had to go through a tunnel to get to, and the room with the stage had real high ceilings that got crowded with the helium balloons that this chick was handing out -- it was Hajime's birthday. The Spunks themselves were pretty good, thought a bit louder and sloppier than on the songs of theirs I'd listened to on the web. At one point, the bass player climbed up on one of the amp stacks at one point, and, while playing, did a kind of twelve-foot swan dive onto the stage. He seemed more or less okay, too. They are all ninjas, it turns out. "I love you!" Haji'd yell between songs. "I don't want to fight any more! Do you love me?!"

We hopped a Northside car to get back to Park Slope, and a funny thing happened. It was around 3:00 AM, and, shortly after we got off the BQE, our driver pulled ahead of another car in that slightly aggressive way that car service drivers do. The other driver seemed pretty ticked off, though, as he pulled right back ahead of us in the middle of a narrow street and then just stopped with us behind him, both cars idling, for about a minute and a half. Our driver was kind of flummoxed, but we couldn't really back out because another car showed up. The angry guy ahead of us, perhaps spurred on by the honking of the car waiting behind us, started to inch slowly up the street, at which point our driver decided to make a break for it and gunned it, pulling around the dude and then trying to lose him on 5th Ave. The guy started chasing us, pulling up alongside and yelling at our terrified driver whenever we had to stop for a light. Our driver kept shouting that he was going to call the cops and eventually did pull out his phone and do it. Seeing this, the other driver got spooked and finally drove off. We got a good look at him, though -- bald, chubby, wearing some kind of college athletic sweatsuit -- and I gave the car service guy my best recollection of the license plate number of his car. I was too tired to be really scared, but I was making contingency plans the whole time in case the guy pulled a gun.

Right now I'm at home, exhausted from work, drinking a whiskey and watching Laura on Emma's long-ago recommendation. I feel like I might look a bit like young Vincent Price. Also, some dialogue:

Waldo: "Have you ever been in love?"
McPherson: "A dame up in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me once."

What a tough dude. I ate a veggie burger with a fried egg on it. Kitty puked up her dinner but I'm hoping she'll get hungry and eat the puke. This often works.

The Zombies Win

I'm at home. Nina's studying for midterms.

I Netflix'd Zombie (aka "Zombi 2"), because it seemed like it's at the head of this pantheon of European horror movies I haven't seen. You know that YouTube video of the zombie fighting the shark? This is the movie it's from! In terms of the hipster vote, that scene is actually even cooler than the clip lets on, since it starts with a topless scuba diving woman fleeing from the shark into the arms of the zombie, who goes for the shark after his attempts to fuck / eat the woman are thwarted by her fins and a handful of coral.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn't quite... I don't know. It's always hard to peg what's wrong with films like this. Zombie movie fans strike me as a rather predictable bunch -- from what I can tell by the IMDb comments, we require that the mechanics of the movie world be laid out just so, and the movie is a success to the extent that it presents a series of novel scenarios in which the zombies triumph over the humans and ultimately win. For my money there's gotta be a better way to make a movie, especially with what seems like such a compelling premise: zombies. This one was kind of head-and-shoulders above the rest in some ways -- it makes pretty thorough use of a tropical setting for the predetermined zombie apocalypse and it's about as lovingly shot, lighting- and angles-wise, as a zombie movie could be. But the acting's terrible, the cultural details of the shooting location and the voodoo aesthetic that necessitates it are kind of... overlooked -- and it just ain't scary.

I often wonder what it would take to make a zombie movie that was scary, and I think it's gonna come down to directors actually thinking about what's scary about zombies: it's not their potential to chomp and bite and eat your brains; it's the prospect of an entirely zombified world, a silent world absent of the texture of human intelligence.

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that culminates in a convergence of a whole bunch of starships Enterprise from parallel universes. Captain Picard (or someone) devises a way to send them all back to their respective M-branes, but some of them aren't eager to go -- an alternate-universe Riker helming a smoldering NCC-1701 protests "We won't go back! You don't know what it's like in our universe - the Federation's gone, the Borg are everywhere!" That line's consistently given me chills.

No zombie movie I've ever seen -- and I've seen a few -- has ever really explored the implications of that line satisfactorily. My friend Pete directed me in his senior thesis film, "The Zombies Win," at Wesleyan, in which the main character courts a lone, aloof human female lost in a world of the undead. Pete said it was based on a summer he spent in Paris; I feel like he was making a glib joke about the French, but I've never been to France so I can't really say that makes any sense to me. We had to put in these one-size-fits-all white contacts; my friends Paul and Dave had to hold me down and stuff them in my eyes.

I've lost track of what I saying.

Speaking of zombies, The Pogues are playing Roseland on St. Patrick's day, and this guy's got tickets! Tom anticipates another "stomach complaint," but I'm optimistic. Hell, even my dad's on board -- are you?