Well, I moved into my new apartment. Eve and Nina came over the two nights before the move and helped me pack everything up. Naturally, it was an odd experience to box up the past three-odd years of my life, but refreshing, too -- I got to jettison about five garbage bags worth of detritus that I and others had accumulated in that creaky old puke-stained place. The move itself was pretty much a snap, even counting all the heavy shit that had to get moved, not least of all this enormous new sofabed I've inherited from my mom's parents. Yeah, I hired movers. But I did it through this kind of mover auction site where you can get competitive bids, and ended up getting some guys who only wanted $275 and who were totally amazing and efficient. (They go by the name "C & C Movers," but Googling that turns up about a dozen different people, so get their info on the CitiMove site, I guess, if you're interested.) We got the whole thing done in about four hours. Nina helped; she has got phenomenal stamina, emotional and otherwise.
The day I really started packing everything up, I took Kitty to Animal Kind for possibly the last time to get some dental work done. She's developed a drooling problem that's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, and Nina'd finally convinced me that I had a moral responsibility to get it fixed. So I brought her in for a physical and they figured out that she had a really rotten tooth in the back on the right. I resisted on skeptical grounds for a little while, but finally caved and dropped her off. In typical Animal Kind fashion, when I picked her up they told me they'd not only extracted the one we'd arranged, but also performed six other "minor extractions." Yes, Kitty still has teeth, but I'm out a half a G, basically. After I picked her up, though, she was really happy and frisky, and I don't think it's just from the drugs they gave her (although she spent the next couple of days bumping into things) -- the drool is gone! Or, at least, she only drools and predictable times now.
I also got rid of my old tower machine; gave it to Tom's gee-eff, Colleen. While I was clearing all the porn and spyware off of it, I came across a bunch of old ASCII art packages and even the original source and layout material for the zine I did in high school with Razor, Halflife. I'll see if I can post some of it in the next week or two -- it'd a bit cliche to say that it's, you know, angsty and adolescent, but I will say that some of it's pretty grim, in terms how hard it sounds like I'm trying to keep the despair out of it.
So, the new place doesn't get that much direct sunlight, let's say, but there are several windows onto this actually very scenic alley between the buildings that's full of beautiful old brickwork -- and a Heathcliff-like arcade of trash cans that a trio of neighborhood cats have exciting and noisy fights over. Kitty is by turns enthralled and terrified. Also, the kitchen, living room, and bathroom windows are all within a few feet of each other outside, so you can throw things from the living room into the kitchen without getting up. I picked up paint today at Home Depot and mom and Eve and Nina are coming over tomorrow to help get things painted; I'll have pictures after that's done.
The bathroom is kind of tiny. So far that's my biggest peeve about the place.
Last weekend, for the second half of our High Line Festival extravaganza, Tom and Eve and Nina and I went to go see Ricky Gervais at the Madison Square Garden theater. Predictably, he was pretty great, although a lot of the material was stuff he'd done before (and is awfully... I don't know, broad, or something. A lot of jokes about animals and fables and what-were-they-thinking observations on figures from world history). David Bowie (I think -- we were sitting in the back row) opened the show with a somewhat timid rendition of the Chubby Little Loser song from the second season of Extras. There were a surprising number of hecklers for the venue and the act, with whom he dealt efficiently.
I have other Things I've Done to talk about, but I'm going to post this now, because it's been too long.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
This Idea Is Dildos
As prophesied, Ted and Katharine and Eve and I hit up the Arcade Fire show at Radio City on Wednesday. It was great, although we were in the very last row of the mezzanine -- for the best, perhaps, considering what happened down below. I'd bought the tickets in part because I kind of liked the band, but, honestly, more because the High Line Festival was being promoted and discussed as being a New York cultural... happening, and I wanted to be a part of it. And, you know, in my more self-confident moments I'm willing to grant that that's basically bullshit, but I'm glad that I got 'em because I'm getting pretty attached to the music. I feel like a lot of other too-many-people-on-stage bands are too much concerned with making some kind of glorious orchestral cacophony, and, you know, that's novel, I guess, but it doesn't rock. I'm gonna go ahead and say that Arcade Fire is first and foremost a rock and roll band: Their songs've got all the right tense and angry chord resolutions and nice hard beats. It's not happy music. So if they happen to want to dress like characters from Ada (e.g., cute girls in leotards stomping around the stage fiddling with theremins or some shit) and have a couple of dudes fight over bashing an un-mic'd symbol on stage during a song... that's okay with me.
But it would've been cooler if Bowie'd showed up.
I picked up Eve on the way up and got to see her office, which is very cool and professional-looking and in a beautiful old building -- the Prince George -- over on 28th St. Apparently a drug deal went down in the elevator as we were leaving? I failed to pick up on it. Eve, ever-vigilant.
Last night was Ted's birthday, so we all went out to the Olive Vine for dinner. It was the one on 7th Ave. and Lincoln, not the one up by me, but the menu is largely the same. I ordered the Olive Vine Pizza because it is fucking good, babies, and the Lincoln St. location prepares it better than mine, even: Lots of zucchini and some cilantro, even -- which Tom H., with whom we met up at PJ Hanley's afterwards, had never heard of but found delicious. He's from somewhere outside of London, though, so.
Woke up flatulent and slightly hung over this morning and headed over to Southpaw for this punk record swap thing I'd heard they were doing. It ended up being okay, but, true to their word, it was mostly records -- which I, you know, respect, but can't listen to -- and they didn't have any of the obscure stuff I was hoping they would, in particular the two albums ("Mentalenema" and "Nail It Down;" think they're John Peel-recorded) from this great 80s punk band The Abs. They've got a song on this compilation I bought in high school that really stands out and I've been searching unsuccessfully ever since for their shit on CD. The best I've been able to do is determine that some of the original members have re-formed under the aegis of Doctor Bison, but it looks like they don't tour or put out actual albums.
One of the former sysadmins from work just called me up out of the blue to come to his house for a belated Cinco de Mayo party. "We're making tamales and drinking tequila-based drinks," he said. Fuck, that sounds pretty good to me. Is this the start of the summer barbecue season?
But it would've been cooler if Bowie'd showed up.
I picked up Eve on the way up and got to see her office, which is very cool and professional-looking and in a beautiful old building -- the Prince George -- over on 28th St. Apparently a drug deal went down in the elevator as we were leaving? I failed to pick up on it. Eve, ever-vigilant.
Last night was Ted's birthday, so we all went out to the Olive Vine for dinner. It was the one on 7th Ave. and Lincoln, not the one up by me, but the menu is largely the same. I ordered the Olive Vine Pizza because it is fucking good, babies, and the Lincoln St. location prepares it better than mine, even: Lots of zucchini and some cilantro, even -- which Tom H., with whom we met up at PJ Hanley's afterwards, had never heard of but found delicious. He's from somewhere outside of London, though, so.
Woke up flatulent and slightly hung over this morning and headed over to Southpaw for this punk record swap thing I'd heard they were doing. It ended up being okay, but, true to their word, it was mostly records -- which I, you know, respect, but can't listen to -- and they didn't have any of the obscure stuff I was hoping they would, in particular the two albums ("Mentalenema" and "Nail It Down;" think they're John Peel-recorded) from this great 80s punk band The Abs. They've got a song on this compilation I bought in high school that really stands out and I've been searching unsuccessfully ever since for their shit on CD. The best I've been able to do is determine that some of the original members have re-formed under the aegis of Doctor Bison, but it looks like they don't tour or put out actual albums.
One of the former sysadmins from work just called me up out of the blue to come to his house for a belated Cinco de Mayo party. "We're making tamales and drinking tequila-based drinks," he said. Fuck, that sounds pretty good to me. Is this the start of the summer barbecue season?
Sunday, May 06, 2007
It's Mostly Pee
So, I found an apartment, I think. I mean, I signed a lease, so I hope so. As I should have expected, maybe, it is outside of my original price range, and probably a little too small, but I'm fairly psyched about the location: It's on 41st St. out in Sunset Park, very close to a wonderful transportation hub (36th St.) and my wonderful girlfriend (Nina). It was not easy to get, though. (All of my friends have, I think, heard this story, but for those of you out in Internet land...) The place was being shown by this company called Rapid Realty, which is not really a real estate brokerage but a "rental agency" (which means they don't get exclusive rights on showing the apartment, I think) and they were suspiciously eager (manically, even) to get me to put down a deposit and fill out an application on the spot. So I did, with some trepidation, only to get a call the next day from one of their secretaries explaining that they gave me the wrong one. The real application, she said, required several times as much information and cost an extra $100, but needed to be complete by the end of the week or I'd potentially lose my deposit. Could I move in by the 15th? Of course, she said, just get the application in. Could I confirm that it was okay to have a cat? Of course, she said, just get the application in. So I did, even though it ended up requiring around 50 pages of personal information to be reluctantly faxed over to them.
I went to the lease signing up at the management company on Wednesday. Waiting for the representative from Rapid to show up, I went through the lease and the management company's rider. Right up front the rider said, "Absolutely no pets allowed." "Excuse me," I said to the management company guy, "Rapid told me I'd be able to keep my cat." "You have a cat?" he said. "Nobody said anything about a cat." So. The woman from Rapid showed up eventually, but showed up with cash, which Yuco wouldn't accept. They directed her to a check cashing place on 45th that did money orders, but she returned empty-handed because she didn't have ID with her. So I ended up having to go back down with her and hand over my ID and Social Security number at the slightly scuzzy check cashing place to get the money orders. The Yuco people got on the phone with their lawyers and the landlord, and (I think) came to an agreement over Kitty -- she can stay, but I have to send them a picture of her so that they can prove, on an ad hoc basis, that I am not playing cat-bait-and-switch. Jesus.
Enough complaining, though. What else have I been doing? Tom and Jill had birthdays; the 680 people had a barbecue; I chipped a tooth on a salad fork. Work is gearing up to release a new version at the end of this month, which means that I am deliriously tired most days out of the verging-on-55-hour work week these days. The fridge is empty -- except for beer -- because I don't want to buy any food and have it spoil. You know. Moving stuff.
Oh yeah -- I got tickets to some of the shows in the High Line Festival. Gonna go see Arcade Fire this Wednesday and then The Gerv in a few weeks.
I went to see Talk Radio last night at the Longacre Theater with Ted and Emma and Katharine. Liev Schreiber, who is the star, is pretty fucking fantastic, but the rest of the actors are not really very good, and the play itself is all over the map in terms of its intent. It's a lot like Network in that regard -- angry, but not clear enough about what it's angry at -- and the hero, played by Schreiber, is pretty much a cipher (which is maybe the point? Not sure). As I was saying to Ted, maybe the 80s (when the play is set) were some kind of watershed period for cultural / political criticism -- like, the very act of complaint was somehow revolutionary? My memory is kind of hazy on the topic, being mostly occupied with plotlines from The Real Ghostbusters.
The high point of the evening, though, came as we were leaving the theater and passing by the side door where all the fans were waiting to get Liev Schreiber's autograph. I was wearing my laptop bag and wasn't really paying attention to where I was going, and I bumped into the rear view mirror of Liev's limousine. His driver yelled, "Hey, look where you're going!" I turned around and made a reciprocal gesture and kept walking -- but Katharine apparently heard him come back with "retard." Awesome.
I went to the lease signing up at the management company on Wednesday. Waiting for the representative from Rapid to show up, I went through the lease and the management company's rider. Right up front the rider said, "Absolutely no pets allowed." "Excuse me," I said to the management company guy, "Rapid told me I'd be able to keep my cat." "You have a cat?" he said. "Nobody said anything about a cat." So. The woman from Rapid showed up eventually, but showed up with cash, which Yuco wouldn't accept. They directed her to a check cashing place on 45th that did money orders, but she returned empty-handed because she didn't have ID with her. So I ended up having to go back down with her and hand over my ID and Social Security number at the slightly scuzzy check cashing place to get the money orders. The Yuco people got on the phone with their lawyers and the landlord, and (I think) came to an agreement over Kitty -- she can stay, but I have to send them a picture of her so that they can prove, on an ad hoc basis, that I am not playing cat-bait-and-switch. Jesus.
Enough complaining, though. What else have I been doing? Tom and Jill had birthdays; the 680 people had a barbecue; I chipped a tooth on a salad fork. Work is gearing up to release a new version at the end of this month, which means that I am deliriously tired most days out of the verging-on-55-hour work week these days. The fridge is empty -- except for beer -- because I don't want to buy any food and have it spoil. You know. Moving stuff.
Oh yeah -- I got tickets to some of the shows in the High Line Festival. Gonna go see Arcade Fire this Wednesday and then The Gerv in a few weeks.
I went to see Talk Radio last night at the Longacre Theater with Ted and Emma and Katharine. Liev Schreiber, who is the star, is pretty fucking fantastic, but the rest of the actors are not really very good, and the play itself is all over the map in terms of its intent. It's a lot like Network in that regard -- angry, but not clear enough about what it's angry at -- and the hero, played by Schreiber, is pretty much a cipher (which is maybe the point? Not sure). As I was saying to Ted, maybe the 80s (when the play is set) were some kind of watershed period for cultural / political criticism -- like, the very act of complaint was somehow revolutionary? My memory is kind of hazy on the topic, being mostly occupied with plotlines from The Real Ghostbusters.
The high point of the evening, though, came as we were leaving the theater and passing by the side door where all the fans were waiting to get Liev Schreiber's autograph. I was wearing my laptop bag and wasn't really paying attention to where I was going, and I bumped into the rear view mirror of Liev's limousine. His driver yelled, "Hey, look where you're going!" I turned around and made a reciprocal gesture and kept walking -- but Katharine apparently heard him come back with "retard." Awesome.
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