Monday, June 25, 2007

Violent Femmes, Diarrhea

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.

Monday, June 11, 2007

White Summer

The Direct From Hollywood Cemetery show at The Pyramid last Thursday was fantastic! I still don't get why nobody but me is into them. Sure, they're a little stagey, which, if you weren't inclined to like them for other reasons, might only deepen your contempt -- but their songs are incredibly catchy and their playing is incredibly tight, considering they only play about one show a year. I was a little worried they weren't gonna do the intro where the lead singer bursts out of a paper coffin (as the audience chants "Rise, Dr. Fanges!"), but, uh... they did it. They had a smoke machine this time, too. Also kind of central to the show being awesome were these two incredibly drunk girls who were the only people in the audience (well, besides me, naturally) who seemed to realize they were at a rock show. They were hooting and hollering and moshing around and wound up kind of slopping themselves around on the beer-covered floor a whole bunch. It was pretty Blue States Lose, except not in a bathroom and nobody puked. I'm a faithful man, but I will admit being a bit thrilled that they were shoving me and grabbing at my jacket.

On Saturday Katharine and Nina and I hopped the LIRR out to Belmont Park and spent the day betting on the ponies. It was the Belmont Stakes! I'd never actually been to a racetrack before, though I'd done some betting at Emma's OTB birthday party a few years ago. The track facility itself was a little less fancy than I'd expected -- it was kind of a cross between, you know, an OTB, and, say... an airport. The horses were very strong and cool looking, though -- I saw one that I wanted to bet on but couldn't properly identify that had unnervingly blue eyes and was drooling a lot. We got there around Race 5 and stayed until the big one, which was Race 11 or 12. Nina was the big winner in terms of picking the right horses -- she won three or four times with a variety of different bets. (Her get of choice is the boxed exacta, a convenient way of betting on the first and second horses in either order.) K-Rod came in second, and I didn't win anything until the Stakes itself -- I was down about $80 and made $65 of it back on the box with Curlin and Rags to Riches.

A guy near the stables told us that a lot of the earlier races have unreliable handicapping because the owners will dope a second- or third-tier horse in these races, ruining it for a long-term career and possibly incurring penalties themselves but come out ahead on the bet money, so it's sometimes better to bet on a 5-to-1 horse than, say, a 3-to-2. That's consistent with my typical maverick strategy, anyway, even though, you know, said strategy was basically a complete failure. Horse racing is a hard game.

On the way back we sat in front of this quintet of noisy frat boys calling each other faggots and giving each other dead arms. I wondered out loud to Nina whether they'd sing themselves to sleep. Eventually they did.

On Sunday Eve got a bicycle in Williamsburg and she and Nina and I stuffed ourselves practically to the point of, you know, eruption at this barbecue place on Metropolitan Avenue called Fette Sau.

Last night I decided to make the "Sin City" Breakfast Tacos that Robert Rodriguez describes here (somewhat off-puttingly insisting on the native pronunciation of "taco"). They came out pretty okay -- the super-easy filling was easier to make than the tortillas themselves and kind of tastier -- but my advice is to use lard, as he recommends (they didn't have it at the Key Food in Sunset Park!), and to use a little bit more flour than he does, because my tortillas came out pretty sticky and hard to work with. Oh, also it takes way more than 10 minutes. It takes like an hour and a half, and your smoke detector will go off, and you will try to pull it off the wall to take the battery out but then it turns out it's wired into the ceiling and you just broke the fixture and your smoke detector is now hanging by a bunch of stupid wires from the ceiling.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Fuck Williamsburg

Tom and Emma and I went to trivia night at the Greenwich Treehouse on Monday night, and I'm pleased to say our fortunes improved over the last time she and I'd gone. The Comancheros (nee Brooklyn Excelsiors) finished squarely in the middle -- as opposed to dead last. I give myself props for knowing that Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for Gone With The Wind even though I've never seen it, and for identifying the UB40 song "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You;" I do not deserve props for forgetting to double the length of the hypotenuse in the one math problem of the evening.

It was around 10:00 when trivia night got out and I was tired and drunk, but I decided to head out to Williamsburg anyway to catch the Horrors show at the Luna Lounge. And... well, I'd typed up with a total indictment of the borough and its people, making the claim that I finally understand what everyone is talking about when they say they hate the place, but, you know, it came off a bit shrill. Suffice it to say that the show was not so great, not least of all because the Horrors are not very good live -- kind of a surprise because I'd liked the stuff of theirs that I'd listened to on the 'net. The lead singer has this total lack of charisma and stage presence; he's an obvious, nervous poseur with a lousy voice, and the brief bit of stage-diving he did was a pallid gesture towards proper rock star behavior. The rest of the band was an awkward, silly embarrassment. The audience didn't help, either -- very bridge-and-tunnel, and fucking everyone close to the stage was taking pictures with annoyingly professional-looking cameras. When I finally slouched my way back to Bedford Ave., it took literally 45 minutes for the L to come.

But I hadn't learned my lesson, because last night, I went back out there with Nina and her friends Thomas and Evan to see The Fucking Champs at Studio B. It was a much better show, especially in comparison, except, I guess, for the fact that the audience could not be persuaded to dance around. Oh, and that apparently those guy are an all-instrumental act? Don't know how I missed that. They sound great, though -- and, as Nina pointed out, they are almost certainly better than you at Guitar Hero.

Watching Hoop Dreams right now and eating a veggie burger. As everyone told me at the time it came out, it's pretty amazing. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Picard gets to experience the entire life of that dude on that alien planet in the span of a few minutes. I mean, it's not quite like that, but.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to hit up the Pyramid club for the first time since high school (for a Diplobrats show where I met Archie's dealer / modeling agent) to see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery -- for the first time since they opened for Ted Leo a year and some change ago. Look at their MySpace page, NYC people, and tell me you don't want to come see them with me.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Bentley Bear

I've basically finished painting my new apartment. That I painted at all may come as a surprise to those of you who have locked horns with me over my admittedly perverse inclination towards plain white walls, but I figured that, you know, this is the first apartment I've moved into entirely on my own and I'm going to make some bold choices. So the Saturday before last I went down to Home Depot with Eve and Nina, and we got paint. I picked a yellowy-green color called Pear for the living room, [in retrospect what seems to be a pretty garish] bright orange called fuckin' Bird Of Paradise for the kitchen and bathroom, and a soft blue color called Little Pond for my bedroom. The next morning my parents came down to see the new place and they helped tape and paint the living room, as did Eve and Nina. It came out great! Pear: Highly recommended for all the dark, cave-like rooms in your house.

The living room's pretty big, so it took about three hours for us to paint the whole thing, and when we were done I took my parents out to Matamoros for tacos. It was one of my more humiliating Matamoros experiences: Since everyone was having tacos, I tried to collate the entire order and tried to read it in English to our waitress -- who I believed spoke English for some reason I can't remember now -- but she didn't understand and went to go get the new guy who speaks English fluently (and manages the place, I think), to whom I read our list half in Spanish and half in English, because he was obviously kind of disgusted by my pronunciation. Eve, sitting directly across from me during this fiasco, flushed visibly. But it ended up okay, because the tacos were off the fucking chain as usual and Nina got a guanabana milkshake that was kind of a revelation.

The rest of the painting I did pretty much solo, and it kind of sucked -- I was sore and praying for it to be, you know, over, the entire time, but I got the kitchen painted and then, by last Friday, my bedroom, though I made a lot of mistakes and there are some fairly visible unpainted spots. And, you know, now it's over.

What else did I do that weekend? Nina and Eve and I attempted to attend this Lightning Bolt show in a weird little room above a garage in Bushwick but were turned away because it was "sold out" -- even though the venue was mostly empty from what we could see. According to some of Eve's friends who were able to gain entry, we didn't miss much, other than the lead singer puking on some of the audience. Instead, we wandered and trained over to Barcade and played games for a while. I discovered that the original Galaga (which they have as part of this three-way Galaga emulator) is way more brutal than the one at Clean Rite and that I don't really like it -- or most old arcade games, for that matter. They're too hard! Eve introduced Nina to this (what I think is an) unplayably frustrating game called Crystal Castles.

Last Thursday I stopped by 471 12th in order to, as bidden, clean the bathroom and the stove and the fridge and sweep the floors and ugh argh bleagh. I guess John didn't think I was gonna do it, though, because he'd changed the locks on the apartment door. Luckily, sort of, the new tenants were moving a few things in at the very moment I showed up and were gracious enough to let me in. All the excess junk had been cleared out and the floors with freshly and beautifully polyurethaned. The stove was still filthy, but the new people told me I was off the hook, since he was going to get a maid service to come in and do it. Two downsides, though -- the screws on my old air conditioner were too stripped for me to remove it from the window, and, more importantly, my Galaga tile mosaic that I'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard for safe-keeping was missing. I'd wanted to cement it to one of the chimney columns on the roof (bought cement and grout and everything), but John'd installed a fire alarm thing on the door to the roof the week before I tried to put it up. I hope, at least, one of the painters took a liking to it and kept it.

On Saturday Nina and I did the First Saturday thing at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn't been for a while, but, as part of my do-everything-possible-this-summer agenda (accompanied by my overstuffed and overambitious Google calendar: HTML and Google Calendar format) I thought I should start doin' it again. First, though, we got some shit at Target and wound up meeting, improbably and awkwardly meeting with the new 12th St. tenants, who did not want to recognize me for some reason. (Maybe they found the dogporn archive?! That's enough to put anyone off their lunch.) I got some t-shirts and then we met up with Eve and some of her friends from work to watch a POV documentary about factory workers in Tijuana, and then spent some time hanging out in the ballroom watching people square dance. I found a large and ornate earring on the ground that must've fallen out of someone's ear -- it was a metal hoop with a bunch of fine threads kind of threaded in and out of the center. I held it up in the air for a little while in the hopes that its owner would recognize it, but she didn't.

Yesterday Ted and Tom and Nina and I drove out to the Red Hook ball fields for some Mexican food. I'd first noticed the food stands a few years ago while driving with Lester but wasn't really keyed in to what an institution they are until recently. The lines are pretty long but we optimized by getting buttery-cheesey-spicy corn, limeade, and raw coconut (which is inedible, as far as I'm concerned -- it's like eating wood! Everyone else was homphed it with gusto, but I had to spit mine out) while we waited for the main event, these delicious and enormous overstuffed taco-like food items called quesohuaraches -- bean paste-stuffed fried tortillas filled with cheese and carne enchilada and other things. Then Nina and I watched this problematic all-day TLC special on this morbid obesity-treatment facility in the city. It was like 12 hours of naughty fat people sneaking food into their rooms and being hoisted around on cranes.

Tonight: Trivia Night with Emma et al. at the Greenwich Treehouse. The first time she and I went, we were full of smug anticipation of victory but ended up losing. With zero points. Better luck this time? Also, The Horrors are playing.