But let's put that aside. Point is, I actually had a pretty bitchen summer -- as Eve pointed out, I did pretty much everything. Saw dozens of bands, a good number of outdoor movies. Didn't go to the beach once, which was surely a mistake, but I did go to motherfucking foreign country, which should count for something. If I could do it over, maybe I would've gotten drunker, ated more hamburgers, um... oh, yeah, maybe gone jogging, like, once. Do-overs are for horseshoes and hand grenades, though.
So what's on the menu now? Mostly fretting about the election. You know how democrats get this kind of failure-stink about them when they've realized they're going to lose? It's this sort of tiredness that you can see in their faces; they're not as mean, not as witty anymore. They're still friendly, still smiley, but they've lost the will to live, kind of. I can't tell if Barack Obama's got the stink or not -- a couple of weeks ago, when he went on Letterman right after the RNC, I would've said yes; and whether or not he "won" it, I didn't think that first debate did him any favors; but looking at these poll numbers now, holy god, we might wind up with the president that I'm gonna vote for! Neat.
Somebody spilled a plastic gallon-jug container of milk on our landing and just left it for days. That was gross.
I've been cooking a fair amount, which is good. I used the last bananas of summer to make a kick-ass banana bread, although I kind of rigged the competition by putting walnuts and apricots and chocolate chips in it as well. I attempted to make Joy of Cooking Italian-style meatballs (parmesan and parsley mixed in) using ground beef-flavor Gimme Lean, which didn't work at all (ugh). And just now I made this pretty sick spicy potato / onion concoction that they posted a recipe for on Gothamist. I didn't make the yogurt topping because for some reason it is impossible to find straight-up plain yogurt in this neighborhood.
There are less musical goings-on to see now that it's gotten colder. A few weeks ago, on a Friday whim, Nina and I went to go see Dragons of Zynth over at this club called Le Poisson Rouge. I hadn't been there before, and I was surprised when it turned out to be in the same location as this old club called Life, right down Bleecker St. from the venerable Pizza Box. I never went to that club either, but there's a story that Razor likes to repeat about being let in to a 21-and-over Dickies show when he and Handsome Caveman and I were in high school by fiat of Leonard Graves Phillips himself. I wasn't there. At any rate, the band opening for the Dragons was this bunch of white dudes called The Suckers, and they kind of sucked -- they were all wearing Hawaiian shirts and had lackadaisically grease-painted faces, and they were playing this spacey stoner rock in time with this kaleidoscopic animation of seashells being projected behind them. Boring. Dragons of Zynth were awesome, though -- no lie that they put on a high-energy stage show. The lead singer (I think) is this stretched-out-looking lanky dude who plays keyboards like he's acting in a German expressionist movie; the guitar player was less flamboyant but had some serious soloing chops. They weren't a very talky band, but they were hot to listen to.
That's my music criticism voice I'm trying out right there.
Last week I caught Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip over at Mercury Lounge, managing to bring Kojo and Libby with me from work. They were pretty great (Dan is fatter than I'd thought, Scroob beardier), but the audience was a little low-energy. By a show of hands, about half of them were from England (weird), but the rest of the audience were New Yorkers, whom Scroobius Pip described as being the "toughest" audience in the world to get to dance. That didn't use to be true, I don't think. Gamely, we tried our best to sort of bop along to his flow, as oddly punctuated as it is ("...hip-hop-is-art... don'-make-a-fuckin'-pop-hit be smart"). Thanks, once again, to Stephen Merchant.
Links:
- Wilfred
- Sheer, unmitigated brilliance
- 1001 rules
At work, with the support of Libby and Peter, I am taking the hundred push-up challenge. Libby and I just finished week three, in which we are in the middle tier, whatever that means. I am finding it brutally difficult -- we do our sets in the evening, and sometimes, after my five, I'm so light-headed that I'm not much good for thinking after sitting back down at my desk. Nonetheless, I'm finding that certain aspects of the experience are changing for the better. Each individual push-up doesn't get any easier, but you find you have a larger reserve of energy to draw from, gruntingly.