It's winter in Sunset Park. The B.I.D. has strung up lights across 5th Ave. and set up speakers at the intersection to play songs in English and Spanish. I managed to send out holiday cards (via Etsy) and do Christmas shopping this year (via Amazon, mostly), despite a somewhat surreal work schedule.
Creepy salespredators from a company called IDT Energy have been prowling the building unbidden, trying to con people into giving up their ConEd statements. The scam is thus (from what I can tell from reading Consumerist): They promise to save you 7% on your energy bill, sometimes claiming to be representatives of ConEd itself, and then they switch you to them as your energy supplier. And they do save you that 7%, apparently, at least for the first month or so, after which they switch you to a "variable rate" plan that costs three times as much as regular ConEd service. The guy who rang my doorbell a few weeks ago complimented me on my pajamas ensemble: "Hey, nice t-shirt, guy! We're with ConEd and we'd like to save you some money! Can I see your latest bill?" I said no and closed the door on him, but, hearing him launch into his patter with some success with the old Mexican guy next door ("Hey, man, nice slippers! You speak English?"), I did some Googling and found a bunch of horror stories about that company elbowing their way into apartments, bullying befuddled elderly or non-English speakers into taking a real lemon of a plan. After sweating over it for a few minutes, I decided to go a little Travis Bickle and stepped into the hall:
"No es de ConEd," I told the old guy. "Es de otra compania. ?Entiendes? No es de ConEd."
"Yeah, it's cool. He gets it," said the IDT salesguy. "I explained that to him." I tried to explain it, too, but it didn't seem to get through to him. "No es legal," I tried, finally, feeling lame.
"Yes it is," said the salesguy, without looking up from his clipboard where my neighbor was signing.
"Esta bien," said my neighbor. "He say he going to..." -- he made a downward, swishing motion with his hand -- "abajar the... bill."
"Fuck it," I thought, and went back inside, feeling sheepish and angry for the rest of the morning. One of them showed up the next weekend, too, a chubby, bald guy, sweaty and panting from the exertion of climbing the stairs. "We're working with ConEd," he said, wiping the moisture from his head with his palm. I managed to talk him into leaving the building with a half-hearted threat to call the police, but I didn't feel much better.
There hasn't been a lot of snow, really only enough to collect into a snowball, which I stored in the freezer. Most of the precipitation has been the dreaded "wintry mix," which promptly froze into an icy cap on the crest of Sunset Park -- as well as a lumpy, hip-fracture incitement in front of the city council building on 4th Ave. There was a strange snow storm earlier this month that blew in an impromptu cloud of enormous flakes around lunch time, more or less filling the sky in Chelsea. Joe and Demetri and I were waiting for our quesadillas outside of Pizza Taco (a.k.a. Great Burrito) on 23rd St. and 6th Ave. when these big, fluffy snowflakes, about the size of, I don't know, gourmet potato chips, just started pouring down. They were so big you could snatch them out of the air and sort of re-throw them, which we did until the freak storm ended a few minutes later.
Last weekend, Nina and I took a walk down through Bay Ridge. I've been taking the train out to Bay Ridge Ave. on the weekends to pick up special cat food for Kitty from a place called Vinny's Pet Store. The subway ride invariably includes some kind of cute interlude with naughty teenagers riding their skateboards on the train and drinking beer at 11:00 AM. The store itself is not far from where a freak tornado tore up the street last year, and down the street from a Turkish seafood restaurant with a hookah and an icy bed of trout in the window. After picking up the cat food, we walked down 65th St. to Owls Head Park (apparently missing a dead body), following a muddy path along the Belt Parkway to this long promenade I'd never been to before, full of joggers and dog-walkers, with a view of the tugs and barges in the bay between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was an unseasonally warm afternoon, and a strange, hot wind was blowing hard in our faces and forcing the pigeons and seagulls to bank out of its way. When we got to Shore Road Park, we turned and headed back uphill to the subway station, past the gaudy McMansions and luxury apartment complexes, past Vito Fosella's shuttered campaign office on 85th St. and 4th Ave.
I managed to send out a few holiday cards this year and buy a few presents for people. The Graham-Rutherfords have yet to actually celebrate Christmukah this year, on account of my mom flying out to California to tend to her parents -- my grandmother had another stroke, and on his way to visit her in the ICU, my grandfather was hit by a bus, crazily enough. They're okay, more or less (less), but, man. Crazy turn of events. She won't be back until the first week of January. So in lieu of a regular family get-together with presents, etc., I stopped by on Christmas Eve and we ordered delicious Indian food from Banjara. It's A Wonderful Life was watched, yet again revealing itself to be worthy of close attention -- did you know that Mr. Potter has a human skull on his desk in most of the shots in his office? I came back the next night, too, in order to eat a ham that my dad had been sent in the mail. Caroline and I baked sugar cookies, which are frustratingly difficult to make on account of having to chill the dough.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
A Night At The Opera
Nina's friend and co-Columbian Lauren, whom she met during her summer program in Brazil, got us tickets to go see Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at the Metropolitan Opera. So we dressed up (I brought a jacket and slacks to work in a bag) and I met Nina and Lauren and Victoria at Lincoln Center after work.
I'd never been to the Met before. The lobby part looks like an okay hotel, red carpet everywhere and full of weird, tacky paintings; but the part with the stage -- the house, I guess -- is enormous and beautiful. Lauren had bought amazingly good tickets, and we found ourselves sitting in the second row behind the pit. When the lights went down, James Levine rose out of the darkness in front of us, turning around briefly and smilingly to receive the adulation of the ancient crowd before doing his conductor thing. In person he looks exactly like he does in the newspaper: Dwarfy and rumpled, but clean. So, a scrubbed dwarf. The backs of the seats had little screens on them that would display subtitles in a fixed-width font, along with a button to switch the language of the subtitles between English, Spanish, and German. Everyone in our immediate vicinity had their screens turned to English. I tried switching mine to Spanish for a while, but it was too distracting.
As for the opera itself, I don't know. I'd read a couple versions of "Faust" before (including Christopher Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," which is a hoot), so I could follow the thing in broad strokes. But it seemed like portions of the story were compressed or missing. And the Playbill-touted technical design was a little... overwhelming. The whole thing centered around the arrangement of the stage as a series of three windowed corridors, one stacked on top of another. The actors had to kind of climb up into these corridors, pace to and fro within them, and then each corridor would sometimes be partially or totally shuttered to allow enormous images to projected onto different "z-levels" of the set, a techique that the production relied on pretty heavily -- the effect of which was by turns clever and austere or frustratingly murky.
The singing was good, though. And the guy who played Mephistopheles had a pretty impressive red lacquer codpiece. During the intermission I paid $11 for a double-shot of Jack Daniels, which I could only drink about half of. I think I passed Caroline Kennedy in the hall.
After the opera was over, Nina's friends were pooped and wanted to go home, but we were hungry so we walked up to Big Nick's. Nina'd never eaten in the inside part, and I don't think I'd been there at all since high school. They don't do the pickles on the tables any more, but it's still got this warm, harried atmosphere. Nina ordered a pretty comprehensive spare ribs platter -- and fucking championed the thing. I tried order a grilled swiss on rye, but they were out of rye bread. "We typically do the grilled cheese on challah. It's really good that way." It was!
Some of you have been asking to see a picture of the punishment beard, which is now mere days away from being destroyed (hopefully) forever. Here you go:
For what it's worth, when all of you beardy types out there had claimed that the thing gets softer and actually comfortable to the grower after some time, well, I'd never believed that before, but I have to admit it's true. It happened between weeks four and five, I think, although I feel like I've gone that long without shaving before.
Thanksgiving happened. I went to my parents' house, and brought vegetarian pâté (made out of mushrooms and cashews; So convincing that it was actually kind of gross the same way pâté is gross) and some bacon-wrapped dates (kind of worryingly undercooked, it turned out), idea courtesy of Ted. In attendance were my parents, my sister (who has so far resisted joining a sorority or secret society), my mom's friend Adrienne, my parents' friend Jon, and two Japanese ladies of unclear provenance who were there to witness an authentic, Western-style Thanksgiving feast. It did not disappoint. Or maybe it did. Doesn't matter.
Nina showed me how to roast chestnuts in the oven. You cut an 'X' across the top of each before cooking them at 425 for, like, ten minutes. When you take them out, they're sort of splayed open at the top like the eggs in Alien, and you can kind of scoop out the stuff inside. I'd never had chestnuts before. They're good! They're basically candy.
On Wednesday, Eve and I hit up Studio B for Ted Leo and The Pharmacists doing a New York Magazine karaoke gig. I'd won the tickets by reply-twittering to an giveaway in Ken Freedman's WFMU Twitter feed. That was neat. We'd gone to something similar earlier this year, and this one followed pretty much the same formula: Ted Leo came out and did a set, then there was a brief interlude (this time with DJs and weird and excruciatingly lame patter from Andrew W.K. of all people), and then karaoke sung by the audience with the band as accompaniment. Like last time, the initial set by the band was a teensy bit uneven and featured a lot of new and some maybe-not-quite polished material. Not that I'm complaining -- the guy is basically a saint, and even a song of his with a hook deficit is still a pretty goddamn hook-y song. And in case you were wondering whether Ted Leo's become complacent in this post-November 4th era, he intro'd one of the songs with, "This song is still, still, still about universal health care!"
And this time Eve and I even stuck around for the karaoke. The karaoke people varied in quality. There were more than a few people, particularly couples, who seemed to think they'd be able to ace a "simple" rock song like Blitzkrieg Bop or Rock The Casbah. Invariably, they were wrong, and the resulting experience was as cringe-y as watching a friend of yours who you already kind of don't trust to sing karaoke sing karaoke but worse (or better?) because they weren't our friends. There were also some real standouts, though, people who clearly knew thoroughly the songs they were doing: I'd never heard of The Outfield, but apparently they have a song called "Your Love," and a guy did a real good version of it; someone else covered "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers really well; and Santogold's "LES Artistes" sung by a bespectacled, lanky hipster was an improbable success. Between each song, Andrew W.K. would congratulate the singer and the audience and deliver these really inscrutable self-help platitudes about believing in yourself and "going for it." I guess that's what he does these days?
The clear champion, though, was this girl named Abigail, who went on about halfway through, and could barely be induced to take the microphone. "Oh my god, you guys," she stammered, "I can't believe I'm up here. I'm going to freak out. I'm, like, this close to Ted Leo!" Yeah, Ted Leo: Now there's an untouchable dude. Despite this eye-rolling intro, she completely knocked one out of the park with a pitch-perfect, jaw-droppingly confident rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Respect." And that's a pretty conventional song, even. She was really good. Andrew W.K. didn't seem to know what to say when he got back up on stage.
I'd never been to the Met before. The lobby part looks like an okay hotel, red carpet everywhere and full of weird, tacky paintings; but the part with the stage -- the house, I guess -- is enormous and beautiful. Lauren had bought amazingly good tickets, and we found ourselves sitting in the second row behind the pit. When the lights went down, James Levine rose out of the darkness in front of us, turning around briefly and smilingly to receive the adulation of the ancient crowd before doing his conductor thing. In person he looks exactly like he does in the newspaper: Dwarfy and rumpled, but clean. So, a scrubbed dwarf. The backs of the seats had little screens on them that would display subtitles in a fixed-width font, along with a button to switch the language of the subtitles between English, Spanish, and German. Everyone in our immediate vicinity had their screens turned to English. I tried switching mine to Spanish for a while, but it was too distracting.
As for the opera itself, I don't know. I'd read a couple versions of "Faust" before (including Christopher Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," which is a hoot), so I could follow the thing in broad strokes. But it seemed like portions of the story were compressed or missing. And the Playbill-touted technical design was a little... overwhelming. The whole thing centered around the arrangement of the stage as a series of three windowed corridors, one stacked on top of another. The actors had to kind of climb up into these corridors, pace to and fro within them, and then each corridor would sometimes be partially or totally shuttered to allow enormous images to projected onto different "z-levels" of the set, a techique that the production relied on pretty heavily -- the effect of which was by turns clever and austere or frustratingly murky.
The singing was good, though. And the guy who played Mephistopheles had a pretty impressive red lacquer codpiece. During the intermission I paid $11 for a double-shot of Jack Daniels, which I could only drink about half of. I think I passed Caroline Kennedy in the hall.
After the opera was over, Nina's friends were pooped and wanted to go home, but we were hungry so we walked up to Big Nick's. Nina'd never eaten in the inside part, and I don't think I'd been there at all since high school. They don't do the pickles on the tables any more, but it's still got this warm, harried atmosphere. Nina ordered a pretty comprehensive spare ribs platter -- and fucking championed the thing. I tried order a grilled swiss on rye, but they were out of rye bread. "We typically do the grilled cheese on challah. It's really good that way." It was!
Some of you have been asking to see a picture of the punishment beard, which is now mere days away from being destroyed (hopefully) forever. Here you go:
For what it's worth, when all of you beardy types out there had claimed that the thing gets softer and actually comfortable to the grower after some time, well, I'd never believed that before, but I have to admit it's true. It happened between weeks four and five, I think, although I feel like I've gone that long without shaving before.
Thanksgiving happened. I went to my parents' house, and brought vegetarian pâté (made out of mushrooms and cashews; So convincing that it was actually kind of gross the same way pâté is gross) and some bacon-wrapped dates (kind of worryingly undercooked, it turned out), idea courtesy of Ted. In attendance were my parents, my sister (who has so far resisted joining a sorority or secret society), my mom's friend Adrienne, my parents' friend Jon, and two Japanese ladies of unclear provenance who were there to witness an authentic, Western-style Thanksgiving feast. It did not disappoint. Or maybe it did. Doesn't matter.
Nina showed me how to roast chestnuts in the oven. You cut an 'X' across the top of each before cooking them at 425 for, like, ten minutes. When you take them out, they're sort of splayed open at the top like the eggs in Alien, and you can kind of scoop out the stuff inside. I'd never had chestnuts before. They're good! They're basically candy.
On Wednesday, Eve and I hit up Studio B for Ted Leo and The Pharmacists doing a New York Magazine karaoke gig. I'd won the tickets by reply-twittering to an giveaway in Ken Freedman's WFMU Twitter feed. That was neat. We'd gone to something similar earlier this year, and this one followed pretty much the same formula: Ted Leo came out and did a set, then there was a brief interlude (this time with DJs and weird and excruciatingly lame patter from Andrew W.K. of all people), and then karaoke sung by the audience with the band as accompaniment. Like last time, the initial set by the band was a teensy bit uneven and featured a lot of new and some maybe-not-quite polished material. Not that I'm complaining -- the guy is basically a saint, and even a song of his with a hook deficit is still a pretty goddamn hook-y song. And in case you were wondering whether Ted Leo's become complacent in this post-November 4th era, he intro'd one of the songs with, "This song is still, still, still about universal health care!"
And this time Eve and I even stuck around for the karaoke. The karaoke people varied in quality. There were more than a few people, particularly couples, who seemed to think they'd be able to ace a "simple" rock song like Blitzkrieg Bop or Rock The Casbah. Invariably, they were wrong, and the resulting experience was as cringe-y as watching a friend of yours who you already kind of don't trust to sing karaoke sing karaoke but worse (or better?) because they weren't our friends. There were also some real standouts, though, people who clearly knew thoroughly the songs they were doing: I'd never heard of The Outfield, but apparently they have a song called "Your Love," and a guy did a real good version of it; someone else covered "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers really well; and Santogold's "LES Artistes" sung by a bespectacled, lanky hipster was an improbable success. Between each song, Andrew W.K. would congratulate the singer and the audience and deliver these really inscrutable self-help platitudes about believing in yourself and "going for it." I guess that's what he does these days?
The clear champion, though, was this girl named Abigail, who went on about halfway through, and could barely be induced to take the microphone. "Oh my god, you guys," she stammered, "I can't believe I'm up here. I'm going to freak out. I'm, like, this close to Ted Leo!" Yeah, Ted Leo: Now there's an untouchable dude. Despite this eye-rolling intro, she completely knocked one out of the park with a pitch-perfect, jaw-droppingly confident rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Respect." And that's a pretty conventional song, even. She was really good. Andrew W.K. didn't seem to know what to say when he got back up on stage.
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