Live-Blogging The Wire

You fuckers have been bugging me to watch The Wire for the past two years, and, like I've been saying, it's in there, man, it's in my Netflix queue. It's just down a ways, past some documentaries about globalization and the second Jackass movie. But Nina was willing to accelerate it a bit in hers, and so last night I finally saw the first three episodes. In view of the faux-momentousness of the event, I decided to "live blog" it.

00:04 - "He'd wait until there was money on the ground, then he'd run off with it. Couldn't help himself." Snot Boogie's racket sounds pretty awesome. I'd play craps with him, although I can see how he'd be an acquired taste.

00:06 - Where do I know that dude McNulty's talking to? Holy shit, it's agent Richard Gill! "You gonna lick? You gonna lick? I'll tell you what you can lick." ("That's why they call me stallion...")

00:22 - Avon Barksdale is a sneaker name. Or the name of a cartoon dog butler.

00:28 - "Use Me 'Til You Use Me Up," says Nina, giving and singing the name of the Al Jarreau song they're playing at the titty bar. "How do you know that?" "It's on a CD I have," she says. "The CD is called 'Badass Singing.'"

00:33 - That fat cop Landsman looks like if Alec Baldwin in The Departed had a baby with Chief Tyrol

00:41 - I've never even heard of anyone paying drug dealers with xeroxed money. That's pretty gutsy.

00:43 - Wait, that white kid who's shooting up with Bubbles -- is that Telly? It is! This show is like a Who's Who of mid-nineties character actors.

00:47 - "You give great case, brother" -- that's some white collar-ass slang.

00:55 - Is that bartender at the strip club moonlighting as a taxi dispatcher? Nina thinks D'Angelo is handsome until I point out he looks like a baby whose eyebrows got shaved off.

00:58 - "You shot the mouse?!"

Hey, so that's a good show, you know? It kind of reminds me of Prime Suspect, both in terms of the subject matter and tone, and in how some scenes seem to be shot on film and some on something cheaper -- Deadwood on DV, say. We're going to keep plowing through, I think. And not least of all, now I know what all the fuss is about Lance Reddick's web site.

Night Of A Thousand Songs

Spring!

After a thorough search for recipes for banana pie that actually involve bananas as something more than, you know, a topping, I settled upon this recipe and made it. It was difficult but ultimately pretty rewarding. Word to the wise: You cannot substitute half-and-half for heavy cream.

On Friday the company was celebrating my friend Joe's birthday; we took him out for Korean barbecue at a place on 31st St. I'd never had that stuff before -- it really is, you know, a barbecue. I totally dig the proscribed method of consumption (cook some shit, bundle it up with rice and kimchi in a big floppy lettuce leaf; homph it). That stuff is pretty expensive, though -- good thing the 'Monkey comped it.

After dinner we went looking for a karaoke den. After rejecting one for price reasons, we walked around K-Town for a good 15 minutes, despaired of finding a joint that could accommodate all of us at the price we wanted, and ultimately settled on a place with a lobby tricked out with lasers and a fog machine. A little while after we'd settled in, Libby and Steve, who'd gone in search of a B.Y.O.B. solution, reappeared carrying a case of Korean plum wine, which they'd been recommended by the locals as being the best thing going for karaoke. Unfortunately, there were cameras in the private rooms, and, naturally, the staff swooped in and briskly removed the offending bottles -- save two, which Libby secreted in the folds of her coat. "What's under here?" they asked. "It's water, it's water," she said, in total bad girl mode. After the fracas concluded, she and Joe (and anyone else they could induce to taste the stuff) nursed their contraband in the corner underneath the security camera.

Some of the Monkeys were reluctant, but Nick and Margaret sang a Madonna song and Matthew led with a funny, super lounge-y rendition of some R&B song. And I tried to be good, giving, and game, to the extent that my half rasping, half hollering style of karaoke delivery allows me to be. (In the absence of songs by bands I'm actually, you know, up on, I think "I'm A Believer" might be my new karaoke go-to.) The little karaoke display system would give you a "grade" when you finished singing a song, via a little cartoon spaceman who'd spray-paint a score on a brick wall or sommat. After attempting to analyze the mechanism behind a bunch of seemingly incongruous ratings, we decided that they were based pretty much entirely on volume.

After a good two hours, our party split up -- management went on to some king of swing-dancing club that they do, other people hit up a bar. I lurched over to Duet 35 where a whole mess of college people were already singing: Tom and Colleen, Emma, Katharine, Nani, li'l Greg; Nina joined up as well. My throat was already pretty sore -- I didn't know if I'd be able to . Nani (not Nina, although she was admirably participatory) did a fairly stunning (Michigan J. Frog-wise) solo performance of that Nat King Cole song "L-O-V-E." "Two Princes" sure as fuck got sung again, as did Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again." Circa 3:00 AM we finally called it quits and piled into cars on the C.A.B. line -- except Nina made her way over to Williamsburg to hit up her friend's birthday party. She made it, too! Truly indomitable, that one.

I've been playing on a pub trivia team. It's held on Sunday nights at Pacific Standard, a slightly fancy California-style beer bar over on 4th Ave. near Atlantic Terminal. Eve got me into it; it's a semi-rotating crew of people from our high school and friends and friends of friends of theirs. She made the initial mistake of selling the virtues of attending based on the intellectual rigors of the questions: "It's all stuff about history and literature! You don't have to know any stupid pop-culture stuff." And maybe it's true that there's something for the Harvard types on our team to chew over, but I got serious brownie points for knowing that Chuck Norris volunteered to be president of a seceded Texas and that the Italian press had nicknamed some murderous American chick "Foxy Knoxy."

The name of our team is Toledo Despair, a failed answer to a question about the name of a minor league baseball team in Ohio. We've been consistently hovering around first place in a set of rankings that supposedly determine our fitness to enter "the playoffs," which stand to net us a private, budgeted party at the bar. Our success also nets us weekly discounts (sometimes of 100%) on Sunday night booze, leaving us lurchingly attempting to tilt the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine long after the questions are over.

Before I forget: You know how I bought that fancy electronic trap that Tom'd turned me onto? Before leaving for Florida last month, I set it up on my desk. The Monday that I was away, I got the following picture in the mail:



Jason, the guy who sits behind me, found the trap sitting in the material shown, which he describes as "liquid mouse." The office consensus was that possibly two mice had wedged themselves into the thing, overloading it such that it, uh, pureed them. Suffice it to say, Jason is owed some Snapples.

Escape From Sarasota

Just got back from a week in Sarasota, Florida, where I was visiting my grandmother on my dad's side. He was flying down there to help her take care of her taxes -- she's got a trust that my grandfather set up for her that keeps her in an assisted living facility for ladies who used to lunch. And it also happened to be her 90th birthday. ...And, embarrassingly, it'd been around five years since I'd visited her. (Mer and I'd gone to see her right after she'd gotten one of her legs amputated; she was pretty out of it the whole time, so that may not even count.) Babies, I struggle with filial piety at times.

The flight down was a snap: I'd never been to the new Terminal 5 at JFK or flown JetBlue before -- the special TV hookup they give you was totally fascinating. I finally got to see an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show -- he went to Uzbekistan and attended a wedding. The footage they got of the country and the people was great, but although Bourdain talks a big game ("Oh no, more vodka? You do not want me to drink more vodka"), he actually seemed to have, in fact, many reservations. After that the Travel Channel had a show where a fat, bald dude ate some puffins.

My grandma lives in an assisted living facility right on the bay -- it's actually a lot like a fancy hotel, except that, because of her leg et al., she lives in the hospital wing, which is a little more... medically equipped. My dad and I were staying at a Comfort Inn a few miles up the road. Every evening after my grandmother was put to bed, we'd head back to the room to watch the free HBO (we watched the pilot for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which I actually kind of liked a lot). There was no way to control the strength of the air conditioner -- it was either sweltering or freezing, so we went in the freezing direction. After hearing my dad describe the situation, including some complaints about the wretched coffee included in the complimentary "continental breakfast," my grandmother dubbed it the "Cold Comfort Inn."

During the day we'd follow her around the palacial grounds of the facility -- she's got a motorized chair with which she's quite agile and speedy -- from the lizard-crossed gazebo looking out over Sarasota Bay to the residents' herb gardens to the fancy-dress dining room (I'd been told to pack a suit for to wear at dinner; as per my usual M.O. I managed to bring two left dress shoes). As we puttered around, she explained to anyone who'd listen, "my whole family's here!" The clucking and attention felt good, I have to admit. We celebrated her birthday, which, to my grandma's consternation, almost all the other residents'd gotten wind of via the chapel bulletin board. Nina'd helped me repurpose a very apropos silk scarf as a gift; my mom sent along a 500-piece Barack Obama jigsaw with my dad. I got to eat a lot of fish and seafood at fancy Sarasota restaurants; I even found a mussel pearl in my food at The Crab & Fin, promptly almost losing the tiny thing in an inner pocket of my jeans.

Somewhat more claustrophobic were the rigors of her schedule: She'd be up early, ready to meet me and my dad for a few circuits of the gardens; then lunch'd be ready; then more walking around around or watching movies from the library; then obligatory whiskey (holy god do old people drink) while she listened to the copious voicemails her friends had left her while she'd been out; changing into dinner clothes; dinner in the posh dining room with motorized curtains that slid closed as the sun set over the water; then it'd time for her to be "processed" and put to bed, leaving my dad and I with naught to do but drive back to the hotel and watch a couple of hours of TV before the whole thing started again.

Nonetheless, the week passed pleasantly enough, and pretty soon we were back at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport to catch a JetBlue flight home to JFK. I picked up some odd-tasting "key lime"-flavored treats for my co-workers (bark, taffy) at the CNBC store and we hunkered down to wait. And we waited. And the scheduled time of our flight came and went. And eventually it was dark and the terminal was almost empty. Apparently JetBlue has a single plane devoted to the New York-to-Florida route, and because of inclement weather earlier in the day at JFK and the cascade delay that had led to, well, blah blah blah, we were running late. At about 10 o'clock, the flight crew made the announcement that they were going to attempt to board us, but because they had a very narrow window for taking off (the pilots were at this point toeing the line of maximum awake hours), we had to be fully boarded in 10 minutes. My heart sank, but we lined up and got on the plane -- and they did do a pretty efficient job getting us on board. We began taxiing, the little DirectTV screens turned on and started playing a New York Times interview with Mickey Rourke. The flight crew did a high-speed version of the emergency procedures, and for a minute it actually looked as if we were going to get airborne. But then we stopped taxiing and the lights flickered out, Mickey Rourke frozen tauntingly on the TV screens in mid-smirk. We'd missed our window, they told us, and, furthermore, they couldn't get us on another flight that night or even the next day. And we might not even be able to fly back to New York until Monday.

My dad and I sort of panicked -- I opened my laptop and we made an emergency visit to Travelocity.com. Last-minute plane tickets are expensive! The earliest, most convenient flights were going for, like, a thousand bucks a pop. So we booked a middlingly-expensive and sort of roundabout itinerary, flying out of Tampa the next morning (at 7:00am!) and into Boston, and then from there into good old JFK on a Czech Air puddle hopper. We were harried and pissed off, but we weren't the most fucked by any means -- a woman ahead of us on line kept repeating into her cell phone: "What am I going to do? I have no one here. I have nothing." My dad re-rented a car and we drove back to the Cold Comfort Inn to try to sleep for three hours (couldn't) before waking in the dark and making the hallucinatorily early hour-and-a-half drive to Tampa. Once we'd done that, though, things were easy -- all our flights were punctual, I slept en route, and even found an issue of The Guardian from January in the seat pocket on the Boston flight that had a scary article about serial killers.

I pretty much agree with this: http://fuckyeahcilantro.tumblr.com/