Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Married Ted

Nina and I went to that Yankees game: August 16th, versus Detroit. I hadn't been to the new stadium yet. First impressions? It feels bigger, cleaner. Maybe brighter. Like they've sort of streamlined the baseball-watching experience, made it more intense. We set out for the Bronx a bit late -- there was a thunderstorm in progress, a proper summer drenching, finally. But it had largely abated by the time the D train went above ground, and by the time we got to our seats, the first inning was over, the 2-1 Detroit. And it stayed like that pretty much all night. None of the Yankees' celebrity hitters seemed to be able to get on base, much less score a run; although some credit is due to Detroit's starting pitcher, Max Scherzer, who threw consistent strikeouts throughout. The exception, as far as I could tell, was Curtis Granderson, whom I'd never heard of before this game (the Yankees actually picked him up from Detroit, I found out later) -- he got on base pretty much every time he was up at bat, and was cagey and appealingly base-stealy.

We cheered at the appropriate times ("Make some noise!" said the plasma marquees) and in the appropriate ways ("hip-hip-Jorge!"), but the Yankees did fuck all until the 9th inning, when there was an unexpected almost-rally. They scored a run, got the bases loaded, and were poised to turn things around... but the Tigers made a double play off Derek Jeter and all of a sudden the huge electronic displays were reminding us to drive home safely. It was a spectacular bit of anticlimax.

It was this Spring over Sunday plates of cornmeal waffles in their penthouse apartment on President St. that Ted and Cat told me and Katie and Tom and Emma that they were engaged to be married. They planned to do the whole thing at the end of the summer, so as not to draw things out, and to do it on Cat's family's farm, out in Boyd, Minnesota. Nina and I just got back from it!

Except that the journey out did not go very well for us. We flew from LaGuardia to Chicago in the early afternoon on Friday, and were scheduled to fly from Chicago to Rochester at around 4:00 PM. Fifteen minutes before our flight was to board, the agent at the American counter announced over the loudspeaker that the flight was canceled due to inclement weather. No warning had been given, no other information was provided -- except that the longer we waited before hustling to the "rescheduling phone bank," the fewer options we'd have. Our arrival was already going to be cutting it pretty close to the beginning of the rehearsal dinner (featuring a much-anticipated pig roast), so we hustled, and through some guileful customer-service negotiating, Nina was able to get us on a flight to La Crosse, Wisconsin, leaving in a couple of hours. It wasn't great, but it was, apparently, the only option that got us there the same evening. We waited and sulked.

Eventually we boarded our flight to Wisconsin. It was short. We were seated with a number of servicemen and -women, evidently returning from abroad. Their families met them at the gate in La Crosse while we waited for a car from Bee Cab, the company who'd given us the best -- although not a great -- quote for the trip into Minnesota. We managed to triangulate the location of a noisy cricket between two panels of sidewalk. Our Bee Cab driver ended up being friendly; and her girlfriend, riding shotgun, struck up a conversation with Nina about non-traditional studenthood. The girlfriend also described her plans to adopt rabbits. She was sort of a rabbity woman.

We were exhausted by the time we arrived at the Best Western, but we managed to rally after checking into our room, and joined the gathering of Friends in progress on the floor below us in Dan and Maia's room. It was just like college all over again! We talked about circumcision and ate peanut butter-filled pretzel nuggets and drank whiskey.

We got up late on Saturday; everyone else'd moseyed off in search of food. There'd been talk of going to Cheap Charlie's, locally famous for the big pig statue on top of its sign. But it had moved, and nobody seemed to know the new address, and Ben and Tanya's kids needed to eat, so we settled on Newt's, a burger joint boasting the best burger in Rochester -- seven years in a row! -- but not much else, to my and KT's effete chagrin. Some of the members of our party were brave enough to try the "Juicy Lucy," and variants thereof, which consist of burgers that've been, uh, injected with or otherwise shaped around a molten core of yellow cheese. Good thing it's down the street from the Mayo Clinic? I know I'm not the first person to make that joke.

In the afternoon, the Best Western shuttle drove us up to the farm, where people were starting to gather for the ceremony. The family house was on top of a hill, on a road lined with drawered hives and bales of hay. Some vigorous-looking chickens roamed the driveway. I stalked one of them, a beautiful golden orange hen named Honey, under a bush while she made quiet, anxious -- and un-chickenlike -- hooting sounds.

The ceremony itself was brief. Ted and Cat stood behind the house, at the crest of hill overlooking some rolling fields. A string quartet played quietly. They exchanged vows. Some little girls sprinkled flower petals up and down the aisle. Afterwards, we carried folding chairs down the hill to the barn, where the reception was. The barn was enormous, sturdy, well-maintained; although it was unclear whether it had a function outside of being a home to a flock of swallows.

Tom, Dan, and Greg delivered the "funny" toast of the evening. In addition to drawing attention to Ted's most easily roastable aspects (e.g., gangles), they described the hat I'd bought him many years ago as, I think, a birthday present: I was working at the 'napse at the time, and, on a whim, I approached one of the enterprising gentlemen who'd set up "hat customization" businesses at tables outside our Broadway office, and asked for a hat with the words "Drunk Ted" on it in wildstyle graffiti. My intent was to make explicit the transformation Ted would undergo after a few drinks at a 680 Degraw party, often the subject of jokes: Drunk Ted was way more likely to tackle you, to do pratfalls, to tell you something that you didn't know about you. I was aiming squarely in the radius of "gag gift" -- who could imagine Oxford-shirted Ted sporting Marc Ecko-looking shit like that? But the hat caught on in a big way, and pretty soon you could expect Ted to be wearing it to indicate exactly who you were talking to at that point in the evening. Tom et al. explained, and then presented Ted with a new hat, red with black Sharpie, that proclaimed his new status.

The sun went down, filling the barn with golden orange light.

After dinner, we moved the tables and chairs out of the way, and the band set up their instruments at one end of the barn. A barn dance caller had been hired, and he explained the moves that we'd be required to do: I now know what it means to promenade, to do-si-do. After Ted and Cat danced their solo dance (to Wichita Lineman, I think?), there was a rollicking, compulsory group dance. I loved it! Although in typical fashion I wound up in the wrong places at various important junctures: On the women's side; turned the wrong way round; going under people's arms when I should have been going over. There were a bunch of little kids joining in the dancing, and at one point, during one of the partner-exchange phases, I wound up across from a little girl who looked absolutely horrified at the prospect of being my dance partner. I reached out to take her hand, but she bolted. That's okay, I thought. I'd be freaked out if I saw me coming at me across a dance floor. But I'd just been reading the bit in Shane MacGowan's book (rich and fascinating, by the way. The review that mentions his "deep knowledge and fathomless ignorance" sums things up pretty well) where he talks about the casual superiority of Irish dance -- in this case, "battering" -- and I did my best to stomp and jump and batter the hell out the barn floor. As I mentioned to Cat afterwards, I've never danced that much, nor had so much fun doing it, in my whole life.

On Sunday morning, after dancing the band out of the barn and then keeping things going with an iPod and some speakers (Intergalactic Pla-ne-tary!) we woke up extra early and hopped the Best Western shuttle back to the Ward farm, where we'd been promised a spectacle: A family friend of the Wards had about a dozen buckets of half-fermented groundfall apples that he planned to feed to the bison, and we were invited to observe. We helped hoist some of the buckets, which smelled clean and dirty and sweet at the same time, off the bed of his pickup truck and down to the electric fence by the barn. We tipped them over the edge of the fence, creating a sort of moat of stinky apples, and then the guy made a sort of whooping call; after a few moments, a small herd of bison came trotting up over the horizon and down the hill towards us. We'd been told their hooves would sound like thunder, but it was quieter than that. What was impressive was how quickly they stopped as they reached the fence and started to chomp on the apples. True to form, Hans -- the farm's stud, the only adult male they keep around from season to season -- was front and center, getting first pick. But there were some notable cows and second-string males: One bison with extremely moist and inflamed-looking conjunctiva (do bison have those?) whom we named "Fly Eyes." Another bison, an older male, hung back from the rest of the herd, only venturing to taste the apples once the others had trotted back over the hill and out of sight. "What's his deal?" I asked Ted. Ted squinted and looked off towards the woods in the distance. "Something ain't right about that one," he said.

And then it was all over (for us, at least). Tom and Colleen drove us to the Rochester Int'l airport, where we all got on a tiny plane back to Chicago. Tom and Colleen were sitting right behind us. We all leafed through the SkyMall catalog and tittered over the chintzy offerings. Tom, who'd flown Chicago-to-Rochester on Wednesday, asked the flight crew if this was the only plane making that flight; it was. He searched the seat pockets, to no avail, for a notebook he'd lost on the trip out. Colleen split off to hop a flight to Colorado, where yet another wedding was in the works (the two of them will have attended five fucking weddings by the end of the summer), and Nina and Tom and I picked up some oily-looking deep-dish personal pizzas and hustled onto the flight back to LaGuardia.

After we got back that afternoon, it rained torrential. I sat on the couch, feeling unexpectedly sad: End of childhood, end of summer. End of drunk Ted? We'll see, I guess.

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Loop

Hello, Internet! Been a while.

I'm 29 now. My birthday passed without much fanfare -- the lack of which being my idea, although probably a bad one in retrospect. It's hard, though, getting older. I don't like it. I feel like Raistlin Majere, I said to people at work, the man with the hourglass eyes. Daryl went out and bought me a bunch of enormous helium party balloons and affixed them to my monitors. I think he meant it, at least partly, to razz me, but I found it strangely affecting. I left them floating above my desk for two weeks, then stashed them in a conference room. But I found the prospect of a more public acknowledgment of my birthday too overwhelming to plan. Although I feel a bit more on top of things than I did last year, when I was literally fired on my birthday, I still wish I had more control over it all. Like, hey, you know, can we hold the passage of time at bay for a few months, 'til I've gotten a few more, uh, life-notches on my belt? The days are practically making a whooshing noise as they go past.

So instead of celebrating, I opted to work the Free Software Foundation's table at The Next HOPE, at the ever-charming / dilapidated Hotel Pennsylvania. They had us in directly in front of the men's room, which at first I thought was sort of a bleakly funny, but which turned out to be a real advantage in terms of grabbing peoples' attention. As with The Last HOPE, I spent some time hanging out with Matt Jording and Ringo, although neither of them were representing the FSF -- Matt was tabling for a startup he's running called Open Gotham; Ringo (now legal) was pushing his anarchist 'zine. We didn't get beers afterwards -- I was there 'til the bitter end, selling stuff and arguing with people who don't like RMS. I even got to take the big box o' stuff home on Saturday night, since Deb couldn't get it to her hotel room. I didn't go to any of the talks (which means I missed the drama with Julian Assange bailing on his keynote), and I missed the only demonstrations I wanted to go to (the introductory lockpicking dealies); I mostly just worked the table. I got to meet a lot of the younger volunteers and FSF interns -- the "GNU generation," I think they're calling them -- and some friendly people kept me fooded and watered throughout.

I got plenty of great presents, though, in spite of my bad attitude: Nina got me a copy of Dragon Age, which I'm quite enjoying. I was initially put off by how hard it was for me to figure out the game's angle -- no, I know, it's another one of those fucking Bioware games that claims to model complex moral equations by offering the user the choice between drowning the puppy and cuddling it. But that aspect of the game is actually kind of secondary to its presentation of a rich political and historical universe where lots of stuff happens. I mean, I'm a dozen or so hours in and I have no idea what form the narrative's actually going to take. It reminds me a bit of George R. R. Martin. Eve, who just moved into a new apartment with a totally sweet back yard / deck (and with whom I baked two pies in the past two weeks) got me a copy of Shane MacGowan's autobiography, which, from the pictures alone, looks like it's going to be a blast. My parents went in on some Yankees tickets for me and Nina; we're gonna see them play Detroit in a couple of weeks.

More summer things: Went to SummerScreen for Dead Man, which I'd never been able to sit through in its entirety. I actually kind of like it, for all its pretentions and silliness. And I certainly like lying outside at night on a patch of still-warm concrete at the McCarren Park ballfields. For free.

Last week I used a semi-obligatory day off from work to do some weekday things I hadn't had time to do before. I went down to Di Fara's Pizza in Midwood for a slice. The place was pretty much exactly the way Tom et al. had described it: The place was packed; the old guy, Domenico, was the only guy making pizza (according to his own edict, apparently); and it took his son -- Dom Jr., stalling like a put-upon bureaucrat -- 20 minutes to take my one-slice order in his weird shorthand. The pizza? It was pretty good. I'm not taking a contrarian tack -- I liked it, especially the fresh basil, scissor-cut by Dom Sr. But I think you'd be wrong to compare it to cheaper, more uniformly-flavored "street slices." Di Fara's takes some work to appreciate.

After that, I took the Q down to Coney Island to see Luna Park, the chromed and polished replacement for Astroland. People have been making wary noises to the effect that it's the first salvo in some larger gentrification play, and, you know, it probably is, but it's not so terrible, either. They've got a fucking log ride. And the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel didn't go anywhere. The Ghost Hole didn't go anywhere. That's still there. I didn't go on any of the rides that day. It was hot and I was alone.

Bad Movie Night marches on: We've been watching them every Tuesday night, too many to list here. There are a few that I feel like I should mention, though: Revenge of the Stolen Stars, which is an incomprehensible mess of a movie about a curse bestowed on the nephew of a plantation owner by any indigenous tribe upset over some missing rubies. ...Or maybe the rubies themselves are upset? It's not really clear -- or interesting -- but the movie's notable for the extremely brief appearance by Klaus Kinski (given top billing) and for the buffoonish lead, a guy with the too-perfect name "Barry Hickey." The guy's like a parody of hammy overacting, he's got a an IMDb bio that he obviously wrote himself -- and, best of all, during the fight scene in the whorehouse, you can actually see his scrotum for a split second. I was really proud of catching that; we went back and freeze-framed it to be sure. But now I'm totally interested in seeing the rest of this guy's ouvre (e.g., his sure-to-be-awesome work as "Ryan Chase" in Space Chase). He's definitely the Ronnie Bostock to my Giles De'Ath. Tom bought a pack of weird sixties, Hammer-style horror movies, which included the wonderfully perverse Bloody Pit of Horror. It's about a reincarnated, bodybuilding S&M enthusiast (played by Mickey Hargitay) who calls himself the The Crimson Executioner. There's not a whole lot of, you know, executioning, but there's some fairly effective tease-y bits where some spikes almost cut a boob.

Nina and I went to the Ted Leo show at Brooklyn Bowl, breaking my streak of missing him live. It was one of the JellyNYC "pool parties," which they've been having at a bunch of different venues now that the pool's being worked on. Brooklyn Bowl's gotten a lot more dance-clubby and, you know, corporate since the last time I was there -- they've installed a couple of huge projection screens between the bar and the stage, upon which they were showing slides of happy white people having comfy fun. It was like an ad for The Edge.

The openers didn't blow me away: The first band, ArpLine, had at least one laptop on stage with them -- automatic demerits, although with that name maybe they get a pass. The Darlings played sulky grunge rock; they were okay but could have used a bit more run-around-the-stage kind of energy.

...Which was exactly what Ted Leo brought. He played a great set, heavily weighted towards stuff from The Brutalist Bricks (although Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone? made a notable appearance). Part-way through, he broke a string, and then, a little later, he broke another on his back-up guitar. No one had any replacement strings. "What's a song we can do without me on guitar?" he asked his band. So they finished out the set with "The Ballad Of The Sin Eater," which worked pretty well with just one guitar -- Ted Leo sounds a lot like Tim Armstrong when he demands "You didn't think they could hate you, now did you?" As an encore they played "Woke Up Near Chelsea," which is pretty quickly becoming a favorite of mine. It's just so evocative:
Cold in the bones, rot in the teeth
Alone in the home, out in the street
All that you've grown, choked in the weeds
But older than stone, that's you and me

We are born of despair
We are born of despair
Fall days, the urgency of work. We all, as the song says, got a job to do.

"Nicky Digital" was creeping satyr-like through the crowd for the duration of the show, grinning and snapping pictures. Of us; the crappy yuppies who brought their fucking babies; the mongoloid hipster in the deep V who was prowling around and vamping for the benefit of no one in particular. All these pictures made it onto the big screen above the crowd. Look, we're having fun! Ugh, I didn't like that guy. But the show was great. Some dudes even managed to get "up," despite the vigorous efforts of the stage security guy. It actually was sort of disastrous: A couple of pint glasses left half full on the stage got knocked over, fucking up one of the monitors -- and then broke, distributing shards of glass around the feet of James Canty. The security guy actually did a face-palm and then rushed out with a little broom and dustpan and managed to sweep up the pieces before anyone got hurt. Ted Leo, surfing the crowd himself, sort of back-flipped back onto the stage and thanked the guy.

This weekend Nina and I walked down to 1st Ave. in Industry City. We'd taken a similar walk a few years ago, a little before I moved into the neighborhood, exploring and taking pictures. Everything was practically the same, down to this swatch of woven black and white plastic stuff that'd gotten tangled up on a barbed wire fence down by the pier. Nobody'd bothered to remove it, I guess. We walked down to the end of the pier and then back east into Brooklyn Chinatown, on our way to Lucky Eight Seafood for jellyfish and ginkgo seeds. We stopped at a table on 5th Ave. where a woman with badly disfigured hands was changing watch batteries. Nina handed her a stopped watch, a gift from her mother, and the woman deftly disassembled it, cleaning its innards with a small, hand-held bellows. Using tweezers, she pried out the old battery and popped in a new one, but the watch wouldn't go. "Sorry," she said. "I think it's broken." That's okay, we said. Thanks for trying.