The craigslist method of apartment hunting is as infuriating as ever: I became very quickly re-attuned to the real estate doublespeak that's used to disguise the problems with a listed property. For example, a "junior one-bedroom" is actually just a studio; any mention of how unusual it is to see an X bedroom place at such a low price means the place is not an X bedroom by any conventional standard; unless a specific number of "blocks from the subway" is given, it's gonna be way too many; "cozy" means it's dark as a cave; lack of mention of recent renovations means the place is a shambles. And you're in competition with thousands of other desperate renters for the same wretched scraps. I had an awful woman from some Park Slope real estate concern tell me, when I asked on a Thursday whether I could come see one of those junior one-bedrooms ($1400, 4th Ave.) on a Saturday: "Oh, honey, is this your first time renting an apartment in New YorK? This place isn't going to be around tomorrow. The good ones always go quickly." Ugh. (Incidentally, I was looking for what would be my fifth apartment Brooklyn apartment in seven years.)
But this is the only game in town, as far as I know, so I played along as best I could, trying to fight my perverse emotional reflexes -- becoming twitchy and covetous after simply reading an appealing description of an apartment -- and tramping out to look at some real dogs: A pimply young broker tried to pitch us on plain awful $1600 place in a ramshackle building next to Xing Long Coffee Shop with dog turds on the door step and plywood apartment doors inside that didn't lock. (We surprised the current tenant, a cranky, bearlike hipster who waded through a sea of dirty clothes to let us in.) Someone else was trying to get out of a lease on an $1800 "duplex" that was pretty much just two walk-in closets connected by a rickety spiral staircase. I despaired; Nina didn't. And ultimately we found a place that's actually pretty nice: A one bedroom in an elevator building in Park Slope with south-facing windows and an enormous bedroom. It's a little more than we wanted to pay, and it's got some warts -- bathroom only accessible from the bedroom, almost no kitchen to speak of, junior-sized appliances therein -- but otherwise it's pretty charming.
Randy arrived in the middle of this chaos to spent a few nights on our sofabed. It was actually a bit of good timing -- I find him to be a calming presence. He was in town to promote his book, 62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer (in the acknowledgments of which I get a thank-you that I don't really deserve -- unless sharing an apartment with me helped crystallize the idea of doing more with less) and to host a table at Maker Faire, which was held this year in the grassy areas around the Queens Hall of Science.
Randy and I share an appreciation of Titus Andronicus, who were headlining a bill with Free Energy on Saturday at Webster Hall -- the ballroom, the real deal, not the "studio." They played against a black backdrop shot through with twinkling lights, while the 'Hall's smoke machines pumped out strawberry-flavored puffs that made rainbows from the house lights. The setting was high school dance-appropriate, but the band has only gotten tighter and more grown up-sounding (although, what are they, 23?). I've usually been focused on the cracking dynamics of Pat Stickles' voice, but that night I was blown away by his guitar playing, near-virtuosic on "A More Perfect Union" and "The Battle of Hampton Roads" and validated by the spray of hands reaching out for his guitar during the crashing solos of those songs. They were featuring Amy a bit more heavily, which is great. She brings exactly the right kind of dorky, earnest energy, and she's also got serious guitar chops. It being the end of "The Monitour," their set was heavy on songs from that album, which was A-OK with me -- I ducked into the pit for "Richard III" --- and there were special guests in attendance: Stickles' mom and dad were both there, apparently the first time this had happened. They stayed on opposite sides of the balcony. In lieu of an encore, the guys from Free Energy came up on the stage for the formation of an impromptu supergroup called The Temporary Tattoos. "Get those smart phones out, 'cuz this shit's going to go viral," Stickles said, and then they played AC/DC's "It's A Long Way To The Top." I'll be honest, I wasn't crazy about that one, but still: Best band playing today.
On Sunday Nina and I went out to Queens to hang out with Randy at Maker Faire. Randy's table was on the outskirts of the "Maker Pavilion," right by some guys from Popular Science. He'd been complaining for the past two days about the sound and heat from their "Propane Poofer" -- essentially a big, gas-powered fire-belching machine they were controlling with an industrial-looking hand-held controller. Next to them were several installations by the Madagascar Institute, who are kind of like Jackass but arts-and-craftier. They were running a kind of jet-powered rocket ride that they referred to as the Thundersteeds, which were incredibly noisy as well. We wandered the fairgrounds and bought some disappointingly middling paella from Gerard's Paella, a booth that had these enormous simmering cauldrons of meat and vegetables going; serves me right for ordering the vegan kind, I guess.
The Madagascar Institute also organized a series of "chariot races" in the museum's "Rocket Roundabout." There were a whole bunch of other "maker" teams participating, each of which had created a custom chariot-like vehicle to race against the Institute's smoke-belching papier-mâché kraken and arc-welded Mad Max-style flame wagons. Swimming Cities, who I think are a collective managed by Swoon, drove a gorgeous iridescent fish right into the ass of the kraken.
At five o'clock we headed up the hill to "Zone D" to see Mark Perez's Life-Size Mousetrap, a blown-up version of the Parker Bros. game that I think the guy said his traveling crew had constructed from junkyard parts -- the "bathtub" part of the machine was a real bathtub, there was a real crane used to drop a two-ton safe onto a junky old car, and the balls were real bowling balls. Perez explained, with the help of his team and some dancing girls, that the contraption took them five days to assembly and two to tear down. It only took them about thirty seconds to put it through its paces, though, and while everything more or less worked (ball went down the stairs, crude skeleton replica got dunked), it was a bit underwhelming.
We hired movers off CityMove, a family of giants who go by the name NYC Moves this time, not C & C; and they moved us, mostly smoothly.
So:
- Goodbye to the Puebla Mini-Mart, which just renovated to add a produce section, and to Don Pepe and his awesome sandwiches
- Goodbye to the Burger King on the corner and its scary black grease valve
- Goodbye to Sunset Park itself, its simultaneous view of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, its widowmaker of a hill, the pee smell by the bathrooms
- Goodbye to The Family Store and its egg sandwiches, a staple of my summer of unemployment last year; to Bertín, who made those sandwiches expertly and surprised me with a fancy bottle of beer for New Year's this year
- Goodbye to Tacos Matamoros and its suggestive neon "Hot Taco" sign
- Goodbye to the Clean-Rite where Nina taught me how to play Galaga and where we spent an early, early Christmas morning two years ago; to the parking lot at the Clean-Rite where a grape vine and an actual peach tree trellised their way over the chain link fence from a back yard on 40th St.
- Hello to the Sunday morning farmers market in front of the Old Stone House Park
- Hello to pie at Four & Twenty Blackbirds
- Hello (again) to Steve's C-Town on 9th St., their captivating lobster tank, the availability of the Spicy Black Bean Morningstar Farms veggie burgers
- Hello again to Great Lakes; hello to O'Connor's