And Best Of

You've all been waiting for it. I know. I know.

Best book I read: Blood's a Rover
Best album: Titus Andronicus, The Monitor. No contest.
Best show I went to: Titus Andronicus, at Bowery Ballroom, March 6th
Best new reason for donating to WFMU: Tom Scharpling, drunk.
Best scone: Cranberry, Not Just Rugelach.
Best movie I saw in the theater: Inception? I don't know, I didn't see a lot of 'em
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Animal House
Best worst movie: Tie: Revenge of the Stolen Stars / The Star Wars Holiday Special
Best brunch: Colombian breakfast, Bogota
Best pie: Winter fruit, again
Best recipe: Green pozole with [tofu]

We played two more shows around Christmas, one at Cake Shop, the other at Bruar Falls. Andy Bodor, the manager of Cake Shop, booked us for the 14th, the bitterly cold day after Amy Klein from Titus had, incidentally, played that stage with her side band, the confusingly-named Hilly Eye. I'd brought the pink vinyl shoulder bag, still laden with pedals and cymbals, to work. I considered walking it down to Cake Shop from 19th St., but as soon as I left the office and felt the freezing metal of our heavy ride cutting into my finger joints, I was like "fuck it." As I was trying to hail a cab, a well-dressed young woman wearing a fur collar and a lot of make-up approached me.

"Excuse me," she said. "Could you spare a few dollars?"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's for a hostel," she said. "Do you know what a hostel is?"

"Yes," I said, bristling. "I know what a hostel is."

The exchange left me annoyed and preoccupied at Cake Shop as I waited for the other guys to show up, but the feeling evaporated after I spent one of my drink tickets. The show ended up being well-attended! Sarah and Nina and Chris' girlfriend Lauren showed up, as well as Eve and Josh and Emma and Tom, which was very nice. In addition to playing a brief solo show before us, Beau'd secured an opening act for us, a two-man group called Ken South Rock, made up of a muppet-like American drummer and a Japanese guitar player who looked a bit like a Jamie Hewlett drawing. They went on before him, and they set an unexpectedly high bar for us: The guitar player, Ken, turned out to be a consummate showman, despite the language barrier, and was able to extract a phenomenally rich tone from his guitar, which was this gorgeous vintage Epiphone EJ-200 (I think). Adam, the drummer, was a real Keith Moon type, and he played these jaw-droppingly fast and intricate fills. Although they were unmistakably playing rock songs, the complement of their individual sounds created a deep and almost meditative resonance. I thought they were great, although I worried that I wouldn't be able to follow Adam's drumming.

Somehow I made it, though. Our set came off without a hitch after Beau played (during which he donned his much-talked-about Christmas light suit, which did not disappoint). Ken and Adam were exceedingly gracious and congratulatory, which was very sweet, considering how comparatively advanced they were. Unfortunately, in the rush to consolidate our equipment and pack up the van, which Billy and Sarah had driven down, I got confused about which cymbal stands were ours and which we'd borrowed from the club, and we ended up leaving one of them behind. I felt crappy about it, but luckily Chris and Lauren were able to swing by the next weekend and pick it up from one of the bartenders, who was surprisingly willing to let them rifle through the store of equipment.

At some point it was Christmas. Nina fled to Clarks Summit, and I visited my parents' house to deliver my meager offerings: I got my mom this year's ubiquitous parent gift, Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography; I got my dad a signed copy of American Tabloid, by that shaved ape James Ellroy. Wondering if he'll be horrified. Christmas evening, I'd casually organized but extensively prepared for a screening of Bad Santa with Billy and Chris and Winnie and Evan and had planned extensive food options; Billy and Chris canceled, independently, leaving me at loose ends, but Winnie and Evan came over and we managed to homph down most of the coffee gingerbread and chocolate apricot cookies I had made. We didn't watch the movie, but we played a fair amount of Red Dead Redemption, which Evan had brought over and just left, and then we spent an embarrassing number of hours trying to unlock hidden characters in Super Street Fighter IV by beating that asshole Seth. There was a lot of swearing.

The next day, the snow began. I'd asked Winnie to come by to help me work on a present for Nina, a painted pair of All-Stars. The snow was blowing horizontally by the time she left Bensonhurst, she informed me in an incredulous phone call from the outdoor subway platform she was waiting on. I hustled out to Joe's (née Prego's) for a half-mushroom pizza to make it worth her while. There was so much snow blowing around that you couldn't see for more than half a block; the streetlights made everything beyond that into a brownish-orange blur. It felt like a gusty day at the beach, the wind whipping stinging little ice crystals against my face like sand. Winnie arrived intact, and we lay down some newspaper. The snow accumulated on the windowsills while I sketched out a little design for the shoes and watched her as she expertly mixed and diluted colors of acrylic paint. We watched The Return of the King one and a half times on SyFy before finishing our work.

The storm had gotten even worse, so Winnie crashed on the fold-out sofa. As has since been more than adequately reported, the city was in a bit of a pickle with the snow the next day. I stubbornly resolved to go to work that day, but judging by the relative emptiness of the R train, when it finally came, I was in the minority. I feel bad about saying so, since it costs millions of dollars and people die, but I secretly find these kinds of weather events thrilling in the transformative effect they have on the landscape of the city. 5th Avenue in Park Slope was a white desert: There were cars spun out and simply abandoned in the middle of the street. Teams of dudes with shovels roamed up and down the avenue offering their services to those what needed help digging out or pushing their cars. At Union St., the stairs were a white slide, and drifts of snow had wended their way down the stairwell and into the station, making it look more cave-like than usual. I was the only engineer in the office all day.

Despite the breakdown of civilization of we played a show at Bruar Falls -- the sister club to Cake Shop in the Bodor entertainment empire, I learned -- on Tuesday. The Falls have speakers but no amps, so we needed to drive the van down from St. Mary's again. I'd taken the liberty of going to Guitar Center after our last show and stocking up on felts and jackets and other small bits of drum hardware, as well as investing in a cymbal case, which proved to be a life-saver for my fingers in the cold; additionally, Chris labeled all of our equipment to prevent a repeat of the confusion over whose hardware was whose. I hopped the subway up to Harlem on Tuesday to help Billy and Chris dig out and load the van, but they were already done by the time I got there, so all I had to do was ride down with them. The St. Mary's van is funny: It handles well enough for its age but complains audibly, and the interior fills with exhaust so you have to keep the windows as open as you can bear. As such, the ride to Williamsburg was freezing and not a little stomach churning as we attempted to navigate to Grand St. via side streets that were only intermittently plowed. Chris commented repeatedly that the fumes were making his extremities go numb, although I think it was probably the cold. For my part, I took of my boots and wrapped my scarf around my feet, which were like ice; ice feet. It was a very band kind of van ride.

When we got to the place, Chris hopped out and lugged some stuff into the club. I attempted to direct Bill into a parallel park up against a piled-up all of snow, but Chris had to re-do it when he returned. Our set went off well, except that Chris and I had trouble hearing the rest of the band, and some kind of firmware change to Billy's pedal board had led him to tune his "A" to 448hz, leaving him subtly and confusingly out of tune, which he blamed, at the time, on Beau. Ken and Adam headlined this time, as they should have, and played a characteristically vigorous and virtuosic set, although theirs was not without incident, either: Ken managed to unplug his amp during one of his solos. (The sound guy staged a daring rescue.) And Adam sliced his hand open on the lip of the snare and spattered all of the drums (including our cymbals, which they'd borrowed, with gore -- a mark of distinction, as far as I'm concerned.

And, unfortunately, there was yet another equipment SNAFU: While we were loading up the van after the show, somebody put the cymbal case into the van without all of the cymbals in it. I noticed this and brought the bag back into the Falls to collect the other cymbals but got distracted and left the bag in the club. In a livery cab on the way home, I had a twinge of memory and called Bill, who searched the van while it was stopped at a gas station and confirmed my fears. At this point I'd gotten all the way back home, and so, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and a black cloud hovering over my head, I hopped into a Carecibo and had the guy take me back to Williamsburg, hoping beyond hope that the Falls was still open. By some miracle of providence it was, and, although there were only a few stragglers left at the bar, one of them turned out to be Adam, who'd noticed my mistake and had the bartender set our cymbals aside in a locked room. That guy is a saint, and Ken South Rock is the nicest band in the world.

Nina had since returned, and with her, the temperature had taken an up-turn. She was concerned that she'd missed the peak of sledding and snowcraft, so on Wednesday we made an early expedition before Bad Movie Night (Creepozoids) out to Prospect Park to see what adventures could still be had. Quite a few, it turned out: We filched some glossy-looking cardboard boxes from the recycling stash in the basement and fashioned them into makeshift sleds that worked reasonably well in the still-snow-blanketed northern part of Long Meadow. We started on some of the gentler hills and then, emboldened, decided to join some Packer-type girls who were riding a plastic three-seater sled down the steep slopes on the northeastern border of the meadow. Nina's box, having a slicker coating to it, proved to be the more exhilarating ride, and we took turns going alarmingly fast (and often head over heels) with it down the hill.

After it finally disintegrated, we attempted to build a snowman, although the snow was so sticky that we couldn't shape it that well. Here are the results:

The First Voyage of The Bel Fucking Argosy

Bel Argosy played our first show on Saturday the 11th at a not-quite venue (read: some guy's apartment) in Bushwick called Cheap Storage. We'd booked a performance at the venerable Cake Shop for the following week, but Billy and Beau are friends with a guy named Doug in a band called MiniBoone, and he got us on the bill, which included an assortment of other guitar-oriented Brooklyn indie rock bands. We practiced like crazy, set up a bunch of promotional web sites, and made some tentative invites. I had to gently dissuade my mom from making the trip out to Wyckoff Ave.: "There's no working toilet," Beau warned us. "So the landlord's been cutting them a break on the rent and they've been going to the bathroom in a bucket up on the roof."

My perennial friends at Lincoln Pl. were throwing a holiday party the same night, so in my typical, neurotic way, I had to not only show up, if only for an hour, but also bake a pie. I managed to do it, too -- another of the Winter Fruits variety, slightly burnt -- and walked it over to their apartment from mine balanced on top of the snare drum we were asked to bring to the show, carrying the hi-hat and kick pedal in a tiny pink vinyl bag in my other hand. I made it without any upsets, and spent a glorious hour hand-decorating Christmas cookies (baked by Colleen into a million different shapes: Snowman, Christmas tree, the outlines of the states of New York and New Jersey) with flavored, food coloring-colored icing and a satisfyingly varied menagerie of nonpareils: Sprinkles, little pine trees, little snowflakes, shiny little edible beads. Pro tip: It takes very little blue food coloring to make white icing sufficiently blueish; it takes a bleeding gallon of red to make it red enough.

I left, somewhat reluctantly, and hopped the R to the N to the L to the Jefferson St. stop in Bushwick, lugging the drum equipment behind some much younger and hipper types who I suspected might also be performing at the same place we were. The guy's house was pretty much right outside the station, and it was clear why he called it Cheap Storage -- that text was emblazoned on the big building's northern tower. The screen on my trusty LG clamshell phone finally bit the dust a few weeks ago -- the dialer and keypad still work, but the video card was just displaying a blank white image. So I'd taken to writing down phone numbers I didn't know by heart on a little index card and punching them in to make calls as necessary. I tried to reach our contact at the venue, but got no answer. Luckily, the young turks I'd been following managed to get the front door open and held it open. They introduced themselves as "douchebags," but I think they were listed as "Hep Cats" on the bill. Cheap Storage was actually a pretty cozy place. It definitely looked like the storage facility it used to be: Concrete floors, big plaster columns throughout, exposed fiberglass insulation. There was a big industrial looking furnace right in the middle of the floor that kept things nice and warm, and there actually was a working bathroom. One corner of the big open living room was set aside for the bands. Each roommate in the loft had a little cubicle-like room; I asked a big Australian-sounding guy if I could deposit our stuff outside his. "As long as you're not depriving me of access to food or sex, you can do whatever you want," he said.

Chris and Beau showed up after a short time, although not so short a time that I was spared the experience of being the weird guy who knows nobody and whom nobody knows. "Are you okay?" asked the girl from Hep Cats. ("I'm fine," I explained. "I'm just an orphan.") Beau, Chris, and I deposited the equipment and then went to stuff our faces a few blocks away at Tortilleria Mexicano Los Hermanos, which was very good.

The first guy to go on was called Yoni Gordon, and he seemed to be sort of an alt-country indie rock troubadour. He had a sad, yelping voice not entirely unlike Jonathan Richman's. He was accompanied by a drummer who looked like The Edge with a full beard and who had a big, beautiful, expensive-looking orange sunburst drum kit that he played very sparingly. Yoni was a pretty good guitar player and had a good sound, but he seemed a little out of place -- people weren't really moving around, and the Hep Cats were bordering on heckling him. He had this little clip-on lamp that he'd affixed to his mic stand and that he was using for dramatic effect, but one of the 'Cats kept turning it on and off while he was singing, to Yoni's obvious irritation. And as he was tuning up between songs, one of them called out to him, "Tell a funny joke," which sounded to me like a bit of a provocation. There was a moment of tension (I thought), but Yoni defused the situation: "I'll do you one better, friend," he said. "I'll take you on an adventure of the mind." And then he gave weird but earnest introduction to the next song, which had something to do with roadhouses and The One That Got Away.

Once they were finished, there was a scramble to get our drums set up. It was briefly proposed that we ask Yoni Gordon's drummer if we could use his fancy and largely untouched kit, but he packed it up before we could muster the courage. Instead, Taylor, the drummer for MiniBoone, brought over some of his equipment and helped me and Chris set it up. He was very nice and patient, even donating extra cymbal felts to the cause (I cannot abide a flapping crash.) The residents of Cheap Storage had suspended a piece of plywood with chains from the ceiling near the area where we were playing, and before we went on they'd put a digital projector on it. When we started, somebody put a movie in and it (or at least the DVD menu) played on the wall adjacent to us. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that it was Le Samouraï. Which is pretty cool.

Our set was very short. We only played the six songs we were sure about, which amounted to around fifteen minutes. I don't know what it's like for other drummers, but for me, playing the drums is an absorbingly passive exercise. I see the job as being kind of like an insect's nervous system -- inhibitory as opposed to excitatory. So I was paying attention, but sort of zoned out as well, staring at an enormous Alain Delon. And I was so scared! But I managed to avoid pulling what Billy and Chris refer to as "a Continental," in reference to my frightened-rabbit tempo at the Headliners show I wrote about a while ago.

"Who are you?" hollered the girl from Hep Cats, towards the end of our set. "We're Bel Argosy," said Billy.

The band after us was called Boom Chick; they were a White Stripes-y collaboration between Frank Hoier, who plays guitar, and his girlfriend Moselle, who plays drums. They played a very long set, but they were actually pretty great. We were all dancing and stomping along to their songs. As Boom Chick played a slow song, I danced with Patrice. Billy danced with Sarah. He tried to dip her, at an opportune moment, but she demurred. "I'll do it," I said. He dipped me and poured Miller High Life into my mouth -- and nose and ear as I tried to turn my face away.

Their set finally ended and MiniBoone started to set up. Le Samouraï rolled its closing credits, and the projection went dark. ...And so did the lights in loft. MiniBoone played a raucous, noisy, dark, sweaty set that belied their math rock-y underpinnings. The crowd pressed in around the band, dancing and clapping.

After MiniBoone finished, we all kind of resolved to head out. I was exhausted from dancing, and pretty drunk, to the extent that I wondered a few times whether I would have to upchuck. We gathered up our stuff. I agreed, perhaps unwisely, to take home an additional cymbal, our twelve-pound heavy ride, tucking it under my arm as Beau and Patrice and some other hanger-on Amherst alumni lurched our way to the subway, and then to 14th St., and then back to Brooklyn, singly. When I finally got above ground at 4th Ave., it was deeply cold and a light rain was falling. I had stop several times to adjust my grip on the bag of hardware and the cymbals, which were digging painfully into the joint-creases of my fingers. A very drunk woman appeared in the entryway of the building as I was struggling to open the door to the lobby without knocking over the ride. "Do you live here?" she asked. "Okay, I'll let you in." In the elevator, as I leaned against the wall, barely conscious, she said, "Did you take a cab home? I took a cab. Too tired to take the train."

War

I'll get to that in a second.

I was able make it through Thanksgiving with my bum tooth, although eating was an ordeal at times. My sister came down from college and we went to go see the penultimate Harry Potter movie, an experience that cemented my conviction that seeing movies in movie theaters is for shit: It costs a million dollars, and we sat through a good twenty minutes of previews before they started showing us the wrong fucking movie. Despite the ensuing boos and mutterings, it took a while for the projectionist to catch on. "Is anyone up there sober?!" hollered a shrill, wannabe voice-of-the-people, audibly virginal and entitled. Of course they're sober, I thought. They just don't care. And then we had to sit through another twenty minutes of previews, before the right movie started. And the right movie turned out to be kind of a drag. Some kids have to hit a locket with a magical sword, and then there's some kind of important cape and a magic wand, and a CGI foreskin dies on a beach.

White people problems.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' friend George's beautiful house on the west side. I made this season's inaugural Winter Fruits Pie. That thing is always a crowd-pleaser, and it's so easy to sling together. I used real cranberries this time, which I think was a marked improvement over Craisins. My dad made his signature pumpkin and berry pies, going the distance by weaving a lattice crust. I've got about zero interest in tracing my family's "roots," but I'll infer that "my people" like to bake.

And then it was time to get my tooth pulled. We woke up early on Monday and trained it up to 10th St. On my way into the office, passing the front desk of Stewart House, I had a flash of memory: going up to visit Bill, watch Ed and His Dead Mother, smoke a clandestine cigarette out his bedroom window; the since-retired doorman, Robbie (?), calling out to me, "Hey, Nine-Inch, how you doing?" -- a reference to my then-favorite t-shirt. I thought about ducking the appointment but didn't.

We checked in, parted ways. The staff led me off to the room with chair, and Dr. Carness came in and started making the preparations to put me under. I made an awkward comment about their using drug that killed Michael Jackson, but it didn't matter. "In about five seconds, you're going to start feeling a little drunk," Dr. Carness said, after inserting the IV into the back of my hand. I did start to feel a little drunk. I remember looking up at the light fixture, which was a pretty conventional, high school-cafeteria rectangular dealie with a pattern of vertical lines on it. The lines started to move like the texture of an asphalt road observed from the window of a car in motion. A pleasant feeling, like starting out in the early morning on a road trip with friends, stole over me. "Here we go," I thought, and promptly fell asleep. And then I woke up a little while later, still feeling very pleasant. Maybe ten years ago I'd had some minor surgery done that required a general anesthetic, and waking up from that was no fun -- I was cold, had trouble breathing. This wasn't anything like that. I felt warm and fuzzy and good -- so good that I wanted to tell everyone. I took out my phone and tried to send Nina a text message but couldn't muster the cognitive stamina to make it work; put it back; took it out again; put it back again. I took it out a third time and sent exuberant, barely coherent text messages to Bill and Katie. When Nina was eventually allowed to come back to see me, I made a show of checking to see if the anesthesia did, in fact, cause priapism as a side-effect. It took me a while to find my sea legs, but once I did I paid the bill (personally thanking the reception staff for showing me "such a great time") and we hobbled off to find a cab. My recollection is fuzzy, but I'm told I gave a running a commentary all the way home on what a beautiful day it was, ignoring our cabbie's shitty, aggressive driving and the fact that almost took us to the wrong address.

They'd given me tooth in a little manila envelope, and I took it out once we got home. The picture above shows it considerably cleaned-up. It was a nasty thing, all covered in scabs, two of the roots twined together. My mouth wasn't a pretty sight, either, but I tried not to think about it or look at the gross stuff soaking through the gauze pads I was biting on. Nina made me some soup, and we watched the first movie in the Red Riding trilogy, but I was still too high to make head or tail of it. After that we went up to the Neergaard on 7th Ave. to pick up my antibiotics and vicodin. I sat in a little chair off to the side of the pharmacist's counter and drunkenly examined the fine print on the sides of the boxes for enema bags and bedpans, while Nina dutifully asked the pharmacist's assistant whether it'd be safe to break up the pills so I could swallow them more easily.

"How old is he?" asked the guy.

"Twenty nine," she said.

The pharmacist's assistant rolled his eyes. It turned out we weren't allowed to break the amoxicillin, but, home again, I was able to get it down with some concentration and a few cups of water. Then we watched Teeth, which I thought was apropos. It had a promising beginning, but turned out to be sort of disappointingly flip, squandering a pretty, uh, juicy premise without really exploring the attendant themes as deeply as they deserve.

Okay, enough about that.

Bel Argosy's plan for world domination takes several steps forward: We've been joined by a friend of Bill's, a guy named Beau who's going to help out on some lead guitar parts. Billy's also booked our first two shows, one at a loft party in Bushwick with the band MiniBoone headlining, the other a low-key Tuesday night show at the venerable Cake Shop! We're continuing our twice-a-week rehearsal regimen, but we've relegated Ultra Sound to a position of last resort: it's expensive; the amps suck and the sound is often disappointingly muddy; and the process of settling our account at the end, in that sixth floor purgatory with the other bands -- paunchy, out-of-state failures with too-long hair and way-receded hairlines, squabbling over who owes who that extra five bucks -- is starting to feel like some awful memento mori. There but for the grace of God go... well, whatever. We will go there. Just not to Ultra Sound, if we can help it. (They do have okay drum kits, though.)

So I started looking for alternate accommodations, and ultimately found a place over on the lower east side, a two studio setup on 2nd Ave. called 6/8 Studios that's essentially in the basement of an Indian restaurant. It's run by a slightly eccentric woman who calls herself "Mrs. Barnes," and who looks eerily familiar, at least to me and Billy. She's weirdly security-conscious: You're not allowed to show up more than five minutes before your scheduled time, she has to have met you or someone in your band before, cameras everywhere, etc. But her equipment is in great shape, the two subterranean studios are clean and cozy, with warm lighting and non-depressing wood paneling -- they make me imagine Nirvana recording Nevermind -- and she's very knowledgeable and helpful. And it's probably the best deal I've come across, money-wise.

She came by to talk to us as we were packing up after the first time we played there. "How would you describe your music?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Billy said. "Rock and roll? Indie rock? What would you call it?"

She thought for a second. "Young... guy... music," she said. "You know, I've heard this kind of music over and over and over again. There are guys who come into my studios, grown men, with children. They come in here, they play their music for an hour, and then they say 'Okay, enough.'" We weren't sure what to make of that, but we thought it was pretty funny.