Hey, everyone else is going with that hed. Why can't I?
Nina and I took a trip to Brighton Beach the weekend before the storm. I'd been to Coney Island twice already this summer, but hadn't been to the beach at all. In between consecutive, obligatory inland LIRR trips, Nina was craving some sand of the non-buried-cigarette-having variety, but without a car or advance plans we had to settle. And Brighton Beach isn't, you know, a private resort or anything, but it's not the public baths, either. We took the Q out past the Aquarium stop and walked out to Brighton 14th and down to the beach. We set up our towels down by the water near a dude who was listening to a Mets game on a portable radio and talking to himself about it. "Unbelievable," he said. "Un-fucking-believable." I stripped down to the trunks I'd put on underneath my jeans and tried to acclimate to the chilly water. Nina lay on the beach with the copy of "A Dance With Dragons" that Tom got me and made a little sand dude. It was pleasant enough, weather-wise, but it wasn't exactly sunny.
When the cloud-occluded sun began to go down for real we called it quits on the beach and looked for a place to change back into our street clothes. We skirted the Brighton Beach changing rooms, where a guy was literally pissing on the side of the building instead of using the toilets inside, but that left us only the public bathrooms on the Coney Island part of the beach if we wanted to protect our modesty. I bit the bullet and ventured inside one of those urine-soaked hell-holes, changing quickly to protect my vulnerable privates from stall creepers; Nina did the same but with less complaining. Then, using her smartphone, she looked for a place where we could get some victuals. We settled on Elza Fancy Food, a Korean-Uzbek (!) restaurant on Brighton 4th St. Once we got there the phone stayed out to help us interpret the menu, which wasn't super accessible to gringos like us. We settled on an order of plov (a kind of lamb pilaf) and some manti (dumpling). The waitress, who was attentive but spoke only halting English, also brought us some compot (fruity drink) and some of the house specialty, a spicy eggplant salad, for the road. It was all super delicious and cost practically nothing. Top marks for Elza! And to me, for being such a flexible vegetarian.
After dinner we took a walk down Surf Ave. towards Luna Park, stopping along the way to check out one of the Russian groceries, where we picked up some treats -- sesame peanuts, sugary chickpeas, and a box of dried cherry-apple tea. We considered but deferred til next time a crazy array of unfamiliar yogurt drinks, cheeses, dried fruits, cured meats, and children's cereals. Our loot in tow, we reached the Coney Island boardwalk proper and took a quick tour of the amusements. Luna Park's been built out a bit more since last year -- in addition to the log flume and the teacups they've got a part of the park now called the "Scream Zone" that's got a couple of real sadistic-looking slingshot-type rides and this thing called the Soarin' Eagle that flies you around Superman style.
After wringing our hands over all that scariness, we walked down the ramp to Deno's Wonder Wheel and visited the video arcade, where I succumbed to the allure of the "coin pusher" machines. Nina, clever little raptor that she is, figured out how to not play the game like a complete chump: Your average pusher's got two shelves, the top one of which moves in and out. The secret is to time the drop of your quarter so that it falls between the front of the moving wall of the top shelf and the mass of quarters on top of the lower shelf. That way the moving shelf will push it into the other quarters and hopefully dislodge one of 'em. In practice, however, that will not happen. The quarters will just sit there. If you're like me you will spend about five dollars in quarters learning as much.
On our way out, we walked through the scuzziest part of Coney Island, the set of rides and booths that aren't part of Luna Park or the Wonder Wheel. There was the ring toss booth with the ghoulish, half-heartedly electrified skull-clown -- wearing a sign reading "Chuckles is not a prize" (yer tellin' me!). And most notably, The Ghost Hole, the haunted house ride I've been daring myself to go on for years but for which I haven't yet mustered the company or the courage. I was feeling a little, uh, crapulent, but thought it was worth taking a slightly closer look, so we stepped up to the ticket booth. ...Where we encountered an animatronic display, enclosed in plexiglass, of a punter voiding himself at both ends simultaneously. Seriously, it was a herky-jerky mannequin on its knees in front of a toilet having diarrhea and the barfs in never-ending succession, like Prometheus getting his liver eaten by the eagle. Nina took a short video with her smartphone; the effect of the rusty water spraying out of the hindquarters of the figure's ripped jeans and all over the plexiglass panel is hard to convey with words. Apparently this thing has been around forever, but I can't remember ever seeing it. Maybe they only take it out when they really need to pique peoples' interest. Suffice it to say I didn't think I could handle The Ghost Hole itself, so we got back on the train at Stillwell and headed home.
The Thursday before the storm, I checked out the free Wavves Summerstage show at East River Park. I quite like that space -- a big concrete amphitheater might not seem like pleasant accommodations for a show, but it's actually pretty dope, especially if you're on your feet. I saw Titus Andronicus for the first time there (a concert that was rained out torrentially). And the Wavves show was even better than that one, mostly on account of the crowd, which was huge!
It was a crazy scene: Young punks with dirty faces, thrashing around in a concrete pit down by the river under a dark and threatening cloud front. There was even a Snake Plissken type dancing by himself on the concrete steps up from the stage. It would've been downright apocalyptic if it weren't so thematically sunny: The band or its management had tossed about a dozen beach balls into the crowd, and people were enthusiastically spiking them up onto the stage and off the band. Someone had also distributed a whole lot of sunglasses with neon green frames throughout the crowd. I would have donned a pair myself and waded in, but I had my bag and, well, I am an old. I could certainly appreciate the band, though: Short songs, an affinity for Pixies-style falsetto, and a drummer whose beats don't make me feel bad about my own drumming. And they played an awesome version of "Nervous Breadown" to round out an encore they played despite the insistence of the Parks Department representative that the show was over.
And then it was time for the hurricane. The city's preparations for the storm have been much discussed at this point; suffice it to say that the southwestern corner of block kissed the edge of Evacuation Zone C. I'll cop to feeling a twinge of anxiety when all the evac and windspeed buzz (120mph?!) reached its peak, but Nina and I went out and armed ourselves a gallon of water and some batteries (we already had the twist ties and black plastic garbage bags that ready.gov recommends you use should the toilet stop working) and then I felt more in control. In the mood to party through it, even. Tom O. was skeptical when I proposed a hurricane-themed get-together, but he was in due attendance at Katharine's when she made good on the idea. Tom H. fixed Pimm's Cups (No. 1 style) for us (we were joined by their downstairs neighbor, Susan) and we all played a 1970s edition of Clue salvaged from Katharine's grandmother's house while The Weather Channel played in the background with the sound off. We also ate football-shaped Oreos.
I was Mrs. White. Let it be known: I did not do shit to Mr. Body.
Come 1:30, the wind and rain started to really pick up and so Nina and I thought it best to wade home. It wasn't even so bad outside, although our umbrellas proved useless. After peeling off my sopping jeans, I got into bed; Nina stayed up. Reclining, I tried to gauge the intensity of the storm by watching the back-and-forth sway of the big tree across the street. Its upper branches waved like the arms of a sea anemone being rocked by the currents. But I fell asleep pretty quickly. I woke up at eleven o'clock the next morning, which was supposed to be the height of the storm, but apparently it had blown itself out early. When I went outside for coffee and such, there were little "packets" of leaves everywhere: The branches off the branches off the branches off the trees on our block. I think they're adapted to break off easily, in order to spare the structural integrity of the rest of the tree. Pretty clever if you ask me.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Monday, August 08, 2011
Mulder Loves Scully
I'm going to try to keep this on the short side, in the hopes that I can turn in more than one of these little dispatches a month. Will it work? Probably not. No.
The heat wave arrived, and it was hot. We're on the top floor in our building, and we took the wooden roll-up blinds down from the living room window (apartment AIDS), so when it gets hot out, it gets hot in here, and it stays hot well into the evening. I'm no delicate flower when it comes to heat, babies, but there's something eerie and discomfiting about coming home at midnight and having the parquet floor still be warm like a pilot light. And there is, of course, the heat at the daily perihelion, which is totally distracting. So we resolved to have the air conditioner up and running by Thursday, the anticipated beginning of the heat wave. I bought a special window mount from Tarzian, but couldn't figure out how to secure it to our brick-and-mortar window ledge; in the end we made a midnight trip to the Home Depot in Red Hook for a good, old-fashioned two-by-four that we bundled up with tape and wedged under the thing.
Kitty responded to the heat by alternating, panting like a dog, between spots inside the wooden cabinet that supports our TV, and on top of a big Tupperware box that's sitting in the middle of the living room. It was only after much encouragement -- and the removal of the cat carrier from view -- that she deigned to enter the bedroom where we were running the air conditioner.
The hottest days of the heatwave were Thursday and Friday. Thursday night we made the sweltering hike up to Prospect Park for The Feelies show at Celebrate Brooklyn. The ambient temperature made it a pretty surreal experience for me, and I wasn't on stage under all those lights; I have no idea how they turned it such a long and consistently good set. In particular, they played a very convincing cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog." Upon returning, we found Kitty in a sorry state: Prostrate, panting, puffed out to the size of a Christmas ham. We tried to cool her down with an ice pack from the fridge and with actual ice cubes from a cup of ice we bought at the corner store. As a testament to her discomfort, she did not object at all. We have resolved to put her on a bit of a diet.
It was still ethereally warm the following week when Beau and Nina and I went to go see a late show at Shea Stadium featuring none other than Shilpa Ray performing a solo set (well, she had her harmonium). Beau got there early and thus got to see -- and fall in love with, he asserted -- one of her openers, an art school band called The Back Pockets. The way he described it, their live show was off the chain. We arrived in time for the next band, Quilty (ugh that name), who were fun and energetic but entirely too loud for the space. We used their set as an opportunity to go get Snapples. But Shilpa Ray was predictably amazing. It was after midnight by the time she went on, and noting the droopy eyelids in the audience, she suggested that everyone lie down sleepover style, and so everyone kind of fanned out on the floor near the front of the stage where she'd set up, like iron filaments around a magnet. The sound system in that place didn't do her voice justice, but she still sounded phenomenal -- strong and angry enough to rattle the windows. She suggested that we take advantage of the late night, bedroom vibe we'd created and, you know, have a wank, but I don't know if I could do it with those songs as accompaniment. Too sad, too scary!
As a treat to myself I've been watching The X-Files over Netflix streaming on the Xbox, one episode a night. That show is great! The first time I watched it, lying side by side with my dad on the rug in our living room of my boyhood home, I was too invested in the narrative elements of the show and too distracted by my own cliched expectations of the direction the story should take. So I liked it, but I didn't really get it. This time around, my experience is colored by pleasant memories of those Friday nights ("Jeez, close your mouth, Scully!" admonishes my dad), but I'm also struck by how visually consistent the production design is: There are indulgent, meandering shots of roads and gas stations and factory buildings, and everything out of doors is gray or green. The editing is nice and slow; leisurely, even. The acting is pretty remarkable, too: David Duchovny is supremely affect-less, and Gillian Anderson's portrayal is both economical and effective in bringing Agent Scully plausibly to life -- especially given how little she has to work with in the first season. It's nuts that a show this gloomy and contemplative was on the air for, what, nine years?
The first week of August I threw myself a more formal birthday party in Prospect Park, an all-afternoon barbecue where I cooked for everyone and loved it. It was exactly the type of thing I should have done last year but was squirmingly reluctant to commit to and thus managed to duck. This year, though, I willed myself to mail out invites a couple of weeks in advance and so I had to follow through. I got up early that morning, sliced up all the fixings, including cutting whole kosher dill Claussen pickles into the "chip" shape that they should sell at the store but don't. I bought three and a half pounds of hyper-organic ground chuck and made three different batches of burgers, mostly variations on the recipe I found here. Ted lent me the use of his grill (my little $10 dealie long since vanished to the mists of time) and I cooked the burgers, some hot dogs, some chicken sausages, some Morningstar Farms spicy black bean burgers, and some of these awesome college-dining-hall fake-chicken "patties" (also by Morningstar Farms). The weather report warned that it might rain, but I would not be deterred, and it ended up being overcast but dry for most of the day.
It did begin to rain at twilight, and we started to pack everything up. As I knelt by the grill trying to gauge the hotness of the coals, I noticed a fat brown cicada on one of the legs, methodically crawling its way up to the hot underside. The less compassionate among us wondered if we should let it "find out" the hard way that it'd misjudged -- or even if we should toss it on the grill and see if the bug was as tasty as the Oreos we'd melted earlier. But Jon, bleeding heart that he is, scooped it up on some cutlery and helped it attach to the maple tree behind us. Without pausing it resumed its upward climb and was soon out of sight. It wasn't the only one: We found two more cicadas on the same tree, all on the same quest towards sunlight and warmth.
Beau had stopped by the festivities after finishing up one of his twice-weekly runs around the park (he's training for the marathon), and he clued us in on a kind of open house that was going on the following weekend: All the Prospect Park-affiliated attractions, including the ordinarily not-quite-worth-ten-dollars Botanic Garden. Nina and walked up and down the paths of the Rose Garden and smelled all of the plants in the Fragrance Garden. But the best part of the afternoon was when we were heading home past the choreographed fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum. That thing, when it's on, is almost a bigger a draw than the museum itself I feel like, and that day was no exception. There was a crowd gathered on the steps to watch the water jumping, and a press of little girls around the railing admonishing the boys who were strutting up and down amid the jets. "You're not supposed to be up there!" they said. "Someone's going to yell at you!" And to us: "They're not supposed to be up there." The boys, they did not care. One of them walked up to the railing and asked Nina, "You want to get splashed?" She said yes, she did. It was a hot day. "Stay there," he said. He stepped back and put his foot over one of the jets. At the right moment he lifted his toe.
We just got back from the final bit of birthday celebration I've allotted myself: A Mets game (against the Padres) at Citi Field. Never seen the Mets, never been to the new (or old) stadium. It was very nice! Th place looks more like a Heartland Brewery than a baseball stadium, but maybe I've just had my expectations set wrong by the noisy, brushed-metal Death Star that is Yankee Stadium, with its dispassionate concessions service and super-vertiginous seating. Whereas Citi Field has a huge plexiglass apple that pops up (well, rises surreptitiously, Kilroy-style) whenever someone on the home team hits a home run! ...Which happened three times -- Jason Bay, David Wright, and Angel Pagan all hit home runs. And the Mets even ended up winning, pulling out a spectacular ninth inning after a pretty grim-looking eighth. It put Nina, who's never met a crapped-upon New York institution she couldn't root for, in a puffed-up, cheery mood. After the game we spent some time in a part of the parking lot where the diamond from the original Shea Stadium is marked out with white paint and plaques. Nina found home plate and curled up around it like a cat.
The heat wave arrived, and it was hot. We're on the top floor in our building, and we took the wooden roll-up blinds down from the living room window (apartment AIDS), so when it gets hot out, it gets hot in here, and it stays hot well into the evening. I'm no delicate flower when it comes to heat, babies, but there's something eerie and discomfiting about coming home at midnight and having the parquet floor still be warm like a pilot light. And there is, of course, the heat at the daily perihelion, which is totally distracting. So we resolved to have the air conditioner up and running by Thursday, the anticipated beginning of the heat wave. I bought a special window mount from Tarzian, but couldn't figure out how to secure it to our brick-and-mortar window ledge; in the end we made a midnight trip to the Home Depot in Red Hook for a good, old-fashioned two-by-four that we bundled up with tape and wedged under the thing.
Kitty responded to the heat by alternating, panting like a dog, between spots inside the wooden cabinet that supports our TV, and on top of a big Tupperware box that's sitting in the middle of the living room. It was only after much encouragement -- and the removal of the cat carrier from view -- that she deigned to enter the bedroom where we were running the air conditioner.
The hottest days of the heatwave were Thursday and Friday. Thursday night we made the sweltering hike up to Prospect Park for The Feelies show at Celebrate Brooklyn. The ambient temperature made it a pretty surreal experience for me, and I wasn't on stage under all those lights; I have no idea how they turned it such a long and consistently good set. In particular, they played a very convincing cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog." Upon returning, we found Kitty in a sorry state: Prostrate, panting, puffed out to the size of a Christmas ham. We tried to cool her down with an ice pack from the fridge and with actual ice cubes from a cup of ice we bought at the corner store. As a testament to her discomfort, she did not object at all. We have resolved to put her on a bit of a diet.
It was still ethereally warm the following week when Beau and Nina and I went to go see a late show at Shea Stadium featuring none other than Shilpa Ray performing a solo set (well, she had her harmonium). Beau got there early and thus got to see -- and fall in love with, he asserted -- one of her openers, an art school band called The Back Pockets. The way he described it, their live show was off the chain. We arrived in time for the next band, Quilty (ugh that name), who were fun and energetic but entirely too loud for the space. We used their set as an opportunity to go get Snapples. But Shilpa Ray was predictably amazing. It was after midnight by the time she went on, and noting the droopy eyelids in the audience, she suggested that everyone lie down sleepover style, and so everyone kind of fanned out on the floor near the front of the stage where she'd set up, like iron filaments around a magnet. The sound system in that place didn't do her voice justice, but she still sounded phenomenal -- strong and angry enough to rattle the windows. She suggested that we take advantage of the late night, bedroom vibe we'd created and, you know, have a wank, but I don't know if I could do it with those songs as accompaniment. Too sad, too scary!
As a treat to myself I've been watching The X-Files over Netflix streaming on the Xbox, one episode a night. That show is great! The first time I watched it, lying side by side with my dad on the rug in our living room of my boyhood home, I was too invested in the narrative elements of the show and too distracted by my own cliched expectations of the direction the story should take. So I liked it, but I didn't really get it. This time around, my experience is colored by pleasant memories of those Friday nights ("Jeez, close your mouth, Scully!" admonishes my dad), but I'm also struck by how visually consistent the production design is: There are indulgent, meandering shots of roads and gas stations and factory buildings, and everything out of doors is gray or green. The editing is nice and slow; leisurely, even. The acting is pretty remarkable, too: David Duchovny is supremely affect-less, and Gillian Anderson's portrayal is both economical and effective in bringing Agent Scully plausibly to life -- especially given how little she has to work with in the first season. It's nuts that a show this gloomy and contemplative was on the air for, what, nine years?
The first week of August I threw myself a more formal birthday party in Prospect Park, an all-afternoon barbecue where I cooked for everyone and loved it. It was exactly the type of thing I should have done last year but was squirmingly reluctant to commit to and thus managed to duck. This year, though, I willed myself to mail out invites a couple of weeks in advance and so I had to follow through. I got up early that morning, sliced up all the fixings, including cutting whole kosher dill Claussen pickles into the "chip" shape that they should sell at the store but don't. I bought three and a half pounds of hyper-organic ground chuck and made three different batches of burgers, mostly variations on the recipe I found here. Ted lent me the use of his grill (my little $10 dealie long since vanished to the mists of time) and I cooked the burgers, some hot dogs, some chicken sausages, some Morningstar Farms spicy black bean burgers, and some of these awesome college-dining-hall fake-chicken "patties" (also by Morningstar Farms). The weather report warned that it might rain, but I would not be deterred, and it ended up being overcast but dry for most of the day.
It did begin to rain at twilight, and we started to pack everything up. As I knelt by the grill trying to gauge the hotness of the coals, I noticed a fat brown cicada on one of the legs, methodically crawling its way up to the hot underside. The less compassionate among us wondered if we should let it "find out" the hard way that it'd misjudged -- or even if we should toss it on the grill and see if the bug was as tasty as the Oreos we'd melted earlier. But Jon, bleeding heart that he is, scooped it up on some cutlery and helped it attach to the maple tree behind us. Without pausing it resumed its upward climb and was soon out of sight. It wasn't the only one: We found two more cicadas on the same tree, all on the same quest towards sunlight and warmth.
Beau had stopped by the festivities after finishing up one of his twice-weekly runs around the park (he's training for the marathon), and he clued us in on a kind of open house that was going on the following weekend: All the Prospect Park-affiliated attractions, including the ordinarily not-quite-worth-ten-dollars Botanic Garden. Nina and walked up and down the paths of the Rose Garden and smelled all of the plants in the Fragrance Garden. But the best part of the afternoon was when we were heading home past the choreographed fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum. That thing, when it's on, is almost a bigger a draw than the museum itself I feel like, and that day was no exception. There was a crowd gathered on the steps to watch the water jumping, and a press of little girls around the railing admonishing the boys who were strutting up and down amid the jets. "You're not supposed to be up there!" they said. "Someone's going to yell at you!" And to us: "They're not supposed to be up there." The boys, they did not care. One of them walked up to the railing and asked Nina, "You want to get splashed?" She said yes, she did. It was a hot day. "Stay there," he said. He stepped back and put his foot over one of the jets. At the right moment he lifted his toe.
We just got back from the final bit of birthday celebration I've allotted myself: A Mets game (against the Padres) at Citi Field. Never seen the Mets, never been to the new (or old) stadium. It was very nice! Th place looks more like a Heartland Brewery than a baseball stadium, but maybe I've just had my expectations set wrong by the noisy, brushed-metal Death Star that is Yankee Stadium, with its dispassionate concessions service and super-vertiginous seating. Whereas Citi Field has a huge plexiglass apple that pops up (well, rises surreptitiously, Kilroy-style) whenever someone on the home team hits a home run! ...Which happened three times -- Jason Bay, David Wright, and Angel Pagan all hit home runs. And the Mets even ended up winning, pulling out a spectacular ninth inning after a pretty grim-looking eighth. It put Nina, who's never met a crapped-upon New York institution she couldn't root for, in a puffed-up, cheery mood. After the game we spent some time in a part of the parking lot where the diamond from the original Shea Stadium is marked out with white paint and plaques. Nina found home plate and curled up around it like a cat.
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