Sunday, December 23, 2012

Windy Winston

December!

In celebration of our big apartment and its tall ceilings, I resolved to buy a Christmas tree. And so, around the beginning of the month, I rode out to Sunset Park, to the parking company office on 4th Ave. and 38th St. with all the different countries' flags flying over its barbed wire fences, which becomes a fir trading post around the holidays. I knew they'd be at least half the price of any vendor in Gowanus or Park Slope, and I was right about that. Penny-pincher that I am, though, I discounted the trickiness of getting a six-and-a-half-foot tree (which is what I wound up with) two miles back to Union St. And I hadn't brought gloves, either. But I set my jaw and grabbed the trunk in two places and lugged the goddamn thing down into the subway and onto the platform, where I got a few bemused looks from some Chinese people waiting for the train. And I lugged it up the stairs at Pacific St., my hands now fully gummed up with sap, and back down the stairs to downtown local platform, because I'd accidentally boarded an express. I got out the single strand of rainbow fairy lights that we already hadn't hung from the lintels and augmented with a slightly mismatched set of 100 from Target. I bought two different non-canonical flavors of candy cane from the Associated on 5th -- strawberry and chocolate mint -- and hung those up as well. Done, I said, even though the tree still looks a little naked.

That is just my way.

Beau and his lady friend Morgan just moved into a new apartment in Bed-Stuy together, and they threw themselves a housewarming party this weekend. Nina and I attended, even though we knew we wouldn't really know anyone else; and, sure enough, we were the only people not affiliated with the "anti-folk" scene. But those people are so nice and so easy to get along with. The longer I ride this spaceship Earth, the more strongly I believe in my friend Peter's advice: That one should cotton to friendly weirdos. I don't think I'm ruffling any feathers to suggest that that's what anti-folk is all about. J.J. Hayes was there -- Beau had contributed a song to an album of covers of his music this year -- and we bonded over loving The Pogues. Beau and Morgan's new apartment is charming, and has a big back yard with a funny wooden stage built out in the middle of it; I'm sure they've got designs on that already. They have three cats, two of which have the regular number of legs, the third of which is a tripod. All of them said hi. Beau directed our attention to a loose tile in the entryway, which, when removed, revealed a drain with a disconcerting amount of hair tufting out of it. Everyone had brought a delicious snack of some sort: There were merengues and cookies of various specious, and Beau himself had cooked an amazingly good tofu chili -- remarkable for its spiciness, which is straight-up missing from most vegetarian chilis. He was modest about the recipe, but I pressed him for it, and he typed it up and emailed it to me the next day. Find it below, a first for this publication?
Get a thing of "firm tofu," and cut it into cubes. Put it in a bowl with a lot of cayanne pepper and a little bit of paprika. Stir it up so the tofu absorbs the flavor.

Put a can (or two if you want a big helping) of red kidney beans in a pot, draining the beans first. Cook it on low.

Cut some celery into small bits and put it into a hot skillet.

Cut some mushrooms into small bits and put them into the skillet.

Cook them for a few minutes, then put them into the pot with the beans. Turn the heat up to medium.

Get a can of pickled jalapenos, cut them into smallish bits, and put them into the pot.

Put the tofu in the pot.

If the chili reaches a boil, turn the heat down to low. Stir occasionally so it doesn't burn.
Nina and I played a game of "trains" (Ticket To Ride) with Beau's friends-slash-bandmates Joe (bass) and Sonia (typewriter). We confirmed that Joe was in fact the guy that we'd seen take a bad fall from the stage at the Titus Andronicus show on the 2nd and get dragged from the crowd by friendly strangers. His shoulder had gotten fucked up, he said, and Webster Hall had sent him to the hospital to repair a gash on his head. He lamented that he'd missed the band performing The Battle of Hampton Roads. Do you think they'll play it again live, he wondered? Crowd-surfing: A perilous sport. Nina won our game, in no small part by forming the longest contiguous section of track. I built out all my connecting routes, but what does that get you?

The party began to wind down around eleven o'clock, and we took our leave. Our destination was the Nitehawk Cinema on Metropolitan Ave., where they were doing a midnight screening of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. A word about that: I was super into Garbage Pail Kids cards. This guy, your humble narrator, was not much of a baseball card collector, if you can believe that. But I thrilled to the scenes of corporeal discomfort depicted on the cards and tried to decode the rationale behind giving the same picture of a gross little kid two different names. (Adult supposition: More cards, more money.) I kept them in an elegant hand-made wooden box, with a lid in the shape of a mallard duck until they wouldn't fit in it any more. Towards the end of elementary school I made the mistake of pooling my collection with that of a like-minded peer -- at his house. I haven't seen my cards since.

Do you people know about the Nitehawk? It's a fancy-pants movie theater in Williamsburg where the hook is that you can get food and booze sent direct to your seat while the movie is playing. It sounds like an infuriating conceit, but in the mostly-empty theater we were in, it was actually pretty delightful. Each pair of seats shares a little table which has lights on the underside -- so you can see to write down your order or scribble commentary on the movie, which we did. It's downright womb-like. We ordered beers and a thing of nachos, which was quite tasty but looked in the dark like featureless gray mush. It's a wonder we were able to eat at all: That movie is pure nightmare fuel. A pre-teen boy with a crush on a cruel, mercenary teenage girl enlists the help of a half dozen aliens? leprechauns? minor demons? with various behavioral disorders and physical deformities in order to win her heart. There are farts, musical numbers. The Garbage Pail Kids sew clothes that would set contemporary Williamsburg on fire. Where the movie disappoints is in its restraint: Valerie Vomit saves her special purpose until the final act, during the girl's (Tangerine's) fashion show, at which point she deploys it sparingly.

But overall it was a very fine date!

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