The Gentleman With Thistle-Down Hair

The Hackers On Planet Earth conference fell on my birthday, as it often does when it makes its semi-annual traverse of our solar system. I told my friends and family that I'd have to spend the weekend tabling for the Free Software Foundation, but assured them that I wasn't trying to duck my birthday responsibilities. It took several emails with the FSF campaigns team before they began the process of reserving the table, and I wondered, briefly, if I was the last Free Software partisan in New York City. I feel weirdly at home when I visit Cambridge every March, whereas New York... I don't have friends that share my interests here. Well, no, that's not true. Just not all my interests. But to paraphrase Ted Leo, was I just a loner in world full of apolitical Python developers? Fortunately, Thomas proved me wrong. He even took care of getting the shipment of supplies I lugged to his bookstore to the Hotel Pennsylvania at an ungodly hour Friday morning. I felt immediately guilty.

I arrived in the early evening on Friday and found that in fact he'd a plum spot right by the main thoroughfare of the vendor floor; he'd strung our vinyl banner between two huge columns (no easy task, he said), and had arranged the merch and books in a neat, appealing way. We were next to and across from groups selling Arduino-type electronic kits. Diagonally across from us was a company selling a fruit and tea-based energy drink. They gave us some samples -- it was okay! Definitely a step up from Club Mate, which was being sold from a human-sized cooler behind us, right next to the EFF's table. This was HOPE number 9, and the "theme" they'd gone with this year was passports issued by the Department of Hopeland Security. The passports doubled as passes to the conference, and they were nicely made: Durable binding, strong paper stock to mimic the pages of actual passports. And there was a tie-in to the proceedings of the conference. If you went to a particular talk or visited a particular vendor table, you could get a stamp on a page of your passport. Gamification! The FSF didn't find out about the stamp thing in time to get us one for the table, but I offered to draw in the logo for anyone who wanted it.

When I tabled two years ago, I wasn't totally comfortable following Deb's instructions to interact with all comers, even the people who had no idea what we were all about. "Are you familiar with Free Software?" I couldn't bring myself to enter into a conversation where I might have to explain, let alone justify, the organization's mission. I was much more comfortable accepting donations from and trading gossip with visitors who were already, you know, among the cognoscenti. This time around, I don't know. I found a way to do it. Maybe it was that I was out there with Thomas, who's kind of an introvert, and this guy Matt who's a bit junior on the philosophy. So I didn't really have a choice about being the talky one. And I knew I was screwing up sometimes but it didn't bother me that much. It was fun! I talked to a lot of nice people:

• I gave a brief, semi-coherent elevator pitch for the Free Software Foundation to a nice guy shooting video for Italian television, an exasperated ghost of RMS dancing in my mind the whole time telling me I had it wrong, wrong, wrong.
• I met Kenzo, the guy who built WFMU's "smart playlist" system. We talked about the intersection of the indie radio and Free Software cultures.
• I met Clinton Ebadi. We talked about running Emacs on top of Guile, and I was glad to hear that someone besides me is psyched about that prospect.

Which was not to say we didn't meet our fair share of table creatures. There was the hitchhiking enthusiast who wanted to tell me how he'd taken a shit in a swamp the previous night. There was the pot-bellied beardo who tells me every year how he was the guy who got the Fermilab people using Linux in 1997 (which basically means he wasn't the guy). There was the glandular case who insisted on writing an infinite loop in Python on our demo machine as we were trying to clean up for the weekend. But most people were sweet and friendly. We raised several thousand dollars, sold out of ladies' t-shirt sizes, and moved all the books and pins.

I'd hoped to bail early in the evening on Saturday so as to take in an act or two at 4Knots, but Thomas fell asleep (propped against a column upstairs, he said, with an assortment of Debian CDs arrayed on his lap) and my shift ran long. And when I checked my phone around 7 o'clock to do some math with the set times, I discovered that the festival was literally on fire -- something backstage had shorted out or gotten too hot, and from the pictures I guess the fireboats were summoned. By the time I got down to the pier, it was dark and the bands had departed. There was no sign of the fire, except for the presence of FDNY vehicles and a faint smell of smoke near a soggy, cordoned-off area at the far end by the water. I walked north a few blocks to the entrance to the Beekman Beer Garden near the loading docks of the old Fulton St. Fish Market and queued up to get into the "after party." The line was super long, and they were only letting in discrete clumps of people at a time, but I was determined, and eventually I got in. And you know what? The Beekman Beer Garden sucks -- like every other engineered-to-be-cool social space in New York and Brooklyn, it's too big, too polished, too much of a compromise. Ravenous, I ordered and homphed a plate of soggy nachos while watching the opening band, Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds. I'd never heard (of) them before, and they weren't bad, but their set, I don't know, it lacked urgency. And ugh, that name. I'd been standing up all day and was exhausted, so after their set I lurched over to the railing and squatted down on the ground. I got out my phone and browsed to Metafilter for some factoids. Someone had posted a story about Gabriel García Márquez losing his mind to dementia. A drunk girl came over to me and asked me for a cigarette. "This is a concert," she said. "Why are you playing a game on your phone."

"I'm reading a web site," I said.

"What does it say?"

"Gabriel García Márquez is going to die."

"I... think I know who that is," she said. She was old enough that she should have. "But you need to try to live in the moment. This moment right now." I didn't tell her that it was minutes to my birthday and that all I could think about was people getting old and dying. But I agreed that it was time to pay attention to The Black Lips.

They got on stage and destroyed! I've always found them a bit intimidating, maybe account of how unpretentious they look -- slight dudes wearing glasses and plaid shirts. Like they came from a place where you couldn't get Maximum Rocknroll and so they had to invent it themselves, Bad Kids with no outlet in ostentatious fashion, channeling their distress through nasty rock songs. Their band could be your life! Someone in the crowd got hold of some rolls of toilet paper and they lobbed them up and over our heads trailing damp white streamers that got tangled in the blades of the big industrial fans on the roof of the tent. The venue people were visibly irked, and things came briefly to a head up at the barricades near the stage. But the show mostly had a wholesomely cheeky vibe; maybe a touch entitled, but hey it's Manhattan. I stood in the back with the rich girls and their boyfriends, cradling my man-purse but tapping my feet.

So I did sort of duck my birthday, but not entirely. Nina took me on a date the following week to see Beasts Of The Southern Wild at The Sunshine, which was totally delightful but made us tear up something fierce. Dabbing our eyes, we walked a few blocks north to Downtown Bakery, where I enjoyed a spinach burrito -- my customary meal there years ago when I was a hushpuppy that did software QA in the bathtub on Broadway & Houston St.

Heatside

Man, is it ever hot. It was hot last week. It's hot this week. Twice now the weather report has promised a cooling rain, perhaps in the form of a dramatic storm, even, and twice the rain has veered off course to miss the city or been re-forecasted beyond the week's horizon. Is it cynical to imagine that they deliberately underpredict the length of a heatwave on the news to keep us all from freaking out? It seems like the heat always lasts longer and the rain always comes later or not at all.

It was so hot that we tried out the public pool at the Douglas-Degraw playground just this last weekend. We weren't the only ones with that idea, and despite the fact that we showed up close to closing time, we had to join a small queue of people outside the entrance waiting for the pool to get below capacity. Ahead of us were a couple of teenage boys who took the Parks Department dude at the door to task for the wait, to the amusement of the rest of us. "Man, four people just left! There's just two of us! And you could fit like two of me inside that one dude." I was a little afraid of the locker room, which did reek of bleach and foot smell, but I was able to change discreetly and it wasn't so bad. And the pool itsef was just about perfect, a bit warmer than freezing on account of the hundred some-odd people enjoying themselves in it but not so warm that we suspected pee. We played Water Taxi (until the lifeguards whistled at us to stop), dog-paddled up and down the length of the pool, and practiced our underwater somersaults. On the way out we saw one of the pushy kids from earlier, this time holding court amid a gathering of younger boys. "Go on, spell 'Mississippi,'" he commanded one of them.

"M... I... S... S... P... I..." said the kid, haltingly.

"How old are you?" the older kid demanded. "Ten? And you can't spell that? Man, you ain't go to school."

The younger kid stood his ground: "Oh yeah? Well you just think it's so cool to spell words and smoke weed. But you not so cool." It made me think of me, a little!

It was so hot that when Beau and Nina and Beau's friend Rebecca and I rode out from a picnic in Prospect Park to Shea Stadium to see a much-anticipated Shilpa Ray show, we had to sit out the opening bands on the balcony, watching through the windows and listening to the poor performers sweat their hearts out in what had literally become a sauna despite the industrial-size fans standing in stategic corners. We piled back in when Shilpa Ray went on stage, but quickly became soaked through our shirts. She's got a new line-up of Happy Hookers, apparently culled from the openers, and the result is a pared-down sound that showcases her singing and harmonium playing. We drank Bud Light to stay hydrated. Shilpa herself seemed a bit taken aback by the heat, although her monstrous voice was undiminished. "Ow, you guys," she said during a break between songs. "My mascara's running into my eyes." She paused. "I guess that's an old lady thing to complain about." Music industry trivia: The creepy older dude we saw in the audience, and who seemed to be part of Shilpa's entourage, turned out to be Larry "Ratso" Sloman, the writer / promoter / music biz gadfly. Beau tracked him down via the vanity license plate on the car he parked outside Shea. (Turns out he wrote a piece about her for LA Weekly.)

Nina and I went to go see Sleep No More last Monday. It was fantastic! I'm loath to describe it in any detail lest I dissipate its weirdness, but for those of you who don't know what it is, it's part dance performance, part haunted house, part treasure hunt. It begins with some artifice around you checking into a hotel on W. 27th St. A band plays in the lobby. You get into an elevator, and then... things happen. There is no talking in this hotel, they tell you. You do not remove your mask in the hotel. It's true: For the most part, there wasn't; and for the most part, we didn't. I spent my time at The McKittrick touching and reading things, mostly, sometimes trying to smell them, too, to the extent that I think I may have missed parts of the, uh, main event. True to her charter, Nina went everywhere / did everything. We debriefed over a fifteen dollar scotch in the hotel lobby listening to jazz standards played by a bill of really very good live bands. My proudest find: A porcelain teacup containing a sculpted dollop of personal lubricant and secreted away in the back of a small cabinet on the third floor.

Everyone left town for the 4th of July -- a good move, maybe, given that it was ninety-fucking-seven degrees that day -- but we stuck around. I went to the Keith Haring exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in the early afternoon, which was pretty awesome. The show covered his output between 1979 and 1982, so it spans the time he was developing that distinctive "pop" aesthetic but not the apotheosis of its implementation at The Pop Shop (a few blocks south of where I grew up!). His early paintings are pleasingly rough and even a little scary, spatters of red criss-crossing the orderly black Sumi ink work. One thing I should have already known but which the exhibit showcased was Haring's involvement in the punk music scene on the Lower East Side in the late 70s and early 80s: There was a whole wall devoted to the scrappy, xeroxed flyers he'd done for rock shows and underground art happenings. I was glad I got to see it.

Later that day Nina and Emma and Jay and I met up to go to a Brooklyn Cyclones game at MCU Park. We rooted for Brandom Nimmo despite his brain-dead at-bat song (Real American by Rick Derringer -- a sometimes collaborator of Larry "Ratso" Sloman?!). There were some impressive hits, both home runs and foul balls, but the fielding was crazy bad. Which is not to say that defense in baseball is an easy thing, but Yankees and Mets games have spoiled me to the extent that I was surprised to see the Cyclones and the Crosscutters alike dropping balls or laying out for and missing balls I would have expected them to catalyze into inning-ending plays. When I turned back quizically to Emma (sitting behind us) she rolled her eyes. "Welcome to the minors," she said. After the game, there were fireworks set off from right field; very convenient, considering we had no intention of catching the "official" display that's still perversely situated over the Hudson. It was also "Everybody Runs The Bases" night at MCU, so Nina and I queued up with the kids and the drunks to have a go. (Emma and Jay couldn't be bothered with such nonsense and said they'd meet us at Ruby's.) We waited our turn and then lit out around the diamond, hand in hand, from first to second, from second to third, from third to home base, the green sod beneath our feet lit up eerily bright by the stadium lights. Then we left the park.

We wanted to get away from the throng of people on Surf Ave., and Nina wanted to dip her toes in the ocean, so we broke away towards the beach. It was almost 11:00 but the beach was still packed with revelers, some splashing in the water, some rolling around in the sand doing kisses with a partner. The detritus of celebration -- bottles, cups, cigarettes, assorted plastic trash -- was floating in the ocean and everywhere on the beach. It's creepy to see so many people on the beach at night, like something terrible's forced us all out towards the edges of the continent, onto the last spit of land, and the only place left to go is into the water. The people waving glow sticks? They're partying as the ship goes down. We made our way towards Ruby's, still very much in business, where we met up with Emma and Jay -- and with a gentleman with red, white, and blue LEDs threaded through his nipple piercings. He seemed to have come to the boardwalk alone and looked desperate for people to acknlowedge his, uh, ornaments. "Eh?" he asked the passers-by, gesturing at his chest. "Yeah," he said. "Uh huh."