The longer I write this ol' blog here, the longer and longer these entries get. They're like essays at this point, and that is why it takes me a long time to write them. So this is just gonna be a list of things opening and closing and moving around. What else happens? Wars and elections and people dying, I guess. But I'm living in a Time Of Peace over here, and the quotidian is also the, uh, transmundane for me right now.
To wit: Great Lakes, the setting for many pivotal evenings in my twenties, has closed. On a good night, when the place was maybe half full, you could get a pint of Yuengling at the fairy light-bejeweled bar and then retreat with your cohort into the womb-like, near-total-darkness of the back, a flickering bulb barely illuminating a map of the mitten state on the far wall. And then you could get down to the business of saying your thoughts about this girl or that girl. For serious it was a core part of my experience. The management seemed determined to fuck it up, though, and so over the past few years they added a Big Buck Hunter cabinet to spoil the mood and the jukebox / bartender-iPod volume steadily increased until you couldn't hear for shit. And then they closed forever. The gate was down for several months, with a semi-intelligible epitaph for the Lakes graffitoed across it. Now it is re-opening as something called Park Slope Terroir.
That Barclays thing has happened, and perhaps in preparation for that, O'Connor's is also shuttered, with plans, I hear, to re-open as a sports bar. Was this prefigured by that weird concrete bunker that appeared on its roof a year or two ago? I don't know. But we all go to Canal Bar now, with its undigestible popcorn and indifferent dogs.
Perch has closed, taking its pretty good coffee and its excellent, overstuffed breakfast burrito with it. It's been replaced by Du Jour Bakery, which is not bad but a bit dainty if you ask me.
Blue Ribbon is closing. I never went there.
Culture has landed.
Southpaw is gone. Theres some kind of after-school tutoring thing opening up there, which makes no goddamn sense. That was the last place I saw The Dickies play, at a show booked by Kitty Kowalski, the ex-proprietress of Coney Island High. Will that turn out to be the last Dickies show I ever see? Which Dickie will be the first -- well, second -- to die?
Emma vacated her studio apartment on Union St. (Casa Dog Hair) to cohabitate with Jay at his deluxe pad / Sabermetrics research library in Downtown Brooklyn.
Nina got super into Adventure Time, and after some skepticism I'm now an obsessive fan as well. Nina likes Princess Bubblegum; I'm a Marceline man. And the show's alternating commitment to take its own mythology quite seriously and not very seriously is maddening and delightful.
On weekends I have been fucking with Skyrim, generously gifted to me by Nina. Those reviews that talk about how huge it is? They're not kidding. It's kind of bonkers. And it actually made the prospect of playing it a bit daunting, until I realized you can engage with the game on whatever level you want; this is not too far off from my approach. Sometimes on a hot Sunday morning I'll just climb a high, snowy mountain (there's no shortage of them) and look out over the Reach, turning the panorama with the thumbstick, trying to figure out how I'm supposed to frame my experience of a life -- my real one -- that is too long and too short.
Oh! Bel Argosy's record shipped! Some context: Producing the four tracks for it turned out to be the quick part, even though it wasn't quick; the next several months were occupied by pricing out options for printing jackets to showcase the beautiful artwork done for us by Billy's friend Andrew, and finding a record press who'd do a run of 200 for less than $800. I'm happy with our choices (JakPrints and Musicol Recording, respectively) but the pressing takes time. It was a month and change for us to get the white label test pressings back and several more to get the final product. But Oh! it was a great feeling when we had everything in hand. The band spent the evening in Billy and Sarah's kitchen (Donkey Town Records HQ), drinking Coors Light and listening to The A's while stuffing liner notes and records into sleeves. We're mailing them out. Want one?