This is something that sounds weird to say: I signed up for a continuing education course in project management at NYU. My job is paying for it, and I enrolled at the not-so-subtle urging of my higher-ups. ("You... need help with this.") I'm not sure why I chose the section that meets from 9 AM to 5 PM on consecutive Saturdays, but that seemed like the only time I'd be able to pay attention without falling asleep. Plus, it turned out to be a great way to stay out of the heat without missing out on too many summer activities. Professor Shapiro has a wide, toothy mouth and a sharky way of interrogating her students when they're equivocal about their past experiences with project management. She pronounces "ask" as "ahsk." Her favorite way of describing a project with a confused deliverable is as a "family-friendly house that's being built into a bachelorette man-trap." The class is held down on Park Place at one of NYU's downtown satellite locations. It's actually in the Woolworth Building, which is one of those huge, ancient buildings in lower Manhattan with crazy ornate exterior texture. The Woolworth is the one with the green pyramidal top. It's also got a cavernous, cathedral-like lobby covered in marble and gold leaf, with ceilings so high that they create an interior hollow into which the windows in rooms on the first several floors can peer, including our classroom. It looks like a bit like a geode growing inside an office park. The area around the building is a true wasteland, to the extent that I couldn't believe the Woolworth was actually where I was supposed to go on the first day and so passed it by several times. We get a few breaks to grab coffee and a longer break for lunch, and I spend almost all of that time trying to figure out what people who work down there eat if not pizza. I mean, if it's pizza, then, great. But I find that I feel polluted enough on a Saturday at noon. The best I could come up with was a bánh mi place way west of Broadway that puts lettuce on the sandwiches. Oh, the humanity.
On the Friday before the final class, my sister texted me at work to let me know that my grandmother had had a stroke. Or at least, something like a stroke: The staff at the nursing home wasn't able to wake her up that morning. My dad booked a flight to Sarasota, turning down an offer of company. I knew it probably wasn't going to be okay, so I kept my phone on with the volume turned down in class on Saturday. When my mom called in the afternoon, I knew that she had died. What to think about that. I sometimes (often) think of my experiences in terms of how much of my time on earth they account for: I have been dating Nina for 20% of my life so far; I have been in Bel Argosy for 10% of my life. I think of my grandmother's decade in her room in the medical wing of Plymouth Harbor, effectively a dorm room looking out over the fountain in the parking lot, decorated with a fancy antique credenza and bureau from the luxury apartment she'd lived in briefly before becoming ill, in the less "assisted" wing of the facility. Certain parts of life are like a bad dream -- not necessarily that their experience is so unpleasant, but that they have the sick permanence of bad dream. Temporary arrangements turn into long-term configurations. This is not what I was supposed to be doing. And so on.
That evening Nina and I shopped for a party we were going to throw at Eve and Jon's new apartment on Pacific St. (We're taking care of Sam and Sasha while the humans are on vacation in Canadian wilderness.) It felt a bit weird to be doing it that night, but we'd already invited people over and there was nothing I could do to assist in Florida. Nina'd bought hamburger meat from Fleisher's, where she'd observed a truly horrifying pageant, a toddler pissing on the floor while its distracted mother selected a cut of grass-fed steak. (People, it does not get more Park Slope than that.) So we went to Key Food and bought an assortment of condiments and breads and the Brooklyn Brewery Party Pack, which never disappoints although it is ungainly. Eve and Jon's new apartment is a duplex, absurdly luxurious. Among other amenities, it has a back yard, accessible down a set of stairs from a small wooden landing which is where the grill lives. Nina mixed in the requisite "perfect burger" ingredients -- egg, breadcrumbs, Worcestershire -- and after some hand-wringing over the right amount of lighter fluid to use, we cooked the meat, plus some Chik Patties for me and Jerry. We all ate down in the yard, in the dark, sitting on lawn chairs. Mercifully, the mosquitoes kept their distance. The charcoal died before we had a chance to roast the marshmallows we'd bought, so we did those in the kitchen with a little hand-held propane starter, using it like a pastry torch.
I'm counting it as a birthday party.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
An Irish Wake
I celebrated my birthday quietly, though not in secret. My parents took me and Nina out for dinner at a fancy vegetarian restaurant called Gobo. My sister's back home from Denmark. She bought me hand-painted Simpsons matryoshka in Russia, probably the best bit of lopsided bootleg Groening I've ever seen.
We survived the week-long heat wave that settled in a few days later. It does feel like you're just enduring that kind of weather, even as you remind yourself that you only get so many summers. Knowing that The Aloe Farm's styrofoam exterior and narrow window ledges would be an awkard fit for our 5000 BTU paperweight of an air conditioner, I paid Pinter from Tarzian to help me install it. He rigged up a wooden crossbar to keep it wedged in place in the window frame instead of screwing it into the frame itself, which is too thick to drill through. We discovered that the plastic accordion wings were cracked (so much of life is trash and dirty plastic), so I trekked to Lowes to get foam replacements, taking a route through the trash-strewn expanse of 2nd Ave. between 9th St. and where it begins at 4th St. We'd set it up not a moment too soon! The heat became surreal. Every morning I'd wake up to find the floorboards still warm from the previous day's heat, pop some freezer grapes into my mouth or drink some mint tea, and put on NY1 to see what indignities were in store for the next 24 hours. About mint tea: It might be the Summer Jam. Take some mint leaves, which cost a bit more than they seem like they should, and add them to a big pot of boiling water, taking it off the burner. When the mint-yellowed water stops steaming (after an hour or two, say), pour it into a big plastic pitcher and put the pitcher in the fridge. Then you drink it when it seems like it's too hot to keep going.
I have been reading books on an e-Reader! I'd bought Nina a Kobo as a birthday present, in the hopes of making library books accessible again in a post-bed bug world. When I saw how useful it was, I decided I had to have one, too. After all, I'd been reluctant to pick through the stinking shelves at Epiphany and thus my own reading had fallen off. So I shelled out, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've read half a dozen books over the past few months, stuff that I'd been putting off, like London Fields and Rabbit, Run. I bring the thing on the subway now. I'm one of those people.
Katharine got me out to Prospect Park for Celebrate Brooklyn on Friday with a promise that headliners The Waterboys sounded like a gentler formulation of The Pogues. She was right, but when I got there it turned out we'd crossed wires and I was alone at the festival. So I walked the transverse axis of the bandshell grounds like a ghost, scanning the faces in the crowd for someone I recognized and only half listening to the music. But what I heard of The Waterboys, a baseball team-sized squad of dudes wearing Oxford shirts and suspenders, was quite good. The song that ended their set was itself finished with a long series of triumphant Celtic downbeats. The BRIC representative who closed the show sounded as always like a schoolteacher who'd lost control of his classroom ("Please put your trash in a marked receptacle..."), and I was swept along with the exiting hordes. It was sweltering hot, and the hoped-for B63 did not arrive, so I marched myself back to Union St. in the dark, sweating hard and singing The Battle of Hampton Roads to pass the time.
I remembered that Appomattox, whom I'd been hoping to get a chance to see for quite some time, were playing at The Rock Shop, gracious host to Bel Argosy and, uh, Mommyoke (though not on the same night), but they wouldn't go on 'til 11, so I made a pit stop at home to dry off and watch a DVR'd episode of Drunk History, which is my current favorite thing. The Comedy Central version doesn't always reach the height of unmoored exuberance that the web series does, but Rich Fulcher's caricature of Lincoln's early career as a trial lawyer might be the best thing I've seen on television, ever. ("This guy... is like an ape!") I ran into Nina on my walk back up to 4th Ave. and managed to lure her into joining me for Appomattox. They'd just started their set when we got there. I was surprised to see that it's only two guys -- at least, I think: Their press kit says they're a power trio, but I could've sworn there was only a drummer on stage with the lead singer, who pivoted repeatedly from guitar duty to programming a synthesizer that provided loops of low range sound. The hooks in their songs reminded me why I'd wanted to see them, and I liked their arrangements; the band actually sounds better on stage than they do on their latest EP. The writing got on my nerves, though. I started to wish they were an instrumental act. An example of some lines that particularly annoyed me:
Maxwell's is closing. I claim no special knowledge of that place, but, you know, I've been there a few times, had slapped the sun-and-columns sigil of the Bel Argosy on the wall in the bathroom, hoping I'd play on that stage but knowing even at that time that I probably wouldn't. There are a lot of people that know that place better and feel stronger about it than I do (which is not very), but, still, I thought, I should go out there and see it as they partied the place to the ground. I missed getting tickets for the three (!) Titus Andronicus shows but figured it was okay 'cuz those should go to the Kids, anyway. Instead I'd bought tickets to a solo performance by Ted Leo, who's probably more Jersey that Messrs. Stickles and Harm anyways. I invited Tom, who couldn't in good faith marry into a Garden State clan without ever visiting Hoboken. I'd run into Chris the Friday before at Flatbush Farm and gotten fully soused hearing about how our mutual friend C. got an actual tick on his actual dick. Chris let me ride the handlebars of his bike and we caromed off a U-Haul truck. "I don't know anything about that guy," Chris said of Ted Leo, but agreed to use the ticket if no one else would take it. (Beau is a TL/Rx superfan but had to leave town.)
We met on Sunday at the WTC PATH station, crossed the river, and made the long trek up Washington Ave. We got to Maxwell's after Shellshag had left the stage. Ted Leo pushed his way through the crowd as we were buying Yuenglings at the bar. He played a talky set. Aimee Mann got name-checked more than once, and he played a handful of songs written for or with her. "So," he'd say, in his self-conscious and strangely deep voice, halting a song he'd just begun playing, and offer context for the song or tell a funny story. He told an anecdote about being heckled for thanking an unpopular local radio station in Baltimore, and reflected on the silliness of punk audiences' calls to "fuck tuning." "That's low self-esteem," he said. "Punks deserve the best!" And it was a long set. "There are twenty-six songs on this list," he said, but it seemed like he played more than that. He played favorites, like The High Party and Me and Mia. He played Bottled In Cork, and let the audience sing the entire thing. "It would have been really embarrassing if that hadn't worked out," he said afterward. Eventually we neared the end. "You know, this thing is like an Irish wake," he said, affecting an accent. "'This isn't a funeral, it's a celebration!' So this song is an Irish wake." I had a feeling I knew what was coming, and I was right: He strummed the opening notes of Timorous Me, and the crowd cheered, knowing that the One Riff could not be far behind. We stomped our feet to it.
"Thanks," he said. We begged for an encore, and got in return a cover of Union City Blue. It was a late night, especially for a Sunday, and we found ourselves leaning against the doors of the PATH train for support on the ride home. Chris left his bike downtown in favor of disembarking at Penn Station.
We survived the week-long heat wave that settled in a few days later. It does feel like you're just enduring that kind of weather, even as you remind yourself that you only get so many summers. Knowing that The Aloe Farm's styrofoam exterior and narrow window ledges would be an awkard fit for our 5000 BTU paperweight of an air conditioner, I paid Pinter from Tarzian to help me install it. He rigged up a wooden crossbar to keep it wedged in place in the window frame instead of screwing it into the frame itself, which is too thick to drill through. We discovered that the plastic accordion wings were cracked (so much of life is trash and dirty plastic), so I trekked to Lowes to get foam replacements, taking a route through the trash-strewn expanse of 2nd Ave. between 9th St. and where it begins at 4th St. We'd set it up not a moment too soon! The heat became surreal. Every morning I'd wake up to find the floorboards still warm from the previous day's heat, pop some freezer grapes into my mouth or drink some mint tea, and put on NY1 to see what indignities were in store for the next 24 hours. About mint tea: It might be the Summer Jam. Take some mint leaves, which cost a bit more than they seem like they should, and add them to a big pot of boiling water, taking it off the burner. When the mint-yellowed water stops steaming (after an hour or two, say), pour it into a big plastic pitcher and put the pitcher in the fridge. Then you drink it when it seems like it's too hot to keep going.
I have been reading books on an e-Reader! I'd bought Nina a Kobo as a birthday present, in the hopes of making library books accessible again in a post-bed bug world. When I saw how useful it was, I decided I had to have one, too. After all, I'd been reluctant to pick through the stinking shelves at Epiphany and thus my own reading had fallen off. So I shelled out, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've read half a dozen books over the past few months, stuff that I'd been putting off, like London Fields and Rabbit, Run. I bring the thing on the subway now. I'm one of those people.
Katharine got me out to Prospect Park for Celebrate Brooklyn on Friday with a promise that headliners The Waterboys sounded like a gentler formulation of The Pogues. She was right, but when I got there it turned out we'd crossed wires and I was alone at the festival. So I walked the transverse axis of the bandshell grounds like a ghost, scanning the faces in the crowd for someone I recognized and only half listening to the music. But what I heard of The Waterboys, a baseball team-sized squad of dudes wearing Oxford shirts and suspenders, was quite good. The song that ended their set was itself finished with a long series of triumphant Celtic downbeats. The BRIC representative who closed the show sounded as always like a schoolteacher who'd lost control of his classroom ("Please put your trash in a marked receptacle..."), and I was swept along with the exiting hordes. It was sweltering hot, and the hoped-for B63 did not arrive, so I marched myself back to Union St. in the dark, sweating hard and singing The Battle of Hampton Roads to pass the time.
I remembered that Appomattox, whom I'd been hoping to get a chance to see for quite some time, were playing at The Rock Shop, gracious host to Bel Argosy and, uh, Mommyoke (though not on the same night), but they wouldn't go on 'til 11, so I made a pit stop at home to dry off and watch a DVR'd episode of Drunk History, which is my current favorite thing. The Comedy Central version doesn't always reach the height of unmoored exuberance that the web series does, but Rich Fulcher's caricature of Lincoln's early career as a trial lawyer might be the best thing I've seen on television, ever. ("This guy... is like an ape!") I ran into Nina on my walk back up to 4th Ave. and managed to lure her into joining me for Appomattox. They'd just started their set when we got there. I was surprised to see that it's only two guys -- at least, I think: Their press kit says they're a power trio, but I could've sworn there was only a drummer on stage with the lead singer, who pivoted repeatedly from guitar duty to programming a synthesizer that provided loops of low range sound. The hooks in their songs reminded me why I'd wanted to see them, and I liked their arrangements; the band actually sounds better on stage than they do on their latest EP. The writing got on my nerves, though. I started to wish they were an instrumental act. An example of some lines that particularly annoyed me:
So why am I so self-destructed?As Richard Stallman once said, those are just sounds to me.
Am I creature who can't be trusted
With anyone... except you?
You're too young
To keep a secret
From anyone
Maxwell's is closing. I claim no special knowledge of that place, but, you know, I've been there a few times, had slapped the sun-and-columns sigil of the Bel Argosy on the wall in the bathroom, hoping I'd play on that stage but knowing even at that time that I probably wouldn't. There are a lot of people that know that place better and feel stronger about it than I do (which is not very), but, still, I thought, I should go out there and see it as they partied the place to the ground. I missed getting tickets for the three (!) Titus Andronicus shows but figured it was okay 'cuz those should go to the Kids, anyway. Instead I'd bought tickets to a solo performance by Ted Leo, who's probably more Jersey that Messrs. Stickles and Harm anyways. I invited Tom, who couldn't in good faith marry into a Garden State clan without ever visiting Hoboken. I'd run into Chris the Friday before at Flatbush Farm and gotten fully soused hearing about how our mutual friend C. got an actual tick on his actual dick. Chris let me ride the handlebars of his bike and we caromed off a U-Haul truck. "I don't know anything about that guy," Chris said of Ted Leo, but agreed to use the ticket if no one else would take it. (Beau is a TL/Rx superfan but had to leave town.)
We met on Sunday at the WTC PATH station, crossed the river, and made the long trek up Washington Ave. We got to Maxwell's after Shellshag had left the stage. Ted Leo pushed his way through the crowd as we were buying Yuenglings at the bar. He played a talky set. Aimee Mann got name-checked more than once, and he played a handful of songs written for or with her. "So," he'd say, in his self-conscious and strangely deep voice, halting a song he'd just begun playing, and offer context for the song or tell a funny story. He told an anecdote about being heckled for thanking an unpopular local radio station in Baltimore, and reflected on the silliness of punk audiences' calls to "fuck tuning." "That's low self-esteem," he said. "Punks deserve the best!" And it was a long set. "There are twenty-six songs on this list," he said, but it seemed like he played more than that. He played favorites, like The High Party and Me and Mia. He played Bottled In Cork, and let the audience sing the entire thing. "It would have been really embarrassing if that hadn't worked out," he said afterward. Eventually we neared the end. "You know, this thing is like an Irish wake," he said, affecting an accent. "'This isn't a funeral, it's a celebration!' So this song is an Irish wake." I had a feeling I knew what was coming, and I was right: He strummed the opening notes of Timorous Me, and the crowd cheered, knowing that the One Riff could not be far behind. We stomped our feet to it.
"Thanks," he said. We begged for an encore, and got in return a cover of Union City Blue. It was a late night, especially for a Sunday, and we found ourselves leaning against the doors of the PATH train for support on the ride home. Chris left his bike downtown in favor of disembarking at Penn Station.
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