Best Of 2013

Sound cue: Drumroll playing in the void of interstellar space.

Best thing on basic cable: Being Human (USA)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Gimme The Loot
Best movie I saw not in a theater: O Lucky Man!
Best book I read: In The First Circle; runner-up: Tinkers
Best album I played drums on: Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best album I didn't play drums on: Blowout!, The So So Glos
Best new talk show on WFMU: Why Oh Why, with Andrea Silenzi
Best show I went to: The Dickies at Knitting Factory, Oct. 31st
Best video game I played: Dead Space
Best brunch: Buttermilk Channel
Best worst movie: Private Resort
Best vegetarian lunch special, Murray Hill: Tiffin Wallah
Best vegetarian Bánh Mi, Park Slope: Vegetarian chicken, Banhmigos
Best cruelty-free calorie-delivery mechanism: Vegan cowboy cookies
Best snack: Pretzel Crisps, aka Bagel Chips

I bought a Christmas tree about a week and a half before Christmas, traveling out to Sunset Park to the place I'd gone on 38th St. last year. It was very cold, and the air was misted and prickly with snow-dust. I told the guy the size of tree I was looking for, and he showed me one of the display models sitting on a spike in front of the lot, a heavy dressing of snow on its branches. It looked about right, and I told him so, and he wrapped it up for me to haul home on the train. That part was easier this time, though when I got the thing down the stairs onto the subway platform, my hands and fingers burned so badly from the cold that I thought there was something really wrong with them. I got it to Union St. and up to our apartment, and Nina and I fastened it to the plastic stand. Only then did I notice that it had a big sparse section on one side, like a bite taken out. It drank up the first pourings of water, but the needles stayed dry and crumbly. We duly wrapped the tree with fairy lights and clipped the "Christmas birds" to it, but it positively barfed needles onto the floor while we did so, and the whole thing seemed (even more than usual) like a hollow exercise. I felt embarrassed, and started counting the days until we could mulch the thing.

My dad suggested that all he really wanted for Christmas was for someone else to cook all the food on the day, so my sister enlisted me to help plan and prepare a suitable feast. I would have gone all vegetarian, because it's so much easier to cook, but she was set on doing some form of lamb dish. I'm glad she pushed for it because it came out really well, and got me out to witness the spectacle of the newly-opened Gowanus Whole Foods on 3rd St. Here is the menu we designed, for posterity and for readers who want to attempt it themselves:

• Hummus
• Roasted Brussels sprouts with fish sauce and Thai chiles
• Red quinoa and roasted butternut squash salad
• Roast leg of lamb with mint, garlic, and lima bean purée
• Cranberry sage pie

On Christmas Eve, Nina made ready to go visit her family in Pennsylvania, and I walked around the neighborhood trying to scoop up a few last-minute gifts. I bought us a sandwich to share at City Sub, but after I wolfed my half I felt ill, so I warned her off eating hers. I had to say goodbye to her from the toilet. I was almost recovered by the time my sister came over that evening to help me cook. We shopped for ingredients and prepared the salad and pie. She also helped me finalize one of my presents for Nina, a t-shirt ">screen-printed with the logo for Cacaolat, which she'd told me she admired when we saw it in Barcelona. We made three shirts, and they all came out good, but each one has different imperfections. That's just the way it works. That night, Jill and Emma and Jay came over and after some debate, we decided to watch Zapped! starring a young Scott Baio and, weirdly enough, the guy who went on to play Buddy on Charles In Charge. Baio plays a high school chemistry nerd who accidentally invents a tonic that gives him telekinetic powers by mixing weed and beer. He uses his powers to take girls' clothes off. It's like they filmed a Johnny Ryan comic strip. At midnight, it was Jay's birthday. We did shots.

Nina and I went on another date the weekend before New Year's Eve. First we saw the tail end of a Liquor Store show at Glasslands. They were characteristically gross / great, and I got to see the new light installation above the stage. It's made of PVC fitted with color-changing LEDs, and it looks like stiff, white fingers of coral reaching down from the ceiling. After that we got a drink at Iona, which Nina drunkenly insisted was "the best bar," on account of its varied seating environments (window, booth, back yard) and its focus on beer and whiskey. Then it was time for the midnight movie at Nitehawk, a series of "naughty" 35mm shorts curated by, like, a guy who restores naughty 35mm shorts. We ordered tall-boy PBRs and tater tots. The clips included some very explicit trailers for the movies:

• Nude in a White Car
• Sexual Freedom in Denmark
• Sex Freaks
• Torture Dungeon

Were they really naughty? It was definitely more penetrative sex than I've seen in a movie theater since, I guess, the Wesleyan Film Series. It occurred to me that suggesting it to Nina as a fun date was a pretty Travis Bickle kind of move. I think some of the best clips in the series, though, were the least naughty -- the guy had collected some film ads that I guess would be shown before a film feature that were pitching dance-hall parties you could go to on New Year's Eve. So many venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn that just don't exist any more. There was also a strange, long-form travel ad encouraging viewers to "Come To Poland." It'd been produced in the 50's by a Polish hospitality company called Orbis, and it featured a Slavic-looking couple enjoying the period charms of an unspecified Polish city as described by an English voice-over. Outdoor cafes! Hotels with elevators! Our host tried to make more hay than was warranted over the otherness on screen.

The last big thing we did in 2013 was see Patti Smith play a show at Webster Hall. This is a thing she does every year, and it's one of those things that New York magazine is always telling you should be on your bucket list. I hadn't done it yet because it's expensive and the tickets sell out crazy quick -- and because I wasn't sure what to expect. I was worried that she'd be some kind of mumbling ersatz gypsy like Bob Dylan. But I figured we should go, you know, just to see, and it turned out that she's amazing on stage. She's got such a steady, confident voice -- deeper, even, than the voices of the dudes in her band. (In two-part harmonies, her male keyboardist always took the upper part.) She moves quickly and deliberately around the stage; she takes easy control of the audience, addressing them with a balance of punk contempt and genuine warmth. "Oh, I just get so flustered when a handsome boy talks to me," she sneered in the direction of an audience member who kept calling her name. "Now shut the fuck up." She opened her set with a cover of "Heroin," and sang it without undue reverence. What followed was a mix of her famous early songs, stuff from her recent albums, and more covers. "This next song is the number one song of 2013," she said. Oh man, I thought. Patti Smith does Miley Cyrus? But no, she sang "Stay" by Rihanna, which was also quite good. It being her birthday and all, her kids came up on stage with a cake and gave her a gift of "bee socks," which somehow support the protection of honeybee colonies. She played "Because The Night" and dedicated it to Fred Smith. She played "Perfect Day" and dedicated it to Lou Reed. It was really great.

When the show was over, we went to go find Patrice, whose birthday, like Patti's, was that evening. She'd been celebrating at a karaoke joint on 17th St., but by the time we we got there it was just some office dudes hollering their way through "Wrecking Ball."

Blue Morpho

I spent Thanksgiving with the Browns. My mom lured me there with an email telling me that Jonah had been invited to join Titus Andronicus. (She scooped BrooklynVegan and the band's own Twitter!) I tried not to slobber to him about his new band, but could not restrain myself. Some inside baseball: On their most recent tour, they rented a U-Haul hitch for their equipment; consequently there was enough room in the van for every member to have his own sleepin' row.

Bel Argosy played a show at Muchmore's, which turned out to be kind of a pleasant place to spend an evening. Beau and I met up early to pick up some equipment from the shared MiniBoone / Robot Princess practice space on Meserole. We found Doug inside, the place decorated with Christmas lights and smelling faintly sulfurous. He was working on putting words to a melody he'd written. We tied an amp to a hand truck. I grabbed Peter's cymbal bag, since we'd arranged that I'd use his stuff. My anxiety about punctuality and continued inability to keep my North Brooklyn geography straight got us to Muchmore's way early, so I sat the bar with Zain and Sam, and Beau ran back to Meserole to return some superfluous gear. Muchmore's is actually a pretty comfy joint. The washing machines in the room behind the bar are for community use -- show up with your laundry, drink a beer and take in a show. Sam had a cold and kept trying to get the bartender to make him a hot toddy, but the place has no license for hard liquor, so the best she could do was a coffee-and-wine, which was no problem for him. Our set was pretty good, though the floor tom collapsed in the middle of one song, and we only played for, like, fifteen minutes. Robot Princess sounds very good and precise and rehearsed; Beau and Dan play synchronized lead lines that sound like candy.

Nina's mom's been working as a docent at The Museum of Natural History, and she got us tickets to see the butterfly exhibit, so that's what we did on Saturday. The Museum admits visitors to the butterfly garden in waves, and there was some time to kill before the next "intake" period, so we took a walk through the Hall of North American Mammals. I've loved those dioramas for as long as can remember, and I've taken pains to avoid learning the floor plan of the Museum, so whenever I go I'm surprised at where I wind up. I looked into the mouth of the bison. I found a small finch hanging upside-down from a tree branch over a stream. The seam between the painted backdrop and the set dressing in the foreground -- the hand-placed blades of a grass, a frozen acrylic river -- is my favorite part. That seam is transportive, hyper-real. The dioramas don't have doors. How do they clean the animals and touch up the paint? I wondered. We turned a corner and found a wall-mounted TV playing a short documentary about how they do those things. (So, yeah, they take out the windows and enter through the front.)

The butterfly enclosure was a kind free-standing greenhouse inside an unused room off the museum's main entrance on Central Park West. It had "airlocks" at both the entrance and exits, to make sure you neither introduced a harmful indigenous critter to the butterfly jungle nor left with a butterfly clinging to your scarf. Inside, it was very warm and humid. For the butterflies what preferred it, there were feeding stations with sections of rotting oranges. There were several dozen different kinds of butterflies in the room, the smallest about the size of a guitar pick, the largest about the size and shape of a diagonal half-sandwich. Of these big ones, we were told, the majority were of the Morpho family. With their wings folded together, they looked unremarkable, like large moths or bits of faded newsprint. But when they spread their wings flat, they revealed a unreal, glittery blue on their dorsal side. An attentive docent showed us how to attract and handle the butterflies, how they'd mash their proboscii against things to taste them, that when two butterflies of the same species perched on a branch and overlapped their wings it meant they were mating. A young woman, wearing the official Museum orage, brought in a kind of mesh duffle bag that she explained was full of newly-hatched butterflies. "They're not very good at flying yet," she said, "so be careful not to step on them." She was right: The butterflies that they shook out of the bag took to the air only hesitatantly. Some of them waddled around on the floor flexing their wings in very deliberate way. We waited motionless for minutes on end in various hopeful locations near the stinky orange piles, hoping for a chance landing on our clothes or outstretched hands. At the other side of the enclosure, one of the docents was kneeling on the floor with a large butterfly clinging to her eyebrow and explaining loudly to a shocked toddler that it was alright. ("It doesn't hurt! It doesn't hurt!") Right as we were about to give up, a large Blue Morpho alit on the tassel of my scarf. It had a big, hairy thorax, a little grotesque, really, but man -- those wings!

At around 6, the museum staff started herding people out, so we left, walking down the big stairs and across the street into Central Park. We headed down to the lake, which had a thick, dull surface layer of slush that looked deceptively solid. There's fencing that runs most of the perimeter, and at various intervals there were signs warning you not to step onto the ice. Next to each sign was mounted a red, telescoping ladder, which you could presumably extend from the shore to someone who'd made a bad choice and fallen in. There are several small gazebo-like structures along the edge of the lake -- little huts, really, with two small benches facing each other inside. One side of each hut seemed to open right onto the lake, like that Edward Hopper painting. I dipped the toe of my boot into the slush to see if it went straight down. It did, but Nina pulled me away. We walked around to the other side of the lake to The Loeb Boathouse, to see if we could sit by the fire and get drunk, but they were closed for a private event.

Instead, we exited the Park on the eastern side, and walked down 5th Ave. to 59th St., where we stopped briefly. at F.A.O. Schwartz. The place was swarming with frenzied children, but there were also several adult couples buying action figures and various doo-dads for themselves. We walked through aisles of pricey candy (fifteen bucks for a grotesquely huge Reese's Peanut Butter Cup); stuffed animals the size of a twin bed; a not-quite-tall-enough guy in Spider-Man spandex, posing for pictures; Lego everything. Everywhere the accumulating clutter of life and western capitalism. There was a wing of the store where you could buy high-end baby dolls, only you had to go through an "adoption interview" to acquire one. I thought we could go through the phony process and then trepan our candidate doll with a power tool in front of the other shoppers, as a bit of creepy performance art. We left empty-handed, although I found myself coveting a make-your-own-geode kit.

Further down 5th Ave., we stepped inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Nina lit a candle for her father. Afterwards, she stopped at a street vendor's cart and bought us a bag of roasted chestnuts, so hot that they singed the brown paper black as we held them. For some reason, the chestnuts seemed like an intimate thing to buy from a stranger. The fur between the shell and the, uh, nut-meat. The softness of the meat itself. We walked past the holiday window displays at Lord & Taylor. The theme seemed tob gilded age New York, with cardboard flats printed with lithographs of wealthy shoppers enjoying the pleasures of the department store while being serenaded by Negro ragtime musicians. The flats would kind of wiggle, but the animation was minimal, and the whole thing was ugly and tone-deaf. We took the train downtown. Two crustpunks were riding the train with a dog. They split up at Union Square, the girl disembarking with the reluctant dog, the guy staying on the train alone.

I don't know. That's all.