Monday, November 03, 2014

Mustache Frog

Apple picking, right at the end of all autumn things. Jerry borrowed her dad's car, and we met her outside the Saint George ferry terminal after crossing the Upper Bay on the 11 AM ferry from Whitehall Street. I hadn't ridden it in quite some time, and was surprised at how comfortable the experience was. I bought a coffee and sipped it as we stood in the bow (stern? It's double-ended) and watched Staten Island approach over the horizon. Hanlon reminded me that I used to watch Count Duckula when I was little and how weird that show was. (Why was his governess so big?) The ferry off-ramps get kind of winched down by a guy in a cherry-picker, and the flexible fringe that helps them connect with the ferry looks like claws.

In the car, we talked about #GermerGoat, regrettably. The whole thing is reprehensible, but the part of it that I find truly disheartening is the hurry of the basement-dwellers to defend an industry status quo that serves them dubiously if at all, and which facilitates their participation in its "culture" in the most passive, disempowered way possible. Naomi Clark describes it shrewdly (as always) as a movement of consumer-monarchists. As someone else once put it, don't wait around for them to come and shake hands; they're not going to be waiting for you.


Our destination was Riamede Farms in Chester, New Jersey. We bought cider donuts and ate them while dodging yellowjackets. (They can sting over and over again, guys!) Much of the orchard had been picked clean at this point in the year, leaving mainly the less desirable apple variants -- I'm looking at you, Red Delicious -- but we were still able to retrieve a good selection of matte-finish red-and-green bakin' apples. We spent some time nosing around the gourd patch as well, and stalked the rows of two-for-a-dollar decorative corn. Jill came away with an enormous, dripping sunflower which promptly wilted. I cradled it in the hay ride to the parking lot. On our way back to Brooklyn we stopped briefly outside the home of Jill's father, the elusive Fadoo, to return the car. He waved from a balcony, cautiously. I love being a passenger in the car so much that I'd almost rather not go anywhere. When I'm in the car I can sleep, I can yell, I can eat things. Full-on toddler mode. I used my half of our eight-pound haul to make a pie with cardamom and crystallized ginger. It didn't reach the level of spicy transcendence I was aiming for (maybe because i didn't include the cookie-cutter Cars shapes) but it was very good.



I used the gift certificate for The Brooklyn Kitchen that Nina'd bought me on a South Indian cooking class that we both attended on Wednesday. The venue was solidly North Brooklyn: A nothing-to-see-here warehouse exterior piled to the rafters inside with stainless steel gear that even ballers like me can't afford. The class was in the back of the shop, in a large room decorated with obvious care to look industrial. Metal lockers, concrete floor. We sat with the other students at two wooden tables abutting a slate counter that ran the length of the room and was laded with dishes in various states of prep. Our table-mates were two Australian UNICEF staff members who sparred with each other in an obnoxiously cheerful, alienating way. ("Mick's our Polio man!") The instructor was a young woman who was working on a cookbook detailing the South Indian recipes of her Jersey girlhood. She laughed nervously and often. The class was focused more on ingredients and procedure than on practicum, in particular on the use of sambar powder and on another spice mixture that included asafoetida, black mustard seeds, curry leaves, and red chilis. Asafoetida, hing asafoetida, is very pungent, but in a savory, clearly edible mode. I really liked it, and when I dumped a whole ramekin of it into our butane tabletop skillet, to the horror of the Australians, it was only partly an accident. We ended up cooking four / sampling four dishes, all flavored with the same mixture of spices, but all of which came out tasting unique.

Nina and I saw Screaming Females play to a packed house at Knitting Factory. It was the first time I'd ever seen them. Despite the band's name, Marissa Paternoster doesn't exactly scream; she roars, more like, which makes it a surprise to hear her soft, friendly speaking voice between songs. And while I wouldn't describe their songs as catchy, holy shit can she ever shred. At the end of their set, she climbed up on one of the speaker cabinets at the back of the stage and crouched, cat-like, her fingers intent on the fretboard, a rapid succession of unearthly sounds issuing from her amp. They didn't play an encore.

I dressed up for Halloween for the first time in many years. I met up with Nina at Abracadabra, which transforms on October 30th from an expensive warehouse of white-elephant "B" movie props to a cheek-to-jowl disaster survival sale, a supermarket with no loaves of bread left on the shelf. We had to wait on line to get in. The floor staff was in full costume, either to demo the merchandise or just get the holiday started early. An androgynous Thing One and Thing Two were helping people try out makeup. Nina was able to find a few components of her desired look -- Nyan Cat, a Popular Internet Thing -- but it wasn't until we got on line to pay that I found a costume that spoke to me: A gruesomely lopsided frog's head bonnet and gloves in a bag marked simply "Frog Costume." Wall eyes; inconsistent stuffing. I snagged a clip-on mustache near the register to complete the look. Mustache frog, I thought. Mustache frog. We went to a Halloween party in Windsor Terrace at the house of a friend of Jill's, where they ferried us a key by way of a stuffed manatee dropped out the window. Hanlon promptly dismantled my costume and self esteem. "Oh," he said. "You're Frog Suit Mario. From the video game. Because you're a gamer." Of course, I thought. How could I have been so blind? I gorged myself on Twix.

We had two friends running in the marathon this year: Beau and Caitlin. We woke up early to watch the proceedings on TV from Katharine and Tom's luxe condo in the sky -- silly, maybe, because they live right off 4th Ave., but convenient because we could track our runners electronically from indoors and then once they were within 10 minutes of us run outside to the bitter cold to cheer them on. Nina made a reversible sign: Go Caitlin; Go Beau! We met up with Caitlin at Morgan's for barbecued things a mere three hours after she completed the ordeal. And then we went into Manhattan to attend a party in Beau's honor at Ray's house, a gorgeous penthouse studio on 14th St. Ray said his apartment was the setting / inspiration for Bruce Springsteen's song "Candy's Room." He packed the place with poets and musicians and weirdos, and there was a kind of impromptu anti-folk show. Ray covered Beau's song "Wake Me Up When Everyone Is Dead" on the piano. While they played I had diarrhea in the bathroom from the jalapeƱos I ate at the BBQ place; it was very Llewyn Davis of me, I thought.

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