Best Of 2014

Best book I read: The Savage Detectives
Best book I turfed out on finishing: The Gulag Archipelago (at Volume 2)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Obvious Child
Best movie I saw not in a theater: The Host
Best album: Run the Jewels 2, Run the Jewels. But Lost In The Dream (The War On Drugs) was pretty good, too.
Best show I went to: Deltron at Celebrate Brooklyn, July 19th. Runner-up: Buzzcocks with Titus Andronicus at Webster Hall, Sept. 6th; observed through the dressing room window with Jo-Jo and Jo-Jo's mother.
Best veggie burger: Falafel burger, Thistle Hill Tavern
Best brunch: Nah, fuck brunch
Best podcast I was on: The Breakfast Quest
Best podcast I wasn't on: Welcome To Night Vale
Best nut: Cashew
Best worst movie: Foodfight!, possibly the only outright evil movie our team has ever watched. Runner up: The Vineyard
Best thorn in the side of clickbait capitalism: @SavedYouAClick
Best weird Twitter: @dogboner
Best Twitter: @RandyIsDaMan

We visited Emma and Jay on New Year's Eve. They'd made spaghetti and meatballs, and we sat for a while and watched Terry Crews and Ken Marino get drunk in Times Square before cutting the TV over to a movie, Roger Corman's Attack Of The Crab Monsters. The crab monsters took their sweet time making an appearance; most of the tension came from the love triangle between Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, and Russell Johnson ("Hank Chapman"). Pearl the ancient dog snored in her bed near the screen.

We didn't wait for the claws. We left Bridge St. at 11:30 and jumped on the train to Classon Ave. to check out the final blasting of the Pratt steam whistles, due at midnight sharp. Mr. Milster, the Chief Engineer at Pratt (guess he runs the physical plant) was blowing the whistles for the very last time. ...Which is what every blog and newspaper item had been saying for the past few weeks, and why we wanted to go, but we didn't really know what the whole thing was all about until we got round the corner of Willoughby and Grand and heard the first massive toots. The main event was through the gates and around the corner in a copse of trees outside the East Building, where a crowd had gathered around an array of steam whistles. We couldn't see or understand any of this at first, because of the volume of steam and noise. It's hard to describe the sound, but it was a bit like a barge horn: A basso-profundo hooooo at the resonant frequency of the human skull. Like the muezzin's adhan, it was hypnotic and pacific. So was the way the steam looked just as it emerged from the valves of the whistles. It looked like the edges of an egg frying in the air, dense, fluid, opaque. We stood in the warm-wet veil created by the steam, smelling that radiator-water smell of old iron pipes, certainly not a clean smell; corrupt in a physical, if not biological way. When we became aware of the mechanics of the scene, we saw that feeding the whistles was a large conduit pipe running along the ground to the wall of the East Building, where Conrad Milster was giving comments to the press and appreciative members of the community, periodically opening and closing a master valve with a lever. Nearby, there was a smaller-scale installation, a kind of miniature steam organ attached to a wood-and-plexiglass console with a piano keyboard that people were lining up to play.

We waited for the whistling to subside, but it was still going pretty strong around 1:00 AM, so we decided to make our way to the next party, at Nina's friend Diana's house on Berry St. in Williamsburg Prime, the heart of corruption and profligacy. Diana and her husband are successful graphic designers, and their ground floor brownstone apartment is furnished like a big game hunter's colonial-era trophy room. There was chocolate cake and fancy cured sausage and champagne. Shiny metallic balloons spelling out "2015" bobbed against the low ceilings. It was a combination New Year's / birthday party for Evan, and so I presented him the prize I'd been carrying with me all night, a handle of Widow Jane, which he promptly cracked open and poured into shots. "You were at Pratt?" he said, as we stood talking with Ray and Nini. "At Parsons, we used to call Pratt students ATMs, because it's so easy to get money out of them." I could swear I'd heard Randy say the same thing about Parsons students, but I kept my mouth shut. It was his birthday.