Nina's cousin Michael got married, and we took the bus out to Philadelphia to visit. We caught the Bolt bus on Friday out on 12th Ave. by the Javits Center, the gray concrete baking in the late afternoon soon. The sun set during the journey, and it was dark when we pulled into 30th St. Weird: Downtown Philadelpia is a ghost town, to its discredit. Market St. is all office towers, nobody inside except maybe a security guard at the front desk playing smartphone.
We'd booked a room in the wedding block at the Sonesta, a modern-looking hotel that was apparently beginning to re-open after a renovation. Some of the floors and amenities were still off-limits, and the elevators all had plaster-dusted cardboard on the floor, but the outdoor swimming pool was open! We could see it out our windows, many floors below. At Nina's urging ("Do all the things"), we ventured down to check it out in the pre-noon hours the following morning. The pool was on top of an intermediate floor of the hotel so that we could look out over sunlit roofs of downtown Philadelphia on one side, the black obelisk of the rest of the hotel towering over us on the other. Nina waded up and down the shallow end of the pool. I mostly just put my feet in. It was very quiet, and we were almost the only people we could see; occasionally we would catch a glimpse of a painter or contractor doing something in a room on one of the sealed-off floors. Sparrows hopped around. The bride and groom are both public transit enthusiasts, and the "goody bag" they'd left for us at the front desk included sufficient SEPTA tokens to get us around for the weekend (along with an admonition to donate them to a less fortunate Philadelphian if we couldn't use them). The wedding was at the Old First Reformed Unitarian Church on 4th and Race. Nina and her brother and I took the Market-Frankford line from the City Hall stop near the hotel to 5th St. It was a Quaker service, meaning that the official proceedings were short, but there were a whole lot of benedictions from the witnesses. Friendly nerds, most all of them.
I spent the whole weekend straining my ears to catch a fragment of Jon Wurster's Philly Boy Roy accent but came up dry until Sunday morning, when I was walking through an alley back to the hotel after an unsuccessful breakfast forage. An old woman and her adult son were walking ahead of me, and I overheard that distinct, peculiar way of speaking: "Did you talk to him last week?" "No, I'm going to call him on Tewsday."
We stopped off at the Mütter Museum on our way to the bus station. I'd heard a lot about the place. My mom and my sister had visited on a road trip many years ago and came back thoroughly titillated. Nina is the prowd owner of their 1993 wall calendar, which lives in a pile of prestige items (hardcover book of battlefield photography; Clash On Broadway boxed set) on our coffee table's lower shelf. So I was expecting an intimidating physical presence, but the Museum is about the size and external demeanor of a Brooklyn Public Library branch -- not the huge central one with the gold-leaf Masonic symbology around the entrance, but one of the Park Slope branches, say, tidy brick with a lawn that no one's bothered to sweep free of dead leaves. Inside, the collection is mostly localized to a single large, split-level room, which is filled with glass-paned wooden display cabinets jammed with specimens -- mostly skeletal -- of human morphological non-conformism, some with an explanation or some description of provenance, others with a simple typewritten slip of paper, yellowed with age, giving only the date of the donation. The presentation is very neutral and mid-century scientific. The cabinets are packed shoulder to shoulder with one another, and each one runs floor to ceiling. In another room on the first floor there's an exhibit on battlefield medicine in the Civil War. There's a booth you can step into to see what you would look like as an amputee. A large stairwell takes you down to the lower tier of the main collection, where there's more stuff, grouped anatomically: Eyes, noses, spines, genitals.
A cabinet at one end of the first floor displayed the personal effects and photos of the late Dr. Mütter himself, who was handsome -- nothing of the "Innsmouth look" you might have reasonably expected -- and died young, in his forties. In a back room of the ground floor there was a similar display noting the recent passing of the Museum's director, Gretchen Worden. She was 56 years old. It made me feel sad, and brought the most disturbing aspect of the collection into focus. The specimens of people who seemed like they'd been dealt a rough hand by birth or by accident, and for whom contemporary medicine could / would do nothing: The skeleton of the dwarf prostitute who'd gotten pregnant with a fetus too big to deliver; the model (it better be a model) of the enormous colon possessed by the Human Windbag, a circus performer who pretty much filled up with shit and died. It reminded me of the hero's final question from The Sirens Of Titan: Why are we created only to suffer and die?
This turned into more of a downer than I wanted it to. Good things are in the offing. Nina got us tickets to see Ana Tijoux in July. Watch this and tell me she can't spit.
We ferried out to the St. Andrew's vicarage in Saltaire to visit Billy and Sarah and Baby Charlie last weekend. It was a bright, hot day, and the gang gathered at the house (Kim, Chris, Jessie, others) was itching to run out to the beach. I'd neglected to pack swim trunks, either by accident or subconscious motive. I felt self-conscious about my bald head and mugwump-like physique, and I wished I could have stayed in a protective and concealing tent like Baby Charlie, who was sporting a bright yellow bathing costume like one of the original X-Men's. But Billy graciously lent me a pair of his own trunks, and Nina and Chris coaxed me into the cold blue water, and it was actually a lot of fun. We bobbed in the deep parts, and splashed around until the afternoon change in the tides drew the waves up higher and stronger than we could handle. In the evening we rode the vicarage house bikes out to Surf's Out for some food. While we waited for Billy and Sarah to show up with the stroller, we elbowed our way into the crowd listening to the band playing in the restaurant's outdoor space. They were Rich Mahogany, five or six swollen middle-aged dudes, red-faced and sharing a glans-like appearance. To their credit, the crowd was dense with ladies, and from the ambient chatter it sounded like many of them had traveled to the island just for this show. (The Cravin' Band had opened the evening; double-header!) We walked away from the noise, out to the pier, where we found a tiny boutique selling beach towels and doo-dads. They were selling "throwing snaps," too, and we bought a couple of boxes to arm Chris for an evening's entertainment.
On the ferry ride back, we were packed cheek-to-jowl with drunk, middle-aged Rich Mahogany fans -- some of whom had been fighting in the restaurant bathroom -- leaning this way and that as the boat pitched in the darkness. It was a Boschian vision of hell, but not a very bad one.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Friday, June 13, 2014
White People Ruin Everything
We went out to Bushwick Open Studios so I could see my friend and former Rebel Monkey colleague Joe Wierenga. He and his friends were showing a series of life drawings, many of which they'd done at 3rd Ward before the owners took the money and ran. Joe's drawings were great, especially the way he renders light and contrast with a watercolor wash. And becase their show was at their apartment building, a very strange, not-quite-condo building affectionately called The Glass Cube; we got to see the apartment he shares with his lady friend and with Elvis The Cat King. Two big rooms, the bedroom illuminated by a fishtank and the lamp over his drafting table. It was lucky that we'd stopped by on Saturday, he said. They were cutting back their participation to just that day because he and his show-mates had gotten wind that their landlord was going to stop by on Sunday, and their art show was strictly unapproved by management. Apparently the landlord was coming by to inspect a small bit of graffiti that had been stencil-sprayed onto the sidewalk outside the building and which read "Build Communities Not Condos." The landlord was very upset about this, Joe said, though it wasn't clear whether it was the medium or the sentiment that was most distressing. Wow, though. They're listening! Streets are saying things.
We left Joe's place and stopped at a few more points of interest on the elaborately-designed (and printed and collated) brochure, mostly in warehouse-to-studio-building conversions. There was some good stuff: hyper-realist paintings of falcons; pleasing geometric arrangements of colored lines. A lot of the studios were already closed for the day, though, and so we mostly just poked around the graffitied stairwells of the warehouses, watched people people lugging supplies up and down in freight elevators. "Who pays for this?" Nina murmured as we looked out a dirty window over the spray of studio buildings and nascent condo developments. I thought she was asking who pays for all these art students to rent studios in chic warehouses. (Their parents?) But she clarified, "No, I mean, who buys this art? Who would buy this?" Which is close to but not actually the same question when you think about it.
The next weekend we went out to Sunset Park to catch a series of short films called "Trapped In The Machine" on the roof of Industry City. We'd tried (and failed) to get inside there a few times, back before it became, like, ground zero for "makers" in South Brooklyn. This time we walked right in and for our fifteen bucks got to poke around the closed-up ground floor with all its upscale canteens and faux-social realist murals before humping it up the six or so stories to the roof. It was beautiful up there, though I was needlessly mean to Nina when she wanted to take arty digital camera photos of the skyline and the electrical transformers erupting from a cage on a cordoned-off part. But it was because I'd just noticed how many other attendees (including myself) were doing the same thing: Oohing and ahhing over the remnants of the industrial landscape and, by virtue of their presence, at their own dominion over it for the purpose of an evening's entertainment.
Still, it was an undeniably pleasant place to watch a movie. The wind was cold for June, so Nina hopped on my lap and we shared a sweatshirt. The films were weird and fun, ranging from bonkers (a guy cuts his own head off and fucks his neck; "too rapey," muttered Nina) to dramatic (a victim of a hit-and-run mistakes it for an alien abudction) to strangely sweet (a guy's friend dies while they're in Mexico and he parties with the coffin). Afterwards, everyone was invited down to the courtyard for cocktails compliments of Bulleit and New Amsterdam Vodka. The courtyard was an immaculate sanded wood and gravel pit affair, with fairy lights strung through the thin branches of a half-dozen just-planted trees. Imagine a fancy hotel's roof deck at street level. Or, like, the place a luxury car would pull up at the end of a commercial to show how spontaenous and bohemian its rich dude owner is. Hard to imagine a factory dude eating lunch out there, but hey I'm obviously not a factory dude.
More art: After stopping off at the post-baptismal brunch for Billy and Sarah's new baby in Brooklyn Heights, Chris and Andre and Nina and I walked down to Pier 6 to goggle at the horror of Smorgasburg, and Nina and I hopped the ferry to Governor's Island to see what was going on at Figment this year. What we saw: A tree draped with transparent plastic cups. A kind of igloo made of knotted plastic bags. An adult hippie and a pre-teen (soon-to-be) hippie gave us expensively-printed fliers for an erotic dance performance in which all the pieces were puns on fruit. We walked out to the southwestern end of the island, off limits last year so that the skeleton of a Navy dormitory could be demolished. It's full of beachgrass now, and there's a playground with a big sanded wood climbing structure. Nina climbed on it. A giant telephone handset hanging from a telephone pole-sized mount. The best thing I saw was a gallery of art-photography holograms in one of the wood-frame houses. Tony Bennett was featured, as was the Pope. Something about the presentation, luminous green images floating out from the plaster walls in the abandoned rooms, made me want to stay there weaving back and forth in front of the phony depth of the pictures. I even considered owning one, even if they're just one step beyond (or behind) black velvet portraiture. Plus, they had one of a toilet.
I mentioned, I think, that my family friend Jonah, whom I'm pretty sure I tutored on long division when he and I were both in short pants, is the new guitar player for only-band-that-matters Titus Andronicus. After I'd gushed about the band on the way home from that Thanksgiving, my mom had asked me to bring her along the next time they played a show in NYC. That turned out to not be for a while, but as soon as I saw them on the market, I snapped up four tickets to their Northside show at Warsaw on Thursday. Eagulls was Titus' immediate opener, and they were just going on when Beau and my mom and dad and I had met up at the venue at 9 o'clock. The main dude was less drunk than when Nina and I saw them at CMJ, and Warsaw is a bigger, better fit for their pummeling sound. The bass-first way their songs are arranged, it's hard not to think of Joy Division, and George Mitchell has a queasy, Ian Curtis look to him, though his vocals are plaintive enough to veer into Robert Smith territory. I got Żywiecs for me and my dad and a coke for Beau. After Eagulls' set, the old folks (Jonah's mom Heather had arrived as well) went up to the balcony -- which I'd always thought was a VIP section -- and Nina and Beau and I got a couple of plates of pierogies in the merch area.
Titus Andronicus took the stage right as we finished eating, and we hurried to find our places in the crowd. They opened with Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, to the great excitement of the crowd. Patrick's voice sounded painfully husky, like it did when he was on the radio while he was working on Local Business. Maybe that's just what he sounds like when they've got an album in progress. And they played several songs from their promised double-CD rock opera, and they were all as fast and punchy as the best stuff on their last record. And there was plenty of conversation from the stage, starting with a characteristic (though undeniably correct) exhortation from Patrick to respect the bodies and physical space of our fellow audience members. When an obnoxious -- if exuberant -- crowd-surfer made it onto the stage and accidentally stepped on Julian's pedal board, Stax gave him a reprimand between songs. And he extended his opprobrium to include the slam-dancing multitudes in the pit. "I used to be like you," he said, on the topic of dancin' around and going up. But now, he warned further surfers seeking his recognition, "I don't admire it. I abhor it." (They were undeterred.) "Back when I lived in this neighborhood," he said, introducing In A Big City, "I used to dream of playing at this place. We opened a show here once" (I was there!) "but we were never the headliners. I don't live in Greenpoint any more. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens." He looked up from tuning his guitar. "Don't come to Ridgewood," he said.
The thing the blogs are talking about is that they played a full cover of Closing Time, which I guess they sometimes tease the crowd with during tuning breaks. But people were cheering and the tuning went on for a while, and before to long we were all, "I know who I want to take me home..." There was also a cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, dedicated to Patrick's mom, who was in the audience. They finished, as they often do, with all sixteen minutes of The Battle of Hampton Roads. He ended the set with a gathering, excruciating wall of noise created by his delay pedal. The end. After the show we waited outside the venue while Heather made the rounds of the green room. It had started to rain a little by the time she came out, and Jonah appeared a moment later, followed by P-Stax himself. I gushed and and thanked him and shook his hand, and so did Nina despite ostensibly being on his Twitter shit list. He hand-fed Jonah some chunks of a muffin he'd bought. A thing I've learned: If you stick with it long enough, you get to meet your idols. (And so does your mom.) He wandered off towards the deli. "I saw you," Jonah said. "You were up front the whole time." Isn't that what every fan wants to hear? I saw you, wild-eyed, balding, overdressed and sweaty, reaching for the peformers on the stage. That was me!
We left Joe's place and stopped at a few more points of interest on the elaborately-designed (and printed and collated) brochure, mostly in warehouse-to-studio-building conversions. There was some good stuff: hyper-realist paintings of falcons; pleasing geometric arrangements of colored lines. A lot of the studios were already closed for the day, though, and so we mostly just poked around the graffitied stairwells of the warehouses, watched people people lugging supplies up and down in freight elevators. "Who pays for this?" Nina murmured as we looked out a dirty window over the spray of studio buildings and nascent condo developments. I thought she was asking who pays for all these art students to rent studios in chic warehouses. (Their parents?) But she clarified, "No, I mean, who buys this art? Who would buy this?" Which is close to but not actually the same question when you think about it.
The next weekend we went out to Sunset Park to catch a series of short films called "Trapped In The Machine" on the roof of Industry City. We'd tried (and failed) to get inside there a few times, back before it became, like, ground zero for "makers" in South Brooklyn. This time we walked right in and for our fifteen bucks got to poke around the closed-up ground floor with all its upscale canteens and faux-social realist murals before humping it up the six or so stories to the roof. It was beautiful up there, though I was needlessly mean to Nina when she wanted to take arty digital camera photos of the skyline and the electrical transformers erupting from a cage on a cordoned-off part. But it was because I'd just noticed how many other attendees (including myself) were doing the same thing: Oohing and ahhing over the remnants of the industrial landscape and, by virtue of their presence, at their own dominion over it for the purpose of an evening's entertainment.
Still, it was an undeniably pleasant place to watch a movie. The wind was cold for June, so Nina hopped on my lap and we shared a sweatshirt. The films were weird and fun, ranging from bonkers (a guy cuts his own head off and fucks his neck; "too rapey," muttered Nina) to dramatic (a victim of a hit-and-run mistakes it for an alien abudction) to strangely sweet (a guy's friend dies while they're in Mexico and he parties with the coffin). Afterwards, everyone was invited down to the courtyard for cocktails compliments of Bulleit and New Amsterdam Vodka. The courtyard was an immaculate sanded wood and gravel pit affair, with fairy lights strung through the thin branches of a half-dozen just-planted trees. Imagine a fancy hotel's roof deck at street level. Or, like, the place a luxury car would pull up at the end of a commercial to show how spontaenous and bohemian its rich dude owner is. Hard to imagine a factory dude eating lunch out there, but hey I'm obviously not a factory dude.
More art: After stopping off at the post-baptismal brunch for Billy and Sarah's new baby in Brooklyn Heights, Chris and Andre and Nina and I walked down to Pier 6 to goggle at the horror of Smorgasburg, and Nina and I hopped the ferry to Governor's Island to see what was going on at Figment this year. What we saw: A tree draped with transparent plastic cups. A kind of igloo made of knotted plastic bags. An adult hippie and a pre-teen (soon-to-be) hippie gave us expensively-printed fliers for an erotic dance performance in which all the pieces were puns on fruit. We walked out to the southwestern end of the island, off limits last year so that the skeleton of a Navy dormitory could be demolished. It's full of beachgrass now, and there's a playground with a big sanded wood climbing structure. Nina climbed on it. A giant telephone handset hanging from a telephone pole-sized mount. The best thing I saw was a gallery of art-photography holograms in one of the wood-frame houses. Tony Bennett was featured, as was the Pope. Something about the presentation, luminous green images floating out from the plaster walls in the abandoned rooms, made me want to stay there weaving back and forth in front of the phony depth of the pictures. I even considered owning one, even if they're just one step beyond (or behind) black velvet portraiture. Plus, they had one of a toilet.
I mentioned, I think, that my family friend Jonah, whom I'm pretty sure I tutored on long division when he and I were both in short pants, is the new guitar player for only-band-that-matters Titus Andronicus. After I'd gushed about the band on the way home from that Thanksgiving, my mom had asked me to bring her along the next time they played a show in NYC. That turned out to not be for a while, but as soon as I saw them on the market, I snapped up four tickets to their Northside show at Warsaw on Thursday. Eagulls was Titus' immediate opener, and they were just going on when Beau and my mom and dad and I had met up at the venue at 9 o'clock. The main dude was less drunk than when Nina and I saw them at CMJ, and Warsaw is a bigger, better fit for their pummeling sound. The bass-first way their songs are arranged, it's hard not to think of Joy Division, and George Mitchell has a queasy, Ian Curtis look to him, though his vocals are plaintive enough to veer into Robert Smith territory. I got Żywiecs for me and my dad and a coke for Beau. After Eagulls' set, the old folks (Jonah's mom Heather had arrived as well) went up to the balcony -- which I'd always thought was a VIP section -- and Nina and Beau and I got a couple of plates of pierogies in the merch area.
Titus Andronicus took the stage right as we finished eating, and we hurried to find our places in the crowd. They opened with Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, to the great excitement of the crowd. Patrick's voice sounded painfully husky, like it did when he was on the radio while he was working on Local Business. Maybe that's just what he sounds like when they've got an album in progress. And they played several songs from their promised double-CD rock opera, and they were all as fast and punchy as the best stuff on their last record. And there was plenty of conversation from the stage, starting with a characteristic (though undeniably correct) exhortation from Patrick to respect the bodies and physical space of our fellow audience members. When an obnoxious -- if exuberant -- crowd-surfer made it onto the stage and accidentally stepped on Julian's pedal board, Stax gave him a reprimand between songs. And he extended his opprobrium to include the slam-dancing multitudes in the pit. "I used to be like you," he said, on the topic of dancin' around and going up. But now, he warned further surfers seeking his recognition, "I don't admire it. I abhor it." (They were undeterred.) "Back when I lived in this neighborhood," he said, introducing In A Big City, "I used to dream of playing at this place. We opened a show here once" (I was there!) "but we were never the headliners. I don't live in Greenpoint any more. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens." He looked up from tuning his guitar. "Don't come to Ridgewood," he said.
The thing the blogs are talking about is that they played a full cover of Closing Time, which I guess they sometimes tease the crowd with during tuning breaks. But people were cheering and the tuning went on for a while, and before to long we were all, "I know who I want to take me home..." There was also a cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, dedicated to Patrick's mom, who was in the audience. They finished, as they often do, with all sixteen minutes of The Battle of Hampton Roads. He ended the set with a gathering, excruciating wall of noise created by his delay pedal. The end. After the show we waited outside the venue while Heather made the rounds of the green room. It had started to rain a little by the time she came out, and Jonah appeared a moment later, followed by P-Stax himself. I gushed and and thanked him and shook his hand, and so did Nina despite ostensibly being on his Twitter shit list. He hand-fed Jonah some chunks of a muffin he'd bought. A thing I've learned: If you stick with it long enough, you get to meet your idols. (And so does your mom.) He wandered off towards the deli. "I saw you," Jonah said. "You were up front the whole time." Isn't that what every fan wants to hear? I saw you, wild-eyed, balding, overdressed and sweaty, reaching for the peformers on the stage. That was me!
Monday, June 09, 2014
Buns Of Earth
I have joined an athletic organization! Once a week for the best several months, Jill and I and sometimes Ted and once even Katharine have been running the Prospect Park loop. Rewind: There's been a minor obsession within my little group of friends with the word "buns" ever since Greg stayed over at Lincoln Place for the marathon last November and muttered "ah, fudge my buns" over a frustrating loss at a game of Blokus. Everyone has been using it in different ways. Noun. Transitive verb. Intransitive verb. Depending on how you say it sounds either like a cutesy affectation or a poor translation of much rougher language, like how the Spanish is written in For Whom The Bell Tolls. It's glossolalia, a sound that infects your mind and sounds better the more you say it, hare hare krishna.
At any rate, our club is called "Runs Buns."
Nina has asked to designate a day of the week on my calendar in which I don't say "buns" to her. I don't know which day that will be. Maybe Sunday, because Saturday is when we've been going running.
Nina and I went to that part of Williamsburg right under the Williamsburg Bridge on Saturday to catch Shilpa Ray at Baby's All Right. A lot of apartment complexes with real small windows and bars across them on every story. I'd never been to Baby's before. It's kind of like a glammed-up Maxwell's: A restaurant in the front and a performance space in the back, which has a kind old New York ballroom feel to it, along with a fancy lighting installation on the wall behind the stage that enables complex and dazzling effects. Triptides was on stage when we got there. We listened to a few songs and then decided we'd rather get something to eat. The food at that place is funny: luxury bar food. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with bean sprouts in it.
Perfect timing: Shilpa Ray was getting set up on stage by the time we paid up and went back to the back room. "Somebody get me some fuckin' booze!" she yelled, laughing a moment later, maybe taken aback at the vehemence of her own demand. Or I don't know, I've never had a conversation with her. But somebody hastily complied. She's got what looks like another full turnover of her band. She didn't introduce them this time, I don't think, no Happy Hookers or Good-luck Girls they. But she played a great set as always, laded with songs from her not-quite-released (?) EP. It's less, uh, punk and screamy, I guess, which, I won't lie, is counter to my preference (and she's so good at it) but the sour, sad hooks still really get into your brain and stay there. Stand-out songs for me: "Posted By Anonymous," "Nocturnal Emissions" (I helped crowd-fund the video!) and "Lessons From Lorena." The guy in the booth put some pretty boss dynamics on the lighting. And of course she played "Erotolepsy" at the end. I found out the next day on Brooklyn Vegan that she'd somehow lost her boots between finishing her set and packing up for the night.
In the middle of the night after we got home, Nina got sick to her stomach off something. The next night I woke up sweating and nauseated, a feeling that intensified when I went to the bathroom to piss. I had to abort mid-stream or else I was pretty sure I'd puke. I sat on the edge of the bed in the blue morning dark, holding my head in my hands and surveying the northern face of President St. across the Yuppy Puppy's courtyard. A day or so after that, Kitty went on a tear of throwing up and doing diarrhea, spitting up slimy pools of watery stuff all over the kitchen floor. She stopped eating and drinking water, too, except when coaxed with a teaspoon, and she looked deflated and generally miserable. At Nina's urging I took her back to Animal Kind on Thursday morning, where they x-rayed and squeezed her in strategic places, tentatively diagnosing her with pancreatitis and sending me home with a half dozen syringes of oral-suspension cat opioids that I'm supposed to squirt under her tongue. We've been feeding her Gerber 2nd Foods, which are these, like, meat purées that you give kids that can't quite chew flank steak yet: Chicken in Gravy; Turkey in Gravy; Ham in Ham Gravy. We feed them to her with a spoon, and she seems pretty psyched about the whole process, but they've gotta be a temporary food, since they don't have any taurine and they've got a bit too much protein for her kidneys.
We decided to give ourselves a night off from waving pureed ham in front of Kitty's face on Wednesday to see Janelle Monáe at Celebrate Brooklyn with Eve. We set out for the Park a little late, and when we saw a steady flow of people heading north on Prospect Park West, it looked like we'd missed the main event. I thought maybe we should turn around, but Eve wanted to check out what was left (and maybe fall back to The Owl Farm if necessary), so we entered the Park at 3rd St. and climbed over the tree-rooted dirt hill by that tucked-away playground (abandoned at this hour), emerging onto the western drive. It turned out the departing multitudes must have despaired at gaining entry to the fenced-in area directly in front of the bandshell -- where, apparently, DiBlasio & Family were seated -- but the show was definitely still going on.
We were way in the back outside the fence, but we could see some of the action on the stage. Janelle Monáe was wearing a blinding white suit and kind of pirouetting across the stage. Too far away to see her spaceman hair-do. We got there in time to see the last half hour of her set; or maybe it was just a crazy long encore. The songs weren't familiar to me, but they had spirit and playfulness, and man can she sing; that bright soprano voice! And she (or her lead guitar player, too hard to tell from where we were) can shred, too. Even now that I'm a bit older and the idea of paying a little money to get a seat at these things no longer seems totally unreasonable -- or even like something you should do if you can to keep the whole thing going -- I like doing summer business this way. To me, that is sort of the essence of these events. You huddle at the periphery, with your moveable feast (flask, loosie) and crane your neck to see what all the fuss is about.
At any rate, our club is called "Runs Buns."
Nina has asked to designate a day of the week on my calendar in which I don't say "buns" to her. I don't know which day that will be. Maybe Sunday, because Saturday is when we've been going running.
Nina and I went to that part of Williamsburg right under the Williamsburg Bridge on Saturday to catch Shilpa Ray at Baby's All Right. A lot of apartment complexes with real small windows and bars across them on every story. I'd never been to Baby's before. It's kind of like a glammed-up Maxwell's: A restaurant in the front and a performance space in the back, which has a kind old New York ballroom feel to it, along with a fancy lighting installation on the wall behind the stage that enables complex and dazzling effects. Triptides was on stage when we got there. We listened to a few songs and then decided we'd rather get something to eat. The food at that place is funny: luxury bar food. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with bean sprouts in it.
Perfect timing: Shilpa Ray was getting set up on stage by the time we paid up and went back to the back room. "Somebody get me some fuckin' booze!" she yelled, laughing a moment later, maybe taken aback at the vehemence of her own demand. Or I don't know, I've never had a conversation with her. But somebody hastily complied. She's got what looks like another full turnover of her band. She didn't introduce them this time, I don't think, no Happy Hookers or Good-luck Girls they. But she played a great set as always, laded with songs from her not-quite-released (?) EP. It's less, uh, punk and screamy, I guess, which, I won't lie, is counter to my preference (and she's so good at it) but the sour, sad hooks still really get into your brain and stay there. Stand-out songs for me: "Posted By Anonymous," "Nocturnal Emissions" (I helped crowd-fund the video!) and "Lessons From Lorena." The guy in the booth put some pretty boss dynamics on the lighting. And of course she played "Erotolepsy" at the end. I found out the next day on Brooklyn Vegan that she'd somehow lost her boots between finishing her set and packing up for the night.
In the middle of the night after we got home, Nina got sick to her stomach off something. The next night I woke up sweating and nauseated, a feeling that intensified when I went to the bathroom to piss. I had to abort mid-stream or else I was pretty sure I'd puke. I sat on the edge of the bed in the blue morning dark, holding my head in my hands and surveying the northern face of President St. across the Yuppy Puppy's courtyard. A day or so after that, Kitty went on a tear of throwing up and doing diarrhea, spitting up slimy pools of watery stuff all over the kitchen floor. She stopped eating and drinking water, too, except when coaxed with a teaspoon, and she looked deflated and generally miserable. At Nina's urging I took her back to Animal Kind on Thursday morning, where they x-rayed and squeezed her in strategic places, tentatively diagnosing her with pancreatitis and sending me home with a half dozen syringes of oral-suspension cat opioids that I'm supposed to squirt under her tongue. We've been feeding her Gerber 2nd Foods, which are these, like, meat purées that you give kids that can't quite chew flank steak yet: Chicken in Gravy; Turkey in Gravy; Ham in Ham Gravy. We feed them to her with a spoon, and she seems pretty psyched about the whole process, but they've gotta be a temporary food, since they don't have any taurine and they've got a bit too much protein for her kidneys.
We decided to give ourselves a night off from waving pureed ham in front of Kitty's face on Wednesday to see Janelle Monáe at Celebrate Brooklyn with Eve. We set out for the Park a little late, and when we saw a steady flow of people heading north on Prospect Park West, it looked like we'd missed the main event. I thought maybe we should turn around, but Eve wanted to check out what was left (and maybe fall back to The Owl Farm if necessary), so we entered the Park at 3rd St. and climbed over the tree-rooted dirt hill by that tucked-away playground (abandoned at this hour), emerging onto the western drive. It turned out the departing multitudes must have despaired at gaining entry to the fenced-in area directly in front of the bandshell -- where, apparently, DiBlasio & Family were seated -- but the show was definitely still going on.
We were way in the back outside the fence, but we could see some of the action on the stage. Janelle Monáe was wearing a blinding white suit and kind of pirouetting across the stage. Too far away to see her spaceman hair-do. We got there in time to see the last half hour of her set; or maybe it was just a crazy long encore. The songs weren't familiar to me, but they had spirit and playfulness, and man can she sing; that bright soprano voice! And she (or her lead guitar player, too hard to tell from where we were) can shred, too. Even now that I'm a bit older and the idea of paying a little money to get a seat at these things no longer seems totally unreasonable -- or even like something you should do if you can to keep the whole thing going -- I like doing summer business this way. To me, that is sort of the essence of these events. You huddle at the periphery, with your moveable feast (flask, loosie) and crane your neck to see what all the fuss is about.
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