Thursday, July 17, 2014

What A Thing To Say

I went down to Coney Island for the hot dog eating thing on the 4th. For the first time in my history of attendance, it was overcast and raining, a hard drizzle. The sky and water were the color of an operating table. Despite the gloomy weather, the intersection of Stillwell and Surf was packed as usual, the assembled multitudes decked out in cheap transparent ponchos and hoisting their umbrellas to form a sort of canopy. This created some convenient shelter but made it impossible to see the stage, so watched the proceedings on the truck-mounted LCD, eerily bright under cloud cover. George Shea said something about America from his cherry-picker.



The big drama this year: Sonya Thomas failed to eat her age in HDBs, falling way short at 27 of the new Women's champ, Miki Sudo, who ate 34. That happened right before I got down there. In the Men's division, Matt Stonie came shockingly close to out-eating Joey Chestnut. At one point, about half-way through the ten minutes, he was even ahead by three or so hot dogs, something I've never seen before. He listened to music on headphones and bopped around as he ate, which is something some of the eaters do to sort of compact the contents of their stomachs. At around the 40-HDB mark, Joey Chestnut rallied and crushed Stonie. He ate 61 hot dogs to win the thing, and he got engaged to his lady friend right after. None of the other eaters came close, not even Eater X. "Badlands" Booker must compete because he likes hot dogs.

I got back on the train as soon as the contest was decided. I studied the back of each house we passed between 18th Ave. and 86th St., the cable wires, its little yard; feeling covetous and peevishly disenfranchised. If I lived there, I thought. If that house were mine. Guys in their boxers and undershirts went in and out of the houses, shutting up patio umbrellas and hoisting bags of trash.

I turned thirty-three, reluctantly.

My birthday was on Tuesday, and Nina took me out to eat at Samudra, a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights. It was raining heavily by the time I got to Roosevelt Ave., and I stood in the alcove of the exit for some time as a tried to get my bearings. There are shops and kiosks built into landings of the stairwell and selling hair oils and cassette tapes. I jetted out northwest down Broadway, which turned out to be way wrong, and got soaked in the storm. At length I found the place, Nina standing hopefully in the doorway; my jeans pressed to my thighs with large ovals of wetness. The restaurant seemed to me to be decked out like a blonde wood railway car; the walls were divided into panels by ribs that sprouted buttresses holding up a high shelf. The storefront's neon sign was hooked up to a powerstrip paint-glued onto the wall. There was one other couple, a white woman and a South Asian man, who seemed to be having a fight. They barely said anything to each other. The staff hung out by the kitchen, playing games on their phones. We ordered some masala dosas, which arrived huge, shiny-smooth, cylindrical; and some curries, including an okra thing that was very good. (Bhindi Masala?) It was all very good. We had hot masala tea out of metal cups.

After dinner we hopped a cab and headed south to Nitehawk where we caught the 10:00 screening of Obvious Child, which was the funniest, most charming thing I've seen all year, not least of because of Jenny Slate's performance. Richard Kind at his least solicitous since he was building a mentaculus. We drank beers in the dark and held hands. The theater retains its ability to make you feel like you're getting away with something. When we got home, Nina revealed what was quite possibly the biggest pie I've ever seen, filled with several quarts of blueberries and spice. She'd made the crust herself, rotating the butter in and out of the freezer to keep it solid during the substantial heat of the afternoon. It was an object to be reckoned with: Huge, sandy-colored, shining with brushed-on egg white and sugar crystals.



The picture doesn't do it justics. And it was very, very good. We had to cut it into twelfths to tame it.

She'd bought me gifts, too: A pajama suit, top and bottom, like I've wanted for the wintertime so I'd be truly able to get into Old Man Mode; a gift certificate for cooking classes at The Brooklyn Kitchen; and two pairs of Happy Feet socks with colorful designs on them. (Fancy socks might be my new jam? Looking for one.) She was beyond generous.

I don't deserve it. I don't.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

New Shoes

Despite adding the schedule to my calendar, I don't go to the summer movies in Bryant Park much. The series epitomizes the filled-to-capacity victim-of-its-own-successitude that sucks all the fun out of everything that happens in Manhattan. But I'd never seen Blazing Saddles, and I happened to get out of work at just around the right time, which almost never happens any more these days.

I found a spot toward the back of the southern edge of the park, next to a Dutch elm-diseased tree growing in the sandy dirt and cobblestones; next to a fancy coffee kiosk being shut down for the evening by its teenaged staff. A drunk sitting in a folding chair in front of the tree bellowed "faggot!" at me. He was surrounded by garbage of various sorts. I inched back around the tree to stay out of his line of sight, and stood there with my messenger bag nestled between my feet. The movie was engrossing and angry and great. Now I see what all the fuss is about. That scene where the old woman brings Bart the pie: Is there a better depiction of Americans' ability (desire) to compartmentalize their thinking on race? It's really... anarchic, too. Having seen that fight on the film lot, I feel like I "get" the Rip Taylor set pieces that close out each Jackass movie. I read about Cleavon Little when I got home. It doesn't seem like he got a fair shake.

I had two missions the Saturday of 4Knots, which fell the weekend before my birthday. One was to see Mac DeMarco and maybe Speedy Ortiz. The other was to buy new shoes. I left the house wearing my decaying burnt-orange Chucks, which I'd bought at a previous 4Knots, having taken refuge from the noise of The Black Angels in the not-yet-destroyed mall of Pier 17. Those shoes survived the years of the kick drum and two rounds of extermination for chinches; but they were beginning to disintegrate, the sides flaring open, a hole dug in the heel by my heel. I flapped them out to the Seaport, where Nina and I found the festival spilling onto Fulton Street, which the festival organizers had covered with an astroturf "lawn." The lawn was itself covered with turfed-out hipsters. It smelled like weed. There were KIND bar wrappers and empty, miniature bottled waters everywhere. We spent a few minutes in front of the smaller stage where Dead Stars were wrapping up their set. They sounded good: Bright, catchy hooks; a strong beat; and fast-paced songs. The band seemed a little amused, like, what are we doing here.

Those Darlins were on the main stage when we got there. The area in front of the main stage was packed. Everybody was eating fancy street cart food and drinking sodas and throwing the garbage in the trash barrel next to where we were standing. An old Chinese woman elbowed her way through the crowd and dug around in the trash for recyclable items. Mac DeMarco went on next. All of my young-dude co-workers are into him - "He's so weird" - and I thought he'd sound like Kurt Vile or Ty Segall or some other au courant young outsider. But he doesn't. His songs are weird, but I found them to be lugubrious and incoherent. The show just didn't, like, rock. I think that's enough, I said. I didn't need to hear Dinosaur Jr., who were the big deal headliners this year. (I wonder if they played Feel The Pain.) Nina and I left the Seaport, making a pit stop at the Starbucks on Water Street so Nina could pee. It grew suddenly cold. Trash blew through the air.

We walked up through Chinatown to Grand Street, and Nina steered me into a Miz Mooz. Beau arrived, having wrapped an afternoon of recording with The Robot Princess at their studio in Union Square. The selection of Chucks was kind of limited, but I saw a pair of high-top navy blue ones that really spoke to me. High-tops could be a cool look, I thought. The salesperson checked the basement and reported that the store was out of my size. "Can you hang around for fifteen minutes?" he asked. "We have a warehouse a couple of blocks away." We waited. The store was bright and clean, with light-colored hard-wood floors. A lot of the storefronts in SoHo are like that; I wonder if they used to be galleries or studios. When the shoes arrived, I put them on and asked the young woman at the register if she could toss my gross, old ones. "Don't talk about them like that," she said. "Those shoes kept your feet dry for three years. You should say goodbye to them."

"Should I kiss them goodbye?" I asked.

"You don't have to kiss them," she said.

We walked down to Canal Street and took the train back to Brooklyn. We had dinner at Sheep Station with Tom and Jill and Hanlon. Everybody's moving out of the big apartment on Lincoln Place at the end of the summer so that Jay, the guy who owns the building, can renovate it. They're being scattered to the four winds. (Or maybe the two winds.) The talk turned again and again to the pain of apartment hunting in New York City. The disappointing reality of a promising Craigslist posting. The unctuous perfidy of real estate brokers. A shame-faced encounter with a fellow apartment hunter worse off than yourself. Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Ditmas. Nice places to live, all, but why does it feel like a fight to get in?