Afropunk!
We only attended the first day, and only in the late afternoon. (Sometimes it's hard to get started.) A guy started walking alongside us near Fort Greene Park, wanted to know if we were heading to the festival. He was an associate professor at Brooklyn College, he said, teaching an Urban Studies seminar. He was excited to see Bad Brains, though he didn't think H.R. would be there. ("I heard that guy was crazy.") And we talked about some of the more outlandish acts on the bill: "Body Count? Ice-T's metal band from the 90's? But he can't possibly still be in it, right?" (He is.) But Bad Brains was the band I was dying to see, and they had just started playing when we got inside. There were three stages this year (up from two and at the expense of a dedicated area for skateboard and BMX stunting) and Bad Brains were playing on the new (smaller) black stage, the punk stage, where the A/V setup was apparently less than ideal. Darryl Jenifer made a few tongue-in-cheek remarks about the accomodations: Why do we gotta play the black stage? They sounded phenomenal, though. Their distinctive mix: Lots of attack on the bass, which was turned up over Dr. Know's buzzsaw guitar. In lieu of H.R., there was a rotating cast of vocalists, including John Joseph from Cro-Mags (though I could've sworn Darryl had a nickname for him. Something like "Choke" or "Squeaky") who struggled to keep up with a lightning fast version of "Attitude."
Nina and I were standing just outside the stage area, our faces pressed to the chain-link fence. Just inside the fence in front of us, there was a young woman wearing a cowrie shell circlet. Is it? I thought. Then I noticed the security detail, a couple of dudes and a lady wearing tuxedoes and earpieces. It was! The queen of the Mermaid Parade, Chiara de Blasio. Bad Brains wrapped up their set, and we walked across the park to check out Body Count, who had just started playing. Sure enough, there was Ice-T, front and center, gripping a wireless mic in a motorcycle-gloved hand. "The next song is called 'Manslaughter,'" he boomed. "It's about the number one threat facing black men in America today."
I braced myself to hear the names of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; a litany of atrocities carried out by America's racist police forces. Ice-T's still got it, I thought.
"Pussification!" he resumed. "Ladies, look around you. Does your man have a vagina?!" Snickering from the crowd; some isolated boos. The red stage; the grandpa stage. We stuck around for a few songs, but it was just so much noise. Fat dudes in sleeveless shirts bouncing around the stage. The sun had set. We stood in the trampled field in front of the green stage and listened Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings get warmed up. She's got a really impressive voice. Which is not news, I guess. I considered buying one of the new Afropunk t-shirts printed with commandments of broad acceptance (No racism; No sexism; No homophobia; etc.) but it didn't feel like it was really for me. We stopped at Junior's on the way home for cheesecake to go. Summer winding down.
The tally:
I went to Astoria to see Forest of the Dancing Spirits at Socrates Sculpture Park. It was very sad: A pygmy woman anxious about miscarriage prepares to deliver her second pregnancy. A very normcore (basic, even) crowd in the Park. L.L. Bean fleece types. A lot of them brought their own chairs.
I went to Brooklyn Bridge Park to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. I'd never seen it before. That Brock guy sure hates mendacity! The lawn was utterly packed, and people kept coming and going, well through the duration of the movie. Continuous photography of the screen via cell phone cameras, SLRs, even a guy with a full tripod rig who was asked to leave by the event staff. Fuss in the audience to equal the fuss on film. But what is the point of any of it? Hypothesis / inescapable conclusion: Outdoor movies are over, babies.
Two trips to the beach.
Three barbecues: Two in Eve's opulent garden while she and Jon were out of town, burning citronella and misting the air with DEET and shooing the cats back inside, the children of the rich people next door bouncing on -- no joke -- a for-real trampoline in their astroturfed back yard. One party in Prospect Park in a big patch of dirt on a hill by the picnic house. I made real meat burgers, using this recipe. (Whenever I search for "best burger recipe" -- once every few years -- I get something new.) Technically a birthday thing for me, one month delayed. Everyone showed up. Chris brought a whiffleball bat and some whiffleballs, but I was so preoccupied with the grill and getting all the meat cooked through that I didn't play. That's how I always react to cooking or party planning. I like it but I don't like it, either. Satisfying, pathological, frustrating. Instead, Nina and I played a "night game" at the Thomas Greene Playground handball courts. It was empty, except for a few people sleeping on benches courtside. We named our teams and each player at bat. The Yomiuri Hamburgers. Joey Baseball. The crew for The Americans were still at work on Nevins street when we walked home around midnight.
Two visits to the Douglass-Degraw Pool, though it never got hot enough to really warrant it.
We never even installed the air conditioner.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Rippers
Nina and I went to Rockaway Beach. She'd been out there last summer for Colleen's bachelorette party but I hadn't been in forever, and I'd been reading invites for shows at Rippers and getting curious what all the fuss was about. We considered riding our bikes there, but it seemed like too daunting a trip (25 miles each way!) for junior bikers such as us. To read on the train, I brought along Chris' reviewer's copy of The Savage Detectives, which he'd loaned me the last time I stopped by his apartment. The prose swept me along half charmed by the solipsism of young poets -- familiar from Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog (I borrowed it from Christopher more than a decade ago) and The Rachel Papers -- half queasy apprehensive at the prospect of Cesárea Tinajero and her prophecy of things to come. The A was running in two parts, and the first part terminated at Howard Beach. We waited in the warm sun for the other train to come pick us up. The second leg of our journey on the A took us across Jamaica Bay. The MTA's map makes it look like you're traveling over Cross Bay Blvd., but it's actually a narrow strip of track that's a bit east of that, and if in turn you look out the eastern windows of the train, it's just the Bay out there. That image -- the shining metal interior of the subway car, the view through the window dominated by the sky and water -- was simultaneously so unexpected and so familiar that I was sure I'd seen it before in a dream. Because I haven't been out to Rockaway Beach since, well, I don't know when. At Broad Channel we transferred to the S shuttle, which took us the rest of the way to Beach 98th St.
We stopped on Rockaway Beach Blvd. at Rockaway Taco (known to many, I hear, as Rock-A-Taco) for tacos. The place is a wooden shack, the posts covered with photocopied paper flyers for events (surfer movies on the beach) clearly beyond the slick machinations of the inner-borough fun promotion machine. Which sounds like I'm calling it provincial (bicycle repair classes) but I think that's what a beach-front community is like. In concert with all the two-story houses with white stucco exteriors it reminded me of Randy's neighborhood in San Francisco. The tacos were quite good. They do them that way where the filling has a blanket of shredded cabbage arranged on top of it. I had a fish taco and a tofu taco -- heresy, I've been told by everybody, over and over again. But I gotta try it whenever it's on the menu, just to see if they do it okay.
It was late afternoon by the time we put our blanket down on the beach. We found a spot in the sand roughly in front of a bunker-like boardwalk bar with a scuzzy blues rock band playing out front on the concrete. At first I thought it was Rippers, but it was actually Low Tide Bar. I don't know what the difference is. A group of middle-aged Latino dudes next to us were drinking Coronas out of a plastic cooler. Nina'd worn her bathing suit under her clothes, and so she was able to strip down and wade into the ocean, at least until the Parks Dept. buggy patrol drove by to tell her that the lifeguard was off duty. I just wanted to read my book, though. I was too caught up in the world of the visceral realists to do swimming. And my reluctance to disrobe proved canny: The beach was home to a multitude of these little biting flies that looked like your average garbage moscas but which bit like horseflies. They bit me on the arms. They bit Nina everywhere. She stuck it out long enough to build a sandcastle, a sort of dome with a squared-off gatehouse.
We walked down Shore Front Parkway to Beach 84th St., surveying the old and new housing developments. Nina showed me a concrete bus shelter, solid concrete and curved like a wave, featuring a mural of fish with human faces. The faces were lumpy and complacent, like the faces of cats in Edward Gorey drawings. We realized we'd walked down to the actual location of Rippers, and we stopped and got beers. We sat near a plywood face cut-out board where you could pretend to be a hot dog or a hamburger.
It was chilly. We reversed our steps and headed home: Shuttle, A train, A train. A big black cricket was parked on the platform next to where we were standing at the Howard Beach station, chirping obliviously in full danger of being stepped on. I thought about shooing it into a gap in the concrete wall behind us, but decided to leave it be. When the subway came, the car that stopped in front of us happened to be the party car, meaning there was a loud dude with a radio (batteries failing) enlisting his fellow passengers in noisy sing-alongs and celebrity impressions. This included the boy-girl couple sitting across from us, the girl so drunk she was mostly asleep, rousing occasionally to puke quietly into a plastic bag.
We stopped on Rockaway Beach Blvd. at Rockaway Taco (known to many, I hear, as Rock-A-Taco) for tacos. The place is a wooden shack, the posts covered with photocopied paper flyers for events (surfer movies on the beach) clearly beyond the slick machinations of the inner-borough fun promotion machine. Which sounds like I'm calling it provincial (bicycle repair classes) but I think that's what a beach-front community is like. In concert with all the two-story houses with white stucco exteriors it reminded me of Randy's neighborhood in San Francisco. The tacos were quite good. They do them that way where the filling has a blanket of shredded cabbage arranged on top of it. I had a fish taco and a tofu taco -- heresy, I've been told by everybody, over and over again. But I gotta try it whenever it's on the menu, just to see if they do it okay.
It was late afternoon by the time we put our blanket down on the beach. We found a spot in the sand roughly in front of a bunker-like boardwalk bar with a scuzzy blues rock band playing out front on the concrete. At first I thought it was Rippers, but it was actually Low Tide Bar. I don't know what the difference is. A group of middle-aged Latino dudes next to us were drinking Coronas out of a plastic cooler. Nina'd worn her bathing suit under her clothes, and so she was able to strip down and wade into the ocean, at least until the Parks Dept. buggy patrol drove by to tell her that the lifeguard was off duty. I just wanted to read my book, though. I was too caught up in the world of the visceral realists to do swimming. And my reluctance to disrobe proved canny: The beach was home to a multitude of these little biting flies that looked like your average garbage moscas but which bit like horseflies. They bit me on the arms. They bit Nina everywhere. She stuck it out long enough to build a sandcastle, a sort of dome with a squared-off gatehouse.
We walked down Shore Front Parkway to Beach 84th St., surveying the old and new housing developments. Nina showed me a concrete bus shelter, solid concrete and curved like a wave, featuring a mural of fish with human faces. The faces were lumpy and complacent, like the faces of cats in Edward Gorey drawings. We realized we'd walked down to the actual location of Rippers, and we stopped and got beers. We sat near a plywood face cut-out board where you could pretend to be a hot dog or a hamburger.
It was chilly. We reversed our steps and headed home: Shuttle, A train, A train. A big black cricket was parked on the platform next to where we were standing at the Howard Beach station, chirping obliviously in full danger of being stepped on. I thought about shooing it into a gap in the concrete wall behind us, but decided to leave it be. When the subway came, the car that stopped in front of us happened to be the party car, meaning there was a loud dude with a radio (batteries failing) enlisting his fellow passengers in noisy sing-alongs and celebrity impressions. This included the boy-girl couple sitting across from us, the girl so drunk she was mostly asleep, rousing occasionally to puke quietly into a plastic bag.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Ride Brooklyn
We bought bicycles!
I haven't owned a bike since mine was snatched from right outside my window on 12th St., what, like ten years ago almost to the day? But everyone is getting bikes now and riding places. Tom rides his everywhere, shows up to things with this helmet still on, unbuckled. Especially since he and Colleen moved to their own apartment on 22nd St. We haven't seen it yet (has anybody?) but we met him for drinks at his new local, Sea Witch. It was alright -- they've got a pretty sweet aquarium behind the bar and an outdoors with a couple of man-made ponds with free-roaming turtles in them -- but the place was packed with weak-looking dudes wearing Best Show t-shirts (takes one to know one) and it took me fifteen minutes to get the attention of a bartender. We left after one beer and traded up to Mary's across the street, which I'd often walked past but never entered. It was nice and dark, and the beers were cheaper.
But having a bike seems pretty cool. Or maybe it's a prerequisite now. The thing is, though, bikes -- new, recycle-a-bicycle'd, stolen, whatevs -- are crazy expensive, even for a baller like this guy. We looked at web sites and felt despair, until Colleen directed us to Ride Brooklyn, which she claimed was selling a $350 starter model that sounded very much within reach. Their Park Slope location is over on Bergen St. near Babeland and the comic book place. It's got a bright orange and blue facade. Jessica Williams was filming something with a film crew at the comic book place the day we went. I didn't see her, but Nina saw her name on something. The staff at Ride Brooklyn was super nice -- beardy and stoned as fuck -- and they did indeed have some good cheap starter bikes. Nina got a teal Liv. Mine is a black Escape with a flat cross-bar that looks a little funny to me, but that's whatever. I'll dress it up with stickers. The real problem with it -- that I keep meaning to fix -- is that the seat's hitched up so high that my feet don't really touch the ground when I stop at an intersection, and there's a lot of weight on my, uh, in-between parts. We had to pick up U-locks and cable-locks, too. Kryptonite makes this insane "New York" model that's about as thick as your wrist. We opted for the "standard" size, which should be able to keep our shit safe during daylight hours, at least. Not a safe place for bikes, this city!
Our first big adventure on the bikes was the Saturday after we got 'em. Nina'd grabbed a bike map at Ride that highlights the major bike lanes and greenways, none of which I feel like existed the last time I was on two wheels. (Maybe because Janette Sadik-Khan built most of them.) We rode up 6th Ave. to 24th St., where Greenwood Cemetery cuts it off, then zoomed down to 5th Ave., me frantically pumping the hand-brakes all the way down the hill, Nina stopping confidentally right at the light. We rode 5th Ave. through Sunset Park and the beginnings of Bay Ridge, down to 64th St., where it goes under the Gowanus Expressway. We passed by Bay Ridge Nissan -- you know, from TV -- and caught a glimpse of Leif Ericson Park, which from what I can tell from looking at a map is less of a park that a kind of green belt that just goes on and on. A right turn at Three Jolly Pigeons took us down to Owls Head Park and then through a twisty greenway, under an overpass for the Belt Parkway, and the finally onto the long promenade that follows the Narrows down to Gravesend Bay. The promenade is very flat and regular and beige and kind of industrial, but not in a depressing way. There's a kind of "lane" for bicycling, and some people go pretty fast in it. At regular intervals on the walking path, there were groups of men casting fishing lines, and Orthodox families parked on benches looking out at the water. It was late afternoon, We rode down to about 91st St., where the Verrazano Narrows Bridge juts out from a huge triangular concrete wedge, and marked that as our turnaround spot.
On our reverse journey, we stopped in Sunset Park at Don Pepe's for some animal protein. I wasn't used to biking. My back hurt, my forearms hurt. My buns hurt. I got the Oaxaquena (or did I? Those sandwiches are all indistinguishable from each other). On impulse, I picked up a packet of D'Gari coconut pudding, because I'd seen it everywhere back when I lived in Sunset Park and had been curious about its toxicity. (Long story short, it's okay.) Bikes have a shot at being the Summer Jam. But there's also popsicles, specifically the strawberry flavor of the Associated store-brand kind. I've been going through a box of them a week. They make other flavors -- coconut, pineapple, passion fruit (by way of corn syrup) -- but none of them are quite as good. The summer beard is huge and denser than usual, probably because I started growing it out in May. To add some texture, I've been pruning back everything except the "mustache area" to create a sort of topiary Derek Smalls / Lemmy effect.
Switching gears.
Tried to hit up the screening of Cry-Baby at McCarren Park a few Wednesdays ago, but a downpour almost washed the whole thing away. I showed up fifteen minutes in and ready to get soaked, but the crowd of yuppie hipsters was stampeding through the chain-link gates, and I could see the Six-Point Craft Ales hawkers wrestling their tent down and dumping plates piled high with beer brats. Girls in heels took shelter under a tree in front of the Automotive H.S., its wet leaves lit up orange by the street lights.
I checked out the Deltron show at Celebrate Brooklyn on a Saturday near the end of July. I was blown away! Work kept me late, so he was well into his set by the time I got there, and heard the show on the approach to Prospet Park well before I saw it. I came around the bend within view of the bandshell and my jaw actually dropped because there was a full orchestra and choir on stage, Dan The Automator conducting it with a baton in full conductor's uniform, coat-tails and everything. Kid Koala scratched records and did flips and handstands by the turntables. A crazy burlesque: Del's masterful, loopy flow (he sounds like Count Chocula or, uh, like a ghost that got high) running ahead of behind the beat; strings section, horns, percussion. This, I thought, is the best thing I've ever seen. Del's certainly the best rapper in the world. He did the whole album. I remembered when I first (I think) heard "Virus," riding in the back of Tim Jones' car (tapedeck) on the way to get late-night pancakes at The New Athenian in Middletown. Then a couple of years later, sitting in the front room of Fishbowl, where Tom and Ted and Greg and Dan lived, hearing "Clint Eastwood" for the first time. Del did that one as an encore, amid wild cheers from the crowd, after thanking everyone and marveling at the fact that he'd gone the whole show without shitting his pants from some bad takeout he'd eaten backstage. The trio of blonde girls standing in front of me put their heads together, eyes closed, singing along to the refrain. It was our song, too: I'm useless, but not for long / The future is coming on.
I haven't owned a bike since mine was snatched from right outside my window on 12th St., what, like ten years ago almost to the day? But everyone is getting bikes now and riding places. Tom rides his everywhere, shows up to things with this helmet still on, unbuckled. Especially since he and Colleen moved to their own apartment on 22nd St. We haven't seen it yet (has anybody?) but we met him for drinks at his new local, Sea Witch. It was alright -- they've got a pretty sweet aquarium behind the bar and an outdoors with a couple of man-made ponds with free-roaming turtles in them -- but the place was packed with weak-looking dudes wearing Best Show t-shirts (takes one to know one) and it took me fifteen minutes to get the attention of a bartender. We left after one beer and traded up to Mary's across the street, which I'd often walked past but never entered. It was nice and dark, and the beers were cheaper.
But having a bike seems pretty cool. Or maybe it's a prerequisite now. The thing is, though, bikes -- new, recycle-a-bicycle'd, stolen, whatevs -- are crazy expensive, even for a baller like this guy. We looked at web sites and felt despair, until Colleen directed us to Ride Brooklyn, which she claimed was selling a $350 starter model that sounded very much within reach. Their Park Slope location is over on Bergen St. near Babeland and the comic book place. It's got a bright orange and blue facade. Jessica Williams was filming something with a film crew at the comic book place the day we went. I didn't see her, but Nina saw her name on something. The staff at Ride Brooklyn was super nice -- beardy and stoned as fuck -- and they did indeed have some good cheap starter bikes. Nina got a teal Liv. Mine is a black Escape with a flat cross-bar that looks a little funny to me, but that's whatever. I'll dress it up with stickers. The real problem with it -- that I keep meaning to fix -- is that the seat's hitched up so high that my feet don't really touch the ground when I stop at an intersection, and there's a lot of weight on my, uh, in-between parts. We had to pick up U-locks and cable-locks, too. Kryptonite makes this insane "New York" model that's about as thick as your wrist. We opted for the "standard" size, which should be able to keep our shit safe during daylight hours, at least. Not a safe place for bikes, this city!
Our first big adventure on the bikes was the Saturday after we got 'em. Nina'd grabbed a bike map at Ride that highlights the major bike lanes and greenways, none of which I feel like existed the last time I was on two wheels. (Maybe because Janette Sadik-Khan built most of them.) We rode up 6th Ave. to 24th St., where Greenwood Cemetery cuts it off, then zoomed down to 5th Ave., me frantically pumping the hand-brakes all the way down the hill, Nina stopping confidentally right at the light. We rode 5th Ave. through Sunset Park and the beginnings of Bay Ridge, down to 64th St., where it goes under the Gowanus Expressway. We passed by Bay Ridge Nissan -- you know, from TV -- and caught a glimpse of Leif Ericson Park, which from what I can tell from looking at a map is less of a park that a kind of green belt that just goes on and on. A right turn at Three Jolly Pigeons took us down to Owls Head Park and then through a twisty greenway, under an overpass for the Belt Parkway, and the finally onto the long promenade that follows the Narrows down to Gravesend Bay. The promenade is very flat and regular and beige and kind of industrial, but not in a depressing way. There's a kind of "lane" for bicycling, and some people go pretty fast in it. At regular intervals on the walking path, there were groups of men casting fishing lines, and Orthodox families parked on benches looking out at the water. It was late afternoon, We rode down to about 91st St., where the Verrazano Narrows Bridge juts out from a huge triangular concrete wedge, and marked that as our turnaround spot.
On our reverse journey, we stopped in Sunset Park at Don Pepe's for some animal protein. I wasn't used to biking. My back hurt, my forearms hurt. My buns hurt. I got the Oaxaquena (or did I? Those sandwiches are all indistinguishable from each other). On impulse, I picked up a packet of D'Gari coconut pudding, because I'd seen it everywhere back when I lived in Sunset Park and had been curious about its toxicity. (Long story short, it's okay.) Bikes have a shot at being the Summer Jam. But there's also popsicles, specifically the strawberry flavor of the Associated store-brand kind. I've been going through a box of them a week. They make other flavors -- coconut, pineapple, passion fruit (by way of corn syrup) -- but none of them are quite as good. The summer beard is huge and denser than usual, probably because I started growing it out in May. To add some texture, I've been pruning back everything except the "mustache area" to create a sort of topiary Derek Smalls / Lemmy effect.
Switching gears.
Tried to hit up the screening of Cry-Baby at McCarren Park a few Wednesdays ago, but a downpour almost washed the whole thing away. I showed up fifteen minutes in and ready to get soaked, but the crowd of yuppie hipsters was stampeding through the chain-link gates, and I could see the Six-Point Craft Ales hawkers wrestling their tent down and dumping plates piled high with beer brats. Girls in heels took shelter under a tree in front of the Automotive H.S., its wet leaves lit up orange by the street lights.
I checked out the Deltron show at Celebrate Brooklyn on a Saturday near the end of July. I was blown away! Work kept me late, so he was well into his set by the time I got there, and heard the show on the approach to Prospet Park well before I saw it. I came around the bend within view of the bandshell and my jaw actually dropped because there was a full orchestra and choir on stage, Dan The Automator conducting it with a baton in full conductor's uniform, coat-tails and everything. Kid Koala scratched records and did flips and handstands by the turntables. A crazy burlesque: Del's masterful, loopy flow (he sounds like Count Chocula or, uh, like a ghost that got high) running ahead of behind the beat; strings section, horns, percussion. This, I thought, is the best thing I've ever seen. Del's certainly the best rapper in the world. He did the whole album. I remembered when I first (I think) heard "Virus," riding in the back of Tim Jones' car (tapedeck) on the way to get late-night pancakes at The New Athenian in Middletown. Then a couple of years later, sitting in the front room of Fishbowl, where Tom and Ted and Greg and Dan lived, hearing "Clint Eastwood" for the first time. Del did that one as an encore, amid wild cheers from the crowd, after thanking everyone and marveling at the fact that he'd gone the whole show without shitting his pants from some bad takeout he'd eaten backstage. The trio of blonde girls standing in front of me put their heads together, eyes closed, singing along to the refrain. It was our song, too: I'm useless, but not for long / The future is coming on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)