Wednesday, December 31, 2014

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.

Monday, December 29, 2014

Last Chance To See

Holidays!

My sister and I cooked Thanksgiving for my parents. (Well, everything except the turkey, which my dad more or less handled himself. With a little help from this video.) Here's what we made:
Nina's grandmother Ann passed away about a week after Thanksgiving. It was sad. She was a nice lady. The funeral was in Scranton, where she'd lived her whole life. I took the Martz bus from Port Authority on a Thursday night, stayed over through Friday, occupying her abandoned house with Nina and her family. The funeral was held at Our Lady of the Snows in downtown Scranton. Appropriate, since the town as freezing and blanketed in white. I'd never been to a Catholic service before; I had to sneak glances at the other mourners to see when to sit, when to stand, when to kneel. The doddering priest slobbered about Jesus, didn't say much about Nina's grandma in particular. We drove the coffin out to the Italian American cemetery, waited in the icy chapel until it was time to lower it into the ground. Nina and I returned to the city on Friday night to prepare for our holiday party, which had been too close to cancel. It felt strange, but there wasn't really anything else to be done in Pennsylvania, anyway. We got up early on Saturday, bought a Christmas tree from a sinewy Québécois woman outside the Key Food on 5th Ave., scrubbed the apartment, and laid out the truly overwhelming selection of cheese and nuts and cookies and chips that Nina'd gotten at Fairway. We gave the tree an initial dressing of lights and Garbage Pail Kids cards, the red "Christmas birds" -- and a new addition, rescued from the fake tree in Nana's dining room in Scranton: Alex the Owl, another fake bird in the shape of a tiny horned owl; but with his eyes glued on about a quarter inch too low, giving him a seriously derpy expression.


Our guests started to arrive at seven o'clock, and we put them to work at the craft table, a tradition from Tom and Colleen's annual party than Nina'd been eager to implement herself. KT brought a pouch of decorations from Michaels, which included googly eyes, pom-poms, shiny confetti (shapes: bible, dreidel, circle) and pipe cleaners. We supplied the glossy pages of The Economist, New York Magazine's grotesque "gifts issue," and, like, the Neiman Marcus Kids catalog. In return, our friends produced the following ornaments.


Skeleton Space Cat


Free Robert Blake


Jay's masterpiece; a kind of Sistine Chapel ceiling of dicks.

I saw The Dickies play a show at The Bowery Electric last weekend. Weird place: Narrow bar at street level, cavernous basement performance space. (And right next door to where I bought my first porno movie!) They were in the same configuration (I think) as when I saw them last year, though this show was filled to capacity. A much older crowd, too; maybe they wouldn't come out to Brooklyn. "It's great to see so many young faces in the crowd," said Leonard, kicking off his traditional five minutes of comedy. "All you forty-year-olds; you've got your whole lives ahead of you." There was a contingent of hecklers standing next to me, definitely older than forty. "Fuck you! Fuck you!" one guy kept hollering, like a boorish Yankees fan. "If I wanted to be bored, I'd'a stayed home! Fuck you!"

I'd yelled that and worse at them when I was twenty, and I sometimes wonder if the band thought it was part of the contract the same way I did at the time. Back when Bel Argosy was still a thing, I think we were flattered when people threw empty cups at us (that one time) but I would've been hurt if teenagers had yelled to us that we were too old. The set list had some good stuff on it, even if it wasn't anything I hadn't heard: They opened with "Silent Night, Holy Night," Leonard in a Santa hat -- one of many props he'd exchange with a patient producer in the sound booth. They played "Welcome To The Diamond Mine," which I think only I danced to. I tried to sing along to "I'm OK, You're OK," but they've changed the lyrics again, and I have no idea what it's about any more. They played "Manny, Moe & Jack," and ended the song with a decisive down-stroked chord instead of the final "...Jack." The crowd applauded, the band turned away to tune their instruments. A good ten seconds passed. Leonard took a swig of water from his Poland Spring bottle, stuck his finger in his ear, and sang the final note on pitch.

Christmas interlude. Caroline and I cooked again. This time we made the four dishes I'd made at the South Indian class I'd taken at Brooklyn Kitchen:
  • Potato carrot (spinach) sambar
  • Coconut cucumber raita
  • Green beans palya
  • Lemon peanut dill rice
My sister made two pies -- cranberry sage and rosemary shoo-fly -- from the Four & Twenty Blackbirds cookbook, which she's been baking her way through. They were both amazing. She makes the dough and weaves lattices herself, something I have never had the patience to do.

Nina and I went out on Sunday to see Bass Drum of Death at Glasslands, one of the last shows before the venue closes. Much has been made of the disappearance of so-called DIY spaces in North Brooklyn this year: 285 Kent, Death By Audio, Goodbye Blue Monday. A real bad thing, for sure. And crazy that so many of those think pieces attempt to re-assure the reader that the closures are No Big Deal. But it's interesting to see in the semi-mourning for all of these lost places the gloss applied to the term "DIY." It doesn't mean there was no money involved -- there's always money, even at the Market Hotel. Doesn't it really mean, We don't know what we're doing yet; we don't have any partners to show us the way? We're writing the book as we go. But no one's gonna call the next place that Haykal and Rosenthal open DIY. Furthermore, isn't there something in VICE's takeover of Kent Ave. akin to Caesar's return to Rome? No excuses for them, but everyone should'a seen it coming. "So where's the Underground?" I asked Nina as we stood up on the balcony watching the last of the opening acts, Mitski. A last tuft of the "burning cloud" sculpture that used to hang above the stage dangled from a wire above the sound booth. "There isn't one," she said. "And you wouldn't like it, anyway." The band was performing a song with the refrain, "I don't care about your fucking money!" It ended with three or four unrestrained, full-throated screams from the lead singer. A thread ran in my brain for the rest of the evening contemplating the idea of starting a zine to curate and distribute the kind of non-artisanal dirtbag outsider art materiel that's being wiped out in New York City. Like a Maximum Rocknroll for the 21st century. I even came up with a name for it: True Weirdo. I think it's a cool name. But it's probably impossible to do, and I might be -- might be -- too old, anyway.

Bass Drum of Death, though: They were very good, even if not every song is as interesting as their singles. At their worst they sound a lot like The White Stripes, which is to say, still pretty good. At their best, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Jay Reatard. Vocals reverbed to hell, unpredictable but catchy lead guitar riffs on top of more and more guitar. The comparison is aided by the hairdos, huge swaying yellow-brown mops that completely obscure their faces. I'm going to miss Glasslands. It's a beautiful place. We spent some minutes after the show staring into an installation they'd put up recently -- since the last time I'd been there: A clever combination of blinking LEDs, mirrors, and one-way glass in elegant black frames to create an impression of an infinite starry corridor.