If It's Horrible, It Exists

Drink, drink, drink.

Nina and I went to the They Might Be Giants show at the 'Ballroom, albeit with Nina's brother Michael and his friend Ari instead of Randy and Danica. It was great! The Johns described the show as being a collection of lesser-played material of theirs from the 90s, and, you know, true to their word, I didn't really know any of the songs -- except for one that my friend Kim put on a mix tape that she gave me in high school to cheer me up. I quote it here because it's a nice example of how stirringly cute their lyrics are, not to mention the hooks:

I returned a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the expiration date

I came back as a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the date stamped on myself

Did a large procession wave their
Torches as my head fell in the basket
And was everybody dancing on the casket?

Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want
Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

The hooks! They're so clean and catchy, these songs. It put me in mind, as a lot of things do, of the songs The Headliners used to play -- pairing up a catchy melody (the less complicated the instrumentation of which the better) with a good-faith exploration of a silly idea. That's a formula I haven't yet lost respect for. I don't know if I ever will!

After the show we followed Michael and Ari over to this Thai bar with a name I can't remember in the West Village to see a childhood friend of Michael's playing blues (raw, acoustic) at, I guess, a sort of open mic dealie. He was very good, but I don't remember his name. What I do remember is that somebody peed on the street afterwards. I won't say who!

One thing I forgot to mention last time was a birthday thing. Eve got me a pair of tickets to go on a "working harbor" tour of the East River, and Nina and I did it. The thing was held on a big yacht that served booze and was equipped with a sound system so the guides (who were kind of like a maritime Click & Clack Tappit) could explain things about container shipping. We left from Pier 16 and got a peek at the Brooklyn Navy Yards before turning around and heading South towards Red Hook and Staten Island. Red Hook had a bunch of beautiful old fire-gutted piers and warehouses. We took some pictures, but most of them came out blurry. Down by Staten Island is a kind of tugboat harbor that the guides were really fascinated with. We got to a see a bunch of tugboats hauling loads around. They can push or pull their barges, but they can also drag them along from the side -- wouldn't've thought that was physically doable. Of all the things we saw, my favorite was this one bit of the fuel tanker docks that had this enormous grid draped with colorful hoses used for routing the payload of the tankers to the proper holding facilities: an Ethernet pinout writ large!

I went to a few more movies at the McCarren Park Pool summerscreen film series, which is turning out to be a wonderful alternative, lineup-wise, to the packed clusterfuck that is Bryant Park. It's a beautiful space, rarely very crowded, and Schnack does the cooking. Most recently, I was there for:

• Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which is a weird and wonderful little punk rock gem that I'd never heard (neither has Netflix). It kind of falls apart, plot- and message-wise, in the final act, but all the characters are played convincingly and earnestly -- the whole thing's got enormous heart. Plus Ray Winstone's one of the leads. Who knew?
• Repo Man, which should have been infuriating, given that it just kind of throws together pretty much every punk movie theme -- the only thing missing, debatably, is a zombie invasion -- but somehow avoided being glib. I really liked it! Tight pacing, clever dialogue, shit acting.

Last week I even braved the stygian, sulfurous depths of the array of Port-a-Pottys they've got there. I'm not proud of it. It was grim, pungent, terrifying. I scrubbed everything as soon as I got home.

I did an exhausting thing yesterday that I can't really talk about on the ol' blog. Maybe I'll talk about later. Suffice it to say that I'm exhausted. I have the day off today and I've spent it lying around, eating and playing video games. I'm watching The Killing Fields right now, but not really giving it 100% of my attention.