Somery

Summer's pretty much over.

I didn't hit my target of seeing a movie at every outdoor film series, but I did manage to see: Slumdog Millionaire at Movies With A View; Exit Through The Gift Shop at Films In Tompkins; the oddly compelling Senna at Socrates Sculpture Park.

I saw three Celebrate Brooklyn shows at the Prospect Park bandshell: Jimmy Cliff and his band, an energetic performance which was the accompaniment to the twice-around-the-park run (my first ever!) that I did at the beginning of the summer; Ghostface Killah; Wild Flag with Mission of Burma, with Beau and a gaggle of anti-folk people on a too-hot Friday night. Carrie Brownstein sang a cover of Ask The Angels to rival Brody Dalle's. It's a good fit for the 'Flag, I think.

Nina and I went to the Afro-Punk festival at Commodore Barry Park on the 25th, where we saw Spank Rock and Das Racist, who are as good as I'd hoped they'd be. There were jaw-droppingly acrobatic BMX stunts performed by bicycle club dudes on a half-pipe right next to the stage. The sun set while we waited for Erykah Badu to take the stage in the grassy half of the Park. It was a warm, pleasant night.

We managed to score Shakespeare In The Park tickets to Into The Woods without waiting in line all night (a practice which seems unduly difficult to the adult me, although I guess that's why they also just let you donate a bunch of money to get tickets). I entered the random daily drawing on a Saturday morning and by noon had won tickets for the night's performance. We took a walk in the park beforehand and flirted with the turtles in the algae-choked pond below Belvedere Castle. I'd never seen Into The Woods before, but my impression since forever was that it was a particular hit with -- and likely catered to the specific taste of -- pre-teen girls that go to musical theater summer camp. (A demographic which, having been a pre-teen boy who took computer classes at a musical theater summer camp, I am not crapping on.) Having seen it, I think I had the right impression. The story and the emotions are entry-level stuff, especially in the first act before everyone starts dying. Which is not to say that I didn't like it. I did like it! The cast was quite good, especially Donna Murphy, who played the Witch. And I liked Denis O'Hare, who played the Baker. He had a prominent lateral lisp, kind of like Ken Freedman, and didn't strive to make the character likeable or even less prickly. And the set transformed itself in astonishing ways.

A large part of our August was devoted to apartment hunting. Our criteria: No biting insects; a spare half-bedroom to use as an office would be nice. Having this year become a strong convert to Canal Bar, I was not-so-secretly hoping to locate a place on 3rd Avenue, preferably in the desolate, not-quite-zoned-for-humans stretch north of 1st St.

You always sort of repress this knowledge, but, man, looking for an apartment really stinks. It's mostly just the insulting character of the market: They're asking how much for this piece of shit? There are the brokers who argue with a straight face that 4th Ave. and 19th St. is "about to see a real explosion in popularity, like Williamsburg in the early 2000s." There are the brokers who meet you on the street outside the apartment to give you their pitch because the actual apartment is laughably tiny. We met some useless but friendly brokers who fed us interesting information in lieu of liveable apartments: We found out that the weird graffiti building on 7th Ave. and 2nd St. is actually owned by a crazy family who've been holding onto it in the hopes of a seven million dollar sale; we got to see a funny little cave of a place above the Ehab Moustafa law firm on the stretch of Atlantic Ave. that is all Islamic beauty supply places. And we met the broker who rented us the apartment that we chose, which is, fortuitously enough, literally around the corner from Canal Bar. (It is also above a soon-to-be doggy day care facility, so we'll see how that turns out.) She (the broker) was out of her mind and lied about everything, but the apartment was big and airy and the couple that was moving out after six years (!) of occupancy made a compelling case for it.

The move was not easy, though not particularly harder than other moves. We threw out a ton of stuff and had the rest taken to a storage facility in Queens to get fumigated. The fumigation company was late bringing it back to us. Nina pulled some telephone heroics and stopped them from bringing it back even later. One of the movers was sick or hung over and threw up on behind the truck after carrying our furniture upstairs. "Jesus," he said, after puking up what looked like cereal. The whole thing cost an ungodly amount of money.

But when it was over, and we were sitting on a new Ikea couch amid a city of boxes holding our now-usable possessions in our apartment across the street from a casket company and down the block from another, luxuriating in the simple joy of a clean break; well, that was bliss.