Best Of 2012

The list:

Best book I read: A Scanner Darkly
Best album: The Wreck of the Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best song: Ecce Homo, Titus Andronicus; runner up: Son Of An American, The So So Glos (lo-fi version)>
Best show I went to: Titus Andronicus at Shea Stadium, Oct. 22nd
Best dance: The Cat Daddy
Best movie I saw in the theater: Beasts of the Southern Wild; Runner up: The Cabin in the Woods
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
Best worst movie: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
Best weekend morning diversion: Fuckin' Skyrim
Best Sunday night HBO show: Girls
Best brunch: Breakfast burrito, Vspot
Best snack: Sahadi's Wasabi Kri-Kri
Best music programme on WFMU: Tie: Thing With A Hook; Distort Jersey City
Best stick gauge: 5A
Best venue: Shea Stadium
Best bar: Canal Bar

I went to my parents' for the holidays. I didn't stress out about getting presents for people this year. I had something for almost everyone, but much of the gifts I bought were just sort of gestures toward my good itentions. My sister, in from Denmark, showed us some very skillful photos she taken with an old-timey camera on a recent trip to Turkey. She'd bought some beautiful curios for us. My present was a hand-ainted ceramic tile with a rich blue enamel design on it. We baked a Boston cream pie for my mom on Monday night, which was easier than I thought, although a lot of credit is owed to my dad's owning a springform cake pane. My parents have always maintained a well-stocked larder -- I attribute my own impulse to hoard dry goods to them -- but I'd bought a few ingredients that I didn't expect them to have on hand: Cake flour, vanilla beans for the custard. My mom found it hard to believe that the strange leathery strips were the source of vanilla flavor. I showed her the scraped-out inside of the bean we'd cut into for the pie, still sticky.

Inspired by the offerings of Tom and Colleen and Tom and Katharine, Nina and I resolved to have a party at our house, a little after Christmas. She hatched the idea as we were leaving Katharine's house after her party on the 20th. "We'll just have a little get-together for people who happen to be town between Christmas and New Year's," she told people. "Something casual with beer and cheese. No need to dress up." But as she started putting together the guest list it became clear that what she had in mind was a first class holiday rager, cheese-themed. The post-Christmas-pre-New-Year's friend demographic surprised us with about twenty positive RSVPs -- the most I think I've ever played host to. Nina rallied and shopped. On her way back from Pennsylvania, she made a tour of K-Mart and Pier 1 and picked some additional lights for the tree, plus a set of traditional "balls" ornaments, plus a wire-frame star for the top, plus a pair of beaded, big-red-feather-tailed bird clip ornaments which I think were supposed to be phoenixes? I clipped those to the top branch despite Nina's hand-wringing over whether they made our living room look like Christmas in a whorehouse. We added to the mix the packs of Garbage Pail Kids cards we'd scored at the Nitehawk screening, nestling the cards in the nooks between branches. Fun Gus, Adam Bomb. "That's a good-looking tree," Nina said when we'd finished.

The day of the party, we went on a long trek through Carroll Gardens, buying cookies, beer (the beer distributor had Quilmes for $10.50!), Trader Joe odds and ends, and a great quantity of food from Sahadi's -- Kri Kri, obv., and cheese of many varieties. People started to show up around 8:30. Bo brought a bottle of Danish akvavit, which tasted faintly of caraway seeds, and which got poured into shots until it was all gone. Ray brought fancy raspberry-infused cheese from Union Market. Pretty much everyone brought beer, to the extent that the top shelf of our generously-proportioned fridge is even now entirely occupied by bottles, complementing a still-mostly-full case of PBR on the bottom shelf left over from a D&D party a week or so previous. People got along pretty well -- no fights, though perhaps there were a few disagreements. People got drunk, too, which was our goal, and pretty much all of the cheese got ate. We did it, we thought, after the last guest departed at 4 AM.

Actually, that thought is what we thought later that morning after we woke up. What we thought at the moment was nothing at all.