Year Of The Snake

Queens! We're visiting places.

We took the 7 train out to Kissena Blvd. to see the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. I'd gotten the idea to do it from a bunch of MTA flyers advertising it the same way they'd warn you that the R isn't running, and I felt a little weird about that, like maybe we'd get there and it wouldn't really be anything, just some bored volunteer sitting at a table with pamphlets and warm juice. But the intersection where we exited the station was totally mobbed. We turned the corner onto Main Street to find a vantage point, but it was almost impossible to make forward progress. People moved around us in all directions, some trying to get a better view, some trying to get away, some trying to make contact with a friend they'd recognized in the crowd. A middle-aged South Asian woman who squeezed passed us started screaming that she thought she might be dying and why wouldn't anybody help her. I think she was having a panic attack, and so did, I guess, the couple of strangers who hissed at her to calm down, but even if she was actually in trouble, there probably wasn't much that could be done. Eventually we made it to a construction scaffold that Nina could clamber up on, and we got to watch the last bit of the parade. The marching groups ranged from radio stations and travel agencies who'd built big, ostentatious papier-mâché floats (giant baby) to more staid groups like karate or dance schools who had their students march and perform in formation. There were at least two marching contingents that represented organizations that help recent immigrants adjust to life without the Communist Party. As might be expected, there was no shortage of dragon-lion... things.

The last person in the parade was a homeless guy in a dress that I used to see every morning outside a flophouse in Chelsea back when I worked at the 'Monkey. As always, he had a bushy beard that he'd dyed a rainbow of colors, like a color wheel, and he had with him a parrot and a baby carriage in which he was pushing a small, shivering dog (also dyed). I can't believe he was part of the parade, though he was acting is if he were, walking at a leisurely pace and waving and smiling at the crowd as he passed. The police and parade officials seemed to be rolling up the carpet behind him, collecting the traffic barriers and letting the onlookers spill into the street. The guy turned onto 39th Ave. and a group of people gathered around him to take pictures with him and his bird. The guy chattered away in a combination of gibberish ("Lady Gaga Lady Gaga") and what sounded like Spanish. Nina took a few pictures, but we were distracted by the sound of fireworks up the street. There were rolls of red paper firecrackers attached to the lintel of one of the storefronts in the Queens Crossing mall -- ironically enough, it was a Paris Baguette franchise. Dudes were lighting the tails of each roll, which would make gray smoke and little popping explosions as the flame traveled up the streamer, and then a big explosion at the top where there was a larger firework that shot out a little jet of sparks and slowly-falling stars. We watched until all the streamers had burned up, and then walked down to Prince St. where we got red bean pastries for luck at Chinese bakery.

A few weeks later, at Winnie's suggestion, we took the G out to 21st Street so that we could check out an art installation called Headscapes in a warehouse gallery. The entrance to the gallery was through a small storefront off Jackson Avenue and down a short hallway with an information desk on one side where there was a stack of "maps" of the different environments on display. The gallery itself was a big open room with a concrete floor across which the "spaces" had been distributed. Each one was a small, discrete environment you could enter, with a discernible but usually unspecified theme: Spider webs, for example, or a tree house. We crawled around and explored them all, shimmying up ladders or through tunnels as the installation required. My favorites were a black, igloo-like structure made of live stereo equipment pumping out tracks from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; and the nook in the corner arrayed with beautiful unfinished wooden furniture and feathered with an explosion of shingles, like a section of a whittling hoarder's apartment. We left after we'd had our fill and walked down the avenue toward PS1, where we stopped for a moment in the hopes of trying out the M. Wells dinette. No such luck, but I managed to convince Nina to pick something out from the selection of fancy, imported art magazines in the gift shop. We walked away with an issue of Frankie, which appears to be an Australian quarterly for twee craft girls. Nina pointed out the spot on the Citigroup building where she peed once. We ate down the street at the Sage General Store, where we stayed so long, I think, that they gave us a free cookie along with the check for our meal.

Cat news.

Kitty is in the middle of a kind of renaissance of play right now, brought about by a significant expenditure of attention and love on Nina's part. Or maybe it's just that she was just profoundly depressed in our old apartment; plenty of reasons that'd be plausible, too. But whereas she used to spend all day and night sprawled disconsolately across the top of some giant tupperware crate, now she charges up and down the length of the apartment, flinging toy "fur mice" up into the air for herself to catch after we've gotten sick of throwing them for her. She's even started playing with a blue handball that Nina fished out of deep storage, nosing and pawing it into noisy action across the living room floor. And she's what, fucking fifteen years old? Kitty 2.0, people. Fuck all other pets.