In The Night Park

I only made it to one outdoor movie this summer. It was a wet July, a wet August, so many screenings across many series were simply rained out. But I'd also seen most of the movies on offer -- with the possible exception of The Goonies -- a realization that was frustrating (who the fuck wants to see Speed at McCarren Park?) and a little depressing (oh no I'm so old I've seen every movie). So the one movie I made it to was Vertigo at Brooklyn Bridge Park. I always forget how deliberately icky it is. Stray observations this time around: Wow how gross is Barbara Bel Geddes when she visits Jimmy Stewart in the mental hospital? And right at the end, when the nun says, "I heard voices" -- what does that mean? Is she speaking on behalf of Scottie? I had to fight my way out of the office and so I got to the park well after sundown. There are several arteries leading from Old Fulton Street to the grassy slope where the screenings take place. I took one of the paths that's really a tube through the trees and vine canopy, and for a few seconds I was in almost total darkness. After the movie was over I met up with Katharine and Tom who'd been picnicking on the far side of the lawn, and we walked home together. We stopped at Katharine's dad's house, mere feet from the Promenade, and helped ourselves to cans of Diet Coke from an assortment in the fridge in the abandoned kitchen. There's a bridge that leads from the southeastern part of the park up over the Furman Street onto Columbia Heights. I don't know if it was engineered to wobble or whether it wasn't built to support the masses exiting the park, but wow. Nothing quite like the feeling of your feet slipping out from under you, Jimmy Stewart's stricken face spiraling up at you from the expressway below.

Nina and I had been looking forward to the Afropunk Festival all summer, not least of all because we found out that Unlocking The Truth and Big Freedia and Death would be playing. We went both days, because there was good stuff the whole time. Like last year, Commodore Barry Park served as the festival grounds, and we queued up by the BQE, turning down offers from entrepreneurs hustling nutcrackers out of coolers in full view of the police. Once inside, we hooked ourselves up with curry from the Madiba tent, served out of an entire scooped-out loaf of whole wheat bread. Unlocking The Truth went on right as we got to the Green Stage. They were pretty great! Their songs don't have lyrics (perhaps that's for the best) but were full of cool, ostentatious solos played on instruments that looked a touch too big for the players. The drummer (peering through thick glasses) kept doing funny pro moves like spinning his sticks mid-song. Obviously it's creepy to speculate -- like the emcees did after the set -- about the band's romantic prospects in middle school, but how can you not, a little bit, knowing yourself how the economies of kisses turn on the ability to plunk out a few notes of Come As You Are on a starter electric guitar. Imagine if you'd been able to shred.

The Heavy also played and they're good but we've seen them before.

The second day was really packed. We milled around for a bit, killing time until Big Freedia took the stage. How to describe? First of all, Big Freedia's act is Freedia herself, plus a DJ, plus two or three dancers. The songs are basically just rhythmic noise, over which Freedia raps a hook ("I got that gin in my system" / "Somebody gonna be my victim"). The dancers kind of loll around chewing gum until they're called upon to move, which they do sometimes all together, sometimes singly. If they're trying to conserve energy, I can see why: They were all skilled and vigorous twerkers, and could perform with shockingly facility all the moves people show off on YouTube. Twerking standing up. The downward dog twerk. The headstand twerk-against-the-wall, which is fucking nuts. What was even more nuts was that Big Freedia herself was probably better than her dancers, kind of effortlessly Fred Astaire-ing up and down the stage and flipping her butt up onto her back over and over again. There were clearly people in the audience who had dressed for twerking, perhaps even knowing that they'd be called up on stage for a participatory rendition of "Azz Everywhere." When Freedia summoned them, the Red Stage filled up with asses of all colors popping out of denim cut-offs. And some of the best amateur twerkers were dudes. The whole thing was funny and crazy and fun.

Then we went back to the Green Stage for Death, who were fucking great. They sounded fast and mean, and their on-stage production was exactly like what I've heard of their recorded stuff: Plenty of treble and reverb. I wish they'd played longer, but what are you gonna do. Festival sets. After them came a band from L.A. that I'd never heard of called Vintage Trouble. I was pushing Nina to go with me and find some cool BMX demos, skeptical of Vintage Trouble's name and provenance. And they're one of those bands that wears nice shirts, like fucking... Train. But then they started playing and they were crazy tight! The lead singer has a voice like James Brown and stage presence like James Brown, twirling and snapping his hips back and forth. I'm sure people say that about him all the time and I barely know what it means, but I was fucking hot-footing it to the very first song they played. After them was holy shit Living Colour. You better believe they opened with Cult of Personality. We wandered over to the Red Stage to check out Chuck D and DJ Lord. In between fragments of Public Enemy songs, Chuck D had a lot to say about the state of "commercial" hip-hop, none of it complimentary. He tried to mine way more laughs than were available from his deliberate mis-hearing of "Hova" as "Hoover," a joke so inappropriate for the age of the audience that I barely got it, and I'm an old 'un. He seemed like a guy who's got a rec room and watches a lot of VHS tapes.

Eventually we left and went to go see The World's End at BAM Harvey, which was excellent, although I think it's a strong indicator that I should stop wearing my beloved motorcycle jacket lest I become even more like Gary King than I already am.

To celebrate the end of the summer, the folks at Lincoln Place herded us into a picnic at Prospect Park on Friday. I made "Spicy Taty Salad," essentially a riff on the basic potato salad in Joy to which I add chorizo and some pulverized chipotle peppers (purchased dry and soaked in warm water). Potato salad is my personal food Summer Jam, I've decided. I've made, say, four batches of it this season for parties and picnics and some just to have. At first I was chasing the mayonaisse-y but not-too-mayonaisse-y taste of the potato salad my dad made when I was growing up, but then I decided that I wanted to see how "smoky" I could make it without making it gross. I think I did a pretty good job! (Four chipotle peppers seems to be the right number.) Jill made a savory Morroccan vegetable stew; KT made brownies; Hanlon ordered a pizza. We got drunk on box wine and vodka lemonade secreted in a thermos and played with a copy of Catch Phrase that somebody'd brought. The sun went down, and a group of hippies down the hill to the north of us started strumming guitar and doing a kind of dance with glow sticks. When it got truly dark, Jill and Ted and I played a game called Sunglasses Foot Race, in which you put on a pair of sunglasses and then pound your way across the Nethermead, disoriented and giddy, each clomping step taking you an unexpected distance because you can't see the contours of the ground you're crossing. "We should come to Night Park more often," said Tom. Later he barfed.

The "real" end to the summer, though, was on Labor Day itself, when Nina and I had resolved to go splash around in the Douglass-Degraw pool. We'd invited people to join us but planned to go it alone, so it was like a dream when Jill and Hanlon stopped at the chain link fence to see if we were really there and then came back in their bathing suits. The pool was emptier than the last time we'd been, no doubt because people were out of town for the long weekend, and at times there were more lifeguards than bathers. They were horsin' around, doing things in flagrant violation of pool-side rules and regs: Running, heaving buckets of water at each other, and lobbing water balloons. One lifeguard (on duty in one of the high chairs) shut a pool umbrella around himself for protection. His colleagues tossed one up from underneath like it was a grenade.