Best thing on basic cable: Being Human (USA)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Gimme The Loot
Best movie I saw not in a theater: O Lucky Man!
Best book I read: In The First Circle; runner-up: Tinkers
Best album I played drums on: Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best album I didn't play drums on: Blowout!, The So So Glos
Best new talk show on WFMU: Why Oh Why, with Andrea Silenzi
Best show I went to: The Dickies at Knitting Factory, Oct. 31st
Best video game I played: Dead Space
Best brunch: Buttermilk Channel
Best worst movie: Private Resort
Best vegetarian lunch special, Murray Hill: Tiffin Wallah
Best vegetarian Bánh Mi, Park Slope: Vegetarian chicken, Banhmigos
Best cruelty-free calorie-delivery mechanism: Vegan cowboy cookies
Best snack: Pretzel Crisps, aka Bagel Chips
I bought a Christmas tree about a week and a half before Christmas, traveling out to Sunset Park to the place I'd gone on 38th St. last year. It was very cold, and the air was misted and prickly with snow-dust. I told the guy the size of tree I was looking for, and he showed me one of the display models sitting on a spike in front of the lot, a heavy dressing of snow on its branches. It looked about right, and I told him so, and he wrapped it up for me to haul home on the train. That part was easier this time, though when I got the thing down the stairs onto the subway platform, my hands and fingers burned so badly from the cold that I thought there was something really wrong with them. I got it to Union St. and up to our apartment, and Nina and I fastened it to the plastic stand. Only then did I notice that it had a big sparse section on one side, like a bite taken out. It drank up the first pourings of water, but the needles stayed dry and crumbly. We duly wrapped the tree with fairy lights and clipped the "Christmas birds" to it, but it positively barfed needles onto the floor while we did so, and the whole thing seemed (even more than usual) like a hollow exercise. I felt embarrassed, and started counting the days until we could mulch the thing.
My dad suggested that all he really wanted for Christmas was for someone else to cook all the food on the day, so my sister enlisted me to help plan and prepare a suitable feast. I would have gone all vegetarian, because it's so much easier to cook, but she was set on doing some form of lamb dish. I'm glad she pushed for it because it came out really well, and got me out to witness the spectacle of the newly-opened Gowanus Whole Foods on 3rd St. Here is the menu we designed, for posterity and for readers who want to attempt it themselves:
- Hummus
- Roasted Brussels sprouts with fish sauce and Thai chiles
- Red quinoa and roasted butternut squash salad
- Roast leg of lamb with mint, garlic, and lima bean purée
- Cranberry sage pie
On Christmas Eve, Nina made ready to go visit her family in Pennsylvania, and I walked around the neighborhood trying to scoop up a few last-minute gifts. I bought us a sandwich to share at City Sub, but after I wolfed my half I felt ill, so I warned her off eating hers. I had to say goodbye to her from the toilet. I was almost recovered by the time my sister came over that evening to help me cook. We shopped for ingredients and prepared the salad and pie. She also helped me finalize one of my presents for Nina, a t-shirt ">screen-printed with the logo for Cacaolat, which she'd told me she admired when we saw it in Barcelona. We made three shirts, and they all came out good, but each one has different imperfections. That's just the way it works. That night, Jill and Emma and Jay came over and after some debate, we decided to watch Zapped! starring a young Scott Baio and, weirdly enough, the guy who went on to play Buddy on Charles In Charge. Baio plays a high school chemistry nerd who accidentally invents a tonic that gives him telekinetic powers by mixing weed and beer. He uses his powers to take girls' clothes off. It's like they filmed a Johnny Ryan comic strip. At midnight, it was Jay's birthday. We did shots.
Nina and I went on another date the weekend before New Year's Eve. First we saw the tail end of a Liquor Store show at Glasslands. They were characteristically gross / great, and I got to see the new light installation above the stage. It's made of PVC fitted with color-changing LEDs, and it looks like stiff, white fingers of coral reaching down from the ceiling. After that we got a drink at Iona, which Nina drunkenly insisted was "the best bar," on account of its varied seating environments (window, booth, back yard) and its focus on beer and whiskey. Then it was time for the midnight movie at Nitehawk, a series of "naughty" 35mm shorts curated by, like, a guy who restores naughty 35mm shorts. We ordered tall-boy PBRs and tater tots. The clips included some very explicit trailers for the movies:Were they really naughty? It was definitely more penetrative sex than I've seen in a movie theater since, I guess, the Wesleyan Film Series. It occurred to me that suggesting it to Nina as a fun date was a pretty Travis Bickle kind of move. I think some of the best clips in the series, though, were the least naughty -- the guy had collected some film ads that I guess would be shown before a film feature that were pitching dance-hall parties you could go to on New Year's Eve. So many venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn that just don't exist any more. There was also a strange, long-form travel ad encouraging viewers to "Come To Poland." It'd been produced in the 50's by a Polish hospitality company called Orbis, and it featured a Slavic-looking couple enjoying the period charms of an unspecified Polish city as described by an English voice-over. Outdoor cafes! Hotels with elevators! Our host tried to make more hay than was warranted over the otherness on screen.
The last big thing we did in 2013 was see Patti Smith play a show at Webster Hall. This is a thing she does every year, and it's one of those things that New York magazine is always telling you should be on your bucket list. I hadn't done it yet because it's expensive and the tickets sell out crazy quick -- and because I wasn't sure what to expect. I was worried that she'd be some kind of mumbling ersatz gypsy like Bob Dylan. But I figured we should go, you know, just to see, and it turned out that she's amazing on stage. She's got such a steady, confident voice -- deeper, even, than the voices of the dudes in her band. (In two-part harmonies, her male keyboardist always took the upper part.) She moves quickly and deliberately around the stage; she takes easy control of the audience, addressing them with a balance of punk contempt and genuine warmth. "Oh, I just get so flustered when a handsome boy talks to me," she sneered in the direction of an audience member who kept calling her name. "Now shut the fuck up." She opened her set with a cover of "Heroin," and sang it without undue reverence. What followed was a mix of her famous early songs, stuff from her recent albums, and more covers. "This next song is the number one song of 2013," she said. Oh man, I thought. Patti Smith does Miley Cyrus? But no, she sang "Stay" by Rihanna, which was also quite good. It being her birthday and all, her kids came up on stage with a cake and gave her a gift of "bee socks," which somehow support the protection of honeybee colonies. She played "Because The Night" and dedicated it to Fred Smith. She played "Perfect Day" and dedicated it to Lou Reed. It was really great.
When the show was over, we went to go find Patrice, whose birthday, like Patti's, was that evening. She'd been celebrating at a karaoke joint on 17th St., but by the time we we got there it was just some office dudes hollering their way through "Wrecking Ball."
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