Blue Morpho

I spent Thanksgiving with the Browns. My mom lured me there with an email telling me that Jonah had been invited to join Titus Andronicus. (She scooped BrooklynVegan and the band's own Twitter!) I tried not to slobber to him about his new band, but could not restrain myself. Some inside baseball: On their most recent tour, they rented a U-Haul hitch for their equipment; consequently there was enough room in the van for every member to have his own sleepin' row.

Bel Argosy played a show at Muchmore's, which turned out to be kind of a pleasant place to spend an evening. Beau and I met up early to pick up some equipment from the shared MiniBoone / Robot Princess practice space on Meserole. We found Doug inside, the place decorated with Christmas lights and smelling faintly sulfurous. He was working on putting words to a melody he'd written. We tied an amp to a hand truck. I grabbed Peter's cymbal bag, since we'd arranged that I'd use his stuff. My anxiety about punctuality and continued inability to keep my North Brooklyn geography straight got us to Muchmore's way early, so I sat the bar with Zain and Sam, and Beau ran back to Meserole to return some superfluous gear. Muchmore's is actually a pretty comfy joint. The washing machines in the room behind the bar are for community use -- show up with your laundry, drink a beer and take in a show. Sam had a cold and kept trying to get the bartender to make him a hot toddy, but the place has no license for hard liquor, so the best she could do was a coffee-and-wine, which was no problem for him. Our set was pretty good, though the floor tom collapsed in the middle of one song, and we only played for, like, fifteen minutes. Robot Princess sounds very good and precise and rehearsed; Beau and Dan play synchronized lead lines that sound like candy.

Nina's mom's been working as a docent at The Museum of Natural History, and she got us tickets to see the butterfly exhibit, so that's what we did on Saturday. The Museum admits visitors to the butterfly garden in waves, and there was some time to kill before the next "intake" period, so we took a walk through the Hall of North American Mammals. I've loved those dioramas for as long as can remember, and I've taken pains to avoid learning the floor plan of the Museum, so whenever I go I'm surprised at where I wind up. I looked into the mouth of the bison. I found a small finch hanging upside-down from a tree branch over a stream. The seam between the painted backdrop and the set dressing in the foreground -- the hand-placed blades of a grass, a frozen acrylic river -- is my favorite part. That seam is transportive, hyper-real. The dioramas don't have doors. How do they clean the animals and touch up the paint? I wondered. We turned a corner and found a wall-mounted TV playing a short documentary about how they do those things. (So, yeah, they take out the windows and enter through the front.)

The butterfly enclosure was a kind free-standing greenhouse inside an unused room off the museum's main entrance on Central Park West. It had "airlocks" at both the entrance and exits, to make sure you neither introduced a harmful indigenous critter to the butterfly jungle nor left with a butterfly clinging to your scarf. Inside, it was very warm and humid. For the butterflies what preferred it, there were feeding stations with sections of rotting oranges. There were several dozen different kinds of butterflies in the room, the smallest about the size of a guitar pick, the largest about the size and shape of a diagonal half-sandwich. Of these big ones, we were told, the majority were of the Morpho family. With their wings folded together, they looked unremarkable, like large moths or bits of faded newsprint. But when they spread their wings flat, they revealed a unreal, glittery blue on their dorsal side. An attentive docent showed us how to attract and handle the butterflies, how they'd mash their proboscii against things to taste them, that when two butterflies of the same species perched on a branch and overlapped their wings it meant they were mating. A young woman, wearing the official Museum orage, brought in a kind of mesh duffle bag that she explained was full of newly-hatched butterflies. "They're not very good at flying yet," she said, "so be careful not to step on them." She was right: The butterflies that they shook out of the bag took to the air only hesitatantly. Some of them waddled around on the floor flexing their wings in very deliberate way. We waited motionless for minutes on end in various hopeful locations near the stinky orange piles, hoping for a chance landing on our clothes or outstretched hands. At the other side of the enclosure, one of the docents was kneeling on the floor with a large butterfly clinging to her eyebrow and explaining loudly to a shocked toddler that it was alright. ("It doesn't hurt! It doesn't hurt!") Right as we were about to give up, a large Blue Morpho alit on the tassel of my scarf. It had a big, hairy thorax, a little grotesque, really, but man -- those wings!

At around 6, the museum staff started herding people out, so we left, walking down the big stairs and across the street into Central Park. We headed down to the lake, which had a thick, dull surface layer of slush that looked deceptively solid. There's fencing that runs most of the perimeter, and at various intervals there were signs warning you not to step onto the ice. Next to each sign was mounted a red, telescoping ladder, which you could presumably extend from the shore to someone who'd made a bad choice and fallen in. There are several small gazebo-like structures along the edge of the lake -- little huts, really, with two small benches facing each other inside. One side of each hut seemed to open right onto the lake, like that Edward Hopper painting. I dipped the toe of my boot into the slush to see if it went straight down. It did, but Nina pulled me away. We walked around to the other side of the lake to The Loeb Boathouse, to see if we could sit by the fire and get drunk, but they were closed for a private event.

Instead, we exited the Park on the eastern side, and walked down 5th Ave. to 59th St., where we stopped briefly. at F.A.O. Schwartz. The place was swarming with frenzied children, but there were also several adult couples buying action figures and various doo-dads for themselves. We walked through aisles of pricey candy (fifteen bucks for a grotesquely huge Reese's Peanut Butter Cup); stuffed animals the size of a twin bed; a not-quite-tall-enough guy in Spider-Man spandex, posing for pictures; Lego everything. Everywhere the accumulating clutter of life and western capitalism. There was a wing of the store where you could buy high-end baby dolls, only you had to go through an "adoption interview" to acquire one. I thought we could go through the phony process and then trepan our candidate doll with a power tool in front of the other shoppers, as a bit of creepy performance art. We left empty-handed, although I found myself coveting a make-your-own-geode kit.

Further down 5th Ave., we stepped inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Nina lit a candle for her father. Afterwards, she stopped at a street vendor's cart and bought us a bag of roasted chestnuts, so hot that they singed the brown paper black as we held them. For some reason, the chestnuts seemed like an intimate thing to buy from a stranger. The fur between the shell and the, uh, nut-meat. The softness of the meat itself. We walked past the holiday window displays at Lord & Taylor. The theme seemed tob gilded age New York, with cardboard flats printed with lithographs of wealthy shoppers enjoying the pleasures of the department store while being serenaded by Negro ragtime musicians. The flats would kind of wiggle, but the animation was minimal, and the whole thing was ugly and tone-deaf. We took the train downtown. Two crustpunks were riding the train with a dog. They split up at Union Square, the girl disembarking with the reluctant dog, the guy staying on the train alone.

I don't know. That's all.