New Shoes

Despite adding the schedule to my calendar, I don't go to the summer movies in Bryant Park much. The series epitomizes the filled-to-capacity victim-of-its-own-successitude that sucks all the fun out of everything that happens in Manhattan. But I'd never seen Blazing Saddles, and I happened to get out of work at just around the right time, which almost never happens any more these days.

I found a spot toward the back of the southern edge of the park, next to a Dutch elm-diseased tree growing in the sandy dirt and cobblestones; next to a fancy coffee kiosk being shut down for the evening by its teenaged staff. A drunk sitting in a folding chair in front of the tree bellowed "faggot!" at me. He was surrounded by garbage of various sorts. I inched back around the tree to stay out of his line of sight, and stood there with my messenger bag nestled between my feet. The movie was engrossing and angry and great. Now I see what all the fuss is about. That scene where the old woman brings Bart the pie: Is there a better depiction of Americans' ability (desire) to compartmentalize their thinking on race? It's really... anarchic, too. Having seen that fight on the film lot, I feel like I "get" the Rip Taylor set pieces that close out each Jackass movie. I read about Cleavon Little when I got home. It doesn't seem like he got a fair shake.

I had two missions the Saturday of 4Knots, which fell the weekend before my birthday. One was to see Mac DeMarco and maybe Speedy Ortiz. The other was to buy new shoes. I left the house wearing my decaying burnt-orange Chucks, which I'd bought at a previous 4Knots, having taken refuge from the noise of The Black Angels in the not-yet-destroyed mall of Pier 17. Those shoes survived the years of the kick drum and two rounds of extermination for chinches; but they were beginning to disintegrate, the sides flaring open, a hole dug in the heel by my heel. I flapped them out to the Seaport, where Nina and I found the festival spilling onto Fulton Street, which the festival organizers had covered with an astroturf "lawn." The lawn was itself covered with turfed-out hipsters. It smelled like weed. There were KIND bar wrappers and empty, miniature bottled waters everywhere. We spent a few minutes in front of the smaller stage where Dead Stars were wrapping up their set. They sounded good: Bright, catchy hooks; a strong beat; and fast-paced songs. The band seemed a little amused, like, what are we doing here.

Those Darlins were on the main stage when we got there. The area in front of the main stage was packed. Everybody was eating fancy street cart food and drinking sodas and throwing the garbage in the trash barrel next to where we were standing. An old Chinese woman elbowed her way through the crowd and dug around in the trash for recyclable items. Mac DeMarco went on next. All of my young-dude co-workers are into him - "He's so weird" - and I thought he'd sound like Kurt Vile or Ty Segall or some other au courant young outsider. But he doesn't. His songs are weird, but I found them to be lugubrious and incoherent. The show just didn't, like, rock. I think that's enough, I said. I didn't need to hear Dinosaur Jr., who were the big deal headliners this year. (I wonder if they played Feel The Pain.) Nina and I left the Seaport, making a pit stop at the Starbucks on Water Street so Nina could pee. It grew suddenly cold. Trash blew through the air.

We walked up through Chinatown to Grand Street, and Nina steered me into a Miz Mooz. Beau arrived, having wrapped an afternoon of recording with The Robot Princess at their studio in Union Square. The selection of Chucks was kind of limited, but I saw a pair of high-top navy blue ones that really spoke to me. High-tops could be a cool look, I thought. The salesperson checked the basement and reported that the store was out of my size. "Can you hang around for fifteen minutes?" he asked. "We have a warehouse a couple of blocks away." We waited. The store was bright and clean, with light-colored hard-wood floors. A lot of the storefronts in SoHo are like that; I wonder if they used to be galleries or studios. When the shoes arrived, I put them on and asked the young woman at the register if she could toss my gross, old ones. "Don't talk about them like that," she said. "Those shoes kept your feet dry for three years. You should say goodbye to them."

"Should I kiss them goodbye?" I asked.

"You don't have to kiss them," she said.

We walked down to Canal Street and took the train back to Brooklyn. We had dinner at Sheep Station with Tom and Jill and Hanlon. Everybody's moving out of the big apartment on Lincoln Place at the end of the summer so that Jay, the guy who owns the building, can renovate it. They're being scattered to the four winds. (Or maybe the two winds.) The talk turned again and again to the pain of apartment hunting in New York City. The disappointing reality of a promising Craigslist posting. The unctuous perfidy of real estate brokers. A shame-faced encounter with a fellow apartment hunter worse off than yourself. Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Ditmas. Nice places to live, all, but why does it feel like a fight to get in?