Monday, August 20, 2007
The Library of Babel
So, yeah, I went to go see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery at Rock Star Bar last Monday, after trivia (this guy Dave from my office and I bombed as The Heaps), and they were amazing, as usual. And I still can't fathom what they're doing playing a Monday night show with horrible openers at a frankly kind of dumpy venue. I asked The Vegetable this question, too, having run into him on the way out, and he said he had no fucking clue, either, but that they've got a new album coming out that's going to rock. He let me keep one of his drum sticks that had gone flying from his kit during a particularly enthusiastic finale for Boiler Room. Nina came, too -- she's well-connected with these guys, surprisingly enough, since the bass player has done some work for Seed.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Nerd Rock
I tire, babies. I didn't sleep that well last night.
What's happened? Last weekend, Eve and I played Scrabble in Greenwood Cemetery. It was very beautiful. I almost, for the first time in my life, used all of my Scrabble letters by spelling out 'wolverine,' but was thwarted.
On Tuesday, I went to go see Peelander-Z and Go!Go!7188 at The Knitting Factory. Go!Go! is from Tokyo, but I'd seen flyers for the 'lander for years and had been curious about their live show. It turns out that they're a little bit, uh, sloppy, but their enthusiasm and the variety and quality of their props pretty well makes up for it -- they're like a manic tricolor Japanese Carrot Top! They led off with a song called "Mad Tiger," during which all three band members donned these awesome, realistically-furred tiger masks. Then there was an interlude in which the gap-toothed lead singer removed his yellow helmet and called up volunteers from the audience to help him scissor off his remaining tendrils of hair. Then they played more songs, the drummer and bass player holding up white cardboard placards with the titles on them, presumably for the benefit of the audience. For their last song, "Health," they invited a bunch of audience members up on stage, this time to play the instruments while they cavorted in the crowd. The yellow dude quick-changed into this bowling pin costume and kept charging and pile-driving the red guy while their merch lady (whose jumpsuit was pink) refereed.
Go!Go!7188 was really very good -- their lead singer, Yuu, has a great set of pipes, even though she's pretty small, and the band is incredibly tight, musically.
On Thursday, Mike Frank came up from D.C. and he and Eve and I went to see The Hold Steady in Prospect Park. They were characteristically energetic -- even though a lot of their songs are a bit too down-tempo, or, I don't know, meandering for me, it's kind of impossible not to be in a good mood while you're watching them. The crowd was psyched, and Craig Finn was doing his trademark shout-unintelligible-stuff-off-mic thing (what is he saying?). He was wearing a baseball jersey given to him personally by Kent Hrbek, I think he said. They didn't play as long as they did at the show of theirs I saw at Warsaw, nor did they drink as much, really, but I think the Celebrate Brooklyn people had to get people home; also it was raining, kind of.
Last night the folks at 680 threw a barbecue. I borrowed Eve's bicycle and Nina and I went around Prospect Park a couple of times before heading down to the party. We saw a whole bunch of fireflies in the park, as well as two bats and a bunny.
Today was the big Thermals / Ted Leo show in McCarren Park Pool. Nina and I got there kind of late, on account of we were kind of hung over and tired and sick-feeling from the activities of yesterday, so we got there just in time to hear The Thermals wrapping up, but that's okay. We were eating sushi. Ted Leo, though, was excellent, as usual and despite the heat, which must have been unbearable up on stage. I'd never been to one of these Jelly NYC pool parties before, and I don't know what I think about them -- they've got enclosures set up for water polo and dodgeball, there's a Slip 'n Slide, and, thankfully, a cooling-off tent with these big fans that kind of spray water at you; and as a result the space is so big and distracting that you don't get the kind of critical mass, crowd-wise that really makes for a good rock show. Nonetheless, they were loud and fast and really tight. It was the bass player's last show with the band, so they did Counting Down The Hours as an encore, since it's apparently his favorite song. I think it might be my favorite song, too!
On the way home from the show, after Nina detrained to go get dinner with her bro and her dad, I bought some stuff at Trader Joe's and then got on the N, which was running local, infuriatingly, as it's been doing recently. I sat down next to a young man and woman who were engaged in animated conversation. I wasn't really paying attention at first, and when the woman started saying, "Kids want different experiences, they want to experience stuff -- electronically, or outdoors, whatever -- it's about experience-hopping," I thought she was talking about, you know, child psychology or teaching or something. But she wasn't. Her male companion took the ball and ran with it: "Right, definitely. So it should be like, 'You can take Go-Gurt to the beach, you can take it underwater, or, uh, in a boat, you can take it to Space Camp..." These were ad people, working after hours on a campaign for Go-Gurt, the yogurt-like acrylic paint you drink out of a condom!
"Yeah," the woman said, "we should have pictures of all the places you can take Go-Gurt, you know, photos or illustrations..." The dude cut in with "I think where all this Dr. Seuss kind of stuff is leading us, though, is that there's nowhere you can't take Go-Gurt. I mean, maybe we give it as a challenge -- show us a place you think you can't take Go-Gurt and we'll show you that you can. And, you know, this is really something we should let the 'creatives' take care of -- because we're not creatives. But, in a way, we are." They went on like this for some time, waxing philosophical on the "portability" merits of Go-Gurt, to the exclusion of all other topics, except for one point, when, after a brief pause in the conversation, the woman started expounding on the virtue of... herself, in a kind of frightening tone of voice. "They're going to love me. I mean, they already love me, but they don't know what I can do. I didn't know what I could do, but now that I do, nothing can stop me." The last thing I heard, as they got off at 9th St. (to return to the apartment that they apparently shared?) was the guy asking the girl, the concern in his voice actually kind of plausible, "Wait, are you proposing a redesign of the product?"
"No," she assured him. "I'm not trying to change the tube experience."
Danica moved out, slightly ahead of schedule -- surprise funeral upstate this weekend, she's flying back to CA tomorrow to start the fall semester as planned. This is kind of sad; she was a good roommate. But tomorrow is Vampire Hollywood at Rock Star Bar!
What's happened? Last weekend, Eve and I played Scrabble in Greenwood Cemetery. It was very beautiful. I almost, for the first time in my life, used all of my Scrabble letters by spelling out 'wolverine,' but was thwarted.
On Tuesday, I went to go see Peelander-Z and Go!Go!7188 at The Knitting Factory. Go!Go! is from Tokyo, but I'd seen flyers for the 'lander for years and had been curious about their live show. It turns out that they're a little bit, uh, sloppy, but their enthusiasm and the variety and quality of their props pretty well makes up for it -- they're like a manic tricolor Japanese Carrot Top! They led off with a song called "Mad Tiger," during which all three band members donned these awesome, realistically-furred tiger masks. Then there was an interlude in which the gap-toothed lead singer removed his yellow helmet and called up volunteers from the audience to help him scissor off his remaining tendrils of hair. Then they played more songs, the drummer and bass player holding up white cardboard placards with the titles on them, presumably for the benefit of the audience. For their last song, "Health," they invited a bunch of audience members up on stage, this time to play the instruments while they cavorted in the crowd. The yellow dude quick-changed into this bowling pin costume and kept charging and pile-driving the red guy while their merch lady (whose jumpsuit was pink) refereed.
Go!Go!7188 was really very good -- their lead singer, Yuu, has a great set of pipes, even though she's pretty small, and the band is incredibly tight, musically.
On Thursday, Mike Frank came up from D.C. and he and Eve and I went to see The Hold Steady in Prospect Park. They were characteristically energetic -- even though a lot of their songs are a bit too down-tempo, or, I don't know, meandering for me, it's kind of impossible not to be in a good mood while you're watching them. The crowd was psyched, and Craig Finn was doing his trademark shout-unintelligible-stuff-off-mic thing (what is he saying?). He was wearing a baseball jersey given to him personally by Kent Hrbek, I think he said. They didn't play as long as they did at the show of theirs I saw at Warsaw, nor did they drink as much, really, but I think the Celebrate Brooklyn people had to get people home; also it was raining, kind of.
Last night the folks at 680 threw a barbecue. I borrowed Eve's bicycle and Nina and I went around Prospect Park a couple of times before heading down to the party. We saw a whole bunch of fireflies in the park, as well as two bats and a bunny.
Today was the big Thermals / Ted Leo show in McCarren Park Pool. Nina and I got there kind of late, on account of we were kind of hung over and tired and sick-feeling from the activities of yesterday, so we got there just in time to hear The Thermals wrapping up, but that's okay. We were eating sushi. Ted Leo, though, was excellent, as usual and despite the heat, which must have been unbearable up on stage. I'd never been to one of these Jelly NYC pool parties before, and I don't know what I think about them -- they've got enclosures set up for water polo and dodgeball, there's a Slip 'n Slide, and, thankfully, a cooling-off tent with these big fans that kind of spray water at you; and as a result the space is so big and distracting that you don't get the kind of critical mass, crowd-wise that really makes for a good rock show. Nonetheless, they were loud and fast and really tight. It was the bass player's last show with the band, so they did Counting Down The Hours as an encore, since it's apparently his favorite song. I think it might be my favorite song, too!
On the way home from the show, after Nina detrained to go get dinner with her bro and her dad, I bought some stuff at Trader Joe's and then got on the N, which was running local, infuriatingly, as it's been doing recently. I sat down next to a young man and woman who were engaged in animated conversation. I wasn't really paying attention at first, and when the woman started saying, "Kids want different experiences, they want to experience stuff -- electronically, or outdoors, whatever -- it's about experience-hopping," I thought she was talking about, you know, child psychology or teaching or something. But she wasn't. Her male companion took the ball and ran with it: "Right, definitely. So it should be like, 'You can take Go-Gurt to the beach, you can take it underwater, or, uh, in a boat, you can take it to Space Camp..." These were ad people, working after hours on a campaign for Go-Gurt, the yogurt-like acrylic paint you drink out of a condom!
"Yeah," the woman said, "we should have pictures of all the places you can take Go-Gurt, you know, photos or illustrations..." The dude cut in with "I think where all this Dr. Seuss kind of stuff is leading us, though, is that there's nowhere you can't take Go-Gurt. I mean, maybe we give it as a challenge -- show us a place you think you can't take Go-Gurt and we'll show you that you can. And, you know, this is really something we should let the 'creatives' take care of -- because we're not creatives. But, in a way, we are." They went on like this for some time, waxing philosophical on the "portability" merits of Go-Gurt, to the exclusion of all other topics, except for one point, when, after a brief pause in the conversation, the woman started expounding on the virtue of... herself, in a kind of frightening tone of voice. "They're going to love me. I mean, they already love me, but they don't know what I can do. I didn't know what I could do, but now that I do, nothing can stop me." The last thing I heard, as they got off at 9th St. (to return to the apartment that they apparently shared?) was the guy asking the girl, the concern in his voice actually kind of plausible, "Wait, are you proposing a redesign of the product?"
"No," she assured him. "I'm not trying to change the tube experience."
Danica moved out, slightly ahead of schedule -- surprise funeral upstate this weekend, she's flying back to CA tomorrow to start the fall semester as planned. This is kind of sad; she was a good roommate. But tomorrow is Vampire Hollywood at Rock Star Bar!
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
If It's Horrible, It Exists
Drink, drink, drink.
Nina and I went to the They Might Be Giants show at the 'Ballroom, albeit with Nina's brother Michael and his friend Ari instead of Randy and Danica. It was great! The Johns described the show as being a collection of lesser-played material of theirs from the 90s, and, you know, true to their word, I didn't really know any of the songs -- except for one that my friend Kim put on a mix tape that she gave me in high school to cheer me up. I quote it here because it's a nice example of how stirringly cute their lyrics are, not to mention the hooks:
After the show we followed Michael and Ari over to this Thai bar with a name I can't remember in the West Village to see a childhood friend of Michael's playing blues (raw, acoustic) at, I guess, a sort of open mic dealie. He was very good, but I don't remember his name. What I do remember is that somebody peed on the street afterwards. I won't say who!
One thing I forgot to mention last time was a birthday thing. Eve got me a pair of tickets to go on a "working harbor" tour of the East River, and Nina and I did it. The thing was held on a big yacht that served booze and was equipped with a sound system so the guides (who were kind of like a maritime Click & Clack Tappit) could explain things about container shipping. We left from Pier 16 and got a peek at the Brooklyn Navy Yards before turning around and heading South towards Red Hook and Staten Island. Red Hook had a bunch of beautiful old fire-gutted piers and warehouses. We took some pictures, but most of them came out blurry. Down by Staten Island is a kind of tugboat harbor that the guides were really fascinated with. We got to a see a bunch of tugboats hauling loads around. They can push or pull their barges, but they can also drag them along from the side -- wouldn't've thought that was physically doable. Of all the things we saw, my favorite was this one bit of the fuel tanker docks that had this enormous grid draped with colorful hoses used for routing the payload of the tankers to the proper holding facilities: an Ethernet pinout writ large!
I went to a few more movies at the McCarren Park Pool summerscreen film series, which is turning out to be a wonderful alternative, lineup-wise, to the packed clusterfuck that is Bryant Park. It's a beautiful space, rarely very crowded, and Schnack does the cooking. Most recently, I was there for:
I did an exhausting thing yesterday that I can't really talk about on the ol' blog. Maybe I'll talk about later. Suffice it to say that I'm exhausted. I have the day off today and I've spent it lying around, eating and playing video games. I'm watching The Killing Fields right now, but not really giving it 100% of my attention.
Nina and I went to the They Might Be Giants show at the 'Ballroom, albeit with Nina's brother Michael and his friend Ari instead of Randy and Danica. It was great! The Johns described the show as being a collection of lesser-played material of theirs from the 90s, and, you know, true to their word, I didn't really know any of the songs -- except for one that my friend Kim put on a mix tape that she gave me in high school to cheer me up. I quote it here because it's a nice example of how stirringly cute their lyrics are, not to mention the hooks:
I returned a bag of groceriesThe hooks! They're so clean and catchy, these songs. It put me in mind, as a lot of things do, of the songs The Headliners used to play -- pairing up a catchy melody (the less complicated the instrumentation of which the better) with a good-faith exploration of a silly idea. That's a formula I haven't yet lost respect for. I don't know if I ever will!
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the expiration date
I came back as a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the date stamped on myself
Did a large procession wave their
Torches as my head fell in the basket
And was everybody dancing on the casket?
Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want
Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do
After the show we followed Michael and Ari over to this Thai bar with a name I can't remember in the West Village to see a childhood friend of Michael's playing blues (raw, acoustic) at, I guess, a sort of open mic dealie. He was very good, but I don't remember his name. What I do remember is that somebody peed on the street afterwards. I won't say who!
One thing I forgot to mention last time was a birthday thing. Eve got me a pair of tickets to go on a "working harbor" tour of the East River, and Nina and I did it. The thing was held on a big yacht that served booze and was equipped with a sound system so the guides (who were kind of like a maritime Click & Clack Tappit) could explain things about container shipping. We left from Pier 16 and got a peek at the Brooklyn Navy Yards before turning around and heading South towards Red Hook and Staten Island. Red Hook had a bunch of beautiful old fire-gutted piers and warehouses. We took some pictures, but most of them came out blurry. Down by Staten Island is a kind of tugboat harbor that the guides were really fascinated with. We got to a see a bunch of tugboats hauling loads around. They can push or pull their barges, but they can also drag them along from the side -- wouldn't've thought that was physically doable. Of all the things we saw, my favorite was this one bit of the fuel tanker docks that had this enormous grid draped with colorful hoses used for routing the payload of the tankers to the proper holding facilities: an Ethernet pinout writ large!
I went to a few more movies at the McCarren Park Pool summerscreen film series, which is turning out to be a wonderful alternative, lineup-wise, to the packed clusterfuck that is Bryant Park. It's a beautiful space, rarely very crowded, and Schnack does the cooking. Most recently, I was there for:
- Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which is a weird and wonderful little punk rock gem that I'd never heard (neither has Netflix). It kind of falls apart, plot- and message-wise, in the final act, but all the characters are played convincingly and earnestly -- the whole thing's got enormous heart. Plus Ray Winstone's one of the leads. Who knew?
- Repo Man, which should have been infuriating, given that it just kind of throws together pretty much every punk movie theme -- the only thing missing, debatably, is a zombie invasion -- but somehow avoided being glib. I really liked it! Tight pacing, clever dialogue, shit acting.
I did an exhausting thing yesterday that I can't really talk about on the ol' blog. Maybe I'll talk about later. Suffice it to say that I'm exhausted. I have the day off today and I've spent it lying around, eating and playing video games. I'm watching The Killing Fields right now, but not really giving it 100% of my attention.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
I'm Killing A Vampire
Short and to-the-point, because I haven't written in a while and many things have happened:
Nina and I managed to get through Caligula -- yes, that Caligula -- which is long and disturbing but not particularly sexy (although I was inexplicably aroused by the scene where Malcolm MacDowell fondles the tits of this old lady) or good. I am making her watch (the extended versions of) The Lord of the Rings.
My friend Squick, who'd moved to Boston, came back to NYC a few weeks ago, in part to celebrate the birthday of P.T., the 40-year-old (well, 41 now?) Thai guy who runs Bite, the sandwich shop that's sort of across the street from where I work. P.T.'d invited me to come along, too, so I did -- and it was a blast. It was me and Squick and some other guys from work and about a dozen Thai dudes I didn't know at this restaurant on 50th St. called Pooket. P.T. and his friend Peter ordered a bunch of stuff off-menu, like some really good spicy Lahb and some (also spicy) mango salad. Around eleven, the wait staff closed the front door and put on the karaoke machine in the back. I did the Ghostbusters theme song and some Thai songs I didn't, believe it or not, actually know the words to.
And then it was my birthday, precious; Sophie and I did another joint fiesta, and, while I was apprehensive about how it'd go, especially considering that she and I haven't really seen much of each other over the past year, it came off swimmingly and nobody got food poisoning. Nina scored a tres-leches cake from this really good local bakery (they were out of the Dora The Exporer cake), as well as some Star-of-David emblazoned party finery that I dutifully wore throughout. Lots of people came! It was great. The cops came, too, eventually, drawn by the sight of unconcealed containers. They threatened to give me a summons but let everyone off with a warning and a somewhat peevish comment about we should be grateful. (I was grateful!)
Tom and I came in third (!) at trivia last week. Go Team "Elven Bards!" We are climbing the fucking ladder, people.
Show-wise, I've only been to, uh... I guess just one, and it wasn't very good -- Spoon, in Rockefeller Park. Very medium energy, those guys. I did go out to Williamsburg a couple of weeks ago to McCarren Park Pool to watch Night Of The Hunter, which I'd been meaning to see for a while. Creepy movie, esp. Robert Mitchum, but I feel like parts of it, esp. the bible stuff, were lost on me. Missed the Siren Festival (it was the last one? Fuck), but I'm going to They Might Be Giants on Wednesday with Nina and Randy and Danica.
Various wisdom teeth are hurting. I read a very long fan fiction on the Internet, thinking it was a bootleg of Harry Potter; and then I read the first part of the actual Harry Potter on the Internet.
Oh yeah, Chore Wars. We're all doing it. Get on the bus.
Nina and I managed to get through Caligula -- yes, that Caligula -- which is long and disturbing but not particularly sexy (although I was inexplicably aroused by the scene where Malcolm MacDowell fondles the tits of this old lady) or good. I am making her watch (the extended versions of) The Lord of the Rings.
My friend Squick, who'd moved to Boston, came back to NYC a few weeks ago, in part to celebrate the birthday of P.T., the 40-year-old (well, 41 now?) Thai guy who runs Bite, the sandwich shop that's sort of across the street from where I work. P.T.'d invited me to come along, too, so I did -- and it was a blast. It was me and Squick and some other guys from work and about a dozen Thai dudes I didn't know at this restaurant on 50th St. called Pooket. P.T. and his friend Peter ordered a bunch of stuff off-menu, like some really good spicy Lahb and some (also spicy) mango salad. Around eleven, the wait staff closed the front door and put on the karaoke machine in the back. I did the Ghostbusters theme song and some Thai songs I didn't, believe it or not, actually know the words to.
And then it was my birthday, precious; Sophie and I did another joint fiesta, and, while I was apprehensive about how it'd go, especially considering that she and I haven't really seen much of each other over the past year, it came off swimmingly and nobody got food poisoning. Nina scored a tres-leches cake from this really good local bakery (they were out of the Dora The Exporer cake), as well as some Star-of-David emblazoned party finery that I dutifully wore throughout. Lots of people came! It was great. The cops came, too, eventually, drawn by the sight of unconcealed containers. They threatened to give me a summons but let everyone off with a warning and a somewhat peevish comment about we should be grateful. (I was grateful!)
Tom and I came in third (!) at trivia last week. Go Team "Elven Bards!" We are climbing the fucking ladder, people.
Show-wise, I've only been to, uh... I guess just one, and it wasn't very good -- Spoon, in Rockefeller Park. Very medium energy, those guys. I did go out to Williamsburg a couple of weeks ago to McCarren Park Pool to watch Night Of The Hunter, which I'd been meaning to see for a while. Creepy movie, esp. Robert Mitchum, but I feel like parts of it, esp. the bible stuff, were lost on me. Missed the Siren Festival (it was the last one? Fuck), but I'm going to They Might Be Giants on Wednesday with Nina and Randy and Danica.
Various wisdom teeth are hurting. I read a very long fan fiction on the Internet, thinking it was a bootleg of Harry Potter; and then I read the first part of the actual Harry Potter on the Internet.
Oh yeah, Chore Wars. We're all doing it. Get on the bus.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Violent Femmes, Diarrhea
After work on Thursday I went down to White St. for one of the Make Music NY festival shows. I don't know who else was on the roster, but my friend Squick had told me a while back that his friend Nullsleep was someone to check out, so. This particular show was sponsored by a place called The Tank, and they'd gotten a permit to clear out the whole block. On the way there I saw an enormous sweaty orange bodybuilder hassling a mousy, middle-aged woman, possibly his wife, outside of a Chinese pharmacy. He kept jabbing his finger into her purse, which she was holding up to her chest. "You're drunk!" he kept yelling. "Don't tell me you're not drunk!" The music was pretty good (in particular this guy Bit Shifter), but the show itself was merely okay. It was a bunch of dudes playing techno music that they'd tracked on their Game Boys -- not a terribly interactive experience, although they were playing it from the Game Boys to the big speakers that had been set up, and the tracking software apparently had some features that let you improv a little on the fly by hitting buttons on the Game Boy. The crowd, though, was fucking psyched. I haven't seen that many dancing nerds there in a while -- there were frizzy-haired nerds, big-glasses nerds, even a nerd with a stumpy little arm, as you can see in this picture (I'm just off-camera to the right, holding a pink plastic bag containing picture frames and condoms).
Friday I went with Tom and 'Leen and Eve to the Ralph Stanley show at the ol' Bandshell. The man himself was pretty brilliant, but he kept kind of tossing the mic over to members of his band to do one-off numbers from their solo albums, and none of them were really that good -- although all had won Grammys and things, as he kept telling us. It was really cold for some reason that night, too. Ironically, the Celebrate Brooklyn people were doling out, in return for the $3 admission, these little American Express-branded pocket fans, which were both unnecessary, and, as I discovered later on a truly hot day, totally useless.
Saturday Nina and I went over to Warsaw to see Violent Femmes. I hadn't really eaten anything all day, so before leaving her house I slurped down the remains of this turkey sandwich she'd bought like five days before at Sunset Bagels. It was covered in liquid lettuce and tasted sort of funny, but I was so hungry that I didn't care. I started to care pretty hard in the cab ride over, but I managed to not shit my pants until the end of the show, when we scurried out and I was able to void myself, wretchedly, at Matchless. I've never done that before! At a bar, that is. Anyway, the 'Femmes were pretty sweet, although their post-Blister In The Sun material is significantly less catchy. I hadn't been paying much attention to their ouvre since high school, I guess. They played their hits, though -- at the end -- with this kind of teasing, casual virtuosity that was pretty intimidating, musically.
After the show (and the shitting) we walked over to Greenpoint and had drinks at Pencil Factory -- two different kinds of fancy bourbon and then some Sweet Action, which the bartender comped us for some reason. We have sweet, hopeful faces, I suppose. Then we got locked in at The Mark Bar playing The Sopranos pinball, and the bouncer made a point of introducing us to the bartender. "I could tell these people were solid," the bouncer said. We are solid!
On the way ride home, though, around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, our car service car got a flat. It happened without us really realizing it, but all of a sudden we were just kind of crawling along down the BQE at four MPH. Our driver limped us over to the shoulder and we were heading for the closest exit when we noticed a yellow cab tailgating us pretty closely. "Oh," our driver said, "he must want to pick you guys up. Is that okay? Sorry about this." Sure, we said. No problem. Are you going to be okay? We got out of the car and made for the cab.
The cabbie leaned out of his window, though, and started yelling at us. "What are you doing?" he yelled. "You're gonna get killed!" I made a gesture like, what? "You're going to get killed!" he yelled. "Get back in the car!" So we got back in the car. Sorry, we told our guy, looks like he's not going to pick us up. So our car service guy got us off the Expressway and into Brooklyn Heights (the cab zipped off as inexplicably as it'd shown up) and we waited for him to change the tire while it became more and more Blue O'Clock in the sky.
Nina's friends (and former roommates) via Winnie, Randy and his girlfriend Danica, are moving into my new apartment as my roommates! Psyched about this. Like several of Nina's friends, Randy's a Parsons guy, and he makes things; he's come back to the East coast to do an artist-in-residency thing at Eyebeam for the next several months -- he mumbled something to me about enslaving a bunch of interns and having them implement and improve a web site in PHP, kind of creating the machinery of their own oppression. It's a valuable lesson about work. They are finalizing their move-in this evening. I wanted to have cookies ready for them (Eve sent me a powerful good recipe), but I've been pretty busy (and a bit too hot for cooking).
Winnie and Evan and Nina and I hit up Coney Island on Sunday. We lay around in the sun for a while and then did the bumper cars. And then there was talk of finding a scary ride to go on, and I felt like that day was a day on which I was prepared to go on a scary ride -- like, say, The Cyclone. But The Cyclone wasn't running, and so their gimlet eyes seized upon what was quite possibly the worst and scariest-looking ride in all of Astroland, the Top Spin 2. This picture does not do it justice. The thing is some kind of fear engine, and I knew I couldn't stomach it, so, humiliatingly, I bowed out. Nina, in spite of her obvious fear -- and my observation that none of the participants before us seemed to be very happy as they disembarked -- mastered herself and, along with Winnie and Evan, threw herself under the wheels of spinning and gravity. I was very impressed. The thing was sort of nauseating just to see in action. And everyone seemed to be pretty rattled afterwards, but I still feel a little... I don't know, like I should've been able to do it.
Trivia last night at Greenwich Treehouse, unfortunately sans Emma. Nina, Eve, and Tom were there, though, and we zeroed out in style under the name Dragon Magazine. Who knew that the hula hoop was more popular than Barbie?
Tonight... you. No, wait -- tonight, Joan Jett.
Friday I went with Tom and 'Leen and Eve to the Ralph Stanley show at the ol' Bandshell. The man himself was pretty brilliant, but he kept kind of tossing the mic over to members of his band to do one-off numbers from their solo albums, and none of them were really that good -- although all had won Grammys and things, as he kept telling us. It was really cold for some reason that night, too. Ironically, the Celebrate Brooklyn people were doling out, in return for the $3 admission, these little American Express-branded pocket fans, which were both unnecessary, and, as I discovered later on a truly hot day, totally useless.
Saturday Nina and I went over to Warsaw to see Violent Femmes. I hadn't really eaten anything all day, so before leaving her house I slurped down the remains of this turkey sandwich she'd bought like five days before at Sunset Bagels. It was covered in liquid lettuce and tasted sort of funny, but I was so hungry that I didn't care. I started to care pretty hard in the cab ride over, but I managed to not shit my pants until the end of the show, when we scurried out and I was able to void myself, wretchedly, at Matchless. I've never done that before! At a bar, that is. Anyway, the 'Femmes were pretty sweet, although their post-Blister In The Sun material is significantly less catchy. I hadn't been paying much attention to their ouvre since high school, I guess. They played their hits, though -- at the end -- with this kind of teasing, casual virtuosity that was pretty intimidating, musically.
After the show (and the shitting) we walked over to Greenpoint and had drinks at Pencil Factory -- two different kinds of fancy bourbon and then some Sweet Action, which the bartender comped us for some reason. We have sweet, hopeful faces, I suppose. Then we got locked in at The Mark Bar playing The Sopranos pinball, and the bouncer made a point of introducing us to the bartender. "I could tell these people were solid," the bouncer said. We are solid!
On the way ride home, though, around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, our car service car got a flat. It happened without us really realizing it, but all of a sudden we were just kind of crawling along down the BQE at four MPH. Our driver limped us over to the shoulder and we were heading for the closest exit when we noticed a yellow cab tailgating us pretty closely. "Oh," our driver said, "he must want to pick you guys up. Is that okay? Sorry about this." Sure, we said. No problem. Are you going to be okay? We got out of the car and made for the cab.
The cabbie leaned out of his window, though, and started yelling at us. "What are you doing?" he yelled. "You're gonna get killed!" I made a gesture like, what? "You're going to get killed!" he yelled. "Get back in the car!" So we got back in the car. Sorry, we told our guy, looks like he's not going to pick us up. So our car service guy got us off the Expressway and into Brooklyn Heights (the cab zipped off as inexplicably as it'd shown up) and we waited for him to change the tire while it became more and more Blue O'Clock in the sky.
Nina's friends (and former roommates) via Winnie, Randy and his girlfriend Danica, are moving into my new apartment as my roommates! Psyched about this. Like several of Nina's friends, Randy's a Parsons guy, and he makes things; he's come back to the East coast to do an artist-in-residency thing at Eyebeam for the next several months -- he mumbled something to me about enslaving a bunch of interns and having them implement and improve a web site in PHP, kind of creating the machinery of their own oppression. It's a valuable lesson about work. They are finalizing their move-in this evening. I wanted to have cookies ready for them (Eve sent me a powerful good recipe), but I've been pretty busy (and a bit too hot for cooking).
Winnie and Evan and Nina and I hit up Coney Island on Sunday. We lay around in the sun for a while and then did the bumper cars. And then there was talk of finding a scary ride to go on, and I felt like that day was a day on which I was prepared to go on a scary ride -- like, say, The Cyclone. But The Cyclone wasn't running, and so their gimlet eyes seized upon what was quite possibly the worst and scariest-looking ride in all of Astroland, the Top Spin 2. This picture does not do it justice. The thing is some kind of fear engine, and I knew I couldn't stomach it, so, humiliatingly, I bowed out. Nina, in spite of her obvious fear -- and my observation that none of the participants before us seemed to be very happy as they disembarked -- mastered herself and, along with Winnie and Evan, threw herself under the wheels of spinning and gravity. I was very impressed. The thing was sort of nauseating just to see in action. And everyone seemed to be pretty rattled afterwards, but I still feel a little... I don't know, like I should've been able to do it.
Trivia last night at Greenwich Treehouse, unfortunately sans Emma. Nina, Eve, and Tom were there, though, and we zeroed out in style under the name Dragon Magazine. Who knew that the hula hoop was more popular than Barbie?
Tonight... you. No, wait -- tonight, Joan Jett.
Monday, June 11, 2007
White Summer
The Direct From Hollywood Cemetery show at The Pyramid last Thursday was fantastic! I still don't get why nobody but me is into them. Sure, they're a little stagey, which, if you weren't inclined to like them for other reasons, might only deepen your contempt -- but their songs are incredibly catchy and their playing is incredibly tight, considering they only play about one show a year. I was a little worried they weren't gonna do the intro where the lead singer bursts out of a paper coffin (as the audience chants "Rise, Dr. Fanges!"), but, uh... they did it. They had a smoke machine this time, too. Also kind of central to the show being awesome were these two incredibly drunk girls who were the only people in the audience (well, besides me, naturally) who seemed to realize they were at a rock show. They were hooting and hollering and moshing around and wound up kind of slopping themselves around on the beer-covered floor a whole bunch. It was pretty Blue States Lose, except not in a bathroom and nobody puked. I'm a faithful man, but I will admit being a bit thrilled that they were shoving me and grabbing at my jacket.
On Saturday Katharine and Nina and I hopped the LIRR out to Belmont Park and spent the day betting on the ponies. It was the Belmont Stakes! I'd never actually been to a racetrack before, though I'd done some betting at Emma's OTB birthday party a few years ago. The track facility itself was a little less fancy than I'd expected -- it was kind of a cross between, you know, an OTB, and, say... an airport. The horses were very strong and cool looking, though -- I saw one that I wanted to bet on but couldn't properly identify that had unnervingly blue eyes and was drooling a lot. We got there around Race 5 and stayed until the big one, which was Race 11 or 12. Nina was the big winner in terms of picking the right horses -- she won three or four times with a variety of different bets. (Her get of choice is the boxed exacta, a convenient way of betting on the first and second horses in either order.) K-Rod came in second, and I didn't win anything until the Stakes itself -- I was down about $80 and made $65 of it back on the box with Curlin and Rags to Riches.
A guy near the stables told us that a lot of the earlier races have unreliable handicapping because the owners will dope a second- or third-tier horse in these races, ruining it for a long-term career and possibly incurring penalties themselves but come out ahead on the bet money, so it's sometimes better to bet on a 5-to-1 horse than, say, a 3-to-2. That's consistent with my typical maverick strategy, anyway, even though, you know, said strategy was basically a complete failure. Horse racing is a hard game.
On the way back we sat in front of this quintet of noisy frat boys calling each other faggots and giving each other dead arms. I wondered out loud to Nina whether they'd sing themselves to sleep. Eventually they did.
On Sunday Eve got a bicycle in Williamsburg and she and Nina and I stuffed ourselves practically to the point of, you know, eruption at this barbecue place on Metropolitan Avenue called Fette Sau.
Last night I decided to make the "Sin City" Breakfast Tacos that Robert Rodriguez describes here (somewhat off-puttingly insisting on the native pronunciation of "taco"). They came out pretty okay -- the super-easy filling was easier to make than the tortillas themselves and kind of tastier -- but my advice is to use lard, as he recommends (they didn't have it at the Key Food in Sunset Park!), and to use a little bit more flour than he does, because my tortillas came out pretty sticky and hard to work with. Oh, also it takes way more than 10 minutes. It takes like an hour and a half, and your smoke detector will go off, and you will try to pull it off the wall to take the battery out but then it turns out it's wired into the ceiling and you just broke the fixture and your smoke detector is now hanging by a bunch of stupid wires from the ceiling.
On Saturday Katharine and Nina and I hopped the LIRR out to Belmont Park and spent the day betting on the ponies. It was the Belmont Stakes! I'd never actually been to a racetrack before, though I'd done some betting at Emma's OTB birthday party a few years ago. The track facility itself was a little less fancy than I'd expected -- it was kind of a cross between, you know, an OTB, and, say... an airport. The horses were very strong and cool looking, though -- I saw one that I wanted to bet on but couldn't properly identify that had unnervingly blue eyes and was drooling a lot. We got there around Race 5 and stayed until the big one, which was Race 11 or 12. Nina was the big winner in terms of picking the right horses -- she won three or four times with a variety of different bets. (Her get of choice is the boxed exacta, a convenient way of betting on the first and second horses in either order.) K-Rod came in second, and I didn't win anything until the Stakes itself -- I was down about $80 and made $65 of it back on the box with Curlin and Rags to Riches.
A guy near the stables told us that a lot of the earlier races have unreliable handicapping because the owners will dope a second- or third-tier horse in these races, ruining it for a long-term career and possibly incurring penalties themselves but come out ahead on the bet money, so it's sometimes better to bet on a 5-to-1 horse than, say, a 3-to-2. That's consistent with my typical maverick strategy, anyway, even though, you know, said strategy was basically a complete failure. Horse racing is a hard game.
On the way back we sat in front of this quintet of noisy frat boys calling each other faggots and giving each other dead arms. I wondered out loud to Nina whether they'd sing themselves to sleep. Eventually they did.
On Sunday Eve got a bicycle in Williamsburg and she and Nina and I stuffed ourselves practically to the point of, you know, eruption at this barbecue place on Metropolitan Avenue called Fette Sau.
Last night I decided to make the "Sin City" Breakfast Tacos that Robert Rodriguez describes here (somewhat off-puttingly insisting on the native pronunciation of "taco"). They came out pretty okay -- the super-easy filling was easier to make than the tortillas themselves and kind of tastier -- but my advice is to use lard, as he recommends (they didn't have it at the Key Food in Sunset Park!), and to use a little bit more flour than he does, because my tortillas came out pretty sticky and hard to work with. Oh, also it takes way more than 10 minutes. It takes like an hour and a half, and your smoke detector will go off, and you will try to pull it off the wall to take the battery out but then it turns out it's wired into the ceiling and you just broke the fixture and your smoke detector is now hanging by a bunch of stupid wires from the ceiling.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Fuck Williamsburg
Tom and Emma and I went to trivia night at the Greenwich Treehouse on Monday night, and I'm pleased to say our fortunes improved over the last time she and I'd gone. The Comancheros (nee Brooklyn Excelsiors) finished squarely in the middle -- as opposed to dead last. I give myself props for knowing that Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for Gone With The Wind even though I've never seen it, and for identifying the UB40 song "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You;" I do not deserve props for forgetting to double the length of the hypotenuse in the one math problem of the evening.
It was around 10:00 when trivia night got out and I was tired and drunk, but I decided to head out to Williamsburg anyway to catch the Horrors show at the Luna Lounge. And... well, I'd typed up with a total indictment of the borough and its people, making the claim that I finally understand what everyone is talking about when they say they hate the place, but, you know, it came off a bit shrill. Suffice it to say that the show was not so great, not least of all because the Horrors are not very good live -- kind of a surprise because I'd liked the stuff of theirs that I'd listened to on the 'net. The lead singer has this total lack of charisma and stage presence; he's an obvious, nervous poseur with a lousy voice, and the brief bit of stage-diving he did was a pallid gesture towards proper rock star behavior. The rest of the band was an awkward, silly embarrassment. The audience didn't help, either -- very bridge-and-tunnel, and fucking everyone close to the stage was taking pictures with annoyingly professional-looking cameras. When I finally slouched my way back to Bedford Ave., it took literally 45 minutes for the L to come.
But I hadn't learned my lesson, because last night, I went back out there with Nina and her friends Thomas and Evan to see The Fucking Champs at Studio B. It was a much better show, especially in comparison, except, I guess, for the fact that the audience could not be persuaded to dance around. Oh, and that apparently those guy are an all-instrumental act? Don't know how I missed that. They sound great, though -- and, as Nina pointed out, they are almost certainly better than you at Guitar Hero.
Watching Hoop Dreams right now and eating a veggie burger. As everyone told me at the time it came out, it's pretty amazing. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Picard gets to experience the entire life of that dude on that alien planet in the span of a few minutes. I mean, it's not quite like that, but.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to hit up the Pyramid club for the first time since high school (for a Diplobrats show where I met Archie's dealer / modeling agent) to see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery -- for the first time since they opened for Ted Leo a year and some change ago. Look at their MySpace page, NYC people, and tell me you don't want to come see them with me.
It was around 10:00 when trivia night got out and I was tired and drunk, but I decided to head out to Williamsburg anyway to catch the Horrors show at the Luna Lounge. And... well, I'd typed up with a total indictment of the borough and its people, making the claim that I finally understand what everyone is talking about when they say they hate the place, but, you know, it came off a bit shrill. Suffice it to say that the show was not so great, not least of all because the Horrors are not very good live -- kind of a surprise because I'd liked the stuff of theirs that I'd listened to on the 'net. The lead singer has this total lack of charisma and stage presence; he's an obvious, nervous poseur with a lousy voice, and the brief bit of stage-diving he did was a pallid gesture towards proper rock star behavior. The rest of the band was an awkward, silly embarrassment. The audience didn't help, either -- very bridge-and-tunnel, and fucking everyone close to the stage was taking pictures with annoyingly professional-looking cameras. When I finally slouched my way back to Bedford Ave., it took literally 45 minutes for the L to come.
But I hadn't learned my lesson, because last night, I went back out there with Nina and her friends Thomas and Evan to see The Fucking Champs at Studio B. It was a much better show, especially in comparison, except, I guess, for the fact that the audience could not be persuaded to dance around. Oh, and that apparently those guy are an all-instrumental act? Don't know how I missed that. They sound great, though -- and, as Nina pointed out, they are almost certainly better than you at Guitar Hero.
Watching Hoop Dreams right now and eating a veggie burger. As everyone told me at the time it came out, it's pretty amazing. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Picard gets to experience the entire life of that dude on that alien planet in the span of a few minutes. I mean, it's not quite like that, but.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to hit up the Pyramid club for the first time since high school (for a Diplobrats show where I met Archie's dealer / modeling agent) to see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery -- for the first time since they opened for Ted Leo a year and some change ago. Look at their MySpace page, NYC people, and tell me you don't want to come see them with me.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Bentley Bear
I've basically finished painting my new apartment. That I painted at all may come as a surprise to those of you who have locked horns with me over my admittedly perverse inclination towards plain white walls, but I figured that, you know, this is the first apartment I've moved into entirely on my own and I'm going to make some bold choices. So the Saturday before last I went down to Home Depot with Eve and Nina, and we got paint. I picked a yellowy-green color called Pear for the living room, [in retrospect what seems to be a pretty garish] bright orange called fuckin' Bird Of Paradise for the kitchen and bathroom, and a soft blue color called Little Pond for my bedroom. The next morning my parents came down to see the new place and they helped tape and paint the living room, as did Eve and Nina. It came out great! Pear: Highly recommended for all the dark, cave-like rooms in your house.
The living room's pretty big, so it took about three hours for us to paint the whole thing, and when we were done I took my parents out to Matamoros for tacos. It was one of my more humiliating Matamoros experiences: Since everyone was having tacos, I tried to collate the entire order and tried to read it in English to our waitress -- who I believed spoke English for some reason I can't remember now -- but she didn't understand and went to go get the new guy who speaks English fluently (and manages the place, I think), to whom I read our list half in Spanish and half in English, because he was obviously kind of disgusted by my pronunciation. Eve, sitting directly across from me during this fiasco, flushed visibly. But it ended up okay, because the tacos were off the fucking chain as usual and Nina got a guanabana milkshake that was kind of a revelation.
The rest of the painting I did pretty much solo, and it kind of sucked -- I was sore and praying for it to be, you know, over, the entire time, but I got the kitchen painted and then, by last Friday, my bedroom, though I made a lot of mistakes and there are some fairly visible unpainted spots. And, you know, now it's over.
What else did I do that weekend? Nina and Eve and I attempted to attend this Lightning Bolt show in a weird little room above a garage in Bushwick but were turned away because it was "sold out" -- even though the venue was mostly empty from what we could see. According to some of Eve's friends who were able to gain entry, we didn't miss much, other than the lead singer puking on some of the audience. Instead, we wandered and trained over to Barcade and played games for a while. I discovered that the original Galaga (which they have as part of this three-way Galaga emulator) is way more brutal than the one at Clean Rite and that I don't really like it -- or most old arcade games, for that matter. They're too hard! Eve introduced Nina to this (what I think is an) unplayably frustrating game called Crystal Castles.
Last Thursday I stopped by 471 12th in order to, as bidden, clean the bathroom and the stove and the fridge and sweep the floors and ugh argh bleagh. I guess John didn't think I was gonna do it, though, because he'd changed the locks on the apartment door. Luckily, sort of, the new tenants were moving a few things in at the very moment I showed up and were gracious enough to let me in. All the excess junk had been cleared out and the floors with freshly and beautifully polyurethaned. The stove was still filthy, but the new people told me I was off the hook, since he was going to get a maid service to come in and do it. Two downsides, though -- the screws on my old air conditioner were too stripped for me to remove it from the window, and, more importantly, my Galaga tile mosaic that I'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard for safe-keeping was missing. I'd wanted to cement it to one of the chimney columns on the roof (bought cement and grout and everything), but John'd installed a fire alarm thing on the door to the roof the week before I tried to put it up. I hope, at least, one of the painters took a liking to it and kept it.
On Saturday Nina and I did the First Saturday thing at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn't been for a while, but, as part of my do-everything-possible-this-summer agenda (accompanied by my overstuffed and overambitious Google calendar: HTML and Google Calendar format) I thought I should start doin' it again. First, though, we got some shit at Target and wound up meeting, improbably and awkwardly meeting with the new 12th St. tenants, who did not want to recognize me for some reason. (Maybe they found the dogporn archive?! That's enough to put anyone off their lunch.) I got some t-shirts and then we met up with Eve and some of her friends from work to watch a POV documentary about factory workers in Tijuana, and then spent some time hanging out in the ballroom watching people square dance. I found a large and ornate earring on the ground that must've fallen out of someone's ear -- it was a metal hoop with a bunch of fine threads kind of threaded in and out of the center. I held it up in the air for a little while in the hopes that its owner would recognize it, but she didn't.
Yesterday Ted and Tom and Nina and I drove out to the Red Hook ball fields for some Mexican food. I'd first noticed the food stands a few years ago while driving with Lester but wasn't really keyed in to what an institution they are until recently. The lines are pretty long but we optimized by getting buttery-cheesey-spicy corn, limeade, and raw coconut (which is inedible, as far as I'm concerned -- it's like eating wood! Everyone else was homphed it with gusto, but I had to spit mine out) while we waited for the main event, these delicious and enormous overstuffed taco-like food items called quesohuaraches -- bean paste-stuffed fried tortillas filled with cheese and carne enchilada and other things. Then Nina and I watched this problematic all-day TLC special on this morbid obesity-treatment facility in the city. It was like 12 hours of naughty fat people sneaking food into their rooms and being hoisted around on cranes.
Tonight: Trivia Night with Emma et al. at the Greenwich Treehouse. The first time she and I went, we were full of smug anticipation of victory but ended up losing. With zero points. Better luck this time? Also, The Horrors are playing.
The living room's pretty big, so it took about three hours for us to paint the whole thing, and when we were done I took my parents out to Matamoros for tacos. It was one of my more humiliating Matamoros experiences: Since everyone was having tacos, I tried to collate the entire order and tried to read it in English to our waitress -- who I believed spoke English for some reason I can't remember now -- but she didn't understand and went to go get the new guy who speaks English fluently (and manages the place, I think), to whom I read our list half in Spanish and half in English, because he was obviously kind of disgusted by my pronunciation. Eve, sitting directly across from me during this fiasco, flushed visibly. But it ended up okay, because the tacos were off the fucking chain as usual and Nina got a guanabana milkshake that was kind of a revelation.
The rest of the painting I did pretty much solo, and it kind of sucked -- I was sore and praying for it to be, you know, over, the entire time, but I got the kitchen painted and then, by last Friday, my bedroom, though I made a lot of mistakes and there are some fairly visible unpainted spots. And, you know, now it's over.
What else did I do that weekend? Nina and Eve and I attempted to attend this Lightning Bolt show in a weird little room above a garage in Bushwick but were turned away because it was "sold out" -- even though the venue was mostly empty from what we could see. According to some of Eve's friends who were able to gain entry, we didn't miss much, other than the lead singer puking on some of the audience. Instead, we wandered and trained over to Barcade and played games for a while. I discovered that the original Galaga (which they have as part of this three-way Galaga emulator) is way more brutal than the one at Clean Rite and that I don't really like it -- or most old arcade games, for that matter. They're too hard! Eve introduced Nina to this (what I think is an) unplayably frustrating game called Crystal Castles.
Last Thursday I stopped by 471 12th in order to, as bidden, clean the bathroom and the stove and the fridge and sweep the floors and ugh argh bleagh. I guess John didn't think I was gonna do it, though, because he'd changed the locks on the apartment door. Luckily, sort of, the new tenants were moving a few things in at the very moment I showed up and were gracious enough to let me in. All the excess junk had been cleared out and the floors with freshly and beautifully polyurethaned. The stove was still filthy, but the new people told me I was off the hook, since he was going to get a maid service to come in and do it. Two downsides, though -- the screws on my old air conditioner were too stripped for me to remove it from the window, and, more importantly, my Galaga tile mosaic that I'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard for safe-keeping was missing. I'd wanted to cement it to one of the chimney columns on the roof (bought cement and grout and everything), but John'd installed a fire alarm thing on the door to the roof the week before I tried to put it up. I hope, at least, one of the painters took a liking to it and kept it.
On Saturday Nina and I did the First Saturday thing at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn't been for a while, but, as part of my do-everything-possible-this-summer agenda (accompanied by my overstuffed and overambitious Google calendar: HTML and Google Calendar format) I thought I should start doin' it again. First, though, we got some shit at Target and wound up meeting, improbably and awkwardly meeting with the new 12th St. tenants, who did not want to recognize me for some reason. (Maybe they found the dogporn archive?! That's enough to put anyone off their lunch.) I got some t-shirts and then we met up with Eve and some of her friends from work to watch a POV documentary about factory workers in Tijuana, and then spent some time hanging out in the ballroom watching people square dance. I found a large and ornate earring on the ground that must've fallen out of someone's ear -- it was a metal hoop with a bunch of fine threads kind of threaded in and out of the center. I held it up in the air for a little while in the hopes that its owner would recognize it, but she didn't.
Yesterday Ted and Tom and Nina and I drove out to the Red Hook ball fields for some Mexican food. I'd first noticed the food stands a few years ago while driving with Lester but wasn't really keyed in to what an institution they are until recently. The lines are pretty long but we optimized by getting buttery-cheesey-spicy corn, limeade, and raw coconut (which is inedible, as far as I'm concerned -- it's like eating wood! Everyone else was homphed it with gusto, but I had to spit mine out) while we waited for the main event, these delicious and enormous overstuffed taco-like food items called quesohuaraches -- bean paste-stuffed fried tortillas filled with cheese and carne enchilada and other things. Then Nina and I watched this problematic all-day TLC special on this morbid obesity-treatment facility in the city. It was like 12 hours of naughty fat people sneaking food into their rooms and being hoisted around on cranes.
Tonight: Trivia Night with Emma et al. at the Greenwich Treehouse. The first time she and I went, we were full of smug anticipation of victory but ended up losing. With zero points. Better luck this time? Also, The Horrors are playing.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Harvard Law School
Well, I moved into my new apartment. Eve and Nina came over the two nights before the move and helped me pack everything up. Naturally, it was an odd experience to box up the past three-odd years of my life, but refreshing, too -- I got to jettison about five garbage bags worth of detritus that I and others had accumulated in that creaky old puke-stained place. The move itself was pretty much a snap, even counting all the heavy shit that had to get moved, not least of all this enormous new sofabed I've inherited from my mom's parents. Yeah, I hired movers. But I did it through this kind of mover auction site where you can get competitive bids, and ended up getting some guys who only wanted $275 and who were totally amazing and efficient. (They go by the name "C & C Movers," but Googling that turns up about a dozen different people, so get their info on the CitiMove site, I guess, if you're interested.) We got the whole thing done in about four hours. Nina helped; she has got phenomenal stamina, emotional and otherwise.
The day I really started packing everything up, I took Kitty to Animal Kind for possibly the last time to get some dental work done. She's developed a drooling problem that's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, and Nina'd finally convinced me that I had a moral responsibility to get it fixed. So I brought her in for a physical and they figured out that she had a really rotten tooth in the back on the right. I resisted on skeptical grounds for a little while, but finally caved and dropped her off. In typical Animal Kind fashion, when I picked her up they told me they'd not only extracted the one we'd arranged, but also performed six other "minor extractions." Yes, Kitty still has teeth, but I'm out a half a G, basically. After I picked her up, though, she was really happy and frisky, and I don't think it's just from the drugs they gave her (although she spent the next couple of days bumping into things) -- the drool is gone! Or, at least, she only drools and predictable times now.
I also got rid of my old tower machine; gave it to Tom's gee-eff, Colleen. While I was clearing all the porn and spyware off of it, I came across a bunch of old ASCII art packages and even the original source and layout material for the zine I did in high school with Razor, Halflife. I'll see if I can post some of it in the next week or two -- it'd a bit cliche to say that it's, you know, angsty and adolescent, but I will say that some of it's pretty grim, in terms how hard it sounds like I'm trying to keep the despair out of it.
So, the new place doesn't get that much direct sunlight, let's say, but there are several windows onto this actually very scenic alley between the buildings that's full of beautiful old brickwork -- and a Heathcliff-like arcade of trash cans that a trio of neighborhood cats have exciting and noisy fights over. Kitty is by turns enthralled and terrified. Also, the kitchen, living room, and bathroom windows are all within a few feet of each other outside, so you can throw things from the living room into the kitchen without getting up. I picked up paint today at Home Depot and mom and Eve and Nina are coming over tomorrow to help get things painted; I'll have pictures after that's done.
The bathroom is kind of tiny. So far that's my biggest peeve about the place.
Last weekend, for the second half of our High Line Festival extravaganza, Tom and Eve and Nina and I went to go see Ricky Gervais at the Madison Square Garden theater. Predictably, he was pretty great, although a lot of the material was stuff he'd done before (and is awfully... I don't know, broad, or something. A lot of jokes about animals and fables and what-were-they-thinking observations on figures from world history). David Bowie (I think -- we were sitting in the back row) opened the show with a somewhat timid rendition of the Chubby Little Loser song from the second season of Extras. There were a surprising number of hecklers for the venue and the act, with whom he dealt efficiently.
I have other Things I've Done to talk about, but I'm going to post this now, because it's been too long.
The day I really started packing everything up, I took Kitty to Animal Kind for possibly the last time to get some dental work done. She's developed a drooling problem that's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, and Nina'd finally convinced me that I had a moral responsibility to get it fixed. So I brought her in for a physical and they figured out that she had a really rotten tooth in the back on the right. I resisted on skeptical grounds for a little while, but finally caved and dropped her off. In typical Animal Kind fashion, when I picked her up they told me they'd not only extracted the one we'd arranged, but also performed six other "minor extractions." Yes, Kitty still has teeth, but I'm out a half a G, basically. After I picked her up, though, she was really happy and frisky, and I don't think it's just from the drugs they gave her (although she spent the next couple of days bumping into things) -- the drool is gone! Or, at least, she only drools and predictable times now.
I also got rid of my old tower machine; gave it to Tom's gee-eff, Colleen. While I was clearing all the porn and spyware off of it, I came across a bunch of old ASCII art packages and even the original source and layout material for the zine I did in high school with Razor, Halflife. I'll see if I can post some of it in the next week or two -- it'd a bit cliche to say that it's, you know, angsty and adolescent, but I will say that some of it's pretty grim, in terms how hard it sounds like I'm trying to keep the despair out of it.
So, the new place doesn't get that much direct sunlight, let's say, but there are several windows onto this actually very scenic alley between the buildings that's full of beautiful old brickwork -- and a Heathcliff-like arcade of trash cans that a trio of neighborhood cats have exciting and noisy fights over. Kitty is by turns enthralled and terrified. Also, the kitchen, living room, and bathroom windows are all within a few feet of each other outside, so you can throw things from the living room into the kitchen without getting up. I picked up paint today at Home Depot and mom and Eve and Nina are coming over tomorrow to help get things painted; I'll have pictures after that's done.
The bathroom is kind of tiny. So far that's my biggest peeve about the place.
Last weekend, for the second half of our High Line Festival extravaganza, Tom and Eve and Nina and I went to go see Ricky Gervais at the Madison Square Garden theater. Predictably, he was pretty great, although a lot of the material was stuff he'd done before (and is awfully... I don't know, broad, or something. A lot of jokes about animals and fables and what-were-they-thinking observations on figures from world history). David Bowie (I think -- we were sitting in the back row) opened the show with a somewhat timid rendition of the Chubby Little Loser song from the second season of Extras. There were a surprising number of hecklers for the venue and the act, with whom he dealt efficiently.
I have other Things I've Done to talk about, but I'm going to post this now, because it's been too long.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
This Idea Is Dildos
As prophesied, Ted and Katharine and Eve and I hit up the Arcade Fire show at Radio City on Wednesday. It was great, although we were in the very last row of the mezzanine -- for the best, perhaps, considering what happened down below. I'd bought the tickets in part because I kind of liked the band, but, honestly, more because the High Line Festival was being promoted and discussed as being a New York cultural... happening, and I wanted to be a part of it. And, you know, in my more self-confident moments I'm willing to grant that that's basically bullshit, but I'm glad that I got 'em because I'm getting pretty attached to the music. I feel like a lot of other too-many-people-on-stage bands are too much concerned with making some kind of glorious orchestral cacophony, and, you know, that's novel, I guess, but it doesn't rock. I'm gonna go ahead and say that Arcade Fire is first and foremost a rock and roll band: Their songs've got all the right tense and angry chord resolutions and nice hard beats. It's not happy music. So if they happen to want to dress like characters from Ada (e.g., cute girls in leotards stomping around the stage fiddling with theremins or some shit) and have a couple of dudes fight over bashing an un-mic'd symbol on stage during a song... that's okay with me.
But it would've been cooler if Bowie'd showed up.
I picked up Eve on the way up and got to see her office, which is very cool and professional-looking and in a beautiful old building -- the Prince George -- over on 28th St. Apparently a drug deal went down in the elevator as we were leaving? I failed to pick up on it. Eve, ever-vigilant.
Last night was Ted's birthday, so we all went out to the Olive Vine for dinner. It was the one on 7th Ave. and Lincoln, not the one up by me, but the menu is largely the same. I ordered the Olive Vine Pizza because it is fucking good, babies, and the Lincoln St. location prepares it better than mine, even: Lots of zucchini and some cilantro, even -- which Tom H., with whom we met up at PJ Hanley's afterwards, had never heard of but found delicious. He's from somewhere outside of London, though, so.
Woke up flatulent and slightly hung over this morning and headed over to Southpaw for this punk record swap thing I'd heard they were doing. It ended up being okay, but, true to their word, it was mostly records -- which I, you know, respect, but can't listen to -- and they didn't have any of the obscure stuff I was hoping they would, in particular the two albums ("Mentalenema" and "Nail It Down;" think they're John Peel-recorded) from this great 80s punk band The Abs. They've got a song on this compilation I bought in high school that really stands out and I've been searching unsuccessfully ever since for their shit on CD. The best I've been able to do is determine that some of the original members have re-formed under the aegis of Doctor Bison, but it looks like they don't tour or put out actual albums.
One of the former sysadmins from work just called me up out of the blue to come to his house for a belated Cinco de Mayo party. "We're making tamales and drinking tequila-based drinks," he said. Fuck, that sounds pretty good to me. Is this the start of the summer barbecue season?
But it would've been cooler if Bowie'd showed up.
I picked up Eve on the way up and got to see her office, which is very cool and professional-looking and in a beautiful old building -- the Prince George -- over on 28th St. Apparently a drug deal went down in the elevator as we were leaving? I failed to pick up on it. Eve, ever-vigilant.
Last night was Ted's birthday, so we all went out to the Olive Vine for dinner. It was the one on 7th Ave. and Lincoln, not the one up by me, but the menu is largely the same. I ordered the Olive Vine Pizza because it is fucking good, babies, and the Lincoln St. location prepares it better than mine, even: Lots of zucchini and some cilantro, even -- which Tom H., with whom we met up at PJ Hanley's afterwards, had never heard of but found delicious. He's from somewhere outside of London, though, so.
Woke up flatulent and slightly hung over this morning and headed over to Southpaw for this punk record swap thing I'd heard they were doing. It ended up being okay, but, true to their word, it was mostly records -- which I, you know, respect, but can't listen to -- and they didn't have any of the obscure stuff I was hoping they would, in particular the two albums ("Mentalenema" and "Nail It Down;" think they're John Peel-recorded) from this great 80s punk band The Abs. They've got a song on this compilation I bought in high school that really stands out and I've been searching unsuccessfully ever since for their shit on CD. The best I've been able to do is determine that some of the original members have re-formed under the aegis of Doctor Bison, but it looks like they don't tour or put out actual albums.
One of the former sysadmins from work just called me up out of the blue to come to his house for a belated Cinco de Mayo party. "We're making tamales and drinking tequila-based drinks," he said. Fuck, that sounds pretty good to me. Is this the start of the summer barbecue season?
Sunday, May 06, 2007
It's Mostly Pee
So, I found an apartment, I think. I mean, I signed a lease, so I hope so. As I should have expected, maybe, it is outside of my original price range, and probably a little too small, but I'm fairly psyched about the location: It's on 41st St. out in Sunset Park, very close to a wonderful transportation hub (36th St.) and my wonderful girlfriend (Nina). It was not easy to get, though. (All of my friends have, I think, heard this story, but for those of you out in Internet land...) The place was being shown by this company called Rapid Realty, which is not really a real estate brokerage but a "rental agency" (which means they don't get exclusive rights on showing the apartment, I think) and they were suspiciously eager (manically, even) to get me to put down a deposit and fill out an application on the spot. So I did, with some trepidation, only to get a call the next day from one of their secretaries explaining that they gave me the wrong one. The real application, she said, required several times as much information and cost an extra $100, but needed to be complete by the end of the week or I'd potentially lose my deposit. Could I move in by the 15th? Of course, she said, just get the application in. Could I confirm that it was okay to have a cat? Of course, she said, just get the application in. So I did, even though it ended up requiring around 50 pages of personal information to be reluctantly faxed over to them.
I went to the lease signing up at the management company on Wednesday. Waiting for the representative from Rapid to show up, I went through the lease and the management company's rider. Right up front the rider said, "Absolutely no pets allowed." "Excuse me," I said to the management company guy, "Rapid told me I'd be able to keep my cat." "You have a cat?" he said. "Nobody said anything about a cat." So. The woman from Rapid showed up eventually, but showed up with cash, which Yuco wouldn't accept. They directed her to a check cashing place on 45th that did money orders, but she returned empty-handed because she didn't have ID with her. So I ended up having to go back down with her and hand over my ID and Social Security number at the slightly scuzzy check cashing place to get the money orders. The Yuco people got on the phone with their lawyers and the landlord, and (I think) came to an agreement over Kitty -- she can stay, but I have to send them a picture of her so that they can prove, on an ad hoc basis, that I am not playing cat-bait-and-switch. Jesus.
Enough complaining, though. What else have I been doing? Tom and Jill had birthdays; the 680 people had a barbecue; I chipped a tooth on a salad fork. Work is gearing up to release a new version at the end of this month, which means that I am deliriously tired most days out of the verging-on-55-hour work week these days. The fridge is empty -- except for beer -- because I don't want to buy any food and have it spoil. You know. Moving stuff.
Oh yeah -- I got tickets to some of the shows in the High Line Festival. Gonna go see Arcade Fire this Wednesday and then The Gerv in a few weeks.
I went to see Talk Radio last night at the Longacre Theater with Ted and Emma and Katharine. Liev Schreiber, who is the star, is pretty fucking fantastic, but the rest of the actors are not really very good, and the play itself is all over the map in terms of its intent. It's a lot like Network in that regard -- angry, but not clear enough about what it's angry at -- and the hero, played by Schreiber, is pretty much a cipher (which is maybe the point? Not sure). As I was saying to Ted, maybe the 80s (when the play is set) were some kind of watershed period for cultural / political criticism -- like, the very act of complaint was somehow revolutionary? My memory is kind of hazy on the topic, being mostly occupied with plotlines from The Real Ghostbusters.
The high point of the evening, though, came as we were leaving the theater and passing by the side door where all the fans were waiting to get Liev Schreiber's autograph. I was wearing my laptop bag and wasn't really paying attention to where I was going, and I bumped into the rear view mirror of Liev's limousine. His driver yelled, "Hey, look where you're going!" I turned around and made a reciprocal gesture and kept walking -- but Katharine apparently heard him come back with "retard." Awesome.
I went to the lease signing up at the management company on Wednesday. Waiting for the representative from Rapid to show up, I went through the lease and the management company's rider. Right up front the rider said, "Absolutely no pets allowed." "Excuse me," I said to the management company guy, "Rapid told me I'd be able to keep my cat." "You have a cat?" he said. "Nobody said anything about a cat." So. The woman from Rapid showed up eventually, but showed up with cash, which Yuco wouldn't accept. They directed her to a check cashing place on 45th that did money orders, but she returned empty-handed because she didn't have ID with her. So I ended up having to go back down with her and hand over my ID and Social Security number at the slightly scuzzy check cashing place to get the money orders. The Yuco people got on the phone with their lawyers and the landlord, and (I think) came to an agreement over Kitty -- she can stay, but I have to send them a picture of her so that they can prove, on an ad hoc basis, that I am not playing cat-bait-and-switch. Jesus.
Enough complaining, though. What else have I been doing? Tom and Jill had birthdays; the 680 people had a barbecue; I chipped a tooth on a salad fork. Work is gearing up to release a new version at the end of this month, which means that I am deliriously tired most days out of the verging-on-55-hour work week these days. The fridge is empty -- except for beer -- because I don't want to buy any food and have it spoil. You know. Moving stuff.
Oh yeah -- I got tickets to some of the shows in the High Line Festival. Gonna go see Arcade Fire this Wednesday and then The Gerv in a few weeks.
I went to see Talk Radio last night at the Longacre Theater with Ted and Emma and Katharine. Liev Schreiber, who is the star, is pretty fucking fantastic, but the rest of the actors are not really very good, and the play itself is all over the map in terms of its intent. It's a lot like Network in that regard -- angry, but not clear enough about what it's angry at -- and the hero, played by Schreiber, is pretty much a cipher (which is maybe the point? Not sure). As I was saying to Ted, maybe the 80s (when the play is set) were some kind of watershed period for cultural / political criticism -- like, the very act of complaint was somehow revolutionary? My memory is kind of hazy on the topic, being mostly occupied with plotlines from The Real Ghostbusters.
The high point of the evening, though, came as we were leaving the theater and passing by the side door where all the fans were waiting to get Liev Schreiber's autograph. I was wearing my laptop bag and wasn't really paying attention to where I was going, and I bumped into the rear view mirror of Liev's limousine. His driver yelled, "Hey, look where you're going!" I turned around and made a reciprocal gesture and kept walking -- but Katharine apparently heard him come back with "retard." Awesome.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Shit City
Pant, pant. Mo'Nique tired, babies.
John, my landlord, called last Monday to tell me what I already knew, which is that my lease is coming up. He gave me the option to renew it, but I'd be hankering for a change of scenery for a while now, so I told him I'd be moving on. Au revoir, old 8th & 12th! I want to live somewhere a little less baby-centric, a little cheaper, and Jesus fuck on a better subway. Over the past few days I've been looking for (and at a few) places in Sunset Park, South Slope, and Greenwood Heights -- basically, 4th and 5th Ave. below 50th St. is my target area.
Liz hooked me up with a former buddy of hers from Corcoran who, given my somewhat stringent price demands, immediately showed me the perfect place, a huge studio, over on 45th and 5th. Too good to be true, of course: The landlord won't take cats ("If I say yes to cats, I can't say no to dogs," he reportedly claimed. What?). Anyone want Kitty? Alas, she is the lingering -- and, sad to say, sometimes unwelcome -- legacy of Saint Mer Reese. Then he showed me this place over on 43rd and 9th which was kind of dingy and dark but had a nice little courtyard. But, you know, I don't know, no one seems to want to come visit me as it stands -- I can't ask my friends to hike up to fucking 9th Ave. This morning I went to go see a place over on 21st and 3rd, which was basically acceptable, except that it has an enormous kitchen and a tiny little living room (partitioned by a weird little narrow countertop, and it's $1100, which is a bit more than I think it's worth.
It was raining and I got soaked, and, to be honest, I'm feeling kind of discouraged and lonely. Whatever -- I've only been looking for a couple of days. Searching for places on the Internet (i.e., poring over craigslist ads written in halting and uninformative English) is driving me fucking nuts, though. Here's what I would like from a real estate listings site:
Last Wednesday I went to see this Spunk Lads show at Southpaw. It's been a while since I've been to, you know, a shitty, neighborhood punk show along, and it was kind of nice to dance around to a band I'd never heard before but who are kind of good. The thing is, this show was apparently a benefit for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, whose mission I couldn't be more conflicted about. Guess what, all you I-Love-Brownstone-Brooklyn aristocrats: If you own property and it's worth several million dollars, you don't get to take to appropriate, you know, countercultural dialectic with a straight face. The 'Lads played a song with the cringe-worthy chorus "This is what hypocrisy looks like / This is what democracy looks like;" they and another band in the lineup covered Redemption Song. I mean, for fuck's sake. Nonetheless, the Spunk Lads are basically a cool band, and their guitar player, Bloody Dick, literally threw his guitar (his signature move, research reveals), without looking, right into the audience as he walked off stage. The 'Tube has some video of the show. Also check out the song "Ink" -- probably their best -- on their MySpace.
So that guy Kurt Vonnegut's dead. Everyone on MeFi is going kind of apeshit with grief, and, you know, yeah, it's sad, but the guy only brought so much to the table, idea-wise. He's probably responsible for the uncompromising Utopian aspect of my political orientation, but I feel like too many people mistake his particular, peculiar variety of reductionist profundity for, you know... actual intellectual effort. But he's dead, so I guess I should say something like "So it goes."
John, my landlord, called last Monday to tell me what I already knew, which is that my lease is coming up. He gave me the option to renew it, but I'd be hankering for a change of scenery for a while now, so I told him I'd be moving on. Au revoir, old 8th & 12th! I want to live somewhere a little less baby-centric, a little cheaper, and Jesus fuck on a better subway. Over the past few days I've been looking for (and at a few) places in Sunset Park, South Slope, and Greenwood Heights -- basically, 4th and 5th Ave. below 50th St. is my target area.
Liz hooked me up with a former buddy of hers from Corcoran who, given my somewhat stringent price demands, immediately showed me the perfect place, a huge studio, over on 45th and 5th. Too good to be true, of course: The landlord won't take cats ("If I say yes to cats, I can't say no to dogs," he reportedly claimed. What?). Anyone want Kitty? Alas, she is the lingering -- and, sad to say, sometimes unwelcome -- legacy of Saint Mer Reese. Then he showed me this place over on 43rd and 9th which was kind of dingy and dark but had a nice little courtyard. But, you know, I don't know, no one seems to want to come visit me as it stands -- I can't ask my friends to hike up to fucking 9th Ave. This morning I went to go see a place over on 21st and 3rd, which was basically acceptable, except that it has an enormous kitchen and a tiny little living room (partitioned by a weird little narrow countertop, and it's $1100, which is a bit more than I think it's worth.
It was raining and I got soaked, and, to be honest, I'm feeling kind of discouraged and lonely. Whatever -- I've only been looking for a couple of days. Searching for places on the Internet (i.e., poring over craigslist ads written in halting and uninformative English) is driving me fucking nuts, though. Here's what I would like from a real estate listings site:
- A discrete keyword description of the size of the apartment (e.g., "STUDIO" or "1BR")
- The exact street address
- The price
- Absolutely nothing else
Last Wednesday I went to see this Spunk Lads show at Southpaw. It's been a while since I've been to, you know, a shitty, neighborhood punk show along, and it was kind of nice to dance around to a band I'd never heard before but who are kind of good. The thing is, this show was apparently a benefit for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, whose mission I couldn't be more conflicted about. Guess what, all you I-Love-Brownstone-Brooklyn aristocrats: If you own property and it's worth several million dollars, you don't get to take to appropriate, you know, countercultural dialectic with a straight face. The 'Lads played a song with the cringe-worthy chorus "This is what hypocrisy looks like / This is what democracy looks like;" they and another band in the lineup covered Redemption Song. I mean, for fuck's sake. Nonetheless, the Spunk Lads are basically a cool band, and their guitar player, Bloody Dick, literally threw his guitar (his signature move, research reveals), without looking, right into the audience as he walked off stage. The 'Tube has some video of the show. Also check out the song "Ink" -- probably their best -- on their MySpace.
So that guy Kurt Vonnegut's dead. Everyone on MeFi is going kind of apeshit with grief, and, you know, yeah, it's sad, but the guy only brought so much to the table, idea-wise. He's probably responsible for the uncompromising Utopian aspect of my political orientation, but I feel like too many people mistake his particular, peculiar variety of reductionist profundity for, you know... actual intellectual effort. But he's dead, so I guess I should say something like "So it goes."
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Blogging The FSF 2007
I'm typing this up on Sunday morning on the F train back to 7th Ave. after de-busing off the Lucky Star bus from Boston.
True to my word, I took the bus up to Brookline last night and stayed at Joel's. His new house is fucking huge, and, using some polite mathematical estimates, he got it for a steal -- I guess because it's a bit run down in some fairly significant ways. Whatever, man. It's got a fucking turret.
The bus ride was great until it got dark -- looking out the window of a moving vehicle is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, but when you can't see anything, you can get kind of button-holed by grim thoughts. I listened to a couple series of The Ricky Gervais show, which helped. After getting out at South Station, I hopped the Red line to Park St. and then got on the Green line, which I'd never ridden before. The trains are much shorter than the ones on the Red line, and the individual cars are tiny, too. And, for a Friday night on a train headed to the suburbs, it was fucking packed with -- from what I could tell -- drunk townies. Halfway along, these two pimply post-high-schoolers got on, each carrying a six-pack. One of them sort of punched me in the chest with his, kind of gripping it like brass knuckles. "Yo," I said. The other, noticing my leather jacket, I guess, asked, "Hey, do you listen to punk music?" "Yeah," I said. "What kind of punk music?" Because I'd been sort of blurting it all week, I came up with "POGUES!" "The Pogues?" said the first one. "Fuck yeah -- that's real fuckin' Irish music!" Did I mention these guys were Irish? They had, you know, real fuckin' Irish faces. Luckily, it was almost my stop, because I was sort of out of things to say. The two dudes, as I was getting off, turned to a couple of high school girls sitting next to me and opened with "Yo, what are you guys doin' tonight? Are you getting fucked up?"
The turret is actually the library room, complete with circular book cases and everything. There's also an outdoor jacuzzi and a fucking bar built into a wall in the basement. The room I was sleeping in had a "secret door" that they hadn't seen when the agent was showing them the place that led into a weird, practically windowless, toothpaste-green room with a bench with an air conditioner above it built into the wall. Joel and Liz surmised that this must have been some kind of rec room, but they really don't know for sure. Past that room was another huge, weird empty room, this one with stairs that led up to an enormous furnished attic whose interior measure was longer than its exterior measure. Also there was a black hole at its center and a howling ghost from another dimension that eats souls just kind of hanging out. Did anyone else read that book? Come on.
We drank wine until 4:00 AM and listened to the new Arcade Fire album. I woke up at 8:00, still kind of drunk, and called a cab to get to the stop for the Green line. I actually got to the meeting in the middle of the first speech this time instead of the fifth. This year it was held in a room at the back of Building 3, which is the one with the columns -- really beautiful.
(Does anyone remember a web site from around 2000 called geekporn.com? It's something else now, but at the time it was a kind of amateur porn site dreamed up some MIT kids that was supposed to feature pictures of men and women of the type you might see in your Computer Science class. Unfortunately, not to make a cliched joke here, that was the reason it didn't really catch on. But there was this really, really gorgeous girl in some of the pictures -- I mean, the rest of the people were, you know, perfectly adequate, but this girl was phenomenal -- and her thing was posing naked in front of Building 3 with a bunch of physics equations drawn all over her body in black marker. I know, you're rolling your eyes. But so now I've been there.)
Gerald Sussman gave the same talk he always gives, focusing on what he refers to as "robust systems" and "paranoid programming" -- pretty much, just that systems should be highly interoperable and flexible in terms of the input they accept and the output they produce. Eh, I think it's debatable. But the innovative thing he brought up this time around was some Scheme syntax he'd developed for writing expression-matching rules. Not just your standard string-matching regexp stuff: These rules performed higher-order speculative matches on Scheme expressions similar to the way ML matches function signatures -- the "/" rule, for example, might match a numerical sub-expression by factoring it. He also indulged in a brief digression based on a description of how a particular species of tropical frog goes through one of its life stages in a strikingly mammalian way (something about the way the way the developing tadpole is positioned relative to the egg) but is otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from other types of frogs. Frogness, Sussman explained, is not defined procedurally.
RMS was in a much better mood this year than he was the previous two years, when he'd kind of slouched into the room and passed out on the table. This time around, he was wearing a button that said "Emacs Loves Every User" -- as opposed to organized religion, I think, don't remember his explanation. He gave a very articulate argument against software patents, bringing up the most convincing rationale I've yet heard, namely: Software source code is more or less acknowledged to be a type of speech and as such it's theoretically impossible and practically infeasible to enumerate the mathematical ideas -- the currency of software patents -- expressed by a program. He mentioned, anecdotally, a case in which the authors of XYWrite (the word processor I used to write practically all my papers in elementary school and junior high) had to send out a downgrade to their users to defuse a patent dispute over automatic word abbreviation -- the patent was later overturned based on prior art found in Emacs. "It's nice to know that I've had at least one patentable idea in my life," said RMS.
Eben Moglen was up next. He's kind of the reason that I've been going to these meetings -- he's an incredibly articulate and charismatic speaker who can go for hours, literally, without consulting any notes or saying "um." He was a bit more brusque than I remembered him being last year and didn't seem to be amused by RMS cheerfully interrupting him at times. As usual, the focus of his talk was on the obstacles facing the world of free software for the coming year -- last year it was patents, this year it's mainly DRM (but also patents) -- and, as usual, he was optimistic. "The breaking point of DRM is nearly upon us," he said. The two main proponents of DRM, he said, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have an uphill battle ahead of them in terms of making the case for their respective new platforms. Jobs, Moglen said, is hoping that the iPhone is so cool that it won't matter to users that it's completely crippled; Gates is hoping "that an operating system that can be subverted by a 12-year-old to allow him to control his own hardware and destroy everyone else's is a salable proposition."
He discussed at length the provisions in GPLv3 designed to combat DRM, in particular the current peculiar industry practice of selling hardware at a loss and recouping money on subscription-based access to restricted content. Companies like TiVo are going to suffer if and when people relicense under the GPLv3, and they've already attempted to bargain with the FSF -- to no avail -- by offering to remove the encryption on downloaded content as long as the connection to the TV guide service can remain protected. ("You are are under the mistaken impression," Moglen recounts telling them, "that my client is the Free Movie Foundation.") "The tide of DRM is going to turn this year," he said. "If I am standing here next year and it hasn't, you know what to throw at me." RMS piped up from the back of the room: "DVDs?"
As usual, he ended with some rousing bon mots: "You have to be bigger than about a hundred billion dollars a year these days before your CEO doesn't return our phone calls." Then, to the audience, he said, "I ask you to do a thing that has never been done before. I ask you to rearrange Microsoft's patent portfolio for them."
After Moglen's talk, there was a Q & A session with the FSF board members. Thankfully, this year featured fewer people trying to stump RMS with GPL loopholes, just general public flailing over ways of increasing acceptance of Free Software and punishing its detractors. Among the revelations: IBM has 6 full-time people tracking the revisions of GPLv3; there's a good chance Sun might be willing to release Solaris under some variant of the GPL (although Sussman was skeptical: "Humans are so complicated," he mused. "I prefer to deal with machines").
Mako Hill gave a short talk about his draft of a definition of what he calls "Free Culture." I tried to think of reasons I'm opposed to the idea but couldn't get anything articulate together. And that was it for the meeting!
As per tradition, a fair number of people went out to eat at The Middle East afterwards, and this year I joined them. At first I was a little shy, but I was sitting next to Brett Smith and Mako, neither of whom are shy themselves, so the chatter was pretty lively and I got sucked in. Most of the people who come to these meetings seem like they're actively involved in a bunch of pretty important projects -- Wikia, the Linux kernel, Gnome -- and kind of all know each other already, and I'm just this guy who writes a little Scheme and just shows up sometimes. I don't feel like anybody really knows who I am. Still, listening to people talk about all this stuff that we're all pretty passionate about put me in mind of time I spent in college feeling like all I really had to do to accomplish big things was put my shoulder to it and work. Like I said to Eve afterwards, "I want to run away and join the circus. But I think the circus is called MIT."
True to my word, I took the bus up to Brookline last night and stayed at Joel's. His new house is fucking huge, and, using some polite mathematical estimates, he got it for a steal -- I guess because it's a bit run down in some fairly significant ways. Whatever, man. It's got a fucking turret.
The bus ride was great until it got dark -- looking out the window of a moving vehicle is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, but when you can't see anything, you can get kind of button-holed by grim thoughts. I listened to a couple series of The Ricky Gervais show, which helped. After getting out at South Station, I hopped the Red line to Park St. and then got on the Green line, which I'd never ridden before. The trains are much shorter than the ones on the Red line, and the individual cars are tiny, too. And, for a Friday night on a train headed to the suburbs, it was fucking packed with -- from what I could tell -- drunk townies. Halfway along, these two pimply post-high-schoolers got on, each carrying a six-pack. One of them sort of punched me in the chest with his, kind of gripping it like brass knuckles. "Yo," I said. The other, noticing my leather jacket, I guess, asked, "Hey, do you listen to punk music?" "Yeah," I said. "What kind of punk music?" Because I'd been sort of blurting it all week, I came up with "POGUES!" "The Pogues?" said the first one. "Fuck yeah -- that's real fuckin' Irish music!" Did I mention these guys were Irish? They had, you know, real fuckin' Irish faces. Luckily, it was almost my stop, because I was sort of out of things to say. The two dudes, as I was getting off, turned to a couple of high school girls sitting next to me and opened with "Yo, what are you guys doin' tonight? Are you getting fucked up?"
The turret is actually the library room, complete with circular book cases and everything. There's also an outdoor jacuzzi and a fucking bar built into a wall in the basement. The room I was sleeping in had a "secret door" that they hadn't seen when the agent was showing them the place that led into a weird, practically windowless, toothpaste-green room with a bench with an air conditioner above it built into the wall. Joel and Liz surmised that this must have been some kind of rec room, but they really don't know for sure. Past that room was another huge, weird empty room, this one with stairs that led up to an enormous furnished attic whose interior measure was longer than its exterior measure. Also there was a black hole at its center and a howling ghost from another dimension that eats souls just kind of hanging out. Did anyone else read that book? Come on.
We drank wine until 4:00 AM and listened to the new Arcade Fire album. I woke up at 8:00, still kind of drunk, and called a cab to get to the stop for the Green line. I actually got to the meeting in the middle of the first speech this time instead of the fifth. This year it was held in a room at the back of Building 3, which is the one with the columns -- really beautiful.
(Does anyone remember a web site from around 2000 called geekporn.com? It's something else now, but at the time it was a kind of amateur porn site dreamed up some MIT kids that was supposed to feature pictures of men and women of the type you might see in your Computer Science class. Unfortunately, not to make a cliched joke here, that was the reason it didn't really catch on. But there was this really, really gorgeous girl in some of the pictures -- I mean, the rest of the people were, you know, perfectly adequate, but this girl was phenomenal -- and her thing was posing naked in front of Building 3 with a bunch of physics equations drawn all over her body in black marker. I know, you're rolling your eyes. But so now I've been there.)
Gerald Sussman gave the same talk he always gives, focusing on what he refers to as "robust systems" and "paranoid programming" -- pretty much, just that systems should be highly interoperable and flexible in terms of the input they accept and the output they produce. Eh, I think it's debatable. But the innovative thing he brought up this time around was some Scheme syntax he'd developed for writing expression-matching rules. Not just your standard string-matching regexp stuff: These rules performed higher-order speculative matches on Scheme expressions similar to the way ML matches function signatures -- the "/" rule, for example, might match a numerical sub-expression by factoring it. He also indulged in a brief digression based on a description of how a particular species of tropical frog goes through one of its life stages in a strikingly mammalian way (something about the way the way the developing tadpole is positioned relative to the egg) but is otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from other types of frogs. Frogness, Sussman explained, is not defined procedurally.
RMS was in a much better mood this year than he was the previous two years, when he'd kind of slouched into the room and passed out on the table. This time around, he was wearing a button that said "Emacs Loves Every User" -- as opposed to organized religion, I think, don't remember his explanation. He gave a very articulate argument against software patents, bringing up the most convincing rationale I've yet heard, namely: Software source code is more or less acknowledged to be a type of speech and as such it's theoretically impossible and practically infeasible to enumerate the mathematical ideas -- the currency of software patents -- expressed by a program. He mentioned, anecdotally, a case in which the authors of XYWrite (the word processor I used to write practically all my papers in elementary school and junior high) had to send out a downgrade to their users to defuse a patent dispute over automatic word abbreviation -- the patent was later overturned based on prior art found in Emacs. "It's nice to know that I've had at least one patentable idea in my life," said RMS.
Eben Moglen was up next. He's kind of the reason that I've been going to these meetings -- he's an incredibly articulate and charismatic speaker who can go for hours, literally, without consulting any notes or saying "um." He was a bit more brusque than I remembered him being last year and didn't seem to be amused by RMS cheerfully interrupting him at times. As usual, the focus of his talk was on the obstacles facing the world of free software for the coming year -- last year it was patents, this year it's mainly DRM (but also patents) -- and, as usual, he was optimistic. "The breaking point of DRM is nearly upon us," he said. The two main proponents of DRM, he said, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have an uphill battle ahead of them in terms of making the case for their respective new platforms. Jobs, Moglen said, is hoping that the iPhone is so cool that it won't matter to users that it's completely crippled; Gates is hoping "that an operating system that can be subverted by a 12-year-old to allow him to control his own hardware and destroy everyone else's is a salable proposition."
He discussed at length the provisions in GPLv3 designed to combat DRM, in particular the current peculiar industry practice of selling hardware at a loss and recouping money on subscription-based access to restricted content. Companies like TiVo are going to suffer if and when people relicense under the GPLv3, and they've already attempted to bargain with the FSF -- to no avail -- by offering to remove the encryption on downloaded content as long as the connection to the TV guide service can remain protected. ("You are are under the mistaken impression," Moglen recounts telling them, "that my client is the Free Movie Foundation.") "The tide of DRM is going to turn this year," he said. "If I am standing here next year and it hasn't, you know what to throw at me." RMS piped up from the back of the room: "DVDs?"
As usual, he ended with some rousing bon mots: "You have to be bigger than about a hundred billion dollars a year these days before your CEO doesn't return our phone calls." Then, to the audience, he said, "I ask you to do a thing that has never been done before. I ask you to rearrange Microsoft's patent portfolio for them."
After Moglen's talk, there was a Q & A session with the FSF board members. Thankfully, this year featured fewer people trying to stump RMS with GPL loopholes, just general public flailing over ways of increasing acceptance of Free Software and punishing its detractors. Among the revelations: IBM has 6 full-time people tracking the revisions of GPLv3; there's a good chance Sun might be willing to release Solaris under some variant of the GPL (although Sussman was skeptical: "Humans are so complicated," he mused. "I prefer to deal with machines").
Mako Hill gave a short talk about his draft of a definition of what he calls "Free Culture." I tried to think of reasons I'm opposed to the idea but couldn't get anything articulate together. And that was it for the meeting!
As per tradition, a fair number of people went out to eat at The Middle East afterwards, and this year I joined them. At first I was a little shy, but I was sitting next to Brett Smith and Mako, neither of whom are shy themselves, so the chatter was pretty lively and I got sucked in. Most of the people who come to these meetings seem like they're actively involved in a bunch of pretty important projects -- Wikia, the Linux kernel, Gnome -- and kind of all know each other already, and I'm just this guy who writes a little Scheme and just shows up sometimes. I don't feel like anybody really knows who I am. Still, listening to people talk about all this stuff that we're all pretty passionate about put me in mind of time I spent in college feeling like all I really had to do to accomplish big things was put my shoulder to it and work. Like I said to Eve afterwards, "I want to run away and join the circus. But I think the circus is called MIT."
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Drawings Of Running And Jumping Men
The weather is finally acceptable. I feel practically optimistic! But not quite.
I'm headed up to Cambridge tomorrow for the annual FSF meeting. Usually I wake up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning and high-tail it over to East Broadway to hop on Fung-Wah, but this time around, I thought I'd be smart and get there on time. I'm gonna head up after work tomorrow and spend the night at Joel's new house in Boston.
Last night I felt like going for a run -- anxious, depressed, in need of endorphins -- but Eve had called and had offered to cook food for me, so I was faced with a dilemma. In a slightly unorthodox move, I decided to jog over to her house instead of around the park. It turned out to be just the right idea -- I haven't gone running in over six months, and the 11 horizontal blocks and 3 long vertical blocks to Eve's place were practically too much for me. I'd brought a change of underclothes and took a quick shower once I'd gotten there. Her shower is more of a powerful misting than it is a shower, but it gets you clean nonetheless. In return for the delicious tofu stir-fry she'd cooked for me and her roommate, Susan, I popped in a new wireless router for her and set it up to replace one that'd died last week.
This evening I swung by The Annex to see Contramano on a tip from flavorpill. The band that opened for them was mopey and shitty, but Contramano themselves were pretty badass. The lead singer is, apparently, a classically-trained cellist from Brazil, and for many of the songs he plays what appears to be some kind of modified cello with no body, only the neck and some pickups. (Update: Squick tells me this is what electric cellos look like.) For other songs, he ditched an instrument entirely and just kind of roamed around the audience dancing with the girls and singing into a wireless mic. The lyrics were not, you know, Yeats or some shit, but he had a nicely plaintive delivery and the playing by all the members was vigorous. They were playing over a fucking backing track, though -- one that had drums, even. What the shit is up with people doing that these days? I feel like a lot of people are doing that these days.
The bartender comped me a second Jameson's and ginger ale for some reason and made it very strong. Usually that's a real pick-me-up, but tonight it just kind of made me sulkier. I was still feeling really drunk when I got home, hours after slurping it down. It's been a drinky week, what with Emma getting unfairly sacked by the Voice. Everyone's been getting loaded.
I'm headed up to Cambridge tomorrow for the annual FSF meeting. Usually I wake up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning and high-tail it over to East Broadway to hop on Fung-Wah, but this time around, I thought I'd be smart and get there on time. I'm gonna head up after work tomorrow and spend the night at Joel's new house in Boston.
Last night I felt like going for a run -- anxious, depressed, in need of endorphins -- but Eve had called and had offered to cook food for me, so I was faced with a dilemma. In a slightly unorthodox move, I decided to jog over to her house instead of around the park. It turned out to be just the right idea -- I haven't gone running in over six months, and the 11 horizontal blocks and 3 long vertical blocks to Eve's place were practically too much for me. I'd brought a change of underclothes and took a quick shower once I'd gotten there. Her shower is more of a powerful misting than it is a shower, but it gets you clean nonetheless. In return for the delicious tofu stir-fry she'd cooked for me and her roommate, Susan, I popped in a new wireless router for her and set it up to replace one that'd died last week.
This evening I swung by The Annex to see Contramano on a tip from flavorpill. The band that opened for them was mopey and shitty, but Contramano themselves were pretty badass. The lead singer is, apparently, a classically-trained cellist from Brazil, and for many of the songs he plays what appears to be some kind of modified cello with no body, only the neck and some pickups. (Update: Squick tells me this is what electric cellos look like.) For other songs, he ditched an instrument entirely and just kind of roamed around the audience dancing with the girls and singing into a wireless mic. The lyrics were not, you know, Yeats or some shit, but he had a nicely plaintive delivery and the playing by all the members was vigorous. They were playing over a fucking backing track, though -- one that had drums, even. What the shit is up with people doing that these days? I feel like a lot of people are doing that these days.
The bartender comped me a second Jameson's and ginger ale for some reason and made it very strong. Usually that's a real pick-me-up, but tonight it just kind of made me sulkier. I was still feeling really drunk when I got home, hours after slurping it down. It's been a drinky week, what with Emma getting unfairly sacked by the Voice. Everyone's been getting loaded.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Some Kind Of Punk Rock Satyr From Under The Bog
Pogues at Roseland; St. Patrick's Day! I'd been in kind of a bad mood all day, but not really for any good reason. I guess I was a little disappointed because some people I'd had extra tickets for had canceled on me, including my dad and Joel and Liz, the three of whom'd been sort of central to my idea of how the night was supposed to go. I suppose it was to be expected -- after all, I had eight tickets, not counting the ones for me and Nina. Why so many, you ask? Well, when it came to my attention that tickets for this show were available, I thought I might snag maybe four. But the page where you say how many you want had two drop-down menus: One for tickets and one, as it turned out, for tickets plus donations to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund. For some reason, this was hard for me to figure out, and, being a generous soul, I ended up getting four regular tickets and four Katrina tickets. (In my defense, I'm a software author, not a software user.) The roster, by showtime:
The Pogues were already on stage by the time Squick and Katharine and Nina and Eve and I got there -- strains of what I think was A Pair of Brown Eyes were wafting through the lobby. The ballroom itself was huge, and complete packed with people, most of them big and fat and Irish. (As per my usual insecure macho boyfriend bullshit, I tried to suss out whose ass I could kick if it "came down to it" -- I estimated no one's.) We got to a place under one of the balconies where we could sort of see the stage and started insinuating ourselves into the crowd. Shane was in a wheelchair -- probably because of the ligaments in his knee that he'd torn a few nights earlier, but maybe, you know, just because -- and he presided over the pit in front of the stage like some kind of dyspeptic, half-comatose monarch. Everyone else on stage looked about twenty years younger than him, except for the roadie who wheeled him, presumably, back and forth from the bathroom / bar ("It's a long way to Tipperary," explained Jem Finer at one point, "but it's an even longer way to the toilets"). I couldn't understand most of what he said besides the names of the songs that he called out, and I think I did better than most people. The songs, from what I can remember, in no particular order:
I guess what appeals to me about the Pogues is that their aesthetic -- the implication that they're a bunch of sleazy, itinerant pub types whose drummer just happened to start playing in double time without taking the cigarette out of his mouth -- suggests that punk rock is a potential branch in the evolution of every musical genre, instead of something that Malcolm McLaren and a bunch of art school dropouts actively cooked up in a clothing store in King's Cross. That is to say, the same way The Ramones are 50s pop "infected" by the punk bug, queered and twisted and made dark, The Pogues are Irish folk "punked," Irish culture itself being maybe a punk version of England's, Shane MacGowan some kind of red-headed Tony Blair rotted out and jagged around the edges. Unfortunately, seeing one of these bands in their twilight years (cf. The Buzzcocks) kind of kills this line of reasoning, because all the dudes in the band are into wearing comfortable clothes and the idea of "putting on a good show" for the "fans." I'm not complaining, really. This is the only way I get to see them.
I should point out that the title of this post refers not to Shane, although it could, but to a dude that Nina and I were standing behind at the show, this weird white-dude-with-dreads guy who was wearing a stitched-together leather jerkin. Nina coined said phrase and also observed that he looked "very Renn faire." So.
I think I'm gonna clean the toilet tonight. Not sure; I'm psyching myself up for it, drinking a too-strong Jameson's and ginger ale.
You guys remember the scary janitor on The Office -- the one who was played by Stephen Merchant's dad? I saw a guy on the subway on the way home who looked like a droopier, crazier version of Ron Merchant. He was kind of rifling through a pile of old newspapers that he was holding between his legs. The papers kept slipping off his lap and the seat next to him where he'd piled them and onto the floor. He leaned forwards to grab them. "Oh, no," he'd say. "Oh, God!"
- Nina and I
- Eve
- Squick
- Katharine and her dude
- Tom
- Tom's friends Eric and Sarah
The Pogues were already on stage by the time Squick and Katharine and Nina and Eve and I got there -- strains of what I think was A Pair of Brown Eyes were wafting through the lobby. The ballroom itself was huge, and complete packed with people, most of them big and fat and Irish. (As per my usual insecure macho boyfriend bullshit, I tried to suss out whose ass I could kick if it "came down to it" -- I estimated no one's.) We got to a place under one of the balconies where we could sort of see the stage and started insinuating ourselves into the crowd. Shane was in a wheelchair -- probably because of the ligaments in his knee that he'd torn a few nights earlier, but maybe, you know, just because -- and he presided over the pit in front of the stage like some kind of dyspeptic, half-comatose monarch. Everyone else on stage looked about twenty years younger than him, except for the roadie who wheeled him, presumably, back and forth from the bathroom / bar ("It's a long way to Tipperary," explained Jem Finer at one point, "but it's an even longer way to the toilets"). I couldn't understand most of what he said besides the names of the songs that he called out, and I think I did better than most people. The songs, from what I can remember, in no particular order:
- A Pair of Brown Eyes
- A Rainy Night In Soho (dedicated to Victoria)
- The Repeal of the Licensing Laws
- The Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn
- Poor Paddy
- The Irish Rover
- The Auld Triangle
- Streams of Whiskey
- Sally MacLenanne
- The Old Main Drag
- Dirty Old Town
- Bottle of Smoke
- Thousands Are Sailing
- Fiesta
- The Broad Majestic Shannon
- The Body of an American
I guess what appeals to me about the Pogues is that their aesthetic -- the implication that they're a bunch of sleazy, itinerant pub types whose drummer just happened to start playing in double time without taking the cigarette out of his mouth -- suggests that punk rock is a potential branch in the evolution of every musical genre, instead of something that Malcolm McLaren and a bunch of art school dropouts actively cooked up in a clothing store in King's Cross. That is to say, the same way The Ramones are 50s pop "infected" by the punk bug, queered and twisted and made dark, The Pogues are Irish folk "punked," Irish culture itself being maybe a punk version of England's, Shane MacGowan some kind of red-headed Tony Blair rotted out and jagged around the edges. Unfortunately, seeing one of these bands in their twilight years (cf. The Buzzcocks) kind of kills this line of reasoning, because all the dudes in the band are into wearing comfortable clothes and the idea of "putting on a good show" for the "fans." I'm not complaining, really. This is the only way I get to see them.
I should point out that the title of this post refers not to Shane, although it could, but to a dude that Nina and I were standing behind at the show, this weird white-dude-with-dreads guy who was wearing a stitched-together leather jerkin. Nina coined said phrase and also observed that he looked "very Renn faire." So.
I think I'm gonna clean the toilet tonight. Not sure; I'm psyching myself up for it, drinking a too-strong Jameson's and ginger ale.
You guys remember the scary janitor on The Office -- the one who was played by Stephen Merchant's dad? I saw a guy on the subway on the way home who looked like a droopier, crazier version of Ron Merchant. He was kind of rifling through a pile of old newspapers that he was holding between his legs. The papers kept slipping off his lap and the seat next to him where he'd piled them and onto the floor. He leaned forwards to grab them. "Oh, no," he'd say. "Oh, God!"
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
In Like A Lion
It's March! And it's freezing. The weather's all over the place. It's snowing right now.
On Saturday, though, it was kind of nice in the earlier part of the day, and Nina and I took a walk out to Bay Ridge by way of the Brooklyn Army Terminal docks where the Water Taxi stops. The light was really great and we took a lot of pictures; you can see the evidence in my photostream. That whole area is kind of dilapidated -- suffused with the slightly foul smell of the water, which reminded me of people (and me) productively fishing on the docks down on Casey Key; but beautiful, full of warehouse buildings with broken blue glass in their windows. The Water Taxi itself -- or a boat with the Water Taxi logo on it -- was moored at one of the piers, abandoned and bobbing gently in the wine-dark river. It looked different than it does in the advertising materials I've seen -- more like some kind of luxury yacht. From there we headed up into Bay Ridge proper and had a really nice dinner at an Indian place called Taj Mahal. I'd forgotten how good mango lassis are: They're so good you practically don't want to drink them because then they'll be gone.
Sunday was cold, cold. I picked up Eve at her house on the way home from Nina's, and we swung by Steve's C-Town to do my weekly shopping and to pick up materials for cooking dinner before the Thermals show (which Nina, knee-deep in Latin American Politics, had to cancel on): We settled on hamburgers with portobello mushrooms, and Eve snagged a six-pack of Kozy Shack chocolate pudding from the dairy aisle, citing an impromptu craving for the stuff. Indeed, she downed three of them while we baked and marinated the mushrooms in preparation for their use on the burgers I sauteed in my wonderful big frying pan. Their combination, along with baby spinach in place of lettuce, was pretty great -- I recommend it if you've got the wherewithal. I had a chocolate pudding myself, finding it kind of uck.
We met up with my friend Squick from work and got into The Bowery Ballroom around 9:30, just in time to hear the last opening act, The Big Sleep. They were no good -- potentially catchy, mostly instrumental pieces, but the band had about zero energy and stage presence. I'm all for nerds on stage, but you can't be shy, guys. Jump around. That's not the real story, though: Eve'd developed a bit of a stomach complaint on the way there, and by the time we'd brandished our tickets and made it to the lounge, she was right nauseated. She took a trip to the bathroom before we headed up to the stage area, and apparently up came the pudding, the burger, etc. Nonetheless, Eve is a total champ, and she stuck it out for the entire goddamn show, retreating to the ladies room to do number two or number... three periodically.
The Thermals were fucking amazing, the epitome of, I don't know, "showmanship", vivacious and unabashedly shrill. I have no idea how they got their set so tight, but everyone in the band seemed to know exactly when to start every song: Hutch Harris would be tuning and muttering something to the audience and then suddenly, without even a gesture on his part to the drummer, the entire band would launch into a song, playing in perfect synchronization, Kathy Foster's hair bouncing in time to the music. The crowd, which had been kind of lukewarm in their reception to the 'Sleep, went nuts. When the band did Pillar of Salt, the entire room, I shit you not, was, as I call it, dancin' around. My regret, other than the fact that Eve was clearly miserable, was that I couldn't really follow suit -- I'd like to think that my laborious digestion of the raw onions we'd mixed into the hamburger had taken the wind out of my sails, but I might just be getting too old to mosh at a show on a Sunday night. Incredible band, though: After they finished their encore and started packing up, we realized that the rhythm guitar player had sprained his ankle or sommat -- he was walking around on crutches -- but he'd been leaping and running around on stage the whole time. Solidarity with Eve, who'd accrued five upchucks over the course of the night. Good thing, as she noted, that the sound in the BB bathrooms is good.
Monday night I watched Out of the Past, another recommendation from Emma, which, I have to say, I liked a whole lot more than Laura. The lighting and the shooting locations in this one were really beautiful, and the whole thing was a bit more interesting, structurally and plot-wise. It didn't hurt that Jane Greer is hot and nasty. I don't get why they cast Kirk Douglas as the scary gangster, though, or why anyone's ever described him as being hard-boiled. He's always seemed a little fey to me.
Spent last night trying to put together some software releases and watching NYCTV (Channel 76 for me), which is actually pretty great. I caught Cool in Your Code, an exploration of the city zip code-by-zip code, and $9.99, a guide to doing stuff on the cheap. Which is, you know, how I roll.
On Saturday, though, it was kind of nice in the earlier part of the day, and Nina and I took a walk out to Bay Ridge by way of the Brooklyn Army Terminal docks where the Water Taxi stops. The light was really great and we took a lot of pictures; you can see the evidence in my photostream. That whole area is kind of dilapidated -- suffused with the slightly foul smell of the water, which reminded me of people (and me) productively fishing on the docks down on Casey Key; but beautiful, full of warehouse buildings with broken blue glass in their windows. The Water Taxi itself -- or a boat with the Water Taxi logo on it -- was moored at one of the piers, abandoned and bobbing gently in the wine-dark river. It looked different than it does in the advertising materials I've seen -- more like some kind of luxury yacht. From there we headed up into Bay Ridge proper and had a really nice dinner at an Indian place called Taj Mahal. I'd forgotten how good mango lassis are: They're so good you practically don't want to drink them because then they'll be gone.
Sunday was cold, cold. I picked up Eve at her house on the way home from Nina's, and we swung by Steve's C-Town to do my weekly shopping and to pick up materials for cooking dinner before the Thermals show (which Nina, knee-deep in Latin American Politics, had to cancel on): We settled on hamburgers with portobello mushrooms, and Eve snagged a six-pack of Kozy Shack chocolate pudding from the dairy aisle, citing an impromptu craving for the stuff. Indeed, she downed three of them while we baked and marinated the mushrooms in preparation for their use on the burgers I sauteed in my wonderful big frying pan. Their combination, along with baby spinach in place of lettuce, was pretty great -- I recommend it if you've got the wherewithal. I had a chocolate pudding myself, finding it kind of uck.
We met up with my friend Squick from work and got into The Bowery Ballroom around 9:30, just in time to hear the last opening act, The Big Sleep. They were no good -- potentially catchy, mostly instrumental pieces, but the band had about zero energy and stage presence. I'm all for nerds on stage, but you can't be shy, guys. Jump around. That's not the real story, though: Eve'd developed a bit of a stomach complaint on the way there, and by the time we'd brandished our tickets and made it to the lounge, she was right nauseated. She took a trip to the bathroom before we headed up to the stage area, and apparently up came the pudding, the burger, etc. Nonetheless, Eve is a total champ, and she stuck it out for the entire goddamn show, retreating to the ladies room to do number two or number... three periodically.
The Thermals were fucking amazing, the epitome of, I don't know, "showmanship", vivacious and unabashedly shrill. I have no idea how they got their set so tight, but everyone in the band seemed to know exactly when to start every song: Hutch Harris would be tuning and muttering something to the audience and then suddenly, without even a gesture on his part to the drummer, the entire band would launch into a song, playing in perfect synchronization, Kathy Foster's hair bouncing in time to the music. The crowd, which had been kind of lukewarm in their reception to the 'Sleep, went nuts. When the band did Pillar of Salt, the entire room, I shit you not, was, as I call it, dancin' around. My regret, other than the fact that Eve was clearly miserable, was that I couldn't really follow suit -- I'd like to think that my laborious digestion of the raw onions we'd mixed into the hamburger had taken the wind out of my sails, but I might just be getting too old to mosh at a show on a Sunday night. Incredible band, though: After they finished their encore and started packing up, we realized that the rhythm guitar player had sprained his ankle or sommat -- he was walking around on crutches -- but he'd been leaping and running around on stage the whole time. Solidarity with Eve, who'd accrued five upchucks over the course of the night. Good thing, as she noted, that the sound in the BB bathrooms is good.
Monday night I watched Out of the Past, another recommendation from Emma, which, I have to say, I liked a whole lot more than Laura. The lighting and the shooting locations in this one were really beautiful, and the whole thing was a bit more interesting, structurally and plot-wise. It didn't hurt that Jane Greer is hot and nasty. I don't get why they cast Kirk Douglas as the scary gangster, though, or why anyone's ever described him as being hard-boiled. He's always seemed a little fey to me.
Spent last night trying to put together some software releases and watching NYCTV (Channel 76 for me), which is actually pretty great. I caught Cool in Your Code, an exploration of the city zip code-by-zip code, and $9.99, a guide to doing stuff on the cheap. Which is, you know, how I roll.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Brooklend Update
Katina's is closed for renovation. The 12th St. Deli is also closed, also for renovation. Also, The Comanches are gone and the outlaw is gone.
Last Saturday, Eve and Nina and Nina's friend Randy and Randy's little brother and I went up to Union Square for the pillow fight organized by Newmindspace. I was sort of unenthused initially -- I figured it was gonna be the same type of weird, regressive pederasts who go to those "cuddle parties" that are (supposedly) grope-free. And, you know, it kind of was those people. But Nina had an extra pillow, and like ten minutes into it I sucked it up and waded in and it was sort of a good time. Observations: Some pillows hurt when people hit you with them! A lot of people had either very firm, heavy pillows or pillows that weren't terribly cohesive and would bunch themselves up into a heavy mass at one end of the pillowcase. The little kids were the worst offenders when it came to swinging hard. Towards the end of the fight, I ended up squaring off near the outskirts of the fray against four pre-teens and their older brothers, and got pretty well pounded. According to Eve, I had a cheering section chanting "Ghost Rider! Ghost Rider!" in support. I assume that was 'cuz I was wearing the old leather jacket, but Eve thought it might have been because I'm a whitey -- you know, like Ghostface Killah. That's cool, too, I guess.
I was also struck by how many people were taking pictures of the event. It seemed like about a quarter of the participants were armed with cameras instead of pillows. They stood at the periphery -- someone, I think, snapped a photo of me and Nina taking a breather and having a smooch. There're practically 2500 photos on Flickr with the pillowfightnyc tag! Check out the pictures. There really were feathers everywhere.
That evening, after some reading at Tea Lounge, we took a car over to Williamsburg to this rock show at a literal hole in the wall -- utterly unmarked on the outside -- called b.p.m. The band we wanted to see was a New York-based punk trio with a couple of Japanese dudes (and a grating gaijin drummer who wouldn't stop braying into the drum mics) in it called The Spunks, but the evening seemed to be a kind of showcase of a bunch of Japanese bands who were all pretty good and played loud, short sets. The venue was a kind of cave of painted, exposed brick that you had to go through a tunnel to get to, and the room with the stage had real high ceilings that got crowded with the helium balloons that this chick was handing out -- it was Hajime's birthday. The Spunks themselves were pretty good, thought a bit louder and sloppier than on the songs of theirs I'd listened to on the web. At one point, the bass player climbed up on one of the amp stacks at one point, and, while playing, did a kind of twelve-foot swan dive onto the stage. He seemed more or less okay, too. They are all ninjas, it turns out. "I love you!" Haji'd yell between songs. "I don't want to fight any more! Do you love me?!"
We hopped a Northside car to get back to Park Slope, and a funny thing happened. It was around 3:00 AM, and, shortly after we got off the BQE, our driver pulled ahead of another car in that slightly aggressive way that car service drivers do. The other driver seemed pretty ticked off, though, as he pulled right back ahead of us in the middle of a narrow street and then just stopped with us behind him, both cars idling, for about a minute and a half. Our driver was kind of flummoxed, but we couldn't really back out because another car showed up. The angry guy ahead of us, perhaps spurred on by the honking of the car waiting behind us, started to inch slowly up the street, at which point our driver decided to make a break for it and gunned it, pulling around the dude and then trying to lose him on 5th Ave. The guy started chasing us, pulling up alongside and yelling at our terrified driver whenever we had to stop for a light. Our driver kept shouting that he was going to call the cops and eventually did pull out his phone and do it. Seeing this, the other driver got spooked and finally drove off. We got a good look at him, though -- bald, chubby, wearing some kind of college athletic sweatsuit -- and I gave the car service guy my best recollection of the license plate number of his car. I was too tired to be really scared, but I was making contingency plans the whole time in case the guy pulled a gun.
Right now I'm at home, exhausted from work, drinking a whiskey and watching Laura on Emma's long-ago recommendation. I feel like I might look a bit like young Vincent Price. Also, some dialogue:
Last Saturday, Eve and Nina and Nina's friend Randy and Randy's little brother and I went up to Union Square for the pillow fight organized by Newmindspace. I was sort of unenthused initially -- I figured it was gonna be the same type of weird, regressive pederasts who go to those "cuddle parties" that are (supposedly) grope-free. And, you know, it kind of was those people. But Nina had an extra pillow, and like ten minutes into it I sucked it up and waded in and it was sort of a good time. Observations: Some pillows hurt when people hit you with them! A lot of people had either very firm, heavy pillows or pillows that weren't terribly cohesive and would bunch themselves up into a heavy mass at one end of the pillowcase. The little kids were the worst offenders when it came to swinging hard. Towards the end of the fight, I ended up squaring off near the outskirts of the fray against four pre-teens and their older brothers, and got pretty well pounded. According to Eve, I had a cheering section chanting "Ghost Rider! Ghost Rider!" in support. I assume that was 'cuz I was wearing the old leather jacket, but Eve thought it might have been because I'm a whitey -- you know, like Ghostface Killah. That's cool, too, I guess.
I was also struck by how many people were taking pictures of the event. It seemed like about a quarter of the participants were armed with cameras instead of pillows. They stood at the periphery -- someone, I think, snapped a photo of me and Nina taking a breather and having a smooch. There're practically 2500 photos on Flickr with the pillowfightnyc tag! Check out the pictures. There really were feathers everywhere.
That evening, after some reading at Tea Lounge, we took a car over to Williamsburg to this rock show at a literal hole in the wall -- utterly unmarked on the outside -- called b.p.m. The band we wanted to see was a New York-based punk trio with a couple of Japanese dudes (and a grating gaijin drummer who wouldn't stop braying into the drum mics) in it called The Spunks, but the evening seemed to be a kind of showcase of a bunch of Japanese bands who were all pretty good and played loud, short sets. The venue was a kind of cave of painted, exposed brick that you had to go through a tunnel to get to, and the room with the stage had real high ceilings that got crowded with the helium balloons that this chick was handing out -- it was Hajime's birthday. The Spunks themselves were pretty good, thought a bit louder and sloppier than on the songs of theirs I'd listened to on the web. At one point, the bass player climbed up on one of the amp stacks at one point, and, while playing, did a kind of twelve-foot swan dive onto the stage. He seemed more or less okay, too. They are all ninjas, it turns out. "I love you!" Haji'd yell between songs. "I don't want to fight any more! Do you love me?!"
We hopped a Northside car to get back to Park Slope, and a funny thing happened. It was around 3:00 AM, and, shortly after we got off the BQE, our driver pulled ahead of another car in that slightly aggressive way that car service drivers do. The other driver seemed pretty ticked off, though, as he pulled right back ahead of us in the middle of a narrow street and then just stopped with us behind him, both cars idling, for about a minute and a half. Our driver was kind of flummoxed, but we couldn't really back out because another car showed up. The angry guy ahead of us, perhaps spurred on by the honking of the car waiting behind us, started to inch slowly up the street, at which point our driver decided to make a break for it and gunned it, pulling around the dude and then trying to lose him on 5th Ave. The guy started chasing us, pulling up alongside and yelling at our terrified driver whenever we had to stop for a light. Our driver kept shouting that he was going to call the cops and eventually did pull out his phone and do it. Seeing this, the other driver got spooked and finally drove off. We got a good look at him, though -- bald, chubby, wearing some kind of college athletic sweatsuit -- and I gave the car service guy my best recollection of the license plate number of his car. I was too tired to be really scared, but I was making contingency plans the whole time in case the guy pulled a gun.
Right now I'm at home, exhausted from work, drinking a whiskey and watching Laura on Emma's long-ago recommendation. I feel like I might look a bit like young Vincent Price. Also, some dialogue:
Waldo: "Have you ever been in love?"What a tough dude. I ate a veggie burger with a fried egg on it. Kitty puked up her dinner but I'm hoping she'll get hungry and eat the puke. This often works.
McPherson: "A dame up in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me once."
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The Zombies Win
I'm at home. Nina's studying for midterms.
I Netflix'd Zombie (aka "Zombi 2"), because it seemed like it's at the head of this pantheon of European horror movies I haven't seen. You know that YouTube video of the zombie fighting the shark? This is the movie it's from! In terms of the hipster vote, that scene is actually even cooler than the clip lets on, since it starts with a topless scuba diving woman fleeing from the shark into the arms of the zombie, who goes for the shark after his attempts to fuck / eat the woman are thwarted by her fins and a handful of coral.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn't quite... I don't know. It's always hard to peg what's wrong with films like this. Zombie movie fans strike me as a rather predictable bunch -- from what I can tell by the IMDb comments, we require that the mechanics of the movie world be laid out just so, and the movie is a success to the extent that it presents a series of novel scenarios in which the zombies triumph over the humans and ultimately win. For my money there's gotta be a better way to make a movie, especially with what seems like such a compelling premise: zombies. This one was kind of head-and-shoulders above the rest in some ways -- it makes pretty thorough use of a tropical setting for the predetermined zombie apocalypse and it's about as lovingly shot, lighting- and angles-wise, as a zombie movie could be. But the acting's terrible, the cultural details of the shooting location and the voodoo aesthetic that necessitates it are kind of... overlooked -- and it just ain't scary.
I often wonder what it would take to make a zombie movie that was scary, and I think it's gonna come down to directors actually thinking about what's scary about zombies: it's not their potential to chomp and bite and eat your brains; it's the prospect of an entirely zombified world, a silent world absent of the texture of human intelligence.
There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that culminates in a convergence of a whole bunch of starships Enterprise from parallel universes. Captain Picard (or someone) devises a way to send them all back to their respective M-branes, but some of them aren't eager to go -- an alternate-universe Riker helming a smoldering NCC-1701 protests "We won't go back! You don't know what it's like in our universe - the Federation's gone, the Borg are everywhere!" That line's consistently given me chills.
No zombie movie I've ever seen -- and I've seen a few -- has ever really explored the implications of that line satisfactorily. My friend Pete directed me in his senior thesis film, "The Zombies Win," at Wesleyan, in which the main character courts a lone, aloof human female lost in a world of the undead. Pete said it was based on a summer he spent in Paris; I feel like he was making a glib joke about the French, but I've never been to France so I can't really say that makes any sense to me. We had to put in these one-size-fits-all white contacts; my friends Paul and Dave had to hold me down and stuff them in my eyes.
I've lost track of what I saying.
Speaking of zombies, The Pogues are playing Roseland on St. Patrick's day, and this guy's got tickets! Tom anticipates another "stomach complaint," but I'm optimistic. Hell, even my dad's on board -- are you?
I Netflix'd Zombie (aka "Zombi 2"), because it seemed like it's at the head of this pantheon of European horror movies I haven't seen. You know that YouTube video of the zombie fighting the shark? This is the movie it's from! In terms of the hipster vote, that scene is actually even cooler than the clip lets on, since it starts with a topless scuba diving woman fleeing from the shark into the arms of the zombie, who goes for the shark after his attempts to fuck / eat the woman are thwarted by her fins and a handful of coral.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn't quite... I don't know. It's always hard to peg what's wrong with films like this. Zombie movie fans strike me as a rather predictable bunch -- from what I can tell by the IMDb comments, we require that the mechanics of the movie world be laid out just so, and the movie is a success to the extent that it presents a series of novel scenarios in which the zombies triumph over the humans and ultimately win. For my money there's gotta be a better way to make a movie, especially with what seems like such a compelling premise: zombies. This one was kind of head-and-shoulders above the rest in some ways -- it makes pretty thorough use of a tropical setting for the predetermined zombie apocalypse and it's about as lovingly shot, lighting- and angles-wise, as a zombie movie could be. But the acting's terrible, the cultural details of the shooting location and the voodoo aesthetic that necessitates it are kind of... overlooked -- and it just ain't scary.
I often wonder what it would take to make a zombie movie that was scary, and I think it's gonna come down to directors actually thinking about what's scary about zombies: it's not their potential to chomp and bite and eat your brains; it's the prospect of an entirely zombified world, a silent world absent of the texture of human intelligence.
There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that culminates in a convergence of a whole bunch of starships Enterprise from parallel universes. Captain Picard (or someone) devises a way to send them all back to their respective M-branes, but some of them aren't eager to go -- an alternate-universe Riker helming a smoldering NCC-1701 protests "We won't go back! You don't know what it's like in our universe - the Federation's gone, the Borg are everywhere!" That line's consistently given me chills.
No zombie movie I've ever seen -- and I've seen a few -- has ever really explored the implications of that line satisfactorily. My friend Pete directed me in his senior thesis film, "The Zombies Win," at Wesleyan, in which the main character courts a lone, aloof human female lost in a world of the undead. Pete said it was based on a summer he spent in Paris; I feel like he was making a glib joke about the French, but I've never been to France so I can't really say that makes any sense to me. We had to put in these one-size-fits-all white contacts; my friends Paul and Dave had to hold me down and stuff them in my eyes.
I've lost track of what I saying.
Speaking of zombies, The Pogues are playing Roseland on St. Patrick's day, and this guy's got tickets! Tom anticipates another "stomach complaint," but I'm optimistic. Hell, even my dad's on board -- are you?
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Kicked Out Of The Bowery Ballroom
Nina and I managed to slip into the Andrew Bird show at the Bowery Ballroom last night, despite the fact that we showed up and hadn't bought any tickets. The BB's calendar had marked the show as being sold out, but we'd swung by after drinking whiskey with Aanie at Double Happiness in the hopes that there'd be people outside who'd had friends cancel on them and needed to get rid of a few extra tickets. When we got there, though, it was pretty clear that no one was selling. The only other person on the scene who didn't head straight into the club was a young man in a long beige wool coat, who seemed to be waiting for the bouncer to acknowledge him. While we smoked and adjusted our plans for the evening, we overheard the following exchange between the bouncer and the guy in the coat:
"Eh, just go in, buy a drink, and a tip your bartender," he said, and ushered us inside. So that was nice.
The show was about half over by the time we got there. Look, I'm gonna level with you: Andrew Bird isn't really my kind of thing, but the show wasn't boring. The guy himself plays three different instruments (that I could see), plus he's a really precise whistler (almost uncannily so -- I've got a loose suspicion that he's gotta be, uh, whistle-synching or something). Although Nina commented that this was the type of show that girls got their boyfriends to take them to, most of the audience was dudes -- oddly sour-faced twenty-somethings who seemed incapable of growing beards evenly. I feel like these twee dudes who listen to... well, whatever passes for rock music these days are the discontents of real rock. So maybe Andrew Bird fans are themselves the discontents of the New Rock? It was a nerdy crowd, to be sure.
After the show, we stuck around and had a few more drinks, partly on account of the fact that the line for the coat check was insanely long. Andrew Bird came over and ordered a drink next to us. I nudged Nina in the ribs to get her attention -- she didn't get what I was trying to tell her at first and looked past him down the bar, noticing someone who looked a startling amount like Monica Lewinsky. The more we looked, the surer we were that it was her, and so was Nina's friend Nikhil who happened to be there. But I just googled some pictures of her and now I'm not so sure.
"I can't let you in, but I can take your ID in and check it out."The guy gave the bouncer his ID and went back to waiting, digging his hands into the pockets of his coat and rocking on his heels. After a few minutes, the bouncer came back out.
"You're not just going to take my license and keep it, are you?"
"Nah, man -- I wouldn't do that. If I was gonna do that, I'd'a done it already."
"Sorry, man -- I showed her. She says it's you."At this point, the head bouncer came out and asked if we were looking for tickets. "We were hoping someone outside would be selling them," I said.
"What? What does she say I did?"
"She says that you, uh, fondled her."
"What?! That's crazy! I didn't do anything!"
"Eh, just go in, buy a drink, and a tip your bartender," he said, and ushered us inside. So that was nice.
The show was about half over by the time we got there. Look, I'm gonna level with you: Andrew Bird isn't really my kind of thing, but the show wasn't boring. The guy himself plays three different instruments (that I could see), plus he's a really precise whistler (almost uncannily so -- I've got a loose suspicion that he's gotta be, uh, whistle-synching or something). Although Nina commented that this was the type of show that girls got their boyfriends to take them to, most of the audience was dudes -- oddly sour-faced twenty-somethings who seemed incapable of growing beards evenly. I feel like these twee dudes who listen to... well, whatever passes for rock music these days are the discontents of real rock. So maybe Andrew Bird fans are themselves the discontents of the New Rock? It was a nerdy crowd, to be sure.
After the show, we stuck around and had a few more drinks, partly on account of the fact that the line for the coat check was insanely long. Andrew Bird came over and ordered a drink next to us. I nudged Nina in the ribs to get her attention -- she didn't get what I was trying to tell her at first and looked past him down the bar, noticing someone who looked a startling amount like Monica Lewinsky. The more we looked, the surer we were that it was her, and so was Nina's friend Nikhil who happened to be there. But I just googled some pictures of her and now I'm not so sure.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Happy 2007
Okay, so I know I haven't been very good about writing in this thing, and it's mostly because I've been doing life things, but I thought I'd start off the new year with something fun for all of my real friends who read this web-log all the time to read.
I shat myself tonight. Not in the sense that I've been using that phrase recently -- "I had to run to the bathroom to shit myself" -- but in the sense that stuff came out of my ass and went into my pants. It happened on 74th St. and 1st Ave., outside the Jan Hus Church where the Balkan Golden Festival was being held. I rode the 6 all the way down to Broadway-Lafayette and went up to my office and threw out my underwear.
This isn't the first time this has happened. 5 or 6 years ago, walking back from Thanksgiving dinner at Sharon and Neil's with my sister, I felt something uncomfortable coming on and I tried to relieve some pressure in my abdomen by letting it out. Seconds later, the seat of my pants was cold and wet. I was lucky -- we were on our home block. I discovered, in my parents' bathroom, that my boxers had been soaked with what Razor had described years previously (on our beloved Delivery Head) when this'd happened to him on the job at Credit Suisse as "some kind of horrible water from the ass." "Gross," said my sister when I told her what had happened. At the time I blamed lamb with mint jelly.
Nina is kind of in love with the Balkans. She did a stint of reporting in Bosnia, personally commissioned by Lewis Lapham, commemorating the anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica, in 2003. So I was sure she'd want to go to the evening of Balkan folk dancing that we got notified about by Jeff Stark's Cool List. And she did! But first she had to have dinner with her mom and pick up a microwave that she bought off of craigslist.
I decided to head up there myself -- I had to go to the upper-ish East anyhow to pick up the tickets I'd bought for a live-action production of David Rees' Get Your War On. The theater was at 59 East 59th St., which is probably why I texted Nina and believed myself that the Jan Hus Church was on 79th St. instead of 74th St. I ate dinner at Neil's Coffee Shop up by Hunter College -- she and I had passed it a few months ago walking around up there and both thought it looked like a good place to eat. And it was -- cozy and nice, with a kind of salty wait staff. I read the Times and homphed a really greasy reuben sandwich.
And then I hiked up to 79th St. and started looking around for the church. I walked from 2nd to 1st to York and back to 2nd again. I found the Albanian embassy, but I didn't find anything that said "Jan Hus." I started to get discouraged and left several petulant voicemails on Nina's phone before hunting down a Starbuck's on 75th and 1st and hunkering down with my laptop and a huge cup of coffee. I was into some deep Scheme when I realized that there were unsecured wireless networks in range. That's how I found the right address for the church.
It was 9:00 when I got there, but the dancing were in full effect, the dancers trotting in concentric circles, hands joined, led by a man waving a white scarf. They were in the middle of the nave, and there were tables of food off to one side. I tried to keep near the entrance in case Nina showed up, and I just kind of watched the proceedings. Everyone was very casually dressed, and the girls were very pale and pretty and had uniformly thick, dark eyebrows. About 45 minutes in, I started getting some bad stomach cramps. The church had a bathroom, but I knew that what I had to do couldn't be done within close aural / olfactory range of the festivities. So I left. And then I shat my pants by accident in the cold on the way to the train. And I shat more, revoltingly, in the bathroom at work in my silent office with all the lights out except for one. Nina, over the phone, offered to bring me a replacement pair of boxers from a set her brother had just purchased.
It wasn't so bad. But I think I drink too much coffee.
On the toilet I read an editorial in the Post in which the author called Barbara Boxer an "appalling scold."
Guitar Hero update: I've managed to get five stars on every song in the Easy and Medium modes. I'm about 14 songs into Hard right now. I haven't gotten anything higher than a three on anything besides Strutter so far, which, I'm ashamed to admit, I kind of like, song-wise.
I shat myself tonight. Not in the sense that I've been using that phrase recently -- "I had to run to the bathroom to shit myself" -- but in the sense that stuff came out of my ass and went into my pants. It happened on 74th St. and 1st Ave., outside the Jan Hus Church where the Balkan Golden Festival was being held. I rode the 6 all the way down to Broadway-Lafayette and went up to my office and threw out my underwear.
This isn't the first time this has happened. 5 or 6 years ago, walking back from Thanksgiving dinner at Sharon and Neil's with my sister, I felt something uncomfortable coming on and I tried to relieve some pressure in my abdomen by letting it out. Seconds later, the seat of my pants was cold and wet. I was lucky -- we were on our home block. I discovered, in my parents' bathroom, that my boxers had been soaked with what Razor had described years previously (on our beloved Delivery Head) when this'd happened to him on the job at Credit Suisse as "some kind of horrible water from the ass." "Gross," said my sister when I told her what had happened. At the time I blamed lamb with mint jelly.
Nina is kind of in love with the Balkans. She did a stint of reporting in Bosnia, personally commissioned by Lewis Lapham, commemorating the anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica, in 2003. So I was sure she'd want to go to the evening of Balkan folk dancing that we got notified about by Jeff Stark's Cool List. And she did! But first she had to have dinner with her mom and pick up a microwave that she bought off of craigslist.
I decided to head up there myself -- I had to go to the upper-ish East anyhow to pick up the tickets I'd bought for a live-action production of David Rees' Get Your War On. The theater was at 59 East 59th St., which is probably why I texted Nina and believed myself that the Jan Hus Church was on 79th St. instead of 74th St. I ate dinner at Neil's Coffee Shop up by Hunter College -- she and I had passed it a few months ago walking around up there and both thought it looked like a good place to eat. And it was -- cozy and nice, with a kind of salty wait staff. I read the Times and homphed a really greasy reuben sandwich.
And then I hiked up to 79th St. and started looking around for the church. I walked from 2nd to 1st to York and back to 2nd again. I found the Albanian embassy, but I didn't find anything that said "Jan Hus." I started to get discouraged and left several petulant voicemails on Nina's phone before hunting down a Starbuck's on 75th and 1st and hunkering down with my laptop and a huge cup of coffee. I was into some deep Scheme when I realized that there were unsecured wireless networks in range. That's how I found the right address for the church.
It was 9:00 when I got there, but the dancing were in full effect, the dancers trotting in concentric circles, hands joined, led by a man waving a white scarf. They were in the middle of the nave, and there were tables of food off to one side. I tried to keep near the entrance in case Nina showed up, and I just kind of watched the proceedings. Everyone was very casually dressed, and the girls were very pale and pretty and had uniformly thick, dark eyebrows. About 45 minutes in, I started getting some bad stomach cramps. The church had a bathroom, but I knew that what I had to do couldn't be done within close aural / olfactory range of the festivities. So I left. And then I shat my pants by accident in the cold on the way to the train. And I shat more, revoltingly, in the bathroom at work in my silent office with all the lights out except for one. Nina, over the phone, offered to bring me a replacement pair of boxers from a set her brother had just purchased.
It wasn't so bad. But I think I drink too much coffee.
On the toilet I read an editorial in the Post in which the author called Barbara Boxer an "appalling scold."
Guitar Hero update: I've managed to get five stars on every song in the Easy and Medium modes. I'm about 14 songs into Hard right now. I haven't gotten anything higher than a three on anything besides Strutter so far, which, I'm ashamed to admit, I kind of like, song-wise.
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