I went with Nina to the airport on July 4th to send her off to Brazil. It was sad, saying goodbye under the gray, arched roof of an empty Newark Airport. She'll have fun, though. (Fuck, I know she's already having fun on account of the video reports she's already wired back.)
I watched the fireworks from far, far away while waiting for the AirTrain back to Penn Station, and then hit up Katharine's 4th of July party in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were thronged and a light rain was falling. I kind of stumbled around, dazed from loneliness and low blood sugar, making a low and dolorous sound to anyone who'd listen. After I got some food in me, though, I felt a lot better. The party lasted until after 3:00 AM, and instead of cleaning the place up, we all piled into a Carecibo van and headed to our respective homes, Katharine making drunken pleas to Tom H. for a pizza bagel.
The next day, to console myself, I stopped by the Brooklyn Museum to check out the Takashi Murakami show. The paintings were wonderful, if a little overwhelming, but the curation was a disaster. I guess I'm really talking about those placards of "helpful analysis" they put up next to all of the paintings in their featured shows. So Murakami's got this little guy he likes to put in his paintings, a Mickey-Mouse-with-teeth thing called D.O.B. The sense I get is that he's Murakami's trademark doodle, like Razor's "guy" or Neck Face's little bat thing. He's usually got a 'D' on one ear and a 'B' on the other. On a card next to one of the portraits of D.O.B., a museum staffer had helpfully explained that you could view the white oval of D.O.B.'s face as the 'O' in his name. "What other parts of D.O.B. could form the 'O'?" the placard asked. (I don't know, his butthole?) Maybe there's too much cultural overhead to get across when you're trying to guide a mainstream audience through a show like this, but I'm beginning to think the 'Museum doesn't understand modern art. Or maybe it's just that they don't understand irony: Right after a roomful of cheeky, inscrutable Louis Vuitton promotional-but-maybe-not artwork, they'd set up -- I shit you not -- a kiosk where you could actually buy fucking purses from genuine, stone-faced Louis Vuitton staff assholes. It was on a par with the ridiculous, missing-the-point postcards they were pushing in the gift shop during the feminist art show earlier this year. Eve knows what I'm talking about.
A week of summer music:
The night before Nina left we went to Hiro to see the Prefuse 73 / Anti-Pop Consortium show at the Hiro Ballroom. Devoted readers will know that I'm not super into techno music, but I was happy to put that aside since it was her first and only opportunity to do fun summer stuff. Unfortunately, the club was awful, packed with goateed techno douchebags, and the music bordered on unlistenable -- Prefuse 73 was doing this really cacophonous, arhythmic set that put my teeth on edge. He was working with another DJ, a lanky nerd who turned out to be a real dickshit: At one point, a member of the audience, presumably finding the performance as tedious as I was, typed something on his Blackberry and leaned into the adjunct DJ's line of sight, holding it out for him to read. The DJ snatched the Blackberry out of the guy's hand and kind of played keep-away with it for a second before tossing it back into the crowd, hard. "Go home, get out of here," he said. "Seriously." He kept doing DJ stuff for a while and then turned back to the mic. "Or go to a strip club. If you want 'music to get the girls to dance.'" Right, because if you want to hear your guy play his hit songs -- the ones that sound good, say -- you're some kind of philistine. Not like, say, some pretentious creep who "plays" music by twiddling knobs on a computer with a faux-serious look on his face.
Fortunately, Anti-Pop Consortium was great; those guys are full of energy! As M. Sayyid kept reminding everyone (in between exhorting "New York" to "make some noise"), it was Beans' birthday. Beans didn't say too much himself, but he got his rap on, with a strange and delightful gurgled delivery, like a toddler with a sinus infection flipping you shit.
On Wednesday it was the birthday of Nina's brother's friend Adam, who's a swell guy. He'd been planning to have a traditional kind of birthday party at his house, but then he found out that Green Jellÿ (nee Jellö) was playing the Gramercy that night, so he canceled his party and told everyone to hit up the show. I hadn't heard them since a brief infatuation with them when I was 13, and even then I'd been kind of puzzled by their aesthetic: The singing was really gruff and rife with cuss words, but the lyrics also seemed to also have a fairly earnest preoccupation with nursery rhymes and children's television, kind of like Ricky Gervais telling all those jokes about Humpty Dumpty. But they had a reputation for putting on an exciting show, and it was for a good cause (birfday), so I swung by after work.
The thing was, the show was practically empty! Well, not empty, but there were maybe, like 100 people there, tops. Green Jellÿ was on stage when I got there, doing their thing, stomping around on stage in a motley assortment of papier-mache and foam costumes, most of which had floppy, oversized heads. Pretty much all of the songs they performed included an aspect of pageantry, although for the most part it had this tame, patchwork quality to it, as if they were kids choreographing a Disney-on-ice show using spare materials they found in the prop closet, and then wrote the songs around the assemblages they'd come up with. And the costumes seemed to be pretty well-traveled, the foam wrinkled and sweat-stained, the googly-eyes hanging on by a few threads; in fact, a lot of the "dancing" involved the dancer's hands up by the costume's head or in its mouth, presumably a clandestine strategy to keep the head from detaching.
Because of all the dressing-up and -down, it was sort of hard to tell who the actual, you know, principals were, but as near as I can figure, they were: Bill Manspeaker, the lead singer / growler, an enormous baldoon with a Neanderthal brow and incongruously long eyelashes, pink and hairless, kind of like a version of G.G. Allin you'd let babysit your kids; and... well, that's it, really. I can't figure out whether any of the other dudes on stage were actually real members of the band and not touring musicians. A guy from a bad called Rosemary's Billygoat was doing backup vocals, and the bassist, guitar player, and drummer all reeked of being second-string players. It was at least partly a family act: During a pause towards the end of the show, Bill suddenly roared, "Where's my son?!"
A waifish tween boy appeared from backstage and boosted himself up onto one of the amps. I hadn't seen him without a giant foam mask on yet and had assumed he was just a short lady performer.
"I took my son to see GWAR last summer for his birthday," explained Bill, panting. "He said, 'Dad, next summer for my birthday, can we go on tour?' ...It's all for you, Damien! This is all for you!"
This is not to say that it wasn't a good show -- in fact, it was pretty darn good. At one point, Bill, complaining about the barricade in front of the stage, climbed over it and onto one of the merch tables, which he repurposed as a miniature stage in the middle of the pit. As they played through what was arguably their most popular song, "The Three Little Pigs," the crowd lifted the table with Bill standing on top of it, into the air. He maintained his balance throughout. Hell, he didn't even sound nervous as he snarled his way through six or seven choruses of "huffin'-and-a'puffin'-and-I'll-blow-your-house-in."
And when the band discovered it was Adam's birthday (we were wearing party hats and beads), he became the belle of the ball -- and the de facto nominee for all of their audience participation bits. In particular, he was selected to wear the "Shitman" costume on stage for the performance of the song "The Misadventures Of Shitman." The thing was like a mountainous accretion of brown fun foam, leaving Adam little to do but rock on his heels and flap his arms as the band played around him. "That costume smells like shit," he confided to me after they let him offstage.
In total they played for more than two hours, literally until the staff at the Gramercy shut them down. As they exited the stage, they started hawking this exclusive 4-disc video collection that apparently contained every piece of media ever created by or about the band. Mike and I got together and bought it for Adam; Mike went around and managed to get it signed by everyone in the band -- even Damien!
Summer is proceeding apace: Libby and Kojo and I hit up Summerscreen to see Wet Hot American Summer on Tuesday. The place was packed, more crowded than I've ever seen it -- the only way we could see the screen was by scrunching ourselves up against the railing on the upper level. I've still got a crick in my neck.
Missed Brazilian Girls at the Prospect Park bandshell on Friday because I was in the basement of Cake Shop checking out a British band called Cut Off Your Hands. The stuff on their MySpace sounded pretty good to me, and their lead singer was appealing enough, in a George-McFly-meets-Julian-Casablancas kind of way, but for some reason their live set failed to pop. The audience seemed to agree; the band ditched out on a finale after someone hollered, "The Smiths called -- they want that last song back!" He wasn't far off the mark.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Pussy Monster
My sister Caroline graduated from Bronx High School of Science last week. They had a big (700 kids or sommat) ceremony that mom and dad and I went to over at Avery Fisher Hall, and Ira Glass gave the commencement speech. Don't be afraid to do something besides what your parents want you to do, he said, but be sensitive to the fact that this may hurt their feelings. The principal of Bronx Science gave several mini-speeches, mentioning in all of them how many doors the Bronx Science name would open for its graduates, which left me a little cold. "That woman," my mom whispered to me, "is a real bitch." All in all, though, the whole thing, with people waxing earnest about the joys of book learnin' and achievement, made me kind of wistful and wish I'd, you know, engaged a bit more in high school. But Caroline looked like she was having a fun time, and after the ceremony, she headed off to do fun things with her graduated peers.
Over dinner for Fathers Day at Jane, she told me she'd gone to a Lil' Wayne concert, thus further demonstrating that she is way cooler than I ever was. "He's really weird and kind of scary on stage," she said. "He wears all these chains and he's covered in tattoos. And there's this song he does that's not an any album called 'The Pussy Monster.' It's not even a song, it's just him whispering into the microphone. Look it up on YouTube."
I did. Here it is.
On a related note, Nina and I were woken up last weekend by at 2:30 AM by someone outside playing a song, super loud, on their car stereo, called "Money Make Me Come" (by Rick Ross -- I looked it up the next morning based on my recollection of the lyrics:
The next morning we headed down to Coney Island to see the Mermaid Parade. Nina'd been before, but I hadn't, and I guess I was kind of expecting a real bacchanal. It turned out to be pretty tame. Sure, there were some titties out, and the amount of greasepaint and sequins some of the paraders were wearing was impressive considering the heat, but the majority of costumes were underwhelming -- eyepatches and bandanas ruled the day. So after a few minutes of gawking, we took a turn onto Ocean Av. and went to go check out the Aquarium.
You may not know this, babies, but the summer after 10th grade, I worked the shark tank down there on weekdays in order to satisfy the Brick Prison's community service requirements. It was actually a pretty blissful experience -- light years better than having to schlep meals to loathsome, racist senior citizens, e.g., which was one of the other jobs I tried briefly -- usually just me in the damp, cool darkness of the shark enclosure, watching the beasts swim by oblivious to me. Occasionally a troop of camp kids (developmentally disabled, more often than not) would march in and I'd give them a spiel of trivia ("Did you know there are sharks swimming around right now off the coast of Coney Island?"), but mostly I could just sit and read by the unearthly light of the water. My favorite part of the job, though, was manning the "touch tank," which I got to a couple times a week, because you got to get all up in the grilles of some horseshoe crabs. Those things are weird.
So Nina and I visited the shark tank, which clearly hadn't seen any renovation in the last decade -- same pieces missing from the sort-of-pathetic mechanical-interactive displays mounted on the slatted wooden walls. And then we ate some sort of gross museum food (the fish-and-chips called to mind the winners of the "Darkest Fish" awards) and visited this fancy new jellyfish exhibit they've got set up.
The real highlight, though, was what we saw on the way out -- the been a baby walrus born the summer before, and the aquarium was still hyping it (possibly on account of both the parents having been raised entirely in captivity). The thing was still pretty much a baby. It was a warm afternoon -- close to closing time -- and it and its mother were sort of spooning on a flat rock in their little enclosure, both of them amorphous and glossy and cafe-au-lait-colored. In the adjacent areas, a couple of penguins got chased around the rocks by an ornery seagull and an otter did some anxious-looking somersaults, but we were transfixed by the two whiskered, slumbering blobs. Over some rocks to the right, the father walrus was also sleeping, but alone and fitfully, tossing around and kind of rubbing at his face with his flippers as if swatting away flies. "Wake up!" a little kid kept hollering at him, but he didn't stir. We left and took a walk on the beach, down to the freezing water. A few mermaids with stamina were still milling around outside Ruby's (which seemed to have recovered quickly from its little problem with collapsing bathrooms).
The next day, we read on Gothamist that the dad walrus had died that night! No joke -- apparently he'd been suffering from a serious and unexpected bacterial infection for the preceding week. His fussing over his face could have been some kind of death agony, and we couldn't tell! Mayhap Nina and I were some of the last to see Ayveq The Masturbating Walrus alive.
More news: Nina's going to the Brazilian rain forest for a month at the end of next week. She'd been planning to do some kind of study-abroad program this summer through this environmental program at Columbia called CERC that does a bunch of different projects at a number of locations around the world, and what ended up working the best, date-wise, was going to the fuckin' jungle. (I think it's also definitely the coolest option.) She's been buying gear for her trip and fretting over tropical diseases for the past month. I think it's going to be swell, although just between you and me, hogosphere, the rain forest does sound a little a-scary.
I'm going to be joining her in the middle of August, though, for a week of post-rain forest chillaxing in Buenos Aires. I'm a little anxious, to be honest, even though it's not my first trip off-continent -- it'll be the longest non-stop flight I've ever taken, and have you looked at a map of Argentina? It's practically the fucking south pole! Does it feel different down there, like you're going to fall off the world? Nonetheless, people live there, I'm told, and apparently Buenos Aires has the highest concentration of psychiatrists in the world (more than New York? Really?), so I'm sure I'll make it out in one piece. I've already had my shots (hepatitis and typhoid) over at the travel medicine clinic in Hell's Kitchen. I asked the doctor administering them if I should get the yellow fever one, too, in case Nina'd been exposed before meeting up with me. "No," he said, in an accent that actually sounded kind of Argentinian. "Is not possible to get yellow fever from another person. But your girlfriend, she got the vaccine, yes? Yellow fever is quite serious."
"It's one of the hemorrhagic fevers," I said, "right?"
"Yes," he said. "There are many hemorrhagic fevers: Dengue, yellow fever; Marburg and Ebola, of course; and Kyasanur [Forest disease]."
More on that as it develops.
Last night after work Peter and I went to The Annex to see Freezepop, who were playing with a bunch of bands I'd never heard of. That's always confused me about Freezepop -- how do they land really catchy songs in two (or is it three) smash hit rock and roll video games but still manage to not be popular or successful? I mean, you know, The Annex, for fuck's sake. Here's why: They're not that great a band. The lady can't really sing, and she looks like Elaine Benes when she's bopping around on stage; maybe the two dudes can play their instruments really well, but it's sort of hard to tell, because the instruments are toys. "They're just playing with toys on stage," I whispered to Peter. "Is what he's doing on that keyboard hard?"
"No," said Peter. "Not particularly."
Still, the crowd was really enthusiastic (except for a few cynics by the bar who kept hollering at them to end their set) and they do have some pretty exciting songs that can't be spoiled by giggly, indistinct vocals.
Today I decided I was finally going to make it to a Titus Andronicus show -- I'd been meaning to see them for months now, but something always got in the way of me getting to their shows. They were scheduled to play two shows today, though, one in the evening at some place deep in North Brooklyn that I wasn't even tryin' to go to, but one in the middle of the afternoon at tis amphitheater in East River Park, which I hadn't ever been to. The organization sponsoring the event, the East River Music Project, wouldn't tell me where the place was, but a hasty googling revealed it to be near Grand St. and the FDR Drive, so I grabbed my laptop (something to do on the train) and headed into the city. It was a significant hike from the station to the East River, and when I got to the footbridge over the FDR, I couldn't see any thing resembling an amphitheater anywhere in sight. Since there were some industrial-looking buildings directly to the south, I decided to hoof it north towards the greener-looking bits, but after about twenty minutes of walking past ballfield after ballfield, I realized I had no idea where the place was. Plus, I reasoned, the show was probably over and the humidity was making me feel kind of sick; best to head back to the train. As I walked back to Grand, a light rain started to fall, which was nice. When I got back to the bridge, though, I heard the sounds of electric guitar -- it turns out the amphitheater was a block south of where I'd started from, just over the crest of a small, dome-obscuring hill.
The assembled crowd was sort of sparse, but Titus Andronicus were on stage and rocking out. I think I'd missed most of their set. It was starting to rain harder, and some of the less hardcore audience members were shuffling into the cover of the trees. "So, uh, how much do you guys hate this?" asked Liam Betson (who looks a lot like Evan Harper). "'Cuz we were gonna do two more, but it could be, like, one short one and one medium one, or, uh, two short ones." Applause and clapping, unclear for which option. They launched into their signature, eponymous song. Liam sings (and plays harmonica) while holding a cigarette, which is pretty neat. Towards the end of the song, he climbs one of the amp stacks, which is covered in a slippery-wet blue tarp, and leaps back onto the stage, a move befitting a crowd of more than, you know, fifty. They sound awesome, even in the rain! ...Which was becoming more of a serious storm at that point. I stowed my laptop bag under a bench. After the song, it became clear that they couldn't keep going -- some of the equipment was getting a real soaking -- so they pretty much wound it up right then.
I left, tucking my laptop into my t-shirt, with the remaining audience as it began to really pour. To no avail, I searched for an awning of any substance among the housing projects near the park. Ultimately I wound up cowering in front of a grocery store called Fine Fare with about a dozen other people, hipsters and not. The store gave me some plastic bags to wrap my shit up in, but the water was really coming down -- to the extent that when I tried to hoof it to the next island of dryness, I couldn't tell which way I was going and accidentally headed back in the direction of the park! My clothes also got completely saturated -- like, they literally couldn't absorb more water I was so wet. A nice old lady let me into the lobby of her building where I called Eve, who I'd sort of originally planned to meet, and strategized. She gave me the number of a car service, but, maybe predictably, five minutes after I got off the phone with her, the storm abated entirely and the sun came out again, leaving the pavement steaming.
I stopped at Doughnut Plant on the way back to the train for some lavender donuts, a taste for which was imparted to me by Nina. "Fap, fap, fap," she said just now. "That should be your last line."
Fap, fap, fap.
Over dinner for Fathers Day at Jane, she told me she'd gone to a Lil' Wayne concert, thus further demonstrating that she is way cooler than I ever was. "He's really weird and kind of scary on stage," she said. "He wears all these chains and he's covered in tattoos. And there's this song he does that's not an any album called 'The Pussy Monster.' It's not even a song, it's just him whispering into the microphone. Look it up on YouTube."
I did. Here it is.
On a related note, Nina and I were woken up last weekend by at 2:30 AM by someone outside playing a song, super loud, on their car stereo, called "Money Make Me Come" (by Rick Ross -- I looked it up the next morning based on my recollection of the lyrics:
I needs a real bitch). That happens fairly frequently on my block, for some reason -- I fall asleep to the murmurings of the kids on the stoop downstairs and then at just the wrong hour of morning someone'll just really crank the Soulja Boy, waking me (and everyone else on the block, I'm guessing) up startled and annoyed. And it's usually just one, song mind you, as if the rest of album can be enjoyed at normal volume, but this single, man, this one's got to go to eleven.
365
Let her count the cheese
Let her see the pies
The next morning we headed down to Coney Island to see the Mermaid Parade. Nina'd been before, but I hadn't, and I guess I was kind of expecting a real bacchanal. It turned out to be pretty tame. Sure, there were some titties out, and the amount of greasepaint and sequins some of the paraders were wearing was impressive considering the heat, but the majority of costumes were underwhelming -- eyepatches and bandanas ruled the day. So after a few minutes of gawking, we took a turn onto Ocean Av. and went to go check out the Aquarium.
You may not know this, babies, but the summer after 10th grade, I worked the shark tank down there on weekdays in order to satisfy the Brick Prison's community service requirements. It was actually a pretty blissful experience -- light years better than having to schlep meals to loathsome, racist senior citizens, e.g., which was one of the other jobs I tried briefly -- usually just me in the damp, cool darkness of the shark enclosure, watching the beasts swim by oblivious to me. Occasionally a troop of camp kids (developmentally disabled, more often than not) would march in and I'd give them a spiel of trivia ("Did you know there are sharks swimming around right now off the coast of Coney Island?"), but mostly I could just sit and read by the unearthly light of the water. My favorite part of the job, though, was manning the "touch tank," which I got to a couple times a week, because you got to get all up in the grilles of some horseshoe crabs. Those things are weird.
So Nina and I visited the shark tank, which clearly hadn't seen any renovation in the last decade -- same pieces missing from the sort-of-pathetic mechanical-interactive displays mounted on the slatted wooden walls. And then we ate some sort of gross museum food (the fish-and-chips called to mind the winners of the "Darkest Fish" awards) and visited this fancy new jellyfish exhibit they've got set up.
The real highlight, though, was what we saw on the way out -- the been a baby walrus born the summer before, and the aquarium was still hyping it (possibly on account of both the parents having been raised entirely in captivity). The thing was still pretty much a baby. It was a warm afternoon -- close to closing time -- and it and its mother were sort of spooning on a flat rock in their little enclosure, both of them amorphous and glossy and cafe-au-lait-colored. In the adjacent areas, a couple of penguins got chased around the rocks by an ornery seagull and an otter did some anxious-looking somersaults, but we were transfixed by the two whiskered, slumbering blobs. Over some rocks to the right, the father walrus was also sleeping, but alone and fitfully, tossing around and kind of rubbing at his face with his flippers as if swatting away flies. "Wake up!" a little kid kept hollering at him, but he didn't stir. We left and took a walk on the beach, down to the freezing water. A few mermaids with stamina were still milling around outside Ruby's (which seemed to have recovered quickly from its little problem with collapsing bathrooms).
The next day, we read on Gothamist that the dad walrus had died that night! No joke -- apparently he'd been suffering from a serious and unexpected bacterial infection for the preceding week. His fussing over his face could have been some kind of death agony, and we couldn't tell! Mayhap Nina and I were some of the last to see Ayveq The Masturbating Walrus alive.
More news: Nina's going to the Brazilian rain forest for a month at the end of next week. She'd been planning to do some kind of study-abroad program this summer through this environmental program at Columbia called CERC that does a bunch of different projects at a number of locations around the world, and what ended up working the best, date-wise, was going to the fuckin' jungle. (I think it's also definitely the coolest option.) She's been buying gear for her trip and fretting over tropical diseases for the past month. I think it's going to be swell, although just between you and me, hogosphere, the rain forest does sound a little a-scary.
I'm going to be joining her in the middle of August, though, for a week of post-rain forest chillaxing in Buenos Aires. I'm a little anxious, to be honest, even though it's not my first trip off-continent -- it'll be the longest non-stop flight I've ever taken, and have you looked at a map of Argentina? It's practically the fucking south pole! Does it feel different down there, like you're going to fall off the world? Nonetheless, people live there, I'm told, and apparently Buenos Aires has the highest concentration of psychiatrists in the world (more than New York? Really?), so I'm sure I'll make it out in one piece. I've already had my shots (hepatitis and typhoid) over at the travel medicine clinic in Hell's Kitchen. I asked the doctor administering them if I should get the yellow fever one, too, in case Nina'd been exposed before meeting up with me. "No," he said, in an accent that actually sounded kind of Argentinian. "Is not possible to get yellow fever from another person. But your girlfriend, she got the vaccine, yes? Yellow fever is quite serious."
"It's one of the hemorrhagic fevers," I said, "right?"
"Yes," he said. "There are many hemorrhagic fevers: Dengue, yellow fever; Marburg and Ebola, of course; and Kyasanur [Forest disease]."
More on that as it develops.
Last night after work Peter and I went to The Annex to see Freezepop, who were playing with a bunch of bands I'd never heard of. That's always confused me about Freezepop -- how do they land really catchy songs in two (or is it three) smash hit rock and roll video games but still manage to not be popular or successful? I mean, you know, The Annex, for fuck's sake. Here's why: They're not that great a band. The lady can't really sing, and she looks like Elaine Benes when she's bopping around on stage; maybe the two dudes can play their instruments really well, but it's sort of hard to tell, because the instruments are toys. "They're just playing with toys on stage," I whispered to Peter. "Is what he's doing on that keyboard hard?"
"No," said Peter. "Not particularly."
Still, the crowd was really enthusiastic (except for a few cynics by the bar who kept hollering at them to end their set) and they do have some pretty exciting songs that can't be spoiled by giggly, indistinct vocals.
Today I decided I was finally going to make it to a Titus Andronicus show -- I'd been meaning to see them for months now, but something always got in the way of me getting to their shows. They were scheduled to play two shows today, though, one in the evening at some place deep in North Brooklyn that I wasn't even tryin' to go to, but one in the middle of the afternoon at tis amphitheater in East River Park, which I hadn't ever been to. The organization sponsoring the event, the East River Music Project, wouldn't tell me where the place was, but a hasty googling revealed it to be near Grand St. and the FDR Drive, so I grabbed my laptop (something to do on the train) and headed into the city. It was a significant hike from the station to the East River, and when I got to the footbridge over the FDR, I couldn't see any thing resembling an amphitheater anywhere in sight. Since there were some industrial-looking buildings directly to the south, I decided to hoof it north towards the greener-looking bits, but after about twenty minutes of walking past ballfield after ballfield, I realized I had no idea where the place was. Plus, I reasoned, the show was probably over and the humidity was making me feel kind of sick; best to head back to the train. As I walked back to Grand, a light rain started to fall, which was nice. When I got back to the bridge, though, I heard the sounds of electric guitar -- it turns out the amphitheater was a block south of where I'd started from, just over the crest of a small, dome-obscuring hill.
The assembled crowd was sort of sparse, but Titus Andronicus were on stage and rocking out. I think I'd missed most of their set. It was starting to rain harder, and some of the less hardcore audience members were shuffling into the cover of the trees. "So, uh, how much do you guys hate this?" asked Liam Betson (who looks a lot like Evan Harper). "'Cuz we were gonna do two more, but it could be, like, one short one and one medium one, or, uh, two short ones." Applause and clapping, unclear for which option. They launched into their signature, eponymous song. Liam sings (and plays harmonica) while holding a cigarette, which is pretty neat. Towards the end of the song, he climbs one of the amp stacks, which is covered in a slippery-wet blue tarp, and leaps back onto the stage, a move befitting a crowd of more than, you know, fifty. They sound awesome, even in the rain! ...Which was becoming more of a serious storm at that point. I stowed my laptop bag under a bench. After the song, it became clear that they couldn't keep going -- some of the equipment was getting a real soaking -- so they pretty much wound it up right then.
I left, tucking my laptop into my t-shirt, with the remaining audience as it began to really pour. To no avail, I searched for an awning of any substance among the housing projects near the park. Ultimately I wound up cowering in front of a grocery store called Fine Fare with about a dozen other people, hipsters and not. The store gave me some plastic bags to wrap my shit up in, but the water was really coming down -- to the extent that when I tried to hoof it to the next island of dryness, I couldn't tell which way I was going and accidentally headed back in the direction of the park! My clothes also got completely saturated -- like, they literally couldn't absorb more water I was so wet. A nice old lady let me into the lobby of her building where I called Eve, who I'd sort of originally planned to meet, and strategized. She gave me the number of a car service, but, maybe predictably, five minutes after I got off the phone with her, the storm abated entirely and the sun came out again, leaving the pavement steaming.
I stopped at Doughnut Plant on the way back to the train for some lavender donuts, a taste for which was imparted to me by Nina. "Fap, fap, fap," she said just now. "That should be your last line."
Fap, fap, fap.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
The Wedding of Razor Lopez
Like I've been saying. it's been crunch time at work. We had a big thing that was due on Monday, and we'd been working on it around the clock (literally, at times). Peter stayed in the office all night Wednesday to Thursday and promptly got sick; the testers woke me up at 4:00 AM Thursday morning to fix something. It was nuts. And Billy's wedding, with the accompanying bachelor party and rehearsal, was this week, too.
To be honest, I was kind of dreading it. I hadn't seen Billy in probably more than a year -- we kept making plans to hang out, have a beer, catch up, but they kept getting derailed. Given that he'd named me one of his groomsmen, I figured we'd need to sit down at least once before the thing, but apparently his job was crazy, too, so we'd had to just leave it that we'd see each other at the bachelor party.
I was pretty worried about that, too. I'd only ever been involved with one bachelor party, which I'd "thrown" for Joel when his best man punked out. We ended up going out for dinner with his wife-to-be at a Mexican place near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The waitress gave me her phone number, which felt like a lot of responsibility, and then we went to go see some movies on a factory roof. Pleasant enough, but pretty tame. So when Bobby sent out the email, I suggested we go see a show. It was all I knew how to do.
"Have you ever heard of him going to a rock concert?" Bobby replied. Chris said, "My guess is that Billy would prefer the strippers." I was overruled. And I'd never been to a strip club. What if I didn't like it -- what if it was really depressing and I didn't like any of the girls? What if the girls could tell I was frightened and they got angry? With some trepidation, I got the name of a place from Joel -- he'd actually treated his no-show best man to a rager when that guy'd gotten married. "It's nice," Joel said. "The girls are young, blond, Brighton Beach types." Bobby made a reservation at a steakhouse down by the seaport where Billy works, and we all went out to dinner there first. We ordered a steak-for-four platter that brought a whole pile of sizzling, hissing cow to our table. I don't think I've ever eaten that much meat! Well, probably. I don't know. We drank a bunch of Jameson, neat. And after dinner we smoked cigars out on some benches on Water St.
I guess I'm not supposed to say what happened at the strip joint? Don't know how this works. Nobody did anything bad. It was actually really nice -- they've really figured out a bunch of subtle things that make a titty bar an order of magnitude better than, you know, a regular drinking place you go to with dudes. The temperature is just so, the waitresses were extra sweet and friendly, and, you know, asses and titties everywhere. And the girls are soaked in this perfume that should be nauseating, but is somehow not. That's not to say there weren't some creepy components to the experience: A couple of fat guys sitting across the T-shaped catwalk from us were monopolizing several of the dancers at once, slipping them hundreds and hundreds of sweaty dollars to buy their way up the lap dance hierarchy to allowed-to-touch-a-stripper's-lower-back. Chris overheard a snippet of conversation in the bathroom that sort of captures up the vibe that these dudes were putting out:
There was a really intense dude sitting at the head of the catwalk who looked a lot like Michael Musto. He was putting singles in practically every dancer's thong. I pointed him out to Bobby. "That's probably not Michael Musto," he said.
The next morning I got up and emptied six Amstel Lights out of my butt into the toilet. That evening there was a rehearsal for the wedding up at St. Mary's in Harlem. Billy's wife-to-be, Sarah, is the daughter of the rector -- the church is their house, really, so there's no way they weren't having the ceremony there. Sarah's dad, Earl, is incredibly friendly (and a dead ringer for Father Damien Karras). His requests for the ceremony were simple and few: That we say "and also with you" and "amen" at the right moments, and stand or sit as the proceedings called for it. No problem. Then we drank beer out in the courtyard.
The wedding went off the next day without a hitch -- except that Billy and Sarah's dog, Job, who'd been tasked with carrying the ring-basket down the aisle got predictably distracted by the assembled well-wishers and shrugged off his duty about half way through. There were some religious-y parts of the ceremony, Rev. Earl being, you know, a priest, but they were tempered by another church officiant giving a little speech, intended to assuage the fears of the less spiritual guests, to the effect that marriage is for sex and that religion is all about fucking. At the beginning of the wedding, Earl asked Chris to ring the church bell. "Ring it three times three, with a pause in between, and then nine times slowly." Chris initially balked, afraid he'd fuck it up and expose himself as a sloptard in the hands of an angry god, but after some coaxing, he rang it with gusto, pulling down with all his might like some kind of louche hunchback.
On Saturday after the wedding I headed back into the office. We all worked on Sunday, too.
On Sunday night, Matthew and I took a walk around the neighborhood to scrounge up food. The heat was stifling, but suffering it felt good. We got some Cuban sandwiches at Cafe Havana on 8th Ave. and went back up to the office. When I bit into mine, I managed to stab a sharp piece of the bread into the soft, tendon-y stuff under my tongue. It hurt like a motherfucker, and I must have cut something open down there, because within minutes all these little nubbins under my tongue swelled up, pushing my tongue up towards the roof my mouth. When I went to look at the affair in the bathroom mirror, it looked like a small, sublingual udder. Rattled and stinging, I sat back down at my desk and kept going.
We managed to finish almost everything we wanted to for Monday, but I'm still getting used to the feeling of having a life again. The air conditioner in the office broke at some point timed to coincide with the uncannily early June heatwave. Sweat.
The heat wave broke today after work, an angry, pre-storm wind throwing trash and leaves through the air across 4th Ave. I snuck in the door just ahead of the downpour.
To be honest, I was kind of dreading it. I hadn't seen Billy in probably more than a year -- we kept making plans to hang out, have a beer, catch up, but they kept getting derailed. Given that he'd named me one of his groomsmen, I figured we'd need to sit down at least once before the thing, but apparently his job was crazy, too, so we'd had to just leave it that we'd see each other at the bachelor party.
I was pretty worried about that, too. I'd only ever been involved with one bachelor party, which I'd "thrown" for Joel when his best man punked out. We ended up going out for dinner with his wife-to-be at a Mexican place near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The waitress gave me her phone number, which felt like a lot of responsibility, and then we went to go see some movies on a factory roof. Pleasant enough, but pretty tame. So when Bobby sent out the email, I suggested we go see a show. It was all I knew how to do.
"Have you ever heard of him going to a rock concert?" Bobby replied. Chris said, "My guess is that Billy would prefer the strippers." I was overruled. And I'd never been to a strip club. What if I didn't like it -- what if it was really depressing and I didn't like any of the girls? What if the girls could tell I was frightened and they got angry? With some trepidation, I got the name of a place from Joel -- he'd actually treated his no-show best man to a rager when that guy'd gotten married. "It's nice," Joel said. "The girls are young, blond, Brighton Beach types." Bobby made a reservation at a steakhouse down by the seaport where Billy works, and we all went out to dinner there first. We ordered a steak-for-four platter that brought a whole pile of sizzling, hissing cow to our table. I don't think I've ever eaten that much meat! Well, probably. I don't know. We drank a bunch of Jameson, neat. And after dinner we smoked cigars out on some benches on Water St.
I guess I'm not supposed to say what happened at the strip joint? Don't know how this works. Nobody did anything bad. It was actually really nice -- they've really figured out a bunch of subtle things that make a titty bar an order of magnitude better than, you know, a regular drinking place you go to with dudes. The temperature is just so, the waitresses were extra sweet and friendly, and, you know, asses and titties everywhere. And the girls are soaked in this perfume that should be nauseating, but is somehow not. That's not to say there weren't some creepy components to the experience: A couple of fat guys sitting across the T-shaped catwalk from us were monopolizing several of the dancers at once, slipping them hundreds and hundreds of sweaty dollars to buy their way up the lap dance hierarchy to allowed-to-touch-a-stripper's-lower-back. Chris overheard a snippet of conversation in the bathroom that sort of captures up the vibe that these dudes were putting out:
Guy 1: Man, I just spent $400 on lap dances. Sometimes I think I should just go find myself a girlfriend.Yeah, so we got a whole bunch of lap dances. That's pretty much the point, I think. Some of the girls were really good and really gave the impression that they liked you, but some weren't / didn't. I'm not going to lie, though -- at the end of the night, I was in Toki Wartooth-mode and was kind of fantasizing about coming back. It was a little weird. "How long does this last?" I asked Chris. "About a day," he said. He was right.
Guy 2: Yeah, but, man -- pussy: It's nothing but trouble.
There was a really intense dude sitting at the head of the catwalk who looked a lot like Michael Musto. He was putting singles in practically every dancer's thong. I pointed him out to Bobby. "That's probably not Michael Musto," he said.
The next morning I got up and emptied six Amstel Lights out of my butt into the toilet. That evening there was a rehearsal for the wedding up at St. Mary's in Harlem. Billy's wife-to-be, Sarah, is the daughter of the rector -- the church is their house, really, so there's no way they weren't having the ceremony there. Sarah's dad, Earl, is incredibly friendly (and a dead ringer for Father Damien Karras). His requests for the ceremony were simple and few: That we say "and also with you" and "amen" at the right moments, and stand or sit as the proceedings called for it. No problem. Then we drank beer out in the courtyard.
The wedding went off the next day without a hitch -- except that Billy and Sarah's dog, Job, who'd been tasked with carrying the ring-basket down the aisle got predictably distracted by the assembled well-wishers and shrugged off his duty about half way through. There were some religious-y parts of the ceremony, Rev. Earl being, you know, a priest, but they were tempered by another church officiant giving a little speech, intended to assuage the fears of the less spiritual guests, to the effect that marriage is for sex and that religion is all about fucking. At the beginning of the wedding, Earl asked Chris to ring the church bell. "Ring it three times three, with a pause in between, and then nine times slowly." Chris initially balked, afraid he'd fuck it up and expose himself as a sloptard in the hands of an angry god, but after some coaxing, he rang it with gusto, pulling down with all his might like some kind of louche hunchback.
On Saturday after the wedding I headed back into the office. We all worked on Sunday, too.
On Sunday night, Matthew and I took a walk around the neighborhood to scrounge up food. The heat was stifling, but suffering it felt good. We got some Cuban sandwiches at Cafe Havana on 8th Ave. and went back up to the office. When I bit into mine, I managed to stab a sharp piece of the bread into the soft, tendon-y stuff under my tongue. It hurt like a motherfucker, and I must have cut something open down there, because within minutes all these little nubbins under my tongue swelled up, pushing my tongue up towards the roof my mouth. When I went to look at the affair in the bathroom mirror, it looked like a small, sublingual udder. Rattled and stinging, I sat back down at my desk and kept going.
We managed to finish almost everything we wanted to for Monday, but I'm still getting used to the feeling of having a life again. The air conditioner in the office broke at some point timed to coincide with the uncannily early June heatwave. Sweat.
The heat wave broke today after work, an angry, pre-storm wind throwing trash and leaves through the air across 4th Ave. I snuck in the door just ahead of the downpour.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Funny Banana In Sunset Park
Well, not quite yet. But I did buy Kitty a leash and collar today at Petland Discounts. In a fit of pre-commute boredom -- and at Nina's repeat urging -- I did some Googling of Kitty's... condition. You know, the stomach thing. The Internet said that she was probably bored and depressed, and that getting her outside might help with that. Now, don't get me wrong, I done knew Kitty's emotions were in a tangle, but I guess I didn't think there was much to be done about it. The Internet said, though, that it might help to let her go outside, attached to a leash, maybe. So on Saturday I hoofed it over to Petland and got a leash and collar, a cute little red nylon dealie with a tiny bell on it. After fretting about the exertions that would be necessary to get her into it, I tried a little test run, slipping the thing over her head. To my surprise, it worked -- I got the leash on on my first try, tightened it, the works, and Kitty wasn't bothered at all. Until she got up and started walking around, that is, and couldn't figure out where the tinkle-tinkle of the bell was coming from. It drove her nuts! She was chasing her tail and pawing at invisible things in the air and seemed generally miserable. So I cornered her in the bedroom and slipped the collar off. And now she won't go near it.
To the extent possible, I kicked off my summer on Friday by heading down to South Street Seaport to go see Wire with my friend Peter from work. It was Friday, we were still there at 9 o'clock, so I just stood up and said, hey, who wants to go see Wire? It was a beautiful night, and even though we go there basically at the end, we were able to get pretty close. Unfortunately, Wire wasn't really that good. I'm not super familiar with their ouvre, but I'd liked the stuff of theirs they'd put on their MySpace, and, live, they just seemed kind of sloppy and over the hill. The lead singer had this laptop he was using for something on stage, and we knew that the concert was over -- after the second encore -- because he kind of snuck back up to collect it.
I've been working real late lately, babies, and it's been making me kind of miserable. I guess experiencing a game industry "crunch" is something I wanted to try -- I mean, this whole job is kind of like Internet startup fantasy camp for me -- but when it goes on for a month or more, it's just... unpleasant. Like, there's this persistent, dull discomfort, and you're tired all the time. But, yeah, so I was getting home around 12:30 the other night, and as I was walking across the Burger King parking lot, I saw these three guys kind of circling each other. Two of them had their fists raised, and the other one was kind of refereeing and giving color commentary. And then they started throwing punches. I wasn't sure quite what to do -- the Burger King was full of patrons, there was even a fourth guy who was leaning in the exit, smoking a cigarette and observing the whole scene. But one of the fighters seemed like he was overmatched, and started really getting pummeled up against the side of a car, while the hovering commentator yelled, "Choke him! Choke the fuck out of him!" It occurred to me that this wasn't a friendly round of midnight street boxing, and I debated calling 911. Was it the kind of affair the cops should get involved in? If they took one or both of the kids off to jail, would that ultimately be for the best? The matter was sort of resolved for me by the sound of sirens on 4th Ave. as I headed up 41st.
When I got home, I popped in Marathon Man -- part of my new watch-it-in-four-weeks-no-matter-what Netflix policy -- and allowed myself to get freaked out by the Laurence Olivier character. The Netflix blurb says that the movie follows Dustin Hoffman's character as he "turns from pacifist to street-smart cynic" -- which one am I? That's not what the movie is about, anyway.
I told Eve about the experience the next evening over drinks and mutton at Sheep Station. Was I too old, I wondered, to let some teenagers settle their grievances in peace? Turns out she'd witnessed a knife fight over a bicycle on the subway ride down to meet me, during that long bit before any station after the D gets into Brooklyn over the bridge. So my story was sort of tame by comparison.
The previous Friday I'd gone over to Aanie's house after work to play Wii with Nina and her and Brooke. Aanie and Brooke have a copy of Wii Fit, and they created Miis for me and Nina, so we spent a while getting in shape. My "Wii Fit Age," as determined by my ability to balance on the stupid plastic pad, is 43! We tried out some skiing games and the hula hoop game and I kind of sucked at all of them, so then I was like, let me take a crack at the push-up activity, I'll rock at that. It turns out the push-up mode is fucking brutal! You have to do them extra slow, with your hands unnaturally close together, and in between repetitions you have to sort of twist yourself around and balance on a single hand. I made it through all six reps, but it was really hard!
And the next evening I was so sore that I couldn't sleep at all! Everything hurt, and I just tossed and turned all night. The next day I couldn't really muster the energy or enthusiasm to do anything, so Nina and I made a pilgrimage over to Brooklyn Bridge Park to take a look at the Telectroscope. It's a faux-implementation of a hoax that some guy was pushing around the turn of the century for making a mirrored tunnel from New York to London to foster camaraderie and understanding between Americans and Brit-Faces. This version works via some kind of digital video hookup, but the whole thing is molded to look like an industrial-age brass telescope exploding up out of the pier. It was around midnight in London by the time we got to the head of the line. A cheeky, sotted limey kept threatening to moon us, eliciting titters from all the girls.
After that we ate dinner.
I'm just re-reading this entry and it's not that exciting.
To the extent possible, I kicked off my summer on Friday by heading down to South Street Seaport to go see Wire with my friend Peter from work. It was Friday, we were still there at 9 o'clock, so I just stood up and said, hey, who wants to go see Wire? It was a beautiful night, and even though we go there basically at the end, we were able to get pretty close. Unfortunately, Wire wasn't really that good. I'm not super familiar with their ouvre, but I'd liked the stuff of theirs they'd put on their MySpace, and, live, they just seemed kind of sloppy and over the hill. The lead singer had this laptop he was using for something on stage, and we knew that the concert was over -- after the second encore -- because he kind of snuck back up to collect it.
I've been working real late lately, babies, and it's been making me kind of miserable. I guess experiencing a game industry "crunch" is something I wanted to try -- I mean, this whole job is kind of like Internet startup fantasy camp for me -- but when it goes on for a month or more, it's just... unpleasant. Like, there's this persistent, dull discomfort, and you're tired all the time. But, yeah, so I was getting home around 12:30 the other night, and as I was walking across the Burger King parking lot, I saw these three guys kind of circling each other. Two of them had their fists raised, and the other one was kind of refereeing and giving color commentary. And then they started throwing punches. I wasn't sure quite what to do -- the Burger King was full of patrons, there was even a fourth guy who was leaning in the exit, smoking a cigarette and observing the whole scene. But one of the fighters seemed like he was overmatched, and started really getting pummeled up against the side of a car, while the hovering commentator yelled, "Choke him! Choke the fuck out of him!" It occurred to me that this wasn't a friendly round of midnight street boxing, and I debated calling 911. Was it the kind of affair the cops should get involved in? If they took one or both of the kids off to jail, would that ultimately be for the best? The matter was sort of resolved for me by the sound of sirens on 4th Ave. as I headed up 41st.
When I got home, I popped in Marathon Man -- part of my new watch-it-in-four-weeks-no-matter-what Netflix policy -- and allowed myself to get freaked out by the Laurence Olivier character. The Netflix blurb says that the movie follows Dustin Hoffman's character as he "turns from pacifist to street-smart cynic" -- which one am I? That's not what the movie is about, anyway.
I told Eve about the experience the next evening over drinks and mutton at Sheep Station. Was I too old, I wondered, to let some teenagers settle their grievances in peace? Turns out she'd witnessed a knife fight over a bicycle on the subway ride down to meet me, during that long bit before any station after the D gets into Brooklyn over the bridge. So my story was sort of tame by comparison.
The previous Friday I'd gone over to Aanie's house after work to play Wii with Nina and her and Brooke. Aanie and Brooke have a copy of Wii Fit, and they created Miis for me and Nina, so we spent a while getting in shape. My "Wii Fit Age," as determined by my ability to balance on the stupid plastic pad, is 43! We tried out some skiing games and the hula hoop game and I kind of sucked at all of them, so then I was like, let me take a crack at the push-up activity, I'll rock at that. It turns out the push-up mode is fucking brutal! You have to do them extra slow, with your hands unnaturally close together, and in between repetitions you have to sort of twist yourself around and balance on a single hand. I made it through all six reps, but it was really hard!
And the next evening I was so sore that I couldn't sleep at all! Everything hurt, and I just tossed and turned all night. The next day I couldn't really muster the energy or enthusiasm to do anything, so Nina and I made a pilgrimage over to Brooklyn Bridge Park to take a look at the Telectroscope. It's a faux-implementation of a hoax that some guy was pushing around the turn of the century for making a mirrored tunnel from New York to London to foster camaraderie and understanding between Americans and Brit-Faces. This version works via some kind of digital video hookup, but the whole thing is molded to look like an industrial-age brass telescope exploding up out of the pier. It was around midnight in London by the time we got to the head of the line. A cheeky, sotted limey kept threatening to moon us, eliciting titters from all the girls.
After that we ate dinner.
I'm just re-reading this entry and it's not that exciting.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Ice Saints
Last Saturday, as I was returning home from picking up some dry cleaning, a fire truck passed me on 5th Avenue. When I got to the corner of my block, I saw why -- there was a guy collapsed on the street right smack in front of Super Pollo Latino II. He was a well-dressed dude, with a dark shirt and a black sports jacket on. He was out cold. A small crowd had gathered around him, and the firemen were sort of prodding him. I'd been planning to go for a run, and it seemed like a poor omen for a guy to have what looked like an ataque de corazón a hundred feet from my front door, but I put on the old track pants, running shoes, knee braces, and boxer briefs (for my cojones, you know) anyway and headed out. When I got back to the corner five minutes later, the guy and the firemen and the gawking multitude were gone, as the thing had never happened. Across the street in Sunset Park, though, there was a small-scale festival going on -- a small cohort of Latin dancers wearing long, flowing skirts and these enormous, fluttering, disc-shaped hats made out bright feathers in a bunch of different colors were doing their thing on the promenade. They danced non-stop for four of my circuits around the park. Probably longer than that, too, but that was when my stomach started doing a thing and I had to go home and sweat and shiver on the toilet.
The folks at 680 Degraw St. threw, as planned, their final BBQ. I think the idea was for it to be a rager, a house party to end all house parties (and to at least spoil the property value a tad for the gimlet-eyed landlord), but it ended up being a rather sedate affair, just sitting around on what remained of the sod and schmoozing over Tedburgers. Maybe we're getting too old to rage? To his credit, Ted did put on his hat. I cooked a variation on Jurney's famous enchilada casserole -- a variation because I lost the original recipe and went with the one I found here. Despite my misgivings about the authenticity of "Mexican Tomato Sauce," it came out really tasty, although, as Eve pointed out, the blue corn tortillas I made it with turned a sort of icky gray color when I baked them. The one weird thing that happened was that a friend of a friend, so to speak, of one of the hosts showed up and got kind of... I don't know, crazy. This person, well, we couldn't tell if she'd simply had too much to drink (she wasn't really drunking it up) or if she was actually emotionally disturbed, but she was saying strange, aggressive things to people she'd barely met, and we didn't really know what to do with her. Eventually, she was escorted home by an acquaintance, but it sort of left an odd taste in everyone's mouth. It also reminded me this game that I and my freshman year floormates at Wesleyan used to play when we got high, in which the group would confront a single target and attempt to talk him down from a ledge he wasn't standing on: "Dude, are you okay? You are creeping everyone out. Look, just calm down, we'll get you to the Health Center." Great game.
On a whim at work I shelled the twenty bucks to download a copy of the Penny Arcade video game, On The Rain Slick Precipice Of Darkness. It's actually pretty good! It plays a lot like one of those old Tim Schafer / Ron Gilbert adventure games, except that there's a combat / role-playing component. The dialogue is funny, the art is swell, and there's this small-scale avatar customization system that kind of surprised me with how well it worked. The characters (and game) are a combination of 3-D and line art. You customize your character in 3-D at the beginning -- facial features, body shape, clothes, etc. -- and your choices are reflected in the line art cut scenes as well as the 3-D gameplay. It looks really sweet. That being said, there are a few frustrating, technical gameplay issues -- most of which I would probably be unaware of were I not in the middle of implementing this kind of thing right now -- such as not being sure where you're supposed to click to pathfind to a particular part of the screen and not always walking closer to an object before examining it. Overall, though, it's swell. I'm about three hours in and I've already collected like 14 pounds of hobo meat. That's a thing you do.
I spent hours today lazing around in Sunset Park, laptopping some Free Software documentation and enjoying the wonderful weather. Oh yeah, and this is after I woke up at two in the afternoon. It's been one of those days: Resty. Nina went to pick up some laundry after dark, though, and there was a guy passed out on the street -- possibly dead, she thinks -- people screaming and hooting outside La Campesina, a woman throwing up ("Like, a constant flow") between two parked cars. It gets wild out here.
Started reading, at Tom's behest, the first book in that George R. R. Martin series. I like it, but -- and maybe this is like the time I was disappointed that my archeology class wasn't going to cover dinosaurs -- I thought there'd be more elves and, you know, spells and shit. There is a dwarf, and, yeah, he's kind of the coolest character, but he's just a plain old little handicapped, no magic involved.
The folks at 680 Degraw St. threw, as planned, their final BBQ. I think the idea was for it to be a rager, a house party to end all house parties (and to at least spoil the property value a tad for the gimlet-eyed landlord), but it ended up being a rather sedate affair, just sitting around on what remained of the sod and schmoozing over Tedburgers. Maybe we're getting too old to rage? To his credit, Ted did put on his hat. I cooked a variation on Jurney's famous enchilada casserole -- a variation because I lost the original recipe and went with the one I found here. Despite my misgivings about the authenticity of "Mexican Tomato Sauce," it came out really tasty, although, as Eve pointed out, the blue corn tortillas I made it with turned a sort of icky gray color when I baked them. The one weird thing that happened was that a friend of a friend, so to speak, of one of the hosts showed up and got kind of... I don't know, crazy. This person, well, we couldn't tell if she'd simply had too much to drink (she wasn't really drunking it up) or if she was actually emotionally disturbed, but she was saying strange, aggressive things to people she'd barely met, and we didn't really know what to do with her. Eventually, she was escorted home by an acquaintance, but it sort of left an odd taste in everyone's mouth. It also reminded me this game that I and my freshman year floormates at Wesleyan used to play when we got high, in which the group would confront a single target and attempt to talk him down from a ledge he wasn't standing on: "Dude, are you okay? You are creeping everyone out. Look, just calm down, we'll get you to the Health Center." Great game.
On a whim at work I shelled the twenty bucks to download a copy of the Penny Arcade video game, On The Rain Slick Precipice Of Darkness. It's actually pretty good! It plays a lot like one of those old Tim Schafer / Ron Gilbert adventure games, except that there's a combat / role-playing component. The dialogue is funny, the art is swell, and there's this small-scale avatar customization system that kind of surprised me with how well it worked. The characters (and game) are a combination of 3-D and line art. You customize your character in 3-D at the beginning -- facial features, body shape, clothes, etc. -- and your choices are reflected in the line art cut scenes as well as the 3-D gameplay. It looks really sweet. That being said, there are a few frustrating, technical gameplay issues -- most of which I would probably be unaware of were I not in the middle of implementing this kind of thing right now -- such as not being sure where you're supposed to click to pathfind to a particular part of the screen and not always walking closer to an object before examining it. Overall, though, it's swell. I'm about three hours in and I've already collected like 14 pounds of hobo meat. That's a thing you do.
I spent hours today lazing around in Sunset Park, laptopping some Free Software documentation and enjoying the wonderful weather. Oh yeah, and this is after I woke up at two in the afternoon. It's been one of those days: Resty. Nina went to pick up some laundry after dark, though, and there was a guy passed out on the street -- possibly dead, she thinks -- people screaming and hooting outside La Campesina, a woman throwing up ("Like, a constant flow") between two parked cars. It gets wild out here.
Started reading, at Tom's behest, the first book in that George R. R. Martin series. I like it, but -- and maybe this is like the time I was disappointed that my archeology class wasn't going to cover dinosaurs -- I thought there'd be more elves and, you know, spells and shit. There is a dwarf, and, yeah, he's kind of the coolest character, but he's just a plain old little handicapped, no magic involved.
Friday, May 02, 2008
World Have Your Say
Round-up of available Chelsea-area breakfast sandwiches:
When we entered, crossing the colonnade to the orchard, there were DJs spinning "Anime-themed J-Pop and J-Rock" -- at the moment we showed up they were playing a song that I recognized as being by Maximum The Hormone called "What's up, people?!" which I recognized because it's the theme song to Death Note on Adult Swim.
Yeah, so I watch that show sometimes. Can I take a second to say what a creepy, mean little wallow it is? In principle, I guess you could take it as a sort of dramatic experiment in telling a story about a protagonist who's utterly, inhumanly loathsome, but that doesn't make it any easier or less icky to watch. Plus, as M-Biddy warned me when he visited a few months ago, something happens part-way through the series (i.e., the episodes that Adult Swim just put up) that kind of snuffs out whatever joy remained in the exercise of watching it. Am I going to stop watching? I, uh... probably not.
But, yeah, so we bought some hot dogs and a Sapporo and then we ran into Eve's roommate Alicia and her friend, who reminded us that there was a koi pond full of turtles. So we hurried off to go look at and take pictures of the turtles. There were a bunch of them, prostrate on the rocks, stretching their little heads up at the sun. I knelt down to get a good shot of one of them with the ol' SD450, and a wasp landed on my shutter finger. I tried to blow it off, but it seemed oblivious -- even when I tried to kind of rotate my finger to wipe it off onto the camera body it hung on, like a lazy cat being dislodged from a lap -- and so I had to wait while it gave itself a short bath, its weird little vertical beak opening and closing as it scrubbed its head and thorax. And then it flew off. As I mentioned to Nina, I had resigned myself to getting stung, but I'm glad I didn't.
Later on, the hot dogs started to bother us... internally, so we went home. I was exhausted! And my calves were sore for a couple days afterwards. Looks like I've got some "body work" to do before summer.
- 23rd & 6th - There's a guy with one of those bagel carts that also has a small grill, there. One egg on a small Portuguese-style roll with salt, pepper, and a liberal amount of butter runs you $1.25 and tastes pretty good. Hard to beat.
- 666 6th Ave. - They probably make plain egg sandwiches, but if you're going to a deli, I feel like you should go with some kind of meat topping (bacon costs $2.50, I think; with sausage it's $2.75). Too pricey to have every day, but everything is cooked well and doled out in generous helpings (ketchup included, unfortunately, even when you ask for just a little bit), so it's perfect when you feel like you deserve a treat just for coming into work.
- Coffee Shop - This place is a little hole in the wall -- really! It's practically a closet -- on 21st St. near 6th Ave. I think it's run by Indian people, but they make conventional diner-y grill food. Two eggs on a roll costs $2.00, which is a little bit rich for my blood, but the atmosphere of the place is kind of homey and the eggs were scrambled just so. So.
- 17th & 7th - Another guy in a propane-fueled bagel wagon. Joe Stroll turned me onto him -- "He makes a sausage, egg, and cheese with real sausage for only $2.00!" -- so I checked it out. It ended up being $2.50, and the sausage was actually pretty much a hot dog, but I managed to keep it down, so it gets points for that?
When we entered, crossing the colonnade to the orchard, there were DJs spinning "Anime-themed J-Pop and J-Rock" -- at the moment we showed up they were playing a song that I recognized as being by Maximum The Hormone called "What's up, people?!" which I recognized because it's the theme song to Death Note on Adult Swim.
Yeah, so I watch that show sometimes. Can I take a second to say what a creepy, mean little wallow it is? In principle, I guess you could take it as a sort of dramatic experiment in telling a story about a protagonist who's utterly, inhumanly loathsome, but that doesn't make it any easier or less icky to watch. Plus, as M-Biddy warned me when he visited a few months ago, something happens part-way through the series (i.e., the episodes that Adult Swim just put up) that kind of snuffs out whatever joy remained in the exercise of watching it. Am I going to stop watching? I, uh... probably not.
But, yeah, so we bought some hot dogs and a Sapporo and then we ran into Eve's roommate Alicia and her friend, who reminded us that there was a koi pond full of turtles. So we hurried off to go look at and take pictures of the turtles. There were a bunch of them, prostrate on the rocks, stretching their little heads up at the sun. I knelt down to get a good shot of one of them with the ol' SD450, and a wasp landed on my shutter finger. I tried to blow it off, but it seemed oblivious -- even when I tried to kind of rotate my finger to wipe it off onto the camera body it hung on, like a lazy cat being dislodged from a lap -- and so I had to wait while it gave itself a short bath, its weird little vertical beak opening and closing as it scrubbed its head and thorax. And then it flew off. As I mentioned to Nina, I had resigned myself to getting stung, but I'm glad I didn't.
Later on, the hot dogs started to bother us... internally, so we went home. I was exhausted! And my calves were sore for a couple days afterwards. Looks like I've got some "body work" to do before summer.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Touch Me I'm Sick
Spring: bursting out all over. This is the kind of weather, I feel like, that you really have a duty to pay attention to, because the niceness of it, the temperature of the air, the flowers blooming, etc., kind of tricks your brain into thinking that the universe is a pleasant place to live in. That is to say, you start to feel like spring weather is the new baseline, when, in fact, it really isn't at all -- it's actually about as good as it gets. That two or three week period in October / November when it's starting to get kind of cold but it's still not freezing, that's the fucking baseline for weather. So what I do is when I'm walking down 4th Ave. to the D train in the morning, I try to think to myself, "Gee, you know, this is actually pretty great."
Except not for the past three days, because I've had this motherfucker of a cold that (I think) I got from Nina. It's one of those sinus / face viruses where you're just completely incapacitated with discomfort, and you can't even really think anything coherent. I got up on Saturday morning and tried to kick off my usual weekend round of FFXII, but I couldn't even really make the screen come into focus. All I could do was sit on the couch and think, "Wow, how do I even feel this bad?"
Some solace was derived from the tender ministrations of Nina, who was very understanding; and from Lost Pig, which all of you must play, preferrably in an 80x24 console window. And I suppose I should also recommend, albeit reluctantly, Urban Dead, in which I've been dutifully spending my daily "Action Points." Come visit me! I'm Picabo Street. Remember her? Yeah, she's a zombie now.
In the depths of this funk -- and on a drizzly Friday to boot -- I hit up Tom's 27th birthday party at P.J. Hanley's. Not to toot my own horn, but I totally knocked the present ball out of the park: I emailed Jonathan Pryce-lookalike (and Facebook friend to me, as of April 2nd) Ken Freedman, to see if there was any way I could get my hands on any remaining pieces of the neat, rare WFMU swag they'd given away in past years during marathon pledge drives. It turned out there was, and I netted for Tom:
I'm feeling a bit better now, though, that I've got progressed to the point of expelling webs of yellow-green custard from the raw upper channels of my nose.
Tom got a bunch of us tickets to see The Kids In The Hall the weekend before last. He's always been a bigger fan of The Kids than me, but they pretty much never tour, so I couldn't really pass it up. They were playing at the "Nokia Theater" in Times Square, which turned out to be a real shit-show -- $10 drinks, disconcertingly low ceilings, and this laughable little "museum" of old Nokia phones. The actual theater part of the place was fine, though, and they had monitors set up and an attentive camera guy who kept them zoomed in on the important parts of the action. Although The Kids are quite a bit older than they were the last time they were working, the material's still pretty fresh (insofar as it's still about blowjobs and drinking) -- but boy did they get wrinkly. It's a sad state of affairs when Kevin MacDonald is "the pretty one." And Dave Foley's face is kind of caving in, Shane MacGowan-style.
So, I laughed a good laugh, but I should say that the central problem I have with their comedy was still there -- it's just kind of too busy. There are a half dozen concepts in execution in any given sketch, and a lot of them are sort of red herrings, distractions. Case in point: Bruce McCullough and Dave Foley had a bit near the end of the show where Bruce played a character called Superdrunk, in which, you know, there's a guy who gets drunk and has super powers. Fair enough. But Mark McKinney's in it, too, and he's playing an assortment of villains that Superdrunk goes up against, but he plays them all sort of super laconic or bored or tired or something, and I'm getting all worked up trying to figure out what that has to do with the central concept of how Superdrunk's behavior sort of walks the line between loutishness and heroism and I'm coming up empty.
I'm not complaining complaining, though. It was ill. Plus, at the end, Mark McKinney brought out the I'm-crushing-your-head guy, who took the rest of The Kids to task for failures in their performance and their careers -- Scott Thompson got called out for doing yet another 15-minute-long Buddy Cole monologue, of which he was totes guilty. What the shit is up with that bit anyway.
The day before, Nina and I had hit up Eve's passover seder, which was, as it is every year, about as nice as a Jewish holiday can get. She'd updated the haggadah with new poetry, pictures, and bleeding heart propaganda, and she'd doled out recipes for delicious foods that people brought in (my assignment was carrot tzimmes, which actually turned out pretty well, despite my putting in way too much water to start with).
I meant to mention this earlier, but: Los de 680 are facing diaspora. The company that owns the building has sold it to a developer (or some such), and the place is destined for condos. As such, Tom, Ted, KT, Jude, and Jerry have to move out by the end of May. They've mostly got plans -- Tom and Ted moving in with their lady friends; Jude emigrating to Mexico, Jill to Staten Island -- but the whole thing seems tragic nonetheless. Look, I don't even live there, but I've come to count on the existence of that address like a comfortable sofa, no matter how stultifyingly hot it got in the winter or how much black mold was doubtless seeping out of Tom's bedroom. They've been throwing these sort of countdown barbecues -- one a month -- until the day they're scattered to the winds.
I'm staying positive, though. Google Calendar says I've got a bitchen summer coming up... at the office.
Except not for the past three days, because I've had this motherfucker of a cold that (I think) I got from Nina. It's one of those sinus / face viruses where you're just completely incapacitated with discomfort, and you can't even really think anything coherent. I got up on Saturday morning and tried to kick off my usual weekend round of FFXII, but I couldn't even really make the screen come into focus. All I could do was sit on the couch and think, "Wow, how do I even feel this bad?"
Some solace was derived from the tender ministrations of Nina, who was very understanding; and from Lost Pig, which all of you must play, preferrably in an 80x24 console window. And I suppose I should also recommend, albeit reluctantly, Urban Dead, in which I've been dutifully spending my daily "Action Points." Come visit me! I'm Picabo Street. Remember her? Yeah, she's a zombie now.
In the depths of this funk -- and on a drizzly Friday to boot -- I hit up Tom's 27th birthday party at P.J. Hanley's. Not to toot my own horn, but I totally knocked the present ball out of the park: I emailed Jonathan Pryce-lookalike (and Facebook friend to me, as of April 2nd) Ken Freedman, to see if there was any way I could get my hands on any remaining pieces of the neat, rare WFMU swag they'd given away in past years during marathon pledge drives. It turned out there was, and I netted for Tom:
- Some WFMU bumper stickers that say "I listen to Seven Second Delay and I vote!"
- A SSD t-shirt
- A DVD of the Seven Second Delay movie, "Dead Air," written by WFMU host and Monk writer Tom Scharpling
I'm feeling a bit better now, though, that I've got progressed to the point of expelling webs of yellow-green custard from the raw upper channels of my nose.
Tom got a bunch of us tickets to see The Kids In The Hall the weekend before last. He's always been a bigger fan of The Kids than me, but they pretty much never tour, so I couldn't really pass it up. They were playing at the "Nokia Theater" in Times Square, which turned out to be a real shit-show -- $10 drinks, disconcertingly low ceilings, and this laughable little "museum" of old Nokia phones. The actual theater part of the place was fine, though, and they had monitors set up and an attentive camera guy who kept them zoomed in on the important parts of the action. Although The Kids are quite a bit older than they were the last time they were working, the material's still pretty fresh (insofar as it's still about blowjobs and drinking) -- but boy did they get wrinkly. It's a sad state of affairs when Kevin MacDonald is "the pretty one." And Dave Foley's face is kind of caving in, Shane MacGowan-style.
So, I laughed a good laugh, but I should say that the central problem I have with their comedy was still there -- it's just kind of too busy. There are a half dozen concepts in execution in any given sketch, and a lot of them are sort of red herrings, distractions. Case in point: Bruce McCullough and Dave Foley had a bit near the end of the show where Bruce played a character called Superdrunk, in which, you know, there's a guy who gets drunk and has super powers. Fair enough. But Mark McKinney's in it, too, and he's playing an assortment of villains that Superdrunk goes up against, but he plays them all sort of super laconic or bored or tired or something, and I'm getting all worked up trying to figure out what that has to do with the central concept of how Superdrunk's behavior sort of walks the line between loutishness and heroism and I'm coming up empty.
I'm not complaining complaining, though. It was ill. Plus, at the end, Mark McKinney brought out the I'm-crushing-your-head guy, who took the rest of The Kids to task for failures in their performance and their careers -- Scott Thompson got called out for doing yet another 15-minute-long Buddy Cole monologue, of which he was totes guilty. What the shit is up with that bit anyway.
The day before, Nina and I had hit up Eve's passover seder, which was, as it is every year, about as nice as a Jewish holiday can get. She'd updated the haggadah with new poetry, pictures, and bleeding heart propaganda, and she'd doled out recipes for delicious foods that people brought in (my assignment was carrot tzimmes, which actually turned out pretty well, despite my putting in way too much water to start with).
I meant to mention this earlier, but: Los de 680 are facing diaspora. The company that owns the building has sold it to a developer (or some such), and the place is destined for condos. As such, Tom, Ted, KT, Jude, and Jerry have to move out by the end of May. They've mostly got plans -- Tom and Ted moving in with their lady friends; Jude emigrating to Mexico, Jill to Staten Island -- but the whole thing seems tragic nonetheless. Look, I don't even live there, but I've come to count on the existence of that address like a comfortable sofa, no matter how stultifyingly hot it got in the winter or how much black mold was doubtless seeping out of Tom's bedroom. They've been throwing these sort of countdown barbecues -- one a month -- until the day they're scattered to the winds.
I'm staying positive, though. Google Calendar says I've got a bitchen summer coming up... at the office.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
April Come She Will
So it's been a while since I wrote anything here, and part of that's because of work, but part of that's also due to the fact that Nina's dad's health took a turn for the worse over the past few weeks, and he died early on the morning of Thursday, April 3rd. With Nina's permission, I'll say a few things about that.
She didn't get much warning -- she'd been scrambling to order and arrange for the delivery of a new leather recliner that he'd asked for, and its arrival strangely coincided with him getting much sicker. The home health aides told her and her brother that it wouldn't be that much longer, so they'd been staying over there in preparation.
As it happened, I was working pretty long hours that week. We had an internal deadline we were racing to meet, and so when Nina called me at 1:30 AM to tell me he'd died, I was in the middle of working on a prototype for a game about protected freshwater pearls from theft by river frogs. By the time I got over to the apartment, they'd laid Peter out on the couch in the living room, and Nina and Michael and Peter's girlfriend and the home health aide were gathered in the kitchen while they waited for the funeral home people to pick up his body. The people showed up at three something, dressed eerily crisply and acting extremely polite (although they addressed us as "youse"), and after giving the family some time to say their goodbyes, they hoisted him onto a gurney and zipped him into a bag. And then they left, and we were alone. At 4:00 AM, some birds in the courtyard started chirping loudly, even though it was still quite dark and cold.
I took the next day off from work and got a haircut and did some shopping for the apartment. That evening, Nina's cousin Michael N. and his girlfriend Jillian showed up from Philadelphia. Right before they showed up, though, we noticed a group of young people in the playground downstairs having a mass, variously choreographed sword fight, using the latest generation of light-up light sabers. You could tell these people were well-practiced -- they were prancing and twirling around -- but all you could really see were their glowing toys. We ushered Michael and Jillian into the guest bedroom, where we were watching from the window. Eventually the combatants finished their game and turned off the lights on their swords, and they noticed the six of us watching them from above. "Hi, window people!" one of them called out. We waved and left the window.
The wake was scheduled for Sunday. We spent Saturday night and that morning going through boxes of family photos trying to put together a slide show that the funeral home could play during the proceedings. In doing so we found a bunch of completely adorable pictures of Nina and her brother looking fierce and inquisitive and unbearably cute. A triptych of photos of 8-year-old Nina in a homebrew rabbit costume, white greasepaint whiskers streaked on, holding a real carrot with a bright spray of greens still attached: One shot in the morning, feisty and pert; one in the afternoon; and one towards end of the escapade, the carrot greens wilted, Nina herself captured on the verge of exhausted tears. Sadly, it wasn't relevant. I fully plan to go back and make copies.
The whole production came off without a hitch, despite iMovie's best efforts to sabotage the final product with an insufferable, maudlin DVD menu and soundtrack. The only thing missing, it turned out, was a printout of a list of buildings in New York that Peter had worked on during his career as an electrician with Local 3. The funeral home didn't have a printer we could use, so I volunteered to lug the family laptop to a copy place to get the file printed. The closest place was a Kinko's on 4th Ave., taking me past the fenced-off greenery of Gramercy Park. I explained my situation to the guy at the desk. "You can use the LapNet station," he said. He took me back to a small cubicle near the bathrooms -- where a guy in a leather coat was passed out drunk. "Hey, wake up," the Kinko's guy said. "You can't sleep here. There's a guy who needs to use the desk."
"Oh, yeah, sure," said the drunk, staggering to his feet. He was really a mess, stringy blonde hair plastered to his face with sweat, out-of-focus eyes set in a weatherbeaten face. "I gotta get goin' anyway." He looked like one of the New York Dolls.
"And wipe your face, man," said the Kinko's guy. "You got some chocolate on your nose."
Oh no, I thought. It's never chocolate. But sure enough, I looked down at the drunk's hands, and he was holding several packages of Ring-Dings -- he'd taken a nap in his cupcakes. Wiping his face, he started lurching towards the exit, but paused about half way across the floor, as if he'd forgotten something. He turned on his heel and walked right back to one of the cubicles and sat down again, tearing open his cupcakes and scarfing them down greedily. For my part, I stood around feeling stiff in my funeral suit while I printed the stuff.
The funeral was on Tuesday morning. The service at the funeral home was a lot like the wake, except this time people went up to the lectern and said things. Most of the speakers were Local 3 people, and they veered, often in the same anecdote, between jocosity and fierce grief. After that was over, the funeral people drove us out to Evergreen Cemetery for the graveside service. We all got flowers to place on the coffin while Nina's uncle Isao played a bagpipe rendition of "Amazing Grace" on his Blackberry. The whole thing was over very quickly: We got back in the cars as they were lowering the coffin into the ground.
Evergreen kind of straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens -- it's not super clear what neighborhood it's in. To deflect suggestions that they may have laid him to rest in, say, Middle Village, Nina did some creative Google Mapsing and pronounced that her father is buried "North of Broadway Junction."
After that, the whole funeral party went out to lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant. And then it was over. I went back to work. My friend Tim asked if I'd been at a job interview, on account of the suit. "Yeah, I figured it was either a job interview or that," he said, when I told him.
There's no good segue here, so I won't try.
On Tuesday Nina and I went with Aanie and her girlfriend Brooke to go see Gossip play Webster Hall. Beth Ditto really does have a pretty amazing voice. At one point during the between-song banter, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" came up and she started doing Eddie Vedder's distinctive "Hoo! Hoo!" noise, perfectly on-point. And that was just, you know, a parlor trick. The songs themselves were hooky and fun, but I didn't know any of the songs besides "Standing In The Way Of Control," so I didn't go up front and get really wild and crazy. Plus, I didn't want to accidentally spoil the good time of the front-row crowd, with whom Beth had established an embarrassingly earnest rapport -- they finished out their encore with some admonishments about being positive about your body and not letting the Democratic party get divided and conquered, followed by a rising chant: "We... are... important! We... mean... something!" I don't know how I feel about that. I mean, I guess I agree, in principle. What else is there?
She didn't get much warning -- she'd been scrambling to order and arrange for the delivery of a new leather recliner that he'd asked for, and its arrival strangely coincided with him getting much sicker. The home health aides told her and her brother that it wouldn't be that much longer, so they'd been staying over there in preparation.
As it happened, I was working pretty long hours that week. We had an internal deadline we were racing to meet, and so when Nina called me at 1:30 AM to tell me he'd died, I was in the middle of working on a prototype for a game about protected freshwater pearls from theft by river frogs. By the time I got over to the apartment, they'd laid Peter out on the couch in the living room, and Nina and Michael and Peter's girlfriend and the home health aide were gathered in the kitchen while they waited for the funeral home people to pick up his body. The people showed up at three something, dressed eerily crisply and acting extremely polite (although they addressed us as "youse"), and after giving the family some time to say their goodbyes, they hoisted him onto a gurney and zipped him into a bag. And then they left, and we were alone. At 4:00 AM, some birds in the courtyard started chirping loudly, even though it was still quite dark and cold.
I took the next day off from work and got a haircut and did some shopping for the apartment. That evening, Nina's cousin Michael N. and his girlfriend Jillian showed up from Philadelphia. Right before they showed up, though, we noticed a group of young people in the playground downstairs having a mass, variously choreographed sword fight, using the latest generation of light-up light sabers. You could tell these people were well-practiced -- they were prancing and twirling around -- but all you could really see were their glowing toys. We ushered Michael and Jillian into the guest bedroom, where we were watching from the window. Eventually the combatants finished their game and turned off the lights on their swords, and they noticed the six of us watching them from above. "Hi, window people!" one of them called out. We waved and left the window.
The wake was scheduled for Sunday. We spent Saturday night and that morning going through boxes of family photos trying to put together a slide show that the funeral home could play during the proceedings. In doing so we found a bunch of completely adorable pictures of Nina and her brother looking fierce and inquisitive and unbearably cute. A triptych of photos of 8-year-old Nina in a homebrew rabbit costume, white greasepaint whiskers streaked on, holding a real carrot with a bright spray of greens still attached: One shot in the morning, feisty and pert; one in the afternoon; and one towards end of the escapade, the carrot greens wilted, Nina herself captured on the verge of exhausted tears. Sadly, it wasn't relevant. I fully plan to go back and make copies.
The whole production came off without a hitch, despite iMovie's best efforts to sabotage the final product with an insufferable, maudlin DVD menu and soundtrack. The only thing missing, it turned out, was a printout of a list of buildings in New York that Peter had worked on during his career as an electrician with Local 3. The funeral home didn't have a printer we could use, so I volunteered to lug the family laptop to a copy place to get the file printed. The closest place was a Kinko's on 4th Ave., taking me past the fenced-off greenery of Gramercy Park. I explained my situation to the guy at the desk. "You can use the LapNet station," he said. He took me back to a small cubicle near the bathrooms -- where a guy in a leather coat was passed out drunk. "Hey, wake up," the Kinko's guy said. "You can't sleep here. There's a guy who needs to use the desk."
"Oh, yeah, sure," said the drunk, staggering to his feet. He was really a mess, stringy blonde hair plastered to his face with sweat, out-of-focus eyes set in a weatherbeaten face. "I gotta get goin' anyway." He looked like one of the New York Dolls.
"And wipe your face, man," said the Kinko's guy. "You got some chocolate on your nose."
Oh no, I thought. It's never chocolate. But sure enough, I looked down at the drunk's hands, and he was holding several packages of Ring-Dings -- he'd taken a nap in his cupcakes. Wiping his face, he started lurching towards the exit, but paused about half way across the floor, as if he'd forgotten something. He turned on his heel and walked right back to one of the cubicles and sat down again, tearing open his cupcakes and scarfing them down greedily. For my part, I stood around feeling stiff in my funeral suit while I printed the stuff.
The funeral was on Tuesday morning. The service at the funeral home was a lot like the wake, except this time people went up to the lectern and said things. Most of the speakers were Local 3 people, and they veered, often in the same anecdote, between jocosity and fierce grief. After that was over, the funeral people drove us out to Evergreen Cemetery for the graveside service. We all got flowers to place on the coffin while Nina's uncle Isao played a bagpipe rendition of "Amazing Grace" on his Blackberry. The whole thing was over very quickly: We got back in the cars as they were lowering the coffin into the ground.
Evergreen kind of straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens -- it's not super clear what neighborhood it's in. To deflect suggestions that they may have laid him to rest in, say, Middle Village, Nina did some creative Google Mapsing and pronounced that her father is buried "North of Broadway Junction."
After that, the whole funeral party went out to lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant. And then it was over. I went back to work. My friend Tim asked if I'd been at a job interview, on account of the suit. "Yeah, I figured it was either a job interview or that," he said, when I told him.
There's no good segue here, so I won't try.
On Tuesday Nina and I went with Aanie and her girlfriend Brooke to go see Gossip play Webster Hall. Beth Ditto really does have a pretty amazing voice. At one point during the between-song banter, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" came up and she started doing Eddie Vedder's distinctive "Hoo! Hoo!" noise, perfectly on-point. And that was just, you know, a parlor trick. The songs themselves were hooky and fun, but I didn't know any of the songs besides "Standing In The Way Of Control," so I didn't go up front and get really wild and crazy. Plus, I didn't want to accidentally spoil the good time of the front-row crowd, with whom Beth had established an embarrassingly earnest rapport -- they finished out their encore with some admonishments about being positive about your body and not letting the Democratic party get divided and conquered, followed by a rising chant: "We... are... important! We... mean... something!" I don't know how I feel about that. I mean, I guess I agree, in principle. What else is there?
Monday, March 17, 2008
Night Of The Hot Dog
I caught the 7:00 train to Boston on Friday night for the FSF's annual Associate Members Meeting. Long time readers will know that this is a pilgrimage I make every year, although it's only recently that I've decided to stop making the 4-plus-hour trip on a Chinatown bus (Amtrak is several times more expensive, but, really, it makes the trip way more bearable). This year I made plans to stay with Greg, who's doing an International Studies degree at MIT.
On line to board the Acela at Penn Station, I recognized a face in the crowd as belonging to someone who works for the FSF, although I couldn't remember the person's name. I tried a little to make eye contact but then decided that it might be best not to -- I didn't want to buttonhole the guy. The train was super crowded; I couldn't find a two-seater to myself as I walked from car to car. As the train was pulling out of the station, the conductor went on the intercom to say that people should just sit down. The only available seat (with an accessible 120V outlet -- part of the reason the train is appealing in the first place) was at a four-person table where the FSF guy I'd recognized was sitting. So I sat there. The FSF guy had a bunch of XOs he was kind of tinkering with and people kept coming over to ask him about them. There was another guy, a sort of besuited business type, at the table who was clearly curious, too -- and when the FSF guy got off the phone with his wife complaining about how he was too tired to prepare his conference presentation for Saturday, the business guy asked him what the conference was going to be about. So they started talking and arguing about the FSF and Free Software, and I figured I had to say something. I said, "I'm going to be at your talk tomorrow." It turned out the guy was Joshua Gay, one of the new Campaigns Managers, and Stallman's editor on Free Software, Free Society. He ended up being super nice and super talkative and not at all weirded out that I'd seemingly sat across from him on purpose. He told me about a bunch of FSF stuff (that I'll get to later), and he even seemed to think a New York office wasn't totally out of the question.
I met Greg at the Harvard stop on the T, and we walked across campus to his house. It was the first time I'd ever seen Harvard, and, not to sound like a reactionary, it wasn't really that impressive -- not terribly distinguishable (maybe a little more colonial?) from other hoary Ivy League institutions, and, kind of predictably, the science and engineering buildings looked dismal and under-architected. I don't know. I didn't go into any of the buildings, so I guess I can't really say. After all, MIT doesn't have the most mainstream attractive campus (the Meeting this year was held in a building that's on what's called The Gray Way) -- but once you get inside, there's this invigorating air of enthusiastic nerdiness that really makes you feel good.
I was famished so I dropped off my bag at Greg's and then Greg and I hit up this place called Bukowski's Tavern that Greg said had excellent bar food. He was right! We drank beers and talked, setting-appropriately, I guess, about the ways in which women have been cruel to us. Before I knew it, it was 1:30. I was on the verge of falling asleep when we got back, but Greg was hell-bent on us playing his new copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl on the Wii, so we did that until my inability to understand that fucking game was well-established. That game is horrible, horrible. That night on the couch, I dreamed that P. Diddy had (mis)cast me in his Broadway production of A Raisin In The Sun.
In the morning Greg gave me cereal and I hopped the T to Kendall Sq. Jeanne signed me in and sweetly pushed coffee and scones on me, and I got into the hall in time to see about half of Joshua's presentation.
...Which was about the direct actions the FSF had staged as part of their various campaigns (Defective By Design and BadVista were the main ones), which had led to measurable successes at the BBC and, I think, at Boston Public Library. They'd also just come out with a major redesign of the FSF's web site. John Sullivan was up next, and he talked about another action the FSF was involved with, this one having to do with complaining to Netflix about their streaming video service (via inserting these nice little cards with FSF copy on them into the DVD return envelopes). It hadn't really occurred to me before, being outside the organization, but the fact that FSF has a formalized battle plan for staging focused actions that have a measurable, prompt effect is sort of a new thing (they've been reading a bunch of Saul Alinsky, they say), and the campaigns people are obviously pretty excited about it.
After Ben Klemens talked about the new End Software Patents campaign, they gave us lunch. MIT's catering service never disappoints -- there were some very good roasted vegetable sandwiches this time around. When we got back into the lecture hall, Peter Brown came in and said that they'd done a raffle with the attendees' names, and they were ready to announce the winner: It was me! The prize was a brindled gnu plush toy, a larger and more articulated version of the ones they were selling this year at the sign-in table. I can't vouch for the integrity of the raffle (Jeanne revealed to me afterwards that they'd sort of slopped it in my favor), but I'm keeping the gnu. It is awesome.
Mako's talk was about possible ways to improve upon non-Free network services like MySpace -- services in which the software isn't distributed, per se, but which comprise a significant component of our daily computing time. His conclusion is that promotion of something like the Affero GPL might be what's called for, but that it's still a very difficult problem. I'm still struggling with accepting as a premise the idea that software I merely interact with needs to be Free; I still think it's a should, rather than a must. Mako's answer to my question on that topic was that I should think of it in terms of goals towards freedom and not in terms of rights. Nina agreed when I explained it to her. I'll try?
Henri Poole and Brett Smith talked, respectively, about organizing Hollywood writers around open licensing and the reception of the third-generation FSF licenses. I had to leave pretty soon after that in order to catch the 4:40 back to New York. (I'm writing this part on the train, in fact! I just went to the food car and bought a ham sandwich and a Corona from the lady behind the counter, who was raving about Bill Belichick and gesturing with a paring knife.)
I had to scramble when I got off the train because I had to drop off my bags at my office before heading up to Roseland for... The Pogues! I actually timed it just about right -- Straight To Hell was fading out of the PA speakers when I met Tom near the island with the sound board, and Messrs. Stacy, Finer, Chevron, etc., and finally MacGowan took the stage to a packed house right after. Shane seemed to be in remarkably better shape than he'd been in last year -- thinner, steadier, maybe a tad more intelligible -- although he did make repeated trips off-stage over the course of the set (catheter?). Their set was largely the same as last year's, and exhileratingly, foot-stompingly played. Additions included a couple of ballads sung by Spider (he's no Shane, let's just say)... and, for the penultimate encore, Fairytale of New York, with Ella Finer! That was a treat. That band is so good, so maddeningly good.
Two things: There was a fat guy with neat little beard standing behind us (me and Nina and Tom and Eve and Eve's friend Sean and his girlfriend), a real Google sysadmin type, who kept yelling, drunkenly, "Fuck the English! Fuck the English! English out of Ireland!" during The Irish Rover and Poor Paddy Works On The Railway.
Also, during one of the times that Shane was off stage, a bloated, pale gentleman with a wispy beard and a bleary look in his eye elbowed his way through the crowd past me and Tom. I didn't get a close look at him, but we made eye contact briefly, and he gave me a look like, hey, that's right, how're you doing. "Tom," I said. "Did Shane MacGowan just walk by us? He was wearing the same hat."
"The pork pie hat?" Tom asked, incredulous. "Look around you -- this place is full of assholes wearing pork pie hats."
On line to board the Acela at Penn Station, I recognized a face in the crowd as belonging to someone who works for the FSF, although I couldn't remember the person's name. I tried a little to make eye contact but then decided that it might be best not to -- I didn't want to buttonhole the guy. The train was super crowded; I couldn't find a two-seater to myself as I walked from car to car. As the train was pulling out of the station, the conductor went on the intercom to say that people should just sit down. The only available seat (with an accessible 120V outlet -- part of the reason the train is appealing in the first place) was at a four-person table where the FSF guy I'd recognized was sitting. So I sat there. The FSF guy had a bunch of XOs he was kind of tinkering with and people kept coming over to ask him about them. There was another guy, a sort of besuited business type, at the table who was clearly curious, too -- and when the FSF guy got off the phone with his wife complaining about how he was too tired to prepare his conference presentation for Saturday, the business guy asked him what the conference was going to be about. So they started talking and arguing about the FSF and Free Software, and I figured I had to say something. I said, "I'm going to be at your talk tomorrow." It turned out the guy was Joshua Gay, one of the new Campaigns Managers, and Stallman's editor on Free Software, Free Society. He ended up being super nice and super talkative and not at all weirded out that I'd seemingly sat across from him on purpose. He told me about a bunch of FSF stuff (that I'll get to later), and he even seemed to think a New York office wasn't totally out of the question.
I met Greg at the Harvard stop on the T, and we walked across campus to his house. It was the first time I'd ever seen Harvard, and, not to sound like a reactionary, it wasn't really that impressive -- not terribly distinguishable (maybe a little more colonial?) from other hoary Ivy League institutions, and, kind of predictably, the science and engineering buildings looked dismal and under-architected. I don't know. I didn't go into any of the buildings, so I guess I can't really say. After all, MIT doesn't have the most mainstream attractive campus (the Meeting this year was held in a building that's on what's called The Gray Way) -- but once you get inside, there's this invigorating air of enthusiastic nerdiness that really makes you feel good.
I was famished so I dropped off my bag at Greg's and then Greg and I hit up this place called Bukowski's Tavern that Greg said had excellent bar food. He was right! We drank beers and talked, setting-appropriately, I guess, about the ways in which women have been cruel to us. Before I knew it, it was 1:30. I was on the verge of falling asleep when we got back, but Greg was hell-bent on us playing his new copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl on the Wii, so we did that until my inability to understand that fucking game was well-established. That game is horrible, horrible. That night on the couch, I dreamed that P. Diddy had (mis)cast me in his Broadway production of A Raisin In The Sun.
In the morning Greg gave me cereal and I hopped the T to Kendall Sq. Jeanne signed me in and sweetly pushed coffee and scones on me, and I got into the hall in time to see about half of Joshua's presentation.
...Which was about the direct actions the FSF had staged as part of their various campaigns (Defective By Design and BadVista were the main ones), which had led to measurable successes at the BBC and, I think, at Boston Public Library. They'd also just come out with a major redesign of the FSF's web site. John Sullivan was up next, and he talked about another action the FSF was involved with, this one having to do with complaining to Netflix about their streaming video service (via inserting these nice little cards with FSF copy on them into the DVD return envelopes). It hadn't really occurred to me before, being outside the organization, but the fact that FSF has a formalized battle plan for staging focused actions that have a measurable, prompt effect is sort of a new thing (they've been reading a bunch of Saul Alinsky, they say), and the campaigns people are obviously pretty excited about it.
After Ben Klemens talked about the new End Software Patents campaign, they gave us lunch. MIT's catering service never disappoints -- there were some very good roasted vegetable sandwiches this time around. When we got back into the lecture hall, Peter Brown came in and said that they'd done a raffle with the attendees' names, and they were ready to announce the winner: It was me! The prize was a brindled gnu plush toy, a larger and more articulated version of the ones they were selling this year at the sign-in table. I can't vouch for the integrity of the raffle (Jeanne revealed to me afterwards that they'd sort of slopped it in my favor), but I'm keeping the gnu. It is awesome.
Mako's talk was about possible ways to improve upon non-Free network services like MySpace -- services in which the software isn't distributed, per se, but which comprise a significant component of our daily computing time. His conclusion is that promotion of something like the Affero GPL might be what's called for, but that it's still a very difficult problem. I'm still struggling with accepting as a premise the idea that software I merely interact with needs to be Free; I still think it's a should, rather than a must. Mako's answer to my question on that topic was that I should think of it in terms of goals towards freedom and not in terms of rights. Nina agreed when I explained it to her. I'll try?
Henri Poole and Brett Smith talked, respectively, about organizing Hollywood writers around open licensing and the reception of the third-generation FSF licenses. I had to leave pretty soon after that in order to catch the 4:40 back to New York. (I'm writing this part on the train, in fact! I just went to the food car and bought a ham sandwich and a Corona from the lady behind the counter, who was raving about Bill Belichick and gesturing with a paring knife.)
I had to scramble when I got off the train because I had to drop off my bags at my office before heading up to Roseland for... The Pogues! I actually timed it just about right -- Straight To Hell was fading out of the PA speakers when I met Tom near the island with the sound board, and Messrs. Stacy, Finer, Chevron, etc., and finally MacGowan took the stage to a packed house right after. Shane seemed to be in remarkably better shape than he'd been in last year -- thinner, steadier, maybe a tad more intelligible -- although he did make repeated trips off-stage over the course of the set (catheter?). Their set was largely the same as last year's, and exhileratingly, foot-stompingly played. Additions included a couple of ballads sung by Spider (he's no Shane, let's just say)... and, for the penultimate encore, Fairytale of New York, with Ella Finer! That was a treat. That band is so good, so maddeningly good.
Two things: There was a fat guy with neat little beard standing behind us (me and Nina and Tom and Eve and Eve's friend Sean and his girlfriend), a real Google sysadmin type, who kept yelling, drunkenly, "Fuck the English! Fuck the English! English out of Ireland!" during The Irish Rover and Poor Paddy Works On The Railway.
Also, during one of the times that Shane was off stage, a bloated, pale gentleman with a wispy beard and a bleary look in his eye elbowed his way through the crowd past me and Tom. I didn't get a close look at him, but we made eye contact briefly, and he gave me a look like, hey, that's right, how're you doing. "Tom," I said. "Did Shane MacGowan just walk by us? He was wearing the same hat."
"The pork pie hat?" Tom asked, incredulous. "Look around you -- this place is full of assholes wearing pork pie hats."
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Observations On The Neighborhood
A few weeks ago a guy got killed in this restaurant called Tacos 2004 Viva Mexico about a block away from my apartment on 5th Ave. The news was calling it a restaurant, but really, the place is a bar where guys go to watch soccer (and apparently shoot each other) -- I went there once as part of a project I was doing to try as many of the different places in the neighborhood as possible, and it became very clear very quickly that a) Food wasn't their strong point; and b) I wasn't wanted. I got a thing of really awful flautas and high-tailed it out of there. That was also sort of the end of the project.
Here's some other stuff in the neighborhood:
The Burger King at the western end of my block has this weird pipe coming out of its otherwise unbroken northern wall. The pipe, and this padlock that's sort of inexplicably attached to it, are caked in the thickest, tarriest, and yet most picturesque grease I've ever seen. Nina says they hook a hose up to it to suck out the grease from cooking burgers.
There's a Mexican restaurant on 39th St. and 4th that opened fairly recently called Los Tres Potrillos ("The Three Stallions," I think). The food's very good (they make very delicious and well-plated steaks and seafood platters), although it's a bit expensive. The place looks like a Greek diner inside, but it's got valet parking. Next door is a old-fashioned-looking wood frame house that used to be a day care center until it half-way burned down last fall. Next door to that is a Chinese bakery where I get pork buns and egg custards sometimes on the way to work.
The best pork buns in the neighborhood come from a place called Savoy Bakery up on 45th St. But that place is a hike and they often run out of buns. The place on 39th is good, but it's a little dirty, and the pork buns are heavy on the onions. There are also pork buns at the deli on 4th Ave. between 39th and 40th; these pork buns are very bad: soggy and foul-tasting.
On 42nd St., there's a bodega called My Kids Candy Store. I went in there on a whim a few days ago to pick up some Red Bulls for Nina -- I figured, it's a candy store, Red Bull tastes like poisonous candy, maybe I'll get lucky and they'll have some. Turns out, it's not really a candy store (I didn't see much candy), it's more of a grocery -- practically a carniceria, really -- and it's run by some scary-ass dudes. Kind of like in a movie where somebody walks into a convenience store while it's being robbed and the thieves have to pretend like they work there. I quickly and wordlessly established the price of the Red Bulls, paid for them, and left.
After the brunt of the election analysis last Tuesday was over, Tom and I sat around and came up with alternate, funny captions for the cartoons in the latest New Yorker. I realize that this activity has become something of a snarkster sport as of late (possibly on account of Gawker's picking up this delightful link), but I've been working with the medium for years now, starting in high school when Razor and I used to draw what we called "comics": A three-by-three panel page of little drawings with funny, subversive captions attached to them, which we'd pass back and forth in math class. Sometimes we'd do a thing where one of us would draw all nine panels but no captions and the other would have to interpret the first's artistic intent as best (or worst) as possible. So I know what I'm doing with captions, even if two out of three 680 roommates polled declared Tom's ones superior.
An early present for Razor -- whose wedding invitation I just got in the mail, for fuck's sake! -- in the form of a revelation (have I come clean about this one? I don't recall): I once knowingly ripped off a joke from Seinfeld in a comic. It wasn't even a particularly funny bit, it just happened to be on my mind while I was thinking of something to write: George is haggling with a fruit vendor over the price of something, and the guy bans him, broken-Englishedly, from the store for a year. At the time, I guess I was sort of banking on the idea that Billy hadn't seen that episode or had forgotten it or something, but no such luck when I showed it to him. "Wait, didn't that happen on Seinfeld?" he asked.
It was a total Ricky Gervais moment. "Oh... did it?" I said. "Which one?"
He explained, outlining the plot points. I lied and said that I didn't remember seeing it, but conceded I could've subconsciously picked it up. Not true; totally conscious plagiarism.
Last Saturday I went into work to help my boss Nick build a rack for our servers. For some reason, I thought it would be a two or three hour job, but it ended up taking more than ten hours, what with dismantling the existing rack, building the new one, and getting everything hooked back up again. When I got home, thoroughly exhausted and sort of physically dazed from exertion, my key got stuck in the door. Nina let me in, and I quickly forgot what'd happened -- until repeated ringing of the doorbell in the morning (by a Mexican dude with a passive-aggressive look on his face) woke me up. Still unable to extract the thing, I started dismantling the lock. That didn't do much good. Finally, Nina came over and pulled the key out with her agile fingers.
Here's some other stuff in the neighborhood:
The Burger King at the western end of my block has this weird pipe coming out of its otherwise unbroken northern wall. The pipe, and this padlock that's sort of inexplicably attached to it, are caked in the thickest, tarriest, and yet most picturesque grease I've ever seen. Nina says they hook a hose up to it to suck out the grease from cooking burgers.
There's a Mexican restaurant on 39th St. and 4th that opened fairly recently called Los Tres Potrillos ("The Three Stallions," I think). The food's very good (they make very delicious and well-plated steaks and seafood platters), although it's a bit expensive. The place looks like a Greek diner inside, but it's got valet parking. Next door is a old-fashioned-looking wood frame house that used to be a day care center until it half-way burned down last fall. Next door to that is a Chinese bakery where I get pork buns and egg custards sometimes on the way to work.
The best pork buns in the neighborhood come from a place called Savoy Bakery up on 45th St. But that place is a hike and they often run out of buns. The place on 39th is good, but it's a little dirty, and the pork buns are heavy on the onions. There are also pork buns at the deli on 4th Ave. between 39th and 40th; these pork buns are very bad: soggy and foul-tasting.
On 42nd St., there's a bodega called My Kids Candy Store. I went in there on a whim a few days ago to pick up some Red Bulls for Nina -- I figured, it's a candy store, Red Bull tastes like poisonous candy, maybe I'll get lucky and they'll have some. Turns out, it's not really a candy store (I didn't see much candy), it's more of a grocery -- practically a carniceria, really -- and it's run by some scary-ass dudes. Kind of like in a movie where somebody walks into a convenience store while it's being robbed and the thieves have to pretend like they work there. I quickly and wordlessly established the price of the Red Bulls, paid for them, and left.
After the brunt of the election analysis last Tuesday was over, Tom and I sat around and came up with alternate, funny captions for the cartoons in the latest New Yorker. I realize that this activity has become something of a snarkster sport as of late (possibly on account of Gawker's picking up this delightful link), but I've been working with the medium for years now, starting in high school when Razor and I used to draw what we called "comics": A three-by-three panel page of little drawings with funny, subversive captions attached to them, which we'd pass back and forth in math class. Sometimes we'd do a thing where one of us would draw all nine panels but no captions and the other would have to interpret the first's artistic intent as best (or worst) as possible. So I know what I'm doing with captions, even if two out of three 680 roommates polled declared Tom's ones superior.
An early present for Razor -- whose wedding invitation I just got in the mail, for fuck's sake! -- in the form of a revelation (have I come clean about this one? I don't recall): I once knowingly ripped off a joke from Seinfeld in a comic. It wasn't even a particularly funny bit, it just happened to be on my mind while I was thinking of something to write: George is haggling with a fruit vendor over the price of something, and the guy bans him, broken-Englishedly, from the store for a year. At the time, I guess I was sort of banking on the idea that Billy hadn't seen that episode or had forgotten it or something, but no such luck when I showed it to him. "Wait, didn't that happen on Seinfeld?" he asked.
It was a total Ricky Gervais moment. "Oh... did it?" I said. "Which one?"
He explained, outlining the plot points. I lied and said that I didn't remember seeing it, but conceded I could've subconsciously picked it up. Not true; totally conscious plagiarism.
Last Saturday I went into work to help my boss Nick build a rack for our servers. For some reason, I thought it would be a two or three hour job, but it ended up taking more than ten hours, what with dismantling the existing rack, building the new one, and getting everything hooked back up again. When I got home, thoroughly exhausted and sort of physically dazed from exertion, my key got stuck in the door. Nina let me in, and I quickly forgot what'd happened -- until repeated ringing of the doorbell in the morning (by a Mexican dude with a passive-aggressive look on his face) woke me up. Still unable to extract the thing, I started dismantling the lock. That didn't do much good. Finally, Nina came over and pulled the key out with her agile fingers.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Three X
M-Biddy made a surprise visit the weekend before last. It was great! Apparently Canada's got this national holiday that coincides with Presidents Day in the U.S. -- Family Day features a bit less presidential history and a bit more highest-rate-of-suicide-all-year-so-maybe-take-the-day-off -- so he and his lady friend were going to take advantage of this really great price they found on tickets to Hungary, except the tickets were out of JFK and getting from Toronto to JFK was going to cost them almost as much as to Hungary, so they decided to make a three-day weekend of it here.
In true Erdősian style, Mike gave me and Nina some math problems to work on. Nina's: Is it possible to construct an irregular hexagon that cannot be bisected into two quadrilaterals? Mine: In a subset of size N + 1 taken from the whole numbers between 1 and 2N, is it guaranteed that there will be a pair of numbers that are relatively prime? Nina got hers in about an hour; I chomped on mine for a good couple of days but didn't really get that far (are X and 2X + 1 necessarily coprime for X > some C? I think yes, but no one seems to want to corroborate).
He also brought some all-in-one instant coffee from Vietnam and a bottle of actual Ontarian maple sizzurp.
I tried to show him a good time, but the best I could do was some fairly sketch Chinese baked goods up on Ninth Ave. and some tacos from Matamaros that promptly made me shit gallons of water. On Saturday night we (Mike and Kira and Nina and I and Kira's friend Nookie) headed to Manhattan to see some Michel Gondry thing at Deitch Projects but ended up missing it so we got Shao Lon Bao at Excellent Dumpling House right before it closed (at 9:00 PM -- what?!) and then booze until late at Local 138.
We also played a bunch of Scrabble -- fuck, we're still playing -- at the 'Lakes.
I read that Howard Zinn book, finally. Back when I was still in college, I'd wanted to read some American history and everyone was recommending A People's History, but I was sort of naively worried that it'd be too partisan, so I browsed around until I found something that didn't advertise its agenda quite as explicitly, this thousand page hunk of book called A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. At the time, I was doing some freelance computer consulting for this friend of my parents who runs a fairly prominent educational advocacy group in New York (the name of which I will omit) -- helping her back up her email, etc. She noticed I was reading this book and got kind of agitated because the guy's apparently pretty conservative. To prove it to me, she picked up the book and started quoting a section that I hadn't read yet disparaging Kennedy. "He doesn't like Kennedy," she said. "Unbelievable!" And then she threw the book into the waste basket, where it sat until I fished it out. So I didn't work for her any more, but I didn't finish the Johnson book, either, because I got bored a little ways after the Civil War. But I was right about A People's History -- it kind of assumes that you've heard the mainstream version of events, and I hadn't, really. But, yeah, Zinn is pretty great, and pretty disturbing -- there was lots of stuff I wasn't really up on, like the government's shooting war with the mining unions around the turn of the century.
Nina's aunt and uncle gave her, for her birthday, I think, a neat pair of Japanese dolls. There's this Japanese doll festival called Hinamatsuri that starts this week, in which you're supposed to sort of display your doll collection for a while (for good luck? It's for girls. The boys' celebration begins the week after, when they get to banish the dolls). She set them up on her dresser and took pictures of them. Then we drank a little bit of the sake my sister'd given me for Christmas. It was good -- thanks, Caroline!
At the behest of Tom, I've been listening to episodes of this radio show on WFMU called Seven Second Delay. It's hosted by these two guys, one of whom runs WFMU and the other of whom is like the producer of and head writer on Monk -- and who has this revolting, spluttery Jew voice and a lisp and who chews gum on air constantly. Maybe it's like rubbernecking a car wreck, but I kind of can't get enough. Maybe I'm just worried I'm Andy Breckman. I love the show! I can't believe I got through.
In true Erdősian style, Mike gave me and Nina some math problems to work on. Nina's: Is it possible to construct an irregular hexagon that cannot be bisected into two quadrilaterals? Mine: In a subset of size N + 1 taken from the whole numbers between 1 and 2N, is it guaranteed that there will be a pair of numbers that are relatively prime? Nina got hers in about an hour; I chomped on mine for a good couple of days but didn't really get that far (are X and 2X + 1 necessarily coprime for X > some C? I think yes, but no one seems to want to corroborate).
He also brought some all-in-one instant coffee from Vietnam and a bottle of actual Ontarian maple sizzurp.
I tried to show him a good time, but the best I could do was some fairly sketch Chinese baked goods up on Ninth Ave. and some tacos from Matamaros that promptly made me shit gallons of water. On Saturday night we (Mike and Kira and Nina and I and Kira's friend Nookie) headed to Manhattan to see some Michel Gondry thing at Deitch Projects but ended up missing it so we got Shao Lon Bao at Excellent Dumpling House right before it closed (at 9:00 PM -- what?!) and then booze until late at Local 138.
We also played a bunch of Scrabble -- fuck, we're still playing -- at the 'Lakes.
I read that Howard Zinn book, finally. Back when I was still in college, I'd wanted to read some American history and everyone was recommending A People's History, but I was sort of naively worried that it'd be too partisan, so I browsed around until I found something that didn't advertise its agenda quite as explicitly, this thousand page hunk of book called A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. At the time, I was doing some freelance computer consulting for this friend of my parents who runs a fairly prominent educational advocacy group in New York (the name of which I will omit) -- helping her back up her email, etc. She noticed I was reading this book and got kind of agitated because the guy's apparently pretty conservative. To prove it to me, she picked up the book and started quoting a section that I hadn't read yet disparaging Kennedy. "He doesn't like Kennedy," she said. "Unbelievable!" And then she threw the book into the waste basket, where it sat until I fished it out. So I didn't work for her any more, but I didn't finish the Johnson book, either, because I got bored a little ways after the Civil War. But I was right about A People's History -- it kind of assumes that you've heard the mainstream version of events, and I hadn't, really. But, yeah, Zinn is pretty great, and pretty disturbing -- there was lots of stuff I wasn't really up on, like the government's shooting war with the mining unions around the turn of the century.
Nina's aunt and uncle gave her, for her birthday, I think, a neat pair of Japanese dolls. There's this Japanese doll festival called Hinamatsuri that starts this week, in which you're supposed to sort of display your doll collection for a while (for good luck? It's for girls. The boys' celebration begins the week after, when they get to banish the dolls). She set them up on her dresser and took pictures of them. Then we drank a little bit of the sake my sister'd given me for Christmas. It was good -- thanks, Caroline!
At the behest of Tom, I've been listening to episodes of this radio show on WFMU called Seven Second Delay. It's hosted by these two guys, one of whom runs WFMU and the other of whom is like the producer of and head writer on Monk -- and who has this revolting, spluttery Jew voice and a lisp and who chews gum on air constantly. Maybe it's like rubbernecking a car wreck, but I kind of can't get enough. Maybe I'm just worried I'm Andy Breckman. I love the show! I can't believe I got through.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Our Final Descent
Nina's birthday was on Saturday. She's 27, or, as she likes to put it, "on the fast approach to 30." I think "the final descent to 30," would be better. It's like an airplane.
Aanie and Eve came over in the morning, letting themselves in with a set of keys I'd given Aanie the night before, to sing Happy Birthday to her in Polish. She does this every year. It goes like this:
In the evening we went with her brother to go see Kaiju Big Battel at Webster Hall. For those of you not clicking the link, it's a kind of live-action, semi-satirical mash-up of Toho-style monster battles and pro wrestling. There's a kind of running narrative, I think, involving this evil guy named Dr. Cube -- in this performance, he was pitting his protege, The Grudyin (a kind of overgrown rat thing), against last year's champion, Call-Me-Kevin (a red, crustacean-like dude). I'd never seen Kaiju before (Nina'd been a few years back), nor had I been to WH. It's (Webster Hall) surprisingly chintzy, like a nightclub inside a casino in Vegas or something. Kaiju was exciting and funny, though. The suits were really well-articulated and colorful -- The Grudyin's suit featured four (or was it five?) pairs of nipples, and Call-Me-Kevin had awesome-looking lobster claws and was covered in flappity yellow spikes -- and must've weighed a ton, though that didn't stop the wearers from climbing up the turnbuckles and doing some fairly professional-looking leaps onto the mat, destroying a bunch of styrofoam buildings and municipal infrastructure that happened to get in the way.
Michael and I petitioned the staff dudes who were sweeping up afterwards for some of the cardboard set detritus -- "It's her birthday!" we yelled, pointing at Nina, who cringed. We managed to score an office building facade and a cube face from one of the "black boxes" that featured heavily in deciding this year's champion. I brought the cube face to work! It's on my desk.
After Kaiju was over, we met up with some of Michael's friends and caught a late dinner at Veselka. Even though we were both strangely tired, we ate a bunch of Ukrainian meat dishes.
I got Nina a copy of We Love Katamari. She was, she says, a devotee of the original Katamari Damacy, so, despite her protests about her academic standing, this seemed like a must-buy. This one takes place in a universe with a kind of postmodern awareness of the success of the first game -- in which you play as the son of the King of All Cosmos and have to roll up objects of varying size on your magnetic ball, amid demands and insults, so that you can replace a bunch of stars that your dad wiped out. The prestige you garner for your dad in that one lead to all the people in the game world in this one seeking katamari-related favors from him that he sends you out to do. They're always yelling things like "Katamari Damacy is the coolest!" It's such a weird and unpredictable game. I mentioned to Aanie that it reminds me of the Giant's Drink game from Ender's Game. Also, I could've sworn that "damacy" was an English word -- that it meant something like "fiefdom" -- but we looked it up, and it's a variant pronunciation of a Japanese word for "soul." "Katamari damacy" means "soul clump." Or "clod spirit."
We didn't leave the house on Sunday, because it was freezing outside! The wind keeps blowing around the alley with the garbage cans and rattling the windows in the hallway. I think I'm coming down with a cold.
On Monday night I made a vegetable soup with a bunch of beans and panchetta using this recipe. It's really good, but it took forever to make, and it makes you really regular. And I've still got gallons of it.
Aanie and Eve came over in the morning, letting themselves in with a set of keys I'd given Aanie the night before, to sing Happy Birthday to her in Polish. She does this every year. It goes like this:
Sto lat, sto lat, niech żyje żyje nam.I've tried to learn the words, but I don't know that I ever will. She brought with her some delicious egg cocottes with panchetta, goat cheese, and some other kind of cheese; some orange juice; and some champagne, with which we made mimosas. Eve got Nina an awesome Coney Island t-shirt. Aanie got her these very cute mugs with pictures of pigeons on them.
Sto lat, sto lat, niech żyje żyje nam.
Jeszcze raz, jeszcze raz, niech żyje, żyje nam.
Niech żyje nam!
In the evening we went with her brother to go see Kaiju Big Battel at Webster Hall. For those of you not clicking the link, it's a kind of live-action, semi-satirical mash-up of Toho-style monster battles and pro wrestling. There's a kind of running narrative, I think, involving this evil guy named Dr. Cube -- in this performance, he was pitting his protege, The Grudyin (a kind of overgrown rat thing), against last year's champion, Call-Me-Kevin (a red, crustacean-like dude). I'd never seen Kaiju before (Nina'd been a few years back), nor had I been to WH. It's (Webster Hall) surprisingly chintzy, like a nightclub inside a casino in Vegas or something. Kaiju was exciting and funny, though. The suits were really well-articulated and colorful -- The Grudyin's suit featured four (or was it five?) pairs of nipples, and Call-Me-Kevin had awesome-looking lobster claws and was covered in flappity yellow spikes -- and must've weighed a ton, though that didn't stop the wearers from climbing up the turnbuckles and doing some fairly professional-looking leaps onto the mat, destroying a bunch of styrofoam buildings and municipal infrastructure that happened to get in the way.
Michael and I petitioned the staff dudes who were sweeping up afterwards for some of the cardboard set detritus -- "It's her birthday!" we yelled, pointing at Nina, who cringed. We managed to score an office building facade and a cube face from one of the "black boxes" that featured heavily in deciding this year's champion. I brought the cube face to work! It's on my desk.
After Kaiju was over, we met up with some of Michael's friends and caught a late dinner at Veselka. Even though we were both strangely tired, we ate a bunch of Ukrainian meat dishes.
I got Nina a copy of We Love Katamari. She was, she says, a devotee of the original Katamari Damacy, so, despite her protests about her academic standing, this seemed like a must-buy. This one takes place in a universe with a kind of postmodern awareness of the success of the first game -- in which you play as the son of the King of All Cosmos and have to roll up objects of varying size on your magnetic ball, amid demands and insults, so that you can replace a bunch of stars that your dad wiped out. The prestige you garner for your dad in that one lead to all the people in the game world in this one seeking katamari-related favors from him that he sends you out to do. They're always yelling things like "Katamari Damacy is the coolest!" It's such a weird and unpredictable game. I mentioned to Aanie that it reminds me of the Giant's Drink game from Ender's Game. Also, I could've sworn that "damacy" was an English word -- that it meant something like "fiefdom" -- but we looked it up, and it's a variant pronunciation of a Japanese word for "soul." "Katamari damacy" means "soul clump." Or "clod spirit."
We didn't leave the house on Sunday, because it was freezing outside! The wind keeps blowing around the alley with the garbage cans and rattling the windows in the hallway. I think I'm coming down with a cold.
On Monday night I made a vegetable soup with a bunch of beans and panchetta using this recipe. It's really good, but it took forever to make, and it makes you really regular. And I've still got gallons of it.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Singing And Dancing
Okay, so forget what I said about not wanting to talk politics -- well, blog politics; I'm always willing to talk politics -- Everyone's got Obamania! I didn't even know about this until last night when I went over to 680 to watch the primary results trickle in (and eat Colleen's frighteningly on-target root beer cake), but apparently everyone I know has been volunteering for the dude: Tom's been phone-banking like crazy (fourth highest number of calls in the state, he claims); Emma, who brought the irresistibly laconic Pearl over to watch was sandwich-boarding it up at 13th & 8th, my old polling place; and one of the 680 roommate, Jude, was handing out stuff in the subways, I think. My own contribution was merely a vote, but since I was sure I'd unaffiliated myself (did so out of despair and irritation during the time it was the Party of Terry McAuliffe), the fact that I showed up on the rolls at 40th & 4th counts as a Super Tuesday miracle, I think.
Man is Barack Obama a good talker. Platform-wise, he's not too far off from Clinton, although he seems to be a lot more up-front and precise about what he's promising; maybe that's why he's a better talker than her, too. Nina and I have an ongoing argument about the value of Washinton experience -- I won't get into here, since, you know, this is my forum and it wouldn't be fair -- but suffice it to say I feel like this is emblematic of why he'd be a more responsive administrator. That, and, you know, he's not morally / politically compromised.
Eve is back from India. We went to Studio B on Thursday to catch The Thermals doing this karaoke thing with New York Magazine and The Whitest Kids U Know, and she filled me in on her trip -- it turns out that whilst journeying through the subcontinent, she was poisoned, beset by religious extremists, and run down by a truck. All of these attempts on her life were unsuccessful -- Eve's kind of like Rasputin, that way. I don't know if I'm jealous, per se -- I may not have a tough enough constitution for a trip like that -- but it sounded like a very exciting trip.
And it was nice to have something to talk about at the show, because the comedy was fucking horrible. I mean, really, really bad. Even Gothamist hated it, and they're usually, you know, "event positive," even for crappy stuff. They're not kidding about the floor, though -- it was fucking sticky as hell. I don't know if I'm on board with Stereogum's commenter analysis, which claimed it was an "adhesive" to keep people from dancing, but it sure made dancing difficult. If you kept moving your feet, it was a little like walking across the floor of, like, five filthy movie theaters at once, but if you stopped moving for like a minute or two, it glued you in place. As usual, I was glad I was wearing the ol' boots -- Eve's sneakers kept getting sucked off by the muck.
The band was terrific, though. After a slightly off-key start (bad levels in the monitor, maybe), they whipped through a really tight set that included a bunch of really promising-sounding new songs. And Kathy was doing that charming thing she does. We were tired, though, and didn't feel like sticking around for the second round of horrible, awkward comedy (K. Foster, to the crowd, while the band was tuning up: "You guys like that stuff? Titties and butt-holes?") even if it meant more Thermals playing for the karaoke stuff later on, so we headed out. And we got as far as Nassau before I realized I'd left my credit card at the bar. When I ran back to get it, karaoke was in full swing, but the band seemed fairly disinterested, playing mostly into their amps and not bopping around much. Don't blame 'em -- it was a fairly dubious prospect. I got my picture taken, though!
My (former) roommate Randy is doing a thing a day, all month. Jesus.
It occurs to me that I haven't been going out to many things recently. Part of that is because of the weather, part of it is on account of my new gig as a rebellious monkey, but you know, yeah, I've been lazy, too. So I've started adding stuff to my wonderful events calendar again. May I draw your attention to the Gallows shows this weekend? No? How about some Jonathan Richman?
Been eating a lot of great Trader Joe's mexican lately, which is weird, since I live in, you know, Mexico City. I also baked some really good zucchini-apple muffins using a recipe from Moosewood, a copy of which Nina brought with her when she moved in. The secret? The recipe called for oat bran, which is fucking impossible to find at normal people stores. So I took. It. Out.
Good night!
Man is Barack Obama a good talker. Platform-wise, he's not too far off from Clinton, although he seems to be a lot more up-front and precise about what he's promising; maybe that's why he's a better talker than her, too. Nina and I have an ongoing argument about the value of Washinton experience -- I won't get into here, since, you know, this is my forum and it wouldn't be fair -- but suffice it to say I feel like this is emblematic of why he'd be a more responsive administrator. That, and, you know, he's not morally / politically compromised.
Eve is back from India. We went to Studio B on Thursday to catch The Thermals doing this karaoke thing with New York Magazine and The Whitest Kids U Know, and she filled me in on her trip -- it turns out that whilst journeying through the subcontinent, she was poisoned, beset by religious extremists, and run down by a truck. All of these attempts on her life were unsuccessful -- Eve's kind of like Rasputin, that way. I don't know if I'm jealous, per se -- I may not have a tough enough constitution for a trip like that -- but it sounded like a very exciting trip.
And it was nice to have something to talk about at the show, because the comedy was fucking horrible. I mean, really, really bad. Even Gothamist hated it, and they're usually, you know, "event positive," even for crappy stuff. They're not kidding about the floor, though -- it was fucking sticky as hell. I don't know if I'm on board with Stereogum's commenter analysis, which claimed it was an "adhesive" to keep people from dancing, but it sure made dancing difficult. If you kept moving your feet, it was a little like walking across the floor of, like, five filthy movie theaters at once, but if you stopped moving for like a minute or two, it glued you in place. As usual, I was glad I was wearing the ol' boots -- Eve's sneakers kept getting sucked off by the muck.
The band was terrific, though. After a slightly off-key start (bad levels in the monitor, maybe), they whipped through a really tight set that included a bunch of really promising-sounding new songs. And Kathy was doing that charming thing she does. We were tired, though, and didn't feel like sticking around for the second round of horrible, awkward comedy (K. Foster, to the crowd, while the band was tuning up: "You guys like that stuff? Titties and butt-holes?") even if it meant more Thermals playing for the karaoke stuff later on, so we headed out. And we got as far as Nassau before I realized I'd left my credit card at the bar. When I ran back to get it, karaoke was in full swing, but the band seemed fairly disinterested, playing mostly into their amps and not bopping around much. Don't blame 'em -- it was a fairly dubious prospect. I got my picture taken, though!
My (former) roommate Randy is doing a thing a day, all month. Jesus.
It occurs to me that I haven't been going out to many things recently. Part of that is because of the weather, part of it is on account of my new gig as a rebellious monkey, but you know, yeah, I've been lazy, too. So I've started adding stuff to my wonderful events calendar again. May I draw your attention to the Gallows shows this weekend? No? How about some Jonathan Richman?
Been eating a lot of great Trader Joe's mexican lately, which is weird, since I live in, you know, Mexico City. I also baked some really good zucchini-apple muffins using a recipe from Moosewood, a copy of which Nina brought with her when she moved in. The secret? The recipe called for oat bran, which is fucking impossible to find at normal people stores. So I took. It. Out.
Good night!
Monday, January 21, 2008
Termites Eating Wood
Ugh; got home at 9:40 PM tonight.
The days in which I would write about politics in this thing are past. I feel like I've become a lot less sure about what to think -- not about what I think (abortions for all, tiny American flags for none), but about what the right way to convince people of it is, or even whether convincing them is feasible or, you know, just, or whether the issues are really as simple as I want them to be. This sounds like hedging, I know. But my approach to the problems of politics lately has been, well, you know, there are lots of smart people out there, maybe these things are actually kind of intractable.
One thing I will say, though, is that the cable news political shows have gotten basically unwatchable for me. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer especially have this infuriating schtick that they do where they wonder out loud whether some particular gaffe or strategem "has hurt [the candidate's] chances." "Gee, Wolf, do you think the voters will react poorly to Huckabee's decision to ban the sale of Tylenol south of the Mason-Dixon line?" I don't know guys, you tell me.
This morning when I stopped off at the deli on 40th and 4th, José was chopping up jalapeños at the counter while a big pile of beans was cooking in some foil on the grill. "What are you making?" I asked.
The Middle Eastern guy who runs the place (whose name I've never learned) was puttering around kind of agitated and wearing a scarf around his forehead. "It's called 'Arabian breakfast'," he said. "Jalapeños and beans. Arabian breakfast." He took the beans off the heat and scraped about half onto a styrofoam plate. "José, I'm taking my half. Yours is there. Ow, these are spicy!"
José chuckled. "He eats jalapeños and complains that they're spicy."
"You trying to kill me, man? I want to kill myself, I don't want you to kill me." A pause. "You want to know how I'm going to kill myself? José -- you want to know? Alcohol, man. I want to be high and drunk. I'm going to get high and drunk and then I'm going to kill myself."
"How's it going with [unintelligible]?" José asked.
"We broke up, man. No more boyfriend and girlfriend no more. Break-up."
Yikes!
The days in which I would write about politics in this thing are past. I feel like I've become a lot less sure about what to think -- not about what I think (abortions for all, tiny American flags for none), but about what the right way to convince people of it is, or even whether convincing them is feasible or, you know, just, or whether the issues are really as simple as I want them to be. This sounds like hedging, I know. But my approach to the problems of politics lately has been, well, you know, there are lots of smart people out there, maybe these things are actually kind of intractable.
One thing I will say, though, is that the cable news political shows have gotten basically unwatchable for me. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer especially have this infuriating schtick that they do where they wonder out loud whether some particular gaffe or strategem "has hurt [the candidate's] chances." "Gee, Wolf, do you think the voters will react poorly to Huckabee's decision to ban the sale of Tylenol south of the Mason-Dixon line?" I don't know guys, you tell me.
This morning when I stopped off at the deli on 40th and 4th, José was chopping up jalapeños at the counter while a big pile of beans was cooking in some foil on the grill. "What are you making?" I asked.
The Middle Eastern guy who runs the place (whose name I've never learned) was puttering around kind of agitated and wearing a scarf around his forehead. "It's called 'Arabian breakfast'," he said. "Jalapeños and beans. Arabian breakfast." He took the beans off the heat and scraped about half onto a styrofoam plate. "José, I'm taking my half. Yours is there. Ow, these are spicy!"
José chuckled. "He eats jalapeños and complains that they're spicy."
"You trying to kill me, man? I want to kill myself, I don't want you to kill me." A pause. "You want to know how I'm going to kill myself? José -- you want to know? Alcohol, man. I want to be high and drunk. I'm going to get high and drunk and then I'm going to kill myself."
"How's it going with [unintelligible]?" José asked.
"We broke up, man. No more boyfriend and girlfriend no more. Break-up."
Yikes!
Saturday, January 19, 2008
A Year Of Being Tired
Nina is moving into Randy's former room. I am excited but, you know, apprehensive. Can I say that in a place where she can read it? She knows. It's a stressful thing, moving -- I was sure wound up about moving in here, and I was ditching a junked-up money-sink of a place when I did that. She's leaving what's basically the best one-bedroom in the city, a palace, really, that's also notable in that its rent was as low as it was for so long. This new place, my place, that she's moving into... not so much. It's smaller, a bit noisier (this evening the neighbors have been alternating Mexican polka with Michael Jackson's greatest hits... with stomping), and the amenities are less... amenable. Tiny bathroom, less light, more stairs. But, you know, it's got two bedrooms. She's painting hers a combination of gray and green. So far only the gray is up, but it's very soft and pretty -- I anticipate it will be even moreso on summer afternoons.
To make her stuff fit, she's getting a bunk bed (unfortunately putting her closer to upstairs footfalls) and we've both ditched a bunch of stuff. Evan and some of his roommates came by yesterday to scavenge her 350-lb. TV and the ol' vibrating / adjustable bed -- which turned out not to fit in Evan's friend Richard's minivan. They had to call around craigslist for last minute movers and managed to obtain the services of a guy who was a dead ringer for the keyboard player from Spinal Tap -- and whom Evan described, having spent a van ride with him back to Williamsburg, as being completely batshit.
But yeah, it's stressful, and not happening at the best time: Her dad is sick, we're both working a lot -- she's going to school, too; me, I keep attending these meetings where they lay out the schedule for the rest of the year, and it doesn't involve long trips to the bathroom, much less vacation or workdays that end before eight thirty. But I think living with someone usually ends up okay. People make concessions, consciously and unconsciously, and company is almost always a joy. Fingers crossed. (It better work out, because we merged our Netflix queues.)
A bit of terrible news, though: Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, the band that opened, serendipitously, for Ted Leo the night Eve hooked Nina and me up -- and which was later discovered to feature one of her co-workers at SEED -- might be no more. Or at least so indicates their MySpace. I know this sounds a bit phony, but I'm serious about these guys being my favorite local band. I hadn't really had the experience before DFHC of looking forward, entirely without misgivings -- to regularly going to a show by a small-time bunch of dudes. Don't get me wrong -- when I bought Dickies tickets in high school and it turned out that The Toilet Boys or The LES Stitches were opening, you know, that was cool, but it's not like those guys were really worth seeing on their own merits -- you'd buy their album and it'd have the couple of good, catchy songs on it that you liked, but then there'd be like a dozen really so-so songs that'd make you go, "Oh, right, you're not that smart."
Anyway, I can't really blame the 'Cemetery: Their stage show must've taken hours to rehearse / perfect, not to mention how much money it undoubtedly took to keep the equipment and costumes in working order. So when the turnout wasn't ever that good, there's a definite cost / benefit deficit. Pearls before swine and that. But both the keyboard guy and the drummer assured me they were working on an album, so I hope that's still in the works.
More awful news: My two big March "events" -- the FSF associate members meeting and the Pogues show at Roseland -- are both on the same day! And the FSF thing is in a whole 'nother state. I can't cancel or exchange the Pogues tickets, and I sure as heck can't reschedule the meeting, so it looks like I'm doing both? The trip to / from Boston takes a while (I think I'll take the train this time, since, as I discovered during an obligatory training visit to DataSynapse North recently, it leaves you feeling a whole lot more human than the bus), but I can leave the FSF thing a bit early, and the Pogues probably won't be on 'til 10:00 or so anyway. I don't know. Maybe this is a bad idea. This is a bad idea.
Tonight I cooked eggplant curry in the new pot my parents got me -- first eggplant dish ever, since I am only recently of the mind that eggplant is anything other than kind of icky. I still think it is kind of icky, actually. I need to find a better recipe. The pot works great, though. Great heat distribution, a causa de "metal," yet things didn't seem to stick. We'll see how it goes tomorrow when I have to clean it.
Emma posted a remarkably cogent review of a remarkably scatterbrained movie we watched a few weeks ago. Read it here.
To make her stuff fit, she's getting a bunk bed (unfortunately putting her closer to upstairs footfalls) and we've both ditched a bunch of stuff. Evan and some of his roommates came by yesterday to scavenge her 350-lb. TV and the ol' vibrating / adjustable bed -- which turned out not to fit in Evan's friend Richard's minivan. They had to call around craigslist for last minute movers and managed to obtain the services of a guy who was a dead ringer for the keyboard player from Spinal Tap -- and whom Evan described, having spent a van ride with him back to Williamsburg, as being completely batshit.
But yeah, it's stressful, and not happening at the best time: Her dad is sick, we're both working a lot -- she's going to school, too; me, I keep attending these meetings where they lay out the schedule for the rest of the year, and it doesn't involve long trips to the bathroom, much less vacation or workdays that end before eight thirty. But I think living with someone usually ends up okay. People make concessions, consciously and unconsciously, and company is almost always a joy. Fingers crossed. (It better work out, because we merged our Netflix queues.)
A bit of terrible news, though: Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, the band that opened, serendipitously, for Ted Leo the night Eve hooked Nina and me up -- and which was later discovered to feature one of her co-workers at SEED -- might be no more. Or at least so indicates their MySpace. I know this sounds a bit phony, but I'm serious about these guys being my favorite local band. I hadn't really had the experience before DFHC of looking forward, entirely without misgivings -- to regularly going to a show by a small-time bunch of dudes. Don't get me wrong -- when I bought Dickies tickets in high school and it turned out that The Toilet Boys or The LES Stitches were opening, you know, that was cool, but it's not like those guys were really worth seeing on their own merits -- you'd buy their album and it'd have the couple of good, catchy songs on it that you liked, but then there'd be like a dozen really so-so songs that'd make you go, "Oh, right, you're not that smart."
Anyway, I can't really blame the 'Cemetery: Their stage show must've taken hours to rehearse / perfect, not to mention how much money it undoubtedly took to keep the equipment and costumes in working order. So when the turnout wasn't ever that good, there's a definite cost / benefit deficit. Pearls before swine and that. But both the keyboard guy and the drummer assured me they were working on an album, so I hope that's still in the works.
More awful news: My two big March "events" -- the FSF associate members meeting and the Pogues show at Roseland -- are both on the same day! And the FSF thing is in a whole 'nother state. I can't cancel or exchange the Pogues tickets, and I sure as heck can't reschedule the meeting, so it looks like I'm doing both? The trip to / from Boston takes a while (I think I'll take the train this time, since, as I discovered during an obligatory training visit to DataSynapse North recently, it leaves you feeling a whole lot more human than the bus), but I can leave the FSF thing a bit early, and the Pogues probably won't be on 'til 10:00 or so anyway. I don't know. Maybe this is a bad idea. This is a bad idea.
Tonight I cooked eggplant curry in the new pot my parents got me -- first eggplant dish ever, since I am only recently of the mind that eggplant is anything other than kind of icky. I still think it is kind of icky, actually. I need to find a better recipe. The pot works great, though. Great heat distribution, a causa de "metal," yet things didn't seem to stick. We'll see how it goes tomorrow when I have to clean it.
Emma posted a remarkably cogent review of a remarkably scatterbrained movie we watched a few weeks ago. Read it here.
Friday, January 04, 2008
The Shock of the New
Randy finished moving out a couple of weeks ago. The apartment is strangely clean and empty. Last night Winnie and Evan came over and played Scrabble and cooked this custom pizza for Randy with goat cheese and chorizo. We ended up opening some champagne that Eve'd gotten me a few weeks ago and we had quite a time. Randy has bequeathed me a number of... gifts, including two toy cars and a kind of attack-of-the-tripods thing that has a Pope inside it. Sorry, I really can't be more articulate than that.
And then it was Christmas. I had kind of a hard time with the holidays; I don't know why. This is not, in general, my favorite time of year -- even if you reject the idea of buying everybody presents, they don't necessarily reject the idea along with you, and then there are, you know, consequences. Plus, I felt like the whole holiday had kind of snuck up on me, given the way my work schedule had turned out: Work work work work Christmas. So I hadn't bought anything for anyone, basically, and felt anxious and awful about it. And I had to spend the whole day with my parents and their friends. To mitigate things, I woke up early on Christmas morning to bake a pie before heading over, and that turned out pretty okay, although I spilled several quickly-carbonizing dollops of pumpkin crap all over the floor and oven door.
After the day itself, I recovered, to the extent that I have even been able to buy things for a few people. Tom et al. threw a nice, cozy New Year's party, and Colleen followed it up the next day with a delightful all-day brunch. Is everyone turning thirty right now or what? My friend Julia just got married; my friend Razor is going to get married -- he told me the date and everything.
Me, I'm watching a TV show on Korean basic cable called "Comedy Show Hey Hey Hey!" Maybe you've heard of it.
Emma and I have been watching some movies recently, baseball-related:
Later Eve and I went to go the Sweeney Todd movie, which was boss. She's in India now, for a month. Good luck, Eve!
Good luck to all of you!
Obamania 2008!
And then it was Christmas. I had kind of a hard time with the holidays; I don't know why. This is not, in general, my favorite time of year -- even if you reject the idea of buying everybody presents, they don't necessarily reject the idea along with you, and then there are, you know, consequences. Plus, I felt like the whole holiday had kind of snuck up on me, given the way my work schedule had turned out: Work work work work Christmas. So I hadn't bought anything for anyone, basically, and felt anxious and awful about it. And I had to spend the whole day with my parents and their friends. To mitigate things, I woke up early on Christmas morning to bake a pie before heading over, and that turned out pretty okay, although I spilled several quickly-carbonizing dollops of pumpkin crap all over the floor and oven door.
After the day itself, I recovered, to the extent that I have even been able to buy things for a few people. Tom et al. threw a nice, cozy New Year's party, and Colleen followed it up the next day with a delightful all-day brunch. Is everyone turning thirty right now or what? My friend Julia just got married; my friend Razor is going to get married -- he told me the date and everything.
Me, I'm watching a TV show on Korean basic cable called "Comedy Show Hey Hey Hey!" Maybe you've heard of it.
Emma and I have been watching some movies recently, baseball-related:
- Rhubarb: The Cat Who Loved To Play And Watch Baseball
- Safe at Home!, which is about the worst little boy in the world
Later Eve and I went to go the Sweeney Todd movie, which was boss. She's in India now, for a month. Good luck, Eve!
Good luck to all of you!
Obamania 2008!
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