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.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
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!
Friday, December 21, 2007
Monte Crisco Hot Dog Heaven
Hey, babies. Happy Michaelmas.
So I had my last day of work at DataSynapse on the 7th. Didn't do much in the way of celebrating -- whimper, not bang, you know -- but earlier in the week I did get all the pennies off the top of the fridge. See, for the past four and a half years, I'd been tossing my pennies up on top of the 50-cent soda machine in the office kitchen. My stated goal was to demolish the machine under the sheer weight of my loose change, but that never quite came to pass. So instead I figured I'd collect 'em and do something nice with the money. I put on some latex gloves and got up on a stool and holy god was it filthy up there but I gathered all the pennies and took them over to Commerce Bank. They have a machine that counts and collates change -- which they give you paper money for -- and if you guess how much you're pouring in within two dollars of the actual amount, you get a prize. Turned out I had $8.69 and my prize was a red felt hat, one like Santa Claus would wear. I put it on before the dude was even done cashing me out.
My friend Bryan and I hit up the Gristedes and. using the above amount as a hard spending maximum and with me still wearing the hat, selected two six-packs of Natural "Natty" Ice. We took it back to the office and split it among some of the tech people who were around. That was nice, although the natty made me feel kind of sluggish and unhappy for the rest of the day. But that was kind of it.
The new job is going swimmingly, but I'm there all the goddamn time. Initial impressions: Everybody is really friendly, and even the people with whom I don't know if I'd wanna hang out outside of work are shockingly good at what they do -- and good at a whole lot of other things, too. They're all polymaths. It's great. I'm a bit less worried about being able to do what they want, but I've still been staying 'til at least 8:00 every night for the past two weeks -- of course, it doesn't hurt that Nick, one of the founders, brought in a copy of Rock Band for "research purposes." (The Onion AV Club is right -- it is your life, now.) But, you know, yeah, I'm having a pretty great time, although, perhaps not inexplicably, my stomach's been all over the map. I even managed to get some mild but quite unpleasant food poisony-thing last Friday that forced me to beat a hasty and shameful early retreat home with my sweater tied around my waist. This surprises none of you.
Eve and I went to Mercury Lounge last weekend to see what we thought was going to be an awesome lineup of bands -- Team Robespierre opening for these dudes named Yeasayer (whom Eve's into, though she referred to them more than once as "Yeaslayer"). Unfortunately, we got confused about the order of the bands and showed up just as The Team were getting off stage. And they sounded strangely fratted-out and sloppy and not very much fun. And then this weird boy-girl duo who called themselves High Places went on and played this very self-important, serious set that involved a lot of slide whistle and very quiet singing. Yeasayer themselves were, you know, technically skillful, except that like most bands these days, they were paying some kind of ironic (or unironic, who fucking cares any more) tribute to 70s classic rock. Plus Eve and I were still confused about the lineup for the first couple of their songs and were expecting them to be Team Robespierre and play some punky Team Robespierre-style songs. And I was still kind of light-headed and queasy from the events of the previous evening. So it was not the best show I'd ever been to.
What else?
Ted got me a ticket to see this Edward Albee play that's opening on Broadway called The Homecoming with Ian McShane in the lead role. The cast was really great, especially Al Swearengen, who was genuinely scary in this one scene where he throws a bunch of punches and then demands "a kiss and a cuddle," but the play itself kind of zigs where it should zag. It's, you know, uneven. But maybe it's just me -- I read Ben Brantley's review of it in the Times, thinking he'd pan the material, but he thought the whole thing was great.
That night after the play I headed to Brooklyn Heights at the invitation of Katharine to watch the boxing match between Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather on her dad's HBO Pay-Per-View. You know me, babies -- I don't know much about sports, and certainly nothing about boxing, so this was a new thing for me. Boxing is kind of scary, it turns out, but it's not boring, and Hatton and Mayweather are clearly both pros, each coming in with, literally, no losses on his respective record. Mayweather was widely favored to win, though K-Rod's dude and his friend Matt were rooting for Hatton -- who is Mancunian and has this very cool way of flying into the fray with his right extended, like Superman. Long story short -- they both fought very well, but Mayweather won in the 10th round after knocking Hatton into the turnbuckle. Not bad, though, considering that both those guys are used to winning their fights in, like, a single round. Plus, both were able, even after being pummeled by each other for the previous 40 minutes, to give coherent interviews and, in Mayweather's case, to do some promotional bidniz on the mic.
There was a domestic disturbance in the apartment across the way a week ago. The cops came, lots of them. Tonight on the way home, this little day-care center on 4th Ave. was in the final throes of burning down, surrounded by fire engines. The ceiling plaster in the bathroom is collapsing, again. I still love my neighborhood and my apartment.
Had brunch last Sunday with The Friends at Beast. That was nice, although Katie had to leave part way through because she was too hung over to be around civilization. I know what that's like. Sometimes you have to be by yourself. What is everyone doing for the holidays? Jerry and Katie are going to Mexico, which is something I have often considered doing, but the notice is too short, I think, for me to go just now. I just got an obligatory ten days off from work, though, a top-down order from the boss, everyone doing it, and now I'm not sure how to spend it. Final Fantasy and beating off will probably be part of the mix.
So I had my last day of work at DataSynapse on the 7th. Didn't do much in the way of celebrating -- whimper, not bang, you know -- but earlier in the week I did get all the pennies off the top of the fridge. See, for the past four and a half years, I'd been tossing my pennies up on top of the 50-cent soda machine in the office kitchen. My stated goal was to demolish the machine under the sheer weight of my loose change, but that never quite came to pass. So instead I figured I'd collect 'em and do something nice with the money. I put on some latex gloves and got up on a stool and holy god was it filthy up there but I gathered all the pennies and took them over to Commerce Bank. They have a machine that counts and collates change -- which they give you paper money for -- and if you guess how much you're pouring in within two dollars of the actual amount, you get a prize. Turned out I had $8.69 and my prize was a red felt hat, one like Santa Claus would wear. I put it on before the dude was even done cashing me out.
My friend Bryan and I hit up the Gristedes and. using the above amount as a hard spending maximum and with me still wearing the hat, selected two six-packs of Natural "Natty" Ice. We took it back to the office and split it among some of the tech people who were around. That was nice, although the natty made me feel kind of sluggish and unhappy for the rest of the day. But that was kind of it.
The new job is going swimmingly, but I'm there all the goddamn time. Initial impressions: Everybody is really friendly, and even the people with whom I don't know if I'd wanna hang out outside of work are shockingly good at what they do -- and good at a whole lot of other things, too. They're all polymaths. It's great. I'm a bit less worried about being able to do what they want, but I've still been staying 'til at least 8:00 every night for the past two weeks -- of course, it doesn't hurt that Nick, one of the founders, brought in a copy of Rock Band for "research purposes." (The Onion AV Club is right -- it is your life, now.) But, you know, yeah, I'm having a pretty great time, although, perhaps not inexplicably, my stomach's been all over the map. I even managed to get some mild but quite unpleasant food poisony-thing last Friday that forced me to beat a hasty and shameful early retreat home with my sweater tied around my waist. This surprises none of you.
Eve and I went to Mercury Lounge last weekend to see what we thought was going to be an awesome lineup of bands -- Team Robespierre opening for these dudes named Yeasayer (whom Eve's into, though she referred to them more than once as "Yeaslayer"). Unfortunately, we got confused about the order of the bands and showed up just as The Team were getting off stage. And they sounded strangely fratted-out and sloppy and not very much fun. And then this weird boy-girl duo who called themselves High Places went on and played this very self-important, serious set that involved a lot of slide whistle and very quiet singing. Yeasayer themselves were, you know, technically skillful, except that like most bands these days, they were paying some kind of ironic (or unironic, who fucking cares any more) tribute to 70s classic rock. Plus Eve and I were still confused about the lineup for the first couple of their songs and were expecting them to be Team Robespierre and play some punky Team Robespierre-style songs. And I was still kind of light-headed and queasy from the events of the previous evening. So it was not the best show I'd ever been to.
What else?
Ted got me a ticket to see this Edward Albee play that's opening on Broadway called The Homecoming with Ian McShane in the lead role. The cast was really great, especially Al Swearengen, who was genuinely scary in this one scene where he throws a bunch of punches and then demands "a kiss and a cuddle," but the play itself kind of zigs where it should zag. It's, you know, uneven. But maybe it's just me -- I read Ben Brantley's review of it in the Times, thinking he'd pan the material, but he thought the whole thing was great.
That night after the play I headed to Brooklyn Heights at the invitation of Katharine to watch the boxing match between Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather on her dad's HBO Pay-Per-View. You know me, babies -- I don't know much about sports, and certainly nothing about boxing, so this was a new thing for me. Boxing is kind of scary, it turns out, but it's not boring, and Hatton and Mayweather are clearly both pros, each coming in with, literally, no losses on his respective record. Mayweather was widely favored to win, though K-Rod's dude and his friend Matt were rooting for Hatton -- who is Mancunian and has this very cool way of flying into the fray with his right extended, like Superman. Long story short -- they both fought very well, but Mayweather won in the 10th round after knocking Hatton into the turnbuckle. Not bad, though, considering that both those guys are used to winning their fights in, like, a single round. Plus, both were able, even after being pummeled by each other for the previous 40 minutes, to give coherent interviews and, in Mayweather's case, to do some promotional bidniz on the mic.
There was a domestic disturbance in the apartment across the way a week ago. The cops came, lots of them. Tonight on the way home, this little day-care center on 4th Ave. was in the final throes of burning down, surrounded by fire engines. The ceiling plaster in the bathroom is collapsing, again. I still love my neighborhood and my apartment.
Had brunch last Sunday with The Friends at Beast. That was nice, although Katie had to leave part way through because she was too hung over to be around civilization. I know what that's like. Sometimes you have to be by yourself. What is everyone doing for the holidays? Jerry and Katie are going to Mexico, which is something I have often considered doing, but the notice is too short, I think, for me to go just now. I just got an obligatory ten days off from work, though, a top-down order from the boss, everyone doing it, and now I'm not sure how to spend it. Final Fantasy and beating off will probably be part of the mix.
Monday, December 03, 2007
First Snow
So, something I've been doing for about six months and haven't been able to write about here is that I've been looking for a new job. And, again, for reasons of propriety, I can't really talk about why I wanted to leave the 'napse, but suffice it to say that I was feeling like I'd outgrown the place. So I started looking for something a bit less corporate and bit more hip-young-person-new-media-collective, and I think I've found it in the form of Rebel Monkey. They're a startup, they make games, and one of the dudes who runs it is an acquaintance of Randy's from Parsons -- and now I have a job there! Tom tipped me off to their existence. "It seems like it'd be an awesome place to work," he told me, so, after checking out their openings, I applied, and it worked out, etc.
But making the decision to hang up my shingle with them (and unhang it at 632 Broadway) was incredibly stressful. You know me, guys -- I was deeply preoccupied with doubts as to whether I was making the right decision, whether I'd be up to the task of what the new guys want me to do. And I'd spent four and a half years at DataSynapse. Those guys are my friends, even though not all of them live within striking distance these days. My life was totally different when I started there; I was a pretty different guy, and I was certainly less... formed, you know, as a technology professional. So I'm still a bit worried about the whole thing, but the new place seems awfully nice -- the space is beautiful, the contract wonderfully reasonable, and their interview process was extremely low on brainteasers and bullshit. God knows I've had plenty of that over the past six months that I've been looking.
I can't really go into detail, but Google: I want my six hours back.
(Actually, here's a small detail, presented for the benefit of M-Biddy, who likes things like this: A convex hull is a minimal subset of a set of points such that all of the angles in the shape formed by drawing line segments between adjacent points are convex and all the points that don't comprise this shape lie within its boundaries; describe an efficient algorithm for discovering the hull. I think I found one that my interviewer hadn't heard before, but I wasn't able to explain it satisfactorily.)
Moving over to the new place has already started -- as part of the (slightly uncomfortable) agreement I negotiated between DataSynapse and Rebel Monkey, I've been going over there in the early evening for the past two weeks and working 'til around 10:00. That's a 12-hour day! And then I worked all of last weekend, slogging through a Windows networking hell largely of my own devising. I'm a bit exhausted. Tonight while I was in meeting with them, one of their florescent overhead lights kind of exploded, filling the office with burning-electronics stink. It's a startup, it's exciting. My last day at DataSynapse is this Friday. I start, officially, at Rebel Monkey on the following Monday.
Anyway, thanks are due to Vickie Lee, even though I wasn't able to go for any of the jobs she looked up for me; and to Jimmy Tones, who gave me some pro bono career counseling, although I ended up jumping back into for-profit softare instead of running off to work for Barack Obama.
Winter is here, as evidenced by the wind tonight and the snow yesterday. It's going to be Hanukkah real soon, and then Christmas. And then we begin something entirely new.
But making the decision to hang up my shingle with them (and unhang it at 632 Broadway) was incredibly stressful. You know me, guys -- I was deeply preoccupied with doubts as to whether I was making the right decision, whether I'd be up to the task of what the new guys want me to do. And I'd spent four and a half years at DataSynapse. Those guys are my friends, even though not all of them live within striking distance these days. My life was totally different when I started there; I was a pretty different guy, and I was certainly less... formed, you know, as a technology professional. So I'm still a bit worried about the whole thing, but the new place seems awfully nice -- the space is beautiful, the contract wonderfully reasonable, and their interview process was extremely low on brainteasers and bullshit. God knows I've had plenty of that over the past six months that I've been looking.
I can't really go into detail, but Google: I want my six hours back.
(Actually, here's a small detail, presented for the benefit of M-Biddy, who likes things like this: A convex hull is a minimal subset of a set of points such that all of the angles in the shape formed by drawing line segments between adjacent points are convex and all the points that don't comprise this shape lie within its boundaries; describe an efficient algorithm for discovering the hull. I think I found one that my interviewer hadn't heard before, but I wasn't able to explain it satisfactorily.)
Moving over to the new place has already started -- as part of the (slightly uncomfortable) agreement I negotiated between DataSynapse and Rebel Monkey, I've been going over there in the early evening for the past two weeks and working 'til around 10:00. That's a 12-hour day! And then I worked all of last weekend, slogging through a Windows networking hell largely of my own devising. I'm a bit exhausted. Tonight while I was in meeting with them, one of their florescent overhead lights kind of exploded, filling the office with burning-electronics stink. It's a startup, it's exciting. My last day at DataSynapse is this Friday. I start, officially, at Rebel Monkey on the following Monday.
Anyway, thanks are due to Vickie Lee, even though I wasn't able to go for any of the jobs she looked up for me; and to Jimmy Tones, who gave me some pro bono career counseling, although I ended up jumping back into for-profit softare instead of running off to work for Barack Obama.
Winter is here, as evidenced by the wind tonight and the snow yesterday. It's going to be Hanukkah real soon, and then Christmas. And then we begin something entirely new.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Live From Nilbog
Emma had a birthday. We drank; then, later, Katharine and she and I watched Troll 2 together. I hadn't known what a gold mine that fucker is in terms of bizarre dialogue and delivery. You don't piss on hospitality -- true, that.
There were a lot of fruit flies in the kitchen recently, and I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't blame it on Sophie any more, and, while I'm not great about doing the dishes, having an empty sink didn't seem to mitigate the problem. What happened, though, was that Nina was cooking steaks on my stove and went looking in the cupboard below the counter, in which Randy's got space allotted for his dry goods, for a saucepan. Next to his stash of Cheddar Bunnies was a bag of potatoes I'd left down there a month or two ago, and there were flies buzzing around that thing like nuts. It was sitting in a swamp of its own putrefaction -- something had gone terribly wrong, and, when I gaggingly hoisted the sack into the garbage, I noticed that it left a viscous trail that was bubbling and seething with a pupal host. Indeed, said ichor had spewed forth out of the cabinet onto the floor below a day before. I had assumed it was cat food gravy. It smelled like old cat food gravy! Nina dubbed the whole scene "the horror," and we determined that the remaining pool should be left for Someone Else to deal with.
Then there was The Game -- you know, when the big football teams play each other. I came up on the train after work on Friday and met up with The Friends at Rudy's. Maggie and Cliff were there -- it was great to see them! I ate some Alfie Bread (they've introduced a new Alfie Bread that has pepperoni!) and then we all crashed at Ted's house. For some reason I petitioned to share a bed with Ted, forgetting that he's a snorer. Greg and Ted made everyone breakfast in the morning, which was delicious, although my stomach was doing a thing. Around 10:30 we headed to the tailgate, which was as about the same as usual. We drank whiskey out of a thermos. The game itself was boring and Yale lost, rottenly; like Yankees fans, we left after about thirty minutes and then waited for another thirty to board a bus back to campus.
I got to pee in that trough urinal, though. Whenever I'm peeing into an unfamiliar thing, I have a second or two where I think, "Maybe I shouldn't be peeing into this!" And then I look around to make sure other people are peeing into it, and they are and I'm sorry I checked.
Master Krauss was having a party when we got to Silliman College, and Ron took us on a tour of the new, renovated dining hall and basement. I can't really think of a way to describe it to people who don't know what I'm talking about without making it sound boring, so I won't try, but suffice it to say that it was very different and kind of a strangely emotional experience. Not with tears or anything, mind you, but it's always surprising what an effect place has on you. I opted to drive back to Pelham with KT that evening instead of staying another day, because I was feeling run down. I'll get to the why a bit later. Pictures are in the photostream.
For Thanksgiving I made chorizo and spinach soup, as per this recipe. I realized part way through making it, though, that my big pot was not going to be big enough to hold it all. So, with the soup simmering on the range, I ran down to the hardware store on my corner and bought a really big pot, like, that a restaurant might use. So I finished making the soup in that (it barely filled it half-way) and then lugged the fucker on the subway over to Eve's, who was also cooking in preparation for the festivities at my parents' house. I was so exhausted when I got there that I had to eat a piece of bread and drink some whiskey. Eve made a vegan chocolate cake and some apple stuff. It was delicious! So was my soup.
There were a lot of fruit flies in the kitchen recently, and I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't blame it on Sophie any more, and, while I'm not great about doing the dishes, having an empty sink didn't seem to mitigate the problem. What happened, though, was that Nina was cooking steaks on my stove and went looking in the cupboard below the counter, in which Randy's got space allotted for his dry goods, for a saucepan. Next to his stash of Cheddar Bunnies was a bag of potatoes I'd left down there a month or two ago, and there were flies buzzing around that thing like nuts. It was sitting in a swamp of its own putrefaction -- something had gone terribly wrong, and, when I gaggingly hoisted the sack into the garbage, I noticed that it left a viscous trail that was bubbling and seething with a pupal host. Indeed, said ichor had spewed forth out of the cabinet onto the floor below a day before. I had assumed it was cat food gravy. It smelled like old cat food gravy! Nina dubbed the whole scene "the horror," and we determined that the remaining pool should be left for Someone Else to deal with.
Then there was The Game -- you know, when the big football teams play each other. I came up on the train after work on Friday and met up with The Friends at Rudy's. Maggie and Cliff were there -- it was great to see them! I ate some Alfie Bread (they've introduced a new Alfie Bread that has pepperoni!) and then we all crashed at Ted's house. For some reason I petitioned to share a bed with Ted, forgetting that he's a snorer. Greg and Ted made everyone breakfast in the morning, which was delicious, although my stomach was doing a thing. Around 10:30 we headed to the tailgate, which was as about the same as usual. We drank whiskey out of a thermos. The game itself was boring and Yale lost, rottenly; like Yankees fans, we left after about thirty minutes and then waited for another thirty to board a bus back to campus.
I got to pee in that trough urinal, though. Whenever I'm peeing into an unfamiliar thing, I have a second or two where I think, "Maybe I shouldn't be peeing into this!" And then I look around to make sure other people are peeing into it, and they are and I'm sorry I checked.
Master Krauss was having a party when we got to Silliman College, and Ron took us on a tour of the new, renovated dining hall and basement. I can't really think of a way to describe it to people who don't know what I'm talking about without making it sound boring, so I won't try, but suffice it to say that it was very different and kind of a strangely emotional experience. Not with tears or anything, mind you, but it's always surprising what an effect place has on you. I opted to drive back to Pelham with KT that evening instead of staying another day, because I was feeling run down. I'll get to the why a bit later. Pictures are in the photostream.
For Thanksgiving I made chorizo and spinach soup, as per this recipe. I realized part way through making it, though, that my big pot was not going to be big enough to hold it all. So, with the soup simmering on the range, I ran down to the hardware store on my corner and bought a really big pot, like, that a restaurant might use. So I finished making the soup in that (it barely filled it half-way) and then lugged the fucker on the subway over to Eve's, who was also cooking in preparation for the festivities at my parents' house. I was so exhausted when I got there that I had to eat a piece of bread and drink some whiskey. Eve made a vegan chocolate cake and some apple stuff. It was delicious! So was my soup.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Five Beautiful Parakeets
More show news, because I have to record what I do.
Eve and I went to see The Thermals at Warsaw on Thursday, and, despite the fact that their openers were awful, it was an amazing show. There wasn't much of a crowd as Hutch & Co. were getting set up, and we were worried that people just weren't gonna turn out, but by the time they started playing, there was a great, vigorous throng. Their set list hasn't changed much since the last time I saw them, but that was fine; they were still admirably tight and angry. Kathy Foster cut a striking figure -- her bouncy hair, kind of her signature, I feel like, was swept forward into a sort of 'fro-hawk -- and she and Hutch faced off on some of the harder numbers. She's got this captivating, stolid grace about her that... well, I won't get into it lest I get into "trouble." I am a faithful man, after all.
The bouncers at Warsaw are these creepy Polish skinheads (at some of the artier shows, Nina and I have played "Polack or hipster?"), and they were managing the crowd pretty actively that night, really front and center, up close to the stage. As I find is often the case, they paid special attention to me (height? Jacket?), even though there were plenty of jackasses in the audience, including a really smelly dreadlocked goth dude and his really smelly girlfriend.
For encores, the band covered a Built To Spill song that was okay and a Wipers song that was pretty cool. And nobody puked this time, so that was good, too.
I'm having a hard time putting into words why I didn't like the Gogol Bordello show I went to on Saturday night with Nina, Randy, Winnie, Evan, and David Bell. All I know for sure is that I was in a good mood when I walked into the joint, but within five minutes I kind of wanted to leave.
Maybe it's the music -- I've never really been sure whether I like them or not, ever since Eve lent me Gypsy Punks a year ago. On the one hand, they've got tons of energy and swell instrumentations with all sorts of old-world instruments playing in minor keys. (To picture the guy who plays the violin for them, imagine Armin Mueller-Stahl in Eastern Promises, but wearing bondage pants and a leather vest with no shirt.) On the other hand, though, the songs aren't really that catchy -- or at least, I can't remember what they sound like when I'm not hearing them. And the tone of the whole thing is kind of problematic: These guys have been compared to The Pogues, but whereas Shane MacGowan is acknowledged as a fond historian of Irish folk who's earned the right, through research (and time on a barstool), to sort of queer the genre; Eugene Hutz doesn't strike me as much of a good shepherd of Gypsy music. Either Gypsy music just isn't that good, or the band is making fun of Gypsy music -- or Hutz just isn't that smart. Or he doesn't speak English that well. With lyrics like this, it's sort of hard to tell:
That's pretty much what the audience was like. Lots of chubby white dudes in popped-collar Polo shirts, lots of spacey girls with frizzy hair in long flowing dresses (too dark to tell, but I bet there were some Henna tattoos). Every problematic rock concert audience trope was on display -- the skittish girls who didn't want anyone dancing around near them; the guy and his girlfriend trying to have a slow, protective cuddle in the middle of the mosh pit; the insanely sweaty guy really swingin' his elbows around with his eyes closed, enjoying some private groove in a contemptibly public way.
Maybe it was the venue, though -- Terminal 5 used to be Club Exit, which was basically a warehouse for bridge-and-tunnel techno douchebags, and nothing has changed besides the name. (Except that they're booking underground rock shows there?) It's got shitty access to the entrances and exits, the bars are irritatingly inaccessible, and the space is shaped such that it's impossible to navigate the types of crowds that form in front of the stage. I don't know how other places do it right, but these fuckers do it wrong.
Nina lost her phone in the crowd, but by the grace of God some nice lady found it and returned it. It still kind of works, too! We went out for dinner afterwards at Renaissance, which totally my new go-to diner for Hell's Kitchen. I'm there so much, you see.
Eve and I went to see The Thermals at Warsaw on Thursday, and, despite the fact that their openers were awful, it was an amazing show. There wasn't much of a crowd as Hutch & Co. were getting set up, and we were worried that people just weren't gonna turn out, but by the time they started playing, there was a great, vigorous throng. Their set list hasn't changed much since the last time I saw them, but that was fine; they were still admirably tight and angry. Kathy Foster cut a striking figure -- her bouncy hair, kind of her signature, I feel like, was swept forward into a sort of 'fro-hawk -- and she and Hutch faced off on some of the harder numbers. She's got this captivating, stolid grace about her that... well, I won't get into it lest I get into "trouble." I am a faithful man, after all.
The bouncers at Warsaw are these creepy Polish skinheads (at some of the artier shows, Nina and I have played "Polack or hipster?"), and they were managing the crowd pretty actively that night, really front and center, up close to the stage. As I find is often the case, they paid special attention to me (height? Jacket?), even though there were plenty of jackasses in the audience, including a really smelly dreadlocked goth dude and his really smelly girlfriend.
For encores, the band covered a Built To Spill song that was okay and a Wipers song that was pretty cool. And nobody puked this time, so that was good, too.
I'm having a hard time putting into words why I didn't like the Gogol Bordello show I went to on Saturday night with Nina, Randy, Winnie, Evan, and David Bell. All I know for sure is that I was in a good mood when I walked into the joint, but within five minutes I kind of wanted to leave.
Maybe it's the music -- I've never really been sure whether I like them or not, ever since Eve lent me Gypsy Punks a year ago. On the one hand, they've got tons of energy and swell instrumentations with all sorts of old-world instruments playing in minor keys. (To picture the guy who plays the violin for them, imagine Armin Mueller-Stahl in Eastern Promises, but wearing bondage pants and a leather vest with no shirt.) On the other hand, though, the songs aren't really that catchy -- or at least, I can't remember what they sound like when I'm not hearing them. And the tone of the whole thing is kind of problematic: These guys have been compared to The Pogues, but whereas Shane MacGowan is acknowledged as a fond historian of Irish folk who's earned the right, through research (and time on a barstool), to sort of queer the genre; Eugene Hutz doesn't strike me as much of a good shepherd of Gypsy music. Either Gypsy music just isn't that good, or the band is making fun of Gypsy music -- or Hutz just isn't that smart. Or he doesn't speak English that well. With lyrics like this, it's sort of hard to tell:
Have you ever been to American wedding?The guy sounds like a Ukrainian Andrew WK. And Andrew WK was kidding, wasn't he? At any rate, it's not like Hutz hasn't had a dark and terrifying life -- Wikipedia sez his family were refugees in the wake of Chernobyl -- why's he writing party songs for college students spending a year abroad?
Where is the vodka, where's marinated herring?
Where is the musicians who got good taste?
Where is the supply that gonna last three days?
Where is the band that [light on fire]?
Gonna keep it goin' 24 hour!
That's pretty much what the audience was like. Lots of chubby white dudes in popped-collar Polo shirts, lots of spacey girls with frizzy hair in long flowing dresses (too dark to tell, but I bet there were some Henna tattoos). Every problematic rock concert audience trope was on display -- the skittish girls who didn't want anyone dancing around near them; the guy and his girlfriend trying to have a slow, protective cuddle in the middle of the mosh pit; the insanely sweaty guy really swingin' his elbows around with his eyes closed, enjoying some private groove in a contemptibly public way.
Maybe it was the venue, though -- Terminal 5 used to be Club Exit, which was basically a warehouse for bridge-and-tunnel techno douchebags, and nothing has changed besides the name. (Except that they're booking underground rock shows there?) It's got shitty access to the entrances and exits, the bars are irritatingly inaccessible, and the space is shaped such that it's impossible to navigate the types of crowds that form in front of the stage. I don't know how other places do it right, but these fuckers do it wrong.
Nina lost her phone in the crowd, but by the grace of God some nice lady found it and returned it. It still kind of works, too! We went out for dinner afterwards at Renaissance, which totally my new go-to diner for Hell's Kitchen. I'm there so much, you see.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Hallowe'en
I've been watching AMC's monster movie marathon. It's pretty great. I love cable TV!
What am I gonna do for Halloween, though? I feel like this past weekend was pretty much it for the grown-up Halloween festivities, except for kind of institutional things like the parade. I'm not dressing up, I think. The time for that is passed. But I did buy this perfectly hideous pirate skull dealie to hang on our front door, and Randy bought some candy. I'm hoping we can hand some out to trick-or-treaters, but I really don't know for sure whether there'll be in our building (although there are plenty of kids). Este hogar es Catolico and that.
I did go to a rock show last weekend, though, over at Otto's Shrunken Head. I was there to see the delightful Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, who were playing there because it the place was doing some kind of rockabilly night? They're not really a rockabilly band, though. Not sure. Anyhow, all the bands' MySpace pages gave different times for the start of the show, and the venue's site listed them at the bottom of the list of bands, which typically means they go on first, but I couldn't believe they'd be opening for all these bands I'd never heard of, so I decided to arrive squarely in the middle of the show and just trust to providence. I get there just as this band called The Deadneks is going on, and they've got this big merch table set up, and I start doing these panicky mental calculations about how many bands could've gone on since I showed up. Plus I'd seen the frontman for DFHC, Dave, wandering around the crowd in full makeup, which was weird, because they usually do a whole intro where he gets into costume and then comes out from behind something, like a speaker cabinet or a door or something. You know, pageantry.
There was a guy standing in front of me, a sort of hulking, bald, impassive, baby-faced lump, wearing one of those glossy jackets that skinheads wear; I've found that this type is, oddly enough, a fixture at small punk shows. Maybe he was a skinhead. But he was talking to this girl whose boyfriend, I think, had temporarily abandoned her, and I overheard the following snippet of conversation:
Anyway, The Deadneks weren't very good, although their lead singer had a kind of cool Chelsea smile and their bass player was playing an awesome, shiny white electric upright bass with a wireless transmitter, and he'd kind of walk it out of the room and up and down the hall by the bathrooms. But they were a bit too screamy and the songs weren't very clever and the guitar and bass weren't tight enough. After them came the Memphis Morticians, who were actually pretty okay although none of their songs had any really catchy hooks.
DFHC did come on after that, thank the fuck Christ, and they were incredible. As usual, inexplicably, the crowd thinned out by about half as they were going on, but the band was impeccable -- ungodly energetic, given the hour, and just really precise and tight. It might have been the best performance of theirs that I've seen so far. Dr. Fangs pogoed into the audience as soon as they started, and everybody was dancing around vigorously -- one lanky, preternaturally tall dude in a leather jacket (not me, believe it or not), jumped on Dr. Fangs' back and rode him around (he's a pretty big guy) for several numbers. People crashed into the instruments, prompting facetious admonition from the band members, who were themselves tossing and kicking their guitars around on the beer-slopped floor. As an encore, they covered Psycho by The Sonics, which is a pretty great song for them, I think. There was even some crowd surfing, though the venue hardly had the room for it -- this shrimpy bespectacled kid in a blazer got boosted up and thrown around for a bit. After the band quit the stage, he somehow wound up with the mic and explained that although it was his birthday that night, "it's all about the music."
Lucretia Secretions was absent, no explanation given.
On my way out, I saw Dave pooped out on a stool near the bar. He looked exhausted, understably. "You guys were amazing," I said. He muttered something appreciative. These guys might be the spiritual heirs to The Dickies. And it's just as well, 'cuz I don't think those guys are going on tour or putting out any records any time soon.
What am I gonna do for Halloween, though? I feel like this past weekend was pretty much it for the grown-up Halloween festivities, except for kind of institutional things like the parade. I'm not dressing up, I think. The time for that is passed. But I did buy this perfectly hideous pirate skull dealie to hang on our front door, and Randy bought some candy. I'm hoping we can hand some out to trick-or-treaters, but I really don't know for sure whether there'll be in our building (although there are plenty of kids). Este hogar es Catolico and that.
I did go to a rock show last weekend, though, over at Otto's Shrunken Head. I was there to see the delightful Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, who were playing there because it the place was doing some kind of rockabilly night? They're not really a rockabilly band, though. Not sure. Anyhow, all the bands' MySpace pages gave different times for the start of the show, and the venue's site listed them at the bottom of the list of bands, which typically means they go on first, but I couldn't believe they'd be opening for all these bands I'd never heard of, so I decided to arrive squarely in the middle of the show and just trust to providence. I get there just as this band called The Deadneks is going on, and they've got this big merch table set up, and I start doing these panicky mental calculations about how many bands could've gone on since I showed up. Plus I'd seen the frontman for DFHC, Dave, wandering around the crowd in full makeup, which was weird, because they usually do a whole intro where he gets into costume and then comes out from behind something, like a speaker cabinet or a door or something. You know, pageantry.
There was a guy standing in front of me, a sort of hulking, bald, impassive, baby-faced lump, wearing one of those glossy jackets that skinheads wear; I've found that this type is, oddly enough, a fixture at small punk shows. Maybe he was a skinhead. But he was talking to this girl whose boyfriend, I think, had temporarily abandoned her, and I overheard the following snippet of conversation:
"Yeah, so the body was on the tracks, but they found the head up in the engine."A little while later, this man and two women were standing behind me, and I overheard them complaining about how they couldn't see because of how tall I was. I turned around and sort of mumbled an apology and stepped to one side. They were a little embarrassed, and the guy said, "Oh, hey, that's the same guy who was fixing the mousetrap!" What? I said. "You were over there earlier," he said, pointing at one of the couches, "fixing this box" -- "It was an effects pedal," said one of the women. That wasn't me, I said. "Really?" he said. "Maybe you're wearing a disguise now." Yeah, I said. That's my costume. I'm a tall guy who goes to a show.
"The engine! Do you get a lot of suicides on the LIRR?"
"Well, Metro North, but, yeah."
Anyway, The Deadneks weren't very good, although their lead singer had a kind of cool Chelsea smile and their bass player was playing an awesome, shiny white electric upright bass with a wireless transmitter, and he'd kind of walk it out of the room and up and down the hall by the bathrooms. But they were a bit too screamy and the songs weren't very clever and the guitar and bass weren't tight enough. After them came the Memphis Morticians, who were actually pretty okay although none of their songs had any really catchy hooks.
DFHC did come on after that, thank the fuck Christ, and they were incredible. As usual, inexplicably, the crowd thinned out by about half as they were going on, but the band was impeccable -- ungodly energetic, given the hour, and just really precise and tight. It might have been the best performance of theirs that I've seen so far. Dr. Fangs pogoed into the audience as soon as they started, and everybody was dancing around vigorously -- one lanky, preternaturally tall dude in a leather jacket (not me, believe it or not), jumped on Dr. Fangs' back and rode him around (he's a pretty big guy) for several numbers. People crashed into the instruments, prompting facetious admonition from the band members, who were themselves tossing and kicking their guitars around on the beer-slopped floor. As an encore, they covered Psycho by The Sonics, which is a pretty great song for them, I think. There was even some crowd surfing, though the venue hardly had the room for it -- this shrimpy bespectacled kid in a blazer got boosted up and thrown around for a bit. After the band quit the stage, he somehow wound up with the mic and explained that although it was his birthday that night, "it's all about the music."
Lucretia Secretions was absent, no explanation given.
On my way out, I saw Dave pooped out on a stool near the bar. He looked exhausted, understably. "You guys were amazing," I said. He muttered something appreciative. These guys might be the spiritual heirs to The Dickies. And it's just as well, 'cuz I don't think those guys are going on tour or putting out any records any time soon.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Apple Bapple
It's finally rainy and cold, which I would be hell of enjoying if not for the fact that I'm still recovering from the worst case of the grippe I've had in quite some time. But more on that in a second.
My friend Squick came down to NYC from Boston on his vacation last Friday and stopped off at work to say hi. We hung out with PT at Bite and had some "drink," which was definitely welcome, given how awful and stressful work has been lately. I'd gotten my hair cut that day by my guy at Astor Hair, Edward, who looks and sounds like a Joe Sacco drawing and gives great haircuts but is utterly unemotive when it comes to pretty much everything. (While I was waiting on Friday, he was cutting the thick, spiky hair of this Asian kid, and he marveled, in a monotone, of course, "Your hair. So much. It like whole other head."
So we were talking about Edward and hair and the cutting of it, and this guy Elo who's a bouncer at Temple Bar came over and started extolling the benefits of shaving with a straight razor. He's kind of a big-shot in the Dominican Republic, he says -- he owns his own pool hall that he won off a guy -- and he's super into collecting razors and shaving paraphernalia. The pride of his collection is one of the razors belonging to the personal barber of Rafael Trujillo. "That guy was like our Hitler," Elo said. (Presumably he didn't mean the barber.) The razor's got this incredible mother-of-pearl handle, and, presumably, some genetic material belonging to the former dictator. "I'm going to restore it," he said. "Wouldn't a museum be interested in those flakes of skin?" I asked. "Nah," he said. "'s worth more if I clean it off." He told me I should Google him to find the forum he posts to in order to get his personal picks for shaving soap and astringents. "I'm like the seventh hit," he said. "He's right," said Squick. "Right after Electric Light Orchestra."
Apple picking got done on Saturday. We usually (well, for the past two years) go to a place called Wright's Farm in Ulster County, NY. That place is great, but it takes a really long time to get to, and we were kind of ready for a change. So this year we went to Riamede Farms, which is in New Jersey, and is just as nice, apple-wise, although they don't have a cool little cafe the way Wright's did, nor do they have dilly beans. Ted (driving) and Tom and 'Leen and Greg (down from MIT) came this time -- Katharine was in the middle of a hellish close at the 'xim, Emma's under the gun on her book, and Nina had midterms to cram for. And Katie just kind of inexplicably bowed out at the last moment. Still, we managed to have a great time -- the evidence is in my photostream. The apples were all huge and strangely luminous, and we ate and picked a ton. I got not one but two grasshoppers put down my shirt (though I may have squealed and cringed about twice as much as last year), and Ted gave himself a pretty deep cut by trying to yank a tough, fibrous weed out of the ground in the pumpkin patch. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my apples. A pie, prolly?
We convened at 680 afterwards to mull some cider and enjoy the material fruits of our fruit-labor -- and the previously absent ladies did show up for this -- but everybody was so exhausted that it wasn't really much of a shindig. Colleen called from her place a few minutes in and asked Tom if he could help her dispose of a rat she and her roommates had nabbed in a glue trap. Tom, not particularly relishing the idea of the actual, uh, disposal, asked if I wanted to help, and I'm all, you know, sure. So we head over there and the thing is kind of writing around in the trap grotesquely, stuck by it's legs, but also sort of keeled over and gummed up on its side. It can't really move much at all -- not a case for extraction, certainly. And it's definitely a rat (I'm a little skeptical of Nina's theory that there are no mice in New York, only baby Norwegian Browns); the shape of its head and back are pretty telltale. So Tom puts the thing in a plastic bag, and we head down to the street, wearing work gloves and filled with terrible purpose. I grab one of those big cobblestone things they use to line the planters the city plants trees in, and I just kind of bash the bag a whole bunch. That's not really a problem for me -- I'm a firm believer in putting things out of their misery -- but in mid-bash, a bunch of dirt flies off the cobblestone and gets in my mouth! And I'm all ack, pbthhh.
As the evening starts to wind down, I start feeling kind of unwell -- throat's all scratchy, nose is running -- and of course I think, oh god, I got plague from the rat bits! But not really. I got plague from Nina or Eve or any one of the dozen people who were sick last week. And what a plague it was! I felt like a dude in a NyQuil commercial (given to describing my suffering in florid similes) for like 3 days straight. I stayed home from work, playing Final Fantasy and creating a small mountain of Kleenexes, which I think freaked Randy out a little. And I've still got a sinus infection, which is turning my nostrils into taps for thick, yellow, acrid custard. Cheers!
My friend Squick came down to NYC from Boston on his vacation last Friday and stopped off at work to say hi. We hung out with PT at Bite and had some "drink," which was definitely welcome, given how awful and stressful work has been lately. I'd gotten my hair cut that day by my guy at Astor Hair, Edward, who looks and sounds like a Joe Sacco drawing and gives great haircuts but is utterly unemotive when it comes to pretty much everything. (While I was waiting on Friday, he was cutting the thick, spiky hair of this Asian kid, and he marveled, in a monotone, of course, "Your hair. So much. It like whole other head."
So we were talking about Edward and hair and the cutting of it, and this guy Elo who's a bouncer at Temple Bar came over and started extolling the benefits of shaving with a straight razor. He's kind of a big-shot in the Dominican Republic, he says -- he owns his own pool hall that he won off a guy -- and he's super into collecting razors and shaving paraphernalia. The pride of his collection is one of the razors belonging to the personal barber of Rafael Trujillo. "That guy was like our Hitler," Elo said. (Presumably he didn't mean the barber.) The razor's got this incredible mother-of-pearl handle, and, presumably, some genetic material belonging to the former dictator. "I'm going to restore it," he said. "Wouldn't a museum be interested in those flakes of skin?" I asked. "Nah," he said. "'s worth more if I clean it off." He told me I should Google him to find the forum he posts to in order to get his personal picks for shaving soap and astringents. "I'm like the seventh hit," he said. "He's right," said Squick. "Right after Electric Light Orchestra."
Apple picking got done on Saturday. We usually (well, for the past two years) go to a place called Wright's Farm in Ulster County, NY. That place is great, but it takes a really long time to get to, and we were kind of ready for a change. So this year we went to Riamede Farms, which is in New Jersey, and is just as nice, apple-wise, although they don't have a cool little cafe the way Wright's did, nor do they have dilly beans. Ted (driving) and Tom and 'Leen and Greg (down from MIT) came this time -- Katharine was in the middle of a hellish close at the 'xim, Emma's under the gun on her book, and Nina had midterms to cram for. And Katie just kind of inexplicably bowed out at the last moment. Still, we managed to have a great time -- the evidence is in my photostream. The apples were all huge and strangely luminous, and we ate and picked a ton. I got not one but two grasshoppers put down my shirt (though I may have squealed and cringed about twice as much as last year), and Ted gave himself a pretty deep cut by trying to yank a tough, fibrous weed out of the ground in the pumpkin patch. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my apples. A pie, prolly?
We convened at 680 afterwards to mull some cider and enjoy the material fruits of our fruit-labor -- and the previously absent ladies did show up for this -- but everybody was so exhausted that it wasn't really much of a shindig. Colleen called from her place a few minutes in and asked Tom if he could help her dispose of a rat she and her roommates had nabbed in a glue trap. Tom, not particularly relishing the idea of the actual, uh, disposal, asked if I wanted to help, and I'm all, you know, sure. So we head over there and the thing is kind of writing around in the trap grotesquely, stuck by it's legs, but also sort of keeled over and gummed up on its side. It can't really move much at all -- not a case for extraction, certainly. And it's definitely a rat (I'm a little skeptical of Nina's theory that there are no mice in New York, only baby Norwegian Browns); the shape of its head and back are pretty telltale. So Tom puts the thing in a plastic bag, and we head down to the street, wearing work gloves and filled with terrible purpose. I grab one of those big cobblestone things they use to line the planters the city plants trees in, and I just kind of bash the bag a whole bunch. That's not really a problem for me -- I'm a firm believer in putting things out of their misery -- but in mid-bash, a bunch of dirt flies off the cobblestone and gets in my mouth! And I'm all ack, pbthhh.
As the evening starts to wind down, I start feeling kind of unwell -- throat's all scratchy, nose is running -- and of course I think, oh god, I got plague from the rat bits! But not really. I got plague from Nina or Eve or any one of the dozen people who were sick last week. And what a plague it was! I felt like a dude in a NyQuil commercial (given to describing my suffering in florid similes) for like 3 days straight. I stayed home from work, playing Final Fantasy and creating a small mountain of Kleenexes, which I think freaked Randy out a little. And I've still got a sinus infection, which is turning my nostrils into taps for thick, yellow, acrid custard. Cheers!
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