It's winter in Sunset Park. The B.I.D. has strung up lights across 5th Ave. and set up speakers at the intersection to play songs in English and Spanish. I managed to send out holiday cards (via Etsy) and do Christmas shopping this year (via Amazon, mostly), despite a somewhat surreal work schedule.
Creepy salespredators from a company called IDT Energy have been prowling the building unbidden, trying to con people into giving up their ConEd statements. The scam is thus (from what I can tell from reading Consumerist): They promise to save you 7% on your energy bill, sometimes claiming to be representatives of ConEd itself, and then they switch you to them as your energy supplier. And they do save you that 7%, apparently, at least for the first month or so, after which they switch you to a "variable rate" plan that costs three times as much as regular ConEd service. The guy who rang my doorbell a few weeks ago complimented me on my pajamas ensemble: "Hey, nice t-shirt, guy! We're with ConEd and we'd like to save you some money! Can I see your latest bill?" I said no and closed the door on him, but, hearing him launch into his patter with some success with the old Mexican guy next door ("Hey, man, nice slippers! You speak English?"), I did some Googling and found a bunch of horror stories about that company elbowing their way into apartments, bullying befuddled elderly or non-English speakers into taking a real lemon of a plan. After sweating over it for a few minutes, I decided to go a little Travis Bickle and stepped into the hall:
"No es de ConEd," I told the old guy. "Es de otra compania. ?Entiendes? No es de ConEd."
"Yeah, it's cool. He gets it," said the IDT salesguy. "I explained that to him." I tried to explain it, too, but it didn't seem to get through to him. "No es legal," I tried, finally, feeling lame.
"Yes it is," said the salesguy, without looking up from his clipboard where my neighbor was signing.
"Esta bien," said my neighbor. "He say he going to..." -- he made a downward, swishing motion with his hand -- "abajar the... bill."
"Fuck it," I thought, and went back inside, feeling sheepish and angry for the rest of the morning. One of them showed up the next weekend, too, a chubby, bald guy, sweaty and panting from the exertion of climbing the stairs. "We're working with ConEd," he said, wiping the moisture from his head with his palm. I managed to talk him into leaving the building with a half-hearted threat to call the police, but I didn't feel much better.
There hasn't been a lot of snow, really only enough to collect into a snowball, which I stored in the freezer. Most of the precipitation has been the dreaded "wintry mix," which promptly froze into an icy cap on the crest of Sunset Park -- as well as a lumpy, hip-fracture incitement in front of the city council building on 4th Ave. There was a strange snow storm earlier this month that blew in an impromptu cloud of enormous flakes around lunch time, more or less filling the sky in Chelsea. Joe and Demetri and I were waiting for our quesadillas outside of Pizza Taco (a.k.a. Great Burrito) on 23rd St. and 6th Ave. when these big, fluffy snowflakes, about the size of, I don't know, gourmet potato chips, just started pouring down. They were so big you could snatch them out of the air and sort of re-throw them, which we did until the freak storm ended a few minutes later.
Last weekend, Nina and I took a walk down through Bay Ridge. I've been taking the train out to Bay Ridge Ave. on the weekends to pick up special cat food for Kitty from a place called Vinny's Pet Store. The subway ride invariably includes some kind of cute interlude with naughty teenagers riding their skateboards on the train and drinking beer at 11:00 AM. The store itself is not far from where a freak tornado tore up the street last year, and down the street from a Turkish seafood restaurant with a hookah and an icy bed of trout in the window. After picking up the cat food, we walked down 65th St. to Owls Head Park (apparently missing a dead body), following a muddy path along the Belt Parkway to this long promenade I'd never been to before, full of joggers and dog-walkers, with a view of the tugs and barges in the bay between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was an unseasonally warm afternoon, and a strange, hot wind was blowing hard in our faces and forcing the pigeons and seagulls to bank out of its way. When we got to Shore Road Park, we turned and headed back uphill to the subway station, past the gaudy McMansions and luxury apartment complexes, past Vito Fosella's shuttered campaign office on 85th St. and 4th Ave.
I managed to send out a few holiday cards this year and buy a few presents for people. The Graham-Rutherfords have yet to actually celebrate Christmukah this year, on account of my mom flying out to California to tend to her parents -- my grandmother had another stroke, and on his way to visit her in the ICU, my grandfather was hit by a bus, crazily enough. They're okay, more or less (less), but, man. Crazy turn of events. She won't be back until the first week of January. So in lieu of a regular family get-together with presents, etc., I stopped by on Christmas Eve and we ordered delicious Indian food from Banjara. It's A Wonderful Life was watched, yet again revealing itself to be worthy of close attention -- did you know that Mr. Potter has a human skull on his desk in most of the shots in his office? I came back the next night, too, in order to eat a ham that my dad had been sent in the mail. Caroline and I baked sugar cookies, which are frustratingly difficult to make on account of having to chill the dough.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
A Night At The Opera
Nina's friend and co-Columbian Lauren, whom she met during her summer program in Brazil, got us tickets to go see Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at the Metropolitan Opera. So we dressed up (I brought a jacket and slacks to work in a bag) and I met Nina and Lauren and Victoria at Lincoln Center after work.
I'd never been to the Met before. The lobby part looks like an okay hotel, red carpet everywhere and full of weird, tacky paintings; but the part with the stage -- the house, I guess -- is enormous and beautiful. Lauren had bought amazingly good tickets, and we found ourselves sitting in the second row behind the pit. When the lights went down, James Levine rose out of the darkness in front of us, turning around briefly and smilingly to receive the adulation of the ancient crowd before doing his conductor thing. In person he looks exactly like he does in the newspaper: Dwarfy and rumpled, but clean. So, a scrubbed dwarf. The backs of the seats had little screens on them that would display subtitles in a fixed-width font, along with a button to switch the language of the subtitles between English, Spanish, and German. Everyone in our immediate vicinity had their screens turned to English. I tried switching mine to Spanish for a while, but it was too distracting.
As for the opera itself, I don't know. I'd read a couple versions of "Faust" before (including Christopher Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," which is a hoot), so I could follow the thing in broad strokes. But it seemed like portions of the story were compressed or missing. And the Playbill-touted technical design was a little... overwhelming. The whole thing centered around the arrangement of the stage as a series of three windowed corridors, one stacked on top of another. The actors had to kind of climb up into these corridors, pace to and fro within them, and then each corridor would sometimes be partially or totally shuttered to allow enormous images to projected onto different "z-levels" of the set, a techique that the production relied on pretty heavily -- the effect of which was by turns clever and austere or frustratingly murky.
The singing was good, though. And the guy who played Mephistopheles had a pretty impressive red lacquer codpiece. During the intermission I paid $11 for a double-shot of Jack Daniels, which I could only drink about half of. I think I passed Caroline Kennedy in the hall.
After the opera was over, Nina's friends were pooped and wanted to go home, but we were hungry so we walked up to Big Nick's. Nina'd never eaten in the inside part, and I don't think I'd been there at all since high school. They don't do the pickles on the tables any more, but it's still got this warm, harried atmosphere. Nina ordered a pretty comprehensive spare ribs platter -- and fucking championed the thing. I tried order a grilled swiss on rye, but they were out of rye bread. "We typically do the grilled cheese on challah. It's really good that way." It was!
Some of you have been asking to see a picture of the punishment beard, which is now mere days away from being destroyed (hopefully) forever. Here you go:
For what it's worth, when all of you beardy types out there had claimed that the thing gets softer and actually comfortable to the grower after some time, well, I'd never believed that before, but I have to admit it's true. It happened between weeks four and five, I think, although I feel like I've gone that long without shaving before.
Thanksgiving happened. I went to my parents' house, and brought vegetarian pâté (made out of mushrooms and cashews; So convincing that it was actually kind of gross the same way pâté is gross) and some bacon-wrapped dates (kind of worryingly undercooked, it turned out), idea courtesy of Ted. In attendance were my parents, my sister (who has so far resisted joining a sorority or secret society), my mom's friend Adrienne, my parents' friend Jon, and two Japanese ladies of unclear provenance who were there to witness an authentic, Western-style Thanksgiving feast. It did not disappoint. Or maybe it did. Doesn't matter.
Nina showed me how to roast chestnuts in the oven. You cut an 'X' across the top of each before cooking them at 425 for, like, ten minutes. When you take them out, they're sort of splayed open at the top like the eggs in Alien, and you can kind of scoop out the stuff inside. I'd never had chestnuts before. They're good! They're basically candy.
On Wednesday, Eve and I hit up Studio B for Ted Leo and The Pharmacists doing a New York Magazine karaoke gig. I'd won the tickets by reply-twittering to an giveaway in Ken Freedman's WFMU Twitter feed. That was neat. We'd gone to something similar earlier this year, and this one followed pretty much the same formula: Ted Leo came out and did a set, then there was a brief interlude (this time with DJs and weird and excruciatingly lame patter from Andrew W.K. of all people), and then karaoke sung by the audience with the band as accompaniment. Like last time, the initial set by the band was a teensy bit uneven and featured a lot of new and some maybe-not-quite polished material. Not that I'm complaining -- the guy is basically a saint, and even a song of his with a hook deficit is still a pretty goddamn hook-y song. And in case you were wondering whether Ted Leo's become complacent in this post-November 4th era, he intro'd one of the songs with, "This song is still, still, still about universal health care!"
And this time Eve and I even stuck around for the karaoke. The karaoke people varied in quality. There were more than a few people, particularly couples, who seemed to think they'd be able to ace a "simple" rock song like Blitzkrieg Bop or Rock The Casbah. Invariably, they were wrong, and the resulting experience was as cringe-y as watching a friend of yours who you already kind of don't trust to sing karaoke sing karaoke but worse (or better?) because they weren't our friends. There were also some real standouts, though, people who clearly knew thoroughly the songs they were doing: I'd never heard of The Outfield, but apparently they have a song called "Your Love," and a guy did a real good version of it; someone else covered "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers really well; and Santogold's "LES Artistes" sung by a bespectacled, lanky hipster was an improbable success. Between each song, Andrew W.K. would congratulate the singer and the audience and deliver these really inscrutable self-help platitudes about believing in yourself and "going for it." I guess that's what he does these days?
The clear champion, though, was this girl named Abigail, who went on about halfway through, and could barely be induced to take the microphone. "Oh my god, you guys," she stammered, "I can't believe I'm up here. I'm going to freak out. I'm, like, this close to Ted Leo!" Yeah, Ted Leo: Now there's an untouchable dude. Despite this eye-rolling intro, she completely knocked one out of the park with a pitch-perfect, jaw-droppingly confident rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Respect." And that's a pretty conventional song, even. She was really good. Andrew W.K. didn't seem to know what to say when he got back up on stage.
I'd never been to the Met before. The lobby part looks like an okay hotel, red carpet everywhere and full of weird, tacky paintings; but the part with the stage -- the house, I guess -- is enormous and beautiful. Lauren had bought amazingly good tickets, and we found ourselves sitting in the second row behind the pit. When the lights went down, James Levine rose out of the darkness in front of us, turning around briefly and smilingly to receive the adulation of the ancient crowd before doing his conductor thing. In person he looks exactly like he does in the newspaper: Dwarfy and rumpled, but clean. So, a scrubbed dwarf. The backs of the seats had little screens on them that would display subtitles in a fixed-width font, along with a button to switch the language of the subtitles between English, Spanish, and German. Everyone in our immediate vicinity had their screens turned to English. I tried switching mine to Spanish for a while, but it was too distracting.
As for the opera itself, I don't know. I'd read a couple versions of "Faust" before (including Christopher Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," which is a hoot), so I could follow the thing in broad strokes. But it seemed like portions of the story were compressed or missing. And the Playbill-touted technical design was a little... overwhelming. The whole thing centered around the arrangement of the stage as a series of three windowed corridors, one stacked on top of another. The actors had to kind of climb up into these corridors, pace to and fro within them, and then each corridor would sometimes be partially or totally shuttered to allow enormous images to projected onto different "z-levels" of the set, a techique that the production relied on pretty heavily -- the effect of which was by turns clever and austere or frustratingly murky.
The singing was good, though. And the guy who played Mephistopheles had a pretty impressive red lacquer codpiece. During the intermission I paid $11 for a double-shot of Jack Daniels, which I could only drink about half of. I think I passed Caroline Kennedy in the hall.
After the opera was over, Nina's friends were pooped and wanted to go home, but we were hungry so we walked up to Big Nick's. Nina'd never eaten in the inside part, and I don't think I'd been there at all since high school. They don't do the pickles on the tables any more, but it's still got this warm, harried atmosphere. Nina ordered a pretty comprehensive spare ribs platter -- and fucking championed the thing. I tried order a grilled swiss on rye, but they were out of rye bread. "We typically do the grilled cheese on challah. It's really good that way." It was!
Some of you have been asking to see a picture of the punishment beard, which is now mere days away from being destroyed (hopefully) forever. Here you go:
For what it's worth, when all of you beardy types out there had claimed that the thing gets softer and actually comfortable to the grower after some time, well, I'd never believed that before, but I have to admit it's true. It happened between weeks four and five, I think, although I feel like I've gone that long without shaving before.
Thanksgiving happened. I went to my parents' house, and brought vegetarian pâté (made out of mushrooms and cashews; So convincing that it was actually kind of gross the same way pâté is gross) and some bacon-wrapped dates (kind of worryingly undercooked, it turned out), idea courtesy of Ted. In attendance were my parents, my sister (who has so far resisted joining a sorority or secret society), my mom's friend Adrienne, my parents' friend Jon, and two Japanese ladies of unclear provenance who were there to witness an authentic, Western-style Thanksgiving feast. It did not disappoint. Or maybe it did. Doesn't matter.
Nina showed me how to roast chestnuts in the oven. You cut an 'X' across the top of each before cooking them at 425 for, like, ten minutes. When you take them out, they're sort of splayed open at the top like the eggs in Alien, and you can kind of scoop out the stuff inside. I'd never had chestnuts before. They're good! They're basically candy.
On Wednesday, Eve and I hit up Studio B for Ted Leo and The Pharmacists doing a New York Magazine karaoke gig. I'd won the tickets by reply-twittering to an giveaway in Ken Freedman's WFMU Twitter feed. That was neat. We'd gone to something similar earlier this year, and this one followed pretty much the same formula: Ted Leo came out and did a set, then there was a brief interlude (this time with DJs and weird and excruciatingly lame patter from Andrew W.K. of all people), and then karaoke sung by the audience with the band as accompaniment. Like last time, the initial set by the band was a teensy bit uneven and featured a lot of new and some maybe-not-quite polished material. Not that I'm complaining -- the guy is basically a saint, and even a song of his with a hook deficit is still a pretty goddamn hook-y song. And in case you were wondering whether Ted Leo's become complacent in this post-November 4th era, he intro'd one of the songs with, "This song is still, still, still about universal health care!"
And this time Eve and I even stuck around for the karaoke. The karaoke people varied in quality. There were more than a few people, particularly couples, who seemed to think they'd be able to ace a "simple" rock song like Blitzkrieg Bop or Rock The Casbah. Invariably, they were wrong, and the resulting experience was as cringe-y as watching a friend of yours who you already kind of don't trust to sing karaoke sing karaoke but worse (or better?) because they weren't our friends. There were also some real standouts, though, people who clearly knew thoroughly the songs they were doing: I'd never heard of The Outfield, but apparently they have a song called "Your Love," and a guy did a real good version of it; someone else covered "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers really well; and Santogold's "LES Artistes" sung by a bespectacled, lanky hipster was an improbable success. Between each song, Andrew W.K. would congratulate the singer and the audience and deliver these really inscrutable self-help platitudes about believing in yourself and "going for it." I guess that's what he does these days?
The clear champion, though, was this girl named Abigail, who went on about halfway through, and could barely be induced to take the microphone. "Oh my god, you guys," she stammered, "I can't believe I'm up here. I'm going to freak out. I'm, like, this close to Ted Leo!" Yeah, Ted Leo: Now there's an untouchable dude. Despite this eye-rolling intro, she completely knocked one out of the park with a pitch-perfect, jaw-droppingly confident rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Respect." And that's a pretty conventional song, even. She was really good. Andrew W.K. didn't seem to know what to say when he got back up on stage.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Barack Fucking Obama
And then we elected a new president. It was an exciting, rapturous Tuesday, but I'll get to that in a second.
Some of you may remember the election four years ago: The Democrats had yet again chosen an absolute, you know, winner as their candidate, and though we may have donated and even, Christ, spent a perfectly decent October afternoon ringing doorbells in shit-ass Pennsylvania for Kerry's cause, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that he was a monstrous, shambling pile of shit as a candidate -- whoever it was that dubbed him "Lurch Dukakis" was right on the money. But at the same time, it was hard to believe that America was going to re-elect George W. Bush. At least, it was hard for some people. Wyatt had an awful lot of faith in the electorate, so he and I made a bet about the outcome of the election, the consequence of which was that the loser had to shave his pubic hair off. (A bit trite, but what are you gonna do.) The day came, and the election happened, and ultimately I decided I wasn't going to claim victory, since it seemed like adding insult to injury.
So, given the track record of my party in every single election in which I've voted, and the fact that Tom is a person of potentially less guile and more naivete than even the Wy-Man, back when it looked like Barack Obama didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the Democratic nomination (much less the general election) I thought this year presented an excellent opportunity to teach him a lesson about America. So we made a bet about it: If John McCain were to win, Tom would have to take his pants down and sit on a Dora The Explorer quinceañera cake (we'd just watched the HBO Real Sex episode about "sploshing"); if Barack Obama clinched it, I'd have to tonsure my hair off like some kind of goddamn Lutheran (less monk-diming; more monk-sand-dollaring).
The terms were unfair. They were settled on over whiskeys. And as history shows, the landscape has changed somewhat since January or whenever it was we shook on it, which, in my opinion, is also unfair. So as election day approached, I knew I was in a bit of a pickle. (In a fit of remorse, a couple of weeks earlier, Tom softened the consequences such that I could leave my dwindling hair supply up top and instead sport what he described as a "relief pitcher goatee" for six weeks. It's still pretty bad, I think.) Nonetheless, Tuesday was a sunny affair. The polling lines at 40th and 4th, where I vote, are never that long, but I actually had to wait, say, twenty minutes this time. And I'm glad that I did it in person and not ahead of time, because I got to see all these people from my neighbourhood voting, like the weird old man who has the apartment next door to mine and is always standing on the landing in his boxer shorts, and a bunch of surly-looking Hispanic twentysomethings wearing tougher, Spanish versions of The Black Mantle. I felt squirmy and distracted all day at the office, though, without a regular stream of news from Nate and Andrew.
I got to Tom and Colleen's around 8:00, after swinging by La Gran Via to pick up the cake, which I'd ordered in preparation a week in advance, selecting flavors off of an order form for all the different layers, as well as a message ("Feliz Cumpleaños Emma") in case it needed to serve a secondary, non-foodplay-related purpose. Upon inspection, the Dora design I'd picked out for the top of the cake was eerily perfect, as if it had been printed onto the surface of the cake with a high-end inkjet printer. Everyone was hanging out in the living room, pacing around, chain-drinking beers. We kept the TV mostly on Fox, since Brit Hume's sad eyes seemed to slide a little further down the sides of his face with each electoral vote called for Obama, and also since, as I like to think of it, watching their take on things is like prepping yourself for a dive into a swimming pool by taking a freezing shower: It just makes reality that much sweeter when you switch back to it.
CNN was doing this thing where, whenever a major set of states closed their polls, there'd be a countdown in the crawl and then they'd throw up a big "PREDICTION" graphic and Wolf Blitzer would call the states based on the exit polling that'd been done. They ran the countdown as the clock reached 11:00 EST, the closing time for the west coast, but instead of calling those states, Blitzer just said, "CNN is now predicting... that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States." It was a hot moment. We hooted and hollered and opened the windows so we could hear people on the street hooting and hollering and we did likewise back at them, and then we sang songs for a while: Tom had helpfully printed out the lyrics to both The Battle Hymn Of The Republic (which I'd been humming to myself all day) and God Save The Queen (for the benefit of Tom Hylton). And then we went outside and walked around for a while amidst the rapturous multitudes. It being Park Slope, the revels were more sedate than the ones I read about taking place in Union Square and Williamsburg, but we did manage to get told, as part of a crowd chanting "yes we can," by some cops in front of Union Hall. And we high-fived pretty much everyone we passed on the street. We wound up boozing it up 'til 4:00 AM at the Lakes, having loaded the jukebox up with patriotic songs as best we could.
The next morning was miserable and hung-over, and over a net hour of it was spent sitting on the toilet at work, rocking back and forth. I shaved my goatee into place as soon as the election was called; I think I look a lot like Josh Beckett. The cake got shelved Tuesday night, untouched, but we reconvened the following weekend and tucked into it. It was horrible.
More to the point: Like Sarah Silverman said, Barack Obama is probably one of the best guys who's ever run for the office. We've got copies of all the November 5th newspapers; I'm considering buying a nice, framed print of the Times' front page. I've read all sorts of editorials to the effect that "our" point of view has been vindicated and that this is the beginning of a new epoch of American politics. I have to admit an eerie, neutral feeling about the whole thing: Things change quickly but also frustratingly not-so-quickly. So I don't know what's going to happen next, but the coming year deserves, as Razor Lopez once wrote, a sweet ushering.
Some of you may remember the election four years ago: The Democrats had yet again chosen an absolute, you know, winner as their candidate, and though we may have donated and even, Christ, spent a perfectly decent October afternoon ringing doorbells in shit-ass Pennsylvania for Kerry's cause, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that he was a monstrous, shambling pile of shit as a candidate -- whoever it was that dubbed him "Lurch Dukakis" was right on the money. But at the same time, it was hard to believe that America was going to re-elect George W. Bush. At least, it was hard for some people. Wyatt had an awful lot of faith in the electorate, so he and I made a bet about the outcome of the election, the consequence of which was that the loser had to shave his pubic hair off. (A bit trite, but what are you gonna do.) The day came, and the election happened, and ultimately I decided I wasn't going to claim victory, since it seemed like adding insult to injury.
So, given the track record of my party in every single election in which I've voted, and the fact that Tom is a person of potentially less guile and more naivete than even the Wy-Man, back when it looked like Barack Obama didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the Democratic nomination (much less the general election) I thought this year presented an excellent opportunity to teach him a lesson about America. So we made a bet about it: If John McCain were to win, Tom would have to take his pants down and sit on a Dora The Explorer quinceañera cake (we'd just watched the HBO Real Sex episode about "sploshing"); if Barack Obama clinched it, I'd have to tonsure my hair off like some kind of goddamn Lutheran (less monk-diming; more monk-sand-dollaring).
The terms were unfair. They were settled on over whiskeys. And as history shows, the landscape has changed somewhat since January or whenever it was we shook on it, which, in my opinion, is also unfair. So as election day approached, I knew I was in a bit of a pickle. (In a fit of remorse, a couple of weeks earlier, Tom softened the consequences such that I could leave my dwindling hair supply up top and instead sport what he described as a "relief pitcher goatee" for six weeks. It's still pretty bad, I think.) Nonetheless, Tuesday was a sunny affair. The polling lines at 40th and 4th, where I vote, are never that long, but I actually had to wait, say, twenty minutes this time. And I'm glad that I did it in person and not ahead of time, because I got to see all these people from my neighbourhood voting, like the weird old man who has the apartment next door to mine and is always standing on the landing in his boxer shorts, and a bunch of surly-looking Hispanic twentysomethings wearing tougher, Spanish versions of The Black Mantle. I felt squirmy and distracted all day at the office, though, without a regular stream of news from Nate and Andrew.
I got to Tom and Colleen's around 8:00, after swinging by La Gran Via to pick up the cake, which I'd ordered in preparation a week in advance, selecting flavors off of an order form for all the different layers, as well as a message ("Feliz Cumpleaños Emma") in case it needed to serve a secondary, non-foodplay-related purpose. Upon inspection, the Dora design I'd picked out for the top of the cake was eerily perfect, as if it had been printed onto the surface of the cake with a high-end inkjet printer. Everyone was hanging out in the living room, pacing around, chain-drinking beers. We kept the TV mostly on Fox, since Brit Hume's sad eyes seemed to slide a little further down the sides of his face with each electoral vote called for Obama, and also since, as I like to think of it, watching their take on things is like prepping yourself for a dive into a swimming pool by taking a freezing shower: It just makes reality that much sweeter when you switch back to it.
CNN was doing this thing where, whenever a major set of states closed their polls, there'd be a countdown in the crawl and then they'd throw up a big "PREDICTION" graphic and Wolf Blitzer would call the states based on the exit polling that'd been done. They ran the countdown as the clock reached 11:00 EST, the closing time for the west coast, but instead of calling those states, Blitzer just said, "CNN is now predicting... that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States." It was a hot moment. We hooted and hollered and opened the windows so we could hear people on the street hooting and hollering and we did likewise back at them, and then we sang songs for a while: Tom had helpfully printed out the lyrics to both The Battle Hymn Of The Republic (which I'd been humming to myself all day) and God Save The Queen (for the benefit of Tom Hylton). And then we went outside and walked around for a while amidst the rapturous multitudes. It being Park Slope, the revels were more sedate than the ones I read about taking place in Union Square and Williamsburg, but we did manage to get told, as part of a crowd chanting "yes we can," by some cops in front of Union Hall. And we high-fived pretty much everyone we passed on the street. We wound up boozing it up 'til 4:00 AM at the Lakes, having loaded the jukebox up with patriotic songs as best we could.
The next morning was miserable and hung-over, and over a net hour of it was spent sitting on the toilet at work, rocking back and forth. I shaved my goatee into place as soon as the election was called; I think I look a lot like Josh Beckett. The cake got shelved Tuesday night, untouched, but we reconvened the following weekend and tucked into it. It was horrible.
More to the point: Like Sarah Silverman said, Barack Obama is probably one of the best guys who's ever run for the office. We've got copies of all the November 5th newspapers; I'm considering buying a nice, framed print of the Times' front page. I've read all sorts of editorials to the effect that "our" point of view has been vindicated and that this is the beginning of a new epoch of American politics. I have to admit an eerie, neutral feeling about the whole thing: Things change quickly but also frustratingly not-so-quickly. So I don't know what's going to happen next, but the coming year deserves, as Razor Lopez once wrote, a sweet ushering.
Monday, October 27, 2008
WFMCMJ
As recompense to myself for the crunch we just went through at work, I decided I was going to, you know, go out this past weekend. It's actually kind of un-easy to get yourself back in the mode of doing activities after you've acclimated to going straight home from work every night and compounding your tiredness with a cup of herbal tea, but sometimes you just have to launch yourself into the world. Thanks are due to Eve, whom I hadn't seen in, like, forever, for teaming up with me to check out some of the Saturday action at the CMJ marathon, which is this massively concurrent, week-long, pan-city showcase of hundreds of lesser-known rock bands, some of them good, some of them not so good, that I'd always meant to check out but had never gotten around to before. She wanted to go to Cake Shop, but I was keen on checking out The Muslims at Santos' Party House, so we headed there. The place was weirdly empty when we got there around ten (my understanding is CMJ usually packs the house) but they were running their smoke machine at full blast as if to obscure that fact. And it turned out that The Muslims had canceled, which sucked.
...Because the other bands in the show were super shitty. The Vaz were on first. They're a three-piece that look like a total guitar teacher band -- that is to say, the lead singer is a bit older and had this serious, self-important vibe about him that set my teeth on edge. It was the look of a guy who must have figured out over the years that he is one of those destined to teach guitar to rock stars in training or write articles about rock stars but who will not himself be a convincing rock star -- and who nonetheless soldiers on through one experimental, unlistenable project / band after another. The expression of concentration on his face I'm guessing reflected the effort involved in acting like his shit was awesome. It was way not awesome -- muddy, tuneless, and dissonant with too-quiet vocals and about 30% of the energy required to sell something as hook-free and humorless as it was.
When the next band also sucked (Iran, I think they were called. Too many beards and newsboy caps; not enough rock), Eve and I decided to ditch and check out another show. We got to Cake Shop just in time to see the second half of a set by a Norwegian band called Lukestar. Terrible name, and the guys were all sort of visually unappealing (stocky, bug-eyed) but their music was great -- tight, hard-charging punk-rock rock-and-roll music with strong vocals and lead guitar hooks. They were obviously psyched to be playing -- they mentioned several times that they'd never traveled outside of Europe before. We begged them for an encore but Cake Shop (I think) said no.
Next up was The XYZ Affair, an NYU band that Razor opened for a few years ago. I remember not liking them at the time (too twee, I think I thought), but they were agreeable enough this time around. Their lead singer has this annoying habit of smiling while he's singing, which makes him look kind of smug, but their songs are engaging and well-written and their arrangements meet my caveman requirements for simplicity. A good sign: It was, like, two in the morning by the time they finished playing, and I wasn't even tired.
In between sets, Eve directed my attention to this NYU student-type girl in front of us who was furiously typing out a response to somebody on some kind of computer-phone doo-dad:
The next day I headed up to Chelsea for the annual WFMU record fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion. I'm not really into records (hell, I don't even own a turntable), but ever since Tom got me listening to 7SD, I've been really taken with the feeling of oddball community the station cultivates. The on-air talent are all so good-natured and dorky and close-knit that it's easy to start feeling like you're having a rap session with some friends from high school you were too cool to hang out with more but maybe it's not too late to start, etc. -- until you remember that, like, a hundred thousand people listen to FMU and take it super seriously. And that was totally evident at the record fair, which might have been more packed with beardos than the FSF's annual meeting. I was there, though, to fan it up for Ken Freedman and Andy Breckman. Ken was working the front desk (with his wife and daughter, I think?) but Andy was nowhere to be found. I walked around the floor for a while and listened to DMBQ play an incongruously wild set, given that it took place in the corner of a florescently-lit convention showroom, but then my legs started to hurt, so I popped into Rebel Monkey, Inc. to take a load off. Idly checking the record fair schedule, though, I saw that Ken and Andy were slated to begin judging a Halloween costume contest that had started five minutes after I'd left and only just ended! I hurried back to the Pavilion, but there were no Breckmans to be found.
A few things I noticed about the record fair:
I was beat, but that night it was back up to the Party House with Nina to see Vivian Girls opening for Jay Reatard. The 'Girls apologized for their exhaustion after playing four CMJ shows in 24 hours, but I thought they were pretty good. It's hard for me to tell when off-key singing is part of a band's premise or if they just can't hear themselves, but Vivian Girls do some of that. It doesn't not suit them. I don't know.
As the curtains on the stage parted for his set, Jay Reatard stepped forward and said, "Man, you guys ready for a fucking puppet show?" We all kind of looked at each other trying to figure out what that meant. "This curtain fucking sucks," he clarified. "Who else here hates these stupid curtains?" Only a smattering of hands went up. "Huh," he said. "Looks like we got some curtain fans in the house."
His set was fucking awesome, though -- incredibly high-energy and aggressive. I'd never seen him live before and had only heard an apparently non-representative selection of his stuff online; he actually sounds a lot like Screeching Weasel, in a good way -- the songs are short and catchy, the vocals are just the right amount of adenoidal. And, in a move that totally needs to make a comeback from when I used to see bands in high school, there was no talking between songs. He'd just call out the name of the next song and go. Efficient. A guy standing next to me leaned in at one point and said, "He doesn't sound the way he looks." Indeed -- Jay and his bass player both have enormous curly hairdos (think Roger Daltrey and Macy Gray, respectively) that they can sort headbang around, although Jay mostly kept his head down, the hair covering his face completely, delivering his lyrics Mitch Hedberg-style.
...Because the other bands in the show were super shitty. The Vaz were on first. They're a three-piece that look like a total guitar teacher band -- that is to say, the lead singer is a bit older and had this serious, self-important vibe about him that set my teeth on edge. It was the look of a guy who must have figured out over the years that he is one of those destined to teach guitar to rock stars in training or write articles about rock stars but who will not himself be a convincing rock star -- and who nonetheless soldiers on through one experimental, unlistenable project / band after another. The expression of concentration on his face I'm guessing reflected the effort involved in acting like his shit was awesome. It was way not awesome -- muddy, tuneless, and dissonant with too-quiet vocals and about 30% of the energy required to sell something as hook-free and humorless as it was.
When the next band also sucked (Iran, I think they were called. Too many beards and newsboy caps; not enough rock), Eve and I decided to ditch and check out another show. We got to Cake Shop just in time to see the second half of a set by a Norwegian band called Lukestar. Terrible name, and the guys were all sort of visually unappealing (stocky, bug-eyed) but their music was great -- tight, hard-charging punk-rock rock-and-roll music with strong vocals and lead guitar hooks. They were obviously psyched to be playing -- they mentioned several times that they'd never traveled outside of Europe before. We begged them for an encore but Cake Shop (I think) said no.
Next up was The XYZ Affair, an NYU band that Razor opened for a few years ago. I remember not liking them at the time (too twee, I think I thought), but they were agreeable enough this time around. Their lead singer has this annoying habit of smiling while he's singing, which makes him look kind of smug, but their songs are engaging and well-written and their arrangements meet my caveman requirements for simplicity. A good sign: It was, like, two in the morning by the time they finished playing, and I wasn't even tired.
In between sets, Eve directed my attention to this NYU student-type girl in front of us who was furiously typing out a response to somebody on some kind of computer-phone doo-dad:
"Oh, you know, the usual. In NYC. Feeling fucking miserable."I don't see how.
The next day I headed up to Chelsea for the annual WFMU record fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion. I'm not really into records (hell, I don't even own a turntable), but ever since Tom got me listening to 7SD, I've been really taken with the feeling of oddball community the station cultivates. The on-air talent are all so good-natured and dorky and close-knit that it's easy to start feeling like you're having a rap session with some friends from high school you were too cool to hang out with more but maybe it's not too late to start, etc. -- until you remember that, like, a hundred thousand people listen to FMU and take it super seriously. And that was totally evident at the record fair, which might have been more packed with beardos than the FSF's annual meeting. I was there, though, to fan it up for Ken Freedman and Andy Breckman. Ken was working the front desk (with his wife and daughter, I think?) but Andy was nowhere to be found. I walked around the floor for a while and listened to DMBQ play an incongruously wild set, given that it took place in the corner of a florescently-lit convention showroom, but then my legs started to hurt, so I popped into Rebel Monkey, Inc. to take a load off. Idly checking the record fair schedule, though, I saw that Ken and Andy were slated to begin judging a Halloween costume contest that had started five minutes after I'd left and only just ended! I hurried back to the Pavilion, but there were no Breckmans to be found.
A few things I noticed about the record fair:
- Literally all the vendors had Who records for sale / trade
- The Who are a startlingly ugly bunch of dudes -- besides Daltrey, the band is like 85% schnoz and beard -- and yet the majority of their album covers feature them striking unironic heartthrob poses in front of shit like shipping containers and public toilets
- Bands that put out albums during the seventies all have at least one record with some weird-ass surrealist art on the cover. Like, think Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, but more out there: I could swear I saw a weeping Trosper giving birth to the World Tree on the cover of a Hall & Oates LP.
- Are "comedy albums" cool or lame? Because there sure were a fuck of a lot of them up for sale, and some of you have birthdays coming up
I was beat, but that night it was back up to the Party House with Nina to see Vivian Girls opening for Jay Reatard. The 'Girls apologized for their exhaustion after playing four CMJ shows in 24 hours, but I thought they were pretty good. It's hard for me to tell when off-key singing is part of a band's premise or if they just can't hear themselves, but Vivian Girls do some of that. It doesn't not suit them. I don't know.
As the curtains on the stage parted for his set, Jay Reatard stepped forward and said, "Man, you guys ready for a fucking puppet show?" We all kind of looked at each other trying to figure out what that meant. "This curtain fucking sucks," he clarified. "Who else here hates these stupid curtains?" Only a smattering of hands went up. "Huh," he said. "Looks like we got some curtain fans in the house."
His set was fucking awesome, though -- incredibly high-energy and aggressive. I'd never seen him live before and had only heard an apparently non-representative selection of his stuff online; he actually sounds a lot like Screeching Weasel, in a good way -- the songs are short and catchy, the vocals are just the right amount of adenoidal. And, in a move that totally needs to make a comeback from when I used to see bands in high school, there was no talking between songs. He'd just call out the name of the next song and go. Efficient. A guy standing next to me leaned in at one point and said, "He doesn't sound the way he looks." Indeed -- Jay and his bass player both have enormous curly hairdos (think Roger Daltrey and Macy Gray, respectively) that they can sort headbang around, although Jay mostly kept his head down, the hair covering his face completely, delivering his lyrics Mitch Hedberg-style.
Monday, October 06, 2008
I Am Kind Of A Filthy Dude
I was remarking to Ted a few nights ago (over blueberry kuchen and red wine in his lovely Park Slope apartment) that sometimes you look around you, at how dirty your clothes are, say, or how grimy the coffee table in your apartment has gotten, and you think to yourself, "man, I am a filthy dude."
Case in point: I am a slobby programmer-type guy who needs to be eating junk food all goddamn day long while I am programming the computer at work. So if you come over to my desk, you will see a whole bunch of plastic kegs of pretzels and "party mix" and maybe a couple of bags of M&Ms or Starbursts or shit like that. Well, the office has a bit of a pest problem, and I left my snack foods a little bit too exposed, I guess, and now there is a mouse that comes and eats things off the desk and leaves mouse poops everywhere. It's gross.
So after a few frown-inducing incidents of noticing a poop on my desk a foot or so away from an in-progress lunch, I decided to kick some mouse ass. I picked up a bunch of wooden snap-traps at a deli on 7th Ave. and baited them with the semi-unappealing organic peanut butter from the office fridge. And then I waited. And several weeks went by and I didn't catch any mice and there were four armed mousetraps sitting on my desk -- mouse pad; floor; between monitors; behind tower -- waiting to snap an unobservant co-worker. I started to feel like... well, like a guy hunting a mouse that no one else can see and who's got cocked mousetraps all over his desk. The week before, though, I'd been at Tom and Colleen's house and they'd shown off a device they'd picked up for dealing with an apparently highly-visible infestation: An electric cul-de-sac in a box that Tom was eager to explain: There's peanut butter at one end and two metal plates on the bottom. The mouse winds up with his front legs on one plate and his hind legs on the other and he gets electrocuted. He said they'd killed two the first night they turned it on and nine in total since getting the thing. I went to a bunch of hardware stores looking for it but to no avail (the guy at Kove Bros. tried to sell me a $50 dealie he said the staff themselves had used to kill a cat-sized rat; he had Polaroid evidence), so I gave up and ordered it online. It is now baited and batteried and switched on, waiting in the storage closet in the kitchen, near where Tim and Libby'd seen a particularly brazen daylight mouse expedition sallying forth.
Then there's the roach situation in my kitchen at home. I'm not particularly squeamish about cockroaches (though boy am I not crazy about waterbugs) but things have gotten sort of out of hand. I've got a row of appliances (toaster oven, coffee maker, blender) between the stove and the sink, and an extended family of roaches has apparently set up a homestead behind them. It'd gotten to the point where I'd dislodge the carafe for my wonderful timer-automatic coffee maker from the heating element in the morning and there'd be two of the fuckers waiting behind it, waving their gross feelers at me. And the problem with these little-to-midsize roaches is that Kitty can't be bothered to chomp them up the way she does with the big scary ones (I guess they don't taste as good? Ick). So I took the nuclear option at home, too -- I created a four-block wall of roach motels next to the counter's power strip and deployed a couple of these weird sterilizing-gas-spewing devices that come with the motels under the sink. A couple weeks later and I've just swept, like, a couple dozen roach carcasses off the counter.
For the trifecta, I made vodka sauce the other night, using some stuff from a jar. (Didn't have vodka in it, but it did have cream cheese. Guh?) "Don't let her eat that," Nina admonished as I set my plate down on the floor for the cat to lick clean. "It's fine," I insisted. "Look how cute." Sure enough, Kitty ate all the vodka sauce off the plate. And then she got diarrhea. And she managed to get the diarrhea in her fur, dipping her tail in it like a calligraphy brush. It got on my hand.
Changing the subject.
I've done some important work on playing video games lately. First off, I finished Final Fantasy XII. It's sort of hard to have something to say about it -- it's just too big and too complicated of an experience. I think it's probably the best-looking Playstation 2 game I've seen, and also has the most content -- more than all those the two-disc games out there, even. The thing took me 160+ hours before I was satisfied that I'd done all I wanted to do. On the other hand, I found the story a lot dryer and less coherent than I'd liked, although it doesn't come close to the level of mindfuckery featured in Final Fantasy X. And the main narrative thread kind of peters out around the time you level 50, which was about halfway through, hours-wise for me. After that you're just doing shit like playing Simon Says against "The River Lord" and helping bunny girls fight ice dragons.
I also managed to battle through the two obstacles standing between me and "Freebird" in Guitar Hero II Hard mode: "Carry Me Home" and "Psychobilly Freakout." Man, those songs are difficult! My fingers and left wrist were aching for days afterwards. Promptly after I embarked on Expert, the game started locking up while loading songs, leaving me at least temporarily stuck behind Nina in the race to championship of the universe.
Nick's lent me a copy of Shadow of the Colossus; he'd brought it in to do some research for a paper / talk he's working on. It's a bit of an odd duck in that it's got all the mise-en-scene of a game like... I don't know, Morrowind, in which there's just so much to do, but in Shadow, there's really just a single mechanic, which is killing colossi. It's so pared-down it's actually kind of austere. And in between your battles, in the bits where you're riding around the countryside on Agro, you start to feel like, man, this game's kind of dull; it doesn't look that great; the controls're sort of frustrating. But five minutes later you're clinging to the back of a giant demonic clockwork bird-thing that's swooping through the air, and you can actually see your little guy holding onto its fur (which is rendered such that it is gorgeous and also distinct from other surfaces, like, say, feathers, which are also gorgeous) while you hack it to death with a sword, and you're like, oh, they skimped a little on that other part so they could do this.
Case in point: I am a slobby programmer-type guy who needs to be eating junk food all goddamn day long while I am programming the computer at work. So if you come over to my desk, you will see a whole bunch of plastic kegs of pretzels and "party mix" and maybe a couple of bags of M&Ms or Starbursts or shit like that. Well, the office has a bit of a pest problem, and I left my snack foods a little bit too exposed, I guess, and now there is a mouse that comes and eats things off the desk and leaves mouse poops everywhere. It's gross.
So after a few frown-inducing incidents of noticing a poop on my desk a foot or so away from an in-progress lunch, I decided to kick some mouse ass. I picked up a bunch of wooden snap-traps at a deli on 7th Ave. and baited them with the semi-unappealing organic peanut butter from the office fridge. And then I waited. And several weeks went by and I didn't catch any mice and there were four armed mousetraps sitting on my desk -- mouse pad; floor; between monitors; behind tower -- waiting to snap an unobservant co-worker. I started to feel like... well, like a guy hunting a mouse that no one else can see and who's got cocked mousetraps all over his desk. The week before, though, I'd been at Tom and Colleen's house and they'd shown off a device they'd picked up for dealing with an apparently highly-visible infestation: An electric cul-de-sac in a box that Tom was eager to explain: There's peanut butter at one end and two metal plates on the bottom. The mouse winds up with his front legs on one plate and his hind legs on the other and he gets electrocuted. He said they'd killed two the first night they turned it on and nine in total since getting the thing. I went to a bunch of hardware stores looking for it but to no avail (the guy at Kove Bros. tried to sell me a $50 dealie he said the staff themselves had used to kill a cat-sized rat; he had Polaroid evidence), so I gave up and ordered it online. It is now baited and batteried and switched on, waiting in the storage closet in the kitchen, near where Tim and Libby'd seen a particularly brazen daylight mouse expedition sallying forth.
Then there's the roach situation in my kitchen at home. I'm not particularly squeamish about cockroaches (though boy am I not crazy about waterbugs) but things have gotten sort of out of hand. I've got a row of appliances (toaster oven, coffee maker, blender) between the stove and the sink, and an extended family of roaches has apparently set up a homestead behind them. It'd gotten to the point where I'd dislodge the carafe for my wonderful timer-automatic coffee maker from the heating element in the morning and there'd be two of the fuckers waiting behind it, waving their gross feelers at me. And the problem with these little-to-midsize roaches is that Kitty can't be bothered to chomp them up the way she does with the big scary ones (I guess they don't taste as good? Ick). So I took the nuclear option at home, too -- I created a four-block wall of roach motels next to the counter's power strip and deployed a couple of these weird sterilizing-gas-spewing devices that come with the motels under the sink. A couple weeks later and I've just swept, like, a couple dozen roach carcasses off the counter.
For the trifecta, I made vodka sauce the other night, using some stuff from a jar. (Didn't have vodka in it, but it did have cream cheese. Guh?) "Don't let her eat that," Nina admonished as I set my plate down on the floor for the cat to lick clean. "It's fine," I insisted. "Look how cute." Sure enough, Kitty ate all the vodka sauce off the plate. And then she got diarrhea. And she managed to get the diarrhea in her fur, dipping her tail in it like a calligraphy brush. It got on my hand.
Changing the subject.
I've done some important work on playing video games lately. First off, I finished Final Fantasy XII. It's sort of hard to have something to say about it -- it's just too big and too complicated of an experience. I think it's probably the best-looking Playstation 2 game I've seen, and also has the most content -- more than all those the two-disc games out there, even. The thing took me 160+ hours before I was satisfied that I'd done all I wanted to do. On the other hand, I found the story a lot dryer and less coherent than I'd liked, although it doesn't come close to the level of mindfuckery featured in Final Fantasy X. And the main narrative thread kind of peters out around the time you level 50, which was about halfway through, hours-wise for me. After that you're just doing shit like playing Simon Says against "The River Lord" and helping bunny girls fight ice dragons.
I also managed to battle through the two obstacles standing between me and "Freebird" in Guitar Hero II Hard mode: "Carry Me Home" and "Psychobilly Freakout." Man, those songs are difficult! My fingers and left wrist were aching for days afterwards. Promptly after I embarked on Expert, the game started locking up while loading songs, leaving me at least temporarily stuck behind Nina in the race to championship of the universe.
Nick's lent me a copy of Shadow of the Colossus; he'd brought it in to do some research for a paper / talk he's working on. It's a bit of an odd duck in that it's got all the mise-en-scene of a game like... I don't know, Morrowind, in which there's just so much to do, but in Shadow, there's really just a single mechanic, which is killing colossi. It's so pared-down it's actually kind of austere. And in between your battles, in the bits where you're riding around the countryside on Agro, you start to feel like, man, this game's kind of dull; it doesn't look that great; the controls're sort of frustrating. But five minutes later you're clinging to the back of a giant demonic clockwork bird-thing that's swooping through the air, and you can actually see your little guy holding onto its fur (which is rendered such that it is gorgeous and also distinct from other surfaces, like, say, feathers, which are also gorgeous) while you hack it to death with a sword, and you're like, oh, they skimped a little on that other part so they could do this.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Preparations For Fall
So the summer's over and I didn't blog it on its way out. The fact of the matter is that ever since getting back from Argentina, my job has been a bit of a hell ride. I've been locked in an apparently futile struggle to eke performance out of a software system that doesn't want to perform, and it's mostly my fault.
But let's put that aside. Point is, I actually had a pretty bitchen summer -- as Eve pointed out, I did pretty much everything. Saw dozens of bands, a good number of outdoor movies. Didn't go to the beach once, which was surely a mistake, but I did go to motherfucking foreign country, which should count for something. If I could do it over, maybe I would've gotten drunker, ated more hamburgers, um... oh, yeah, maybe gone jogging, like, once. Do-overs are for horseshoes and hand grenades, though.
So what's on the menu now? Mostly fretting about the election. You know how democrats get this kind of failure-stink about them when they've realized they're going to lose? It's this sort of tiredness that you can see in their faces; they're not as mean, not as witty anymore. They're still friendly, still smiley, but they've lost the will to live, kind of. I can't tell if Barack Obama's got the stink or not -- a couple of weeks ago, when he went on Letterman right after the RNC, I would've said yes; and whether or not he "won" it, I didn't think that first debate did him any favors; but looking at these poll numbers now, holy god, we might wind up with the president that I'm gonna vote for! Neat.
Somebody spilled a plastic gallon-jug container of milk on our landing and just left it for days. That was gross.
I've been cooking a fair amount, which is good. I used the last bananas of summer to make a kick-ass banana bread, although I kind of rigged the competition by putting walnuts and apricots and chocolate chips in it as well. I attempted to make Joy of Cooking Italian-style meatballs (parmesan and parsley mixed in) using ground beef-flavor Gimme Lean, which didn't work at all (ugh). And just now I made this pretty sick spicy potato / onion concoction that they posted a recipe for on Gothamist. I didn't make the yogurt topping because for some reason it is impossible to find straight-up plain yogurt in this neighborhood.
There are less musical goings-on to see now that it's gotten colder. A few weeks ago, on a Friday whim, Nina and I went to go see Dragons of Zynth over at this club called Le Poisson Rouge. I hadn't been there before, and I was surprised when it turned out to be in the same location as this old club called Life, right down Bleecker St. from the venerable Pizza Box. I never went to that club either, but there's a story that Razor likes to repeat about being let in to a 21-and-over Dickies show when he and Handsome Caveman and I were in high school by fiat of Leonard Graves Phillips himself. I wasn't there. At any rate, the band opening for the Dragons was this bunch of white dudes called The Suckers, and they kind of sucked -- they were all wearing Hawaiian shirts and had lackadaisically grease-painted faces, and they were playing this spacey stoner rock in time with this kaleidoscopic animation of seashells being projected behind them. Boring. Dragons of Zynth were awesome, though -- no lie that they put on a high-energy stage show. The lead singer (I think) is this stretched-out-looking lanky dude who plays keyboards like he's acting in a German expressionist movie; the guitar player was less flamboyant but had some serious soloing chops. They weren't a very talky band, but they were hot to listen to.
That's my music criticism voice I'm trying out right there.
Last week I caught Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip over at Mercury Lounge, managing to bring Kojo and Libby with me from work. They were pretty great (Dan is fatter than I'd thought, Scroob beardier), but the audience was a little low-energy. By a show of hands, about half of them were from England (weird), but the rest of the audience were New Yorkers, whom Scroobius Pip described as being the "toughest" audience in the world to get to dance. That didn't use to be true, I don't think. Gamely, we tried our best to sort of bop along to his flow, as oddly punctuated as it is ("...hip-hop-is-art... don'-make-a-fuckin'-pop-hit be smart"). Thanks, once again, to Stephen Merchant.
Links:
At work, with the support of Libby and Peter, I am taking the hundred push-up challenge. Libby and I just finished week three, in which we are in the middle tier, whatever that means. I am finding it brutally difficult -- we do our sets in the evening, and sometimes, after my five, I'm so light-headed that I'm not much good for thinking after sitting back down at my desk. Nonetheless, I'm finding that certain aspects of the experience are changing for the better. Each individual push-up doesn't get any easier, but you find you have a larger reserve of energy to draw from, gruntingly.
But let's put that aside. Point is, I actually had a pretty bitchen summer -- as Eve pointed out, I did pretty much everything. Saw dozens of bands, a good number of outdoor movies. Didn't go to the beach once, which was surely a mistake, but I did go to motherfucking foreign country, which should count for something. If I could do it over, maybe I would've gotten drunker, ated more hamburgers, um... oh, yeah, maybe gone jogging, like, once. Do-overs are for horseshoes and hand grenades, though.
So what's on the menu now? Mostly fretting about the election. You know how democrats get this kind of failure-stink about them when they've realized they're going to lose? It's this sort of tiredness that you can see in their faces; they're not as mean, not as witty anymore. They're still friendly, still smiley, but they've lost the will to live, kind of. I can't tell if Barack Obama's got the stink or not -- a couple of weeks ago, when he went on Letterman right after the RNC, I would've said yes; and whether or not he "won" it, I didn't think that first debate did him any favors; but looking at these poll numbers now, holy god, we might wind up with the president that I'm gonna vote for! Neat.
Somebody spilled a plastic gallon-jug container of milk on our landing and just left it for days. That was gross.
I've been cooking a fair amount, which is good. I used the last bananas of summer to make a kick-ass banana bread, although I kind of rigged the competition by putting walnuts and apricots and chocolate chips in it as well. I attempted to make Joy of Cooking Italian-style meatballs (parmesan and parsley mixed in) using ground beef-flavor Gimme Lean, which didn't work at all (ugh). And just now I made this pretty sick spicy potato / onion concoction that they posted a recipe for on Gothamist. I didn't make the yogurt topping because for some reason it is impossible to find straight-up plain yogurt in this neighborhood.
There are less musical goings-on to see now that it's gotten colder. A few weeks ago, on a Friday whim, Nina and I went to go see Dragons of Zynth over at this club called Le Poisson Rouge. I hadn't been there before, and I was surprised when it turned out to be in the same location as this old club called Life, right down Bleecker St. from the venerable Pizza Box. I never went to that club either, but there's a story that Razor likes to repeat about being let in to a 21-and-over Dickies show when he and Handsome Caveman and I were in high school by fiat of Leonard Graves Phillips himself. I wasn't there. At any rate, the band opening for the Dragons was this bunch of white dudes called The Suckers, and they kind of sucked -- they were all wearing Hawaiian shirts and had lackadaisically grease-painted faces, and they were playing this spacey stoner rock in time with this kaleidoscopic animation of seashells being projected behind them. Boring. Dragons of Zynth were awesome, though -- no lie that they put on a high-energy stage show. The lead singer (I think) is this stretched-out-looking lanky dude who plays keyboards like he's acting in a German expressionist movie; the guitar player was less flamboyant but had some serious soloing chops. They weren't a very talky band, but they were hot to listen to.
That's my music criticism voice I'm trying out right there.
Last week I caught Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip over at Mercury Lounge, managing to bring Kojo and Libby with me from work. They were pretty great (Dan is fatter than I'd thought, Scroob beardier), but the audience was a little low-energy. By a show of hands, about half of them were from England (weird), but the rest of the audience were New Yorkers, whom Scroobius Pip described as being the "toughest" audience in the world to get to dance. That didn't use to be true, I don't think. Gamely, we tried our best to sort of bop along to his flow, as oddly punctuated as it is ("...hip-hop-is-art... don'-make-a-fuckin'-pop-hit be smart"). Thanks, once again, to Stephen Merchant.
Links:
- Wilfred
- Sheer, unmitigated brilliance
- 1001 rules
At work, with the support of Libby and Peter, I am taking the hundred push-up challenge. Libby and I just finished week three, in which we are in the middle tier, whatever that means. I am finding it brutally difficult -- we do our sets in the evening, and sometimes, after my five, I'm so light-headed that I'm not much good for thinking after sitting back down at my desk. Nonetheless, I'm finding that certain aspects of the experience are changing for the better. Each individual push-up doesn't get any easier, but you find you have a larger reserve of energy to draw from, gruntingly.
Monday, August 25, 2008
What A Health
I hate to say it, but summer's kind of winding down. I'm not ready to do a post-mortem; I'm at the point where I'm trying to pack a lot of good stuff into these last few weeks.
The weekend before leaving for Argentina, I checked out King Khan & The Shrines at McCarren. King Khan is a chubby little Indian (via Canada) dude who plays James Brown-style dutty rock and has a voice like Screamin' Jay Hawkins'. For their show at the pool, he was wearing a Speedo and some kind of gold lamé garment that was either a cape or a cocktail dress -- I couldn't tell which. Their set was awesome -- real nasty and fast. About half way through, one of the guys from The Black Lips, the other band playing that day, got on stage with a bag of bananas, which King Khan distributed into the crowd. Kind of predictably, this proved to be a bad idea: some of the people who caught the bananas ate them, but most of them threw them back on stage -- and mostly at King Khan or at the Shrines' dancing girl. Khan got fairly pissed at this and hauled one of the chief offenders up on stage, where he chewed him out and the two of them got into a mashed-banana-to-the-face slap fight that was kind of all in fun but kind of creepily not.
Friday night I was sitting at work wondering to do with myself; it was already like 9:00. As I was surfing my events calendar, Nina pointed out that her former co-worker June was in a band called Vagina Panther that was playing at Trash Bar. I'd heard the name mentioned before -- as I understand it, V.P.'d long been germinating among the staff at Seed as an idea for a band but had just recently become, you know, real. So I checked out their MySpace, and they sounded exactly what I was in the mood for. I hopped on the L train and hoofed it over to Trash just in time for their set -- and to run into another former co-worker of Nina's, Nikhil, who'd showed up to support June, but also to offer a (friendly) critique of their style and skill. "They think they're a punk band, but they're playing stoner rock," he said. "With a little practice, they could be a pretty good 'Queens of the Stone Age' cover band." Nina showed up a little while later and we managed to escape back to Sunset Park with a copy of the awesome, design-y poster from the show, which is now hanging up in our bathroom. I challenge you to come see it.
Then on Saturday I headed out to The Yard to see Peelander-Z and a Kaiju Big Battel tournament, another spur-of-the-moment decision, since the show had only started being advertised in the usual places a day or so beforehand. I'd never been to The Yard. It's, well, a yard -- a junkyard, really, behind a police / fire station building and on the banks of the Gowanus Canal. There's even a little jetty with some boats tied up to it and a small "flag" that looks like a windsock made of fish skeletons. I ran into Adam and his friends Ari and Jay, which was lucky, and we all got food together. One of the vendors from the Red Hook ballfields was there, making delicious-smelling tortillas on the spot and selling tacos and these things they were calling quesadillas, but which were actually a lot more like huaraches. Not that it matters -- it's not like the components of the top five "Mexican dishes" most places make are really all that different. It's just a matter of arrangement / size. And I'm not arguing. So people on the line were doing things like ordering "the big taco" or "two of those small burritos," and somehow everything worked out. Peelander-Z went on around five o'clock, playing, as they did the last time I saw them, about four or five songs in 40 minutes. I love those guys -- they're funny, high-energy, they flick boogers, the works -- but I can't help feeling like they put on a bit of a minstrel show. Like, after the show, Peelander Yellow told me and Adam to check out their next show in September, and, you know, his command of English is significantly better than his stage act would lead you to believe. Nonetheless, I bopped along during "Mad Tiger" and joined the conga line during "Health."
The Kaiju show was pretty great, too. The ring was enclosed in a high chain-link fence with little wooden platforms built on its upper corners, so you knew it was going to be great. The results, for those of you who care:
On Sunday, Nina and I went out to Williamsburg to see what we could see. The venerable and screamy Titus Andronicus were opening for Yo La Tengo out in McCarren Pool; it was the last free show there, ever -- they're turning the thing back into a pool after this summer, in case you hadn't heard. But that also meant that there was a huge line. So we opted to check out this motorcycle show with Winnie and Evan at the garage on N. 14th St. They had lots of awesome old and new bikes and weird machines to work on them. We all ended up having afternoon beers at this attractively grungy bar next door called The Gutter, which is run, apparently, by the people who own Barcade, and includes on its premises a set of functional bowling lanes. Evan's friend Ray turned me on to a couple of interesting resources. We never did end up going to the show.
Finally, on Wednesday, we hit up Santos Party House in Chinatown to see The Virgins, a band I hadn't really heard much about -- except I guess that they had a song on that show Gossip Girl? That would stand to reason, because the crowd wasn't really what I was expecting for a downtown Manhattan rock show. I got to wait outside for a little while before Nina showed up with the ticket-purchasing credit card, and, man -- lots of bridge-and-tunnel meatheads in tight V-neck t-shirts, lots of disturbingly orange, not-too-attractive girls. I watched two drunk girls with hair the color of glitter pens get kicked out and banned from the establishment for trying to sneak in ("Fuckin', okay, I'm sorry, I lied about us being friends with the band, but seriously, they're, like, our favorite. We wanna see 'em so fuckin' bad!"). As for the band themselves, they were, you know, okay. Their hit song, which I think is called "Rich Girls," was pretty catchy, but everything else they played had no hook; no, you know, idea. They're good enough to write songs for car commercials, maybe, but not to play rock music. Case in point, they had a song called "One Week Of Danger" that went:
In other news, there's some kind of political thing going on? And a storm about to destroy New Orleans? I don't even know.
The weekend before leaving for Argentina, I checked out King Khan & The Shrines at McCarren. King Khan is a chubby little Indian (via Canada) dude who plays James Brown-style dutty rock and has a voice like Screamin' Jay Hawkins'. For their show at the pool, he was wearing a Speedo and some kind of gold lamé garment that was either a cape or a cocktail dress -- I couldn't tell which. Their set was awesome -- real nasty and fast. About half way through, one of the guys from The Black Lips, the other band playing that day, got on stage with a bag of bananas, which King Khan distributed into the crowd. Kind of predictably, this proved to be a bad idea: some of the people who caught the bananas ate them, but most of them threw them back on stage -- and mostly at King Khan or at the Shrines' dancing girl. Khan got fairly pissed at this and hauled one of the chief offenders up on stage, where he chewed him out and the two of them got into a mashed-banana-to-the-face slap fight that was kind of all in fun but kind of creepily not.
Friday night I was sitting at work wondering to do with myself; it was already like 9:00. As I was surfing my events calendar, Nina pointed out that her former co-worker June was in a band called Vagina Panther that was playing at Trash Bar. I'd heard the name mentioned before -- as I understand it, V.P.'d long been germinating among the staff at Seed as an idea for a band but had just recently become, you know, real. So I checked out their MySpace, and they sounded exactly what I was in the mood for. I hopped on the L train and hoofed it over to Trash just in time for their set -- and to run into another former co-worker of Nina's, Nikhil, who'd showed up to support June, but also to offer a (friendly) critique of their style and skill. "They think they're a punk band, but they're playing stoner rock," he said. "With a little practice, they could be a pretty good 'Queens of the Stone Age' cover band." Nina showed up a little while later and we managed to escape back to Sunset Park with a copy of the awesome, design-y poster from the show, which is now hanging up in our bathroom. I challenge you to come see it.
Then on Saturday I headed out to The Yard to see Peelander-Z and a Kaiju Big Battel tournament, another spur-of-the-moment decision, since the show had only started being advertised in the usual places a day or so beforehand. I'd never been to The Yard. It's, well, a yard -- a junkyard, really, behind a police / fire station building and on the banks of the Gowanus Canal. There's even a little jetty with some boats tied up to it and a small "flag" that looks like a windsock made of fish skeletons. I ran into Adam and his friends Ari and Jay, which was lucky, and we all got food together. One of the vendors from the Red Hook ballfields was there, making delicious-smelling tortillas on the spot and selling tacos and these things they were calling quesadillas, but which were actually a lot more like huaraches. Not that it matters -- it's not like the components of the top five "Mexican dishes" most places make are really all that different. It's just a matter of arrangement / size. And I'm not arguing. So people on the line were doing things like ordering "the big taco" or "two of those small burritos," and somehow everything worked out. Peelander-Z went on around five o'clock, playing, as they did the last time I saw them, about four or five songs in 40 minutes. I love those guys -- they're funny, high-energy, they flick boogers, the works -- but I can't help feeling like they put on a bit of a minstrel show. Like, after the show, Peelander Yellow told me and Adam to check out their next show in September, and, you know, his command of English is significantly better than his stage act would lead you to believe. Nonetheless, I bopped along during "Mad Tiger" and joined the conga line during "Health."
The Kaiju show was pretty great, too. The ring was enclosed in a high chain-link fence with little wooden platforms built on its upper corners, so you knew it was going to be great. The results, for those of you who care:
- Powa Ranjuru was kicking Pedro Plantain's ass until his brother, Zombie Pablo, showed up and quickly got her onto the ropes. Pedro ended up having to pull Pablo off of her, after which the two of them ran off, leaving Powa Ranjuru FTW.
- The Sea Amigos were auditioning a replacement for Call-Me-Kevin (who'd been given the boot as a result of his bad attitude). None of the contenders -- including a human wrestler from Chikara named Jimmy Sprinkles -- were making the grade, until a suspiciously familiar-looking monster named Call-Me-Thurston showed up and blew the Amigos out of the water.
- Dusto Bunny, whose costume might be the ickiest in the league, and Super Wrong kicked the crap out of Dai Hachi Hachi and The Grudyin, nipples and all. (I think? It's kind of hard to remember who everyone is and what "side" they're on, especially a week afterwards.)
- Neo Teppen, who was supposed to fight no-show Hell Monkey ("He wasn't picking up his cell phone," Louden explained), instead took on the three Iron Brothers, Fist, Claw, and Mace. They had the cooler costumes, but he won.
- Chris Hero and Dr. Cube defeated Hero Intern '08 and American Beetle, although it took a half dozen interrupted counts, and a whole lot of really impressive jumps off the top of the fence. At the end of the fight, Louden Noxious was so disgusted with the outcome, that he tried to award the medals (oatmeal cookies glued to loops of yellow caution tape) to the fallen heroes, but Dr. Cube and Chris Hero grabbed them back.
On Sunday, Nina and I went out to Williamsburg to see what we could see. The venerable and screamy Titus Andronicus were opening for Yo La Tengo out in McCarren Pool; it was the last free show there, ever -- they're turning the thing back into a pool after this summer, in case you hadn't heard. But that also meant that there was a huge line. So we opted to check out this motorcycle show with Winnie and Evan at the garage on N. 14th St. They had lots of awesome old and new bikes and weird machines to work on them. We all ended up having afternoon beers at this attractively grungy bar next door called The Gutter, which is run, apparently, by the people who own Barcade, and includes on its premises a set of functional bowling lanes. Evan's friend Ray turned me on to a couple of interesting resources. We never did end up going to the show.
Finally, on Wednesday, we hit up Santos Party House in Chinatown to see The Virgins, a band I hadn't really heard much about -- except I guess that they had a song on that show Gossip Girl? That would stand to reason, because the crowd wasn't really what I was expecting for a downtown Manhattan rock show. I got to wait outside for a little while before Nina showed up with the ticket-purchasing credit card, and, man -- lots of bridge-and-tunnel meatheads in tight V-neck t-shirts, lots of disturbingly orange, not-too-attractive girls. I watched two drunk girls with hair the color of glitter pens get kicked out and banned from the establishment for trying to sneak in ("Fuckin', okay, I'm sorry, I lied about us being friends with the band, but seriously, they're, like, our favorite. We wanna see 'em so fuckin' bad!"). As for the band themselves, they were, you know, okay. Their hit song, which I think is called "Rich Girls," was pretty catchy, but everything else they played had no hook; no, you know, idea. They're good enough to write songs for car commercials, maybe, but not to play rock music. Case in point, they had a song called "One Week Of Danger" that went:
One week of dangerI kind of liked the venue, though -- I've been wary of stylish, fancy-vodka-serving places since attending a spate of awful shows at Terminal 5 (nee "Club Exit"), but the 'Party House seems like it was planned out so you could actually see the stage.
One week of danger
I just want to have
One week of danger
In other news, there's some kind of political thing going on? And a storm about to destroy New Orleans? I don't even know.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Rainy Night In Palermo SoHo
Well, Palermo Viejo, actually. But, yeah, that's where I am -- Buenos Aires. Nina and I are staying in a very charming bed and breakfast-type place called La Casa Palermitano where we have an enormous green room with our own bathroom, a built-in heater (it's winter here), and fuckin' WiFi. The proprietress, Lorena, is impressively tolerant of our mangled castellano and has a parrot named Lucas in her office who likes to be petted and wrassled like a cat. (Seriously -- the thing rolls around on her lap with its feet in the air, lolling its head back on her knee and waiting to be scratched on its tummy.) In the mornings we slop our way out to the bright little kitchen next to our room and munch on dulce de leche-infused pastries while we listen to a morning zoo radio show that features the host singing along to full-length pop songs (Radio Diez: El Radio; siempre noticia).
Buenos Aires is, you know, a full-on city, bearing a more than passing resemblance to San Francisco -- lots of medium-sized apartment complexes with boxy, ivy-draped terraces, each with an opulent marble-and-brass lobby. They've got a six-line subway system with free WiFi and trains that come every seven seconds (until 10:30, that is) and a European fondness for carbonated water.
But it's also a long way away! Truth be told, I was a little nervous to fly down. Have you looked at the map? The goddamn country's practically at the South Pole! I had more apprehension than I'm comfortable admitting that it'd feel, you know, physically weird to walk around down there, so far south -- would I feel like I was falling off? (Actual thought.) So I had a small case of the jitters heading to the airport on Friday. But there this funny thing about airports -- all the waiting and sitting and shuffling through metal detectors (and listening to Anderson Cooper express outrage at the hypocrisy of John Edwards for keeping something so important out of public view) is kind of calming. And by the time they've started showing you that little video telemetry display of where the plane is on the Mercator projection, it starts to feel like you're just taking a relaxing eleven-hour trip across town. Which is good, because otherwise I might have started to really freak the fuck out at having to spend eleven fucking hours with my skeleton frame crammed into an itty-bitty coach seat. I tossed and turned and checked my watch over and over again.
Eventually it was over and I got to see Nina for the first time in a month and a half, which was wonderful, and we got to nap for a while and enjoy the comforts of a bathroom that's larger than our living room in Brooklyn. And then we launched ourselves into the streets of Palermo, armed with our Lonely Planets, looking for cheap eats. You guys may remember that Argentina's currency and economy underwent a near complete collapse circa 2000; they've largely recovered, but a USD still buys you three pesos. And so when you're at a fancy-pants restaurant looking at the menu, you get to divide all the prices by three! Shamefully enough, that's part of the draw, at least as far as the guidebooks present it: Eat the best foods for the least money! Sure enough, we went to a fancy place called Bar 6 and had steak and foods from the sea for practically nothing. And it was delicious! That's the other thing about Argentina, or the version of Argentina that Lonely Planet is pushing -- they eat lots of beef and lots of fish and so must you when you're there.
The next day we walked over to Plaza Serrano, a small park west of our hotel, and ate a fancy, cheap lunch among the leafless treetops on the roof of a hip restaurant within view of the other tourist-y venues: Sullivan's, the Irish pub; Crónica, the dive bar; and a place no obvious name but a huge Budweiser sign on the front. We shopped for some clothing-type presents for people, as well as for the right kind of alfajores, which are sort of the national cookie of Argentina? They're a little like mallomars, except without the marshmallows and with a whole lot of dulce de leche. (We ended up bringing back seven (7!) boxes of the ones from Havanna, which is sort of like the Ghiradelli down there...)
Among the stuff we visited:
* MALBA, the fancy art museum. Think the Whitney, both in terms of the scope of the collection as well as the swank part of town it's in. They were running a survey of twentieth-century Mexican political artwork that included a video of a performance artist (maybe) eating his own shit.
* La Casa Rosada, the executive government building in Buenos Aires and the seat of fuerza Cristina. It looks like a pink version of City Hall and has a small museum that we visited that has a collection of presidential and historical artifacts (i.e., canes and cravats) that covers up until around the 1970s, when a military junta with a serious enthusiasm for torture and forced disappearance came to power. Across the Plaza de Mayo is the Catedral Metropolitana, in which Gen. San Martín's casket sits on top of an enormous altar-like structure guarded by a couple of beefeaters and a statue of somebody who might be Athena.
* The plaza in San Telmo, which is not unlike Union Sq. in terms of the vibe and assembled natives. We watched a tango class being conducted in the evening before getting swept up, Pied Piper-style in an impromptu drum parade that we followed to the border of Montserrat. Ate some outside dessert (banana crepes and whiskey ice cream) at a tourist trap named Nefertiti, where a homeless guy sidled up and sold us a copy of the Argentine version of Street News (he pointed out in his pitch that it's a big problem in Nueva York as well) before asking if we wanted to know where to buy cocaina. Later in the week we returned during daylight hours to visit a
* El Cementerio de la Ricoleta, which is where a whole bunch of really famous Argentines are buried -- it's an actual necropolis, with streets and avenues filled with mausoleums, plus a wall around the perimeter where they stuff the coffins of the somewhat less fancy dead people. There were also a half dozen lazy, friendly cats just kind of lying around and taking dust baths. Most of the crypts have windows that you can peek through and a little room with and assemblage of furniture and artwork or flowers to accompany the casket. In some of the little rooms it looked like somebody'd been in very recently to freshen things up; in others, not so much -- broken glass, dust, the leavings of insects and small animals. Some of the crypts didn't even have a casket on display, but there'd be a tiny hatch or stairwell leading down to a subterranean level I wished we could've visited. Hey, you know, corpse sewer. We visited Eva Perón's crypt, which had had a lot of affection / flowers lavished on it. Nina wanted to do some shenanigans and photograph the evidence, but the stream of earnest devotees didn't let up. She did, however, get some pictures of herself in front of the grave of Hipolito Yrigoyen, El Peludo. Afterwards we had nice sandwiches (completa -- which means, apparently, with slices of hard boiled eggs) on pan arabe at a little cafe. While we were eating, an old, fancy lady in a fur coat got her purse snatched and had a bit of a conniption ("!Todos mis numeros de telefono! !Que pena!"), complete with fanning herself, feeling faint, etc. Buenos Aires has had an exhaustively publicized issue with petty crime since the economic collapse -- but from what we could tell, the guy who we're pretty sure took it was a senior citizen himself, limping into the shop and gumming his toothless palate as he snooped around for a moment before limping off down the street. Go figure.
* The National Library, a grim, Le Corbusier building full of weird little port-hole windows and caked with bird shit. We visited an exhibit about Leopoldo Lugones and Alfonsina Storni and argued over whether or not the building's style of architecture was conducive to human existence. I like it. Me parece como un "engineering building."
* Puerto Madero, a working port on a kind of canal of the Río de la Plata. We crossed the Puente de la Mujer, which is shaped like a kind of diagonal spike and is meant, I think, to represent a couple doing the tango. I can see that, actually. There's a sort of national park -- mostly rush-filled marshes -- to the east of the canal on the banks of the river that we couldn't really figure out how to get into.
Thursday, in the early evening, we headed over to La Boca, which Lonely Planet alternately described as being the hip, South American analogue to the L.E.S.; and the scary, dangerous part of town into which no turista must ever go. It's probably one of the more well-known, iconic parts of the city -- the immigrant dock workers that settled there built sprawling shanties out of sheet metal and spare lumber and painted them with leftover paint, which tended to be any color but white. The houses are a kind of bright and pastel rainbow, and the newly-added row of tourist-friendly shops clearly wanted to capitalize on the scrappy, Cinema Paradiso feeling of the place. We wandered slightly out of the pretty parts, to a grimmer, kind of actual shanty town area where there were dogs fighting in the street, and then we went back to the bus stop and rode back to our fancy hotel.
Nina left early Friday morning, but my flight back to JFK wasn't until 8:15 that evening, so I figured I'd take the day to tie up loose ends. I hopped the subte over to the Plaza Italia to check out the Jardin Zoológico. It was only 10:00 AM or so, but the line was long, and when I got to the ticket window, the lady couldn't change my 100-peso note. A lot of other people were in the same boat and had kind of clustered around the head of the line kvetching in Spanish ("es inaceptable" "es una lastima"), but I didn't have the energy or confidence to join the fray, so I wandered around for a while looking for a bank that'd make change. About an hour later, 10-peso notes in hand, I bought my zoo pasaporte and got to check it out. It was great! The first (and maybe best) thing I saw were the little gangs of nutrias roving the park. Like at the Staten Island Zoo, you could buy small bags of "llama food" to hand-feed to the larger quadrupeds, but at this zoo, the majority of the animals were set up to be fed, including the nutrias, which would wander up to you and climb up in your lap to take a pellet out of your hands. Also wandering the grounds were these weird goose-like things that were apparently some type of Muscovy Duck, which were equally friendly, though, as birds, harder to feed. They'd waddle up open-mouthed and kind of tremble their warty beaks at you while making a wheezing noise. My pasaporte got me into the rain forest exhibit, the reptile house, and the aquarium; but the most exciting exhibit was probably the monkey house, where they had a dozen fairly active baboons, doing baboon things exactly like the stuff from A Primate's Memoir. There was a lower-caste male baboon waiting for food pellets to be dropped down the ramp who'd be pushed aside by the dominant male whenever any visitors tossed food his way, as well as an older female baboon sitting by the food ramp on the other side of the cage who'd pat the side of the ramp impatiently (and totally anthropomorphically) whenever the flow of pellets stopped. "Come on. Come on. Food. Right here."
So that was that. We didn't drink any mate, although we wanted to. My plane trip back was as crampy as the trip out -- my seatmate this time was a big futboller type who seemed to have no problem conking out as soon as we'd taken off. I found him snuggling my blanket and pillow after I made a trip to the bathroom, and it took him an hour or so before he realized. "O. Es tuyo," he said.
Buenos Aires is, you know, a full-on city, bearing a more than passing resemblance to San Francisco -- lots of medium-sized apartment complexes with boxy, ivy-draped terraces, each with an opulent marble-and-brass lobby. They've got a six-line subway system with free WiFi and trains that come every seven seconds (until 10:30, that is) and a European fondness for carbonated water.
But it's also a long way away! Truth be told, I was a little nervous to fly down. Have you looked at the map? The goddamn country's practically at the South Pole! I had more apprehension than I'm comfortable admitting that it'd feel, you know, physically weird to walk around down there, so far south -- would I feel like I was falling off? (Actual thought.) So I had a small case of the jitters heading to the airport on Friday. But there this funny thing about airports -- all the waiting and sitting and shuffling through metal detectors (and listening to Anderson Cooper express outrage at the hypocrisy of John Edwards for keeping something so important out of public view) is kind of calming. And by the time they've started showing you that little video telemetry display of where the plane is on the Mercator projection, it starts to feel like you're just taking a relaxing eleven-hour trip across town. Which is good, because otherwise I might have started to really freak the fuck out at having to spend eleven fucking hours with my skeleton frame crammed into an itty-bitty coach seat. I tossed and turned and checked my watch over and over again.
Eventually it was over and I got to see Nina for the first time in a month and a half, which was wonderful, and we got to nap for a while and enjoy the comforts of a bathroom that's larger than our living room in Brooklyn. And then we launched ourselves into the streets of Palermo, armed with our Lonely Planets, looking for cheap eats. You guys may remember that Argentina's currency and economy underwent a near complete collapse circa 2000; they've largely recovered, but a USD still buys you three pesos. And so when you're at a fancy-pants restaurant looking at the menu, you get to divide all the prices by three! Shamefully enough, that's part of the draw, at least as far as the guidebooks present it: Eat the best foods for the least money! Sure enough, we went to a fancy place called Bar 6 and had steak and foods from the sea for practically nothing. And it was delicious! That's the other thing about Argentina, or the version of Argentina that Lonely Planet is pushing -- they eat lots of beef and lots of fish and so must you when you're there.
The next day we walked over to Plaza Serrano, a small park west of our hotel, and ate a fancy, cheap lunch among the leafless treetops on the roof of a hip restaurant within view of the other tourist-y venues: Sullivan's, the Irish pub; Crónica, the dive bar; and a place no obvious name but a huge Budweiser sign on the front. We shopped for some clothing-type presents for people, as well as for the right kind of alfajores, which are sort of the national cookie of Argentina? They're a little like mallomars, except without the marshmallows and with a whole lot of dulce de leche. (We ended up bringing back seven (7!) boxes of the ones from Havanna, which is sort of like the Ghiradelli down there...)
Among the stuff we visited:
* MALBA, the fancy art museum. Think the Whitney, both in terms of the scope of the collection as well as the swank part of town it's in. They were running a survey of twentieth-century Mexican political artwork that included a video of a performance artist (maybe) eating his own shit.
* La Casa Rosada, the executive government building in Buenos Aires and the seat of fuerza Cristina. It looks like a pink version of City Hall and has a small museum that we visited that has a collection of presidential and historical artifacts (i.e., canes and cravats) that covers up until around the 1970s, when a military junta with a serious enthusiasm for torture and forced disappearance came to power. Across the Plaza de Mayo is the Catedral Metropolitana, in which Gen. San Martín's casket sits on top of an enormous altar-like structure guarded by a couple of beefeaters and a statue of somebody who might be Athena.
* The plaza in San Telmo, which is not unlike Union Sq. in terms of the vibe and assembled natives. We watched a tango class being conducted in the evening before getting swept up, Pied Piper-style in an impromptu drum parade that we followed to the border of Montserrat. Ate some outside dessert (banana crepes and whiskey ice cream) at a tourist trap named Nefertiti, where a homeless guy sidled up and sold us a copy of the Argentine version of Street News (he pointed out in his pitch that it's a big problem in Nueva York as well) before asking if we wanted to know where to buy cocaina. Later in the week we returned during daylight hours to visit a
* El Cementerio de la Ricoleta, which is where a whole bunch of really famous Argentines are buried -- it's an actual necropolis, with streets and avenues filled with mausoleums, plus a wall around the perimeter where they stuff the coffins of the somewhat less fancy dead people. There were also a half dozen lazy, friendly cats just kind of lying around and taking dust baths. Most of the crypts have windows that you can peek through and a little room with and assemblage of furniture and artwork or flowers to accompany the casket. In some of the little rooms it looked like somebody'd been in very recently to freshen things up; in others, not so much -- broken glass, dust, the leavings of insects and small animals. Some of the crypts didn't even have a casket on display, but there'd be a tiny hatch or stairwell leading down to a subterranean level I wished we could've visited. Hey, you know, corpse sewer. We visited Eva Perón's crypt, which had had a lot of affection / flowers lavished on it. Nina wanted to do some shenanigans and photograph the evidence, but the stream of earnest devotees didn't let up. She did, however, get some pictures of herself in front of the grave of Hipolito Yrigoyen, El Peludo. Afterwards we had nice sandwiches (completa -- which means, apparently, with slices of hard boiled eggs) on pan arabe at a little cafe. While we were eating, an old, fancy lady in a fur coat got her purse snatched and had a bit of a conniption ("!Todos mis numeros de telefono! !Que pena!"), complete with fanning herself, feeling faint, etc. Buenos Aires has had an exhaustively publicized issue with petty crime since the economic collapse -- but from what we could tell, the guy who we're pretty sure took it was a senior citizen himself, limping into the shop and gumming his toothless palate as he snooped around for a moment before limping off down the street. Go figure.
* The National Library, a grim, Le Corbusier building full of weird little port-hole windows and caked with bird shit. We visited an exhibit about Leopoldo Lugones and Alfonsina Storni and argued over whether or not the building's style of architecture was conducive to human existence. I like it. Me parece como un "engineering building."
* Puerto Madero, a working port on a kind of canal of the Río de la Plata. We crossed the Puente de la Mujer, which is shaped like a kind of diagonal spike and is meant, I think, to represent a couple doing the tango. I can see that, actually. There's a sort of national park -- mostly rush-filled marshes -- to the east of the canal on the banks of the river that we couldn't really figure out how to get into.
Thursday, in the early evening, we headed over to La Boca, which Lonely Planet alternately described as being the hip, South American analogue to the L.E.S.; and the scary, dangerous part of town into which no turista must ever go. It's probably one of the more well-known, iconic parts of the city -- the immigrant dock workers that settled there built sprawling shanties out of sheet metal and spare lumber and painted them with leftover paint, which tended to be any color but white. The houses are a kind of bright and pastel rainbow, and the newly-added row of tourist-friendly shops clearly wanted to capitalize on the scrappy, Cinema Paradiso feeling of the place. We wandered slightly out of the pretty parts, to a grimmer, kind of actual shanty town area where there were dogs fighting in the street, and then we went back to the bus stop and rode back to our fancy hotel.
Nina left early Friday morning, but my flight back to JFK wasn't until 8:15 that evening, so I figured I'd take the day to tie up loose ends. I hopped the subte over to the Plaza Italia to check out the Jardin Zoológico. It was only 10:00 AM or so, but the line was long, and when I got to the ticket window, the lady couldn't change my 100-peso note. A lot of other people were in the same boat and had kind of clustered around the head of the line kvetching in Spanish ("es inaceptable" "es una lastima"), but I didn't have the energy or confidence to join the fray, so I wandered around for a while looking for a bank that'd make change. About an hour later, 10-peso notes in hand, I bought my zoo pasaporte and got to check it out. It was great! The first (and maybe best) thing I saw were the little gangs of nutrias roving the park. Like at the Staten Island Zoo, you could buy small bags of "llama food" to hand-feed to the larger quadrupeds, but at this zoo, the majority of the animals were set up to be fed, including the nutrias, which would wander up to you and climb up in your lap to take a pellet out of your hands. Also wandering the grounds were these weird goose-like things that were apparently some type of Muscovy Duck, which were equally friendly, though, as birds, harder to feed. They'd waddle up open-mouthed and kind of tremble their warty beaks at you while making a wheezing noise. My pasaporte got me into the rain forest exhibit, the reptile house, and the aquarium; but the most exciting exhibit was probably the monkey house, where they had a dozen fairly active baboons, doing baboon things exactly like the stuff from A Primate's Memoir. There was a lower-caste male baboon waiting for food pellets to be dropped down the ramp who'd be pushed aside by the dominant male whenever any visitors tossed food his way, as well as an older female baboon sitting by the food ramp on the other side of the cage who'd pat the side of the ramp impatiently (and totally anthropomorphically) whenever the flow of pellets stopped. "Come on. Come on. Food. Right here."
So that was that. We didn't drink any mate, although we wanted to. My plane trip back was as crampy as the trip out -- my seatmate this time was a big futboller type who seemed to have no problem conking out as soon as we'd taken off. I found him snuggling my blanket and pillow after I made a trip to the bathroom, and it took him an hour or so before he realized. "O. Es tuyo," he said.
Monday, July 21, 2008
The Last Hope
I'm 27! The day of (a Tuesday) I brought some cupcakes into work, and then later went to go see The Virgin Suicides in McCarren Park Pool (suck). Nothing to report, except that apparently there was a corpse in the pool? Didn't know. My parents took me out for Boyd Thai on Wednesday and gave me a very trendy-looking laptop bag.
You guys may remember that in years past, Sophie and I did a thing in the park where we grilled (sometimes FDA-recalled) hamburgers, and, you know, that was fun, but it was a hard thing to organize and Sophie doesn't live here any more. So this year we still did a joint thing, but we just went out to dinner Saturday at Acme with a bunch of people and then got drinks at Blue & Gold, which was somehow not totally packed, even though tons of people showed up. But man, it was exhausting, because all that day I'd been tabling at HOPE for the FSF, and had to really bust ass to get downtown in time to be feted.
Loyal readers will remember the last time I went to HOPE. It's kind a lot of cash to shell out, given that I'm not, you know, a hacker, but Jeanne needed people to sit at a table and sell merch, and because the HOPE people weren't comping the FSF (drama!), it was looking like they might be shorthanded. Turns out it was fine -- the table was already in the competent hands of Thomas (whom I'd met at an Associate Members meeting a few years back), Matthew (who lives like five blocks away from me in Sunset Park), and this kid Ringo who took a bus all the way to NYC from Denver just for HOPE. And business was booming! We ended up raising a huge amount of cash for the FSF -- orders of magnitude more than the admissions fees we'd paid. I didn't even have a chance to go to any of the talks, although I did get to see the keynote address (delivered by a chubby guy who looked like a car parts salesman from Scranton -- and who turned out to be Jello fucking Biafra) from the vendor floor. Our table was right next to 2600's swag booth where they were selling bottles of this German energy drink called Club-Mate that Emmanuel Goldstein really likes and had had shipped in for the occasion. Like most energy drinks, it tasted fundamentally vile -- kind of a mix of prune juice and Budweiser -- but, as the organizers acknowledged during the closing ceremony, "One gets used to it." There'd been a lot of speculation to the effect that the Pennsylvania Hotel was gonna get torn down -- that's why this year's was "The Last HOPE" -- but at the end of the day on Sunday, Emmanuel revealed that the building's been granted a (temporary) reprieve, and that by "last," he really just meant "most recent." After things finished up that night, Thomas, Matthew, Ringo and I hit up the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker St. for an after-party pub crawl that we tried (unsuccessfully) to coax assorted hackers into joining, and ate bar nachos and talked campaign strategy until well past 11. It was a hoot!
Family news: My dad's got kidney stones -- well, one motherfucker of a stone in particular that's stuck somewhere up in his business and ain't budging on its own. I was maybe four years old the last time this happened to him. That time he passed the thing on his own; this time they've determined that he'll need some minor surgery to get it out. Unfortunately, an hour before they were going to put him under, he developed an infection from having the stone blocking his vital processes for so long, so he's gotta finish a course of antibiotics first. Nobody is thrilled about this.
So I went over to my parents' place on Tuesday to help him get some stuff out of the crawlspace above my sister's room -- they need to run some electrical cables for a new washer-dryer -- and discovered some delightful old junk: A turntable, a photo enlarger, old coloring books, an unfinished oil painting, a "portable" black-and-white television. I came back to work covered in dust and mouse poops but carrying an awesome, laminated map of the world from 1984 that my mom used to have above her desk and which features fantastical place names like Burma and Bombay.
On Thursday night I hoofed it over to Pier 54 to check out Flogging Molly. The last time I'd heard them, my friend Dave Krypel was playing them for me on our hall freshman year of college at Wesleyan. Back then I dismissed them as being a gimmick band, but I've since developed a shameful fondness for so-called "celtic punk," so if I'm going to keep dismissing them, I guess it should be for a better reason? I don't know... naturally, it's pretty hard not to compare them to The Pogues, but the resemblance is only riff-deep. Dave King's lyrics are very literal and very broad -- when Wikipedia says, "Lyrics typically touch on subjects such as Ireland and its history, drinking, politics, love, and include several references to the Roman Catholic Church," they're not generalizing. That's... the actual verbal content of the songs. It takes subtlety, and, you know, intellectual confidence to write songs about "an old hurly ball" instead of how much you hate Oliver Cromwell. Or maybe it doesn't. Not sure.
But it was nice to sit down by the water and watch the sun set and read about CSS 2.1 anonymous box generation on countyhell while listening to an enthusiastic band do their thing. There were some belligerent teenage gutterpunks hanging around near where I was sitting, begging for change to get home from Manhattan -- first they were trying to get back to Jersey, then it was somewhere in Pennsylvania, then it was Baltimore. At one point, they were scrounging bus fare back to Iowa. To their credit, they were able to exploit the crowd pretty successfully; when their initial appeal was rebuffed, a follow-up "please?!" usually did the trick.
After Flogging Molly was done, I hoofed it across town to Mercury Lounge, in a somewhat ill-advised attempt to catch The Airborne Toxic Event show. Two shows in one night! How old am I -- 26? Turned out the late show hasdstarted late, though, and the opener, a band called Blacklist were on when I got there, playing this kind of earnest, synth-y goth rock, and somehow doing it without keyboards. It wasn't bad. I drank a pee-tasting Blue Point. The 'Event themselves came on at 11:00 as promised, but, similar to Cut Off Your Hands, they turned out to be better on the Internet than live. They sound a bit like a less... "cool" Titus Andronicus. That is to say, their music's got this jangly edge to it, but they're not self-aware enough to avoid embarrassing themselves lyrically. Case in point, their lead singer has a speaking voice like Bobcat Goldthwait's, and he introduced the first song by saying, "This song's about all those black kids dying in Iraq." And there was a patch of that song that went:
You guys may remember that in years past, Sophie and I did a thing in the park where we grilled (sometimes FDA-recalled) hamburgers, and, you know, that was fun, but it was a hard thing to organize and Sophie doesn't live here any more. So this year we still did a joint thing, but we just went out to dinner Saturday at Acme with a bunch of people and then got drinks at Blue & Gold, which was somehow not totally packed, even though tons of people showed up. But man, it was exhausting, because all that day I'd been tabling at HOPE for the FSF, and had to really bust ass to get downtown in time to be feted.
Loyal readers will remember the last time I went to HOPE. It's kind a lot of cash to shell out, given that I'm not, you know, a hacker, but Jeanne needed people to sit at a table and sell merch, and because the HOPE people weren't comping the FSF (drama!), it was looking like they might be shorthanded. Turns out it was fine -- the table was already in the competent hands of Thomas (whom I'd met at an Associate Members meeting a few years back), Matthew (who lives like five blocks away from me in Sunset Park), and this kid Ringo who took a bus all the way to NYC from Denver just for HOPE. And business was booming! We ended up raising a huge amount of cash for the FSF -- orders of magnitude more than the admissions fees we'd paid. I didn't even have a chance to go to any of the talks, although I did get to see the keynote address (delivered by a chubby guy who looked like a car parts salesman from Scranton -- and who turned out to be Jello fucking Biafra) from the vendor floor. Our table was right next to 2600's swag booth where they were selling bottles of this German energy drink called Club-Mate that Emmanuel Goldstein really likes and had had shipped in for the occasion. Like most energy drinks, it tasted fundamentally vile -- kind of a mix of prune juice and Budweiser -- but, as the organizers acknowledged during the closing ceremony, "One gets used to it." There'd been a lot of speculation to the effect that the Pennsylvania Hotel was gonna get torn down -- that's why this year's was "The Last HOPE" -- but at the end of the day on Sunday, Emmanuel revealed that the building's been granted a (temporary) reprieve, and that by "last," he really just meant "most recent." After things finished up that night, Thomas, Matthew, Ringo and I hit up the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker St. for an after-party pub crawl that we tried (unsuccessfully) to coax assorted hackers into joining, and ate bar nachos and talked campaign strategy until well past 11. It was a hoot!
Family news: My dad's got kidney stones -- well, one motherfucker of a stone in particular that's stuck somewhere up in his business and ain't budging on its own. I was maybe four years old the last time this happened to him. That time he passed the thing on his own; this time they've determined that he'll need some minor surgery to get it out. Unfortunately, an hour before they were going to put him under, he developed an infection from having the stone blocking his vital processes for so long, so he's gotta finish a course of antibiotics first. Nobody is thrilled about this.
So I went over to my parents' place on Tuesday to help him get some stuff out of the crawlspace above my sister's room -- they need to run some electrical cables for a new washer-dryer -- and discovered some delightful old junk: A turntable, a photo enlarger, old coloring books, an unfinished oil painting, a "portable" black-and-white television. I came back to work covered in dust and mouse poops but carrying an awesome, laminated map of the world from 1984 that my mom used to have above her desk and which features fantastical place names like Burma and Bombay.
On Thursday night I hoofed it over to Pier 54 to check out Flogging Molly. The last time I'd heard them, my friend Dave Krypel was playing them for me on our hall freshman year of college at Wesleyan. Back then I dismissed them as being a gimmick band, but I've since developed a shameful fondness for so-called "celtic punk," so if I'm going to keep dismissing them, I guess it should be for a better reason? I don't know... naturally, it's pretty hard not to compare them to The Pogues, but the resemblance is only riff-deep. Dave King's lyrics are very literal and very broad -- when Wikipedia says, "Lyrics typically touch on subjects such as Ireland and its history, drinking, politics, love, and include several references to the Roman Catholic Church," they're not generalizing. That's... the actual verbal content of the songs. It takes subtlety, and, you know, intellectual confidence to write songs about "an old hurly ball" instead of how much you hate Oliver Cromwell. Or maybe it doesn't. Not sure.
But it was nice to sit down by the water and watch the sun set and read about CSS 2.1 anonymous box generation on countyhell while listening to an enthusiastic band do their thing. There were some belligerent teenage gutterpunks hanging around near where I was sitting, begging for change to get home from Manhattan -- first they were trying to get back to Jersey, then it was somewhere in Pennsylvania, then it was Baltimore. At one point, they were scrounging bus fare back to Iowa. To their credit, they were able to exploit the crowd pretty successfully; when their initial appeal was rebuffed, a follow-up "please?!" usually did the trick.
After Flogging Molly was done, I hoofed it across town to Mercury Lounge, in a somewhat ill-advised attempt to catch The Airborne Toxic Event show. Two shows in one night! How old am I -- 26? Turned out the late show hasdstarted late, though, and the opener, a band called Blacklist were on when I got there, playing this kind of earnest, synth-y goth rock, and somehow doing it without keyboards. It wasn't bad. I drank a pee-tasting Blue Point. The 'Event themselves came on at 11:00 as promised, but, similar to Cut Off Your Hands, they turned out to be better on the Internet than live. They sound a bit like a less... "cool" Titus Andronicus. That is to say, their music's got this jangly edge to it, but they're not self-aware enough to avoid embarrassing themselves lyrically. Case in point, their lead singer has a speaking voice like Bobcat Goldthwait's, and he introduced the first song by saying, "This song's about all those black kids dying in Iraq." And there was a patch of that song that went:
...But what's reality?Yeesh. So, you know, I'm kind of oh-for-two on discovering new music.
What's reality?
What's reality?
...It's a fucking bullet!!!
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Sewage
I went with Nina to the airport on July 4th to send her off to Brazil. It was sad, saying goodbye under the gray, arched roof of an empty Newark Airport. She'll have fun, though. (Fuck, I know she's already having fun on account of the video reports she's already wired back.)
I watched the fireworks from far, far away while waiting for the AirTrain back to Penn Station, and then hit up Katharine's 4th of July party in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were thronged and a light rain was falling. I kind of stumbled around, dazed from loneliness and low blood sugar, making a low and dolorous sound to anyone who'd listen. After I got some food in me, though, I felt a lot better. The party lasted until after 3:00 AM, and instead of cleaning the place up, we all piled into a Carecibo van and headed to our respective homes, Katharine making drunken pleas to Tom H. for a pizza bagel.
The next day, to console myself, I stopped by the Brooklyn Museum to check out the Takashi Murakami show. The paintings were wonderful, if a little overwhelming, but the curation was a disaster. I guess I'm really talking about those placards of "helpful analysis" they put up next to all of the paintings in their featured shows. So Murakami's got this little guy he likes to put in his paintings, a Mickey-Mouse-with-teeth thing called D.O.B. The sense I get is that he's Murakami's trademark doodle, like Razor's "guy" or Neck Face's little bat thing. He's usually got a 'D' on one ear and a 'B' on the other. On a card next to one of the portraits of D.O.B., a museum staffer had helpfully explained that you could view the white oval of D.O.B.'s face as the 'O' in his name. "What other parts of D.O.B. could form the 'O'?" the placard asked. (I don't know, his butthole?) Maybe there's too much cultural overhead to get across when you're trying to guide a mainstream audience through a show like this, but I'm beginning to think the 'Museum doesn't understand modern art. Or maybe it's just that they don't understand irony: Right after a roomful of cheeky, inscrutable Louis Vuitton promotional-but-maybe-not artwork, they'd set up -- I shit you not -- a kiosk where you could actually buy fucking purses from genuine, stone-faced Louis Vuitton staff assholes. It was on a par with the ridiculous, missing-the-point postcards they were pushing in the gift shop during the feminist art show earlier this year. Eve knows what I'm talking about.
A week of summer music:
The night before Nina left we went to Hiro to see the Prefuse 73 / Anti-Pop Consortium show at the Hiro Ballroom. Devoted readers will know that I'm not super into techno music, but I was happy to put that aside since it was her first and only opportunity to do fun summer stuff. Unfortunately, the club was awful, packed with goateed techno douchebags, and the music bordered on unlistenable -- Prefuse 73 was doing this really cacophonous, arhythmic set that put my teeth on edge. He was working with another DJ, a lanky nerd who turned out to be a real dickshit: At one point, a member of the audience, presumably finding the performance as tedious as I was, typed something on his Blackberry and leaned into the adjunct DJ's line of sight, holding it out for him to read. The DJ snatched the Blackberry out of the guy's hand and kind of played keep-away with it for a second before tossing it back into the crowd, hard. "Go home, get out of here," he said. "Seriously." He kept doing DJ stuff for a while and then turned back to the mic. "Or go to a strip club. If you want 'music to get the girls to dance.'" Right, because if you want to hear your guy play his hit songs -- the ones that sound good, say -- you're some kind of philistine. Not like, say, some pretentious creep who "plays" music by twiddling knobs on a computer with a faux-serious look on his face.
Fortunately, Anti-Pop Consortium was great; those guys are full of energy! As M. Sayyid kept reminding everyone (in between exhorting "New York" to "make some noise"), it was Beans' birthday. Beans didn't say too much himself, but he got his rap on, with a strange and delightful gurgled delivery, like a toddler with a sinus infection flipping you shit.
On Wednesday it was the birthday of Nina's brother's friend Adam, who's a swell guy. He'd been planning to have a traditional kind of birthday party at his house, but then he found out that Green Jellÿ (nee Jellö) was playing the Gramercy that night, so he canceled his party and told everyone to hit up the show. I hadn't heard them since a brief infatuation with them when I was 13, and even then I'd been kind of puzzled by their aesthetic: The singing was really gruff and rife with cuss words, but the lyrics also seemed to also have a fairly earnest preoccupation with nursery rhymes and children's television, kind of like Ricky Gervais telling all those jokes about Humpty Dumpty. But they had a reputation for putting on an exciting show, and it was for a good cause (birfday), so I swung by after work.
The thing was, the show was practically empty! Well, not empty, but there were maybe, like 100 people there, tops. Green Jellÿ was on stage when I got there, doing their thing, stomping around on stage in a motley assortment of papier-mache and foam costumes, most of which had floppy, oversized heads. Pretty much all of the songs they performed included an aspect of pageantry, although for the most part it had this tame, patchwork quality to it, as if they were kids choreographing a Disney-on-ice show using spare materials they found in the prop closet, and then wrote the songs around the assemblages they'd come up with. And the costumes seemed to be pretty well-traveled, the foam wrinkled and sweat-stained, the googly-eyes hanging on by a few threads; in fact, a lot of the "dancing" involved the dancer's hands up by the costume's head or in its mouth, presumably a clandestine strategy to keep the head from detaching.
Because of all the dressing-up and -down, it was sort of hard to tell who the actual, you know, principals were, but as near as I can figure, they were: Bill Manspeaker, the lead singer / growler, an enormous baldoon with a Neanderthal brow and incongruously long eyelashes, pink and hairless, kind of like a version of G.G. Allin you'd let babysit your kids; and... well, that's it, really. I can't figure out whether any of the other dudes on stage were actually real members of the band and not touring musicians. A guy from a bad called Rosemary's Billygoat was doing backup vocals, and the bassist, guitar player, and drummer all reeked of being second-string players. It was at least partly a family act: During a pause towards the end of the show, Bill suddenly roared, "Where's my son?!"
A waifish tween boy appeared from backstage and boosted himself up onto one of the amps. I hadn't seen him without a giant foam mask on yet and had assumed he was just a short lady performer.
"I took my son to see GWAR last summer for his birthday," explained Bill, panting. "He said, 'Dad, next summer for my birthday, can we go on tour?' ...It's all for you, Damien! This is all for you!"
This is not to say that it wasn't a good show -- in fact, it was pretty darn good. At one point, Bill, complaining about the barricade in front of the stage, climbed over it and onto one of the merch tables, which he repurposed as a miniature stage in the middle of the pit. As they played through what was arguably their most popular song, "The Three Little Pigs," the crowd lifted the table with Bill standing on top of it, into the air. He maintained his balance throughout. Hell, he didn't even sound nervous as he snarled his way through six or seven choruses of "huffin'-and-a'puffin'-and-I'll-blow-your-house-in."
And when the band discovered it was Adam's birthday (we were wearing party hats and beads), he became the belle of the ball -- and the de facto nominee for all of their audience participation bits. In particular, he was selected to wear the "Shitman" costume on stage for the performance of the song "The Misadventures Of Shitman." The thing was like a mountainous accretion of brown fun foam, leaving Adam little to do but rock on his heels and flap his arms as the band played around him. "That costume smells like shit," he confided to me after they let him offstage.
In total they played for more than two hours, literally until the staff at the Gramercy shut them down. As they exited the stage, they started hawking this exclusive 4-disc video collection that apparently contained every piece of media ever created by or about the band. Mike and I got together and bought it for Adam; Mike went around and managed to get it signed by everyone in the band -- even Damien!
Summer is proceeding apace: Libby and Kojo and I hit up Summerscreen to see Wet Hot American Summer on Tuesday. The place was packed, more crowded than I've ever seen it -- the only way we could see the screen was by scrunching ourselves up against the railing on the upper level. I've still got a crick in my neck.
Missed Brazilian Girls at the Prospect Park bandshell on Friday because I was in the basement of Cake Shop checking out a British band called Cut Off Your Hands. The stuff on their MySpace sounded pretty good to me, and their lead singer was appealing enough, in a George-McFly-meets-Julian-Casablancas kind of way, but for some reason their live set failed to pop. The audience seemed to agree; the band ditched out on a finale after someone hollered, "The Smiths called -- they want that last song back!" He wasn't far off the mark.
I watched the fireworks from far, far away while waiting for the AirTrain back to Penn Station, and then hit up Katharine's 4th of July party in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were thronged and a light rain was falling. I kind of stumbled around, dazed from loneliness and low blood sugar, making a low and dolorous sound to anyone who'd listen. After I got some food in me, though, I felt a lot better. The party lasted until after 3:00 AM, and instead of cleaning the place up, we all piled into a Carecibo van and headed to our respective homes, Katharine making drunken pleas to Tom H. for a pizza bagel.
The next day, to console myself, I stopped by the Brooklyn Museum to check out the Takashi Murakami show. The paintings were wonderful, if a little overwhelming, but the curation was a disaster. I guess I'm really talking about those placards of "helpful analysis" they put up next to all of the paintings in their featured shows. So Murakami's got this little guy he likes to put in his paintings, a Mickey-Mouse-with-teeth thing called D.O.B. The sense I get is that he's Murakami's trademark doodle, like Razor's "guy" or Neck Face's little bat thing. He's usually got a 'D' on one ear and a 'B' on the other. On a card next to one of the portraits of D.O.B., a museum staffer had helpfully explained that you could view the white oval of D.O.B.'s face as the 'O' in his name. "What other parts of D.O.B. could form the 'O'?" the placard asked. (I don't know, his butthole?) Maybe there's too much cultural overhead to get across when you're trying to guide a mainstream audience through a show like this, but I'm beginning to think the 'Museum doesn't understand modern art. Or maybe it's just that they don't understand irony: Right after a roomful of cheeky, inscrutable Louis Vuitton promotional-but-maybe-not artwork, they'd set up -- I shit you not -- a kiosk where you could actually buy fucking purses from genuine, stone-faced Louis Vuitton staff assholes. It was on a par with the ridiculous, missing-the-point postcards they were pushing in the gift shop during the feminist art show earlier this year. Eve knows what I'm talking about.
A week of summer music:
The night before Nina left we went to Hiro to see the Prefuse 73 / Anti-Pop Consortium show at the Hiro Ballroom. Devoted readers will know that I'm not super into techno music, but I was happy to put that aside since it was her first and only opportunity to do fun summer stuff. Unfortunately, the club was awful, packed with goateed techno douchebags, and the music bordered on unlistenable -- Prefuse 73 was doing this really cacophonous, arhythmic set that put my teeth on edge. He was working with another DJ, a lanky nerd who turned out to be a real dickshit: At one point, a member of the audience, presumably finding the performance as tedious as I was, typed something on his Blackberry and leaned into the adjunct DJ's line of sight, holding it out for him to read. The DJ snatched the Blackberry out of the guy's hand and kind of played keep-away with it for a second before tossing it back into the crowd, hard. "Go home, get out of here," he said. "Seriously." He kept doing DJ stuff for a while and then turned back to the mic. "Or go to a strip club. If you want 'music to get the girls to dance.'" Right, because if you want to hear your guy play his hit songs -- the ones that sound good, say -- you're some kind of philistine. Not like, say, some pretentious creep who "plays" music by twiddling knobs on a computer with a faux-serious look on his face.
Fortunately, Anti-Pop Consortium was great; those guys are full of energy! As M. Sayyid kept reminding everyone (in between exhorting "New York" to "make some noise"), it was Beans' birthday. Beans didn't say too much himself, but he got his rap on, with a strange and delightful gurgled delivery, like a toddler with a sinus infection flipping you shit.
On Wednesday it was the birthday of Nina's brother's friend Adam, who's a swell guy. He'd been planning to have a traditional kind of birthday party at his house, but then he found out that Green Jellÿ (nee Jellö) was playing the Gramercy that night, so he canceled his party and told everyone to hit up the show. I hadn't heard them since a brief infatuation with them when I was 13, and even then I'd been kind of puzzled by their aesthetic: The singing was really gruff and rife with cuss words, but the lyrics also seemed to also have a fairly earnest preoccupation with nursery rhymes and children's television, kind of like Ricky Gervais telling all those jokes about Humpty Dumpty. But they had a reputation for putting on an exciting show, and it was for a good cause (birfday), so I swung by after work.
The thing was, the show was practically empty! Well, not empty, but there were maybe, like 100 people there, tops. Green Jellÿ was on stage when I got there, doing their thing, stomping around on stage in a motley assortment of papier-mache and foam costumes, most of which had floppy, oversized heads. Pretty much all of the songs they performed included an aspect of pageantry, although for the most part it had this tame, patchwork quality to it, as if they were kids choreographing a Disney-on-ice show using spare materials they found in the prop closet, and then wrote the songs around the assemblages they'd come up with. And the costumes seemed to be pretty well-traveled, the foam wrinkled and sweat-stained, the googly-eyes hanging on by a few threads; in fact, a lot of the "dancing" involved the dancer's hands up by the costume's head or in its mouth, presumably a clandestine strategy to keep the head from detaching.
Because of all the dressing-up and -down, it was sort of hard to tell who the actual, you know, principals were, but as near as I can figure, they were: Bill Manspeaker, the lead singer / growler, an enormous baldoon with a Neanderthal brow and incongruously long eyelashes, pink and hairless, kind of like a version of G.G. Allin you'd let babysit your kids; and... well, that's it, really. I can't figure out whether any of the other dudes on stage were actually real members of the band and not touring musicians. A guy from a bad called Rosemary's Billygoat was doing backup vocals, and the bassist, guitar player, and drummer all reeked of being second-string players. It was at least partly a family act: During a pause towards the end of the show, Bill suddenly roared, "Where's my son?!"
A waifish tween boy appeared from backstage and boosted himself up onto one of the amps. I hadn't seen him without a giant foam mask on yet and had assumed he was just a short lady performer.
"I took my son to see GWAR last summer for his birthday," explained Bill, panting. "He said, 'Dad, next summer for my birthday, can we go on tour?' ...It's all for you, Damien! This is all for you!"
This is not to say that it wasn't a good show -- in fact, it was pretty darn good. At one point, Bill, complaining about the barricade in front of the stage, climbed over it and onto one of the merch tables, which he repurposed as a miniature stage in the middle of the pit. As they played through what was arguably their most popular song, "The Three Little Pigs," the crowd lifted the table with Bill standing on top of it, into the air. He maintained his balance throughout. Hell, he didn't even sound nervous as he snarled his way through six or seven choruses of "huffin'-and-a'puffin'-and-I'll-blow-your-house-in."
And when the band discovered it was Adam's birthday (we were wearing party hats and beads), he became the belle of the ball -- and the de facto nominee for all of their audience participation bits. In particular, he was selected to wear the "Shitman" costume on stage for the performance of the song "The Misadventures Of Shitman." The thing was like a mountainous accretion of brown fun foam, leaving Adam little to do but rock on his heels and flap his arms as the band played around him. "That costume smells like shit," he confided to me after they let him offstage.
In total they played for more than two hours, literally until the staff at the Gramercy shut them down. As they exited the stage, they started hawking this exclusive 4-disc video collection that apparently contained every piece of media ever created by or about the band. Mike and I got together and bought it for Adam; Mike went around and managed to get it signed by everyone in the band -- even Damien!
Summer is proceeding apace: Libby and Kojo and I hit up Summerscreen to see Wet Hot American Summer on Tuesday. The place was packed, more crowded than I've ever seen it -- the only way we could see the screen was by scrunching ourselves up against the railing on the upper level. I've still got a crick in my neck.
Missed Brazilian Girls at the Prospect Park bandshell on Friday because I was in the basement of Cake Shop checking out a British band called Cut Off Your Hands. The stuff on their MySpace sounded pretty good to me, and their lead singer was appealing enough, in a George-McFly-meets-Julian-Casablancas kind of way, but for some reason their live set failed to pop. The audience seemed to agree; the band ditched out on a finale after someone hollered, "The Smiths called -- they want that last song back!" He wasn't far off the mark.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Pussy Monster
My sister Caroline graduated from Bronx High School of Science last week. They had a big (700 kids or sommat) ceremony that mom and dad and I went to over at Avery Fisher Hall, and Ira Glass gave the commencement speech. Don't be afraid to do something besides what your parents want you to do, he said, but be sensitive to the fact that this may hurt their feelings. The principal of Bronx Science gave several mini-speeches, mentioning in all of them how many doors the Bronx Science name would open for its graduates, which left me a little cold. "That woman," my mom whispered to me, "is a real bitch." All in all, though, the whole thing, with people waxing earnest about the joys of book learnin' and achievement, made me kind of wistful and wish I'd, you know, engaged a bit more in high school. But Caroline looked like she was having a fun time, and after the ceremony, she headed off to do fun things with her graduated peers.
Over dinner for Fathers Day at Jane, she told me she'd gone to a Lil' Wayne concert, thus further demonstrating that she is way cooler than I ever was. "He's really weird and kind of scary on stage," she said. "He wears all these chains and he's covered in tattoos. And there's this song he does that's not an any album called 'The Pussy Monster.' It's not even a song, it's just him whispering into the microphone. Look it up on YouTube."
I did. Here it is.
On a related note, Nina and I were woken up last weekend by at 2:30 AM by someone outside playing a song, super loud, on their car stereo, called "Money Make Me Come" (by Rick Ross -- I looked it up the next morning based on my recollection of the lyrics:
The next morning we headed down to Coney Island to see the Mermaid Parade. Nina'd been before, but I hadn't, and I guess I was kind of expecting a real bacchanal. It turned out to be pretty tame. Sure, there were some titties out, and the amount of greasepaint and sequins some of the paraders were wearing was impressive considering the heat, but the majority of costumes were underwhelming -- eyepatches and bandanas ruled the day. So after a few minutes of gawking, we took a turn onto Ocean Av. and went to go check out the Aquarium.
You may not know this, babies, but the summer after 10th grade, I worked the shark tank down there on weekdays in order to satisfy the Brick Prison's community service requirements. It was actually a pretty blissful experience -- light years better than having to schlep meals to loathsome, racist senior citizens, e.g., which was one of the other jobs I tried briefly -- usually just me in the damp, cool darkness of the shark enclosure, watching the beasts swim by oblivious to me. Occasionally a troop of camp kids (developmentally disabled, more often than not) would march in and I'd give them a spiel of trivia ("Did you know there are sharks swimming around right now off the coast of Coney Island?"), but mostly I could just sit and read by the unearthly light of the water. My favorite part of the job, though, was manning the "touch tank," which I got to a couple times a week, because you got to get all up in the grilles of some horseshoe crabs. Those things are weird.
So Nina and I visited the shark tank, which clearly hadn't seen any renovation in the last decade -- same pieces missing from the sort-of-pathetic mechanical-interactive displays mounted on the slatted wooden walls. And then we ate some sort of gross museum food (the fish-and-chips called to mind the winners of the "Darkest Fish" awards) and visited this fancy new jellyfish exhibit they've got set up.
The real highlight, though, was what we saw on the way out -- the been a baby walrus born the summer before, and the aquarium was still hyping it (possibly on account of both the parents having been raised entirely in captivity). The thing was still pretty much a baby. It was a warm afternoon -- close to closing time -- and it and its mother were sort of spooning on a flat rock in their little enclosure, both of them amorphous and glossy and cafe-au-lait-colored. In the adjacent areas, a couple of penguins got chased around the rocks by an ornery seagull and an otter did some anxious-looking somersaults, but we were transfixed by the two whiskered, slumbering blobs. Over some rocks to the right, the father walrus was also sleeping, but alone and fitfully, tossing around and kind of rubbing at his face with his flippers as if swatting away flies. "Wake up!" a little kid kept hollering at him, but he didn't stir. We left and took a walk on the beach, down to the freezing water. A few mermaids with stamina were still milling around outside Ruby's (which seemed to have recovered quickly from its little problem with collapsing bathrooms).
The next day, we read on Gothamist that the dad walrus had died that night! No joke -- apparently he'd been suffering from a serious and unexpected bacterial infection for the preceding week. His fussing over his face could have been some kind of death agony, and we couldn't tell! Mayhap Nina and I were some of the last to see Ayveq The Masturbating Walrus alive.
More news: Nina's going to the Brazilian rain forest for a month at the end of next week. She'd been planning to do some kind of study-abroad program this summer through this environmental program at Columbia called CERC that does a bunch of different projects at a number of locations around the world, and what ended up working the best, date-wise, was going to the fuckin' jungle. (I think it's also definitely the coolest option.) She's been buying gear for her trip and fretting over tropical diseases for the past month. I think it's going to be swell, although just between you and me, hogosphere, the rain forest does sound a little a-scary.
I'm going to be joining her in the middle of August, though, for a week of post-rain forest chillaxing in Buenos Aires. I'm a little anxious, to be honest, even though it's not my first trip off-continent -- it'll be the longest non-stop flight I've ever taken, and have you looked at a map of Argentina? It's practically the fucking south pole! Does it feel different down there, like you're going to fall off the world? Nonetheless, people live there, I'm told, and apparently Buenos Aires has the highest concentration of psychiatrists in the world (more than New York? Really?), so I'm sure I'll make it out in one piece. I've already had my shots (hepatitis and typhoid) over at the travel medicine clinic in Hell's Kitchen. I asked the doctor administering them if I should get the yellow fever one, too, in case Nina'd been exposed before meeting up with me. "No," he said, in an accent that actually sounded kind of Argentinian. "Is not possible to get yellow fever from another person. But your girlfriend, she got the vaccine, yes? Yellow fever is quite serious."
"It's one of the hemorrhagic fevers," I said, "right?"
"Yes," he said. "There are many hemorrhagic fevers: Dengue, yellow fever; Marburg and Ebola, of course; and Kyasanur [Forest disease]."
More on that as it develops.
Last night after work Peter and I went to The Annex to see Freezepop, who were playing with a bunch of bands I'd never heard of. That's always confused me about Freezepop -- how do they land really catchy songs in two (or is it three) smash hit rock and roll video games but still manage to not be popular or successful? I mean, you know, The Annex, for fuck's sake. Here's why: They're not that great a band. The lady can't really sing, and she looks like Elaine Benes when she's bopping around on stage; maybe the two dudes can play their instruments really well, but it's sort of hard to tell, because the instruments are toys. "They're just playing with toys on stage," I whispered to Peter. "Is what he's doing on that keyboard hard?"
"No," said Peter. "Not particularly."
Still, the crowd was really enthusiastic (except for a few cynics by the bar who kept hollering at them to end their set) and they do have some pretty exciting songs that can't be spoiled by giggly, indistinct vocals.
Today I decided I was finally going to make it to a Titus Andronicus show -- I'd been meaning to see them for months now, but something always got in the way of me getting to their shows. They were scheduled to play two shows today, though, one in the evening at some place deep in North Brooklyn that I wasn't even tryin' to go to, but one in the middle of the afternoon at tis amphitheater in East River Park, which I hadn't ever been to. The organization sponsoring the event, the East River Music Project, wouldn't tell me where the place was, but a hasty googling revealed it to be near Grand St. and the FDR Drive, so I grabbed my laptop (something to do on the train) and headed into the city. It was a significant hike from the station to the East River, and when I got to the footbridge over the FDR, I couldn't see any thing resembling an amphitheater anywhere in sight. Since there were some industrial-looking buildings directly to the south, I decided to hoof it north towards the greener-looking bits, but after about twenty minutes of walking past ballfield after ballfield, I realized I had no idea where the place was. Plus, I reasoned, the show was probably over and the humidity was making me feel kind of sick; best to head back to the train. As I walked back to Grand, a light rain started to fall, which was nice. When I got back to the bridge, though, I heard the sounds of electric guitar -- it turns out the amphitheater was a block south of where I'd started from, just over the crest of a small, dome-obscuring hill.
The assembled crowd was sort of sparse, but Titus Andronicus were on stage and rocking out. I think I'd missed most of their set. It was starting to rain harder, and some of the less hardcore audience members were shuffling into the cover of the trees. "So, uh, how much do you guys hate this?" asked Liam Betson (who looks a lot like Evan Harper). "'Cuz we were gonna do two more, but it could be, like, one short one and one medium one, or, uh, two short ones." Applause and clapping, unclear for which option. They launched into their signature, eponymous song. Liam sings (and plays harmonica) while holding a cigarette, which is pretty neat. Towards the end of the song, he climbs one of the amp stacks, which is covered in a slippery-wet blue tarp, and leaps back onto the stage, a move befitting a crowd of more than, you know, fifty. They sound awesome, even in the rain! ...Which was becoming more of a serious storm at that point. I stowed my laptop bag under a bench. After the song, it became clear that they couldn't keep going -- some of the equipment was getting a real soaking -- so they pretty much wound it up right then.
I left, tucking my laptop into my t-shirt, with the remaining audience as it began to really pour. To no avail, I searched for an awning of any substance among the housing projects near the park. Ultimately I wound up cowering in front of a grocery store called Fine Fare with about a dozen other people, hipsters and not. The store gave me some plastic bags to wrap my shit up in, but the water was really coming down -- to the extent that when I tried to hoof it to the next island of dryness, I couldn't tell which way I was going and accidentally headed back in the direction of the park! My clothes also got completely saturated -- like, they literally couldn't absorb more water I was so wet. A nice old lady let me into the lobby of her building where I called Eve, who I'd sort of originally planned to meet, and strategized. She gave me the number of a car service, but, maybe predictably, five minutes after I got off the phone with her, the storm abated entirely and the sun came out again, leaving the pavement steaming.
I stopped at Doughnut Plant on the way back to the train for some lavender donuts, a taste for which was imparted to me by Nina. "Fap, fap, fap," she said just now. "That should be your last line."
Fap, fap, fap.
Over dinner for Fathers Day at Jane, she told me she'd gone to a Lil' Wayne concert, thus further demonstrating that she is way cooler than I ever was. "He's really weird and kind of scary on stage," she said. "He wears all these chains and he's covered in tattoos. And there's this song he does that's not an any album called 'The Pussy Monster.' It's not even a song, it's just him whispering into the microphone. Look it up on YouTube."
I did. Here it is.
On a related note, Nina and I were woken up last weekend by at 2:30 AM by someone outside playing a song, super loud, on their car stereo, called "Money Make Me Come" (by Rick Ross -- I looked it up the next morning based on my recollection of the lyrics:
I needs a real bitch). That happens fairly frequently on my block, for some reason -- I fall asleep to the murmurings of the kids on the stoop downstairs and then at just the wrong hour of morning someone'll just really crank the Soulja Boy, waking me (and everyone else on the block, I'm guessing) up startled and annoyed. And it's usually just one, song mind you, as if the rest of album can be enjoyed at normal volume, but this single, man, this one's got to go to eleven.
365
Let her count the cheese
Let her see the pies
The next morning we headed down to Coney Island to see the Mermaid Parade. Nina'd been before, but I hadn't, and I guess I was kind of expecting a real bacchanal. It turned out to be pretty tame. Sure, there were some titties out, and the amount of greasepaint and sequins some of the paraders were wearing was impressive considering the heat, but the majority of costumes were underwhelming -- eyepatches and bandanas ruled the day. So after a few minutes of gawking, we took a turn onto Ocean Av. and went to go check out the Aquarium.
You may not know this, babies, but the summer after 10th grade, I worked the shark tank down there on weekdays in order to satisfy the Brick Prison's community service requirements. It was actually a pretty blissful experience -- light years better than having to schlep meals to loathsome, racist senior citizens, e.g., which was one of the other jobs I tried briefly -- usually just me in the damp, cool darkness of the shark enclosure, watching the beasts swim by oblivious to me. Occasionally a troop of camp kids (developmentally disabled, more often than not) would march in and I'd give them a spiel of trivia ("Did you know there are sharks swimming around right now off the coast of Coney Island?"), but mostly I could just sit and read by the unearthly light of the water. My favorite part of the job, though, was manning the "touch tank," which I got to a couple times a week, because you got to get all up in the grilles of some horseshoe crabs. Those things are weird.
So Nina and I visited the shark tank, which clearly hadn't seen any renovation in the last decade -- same pieces missing from the sort-of-pathetic mechanical-interactive displays mounted on the slatted wooden walls. And then we ate some sort of gross museum food (the fish-and-chips called to mind the winners of the "Darkest Fish" awards) and visited this fancy new jellyfish exhibit they've got set up.
The real highlight, though, was what we saw on the way out -- the been a baby walrus born the summer before, and the aquarium was still hyping it (possibly on account of both the parents having been raised entirely in captivity). The thing was still pretty much a baby. It was a warm afternoon -- close to closing time -- and it and its mother were sort of spooning on a flat rock in their little enclosure, both of them amorphous and glossy and cafe-au-lait-colored. In the adjacent areas, a couple of penguins got chased around the rocks by an ornery seagull and an otter did some anxious-looking somersaults, but we were transfixed by the two whiskered, slumbering blobs. Over some rocks to the right, the father walrus was also sleeping, but alone and fitfully, tossing around and kind of rubbing at his face with his flippers as if swatting away flies. "Wake up!" a little kid kept hollering at him, but he didn't stir. We left and took a walk on the beach, down to the freezing water. A few mermaids with stamina were still milling around outside Ruby's (which seemed to have recovered quickly from its little problem with collapsing bathrooms).
The next day, we read on Gothamist that the dad walrus had died that night! No joke -- apparently he'd been suffering from a serious and unexpected bacterial infection for the preceding week. His fussing over his face could have been some kind of death agony, and we couldn't tell! Mayhap Nina and I were some of the last to see Ayveq The Masturbating Walrus alive.
More news: Nina's going to the Brazilian rain forest for a month at the end of next week. She'd been planning to do some kind of study-abroad program this summer through this environmental program at Columbia called CERC that does a bunch of different projects at a number of locations around the world, and what ended up working the best, date-wise, was going to the fuckin' jungle. (I think it's also definitely the coolest option.) She's been buying gear for her trip and fretting over tropical diseases for the past month. I think it's going to be swell, although just between you and me, hogosphere, the rain forest does sound a little a-scary.
I'm going to be joining her in the middle of August, though, for a week of post-rain forest chillaxing in Buenos Aires. I'm a little anxious, to be honest, even though it's not my first trip off-continent -- it'll be the longest non-stop flight I've ever taken, and have you looked at a map of Argentina? It's practically the fucking south pole! Does it feel different down there, like you're going to fall off the world? Nonetheless, people live there, I'm told, and apparently Buenos Aires has the highest concentration of psychiatrists in the world (more than New York? Really?), so I'm sure I'll make it out in one piece. I've already had my shots (hepatitis and typhoid) over at the travel medicine clinic in Hell's Kitchen. I asked the doctor administering them if I should get the yellow fever one, too, in case Nina'd been exposed before meeting up with me. "No," he said, in an accent that actually sounded kind of Argentinian. "Is not possible to get yellow fever from another person. But your girlfriend, she got the vaccine, yes? Yellow fever is quite serious."
"It's one of the hemorrhagic fevers," I said, "right?"
"Yes," he said. "There are many hemorrhagic fevers: Dengue, yellow fever; Marburg and Ebola, of course; and Kyasanur [Forest disease]."
More on that as it develops.
Last night after work Peter and I went to The Annex to see Freezepop, who were playing with a bunch of bands I'd never heard of. That's always confused me about Freezepop -- how do they land really catchy songs in two (or is it three) smash hit rock and roll video games but still manage to not be popular or successful? I mean, you know, The Annex, for fuck's sake. Here's why: They're not that great a band. The lady can't really sing, and she looks like Elaine Benes when she's bopping around on stage; maybe the two dudes can play their instruments really well, but it's sort of hard to tell, because the instruments are toys. "They're just playing with toys on stage," I whispered to Peter. "Is what he's doing on that keyboard hard?"
"No," said Peter. "Not particularly."
Still, the crowd was really enthusiastic (except for a few cynics by the bar who kept hollering at them to end their set) and they do have some pretty exciting songs that can't be spoiled by giggly, indistinct vocals.
Today I decided I was finally going to make it to a Titus Andronicus show -- I'd been meaning to see them for months now, but something always got in the way of me getting to their shows. They were scheduled to play two shows today, though, one in the evening at some place deep in North Brooklyn that I wasn't even tryin' to go to, but one in the middle of the afternoon at tis amphitheater in East River Park, which I hadn't ever been to. The organization sponsoring the event, the East River Music Project, wouldn't tell me where the place was, but a hasty googling revealed it to be near Grand St. and the FDR Drive, so I grabbed my laptop (something to do on the train) and headed into the city. It was a significant hike from the station to the East River, and when I got to the footbridge over the FDR, I couldn't see any thing resembling an amphitheater anywhere in sight. Since there were some industrial-looking buildings directly to the south, I decided to hoof it north towards the greener-looking bits, but after about twenty minutes of walking past ballfield after ballfield, I realized I had no idea where the place was. Plus, I reasoned, the show was probably over and the humidity was making me feel kind of sick; best to head back to the train. As I walked back to Grand, a light rain started to fall, which was nice. When I got back to the bridge, though, I heard the sounds of electric guitar -- it turns out the amphitheater was a block south of where I'd started from, just over the crest of a small, dome-obscuring hill.
The assembled crowd was sort of sparse, but Titus Andronicus were on stage and rocking out. I think I'd missed most of their set. It was starting to rain harder, and some of the less hardcore audience members were shuffling into the cover of the trees. "So, uh, how much do you guys hate this?" asked Liam Betson (who looks a lot like Evan Harper). "'Cuz we were gonna do two more, but it could be, like, one short one and one medium one, or, uh, two short ones." Applause and clapping, unclear for which option. They launched into their signature, eponymous song. Liam sings (and plays harmonica) while holding a cigarette, which is pretty neat. Towards the end of the song, he climbs one of the amp stacks, which is covered in a slippery-wet blue tarp, and leaps back onto the stage, a move befitting a crowd of more than, you know, fifty. They sound awesome, even in the rain! ...Which was becoming more of a serious storm at that point. I stowed my laptop bag under a bench. After the song, it became clear that they couldn't keep going -- some of the equipment was getting a real soaking -- so they pretty much wound it up right then.
I left, tucking my laptop into my t-shirt, with the remaining audience as it began to really pour. To no avail, I searched for an awning of any substance among the housing projects near the park. Ultimately I wound up cowering in front of a grocery store called Fine Fare with about a dozen other people, hipsters and not. The store gave me some plastic bags to wrap my shit up in, but the water was really coming down -- to the extent that when I tried to hoof it to the next island of dryness, I couldn't tell which way I was going and accidentally headed back in the direction of the park! My clothes also got completely saturated -- like, they literally couldn't absorb more water I was so wet. A nice old lady let me into the lobby of her building where I called Eve, who I'd sort of originally planned to meet, and strategized. She gave me the number of a car service, but, maybe predictably, five minutes after I got off the phone with her, the storm abated entirely and the sun came out again, leaving the pavement steaming.
I stopped at Doughnut Plant on the way back to the train for some lavender donuts, a taste for which was imparted to me by Nina. "Fap, fap, fap," she said just now. "That should be your last line."
Fap, fap, fap.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
The Wedding of Razor Lopez
Like I've been saying. it's been crunch time at work. We had a big thing that was due on Monday, and we'd been working on it around the clock (literally, at times). Peter stayed in the office all night Wednesday to Thursday and promptly got sick; the testers woke me up at 4:00 AM Thursday morning to fix something. It was nuts. And Billy's wedding, with the accompanying bachelor party and rehearsal, was this week, too.
To be honest, I was kind of dreading it. I hadn't seen Billy in probably more than a year -- we kept making plans to hang out, have a beer, catch up, but they kept getting derailed. Given that he'd named me one of his groomsmen, I figured we'd need to sit down at least once before the thing, but apparently his job was crazy, too, so we'd had to just leave it that we'd see each other at the bachelor party.
I was pretty worried about that, too. I'd only ever been involved with one bachelor party, which I'd "thrown" for Joel when his best man punked out. We ended up going out for dinner with his wife-to-be at a Mexican place near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The waitress gave me her phone number, which felt like a lot of responsibility, and then we went to go see some movies on a factory roof. Pleasant enough, but pretty tame. So when Bobby sent out the email, I suggested we go see a show. It was all I knew how to do.
"Have you ever heard of him going to a rock concert?" Bobby replied. Chris said, "My guess is that Billy would prefer the strippers." I was overruled. And I'd never been to a strip club. What if I didn't like it -- what if it was really depressing and I didn't like any of the girls? What if the girls could tell I was frightened and they got angry? With some trepidation, I got the name of a place from Joel -- he'd actually treated his no-show best man to a rager when that guy'd gotten married. "It's nice," Joel said. "The girls are young, blond, Brighton Beach types." Bobby made a reservation at a steakhouse down by the seaport where Billy works, and we all went out to dinner there first. We ordered a steak-for-four platter that brought a whole pile of sizzling, hissing cow to our table. I don't think I've ever eaten that much meat! Well, probably. I don't know. We drank a bunch of Jameson, neat. And after dinner we smoked cigars out on some benches on Water St.
I guess I'm not supposed to say what happened at the strip joint? Don't know how this works. Nobody did anything bad. It was actually really nice -- they've really figured out a bunch of subtle things that make a titty bar an order of magnitude better than, you know, a regular drinking place you go to with dudes. The temperature is just so, the waitresses were extra sweet and friendly, and, you know, asses and titties everywhere. And the girls are soaked in this perfume that should be nauseating, but is somehow not. That's not to say there weren't some creepy components to the experience: A couple of fat guys sitting across the T-shaped catwalk from us were monopolizing several of the dancers at once, slipping them hundreds and hundreds of sweaty dollars to buy their way up the lap dance hierarchy to allowed-to-touch-a-stripper's-lower-back. Chris overheard a snippet of conversation in the bathroom that sort of captures up the vibe that these dudes were putting out:
There was a really intense dude sitting at the head of the catwalk who looked a lot like Michael Musto. He was putting singles in practically every dancer's thong. I pointed him out to Bobby. "That's probably not Michael Musto," he said.
The next morning I got up and emptied six Amstel Lights out of my butt into the toilet. That evening there was a rehearsal for the wedding up at St. Mary's in Harlem. Billy's wife-to-be, Sarah, is the daughter of the rector -- the church is their house, really, so there's no way they weren't having the ceremony there. Sarah's dad, Earl, is incredibly friendly (and a dead ringer for Father Damien Karras). His requests for the ceremony were simple and few: That we say "and also with you" and "amen" at the right moments, and stand or sit as the proceedings called for it. No problem. Then we drank beer out in the courtyard.
The wedding went off the next day without a hitch -- except that Billy and Sarah's dog, Job, who'd been tasked with carrying the ring-basket down the aisle got predictably distracted by the assembled well-wishers and shrugged off his duty about half way through. There were some religious-y parts of the ceremony, Rev. Earl being, you know, a priest, but they were tempered by another church officiant giving a little speech, intended to assuage the fears of the less spiritual guests, to the effect that marriage is for sex and that religion is all about fucking. At the beginning of the wedding, Earl asked Chris to ring the church bell. "Ring it three times three, with a pause in between, and then nine times slowly." Chris initially balked, afraid he'd fuck it up and expose himself as a sloptard in the hands of an angry god, but after some coaxing, he rang it with gusto, pulling down with all his might like some kind of louche hunchback.
On Saturday after the wedding I headed back into the office. We all worked on Sunday, too.
On Sunday night, Matthew and I took a walk around the neighborhood to scrounge up food. The heat was stifling, but suffering it felt good. We got some Cuban sandwiches at Cafe Havana on 8th Ave. and went back up to the office. When I bit into mine, I managed to stab a sharp piece of the bread into the soft, tendon-y stuff under my tongue. It hurt like a motherfucker, and I must have cut something open down there, because within minutes all these little nubbins under my tongue swelled up, pushing my tongue up towards the roof my mouth. When I went to look at the affair in the bathroom mirror, it looked like a small, sublingual udder. Rattled and stinging, I sat back down at my desk and kept going.
We managed to finish almost everything we wanted to for Monday, but I'm still getting used to the feeling of having a life again. The air conditioner in the office broke at some point timed to coincide with the uncannily early June heatwave. Sweat.
The heat wave broke today after work, an angry, pre-storm wind throwing trash and leaves through the air across 4th Ave. I snuck in the door just ahead of the downpour.
To be honest, I was kind of dreading it. I hadn't seen Billy in probably more than a year -- we kept making plans to hang out, have a beer, catch up, but they kept getting derailed. Given that he'd named me one of his groomsmen, I figured we'd need to sit down at least once before the thing, but apparently his job was crazy, too, so we'd had to just leave it that we'd see each other at the bachelor party.
I was pretty worried about that, too. I'd only ever been involved with one bachelor party, which I'd "thrown" for Joel when his best man punked out. We ended up going out for dinner with his wife-to-be at a Mexican place near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The waitress gave me her phone number, which felt like a lot of responsibility, and then we went to go see some movies on a factory roof. Pleasant enough, but pretty tame. So when Bobby sent out the email, I suggested we go see a show. It was all I knew how to do.
"Have you ever heard of him going to a rock concert?" Bobby replied. Chris said, "My guess is that Billy would prefer the strippers." I was overruled. And I'd never been to a strip club. What if I didn't like it -- what if it was really depressing and I didn't like any of the girls? What if the girls could tell I was frightened and they got angry? With some trepidation, I got the name of a place from Joel -- he'd actually treated his no-show best man to a rager when that guy'd gotten married. "It's nice," Joel said. "The girls are young, blond, Brighton Beach types." Bobby made a reservation at a steakhouse down by the seaport where Billy works, and we all went out to dinner there first. We ordered a steak-for-four platter that brought a whole pile of sizzling, hissing cow to our table. I don't think I've ever eaten that much meat! Well, probably. I don't know. We drank a bunch of Jameson, neat. And after dinner we smoked cigars out on some benches on Water St.
I guess I'm not supposed to say what happened at the strip joint? Don't know how this works. Nobody did anything bad. It was actually really nice -- they've really figured out a bunch of subtle things that make a titty bar an order of magnitude better than, you know, a regular drinking place you go to with dudes. The temperature is just so, the waitresses were extra sweet and friendly, and, you know, asses and titties everywhere. And the girls are soaked in this perfume that should be nauseating, but is somehow not. That's not to say there weren't some creepy components to the experience: A couple of fat guys sitting across the T-shaped catwalk from us were monopolizing several of the dancers at once, slipping them hundreds and hundreds of sweaty dollars to buy their way up the lap dance hierarchy to allowed-to-touch-a-stripper's-lower-back. Chris overheard a snippet of conversation in the bathroom that sort of captures up the vibe that these dudes were putting out:
Guy 1: Man, I just spent $400 on lap dances. Sometimes I think I should just go find myself a girlfriend.Yeah, so we got a whole bunch of lap dances. That's pretty much the point, I think. Some of the girls were really good and really gave the impression that they liked you, but some weren't / didn't. I'm not going to lie, though -- at the end of the night, I was in Toki Wartooth-mode and was kind of fantasizing about coming back. It was a little weird. "How long does this last?" I asked Chris. "About a day," he said. He was right.
Guy 2: Yeah, but, man -- pussy: It's nothing but trouble.
There was a really intense dude sitting at the head of the catwalk who looked a lot like Michael Musto. He was putting singles in practically every dancer's thong. I pointed him out to Bobby. "That's probably not Michael Musto," he said.
The next morning I got up and emptied six Amstel Lights out of my butt into the toilet. That evening there was a rehearsal for the wedding up at St. Mary's in Harlem. Billy's wife-to-be, Sarah, is the daughter of the rector -- the church is their house, really, so there's no way they weren't having the ceremony there. Sarah's dad, Earl, is incredibly friendly (and a dead ringer for Father Damien Karras). His requests for the ceremony were simple and few: That we say "and also with you" and "amen" at the right moments, and stand or sit as the proceedings called for it. No problem. Then we drank beer out in the courtyard.
The wedding went off the next day without a hitch -- except that Billy and Sarah's dog, Job, who'd been tasked with carrying the ring-basket down the aisle got predictably distracted by the assembled well-wishers and shrugged off his duty about half way through. There were some religious-y parts of the ceremony, Rev. Earl being, you know, a priest, but they were tempered by another church officiant giving a little speech, intended to assuage the fears of the less spiritual guests, to the effect that marriage is for sex and that religion is all about fucking. At the beginning of the wedding, Earl asked Chris to ring the church bell. "Ring it three times three, with a pause in between, and then nine times slowly." Chris initially balked, afraid he'd fuck it up and expose himself as a sloptard in the hands of an angry god, but after some coaxing, he rang it with gusto, pulling down with all his might like some kind of louche hunchback.
On Saturday after the wedding I headed back into the office. We all worked on Sunday, too.
On Sunday night, Matthew and I took a walk around the neighborhood to scrounge up food. The heat was stifling, but suffering it felt good. We got some Cuban sandwiches at Cafe Havana on 8th Ave. and went back up to the office. When I bit into mine, I managed to stab a sharp piece of the bread into the soft, tendon-y stuff under my tongue. It hurt like a motherfucker, and I must have cut something open down there, because within minutes all these little nubbins under my tongue swelled up, pushing my tongue up towards the roof my mouth. When I went to look at the affair in the bathroom mirror, it looked like a small, sublingual udder. Rattled and stinging, I sat back down at my desk and kept going.
We managed to finish almost everything we wanted to for Monday, but I'm still getting used to the feeling of having a life again. The air conditioner in the office broke at some point timed to coincide with the uncannily early June heatwave. Sweat.
The heat wave broke today after work, an angry, pre-storm wind throwing trash and leaves through the air across 4th Ave. I snuck in the door just ahead of the downpour.
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