Well, the furlough turned, predictably enough, into the full-on dissolution of Rebel Monkey (on my birthday, no less). I won't speak to the particulars, since some very important aspects of them are still being resolved. But, man, losing your job is really a drag. It's not like I don't have a full plate of projects to work on, but there's nothing like having all the time in the world to make you not feel like doing very much at all. And there's nothing like having a whole summer to do with what you will to make you not feel like going out and doing fun summer things. I was assisted in these exertions by Nina, who very sweetly bought me an Xbox 360 and a copy of Fallout 3 (which is surprisingly sad, and far too short) for my birthday.
Finding a job is a drag, too. But find one I did, shepherded by a team of recruiters (whose attentions are hard to get used to). So I have a new job now, and a new apartment, because we moved, and that was arduous and stressful, too. Maybe I'll write about that later. But I haven't posted anything here for three months, so this is me just clearing the slate.
Monday, September 07, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Furlough Tuesday
Okay, this rain shit has got to stop. It's making me moody and sluggish. It's been raining non-stop for like three fucking weeks! More, probably. I brought my lemon tree outside a couple of weeks ago, thinking it wasn't getting enough light / moisture, but now I'm worried it's gonna be washed away.
Spinnerette played Bowery Ballroom on Monday. Committed readers will know that I've been a fan of The Distillers since I first saw the video for "Drain The Blood" on MTV of all places while channel surfing at 680 Degraw. At the time I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard of a band as good as that. But I was like, fuck, this is great, I can get really into them and go see them live. And I did, once, right after they released their most commercial-sounding album and right before they broke up forever. That's just the way of things. So I was psyched when I heard Brody Dalle was putting a new band together, somewhat less psyched when I heard it was going to be a techno grime dance rock band, but then a little psyched again once I heard a couple of their singles last summer. An eponymous album has since come out. The Onion A.V. Club describes their sound as having "rubbery hooks," which, although it sounds like oblique music criticism jibberish, is oddly accurate -- the beats throb instead of, you know, beat; and the melodies have these eerie harmonies that defy being prized apart.
So I figured that when I saw them live, it'd be Brody and a bunch of keyboards. Not so -- they managed to produce a sound pretty comparable to the album using three guitars (Tony Bevilacqua, Brody, and some other dude), a bass, and a whole fuck of a lot of flange pedal. The real draw, of course, was Brody's voice, which was frighteningly good as usual, despite her claim that she'd been stricken with laryngitis. "They gave me a shot in the ass," she said. "So I could sing for you guys." ("With a cock?" someone in the audience hollered. "I wish," she said.) Also present were the hordes of tween girls (sans Courtney Love this time), hollering, pogo-ing, and doing that annoying dance where you kind of press your arms together above your head and just kind of sway, eyes closed -- the dance that, according to Dave Chappelle, all white people do when they hear guitar music. But, man. That voice. Whatever shot she got must've been a doozy, 'cuz she sounded pretty much perfect -- there's something in the sonic middle of that hoarse, ragged sound that hits the resonant frequency of your skull. They mostly played stuff off their album, including plenty of songs I hadn't heard before and which sounded a little rougher than their singles -- some of them kind of unfinished, even. Perhaps as a consequence of her illness, they didn't play any encores. I confess to a guilty desire to hear "Dismantle Me," but it was not to be.
Free summer rock and roll music continues apace. Startlingly, Jay Reatard played a set at this free concert series called Music On The Oval being sponsored by the idiots who bought Stuy Town. For those of you who didn't know (like me), the park in the center of the maze that is Stuy Town is called the oval, and, in an attempt to dampen the financial tailspin that they're in, Tishman Speyer has been setting up little pay-to-play premium areas, which they call "amenities," all kind of branded, uninspiringly, with the word "oval." There's OvalKids (a playpen for little Max Fishers, I guess), OvalLounge, OvalStudy, etc. So the powers that be booking Jay Reatard is entirely consistent with their history of making poor choices. Land grab? Billion-dollar boondoggle. Family music festival? Awkward performance by sweaty hair-punks.
It had rained the night before, and although it was a beautiful day the oval was pretty swampy: Nina lost a flip-flop to a sucking mud hole. There were toddlers and non-plussed-looking oldsters everywhere. An events coordinator with the demeanor of a kindergarten teacher introduced the band as "Jay Ree-a-tard," and the band played a short, tight set. I don't really know what to say about it -- those guys are great, and they played energetically, spinning their hair as they thrashed out their songs. Jay's between-song commentary (when there was any) showed he was not unaware of the contradictions inherent in the situation, and his set list included "Greed, Money, Useless Children." But it felt wrong, kind of like that scene in Spinal Tap where the 'Tap plays the Air Force base. Eve and Nina and I sat towards the back of the park and ate bagels and drank beer, which Eve loudly referred to as "soda" so as to thwart detection by Stuy Town security personnel on the prowl for open containers. You know, culture-jamming.
On the Bad News front, my employer has run into some cash flow issues -- the cash ain't flowing, and I'm on an enforced, unpaid two-week vacation. We're going to re-evaluate at the end of it. Things might clear up, or they might not. So, you know, I don't want to be premature here, but if you think you might need someone to engineer some software for you, I encourage you to look at my resume. To paraphrase Katt Williams, I love engineering software; engineering software is my shit. That's my shit.
Of course, all this free time has left me with plenty of time to hang out with friendos. KT threw an impressive dinner party at her new apartment on Saturday on the Upper West Side, which is more or less a studio but has an impressive view and a wonderful, maze-like entryway -- the building houses both commercial and residential units, and to get to the apartments, you have to go up several staircases and through a bunch of doors that don't look like you should be opening them. It reminds me of dreams I've had. And then Ted and Cat had a cook-out in the back yard of the ground floor unit in their posh Park Slope apartment (they're house-sitting). I showed up a little early and helped Ted whip up some Mexican-inflected Rick Bayless recipes: A tomatillo salsa type concoction (which caused a minor explosion in the food processor) and a spicy, quivering pork loin that we slow-cooked in the grill. Cat made these little individual strawberry shortcakes, which were crazy good.
Spinnerette played Bowery Ballroom on Monday. Committed readers will know that I've been a fan of The Distillers since I first saw the video for "Drain The Blood" on MTV of all places while channel surfing at 680 Degraw. At the time I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard of a band as good as that. But I was like, fuck, this is great, I can get really into them and go see them live. And I did, once, right after they released their most commercial-sounding album and right before they broke up forever. That's just the way of things. So I was psyched when I heard Brody Dalle was putting a new band together, somewhat less psyched when I heard it was going to be a techno grime dance rock band, but then a little psyched again once I heard a couple of their singles last summer. An eponymous album has since come out. The Onion A.V. Club describes their sound as having "rubbery hooks," which, although it sounds like oblique music criticism jibberish, is oddly accurate -- the beats throb instead of, you know, beat; and the melodies have these eerie harmonies that defy being prized apart.
So I figured that when I saw them live, it'd be Brody and a bunch of keyboards. Not so -- they managed to produce a sound pretty comparable to the album using three guitars (Tony Bevilacqua, Brody, and some other dude), a bass, and a whole fuck of a lot of flange pedal. The real draw, of course, was Brody's voice, which was frighteningly good as usual, despite her claim that she'd been stricken with laryngitis. "They gave me a shot in the ass," she said. "So I could sing for you guys." ("With a cock?" someone in the audience hollered. "I wish," she said.) Also present were the hordes of tween girls (sans Courtney Love this time), hollering, pogo-ing, and doing that annoying dance where you kind of press your arms together above your head and just kind of sway, eyes closed -- the dance that, according to Dave Chappelle, all white people do when they hear guitar music. But, man. That voice. Whatever shot she got must've been a doozy, 'cuz she sounded pretty much perfect -- there's something in the sonic middle of that hoarse, ragged sound that hits the resonant frequency of your skull. They mostly played stuff off their album, including plenty of songs I hadn't heard before and which sounded a little rougher than their singles -- some of them kind of unfinished, even. Perhaps as a consequence of her illness, they didn't play any encores. I confess to a guilty desire to hear "Dismantle Me," but it was not to be.
Free summer rock and roll music continues apace. Startlingly, Jay Reatard played a set at this free concert series called Music On The Oval being sponsored by the idiots who bought Stuy Town. For those of you who didn't know (like me), the park in the center of the maze that is Stuy Town is called the oval, and, in an attempt to dampen the financial tailspin that they're in, Tishman Speyer has been setting up little pay-to-play premium areas, which they call "amenities," all kind of branded, uninspiringly, with the word "oval." There's OvalKids (a playpen for little Max Fishers, I guess), OvalLounge, OvalStudy, etc. So the powers that be booking Jay Reatard is entirely consistent with their history of making poor choices. Land grab? Billion-dollar boondoggle. Family music festival? Awkward performance by sweaty hair-punks.
It had rained the night before, and although it was a beautiful day the oval was pretty swampy: Nina lost a flip-flop to a sucking mud hole. There were toddlers and non-plussed-looking oldsters everywhere. An events coordinator with the demeanor of a kindergarten teacher introduced the band as "Jay Ree-a-tard," and the band played a short, tight set. I don't really know what to say about it -- those guys are great, and they played energetically, spinning their hair as they thrashed out their songs. Jay's between-song commentary (when there was any) showed he was not unaware of the contradictions inherent in the situation, and his set list included "Greed, Money, Useless Children." But it felt wrong, kind of like that scene in Spinal Tap where the 'Tap plays the Air Force base. Eve and Nina and I sat towards the back of the park and ate bagels and drank beer, which Eve loudly referred to as "soda" so as to thwart detection by Stuy Town security personnel on the prowl for open containers. You know, culture-jamming.
On the Bad News front, my employer has run into some cash flow issues -- the cash ain't flowing, and I'm on an enforced, unpaid two-week vacation. We're going to re-evaluate at the end of it. Things might clear up, or they might not. So, you know, I don't want to be premature here, but if you think you might need someone to engineer some software for you, I encourage you to look at my resume. To paraphrase Katt Williams, I love engineering software; engineering software is my shit. That's my shit.
Of course, all this free time has left me with plenty of time to hang out with friendos. KT threw an impressive dinner party at her new apartment on Saturday on the Upper West Side, which is more or less a studio but has an impressive view and a wonderful, maze-like entryway -- the building houses both commercial and residential units, and to get to the apartments, you have to go up several staircases and through a bunch of doors that don't look like you should be opening them. It reminds me of dreams I've had. And then Ted and Cat had a cook-out in the back yard of the ground floor unit in their posh Park Slope apartment (they're house-sitting). I showed up a little early and helped Ted whip up some Mexican-inflected Rick Bayless recipes: A tomatillo salsa type concoction (which caused a minor explosion in the food processor) and a spicy, quivering pork loin that we slow-cooked in the grill. Cat made these little individual strawberry shortcakes, which were crazy good.
Monday, June 08, 2009
The Sexton's Mouse
Summer, I think? It's been inordinately rainy in June so far. Lightning wakes me up around 3:00 AM.
Otherwise, Sunset Park has been a dream. The barber shop on our block up towards 5th Ave. was gutted last year and turned into a mini-warehouse for Coco Helado guys to store their carts. And a month or so ago, somebody parked an ice cream truck in front of it with a "For Sale" sign on the back. I think it may be damaged goods since I've never seen it drive anywhere, but somebody's run an orange power line from the warehouse, draping it over some branches of a nearby tree (which the rainy weather has made green and leafy as fuck), and into one of the windows, where, presumably, it runs the freezer when its owners are operating it in stationary mode in the afternoons. The jingle the thing plays is La Cucaracha.
The second floor landing of our apartment building has had a nice, musky spice smell to it for several weeks now, like chili powder or curry or something. I thought it was great until Nina pointed out that bedbugs, in a population that's reached horrifyingly critical mass produce a smell that's ironically pleasant to humans. But then I looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out that smell is "raspberry," and this is definitely not raspberries, so now I think the second floor is great again.
Nina and I came home from helping her mom clean her apartment (in extended preparation for accommodating relatives visiting from Puglia) the other night to find the house in mild disarray (waste baskets knocked over, bedclothes tossed around) and no sign of Kitty to be found. After looking in the closets and under and behind everything we could think of, we finally found her in the bathroom curled up behind the toilet, in the nook behind the bowl under the the toilet, a torn plastic bag sealed firmly around her midsection. She likes to eat the fucking things, see, but one must have gotten the better of her.
Ever since Steve Merchant wrapped up The Steve Show a couple of months ago, I've been trying to be more active in my search for, as Smerch would call it, "new music." (This pretty much means I read the descriptions of bands on Oh My Rockness and then visit their Myspaces.) I recently became aware of a group called Kittens Ablaze that met my current criteria for contemporary indie rock music: Not folk, not techno. I hit up a show they played the last weekend of May at a venue I'd never heard of called The Flytrap -- which ended up being a two-story private house on Court St. right across the Gowanus Expressway. I almost didn't find it, but the sounds of rock music got me zeroed in. They'd set up a little ticket counter by the entryway, and then you walked down a long hallway to get to the back yard where the actual show was happening. It was a beautiful spot: The house was and yard were flanked by warehouses, so the yard made a kind of concrete box that somebody'd gone to the trouble of furnishing with hedges. There was what I guess you could call a shed towards the back where the bands were setting up, except it was sized and decorated like a miniature house. The most impressive feature, though, was the cascade of roses and what I think were climbing hydrangeas pouring over the northern wall and wrapping themselves around the wrought-iron staircase going up to the second floor, creating a flowery canopy over the stage.
The bands (and there were hours of 'em) were mostly of a single disposition: Jangly, earnest. Nonexistent production. A band called Turbotronics (whose members apparently contained tenants of the building) was releasing an album -- this was their release party -- but they ended up switching up the list so that they were opening for Kittens Ablaze. I'd never heard of them, but I was pleasantly surprised by their sound: Kind of synth-y, nasty guitar rock, with a snotty, "fuck it" attitude in the lyrics that reminded me of the Dickies or the Dead Kennedys. Their songs had names like "Taco Bell (Taco Hell)" and "Let's Do Some Yoga."
By the time Kittens Ablaze went on, I was almost too beat to dance -- I have to stop dragging my stupid laptop to shows just so I have something to do on the subway. They played a vigorous, orchestral set (didn't realize they've got both cello and violin players). Their songs are long but have a sustained urgency to them that got me dancing around. Someone kept firing these little champagne party poppers over the heads of the band, the sparks and confetti mixing with the flowers. Long songs but not very many of them (four, five, maybe?) -- after they finished, there were calls for an encore. "I don't think we have any other ones," said the cello player.
The following week, I went to Mercury Lounge to catch Art Brut for the fourth night of their week-long residency. They were great! I remember being fairly skeptical about them when Katharine played their first album for me a few years ago, but I've come around. Despite Eddie Argos' admonitions to the contrary, I did think his talk-singing was ironic -- or musically prickly enough that I was put off. But over the years I've been won over by his clever writing and the band's obvious enthusiasm (although I still don't know if the songs are, you know, hummable). Argos' flustered delivery combines amusingly with how tight the band is and how confidently he directs them. He's a mix of authoritarian and self-effacing -- it's like Martin Prince grew up and started fronting a punk rock band.
The opening act, Cymbals Eat Guitars, was awful: yet another lead singer without any charisma. And a hippie playing a keyboard. How does this keep happening?
Otherwise, Sunset Park has been a dream. The barber shop on our block up towards 5th Ave. was gutted last year and turned into a mini-warehouse for Coco Helado guys to store their carts. And a month or so ago, somebody parked an ice cream truck in front of it with a "For Sale" sign on the back. I think it may be damaged goods since I've never seen it drive anywhere, but somebody's run an orange power line from the warehouse, draping it over some branches of a nearby tree (which the rainy weather has made green and leafy as fuck), and into one of the windows, where, presumably, it runs the freezer when its owners are operating it in stationary mode in the afternoons. The jingle the thing plays is La Cucaracha.
The second floor landing of our apartment building has had a nice, musky spice smell to it for several weeks now, like chili powder or curry or something. I thought it was great until Nina pointed out that bedbugs, in a population that's reached horrifyingly critical mass produce a smell that's ironically pleasant to humans. But then I looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out that smell is "raspberry," and this is definitely not raspberries, so now I think the second floor is great again.
Nina and I came home from helping her mom clean her apartment (in extended preparation for accommodating relatives visiting from Puglia) the other night to find the house in mild disarray (waste baskets knocked over, bedclothes tossed around) and no sign of Kitty to be found. After looking in the closets and under and behind everything we could think of, we finally found her in the bathroom curled up behind the toilet, in the nook behind the bowl under the the toilet, a torn plastic bag sealed firmly around her midsection. She likes to eat the fucking things, see, but one must have gotten the better of her.
Ever since Steve Merchant wrapped up The Steve Show a couple of months ago, I've been trying to be more active in my search for, as Smerch would call it, "new music." (This pretty much means I read the descriptions of bands on Oh My Rockness and then visit their Myspaces.) I recently became aware of a group called Kittens Ablaze that met my current criteria for contemporary indie rock music: Not folk, not techno. I hit up a show they played the last weekend of May at a venue I'd never heard of called The Flytrap -- which ended up being a two-story private house on Court St. right across the Gowanus Expressway. I almost didn't find it, but the sounds of rock music got me zeroed in. They'd set up a little ticket counter by the entryway, and then you walked down a long hallway to get to the back yard where the actual show was happening. It was a beautiful spot: The house was and yard were flanked by warehouses, so the yard made a kind of concrete box that somebody'd gone to the trouble of furnishing with hedges. There was what I guess you could call a shed towards the back where the bands were setting up, except it was sized and decorated like a miniature house. The most impressive feature, though, was the cascade of roses and what I think were climbing hydrangeas pouring over the northern wall and wrapping themselves around the wrought-iron staircase going up to the second floor, creating a flowery canopy over the stage.
The bands (and there were hours of 'em) were mostly of a single disposition: Jangly, earnest. Nonexistent production. A band called Turbotronics (whose members apparently contained tenants of the building) was releasing an album -- this was their release party -- but they ended up switching up the list so that they were opening for Kittens Ablaze. I'd never heard of them, but I was pleasantly surprised by their sound: Kind of synth-y, nasty guitar rock, with a snotty, "fuck it" attitude in the lyrics that reminded me of the Dickies or the Dead Kennedys. Their songs had names like "Taco Bell (Taco Hell)" and "Let's Do Some Yoga."
By the time Kittens Ablaze went on, I was almost too beat to dance -- I have to stop dragging my stupid laptop to shows just so I have something to do on the subway. They played a vigorous, orchestral set (didn't realize they've got both cello and violin players). Their songs are long but have a sustained urgency to them that got me dancing around. Someone kept firing these little champagne party poppers over the heads of the band, the sparks and confetti mixing with the flowers. Long songs but not very many of them (four, five, maybe?) -- after they finished, there were calls for an encore. "I don't think we have any other ones," said the cello player.
The following week, I went to Mercury Lounge to catch Art Brut for the fourth night of their week-long residency. They were great! I remember being fairly skeptical about them when Katharine played their first album for me a few years ago, but I've come around. Despite Eddie Argos' admonitions to the contrary, I did think his talk-singing was ironic -- or musically prickly enough that I was put off. But over the years I've been won over by his clever writing and the band's obvious enthusiasm (although I still don't know if the songs are, you know, hummable). Argos' flustered delivery combines amusingly with how tight the band is and how confidently he directs them. He's a mix of authoritarian and self-effacing -- it's like Martin Prince grew up and started fronting a punk rock band.
The opening act, Cymbals Eat Guitars, was awful: yet another lead singer without any charisma. And a hippie playing a keyboard. How does this keep happening?
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Everything Thermal
Eve and I went to go see The Thermals play the Music Hall Of Williamsburg. I'd never been to the place, despite it having opened almost two years ago (and I'd never been to Northsix, either). I guess I'd forgotten that the place is owned by the same people who run Bowery Ballroom, but holy shit -- the layouts of those venues are totally fucking identical! Like, seriously, down to the shape of the bar in the basement, and the locations of the bathrooms.
The opening act was a band from Portland called The Shaky Hands, and they pretty much ate it -- no charm, the music had no hooks, and the front guy's between-song banter was so tentative and awkward that the sound man's jaw dropped visibly several times, an incredulous look on his face. Eve and I stood back by the board and talked. And it wasn't just us -- the stage area was pretty empty for the duration, and I would've been worried that the crowd wasn't going to reach, you know, critical mass, except for all the people milling around in the foyer and downstairs at the bar. But everyone showed up and got front and center for The Thermals, and they played an amazing set: tight, energetic, a really good mix of old and new songs. Hutch Harris was wearing a full suit, which he explained, cryptically, as being an artifact of his having been hanging out at the stock exchange all morning. That guy always reminds me a bit of Moloch from Watchmen; he's a great, sardonic counterpoint to Kathy Foster, who was also in top form, bopping her springy hair and trademark frilly collar all over the place and squeakily dismantling, as she always does, the weirdos in the crowd who wouldn't shut up: One guy kept yelling, "I love your zapatos!" "Zapatos?" She said. "Did you just learn that word?"
Here's a partial, out-of-order set list. I'm not enough of an expert on their catalog to recognize everything.
Katharine got married to Tom last weekend up on the Cape. I'd gotten them something from their registry and booked a room at A Beach Breeze Inn a while back, but I kind of slacked on planning the transportation for me and Nina: Instead of carpooling on Friday like everyone else, we hopped an afternoon Acela to Providence -- which was fine, except then we got stuck there for three hours waiting for a connecting Peter Pan and trying to ignore a noisy drunk who'd stolen a TV and a bunch of jewelry attempt to make away with his contraband on a Providence city bus. And then our bus missed its connection in Bourne and the bus company had to send an extra bus back to pick us up and take us to Falmouth. ...Except when it showed up, the driver said he was going too Woods Hole, and we were like, oh, that's not us. And so he almost left without us, but finally called out "Falmouth!" too. ...Which would've been great, except that when we got to Falmouth, it turned out that's not where we wanted to be at all. Whatever calculations I'd made had involved calculating the proximity of the bus stop to Falmouth (possibly because there is a similarly-named, competing hotel there), not West Harwich. I started calling cab companies, but when I told them where we were and where we were going, there was silence; and then they'd all say, "You're on the wrong side of the Cape!" So, we were, but we still needed to get 50 miles east, so I finally caved and went with the guy who said he'd get us there for $100. That was the best offer. Pam, the woman who ran A Beach Breeze had waited up and was very understanding. We were beat, but not too beat to order a pineapple-and-pepperoni Dominoes pizza and homph it down like orphans at a food rodeo.
Maggie and Cliff drove by in the morning, and hauled us over to a buffet-style breakfast-only place called The Egg And "I" (quotes included), where we were joined by Tom O., Greg, etc. Over plates of eggs and egg-like things (Devin ordered a cheesy horror called The Crow's Nest), we discussed Tom H.'s request (via Katharine) that we sing the proffered hymns at the wedding. "When we had to sing Latin hymns in my church growing up," Maggie said, "we couldn't pronounce the words, so we just sang 'pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin.'"
After breakfast we went over to a mini-golf course across the road from the Beach Breeze, and the nine of us split into two semi-competitive teams. The course was brutal, but it was really nice out -- so nice, in fact, that I totally didn't notice getting an actual sunburn on the back of my neck. We ate some moose tracks. And then the buses that Tom and Katharine and arranged for showed up and we had to get dressed up and go to the actual wedding. ...Which took place at the First Congregational Church in Chatham, which was very pretty and had a neat little churchyard with graves from hundreds of years ago. It was a short service. The bride and groom were sharply attired, and the minister was a dead ringer for Victor Garber. We sang the hymns as requested, although I sang "pumpking, pumpkin, pumpkin," and then felt guilty about it.
After that, the buses took us over Wychmere Harbor, the fancy country club where the reception was being held. The tables at the reception were named, I think, according to places that the newlyweds'd lived or visited; Nina and I were at one called Little Venice, wherever that is. We were sitting with Matt Carter, of whom I'm a fan, Mike Ettanani, some Scots, and a guy from Boston also named Mike. There was some initial awkward silence while we sipped our wines and stared at our plates. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mike from Boston reach over to the plate of beautifully-carved butter roses. I made eye contact with Matt. "No way," I thought. But, yeah -- he popped the rose into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, hard. Matt and I stared at him, awaiting his reaction. "These aren't white chocolate," he said finally. "Just so you know."
There were speeches and there was dancing: The British contingent acquitted themselves impressively, the kilted and the elderly among them kicking up their heels and doing rhythmic, atavistic dances to covers of "Jesse's Girl" and "Don't Stop Believin'." After it was all over, we piled back in the buses and, at Katharine's behest, headed over to a bar in Chatham called The Squire, which was packed full of Cape Cod, uh, off-season types. There was a band playing, deafeningly, somewhere out of sight. We found an out-of-the-way nook in which to drink our Pabsts and homph the custom-branded (complete with little black-and-white photo transfers) "Tom & Katharine" M&Ms that had been favors at the reception. At around 1:30, the bar closed, we got back on the buses and headed back to the hotel, where Nina and I conked the fuck out. We were exhausted! So much so that we missed brunch the next morning. Nani was nice enough to drive us back, though, which was a relief considering the trip up. And I got to DJ the ride on this neat satellite radio console he had in the car!
Minutiae:
The opening act was a band from Portland called The Shaky Hands, and they pretty much ate it -- no charm, the music had no hooks, and the front guy's between-song banter was so tentative and awkward that the sound man's jaw dropped visibly several times, an incredulous look on his face. Eve and I stood back by the board and talked. And it wasn't just us -- the stage area was pretty empty for the duration, and I would've been worried that the crowd wasn't going to reach, you know, critical mass, except for all the people milling around in the foyer and downstairs at the bar. But everyone showed up and got front and center for The Thermals, and they played an amazing set: tight, energetic, a really good mix of old and new songs. Hutch Harris was wearing a full suit, which he explained, cryptically, as being an artifact of his having been hanging out at the stock exchange all morning. That guy always reminds me a bit of Moloch from Watchmen; he's a great, sardonic counterpoint to Kathy Foster, who was also in top form, bopping her springy hair and trademark frilly collar all over the place and squeakily dismantling, as she always does, the weirdos in the crowd who wouldn't shut up: One guy kept yelling, "I love your zapatos!" "Zapatos?" She said. "Did you just learn that word?"
Here's a partial, out-of-order set list. I'm not enough of an expert on their catalog to recognize everything.
- I Let It Go
- Now We Can See
- I Called Out Your Name
- When I Was Afraid
- Here's Your Future
- A Pillar Of Salt
- Returning To The Fold
- Test Pattern
- St. Rosa and the Swallows
- I Hold The Sound
- How We Know
- No Culture Icons
- Everything Thermal
Katharine got married to Tom last weekend up on the Cape. I'd gotten them something from their registry and booked a room at A Beach Breeze Inn a while back, but I kind of slacked on planning the transportation for me and Nina: Instead of carpooling on Friday like everyone else, we hopped an afternoon Acela to Providence -- which was fine, except then we got stuck there for three hours waiting for a connecting Peter Pan and trying to ignore a noisy drunk who'd stolen a TV and a bunch of jewelry attempt to make away with his contraband on a Providence city bus. And then our bus missed its connection in Bourne and the bus company had to send an extra bus back to pick us up and take us to Falmouth. ...Except when it showed up, the driver said he was going too Woods Hole, and we were like, oh, that's not us. And so he almost left without us, but finally called out "Falmouth!" too. ...Which would've been great, except that when we got to Falmouth, it turned out that's not where we wanted to be at all. Whatever calculations I'd made had involved calculating the proximity of the bus stop to Falmouth (possibly because there is a similarly-named, competing hotel there), not West Harwich. I started calling cab companies, but when I told them where we were and where we were going, there was silence; and then they'd all say, "You're on the wrong side of the Cape!" So, we were, but we still needed to get 50 miles east, so I finally caved and went with the guy who said he'd get us there for $100. That was the best offer. Pam, the woman who ran A Beach Breeze had waited up and was very understanding. We were beat, but not too beat to order a pineapple-and-pepperoni Dominoes pizza and homph it down like orphans at a food rodeo.
Maggie and Cliff drove by in the morning, and hauled us over to a buffet-style breakfast-only place called The Egg And "I" (quotes included), where we were joined by Tom O., Greg, etc. Over plates of eggs and egg-like things (Devin ordered a cheesy horror called The Crow's Nest), we discussed Tom H.'s request (via Katharine) that we sing the proffered hymns at the wedding. "When we had to sing Latin hymns in my church growing up," Maggie said, "we couldn't pronounce the words, so we just sang 'pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin.'"
After breakfast we went over to a mini-golf course across the road from the Beach Breeze, and the nine of us split into two semi-competitive teams. The course was brutal, but it was really nice out -- so nice, in fact, that I totally didn't notice getting an actual sunburn on the back of my neck. We ate some moose tracks. And then the buses that Tom and Katharine and arranged for showed up and we had to get dressed up and go to the actual wedding. ...Which took place at the First Congregational Church in Chatham, which was very pretty and had a neat little churchyard with graves from hundreds of years ago. It was a short service. The bride and groom were sharply attired, and the minister was a dead ringer for Victor Garber. We sang the hymns as requested, although I sang "pumpking, pumpkin, pumpkin," and then felt guilty about it.
After that, the buses took us over Wychmere Harbor, the fancy country club where the reception was being held. The tables at the reception were named, I think, according to places that the newlyweds'd lived or visited; Nina and I were at one called Little Venice, wherever that is. We were sitting with Matt Carter, of whom I'm a fan, Mike Ettanani, some Scots, and a guy from Boston also named Mike. There was some initial awkward silence while we sipped our wines and stared at our plates. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mike from Boston reach over to the plate of beautifully-carved butter roses. I made eye contact with Matt. "No way," I thought. But, yeah -- he popped the rose into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, hard. Matt and I stared at him, awaiting his reaction. "These aren't white chocolate," he said finally. "Just so you know."
There were speeches and there was dancing: The British contingent acquitted themselves impressively, the kilted and the elderly among them kicking up their heels and doing rhythmic, atavistic dances to covers of "Jesse's Girl" and "Don't Stop Believin'." After it was all over, we piled back in the buses and, at Katharine's behest, headed over to a bar in Chatham called The Squire, which was packed full of Cape Cod, uh, off-season types. There was a band playing, deafeningly, somewhere out of sight. We found an out-of-the-way nook in which to drink our Pabsts and homph the custom-branded (complete with little black-and-white photo transfers) "Tom & Katharine" M&Ms that had been favors at the reception. At around 1:30, the bar closed, we got back on the buses and headed back to the hotel, where Nina and I conked the fuck out. We were exhausted! So much so that we missed brunch the next morning. Nani was nice enough to drive us back, though, which was a relief considering the trip up. And I got to DJ the ride on this neat satellite radio console he had in the car!
Minutiae:
- Calendar season. Get on it.
- I've been running in Sunset Park, which is difficult but rewarding in that I can actually, you know, do it. The hill on the southeastern corner might be even more brutal than the one in the northeastern part of Prospect Park.
- Nina and I got dinner on Saturday at Tempo in Park Slope, a place I'd often passed but never visited. The service was a little stiff, but the affogatto... oh, man.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Live-Blogging The Wire
You fuckers have been bugging me to watch The Wire for the past two years, and, like I've been saying, it's in there, man, it's in my Netflix queue. It's just down a ways, past some documentaries about globalization and the second Jackass movie. But Nina was willing to accelerate it a bit in hers, and so last night I finally saw the first three episodes. In view of the faux-momentousness of the event, I decided to "live blog" it.
Hey, so that's a good show, you know? It kind of reminds me of Prime Suspect, both in terms of the subject matter and tone, and in how some scenes seem to be shot on film and some on something cheaper -- Deadwood on DV, say. We're going to keep plowing through, I think. And not least of all, now I know what all the fuss is about Lance Reddick's web site.
00:04 - "He'd wait until there was money on the ground, then he'd run off with it. Couldn't help himself." Snot Boogie's racket sounds pretty awesome. I'd play craps with him, although I can see how he'd be an acquired taste.
00:06 - Where do I know that dude McNulty's talking to? Holy shit, it's agent Richard Gill! "You gonna lick? You gonna lick? I'll tell you what you can lick." ("That's why they call me stallion...")
00:22 - Avon Barksdale is a sneaker name. Or the name of a cartoon dog butler.
00:28 - "Use Me 'Til You Use Me Up," says Nina, giving and singing the name of the Al Jarreau song they're playing at the titty bar. "How do you know that?" "It's on a CD I have," she says. "The CD is called 'Badass Singing.'"
00:33 - That fat cop Landsman looks like if Alec Baldwin in The Departed had a baby with Chief Tyrol
00:41 - I've never even heard of anyone paying drug dealers with xeroxed money. That's pretty gutsy.
00:43 - Wait, that white kid who's shooting up with Bubbles -- is that Telly? It is! This show is like a Who's Who of mid-nineties character actors.
00:47 - "You give great case, brother" -- that's some white collar-ass slang.
00:55 - Is that bartender at the strip club moonlighting as a taxi dispatcher? Nina thinks D'Angelo is handsome until I point out he looks like a baby whose eyebrows got shaved off.
00:58 - "You shot the mouse?!"
Hey, so that's a good show, you know? It kind of reminds me of Prime Suspect, both in terms of the subject matter and tone, and in how some scenes seem to be shot on film and some on something cheaper -- Deadwood on DV, say. We're going to keep plowing through, I think. And not least of all, now I know what all the fuss is about Lance Reddick's web site.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Night Of A Thousand Songs
Spring!
After a thorough search for recipes for banana pie that actually involve bananas as something more than, you know, a topping, I settled upon this recipe and made it. It was difficult but ultimately pretty rewarding. Word to the wise: You cannot substitute half-and-half for heavy cream.
On Friday the company was celebrating my friend Joe's birthday; we took him out for Korean barbecue at a place on 31st St. I'd never had that stuff before -- it really is, you know, a barbecue. I totally dig the proscribed method of consumption (cook some shit, bundle it up with rice and kimchi in a big floppy lettuce leaf; homph it). That stuff is pretty expensive, though -- good thing the 'Monkey comped it.
After dinner we went looking for a karaoke den. After rejecting one for price reasons, we walked around K-Town for a good 15 minutes, despaired of finding a joint that could accommodate all of us at the price we wanted, and ultimately settled on a place with a lobby tricked out with lasers and a fog machine. A little while after we'd settled in, Libby and Steve, who'd gone in search of a B.Y.O.B. solution, reappeared carrying a case of Korean plum wine, which they'd been recommended by the locals as being the best thing going for karaoke. Unfortunately, there were cameras in the private rooms, and, naturally, the staff swooped in and briskly removed the offending bottles -- save two, which Libby secreted in the folds of her coat. "What's under here?" they asked. "It's water, it's water," she said, in total bad girl mode. After the fracas concluded, she and Joe (and anyone else they could induce to taste the stuff) nursed their contraband in the corner underneath the security camera.
Some of the Monkeys were reluctant, but Nick and Margaret sang a Madonna song and Matthew led with a funny, super lounge-y rendition of some R&B song. And I tried to be good, giving, and game, to the extent that my half rasping, half hollering style of karaoke delivery allows me to be. (In the absence of songs by bands I'm actually, you know, up on, I think "I'm A Believer" might be my new karaoke go-to.) The little karaoke display system would give you a "grade" when you finished singing a song, via a little cartoon spaceman who'd spray-paint a score on a brick wall or sommat. After attempting to analyze the mechanism behind a bunch of seemingly incongruous ratings, we decided that they were based pretty much entirely on volume.
After a good two hours, our party split up -- management went on to some king of swing-dancing club that they do, other people hit up a bar. I lurched over to Duet 35 where a whole mess of college people were already singing: Tom and Colleen, Emma, Katharine, Nani, li'l Greg; Nina joined up as well. My throat was already pretty sore -- I didn't know if I'd be able to . Nani (not Nina, although she was admirably participatory) did a fairly stunning (Michigan J. Frog-wise) solo performance of that Nat King Cole song "L-O-V-E." "Two Princes" sure as fuck got sung again, as did Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again." Circa 3:00 AM we finally called it quits and piled into cars on the C.A.B. line -- except Nina made her way over to Williamsburg to hit up her friend's birthday party. She made it, too! Truly indomitable, that one.
I've been playing on a pub trivia team. It's held on Sunday nights at Pacific Standard, a slightly fancy California-style beer bar over on 4th Ave. near Atlantic Terminal. Eve got me into it; it's a semi-rotating crew of people from our high school and friends and friends of friends of theirs. She made the initial mistake of selling the virtues of attending based on the intellectual rigors of the questions: "It's all stuff about history and literature! You don't have to know any stupid pop-culture stuff." And maybe it's true that there's something for the Harvard types on our team to chew over, but I got serious brownie points for knowing that Chuck Norris volunteered to be president of a seceded Texas and that the Italian press had nicknamed some murderous American chick "Foxy Knoxy."
The name of our team is Toledo Despair, a failed answer to a question about the name of a minor league baseball team in Ohio. We've been consistently hovering around first place in a set of rankings that supposedly determine our fitness to enter "the playoffs," which stand to net us a private, budgeted party at the bar. Our success also nets us weekly discounts (sometimes of 100%) on Sunday night booze, leaving us lurchingly attempting to tilt the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine long after the questions are over.
Before I forget: You know how I bought that fancy electronic trap that Tom'd turned me onto? Before leaving for Florida last month, I set it up on my desk. The Monday that I was away, I got the following picture in the mail:
Jason, the guy who sits behind me, found the trap sitting in the material shown, which he describes as "liquid mouse." The office consensus was that possibly two mice had wedged themselves into the thing, overloading it such that it, uh, pureed them. Suffice it to say, Jason is owed some Snapples.
After a thorough search for recipes for banana pie that actually involve bananas as something more than, you know, a topping, I settled upon this recipe and made it. It was difficult but ultimately pretty rewarding. Word to the wise: You cannot substitute half-and-half for heavy cream.
On Friday the company was celebrating my friend Joe's birthday; we took him out for Korean barbecue at a place on 31st St. I'd never had that stuff before -- it really is, you know, a barbecue. I totally dig the proscribed method of consumption (cook some shit, bundle it up with rice and kimchi in a big floppy lettuce leaf; homph it). That stuff is pretty expensive, though -- good thing the 'Monkey comped it.
After dinner we went looking for a karaoke den. After rejecting one for price reasons, we walked around K-Town for a good 15 minutes, despaired of finding a joint that could accommodate all of us at the price we wanted, and ultimately settled on a place with a lobby tricked out with lasers and a fog machine. A little while after we'd settled in, Libby and Steve, who'd gone in search of a B.Y.O.B. solution, reappeared carrying a case of Korean plum wine, which they'd been recommended by the locals as being the best thing going for karaoke. Unfortunately, there were cameras in the private rooms, and, naturally, the staff swooped in and briskly removed the offending bottles -- save two, which Libby secreted in the folds of her coat. "What's under here?" they asked. "It's water, it's water," she said, in total bad girl mode. After the fracas concluded, she and Joe (and anyone else they could induce to taste the stuff) nursed their contraband in the corner underneath the security camera.
Some of the Monkeys were reluctant, but Nick and Margaret sang a Madonna song and Matthew led with a funny, super lounge-y rendition of some R&B song. And I tried to be good, giving, and game, to the extent that my half rasping, half hollering style of karaoke delivery allows me to be. (In the absence of songs by bands I'm actually, you know, up on, I think "I'm A Believer" might be my new karaoke go-to.) The little karaoke display system would give you a "grade" when you finished singing a song, via a little cartoon spaceman who'd spray-paint a score on a brick wall or sommat. After attempting to analyze the mechanism behind a bunch of seemingly incongruous ratings, we decided that they were based pretty much entirely on volume.
After a good two hours, our party split up -- management went on to some king of swing-dancing club that they do, other people hit up a bar. I lurched over to Duet 35 where a whole mess of college people were already singing: Tom and Colleen, Emma, Katharine, Nani, li'l Greg; Nina joined up as well. My throat was already pretty sore -- I didn't know if I'd be able to . Nani (not Nina, although she was admirably participatory) did a fairly stunning (Michigan J. Frog-wise) solo performance of that Nat King Cole song "L-O-V-E." "Two Princes" sure as fuck got sung again, as did Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again." Circa 3:00 AM we finally called it quits and piled into cars on the C.A.B. line -- except Nina made her way over to Williamsburg to hit up her friend's birthday party. She made it, too! Truly indomitable, that one.
I've been playing on a pub trivia team. It's held on Sunday nights at Pacific Standard, a slightly fancy California-style beer bar over on 4th Ave. near Atlantic Terminal. Eve got me into it; it's a semi-rotating crew of people from our high school and friends and friends of friends of theirs. She made the initial mistake of selling the virtues of attending based on the intellectual rigors of the questions: "It's all stuff about history and literature! You don't have to know any stupid pop-culture stuff." And maybe it's true that there's something for the Harvard types on our team to chew over, but I got serious brownie points for knowing that Chuck Norris volunteered to be president of a seceded Texas and that the Italian press had nicknamed some murderous American chick "Foxy Knoxy."
The name of our team is Toledo Despair, a failed answer to a question about the name of a minor league baseball team in Ohio. We've been consistently hovering around first place in a set of rankings that supposedly determine our fitness to enter "the playoffs," which stand to net us a private, budgeted party at the bar. Our success also nets us weekly discounts (sometimes of 100%) on Sunday night booze, leaving us lurchingly attempting to tilt the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine long after the questions are over.
Before I forget: You know how I bought that fancy electronic trap that Tom'd turned me onto? Before leaving for Florida last month, I set it up on my desk. The Monday that I was away, I got the following picture in the mail:
Jason, the guy who sits behind me, found the trap sitting in the material shown, which he describes as "liquid mouse." The office consensus was that possibly two mice had wedged themselves into the thing, overloading it such that it, uh, pureed them. Suffice it to say, Jason is owed some Snapples.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Escape From Sarasota
Just got back from a week in Sarasota, Florida, where I was visiting my grandmother on my dad's side. He was flying down there to help her take care of her taxes -- she's got a trust that my grandfather set up for her that keeps her in an assisted living facility for ladies who used to lunch. And it also happened to be her 90th birthday. ...And, embarrassingly, it'd been around five years since I'd visited her. (Mer and I'd gone to see her right after she'd gotten one of her legs amputated; she was pretty out of it the whole time, so that may not even count.) Babies, I struggle with filial piety at times.
The flight down was a snap: I'd never been to the new Terminal 5 at JFK or flown JetBlue before -- the special TV hookup they give you was totally fascinating. I finally got to see an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show -- he went to Uzbekistan and attended a wedding. The footage they got of the country and the people was great, but although Bourdain talks a big game ("Oh no, more vodka? You do not want me to drink more vodka"), he actually seemed to have, in fact, many reservations. After that the Travel Channel had a show where a fat, bald dude ate some puffins.
My grandma lives in an assisted living facility right on the bay -- it's actually a lot like a fancy hotel, except that, because of her leg et al., she lives in the hospital wing, which is a little more... medically equipped. My dad and I were staying at a Comfort Inn a few miles up the road. Every evening after my grandmother was put to bed, we'd head back to the room to watch the free HBO (we watched the pilot for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which I actually kind of liked a lot). There was no way to control the strength of the air conditioner -- it was either sweltering or freezing, so we went in the freezing direction. After hearing my dad describe the situation, including some complaints about the wretched coffee included in the complimentary "continental breakfast," my grandmother dubbed it the "Cold Comfort Inn."
During the day we'd follow her around the palacial grounds of the facility -- she's got a motorized chair with which she's quite agile and speedy -- from the lizard-crossed gazebo looking out over Sarasota Bay to the residents' herb gardens to the fancy-dress dining room (I'd been told to pack a suit for to wear at dinner; as per my usual M.O. I managed to bring two left dress shoes). As we puttered around, she explained to anyone who'd listen, "my whole family's here!" The clucking and attention felt good, I have to admit. We celebrated her birthday, which, to my grandma's consternation, almost all the other residents'd gotten wind of via the chapel bulletin board. Nina'd helped me repurpose a very apropos silk scarf as a gift; my mom sent along a 500-piece Barack Obama jigsaw with my dad. I got to eat a lot of fish and seafood at fancy Sarasota restaurants; I even found a mussel pearl in my food at The Crab & Fin, promptly almost losing the tiny thing in an inner pocket of my jeans.
Somewhat more claustrophobic were the rigors of her schedule: She'd be up early, ready to meet me and my dad for a few circuits of the gardens; then lunch'd be ready; then more walking around around or watching movies from the library; then obligatory whiskey (holy god do old people drink) while she listened to the copious voicemails her friends had left her while she'd been out; changing into dinner clothes; dinner in the posh dining room with motorized curtains that slid closed as the sun set over the water; then it'd time for her to be "processed" and put to bed, leaving my dad and I with naught to do but drive back to the hotel and watch a couple of hours of TV before the whole thing started again.
Nonetheless, the week passed pleasantly enough, and pretty soon we were back at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport to catch a JetBlue flight home to JFK. I picked up some odd-tasting "key lime"-flavored treats for my co-workers (bark, taffy) at the CNBC store and we hunkered down to wait. And we waited. And the scheduled time of our flight came and went. And eventually it was dark and the terminal was almost empty. Apparently JetBlue has a single plane devoted to the New York-to-Florida route, and because of inclement weather earlier in the day at JFK and the cascade delay that had led to, well, blah blah blah, we were running late. At about 10 o'clock, the flight crew made the announcement that they were going to attempt to board us, but because they had a very narrow window for taking off (the pilots were at this point toeing the line of maximum awake hours), we had to be fully boarded in 10 minutes. My heart sank, but we lined up and got on the plane -- and they did do a pretty efficient job getting us on board. We began taxiing, the little DirectTV screens turned on and started playing a New York Times interview with Mickey Rourke. The flight crew did a high-speed version of the emergency procedures, and for a minute it actually looked as if we were going to get airborne. But then we stopped taxiing and the lights flickered out, Mickey Rourke frozen tauntingly on the TV screens in mid-smirk. We'd missed our window, they told us, and, furthermore, they couldn't get us on another flight that night or even the next day. And we might not even be able to fly back to New York until Monday.
My dad and I sort of panicked -- I opened my laptop and we made an emergency visit to Travelocity.com. Last-minute plane tickets are expensive! The earliest, most convenient flights were going for, like, a thousand bucks a pop. So we booked a middlingly-expensive and sort of roundabout itinerary, flying out of Tampa the next morning (at 7:00am!) and into Boston, and then from there into good old JFK on a Czech Air puddle hopper. We were harried and pissed off, but we weren't the most fucked by any means -- a woman ahead of us on line kept repeating into her cell phone: "What am I going to do? I have no one here. I have nothing." My dad re-rented a car and we drove back to the Cold Comfort Inn to try to sleep for three hours (couldn't) before waking in the dark and making the hallucinatorily early hour-and-a-half drive to Tampa. Once we'd done that, though, things were easy -- all our flights were punctual, I slept en route, and even found an issue of The Guardian from January in the seat pocket on the Boston flight that had a scary article about serial killers.
I pretty much agree with this: http://fuckyeahcilantro.tumblr.com/
The flight down was a snap: I'd never been to the new Terminal 5 at JFK or flown JetBlue before -- the special TV hookup they give you was totally fascinating. I finally got to see an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show -- he went to Uzbekistan and attended a wedding. The footage they got of the country and the people was great, but although Bourdain talks a big game ("Oh no, more vodka? You do not want me to drink more vodka"), he actually seemed to have, in fact, many reservations. After that the Travel Channel had a show where a fat, bald dude ate some puffins.
My grandma lives in an assisted living facility right on the bay -- it's actually a lot like a fancy hotel, except that, because of her leg et al., she lives in the hospital wing, which is a little more... medically equipped. My dad and I were staying at a Comfort Inn a few miles up the road. Every evening after my grandmother was put to bed, we'd head back to the room to watch the free HBO (we watched the pilot for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which I actually kind of liked a lot). There was no way to control the strength of the air conditioner -- it was either sweltering or freezing, so we went in the freezing direction. After hearing my dad describe the situation, including some complaints about the wretched coffee included in the complimentary "continental breakfast," my grandmother dubbed it the "Cold Comfort Inn."
During the day we'd follow her around the palacial grounds of the facility -- she's got a motorized chair with which she's quite agile and speedy -- from the lizard-crossed gazebo looking out over Sarasota Bay to the residents' herb gardens to the fancy-dress dining room (I'd been told to pack a suit for to wear at dinner; as per my usual M.O. I managed to bring two left dress shoes). As we puttered around, she explained to anyone who'd listen, "my whole family's here!" The clucking and attention felt good, I have to admit. We celebrated her birthday, which, to my grandma's consternation, almost all the other residents'd gotten wind of via the chapel bulletin board. Nina'd helped me repurpose a very apropos silk scarf as a gift; my mom sent along a 500-piece Barack Obama jigsaw with my dad. I got to eat a lot of fish and seafood at fancy Sarasota restaurants; I even found a mussel pearl in my food at The Crab & Fin, promptly almost losing the tiny thing in an inner pocket of my jeans.
Somewhat more claustrophobic were the rigors of her schedule: She'd be up early, ready to meet me and my dad for a few circuits of the gardens; then lunch'd be ready; then more walking around around or watching movies from the library; then obligatory whiskey (holy god do old people drink) while she listened to the copious voicemails her friends had left her while she'd been out; changing into dinner clothes; dinner in the posh dining room with motorized curtains that slid closed as the sun set over the water; then it'd time for her to be "processed" and put to bed, leaving my dad and I with naught to do but drive back to the hotel and watch a couple of hours of TV before the whole thing started again.
Nonetheless, the week passed pleasantly enough, and pretty soon we were back at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport to catch a JetBlue flight home to JFK. I picked up some odd-tasting "key lime"-flavored treats for my co-workers (bark, taffy) at the CNBC store and we hunkered down to wait. And we waited. And the scheduled time of our flight came and went. And eventually it was dark and the terminal was almost empty. Apparently JetBlue has a single plane devoted to the New York-to-Florida route, and because of inclement weather earlier in the day at JFK and the cascade delay that had led to, well, blah blah blah, we were running late. At about 10 o'clock, the flight crew made the announcement that they were going to attempt to board us, but because they had a very narrow window for taking off (the pilots were at this point toeing the line of maximum awake hours), we had to be fully boarded in 10 minutes. My heart sank, but we lined up and got on the plane -- and they did do a pretty efficient job getting us on board. We began taxiing, the little DirectTV screens turned on and started playing a New York Times interview with Mickey Rourke. The flight crew did a high-speed version of the emergency procedures, and for a minute it actually looked as if we were going to get airborne. But then we stopped taxiing and the lights flickered out, Mickey Rourke frozen tauntingly on the TV screens in mid-smirk. We'd missed our window, they told us, and, furthermore, they couldn't get us on another flight that night or even the next day. And we might not even be able to fly back to New York until Monday.
My dad and I sort of panicked -- I opened my laptop and we made an emergency visit to Travelocity.com. Last-minute plane tickets are expensive! The earliest, most convenient flights were going for, like, a thousand bucks a pop. So we booked a middlingly-expensive and sort of roundabout itinerary, flying out of Tampa the next morning (at 7:00am!) and into Boston, and then from there into good old JFK on a Czech Air puddle hopper. We were harried and pissed off, but we weren't the most fucked by any means -- a woman ahead of us on line kept repeating into her cell phone: "What am I going to do? I have no one here. I have nothing." My dad re-rented a car and we drove back to the Cold Comfort Inn to try to sleep for three hours (couldn't) before waking in the dark and making the hallucinatorily early hour-and-a-half drive to Tampa. Once we'd done that, though, things were easy -- all our flights were punctual, I slept en route, and even found an issue of The Guardian from January in the seat pocket on the Boston flight that had a scary article about serial killers.
I pretty much agree with this: http://fuckyeahcilantro.tumblr.com/
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Alex Rider: Stormbreaker
Libre Planet 2009, aka the Free Software Foundation's annual members meeting, was this past weekend, and this year the powers that be planned two days of software activism-related... fun. I emailed Greg to see if I could crash on his sofa again, but he replied to say that he was going to be NYC that weekend. I started researching hostels but secretly planned to get a private room at a commodity motel chain such as could be located. Luckily, in the middle of the week, Greg wrote back again to say that he was so swamped with work that he'd canceled his visit to the city. I went out and bought him a bottle of scotch. And then I got up at 6:00 AM, every bone in my body wishing I could scrap the weekend, and schlepped it up to Penn Station to catch the 8:00 AM train to Boston. Trying to sleep on the train, I couldn't get comfortable and sort of draped myself over the armrest in the pair of seats closest to the bathroom like a homeless person, making no usage whatsoever of the AC adapter in the business-class seat I'd shelled out extra for.
Nonetheless, I did get to Boston about forty minutes earlier than I would've on the regional, and managed to find my way to the Science Center (it was at Harvard this year). At the sign-in desk they were giving everybody these little badges that said either "Staff" or "Blogger" or "Activist." That last one was me. (Although, as I pointed out to Joshua Gay later, I'm fuckin' blogging this, aren't I?) The format of the first day was pretty much what the meetings have been like every year -- technical-political talks with breaks for portabello mushroom sandwiches and cookies.
I missed Mako's talk about freedom for network services, which is too bad, since I really liked where they were going with the Franklin St. Statement.
Rob Savoye, who's running the Gnash project, gave a really entertaining talk about what it takes practically to do a clean-room implementation of a jealously-guarded piece of proprietary software -- spoiler: it involves having a friend of yours install Flash Player so that you don't have to agree to the EULA and then sniffing their network traffic. He also described, entertainingly, his conversion from skeptic to enthusiast with regard to Flash on the web: He didn't know what the fuss was about at all until he saw YouTube. Now he's an addict, he says.
Ciaran O'Riordan gave an update on what the FSFE's been up to, specifically with regard to the EndSoftwarePatents campaign that he took over from Ben Klemens (never heard why he stepped down). He had some good stories about camping out at the European Parliament during the debate over the European software patents directive: "We were sleeping on the floor. Eventually someone came and told us that there were beds in the building that we could sleep in. They were kept around for the politicians to sleep in. So we went and slept in those beds."
"With the politicians?" someone asked.
Ciaran paused. "That's not the kind of lobbying we do," he said.
Bradley Kuhn and the two guys from the EU did short panel discussion on activism. Brad made some good points about the importance of "showing up" (which is apparently how he got the executive directorship at the FSF). And he had a funny anecdote about following RMS into a bathroom to talk to him about Free Software. "Especially if you're an awkward person, it's probably not a good idea to follow your intellectual idols into the bathroom. Luckily, Richard's such an awkward guy himself that he didn't seem to mind."
Evan Prodromou, the author of (net http), but more prominently the CEO of Control Yourself, Inc., the company that runs identi.ca, gave a talk on the practical issues related to creating and running a Free network service.
Stallman came out at the end and gave short (5 mins.) and kind of anemic talk about how the concept of "software as a service" is problematic. He also handed out a pamphlet about what he's calling "The Javascript Trap" -- the deal where a lot of Javascript doesn't have an explicit license and you don't have any control over how it executes in your browser. (Seems to me like that's a general problem with dynamic code in general, but I didn't want to get into it with him.) He didn't take any questions. Think he had a cold or something; his voice was all hoarse.
After the talks were done, I stood around for a while chatting with Josh and some other FSF types. And then, this year, instead of everyone going to The Middle East for a pay-your-own-way dinner party, we walked over to redline, where some generous software person had bought out the space for the FSF for the evening, complete with vegetarian hors d'oerves and drink tickets. (Drink tickets, courtesy the Free Software Foundation! The mind boggles.) I wound up having a long talk with Mike Linksvayer, the guy who'd accepted the FSF award on behalf of Creative Commons (a plaque inscribed from the FSF to CC! The mind boggles further), who turned out to be a super nice dude. And I got to plug the new bytecode VM to Evan, who admitted, in a moment of candor, that he'd be writing network services in Scheme if he could. Mako invited everyone to the Acetarium ("Your place!" I said. "Your place is the place that has a name!"), but I was pretty pooped.
I gave Greg a tipsy call and managed to navigate to his apartment based on half-remembered phone instructions and an assortment of visual Cambridge landmarks. His new place is a grad student's dream of an apartment: enormous, newly-renovated, exposed brick, the works. He'd called off his academic efforts for the day and seemed kind of beat, but he shared his pizza and cookies with me and we watched a bunch of premium cable: We found this on-demand movie called Alex Rider: Stormbreaker that starred basically every famous British person, plus, inexplicably, Alicia Silverstone and Mickey Rourke. It was about a kid who discovers that he's been sort of covertly trained his whole life to be a secret agent, and he uses his spying and martial arts skills to thwart a plot involving deadly (!) computers donated to public (or is it private?) school classrooms. The computers were the things called "Stormbreakers." I don't get why they were called that; it's a scary name to give to an educational computer.
Then the second half of Knocked Up was on, so we watched that. I don't know, I guess it was pretty funny? But the main characters are pretty loathsome and there wasn't much of a catharsis for me when they wound up together at the end. I was like, is this a joke? They hate each other. After that I went to bed -- and slept great, actually, although I had to get up once in the night and do bathroom stuff because of all the vegetable kebabs.
The second round of talks was a free-er form dealie. I got there late and in my hurry to find a talk to sit in on, I wound up in the room for the track I was least interested in, which was Free Software activism. Nonetheless, the guy giving the spiel had some tips that I was glad to hear articulated, moreso because he was sort of pitching from the perspective of a super awkward dude who'd had to clean up his act a bit to appeal to normals.
After that I listened to a tired-looking guy from the coreboot project talk about some of the technical / business difficulties inherent in developing a custom BIOS from scratch. After him a striking-looking Russian guy with a white ponytail and a missing eye gave a talk about running free software on digital cameras: apparently the hardware resources are so limited that you have to compile all your code using scary proprietary compilers that do things to optimize the layout of the heap at build time. After more cookies, I listened to Tom Dukleth, whom I know from various NYC Free Software activities talk about free access to bibliographic data, which is his particular thing. And then I had to run because I wanted to catch a reasonably-timed train back home. The whole thing cost a lot, but, man -- the emotional difference between this year and last year, when I'd barely slept and felt totally strung out the whole time, was huge. And they have fucking Internet on the train, man. I bet you didn't know that.
But then I watched Come And See because it was in my Netflix, and it was fucking terrifying.
Nonetheless, I did get to Boston about forty minutes earlier than I would've on the regional, and managed to find my way to the Science Center (it was at Harvard this year). At the sign-in desk they were giving everybody these little badges that said either "Staff" or "Blogger" or "Activist." That last one was me. (Although, as I pointed out to Joshua Gay later, I'm fuckin' blogging this, aren't I?) The format of the first day was pretty much what the meetings have been like every year -- technical-political talks with breaks for portabello mushroom sandwiches and cookies.
I missed Mako's talk about freedom for network services, which is too bad, since I really liked where they were going with the Franklin St. Statement.
Rob Savoye, who's running the Gnash project, gave a really entertaining talk about what it takes practically to do a clean-room implementation of a jealously-guarded piece of proprietary software -- spoiler: it involves having a friend of yours install Flash Player so that you don't have to agree to the EULA and then sniffing their network traffic. He also described, entertainingly, his conversion from skeptic to enthusiast with regard to Flash on the web: He didn't know what the fuss was about at all until he saw YouTube. Now he's an addict, he says.
Ciaran O'Riordan gave an update on what the FSFE's been up to, specifically with regard to the EndSoftwarePatents campaign that he took over from Ben Klemens (never heard why he stepped down). He had some good stories about camping out at the European Parliament during the debate over the European software patents directive: "We were sleeping on the floor. Eventually someone came and told us that there were beds in the building that we could sleep in. They were kept around for the politicians to sleep in. So we went and slept in those beds."
"With the politicians?" someone asked.
Ciaran paused. "That's not the kind of lobbying we do," he said.
Bradley Kuhn and the two guys from the EU did short panel discussion on activism. Brad made some good points about the importance of "showing up" (which is apparently how he got the executive directorship at the FSF). And he had a funny anecdote about following RMS into a bathroom to talk to him about Free Software. "Especially if you're an awkward person, it's probably not a good idea to follow your intellectual idols into the bathroom. Luckily, Richard's such an awkward guy himself that he didn't seem to mind."
Evan Prodromou, the author of (net http), but more prominently the CEO of Control Yourself, Inc., the company that runs identi.ca, gave a talk on the practical issues related to creating and running a Free network service.
Stallman came out at the end and gave short (5 mins.) and kind of anemic talk about how the concept of "software as a service" is problematic. He also handed out a pamphlet about what he's calling "The Javascript Trap" -- the deal where a lot of Javascript doesn't have an explicit license and you don't have any control over how it executes in your browser. (Seems to me like that's a general problem with dynamic code in general, but I didn't want to get into it with him.) He didn't take any questions. Think he had a cold or something; his voice was all hoarse.
After the talks were done, I stood around for a while chatting with Josh and some other FSF types. And then, this year, instead of everyone going to The Middle East for a pay-your-own-way dinner party, we walked over to redline, where some generous software person had bought out the space for the FSF for the evening, complete with vegetarian hors d'oerves and drink tickets. (Drink tickets, courtesy the Free Software Foundation! The mind boggles.) I wound up having a long talk with Mike Linksvayer, the guy who'd accepted the FSF award on behalf of Creative Commons (a plaque inscribed from the FSF to CC! The mind boggles further), who turned out to be a super nice dude. And I got to plug the new bytecode VM to Evan, who admitted, in a moment of candor, that he'd be writing network services in Scheme if he could. Mako invited everyone to the Acetarium ("Your place!" I said. "Your place is the place that has a name!"), but I was pretty pooped.
I gave Greg a tipsy call and managed to navigate to his apartment based on half-remembered phone instructions and an assortment of visual Cambridge landmarks. His new place is a grad student's dream of an apartment: enormous, newly-renovated, exposed brick, the works. He'd called off his academic efforts for the day and seemed kind of beat, but he shared his pizza and cookies with me and we watched a bunch of premium cable: We found this on-demand movie called Alex Rider: Stormbreaker that starred basically every famous British person, plus, inexplicably, Alicia Silverstone and Mickey Rourke. It was about a kid who discovers that he's been sort of covertly trained his whole life to be a secret agent, and he uses his spying and martial arts skills to thwart a plot involving deadly (!) computers donated to public (or is it private?) school classrooms. The computers were the things called "Stormbreakers." I don't get why they were called that; it's a scary name to give to an educational computer.
Then the second half of Knocked Up was on, so we watched that. I don't know, I guess it was pretty funny? But the main characters are pretty loathsome and there wasn't much of a catharsis for me when they wound up together at the end. I was like, is this a joke? They hate each other. After that I went to bed -- and slept great, actually, although I had to get up once in the night and do bathroom stuff because of all the vegetable kebabs.
The second round of talks was a free-er form dealie. I got there late and in my hurry to find a talk to sit in on, I wound up in the room for the track I was least interested in, which was Free Software activism. Nonetheless, the guy giving the spiel had some tips that I was glad to hear articulated, moreso because he was sort of pitching from the perspective of a super awkward dude who'd had to clean up his act a bit to appeal to normals.
After that I listened to a tired-looking guy from the coreboot project talk about some of the technical / business difficulties inherent in developing a custom BIOS from scratch. After him a striking-looking Russian guy with a white ponytail and a missing eye gave a talk about running free software on digital cameras: apparently the hardware resources are so limited that you have to compile all your code using scary proprietary compilers that do things to optimize the layout of the heap at build time. After more cookies, I listened to Tom Dukleth, whom I know from various NYC Free Software activities talk about free access to bibliographic data, which is his particular thing. And then I had to run because I wanted to catch a reasonably-timed train back home. The whole thing cost a lot, but, man -- the emotional difference between this year and last year, when I'd barely slept and felt totally strung out the whole time, was huge. And they have fucking Internet on the train, man. I bet you didn't know that.
But then I watched Come And See because it was in my Netflix, and it was fucking terrifying.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Blizzard!
[Ironically, after finishing editing a post about a conference where everyone was fretting over the ubiquity of not-free-as-in-freedom network services like the ones Google offers, Blogger freaked out and deleted this post -- from its internal database *and* from undecidable.net. It did this silently: the timestamps on the files on my site were the only indication that anything had changed. What's more, it turns out there's no way to get Google to help you with this kind of thing, not even if you give them money. So, hey, case in point. WordPress ahoy?]
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Best Of
Hey, so it is a new year and everything. Maybe I should say something about 2008?
Marc Maron did a show at Maxwell's on Saturday night. He's been doing stand-up shows in and around New York recently as, I think, he refines his one-man show about his bad, ugly divorce from his second wife. I'd been stuck at work for it, but Tom described "An Evening With Marc Maron" at Union Hall as "intense. Not a lot of jokes" -- so I knew I had to see him. I hopped the PATH at 34th St., remembering that I hadn't been to Maxwell's since Chris and I saw The Queers there in high school. What I recall about that show is that there were a bunch of sandal-wearing hippies there who were kind of killing the vibe; that Chris and I got a bunch of dirty looks for putting The Beach Boys on the jukebox; and that the eleven blocks between the station and the club were really, really long. That last part hadn't changed, and I'd remembered halfway through the trip that since comedians don't do 50 minute sets with DJs in between, my plan to skip the openers might lead to me missing Marc himself. So I had to really leg it to 11th St. through the freezing cold, lugging the laptop and book that I'd stupidly brought along, mucus pouring out of my face, using a free hand to alternately and unwrap my scarf around my head. By the time I got to the place I was 'bout ready to puke, but it turned out I hadn't missed that much.
Marc was doing a mix of funny and, you know, scary material, some of which I'd seen him do on Conan or whatever. There was an irritating, unappealing woman who'd stepped right up close to the stage, at some remove from the rest of the audience, who was clearly trying to "connect" with Marc throughout the show. She was drinking a glowing red drink, its luminescence of origin unknown, and she kept nodding and shaking her head and saying "yes, yes" in response to his rhetorical questions.
I've been working late these days, babies, later than a man should work. So, sometimes, when I get out of the office and it's super late, I opt for the ol' C.A.B. line over the F-to-the-D, which can take up to two hours after a certain time of night. It's expensive, but, you know, I do some mental economics about how much the extra hour or two of sleep / girl is worth, and, you know, it's hard to argue against. Anyway, I've gotten sort of pleasantly accustomed to the route we usually take, which goes something like: FDR or 5th Ave. to lower Manhattan; the Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp taking us right past the tantalizing windows of one of the Pace University libraries; over the bridge; a brief drive through Brooklyn Heights before getting on the BQE; the BQE to the 39th St. exit; that U-Turn in front of Peyton's Playpen. The initial leg of the BQE goes by a stretch of the Brooklyn Heights waterfront with some piers and warehouses. There's nothing really going on there at night; it's dark, except for a lone street light that always seems to be on, illuminating the municipal utility vehicle under it, like a lone fisherman fishing through a hole on an ice floe.
- Best Chris Matthews moment - tie: Fred Thompson's masculine musk; What did Neville Chamberlain do?
- Best killing spree - Stephen Maturin, in The Fortunes of War
- Best informercial - Snuggies: The blanket you die in
- Best Keith Olbermann impression - Ben Affleck
- Best song on the Spinnerette EP I bought, even though it was also the free single - Valium Knights
- Best SciFi channel original movie - Rock Monster
- Best return on investment "hard" mode drum song in Rock Band - Maps
- Best show I attended - Green Jelly at The Gramercy
- Best scone - The maple walnut at Cafe Grumpy
- Best Seven Second Delay episode - Andy Breckman gets waterboarded; runners-up - anything with Kelly Jones
Marc Maron did a show at Maxwell's on Saturday night. He's been doing stand-up shows in and around New York recently as, I think, he refines his one-man show about his bad, ugly divorce from his second wife. I'd been stuck at work for it, but Tom described "An Evening With Marc Maron" at Union Hall as "intense. Not a lot of jokes" -- so I knew I had to see him. I hopped the PATH at 34th St., remembering that I hadn't been to Maxwell's since Chris and I saw The Queers there in high school. What I recall about that show is that there were a bunch of sandal-wearing hippies there who were kind of killing the vibe; that Chris and I got a bunch of dirty looks for putting The Beach Boys on the jukebox; and that the eleven blocks between the station and the club were really, really long. That last part hadn't changed, and I'd remembered halfway through the trip that since comedians don't do 50 minute sets with DJs in between, my plan to skip the openers might lead to me missing Marc himself. So I had to really leg it to 11th St. through the freezing cold, lugging the laptop and book that I'd stupidly brought along, mucus pouring out of my face, using a free hand to alternately and unwrap my scarf around my head. By the time I got to the place I was 'bout ready to puke, but it turned out I hadn't missed that much.
Marc was doing a mix of funny and, you know, scary material, some of which I'd seen him do on Conan or whatever. There was an irritating, unappealing woman who'd stepped right up close to the stage, at some remove from the rest of the audience, who was clearly trying to "connect" with Marc throughout the show. She was drinking a glowing red drink, its luminescence of origin unknown, and she kept nodding and shaking her head and saying "yes, yes" in response to his rhetorical questions.
I've been working late these days, babies, later than a man should work. So, sometimes, when I get out of the office and it's super late, I opt for the ol' C.A.B. line over the F-to-the-D, which can take up to two hours after a certain time of night. It's expensive, but, you know, I do some mental economics about how much the extra hour or two of sleep / girl is worth, and, you know, it's hard to argue against. Anyway, I've gotten sort of pleasantly accustomed to the route we usually take, which goes something like: FDR or 5th Ave. to lower Manhattan; the Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp taking us right past the tantalizing windows of one of the Pace University libraries; over the bridge; a brief drive through Brooklyn Heights before getting on the BQE; the BQE to the 39th St. exit; that U-Turn in front of Peyton's Playpen. The initial leg of the BQE goes by a stretch of the Brooklyn Heights waterfront with some piers and warehouses. There's nothing really going on there at night; it's dark, except for a lone street light that always seems to be on, illuminating the municipal utility vehicle under it, like a lone fisherman fishing through a hole on an ice floe.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Stukas Over Southpaw
The always-elusive Dickies played a bunch of East-coast shows shortly after New Year's -- they played a weird $45 New Year's Eve lock-in at some newly-fancy shithole on the Bowery, and then on the 2nd they did a show at Southpaw with The Kowalskis, a ticket for which I bought as soon as I saw found them on sale. I'm always a little worried they're never going to back out here.
They opened with "Rosemary," as they've been doing for the past I-don't-know-how-many years. It's a great song, but nobody danced. And I was like, man, these Park Slope fuckers, they're just gonna stand around. Because that's what punk audiences are like these days, especially for bands of a "certain age" -- moms and dads (both looking like members of The Lone Gunmen) who brought their kids to the show and most certainly do not want to dance. But then they launched into "Nights In White Satin" and the pit opened up so fast and so violently that I thought somebody'd started a fight (actually someone had, but, you know).
The band was plagued with electrical problems throughout: Stan's amp kept squawking and hissing, the result of a bum cord; and then he broke a string, temporarily forsaking his yellow Spider-Man SG for Kitty Kowalski's powder blue one. And I would've expected Leonard to pout like the Dauphin in Henry IV or storm off or something, but he was relaxed and understanding, and he had banter to spare: After explaining at length how happy he was to be back in beautiful Queens, New York, he opened the floor up for questions:
Now (that I've transmitted Christmas presents to Nina) it can be told: I spent several hours on a Friday night several weeks ago waiting to meet Chris Onstad at a signing at Rocketship in the Carroll Gardens. I showed up on the late side, having underestimated both the time constraints and the popularity of the event and found myself at the end of a line stretching around the corner. Passersby kept stopping to ask what all the fuss was about, and the guys in front of me couldn't help themselves, apparently, from sounding like total assholes: "It's a comic. Well, a web-comic. That's a comic that the creator -- usually they're self-published -- puts on a web site, typically in daily installments -- although they're free to publish on whatever schedule they choose..." Ai yi yi. I kept my head down; I felt awkward enough as it was, finishing an enormous George R. R. Martin book. For a long time the line didn't move, and then someone from the store came out to say that Chris had taken a break, sneaking out the back of the store (I shit you not) to drink a couple of shots at a bar, but now he was back and signing again, and to not give up hope. So I didn't, and eventually I made it inside and got to meet him. The guy himself looks like a cross between Ray and Pat from the comic. I was, I think, the third-to-last person to get signed, right behind a short little nerd who asked for five copies and wanted to talk a lot. Onstad looked exhausted, but he was still polite when he shook my hand, even though I still had that gross little chin-beard, the punishment beard.
Nina and I made another pilgrimage to Bay Ridge last weekend, in order to fill a prescription at the Duane Reade on 86th. It was a bitterly cold Saturday night, characteristic of the frigid weather we've been having. We'd committed to eating dinner out there, but none of the restaurants really seemed to be beckoning, so we just walked up and down Fort Hamilton Parkway. We bought some rye bread at a Polish grocery and looked in the window of a storefront that promised "PUPPIES" (they weren't kidding). Finally, we headed shiveringly down 5th Ave. with the intent of heading back to Sunset Park, but found ourselves in front of a Greek place called Agnanti that we decided to give a shot. It turned out to be great. They sat us (well, me) in front of a nice, hot wood-burning stove. I had lamb stew, allowing my post-November 4th attempt at vegetarianism to lapse a bit. (I am trying, though). Nina had an enormous fish thing. We ordered a half-carafe of retsina, thinking it was a kind of red. Was there something else I was supposed to remember? Along with the rest of the restaurant, we sang "Happy Birthday" to somebody whose birthday it was.
Oh, you know. Happy New Year, too.
They opened with "Rosemary," as they've been doing for the past I-don't-know-how-many years. It's a great song, but nobody danced. And I was like, man, these Park Slope fuckers, they're just gonna stand around. Because that's what punk audiences are like these days, especially for bands of a "certain age" -- moms and dads (both looking like members of The Lone Gunmen) who brought their kids to the show and most certainly do not want to dance. But then they launched into "Nights In White Satin" and the pit opened up so fast and so violently that I thought somebody'd started a fight (actually someone had, but, you know).
- See My Way
- I'm Okay, You're Okay
- Waterslide
- My Pop the Cop
- Give It Back
- Poodle Party
- Paranoid
- Manny, Moe, & Jack
- I Got It At The Store
- If Stuart Could Talk
- Going Homo
- You Drive Me Ape
- Gigantor
- Rockin' In The Free World
- Banana Splits
The band was plagued with electrical problems throughout: Stan's amp kept squawking and hissing, the result of a bum cord; and then he broke a string, temporarily forsaking his yellow Spider-Man SG for Kitty Kowalski's powder blue one. And I would've expected Leonard to pout like the Dauphin in Henry IV or storm off or something, but he was relaxed and understanding, and he had banter to spare: After explaining at length how happy he was to be back in beautiful Queens, New York, he opened the floor up for questions:
"Alright, Q & A. Ask me anything."The precise attitudinal pH of The Dickies is something I've puzzled over for a long time. A band that plays nonsense music to an audience of shoving punks; maybe it's a California thing, re-purposing your sugary pop-culture milieu as something dark and rough. That's sort of what the Dead Kennedys pulled off, and it's a little like what I always had in mind for The Headliners: Writing music that's not grotty or mean on first listen but nonetheless achieves a kind of punk perfection by tricking the audience into taking seriously a bunch of inconsequential doggerel. You know. "Horse The Cop."
"When's the new album coming out?"
"No comment."
"How's your mom doing?"
"No comment."
"How old are you?"
"No comment."
Now (that I've transmitted Christmas presents to Nina) it can be told: I spent several hours on a Friday night several weeks ago waiting to meet Chris Onstad at a signing at Rocketship in the Carroll Gardens. I showed up on the late side, having underestimated both the time constraints and the popularity of the event and found myself at the end of a line stretching around the corner. Passersby kept stopping to ask what all the fuss was about, and the guys in front of me couldn't help themselves, apparently, from sounding like total assholes: "It's a comic. Well, a web-comic. That's a comic that the creator -- usually they're self-published -- puts on a web site, typically in daily installments -- although they're free to publish on whatever schedule they choose..." Ai yi yi. I kept my head down; I felt awkward enough as it was, finishing an enormous George R. R. Martin book. For a long time the line didn't move, and then someone from the store came out to say that Chris had taken a break, sneaking out the back of the store (I shit you not) to drink a couple of shots at a bar, but now he was back and signing again, and to not give up hope. So I didn't, and eventually I made it inside and got to meet him. The guy himself looks like a cross between Ray and Pat from the comic. I was, I think, the third-to-last person to get signed, right behind a short little nerd who asked for five copies and wanted to talk a lot. Onstad looked exhausted, but he was still polite when he shook my hand, even though I still had that gross little chin-beard, the punishment beard.
"Who's this for?" he asked.Later, I shaved off the punishment beard.
"Nina," I said.
"She a Philippe girl?" he asked, signing.
"Actually, she likes Roast Beef," I said.
Nina and I made another pilgrimage to Bay Ridge last weekend, in order to fill a prescription at the Duane Reade on 86th. It was a bitterly cold Saturday night, characteristic of the frigid weather we've been having. We'd committed to eating dinner out there, but none of the restaurants really seemed to be beckoning, so we just walked up and down Fort Hamilton Parkway. We bought some rye bread at a Polish grocery and looked in the window of a storefront that promised "PUPPIES" (they weren't kidding). Finally, we headed shiveringly down 5th Ave. with the intent of heading back to Sunset Park, but found ourselves in front of a Greek place called Agnanti that we decided to give a shot. It turned out to be great. They sat us (well, me) in front of a nice, hot wood-burning stove. I had lamb stew, allowing my post-November 4th attempt at vegetarianism to lapse a bit. (I am trying, though). Nina had an enormous fish thing. We ordered a half-carafe of retsina, thinking it was a kind of red. Was there something else I was supposed to remember? Along with the rest of the restaurant, we sang "Happy Birthday" to somebody whose birthday it was.
Oh, you know. Happy New Year, too.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Not Your Cute Little Children
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.
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.
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.
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