Calendar Season

...is in full effect. Scope the calendar itself for proof.

What have I been doing? Not blogging examining my life, that's for sure. But I did manage to hit up a few shows at the Northside Festival. On Friday, this band-slash-dude called Fluffy Lumbers was playing at Matchless, which I struggled to locate, despite the fact that I'll always associate with a memorable bit of stomach trouble. I'd meant to see Fluffy Lumbers at Shea Stadium when I'd gone with Chris -- like a lot of "new" acts, the guy seemed to be more about sounds than about songs, but kind of intriguingly raw -- and we wound up stuck with Total Slacker instead. Plus the show was only $6. I got my hand-stamp and hit the back-room, which was dim enough that I couldn't make out any of the names on the taps. I asked the bartender for a Heineken, spying a cooler full of them. "The promotion just ended," she said. "The Heinekens aren't a dollar any more. Do you still want one?" "Yeah, sure," I said, like a guy who just loves Heineken that much. I went and stood over by a guy who was dressed like an old-timey milkman: Pressed white slacks; black tie; a crisp, military-looking hat.

The show started with a bunch of keyboard noodling -- the guy was crouched over his synthesizer, twisting knobs and adjusted sliders, producing a sound that had a not-unpleasant resemblance to whale songs. The sound reached a kind of crescendo, and then he turned it off. The rest of his act was him playing guitar and singing, running both the mic and the guitar through a chorus pedal. It was, you know, okay, but it could stand to have been more intelligible. It was so distorted, in fact, that at one point the sound guy commandeered the PA system and said, "Can you turn that down? People are walking out of here because it's too noisy." Fluffy Lumbers obliged, muttering, "When a voice from above tells you to do something, I guess you've gotta do it." But he must have known his goose was cooked, performance-wise: I bet the booth engineer never tells Jack White to quit it with the pedals. He finished up with a wan cover of "I Think We're Alone Now," after which I peaced out.

The next day, Nina and I went out to Newtown Barge Park for Titus Andronicus' Northside show. Barge Park is pretty much just a basket court with a baseball diamond painted over it. ... Patrick Stickles stopped after the first couple of songs to announce: "I know it's fun to go to outdoor music festivals," he said, "but let's not forget about what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now. And you know what the ground looks like after an outdoor show -- there are cans and bottles everywhere. So would everyone please remember to recycle your bottles?" I don't know why this kind of liberal scolding doesn't chafe more, but it doesn't. In fact, I think it's pretty endearing. And he sounds even more fussy and pedantic in the profile of the band that ran in the L magazine they were handing out at the festival. Maybe it comes across as charming because Stickles looks like a cross between William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln.

"This song's about feelings," he said, and they launched into "No Future Part III: Escape From No Future," which I'm still humming to myself between home and the subway. They played a lot of material from their fantastic "The Monitor," changing the arrangements at times to segue one into the next. Somehow we wound up on the non-dancing side of the crowd; I had to content myself vicariously with observing the thrashing of the Jersey contingent, many of whom I'm starting to recognize, bandanas and all, from previous shows. I managed to infiltrate the pit for "Titus Andronicus" (how could you not?) but then retreated. You'll always be a loser. And that's okay!

After the show was over, Nina and I put our plastic bottle in the proper receptacle and bought some food at San Loco, which was, predictably, very tomato- and onion-y and perversely free of cilantro. A few vendors milled about aimlessly. A Heineken guy at a booth in an empty and inaccessible part of the park drummed his fingers on the table. We left and walked down through Greenpoint to Williamsburg, where there was some kind of street fair going on. There were kids -- lots of kids -- cavorting, getting their faces painted; and there were Cirque du Soleil types flipping around on trampolines. We stopped at Fabiane's on Bedford Ave. for food and drink and ended up staying there in the air conditioning for almost two hours, watching skinny young fathers with beards tote their babies around. One of the bits of the fair involved mats of sod being laid out in the middle of the street. Boston terriers, golden retrievers, and Jack Russell terriers splayed themselves with abandon.

It put me in mind of the movie Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I Netflixed a week or two ago. I really liked Raising Victor Vargas (also by Peter Sollett) when I saw it -- it struck me as both deeply romantic and emotionally frank -- but this one left me cold, and I've been trying to figure out why. I guess I was taken aback by the self-absorption of the two protagonists, both children of means who almost have to work to invent the problems they struggle with in the film. They spend an evening jetting from one conspicuous L.E.S. hotspot to another, heedless of their surroundings, moping all the way; the revelatory bit of philosophy that comes toward the end is:

Norah: There's this part of Judaism that I like. Tikun Olam. It said that the world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together.

Nick: Maybe we don't have to find it. Maybe we are the pieces.

And of course it certainly feels that way when you're seventeen. Look, I'm no Jane Jacobs, but isn't the promise (and fatal flaw) of edgy neighborhoods like Williamsburg or the Lower East Side that you'll get to be the star of some bohemian fantasy replete with undiscovered rock 'n' roll bands and exotic food? The reality is, of course, that there's not really room for more than a few main characters per acre. You've either gotta resign yourself to being a background artist in the big pond or you've gotta find some new part of the city (any city) to colonize and destroy.

We ended up meeting Winnie in Chinatown to help her feed her sister's cat, an adopted stray named Fei Dao. After filling his bowl, we stood in the mostly un-unpacked bedroom and looked out the window at a display of fireworks being set off, unheralded, over the Hudson. On the way out of the building, I stopped to look at a waterbug I'd stomped reflexively on the way in. It had been swarmed with ants, the ministrations of which were triggering stray muscular contractions in its legs. "Boy," I thought. "He doesn't seem to like that much."

Then we had ice cream.

The College Graduate

Nina graduated from Columbia this week! She's got one more class to finish up over the summer (Microeconomics), but she got to walk with the rest of her class in the two-day graduation ceremony.

Sunday was Class Day for the School of General Studies -- each school in Columbia's pantheon's got their own day, plus a big joint ceremony at the end. We got up real early, got ourselves into our formal-wear, and summoned an Elegante cab -- the driver of which turned out to be the only cabbie in the city who respects the speed limit on the BQE. We had to make an emergency explanation, in our pidgin Spanish, that we wanted to go to 115th and Broadway in Manhattan, not 115 Broadway (which, as we overheard his dispatcher informing him, is between Cedar St. and Liberty St.). Nonetheless, we got up there more or less on time, and Nina joined the mass of blue-robed General Studies degree candidates and I sat down with Nina's mom and brother and uncle and grandma. There were three tents set up in the southern half of the big campus plaza -- one each on either side of a central tent for the candidates and some VIPs. At the front of the two satellite tents there were these enormous bright LCD screens that played a slide show of photos of and quotes from the candidates.

Nina's mom wondered out loud whether we should have procured flowers. I assured her, without knowing myself that there was a florist within walking distance; and, armed with a twenty, I dashed out the eastern gates to look. Of course, there wasn't anything obvious nearby, and so I started jogging uptown, coffee-filled stomach roiling as I held my tie in place with one hand. Eventually, I found a deli with a built-in flower stall. The place was called The Apple Tree, which is the same name as the fancy deli we used to go to in high school. I had to beg them to unlock the flowers (the guy who trimmed the stems was running late) and got preempted by a middle-aged Asian guy who seemed to be there for the same reason as me, someone's dad, maybe, and who wanted to know the price of every bouquet. But I was ultimately able to buy way too many flowers and trotted back to the ceremony, where I took some antacids and focused on not farting or burping. Or tearing up, because I knew how hard Nina'd worked for this day and how much it meant to her. College is difficult, babies -- no less so when you've gotta pay rent and commute to your classes from way far away. She's hit more than her fair share of obstacles, but she's always gotten back on track. I was -- and am -- deeply proud of her and impressed by what she's done.

Jacques Pépin gave a thoughtful speech in which he talked about the way his degree helped him feel like he was on equal footing with his peers and colleagues. After that, Brian Corman gave the valedictory address. Nina remarked, via text, that one of the anecdotes he told sounded familiar. She wasn't the only person to notice. Yikes. (Although it's still not as lame, I'd argue, as Thomas Friedman telling my graduating class to "dance like there's nobody watching.") But then there was the candidate procession up to the podium to receive their degrees, led by a four-person New Orleans marching jazz band. That was kind of my favorite part -- everyone looked so happy! Dean Awn hugged and posed each candidate for a photo, even the ones that clearly didn't want to be hugged or posed with. I could've watched it forever. But the line of blue robes finished making its way across the stage and was led, again, by the band. Another tent was opened off to one side serving mimosas and cookies and mini-quiches.

After we'd gotten suitably tipsy on the champagne, we hopped into cabs and headed down to 91st St. to meet up with Nina's family and have lunch at Carmine's, a big, fancy, old-fashioned Italian restaurant, where all the food comes family-style -- meaning that there's an absolute shit-ton of each order on every enormous plate. Nina and I were wired and exhausted and sore and not really in any condition to eat, but we managed to put away a reasonable amount of it and bagged up the rest to take home. ...Where we spent the rest of the day dozing and eating leftovers.

Tuesday was Commencement. It was a gray day, rainy and cold. On the way up to Columbia on the subway we stood next to a shabby, unshaven guy in sweatpants and a sweatshirt playing with an Amazon Kindle. He was wearing a baseball cap that said "Swallow, or it's going in your eye." But then he got off the train and Columbians started to board: At Columbus Circle, two girls in light blue robes got on and started talking to a couple of French tourists. "Aren't you late for the ceremony?" the man asked. "They can't start it until we get there!" said one of the girls. That's right, I thought, nudging Nina, who was worried about the timing of our arrival.

Columbia security had the streets barricaded and were doing a remarkable job of sorting graduates and family members. At the side of the barricades there were a bunch of activists handing out fliers protesting Columbia's expansion into Morningside Heights. A woman handed me one as soon as I got out of the subway, and, after figuring out what it was, I crumpled it up and threw it away. "To hell with these guys," I thought. "I'm pro-Columbia today." A few dozen feet down the block, though, I ran into another protester, who just happened to be the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, proprietor of St. Mary's, which houses the attic in which the mellifluous Hotel For Dogs holds its rehearsals. "Hi, Earl" I said, taking a flier. "Oh, uh, hi!" he said, surprised. "Peace be with you!" I kept that one folded neatly in my pocket.

There weren't tents set up this time, although the screens were still set up. Nina's mom and brother and I sat together on wet plastic folding chairs with our umbrellas up, angling them so as to drip the run-off onto the people in front of us. After what seemed like a hundred repetitions of a Pomp-and-Circumstance medley, the commencement ceremony began. It started with an elaborate processional: The deans came out, followed by the trustees, distinguished guests, and some selected faculty members. Finally, the "mace-bearer" appeared (bearing Columbia's silver mace), followed by President Bollinger.

He stepped up to the podium and made some abridged remarks. In reference to the weather, he said, "It's a well-known piece of academic folk wisdom: if it rains on your commencement, you are guaranteed to have a fabulous life." (Ah, that explains my fabulous life!) One by one, the Deans of the individual schools came up to the podium and petitioned the President to bestow upon their students the rights, privileges and responsibilities of Columbia graduates. The petitions were often punny or entendre-laden: E.g., "These students have proven themselves to be exceptional lovers... of the study of human anatomy," pleaded the dean of the medical school. Each school also had their own "props," replicas (often inflatable) of which were distributed throughout the stands: The college of arts and sciences had broadswords; the engineers had big red mallets; the teachers' college apples; the dental school some surprisingly well-articulated giant toothbrushes. Graduates in Nina's school were waving black and white-checked racing flags: The finish line, I think.

After the petitioning was finished, President Bollinger said a few more things, and Jewelnel Davis said a few more things, Nina's mom and Michael and I hustled, accompanied by "New York, New York" and "Empire State of Mind," over to Lewisohn Hall where there were cupcakes and champagne for GS students and their hangers-on. We lingered while Nina gossiped with some fellow graduates and then cabbed it back downtown, where Nina & Co. went out for a celebratory lunch and I went into the office, tipsier than I should've been at that early hour of the wide-open afternoon.

Software As A Skurvice

I spent Saturday mostly on the train, en route to and from the Free Software Foundation's annual associate members meeting in Cambridge. The conference is one of the highlights of the year for me -- good news delivered by smart people, bad news framed as motivation. And as, I think, one of the board members pointed out a few years ago, you get the superficial pleasure of seeing what they spend the money on.

On the way I listened to the excellent new Titus Andronicus album, The Monitor, which I'd purchased along with some other music (The Airing Of Grievances, also by T.A.; Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock And Roll; Arcade Fire's Neon Bible) in a semi-impulsive bid to update my music library. It's very, very good: Wrenchingly earnest, unabashedly pretentious, with maddeningly catchy guitar melodies. "Richard II" is my favorite song as of this writing, but I've found myself singing the unwholesome chorus of "No Future Part Three" to myself more than I probably should: "You'll always be a loser, you'll always be a loser..." It's been frustratingly long since I've bought a record where I didn't feel bored and alienated by all but a few songs; this one's a very nice treat. I'm glad to finally own Neon Bible as well, but it's almost too scary to listen to all in one go -- "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" is a grotesque and upsetting little kernel of discomfort nestled snugly in the middle of the track list.

I'm embarrassed to admit that taking the Acela is also something I look forward to. Why it costs $80 is beyond me (as Chris would sing, "that's a whole lotta dough!"), and the sandwiches they sell in the bar car are unpleasantly damp; but god the scenery is breathtaking, and I get four solid hours to devote to programming, a rare treat for me. This year I spent the time finishing a pretty large project that I'd started around this time last year and which had gotten variously stalled and started up again several times in the intervening months. It was satisfying. I made a lot of progress.

The train was late getting into South Station, though, and it was close to noon by the time I got to Harvard Yard. The first few speakers had already gone. It was almost lunch-time, so I just kind of lurked awkwardly outside the auditorium. It being spring break, Crimson Catering was out of commission, but Deborah Nicholson had arranged for some pretty good burritos to be airdropped in. I ate one with tofu in it, outside on the warm rocks. My lunch companion was Debra Cauley, who writes technical manuals for a lot of Free Software projects; she had some interesting stories about being a long-term Alphabet City dweller, with all the attendant stressors and excitement. A friend of hers, whose name I didn't catch, gave me a few handmade stickers that said "Free Software - Fuck Yeah."

After lunch I had the good fortune to see Eben Moglen give a state-of-the-Free Software-nation talk. He's no longer on the board, and was going to be abroad doing the SFLC's business instead of at the conference, but apparently he'd come down with a cold that caused him to miss a flight to India (but which allowed him to give a one hour, ad lib lecture? I don't get it either). Cold or no, he's always a great talker. He devoted a lot of time this year, as he did last year, to software patents -- in particular, the difficulty in negotiating disarmament in the patents arms races between corporations engaged in IP détente. He also talked about Sun's semi-recent purchase by Oracle: "We in the Free world have not traditionally looked to Oracle for pro-Freedom practices," he said, getting laughs. Still, he thought, it was possible, or even likely, that Oracle would keep the MySQL project, which they'd acquired with the rest of Sun, going, as a way of eroding Microsoft SQL Server's position. The last thing he talked about was freedom for network services and making the relationship between Free Software and privacy more manifest. "It'll be as hard as anything we've ever done," he said, "but not harder."

I stayed in the room after Prof. Moglen's talk for Walter Bender's presentation on Sugar, the desktop environment for the OLPC project. A lot of Free Software people seem to also have a bent towards alternative education and teaching practice, and Sugar's always had a secondary roles as a proof of concept of its designers' pedagogical theories. Walter demonstrated some interesting features of the platform, like the ubiquitous "view source" command that brings up the source code to any component of the system; he discussed how this feature dictates some organizational requirements for the software itself: We can better facilitate learning on the Sugar platform, he said, by making the platform's software easy to understand and decompose into simple pieces. I was skeptical -- View Source works well enough for the system's chrome, which seems to be written in Python, but doesn't let you dig any deeper. (Maybe that's good enough, though?)

Richard Stallman's talk was a step up from his spiel from last year about "The JavaScript Trap." The FSF has clearly been sharpening their thinking about freedom for network services. Whereas Mako had focused in the past on the rights of a user a service to access its source code, which to me seemed to lack the logical imperative common to the rest of the FSF's dicta, "Who does that server really serve?" suggested that you should be doing your computing only on your own hardware -- the work that's been done over the past several years to abstract away the concept of the personal computer has also had the side effect of making it acceptable for users to delegate control of their applications to systems they have no reason to trust. It's hard to make coherent arguments about your rights as a user of other peoples' hardware (at least, I think it is) -- better not to give up your agency in the first place. RMS suggested, as Eben Moglen did, that a federated network of secure, peer-to-peer systems would better serve the interests of users. (I think it's certainly worth a shot.) The usual cadre of imbeciles was on hand to pepper him with irrelevant questions ("Have you considered [boring, overly-specific edge case]?"), which he duly dismissed. He seemed to be in good spirits.

There was a meet-up scheduled afterwards at a local bar, which I considered going to. I hadn't seen anyone I knew, though; and aside from lunch, the only interactions I'd had were with Robert Collins, from GNU bzr, and this uncannily persistent Gnome usability guy, both of whom wanted to tell me how much they hate GNU Guile. Plus, although the conference, like last year, was extended to go for three whole days, I hadn't arranged for anywhere to stay in Boston. Greg's living in China, and my dreamed-of invitation to crash on the couch at the Acetarium didn't materialize. So I had to catch an evening train back to NYC, and the last one 'til, like, late was leaving at 6:30. As it happened, hanging out at the pub turned out to be off the table -- I made a run to the bank to get cash and lost sight of the procession of beardos I'd assumed I could count on to lead me to the place from the Science Center. I wandered around the shopping district near campus for about ten minutes, swearing audibly, before giving up and getting back on the T for the four hour trip back home.

I got some more programming work done on the way, but there was something missing: That knot of yearning in my chest for the tall grass and salt marshes of New England wasn't there. Maybe it's this cold spring we've been having.

My band, Hotel For Dogs, continues its inexorable ascension to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: We just wrote a song about a guy who works at the zoo and has to distinguish the boy pumas from the girl pumas. It's a fraught kind of husbandry.

Twelve Hours of Papo

Nina and I just got back from a trip to Puerto Rico!

It was kind of a modified Spring Break: Nina's got an actual break this week, but my schedule was looking a bit hairy, so we wanted to go a little early. We put the whole thing together kind of at the last minute, too -- we didn't really know where we wanted to go, except that it had to have beaches and be warm; we wanted to do something purely vacational. Like Seinfeld: no learning (but, hopefully, some hugging). Nina suggested Puerto Rico, and I asked around about it. My mom recommended a bed-and-breakfast in San Juan where she'd stayed while on a Caribbean cruise (weird!). Chris wrote me a very detailed account of his own visit to the island a couple of years ago, from which I extracted the following:

• Expect to eat tostones covered in ranch dressing
• Stay out of the neighborhood called La Perla

"Why?" I asked him at practice. "Is it worse than La Boca?"

"La Boca is nothing," said Chris. "La Perla is way worse."

Armed with this knowledge, and a reservation at The Gallery Inn, we hopped a Friday morning flight to SJU. It's crazy how close Puerto Rico is! I slept for some of the flight (enough to miss the beverage service and the distribution of "Chocobillys") and didn't have to break into any of the toys I'd packed to distract myself. We cabbed it to the hotel directly from the airport. The place was beautiful! The Gallery Inn is what it sounds like: The proprietress, Jan D'Esopo, is a sculptress (among other things), and the maze-like building, which looks like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez story, complete with crumbling plaster and creeping vines, is also her house. It's also a showroom for the various objects she's made, among which, notably, are several facsimile busts of Michelle Obama, whose grinning visage can be found peeking out from behind ferns or down from the mantelpiece in a musty costume closet, etc. The building is also home to several exotic birds that mingle more or less freely with the guests (although we are instructed not to pet or cuddle them):

• Campeche, a 14-year-old moluccan cockatoo, who seems to be kind of the mascot of the Inn
• Mikey, a giant blue macaw; the most vocally articulate of all the birds. He was able to produce an eerily accurate rendition of human laughter
• Pica, a harlequin macaw with a mite allergy that made her look a bit threadbare
• Dozer (sp?), a cockatoo like Campeche, but with more shrieking

The place is on Calle Norzagaray, directly across from the city wall that protects Old San Juan from the predations of the Atlantic Ocean and marauding navies.

That evening we walked down to the Plaza De La Marina. There were a bunch of push-cart vendors there, and I bought a kind of blended fruit smoothie of the type that Chris had raved about in his travelogue. (It was good, but cost $7.00) After no small amount of restaurant shopping (places close early, dogg), we sat down at a small place called El Caldero Sabroso, where the cook, a middle-aged lady with a very fuzzy, if bleached, upper lip served us two plates of mofongo, a kind of fried plantain mash that was very, very good.

The next morning, after eating our complimentary "continental breakfast" (which included Puerto Rican coffee with powdered milk blendered into it all foamy) in the sun-drenched, lizard-infested garden, we struck out to see some shit. The first thing we did was head down the stairs by the side of the road leading down into the shantytown below. A lot of the place seemed to be in ruins -- houses without walls filled with drifts of garbage -- and inhabited almost entirely by stray cats, who did not give a fuck. We left, not realizing until we saw its name emblazoned on some basketball bleachers from the road above, that this was the notorious La Perla. It wasn't really that bad. After that, we walked a little further down the road 'til we got to the Castillo de San Cristóbal, where we joined an English-language walking tour. The guide, Hector Montes, a strawberry blonde-haired, blue-eyed park ranger, had an aggressively didactic approach to explaining the fortress's many layers of fortification. "Did you know," he said, "that the walls in this tunnel are grooved to allow the defenders to pack the walls with gunpowder? Did you know?" We didn't know.

Later in the afternoon we took a cab to Condado, a neighborhood across the Ashford Ave. bridge from Old San Juan and renowned for its nice beaches. The sun was approaching the horizon once we found a segment of beach that seemed right, in the back of one of the enormous resort hotels and girded by a pier a little ways out from the shore, but the sand and water were both impossibly warm. Nina and I rolled around in the surf, letting the small waves carry us back to and from the shore. When it got genuinely dark, some bright lights -- like, flood lamps -- came on on the pier and lit the water up white. It was like being in a water rescue scene in an action movie. We got out and put our clothes back on over our swimsuits and wandered over to the front of the hotel, where there was a small bar and a restaurant from which we ordered mojitos and some impressively good nachos.

On Sunday we spent the morning at the other big fortress in Old San Juan, the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro. The enormous green lawn in front of the fortress walls, where people were flying a crazy array of complex and beautiful kites, proved to be a better time than the fortress itself, the exploration of which was concerned mostly with stair-climbing amd peering through arrow-slits; but we ran into Hector Montes again, taking tickets at the entrance. "You two look familiar," he said. After we got back to the hotel, we decided to buy into one of those package tour deals, which would take us the next day to a bunch of different places, including the rain forest in El Yunque, and a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo. The organization we ended up registering with was called "Manny Tours." They were expensive, but we didn't really have a lot of time to be choosy. And vacation is a "sometimes food," as Cookie Monster would say.

And then we took a walk out to Escambrón, the beach nearest our hotel by walking. It ended up taking longer than we anticipated, and Nina developed a really bad blister between her toes from the thong of her sandals, which was only made worse by the sand once we finally got there. So we didn't really go in the water, and when it started to get dark we decided to head back to the hotel. We wanted to hail a cab, but none of them would stop for us (the medallion light on the top is not a good heuristic for determining availability, since the cabbies never use the meter). Finally one did stop, without us hailing it, as we limped down Muñoz Rivera Ave. There were already passengers in it, but the driver'd taken pity on us. "Thanks," we said. "Where're you from," asked one of the riders, an old white guy. "France?" "We're from New York," we said. "Oh. We're from Jersey," he said.

That night, during a walk around the Plaza Baldorioty De Castro, Nina finally acquiesced to my desire that she get her photo taken by the carnies with the bird-draped push-cart -- they had a bunch of different-colored birds, which could be dutifully posed on the shoulders and arms and heads of tourists. The carnies seemed to want to lade people with as many birds as possible, but I had something specific in mind: Beside the parrots and macaws, there were a pair of slate-green budgies, one of which was visibly overweight and didn't seem to be able to close its mouth, giving it a slack-jawed, overstuffed look. I had the guy put that bird and that bird only on Nina, on top of her head. After he took the picture, though, he insisted on decking us out, together and singly, with various combinations of the other birds. I was expecting their talons to be pinchy and uncomfortable, but they were actually really gentle. One of the parrots sat on my shoulder, licking dried salt out of my ear with its soft, dry, weird tongue.

Manny, or, as we were instructed to call him, Papo, bore a strong resemblance to Penn Jillette, without the smugness. He picked us up at the hotel at around 9:30, and we started the trip to El Yunque, collecting other parties along the way (including a couple of obnoxious girls on an actual spring break from Harvard, as they were quick to mention, unbidden). He gave us running descriptions of the social and economic conditions of the neighborhoods we passed, explaining how, for example, the recent recession had forced the governor to thin the rolls of island government, one of the major sources of employment in the area, contravening the policies that made Luis Muñoz Marín beloved enough to get the airport named after him.

The public portions of El Yunque are built into levels corresponding to different elevations. Our first stop was at the visitor center, where we watched a Spanish-language documentary about the park (narrated by David Ortiz) and changed into our bathing suit. We were on our own for the next leg of the trip: Papo dropped us off at the entrance to a trail taking us from the side of one of the main roads, through the rain forest with a pit stop at La Mina Falls. Babies, I have never been in a rain forest. As I was saying to Nina, I was expecting it to be all mist and tarantulas and fungus. It's not actually like that, although there are certainly some weird, snakey roots and funny-looking plants, along with the ubiquitous lizards. It was more like a really hilly park, with paved trails leading from one vista to the next. Along the way, there were these little open air concrete (and graffiti-tagged) "cabins," where, at night or during a rainstorm, I guess, you could take shelter and eat meats cooked on the crude provided grill.

The waterfall, as Papo promised, was cold and refreshing. An enormous dude covered in scary-looking tattoos splashed around with a toddler on his shoulders in the pool directly under the falls.

After we met back up with Papo, he took us to a roadside stand run by some friends of his. We got, as per his recommendation, the pasteles, a kind of smoother-textured tamale made of plantains and wrapped in banana leaves, which lent them a complex, acrid taste. Papo hung out in the kitchen as we ate, sharing a Medalla Light with the staff. The next stop was Luquillo Beach, a preternaturally calm expanse of flat sand and water on the eastern side of the island. While Papo waited in his van, we bought piña-coladas from the one-armed guy manning the cantina and then hung out in the water. Nina showed me how to float on my back, something I'd never been able to do successfully before (no lie -- the part I'd been missing is that you have to tilt your head back 'til your ears are in the water; otherwise you sink), and she pulled me around like a tugboat by my feet. I loved that. We kind of walked around on our hands in the shallows until a small stripy fish swam up and nipped at Nina's finger. We tried, unsuccessfully, to catch him.

The final component in our package was the kayaking trip to the "bioluminescent bay," which began at the marina in Fajardo. The paddle started in the open, choppy waters of the bay, from which the guys running the trip led the group, theoretically in single file, into the "channel," a tree-lined aquatic corridor that quickly became so dark that the only thing we could see, trees included, was the red, coiled glowstick tied to the stern of the kayak in front of us. This was what we used, along with the guidance of mangrove branches, to keep us moving forward until the channel finally opened up into another, smaller bay. I am not a champion kayaker by any stretch, but Nina and I were more coordinated than a lot of the other pairs, who couldn't seem to figure out how to get their boats to turn in the right directions. The place we unded up was, I guess, where the highest concentration of bioluminescent organisms was -- dipping our fingers in the water or paddling around with our hands produced bubbles of strange, bright whiteness, and when you scooped up a handful of water, there were little sparks in it. The creatures didn't produce enough light to, say, see by; but they made colors that shouldn't have been as visible as they were in the dark. And, almost more strikingly, we'd paddled out to a part of the island that was far enough from a major city that we could see clearly the whole menagerie of northern-hemisphere constellations in the sky. Nina pointed out the Little Dipper to one of the Harvard girls, standing on end and low in the sky, near a lighthouse to the east.

We flew out the next morning, uneventfully (our in-flight movie was The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spanish-language edition). Arriving back home after a frustratingly long and expensive cab ride -- awful traffic on the BQE -- we ran into Martin hanging around on the stoop. "Were you guys just on vacation?" he asked. "Guess where we went," I said. "Puerto Rico? Where'd you stay? How much was your hotel?" We told him. "I could've got you a room for a hundred dollars less than that. How much was the plane?" And then he asked "Did you go to La Perla?"

The Sound Of Young America

It looks like The Pogues are foregoing their annual St. Patrick's day Roseland performance, which is convenient, since this year I was planning on skipping it, Shane's new teeth and all.

After two separate, abortive attempts at Union Pool, I finally saw The Muslims on Friday at Cake Shop. (They've since been renamed The Soft Pack, which is a way less punk rock name, but.) It was freezing cold when I got to Ludlow St., and some light snow had started to fall. There was a line down the block to get in. As I got in line, I thought I recognized a guy standing off to the side, by the curb, holding a vintage amp in one hand, a gig bag slung over his shoulder. His beard made him look like an earnest satyr. "That's Patrick Stickles!" someone yelled from a cluster of NYU freshmen behind me. "From Titus Andronicus!" Patrick waved and, to my surprise, came over to talk to the guy.

"Titus Andronicus are amazing," the fan said.

"Uh, I don't know if we're amazing," said Patrick. "A baby's laugh is amazing. We're just really high energy."

"Can you guys play a show at our dorm?" asked one of the kids. To my further surprise, Patrick entered into schedule negotiations with the guy.

Cake Shop was packed, moreso than I'd ever seen it. Nina showed up and we sort of nestled up against the bar. A bunch of people kept trying, annoyingly and unsuccessfully, to squeeze past us -- not only was there actually no room, but there was an enormous guy standing right in front of us who would brook no attempt to usurp his spot. I'd never given much thought to the cruddy old TV above the bar, hooked up to a grainy video feed of the stage, but that night it was the only way I could see what was going on.

The Soft Pack were fine -- I've liked them for a while now for two reasons: 1. They've got a fantastic song called "Extinction," a great, nasty, Richard Hell-type punk song; 2. They've got a kind of aggressively non-rock-and-roll aesthetic: they dress like guys who temp at a second-tier investment bank, and, like, the most handsome dude among them looks like a less memorable version of Todd Barry. They played a tight, fast show. It was their record release party, apparently. Maybe I'll buy their album.

So this February has been, apparently, the snowiest ever in New York? That's crazy! All told, we've gotten two large reg'lar snowstorms and then one kind of unexpected one at the end that really clobbered everything. I don't know, I'm a big fan. Nina hates it, but I love the way a good layering of snow changes the terms of engagement with the city: More climbing, more balancing, more puddle-jumping. From my office on Friday the 26th, in the midst of a storm that would leave the city with twenty inches of snow, I watched the flakes blowing practically horizontally, or in miniature vortexes, doing the strange things that snow does when caught in the updraft between two large buildings in Manhattan. Here's a photo I took up on the roof in Sunset Park:



The night after one the big storms, I hit up Don Pedro in Williamsburg to see Cerebral Ballzy, who I'd admired ever since hearing them on Myspace a year or so ago. I'd eaten something gross, was worried that I'd crap myself, but managed to huddle in a dark corner of Don Pedro's music space, which looked like a place you'd through a quinceañera party: It's a large, mostly unadorned and featureless room, with high tin ceilings in need of cleaning and repair.

The first opener was a band called Fuck School. Their lead singer Nick was a big guy in a hooded robe whose long hair and beard contributed to his druid-y appearance. Fuck School's set was short and sloppy, and funny. At the end, they played their eponymous anthem, which put me strongly in mind of a similar song by The Headliners ("We are The Headliners / We only fuck minors / We are not coal miners"). After they were done, we were subjected to the execrable Total Slacker. (I'd recognized their waif-like lead singer earlier, with a sinking heart.) Or not, since I and, satisfyingly, most of the audience, left and went out to the bar while 'Slacker was on.

Cerebral Ballzy came on close to 1:00 AM, but the crowd was still pretty thick. They sound a little like the early Jones / Da Fonseca collaboration, Contraband, but with knit caps and skateboards. Their lead singer, Honor, is a great front man -- he's got a really expressive face and a tough, cheeky attitude. Literally: his coin slot was hanging out of his jeans the whole time he was climbing the amps and dangling off the exposed pipes on the back wall of the stage, tearing bits of insulation out with his bare hands. I've never been to a hardcore show before, and it was great -- the songs were fast, the audience was intense and enthusiastic. Honor stood straight atop an amp, one arm behind his back like a punk George Washington crossing the Potomac, while the band played what I guess might be their hit, a song called "Shit Rag," which is about a topic near and dear to my heart: a digestive crisis and the suppression of its expression. Towards the end of the set, Honor's, uh, ballzy made an appearance. He flapped them vigorously at the crowd.

I saw Patrick Stickles again when I went to see Titus Andronicus and Parts & Labor at the Bowery Ballroom on Saturday.

Parts & Labor were good, although I was spent part of their set being preoccupied with how beardy and owlish the lead singer looked -- he rocked out, but it was hard to read any emotional cues from him. Is this what punk rock looks like these days? To my fusiform facial area, heavy beardos are all pretty much indistinguishable from the yeti in Monsters, Inc.

Titus Andronicus were fantastic, though, in spite of being even beardier. I'd never seen (or heard) a full-length set by that band, nor had I heard any of the material from the album they were releasing the next week. So I noticed some things that made a really strong impression on me: Like Ted Leo & Co., they've got really clear, bright lead guitar lines; but whereas The Pharmacists take their cues from pop-punk and soul, Titus Andronicus draw from folk and traditional music -- one song even featured an extended breakdown into The Battle Hymn Of The Republic, never a bad idea. I've read several comparisons of their sound to Bruce Springsteen's, and one thing they definitely have in common is their use of chord resolution. I've got kind of a tin ear when it comes to intervals (although I passed "Clapping For Credit" back in college with flying colors), but I'm thinking of a 4th or a Major 3rd or something. Or maybe it's a 5th, I don't know; it's that sonic "dunh-dunh" you get from the inhalation / exhalation of an accordion or from drawing the bow across and back on the violin or cello. From what I could tell, Stickles' songs tend to chew over the problem of, well, America; American history; being an outsider in America. The material's compelling and disturbing to listen to, and his reedy howl drives home that there's no actual resolution to be had.

"This might be the best show of all time," said a guy behind me. I wasn't sure initially -- I was a bit lonely, didn't know the songs -- but the crowd was undeniably lively, and it wasn't just dudes. Some of the hardest pushers and shovers were ladies, and not the peacoated, Blackberry-checking ones you usually find at the Bowery Ballroom -- these were nerd girls: Acned; fuzzy-haired with long, wispy girl-sideburns; wearing faded, baggy sweatshirts. They were great. And, oh man, that eponymous song: It's a steamroller. Pretty much impossible not to get right up in the middle of the pit when they play that one. So I guess it was a pretty great show.

Towards the end of the show, Patrick took a moment to wax optimistic. "We're going out on tour on Monday," he said, turning to his bandmates, "and I honestly believe it's going to be the greatest adventure of our lives." Then he serenaded them with a solo cover of a Replacements song called "Treatment Bound." And then the band joined in and they played a vigorous, extended finale, a song from (I think) a triptych called "No Future."

Don't Think About It

Do it!

So says Henry Garfield. It's not a bad mantra at all.

At the second rehearsal we played at St. Mary's, Chris told me something wondrous. He was moving, he said, from his apartment in Williamsburg to a sublet in Murray Hill, and in the process of boxing up his things, he'd found a videotape. "It's a video of this crappy Headliners show we played at Continental back in college," he said. Little did he know, I'd been searching for this grail-like tape for almost ten years -- it's a record of the only full live performance I played in the band. (Billy thought he'd tracked the footage down about five years ago in the form of a Super-8 tape that had to be pried loose from a dinosaur of a camcorder, but after I paid a tape duplication company in The Cable Building to transfer its contents sight unseen, it turned out to be a video of a birthday party for one of Billy's Filipino relatives, affectionately known as "Crazy Uncle Darwin.")

So when Chris offered to lend me the tape, I couldn't believe my luck. I brought it to a Russian video transfer place with offices in a soundless, maze-like building of suites on 35th St. and had it put on a DVD. Contrary to Chris' assessment, the show turned out to be great! Sure, I'm playing way too fast, and there are some missed notes, on the whole it's funny, high-energy, and satisfyingly punk rock (viddy Chris' homebrew "Nike" swoosh). And the whole thing goes down at Continental, which has since forsaken live music for selling shots to creeps in visors. I cut the show up into individual songs and assembled them into a YouTube playlist. Watch it, share it, etc. There's something for everyone: Headliners "classics," like "I Wanna Be Alana's Boyfriend;" songs that made up our latter-day corpus, like "The Thrifty Drunk" and "Wonderful Picnic." Seriously, it's awesome.

I have another thing to tell you about. Back when I lost my job over the summer, I decided it would be an excellent opportunity to take a stab at a game project that Tom had been wanting to design -- I had a head full of ideas about what not to do when writing games for the web. And at the time I started working on it I wanted to prove to myself that I could build a better game faster than we'd done at Rebel Monkey and for way less (or no) money. And for the most part I think I was successful. Or, I should say, we were successful, since Tom's responsible for pretty much all of the game design and artwork. The game is called Battle Row, and it's a massively-multiplayer online game in the same vein as Urban Dead, a personal favorite of mine and Tom's -- only, instead of pitting humans against zombies in a vaguely Canadian-sounding city, we're staging a 6-way battle between street gangs and the police in 19th-century lower Manhattan. We've taken a lot of inspiration (as did Martin Scorsese) from Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York; Tom's dug deeper, reserving time at the New York City Police Museum to look up pictures of old-fashioned cop uniforms.

We got the skeleton of the system working in a couple of months, using PHP's Zend Framework (plus what I'd like to think are some fairly advanced transactional caching features that I wrote) and we've been progressively adding new stuff and holding playtests since the fall. We're in the middle of a sort of rolling playtest right now, actually. (Want to get in on it? Drop me a line.)

I attended my first show of the New Year, a co-worker's band at the nearly empty Alphabet Lounge on Avenue C. The bathroom there is on the stage, pretty much, so you have to skirt amps and a bass player to take a pee.

On Saturday morning, although it was paralyzingly cold, I met up with Ted, Cat, Tom, Colleen, and KT to have dim sum at a sumptuously appointed banquet hall in Chinatown called Golden Bridge. It was one of those places that doesn't really look like a restaurant from the outside -- more like a bank or a mall -- but it had a great view of the bridge, and everything was covered in (somewhat filthy) satin. Next to an enormous embossed golden dragon on one wall, a huge four panel flat-screen display blared advertisements for herbal colon remedies, and at one end of the hall was a stage with two empty tables on it, probably reserved for newlyweds or exalted personages. I'd never had dim sum before, but it's a great premise: Ladies push carts full of food around and try to give you stuff, and if you let them, they stamp a little stamp on a card at your table. We ate different kinds of dumplings: egg custard, shrimp, variants on pork. Dissuading the wait staff from loading you up with food was hard work! The one thing we wanted to try but was not practically forced on us was a plate of perfectly round, bright green balls. When we asked about them, the lady pushing the cart said, "They're filled with vegetables and pork. They're just for dessert."

After brunch, Tom and I visited a greatly diminished Pearl Paint, where he bought nibs.

That night, Chris and I went out to Williamsburg to see a show at Shea Stadium, the venue that is impossible to Google. Neither of us had ever been there. The place ended up being up a fairy-lighted flight of stairs behind an unmarked door, 20 Meadow St., out by some warehouses and hot sheet motels off the Grand St. stop on the L. It's kind of just somebody's apartment: one not-too-big room, creaky wooden floor. Not that it's not an endearing space -- among other adornments, one thing I particularly liked was a large drawing on one wall of a haughty-looking white Persian cat wearing a string of pearls; legs spread, its... business... artfully concealed. The place was packed with twee little beardos and a bunch of those porcelain doll-faced, pea coat-bedecked girls that show up at inexplicably at rock shows (I've always found them a bit of a buzzkill, but Chris was down). Someone was selling Miller Lites from behind a card table.

The band that went on when we got there was called, I think, Total Slacker, and they were wretched. It was this guy who looked and acted like a young Andy Dick playing guitar and kind of spazzing out, and then a little mushroom of a girl playing bass. And there was a drummer. But the band was clearly supposed to be a showcase for this awful guy's guitar-playing talent -- he would writhe around on the ground, and sort of bunny-hop around, jump off the drum kit, and just thrash tunelessly on his guitar. "This is the most self-conscious thing I've ever seen," I said to Chris. When their set was over, this big guy in a tweed suit went up to the guitar player and started chatting him up in a boorish, mopey, music critic tone of voice. "I saw you guys play a show at [some place or other]," he said. "I was wondering whether you..." (I stopped listening.)

After that was a band called Golden Girls, which was much better. They played a kind of punky, hard-driving rock-and-roll that sounded, at its better points, a little like Motörhead. The crowd moshed around enthusiastically, and somebody ended up dropping a forty on the ground, which rolled over to my feet at the periphery of the pit. The lead singer / guitar player had a mustache that should have made him look unbearable, but for some reason made me and Chris feel charitably disposed towards him.

During the time between acts, Chris and I stepped out onto the little balcony area for a smoke. A girl from Holland asked, "Do you guys come here often?" No, we said, tittering. She wanted to know if we could figure out which door across the street was 23 Meadow St., since there was a party starting there later and going until 8:00 AM. 23 seemed to be another warehouse, lights on on the second floor, a lonely maintenance man visible through the window pushing some kind of floor buffer. We told her we were in a band (nearly true). Our guitarist was home with his wife. "His wife?" she asked. "Are you that old?" Yes, we said, we are that old.

We ended up leaving (I think) without seeing Fluffy Lumbers, the band I'd originally wanted to see. But we finished out the night with whiskey at a place called Sweet Ups, and that was just fine.

On 2009

The New Year always feels like it comes too soon. I guess that's a pretty trite observation, but I feel like this past year, especially, ended without enough concrete deliverables -- I never got to see the roll-out of the final (working) version of the code I wrote at Rebel Monkey (hell, I haven't even been paid). I didn't juice all the juice out of the summer. The projects I laid out for myself the year I graduated from college are still incomplete -- the second-order dependencies for some of them are still incomplete. I'm softer around the middle than I want to be, my hair is thinner than I'm comfortable with. These things aren't surprises, I suppose, but I think even younger, less decrepit readers can relate to the feeling of doors to possible futures shutting for lack of time.

Call the waaambulance.

My list, for posterity:

Best book I read: 2666
Best movie I saw in the theater: Moon
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Let The Right One In
Best show I went to: The Dickies, at Southpaw, January 2nd
Best reason for donating to WFMU: Ken Freedman, drunk
Best pie: Winter fruit
Best bark stripper: Alan Grayson
Best video game: Fallout 3
Best single: Alcoholics Unanimous
Best cemita: Pollo asado, Tacos Matamoros

For New Year's Eve, Nina and I had vague plans to hit up a dance party at the still-mysterious-to-me Industry City, the warren of art studios across the BQE from us between 34th and 40th St. But we waffled and ultimately took the train up to KT's apartment on the upper west side, which was filled with friends and food. We left around 2:30 AM, taking a D train that paused for a while at 53rd St. while some guys who were puking and punching at each other were hustled off the train by some extremely patient police officers. When Nina and I got off at 36th St., we weren't totally beat yet, so we decided to investigate the party. We walked in the dark, up and down the puddly, unpaved service roads strewn with rusty barrel hoops and corded rebar; but, although we could hear the sounds of music in the distance, we couldn't figure out precisely where the entrance was and gave up.

When I saw Billy and Chris at Billy's birthday party at Barcade on the 18th, we discussed the possibility of forming a (new) band, huddled in the corner with the original and unforgiving Punch Out!! machine. I did not realize these discussions were in earnest until a week or two later, when the email negotiations began.

I haven't played real drums in, god, years; and the last time I played anything approximating the drums was during the final, sad weeks of Rebel Monkey, on the office copy of Rock Band. I was holding the sticks a bit too tight or something, because I gave myself a large and painful hematoma on the inner joint of my thumb, which, at the time, I decided was a sprain and peevishly splinted with two snapped-off barbecue skewers.

Messrs. Lopez and Cumming were very tolerant. We played in a small attic room at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, across the street from the 26th precinct on 126th St. I'd been to Bill's wedding there a year or so ago; I'd even stood around the Kooperkamps' living room -- the western half of the church is their house, sort of -- uncomfortable and hungover in my one fancy, funereal suit. But I'd never explored the upper reaches of the place, and it turns to be delightfully maze-like, with irregularly-placed staircases and chilly, darkened corridors leading off to rooms that have been abandoned to the cats and dogs. There's art all over the walls -- prints, paintings, and sketches made by Sarah and her family. It's really beautiful, especially the aforementioned practice room, which is covered in collages and photos. There are amps, an old computer with a surprisingly well-balanced microphone, and the original drum kit we bought for The Headliners, although I didn't recognize it at first.

Like I said, I'm a bit out of practice, but I think I've made incremental improvements to some of the basics, especially when it comes to bass drum independence and endurance, which was always a weak spot for me. We wrote and recorded three songs, no lyrics yet. They're substantially different, tonally, than Headliners songs -- a bit moodier, less patently "rock and roll punk rock music." The hooks are buried a little deeper, but they're there.

The Boss Wants To Talk To You

Hello everyone.

It's the holidays already. What have I been up to? Not a whole lot -- or not a lot of the stuff I usually talk about on the online journal. Tom O'Donnell and I are hard at work on a project I hope we can unveil in the new year. My office job continues more or less peacefully. The weather got cold and rainy.

Sunset Park's Business Improvement District put up their 5th-Avenue-spanning Christmas decorations, which would be unremarkable except for the way some of the banners seem to hover in the air on account of the semi-invisible cords that lash them to the lamp posts. Some guys got killed on Nina's old block -- Winnie happened across one of the crime scenes as she was on her way to feed Kitty while Nina and I were away in Clark's Summit for Thanksgiving with the Priccis.

Concert season seems to have been put on pause for a little while. In lieu of that type of entertainment, I've been attending what Tom and Co. have been referring to as "film festivals" -- weekly screenings of movies that we've determined to be the bêtes noir of the critical establishment. The first of these was a movie called Snake Eater, in which a smirking, mouth-breathing Lorenzo Lamas plays a rogue marine who tails a family of hillbillies who've boiled his mom's head and are threatening, unconvincingly, to rape his sister. Lamas has the idiosyncratic delivery and mannerisms of Nicolas Cage at his loopiest, but he's got none of the emotional range and about zero charisma. And the movie begins and opens with a gag about cops pissing into a homeless man's coffee cup. We followed up with:

Gymkata: The CIA recruits a champion gymnast (played by Kurt Thomas, who's got the same fetal pig look as Mark Hamill but none of the spark) to help protect their interests in Eastern Europe, training him in a fighting style that blends the, uh, killing power of gymnastics with the oriental caché of karate. There's some jibber-jabber about spy satellites, but what Thomas really ends up doing once he arrives in the primitive nation of "Parmistan" is compete in a poorly-described and more poorly-justified athletic contest known as The Game, which consists of running, jumping, and not giving in to the temptations of wayward monks whose robes don't close in the back.

Heartbeeps: This one was a truly execrable piece of shit. Andy Kaufman, basically unbearable to begin with, puts on this excruciating baby voice to play some kind of robotic accountant that escapes from a warehouse along with a prostitute robot (Bernadette Peters) and a Rodney Dangerfield tank. They get lost in the woods and make a baby. I picked it out because the name made me laugh out loud, but it made everybody angry to sit through. On the plus side, it pretty much ruined the careers of everybody who appeared in it.

Fire Down Below: Steven Seagal's got a resume full of films where he plays folksy karate masters who step in to save small towns or neighborhoods from the predations of nebulously evil corporations or gangs. In this one he plays a government agent trying to stop some scary guys from dumping toxic waste in Kentucky. I don't know whether it's the ridiculous embroidered vests he wears in every movie I've seen him in or that his characters never seem to take any punches during fight scenes, you can just tell Seagal's impossible to direct. Also, I'll cop to thinking the guy was Native American, but it turns out he's an Irish Jew. (And he makes his own wine!)

Bionic Ninja: Tom found this one. It's by the guy who directed "Enter The Dragon," and it's basically gibberish -- an American CIA agent wearing a yellow spandex leotard has to beat up a bunch of KGB guys who've been trained as ninjas ("Who are these bloody wizards?" he wonders) in order to retrieve something called the "Top Technical Secret Tape." But there's a whole 'nother, unrelated movie that somehow got spliced into it about a criminal cartel led by a guy named Mr. Smart that's hunting down a street-fighting high school student named Gordon Mann. Along the way, the CIA guy does a bunch of calisthenics in a public park and gets dirt all of over his ass, which stays there for the whole rest of the movie.

Out For Justice: Pretty much the same formula as Fire Down Below, except that in this one Steven Seagal (younger, more horse than pudding) plays an invincible Brooklyn cop (instead of an invincible DEP agent) with a ludicrous accent, named, no joke, "Gino Felino." He's gotta kill some mob guys, but the convoluted reason why is sort of obscured over the course of dozens stupid fight scenes in which hundreds of guys who may or may not deserve it get their asses kicked by a humble Italian cop with awesome karate training.

China O'Brien: I had to actually buy this one, because Netflix doesn't carry it, and it was kind of a disappointment: Cynthia Rothrock is actually kind of good at karate. ("She's a chop-suey fighter!" points out one character.) After her dad gets blown up, she has to rescue her hometown from a bunch of sinister business types conspiring to rig elections and... do something else that's bad. It's not really clear. But she and a kid with a missing hand and some barbarian guy from Gymkata kick a bunch of guys in the face.

Tom Scharpling's The Best Show On WFMU, which I'll admit to listening to quite a bit over the past month or two, did a Jon Wurster bit on their November 24th show about hypothetical guy who lives in Brooklyn and only listens to unlistenable music, eats inedible food, wears ridiculous clothes, and is forty years old. "It's so stupid," says Wurster as the character, describing some bit of kitsch he's acquired. "It's great." Is that what we're up to here? Maybe. But for me, it takes a special combination of flaws for these movies to hit their resonant frequency, so to speak: The intention of the director needs to be intelligible but contemptible or completely out of sync with the final product; the dialogue should be polished enough that it's wincingly obvious when the writers have "written around" some critical element of the plot that nobody involved with the project understood (spy satellites, drugs, pollution, etc.); bonus points if the whole thing is an ego trip for a star who's got no right to treat it as such.

It was Christmas! Nina and I decorated with LED lights and a diminutive Christmas tree purchased at the garage on the corner of 39th and 4th Ave. that's pretty only open around Christmas. We cut out paper snowflakes and stuck them on the windows: Getting them to look flake-y is surprisingly tricky -- you have to kind of fold and wrap them into a flattened cone before cutting all the shapes into them. Later, real snow fell and blew into a strikingly dune-like ridge on the roof.

yankeesbeisbol.com

It was Halloween! I toyed with the idea of dressing up as Donny Donowitz, The Bear Jew, but ultimately resolved once again to stay home and play grown-up by attempting to give candy away to trick-or-treaters. Nina and I carved a pumpkin! Evidence:



Candy-wise, I picked a several-pound bag of individually-wrapped chocolate things and we emptied them into a bowl. Nina made a very nice hand-painted sign for our apartment door advertising our inventory, but I was skeptical -- there are maybe two kids of trick-or-treating age in our building, and, come 8 o'clock no one had rung our bell. I insisted that we take our bowl, running over with Whoppers, to street level. We sat in the evening drizzle for a while. A few costumed adults passed by and sampled the goods, some of them on their way into our building to attend a Halloween party. Eventually Martin, our upstairs neighbor, and apparently the guy throwing one of the parties, came down to the stoop. He was dressed as a chef. "Come upstairs to my party," he said. "Bring the candy."

Up on the fifth floor, there was dancing, booze, a Yankees game, and some bored kids happy to eat our candy. Martin's sister, dressed up (I think) as a fairy, kept doing the robot. She'd come up to you and sort of slump over. "She wants you to wind her up," explained Martin. "Don't do it! She's been doing this all night!" Martin's niece came as a referee. She was wearing a whistle that she'd blow whenever people started dancing too close or, you know, intimately. Long after we'd retreated downstairs -- Nina to write a paper; me to, uh, watch TV while she wrote a paper -- we heard intermittent whistle-blasts that let us know that people were still grinding above.

Our new apartment is great, but for a while after we moved in, the oven wasn't working -- we'd turn the knob, the pilot'd be on, but the gas wouldn't flow and the main oven burner wouldn't light. Kat eventually got Sears to come out and repair it, though, at not-insignificant cost, and now it is fine. I started baking things immediately to make up for lost time.

• First, I baked my sister the lemon bars she'd asked for for her birthday. Those things are insane on the butter and sugar front! I overnighted them to her in Saratoga Springs.
• Then I baked a pumpkin pie, hoping to use some piece of the pumpkin we'd carved, though I had to fall back to the canned stuff after finding out how much work you have to do to prepare the raw pumpkin
• So instead I roasted the seeds after marinating them in chili sauce as per this recipe
• ...and then mixed them into brittle as per this one. Highly recommended.

The Yankees won the world series! I sort of paid attention to the lineups and who was getting injured et cetera. I watched a bunch of the games at Emma's house, snuggled up with Pearl, who is ever-eager to shake hands. She (Emma) proclaimed that I know "fifteen percent" of baseball. Highly unlikely, I think, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.

On Monday I had drinks with Scott Moran, the release engineer from Rebel Monkey. We talked about his losing campaign for Camden County clerk versus Kelly Ripa's dad. Partisan hack that I am, I can't give Scott the undecidable.net endorsement for public office, but he's a very good release engineer.

On Friday night Nina and I went out to Williamsburg to see Art Brut at Brooklyn Bowl. I'd never been to the 'Bowl before, and thus hadn't realized that it's literally right around the corner from Brooklyn Brewery. So, while the bowling lanes were a neat touch (wait, scratch that, they were kind of distracting) the place gets a gold star from me for having pretty much every variety of Brooklyn on tap. ...Including my particular favorite, the Pennant Ale '55, which is more or less impossible to find outside of a few pretty fancy beer stores in Manhattan and Park Slope.

Surfer Blood was opening, which was sweet because I'd wanted to see them anyway. They've got raw, novel hooks; moody and good enough that I can't quite imagine their sound coming out of a practice space in South Florida. They kind of remind me of Kittens Ablaze, but more tightly controlled -- to the extent that their lead singer needs could probably loosen up a bit. He's this kind of delicate-looking Michael Cera type, and his guitar playing is proficient but tentative, like he has to concentrate so hard on the fingerings that he can't rock out. The other guys in the band didn't seem to have any problem hoppin' around. At the end of their set, the band all made out with each other, sloppily -- for which, you know, I woooo!ed at them, because it tipped the scales a hair, from twee to punk. Although maybe it just spoke to the fact that those dudes are still real young.

Art Brut were great, despite Eddie Argos' repeated apologies for being hung over. He certainly seemed to be in top form, at least as far as being a punk rock eyebrow Frankenstein is concerned. Surfer Blood got a shout-out in "Formed A Band": Eddie announced (using his distinctive referent synecdoche) that Art Brut were adopting them. They played everything I was secretly hoping to hear, including, as a first encore, "Alcoholics Unanimous" (during which Eddie ran and hid his head behind an amp instead of doing his traditional shot). "Took me ages and ages to get dressed this morning," he spoke-sang, shooting a mea culpa look in the drummer's direction. Jasper Future was also characteristically high-energy, leaping around on the stage and doing the sort of flamboyant performer-to-audience pantomime ("What's that? You want us to play our hit single?") that I find impossible to resist. What's up with the other guitarist and the bass player, though? They keep it pretty "Todd Barry" as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, I'm getting pretty attached to that band, not least of all because Eddie Argos' admonitions to call up a friend on a hung-over Saturday and form a band actually make me feel like doing it.

After the show, we dropped by Teddy's for wings, deep-fried portobello mushroom, and whiskey. Gross? No. It was delicious. Have I mentioned in my online journal, babies, that I harbor secret yearnings to live in that neighborhood? Contemptible, I know, but I feel a pang whenever I walk down a street of those shabby, wooden row houses.

One day.

What The Hell Do We Do

I ended up going one for three on CMJ.

On Wednesday night, after an early screening of Lorenzo Lamas' Snake Eater at Chez O'Donnell, I tried to hit up the Hooray For Earth show at Crash Mansion, only to realize I'd written the info for the show down wrong. I could've stayed and seen Die! Die! Die!, but didn't.

Friday was worse: I swung by the WFMU Record Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion after work, with the intention of snagging a vinyl copy of one of The Abs' albums (my current low-grade obsession). Didn't find any, but I did get to peep Nick The Bard and Ken in the flesh, and the wet-dog smell of record collectors is pleasantly familiar. After that, I got booze with Emma and we had dinner at Melt. We parted ways around 10:30 -- my plan was to hit up the Matador showcase at The Suffolk just in time to catch Ted Leo and miss all of the opening acts. Unfortunately, I failed to anticipate the popularity of bands like... "Cold Cave." Or "Lemonade." That is to say, the place was packed, the bouncer unsympathetic, and I'd arrived past the beginning of Ted Leo's set. I'd just hoofed it all the way to Suffolk and Delancey from Canal St., though, and, although it was drizzling, there was a spot next to the external stage door under some scaffolding where you could hear pretty much everything (except the vocals). So, somewhat shamefully, I lurked outside, face metaphorically pressed to the window, and managed to semi-listen to the majority of the songs. They played "Me And Mia." I think they played "Counting Down The Hours." They covered Hybrid Moments as their first encore.

Thursday almost made up for all that, though. I went to Cake Shop to see Kittens Ablaze, again trying to time things to miss as many bands as possible that I hadn't vetted beforehand. Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers were on stage as I came downstairs -- I hadn't meant to arrive for their set, but I was pretty quickly overwhelmed by the, uh, intensity of their sound. Shilpa Ray sings and plays the harmonium, which is a kind of stationary accordion that she pumped with one hand. She's got an amazing, Brody Dalle-level set of pipes, and a frighteningly expressive face: When she's howling out a real raw, scary song, her features get all screwed up like a toddler throwing a tantrum and her frizzy hair floats in front of her face like a dark cloud, bruise-colored. In contrast, the "happy hookers" were a trio of chubby white beardos. It was weird. But I came away from their set feeling like I'd been hit by a (small) truck, which doesn't happen very often.

pow wow! came on next, and they were fine but nowhere near as good as Shilpa Ray. Their set reminded me of what (I think) people don't like about The Strokes: Bouncy, sing-song guitar and bass backup up indifferently-sung lyrics of no particular significance. After them were a Mancunian ensemble called The Answering Machine (ugh) who were also fine but not very interesting.

Kittens Ablaze went on a little after 11:00. One thing I like about them is the way their songs sort of emerge from the tuning noise and between-song dithering of six different instruments. This sounds like a horrible way to perform rock and roll -- indeed, I have no idea why I don't hate it -- but they ramp up the tempo and tighten things up nice and quick, and before you know it they're literally clambering over each other and across the cramped stage area to shout into the mics and the cellist and violinist are going nuts. Their aesthetic and the earnestness of their music reminds me of the The Clash a little -- they've got the backpacking-through-Europe look nailed, and the music's sloppy and super catchy. There's no way to avoid being drawn in by the screamed choruses of "This Machine Is Dying." You'd have to be a real suck-ass not to sing along.

On Sunday, Tom and I went to go see a stage production at the Magnet Theater by the people who curate the website Everything Is Terrible!, which showcases awful, found videos from the past few decades. The stuff on their site runs the gamut from funny (old people using the Internet in 1994) to terrifying (mass hysteria at a Pentecostal prayer convention), and the show included some additional videos that they weren't allowed to put on YouTube, like a promotional video for a Jeff Stryker-branded penis pump. Unfortunately, the show also featured some live-action "interview" segments with the people who hunt down and edit the videos (wearing outsized masks / headdresses to obscure their identities from the potentially litigious) and those really dragged.

Video game news: I finished Bioshock, ultimately coming around to appreciating its narrative chops; the story really solidifies in the second act. I had to put it on easy mode to get through the very last fight. Evan came over a few weeks ago and filled up the Xbox's download queue with demos, which Nina and I have been working through since. The one for Batman: Arkham Asylum was pretty neat, although the controls seemed to be pretty involved. Brutal Legend's got great writing and voice work but the running around and killing things part isn't that much fun. Lost Planet 2 was gorgeous but pretty much unintelligible. I've become very impatient in my dotage -- tl;dr.

Ugly, Ugly, Ugly, Ugly, Handsome

Emma was on Jeopardy! She looked and sounded really professional, and answered so many questions that I can't believe she only came in second. Although, to be fair, Terry From Plano is clearly a trivia master, and Jeff Kirby has apparently done this before.

On Saturday night, Nina and I went to the Peelander-Z show at The Studio at Webster Hall. I'd never been to that part of the club. We got in via their weird little subterranean entrance, cutting through the line winding around the block for the show in the main space, some DJ. The Studio's not bad at all -- kind of cozy, really -- except that people from the horrible, regular part of Webster Hall pass through on their way to the bathroom. It's like rooming with a bunch of frat brothers in a railroad apartment.

Peelander-Z command attention, though. Peelander Red opened the show, storming the stage in an enormous plush red squid / bass hybrid costume. He couldn't play bass while wearing it (or see, I don't think), but he could cavort, and he sure as fuck, you know, went up. They played a bunch of songs, or parts of songs, but that's kind of besides the point. And I don't mean that, you know, the music doesn't matter, but the fact that they start and stop the songs more or less as they feel like it keeps the show lively; keeps at bay the sweaty pageant vibe that so often creeps into the live show of "fun" bands.

"We are not human beings," explained Peelander Yellow, picking his nose and flicking it into the crowd. "We are from Peelander planet, Z area. On my planet, I am considered very handsome. Here, okay. But on Peelander planet, very, very handsome." Peelander Red climbed into the ceiling, hooking his legs around a metal beam and dangling upside down over the audience while he played. Peelander Green did the same thing, while pounding the fucking drums. All the Michaels in the audience came up on stage for "So Many Mike." They closed out the show with a combination conga line drum circle sing-a-long to "We Are The Champions." "This is cheaper than therapy," Nina said. I bought a t-shirt.

Afterwards, Nina wanted a slice of cake, so we walked over to Veniero's, which was still open. She had a slice of coffee-imbued cake and a limoncello. I had a coffee with a bunch of booze in it, which was awesome. It was a nice date.

Tom's been trying to get me to listen to The Best Show On WFMU, but I just can't get over how radio Tom Scharpling sounds. And is it possible to have a genuine radio talk show with bearable phone calls? I don't know. Scharpling's just too unpredictable when it comes to which self-important WFMU-listening twits he's willing to indulge, and for how long. Fans of Seven Second Delay have complained that they're afraid of being summarily dismissed by Andy Breckman; I find I get a cold feeling in my stomach when it becomes clear that Tom won't be giving "Spike" the "heave-ho" he so desperately deserves.

This week is CMJ! I'm planning what to go to.

Sunset Park got cold, babies. I brought lemon tree inside from where it had been summering: the top of the metal staircase out back where all the flies are. Our apartment, like others in the neighborhood, comes with ample heating apparatus but practically no way to control the temperature. First it was sweltering, then freezing; last weekend the radiators made a soft splashing sound, like the waters of a quiet lake being acted upon by the moon.

Diablo Cody

Eve and I went to Union Hall on Saturday to check out The Rifles, after eating delicious poutine at Sheep Station. We got to the 'Hall around 9:30, expecting to miss the opening act, and the place was practically empty. "Oh no," I said. "What if nobody came? I'm sorry if the bands suck." But it turned out that nobody had gone on yet. The first band was called The Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band (ugh), and I hadn't been wowed by the songs of theirs that I'd heard, but they ended up being fairly tight, musically -- good, precise guitar playing; excellent, vigorous drums. There were two things wrong with them, though: First off, there was this chick in the band whose only job seemed to be to shake rain sticks and look really blissed out, like the music was really, you know, moving her. Second, the lead singer had this awful smug, insincere attitude. While the band was tuning up between songs, he'd say things like: "Yesterday we were in the Poconos. ...Hiking on the old Appalachian trail. What were you doing? Were you stuck in the sticky city? ...Were you in your office?" (Yep. I sure was. What a sucker I am.) As they prepared to leave the stage, he said, "Thanks everybody. Stick around for The Rifles. I'm sure they sound really great." Yikes.

The bass player was the first member of The Rifles to take the stage, and we could tell immediately that they had a much better vibe. The guy was dressed like a alt-rock clown: aviator shades, a black felt hat with a feather in it, and a weird little miniature checkered scarf. He gave a bunch of fans in the front some cool older-brother high-fives, like a guy who might technically be a douchebag but who's pretty hard to dislike. Their music was also pretty hard to dislike -- they sound a bit like The Jam, a bit like The Fratellis -- but it was almost unmitigatedly monotonous, to the extent that Eve decided she'd had enough and left about fifteen minutes before their set was over. I guess I felt a little more charitable towards them, but, yeah, it was a little boring, and a little hard to fathom how they had so many fans who were that into them -- because there was a mysteriously high quotient of well-dressed, purse-carrying girls who were dancing around and taking pictures of the band and each other on their fancy computer phones. It reminded me of that time that Alana and I went to go see this ridiculously terrible band called Copperpot at a now-defunct club on the Lower East Side that was packed with screaming teenage fans who'd been bused in. The Rifles definitely had a leg up (or not) on that band, though, in that the guys in The Rifles mapped eerily well onto the cast of That 70s Show: The bass player looked like Danny Masterson, the lead singer like Topher Grace, and the other guitar player like Wilmer Valderrama. The drummer didn't look like Ashton Kutcher, though.

On Sunday, Nina and I had planned to go apple picking with Brooke and Aanie, but it ended up being too rainy. So we went out to brunch at Belleville instead, and then hopped the bus to Ikea, where we picked up a few small, useful things. Because of the speed and circumstances of our move, we hadn't yet had a chance to "play house," and so it was nice to make plans and think about ways to improve our new apartment. Ikea can be pretty draining, though. It's like a hedge maze, or one of those haunted house amusement park rides where you go from diorama to scary diorama and you just have to wait until it's over. But at Ikea all the dioramas are about chairs that don't have armrests.

My new(-ish) job continues to be an improvement over the past two years. I guess I didn't say too much about it last time, so: Conductor is a search optimization / analytics company, about 60 people strong. You know me, I'm not into marketing or business or that type of thing, but they're building something pretty advanced and interesting (and which I can't really talk about). The company's currently headquartered in the Grand Masonic Lodge building on 6th Ave. and 23rd St., which is a regular office building except that some of the floors (including one of the ones Conductor's on) are outfitted with mahogany trim and full-length wall murals of Teddy Roosevelt and other famous Masons. Oh, and there are special locked rooms full of Masonic books and artifacts -- for example, there's a Masonic dining room about 10 feet from one of our conference rooms that houses, among other curios, an 8-foot-tall stuffed polar bear. I shit you not.

Like I said, though, it's an improvement, especially in terms of management sanity and, you know, "perks" -- there's free fancy coffee, a fully-stocked snacks cabinet, and free pizza on Friday. I'm not fully sure what it means that this is reassuring to me. It's either that, as a company, it's pretty easy to provide a baseline level of comfort for your employees; or maybe it's just that programmer types can be bought off with granola bars and pepperoni.

I went out to Williamsburg tonight to catch a show at Bruar Falls. I'd never been to the venue before, although it comes up a lot on Oh My Rockness. It's set up like a lot of new places seem to be these days: Bar in the front, small stage area in the back, furnished like a kooky living room from the 70s. And there were a lot of little Bud Cort-type guys in attendance. But the bands ended up being pretty great. The opener was called Yusef Jerusalem, and they were a little rough at first -- their first song was just a bunch of shrieking and guitar feedback that made me go "oh no" -- but they ended up being pretty tight and garage punk-y. The lead singer didn't say anything to the audience, though, which was a little weird. Not even hello or goodbye.

Thomas Function, the band I was there to see, were pretty dope. They play fast, tight, punky soul songs, and their lead singer had a cool, nerdy yell. I wanted their set to be longer, but it was not to be.

I've been playing Xbox 360 games. They're selling a combo-pack of Bioshock and Oblivion for cheap at Best Buy, and both of those games seemed to be pretty well-received, so I picked 'em up. I'm in the middle of Bioshock right now. I can't deny that it's a pretty original framing device, and it certainly makes me consider while I'm playing it the differences between representation and endorsement of an idea, but there's something about the way it's paced -- the fact that you never really leave first-person-shooter mode, say, or that the character development happens primarily through asynchronous voice-over -- that makes the world feel kind of superficial.

Lost Summer

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.

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.