The World Moves On

Winter showed up. The apartment's working out well, I think. From the living room windows, I can see an undulating expanse of South Brooklyn, a sea of houses, all brown and red and pale yellow. I feel like I'm looking out at some Dutch exurb as I muddle with the French press in the tiny little kitchen.

The last time I wrote, I neglected to mention the crazy hail storm we had at the end of October. Nina and I had met at the Home Depot on 23rd St. for some ill-fated carpet shopping. I got there early and quickly determined that we couldn't afford any of their nicer offerings, and that their affordable offerings were a non-starter. I waited for Nina and watched a small gathering of termites mill about one of the big plaster columns outside the store. It started to rain on our way back to Brooklyn. By the time the F was going over the trestle, it was pouring, the wind really lashing the rain against the windows like the the yarn of a mop. When the doors opened at Smith St., a noisy veil of water came down in front of them. We got off at 4th Ave., and as the train pulled out of the station the sound of the downpour got even louder. It sounded like someone was whipping little rocks at the sides of the train, and that's sort of what was happening. We found ourselves on the receiving end of a barrage of big, pozole-sized hailstones, distinctively shaped: clear, ovoid, with a dip in the middle like a red blood cell. They poured out of the sky, accumulating in piles on the tracks and platform. After Nina did some citizen journalism with her phone, we made our way downstairs and outside, where drifts of hailstones were accumulating by the curb and in the gutters. No one could believe it was happening!

When we got back to our building, the awning looked like Sonny Corleone after the toll booth.

I carved a pumpkin. Nina carved one better.




As I've mentioned before, I've been going up to St. Mary's every Friday to play drums with Chris and Billy, an activity Nina has termed "Music Club For Boys." And we've been playing music, sort of. Until recently, though, it was sort of just an excuse for me to get crunk. Hotel For Dogs had songs, sure, but they were mostly just these little jams that I would've been loath to play in front of other people. What's more, we'd run aground on one we were working on, a kind of Velvet Underground homage we were attempting to coax out of Chris' forebrain, half sung, half spoken, called "Impecca." It was proving to be a tough song to draw a line around. So we were mostly drinking a lot and playing old Headliners songs. A few months ago, though, Billy started emailing me demos of songs he'd written and recorded -- real songs, with lyrics and hooks and everything. At first I thought he just wanted to show them off, but it turned out he had arrangements he wanted to try. He wanted us to do them. So we've been trying. We've rebooted the franchise, so to speak, and re-christened ourselves Bel Argosy. I'm excited about our new sound, enough to be singing the songs to myself while walking down the street. Rehearsals are now twice a week, one on Friday up at St. Mary's (a bit drier and more focused) and one on Wednesday by my request at some location in lower-er Manhattan (so far, the perennially dissatisfying Ultra Sound).

I woke up on a Saturday morning following one such rehearsal earlier this month with an intense discomfort in the back of my mouth. I should probably reserve the word "excruciating" for something closer to 10 on the pain inventory, but, man, all I could do was sit on the couch with my head in my hands stupidly waiting for Nina to wake up and tell me, sensibly, to take some Aleve. I managed to stick it out 'til Monday when Dr. Dorato was kind of to see me in the morning before work and dig what I think was a jalapeño seed out from under my gums, which brought me some relief. I'd expected him to prescribe me some kind of panacea antibiotic, like he did several years ago when I'd gotten some kind of horrible jaw infection back there, but this time all he said was "it's impacted. It's got to come out." So, grudgingly, I picked up the phone and called the oral surgeon whose name was on the little card he gave me, along with the number of the tooth that had to be extracted, #16.

I say "grudgingly," because having my wisdom teeth out has been one of those planned-for traumas that I've been dreading since I knew the procedure existed. It's right up there with having a fingernail fall off (which did happen to me, and sucked for a good several weeks but was, I should mention, ultimately okay). I guess I was hoping, in a very exceptionalist mode, that I could sort of sneak into adulthood without going through this, dentally intact. After all, one of them (the other top one -- #1?) seemed to have arrived okay.

You see, I'm afraid of general anesthesia, I'm afraid of having the procedure done under local anesthetic ("It's pretty close to your ear," the surgeon said. "You may hear some... crunching"), and I've heard a bunch of horror stories from friends and acquaintances of extractions gone wrong: My roommate in college described with awe how his older brother had taken too much pain medication with too little food and had thrown up in his sleep with enough force to tear out his stitches, drenching his pillow with blood; the VP of engineering at the 'Napse told me how he'd been getting driven home from surgery and had fainted and broken his nose on the dash. Of course, there were plenty of people who reported pretty smooth sailing. Bill and I went out to the movies the evening after he'd gotten all four teeth pulled when we were 20. "I was eating solid food after a couple of days," said Katie.

The receptionist at the surgeon's office could tell I was nervous when I balked at committing to an appointment for the surgery over the phone. "Why don't you just come in for a consultation first?" she said. So I did, and Dr. Carness (who, it turned out, was the same guy who'd pulled Bill's teeth -- and my mom's) was very reassuring. His assistant took a full X-ray of my teeth using one of those standing X-ray machines where you bite down on a little plastic outcropping while a couple of metal plates rotate around your face. He showed me the impaction -- the problem wisdom tooth plowing deeply into my molar and poised to lever the goddamn thing out of my jaw entirely. He also noted that my two bottom wisdom teeth were textbook candidates for future impaction, rotated ninety degrees in the direction of my lower teeth. On the X-ray, with their fin-like roots, they looked like a couple of little Goldfish crackers swimming through the dark gray sea of my jaw.

He settled my nerves about the surgery and I made an appointment for the procedure, a date which, now that I'd committed, seemed far too far into the future to wait with my jaw feeling the way it did. But I'm going to have to stick it out.

Last weekend I went out to Williamsburg to see Kittens Ablaze play Glasslands. I've been into Kittens since I saw them play a few shows a couple years ago - they brought a kind of joyous, chaotic energy. The gang vocals and hand clapping didn't hurt, either. But then they disappeared for a while. I'd never been to Glasslands before, but I've seen pictures of bands playing there: There's this elaborate papier-mache (I think) sculpture affixed to the ceiling and wall behind the stage, a kind of papery cloud with lights embedded in it. It looks like a still photograph of an explosion, or a storm cloud with bolts of lightning in it. It's totally distracting and wonderful.

The bands were a mixed bag. Baby Alpaca was playing when I got there, and they were like a joke. A ridiculous moppet wearing tights, a real Tucker Rountree type, plucked some kind of zither he held in his lap and twiddled knobs on a drum machine while a Williamsburg beardo next to him strummed a guitar seriously. I wished Billy and Sarah had shown up in time to see them. We could have exchanged looks: "What." They did show up in time to see Team B, which was fronted by a guy who plays in Arcade Fire sometimes, I think? He looks like a diminutive version of Dave Grant, from Direct From Hollywood Cemetery. Team B's sound was hard to pin down. Some of their songs were restrained and quiet, some of them were big and brassy (there was a guy playing a tuba), like showtunes; none of them were really, you know, rock and roll. But Billy liked them, and he told the guy so after their set.

After them, Kittens Ablaze went on. They seemed a bit diminished, both in number (didn't count, but they all fit handily on stage) and in spirit. Their playing was more careful, less exuberant. I think they had a different drummer. They opened with a song of theirs that I'm pretty fond of (think it's called, ugh, "Gloom Doom Buttercups"), but never pulled out their hit, "This Machine Is Dying," much to the chagrin, I observed, of the assembled Kittens aficionados.

Good night for now! The next time I address you, tubes, I will be less one wedge of bone and gristle.

The Butts

Many things; so many things!

The Rase came to town last weekend and Nina's brother Michael and I went out for drinks with her and a mix of our mutual friends from college and high school. In true The Rase fashion, the venue chosen was a fancy shithole on Houston and Sullivan called XR Bar. When the place got too full of crummy debutantes, we hit the road for Arrow Bar on Ave. A, Sophie and some of her associates in a taxi, Michael and my friend Moira and I on foot. We got frustratingly lost: Arrow Bar is downstairs from and partially obscured by the signage of some awful karaoke place, and by the time we figured that out, Moira'd gone home and Sophie was planning to do the same.

We finally met up with her and convinced her and her boyfriend to stick around for one last whiskey at a place a few blocks further downtown, and we were en route when a whole bunch of... stuff exploded around us. At first we thought someone had lobbed a McDonald's milkshake at us from across the street -- there was white liquid everywhere, including on us -- but there was no cup, only about four or five ruptured zip-lock baggies. It wasn't until we looked up from the splatter of what we ultimately decided was (spoiled) milk and saw two bespectacled, teenage-looking faces leering down at us from a second-floor window of the apartment building above us that we figured out what had happened. "Fags!" they yelled. Sophie and her boyfriend hustled to a cab and jetted off. Michael ran around the corner to the entrance of the building and, before I knew it, had managed to kick in the lobby door and disappeared inside. As I tried from the street via cell phone to dissuade him from his quest to locate and punish the guilty, two cop cars pulled up and two pairs of cops entered the building. I face-palmed, but Michael, as always, was able to charm his way out of the situation. We didn't stick around to see the outcome, favorable or otherwise. It had been a long night.

"They sent you air mail!" said Tom when I told him the story the following week at the High Dive. "We used to do that kind of shit all the time in Virginia. Of course, some older boys caught us once and threw my friend Guy off a roof for it."

We watched Howard The Duck at Bad Movie Night. I'd heard that that flick was bad, but I didn't realize that what an enormous and rightfully deserved place it occupies in the, you know, shit canon. Like I think I've said before, it's very easy to glibly dismiss a "bad" movie without really getting into why it's a trainwreck. So: It's not just that the movie's about a kind of creepy, talking, fundamentally unlikeable humanoid duck; it's not just that the duck comes very close to fucking Lea Thompson ("I have developed a greater appreciation for the female version of the human anatomy," he says; she lovingly caresses an unwrapped condom she discovers in his wallet); it's not just that there's this insane third act about a monster called the Dark Overlord played by Jeffrey Jones. Each of these things alone could probably sink a movie. Combined, they converted me from willing craphound to, like, feeling like I was actually stuck on that space prison from Mystery Science Theater. Truly uncomfty.

Speaking of movies, Hanlon was in one -- a proper feature, a zombie movie called A Cadaver Christmas. It was his birthday a few weeks ago, and, being one of the managers of the venerable Landmark Sunshine, he took over the basement of the theater for an after-hours Saturday screening. I arrived limping -- I'd taken a painful spill onto my patella while carrying a heavy mirror (sober!) across our bedroom -- but the seventeen (!) pizzas he'd ordered to feed his assembled well-wishers, not to mention the thrill of getting the run of the place after hours, helped take my mind off it. There were also cookies. And we got to take a peek inside the projection room to see the strange, enormous projector. The movie follows the ordeal of an intense (and sorta mis-cast) young janitor who fends off a zombie attack at a university with the help of a cop, a wino (Hanners), and a bartender. I won't reveal how it ends. It looked very professional! They had strikingly polished animated titles and all sorts of complicated shots: exploding heads; camera submerged in pint glass, toilet.

CMJ started on Tuesday. Having been largely shut out last year, I did a fair amount of planning this time around, using the official schedule cross-referenced with Myspace, and created a casual itinerary for myself designed to maximize access to bands that sounded good.

I started on Wednesday, and after an abortive attempt to get into the Surfer Blood show at Webster Hall without a pre-ordered ticket or badge, I headed out to Grand Ave. in Williamsburg to see the Mon Amie Records showcase at Bruar Falls. Magic Bullets were playing when I got there. They do a kind of polished-sounding guitar pop, maybe a little bit like Jonathan Richman, and they'd been heralded as the band doing the most dancing at the marathon (hard to believe) I guess because the lead singer bopped along to all the songs in a look-'Ma-I'm-dancing, white guy way. He had the same awkward physicality and put out the same kind of phony bonhomie as Nick, guy who used to run Rebel Monkey. It creeped me out. And their songs were only so-so.

The band I'd come to see, Drunken Barn Dance, was up next. That's not a great name for a band, but it had caught my eye in the schedule since it seemed like it could be a literal description of the type of show they put on -- hard to resist if true. As it turned out, they were less exuberant than their name had led me to believe, but they were still pretty good. I guess what they were playing was more or less country or folk music, but with some satisfyingly rock-sounding chord progressions mixed in. The lead singer had a face like a young Harry Dean Stanton.

After they finished playing, I ducked out of the Falls and got back on the train to Manhattan and then headed over to the Sidewalk Cafe, where 194 Records was holding their showcase. That place doesn't have a whole lot of places to stand once the tables are taken, so I kind of lurked in the hallway, under a sign saying not to stand there, and craned my neck around the corner at the stage. The first band to go on was called Elastic Summer, and they were super young. "This is our second show," chirped their lead singer. "First!" the drummer corrected her. "I'm counting that awesome party we had in our practice space," she explained. Despite this, their sound was pretty tight -- a little too tight, actually. As I was explaining to Nina, when I was a teenager and trying to write rock and roll songs, I found it impossible to come up with anything that didn't take its cues from Nirvana -- power chords, oblique lyrics. You know, the, uh, anxiety of influence. I wonder if the following generation has the same problem with The Strokes. Because these guys really sounded like The Strokes -- carefully layered guitar and bass, consistent eighth notes on the drums, warbling vocals -- but without the plaintive neediness evoked by Julian Casablancas to keep things interesting.

In between sets, I loped over to Sal's and bought a slice of pizza that sagged with the weight of all the broccoli on it, and which I ate hunched over in the corner like a sad old pensioner. Somewhat revived, I went back to Sidewalk in time for Beast Make Bomb, the band that'd got me interested in the show. They were a bit looser and more exciting than the last band, noisier, got people up and dancing. I liked them, but I was beat.

The next night, I teamed up with Chris and Billy to see a hardcore show at Club Europa in Greenpoint. I was a little tipsy from obligatory sake at a sushi restaurant with people from work when I met them on the L platform at Union Sq. We got off at Bedford Ave. and stopped by The Turkey's Nest to piss and to pick up beers in styrofoam to-go cups. I didn't know those existed! They're pretty great, except for the slight weirdness of drinking beer with a straw. We sipped 'em as we walked past the Automotive Careers High School and onto Manhattan Ave. Europa's sort of tucked away on Messerole St. such that I'd never noticed it when walking around that area before. The space inside was pretty okay: It's got all these bits of ballroom filigree -- faux-crystal chandeliers, red lighting -- that seem equally appropriate in both heavy metal and date-rape dance club contexts.

Cerebral Ballzy were about to go on when we got there. They opened their quick, energetic set to a hail of bottles and plastic cups. Honor introduced every song with the same deadpan ironic phrasing: "This next number's about having to take a shit." "This next number's about not having enough money to ride the subway." "This next number's about getting hassled by the cops when you're just trying to ride your skateboard." Even as he maintained a flat affect, he climbed the amps and the drum kit, miming onanistically with the mic whenever he wasn't yelling into it. They're great, even if, as Chris pointed out, they're just making fun of Suicidal Tendencies.

OFF! was up next. Apparently they're kind of a hardcore punk supergroup, and they were fronted by Keith Morris, the original front man for Black Flag. He looks like a jazz critic for a New York alt. weekly, and he's got the same sort of owlish intensity as Marc Maron at his most antagonistic. A plastic cup went whizzing by the guy's thinning dreadlocks as they were setting up. "Hey, none of that shit," he said. "You know, respect is a two-way street." Yikes. Reminded me of Lars Frederiksen explaining that there's no fighting in punk rock. Or when Dee Dee Ramone complained about some "punk faggot" giving him the finger when I saw him in high school at Continental. To his credit, though, OFF! sounded significantly more together, musically, than the Ballzies, although seemed to be having way less of a good time.

On Saturday night, I dragged myself semi-willingly back to Williamsburg for the Panache Booking showcase at the "new" Knitting Factory. AIDS Wolf was headlining, along with Ty Segall, but the band I really wanted to see was the very first opener, Screens. So of course I missed most of their set, but I did manage catch their last song, which delivered on what I'd liked about them from their Myspace page: Eerie, sepulchral vocals; keyboard sounds that were weird without being self-indulgent; tight, stripped-down arrangements. The necktie-wearing keyboard-player / singer, whose name might be Danny, reminded me of Antony Hegarty, or Damon Albarn at his spookiest. In fact, they'd make a great year-round Halloween band (cf. Direct From Hollywood Cemetery), but I don't think that's their aesthetic.

The new Knitting Factory has a kind of lounge area with tables and a bar and two flat-screen TVs, one of which was playing the Phillies-Rangers series, and the other of which was displaying ads for some indie rock cruise line sweepstakes. It seems pretty well positioned as a "new" Williamsburg venue, and it's certainly less cozy than the old location (and pricier). I don't know. It's not bad. The stage is positioned pretty perfectly.

The next band was called Circle Pit, and I didn't like them much. They were Australian, I think; two guys and two girls. Their lead singer had an elaborately feathered hair-do and wore an expression of preening naiveté as he strummed his guitar with awkward, deliberate strokes. The lead guitar player, a girl with face-obscuringly-long blond bangs and wearing a baggy gray sweatshirt seemed like she was probably the brains of the operation -- at least, she obviously knew how to play guitar -- but she also wasn't super demonstrative. All of which would have been okay if they were good, but they weren't. Their set was plagued by feedback and buzzing from the Marshall stack behind them, which the singer and the sound guy took turns tweaking, to the visible exasperation of their drummer, and which was ultimately blamed, I think, on a cruddy mic. All of the technical fussing cut into their allotted time, and they left the stage peevishly explaining "We're playing a show at The Shank later, and I promise it'll be better than this. We're better than this."

Next up was Tôg, a Norwegian pop group who sounded like, I don't know, a sunnier version of New Order and who, as they reminded us several times, were kind of a big deal in Norway ("believe it or not," said their front man). They all dressed in black, sort of in a Sprockets-y way, but with plenty of dancing -- the male pixie singing lead (there was a lady pixie keyboard player who teamed up on vocals) even jumped on the back of some dude in the crowd and rode around on his back for the duration of a song. He pointed at the guy and was like, "Down. I'm climbin' on."

Pujol was up next, fronted by Dan Pujol, who looks like someone's scruffy, naughty older brother. And maybe a bit like Derek Waters, too. They played a bunch of good, sweaty, blues-inflected garage rock, with lots of shout-outs to friends at home and in the audience. I liked them plenty, so I stuck it out for their set, but I left immediately afterwards.

I was tired, babies. But for a working man, I think I sucked things pretty dry.

Goodbye Sunset Park

We've moved again. Although we'd hoped to stay in the place we were renting from Kat for a bit longer, to help defray the cost we'd incurred by my ill-advised and failed attempt to break the lease (now it can be told) on the place I'd been renting down the block where the bathroom ceiling had fallen in five times, but Kat needed to move back in for family reasons, and so, a bit bummed out, we started looking for a new place to live.

The craigslist method of apartment hunting is as infuriating as ever: I became very quickly re-attuned to the real estate doublespeak that's used to disguise the problems with a listed property. For example, a "junior one-bedroom" is actually just a studio; any mention of how unusual it is to see an X bedroom place at such a low price means the place is not an X bedroom by any conventional standard; unless a specific number of "blocks from the subway" is given, it's gonna be way too many; "cozy" means it's dark as a cave; lack of mention of recent renovations means the place is a shambles. And you're in competition with thousands of other desperate renters for the same wretched scraps. I had an awful woman from some Park Slope real estate concern tell me, when I asked on a Thursday whether I could come see one of those junior one-bedrooms ($1400, 4th Ave.) on a Saturday: "Oh, honey, is this your first time renting an apartment in New YorK? This place isn't going to be around tomorrow. The good ones always go quickly." Ugh. (Incidentally, I was looking for what would be my fifth apartment Brooklyn apartment in seven years.)

But this is the only game in town, as far as I know, so I played along as best I could, trying to fight my perverse emotional reflexes -- becoming twitchy and covetous after simply reading an appealing description of an apartment -- and tramping out to look at some real dogs: A pimply young broker tried to pitch us on plain awful $1600 place in a ramshackle building next to Xing Long Coffee Shop with dog turds on the door step and plywood apartment doors inside that didn't lock. (We surprised the current tenant, a cranky, bearlike hipster who waded through a sea of dirty clothes to let us in.) Someone else was trying to get out of a lease on an $1800 "duplex" that was pretty much just two walk-in closets connected by a rickety spiral staircase. I despaired; Nina didn't. And ultimately we found a place that's actually pretty nice: A one bedroom in an elevator building in Park Slope with south-facing windows and an enormous bedroom. It's a little more than we wanted to pay, and it's got some warts -- bathroom only accessible from the bedroom, almost no kitchen to speak of, junior-sized appliances therein -- but otherwise it's pretty charming.

Randy arrived in the middle of this chaos to spent a few nights on our sofabed. It was actually a bit of good timing -- I find him to be a calming presence. He was in town to promote his book, 62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer (in the acknowledgments of which I get a thank-you that I don't really deserve -- unless sharing an apartment with me helped crystallize the idea of doing more with less) and to host a table at Maker Faire, which was held this year in the grassy areas around the Queens Hall of Science.

Randy and I share an appreciation of Titus Andronicus, who were headlining a bill with Free Energy on Saturday at Webster Hall -- the ballroom, the real deal, not the "studio." They played against a black backdrop shot through with twinkling lights, while the 'Hall's smoke machines pumped out strawberry-flavored puffs that made rainbows from the house lights. The setting was high school dance-appropriate, but the band has only gotten tighter and more grown up-sounding (although, what are they, 23?). I've usually been focused on the cracking dynamics of Pat Stickles' voice, but that night I was blown away by his guitar playing, near-virtuosic on "A More Perfect Union" and "The Battle of Hampton Roads" and validated by the spray of hands reaching out for his guitar during the crashing solos of those songs. They were featuring Amy a bit more heavily, which is great. She brings exactly the right kind of dorky, earnest energy, and she's also got serious guitar chops. It being the end of "The Monitour," their set was heavy on songs from that album, which was A-OK with me -- I ducked into the pit for "Richard III" --- and there were special guests in attendance: Stickles' mom and dad were both there, apparently the first time this had happened. They stayed on opposite sides of the balcony. In lieu of an encore, the guys from Free Energy came up on the stage for the formation of an impromptu supergroup called The Temporary Tattoos. "Get those smart phones out, 'cuz this shit's going to go viral," Stickles said, and then they played AC/DC's "It's A Long Way To The Top." I'll be honest, I wasn't crazy about that one, but still: Best band playing today.

On Sunday Nina and I went out to Queens to hang out with Randy at Maker Faire. Randy's table was on the outskirts of the "Maker Pavilion," right by some guys from Popular Science. He'd been complaining for the past two days about the sound and heat from their "Propane Poofer" -- essentially a big, gas-powered fire-belching machine they were controlling with an industrial-looking hand-held controller. Next to them were several installations by the Madagascar Institute, who are kind of like Jackass but arts-and-craftier. They were running a kind of jet-powered rocket ride that they referred to as the Thundersteeds, which were incredibly noisy as well. We wandered the fairgrounds and bought some disappointingly middling paella from Gerard's Paella, a booth that had these enormous simmering cauldrons of meat and vegetables going; serves me right for ordering the vegan kind, I guess.

The Madagascar Institute also organized a series of "chariot races" in the museum's "Rocket Roundabout." There were a whole bunch of other "maker" teams participating, each of which had created a custom chariot-like vehicle to race against the Institute's smoke-belching papier-mâché kraken and arc-welded Mad Max-style flame wagons. Swimming Cities, who I think are a collective managed by Swoon, drove a gorgeous iridescent fish right into the ass of the kraken.

At five o'clock we headed up the hill to "Zone D" to see Mark Perez's Life-Size Mousetrap, a blown-up version of the Parker Bros. game that I think the guy said his traveling crew had constructed from junkyard parts -- the "bathtub" part of the machine was a real bathtub, there was a real crane used to drop a two-ton safe onto a junky old car, and the balls were real bowling balls. Perez explained, with the help of his team and some dancing girls, that the contraption took them five days to assembly and two to tear down. It only took them about thirty seconds to put it through its paces, though, and while everything more or less worked (ball went down the stairs, crude skeleton replica got dunked), it was a bit underwhelming.

We hired movers off CityMove, a family of giants who go by the name NYC Moves this time, not C & C; and they moved us, mostly smoothly.

So:

• Goodbye to the Puebla Mini-Mart, which just renovated to add a produce section, and to Don Pepe and his awesome sandwiches
• Goodbye to the Burger King on the corner and its scary black grease valve
• Goodbye to Sunset Park itself, its simultaneous view of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, its widowmaker of a hill, the pee smell by the bathrooms
• Goodbye to The Family Store and its egg sandwiches, a staple of my summer of unemployment last year; to Bertín, who made those sandwiches expertly and surprised me with a fancy bottle of beer for New Year's this year
• Goodbye to Tacos Matamoros and its suggestive neon "Hot Taco" sign
• Goodbye to the Clean-Rite where Nina taught me how to play Galaga and where we spent an early, early Christmas morning two years ago; to the parking lot at the Clean-Rite where a grape vine and an actual peach tree trellised their way over the chain link fence from a back yard on 40th St.

But:

• Hello to the Sunday morning farmers market in front of the Old Stone House Park
• Hello to pie at Four & Twenty Blackbirds
• Hello (again) to Steve's C-Town on 9th St., their captivating lobster tank, the availability of the Spicy Black Bean Morningstar Farms veggie burgers
• Hello again to Great Lakes; hello to O'Connor's

Hello, autumn.

Married Ted

Nina and I went to that Yankees game: August 16th, versus Detroit. I hadn't been to the new stadium yet. First impressions? It feels bigger, cleaner. Maybe brighter. Like they've sort of streamlined the baseball-watching experience, made it more intense. We set out for the Bronx a bit late -- there was a thunderstorm in progress, a proper summer drenching, finally. But it had largely abated by the time the D train went above ground, and by the time we got to our seats, the first inning was over, the 2-1 Detroit. And it stayed like that pretty much all night. None of the Yankees' celebrity hitters seemed to be able to get on base, much less score a run; although some credit is due to Detroit's starting pitcher, Max Scherzer, who threw consistent strikeouts throughout. The exception, as far as I could tell, was Curtis Granderson, whom I'd never heard of before this game (the Yankees actually picked him up from Detroit, I found out later) -- he got on base pretty much every time he was up at bat, and was cagey and appealingly base-stealy.

We cheered at the appropriate times ("Make some noise!" said the plasma marquees) and in the appropriate ways ("hip-hip-Jorge!"), but the Yankees did fuck all until the 9th inning, when there was an unexpected almost-rally. They scored a run, got the bases loaded, and were poised to turn things around... but the Tigers made a double play off Derek Jeter and all of a sudden the huge electronic displays were reminding us to drive home safely. It was a spectacular bit of anticlimax.

It was this Spring over Sunday plates of cornmeal waffles in their penthouse apartment on President St. that Ted and Cat told me and Katie and Tom and Emma that they were engaged to be married. They planned to do the whole thing at the end of the summer, so as not to draw things out, and to do it on Cat's family's farm, out in Boyd, Minnesota. Nina and I just got back from it!

Except that the journey out did not go very well for us. We flew from LaGuardia to Chicago in the early afternoon on Friday, and were scheduled to fly from Chicago to Rochester at around 4:00 PM. Fifteen minutes before our flight was to board, the agent at the American counter announced over the loudspeaker that the flight was canceled due to inclement weather. No warning had been given, no other information was provided -- except that the longer we waited before hustling to the "rescheduling phone bank," the fewer options we'd have. Our arrival was already going to be cutting it pretty close to the beginning of the rehearsal dinner (featuring a much-anticipated pig roast), so we hustled, and through some guileful customer-service negotiating, Nina was able to get us on a flight to La Crosse, Wisconsin, leaving in a couple of hours. It wasn't great, but it was, apparently, the only option that got us there the same evening. We waited and sulked.

Eventually we boarded our flight to Wisconsin. It was short. We were seated with a number of servicemen and -women, evidently returning from abroad. Their families met them at the gate in La Crosse while we waited for a car from Bee Cab, the company who'd given us the best -- although not a great -- quote for the trip into Minnesota. We managed to triangulate the location of a noisy cricket between two panels of sidewalk. Our Bee Cab driver ended up being friendly; and her girlfriend, riding shotgun, struck up a conversation with Nina about non-traditional studenthood. The girlfriend also described her plans to adopt rabbits. She was sort of a rabbity woman.

We were exhausted by the time we arrived at the Best Western, but we managed to rally after checking into our room, and joined the gathering of Friends in progress on the floor below us in Dan and Maia's room. It was just like college all over again! We talked about circumcision and ate peanut butter-filled pretzel nuggets and drank whiskey.

We got up late on Saturday; everyone else'd moseyed off in search of food. There'd been talk of going to Cheap Charlie's, locally famous for the big pig statue on top of its sign. But it had moved, and nobody seemed to know the new address, and Ben and Tanya's kids needed to eat, so we settled on Newt's, a burger joint boasting the best burger in Rochester -- seven years in a row! -- but not much else, to my and KT's effete chagrin. Some of the members of our party were brave enough to try the "Juicy Lucy," and variants thereof, which consist of burgers that've been, uh, injected with or otherwise shaped around a molten core of yellow cheese. Good thing it's down the street from the Mayo Clinic? I know I'm not the first person to make that joke.

In the afternoon, the Best Western shuttle drove us up to the farm, where people were starting to gather for the ceremony. The family house was on top of a hill, on a road lined with drawered hives and bales of hay. Some vigorous-looking chickens roamed the driveway. I stalked one of them, a beautiful golden orange hen named Honey, under a bush while she made quiet, anxious -- and un-chickenlike -- hooting sounds.

The ceremony itself was brief. Ted and Cat stood behind the house, at the crest of hill overlooking some rolling fields. A string quartet played quietly. They exchanged vows. Some little girls sprinkled flower petals up and down the aisle. Afterwards, we carried folding chairs down the hill to the barn, where the reception was. The barn was enormous, sturdy, well-maintained; although it was unclear whether it had a function outside of being a home to a flock of swallows.

Tom, Dan, and Greg delivered the "funny" toast of the evening. In addition to drawing attention to Ted's most easily roastable aspects (e.g., gangles), they described the hat I'd bought him many years ago as, I think, a birthday present: I was working at the 'napse at the time, and, on a whim, I approached one of the enterprising gentlemen who'd set up "hat customization" businesses at tables outside our Broadway office, and asked for a hat with the words "Drunk Ted" on it in wildstyle graffiti. My intent was to make explicit the transformation Ted would undergo after a few drinks at a 680 Degraw party, often the subject of jokes: Drunk Ted was way more likely to tackle you, to do pratfalls, to tell you something that you didn't know about you. I was aiming squarely in the radius of "gag gift" -- who could imagine Oxford-shirted Ted sporting Marc Ecko-looking shit like that? But the hat caught on in a big way, and pretty soon you could expect Ted to be wearing it to indicate exactly who you were talking to at that point in the evening. Tom et al. explained, and then presented Ted with a new hat, red with black Sharpie, that proclaimed his new status.

The sun went down, filling the barn with golden orange light.

After dinner, we moved the tables and chairs out of the way, and the band set up their instruments at one end of the barn. A barn dance caller had been hired, and he explained the moves that we'd be required to do: I now know what it means to promenade, to do-si-do. After Ted and Cat danced their solo dance (to Wichita Lineman, I think?), there was a rollicking, compulsory group dance. I loved it! Although in typical fashion I wound up in the wrong places at various important junctures: On the women's side; turned the wrong way round; going under people's arms when I should have been going over. There were a bunch of little kids joining in the dancing, and at one point, during one of the partner-exchange phases, I wound up across from a little girl who looked absolutely horrified at the prospect of being my dance partner. I reached out to take her hand, but she bolted. That's okay, I thought. I'd be freaked out if I saw me coming at me across a dance floor. But I'd just been reading the bit in Shane MacGowan's book (rich and fascinating, by the way. The review that mentions his "deep knowledge and fathomless ignorance" sums things up pretty well) where he talks about the casual superiority of Irish dance -- in this case, "battering" -- and I did my best to stomp and jump and batter the hell out the barn floor. As I mentioned to Cat afterwards, I've never danced that much, nor had so much fun doing it, in my whole life.

On Sunday morning, after dancing the band out of the barn and then keeping things going with an iPod and some speakers (Intergalactic Pla-ne-tary!) we woke up extra early and hopped the Best Western shuttle back to the Ward farm, where we'd been promised a spectacle: A family friend of the Wards had about a dozen buckets of half-fermented groundfall apples that he planned to feed to the bison, and we were invited to observe. We helped hoist some of the buckets, which smelled clean and dirty and sweet at the same time, off the bed of his pickup truck and down to the electric fence by the barn. We tipped them over the edge of the fence, creating a sort of moat of stinky apples, and then the guy made a sort of whooping call; after a few moments, a small herd of bison came trotting up over the horizon and down the hill towards us. We'd been told their hooves would sound like thunder, but it was quieter than that. What was impressive was how quickly they stopped as they reached the fence and started to chomp on the apples. True to form, Hans -- the farm's stud, the only adult male they keep around from season to season -- was front and center, getting first pick. But there were some notable cows and second-string males: One bison with extremely moist and inflamed-looking conjunctiva (do bison have those?) whom we named "Fly Eyes." Another bison, an older male, hung back from the rest of the herd, only venturing to taste the apples once the others had trotted back over the hill and out of sight. "What's his deal?" I asked Ted. Ted squinted and looked off towards the woods in the distance. "Something ain't right about that one," he said.

And then it was all over (for us, at least). Tom and Colleen drove us to the Rochester Int'l airport, where we all got on a tiny plane back to Chicago. Tom and Colleen were sitting right behind us. We all leafed through the SkyMall catalog and tittered over the chintzy offerings. Tom, who'd flown Chicago-to-Rochester on Wednesday, asked the flight crew if this was the only plane making that flight; it was. He searched the seat pockets, to no avail, for a notebook he'd lost on the trip out. Colleen split off to hop a flight to Colorado, where yet another wedding was in the works (the two of them will have attended five fucking weddings by the end of the summer), and Nina and Tom and I picked up some oily-looking deep-dish personal pizzas and hustled onto the flight back to LaGuardia.

After we got back that afternoon, it rained torrential. I sat on the couch, feeling unexpectedly sad: End of childhood, end of summer. End of drunk Ted? We'll see, I guess.

Loop

Hello, Internet! Been a while.

I'm 29 now. My birthday passed without much fanfare -- the lack of which being my idea, although probably a bad one in retrospect. It's hard, though, getting older. I don't like it. I feel like Raistlin Majere, I said to people at work, the man with the hourglass eyes. Daryl went out and bought me a bunch of enormous helium party balloons and affixed them to my monitors. I think he meant it, at least partly, to razz me, but I found it strangely affecting. I left them floating above my desk for two weeks, then stashed them in a conference room. But I found the prospect of a more public acknowledgment of my birthday too overwhelming to plan. Although I feel a bit more on top of things than I did last year, when I was literally fired on my birthday, I still wish I had more control over it all. Like, hey, you know, can we hold the passage of time at bay for a few months, 'til I've gotten a few more, uh, life-notches on my belt? The days are practically making a whooshing noise as they go past.

So instead of celebrating, I opted to work the Free Software Foundation's table at The Next HOPE, at the ever-charming / dilapidated Hotel Pennsylvania. They had us in directly in front of the men's room, which at first I thought was sort of a bleakly funny, but which turned out to be a real advantage in terms of grabbing peoples' attention. As with The Last HOPE, I spent some time hanging out with Matt Jording and Ringo, although neither of them were representing the FSF -- Matt was tabling for a startup he's running called Open Gotham; Ringo (now legal) was pushing his anarchist 'zine. We didn't get beers afterwards -- I was there 'til the bitter end, selling stuff and arguing with people who don't like RMS. I even got to take the big box o' stuff home on Saturday night, since Deb couldn't get it to her hotel room. I didn't go to any of the talks (which means I missed the drama with Julian Assange bailing on his keynote), and I missed the only demonstrations I wanted to go to (the introductory lockpicking dealies); I mostly just worked the table. I got to meet a lot of the younger volunteers and FSF interns -- the "GNU generation," I think they're calling them -- and some friendly people kept me fooded and watered throughout.

I got plenty of great presents, though, in spite of my bad attitude: Nina got me a copy of Dragon Age, which I'm quite enjoying. I was initially put off by how hard it was for me to figure out the game's angle -- no, I know, it's another one of those fucking Bioware games that claims to model complex moral equations by offering the user the choice between drowning the puppy and cuddling it. But that aspect of the game is actually kind of secondary to its presentation of a rich political and historical universe where lots of stuff happens. I mean, I'm a dozen or so hours in and I have no idea what form the narrative's actually going to take. It reminds me a bit of George R. R. Martin. Eve, who just moved into a new apartment with a totally sweet back yard / deck (and with whom I baked two pies in the past two weeks) got me a copy of Shane MacGowan's autobiography, which, from the pictures alone, looks like it's going to be a blast. My parents went in on some Yankees tickets for me and Nina; we're gonna see them play Detroit in a couple of weeks.

More summer things: Went to SummerScreen for Dead Man, which I'd never been able to sit through in its entirety. I actually kind of like it, for all its pretentions and silliness. And I certainly like lying outside at night on a patch of still-warm concrete at the McCarren Park ballfields. For free.

Last week I used a semi-obligatory day off from work to do some weekday things I hadn't had time to do before. I went down to Di Fara's Pizza in Midwood for a slice. The place was pretty much exactly the way Tom et al. had described it: The place was packed; the old guy, Domenico, was the only guy making pizza (according to his own edict, apparently); and it took his son -- Dom Jr., stalling like a put-upon bureaucrat -- 20 minutes to take my one-slice order in his weird shorthand. The pizza? It was pretty good. I'm not taking a contrarian tack -- I liked it, especially the fresh basil, scissor-cut by Dom Sr. But I think you'd be wrong to compare it to cheaper, more uniformly-flavored "street slices." Di Fara's takes some work to appreciate.

After that, I took the Q down to Coney Island to see Luna Park, the chromed and polished replacement for Astroland. People have been making wary noises to the effect that it's the first salvo in some larger gentrification play, and, you know, it probably is, but it's not so terrible, either. They've got a fucking log ride. And the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel didn't go anywhere. The Ghost Hole didn't go anywhere. That's still there. I didn't go on any of the rides that day. It was hot and I was alone.

Bad Movie Night marches on: We've been watching them every Tuesday night, too many to list here. There are a few that I feel like I should mention, though: Revenge of the Stolen Stars, which is an incomprehensible mess of a movie about a curse bestowed on the nephew of a plantation owner by any indigenous tribe upset over some missing rubies. ...Or maybe the rubies themselves are upset? It's not really clear -- or interesting -- but the movie's notable for the extremely brief appearance by Klaus Kinski (given top billing) and for the buffoonish lead, a guy with the too-perfect name "Barry Hickey." The guy's like a parody of hammy overacting, he's got a an IMDb bio that he obviously wrote himself -- and, best of all, during the fight scene in the whorehouse, you can actually see his scrotum for a split second. I was really proud of catching that; we went back and freeze-framed it to be sure. But now I'm totally interested in seeing the rest of this guy's ouvre (e.g., his sure-to-be-awesome work as "Ryan Chase" in Space Chase). He's definitely the Ronnie Bostock to my Giles De'Ath. Tom bought a pack of weird sixties, Hammer-style horror movies, which included the wonderfully perverse Bloody Pit of Horror. It's about a reincarnated, bodybuilding S&M enthusiast (played by Mickey Hargitay) who calls himself the The Crimson Executioner. There's not a whole lot of, you know, executioning, but there's some fairly effective tease-y bits where some spikes almost cut a boob.

Nina and I went to the Ted Leo show at Brooklyn Bowl, breaking my streak of missing him live. It was one of the JellyNYC "pool parties," which they've been having at a bunch of different venues now that the pool's being worked on. Brooklyn Bowl's gotten a lot more dance-clubby and, you know, corporate since the last time I was there -- they've installed a couple of huge projection screens between the bar and the stage, upon which they were showing slides of happy white people having comfy fun. It was like an ad for The Edge.

The openers didn't blow me away: The first band, ArpLine, had at least one laptop on stage with them -- automatic demerits, although with that name maybe they get a pass. The Darlings played sulky grunge rock; they were okay but could have used a bit more run-around-the-stage kind of energy.

...Which was exactly what Ted Leo brought. He played a great set, heavily weighted towards stuff from The Brutalist Bricks (although Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone? made a notable appearance). Part-way through, he broke a string, and then, a little later, he broke another on his back-up guitar. No one had any replacement strings. "What's a song we can do without me on guitar?" he asked his band. So they finished out the set with "The Ballad Of The Sin Eater," which worked pretty well with just one guitar -- Ted Leo sounds a lot like Tim Armstrong when he demands "You didn't think they could hate you, now did you?" As an encore they played "Woke Up Near Chelsea," which is pretty quickly becoming a favorite of mine. It's just so evocative:

Cold in the bones, rot in the teeth
Alone in the home, out in the street
All that you've grown, choked in the weeds
But older than stone, that's you and me

We are born of despair
We are born of despair

Fall days, the urgency of work. We all, as the song says, got a job to do.

"Nicky Digital" was creeping satyr-like through the crowd for the duration of the show, grinning and snapping pictures. Of us; the crappy yuppies who brought their fucking babies; the mongoloid hipster in the deep V who was prowling around and vamping for the benefit of no one in particular. All these pictures made it onto the big screen above the crowd. Look, we're having fun! Ugh, I didn't like that guy. But the show was great. Some dudes even managed to get "up," despite the vigorous efforts of the stage security guy. It actually was sort of disastrous: A couple of pint glasses left half full on the stage got knocked over, fucking up one of the monitors -- and then broke, distributing shards of glass around the feet of James Canty. The security guy actually did a face-palm and then rushed out with a little broom and dustpan and managed to sweep up the pieces before anyone got hurt. Ted Leo, surfing the crowd himself, sort of back-flipped back onto the stage and thanked the guy.

This weekend Nina and I walked down to 1st Ave. in Industry City. We'd taken a similar walk a few years ago, a little before I moved into the neighborhood, exploring and taking pictures. Everything was practically the same, down to this swatch of woven black and white plastic stuff that'd gotten tangled up on a barbed wire fence down by the pier. Nobody'd bothered to remove it, I guess. We walked down to the end of the pier and then back east into Brooklyn Chinatown, on our way to Lucky Eight Seafood for jellyfish and ginkgo seeds. We stopped at a table on 5th Ave. where a woman with badly disfigured hands was changing watch batteries. Nina handed her a stopped watch, a gift from her mother, and the woman deftly disassembled it, cleaning its innards with a small, hand-held bellows. Using tweezers, she pried out the old battery and popped in a new one, but the watch wouldn't go. "Sorry," she said. "I think it's broken." That's okay, we said. Thanks for trying.

Heat Wave!

Summer things continue apace. It is very hot, babies. We just had the hottest July 6th on record, apparently, although I don't think I was paying attention. Don't get me wrong. It was definitely hot.

Last Wednesday I met Bill at Bruar Falls for a CD release party some of his friends were doing. I was feeling weak and hungry beforehand, so I went on a hike down Grand St. looking for grub and found myself at Foodswings, which I'd never been to before. I got some macaroni and "cheese," which was, like most vegan cooking, obviously carefully thought-out but, you know, merely okay. At the 'Falls, Bill and I drank beers with Gabi and Patrice, my aisle-walking partner from Bill's wedding. The bands were pleasant and energetic. One of them had an awesome, slovenly-looking drummer -- a cross, visually, between Murray Hill and Bernie (from Weekend At...). The lead singer sang, "I don't know what to do with my life." I can do this, I thought. I should be doing this.

On Saturday, it was back to Bedford Ave. for a Peelander-Z show at Death By Audio, a venue whose name I'd often seen in show listings but which I'd never visited. What was it like, I wondered. It had a too-cute name, like a record store. Was it part of a record store? It turns out, no (although it is a record label), it is a weird little warehouse down by the water on the west side of Williamsburg. You go in through an unmarked door and wend your way around some exposed pipes and off-limits rooms, entrances draped with bedsheets. The public part of the venue is two rooms, more or less, with low, asbestos-tile ceilings, seemingly too small to hold the crowd they accommodated that night. The stage room was stiflingly hot, cooled only by a rickety fan hung swayingly from a rope in one corner. The merch tables, bathrooms, and rudimentary bar were in the other room, which sported a mural that looked like it belonged on the wall of a high school prop closet. Sweaty, hunchbacked nerds milled about, high-fiving each other.

Anamanaguchi was winding up their set when we got there. They've got an appealing, energetic sound: High volume guitar riffs over video-game synthesizer noises. Stuck in the back as we were, I couldn't tell how much of their performance was "organic" and how much was canned, but they certainly seemed committed to it. A lot of people crowd-surfed, which was good to see. (Am I supposed to hate that? I've always thought it was cool.)

Next up was Math The Band, who I'd been curious about for a long time. They were also really enthusiastic and fun, and there was no question about where their sound was coming from: There's only two of them, and the drummer doubles as their keyboard player, sometimes playing both instruments at the same time. The resulting rhythmic, noisy pop sounded something like the songs Andrew W.K. used to write. There was even more crowd surfing, and towards the end of the set, the band solicited yelled requests from the audience.

Between sets, we walked down to the boarded up Domino Sugar plant and up to one of the new condo buildings going up across the street, where we screwed and unscrewed some shittily-assembled exterior fixtures. At one point, we realized we were standing next to a pigeon that was perched on a step, being very still. Its eyes were open, but it was clearly not well: it was pooping where it was standing.

Nina and I had seen Peelander Red walking urgently down S 2nd street earlier, away from the venue. "Shit," we thought. "We missed them." And then we thought, "Uh oh, is Peelander-Z no longer headlining the shows they play?" And Nina wondered out loud whether Peelander Red was getting understandably sick of having to don the mantle of the "bass squid" in 90-degree heat. "He looks stressed out," she said. But we were wrong about their set. And if they're getting tired of their own schtick, it sure doesn't show. Peelander Yellow ended the sound check with a faux "thank you, good night!" (Nina and I managed to get everyone to chant "One more song!") And then they came out in full costume (bass squid included) and launched into "Mad Tiger." Red jumped out onto the eager hands of the crowd almost as soon as the song started.

It's hard to write about Peelander-Z without making them sound like a parody of punk rock and how deliberately oblique its lyrics can be -- which they absolutely are. For example, Peelander Yellow explains, "When people ask-u me, what kind of food is the best food, I say 'Mexican food!'" They launch into a their song "Taco Taco Tacos," which is heavy on the shouting, light on melody, and features Peelander Pink standing at the edge of the stage like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, banging a saucepan with a spoon and hollering out the chorus. But they've got a lot of album songs that aren't part of their choreographed stage act but which sneak onto their set lists and reveal that they're capable of putting out a fairly conventional, polished sound. Don't get me wrong -- I love those guys. Nina and I participated in every "bit" they did, including an extremely sweaty, abortive conga line and limbo competition. Evidence: See if you can find us in these photos.

Then on Sunday it was the 4th of July. Returning from Williamsburg at 2:30 AM, we ran into our upstairs neighbor Martin on the stairs. "Yo, you guys gotta come to my brother's party," he said. "You suck if you don't come. You suck." But, we protested, what about the hot-dog eating contest? "Oh yeah," he said. "Yeah, wake me up for that. I'll come with you. Pound on my door real loud." In the morning, puffy-eyed and hot, I trudged upstairs and knocked as loudly as I thought reasonable, three groups of three knocks each. But no one answered. So I turned and went downstairs and left the building and got on the train alone (Nina opted to sleep in).

It was the hottest day of the year so far, but people were crammed into the Surf and Stillwell Ave. intersection. I'm wowed every year by the audacity of the jerks who come down there and expect to be able to cut through the crowd instead of accumulating around the edges. "I gotta get by! Can't these people see I've gotta get by?" this one guy kept saying. The contest itself was less than memorable, presumably because of the heat; the contestants had a sluggish cast and failed to keep pace with their previous records. George Shea seemed to acknowledge the effect the heat was having on the contest. "Look at him -- he can barely lift his head," he said of Eric "Badlands" Booker, who failed to place at all. The final tally had Joey Chestnut leading (naturally) followed by Eater X, who experienced what looked like a partial, nasal reversal-of-fortune; and Patrick Bertoletti, whose squeeze-the-hot-dogs-to-paste technique was no less revolting the second time I've seen it. None of them came close to hitting the HDBs they'd managed last year. Chestnut gave a typically grimace-y post-eat interview, opening and taking a swig from a bottle of Pepto-Bismol (a prominent sponsor) upon prompting from a handler.

As predicted, Takeru Kobayashi did not compete, although the roving Nathan's camera caught his angry face in the crowd. And we all know what happened afterwards. I didn't stay long enough to see that, though. Queasy and heat-exhausted, I hopped back on the N and headed back to Sunset Park, where I picked up some groceries and made a white hominy salad (with tomatillo dressing) for Ted's 4th-of-July BBQ. That was easy, and I trained it over to Park Slope, arriving, accidentally, an hour early; which meant there was time to help Ted and Cat carry supplies down from their roof apartment to the ground floor, where they were house-sitting for neighbors with a back yard. Except that the neighbors came home a day early, about five minutes after we'd gotten everything set up. There were a few awkward moments (permission had been asked for prior uses of the yard but not for this one), but we got everything sorted out amicably.

I caught and re-caught a firefly in the weeds.

And then it was time for Martin's 4th of July party at his brother's house, down on the south side of Sunset Park. Martin's brother, Freddy, has a back yard, and he'd come up with the genius idea of projecting YouTube videos onto the back wall of a neighboring building (actually, onto a shower curtain tacked to said wall -- it worked surprisingly well). Arriving late, we missed the backyard fireworks (and we'd missed the official display over the inconvenient Hudson river again), but stuffed as we were, Freddy's wife plied us with sausages and salad and rice with gandules; it was difficult to say no.

Their young daughter gave us a detailed explanation of these things called "silly bandz," which are rubber bands that are "shaped" like things and which you can wear like bracelets. You can stretch them like normal rubber bands to make use of their tensile strength, which kind of distorts them -- but if you jiggle one loose, it'll kind of pop back to being whatever it is, the outline of a shark or a flower or a bird. There are even ones in the shapes of letters or short words. She claimed to have thousands of them, in various shapes and colors. Generously, she gave us a few: Nina received a giraffe, and I got a musical note.

We indulged her in some little-kid mythology: there were, she said, some rare, scary silly bandz to be found. A friend of hers, she said, saw one in the park that said "CHILD ABUSE" in blood red letters. Yikes! That would scare me. That would scare anyone! More like "chilling bandz." Am I right?

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?"