Do Ya

Folks, I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Back in February, at Nina's birthday party at Pacific Standard, Evan and Tom and I got to talking about old-fashioned, pen-and-paper role-playing games, and how one might go explaining their appeal to someone who'd never played. "It's just talking," we said to Nina and Winnie, whose skepticism had motivated our conversation. "Talking and drinking beer." "But how do you win?" asked Nina. So Evan, who'd extolled the dry virtues of the classic Dungeons & Dragons first edition ruleset, located some PDFs of the Player's Handbook, as well as a helpful, "open source" D&D play-alike ruleset called OSRIC, which refines the rules and clarifies some of the more abstruse language in the original materials. He also prepared a first edition campaign for us all to play together, and at the beginning of March, we started rolling our characters. Our initial contingent was me, Nina, Winnie, and Tom. I knew I wanted to try playing a less, you know, physical character, and so I created Camphor Earwig, a forktongue (as Evan described him) and corrupt priest who'd been expelled from his order for his misdeeds and who now worshipped Syrul, goddess of lies and malice. Tom also went the Neutral Evil route, and rolled Florian Aethelred D'Ascoyne IV, a craven, effete "magic user" with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the dark arts. Nina was pretty sure from the outset that she wanted to play a half-orc, and she rolled one and made him dual-classed, a fighter-thief. She named him, to her credit against my urging, Stinkus Pinkus. Winnie created Pinkie Underbrush, a greedy little gnome assassin, small enough to fit in a sack. Not a Lawful one among us, nor a Good. For understandable reasons, then, Evan had us start by being released from the same town jail in the village of Hochen. In the slightly synthetic way common to the outset of most campaigns, we agreed to travel together to the nearby town of Orlane, to investigate some food shortages, disappearances, and other strange goings-on -- and, for Camphor, the possibility of lining his pockets.

The following adventures were experienced over the course of several weeks and with the help of several large bottles of Mountain Dew, Fresca, and fancy Japanese tea; several big bags of Doritos (various powdery flavors) and spicy potato chips; an assortment of theme-appropriate ales (Orkney's Skull Splitter, Rogue's Dead Guy, Wychwood's Hobgoblin); and various and sundry candies and cookies -- the consumption of all of which routinely left us feeling physically ill after a six-plus hour play session.

But it's fun, babies! Like I said, we're using the first edition rules, the design for which I guess was all about modeling the world as formally and as exhaustively as possible while subsidizing the manufacture of oddly-shaped dice. (And I did buy several new four-, eight-, and ten-siders at Blatt Billiards for the occasion.) And there is something comforting about having that layer of abstraction to broker your interactions with the universe. It certainly makes it easier, as a real-life mush-mouth, to play a smooth-talking villain; the dice-roll an effective gloss on my feeble description of my character's attempt to hoodwink an NPC. Evan is an able Dungeon Master, able to improvise when we go beyond the source material, and patient when we're too obtuse to grasp the clues that are in front of our faces. Sometimes he asks us to demonstrate the actions we're attempting: "I'm going to vault the wall and jump down on the guard with my dagger out," says Winnie. "Role-play it for me," he says.

After emerging from a dark and possibly haunted forest, we reached the outskirts of Orlane, and approached a small dairy farm, the proprietor of which directed us to the town center and the Inn of the Slumbering Serpent. (There was an alternative, competing venue, he told us -- The Golden Grain -- but it wasn't as... nice.) He also gave us a few pointers on the lay of the town: Where the local hermit was holed up; where a group of elves that had recently arrived in town was staying; blacksmith; general store; temple of Merikka (the local goddess of the harvest). We thanked him and made our way to the Slumbering Serpent, where we attempted to allay the suspicions of some local workmen dining at the bar by buying them a round. We also bought some meals for ourselves and a few bottles of the inn's renowned, locally-source wine. (Evan asked us to roll a perception check, after which he solemnly informed us, "You believe it is some of the best wine you have ever tasted.")

We negotiated the price of our rooms with the innkeeper -- who also warned us off the Golden Grain, thus further piquing our interest -- and then set out for an evening walk across the river to the temple. It's a big imposing building surrounded by high walls and a moat. By the time we arrived, however, the gates were locked. We managed to rouse a guard, who told us to come back in the morning. A wolf howled ominously somewhere on the grounds. "Fuck it," we said. "Let's go to the Golden Grain." We walked back across town and arrived at the Grain well after dark. Inside, sitting at the bar, we met a hard case with an ugly face who didn't much seem to like us or our questions, so we ordered some ale and found our own table. Unfortunately, it became apparent that the barkeep wasn't on our side either: As soon as we brought the ale to our lips, we started feeling funny. The others were able shake it off, but Camphor's head hit the table; I was out. Which meant I couldn't take part in the ensuing melee, in which our party slew the mysterious patron, the barkeep, and almost the cook, before escaping with my unconscious body slung over Stinkus' back. We avoided a potential rout: The staff could have followed us down the road, but chose not to, strangely.

I was allowed to sleep off the effects of my adulterated booze in our rooms at the Serpent. Florian, rising early, went downstairs to the common area of the inn, where he ran into a well-intentioned (L/G) but deeply unpleasant (CH:7) dwarf-for-hire, Euler Eigenkett, played by a late-to-the-table Ted. (...Who, last time we did this, about ten years ago, played a character named Dirac. What's it going to be next time -- Gauss von Erdős?) Together they made the trek out to the elm grove on the outskirts of town to pay a visit to Ramne the hermit. Old Ramne turned out to be a bit hard of hearing and clearly preferred the company of his pet weasel Whiskers to that of a pair of itinerant fortune-seekers -- especially Florian, who made no secret of his craving for some hands-on access to Ramne's cache of magical artifacts. But he also happened to be the most forthright dude we'd dealt with so far, not only confirming the disappearances, harvest shortages, and a conspiracy at work within the town but suggesting that the temple of Merikka might bear a closer look. He also pointed out that as a bit of an outsider to the affairs of the town, his investigative capabilities were limited. He suggested that we bring any concrete proof of wrongdoing to the mayor.

So Florian and Euler headed back into town an met the mayor, who shared Ramne's suspicions, although he didn't much care for Ramne himself. Also like Ramne, he also tried to pass the buck, claiming that he was too short on resources to get to the bottom of the trouble himself. He said he had agents hard at work on uprooting the conspirators, though. The human and the dwarf pressed him harder -- where could our party best direct our efforts? Reluctantly, he fingered the blacksmith and the storekeep of the general store, who, he said, had been acting strangely of late. The two thanked the Mayor and returned to the Slumbering Serpent.

Euler was introduced to the rest of us, meeting with varying levels of warmth (Camphor was unimpressed; Pinkie Underbrush's pecuniary anxiety bubbled briefly to the surface -- "Is he gonna get an equal share of the treasure?"), and the party resolved to make a return visit to the temple of Merikka. We made the trip, crossed the moat, and found the temple open to worshippers. We asked to meet with the people in charge, and waited, some of us greedily eying an enormous jade slab at the far end of the large antechamber, for our granted audience with the high priestess, Misha Devi. Although easy on the eyes, she wasn't forthcoming when it came to the disappearances in the town -- refusing to acknowledge them at all, really. We left frustrated, but Camphor doubled back. "I'm gonna pledge her cult," I told Evan. "Role-play it out," he said. "Look," I whispered to Evan-as-Misha. "I know about the... thing. I'm down for it. I want in." He had me a roll a d20. Misha acquiesced. If Camphor was serious, she said, he could rendezvous with her agents at the river that night. Naturally, he'd have to give the appropriate sign. "Oh, of course," I said. "Of course I know what that is."

We had the rest of the day to dispose of as we wished, so we decided to take the Mayor up on his suggestion and visit the blacksmith and the general store, splitting into two groups, dropping off Florian and Pinkie at the forge while the rest of us continued down the road. True to the Mayor's description, the blacksmith was in some kind of fugue state, wild-eyed and unresponsive, his forge full of shoddy, half-finished work, the two bellows-boys cringing and wary. Pinkie baited him with a hypothetical order for some chairs she'd like to have built, but it was a flip comment from Florian that put him into a psychotic fury. He grabbed his hammer and drove them running from the the forge, seemingly intent upon bludgeoning them in the road, his assistants trailing behind (perhaps with the idea to restrain him). The mage and the gnome ran to catch up with the other members of the party, who became aware of the commotion and turned to join the ensuing scuffle -- as did the storekeep and his family. Camphor swung his mace (to no effect); Stinkus attacked with his short sword; Pinkie threw daggers (taking out a bellows-boy); but it was Euler who stole the show, cleaving the ravening smith's head from his shoulders with a single (natural 20!) swing of his axe. The other hostiles, taken aback by this bloody display of our martial prowess, were easy to kill or subdue, leaving us panting and victorious in the red chaos of the road.

Time passes.

As the title of this post might suggest to you, I have committed myself to making it through Stephen King's backpack-breaking heptalogy. I'm doing this largely because I got it into my head that pretty much everyone had read them but me. Indeed, several co-workers of mine, even ones that I think of as being more, uh, literate have approached me to discuss, seeing one volume or another on my desk. One of the office's security guards saw me at the elevators in the lobby with Wizard and Glass in my hands.

"The Dark Tower, right?" he said.
"Yep," I said. "You read 'em?"
"Yep," he said.
"All of them?"
"Oh yeah."

So I wanted to find out what they were all about, even if, as I'd been warned, what they were about was pretty stupid. And it is -- and they are -- pretty silly. But I do admit to a degree of sincere admiration at the sheer ambition of the project: Imagine taking a half-baked high school daydream of a story (which is basically what he admits it started off as) and putting in the authorial effort to, you know, implement it in its entirety, which he does. And maybe it's the scale of the plot (Dude Saves The Whole Universe) that makes most of the characterization seem a bit flat or insufficiently empathetic. Or maybe it's just that Stephen King doesn't have the chops to write dialogue for a jive-talking double-amputee who's got multiple personalities. That's an awful lot of rope to give yourself for hangin'.

A Hell of a Drug

I just got back from Boston, where I'd gone on my yearly pilgrimage to the Free Software Foundation's annual associate members meeting. Making it a one-day trip, as I do, can be a bit grueling, but as I may have mentioned before, part of the draw of attending for me is getting to spend eight or so uninterrupted hours with my laptop, working on a project of my choosing. The Acela's seat-local AC outlets are largely what makes that possible, though, and when I checked the Amtrak site on Friday, I did a double-take at the ticket prices: It was gonna cost me upwards of three hondo to enjoy decidedly spotty WiFi and rest my netbook on a glorified card table. So I resolved to tighten my belt and do it 2004 style -- that is to say, take the Chinatown bus. I set my alarm for 5:30; woke up at 5:15; stumbled out the door and down to the R station at Union St.; and made it to Canal St. by 6:15 AM. Unfortunately, the Google Maps location for Lucky Star Bus is just flat-out wrong, and I wasted enough time nosing around Bayard St. in the pre-dawn darkness that I ended up missing their 6:30 departure from Chrystie St. So I had to wait and take the 7:00 AM Fung-Wah instead. And that was not so bad -- the seats were actually comfier than I remembered them being, and the Dramamine I took knocked me out pretty quickly. So I didn't get any computer time in, but at least I was rested by the time we got into South Station bus terminal. ...Which is considerably less fancy than the Amtrak terminal, babies: A hobo slept on a bench across the way from a cartoonishly off-brand donut joint whose service door literally opened into the men's restroom... in which somebody had puked into one of the sinks. Whatever, man. I jam econo.

The meeting this year was a scaled-down version of the events they've had in years past, although they tried to gloss over the changes: For example, instead of the FSF hosting a GNU hackers meeting as part of the members meeting itself, they invited interested parties to get together informally ("in coffee shops") to work on projects. The wiki explained that the Foundation was planning something extra special for next year, but no one could tell me what that might be. They'd also moved things from Cambridge to Bunker Hill Community College, over on the Orange line of the T.

I arrived in the middle of Máirín Duffy's talk, which was about an educational program she'd designed (with sponsorship from Red Hat) to teach middle schoolers digital media design using Free tools; she'd been running it with a Massachusetts Girl Scouts troop and made her lesson plans (along with write-ups of her observations) available online. Her presentation elicited a lot of interest from the assembled nerds: People wanted to know whether she thought she'd created many converts to FLOSS. I was still pretty groggy at this point, but I recall her saying something about having graduates of her course assist in teaching it the next go-round, which sounds like success to me.

Matt Lee coordinated a round of lightning talks next; eager nerds queued at the stairs at the sides of the auditorium. Asheesh Laroia gave a truncated but inspiring version of a talk about successful strategies adopted by projects and user groups attempting to increase the diversity of their contributor base. He pointed out that isolation is self-reinforcing, and proposed that user groups adopt rules like the ones Jonathan Ames describes for orgies: You can show up if you're a dude, but you gotta bring ladies. James Vasile talked about a project dreamed up by Eben Moglen, a home networking appliance called FreedomBox that acts as a sort of federated social networking aggregator and privacy guard. Mary-Anne Wolf had some questions for the community about finding people capable of modifying the hardware and software component of electric wheelchairs, for the benefit of Arthur Torrey, who'd been injured and partially paralyzed in a recent accident.

Aside from some coffee and muffins, there wasn't any catering for the conference this year. The web site helpfully suggested that we investigate the strip mall across the street from BHCC; I followed Asheesh and his cadre over to a Papa Gino's, where we ran into Brad Kuhn and some other FSF people who generously shared with us some of the salty pizzas they'd ordered.

Richard Stallman's keynote was after lunch. As has been his habit for the past several years, he gave a kind of rambling talk that touched on a number of topics; he focused mostly on the ground he felt had been lost with regard to software running on mobile devices, and on the role the Internet had played in the recent uprisings in the Middle East. On the former, he was pessimistic, although he had some positive things to say about projects like the free Replicant, which has made a lot of technical progress recently.

"They've got it working on the HTC Dream, I think it's called," he said.
"It's the G1," Matt Lee piped up from the first row.
"The G1?"
"That's its marketing name."
"I don't know," said RMS. "These things are just... sounds to me."

On the latter topic, he was also pessimistic: "We took it for granted that it would be good for humanity because governments were not attacking it very hard," he said. "But the Internet may turn out to be a disaster for human rights." He also praised the actions of Anonymous in launching distributed denial of service attacks against the web sites of companies that agreed to help cut off funding from WikiLeaks, comparing them to "suffragettes chaining themselves to doors and such." I thought that was kind of a problematic position to take, but I didn't say anything. The questions period that followed was characteristically... tense, if not combative. Several members questioned the urgency of the projects on the High Priority Projects list, like GNU PDF.

Brad Kuhn gave the last talk of the afternoon, in which he gave a brief history of the FSF's operations from its inception to the present day, which was neat to have laid out explicitly, having spent . One thing he went into some detail on was the fact that for the first twelve years of its existence, the Foundation devoted a significant portion of its budget to funding developers to work on the GNU system. He popped up a slide with a list of names on it, of which I recognized several. But, for better or for worse, the FSF now concerns itself primarily with marketing and lobbying for Free Software, and with managing the, uh, "intellectual property" that has been assigned to it by developers. To that end, he explained, he'd helped the FSF go through the laborious process of establishing itself as a 501(c)(3) corporation, which, among other benefits, enabled it to raise funds much more effectively. The experience inspired him to create the Software Freedom Conservancy, which acts as an organizational proxy for independent software projects that want to reap the rewards of Tax-Exempt status but lack the time or expertise to go through with the filing process.

The Free Software awards this year went to Rob Savoye, who's certainly put in enough hours of debugging Flash media server wire traffic to deserve it; and to the Tor project. Hard to argue with that.

BHCC gave us the heave-ho at around 5 o'clock. Deb Nicholson and I exchanged contact info (she's no longer with the Foundation), although we were interrupted by RMS chewing out a star-struck fanboy ("For the last time, don't ask if you can take a picture with me! Either take the picture or don't take it!"). I managed to tag along with her, plus Thomas Dukleth and James Vasile, for dinner at a walk-up vegan Thai restaurant in Boston Chinatown called My Thai, which was really, really good -- the most convincing "fake meat" I've ever had, for whatever that's worth. We were joined by Jeanne Rasata and some other FSF people, including the two volunteers I'd met at HOPE last summer, Forest and Fizza. People actually remembered me, which was nice. It grew dark outside the large colonial windows of the restaurant; we talked about reading mail in Emacs and whether anybody posts on Usenet any more about topics that aren't related to Usenet itself (probably not).

And then I looked at my watch and it was almost 8 o'clock, meaning that I had to gun it back to South Station if I wanted to get back to NYC before 1 AM. I did plan to try to work on the way back, but I popped another Dramamine, and quickly wound up back in a pleasant but hard-to-shake twilight state. I tried to rally by listening to The Monitor in full on my iPod, which I'd found to be a potent shit-disturber having just purchased it when I made the trek last year, but no dice: I fell asleep in the middle of the fourteen-minute epic "The Battle of Hampton Roads." The guy in front of me was sitting lengthwise across two seats, staring intently out the window. He kept a napkin pressed to his mouth for the entirety of the trip, as if overcome with emotion or motion sickness. It was a strange sight to wake up to over and over again in the eerie half-light of the Lucky Star.

The Tall Tree

Up on the chilly roof of The Iron Monkey in downtown Jersey City on Sunday night, surrounded by a constellation of auto-on lights of the towering office buildings, I was gripped by doubt. Were we alone out here? Had we crossed the Jersey border for nothing?

Nina and I had PATH-trained it out there, lured by a "tweet" that I'd seen on Tom Scharpling's Twitter feed to the effect that he was going to be shooting a music video for the estimable Titus Andronicus: a marathon, single-day guided tour of the Garden State, that was gonna finish up at what looked like a fairly un-punk rock fancy beer bar. I'd been in a panic about being late, and we'd power-walked from the Exchange Pl. stop, only to find that the Monkey was hosting an event for something called Beer Club NJ, a gathering of people wearing khakis and club-branded t-shirts. With increasing bewilderment, we followed the signs pointing us to up to the roof: If the event were for real, why wasn't the place mobbed with angry young beardos in too-tight jeans? The roof was cold, dark, and abandoned, but even empty it didn't look like a place you'd wanna film a video for a rock song: There was a wooden bar, some wrought-iron patio furniture, some unused wooden trellises leaning up against a wall. We parked ourselves on a pair of cold chairs by the edge of the roof and checked and double-checked that we were in the right place.

Eventually we were joined by another young-ish couple, a beardy ginger and his girlfriend, who at least assured us that we weren't crazy. The guy and I fussed with our smart-phones and complained about the punctuality of Scharpling's video producer, Rob Hatch-Miller, as if we knew him personally.

Some more time went by, and finally an Iron Monkey staffer came through the roof door and told us we had to go downstairs, although she did confirm that the shoot was still on track to happen.

When I was a kid I had one of those EC horror comics with a story in it ("Midnight Mess") about a guy who goes to eat at a restaurant in a part of town that's unfamiliar to him. The place is busy but the decor is strange, and there are all these blood-based (!) dishes on the menu. Eventually he realizes that all the other patrons in the restaurant are vampires and that he's the only alive dude in the place -- they realize it, too, of course, and, you know, do their thing on him. Going back downstairs to the bar kind of reminded me of that story, except that I was recognizing my fellow vampires: Those pale geeks at the bar -- they're wearing Titus Andronicus t-shirts under their hoodies! That guy nursing a pint over his duck confit on the second floor -- he's got a WFMU sticker on his briefcase! After that I felt a whole lot better about the situation. Nina and I ordered some fancy beers that came with orange slices in them. And it wasn't too much longer before the band and film crew did show up.

I was watching the street out the window, but what actually tipped me off was Tom Scharpling walking by our table and up the stairs to the roof. He's a big guy in person, bear-like, even, and his voice and mannerisms ("Oh. Well, thank you. You're sweet to say so.") are unmistakable from hearing him on his radio show. He was with his wife, Terre T (much taller than I expected), host of the excellent Cherry Blossom Clinic, also on FMU.

After another interminable wait, they started herding us upstairs. The roof had been transformed by bright lights and bustling PAs, and right where we'd be sitting in the cold and dark a few hours earlier, the band had set up. We were in the first batch of audience members to get up the stairs, and so they kind of herded us around the side of the bar to the far side of the roof. Too late we (I) realized that this would put us out of sight of the cameras, but I was too busy trying to be a good extra to resist the film crew's directions. No matter: We wound up huddled on top of the bar with a bunch of rowdy, friendly people who were as excited to sing along and pump their mittened fists as we were.

After warming us up with the beginning of A More Perfect Union, the band launched into the first of several takes of the song they were doing for the video, No Future Part III: Escape From No Future. Only a few people in the audience seemed to know the long and meandering verses, but everybody sure knew the chorus. "You will always be a loser; you will always be...j a loser."

"I always feel bad about singing along to this part," Nina confessed to the girl sitting next to her. "This can't be good for his self-esteem."

"I know," said the girl. "Our mom goes over his lyrics with a fine-toothed comb."

It turned out we were sitting right next to Mr. Stickles' sister! Nina and I disagree about the meaning of the song's lyrics -- I think it's an affirmation, while she only hears the sad stuff in it -- but either way it's a personal enough song that it's a little unsettling to have it repeated and deconstructed for the purposes of making the video.

A few minutes into the filming, one of the revelers in the part of the roof directly in front of the band took an unlucky stomp on a weak part of the wooden deck and put his foot right through it. There was a pause while the damage was assessed, and then the producers announced that they were going to have to cut the filming a bit short. As a consolation prize of sorts, though, they recorded a very long audience-participatory version of the breakdown during the end of the song. "You'll always! Be a loser!" So I don't think we're gonna be visible in the video, but we might be audible -- and someone behind us took a pretty awesome shot of Nina's gloved and cheering hands that evokes the experience pretty well.

And then it was over and we had to go downstairs. Tom and Terre lingered around by the bathrooms on the top floor, anxiously attempting to triangulate the position of the dude who'd fucked up the deck to see if there was any damage to The Iron Monkey's ceiling that Tom'd have to cover out of pocket. Fortunately, there wasn't any. Nonetheless, when Nina and I finally decided to pack up and head home, we found him lolling on a bench outside the bar, fretting about the incident to the band and an assembled crowd of admirers.

"I'm never going to another Tom Scharpling video shoot ever again," I whined, play-acting an injured deck-stepper.

"Me neither!" he said. But he looked pretty happy.

Three Hundred

This is my three hundredth "blog post!" I've been writing in this thing for, holy shit, about eight years. This thing has seen me through different jobs, different apartments, different relationships; if you scroll back to the beginning, you can see how the subject matter and style has changed quite a bit over the years. I guess if I've learned anything in my tenure as Navel-Gazer-in-Chief here, it's, in the immortal and cryptic words of that weird old guy on Union St. with the signs in his window, "Take it easy, but take it."

Bel Argosy played three more shows: Monday, January 10th at Otto's Shrunken Head, the tiki bar on 14th St. where I'd seen Direct From Hollywood Cemetery play a glorious if sparsely-attended Halloween show several years ago. Our show was even emptier than theirs, though, due in no small part to the fact that we almost entirely neglected to promote it: I posted a Facebook event the day of, facetiously billing it as a "top-secret VIP concert" with a password required at the door. No one (besides the Argosy Belles, Nina's brother Michael, and the steadfast Eve) was fooled. We took turns complaining about the broken fixtures in the men's bathroom, which had that public park reek of old fermenting urine. The back room at Otto's, recently renovated after a fire last year, is separated from the rest of the bar by a pair of double doors, which we closed and then started our newly expanded set. We were told we sounded good -- it's a small room with low ceilings, a good fit for the simple amplifier setup. At one point one of the drunks from the bar poked his head in through the doors and peered at us severely before disappearing back to his post, evidently deciding we weren't his cup of tea. For the first time on stage I got lost in the middle of one of our songs and had to scramble to find the beat. I felt depressed about it after the set, but with some effort got over it. I'm sure it won't be the last time that happens. After the show the we took some "band" pictures in the photo booth, Chris and Billy and I wedged into the two-seater, Beau diving across our laps at the moment of exposure, a dark blur across our faces.

Emma picked up another job: She's ghostwriting a book for a woman in Detroit, and she flew out there on the 13th on the tail of another dramatic snow storm that began on Tuesday. What may interest you, dear reader, is that she left Pearl with us as a boarder of sorts, all of us crossing our fingers that she and Kitty could get along. This was not without precedent -- we'd had Pearl over for a "play date" a few months before to test the waters. That had gone... reasonably well: Kitty was stand-offish and hissy, taking a deep, territory-asserting drink from the bowl of water we'd set aside for Pearl. And she is not a water-drinking cat. But there was no physical violence, and Pearl, for her part, seemed to be entirely oblivious. And Emma brought Pearl over again a few weeks ago for a Bad Movie Night screening, during which Kitty ignored her entirely in favor of copping a nap in the bedroom. So we figured we were primed for a multi-day, cross-species sleepover. Emma dropped off Pearl the morning of her flight, along with the requisite kibble, cartoon bone-shaped dog treats, and a miniature plush cow that'd absorbed more than its carrying capacity of hair and drool. Kitty was horrified. She never let Pearl out of her sight, would hiss when Pearl approached, and over the course of the four days that Pearl stayed with us, delivered several undeserved whops to Pearl's nose. Pearl tolerated this hostility with stoicism if not aplomb, although she demonstrated a marked reluctance to re-enter the apartment after going on walks. The one time Kitty seemed to be able to tolerate Pearl's presence was, oddly enough, at bedtime, when the two of them heaved their combined bulk into the narrow crevasse between our sleeping bodies. "Welcome to the Animal Bed," I told Nina.

Walking Pearl turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. I tried to craft novel circuits through the snow-lined corridors of the blocks near our apartment: We went to Prospect Park, walked around the Old Stone House, did figure-eights from 4th and 5th to 2nd and 7th. The lingering piles of snow and ice, which held the historical pisses of multiple dogs in a kind of suspension (very evident during daylight hours but effectively invisible under the yellow streetlights after dark) seemed to be an irresistible buffet of smells for Pearl; a lot of the time I was more or less dragging her along, trying to keep her from getting crystallized urine all over her muzzle. I felt a little like Perkus Tooth in Chronic City.

We thought we'd been booked for a Saturday slot at Cake Shop, but there was some kind of mix-up with the schedule, and we ended up getting bumped. Ken South Rock got wind of this (we whined about it to them) and their manager Aron got in touch to let us know we could play at the release party for their CD (Ningen) at a place called Lone Wolf in Bushwick. And, incredibly, she told us all we had to bring were our guitars. Hard to do better than that. And the place was certainly comfy enough and very chic -- tin ceiling, nice big stage with wallpaper on the back wall, faux-crumbling fixtures. Our set went well, I thought, although the monitors didn't give us a lot of help; Chris said he had to watch my hands to follow the beat. The next band after us was called "Love Handle" (not a great name; they seemed amenable to Beau's suggestion that they re-christen themselves as the marginally better "Abraham Lincoln"), and they played a sort of twangy rock and roll. It was good. I stomped my foot to it. Chris and I remarked on the fact that we only pay attention to the instrument we play in our band when we watch other bands play. "Oh, they've got a girl playing bass," said Chris about Love Handle. "That's kind of a cheap move."

Next up was a band called Imaginary Friends, a bunch of guys who dressed like an 80's hardcore band (knit caps, v-neck shirts, beards) but who had a very controlled, droning sound, especially on the vocals -- a lot like Joy Division, several people commented. Someone in charge was actually manning the lighting controls, and the band was lit up in dramatic red light and shadow, which complemented the lead singer's impassive demeanor. I think we'd like to play with them again if they'll have us.

Ken South Rock's valedictory set was suitably chaotic and exuberant, Adam's drumming leaving me with all sorts of resolutions on how I might improve my own playing, and they were mobbed with admirers upon finishing. Billy and I talked to Aron briefly about KSR's next steps: They're embarking on a spring tour of Japan in a few weeks and then coming back to the U.S. for the summer. She promised we get first dibs on them when they return. "You were here from the beginning!" she said. Oh right, I thought: Those guys have only been playing together for three months.

I lugged the drum stuff back to the Slope and ran into Nina on the corner taking Pearl on a late walk. Pearl was apparently glad to see me -- she reared up to put both front paws on my chest -- but wanted to keep Nina in sight as well, and in tilting her head back to do so, she toppled over onto her back in the dirty snow. We were worried for a moment that she'd hurt herself, but she started rolling from side to side, flappity dog lips falling back from her teeth, her eyes tracking our faces in expectation of tummy-rubs.

The following week we'd booked a Tuesday show with the bands Felix & Volcano and Octo/Octa at a place right next door to where we'd played KSR's party, a coffee house / gallery type deal called Goodbye Blue Monday. Billy got notified the day of that the other two bands were dropping out on account of illness (the unafflicted band depending on the other for a van ride), and given that the venue had expressed ambivalence about us making the gig, we weren't sure whether we should brave the steady drizzle to play. I was feeling pretty crappy myself -- light-headed, fatigued -- but assured Bill that I'd "pull one out" and voted that we do the show in an impromptu band quorum. I felt worse during the day, and was having misgivings by the time I met up with Chris at his girlfriend Lauren's lavishly appointed apartment in Bushwick. She and her roommates revived me with a cup of peppermint tea and some cookies, though, and Chris and I put his bass and the collected drum hardware into the back of a livery cab and headed off to the club. Goodbye Blue Monday really is like a cafe in Portland or something: There's, you know, flair all over the walls: Dioramas, doll parts, road signs. It's like the hoarder younger sister of Glasslands.

We showed up a few minutes late, but the open mic that preceded the bill we were on was still going on. Some of the performers were actually kind of good, but a lot of them were, you know, standard open mic types: Girls singing about themselves in high, operatic voices, dudes strumming guitars noisily with looks of consternation on their faces. The emcee was a big guy in overalls who called himself "Joe Crow," and who looked like a cross between Steve Earle and Mick Foley.

By the time we were cleared to go on, the place was still pretty packed with people who'd come for the open mic and were finishing their drinks. We signaled our readiness, and Billy got up to the mic. He apologized for the absence of the other acts, and then he said, "That's okay, though. We don't really sound very much like them. We sound like this," launching seamlessly into a fast rendition of the rousing song that is our opener, "Into The Distance." I liked that a lot. And despite my lingering feelings of sickness, I was able to keep things together on the drums. We sounded great! But the open mic audience didn't agree -- I couldn't see from where I was, but Bill told me later that people were racing to put their coats on. And by the second song I could tell that the space was empty besides the staff and the small table of wives and girlfriends. That's okay, though. That's even kind of cool.

The next morning I felt like shit. I managed to drag myself into work, but by the end of the day my nose was running like a faucet and I was shaking with chills. I had to bow out of a promised game of Settlers of Catan at Eve's house, sending Tom in my stead. When Nina got home with a bottle of NyQuil I'd been too stupid to get for myself, she found me shivering on the couch in front of a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon on Spike TV, wrapped up in a blanket I'd fished out from under the bed. She took my temperature (102!) and put me to bed. I didn't feel any better the next morning and stayed home from work, but we also had a show -- a "big" one: We actually promoted it a little -- booked that night at Trash Bar, and I had to let Billy know that I wasn't going to make it. I felt rotten about it, and could've kicked myself for pushing us to play the show on Tuesday, but I was still running a high fever by the evening was pretty sure I'd only embarrass us on stage. Luckily Billy and Beau were able to perform a quickly-rehearsed set for one of Beau's other bands, a trio (with Doug from MiniBoone on drums) called Robot Princess.

As far as I can perceive it, I don't often get sick. Or maybe I'm just a little sick -- sniffles, phlegm-spitting -- a lot of the time. But every so often I get a flu or something that kind of stops me cold, makes me feel weak and helpless; a real memento morii type deal. And this was one of those. I guzzled over-the-counter remedies and took it about as easy as I know how, but I was still pretty much out of commission mentally and physically for the better part of a week. I'd like to think there's some secret benefit to getting a dose of mortality like this, like maybe it helps you savor the quotidian pleasures more readily, but I don't think there is. At the very least, I'm hoping that'll do me for the rest of the year, because I got some shit to do.

And Best Of

You've all been waiting for it. I know. I know.

Best book I read: Blood's a Rover
Best album: Titus Andronicus, The Monitor. No contest.
Best show I went to: Titus Andronicus, at Bowery Ballroom, March 6th
Best new reason for donating to WFMU: Tom Scharpling, drunk.
Best scone: Cranberry, Not Just Rugelach.
Best movie I saw in the theater: Inception? I don't know, I didn't see a lot of 'em
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Animal House
Best worst movie: Tie: Revenge of the Stolen Stars / The Star Wars Holiday Special
Best brunch: Colombian breakfast, Bogota
Best pie: Winter fruit, again
Best recipe: Green pozole with [tofu]

We played two more shows around Christmas, one at Cake Shop, the other at Bruar Falls. Andy Bodor, the manager of Cake Shop, booked us for the 14th, the bitterly cold day after Amy Klein from Titus had, incidentally, played that stage with her side band, the confusingly-named Hilly Eye. I'd brought the pink vinyl shoulder bag, still laden with pedals and cymbals, to work. I considered walking it down to Cake Shop from 19th St., but as soon as I left the office and felt the freezing metal of our heavy ride cutting into my finger joints, I was like "fuck it." As I was trying to hail a cab, a well-dressed young woman wearing a fur collar and a lot of make-up approached me.

"Excuse me," she said. "Could you spare a few dollars?"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's for a hostel," she said. "Do you know what a hostel is?"

"Yes," I said, bristling. "I know what a hostel is."

The exchange left me annoyed and preoccupied at Cake Shop as I waited for the other guys to show up, but the feeling evaporated after I spent one of my drink tickets. The show ended up being well-attended! Sarah and Nina and Chris' girlfriend Lauren showed up, as well as Eve and Josh and Emma and Tom, which was very nice. In addition to playing a brief solo show before us, Beau'd secured an opening act for us, a two-man group called Ken South Rock, made up of a muppet-like American drummer and a Japanese guitar player who looked a bit like a Jamie Hewlett drawing. They went on before him, and they set an unexpectedly high bar for us: The guitar player, Ken, turned out to be a consummate showman, despite the language barrier, and was able to extract a phenomenally rich tone from his guitar, which was this gorgeous vintage Epiphone EJ-200 (I think). Adam, the drummer, was a real Keith Moon type, and he played these jaw-droppingly fast and intricate fills. Although they were unmistakably playing rock songs, the complement of their individual sounds created a deep and almost meditative resonance. I thought they were great, although I worried that I wouldn't be able to follow Adam's drumming.

Somehow I made it, though. Our set came off without a hitch after Beau played (during which he donned his much-talked-about Christmas light suit, which did not disappoint). Ken and Adam were exceedingly gracious and congratulatory, which was very sweet, considering how comparatively advanced they were. Unfortunately, in the rush to consolidate our equipment and pack up the van, which Billy and Sarah had driven down, I got confused about which cymbal stands were ours and which we'd borrowed from the club, and we ended up leaving one of them behind. I felt crappy about it, but luckily Chris and Lauren were able to swing by the next weekend and pick it up from one of the bartenders, who was surprisingly willing to let them rifle through the store of equipment.

At some point it was Christmas. Nina fled to Clarks Summit, and I visited my parents' house to deliver my meager offerings: I got my mom this year's ubiquitous parent gift, Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography; I got my dad a signed copy of American Tabloid, by that shaved ape James Ellroy. Wondering if he'll be horrified. Christmas evening, I'd casually organized but extensively prepared for a screening of Bad Santa with Billy and Chris and Winnie and Evan and had planned extensive food options; Billy and Chris canceled, independently, leaving me at loose ends, but Winnie and Evan came over and we managed to homph down most of the coffee gingerbread and chocolate apricot cookies I had made. We didn't watch the movie, but we played a fair amount of Red Dead Redemption, which Evan had brought over and just left, and then we spent an embarrassing number of hours trying to unlock hidden characters in Super Street Fighter IV by beating that asshole Seth. There was a lot of swearing.

The next day, the snow began. I'd asked Winnie to come by to help me work on a present for Nina, a painted pair of All-Stars. The snow was blowing horizontally by the time she left Bensonhurst, she informed me in an incredulous phone call from the outdoor subway platform she was waiting on. I hustled out to Joe's (née Prego's) for a half-mushroom pizza to make it worth her while. There was so much snow blowing around that you couldn't see for more than half a block; the streetlights made everything beyond that into a brownish-orange blur. It felt like a gusty day at the beach, the wind whipping stinging little ice crystals against my face like sand. Winnie arrived intact, and we lay down some newspaper. The snow accumulated on the windowsills while I sketched out a little design for the shoes and watched her as she expertly mixed and diluted colors of acrylic paint. We watched The Return of the King one and a half times on SyFy before finishing our work.

The storm had gotten even worse, so Winnie crashed on the fold-out sofa. As has since been more than adequately reported, the city was in a bit of a pickle with the snow the next day. I stubbornly resolved to go to work that day, but judging by the relative emptiness of the R train, when it finally came, I was in the minority. I feel bad about saying so, since it costs millions of dollars and people die, but I secretly find these kinds of weather events thrilling in the transformative effect they have on the landscape of the city. 5th Avenue in Park Slope was a white desert: There were cars spun out and simply abandoned in the middle of the street. Teams of dudes with shovels roamed up and down the avenue offering their services to those what needed help digging out or pushing their cars. At Union St., the stairs were a white slide, and drifts of snow had wended their way down the stairwell and into the station, making it look more cave-like than usual. I was the only engineer in the office all day.

Despite the breakdown of civilization of we played a show at Bruar Falls -- the sister club to Cake Shop in the Bodor entertainment empire, I learned -- on Tuesday. The Falls have speakers but no amps, so we needed to drive the van down from St. Mary's again. I'd taken the liberty of going to Guitar Center after our last show and stocking up on felts and jackets and other small bits of drum hardware, as well as investing in a cymbal case, which proved to be a life-saver for my fingers in the cold; additionally, Chris labeled all of our equipment to prevent a repeat of the confusion over whose hardware was whose. I hopped the subway up to Harlem on Tuesday to help Billy and Chris dig out and load the van, but they were already done by the time I got there, so all I had to do was ride down with them. The St. Mary's van is funny: It handles well enough for its age but complains audibly, and the interior fills with exhaust so you have to keep the windows as open as you can bear. As such, the ride to Williamsburg was freezing and not a little stomach churning as we attempted to navigate to Grand St. via side streets that were only intermittently plowed. Chris commented repeatedly that the fumes were making his extremities go numb, although I think it was probably the cold. For my part, I took of my boots and wrapped my scarf around my feet, which were like ice; ice feet. It was a very band kind of van ride.

When we got to the place, Chris hopped out and lugged some stuff into the club. I attempted to direct Bill into a parallel park up against a piled-up all of snow, but Chris had to re-do it when he returned. Our set went off well, except that Chris and I had trouble hearing the rest of the band, and some kind of firmware change to Billy's pedal board had led him to tune his "A" to 448hz, leaving him subtly and confusingly out of tune, which he blamed, at the time, on Beau. Ken and Adam headlined this time, as they should have, and played a characteristically vigorous and virtuosic set, although theirs was not without incident, either: Ken managed to unplug his amp during one of his solos. (The sound guy staged a daring rescue.) And Adam sliced his hand open on the lip of the snare and spattered all of the drums (including our cymbals, which they'd borrowed, with gore -- a mark of distinction, as far as I'm concerned.

And, unfortunately, there was yet another equipment SNAFU: While we were loading up the van after the show, somebody put the cymbal case into the van without all of the cymbals in it. I noticed this and brought the bag back into the Falls to collect the other cymbals but got distracted and left the bag in the club. In a livery cab on the way home, I had a twinge of memory and called Bill, who searched the van while it was stopped at a gas station and confirmed my fears. At this point I'd gotten all the way back home, and so, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and a black cloud hovering over my head, I hopped into a Carecibo and had the guy take me back to Williamsburg, hoping beyond hope that the Falls was still open. By some miracle of providence it was, and, although there were only a few stragglers left at the bar, one of them turned out to be Adam, who'd noticed my mistake and had the bartender set our cymbals aside in a locked room. That guy is a saint, and Ken South Rock is the nicest band in the world.

Nina had since returned, and with her, the temperature had taken an up-turn. She was concerned that she'd missed the peak of sledding and snowcraft, so on Wednesday we made an early expedition before Bad Movie Night (Creepozoids) out to Prospect Park to see what adventures could still be had. Quite a few, it turned out: We filched some glossy-looking cardboard boxes from the recycling stash in the basement and fashioned them into makeshift sleds that worked reasonably well in the still-snow-blanketed northern part of Long Meadow. We started on some of the gentler hills and then, emboldened, decided to join some Packer-type girls who were riding a plastic three-seater sled down the steep slopes on the northeastern border of the meadow. Nina's box, having a slicker coating to it, proved to be the more exhilarating ride, and we took turns going alarmingly fast (and often head over heels) with it down the hill.

After it finally disintegrated, we attempted to build a snowman, although the snow was so sticky that we couldn't shape it that well. Here are the results:

The First Voyage of The Bel Fucking Argosy

Bel Argosy played our first show on Saturday the 11th at a not-quite venue (read: some guy's apartment) in Bushwick called Cheap Storage. We'd booked a performance at the venerable Cake Shop for the following week, but Billy and Beau are friends with a guy named Doug in a band called MiniBoone, and he got us on the bill, which included an assortment of other guitar-oriented Brooklyn indie rock bands. We practiced like crazy, set up a bunch of promotional web sites, and made some tentative invites. I had to gently dissuade my mom from making the trip out to Wyckoff Ave.: "There's no working toilet," Beau warned us. "So the landlord's been cutting them a break on the rent and they've been going to the bathroom in a bucket up on the roof."

My perennial friends at Lincoln Pl. were throwing a holiday party the same night, so in my typical, neurotic way, I had to not only show up, if only for an hour, but also bake a pie. I managed to do it, too -- another of the Winter Fruits variety, slightly burnt -- and walked it over to their apartment from mine balanced on top of the snare drum we were asked to bring to the show, carrying the hi-hat and kick pedal in a tiny pink vinyl bag in my other hand. I made it without any upsets, and spent a glorious hour hand-decorating Christmas cookies (baked by Colleen into a million different shapes: Snowman, Christmas tree, the outlines of the states of New York and New Jersey) with flavored, food coloring-colored icing and a satisfyingly varied menagerie of nonpareils: Sprinkles, little pine trees, little snowflakes, shiny little edible beads. Pro tip: It takes very little blue food coloring to make white icing sufficiently blueish; it takes a bleeding gallon of red to make it red enough.

I left, somewhat reluctantly, and hopped the R to the N to the L to the Jefferson St. stop in Bushwick, lugging the drum equipment behind some much younger and hipper types who I suspected might also be performing at the same place we were. The guy's house was pretty much right outside the station, and it was clear why he called it Cheap Storage -- that text was emblazoned on the big building's northern tower. The screen on my trusty LG clamshell phone finally bit the dust a few weeks ago -- the dialer and keypad still work, but the video card was just displaying a blank white image. So I'd taken to writing down phone numbers I didn't know by heart on a little index card and punching them in to make calls as necessary. I tried to reach our contact at the venue, but got no answer. Luckily, the young turks I'd been following managed to get the front door open and held it open. They introduced themselves as "douchebags," but I think they were listed as "Hep Cats" on the bill. Cheap Storage was actually a pretty cozy place. It definitely looked like the storage facility it used to be: Concrete floors, big plaster columns throughout, exposed fiberglass insulation. There was a big industrial looking furnace right in the middle of the floor that kept things nice and warm, and there actually was a working bathroom. One corner of the big open living room was set aside for the bands. Each roommate in the loft had a little cubicle-like room; I asked a big Australian-sounding guy if I could deposit our stuff outside his. "As long as you're not depriving me of access to food or sex, you can do whatever you want," he said.

Chris and Beau showed up after a short time, although not so short a time that I was spared the experience of being the weird guy who knows nobody and whom nobody knows. "Are you okay?" asked the girl from Hep Cats. ("I'm fine," I explained. "I'm just an orphan.") Beau, Chris, and I deposited the equipment and then went to stuff our faces a few blocks away at Tortilleria Mexicano Los Hermanos, which was very good.

The first guy to go on was called Yoni Gordon, and he seemed to be sort of an alt-country indie rock troubadour. He had a sad, yelping voice not entirely unlike Jonathan Richman's. He was accompanied by a drummer who looked like The Edge with a full beard and who had a big, beautiful, expensive-looking orange sunburst drum kit that he played very sparingly. Yoni was a pretty good guitar player and had a good sound, but he seemed a little out of place -- people weren't really moving around, and the Hep Cats were bordering on heckling him. He had this little clip-on lamp that he'd affixed to his mic stand and that he was using for dramatic effect, but one of the 'Cats kept turning it on and off while he was singing, to Yoni's obvious irritation. And as he was tuning up between songs, one of them called out to him, "Tell a funny joke," which sounded to me like a bit of a provocation. There was a moment of tension (I thought), but Yoni defused the situation: "I'll do you one better, friend," he said. "I'll take you on an adventure of the mind." And then he gave weird but earnest introduction to the next song, which had something to do with roadhouses and The One That Got Away.

Once they were finished, there was a scramble to get our drums set up. It was briefly proposed that we ask Yoni Gordon's drummer if we could use his fancy and largely untouched kit, but he packed it up before we could muster the courage. Instead, Taylor, the drummer for MiniBoone, brought over some of his equipment and helped me and Chris set it up. He was very nice and patient, even donating extra cymbal felts to the cause (I cannot abide a flapping crash.) The residents of Cheap Storage had suspended a piece of plywood with chains from the ceiling near the area where we were playing, and before we went on they'd put a digital projector on it. When we started, somebody put a movie in and it (or at least the DVD menu) played on the wall adjacent to us. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that it was Le Samouraï. Which is pretty cool.

Our set was very short. We only played the six songs we were sure about, which amounted to around fifteen minutes. I don't know what it's like for other drummers, but for me, playing the drums is an absorbingly passive exercise. I see the job as being kind of like an insect's nervous system -- inhibitory as opposed to excitatory. So I was paying attention, but sort of zoned out as well, staring at an enormous Alain Delon. And I was so scared! But I managed to avoid pulling what Billy and Chris refer to as "a Continental," in reference to my frightened-rabbit tempo at the Headliners show I wrote about a while ago.

"Who are you?" hollered the girl from Hep Cats, towards the end of our set. "We're Bel Argosy," said Billy.

The band after us was called Boom Chick; they were a White Stripes-y collaboration between Frank Hoier, who plays guitar, and his girlfriend Moselle, who plays drums. They played a very long set, but they were actually pretty great. We were all dancing and stomping along to their songs. As Boom Chick played a slow song, I danced with Patrice. Billy danced with Sarah. He tried to dip her, at an opportune moment, but she demurred. "I'll do it," I said. He dipped me and poured Miller High Life into my mouth -- and nose and ear as I tried to turn my face away.

Their set finally ended and MiniBoone started to set up. Le Samouraï rolled its closing credits, and the projection went dark. ...And so did the lights in loft. MiniBoone played a raucous, noisy, dark, sweaty set that belied their math rock-y underpinnings. The crowd pressed in around the band, dancing and clapping.

After MiniBoone finished, we all kind of resolved to head out. I was exhausted from dancing, and pretty drunk, to the extent that I wondered a few times whether I would have to upchuck. We gathered up our stuff. I agreed, perhaps unwisely, to take home an additional cymbal, our twelve-pound heavy ride, tucking it under my arm as Beau and Patrice and some other hanger-on Amherst alumni lurched our way to the subway, and then to 14th St., and then back to Brooklyn, singly. When I finally got above ground at 4th Ave., it was deeply cold and a light rain was falling. I had stop several times to adjust my grip on the bag of hardware and the cymbals, which were digging painfully into the joint-creases of my fingers. A very drunk woman appeared in the entryway of the building as I was struggling to open the door to the lobby without knocking over the ride. "Do you live here?" she asked. "Okay, I'll let you in." In the elevator, as I leaned against the wall, barely conscious, she said, "Did you take a cab home? I took a cab. Too tired to take the train."

War

I'll get to that in a second.

I was able make it through Thanksgiving with my bum tooth, although eating was an ordeal at times. My sister came down from college and we went to go see the penultimate Harry Potter movie, an experience that cemented my conviction that seeing movies in movie theaters is for shit: It costs a million dollars, and we sat through a good twenty minutes of previews before they started showing us the wrong fucking movie. Despite the ensuing boos and mutterings, it took a while for the projectionist to catch on. "Is anyone up there sober?!" hollered a shrill, wannabe voice-of-the-people, audibly virginal and entitled. Of course they're sober, I thought. They just don't care. And then we had to sit through another twenty minutes of previews, before the right movie started. And the right movie turned out to be kind of a drag. Some kids have to hit a locket with a magical sword, and then there's some kind of important cape and a magic wand, and a CGI foreskin dies on a beach.

White people problems.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' friend George's beautiful house on the west side. I made this season's inaugural Winter Fruits Pie. That thing is always a crowd-pleaser, and it's so easy to sling together. I used real cranberries this time, which I think was a marked improvement over Craisins. My dad made his signature pumpkin and berry pies, going the distance by weaving a lattice crust. I've got about zero interest in tracing my family's "roots," but I'll infer that "my people" like to bake.

And then it was time to get my tooth pulled. We woke up early on Monday and trained it up to 10th St. On my way into the office, passing the front desk of Stewart House, I had a flash of memory: going up to visit Bill, watch Ed and His Dead Mother, smoke a clandestine cigarette out his bedroom window; the since-retired doorman, Robbie (?), calling out to me, "Hey, Nine-Inch, how you doing?" -- a reference to my then-favorite t-shirt. I thought about ducking the appointment but didn't.

We checked in, parted ways. The staff led me off to the room with chair, and Dr. Carness came in and started making the preparations to put me under. I made an awkward comment about their using drug that killed Michael Jackson, but it didn't matter. "In about five seconds, you're going to start feeling a little drunk," Dr. Carness said, after inserting the IV into the back of my hand. I did start to feel a little drunk. I remember looking up at the light fixture, which was a pretty conventional, high school-cafeteria rectangular dealie with a pattern of vertical lines on it. The lines started to move like the texture of an asphalt road observed from the window of a car in motion. A pleasant feeling, like starting out in the early morning on a road trip with friends, stole over me. "Here we go," I thought, and promptly fell asleep. And then I woke up a little while later, still feeling very pleasant. Maybe ten years ago I'd had some minor surgery done that required a general anesthetic, and waking up from that was no fun -- I was cold, had trouble breathing. This wasn't anything like that. I felt warm and fuzzy and good -- so good that I wanted to tell everyone. I took out my phone and tried to send Nina a text message but couldn't muster the cognitive stamina to make it work; put it back; took it out again; put it back again. I took it out a third time and sent exuberant, barely coherent text messages to Bill and Katie. When Nina was eventually allowed to come back to see me, I made a show of checking to see if the anesthesia did, in fact, cause priapism as a side-effect. It took me a while to find my sea legs, but once I did I paid the bill (personally thanking the reception staff for showing me "such a great time") and we hobbled off to find a cab. My recollection is fuzzy, but I'm told I gave a running a commentary all the way home on what a beautiful day it was, ignoring our cabbie's shitty, aggressive driving and the fact that almost took us to the wrong address.

They'd given me tooth in a little manila envelope, and I took it out once we got home. The picture above shows it considerably cleaned-up. It was a nasty thing, all covered in scabs, two of the roots twined together. My mouth wasn't a pretty sight, either, but I tried not to think about it or look at the gross stuff soaking through the gauze pads I was biting on. Nina made me some soup, and we watched the first movie in the Red Riding trilogy, but I was still too high to make head or tail of it. After that we went up to the Neergaard on 7th Ave. to pick up my antibiotics and vicodin. I sat in a little chair off to the side of the pharmacist's counter and drunkenly examined the fine print on the sides of the boxes for enema bags and bedpans, while Nina dutifully asked the pharmacist's assistant whether it'd be safe to break up the pills so I could swallow them more easily.

"How old is he?" asked the guy.

"Twenty nine," she said.

The pharmacist's assistant rolled his eyes. It turned out we weren't allowed to break the amoxicillin, but, home again, I was able to get it down with some concentration and a few cups of water. Then we watched Teeth, which I thought was apropos. It had a promising beginning, but turned out to be sort of disappointingly flip, squandering a pretty, uh, juicy premise without really exploring the attendant themes as deeply as they deserve.

Okay, enough about that.

Bel Argosy's plan for world domination takes several steps forward: We've been joined by a friend of Bill's, a guy named Beau who's going to help out on some lead guitar parts. Billy's also booked our first two shows, one at a loft party in Bushwick with the band MiniBoone headlining, the other a low-key Tuesday night show at the venerable Cake Shop! We're continuing our twice-a-week rehearsal regimen, but we've relegated Ultra Sound to a position of last resort: it's expensive; the amps suck and the sound is often disappointingly muddy; and the process of settling our account at the end, in that sixth floor purgatory with the other bands -- paunchy, out-of-state failures with too-long hair and way-receded hairlines, squabbling over who owes who that extra five bucks -- is starting to feel like some awful memento mori. There but for the grace of God go... well, whatever. We will go there. Just not to Ultra Sound, if we can help it. (They do have okay drum kits, though.)

So I started looking for alternate accommodations, and ultimately found a place over on the lower east side, a two studio setup on 2nd Ave. called 6/8 Studios that's essentially in the basement of an Indian restaurant. It's run by a slightly eccentric woman who calls herself "Mrs. Barnes," and who looks eerily familiar, at least to me and Billy. She's weirdly security-conscious: You're not allowed to show up more than five minutes before your scheduled time, she has to have met you or someone in your band before, cameras everywhere, etc. But her equipment is in great shape, the two subterranean studios are clean and cozy, with warm lighting and non-depressing wood paneling -- they make me imagine Nirvana recording Nevermind -- and she's very knowledgeable and helpful. And it's probably the best deal I've come across, money-wise.

She came by to talk to us as we were packing up after the first time we played there. "How would you describe your music?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Billy said. "Rock and roll? Indie rock? What would you call it?"

She thought for a second. "Young... guy... music," she said. "You know, I've heard this kind of music over and over and over again. There are guys who come into my studios, grown men, with children. They come in here, they play their music for an hour, and then they say 'Okay, enough.'" We weren't sure what to make of that, but we thought it was pretty funny.

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.