It takes so long to write in my Internet diary! Did I really used to write three of these a week? I will try to be briefer.
Here is what I did at Northside this year: I met Beau on Friday to see Clouder at The Charleston. Beau's friends with Max, the bass player, who is also a member of a band called Quiet Loudly, which has Sal -- with whom I became friends during the filming of Vanderpuss -- playing drums. Clouder's not my 100% cup of tea musically, what with their being, like, a psychedelic garage quintent, but I'd seen them play a show at Death By Audio earlier this year, and they'd brought the house down. There was bottle-throwing, stage diving, gang vocals, and they weren't even the headliners. It made an impression on me. I hadn't been to the Charleston since I saw, uh, Baby Erection there last year. Bel Argosy had been meaning to reach out, but then someone told us not to bother booking a show there since the owners were gonna renovate and re-open it as a gay bar. I don't think that happened, although I'm not totally sure I could tell the difference? That basement performance area is still hell of scuzzy. I got dripped on by a leak in the ceiling that had accumulated a little white mineral stalactite like some particularly neglected bit of subway infrastructure. Clouder were great, though, their spooky lead singer Eric in top form, wailing and vamping like Robert Smith with better hair. I sang along to Telepathic Lines, my favorite song off their new record, but the room wasn't, you know, packed, so I kept it tentative. In particular I wanted to not be like this gross dude at the front who kept making a nuisance of himself. He was an Uncle Fester-looking guy wearing surgical scrubs and doing some complicated multimedia shit with a smartphone the whole time, leaning in and taking videos and close-up pictures of the band. Chris and his friend Clint showed up and we all bailed to go drink beers at The Bedford on North 11th St., a place I'd only ever gone inside for to piss. It's got a nice little back yard, but the tables were packed with smirking yuppies wearing laminated Northside Festival lanyards, so we sat on the ground in a corner by some garbage. Chris left with Clint on the promise of a birthday party with 22-year-old girls in attendance; Nina showed up and she and Beau and I walked down Bedford Ave. eating ice cream.
Oh, so I've already hit one of my marks for the summer: Last weekend, Nina and Tom and I went down to Coney Island to take in a sideshow and some rides. That wasn't the line item -- it's more specific than that. First, the freaks: They rotate the cast out, so while there was a familiar face or two (notably Serpentina, doing exactly the same shit as the last time we saw her), I didn't see Heather Holliday or The Black Scorpion. Ray Valenz, who talks and juggles, did a very convincing oh-no-I'm-juggling-too-many-knives routine even as he took 11 (!) bites out of an apple. A nice lady named Insectavora did some pretty bad-ass fire-breathing but no voring of insecta. Then, rides. Context: When Nina and I went down to Brighton Beach late last summer, I was too squeamish (and full of Uzbek food) to enter The Ghost Hole, but I'd resolved that I would conquer it next time. Which was now! I've described for you the, uh, display they have out in front of the Hole. That was still there, and some poor carny'd gotten stuck with the job of catching the effluvial run-off from the display in a bucket. The diarrhea box is not, as it turns out, a fully "closed system."
But yeah, I plumbed the depths of The Ghost Hole. That Wikipedia page (as of this writing) is more or less accurate on the experience of the ride itself. Your little cart wobbles along through the darkness, occasionally swiveling to one side or the other, and you are presented with a series of somewhat animated dioramas. Strangely, there's not a lot of supernatural content -- the stuff you see is largely concerned with punishments of the flesh. There's a mannequin in an electric chair; a mannequin throwing up endlessly into a barrel; a mannequin wrapped in blood-spattered plastic sheeting and hung upside-down. Is the Ghost Hole a moral fable for the American Panopticon? Analyze it, Klosterman. Unfortunately, the carts only seat two, so Tom had to wait for our cart to get far enough ahead so that he could board, and then he had to go solo. There's a section of the ride where the cart emerges briefly onto a balcony overlooking the ticker-holders line, and I wonder if he could see me cringingly gripping Nina's upper arm -- the Hole is not without its shocks.
And I did love it, from its this-way-to-the-egress hokiness to the bored, sardonic mien of the carnies running it, so much so that I dragged Tom and Nina into Dino's Wonder Wheel so that we could ride Coney Island's other haunted house ride, the Spook-a-Rama. Tom demurred this time, but Nina, trouper that she is, got into the tea cup with me and off we went again into the darkness. The Spook-a-Rama is a step up from the Ghost Hole in almost every way: It's more thematically consistent and more focused on, you know, spooks and the spooky, and it's more polished, with little bits of flair like lenticular prints that have old-timey portraits from one angle that turn ghost-y as you pass by. True, you could actually smell the latex that the floppy monster masks were made of, but there was also more shit in there that actually moved around. Or lunged at you, even -- several components of the ride involved gusts of air to the face or stuff grazing the top of your head. And Nina felt sure that the one of the scares at the beginning of the ride was actually just a dude in the dark bellowing in our faces.
After that we dicked around with some of the shitty arcade machines around the entrance to the Wonder Wheel itself. Tom was hell-bent on us getting pictures taken in this little photo booth machine that lets you experiment with different virtual hair-styles (read: floating, superimposed hair GIFs), but the machine wouldn't take our money, and so we conspired with a gang of kids to cheat at the arm-wrestling machine. Later, we tried to make it to Totonno's Pizza for dinner, but they were closing right when we showed up, so sure enough we wound up on Brighton 4th at Elza. In a bit of weird coincedence, our old Pacific Standard trivia-mates Mark and Lisa entered the restaurant. I wish I could say that we branched out more on the menu, but we stuck with some known-to-be-delicious fare like plov and manti and eggplant hye. Tom ordered stuffed cabbage. We got some seaweed salad to go. It was all so very good.
On Tuesday I went out to Bushwick to see The So So Glos play a free show at Shea Stadium, which might be the city's last punk venue. (Which classification I'm bestowing on it in part because of its lack of A/C and the grossness of the bathrooms.) I'd been wanting to see them play since becoming dimly aware of them as, you know, genre-buddies with Titus Andronicus; and then really intensely wanting it after seeing the video for My Block. The band that was on when I got there was called Darlings and despite their name -- seriously, is there, like, a really short list of un-Googleable names that mopey young bands have to choose from? -- they were great. Their lead singer has a snotty, Julian Casablancas affect to him, and the band plays punchy garage rock, catchy lo-fi hooks over a hard, urgent beat. "Stick around for The So So Glos," their frontman said, pronouncing it SOH-suh-glos. (I'd been wondering how to say it.) The 'Glos were just... phenomenal, and so was the crowd. The band sounds exactly like something I'd given up looking for years ago: Tightly orchestrated, literate punk rock with a sneering, mush-mouthed lead singer. Despite the considerable heat, they were all wearing jeans and long-sleeve shirts. That's Clash-level commitment. The audience reciprocated. Everybody was dancing and pogo-ing around, which made Shea Stadium's creaky wood floor flop up and down like a trampoline.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
What Is The Summer Jam
That is a tough question to answer. In addition to the existing contenders, I add the following:
And there's Girls, which I actually pretty much love, not because it's particularly profound (it's not) nor because its characters are likeable (they're not, although that seems to be the point), but because it's such a forthright presentation of scuzziness. Not to be confused with grittiness -- The Wire this show ain't, not least of all 'cuz there are no black people on it. No, the thing it's good at depicting is a kind of naive, lower-middle-class bohemianism, like the way Martin Amis behaves in The Rachel Papers. I didn't even know I was supposed to do this shit when I was 22: Fuss over obscure, unlistenable rock bands; drink to excess in vile East Williamsburg bars; dress like a birthday-party clown. It's what I aspire to now, mind you, but it may be too late: I'm a dude, thirty years old, and not living off my parents any more (although they did pay for my liberal arts degree).
Tattoos could be a summer jam. Point of fact: My sister just got one, facilitated by yours truly -- a graduation present of sorts, in lieu of luggage or, I don't know, good advice. I think it was a good move on her part, not least of all because of the design she chose: No Chinese character ankle-tat for her, she got the fuckin' golden ratio tattooed on her ribcage. Minus that indulgent spiral; very simple, like a Mondrian waiting to be colored in. The guy at Saved -- right off the Metropolitan Ave. stop -- did a thing where he transferred the printout she gave him onto a sort of tracing paper and then drew over it. The whole process took about 20 minutes, although the pamphlet they gave her suggested that the thing would crust up suddenly a few days down the road. She made me swear over celebratory pints at Union Pool that I'd get one, too. The difficulty is, of course, in the choosing. I won't lie, I've often thought about getting the venerable GNU gnu stenciled onto one of my triceps. I've been a devotee for a decade or more, so I think it passes the morning-after test. My only reservation is that it looks awfully blissed out -- stoned, even. It could attract, you know, the wrong kind of attention.
I will keep you all posted.
Maggie and Cliff got married! I'm writing to you still not fully recovered from the red-eye we took back from San Francisco. They'd arranged to have their wedding in wine country, Paso Robles to be exact, and Maggie'd told us she'd rented a big cottage to house all of us commuting from parts east. On Thursday morning, Tom and Colleen and Nina and I all hopped the same plane to San Francisco, where we met up with old Greg and rented an enormous Jeep Liberty to take us the rest of the way to Paso Robles. On the journey, we taught him about The Motto and argued about whether George R. R. Martin's writer's block on "Book 5" was cynically aligned with the HBO show's debut. As we traveled south and east, stopping at an In & Out Burger for a fully unncessary and totally non-vegetarian dinner, from Redwood City out towards Salinas and beyond, the road became straighter and the scenery got flatter. We found ourselves in garlic country, and stopped at a road-side produce stand for various pungent foodstuffs: Among other items, a half-gallon jar of garlic salsa and several individual scoops of garlic-flavored ice cream (vanilla-and-garlic; chocolate-and-garlic).
It was dark when we finally got to the house in Paso Robles, but people were still celebrating inside. The ranch house that Maggie'd rented turned out to be enormous -- nine bedrooms and a "media room" that slept three -- plus satellite cabins. There was a pool; tennis courts; basket hoops; pens with horses in them for some reason. Maggie showed us to our room, which was right off the kitchen and decorated with a funny "safari" motif. We deposited our bags and homphed barbecue food, whooping as further stragglers and long lost friends arrived.
On Friday morning, Tom and Colleen and KT's man-friend Chris and I drove out to Von's to pick up groceries and cooking things. We also picked up a copy of what I think was a local-ish alt-weekly, the San Luis Obispo New Times, which included an utterly risible live music review, excerpted below:
The castle itself reminded me a bit of Ricoleta Cemetery, in terms of its opulence and architecture. The tour we'd signed up for ("Grand Rooms") took us through the ground floor of the main building on the castle grounds, which included a sitting room, a dining room, a billiards room, a breakfast nook, and a screening room. Each of these was packed with Hearst's acquisitions: Statues, paintings, tapestries, tables, and wood paneling, from an assortment of centuries, countries of origin, and artistic traditions. The tour guide took a weirdly populist-folksy tack on explaining what we saw:
On the way back from the castle, we parked at a rest stop built out with a wooden terrace of sorts from which you could observe a beach's worth of Elephant seals, prone and sunning themselves, and as a pamphlet helpfully informed us, undergoing a scheduled "catastrophic molt," which meant losing, like, all of their skin at once. ("Are these elephant seals sick or dying? No.") They flopped up and down the beach, some snuggled up to each other, others looking to spar, but mostly just lying prone and gray-brown, like hairballs horked up by an outsize cat. Occasionally one would "flip" sand up onto itself with its flippers.
We had to deposit Emma at the wedding venue, a vineyard called Vina Robles, so that she could rehearse some key components of the ceremony, and since we arrived early, we decided to do a wine tasting. I could see why they'd chosen that place to get married -- the building had really high ceilings with tall windows that filled the rooms with hazy afternoon sunlight. It was like a wine church. The "tasting associate" was friendly and talked a good game about what we were drinking -- although my palate is so suggestible that she could've told me pretty much anything. I certainly can't tell the difference between "notes of cherry" and "notes of strawberry." But the wines were tasty enough that we bought a couple of bottles (Jay and Emma did, too), along with a tin of the vineyard's "signature" spicy peanuts. (Which were speedily devoured during a late-night game of Werewolf.) Later in the evening, a few of the already-married gentlemen in our number took Cliff into the garage to drunkenly impart advice on marriage. I crashed their party and tried my best to contribute.
The morning of the wedding, Maggie and Cliff disappeared to perform some secret logistics. We members of the house resolved to suck the premises dry: After a marathon breakfast-cooking orchestrated by Chris (he's worked as a restaurant chef), we swam in the pool for a while drinking Bud Light. Nina rode the Water Taxi. Then she became the Water Taxi and carried me around. We went on a wine-tasting tour in the afternoon. The first place we went was Tobin James Cellars, named, of course, after the killer in the Saw movies. It was a very different scene from Vina Robles: The vineyard's tasting room was a repurposed barn, decked out with bits of ranch kitsch and about a hundred mirrors in the shape of the vineyard logo, a star with a spiral in the center which I could swear I've seen on the awning of a tanning salon. It looked like a maiden aunt's patio. And, because their tastings were free, it was packed with sandaled, fanny-packed people. Their wines were pretty sugary -- or, in California wine parlance, "fruit forward" -- but not undrinkable, with the exception of one, the Petite Sirah, which the menu described as a "dark, inky fruit bomb." It was inky, to be sure -- like a Bic pen. It was also the only one thus far that we spat out. The next vineyard we went to was the Rockin' R. They were obviously a smaller operation, their tasting setup pretty much just a picnic table out front. The woman who pitched us wine there was euphemistic about "the James gang." "They get a lot of... first-time wine buyers," she said. Rockin' R's wines were pretty fruit foward, too, though.
We were still tipsy by the time the trolley came to take us to Vina Robles. Nina and I rode in the unenclosed rear section, which treated us to the warmth of the late afternoon sun but also a frenzy of wind and dust that chapped our lips something fierce as the trolley careened up and down the sloping hills towards the vineyard. The wedding proper was actually outside on the warm flagstones of the vineyard's back patio. Presided over by their friend Jeremy (whose wedding Maggie'd officiated some years prior), the ceremony included a reading from the Massachusetts court ruling on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage (!). Maggie and Cliff's vows were characteristically funny and beyond sweet: There was mutual compromise over adjusting the thermostat, and they'd had plotted out a symbolic breaking-of-the-glass ritual that included sweeping up the shards to appease Cliff's neat-freak tendencies. It made me tear up, it did. Then it was into the vineyard's cavernous dining room for homphing and dancing. Maggie and Cliff had seated me and Nina directly across from them -- I tried to be extra funny, but all I felt like doing was to gawp and smile at them. Maggie's old teaching buddy Corey did something heroic on the dance floor. And then it was time for all of us to dance, which we did, stuffed as we were with purple potatoes and risotto. Those of us wearing ties (I'd borrowed one last-second from Ted) removed them and re-tied them around our foreheads (it's a summer jam). Cliff sang and performed The Humpty Dance.
We woke up stiff and headached on Sunday morning to the sound of the caterers preparing a brunch outside our room. After inhaling the breakfast burritos they provided, we said our goodbyes to everyone (the newly-minted Maraschinos were departing to Fiji!) and piled back into the Jeep Liberty. We drove back out to the coast and made a pit stop in San Simeon to say peace to the elephant seals (they flipped sand and belched) before embarking on our journey to the north via the storied Pacific Coast Highway. Oh, man. That drive is hard to describe. The nearest I can get it is that it's like being on another planet: The sheer red cliffs on one side, the sheer drop-off into the Pacific on the other; the blue sky, the wildflowers growing in a dozen different colors all around the road. And it went on and one, babies, like a dream. We stopped at a rest stop to watch surfers contending with the waves several hundred feet below, and I fed Red Vines to a shy contingent of pygmy squirrels. We drove on and on, eventually stopping for food at Big Sur Coast, a crunchy art gallery and café built into the side of a cliff. They were exhibiting a selection of weird little bronze frog sculptures by a guy who called himself Frogman. The frogs' little black hands struck me as being somehow sexual. I don't know.
The next place we stopped was a marijuana dispensary right off the highway a little bit north of Santa Cruz, where we were hoping to use the bathroom. The dispensary was closed, and the bathroom was indicated by a series of rude signs: "Don't ask where the bathroom is. If you can't read the signs, go back to kindergarten!" The "bathroom" ended up being a port-a-potty, and Colleen balked when she opened the door. "That is the most digusting port-a-potty I've ever seen," she said. We got to San Francisco at twilight, and dropped Greg off in the Mission before stopping for burritos at El Farolito. I made sure to charge all my electronic toys at SFO before getting on the plane, but as soon as we boarded I got so tired that even the fact that Nina and I had non-negotiable front-row seats to the in-flight screening of John Carter couldn't keep me awake. Tom kept himself awake enough to learn something about Tharks, which he told me when we got off the plane in the morning:
Tharks did not start this war, but they will end it!
- Flo Rida - Run
- Superchunk - This Summer
- Nicki Minaj - Starships (I hope not)
And there's Girls, which I actually pretty much love, not because it's particularly profound (it's not) nor because its characters are likeable (they're not, although that seems to be the point), but because it's such a forthright presentation of scuzziness. Not to be confused with grittiness -- The Wire this show ain't, not least of all 'cuz there are no black people on it. No, the thing it's good at depicting is a kind of naive, lower-middle-class bohemianism, like the way Martin Amis behaves in The Rachel Papers. I didn't even know I was supposed to do this shit when I was 22: Fuss over obscure, unlistenable rock bands; drink to excess in vile East Williamsburg bars; dress like a birthday-party clown. It's what I aspire to now, mind you, but it may be too late: I'm a dude, thirty years old, and not living off my parents any more (although they did pay for my liberal arts degree).
Tattoos could be a summer jam. Point of fact: My sister just got one, facilitated by yours truly -- a graduation present of sorts, in lieu of luggage or, I don't know, good advice. I think it was a good move on her part, not least of all because of the design she chose: No Chinese character ankle-tat for her, she got the fuckin' golden ratio tattooed on her ribcage. Minus that indulgent spiral; very simple, like a Mondrian waiting to be colored in. The guy at Saved -- right off the Metropolitan Ave. stop -- did a thing where he transferred the printout she gave him onto a sort of tracing paper and then drew over it. The whole process took about 20 minutes, although the pamphlet they gave her suggested that the thing would crust up suddenly a few days down the road. She made me swear over celebratory pints at Union Pool that I'd get one, too. The difficulty is, of course, in the choosing. I won't lie, I've often thought about getting the venerable GNU gnu stenciled onto one of my triceps. I've been a devotee for a decade or more, so I think it passes the morning-after test. My only reservation is that it looks awfully blissed out -- stoned, even. It could attract, you know, the wrong kind of attention.
I will keep you all posted.
Maggie and Cliff got married! I'm writing to you still not fully recovered from the red-eye we took back from San Francisco. They'd arranged to have their wedding in wine country, Paso Robles to be exact, and Maggie'd told us she'd rented a big cottage to house all of us commuting from parts east. On Thursday morning, Tom and Colleen and Nina and I all hopped the same plane to San Francisco, where we met up with old Greg and rented an enormous Jeep Liberty to take us the rest of the way to Paso Robles. On the journey, we taught him about The Motto and argued about whether George R. R. Martin's writer's block on "Book 5" was cynically aligned with the HBO show's debut. As we traveled south and east, stopping at an In & Out Burger for a fully unncessary and totally non-vegetarian dinner, from Redwood City out towards Salinas and beyond, the road became straighter and the scenery got flatter. We found ourselves in garlic country, and stopped at a road-side produce stand for various pungent foodstuffs: Among other items, a half-gallon jar of garlic salsa and several individual scoops of garlic-flavored ice cream (vanilla-and-garlic; chocolate-and-garlic).
It was dark when we finally got to the house in Paso Robles, but people were still celebrating inside. The ranch house that Maggie'd rented turned out to be enormous -- nine bedrooms and a "media room" that slept three -- plus satellite cabins. There was a pool; tennis courts; basket hoops; pens with horses in them for some reason. Maggie showed us to our room, which was right off the kitchen and decorated with a funny "safari" motif. We deposited our bags and homphed barbecue food, whooping as further stragglers and long lost friends arrived.
On Friday morning, Tom and Colleen and KT's man-friend Chris and I drove out to Von's to pick up groceries and cooking things. We also picked up a copy of what I think was a local-ish alt-weekly, the San Luis Obispo New Times, which included an utterly risible live music review, excerpted below:
I wasn’t there on Aug. 16, 1974, when the Ramones first played CBGBs, but I know what it probably felt like, because I am here, in the Z Club, on Friday, June 1, to see Han Solo’s Baby, American Dirt, and Magazine Dirty.Later, Jay and Emma drove us out to San Simeon to visit the Hearst Castle historic site. The Castle was pretty much the vacation home of William Randolph Hearst, consummate robber baron and yellow journalist, now maintained by the California parks department. Wine country is nuts, babies! Now that we could see the landscape in daylight, the full strangeness of it became clear: We drove over and between huge rolling yellow hills, like grassy sand dunes, broken in spots by a field of grapes or a patch of scrubby green stuff or an abandoned bit of farm equipment. Hearst Castle itself is on top of one of these hills, off a highway out by the coast. It's not immediately visible from the road, and the place where you park your car is not quite the castle, it's the visitor center, where you can buy five-dollar bottles of water and various Hearst tchotchkies (mugs, tiny license plates, top hats), and where you put yourself on a schedule to ride a bus up to the actual castle. The bus ride took about fifteen minutes, the bus chugging up a winding, tree-lined path through the hills while Alex Trebek (!) provided a heavily-expurgated family history of the Hearsts and gave a rationale for the building of the castle.
The castle itself reminded me a bit of Ricoleta Cemetery, in terms of its opulence and architecture. The tour we'd signed up for ("Grand Rooms") took us through the ground floor of the main building on the castle grounds, which included a sitting room, a dining room, a billiards room, a breakfast nook, and a screening room. Each of these was packed with Hearst's acquisitions: Statues, paintings, tapestries, tables, and wood paneling, from an assortment of centuries, countries of origin, and artistic traditions. The tour guide took a weirdly populist-folksy tack on explaining what we saw:
This was Hearst's living room. I've got a living room in my house, too. The only difference is that Hearst had a 16th-century tapestry hanging in his.but that seemed to be a dodge for a shameful and self-evident truth: Material goods cannot save you from death, and it is a mistake to hoard them. Nonetheless, we had a fun silly time, especially after the tour, when we had some opportunity to wander the grounds and gawk at the "Neptune pool" and the various porn-y marble statues (naked muscle-wrestlers, the three graces sucking face).
On the way back from the castle, we parked at a rest stop built out with a wooden terrace of sorts from which you could observe a beach's worth of Elephant seals, prone and sunning themselves, and as a pamphlet helpfully informed us, undergoing a scheduled "catastrophic molt," which meant losing, like, all of their skin at once. ("Are these elephant seals sick or dying? No.") They flopped up and down the beach, some snuggled up to each other, others looking to spar, but mostly just lying prone and gray-brown, like hairballs horked up by an outsize cat. Occasionally one would "flip" sand up onto itself with its flippers.
We had to deposit Emma at the wedding venue, a vineyard called Vina Robles, so that she could rehearse some key components of the ceremony, and since we arrived early, we decided to do a wine tasting. I could see why they'd chosen that place to get married -- the building had really high ceilings with tall windows that filled the rooms with hazy afternoon sunlight. It was like a wine church. The "tasting associate" was friendly and talked a good game about what we were drinking -- although my palate is so suggestible that she could've told me pretty much anything. I certainly can't tell the difference between "notes of cherry" and "notes of strawberry." But the wines were tasty enough that we bought a couple of bottles (Jay and Emma did, too), along with a tin of the vineyard's "signature" spicy peanuts. (Which were speedily devoured during a late-night game of Werewolf.) Later in the evening, a few of the already-married gentlemen in our number took Cliff into the garage to drunkenly impart advice on marriage. I crashed their party and tried my best to contribute.
The morning of the wedding, Maggie and Cliff disappeared to perform some secret logistics. We members of the house resolved to suck the premises dry: After a marathon breakfast-cooking orchestrated by Chris (he's worked as a restaurant chef), we swam in the pool for a while drinking Bud Light. Nina rode the Water Taxi. Then she became the Water Taxi and carried me around. We went on a wine-tasting tour in the afternoon. The first place we went was Tobin James Cellars, named, of course, after the killer in the Saw movies. It was a very different scene from Vina Robles: The vineyard's tasting room was a repurposed barn, decked out with bits of ranch kitsch and about a hundred mirrors in the shape of the vineyard logo, a star with a spiral in the center which I could swear I've seen on the awning of a tanning salon. It looked like a maiden aunt's patio. And, because their tastings were free, it was packed with sandaled, fanny-packed people. Their wines were pretty sugary -- or, in California wine parlance, "fruit forward" -- but not undrinkable, with the exception of one, the Petite Sirah, which the menu described as a "dark, inky fruit bomb." It was inky, to be sure -- like a Bic pen. It was also the only one thus far that we spat out. The next vineyard we went to was the Rockin' R. They were obviously a smaller operation, their tasting setup pretty much just a picnic table out front. The woman who pitched us wine there was euphemistic about "the James gang." "They get a lot of... first-time wine buyers," she said. Rockin' R's wines were pretty fruit foward, too, though.
We were still tipsy by the time the trolley came to take us to Vina Robles. Nina and I rode in the unenclosed rear section, which treated us to the warmth of the late afternoon sun but also a frenzy of wind and dust that chapped our lips something fierce as the trolley careened up and down the sloping hills towards the vineyard. The wedding proper was actually outside on the warm flagstones of the vineyard's back patio. Presided over by their friend Jeremy (whose wedding Maggie'd officiated some years prior), the ceremony included a reading from the Massachusetts court ruling on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage (!). Maggie and Cliff's vows were characteristically funny and beyond sweet: There was mutual compromise over adjusting the thermostat, and they'd had plotted out a symbolic breaking-of-the-glass ritual that included sweeping up the shards to appease Cliff's neat-freak tendencies. It made me tear up, it did. Then it was into the vineyard's cavernous dining room for homphing and dancing. Maggie and Cliff had seated me and Nina directly across from them -- I tried to be extra funny, but all I felt like doing was to gawp and smile at them. Maggie's old teaching buddy Corey did something heroic on the dance floor. And then it was time for all of us to dance, which we did, stuffed as we were with purple potatoes and risotto. Those of us wearing ties (I'd borrowed one last-second from Ted) removed them and re-tied them around our foreheads (it's a summer jam). Cliff sang and performed The Humpty Dance.
We woke up stiff and headached on Sunday morning to the sound of the caterers preparing a brunch outside our room. After inhaling the breakfast burritos they provided, we said our goodbyes to everyone (the newly-minted Maraschinos were departing to Fiji!) and piled back into the Jeep Liberty. We drove back out to the coast and made a pit stop in San Simeon to say peace to the elephant seals (they flipped sand and belched) before embarking on our journey to the north via the storied Pacific Coast Highway. Oh, man. That drive is hard to describe. The nearest I can get it is that it's like being on another planet: The sheer red cliffs on one side, the sheer drop-off into the Pacific on the other; the blue sky, the wildflowers growing in a dozen different colors all around the road. And it went on and one, babies, like a dream. We stopped at a rest stop to watch surfers contending with the waves several hundred feet below, and I fed Red Vines to a shy contingent of pygmy squirrels. We drove on and on, eventually stopping for food at Big Sur Coast, a crunchy art gallery and café built into the side of a cliff. They were exhibiting a selection of weird little bronze frog sculptures by a guy who called himself Frogman. The frogs' little black hands struck me as being somehow sexual. I don't know.
The next place we stopped was a marijuana dispensary right off the highway a little bit north of Santa Cruz, where we were hoping to use the bathroom. The dispensary was closed, and the bathroom was indicated by a series of rude signs: "Don't ask where the bathroom is. If you can't read the signs, go back to kindergarten!" The "bathroom" ended up being a port-a-potty, and Colleen balked when she opened the door. "That is the most digusting port-a-potty I've ever seen," she said. We got to San Francisco at twilight, and dropped Greg off in the Mission before stopping for burritos at El Farolito. I made sure to charge all my electronic toys at SFO before getting on the plane, but as soon as we boarded I got so tired that even the fact that Nina and I had non-negotiable front-row seats to the in-flight screening of John Carter couldn't keep me awake. Tom kept himself awake enough to learn something about Tharks, which he told me when we got off the plane in the morning:
Tharks did not start this war, but they will end it!
Monday, May 28, 2012
Big Success
It's pretty much summertime already. The calendar has landed. Go to there.
My sister graduated from Skidmore College last weekend, and Nina and I went up to Saratoga Springs to witness. We'd reserved rooms in a cute little bed-and-breakfast called The Brunswick Inn, and we took the Amtrak up the Ethan Allen line there on Friday. Mark it: I am a bad brother, and though I'd sent her several care packages during her time in school I'd never once come up to visit her. If you can choose your next brother, choose a good one, like Billy's Bobby or Ted's Dan. And I really should have made the trip, because among other things Saratoga Springs is a pretty little town, one that you could really rule as an undergraduate with some gumption. There's a modest downtown area with coffee shops and stores that sell ladies' pants suits, and there are lots of quiet, tree-lined streets with big, clean-looking houses. Obviously they do horse-racing, too, but we didn't see any racetracks, just an ominous coterie of empty horse trailers being pulled up and down the streets. We arrived pretty late, around 10:30 or so, and it took some doing to raise our inn-keeper -- phone calls and bell-dinging in the dark and quiet downstairs sitting room. It reminded me a little of the hotel in In The Mouth Of Madness, really. But he was very accomodating when he arrived and showed us to an elegantly-furnished room with a big comfy bed and holy shit a motherfucking jacuzzi.
We dropped off the bags and hurried off to a party at a place called The Irish Times. It wasn't a particularly Irish joint but it was crammed with graduating seniors and my sister's friend's jazz band was performing on the second floor. My parents were there, too, looking a little shell-shocked. We joined them and let my sister introduce us to about a million of her friends. We stayed until about 1 AM, although it looked like the party was gonna go way later.
My parents picked us up in the minivan they'd rented for the weekend and ferried us to SPAC, where the graduation ceremonies were going to be held. The amphitheater The first speaker was the jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He's not a Skidmore alumnus himself, but he led a kind of class-wide seminar my sister's freshman year on jazz music and the rebulding of New Orleans after Katrina, and so, as he pointed out, this was kind of a matriculation for him as well. He had good and difficult advice to impart: Stay true to yourself; always do the right thing. Ron Chernow was next -- he's written a bunch of famous biographies (Alexander Hamilton, J.P. Morgan) but his speech was kind of a snooze, filled with Unconventional Wisdom to the effect that the plans you make upon graduation are probably going to see a fair amount of, you know, flux. Not that that stuff isn't true, mind you. And it was still a head and shoulders better than the awful speech my class got from The Mustache of Understanding. There were several other speakers: A Spanish teacher who gave a suspiciously clever speech about the value of doing nothing; a Skidmore alumna who made a laryngitic plea for donations.
And then it was time for the graduates to collect their diplomas (or the folders for their diplomas, depending). So many kids! So many blonde ladies. My sister was among them, of course, and we hollered as loud as we were able when she crossed the stage. After it was all over, we had lunch with the families of some of my sister's friends, in a sunny clearing next to a quiet brook where some people were fishing; and then we drove to my sister's off-campus house, a big beautiful four-bedroom deal with a front porch and a back yard for barbecues. She showed off some her favorite textbooks and the remains of a presentation she'd given on the distribution of prime numbers as we helped get her clothes into big Chinatown shopping bags. Some of her friends watched a horse race on the house television and cheered. It made me wish I'd lived in a big friend house when I was in college, although to be fair that's sort of what I get to do now. For dinner we went to Hattie's Chicken Shack, apparently a bit of a fixture in Saratoga Springs, and ordered fried chicken sandwiches that turned out to be way bigger than we could handle. We chomped as hard as we could; I finished mine, my dad ate everything but the bun, and Nina made it about three quarters of the way through before throwing in the towel. And it made us sleepy, so sleepy we could barely think straight.
Exhausted from our exertions, we returned to the Brunswick. We'd promised to rally and go wild out with my sister, but we found ourselves more or less immobilized. As an alternative entertainment, I hit up the inn's vaunted "VHS library," a row of, say, two dozen tapes next to the sink in the second-floor kitchen. As these things often are, I think, it was a strange mix of family-inappropriate ("Platoon") and wildly dull ("Video Golf Tutor"). I grabbed a promising-looking tape with the humble title "Sports Bloopers" and ferried it back to our room, where I popped it into the slot on the small, arm-mounted TV set above the armoire. I was half worried it would be a snuff film or a terrorist video manifesto, but it was exactly as advertised: Grainy broadcast footage of athletes having accidents while playing various sports (football, boxing, rodeo) while a smug narrator cracked dusty jokes about their misfortune. The whole video was only about 40 minutes long, but they had so little footage that they started repeating clips at around the half hour mark. Eat your heart out, Everything Is Terrible! My next selection was going to be a highlight reel of Jay Leno at the 1990-something Montreal Comedy Festival, but Nina begged off. ("No. No. Fuck that guy.") People, I am not a monster.
The next morning we hung out in the jacuzzi until check-out time, and then tried to occupy ourselves in downtown Saratoga, my parents having loaded up the caravan and split. We did so largely by lolling about in Congress Park, watching pairs of ducks root around in the banks of the stream that bisects the green. The cab driver who took us back to the train station said racist things. We played GalaxIR against each other on our phone while we waited for the train. On the train we got drunk off Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA and I wrote programs on my computer.
Upon returning to Brooklyn, we responded to a message from Katharine and Young Thomas asking us to join them at Katharine's family's cabin on Cape Cod for Memorial Day. Of course we said yes -- that shack is kind of a paradise, implausibly comfortable given how small and out-of-the-way it is. That Friday we took the Metro-North train to New Haven with Katharine and then picked up Tom and a rental car for the second leg of the journey. We listened to local radio stations as we passed in and out of their broadcast radius and tried to figure out what the 2012 "summer jam" is going to be: Call Me Maybe? Glad You Came? My money is still on The Motto. I love road trips! Not least of all because you get to eat the worst kind of garbage for dinner. Hailing from across the sea as he does, Tom's got some gaps in his knowledge of North American fast food. He's been working to, uh, fill them in, but when we saw the turn-off on I-95 for an Applebee's in Coventry, Rhode Island, we knew we had to stop in. There was a girls' high school soccer team forming a sort of gauntlet outside as they waited to be seated. "Go seniors!" they hollered at us. We ordered an appetizer sampler -- all sorts of gross fried / gooey stuff -- which was basically enough food for our entire meal. We also got entrees. It was so good. When the waitress asked if I wanted another 20-oz Bud Light, I stammered, "But that'd be forty ounces!"
"Wow," she said. "Are you a mathematician?"
The next morning, we got breakfast at Dunkin' & Donut and ate on a rocky spit down by harbor, watching people digging for clams in the mud. Then we struck out for Provincetown, where we walked up and down the main drag, saying hi to friendly dogs. We stopped at Cabot's for bags of salt-water taffy. I was tempted to take a cheeky picture of their painted glass front window, which advertised the availability of "mouthwatering fudge" -- and which naturally put me in mind of Jon Wurster. We spent the afternoon on one of the Atlantic coast beaches. Nina and I took a walk and collected an assortment of pretty stones. The water was freezing but I agreed to wade out to chest level with Tom before we left. When we got out to the negotiated depth, he submerged himself complete. "Fuck," I thought, and did the same. Babies, it was cold. I wondered for a scant second in the darkness below the water whether my heart would stop. It didn't. On the way back to the cabin we stopped at what I think was Turtle Pond for a quick swim. With Nina on my back I invented an entirely original swim activity called "Water Taxi." It has an accompanying sound effect: B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b. We chased small fish around in the water near the shore. In the evening we cooked hamburgers and I read aloud from Robin Cook's Invasion, part of the cabin's tiny library and surely one of the dumbest books ever.
The next day we made eggs and drove out to a beach on, I think, Cape Cod Bay, which was rockier but where the water was warmer than the ocean. Nina and I waded in the shallow water, scooping up and releasing tiny hermit crabs. "Look at him go!" she said.
Later we went out to Cahoon Hollow beach, the one with the crazily steep descent down a dune to the water. Upon arriving we saw on the horizon a crowd gathered at the other end of the beach and realized it must be the first few days of The Beachcomber's season. O Beachcomber! Haven to massholes and wharf drunks. On every visit to Wellfleet we've tried to hit it up, but fate has ever thwarted us. This time, though, its doors were open to us. It's an okay joint, for a shithole. Lots of nautical tchotchkies and head shots of famous people all the walls. And it was packed that day, with a crowd ranging from Polo-shirted mom-and-dad types to leathery beach weirdos. Notably, there was a really big guy inexplicably clad in a tan suit and matching fedora that Katharine nicknamed The Mayor. (He did seem to know everyone.) Since there was a band playing there was a flat ten-dollar cover, the bouncer -- who had an arrogant disposition despite missing his two front teeth -- informed us. The band turned out to be a local act, a reunited group called The Incredible Casuals. I was a little skeezed out by the name (it fails Steve Merchant's "Welcome to the stage..." test) and by the baseball caps and ponytails I saw on some of their members, but they ultimately won me over: A beardy, barefoot dude who looked a fuck of a lot like Charles Manson and who'd been creeping around in the audience before the set hopped up on stage as their lead singer, a la my favorite Shane MacGowan anecdote ("They're not letting him in here, are they?"); the drummer, who goes by "Rikki Bates," played with a gawky traditional grip. And their songs were solid, peppy bar rock songs. We watched them for two or three beers and then began the long trek back to the car.
In the evening we drove into the Wellfleet town center, passing by a familiar array of used book stores and nautical curio shops. Our destination was Winslow's Tavern, where we had white wine and oysters on the second floor. I ate my first (?) oyster, which I'd been putting off for no real reason. It was alright -- there's a slight metallic edge that makes the critter's natural fishiness taste "clean" -- but I confess I'm not totally clear on what all the fuss is about. Are they supposed to make your dick hard? I don't know if I was paying enough attention. After that we went to PJ's for fried clams. (Shamefully, this was one of the parts of the trip I was most looking forward to, like fucking Wimpy with his hamburgers.) We bought a Duraflame log at the convenience store next to PJ's and used it to start a fire in the cottage's neat little fireplace, then roasted marshmallows to make s'mores.
Driving back to New Haven on Monday morning, we looked to recreate our chain restaurant success from Friday night, and so when we caught sight of a Friendly's after passing the rotary that is the gateway to the Cape, we stopped for breakfast. I don't know if I'd ever been to a Friendly's before. I certainly hadn't eaten there in many years. The Friendly's we went to -- and by the franchise predicate calculus, all Friendly's restaurants -- was a bit threadbare and more industrial than Applebee's. While we waited for the hostess to seat us, I read the employee code of conduct, which bore several dozen signatures and was scotch-taped to the side of an out-of-order soda machine. Among other things, it required that Friendly's servers "emphasize the importance of ice cream as a FUN FOOD that makes the meal" (capitalization theirs). We'd missed breakfast (do they serve it?) so we ordered a bunch of high-calorie fried things for lunch, and sure enough the waitress pressed us to get ice cream -- as she pointed out, Tom's burger-and-soft drink order would perversely be two dollars cheaper if he added an ice cream sundae to it. He acquiesced, but she let the rest of us off the hook when we squirmed visibly. When it came time to order it, we decided to go all in, like that Uruk-hai who shoves Aragorn's sword in deeper, which is how we wound up with a cotton candy-and-pop rocks-flavored sundae with gummy bears and Maraschino cherries on top. And here's the crazy part: It was actually pretty good. Go Friendly's!
There was some quiet time in the car. I thought about the trips to the Cape my family had taken me on. Horseflies on the beach, minnows caught in tide pools. What children owe their parents.
My sister graduated from Skidmore College last weekend, and Nina and I went up to Saratoga Springs to witness. We'd reserved rooms in a cute little bed-and-breakfast called The Brunswick Inn, and we took the Amtrak up the Ethan Allen line there on Friday. Mark it: I am a bad brother, and though I'd sent her several care packages during her time in school I'd never once come up to visit her. If you can choose your next brother, choose a good one, like Billy's Bobby or Ted's Dan. And I really should have made the trip, because among other things Saratoga Springs is a pretty little town, one that you could really rule as an undergraduate with some gumption. There's a modest downtown area with coffee shops and stores that sell ladies' pants suits, and there are lots of quiet, tree-lined streets with big, clean-looking houses. Obviously they do horse-racing, too, but we didn't see any racetracks, just an ominous coterie of empty horse trailers being pulled up and down the streets. We arrived pretty late, around 10:30 or so, and it took some doing to raise our inn-keeper -- phone calls and bell-dinging in the dark and quiet downstairs sitting room. It reminded me a little of the hotel in In The Mouth Of Madness, really. But he was very accomodating when he arrived and showed us to an elegantly-furnished room with a big comfy bed and holy shit a motherfucking jacuzzi.
We dropped off the bags and hurried off to a party at a place called The Irish Times. It wasn't a particularly Irish joint but it was crammed with graduating seniors and my sister's friend's jazz band was performing on the second floor. My parents were there, too, looking a little shell-shocked. We joined them and let my sister introduce us to about a million of her friends. We stayed until about 1 AM, although it looked like the party was gonna go way later.
My parents picked us up in the minivan they'd rented for the weekend and ferried us to SPAC, where the graduation ceremonies were going to be held. The amphitheater The first speaker was the jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He's not a Skidmore alumnus himself, but he led a kind of class-wide seminar my sister's freshman year on jazz music and the rebulding of New Orleans after Katrina, and so, as he pointed out, this was kind of a matriculation for him as well. He had good and difficult advice to impart: Stay true to yourself; always do the right thing. Ron Chernow was next -- he's written a bunch of famous biographies (Alexander Hamilton, J.P. Morgan) but his speech was kind of a snooze, filled with Unconventional Wisdom to the effect that the plans you make upon graduation are probably going to see a fair amount of, you know, flux. Not that that stuff isn't true, mind you. And it was still a head and shoulders better than the awful speech my class got from The Mustache of Understanding. There were several other speakers: A Spanish teacher who gave a suspiciously clever speech about the value of doing nothing; a Skidmore alumna who made a laryngitic plea for donations.
And then it was time for the graduates to collect their diplomas (or the folders for their diplomas, depending). So many kids! So many blonde ladies. My sister was among them, of course, and we hollered as loud as we were able when she crossed the stage. After it was all over, we had lunch with the families of some of my sister's friends, in a sunny clearing next to a quiet brook where some people were fishing; and then we drove to my sister's off-campus house, a big beautiful four-bedroom deal with a front porch and a back yard for barbecues. She showed off some her favorite textbooks and the remains of a presentation she'd given on the distribution of prime numbers as we helped get her clothes into big Chinatown shopping bags. Some of her friends watched a horse race on the house television and cheered. It made me wish I'd lived in a big friend house when I was in college, although to be fair that's sort of what I get to do now. For dinner we went to Hattie's Chicken Shack, apparently a bit of a fixture in Saratoga Springs, and ordered fried chicken sandwiches that turned out to be way bigger than we could handle. We chomped as hard as we could; I finished mine, my dad ate everything but the bun, and Nina made it about three quarters of the way through before throwing in the towel. And it made us sleepy, so sleepy we could barely think straight.
Exhausted from our exertions, we returned to the Brunswick. We'd promised to rally and go wild out with my sister, but we found ourselves more or less immobilized. As an alternative entertainment, I hit up the inn's vaunted "VHS library," a row of, say, two dozen tapes next to the sink in the second-floor kitchen. As these things often are, I think, it was a strange mix of family-inappropriate ("Platoon") and wildly dull ("Video Golf Tutor"). I grabbed a promising-looking tape with the humble title "Sports Bloopers" and ferried it back to our room, where I popped it into the slot on the small, arm-mounted TV set above the armoire. I was half worried it would be a snuff film or a terrorist video manifesto, but it was exactly as advertised: Grainy broadcast footage of athletes having accidents while playing various sports (football, boxing, rodeo) while a smug narrator cracked dusty jokes about their misfortune. The whole video was only about 40 minutes long, but they had so little footage that they started repeating clips at around the half hour mark. Eat your heart out, Everything Is Terrible! My next selection was going to be a highlight reel of Jay Leno at the 1990-something Montreal Comedy Festival, but Nina begged off. ("No. No. Fuck that guy.") People, I am not a monster.
The next morning we hung out in the jacuzzi until check-out time, and then tried to occupy ourselves in downtown Saratoga, my parents having loaded up the caravan and split. We did so largely by lolling about in Congress Park, watching pairs of ducks root around in the banks of the stream that bisects the green. The cab driver who took us back to the train station said racist things. We played GalaxIR against each other on our phone while we waited for the train. On the train we got drunk off Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA and I wrote programs on my computer.
Upon returning to Brooklyn, we responded to a message from Katharine and Young Thomas asking us to join them at Katharine's family's cabin on Cape Cod for Memorial Day. Of course we said yes -- that shack is kind of a paradise, implausibly comfortable given how small and out-of-the-way it is. That Friday we took the Metro-North train to New Haven with Katharine and then picked up Tom and a rental car for the second leg of the journey. We listened to local radio stations as we passed in and out of their broadcast radius and tried to figure out what the 2012 "summer jam" is going to be: Call Me Maybe? Glad You Came? My money is still on The Motto. I love road trips! Not least of all because you get to eat the worst kind of garbage for dinner. Hailing from across the sea as he does, Tom's got some gaps in his knowledge of North American fast food. He's been working to, uh, fill them in, but when we saw the turn-off on I-95 for an Applebee's in Coventry, Rhode Island, we knew we had to stop in. There was a girls' high school soccer team forming a sort of gauntlet outside as they waited to be seated. "Go seniors!" they hollered at us. We ordered an appetizer sampler -- all sorts of gross fried / gooey stuff -- which was basically enough food for our entire meal. We also got entrees. It was so good. When the waitress asked if I wanted another 20-oz Bud Light, I stammered, "But that'd be forty ounces!"
"Wow," she said. "Are you a mathematician?"
The next morning, we got breakfast at Dunkin' & Donut and ate on a rocky spit down by harbor, watching people digging for clams in the mud. Then we struck out for Provincetown, where we walked up and down the main drag, saying hi to friendly dogs. We stopped at Cabot's for bags of salt-water taffy. I was tempted to take a cheeky picture of their painted glass front window, which advertised the availability of "mouthwatering fudge" -- and which naturally put me in mind of Jon Wurster. We spent the afternoon on one of the Atlantic coast beaches. Nina and I took a walk and collected an assortment of pretty stones. The water was freezing but I agreed to wade out to chest level with Tom before we left. When we got out to the negotiated depth, he submerged himself complete. "Fuck," I thought, and did the same. Babies, it was cold. I wondered for a scant second in the darkness below the water whether my heart would stop. It didn't. On the way back to the cabin we stopped at what I think was Turtle Pond for a quick swim. With Nina on my back I invented an entirely original swim activity called "Water Taxi." It has an accompanying sound effect: B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b. We chased small fish around in the water near the shore. In the evening we cooked hamburgers and I read aloud from Robin Cook's Invasion, part of the cabin's tiny library and surely one of the dumbest books ever.
The next day we made eggs and drove out to a beach on, I think, Cape Cod Bay, which was rockier but where the water was warmer than the ocean. Nina and I waded in the shallow water, scooping up and releasing tiny hermit crabs. "Look at him go!" she said.
Later we went out to Cahoon Hollow beach, the one with the crazily steep descent down a dune to the water. Upon arriving we saw on the horizon a crowd gathered at the other end of the beach and realized it must be the first few days of The Beachcomber's season. O Beachcomber! Haven to massholes and wharf drunks. On every visit to Wellfleet we've tried to hit it up, but fate has ever thwarted us. This time, though, its doors were open to us. It's an okay joint, for a shithole. Lots of nautical tchotchkies and head shots of famous people all the walls. And it was packed that day, with a crowd ranging from Polo-shirted mom-and-dad types to leathery beach weirdos. Notably, there was a really big guy inexplicably clad in a tan suit and matching fedora that Katharine nicknamed The Mayor. (He did seem to know everyone.) Since there was a band playing there was a flat ten-dollar cover, the bouncer -- who had an arrogant disposition despite missing his two front teeth -- informed us. The band turned out to be a local act, a reunited group called The Incredible Casuals. I was a little skeezed out by the name (it fails Steve Merchant's "Welcome to the stage..." test) and by the baseball caps and ponytails I saw on some of their members, but they ultimately won me over: A beardy, barefoot dude who looked a fuck of a lot like Charles Manson and who'd been creeping around in the audience before the set hopped up on stage as their lead singer, a la my favorite Shane MacGowan anecdote ("They're not letting him in here, are they?"); the drummer, who goes by "Rikki Bates," played with a gawky traditional grip. And their songs were solid, peppy bar rock songs. We watched them for two or three beers and then began the long trek back to the car.
In the evening we drove into the Wellfleet town center, passing by a familiar array of used book stores and nautical curio shops. Our destination was Winslow's Tavern, where we had white wine and oysters on the second floor. I ate my first (?) oyster, which I'd been putting off for no real reason. It was alright -- there's a slight metallic edge that makes the critter's natural fishiness taste "clean" -- but I confess I'm not totally clear on what all the fuss is about. Are they supposed to make your dick hard? I don't know if I was paying enough attention. After that we went to PJ's for fried clams. (Shamefully, this was one of the parts of the trip I was most looking forward to, like fucking Wimpy with his hamburgers.) We bought a Duraflame log at the convenience store next to PJ's and used it to start a fire in the cottage's neat little fireplace, then roasted marshmallows to make s'mores.
Driving back to New Haven on Monday morning, we looked to recreate our chain restaurant success from Friday night, and so when we caught sight of a Friendly's after passing the rotary that is the gateway to the Cape, we stopped for breakfast. I don't know if I'd ever been to a Friendly's before. I certainly hadn't eaten there in many years. The Friendly's we went to -- and by the franchise predicate calculus, all Friendly's restaurants -- was a bit threadbare and more industrial than Applebee's. While we waited for the hostess to seat us, I read the employee code of conduct, which bore several dozen signatures and was scotch-taped to the side of an out-of-order soda machine. Among other things, it required that Friendly's servers "emphasize the importance of ice cream as a FUN FOOD that makes the meal" (capitalization theirs). We'd missed breakfast (do they serve it?) so we ordered a bunch of high-calorie fried things for lunch, and sure enough the waitress pressed us to get ice cream -- as she pointed out, Tom's burger-and-soft drink order would perversely be two dollars cheaper if he added an ice cream sundae to it. He acquiesced, but she let the rest of us off the hook when we squirmed visibly. When it came time to order it, we decided to go all in, like that Uruk-hai who shoves Aragorn's sword in deeper, which is how we wound up with a cotton candy-and-pop rocks-flavored sundae with gummy bears and Maraschino cherries on top. And here's the crazy part: It was actually pretty good. Go Friendly's!
There was some quiet time in the car. I thought about the trips to the Cape my family had taken me on. Horseflies on the beach, minnows caught in tide pools. What children owe their parents.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
The Thing About Prez
Everybody has cats now! My tenure with Kitty naturally grants me O.G. status. But after years of stubbornly holding out against the yearnings of his apartment-mates for fear of mind-control parasites, Tom caved and Jill adopted Bug, a small, unpredictable black cat with a clipped ear and oddly prominent genitals. Eve and Jon, cohabitating in advance of their marriage in the fall picked up two mostly-white kitten siblings, Sam and Sasha, who promptly doubled in size and now effectively run the apartment. And Ted and Cat took in Lola, a former stray tabby of indeterminate age and fairly inscrutable disposition. Lola died unexpectedly earlier this year after a rapid deterioration in her health caused by kitty lymphoma. But Ted and Cat were undeterred, and they got back on the horse with Prez, a friendly kitten with a penchant for biting fingers and whomping sleeping faces, and whom they named Prez, partly after President St., partly after Jim True-Frost.
When they went on vacation to Italy, they charged Jill with Prez's care and feeding, and assigned me the few days that she wouldn't be able to make it. And so on Thursday I went over to their apartment to administer kibble. Except that I didn't see Prez when I opened the door. And he wasn't in the living room or the bedroom. Didn't respond when I called. He turned out to be in the bathroom, lying puddled on the bathmat under the skylight. He was awake but seemed unwilling to get up, and when I put my hand on him and he turned to look at me, his eyes were rheumy and unfocused. Oh no, I thought. I have strong urges, people, to avoid addressing problems head-on. Have you noticed? If there is a way I can just hang back and let someone else discover and deal with a thing, then that is what I vastly prefer to do. Oh, was that like that? I didn't realize. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Thanks for dealing with it so quickly. --That is the way I like to play it. But Prez was putting out strong vibes of being a Very Sick Animal, so I called Jerry. "Was he, uh, like this the last time you saw him?" I asked. Which was, come to think of it, really just a minor variation on my core strategy. No, she said, and suggested that we car him to the vet right away. So while she brought over the vehicle, I made preparations over the phone with Animal Kind, where I take Kitty but also the only place that I knew would be open at 11 o'clock at night.
We hefted Prez into the fabric cat-carrier Jill brought. That operation is one that I dread when it comes to Kitty -- hissing, feet braced against the edges of the carrier -- but Prez was too sick to make a fuss. Or maybe he's always just that easy. We got him into the car. Hanlon drove. At Animal Kind, the woman at the front desk buzzed us in and summoned Dr. Salas, the vet on duty for the evening. She escorted me and Jill to an exam room in the back, where, with the help of a vet tech, we scooped Prez out of the carrier. They took his temperature in the customary way; this was the only part of the ordeal about which he complained. It turned out he had a high fever and that something was restricting his breathing. They'd have to do an x-ray, Dr. Salas said, before knowing anything further.
So we sat and waited, the four of us, in the bright front room, watching people cross back and forth in front of the big windows -- Thursday-night revelers returning home, maybe, sneaking a wary peek at us as they passed. It was a dynamic one mostly gets to enjoy, so to speak, from that other side, and less often from the one we were on: Skirting a sidewalk assembly in front of a funeral home, for example; the guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt you see walking down the street as you are leaving the funeral home. It's fairly impossible to shake the relief that you feel when, having sampled a stranger's private tragedy for a few seconds, you can go away and leave them with it -- as Jerry Seinfeld used to say, "Good luck with all... that." But being on that other side, we were all pretty bummed out. Tom pointed out all of the funny little plaques on the wall thanking the vets for their kindness and patience with, say, Muffy, some poodle with tear-stained fur and red eyes reflecting a camera flash; and how implicit in their presence was the fact that all the animals were dead. "This isn't a doctor's office," I said in a stage whisper. "It's a tomb!" Nobody laughed. Hanlon brought out his iPhone and dug into his curated gallery of inscrutable New Yorker cartoons, but it didn't cheer us up much.
Eventually Dr. Salas called me and Jerry into the back, into the little hallway that connects all the downstairs exam rooms, where she had an x-ray up on a fancy Apple Studio Display screen. She walked us through the anatomical details, pointing out areas of accumulated fluid in the thoracic cavity, and how the fluid was compressing Prez's right lung and part of his esophagus. And she showed us how there seemed to be a kind of mass, only negatively visible on the x-ray, in some of the connective tissue right around his heart. "Until we do an ultrasound, there's no way to know exactly what that is," she said. "It could be an infection, but it's possible that it's a malignancy, maybe lymphoma, which is common in young cats. Obviously, that's not a great diagnosis."
"Fuck," said Tom, when we returned to the waiting room. "I really don't want Ted to have another cancer cat." I didn't, either. And while, having done my part and delivered Prez to the doctor, I didn't feel anxiety over his care, there is something awfully metaphorical about an absent friend's pet. Because the pet is a proxy for the friend, isn't it? Or a proxy for something about the friend; I don't know what. But there was nothing else for us to do, and so we piled back into the car and drove home. I ate one of the cookies that Jill had bought us for dinner.
A bright spot, lest you think this blog-thing a downer: I found a voicemail from Dr. Salas on my phone after getting home. She'd drawn some of the fluid out of Prez's chest, and it seemed like it was the product of an infection ("yucky," she said) rather than a tumor. Accordingly, she had started him on antibiotics. He's not out of the woods yet, by any means, but things are perhaps less dire than they seemed.
When they went on vacation to Italy, they charged Jill with Prez's care and feeding, and assigned me the few days that she wouldn't be able to make it. And so on Thursday I went over to their apartment to administer kibble. Except that I didn't see Prez when I opened the door. And he wasn't in the living room or the bedroom. Didn't respond when I called. He turned out to be in the bathroom, lying puddled on the bathmat under the skylight. He was awake but seemed unwilling to get up, and when I put my hand on him and he turned to look at me, his eyes were rheumy and unfocused. Oh no, I thought. I have strong urges, people, to avoid addressing problems head-on. Have you noticed? If there is a way I can just hang back and let someone else discover and deal with a thing, then that is what I vastly prefer to do. Oh, was that like that? I didn't realize. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Thanks for dealing with it so quickly. --That is the way I like to play it. But Prez was putting out strong vibes of being a Very Sick Animal, so I called Jerry. "Was he, uh, like this the last time you saw him?" I asked. Which was, come to think of it, really just a minor variation on my core strategy. No, she said, and suggested that we car him to the vet right away. So while she brought over the vehicle, I made preparations over the phone with Animal Kind, where I take Kitty but also the only place that I knew would be open at 11 o'clock at night.
We hefted Prez into the fabric cat-carrier Jill brought. That operation is one that I dread when it comes to Kitty -- hissing, feet braced against the edges of the carrier -- but Prez was too sick to make a fuss. Or maybe he's always just that easy. We got him into the car. Hanlon drove. At Animal Kind, the woman at the front desk buzzed us in and summoned Dr. Salas, the vet on duty for the evening. She escorted me and Jill to an exam room in the back, where, with the help of a vet tech, we scooped Prez out of the carrier. They took his temperature in the customary way; this was the only part of the ordeal about which he complained. It turned out he had a high fever and that something was restricting his breathing. They'd have to do an x-ray, Dr. Salas said, before knowing anything further.
So we sat and waited, the four of us, in the bright front room, watching people cross back and forth in front of the big windows -- Thursday-night revelers returning home, maybe, sneaking a wary peek at us as they passed. It was a dynamic one mostly gets to enjoy, so to speak, from that other side, and less often from the one we were on: Skirting a sidewalk assembly in front of a funeral home, for example; the guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt you see walking down the street as you are leaving the funeral home. It's fairly impossible to shake the relief that you feel when, having sampled a stranger's private tragedy for a few seconds, you can go away and leave them with it -- as Jerry Seinfeld used to say, "Good luck with all... that." But being on that other side, we were all pretty bummed out. Tom pointed out all of the funny little plaques on the wall thanking the vets for their kindness and patience with, say, Muffy, some poodle with tear-stained fur and red eyes reflecting a camera flash; and how implicit in their presence was the fact that all the animals were dead. "This isn't a doctor's office," I said in a stage whisper. "It's a tomb!" Nobody laughed. Hanlon brought out his iPhone and dug into his curated gallery of inscrutable New Yorker cartoons, but it didn't cheer us up much.
Eventually Dr. Salas called me and Jerry into the back, into the little hallway that connects all the downstairs exam rooms, where she had an x-ray up on a fancy Apple Studio Display screen. She walked us through the anatomical details, pointing out areas of accumulated fluid in the thoracic cavity, and how the fluid was compressing Prez's right lung and part of his esophagus. And she showed us how there seemed to be a kind of mass, only negatively visible on the x-ray, in some of the connective tissue right around his heart. "Until we do an ultrasound, there's no way to know exactly what that is," she said. "It could be an infection, but it's possible that it's a malignancy, maybe lymphoma, which is common in young cats. Obviously, that's not a great diagnosis."
"Fuck," said Tom, when we returned to the waiting room. "I really don't want Ted to have another cancer cat." I didn't, either. And while, having done my part and delivered Prez to the doctor, I didn't feel anxiety over his care, there is something awfully metaphorical about an absent friend's pet. Because the pet is a proxy for the friend, isn't it? Or a proxy for something about the friend; I don't know what. But there was nothing else for us to do, and so we piled back into the car and drove home. I ate one of the cookies that Jill had bought us for dinner.
A bright spot, lest you think this blog-thing a downer: I found a voicemail from Dr. Salas on my phone after getting home. She'd drawn some of the fluid out of Prez's chest, and it seemed like it was the product of an infection ("yucky," she said) rather than a tumor. Accordingly, she had started him on antibiotics. He's not out of the woods yet, by any means, but things are perhaps less dire than they seemed.
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Millenarian Maths
My annual LibrePlanet re-cap, 2012 edition:
I spent two days in Boston this year, as the FSF had promised a bigger, more organized conference, with more speakers than would fit a one-day meeting like last year's. I'm a lousy trip-planner -- Nina knows it, you all know it. The process makes me anxious, and so I defer it, which means that when I do get down to the business of, say, figuring out where to stay over a weekend, there are fewer options and they're more expensive. So it was that I neglected to discover that good ol' Greg had returned from China and was living back near the vicinity of MIT again until it was too late to ask him to couch-surf, gift of whiskey or no. Instead I booked myself a room at the Hampton Inn and shelled out for Amtrak tickets there and back. I woke up at 5:00 AM in order to make my 7:00 AM train, attempting to reach Penn Station via the F train, then falling back to trusty old Carecibo when the F hadn't come after 25 minutes. To get to the actual Acela platform at Penn Station you have to go down this escalator tube from the waiting area. Even though the first time I went to Boston for the conference I went via Chinatown bus, looking that tube hole always reminds me of that time, when I didn't really know where I was going or what it would be like when I got there. We stopped at Roy Rogers. I think I had french fries for breakfast.
The conference has moved around a bit over the years. The first few years I went to it, it was at MIT, which was neat, 'cuz that was probably the only way I was ever going to see MIT. And then they moved it to Harvard after MIT stopped cutting them a good enough deal on space and catering, and that was neat, too, because I'd been curious about Harvard. Last year they moved to Bunker Hill Community College, which was somewhat less neat, because small and drab and out in the sticks (oh god the Orange line) with only strip mall amenities. This year they moved yet again, to the UMass Boston campus, which was not super convenient to get to (T to a 20 minute ride on a shuttle bus) but which is right on the harbor, and so the high windows in its great big meeting rooms provide a wide-angle view of Dorchester Bay, cold and still, like a gray mirror. It's very New England, you see.
David Sugar was wrapping up his talk on the GNU Telephony project as I arrived. He fielded some questions about SIP support and various types of audio codecs, and then yielded the stage to Michael Flickinger from GNU Savannah. Michael gave a run-down of the services offered by Savannah and how they distinguish it from other established software forges like SourceForge as well as some of the flavor-of-the-month ones like gitorious. In particular, every project submission on Savannah is human-reviewed to ensure license consistency and avoid tricky legal situations further on down the line. (This is also a resource squeeze for them, as the process can be time-consuming.) He also explained some of the current plans for improving -- or rather, rewriting from scratch -- the software that drives Savannah, Savane. The audience was nonplussed, and he seemed nervous, so I raised my hand and gave a little sales pitch for Savannah, which I genuinely love, despite its warts. I don't know if it worked.
We broke for lunch after that. They'd arranged for these little bag lunches to be delivered, and I found an empty table in the adjacent room. Some people travel to these events with friends, but I'm kind of a unicorn among my local peer group when it comes to this particular interest, and so I'm always there alone. Not knowing anybody used to make me really uncomfortable, but over the years I've gotten used to doing this stuff on my own, gotten used to being and feeling weird. So while I was prepared to eat by myself, it was nice to be joined by people who introduced themselves Alison Chaiken and Tom Marble. We talked about data serialization frameworks (something that's been a focus of mine recently) and swapped FSF gossip.
Alison's talk was directly after lunch. She's working on establishing a foothold for Free software in cars, as part of her involvement in the more general "right to repair" movement. She pointed out that since the first software systems embedded in cars was for purposes of "info-tainment" -- DVD players and video games for the back seat -- there's an established tendency towards complacency around the next generation of car "apps," which will likely focus on safety and driver informatics. Some manufacturers have even begun to release SDKs of a sort, such as the Cadillac User Experience framework, which is built on top of X11. But without unrestricted access to source code, users will just have to trust manufacturers and their partners to deliver secure, bug-free software, which is by no means a safe bet: She referenced a study done by researchers at UCSD and the University of Washington that produced an exploit capable of disabling the brakes and steering console of a moving car by hijacking a wireless tire pressure sensor. Wowza! And then there is also, of course, the perennial motivation of being able to inspect and modify the operations of a device that you've, you know, bought.
Brett Smith gave an update on the work he's been doing in the licensing lab. He works on two fronts towards a single goal: The lab strives to help Free software developers do their work without excessive interference from the law; and it helps legislators understand what Free software developers do so that they don't interfere. Toward the first half of that agenda, he presented some new licensing resources for developers. The FSF's guide How to choose a Free software license for your own work aims to provide a criteria-based approach to license selection. There's a new paper about what he referred to as "Javascript labels," a technique for providing formal descriptions of license characteristics for Javascript source files, reflecting the current trend toward client-side processing for interactions with web applications. (He noted that the current proposal was unlikely to "take over the world," but said the FSF was very interested in feedback.) And the new version of the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0, features compatibility by default with the GPL; the MPL 2.0 process, in fact, was inspired by the highly interactive one that produced GPLv3.
"So that's our friends," he said. "Now let's talk about our enemies." The FSF has apparently been sending him around the world to participate in panel discussions for international trade agreements and bits of legislation. In the U.S., the Library of Congress is about to go through an every-three-years mandated review of the "chilling effects" of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The last time around, they resolved that "jailbreaking" devices like cell phones ought to be permitted. Brett said that this time the Software Freedom Law Center is going to be pushing for a provision to allow people to install their own software on any computing device that they own. And he's going to sit in on the negotations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, actually at the request of the treaty authors, who are hoping to avoid a post-ratification debacle of the scale of the one resulting from ACTA, which left even some of the representatives who voted for it wishing that they hadn't.
ginger coons (she spells it lower-case) is the E.I.C. of LibreGraphics Magazine, a paper-and-ink publication whose aim is to promote the use of Free graphics tools, with a focus on creators and how they use software tools. She repeated a question that she's often asked about Free graphics software: It's good, but is it print good? As proof she explained how the sausage gets made. The whole magazine is produced in Scribus, Inkscape, and GIMP, among other applications, and using Free fonts (Univers Else, Prop Courier Sans). They print on recycled paper with soy inks, and license the whole thing CC-BY-SA. She had several issues for demonstration and sale. They looked good! The print design straddles the line between trade publication and art magazine, kind of the same way that SEED, the magazine Nina used to work for, did. I wanted to buy her a copy of issue 1.3, which featured a striking pattern of opening and closing eyes -- ginger claimed they'd figured out a way to randomize the colors on a per-physical issue basis -- but it sold out quickly.
The "keynote" of Day 1 was Evan Prodromou's presentation on freedom for the social web. Since the launch of StatusNet a few years ago and with his commitment to engaging with its users for the purposes of technical support and philosophical debate, I feel like he's developed a pretty high profile in the Free world. So his talk was a celebrity appearance of sorts. It didn't hurt that he's a very engaging speaker, equal parts nerdy intensity and practiced charm. He opened with some historical perspective on social networking, detailing how providers have evolved from an application-per-media-type model to social platforms like Facebook -- a model he refers to as the "imperial network." These platforms have the primary benefit of mapping independent streams of shared social data onto the same unified social graph. This has provides the benefit of one-stop shopping for marketers, but doesn't do much for users -- in addition to the fact that it's, you know, evil and non-Free, it doesn't accomodate users' disparate interests very well, unless those interests are confined to finding one's friends on Facebook.
Evan proposes / predicts what he calls the federated social network, which is really a network of social networks with interoperability at the borders. He cited some examples of work in this direction: OStatus; activitystrea.ms; pubsubhubbub; Webfinger; salmon. The question always gets asked: Why aren't we there yet? Where's my Free Facebook? These things take time, he said, and people often focus on distractions like novel architectures and cryptotopian fantasy.
Evan wrapped up, and was quickly mobbed by inquisitve software developers. Matt got the room under control and dispersed everyone with instructions to reconvene at JJ Foley's on Berkeley St. I rode the shuttle back to JFK/UMass chatting with Deb Nicholson about Occupy Wall Street. At JJ Foley's I found myself at a table with Tom and two guys having a heated debate about the right business model to use for running a Free hardware mail-order business. Josh Gay stopped by and gave a engaging if somewhat manic explanation of his "theory of change." I can't claim to have understood him fully. I was looking for a way to engineer an outcome; he seemed to take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive view of things: When we're successful the associated circumstances will be such and such. But maybe that's the a more sophisticated way to think about it. Have any of you read Anathem? The senior FSF strategists remind me of the monks that live in the center of the monastery and only come out once every thousand years. The hipster monks might find them frustratingly impractical, but they've got powers, babies.
I was exhausted when I checked into my hotel. The room was clean, featured a fancy writing desk (who uses those?), and the huge bed had an embarrassment of pillows, big and hard like breast implants. I showered, shat, and flipped through a few local channels on the TV before calling it a night. Some people were having a party in another room on my floor. I could hear it but it didn't keep me up. I started the next morning with a breakfast of eggs and hastily-scarfed spicy potato cubes in the hotel lobby, CNN Headline News playing on a flat-screen TV levitating above some ficuses, and then struck out for the university.
Eben Moglen was in the middle of his yearly update on the legal battlegrounds for Free software. As ever, much of his focus was on software patents. The patent wars continue, and his most recent conclusions were more pessimistic than in years past: Organizations have found that software patents have become more worthwhile to trade than they are to hold, which has turned the legal brinksmanship over software patents into a multi-billion dollar game and thus prolonged the existence of patents themselves. "We can't stop the patent war," he said, "and even if we were participants we couldn't stop it." And he said that the Free software movement would not be able to achieve its social and political goals until the war is over.
Mike Linksvayer and Chris Webber from Creative Commons were up next, with a somewhat sunnier presentation on the progress of CCv4. There were a couple of pleasant diversions from the charted course of their talk in the form of plugs for MediaGoblin and the Liberated Pixel Cup (relevant to my interests!) both of which are side projects of Chris'. But they managed to get across the important data about the license revision process; to wit, its goals:
Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, gave a charming autobiographical talk about how Emacs changed his life, beginning with his interest in hobby programming (the Ruby compiler) during the economic depression in Japan in the 1990s and how that led him to using Emacs, and then, as this type of thing often leads, to wanting to extend Emacs in the direction of better support for Ruby syntax (i.e., `ruby-mode'). And it was this activity that really got him deep into languages and software development. His argument, as best as I could transcribe it, in list form:
Matthew Garrett, now at Red Hat, talked about some hardware concerns for Free software developers, specfically the various implementations of "secure boot" and how they interact with non-vendor-approved (i.e., Free) software. Summary, from what I could understand: It's all bullshit predicated on some flimsy separation of hardware and software near the BIOS.
Karen Sandler, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Joanmarie Diggs, who does accessibility development gave a talk on the status and importance of accessibility support in Free software, using the GNOME 3.0 development lifecycle as a miniature case study of sorts. One point they made stuck with me in an uncomfty way (I assume this was the desired effect): We're all going to need accessibility technologies to continue to use software systems as we get older. We are merely "temporarily able-bodied." Jonathan Nadeau, an FSF campaigns intern who also happens to be a blind GNU/Linux user followed up with a first-hand account of the state of accessibility software. He's a big fan of Orca, a screen reader that's part of the GNOME project. In fact, he was using it to read some of the slides in his presentation back to him during his talk. I'd never seen a system like that in action before; it was impressive.
Jeremy Allison delivered the keynote for the second day. Like Evan Prodromou, he's become sort of a household name in the Free software world, and he also turned out to be a fun guy to listen to. His talk was less structured than Evan's; he presented the history of the relationship between his project, Samba, and the GPL. He'd chosen it initially as a way to "clear the air" within the community of developers reverse engineering the SMB protocol, who had adopted a policy of secrecy to prevent their improvement from being co-opted by their competitors. At the time, using the GPL helped Samba become the SMB implementation of note -- to the extent that he had to stop accepting corporate copyrights on contributions, because contributors were attempting to use their patches to entrap their non-GPL-compliant competitors. (The GPLv3 has eliminated this technique via compliance grace periods and additional flexibility for source code delivery.) He also shared some amusing anecdotes he'd acquired from his years in Free software development: How the benefits of Free software were made manifest whenever he collaborated with Microsoft ("Oh, you have to write all your own software? That must take forever!"); how the initial jailbreaking of the TiVo was done in Australia by Andrew Tridgell, who wanted to help his friends at the U.S. embassy watch TV shows from back home.
RMS made an appearance right at the end to present the Free Software Awards (to matz and to GNU Health) and to briefly promote the use of LibreJS, which (finally) addresses the issues he brought up several years ago in his essay The JavaScript Trap. The "Stump Stallman" portion of the meeting -- the part where the members line up at the mics to ask RMS pointless questions about the GPL, or try to praise his ideas in ways that confuse and annoy him -- was mercifully absent. Hopefully the organizers finally grokked that this process was doing more harm than good.
By the time the talks were completely wrapped up and all the immediate chatting had subsided, the last free UMass shuttle of the day had already left. The group I was stranded were friendly and interesting (Evan, Mike, Deb), though, and I was glad to walk with them the mile or so to the JFK stop, even though it was a little unclear whether I was going to make my Amtrak connection. Deb and I talked about The Ada Initiative and OpenHatch and how she once booked Peelander-Z at a house party in Somerville. We made it to the T stop, and I said goodbye to everyone and ultimately did end up making my train with a few minutes to spare. I bought a beer on the train and tried to program, but the hops gave me a headache -- or more likely I was just worn out -- and so I just ended up closing my eyes. Jerry and Hanlon texted me in response to a celebratory Tweet I tweeted, and informed me that they happened to be driving back from the Cape at that very moment and would I like to catch a ride back with them. It would have been like the wild west! But I was feeling too depleted to want to be around people and so I said no thanks.
Amtrak to Penn Station; C train to Jay St. When the subway pulled into Fulton St., this hipster dude rushing to make the train took a header down the stairs. He got up, clearly dazed, and scrambled on board. He'd taken damage, though -- blood began to flow insistently down his face from a gash near his hairline. "Oh, dude," said his friend. A well-meaning passenger produced a wet-wipe. I took a step back and watched.
I spent two days in Boston this year, as the FSF had promised a bigger, more organized conference, with more speakers than would fit a one-day meeting like last year's. I'm a lousy trip-planner -- Nina knows it, you all know it. The process makes me anxious, and so I defer it, which means that when I do get down to the business of, say, figuring out where to stay over a weekend, there are fewer options and they're more expensive. So it was that I neglected to discover that good ol' Greg had returned from China and was living back near the vicinity of MIT again until it was too late to ask him to couch-surf, gift of whiskey or no. Instead I booked myself a room at the Hampton Inn and shelled out for Amtrak tickets there and back. I woke up at 5:00 AM in order to make my 7:00 AM train, attempting to reach Penn Station via the F train, then falling back to trusty old Carecibo when the F hadn't come after 25 minutes. To get to the actual Acela platform at Penn Station you have to go down this escalator tube from the waiting area. Even though the first time I went to Boston for the conference I went via Chinatown bus, looking that tube hole always reminds me of that time, when I didn't really know where I was going or what it would be like when I got there. We stopped at Roy Rogers. I think I had french fries for breakfast.
The conference has moved around a bit over the years. The first few years I went to it, it was at MIT, which was neat, 'cuz that was probably the only way I was ever going to see MIT. And then they moved it to Harvard after MIT stopped cutting them a good enough deal on space and catering, and that was neat, too, because I'd been curious about Harvard. Last year they moved to Bunker Hill Community College, which was somewhat less neat, because small and drab and out in the sticks (oh god the Orange line) with only strip mall amenities. This year they moved yet again, to the UMass Boston campus, which was not super convenient to get to (T to a 20 minute ride on a shuttle bus) but which is right on the harbor, and so the high windows in its great big meeting rooms provide a wide-angle view of Dorchester Bay, cold and still, like a gray mirror. It's very New England, you see.
David Sugar was wrapping up his talk on the GNU Telephony project as I arrived. He fielded some questions about SIP support and various types of audio codecs, and then yielded the stage to Michael Flickinger from GNU Savannah. Michael gave a run-down of the services offered by Savannah and how they distinguish it from other established software forges like SourceForge as well as some of the flavor-of-the-month ones like gitorious. In particular, every project submission on Savannah is human-reviewed to ensure license consistency and avoid tricky legal situations further on down the line. (This is also a resource squeeze for them, as the process can be time-consuming.) He also explained some of the current plans for improving -- or rather, rewriting from scratch -- the software that drives Savannah, Savane. The audience was nonplussed, and he seemed nervous, so I raised my hand and gave a little sales pitch for Savannah, which I genuinely love, despite its warts. I don't know if it worked.
We broke for lunch after that. They'd arranged for these little bag lunches to be delivered, and I found an empty table in the adjacent room. Some people travel to these events with friends, but I'm kind of a unicorn among my local peer group when it comes to this particular interest, and so I'm always there alone. Not knowing anybody used to make me really uncomfortable, but over the years I've gotten used to doing this stuff on my own, gotten used to being and feeling weird. So while I was prepared to eat by myself, it was nice to be joined by people who introduced themselves Alison Chaiken and Tom Marble. We talked about data serialization frameworks (something that's been a focus of mine recently) and swapped FSF gossip.
Alison's talk was directly after lunch. She's working on establishing a foothold for Free software in cars, as part of her involvement in the more general "right to repair" movement. She pointed out that since the first software systems embedded in cars was for purposes of "info-tainment" -- DVD players and video games for the back seat -- there's an established tendency towards complacency around the next generation of car "apps," which will likely focus on safety and driver informatics. Some manufacturers have even begun to release SDKs of a sort, such as the Cadillac User Experience framework, which is built on top of X11. But without unrestricted access to source code, users will just have to trust manufacturers and their partners to deliver secure, bug-free software, which is by no means a safe bet: She referenced a study done by researchers at UCSD and the University of Washington that produced an exploit capable of disabling the brakes and steering console of a moving car by hijacking a wireless tire pressure sensor. Wowza! And then there is also, of course, the perennial motivation of being able to inspect and modify the operations of a device that you've, you know, bought.
Brett Smith gave an update on the work he's been doing in the licensing lab. He works on two fronts towards a single goal: The lab strives to help Free software developers do their work without excessive interference from the law; and it helps legislators understand what Free software developers do so that they don't interfere. Toward the first half of that agenda, he presented some new licensing resources for developers. The FSF's guide How to choose a Free software license for your own work aims to provide a criteria-based approach to license selection. There's a new paper about what he referred to as "Javascript labels," a technique for providing formal descriptions of license characteristics for Javascript source files, reflecting the current trend toward client-side processing for interactions with web applications. (He noted that the current proposal was unlikely to "take over the world," but said the FSF was very interested in feedback.) And the new version of the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0, features compatibility by default with the GPL; the MPL 2.0 process, in fact, was inspired by the highly interactive one that produced GPLv3.
"So that's our friends," he said. "Now let's talk about our enemies." The FSF has apparently been sending him around the world to participate in panel discussions for international trade agreements and bits of legislation. In the U.S., the Library of Congress is about to go through an every-three-years mandated review of the "chilling effects" of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The last time around, they resolved that "jailbreaking" devices like cell phones ought to be permitted. Brett said that this time the Software Freedom Law Center is going to be pushing for a provision to allow people to install their own software on any computing device that they own. And he's going to sit in on the negotations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, actually at the request of the treaty authors, who are hoping to avoid a post-ratification debacle of the scale of the one resulting from ACTA, which left even some of the representatives who voted for it wishing that they hadn't.
ginger coons (she spells it lower-case) is the E.I.C. of LibreGraphics Magazine, a paper-and-ink publication whose aim is to promote the use of Free graphics tools, with a focus on creators and how they use software tools. She repeated a question that she's often asked about Free graphics software: It's good, but is it print good? As proof she explained how the sausage gets made. The whole magazine is produced in Scribus, Inkscape, and GIMP, among other applications, and using Free fonts (Univers Else, Prop Courier Sans). They print on recycled paper with soy inks, and license the whole thing CC-BY-SA. She had several issues for demonstration and sale. They looked good! The print design straddles the line between trade publication and art magazine, kind of the same way that SEED, the magazine Nina used to work for, did. I wanted to buy her a copy of issue 1.3, which featured a striking pattern of opening and closing eyes -- ginger claimed they'd figured out a way to randomize the colors on a per-physical issue basis -- but it sold out quickly.
The "keynote" of Day 1 was Evan Prodromou's presentation on freedom for the social web. Since the launch of StatusNet a few years ago and with his commitment to engaging with its users for the purposes of technical support and philosophical debate, I feel like he's developed a pretty high profile in the Free world. So his talk was a celebrity appearance of sorts. It didn't hurt that he's a very engaging speaker, equal parts nerdy intensity and practiced charm. He opened with some historical perspective on social networking, detailing how providers have evolved from an application-per-media-type model to social platforms like Facebook -- a model he refers to as the "imperial network." These platforms have the primary benefit of mapping independent streams of shared social data onto the same unified social graph. This has provides the benefit of one-stop shopping for marketers, but doesn't do much for users -- in addition to the fact that it's, you know, evil and non-Free, it doesn't accomodate users' disparate interests very well, unless those interests are confined to finding one's friends on Facebook.
Evan proposes / predicts what he calls the federated social network, which is really a network of social networks with interoperability at the borders. He cited some examples of work in this direction: OStatus; activitystrea.ms; pubsubhubbub; Webfinger; salmon. The question always gets asked: Why aren't we there yet? Where's my Free Facebook? These things take time, he said, and people often focus on distractions like novel architectures and cryptotopian fantasy.
Evan wrapped up, and was quickly mobbed by inquisitve software developers. Matt got the room under control and dispersed everyone with instructions to reconvene at JJ Foley's on Berkeley St. I rode the shuttle back to JFK/UMass chatting with Deb Nicholson about Occupy Wall Street. At JJ Foley's I found myself at a table with Tom and two guys having a heated debate about the right business model to use for running a Free hardware mail-order business. Josh Gay stopped by and gave a engaging if somewhat manic explanation of his "theory of change." I can't claim to have understood him fully. I was looking for a way to engineer an outcome; he seemed to take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive view of things: When we're successful the associated circumstances will be such and such. But maybe that's the a more sophisticated way to think about it. Have any of you read Anathem? The senior FSF strategists remind me of the monks that live in the center of the monastery and only come out once every thousand years. The hipster monks might find them frustratingly impractical, but they've got powers, babies.
I was exhausted when I checked into my hotel. The room was clean, featured a fancy writing desk (who uses those?), and the huge bed had an embarrassment of pillows, big and hard like breast implants. I showered, shat, and flipped through a few local channels on the TV before calling it a night. Some people were having a party in another room on my floor. I could hear it but it didn't keep me up. I started the next morning with a breakfast of eggs and hastily-scarfed spicy potato cubes in the hotel lobby, CNN Headline News playing on a flat-screen TV levitating above some ficuses, and then struck out for the university.
Eben Moglen was in the middle of his yearly update on the legal battlegrounds for Free software. As ever, much of his focus was on software patents. The patent wars continue, and his most recent conclusions were more pessimistic than in years past: Organizations have found that software patents have become more worthwhile to trade than they are to hold, which has turned the legal brinksmanship over software patents into a multi-billion dollar game and thus prolonged the existence of patents themselves. "We can't stop the patent war," he said, "and even if we were participants we couldn't stop it." And he said that the Free software movement would not be able to achieve its social and political goals until the war is over.
Mike Linksvayer and Chris Webber from Creative Commons were up next, with a somewhat sunnier presentation on the progress of CCv4. There were a couple of pleasant diversions from the charted course of their talk in the form of plugs for MediaGoblin and the Liberated Pixel Cup (relevant to my interests!) both of which are side projects of Chris'. But they managed to get across the important data about the license revision process; to wit, its goals:
- Internationalization: Beyond translation, the licenses need to be "ported" to the legal jurisdiction of other countries; in contrast with Free software licenses, a lot of this porting has already been done, but they're looking to do more
- Interoperability: ...with older versions of the Creative Commons licenses and with other types of software licenses
- Readability: For the lay public and lawyers alike
- Rights for additional media: Such as databases of indexed content (this is apparently more of a thing in Europe)
Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, gave a charming autobiographical talk about how Emacs changed his life, beginning with his interest in hobby programming (the Ruby compiler) during the economic depression in Japan in the 1990s and how that led him to using Emacs, and then, as this type of thing often leads, to wanting to extend Emacs in the direction of better support for Ruby syntax (i.e., `ruby-mode'). And it was this activity that really got him deep into languages and software development. His argument, as best as I could transcribe it, in list form:
- Emacs taught me freedom for software
- Emacs taught me how to read code
- Emacs taught me the power of Lisp
- Emacs taught me how to implement a garbage collector
- Emacs helped me to code and debug
- Emacs helped me to write an edit text/email/documents
- Emacs helped me to be an effective programmer
- Emacs made me a hacker
- Emacs has changed my life (forever)
Matthew Garrett, now at Red Hat, talked about some hardware concerns for Free software developers, specfically the various implementations of "secure boot" and how they interact with non-vendor-approved (i.e., Free) software. Summary, from what I could understand: It's all bullshit predicated on some flimsy separation of hardware and software near the BIOS.
Karen Sandler, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Joanmarie Diggs, who does accessibility development gave a talk on the status and importance of accessibility support in Free software, using the GNOME 3.0 development lifecycle as a miniature case study of sorts. One point they made stuck with me in an uncomfty way (I assume this was the desired effect): We're all going to need accessibility technologies to continue to use software systems as we get older. We are merely "temporarily able-bodied." Jonathan Nadeau, an FSF campaigns intern who also happens to be a blind GNU/Linux user followed up with a first-hand account of the state of accessibility software. He's a big fan of Orca, a screen reader that's part of the GNOME project. In fact, he was using it to read some of the slides in his presentation back to him during his talk. I'd never seen a system like that in action before; it was impressive.
Jeremy Allison delivered the keynote for the second day. Like Evan Prodromou, he's become sort of a household name in the Free software world, and he also turned out to be a fun guy to listen to. His talk was less structured than Evan's; he presented the history of the relationship between his project, Samba, and the GPL. He'd chosen it initially as a way to "clear the air" within the community of developers reverse engineering the SMB protocol, who had adopted a policy of secrecy to prevent their improvement from being co-opted by their competitors. At the time, using the GPL helped Samba become the SMB implementation of note -- to the extent that he had to stop accepting corporate copyrights on contributions, because contributors were attempting to use their patches to entrap their non-GPL-compliant competitors. (The GPLv3 has eliminated this technique via compliance grace periods and additional flexibility for source code delivery.) He also shared some amusing anecdotes he'd acquired from his years in Free software development: How the benefits of Free software were made manifest whenever he collaborated with Microsoft ("Oh, you have to write all your own software? That must take forever!"); how the initial jailbreaking of the TiVo was done in Australia by Andrew Tridgell, who wanted to help his friends at the U.S. embassy watch TV shows from back home.
RMS made an appearance right at the end to present the Free Software Awards (to matz and to GNU Health) and to briefly promote the use of LibreJS, which (finally) addresses the issues he brought up several years ago in his essay The JavaScript Trap. The "Stump Stallman" portion of the meeting -- the part where the members line up at the mics to ask RMS pointless questions about the GPL, or try to praise his ideas in ways that confuse and annoy him -- was mercifully absent. Hopefully the organizers finally grokked that this process was doing more harm than good.
By the time the talks were completely wrapped up and all the immediate chatting had subsided, the last free UMass shuttle of the day had already left. The group I was stranded were friendly and interesting (Evan, Mike, Deb), though, and I was glad to walk with them the mile or so to the JFK stop, even though it was a little unclear whether I was going to make my Amtrak connection. Deb and I talked about The Ada Initiative and OpenHatch and how she once booked Peelander-Z at a house party in Somerville. We made it to the T stop, and I said goodbye to everyone and ultimately did end up making my train with a few minutes to spare. I bought a beer on the train and tried to program, but the hops gave me a headache -- or more likely I was just worn out -- and so I just ended up closing my eyes. Jerry and Hanlon texted me in response to a celebratory Tweet I tweeted, and informed me that they happened to be driving back from the Cape at that very moment and would I like to catch a ride back with them. It would have been like the wild west! But I was feeling too depleted to want to be around people and so I said no thanks.
Amtrak to Penn Station; C train to Jay St. When the subway pulled into Fulton St., this hipster dude rushing to make the train took a header down the stairs. He got up, clearly dazed, and scrambled on board. He'd taken damage, though -- blood began to flow insistently down his face from a gash near his hairline. "Oh, dude," said his friend. A well-meaning passenger produced a wet-wipe. I took a step back and watched.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Projects
Most of my friends and I do projects. Projects are a form of fidgeting until death, but I still feel like I have to do them. If I stopped doing projects, I don't know what I'd do!
Nina and I helped Beau out with his project Vanderpuss last summer. He spent the next six months or so editing it and prepping it for release. The DVD company sent him his first run a few weeks ago, and he finally screened it for everyone on Sunday at Cake Shop. He gave a funny speech to introduce the subject matter of the film, and he'd arranged for some bands to play before and after: There was a folk / anti-folk type dude who alternated between an acoustic guitar and Beau's day-glo painted electronic keyboard; he sang several crypto-misogynist songs about his problems with "blonde actresses." Then there was I'm Turning Into, a trio of plaid-clad dudes I'd actually been meaning to check out anyway. They were good! And they put out a strong vibe of enjoying themselves. Beau'd also managed to book a band called Eula, fresh from SXSW, who played jangly, punky guitar rock. They kept hyping the film, either ironically or earnestly referring to it as "Vanderpussy."
The movie itself was -- I don't know. I like it, but I'd already seen it several times and worked hard enough to blunt my own self-consciousness that I can't really tell how coherent it is. At the time we shot it, it seemed to be reasonably intelligible, a tribute to Beau and Doug and the other people who ginned up the ideas and the dialogue, so I'll trust that that hasn't changed. And it got laughs in the right places, and Drew as Vanderpuss was obviously in command of the material. It was fun!
Warning: Computer bullshit.
A little while ago, I finished a project of my own. I released an initial version of a software framework I'd been working on, in some form or another, ever since I graduated from college. It's called gzochi, and it's a system for developing multiplayer network games. I'd begun building it -- or feature prototypes of it -- around the time that Blizzard's World of Warcraft was really firing the consciousness of the media and the game-playing populace, and also at the same time that the Free Software folks were pushing both for Free implementations of popular bits of software and for Free game libraries and games. What I had in mind was a rich framework, a piece of software that would comprise, say, 90% of a working game. The only thing to be supplied by a downstream developer would be, well, game design, specified in as semantically direct a way as possible. Every other aspect of the application, from server-side persistence to client-side rendering, would be managed by the framework. Suffice it to say, this idea was worryingly vague and prohibitively ambitious. In fact, I spent the next several years side-tracked by the work required to create the systems that would support my hypothetical framework.
The time I spent working professionally in games -- at Rebel Monkey -- was a net negative, life-wise, except that I got to build some software on top of a Java game development framework called Project Darkstar that was tackling some of the same problems as gzochi. (Trivia: the Monkey actually hired Jeff Kesselman, the lead developer of that project, as its CTO. For about five months.) Instead of proposing a single, all-encompassing data model on top of the games it hosted, the PDS framework provided a set of container services that game applications could choose advantage of. Forget gaming: Project Darkstar is really more of a transactional execution and persistence framework. And the design of the system dovetailed with some lessons about software I was slowly internalizing at the time: One-size-fits-all software solutions are hard to develop; data modeling is the hardest and most important part of software engineering; the best way to expose software functionality is via thin, decomposable layers. So when I got the idea to pick up gzochi again, I decided to scrap what I'd done back in 2004 and re-implement it as a clone of PDS, using languages that I actually enjoy writing code in, C and Scheme. As a validation of that impulse, the past couple of months have been pretty nuts. I don't think I've ever had code come to me as easily as it has been for this project. And I just released an initial version! I'm going to take a break for a while and work on something else, but I'm bedeviled with fantasies of games to build.
Nina and I joined a gym over the winter -- for three months, I should say, beginning on New Years Day, so our membership is just about up. We went with Body Reserve, over on 5th Ave. and Union, which Tom and Jill have gently mocked over the years for its dopey eagle-with-a-barbell signage. They call it "American Dream Muscles." But they had the least aggressive terms and they priced competitively, relative to their offering, which seems, well, correspondingly modest. I hadn't exercised in a gym since, I don't know, college, but the qualia seem to be largely the same: There's a clammy, grimy texture to everything you touch, and a faint, not unpleasant worn-sneaker smell throughout. I was going primarily to run on the treadmill during the cold months, but I also pushed myself to branch out to other machines and exercises. I use the free weights, glaring at myself in the mirror as it seems is customary. I use one of the abdominal "crunch" machines. I do the thing where you pull down on a bar and it lifts up some weights, a kind of seated chin-up. Is it working? Unclear. I've got this little hot dog body, you see.
Bad Movie Night continues unabated. Recent selections:
I went out to Maxwell's on Sunday night to catch the WFMU Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia, the big karaoke party that signals the end of their annual two-week-long fundraising marathon. I know I'm not supposed to merely tolerate it, but I not-so-secretly love the marathon -- my favorite show, the lively Prank Patrol, brings out The Wheel Of Fate, a full complement of tortures unbecoming the middle-aged hosts: This year's edition promised underwear trading, foot kissing, and briefs full of coffee grounds. The other shows on the station get a whole lot more personable as well, since even the music shows with the most taciturn hosts are obligated to devote half their air time to shilling. You get to experience non-naturally-occurring DJ combos: Frangry vs. Station Manager Ken! Billy Jam vs. Bronwyn Carlton! Tom Scharpling vs. Terre T, pretending they're not real-life married! And Scharpling's show is always a stunner, even if it lacks the sweaty desperation of some of the less popular programs. I've pledged (to 7SD) the past several years, partly out of the goodness of my heart, partly out of a desire, as Andy says, to hear my name said on the "ray-dee-oh," but I'd never had the nerve to make it out to Hoof & Mouth. I decided to try it this year after watching a joyous video of last year's, and so I bailed early on dinner at Surfish with Eve and Jon and took the F to 14th for the switch to the PATH.
The hardest part of making it to Maxwell's is the trek down Washington Ave. When I was younger and more attuned to discomfort, my spirit revolted at the thought of walking eleven long blocks to my destination, especially in the cold -- that street really focuses the wind on your business. But I am older now, and I persevered, taking opportunities to peek into the windows of ground-floor brownstone apartments and check out the anti-Obama tchotchkes inexplicably on offer for St. Patrick's Day at more than one pharmacy. Hoboken's a pretty town, I thought. There's a sports bar on every corner, but I could live there. It's what I always think.
I knew I was at Maxwell's even before I saw the sign, because I caught sight of Ken in the window wearing his "vinyl suit," a set of armored plates built out of fire-wilted records. He was wearing a kilt, too, but not much else. Irwin Chusid and Therese were there, too, in a little reserved part of the front of the house where they'd set up a remote broadcasting system to finish out the fundraising. The real action was in the back, where the Sinfonia (a bunch of musically adept FMU DJs) were playing. I arrived in time to catch the end of X. Ray Burns' performance, delivered naked to the waist, his beard pointed like a satyr's. After him came songs sung by Bryce Kretschmann, Keili Hamilton, Lamin Fofana, and other DJs with familiar names and sometimes familiar faces. I picked out a bunch of WFMU luminaries in the crowd: AP Mike (Lisk), Frangry (whose real name, I overheard, is Francine), Andy Cohen, a guy I think might've been Kevin Nutt from Sinner's Crossroads. The big performances came at the end of the night. Ken invited "The Queen of WFMU," Terre T, to the stage, and she turned in a high-octane performance of "Ace Of Spades," quite possibly one of the most difficult songs ever to play or sing. And then it was time for "The King of WFMU," a characteristically disheveled Tom Scharpling, who sang "Communication Breakdown" and, as he'd hinted he would, "Killing In The Name Of." To make the latter song radio friendly (a feed of the festivities was going out over the air) he edited its refrain to "Fudge you, I won't do what you tell me." The appreciative mosh pit that had formed roared it right back at him. Upon finishing, he dropped the mic and stepped off the stage into the crowd, half rock star, half Joe Lunchpail.
Nina and I helped Beau out with his project Vanderpuss last summer. He spent the next six months or so editing it and prepping it for release. The DVD company sent him his first run a few weeks ago, and he finally screened it for everyone on Sunday at Cake Shop. He gave a funny speech to introduce the subject matter of the film, and he'd arranged for some bands to play before and after: There was a folk / anti-folk type dude who alternated between an acoustic guitar and Beau's day-glo painted electronic keyboard; he sang several crypto-misogynist songs about his problems with "blonde actresses." Then there was I'm Turning Into, a trio of plaid-clad dudes I'd actually been meaning to check out anyway. They were good! And they put out a strong vibe of enjoying themselves. Beau'd also managed to book a band called Eula, fresh from SXSW, who played jangly, punky guitar rock. They kept hyping the film, either ironically or earnestly referring to it as "Vanderpussy."
The movie itself was -- I don't know. I like it, but I'd already seen it several times and worked hard enough to blunt my own self-consciousness that I can't really tell how coherent it is. At the time we shot it, it seemed to be reasonably intelligible, a tribute to Beau and Doug and the other people who ginned up the ideas and the dialogue, so I'll trust that that hasn't changed. And it got laughs in the right places, and Drew as Vanderpuss was obviously in command of the material. It was fun!
Warning: Computer bullshit.
A little while ago, I finished a project of my own. I released an initial version of a software framework I'd been working on, in some form or another, ever since I graduated from college. It's called gzochi, and it's a system for developing multiplayer network games. I'd begun building it -- or feature prototypes of it -- around the time that Blizzard's World of Warcraft was really firing the consciousness of the media and the game-playing populace, and also at the same time that the Free Software folks were pushing both for Free implementations of popular bits of software and for Free game libraries and games. What I had in mind was a rich framework, a piece of software that would comprise, say, 90% of a working game. The only thing to be supplied by a downstream developer would be, well, game design, specified in as semantically direct a way as possible. Every other aspect of the application, from server-side persistence to client-side rendering, would be managed by the framework. Suffice it to say, this idea was worryingly vague and prohibitively ambitious. In fact, I spent the next several years side-tracked by the work required to create the systems that would support my hypothetical framework.
The time I spent working professionally in games -- at Rebel Monkey -- was a net negative, life-wise, except that I got to build some software on top of a Java game development framework called Project Darkstar that was tackling some of the same problems as gzochi. (Trivia: the Monkey actually hired Jeff Kesselman, the lead developer of that project, as its CTO. For about five months.) Instead of proposing a single, all-encompassing data model on top of the games it hosted, the PDS framework provided a set of container services that game applications could choose advantage of. Forget gaming: Project Darkstar is really more of a transactional execution and persistence framework. And the design of the system dovetailed with some lessons about software I was slowly internalizing at the time: One-size-fits-all software solutions are hard to develop; data modeling is the hardest and most important part of software engineering; the best way to expose software functionality is via thin, decomposable layers. So when I got the idea to pick up gzochi again, I decided to scrap what I'd done back in 2004 and re-implement it as a clone of PDS, using languages that I actually enjoy writing code in, C and Scheme. As a validation of that impulse, the past couple of months have been pretty nuts. I don't think I've ever had code come to me as easily as it has been for this project. And I just released an initial version! I'm going to take a break for a while and work on something else, but I'm bedeviled with fantasies of games to build.
Nina and I joined a gym over the winter -- for three months, I should say, beginning on New Years Day, so our membership is just about up. We went with Body Reserve, over on 5th Ave. and Union, which Tom and Jill have gently mocked over the years for its dopey eagle-with-a-barbell signage. They call it "American Dream Muscles." But they had the least aggressive terms and they priced competitively, relative to their offering, which seems, well, correspondingly modest. I hadn't exercised in a gym since, I don't know, college, but the qualia seem to be largely the same: There's a clammy, grimy texture to everything you touch, and a faint, not unpleasant worn-sneaker smell throughout. I was going primarily to run on the treadmill during the cold months, but I also pushed myself to branch out to other machines and exercises. I use the free weights, glaring at myself in the mirror as it seems is customary. I use one of the abdominal "crunch" machines. I do the thing where you pull down on a bar and it lifts up some weights, a kind of seated chin-up. Is it working? Unclear. I've got this little hot dog body, you see.
Bad Movie Night continues unabated. Recent selections:
- Snowboard Academy: A miscalculated slobs-vs-snobs comedy that pits snowboarders against skiers -- as if the distinction were somehow important -- in a tussle for liebensraum at a fancy resort. The always unhealthy-looking Corey Haim plays a degenerate 'boarder who somehow becomes the ambassador for his "sport," asserting that "snowboading is new, it's happening, it's hot, it's fresh." A beef jerky-textured Jim Varney makes an appearance as a hack road comic who's inexplicably promoted to management. The movie attempts nothing and goes nowhere.
- Undefeatable: We were pretty excited to see this one, as it's the source of a famous Internet video called Best fight scene of all time. It is actually a very good fight scene, cartoonishly destructive and unnecessarily shirtless, but the rest of the movie is richly silly as well -- the guy who gets his eyeball poked out at the end is a wild-eyed caricature of a villain with an Oedipus complex that drives him to kill. But the funniest part for me is how seriously the film takes the martial arts pedigree of its stars, John Miller and Cynthia Rothrock. There are multiple, endless scenes of lame dudes in sweatpants delivering very serious-looking practice punches to the air. It's as much of a boner-killer for the concept of karate as people who pronounce it kah-rah-tay.
I went out to Maxwell's on Sunday night to catch the WFMU Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia, the big karaoke party that signals the end of their annual two-week-long fundraising marathon. I know I'm not supposed to merely tolerate it, but I not-so-secretly love the marathon -- my favorite show, the lively Prank Patrol, brings out The Wheel Of Fate, a full complement of tortures unbecoming the middle-aged hosts: This year's edition promised underwear trading, foot kissing, and briefs full of coffee grounds. The other shows on the station get a whole lot more personable as well, since even the music shows with the most taciturn hosts are obligated to devote half their air time to shilling. You get to experience non-naturally-occurring DJ combos: Frangry vs. Station Manager Ken! Billy Jam vs. Bronwyn Carlton! Tom Scharpling vs. Terre T, pretending they're not real-life married! And Scharpling's show is always a stunner, even if it lacks the sweaty desperation of some of the less popular programs. I've pledged (to 7SD) the past several years, partly out of the goodness of my heart, partly out of a desire, as Andy says, to hear my name said on the "ray-dee-oh," but I'd never had the nerve to make it out to Hoof & Mouth. I decided to try it this year after watching a joyous video of last year's, and so I bailed early on dinner at Surfish with Eve and Jon and took the F to 14th for the switch to the PATH.
The hardest part of making it to Maxwell's is the trek down Washington Ave. When I was younger and more attuned to discomfort, my spirit revolted at the thought of walking eleven long blocks to my destination, especially in the cold -- that street really focuses the wind on your business. But I am older now, and I persevered, taking opportunities to peek into the windows of ground-floor brownstone apartments and check out the anti-Obama tchotchkes inexplicably on offer for St. Patrick's Day at more than one pharmacy. Hoboken's a pretty town, I thought. There's a sports bar on every corner, but I could live there. It's what I always think.
I knew I was at Maxwell's even before I saw the sign, because I caught sight of Ken in the window wearing his "vinyl suit," a set of armored plates built out of fire-wilted records. He was wearing a kilt, too, but not much else. Irwin Chusid and Therese were there, too, in a little reserved part of the front of the house where they'd set up a remote broadcasting system to finish out the fundraising. The real action was in the back, where the Sinfonia (a bunch of musically adept FMU DJs) were playing. I arrived in time to catch the end of X. Ray Burns' performance, delivered naked to the waist, his beard pointed like a satyr's. After him came songs sung by Bryce Kretschmann, Keili Hamilton, Lamin Fofana, and other DJs with familiar names and sometimes familiar faces. I picked out a bunch of WFMU luminaries in the crowd: AP Mike (Lisk), Frangry (whose real name, I overheard, is Francine), Andy Cohen, a guy I think might've been Kevin Nutt from Sinner's Crossroads. The big performances came at the end of the night. Ken invited "The Queen of WFMU," Terre T, to the stage, and she turned in a high-octane performance of "Ace Of Spades," quite possibly one of the most difficult songs ever to play or sing. And then it was time for "The King of WFMU," a characteristically disheveled Tom Scharpling, who sang "Communication Breakdown" and, as he'd hinted he would, "Killing In The Name Of." To make the latter song radio friendly (a feed of the festivities was going out over the air) he edited its refrain to "Fudge you, I won't do what you tell me." The appreciative mosh pit that had formed roared it right back at him. Upon finishing, he dropped the mic and stepped off the stage into the crowd, half rock star, half Joe Lunchpail.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Tug Job
We -- Bel Argosy -- played our first show of the year at Don Pedro's on Wednesday, February 1st. Nina's brother Michael booked the show for us. He's trying his hand, I think, at being a show promoter / all-around music guy. I made the poster for this one. It's the first poster I've made since, gee, the one I drew for The Headliners back in 1998, in ball-point pen, with Billy and Chris and Simon as Abraham Lincoln (there was no photo of him to work from). I think I used it in my college applications. For this one, I went with a paper-and-Scotch tape 80's hardcore aesthetic. I think it worked out okay. As part of the Bel Argosy 2012 marketing initiative, Chris and I went out to Bushwick the weekend before the show to hang up flyers. Don Pedro's has changed, babies. The last time I was there was several years ago, when I saw Fuck School and Cerebral Ballzy, and back then it was a bit scarier. It looked like a rec center that'd been trashed during a World Cup, all crumbling asbestos tile and Latin-American soccer club banners. It's gone through some design iterations since then. In addition to an overall renovation, there's a photo booth and two Skee Ball machines, clearly an attempt to draw a hipster crowd, and they've got a menu with pulled pork "sliders" -- a sine qua non, I think, for trendy bars with kitchens. We hung up all three of my painstakingly photocopied flyers and then settled in for a drink. The band on stage, which I think was called Born Loose, finished their set and retired to the bar to have a drink themselves and receive well-wishers from the audience. "Isn't that the guy from The Candy Snatchers?" Chris asked, nodding at the lead singer and referring to a band we saw a few times in high school, notorious for their blood-spraying live act and an interview with Maximum Rocknroll that left our teenage selves tittering over the phrase "brain ass." He didn't want to bother the guy, but I was drunker and maybe a bit less star-struck than him, and so when he went to take a piss I went over and introduced myself. He was super nice! And his new band is very good. Celebrity!
On the night of the show, I trained it up to Billy's house to pick up our equipment, and then he and I took the train back downtown and into Bushwick. We lugged the drum stuff, a guitar, and a guitar amp the six or so interminable blocks from the subway to Don Pedro's. I'd bought a new snare drum a week or so previous, as part of the Bel Argosy 2012 Capital Improvement plan, and this show was its debut. The old snare drum was part of the ancient Headliners drum kit we'd bought (cymbals included) for something like $250 from a sneering, dismissive clerk at Sam Ash back in freshman year of college. It's served us / me very well over the years, but was starting advertise its age and quality pretty obviously -- despite replacements and tuning attempts over the years, the tom and kick drum heads are all slack and wrinkly, and the snare drum itself is covered in a criss-crossing pattern of black electrical tape to patch tears in the heads and keep the tone appropriately flat.
So Beau and I hit up the Guitar Center at the Atlantic Ave. mall on an overcast Sunday afternoon -- they may be Kryptonite for local music stores, but they're way friendlier. I didn't know exactly what we were looking for. We struggled to describe our "drum sound" to the salesperson, a big guy with an Australian accent and a scar running down his forehead. If there's a vocabulary for drum tone -- surely there is -- I surely do not know it. "We want, like, a really... 'crack' kind of snare sound," I said. "Kind of flat and military-sounding. As little melody or resonance as possible." Ultimately we had to resort to mouth noises to explain. But the dude was game and showed us a bunch of different snare drums, and we found one that I think sounds really good, a steel-shell Pearl with a really crisp sound. And it was only $200!
The first band of the night was called Yankee Bang Bang. They're a three-piece who play poppy, guitar-oriented punk songs with some strong Raga flavor. Their frontwoman, Sita, took singing lessons in India, and they do a mean cover of "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" -- no small feat once you see first-hand how fast and tricky that lead line is. After them came Stuvoodoo. Their Facebook page says they're "what comes after Green Day," but they sounded a lot more like, say, The Doors. They've got a kind of bluesy, cock-rock sound, and a frontman who looks like Victor Creed. I particularly like their song "Grow My City Goldmine," although I suspect that it may be about Warcraft. We played last. The new snare worked great! Crack crack crack.
Meeting Sita worked out to our mutual advantage: Her band was playing a show at Cake Shop on the 16th, and one of the bands on the bill had dropped out; she asked if we could fill in. Of course, we said. It was good to be back at Cake Shop! It's a very comfortable venue to play -- there's an actual green room (of sorts); they've got a real backline; and the sound guy, always recognizable in his tights and knee-length sweater, provides a clear mix, at least for us on stage. The first band up was Cave Days, a three-piece who play moody, drone-y guitar songs. We were after them. We played a new song we'd been working on called "Albert Chasey." I think we sounded good! I got a little too drunk and made the mistake of playing around with the tinsel hanging behind the stage, which led to a private moment of panic as Billy started a song while my hi-hat hand was firmly entangled in the stuff. Yankee Bang Bang was after us, and they played a really great, tight set, even better than the last time we saw them. They were followed in turn by Clinical Trials, a really awesome guitar-and-drums two-piece who were kind of like a female version of Ken South Rock -- or maybe KSR is a male version of them, since Clinical Trials has been around longer. They played bluesy garage punk songs, with shreddy guitar parts and hoarse, Distillers-style vocals. Their drummer was particularly impressive, breezily rolling up and down the kit without breaking a sweat. She was nuts. It was a fun night!
It's the middle of February, though, and we've only played two shows so far this year. How have we been spending our time? We're trying to press some vinyl! Billy and Chris, veterans of a half dozen bands that are no longer of this earth, had the observation that the rush to record might have stunted the development of some of their earlier projects, and so we spent our first year playing out and not worrying about putting anything down on tape. But people had been asking for full-band recordings of our songs, and Cenk let us know that he'd help us release something once we had something to release. So we prepared the Practice Hole Mark II and started experimenting with microphone placement and cable configurations, and over the course of several months we've found a process that so far seems to serves us well. Here it is: Billy records a "scratch" guitar track to a metronome in Logic. We use three mics for the drums -- two dynamic mics, one for each of the kick and snare drums; and one condenser mic for the cymbals and other drums. I play the drums to the metronome and the scratch track, and we record it to a four track tape, which seems to lead to a more forgiving sound -- less echo-y and with a little bit of microphone hiss. After that, we "bounce" the drum tracks back to the computer, and Beau and Billy and Chris record the two guitar tracks and the bass track directly from the amp to the computer. It usually takes me the most takes to get a workable track -- a testament both to my particular level of skill but also to how "clean" the drum track needs to be -- followed by Chris. Billy and Beau can usually nail their tracks in one or two takes. It's not a race. In the end we get something great!
We've decided to name the record "Tug Job," for a couple of reasons: One, because we liked the cheeky, obvious innuendo, which puts me in mind of similarly-titled albums by The Dickies, The Queers, and The Dwarves, among others; and two, as a tribute to how long it's taken us and how much effort we put in to get it done. "Getting this album out has been a real tug job," Billy suggested as an apropos example usage. It sounded plausible enough that I took it as a piece of idiom with which I'd been hitherto unfamiliar. It's not -- give it a Google and see what, uh, comes up.
On the night of the show, I trained it up to Billy's house to pick up our equipment, and then he and I took the train back downtown and into Bushwick. We lugged the drum stuff, a guitar, and a guitar amp the six or so interminable blocks from the subway to Don Pedro's. I'd bought a new snare drum a week or so previous, as part of the Bel Argosy 2012 Capital Improvement plan, and this show was its debut. The old snare drum was part of the ancient Headliners drum kit we'd bought (cymbals included) for something like $250 from a sneering, dismissive clerk at Sam Ash back in freshman year of college. It's served us / me very well over the years, but was starting advertise its age and quality pretty obviously -- despite replacements and tuning attempts over the years, the tom and kick drum heads are all slack and wrinkly, and the snare drum itself is covered in a criss-crossing pattern of black electrical tape to patch tears in the heads and keep the tone appropriately flat.
So Beau and I hit up the Guitar Center at the Atlantic Ave. mall on an overcast Sunday afternoon -- they may be Kryptonite for local music stores, but they're way friendlier. I didn't know exactly what we were looking for. We struggled to describe our "drum sound" to the salesperson, a big guy with an Australian accent and a scar running down his forehead. If there's a vocabulary for drum tone -- surely there is -- I surely do not know it. "We want, like, a really... 'crack' kind of snare sound," I said. "Kind of flat and military-sounding. As little melody or resonance as possible." Ultimately we had to resort to mouth noises to explain. But the dude was game and showed us a bunch of different snare drums, and we found one that I think sounds really good, a steel-shell Pearl with a really crisp sound. And it was only $200!
The first band of the night was called Yankee Bang Bang. They're a three-piece who play poppy, guitar-oriented punk songs with some strong Raga flavor. Their frontwoman, Sita, took singing lessons in India, and they do a mean cover of "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" -- no small feat once you see first-hand how fast and tricky that lead line is. After them came Stuvoodoo. Their Facebook page says they're "what comes after Green Day," but they sounded a lot more like, say, The Doors. They've got a kind of bluesy, cock-rock sound, and a frontman who looks like Victor Creed. I particularly like their song "Grow My City Goldmine," although I suspect that it may be about Warcraft. We played last. The new snare worked great! Crack crack crack.
Meeting Sita worked out to our mutual advantage: Her band was playing a show at Cake Shop on the 16th, and one of the bands on the bill had dropped out; she asked if we could fill in. Of course, we said. It was good to be back at Cake Shop! It's a very comfortable venue to play -- there's an actual green room (of sorts); they've got a real backline; and the sound guy, always recognizable in his tights and knee-length sweater, provides a clear mix, at least for us on stage. The first band up was Cave Days, a three-piece who play moody, drone-y guitar songs. We were after them. We played a new song we'd been working on called "Albert Chasey." I think we sounded good! I got a little too drunk and made the mistake of playing around with the tinsel hanging behind the stage, which led to a private moment of panic as Billy started a song while my hi-hat hand was firmly entangled in the stuff. Yankee Bang Bang was after us, and they played a really great, tight set, even better than the last time we saw them. They were followed in turn by Clinical Trials, a really awesome guitar-and-drums two-piece who were kind of like a female version of Ken South Rock -- or maybe KSR is a male version of them, since Clinical Trials has been around longer. They played bluesy garage punk songs, with shreddy guitar parts and hoarse, Distillers-style vocals. Their drummer was particularly impressive, breezily rolling up and down the kit without breaking a sweat. She was nuts. It was a fun night!
It's the middle of February, though, and we've only played two shows so far this year. How have we been spending our time? We're trying to press some vinyl! Billy and Chris, veterans of a half dozen bands that are no longer of this earth, had the observation that the rush to record might have stunted the development of some of their earlier projects, and so we spent our first year playing out and not worrying about putting anything down on tape. But people had been asking for full-band recordings of our songs, and Cenk let us know that he'd help us release something once we had something to release. So we prepared the Practice Hole Mark II and started experimenting with microphone placement and cable configurations, and over the course of several months we've found a process that so far seems to serves us well. Here it is: Billy records a "scratch" guitar track to a metronome in Logic. We use three mics for the drums -- two dynamic mics, one for each of the kick and snare drums; and one condenser mic for the cymbals and other drums. I play the drums to the metronome and the scratch track, and we record it to a four track tape, which seems to lead to a more forgiving sound -- less echo-y and with a little bit of microphone hiss. After that, we "bounce" the drum tracks back to the computer, and Beau and Billy and Chris record the two guitar tracks and the bass track directly from the amp to the computer. It usually takes me the most takes to get a workable track -- a testament both to my particular level of skill but also to how "clean" the drum track needs to be -- followed by Chris. Billy and Beau can usually nail their tracks in one or two takes. It's not a race. In the end we get something great!
We've decided to name the record "Tug Job," for a couple of reasons: One, because we liked the cheeky, obvious innuendo, which puts me in mind of similarly-titled albums by The Dickies, The Queers, and The Dwarves, among others; and two, as a tribute to how long it's taken us and how much effort we put in to get it done. "Getting this album out has been a real tug job," Billy suggested as an apropos example usage. It sounded plausible enough that I took it as a piece of idiom with which I'd been hitherto unfamiliar. It's not -- give it a Google and see what, uh, comes up.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Punchums
Winter has been dry, the weather alternating between periods of eerie warmth and icy cold. This is the cold and sleepy time of the year. It's the dead time, when the cost of all the business of the past year is brought to bear. I'm feeling sluggish and drained these days. Nina's been quite sick -- fever, etc. -- and the world just seems like it doesn't wanna get out of bed.
Nina and I went to brunch last weekend at Stone Park Cafe. We've been eating a lot of weekend restaurant brunches these past several weeks, often at Juventino, sometimes across the street from it at Perch, sometimes a few blocks north at Bogota. I guess it's kind of an expensive habit, but as expensive habits go, well, it's not really that expensive. Stone Park is usually thronged with dopey Park Slope yuppie types -- you can tell exactly how busy it is inside by how many people wearing sunglasses and pastel-colored fleece are lurking around the entrance waiting to be called in for a table. Sunday was bitterly cold, though, and so we were able to sneak in after a mere ten-minute wait. We ordered Bloody Marys with our food, and they came with oversize caper berries in them instead of olives, each berry packed full of crunchy little seeds like some kind of extra-terrestrial shipping container. Nina had the bluefish cakes. I think I had a "chef omelette." It was pretty good, but I don't think there's any brunch that's worth waiting on line for. Waiting on line at restaurants is horse shit.
After brunch we resolved to go to the grocery store, heading up to 6th Ave. in the hopes of presenting less of ourselves to the freezing wind. It worked, at least until we got to 9th St. and had to turn right, at which point we felt the icy sting of a powerful westerly wind. Or rather, I felt it -- Nina, ever practical, had deployed her full-length down coat, which afforded her its rich and downy protection. I was wearing my dumb leather jacket-and-jeans combination, no hat, no gloves, which was useless at this temperature. I begged for a pit stop at the CVS to warm up and wipe my nose.
We made it to C-Town, though, and wove drunkenly up and down the aisles, plucking stock off the shelves according to habit. Our take-away: D'Anjou pears (4); Gala apples (4); an orange Holland pepper (why not); Stoned Wheat Thins crackers; Arnold Health Nut sandwich bread; Nature Valley granola bars (peanut butter flavor); a jar of pickled beets; Celestial Seasonings tea bags (Sleepytime); Krasdale peanut butter (chunky); 3M Dobie scrubbing sponge; Friskies Special Diet Beef & Liver Entrée (8 cans); Bachman hard pretzels; Desert Pepper salsa (spicy black bean flavor); Green & Black's chocolate (1 bar) (peanut with sea salt flavor, a reward for running errands); Pete & Gerry's cage-free organic eggs (half dozen); Breakstone unsalted butter (2 bars); Morningstar Farms "Chik Patties" (1 box); Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers (1 box); Amy's Organic burritos: bean and cheese (2), Especial (2), black bean (2); Krasdale frozen peas; Krasdale swiss cheese. We considered buying, but did not buy: Expensive, exotically-sourced strawberries and blueberries; a live lobster, as always.
It was still freezing on the way back from the grocery store. We passed a vendor selling knit caps off a folding table outside the Brooklyn Wholesale storefront. I bought one for five bucks and put it on my head, which stopped my monk dime (okay, sand-dollar) from stinging. I still needed gloves to help me get the groceries home, and Nina stopped us at Save On Fifth. I'd bought a tiny little barbecue grill there many years ago for ten dollars. The cold had sapped my will, but not enough so that I wasn't capable of making a fuss over the which exact pair of gloves to buy. "Too bulky," I told Nina when she suggested a pair of big padded work gloves. "Those are lady gloves!" I said about another pair. Finally, the security guard, overhearing all this from his white particle-board cubicle by the door, admonished me, "Come on, man. Just do what she says!" So I did.
There is a new beer technique I need to explain. I learned it from Evan on New Year's Eve, as we were sitting around his apartment in Williamsburg. He got a can of Tecate from the bag of them we'd bought at the gas station, and instead of bending the tab up and over to open the can, he raised one knuckle and punched down on the perforated tab area on the top of the can several times until it tore, spraying a bit of beer but opening the can enough to drink. He said he'd learned the trick growing up as a bad kid in Wisconsin. I tried it on a can myself, and, lo and behold, after punching and swearing a bit, it popped open! I love this trick, because, unlike, say, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, it requires no special knowledge or particular dexterity. You just have to be willing to punch a metal can seven to ten times, harder than seems reasonable to punch an object that you are holding, and quickly enough that the can opens before your hand starts to hurt too much to keep punching. You may often hit the raised lip at the edge of the can a bunch of times by accident, which really hurts. That's just part of the deal. You may also wind up tearing your knuckles open and getting blood on things, which is just, you know, icing.
Oh, so I think we should call Tecates "punchums" from now on. Let's see if that takes off.
Nina and I went to brunch last weekend at Stone Park Cafe. We've been eating a lot of weekend restaurant brunches these past several weeks, often at Juventino, sometimes across the street from it at Perch, sometimes a few blocks north at Bogota. I guess it's kind of an expensive habit, but as expensive habits go, well, it's not really that expensive. Stone Park is usually thronged with dopey Park Slope yuppie types -- you can tell exactly how busy it is inside by how many people wearing sunglasses and pastel-colored fleece are lurking around the entrance waiting to be called in for a table. Sunday was bitterly cold, though, and so we were able to sneak in after a mere ten-minute wait. We ordered Bloody Marys with our food, and they came with oversize caper berries in them instead of olives, each berry packed full of crunchy little seeds like some kind of extra-terrestrial shipping container. Nina had the bluefish cakes. I think I had a "chef omelette." It was pretty good, but I don't think there's any brunch that's worth waiting on line for. Waiting on line at restaurants is horse shit.
After brunch we resolved to go to the grocery store, heading up to 6th Ave. in the hopes of presenting less of ourselves to the freezing wind. It worked, at least until we got to 9th St. and had to turn right, at which point we felt the icy sting of a powerful westerly wind. Or rather, I felt it -- Nina, ever practical, had deployed her full-length down coat, which afforded her its rich and downy protection. I was wearing my dumb leather jacket-and-jeans combination, no hat, no gloves, which was useless at this temperature. I begged for a pit stop at the CVS to warm up and wipe my nose.
We made it to C-Town, though, and wove drunkenly up and down the aisles, plucking stock off the shelves according to habit. Our take-away: D'Anjou pears (4); Gala apples (4); an orange Holland pepper (why not); Stoned Wheat Thins crackers; Arnold Health Nut sandwich bread; Nature Valley granola bars (peanut butter flavor); a jar of pickled beets; Celestial Seasonings tea bags (Sleepytime); Krasdale peanut butter (chunky); 3M Dobie scrubbing sponge; Friskies Special Diet Beef & Liver Entrée (8 cans); Bachman hard pretzels; Desert Pepper salsa (spicy black bean flavor); Green & Black's chocolate (1 bar) (peanut with sea salt flavor, a reward for running errands); Pete & Gerry's cage-free organic eggs (half dozen); Breakstone unsalted butter (2 bars); Morningstar Farms "Chik Patties" (1 box); Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers (1 box); Amy's Organic burritos: bean and cheese (2), Especial (2), black bean (2); Krasdale frozen peas; Krasdale swiss cheese. We considered buying, but did not buy: Expensive, exotically-sourced strawberries and blueberries; a live lobster, as always.
It was still freezing on the way back from the grocery store. We passed a vendor selling knit caps off a folding table outside the Brooklyn Wholesale storefront. I bought one for five bucks and put it on my head, which stopped my monk dime (okay, sand-dollar) from stinging. I still needed gloves to help me get the groceries home, and Nina stopped us at Save On Fifth. I'd bought a tiny little barbecue grill there many years ago for ten dollars. The cold had sapped my will, but not enough so that I wasn't capable of making a fuss over the which exact pair of gloves to buy. "Too bulky," I told Nina when she suggested a pair of big padded work gloves. "Those are lady gloves!" I said about another pair. Finally, the security guard, overhearing all this from his white particle-board cubicle by the door, admonished me, "Come on, man. Just do what she says!" So I did.
There is a new beer technique I need to explain. I learned it from Evan on New Year's Eve, as we were sitting around his apartment in Williamsburg. He got a can of Tecate from the bag of them we'd bought at the gas station, and instead of bending the tab up and over to open the can, he raised one knuckle and punched down on the perforated tab area on the top of the can several times until it tore, spraying a bit of beer but opening the can enough to drink. He said he'd learned the trick growing up as a bad kid in Wisconsin. I tried it on a can myself, and, lo and behold, after punching and swearing a bit, it popped open! I love this trick, because, unlike, say, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, it requires no special knowledge or particular dexterity. You just have to be willing to punch a metal can seven to ten times, harder than seems reasonable to punch an object that you are holding, and quickly enough that the can opens before your hand starts to hurt too much to keep punching. You may often hit the raised lip at the edge of the can a bunch of times by accident, which really hurts. That's just part of the deal. You may also wind up tearing your knuckles open and getting blood on things, which is just, you know, icing.
Oh, so I think we should call Tecates "punchums" from now on. Let's see if that takes off.
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