...is what I heard a guy say at one of the CMJ shows I went to this week. And, you know, sure -- the publications and record labels that organize all the showcases do dopey, corporate things like create "dossiers" of bands, organized by supposed genre. But I do the same thing in Google Docs as I'm planning which things to go to, optimizing my travel time between venues and sampling the pool of artists using an advanced heuristic based on how punk the band's name is. Truly, it is the only way to survive musical Hell Week. The festival started on Tuesday, I think, but I'd spent that night with the decidedly non-underground, non-emerging-new-act Gwar, so Wednesday was the first night of CMJ for me. I started at Spike Hill, where I wanted to see Fast Years. They played lo-fi, melodic garage-punk, and all the dudes looked like different Lord of the Rings characters. But they had the misfortune of playing an early bill, so the joint was pretty empty. I was surprised to see a familiar face in Ace Reporter, band that came on next -- it's fronted by Chris Snyder, bandmate of my friend Previn in the lost and lamented The States.
Nina met me outside and we jogged over to Trash Bar to see her friend and former colleague June's band, Vagina Panther, play a set. They're always fun and since the band is peopled with professional designers the swag is always cool. This year their goodie bags included some new stickers and a copy of the LP that corresponds to my beloved "titty" poster that we picked up at a show of theirs a few years back. We spent a few minutes talking to some other old SEED Magazine types, and then we were off again! Our next stop was Cake Shop, where we were hoping to see Punks On Mars. We got there late but were in luck -- there'd been a re-ordering of the set times, and they were going on right when we arrived. I'd been drawn to them because of their name. I liked the obliqueness of it; was it supposed to evoke something funny? Something sinister? The actual aesthetic of the band was endearingly dorky, like if Max Fischer from Rushmore had a punk rock band (shouldn't he have?) in the 50's. And they've got an expertly tuned sound: Elastic keyboard and guitar, stylized vocals that call to mind Television or early Blondie.
We bailed on Cake Shop after their set because I was anxious to check out what was going on next door in the back room of Pianos. Looking at the front room / bar, you'd never guess that there was a hipster convention in progress; that place is always slammed with meatheads and Neil Strauss types. Such is Pianos. But we knew we were iin the right place when we noticed with some surprise that our musical -- and, to be honest, non-musical -- crush Shilpa Ray was taking tickets at the entrance to the back room. We considered signaling our recognition but decided that would be creepy. Black Light Dinner Party were setting up as we got there. They were alright, although they weren't my kind of thing: electro-clash? Not sure. But it was more keyboard than I wanted, singing a bit too polished. And they'd loaded the room with friends, which, I'm not gonna lie, is creepy when it's not my band and the venue's not in Bushwick. Devin (née Devin Therriault) was the act I wanted to see. He fronts an eponymous band and looks like a punk He-Man or maybe like a more together version of Jon Voight's character in Midnight Cowboy. As his dudes were setting up, this fat Hell's Angel type jumped on stage to do an impromptu introduction. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "This band is the eighth wonder of the world! They will drink any shot you buy them." They pounded out a terrific, jangly guitar-punk set. Their drummer was monstrously fast and precise, but it's obvious why the band's named after its lead singer. He's got terrific stage presence, bopping up and down the stage, yelping and going "watch this" with his face. As promised, the band drank one shot, purchased by their M.C.
Whew!
On Thursday night I took the L out to Grand Ave. to go to The Paper Box, which is literally across the street from the Little Venue That Could, Shea Stadium. Bel Argosy had been booked to play at the Box a few months ago -- we'd had to cancel, as we so often do these days -- and I'd remained curious about what the joint was like inside, because it looks like an East Williamsburg speakeasy, or, I don't know, a gun store from the outside. Turns out it's neither -- it's actually three different things. The stage area is low-tech and industrial, pipes overhead and plenty of exposed brick, but the bar a few feet away is an upscale dealie, all white-frosted glass shelves of fancy booze; bar, bartenders, and bottles lit from below like props in a Grey Goose ad. And then there's a little lounge area that you get to through an accordian-folded hallway (which somehow incorporates a taco stand) that looks like the backstage room of high school theater or, actually, like the lobby of the original Manhattan Knitting Factory. Plastiq Passion was setting up as I got there. They're a four-girl ensemble that calls to mind The Shondes in their visual aesthetic: Suspenders and pompadours are involved. And like The Shondes their songs inherit from a number of loosely related musical genres. There was some riot grrl punk in there, some Gypsy Rose Lee, too. They played a luxurious set (by CMJ standards) that included several audience requests. Their EPK describes their drummer as an "animal," and it's not wrong. She was great; she was all arms.
In between sets I poked my head in at the taco window and bought a couple of vegetarian tacos. They weren't bad! They were even a little spicy. Bikini Carwash was up next -- they were the act I'd come there to see, three dudes and a lady who looked like Tank Girl-era Lori Petty. Their songs were perfectly serviceable if a little too polished and too dependent on newschool punk gimmicks; they wore their influences on their sleeves. I was trying to put my finger on exactly which band they were trying to be when they busted out with an early-in-the-set cover of Beat Your Heart Out. Oh, I thought. Well, there you go. But 'Carwash doesn't have the darkness or depth of Brody & Co. Worse, they had a substantial contingent of dwarfy little male fans in the audience who were apparently "regulars" -- the lead singer seemed to recognize them and dropped down into the crowd to cuddle them. So I think I liked them, but they were too eager to please. (The bikini made an appearance, although not the carwash.)
After they were done, I raced over to Metropolitan Ave. to meet Nina and Evan at The Knitting Factory for the Sub Pop showcase. Evan was there to see Metz; Nina'd liked what she'd heard from King Tuff. The show was totally sold out, but the venue was doing a thing where they'd sell a few more tickets every time someone'd leave. So Nina and Evan had copped entry that way, and when I showed up they sort of snuck me around the barricades and into the little box office cubicle right as some tickets were getting freed up. Sorry, (fellow) hipsters! The main room was insanely packed, like, shoulder-to-shoulder not-gonna-budge level. We squeezed in just in time to see Metz setting up. Their set started in the dark, and when the lights came on they were dim and focused like flashlights, giving the band a kind of ghoulish caste. Man was I glad I'd put in earplugs -- Metz are fucking loud. But they're also really, really good: Super tight, with perfect sound on every instrument. They'd turned the sustain way, way up for the guitar; fuzzed out the bass like crazy; and the drums had this throbbing, rubbery quality. The lead singer was a total beast on the mic, although he and the bass player looked and were dressed like total poindexters on the bus to a chess tourney. Who invented the Jekyll-and-Hyde nerd-goes-ballistic thing in punk rock? It's pretty effective. Metz were dope.
King Tuff came on next. There's four dudes in the band, but they're rocking enough hipster-scumbag accessories for, like, a small orchestra; multiples of: Basketball jerseys, baseball caps, wifebeaters, gold chains, handlebar mustaches, big scruffy beards, fiveheads, exposed chest hair. Which is not to say they werent good -- they were good, although they were orders of magnitude more chilled-out than their opener. 'Tuff plays punchy, honky-tonk rock songs, maybe a little like Dan Pujol, whom I'd seen on the same stage a couple of years ago. They saved their single 'til last, and it's kind of their best song. Maybe they've gotten sick of playing it, but I'm not sick of singing it to myself: "I'm a ba-a-a-a-ad thing!"
Weirdly enough, I hadn't been able to find any bands in the line-up for Friday that I hadn't yet seen and was desperate to see. So instead I walked over to The Sidewalk Cafe after work, where The Deli Magazine was hosting an anti-folk showcase. I knew Beau would be performing with his anti-folk "super group," the Ray Brown-based collective called Go Love. And indeed, I saw him at a table in the back of the room when I showed up, and he beckoned me over. Andrew Choi, whose stage name is St. Lenox, went on a few minutes after I got there. Beau'd contributed a quote to his Deli listing, to the effect that he "sounds like a beautiful robot from the future," and it's true. Andrew sings over I guess what you'd call a "beat" (an instrumental track from his iPod) and he has a strange, warbling voice. One of his songs ("Bitter Pill") was about sifting the memories of a departed lover and included a line about a fortune from a fortune cookie "from that Chinese restaurant that we had tried." Thinking about the small, self-involved activities that fill the hours of a relationship -- a couple undertaking to eat at a new restaurant, say -- made me feel very sad for some reason. My eyes got misty, even. But most of his songs are more upbeat and strange. I hung out with Andrew at the bar for a few minutes afterward and asked him about his native Columbus, Ohio. Turns out he's heard of Musicol, the Columbus company that pressed Bel Argosy's EP.
Beau and I hung out while he waited for his group to get their turn. He and I and his lady friend walked over to a newsstand nearby and got some soft serve ice cream that Beau swore was life-changingly good. He and Morgan swiftly devoured theirs; I got a peanut butter-flavored one that tasted like chemicals. "I don't know," he said. "They're usually pretty good." His band was good, though! And I love his song, "Wake Me Up When Everyone Is Dead." Is it giving too much away to say that it's about living on a cot in the practice hole up at St. Mary's during the dead of winter? Try to imagine that you are there, in the quiet, in the cold. A faintly glowing space heater.
On Saturday I took a break.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Oderus & Eve
Wedding season continues. This month, Eve and Jon got married! They did it in Fishkill, up by the Dia:Beacon art space. We took the Metro North train there on Friday night and hopped a cab to what appeared to be the hotel district. Our Days Inn had a sad, unplugged popcorn machine in lobby, but our destination for the evening was across the street at a Ruby Tuesday, where the groom was holding court. We'd just missed Eve, who'd gone to bed early with a high fever, a pretty shitty bit of business though she dealt with it like a champ. We slurped whiskey with Jon and Sean and Kate and tried to be the life of the party. I made a spontaneous joke about a Roman senator combing K-Y out of a horse's tail that made Sean laugh. "Remember that joke I made about the horse?" I asked Nina several times as we were going to bed, still drunk. "I think that was a pretty good one," I said.
The next morning I ate a misshapen waffle in the lobby's breakfast nook with a co-ed soccer team and brought a Danish back up to the room for Nina. A little kid had thrown up in the stairwell. We dressed ourselves and headed out. The buses they'd chartered dropped us off at the Mount Gulian historic site, a sloping green lawn below a handsome stone manor house. It was chilly, but the bride and groom had thoughtfully set out canteens of hot cider (with a bottle of Maker's for those what wanted a spike), which actually made everything feel cozy. They got married by their friend Doug in the middle of the field, looking out over a small pond. After the ceremony, we walked down the hill to the barn for dinner. The rafters were decked out with fairy lights and twigs with small red berries (holly?). There were several great toasts, many of which called out Eve for her bravery. They weren't wrong -- she is brave, a veritable Starbuck of social justice. Some toast-giver mentioned but did not dwell upon the fact that the couple began their relationship as members of a pub trivia team. I guess that's not the weirdest way to go about it. I've heard of weirder things. I knew that something like this would happen when I saw them both taking beer-tasting notes and scatter-plotting the performance of other teams.
Jon being a vegetarian, they'd had the caterers mostly follow suit. It was the easiest wedding food I ever homphed! What wasn't easy was dancing after eating, but we did it anyway, venturing outside at times for hot pie when we needed a break from the now-steamy barn. Eve danced all night despite her ill health. We danced her around the room on a chair. I made Doug carry me around the room in his arms. And then later as I'd promised Sean, I took my tie off and tied it around my forehead, like a "party guy." He did the same thing, but nobody else would do it. After things wound down in the barn, the buses reappeared and took us to a place called Max's On Main in downtown Beacon, a little bar type place that served cheese-based bar foods. The wedding party swamped it. There was a musical act doing their thing at one end of the room, their thing being two-person acoustic covers of heavy metal songs: Run To The Hills, Crazy Train.
And then there was day-after wedding business: Brunch, a friendly car ride back to Brooklyn. I got a nose bleed going over the Brooklyn Bridge.
The following Tuesday we'd bought tickets to see Gwar (!) at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. My co-workers Caitlin and Kevin joined us after some prompting, and we assembled after work and met Nina at the venue in time to see the second band on the bill. They were called Devil Driver; the lead singer was this long-haired beardy guy, an old-man-of-metal type dude who kept saying it was "the Halloween season." He was using this custom microphone that looked like one of those soda guns that bartenders use, or like a control pad for a freight elevator, but it was all lit up inside, and it seemed to be causing all sorts of problems with the sound system at the venue -- it was feeding back into the amps and his vocals kept cutting out. He was pretty upset about it ("Can't hear a fuckin' thing!" "Fix the fucking sound, sound man!") but wouldn't switch mics until practically the end of the set, at which point everything cleared up.
"Who am I kidding?" he said. "We're all here tonight in the Halloween season for one thing: To see Gwar!"
A few words about Gwar: I'd known about them since I was in junior high, but didn't think of them as, you know, accessible, until much later. Maybe it was that appearance on Jerry Springer, but I guess I bought the myth that the monster costumes were part of a twisted, deeply underground counter-culture. What kind of perverts would pay money to get jizzed on by naked guys wearing spike armor?! I had a similarly naive view of the Crimson Ghost stencil-sprayed onto the backs of the leather jackets worn by Tower Video cashiers: Was it a Trystero-style indicator that they were members of a dark brotherhood of evil Road Warrior punks? Somehow it didn't occur to me that guys who dress up in rubber suits and play horror movie metal cannot possibly be scary tough guys. In fact, it is my experience that it is the very rare musician who is also a tough guy. Sondheim aside, thugs don't sing. So it was a nice surprise to find out that not only are Gwar dorks themselves, but they make music for dorks, and a lot of it is pretty cool and funny. Oh, and that Gwar isn't an acronym, it's just a funny word. That one took me a while, too.
Their set that night opened with a dark stage and a voice-over from God, who made it clear that he had it in for Gwar and planned to disrupt their operations and give them a hard time. The lights went up as Oderus Urungus took the stage to vow his disobedience, Paradise Lost-style. The next hour and change was a blur of puppets, fake blood, and guitar solos, but here's what I remember: Their puppets are incredibly detailed and in really good condition. When I saw Green Jellÿ a few years ago, they had cool props, but everything was kind of held together with twine and duct tape. Gwar wheeled out an Adolph Hitler puppet that wound up getting laterally bisected by Oderus' axe, revealing a glistening and detailed set of internal organs and a cross-section of a skull with chattering teeth and rolling eyeballs. An outsize Christ got re-crucified and then disemboweled, returned as a cybernetic horror with a glowing red ocular implant and was promptly dismembered by Oderus. I've always liked Balsac The Jaws Of Death, but I never noticed that his costume includes a delicate-looking pair of truck nuts that dangle behind him as he plays. Obviously, Flattus Maximus -- who's departed to the great Butt-Cannon in the sky -- was absent, but Oderus introduced his replacement (and cousin? Unclear on the lineage), Pustulus Maximus, whose distinguishing feature is that he has some kind of foot fungus. At the end of it all, Oderus realizes that he doesn't have to kill God because, you know, God doesn't, uh, exist?
The mosh pit was pretty rough, and most of the elbow-throwing was coming from ladies! The blood goes everywhere; they ramp up the wetness by degrees, I think. The first little squirt happened almost unexpectedly, like, whoops sorry everyone. But before long there are great clouds of it misting out from the weirdly detailed butthole of a puppet priest who'd taken an axe to the head and then been upended. By the end of the show, the band members and crew were actively manipulating the blood hoses embedded in the props to douse the audience with the widest possible spread. There was no way around it -- we all got soaked with the stuff. Nina'd found a blog post on how to deal with "Gwar blood" (Summary: Won't stain! It's just food coloring and a little carageenen) so I was fully prepared to get it in the face. But to be sure, the floor was a lake of red. And when the lights went up, all the white t-shirts were pink, and our jeans were soaked purple. As we went down the stairs to collect our delicates from the coat check, we passed a grumbling bartender wheeling a mop and bucket behind him.
The next morning I ate a misshapen waffle in the lobby's breakfast nook with a co-ed soccer team and brought a Danish back up to the room for Nina. A little kid had thrown up in the stairwell. We dressed ourselves and headed out. The buses they'd chartered dropped us off at the Mount Gulian historic site, a sloping green lawn below a handsome stone manor house. It was chilly, but the bride and groom had thoughtfully set out canteens of hot cider (with a bottle of Maker's for those what wanted a spike), which actually made everything feel cozy. They got married by their friend Doug in the middle of the field, looking out over a small pond. After the ceremony, we walked down the hill to the barn for dinner. The rafters were decked out with fairy lights and twigs with small red berries (holly?). There were several great toasts, many of which called out Eve for her bravery. They weren't wrong -- she is brave, a veritable Starbuck of social justice. Some toast-giver mentioned but did not dwell upon the fact that the couple began their relationship as members of a pub trivia team. I guess that's not the weirdest way to go about it. I've heard of weirder things. I knew that something like this would happen when I saw them both taking beer-tasting notes and scatter-plotting the performance of other teams.
Jon being a vegetarian, they'd had the caterers mostly follow suit. It was the easiest wedding food I ever homphed! What wasn't easy was dancing after eating, but we did it anyway, venturing outside at times for hot pie when we needed a break from the now-steamy barn. Eve danced all night despite her ill health. We danced her around the room on a chair. I made Doug carry me around the room in his arms. And then later as I'd promised Sean, I took my tie off and tied it around my forehead, like a "party guy." He did the same thing, but nobody else would do it. After things wound down in the barn, the buses reappeared and took us to a place called Max's On Main in downtown Beacon, a little bar type place that served cheese-based bar foods. The wedding party swamped it. There was a musical act doing their thing at one end of the room, their thing being two-person acoustic covers of heavy metal songs: Run To The Hills, Crazy Train.
And then there was day-after wedding business: Brunch, a friendly car ride back to Brooklyn. I got a nose bleed going over the Brooklyn Bridge.
The following Tuesday we'd bought tickets to see Gwar (!) at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. My co-workers Caitlin and Kevin joined us after some prompting, and we assembled after work and met Nina at the venue in time to see the second band on the bill. They were called Devil Driver; the lead singer was this long-haired beardy guy, an old-man-of-metal type dude who kept saying it was "the Halloween season." He was using this custom microphone that looked like one of those soda guns that bartenders use, or like a control pad for a freight elevator, but it was all lit up inside, and it seemed to be causing all sorts of problems with the sound system at the venue -- it was feeding back into the amps and his vocals kept cutting out. He was pretty upset about it ("Can't hear a fuckin' thing!" "Fix the fucking sound, sound man!") but wouldn't switch mics until practically the end of the set, at which point everything cleared up.
"Who am I kidding?" he said. "We're all here tonight in the Halloween season for one thing: To see Gwar!"
A few words about Gwar: I'd known about them since I was in junior high, but didn't think of them as, you know, accessible, until much later. Maybe it was that appearance on Jerry Springer, but I guess I bought the myth that the monster costumes were part of a twisted, deeply underground counter-culture. What kind of perverts would pay money to get jizzed on by naked guys wearing spike armor?! I had a similarly naive view of the Crimson Ghost stencil-sprayed onto the backs of the leather jackets worn by Tower Video cashiers: Was it a Trystero-style indicator that they were members of a dark brotherhood of evil Road Warrior punks? Somehow it didn't occur to me that guys who dress up in rubber suits and play horror movie metal cannot possibly be scary tough guys. In fact, it is my experience that it is the very rare musician who is also a tough guy. Sondheim aside, thugs don't sing. So it was a nice surprise to find out that not only are Gwar dorks themselves, but they make music for dorks, and a lot of it is pretty cool and funny. Oh, and that Gwar isn't an acronym, it's just a funny word. That one took me a while, too.
Their set that night opened with a dark stage and a voice-over from God, who made it clear that he had it in for Gwar and planned to disrupt their operations and give them a hard time. The lights went up as Oderus Urungus took the stage to vow his disobedience, Paradise Lost-style. The next hour and change was a blur of puppets, fake blood, and guitar solos, but here's what I remember: Their puppets are incredibly detailed and in really good condition. When I saw Green Jellÿ a few years ago, they had cool props, but everything was kind of held together with twine and duct tape. Gwar wheeled out an Adolph Hitler puppet that wound up getting laterally bisected by Oderus' axe, revealing a glistening and detailed set of internal organs and a cross-section of a skull with chattering teeth and rolling eyeballs. An outsize Christ got re-crucified and then disemboweled, returned as a cybernetic horror with a glowing red ocular implant and was promptly dismembered by Oderus. I've always liked Balsac The Jaws Of Death, but I never noticed that his costume includes a delicate-looking pair of truck nuts that dangle behind him as he plays. Obviously, Flattus Maximus -- who's departed to the great Butt-Cannon in the sky -- was absent, but Oderus introduced his replacement (and cousin? Unclear on the lineage), Pustulus Maximus, whose distinguishing feature is that he has some kind of foot fungus. At the end of it all, Oderus realizes that he doesn't have to kill God because, you know, God doesn't, uh, exist?
The mosh pit was pretty rough, and most of the elbow-throwing was coming from ladies! The blood goes everywhere; they ramp up the wetness by degrees, I think. The first little squirt happened almost unexpectedly, like, whoops sorry everyone. But before long there are great clouds of it misting out from the weirdly detailed butthole of a puppet priest who'd taken an axe to the head and then been upended. By the end of the show, the band members and crew were actively manipulating the blood hoses embedded in the props to douse the audience with the widest possible spread. There was no way around it -- we all got soaked with the stuff. Nina'd found a blog post on how to deal with "Gwar blood" (Summary: Won't stain! It's just food coloring and a little carageenen) so I was fully prepared to get it in the face. But to be sure, the floor was a lake of red. And when the lights went up, all the white t-shirts were pink, and our jeans were soaked purple. As we went down the stairs to collect our delicates from the coat check, we passed a grumbling bartender wheeling a mop and bucket behind him.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
La Nozze Di Biddy
I'd known Mike was getting married since a March email letting me know as much, in which he also stated his plans to open a sandwich shop in Tacoma, where he lives now. I didn't know that he and his fiancée, Ann, were planning to make things, you know, material, so soon, until we got the invite last month. By our calculations we would only just have moved -- god willing -- into a new apartment by the date on the invite, and though I love Mike like a brother I was on the fence about whether we should commit. I am a coward; it is in my nature. But Nina, in the spirit of adventure, pushed me over to the side of, you know, doing it. And it was great! And that is why I picked her, after all.
When Eve found out we were gonna be visiting the site of her early-twenties rumspringa, she promptly typed up a book-length email that included recommendations for hotels, a layout of the central neighborhoods, and several detailed "walks," each of which would take us by multiple coffee shops, rare book stores, and bars. It was some for-real shit. Thus armed, we hopped an 8:00 AM flight, most of which we slept through, although a complimentary screening of The Hunger Games rounded out the fifth hour. Upon landing, we made our way from the gate-u (SeaTac's signage and intercom broadcasts are English-Japanese bilingual) to the light rail station and got the train to Pioneer Square. It took us past several miles of nautical-looking industrial park, then past the Seahawks stadium, past about a million Vietnamese restaurants, then gradually into the suburbs and the city center. Since we'd booked on such short notice, the big corporate hotels were the only ones with vacancies, and so we were staying at the Courtyard Marriott on Cherry St. They were nice enough to let us check in early, so we ditched our bags in our room and went looking for lunch.
I had a guilty inclination towards visiting the Pike Place Market: Oh man, the place they named the coffee at Starbucks after -- and I don't even like that shit. My theory of tourism is this, though: You're not going to really get a place the first time you go to it, cf. New York fucking City, right? So it's okay to relax about it and let your initial forays take you to a bunch of tourist-y attractions, so long as you make some kind of incremental effort to find the heart of wherever you are. But it was a dazzling place to shuffle through, fruit hawkers pushing sample slices of white peach on us, a stand selling "chocolate spaghetti." We settled on Michou for food. They made us some pretty okay paninis. And then we hit up this Russian bakery next door for a dessert we ended up being too stuffed to eat but which we bought because the smell of sweet bread was irresistible. And then we made a stop at Left Bank Books to scope the zines and gawk at the walking wounded types browsing the shelves. Nina found her childhood edition of Mirriam-Webster with a nightmare-fuel drawing of an epicanthus on page 611.
Seattle's pretty livable, by which I mean a pedestrian dude such as myself can navigate the map and grok the neighborhood geography. Eve'd given us bus suggestions along with her walking tour notes, but we'd kind of dismissed them because, you know, ugh, buses never come and they don't go where you want, etc. But Seattle's bus service (provided by the King County Department of Transportation) is pervasive, babies, and buses come every few minutes, even on the weekend. We took the 49 bus to Capitol Hill and got coffee at Caffé Vita, where we sat and leafed through a medical marijuana trade magazine. Going on vacay is all about eating, though (right?), So we struck out again to look for grub. We found this appealing-looking (to me, anyway) vegan restaurant that boasted four kinds of veggie burgers, but the lines were super long, and the hostess told us it'd be an hour plus for a table for two. For vegan food! So we went with Plan B, which was to bus it out to the university (U) district and get Thai food. Eve'd recommended a place called Thai Tom, which proved equally popular, relatively speaking: It was a tiny place -- a few tables but mostly seating at the bar -- but jammed so that the diminutive waitress had to weave her way through people entering, leaving, and homphing. The bar seating was actually the best option, on account of the action by the stove, which was manned by a thin, gristly-looking Thai guy in a sleeveless jersey who was doing the work of like three regular cooks. He had four or five medium-sized woks going on the stove, which he'd incrementally lade with meat (or tofu), vegetables, chilies, and sauce, his arms like octopus arms, each doing an entirely separate thing except for isolated moments when, say, they'd sync up for a scary-fast hand-off of an empty wok to the sous chef. And the food was great! After dinner, though, I was tired enough that I could have slept on my feet. The Stranger'd been relatively dry on activities, but we'd planned to head to The Funhouse, directly below the Space Needle (and described by its own web site as "the punkest place on earth") to see Nardwuar The Human Serviette's band, The Evaporators -- but I was too beat go on, and talked Nina into taking me hotelwards on my new friend, the 73 bus.
The wedding was on Vashon Island, and, for those of you who do not know: Vashon's about 15 miles long north to south; there are no bridges connecting it to the mainland, so you have to take a ferry to it, and the only Vashon ferry running from Seattle this time of year left from Fauntleroy in West Seattle, which is about an hour from downtown Seattle on the 54 bus. But we made it to the ferry and discovered to our (well, my) delight that it was a pretty swag accommodation: Even though the ride is only 20 minutes, they've got an actual cafeteria you can eat in, and the mezzanine deck has its own video arcade (Cruis'n USA!). I homphed waffle fries and a greasy egg sandwich. We'd chartered a shuttle van to get us from the top of the island to the bottom, and Danette, who operates the shuttle company, met us at the ferry terminal. Vashon's got a number of thriving local industries, many of them boutique-organic agricultural: We passed a winery, a chicken farm, a coffee roaster's. We found out that not only do blackberries grow everywhere on the island, girding the roads and winding around wooden handrails, say, that lead down from the houses to the rocky shore, but that they're considered a harmful weed, and the locals go out of their way to uproot them.
The wedding celebration was at Mike's parents' house, an open, unabashedly boxy-looking corrugated steel structure in the middle of a big, grassy field ringed by blackberry bushes. We arrived in time to see Mike and Ann receive and cut into their wedding cake at a tented wooden table in front of the house. Though I'd seen photos of her journey with Mike across the Chinese steppes, I'd never met Ann in person. She was, of course, very sweet, knew who we were, and had a charming, goofy laugh that made it abundantly clear that she was, you know, serious wife material. The wedding guests were a mix of suspenders hipsters, Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse dudes (likely from Mike's Apocalypse Street Bicycle Polo league), and disoriented out-of-towners like ourselves. I ran into Mike's college roommate Matt, also in from the east coast, where he is doing a PhD at the MIT Media Lab, and his wife Becky. We drank blackberry wine brewed by the groom: Fizzy, licorice-y, not much like blackberries but very good. Mike had cooked (almost) everything, losing a bit of his index finger in the process. An old-timey band, a washboard and geetar combo, played in a large shed behind the house. We didn't dance ourselves, but tapped our feet to the clicking of the washboard as Mike and Ann showed off their swing dancing moves. My favorite thing happened that night as we were about to leave: A number of other departing guests -- strangers to me -- cornered Mike in the kitchen and toasted him with a chorus of barks and yelps, his lovely characteristic sound. I gaped at Matt, who'd originated this form of communication their freshman year in Silliman and who returned my expression of shocked delight.
Matt and Becky drove us back to the rental house down the windy, pitch-dark Vashon coast road. It took us a few tries to find the address, but we did, and managed to avoid the crawly hordes of spiders to boot. We watched the end of a U. of Arizona football game before claiming our rooms for bed time. Nina and I chose the first floor "Captain's Quarters." Matt and Becky went downstairs, hoping for "Galley Slaves" but finding instead the "State Room." I did bathroom things in the bathroom looking at a black-and-white needlepoint commemorating the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens. Danette picked us up the next morning and drove us to the ferry and then from the ferry to SeaTac. She took the scenic route from West Seattle to the airport. "This is actually the roughest part of Seattle," she said. And for some reason she was reminded of a hotel in Queens that she'd wound up in via Priceline: "It was so dark. I had to walk under the highway, and the lights were all burnt out. You could hear the mice screaming in the darkness."
When Eve found out we were gonna be visiting the site of her early-twenties rumspringa, she promptly typed up a book-length email that included recommendations for hotels, a layout of the central neighborhoods, and several detailed "walks," each of which would take us by multiple coffee shops, rare book stores, and bars. It was some for-real shit. Thus armed, we hopped an 8:00 AM flight, most of which we slept through, although a complimentary screening of The Hunger Games rounded out the fifth hour. Upon landing, we made our way from the gate-u (SeaTac's signage and intercom broadcasts are English-Japanese bilingual) to the light rail station and got the train to Pioneer Square. It took us past several miles of nautical-looking industrial park, then past the Seahawks stadium, past about a million Vietnamese restaurants, then gradually into the suburbs and the city center. Since we'd booked on such short notice, the big corporate hotels were the only ones with vacancies, and so we were staying at the Courtyard Marriott on Cherry St. They were nice enough to let us check in early, so we ditched our bags in our room and went looking for lunch.
I had a guilty inclination towards visiting the Pike Place Market: Oh man, the place they named the coffee at Starbucks after -- and I don't even like that shit. My theory of tourism is this, though: You're not going to really get a place the first time you go to it, cf. New York fucking City, right? So it's okay to relax about it and let your initial forays take you to a bunch of tourist-y attractions, so long as you make some kind of incremental effort to find the heart of wherever you are. But it was a dazzling place to shuffle through, fruit hawkers pushing sample slices of white peach on us, a stand selling "chocolate spaghetti." We settled on Michou for food. They made us some pretty okay paninis. And then we hit up this Russian bakery next door for a dessert we ended up being too stuffed to eat but which we bought because the smell of sweet bread was irresistible. And then we made a stop at Left Bank Books to scope the zines and gawk at the walking wounded types browsing the shelves. Nina found her childhood edition of Mirriam-Webster with a nightmare-fuel drawing of an epicanthus on page 611.
Seattle's pretty livable, by which I mean a pedestrian dude such as myself can navigate the map and grok the neighborhood geography. Eve'd given us bus suggestions along with her walking tour notes, but we'd kind of dismissed them because, you know, ugh, buses never come and they don't go where you want, etc. But Seattle's bus service (provided by the King County Department of Transportation) is pervasive, babies, and buses come every few minutes, even on the weekend. We took the 49 bus to Capitol Hill and got coffee at Caffé Vita, where we sat and leafed through a medical marijuana trade magazine. Going on vacay is all about eating, though (right?), So we struck out again to look for grub. We found this appealing-looking (to me, anyway) vegan restaurant that boasted four kinds of veggie burgers, but the lines were super long, and the hostess told us it'd be an hour plus for a table for two. For vegan food! So we went with Plan B, which was to bus it out to the university (U) district and get Thai food. Eve'd recommended a place called Thai Tom, which proved equally popular, relatively speaking: It was a tiny place -- a few tables but mostly seating at the bar -- but jammed so that the diminutive waitress had to weave her way through people entering, leaving, and homphing. The bar seating was actually the best option, on account of the action by the stove, which was manned by a thin, gristly-looking Thai guy in a sleeveless jersey who was doing the work of like three regular cooks. He had four or five medium-sized woks going on the stove, which he'd incrementally lade with meat (or tofu), vegetables, chilies, and sauce, his arms like octopus arms, each doing an entirely separate thing except for isolated moments when, say, they'd sync up for a scary-fast hand-off of an empty wok to the sous chef. And the food was great! After dinner, though, I was tired enough that I could have slept on my feet. The Stranger'd been relatively dry on activities, but we'd planned to head to The Funhouse, directly below the Space Needle (and described by its own web site as "the punkest place on earth") to see Nardwuar The Human Serviette's band, The Evaporators -- but I was too beat go on, and talked Nina into taking me hotelwards on my new friend, the 73 bus.
The wedding was on Vashon Island, and, for those of you who do not know: Vashon's about 15 miles long north to south; there are no bridges connecting it to the mainland, so you have to take a ferry to it, and the only Vashon ferry running from Seattle this time of year left from Fauntleroy in West Seattle, which is about an hour from downtown Seattle on the 54 bus. But we made it to the ferry and discovered to our (well, my) delight that it was a pretty swag accommodation: Even though the ride is only 20 minutes, they've got an actual cafeteria you can eat in, and the mezzanine deck has its own video arcade (Cruis'n USA!). I homphed waffle fries and a greasy egg sandwich. We'd chartered a shuttle van to get us from the top of the island to the bottom, and Danette, who operates the shuttle company, met us at the ferry terminal. Vashon's got a number of thriving local industries, many of them boutique-organic agricultural: We passed a winery, a chicken farm, a coffee roaster's. We found out that not only do blackberries grow everywhere on the island, girding the roads and winding around wooden handrails, say, that lead down from the houses to the rocky shore, but that they're considered a harmful weed, and the locals go out of their way to uproot them.
The wedding celebration was at Mike's parents' house, an open, unabashedly boxy-looking corrugated steel structure in the middle of a big, grassy field ringed by blackberry bushes. We arrived in time to see Mike and Ann receive and cut into their wedding cake at a tented wooden table in front of the house. Though I'd seen photos of her journey with Mike across the Chinese steppes, I'd never met Ann in person. She was, of course, very sweet, knew who we were, and had a charming, goofy laugh that made it abundantly clear that she was, you know, serious wife material. The wedding guests were a mix of suspenders hipsters, Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse dudes (likely from Mike's Apocalypse Street Bicycle Polo league), and disoriented out-of-towners like ourselves. I ran into Mike's college roommate Matt, also in from the east coast, where he is doing a PhD at the MIT Media Lab, and his wife Becky. We drank blackberry wine brewed by the groom: Fizzy, licorice-y, not much like blackberries but very good. Mike had cooked (almost) everything, losing a bit of his index finger in the process. An old-timey band, a washboard and geetar combo, played in a large shed behind the house. We didn't dance ourselves, but tapped our feet to the clicking of the washboard as Mike and Ann showed off their swing dancing moves. My favorite thing happened that night as we were about to leave: A number of other departing guests -- strangers to me -- cornered Mike in the kitchen and toasted him with a chorus of barks and yelps, his lovely characteristic sound. I gaped at Matt, who'd originated this form of communication their freshman year in Silliman and who returned my expression of shocked delight.
Matt and Becky drove us back to the rental house down the windy, pitch-dark Vashon coast road. It took us a few tries to find the address, but we did, and managed to avoid the crawly hordes of spiders to boot. We watched the end of a U. of Arizona football game before claiming our rooms for bed time. Nina and I chose the first floor "Captain's Quarters." Matt and Becky went downstairs, hoping for "Galley Slaves" but finding instead the "State Room." I did bathroom things in the bathroom looking at a black-and-white needlepoint commemorating the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens. Danette picked us up the next morning and drove us to the ferry and then from the ferry to SeaTac. She took the scenic route from West Seattle to the airport. "This is actually the roughest part of Seattle," she said. And for some reason she was reminded of a hotel in Queens that she'd wound up in via Priceline: "It was so dark. I had to walk under the highway, and the lights were all burnt out. You could hear the mice screaming in the darkness."
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Somery
Summer's pretty much over.
I didn't hit my target of seeing a movie at every outdoor film series, but I did manage to see: Slumdog Millionaire at Movies With A View; Exit Through The Gift Shop at Films In Tompkins; the oddly compelling Senna at Socrates Sculpture Park.
I saw three Celebrate Brooklyn shows at the Prospect Park bandshell: Jimmy Cliff and his band, an energetic performance which was the accompaniment to the twice-around-the-park run (my first ever!) that I did at the beginning of the summer; Ghostface Killah; Wild Flag with Mission of Burma, with Beau and a gaggle of anti-folk people on a too-hot Friday night. Carrie Brownstein sang a cover of Ask The Angels to rival Brody Dalle's. It's a good fit for the 'Flag, I think.
Nina and I went to the Afro-Punk festival at Commodore Barry Park on the 25th, where we saw Spank Rock and Das Racist, who are as good as I'd hoped they'd be. There were jaw-droppingly acrobatic BMX stunts performed by bicycle club dudes on a half-pipe right next to the stage. The sun set while we waited for Erykah Badu to take the stage in the grassy half of the Park. It was a warm, pleasant night.
We managed to score Shakespeare In The Park tickets to Into The Woods without waiting in line all night (a practice which seems unduly difficult to the adult me, although I guess that's why they also just let you donate a bunch of money to get tickets). I entered the random daily drawing on a Saturday morning and by noon had won tickets for the night's performance. We took a walk in the park beforehand and flirted with the turtles in the algae-choked pond below Belvedere Castle. I'd never seen Into The Woods before, but my impression since forever was that it was a particular hit with -- and likely catered to the specific taste of -- pre-teen girls that go to musical theater summer camp. (A demographic which, having been a pre-teen boy who took computer classes at a musical theater summer camp, I am not crapping on.) Having seen it, I think I had the right impression. The story and the emotions are entry-level stuff, especially in the first act before everyone starts dying. Which is not to say that I didn't like it. I did like it! The cast was quite good, especially Donna Murphy, who played the Witch. And I liked Denis O'Hare, who played the Baker. He had a prominent lateral lisp, kind of like Ken Freedman, and didn't strive to make the character likeable or even less prickly. And the set transformed itself in astonishing ways.
A large part of our August was devoted to apartment hunting. Our criteria: No biting insects; a spare half-bedroom to use as an office would be nice. Having this year become a strong convert to Canal Bar, I was not-so-secretly hoping to locate a place on 3rd Avenue, preferably in the desolate, not-quite-zoned-for-humans stretch north of 1st St.
You always sort of repress this knowledge, but, man, looking for an apartment really stinks. It's mostly just the insulting character of the market: They're asking how much for this piece of shit? There are the brokers who argue with a straight face that 4th Ave. and 19th St. is "about to see a real explosion in popularity, like Williamsburg in the early 2000s." There are the brokers who meet you on the street outside the apartment to give you their pitch because the actual apartment is laughably tiny. We met some useless but friendly brokers who fed us interesting information in lieu of liveable apartments: We found out that the weird graffiti building on 7th Ave. and 2nd St. is actually owned by a crazy family who've been holding onto it in the hopes of a seven million dollar sale; we got to see a funny little cave of a place above the Ehab Moustafa law firm on the stretch of Atlantic Ave. that is all Islamic beauty supply places. And we met the broker who rented us the apartment that we chose, which is, fortuitously enough, literally around the corner from Canal Bar. (It is also above a soon-to-be doggy day care facility, so we'll see how that turns out.) She (the broker) was out of her mind and lied about everything, but the apartment was big and airy and the couple that was moving out after six years (!) of occupancy made a compelling case for it.
The move was not easy, though not particularly harder than other moves. We threw out a ton of stuff and had the rest taken to a storage facility in Queens to get fumigated. The fumigation company was late bringing it back to us. Nina pulled some telephone heroics and stopped them from bringing it back even later. One of the movers was sick or hung over and threw up on behind the truck after carrying our furniture upstairs. "Jesus," he said, after puking up what looked like cereal. The whole thing cost an ungodly amount of money.
But when it was over, and we were sitting on a new Ikea couch amid a city of boxes holding our now-usable possessions in our apartment across the street from a casket company and down the block from another, luxuriating in the simple joy of a clean break; well, that was bliss.
I didn't hit my target of seeing a movie at every outdoor film series, but I did manage to see: Slumdog Millionaire at Movies With A View; Exit Through The Gift Shop at Films In Tompkins; the oddly compelling Senna at Socrates Sculpture Park.
I saw three Celebrate Brooklyn shows at the Prospect Park bandshell: Jimmy Cliff and his band, an energetic performance which was the accompaniment to the twice-around-the-park run (my first ever!) that I did at the beginning of the summer; Ghostface Killah; Wild Flag with Mission of Burma, with Beau and a gaggle of anti-folk people on a too-hot Friday night. Carrie Brownstein sang a cover of Ask The Angels to rival Brody Dalle's. It's a good fit for the 'Flag, I think.
Nina and I went to the Afro-Punk festival at Commodore Barry Park on the 25th, where we saw Spank Rock and Das Racist, who are as good as I'd hoped they'd be. There were jaw-droppingly acrobatic BMX stunts performed by bicycle club dudes on a half-pipe right next to the stage. The sun set while we waited for Erykah Badu to take the stage in the grassy half of the Park. It was a warm, pleasant night.
We managed to score Shakespeare In The Park tickets to Into The Woods without waiting in line all night (a practice which seems unduly difficult to the adult me, although I guess that's why they also just let you donate a bunch of money to get tickets). I entered the random daily drawing on a Saturday morning and by noon had won tickets for the night's performance. We took a walk in the park beforehand and flirted with the turtles in the algae-choked pond below Belvedere Castle. I'd never seen Into The Woods before, but my impression since forever was that it was a particular hit with -- and likely catered to the specific taste of -- pre-teen girls that go to musical theater summer camp. (A demographic which, having been a pre-teen boy who took computer classes at a musical theater summer camp, I am not crapping on.) Having seen it, I think I had the right impression. The story and the emotions are entry-level stuff, especially in the first act before everyone starts dying. Which is not to say that I didn't like it. I did like it! The cast was quite good, especially Donna Murphy, who played the Witch. And I liked Denis O'Hare, who played the Baker. He had a prominent lateral lisp, kind of like Ken Freedman, and didn't strive to make the character likeable or even less prickly. And the set transformed itself in astonishing ways.
A large part of our August was devoted to apartment hunting. Our criteria: No biting insects; a spare half-bedroom to use as an office would be nice. Having this year become a strong convert to Canal Bar, I was not-so-secretly hoping to locate a place on 3rd Avenue, preferably in the desolate, not-quite-zoned-for-humans stretch north of 1st St.
You always sort of repress this knowledge, but, man, looking for an apartment really stinks. It's mostly just the insulting character of the market: They're asking how much for this piece of shit? There are the brokers who argue with a straight face that 4th Ave. and 19th St. is "about to see a real explosion in popularity, like Williamsburg in the early 2000s." There are the brokers who meet you on the street outside the apartment to give you their pitch because the actual apartment is laughably tiny. We met some useless but friendly brokers who fed us interesting information in lieu of liveable apartments: We found out that the weird graffiti building on 7th Ave. and 2nd St. is actually owned by a crazy family who've been holding onto it in the hopes of a seven million dollar sale; we got to see a funny little cave of a place above the Ehab Moustafa law firm on the stretch of Atlantic Ave. that is all Islamic beauty supply places. And we met the broker who rented us the apartment that we chose, which is, fortuitously enough, literally around the corner from Canal Bar. (It is also above a soon-to-be doggy day care facility, so we'll see how that turns out.) She (the broker) was out of her mind and lied about everything, but the apartment was big and airy and the couple that was moving out after six years (!) of occupancy made a compelling case for it.
The move was not easy, though not particularly harder than other moves. We threw out a ton of stuff and had the rest taken to a storage facility in Queens to get fumigated. The fumigation company was late bringing it back to us. Nina pulled some telephone heroics and stopped them from bringing it back even later. One of the movers was sick or hung over and threw up on behind the truck after carrying our furniture upstairs. "Jesus," he said, after puking up what looked like cereal. The whole thing cost an ungodly amount of money.
But when it was over, and we were sitting on a new Ikea couch amid a city of boxes holding our now-usable possessions in our apartment across the street from a casket company and down the block from another, luxuriating in the simple joy of a clean break; well, that was bliss.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
What Has Changed
The longer I write this ol' blog here, the longer and longer these entries get. They're like essays at this point, and that is why it takes me a long time to write them. So this is just gonna be a list of things opening and closing and moving around. What else happens? Wars and elections and people dying, I guess. But I'm living in a Time Of Peace over here, and the quotidian is also the, uh, transmundane for me right now.
To wit: Great Lakes, the setting for many pivotal evenings in my twenties, has closed. On a good night, when the place was maybe half full, you could get a pint of Yuengling at the fairy light-bejeweled bar and then retreat with your cohort into the womb-like, near-total-darkness of the back, a flickering bulb barely illuminating a map of the mitten state on the far wall. And then you could get down to the business of saying your thoughts about this girl or that girl. For serious it was a core part of my experience. The management seemed determined to fuck it up, though, and so over the past few years they added a Big Buck Hunter cabinet to spoil the mood and the jukebox / bartender-iPod volume steadily increased until you couldn't hear for shit. And then they closed forever. The gate was down for several months, with a semi-intelligible epitaph for the Lakes graffitoed across it. Now it is re-opening as something called Park Slope Terroir.
That Barclays thing has happened, and perhaps in preparation for that, O'Connor's is also shuttered, with plans, I hear, to re-open as a sports bar. Was this prefigured by that weird concrete bunker that appeared on its roof a year or two ago? I don't know. But we all go to Canal Bar now, with its undigestible popcorn and indifferent dogs.
Perch has closed, taking its pretty good coffee and its excellent, overstuffed breakfast burrito with it. It's been replaced by Du Jour Bakery, which is not bad but a bit dainty if you ask me.
Blue Ribbon is closing. I never went there.
Culture has landed.
Southpaw is gone. Theres some kind of after-school tutoring thing opening up there, which makes no goddamn sense. That was the last place I saw The Dickies play, at a show booked by Kitty Kowalski, the ex-proprietress of Coney Island High. Will that turn out to be the last Dickies show I ever see? Which Dickie will be the first -- well, second -- to die?
Emma vacated her studio apartment on Union St. (Casa Dog Hair) to cohabitate with Jay at his deluxe pad / Sabermetrics research library in Downtown Brooklyn.
Nina got super into Adventure Time, and after some skepticism I'm now an obsessive fan as well. Nina likes Princess Bubblegum; I'm a Marceline man. And the show's alternating commitment to take its own mythology quite seriously and not very seriously is maddening and delightful.
On weekends I have been fucking with Skyrim, generously gifted to me by Nina. Those reviews that talk about how huge it is? They're not kidding. It's kind of bonkers. And it actually made the prospect of playing it a bit daunting, until I realized you can engage with the game on whatever level you want; this is not too far off from my approach. Sometimes on a hot Sunday morning I'll just climb a high, snowy mountain (there's no shortage of them) and look out over the Reach, turning the panorama with the thumbstick, trying to figure out how I'm supposed to frame my experience of a life -- my real one -- that is too long and too short.
Oh! Bel Argosy's record shipped! Some context: Producing the four tracks for it turned out to be the quick part, even though it wasn't quick; the next several months were occupied by pricing out options for printing jackets to showcase the beautiful artwork done for us by Billy's friend Andrew, and finding a record press who'd do a run of 200 for less than $800. I'm happy with our choices (JakPrints and Musicol Recording, respectively) but the pressing takes time. It was a month and change for us to get the white label test pressings back and several more to get the final product. But Oh! it was a great feeling when we had everything in hand. The band spent the evening in Billy and Sarah's kitchen (Donkey Town Records HQ), drinking Coors Light and listening to The A's while stuffing liner notes and records into sleeves. We're mailing them out. Want one?
To wit: Great Lakes, the setting for many pivotal evenings in my twenties, has closed. On a good night, when the place was maybe half full, you could get a pint of Yuengling at the fairy light-bejeweled bar and then retreat with your cohort into the womb-like, near-total-darkness of the back, a flickering bulb barely illuminating a map of the mitten state on the far wall. And then you could get down to the business of saying your thoughts about this girl or that girl. For serious it was a core part of my experience. The management seemed determined to fuck it up, though, and so over the past few years they added a Big Buck Hunter cabinet to spoil the mood and the jukebox / bartender-iPod volume steadily increased until you couldn't hear for shit. And then they closed forever. The gate was down for several months, with a semi-intelligible epitaph for the Lakes graffitoed across it. Now it is re-opening as something called Park Slope Terroir.
That Barclays thing has happened, and perhaps in preparation for that, O'Connor's is also shuttered, with plans, I hear, to re-open as a sports bar. Was this prefigured by that weird concrete bunker that appeared on its roof a year or two ago? I don't know. But we all go to Canal Bar now, with its undigestible popcorn and indifferent dogs.
Perch has closed, taking its pretty good coffee and its excellent, overstuffed breakfast burrito with it. It's been replaced by Du Jour Bakery, which is not bad but a bit dainty if you ask me.
Blue Ribbon is closing. I never went there.
Culture has landed.
Southpaw is gone. Theres some kind of after-school tutoring thing opening up there, which makes no goddamn sense. That was the last place I saw The Dickies play, at a show booked by Kitty Kowalski, the ex-proprietress of Coney Island High. Will that turn out to be the last Dickies show I ever see? Which Dickie will be the first -- well, second -- to die?
Emma vacated her studio apartment on Union St. (Casa Dog Hair) to cohabitate with Jay at his deluxe pad / Sabermetrics research library in Downtown Brooklyn.
Nina got super into Adventure Time, and after some skepticism I'm now an obsessive fan as well. Nina likes Princess Bubblegum; I'm a Marceline man. And the show's alternating commitment to take its own mythology quite seriously and not very seriously is maddening and delightful.
On weekends I have been fucking with Skyrim, generously gifted to me by Nina. Those reviews that talk about how huge it is? They're not kidding. It's kind of bonkers. And it actually made the prospect of playing it a bit daunting, until I realized you can engage with the game on whatever level you want; this is not too far off from my approach. Sometimes on a hot Sunday morning I'll just climb a high, snowy mountain (there's no shortage of them) and look out over the Reach, turning the panorama with the thumbstick, trying to figure out how I'm supposed to frame my experience of a life -- my real one -- that is too long and too short.
Oh! Bel Argosy's record shipped! Some context: Producing the four tracks for it turned out to be the quick part, even though it wasn't quick; the next several months were occupied by pricing out options for printing jackets to showcase the beautiful artwork done for us by Billy's friend Andrew, and finding a record press who'd do a run of 200 for less than $800. I'm happy with our choices (JakPrints and Musicol Recording, respectively) but the pressing takes time. It was a month and change for us to get the white label test pressings back and several more to get the final product. But Oh! it was a great feeling when we had everything in hand. The band spent the evening in Billy and Sarah's kitchen (Donkey Town Records HQ), drinking Coors Light and listening to The A's while stuffing liner notes and records into sleeves. We're mailing them out. Want one?
Thursday, July 19, 2012
The Gentleman With Thistle-Down Hair
The Hackers On Planet Earth conference fell on my birthday, as it often does when it makes its semi-annual traverse of our solar system. I told my friends and family that I'd have to spend the weekend tabling for the Free Software Foundation, but assured them that I wasn't trying to duck my birthday responsibilities. It took several emails with the FSF campaigns team before they began the process of reserving the table, and I wondered, briefly, if I was the last Free Software partisan in New York City. I feel weirdly at home when I visit Cambridge every March, whereas New York... I don't have friends that share my interests here. Well, no, that's not true. Just not all my interests. But to paraphrase Ted Leo, was I just a loner in world full of apolitical Python developers? Fortunately, Thomas proved me wrong. He even took care of getting the shipment of supplies I lugged to his bookstore to the Hotel Pennsylvania at an ungodly hour Friday morning. I felt immediately guilty.
I arrived in the early evening on Friday and found that in fact he'd a plum spot right by the main thoroughfare of the vendor floor; he'd strung our vinyl banner between two huge columns (no easy task, he said), and had arranged the merch and books in a neat, appealing way. We were next to and across from groups selling Arduino-type electronic kits. Diagonally across from us was a company selling a fruit and tea-based energy drink. They gave us some samples -- it was okay! Definitely a step up from Club Mate, which was being sold from a human-sized cooler behind us, right next to the EFF's table. This was HOPE number 9, and the "theme" they'd gone with this year was passports issued by the Department of Hopeland Security. The passports doubled as passes to the conference, and they were nicely made: Durable binding, strong paper stock to mimic the pages of actual passports. And there was a tie-in to the proceedings of the conference. If you went to a particular talk or visited a particular vendor table, you could get a stamp on a page of your passport. Gamification! The FSF didn't find out about the stamp thing in time to get us one for the table, but I offered to draw in the logo for anyone who wanted it.
When I tabled two years ago, I wasn't totally comfortable following Deb's instructions to interact with all comers, even the people who had no idea what we were all about. "Are you familiar with Free Software?" I couldn't bring myself to enter into a conversation where I might have to explain, let alone justify, the organization's mission. I was much more comfortable accepting donations from and trading gossip with visitors who were already, you know, among the cognoscenti. This time around, I don't know. I found a way to do it. Maybe it was that I was out there with Thomas, who's kind of an introvert, and this guy Matt who's a bit junior on the philosophy. So I didn't really have a choice about being the talky one. And I knew I was screwing up sometimes but it didn't bother me that much. It was fun! I talked to a lot of nice people:
I'd hoped to bail early in the evening on Saturday so as to take in an act or two at 4Knots, but Thomas fell asleep (propped against a column upstairs, he said, with an assortment of Debian CDs arrayed on his lap) and my shift ran long. And when I checked my phone around 7 o'clock to do some math with the set times, I discovered that the festival was literally on fire -- something backstage had shorted out or gotten too hot, and from the pictures I guess the fireboats were summoned. By the time I got down to the pier, it was dark and the bands had departed. There was no sign of the fire, except for the presence of FDNY vehicles and a faint smell of smoke near a soggy, cordoned-off area at the far end by the water. I walked north a few blocks to the entrance to the Beekman Beer Garden near the loading docks of the old Fulton St. Fish Market and queued up to get into the "after party." The line was super long, and they were only letting in discrete clumps of people at a time, but I was determined, and eventually I got in. And you know what? The Beekman Beer Garden sucks -- like every other engineered-to-be-cool social space in New York and Brooklyn, it's too big, too polished, too much of a compromise. Ravenous, I ordered and homphed a plate of soggy nachos while watching the opening band, Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds. I'd never heard (of) them before, and they weren't bad, but their set, I don't know, it lacked urgency. And ugh, that name. I'd been standing up all day and was exhausted, so after their set I lurched over to the railing and squatted down on the ground. I got out my phone and browsed to Metafilter for some factoids. Someone had posted a story about Gabriel García Márquez losing his mind to dementia. A drunk girl came over to me and asked me for a cigarette. "This is a concert," she said. "Why are you playing a game on your phone."
"I'm reading a web site," I said.
"What does it say?"
"Gabriel García Márquez is going to die."
"I... think I know who that is," she said. She was old enough that she should have. "But you need to try to live in the moment. This moment right now." I didn't tell her that it was minutes to my birthday and that all I could think about was people getting old and dying. But I agreed that it was time to pay attention to The Black Lips.
They got on stage and destroyed! I've always found them a bit intimidating, maybe account of how unpretentious they look -- slight dudes wearing glasses and plaid shirts. Like they came from a place where you couldn't get Maximum Rocknroll and so they had to invent it themselves, Bad Kids with no outlet in ostentatious fashion, channeling their distress through nasty rock songs. Their band could be your life! Someone in the crowd got hold of some rolls of toilet paper and they lobbed them up and over our heads trailing damp white streamers that got tangled in the blades of the big industrial fans on the roof of the tent. The venue people were visibly irked, and things came briefly to a head up at the barricades near the stage. But the show mostly had a wholesomely cheeky vibe; maybe a touch entitled, but hey it's Manhattan. I stood in the back with the rich girls and their boyfriends, cradling my man-purse but tapping my feet.
So I did sort of duck my birthday, but not entirely. Nina took me on a date the following week to see Beasts Of The Southern Wild at The Sunshine, which was totally delightful but made us tear up something fierce. Dabbing our eyes, we walked a few blocks north to Downtown Bakery, where I enjoyed a spinach burrito -- my customary meal there years ago when I was a hushpuppy that did software QA in the bathtub on Broadway & Houston St.
I arrived in the early evening on Friday and found that in fact he'd a plum spot right by the main thoroughfare of the vendor floor; he'd strung our vinyl banner between two huge columns (no easy task, he said), and had arranged the merch and books in a neat, appealing way. We were next to and across from groups selling Arduino-type electronic kits. Diagonally across from us was a company selling a fruit and tea-based energy drink. They gave us some samples -- it was okay! Definitely a step up from Club Mate, which was being sold from a human-sized cooler behind us, right next to the EFF's table. This was HOPE number 9, and the "theme" they'd gone with this year was passports issued by the Department of Hopeland Security. The passports doubled as passes to the conference, and they were nicely made: Durable binding, strong paper stock to mimic the pages of actual passports. And there was a tie-in to the proceedings of the conference. If you went to a particular talk or visited a particular vendor table, you could get a stamp on a page of your passport. Gamification! The FSF didn't find out about the stamp thing in time to get us one for the table, but I offered to draw in the logo for anyone who wanted it.
When I tabled two years ago, I wasn't totally comfortable following Deb's instructions to interact with all comers, even the people who had no idea what we were all about. "Are you familiar with Free Software?" I couldn't bring myself to enter into a conversation where I might have to explain, let alone justify, the organization's mission. I was much more comfortable accepting donations from and trading gossip with visitors who were already, you know, among the cognoscenti. This time around, I don't know. I found a way to do it. Maybe it was that I was out there with Thomas, who's kind of an introvert, and this guy Matt who's a bit junior on the philosophy. So I didn't really have a choice about being the talky one. And I knew I was screwing up sometimes but it didn't bother me that much. It was fun! I talked to a lot of nice people:
- I gave a brief, semi-coherent elevator pitch for the Free Software Foundation to a nice guy shooting video for Italian television, an exasperated ghost of RMS dancing in my mind the whole time telling me I had it wrong, wrong, wrong.
- I met Kenzo, the guy who built WFMU's "smart playlist" system. We talked about the intersection of the indie radio and Free Software cultures.
- I met Clinton Ebadi. We talked about running Emacs on top of Guile, and I was glad to hear that someone besides me is psyched about that prospect.
I'd hoped to bail early in the evening on Saturday so as to take in an act or two at 4Knots, but Thomas fell asleep (propped against a column upstairs, he said, with an assortment of Debian CDs arrayed on his lap) and my shift ran long. And when I checked my phone around 7 o'clock to do some math with the set times, I discovered that the festival was literally on fire -- something backstage had shorted out or gotten too hot, and from the pictures I guess the fireboats were summoned. By the time I got down to the pier, it was dark and the bands had departed. There was no sign of the fire, except for the presence of FDNY vehicles and a faint smell of smoke near a soggy, cordoned-off area at the far end by the water. I walked north a few blocks to the entrance to the Beekman Beer Garden near the loading docks of the old Fulton St. Fish Market and queued up to get into the "after party." The line was super long, and they were only letting in discrete clumps of people at a time, but I was determined, and eventually I got in. And you know what? The Beekman Beer Garden sucks -- like every other engineered-to-be-cool social space in New York and Brooklyn, it's too big, too polished, too much of a compromise. Ravenous, I ordered and homphed a plate of soggy nachos while watching the opening band, Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds. I'd never heard (of) them before, and they weren't bad, but their set, I don't know, it lacked urgency. And ugh, that name. I'd been standing up all day and was exhausted, so after their set I lurched over to the railing and squatted down on the ground. I got out my phone and browsed to Metafilter for some factoids. Someone had posted a story about Gabriel García Márquez losing his mind to dementia. A drunk girl came over to me and asked me for a cigarette. "This is a concert," she said. "Why are you playing a game on your phone."
"I'm reading a web site," I said.
"What does it say?"
"Gabriel García Márquez is going to die."
"I... think I know who that is," she said. She was old enough that she should have. "But you need to try to live in the moment. This moment right now." I didn't tell her that it was minutes to my birthday and that all I could think about was people getting old and dying. But I agreed that it was time to pay attention to The Black Lips.
They got on stage and destroyed! I've always found them a bit intimidating, maybe account of how unpretentious they look -- slight dudes wearing glasses and plaid shirts. Like they came from a place where you couldn't get Maximum Rocknroll and so they had to invent it themselves, Bad Kids with no outlet in ostentatious fashion, channeling their distress through nasty rock songs. Their band could be your life! Someone in the crowd got hold of some rolls of toilet paper and they lobbed them up and over our heads trailing damp white streamers that got tangled in the blades of the big industrial fans on the roof of the tent. The venue people were visibly irked, and things came briefly to a head up at the barricades near the stage. But the show mostly had a wholesomely cheeky vibe; maybe a touch entitled, but hey it's Manhattan. I stood in the back with the rich girls and their boyfriends, cradling my man-purse but tapping my feet.
So I did sort of duck my birthday, but not entirely. Nina took me on a date the following week to see Beasts Of The Southern Wild at The Sunshine, which was totally delightful but made us tear up something fierce. Dabbing our eyes, we walked a few blocks north to Downtown Bakery, where I enjoyed a spinach burrito -- my customary meal there years ago when I was a hushpuppy that did software QA in the bathtub on Broadway & Houston St.
Friday, July 06, 2012
Heatside
Man, is it ever hot. It was hot last week. It's hot this week. Twice now the weather report has promised a cooling rain, perhaps in the form of a dramatic storm, even, and twice the rain has veered off course to miss the city or been re-forecasted beyond the week's horizon. Is it cynical to imagine that they deliberately underpredict the length of a heatwave on the news to keep us all from freaking out? It seems like the heat always lasts longer and the rain always comes later or not at all.
It was so hot that we tried out the public pool at the Douglas-Degraw playground just this last weekend. We weren't the only ones with that idea, and despite the fact that we showed up close to closing time, we had to join a small queue of people outside the entrance waiting for the pool to get below capacity. Ahead of us were a couple of teenage boys who took the Parks Department dude at the door to task for the wait, to the amusement of the rest of us. "Man, four people just left! There's just two of us! And you could fit like two of me inside that one dude." I was a little afraid of the locker room, which did reek of bleach and foot smell, but I was able to change discreetly and it wasn't so bad. And the pool itsef was just about perfect, a bit warmer than freezing on account of the hundred some-odd people enjoying themselves in it but not so warm that we suspected pee. We played Water Taxi (until the lifeguards whistled at us to stop), dog-paddled up and down the length of the pool, and practiced our underwater somersaults. On the way out we saw one of the pushy kids from earlier, this time holding court amid a gathering of younger boys. "Go on, spell 'Mississippi,'" he commanded one of them.
"M... I... S... S... P... I..." said the kid, haltingly.
"How old are you?" the older kid demanded. "Ten? And you can't spell that? Man, you ain't go to school."
The younger kid stood his ground: "Oh yeah? Well you just think it's so cool to spell words and smoke weed. But you not so cool." It made me think of me, a little!
It was so hot that when Beau and Nina and Beau's friend Rebecca and I rode out from a picnic in Prospect Park to Shea Stadium to see a much-anticipated Shilpa Ray show, we had to sit out the opening bands on the balcony, watching through the windows and listening to the poor performers sweat their hearts out in what had literally become a sauna despite the industrial-size fans standing in stategic corners. We piled back in when Shilpa Ray went on stage, but quickly became soaked through our shirts. She's got a new line-up of Happy Hookers, apparently culled from the openers, and the result is a pared-down sound that showcases her singing and harmonium playing. We drank Bud Light to stay hydrated. Shilpa herself seemed a bit taken aback by the heat, although her monstrous voice was undiminished. "Ow, you guys," she said during a break between songs. "My mascara's running into my eyes." She paused. "I guess that's an old lady thing to complain about." Music industry trivia: The creepy older dude we saw in the audience, and who seemed to be part of Shilpa's entourage, turned out to be Larry "Ratso" Sloman, the writer / promoter / music biz gadfly. Beau tracked him down via the vanity license plate on the car he parked outside Shea. (Turns out he wrote a piece about her for LA Weekly.)
Nina and I went to go see Sleep No More last Monday. It was fantastic! I'm loath to describe it in any detail lest I dissipate its weirdness, but for those of you who don't know what it is, it's part dance performance, part haunted house, part treasure hunt. It begins with some artifice around you checking into a hotel on W. 27th St. A band plays in the lobby. You get into an elevator, and then... things happen. There is no talking in this hotel, they tell you. You do not remove your mask in the hotel. It's true: For the most part, there wasn't; and for the most part, we didn't. I spent my time at The McKittrick touching and reading things, mostly, sometimes trying to smell them, too, to the extent that I think I may have missed parts of the, uh, main event. True to her charter, Nina went everywhere / did everything. We debriefed over a fifteen dollar scotch in the hotel lobby listening to jazz standards played by a bill of really very good live bands. My proudest find: A porcelain teacup containing a sculpted dollop of personal lubricant and secreted away in the back of a small cabinet on the third floor.
Everyone left town for the 4th of July -- a good move, maybe, given that it was ninety-fucking-seven degrees that day -- but we stuck around. I went to the Keith Haring exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in the early afternoon, which was pretty awesome. The show covered his output between 1979 and 1982, so it spans the time he was developing that distinctive "pop" aesthetic but not the apotheosis of its implementation at The Pop Shop (a few blocks south of where I grew up!). His early paintings are pleasingly rough and even a little scary, spatters of red criss-crossing the orderly black Sumi ink work. One thing I should have already known but which the exhibit showcased was Haring's involvement in the punk music scene on the Lower East Side in the late 70s and early 80s: There was a whole wall devoted to the scrappy, xeroxed flyers he'd done for rock shows and underground art happenings. I was glad I got to see it.
Later that day Nina and Emma and Jay and I met up to go to a Brooklyn Cyclones game at MCU Park. We rooted for Brandom Nimmo despite his brain-dead at-bat song (Real American by Rick Derringer -- a sometimes collaborator of Larry "Ratso" Sloman?!). There were some impressive hits, both home runs and foul balls, but the fielding was crazy bad. Which is not to say that defense in baseball is an easy thing, but Yankees and Mets games have spoiled me to the extent that I was surprised to see the Cyclones and the Crosscutters alike dropping balls or laying out for and missing balls I would have expected them to catalyze into inning-ending plays. When I turned back quizically to Emma (sitting behind us) she rolled her eyes. "Welcome to the minors," she said. After the game, there were fireworks set off from right field; very convenient, considering we had no intention of catching the "official" display that's still perversely situated over the Hudson. It was also "Everybody Runs The Bases" night at MCU, so Nina and I queued up with the kids and the drunks to have a go. (Emma and Jay couldn't be bothered with such nonsense and said they'd meet us at Ruby's.) We waited our turn and then lit out around the diamond, hand in hand, from first to second, from second to third, from third to home base, the green sod beneath our feet lit up eerily bright by the stadium lights. Then we left the park.
We wanted to get away from the throng of people on Surf Ave., and Nina wanted to dip her toes in the ocean, so we broke away towards the beach. It was almost 11:00 but the beach was still packed with revelers, some splashing in the water, some rolling around in the sand doing kisses with a partner. The detritus of celebration -- bottles, cups, cigarettes, assorted plastic trash -- was floating in the ocean and everywhere on the beach. It's creepy to see so many people on the beach at night, like something terrible's forced us all out towards the edges of the continent, onto the last spit of land, and the only place left to go is into the water. The people waving glow sticks? They're partying as the ship goes down. We made our way towards Ruby's, still very much in business, where we met up with Emma and Jay -- and with a gentleman with red, white, and blue LEDs threaded through his nipple piercings. He seemed to have come to the boardwalk alone and looked desperate for people to acknlowedge his, uh, ornaments. "Eh?" he asked the passers-by, gesturing at his chest. "Yeah," he said. "Uh huh."
It was so hot that we tried out the public pool at the Douglas-Degraw playground just this last weekend. We weren't the only ones with that idea, and despite the fact that we showed up close to closing time, we had to join a small queue of people outside the entrance waiting for the pool to get below capacity. Ahead of us were a couple of teenage boys who took the Parks Department dude at the door to task for the wait, to the amusement of the rest of us. "Man, four people just left! There's just two of us! And you could fit like two of me inside that one dude." I was a little afraid of the locker room, which did reek of bleach and foot smell, but I was able to change discreetly and it wasn't so bad. And the pool itsef was just about perfect, a bit warmer than freezing on account of the hundred some-odd people enjoying themselves in it but not so warm that we suspected pee. We played Water Taxi (until the lifeguards whistled at us to stop), dog-paddled up and down the length of the pool, and practiced our underwater somersaults. On the way out we saw one of the pushy kids from earlier, this time holding court amid a gathering of younger boys. "Go on, spell 'Mississippi,'" he commanded one of them.
"M... I... S... S... P... I..." said the kid, haltingly.
"How old are you?" the older kid demanded. "Ten? And you can't spell that? Man, you ain't go to school."
The younger kid stood his ground: "Oh yeah? Well you just think it's so cool to spell words and smoke weed. But you not so cool." It made me think of me, a little!
It was so hot that when Beau and Nina and Beau's friend Rebecca and I rode out from a picnic in Prospect Park to Shea Stadium to see a much-anticipated Shilpa Ray show, we had to sit out the opening bands on the balcony, watching through the windows and listening to the poor performers sweat their hearts out in what had literally become a sauna despite the industrial-size fans standing in stategic corners. We piled back in when Shilpa Ray went on stage, but quickly became soaked through our shirts. She's got a new line-up of Happy Hookers, apparently culled from the openers, and the result is a pared-down sound that showcases her singing and harmonium playing. We drank Bud Light to stay hydrated. Shilpa herself seemed a bit taken aback by the heat, although her monstrous voice was undiminished. "Ow, you guys," she said during a break between songs. "My mascara's running into my eyes." She paused. "I guess that's an old lady thing to complain about." Music industry trivia: The creepy older dude we saw in the audience, and who seemed to be part of Shilpa's entourage, turned out to be Larry "Ratso" Sloman, the writer / promoter / music biz gadfly. Beau tracked him down via the vanity license plate on the car he parked outside Shea. (Turns out he wrote a piece about her for LA Weekly.)
Nina and I went to go see Sleep No More last Monday. It was fantastic! I'm loath to describe it in any detail lest I dissipate its weirdness, but for those of you who don't know what it is, it's part dance performance, part haunted house, part treasure hunt. It begins with some artifice around you checking into a hotel on W. 27th St. A band plays in the lobby. You get into an elevator, and then... things happen. There is no talking in this hotel, they tell you. You do not remove your mask in the hotel. It's true: For the most part, there wasn't; and for the most part, we didn't. I spent my time at The McKittrick touching and reading things, mostly, sometimes trying to smell them, too, to the extent that I think I may have missed parts of the, uh, main event. True to her charter, Nina went everywhere / did everything. We debriefed over a fifteen dollar scotch in the hotel lobby listening to jazz standards played by a bill of really very good live bands. My proudest find: A porcelain teacup containing a sculpted dollop of personal lubricant and secreted away in the back of a small cabinet on the third floor.
Everyone left town for the 4th of July -- a good move, maybe, given that it was ninety-fucking-seven degrees that day -- but we stuck around. I went to the Keith Haring exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in the early afternoon, which was pretty awesome. The show covered his output between 1979 and 1982, so it spans the time he was developing that distinctive "pop" aesthetic but not the apotheosis of its implementation at The Pop Shop (a few blocks south of where I grew up!). His early paintings are pleasingly rough and even a little scary, spatters of red criss-crossing the orderly black Sumi ink work. One thing I should have already known but which the exhibit showcased was Haring's involvement in the punk music scene on the Lower East Side in the late 70s and early 80s: There was a whole wall devoted to the scrappy, xeroxed flyers he'd done for rock shows and underground art happenings. I was glad I got to see it.
Later that day Nina and Emma and Jay and I met up to go to a Brooklyn Cyclones game at MCU Park. We rooted for Brandom Nimmo despite his brain-dead at-bat song (Real American by Rick Derringer -- a sometimes collaborator of Larry "Ratso" Sloman?!). There were some impressive hits, both home runs and foul balls, but the fielding was crazy bad. Which is not to say that defense in baseball is an easy thing, but Yankees and Mets games have spoiled me to the extent that I was surprised to see the Cyclones and the Crosscutters alike dropping balls or laying out for and missing balls I would have expected them to catalyze into inning-ending plays. When I turned back quizically to Emma (sitting behind us) she rolled her eyes. "Welcome to the minors," she said. After the game, there were fireworks set off from right field; very convenient, considering we had no intention of catching the "official" display that's still perversely situated over the Hudson. It was also "Everybody Runs The Bases" night at MCU, so Nina and I queued up with the kids and the drunks to have a go. (Emma and Jay couldn't be bothered with such nonsense and said they'd meet us at Ruby's.) We waited our turn and then lit out around the diamond, hand in hand, from first to second, from second to third, from third to home base, the green sod beneath our feet lit up eerily bright by the stadium lights. Then we left the park.
We wanted to get away from the throng of people on Surf Ave., and Nina wanted to dip her toes in the ocean, so we broke away towards the beach. It was almost 11:00 but the beach was still packed with revelers, some splashing in the water, some rolling around in the sand doing kisses with a partner. The detritus of celebration -- bottles, cups, cigarettes, assorted plastic trash -- was floating in the ocean and everywhere on the beach. It's creepy to see so many people on the beach at night, like something terrible's forced us all out towards the edges of the continent, onto the last spit of land, and the only place left to go is into the water. The people waving glow sticks? They're partying as the ship goes down. We made our way towards Ruby's, still very much in business, where we met up with Emma and Jay -- and with a gentleman with red, white, and blue LEDs threaded through his nipple piercings. He seemed to have come to the boardwalk alone and looked desperate for people to acknlowedge his, uh, ornaments. "Eh?" he asked the passers-by, gesturing at his chest. "Yeah," he said. "Uh huh."
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Northwave
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.
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.
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.
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