Zaphod Beeblebrox

Our flight back from Sarasota landed, and we cabbed home to Gowanus. We dropped off our bags and walked straight to Barclays Center, where we had tickets to see the Nets play the Denver Nuggets.

How do I regard that building? With some ambivalence. True: It's ugly; they didn't build the housing they promised; it does nothing good and does some bad things. But those Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn people -- aren't they all sort of landed aristocracy? The reason they Love Brownstone Brooklyn is that they own a piece of Brownstone Brooklyn. They already got theirs. A tiny violin plays. (Am I thinking about it wrong? Educate me. Wait, don't.) So I am mostly mad at Barclays Center for taking away O'Connor's, which is still shrouded in white plywood, its sparkling concrete-and-glass upstairs protruding from the roof like a second head. And I do kind of like the funny little moss-wave they built in the plaza by the entrance, fulfilling, I guess some line-item requirement for greenery. To the point, though: Barclays Center is real nice inside. It's very controlled and a little too nice, like a strip club is nice -- in spite of you. At various points along the winding ramp that led up to the nosebleed seats, there was a little wagon that sold Brooklyn Brewery beers, a little wagon that sold fancy sausages, a little pizza wagon. Our seats were almost at the top of the stadium, and we experienced the same feeling vertiginous peril you get at Yankee Stadium when we side-stepped our way through the row to get to them. We were a few seats over from Eve and Jon and several other people that we knew.

Look, basketball is not quite my thing. At least, it is not quite my thing, yet. But the quarters went by quickly, and it was exciting to see a sports team zipping around the court and actually, you know, exerting themselves. And it turns out there are still some goony, character-actor types, like Kosta Koufos on the Nuggets, who add a welcome bit of, uh, personality. So I'm not quite sure how to evaluate the proceedings, but it seemed like the Nets beat Denver pretty handily. In between quarters, there were funny little pageants on the court, like a class of Greek Orthodox elementary school kids playing a five minute expo game. A slightly confused-looking community organizer was trundled out to be honored for her contributions. There were no dunks.

The following Saturday, Nina and I stopped by the Mercury Lounge to see bands. Ski Lodge was opening for Ex-Cops, who I thought Nina would get a kick out of. I think they were the early show. Ski Lodge is one of those bands that doesn't move around a lot. The two guitar players and the bassist wore their instruments high up on their chests and strummed them in a very deliberate and controlled way. The lead singer sounded a bit like Morrissey and had a pale blue Oxford shirt on that he tucked into his pants. The band sounded like The Smiths. They were okay. Ex-Cops were a bit more exciting. I guess they're properly a two-piece, a guy and a lady, but they had a bass player and a drummer up on stage with them. They've got a very hip look -- the lady's improbably good-looking, in a particularly North Brooklyn sort of way; the guy is carefully scruffy, sports a denim jacket and a baseball cap with a flipped-up brim like the skater skeleton on Cerebral Ballzy's album cover. They played tightly controlled, high speed punky pop songs, bopping in place as the lights flashed around them. The best thing in their set was a song called Broken Chinese Chairs. As we were leaving, I heard someone call my name. It turned out that my friend Adam from high school had been at the show with a lady friend. We cross-introduced each other and chatted for a while on Houston Street. We agreed in our assessment of the bands. Nina and I complimented him on his success: We'd learned on Facebook just days earlier that not only had he made a feature film but that it had won the top prize at SXSW. I hadn't seen him in years.

Nina and I stopped at Cake Shop afterwards so I could check something. Had Andy Bodor put a copy of our record up for sale in the "Cake Shop Recommends" bin? Indeed he had. Internet, now I can die.

Time passes.

Things that used to be small milestones for me but which I hardly notice now:

• Swapping out a used-up razor blade
• Buying a new brick of supermarket cheese
• Renting a movie
• Buying a new pair of jeans
• Getting a haircut from Edward

You would not believe how bald I've become.

Tube Dude

Finally, a proper piling of snow, although the timing could have been better. Impelled by equal parts filial guilt and "No, really" nudging from my job's HR department, I'd schedule some vacation time and plunked down for a flight to and hotel room in Sarasota. Two birds, one stone, my thinking went: I can see my grandma and get Nina some sunlight. And maybe I'll drink a margarita or find some fossilized sharks' teeth or something. I am not immune to the idea of vacationing, babies, but like many things in my life, I find it hard to engage with it if I'm not fully sold on the idea; examples: John Kerry, backpacking through Europe, writing a proof. At any rate, we were scheduled to fly down to Florida on Feburary 9th, which is exactly when Winter Storm Nemo landed in New York and Boston.

Delta promptly canceled our flight. Which was not a problem, really, since it gave us the following day to observe Nina's birthday, which she'd been trying to duck as usual. That night, though, we put out a call to our friends in the neighborhood to the effect that we had hot chocolate and whiskey and would people like to brave the storm with us stranded as we were in our rickety apartment by the bridge over the part of the Canal where the sick dolphin died in shit. And we were expecting that they would pass on it, but instead our house filled up with our friends and we set up an assembly line to boil milk, mix in Swiss Miss, and spike the result with Glenlivet. Everybody had some except for Tom, who had strep throat and asked for tea instead. I thought of another time he'd had something similar, right around the time we were graduating from college, and how sick we all used to get back then because we didn't have jobs or health insurance and you'd just walk around suffering for weeks. We all piled onto the couch and I put on the dreadful movie Vibrations, which almost but not quite captured peoples' attention. The storm howled outside, blasting the street with powder: The front door was adrift in fresh snow whenever I went downstairs to let someone in or out. And when the last people had left, Nina and I stood by the front windows, between the toasty warmth and the cold, and looked out over Union St. Small curiosities! One of the casket companies had hired a tiny earthmover to scoop snow out of the driveway. Nina edited together a short video of it. It was really zipping around!

The next day, Nina had to endure receiving her birthday presents, but after that we were at loose ends. She'd been waiting all winter for an opportunity to go sledding -- for real, with a proper sled, not just some cardboard from the recycling. Okay, I said, sure. Let's do it. In the late afternoon we walked over to Save On Fifth for a sled, picturing something luxurious, a two-seater Rosebud. But all they had were these enormous circular sleds shaped like dinner plates with ass prints, like they'd been sat upon before being fired in the kiln. We bought a blue one, and, disc in tow, we trekked up to the Park and trudged out to the north meadow through the gray brown purple darkness. A guy hollered at from the base of a snowy hill near the 3rd St. entrance to lend him the sled for his kids, but I told Nina we should ignore him. "He didn't ask nice," I said. When we got close to the middle of the meadow, we saw that someone had built a snowman there, leaving it in the dark, featureless like an obelisk on a dead planet. It was very cold. Nina took out her phone and turned on the lightbulb to get a better look, and we saw that somebody had hung a cardboard plaquard around the thing's neck that identified it as Ed Koch. Ha! We pulled our sled up the slope on the eastern side of the meadow where the lights were and readied ourselves for the ride, Nina taking the helm and me behind her, motorcycle-style, with my legs wrapped around her torso. Oh man that thing went fast! It was at least as fast as the greased cardboard we'd used last year for the same purpose. We worked through several variations: Her behind me, each of us on our own, a little bit north where the hill was steeper, a little bit south (The Bunny Slope) where it was less. We called it quits after an hour, my tailbone bruised and our clothes caked with snow. Anyway, we had plans to visit Sean and Kate at their apartment in Crown Heights. We didn't know their precise address, and our cell phones had both died by the time we got to their building, so it was only through a stroke of wild luck that a woman happened to be leaving a building that looked like it was theirs and was willing to let us in. And that she happened to be Sean and Kate's next door neighbor and thus could tell us their apartment number, well, that was very improbable as well. We left our sled in the hall with our snowy boots. Kate welcomed us into the kitchen, where there was a bolognese sauce simmering on the stovetop, and up to the second floor of their duplex where, no shit, there was a fucking fireplace with a fire burning in it. "He's in a truculent mood right now," said Kate of Sean, by way of warning, I guess. "He's been drinking whiskey since noon." He was up there with Jon, and yeah he was tight, but we got fucked up ourselves and watched WarGames by the fire and ate spaghetti.

The next morning it really was time for us to fly, so we hustled out to Laguardia and hopped our flight, and three hours later we were at Sarasota-Bradenton Int'l, another world, everything turquoise and smelling faintly of sulfur. We walked up to the Mote Marine kiosk above the baggage claim and chased a stripey lobster around the tank. We'd planned that Nina, a recently-legal car renter, would rent a car to get us around, and she did: Level up! José from Enterprise gave us tips on what to see and do, although I already fancied myself a pro. The first thing we did was drive to the Sarasota Holiday Inn, down by the ocean. On the way, we passed by necessity through St. Armand's Circle, a large rotary that forms Sarasota's downtown. The businesses along its perimeter are inconsequential (okay restaurants, galleries for terrible art), and the interior of the circle is decorated with white marble and limestone statues of a gauche variety of classical (the "Seven Virtues of Sarasota") and non-classical (several busts of John Ringling, town patron / tyrant). It's a perfect display of vapid, new-world pretentiousness. The room we'd reserved faced inland, giving us a direct view of an array of cranes and earthmoving equipment performing surgery on a row of unfinished villas across the street. (Winter is "building season," a local informed us.) After dropping off our stuff, we got back into the car and drove back up the Tamiami Trail to visit my grandma at the retirement community where she lives. My dad was there to greet us; he flies down periodically to help her keep track of her finances and other things. My grandmother is obviously losing the thread, but she's armed herself with a mirror frame wedged full of snapshots so she knows who everyone is. She asked Nina for one to add to her collection. We drank Jim Beam with her in her room, and then took a stroll around the grounds. She pointed out a pelican diving for a fish in Sarasota Bay: "You see how he plunges? He can see a fish from way up there and he plunges." She told us again a minute later. In the evening, my dad took me and Nina out to dinner at The Crab & Fin. The last time I'd been there was with my grandmother. I'd found a mussel pearl.

The next day we visited granny again. I re-introduced her to Nina before she could ask. We spent a few minutes with one of her friends within the facility, who showed us a piece of sculpture made by a local craftsman known as Tube Dude. In the afternoon, we drove up the trail a bit further and visited the Jungle Gardens. When I was a little kid and my family would stay in a bungalow on Casey Key, we would go there every year, and I remember thinking it was exotic and manicured. As a grup I can see that it's a little exotic and a little manicured, but it's also, you know, a roadside zoo: Musty smell, threadbare animals, bird shit everywhere. Whatever -- they take in abandoned pets and critters that get hit by cars. They're great. We watched a little show in the amphitheater featuring a coffee-colored skunk named Mocha (Nina got to hold her like a baby at the end) and some birds with clipped wings did tricks like riding little bicycles across a table. When you buy your ticket, you can shell out a little extra for a bag of food pellets to feed to animals roaming the grounds. It took us a little while to figure out where the. They were surprisingly gentle, if insistent -- a flamingo nipped Nina's elbow to get her attention when she turned away from a moment. But they'd turn their heads sideways and lay them in your hand to kind of lap the pellets up with of the sides of their mouths. Some of them were a little worse for wear: One had a mangled-up beak, curved out and up like a bruised fingernail about to pop off; another didn't seem to want to its head up off the ground, swinging it back and forth like a clock pendulum to shoo away hungry sparrows. Beyond the flamingo grove was a strange and apparently neglected part of the gardens. It was a small, wooded grotto ringed with little glassed-in dioramas depicting scenes from the Bible: Jesus doing something with lepers, Jesus crucified at Golgotha. The figures in the dioramas had a grotesque look about them, like a harbinger of evil discovered by a character in a Lovecraft story. They were squat and ugly, their faces grotesque and undifferentiated. The dioramas themselves looked like they might have at one time been interactive or light-up or something, but not any more. There was dust and dirt all over everything, inside and outside the glass. Several of the scenes had cardboard "out of order" signs taped over them. We got back to the hotel a little before six. It was already quite dark, but the swimming pool was open and warm. We quick-changed into bathing costumes and borrowed towels from the front desk. We bobbed around for almost an hour, trying to keep everything below our necks submerged, until the cold air made even that untenable.

The following morning we knew we wanted to go to the beach, so after eating oatmeal at the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel we put on our beach things and went across the street. We rented a beach umbrella from one of the leatheriest dudes I've ever seen. But I wanted to roam the beach and find a few fossilized shark's teeth; I'd collected hundreds of them as a kid, but Nina was skeptical. "So they're just lying on the beach? I don't see any." I remembered to put sunblock on everything excepy my ears and so promptly got a sunburn there (February!). But I did find three teeth. Nina found one, too! After that we swam in the pool some more, irking the serious lap-swimmers by playing "Water Taxi" in the shallows; and then we drove out to Mote Marine Laboratory. The live animal shows were all wrapping up by the time we got there, and the grounds were emptying out, but that was maybe a good thing: No lines for the touch tanks! We prodded and inspected decorator sea urchins, small horshoe crabs, a racing circuit of slimy rays. A team of divers was cleaning the shark tank (partitioning it first with a weighted, heavy net) and we watched them, mostly old men, their hair clouding away from their skulls like algae as they buffed the glass and repositioned the various ornaments in the tank, occasionally giving a friendly pat on the flank to a curious fish. Back to St. Armand's Circle, where they were celebrating Mardi Gras. An awful band (teenagers) played Beatles covers ("Thanks, everyone! That was 'Let It Be,' by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.") at the head of the rotary. We poked our heads into various shops, looking for trinkets to reward our friends who were feeding the cat. We made the mistake of entering a commercial gallery of blown-glass surf art -- end tables hoisted onto the backs of translucent sea turtles and small dolphins. An array of flat-screen TVs showed a documentary about the mercenary hack responsible for some of the glittery crap, and as we stood momentarily transfixed, an imbecilic salesman approached and started slobbering about how the artist was going to be coming to the store in person next week and how lucky the staff was to be graced with his presence. We escaped to a nearby fudge shop, where we bought fudge, and then to a store that specialized in hot sauce, where we bought salt and vinegar-flavored crickets.

We drove out to Fruitville for dinner, to a place recommended by a friend of Nina's family. It was called The Old Packinghouse Cafe, and it turned out to be a real (well, real to my gullible eye) "road house." Which is to say it was deserted except for a party of black leather motorcycle people sitting at a wooden table outside and complaining loudly about Barack Obama, and the guy playing a guitar on a stool inside the restaurant also worked in the kitchen. We opted for an outside table as well. A fearless tabby cat came over and lay down in the dust next to the table. Nina ordered a catfish sandwich that was unbelievably good. I had some kind of chicken thing. The bikers roared. We drove back to the hotel, parked the car, and then returned to the Circle on foot to take care of some unfinished business: Fruity drinks at the Daquiri Deck. It was chilly, so we parked ourselves squarely under a palm tree-shaped propane heater. I had a piña colada. Nina had something called a "green parrot."

Did we try the snacketizers? We did not.

Letters To A Young Promoter

In the early, freeze-dried days of the new year, one thing I have been doing is mailing out review copies of the record Bel Argosy put out last summer, The Wreck of the Bel Argosy. The process is sometimes exhilerating (when the record is reviewed) and often frustrating (when the record is ignored). I'd like to say that it's led us to develop a more sophisticated strategy for promotion, but I don't think that's quite true. That is to say, can we expect a radically different response to the next thing we put out? Almost certainly not. Inevitably, though, we have learned a few things. The first records we sent out were like my first round of college applications: Requested information supplied, but nothing to supplement or distinguish it, and nothing to suggest a personality behind the envelope. We assumed people would be like, oh, let me listen to this strange and unsolicited record and judge it on its obvious merits. Because I am a record label / college radio station / blogger and that is just my job.

And it would be great if that worked, but that approach was largely unsuccessful for us -- even when we reminded our respective almas mater's radio stations of our membership in the class of oh-man-that-was-a-long-time-ago. (Hi, WESU Middletown!) Thus, our new tack is that we are willing to play ball and, you know, get personal. Open a vein. And that seems to work better: After all, a lot of blogs or magazines even suggest that you write a personal statement to accompany your record in order to help it stand out from all of the unsolicited free music they get in the mail every day, and many of them hint that your communication with them should contain entirely original content -- no form letters, please. So I've started writing little essays about what a fun band we are and how proud we are of the record and what an interesting time this is to be playing music in New York City -- all true, really. However, doing this anew for every blog we pitch is prohibitively time-intensive, and even when you do find the time to write something personal and evocative, it's no guarantee of coverage. I successfully reverse-engineered the kind of writing I thought one guy was looking for, and we got into a back-and-forth with him about editing it just-so for inclusion on his site, and then he abruptly shuttered his blog and moved to Paris. No lie, it pays to hedge a bit. But we've enjoyed a fair amount of success, too. In particular, blogs that specialize in reviewing vinyl records have been kind to us, as have a few local indie rock blogs. And publications that represent the intersection of the two, well, that's just gold.

Moving on. Truly, it's been bitterly cold out, but I didn't want to have spent it indoors like I did last year. Instead, I'm continuing the silly quest for for new experiences, as if I were 21 instead of 31 and a decidedly middle-class computer guy. I'd bought tickets to the Iceage show at 285 Kent last night, and, appropriately, it was well below freezing as I walked down Kent Ave. to South 1st. Kent in winter always reminds me of the very beginning of Moby Dick, where Ishmael is exploring a pitch dark New Bedford. There are a lot of boarded-up storefronts and a lot of barred windows on funny little single-story buildings that might be peoples' houses and might not be. 285 itself is right next to Glasslands and looks like maybe the freight entrance for that place; if there weren't a parka'd bouncer parked in front of the featureless door, you wouldn't know to go inside. Initially I thought it might be the place where Nina and I saw The Spunks-u several years ago, but 285 Kent is much bigger and, well, grander than that place. The room easily holds two hundred people, and the walls are covered in a network of aerosol and brush-painted black lines, part Keith Haring, part Mentaculus. It's cavernous and cold and a little intimidating, maybe like a much less cozy Death By Audio (which is right down the street).

The first band was Deformity, perhaps an ironic name since all the band members were good-looking dudes. They sounded alright, although I quickly deployed my earplugs. The lead singer, who vibed hardcore nerd rage in an IBM-style short-sleeve shirt, yelped his vocals in staccato, which made me think of Sarim al-Rawi from Liquor Store. "Fuck!" he shrieked, frantically diddling his guitar. The drummer took his shirt off. They played a short set, less than thirty minutes, I think. Maybe that's de rigeur for the genre -- which would make sense when there's not a whole lot in terms of hooks or lyrics for a listener to latch onto.

Raspberry Bulbs were next. I'd read their name here and there in the breathlessly-written metal coverage on BrooklynVegan, and I guess I'd managed to suppress or ignore my confusion over their name. Raspberry Bulbs: What gives? Is their name some kind of ironic meiosis? Or do raspberry bulbs look really, you know, brutal? I suspect it's the former, since the lead singer goes by the stage name He Who Crushes Teeth. "Turn the reverb, like, all the way up," he instructed the sound guy while adjusting his mic. That made me worried, but they were actually pretty good! Also, there are not one but two old bald dudes in the band, another several points in their favor. And their on-stage affect was pretty awesome, too, a careful balance between too-cool-for-school and rocking-too-hard-over-thirty; they were like blacksmiths working a forge. Unfortunately, the wiring on one of the guitars crapped out about four songs in, and they couldn't get it going again. He Who Crushes Teeth shrugged and signaled to turn the house music back on.

Nomads were up next. I don't have a lot to say about them: Screaming and noise. But they only played for twenty-five minutes. While I waited for Iceage to set up, I sat on a dirty couch in the foyer next to Craig Finn, who was talking to a pretty girl. The concrete floor was wet and dirty. I was tempted to drink another beer but started worrying about the calories, like an old guy who is getting soft. A few years ago, Iceage was notorious for being young ("Some of the band isn't even old enough to drink! And yet they do it anyway!!") but now I think people wan to know whether they're racist ("I heard they're racist!!"). I think I would have been super into them in high school, mostly because of their practiced punk rock disaffection: They played songs off a new album called "You're Nothing" and from the moment they got on stage, you could tell that Elias, the lead singer, was spoiling for a fight. He had an air of threatening nonchalance, dispensing the lyrics instead of singing them, and before too long he'd hopped down into the crowd to take care of business. Their albums have a thrilling buzzsaw energy to them, but their live sound was a bit unfocused and muddled. I'd gotten stuck at the back of the house as the room filled up before their set, and as a tall dude it was fun to see hundreds of people react to the violence, performative or otherwise.

Then back out into the cold and wet. We left our boots in the hallway.

The Wonderful Underworld

What we did on New Year's Eve.

This year I was the one who insisted that we "wild out." Nina wanted to go to a few friend parties and call it a night, but I was thinking, Come on, City. Let me push my limits a bit. Specifically, I wanted to try to go to the Rubulad party in Bushwick, a three-venue affair that promised live music by some bands I'd sort of heard of, plus attractions that, you know, seemed pretty okay: a puppet show, acrobats, a "magical RV." Rubulad has occupied a position of awed prestige in my imaginings, on account of Nina characterizing herself as a frequent attendee around the time we started dating. She'd drop some casual mention, like, hey I saw Jonathan Ames smoking crack with Terry Richardson... you know, at Rubulad. Well, I have to do this, too, I thought, if only to make myself feel more like a guy who's seen a thing or two.

We spent the afternoon with Evan, whose birthday is New Year's Eve. I'd bought him a bottle of Jeppson's Malort for Christmas. I saw it sitting on the window sill as we entered his Grand St. apartment, the filmy gray afternoon sunlight revealing a few sips missing. Evan wanted us to watch a YouTube video demo of this piece of software called Artemis, which is one of those things that makes you feel a little sad because it nails an idea or a feeling you'd been grasping at unsuccessfully. I wanted be the one to make this thing exist, you think, maybe. Whatever, it's a Star Trek game. We took him out for lunch at Champs, which was very nice except that it looked a lot like somebody had spat a generous loogie onto the seat of the booth before we sat down. Why would someone do that? I thought, like an old person. I had a sandwich. We left Evan at Bushwick Country Club with Fili the bartender, after drinking a round of Old Crow specials and attempting to reverse engineer the countertop photo hunt game, and returned to Gowanus to make ourselves ready.

Our destination was Cypress Ave., but our first stop was on Garfield St., where we crashed Mark and Lisa's party, which Lisa explained they were conducting in the Russian mode -- which meant it was okay for us to show up unannounced, eat their food, and depart. Her parents confirmed this, pouring us paper cup after cup of easy-to-swallow vodka to show that they meant what they said. They had tubs and tubs of pickled mushrooms and eggplant hye from Elza Fancy Food, the actual name of which, Lisa explained, is printed on the menu in Russian as "At Your Mother-In-Law's." Mark was cooking, too; the kitchen was filled with the smell of brisket. We looked at some of their vacation photos, poses with animals and water. Mark pitched us, drunkenly, on joining the Food Co-op. I will never do that, I think, but I have been wrong before.

After that, we took the train to City Hall where we visited Nani at his soon-to-be-vacated apartment, in the building with a goddamn fireplace in its lobby. As he often does, he had a wide array of booze and mixers available, and he'd ordered a gargantuan thing of crudités. He made me a Singapore Sling, which pretty much knocked me on my ass. We all watched the ball drop in his living room, the college folk and his friends from Long Island and his lawyer friends, firing champagne poppers at the flat-screen TV. Nani's gonna be in Paris this year, and in an effort to lighten his suitcases, he was giving away a subset of his possessions, The Mad Men Guide To... etc. The taxidermied squirrel on his bookshelf was not on the auction block, although Emma attempted to claim it by dressing it up with a party hat and noisemaker.

1 AM, onwards to East Williamsburg. The first of the three venues was a nameless storefront on Cypress and Starr St., a low-slung building with a sparsely furnished interior. There was a plywood bar and a small stage with a number of folding chairs arrayed in front of it. A freckly woman with muscular arms sat on a stool and strummed a guitar. The party had obviously moved on, but the room was still half full, with several people gathered near a rickety, wrought-iron staircase descending into the floor. We nudged them out of the way and went down. It was weird down there, babies: The basement was laid out in Mission Revival style -- or at least, it looked a bit like the Mos Eisley Cantina. There was a long chamber with a very low ceiling and a small bar at one end, lit with candles and pink fairy lights. It opened onto a couple of attached rooms where a few people were sipping beers out of plastic cups. We stepped into one of these rooms and realized that the floor had been entirely papered over with tin foil. A girl sitting on a stool in the corner hissed, "It's ice. You're skating." We crossed the floor in our best pantomime of skating. At the far end, there was a low doorway into a dark kind of grotto. There was nothing there except for a damp smell and a dirty newspaper. Another reveler skated across the "ice," stuck his head in, and left. Should we try to find the next place? we wondered. Like the kids might do, we turned to Twitter for advice. A DJ had tweeted, perhaps intentionally, the location of the second party.

We struck out for 135 Thames, passing house parties and reggaeton raves. Upon arrival, though -- riding up on, say, 2 AM -- we discovered that the venue was closed. If it had ever been a venue. On the outside, it looked like a wholesaler's garage, with a painting contractor on the second floor. We nosed around the adjacent buildings for a while before admitting defeat and trudging back to Cypress in the cold. ...Where they told us at the basement bar that the second venue had been shut down by the police, but did give us the third location: The Bat Haus co-working space, on Starr St. near St. Nicholas Ave.

This was what I was expecting from Rubulad: They'd cleared the desks out, leaving a generous dance floor in the front that tapered into a sort of hallway towards the back, illuminated by red lights, along which there were booths where you could buy drinks or novelties -- Nina bought a shot of "genuine" absinthe. I got a PBR from a bartender dressed like a bunny, Bridget Jones-style. There was a small yard in the back where you could get a breath of fresh air. A basket of pastel chalk had been set out to allow revelers to write messages to the new year. Back indoors, there was a projector mounted on one side of the room projecting the movie Zardoz onto the opposite wall, which would have been beyond confusing for me, except that we'd screened it for Bad Movie Night. There were costumes: A willowy young man and woman wearing full-body leopard-striped onesies vamped on the staircase leading up to the locked office; a young man with a build like a satyr was gyrating next to us in a toga. We danced and drank, holding our winter coats and hats and scarves under our arms.

By 3 AM, Zardoz was winding down; Zed had found the metaphysical cipher in the library of Arthur Frayn, and we were getting pretty danced out. We left the warehouse and walked down Starr St. to St. Nicholas, scanning the chilly horizon for a taxi or car service car. By 3:30 we decided it was fruitless, and got back on the L at Jefferson Ave. I had to pee, and the further we got, the more sure I got that I wouldn't make it all the way to 14th St. much less all the way back down to Gowanus. I made the case to Nina for disembarking at Bedford Ave. and ducking into a bar. She acquiesced, but my timing was terribly wrong: It was now past "last call," and The Abbey, whose pot I'd hoped to piss in, was closed. And the bodega on Driggs wouldn't let me use their bathroom. Likewise Eden, a gross restaurant right outside the train station, the unctuous waiter telling me it was for customers only but did I know that they were still selling chicken tacos for $9? Never have I been so grateful to that gross pizza place between N 7th and 8th, where they could not care less who was doing what in their bathroom. The place was packed with party people -- orders of magnitude worse than on a Friday or Saturday night -- and the guy on line behind me came stumbling into the bathroom with his eyes closed. But I was free! I bought Nina, who was feeling justifiably put out, a conciliatory slice, and we ate amidst the drunks (who were so drunk they were slumping out of their seats and onto the floor) and the girls who were complaining that they hadn't done anything good yet.

We got home before the dreaded blue o'clock -- but not much before -- and we quick-changed from our party clothes into our jammies. When I opened the fridge to decant a pre-fizzed SodaStream bottle, the little light in the back popped its death-flash. The next morning, I clogged the toilet and had to plunge it for a solid forty minutes to get it working again.

Renewal.

Best Of 2012

The list:

Best book I read: A Scanner Darkly
Best album: The Wreck of the Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best song: Ecce Homo, Titus Andronicus; runner up: Son Of An American, The So So Glos (lo-fi version)>
Best show I went to: Titus Andronicus at Shea Stadium, Oct. 22nd
Best dance: The Cat Daddy
Best movie I saw in the theater: Beasts of the Southern Wild; Runner up: The Cabin in the Woods
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
Best worst movie: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
Best weekend morning diversion: Fuckin' Skyrim
Best Sunday night HBO show: Girls
Best brunch: Breakfast burrito, Vspot
Best snack: Sahadi's Wasabi Kri-Kri
Best music programme on WFMU: Tie: Thing With A Hook; Distort Jersey City
Best stick gauge: 5A
Best venue: Shea Stadium
Best bar: Canal Bar

I went to my parents' for the holidays. I didn't stress out about getting presents for people this year. I had something for almost everyone, but much of the gifts I bought were just sort of gestures toward my good itentions. My sister, in from Denmark, showed us some very skillful photos she taken with an old-timey camera on a recent trip to Turkey. She'd bought some beautiful curios for us. My present was a hand-ainted ceramic tile with a rich blue enamel design on it. We baked a Boston cream pie for my mom on Monday night, which was easier than I thought, although a lot of credit is owed to my dad's owning a springform cake pane. My parents have always maintained a well-stocked larder -- I attribute my own impulse to hoard dry goods to them -- but I'd bought a few ingredients that I didn't expect them to have on hand: Cake flour, vanilla beans for the custard. My mom found it hard to believe that the strange leathery strips were the source of vanilla flavor. I showed her the scraped-out inside of the bean we'd cut into for the pie, still sticky.

Inspired by the offerings of Tom and Colleen and Tom and Katharine, Nina and I resolved to have a party at our house, a little after Christmas. She hatched the idea as we were leaving Katharine's house after her party on the 20th. "We'll just have a little get-together for people who happen to be town between Christmas and New Year's," she told people. "Something casual with beer and cheese. No need to dress up." But as she started putting together the guest list it became clear that what she had in mind was a first class holiday rager, cheese-themed. The post-Christmas-pre-New-Year's friend demographic surprised us with about twenty positive RSVPs -- the most I think I've ever played host to. Nina rallied and shopped. On her way back from Pennsylvania, she made a tour of K-Mart and Pier 1 and picked some additional lights for the tree, plus a set of traditional "balls" ornaments, plus a wire-frame star for the top, plus a pair of beaded, big-red-feather-tailed bird clip ornaments which I think were supposed to be phoenixes? I clipped those to the top branch despite Nina's hand-wringing over whether they made our living room look like Christmas in a whorehouse. We added to the mix the packs of Garbage Pail Kids cards we'd scored at the Nitehawk screening, nestling the cards in the nooks between branches. Fun Gus, Adam Bomb. "That's a good-looking tree," Nina said when we'd finished.

The day of the party, we went on a long trek through Carroll Gardens, buying cookies, beer (the beer distributor had Quilmes for $10.50!), Trader Joe odds and ends, and a great quantity of food from Sahadi's -- Kri Kri, obv., and cheese of many varieties. People started to show up around 8:30. Bo brought a bottle of Danish akvavit, which tasted faintly of caraway seeds, and which got poured into shots until it was all gone. Ray brought fancy raspberry-infused cheese from Union Market. Pretty much everyone brought beer, to the extent that the top shelf of our generously-proportioned fridge is even now entirely occupied by bottles, complementing a still-mostly-full case of PBR on the bottom shelf left over from a D&D party a week or so previous. People got along pretty well -- no fights, though perhaps there were a few disagreements. People got drunk, too, which was our goal, and pretty much all of the cheese got ate. We did it, we thought, after the last guest departed at 4 AM.

Actually, that thought is what we thought later that morning after we woke up. What we thought at the moment was nothing at all.

Windy Winston

December!

In celebration of our big apartment and its tall ceilings, I resolved to buy a Christmas tree. And so, around the beginning of the month, I rode out to Sunset Park, to the parking company office on 4th Ave. and 38th St. with all the different countries' flags flying over its barbed wire fences, which becomes a fir trading post around the holidays. I knew they'd be at least half the price of any vendor in Gowanus or Park Slope, and I was right about that. Penny-pincher that I am, though, I discounted the trickiness of getting a six-and-a-half-foot tree (which is what I wound up with) two miles back to Union St. And I hadn't brought gloves, either. But I set my jaw and grabbed the trunk in two places and lugged the goddamn thing down into the subway and onto the platform, where I got a few bemused looks from some Chinese people waiting for the train. And I lugged it up the stairs at Pacific St., my hands now fully gummed up with sap, and back down the stairs to downtown local platform, because I'd accidentally boarded an express. I got out the single strand of rainbow fairy lights that we already hadn't hung from the lintels and augmented with a slightly mismatched set of 100 from Target. I bought two different non-canonical flavors of candy cane from the Associated on 5th -- strawberry and chocolate mint -- and hung those up as well. Done, I said, even though the tree still looks a little naked.

That is just my way.

Beau and his lady friend Morgan just moved into a new apartment in Bed-Stuy together, and they threw themselves a housewarming party this weekend. Nina and I attended, even though we knew we wouldn't really know anyone else; and, sure enough, we were the only people not affiliated with the "anti-folk" scene. But those people are so nice and so easy to get along with. The longer I ride this spaceship Earth, the more strongly I believe in my friend Peter's advice: That one should cotton to friendly weirdos. I don't think I'm ruffling any feathers to suggest that that's what anti-folk is all about. J.J. Hayes was there -- Beau had contributed a song to an album of covers of his music this year -- and we bonded over loving The Pogues. Beau and Morgan's new apartment is charming, and has a big back yard with a funny wooden stage built out in the middle of it; I'm sure they've got designs on that already. They have three cats, two of which have the regular number of legs, the third of which is a tripod. All of them said hi. Beau directed our attention to a loose tile in the entryway, which, when removed, revealed a drain with a disconcerting amount of hair tufting out of it. Everyone had brought a delicious snack of some sort: There were merengues and cookies of various specious, and Beau himself had cooked an amazingly good tofu chili -- remarkable for its spiciness, which is straight-up missing from most vegetarian chilis. He was modest about the recipe, but I pressed him for it, and he typed it up and emailed it to me the next day. Find it below, a first for this publication?

Get a thing of "firm tofu," and cut it into cubes. Put it in a bowl with a lot of cayanne pepper and a little bit of paprika. Stir it up so the tofu absorbs the flavor.

Put a can (or two if you want a big helping) of red kidney beans in a pot, draining the beans first. Cook it on low.

Cut some celery into small bits and put it into a hot skillet.

Cut some mushrooms into small bits and put them into the skillet.

Cook them for a few minutes, then put them into the pot with the beans. Turn the heat up to medium.

Get a can of pickled jalapenos, cut them into smallish bits, and put them into the pot.

Put the tofu in the pot.

If the chili reaches a boil, turn the heat down to low. Stir occasionally so it doesn't burn.

Nina and I played a game of "trains" (Ticket To Ride) with Beau's friends-slash-bandmates Joe (bass) and Sonia (typewriter). We confirmed that Joe was in fact the guy that we'd seen take a bad fall from the stage at the Titus Andronicus show on the 2nd and get dragged from the crowd by friendly strangers. His shoulder had gotten fucked up, he said, and Webster Hall had sent him to the hospital to repair a gash on his head. He lamented that he'd missed the band performing The Battle of Hampton Roads. Do you think they'll play it again live, he wondered? Crowd-surfing: A perilous sport. Nina won our game, in no small part by forming the longest contiguous section of track. I built out all my connecting routes, but what does that get you?

The party began to wind down around eleven o'clock, and we took our leave. Our destination was the Nitehawk Cinema on Metropolitan Ave., where they were doing a midnight screening of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. A word about that: I was super into Garbage Pail Kids cards. This guy, your humble narrator, was not much of a baseball card collector, if you can believe that. But I thrilled to the scenes of corporeal discomfort depicted on the cards and tried to decode the rationale behind giving the same picture of a gross little kid two different names. (Adult supposition: More cards, more money.) I kept them in an elegant hand-made wooden box, with a lid in the shape of a mallard duck until they wouldn't fit in it any more. Towards the end of elementary school I made the mistake of pooling my collection with that of a like-minded peer -- at his house. I haven't seen my cards since.

Do you people know about the Nitehawk? It's a fancy-pants movie theater in Williamsburg where the hook is that you can get food and booze sent direct to your seat while the movie is playing. It sounds like an infuriating conceit, but in the mostly-empty theater we were in, it was actually pretty delightful. Each pair of seats shares a little table which has lights on the underside -- so you can see to write down your order or scribble commentary on the movie, which we did. It's downright womb-like. We ordered beers and a thing of nachos, which was quite tasty but looked in the dark like featureless gray mush. It's a wonder we were able to eat at all: That movie is pure nightmare fuel. A pre-teen boy with a crush on a cruel, mercenary teenage girl enlists the help of a half dozen aliens? leprechauns? minor demons? with various behavioral disorders and physical deformities in order to win her heart. There are farts, musical numbers. The Garbage Pail Kids sew clothes that would set contemporary Williamsburg on fire. Where the movie disappoints is in its restraint: Valerie Vomit saves her special purpose until the final act, during the girl's (Tangerine's) fashion show, at which point she deploys it sparingly.

But overall it was a very fine date!

Come On, Sandy

One thing after another.

The Monday after CMJ finished, Nina and I managed to get tickets to the release party for Titus Andronicus' new album, Local Business, at Shea Stadium. It was one of those things where I saw the announcement for the show on a several days' old blog post somewhere horrible like BrooklynVegan. Limited admission! Already sold out! No tickets at the door! I despaired. But then I saw a "tweet" from the band leader's volatile Twitter feed that gave me hope. So I did as I was told and reloaded the ticket page, and lo! there were more tickets.

Liquor Store, whom I'm liking more and more, opened the show, and finished their set with a raunchy instrumental performance. Dan Friel from Parts and Labor (who opened the very first Titus Andronicus show I ever saw) played a bunch of computer music, and acknowledged his status as one of the local businesses in partnertship with T.A., LLC. Speaking of which, The So So Glos, who run the venue and helped record the album -- and who just seem like all-around nice guys -- were working the bar. Alex, their lead singer was walking the floor with a characteristic look of worry on his face. I saw my friend Anthony from Silicone Sister. The DJ put on If I Should Fall From Grace With God, and I danced a little dance by myself. This is a good sign, I thought.

I had heard a few tracks off the new album already, one in a YouTube video, another couple in an, uh, uneven live performance on The Best Show's marathon special. They were good, but left me wondering if they'd really hit the same resonant frequency as the last album. That's a pretty trite thing to think about a band's new album, right? But The Monitor really shook me the first few times I listened to it. It's a strikingly vulnerable collection of songs, angry and self-deprecating and hopeful and of course very, very pretentious -- a quality balanced by its outsize ambition, which I took as a challenge: You must improve your life. I'm still trying to figure out what this new one's all about. My best guess so far is that it's an attempt to channel the compulsion toward self-scrutiny -- on display in their first two releases -- into a sustainable musical practice. You know, like a business! Or to put it another way, it's a more "mature" album, which means the songs are less sloppy but also less maniacally exhilerating. The new band, which I guess is notable for being the same crew between recording the album and going on tour, is very good, although they have more of a indie rock "dude" vibe about them. Adam Reisch in particular can shred like a motherfucker. They played the album pretty much in its entirety, including the songs that are quickly becoming my favorites, "Ecce Homo" and "Upon Viewing Oregon's Landscape With The Flood Of Detritus;" as well as some of what are probably the "deeper cuts," like "Tried To Quit Smoking" and "(I Am) The Electric Man." Eric Harm's dad came up on stage to play a harmonica solo for "Smoking." He seemed nonplussed by the chaos below the stage; he's probably done this before. And they played pretty much everything you could hope for from their first two albums. And they played a kind of novelty song they'd said they'd been workshopping, a Headliners-esque number called "I've Got A Date Tonight."

They played for two euphoric hours, and the crowd kept pace, dancing around with reciprocal joy. There were beta-male types like yours truly (only, let's be honest, about five years younger on average) doing their fair of pushing and shoving, as well as a big ox of a guy who was tossing people around like The Thing plowing through a bunch of scrawny henchmen. At one point I realized I'd come close to colliding with the venerable Amy Klein. (Hey! I said). They didn't play any encores because they were basically out of songs. I went over and bought the new album as soon as they got off stage. I thought to myself: That was maybe, maybe the best thing I've ever seen.

Now to the hurricane.

Nina had left town for the weekend to celebrate her grandmother's birthday in Scranton, knowing that she might not be able to get back into the city until well into the following week if the storm proved to be severe. But we weren't anticipating anything worse than Hurricane Irene last year, even if the satellite photos of Sandy were pretty disconcerting. And we were in Zone B, whatever that means, only a block or so closer to the "danger zone" of the Gowanus flood plain than in our preious digs. I'd invited a bunch of people over on Sunday for a Hurricane Party I'd hoped would recall the cozy charm of the one Katharine had thrown during Irene last year, but my timing was wrong: It was a windy and cold that night, but it was clear that the real shit wasn't going down yet. There was no risk, you see. Tom and Ted came over and we watched Transmorphers.

Monday night was a different story. The wind and the rain picked up significantly after I got home from work. Nina called from Pennsylvania around eight o'clock to make sure I was okay. "Lower Manhattan is totally blacked out," she said, "and people are losing power all over Brooklyn." I had been curled up on the couch listening to the Titus Andronicus album on repeat, and I told her as much, but almost as soon as I had said it, the lights went out. It's funny (well, not really) the extent to which electricity is the lubricant of modern life. I had to do a quick prioritization: Get off the phone to save battery in case there's an emergency; shut down the laptop to save battery in case I get really bored; figure out which things in the fridge need to get eaten now, real business-like, in the dark. Strangely enough, there was one outlet in the kitchen that still seemed to be "live," and the lights in the hall stayed on throughout. I made the mistake of leaving the front door open to light the kitchen as I checked on various things, and Kitty ventured out into the hall and down the stairs, immediately becoming lost and terrified. When I picked her up to bring her back upstairs, she hooked her claws so deeply into the flesh of my shoulder that I had to sit down in the hall to undo her. At 8:30, I got the following "Extreme alert" on my cell phone:

Take Shelter Now

We'd been reviewing our disaster preparedness the previous week, and Nina'd unpacked a small battery-powered radio, plastic moldings in the shape of a 1950s jukebox. I took it out and plugged a nine-volt battery into it, and with some effort was able to tune it to a station that was still broadcasting in English, the hosts sort of sheepishly apologizing for the lack of content, as a festive pattern of LEDs danced up and down the side. At 9:30, I got another alert:

Go indoors immediately and remain inside.

I took a shit in the dark. My dad called to say his power was out as well. My mom had gone to California to visit her parents, so it was just us dudes, in the dark. Takin' shits.

The wind was strong enough to rattle the windows -- and to make the building actually sway perceptibly, but it didn't seem like a real hazard where I was. I kept craning my neck to get a better view through the window of what I was sure was going to be the Gowanus Canal surging up Union St., but that didn't happen. I could see into the candle-lit front rooms of the houses across the street, and everyone seemed to be doing okay. I gauged the neightborhood's access to power by the red light-up S.J. Fuel Co. sign on Third Ave. and Union. Eventually it went out as well, but not 'til very late.

I woke up the next morning to a cold apartment. I'd resisted Tom's offers the day before to spend the night at his house -- they're well uphill from me and never lost power -- but relented that morning and let him make me a very good omelette (artichoke and cherry tomatoes) at Lincoln Pl., even though being waited on like that made me feel slightly helpless. Business never stops, so I lugged my work laptop over there as well and spent the day examining source code and talking quietly on the phone, which is what I do now. Katharine came over to do the same (well, work), even though she still had electricity. It's not like she or I could have gone into our offices even if they'd been open: At this point, the impact on the sbway system is well publicized, and that morning there were prophets of doom on the radio and TV predicting that it could be upwards of six weeks before people from the outer boroughs would be able to cross the rivers on a train. Obviously, that was nothing compared to what happened to Breezy Point. You've seen the pictures. Tom and I took a walk down Union St. on Wednesday to survey the canal. Though it had flooded points west during the storm, it looked totally unremarkable that afternoon -- which didn't stop a gaggle of out-of-borough photographers from "documenting" it.

Our power stayed off for two more days and required an in-person visit from ConEd to fix -- which is nothing compared to what, for example, people in Red Hook are still enduring -- but the apartment really kind of... came back to life once there was juice again. On a chilly gray Saturday afternoon I took a long bus ride up to 42nd St. to get the 6 to rehearsal at the Practice Hole Mark II. The bus scene outside the Barclays Center was decidedly non-horrific, and the parts of downtown Brooklyn we passed looked very normal. But once I saw the blank weirdness of a dark Manhattan as the bus got onto the bridge, it was difficult to ignore, like a stain on a clean sheet. The bus' route took us up through a blacked-out Chinatown and then up through the East Village and onto Lexington Ave. We passed my parents' apartment, still without power, my mom still on vacation. (My dad said he was reading by candlelight and spending quality time with the cats.) We passed Chris' apartment, which, from the look of it, was still blacked out as well. At around 33rd St. there was a sharp cut-over to lights-back-on territory.

Chris was adamant that the blackout was the best thing that had happened to him in a long while, although his explanation for that assertion centered on not having to go to work. "Maybe you just like being uncomfortable," Billy suggested. But I could see what he meant when he and I took a walk through the "dark zone" later that night, down a section of Lexington Ave. where the intersections were illuminated by road flares diminishing into ashy red piles. The big apartment buildings with their lights out looked like dolmens rising out of an ancient forest. We bought some 22s and drank them on the side streets, tucking them behind our backs whenever a car drove by. Gradually we made our way back down to the twenties, where we found, to Chris' dismay, that the lights were starting to come back on.

Corporate Music Journal

...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.

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.

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."

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.