In The Night Park

I only made it to one outdoor movie this summer. It was a wet July, a wet August, so many screenings across many series were simply rained out. But I'd also seen most of the movies on offer -- with the possible exception of The Goonies -- a realization that was frustrating (who the fuck wants to see Speed at McCarren Park?) and a little depressing (oh no I'm so old I've seen every movie). So the one movie I made it to was Vertigo at Brooklyn Bridge Park. I always forget how deliberately icky it is. Stray observations this time around: Wow how gross is Barbara Bel Geddes when she visits Jimmy Stewart in the mental hospital? And right at the end, when the nun says, "I heard voices" -- what does that mean? Is she speaking on behalf of Scottie? I had to fight my way out of the office and so I got to the park well after sundown. There are several arteries leading from Old Fulton Street to the grassy slope where the screenings take place. I took one of the paths that's really a tube through the trees and vine canopy, and for a few seconds I was in almost total darkness. After the movie was over I met up with Katharine and Tom who'd been picnicking on the far side of the lawn, and we walked home together. We stopped at Katharine's dad's house, mere feet from the Promenade, and helped ourselves to cans of Diet Coke from an assortment in the fridge in the abandoned kitchen. There's a bridge that leads from the southeastern part of the park up over the Furman Street onto Columbia Heights. I don't know if it was engineered to wobble or whether it wasn't built to support the masses exiting the park, but wow. Nothing quite like the feeling of your feet slipping out from under you, Jimmy Stewart's stricken face spiraling up at you from the expressway below.

Nina and I had been looking forward to the Afropunk Festival all summer, not least of all because we found out that Unlocking The Truth and Big Freedia and Death would be playing. We went both days, because there was good stuff the whole time. Like last year, Commodore Barry Park served as the festival grounds, and we queued up by the BQE, turning down offers from entrepreneurs hustling nutcrackers out of coolers in full view of the police. Once inside, we hooked ourselves up with curry from the Madiba tent, served out of an entire scooped-out loaf of whole wheat bread. Unlocking The Truth went on right as we got to the Green Stage. They were pretty great! Their songs don't have lyrics (perhaps that's for the best) but were full of cool, ostentatious solos played on instruments that looked a touch too big for the players. The drummer (peering through thick glasses) kept doing funny pro moves like spinning his sticks mid-song. Obviously it's creepy to speculate -- like the emcees did after the set -- about the band's romantic prospects in middle school, but how can you not, a little bit, knowing yourself how the economies of kisses turn on the ability to plunk out a few notes of Come As You Are on a starter electric guitar. Imagine if you'd been able to shred.

The Heavy also played and they're good but we've seen them before.

The second day was really packed. We milled around for a bit, killing time until Big Freedia took the stage. How to describe? First of all, Big Freedia's act is Freedia herself, plus a DJ, plus two or three dancers. The songs are basically just rhythmic noise, over which Freedia raps a hook ("I got that gin in my system" / "Somebody gonna be my victim"). The dancers kind of loll around chewing gum until they're called upon to move, which they do sometimes all together, sometimes singly. If they're trying to conserve energy, I can see why: They were all skilled and vigorous twerkers, and could perform with shockingly facility all the moves people show off on YouTube. Twerking standing up. The downward dog twerk. The headstand twerk-against-the-wall, which is fucking nuts. What was even more nuts was that Big Freedia herself was probably better than her dancers, kind of effortlessly Fred Astaire-ing up and down the stage and flipping her butt up onto her back over and over again. There were clearly people in the audience who had dressed for twerking, perhaps even knowing that they'd be called up on stage for a participatory rendition of "Azz Everywhere." When Freedia summoned them, the Red Stage filled up with asses of all colors popping out of denim cut-offs. And some of the best amateur twerkers were dudes. The whole thing was funny and crazy and fun.

Then we went back to the Green Stage for Death, who were fucking great. They sounded fast and mean, and their on-stage production was exactly like what I've heard of their recorded stuff: Plenty of treble and reverb. I wish they'd played longer, but what are you gonna do. Festival sets. After them came a band from L.A. that I'd never heard of called Vintage Trouble. I was pushing Nina to go with me and find some cool BMX demos, skeptical of Vintage Trouble's name and provenance. And they're one of those bands that wears nice shirts, like fucking... Train. But then they started playing and they were crazy tight! The lead singer has a voice like James Brown and stage presence like James Brown, twirling and snapping his hips back and forth. I'm sure people say that about him all the time and I barely know what it means, but I was fucking hot-footing it to the very first song they played. After them was holy shit Living Colour. You better believe they opened with Cult of Personality. We wandered over to the Red Stage to check out Chuck D and DJ Lord. In between fragments of Public Enemy songs, Chuck D had a lot to say about the state of "commercial" hip-hop, none of it complimentary. He tried to mine way more laughs than were available from his deliberate mis-hearing of "Hova" as "Hoover," a joke so inappropriate for the age of the audience that I barely got it, and I'm an old 'un. He seemed like a guy who's got a rec room and watches a lot of VHS tapes.

Eventually we left and went to go see The World's End at BAM Harvey, which was excellent, although I think it's a strong indicator that I should stop wearing my beloved motorcycle jacket lest I become even more like Gary King than I already am.

To celebrate the end of the summer, the folks at Lincoln Place herded us into a picnic at Prospect Park on Friday. I made "Spicy Taty Salad," essentially a riff on the basic potato salad in Joy to which I add chorizo and some pulverized chipotle peppers (purchased dry and soaked in warm water). Potato salad is my personal food Summer Jam, I've decided. I've made, say, four batches of it this season for parties and picnics and some just to have. At first I was chasing the mayonaisse-y but not-too-mayonaisse-y taste of the potato salad my dad made when I was growing up, but then I decided that I wanted to see how "smoky" I could make it without making it gross. I think I did a pretty good job! (Four chipotle peppers seems to be the right number.) Jill made a savory Morroccan vegetable stew; KT made brownies; Hanlon ordered a pizza. We got drunk on box wine and vodka lemonade secreted in a thermos and played with a copy of Catch Phrase that somebody'd brought. The sun went down, and a group of hippies down the hill to the north of us started strumming guitar and doing a kind of dance with glow sticks. When it got truly dark, Jill and Ted and I played a game called Sunglasses Foot Race, in which you put on a pair of sunglasses and then pound your way across the Nethermead, disoriented and giddy, each clomping step taking you an unexpected distance because you can't see the contours of the ground you're crossing. "We should come to Night Park more often," said Tom. Later he barfed.

The "real" end to the summer, though, was on Labor Day itself, when Nina and I had resolved to go splash around in the Douglass-Degraw pool. We'd invited people to join us but planned to go it alone, so it was like a dream when Jill and Hanlon stopped at the chain link fence to see if we were really there and then came back in their bathing suits. The pool was emptier than the last time we'd been, no doubt because people were out of town for the long weekend, and at times there were more lifeguards than bathers. They were horsin' around, doing things in flagrant violation of pool-side rules and regs: Running, heaving buckets of water at each other, and lobbing water balloons. One lifeguard (on duty in one of the high chairs) shut a pool umbrella around himself for protection. His colleagues tossed one up from underneath like it was a grenade.

Tommy

Okay, so it's wedding season. But first: Nina and I took a combination of the G and a shuttle bus out to Long Island City last weekend to check out Warm Up at PS1. (As an aside, could the MTA be any worse at providing transit service? Really makes me go right of the dial. Or, wait, they're a "public-benefit corporation." So... left-er of the dial? Seriously, though: fuck those guys.) Been to PS1 before, but I don't think I'd ever done Warm Up. We waited on a crazy long line around the block, paid our $20 (!) and then we entered the big concrete-walled courtyard in front of the museum. They're doing a thing right now where they've got a portion of the courtyard set aside for a group of visiting artists who are living in trailers with solar panels and gray water filtering. Some kind of buzzy electronic act was playing at the top of the stairs when we got there, so we nosed around the enormous wooden water feature in the middle of the yard for a few minutes before taking advantage of our free admission to the museum. There were a lot of things to see (so many pencil drawings of folds in bedsheets!) but I think my favorite was The Drowning Room, a video shot in a house submerged in water. In every scene, the actors' hair floats around them and air bubbles escape from their noses and mouths, but all of the furniture and bric-a-brac is glued or weighted down, so the only other clue that the camera's underwater is the eerie way that objects recede from the lens into greenish darkness. RatKing was performing in the courtyard when we left. They sounded like yelling on top of noise. I don't know.

We stopped at Malu for ice cream. I got a flavor called (I think) "Baseball," which was a mix of all the treats you can buy at a ball game (peanuts, popcorn, etc.). Nina got a few scoops of a red wine-based flavor. As we chomped, we listened to a owner of Malu's chat with the guy who ran the newsstand next door. It turned out he'd only just replaced the store windows after someone put his ass right through the middle of one during an after-hours lovers' spat. We walked over the Pulaski Bridge, peeking into the secret hollows where the workers who work on Newtown Creek might go to enjoy a beer. We walked all the way down through Greenpoint to Metropolitan, and from there to Shea Stadium. I wanted to see Space Wolves, though Et al. was still playing when we got there. The lead singer of Et al. is a real angry young artist type dude, a lanky dork with frizzy hair like if Daniel Stern's character in C.H.U.D. had gotten a semiotics degree or something. In lieu of actual merch, he'd piled on the display case a bunch of copies of his "manifesto," in which he argued, essentially, that there are too many bands right now because it's too easy to start a band. Ugh. I don't even remember what they sounded like, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't impressed. Not a fan. Space Wolves were great, though. It's two dudes who dress all in white, a fucking great drummer and a guitar player who sings into an old-fashioned telephone handset. They're fast and tight, a bit like Punks On Mars, though their songs are much shorter; and their commitment to their manic stage personas put me in mind of The Hamburglars. Great band! Fan.

Ted and I had been discussing options for a bachelor party for several months before Tom and Colleen's Wedding. There'd been an email thread on which we collaborated with Dan, Greg, and two of Tom's friends from high school -- Matt and Eric -- to develop a plan. Naturally, the discussion started with strip clubs, but there were some objections on moral grounds, and, to be honest, we are a pretty "women's lib" gang of dudes (to use Tom's expression). Tubin' was considered but not really seconded, and an adventure on a terrifying (for acrophobes like Tom and yours truly) "ropes course" almost came together but fizzled. Ted laid the foundation for a concrete party plan by finding and renting on AirBnB a cabin in Goshen that we could treat as our base of operations. He proposed an afternoon and evening of The rest of the structure of the party was decided at a very humid and boozy evening at the rooftop bar at The Rock Shop. I had two ideas that I feel very proud of. The first was this: We would locate and hire a Northampton "sex educator" to some kind of live session similar to a Passion Parties demo. The person I had in mind would be a cross between Mr. Van Driessen and John Cleese's sex educator in The Meaning of Life -- ideally, a middle-aged dude with a graying ponytail and a dissipated physique who'd show Tom how to perform cunnilingus on a blow-up doll. We searched for this person drunkenly on our smartphones to no avail. The other idea I had was that we would design and provision a LARP that we would go on as a group. And that is what we did.

The weekend before the wedding, he and I went shopping for supplies. We went Ricky's, Babeland, Bergen St. Comics, and finally Target. We were looking for bachelor party gear in general; objects to humiliate the groom sexually and both condemn and glorify his nerdy obsessions in specific. We managed to find some Eyes Wide Shut-style cat masks at Ricky's but Babeland proved to be a desert -- dildos, especially the ones with lovingly-modeled dick veins, are really fucking expensive. (Ted turned down my offer to train down to a seedy adult video store in Sunset Park to get a cheap plastic model.) Our goal for the comic book store was to gather a few dozen terrible comics and somehow impel Tom to protect them. Ted was inspired by his older brother's bachelor party, in which the stripper they hired shredded some beloved comics in the groom's face while giving him a dance. We were worried that, like Babeland, Bergen St. Comics doesn't sell no shit, until they directed us to their 25-cent bin, which was full of oh man just the worst garbage. At Target we were hoping that the "seasonal goods" aisle would already be stocking Halloween type things, but no such luck. Back to fucking school. So instead we dug into the toy section and made a great discovery: Styrofoam "pool noodles" on sale for a couple of dollars a pop! We bought two, knowing that they were long enough to cut in half to form four "short swords" for our adventure. Still, though, we were short a number of essential props. Ted was going to be upstate on "business" through the rest of the week, but I resolved to hit all the costume shops in town for reasonably-priced LARP gear. That Tuesday I used my lunch break to walk over to Abracadabra on 21st St. and ask them about "wizard robes." I didn't have to explain myself any more than that to the cashier -- she walked me right over to a nook in their costume section that was, like, all wizard gear. But it was expensive as hell, each robe averaging something like $70, so I asked if they had robes with a lower "price point." "Um," she said, "this is probably our cheapest selection of new costumes, but you can check downstairs in the remaindered section to see if we've got something cheaper." That's what I did. The basement of Abracadabra not only has the cheap, used stuff, but also a costume / prop repair workshop and a huge selection of really awesome stage-worthy rental costumes: Period dress, rubber monster suits, mascot heads of all shapes and sizes. It would make a great room in a text adventure, I thought. The remaindered stuff seemed to be a subset of their collection that was too worn or broken to be rented any more, and, true enough, it was much cheaper than anything they had upstairs. I agonized for a while over buying an enormous feathered headdress for twenty-five dollars or a full-body zip-up brown fursuit for thirty but decided against it: Holy shit bed bugs, for one, but also because looking over the used stuff, there still wasn't enough gear for seven dudes. So I went back upstairs and called Ted, and we revised the plan. We realized our budget could support a complete set of gear for one person, so if we split it across seven dudes, each person could have, like, one thing. And we could assign a different characteristic to each accessory. So I bought:

• A pilaeus cap, plus the two cat masks and a Mardi Gras mask from Ricky's: Protection from noodle-hits to the head
• Brown felt gauntlets: Protection on the arms
• Brown felt boot covers: Protection on the legs
• Black plastic shield: Protection anywhere you can swing it

And to complement the pool noodle swords, I picked up three bitchen skull scepters to serve as mages' wands, though, truth be told they'd be great for whomping, too. The treasure would be a bag of plastic gold coins. With that, we were set.

Ted and Nina teamed up on a car rental early Thursday morning, and we drove up to Northampton with Stephanie. No driving for this guy but I tried to do my part by running the iPod. Steph pointed out correctly that I have almost no lady bands in my library. We dropped her off at her hotel and then bought enough groceries to cook dinner for seven dudes. We dropped the food off at the cabin, which tuned out to be a beautiful five-bedroom wood frame house full of Zen Buddhist bullshit and sporting a rock garden, a hot tub, and a fuckin' jacuzzi. There was a resident cat named Mina, a tortoise shell with short little legs like Ted's old cat Lola. The place reminded me of the house my aunt built with her first husband in Shutesbury. We returned to the main hotel where there was a tailgate of sorts in progress: Vodka shots in Dixie cups outside the jazz lounge of the Northampton Clarion. In person, Matt had the beard and overall demeanor of a hobbit; Eric was a lovable goon. We caravaned to Walmart and bought a few more things, notably: A multi-stroke pneumatic air rifle, a paint ball "blowgun," three heavily-discounted Halloween masks of The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man, and a set of zip ties -- this last because, as Matt kept saying, "There are six of us."

The guns came out as soon as we got to the cabin. We took aim at rocks and small targets in the woods circling the house, trying to figure out safely whether or not BBs were coming out of the air rifle, and how to get the paintballs from the blowgun to actually, you know, pop -- this in particular was frustrating and difficult, since the blowgun was really just a thick straw with a small stage for the brightly-colored paintball (careful, don't inhale it!) and even when we blew with all our might, the paintballs would often just fall impotently out of the end of the barrel. We started to worry about accidentally hitting Mina, who was out in the yard hunting sparrows, so we took the party to the road, and from there into the woods across from the house, where we used the shattered remains of a tree to hold our targets: Cans of PBR, an empty whiskey bottle. Some conventions of play emerged. When a rifleman (wearing a Lizard mask) successfully punctured a PBR can, his "second" would sprint over and drink as much of the spraying beer as possible. While this was happening, anyone who could lay hands on the blowgun was free to shoot stinging paintballs at the drinker. There are cell phone videos of me and Ted loping and ducking through the ferns sasquatch-like, hooting and covered in beer, to the shrill laughter of the group. It was a little bit scary how much fun this was. But we knew we still had the LARP ahead of us, so we cleaned up the cans and shards of glass, and returned briefly to the cabin. Ted and I arrayed the props on one of the beds, and we made our selections. The people who chose pool noodles were the warriors. The people who chose the bitchen skull scepters were the ages.

By the time we returned to the forest, the sun was about to set, and we were all quite drunk. The woods were lit only by a kind of ambient glow, and our eyes were saturated with green. Everything was ferns and moss. That's my strongest memory of the proceedings: Wading and tripping through a fern sea with a pool noodle in my hand and a can of PBR stretching the back pocket of my jeans. Yes, I thought. This. We'd refined the rules such that our game was a modified Capture The Flag: Each time arrayed their gold coins around their base, and set their intent on liberating the other team's gold from their base about 200 feet away. The mages could paralyze a foe with a spell (birdseed thrown from a plastic baggie), setting him up to be dispatched by a whack from a warrior's pool noodle. I was on the team with superior numbers, having two mages (Tom and Dan) and two warriors (myself and Eric). We enacted two skirmishes, and I think we won both of them, although drunken confusion over the rules muddied the tally a bit. I ran over a log concealed by ferns and fell hard into forest rot. Dogs barked somewhere far away. Matt caught a salamander and two small frogs. The game lasted an hour, maybe two. I wished it could have gone on forever; it was ecstasy. But it was getting dark in the woods, and people were afeared that someone'd sprain his ankle. So we went back to the cabin and made dinner. We'd bought steaks that Ted set about grilling on a comically small grill; using his recipe I made a pesto that I was proud of (no small feat without a food processor) which we applied to some grilled zucchini. After dinner we stood around the glowing embers of the grill in the dark telling jokes. I stole all of mine from Andy Breckman.

The next morning we rose groggy but largely intact, and Ted and I cooked breakfast for the group. We tidied the house, to the extent, we hoped, that it wouldn't be quite so obvious that we'd thrown a drinkin' party. We said goodbye to Mina, who was already hunkered down over a freshly-killed sparrow. The boys dropped me off at the Clarion, where I waited for Nina and ran into Maggie and Cliff. Together, we embarked upon a whistlestop tour of the Pioneer Valley's charms. The first stop was the dinosaur footprints on the banks of the Connecticut River, which Cliff and I were sure would be awesome but turned out to just be a some dents in some granite slabs next to a little kiosk with a can of Budweiser stuffed into one of its brochure slots. No luck trying to visit the Dead Frog Circus at the Wistariahurst Museum -- some people were getting married (!) there that weekend. Instead we stopped at Herrell's Ice Cream in downtown Northampton, where a placard below the list of flavors proclaims Steve Herrell as the inventor of the, uh, topping, which Herrell's refers to as a "Smoosh-in." The ice cream was very good. We had to drive quickly back to our hotel to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. We passed a storefront with a sign in the window advertising something called the Beer Can Museum. Cliff sighed as if he knew he was missing his one opportunity to visit. The rehearsal dinner was at something called WWII club. The boys and I showed off the videos of our antics. Tom's iPod playlist for the evening included a Bel Argosy song! I left my suit jacket at the ballroom. After dinner we returned to the Clarion. It's a strange hotel. Walking the narrow halls it seemed more like a minimum-security prison or a summer camp than a hotel, the dormitory areas made of cinderblock covered with a generous helping of latex paint. There were three enclosed atria that were always a surprise to find yourself in coming around a corner at night: A miniature jungle of towering office plants; a haphazard "rock garden" of craggy boulders and small stones; and a clearing filled with dorm-room chairs and nothing else. Weaving through those corridors at night was like being inside a persistent dream. We tried to rally Maggie to test her legendary skill against the claw machine in the hotel's neglected arcade, but the night porter had come by to turn it off before we could do so. We sat in deck chairs in the indoor pool room, which looked like a haunted greenhouse or an abandoned gymnasium being reclaimed by nature, while Ted and Jill frolicked in the pool with some old ladies and a woman with Downs Syndrome. At our urging, they (Ted and Jill) acted out an underwater tea party, an underwater yoga class. Night swimming.

The next day I worked with Ted and Dan and Greg on a four-man toast, and then hurried back to Hadley to iron my shirt and slip into my suit. Tom'd arranged for a shuttle from our hotel, but the driver didn't know where he was going nor how to get there, so we had to feed him the directions to the Unitarian Society. Our hotel-mate (and role-playing companion!) Bo described his treatment for a new Bill & Ted movie on the way. The ceremony itself was maybe the shortest I think I've ever been party to. Colleen looked great; she never doesn't. Tom wore his Radagast Brown suit. His sister officiated. Their vows were sweet and funny. "Before I met you," Tom said to Colleen, "all I ate were pizza bagels." (True, more or less.) Their parents had brought scoops of earth from their respective home states, and they dumped these into a small pot and pressed some seeds into the dirt and watered them. I got to be friends with Tom when Emma and Katharine made me his Secret Santa the Christmas of our sophomore year in college. I bought him a small jar of jam and a shower glove, with some hand-drawn instructions diagramming their suggested use. It was a gamble; he could've been offended. It boggles my mind that twelve years later I would be sitting in a pew behind his mom and dad and watching him get married to a very nice lady.

Ted and Cat and Nina and I walked to the reception at the Smith College Conference Center, which looks out over the Mill River and the Smith College track and field grounds. We drank and ate and when it was time to give our toast, I think the gentlemen and I did a pretty good job. "Tom used to waste time he could have spent socializing playing video games," Greg said, as part of the bit where we explained to Colleen how Tom had changed since meeting her. "Now he ruins social situations with fancy European board games." (This is true.) Improbably, we were able to dance after all of the eating and drinking, and we did so, on a removable wooden dance floor in the basement of the Conference Center. Tom and Colleen danced alone to the wonderful song "Bless The Telephone" by Labi Siffre, and then everybody joined them. "Empire State of Mind" made its inevitable appearance in the playlist, as did that ol' "Streetlights, People" song. The dancing ended when we Conference Center closed. Tom and Colleen had arranged for a shuttle to take people to the hotels, but it made an unannounced stop at Ye Ol' Watering Hole, home of the Northampton Beer Can Museum! The place sure had a lot of beer cans. They were arrayed in the hundreds on mahogany shelves up by the ceiling where a more pretentious establishment might've stored, I don't know, books. The Watering Hole sold us beer until we were drunk again, then served us water 'til we sobered up. We left the bar at 1:00 AM but didn't manage to get a cab until 2:00.

Ted drove us home the next day after brunch. We had to surreptitiously ferry the air rifle, which is extremely threatening and real looking, into our apartment building from the curb. I'll find some way to dispose of it later. But there's a shopping bag full of LARP scepters on the landing that I can't bring myself to throw away.

The Discovery Song

This is something that sounds weird to say: I signed up for a continuing education course in project management at NYU. My job is paying for it, and I enrolled at the not-so-subtle urging of my higher-ups. ("You... need help with this.") I'm not sure why I chose the section that meets from 9 AM to 5 PM on consecutive Saturdays, but that seemed like the only time I'd be able to pay attention without falling asleep. Plus, it turned out to be a great way to stay out of the heat without missing out on too many summer activities. Professor Shapiro has a wide, toothy mouth and a sharky way of interrogating her students when they're equivocal about their past experiences with project management. She pronounces "ask" as "ahsk." Her favorite way of describing a project with a confused deliverable is as a "family-friendly house that's being built into a bachelorette man-trap." The class is held down on Park Place at one of NYU's downtown satellite locations. It's actually in the Woolworth Building, which is one of those huge, ancient buildings in lower Manhattan with crazy ornate exterior texture. The Woolworth is the one with the green pyramidal top. It's also got a cavernous, cathedral-like lobby covered in marble and gold leaf, with ceilings so high that they create an interior hollow into which the windows in rooms on the first several floors can peer, including our classroom. It looks like a bit like a geode growing inside an office park. The area around the building is a true wasteland, to the extent that I couldn't believe the Woolworth was actually where I was supposed to go on the first day and so passed it by several times. We get a few breaks to grab coffee and a longer break for lunch, and I spend almost all of that time trying to figure out what people who work down there eat if not pizza. I mean, if it's pizza, then, great. But I find that I feel polluted enough on a Saturday at noon. The best I could come up with was a bánh mi place way west of Broadway that puts lettuce on the sandwiches. Oh, the humanity.

On the Friday before the final class, my sister texted me at work to let me know that my grandmother had had a stroke. Or at least, something like a stroke: The staff at the nursing home wasn't able to wake her up that morning. My dad booked a flight to Sarasota, turning down an offer of company. I knew it probably wasn't going to be okay, so I kept my phone on with the volume turned down in class on Saturday. When my mom called in the afternoon, I knew that she had died. What to think about that. I sometimes (often) think of my experiences in terms of how much of my time on earth they account for: I have been dating Nina for 20% of my life so far; I have been in Bel Argosy for 10% of my life. I think of my grandmother's decade in her room in the medical wing of Plymouth Harbor, effectively a dorm room looking out over the fountain in the parking lot, decorated with a fancy antique credenza and bureau from the luxury apartment she'd lived in briefly before becoming ill, in the less "assisted" wing of the facility. Certain parts of life are like a bad dream -- not necessarily that their experience is so unpleasant, but that they have the sick permanence of bad dream. Temporary arrangements turn into long-term configurations. This is not what I was supposed to be doing. And so on.

That evening Nina and I shopped for a party we were going to throw at Eve and Jon's new apartment on Pacific St. (We're taking care of Sam and Sasha while the humans are on vacation in Canadian wilderness.) It felt a bit weird to be doing it that night, but we'd already invited people over and there was nothing I could do to assist in Florida. Nina'd bought hamburger meat from Fleisher's, where she'd observed a truly horrifying pageant, a toddler pissing on the floor while its distracted mother selected a cut of grass-fed steak. (People, it does not get more Park Slope than that.) So we went to Key Food and bought an assortment of condiments and breads and the Brooklyn Brewery Party Pack, which never disappoints although it is ungainly. Eve and Jon's new apartment is a duplex, absurdly luxurious. Among other amenities, it has a back yard, accessible down a set of stairs from a small wooden landing which is where the grill lives. Nina mixed in the requisite "perfect burger" ingredients -- egg, breadcrumbs, Worcestershire -- and after some hand-wringing over the right amount of lighter fluid to use, we cooked the meat, plus some Chik Patties for me and Jerry. We all ate down in the yard, in the dark, sitting on lawn chairs. Mercifully, the mosquitoes kept their distance. The charcoal died before we had a chance to roast the marshmallows we'd bought, so we did those in the kitchen with a little hand-held propane starter, using it like a pastry torch.

I'm counting it as a birthday party.

An Irish Wake

I celebrated my birthday quietly, though not in secret. My parents took me and Nina out for dinner at a fancy vegetarian restaurant called Gobo. My sister's back home from Denmark. She bought me hand-painted Simpsons matryoshka in Russia, probably the best bit of lopsided bootleg Groening I've ever seen.

We survived the week-long heat wave that settled in a few days later. It does feel like you're just enduring that kind of weather, even as you remind yourself that you only get so many summers. Knowing that The Aloe Farm's styrofoam exterior and narrow window ledges would be an awkard fit for our 5000 BTU paperweight of an air conditioner, I paid Pinter from Tarzian to help me install it. He rigged up a wooden crossbar to keep it wedged in place in the window frame instead of screwing it into the frame itself, which is too thick to drill through. We discovered that the plastic accordion wings were cracked (so much of life is trash and dirty plastic), so I trekked to Lowes to get foam replacements, taking a route through the trash-strewn expanse of 2nd Ave. between 9th St. and where it begins at 4th St. We'd set it up not a moment too soon! The heat became surreal. Every morning I'd wake up to find the floorboards still warm from the previous day's heat, pop some freezer grapes into my mouth or drink some mint tea, and put on NY1 to see what indignities were in store for the next 24 hours. About mint tea: It might be the Summer Jam. Take some mint leaves, which cost a bit more than they seem like they should, and add them to a big pot of boiling water, taking it off the burner. When the mint-yellowed water stops steaming (after an hour or two, say), pour it into a big plastic pitcher and put the pitcher in the fridge. Then you drink it when it seems like it's too hot to keep going.

I have been reading books on an e-Reader! I'd bought Nina a Kobo as a birthday present, in the hopes of making library books accessible again in a post-bed bug world. When I saw how useful it was, I decided I had to have one, too. After all, I'd been reluctant to pick through the stinking shelves at Epiphany and thus my own reading had fallen off. So I shelled out, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've read half a dozen books over the past few months, stuff that I'd been putting off, like London Fields and Rabbit, Run. I bring the thing on the subway now. I'm one of those people.

Katharine got me out to Prospect Park for Celebrate Brooklyn on Friday with a promise that headliners The Waterboys sounded like a gentler formulation of The Pogues. She was right, but when I got there it turned out we'd crossed wires and I was alone at the festival. So I walked the transverse axis of the bandshell grounds like a ghost, scanning the faces in the crowd for someone I recognized and only half listening to the music. But what I heard of The Waterboys, a baseball team-sized squad of dudes wearing Oxford shirts and suspenders, was quite good. The song that ended their set was itself finished with a long series of triumphant Celtic downbeats. The BRIC representative who closed the show sounded as always like a schoolteacher who'd lost control of his classroom ("Please put your trash in a marked receptacle..."), and I was swept along with the exiting hordes. It was sweltering hot, and the hoped-for B63 did not arrive, so I marched myself back to Union St. in the dark, sweating hard and singing The Battle of Hampton Roads to pass the time.

I remembered that Appomattox, whom I'd been hoping to get a chance to see for quite some time, were playing at The Rock Shop, gracious host to Bel Argosy and, uh, Mommyoke (though not on the same night), but they wouldn't go on 'til 11, so I made a pit stop at home to dry off and watch a DVR'd episode of Drunk History, which is my current favorite thing. The Comedy Central version doesn't always reach the height of unmoored exuberance that the web series does, but Rich Fulcher's caricature of Lincoln's early career as a trial lawyer might be the best thing I've seen on television, ever. ("This guy... is like an ape!") I ran into Nina on my walk back up to 4th Ave. and managed to lure her into joining me for Appomattox. They'd just started their set when we got there. I was surprised to see that it's only two guys -- at least, I think: Their press kit says they're a power trio, but I could've sworn there was only a drummer on stage with the lead singer, who pivoted repeatedly from guitar duty to programming a synthesizer that provided loops of low range sound. The hooks in their songs reminded me why I'd wanted to see them, and I liked their arrangements; the band actually sounds better on stage than they do on their latest EP. The writing got on my nerves, though. I started to wish they were an instrumental act. An example of some lines that particularly annoyed me:

So why am I so self-destructed?
Am I creature who can't be trusted
With anyone... except you?
You're too young
To keep a secret
From anyone

As Richard Stallman once said, those are just sounds to me.

Maxwell's is closing. I claim no special knowledge of that place, but, you know, I've been there a few times, had slapped the sun-and-columns sigil of the Bel Argosy on the wall in the bathroom, hoping I'd play on that stage but knowing even at that time that I probably wouldn't. There are a lot of people that know that place better and feel stronger about it than I do (which is not very), but, still, I thought, I should go out there and see it as they partied the place to the ground. I missed getting tickets for the three (!) Titus Andronicus shows but figured it was okay 'cuz those should go to the Kids, anyway. Instead I'd bought tickets to a solo performance by Ted Leo, who's probably more Jersey that Messrs. Stickles and Harm anyways. I invited Tom, who couldn't in good faith marry into a Garden State clan without ever visiting Hoboken. I'd run into Chris the Friday before at Flatbush Farm and gotten fully soused hearing about how our mutual friend C. got an actual tick on his actual dick. Chris let me ride the handlebars of his bike and we caromed off a U-Haul truck. "I don't know anything about that guy," Chris said of Ted Leo, but agreed to use the ticket if no one else would take it. (Beau is a TL/Rx superfan but had to leave town.)

We met on Sunday at the WTC PATH station, crossed the river, and made the long trek up Washington Ave. We got to Maxwell's after Shellshag had left the stage. Ted Leo pushed his way through the crowd as we were buying Yuenglings at the bar. He played a talky set. Aimee Mann got name-checked more than once, and he played a handful of songs written for or with her. "So," he'd say, in his self-conscious and strangely deep voice, halting a song he'd just begun playing, and offer context for the song or tell a funny story. He told an anecdote about being heckled for thanking an unpopular local radio station in Baltimore, and reflected on the silliness of punk audiences' calls to "fuck tuning." "That's low self-esteem," he said. "Punks deserve the best!" And it was a long set. "There are twenty-six songs on this list," he said, but it seemed like he played more than that. He played favorites, like The High Party and Me and Mia. He played Bottled In Cork, and let the audience sing the entire thing. "It would have been really embarrassing if that hadn't worked out," he said afterward. Eventually we neared the end. "You know, this thing is like an Irish wake," he said, affecting an accent. "'This isn't a funeral, it's a celebration!' So this song is an Irish wake." I had a feeling I knew what was coming, and I was right: He strummed the opening notes of Timorous Me, and the crowd cheered, knowing that the One Riff could not be far behind. We stomped our feet to it.

"Thanks," he said. We begged for an encore, and got in return a cover of Union City Blue. It was a late night, especially for a Sunday, and we found ourselves leaning against the doors of the PATH train for support on the ride home. Chris left his bike downtown in favor of disembarking at Penn Station.

Wet June

It really has been. Drizzles, downpours, big fat drops. My company's new office has an expansive southern view of Park Avenue, wunderkammer Manhattan skyline against a background that turns a dark matte gray when it's rainin' time.

Sarah was turning thirty. Coincedentally, she'd been offered the Rectory of St. Andrew's on Fire Island as hers to do with as she pleased, more or less, for a week, if only she'd deliver several sermons at the Episcopal Church in Saltaire. So she invited us up for a sleepover and birthday party. We'd also been invited to use the remains of a full kilogram of Spanish chorizo we'd bought at La Boqueria to grill pizza at Aanie and Brooke's place in Patchogue. Tight schedule: we (I) agonized over how to make the transportation work, and then flung ourselves onto the LIRR, chorizo in hand, six-pack of Budweiser in hand, bags of Doritos Party Mix plus other semi-edibles in a bulging sack. It takes two transfers to get all the way out there. How do people do that every day? A & B met us at the station. On the way to their house, we paused at a dog-sitter friend of theirs to say goodbye to their dog (ferried off to compete in a show) and meet a petting zoo complement of friendly goats and ducks. We fed slices of white bread to both contingents. A goat climbed into Nina's lap. Another one nibbled holes in my t-shirt. They pressed their bony, lightly furred heads up against us, their puzzle-piece eyes staring outwards seemingly at nothing. The poop just falls out of their butts. We left and drove to the house, where I got quickly drunk on some kind of lemonade. And then I got back in the car with Brooke and drove down the road to the supermarket, where I grabbed a bunch of pizza fixings in a boozy haze: Jalapeño? Check. Cilantro? Check. Gruyère? Check, for some reason. Red onions? Yeah, I don't know, but yeah.

Back to the house. Aanie mixed the dough, asked me and Nina to punch it a few times. Back in the car, this time to The Steam Room in Port Jeff, where we ate hush puppies and I had my first steamer clams, Aanie showing me how to kind of, uh, deglove them before dousing them in lemon and some kind of cayenne sauce. We were pushing up against our scheduled ferry departure by the time we started making the pizzas -- the propane grill in the driveway, like it was an emergency. Aanie spread the dough into rectangles, toasted it firm, and then we'd dress it with a combination of weird ingredients before subjecting it to the full heat of the grill. We took the results inside and sat down at the kitchen table to eat them. Holy shit it was the best pizza I think I may have ever had, ever. More cilantro on pizza, world. Aanie and Brooke were nice enough to drop us off at the ferry terminal in Bay Shore. Too late we realized that our ferry was actually leaving from a much further dock, and so we had to run across two parking lots. "I don't think you can make it," said the teenager in the ticket booth, helpfully. But we did make it, and soon we were knifing across the water of, what -- Long Island Sound? Nina says no, but I'm saying that's what it was.

Saltaire is one of the "straight" parts of Fire Island, which among other things, means the houses are a little less fancy. But there still were plenty of drunk revelers, Kennedy cousins with gin blossomed faces and half-unbuttoned Oxford shirts waiting to meet us on the dock, along with the dulcet (read: non-dulcet) sounds of something called The Cravin' Band. Mosquitoes swarmed us as we walked the U-shaped route from the ferry dock to the Rectory, and we realized why: All the rain had turned the sand and dry grasses growing under and around the boardwalk into a swamp. We hustled over the planks, slapping and cursing. We passed an iPhone, half-buried in the sand and with a sequined cross glued to the back. At last we came to the Rectory at the far end of the street, and rattled the windows and doorknobs until Chris let us in. We were just in time for dinner, so we contributed our remaining grilled pizza and our Doritos things, and ate some veggie burgers thoughtfully provisioned and cooked for us by Sarah. We drank and talked for a while, and stuffed our pockets with Budweiser cans and walked down Marine Way to the beach. It was a little before midnight, but we were the only ones out (straight part of the island). Chris and Jessie waded right into the darkness of the ocean, the supermoon painting the water with a big fat crossing lane.

Like any regulation vacation property, the Rectory had a single jigsaw puzzle (racing yachts) sitting in a nook in the living room. Upon returning, we took it out and dismantled the previous solvers' work and then set about rebuilding it, as the radio played Billy Joel and John Cougar Mellencamp. It was after 2 AM when we all retired to our rooms. Nina and I made the mistake of not running the air conditioner in ours, which I guess offered the mosquitoes an open invitation to enter through its vents and attack us in our bed. Too late we realized that the hook above the bed was for. "Fuck," I hissed at 4 after waking up for the second time with a whining in my ear. The moon shone in brightly through the curtains and there was a chorus of frogs and insects outside the house. I switched the light on and went after the fuckers with a rolled up National Geographic, dispatching sixteen (!) while Nina used the bathroom.

The next morning, a little bit ragged around the edges (Nina'd got bit on the eyelid), we creaked downstairs and Chris made us coffee while Jessie slept and Billy and Sarah were at church. We finished the puzzle. A little later Chris and I took some of the Rectory's spare bikes for a ride down the rattling boardwalk streets to Fair Harbor, the next town over. There wasn't much town to speak of -- tellingly, the commercial storefronts are mostly real estate offices -- but we stopped at a small grocery store and bought cans of cream soda from the bored sunburned teenage girls working the register. Chris was resplendant in a Mets cap and WASP summer gear; I worried about sunburn on my exposed scalp. Fairskins both, we lathered on sunscreen back at the house and then returned to the beach. I made it all the way into the water this time and swam out to where I couldn't quite touch bottom, and let myself get rolled a few times by the rough surf. There were medium-sized purple jellyfish in the water, ominously bobbing into view and then disappearing before you'd safely plotted their course. But no one had to pee on me and I didn't have to pee on anyone else, so it was okay. Chris and Nina and I took an early afternoon ferry back to Bay Shore, dozing in the lower deck, wearing the roar of the engine like a blanket. Chris drove us all the way back to the city in Roger's antique Volvo, the entire thing the color of cigarette tar. It took hours, but we played the radio the whole way, speculating about the appearance of the jazz show DJs and trying to guess the Summer Jam -- Nina says it's Get Lucky for sure, but I like I Love It, or -- worst case -- Can't Hold Us.

I didn't really do Northside this year. Shows didn't grab me: everything seemed to be some variation on "synth" or "psych." Am I out of phase with The Scene? I'm probably at least out of phase with The L Magazine. The one show I went to was Shilpa Ray and Her Good Luck Girls (nee Happy Hookers) at The Gutter, the performance space of which I don't think I'd seen before. It's alright. Lazyeyes was wrapping up by the time I got there. They were quite good -- indie pop with a rough edge. I wondered if Bel Argosy could play a show with them. When Shilpa Ray started playing, the house lights dropped and someone turned on a disco ball effect that made the room swim like little fish in a sea of blood. You can tell the band is new -- the hooks aren't totally there yet, and the arrangements don't showcase their best asset. "More vocals!" someone in front of us hollered. "More vocals?" she asked, perhaps faux-incredulous. "I hate the way my voice sounds." Surely she understood that we'd all come to hear her sing. But the band is good, even if they're visually than musically satisfying. It's a menagerie of weird-lookin' dudes, like a something you'd see in an early Merry Melodies cartoon or, more like, a David Lynch movie: Sinister weirdos intensely focused on their instruments.

I went to 4Knots on Saturday, arriving in time to see Reigning Sound on stage, WFMU's DA the DJ playing the organ like Viv Savage. For a band that has -- visually -- a strong dirtbag vibe, they play an awful lot of moody songs about girls. I watched from a few different vantage points: in the crowd on wooden slats of the pier; up the ramp adjacent to the stage; I even went through the process of gaining entry to the cordoned-off beer zone (set up around some Sandy-vacated exterior storefronts from the Pier 17 mall) and obtaining a plastic pint cup of Bud Light. Bracelets, tickets, a twenty minute wait in line. Is 4Knots "over?" But I was there to see Kurt Vile. Not necessarily because I love the Violators' chilled-out sound, although I've come to really appreciate the signature nasal dissonance of the vocals, but because I like the character actor vibe he brings to rock performance. He reminds me a bit of some old video footage I'd seen of Joey Ramone on tour in Europe -- shy stringbean with a wall of hair and a too-big shirt. They played KV Crimes, the Scharpling-directed video for which impressed me with K. Vile's goony stage presence. Afterwards, Nina and I walked around the seaport, inspecting the See/Change shipping container city, the candy store selling comically enormous gummy candy. The fancy pizza place on Front St. looked appealing, but there was a steady flow of reeking human waste from the fancy Port-A-Pottys right across from it. The cobblestones shone with piss.

Tapas Musicales

Where to begin? It's been a crazy week. Nina and I just got back from Barcelona, where we'd been vacationing and attending the Primavera Sound music festival. I'm a bit overwhelmed with experience, but here's what I got.

Our flight from JFK to El Prat took eight hours. Thankfully, there were several very long movies available to watch -- Nina and I teamed up on Les Miserables, which, for some reason, I'd been looking forward to watching. The rest of the flight I tried to sleep but mostly just pretzeled myself into different postures and periodically accepted plastic cups of Fresca from the flight attendants. Upon landing, we rode the Aerobus to the Plaça de Catalunya. Our hotel was in a neighborhood called El Raval, which was variously described as being rough and ungentrified, and as being a prime destination for tourists. We were on El Carrer de Hospital (named after the hospital where Antoni Gaudí was treated after being hit by a tram in 1926), one block away from La Rambla, the huge central promenade leading from the Plaça down to Port Vell. The street has two gutters on either side that are just wide enough to allow a car to pass, but I wouldn't want to drive it -- La Rambla is always thronged with people: People on their way to things, people just kind of strolling, and a consistent distribution of South Asian men selling cheap LED whirligigs (which they demonstrated non-stop); little devices to put in your mouth to make you sound like Donald Duck (which were also extensively demonstrated); and six-packs of red cans of Estrella Damm, which seems to be the Spanish answer to Miller High Life or Beast. There are several dozen kiosks dotting the street that sell flowers, postcards, and fruit juice. Places like La Rambla are the ones where everyone tells you to keep close tabs on your personal effects, so we did.

We checked into the hotel and promptly napped for four hours. When we awoke, we figured we'd better get our bearings and sort out our access to the Festival. We dressed and exited the hotel. El Raval isn't much like Williamsburg, as somebody suggested; it's got a lot more in common with SoHo, a mix of crumbling bohemian lofts and big new construction, brushed-metal coffee shops and dingy storefronts hawking third-world plastic crap. We crossed La Rambla into the Barri Gòtic, the truly ancient part of the city whose boundaries trace the Roman fortifications erected in the first century BCE. Walking around there is like a being a rat in a wonderful maze: The narrow, criss-crossing streets are girded by an irregular distribution of beautiful old stone buildings, each with rows of balconies dangling flowering vines into the piss-smelling gutters below; and there are a million tiny storefronts, some for hip-looking coffee joints, some for dusty old-man bodegas. The Barcelona metro is like the New York City subway in that the lines have different colors; and that once a swipe of your pass gets you into the system, you can ride the trains as you please. It's much cleaner, though, and has very nice amenities, like vending machines on the platform and ubiquitous and accurate countdown clocks to let you know when the next train is arriving. It shuts down at midnight, except on Saturdays when it runs around the clock. We took the train 7 stops to Parc del Fòrum. I wanted to get out at the Villa Olímpica stop to take a picture of the riot of scratch-graffiti accumulated on the blue station wall, but we were burning daylight.

Parc del Fòrum looks like it's half industrial park, half fairgrounds. It's right on what I think is a working harbor -- the guy from Hot Snakes claimed he could smell a "shrimp factory" upwind -- and its concrete and metal terrain doesn't particularly lend itself to recreation. (Parkour, maybe?) And yet there are several amphitheater-like structures across its dozen or so acres. The Primavera Sound festival includes a couple of these for a total of eight stages: One huge one for headliners, and others of varying sizes named after their sponsors: Ray-Ban, Heineken, Pitchfork. There's a central promenade, a kind of main drag where all the t-shirt vendors, record shops, and radio stations had discrete canvas tents wired with power and Internet. The first stage we found that night was a joint venture by the Spanish mint candy Smint (owned by Chupa Chups!) and, uh, Myspace. The band playing was Evans The Death, a somewhat goofy punk band with a lady singer and a bunch of dudes with a laissez-faire attitude about keeping their guitars in tune. They were great! Our programmes suggested that this night of the festival was already winding down, so we decided to explore a bit further and strolled down the promenade towards the crest of a small hill and the sound of another stage. ...Where we encountered a crowd of maybe more people than I've ever seen outside of Yankee Stadium. This was the Ray-Ban stage, and everyone was there to see Delorean, a Spanish dance rock band. They were good! As we hadn't eaten, we walked over to the food vendors the majority of which were gathered in a large open area with tables and a huge metal "roof" from which were dangling confusing bits of netting and metal chain, like the remnants of an oil-refinery circus that'd left town. We got seitan sandwiches from a booth called BoomBoomRest. They didn't taste like much, although they proved a bit troublesome later on. We looked for the WFMU tent, but it didn't seem to be open yet, so we made our way back to the hotel for the evening.

The next morning, we had breakfast at a small diner down the street from our hotel, La Granja Viader on C. de Xucla, cappucinos with an ensaimada for me and a jar of fancy kefir for Nina. And we ate lunch at Bar Pinotxo, a kiosk in the Boqueria Market in Raval. They were running low on provisions, and practically the only thing left was navajas (razor clams) which were quite good. It was great! Our goal for the day was to visit La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's famous unfinished cathedral in Gracia. It's the thing that every guide book and fellow traveler tell you to visit, and once you do you can see why: True, it's yet another pompous tribute to the Catholic church, but it's strikingly, almost subversively weird-looking, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's more rococo imaginings. We waited in a line wrapping around the block, and bought tickets to see the internals as well as the partly-unfinished towers, because, hey. The interior of the basilica is a bit like a forest floor, with the struts of the roof poking up into the canopy here and there, knobbily jointed like giraffe legs. Every stained glass window runs the full spectrum of the rainbow. To get to the towers, you take a small elevator that lets you out at one end of a narrow stone bridge that spans the two of the mid-level tower structures -- the taller ones are still being worked on, it looks like. From that bridge, you can see pretty much all of Barcelona in both directions, surrounded by Gaudí's geometrical stone-and-tile fruit trees. Across the bridge and through over some more stone walkways, there's a vertiginously long spiral staircase that takes you back down to the basilica. That one was actually harder for me -- with my acrophobia, babies -- than the bridge. Never look down.

All of the stages of Primavera were going when we got there that evening. We stopped by the WFMU tent, which was fully set up, and introduced ourselves to Liz Berg, Evan "Funk" Davies, Scott Williams, and Brian Turner. They were all super nice, and it was a bit of a struggle not to let on how thrilled I was to meet all of them. I pulled myself away before I got too creepy. I don't know how to describe our zig-zag progress from stage to stage. These festival sets are like musical tapas, if I can draw a rather facile analogy: They're short, and you can come and go as you please, sampling bands until you're full. In that vein, I'll keep the summaries short.

Savages, Pitchfork Stage: Savage, intense, weird. They were great.

Tame Impala, Heineken Stage: They're not my favorite, but their arrangements are nicely complementary, and their lead singer sings like a lady.

Metz, Pitchfork Stage: Very, very good. The presentation was a bit less dramatic than when I saw them at CMJ, to their credit. They're loud and fast and polished to a brilliant sheen.

Dinosaur Jr., Primavera Stage: Hey, it's those dudes! The guy with the hair. I'm not a Dinosaur Jr. fan, but so many of my musician friends are that I figured I should at least take a look. As they're probably required to do, they played Feel The Pain, which is a pretty good song, even if it kind of captures why I'm not crazy about them. And J Mascis sure can shred. "I never thought I'd see them in my lifetime," I remarked to Evan "Funk" Davies after wandering over to the FMU tent. "Yeah, but you walked away," he pointed out. "Yeah, well, I guess I know all those songs already," I said. And that's kind of how I feel about that.

Bob Mould, ATP Stage: We stayed for the whole set, although I don't think Nina's crazy about him, and I'm not sure if I am, either -- grown-up me is ambivalent about the sound that Hüsker Dü originated, even if it informed the style of every band I liked in high school and college. But they were fast and polished, and Bob Mould paced the stage with obvious joy, his nasal singing voice itself like an electric guitar line. And I don't know if I've ever seen Jon Wurster play live before, but, wow. That dude plays perfectly and makes it look easy.

Hot Snakes, ATP Stage: This band is loud.

Fucked Up, Pitchfork Stage: Wonderful, joyous, coordinated. Talky: Damien went on a riff about the rich heritage of Spanish hardcore. The sound system didn't do a lot of favors for the lead guitar lines, but even so, how can you not stomp your foot to Queen Of Hearts?

Death Grips, ATP Stage: This band is loud. Or rather, that dude is loud. He seemed to be playing solo, although it was hard to tell wth the smoke machines going.

We decided to head home around two o'clock, well after the metro had stopped running for the night. Nonetheless, we followed the crowd walking to the Meresme stop, figuring they knew what they were doing. Some did, maybe, since they kept going once they got there. The others queued up at the stop for the night bus, which was just a few feet from the entrance to the metro. The Estrella-sellers swarmed us like mosquitoes. Almost everybody said no, although one British girl's interest was piqued by an offer of cocaine. "Do you have it here?" she asked. "No, you go over there," the guy said, indicating a patch of trees and bushes growing on the meridian across the street. She demurred. And then we saw something awful: One of the South Asian men who'd apparently exhausted his inventory walked over to a sewer grate near where we were standing, knelt down and fiddled with a latch to open it, and retrieved... a fresh six-pack of red Estrella cans!

Estrella Damm: The toilet beer.

After what felt like almost an hour of waiting, the N6 arrived, and we got on. The night bus takes a circuitous route whose endpoint is the Plaça del Catalunya. It didn't stop near our hotel, so we had to guess where to get off. We chose a stop that seemed latitudinally equivalent but west of where we had to go. The twisty-turny streets of Raval got the better of us, and it took us quite some time to get home, running a gauntlet of Estrella salesmen and drinkers, the line between them becoming increasingly unclear. A few of them chucked foaming cans of the stuff at our feet, like gunslingers demanding that we dance. We persevered and made it back unscathed.

The third day, Nina said, looking at the festival schedule, was going to be a doozy. But the test wouldn't begin until the evening. During the day, we visited -- on Tom's urging -- the Museu d'Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona. It's part history museum, part archaeological dig, sort of like Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen: You can go down to a basement level and actually walk around in the stone ruins of a part of Barcino, one of the predecessors of Barcelona. Of particular note are the wine-vats and the fabric dyers facilities, which included vessels for collecting urine from the general public to be used in the setting of dye. The depressing thing that I learned is that like so much of Europe, early Spanish history is pretty much just Roman history. I don't know. Is that depressing? I suppose in my ignorant way I was expecting something a bit less recognizable. We spent several hours browsing various artifacts of Roman occupation, mentally translating the Spanish halves of the plaques on the display cases. Afterwards, we stopped by La Plata, a small corner bar that serves three dishes, all of which are great: Sausage wedges pinned to pan-con-tomate (a Spanish stable); olive-onion-tomato salad; and a bowl of just-fried sardines. We timed our arrival to the Fòrum to enable us to see Daniel Johnston play a set at an indoor auditorium adjacent to the Fòrum. We waited on a stupendously long line -- whose progress took us on a helpless circuit around a couple who were really sucking the fuck out of each others' faces -- before realizing that we needed special tickets to get in. That was a drag, but we consoled ourselves with:

Breeders, Primavera Stage: They were playing the entirety of Last Splash, which brought to mind my middle school practice of taping songs off Z100. There was something weirdly restrained about their live performance, as if they'd engineered their playing and production to sound exactly like the album. But those songs are quite good.

Solange, Pitchfork Stage: She had a tight band with her, and she can definitely sing. But I dunno. The hooks weren't that big. The crowd (big for a small stage) seemed to love her, though. Or maybe they were just happy to begin with: A group of people behind us were huddled around a big novelty cardboard guitar pick -- a piece of Smint swag -- doing lines off it.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Heineken Stage: Despite being Shane MacGowan's favorite band, they failed to move me. What is the fuss about? They'd erected a big cruciform lighting display behind them, which I think was dismantled before Blur took the stage after them.

Swans, Ray-Ban Stage: They play -- with gusto and sustained intensity -- a sort of of drone / noise rock that I found very difficult to bear. Although she liked them, Nina gave me a reprieve after about half an hour, and we shuffled up the hill to the food tent to pump more Euros into the Spanish vegan restaurant economy.

We walked down to the Pitchfork stage, where Titus Andronicus were setting up. Patrick propped up two paperback books on his guitar amp. We strained to read their titles. I think one of them was The Sun Also Rises; Nina disagrees. He addressed the now-substantial crowd in pidgin Spanish. "Hola amigos! Es muy bueno to be here at Primavera! Muchas gracias to Pitchfork for having us." He paused. "Pitchfork dice que Titus Andronicus third album es muy malo. Pitchfork es muy estupido! Muy, muy estupido." Patrick's voice was ragged, as it sometimes is, but he sang with abandon and the band (the Dudes) were delightful, as they always are. We took a brief detour up to the Primavera stage, where The Knife were playing. Nina'd wanted to see their acrobatic live set, but the crowd was so thick that we couldn't get close enough to see the performers themselves, just the huge digital monitors, which aren't much different than watching the thing on TV, really. So we ended up going back down to the dudes in time for The Battle of Hampton Roads.

It was after 4 in the morning when they wrapped it up, Patrick pointing at his throat to indicate that there would be no encores, but Nina reminded me that I'd pledged to stick around for King Tuff. "I do the fireball," sang Kyle Thomas. "That's how I kill them all." He sounded great, like a punk cartoon, maybe. I'd been lukewarm on them at CMJ, but at Primavera they were tight and efficient. Nina relented and said we could leave before their set was over, but I wanted to hear them play their hit, so we stayed until they did. Then we trudged up to the main concourse and said goodbye to the radio people. We spent a few fruitless minutes outside the Fòrum trying to hail a cab before giving up. Horrifyingly, it was late enough that the metro was beginning to run again, so we waited with the horde of sleepy / not-so-sleepy revelers to be let onto the platform by Control. I felt sick, babies, and propped myself up in the ass-clefts that are so helpfully molded into the seat backs on the L4. When we finally got back to the Hesperia, we slept -- I kid you not -- until 4 in the afternoon. Have I ever done that in my life? Surely not.

There wasn't much time for anything on Saturday, so we got some coffee at one of the many dusty Forns in Raval and headed back to the Frum. We arrived in time to see The Wu-Tang Clan take the Primavera stage: RZA, GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God. "I don't know where the rest of our family is," said GZA before launching into Shimmy Shimmy Ya. "Maybe they got contractual issues, or maybe they missed their flight. There's one guy that's got a good excuse for not being here." They were accompanied by DJ Mathematics, who took a "scratch solo" or sorts, which involved mixing with his feet, Jerry Lee Lewis style. The whole thing was a sight to behold, even if those guys are getting pretty long in the tooth.

After that we visited the Heineken stage, where Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds were playing a set of extended arrangements of the classics. He had two drummers on stage pounding out a dirty beat, and he spent a lot of time undulating in and on top of the crowd, especially during a crowd-pleasing version of Stagger Lee, in which he focused his crotch squarely in the face of a young woman in the front row. "I'll crawl over fifty pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole." So. That dude is looking well-preserved, and he must have hell of lower back muscles. I wonder if he ever gets sick of doing Red Right Hand.

We rounded out the evening with Crystal Castles at the Ray-Ban stage. Their set was almost -- no, it was -- eclipsed by their lighting display, which was complex, intense, and definitely Not Safe For Epileptics. The crowd overflowed the bowl of the amphitheater. A guy next to us who must've been really, you know, feeling it, waved a big black-and-white flag back and forth like Enjorlas in Les Mis. It kept getting in peoples' faces, and they shooed him away. But that set was our last one. We said goodbye to the radio people and returned to Jaume I. At my request, we made a post-festival pit stop at Nevermind, a horrible Nirvana-themed (!) bar in the Barri Gòtic, where we payed full price for two bottles of Estrella. It's... drinkable, though not good. We sat across from a heinous mural of Kurt Cobain in a shredding duel with Jimi Hendrix. I put a WFMU sticker on the lid of the toilet tank in the men's room, although given how clean it was compared with every other surface in the place, I expect my sticker will be expeditiously removed so as not to interfere with people, you know, uh, going skiing.

The following day, we walked to the Catedral de la Santa Creu, where there was a Catalonian cultural festival underway. The giants were out, a knight with a morning star facing some fancy lady, enormous, motionless, anonymous -- at least as far as I knew. Behind them on the steps, teams of tumblers were pitted against each other building human pyramids in a competition strangely relevant to Catalans. Later, we made our way to the CaixaForum in Montjuïc, one of the larger contemporary art galleries, and looked at an international collection of new photography, sculpture, and video art; and a surprisingly comprehensive exhibition of artifacts and film projections by and about Georges Méliès, the director of A Trip To The Moon. It was really fun, although Une nuit terrible brought back some bad memories. The National Art Museum was closed, but we walked up the Av. Reina Maria Cristina to the "Magic Fountain" anyway in the hopes of seeing a promised "light and music display." Which started abruptly a minutes or two after we'd sat down on the fountain's edge -- I grabbed Nina's shoulder in fright, to her amusement. We walked up the big staircase and around the museum to the old Olympic grounds behind it, the somewhat forlorn-looking torch-shaped Communications Tower rising above the trees in the distance.

The final full day of our trip we used the way I think travelers often do, trying to pack in all of the small things we'd put off or hadn't yet found the time to do. Working from a friend's list, we took the L3 to Fontana in Gracia, and walked to the Lucania II, a Spanish pizzeria. Spanish pizza reminds me not unpleasantly of the square frozen Krasdale pizzas I used to buy when I was living in Prospect Heights. Nina and I shared a pie topped with fried egg yolk and one stuffed with blood-red sopressata. From their we hiked up Carrer Verdi to Parc Güell, the gated community Gaudi designed for Eusebi Güell and his rich buddies. We touched the iconic water-drooling lizard. Then it was back down to the foot of the hill in Gracia, where we stopped in at a hot chocolate cafe (!) called La Nena. We'd hoped to find Spanish orxata, but we settled for two cups of molten suizo. Then back to Raval for more eating. La Bodega de La Palma was another recommendation from a native, but we'd twice found it shuttered when we'd tried to visit earlier in the week. Third time's the charm: They were open, and we ordered a round of tapas, which completely overwhelmed us. Cheeses, cured ham, patatas bravas, croquettes.

Hobbit! on the plane ride home.

Holi

Nina took me to Holi, the Indian festival of colors. But I was in an irritable mood because I hadn't eaten and because I'd wanted to see Nick Cave's (not that Nick Cave) dancing "horses" at Grand Central. It was the last day of the exhibition, and by the time we arrived at the atrium, pounding the echoing floors of the station like we were late to catch a train, they were loading the horses into wooden crates. We walked east, to Dag Hammerskold Plaza, and I was embarrassed to be reminded of The Dark Tower. We found the festival a few blocks north at D.H. Park. A light rain was falling, but nobody seemed to notice. The band was still playing to a mob of revellers, and people were still queueing up for the booth selling little sachets of colored powder. Every so often someone would throw a handful of stuff into the air, and there'd be a little burst of green or purple above everyone's heads. It was very pretty, but I was feeling hungry and cranky, and so when an exuberant young lady passed by and colored both our cheeks with a bright crimson handprint, it just made me sulk harder. Nina fed me, which helped my mood, but the festival soon wrapped things up. We took a rainy stroll around Turtle Bay, up the stairs to Tudor City, gawping at the huge tree growing inside the dark glass of the Ford Foundation building.

With some help from Drew (one of my castmates from Vanderpuss) Bel Argosy managed to book a show at Fort Useless, a DIY venue in Bushwick whose stage I'd begun covet after seeing about a million shows there advertised on Facebook. It'd been a while since we'd played a show that wasn't in a bar or at a proper rock club, and I yearned to return to our origins playing loft shows at places like Cheap Storage. I made the spectacular miscalculation that it would make the most sense for Billy and Sarah and I, in our traditional transportation of gear from the Practice Hole Mark II, should take the L to Jefferson. (In my defense, that is the, uh, second closest L stop. Which would be okay if the L were the right train to take.) So we ended up having to walk for about half an hour to get to the place, laden with guitars, cymbals, and, I think, an amp. Our walk took us through a cross-section of Bushwick, passing art galleries, community centers thowing quinceañera parties, fancy burger joints, rotting dive bars. We passed the new location of Silent Barn, which is so undifferentiated that we would've missed it entirely except for the noise of indie rock coming from behind a rusty door with a piece of notebook paper taped to it winkingly announcing it as the entrance of the Barn's "Champagne Room." We walked on, sweating. Finally we came to Ditmars, the cross street of Fort Useless, and a made a left. The Fort really is just some dude's (Jeremiah's) ground floor apartment, the performance space / gallery is the living room, the small hallway kitchen is where you sort out your gear. There's a hanging sheet that partitions off the part of the house that's, I guess, off limits. I didn't peek behind it. Lest you think it an unofficial operation, though, I tell you there was staff: A dude seated at the door collecting donations, a dude tending bar, a dude doing sound. Jeremiah himself sort of puttered about, taking the occasional picture and sorting out cables and such.

Our openers were Black Salad, a two-piece noise band featuring Max from Quiet Loudly, Clouder, and about a million other groups. We arrived in time to see what was, I think, the second half of their set. Max and his Salad-mate Steve knelt on the floor in front of a tiered array of synthesizers, keyboards, and pedals; intermittently leaning over to generate a sound from an instrument and capture it with their equipment, after which they'd repeat it, alter it, compose it with itself and with other samples they'd trapped. Did they have songs? I don't really know. But all that sound, crashing in waves against your face, kind of forces you to turn inward, and the result is that for all its abrasiveness, their set produces a calm and meditative state of mind. Among other curiosities, they'd lined up an array of glazed ceramic cones at the perimeter of the carpet that marked out the part of the wood floor that was the stage. We showed up too late to see what part they played in the set, and when I asked Steve what they were for, he wouldn't say. "You'll just have to show up earlier next time."

After that, we set up and played. It's always thrilling and feels risky to assemble the drums in front of a crowd. They can see me, I can sort of see them. We all know there's nothing that's gonna stop the train from leaving the station. (Does anyone relate to this?? Write in pls kthx.) At any rate, here we are, in full Instagram-filtered glory.

 

After us was Jane Eyre, Drew's band, a skillful dutty rock three-piece. True to form, Drew wore a yellow sundress for his performance. It was sweltering inside the Fort, so I was in and out for the duration of their set taking gulps of cool spring air mixed with cigarette smoke in the little 8-foot-square courtyard in front of the building formed by a high wrought-iron fence. From the selection of songs that I heard, J. Eyre's a litte bit Creedence, a little bit Pumpkins. Definitely a guitar band, polished but nasty.

After the show a contingent of our friends / fans converged on a Spanish buffet restaurant that had foolishly left its doors open though the steam table trays were all packed away, uprooted from like teeth, leaving just the steaming sockets. Nina and I showed up late and found a dozen people huddled in the back with a flight of Coronas. A radio blared an aggressively-DJ'd Latin station, plenty of air horn and exhortations to "¡Baile, baile, baile!"

The Contest Winners

Sam had been hyping All City Hour, his new public access show, on Facebook for quite some time. We resolved to watch, setting our DVR to record it since it airs on BCAT at 3:00 AM. The first episode we watched was mostly cell phone footage of Sam and a guy with a lot of face tattoos wandering around at SXSW. I was initially confused, and then a bit disappointed -- the show seemed to be mostly an extended promotion for Adam's movie, Gimme The Loot, which, as it turned out, featured both Sam and the tattoo'd guy, who goes by the name Meeko Gattuso. But then I watched a few more episodes, and the show started to grow on me. The first one I'd seen turned out to be an anomaly. Most of the episodes have a kind of variety show format, with a number of different segments, each of which is quite charming: Sam and Meeko interview a local celebrity on a sofa in someone's fancy apartment in what loos like Long Island City; Meeko teaches Cooking In Jail (toilet coffee, some kind of ramen burrito log); Sam delivers an improvised but flawless monologue on some aspect of New York City history ("Aqueducts, aqueducts, aqueducts!"). They give advice to people who write in. There are musical guests. They talk about nutcrackers! In one particularly thrilling show, the crew visits an illegal "street dentist" somewhere in the Bronx so that Meeko can get a missing tooth worked on. Meeko is very funny, and Sam's odd, shaggy confidence really sells the show as a cheerful introduction to the underworld. Questions of authenticity and exploitation aside, that idea is pure catnip for me. Access! Experience! R-U-1... Judo?

And it serves All City Hour's primary function very well: We were very excited to see Gimme The Loot, and so when Adam announced that they were having the premiere on Friday, we made plans to go. On the day, I jogged across town from my office to the IFC Center in time to make the 6:30 screening. I loved it! Like The Warriors, Adam's movie has a fantastical narrative premise -- two unknown taggers try to make a name for themselves by bombing the home run apple at Citi Field -- and also like that movie, the plot in Gimme The Loot is way less important than the setting the film evokes. ...That being, in The Warriors, a thrilling but wildly inaccurate Heathcliff-the-Cat version of New York City at permanent midnight, all fishbones and garbage can lids. In GtL, it's a lush and endless city summer day, a million locked doors and a few open ones, less racist but certainly not post-racial. Among my favorite parts: A geography-bending chase that impossibly criss-crosses lower Manhattan and Midtown in about five minutes of screen time. And everyone in it -- Sam and Meeko included -- is wonderful, especially Tashiana Washington, who plays Sofia (who writes "Sofia"). It's definitely one of those bits of art that's so effective at realizing an idea you thought you had to make or write a thing that it's actually a bit disheartening to watch. No point in me doing that, now. So.

Bel Argosy's second EP, Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, is in the can! We're thinking about releasing this one on cassette tape. "So that it's more accessible," I tell bloggers, jokingly, than our vinyl 7". But the real reason we're doing it (at least, that I'm doing it) is so that we can work our way through every form of physical media that preceded the founding of the band. MP3 may be the currency of the realm, but we're out there planting fossils in the desert like we were actually there in 1990. (We also have MP3s.)

WFMU had their annual fund-raising marathon last week. I've said it before: I love the marathon, and in fact have come to regard it as one of the milestones that breaks up the year for me. Although the station is pure joy year round -- I've actually stepped up my consumption this past yeay, by listening to it at home in stereo as if I were within radio broadcast range (and owned a real radio). I use a UPnP media server called PS3 Media Server, which I run on my work MacBook and then use the control point built into the Xbox 360 to pull the stream from WFMU's servers and play it on our big TV speakers. It works really well! But, marathon: Everyone is talking about Tom Scharpling's marathon show, which as usual broke some kind of fund-raising record, and in which John Hodgman went head to head with Cory Booker in a Star Trek trivia battle; but my favorite parts were from Seven Second Delay: First, The Lickathon, which featured Station Manager Ken licking the handle of a toilet; then, obviously, the Wheel of Fate, which ended up forcing Andy to drink a shot of soda out of Ken's belly button ("Ken, I'm 58 years old!"), but which failed to produce hot noodles poured into anyone's underwear. The whole thing wrapped up with a multi-hour performance by the Hoof 'n' Mouth Sinfonia. I'd had a fun time watching that live last year, but that wasn't on the table this time around. The 2013 Hoof 'n' Mouth was a test flight of the new basement performance space the station is almost done building out. It's not a venue and not a bar, Ken was careful to point out, and thus the show wasn't open to the listening public. So I stayed home and watched the DJs do their karaoke thing on Ustream, which only made me feel a little bit creepy.

But here's the crazy part: The morning after, I got an email from Asst. General Manager Liz Berg congratulating me for winning the Primavera Festival raffle! (I'd entered because I was eligible and because, you know, why not.) "Not sure if you were tuned in last night," she wrote. And the thing is, I was tuned in, but I stepped away from the Ustream for a few minutes, maybe, to go to the bathroom or something. I guess that's when they announced the results. But, yeah, Nina and I are going to be flying to Barcelona in May to go to this crazy Spanish rock festival! The whole thing is a bit much to take in, not least of all the idea of myself as a contest winner. Although I've certainly been plenty lucky in my life so far. So it's really just an unfair heaping-on of good fortune. But I've learned, over the years, not to interrogate the significance of stuff like this too much. And for some reason, the title "The Contest Winners" occurred to me as a good fit for, say, a particularly prosaic short story in the style of Vonnegut or Salinger. So we are doing things like renewing our passports, sifting through the list of a hundred and seventy-odd bands that'll be appearing at the Festival, and leafing through some guidebooks graciously lent to us by Jay. We'll be staying in El Raval, which seemed like the place that, you know, the kids go.

¡Qué extraño!

Year Of The Snake

Queens! We're visiting places.

We took the 7 train out to Kissena Blvd. to see the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. I'd gotten the idea to do it from a bunch of MTA flyers advertising it the same way they'd warn you that the R isn't running, and I felt a little weird about that, like maybe we'd get there and it wouldn't really be anything, just some bored volunteer sitting at a table with pamphlets and warm juice. But the intersection where we exited the station was totally mobbed. We turned the corner onto Main Street to find a vantage point, but it was almost impossible to make forward progress. People moved around us in all directions, some trying to get a better view, some trying to get away, some trying to make contact with a friend they'd recognized in the crowd. A middle-aged South Asian woman who squeezed passed us started screaming that she thought she might be dying and why wouldn't anybody help her. I think she was having a panic attack, and so did, I guess, the couple of strangers who hissed at her to calm down, but even if she was actually in trouble, there probably wasn't much that could be done. Eventually we made it to a construction scaffold that Nina could clamber up on, and we got to watch the last bit of the parade. The marching groups ranged from radio stations and travel agencies who'd built big, ostentatious papier-mâché floats (giant baby) to more staid groups like karate or dance schools who had their students march and perform in formation. There were at least two marching contingents that represented organizations that help recent immigrants adjust to life without the Communist Party. As might be expected, there was no shortage of dragon-lion... things.

The last person in the parade was a homeless guy in a dress that I used to see every morning outside a flophouse in Chelsea back when I worked at the 'Monkey. As always, he had a bushy beard that he'd dyed a rainbow of colors, like a color wheel, and he had with him a parrot and a baby carriage in which he was pushing a small, shivering dog (also dyed). I can't believe he was part of the parade, though he was acting is if he were, walking at a leisurely pace and waving and smiling at the crowd as he passed. The police and parade officials seemed to be rolling up the carpet behind him, collecting the traffic barriers and letting the onlookers spill into the street. The guy turned onto 39th Ave. and a group of people gathered around him to take pictures with him and his bird. The guy chattered away in a combination of gibberish ("Lady Gaga Lady Gaga") and what sounded like Spanish. Nina took a few pictures, but we were distracted by the sound of fireworks up the street. There were rolls of red paper firecrackers attached to the lintel of one of the storefronts in the Queens Crossing mall -- ironically enough, it was a Paris Baguette franchise. Dudes were lighting the tails of each roll, which would make gray smoke and little popping explosions as the flame traveled up the streamer, and then a big explosion at the top where there was a larger firework that shot out a little jet of sparks and slowly-falling stars. We watched until all the streamers had burned up, and then walked down to Prince St. where we got red bean pastries for luck at Chinese bakery.

A few weeks later, at Winnie's suggestion, we took the G out to 21st Street so that we could check out an art installation called Headscapes in a warehouse gallery. The entrance to the gallery was through a small storefront off Jackson Avenue and down a short hallway with an information desk on one side where there was a stack of "maps" of the different environments on display. The gallery itself was a big open room with a concrete floor across which the "spaces" had been distributed. Each one was a small, discrete environment you could enter, with a discernible but usually unspecified theme: Spider webs, for example, or a tree house. We crawled around and explored them all, shimmying up ladders or through tunnels as the installation required. My favorites were a black, igloo-like structure made of live stereo equipment pumping out tracks from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; and the nook in the corner arrayed with beautiful unfinished wooden furniture and feathered with an explosion of shingles, like a section of a whittling hoarder's apartment. We left after we'd had our fill and walked down the avenue toward PS1, where we stopped for a moment in the hopes of trying out the M. Wells dinette. No such luck, but I managed to convince Nina to pick something out from the selection of fancy, imported art magazines in the gift shop. We walked away with an issue of Frankie, which appears to be an Australian quarterly for twee craft girls. Nina pointed out the spot on the Citigroup building where she peed once. We ate down the street at the Sage General Store, where we stayed so long, I think, that they gave us a free cookie along with the check for our meal.

Cat news.

Kitty is in the middle of a kind of renaissance of play right now, brought about by a significant expenditure of attention and love on Nina's part. Or maybe it's just that she was just profoundly depressed in our old apartment; plenty of reasons that'd be plausible, too. But whereas she used to spend all day and night sprawled disconsolately across the top of some giant tupperware crate, now she charges up and down the length of the apartment, flinging toy "fur mice" up into the air for herself to catch after we've gotten sick of throwing them for her. She's even started playing with a blue handball that Nina fished out of deep storage, nosing and pawing it into noisy action across the living room floor. And she's what, fucking fifteen years old? Kitty 2.0, people. Fuck all other pets.