We got invited to Jay's Superb Owl party, and I fixed in my mind that I would make an enchilada casserole -- vegetarian, mind you -- to compete with something called the Porkestra that we were told was going to go down. I have an embellished memory of similar enchilada dish that my old colleague Mike Jurney made for a party at Joel's house many, many years ago, a layered preparation with alternating strata of tortillas, chicken, cheese, and green chiles. I've been trying to reproduce it ever since I first tried it in, like, 2005.
I found this recipe, which was irresistible to me and my particular fetishes: Unorthodox components; lots of them; a claim to cultural authenticity. I went out to Sunset Park the morning-of to collect ingredients. It was 10 AM, and there was a spectacular pile of vomit in front of the benches on the southbound platform at Union St. The first stop I made was at the Key Food, which looked dirtier than I remembered and kind of visually desaturated. (I'd worried that I'd feel that way after moving back to Park Slope.) Store manager who looks like a dissipated Boy Scout. Weird guy talking to himself in the produce aisle who turned out to work there. There's a section of one aisle devoted to Mexican spices and dried herbs packaged in very small quantities: Chamomile flowers, yerba buena, various thistle-like things. There was one small package of hibiscus flowers there, labeled flor de jamaica, far too small an amount to account for the two cups called for by the recipe, but at least I knew I was on the right track. I found the rest of it a block away at "Sam" Grocery, the dusty Mexican provisions store on the corner of 43rd St. Practically the entire back wall of the shop was given over to pillow-sized bags of dried hibiscus.
I treated myself to a celebratory tornillo from Angel's.
The enchiladas came out well, though I realized after getting them into the oven just how obsessed I'd been with their successful execution. Hibiscus flowers are pretty good. I don't know if I'd describe them as "meaty," the way the recipe does, but they're good. Imagine eating the contents of a Red Zinger tea bag. There were also turnips, grated carrots, and enchilada sauce made from canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. That stuff is hell of spicy, in case you'd ever seen it at the grocery story and wondered.
For Nina's birthday, we returned to the Museum Of Natural History. This time we visited the Hall Of Minerals, gray-carpeted gymnasium of, I should hope, every Manhattan childhood. I made her watch the short movie about gold that plays in a loop in the little room right to the left of where they keep the the Star of India. She said she'd never seen this movie, but I've seen it dozens of times. I know what the narrator's voice sounds like and what all the musical cues are, and I can picture the nugget sitting submerged in a riverbed that serves as the movie's unifying visual motif. It's funny to think of it playing over and over again day after day. The young geologist who gets interviewed in one part is middle aged now. The middle-aged economist who gets interviewed in another part is probably dead. And there's the part where they show you what it would look like if all the gold in the world were molded into an enormous cube and placed at one end of a football field, the stands empty, the sounds of the game played over the loudspeakers from an audio tape.
On our way out, we walked through the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. The "human being" exhibits have never held my interest as a kid, but now that I'm older I've become more curious about them, in part because of how resistant to change their curation seems to be. Same atlatls, same silly putty-colored mannequins year after year. And here is one of the few remaining mysteries of my adult life: I have a vivid memory of walking through one of the Indians halls as a kid and peering down at one of the waist-high, glass-topped display cases that contain cutaway views of longhouses and other structures. Inside the longhouse, I remember seeing a tiny model of a firepit and cooking utensils, and that the model firepit had a light underneath it so that it glowed red and yellow. I wind up walking through one of the Indians halls (how many are there -- three?) whenever I come to the museum, and I always check for the glowing fire. I've never been able to find it. Did it really exist? Is it like the issue of Astounding magazine that Philip K. Dick knew he shouldn't find?
The museum was closing at 6, but our dinner reservation wasn't until 7:30. We decided to walk through the Park to the train. I slipped on the ice at one point and landed hard on a bony part of my leg. Am I getting old? We rounded a corner near the southeastern edge of the Park and came upon Trump (nee Wollman) Rink (ugh). Babies, it isn't easy for me to ignore the mental alarms that go off when I think about slipping off schedule, but I could tell Nina was looking down wistfully at the turning wheel of skaters. Hey, I said. We have a few minutes. What if we just went skating? A few isolated flakes were falling when we left the museum, but by the time we laced up our skates and got out on the ice, the air was full of glittering snow. We went around and around with the other skaters, feeling the skates negotiate with our ankles as we took the curves. The rink staff dudes darted here and there through the slowly turning wheel of skaters, sometimes stopping to flirt with teenage girls windmilling their arms and clomping their skates. I re-learned how to kind of flip around real fast (make a T with your skates) and even managed to skate backwards for a little while (not sure how that works). The snow fell all around us and mixed with the powder carved out of the ice by our skates. It was charming and fun.
We ate dinner at Kin Shop. Their deal is that they serve fancy Thai street food. Nina ordered a kind of duck curry thing that you could roll up in a piece of roti. It was really good.
The final stop on the birthday express was at the Regal Union Square, where we sat for the 10:30 show of Inside Llewyn Davis. It was beautiful but made me feel like shit. The predicament of Mr. Davis -- cursed to be a salesman for a product that nobody wants to buy -- was very distressing for me to contemplate. I mean, that's what I am, right? I hope that's what it feels like for everyone. I don't think I'll ever really know. But I left the theater humming Dink's Song: Fare thee well, O Honey, fare thee well.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Sledding
Let it not be said that our snow-prayers were not granted.
Our New Years' Eve plans weren't fully baked by the time we struck out for the first party of the evening in Crown Heights. Mark and Lisa had just had a literal baby, but they went forward nonetheless with their party plans. We visited them in their new apartment in Crown Heights, and found the place decked out with various pickled Russian delicacies, along with several "salads" from Elza Fancy Food. Mark had warned us that Puck, their two-and-a-half-stone tomcat, had taken the birth of the baby hard. I'd laughed at Mark's description, but when we got there the cat was indeed moping on an office chair and staring at itself in the mirror. Nina cradled their new baby like a very delicate hero sandwich. I tried to distract Puck from his existential crisis, tickling him and cooing at him until he took a swing at me.
Our next stop was at Emma and Jay's in Downtown Brooklyn, where we watched the ball drop and rewind in Times Square several times over, using the DVR to broker our experience of the event. We left Emma's a bit after 1 AM, and I was still hoping that there'd be adventure in store. But Rubulad had been ruled out -- too racist this year -- and everything else we'd seen on the Nonsense List was heavily, heavily DJ-based. (Some kind of techno lock-in at The Bell House? Ugh.) The New Years' Eve landscape was barren, like when every rock band leaves the city for Texas during SXSW. So instead I made Nina come to Canal Bar and drink a whiskey with me at 2 AM, like Homer in that episode of The Simpsons where he out-eats the buffet.
The next morning we tried to re-create the pleasant exercise of last year's New Year's Day with breakfast at Abilene. They were out of fried pickles, though, and Nina's breakfast burrito had three hairs in it, which she removed and deposited on a napkin. She eyed them mournfully as she dismantled the remainder of her breakfast.
A few days later, the microwave broke, spontaneously arcing during an innocuous attempt to defrost an Amy's burrito. (Nina diagnosed a faulty waveguide cover.)
We got the first snow of the year on Friday afternoon. I was afraid it would be gone or trampled slushy before we could get out in it, but it held frozen through the next day, and so we were able to go sledding on Saturday afternoon. I went down to the basement to retrieve the big blue sled we'd bought around this time last year, dusting off the sprinkling of wood shavings that had accumulated on it (termites?) all the while keeping an eye out for rats or spiders amidst the filth and rubble, and ducking preemptively so as not to bonk myself on the iron underpinnings of the building.
We entered the Park at Third St. and headed towards the bright crest of the hill on the eastern side of the park where we could see a whole lot of fellow sledders practicing their sport. A group of kids called out to us at the base of the hill, asking if we'd share our sled. There were three of them, and as we talked to them it became clear that they had come to the Park looking to get some fun out of discarded sleds -- quite a reasonable proposition, although they'd come up empty so far, their best haul being an upscale laminated foam wedge with the lamination all scraped off so that it balked when you tried to make it slide across the snow. This had clearly been a major setback for their evening. We all traded off on taking turns down the hill in our big plastic dish, one by one and sometimes two by two, me riding piggy-back on Nina's hips. The kid who was in the middle by height and age had a fixed, dissatisfied look on his face and a generally dysphoric affect. He was the one who'd found the broken sled, and he was obviously disappointed, though he continued to strategize. "My plan," he told me as we surveyed the landscape from the top of the hill, "is to wait until some of these people leave their sled for a few minutes to use the bathroom, and then I'm gonna take it. They're going to be like, oh no, where's our sled?"
It occurred to me that this was an opportunity for me to shape the values of the next generation. "Won't they be upset that their sled is gone?" I suggested.
He didn't seem to hear me. "They'll be like, where's our sled?" he repeated. There was a pause. "Wait," he said. "Is that stealing?"
The center of Long Meadow actually stays pretty dark even when the lamps around the perimeter are on. So after you slide down the hill, your inertia carries you out into an enveloping blue-gray darkness from which you must trudge back towards the light and your friends. An irritatingly polite and cooperative Park Slope family had staked out a spot next to us. They included a tow-headed pair of eerily simpatico siblings, each armed with a vintage wooden sled with red metal runners and steering handles. (Flexible Flyers, maybe?) They were willing to let the boys try their fancy sleds but first they had to finish their own competition. "One, two, go!" yelled the girl, and they both took off down the hill, throwing their sleds down in front of them as they made practiced, fluid transitions from a run to a face-first descent into the meadow. At length we came to the final challenge, a small makeshift jump made of snow at the base of the slope. Nina made the first attempt, whooping as she got airborne. I took the next turn, making feeble yelps as I caromed off the snow-submerged curb and enduring a pelvis-thumping landing off the ramp. Nonetheless, I think I was legitimately flying for about a second and a half.
"Come on, man," said, the oldest boy said, exhorting his friends to follow us. "She did it." (Gesturing at Nina.) "And she's a girl! What's the matter -- You scared?"
"I'm not scared," said the middle one with the sour face. "My stomach hurts. Feels like I'm going to throw up."
Convenient, I thought. But Nina was laid low by a stomach thing a few days later, so maybe that was no subterfuge.
Afterwards, we ate dinner at The Olive Vine, stashing our snow- and dirt-encrusted sled at the front by the register. Our host seated us in the back, in the "heated bedouin tent" they'd created by draping carpets over a metal scaffold and filling the enclosure with electric space heaters. It was very comfy, and even though I'd forgotten to wrap plastic bags around my socks, thus allowing snow to spill in over the tops of my Doc Martens, my feet were soon dry. There was a clear plastic tarp at the back of the tent through which you could see the back yard of the musical school or whatever that building is to the west, full of withered bushes and frost-emaciated creeping vines. The yard was blanketed with untouched snow, but the heat of the tent had melted it around the perimeter. The mexican chocolate place next door is gone; the Thai fusion place is gone. The Olive Vine's menu doesn't change. I ordered the same zataar-and-zucchini pizza I've been ordering since 2003, back when the place was where you would take your parents to show them that you were doing okay and that you were gonna make it as an adult.
Our New Years' Eve plans weren't fully baked by the time we struck out for the first party of the evening in Crown Heights. Mark and Lisa had just had a literal baby, but they went forward nonetheless with their party plans. We visited them in their new apartment in Crown Heights, and found the place decked out with various pickled Russian delicacies, along with several "salads" from Elza Fancy Food. Mark had warned us that Puck, their two-and-a-half-stone tomcat, had taken the birth of the baby hard. I'd laughed at Mark's description, but when we got there the cat was indeed moping on an office chair and staring at itself in the mirror. Nina cradled their new baby like a very delicate hero sandwich. I tried to distract Puck from his existential crisis, tickling him and cooing at him until he took a swing at me.
Our next stop was at Emma and Jay's in Downtown Brooklyn, where we watched the ball drop and rewind in Times Square several times over, using the DVR to broker our experience of the event. We left Emma's a bit after 1 AM, and I was still hoping that there'd be adventure in store. But Rubulad had been ruled out -- too racist this year -- and everything else we'd seen on the Nonsense List was heavily, heavily DJ-based. (Some kind of techno lock-in at The Bell House? Ugh.) The New Years' Eve landscape was barren, like when every rock band leaves the city for Texas during SXSW. So instead I made Nina come to Canal Bar and drink a whiskey with me at 2 AM, like Homer in that episode of The Simpsons where he out-eats the buffet.
The next morning we tried to re-create the pleasant exercise of last year's New Year's Day with breakfast at Abilene. They were out of fried pickles, though, and Nina's breakfast burrito had three hairs in it, which she removed and deposited on a napkin. She eyed them mournfully as she dismantled the remainder of her breakfast.
A few days later, the microwave broke, spontaneously arcing during an innocuous attempt to defrost an Amy's burrito. (Nina diagnosed a faulty waveguide cover.)
We got the first snow of the year on Friday afternoon. I was afraid it would be gone or trampled slushy before we could get out in it, but it held frozen through the next day, and so we were able to go sledding on Saturday afternoon. I went down to the basement to retrieve the big blue sled we'd bought around this time last year, dusting off the sprinkling of wood shavings that had accumulated on it (termites?) all the while keeping an eye out for rats or spiders amidst the filth and rubble, and ducking preemptively so as not to bonk myself on the iron underpinnings of the building.
We entered the Park at Third St. and headed towards the bright crest of the hill on the eastern side of the park where we could see a whole lot of fellow sledders practicing their sport. A group of kids called out to us at the base of the hill, asking if we'd share our sled. There were three of them, and as we talked to them it became clear that they had come to the Park looking to get some fun out of discarded sleds -- quite a reasonable proposition, although they'd come up empty so far, their best haul being an upscale laminated foam wedge with the lamination all scraped off so that it balked when you tried to make it slide across the snow. This had clearly been a major setback for their evening. We all traded off on taking turns down the hill in our big plastic dish, one by one and sometimes two by two, me riding piggy-back on Nina's hips. The kid who was in the middle by height and age had a fixed, dissatisfied look on his face and a generally dysphoric affect. He was the one who'd found the broken sled, and he was obviously disappointed, though he continued to strategize. "My plan," he told me as we surveyed the landscape from the top of the hill, "is to wait until some of these people leave their sled for a few minutes to use the bathroom, and then I'm gonna take it. They're going to be like, oh no, where's our sled?"
It occurred to me that this was an opportunity for me to shape the values of the next generation. "Won't they be upset that their sled is gone?" I suggested.
He didn't seem to hear me. "They'll be like, where's our sled?" he repeated. There was a pause. "Wait," he said. "Is that stealing?"
The center of Long Meadow actually stays pretty dark even when the lamps around the perimeter are on. So after you slide down the hill, your inertia carries you out into an enveloping blue-gray darkness from which you must trudge back towards the light and your friends. An irritatingly polite and cooperative Park Slope family had staked out a spot next to us. They included a tow-headed pair of eerily simpatico siblings, each armed with a vintage wooden sled with red metal runners and steering handles. (Flexible Flyers, maybe?) They were willing to let the boys try their fancy sleds but first they had to finish their own competition. "One, two, go!" yelled the girl, and they both took off down the hill, throwing their sleds down in front of them as they made practiced, fluid transitions from a run to a face-first descent into the meadow. At length we came to the final challenge, a small makeshift jump made of snow at the base of the slope. Nina made the first attempt, whooping as she got airborne. I took the next turn, making feeble yelps as I caromed off the snow-submerged curb and enduring a pelvis-thumping landing off the ramp. Nonetheless, I think I was legitimately flying for about a second and a half.
"Come on, man," said, the oldest boy said, exhorting his friends to follow us. "She did it." (Gesturing at Nina.) "And she's a girl! What's the matter -- You scared?"
"I'm not scared," said the middle one with the sour face. "My stomach hurts. Feels like I'm going to throw up."
Convenient, I thought. But Nina was laid low by a stomach thing a few days later, so maybe that was no subterfuge.
Afterwards, we ate dinner at The Olive Vine, stashing our snow- and dirt-encrusted sled at the front by the register. Our host seated us in the back, in the "heated bedouin tent" they'd created by draping carpets over a metal scaffold and filling the enclosure with electric space heaters. It was very comfy, and even though I'd forgotten to wrap plastic bags around my socks, thus allowing snow to spill in over the tops of my Doc Martens, my feet were soon dry. There was a clear plastic tarp at the back of the tent through which you could see the back yard of the musical school or whatever that building is to the west, full of withered bushes and frost-emaciated creeping vines. The yard was blanketed with untouched snow, but the heat of the tent had melted it around the perimeter. The mexican chocolate place next door is gone; the Thai fusion place is gone. The Olive Vine's menu doesn't change. I ordered the same zataar-and-zucchini pizza I've been ordering since 2003, back when the place was where you would take your parents to show them that you were doing okay and that you were gonna make it as an adult.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Best Of 2013
Sound cue: Drumroll playing in the void of interstellar space.
Best thing on basic cable: Being Human (USA)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Gimme The Loot
Best movie I saw not in a theater: O Lucky Man!
Best book I read: In The First Circle; runner-up: Tinkers
Best album I played drums on: Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best album I didn't play drums on: Blowout!, The So So Glos
Best new talk show on WFMU: Why Oh Why, with Andrea Silenzi
Best show I went to: The Dickies at Knitting Factory, Oct. 31st
Best video game I played: Dead Space
Best brunch: Buttermilk Channel
Best worst movie: Private Resort
Best vegetarian lunch special, Murray Hill: Tiffin Wallah
Best vegetarian Bánh Mi, Park Slope: Vegetarian chicken, Banhmigos
Best cruelty-free calorie-delivery mechanism: Vegan cowboy cookies
Best snack: Pretzel Crisps, aka Bagel Chips
I bought a Christmas tree about a week and a half before Christmas, traveling out to Sunset Park to the place I'd gone on 38th St. last year. It was very cold, and the air was misted and prickly with snow-dust. I told the guy the size of tree I was looking for, and he showed me one of the display models sitting on a spike in front of the lot, a heavy dressing of snow on its branches. It looked about right, and I told him so, and he wrapped it up for me to haul home on the train. That part was easier this time, though when I got the thing down the stairs onto the subway platform, my hands and fingers burned so badly from the cold that I thought there was something really wrong with them. I got it to Union St. and up to our apartment, and Nina and I fastened it to the plastic stand. Only then did I notice that it had a big sparse section on one side, like a bite taken out. It drank up the first pourings of water, but the needles stayed dry and crumbly. We duly wrapped the tree with fairy lights and clipped the "Christmas birds" to it, but it positively barfed needles onto the floor while we did so, and the whole thing seemed (even more than usual) like a hollow exercise. I felt embarrassed, and started counting the days until we could mulch the thing.
My dad suggested that all he really wanted for Christmas was for someone else to cook all the food on the day, so my sister enlisted me to help plan and prepare a suitable feast. I would have gone all vegetarian, because it's so much easier to cook, but she was set on doing some form of lamb dish. I'm glad she pushed for it because it came out really well, and got me out to witness the spectacle of the newly-opened Gowanus Whole Foods on 3rd St. Here is the menu we designed, for posterity and for readers who want to attempt it themselves:
On Christmas Eve, Nina made ready to go visit her family in Pennsylvania, and I walked around the neighborhood trying to scoop up a few last-minute gifts. I bought us a sandwich to share at City Sub, but after I wolfed my half I felt ill, so I warned her off eating hers. I had to say goodbye to her from the toilet. I was almost recovered by the time my sister came over that evening to help me cook. We shopped for ingredients and prepared the salad and pie. She also helped me finalize one of my presents for Nina, a t-shirt ">screen-printed with the logo for Cacaolat, which she'd told me she admired when we saw it in Barcelona. We made three shirts, and they all came out good, but each one has different imperfections. That's just the way it works. That night, Jill and Emma and Jay came over and after some debate, we decided to watch Zapped! starring a young Scott Baio and, weirdly enough, the guy who went on to play Buddy on Charles In Charge. Baio plays a high school chemistry nerd who accidentally invents a tonic that gives him telekinetic powers by mixing weed and beer. He uses his powers to take girls' clothes off. It's like they filmed a Johnny Ryan comic strip. At midnight, it was Jay's birthday. We did shots.
Nina and I went on another date the weekend before New Year's Eve. First we saw the tail end of a Liquor Store show at Glasslands. They were characteristically gross / great, and I got to see the new light installation above the stage. It's made of PVC fitted with color-changing LEDs, and it looks like stiff, white fingers of coral reaching down from the ceiling. After that we got a drink at Iona, which Nina drunkenly insisted was "the best bar," on account of its varied seating environments (window, booth, back yard) and its focus on beer and whiskey. Then it was time for the midnight movie at Nitehawk, a series of "naughty" 35mm shorts curated by, like, a guy who restores naughty 35mm shorts. We ordered tall-boy PBRs and tater tots. The clips included some very explicit trailers for the movies:Were they really naughty? It was definitely more penetrative sex than I've seen in a movie theater since, I guess, the Wesleyan Film Series. It occurred to me that suggesting it to Nina as a fun date was a pretty Travis Bickle kind of move. I think some of the best clips in the series, though, were the least naughty -- the guy had collected some film ads that I guess would be shown before a film feature that were pitching dance-hall parties you could go to on New Year's Eve. So many venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn that just don't exist any more. There was also a strange, long-form travel ad encouraging viewers to "Come To Poland." It'd been produced in the 50's by a Polish hospitality company called Orbis, and it featured a Slavic-looking couple enjoying the period charms of an unspecified Polish city as described by an English voice-over. Outdoor cafes! Hotels with elevators! Our host tried to make more hay than was warranted over the otherness on screen.
The last big thing we did in 2013 was see Patti Smith play a show at Webster Hall. This is a thing she does every year, and it's one of those things that New York magazine is always telling you should be on your bucket list. I hadn't done it yet because it's expensive and the tickets sell out crazy quick -- and because I wasn't sure what to expect. I was worried that she'd be some kind of mumbling ersatz gypsy like Bob Dylan. But I figured we should go, you know, just to see, and it turned out that she's amazing on stage. She's got such a steady, confident voice -- deeper, even, than the voices of the dudes in her band. (In two-part harmonies, her male keyboardist always took the upper part.) She moves quickly and deliberately around the stage; she takes easy control of the audience, addressing them with a balance of punk contempt and genuine warmth. "Oh, I just get so flustered when a handsome boy talks to me," she sneered in the direction of an audience member who kept calling her name. "Now shut the fuck up." She opened her set with a cover of "Heroin," and sang it without undue reverence. What followed was a mix of her famous early songs, stuff from her recent albums, and more covers. "This next song is the number one song of 2013," she said. Oh man, I thought. Patti Smith does Miley Cyrus? But no, she sang "Stay" by Rihanna, which was also quite good. It being her birthday and all, her kids came up on stage with a cake and gave her a gift of "bee socks," which somehow support the protection of honeybee colonies. She played "Because The Night" and dedicated it to Fred Smith. She played "Perfect Day" and dedicated it to Lou Reed. It was really great.
When the show was over, we went to go find Patrice, whose birthday, like Patti's, was that evening. She'd been celebrating at a karaoke joint on 17th St., but by the time we we got there it was just some office dudes hollering their way through "Wrecking Ball."
Best thing on basic cable: Being Human (USA)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Gimme The Loot
Best movie I saw not in a theater: O Lucky Man!
Best book I read: In The First Circle; runner-up: Tinkers
Best album I played drums on: Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best album I didn't play drums on: Blowout!, The So So Glos
Best new talk show on WFMU: Why Oh Why, with Andrea Silenzi
Best show I went to: The Dickies at Knitting Factory, Oct. 31st
Best video game I played: Dead Space
Best brunch: Buttermilk Channel
Best worst movie: Private Resort
Best vegetarian lunch special, Murray Hill: Tiffin Wallah
Best vegetarian Bánh Mi, Park Slope: Vegetarian chicken, Banhmigos
Best cruelty-free calorie-delivery mechanism: Vegan cowboy cookies
Best snack: Pretzel Crisps, aka Bagel Chips
I bought a Christmas tree about a week and a half before Christmas, traveling out to Sunset Park to the place I'd gone on 38th St. last year. It was very cold, and the air was misted and prickly with snow-dust. I told the guy the size of tree I was looking for, and he showed me one of the display models sitting on a spike in front of the lot, a heavy dressing of snow on its branches. It looked about right, and I told him so, and he wrapped it up for me to haul home on the train. That part was easier this time, though when I got the thing down the stairs onto the subway platform, my hands and fingers burned so badly from the cold that I thought there was something really wrong with them. I got it to Union St. and up to our apartment, and Nina and I fastened it to the plastic stand. Only then did I notice that it had a big sparse section on one side, like a bite taken out. It drank up the first pourings of water, but the needles stayed dry and crumbly. We duly wrapped the tree with fairy lights and clipped the "Christmas birds" to it, but it positively barfed needles onto the floor while we did so, and the whole thing seemed (even more than usual) like a hollow exercise. I felt embarrassed, and started counting the days until we could mulch the thing.
My dad suggested that all he really wanted for Christmas was for someone else to cook all the food on the day, so my sister enlisted me to help plan and prepare a suitable feast. I would have gone all vegetarian, because it's so much easier to cook, but she was set on doing some form of lamb dish. I'm glad she pushed for it because it came out really well, and got me out to witness the spectacle of the newly-opened Gowanus Whole Foods on 3rd St. Here is the menu we designed, for posterity and for readers who want to attempt it themselves:
- Hummus
- Roasted Brussels sprouts with fish sauce and Thai chiles
- Red quinoa and roasted butternut squash salad
- Roast leg of lamb with mint, garlic, and lima bean purée
- Cranberry sage pie
On Christmas Eve, Nina made ready to go visit her family in Pennsylvania, and I walked around the neighborhood trying to scoop up a few last-minute gifts. I bought us a sandwich to share at City Sub, but after I wolfed my half I felt ill, so I warned her off eating hers. I had to say goodbye to her from the toilet. I was almost recovered by the time my sister came over that evening to help me cook. We shopped for ingredients and prepared the salad and pie. She also helped me finalize one of my presents for Nina, a t-shirt ">screen-printed with the logo for Cacaolat, which she'd told me she admired when we saw it in Barcelona. We made three shirts, and they all came out good, but each one has different imperfections. That's just the way it works. That night, Jill and Emma and Jay came over and after some debate, we decided to watch Zapped! starring a young Scott Baio and, weirdly enough, the guy who went on to play Buddy on Charles In Charge. Baio plays a high school chemistry nerd who accidentally invents a tonic that gives him telekinetic powers by mixing weed and beer. He uses his powers to take girls' clothes off. It's like they filmed a Johnny Ryan comic strip. At midnight, it was Jay's birthday. We did shots.
Nina and I went on another date the weekend before New Year's Eve. First we saw the tail end of a Liquor Store show at Glasslands. They were characteristically gross / great, and I got to see the new light installation above the stage. It's made of PVC fitted with color-changing LEDs, and it looks like stiff, white fingers of coral reaching down from the ceiling. After that we got a drink at Iona, which Nina drunkenly insisted was "the best bar," on account of its varied seating environments (window, booth, back yard) and its focus on beer and whiskey. Then it was time for the midnight movie at Nitehawk, a series of "naughty" 35mm shorts curated by, like, a guy who restores naughty 35mm shorts. We ordered tall-boy PBRs and tater tots. The clips included some very explicit trailers for the movies:Were they really naughty? It was definitely more penetrative sex than I've seen in a movie theater since, I guess, the Wesleyan Film Series. It occurred to me that suggesting it to Nina as a fun date was a pretty Travis Bickle kind of move. I think some of the best clips in the series, though, were the least naughty -- the guy had collected some film ads that I guess would be shown before a film feature that were pitching dance-hall parties you could go to on New Year's Eve. So many venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn that just don't exist any more. There was also a strange, long-form travel ad encouraging viewers to "Come To Poland." It'd been produced in the 50's by a Polish hospitality company called Orbis, and it featured a Slavic-looking couple enjoying the period charms of an unspecified Polish city as described by an English voice-over. Outdoor cafes! Hotels with elevators! Our host tried to make more hay than was warranted over the otherness on screen.
The last big thing we did in 2013 was see Patti Smith play a show at Webster Hall. This is a thing she does every year, and it's one of those things that New York magazine is always telling you should be on your bucket list. I hadn't done it yet because it's expensive and the tickets sell out crazy quick -- and because I wasn't sure what to expect. I was worried that she'd be some kind of mumbling ersatz gypsy like Bob Dylan. But I figured we should go, you know, just to see, and it turned out that she's amazing on stage. She's got such a steady, confident voice -- deeper, even, than the voices of the dudes in her band. (In two-part harmonies, her male keyboardist always took the upper part.) She moves quickly and deliberately around the stage; she takes easy control of the audience, addressing them with a balance of punk contempt and genuine warmth. "Oh, I just get so flustered when a handsome boy talks to me," she sneered in the direction of an audience member who kept calling her name. "Now shut the fuck up." She opened her set with a cover of "Heroin," and sang it without undue reverence. What followed was a mix of her famous early songs, stuff from her recent albums, and more covers. "This next song is the number one song of 2013," she said. Oh man, I thought. Patti Smith does Miley Cyrus? But no, she sang "Stay" by Rihanna, which was also quite good. It being her birthday and all, her kids came up on stage with a cake and gave her a gift of "bee socks," which somehow support the protection of honeybee colonies. She played "Because The Night" and dedicated it to Fred Smith. She played "Perfect Day" and dedicated it to Lou Reed. It was really great.
When the show was over, we went to go find Patrice, whose birthday, like Patti's, was that evening. She'd been celebrating at a karaoke joint on 17th St., but by the time we we got there it was just some office dudes hollering their way through "Wrecking Ball."
Monday, December 16, 2013
Blue Morpho
I spent Thanksgiving with the Browns. My mom lured me there with an email telling me that Jonah had been invited to join Titus Andronicus. (She scooped BrooklynVegan and the band's own Twitter!) I tried not to slobber to him about his new band, but could not restrain myself. Some inside baseball: On their most recent tour, they rented a U-Haul hitch for their equipment; consequently there was enough room in the van for every member to have his own sleepin' row.
Bel Argosy played a show at Muchmore's, which turned out to be kind of a pleasant place to spend an evening. Beau and I met up early to pick up some equipment from the shared MiniBoone / Robot Princess practice space on Meserole. We found Doug inside, the place decorated with Christmas lights and smelling faintly sulfurous. He was working on putting words to a melody he'd written. We tied an amp to a hand truck. I grabbed Peter's cymbal bag, since we'd arranged that I'd use his stuff. My anxiety about punctuality and continued inability to keep my North Brooklyn geography straight got us to Muchmore's way early, so I sat the bar with Zain and Sam, and Beau ran back to Meserole to return some superfluous gear. Muchmore's is actually a pretty comfy joint. The washing machines in the room behind the bar are for community use -- show up with your laundry, drink a beer and take in a show. Sam had a cold and kept trying to get the bartender to make him a hot toddy, but the place has no license for hard liquor, so the best she could do was a coffee-and-wine, which was no problem for him. Our set was pretty good, though the floor tom collapsed in the middle of one song, and we only played for, like, fifteen minutes. Robot Princess sounds very good and precise and rehearsed; Beau and Dan play synchronized lead lines that sound like candy.
Nina's mom's been working as a docent at The Museum of Natural History, and she got us tickets to see the butterfly exhibit, so that's what we did on Saturday. The Museum admits visitors to the butterfly garden in waves, and there was some time to kill before the next "intake" period, so we took a walk through the Hall of North American Mammals. I've loved those dioramas for as long as can remember, and I've taken pains to avoid learning the floor plan of the Museum, so whenever I go I'm surprised at where I wind up. I looked into the mouth of the bison. I found a small finch hanging upside-down from a tree branch over a stream. The seam between the painted backdrop and the set dressing in the foreground -- the hand-placed blades of a grass, a frozen acrylic river -- is my favorite part. That seam is transportive, hyper-real. The dioramas don't have doors. How do they clean the animals and touch up the paint? I wondered. We turned a corner and found a wall-mounted TV playing a short documentary about how they do those things. (So, yeah, they take out the windows and enter through the front.)
The butterfly enclosure was a kind free-standing greenhouse inside an unused room off the museum's main entrance on Central Park West. It had "airlocks" at both the entrance and exits, to make sure you neither introduced a harmful indigenous critter to the butterfly jungle nor left with a butterfly clinging to your scarf. Inside, it was very warm and humid. For the butterflies what preferred it, there were feeding stations with sections of rotting oranges. There were several dozen different kinds of butterflies in the room, the smallest about the size of a guitar pick, the largest about the size and shape of a diagonal half-sandwich. Of these big ones, we were told, the majority were of the Morpho family. With their wings folded together, they looked unremarkable, like large moths or bits of faded newsprint. But when they spread their wings flat, they revealed a unreal, glittery blue on their dorsal side. An attentive docent showed us how to attract and handle the butterflies, how they'd mash their proboscii against things to taste them, that when two butterflies of the same species perched on a branch and overlapped their wings it meant they were mating. A young woman, wearing the official Museum orage, brought in a kind of mesh duffle bag that she explained was full of newly-hatched butterflies. "They're not very good at flying yet," she said, "so be careful not to step on them." She was right: The butterflies that they shook out of the bag took to the air only hesitatantly. Some of them waddled around on the floor flexing their wings in very deliberate way. We waited motionless for minutes on end in various hopeful locations near the stinky orange piles, hoping for a chance landing on our clothes or outstretched hands. At the other side of the enclosure, one of the docents was kneeling on the floor with a large butterfly clinging to her eyebrow and explaining loudly to a shocked toddler that it was alright. ("It doesn't hurt! It doesn't hurt!") Right as we were about to give up, a large Blue Morpho alit on the tassel of my scarf. It had a big, hairy thorax, a little grotesque, really, but man -- those wings!
At around 6, the museum staff started herding people out, so we left, walking down the big stairs and across the street into Central Park. We headed down to the lake, which had a thick, dull surface layer of slush that looked deceptively solid. There's fencing that runs most of the perimeter, and at various intervals there were signs warning you not to step onto the ice. Next to each sign was mounted a red, telescoping ladder, which you could presumably extend from the shore to someone who'd made a bad choice and fallen in. There are several small gazebo-like structures along the edge of the lake -- little huts, really, with two small benches facing each other inside. One side of each hut seemed to open right onto the lake, like that Edward Hopper painting. I dipped the toe of my boot into the slush to see if it went straight down. It did, but Nina pulled me away. We walked around to the other side of the lake to The Loeb Boathouse, to see if we could sit by the fire and get drunk, but they were closed for a private event.
Instead, we exited the Park on the eastern side, and walked down 5th Ave. to 59th St., where we stopped briefly. at F.A.O. Schwartz. The place was swarming with frenzied children, but there were also several adult couples buying action figures and various doo-dads for themselves. We walked through aisles of pricey candy (fifteen bucks for a grotesquely huge Reese's Peanut Butter Cup); stuffed animals the size of a twin bed; a not-quite-tall-enough guy in Spider-Man spandex, posing for pictures; Lego everything. Everywhere the accumulating clutter of life and western capitalism. There was a wing of the store where you could buy high-end baby dolls, only you had to go through an "adoption interview" to acquire one. I thought we could go through the phony process and then trepan our candidate doll with a power tool in front of the other shoppers, as a bit of creepy performance art. We left empty-handed, although I found myself coveting a make-your-own-geode kit.
Further down 5th Ave., we stepped inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Nina lit a candle for her father. Afterwards, she stopped at a street vendor's cart and bought us a bag of roasted chestnuts, so hot that they singed the brown paper black as we held them. For some reason, the chestnuts seemed like an intimate thing to buy from a stranger. The fur between the shell and the, uh, nut-meat. The softness of the meat itself. We walked past the holiday window displays at Lord & Taylor. The theme seemed tob gilded age New York, with cardboard flats printed with lithographs of wealthy shoppers enjoying the pleasures of the department store while being serenaded by Negro ragtime musicians. The flats would kind of wiggle, but the animation was minimal, and the whole thing was ugly and tone-deaf. We took the train downtown. Two crustpunks were riding the train with a dog. They split up at Union Square, the girl disembarking with the reluctant dog, the guy staying on the train alone.
I don't know. That's all.
Bel Argosy played a show at Muchmore's, which turned out to be kind of a pleasant place to spend an evening. Beau and I met up early to pick up some equipment from the shared MiniBoone / Robot Princess practice space on Meserole. We found Doug inside, the place decorated with Christmas lights and smelling faintly sulfurous. He was working on putting words to a melody he'd written. We tied an amp to a hand truck. I grabbed Peter's cymbal bag, since we'd arranged that I'd use his stuff. My anxiety about punctuality and continued inability to keep my North Brooklyn geography straight got us to Muchmore's way early, so I sat the bar with Zain and Sam, and Beau ran back to Meserole to return some superfluous gear. Muchmore's is actually a pretty comfy joint. The washing machines in the room behind the bar are for community use -- show up with your laundry, drink a beer and take in a show. Sam had a cold and kept trying to get the bartender to make him a hot toddy, but the place has no license for hard liquor, so the best she could do was a coffee-and-wine, which was no problem for him. Our set was pretty good, though the floor tom collapsed in the middle of one song, and we only played for, like, fifteen minutes. Robot Princess sounds very good and precise and rehearsed; Beau and Dan play synchronized lead lines that sound like candy.
Nina's mom's been working as a docent at The Museum of Natural History, and she got us tickets to see the butterfly exhibit, so that's what we did on Saturday. The Museum admits visitors to the butterfly garden in waves, and there was some time to kill before the next "intake" period, so we took a walk through the Hall of North American Mammals. I've loved those dioramas for as long as can remember, and I've taken pains to avoid learning the floor plan of the Museum, so whenever I go I'm surprised at where I wind up. I looked into the mouth of the bison. I found a small finch hanging upside-down from a tree branch over a stream. The seam between the painted backdrop and the set dressing in the foreground -- the hand-placed blades of a grass, a frozen acrylic river -- is my favorite part. That seam is transportive, hyper-real. The dioramas don't have doors. How do they clean the animals and touch up the paint? I wondered. We turned a corner and found a wall-mounted TV playing a short documentary about how they do those things. (So, yeah, they take out the windows and enter through the front.)
The butterfly enclosure was a kind free-standing greenhouse inside an unused room off the museum's main entrance on Central Park West. It had "airlocks" at both the entrance and exits, to make sure you neither introduced a harmful indigenous critter to the butterfly jungle nor left with a butterfly clinging to your scarf. Inside, it was very warm and humid. For the butterflies what preferred it, there were feeding stations with sections of rotting oranges. There were several dozen different kinds of butterflies in the room, the smallest about the size of a guitar pick, the largest about the size and shape of a diagonal half-sandwich. Of these big ones, we were told, the majority were of the Morpho family. With their wings folded together, they looked unremarkable, like large moths or bits of faded newsprint. But when they spread their wings flat, they revealed a unreal, glittery blue on their dorsal side. An attentive docent showed us how to attract and handle the butterflies, how they'd mash their proboscii against things to taste them, that when two butterflies of the same species perched on a branch and overlapped their wings it meant they were mating. A young woman, wearing the official Museum orage, brought in a kind of mesh duffle bag that she explained was full of newly-hatched butterflies. "They're not very good at flying yet," she said, "so be careful not to step on them." She was right: The butterflies that they shook out of the bag took to the air only hesitatantly. Some of them waddled around on the floor flexing their wings in very deliberate way. We waited motionless for minutes on end in various hopeful locations near the stinky orange piles, hoping for a chance landing on our clothes or outstretched hands. At the other side of the enclosure, one of the docents was kneeling on the floor with a large butterfly clinging to her eyebrow and explaining loudly to a shocked toddler that it was alright. ("It doesn't hurt! It doesn't hurt!") Right as we were about to give up, a large Blue Morpho alit on the tassel of my scarf. It had a big, hairy thorax, a little grotesque, really, but man -- those wings!
At around 6, the museum staff started herding people out, so we left, walking down the big stairs and across the street into Central Park. We headed down to the lake, which had a thick, dull surface layer of slush that looked deceptively solid. There's fencing that runs most of the perimeter, and at various intervals there were signs warning you not to step onto the ice. Next to each sign was mounted a red, telescoping ladder, which you could presumably extend from the shore to someone who'd made a bad choice and fallen in. There are several small gazebo-like structures along the edge of the lake -- little huts, really, with two small benches facing each other inside. One side of each hut seemed to open right onto the lake, like that Edward Hopper painting. I dipped the toe of my boot into the slush to see if it went straight down. It did, but Nina pulled me away. We walked around to the other side of the lake to The Loeb Boathouse, to see if we could sit by the fire and get drunk, but they were closed for a private event.
Instead, we exited the Park on the eastern side, and walked down 5th Ave. to 59th St., where we stopped briefly. at F.A.O. Schwartz. The place was swarming with frenzied children, but there were also several adult couples buying action figures and various doo-dads for themselves. We walked through aisles of pricey candy (fifteen bucks for a grotesquely huge Reese's Peanut Butter Cup); stuffed animals the size of a twin bed; a not-quite-tall-enough guy in Spider-Man spandex, posing for pictures; Lego everything. Everywhere the accumulating clutter of life and western capitalism. There was a wing of the store where you could buy high-end baby dolls, only you had to go through an "adoption interview" to acquire one. I thought we could go through the phony process and then trepan our candidate doll with a power tool in front of the other shoppers, as a bit of creepy performance art. We left empty-handed, although I found myself coveting a make-your-own-geode kit.
Further down 5th Ave., we stepped inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Nina lit a candle for her father. Afterwards, she stopped at a street vendor's cart and bought us a bag of roasted chestnuts, so hot that they singed the brown paper black as we held them. For some reason, the chestnuts seemed like an intimate thing to buy from a stranger. The fur between the shell and the, uh, nut-meat. The softness of the meat itself. We walked past the holiday window displays at Lord & Taylor. The theme seemed tob gilded age New York, with cardboard flats printed with lithographs of wealthy shoppers enjoying the pleasures of the department store while being serenaded by Negro ragtime musicians. The flats would kind of wiggle, but the animation was minimal, and the whole thing was ugly and tone-deaf. We took the train downtown. Two crustpunks were riding the train with a dog. They split up at Union Square, the girl disembarking with the reluctant dog, the guy staying on the train alone.
I don't know. That's all.
Monday, November 04, 2013
Doggy Doo
Nina and I went to Target the week before Halloween, ostensibly to see if they had a Mag-Safe 2 adapter for my new work laptop, but actually so that I could buy a big thing of Halloween candy. The adapter was not forthcoming, but I was able to talk my way into bringing home a four-pound bag of fun-size candy: Snicker, peanut butter Snicker, M&Ms, Skittle. A little kid threw up on the floor in one of the aisles over by the pharmacy, but a guy with a mop was summoned and quickly cleaned it up. It was a good day for Target; people were on top of their shit and everything was humming.
I left work a little early on the 31st, which for me means 5 o'clock. I wanted to make sure I'd be home in time for the dog Halloween costume contest that was scheduled to take place in front of my building at 5:30. Have I said much about The Yuppy Puppy? Probably not, sidebar: We live above a doggy day care place. We moved into this building around the same time they did. Our building shares a wall with an identical (also styrofoam) building to the east, as well as a concrete "back yard" and a small shed. The Y.P. occupies the ground floor on both sides; before that, there was a hair salon and a garage, unused. Danielle, who runs the place, keeps five of her own dogs on the premises as a kind of seed population, including a huge, un-cut mastiff named Floyd and a weird little Boston terrier with one eye named Batman. The neighborhood kids have recognized that she can't say no to a sick or wounded animal of any species, and have started dragging various strays and almost-roadkill into the store. As such, the ground floor is now also home to three cats and a couple of pigeons that Danielle feeds with a bottle. I go in there sometimes to get cat litter (World's Best!), which she keeps in stock mostly for me, I think, and to see what all is happening with the zoo.
Whenever I look out our rear window, I see dogs snoozing or sniffing around (plus a whole lot of dog turds). They do sometimes bark in the morning, earlier than I wish they would, and the barking is often accompanied by the sound of Danielle loudly chastising the dogs for barking. ("Batman, no!!") But I've learned to kind of filter it out and / or accept it as useful punctuation in the continuum of my life. Nina might tell you different, though. And Stacy, the woman who briefly lived downstairs from us had a small meltdown when The Yuppy Puppy moved in. She's a writer (of middlebrow non-fiction) and was understandably concerned about the potential for daytime noise. While we were moving in, she invited us into her apartment and showed us how she'd used the half-bedroom area we were planning to turn into an office for Nina, our apartment layouts being mostly identical. There was some soft acoustic guitar percolating in from the second-floor apartment in the next building over. "I call this the hell corner," she said. She moved out a week before The Yuppy Puppy opened, having unsuccessfully attempted to convince the post office not to deliver their mail. Should I feel bad for her? She was an unremitting buzz-kill, and so much the better if she got metaphorically paved over in this deal. Our new downstairs neighbor is a sweet guy whom we almost never see or hear. Nina thinks he's a computer person, like me. I guess I hadn't Livejournaled about any of this yet, because of all the Sturm und Drang which accompanied our moving out of our old apartment. I was afraid this place wouldn't work out, but, you know, so far so good.
We could hear the dogs starting to gather as soon as I got home. Nina grabbed her camera and we went down to the twilight street, where the costumed dogs and their owners awaited judgment. There was a dog dressed up like a hot dog. There was a dog dressed up like a fairy. There was a beautiful brown dog with light-colored eyes named Beetlejuice, wearing a kind of 3-D skeleton costume. And there was a pit bull dressed up like a king, with a velvet cape and a floppy, plush crown. The dogs milled around, sniffing each other politely. At about a quarter to seven, Danielle had them line up and conducted the judging by a sort of applause meter. The winner was the pit bull king. I'm not sure what the prize was. A gift certificate, maybe? The pit bull's owner posed with it for a picture. Beetlejuice grabbed a complimentary squeaky toy in his jaws and ran to the end of his leash lest it be taken from him.
We went back upstairs and got dressed to party: I had tickets to see The Dickies making a highly unusual east coast appearance at The Knitting Factory. We made our way to the G train, me carrying the opened sack of fun-size candy like the spoils of a cartoon bank robbery. I was hoping that a drunk or a kid would see it and ask for some, but nobody did. The best I could do was trade a fun-size Snickers for a little bag of fruit gummies from the guy behind the counter at the bodega across from the venue on Metropolitan Ave. It was about eight o'clock, and we were just hanging out in front of the place, trying to display the bag of candy suggestively and waiting for Chris and Billy to show up. Billy was first, then Chris, telling me he told me that he'd be late, so what did I expect. And then with some surprise, we realized that Stan Lee was leaning up against the wall next to us, playing with his phone. "Stan," I hissed. "You want some candy?" "Bengals minus three," he said to his phone. "Whaddya mean you can't cover that?" He came over and dug around in the bag. "Are you a Bengals fan?" asked Billy. "Sure," said Stan. "Although two of my Bengals died this year. Sad. My Bengal cats, I mean. The football team is good, too. But the Dolphins have the best logo in the NFL. Dolphin wearing a football helmet -- how can you beat that?"
Stan went inside to help Little Dave Teague with something. We went inside and sat down at a table in the bar area, which, with its soundproof window onto the performance space, makes me think of an observation bunker for a nuclear test site. We ate Halloween candy from the bag and drank beer. I recognized the lead singer of Wyldlife at a nearby table. I don't know if they were secretly opening or if he's just a fan. Stan came into the room looking like he didn't know which table in the cafeteria was his. To our surprise and delight, he came over and sat down next to us. Billy and Chris and I peppered him with questions. Did he remember the time the band snuck 15-year-old Billy and Chris into a 21-and-over show at Life (now le poisson rouge)? No, but he remembered the show. ("That was a strange place to play a punk show.") Did he remember opening for Misfits at Club Exit (now Terminal 5)? Sort of. Did he remember playing a New Year's Eve show with The Kowalskis at Southpaw (now some kind of day care) in 2008? Maybe. Did he remember Coney Island High (owned in its time by Kitty Kowalski)? Yes! "That was a great place," he said. He showed us pictures from his Instagram on his phone of a show they played at Rob Zombie's haunted house in L.A., which, unsurprisingly, seemed to be decorated half with scary, grimy stuff, and half with doodles from a pot-smoking teenager's composition book.
He asked if there were any songs in particular we wanted to hear. Oh wow. "I'm OK You're OK," I said without thinking.
"No," said Billy. "That's, like, one of their hits."
"Okay," I said. "How about, Welcome To The Diamond Mine?"
"Yeah." said Chris. "Or what's that song from Dawn Of The Dickies? Infidel Zombie!"
"Can't do that one," said Stan. "No saxophone since Bob died."
We spent a while trying to stump him with songs he didn't remember. The best we could do was Canyon, a song that Chris found on a very early live bootleg while he was working at KSPC. "Wow," said Stan. He didn't think they knew how to play that one. He talked about which of their records had the worst covert art: All of the live albums and Idjit Savant. "Are you guys writing new songs?" we wanted to know. "I've got a ton of new stuff in a box in my closet," he said, but they didn't have plans to record a new album any time soon. It wasn't clear whether he thought the demand wasn't there or whether the band's inertia was too great. "This is really just a hobby," he said, although he spoke with obvious pride about the promo they were doing for the 25th anniversary of Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Billy geeked out over guitars with him. His signature yellow Spider-Man was in the shop with a cracked headstock, so he'd flown out east with a newer rig, a Jackson Flying V that'd been custom-built for him by a friendly luthier.
When we saw the opening act winding down their set, he left to go get ready. Lingering at the bar, we almost missed The Dickies starting, but made it into the room in time to hear Stan and Dave shredding their way through the main riff in the theme from Killer Klowns, a perverted take on Entrance of the Gladiators. Leonard came out wearing a lycra ghost mask and a long-sleeve t-shirt with a picture of a suit and tie on it; a sort of dickey, if you will. The band sounds as good as or better than ever: the synchronized piercing guitar, the perfect-pitch helium vocals. Leonard's fierce little face like a spitting-mad cat's. He sticks his middle finger in his ear, does that same little kicky-leg dance. I find that I've seen them so many times now that I know exactly how he'll move on stage, from the way to he snaps his towel at the guitar amp to the way he chokes that grimy plush penis during the bridge of If Stuart Could Talk. But man are they great. They plowed through one perfect song after another, a real Ramones set, and though the pit was sparse, Billy and I danced ourselves soaking wet -- like, actual soak: The back of my sweatshirt was saturated.
Billy snagged the actual set list by begging it off of their new bass player, a hulking dude who looks like a life-sized action figure, but here's an approximaton of what they played:
Billy and Chris took the L back to Manhattan together, but Nina and I headed across the street to Mariella Pizzaria [sic], our go-to for sweaty, post-show pizza even though they pretty much always run out of pizza by the time we get there. They're one of those places that makes unconventional pizzas -- like, in addition to the regular combinations of cheese and marinara and, like, broccoli, there'll be a "pizza" that's just bread and chicken and thick brown barbecue sauce. A dude we'd seen in the crowd at the show was holding forth on the glory days of apartment squatting on the Lower East Side. His friend broke away for a moment to say hi. "That was the best version of 'Manny Moe & Jack' I've ever heard," he said. My voice was shot from screaming and I was exhausted. "Amazing show," I croaked. Someone else came in and tried to order a slice of plain, but there was no plain to be had, only barbecue. He left empty-handed.
I left work a little early on the 31st, which for me means 5 o'clock. I wanted to make sure I'd be home in time for the dog Halloween costume contest that was scheduled to take place in front of my building at 5:30. Have I said much about The Yuppy Puppy? Probably not, sidebar: We live above a doggy day care place. We moved into this building around the same time they did. Our building shares a wall with an identical (also styrofoam) building to the east, as well as a concrete "back yard" and a small shed. The Y.P. occupies the ground floor on both sides; before that, there was a hair salon and a garage, unused. Danielle, who runs the place, keeps five of her own dogs on the premises as a kind of seed population, including a huge, un-cut mastiff named Floyd and a weird little Boston terrier with one eye named Batman. The neighborhood kids have recognized that she can't say no to a sick or wounded animal of any species, and have started dragging various strays and almost-roadkill into the store. As such, the ground floor is now also home to three cats and a couple of pigeons that Danielle feeds with a bottle. I go in there sometimes to get cat litter (World's Best!), which she keeps in stock mostly for me, I think, and to see what all is happening with the zoo.
Whenever I look out our rear window, I see dogs snoozing or sniffing around (plus a whole lot of dog turds). They do sometimes bark in the morning, earlier than I wish they would, and the barking is often accompanied by the sound of Danielle loudly chastising the dogs for barking. ("Batman, no!!") But I've learned to kind of filter it out and / or accept it as useful punctuation in the continuum of my life. Nina might tell you different, though. And Stacy, the woman who briefly lived downstairs from us had a small meltdown when The Yuppy Puppy moved in. She's a writer (of middlebrow non-fiction) and was understandably concerned about the potential for daytime noise. While we were moving in, she invited us into her apartment and showed us how she'd used the half-bedroom area we were planning to turn into an office for Nina, our apartment layouts being mostly identical. There was some soft acoustic guitar percolating in from the second-floor apartment in the next building over. "I call this the hell corner," she said. She moved out a week before The Yuppy Puppy opened, having unsuccessfully attempted to convince the post office not to deliver their mail. Should I feel bad for her? She was an unremitting buzz-kill, and so much the better if she got metaphorically paved over in this deal. Our new downstairs neighbor is a sweet guy whom we almost never see or hear. Nina thinks he's a computer person, like me. I guess I hadn't Livejournaled about any of this yet, because of all the Sturm und Drang which accompanied our moving out of our old apartment. I was afraid this place wouldn't work out, but, you know, so far so good.
We could hear the dogs starting to gather as soon as I got home. Nina grabbed her camera and we went down to the twilight street, where the costumed dogs and their owners awaited judgment. There was a dog dressed up like a hot dog. There was a dog dressed up like a fairy. There was a beautiful brown dog with light-colored eyes named Beetlejuice, wearing a kind of 3-D skeleton costume. And there was a pit bull dressed up like a king, with a velvet cape and a floppy, plush crown. The dogs milled around, sniffing each other politely. At about a quarter to seven, Danielle had them line up and conducted the judging by a sort of applause meter. The winner was the pit bull king. I'm not sure what the prize was. A gift certificate, maybe? The pit bull's owner posed with it for a picture. Beetlejuice grabbed a complimentary squeaky toy in his jaws and ran to the end of his leash lest it be taken from him.
We went back upstairs and got dressed to party: I had tickets to see The Dickies making a highly unusual east coast appearance at The Knitting Factory. We made our way to the G train, me carrying the opened sack of fun-size candy like the spoils of a cartoon bank robbery. I was hoping that a drunk or a kid would see it and ask for some, but nobody did. The best I could do was trade a fun-size Snickers for a little bag of fruit gummies from the guy behind the counter at the bodega across from the venue on Metropolitan Ave. It was about eight o'clock, and we were just hanging out in front of the place, trying to display the bag of candy suggestively and waiting for Chris and Billy to show up. Billy was first, then Chris, telling me he told me that he'd be late, so what did I expect. And then with some surprise, we realized that Stan Lee was leaning up against the wall next to us, playing with his phone. "Stan," I hissed. "You want some candy?" "Bengals minus three," he said to his phone. "Whaddya mean you can't cover that?" He came over and dug around in the bag. "Are you a Bengals fan?" asked Billy. "Sure," said Stan. "Although two of my Bengals died this year. Sad. My Bengal cats, I mean. The football team is good, too. But the Dolphins have the best logo in the NFL. Dolphin wearing a football helmet -- how can you beat that?"
Stan went inside to help Little Dave Teague with something. We went inside and sat down at a table in the bar area, which, with its soundproof window onto the performance space, makes me think of an observation bunker for a nuclear test site. We ate Halloween candy from the bag and drank beer. I recognized the lead singer of Wyldlife at a nearby table. I don't know if they were secretly opening or if he's just a fan. Stan came into the room looking like he didn't know which table in the cafeteria was his. To our surprise and delight, he came over and sat down next to us. Billy and Chris and I peppered him with questions. Did he remember the time the band snuck 15-year-old Billy and Chris into a 21-and-over show at Life (now le poisson rouge)? No, but he remembered the show. ("That was a strange place to play a punk show.") Did he remember opening for Misfits at Club Exit (now Terminal 5)? Sort of. Did he remember playing a New Year's Eve show with The Kowalskis at Southpaw (now some kind of day care) in 2008? Maybe. Did he remember Coney Island High (owned in its time by Kitty Kowalski)? Yes! "That was a great place," he said. He showed us pictures from his Instagram on his phone of a show they played at Rob Zombie's haunted house in L.A., which, unsurprisingly, seemed to be decorated half with scary, grimy stuff, and half with doodles from a pot-smoking teenager's composition book.
He asked if there were any songs in particular we wanted to hear. Oh wow. "I'm OK You're OK," I said without thinking.
"No," said Billy. "That's, like, one of their hits."
"Okay," I said. "How about, Welcome To The Diamond Mine?"
"Yeah." said Chris. "Or what's that song from Dawn Of The Dickies? Infidel Zombie!"
"Can't do that one," said Stan. "No saxophone since Bob died."
We spent a while trying to stump him with songs he didn't remember. The best we could do was Canyon, a song that Chris found on a very early live bootleg while he was working at KSPC. "Wow," said Stan. He didn't think they knew how to play that one. He talked about which of their records had the worst covert art: All of the live albums and Idjit Savant. "Are you guys writing new songs?" we wanted to know. "I've got a ton of new stuff in a box in my closet," he said, but they didn't have plans to record a new album any time soon. It wasn't clear whether he thought the demand wasn't there or whether the band's inertia was too great. "This is really just a hobby," he said, although he spoke with obvious pride about the promo they were doing for the 25th anniversary of Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Billy geeked out over guitars with him. His signature yellow Spider-Man was in the shop with a cracked headstock, so he'd flown out east with a newer rig, a Jackson Flying V that'd been custom-built for him by a friendly luthier.
When we saw the opening act winding down their set, he left to go get ready. Lingering at the bar, we almost missed The Dickies starting, but made it into the room in time to hear Stan and Dave shredding their way through the main riff in the theme from Killer Klowns, a perverted take on Entrance of the Gladiators. Leonard came out wearing a lycra ghost mask and a long-sleeve t-shirt with a picture of a suit and tie on it; a sort of dickey, if you will. The band sounds as good as or better than ever: the synchronized piercing guitar, the perfect-pitch helium vocals. Leonard's fierce little face like a spitting-mad cat's. He sticks his middle finger in his ear, does that same little kicky-leg dance. I find that I've seen them so many times now that I know exactly how he'll move on stage, from the way to he snaps his towel at the guitar amp to the way he chokes that grimy plush penis during the bridge of If Stuart Could Talk. But man are they great. They plowed through one perfect song after another, a real Ramones set, and though the pit was sparse, Billy and I danced ourselves soaking wet -- like, actual soak: The back of my sweatshirt was saturated.
Billy snagged the actual set list by begging it off of their new bass player, a hulking dude who looks like a life-sized action figure, but here's an approximaton of what they played:
- Killer Klowns From Outer Space
- Welcome To The Diamond Mine
- I'm OK, You're OK
- Paranoid
- I Got It At The Store
- Give It Back
- Doggy Doo
- I'm Stan
- Manny Moe & Jack
- She's A Hunchback
- Rosemary
- See My Way
- Going Homo
- You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)
- Attack Of The Molemen
- Gigantor
- If Stuart Could Talk
- Rondo In A Major (Midget's Revenge)
- Banana Splits
Billy and Chris took the L back to Manhattan together, but Nina and I headed across the street to Mariella Pizzaria [sic], our go-to for sweaty, post-show pizza even though they pretty much always run out of pizza by the time we get there. They're one of those places that makes unconventional pizzas -- like, in addition to the regular combinations of cheese and marinara and, like, broccoli, there'll be a "pizza" that's just bread and chicken and thick brown barbecue sauce. A dude we'd seen in the crowd at the show was holding forth on the glory days of apartment squatting on the Lower East Side. His friend broke away for a moment to say hi. "That was the best version of 'Manny Moe & Jack' I've ever heard," he said. My voice was shot from screaming and I was exhausted. "Amazing show," I croaked. Someone else came in and tried to order a slice of plain, but there was no plain to be had, only barbecue. He left empty-handed.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Marathon
This year's CMJ marathon came at the end of about six weeks of uninterrupted professional and familial obligations, and so I found that the process of creating a personal concert agenda on my only free weekend before the marathon wasn't just a way of optimizing my time, it was the only way I was going to see anything at all. The following is a log of my spreadsheet-planned adventures.
I started off the marathon on Tuesday with an ambitious schedule of five bands across three venues. My first stop was Fat Baby, where Birth Of Joy was playing a 7:00 set. They're a three-piece -- drums, guitar, and, uh, synth-organ -- from Holland, which they repeated in case we forgot. They play heavy 60's-style guitar rock with many of the hooks and solos played on the organ, which made me think of Iron Butterfly, although I'm sure that's a pretty obvious comparison. More interesting was that the lead singer had a voice quite a lot like one of the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. (Or maybe it was just all the reverb they were using.) He took his shirt off about half way through their set, revealing a classic dirtbag physique, hairless and not quite in shape. I liked their sound and was tempted to stick around as their singer suggested for "[our] friends from Budapest" (Instrumenti, I guess?) but I had to be off to the Cameo Gallery to see Ovlov and PUP. I'd never been there before, and I was taken unawares by the amazing ceiling art: They've got an elongated triangle of white fabric -- maybe like the "train" of a wedding dress -- from which are suspended hundreds of little white strands or fabric strips. A projector mounted up by the ceiling plays a loop of scrolling bands of color which "paints" the dangling strands, making them look like they're conducting little packets of colored light. It made me think of the undercarriage of an enormous invertebrate living at some inhospitable depth of the ocean and signaling its readiness to mate by bioluminescence. I could have watched it all night.
Ovlov took the stage at 9:00. They play a kind of sludgy, noisy indie punk; squealing guitars and distorted vocals -- distorted everything, really. Their lead singer and guitar player had a caveman intensity and played with a look of frustrated concentration. They weren't bad, actually. (I think Bel Argosy were supposed to play a show with them and, like, Majuscules, way back when at The Paper Box but had to cancel.) "If you want t-shirts or CDs, let one of us know," he said when they were done. "We left them all in the car because we didn't think anyone would want one." PUP was on next. They were one of the acts I knew I wanted to see during the marathon: I'd like the barely-keeping-it-together production on Reservoir, their Bandcamp "single," and was hoping they'd put on a live show like METZ, angry young men clobbering the stage. They ended up being a lot more like The Thermals, peppy and earnest and a hair too self-conscious. Not that that's so bad, though I was bit annoyed by some of the on-stage talk, which was all about how committed the band is and how much they love their craft. Maybe I should've seen that coming in the bio included in their EPK, which says, "They play loud. Like really fucking loud." (They weren't that loud.) Before launching into a song about Robert McClure, the lead singer said, "He was a real dick. He led his crew up to the Arctic and they almost froze to death. Sometimes I worry that I'm like that guy with this band." When they finished up, I pushed my way out of the Cameo Gallery and back to Bedford, then to Manhattan Ave. and Bar Matchless, where Shilpa Ray was playing the back room. There's always some shitty DJ bullshit happening at the bar there, and whenever I see a show at that place I feel like I'm in high school and fighting my way through a cheerleading practice to, like, glee club. Ms. Ray and her band were already playing when I got there, and she was giving such a withering look towards the door that I had to remind myself there was no way she could see through the lights. The latest iteration of her band sounds more sure of themselves now, though her new album seems to be a slower, quieter affair. Erotolepsy made a welcome appearance late in the set. "Follow the big star, bright star, rock star, porn star," she sang, alternating between a murmur and that terrifying howl. "You know how to find to me!" Best voice in harmonium punk, 2013.
On Wednesday I spent the early evening rehearsing at 6/8 Studios with Bel Argosy. Chris brought a fifth of Heaven Hill in a plastic bottle and the non-tee-totalling members of the band tossed it back and forth until it was empty. By the end of our two hours I was quite drunk, but the band sounded tight and we'd worked out a set list that we knew we could play Ramones-style in twenty-five minutes. Chris and Beau went their separate ways, and Billy and I lurched over to one of the 2 Bros Pizza places on St. Mark's and grabbed dollar slices before heading down to Leftfield for a preview of the space we'd be playing (!) on Saturday, and to check out Quitty and the Don'ts, for whom I'd carved out a slot on my agenda on account of their cool, goofy sound -- a lot like Punks On Mars. A band called Time and Energy were playing the upstairs space when we stumbled in. They're a drummer and a guy who somehow plays a keyboard and bass guitar at the same time. The effect was frustrated and noisy. Worse, they had a merch table with way too much and too expensive merch on it: CDs for $10; vinyl record with meticulously detailed cover for $20; $30 gets you the record and a t-shirt! Next to take the tiny stage in front of the window were Literature, who had more dudes and sounded a lot more like a conventional indie rock band, a bit dissonant and moody maybe, but they played with care and precision. After they finished up, we realized the clock was ticking on our schedule, so Nina and I headed north up Ludlow St. to Pianos, where we found Mean Creek setting up in the upstairs performance space. I'd clicked on them on a whim -- I thought I should calibrate my sensors for good and band band names -- and was pleasantly surprised by how rock-and-roll and dance-y and, well, fun they sounded. And they were good live, too. The lead singer looks a bit like Joaquin Phoenix and he's got an appropriately serious vibe, sings with his eyes closed. The crowd loved them! Stompy feet, applause, hollering. Nina left at 11:00 to head to Glasslands to see Yuck (a goal which she did not entirely achieve that night). When 'Creek were finished, I found my way drunkenly to the F and home. I was still a bit tipsy when I woke up in the early, early morning to pee.
Thursday was rough going on account of my indulgence the previous night, and so I pared my schedule down to a single venue: The Flat, on South 9th and Hooper, where I wanted to see Left And Right and Lurve. True to its name, The Flat is made up to look like a rec room or furnished basement with a mahogany bar. There are dingy throw rugs and dilapidated sofas and even some ancient-looking bunting up near the ceiling. Left and Right started playing right when I got there. They're definitely a "young man" band, four dudes that seem pretty committed to a t-shirt-and-jeans personal aesthetic and who write serious, sometimes bitterly dissonant songs about lonely highways and girls. They took turns on the vocals. I liked them in spite of myself. But it was Lurve that I'd come to see. I'd liked the tight, focused songs I'd listened to on their Bandcamp, and coveted the design-y cover art from their EP. I was surprised to see that the band themselves are a shaggy buncch, each member sporting long, frizzy hair and sometimes scruffy beards. It's like if you cloned the hippy character from Workaholics several times. But they sounded great, with neat, quick energy, the guitar players turning their All-Stars sideways to brace themselves for playing. Nina'd joined me for Lurve's set. When they were done, we walked over to Kent Ave. She'd bought the last ticket to a Speedy Ortiz show (with Ex-Cult and Hunters) at 285. We sat for a while in a small, scrubby park down by the East River. An alarm from one of the security systems for a nearby warehouse was going off, but it was a peaceful moment nonetheless. I watched the texture of the river as it was buffeted by the wind. Oddly smooth patches would form for a few seconds here and there between the ripples. The marathon's exhausting, but it's also nice to fill your time with stuff like shows. You visit lots of places, never staying long enough to get comfortable and begin to resent your surroundings. You hear lots of music, and it stops you from thinking too much about yourself. It got towards 11:30, and we left the park and headed to the venue. "CMJ is MAXED OUT," said a hand-written sign in the "box office," meaning Nina and I would have to part ways. I snagged a cab back to Gowanus. It turned out to be one of the ones with an electric motor and glowing blue dash, and it ferried me home in near silence.
Big plans for Friday night: I wanted to see Osekre and The Lucky Bastards and The Denzels at Muchmore's, but Nina had a tip that the Eagulls and Yuck show at Mercury Lounge wasn't actually sold out after all, you just had to show up in person to buy your tickets. So Kermen and I looped down to 2nd Ave. from the office to get our fifteen-dollar wrist stamps, and then took the F to the L to Bedford Ave. We stopped for pizza at Anna Maria along the way. A woman ahead of us on line was trying to order half of five different, elaborate pizzas that were sitting behind the counter. "I don't understand why this is different than ordering them ahead of time," she said when the guy hesitated. She had a point, but she did not tener razón. "This is my actual life," muttered Kermen in a Charlie Brown-ish kind of way as he waited for his plain slice to make it through this gridlock. There were still several bands ahead of the ones I wanted to see when we got to Muchmore's, so we got beers and planted ourselves at the back of the room. The next band to take the stage was called Gypsy Wig, and they had a big printed sign hanging behind the drums to let you know. They had six (!) people on stage, including a lady who played piercing lead lines on a saxophone. The band played with blissed-out looks on their faces, but their songs were no fun -- everybody was playing their own thing, and a coherent sound never really emerged. It was a bit like the jazz band from Wake Up, Wakefield. The next group brought fewer people on stage, but they weren't much better. They called themselves For Every Story Untold (!), and their lead singer was a woman with a very high and controlled voice who touched her face self-consciously as she sang. The guitarist did a thing where he really choke-wanked his guitar on every song, something that didn't bother me when Previn did it to his bass in The States but probably should have.
I started wishing that I'd checked my schedule a bit more closely. The next band who took the stage was a fronted by a lady and a dude sporting sleeve tattoos and way tight jeans -- Kermen suggested that they could be a husband-and-wife hipster bartending team. They played a few notes of their first song before the dude stopped it and said, "Hang on a second, I'm going to blow all of your minds." He darted down into the audience and flicked off the light switch on the wall next to us, then resumed his ready position on stage and introduced the band. "We're Bugs In The Dark. From Brooklyn." Osekre might well have been up next, but we didn't stick around to find out. Back to the L to the F to 2nd Ave. Willis Earl Beal was leaving the stage as we made it to the back room and located Nina by the sound booth. "I don't believe in nothing except atheism," he said, exiting into the crowd while his band continued to play. "And the only thing I know is that I don't know nothing." He disappeared into the corridor in the back on the right. Next up was Eagulls. Their lead singer was decked out in straight Steve Jobs attire: Black turtleneck tucked into dark jeans with a shiny silver buckle, plus a beige anorak to make it extra uncool. The band was tight and aggressive, and though their frontman may have looked like a dork, he was drunk and nasty, and bellowed the lines of the songs into the mic, alternately leaning on and swinging the mic stand. After their set, we realized we'd been standing next to Zain the whole time. Hugs all around. "Aren't they great?" he said, about Eagulls. "I met them two days ago! They're gonna let me hang out in the basement with them." And with that, he handed me what was left of his beer and snuck backstage. Yuck took the stage right on time at 11:00. Tony (?) their drummer looks more than a little like Bob Ross. They played a set full of songs with strong pop lead guitar lines, and a lot less noise than they're capable of, now that I've listened to a larger sample of their ouvre.
And then on Saturday was Bel Argosy's show! A word about that: We don't play much these days, which is sad. And I was nervous enough about playing in front of an audience that I took it real sleazy all day, so as not to do anything to my golden arms and hands. I ate peanut butter crackers for breakfast, eschewed my company's annual complimentary flu shot. I did make the mistake of gorging on a spicy vegetarian pork bánh mi from Hanco's, which gave me cramps well until my first warm-up Tecate in the basement of Leftfield. But Job The Dog kissed me on the face when I showed up to pick up the drum stuff, and Sarah taught me how to play Silent Night on the piano, which made me feel like Real Musician. This guy can still read sheet! Sort of. We took the subway down to Littlefield, where we shmoozed with Cenk and packed in several Tecates and whiskeys as we waited for the altogether-too-quiet band before us to get through their set. For our part, we did pretty good, I think. Leftfield has a smoke machine hooked up the podium that houses the soundboard, and we instructed the sound guy to deploy smoke as the mood might strike him. We got billows of the stuff at strange moments. I loved it! A first time for us, I think. I broke a stick, which almost never happens, and Billy forgot how to start one of the songs, which made it, you know, a more intimate set.
Afterwards, Nina's brother took us to dba and then to The Edge, greeting the bouncers and bartenders by name, and then finally to Fish Bar, where I ended the night with a Coke I could barely taste, sitting on the wooden bench by the window on a funny plastic cushion stuffed with shredded paper. End of the marathon. Decorative mason jar filled with phony eyeballs on the bar.
I started off the marathon on Tuesday with an ambitious schedule of five bands across three venues. My first stop was Fat Baby, where Birth Of Joy was playing a 7:00 set. They're a three-piece -- drums, guitar, and, uh, synth-organ -- from Holland, which they repeated in case we forgot. They play heavy 60's-style guitar rock with many of the hooks and solos played on the organ, which made me think of Iron Butterfly, although I'm sure that's a pretty obvious comparison. More interesting was that the lead singer had a voice quite a lot like one of the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. (Or maybe it was just all the reverb they were using.) He took his shirt off about half way through their set, revealing a classic dirtbag physique, hairless and not quite in shape. I liked their sound and was tempted to stick around as their singer suggested for "[our] friends from Budapest" (Instrumenti, I guess?) but I had to be off to the Cameo Gallery to see Ovlov and PUP. I'd never been there before, and I was taken unawares by the amazing ceiling art: They've got an elongated triangle of white fabric -- maybe like the "train" of a wedding dress -- from which are suspended hundreds of little white strands or fabric strips. A projector mounted up by the ceiling plays a loop of scrolling bands of color which "paints" the dangling strands, making them look like they're conducting little packets of colored light. It made me think of the undercarriage of an enormous invertebrate living at some inhospitable depth of the ocean and signaling its readiness to mate by bioluminescence. I could have watched it all night.
Ovlov took the stage at 9:00. They play a kind of sludgy, noisy indie punk; squealing guitars and distorted vocals -- distorted everything, really. Their lead singer and guitar player had a caveman intensity and played with a look of frustrated concentration. They weren't bad, actually. (I think Bel Argosy were supposed to play a show with them and, like, Majuscules, way back when at The Paper Box but had to cancel.) "If you want t-shirts or CDs, let one of us know," he said when they were done. "We left them all in the car because we didn't think anyone would want one." PUP was on next. They were one of the acts I knew I wanted to see during the marathon: I'd like the barely-keeping-it-together production on Reservoir, their Bandcamp "single," and was hoping they'd put on a live show like METZ, angry young men clobbering the stage. They ended up being a lot more like The Thermals, peppy and earnest and a hair too self-conscious. Not that that's so bad, though I was bit annoyed by some of the on-stage talk, which was all about how committed the band is and how much they love their craft. Maybe I should've seen that coming in the bio included in their EPK, which says, "They play loud. Like really fucking loud." (They weren't that loud.) Before launching into a song about Robert McClure, the lead singer said, "He was a real dick. He led his crew up to the Arctic and they almost froze to death. Sometimes I worry that I'm like that guy with this band." When they finished up, I pushed my way out of the Cameo Gallery and back to Bedford, then to Manhattan Ave. and Bar Matchless, where Shilpa Ray was playing the back room. There's always some shitty DJ bullshit happening at the bar there, and whenever I see a show at that place I feel like I'm in high school and fighting my way through a cheerleading practice to, like, glee club. Ms. Ray and her band were already playing when I got there, and she was giving such a withering look towards the door that I had to remind myself there was no way she could see through the lights. The latest iteration of her band sounds more sure of themselves now, though her new album seems to be a slower, quieter affair. Erotolepsy made a welcome appearance late in the set. "Follow the big star, bright star, rock star, porn star," she sang, alternating between a murmur and that terrifying howl. "You know how to find to me!" Best voice in harmonium punk, 2013.
On Wednesday I spent the early evening rehearsing at 6/8 Studios with Bel Argosy. Chris brought a fifth of Heaven Hill in a plastic bottle and the non-tee-totalling members of the band tossed it back and forth until it was empty. By the end of our two hours I was quite drunk, but the band sounded tight and we'd worked out a set list that we knew we could play Ramones-style in twenty-five minutes. Chris and Beau went their separate ways, and Billy and I lurched over to one of the 2 Bros Pizza places on St. Mark's and grabbed dollar slices before heading down to Leftfield for a preview of the space we'd be playing (!) on Saturday, and to check out Quitty and the Don'ts, for whom I'd carved out a slot on my agenda on account of their cool, goofy sound -- a lot like Punks On Mars. A band called Time and Energy were playing the upstairs space when we stumbled in. They're a drummer and a guy who somehow plays a keyboard and bass guitar at the same time. The effect was frustrated and noisy. Worse, they had a merch table with way too much and too expensive merch on it: CDs for $10; vinyl record with meticulously detailed cover for $20; $30 gets you the record and a t-shirt! Next to take the tiny stage in front of the window were Literature, who had more dudes and sounded a lot more like a conventional indie rock band, a bit dissonant and moody maybe, but they played with care and precision. After they finished up, we realized the clock was ticking on our schedule, so Nina and I headed north up Ludlow St. to Pianos, where we found Mean Creek setting up in the upstairs performance space. I'd clicked on them on a whim -- I thought I should calibrate my sensors for good and band band names -- and was pleasantly surprised by how rock-and-roll and dance-y and, well, fun they sounded. And they were good live, too. The lead singer looks a bit like Joaquin Phoenix and he's got an appropriately serious vibe, sings with his eyes closed. The crowd loved them! Stompy feet, applause, hollering. Nina left at 11:00 to head to Glasslands to see Yuck (a goal which she did not entirely achieve that night). When 'Creek were finished, I found my way drunkenly to the F and home. I was still a bit tipsy when I woke up in the early, early morning to pee.
Thursday was rough going on account of my indulgence the previous night, and so I pared my schedule down to a single venue: The Flat, on South 9th and Hooper, where I wanted to see Left And Right and Lurve. True to its name, The Flat is made up to look like a rec room or furnished basement with a mahogany bar. There are dingy throw rugs and dilapidated sofas and even some ancient-looking bunting up near the ceiling. Left and Right started playing right when I got there. They're definitely a "young man" band, four dudes that seem pretty committed to a t-shirt-and-jeans personal aesthetic and who write serious, sometimes bitterly dissonant songs about lonely highways and girls. They took turns on the vocals. I liked them in spite of myself. But it was Lurve that I'd come to see. I'd liked the tight, focused songs I'd listened to on their Bandcamp, and coveted the design-y cover art from their EP. I was surprised to see that the band themselves are a shaggy buncch, each member sporting long, frizzy hair and sometimes scruffy beards. It's like if you cloned the hippy character from Workaholics several times. But they sounded great, with neat, quick energy, the guitar players turning their All-Stars sideways to brace themselves for playing. Nina'd joined me for Lurve's set. When they were done, we walked over to Kent Ave. She'd bought the last ticket to a Speedy Ortiz show (with Ex-Cult and Hunters) at 285. We sat for a while in a small, scrubby park down by the East River. An alarm from one of the security systems for a nearby warehouse was going off, but it was a peaceful moment nonetheless. I watched the texture of the river as it was buffeted by the wind. Oddly smooth patches would form for a few seconds here and there between the ripples. The marathon's exhausting, but it's also nice to fill your time with stuff like shows. You visit lots of places, never staying long enough to get comfortable and begin to resent your surroundings. You hear lots of music, and it stops you from thinking too much about yourself. It got towards 11:30, and we left the park and headed to the venue. "CMJ is MAXED OUT," said a hand-written sign in the "box office," meaning Nina and I would have to part ways. I snagged a cab back to Gowanus. It turned out to be one of the ones with an electric motor and glowing blue dash, and it ferried me home in near silence.
Big plans for Friday night: I wanted to see Osekre and The Lucky Bastards and The Denzels at Muchmore's, but Nina had a tip that the Eagulls and Yuck show at Mercury Lounge wasn't actually sold out after all, you just had to show up in person to buy your tickets. So Kermen and I looped down to 2nd Ave. from the office to get our fifteen-dollar wrist stamps, and then took the F to the L to Bedford Ave. We stopped for pizza at Anna Maria along the way. A woman ahead of us on line was trying to order half of five different, elaborate pizzas that were sitting behind the counter. "I don't understand why this is different than ordering them ahead of time," she said when the guy hesitated. She had a point, but she did not tener razón. "This is my actual life," muttered Kermen in a Charlie Brown-ish kind of way as he waited for his plain slice to make it through this gridlock. There were still several bands ahead of the ones I wanted to see when we got to Muchmore's, so we got beers and planted ourselves at the back of the room. The next band to take the stage was called Gypsy Wig, and they had a big printed sign hanging behind the drums to let you know. They had six (!) people on stage, including a lady who played piercing lead lines on a saxophone. The band played with blissed-out looks on their faces, but their songs were no fun -- everybody was playing their own thing, and a coherent sound never really emerged. It was a bit like the jazz band from Wake Up, Wakefield. The next group brought fewer people on stage, but they weren't much better. They called themselves For Every Story Untold (!), and their lead singer was a woman with a very high and controlled voice who touched her face self-consciously as she sang. The guitarist did a thing where he really choke-wanked his guitar on every song, something that didn't bother me when Previn did it to his bass in The States but probably should have.
I started wishing that I'd checked my schedule a bit more closely. The next band who took the stage was a fronted by a lady and a dude sporting sleeve tattoos and way tight jeans -- Kermen suggested that they could be a husband-and-wife hipster bartending team. They played a few notes of their first song before the dude stopped it and said, "Hang on a second, I'm going to blow all of your minds." He darted down into the audience and flicked off the light switch on the wall next to us, then resumed his ready position on stage and introduced the band. "We're Bugs In The Dark. From Brooklyn." Osekre might well have been up next, but we didn't stick around to find out. Back to the L to the F to 2nd Ave. Willis Earl Beal was leaving the stage as we made it to the back room and located Nina by the sound booth. "I don't believe in nothing except atheism," he said, exiting into the crowd while his band continued to play. "And the only thing I know is that I don't know nothing." He disappeared into the corridor in the back on the right. Next up was Eagulls. Their lead singer was decked out in straight Steve Jobs attire: Black turtleneck tucked into dark jeans with a shiny silver buckle, plus a beige anorak to make it extra uncool. The band was tight and aggressive, and though their frontman may have looked like a dork, he was drunk and nasty, and bellowed the lines of the songs into the mic, alternately leaning on and swinging the mic stand. After their set, we realized we'd been standing next to Zain the whole time. Hugs all around. "Aren't they great?" he said, about Eagulls. "I met them two days ago! They're gonna let me hang out in the basement with them." And with that, he handed me what was left of his beer and snuck backstage. Yuck took the stage right on time at 11:00. Tony (?) their drummer looks more than a little like Bob Ross. They played a set full of songs with strong pop lead guitar lines, and a lot less noise than they're capable of, now that I've listened to a larger sample of their ouvre.
And then on Saturday was Bel Argosy's show! A word about that: We don't play much these days, which is sad. And I was nervous enough about playing in front of an audience that I took it real sleazy all day, so as not to do anything to my golden arms and hands. I ate peanut butter crackers for breakfast, eschewed my company's annual complimentary flu shot. I did make the mistake of gorging on a spicy vegetarian pork bánh mi from Hanco's, which gave me cramps well until my first warm-up Tecate in the basement of Leftfield. But Job The Dog kissed me on the face when I showed up to pick up the drum stuff, and Sarah taught me how to play Silent Night on the piano, which made me feel like Real Musician. This guy can still read sheet! Sort of. We took the subway down to Littlefield, where we shmoozed with Cenk and packed in several Tecates and whiskeys as we waited for the altogether-too-quiet band before us to get through their set. For our part, we did pretty good, I think. Leftfield has a smoke machine hooked up the podium that houses the soundboard, and we instructed the sound guy to deploy smoke as the mood might strike him. We got billows of the stuff at strange moments. I loved it! A first time for us, I think. I broke a stick, which almost never happens, and Billy forgot how to start one of the songs, which made it, you know, a more intimate set.
Afterwards, Nina's brother took us to dba and then to The Edge, greeting the bouncers and bartenders by name, and then finally to Fish Bar, where I ended the night with a Coke I could barely taste, sitting on the wooden bench by the window on a funny plastic cushion stuffed with shredded paper. End of the marathon. Decorative mason jar filled with phony eyeballs on the bar.
Monday, September 02, 2013
Blowout
One last heat wave, one last end-of-summer show. Nina and I went to go see The So So Glos with Diarrhea Planet at Shea Stadium. The 'Stadium, despite its many charms, is a venue ill-suited to warm-weather punk-rocking, what with its enormous but non-functioning air conditioner, and puny, apartment-grade refridgerator, barely able to chill its cache of sticky PBR cans. So when it actually gets, you know, hot, the place is a fucking sauna. It's hard to describe how hot it gets. Like... very, very hot. They've got industrial-looking standing fans at either side of the stage, but they're not very effective.
Despite their name (which evokes, you know... sludge) Diarrhea Planet is a guitar rock band, the kind with four guitar players who play bright, complex, synchronized solos; angling the headstocks of their guitars over a well of grasping hands. They've got a downright prog-rock sound, and, evidently, a ton of fans: The place was packed. By the middle of their set, the room had gotten so hot that I had to mop my big Scottish forehead with my t-shirt several times a minute, and the parts the shirt I was using to mop were soaked through. It was gross! I felt like I must've been the sweatiest guy in the room, but there were a ton of people dancing in the pit and going up, so there must have been wetter people. A friendly girl who looked a bit like Overly Attached Girlfriend tried to pogo with me. She must not have seen Nina glowering at her, nor realized that I'm basically too old to rock and roll.
When D. Planet finished up, we made a fast break for the stairs. It was warm outside on Meadow St. but chilly in comparison to the sauna upstairs, and you could move around and flap your clothes to cool off. The house manager shooed us away from the door lest the cops take notice of the venue, so we took a few loops around the neighborhood to check out the scene at The Acheron and (for my part) to gaze wistfully at the crumbling loft apartment buildings on Meserole St. Imagine living there! It would be so much easier to forget that you exist. "Warehouse Disneyland," says Nina. The So So Glos had already played a song or two by the time we got back upstairs. Oddly enough, the place had cleared out a bit. (Could 'Planet be a bigger draw than the 'Glos? They were on Letterman!) But they played a great set, stuffed with old (Fred Astaire, from Low Back Chain Shift) and new (Lost Weekend) songs, and closed the night with their single (Son Of An American). They make a funny on-stage assortment: a pair of friendly Bay Ridge meatheads; a quiet virtuoso; smaller guy with a firebrand temper. But their songs and arrangements are personal and fun, and the band is so confident that their shows feel like hanging out with friends. I stuck around after the show to pick up a hard copy of Blowout. Which is a very good album, by the way, articulate and earnest, full of catchy songs and bombastic singing. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that it never feels like the band's not in complete control. The stand-out tracks are the ones where Alex Levine sounds like he's really got something urgent to communicate: Diss Town, Son Of An American, All Of The Time.
What else do I do besides write this journal of not-exactly-cutting-edge rock-and-roll show-going? I work at my job. I try to make a video game. And every Tuesday I go to Bad Movie Night, at Tom's or Emma's or sometimes our house. When it's a home game, I leave work early and Nina and I scramble to clean the house (vacuum the couch, do the dishes, clean the cat litter) and purchase and set out snacks: Almonds, kri kri, maybe some kind of gross Haribo with an oblique German name. Maybe some popcorn. We only buy a single six-pack of beer because everybody else always brings so much. It's a really bright spot in my week. I think I've explained my movie selection process before: I like the ones that express a truly incoherent or alien worldview -- most often that means sexploitation "comedies" or low-budget horror movies. Tom got me a big collection of the former for my birthday, and we've been mining it steadily for the past several weeks. A couple of good ones:
Despite their name (which evokes, you know... sludge) Diarrhea Planet is a guitar rock band, the kind with four guitar players who play bright, complex, synchronized solos; angling the headstocks of their guitars over a well of grasping hands. They've got a downright prog-rock sound, and, evidently, a ton of fans: The place was packed. By the middle of their set, the room had gotten so hot that I had to mop my big Scottish forehead with my t-shirt several times a minute, and the parts the shirt I was using to mop were soaked through. It was gross! I felt like I must've been the sweatiest guy in the room, but there were a ton of people dancing in the pit and going up, so there must have been wetter people. A friendly girl who looked a bit like Overly Attached Girlfriend tried to pogo with me. She must not have seen Nina glowering at her, nor realized that I'm basically too old to rock and roll.
When D. Planet finished up, we made a fast break for the stairs. It was warm outside on Meadow St. but chilly in comparison to the sauna upstairs, and you could move around and flap your clothes to cool off. The house manager shooed us away from the door lest the cops take notice of the venue, so we took a few loops around the neighborhood to check out the scene at The Acheron and (for my part) to gaze wistfully at the crumbling loft apartment buildings on Meserole St. Imagine living there! It would be so much easier to forget that you exist. "Warehouse Disneyland," says Nina. The So So Glos had already played a song or two by the time we got back upstairs. Oddly enough, the place had cleared out a bit. (Could 'Planet be a bigger draw than the 'Glos? They were on Letterman!) But they played a great set, stuffed with old (Fred Astaire, from Low Back Chain Shift) and new (Lost Weekend) songs, and closed the night with their single (Son Of An American). They make a funny on-stage assortment: a pair of friendly Bay Ridge meatheads; a quiet virtuoso; smaller guy with a firebrand temper. But their songs and arrangements are personal and fun, and the band is so confident that their shows feel like hanging out with friends. I stuck around after the show to pick up a hard copy of Blowout. Which is a very good album, by the way, articulate and earnest, full of catchy songs and bombastic singing. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that it never feels like the band's not in complete control. The stand-out tracks are the ones where Alex Levine sounds like he's really got something urgent to communicate: Diss Town, Son Of An American, All Of The Time.
What else do I do besides write this journal of not-exactly-cutting-edge rock-and-roll show-going? I work at my job. I try to make a video game. And every Tuesday I go to Bad Movie Night, at Tom's or Emma's or sometimes our house. When it's a home game, I leave work early and Nina and I scramble to clean the house (vacuum the couch, do the dishes, clean the cat litter) and purchase and set out snacks: Almonds, kri kri, maybe some kind of gross Haribo with an oblique German name. Maybe some popcorn. We only buy a single six-pack of beer because everybody else always brings so much. It's a really bright spot in my week. I think I've explained my movie selection process before: I like the ones that express a truly incoherent or alien worldview -- most often that means sexploitation "comedies" or low-budget horror movies. Tom got me a big collection of the former for my birthday, and we've been mining it steadily for the past several weeks. A couple of good ones:
- My Chauffeur: We've been calling this one "Female Chauffeur." An impulsive young woman takes a job as a chauffeur, ruffling the feathers of her male colleagues. In this capacity she meets a volatile executive, gets him hooked on booze, and begins a sexual relationship with him. Later we find out that they are brother ad sister. Penn Jillette performs an eleven minute racist monologue in the back of a limo.
- Cavegirl: A initially sympathetic nerd on a high school archaeology (?) trip gets transported back in time by, uh, crystals to what must be pre-historic Africa, where he meets a hot "cavegirl" (as well as stone-age counterparts of his classmates) and aggressively pressures her into sleeping with him. There is a "B" plot about the government using the crystals to create some kind of weapon. I don't know.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
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:
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.
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
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.
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