Thursday was when the MSF guy checked himself into Bellevue and turned out to have Ebola. The announcement came around 7 PM, as I was preparing to leave work to meet Nina at Pianos for some CMJ acts. I watched the mentions of #EbolaNYC on Twitter begin to shoot up. 45 unread tweets. 180 unread tweets. It was strange to think that just ten blocks away from my office, there was a dude having a real bad time. (Or about to.) Oh no, I thought. People are gonna go nuts. I headed to Pianos anyway, the lineup mostly unevaluated except that I listened to some songs by Spookyland and thought they were pretty good. But by the time I got down there, he? they? had come and gone, and we were waiting for the next band.
Which turned out to be Ages And Ages, one of those ragtag folk music collectives with so many members that they were able to support two people playing rhythm guitar and one woman who had an assortment of musical props, like maracas and a cabasa. The main dude was having a hard time with his monitor and kept summoning the beleaguered sound lady over to fix it. In spite of all this, they were very good, I thought. They sounded a bit like Alan Price and The Animals: Strong vocals with pop sensibilities; rich arrangements. We stood up front, near a kid with a big backpack on, who before the band started had been standing up straight and holding a book about an inch away from his face. Now he was filming the set on his smartphone with the same posture and slack expression. A nerd out on the town. Part-way through the band's set, during a tuning between songs, a little South Asian guy pushed his way through the crowd carrying a bag full of tiny, light-up tambourines; clearly having taken advantage of the general chaos of CMJ. He was shaking them and offering them for purchase. The band started their next song, but the guy kept shaking the tambourines, out of time with the music and seemingly oblivious to the spectacle he was interrupting. He was like one of the toilet beer hawkers in Barcelona. One of the guitar players looked at him like what? I made eye contact with her. I know, right? I mimed.
When the set was over, we ducked downstairs to see what was happening on the ground floor stage. It was a trio of scruffy dudes making sad dude music. We didn't stay long. Nina established that Dr. Spencer had been hanging out at The Gutter, not Brooklyn Bowl. Thank god ?uestlove is safe, we said.
Instead, we went on the prowl for other new things. The lineup at Cake Shop didn't look promising, and Leftfield cost cash money to get in, so we cut over to Rivington and walked into Fat Baby, passing straight through the always-empty upstairs and down into the almost-empty performance space below. The band setting up was called Prom Body, and they were visiting New York for the first time from Arizona. The guys in the band had a sort of bar rock dirtbag look, and they were loud, so loud that you could feel it in your legs and the band's playing lost all articulation. But their songs were actually kind of okay indie rock type songs, and the main dude's voice was high and interesting, not what you'd expect after hearing his speaking voice. If they'd only turned down a bit they would'a been kind of okay. We stayed for their entire set, though, then caught the subway at East Broadway, passing a piece of graffiti around the corner from 169 Bar, a broken wine bottle in the style of Basquiat, underneath which: Fuck 169 Bar.
On Friday night I found myself at 169 Bar for Caitlin's going-away party. That place is true hell-on-earth bar, an explosion of tchotchkes and camp doo-dads, packed with Oxford-shirted douchebags, almost all male. There were drag queens dancing in cages. A 15 minute wait for the bathroom. Eventually the party became mobile and moved across town to an all-night dumpling place near the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. I veered off and headed for Canal St. to train home. I spent no less than 45 minutes on the platform waiting for a train, foolishly wearing my messenger bag overloaded with two laptops and a bunch of cables and other unnecessary junk. When the train finally arrived, I lurched forward from my lean against the wall, and found that my vision was getting fogged with a kind of yellow geometric static, the kind I used to self-induce as a kid by pressing on my eyeballs. It occupied more and more of my field of vision as the train pulled in, and by the time the doors were opening, I could barely see. This seems kind of dangerous, I thought, but I don't know when the next one's gonna come. I managed to board the train blind and get to a squatting position at the doors opposite the entrance, and my vision promptly returned. But I was all sweaty and felt weird. "Oh yeah," said Nina when I got home and described the experience. "That's what it feels like right before you faint."
Nina went to Pennsylvania on Saturday to visit her grandma, and I spent most of the day feeling hung over and run down. I managed to rally in the evening and flung myself back to Hell Square for the evening's festival offerings. I'd been aiming to catch pow wow! at Leftfield to say hi to Sal, my co-star from Vanderpuss, but they were off stage by the time I got there and I was unable to pick out any familiar faces in the red darkness of the basement. (I think the band might've been packing up outside when I left the bar, but I felt a pang of shyness and crossed to the other side of the street.) Next, I returned to Pianos, where Native America were wrapping up their set. They were good: punky, unpredictable garage pop; a lot of texture to their sound despite having only three dudes on stage. In particular, their bass player delivered a well-articulated, energetic performance, which somewhat justified how high he was turned up. A warm-blooded bass player; you don't see that every day.
But I'd come to see Future Punx, who were up next. I'd discovered them in the some concert listings as a result of some momentary, and, I think, justified confusion with Punks On Mars. Both bands share a highly affected art-school aesthetic, and produce cheeky pop arrangements; but where Punks On Mars is twisting Telephone Hour sock hop Americana, Future Punx imagines something more akin to Deltron 3030: A band like Television or Blondie or another of the prickly, proto-punk 70s acts battles for the human race in some kind of future dystopia. Or at least that's what I think it was all about. It was all very serious. The lead singer wore dark glasses. They set up a projector. An intense young woman played a keytar and managed to make it look cool. "This is post-wave," they chanted. The music was tight, somewhat dissonant electro-pop. A bald guy in a mink stole gyrated next to me. It was a great show.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, September 15, 2014
The Day Of The Bikes
Nina and I went on an epic bike journey over the weekend, the longest ride I think I've ever taken by any measure. Our goal was to see how far we could make it up the West Side Highway. We didn't think we'd be able to make it to the George Washington Bridge, but we'd heard tell of a pretty boss picnic area right across the river in Fort Lee.
We decided to take the Brooklyn Bridge into the city and then cross lower Manhattan to get to the West Side Highway. It turns out the Brooklyn Bridge is a bad bridge to bike across because the city's made it all stupid and pretty for people crossing on foot: The stone towers are huge and elegant, and the hardwood boardwalk feels good under your feet. So everyone crosses very slowly. Sometimes they stop to take pictures, and they mostly don't pay attention, even when you're a foot from them and about to run into a kid and you're ringing your $30 bell brrrring brrrring! Peds. There was a little guy wearing army fatigues and a backpack jogging stoically in front of us for most of the length of the crossing, contending just as we were with the pedestrian gridlock but going maybe a little faster than we were. The hardest parts to pass through were the areas around the suspension towers, where the lanes squeezed down to a fraction of their size and more than once I had to just get off the bike and let oncoming bikers go around me, muttering their frustration. Finally we got to the other side and onto Chanbers St., where we turned west and headed for the highway, bumping over cobblestones and braving the frightening speed of the traffic on West St. We walked our bikes down the ramp to the little marina at River Terrace, remounting when we reached the entrance to the greenway.
We passed the heliport at 30th St., where a helicopter was idly spinning its blades.
We passed the Intrepid at 48th St.
We passed a huge queue of people waiting to get into something happening at Pier 97. A banner on the wall of the stage came into view: Lorde. I looked back at the people: Excited young women; warped, frustrated young men. Ah, okay, I thought.
We passed the Hustler Club.
We stopped at a public bathroom on the Upper West Side, more for the information kiosk (which told us we were near 72nd St.) than anything else, but I went to take a piss for good measure. There was an older dude in there washing his hands and someone in one of the stalls. The guy in the stall said, "Hey, how ya doin'." I thought he might be talking to the old man, but I couldn't tell. He stepped out of the stall a moment later, wearing a full bicycle get-up -- spandex shorts, aerodynamic shirt. He might have been changing into them or just taking a little toilet bath, I don't know. He was a young guy, looked maybe a little like the kid with the freckles from The Sandlot. I washed my hands and left. The guy in the cycling costume walked out and unchained his bike. "Hey folks, how's it going," he said, to no one in particular.
We walked our bikes up the hill and out of Riverside Park into the little plaza where Riverside Blvd. turns into at 72nd St. We texted KT and Chris and met them in the lobby of their building on Broadway, where we chatted for a while. They recommended we cross Central Park and exit off West Dr. at Central Park South (to avoid having to take Center Drive all the way up to 66th St.) on our way to East River Park and an unbroken stretch of bike path. It was late afternoon, late in the summer; I began to worry about the fact that I wouldn't have a head or tail light for my bike in the dark. (I'm a rule-follower, you see.) Nina had a spare set of lights from a previous bike that she'd jury-rigged to her new one with duct tape. We'd passed a bike store right off 72nd St., but by the time we'd said goodbye to KT and Chris, it was closed. The sun was setting rapidly. I was balking at the idea of hauling my bike down to the subway, and so I was settling into a good, deep sulk. Nina rescued the situation, as she always does, with pluck and resourcefulness. She geolocated an Eastern Mountain Sports outlet on 76th St., and called to make sure they were still open. In no I'd acquired a cheap set of bike lights, and we were squatting in the murky darkness outside the store, that unusually deep darkness under the trees on Broadway in the 70s.
We set out across 76th St. and rode past a shuttered townhouse with a fire engine parked outside, firemen trudging up the steps in no particular hurry. We entered the Park at 72nd St., and quickly merged from Terrace Dr. to West Dr., which sloped downward towards 64th St., and I rode the handbrake to control my speed. We exited at 7th Ave. as Katie had suggested, zipping around horses and piles of horseshit. To find a bicycle-friendly street to take us east, we had to round the southeastern corner of the Park, past The Pierre and The Metropolitan Club (where they held our high school prom? Nina thinks so, but she didn't go. I honestly can't remember) onto 62nd St., which we followed until it became clear that it would take us onto the FDR Drive and not a bike path. A couple of hasidic families waited for cars outside the entrance to the Bentley Hotel. We walked the bikes back to York Ave. and up to 63rd St., where we found a pedestrian bridge over the FDR. An old tramp and a young tramp were crossing the bridge toward the river like us, the old guy pushing a shopping cart with some bedding in it. I thought of The Fisher King, inadvertantly. I looked up at the skyway that connected the Rockerfeller University dormitory building on our right to the Weiss lab on the left. It was 8 o'clock on a Saturday night. The Weiss café was empty, I could see through the big windows. We started biking down the concrete walk that met the far end of the bridge, but by the time we got to about 60th St., we found that it was curving back up to 60th St. Frustrating!
We rode down through the 50s on Sutton Place, goggling at the grotesque stone cottages in which New York's rich sequester themselves; the absurd, pointless NYPD surveillance kiosk at 57th St. Heiresses in sweatsuits entered and left the buildings. (What is it with the upper class and sweatpants?) We turned right at 53rd St. and pedaled west to 3rd Ave., which we took south through the hell of Murray Hill (traffic and yelling and I might've broken someone's rear-view mirror) down to Stuyvesant Town, where Nina made a pit stop to pee at her mom's apartment. 20th St. led us to East River Park and the bike path we'd been hoping for. We zipped downtown, taking the winding promenade around man-made rock formations, passing multiple encampments of homeless people sleeping on benches a few feet from the water. Somewhere around Corlears Hook, we passed through a recreation center under the FDR, with semi-enclosed basketball courts and a space for skateboarders to practice their tricks. A group of middle-aged and elderly Chinese people were gathered (it looked like) to celebrate the pleasant evening. Some of them were dancing, ballroom-style. We turned right and found the greenway that took us down Delancey and then down Allen, and then onto to the Manhattan Bridge.
The bicycle onramp to the bridge was so steep that for a moment I wasn't sure we were supposed to be riding up it, but we shifted into our lowest gears and puffed our way to the top, where the incline became less severe. But it didn't level off -- the bike path on the Manhattan Bridge is like a gentle concrete hill, cresting -- it seemed -- towards the far end in Brooklyn. It's less inviting, more industrial than the Brooklyn Bridge, and there's no aesthetic reason to linger on any single part of it, which makes it much easier to cross by bicycle. I thought all the gray was beautiful, though, and I pedaled and pedaled; the unbroken line of concrete in front of me, the metal fencework forming a cage created the feeling of an intense and enveloping dream. We stopped pedaling once we came to the inflection point of the bridge, and let gravity and momentum carry us all the way down to Tillary St.
I don't remember the details of how we got home. It was after ten o'clock, and we were both exhausted. My butt, in particular, was real sore. But it was a great day!
We decided to take the Brooklyn Bridge into the city and then cross lower Manhattan to get to the West Side Highway. It turns out the Brooklyn Bridge is a bad bridge to bike across because the city's made it all stupid and pretty for people crossing on foot: The stone towers are huge and elegant, and the hardwood boardwalk feels good under your feet. So everyone crosses very slowly. Sometimes they stop to take pictures, and they mostly don't pay attention, even when you're a foot from them and about to run into a kid and you're ringing your $30 bell brrrring brrrring! Peds. There was a little guy wearing army fatigues and a backpack jogging stoically in front of us for most of the length of the crossing, contending just as we were with the pedestrian gridlock but going maybe a little faster than we were. The hardest parts to pass through were the areas around the suspension towers, where the lanes squeezed down to a fraction of their size and more than once I had to just get off the bike and let oncoming bikers go around me, muttering their frustration. Finally we got to the other side and onto Chanbers St., where we turned west and headed for the highway, bumping over cobblestones and braving the frightening speed of the traffic on West St. We walked our bikes down the ramp to the little marina at River Terrace, remounting when we reached the entrance to the greenway.
We passed the heliport at 30th St., where a helicopter was idly spinning its blades.
We passed the Intrepid at 48th St.
We passed a huge queue of people waiting to get into something happening at Pier 97. A banner on the wall of the stage came into view: Lorde. I looked back at the people: Excited young women; warped, frustrated young men. Ah, okay, I thought.
We passed the Hustler Club.
We stopped at a public bathroom on the Upper West Side, more for the information kiosk (which told us we were near 72nd St.) than anything else, but I went to take a piss for good measure. There was an older dude in there washing his hands and someone in one of the stalls. The guy in the stall said, "Hey, how ya doin'." I thought he might be talking to the old man, but I couldn't tell. He stepped out of the stall a moment later, wearing a full bicycle get-up -- spandex shorts, aerodynamic shirt. He might have been changing into them or just taking a little toilet bath, I don't know. He was a young guy, looked maybe a little like the kid with the freckles from The Sandlot. I washed my hands and left. The guy in the cycling costume walked out and unchained his bike. "Hey folks, how's it going," he said, to no one in particular.
We walked our bikes up the hill and out of Riverside Park into the little plaza where Riverside Blvd. turns into at 72nd St. We texted KT and Chris and met them in the lobby of their building on Broadway, where we chatted for a while. They recommended we cross Central Park and exit off West Dr. at Central Park South (to avoid having to take Center Drive all the way up to 66th St.) on our way to East River Park and an unbroken stretch of bike path. It was late afternoon, late in the summer; I began to worry about the fact that I wouldn't have a head or tail light for my bike in the dark. (I'm a rule-follower, you see.) Nina had a spare set of lights from a previous bike that she'd jury-rigged to her new one with duct tape. We'd passed a bike store right off 72nd St., but by the time we'd said goodbye to KT and Chris, it was closed. The sun was setting rapidly. I was balking at the idea of hauling my bike down to the subway, and so I was settling into a good, deep sulk. Nina rescued the situation, as she always does, with pluck and resourcefulness. She geolocated an Eastern Mountain Sports outlet on 76th St., and called to make sure they were still open. In no I'd acquired a cheap set of bike lights, and we were squatting in the murky darkness outside the store, that unusually deep darkness under the trees on Broadway in the 70s.
We set out across 76th St. and rode past a shuttered townhouse with a fire engine parked outside, firemen trudging up the steps in no particular hurry. We entered the Park at 72nd St., and quickly merged from Terrace Dr. to West Dr., which sloped downward towards 64th St., and I rode the handbrake to control my speed. We exited at 7th Ave. as Katie had suggested, zipping around horses and piles of horseshit. To find a bicycle-friendly street to take us east, we had to round the southeastern corner of the Park, past The Pierre and The Metropolitan Club (where they held our high school prom? Nina thinks so, but she didn't go. I honestly can't remember) onto 62nd St., which we followed until it became clear that it would take us onto the FDR Drive and not a bike path. A couple of hasidic families waited for cars outside the entrance to the Bentley Hotel. We walked the bikes back to York Ave. and up to 63rd St., where we found a pedestrian bridge over the FDR. An old tramp and a young tramp were crossing the bridge toward the river like us, the old guy pushing a shopping cart with some bedding in it. I thought of The Fisher King, inadvertantly. I looked up at the skyway that connected the Rockerfeller University dormitory building on our right to the Weiss lab on the left. It was 8 o'clock on a Saturday night. The Weiss café was empty, I could see through the big windows. We started biking down the concrete walk that met the far end of the bridge, but by the time we got to about 60th St., we found that it was curving back up to 60th St. Frustrating!
We rode down through the 50s on Sutton Place, goggling at the grotesque stone cottages in which New York's rich sequester themselves; the absurd, pointless NYPD surveillance kiosk at 57th St. Heiresses in sweatsuits entered and left the buildings. (What is it with the upper class and sweatpants?) We turned right at 53rd St. and pedaled west to 3rd Ave., which we took south through the hell of Murray Hill (traffic and yelling and I might've broken someone's rear-view mirror) down to Stuyvesant Town, where Nina made a pit stop to pee at her mom's apartment. 20th St. led us to East River Park and the bike path we'd been hoping for. We zipped downtown, taking the winding promenade around man-made rock formations, passing multiple encampments of homeless people sleeping on benches a few feet from the water. Somewhere around Corlears Hook, we passed through a recreation center under the FDR, with semi-enclosed basketball courts and a space for skateboarders to practice their tricks. A group of middle-aged and elderly Chinese people were gathered (it looked like) to celebrate the pleasant evening. Some of them were dancing, ballroom-style. We turned right and found the greenway that took us down Delancey and then down Allen, and then onto to the Manhattan Bridge.
The bicycle onramp to the bridge was so steep that for a moment I wasn't sure we were supposed to be riding up it, but we shifted into our lowest gears and puffed our way to the top, where the incline became less severe. But it didn't level off -- the bike path on the Manhattan Bridge is like a gentle concrete hill, cresting -- it seemed -- towards the far end in Brooklyn. It's less inviting, more industrial than the Brooklyn Bridge, and there's no aesthetic reason to linger on any single part of it, which makes it much easier to cross by bicycle. I thought all the gray was beautiful, though, and I pedaled and pedaled; the unbroken line of concrete in front of me, the metal fencework forming a cage created the feeling of an intense and enveloping dream. We stopped pedaling once we came to the inflection point of the bridge, and let gravity and momentum carry us all the way down to Tillary St.
I don't remember the details of how we got home. It was after ten o'clock, and we were both exhausted. My butt, in particular, was real sore. But it was a great day!
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Scorecard
Afropunk!
We only attended the first day, and only in the late afternoon. (Sometimes it's hard to get started.) A guy started walking alongside us near Fort Greene Park, wanted to know if we were heading to the festival. He was an associate professor at Brooklyn College, he said, teaching an Urban Studies seminar. He was excited to see Bad Brains, though he didn't think H.R. would be there. ("I heard that guy was crazy.") And we talked about some of the more outlandish acts on the bill: "Body Count? Ice-T's metal band from the 90's? But he can't possibly still be in it, right?" (He is.) But Bad Brains was the band I was dying to see, and they had just started playing when we got inside. There were three stages this year (up from two and at the expense of a dedicated area for skateboard and BMX stunting) and Bad Brains were playing on the new (smaller) black stage, the punk stage, where the A/V setup was apparently less than ideal. Darryl Jenifer made a few tongue-in-cheek remarks about the accomodations: Why do we gotta play the black stage? They sounded phenomenal, though. Their distinctive mix: Lots of attack on the bass, which was turned up over Dr. Know's buzzsaw guitar. In lieu of H.R., there was a rotating cast of vocalists, including John Joseph from Cro-Mags (though I could've sworn Darryl had a nickname for him. Something like "Choke" or "Squeaky") who struggled to keep up with a lightning fast version of "Attitude."
Nina and I were standing just outside the stage area, our faces pressed to the chain-link fence. Just inside the fence in front of us, there was a young woman wearing a cowrie shell circlet. Is it? I thought. Then I noticed the security detail, a couple of dudes and a lady wearing tuxedoes and earpieces. It was! The queen of the Mermaid Parade, Chiara de Blasio. Bad Brains wrapped up their set, and we walked across the park to check out Body Count, who had just started playing. Sure enough, there was Ice-T, front and center, gripping a wireless mic in a motorcycle-gloved hand. "The next song is called 'Manslaughter,'" he boomed. "It's about the number one threat facing black men in America today."
I braced myself to hear the names of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; a litany of atrocities carried out by America's racist police forces. Ice-T's still got it, I thought.
"Pussification!" he resumed. "Ladies, look around you. Does your man have a vagina?!" Snickering from the crowd; some isolated boos. The red stage; the grandpa stage. We stuck around for a few songs, but it was just so much noise. Fat dudes in sleeveless shirts bouncing around the stage. The sun had set. We stood in the trampled field in front of the green stage and listened Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings get warmed up. She's got a really impressive voice. Which is not news, I guess. I considered buying one of the new Afropunk t-shirts printed with commandments of broad acceptance (No racism; No sexism; No homophobia; etc.) but it didn't feel like it was really for me. We stopped at Junior's on the way home for cheesecake to go. Summer winding down.
The tally:
I went to Astoria to see Forest of the Dancing Spirits at Socrates Sculpture Park. It was very sad: A pygmy woman anxious about miscarriage prepares to deliver her second pregnancy. A very normcore (basic, even) crowd in the Park. L.L. Bean fleece types. A lot of them brought their own chairs.
I went to Brooklyn Bridge Park to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. I'd never seen it before. That Brock guy sure hates mendacity! The lawn was utterly packed, and people kept coming and going, well through the duration of the movie. Continuous photography of the screen via cell phone cameras, SLRs, even a guy with a full tripod rig who was asked to leave by the event staff. Fuss in the audience to equal the fuss on film. But what is the point of any of it? Hypothesis / inescapable conclusion: Outdoor movies are over, babies.
Two trips to the beach.
Three barbecues: Two in Eve's opulent garden while she and Jon were out of town, burning citronella and misting the air with DEET and shooing the cats back inside, the children of the rich people next door bouncing on -- no joke -- a for-real trampoline in their astroturfed back yard. One party in Prospect Park in a big patch of dirt on a hill by the picnic house. I made real meat burgers, using this recipe. (Whenever I search for "best burger recipe" -- once every few years -- I get something new.) Technically a birthday thing for me, one month delayed. Everyone showed up. Chris brought a whiffleball bat and some whiffleballs, but I was so preoccupied with the grill and getting all the meat cooked through that I didn't play. That's how I always react to cooking or party planning. I like it but I don't like it, either. Satisfying, pathological, frustrating. Instead, Nina and I played a "night game" at the Thomas Greene Playground handball courts. It was empty, except for a few people sleeping on benches courtside. We named our teams and each player at bat. The Yomiuri Hamburgers. Joey Baseball. The crew for The Americans were still at work on Nevins street when we walked home around midnight.
Two visits to the Douglass-Degraw Pool, though it never got hot enough to really warrant it.
We never even installed the air conditioner.
We only attended the first day, and only in the late afternoon. (Sometimes it's hard to get started.) A guy started walking alongside us near Fort Greene Park, wanted to know if we were heading to the festival. He was an associate professor at Brooklyn College, he said, teaching an Urban Studies seminar. He was excited to see Bad Brains, though he didn't think H.R. would be there. ("I heard that guy was crazy.") And we talked about some of the more outlandish acts on the bill: "Body Count? Ice-T's metal band from the 90's? But he can't possibly still be in it, right?" (He is.) But Bad Brains was the band I was dying to see, and they had just started playing when we got inside. There were three stages this year (up from two and at the expense of a dedicated area for skateboard and BMX stunting) and Bad Brains were playing on the new (smaller) black stage, the punk stage, where the A/V setup was apparently less than ideal. Darryl Jenifer made a few tongue-in-cheek remarks about the accomodations: Why do we gotta play the black stage? They sounded phenomenal, though. Their distinctive mix: Lots of attack on the bass, which was turned up over Dr. Know's buzzsaw guitar. In lieu of H.R., there was a rotating cast of vocalists, including John Joseph from Cro-Mags (though I could've sworn Darryl had a nickname for him. Something like "Choke" or "Squeaky") who struggled to keep up with a lightning fast version of "Attitude."
Nina and I were standing just outside the stage area, our faces pressed to the chain-link fence. Just inside the fence in front of us, there was a young woman wearing a cowrie shell circlet. Is it? I thought. Then I noticed the security detail, a couple of dudes and a lady wearing tuxedoes and earpieces. It was! The queen of the Mermaid Parade, Chiara de Blasio. Bad Brains wrapped up their set, and we walked across the park to check out Body Count, who had just started playing. Sure enough, there was Ice-T, front and center, gripping a wireless mic in a motorcycle-gloved hand. "The next song is called 'Manslaughter,'" he boomed. "It's about the number one threat facing black men in America today."
I braced myself to hear the names of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; a litany of atrocities carried out by America's racist police forces. Ice-T's still got it, I thought.
"Pussification!" he resumed. "Ladies, look around you. Does your man have a vagina?!" Snickering from the crowd; some isolated boos. The red stage; the grandpa stage. We stuck around for a few songs, but it was just so much noise. Fat dudes in sleeveless shirts bouncing around the stage. The sun had set. We stood in the trampled field in front of the green stage and listened Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings get warmed up. She's got a really impressive voice. Which is not news, I guess. I considered buying one of the new Afropunk t-shirts printed with commandments of broad acceptance (No racism; No sexism; No homophobia; etc.) but it didn't feel like it was really for me. We stopped at Junior's on the way home for cheesecake to go. Summer winding down.
The tally:
I went to Astoria to see Forest of the Dancing Spirits at Socrates Sculpture Park. It was very sad: A pygmy woman anxious about miscarriage prepares to deliver her second pregnancy. A very normcore (basic, even) crowd in the Park. L.L. Bean fleece types. A lot of them brought their own chairs.
I went to Brooklyn Bridge Park to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. I'd never seen it before. That Brock guy sure hates mendacity! The lawn was utterly packed, and people kept coming and going, well through the duration of the movie. Continuous photography of the screen via cell phone cameras, SLRs, even a guy with a full tripod rig who was asked to leave by the event staff. Fuss in the audience to equal the fuss on film. But what is the point of any of it? Hypothesis / inescapable conclusion: Outdoor movies are over, babies.
Two trips to the beach.
Three barbecues: Two in Eve's opulent garden while she and Jon were out of town, burning citronella and misting the air with DEET and shooing the cats back inside, the children of the rich people next door bouncing on -- no joke -- a for-real trampoline in their astroturfed back yard. One party in Prospect Park in a big patch of dirt on a hill by the picnic house. I made real meat burgers, using this recipe. (Whenever I search for "best burger recipe" -- once every few years -- I get something new.) Technically a birthday thing for me, one month delayed. Everyone showed up. Chris brought a whiffleball bat and some whiffleballs, but I was so preoccupied with the grill and getting all the meat cooked through that I didn't play. That's how I always react to cooking or party planning. I like it but I don't like it, either. Satisfying, pathological, frustrating. Instead, Nina and I played a "night game" at the Thomas Greene Playground handball courts. It was empty, except for a few people sleeping on benches courtside. We named our teams and each player at bat. The Yomiuri Hamburgers. Joey Baseball. The crew for The Americans were still at work on Nevins street when we walked home around midnight.
Two visits to the Douglass-Degraw Pool, though it never got hot enough to really warrant it.
We never even installed the air conditioner.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Rippers
Nina and I went to Rockaway Beach. She'd been out there last summer for Colleen's bachelorette party but I hadn't been in forever, and I'd been reading invites for shows at Rippers and getting curious what all the fuss was about. We considered riding our bikes there, but it seemed like too daunting a trip (25 miles each way!) for junior bikers such as us. To read on the train, I brought along Chris' reviewer's copy of The Savage Detectives, which he'd loaned me the last time I stopped by his apartment. The prose swept me along half charmed by the solipsism of young poets -- familiar from Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog (I borrowed it from Christopher more than a decade ago) and The Rachel Papers -- half queasy apprehensive at the prospect of Cesárea Tinajero and her prophecy of things to come. The A was running in two parts, and the first part terminated at Howard Beach. We waited in the warm sun for the other train to come pick us up. The second leg of our journey on the A took us across Jamaica Bay. The MTA's map makes it look like you're traveling over Cross Bay Blvd., but it's actually a narrow strip of track that's a bit east of that, and if in turn you look out the eastern windows of the train, it's just the Bay out there. That image -- the shining metal interior of the subway car, the view through the window dominated by the sky and water -- was simultaneously so unexpected and so familiar that I was sure I'd seen it before in a dream. Because I haven't been out to Rockaway Beach since, well, I don't know when. At Broad Channel we transferred to the S shuttle, which took us the rest of the way to Beach 98th St.
We stopped on Rockaway Beach Blvd. at Rockaway Taco (known to many, I hear, as Rock-A-Taco) for tacos. The place is a wooden shack, the posts covered with photocopied paper flyers for events (surfer movies on the beach) clearly beyond the slick machinations of the inner-borough fun promotion machine. Which sounds like I'm calling it provincial (bicycle repair classes) but I think that's what a beach-front community is like. In concert with all the two-story houses with white stucco exteriors it reminded me of Randy's neighborhood in San Francisco. The tacos were quite good. They do them that way where the filling has a blanket of shredded cabbage arranged on top of it. I had a fish taco and a tofu taco -- heresy, I've been told by everybody, over and over again. But I gotta try it whenever it's on the menu, just to see if they do it okay.
It was late afternoon by the time we put our blanket down on the beach. We found a spot in the sand roughly in front of a bunker-like boardwalk bar with a scuzzy blues rock band playing out front on the concrete. At first I thought it was Rippers, but it was actually Low Tide Bar. I don't know what the difference is. A group of middle-aged Latino dudes next to us were drinking Coronas out of a plastic cooler. Nina'd worn her bathing suit under her clothes, and so she was able to strip down and wade into the ocean, at least until the Parks Dept. buggy patrol drove by to tell her that the lifeguard was off duty. I just wanted to read my book, though. I was too caught up in the world of the visceral realists to do swimming. And my reluctance to disrobe proved canny: The beach was home to a multitude of these little biting flies that looked like your average garbage moscas but which bit like horseflies. They bit me on the arms. They bit Nina everywhere. She stuck it out long enough to build a sandcastle, a sort of dome with a squared-off gatehouse.
We walked down Shore Front Parkway to Beach 84th St., surveying the old and new housing developments. Nina showed me a concrete bus shelter, solid concrete and curved like a wave, featuring a mural of fish with human faces. The faces were lumpy and complacent, like the faces of cats in Edward Gorey drawings. We realized we'd walked down to the actual location of Rippers, and we stopped and got beers. We sat near a plywood face cut-out board where you could pretend to be a hot dog or a hamburger.
It was chilly. We reversed our steps and headed home: Shuttle, A train, A train. A big black cricket was parked on the platform next to where we were standing at the Howard Beach station, chirping obliviously in full danger of being stepped on. I thought about shooing it into a gap in the concrete wall behind us, but decided to leave it be. When the subway came, the car that stopped in front of us happened to be the party car, meaning there was a loud dude with a radio (batteries failing) enlisting his fellow passengers in noisy sing-alongs and celebrity impressions. This included the boy-girl couple sitting across from us, the girl so drunk she was mostly asleep, rousing occasionally to puke quietly into a plastic bag.
We stopped on Rockaway Beach Blvd. at Rockaway Taco (known to many, I hear, as Rock-A-Taco) for tacos. The place is a wooden shack, the posts covered with photocopied paper flyers for events (surfer movies on the beach) clearly beyond the slick machinations of the inner-borough fun promotion machine. Which sounds like I'm calling it provincial (bicycle repair classes) but I think that's what a beach-front community is like. In concert with all the two-story houses with white stucco exteriors it reminded me of Randy's neighborhood in San Francisco. The tacos were quite good. They do them that way where the filling has a blanket of shredded cabbage arranged on top of it. I had a fish taco and a tofu taco -- heresy, I've been told by everybody, over and over again. But I gotta try it whenever it's on the menu, just to see if they do it okay.
It was late afternoon by the time we put our blanket down on the beach. We found a spot in the sand roughly in front of a bunker-like boardwalk bar with a scuzzy blues rock band playing out front on the concrete. At first I thought it was Rippers, but it was actually Low Tide Bar. I don't know what the difference is. A group of middle-aged Latino dudes next to us were drinking Coronas out of a plastic cooler. Nina'd worn her bathing suit under her clothes, and so she was able to strip down and wade into the ocean, at least until the Parks Dept. buggy patrol drove by to tell her that the lifeguard was off duty. I just wanted to read my book, though. I was too caught up in the world of the visceral realists to do swimming. And my reluctance to disrobe proved canny: The beach was home to a multitude of these little biting flies that looked like your average garbage moscas but which bit like horseflies. They bit me on the arms. They bit Nina everywhere. She stuck it out long enough to build a sandcastle, a sort of dome with a squared-off gatehouse.
We walked down Shore Front Parkway to Beach 84th St., surveying the old and new housing developments. Nina showed me a concrete bus shelter, solid concrete and curved like a wave, featuring a mural of fish with human faces. The faces were lumpy and complacent, like the faces of cats in Edward Gorey drawings. We realized we'd walked down to the actual location of Rippers, and we stopped and got beers. We sat near a plywood face cut-out board where you could pretend to be a hot dog or a hamburger.
It was chilly. We reversed our steps and headed home: Shuttle, A train, A train. A big black cricket was parked on the platform next to where we were standing at the Howard Beach station, chirping obliviously in full danger of being stepped on. I thought about shooing it into a gap in the concrete wall behind us, but decided to leave it be. When the subway came, the car that stopped in front of us happened to be the party car, meaning there was a loud dude with a radio (batteries failing) enlisting his fellow passengers in noisy sing-alongs and celebrity impressions. This included the boy-girl couple sitting across from us, the girl so drunk she was mostly asleep, rousing occasionally to puke quietly into a plastic bag.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Ride Brooklyn
We bought bicycles!
I haven't owned a bike since mine was snatched from right outside my window on 12th St., what, like ten years ago almost to the day? But everyone is getting bikes now and riding places. Tom rides his everywhere, shows up to things with this helmet still on, unbuckled. Especially since he and Colleen moved to their own apartment on 22nd St. We haven't seen it yet (has anybody?) but we met him for drinks at his new local, Sea Witch. It was alright -- they've got a pretty sweet aquarium behind the bar and an outdoors with a couple of man-made ponds with free-roaming turtles in them -- but the place was packed with weak-looking dudes wearing Best Show t-shirts (takes one to know one) and it took me fifteen minutes to get the attention of a bartender. We left after one beer and traded up to Mary's across the street, which I'd often walked past but never entered. It was nice and dark, and the beers were cheaper.
But having a bike seems pretty cool. Or maybe it's a prerequisite now. The thing is, though, bikes -- new, recycle-a-bicycle'd, stolen, whatevs -- are crazy expensive, even for a baller like this guy. We looked at web sites and felt despair, until Colleen directed us to Ride Brooklyn, which she claimed was selling a $350 starter model that sounded very much within reach. Their Park Slope location is over on Bergen St. near Babeland and the comic book place. It's got a bright orange and blue facade. Jessica Williams was filming something with a film crew at the comic book place the day we went. I didn't see her, but Nina saw her name on something. The staff at Ride Brooklyn was super nice -- beardy and stoned as fuck -- and they did indeed have some good cheap starter bikes. Nina got a teal Liv. Mine is a black Escape with a flat cross-bar that looks a little funny to me, but that's whatever. I'll dress it up with stickers. The real problem with it -- that I keep meaning to fix -- is that the seat's hitched up so high that my feet don't really touch the ground when I stop at an intersection, and there's a lot of weight on my, uh, in-between parts. We had to pick up U-locks and cable-locks, too. Kryptonite makes this insane "New York" model that's about as thick as your wrist. We opted for the "standard" size, which should be able to keep our shit safe during daylight hours, at least. Not a safe place for bikes, this city!
Our first big adventure on the bikes was the Saturday after we got 'em. Nina'd grabbed a bike map at Ride that highlights the major bike lanes and greenways, none of which I feel like existed the last time I was on two wheels. (Maybe because Janette Sadik-Khan built most of them.) We rode up 6th Ave. to 24th St., where Greenwood Cemetery cuts it off, then zoomed down to 5th Ave., me frantically pumping the hand-brakes all the way down the hill, Nina stopping confidentally right at the light. We rode 5th Ave. through Sunset Park and the beginnings of Bay Ridge, down to 64th St., where it goes under the Gowanus Expressway. We passed by Bay Ridge Nissan -- you know, from TV -- and caught a glimpse of Leif Ericson Park, which from what I can tell from looking at a map is less of a park that a kind of green belt that just goes on and on. A right turn at Three Jolly Pigeons took us down to Owls Head Park and then through a twisty greenway, under an overpass for the Belt Parkway, and the finally onto the long promenade that follows the Narrows down to Gravesend Bay. The promenade is very flat and regular and beige and kind of industrial, but not in a depressing way. There's a kind of "lane" for bicycling, and some people go pretty fast in it. At regular intervals on the walking path, there were groups of men casting fishing lines, and Orthodox families parked on benches looking out at the water. It was late afternoon, We rode down to about 91st St., where the Verrazano Narrows Bridge juts out from a huge triangular concrete wedge, and marked that as our turnaround spot.
On our reverse journey, we stopped in Sunset Park at Don Pepe's for some animal protein. I wasn't used to biking. My back hurt, my forearms hurt. My buns hurt. I got the Oaxaquena (or did I? Those sandwiches are all indistinguishable from each other). On impulse, I picked up a packet of D'Gari coconut pudding, because I'd seen it everywhere back when I lived in Sunset Park and had been curious about its toxicity. (Long story short, it's okay.) Bikes have a shot at being the Summer Jam. But there's also popsicles, specifically the strawberry flavor of the Associated store-brand kind. I've been going through a box of them a week. They make other flavors -- coconut, pineapple, passion fruit (by way of corn syrup) -- but none of them are quite as good. The summer beard is huge and denser than usual, probably because I started growing it out in May. To add some texture, I've been pruning back everything except the "mustache area" to create a sort of topiary Derek Smalls / Lemmy effect.
Switching gears.
Tried to hit up the screening of Cry-Baby at McCarren Park a few Wednesdays ago, but a downpour almost washed the whole thing away. I showed up fifteen minutes in and ready to get soaked, but the crowd of yuppie hipsters was stampeding through the chain-link gates, and I could see the Six-Point Craft Ales hawkers wrestling their tent down and dumping plates piled high with beer brats. Girls in heels took shelter under a tree in front of the Automotive H.S., its wet leaves lit up orange by the street lights.
I checked out the Deltron show at Celebrate Brooklyn on a Saturday near the end of July. I was blown away! Work kept me late, so he was well into his set by the time I got there, and heard the show on the approach to Prospet Park well before I saw it. I came around the bend within view of the bandshell and my jaw actually dropped because there was a full orchestra and choir on stage, Dan The Automator conducting it with a baton in full conductor's uniform, coat-tails and everything. Kid Koala scratched records and did flips and handstands by the turntables. A crazy burlesque: Del's masterful, loopy flow (he sounds like Count Chocula or, uh, like a ghost that got high) running ahead of behind the beat; strings section, horns, percussion. This, I thought, is the best thing I've ever seen. Del's certainly the best rapper in the world. He did the whole album. I remembered when I first (I think) heard "Virus," riding in the back of Tim Jones' car (tapedeck) on the way to get late-night pancakes at The New Athenian in Middletown. Then a couple of years later, sitting in the front room of Fishbowl, where Tom and Ted and Greg and Dan lived, hearing "Clint Eastwood" for the first time. Del did that one as an encore, amid wild cheers from the crowd, after thanking everyone and marveling at the fact that he'd gone the whole show without shitting his pants from some bad takeout he'd eaten backstage. The trio of blonde girls standing in front of me put their heads together, eyes closed, singing along to the refrain. It was our song, too: I'm useless, but not for long / The future is coming on.
I haven't owned a bike since mine was snatched from right outside my window on 12th St., what, like ten years ago almost to the day? But everyone is getting bikes now and riding places. Tom rides his everywhere, shows up to things with this helmet still on, unbuckled. Especially since he and Colleen moved to their own apartment on 22nd St. We haven't seen it yet (has anybody?) but we met him for drinks at his new local, Sea Witch. It was alright -- they've got a pretty sweet aquarium behind the bar and an outdoors with a couple of man-made ponds with free-roaming turtles in them -- but the place was packed with weak-looking dudes wearing Best Show t-shirts (takes one to know one) and it took me fifteen minutes to get the attention of a bartender. We left after one beer and traded up to Mary's across the street, which I'd often walked past but never entered. It was nice and dark, and the beers were cheaper.
But having a bike seems pretty cool. Or maybe it's a prerequisite now. The thing is, though, bikes -- new, recycle-a-bicycle'd, stolen, whatevs -- are crazy expensive, even for a baller like this guy. We looked at web sites and felt despair, until Colleen directed us to Ride Brooklyn, which she claimed was selling a $350 starter model that sounded very much within reach. Their Park Slope location is over on Bergen St. near Babeland and the comic book place. It's got a bright orange and blue facade. Jessica Williams was filming something with a film crew at the comic book place the day we went. I didn't see her, but Nina saw her name on something. The staff at Ride Brooklyn was super nice -- beardy and stoned as fuck -- and they did indeed have some good cheap starter bikes. Nina got a teal Liv. Mine is a black Escape with a flat cross-bar that looks a little funny to me, but that's whatever. I'll dress it up with stickers. The real problem with it -- that I keep meaning to fix -- is that the seat's hitched up so high that my feet don't really touch the ground when I stop at an intersection, and there's a lot of weight on my, uh, in-between parts. We had to pick up U-locks and cable-locks, too. Kryptonite makes this insane "New York" model that's about as thick as your wrist. We opted for the "standard" size, which should be able to keep our shit safe during daylight hours, at least. Not a safe place for bikes, this city!
Our first big adventure on the bikes was the Saturday after we got 'em. Nina'd grabbed a bike map at Ride that highlights the major bike lanes and greenways, none of which I feel like existed the last time I was on two wheels. (Maybe because Janette Sadik-Khan built most of them.) We rode up 6th Ave. to 24th St., where Greenwood Cemetery cuts it off, then zoomed down to 5th Ave., me frantically pumping the hand-brakes all the way down the hill, Nina stopping confidentally right at the light. We rode 5th Ave. through Sunset Park and the beginnings of Bay Ridge, down to 64th St., where it goes under the Gowanus Expressway. We passed by Bay Ridge Nissan -- you know, from TV -- and caught a glimpse of Leif Ericson Park, which from what I can tell from looking at a map is less of a park that a kind of green belt that just goes on and on. A right turn at Three Jolly Pigeons took us down to Owls Head Park and then through a twisty greenway, under an overpass for the Belt Parkway, and the finally onto the long promenade that follows the Narrows down to Gravesend Bay. The promenade is very flat and regular and beige and kind of industrial, but not in a depressing way. There's a kind of "lane" for bicycling, and some people go pretty fast in it. At regular intervals on the walking path, there were groups of men casting fishing lines, and Orthodox families parked on benches looking out at the water. It was late afternoon, We rode down to about 91st St., where the Verrazano Narrows Bridge juts out from a huge triangular concrete wedge, and marked that as our turnaround spot.
On our reverse journey, we stopped in Sunset Park at Don Pepe's for some animal protein. I wasn't used to biking. My back hurt, my forearms hurt. My buns hurt. I got the Oaxaquena (or did I? Those sandwiches are all indistinguishable from each other). On impulse, I picked up a packet of D'Gari coconut pudding, because I'd seen it everywhere back when I lived in Sunset Park and had been curious about its toxicity. (Long story short, it's okay.) Bikes have a shot at being the Summer Jam. But there's also popsicles, specifically the strawberry flavor of the Associated store-brand kind. I've been going through a box of them a week. They make other flavors -- coconut, pineapple, passion fruit (by way of corn syrup) -- but none of them are quite as good. The summer beard is huge and denser than usual, probably because I started growing it out in May. To add some texture, I've been pruning back everything except the "mustache area" to create a sort of topiary Derek Smalls / Lemmy effect.
Switching gears.
Tried to hit up the screening of Cry-Baby at McCarren Park a few Wednesdays ago, but a downpour almost washed the whole thing away. I showed up fifteen minutes in and ready to get soaked, but the crowd of yuppie hipsters was stampeding through the chain-link gates, and I could see the Six-Point Craft Ales hawkers wrestling their tent down and dumping plates piled high with beer brats. Girls in heels took shelter under a tree in front of the Automotive H.S., its wet leaves lit up orange by the street lights.
I checked out the Deltron show at Celebrate Brooklyn on a Saturday near the end of July. I was blown away! Work kept me late, so he was well into his set by the time I got there, and heard the show on the approach to Prospet Park well before I saw it. I came around the bend within view of the bandshell and my jaw actually dropped because there was a full orchestra and choir on stage, Dan The Automator conducting it with a baton in full conductor's uniform, coat-tails and everything. Kid Koala scratched records and did flips and handstands by the turntables. A crazy burlesque: Del's masterful, loopy flow (he sounds like Count Chocula or, uh, like a ghost that got high) running ahead of behind the beat; strings section, horns, percussion. This, I thought, is the best thing I've ever seen. Del's certainly the best rapper in the world. He did the whole album. I remembered when I first (I think) heard "Virus," riding in the back of Tim Jones' car (tapedeck) on the way to get late-night pancakes at The New Athenian in Middletown. Then a couple of years later, sitting in the front room of Fishbowl, where Tom and Ted and Greg and Dan lived, hearing "Clint Eastwood" for the first time. Del did that one as an encore, amid wild cheers from the crowd, after thanking everyone and marveling at the fact that he'd gone the whole show without shitting his pants from some bad takeout he'd eaten backstage. The trio of blonde girls standing in front of me put their heads together, eyes closed, singing along to the refrain. It was our song, too: I'm useless, but not for long / The future is coming on.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
What A Thing To Say
I went down to Coney Island for the hot dog eating thing on the 4th. For the first time in my history of attendance, it was overcast and raining, a hard drizzle. The sky and water were the color of an operating table. Despite the gloomy weather, the intersection of Stillwell and Surf was packed as usual, the assembled multitudes decked out in cheap transparent ponchos and hoisting their umbrellas to form a sort of canopy. This created some convenient shelter but made it impossible to see the stage, so watched the proceedings on the truck-mounted LCD, eerily bright under cloud cover. George Shea said something about America from his cherry-picker.
The big drama this year: Sonya Thomas failed to eat her age in HDBs, falling way short at 27 of the new Women's champ, Miki Sudo, who ate 34. That happened right before I got down there. In the Men's division, Matt Stonie came shockingly close to out-eating Joey Chestnut. At one point, about half-way through the ten minutes, he was even ahead by three or so hot dogs, something I've never seen before. He listened to music on headphones and bopped around as he ate, which is something some of the eaters do to sort of compact the contents of their stomachs. At around the 40-HDB mark, Joey Chestnut rallied and crushed Stonie. He ate 61 hot dogs to win the thing, and he got engaged to his lady friend right after. None of the other eaters came close, not even Eater X. "Badlands" Booker must compete because he likes hot dogs.
I got back on the train as soon as the contest was decided. I studied the back of each house we passed between 18th Ave. and 86th St., the cable wires, its little yard; feeling covetous and peevishly disenfranchised. If I lived there, I thought. If that house were mine. Guys in their boxers and undershirts went in and out of the houses, shutting up patio umbrellas and hoisting bags of trash.
I turned thirty-three, reluctantly.
My birthday was on Tuesday, and Nina took me out to eat at Samudra, a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights. It was raining heavily by the time I got to Roosevelt Ave., and I stood in the alcove of the exit for some time as a tried to get my bearings. There are shops and kiosks built into landings of the stairwell and selling hair oils and cassette tapes. I jetted out northwest down Broadway, which turned out to be way wrong, and got soaked in the storm. At length I found the place, Nina standing hopefully in the doorway; my jeans pressed to my thighs with large ovals of wetness. The restaurant seemed to me to be decked out like a blonde wood railway car; the walls were divided into panels by ribs that sprouted buttresses holding up a high shelf. The storefront's neon sign was hooked up to a powerstrip paint-glued onto the wall. There was one other couple, a white woman and a South Asian man, who seemed to be having a fight. They barely said anything to each other. The staff hung out by the kitchen, playing games on their phones. We ordered some masala dosas, which arrived huge, shiny-smooth, cylindrical; and some curries, including an okra thing that was very good. (Bhindi Masala?) It was all very good. We had hot masala tea out of metal cups.
After dinner we hopped a cab and headed south to Nitehawk where we caught the 10:00 screening of Obvious Child, which was the funniest, most charming thing I've seen all year, not least of because of Jenny Slate's performance. Richard Kind at his least solicitous since he was building a mentaculus. We drank beers in the dark and held hands. The theater retains its ability to make you feel like you're getting away with something. When we got home, Nina revealed what was quite possibly the biggest pie I've ever seen, filled with several quarts of blueberries and spice. She'd made the crust herself, rotating the butter in and out of the freezer to keep it solid during the substantial heat of the afternoon. It was an object to be reckoned with: Huge, sandy-colored, shining with brushed-on egg white and sugar crystals.
The picture doesn't do it justics. And it was very, very good. We had to cut it into twelfths to tame it.
She'd bought me gifts, too: A pajama suit, top and bottom, like I've wanted for the wintertime so I'd be truly able to get into Old Man Mode; a gift certificate for cooking classes at The Brooklyn Kitchen; and two pairs of Happy Feet socks with colorful designs on them. (Fancy socks might be my new jam? Looking for one.) She was beyond generous.
I don't deserve it. I don't.
The big drama this year: Sonya Thomas failed to eat her age in HDBs, falling way short at 27 of the new Women's champ, Miki Sudo, who ate 34. That happened right before I got down there. In the Men's division, Matt Stonie came shockingly close to out-eating Joey Chestnut. At one point, about half-way through the ten minutes, he was even ahead by three or so hot dogs, something I've never seen before. He listened to music on headphones and bopped around as he ate, which is something some of the eaters do to sort of compact the contents of their stomachs. At around the 40-HDB mark, Joey Chestnut rallied and crushed Stonie. He ate 61 hot dogs to win the thing, and he got engaged to his lady friend right after. None of the other eaters came close, not even Eater X. "Badlands" Booker must compete because he likes hot dogs.
I got back on the train as soon as the contest was decided. I studied the back of each house we passed between 18th Ave. and 86th St., the cable wires, its little yard; feeling covetous and peevishly disenfranchised. If I lived there, I thought. If that house were mine. Guys in their boxers and undershirts went in and out of the houses, shutting up patio umbrellas and hoisting bags of trash.
I turned thirty-three, reluctantly.
My birthday was on Tuesday, and Nina took me out to eat at Samudra, a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights. It was raining heavily by the time I got to Roosevelt Ave., and I stood in the alcove of the exit for some time as a tried to get my bearings. There are shops and kiosks built into landings of the stairwell and selling hair oils and cassette tapes. I jetted out northwest down Broadway, which turned out to be way wrong, and got soaked in the storm. At length I found the place, Nina standing hopefully in the doorway; my jeans pressed to my thighs with large ovals of wetness. The restaurant seemed to me to be decked out like a blonde wood railway car; the walls were divided into panels by ribs that sprouted buttresses holding up a high shelf. The storefront's neon sign was hooked up to a powerstrip paint-glued onto the wall. There was one other couple, a white woman and a South Asian man, who seemed to be having a fight. They barely said anything to each other. The staff hung out by the kitchen, playing games on their phones. We ordered some masala dosas, which arrived huge, shiny-smooth, cylindrical; and some curries, including an okra thing that was very good. (Bhindi Masala?) It was all very good. We had hot masala tea out of metal cups.
After dinner we hopped a cab and headed south to Nitehawk where we caught the 10:00 screening of Obvious Child, which was the funniest, most charming thing I've seen all year, not least of because of Jenny Slate's performance. Richard Kind at his least solicitous since he was building a mentaculus. We drank beers in the dark and held hands. The theater retains its ability to make you feel like you're getting away with something. When we got home, Nina revealed what was quite possibly the biggest pie I've ever seen, filled with several quarts of blueberries and spice. She'd made the crust herself, rotating the butter in and out of the freezer to keep it solid during the substantial heat of the afternoon. It was an object to be reckoned with: Huge, sandy-colored, shining with brushed-on egg white and sugar crystals.
The picture doesn't do it justics. And it was very, very good. We had to cut it into twelfths to tame it.
She'd bought me gifts, too: A pajama suit, top and bottom, like I've wanted for the wintertime so I'd be truly able to get into Old Man Mode; a gift certificate for cooking classes at The Brooklyn Kitchen; and two pairs of Happy Feet socks with colorful designs on them. (Fancy socks might be my new jam? Looking for one.) She was beyond generous.
I don't deserve it. I don't.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
New Shoes
Despite adding the schedule to my calendar, I don't go to the summer movies in Bryant Park much. The series epitomizes the filled-to-capacity victim-of-its-own-successitude that sucks all the fun out of everything that happens in Manhattan. But I'd never seen Blazing Saddles, and I happened to get out of work at just around the right time, which almost never happens any more these days.
I found a spot toward the back of the southern edge of the park, next to a Dutch elm-diseased tree growing in the sandy dirt and cobblestones; next to a fancy coffee kiosk being shut down for the evening by its teenaged staff. A drunk sitting in a folding chair in front of the tree bellowed "faggot!" at me. He was surrounded by garbage of various sorts. I inched back around the tree to stay out of his line of sight, and stood there with my messenger bag nestled between my feet. The movie was engrossing and angry and great. Now I see what all the fuss is about. That scene where the old woman brings Bart the pie: Is there a better depiction of Americans' ability (desire) to compartmentalize their thinking on race? It's really... anarchic, too. Having seen that fight on the film lot, I feel like I "get" the Rip Taylor set pieces that close out each Jackass movie. I read about Cleavon Little when I got home. It doesn't seem like he got a fair shake.
I had two missions the Saturday of 4Knots, which fell the weekend before my birthday. One was to see Mac DeMarco and maybe Speedy Ortiz. The other was to buy new shoes. I left the house wearing my decaying burnt-orange Chucks, which I'd bought at a previous 4Knots, having taken refuge from the noise of The Black Angels in the not-yet-destroyed mall of Pier 17. Those shoes survived the years of the kick drum and two rounds of extermination for chinches; but they were beginning to disintegrate, the sides flaring open, a hole dug in the heel by my heel. I flapped them out to the Seaport, where Nina and I found the festival spilling onto Fulton Street, which the festival organizers had covered with an astroturf "lawn." The lawn was itself covered with turfed-out hipsters. It smelled like weed. There were KIND bar wrappers and empty, miniature bottled waters everywhere. We spent a few minutes in front of the smaller stage where Dead Stars were wrapping up their set. They sounded good: Bright, catchy hooks; a strong beat; and fast-paced songs. The band seemed a little amused, like, what are we doing here.
Those Darlins were on the main stage when we got there. The area in front of the main stage was packed. Everybody was eating fancy street cart food and drinking sodas and throwing the garbage in the trash barrel next to where we were standing. An old Chinese woman elbowed her way through the crowd and dug around in the trash for recyclable items. Mac DeMarco went on next. All of my young-dude co-workers are into him - "He's so weird" - and I thought he'd sound like Kurt Vile or Ty Segall or some other au courant young outsider. But he doesn't. His songs are weird, but I found them to be lugubrious and incoherent. The show just didn't, like, rock. I think that's enough, I said. I didn't need to hear Dinosaur Jr., who were the big deal headliners this year. (I wonder if they played Feel The Pain.) Nina and I left the Seaport, making a pit stop at the Starbucks on Water Street so Nina could pee. It grew suddenly cold. Trash blew through the air.
We walked up through Chinatown to Grand Street, and Nina steered me into a Miz Mooz. Beau arrived, having wrapped an afternoon of recording with The Robot Princess at their studio in Union Square. The selection of Chucks was kind of limited, but I saw a pair of high-top navy blue ones that really spoke to me. High-tops could be a cool look, I thought. The salesperson checked the basement and reported that the store was out of my size. "Can you hang around for fifteen minutes?" he asked. "We have a warehouse a couple of blocks away." We waited. The store was bright and clean, with light-colored hard-wood floors. A lot of the storefronts in SoHo are like that; I wonder if they used to be galleries or studios. When the shoes arrived, I put them on and asked the young woman at the register if she could toss my gross, old ones. "Don't talk about them like that," she said. "Those shoes kept your feet dry for three years. You should say goodbye to them."
"Should I kiss them goodbye?" I asked.
"You don't have to kiss them," she said.
We walked down to Canal Street and took the train back to Brooklyn. We had dinner at Sheep Station with Tom and Jill and Hanlon. Everybody's moving out of the big apartment on Lincoln Place at the end of the summer so that Jay, the guy who owns the building, can renovate it. They're being scattered to the four winds. (Or maybe the two winds.) The talk turned again and again to the pain of apartment hunting in New York City. The disappointing reality of a promising Craigslist posting. The unctuous perfidy of real estate brokers. A shame-faced encounter with a fellow apartment hunter worse off than yourself. Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Ditmas. Nice places to live, all, but why does it feel like a fight to get in?
I found a spot toward the back of the southern edge of the park, next to a Dutch elm-diseased tree growing in the sandy dirt and cobblestones; next to a fancy coffee kiosk being shut down for the evening by its teenaged staff. A drunk sitting in a folding chair in front of the tree bellowed "faggot!" at me. He was surrounded by garbage of various sorts. I inched back around the tree to stay out of his line of sight, and stood there with my messenger bag nestled between my feet. The movie was engrossing and angry and great. Now I see what all the fuss is about. That scene where the old woman brings Bart the pie: Is there a better depiction of Americans' ability (desire) to compartmentalize their thinking on race? It's really... anarchic, too. Having seen that fight on the film lot, I feel like I "get" the Rip Taylor set pieces that close out each Jackass movie. I read about Cleavon Little when I got home. It doesn't seem like he got a fair shake.
I had two missions the Saturday of 4Knots, which fell the weekend before my birthday. One was to see Mac DeMarco and maybe Speedy Ortiz. The other was to buy new shoes. I left the house wearing my decaying burnt-orange Chucks, which I'd bought at a previous 4Knots, having taken refuge from the noise of The Black Angels in the not-yet-destroyed mall of Pier 17. Those shoes survived the years of the kick drum and two rounds of extermination for chinches; but they were beginning to disintegrate, the sides flaring open, a hole dug in the heel by my heel. I flapped them out to the Seaport, where Nina and I found the festival spilling onto Fulton Street, which the festival organizers had covered with an astroturf "lawn." The lawn was itself covered with turfed-out hipsters. It smelled like weed. There were KIND bar wrappers and empty, miniature bottled waters everywhere. We spent a few minutes in front of the smaller stage where Dead Stars were wrapping up their set. They sounded good: Bright, catchy hooks; a strong beat; and fast-paced songs. The band seemed a little amused, like, what are we doing here.
Those Darlins were on the main stage when we got there. The area in front of the main stage was packed. Everybody was eating fancy street cart food and drinking sodas and throwing the garbage in the trash barrel next to where we were standing. An old Chinese woman elbowed her way through the crowd and dug around in the trash for recyclable items. Mac DeMarco went on next. All of my young-dude co-workers are into him - "He's so weird" - and I thought he'd sound like Kurt Vile or Ty Segall or some other au courant young outsider. But he doesn't. His songs are weird, but I found them to be lugubrious and incoherent. The show just didn't, like, rock. I think that's enough, I said. I didn't need to hear Dinosaur Jr., who were the big deal headliners this year. (I wonder if they played Feel The Pain.) Nina and I left the Seaport, making a pit stop at the Starbucks on Water Street so Nina could pee. It grew suddenly cold. Trash blew through the air.
We walked up through Chinatown to Grand Street, and Nina steered me into a Miz Mooz. Beau arrived, having wrapped an afternoon of recording with The Robot Princess at their studio in Union Square. The selection of Chucks was kind of limited, but I saw a pair of high-top navy blue ones that really spoke to me. High-tops could be a cool look, I thought. The salesperson checked the basement and reported that the store was out of my size. "Can you hang around for fifteen minutes?" he asked. "We have a warehouse a couple of blocks away." We waited. The store was bright and clean, with light-colored hard-wood floors. A lot of the storefronts in SoHo are like that; I wonder if they used to be galleries or studios. When the shoes arrived, I put them on and asked the young woman at the register if she could toss my gross, old ones. "Don't talk about them like that," she said. "Those shoes kept your feet dry for three years. You should say goodbye to them."
"Should I kiss them goodbye?" I asked.
"You don't have to kiss them," she said.
We walked down to Canal Street and took the train back to Brooklyn. We had dinner at Sheep Station with Tom and Jill and Hanlon. Everybody's moving out of the big apartment on Lincoln Place at the end of the summer so that Jay, the guy who owns the building, can renovate it. They're being scattered to the four winds. (Or maybe the two winds.) The talk turned again and again to the pain of apartment hunting in New York City. The disappointing reality of a promising Craigslist posting. The unctuous perfidy of real estate brokers. A shame-faced encounter with a fellow apartment hunter worse off than yourself. Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Ditmas. Nice places to live, all, but why does it feel like a fight to get in?
Monday, June 30, 2014
Hoogies
Nina's cousin Michael got married, and we took the bus out to Philadelphia to visit. We caught the Bolt bus on Friday out on 12th Ave. by the Javits Center, the gray concrete baking in the late afternoon soon. The sun set during the journey, and it was dark when we pulled into 30th St. Weird: Downtown Philadelpia is a ghost town, to its discredit. Market St. is all office towers, nobody inside except maybe a security guard at the front desk playing smartphone.
We'd booked a room in the wedding block at the Sonesta, a modern-looking hotel that was apparently beginning to re-open after a renovation. Some of the floors and amenities were still off-limits, and the elevators all had plaster-dusted cardboard on the floor, but the outdoor swimming pool was open! We could see it out our windows, many floors below. At Nina's urging ("Do all the things"), we ventured down to check it out in the pre-noon hours the following morning. The pool was on top of an intermediate floor of the hotel so that we could look out over sunlit roofs of downtown Philadelphia on one side, the black obelisk of the rest of the hotel towering over us on the other. Nina waded up and down the shallow end of the pool. I mostly just put my feet in. It was very quiet, and we were almost the only people we could see; occasionally we would catch a glimpse of a painter or contractor doing something in a room on one of the sealed-off floors. Sparrows hopped around. The bride and groom are both public transit enthusiasts, and the "goody bag" they'd left for us at the front desk included sufficient SEPTA tokens to get us around for the weekend (along with an admonition to donate them to a less fortunate Philadelphian if we couldn't use them). The wedding was at the Old First Reformed Unitarian Church on 4th and Race. Nina and her brother and I took the Market-Frankford line from the City Hall stop near the hotel to 5th St. It was a Quaker service, meaning that the official proceedings were short, but there were a whole lot of benedictions from the witnesses. Friendly nerds, most all of them.
I spent the whole weekend straining my ears to catch a fragment of Jon Wurster's Philly Boy Roy accent but came up dry until Sunday morning, when I was walking through an alley back to the hotel after an unsuccessful breakfast forage. An old woman and her adult son were walking ahead of me, and I overheard that distinct, peculiar way of speaking: "Did you talk to him last week?" "No, I'm going to call him on Tewsday."
We stopped off at the Mütter Museum on our way to the bus station. I'd heard a lot about the place. My mom and my sister had visited on a road trip many years ago and came back thoroughly titillated. Nina is the prowd owner of their 1993 wall calendar, which lives in a pile of prestige items (hardcover book of battlefield photography; Clash On Broadway boxed set) on our coffee table's lower shelf. So I was expecting an intimidating physical presence, but the Museum is about the size and external demeanor of a Brooklyn Public Library branch -- not the huge central one with the gold-leaf Masonic symbology around the entrance, but one of the Park Slope branches, say, tidy brick with a lawn that no one's bothered to sweep free of dead leaves. Inside, the collection is mostly localized to a single large, split-level room, which is filled with glass-paned wooden display cabinets jammed with specimens -- mostly skeletal -- of human morphological non-conformism, some with an explanation or some description of provenance, others with a simple typewritten slip of paper, yellowed with age, giving only the date of the donation. The presentation is very neutral and mid-century scientific. The cabinets are packed shoulder to shoulder with one another, and each one runs floor to ceiling. In another room on the first floor there's an exhibit on battlefield medicine in the Civil War. There's a booth you can step into to see what you would look like as an amputee. A large stairwell takes you down to the lower tier of the main collection, where there's more stuff, grouped anatomically: Eyes, noses, spines, genitals.
A cabinet at one end of the first floor displayed the personal effects and photos of the late Dr. Mütter himself, who was handsome -- nothing of the "Innsmouth look" you might have reasonably expected -- and died young, in his forties. In a back room of the ground floor there was a similar display noting the recent passing of the Museum's director, Gretchen Worden. She was 56 years old. It made me feel sad, and brought the most disturbing aspect of the collection into focus. The specimens of people who seemed like they'd been dealt a rough hand by birth or by accident, and for whom contemporary medicine could / would do nothing: The skeleton of the dwarf prostitute who'd gotten pregnant with a fetus too big to deliver; the model (it better be a model) of the enormous colon possessed by the Human Windbag, a circus performer who pretty much filled up with shit and died. It reminded me of the hero's final question from The Sirens Of Titan: Why are we created only to suffer and die?
This turned into more of a downer than I wanted it to. Good things are in the offing. Nina got us tickets to see Ana Tijoux in July. Watch this and tell me she can't spit.
We ferried out to the St. Andrew's vicarage in Saltaire to visit Billy and Sarah and Baby Charlie last weekend. It was a bright, hot day, and the gang gathered at the house (Kim, Chris, Jessie, others) was itching to run out to the beach. I'd neglected to pack swim trunks, either by accident or subconscious motive. I felt self-conscious about my bald head and mugwump-like physique, and I wished I could have stayed in a protective and concealing tent like Baby Charlie, who was sporting a bright yellow bathing costume like one of the original X-Men's. But Billy graciously lent me a pair of his own trunks, and Nina and Chris coaxed me into the cold blue water, and it was actually a lot of fun. We bobbed in the deep parts, and splashed around until the afternoon change in the tides drew the waves up higher and stronger than we could handle. In the evening we rode the vicarage house bikes out to Surf's Out for some food. While we waited for Billy and Sarah to show up with the stroller, we elbowed our way into the crowd listening to the band playing in the restaurant's outdoor space. They were Rich Mahogany, five or six swollen middle-aged dudes, red-faced and sharing a glans-like appearance. To their credit, the crowd was dense with ladies, and from the ambient chatter it sounded like many of them had traveled to the island just for this show. (The Cravin' Band had opened the evening; double-header!) We walked away from the noise, out to the pier, where we found a tiny boutique selling beach towels and doo-dads. They were selling "throwing snaps," too, and we bought a couple of boxes to arm Chris for an evening's entertainment.
On the ferry ride back, we were packed cheek-to-jowl with drunk, middle-aged Rich Mahogany fans -- some of whom had been fighting in the restaurant bathroom -- leaning this way and that as the boat pitched in the darkness. It was a Boschian vision of hell, but not a very bad one.
We'd booked a room in the wedding block at the Sonesta, a modern-looking hotel that was apparently beginning to re-open after a renovation. Some of the floors and amenities were still off-limits, and the elevators all had plaster-dusted cardboard on the floor, but the outdoor swimming pool was open! We could see it out our windows, many floors below. At Nina's urging ("Do all the things"), we ventured down to check it out in the pre-noon hours the following morning. The pool was on top of an intermediate floor of the hotel so that we could look out over sunlit roofs of downtown Philadelphia on one side, the black obelisk of the rest of the hotel towering over us on the other. Nina waded up and down the shallow end of the pool. I mostly just put my feet in. It was very quiet, and we were almost the only people we could see; occasionally we would catch a glimpse of a painter or contractor doing something in a room on one of the sealed-off floors. Sparrows hopped around. The bride and groom are both public transit enthusiasts, and the "goody bag" they'd left for us at the front desk included sufficient SEPTA tokens to get us around for the weekend (along with an admonition to donate them to a less fortunate Philadelphian if we couldn't use them). The wedding was at the Old First Reformed Unitarian Church on 4th and Race. Nina and her brother and I took the Market-Frankford line from the City Hall stop near the hotel to 5th St. It was a Quaker service, meaning that the official proceedings were short, but there were a whole lot of benedictions from the witnesses. Friendly nerds, most all of them.
I spent the whole weekend straining my ears to catch a fragment of Jon Wurster's Philly Boy Roy accent but came up dry until Sunday morning, when I was walking through an alley back to the hotel after an unsuccessful breakfast forage. An old woman and her adult son were walking ahead of me, and I overheard that distinct, peculiar way of speaking: "Did you talk to him last week?" "No, I'm going to call him on Tewsday."
We stopped off at the Mütter Museum on our way to the bus station. I'd heard a lot about the place. My mom and my sister had visited on a road trip many years ago and came back thoroughly titillated. Nina is the prowd owner of their 1993 wall calendar, which lives in a pile of prestige items (hardcover book of battlefield photography; Clash On Broadway boxed set) on our coffee table's lower shelf. So I was expecting an intimidating physical presence, but the Museum is about the size and external demeanor of a Brooklyn Public Library branch -- not the huge central one with the gold-leaf Masonic symbology around the entrance, but one of the Park Slope branches, say, tidy brick with a lawn that no one's bothered to sweep free of dead leaves. Inside, the collection is mostly localized to a single large, split-level room, which is filled with glass-paned wooden display cabinets jammed with specimens -- mostly skeletal -- of human morphological non-conformism, some with an explanation or some description of provenance, others with a simple typewritten slip of paper, yellowed with age, giving only the date of the donation. The presentation is very neutral and mid-century scientific. The cabinets are packed shoulder to shoulder with one another, and each one runs floor to ceiling. In another room on the first floor there's an exhibit on battlefield medicine in the Civil War. There's a booth you can step into to see what you would look like as an amputee. A large stairwell takes you down to the lower tier of the main collection, where there's more stuff, grouped anatomically: Eyes, noses, spines, genitals.
A cabinet at one end of the first floor displayed the personal effects and photos of the late Dr. Mütter himself, who was handsome -- nothing of the "Innsmouth look" you might have reasonably expected -- and died young, in his forties. In a back room of the ground floor there was a similar display noting the recent passing of the Museum's director, Gretchen Worden. She was 56 years old. It made me feel sad, and brought the most disturbing aspect of the collection into focus. The specimens of people who seemed like they'd been dealt a rough hand by birth or by accident, and for whom contemporary medicine could / would do nothing: The skeleton of the dwarf prostitute who'd gotten pregnant with a fetus too big to deliver; the model (it better be a model) of the enormous colon possessed by the Human Windbag, a circus performer who pretty much filled up with shit and died. It reminded me of the hero's final question from The Sirens Of Titan: Why are we created only to suffer and die?
This turned into more of a downer than I wanted it to. Good things are in the offing. Nina got us tickets to see Ana Tijoux in July. Watch this and tell me she can't spit.
We ferried out to the St. Andrew's vicarage in Saltaire to visit Billy and Sarah and Baby Charlie last weekend. It was a bright, hot day, and the gang gathered at the house (Kim, Chris, Jessie, others) was itching to run out to the beach. I'd neglected to pack swim trunks, either by accident or subconscious motive. I felt self-conscious about my bald head and mugwump-like physique, and I wished I could have stayed in a protective and concealing tent like Baby Charlie, who was sporting a bright yellow bathing costume like one of the original X-Men's. But Billy graciously lent me a pair of his own trunks, and Nina and Chris coaxed me into the cold blue water, and it was actually a lot of fun. We bobbed in the deep parts, and splashed around until the afternoon change in the tides drew the waves up higher and stronger than we could handle. In the evening we rode the vicarage house bikes out to Surf's Out for some food. While we waited for Billy and Sarah to show up with the stroller, we elbowed our way into the crowd listening to the band playing in the restaurant's outdoor space. They were Rich Mahogany, five or six swollen middle-aged dudes, red-faced and sharing a glans-like appearance. To their credit, the crowd was dense with ladies, and from the ambient chatter it sounded like many of them had traveled to the island just for this show. (The Cravin' Band had opened the evening; double-header!) We walked away from the noise, out to the pier, where we found a tiny boutique selling beach towels and doo-dads. They were selling "throwing snaps," too, and we bought a couple of boxes to arm Chris for an evening's entertainment.
On the ferry ride back, we were packed cheek-to-jowl with drunk, middle-aged Rich Mahogany fans -- some of whom had been fighting in the restaurant bathroom -- leaning this way and that as the boat pitched in the darkness. It was a Boschian vision of hell, but not a very bad one.
Friday, June 13, 2014
White People Ruin Everything
We went out to Bushwick Open Studios so I could see my friend and former Rebel Monkey colleague Joe Wierenga. He and his friends were showing a series of life drawings, many of which they'd done at 3rd Ward before the owners took the money and ran. Joe's drawings were great, especially the way he renders light and contrast with a watercolor wash. And becase their show was at their apartment building, a very strange, not-quite-condo building affectionately called The Glass Cube; we got to see the apartment he shares with his lady friend and with Elvis The Cat King. Two big rooms, the bedroom illuminated by a fishtank and the lamp over his drafting table. It was lucky that we'd stopped by on Saturday, he said. They were cutting back their participation to just that day because he and his show-mates had gotten wind that their landlord was going to stop by on Sunday, and their art show was strictly unapproved by management. Apparently the landlord was coming by to inspect a small bit of graffiti that had been stencil-sprayed onto the sidewalk outside the building and which read "Build Communities Not Condos." The landlord was very upset about this, Joe said, though it wasn't clear whether it was the medium or the sentiment that was most distressing. Wow, though. They're listening! Streets are saying things.
We left Joe's place and stopped at a few more points of interest on the elaborately-designed (and printed and collated) brochure, mostly in warehouse-to-studio-building conversions. There was some good stuff: hyper-realist paintings of falcons; pleasing geometric arrangements of colored lines. A lot of the studios were already closed for the day, though, and so we mostly just poked around the graffitied stairwells of the warehouses, watched people people lugging supplies up and down in freight elevators. "Who pays for this?" Nina murmured as we looked out a dirty window over the spray of studio buildings and nascent condo developments. I thought she was asking who pays for all these art students to rent studios in chic warehouses. (Their parents?) But she clarified, "No, I mean, who buys this art? Who would buy this?" Which is close to but not actually the same question when you think about it.
The next weekend we went out to Sunset Park to catch a series of short films called "Trapped In The Machine" on the roof of Industry City. We'd tried (and failed) to get inside there a few times, back before it became, like, ground zero for "makers" in South Brooklyn. This time we walked right in and for our fifteen bucks got to poke around the closed-up ground floor with all its upscale canteens and faux-social realist murals before humping it up the six or so stories to the roof. It was beautiful up there, though I was needlessly mean to Nina when she wanted to take arty digital camera photos of the skyline and the electrical transformers erupting from a cage on a cordoned-off part. But it was because I'd just noticed how many other attendees (including myself) were doing the same thing: Oohing and ahhing over the remnants of the industrial landscape and, by virtue of their presence, at their own dominion over it for the purpose of an evening's entertainment.
Still, it was an undeniably pleasant place to watch a movie. The wind was cold for June, so Nina hopped on my lap and we shared a sweatshirt. The films were weird and fun, ranging from bonkers (a guy cuts his own head off and fucks his neck; "too rapey," muttered Nina) to dramatic (a victim of a hit-and-run mistakes it for an alien abudction) to strangely sweet (a guy's friend dies while they're in Mexico and he parties with the coffin). Afterwards, everyone was invited down to the courtyard for cocktails compliments of Bulleit and New Amsterdam Vodka. The courtyard was an immaculate sanded wood and gravel pit affair, with fairy lights strung through the thin branches of a half-dozen just-planted trees. Imagine a fancy hotel's roof deck at street level. Or, like, the place a luxury car would pull up at the end of a commercial to show how spontaenous and bohemian its rich dude owner is. Hard to imagine a factory dude eating lunch out there, but hey I'm obviously not a factory dude.
More art: After stopping off at the post-baptismal brunch for Billy and Sarah's new baby in Brooklyn Heights, Chris and Andre and Nina and I walked down to Pier 6 to goggle at the horror of Smorgasburg, and Nina and I hopped the ferry to Governor's Island to see what was going on at Figment this year. What we saw: A tree draped with transparent plastic cups. A kind of igloo made of knotted plastic bags. An adult hippie and a pre-teen (soon-to-be) hippie gave us expensively-printed fliers for an erotic dance performance in which all the pieces were puns on fruit. We walked out to the southwestern end of the island, off limits last year so that the skeleton of a Navy dormitory could be demolished. It's full of beachgrass now, and there's a playground with a big sanded wood climbing structure. Nina climbed on it. A giant telephone handset hanging from a telephone pole-sized mount. The best thing I saw was a gallery of art-photography holograms in one of the wood-frame houses. Tony Bennett was featured, as was the Pope. Something about the presentation, luminous green images floating out from the plaster walls in the abandoned rooms, made me want to stay there weaving back and forth in front of the phony depth of the pictures. I even considered owning one, even if they're just one step beyond (or behind) black velvet portraiture. Plus, they had one of a toilet.
I mentioned, I think, that my family friend Jonah, whom I'm pretty sure I tutored on long division when he and I were both in short pants, is the new guitar player for only-band-that-matters Titus Andronicus. After I'd gushed about the band on the way home from that Thanksgiving, my mom had asked me to bring her along the next time they played a show in NYC. That turned out to not be for a while, but as soon as I saw them on the market, I snapped up four tickets to their Northside show at Warsaw on Thursday. Eagulls was Titus' immediate opener, and they were just going on when Beau and my mom and dad and I had met up at the venue at 9 o'clock. The main dude was less drunk than when Nina and I saw them at CMJ, and Warsaw is a bigger, better fit for their pummeling sound. The bass-first way their songs are arranged, it's hard not to think of Joy Division, and George Mitchell has a queasy, Ian Curtis look to him, though his vocals are plaintive enough to veer into Robert Smith territory. I got Żywiecs for me and my dad and a coke for Beau. After Eagulls' set, the old folks (Jonah's mom Heather had arrived as well) went up to the balcony -- which I'd always thought was a VIP section -- and Nina and Beau and I got a couple of plates of pierogies in the merch area.
Titus Andronicus took the stage right as we finished eating, and we hurried to find our places in the crowd. They opened with Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, to the great excitement of the crowd. Patrick's voice sounded painfully husky, like it did when he was on the radio while he was working on Local Business. Maybe that's just what he sounds like when they've got an album in progress. And they played several songs from their promised double-CD rock opera, and they were all as fast and punchy as the best stuff on their last record. And there was plenty of conversation from the stage, starting with a characteristic (though undeniably correct) exhortation from Patrick to respect the bodies and physical space of our fellow audience members. When an obnoxious -- if exuberant -- crowd-surfer made it onto the stage and accidentally stepped on Julian's pedal board, Stax gave him a reprimand between songs. And he extended his opprobrium to include the slam-dancing multitudes in the pit. "I used to be like you," he said, on the topic of dancin' around and going up. But now, he warned further surfers seeking his recognition, "I don't admire it. I abhor it." (They were undeterred.) "Back when I lived in this neighborhood," he said, introducing In A Big City, "I used to dream of playing at this place. We opened a show here once" (I was there!) "but we were never the headliners. I don't live in Greenpoint any more. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens." He looked up from tuning his guitar. "Don't come to Ridgewood," he said.
The thing the blogs are talking about is that they played a full cover of Closing Time, which I guess they sometimes tease the crowd with during tuning breaks. But people were cheering and the tuning went on for a while, and before to long we were all, "I know who I want to take me home..." There was also a cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, dedicated to Patrick's mom, who was in the audience. They finished, as they often do, with all sixteen minutes of The Battle of Hampton Roads. He ended the set with a gathering, excruciating wall of noise created by his delay pedal. The end. After the show we waited outside the venue while Heather made the rounds of the green room. It had started to rain a little by the time she came out, and Jonah appeared a moment later, followed by P-Stax himself. I gushed and and thanked him and shook his hand, and so did Nina despite ostensibly being on his Twitter shit list. He hand-fed Jonah some chunks of a muffin he'd bought. A thing I've learned: If you stick with it long enough, you get to meet your idols. (And so does your mom.) He wandered off towards the deli. "I saw you," Jonah said. "You were up front the whole time." Isn't that what every fan wants to hear? I saw you, wild-eyed, balding, overdressed and sweaty, reaching for the peformers on the stage. That was me!
We left Joe's place and stopped at a few more points of interest on the elaborately-designed (and printed and collated) brochure, mostly in warehouse-to-studio-building conversions. There was some good stuff: hyper-realist paintings of falcons; pleasing geometric arrangements of colored lines. A lot of the studios were already closed for the day, though, and so we mostly just poked around the graffitied stairwells of the warehouses, watched people people lugging supplies up and down in freight elevators. "Who pays for this?" Nina murmured as we looked out a dirty window over the spray of studio buildings and nascent condo developments. I thought she was asking who pays for all these art students to rent studios in chic warehouses. (Their parents?) But she clarified, "No, I mean, who buys this art? Who would buy this?" Which is close to but not actually the same question when you think about it.
The next weekend we went out to Sunset Park to catch a series of short films called "Trapped In The Machine" on the roof of Industry City. We'd tried (and failed) to get inside there a few times, back before it became, like, ground zero for "makers" in South Brooklyn. This time we walked right in and for our fifteen bucks got to poke around the closed-up ground floor with all its upscale canteens and faux-social realist murals before humping it up the six or so stories to the roof. It was beautiful up there, though I was needlessly mean to Nina when she wanted to take arty digital camera photos of the skyline and the electrical transformers erupting from a cage on a cordoned-off part. But it was because I'd just noticed how many other attendees (including myself) were doing the same thing: Oohing and ahhing over the remnants of the industrial landscape and, by virtue of their presence, at their own dominion over it for the purpose of an evening's entertainment.
Still, it was an undeniably pleasant place to watch a movie. The wind was cold for June, so Nina hopped on my lap and we shared a sweatshirt. The films were weird and fun, ranging from bonkers (a guy cuts his own head off and fucks his neck; "too rapey," muttered Nina) to dramatic (a victim of a hit-and-run mistakes it for an alien abudction) to strangely sweet (a guy's friend dies while they're in Mexico and he parties with the coffin). Afterwards, everyone was invited down to the courtyard for cocktails compliments of Bulleit and New Amsterdam Vodka. The courtyard was an immaculate sanded wood and gravel pit affair, with fairy lights strung through the thin branches of a half-dozen just-planted trees. Imagine a fancy hotel's roof deck at street level. Or, like, the place a luxury car would pull up at the end of a commercial to show how spontaenous and bohemian its rich dude owner is. Hard to imagine a factory dude eating lunch out there, but hey I'm obviously not a factory dude.
More art: After stopping off at the post-baptismal brunch for Billy and Sarah's new baby in Brooklyn Heights, Chris and Andre and Nina and I walked down to Pier 6 to goggle at the horror of Smorgasburg, and Nina and I hopped the ferry to Governor's Island to see what was going on at Figment this year. What we saw: A tree draped with transparent plastic cups. A kind of igloo made of knotted plastic bags. An adult hippie and a pre-teen (soon-to-be) hippie gave us expensively-printed fliers for an erotic dance performance in which all the pieces were puns on fruit. We walked out to the southwestern end of the island, off limits last year so that the skeleton of a Navy dormitory could be demolished. It's full of beachgrass now, and there's a playground with a big sanded wood climbing structure. Nina climbed on it. A giant telephone handset hanging from a telephone pole-sized mount. The best thing I saw was a gallery of art-photography holograms in one of the wood-frame houses. Tony Bennett was featured, as was the Pope. Something about the presentation, luminous green images floating out from the plaster walls in the abandoned rooms, made me want to stay there weaving back and forth in front of the phony depth of the pictures. I even considered owning one, even if they're just one step beyond (or behind) black velvet portraiture. Plus, they had one of a toilet.
I mentioned, I think, that my family friend Jonah, whom I'm pretty sure I tutored on long division when he and I were both in short pants, is the new guitar player for only-band-that-matters Titus Andronicus. After I'd gushed about the band on the way home from that Thanksgiving, my mom had asked me to bring her along the next time they played a show in NYC. That turned out to not be for a while, but as soon as I saw them on the market, I snapped up four tickets to their Northside show at Warsaw on Thursday. Eagulls was Titus' immediate opener, and they were just going on when Beau and my mom and dad and I had met up at the venue at 9 o'clock. The main dude was less drunk than when Nina and I saw them at CMJ, and Warsaw is a bigger, better fit for their pummeling sound. The bass-first way their songs are arranged, it's hard not to think of Joy Division, and George Mitchell has a queasy, Ian Curtis look to him, though his vocals are plaintive enough to veer into Robert Smith territory. I got Żywiecs for me and my dad and a coke for Beau. After Eagulls' set, the old folks (Jonah's mom Heather had arrived as well) went up to the balcony -- which I'd always thought was a VIP section -- and Nina and Beau and I got a couple of plates of pierogies in the merch area.
Titus Andronicus took the stage right as we finished eating, and we hurried to find our places in the crowd. They opened with Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, to the great excitement of the crowd. Patrick's voice sounded painfully husky, like it did when he was on the radio while he was working on Local Business. Maybe that's just what he sounds like when they've got an album in progress. And they played several songs from their promised double-CD rock opera, and they were all as fast and punchy as the best stuff on their last record. And there was plenty of conversation from the stage, starting with a characteristic (though undeniably correct) exhortation from Patrick to respect the bodies and physical space of our fellow audience members. When an obnoxious -- if exuberant -- crowd-surfer made it onto the stage and accidentally stepped on Julian's pedal board, Stax gave him a reprimand between songs. And he extended his opprobrium to include the slam-dancing multitudes in the pit. "I used to be like you," he said, on the topic of dancin' around and going up. But now, he warned further surfers seeking his recognition, "I don't admire it. I abhor it." (They were undeterred.) "Back when I lived in this neighborhood," he said, introducing In A Big City, "I used to dream of playing at this place. We opened a show here once" (I was there!) "but we were never the headliners. I don't live in Greenpoint any more. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens." He looked up from tuning his guitar. "Don't come to Ridgewood," he said.
The thing the blogs are talking about is that they played a full cover of Closing Time, which I guess they sometimes tease the crowd with during tuning breaks. But people were cheering and the tuning went on for a while, and before to long we were all, "I know who I want to take me home..." There was also a cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, dedicated to Patrick's mom, who was in the audience. They finished, as they often do, with all sixteen minutes of The Battle of Hampton Roads. He ended the set with a gathering, excruciating wall of noise created by his delay pedal. The end. After the show we waited outside the venue while Heather made the rounds of the green room. It had started to rain a little by the time she came out, and Jonah appeared a moment later, followed by P-Stax himself. I gushed and and thanked him and shook his hand, and so did Nina despite ostensibly being on his Twitter shit list. He hand-fed Jonah some chunks of a muffin he'd bought. A thing I've learned: If you stick with it long enough, you get to meet your idols. (And so does your mom.) He wandered off towards the deli. "I saw you," Jonah said. "You were up front the whole time." Isn't that what every fan wants to hear? I saw you, wild-eyed, balding, overdressed and sweaty, reaching for the peformers on the stage. That was me!
Monday, June 09, 2014
Buns Of Earth
I have joined an athletic organization! Once a week for the best several months, Jill and I and sometimes Ted and once even Katharine have been running the Prospect Park loop. Rewind: There's been a minor obsession within my little group of friends with the word "buns" ever since Greg stayed over at Lincoln Place for the marathon last November and muttered "ah, fudge my buns" over a frustrating loss at a game of Blokus. Everyone has been using it in different ways. Noun. Transitive verb. Intransitive verb. Depending on how you say it sounds either like a cutesy affectation or a poor translation of much rougher language, like how the Spanish is written in For Whom The Bell Tolls. It's glossolalia, a sound that infects your mind and sounds better the more you say it, hare hare krishna.
At any rate, our club is called "Runs Buns."
Nina has asked to designate a day of the week on my calendar in which I don't say "buns" to her. I don't know which day that will be. Maybe Sunday, because Saturday is when we've been going running.
Nina and I went to that part of Williamsburg right under the Williamsburg Bridge on Saturday to catch Shilpa Ray at Baby's All Right. A lot of apartment complexes with real small windows and bars across them on every story. I'd never been to Baby's before. It's kind of like a glammed-up Maxwell's: A restaurant in the front and a performance space in the back, which has a kind old New York ballroom feel to it, along with a fancy lighting installation on the wall behind the stage that enables complex and dazzling effects. Triptides was on stage when we got there. We listened to a few songs and then decided we'd rather get something to eat. The food at that place is funny: luxury bar food. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with bean sprouts in it.
Perfect timing: Shilpa Ray was getting set up on stage by the time we paid up and went back to the back room. "Somebody get me some fuckin' booze!" she yelled, laughing a moment later, maybe taken aback at the vehemence of her own demand. Or I don't know, I've never had a conversation with her. But somebody hastily complied. She's got what looks like another full turnover of her band. She didn't introduce them this time, I don't think, no Happy Hookers or Good-luck Girls they. But she played a great set as always, laded with songs from her not-quite-released (?) EP. It's less, uh, punk and screamy, I guess, which, I won't lie, is counter to my preference (and she's so good at it) but the sour, sad hooks still really get into your brain and stay there. Stand-out songs for me: "Posted By Anonymous," "Nocturnal Emissions" (I helped crowd-fund the video!) and "Lessons From Lorena." The guy in the booth put some pretty boss dynamics on the lighting. And of course she played "Erotolepsy" at the end. I found out the next day on Brooklyn Vegan that she'd somehow lost her boots between finishing her set and packing up for the night.
In the middle of the night after we got home, Nina got sick to her stomach off something. The next night I woke up sweating and nauseated, a feeling that intensified when I went to the bathroom to piss. I had to abort mid-stream or else I was pretty sure I'd puke. I sat on the edge of the bed in the blue morning dark, holding my head in my hands and surveying the northern face of President St. across the Yuppy Puppy's courtyard. A day or so after that, Kitty went on a tear of throwing up and doing diarrhea, spitting up slimy pools of watery stuff all over the kitchen floor. She stopped eating and drinking water, too, except when coaxed with a teaspoon, and she looked deflated and generally miserable. At Nina's urging I took her back to Animal Kind on Thursday morning, where they x-rayed and squeezed her in strategic places, tentatively diagnosing her with pancreatitis and sending me home with a half dozen syringes of oral-suspension cat opioids that I'm supposed to squirt under her tongue. We've been feeding her Gerber 2nd Foods, which are these, like, meat purées that you give kids that can't quite chew flank steak yet: Chicken in Gravy; Turkey in Gravy; Ham in Ham Gravy. We feed them to her with a spoon, and she seems pretty psyched about the whole process, but they've gotta be a temporary food, since they don't have any taurine and they've got a bit too much protein for her kidneys.
We decided to give ourselves a night off from waving pureed ham in front of Kitty's face on Wednesday to see Janelle Monáe at Celebrate Brooklyn with Eve. We set out for the Park a little late, and when we saw a steady flow of people heading north on Prospect Park West, it looked like we'd missed the main event. I thought maybe we should turn around, but Eve wanted to check out what was left (and maybe fall back to The Owl Farm if necessary), so we entered the Park at 3rd St. and climbed over the tree-rooted dirt hill by that tucked-away playground (abandoned at this hour), emerging onto the western drive. It turned out the departing multitudes must have despaired at gaining entry to the fenced-in area directly in front of the bandshell -- where, apparently, DiBlasio & Family were seated -- but the show was definitely still going on.
We were way in the back outside the fence, but we could see some of the action on the stage. Janelle Monáe was wearing a blinding white suit and kind of pirouetting across the stage. Too far away to see her spaceman hair-do. We got there in time to see the last half hour of her set; or maybe it was just a crazy long encore. The songs weren't familiar to me, but they had spirit and playfulness, and man can she sing; that bright soprano voice! And she (or her lead guitar player, too hard to tell from where we were) can shred, too. Even now that I'm a bit older and the idea of paying a little money to get a seat at these things no longer seems totally unreasonable -- or even like something you should do if you can to keep the whole thing going -- I like doing summer business this way. To me, that is sort of the essence of these events. You huddle at the periphery, with your moveable feast (flask, loosie) and crane your neck to see what all the fuss is about.
At any rate, our club is called "Runs Buns."
Nina has asked to designate a day of the week on my calendar in which I don't say "buns" to her. I don't know which day that will be. Maybe Sunday, because Saturday is when we've been going running.
Nina and I went to that part of Williamsburg right under the Williamsburg Bridge on Saturday to catch Shilpa Ray at Baby's All Right. A lot of apartment complexes with real small windows and bars across them on every story. I'd never been to Baby's before. It's kind of like a glammed-up Maxwell's: A restaurant in the front and a performance space in the back, which has a kind old New York ballroom feel to it, along with a fancy lighting installation on the wall behind the stage that enables complex and dazzling effects. Triptides was on stage when we got there. We listened to a few songs and then decided we'd rather get something to eat. The food at that place is funny: luxury bar food. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with bean sprouts in it.
Perfect timing: Shilpa Ray was getting set up on stage by the time we paid up and went back to the back room. "Somebody get me some fuckin' booze!" she yelled, laughing a moment later, maybe taken aback at the vehemence of her own demand. Or I don't know, I've never had a conversation with her. But somebody hastily complied. She's got what looks like another full turnover of her band. She didn't introduce them this time, I don't think, no Happy Hookers or Good-luck Girls they. But she played a great set as always, laded with songs from her not-quite-released (?) EP. It's less, uh, punk and screamy, I guess, which, I won't lie, is counter to my preference (and she's so good at it) but the sour, sad hooks still really get into your brain and stay there. Stand-out songs for me: "Posted By Anonymous," "Nocturnal Emissions" (I helped crowd-fund the video!) and "Lessons From Lorena." The guy in the booth put some pretty boss dynamics on the lighting. And of course she played "Erotolepsy" at the end. I found out the next day on Brooklyn Vegan that she'd somehow lost her boots between finishing her set and packing up for the night.
In the middle of the night after we got home, Nina got sick to her stomach off something. The next night I woke up sweating and nauseated, a feeling that intensified when I went to the bathroom to piss. I had to abort mid-stream or else I was pretty sure I'd puke. I sat on the edge of the bed in the blue morning dark, holding my head in my hands and surveying the northern face of President St. across the Yuppy Puppy's courtyard. A day or so after that, Kitty went on a tear of throwing up and doing diarrhea, spitting up slimy pools of watery stuff all over the kitchen floor. She stopped eating and drinking water, too, except when coaxed with a teaspoon, and she looked deflated and generally miserable. At Nina's urging I took her back to Animal Kind on Thursday morning, where they x-rayed and squeezed her in strategic places, tentatively diagnosing her with pancreatitis and sending me home with a half dozen syringes of oral-suspension cat opioids that I'm supposed to squirt under her tongue. We've been feeding her Gerber 2nd Foods, which are these, like, meat purées that you give kids that can't quite chew flank steak yet: Chicken in Gravy; Turkey in Gravy; Ham in Ham Gravy. We feed them to her with a spoon, and she seems pretty psyched about the whole process, but they've gotta be a temporary food, since they don't have any taurine and they've got a bit too much protein for her kidneys.
We decided to give ourselves a night off from waving pureed ham in front of Kitty's face on Wednesday to see Janelle Monáe at Celebrate Brooklyn with Eve. We set out for the Park a little late, and when we saw a steady flow of people heading north on Prospect Park West, it looked like we'd missed the main event. I thought maybe we should turn around, but Eve wanted to check out what was left (and maybe fall back to The Owl Farm if necessary), so we entered the Park at 3rd St. and climbed over the tree-rooted dirt hill by that tucked-away playground (abandoned at this hour), emerging onto the western drive. It turned out the departing multitudes must have despaired at gaining entry to the fenced-in area directly in front of the bandshell -- where, apparently, DiBlasio & Family were seated -- but the show was definitely still going on.
We were way in the back outside the fence, but we could see some of the action on the stage. Janelle Monáe was wearing a blinding white suit and kind of pirouetting across the stage. Too far away to see her spaceman hair-do. We got there in time to see the last half hour of her set; or maybe it was just a crazy long encore. The songs weren't familiar to me, but they had spirit and playfulness, and man can she sing; that bright soprano voice! And she (or her lead guitar player, too hard to tell from where we were) can shred, too. Even now that I'm a bit older and the idea of paying a little money to get a seat at these things no longer seems totally unreasonable -- or even like something you should do if you can to keep the whole thing going -- I like doing summer business this way. To me, that is sort of the essence of these events. You huddle at the periphery, with your moveable feast (flask, loosie) and crane your neck to see what all the fuss is about.
Monday, May 05, 2014
That Ain't A Skyline It's A Cemetery
I am trying to get ready for calendar season. We went to a Sunday night "tooth fairy" benefit show at Shea Stadium. They were raising money for somebody to get dental work done, I guess? I was there for The So So Glos, and to show myself that going out a Sunday night is still okay.
The first band was called Krill, which is a pretty funny name for a bunch of delicate-looking young white dudes. Name notwithstanding, they were pretty good -- yelped, plaintive singing over trebly guitar -- although they committed the venial sin of not introducing or outtroducing themselves. They didn't say much of anything at all, in fact.
Juan Waters was up next. He's small; got a neat haircut, dresses conservatively in a collared shirt and sweater. Behind him, someone had erected a kind of stand-up canvas painting of a luchador that had fairy lights exed across it, and fairy lights spelling out "N. A. P.," which, I think, now that I look it up on the Internet, stands for North American Poetry, the name of his new album. The lights flashed in time to his strumming. There was also a caged utility light attached to a stand in front of him and angled up at his chin as he perched on a stool, giving him the appearance of a camp counselor at a campfire. Aside from that, the stage was dark, and he was the only performer. His songs are on the long side, and his vocals are a mix of talk-singing and his earnest -- if not always pitch-perfect -- tenor. The songs are up-tempo but also sad and meditative. He's a bit snaggle-toothed, such that his face has a mournful caste. "It's a shame," he sang, toward the end of his set, "that everybody wants to look the same."
In between sets, Patrick Stickles was DJing, looking gaunt, not quite clean-shaven but not quite William Tecumseh Sherman, either. He played some Clash, I think, and a song off the forthcoming Titus Andronicus album. Later, he took the microphone and came down from the engineering booth, soliloquizing as he walked around the half-empty room. "I moved to this city to follow my dreams of becoming a rock star," he said to no one in particular. "But now that I'm here, nothing is real and everything is bullshit." I agree. It's worth saying. Eric Harm was working the bar. Nina and I stepped outside for some air. It smelled sweet on the balcony, whiffs of maple syrup drifting from the north or maybe from Newtown Creek to the east. We watched the bouncers frisking people outside the shitty club right across the street. There's a furniture store next door to the club, and sometimes some old guys that work there sit in front of it and talk. Sometimes they start a little fire in an oil drum and cook things on it. No one was there that night.
The So So Glos took the stage a bit after 11. Adam Reich was subbing in for Elkin, who was absent from the lineup. I'd wanted to watch them, but I was pooped and apprehensive about getting to work on time the next morning, so we only stayed for a couple of songs. "It's up to all of us to keep this place safe," Alex Levine said as the band was tuning up, explaining that people live and work at the Stadium. "This is a fragile thing. It's a..." They launched into "House of Glass." They sounded great, as usual. We discarded our beer cans, did bathroom. They started to play "Diss Town," one of my "best faves" from Blowout, but it was bed time, and I wrenched myself away. Stax was pacing in the stairwell as we left. "Good night," I said. He looked understandably confused.
Kitty update.
When Mer and I adopted Kitty back in 2003 (?), we were the first people we knew to adopt a pet, and, believe it or not, it felt kind of bold -- maybe even transgressive -- to make a fifteen year (median) commitment to a five-year-old cat with a scabby tummy and a dirty bottom. Kitty was a conversation piece, especially when she'd eat a cockroach or throw up mouse parts into the Elizabethan collar we were making her wear for some reason or another. But so is Prez, now, and Bug, and Sam and Sasha. Everybody has a cat. What are the accessories and events that provide real emphasis to the hours of our lives? People get married and have babies. People get new jobs or phones. I bought a new laptop that inexplicably has a touchscreen.
So what of Kitty? The Rase sometimes emails to make sure Kitty's not dead. She's not dead. But she's visibly old. She smells more like the litter box more often, and her meowing is louder and more frequent. I took her to Animal Kind, where they diagnosed her with hypertheroidism. Treating it will make her kidney disease worse. Otherwise, they said, she's in pretty good shape for a fifteen-year-old cat. Nina's begun a habituation regimen of picking her up, holding her 'til she reaches peak fussiness, then returning her to earth and rewarding her with a bit of dehydrated chicken treat. Me, I just superman her up and down the length of the apartment, which she tolerates surprisingly well. One day I'll probably have to have her put down. Right before that happens, though, we're going to feed her as much fish as she wants.
The first band was called Krill, which is a pretty funny name for a bunch of delicate-looking young white dudes. Name notwithstanding, they were pretty good -- yelped, plaintive singing over trebly guitar -- although they committed the venial sin of not introducing or outtroducing themselves. They didn't say much of anything at all, in fact.
Juan Waters was up next. He's small; got a neat haircut, dresses conservatively in a collared shirt and sweater. Behind him, someone had erected a kind of stand-up canvas painting of a luchador that had fairy lights exed across it, and fairy lights spelling out "N. A. P.," which, I think, now that I look it up on the Internet, stands for North American Poetry, the name of his new album. The lights flashed in time to his strumming. There was also a caged utility light attached to a stand in front of him and angled up at his chin as he perched on a stool, giving him the appearance of a camp counselor at a campfire. Aside from that, the stage was dark, and he was the only performer. His songs are on the long side, and his vocals are a mix of talk-singing and his earnest -- if not always pitch-perfect -- tenor. The songs are up-tempo but also sad and meditative. He's a bit snaggle-toothed, such that his face has a mournful caste. "It's a shame," he sang, toward the end of his set, "that everybody wants to look the same."
In between sets, Patrick Stickles was DJing, looking gaunt, not quite clean-shaven but not quite William Tecumseh Sherman, either. He played some Clash, I think, and a song off the forthcoming Titus Andronicus album. Later, he took the microphone and came down from the engineering booth, soliloquizing as he walked around the half-empty room. "I moved to this city to follow my dreams of becoming a rock star," he said to no one in particular. "But now that I'm here, nothing is real and everything is bullshit." I agree. It's worth saying. Eric Harm was working the bar. Nina and I stepped outside for some air. It smelled sweet on the balcony, whiffs of maple syrup drifting from the north or maybe from Newtown Creek to the east. We watched the bouncers frisking people outside the shitty club right across the street. There's a furniture store next door to the club, and sometimes some old guys that work there sit in front of it and talk. Sometimes they start a little fire in an oil drum and cook things on it. No one was there that night.
The So So Glos took the stage a bit after 11. Adam Reich was subbing in for Elkin, who was absent from the lineup. I'd wanted to watch them, but I was pooped and apprehensive about getting to work on time the next morning, so we only stayed for a couple of songs. "It's up to all of us to keep this place safe," Alex Levine said as the band was tuning up, explaining that people live and work at the Stadium. "This is a fragile thing. It's a..." They launched into "House of Glass." They sounded great, as usual. We discarded our beer cans, did bathroom. They started to play "Diss Town," one of my "best faves" from Blowout, but it was bed time, and I wrenched myself away. Stax was pacing in the stairwell as we left. "Good night," I said. He looked understandably confused.
Kitty update.
When Mer and I adopted Kitty back in 2003 (?), we were the first people we knew to adopt a pet, and, believe it or not, it felt kind of bold -- maybe even transgressive -- to make a fifteen year (median) commitment to a five-year-old cat with a scabby tummy and a dirty bottom. Kitty was a conversation piece, especially when she'd eat a cockroach or throw up mouse parts into the Elizabethan collar we were making her wear for some reason or another. But so is Prez, now, and Bug, and Sam and Sasha. Everybody has a cat. What are the accessories and events that provide real emphasis to the hours of our lives? People get married and have babies. People get new jobs or phones. I bought a new laptop that inexplicably has a touchscreen.
So what of Kitty? The Rase sometimes emails to make sure Kitty's not dead. She's not dead. But she's visibly old. She smells more like the litter box more often, and her meowing is louder and more frequent. I took her to Animal Kind, where they diagnosed her with hypertheroidism. Treating it will make her kidney disease worse. Otherwise, they said, she's in pretty good shape for a fifteen-year-old cat. Nina's begun a habituation regimen of picking her up, holding her 'til she reaches peak fussiness, then returning her to earth and rewarding her with a bit of dehydrated chicken treat. Me, I just superman her up and down the length of the apartment, which she tolerates surprisingly well. One day I'll probably have to have her put down. Right before that happens, though, we're going to feed her as much fish as she wants.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
GNU Soap
LibrePlanet can be hit or miss. Last year's didn't make enough of an impression on me that I felt like online-journaling about it. Nonetheless, the appeal of eight-plus uninterrupted hours with an Emacs window and the gentle rattle of the Acela was more than enough reason to wake up at 5 AM on a Saturday and lurch my way to Penn Station, creaking and dyspeptic, to board a 7 AM train. Out the window the landscape looked dead and wet, like it'd been frozen in an ice sheet that had only just retreated. But I was in good spirits. I snuggled into my seat, hooked up all my electrical bits and put on that Titus Andronicus album about wanting to leave Boston. Almost immediately I fixed a bug in one of my programs that had been driving me crazy for two weeks. For once, the Acela Wi-Fi was fast and reliable. What a nice morning!
The tunnel connecting the railyards at South Station to the T lines was closed. Outside on the street it was cold and a bit rainy. The sky was steely gray. The conference was back at the Stata Center this year, a few blocks from the Kendall Square stop on the T. I've made this journey so many times in such a similar way on so little sleep that at this point that I get the solipsistic feeling that the tiny part of Boston I pass through is a small extension to the local geography of my life (subway, office, home, Brooklyn) or maybe like a folded-up dimension within my personal universe.
I said my yearly hello to Jeanne when I got to the Stata Center and ducked into a classroom in time to catch Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft, which included a fairly dour assessment of the state of GPL adoption. Non-copyleft permissive licenses are gaining ground, both because of political apathy on the part of software developers, he claimed, but also because of enthusiasm for technology that is already non-copyleft. As an example, he pointed out that Clang is rapidly displacing GCC. He spoke to the general culture of expediency concommitant with the boom in startups, and cited a representative quote from Tom Preston-Werner of Github about how the GPL is inconvenient compared to the Apache license. Kuhn suggested that you have to do whatever you can to destroy your political enemies, and so pointed out the despicable shit that guy pulled on Julie Ann Horvath. I agree. Fuck that guy. The talk left me feeling bummed out but agitated. What to do!
Next, I went to a panel called "Beyond the Women In Tech Talk," which was both about going beyond outreach to women to draw in people who belong to more and different groups under-represented in the Free Software movement, and about getting beyond the tone of the typical women-in-tech panel ("How can we be more welcoming? We're already being as welcoming as we can possibly be!"). The moderators were ginger coons, who edits and publishes Libre Graphics Magazine; Sara Hendren, who researches assistive technologies; Marina Zhurakhinskaya, who does community outreach for the GNOME Foundation; and Kÿra, whom I'd met when we were both tabling for the FSF at HOPE. They opened things up with a well-observed comment by Kÿra that the focus on inclusiveness and joining isn't necessarily constructive. Communities of historically oppressed people don't want to be swept up in a political movement that looks like a lot of straight white guys doing straight white guy behaviors. You gotta let the Queer South Indian Student Computing Group have its own meetings and leave 'em alone. This seemed like a difficult point for the white dudes in the room to grasp; there were some polite attempts to renegotiate the point. A few people got up and left. But another audience member made what I thought was a very good point, which was that people from ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds other than your own are not going to be like you. And if you want them to usefully contribute their labor to your project, she said, you need to spend time with them and actually get to know them. She wondered whether the average white cis male Free Software project developer is actually prepared to do this. I thought about it. I don't know! I'll admit it: It's difficult to get out there and understand people.
I ate lunch alone at Clover, a vegan food co-op that looks like an Apple Store and which has a few locations around Cambridge.
Eben Moglen gave the afternoon keynote. He was wearing an uncharacteristically bold suit and tie combo, and seemed to be feeling pretty good. He was anticipating a satisfactory ruling in an upcoming Supreme Court case, Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank. Like many of the other speakers, he made some observations about the rise of government surveillance, and how practically every mobile computing device can be subverted to spy on its user on behalf of state security agencies like the NSA. (At this, RMS piped up from the front row: "Perhaps we should make stickers that say 'Intel Inside.'") He ended with the somewhat perplexing assurance that "You have always had the finest legal representation in the world on the subjects of our mutual concern, and while I live, you always will." True, he's got a crack team, but they don't have a ton of competition doing what they do. Someone asked about the Freedom Box. Moglen estimated that the project had lost about a year's worth of progress because wildfires in Colorado had burned down the home of one of the lead engineers, taking some important prototypes and designs with it.
RMS was up next. "I'm a pessimist by nature," was the first thing he said. There were some knowing chuckles from the audience. "I've been expecting defeat since I started this movement in 1983. But surrender isn't an option, because that means immediate defeat. So the only thing I can do is fight." It was maybe the most inspiring thing I think I've ever heard him say. He went on to suggest that the Free Software folks had better get started preparing for an inevitable Political Action Committee assault in the event of a victory on patents; and to suggest that there should be laws preventing the sale of mobile computing devices that can't be jail-broken. "We used to think that people who were willing to make sacrifices for their freedom were heroes," he said as he was wrapping up. But now we're unwilling to sacrifice the smallest amount of comfort. "I don't know if I could sacrifice my life," he said. "But I can give up some convenience. Any adult can do that." He announced the Free Software awards: One to Matthew Garrett, for his work on implementing UEFI SecureBoot for Free operating systems; the other to the GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women. Garrett spoke movingly of his experience growing up in an isolated town in Northern Ireland and learning to write software by reading code off a burned CD of Free Software programs.
The "social event" for the evening was nearby, at The Asgard. Outside of a handful of staff and old-timers, I don't really know anybody at these events, so I had to pound a few beers before I felt comfortable talking to anybody. Deb paired me up with Alex Oliva, the head of the FSF Latin America, and I assaulted him with questions about GCC development and the difficulties of launching an activist group in a market saturated with activist groups. I spoke to Emily Lippold Cheney, who's interested in the intersection of Free Software and co-operatives of various kinds. I spent a good 45 minutes talking to a trio of developers from Tiki, who were not offended at all when I confused their project with TWiki. "Happens all the time," said the main dude. After that I lurched back to Kendall Sq. and my hotel room, singing songs to myself. I walked past Building 41, bits of large machines visible through its dirty windows. At the hotel, after changing into my jammies, I stood for a minute in the part of the room where the two floor-to-ceiling windows form a seamless corner. It felt a little like I was hovering over the muddy construction site below. (If I'd shelled out an extra hondo for a room on the other side of the building, it would have been the Charles River.) Then I called Nina and bellowed drunkenly at her for an hour, sprawled over the unnecessary upholstered couch next to the enormous bed. I slept fitfully, having dreams of missing trains and conference sessions.
I got up at 8:30 or so, washed and dressed while listening to MSNBC's coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, and then checked out of my room. When I got to the Stata Center, Jacob Applebaum was well into his morning keynote address, delivered via a gstreamer video feed from his base of operations in Berlin, where he remains in self-imposed exile. His talk focused naturally on the tactics of the surveillance state uncovered by Edward Snowden, and he made an argument for the importance of making anonymizing services and personal security software more usable for non-technical users. He showed off some of the aparatus that he uses to ensure his privacy (mostly network communication pipelines based on Tor) and described the acid test that he uses to decide whether he can trust a reporter (no NSA secrets for you if you can't figure out how to use GnuPG). He ended his talk with, "And I hope to meet some of you again someday in real life, but if not, remember... it was murder!" He hung up the video connection, but his face stayed frozen on the big projector screen in front of all of us.
I sat in on an assortment of talks for the rest of the day. The speakers were engaging. I liked hearing Máirín Duffy's explanation of how she redesigned GNU Mailman; Matthew Garrett described the architecture of SecureBoot and showed how secure firmware implementations conflate physical presence with ownership. Nothing really riled me up like the talks from the day before, but I got some good programming done. I had to leave in the middle of Karen Sandler's closing keynote, in which she stressed the importance of making Free Software ideals personal. "We can't all be cyborg lawyers," she said. (She is one.)
It was time to go. I took the T back to South Station and got myself onto the 6:40 train right as they were closing the doors. I found myself a seat in the quiet car. A woman got on at Providence and sat down next to me, fiddling with her phone. Out the window, the sun set, turning the western sky a bright pink color. I thought about getting the woman's attention so she could see it as well, but instead I just hunkered down with my devices and typed.
The tunnel connecting the railyards at South Station to the T lines was closed. Outside on the street it was cold and a bit rainy. The sky was steely gray. The conference was back at the Stata Center this year, a few blocks from the Kendall Square stop on the T. I've made this journey so many times in such a similar way on so little sleep that at this point that I get the solipsistic feeling that the tiny part of Boston I pass through is a small extension to the local geography of my life (subway, office, home, Brooklyn) or maybe like a folded-up dimension within my personal universe.
I said my yearly hello to Jeanne when I got to the Stata Center and ducked into a classroom in time to catch Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft, which included a fairly dour assessment of the state of GPL adoption. Non-copyleft permissive licenses are gaining ground, both because of political apathy on the part of software developers, he claimed, but also because of enthusiasm for technology that is already non-copyleft. As an example, he pointed out that Clang is rapidly displacing GCC. He spoke to the general culture of expediency concommitant with the boom in startups, and cited a representative quote from Tom Preston-Werner of Github about how the GPL is inconvenient compared to the Apache license. Kuhn suggested that you have to do whatever you can to destroy your political enemies, and so pointed out the despicable shit that guy pulled on Julie Ann Horvath. I agree. Fuck that guy. The talk left me feeling bummed out but agitated. What to do!
Next, I went to a panel called "Beyond the Women In Tech Talk," which was both about going beyond outreach to women to draw in people who belong to more and different groups under-represented in the Free Software movement, and about getting beyond the tone of the typical women-in-tech panel ("How can we be more welcoming? We're already being as welcoming as we can possibly be!"). The moderators were ginger coons, who edits and publishes Libre Graphics Magazine; Sara Hendren, who researches assistive technologies; Marina Zhurakhinskaya, who does community outreach for the GNOME Foundation; and Kÿra, whom I'd met when we were both tabling for the FSF at HOPE. They opened things up with a well-observed comment by Kÿra that the focus on inclusiveness and joining isn't necessarily constructive. Communities of historically oppressed people don't want to be swept up in a political movement that looks like a lot of straight white guys doing straight white guy behaviors. You gotta let the Queer South Indian Student Computing Group have its own meetings and leave 'em alone. This seemed like a difficult point for the white dudes in the room to grasp; there were some polite attempts to renegotiate the point. A few people got up and left. But another audience member made what I thought was a very good point, which was that people from ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds other than your own are not going to be like you. And if you want them to usefully contribute their labor to your project, she said, you need to spend time with them and actually get to know them. She wondered whether the average white cis male Free Software project developer is actually prepared to do this. I thought about it. I don't know! I'll admit it: It's difficult to get out there and understand people.
I ate lunch alone at Clover, a vegan food co-op that looks like an Apple Store and which has a few locations around Cambridge.
Eben Moglen gave the afternoon keynote. He was wearing an uncharacteristically bold suit and tie combo, and seemed to be feeling pretty good. He was anticipating a satisfactory ruling in an upcoming Supreme Court case, Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank. Like many of the other speakers, he made some observations about the rise of government surveillance, and how practically every mobile computing device can be subverted to spy on its user on behalf of state security agencies like the NSA. (At this, RMS piped up from the front row: "Perhaps we should make stickers that say 'Intel Inside.'") He ended with the somewhat perplexing assurance that "You have always had the finest legal representation in the world on the subjects of our mutual concern, and while I live, you always will." True, he's got a crack team, but they don't have a ton of competition doing what they do. Someone asked about the Freedom Box. Moglen estimated that the project had lost about a year's worth of progress because wildfires in Colorado had burned down the home of one of the lead engineers, taking some important prototypes and designs with it.
RMS was up next. "I'm a pessimist by nature," was the first thing he said. There were some knowing chuckles from the audience. "I've been expecting defeat since I started this movement in 1983. But surrender isn't an option, because that means immediate defeat. So the only thing I can do is fight." It was maybe the most inspiring thing I think I've ever heard him say. He went on to suggest that the Free Software folks had better get started preparing for an inevitable Political Action Committee assault in the event of a victory on patents; and to suggest that there should be laws preventing the sale of mobile computing devices that can't be jail-broken. "We used to think that people who were willing to make sacrifices for their freedom were heroes," he said as he was wrapping up. But now we're unwilling to sacrifice the smallest amount of comfort. "I don't know if I could sacrifice my life," he said. "But I can give up some convenience. Any adult can do that." He announced the Free Software awards: One to Matthew Garrett, for his work on implementing UEFI SecureBoot for Free operating systems; the other to the GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women. Garrett spoke movingly of his experience growing up in an isolated town in Northern Ireland and learning to write software by reading code off a burned CD of Free Software programs.
The "social event" for the evening was nearby, at The Asgard. Outside of a handful of staff and old-timers, I don't really know anybody at these events, so I had to pound a few beers before I felt comfortable talking to anybody. Deb paired me up with Alex Oliva, the head of the FSF Latin America, and I assaulted him with questions about GCC development and the difficulties of launching an activist group in a market saturated with activist groups. I spoke to Emily Lippold Cheney, who's interested in the intersection of Free Software and co-operatives of various kinds. I spent a good 45 minutes talking to a trio of developers from Tiki, who were not offended at all when I confused their project with TWiki. "Happens all the time," said the main dude. After that I lurched back to Kendall Sq. and my hotel room, singing songs to myself. I walked past Building 41, bits of large machines visible through its dirty windows. At the hotel, after changing into my jammies, I stood for a minute in the part of the room where the two floor-to-ceiling windows form a seamless corner. It felt a little like I was hovering over the muddy construction site below. (If I'd shelled out an extra hondo for a room on the other side of the building, it would have been the Charles River.) Then I called Nina and bellowed drunkenly at her for an hour, sprawled over the unnecessary upholstered couch next to the enormous bed. I slept fitfully, having dreams of missing trains and conference sessions.
I got up at 8:30 or so, washed and dressed while listening to MSNBC's coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, and then checked out of my room. When I got to the Stata Center, Jacob Applebaum was well into his morning keynote address, delivered via a gstreamer video feed from his base of operations in Berlin, where he remains in self-imposed exile. His talk focused naturally on the tactics of the surveillance state uncovered by Edward Snowden, and he made an argument for the importance of making anonymizing services and personal security software more usable for non-technical users. He showed off some of the aparatus that he uses to ensure his privacy (mostly network communication pipelines based on Tor) and described the acid test that he uses to decide whether he can trust a reporter (no NSA secrets for you if you can't figure out how to use GnuPG). He ended his talk with, "And I hope to meet some of you again someday in real life, but if not, remember... it was murder!" He hung up the video connection, but his face stayed frozen on the big projector screen in front of all of us.
I sat in on an assortment of talks for the rest of the day. The speakers were engaging. I liked hearing Máirín Duffy's explanation of how she redesigned GNU Mailman; Matthew Garrett described the architecture of SecureBoot and showed how secure firmware implementations conflate physical presence with ownership. Nothing really riled me up like the talks from the day before, but I got some good programming done. I had to leave in the middle of Karen Sandler's closing keynote, in which she stressed the importance of making Free Software ideals personal. "We can't all be cyborg lawyers," she said. (She is one.)
It was time to go. I took the T back to South Station and got myself onto the 6:40 train right as they were closing the doors. I found myself a seat in the quiet car. A woman got on at Providence and sat down next to me, fiddling with her phone. Out the window, the sun set, turning the western sky a bright pink color. I thought about getting the woman's attention so she could see it as well, but instead I just hunkered down with my devices and typed.
Monday, March 03, 2014
Hump!
My grandfather -- my mother's father -- passed away at the end of February. That's it for me: no more grandfathers. Nina and I flew out to San Francisco to help out with family things and to attend the funeral. I took Friday off work. On the plane, we played trivia with my sister on the little seatback computer, but then we just watched a lot of movies. Do the movie people know how much of their audience is using the movie to wait out something terrible? (Air travel; a visit with relatives; somebody dying) I watched This Is The End and laughed out loud at the part where Danny McBride yells that he's going to jizz everywhere. I also watched Hobbit! Part 2, which was a real snooze.
San Francisco is weird. Why do people want to live there? (I mean, I know why, but.) True, I guess I only visit in winter, when the city is damp and cold and the doorways and windows of the buildings are dark. But even in the summertime the place still has to seem a bit like a dingy bodega, dim around the edges like a David Fincher movie playing 24/7. It seems like a good place for hippies or junkies to run aground. So I guess I don't know what the draw is for young rich people. (I mean, I do.) I like riding the bus at night when we're there, though, because it's dirty and everybody on it looks like they're on the way to art school. Like being inside a Love and Rockets comic.
My mom and her brothers had arranged a little get-together and my grandparents' palatial apartment on Russian Hill overlooking the city. Like all old people, my grandparents have a piano and a bunch of dried plants and empty birdcages. We set out pretzels and things, and then I suggested that Nina and I go buy beers. It was a little weird, buying Pacifico for my family, but almost every adult likes beer and I wanted to get out of the house for a few minutes. It was easier after people started drinking. One of my uncles' ex-girlfriends talked to us about being a ham radio operator; his current girlfriend talked to us about being a park ranger in Yellowstone. My grandmother didn't seem to know who I was, but I didn't try very hard to make myself known to her, either. We left around 10 o'clock. It started raining hard on the way to Randy's house. We took the bus and then the muni and then Randy picked us up on Noriega St., pulling up alongside us in the dark on Noriega St. in his red Honda Civic or whatever it is.
The funeral was the next morning at the First Unitarian Church in Cathedral Hill. My mom and her brothers gave little speeches they'd prepared. My mom repeated his last words: "Take care, and have fun." My step-cousins from Mendocino spoke gratefully of how my grandfather had given a lot of his time to help them get into grad school, even though they weren't blood relatives. Some color on a guy I didn't know very well. Afterwards there was a small reception in an adjacent room. I stuffed my face with sandwiches and talked to some of my grandfather's co-workers from the engineering firm he founded. "The last time I saw him," one of them said, "was at the office Christmas party a few years ago. He wasn't working there any more but he wanted to stop by and say a few words to the company. He tried to tell them how important it was to support veterans returning from war and how important the VA system is, but his voice was so quiet that I don't think anyone could understand him." Another woman, upon hearing that I'm a professional computer guy, wanted to know what I thought of the wave of intense gentrification crashing against the Bay Area. (This was right around the time a protester had barfed on the Yahoo bus.) Did I support the behavior of these companies and their employees, she wanted to know. For the record, babies, I do not.
After the reception, Nina and I walked south down Franklin St. and eventually west to Mission Dolores Park. We stopped at a coffee shop in the Haight and drank cappucinos while leafing through a newspaper called Bay Woof, which was all about having a dog in San Francisco. Dog massage, dog therapists, dog psychics. Crazy! That evening, we had dinner with Randy and Danica at Pancho Villa in the Mission -- the only place in San Francisco where anyone seemed poor or unhappy -- and stood on line in front of the Roxie to see Hump!, the traveling amateur pornography film festival curated by Dan Savage. The performers are truly amateurs, and so there was a lot of process in place to protect their identities and privacy, and there's only one copy of each piece of footage. Dan Savage gave a somewhat sanctimonious explanation of what the theater staff would do to any cell phones they saw removed from their holsters. (They would take them away and break them!) Then they started the show. The movies with straight people were alright, I guess, but they were for the most part unimaginative and self-involved. I think my favorite short of the evening was "Tuff Titties," about a couple of auto mechanics that get it on in a junkyard, but it was pretty hard not to like the stop-motion animation short about centaur fucking, which was called "Mythical Proportions."
The movies were over at around midnight. We got back in the car and drove to San Mateo, where we got frozen yogurt from a flourescently lit place called Nubi in a mostly-shuttered strip mall. You squirt out the flavor you want from a row of casks and levers on the wall of the place, and then they put whatever toppings you want on it. We drove home and ate our froyos in front of the TV in Randy and Danica's apartment, watching Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I fell asleep for most of it, but I managed to keep my eyes open for the part where Pee-Wee meets Large Marge: "And when they finally pulled the driver's body from the twisted, burning wreck, it looked like... this!" I've been covering my eyes for that bit since I was little, but this time I looked. It's bad, but it's not that bad.
San Francisco is weird. Why do people want to live there? (I mean, I know why, but.) True, I guess I only visit in winter, when the city is damp and cold and the doorways and windows of the buildings are dark. But even in the summertime the place still has to seem a bit like a dingy bodega, dim around the edges like a David Fincher movie playing 24/7. It seems like a good place for hippies or junkies to run aground. So I guess I don't know what the draw is for young rich people. (I mean, I do.) I like riding the bus at night when we're there, though, because it's dirty and everybody on it looks like they're on the way to art school. Like being inside a Love and Rockets comic.
My mom and her brothers had arranged a little get-together and my grandparents' palatial apartment on Russian Hill overlooking the city. Like all old people, my grandparents have a piano and a bunch of dried plants and empty birdcages. We set out pretzels and things, and then I suggested that Nina and I go buy beers. It was a little weird, buying Pacifico for my family, but almost every adult likes beer and I wanted to get out of the house for a few minutes. It was easier after people started drinking. One of my uncles' ex-girlfriends talked to us about being a ham radio operator; his current girlfriend talked to us about being a park ranger in Yellowstone. My grandmother didn't seem to know who I was, but I didn't try very hard to make myself known to her, either. We left around 10 o'clock. It started raining hard on the way to Randy's house. We took the bus and then the muni and then Randy picked us up on Noriega St., pulling up alongside us in the dark on Noriega St. in his red Honda Civic or whatever it is.
The funeral was the next morning at the First Unitarian Church in Cathedral Hill. My mom and her brothers gave little speeches they'd prepared. My mom repeated his last words: "Take care, and have fun." My step-cousins from Mendocino spoke gratefully of how my grandfather had given a lot of his time to help them get into grad school, even though they weren't blood relatives. Some color on a guy I didn't know very well. Afterwards there was a small reception in an adjacent room. I stuffed my face with sandwiches and talked to some of my grandfather's co-workers from the engineering firm he founded. "The last time I saw him," one of them said, "was at the office Christmas party a few years ago. He wasn't working there any more but he wanted to stop by and say a few words to the company. He tried to tell them how important it was to support veterans returning from war and how important the VA system is, but his voice was so quiet that I don't think anyone could understand him." Another woman, upon hearing that I'm a professional computer guy, wanted to know what I thought of the wave of intense gentrification crashing against the Bay Area. (This was right around the time a protester had barfed on the Yahoo bus.) Did I support the behavior of these companies and their employees, she wanted to know. For the record, babies, I do not.
After the reception, Nina and I walked south down Franklin St. and eventually west to Mission Dolores Park. We stopped at a coffee shop in the Haight and drank cappucinos while leafing through a newspaper called Bay Woof, which was all about having a dog in San Francisco. Dog massage, dog therapists, dog psychics. Crazy! That evening, we had dinner with Randy and Danica at Pancho Villa in the Mission -- the only place in San Francisco where anyone seemed poor or unhappy -- and stood on line in front of the Roxie to see Hump!, the traveling amateur pornography film festival curated by Dan Savage. The performers are truly amateurs, and so there was a lot of process in place to protect their identities and privacy, and there's only one copy of each piece of footage. Dan Savage gave a somewhat sanctimonious explanation of what the theater staff would do to any cell phones they saw removed from their holsters. (They would take them away and break them!) Then they started the show. The movies with straight people were alright, I guess, but they were for the most part unimaginative and self-involved. I think my favorite short of the evening was "Tuff Titties," about a couple of auto mechanics that get it on in a junkyard, but it was pretty hard not to like the stop-motion animation short about centaur fucking, which was called "Mythical Proportions."
The movies were over at around midnight. We got back in the car and drove to San Mateo, where we got frozen yogurt from a flourescently lit place called Nubi in a mostly-shuttered strip mall. You squirt out the flavor you want from a row of casks and levers on the wall of the place, and then they put whatever toppings you want on it. We drove home and ate our froyos in front of the TV in Randy and Danica's apartment, watching Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I fell asleep for most of it, but I managed to keep my eyes open for the part where Pee-Wee meets Large Marge: "And when they finally pulled the driver's body from the twisted, burning wreck, it looked like... this!" I've been covering my eyes for that bit since I was little, but this time I looked. It's bad, but it's not that bad.
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