Best Of 2014

Best book I read: The Savage Detectives
Best book I turfed out on finishing: The Gulag Archipelago (at Volume 2)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Obvious Child
Best movie I saw not in a theater: The Host
Best album: Run the Jewels 2, Run the Jewels. But Lost In The Dream (The War On Drugs) was pretty good, too.
Best show I went to: Deltron at Celebrate Brooklyn, July 19th. Runner-up: Buzzcocks with Titus Andronicus at Webster Hall, Sept. 6th; observed through the dressing room window with Jo-Jo and Jo-Jo's mother.
Best veggie burger: Falafel burger, Thistle Hill Tavern
Best brunch: Nah, fuck brunch
Best podcast I was on: The Breakfast Quest
Best podcast I wasn't on: Welcome To Night Vale
Best nut: Cashew
Best worst movie: Foodfight!, possibly the only outright evil movie our team has ever watched. Runner up: The Vineyard
Best thorn in the side of clickbait capitalism: @SavedYouAClick
Best weird Twitter: @dogboner
Best Twitter: @RandyIsDaMan

We visited Emma and Jay on New Year's Eve. They'd made spaghetti and meatballs, and we sat for a while and watched Terry Crews and Ken Marino get drunk in Times Square before cutting the TV over to a movie, Roger Corman's Attack Of The Crab Monsters. The crab monsters took their sweet time making an appearance; most of the tension came from the love triangle between Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, and Russell Johnson ("Hank Chapman"). Pearl the ancient dog snored in her bed near the screen.

We didn't wait for the claws. We left Bridge St. at 11:30 and jumped on the train to Classon Ave. to check out the final blasting of the Pratt steam whistles, due at midnight sharp. Mr. Milster, the Chief Engineer at Pratt (guess he runs the physical plant) was blowing the whistles for the very last time. ...Which is what every blog and newspaper item had been saying for the past few weeks, and why we wanted to go, but we didn't really know what the whole thing was all about until we got round the corner of Willoughby and Grand and heard the first massive toots. The main event was through the gates and around the corner in a copse of trees outside the East Building, where a crowd had gathered around an array of steam whistles. We couldn't see or understand any of this at first, because of the volume of steam and noise. It's hard to describe the sound, but it was a bit like a barge horn: A basso-profundo hooooo at the resonant frequency of the human skull. Like the muezzin's adhan, it was hypnotic and pacific. So was the way the steam looked just as it emerged from the valves of the whistles. It looked like the edges of an egg frying in the air, dense, fluid, opaque. We stood in the warm-wet veil created by the steam, smelling that radiator-water smell of old iron pipes, certainly not a clean smell; corrupt in a physical, if not biological way. When we became aware of the mechanics of the scene, we saw that feeding the whistles was a large conduit pipe running along the ground to the wall of the East Building, where Conrad Milster was giving comments to the press and appreciative members of the community, periodically opening and closing a master valve with a lever. Nearby, there was a smaller-scale installation, a kind of miniature steam organ attached to a wood-and-plexiglass console with a piano keyboard that people were lining up to play.

We waited for the whistling to subside, but it was still going pretty strong around 1:00 AM, so we decided to make our way to the next party, at Nina's friend Diana's house on Berry St. in Williamsburg Prime, the heart of corruption and profligacy. Diana and her husband are successful graphic designers, and their ground floor brownstone apartment is furnished like a big game hunter's colonial-era trophy room. There was chocolate cake and fancy cured sausage and champagne. Shiny metallic balloons spelling out "2015" bobbed against the low ceilings. It was a combination New Year's / birthday party for Evan, and so I presented him the prize I'd been carrying with me all night, a handle of Widow Jane, which he promptly cracked open and poured into shots. "You were at Pratt?" he said, as we stood talking with Ray and Nini. "At Parsons, we used to call Pratt students ATMs, because it's so easy to get money out of them." I could swear I'd heard Randy say the same thing about Parsons students, but I kept my mouth shut. It was his birthday.

Last Chance To See

Holidays!

My sister and I cooked Thanksgiving for my parents. (Well, everything except the turkey, which my dad more or less handled himself. With a little help from this video.) Here's what we made:

• Roasted Brussels sprouts, David Chang-style
• Green beans with mushroom-Madeira sauce
• Pear brandy and walnut cranberry sauce

Nina's grandmother Ann passed away about a week after Thanksgiving. It was sad. She was a nice lady. The funeral was in Scranton, where she'd lived her whole life. I took the Martz bus from Port Authority on a Thursday night, stayed over through Friday, occupying her abandoned house with Nina and her family. The funeral was held at Our Lady of the Snows in downtown Scranton. Appropriate, since the town as freezing and blanketed in white. I'd never been to a Catholic service before; I had to sneak glances at the other mourners to see when to sit, when to stand, when to kneel. The doddering priest slobbered about Jesus, didn't say much about Nina's grandma in particular. We drove the coffin out to the Italian American cemetery, waited in the icy chapel until it was time to lower it into the ground. Nina and I returned to the city on Friday night to prepare for our holiday party, which had been too close to cancel. It felt strange, but there wasn't really anything else to be done in Pennsylvania, anyway. We got up early on Saturday, bought a Christmas tree from a sinewy Québécois woman outside the Key Food on 5th Ave., scrubbed the apartment, and laid out the truly overwhelming selection of cheese and nuts and cookies and chips that Nina'd gotten at Fairway. We gave the tree an initial dressing of lights and Garbage Pail Kids cards, the red "Christmas birds" -- and a new addition, rescued from the fake tree in Nana's dining room in Scranton: Alex the Owl, another fake bird in the shape of a tiny horned owl; but with his eyes glued on about a quarter inch too low, giving him a seriously derpy expression.

Our guests started to arrive at seven o'clock, and we put them to work at the craft table, a tradition from Tom and Colleen's annual party than Nina'd been eager to implement herself. KT brought a pouch of decorations from Michaels, which included googly eyes, pom-poms, shiny confetti (shapes: bible, dreidel, circle) and pipe cleaners. We supplied the glossy pages of The Economist, New York Magazine's grotesque "gifts issue," and, like, the Neiman Marcus Kids catalog. In return, our friends produced the following ornaments.

Skeleton Space Cat

Free Robert Blake

Jay's masterpiece; a kind of Sistine Chapel ceiling of dicks.

I saw The Dickies play a show at The Bowery Electric last weekend. Weird place: Narrow bar at street level, cavernous basement performance space. (And right next door to where I bought my first porno movie!) They were in the same configuration (I think) as when I saw them last year, though this show was filled to capacity. A much older crowd, too; maybe they wouldn't come out to Brooklyn. "It's great to see so many young faces in the crowd," said Leonard, kicking off his traditional five minutes of comedy. "All you forty-year-olds; you've got your whole lives ahead of you." There was a contingent of hecklers standing next to me, definitely older than forty. "Fuck you! Fuck you!" one guy kept hollering, like a boorish Yankees fan. "If I wanted to be bored, I'd'a stayed home! Fuck you!"

I'd yelled that and worse at them when I was twenty, and I sometimes wonder if the band thought it was part of the contract the same way I did at the time. Back when Bel Argosy was still a thing, I think we were flattered when people threw empty cups at us (that one time) but I would've been hurt if teenagers had yelled to us that we were too old. The set list had some good stuff on it, even if it wasn't anything I hadn't heard: They opened with "Silent Night, Holy Night," Leonard in a Santa hat -- one of many props he'd exchange with a patient producer in the sound booth. They played "Welcome To The Diamond Mine," which I think only I danced to. I tried to sing along to "I'm OK, You're OK," but they've changed the lyrics again, and I have no idea what it's about any more. They played "Manny, Moe & Jack," and ended the song with a decisive down-stroked chord instead of the final "...Jack." The crowd applauded, the band turned away to tune their instruments. A good ten seconds passed. Leonard took a swig of water from his Poland Spring bottle, stuck his finger in his ear, and sang the final note on pitch.

Christmas interlude. Caroline and I cooked again. This time we made the four dishes I'd made at the South Indian class I'd taken at Brooklyn Kitchen:

• Potato carrot (spinach) sambar
• Coconut cucumber raita
• Green beans palya
• Lemon peanut dill rice

My sister made two pies -- cranberry sage and rosemary shoo-fly -- from the Four & Twenty Blackbirds cookbook, which she's been baking her way through. They were both amazing. She makes the dough and weaves lattices herself, something I have never had the patience to do.

Nina and I went out on Sunday to see Bass Drum of Death at Glasslands, one of the last shows before the venue closes. Much has been made of the disappearance of so-called DIY spaces in North Brooklyn this year: 285 Kent, Death By Audio, Goodbye Blue Monday. A real bad thing, for sure. And crazy that so many of those think pieces attempt to re-assure the reader that the closures are No Big Deal. But it's interesting to see in the semi-mourning for all of these lost places the gloss applied to the term "DIY." It doesn't mean there was no money involved -- there's always money, even at the Market Hotel. Doesn't it really mean, We don't know what we're doing yet; we don't have any partners to show us the way? We're writing the book as we go. But no one's gonna call the next place that Haykal and Rosenthal open DIY. Furthermore, isn't there something in VICE's takeover of Kent Ave. akin to Caesar's return to Rome? No excuses for them, but everyone should'a seen it coming. "So where's the Underground?" I asked Nina as we stood up on the balcony watching the last of the opening acts, Mitski. A last tuft of the "burning cloud" sculpture that used to hang above the stage dangled from a wire above the sound booth. "There isn't one," she said. "And you wouldn't like it, anyway." The band was performing a song with the refrain, "I don't care about your fucking money!" It ended with three or four unrestrained, full-throated screams from the lead singer. A thread ran in my brain for the rest of the evening contemplating the idea of starting a zine to curate and distribute the kind of non-artisanal dirtbag outsider art materiel that's being wiped out in New York City. Like a Maximum Rocknroll for the 21st century. I even came up with a name for it: True Weirdo. I think it's a cool name. But it's probably impossible to do, and I might be -- might be -- too old, anyway.

Bass Drum of Death, though: They were very good, even if not every song is as interesting as their singles. At their worst they sound a lot like The White Stripes, which is to say, still pretty good. At their best, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Jay Reatard. Vocals reverbed to hell, unpredictable but catchy lead guitar riffs on top of more and more guitar. The comparison is aided by the hairdos, huge swaying yellow-brown mops that completely obscure their faces. I'm going to miss Glasslands. It's a beautiful place. We spent some minutes after the show staring into an installation they'd put up recently -- since the last time I'd been there: A clever combination of blinking LEDs, mirrors, and one-way glass in elegant black frames to create an impression of an infinite starry corridor.

Horses

Nina and Eve go driving some Sundays, partly to keep their skills sharp and partly to learn about the mysterious parts of the city that are accessible only by car. This most recent Sunday I took them up on an invitation to ride along, and we drove out to Floyd Bennett Field. Which is to say that they drove, alternating in the driver's seat, while I sat in the back and munched on pastry. It was a cold, gray afternoon. We put Neon Bible on the stereo, and I sat in the back, watching us pass through Kensington and Marine Park, trying not to be boorish and sing out loud along to the record. There's a great black wave in the middle of the sea. Floyd Bennett Field is a former municipal airport that's been turned into a kind recreational area. It's got "nature walks" and a climbing wall and an ice skating rink and even a petting zoo. When we arrived, I got into the driver's seat and drove around the parking lot, a couple of times, haltingly. (I've recently re-obtained my Learner's Permit, having let it lapse in a fit of despair about five years ago.) We ducked inside the hangar, now converted to a kind of neutered, family-friendly video arcade, to use the bathroom, then struck out across the tarmac for the wilderness. The runways are cracked and faded, but you can still see the markings that indicate the landing zone for, say, a helicopter; standing inside it makes the airfield seem even bigger, even emptier. We took one of the hiking trails on the far side of the airfield that lead into what the National Park Service map calls the "Natural Area," a kind of ramble of small trees, thorn bushes, and tall grass that's taken back the northwestern side of the facility.

At first the paths were obvious, dusted with sand and bordered by shrubs and berry bushes offering pale and inedible little berries. The kinds that birds eat or that maybe nothing eats at all. The further we went, though, the thornier and more overgrown the trail became. We saw several buildings and large machines covered over with creeping vines and in some cases with trees growing up through them, despite printed signs insisting that the buildings were still in use and alarmed. We talked about The Magicians trilogy, which Eve and I had just finished, and whether Quentin Coldwater's emotional journey is plausible or resonant. (I say it's not.) At length we emerged into a clearing near the banks of the Mill Basin Inlet and dominated by the skeleton of some kind of warehouse or other functional structure, now overtaken by weeds and graffiti -- the ubiquitous "KUMA" in big, elegant letters on the north-facing side. Peeking inside, I saw drifts of empty aerosols and bottles and takeout containers, and I got the prickly feeling that this might be a place someone would go to get away from the world, and that they might not want visitors. I suggested that to Eve and Nina, but they pooh-poohed the idea and went poking around inside while I stood on the rocks looking out across Island Channel. They were right, I was wrong; the place was deserted. We followed the shore as it curved around to the south and came upon a rocky, trash-covered beach. A guy with some kind of fishing apparatus was picking through a net he'd cast. He looked like he had a very practical interest in the area. He wasn't there to paint or hide out.

As we re-emerged onto the airfield, we came upon a group of middle aged men in heavy coats flying and observing a set of expensive-looking remote-controlled model airplanes. Model planes swooping, carefully landing; Old Dudes impassive with their hands in the pockets of their parkas. Obviously a dad activity, and one apparently with some real precedent: A wooden shed, open to the elements but wired for electricity and phones, displayed a wall full of plaques and crusty laminated photographs of Old Dudes through the decades with their model planes. We watched for a few minutes and then walked back west towards the parking lot.

A pair of newlyweds (or soon-to-be-newlyweds) were taking a photo out on the runway as we neared the hangar. The cold and the wind were fierce, whipping the bride's train like a flag. We got back in the car and drove out to Brighton Beach to buy groceries, picking up a few tubs of eggplant hye from Elza Fancy Foods, and some frozen pierogies (mushroom, cherry) and charcuterie from the Russian grocery around the corner. We passed by the proctology clinic with the distinctive signage; we passed the stretch of Brighton 4th St. with the tiny houses sprouting like cabbages on a tiny grid within the block. It was very dark by the time we were done. Nina drove us back on Ocean Parkway like a total champ, Ben Folds' frustratingly ironic cover of Bitches Ain't Shit playing off an ancient mix CD on the car stereo.

My parents euthanized Ivy, the cat the family adopted after Josephine died and I left for college. She was old (though not as old as Kitty) and had bad teeth, and once they fixed her teeth, she'd stopped eating, probably because of a growth or a blockage in her intestines. My parents had brought her to the St. Marks Veterinary Hospital on 9th St. and 1st Ave., which is where they always bring their animals when they're in trouble. It was a freezing night. I stopped there on my way home from work, and joined them in a tiny exam room. Ivy looked like a sick kitty; bony, weak. My parents talked to the vet about all the things they'd tried to do to get her to eat. The vet agreed that they'd done everything a good pet owner would have done; she gave them permission to put the cat to sleep, which is what they were asking for, in so many words. She gave Ivy the first injection, which, after about a minute, caused her to just sort of keel over. I sat on a metal chair with my jacket and hat on and peered into the cat's unseeing face. "Their eyes stay open," said the vet. "It's not how it looks in the movies." Then she administered the second shot, and Ivy stopped breathing. My sister cried and said that Ivy was "a baby angel," which was sad and funny at the same time.

After leaving the vet, I went to Ted's huge condo on Dean St. to watch I Know Who Killed Me, which was insane; like a fever dream.

Nina and Caitlin and I went out to Kensington Stables on Sunday to ride some horses through Prospect Park. First we had brunch at the Thistle Hill Tavern (close to my old apartment on 12th St. and former home of the second location of The Olive Vine) which was very good and in which none of Fat Mike's influence could be detected. (Certainly not in the house playlist. But maybe the dude really likes "falafel burgers?") We walked around the perimeter of the Park to Caton Pl. where the stables shared a corner at E 8th St. with Calvary Cathedral. Some teenage girls were using a hose to bathe a shaggy brown pony on the sidewalk.

Caitlin announced herself as an experienced rider, and was promptly assigned a large brown horse named Bingo. "You'll be riding Emma," the trainer told Nina. A guy and a girl who'd walked in at the same time as us were assigned horses named Cody and Tinkerbell, respectively. "And you'll be riding Dakota," the trainer told me. (Dakota! Like Dakota Moss from I Know Who Killed Me!") Emma turned out to be a enormous white mare with a sleepy demeanor who stood patiently in the middle of the street while Nina climbed onto her back, using a plastic mounting block to boost herself up. Nina sat in the saddle, taking instructions from the trainer on how to hold the reins and control Emma's speed. Emma closed her eyes, fanning her long eyelashes. Dakota turned out to be a stallion, not quite as big as the other horses, I thought, but still the size of a freight train. I couldn't see how I'd be able to get a leg up over him, but I put my foot in the stirrup and just kind of clambered up. it's a testament to their training, I guess, that they just stand there and let you push and pull them.

"I'd forgotten how weird horse people are," whispered Caitlin, as the procession of riders and horses with ridiculous names filed past us.

Walker, the head trainer, mounted the "boss" horse, a huge coffee-colored stallion named Spider, and led our party in a single-file line around the corner and down E 8th St. onto Ocean Parkway. The horses moved slowly, almost comically so. Dakota and I were behind Tinkerbell, who had a loose shoe that clanked every time she took a step. Brian, the other trainer (I think that was his name; he looked like a "Brian") riding a horse whose name I didn't catch, brought up the rear. He kept giving me pointers on how to handle Dakota and keep him out of trouble, but Dakota seemed like he had no intention to misbehave. He was the best-behaved of all the horses. "Press in with your left leg and tug the reins to the right," called Brian. "He's going to want to eat those bushes." (He didn't.) We crossed the intersection at East and West Drive and entered the park, where we crossed West Drive at the southern end of the lake and walked up the western side of the park in the muddy ravine next to the road. We turned the horses right at Well House Drive and made a slow loop of the southern interior.

The whole time, the horses moved slowly, obediantly. A loose nail in one of Tinkerbell's shoes clinked with each step. Occasionally a horse would stop to pee or take a shit, their tails shifting to reveal their enormous, dark-hued orifices; and every horse behind would stop politely and wait for it to be over before clomping forward. It was good of them to do that, because I felt very little control otherwise and would have been powerless to prevent a horse pile-up, which the trainers were anxious to avoid. ("Dakota shouldn't get too close to Tinkerbell!" called Brian.) We'd only been riding for about an hour, but the effort of sitting straight in the saddle and the continuous, low-grade impacts on my lower parts made my body feel not good. Nina was unaffected. I loped and limped with her back through Prospect Park, anticipating a painful morning.

Mustache Frog

Apple picking, right at the end of all autumn things. Jerry borrowed her dad's car, and we met her outside the Saint George ferry terminal after crossing the Upper Bay on the 11 AM ferry from Whitehall Street. I hadn't ridden it in quite some time, and was surprised at how comfortable the experience was. I bought a coffee and sipped it as we stood in the bow (stern? It's double-ended) and watched Staten Island approach over the horizon. Hanlon reminded me that I used to watch Count Duckula when I was little and how weird that show was. (Why was his governess so big?) The ferry off-ramps get kind of winched down by a guy in a cherry-picker, and the flexible fringe that helps them connect with the ferry looks like claws.

In the car, we talked about #GermerGoat, regrettably. The whole thing is reprehensible, but the part of it that I find truly disheartening is the hurry of the basement-dwellers to defend an industry status quo that serves them dubiously if at all, and which facilitates their participation in its "culture" in the most passive, disempowered way possible. Naomi Clark describes it shrewdly (as always) as a movement of consumer-monarchists. As someone else once put it, don't wait around for them to come and shake hands; they're not going to be waiting for you.

Our destination was Riamede Farms in Chester, New Jersey. We bought cider donuts and ate them while dodging yellowjackets. (They can sting over and over again, guys!) Much of the orchard had been picked clean at this point in the year, leaving mainly the less desirable apple variants -- I'm looking at you, Red Delicious -- but we were still able to retrieve a good selection of matte-finish red-and-green bakin' apples. We spent some time nosing around the gourd patch as well, and stalked the rows of two-for-a-dollar decorative corn. Jill came away with an enormous, dripping sunflower which promptly wilted. I cradled it in the hay ride to the parking lot. On our way back to Brooklyn we stopped briefly outside the home of Jill's father, the elusive Fadoo, to return the car. He waved from a balcony, cautiously. I love being a passenger in the car so much that I'd almost rather not go anywhere. When I'm in the car I can sleep, I can yell, I can eat things. Full-on toddler mode. I used my half of our eight-pound haul to make a pie with cardamom and crystallized ginger. It didn't reach the level of spicy transcendence I was aiming for (maybe because i didn't include the cookie-cutter Cars shapes) but it was very good.

I used the gift certificate for The Brooklyn Kitchen that Nina'd bought me on a South Indian cooking class that we both attended on Wednesday. The venue was solidly North Brooklyn: A nothing-to-see-here warehouse exterior piled to the rafters inside with stainless steel gear that even ballers like me can't afford. The class was in the back of the shop, in a large room decorated with obvious care to look industrial. Metal lockers, concrete floor. We sat with the other students at two wooden tables abutting a slate counter that ran the length of the room and was laded with dishes in various states of prep. Our table-mates were two Australian UNICEF staff members who sparred with each other in an obnoxiously cheerful, alienating way. ("Mick's our Polio man!") The instructor was a young woman who was working on a cookbook detailing the South Indian recipes of her Jersey girlhood. She laughed nervously and often. The class was focused more on ingredients and procedure than on practicum, in particular on the use of sambar powder and on another spice mixture that included asafoetida, black mustard seeds, curry leaves, and red chilis. Asafoetida, hing asafoetida, is very pungent, but in a savory, clearly edible mode. I really liked it, and when I dumped a whole ramekin of it into our butane tabletop skillet, to the horror of the Australians, it was only partly an accident. We ended up cooking four / sampling four dishes, all flavored with the same mixture of spices, but all of which came out tasting unique.

Nina and I saw Screaming Females play to a packed house at Knitting Factory. It was the first time I'd ever seen them. Despite the band's name, Marissa Paternoster doesn't exactly scream; she roars, more like, which makes it a surprise to hear her soft, friendly speaking voice between songs. And while I wouldn't describe their songs as catchy, holy shit can she ever shred. At the end of their set, she climbed up on one of the speaker cabinets at the back of the stage and crouched, cat-like, her fingers intent on the fretboard, a rapid succession of unearthly sounds issuing from her amp. They didn't play an encore.

I dressed up for Halloween for the first time in many years. I met up with Nina at Abracadabra, which transforms on October 30th from an expensive warehouse of white-elephant "B" movie props to a cheek-to-jowl disaster survival sale, a supermarket with no loaves of bread left on the shelf. We had to wait on line to get in. The floor staff was in full costume, either to demo the merchandise or just get the holiday started early. An androgynous Thing One and Thing Two were helping people try out makeup. Nina was able to find a few components of her desired look -- Nyan Cat, a Popular Internet Thing -- but it wasn't until we got on line to pay that I found a costume that spoke to me: A gruesomely lopsided frog's head bonnet and gloves in a bag marked simply "Frog Costume." Wall eyes; inconsistent stuffing. I snagged a clip-on mustache near the register to complete the look. Mustache frog, I thought. Mustache frog. We went to a Halloween party in Windsor Terrace at the house of a friend of Jill's, where they ferried us a key by way of a stuffed manatee dropped out the window. Hanlon promptly dismantled my costume and self esteem. "Oh," he said. "You're Frog Suit Mario. From the video game. Because you're a gamer." Of course, I thought. How could I have been so blind? I gorged myself on Twix.

We had two friends running in the marathon this year: Beau and Caitlin. We woke up early to watch the proceedings on TV from Katharine and Tom's luxe condo in the sky -- silly, maybe, because they live right off 4th Ave., but convenient because we could track our runners electronically from indoors and then once they were within 10 minutes of us run outside to the bitter cold to cheer them on. Nina made a reversible sign: Go Caitlin; Go Beau! We met up with Caitlin at Morgan's for barbecued things a mere three hours after she completed the ordeal. And then we went into Manhattan to attend a party in Beau's honor at Ray's house, a gorgeous penthouse studio on 14th St. Ray said his apartment was the setting / inspiration for Bruce Springsteen's song "Candy's Room." He packed the place with poets and musicians and weirdos, and there was a kind of impromptu anti-folk show. Ray covered Beau's song "Wake Me Up When Everyone Is Dead" on the piano. While they played I had diarrhea in the bathroom from the jalapeños I ate at the BBQ place; it was very Llewyn Davis of me, I thought.

A Cemetery In The Year 3030

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!