joe forwarded me an article about the aquarium explosion in berlin this morning. we stayed at the hotel it flooded back in 2019, and had ill-advised cocktails under that dire cylinder, just before getting on a ship. do you think 1,500 fish in the road look the way you'd imagine they would? it's something you'd never forget. i wouldn't compare anything that happened to me to that much death in a very public way but in my heart i think of coming here to talk about what the last while has felt like and i think the fish are in the road, the fish are in the road. i can't imagine not coming here, but i don't always know what i'm ready to haul into the air.
we got really terrible news about steve this week; after some fairly extensive diagnostics, our vet thinks he has some kind of cancer in his large intestine and a rectal mass, probably a tumor, that she couldn't remove without a lot of risk and difficulty. he's lost a lot of weight and is essentially incontinent, but is also essentially himself, or at least what i understand his self to be, and so we did not take his doctor up on her offer to have the euthanasia discussion with us on tuesday. trying to decide how to show up most responsibly for a little nonverbal animal i both love dearly and don't want to anthropomorphize is my personal hell, as you probably know, and it is a hard time. i gave steve my toothbrush the other night, just let him purr and chew at the minty-ass bristles and god knows what fluoride does to a senior cat with likely terminal cancer. i turn my sweatshirts inside out before i put them in the hamper where he sleeps, both because i know they're going to end up smeared with blood and shit and because he loves the smell of deodorant, he loves all human smells, he's such a little roommate.
have i talked about how not drinking feels like not having any skin? i'm glad i stopped, it was indeed subtly and occasionally not so subtly desaturating my life, but oh how the fish are in the road. i've done so much work this year and am fiercely proud of what i'm finally getting to tackle in my professional writing, but i don't think i had any real idea of just how raw i would feel. or any idea at all, really. i wouldn't have told you i was partially numb, quite the opposite. i'm also fiercely proud of finally talking to a proper therapist, and finally talking to another proper therapist with joe; poor old doctor omnibus is a psychiatrist who wouldn't be expected to field my feelings even if he wasn't an old boot. though it is nice to be able to multitask, i miss being able to sleep.
Showing posts with label booze. Show all posts
Showing posts with label booze. Show all posts
12.16.21
the exotic personal weather and promise i made to myself when i tearily high-fived a tree after a thunderstorm this summer related to the fact that i had very recently and suddenly decided to stop drinking; the promise was that i was really going to do it, that i was going to level up. and i have! or i have really done it, anyway. i don't drink now. i think i am probably an alcoholic.
the question of whether or not i am an alcoholic—or, more precisely, whether or not i tell anyone that i am an alcoholic—has felt weirdly important to me. it's shorthand for the fact that i have a problematic relationship with drinking, and dropping a few strategic a-bombs with people i love and respect felt like a way to force a decisive end to a war with myself. if i disclosed that and then any of those people ever saw me drink again, oh, i would be so ashamed. shame has always been a big motivator for me, which is ironic, given that several of what i consider the most shameful things i've ever done are things i did when i had been drinking.
i don't know whether or not it matters that i didn't have any big, dramatic bottoming-out moment. given that i work from home on my own schedule and don't have children, it's conceivable that my life could have tootled on in a nominally functional, undramatic way for quite some time, or forever. but i felt like the color was draining out of it, and i hated waking up with the panicky feeling that i might have said or done something foolish or hurtful; i worry about that all of the time anyway, and drinking, or being hung over, eroded whatever assurances or confidence i managed to cobble together. my friend sarah once joked that my memoir would be called i just don't want anyone to feel bad, and i believed everyone felt bad.
for a while, the only people who knew i'd come to this realization/decision were joe and a few friends who are sober; i didn't want a sponsor or anything (i don't think aa or meetings are for me?), but they had inspired me, and i wanted them to know that. (some of them check in with me even though i don't ask, which is both predictable and shockingly touching.) i didn't know what i would say to my parents, and i worried about it, even though i knew i wanted them to know. i have a mica-flaky memory of sitting at the dining table with my mother and sisters on my twelfth birthday and my father telling me over the phone that he was in recovery and couldn't be with me and that was a gift to me, or something. it turns out that it's pretty easy to talk to my mother about drinking and our family; we did it a lot in september when we hiked across hampstead heath and swam in the kenwood ladies' pond together. it seems that my dad doesn't want to talk about it, and i learned twenty years ago when he left my mother that learning too much about the dissolution of a relationship is one of the costliest experiences you can have, even if offering boundary-free adult friendship and support to the people who created you feels like the only way you could ever hope to repay them, so that's fine.
realizing that all of this is the course for me was/is something like watching a time lord regenerate on doctor who in that i'm mourning and excited all at once, and if i end up becoming david tennant i'll know for sure that i did the right thing. occasionally i wish the realization hadn't been so sudden, but i have always felt that it's best not to know when you're doing something for the last time.
the question of whether or not i am an alcoholic—or, more precisely, whether or not i tell anyone that i am an alcoholic—has felt weirdly important to me. it's shorthand for the fact that i have a problematic relationship with drinking, and dropping a few strategic a-bombs with people i love and respect felt like a way to force a decisive end to a war with myself. if i disclosed that and then any of those people ever saw me drink again, oh, i would be so ashamed. shame has always been a big motivator for me, which is ironic, given that several of what i consider the most shameful things i've ever done are things i did when i had been drinking.
i don't know whether or not it matters that i didn't have any big, dramatic bottoming-out moment. given that i work from home on my own schedule and don't have children, it's conceivable that my life could have tootled on in a nominally functional, undramatic way for quite some time, or forever. but i felt like the color was draining out of it, and i hated waking up with the panicky feeling that i might have said or done something foolish or hurtful; i worry about that all of the time anyway, and drinking, or being hung over, eroded whatever assurances or confidence i managed to cobble together. my friend sarah once joked that my memoir would be called i just don't want anyone to feel bad, and i believed everyone felt bad.
for a while, the only people who knew i'd come to this realization/decision were joe and a few friends who are sober; i didn't want a sponsor or anything (i don't think aa or meetings are for me?), but they had inspired me, and i wanted them to know that. (some of them check in with me even though i don't ask, which is both predictable and shockingly touching.) i didn't know what i would say to my parents, and i worried about it, even though i knew i wanted them to know. i have a mica-flaky memory of sitting at the dining table with my mother and sisters on my twelfth birthday and my father telling me over the phone that he was in recovery and couldn't be with me and that was a gift to me, or something. it turns out that it's pretty easy to talk to my mother about drinking and our family; we did it a lot in september when we hiked across hampstead heath and swam in the kenwood ladies' pond together. it seems that my dad doesn't want to talk about it, and i learned twenty years ago when he left my mother that learning too much about the dissolution of a relationship is one of the costliest experiences you can have, even if offering boundary-free adult friendship and support to the people who created you feels like the only way you could ever hope to repay them, so that's fine.
realizing that all of this is the course for me was/is something like watching a time lord regenerate on doctor who in that i'm mourning and excited all at once, and if i end up becoming david tennant i'll know for sure that i did the right thing. occasionally i wish the realization hadn't been so sudden, but i have always felt that it's best not to know when you're doing something for the last time.
07.12.18
the dirty dozen, FIFA edition {some of the places joe and i have watched world cup matches this june and july}
jw marriott chicago (chicago, IL). the first of the hotels in last month's Circle of Life saga had talking elevators that sounded like judi dench and interminable hallways that reminded me of the overlook, all of which i found impossibly charming. our room and television were large, the air conditioning was robust, and it was a fine place to recover from the heat wave and reflect on our friends' nuptials while yelling at soccer players.
replay andersonville (chicago, IL). the smugness i felt after filing the first of my on-the-road freelance assignments quickly gave way to humiliation when i failed to acquit myself honorably with replay's free(!) arcade games (why don't you love me as i love you, midwestern galaga?). no matter. a single triumph is still a triumph.
the robey (chicago, IL). a hoteltonight hero that came through for us when o'hare made it clear that we weren't flying out of chicago for at least another 24 hours, the robey upgraded our room and provided us with a pot of coffee to pair with our first game of the morning on tuesday. bless the robey.
links taproom (chicago, IL). my second on-the-road freelance-assignment filing found us at a mostly-empty but very friendly sportstravaganza in wicker park, where i wore a tee shirt joe ran out to purchase at the bookstore we'd visited in search of a vintage copy of 1984 the previous afternoon (since o'hare had flown our luggage to california, despite our pleas). an empty pub is actually a pretty good place to work, assuming you can find a table that doesn't wiggle (and i did!). also, there's soccer. coffeehouses are for suckers.
sonesta silicon valley (san jose, CA). after another five-hour barrage of delays at o'hare, we were permitted to fly to northern california, where it was far too late for us to drive to my sister and brother-in-law's treehouse on the coast. we drove instead through a series of office parks and had a second spur-of-the-moment hotel date, this time at a comfortingly unrenovated retreat for pilots? (i resisted the urge to tackle the gaggle of them checking in the next morning and demand to know one had broken our spirits in chicago 12-72 hours ago.) while much of the valley looks suspiciously like pop-up ads or holograms projected from smartphones, sonesta looked to me like a slightly more corporate version of stanford sierra camp, and i slept (and watched television) like a rock there.
royal pacific motor inn (san francisco, CA). our old favorite (a wonderful japantown hotel with a toy machine in the lobby) is now part of an upscale chain that has standardized it and might now require actual organs from its guests, so we settled on a lodge that, like the one we found on long island for the night of this spring's broken social scene concert, was somewhat disappointingly non-murder-y. its television was small and old, but since we spent the majority of our time in the city with my other sister and her family and had just been introduced to the wonderful world of collecting and trading panini stickers, it was just fine (mostly i was excited about having room on our bed to muster our new two-dimensional squads). it was also very gratifying to be adhering to parts of our schedule that we'd planned more than 12 hours in advance—that two-day stay was edenic. parking was free! free!
nickies bar (san francisco, CA). i was excited about seeing our first game with my sister and her baby at mad dog in the fog, a haight spot that's captivated my imagination since college—i would pass it on the bus once every few months (the walk plus train ride plus walk plus bus ride to haight-ashbury from my place took like two hours each way, so i didn't do it very often, and i was underage, so i couldn't get in anyway). mad dog in the fog has a strict NO BABIES policy (the nerve!), though, so we holed up at nickies a few blocks away and had a fine old time. our server there came over to admire our infant, which was a good call on her part, for he is awfully admirable. and super huge! probably he won't even get carded circa the next world cup. she was in a remarkably good mood for someone who'd been tackling sports fans since eight in the morning, that server. we left a generous tip.
san francisco athletic club (san francisco, CA). hats off to the cavernous SFAC for having a huge corner booth at which my sister's actual baby and my and joe's soccer-sticker-album baby had plenty of room to spread out and do our thing. screens were massive, memorabilia was old-school and charming, and i'd have happily eaten lunch there if we hadn't been en route to the mission for a last-minute taqueria pancho villa pilgrimage. (my burrito was not as exquisite as i'd been hoping it would be, but my god, pancho villa still beats new york burritos hollow.)
olde sonoma public house (sonoma, CA). i've been to many a bar that offers take-out menus from local spots and lets you call something in, but i have never had a server from a neighboring restaurant roll up to my table with dishes and silverware. you astonish, sonoma! we and the bartenders then turned out to be the only germany supporters in a strip-mall watering hole full of swedish soccer enthusiasts; you astonish again, sonoma! i learned that day that i bellow when germany scores, and that one should always order more quesadillas than one believes one needs. also my cousins are shorter than i thought they were (we had a family reunion later that afternoon).
dog house pub (st. john, USVI). there was a minor sports-related freakout in cruz bay last tuesday when it became clear that the FOX affiliate out of puerto rico (which had supposedly aired every other world cup match) decided to show valkyrie instead, which conspiracy theorists insisted was somehow germany's revenge after getting knocked out of the tournament? i was unaware that telemundo was an option (and was unable to work the TV in my suite back at the resort anyway), so i wandered down to the marina and found a place where someone had managed to direct the english team's wonky live stream from his smartphone to a bar's television. i probably should have been napping instead of sweltering with a bunch of colombia supporters, but i did meet and have a lovely conversation with a woman who'd come down with FEMA to help with long-term economic recovery on the islands. look, ma! i networked!
videology bar & cinema (brooklyn, NY). i had yet another story to file before i could join joe back in videology's super-boss screening room the day after i returned from st. john, so i spent the first half of the game formatting jpegs while listening to brazilians and belgians scream and groan. i can't listen to music while i work, but that was surprisingly okay. you definitely shouldn't go see the final there on sunday, though—it's a terrible place (okay, it's the best place, but keep that to yourself.)
barleycorn (new york, ny). we'd intended to head back to videology, and i'd woken up extra-early to file two stories so i could head to videology without a laptop, but a surprise meeting meant joe had to stay downtown. "do you remember that place where we met that couple at the bar and they shared their pizza with us?" he asked. "we could go there, they have the game." (it took me a while to figure out which place he meant, actually—strangers like to give us stuff.). i have questions: who are these suited dudes who can roll into a bar at two in the afternoon and not work there? they did not have laptops. are world cup matches the new three-martini lunches? they were definitely england fans, though, and they were pretty bummed. we decided that luka modrić is an elf; he looks like he has access to special, extra-nutritious travel wafers. i am proud to say that we have collected every last sticker for his team.
*i often refer to our little cat as mad dog in the fog.
jw marriott chicago (chicago, IL). the first of the hotels in last month's Circle of Life saga had talking elevators that sounded like judi dench and interminable hallways that reminded me of the overlook, all of which i found impossibly charming. our room and television were large, the air conditioning was robust, and it was a fine place to recover from the heat wave and reflect on our friends' nuptials while yelling at soccer players.
replay andersonville (chicago, IL). the smugness i felt after filing the first of my on-the-road freelance assignments quickly gave way to humiliation when i failed to acquit myself honorably with replay's free(!) arcade games (why don't you love me as i love you, midwestern galaga?). no matter. a single triumph is still a triumph.
the robey (chicago, IL). a hoteltonight hero that came through for us when o'hare made it clear that we weren't flying out of chicago for at least another 24 hours, the robey upgraded our room and provided us with a pot of coffee to pair with our first game of the morning on tuesday. bless the robey.
links taproom (chicago, IL). my second on-the-road freelance-assignment filing found us at a mostly-empty but very friendly sportstravaganza in wicker park, where i wore a tee shirt joe ran out to purchase at the bookstore we'd visited in search of a vintage copy of 1984 the previous afternoon (since o'hare had flown our luggage to california, despite our pleas). an empty pub is actually a pretty good place to work, assuming you can find a table that doesn't wiggle (and i did!). also, there's soccer. coffeehouses are for suckers.
sonesta silicon valley (san jose, CA). after another five-hour barrage of delays at o'hare, we were permitted to fly to northern california, where it was far too late for us to drive to my sister and brother-in-law's treehouse on the coast. we drove instead through a series of office parks and had a second spur-of-the-moment hotel date, this time at a comfortingly unrenovated retreat for pilots? (i resisted the urge to tackle the gaggle of them checking in the next morning and demand to know one had broken our spirits in chicago 12-72 hours ago.) while much of the valley looks suspiciously like pop-up ads or holograms projected from smartphones, sonesta looked to me like a slightly more corporate version of stanford sierra camp, and i slept (and watched television) like a rock there.
royal pacific motor inn (san francisco, CA). our old favorite (a wonderful japantown hotel with a toy machine in the lobby) is now part of an upscale chain that has standardized it and might now require actual organs from its guests, so we settled on a lodge that, like the one we found on long island for the night of this spring's broken social scene concert, was somewhat disappointingly non-murder-y. its television was small and old, but since we spent the majority of our time in the city with my other sister and her family and had just been introduced to the wonderful world of collecting and trading panini stickers, it was just fine (mostly i was excited about having room on our bed to muster our new two-dimensional squads). it was also very gratifying to be adhering to parts of our schedule that we'd planned more than 12 hours in advance—that two-day stay was edenic. parking was free! free!
nickies bar (san francisco, CA). i was excited about seeing our first game with my sister and her baby at mad dog in the fog, a haight spot that's captivated my imagination since college—i would pass it on the bus once every few months (the walk plus train ride plus walk plus bus ride to haight-ashbury from my place took like two hours each way, so i didn't do it very often, and i was underage, so i couldn't get in anyway). mad dog in the fog has a strict NO BABIES policy (the nerve!), though, so we holed up at nickies a few blocks away and had a fine old time. our server there came over to admire our infant, which was a good call on her part, for he is awfully admirable. and super huge! probably he won't even get carded circa the next world cup. she was in a remarkably good mood for someone who'd been tackling sports fans since eight in the morning, that server. we left a generous tip.
san francisco athletic club (san francisco, CA). hats off to the cavernous SFAC for having a huge corner booth at which my sister's actual baby and my and joe's soccer-sticker-album baby had plenty of room to spread out and do our thing. screens were massive, memorabilia was old-school and charming, and i'd have happily eaten lunch there if we hadn't been en route to the mission for a last-minute taqueria pancho villa pilgrimage. (my burrito was not as exquisite as i'd been hoping it would be, but my god, pancho villa still beats new york burritos hollow.)
olde sonoma public house (sonoma, CA). i've been to many a bar that offers take-out menus from local spots and lets you call something in, but i have never had a server from a neighboring restaurant roll up to my table with dishes and silverware. you astonish, sonoma! we and the bartenders then turned out to be the only germany supporters in a strip-mall watering hole full of swedish soccer enthusiasts; you astonish again, sonoma! i learned that day that i bellow when germany scores, and that one should always order more quesadillas than one believes one needs. also my cousins are shorter than i thought they were (we had a family reunion later that afternoon).
dog house pub (st. john, USVI). there was a minor sports-related freakout in cruz bay last tuesday when it became clear that the FOX affiliate out of puerto rico (which had supposedly aired every other world cup match) decided to show valkyrie instead, which conspiracy theorists insisted was somehow germany's revenge after getting knocked out of the tournament? i was unaware that telemundo was an option (and was unable to work the TV in my suite back at the resort anyway), so i wandered down to the marina and found a place where someone had managed to direct the english team's wonky live stream from his smartphone to a bar's television. i probably should have been napping instead of sweltering with a bunch of colombia supporters, but i did meet and have a lovely conversation with a woman who'd come down with FEMA to help with long-term economic recovery on the islands. look, ma! i networked!
videology bar & cinema (brooklyn, NY). i had yet another story to file before i could join joe back in videology's super-boss screening room the day after i returned from st. john, so i spent the first half of the game formatting jpegs while listening to brazilians and belgians scream and groan. i can't listen to music while i work, but that was surprisingly okay. you definitely shouldn't go see the final there on sunday, though—it's a terrible place (okay, it's the best place, but keep that to yourself.)
barleycorn (new york, ny). we'd intended to head back to videology, and i'd woken up extra-early to file two stories so i could head to videology without a laptop, but a surprise meeting meant joe had to stay downtown. "do you remember that place where we met that couple at the bar and they shared their pizza with us?" he asked. "we could go there, they have the game." (it took me a while to figure out which place he meant, actually—strangers like to give us stuff.). i have questions: who are these suited dudes who can roll into a bar at two in the afternoon and not work there? they did not have laptops. are world cup matches the new three-martini lunches? they were definitely england fans, though, and they were pretty bummed. we decided that luka modrić is an elf; he looks like he has access to special, extra-nutritious travel wafers. i am proud to say that we have collected every last sticker for his team.
*i often refer to our little cat as mad dog in the fog.
01.11.18
our old friend austin, a fellow member of joe's darts team when we lived in hell's kitchen long ago and the earth was flat, spent a not-insignificant portion of the fall on jeopardy! (and being televised for being on jeopardy! in his inimitable way), and i decided to troll him for mispronouncing "sherbet" and missing a question by making and instagramming a cocktail, as one does. that left me with a surprisingly large tub of cheap rainbow sherbet, which hunched in the freezer for a month or two until i decided i needed to start eating a spoonful of it once each day for the rest of my life, or something.
if you'd asked me about my associations with sherbet prior to that first day, i'd have told you that i used to order a scoop of coffee ice cream topped with a scoop of rainbow sherbet every now and again as a child, because the combination was surprisingly good and because i enjoy making people uncomfortable with seemingly-gross orders (see also: steamed orange juice at starbucks). after that first spoonful i can tell you that it actually plucks me out of adulthood in new york city, whirls me across the country and three decades, and deposits me at the dining room table at my grandparents' condominium in los angeles, where my grandmother's mysterious cold lunches always, always ended with a plateful of puddling rainbow sherbet. served with forks, maybe? i could be conflating that part with when we euthanized our three-legged cat in 2009 and were so distraught that we ended up at a shitty pub near lincoln center—if you ever find yourself in the position of having to kill someone you love, be sure that the next place you go is somewhere you'll never need to go again—where i ate cinnamon ice cream with a fork. i'm not sure.
my grandmother spent formative years in new york city, remains obsessed with new york city, and in moving here in my mid-twenties i had something in common with her for what i think was/is the first time in our lives. most of what i say is clearly of no interest to her—i say that without resentment, as i imagine certain kinds of grandchildren are uninteresting to certain kinds of grandparents—but she loves hearing and talking about the city, and i have sent her postcards and letters full of cartographic pornography over the years. block by block, the theaters and libraries we visit, the landmarks we pass (she lives, somehow, for news of grant's tomb), the coordinates of our various offices. i sometimes wish we could talk about the undiscovered country between our new york cities, what it was like for her to leave her young family as a middle-aged woman and to come back to it as her ex- and future husband's date to their daughter's wedding (for example), but we were never and will never be close enough for that. all she will say, what she says constantly now that she is in her upper nineties, is that she didn't want to have any more children.
she's also moving to the memory ward at her nursing home; sometimes she believes she's on a ship, and sometimes she sees her long-grown sons asleep in her room. i haven't sent her any of my city in a while, and it's likely that she wouldn't recognize it if i did. i don't believe anything i needed to tell or hear from her, or that she needed to tell or hear from me, has gone unsaid, but i find myself barefoot in the kitchen with this freezer-burned sherbet and wonder who we might have been, had we been other people.
if you'd asked me about my associations with sherbet prior to that first day, i'd have told you that i used to order a scoop of coffee ice cream topped with a scoop of rainbow sherbet every now and again as a child, because the combination was surprisingly good and because i enjoy making people uncomfortable with seemingly-gross orders (see also: steamed orange juice at starbucks). after that first spoonful i can tell you that it actually plucks me out of adulthood in new york city, whirls me across the country and three decades, and deposits me at the dining room table at my grandparents' condominium in los angeles, where my grandmother's mysterious cold lunches always, always ended with a plateful of puddling rainbow sherbet. served with forks, maybe? i could be conflating that part with when we euthanized our three-legged cat in 2009 and were so distraught that we ended up at a shitty pub near lincoln center—if you ever find yourself in the position of having to kill someone you love, be sure that the next place you go is somewhere you'll never need to go again—where i ate cinnamon ice cream with a fork. i'm not sure.
my grandmother spent formative years in new york city, remains obsessed with new york city, and in moving here in my mid-twenties i had something in common with her for what i think was/is the first time in our lives. most of what i say is clearly of no interest to her—i say that without resentment, as i imagine certain kinds of grandchildren are uninteresting to certain kinds of grandparents—but she loves hearing and talking about the city, and i have sent her postcards and letters full of cartographic pornography over the years. block by block, the theaters and libraries we visit, the landmarks we pass (she lives, somehow, for news of grant's tomb), the coordinates of our various offices. i sometimes wish we could talk about the undiscovered country between our new york cities, what it was like for her to leave her young family as a middle-aged woman and to come back to it as her ex- and future husband's date to their daughter's wedding (for example), but we were never and will never be close enough for that. all she will say, what she says constantly now that she is in her upper nineties, is that she didn't want to have any more children.
she's also moving to the memory ward at her nursing home; sometimes she believes she's on a ship, and sometimes she sees her long-grown sons asleep in her room. i haven't sent her any of my city in a while, and it's likely that she wouldn't recognize it if i did. i don't believe anything i needed to tell or hear from her, or that she needed to tell or hear from me, has gone unsaid, but i find myself barefoot in the kitchen with this freezer-burned sherbet and wonder who we might have been, had we been other people.
04.20.17
the dirty dozen {twelve things i cherished at our all-night trail-racing extravaganza in kentucky}
what's so goddamn essential to a camping-and-running trip that it's worth shoving into a suitcase and hauling all the way to la guardia, then to an airport hotel, then to a field outside fort knox? well. (as always, none of these links generate anything other than immaterial awesomeness.)
01 tzumi pocketjuice portable chargers. i bought one of these for my first ragnar in the fall and picked up two more before we headed out to kentucky this year, and what a boss call that was on my part. they're cheap ($15-$20), small, and powerful: each one will recharge a smartphone three times.
02 coleman flatwoods II 6-person dome tent. this bad boy packed down to 8.5"x8.5"x24", which was perfect for our larger suitcase (which also fit a sleeping bag, one of our inflatable pads, and a couple of my shrink-wrapped running outfits), and it rang in at under $100, which was a relief after the tents i priced at REI (which were light and sleek but scorchingly expensive). i would by no means attempt to squish six people into a tent of this size (the footprint is 10'x10'), but it housed joe, my sister, me, and our suitcases quite handily. bonus points for the front awning. my friend rachel, an accomplished car camper, suggested we spring for a big tent; as in all things, she was right.
03 nite ize radiant 400 led lantern. i'm still a little traumatized by the spectacular mess i made of our previous lantern by neglecting to take the batteries out after we loaded it up for superstorm irene several years ago; when i pulled it out for superstorm sandy a few years later, they had foamed up like rabid beasts and killed their host. this model was smaller and a bit less expensive than its predecessor, but it was bright, and our main source of light on the communal tarp between our tents. led light isn't always the sexiest light, but when you're digging around for a headlamp and/or a can of cider, it's awfully handy. speaking of sexy lights,
04 eno twilights led string lights. i valued these at our first ragnar because stringing them between our tents kept people from wandering through our campsite en route to the port-o-lets; i also valued them at this one, especially the purple set my friend melissa gave me when we got to kentucky, because they're damn sexy (and they made it easier to find everyone after night runs). i wanted to wrap a string of these around my body.
05 adidas adilette slides. i did not bring a pair of proper recovery sandals last time around—hell, i didn't bring a pair of flip flops last time around—and was forced to stay in my muddy running shoes for several extra hours after the race ended. i told myself that if i could find an only mildly offensive pair for sale in the gear tent, i could have them; reader, i could not. this time i acquired a pair of black-on-grey slides via ebay and was happy as a clam (joe, who requested and got a pair of the adissage slides, was not as comfortable; make sure you're really into that massage-nub footbed before you commit to it). i have only anecdotal evidence that loud, patterned pairs are more effective than the striped ones, but this evidence is compelling.
06 white pumpkin. a cornell horticulturist maintains that a healthy pumpkin picked from a disease-controlled field can last eight to 12 weeks; dottie in charlotte, in turn, told her gardenweb.com forum buddies back in october of '08 that she still had a white pumpkin purchased in '07. the one i acquired and brought to wawayanda lake was still going strong on a melamine plate in our foyer as i packed for kentucky, so i took it along, of course. after the race i kissed it goodbye and left it in the woods beyond the edge of our campsite; if a herd of feral pumpkins begins performing miracles across northern kentucky in a few months' time, you're welcome.
07 the believer, november/december 2007. when the believer and its cover art featuring 18 temporary tattoos (including a small bat with a POWER OF ATTORNEY motto and a portrait of ai weiwei in pigtails) turned up at ye olde charity bookstore, i knew it had to be mine (and my team's). ten-year-old temporary tattoos don't age nearly as gracefully as yearling white pumpkins do, and the gas can (BE MY CO-DEFENDANT) i applied to my neck looked rather like an unfortunate sun incident after a few hours, but it inspired me to apply one of the ragnar tattoos included in our welcome packet, and that was properly lurid. joe made me scrub it off at our airbnb on sunday. "you look like a gang member."
08 kossar's assorted rugelach. (see also: kossar's mini black and white cookies and babka.) kossar's is the oldest operating bialy bakery in the united states (since 1936), and it's been making grand street fatter since 1960. bialys don't travel especially well, but the aforementioned desserts just love the road; i pick them up en route to the airport, as should anyone who visits new york city, really.
09 ticla camp hero tarp/blanket. what sort of douchebag pays $50 or more for a stripey hipster tarp/blanket? this kind, though mine was part of the goodie bag from a fancy camping press event at the ace hotel a few years ago (yeah, yeah). ticla (whose "don't camp ugly" slogan moved me, i'll admit it) folded more than a year ago, but its pretty gear is worth stalking on ebay (i'm kind of tempted to pull the trigger on that link myself, truth be told). the tarp in question has been a solid teammate at picnics, the beach, and campsites, and it handles machine washing and drying like a pro. it also makes a great cape, obviously. blue plastic tarps are fine, but the camp hero is, well, you know.
10 REI evrgrn lowboy lantern. like the camp hero, the delightfully squishy evrgrn lowboy (its cover is made of silicone, and i make everyone at my campsite touch it) has gone the way of the giant banana; that said, i love you and i want you to know how important it is to cherish any evrgrn products and/or kawaii lanterns that might cross your path one day. maybe your local REI has a bunch of dead stock, who knows?
11 cidergeist bubbles rosé cider. a beer after a long run is nice. a cider after a long run is poetry.
12 s'well 17-oz insulated stainless steel bottle. who knew my trusty gym-hydration buddy could keep communal coffee hot for 12 hours? sarah kauss (who happens to head the fastest-growing woman-owned company in the country), that's who. triples as an excellent way to spirit pre-mixed aviations into central park for an evening of shakespeare.
what's so goddamn essential to a camping-and-running trip that it's worth shoving into a suitcase and hauling all the way to la guardia, then to an airport hotel, then to a field outside fort knox? well. (as always, none of these links generate anything other than immaterial awesomeness.)
01 tzumi pocketjuice portable chargers. i bought one of these for my first ragnar in the fall and picked up two more before we headed out to kentucky this year, and what a boss call that was on my part. they're cheap ($15-$20), small, and powerful: each one will recharge a smartphone three times.
02 coleman flatwoods II 6-person dome tent. this bad boy packed down to 8.5"x8.5"x24", which was perfect for our larger suitcase (which also fit a sleeping bag, one of our inflatable pads, and a couple of my shrink-wrapped running outfits), and it rang in at under $100, which was a relief after the tents i priced at REI (which were light and sleek but scorchingly expensive). i would by no means attempt to squish six people into a tent of this size (the footprint is 10'x10'), but it housed joe, my sister, me, and our suitcases quite handily. bonus points for the front awning. my friend rachel, an accomplished car camper, suggested we spring for a big tent; as in all things, she was right.
03 nite ize radiant 400 led lantern. i'm still a little traumatized by the spectacular mess i made of our previous lantern by neglecting to take the batteries out after we loaded it up for superstorm irene several years ago; when i pulled it out for superstorm sandy a few years later, they had foamed up like rabid beasts and killed their host. this model was smaller and a bit less expensive than its predecessor, but it was bright, and our main source of light on the communal tarp between our tents. led light isn't always the sexiest light, but when you're digging around for a headlamp and/or a can of cider, it's awfully handy. speaking of sexy lights,
04 eno twilights led string lights. i valued these at our first ragnar because stringing them between our tents kept people from wandering through our campsite en route to the port-o-lets; i also valued them at this one, especially the purple set my friend melissa gave me when we got to kentucky, because they're damn sexy (and they made it easier to find everyone after night runs). i wanted to wrap a string of these around my body.
05 adidas adilette slides. i did not bring a pair of proper recovery sandals last time around—hell, i didn't bring a pair of flip flops last time around—and was forced to stay in my muddy running shoes for several extra hours after the race ended. i told myself that if i could find an only mildly offensive pair for sale in the gear tent, i could have them; reader, i could not. this time i acquired a pair of black-on-grey slides via ebay and was happy as a clam (joe, who requested and got a pair of the adissage slides, was not as comfortable; make sure you're really into that massage-nub footbed before you commit to it). i have only anecdotal evidence that loud, patterned pairs are more effective than the striped ones, but this evidence is compelling.
06 white pumpkin. a cornell horticulturist maintains that a healthy pumpkin picked from a disease-controlled field can last eight to 12 weeks; dottie in charlotte, in turn, told her gardenweb.com forum buddies back in october of '08 that she still had a white pumpkin purchased in '07. the one i acquired and brought to wawayanda lake was still going strong on a melamine plate in our foyer as i packed for kentucky, so i took it along, of course. after the race i kissed it goodbye and left it in the woods beyond the edge of our campsite; if a herd of feral pumpkins begins performing miracles across northern kentucky in a few months' time, you're welcome.
07 the believer, november/december 2007. when the believer and its cover art featuring 18 temporary tattoos (including a small bat with a POWER OF ATTORNEY motto and a portrait of ai weiwei in pigtails) turned up at ye olde charity bookstore, i knew it had to be mine (and my team's). ten-year-old temporary tattoos don't age nearly as gracefully as yearling white pumpkins do, and the gas can (BE MY CO-DEFENDANT) i applied to my neck looked rather like an unfortunate sun incident after a few hours, but it inspired me to apply one of the ragnar tattoos included in our welcome packet, and that was properly lurid. joe made me scrub it off at our airbnb on sunday. "you look like a gang member."
08 kossar's assorted rugelach. (see also: kossar's mini black and white cookies and babka.) kossar's is the oldest operating bialy bakery in the united states (since 1936), and it's been making grand street fatter since 1960. bialys don't travel especially well, but the aforementioned desserts just love the road; i pick them up en route to the airport, as should anyone who visits new york city, really.
09 ticla camp hero tarp/blanket. what sort of douchebag pays $50 or more for a stripey hipster tarp/blanket? this kind, though mine was part of the goodie bag from a fancy camping press event at the ace hotel a few years ago (yeah, yeah). ticla (whose "don't camp ugly" slogan moved me, i'll admit it) folded more than a year ago, but its pretty gear is worth stalking on ebay (i'm kind of tempted to pull the trigger on that link myself, truth be told). the tarp in question has been a solid teammate at picnics, the beach, and campsites, and it handles machine washing and drying like a pro. it also makes a great cape, obviously. blue plastic tarps are fine, but the camp hero is, well, you know.
10 REI evrgrn lowboy lantern. like the camp hero, the delightfully squishy evrgrn lowboy (its cover is made of silicone, and i make everyone at my campsite touch it) has gone the way of the giant banana; that said, i love you and i want you to know how important it is to cherish any evrgrn products and/or kawaii lanterns that might cross your path one day. maybe your local REI has a bunch of dead stock, who knows?
11 cidergeist bubbles rosé cider. a beer after a long run is nice. a cider after a long run is poetry.
12 s'well 17-oz insulated stainless steel bottle. who knew my trusty gym-hydration buddy could keep communal coffee hot for 12 hours? sarah kauss (who happens to head the fastest-growing woman-owned company in the country), that's who. triples as an excellent way to spirit pre-mixed aviations into central park for an evening of shakespeare.
12.21.16
i had my first glühwein of the season on a perfect november day in berlin; we'd just toured a spooky east german amusement park with our friend ed and were taking the long way back to the train along the spree when it began to drizzle. the vacation rule, of course, is that one must hole up with a drink when it starts to rain, and lo, there was a riverside cafe. do germans ever put their holiday mugs away? we took a table and argued about politics for an hour while i pretended i was a one-woman christmas market. i'm still thinking of berlin, and of another friend who lived there for a few months while working on her doctorate. she posted on facebook last night:
first-day-of-winter glühwein
- 1 lemon
- 1 orange
- pinch of ground cardamom
- pinch of ground cloves
- 5/8 c granulated sugar
- 5/8 c water
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 bottle red wine (i used castillo de fuente)
- 1/4 cup brandy (i used grappa we smuggled on the train from milan to berlin)
zest and juice the citrus and put the zest and juice in a medium saucepan; add the cloves, cardamom, sugar, and water, then bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the mixture reduces by a third. add the red wine and brandy, then bring back to a simmer, remove from heat, serve in mugs, and make merry. i leave the zested citrus in there; it reminds me of fallen leaves in the spree.
Listening to the BBC interviewing someone about the Berlin attacks - yesterday's kick in the chest, for me - and the reporter asks some security pundit if the Germans know everything about the however-many-thousand refugees that they are sheltering. And pundit responds (in paraphrase), "of course not, but we also don't know everything about the however-many-million Germans who live in the country, and nor should we _want_ to." Stay sensible, my shaken city.i adapted a chowhound recipe, as our local grocery store lacked whole cloves and cardamom pods and making a two-bottle batch of glühwein when you only live with one person is intense, even when you're mostly german.
first-day-of-winter glühwein
- 1 lemon
- 1 orange
- pinch of ground cardamom
- pinch of ground cloves
- 5/8 c granulated sugar
- 5/8 c water
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 bottle red wine (i used castillo de fuente)
- 1/4 cup brandy (i used grappa we smuggled on the train from milan to berlin)
zest and juice the citrus and put the zest and juice in a medium saucepan; add the cloves, cardamom, sugar, and water, then bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the mixture reduces by a third. add the red wine and brandy, then bring back to a simmer, remove from heat, serve in mugs, and make merry. i leave the zested citrus in there; it reminds me of fallen leaves in the spree.
12.15.16
BERLIN ENDORSEMENTS {part II}*
interfilm berlin (festival, citywide). we've had the good luck to stumble on several film festivals while on foreign adventures: montreal's festival du nouveau cinéma, the reykjavík international film festival, and, for 2016, berlin's 32nd annual short film festival. we did our damndest to catch the sci-fi program (which was heavy on extraplanetary disasters and draconian population control, as one would expect) and the horror program (held on our final night in town), but cooler heads than mine prevailed; starting a late-night film extravaganza hours before catching a flight to milan and a flight to new york probably wasn't the soundest plan, even if it was the best plan. german audiences don't seem to be as forward as american festival audiences i've known, and the largely questionless q&a sessions after a few of the films were kind of painful (particularly the one where the woman whose empty beer i knocked over as i tried to sneak out to the bathroom turned out to be the writer-director of the short we'd just seen), but the works themselves were marvelous, and the venues (or what i could tell of them from their websites) were gorgeous. we'll be back.
michelberger hotel (hotel, friedrichshain). the michelberger did not let us check in at 7 am, or 8 am, or any of the other hours before 3 pm, which hurt, given that our train from leipzig deposited us at the station just after dawn. that said, we were motivated to burn an hour and a half or so walking along the remains of the berlin wall, which was just across the river, and i was awake for hotel breakfast (which was staggeringly good; here's to you, german hipster breakfast) for the first time in years. my sister and brother-in-law raved about the michelberger after staying there a few years ago as part of a eurotrip for a small-town polish wedding at which people woke up the next day with sausages tucked into their clothes (we need to befriend art-school people who seem like they might get married), and they were right; it was cheap as hell (something like 90 euros a night), the room was large (i feared i'd mangle myself on the ladder up to the spacious sleeping loft, but it wasn't nearly as dangerous as it looked), we were right across the (very wide) street from the warschauer straße s-bahn station (a girl on the train-style commuter with binoculars could have watched me apply ultraprecise german salve to my bowie-tribute tattoo each morning when we threw open the drapes), and we were within walking distance of kreuzberg's greatest hits. they made their own schnapps and canned their own coconut water. they played the big lebowski in the hall at all hours of the day and night (to be fair, half of berlin did that). they let us sneak rosé and a bottle opener upstairs when we were too tired to mingle in the hotel bar. stay at the michelberger, especially if you were thinking of an airbnb instead (most short-term airbnbs in berlin are now super-illegal, thanks to last may's zweckentfremdungsverbot).
monkey bar (bar, tiergarten). can one really say one has been to berlin if one hasn't been to a tiki bar overlooking the zoo? don't answer that. we ventured up to monkey bar to investigate monkey 47, a black-forest-produced gin based on a recipe scribbled down decades and decades ago by a homesick brit who named his hooch after his favorite primate. parts of that story are likely apocryphal, but the cocktail piece in which i mentioned the booze and the bar were very real, so we queued at an elevator bank for like half an hour and were carried into the sky to sip tiki drinks and rub elbows with tiergarten's prettiest (and some tourists). the mango maniac slushy, a seasonal special, was one of the best tropical drinks i've had in the last couple of years. if you can manage to make it to monkey bar's terrace in time to watch the sun set over the elephant enclosure at the zoo, you'll probably feel like a master of the universe.
neues ufer (bar, schöneberg). "do you follow american football at all?" robert, the impossibly young fellow behind the bar at david bowie's old local, asked. "i was asked to go play for the ducks of oregon, or for alabama." (he decided to join the german military instead, and will be leaving the bar in a few months.) if you catch them in repose, the folks at neues ufer don't listen to all that much david bowie; they hear hours and hours of him when tourists come through after visiting his apartment down the block, and his face has been on every wall since his death in january. i believe we listened to michelle branch as we chatted with regulars about donald trump and i shifted on my seat and tried not to harass my new tattoo. i think robert would have gone to oregon rather than to alabama, but it sounds like he ended up in the right place anyway. a stately woman with a perfect rooster wished us well as we folded ourselves back into the rain: "have a nice life!"
*part I is here.
interfilm berlin (festival, citywide). we've had the good luck to stumble on several film festivals while on foreign adventures: montreal's festival du nouveau cinéma, the reykjavík international film festival, and, for 2016, berlin's 32nd annual short film festival. we did our damndest to catch the sci-fi program (which was heavy on extraplanetary disasters and draconian population control, as one would expect) and the horror program (held on our final night in town), but cooler heads than mine prevailed; starting a late-night film extravaganza hours before catching a flight to milan and a flight to new york probably wasn't the soundest plan, even if it was the best plan. german audiences don't seem to be as forward as american festival audiences i've known, and the largely questionless q&a sessions after a few of the films were kind of painful (particularly the one where the woman whose empty beer i knocked over as i tried to sneak out to the bathroom turned out to be the writer-director of the short we'd just seen), but the works themselves were marvelous, and the venues (or what i could tell of them from their websites) were gorgeous. we'll be back.
michelberger hotel (hotel, friedrichshain). the michelberger did not let us check in at 7 am, or 8 am, or any of the other hours before 3 pm, which hurt, given that our train from leipzig deposited us at the station just after dawn. that said, we were motivated to burn an hour and a half or so walking along the remains of the berlin wall, which was just across the river, and i was awake for hotel breakfast (which was staggeringly good; here's to you, german hipster breakfast) for the first time in years. my sister and brother-in-law raved about the michelberger after staying there a few years ago as part of a eurotrip for a small-town polish wedding at which people woke up the next day with sausages tucked into their clothes (we need to befriend art-school people who seem like they might get married), and they were right; it was cheap as hell (something like 90 euros a night), the room was large (i feared i'd mangle myself on the ladder up to the spacious sleeping loft, but it wasn't nearly as dangerous as it looked), we were right across the (very wide) street from the warschauer straße s-bahn station (a girl on the train-style commuter with binoculars could have watched me apply ultraprecise german salve to my bowie-tribute tattoo each morning when we threw open the drapes), and we were within walking distance of kreuzberg's greatest hits. they made their own schnapps and canned their own coconut water. they played the big lebowski in the hall at all hours of the day and night (to be fair, half of berlin did that). they let us sneak rosé and a bottle opener upstairs when we were too tired to mingle in the hotel bar. stay at the michelberger, especially if you were thinking of an airbnb instead (most short-term airbnbs in berlin are now super-illegal, thanks to last may's zweckentfremdungsverbot).
monkey bar (bar, tiergarten). can one really say one has been to berlin if one hasn't been to a tiki bar overlooking the zoo? don't answer that. we ventured up to monkey bar to investigate monkey 47, a black-forest-produced gin based on a recipe scribbled down decades and decades ago by a homesick brit who named his hooch after his favorite primate. parts of that story are likely apocryphal, but the cocktail piece in which i mentioned the booze and the bar were very real, so we queued at an elevator bank for like half an hour and were carried into the sky to sip tiki drinks and rub elbows with tiergarten's prettiest (and some tourists). the mango maniac slushy, a seasonal special, was one of the best tropical drinks i've had in the last couple of years. if you can manage to make it to monkey bar's terrace in time to watch the sun set over the elephant enclosure at the zoo, you'll probably feel like a master of the universe.
neues ufer (bar, schöneberg). "do you follow american football at all?" robert, the impossibly young fellow behind the bar at david bowie's old local, asked. "i was asked to go play for the ducks of oregon, or for alabama." (he decided to join the german military instead, and will be leaving the bar in a few months.) if you catch them in repose, the folks at neues ufer don't listen to all that much david bowie; they hear hours and hours of him when tourists come through after visiting his apartment down the block, and his face has been on every wall since his death in january. i believe we listened to michelle branch as we chatted with regulars about donald trump and i shifted on my seat and tried not to harass my new tattoo. i think robert would have gone to oregon rather than to alabama, but it sounds like he ended up in the right place anyway. a stately woman with a perfect rooster wished us well as we folded ourselves back into the rain: "have a nice life!"
*part I is here.
01.02.16
2016: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
i watched five minutes of the rose bowl halftime show.
i finished a crossword puzzle on the subway.
i ate a vegetarian sloppy joe.
i ran into the ocean in a skeleton suit and wool socks.
i ordered a mermaid pilsner while a cover band performed "the final countdown."
i finally saw the shining's man-bear-pig at a midnight screening (other versions i'd seen had edited him out?).
i drank the rest of my sister's holiday kombucha.
i put new sheets on the bed.
i watched five minutes of the rose bowl halftime show.
i finished a crossword puzzle on the subway.
i ate a vegetarian sloppy joe.
i ran into the ocean in a skeleton suit and wool socks.
i ordered a mermaid pilsner while a cover band performed "the final countdown."
i finally saw the shining's man-bear-pig at a midnight screening (other versions i'd seen had edited him out?).
i drank the rest of my sister's holiday kombucha.
i put new sheets on the bed.
10.01.15
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
the christians (play). we continue to bask in theatrical excellence via our membership at playwrights horizons, to such a degree that i've toyed with the idea of hooking up with a second off-broadway theater (signature, as new-fangled and luxe as playwrights is scrappy, is a frontrunner). i knew the christians was about an evolution in faith—lucas hnath's letter to the audience made it clear that some heavy shit was going to go down—but i was caught off guard by how moving said shit turned out to be. it's been years since i've had a conversation with a loved one about how they won't be seeing me in heaven someday, and i'd forgotten how much they can hurt. see this with your friend's thoughtful husband who works at a megachurch! see it with your mom's awesome boyfriend who served as a missionary during the vietnam war! see it with your atheist friend who has a cross tattoo! er.
john (play). annie baker and sam gold's new production is both the best play i've seen this year and the show that convinced me that i must never attend a matinee ever again. baker won last year's pulitzer prize for the flick, an extremely long, hypernaturalistic work that enraged conservative theatergoers: that crosstalk! those uncomfortable silences! that virtual plotlessness! the pulitzer plus several high-profile, glowing reviews made her new play this summer's hot ticket in new york city but somehow failed to impress upon its prospective audiences the fact that it's more, much more, of the same. (i was counting on that; i loved the flick.) two saturdays ago, then, we spent the afternoon with an audience full of jackasses. five minutes into the first act, a cell phone went off at the end of our row; its owner pretended it wasn't hers for five rings before rummaging in her purse and shutting it off. (an hour later, her husband talked back at the action as if he was watching netflix at home: "CAN YOU IMAGINE IF I DID SOMETHING LIKE THAT?") audience members on both sides of the theater dropped and rolled heavy items down the aisles; as joe put it, it sounded like six manacled people were scattered about the theater and then slowly freed over the course of the show. i began to suspect after the second intermission that baker had actually planted terrible people in the audience to provoke people like joe and me; could off-broadway regulars at an explicitly challenging play really be that shitty? (these weren't people who rolled out of their tour buses and ended up at john because mamma mia! was sold out for the day; these tickets were difficult to come by, and i can't imagine anyone just stumbled in.) reader, they could. i checked with a few friends who'd also seen the play, and their audiences had no such fools. the bad news, then, is that our appreciation of an exceedingly fine play (which i will not spoil by describing in detail here; read the hilton als new yorker review i linked up top if you'd like to get a general sense of it that doesn't ruin any surprises) was compromised by whisperin' asshats; the good news is that joe now wants to see the flick, which is still running in the city with the original cast. WE WILL SEE IT AT NIGHT.
paulina & fran (book). full disclosure: rachel b. glaser is my friend's sister (though i didn't realize that until after i'd brought her novel home). additional disclosure: she also writes poetry and short stories and paints nba players and sort of intimidates the hell out of me, in a good way. i want to lend P&F to my sister even more than i wanted to lend her jonathan lethem's you don't love me yet—books about visual art students visual-arting are so much more interesting than books about writing students writing!—but she is a visual artist, and one never knows how that sort of loaner will land. P&F is a playful, crass, unapologetic novel about what young women inflict on one another in the name of sorority (not sororities), a frustrating love story that makes a lot of sense, and the only book i've ever read in which a secret message makes its way from one person to another on a man's buttock. its emotional math kept me up until four this morning:
piercing brightness (film). both narrative and gloriously non-, shezad dawood's first full-length film is the product of three years of on-site research in preston, a town in the northwest of england that is both the birthplace of mormonism(?!) and the uk's leader in ufo sightings. that deep-dive storytelling results in immensely satisfying texture; when i asked dawood at the post-screening q&a about his use of birds (pigeons in bus stations, pulsating airborne flocks, glamour shots of exotic breeds), he told me that the many bicycle gangs in preston use bird calls to communicate (a detail that isn't directly referenced in the movie). piercing brightness is sort of the story of the glorious 100, a group of extraterrestrials that came to earth for the mutual benefit of their kind and ours, but it's also about immigration, identity, and naturalism, whatever that is. i love smart science fiction almost as much as i love vampire movies, and this is exceedingly smart; here's to diligent listeners who let their subjects guide them.
wassail (restaurant). i have been avoiding wassail since joe told me about it a few months ago, since if a vegetarian restaurant that also specialized in obscure ciders didn't make me happy we would know for sure that there is no joy in my heart. i am deeply glad that i have stopped avoiding wassail. for my money, they have the best happy hour on the lower east side: perfect hot peanuts tossed with dried chiles de arbol and aged gouda jalapeno fritters materialized at our elbows for next to nothing, and the two cider flights on offer when we visited were refined (joe's, a variety of vintages from an upstate cidery) and satisfyingly footy (mine, a european assortment—their spanish cider was madrid in a glass, and i don't mind if my use of that expression makes you want to kick me in the face). wassail played matthew sweet, cranky old elvis costello, and the LA's; i'm tempted to start a disinformation campaign to keep its fans to a minimum and a pair of stools free for us, but a hipster meatless-vittles-and-cider-bar craze is more than fine with me.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 has anyone tried to convert you lately?
02 had you known of the peach basket, where poets write about basketball? why didn't you tell me?
03 why are matinee audiences so shitty?
04 have you ever owned an american girl doll?
05 how many birds can you ID by their calls?
06 where's your favorite happy hour?
the christians (play). we continue to bask in theatrical excellence via our membership at playwrights horizons, to such a degree that i've toyed with the idea of hooking up with a second off-broadway theater (signature, as new-fangled and luxe as playwrights is scrappy, is a frontrunner). i knew the christians was about an evolution in faith—lucas hnath's letter to the audience made it clear that some heavy shit was going to go down—but i was caught off guard by how moving said shit turned out to be. it's been years since i've had a conversation with a loved one about how they won't be seeing me in heaven someday, and i'd forgotten how much they can hurt. see this with your friend's thoughtful husband who works at a megachurch! see it with your mom's awesome boyfriend who served as a missionary during the vietnam war! see it with your atheist friend who has a cross tattoo! er.
john (play). annie baker and sam gold's new production is both the best play i've seen this year and the show that convinced me that i must never attend a matinee ever again. baker won last year's pulitzer prize for the flick, an extremely long, hypernaturalistic work that enraged conservative theatergoers: that crosstalk! those uncomfortable silences! that virtual plotlessness! the pulitzer plus several high-profile, glowing reviews made her new play this summer's hot ticket in new york city but somehow failed to impress upon its prospective audiences the fact that it's more, much more, of the same. (i was counting on that; i loved the flick.) two saturdays ago, then, we spent the afternoon with an audience full of jackasses. five minutes into the first act, a cell phone went off at the end of our row; its owner pretended it wasn't hers for five rings before rummaging in her purse and shutting it off. (an hour later, her husband talked back at the action as if he was watching netflix at home: "CAN YOU IMAGINE IF I DID SOMETHING LIKE THAT?") audience members on both sides of the theater dropped and rolled heavy items down the aisles; as joe put it, it sounded like six manacled people were scattered about the theater and then slowly freed over the course of the show. i began to suspect after the second intermission that baker had actually planted terrible people in the audience to provoke people like joe and me; could off-broadway regulars at an explicitly challenging play really be that shitty? (these weren't people who rolled out of their tour buses and ended up at john because mamma mia! was sold out for the day; these tickets were difficult to come by, and i can't imagine anyone just stumbled in.) reader, they could. i checked with a few friends who'd also seen the play, and their audiences had no such fools. the bad news, then, is that our appreciation of an exceedingly fine play (which i will not spoil by describing in detail here; read the hilton als new yorker review i linked up top if you'd like to get a general sense of it that doesn't ruin any surprises) was compromised by whisperin' asshats; the good news is that joe now wants to see the flick, which is still running in the city with the original cast. WE WILL SEE IT AT NIGHT.
paulina & fran (book). full disclosure: rachel b. glaser is my friend's sister (though i didn't realize that until after i'd brought her novel home). additional disclosure: she also writes poetry and short stories and paints nba players and sort of intimidates the hell out of me, in a good way. i want to lend P&F to my sister even more than i wanted to lend her jonathan lethem's you don't love me yet—books about visual art students visual-arting are so much more interesting than books about writing students writing!—but she is a visual artist, and one never knows how that sort of loaner will land. P&F is a playful, crass, unapologetic novel about what young women inflict on one another in the name of sorority (not sororities), a frustrating love story that makes a lot of sense, and the only book i've ever read in which a secret message makes its way from one person to another on a man's buttock. its emotional math kept me up until four this morning:
"I'm sorry," Fran said, but she wasn't. She felt Gretchen was the kind of girlfriend she would be offered again and again by the adult world, the real world, but Paulina was someone truly original, someone who existed only once.i even liked the part where baby mice were dressed as characters from the wizard of oz. recommended.
piercing brightness (film). both narrative and gloriously non-, shezad dawood's first full-length film is the product of three years of on-site research in preston, a town in the northwest of england that is both the birthplace of mormonism(?!) and the uk's leader in ufo sightings. that deep-dive storytelling results in immensely satisfying texture; when i asked dawood at the post-screening q&a about his use of birds (pigeons in bus stations, pulsating airborne flocks, glamour shots of exotic breeds), he told me that the many bicycle gangs in preston use bird calls to communicate (a detail that isn't directly referenced in the movie). piercing brightness is sort of the story of the glorious 100, a group of extraterrestrials that came to earth for the mutual benefit of their kind and ours, but it's also about immigration, identity, and naturalism, whatever that is. i love smart science fiction almost as much as i love vampire movies, and this is exceedingly smart; here's to diligent listeners who let their subjects guide them.
wassail (restaurant). i have been avoiding wassail since joe told me about it a few months ago, since if a vegetarian restaurant that also specialized in obscure ciders didn't make me happy we would know for sure that there is no joy in my heart. i am deeply glad that i have stopped avoiding wassail. for my money, they have the best happy hour on the lower east side: perfect hot peanuts tossed with dried chiles de arbol and aged gouda jalapeno fritters materialized at our elbows for next to nothing, and the two cider flights on offer when we visited were refined (joe's, a variety of vintages from an upstate cidery) and satisfyingly footy (mine, a european assortment—their spanish cider was madrid in a glass, and i don't mind if my use of that expression makes you want to kick me in the face). wassail played matthew sweet, cranky old elvis costello, and the LA's; i'm tempted to start a disinformation campaign to keep its fans to a minimum and a pair of stools free for us, but a hipster meatless-vittles-and-cider-bar craze is more than fine with me.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 has anyone tried to convert you lately?
02 had you known of the peach basket, where poets write about basketball? why didn't you tell me?
03 why are matinee audiences so shitty?
04 have you ever owned an american girl doll?
05 how many birds can you ID by their calls?
06 where's your favorite happy hour?
03.24.15
the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register*}
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:35 p.m. A caller said he witnessed a man expose himself to a woman. The man was described as in his late 40s and possibly wearing an Angels beanie.
Suspicious persons in vehicle. The owner of a tire shop called because two men came in asking to have a tire repair and he suspected they were under the influence and the car smelled like weed.
Disturbance. 12:37 p.m. A woman was selling expired coupons to elderly people. The caller said it was an ongoing problem with the woman.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 8:50 a.m. The caller reported a man looking into yards.
Terrorist threats. 10:03 a.m. The caller reported a man who threatened a driving evaluator after he failed his driving test.
Burglary in progress. 2:26 a.m. A man, about 30, with a medium build wearing a black baseball cap with orange writing, a black shirt and black pants, was reportedly trying to break into the newspaper stand. The caller said he saw quarters falling from the man's pocket.
Drunk in public. 6:47 p.m. A juvenile was reportedly drinking beer out of a water bottle. He was reportedly stumbling and skateboarding.
Annoying phone call. 5:27 p.m. The caller said her soon to be ex-husband is calling her at work and complaining about her babysitter.
Assist outside agency. 12:37 p.m. The caller reported a combative man in a wheelchair behind Wells Fargo.
Reckless driving. 5:20 p.m. The caller reported a Cadillac going across all lanes, stopping suddenly and stopping to ask for directions.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 7:22 a.m. The caller reported a homeless man sleeping outside the office. The caller was afraid to go to work.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 4:14 p.m. Several subjects were reportedly drinking beer behind flamingos.
*previous installment here.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:35 p.m. A caller said he witnessed a man expose himself to a woman. The man was described as in his late 40s and possibly wearing an Angels beanie.
Suspicious persons in vehicle. The owner of a tire shop called because two men came in asking to have a tire repair and he suspected they were under the influence and the car smelled like weed.
Disturbance. 12:37 p.m. A woman was selling expired coupons to elderly people. The caller said it was an ongoing problem with the woman.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 8:50 a.m. The caller reported a man looking into yards.
Terrorist threats. 10:03 a.m. The caller reported a man who threatened a driving evaluator after he failed his driving test.
Burglary in progress. 2:26 a.m. A man, about 30, with a medium build wearing a black baseball cap with orange writing, a black shirt and black pants, was reportedly trying to break into the newspaper stand. The caller said he saw quarters falling from the man's pocket.
Drunk in public. 6:47 p.m. A juvenile was reportedly drinking beer out of a water bottle. He was reportedly stumbling and skateboarding.
Annoying phone call. 5:27 p.m. The caller said her soon to be ex-husband is calling her at work and complaining about her babysitter.
Assist outside agency. 12:37 p.m. The caller reported a combative man in a wheelchair behind Wells Fargo.
Reckless driving. 5:20 p.m. The caller reported a Cadillac going across all lanes, stopping suddenly and stopping to ask for directions.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 7:22 a.m. The caller reported a homeless man sleeping outside the office. The caller was afraid to go to work.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 4:14 p.m. Several subjects were reportedly drinking beer behind flamingos.
*previous installment here.
01.05.15
2015: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
i ate pizza at a chinese restaurant.
i finished the girls from corona del mar.
i poured fireball into a dunkin’ donuts coffee and drank it in front of the literature/needlecraft holiday window at bergdorf's.
i told my sister not to have a baby because the apocalypse is coming and it’s our fault.
my sister told me “the terrible ‘blank space’ song that’s always on at fine fare” is, in fact, taylor swift.
i ran 3.1 miles.
i bought 6 pouches of cat food.
i sneezed 8 times in under a minute.
i called my mom.
i ate pizza at a chinese restaurant.
i finished the girls from corona del mar.
i poured fireball into a dunkin’ donuts coffee and drank it in front of the literature/needlecraft holiday window at bergdorf's.
i told my sister not to have a baby because the apocalypse is coming and it’s our fault.
my sister told me “the terrible ‘blank space’ song that’s always on at fine fare” is, in fact, taylor swift.
i ran 3.1 miles.
i bought 6 pouches of cat food.
i sneezed 8 times in under a minute.
i called my mom.
12.02.14
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
birdman (film). i heard birdman described as a cross between louie and black swan, which is about right, though i wish the parallels there could have extended to some rodarte costumes for ed norton. fetishizing the exotic is kind of lazy, ed norton in rodarte aside, but a mexican director (alejandro gonzález iñárritu) skewering hollywood and broadway is much more interesting to me than, say, woody allen doing the same. birdman isn't A Great Movie, but it's a limber (the cinematography in particular is wonderfully cartilaginous) and sly one. we were talking today at the wild bird fund about whether or not shakes made with ferret food could be the next fad diet, speaking of limber and sly. i myself am convinced of it.
cooking with fernet branca (book). i have been trying to limit myself to a single purchase at my weekly shift at housing works bookstore and failing rather miserably; i feel like a man-eating carp working at a hammam. cooking with fernet branca, one of my first and splashiest acquisitions, is that rare modern british satire that doesn't make me want to start a bar fight (looking at you, david lodge). published a decade ago, it's (among other things) a fine takedown of yuppie porn like under the tuscan sun, featuring a british ghostwriter, an eastern european film composer who lives in the next villa over, and recipes for the repellent meals they share. choosing a favorite passage is like choosing a favorite cat, but -
Beyond this point we enter the realm of the sacramental, and words all but fail me. All I can say is that Alien Pie, hot from the oven and with a jaunty buzzard feather stuck in the top, should be eaten on a terrace overlooking a distant ocean above which the remnants of sunset brood like old wounds seeping through a field dressing. It is one of those experiences poised exquisitely between sorrow and oblivion.
[...]
"Perfectly correct, papà," says this vision, flashing me a smile I want to lay away in lavender in a dark drawer for the rocky years ahead.
[...]
When I turn back to the scene I've just left—which despite the fire brigade is still considerably ablaze—it's just in time to see an extraordinary thing. The two tall cypress trees are standing up to their knees in incandescent scrub and brushwood. One is just beginning to catch fire, the flames running up it like a bright liquid under pressure. The other, though, simply begins to—and I can scarcely believe what I'm seeing—to bend very slowly from the waist, as if it were an elderly butler greeting a monarch. As I watch, the bend accelerates into a grovel and the cypress wilts like a dildo in a smithy, its crest coming to rest on the ground. Curious, I think as I trudge woozily away with my ears singing. Most curious.
kantin (restaurant). in the afternoon, istanbul professionals flock to kantin in posh nişantaşi for the artisanal lunch spread: the shop floor is jammed with bread baked from thousand-year-old strains of wheat, refrigerator cases full of handmade mustard and catsup, and terrier-sized wheels of cheese. the fancy-rural implements on the wall would transfer quite handily to a millionaire-mom cafe in park slope. at night, the upstairs dining room becomes a dionysian temple of modern slow food. i suspect the four thousand courses we were served had something to do with the fact that we were travel journalists, but i can't deny that şemsa "alice waters of istanbul" denizsel and her team have more ideas about what to do with local ingredients than i have hairs on my head. roasted pumpkin with oyster mushrooms! sorrel with caramelized pear! green tangerine sorbet with mastic pudding and sour cherries! i'm even sort of OK with the fact that they snuck a bunch of spicy cheese in with the halvah for the last course of the night.
maleficent (film). i boarded an evening flight to istanbul by myself, chewed a complimentary piece of turkish delight as the runway unspooled beneath us and we rose into the sky (well done on those individual links to the cockpit cam, turkish airlines), and realized i needed to watch maleficent, a film that should be mummy-wrapped with trigger warnings for PANKs (professional aunts, no kids). i think i started crying when angelina jolie first laid eyes on elle fanning (aurora), and it's entirely possible that i sobbed audibly when i thought i knew how the story would end (my apologies, sweet retired rowmates en route to a fancy hike in cappadocia). i'll refrain from revealing how it ends, as i'm hoping one of you will see it and help me understand why it manhandled me so. as matt zoller seitz puts it, "it has a primordial edge that the clumsy filmmaking can't blunt."
nightcrawler (film). not since some demon stylist gave javier bardem a pageboy for no country for old men has villainous hair performed such heavy lifting. like drive, another hypersaturated movie with an implausible jacket, this one is much more about style than it is about nuanced statement; though both los angeles and jake gyllenhaal look quite spooky, gestures alone don't add up to much of a takeaway. nightcrawler goes down a bit like an off-brand black jellybean.
raki (spirit). like most supposedly beloved national drinks, raki tastes like anise and regret; you pour a finger or two of it into a tumbler, fill the tumbler the rest of the way with water so that it turns milky, and tell yourself you're having an authentic local experience. our turkish tour director told us that raki is a good drink if you want to laugh and cry and sing. i didn't laugh and cry after confronting it near gallipoli, but i did end up at something called a Fancy Boozy Roof Bar (which was not on a rooftop) singing "california dreaming" with my fellow journalists, including an australian former newspaper editor who'd borrowed a guitar from the departing band. i spotted a small bottle of raki in my mini fridge a few nights later and did not disturb it.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 if ferret-food shakes had magical dietary properties, would you try one?
02 have you ever used a recipe you found in a novel?
03 when were you last reminded of brooklyn when you were elsewhere? (a madrid restaurant menu advertised a Brooklyn Hipster Sandwich last week. it did not remind me of brooklyn.)
04 are you fond of any beloved national drinks?
05 if you were to serenade a bunch of journalists with a borrowed guitar, what would you sing?
05.13.12
administrative note: blogger swallowed this post a few years ago and regurgitated it this week. insofar as it's ever 2014 on kidchamp dot net, rest assured that it's 2014 on kidchamp dot net.
the unrelenting onslaught of wisdom and beauty you know as kidchamp dot net has been stemmed this month for administrative reasons; after ten-plus years of assembling the site as a narcoleptic would a scrapbook or a swallow would a nest (dozily, that is, and with unsightly mud), i finally handed the whole thing over to a professional to be reassembled as a killer robot from the future. the good news is that once the fine-tuning is complete, the shambolic horror that is the current commenting platform will be no more; the bad news is that i haven't been able to keep you abreast of the latest developments at headquarters (as new posts would obviously spawn hordes of comments which would then have to be painstakingly exported, reformatted, plunked into the hole where the robot's heart will never be, and so on). that said, construction is on hold for the time being, so i'm free to tell you that joe's nose recently went on a tiki tour of new jersey and staten island.
the nose began its tour at lani kai, an artisanal cocktail lounge near the holland tunnel in manhattan. this was more heroic than it sounds, for the nose concluded its evening at the campbell apartment after the manhattan cocktail classic opening gala mere hours earlier. ironically, the hideous limo-van that would ferry the tiki tourists from manhattan to jersey and staten island (for tropical cocktails and the operation of heavy machinery are a terrible blend) was pulled over for inspection and ran an hour late; the tour guides pacified their already-mellow charges* with dark and stormys and bar snacks. yes, short pants and long fuses in that crowd - which turned out to be a good thing, as (more irony) the freshly-inspected limo-van lacked air conditioning and we spent an hour inching up broadway in swampy, ninety-degree car-fug. this the guides battled with party cups of premium rum for everyone and tiki trash talk ("that guy's so tiki he takes a shit and garnishes it with a pineapple slice and a little umbrella." "that guy's so tiki he takes a piss and tops it with a float of 151.") morale remained high.
the nose's first port of call was chan's dragon inn, a c. 1962 polynesian-chinese joint in ridgefield, new jersey. i believe the nose tucked into a mai tai and i had a zombie, or was it the other way around? the menu was limited, but the towelettes were moist, the mustard was sinus-rejuvenating, and the (non-vegetarian) pupu was on fire. (we made ourselves a fairly substantial lunch before embarking on the tiki tour, which is why i'm here to tell you about it today.)
after a round of dead bastards (served with a jovial "see you in hell, motherfuckers") and another hour on the bus, we reached staten island and our second far-flung stop: jade island (est. 1972), shaolin's only tiki bar, once host to anthony bourdain (there on a visit with buster poindexter on an outer-borough episode of no reservations). weirdly, it was just across the strip mall from the pathmark of the damned, where, a few years ago, i spent ten minutes in line behind a woman trying to return a half-empty bag of dog food (without a receipt, naturally) because her dog "didn't like it." but that's neither here nor there; the nose called for an epic pineapple drink, i acquired a tiny umbrella which eventually migrated to my ear, and we wandered into what i imagine will end up being the most in-depth discussion of fruit juice our civilian radar will ever map.
on its third hour-long bus ride of the day (abandon all hope, ye who enter the holland tunnel), the nose was presented with a rum old-fashioned, and straight rum, and a handful of mel torme singalongs; the sun fled to western new jersey and disappeared, and assorted drink accessories crept into updos. lani kai was regained after dark, and the sleep of the just was eventually slept.
*fellow tiki tourists, i salute you and your unassailably good moods. the setbacks on our outer-borough slog could have been irritating or even alarming, but to a man, you kept it together (in flowered polyester).
the unrelenting onslaught of wisdom and beauty you know as kidchamp dot net has been stemmed this month for administrative reasons; after ten-plus years of assembling the site as a narcoleptic would a scrapbook or a swallow would a nest (dozily, that is, and with unsightly mud), i finally handed the whole thing over to a professional to be reassembled as a killer robot from the future. the good news is that once the fine-tuning is complete, the shambolic horror that is the current commenting platform will be no more; the bad news is that i haven't been able to keep you abreast of the latest developments at headquarters (as new posts would obviously spawn hordes of comments which would then have to be painstakingly exported, reformatted, plunked into the hole where the robot's heart will never be, and so on). that said, construction is on hold for the time being, so i'm free to tell you that joe's nose recently went on a tiki tour of new jersey and staten island.
the nose began its tour at lani kai, an artisanal cocktail lounge near the holland tunnel in manhattan. this was more heroic than it sounds, for the nose concluded its evening at the campbell apartment after the manhattan cocktail classic opening gala mere hours earlier. ironically, the hideous limo-van that would ferry the tiki tourists from manhattan to jersey and staten island (for tropical cocktails and the operation of heavy machinery are a terrible blend) was pulled over for inspection and ran an hour late; the tour guides pacified their already-mellow charges* with dark and stormys and bar snacks. yes, short pants and long fuses in that crowd - which turned out to be a good thing, as (more irony) the freshly-inspected limo-van lacked air conditioning and we spent an hour inching up broadway in swampy, ninety-degree car-fug. this the guides battled with party cups of premium rum for everyone and tiki trash talk ("that guy's so tiki he takes a shit and garnishes it with a pineapple slice and a little umbrella." "that guy's so tiki he takes a piss and tops it with a float of 151.") morale remained high.
the nose's first port of call was chan's dragon inn, a c. 1962 polynesian-chinese joint in ridgefield, new jersey. i believe the nose tucked into a mai tai and i had a zombie, or was it the other way around? the menu was limited, but the towelettes were moist, the mustard was sinus-rejuvenating, and the (non-vegetarian) pupu was on fire. (we made ourselves a fairly substantial lunch before embarking on the tiki tour, which is why i'm here to tell you about it today.)
after a round of dead bastards (served with a jovial "see you in hell, motherfuckers") and another hour on the bus, we reached staten island and our second far-flung stop: jade island (est. 1972), shaolin's only tiki bar, once host to anthony bourdain (there on a visit with buster poindexter on an outer-borough episode of no reservations). weirdly, it was just across the strip mall from the pathmark of the damned, where, a few years ago, i spent ten minutes in line behind a woman trying to return a half-empty bag of dog food (without a receipt, naturally) because her dog "didn't like it." but that's neither here nor there; the nose called for an epic pineapple drink, i acquired a tiny umbrella which eventually migrated to my ear, and we wandered into what i imagine will end up being the most in-depth discussion of fruit juice our civilian radar will ever map.
on its third hour-long bus ride of the day (abandon all hope, ye who enter the holland tunnel), the nose was presented with a rum old-fashioned, and straight rum, and a handful of mel torme singalongs; the sun fled to western new jersey and disappeared, and assorted drink accessories crept into updos. lani kai was regained after dark, and the sleep of the just was eventually slept.
*fellow tiki tourists, i salute you and your unassailably good moods. the setbacks on our outer-borough slog could have been irritating or even alarming, but to a man, you kept it together (in flowered polyester).
07.21.14
returning to new york city from a wedding weekend in portland was rough: sunday evening in northern oregon was a charming windswept grab bag of sunshowers and summery northwestern gusts, and last monday morning in line for a taxi in queens was like stepping into an elevator full of trolls. 75% of portland is painted the color of our bedroom, so spending time there was like getting the best room service ever (though i'd never eat in bed, i'm not a monster). it felt good to find a place that made me want to want to leave manhattan, even though i'm years and years from really and truly having that kind of yen.
CONSUMED {IN PORTLAND}: A PARTIAL LIST.
blue star donuts (shop). i'd probably have toddled down to the massive line wrapping around voodoo doughnut in the absence of expert guidance; it's part of just about every portland-adjacent food show i've ever seen, and it's smack in the middle of old town, so those of us with questionable senses of direction tend to circle the vortex like doomed sailors. those of us who also have a bespoke map from rachel, now—we get to start the day at blue star, where the front of the line is four people away, there are seats facing the street, and the old-fashioned donut chock full of locally-sourced goodness will make you cry just a little bit into your stumptown coffee (we also bought a meyer lemon donut filled with key lime curd, a blueberry-basil-bourbon donut, and a tres leches cake donut with hazelnuts; they were all excellent). i congratulated the guy at the counter on how pleasant it was downtown. "the streets are clean," he said, "but the people are dirty."
boxer ramen (restaurant). late-morning weekday downtown portland is informative and exhausting, for every shopkeeper will tell you about the last three west coast cities in which he or she lived and explain the intricacies of the local public transportation and give you gentle hints about where to eat without actually disparaging any of the places at which you probably shouldn't eat ("wait to have one of their burritos until you've had time to temper your expectations of what a burrito should be, maybe"). we heaped praise on blue star donuts to a kind and gregarious man selling selvedge denim and were directed to a ramen place owned by the blue star guy just a few doors away—perfect, as we were inexplicably hungry again. boxer ramen is goddamn adorable, its vegetarian curry is mild but delicious (and a mere $10), and if humming along with mid-'90s r&b in a mostly-empty air-conditioned room with a bowl of noodles, the missus, and a $4 beer isn't happiness, well.
floating world comics (shop). part of floating world's record-store vibe is the fact that it actually is a record store; it's also a gallery, a publisher, an art and design store, a cheerful zine-buyer (portland must be our nation's mightiest producer of zines), and an utterly magnificent repository of both mainstream and indie comics, and while i'm used to that kind of well-groomed enthusiasm from places like rough trade's new music store/venue in williamsburg, it, i don't expect it with my serial art. my (huge) mistake.
grassa (restaurant). by the time sunday night rolled around, we'd followed the 12hrs hipster guide across the river and back, powered down fancy corn nuts to soak up tiki drinks before tricia lockwood's reading, taken selfies over fancy wedding dinners, and eaten tater tot nachos on elephantine leather sofas underground while messi lost to germany in the world cup; our last group dinner didn't need to be great, it just had to be uncomplicated and pleasant. it was uncomplicated and pleasant, team! as the aforementioned denim guy said, the nice thing about portland is that you don't have to work yourself into a fomo-lather over must-sees and must-dos and hype or backlash; you can follow hunches when things look appealing and be reasonably confident that you'll enjoy yourself. at grassa, you order items from a chalkboard menu, pay up front, take a seat at one of the long communal tables, then tuck into fresh homemade pasta and a glass of local wine. mine was modest, comforting, and perfect for the end of a long weekend.
hand-eye supply (shop). THING I PURCHASED AT HAND-EYE SUPPLY, UNQUESTIONABLY THE FINEST ARTISANAL HARDWARE STORE I HAVE EVER SEEN: safety glasses which are now in rotation with my regular sunglasses, even though they were packaged in an airless plastic bag and are going to smell like feet for a while. THING I VERY NEARLY PURCHASED: a bar of otter wax for the brass otter i found at hippo hardware. THING I SHOULD HAVE PURCHASED: the clampersand. a clampersand, i said! i'm not sorry i got the smelly glasses, but with the smelly glasses and a clampersand i'd really be going places. a ferocious shower kicked up just as we were leaving hand-eye supply, and the friendly gal behind the counter rooted around in her storeroom until she found a plastic bag big enough to protect all of the posters and zines and david lynch art books i'd just purchased at floating world comics. gal, you were good to me.
hippo hardware & trading co. (shop). if i knew more about rebuilding vintage doors or was responsible for a full-body house rehab like jen's, i could have burned a few hours admiring the fancy knobs and swapping this old house quotes with the kind woman downstairs at hippo hardware. as i would surely be the worst contractor ever and had only five minutes to shop before heading back across the willamette for a big pre-wedding brunch with our friends, i merely bought a brass otter from the brusque woman upstairs. where did it come from? "from a supplier," she growled. "they supply us with brass otters."
portland saturday market (sprawl). i sing of east-to-west jet lag that pries me from bed at weird hours and flings me at coffeehouses and street fairs! on saturdays in new york i'm rarely wearing pants at noon, but on saturday in portland i'd scorned questionable ceramics, bought vegan black licorice lip balm (hey!), and tasted local hard cider (meh?) before ten. the saturday market felt like a cross between one of the summer street fairs that pop up on avenues in manhattan in a burst of mozzarepas and tube socks and the corner of the union square greenmarket where the farmstands start mixing with guys selling novelty tees; i wish it had been a bit farmstandier, as the buckets of wildflowers were, as rachel predicted, gorgeous and nearly free, but i will apply my lip balm and keep my gripes to myself.
powell's books (shop). while i can't know for sure that i'd happily swap new york's strand with powell's even if my first visit to the latter hadn't been for tricia lockwood's friday-night reading and it seems kind of mean-spirited to pit independent bookstores against one another—i treasure all of them except for san francisco's city lights, which can suck it—i sure would like to swap for powell's. it's more comfortable and navigable than i'd have thought a store of that size was capable of being, its displays are intuitive and dynamic, it managed to trick joe "all digital all the time" s. into falling in love with a big-ass book about soviet architecture, and it programmed a hot poetry event for the one weekend i'd be in town. i went back half a dozen times before we left portland on sunday night. please shop at powell's instead of on amazon.
rum club (bar). knowing of my and joe's love for laid-back bars and tiki, rachel sent us to meet the giant wooden bear with a shriner's fez at rum club in the industrial district; "the wallpaper is also amazing," she noted. she's right, and as always, she steered us true; daiquiris here are rarely that good, and they're never that cheap. our evening plans on the other side of the river kept me from establishing a scandalous all-night cocktail fiefdom at our little collection of tables, but i dream about it still (rachel's full portland and eugene write-up is here). that gossipy late afternoon with our friends was one of this summer's best.
CONSUMED {IN PORTLAND}: A PARTIAL LIST.
blue star donuts (shop). i'd probably have toddled down to the massive line wrapping around voodoo doughnut in the absence of expert guidance; it's part of just about every portland-adjacent food show i've ever seen, and it's smack in the middle of old town, so those of us with questionable senses of direction tend to circle the vortex like doomed sailors. those of us who also have a bespoke map from rachel, now—we get to start the day at blue star, where the front of the line is four people away, there are seats facing the street, and the old-fashioned donut chock full of locally-sourced goodness will make you cry just a little bit into your stumptown coffee (we also bought a meyer lemon donut filled with key lime curd, a blueberry-basil-bourbon donut, and a tres leches cake donut with hazelnuts; they were all excellent). i congratulated the guy at the counter on how pleasant it was downtown. "the streets are clean," he said, "but the people are dirty."
boxer ramen (restaurant). late-morning weekday downtown portland is informative and exhausting, for every shopkeeper will tell you about the last three west coast cities in which he or she lived and explain the intricacies of the local public transportation and give you gentle hints about where to eat without actually disparaging any of the places at which you probably shouldn't eat ("wait to have one of their burritos until you've had time to temper your expectations of what a burrito should be, maybe"). we heaped praise on blue star donuts to a kind and gregarious man selling selvedge denim and were directed to a ramen place owned by the blue star guy just a few doors away—perfect, as we were inexplicably hungry again. boxer ramen is goddamn adorable, its vegetarian curry is mild but delicious (and a mere $10), and if humming along with mid-'90s r&b in a mostly-empty air-conditioned room with a bowl of noodles, the missus, and a $4 beer isn't happiness, well.
floating world comics (shop). part of floating world's record-store vibe is the fact that it actually is a record store; it's also a gallery, a publisher, an art and design store, a cheerful zine-buyer (portland must be our nation's mightiest producer of zines), and an utterly magnificent repository of both mainstream and indie comics, and while i'm used to that kind of well-groomed enthusiasm from places like rough trade's new music store/venue in williamsburg, it, i don't expect it with my serial art. my (huge) mistake.
grassa (restaurant). by the time sunday night rolled around, we'd followed the 12hrs hipster guide across the river and back, powered down fancy corn nuts to soak up tiki drinks before tricia lockwood's reading, taken selfies over fancy wedding dinners, and eaten tater tot nachos on elephantine leather sofas underground while messi lost to germany in the world cup; our last group dinner didn't need to be great, it just had to be uncomplicated and pleasant. it was uncomplicated and pleasant, team! as the aforementioned denim guy said, the nice thing about portland is that you don't have to work yourself into a fomo-lather over must-sees and must-dos and hype or backlash; you can follow hunches when things look appealing and be reasonably confident that you'll enjoy yourself. at grassa, you order items from a chalkboard menu, pay up front, take a seat at one of the long communal tables, then tuck into fresh homemade pasta and a glass of local wine. mine was modest, comforting, and perfect for the end of a long weekend.
hand-eye supply (shop). THING I PURCHASED AT HAND-EYE SUPPLY, UNQUESTIONABLY THE FINEST ARTISANAL HARDWARE STORE I HAVE EVER SEEN: safety glasses which are now in rotation with my regular sunglasses, even though they were packaged in an airless plastic bag and are going to smell like feet for a while. THING I VERY NEARLY PURCHASED: a bar of otter wax for the brass otter i found at hippo hardware. THING I SHOULD HAVE PURCHASED: the clampersand. a clampersand, i said! i'm not sorry i got the smelly glasses, but with the smelly glasses and a clampersand i'd really be going places. a ferocious shower kicked up just as we were leaving hand-eye supply, and the friendly gal behind the counter rooted around in her storeroom until she found a plastic bag big enough to protect all of the posters and zines and david lynch art books i'd just purchased at floating world comics. gal, you were good to me.
hippo hardware & trading co. (shop). if i knew more about rebuilding vintage doors or was responsible for a full-body house rehab like jen's, i could have burned a few hours admiring the fancy knobs and swapping this old house quotes with the kind woman downstairs at hippo hardware. as i would surely be the worst contractor ever and had only five minutes to shop before heading back across the willamette for a big pre-wedding brunch with our friends, i merely bought a brass otter from the brusque woman upstairs. where did it come from? "from a supplier," she growled. "they supply us with brass otters."
portland saturday market (sprawl). i sing of east-to-west jet lag that pries me from bed at weird hours and flings me at coffeehouses and street fairs! on saturdays in new york i'm rarely wearing pants at noon, but on saturday in portland i'd scorned questionable ceramics, bought vegan black licorice lip balm (hey!), and tasted local hard cider (meh?) before ten. the saturday market felt like a cross between one of the summer street fairs that pop up on avenues in manhattan in a burst of mozzarepas and tube socks and the corner of the union square greenmarket where the farmstands start mixing with guys selling novelty tees; i wish it had been a bit farmstandier, as the buckets of wildflowers were, as rachel predicted, gorgeous and nearly free, but i will apply my lip balm and keep my gripes to myself.
powell's books (shop). while i can't know for sure that i'd happily swap new york's strand with powell's even if my first visit to the latter hadn't been for tricia lockwood's friday-night reading and it seems kind of mean-spirited to pit independent bookstores against one another—i treasure all of them except for san francisco's city lights, which can suck it—i sure would like to swap for powell's. it's more comfortable and navigable than i'd have thought a store of that size was capable of being, its displays are intuitive and dynamic, it managed to trick joe "all digital all the time" s. into falling in love with a big-ass book about soviet architecture, and it programmed a hot poetry event for the one weekend i'd be in town. i went back half a dozen times before we left portland on sunday night. please shop at powell's instead of on amazon.
rum club (bar). knowing of my and joe's love for laid-back bars and tiki, rachel sent us to meet the giant wooden bear with a shriner's fez at rum club in the industrial district; "the wallpaper is also amazing," she noted. she's right, and as always, she steered us true; daiquiris here are rarely that good, and they're never that cheap. our evening plans on the other side of the river kept me from establishing a scandalous all-night cocktail fiefdom at our little collection of tables, but i dream about it still (rachel's full portland and eugene write-up is here). that gossipy late afternoon with our friends was one of this summer's best.
06.16.14
101 in 1001 {III}: 070 make beer [ongoing]
my night of triumph was at hand: after saving up and sanitizing eight empty swing-top grolsch bottles (arduous; grolsch is not very good), acquiring a brooklyn brew shop kit with ingredients for a gallon of their warrior double ipa, mashing in, collecting and boiling wort, adding hops, pitching yeast, watching the beer-beast freak out on our counter for three days, installing an airlock, some other steps i'm probably forgetting, and letting the growler of whatever it was at that point become self-aware in a dark corner of our bedroom closet for two weeks, it was time to siphon and carbonate and bottle and promote my homemade beer, which would be the finest beer in all the land. i would call it grand street brown-brown, perhaps, in honor of matty, who supervised and inspired my efforts à la brooklyn brewery's beloved monster. i sanitized and prepared my racking cane and tubing, realized i hadn't yet prepared the honey and water mixture in the bottom of my sanitized pot, spilled a bunch of honey on the cat (who had started drinking the sanitizer when my back was turned, then panicked and scattered my bottles when i caught him at it), fled to retrieve the growler from the bedroom closet, and found that a pile of laundry had snapped the airlock clean off at the growler's open mouth, which explains why our clothes have smelled so spooky this week. a hop-addled moth traced a crooked spiral out of the closet.
my night of triumph was at hand: after saving up and sanitizing eight empty swing-top grolsch bottles (arduous; grolsch is not very good), acquiring a brooklyn brew shop kit with ingredients for a gallon of their warrior double ipa, mashing in, collecting and boiling wort, adding hops, pitching yeast, watching the beer-beast freak out on our counter for three days, installing an airlock, some other steps i'm probably forgetting, and letting the growler of whatever it was at that point become self-aware in a dark corner of our bedroom closet for two weeks, it was time to siphon and carbonate and bottle and promote my homemade beer, which would be the finest beer in all the land. i would call it grand street brown-brown, perhaps, in honor of matty, who supervised and inspired my efforts à la brooklyn brewery's beloved monster. i sanitized and prepared my racking cane and tubing, realized i hadn't yet prepared the honey and water mixture in the bottom of my sanitized pot, spilled a bunch of honey on the cat (who had started drinking the sanitizer when my back was turned, then panicked and scattered my bottles when i caught him at it), fled to retrieve the growler from the bedroom closet, and found that a pile of laundry had snapped the airlock clean off at the growler's open mouth, which explains why our clothes have smelled so spooky this week. a hop-addled moth traced a crooked spiral out of the closet.
05.09.14
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
the few (play). joe and i saw samuel d. hunter's the whale at playwrights horizons two winters ago; we both loved it, joe to such a degree that i've been able to convince him to see all sorts of things in the intervening years (thanks, playwrights horizons!). he was all for making a night of hunter's the few, also directed by davis mccallum and now at rattlestick, an even smaller theater down in the village (a note on our tickets instructed us to use the restroom before arriving, as their only one was onstage*). the two plays are clearly blood relations: the whale centers on an online writing teacher who annihilates intimacy with his morbid obesity, and the few is a once-lyrical newspaper established to assure long-haul truckers they are seen and heard (now kept alive by an IV drip of their personal ads). writing can connect us, sure, but it's also just another way for us to lie to each other. the whale is more successful because it concentrates its anguish so effectively in one character, i think, but the few hits some of the same eerie notes—and, if we're being honest, i could look at dane laffrey's ultranaturalistic set design all day. i wish my dear jen had been in the house to geek out over grimy walls and idaho refrigerator magnets with me.
gracias madre (restaurant). my sister was kind enough to allow us to admire her newborn daughter for the better part of a week last month and to make a big old family reservation for organic/local/vegan mexican food when we were in san francisco. as when i worked at the spca hospital a few blocks away c. 2002, gracias madre's corner of the mission isn't...especially...not...sketchy, but the restaurant itself is so wholesome (our long table had a drawerful of earnest doodled notes from patrons to other patrons**) that i stopped reminiscing about crack pipe sightings almost immediately. i was also distracted by gracias madre's respectable guacamole and craft beer list, though to be fair, if you're in california and can't do those things right you should probably go to canada. other dishes ranged from marvelous (a well-spiced quesadilla with sweet potato and caramelized onion) to stand-up (pozole) to mystifying (a "queso fundido" of bread crumbs, cashews, and cauliflower). i'd love to be able to say gracias madre's kitchen is holding its own in the neighborhood, but that neighborhood makes most of the best mexican food i've ever eaten; let's say that i respect what they're doing and hope their game gets tighter. team veg has an awfully shallow bench.
little failure (book). in a world of my making gary shteyngart would have a catlike nine lives and a memoir for each. in the experimental short story i lack the attention span to write, young gary shteyngart happens upon the young fictional characters of donna tartt's the goldfinch and just beats the snot out of them. we are all of us in this world, though, and i can but say that little failure (failurchka, as shteyngart's mother calls him) is a dense and self-aware and heartbreaking memoir, and that i now feel even weirder about peeking into shteyngart's closets when joe and i were thinking about buying his apartment (i am still grateful for the faux-molding trick we borrowed for our bedroom a few months later). little asthmatic igor (gary was an anagram-ish attempt to avoid ridicule) moved with his parents from leningrad to new york in 1979; little failure offers (literal and figurative) snapshots of his early years in russia (when his grandmother bribed him with cheese to write lenin and his magical goose, a first 'novel'), scenes of extended agony at hebrew school in queens (he spoke no english and relied on sympathetic local jews for secondhand clothes), and a recipe for the funny-guy persona he cooks up to survive adolescence and adulthood. i tend to pass over memoirs in favor of biographies, but shteyngart has me reconsidering that reflex: little failure is fucking great.
mother (restaurant). our week of niece-admiration in northern california concluded with another thoughtfully-planned vegetable-based meal, this time at a buzztastic place in downtown sacramento. given how reverentially our hosts spoke about its chef, michael thiemann (formerly of ella), i figured we'd wait for a table for hours,*** but we were seated and convinced to order the ten-course chef's-choice menu in no time (in sacramento a ten-course chef's-choice menu rings in at $25 per person; WELL DONE, SACRAMENTO). our table promptly became a kaleidoscope of sexy meatlessness: chicken-fried trumpet mushrooms with buffalo sauce, deconstructed portobello poutine with a luxurious kimchi-based gravy and wildflowers, smoked baby carrots, fresh pasta with ramps and crisp fiddleheads...i should have been taking notes. thiemann isn't a vegetarian; he just gives his main ingredients the same respect he'd give an animal protein, and he has the advantage of a palate that's accustomed to animal proteins' depth of flavor. i couldn't tell you what an authentic poutine gravy tastes like, but he can, and my non-vegetarian folks loved his food as hard as i did. look this place up on your next joan-didion-themed road trip.
pliny the elder (beer). i hunt for things for a living, and in my spare time i hunts the things even more enthusiastically. pliny's sole east coast distributor is down in philadelphia, and it's scarce enough in southern california that an announcement that pliny the younger (its seasonal cousin) is on tap somewhere in los angeles generates an instant three-hour hipster queue.**** i wandered into a specialty grocer's at the san francisco ferry building when i was out west in february and found a1 PLINY PER PERSON! SOLD OUT sign on an empty refrigerator case. we revisited said case on this trip an hour before the next shipment was due—i am smooth like that—and stocked up after a leisurely lunch. it probably goes without saying that pliny wasn't nearly as exciting to drink as it was to hunt (i actually preferred blind pig, another russian river IPA with a more complex finish), but in a craft landscape where most celebrated microbrews are either octuple imperial stouts with ABVs that could send you straight into a coma or so hoppy they present like asparagus pee, it's awfully nice when a brewmaster exercises some restraint. this is a well-balanced imperial IPA: evergreen but not aggressively resinous, citrusy in a sophisticated rather than a cheapie-witbier way. while i will always love fraoch (a weird scottish ale brewed with heather and bog myrtle) more than i love other beers, i salute this one.
the realistic joneses (play). tip of the hat to esb for turning our biannual bicoastal cocktail night into an evening at the theater; we met up in hell's kitchen for a drink and a show the night after joe and i saw the few, so i was basically the fanciest girl in new york last weekend. those are weird shows to see back to back, though: will eno's writing is as stylized as hunter's is naturalistic, and it took me a few scenes to get used to his big-name cast's quippity-quipping. it's weirdly affecting absurdism, though, and michael c. hall in particular did an unexpectedly fine job of layering little gut-twists into his non sequiturs (i have yet to watch six feet under and know him primarily from dexter, a show i watched mainly because DVDs of the first three seasons materialized like pop-culture dust bunnies in our credenza). the simple plot provides comfortable digs for the non sequiturs: hall's character and his wife (marisa tomei) move to a small town and befriend their neighbors (tracy letts and toni collette). both husbands suffer from a rare, mysterious disorder that seems to complicate relationships and make conversations more exotic; both wives struggle as partners and as wearers of awkward summer-casual clothing. these pairings reminded my companions of edward albee's marriages; i'm still new to this non-shakespeare stuff and know albee primarily from a cross-stitched quote ("You have lovely breasts.") in the first new york apartment joe and i sublet, so i will simply trust them.
der samurai (film). this year's tribeca film festival revels were squashed into a single weekend, thanks to our trip to california; i try to get to at least a couple of foreign horror movies, but this year's small-town-east-german-cop-and-dress-wearing-samurai story was an only child. the screening was free for crew members, so half a dozen of the guys i'd worked with over the past few days turned up for (and hated) the movie; joe said he quite liked it and strove mightily not to fall asleep halfway through (he failed). too bad for him! till kleinert spoke in the subsequent Q&A of wanting to plant his feet in germany and make the sort of film most directors would decamp to america for; i loved that he decided to go weird and dreamy and grand-guignol in a market that doesn't yet know what to do with him. appropriately, der samurai is all about repression and release: a straightforward treatment of a young officer protecting his village from a wolf mutates into a violently romantic dreamscape in which conventional locals are "corks;" sometimes self-actualization means sabering people like champagne bottles, i guess, and you have to just submit to a tender interpretive dance with a terrifying man in a gore-spattered white gown. the movie ends up feeling like david lynch's entry in the eurovision song contest (the joyful final scene fades out to the ark's "it takes a fool to remain sane"). since joe missed so much of it we should probably see it again.
something must break (film). seating tribeca audiences is surprisingly intense: filmmakers underestimate their entourages, all-access-badgeholders descend en masse without warning, random squirrelly people lie and steal each other's seats. in my second shift this year a documentary's subject, a softspoken old art forger who donates his creations to unsuspecting museum curators, went AWOL an hour before showtime and was discovered at the last minute in a restaurant around the corner. writer/directors never show up on time with their collaborators and take the worst seats in the house, but ester martin bergsmark did; loading the house for something must break was such a breeze that i got to stay and watch the film, which was the highlight of my festival. saga becker plays sebastian, a young punk in stockholm who's fallen for andreas (performance artist iggy malmborg), who is not gay (sebastian: "neither am i.") but tells sebastian, "you're so beautiful i want to vomit." that's an understatement, really: becker's almost frighteningly lovely, like kristen stewart if she gave up and decided to be charismatic. their love scenes are somehow both graphic and chaste, and their love story's set to impeccable don't-speak-to-me-stay-with-me swedish electroclash (appropriate for a film named for a joy division song; a detractor called it a "moody soundtrack-album in search of a movie"). for this one i wish i'd had my costume-designer sister with me; she'd love how ellie, the identity sebastian initially suggests with strands of pearls, begins to become herself in pieces like a shoplifted dress. duck into this if it comes your way. it's unforgettable.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 how do you feel about vegan "cheese"?
02 what's the best memoir you've ever read?
03 do you think merpeople have to wash with special soap before they perform in aquariums with live fish?
04 where would one go on a joan-didion-themed road trip?
05 have you had either of the plinys? do they live up to the hype for you?
06 where in our sublet would you guess the edward albee quote was hanging?
07 how do you feel about swedish music?
*everyone else ignored this note and formed a twenty-idiot line for the head anyway, so the play started fifteen minutes late. i'd have been cooler about that if i hadn't just housed my dinner like a fugitive in order to get to my seat on time.
**and a graphic designer's business card.
***happily, there was a weird merpeople bar across the street.
****i would love to mock those hipsters, but i waited several pre-dawn hours on an east side sidewalk for the comme des garçons x h&m collection a few years ago.
the few (play). joe and i saw samuel d. hunter's the whale at playwrights horizons two winters ago; we both loved it, joe to such a degree that i've been able to convince him to see all sorts of things in the intervening years (thanks, playwrights horizons!). he was all for making a night of hunter's the few, also directed by davis mccallum and now at rattlestick, an even smaller theater down in the village (a note on our tickets instructed us to use the restroom before arriving, as their only one was onstage*). the two plays are clearly blood relations: the whale centers on an online writing teacher who annihilates intimacy with his morbid obesity, and the few is a once-lyrical newspaper established to assure long-haul truckers they are seen and heard (now kept alive by an IV drip of their personal ads). writing can connect us, sure, but it's also just another way for us to lie to each other. the whale is more successful because it concentrates its anguish so effectively in one character, i think, but the few hits some of the same eerie notes—and, if we're being honest, i could look at dane laffrey's ultranaturalistic set design all day. i wish my dear jen had been in the house to geek out over grimy walls and idaho refrigerator magnets with me.
gracias madre (restaurant). my sister was kind enough to allow us to admire her newborn daughter for the better part of a week last month and to make a big old family reservation for organic/local/vegan mexican food when we were in san francisco. as when i worked at the spca hospital a few blocks away c. 2002, gracias madre's corner of the mission isn't...especially...not...sketchy, but the restaurant itself is so wholesome (our long table had a drawerful of earnest doodled notes from patrons to other patrons**) that i stopped reminiscing about crack pipe sightings almost immediately. i was also distracted by gracias madre's respectable guacamole and craft beer list, though to be fair, if you're in california and can't do those things right you should probably go to canada. other dishes ranged from marvelous (a well-spiced quesadilla with sweet potato and caramelized onion) to stand-up (pozole) to mystifying (a "queso fundido" of bread crumbs, cashews, and cauliflower). i'd love to be able to say gracias madre's kitchen is holding its own in the neighborhood, but that neighborhood makes most of the best mexican food i've ever eaten; let's say that i respect what they're doing and hope their game gets tighter. team veg has an awfully shallow bench.
little failure (book). in a world of my making gary shteyngart would have a catlike nine lives and a memoir for each. in the experimental short story i lack the attention span to write, young gary shteyngart happens upon the young fictional characters of donna tartt's the goldfinch and just beats the snot out of them. we are all of us in this world, though, and i can but say that little failure (failurchka, as shteyngart's mother calls him) is a dense and self-aware and heartbreaking memoir, and that i now feel even weirder about peeking into shteyngart's closets when joe and i were thinking about buying his apartment (i am still grateful for the faux-molding trick we borrowed for our bedroom a few months later). little asthmatic igor (gary was an anagram-ish attempt to avoid ridicule) moved with his parents from leningrad to new york in 1979; little failure offers (literal and figurative) snapshots of his early years in russia (when his grandmother bribed him with cheese to write lenin and his magical goose, a first 'novel'), scenes of extended agony at hebrew school in queens (he spoke no english and relied on sympathetic local jews for secondhand clothes), and a recipe for the funny-guy persona he cooks up to survive adolescence and adulthood. i tend to pass over memoirs in favor of biographies, but shteyngart has me reconsidering that reflex: little failure is fucking great.
mother (restaurant). our week of niece-admiration in northern california concluded with another thoughtfully-planned vegetable-based meal, this time at a buzztastic place in downtown sacramento. given how reverentially our hosts spoke about its chef, michael thiemann (formerly of ella), i figured we'd wait for a table for hours,*** but we were seated and convinced to order the ten-course chef's-choice menu in no time (in sacramento a ten-course chef's-choice menu rings in at $25 per person; WELL DONE, SACRAMENTO). our table promptly became a kaleidoscope of sexy meatlessness: chicken-fried trumpet mushrooms with buffalo sauce, deconstructed portobello poutine with a luxurious kimchi-based gravy and wildflowers, smoked baby carrots, fresh pasta with ramps and crisp fiddleheads...i should have been taking notes. thiemann isn't a vegetarian; he just gives his main ingredients the same respect he'd give an animal protein, and he has the advantage of a palate that's accustomed to animal proteins' depth of flavor. i couldn't tell you what an authentic poutine gravy tastes like, but he can, and my non-vegetarian folks loved his food as hard as i did. look this place up on your next joan-didion-themed road trip.
pliny the elder (beer). i hunt for things for a living, and in my spare time i hunts the things even more enthusiastically. pliny's sole east coast distributor is down in philadelphia, and it's scarce enough in southern california that an announcement that pliny the younger (its seasonal cousin) is on tap somewhere in los angeles generates an instant three-hour hipster queue.**** i wandered into a specialty grocer's at the san francisco ferry building when i was out west in february and found a
the realistic joneses (play). tip of the hat to esb for turning our biannual bicoastal cocktail night into an evening at the theater; we met up in hell's kitchen for a drink and a show the night after joe and i saw the few, so i was basically the fanciest girl in new york last weekend. those are weird shows to see back to back, though: will eno's writing is as stylized as hunter's is naturalistic, and it took me a few scenes to get used to his big-name cast's quippity-quipping. it's weirdly affecting absurdism, though, and michael c. hall in particular did an unexpectedly fine job of layering little gut-twists into his non sequiturs (i have yet to watch six feet under and know him primarily from dexter, a show i watched mainly because DVDs of the first three seasons materialized like pop-culture dust bunnies in our credenza). the simple plot provides comfortable digs for the non sequiturs: hall's character and his wife (marisa tomei) move to a small town and befriend their neighbors (tracy letts and toni collette). both husbands suffer from a rare, mysterious disorder that seems to complicate relationships and make conversations more exotic; both wives struggle as partners and as wearers of awkward summer-casual clothing. these pairings reminded my companions of edward albee's marriages; i'm still new to this non-shakespeare stuff and know albee primarily from a cross-stitched quote ("You have lovely breasts.") in the first new york apartment joe and i sublet, so i will simply trust them.
der samurai (film). this year's tribeca film festival revels were squashed into a single weekend, thanks to our trip to california; i try to get to at least a couple of foreign horror movies, but this year's small-town-east-german-cop-and-dress-wearing-samurai story was an only child. the screening was free for crew members, so half a dozen of the guys i'd worked with over the past few days turned up for (and hated) the movie; joe said he quite liked it and strove mightily not to fall asleep halfway through (he failed). too bad for him! till kleinert spoke in the subsequent Q&A of wanting to plant his feet in germany and make the sort of film most directors would decamp to america for; i loved that he decided to go weird and dreamy and grand-guignol in a market that doesn't yet know what to do with him. appropriately, der samurai is all about repression and release: a straightforward treatment of a young officer protecting his village from a wolf mutates into a violently romantic dreamscape in which conventional locals are "corks;" sometimes self-actualization means sabering people like champagne bottles, i guess, and you have to just submit to a tender interpretive dance with a terrifying man in a gore-spattered white gown. the movie ends up feeling like david lynch's entry in the eurovision song contest (the joyful final scene fades out to the ark's "it takes a fool to remain sane"). since joe missed so much of it we should probably see it again.
something must break (film). seating tribeca audiences is surprisingly intense: filmmakers underestimate their entourages, all-access-badgeholders descend en masse without warning, random squirrelly people lie and steal each other's seats. in my second shift this year a documentary's subject, a softspoken old art forger who donates his creations to unsuspecting museum curators, went AWOL an hour before showtime and was discovered at the last minute in a restaurant around the corner. writer/directors never show up on time with their collaborators and take the worst seats in the house, but ester martin bergsmark did; loading the house for something must break was such a breeze that i got to stay and watch the film, which was the highlight of my festival. saga becker plays sebastian, a young punk in stockholm who's fallen for andreas (performance artist iggy malmborg), who is not gay (sebastian: "neither am i.") but tells sebastian, "you're so beautiful i want to vomit." that's an understatement, really: becker's almost frighteningly lovely, like kristen stewart if she gave up and decided to be charismatic. their love scenes are somehow both graphic and chaste, and their love story's set to impeccable don't-speak-to-me-stay-with-me swedish electroclash (appropriate for a film named for a joy division song; a detractor called it a "moody soundtrack-album in search of a movie"). for this one i wish i'd had my costume-designer sister with me; she'd love how ellie, the identity sebastian initially suggests with strands of pearls, begins to become herself in pieces like a shoplifted dress. duck into this if it comes your way. it's unforgettable.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 how do you feel about vegan "cheese"?
02 what's the best memoir you've ever read?
03 do you think merpeople have to wash with special soap before they perform in aquariums with live fish?
04 where would one go on a joan-didion-themed road trip?
05 have you had either of the plinys? do they live up to the hype for you?
06 where in our sublet would you guess the edward albee quote was hanging?
07 how do you feel about swedish music?
*everyone else ignored this note and formed a twenty-idiot line for the head anyway, so the play started fifteen minutes late. i'd have been cooler about that if i hadn't just housed my dinner like a fugitive in order to get to my seat on time.
**and a graphic designer's business card.
***happily, there was a weird merpeople bar across the street.
****i would love to mock those hipsters, but i waited several pre-dawn hours on an east side sidewalk for the comme des garçons x h&m collection a few years ago.
09.08.13
at the risk of being the girl who insists all gatherings are better in cemeteries, i'm starting to feel like all gatherings are better in cemeteries. my little sister and esb and i rolled out to see scream* at cinespia at hollywood forever when i was out in los angeles for matty in july, and i insisted on a follow-up trip when joe and i were back in town two weeks ago. this time we saw back to the future, so hobbyists' souped-up old deloreans ant-marched around the cemetery grounds. the crowd was a bit less costumed than it had been for scream's ninetiesfest (really, los angeles? who doesn't have an old puffer vest and/or a prom dress?), but it was enthusiastic, and it seemed to appreciate our complicated picnic accessories. we planned separate menus for encampments in line and in front of the screen, swapped cheese for wine with the kids on blankets behind us, and toasted absent friends as the sun ducked like a starlet behind the mausoleums. i'll say it again: new york, please try harder.
*was skeet ulrich ever plausible as a teenager? he's that franchise's gabrielle carteris. also, esb had never seen scream. what?!
09.02.13
the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*
Suspicious person/circumstance. 10:19 p.m. A male subject was sitting with a hammer in his hand.
Disturbance. 5:12 p.m. An informant in the principal's office at Hidden Hills Elementary said skateboarders were using picnic tables.
Disturbance. 6:59 p.m. A woman called about a 7-year-old child who was abusive to her dog and her daughter.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:15 a.m. The caller reported finding two cash registers on his lawn.
Disturbance. 6:29 p.m. The caller said six children are throwing rocks at nine ducklings along the bike trail. The caller yelled at them and is a little concerned they may come after him next.
Suspicious person. 10:46 a.m. A woman was pulling plants out of people's yards.
Suspicious person. 4:47 p.m. A gallon size plastic bag was attached to a street sign. The caller said it looked like pencils inside and said it didn't look normal.
Disturbance. 9:25 p.m. A caller reported that someone threw a gallon of milk at his house 10 minutes ago. He doesn't know who did it but there are three people standing nearby in the dark in a hallway.
Citizen assist, 3:28 p.m. Someone reported people handing out religious material to students coming out of school.
Keeping the peace, 7:42 p.m. A man said his neighbor was giving baseball lessons in his own backyard and it was too loud.
Petty theft. 10:49 a.m. A man said someone used a rock to break into the candy vending machine at a construction project he supervises and stole $50 in candy. The damage to the machine was $100.
Shoplifting. 9:05 a.m. An employee of Ralphs said a man took a 24-ounce can of Budweiser into the bathroom and drank it without paying. The loss was $1.94.
*previous installment here.
Suspicious person/circumstance. 10:19 p.m. A male subject was sitting with a hammer in his hand.
Disturbance. 5:12 p.m. An informant in the principal's office at Hidden Hills Elementary said skateboarders were using picnic tables.
Disturbance. 6:59 p.m. A woman called about a 7-year-old child who was abusive to her dog and her daughter.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:15 a.m. The caller reported finding two cash registers on his lawn.
Disturbance. 6:29 p.m. The caller said six children are throwing rocks at nine ducklings along the bike trail. The caller yelled at them and is a little concerned they may come after him next.
Suspicious person. 10:46 a.m. A woman was pulling plants out of people's yards.
Suspicious person. 4:47 p.m. A gallon size plastic bag was attached to a street sign. The caller said it looked like pencils inside and said it didn't look normal.
Disturbance. 9:25 p.m. A caller reported that someone threw a gallon of milk at his house 10 minutes ago. He doesn't know who did it but there are three people standing nearby in the dark in a hallway.
Citizen assist, 3:28 p.m. Someone reported people handing out religious material to students coming out of school.
Keeping the peace, 7:42 p.m. A man said his neighbor was giving baseball lessons in his own backyard and it was too loud.
Petty theft. 10:49 a.m. A man said someone used a rock to break into the candy vending machine at a construction project he supervises and stole $50 in candy. The damage to the machine was $100.
Shoplifting. 9:05 a.m. An employee of Ralphs said a man took a 24-ounce can of Budweiser into the bathroom and drank it without paying. The loss was $1.94.
*previous installment here.
08.15.13
the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:47 p.m. The caller said a pizza delivery guy came to the door with a pizza but she didn't order any.
Found property. 5:10 p.m. The caller said he was using a metal detector and found a knife.
Disturbance. 10:47 p.m. The caller reported four men smoking out of a bong at the community center softball field.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:12 p.m. The caller said a "big-time drug dealer" is going to be doing a huge drug deal at the In-N-Out.
Reckless driving. 10:55 a.m. The caller reported a woman in a Jetta "hugging" the curb and hitting the sidewalk.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 12:21 a.m. The caller said all lights are on at Carl's Jr. and it's a 24-hour drive-through, but there are signs on the doors saying "closed, sorry for the inconvenience" and registers are wrapped in black trash bags.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:01 a.m. The caller said a man set up a tent in the Little League first base dugout area.
Keep the peace. 4:15 p.m. The caller said he negotiated a purchase of a printer on eBay and was told by the owner to drive to Beverly Hills and pick it up. When he got there, a woman was standing there with the printer and said she's handling the sale, but she's not who he spoke to and she's denying knowing that person. The caller said it's very shady.
Disturbance. 11:55 p.m. The caller said his drunken friend is not acting normal.
Assist outside agency. 6:30 a.m. A bobcat or mountain lion reportedly was spotted in a resident's back yard.
Citizen assist. 6:25 p.m. A woman said she left her driver's license and credit card in her lover's trousers. Her lover then went home to his wife, who was angry and now had both her ID and credit card, she said. She called sheriff's deputies in an attempt to retrieve her property, officials said.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 1:42 p.m. The caller reported two men mowing the lawn and thought it was suspicious because they're driving a small U-Haul instead of a truck.
*previous installment here.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:47 p.m. The caller said a pizza delivery guy came to the door with a pizza but she didn't order any.
Found property. 5:10 p.m. The caller said he was using a metal detector and found a knife.
Disturbance. 10:47 p.m. The caller reported four men smoking out of a bong at the community center softball field.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:12 p.m. The caller said a "big-time drug dealer" is going to be doing a huge drug deal at the In-N-Out.
Reckless driving. 10:55 a.m. The caller reported a woman in a Jetta "hugging" the curb and hitting the sidewalk.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 12:21 a.m. The caller said all lights are on at Carl's Jr. and it's a 24-hour drive-through, but there are signs on the doors saying "closed, sorry for the inconvenience" and registers are wrapped in black trash bags.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:01 a.m. The caller said a man set up a tent in the Little League first base dugout area.
Keep the peace. 4:15 p.m. The caller said he negotiated a purchase of a printer on eBay and was told by the owner to drive to Beverly Hills and pick it up. When he got there, a woman was standing there with the printer and said she's handling the sale, but she's not who he spoke to and she's denying knowing that person. The caller said it's very shady.
Disturbance. 11:55 p.m. The caller said his drunken friend is not acting normal.
Assist outside agency. 6:30 a.m. A bobcat or mountain lion reportedly was spotted in a resident's back yard.
Citizen assist. 6:25 p.m. A woman said she left her driver's license and credit card in her lover's trousers. Her lover then went home to his wife, who was angry and now had both her ID and credit card, she said. She called sheriff's deputies in an attempt to retrieve her property, officials said.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 1:42 p.m. The caller reported two men mowing the lawn and thought it was suspicious because they're driving a small U-Haul instead of a truck.
*previous installment here.
07.31.13
the dirty dozen-ish {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*
Disturbance. 12:52 p.m. The caller reported a man and a woman making out on the grass and said it's not appropriate.
Illegal peddling. 7:36 p.m. The caller reported a man going door to door and arguing when he's refused.
Disturbance. 11:37 a.m. The caller reported an argument with 16-year-old grandson over a computer.
Citizen assist. 12:46 p.m. The caller said someone is spitting on his car every morning. The caller thinks it's a neighbor who lives behind him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 7:57 p.m. The caller reported a boy smoking marijuana behind the electrical shed.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 8:00 p.m. The caller said people are possibly lighting something on fire in the park.
Vandalism in progress. 12:27 p.m. The caller reported a woman lying down on the bus stop and writing on it with a pink marker.
Disturbance. 5:45 a.m. The caller reported inviting a woman over and said she is now refusing to leave.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported someone trying to get into a wedding party as an uninvited guest.
Disturbance. 1:26 p.m. The caller reported a man eating yogurt, yelling about the government and using bad language.
Disturbance. 11:37 p.m. The caller reported loud people who have hopped the fence and are in the pool.
Disturbance. 10:39 p.m. The caller reported four people on bicycles being loud.
Defrauding an innkeeper. The caller said a man drank $100 worth of alcohol and left without paying.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported a drunken man sleeping in the planter. The caller said there are newspapers all around him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported hearing someone knocking on the door twice. The caller's husband turned on the light and saw shadows.
*inspired in part by chelsey johnson's excellent incident reports from park rapids, minnesota.
Disturbance. 12:52 p.m. The caller reported a man and a woman making out on the grass and said it's not appropriate.
Illegal peddling. 7:36 p.m. The caller reported a man going door to door and arguing when he's refused.
Disturbance. 11:37 a.m. The caller reported an argument with 16-year-old grandson over a computer.
Citizen assist. 12:46 p.m. The caller said someone is spitting on his car every morning. The caller thinks it's a neighbor who lives behind him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 7:57 p.m. The caller reported a boy smoking marijuana behind the electrical shed.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 8:00 p.m. The caller said people are possibly lighting something on fire in the park.
Vandalism in progress. 12:27 p.m. The caller reported a woman lying down on the bus stop and writing on it with a pink marker.
Disturbance. 5:45 a.m. The caller reported inviting a woman over and said she is now refusing to leave.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported someone trying to get into a wedding party as an uninvited guest.
Disturbance. 1:26 p.m. The caller reported a man eating yogurt, yelling about the government and using bad language.
Disturbance. 11:37 p.m. The caller reported loud people who have hopped the fence and are in the pool.
Disturbance. 10:39 p.m. The caller reported four people on bicycles being loud.
Defrauding an innkeeper. The caller said a man drank $100 worth of alcohol and left without paying.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported a drunken man sleeping in the planter. The caller said there are newspapers all around him.
Suspicious person/circumstances. The caller reported hearing someone knocking on the door twice. The caller's husband turned on the light and saw shadows.
*inspired in part by chelsey johnson's excellent incident reports from park rapids, minnesota.
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