This is Max, who came to live with us this morning. He likes: meowing, running up and down the length of the apartment, hiding under the bed when his plaintive mewls are not consistently replied to, and sitting under a blanket on the couch while listening to Joanna Newsom. She gave an absolutely brilliant performance supporting Neko Case at McCarren Park Pool last night, but Max deserves a post all his own, so she'll have to wait. Suffice to say that we considered calling him "Mewsom" in her honour, but Max was already his name and it suits him. And, as you can see from the last photo here, Max also thinks it's about time I got around to doing the Library Thing. 
Friday, August 25, 2006
Introducing Max
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Watching Williamsburg
While I'm passing on my bad habits of watching hilarious stuff online instead of working, have a look at The Burg, a sitcom about Williamsburg (our cooler-than-thou neighbourhood) which hits the hipster nail on the head pretty accurately every time. Very funny. Just as funny is reading the comments on the site from all the disgruntled real-life hipsters who feel they haven't been fairly represented, because they would never drink Coors....
Americaaaaaaay-yay, United Against Baby-Melting Candle-Makers Everywhere
Last night we wandered over to Bedford Avenue for the Found Footage festival presented by Rooftop Films. These guys spend their time rooting in thrift shops, dumpsters, HR offices and other spots for old footage that people would rather forget, and put them all together into a sort of montage. It sounded like it would be good, maybe along the lines of what the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players do with their found footage, and since we're both Super 8 film nerds, we were also hoping there'd be some of that kind of thing in there. There wasn't - the sixteen they screened were all strictly of the 1980s VCR variety, not to mention of the freakin' hilarious variety. This was all the kind of stuff that those involved would probably prefer to be destroyed...in fact, when it comes to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the "I'm coming day and night" bodybuilding movie, Pumping Iron (1979), forget the "probably". When his career turned from pumping to politics, Arnie tried to ban the screening of this footage, apparently, but he didn't succeed. Personally, I think he should have been more worried about Carnival in Rio, from 1983, a travel guide to Rio hosted by Arnie in which he loses the run of himself somewhat, gleefully pawing every bit of naked "mulatto" ass he can get his hands on, and giving his female co-host an English lesson which necessitates her to suck slowly on the carrot in his hand...you've got to see this.
There were other gems in there too, chief among them How to Seduce Women Through Hypnosis (1983), which seemed to be an entirely sincere guide to basically raping a woman by putting her in a phony trance; Strong Kids, Safe Kids (1984), a well-intentioned educational video teaching children about how to keep the bad guys away from their "private parts" and starring Henry Winkler in character as the Fonz (and featuring the genius that is the Proper Words Song); and a medley of patriotic videos by gleefully insane people, my favourite of which doesn't even have the excuse of dating from the '80s but was made last year by someone called Denis Madalone. You can experience its joys, tears and stars-and-striped-infused waters here. It'll make you cry. With happiness that you don't live here. Or with terror that you do.
Oh, and while you're at it, get yourself some unhinged preacher men: Wayne David Meyer and Jonathan Bell (the later swiped from a Daily Show clip).
Friday, August 18, 2006
Frank Bascombe, Older and Hardly Wiser...
The new Richard Ford novel, in proof form, just arrived on my desk (wait, I don't have a desk. I mean, my kitchen table.) I haven't read it yet, obviously (at 485 pages, it will probably keep me going for a while) but I'm looking forward to seeing whether Ford has managed to convincingly get back into the voice of the narrator he first created 20 years ago, with The Sportswriter and returned to for Independence Day. Like each of those novels, it's set on a holiday, this time Thanksgiving, in the year 2000. So it's America before 2001, and before Bush (the Florida votes farce is still ongoing), and that in itself will make for an interesting read.
Something else I'm looking forward to reading today is the rehearsal script of Stuart Carolan's new play, The Empress of India, which opens in Galway and moves to the Dublin Theatre Festival. Carolan's first play, Defender of the Faith, was perhaps the strongest new work (in terms of "straight" plays) to open on an Irish stage in 2004, and perhaps even since then. When I was in the Abbey over the summer I noticed that the script was still for sale in the lobby there for something like €8. That's a recommendation, in case I'm being too subtle...The cast for the Galway/Dublin production looks terrific, including Sean McGinley in his first stage outing in five years, Aaron Monaghan, Catherine Walsh and Tadhg Murphy. It doesn't open until Sept 12, but I'd be interested to hear the views of anybody who gets to see it.
What else...slipped into my bad habit of listening online to RTE Radio 1 again while working (too depressing listening to NPR these days, most of the time...Israel or nothing) but today wasn't too bad; caught the excellent Rattlebag special on trad, and am now listening to the RnaG live stream ( I was going to write there, "I'm not a smug gaelgóir, I just listen for the music" but if I was a gaelgóir of any sort, rather than a head-hanging-shambles of an Irish speaker, it would be the smug sort, so forget about that). My neighbours probably hate me. But then, I hate them too, with their constantly appearing newborns and enormous dogs. That sounds very uncharitable. I like dogs and babies. But in a building which, even if it were a house, would arguably not be big enough to hold one of each, the apparent presence of several of them tends to grate on the nerves. Which reminds me. We're getting a kitten (now that it's in my blog, A, it has to happen. Ok?). Names suggested so far: Spling, Doodlemunch (long story) and Wee Thomas (short story...ok, downright theft). The eventual name, however, will depend on the unique personality and litterbox-related delinquency of the kitten itself.Dandelion, maybe?
Oh yeah. And the view is completely gone now. I don't want to talk about it...
Monday, August 14, 2006
www.everdiminishingview.blogspot.com?
They're taking it away from us....a little more each day. How tall is that damn building going to be, anyway?
My Old Boy's A Dustman
Boy George, who mistook his coke for a thief last year, today began the five days of community service to which he was sentenced for wasting police time, not to mention snorting time. He pushed a broom around lower Manhattan for a couple of hours this morning until the pressure of being followed by a few dozen photographers got to him and he screamed at them. He has now been assigned a gated sanitation lot for the remainder of his service. Here he's pictured accidentally tipping an ounce of his best stuff away.
Photos from McCarren Park Pool
Sonic Youth were amazing; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs weren't worth the hype. Pretty boring, actually. But the venue was what made it for me, with its vast flaking floor and its rusted diving boards...
Friday, August 11, 2006
Home to Brooklyn, broadband... and blocked views
Flying from Dublin to New York at 10.30 yesterday morning sounds like it should have been a nightmare, but, thanks to the very decent and professional staff at the airport, it wasn't really. Except for a moment when I had to restrain myself from spinning around in the crush at gate 32 to shout "JUST GIVE THEM THE GODDAMN CREAM!!!" at a woman behind me who was refusing to understand that the no liquid/no gel rule applied to her, too, no matter how little she felt like stooping down and opening up her bag (which, incidentally, looked way too big to pass as hand luggage, but anyway).
En route to the airport, the friends we'd stayed with called to tell us that there was a major security alert, and that if we needed to stay another night or two, there was no problem. It wasn't much fun turning to the severely-hungover and not-too-flight-happy-in-normal-circumstances A to relay this news (the security alert bit, not the staying another night with our very fun and now very pregnant friends). It was even less fun reading the texts that miglior started sending me at five minute intervals, each one carrying a greater air of foreboding than the last. When you're standing in the check in area for US flights, the last words you want to read are "Critical Terrorist Alert" or "liquid device expected/sought". Any minute the frantic calls from our mothers were bound to start coming, and they did. But check-in went smoothly, as did screening, as did immigration, and though the boarding gate was a bit of a cattle mart, it would have been chaotic on any day, given the number of very small kids travelling with their self-righteous parents (of COURSE you can push past me because you've been "separated" from your husband. What is this, a mercy flight? Look, he's just over there. He's not being bundled into a flight going in another direction to you. You don't have to step on everyone's heads to get to him).
I don't think the ban on liquids, medicines aside, will have that terrible an effect on the experience of long-haul travel; it depends on whether the airlines decide to use it as an opportunity to make more money by charging for water and other non-alcoholic drinks. On the flight I took yesterday, you could have as much water as you needed after the seatbelt lights were switched off. The other liquids I gave up - moisturiser, foundation, lip gloss - are hardly essential for hand luggage. True, the skin on my face felt like an armadillo's arse afterwards, but...well...plus ca change. But I was emotionally reunited with pretty much everything I'd given up at the baggage carousel in JFK, where a pretty surly crew worked to match the plastic bags of duty-free and other liquids with their red-faced, impatient Irish owners. Any flight from Dublin to New York, after all, will have its fair share of women on shopping trips, and it's dangerous for them to be separated from their bottles of bronzer for too long. Mild panic had definitely set in.
Favourite moment of the whole experience, though, was when the young male flight attendant did his last whirl round the cabin with a huge bin bag looking for "shampoos, gels, anything like that". "Still looking?" someone asked him cheerily. "Yeah, and I'll be selling this lot up the front in half an hour," he said, to loud, prolonged laughter from our end of the plane. It was a huge release of tension. He continued on his search. "Any shampoos, gels, ipods...."
Thankfully, the New York in which we found ourselves was not the New York of last week, when temperatures hit 117 farenheit; yesterday was a bearable 78 degrees. Thunderstorms last night ensured that today is manageable, too. We're going to see Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the amazing, surreal venue that is the disused pool at McCarren Park later today, and tomorrow we're going to a wedding of two friends who've recently moved back here (well, the groom has moved back, the bride has just moved here, full stop) up in Connecticut. So it's good to be back. But there is some bad news. I don't know whether I can call this blog by its current name for much longer. Why? Because yesterday, when we walked into the apartment, and when we looked out the kitchen window where our lovely view used to be, we saw this monstrosity.
This is how it used to look:
And it's only going to get taller. Even a Sashimi and Sushi Platter (that's 23 pieces of raw fish, folks! YUM) on Bedford Avenue couldn't make me feel better. Well, not much better.
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