Read:My:Back

Weekend Updates: Rock shows! Cooking! Movies from 13 Years Ago!

Friday: My wife and I met friends at the South Street Seaport to see a band called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart perform for hundreds of very polite young people. I thought they sounded like the Jesus and Mary Chain crossed with a Pepsi commercial. She said they reminded her of the Connells—a band I had not thought about in several thousand years, so kudos to her for whipping out explicit references in the face of my rote sarcasm. That said, TPOBPAH might be the most appallingly good-natured band I have ever seen, making even the most earnest, NPR-approved indie rock seem like black metal in comparison. In spite of my general disinterest in such music, I must commend their singer for deploying a brilliant on-stage comment which went something like: "Good night, God bless America, and we'll see you all at Pizzeria Uno!" Let's hear it for the death of irony, eh?

Saturday: Evening plans to hit Coney Island for the Cyclones game were scrapped because of the crummy weather forecast, so we instead devoted the day to gastronomical adventures that had me doing food-inspired happydances not once, not twice, but three times for three different meals!

• Breakfast: Leftover buttermilk pancake batter retrieved from deep freeze, cooked up with fresh blueberries and strawberries, plus orange maple syrup. Crazy delicious. [Recipe here]


• Lunch: A late morning voyage to the supermarket revealed that it is finally heirloom tomato season! We wasted no time in selecting two of the ripest and gnarliest looking purple and yellow specimens, and to the grocery cart also added a loaf of still-warm sourdough bread and an appealing wad of fresh mozzarella cheese. Back home, we cut the bread into lengthwise slices, spread leftover rocket pesto on each side, added the cheese, tomato, some windowbox basil, and a splash of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Result? Heaven on a stick, bub. Heaven on a stick.

• Dinner: I'd recently seen an episode of Tyler Florence on which he made jerk chicken, so with a whole bird already stashed in our fridge and most of the other ingredients within easy reach, I decided a major culinary project would be just the thing to take our minds off the missed Cyclones game (they got stomped, by the way.) Anyhow, here's the recipe we based our jerk chicken on, but with the following alterations: Instead of a Scotch-bonnet pepper, we used some unknown green chili. Also, since we're not crazy enough to try smoking meat inside with only makeshift equipment, we soaked a bowl full of cedar chips and prepared the outdoor grill for this first critical step. (I put the soaked chips in a big cast-iron skillet, got 'em good and smoldering, and then laid a slotted grill tray on top of it to rest the chicken on. This hasty bit of improvisation worked out well, but I fear the skillet may be done for as a result of subjecting it to such trauma.) The end result was magnificent, as was the accompanying corn porridge [recipe], which we consumed while watching The English Patient. This was my first re-viewing of the Oscar-winning film since it debuted in 1996, and it once again inspired the familiar debate over whether Kristin Scott Thomas is hotter than Juliette Binoche, or likewise, if Naveen Andrews is hotter than Ralph Fiennes. No definitive conclusions were reached, but I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that it's been too long since such a drool-worthy cast has been assembled for any film, major or independent.

 

Sunday: Slept late for a change. Cooked up some navy eggs for breakfast. Poked around garden, pulled weeds, listened to a few Cheap Trick and Augustus Pablo records, and then went for a long bike ride. I also finished that incredibly gripping New Yorker article from a couple weeks ago about U.S. troop deployments in Iraq (you can read it here, though you must register for the New Yorker's horrifically designed website), and prepped for tomorrow morning's radio program on WFMU. Speaking of which, it's nearly time for me to go pass out for a few hours before showtime...

Everybody Take Five and Stretch Your Legs

The Internet's biggest problem is that it rarely calls for any of us to stand up. Just imagine how different we'd all feel if brief exercise breaks were an expected part of our daily web browsing... Don't you think periodic moments of drop-and-give-me-twenty would put a different spin on our LinkedIn communications and Flickr uploads? I certainly do.

My gym membership lapsed today, and with financial uncertainty topping my list of things to freak out over, it won't be getting renewed. At least not until next winter, when it becomes too cold to ride my bike around the city anymore. Besides, going to the gym is a freakish experience that I don't think I'll ever be really comfortable with. There's something about watching CNN on ten televisions at once that makes me retreat to a weird corner of my brain where everything seems like a Japanese horror movie. Also, the music they play at the gym totally rots.

Another problem is that since I was occasionally victimized by jocks back in high school, just being around rows of lockers and lots of towels is enough to summon up the associated horrors of that terrible time in life. The football toughs in my school were known to periodically seize wimpy guys for a ritualistic abuse they called "eating the cake". I offer my sincere condolences if you are familiar with the horrific details of this practice, and if you're not, consider yourself lucky. It never happened to me, but I have seen "the cake" administered to others, and can only imagine the therapy bills its victims are now paying.

One thing I do love about my gym is the dry-erase marker board that hangs in its window, which the staff routinely updates with snarky one-liners. Most gyms would use such display space to advertise aerobics classes or spin sessions, but this place treats it as a home for off-color zingers like "Look better for your stalker!" or "Man-boobs begone!" On one level, it's always reassuring to see cheeky humor used in unexpected places, but on the other hand, the practice may be hurting their business, as my gym rarely has more than 3 or 4 members in it at any one time. I'm genuinely shocked that corporate HQ hasn't instructed them to knock it off yet.

Anyway, if you've got the willpower to honor your New York Sports Club membership even as seasonal changes drive the mercury ever upward, I can only see you off with my best wishes and this 30 minute warmup mix. I can reasonably guarantee it's better than whatever your gym is playing right now, unless of course you happen to like segues from the Hives to the Footloose soundtrack. [MP3]

Another Britishism Uncloaked by Top Gear

OK, I'll fess up to not knowing what a "lorry" was until this past week's episode of the BBC2 series Top Gear. (Spoiler: It's a big truck.) And to think that I stumbled ignorantly through nearly 37 years of life without ever bothering to discover this detail... Furthering my personal shame is the realization that I've owned an LP by that band Red Lorry Yellow Lorry since high school. Oof.

Curse my ignorant and lazy ways, and then enjoy this clip of the latest Top Gear challenge. It easily ranks among the show's best and funniest ever.

Pouring a Pint for George Best

The noted professional footballer George Best passed away three years ago today. As his Wikipedia entry neatly summarizes, he is most remembered for his years with Manchester United, where he became one of the first true celebrities of the sport. His devilish good looks no doubt earned him a great many additional fans (GQ magazine once identified him as one of the most stylish men of the last 50 years), but still others became familiar with him through the curious lens of the British indie band The Wedding Present, who named their 1987 debut album after him.

Infuriatingly, I missed that recently reunited band's Autumn swing through the these parts, but I harbor exceptional memories of seeing them at Maxwell's a great many years ago (possibly at the tail-end of the Seamonsters tour), where they bled eardrums with a performance that was as loud as construction equipment.

There's a wonderful montage of George Best clips on YouTube, although it is incongruously set to the sound of "Ordinary World" by Duran Duran. Granted, the Wedding Present's "My Favourite Dress" is no more lyrically applicable, but it is a longtime favorite of mine, and so I lean thusly.

Get your Wedding Present fix in the physical format at Insound, or if you're the type who prefers MP3s, eMusic will serve you up right nicely.

Skatepunks Invade Oslo Opera House

Rising to this morning's news that we'll all be witness to a major restructuring of the global power index in the coming two decades, I downed an extra cup of nerve-soothing coffee and switched over to the decidedly less alarming content offered by this month's issue of Wired. The teenage skaterat who still lives somewhere inside of me did a mental ollie-to-grind over Andrew Blum's analysis of the Oslo Opera House, for which the architects consulted skateboarders to further their own understanding of design, surface texture, and the subtleties that transform a building into a man-made topographical landmark. The results of this project -- said to be inspired by the image of two colliding glaciers -- are quite breathtaking, not to mention pulse-quickening from a would-be skater's perspective. (Truth be told, I was really never too talented a skater, so I assumed the role of the guy who'd drive a carload of hoodlums to some remote but skateable parking garage. Once onsite, a battery-powered boombox would be produced from the trunk of my '81 VW Rabbit, and mixtapes featuring the finest in mediocre punk bands would belch forth in normal-bias triumph.)

Unfortunately, Wired's website isn't running an online version of the article, but there are a bunch of great pictures on Flickr of the opera house's many futuristic plateaus and steep embankments. I especially like this one, which demonstrates that even the Razor crowd is getting in on the action. Now if only there was a way that my dog-eared back issues of Thrasher could smooth over the looming geopolitical troubles on the horizon... I'll take three to one on another Stacy Peralta documentary, though the house bet is likely to fall for declining food resources in developing nations.

Crash Course in NYC History

My magazine-reading habits are pretty cut and dry, which isn't really surprising since I subscribe to only a handful of them. The majority of my reading -- magazine or otherwise -- has been done on trains and subways for as long as I've been a city-dweller. But since the current economic climate has forced me to make major cuts in the frequency of my travels around town, I feel like I've fallen woefully behind in keeping up with the periodicals that routinely appear in my mailbox. At best, I'm usually a month behind with The New Yorker, the subscription to Wired that my otherwise useless Media Bistro membership rewarded me with has proved to be a bust, and the last three issues of GQ have gone wholly uncracked, in spite of their potential for sharp political speak, laughably mundane music coverage, and tantalizing breasts.

Weirdly, however, I have read every issue of New York Magazine from cover to cover for the last year, and am now proud to call it my favorite digest of local happenings, history, culture, and politics. It's a brilliant intersection where the labyrinthian complexity of NPR-styled reporting meets the brash, take-no-shit-from-offending-parties nuance that The Daily News has been dining out on for years. Even its devotion to celebrity culture and the local star system -- which in any other magazine I'd regard as an unwelcome irritant -- comes off like a critical component of their overall gameplan. In other words, you may come for the Approval Matrix and the hastily-collaged photos of Lindsay Lohan, Iggy Pop, and Grace Jones, but you'll stay for triumphant works like Kurt Anderson's Boom-Bust-Boom Town from the magazine's current 40th anniversary issue. The latter is exactly the kind of thoughtful and arresting diction that seals my love for this weekly journal, and which this morning I was powerless to escape from until my coffee had gone cold, the eggs I was cooking were burnt, and my wife had departed for work without saying goodbye.

The rest of this special issue is a showpiece that's guaranteed to earn coffee table honors for weeks to come, what with critical verbiage devoted to everything NYC from Bernie Goetz, Joe Namath, and coke-binging yuppies to DJ Kool Herc, Woody Allen, Times Square, and Warhol's Factory all clamboring for my undivided attention. If there's any advice to be deployed this early on a Wednesday morning, mine would be to swing by the newsstand of your preference before noon to grab a copy for yourself.

Story of the Day: Dock Ellis Throws a No-Hitter While Burnt on Acid

On June 12th, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres while heavily under the influence of LSD. So sayeth his Wikipedia page, Ellis "had been visiting friends in Los Angeles and was still high when his girlfriend told him he had to pitch a game against the San Diego Padres that night. Ellis boarded a shuttle flight to the ballpark, took some amphetamines to mitigate the effects of the acid, and then threw a no-hitter despite not being able to feel the ball or clearly see the batter or catcher. According to Ellis, catcher Jerry May wore reflective tape on his fingers, which helped Ellis to see his target."

Barbara Manning and the SF Seals wrote a great song about the incident. [Streaming MP3]

And there's a nice timeline of recreational drug use and professional sports here.

The 1k Project II by Blackshark

I came across this entrancing clip of video game art several years ago, but the 28 MB download was a major obstacle to sharing it, especially in the dark days before YouTube. The original description I read on Octopus Dropkick said: "The 1K Project II is created by an artist called Blackshark... using the physics based driving game Track Mania. 1000 replays were recorded, then played back merged together using the replay editor. The result is a polished video of flocking, swarming cars".

I've never actually played this game before, but always having been the kid who'd immediately gravitate to any game in the arcade that featured a steering wheel, (OutRun, Pole Position) it's no surprise that I've cultivated a weird fixation on it.

Repeated viewings have also made it evident that I kind of like a couple of Moby songs. Kind of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning

This came out some time ago, and I completely missed the ESPN mini-series that was based on it, but I wanted to cast my own public praise on this fantastic Jonathan Mahler book. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of New York City 1977, the hammer-pulsed narrative charges back and forth between the Son of Sam serial killings, the wildly disfunctional relationship between Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson and his forever-embattled manager Billy Martin, the public suckerpunches hurled from the Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo camps throughout the city's mayoral race, and the infamous blackout and subsequent riots that besieged Bushwick. (Now comically known as "East Williamsburg", in Realtorspeak).

This is the story of a New York that I experienced through the lens of the WPIX Action News broadcasts which followed my family's weeknight suppers (and then later on, through lauded films like Dog Day Afternoon and the French Connection). Having the dispassionate mood of that era addressed historically, but at the breakneck velocity that's normally reserved for an action-thriller, creates the kind of narrative that you'll continue to re-consider well after setting the book down. (The chapter devoted to the city-wide blackout and near lynching of Con Ed chairman Charles Luce is one of the most palpably arresting passages you'll find anywhere.)

In short, The Bronx is Burning is as comprehensive as it is fantastic. It offers insight, action, outrage, and an electrifying summation of the city during its worst period of urban rot. Most importantly, it sets the stage for the economic and cultural changes ushered in during the 80s, which have made New York the decidedly more palatable environment that it's become. For any New Yorker, sports fan or otherwise, The Bronx is Burning offers a compelling re-thinking of the city at its most critical point of transition.

NYC-related Real Audio:
Lou Reed - Dirty Boulevard [Listen]
Interpol - NYC [Listen]
MC Shan - The Bridge [Listen]
Daddy Warbucks & Friends - NYC [Listen]
Harry Nilsson - I Guess the Lord must be in NYC [Listen]

All tracks from my September 11th, 2006 radio show