Point / Counterpoint
Suave:
Less suave:
Snooty
Growing up in suburban Northern California, with Jewish New Yorker parents, Southern culture was, to put it mildly, not a large part of my early life. So far as I was concerned, America was the West Coast, the East Coast, and a whole bunch of ‘fly-over states’ in between.
But, over the past five years, largely due to living several of those with a Georgian and a Kentuckian, I’ve slowly begun to believe there might actually be something good going on in all those places jumbled up in the beach-less middle.
My iTunes library has filled with bluegrass and alt-country. My DVD collection has grown to encompass swaths of ‘regional storytelling’ – from *Matewan* through *All the Real Girls*.
And I’ve eaten barbecue. Lots of barbecue. With a host of guides ready to toss aside ‘Yankee bullshit’, I’ve toured the range of New York options, tasting scores of hush puppies, comparing the merits of vinegar- and tomato-based sauces, and marveling at the wide array of ways to chop up and char-broil the contents of an average barnyard. (Pig snoot sandwiches? Seriously?)
So it was with great anticipation that, yesterday at high noon, I headed down to Madison Square Park to meet James, Colin and Bill at the 3rd Annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. The event brought together pitmasters from places like Little Rock and Decatur, Murphysboro and St. Louis, Elgin and Driftwood, each carting with them a little slice of home.
Or, as it turned out, a big slice of home. Which was good, because New Yorkers came in droves to the event, yielding hour-long lines at each separate stand. The restauranteurs were ready, having towed along fleets of trailer-hitched industrial-sized grills, and having piled high stacks of animal carcasses, part and whole, bound for fiery fates.
I arrived at the park just after noon, and found James already in line for the Salt Lick’s stand. Ten minutes and ten feet of line later, it became clear my initial wide-sampling intentions likely wouldn’t work out. Buying plates from just two different vendors, it seemed, would be an all-afternoon affair.
Moments later, however, Colin arrived with our salvation: a Bubba Fast Pass he’d scored from a VIP the day before. The pass took us ‘backstage’, past the crawling lines and into the cordoned-off sections behind each stand, where the barbecuing itself was actually underway. From that vantage point, we could amble up to any of the serving stations and score selections of grilled goodness in mere seconds.
By the time we left the park, some two hours later, I could barely walk. Sated and sauce-spattered, I was nearly sweating from the sheer effort of ongoing digestion. James pointed out that he was trying not to step too hard when he walked, for fear of triggering an emergency bathroom run.
But, goddamn, that was some barbecue.
As we headed towards the subway, Colin announced he was considering holding his upcoming birthday party at Blue Smoke, a relatively recent addition to the NYC barbecue scene, which brings a rather New York perspective (“you can improve anything, or, at least, make anything more expensive”) to it all by serving up what might be called haute barbecue cuisine.
Normally, I’d have been more than happy to pencil that into my calendar. But with the taste of authenticity still literally stuck between my teeth, it seemed like, well, kind of a waste.
Turns out, my Southern friends are right: when it come to barbecue, them yankees don’t know shit.
Two Long Nights
**Thursday**
Though exact details are hazy, the night definitely involved karaoke, four bars, and drinking champagne direct from pilfered bottles in the conference room of the Union Square W Hotel, with Colin and Sarah.
From their emails the following morning:
Colin:
> I am still drunk. And at work.
>
> My memory of Lemon Bar is a little fuzzy, but I remember we closed the
> place. I passed out on the subway home and woke up in Long Island City.
>
> I just want to be the first to say that last night was, unparallelled.
Sarah:
> Oh my god, best night ever.
>
> We are invincible.
And Colin’s response to Sarah:
> I am feeling very vincible.
>
> I think I may yet throw up.
**Friday**
Came up to New Haven late afternoon for dinner at the Chai Society. Wandered around Yale’s campus for a bit, marvelling at how beautiful it is, and trying to convince myself that I actually lived here for four years. Post-dinner, walked back to the train station, and discovered I’d missed the last train out for the night by about fifteen minutes, leaving me more than five hours off from the next train at 4:40am.
Spent those hours huddled on a bench of the quiet, cavernous New Haven train station, as I and three other poor saps who similarly missed the last train home sureptitiously eyed each other, mentally calculating the odds that one of the other three might rob us all blind if we drifted off to sleep.
Nonetheless, did manage to get some neck-crink-inducing naptime on the train ride itself, feeling safe under the conductor’s watchful eye. Pulled into Grand Central at 6:30am, and pulled my bed covers over my head at 7:00am.
Sadly, after too many days of work-driven early rising, by 10:00am, I was up again and nominally ready to face the world.
Now, at 5:00pm, I’m ready to rock out Florida style: early-bird special for dinner, asleep by 7:00pm.
The (Belated) Recap
Meant to post about this yesterday, but a non-stop string of Cyan and Long Tail meetings kept me, sadly, doing actual work rather than writing up inane summaries of my rampant social alcoholism.
Despite a slow start (involving a terrifying initial half-hour of sitting at a table by myself, imagining that nobody would show up at all), the inaugural S-A Block Party collected a crowd of seventeen different attendees over the course of the evening, five of whom I’d never before met live, making it, in my opinion, an unqualified success.
As it was also the first chance for a crowd of my friends to meet Abigail (who showed up with a couple of her own friends in tow, presumably as reinforcements), the event brought together ‘holy crap there are real people on the other end of that email address’ internet weirdness with ‘so this girl really exists after all’ dating weirdness, yielding an event that was, in equal parts, exceedingly awkward and absolutely excellent.
In short, my kind of party.
Swing By Tonight
The S-A Block Party is at 9:00 this very evening, B.B. Doyle’s Pub & Restaurant, 51st just off 8th.
Hope to see you there.
disclaimer
Based on some of the misadventures about which I’ve blogged in months and years past, a number of readers (by which I mean, my mother) have likely begun to look into A.A. chapters that meet near my apartment, or perhaps see if they might, as a birthday gift, enroll me early on the liver transplant list.
So, before I come home one evening to a living room intervention, I thought I’d better set the record straight: In point of fact, not only do the vast majority of my evenings not involve liquor at all, most are, further, rather dull. I end up at inane business dinners, or while away evenings banging out emails while curled up on the couch, besweatpantsed, simultaneously (occupational hazard) screening a film.
It’s just that, the other nights, that small minority when I likely am, in fact, causing irreparable biotic harm, tend to be far, far more interesting. So they show up disproportionately in posts on this fair site.
From those intermittent posts, it’s understandable that readers might extrapolate to my leading a life involving a permanent alcohol I.V. (though, actually, if anyone has some good leads on where I can get that set up, certainly shoot me an email). Instead, my life is pretty, remarkably bland, with just enough excitement to, at least occasionally, yield a retelling good enough to warrant your risking corporate wrath by tuning in over lunch break.
In service to that, I figure, the rare bout of cirrhosis is a small price to pay indeed.
recapped
Apologies, kids, for the recent silence and relatively crap posts; real life, as it’s sometimes wont to do, has been getting in the way.
On the work front, we’re getting ready to launch into pre-production on Earthquake Weather with Cyan, and prepping This is Not a Film to head off to the DVD presser with Long Tail.
But, more detrimentally to my regular raconteuring, I’ve also been drinking the nights away, with nary a free minute of ‘me time’. A quick run-down, for those looking for some vicarious liver damage:
Wednesday night, headed out to celebrate The Girl’s birthday. As she quoted me saying on her own blog (and, no, I won’t link it, because heaven knows my mother doesn’t want that much detail about my sex life. Not that we’ve had sex. I’m, um, saving myself until marriage. Yes, that’s it! Saving myself until marriage…), there are two traumatic events that can fall within the first few weeks of dating someone: Valentine’s Day, and their birthday. And, wowsers, there’s nothing like getting both in the span of a single week.
Still, I think I stumbled through both reasonably competently, as I’ll be seeing her again this evening. (More on that later.) We started the natal evening at a Nerve bash, largely because it involved free wine. As she ran into train trouble, I headed into the party alone for a half hour or so, and emerged just in time to discover that the doorman wasn’t letting her (or anyone else) in, despite her repeated protestation that she was actually on the guest list, and that her +1 was waiting patiently (albeitly already slightly drunkenly) inside. Fortunately, as I had come out sans-overcoat, I managed to get us both inside with the old ‘I need to retrieve my coat’ and Jedi mind-trick stare one-two punch. Though, frankly, it wouldn’t have been worth much more effort. The small bar, Odea, was packed well past the confines of fire code, and moving from one end of the narrow bar to the other made me thankful for years of practice on thrown-elbow dodging. We did, however, manage to get onto Gawker, as Team Party Crash was stalking the event; add back-of-the-head picture of me making out to the growing list of incriminating artifacts trailing me around the Internets.
Post-Odea, we cabbed down Broome to the excellent Ivo & Lulu, a closet of a restaurant with truly excellent food they inexplicably sell for about a third the rate of similar gastronomic delights elsewhere. (For potential visitors, it’s BYOB, so either buy in advance, or [as I was forced to do] head next door to the oddly-named Monkey Temple bar and sweet-talk them into selling you a whole bottle of cabernet at wholesale) Then over to Circa Tabac, where I first pissed off and then befriended the owner by requesting two empty wine glasses to finish off the remains of the cabernet bottle.
I’m pretty sure we cabbed back to my apartment following that, though the combined effects of wine, more wine, and a stiff Sidecar left details sketchy until the following morning, when, waking up at 9:00, we discovered a lawyer nearly pressed up against the glass in his office across the street, admiring the show through my aquarium-like bedroom windows. Thank you, but no, life-imitating-Hitchcock.
Despite barely staggering through the rest of the day, and repeatedly swearing off liquor, I nonetheless found myself at Russian Samovar later that evening (drinking problem; what drinking problem?) for a sipping vodka carafe with the visiting Dan Birdwhistile, founder of the Dropstone Group, a new and rather cool young-people-driven nonprofit. Then, after a brief glass-of-water respite in my apartment, I was out yet again to B.B. Doyles, to meet up with long-standing friend Mike Hoevel, in town for the weekend from L.A. (and, before that, China), as well as recent-ex-roommate Colin and his lovely girlfriend Carrie.
As ever, there’s nothing like an evening of bad beer with good friends to pass the time, though Hoevel at one point launched into a retelling of a story I’d long since forgotten: in the Yale dining hall, over dinner one evening, I accepted a five dollar bet to stand on a chair and de-shirt. Though, contrary to the name of the site, I try to steer clear of too much narcissistic back-patting, I must admit I was thrilled that Hoevel described the event as a bit like Flanders shirtlessly mowing the lawn: I was ‘unexpectedly ripped’.
As the evening rolled on, Colin excused Carrie and himself, to nurse the start of a winter cold, and both were replaced by Hoevel’s man-du-jour, who trekked down 9th from Julliard. Eventually,after several TableTaps of YuengLing, and much flirting all around with middle-aged Irish waitress Regina, I made it back home to once again fruitlessly swear off ever drinking again.
Yesterday evening, in penance for the prior two nights, I met my friend Tova to take in some art at the Met, where she works, as well as some behind-the-scenes gossip on the Rubens exhibit and newly-redone modern art mezzanine. Then went with her to meet her friend Joel, a TV writer, for moulles, frittes, and more frittes, at Petite Abeille. (I may eat healthfully most of the time, but a french fry so rich you can feel your arteries clogging as you chew is certainly not to be missed.)
After crashing at home early, I spent most of the day cleaning my apartment and re-doing work I’d been too hung over to do well the first time through in the past few days. Now, I’m off to dinner with ex-girlfriend Kate, having lost a steak dinner bet that she wouldn’t still be dating the guy she’s in fact still dating after three months. And, then, up to Morningside Heights for the Girl’s official birthday extravaganza, as well as a second chance at ruining the good first impression I made on all her friends.
But, at least, I won’t be drinking much.
[Famous last words.]
first impressions
My long-standing friend Josh Lilienstein is in town for the weekend, leading up to a med school interview this Monday. And, bucking the common wisdom of a quiet weekend of preparation, he instead spent yesterday rocking New York, beginning shortly after his arrival by Jet Blue red-eye from San Francisco when we headed into Central Park at 9:00am with a bottle of Hennesey and some Starbucks paper cups.
The day went happily downhill from there, with the two of us slurring through a slew of topics; one of the brightest people I know, Josh also has an exceedingly broad range of interests and knowledge, allowing us to – in the course of fifteen minutes – somehow skip from women to adipose biochemistry to Italian liquors to political theory. And while, at varying points of the day, we were more sober than at others, I don’t suspect we ever crossed below the legal blood-alcohol limit for safe driving. Thank god for New York’s subway-centric life.
So it was still not entirely sober that we headed uptown to Morningside Heights at 10:00pm, to meet the girl I’ve been blogging about, along with one of her college best friends and her literature PhD cohorts. Needless to say, I was a bit freaked out, as meeting friends is a crucial moment in any nascent relationship. Inevitably, at some point down the road, you’ll do something to make a girl really, justifiably pissed off with you, and having her friends either rooting for or against you almost always decides your fate.
While I normally wouldn’t much worry, as more than a few of my friends have pointed out, this was essentially our fourth date in just over a week – about the same tally that I usually hit in the first month of dating. So, basically, I really didn’t want to screw it up.
The grad student party we first collectively hit was, admittedly, a bit short of the Platonic college party form (which ideally includes such elements as ‘chug! chug! chug!’-shouting keg-stands and someone dancing on a table with a lampshade on their head), though I spent most of the first hour or two less concerned about the surroundings, and more concerned about just-starting-to-date etiquette. Within the larger party, she and I were privately carrying out the ritual of a middle school dance: slow progress from furtive across-the-room smiles and eye contact, to adjacent leg-brushing sitting to, finally, eventually, standing naturally next to each other, slightly intertwined, hand on back, arm around waist, or (most adventurous of all party stances!) hand in back pocket.
Through it all, it was actually her friends that saved me, as, fortunately, really liking people is far easier than simply pretending to. With each conversation, I eased back towards my natural self, as I discovered that literature PhD students are pretty much exactly my favorite sort of people: intelligent, neurotically over-analytic ones passionately pursuing some relatively obscure topic of interest. As the girl’s closest friends turn out also to be attractive, articulate alcoholics, by the time we left the grad party to head to a nearby bar, I was happily convinced that I’d actually look forward to spending more time with them all.
And, mainly, I realized that I’m looking forward to spending more time with her. So when, a little after 3:00 in the morning, Josh and I finally bid the group adieu, as I kissed the girl goodbye on the stoop of the bar and she asked what I was doing Monday night, although I said I’d have to check my calendar to see, I was pretty sure, whatever it might be, I could probably rearrange my schedule.
preparations
With Kentuckians and Missourians and god knows who else crowding my Times Square-adjacent block in anticipation of tomorrow’s ball drop, my brother and I will instead be escaping down to the East Village to celebrate New Year’s Eve at FEVA‘s Bedazzle Ball.
The problem: a costume’s required. So, in a burst of do-it-yourself ingenuity, we headed down to Home Depot to purchase Tyvek Hooded Coveralls, 3M Woodworking Respirators, green latex gloves and a Sharpie marker.
Back at my apartment, we emblazoned the back of the coveralls, “Times Square Dirty Bomb First Response Unit,” then drew nuclear warning symbols and a slew of official sounding nonsense (“Alpha Squad 4HQ3”) on the front and arms. I wrapped an old handheld digital metronome in white paper, scrawled “Dirty Bomb Geiger Counter” across the top, and cut a hole in the paper to allow us to turn on menacing beeping at the touch of a button.
Let the 2005 hilarity begin.
told you so
Drinking homemade vodka with my high school friend, Lis, at home-away-from-home Russian Samovar.
Me: Actually, this bar is part-owned by Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Her: No it isn’t.
Me: No, seriously.
Her: [Very skeptical look]
Baryshnikov walks through the door, nods as he passes, then sits down at the piano and begins to play Debussy’s “RÍverie”, flawlessly.
Her: Okay. So maybe it is.