You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2008.
Years ago, when I was around 6 or so, my mother sent in a coupon to get a free Care Bears “Safe ‘n Fun” playset given out by the Adam Walsh Foundation. For those who don’t remember the media circus, Adam Walsh was a kid who got abducted off the street, and after a multi-state search expedition all that was recovered was his head.
And so his foundation sent out these free paper playsets.
I barely remember this part. I might have looked at it for all of thirty seconds before tossing it. However, the set came with a record, featuring the Care Bears cautiously reminding kids not to talk to strangers, and not to let Uncle Bob play Mr. Slippy Fist with them.
For your listening pleasure, I now give you Safe ‘n Fun™ with the Care Bears.
Touch & Dance!
Thank you, Japan, for a world where we can still make fun of a pudgy white kid named Johan.
For years, there was a fruit market on the corner of 30th Avenue and 35th Street, around the block from me. It always had fruit and vegetables beautiful enough to photograph, was a bit too expensive for the neighborhood, and would close around 9 every night whereas other neighborhood fruit markets would stay open all night. I seldom bought anything there, but enjoyed walking by it, taking in the view of some of the most beautiful produce I’d ever seen.
About a year ago, the place closed, and after about six months of construction, in its place opened “Corner 30″, one of many nicely decorated sidewalk cafés on that street.
Many of those sidewalk cafés actually have pretty good food, so I thought I’d give Corner 30 a try. It was overpriced and terrible. Its offerings had no sense of style or identity, and its food tasted like it was made out of obligation. The place closed after only a month, 1/6th of the time it took to build the damn thing.
Six months later, the windows remain papered over. I noticed yesterday that the small potted evergreen bushes sitting outside had died, and somebody had taken (or stolen) the pots, leaving the brown trees collapsed on their clumps of potting soil, ground pointing up at a 45° angle. Perched in front of a clearly ill-conceived business, they seemed like tombstones to the dream of the proprietor, as temporary and as worthless as the dream itself.
So I helped my friend Dylan move apartments today. I hadn’t actually moved or helped move anyone since I made my last move over 7 years ago. It’s amazing how 7 years dull the pain.
As I’m inevitably going to move myself in a few months, it occurs to me that the sooner I get rid of my old high school stereo, the TV I bought when I was 13, my VHS deck, my old mac and the half-billion CDs I don’t like and will never listen to, the better. Because there is nothing more terrifying to me than having to move that stuff.
I come from a long line of pack rats. When I was a kid I used to (kinda) look forward to going to my Chinese grandmother’s place, a large two-story treasure trove of old crap that reeked of mothballs and old food. I never knew what I was going to find there, from a WWII era cigarette lighter to an 8mm projector. My then-college aged uncle also had most of his stuff there, and there were countless old cigar boxes that reeked in ways I would not experience again until college.
In more recent days I had to argue with my father as he clung tenaciously onto his first DVD player, a miniature Sharp model that no longer works at all. “DVD players are $30 now, dad!” I told him. He agreed and exhaled with a sad look on his face, and I instantly understood what he was going through. I glanced over at his reel-to-reel tape deck circa 1972. It had spent over a decade of its life in my bedroom. Next to it was my first bookshelf stereo system, two cassette decks, a turntable, and a Radio Shack audio processor that never seemed to do anything useful. I had lost track of what was originally mine and what was my dad’s. (I should admit here I was less sympathetic to my mother and her over 4 full metal cabinets full of craft supplies she hadn’t touched in over a decade.)
I’ve always been a media collector, be it ancient video game ROM files, anime or obscure movies. In that way, the digital revolution has been a boon to me, as I can sort of have my cake at eat it too, or rather have a perfect reproduction of a 35mm-quality film print without having to keep the 70-pound canister of film. Now that DAYS worth of music can fit on a 25¢ DVD-R and I have the life-long creative output of a small army of movie directors in a binder on my shelf, the media and its related rituals have been lost. Romanticism aside, it seems like a decent trade-off.
In my heart of hearts, I know I’m not going to be able to pair down this collection much. My CD library, much of it serving more a sentimental role than a utilitarian one, will probably not see much more than a 30% reduction. My DVD library, around 500 discs strong, will likely not take a hit at all. But I can try.
Ironically, the first to go seems to be not the media itself, but the engine on which I play it. My bookshelf stereo system, a Sony all-in-one replete with tape deck, AM/FM radio and 5-disc carousel CD changer, is headed for Craig’s List. I can’t remember the last time I used any of those. (I still have a few cassettes, but most of them are unimportant and easily replaced.) More alarming is that the Logitech iPod dock I bought for $30 after rebate sounds considerably better than this old behemoth. So out it goes, along with the quite serviceable but big and ugly turntable my uncle gave me. I was delighted to discover I still had my little portable turntable, the Mister Disc.
Japanese magazine ad for the red version. Only the silver was released in the States.
Originally marketed in Japan with the hysterical name “Sound Burger”, the Mister Disc is a turntable capable of playing full-sized records, but it folds up into a little brick not much bigger than one of my shoes. With a built-in preamp, it hooks right into a modern stereo, and even had headphone jacks. So between my Sirius radio, my iPod dock, and my Mister Disc, my entire stereo system now fits in an 18″ x 9″ square on my computer desk.
We’re living in the future.
My friend Mayumi and I decided we were hankering for seafood, but wanted to try someone new. My usual seafood joint, Elias Corner, hasn’t been quite so hot in a while. All I can say is, thank God for the internet, because a quick search of my neighborhood revealed a treasure of a small restaurant that I can easily say is the best seafood experience I quite possibly have ever had.
The place is called Sabry’s, and it’s a little Egyptian place with a sidewalk café so far down Steinway you’re practically on the Triborough Bridge on ramp. I’d actually never been this far down Steinway before, and was unaware of the large Egyptian population just under my nose. (Mayumi insists that I must try real Egyptian hookah, as Indian hookah just doesn’t hold a candle to it.)
Sabry’s looks quite a bit different than it does in its New York Times write-up of 3 years ago. It’s now full of bronze and metals, reflecting an elegance that its simple menu wouldn’t: the prices are low (no item is over $20) and there’s not a drop of alcohol to be found. As Sabry is Muslim, there is strictly no drinking at his restaurant. Instead, there are fresh squeezed juices of a quality rarely seen. We ordered the lemonade, and was treated to a delicately sweetened version of fresh lemon juice. It was out of this world.
But what of the food? Well, we started with babaganush and salad, and couldn’t resist some mussels in red sauce. There were no mussels, but rather clams, and so we resigned ourselves to picking at these pathetic little rubbery things. When the plate came out, we were utterly shocked: these were the biggest, meatiest, most tender clams I’ve ever had. It redefined what I thought clam should taste like. Seasoned in a tomato reduction with onion, cilantro and whole coriander, all talking stopped until they were reduced to shells. Then we grabbed spoons and started lapping up the sauce. It was THAT GOOD. And the bread, oh, the bread! Fresh flatbread, seemingly baked just for us.
Then the main course came out: one was called tagine, a stew (with the same base for the sauce that the clams came in) with squid and grilled shrimp, both out of this world. And then the fish came out. We ordered whole, fried fish, a whiting and a larger one I couldn’t remember. Crispy skinned and lovely, we quickly reduced both to skeletons.
Afterwards Sabry himself came out to ask how everything was, and we told him. A very friendly man of large proportion (as a great chef should be, see: Ratatouille) he and Mayumi chatted about the delights of his hometown, a place she had recently visited. It was a glorious night.
Few restaurants have moved me like this place has. I immediately ran home and wrote a review on Yelp. Everyone must learn of Sabry’s. It’s a treasure.
I actually bought a CD this week. I haven’t bought a CD in years! But, listening to Pandora on my iPhone, I actually found a song I really liked that just wasn’t available online ANYWHERE. It was a late 80s cover of Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love” by none other than Ronnie Spector. So I found a used copy on half.com for $8 or so.
Jesus, there is only ONE GOOD SONG on this whole freaking disc. And that was it. Every other song was this terrible 80s pop pablum that made me want to sit in a dentist’s waiting room flipping through old issues of Us Weekly. All I could think was, “$8 for THIS? Imagine if I had bought it NEW back in the day!”
And then I remembered that I did. We all did. And we pretended to like it, but every album and CD we bought with a single listenable track made us all die a little inside.
Downloading isn’t what killed the music business. Filler. THAT’S what killed it.
Today I threw out about 20 laserdiscs. I cannot overstate how wrong this felt. Laserdiscs are something I once paid $35+ for, and once held the promise of everlasting top-quality video. They were what separated those who are serious about media from those who were only casual consumers. Like VHS, they have long since been made obsolete, but unlike VHS they never had that period of psychological depreciation: they never felt worthless.
Part of the reason for that is that they were always somewhat rare in the United States, and that they are both delicate and heavy: double-sided shiny 12 inch platters that weigh almost a pound, which like a CD can only be handled by its edges. They remain something special that only videophiles of the era can appreciate. Moreover, the experience of using a laserdisc feels weighty and important, like playing a record as opposed to an MP3.
But alas, space considerations mandated I go through my collection and pair it down to only my recent Japanese import purchases of rare anime not available on DVD. I went through all the discs I was so happy to find once upon a time: Broadcast News, Strange Days, Wings of Honneamise…
They now are sitting out at the curb. Tomorrow I’ll forget about them. I have them all on DVD, and a few of them, Blu-Ray. Time marches on. But occasionally one must stop and take notice as days go by.
I went for the big long walk today, the one that I always take. It goes West along the edge of Queens, where Astoria meets the East River. It’s nice and picturesque, has the biggest public swimming pool I’ve ever seen (about 3 Olympic-sized pools, along with a sprinkler area for the youngest potential drowning victims and a deep high-diving area long since abandoned for legal reasons) and a nice stretch of open grass that many people use for tanning. As I’m trying to look a little more healthy and less pasty and cancerous these days I went there and tanned for an hour or so. Besides, doctors are now saying tanning a bit is good for you. I’m starting to think the entire medical community is actually run by a Magic 8-ball.
As I lay there, I noticed a couple of bees collecting their pollen from the clover flowers. Years ago, after seeing Bambi one day, I took Thumper’s advice and tried one and was quite impressed with its flavor. I was at least 15. I guess all the news about bees dying out lately has made me a little more sympathetic to the little guys’ plight, and rather than swatting them away and/or running like hell, as would be my usual inclination, I simply stood up and got out of the way while they did their thing. The bees seemed grateful.
Upon getting up and looking out over the grassy area, I noticed dragonflies and even a butterfly. Growing up across the street from woods in the heavily shaded suburbs of Detroit I never noticed such a swath of wildlife as I did in this sorry excuse for a natural environment in the most densely populated city on the continent. I even see fireflies at night on occasion. I wondered what we had done in Detroit to get rid of all of these critters, and in reply, the man on the NPR podcast I was listening to answered: killin’ em. We make our world a reflection of ourselves: a burned out, used up shell unable to sustain the basic requirements of meaningful existence.
I gathered up my old bedsheet and started walking, my eyes taking quick account of the other sunbathers around me. None of them were particularly good looking, though several were in decent shape. I couldn’t decide whether to feel disappointed or simply less intimidated by this. As if to prove to myself that I would start feeling better about myself, I decided to walk home shirtless, both to work on my tan and my self esteem. Said self esteem would have prevented me from showing off my still slightly-bulging gut and sunken chest a few months ago. I’d have like to have thought that months of sporadic gym usage had diminished the presence of either, but the reality of things weighed on me too heavily to take such a notion seriously. Nonetheless, I carried my man-purse in my hand rather than use the strap, lest I end up with a ridiculous tan line.
As I walked back in the general direction towards my apartment about a mile away or so, one of the five or six NPR hosts named Ira talked about some unfamiliar author/comedian’s pointless experiences on the Upper West Side, and as I tried to relate and to care about said author, it occurred to me how different this quiet area of Queens felt from the “city”, as those of us in the outer-boroughs call it. Since I had started working from home nearly a year ago, I found myself in Manhattan less and less these days, and not particularly missing it. On the few occasions I found myself wandering on its now too-familiar overcrowded streets, I wondered how anyone could possibly live amongst so many ludicrous people. What was once my life blood was starting to tire me out.
And yet, Queens seemed just as annoying, in a less precise way: a place unable to decide if it wanted to be city or suburb, and not fitting comfortably into either category. How fitting that I have spent seven years of my life here.
This morning I killed a cockroach in my bathroom. It was about the size of my pinky finger, from the top knuckle upward. This made it one of the smaller roaches I’ve killed. I was standing at my sink and looked down, noticing it nearly cuddling up against my sandal. Instinctively, I stomped it a few times until its entrails lay spread in front of it. As I scooped up its remains in a piece of toilet paper, I realized that roaches no longer scare me, but merely depress me, for the sole reason that they are an inescapable reminder of what I no longer am willing to put up with.
I went to see a play this week. This is highly unusual.
The play was called, appropriately, “What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends,” and though one would think that title alone would attract me, the real reason I went is because my friend Carrie was in it. It was a guy who hates all of his friends (hence the title) who falls in with a a ridiculous type-A click that has a systematic and ongoing ranking system for all of their interpersonal relationships. Cattiness ensues.
I enjoyed the play quite a bit, though that premise requires a suspension of disbelief, either that anybody would ever want to be friends with this group of yahoos after high school or that anybody would actually act in this way. It had a dark, misanthropic world view, and it was refreshing to see one that wasn’t very similar to my own.
It also made me think about why I am not a play person. I miss the editing, the framing, the composition. It’s hard for me to do without the close-ups, the quiet moments, the punctuation of music. I find it very hard to envision a story without these things.
Well, that’s fine. There’s no money in theater anyway.
While at Otakon, I was happy to hear that our hotel boasted not only a fitness area, but a pool as well. Friday morning I got up early to go work out, wearing my swim trunks. I brought my ipod as well, just in case.
I ended up not needing the ipod (the small workout room had a TV), so I stuck it in my pocket while I used their crappy old cross country machine. Then I took a shower and headed to the tiny diamond-shaped pool. The thing was so small, the only way to swim an entire lap was to swim the widest part of the diamond. It was smaller than some above-ground pools I’ve seen.
Upon getting out, I was dismayed to find my iPod Nano still in my pocket.
Even after drying out, it appears to be completely dead. Took it to the Apple Store today, and not only was my warranty only two months long, but there’s actually a water damage indicator inside the headphone jack. They refused to touch it.
Next stop is a third party repair place. Sigh.
