What is this place anyway?

Is anybody good at picking out a place to party in New York? The cool bar you have a drunken fine time at on Friday is the lame, no-customers place on Saturday. It’s like it’s all a crapshoot and the only thing you can control is how much fun you bring to the party and how many people you know will be there.

That said, tonight we’re gonna blow hard at Sutra (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like lingo for birthday candles or something). Sutra, as kinky as it sounds, could also be a guidos paradise, so in case this crapshoot ends before it begins, we’ll be drinking early at the den of apostemation (I looked it up -that’s a word), Apartment 2.

Sutra didn’t get bad reviews on Citysearch. But regardless, we’ll make our own good time!

Few things to know (well, just two):

Girls get in free.  We’re getting bottle service ala Vegas night clubs, and I think that gets 10 guys in free as well, otherwise, guys get in for $5 bucks, but I’m trying to speak to someone about this because an entry fee is ridiculous.  When you get there, just tell ‘em whose party you’re there for.  It should be fine.

Blow hard folks! And get your head outta the gutter.

Youth is fleeting. Immaturity lasts forever…

It’s not hard to see that now is one of the best times of the year to be outside enjoying NYC. The weather is perfect, and the days are beautiful with clear blue skies, cool, dry breezes, and averages in the mid-seventies. And after work, the nights are even better for being out, lounging an extra hour or so after work, drinking with friends, or getting dinner later. So long as you’re out, you’ll be taking advantage of living in the city. Get out and enjoy it!

As all 10 of you know, it’s my birthday this Tuesday, September 25th, and I’ve been asked a few times what I was planning to do. Well, here’s a list of plans below, open to all to come hang out. I’ll be somewhere every night, getting my friends to come hang out by singing songs that I’ll change the words to, or by traditional spoken word (with strategically placed guile inserted into the conversation). While acting my age and happy that I still have all of my hair- I will also be drinking moderate to heavy amounts of alcohol while operating at a (hopefully) somewhat undisturbing -yet entertaining- level (‘undisturbing’, by the way, is not a word, but I’m using it anyway). I plan on learning new jokes every day this week and maybe even a magic trick or two. Now here’s the list….

Monday Night, September 24th – Dinner with family, beers, Heroes premiere, Prison Break (see previous entry). Okay, it’s a slow night.

Tuesday Night, September 25th (Birthday) – Early dinner with family and then I’m heading downtown for drinks at the Spiegeltent (see picture above) -East Village Radio is the sponsored DJ and they seem to have pretty good beats so give them a listen. If you haven’t been to the Spiegeltent yet, then you’re in for a treat. Music, drinks, and the City don’t get much better than this! It’s alotta fun and it ends this week!

Wednesday Night, September 26th – More Dinner (I do this every night) -this time with friends, along with a gathering at Apartment 2. We will have to keep whatever is going on going on til Jeff can join us after his show at the Bowery. What kind of name is ‘Vanderslice‘ anyway? Not that I should talk, but look at this guy’s pic. C’mon. (Though he doesn’t sound too bad.) It’s also my friend Amie’s Bday. Happy Birthday Ferocious!

Thursday night will be raining, so go home and get some rest. The Office premieres along with other good tv. Give me a call if you wanna talk.

Friday Night, September 28th – Early in the evening a friend of mine from work’s having her birthday at Southpaw in Bklyn. I’ll go there early in the night, and then I plan on trying to make the Plus/Minus show at The Knitting Factory. Plus/Minus are an ethnically diverse music trio that rock! They play very sharp and kick ass. Give a listen and then I’ll burn you a cd.

Saturday, September 29th – THE BLOWOUT. Should be, at least. Details are still sketchy, but Saturday seems to be the night we’ll get hammered and hang out outside the FIT dorms (wait, that was this Saturday). Amie will also be celebrating her birthday (if she ever calls me back), so a lot of laughs and good looking women will be out. Also, charming young fellows (equally good looking), and a few irritating people as well. But we’ll make fun of them. Should be a blast!

Sunday, September 30th – Recovery, football, spelunking.

Here’s my very small list of things I want for my birthday (it really should be bigger (that’s what she said), but I usually forget the good things I thought about way back in March).

Heroes Season 1 DVD, Cool backpack that won’t make me look dumb and is good for my laptop and doesn’t need to be sewn together, Digital camera (I would’ve taken a picture of my shitty backpack now for the previous item, but don’t have the digital camera capabilities to do it!

I also still need plenty of toiletries. Floss!!!

Prison Break Yourself!

I feel fucking numb. It’s 1:49am and I can’t sleep and I’m creepily hunched over my laptop like Carrie Bradshaw. I can talk about anything. And there’s plenty to talk about. I have a fucking list of good topics. But instead I’m gonna talk about Prison Break.

If you don’t know what Prison Break is, well, congratulations, you have a life. But if do, then you’re like me, and you have a few slightly obsessive compulsive tendencies, and you’ve downloaded the show from the internet because you missed the season premiere, and you plugged your laptop into the tv and the stereo into your laptop in order to watch it (high) with your roommate. If you are me, your roommate’s name is Jeff.

Like any story that you’ve followed for two years, Prison Break works for a number of reasons, one of which is because it is character driven. Character driven stories must be what people mean when they say it’s not where you end up, but how you get there (also see Best American Water Treks 1 (ca 1994)). That’s not to say this show always works, because it definitely doesn’t. But watching drama on tv can be a lot like playing a game of chess (bear with me) -On one hand you may want to be outsmarted because that way you’ll learn how to be smarter, but on the other, you want to be right because you want to succeed. Case in point -In the nineties, Kasparov, known then as the worlds best chess player played a supercomputer, Deep Blue, in chess in a series of matches in order to see if we could beat our own creation. There was alot of back-and-forth, but in the 3rd game Kasparov tried something different to figure out the computers strategy. What was my point? I don’t know. But read the link. It took a while to find.

Oh wait, I remember. Okay, just a little more…

Prison Break had a weird season 2. (Completely beyond any semblance of reality, I nearly did not come back, but 24 was so bad, and such an insult to my intelligence that it pissed and threw up in the bed in addition to just shitting it.) But now, in season three, the show shows signs of outsmarting the viewer (or at least me) -that is little tiny subplots that have been building for two seasons, that you always questioned, but never cared about, might be coming to fruition now (the guy who doesn’t talk, what’s the point of all this), and what this means is that if the show has done this part intelligently, then they could make Michael Scofield have a third nipple and speak Yiddish, because they’ll have me beat. Checkmate.

Still with me? No? it’s 2:35am. Fuck you. I’m going to bed.

My Best Friend’s Barat

I know you come here looking for mindless drivel, which is why I come here too, but how can I resist starting a story like this:

So I’m dancing around this horse named Carona, drunk, at 1:30pm, and there are hundreds of Indians surrounding me while my friends and I chant our friend’s name over and over to the beat of The Eye Of The Tiger.

“SEAN!”

“SEAN, SEAN, SEAN!”

“SEAN SEAN SEAAAAAAN! “

[ If I was smooth, I would insert a clip of the song. But I'm not, so just picture Rocky IV.]

Sean -the man in question- is a soft spoken, hilariously dry friend of mine with very sharp wit, who decided to throw his bachelorhood away and go toward that enflamed, hormonal creature known as the female. Not only did he engage one, but he even signed a contract to do things like get her tissues when she’s got a cold, and tell her to pick up her clothes off the floor if they’re getting in his way. Stuff like that. You might call it marriage.
While I may not agree with his choice of early morning weekend errands, his wedding was a great excuse to get drunk and party with friends and have a blast. And drunk we got! One friend broke open his chin after taking advantage of a woman who was probably feeling bad about being from New Jersey, while another was verbally masticated by his girlfriend for having been born and lived before she was told about it.

But more importantly was the wedding itself, which was a superbly fun event. Half Hindi, half Catholic, the first ceremony was the reason for the horse dancing. Apparently it’s called a Barat, and it’s a Norther India tradition that symbolizes something along the lines of one villager approaching another village to ask for his bride’s hand. You ride a horse, but you’re also allowed to ride an elephant. In fact, the Hindu wedding has quite a bit going on and it was an incredibly interesting and fun event to be a part of, despite being told I fell asleep during the vows (though I was hung over).

Dump Trump in SoHo.

There’s a bunch of fliers posted around the ‘hood about a protest tomorrow at Trumps new hotel in SoHo (Spring St. between 6th and Varick). It’s tomorrow (September 19th) at 10:15 am to coincide with an “invitation only” press conference or something like that about the opening.

While I admittedly don’t know all the details, it is supported by the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, which is also pushing for the creation of the South Village Historical District, and that’s fine by me because I live here and I love this hood and I’d hate to see it shamelessly torn down piece by piece to be replaced by some fodder called “Trump”.

To me, the brand name ‘Trump’ doesn’t exactly make you think ‘quaint’ or ‘warm’ or ‘full of character’. I mean, if the walls in some of these buildings could talk, imagine what they could tell you. By contrast, I imagine all a Trump building’s wall could say is something like, ‘OMG! Look at my new manicure!’ or ‘Ewww, I’m not eating that.’

Another link.

A Tuesday by any other name…

It’s six years since 9/11/2001. For many, it’s an emotional time. And it should be. For better or worse, the day is just different and it occurs for me in that way too. 9/11 happened on a Tuesday -I’ll never forget that- and since each day of the week has it’s identity, it was interesting to have that similar feeling approaching today that others obviously felt that fateful Tuesday morning. It’s Tuesday, not quite over the hump of the workweek yet, definitely not Friday or Thursday, but certainly not Monday. Tuesday is a workday thru and thru. It’s All-American if a day ever was one.

Though I do it often enough regularly, every year on this day I tend to take a step back and reflect on the scenes of people and life going on here in our city of New York. I look at them all and I take note…as much as I can. The firemen: Specifically Bill from Brownsville who was very appreciative of a thankful gesture (past due, I’m sure), the cops, the working people pouring into and out of the subway/PATH, the spanish guy cutting flowers in the bodega, the hot bartender I like cause of her funky hat, the nuts that greet me on the street and ask me who the greatest jazz bassist ever to play, the guy behind the pizza counter from Peru and the Italian manager behind him, the taxi driver Hassan swearing to me that I’m getting a deal by not using the meter, the waitress in the diner asking my boss if he’s got grandkids, my sister, my family, my friend Bruce who hasn’t been the same since then, the family friends we lost and the people we lost in other ways, my friend Brian and his band and his friends, the obese bouncer that spilled beer on me, the Italians tourists waiting to eat a pizza pie, the two British girls looking at a map looking to get more drinks, the Belgian female singer that was not very good, the man buying flowers to get home to his girl, the skinny brown kid with his heavier girlfriend, the NYU students, the kids getting dropped off at school on Hudson Street, the bitchy waitress with an awful drink incentive and so on, and so on, and so on…

I wanted to get this in under the wire.

El Día de Trabajo en México

Sorry to anyone who’s looked at this and hasn’t seen an update. Also, thanks for looking at this at all.  I think we’re up to four readers now!

Like last time, there’s so damn much to talk about (since I can write about anything), but I have a few things I really want to mention. But I’ll start with one for this post…

Hola mis amigos! Donde esta las senoritas?! I was in Mexico City for Labor Day last week and had a fantastic trip! What a great city! Who knew? I was visiting mi prima, Dorian, for the weekend and seeing what life was like for him down there. Hopefully, abzme.com now has an international audience (of one, hola cousin).

Mexico City is great. The food is fantastic, the weather is awesome, and the lifestyle is cosmopolitan and easy to afford (unlike NY). I didn’t see much in the ways of Mexico’s sights, but I got to hang out with my cousin and his friends, which to me is great since I get to see how they really live and get on each day down there (or at least on the weekend). There was plenty that happened on this trip and it felt more like a week than two days. But just to list some highlights including real Mexican tequila, girls speaking Spanish, empeniadas (did I eat those?), La Condesa and La Roma, lemon with every meal (they call limes lemons and disregard our lemons altogether), horseback riding (or attempting to), the painter Tomayo, granola with cactus fruit, the only bluegrass band in Mexico, trying to change a flat tire in the rain, meeting many new relatives for the first time, Caballeros, a reporter for The Economist, altitude sickness, playing tricks on Mariachis, and much more.

I don’t want to ramble on about each story but you can find me if you really want to know more. Here’s one anecdote below, though, a subtle reminder of things you only see when you travel. I remember walking in the park in La Condesa and there were these school children, girls, playing a game in the water, fully clothed and covered in this muddy water. They didn’t care that they were in this public pond, and I don’t think anyone else did either. I could’ve sworn they were playing SPUD. At one point I saw one girl bring down another girl underwater. Pretty amusing. I’m just mentioning it because it was such an odd site to me. I took a picture of it (see below).

A couple of final notes on Mexico City, until the next time I visit:

-I was struck by the large amounts of modern architecture there. Not so much by the fact that these are new buildings, but moreso by the actual buildings themselves. Here in NY we have plenty of nice, new, state-of-the-art buildings, but they’re mostly just glass towers. In Mexico, the new buildings are gravitational curiosities and physical anomalies. I often found myself staring up at buildings and wondering just how they went, and how did they get that way. And for a New Yorker to look up at a building and think that (and one that’s read The Fountainhead), I think, says a lot about the city.

-Due to Mexico City being over 7000 feet above sea level, the weather there is incredible. It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold. It’s dry, but wet with a nice rain every afternoon (at least in the rainy season). You need a light jacket at night, but those are my favorite kinds of jackets! This place epitomizes t-shirt and jeans, and from what I gathered, the weather is never a topic of conversation because, well, it never changes.

One note I will say on this is that since no days are sweltering, you won’t find the girls as scantily clad as you may in NY when it’s 90 degrees out at 9pm. But it is Mexico and I’m sure there’s a resort with just such sights not too far away.

-Real Mexican food kicks ass! Something about the climate makes all the fruits and vegetables taste super-juicy and fresh (I noticed this in Israel too). It’s also cheap, so where in the city you pay 75 cents for a banana (that’s how much they wanted at Dunkin’ Donuts the other day -can you believe that shit!), in Mexico, I paid 1 dollar for a 16 ounce cup filled with fresh cut mangoes. So damn good!

But the real food in Mexico -tortillas, salsa, limes (which they refer to as lemons (or limon)), are favorful and full of spice. I mean, I had a quesadilla at a ranch on the outskirts of Mexico City with little electricity and the bathroom outside. There was no health department here and I got the feeling the pollo was butchered and plucked around back. Still, the quesadilla was delicious enough to go back for seconds.  Also, the beer was in an old Coca-Cola icebox from the fifties with a bottle opener on the side.  How cool is that!

This is more than enough writing for now.   My back is hurting from being hunched over my coffee table, and I’ve got a bunch of other shit to do tonight.  Viva la Mexico.