Handbill Handout

There seems to be a new trend afoot in the NYC popular music performance venue scene. I’m not sure what to call it: dinner theater rock or comfort clubs or “aren’t you a bit old to be out seeing this kind of music in small venues buddy?” spaces. Whatever you want to call it, I have to say that as a middle aged fat guy with bad knees, I sorta like it. The venues I’m talking about are places like City Winery and Highline Ballroom and Le Poisson Rouge to name three. The concept here is that these venues offer seating, waitress service and, if you get there early enough, dinner. City Winery in particular goes upscale on the food; last Friday I saw Bob Mould and Jon Auer there and over the course of the evening we had a round of prosecco, a few bottles of wine, a cheese course and a hummus and olives platter. Hell, they even go so far as to suggest wine pairings with the food offerings . This, my friends, is a far cry from standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow music enthusiast/Eas...

I cheated on my coffee cart guy today. There, I said it. I’m not proud of it. It really wasn’t my fault. Well it was my fault but not because of what you think. It’s because I let my MetroCard run out this morning. Well it’s not just because of that. I suppose all acts of infidelity have more than just one cause. The empty MetroCard was merely a trigger. An excuse. My most recent cart guy has been unfailingly chatty and cheery. That’s not necessarily a good thing. He also has a tip jar out. A tip jar! On a coffee cart! I have never put at thing in that jar but it seems that others have. Either than or he’s doing the old “prime the pump” routine by putting a few bucks of his own in there to let folks know that they should toss him a few extra coins. In any event, I’m not doing it. If he wants more money he should raise the price of coffee. The fancy organic place and the upscale pastry joint in my building both charge roughly double what the carts do for coffee and they still do a solid...

The January morning was icy cold. The air felt almost like liquid in Carl’s lungs. It was, he thought, the sort of cold that robs you of bits of your life. Still, he could not resist stopping in front of the gallery that morning the same way he had every morning for weeks since the painting was hung in the window. The painting that was vexing Carl because he couldn ’t figure out what it was. The picture wasn ’t anything remarkable in subject matter or execution. It wasn ’t an abstraction that lent itself to interpretation. It was, in fact a pretty straightforward painting until you tried to figure out what the narrative was behind it; that is what moment in time was the painting trying to capture? The painting was a picture of a man that Carl had initially presumed to be a fisherman because he appeared to be standing at the rail of a boat except you couldn ’t see the boat you could only see the man, the rail and the water and another man further in the background. The men were position...

Whether or not you think that the new decade began on January 1 of this year or will begin on January 1, 2011, there’s one thing we can all agree upon: the makers of novelty New Year’s sunglasses are screwed. This occurred to me as I walked east on 48th street at lunch today and I passed a newsstand still selling those 2010 glasses. Every year for the past decade hawkers of overpriced chintz all over the city foisted sunglasses with frames in the shape of the year (that’s the Gregorian calendar year, of course) on eager-to-spend tourists and they were quite easy to construct given that you had a “00” smack in the middle. The 2010 glasses seem to have the “1” wedged between the lenses, not too unwieldy. However, next year is 2011. So now what are they going to do? I suspect somewhere out there there’s a novelty sunglasses designer sweating it out over this. He lays in the dark trying to imagine an alignment of digits that would not result in a reduced field of vision, accidents an...

Why can’t I get any decent Chinese food where I live anymore? Really, am I asking for so much? Is it really that hard? Now to be sure, the folks I deal with in the Chinese places in my neighborhood are all very polite and they seem to be quite hard working. I feel really awful dumping on them this way. However I just can’t stand it anymore. The food just isn’t really all that good, at least not as good as the Chinese food of my youth. (And at this point I have to stop and give another clarification: I’m not talking about Chinese-Chinese food like actual Chinese folks eat in China or even Chinatowns around the world. I’m talking about Chinese-American, not Chop Suey, no, not quite that Westernized but rather Kung Po this and whatever-meat-with garlic sauce that and the one dish that is driving me to write this, a hoary classic that probably exists nowhere in Szechuan province: General Tso’s Chicken). I did not always have the feelings I have now for General Tso’s Chicken. Grow...

The world is short another curler today. Actually it happened five days ago. I have been struggling with this, struggling to deal with comprehending it, struggling over what to say. The stories I could tell don't fully express the sort of person he was. Praise winds up sounding generic like the sort of thing you pick up at Death R'Us or from a prefab sympathy card. Other people spoke as his service and said things better than I ever could here. But you gotta do something, right? So what to do? Then I remembered. This guy who's dead now see, he really, really loved this one thing I said to him once. He thought it was the one of the greatest compliments he ever received. He would even tell other people about it. So, since he loved it so much there's no better way to send him on his way by offering it again. So here it is in the same spirit as it was the first time. Eric, you're an idiot.

(plinking banjo music) Dear Margaret- I fear the center of our line is about to crumble, and I may not return to our fair home. BRAINS!!! The seargent-major is a fair man, he knows we may not ever return to our loved ones again so he has given us each a promotion and MORE BRAINS SENT MORE BRAINS GRRRRWWAAAHHH. This may be the last time I write to you so please kiss baby Tim for me and tell my mother I to remember me dear...GIVE ME YOUR BRAINS, BRAINS, MORE BRAINS BRRRRUAAAAAAHHHHHGGGGH! Yours, Corporal Agarn