He Needs a Manny Ramirez Jersey
Originally uploaded by wrysloan

First stop on the Road Trip: Boston

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The Sweet Song of Farewell, originally uploaded by wrysloan.

As I prepare to move to San Francisco on the 20th, I threw a little bbq bash yesterday. It began with brats and ended with Mafia.

It’s published. The Modern Spectator serves up my piece on the virtues of rioting during March Madness. It’s a great journal, have a peek:

—

It’s dark and loud, with a hot wet tang of beer and crowd in my nostrils. A couple to my right screams. To my left a hefty elbow pins the waitress against the bar. The clock ticks, the roar goes up… and as the first dunk slams home, I roar too, along with a hundred perfect strangers in a town that could care less.

During these days of late March Madness, New Yorkers are largely oblivious to the crucial ascent of my team: UCLA. And yet last week, a long way from home, I encountered Bruins aplenty in the back room of an East Village pub called Professor Thom’s. Stumbling onto the Alumni Association was dumb luck, but as I talked my way past the fleshy wall of bouncers, I felt the strange thrill of finding people as fiercely excited as I was about our team’s chances to win another championship. For an hour, I managed to forget I wasn’t actually invited, until a woman in powder-blue thigh-highs distributed UCLA pins and pennants. She could barely squeeze past the broad-shouldered consultants and nascent bankers. The shifting mass of bodies jostled for a better view of the screen. I couldn’t see so much as feel Darren Collison’s three-point shot, rolling through and between each of us. We held our breath. Then we let out a moan that became a growl and then finally, ecstatic, the roar.

continue…

Thought it was about time I returned to the musing. I go through periods of dormancy with my writing; life hurtles merrily along, and I realize the past few months have been spent thoroughly preoccupied with teaching and politics and new bands and rediscovering the joys of running and east-village-carousing with friends.

Nicole Hefner, early in the mfa program, said it best: Drinking with writers is not writing, but you’d be forgiven for feeling sure it was at 2am.

– Am I thrilled with the new political climate? Cautiously, I am.
– Am I working on my novel again? Slowly but with enthusiasm. New direction, better characters. Also, headed back into short stories and essays I hope.
– Am I watching too much basketball? Clearly.
– Am I still in love with NYU’s Expository Writing Program? There is no more rewarding cult that I’m aware of. But then, I pass out the kool aid.
– Am I planning to live in the East Village indefinitely? Nah. But I do have this amazing community of writers and friends and quirky coffee shops and odd little parks and speakeasy bars and… it takes five minutes by foot to get to work. Even though I bike with speedy sloth.
– Am I aware that no one really cares to read a personal status update, as blogs are far more interesting when commenting on the outside world, when smartly asserting and claiming and persuading? I am. Bite me.

New York Times
July 30, 2006
Sunday Styles

DANCING IN SANDY SHOES

By MELENA RYZIK

“HOT DOGS! Two-dollar hot dogs!”

That is the late-night rallying cry from the vendors at the Water Taxi Beach, which is less of a beach and more of a pier jutting into the East River in Long Island City, Queens, with 440 tons of imported sand.

But with beer, epicurean snacks (unlike the tofu dogs, the elk burgers pretty much sell themselves) and a killer view, it is a near-perfect spot for a night out. It is especially crowded on Saturdays, when there are D.J.’s, dancing, and even some wayward acrobatics at a new gathering called Rebound. Organized by a few downtown D.J.’s, it is intended as an after-party to the Warm-Up series, another D.J.-and-dancing event at the nearby P.S. 1 Museum.

“This is almost better than P.S. 1,” Ryan Sloan, 30, said as he and a friend, Sandar Hla, absorbed Midtown’s glow. People were turning cartwheels, making out and dancing barefoot. A family of ducks floated by; a group of friends buried themselves in the sand. It was as close to a love-in as Queens is likely to get. Why, then, is it only near-perfect?

For one thing, it is in a hard-to-find spot in a borough not known for sophistication. Or as Hiram Bonet IV, a truck driver from Richmond Hills, put it, “There’s no chi-chi-pooh-poohness.”

Well, there didn’t used to be.

“I thought it was going to be full of hipsters and cool kids, and it is,” said Myles Kane, an editor from Williamsburg. Would he prefer fewer cool kids?

“I guess so,” Mr. Kane, 27, said, sighing, “but what the hell am I?”

To be fair, hipsters aren’t the only ones who have discovered Rebound. “You have your Hamptons crowd, your bridge-and-tunnel crowd, and children break dancing,” said Ms. Hla, 30.

She took in the water, the skyline, the elk burgers. “It’s like sensory overload,” she said, “the moment you fall in love with everything all at once.”

Mr. Sloan added with a grin: “I don’t know how we get home, but other than that, it’s great.”

It’s about to get better. Starting Saturday, a night ferry will shuttle partygoers between Rebound and East 34th Street in Manhattan. It’s $6 each way and takes four minutes. Which is actually pretty close to perfect.

Rebound

Second Street and Borden Avenue, Long Island City, Queens.

GETTING IN Admission is free; check directions at http://www.watertaxibeach.com.

DRESS CODE Bare feet and bikini tops.

D.J. LINEUP Includes Tim (Love) Lee, Metro Area, D.J. Spun, Justin Carter, and Probus.

SIGNATURE DRINK BlueTini (fresh blueberry and ginger-infused gins, dry vermouth), $14.

Most days, if you ask me, my home is Manhattan. I’m from LA, but my home is here.

But there are times when I miss, deeply miss, where I come from. And then I get a note from a friend looking forward to my return, or my mom starts planning an extensive itinerary of leisure activities, or I read an article like the one below…

And I think — I’ll be home in a week.

(Here is Cindy Price’s NY Times travel piece up along the coastline and its taquerias. Read it and eat.)

So I’m watching the second Pirates of the Caribbean the other day, and there’s Johnny Depp, aka Capt Jack Sparrow. The place is packed, a week into its run. The critics hate it (and insist they’re hating it for us, which is hilariously fraudulent). I keep thinking, okay — conflict, got it, more conflict, right, ooh even more conflict. But witless conflict, and Orlando Bloom is as stiff as that starfish mashed on the face of Stellan Skarsgaard.

But Captain Jack is the real disappointment. He’s only as deep as his affect this time around, all eye makeup and dreds and arms still up in the air like an effeminate muppet on Disney-writer marionette strings… but for what? He’s got one good grin, just at the end, and the girl I’m sitting next to lets out an involuntary moan.

Seriously, a moan. The last time I heard one of those in a theater was when I got draggged to the ballet at 19. Neve Campbell is sitting right behind me as Mikhail Barishnikov, in his farewell tour, leapt through the air and crumpled in front of us, pretending to be dead in his snug white unitard. There it went, right by my ear, an arrow meant expressly for a man whose film greatness climaxed with White Nights: the airborne moan. Ooooh, went Neve. Ooooh.

Which makes me realize part of why women my age love the Pirates franchise. And it ain’t fond flashbacks to their inebriated Disneyland grad night.

It’s the fact that if you were a girl and you grew up remotely near the Eighties, your sex symbols were sexually ambiguous. Every glam metal band from 1980 onward had lacquered eyeshadow and ion-treated hair and war paint.

– Van Halen, Bon Jovi: big hair
– Duran Duran, Def Leppard: big hair, eyeliner, leather chaps
– The Cure: smeared lipstick, big hair, miniskirts, eating disorders
– Poison, Whitesnake, Warrant, Motley Crue, Cinderella(!!!): don’t get me started. “Girls, Girls, Girls” my ass.

But at its primal root, the fey sneering son of Ziggy Stardust, is Adam Ant. Of course Jack Sparrow, mincing and shuddering, hands and eyes akimbo, sidles directly into the collective unconscious. Mr. Ant, with all of his face-painted preening, has done all of that foreplay ages ago. Johnny Depp is, no doubt, shuttling a small sum over to the Ant estate for copyright infringement settlements as we speak.

I’ve heard Keith Richards was Depp’s inspiration. Please. Who ever let out an involuntary moan for Captain Emphysema Bag O’Bones? It’s pretty, floppy, arch Adam Ant who ought to take a bow — or a curtsey, garb permitting — when the third Pirates installment beaches next summer. And then, perhaps amid the collective oooh, I’ll figure out finally how to get the eyeliner right for my next date.

This is not a long, meaningful post, filled with my adventures over the past month.

If you’re in search of insight, I was never really your stop anyway.

Instead, I offer this: you need to catch the Fruit Bats when they come to your town, even if that town is Hoboken and your bike breaks on the way to the entrance and you get on the wrong train and you switch, sweating, under the tunnel somewhere below Jersey and you emerge and share a cab with two (attractive) strangers along Washington St. because that’s what you do in Hoboken, you pay five dollars flat for a ride any old where, and you get to Maxwell’s early because you’re a huge geek but that’s okay because you are armed… with two hours of This American Life.

And the Fruit Bats themselves, awkward and eager to headline their own show for one night? Small and loud and full of their own kind of folk-tinged plaintive joy, they were phenomenal. Raucous yawps and singalongs, kids.

Afterward, the singer, Eric Johnson, chatted with me for a bit while he sold band t-shirts. We talked about album covers by Chicago illustrator Jay Ryan, of Andrew Bird and Calexico and Fugazi fame. Why do all singers have floppy hair? We’ll never know.

Have I mentioned recently I might never move? All the odd build to get to the show just made the show better.

Such a tumultuous year thus far.

After much ado, I am officially a Language Lecturer at New York University, with the ability suddenly to pay my rent, house my car, feed my belly, adventure in the world and actually enjoy the city… simultaneously.

My screenplay’s nearly done. My classes ended brilliantly. And the Clips move on to the second round of the playoffs (in convincing fashion) for the first time in 30 years.

Life is really great. Small pleasures indeed.