Electric Boogaloo

The bouncer at Bowery Electric believes that the Rule of 3 doesn't just apply to celebrity deaths. Here's why:

1.The other night, three people in NYC from Aspen walked into the bar. According to the bartender, there was something very vibe-disturbing about them, in a “We're trying to hide how much we've been drinking” kind of way. One of them got up to leave, and walked right through the glass door. Shattered the whole thing (see above: he's explaining how that door to his left used to be see-through). The bouncer asked if he was okay; he just muttered incoherently and stumbled into the night, apparently unhurt. The other two Aspenites took the “Oh, damn, sorry, we barely even know that guy” line. Because people who travel from Aspen to the same bar on the Bowery generally barely know each other.
2.Not too long ago, the fire escape above the bar collapsed. Not sure if it was the whole thing, or just a section, but either way, fire escapes are heavy.
3.Not too long before not too long ago, an older guy drinking downstairs flew into a rage because the bar's British flag hung slightly higher on the wall than its American one. He stormed upstairs and outside, and started violently chest-bumping the sidewalk ATM. This proved ineffective, so he got in his truck and ran the thing over, then drove away. He turned himself in to the police the next day.

On the bright side, again, the door-crasher was unhurt, and the fire escape, having been replaced, is probably now less likely to crush you than any other fire escape in New York, and hey, at least there was nobody using the ATM.

Rule of 3, meet Caveat of 3.

Too Big To Fail

Both of these signs mark the front of the HSBC taking over the southwest corner of 9th and 2nd, which used to host a Max Brenner, and before that a Japanese place that never took off because the chef died right before it opened, and before that a Starbucks, which for no apparent reason moved across the street.

Since you can't bring a gun into New York City, period, it kind of goes without saying that you can't bring one into a bank, no matter how redundant the branch (there are other HSBCs at Broadway & 9th, 1st & 14th, and USQ, not to mention dueling 2nd Ave Chases on St. Marks and 10th St, plus another at Astor Place).

If you're an armed robber, this sign probably won't phase you. But this shitty, hand-drawn “Closed” sign should stop you dead in your tracks. If this branch can't even afford a decent “Closed” sign, you should just walk the few extra blocks and rob a less impoverished HSBC (Broadway & 9th, 1st & 14th, or USQ, or since you clearly don't have a banking preference just rob the Chase on St. Marks, 10th, or Astor Place).

There's also an Emigrant Bank, but I think you have to be of Irish descent to rob it.

Jamming with Kentrell Lockett

“Shark Face Ass Boy!!” – joyous exclamation issued by Ole Miss defensive end Kentrell Lockett on his NFL Draft Twitter feed

Walking past the Houston Whole Foods with a coworker, I spotted Steve, an East Village fixture in his late 50s I know from my coffee shop, but who I hadn't seen in ages. As Steve approached the corner where we waited out the light, I relayed Steve's bio: Detroit native who once partied at the MC5's headquarters, Vietnam vet, punk scenester who took Super 8 footage of The Jam's first CBGB show, handyman behind untold area businesses' cabinets, wiring, and other things that handymen do.

I might've been bragging a little: I'm a guy who meets interesting people, and has the capacity to be interested by them.

The universe hates that kind of shit.

I shook Steve's hand. We talked about what he'd been up to (odd jobs for the Yippie Museum Cafe on Bleecker). He introduced me to his friends: a woman he'd gone to college with who'd moved to New York at the same time as him in the 70s, and her brother, both of whom now live in Berlin.

Between Vietnam and CBGB, I'd always assumed Steve hadn't gone to college. As we parted ways, he said “Good to see you, Mark.” My name isn't Mark. But it's cool, because Steve still keeps up with people he partied with 35 years ago and who've since moved to Berlin, and that's more important than remembering the name of everyone he ever met in a coffee shop.

“Hey...Mark,” my coworker grinned. I am a guy who takes the time to meet interesting people, and has the capacity to be interested by them, but sometimes, well...

“Shark Face Ass Boy!!” – a phrase people who are not Ole Miss defensive end Kentrell Lockett scream in order to admit minor but embarrassing mistakes and quickly put the whole matter behind them

Yacht von Trier

Heading to the Yacht Rock screening/Ambrosia 40th anniversary show at the Bell House last night, I might've been overly impressed by the showman component of our limo driver's game. “He's playing the tambourine, and blowing a party whistle.”

Adam was less enthusiastic. “And...driving”, he said, unconvinced the guy had that part of the job descrip down. He didn't: after taking us to the wrong 7th Street (Williamsburg), he said, “We're going to hit the BQE and head straight for Gowanus. That's near Bensonhurst or some shit. I don't believe in GPS.”

When we finally stepped out of our rented class-wagon, some guy in a mildly loud buttondown walked up and told us how glad he was that somebody'd decided to dress yacht-y. There's detached irony and participatory irony. This crowd was in the former camp, but the captain's hats, fake mustaches, boat shoes, pink shirts, tight white pants, and oversized pink sunglasses moved most of us into the latter category. I've got a real mustache, just like my dad had in the 70s. Only in moments of weakness do I consider mine ironic.

I spent half the show talking to a Montreal expat in a WWE t-shirt, featuring some wrestler with a 90s-style flavor-savor under his lip. She had no idea who the guy was – she'd bought the shirt in India. I would've said, “You should've gone with The Great Khali,” but she wouldn't have known who that was either. She also didn't know who Ambrosia was, and didn't have a clue what this Yacht Rock thing was all about. She was very into Lars von Trier. I've only seen one movie – Dancer in the Dark – and thought it was pretty good, until it turned into a steaming pile of shit. She joked that me not having seen Antichrist – which apparently includes a scene where Charlotte Gainsbourg cuts off her own clitoris (empowerment? misogyny? whatever, as long as it's not intended as a critique of American character. eat my dick, Lars von Trier.) – meant we couldn't hang out. I told her I could still converse on the meaning of cutting off your own clitoris. Fortunately she didn't take me up on that.

She wanted to hit Sunny's, out in Red Hook. We tried four cabs. All four pretended not to know where Red Hook was, then blamed us for not being able to give them directions. That's like a surgeon refusing to admit he knows where your spleen is, then blaming you for not guiding his hand. The fifth cabbie, we just told to head down Van Brunt, and figured we'd run into it. We did. (eat my dick, cabbies.)

There were some old guitarists playing in back – two men and a woman. They'd been doing a folk jam there for seven years. One of the men had a terrible voice. The other couldn't remember the words to very many songs (“Lay lady lay” was about all he recalled of “Lay Lady Lay”). I got the feeling the woman remembered a lot of words, but was too deep into a timid life to take on lead vocals. They offered us pretzels.

We took a gypsy cab back to her place in Bed-Stuy and hung out a while. She was a photographer, and had put together an intentionally kookie book of repeated photographs designed to teach kids math-based counting strategies – for instance, four rows of the same smiley guy in a speedo, and you're supposed to figure the quickest way to count how many times he appears without a satchel over his shoulder.

I made to leave around 4am. We joked about how dodgy Bed-Stuy was. As I walked out to the street, she cautioned “Don't get raped!”

I did not get raped. However, the Popeye's across from the C train was down to 2 1/2 chicken strips. I'm no math genius, but I know it takes three to make a combo meal, and five to blow my party whistle.

I (Don't) Have Many Leather-bound Books

I hadn't seen my friend Matt Wu* for maybe two years until last night, when he asked me to dinner with him and his girlfriend so I could give my two cents on her prospective vegan-based internet venture (I have an Internet job – big surprise). After my advice-stream ran dry, she randomly busted out with a story involving pulling her suddenly horny, neutered 14-year-old cat off a screaming female cat. She then held up her pinkie. You can guess what that represented. Then she told me about the dog she'd found chained to a pole in five-degree weather. She stayed with the dog for two hours until it became apparent no one was coming back for him, then she adopted him. The dog lives with Matt Wu now. Matt Wu enjoys putting things on top of the dog and taking pictures: a running shoe, jeans, a Hank Williams, Jr “Original Bad Ass” t-shirt, a stuffed squirrel doll, a giant rubber exercise ball, a Yankees cap.

Matt Wu went to the Fame high school. He played saxophone, but now does business-y things. This is a good creative outlet for him.

His girlfriend is a very nice person who rescues animals and doesn't eat them. I thought that was the sum of it. But later, at a Bowery loft party for Barking Irons' new music-clothing video series**, we were talking to the girlfriend (wife?) of Stewart D'Arrieta (both above), an Australian Tom Waits tribute artist who periodically crashes America to perform his review, “Belly of a Drunken Piano”, which you should totally see, because Stewart totally channels Tom Waits, without losing Stewart, and clearly has some Waits-worthy stories of his own, and... So, we were talking to his girlfriend/wife, and AC/DC came up, as AC/DC must. Then Matt Wu's girlfriend sprung it on us that she'd once appeared in an AC/DC video (“Stiff Upper Lip”), and had gotten along with Malcolm Young so famously they'd exchanged phone numbers. Also, she was apparently once employed as a professional roller-skater. Matt Wu was as surprised as I was.

Which obviously just goes to show that you can't judge a book by its cover, even if the book refuses to be bound in leather, based on moral principles.

*Technically Matt Yu, but he thinks “Wu” makes him sound more like a spy
**Barking Irons: two brothers who started out making clothes based on historical New York characters – gang members, hobos, politicians... – before Gangs of New York was made

Candidate Withdrawal

Last night at High Bar (48th and 8th), my buddy Duke and a friend of one of my coworkers spent about ten thinking they'd met somewhere before, 'til they realized that last week they'd been candidates for jury duty together. The case involved a “really tall but not at all threatening middle-aged white guy in a bad suit” pushing a little too hard for affection from a much younger drunken woman in Times Square. Both Duke and my coworker's friend were rejected from the pool. Neither seemed hurt.

This morning I walked into one of my three local Chase banks and saw this carnage.

Bungled sexual assault in Times Square. Attempt to rob ATM by smashing through touchscreen in East Village.

This is New Jack City, baby. Shit is falling apart all over.

Just a Squirrel Trying to Smooth a Nut

Last night at the Strip House, my Filipino Fort Worthian friend told a story about the real-life husband of the girl he used to consider his “work wife”. I've met both of them and, long story short, she's amazing, he's an asshole, and I'm not just saying that because she's amazing. Anyway, my friend started out by relating that the husband's been unemployed two years, and in that time's become an avid foodie – an intro you'd think would lead into him becoming an amazing cook and deciding to open a restaurant, or go to culinary school, or throw extravagant dinner parties. But here's where things went instead: the guy started growing vegetables in his back yard, and of course a squirrel started devouring them. So he traps the squirrel. And drowns it in his bathtub. And cooks it. And eats it.

My best friend's family are borderline genius Cajuns from Bunkie, LA. The dad – whose title I believe was Head of the East TX Psychiatric Association – and the brothers – one of whom's now a clinical psychiatrist dealing with real killers in upstate NY – used to take out powerline-munching squirrels in their Dallas backyard with a .22, and tally their kills on a sheet of paper tacked up over the washing machine. That seemed normal. I read in the Times that in England, there's a sizable and respectable squirrel-eating movement motivated by both culinary adventure a need to thin out interloping gray squirrels to preserve the native red population (“Save a red, eat a gray!”). That seems at least normal enough. The Times also had a story about people using everything from electric fences to shovels to kill off garden-destroying varmints. All of them had fairly normal reactions (anguish-to-acceptance-of-necessity) to their bloody deeds, except this one self-described Brooklyn yuppie who, after seeing the damage a squirrel'd wreaked on her rooftop garden, said: “There was a wow factor, like when one looks out at the aftermath of a really, really, really destructive thunderstorm and says, ‘Look at that tree branch on the Volvo.'” So she drowned the squirrel in a rain barrel.

One blogger who read the story named her his “Urban Bunghole of the Year”. I don't think Bunghole begins to describe it. There's something deeply troubling about a method of killing that involves you standing over the victim and dispassionately watching it thrash. As the blogger noted, the American Veterinary Medical Association agrees: “Drowning is not a means of euthanasia and is inhumane.”

I also asked a restaurant PR friend if he knew of any hardcore, slaughter-my-own-pig chefs who'd actually drown a squirrel. He did not, and was alarmed that someone would. So this guy who I'd thought was just an asshole, might be a burgeoning serial killer – though depending on your perspective, many serial killers are just really big assholes.

But let's take this to a happy place: I spotted the giant balloon above on my way to Wogies for lunch today, where I met the guys from last night, plus a Pakistani-born plastic surgeon (one of my friends has a self-confessed compulsion to befriend Subcontinentals; the Subcontinentals he has befriended all apparently know this). As it often does, the talk turned to balls, specifically whether it'd be possible to Botox them into smoothness, just like the giant balloon. The plastic surgeon said he smelled a research paper, and there was talk of purchasing smoothballs.com, just in case.

Tonight, I went to my friend Katie's 4th Annual Braise-Off, an amateur cooking event she throws to benefit The Food Bank for New York City. There were around 20 entries, and everyone got to try them all. It doesn't matter if you're a foodie or not, grazing on 20 accomplished amateurs' slow-cooked meats is a beautiful experience, eventual colonoscopy be damned.

Before the feasting started, I conversed with my friend Kara's boyfriend (above's him, Kara, and Katie). He's around 6'5", and keeps kosher. We were BS'ing about the similarity of rednecks in mine and Kara's home states (Texas and Maine), and he told me about traveling to Western Virginia (moonshine capital of the world) to hang out with a college friend's family. He'd been a little nervous about the trip, because his friend's grandfather had once held the illustrious title Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but his friend said not to worry, that his grandfather was wholly reformed. Sure enough, the former Wizard was warm and welcoming, and actually prepared a kosher meal for his Yankee Jew guest.

Whether or not Botox can smooth out balls into wrinkle-free balloons remains to be seen. But it's good to know that time can smooth out even the most violent of nuts. As to why I'm more inclined to believe in redemption for Grand Wizards than for squirrel-drowners, I'm not sure.

I hope it's not just because I want to bang the squirrel guy's wife.

Still The Old One

Among the things this surprisingly nimble 23lb cat learned last night:
Shania Twain is now dating the husband of the assistant Mutt Lange left her for.
Angela Lansbury once starred in an exercise video.
When Welshmen exclaim “Oh, the old one!” after finally putting Angela Lansbury's name together with her career, Americans desperately want to believe that, in Wales, Angela Lansbury really is known as “The Old One”.
Madness (the band, not the condition) is still huge in England, and primed to make an American comeback.
If you've never done mushrooms before, people who have done mushrooms before will lock you inside a bus.
Just because you've spent two hours trying to hook your computer up to someone else's television, doesn't mean you should give up.

Eleven O'Clock Shadow

These are the police who responded to the wrestling-thief situation -- two of them are, anyway -- lined up in a sky-bridge for their 11pm shift change. Incidentally, the wrestling-thief called the bar on Sunday, for no apparent purpose. Rob told him that he didn't give a crap about The Rest Of It, but he still owed the bar $60, and that'd have to be paid. The wrestling-thief claimed he'd blacked out and didn't even remember The Rest Of It. The world would be a more interesting place if this guy irretrievably forgot every steroidal romance-con he pulled while drunk the same way other guys irretrievably forget texting a girl or ordering a pizza, but he's almost certainly lying.

People just can't always be who you want them to be.

And The Purse Shall Rise

Watching the games Saturday: right after my friend Duke walked into the bar, an aggro freak in a USA Wrestling track jacket walked up and questioningly accused, "Hey man, did you fart?" The answer was no. The guy twitched there awkwardly for a few minutes, trying to escalate the fart thing into a conversation/confrontation. Then he drifted back into his corner with this British woman he'd shacked up with the night before, and whose very decent breasts he'd earlier exposed and groped by the vid-poker/sex-trivia machine.

Then he walked back over with a candle, and made a big show of smoking out the smell.

Then he apparently stole his date's purse and sold it to a homeless person, because her purse went missing, and after two hours scouring the streets for phantom thieves, there was this bag lady lording over a lot of fake purses, and the British woman's very real purse, claiming some guy in a wrestling track suit had fenced it to her. The Brit bought her purse back, and for whatever reason, everything was still inside. The wrestler disappeared, the cops were called (station's just across the street), and when Rob the bartender Googled him, he actually found an entire webpage dedicated to the guy's bizarre history of conning.

Meanwhile, a girl of unknown origin who'd been barstooling with my friend Ben all night made the above contribution to the bar's DIY Easter decorations. Whether Barabbas was a thief and a murderer, or a revolutionary, if he'd been as big of an ass as the wrestling purse thief, the crowd would have let Jesus down, and the world would never have been blessed with this creepy little Marks-A-Lot sketch.