In Like A Lion

It's March! And it's freezing. The weather's all over the place. It's snowing right now.

On Saturday, though, it was kind of nice in the earlier part of the day, and Nina and I took a walk out to Bay Ridge by way of the Brooklyn Army Terminal docks where the Water Taxi stops. The light was really great and we took a lot of pictures; you can see the evidence in my photostream. That whole area is kind of dilapidated -- suffused with the slightly foul smell of the water, which reminded me of people (and me) productively fishing on the docks down on Casey Key; but beautiful, full of warehouse buildings with broken blue glass in their windows. The Water Taxi itself -- or a boat with the Water Taxi logo on it -- was moored at one of the piers, abandoned and bobbing gently in the wine-dark river. It looked different than it does in the advertising materials I've seen -- more like some kind of luxury yacht. From there we headed up into Bay Ridge proper and had a really nice dinner at an Indian place called Taj Mahal. I'd forgotten how good mango lassis are: They're so good you practically don't want to drink them because then they'll be gone.

Sunday was cold, cold. I picked up Eve at her house on the way home from Nina's, and we swung by Steve's C-Town to do my weekly shopping and to pick up materials for cooking dinner before the Thermals show (which Nina, knee-deep in Latin American Politics, had to cancel on): We settled on hamburgers with portobello mushrooms, and Eve snagged a six-pack of Kozy Shack chocolate pudding from the dairy aisle, citing an impromptu craving for the stuff. Indeed, she downed three of them while we baked and marinated the mushrooms in preparation for their use on the burgers I sauteed in my wonderful big frying pan. Their combination, along with baby spinach in place of lettuce, was pretty great -- I recommend it if you've got the wherewithal. I had a chocolate pudding myself, finding it kind of uck.

We met up with my friend Squick from work and got into The Bowery Ballroom around 9:30, just in time to hear the last opening act, The Big Sleep. They were no good -- potentially catchy, mostly instrumental pieces, but the band had about zero energy and stage presence. I'm all for nerds on stage, but you can't be shy, guys. Jump around. That's not the real story, though: Eve'd developed a bit of a stomach complaint on the way there, and by the time we'd brandished our tickets and made it to the lounge, she was right nauseated. She took a trip to the bathroom before we headed up to the stage area, and apparently up came the pudding, the burger, etc. Nonetheless, Eve is a total champ, and she stuck it out for the entire goddamn show, retreating to the ladies room to do number two or number... three periodically.

The Thermals were fucking amazing, the epitome of, I don't know, "showmanship", vivacious and unabashedly shrill. I have no idea how they got their set so tight, but everyone in the band seemed to know exactly when to start every song: Hutch Harris would be tuning and muttering something to the audience and then suddenly, without even a gesture on his part to the drummer, the entire band would launch into a song, playing in perfect synchronization, Kathy Foster's hair bouncing in time to the music. The crowd, which had been kind of lukewarm in their reception to the 'Sleep, went nuts. When the band did Pillar of Salt, the entire room, I shit you not, was, as I call it, dancin' around. My regret, other than the fact that Eve was clearly miserable, was that I couldn't really follow suit -- I'd like to think that my laborious digestion of the raw onions we'd mixed into the hamburger had taken the wind out of my sails, but I might just be getting too old to mosh at a show on a Sunday night. Incredible band, though: After they finished their encore and started packing up, we realized that the rhythm guitar player had sprained his ankle or sommat -- he was walking around on crutches -- but he'd been leaping and running around on stage the whole time. Solidarity with Eve, who'd accrued five upchucks over the course of the night. Good thing, as she noted, that the sound in the BB bathrooms is good.

Monday night I watched Out of the Past, another recommendation from Emma, which, I have to say, I liked a whole lot more than Laura. The lighting and the shooting locations in this one were really beautiful, and the whole thing was a bit more interesting, structurally and plot-wise. It didn't hurt that Jane Greer is hot and nasty. I don't get why they cast Kirk Douglas as the scary gangster, though, or why anyone's ever described him as being hard-boiled. He's always seemed a little fey to me.

Spent last night trying to put together some software releases and watching NYCTV (Channel 76 for me), which is actually pretty great. I caught Cool in Your Code, an exploration of the city zip code-by-zip code, and $9.99, a guide to doing stuff on the cheap. Which is, you know, how I roll.