Plugging Myself, I guess (painful/impossible)

Apparently my piece about the ND/NF After-Party is up and, according to my editor, Movie City News has linked to it.

You’d think the Armond interview would be more popular.

But whatever.

Here’s the piece entitled: “Ambience and Ambivalence at New Direc–Aw, Screw It All, Let’s Get Hammered.”

As always, leave a comment there if you can. It makes me look good to my boss.

P.S.- I sent the interview to Armond and he called it “very entertaining”, although he excoriated me for my typos.

“Spell check, man! Spell check!” He told me.

I finger-point at my editor and look the other way.

:p

Pre-Movie-Meltdowns and Video-Game-Dreams

I wrote the title of this before I wrote, well, what I’m about to write.

So I don’t know if what I’m going through qualifies as a pre-movie-meltdown or just, well, pre-movie life.

Or a pre-movie “life-down” for that matter.

That sounds cooler, anyway.

Again, I find myself having spent the last three days drinking. Not always so crazily, but drinking nonetheless.

Every night there’s a reason, but then again there always is.

Friday, it was Langston’s birthday party. Langston is a good guy, easy-going and I was happy to come out there, even though he was going to a vegetarian restaurant (Quantum Leap) which, stangely since I’m an almost-vegetarian, I tend to deplore. But the nachos, which in terrible-manners-manner I snarfed as soon as I found them on the table with little competition, were pretty yummy, soy-whatever or not and pretty soon my aversion to vegetarian food was alleviated by the news that I could get Garlicky French Fries with my burrito.

“Fries with my burrito?” I asked the waitress, teary-eyed.

She nodded.

I felt like standing up, gently stroking the back of her neck, then maybe making out with her for a few minutes.

But I was content with eating my burrito when it came.

That night was a chain of parties where I went from Langston’s dig at Quantum Leap (2-for-1 Miller High Life: the champagne of beers) to International Bar (4-dollar whiskey-shot and a Schaffer’s) to some place I don’t even remember where someone bought me a drink and I drank it (so drink for free, I guess). The usual dramatics were involved, girls, disappointment and romantic mistakery, but someone had given me a unopened bottle of 3-Buck-Chuck Chardonnay that I’d stuffed in my jacket pocket as I walked down the street and besides I got home early.

Saturday was another night of parties touring around with some buddies between a party with some blog-backlash and Rubulad, the party which I revere. That night I found myself playing my first games of flip-cup (yet another piece of evidence that I’m a case of arrested development) and drinking from a 24-oz Coors while someone extolled the virtues of Dan Clifton to me as “the only person who will be successful from our year”. Thanks.

Rubulad proved decent, but after more romantic mis-haps (non-haps) and a reminder of the previous night’s drunkeness, I told my friends I was going and the threat of being abandoned in the black hole of Brooklyn proved compelling enough for them to follow.

Finally, I went out to my “job-party”, the swankster after-party for New Directors/New Films where the most common question, “Do you have a film in the festival?”, caused me to fail like a failure when I had to smile and say no as the term “blogger” would cause them to move on to whoever else they could find. Langston again did me a solid coming with me and unexpectedly, Jeremiah Newton from my school who I plugged for earlier, helped me out greatly in trying to find people. Plus the food was free and good and so were the drinks (less good, but free).

But again I woke up with the taste of alcohol in my mouth and disappointment waiting for me. I had missed a friend’s film at the festival, which she called me on rightly.

Which made me think about the cascading things in my life. It was one of those moments–suddenly it all hits you.

I’m the sort of person who goes to do the right thing politically at a film but short-shrifts a friend.

I’m the sort of person who people think of as a film, space, writer and not a film-writer.

I’m the sort of person who has more romantic disentanglements than entanglements in the first place.

I’m the sort of person who has gotten drunk the past three nights when I vowed I wouldn’t drink at night if I was hungover in the morning.

Who was I and who was I becoming?

Also, I had been playing a lot of Pokemon.

(Again, arrested development.)

What can I say? The Platinum edition came out.

Pla-ti-num.

That’s like.

Better than Gold AND Silver.

I should know.

My dad was a metals trader. He used to bring me back small pieces of metal from trading conventions which I would then suck on my mouth because they tasted interesting (I didn’t swallow them, no).

I guess that explains a lot.

But playing Pokemon, like playing all video games for me, is a way to turn off your brain, to not think about things, to put the motion of your mind in idle without killing it. A wave of utter distraction. Yet I find, even as I’m playing, whiling away on my cool-Black Nintendo Double-Screen, all of the associations I’ve had with playing Pokemon in the past. I feel like I’m in high school, middle school. I remember my old GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance.

These are not happy memories.

And when I wake up in the morning, for the moment I can remember past dreaming into wakefulness, I’m playing video games in my dreams, not living them mind you, like exploring the world, but I dream like I’m still sitting, playing the game, like WoW players must feel going on sleep-walking raids.

And all this with my movie in two weeks and the anxieties there.

On Saturday I met with the actress playing Leslie, Donnie’s mother, the mother of my loser-protagonist of my loser-script. We went out to Daisy May’s BBQ, a place I selected since she said she lived in Hell’s Kitchen and that was the only decent place I’d known to eat there. I had been agonizing too on how I’d talk to her, along with getting over my hangover for that morning. I remembered my conversation with Sarah-Doe, talking about actors and working with them and wanting to not to offend them and trust them and mold them and my head just flooded and felt shut.

When I went to talk to her, to eat lunch, I drank a Diet Coke and felt better. I talked with her, my Leslie and she told me of playing for Edward Albee, a hero of mine and auditioning for him and what that fun was, along with the joys and perils of a public pre-kindergarden education. When I tried to explain to her, to not explain to her, to tread lightly but to get my point across, I fumbled as we went from lunch to walking down Hell’s Kitchen-11th Avenue with it’s Car Washes and Chryslers Big-big-buildings.

When we got past her house and walked back towards it, I just asked her:

“Well, how do you think this’ll work?”

She smiled, un-nervous.

“Well,” She told me. “I suppose, we’ll do the scene. And then do it again a different way. And maybe even one more time if you like. And you can give a note or something and… tell me what you want.”

And I blinked. I’m an idiot. Well, b’duh.

“Oh.” I said. “Yeah. That could work. Yeah, that sounds good.”

And we shook hands and I left.

Maybe I’m making too much of all this, too much of Pokemon, parties, boozing and broads.

Some days I feel like my life’s a mumblecore movie, which when I described what that’s like to Dan Pleck, he commented: “Who the fuck would ever want to watch that?”

But some days I just feel wound-up all-tight-tight-tight and if I just let it go, then maybe the tension from my neck will release and I can have– well, I can have a day.

Those days, I write.

Slam-Crunch-Bam-Blood-Lithuanians

So last night as I was leaving I let my hand drift back as I was closing the door and the door closed and it closed on my middle finger of my middle hand but it only grasped the tip as I felt nothing and then looked back and saw bloodandbloodandblood and wrapped in my shirt as I walked downthestairs and outhedoor and out in to the street.

For some reason, I’m one of those people who is squeamish at the sight of their own blood. It’s not like seeing a mouse to me. Just like seeing, well… you’re own blood. It feels like it’s escaping you and it’s not going to come back and you know you have a lot of it, but damnit, you need it to live and stuff and things and this is definitely not good.

I passed a Key Food as I was walking around the corner but figured the employees who didn’t see me defraud a self-checkout machine with a mix-and-match six-pack would be any use in first aid. Rather, I limped with my blood-soaked t-shirt to Two Boots Pizza, where I’d actually been to earlier in the night (at their NoHo location) for some pretty decent slices. I guess I figured that what with the pizza-cutters and all, they might have a kit.

And that they did, giving me Neosporin and band-aid after band-aid to encapsulate my bloody-and-bloodier swollen digit.

I had gotten into this mess when, after turning a 4-page paper for a 5-page assignment, my friend Beardo Malone had informed that they were sousing people on the 8th floor. In a general malaise about my life, this sounded good.

The event was full of arty-kids with oversized prescription-less plastic-rim glass and Three-Buck-Chuck; your typical art school scene. But I figured with my friend Malone already drunk and beardy, I could at least hang around and have a few laughs.

And that I did. The party was centered around a small nondescript room (which turned out to be the booze room) full of some people I did or didn’t know, including friends of Rob, former friends of Rob and a producer who’d grown a beard. I even managed to find, amidst my cups and plastic cups of cheapo-wine, a nice girl to hit on, who apparently was from my Post-Modern Travel-Fiction Class

O.B. (Original Beardo) and teacher Tom Drysdale commented on this when he heard it:

“Why the fuck are you in that class?” He asked, taking his chewing-cigar from his teeth. “Let me tell you what post-modernism is: the failure of teachers to teach students to make up their own goddam minds, leaving them instead spewing back the same crap.”

Nevertheless, the girl was cute, freckled, with a smart-style black-dress with cleavage enough to make me wonder. What sealed the deal was that I found out that not only was she in my class, but she sat behind me.

This instilled panic for me in a second. Oh fuck, I thought to myself. This girl has seen me pick my nose and scratch my hair or my butt or whatever the gross things are that I did that I don’t notice that I do and this, man, this is just terrible.

Play it off as a joke:

“Oh, sorry about that. Ha ha. That must not be too much fun.”

“It’s fine” She said. “You ask good questions.”

Whoof. A comment I’ve been getting since I was”Curious Nicholas back in 3rd Grade.

Still, if this girl had seen the back of me for nigh on 8 weeks and wasn’t instantly repulsed, I knew I was going somewhere and kept on talking.

“That girl’s cute over there.”  I said, consolidating myself to Beardo Malone.

“Her?” He replied. “Oh, yeah, I thought so too.”

“Wait, were you trying to hit on her?” I asked, anxious. “Cause man, I mean, I don’t want to–

“No, I mean she’s Jackie’s friend, I mean whatever. I’ve probably already lost my chance.” Beardo replied.

“Well, I mean, dude you can, like, try.” I told him.

“Well, we can both hit on her.” He said.

Crossing swords.

“…That’s a terrible idea.” I said.

“Well, we could at least both get more wine” Beardo offered and we did, since she was the bartender.

But upon the break-up of our consolidation to get some wine, we turned to see two club-looking-guys in suits talking to her.

I heard their accents and after a moment of wavering trying to cut in to the conversation, I tried:

“So where you guys from? Scandinavia?”

“Lithuania.” One replied.

“Lithuania.” The other replied.

And they kept on talking to her.

Back into the corner with Beardo–

“Those Lithuanians are talking to our girl!” I told him.

“Lithuanians?” He asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I mean, I thought they were Scandinavians but then I found out they weren’t but they’re blond and shit and really good-looking and they’re just not letting up.”

“Think they’re going to split her?” Rob asked. “Think we should have split her?”

“No!” I told him. “No.”

Rob finished his cup of wine, crumpled it, threw it. Took out his empty Jack Daniels’ flask and threw that too.

“All I’m saying is if we did then we could be those Lithuanians right now.” Rob said.

And we split.

The place we went to was a pre-party hang-out, the purpose of buying that mix-and-match six-pack. But once I got there, the only place to sit was the elevated but non-bunked bed, several feet above the couch and where everyone else was talking. And it was there where my drunkenness was fading and there was no freckled girl to hit on or O.B. Tommy D to make cool comments that I realized it was 10 o’clock, my fun-times were over and I was just sitting on a bed of a bunch of people I only-kinda-knew.

It was about then or shortly after that I slammed my finger in the door.

The guys at Two Boots were actually really nice. They even gave me a cup-of-ice to put my finger in, band-aids and all, as I limped home in fading stupor. 

At least I got some sleep.

At least I got some sleep.

Where Our Hero Talks To Armond

Check it out on FilmLinc.

I have to say, I’m pretty proud of it.

Leave a comment, too if you can.

It makes me look good.

-Feitelogram

Beers and Blogs and Burying-the-Hatchet

I drank too much tonight, but I did ok.

It’s strange what drinking too much to me means. Tonight, it meant four of the small beer-mugs given out at McSorleys as I was asked by an ex-not-girlfriend-and-presently-talented-filmmaker to go with her there.

It wasn’t that it was too much for me to handle or that I didn’t like the beer. McSorley’s has one of the best, cheapest beers you can find in New York. Even with the price hike (up from 8), Mc Sorley’s still offers you 4 pretty decent-sized beers for 9 dollars and the beer far outstrips a Coors or a Rolling Rock.

Also, I can hold my liquor. Well, in some ways, at least. I can drink a pretty decent amount and still be okay–meaning not blackout, make my way home, be okay the next day, etc–but the one think alcohol really does take it’s toll on me with is bladder control. By the way, I think it’s become okay in public to talk about peeing. There’s so many other nasty discussions that have entered the public realm (lube-use, fisting, the economy, Afghanistan) that it just seems like it doesn’t really matter anymore.

But anyway, it makes me wanna pee.

And when I gotta go, I gotta go. A swift walk back to my place only made more difficult by the fact that my urinary tract seems to know the closer I get, applying gradually more pressure as if holding a yellow knife to my throat if I didn’t go faster-faster-faster-damnit.

But really, the problem was that I felt bitter, after those beers, after the night, as I walked down Lafayette with that ex-not-girlfriend.

It hadn’t been such a bad day. I’d gone back to my high school to put up posters with a friend and manage to sneak in some good video-gaming. I got to rehearse with my lead actor and I really thought we’d made some progress. I scouted a location for my film and cracked some holocaust jokes, met up with Armond White for Sake and buried the hatchet with a flame-on-flame-off-enemy.

But in that four-beer-walk, it felt hollow.

My high school empty when I got there with Langston and I’d spent the whole time on the train describing to him the different people he’d meet. With all the associations I have with my high school and that I’d really not like to see them, in some way, I felt let down that Langston couldn’t see what I had seen, the people, the pressure.

High School can be one of those things like a story about Bigfoot; without the evidence, you might just be making it all up.

My lead actor is a good kid but he just gotten off a shoot where his job was to get raped by another ex-not-girlfriend of mine (not the beer-walking one) and this one was particularly crazy.

A funny conversation I had with Dan Pleck over email:

Nick: Dan should I be worried that my lead actor changed his facebook picture to a picture of him getting raped my sort-of-not-really-ex?

Dan: The crazy one?

Nick: Yeeah.

Dan: Is this the actor who’s supposed to be playing you?

Nick: Yeeah.

Dan: Fuck, then I suppose he’s perfect.

Fuckin’ Dan, but he’s right.

From there, the location was good but we’d have to deal with a building manager “out of the Sopranos” as the owner put it.

Armond was nice and sufficiently kooky, but also told me I wasn’t a film critic.

I even spent most of the day orchestrating how I was going to make right with Dan Clifton.

It feels particularly embarrassing on this blog to admit that I made up with Dan. But that I did. I’ll tell you what did it for me.

The morning after I wrote my scathing diatribe I was so proud of tearing him apart, I called my father to proclaim my awesomeness for standing up to a bully.

To my surprise, he sounded disappointed when I told him the story.

“Nick,” He asked me. “Why are you in film school?”

“Uh,” I replied, trying to sum up the last four years of my life concisely.

“To make movies, I guess?” I told him.

“Right.” He replied. “Everything else is a distraction.”

And as I thought about more-and-more, day-after-day, he was right. But that still didn’t change anything.

Finally, Dan, self-promoter that he is, but at least a shameless one, called me to “bury the hatchet” by coming to see his film at the NYU Film Festival. It took another prompting for me to finally man-up: I asked my producing teacher and the person whose opinion I admire the most when it comes to working in the film business: Sharon Badal.

“Prof. Badal,” I asked her, in the moments preceeding class. “If you have a really public fight with someone in the industry, unresolved, and they extend you an olive branch, do you take it?”

“Yes.” she replied unequivocally. “The industry is too small.” And she too was right again.

I planned my effort well, deciding against calling back Dan in order to show up for his film unannounced.

I came to festival, sat down, watched the films (his included) and at the end of it all, I came up to him with a bottle of wine, I’d been holding all day.

“Congratulations, Dan.” I told him and shook his hand. “Congratulations on the film.”

As I turned to leave the theater, Beardo Malone waited at the door.

“You’re my favorite.” He told me. “That was a real-classy-move.”

“Soul-crushing.” I replied in a phrase and we headed out.

So that pretty much brings me back to the four-beer-walk-home where I felt bitter.

I thought about the day. I thought about my life. I thought about Thursday and the paper I hadn’t written and the class I would miss to write it and how bad I felt that all my academic integrity had come to this–skipping one class to complete another. I had skipped class too to make up with Clifton, something that my teacher, a man I respect and who has helped me greatly, excoriated me for.

Also I finally got to pee as I got home on the nervous jaunt past gate after door after door after open-restroom.

I also beat my video game with the worst possible ending–the one where you slay your nemesis, only to be sent to hell for eternity, understanding and accepting of your fate.

But you can always replay a video game, start a new one, or just wake up tomorrow and be.

It’s just that sometimes hope ain’t forthcoming on a four-beer-walk-home.

***

MCSORLEY’S

2 beers (Light or Dark)- $4.50

7th St bet Bowery and 2nd Avenue.

6 to Astor Pl

P.S.- Kudos to Brennan McVicar for taking that cool picture of me with a sword on set and for generally being a good, sane dude when others lack.

P.P.S.- I’ll link to my interview with Armond when they put it up. Good stuff.

New-Jersey-Nightmares and Blogless-Days-and-Days

I’ve been bad lately.

I haven’t been writing as much as I should.

Some of this is due to the New-Jersey-Nightmare I was on this weekend and the recovery from such, but a conversation I did have there illuminated something for me.

The movie was about cos-playing would-be-lesbian college-agers who hook-up and pretend to be elves. It was shooting all on the property of one house, which was nice, but it was the directors’ (plural, already a problem) first film, which is something I didn’t know I was signing on for. Worse than that, for their first (and presumably final) film, they were shooting 35mm with heavy lighting of nighttime-exteriors, one of the more costly options it was possible to shoot. What resulted sometimes worked but other times, like a junior-level film, felt rushed and abandoned, exploiting both the crew and the film itself in the worst way, not least of all because the directors had staked so much money on the project.

It wasn’t all bad; filmmaking rarely is when you are a film student. I brought my friends on set so I almost always had someone to hang with and my friends are more up-beat individuals than I, the grumpster. Matt Chao’s indefatigable animating his school project between takes along with Andy Roehm’s usual tales of drunken-hookups with women whose names he doesn’t remember made for some fun times. We had a French mom cooking for us for our meals (exquisite) and the actors were both cute girls one of whom was intellectual and the other of whom had a righteously nasty sense of humor, which is very hot in itself.

It was the actress-intellectual I ended up having the good conversation with. She was a young woman named Sarah-Doe, oddly enough (“Would you be offended if I call you ‘Sara’?” I asked her. “Yes”: her reply.) When I’d asked her in the perfunctory sort of way a script supervisor might greet an actress, the question of where she had gone to school, she named an acting studio I’d never heard of and I dropped the conversation with an “oh” and moved on.

But upon further prompting, it turned out that she had graduated with honors from the University of Chicago, the alma mater of our president and one-time first-choice school of yours-truly. She told me she was an English major there, which she somewhat regretted as she thought taking Economics would have made her a more interesting person.

“And a less happy one, probably.” I told her.

“Yeah, I suppose.” She said. “But sometimes as an actress I feel crushed by words, by English. My degree is in it, I’m using them, expressing them, deconstructing them. In my life I feel so word-centric. I wish I had a different way to view the world.”

Which made me wonder: “You don’t have to be acting.” I told her. “You could get a job a lot of places with that kind of degree.”

She had told me about her job, working as a communications person at a Builders’ Union. The hours were flexible and the pay was decent, but my perhaps-trumped-up opinion of the University of Chicago as a place I almost went, was that the people who graduated from there were supposed to be serious intellectuals, pursuing graduate school, if not various endeavors to ameliorate the world.

“Yes.” She responded. “I suppose I could do something else.”

And she paused, considered.

“But I feel stifled when I’m  not acting. I feel like I’m living a half-life. I feel like I’m a breathing with a rag in front of my face or that I’m not getting air–or what have you. I feel like acting is a part of me. And I have to try to do that.”

I respected what she said. I went on talking to her about how I felt about writing and acting and directing and all the things I do, or sometimes do, or try to do, or wish I did. I’m sure I talked her ear off and certainly apologized for my talking her ear off–but just hearing from someone the same sort of feeling I aspire to or try to engender, another person hellbent on a path that seems sometimes only as a road to self-destruction, I felt a connection.

I didn’t really have a lot more time to talk to her on set. I worry now that I creeped her out or that I took liberties with her time; actors are vulnerable people on a film set and its hard to know when you’ve taken advantage of them. Still, that moment for me, that moment of ecstatic exposition, redeemed the rest of being on set, of being on this new-jersey-nightmare.

Being a script supervisor is the art of striking a balance between being ignored and forcing people not to ignore you. You want to be ignored for much of the film, because you are essentially bothering people that need to have their minds on other things. At the same time, if you are completely ignored, people lose faith in you, you can’t do your job and you get locked out of the set. As such I spent most of my time on set, cloistered, in corners, trying not to make myself known until necessary.

But in life, if you feel for a moment a connection in an unexpected place, it’s like a glimpse of the sun or an interesting girl while you’re crossing the street; there’s something there thats needing and unknowable, but it’s both sad and necessary to look away or else the Prius-hybrid-taxi-cab is going to hit you or at least honk a lot.

Which is not to say I wasn’t happy to be home, when I got home.

To my bed, which was not a couch in a home where I’d be attacked my dogs while attempting to pee.

To my computer and TV, which I could examine and luxuriate with in my bed without squinting at my phone in the scrutiny of others.

To my next morning, getting an email from my Lincoln Center editor telling me to write a post busting A.O. Scott’s chops, which I could just roll-over and DO.

That’s the thing about set, I suppose. It makes you appreciate the little things in life.

Like calling the Times’ film critic a wiener.

And what a wiener.

Petty Things, Lincoln (b)Logs and Jersey Sleep-Over-Time

I’m pretty sure Tom Petty just sucks.

I mean, maybe not that he “just sucks”, but that’s he’s just, well, a mediocre musician.

To call him a poor man’s Dylan feels almost insulting to Dylan, but you can’t help making the comparison given the stylized singing and the bouts with the harmonica. Sure, he’s a little more country too, just as Springsteen’s a little more rock-and-roll, but the comparison’s still there.

He’s just not very good. His lyrics are kind of vague or boring or just weird.

Like for instance “Won’t Back Down”. Alright, so we know that you “won’t back down”. You won’t be “pushed around”. You’ll “stand your ground”. And also, again, you “won’t back down”.

Well, I mean, that’s all well and good, but really, who the fuck cares?

You know when Dylan disses someone he gives them a poetic roast. In fact sometimes it feels like just about half his songs are just hater-ballads. Here you just say you won’t back down. Who the fuck is asking you to back down? Me, maybe.

We know in his songs there’s an “American Girl” who seems to be very naive, “raised on promises” who then later dumps Tom Petty (presumably because he breaks them, thus the band name–“The Heartbreakers”) which then later causes him to be “Free Falling”, thus we can assume, reneging on his promise of not “backing down”.

But for some reason when “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” (one of the most inexplicably terrible music videos I have ever seen) comes on my radio, I can’t turn it off. It’s enjoyable, even it’s about that same “American Girl”, or Weed or America generally speaking.

I have no idea. All I know is that he sucks compared to so many people I listen to. But he’s like a corn husk you can’t get rid of.

As a New Yorker, that befuddles me.

***

As I mentioned, I’ve started blogging for Film Society of Lincoln Center. It’s kind of like working for the man, but the New Directors/New Films festival (the one I’m covering) is a worthy cause and it gives me a chance to do little jumbles about films in a micro-easy form that I can just spout out in 15 minutes and have them ready pressed.

Here’s my newest post on their site, the first one listed if you go to their page as well. Right now, I’m trying to swing a gig interviewing iconoclastic film reviewer Armond White, who is introducing a film there. Unfortunately, my editor is at SXSW (a place I’d love to be right now) so we’ll see if she can get back to me in time. Otherwise, check out the festival (or at least my stuff).

***

For the next three nights after this one, I’ll be in a land where zombies walk the earth enslaving debased humans as their vassals; some for menial labor and others for nourishment, farmed for their flesh before their bones are tossed casually into lakes of chemical refuse, melting instantly as they hit the surface of the viscous pools.

This place is, of course, New Jersey.

The shoot became progressively jersey-er as I found out more about it. First the director, a friend, begged me to come on as Script Sup, which I told him I probably couldn’t. Then I said I could because I like the guy and he’s working for me later.

Then I found out he was sort-of-directing-it-sort-of-not.

Then I found out that I wouldn’t get to meet the director till set.

Then I found out we had half a crew.

Then I found out I would have to sleep during the daytime in Jersey as well.

Sigh.

But I hold out hope.

It’s hard to be hopeful facing 2 nights in Jersey, but I shanghai’d my friends into coming on set with me last night telling the director “get them drunk enough and they’ll come” and, luckily, my scheme was a success.

So at worst I’ll be in Hell with Friends, which is not so much of a hell at all.

But those sleep-needy daytimes in Jersey.

They’re sending shivers down my spine.

***

Finally, an update.

My frien Lauren Hamilton is one of the two best comedy writers of my age I’ve met and a fine-looking woman, who I was very disappointed upon meeting her to find out she was a lezzie.

“You sure?” I asked her. “You even tried? Cause, I mean. Well, you know. Might be fun.”

“Been there done that.” She told me.

End of story.

I call her Boss now, most times, since she cast me in a web pilot.

But now she’s got her own thing going on in LA, so I’m adding it to my blogroll.

Think of her as a black, hip, lesbian counterpart to my blog.

(That’s fucking impossible.)

But actually, it’s just a soul in the world trying to find love, meaning and the right “your mom” joke from time-to-time.

Enjoy.

In Search of an 11:30 Lunch

Remind me to write my post about alternative breakfasts.

It’s been one I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but every time I think to write it, I talk about something else.

This time, it’s something close, Inter-related, really.

Wandering the Village in a pre-food 11am morning, I was too late for an alternative breakfast, the sort of thing I might indulge in only in the pre-11 o’clock hour. Instead I was on the prowl for an 11:30 lunch.

An 11:30 lunch sounds pretty self-explanatory, but perhaps a little bit of something is required.

See, as a single-male-college-student, I don’t cook often and have groceries to cook even less often in my tiny-micro-fridge and my freezer that seems to focus more on creating melty stalactites than actual freezing things of my choice. This combined with my general dislike of the breakfast meal often causes me just to skip breakfast all-together, especially if I don’t get up till 10 on a lazy day-off. But on a skip-breakfasty day, I get hungry pretty much right-out-the-door, round 11 or a little before.

What I’m looking for then is the sort of uber-meal. A lunch so filling and delicious that it will assuage not only my hunger for lunch, but my hunger for breakfast as well; I’m looking for the meal that will banish two.

The first place I tried for such a task was a place I’d been wanting to go since I saw them around: FoodFight.

Now, to be honest, I didn’t even know anything about this place (other than that it advertised mini-burgers) but I always like to check out new cheap-looking places, almost to a serial degree. So my 11am quest first took me here to find them… closed like they’d been for the past 2 or so months. This time though was perhaps even more frustrating since, where as before this place had been covered in construction paper, it now almost looked open. I turned to the guy sitting in front of Creperie next door to try for a consult.

“Know if this is ever open?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Awanagah.” He said.

Which I assumes means something like no.

A shame. Though I didn’t know the quality of the restaurant yet, sliders in my mind would make an excellent 11:3o lunch, as they had atWhite Castle once, since you could order a fixed amount to start and then “re-up” as necessary.

But it was not to be.

The Kati-Roll Company, as seen here, might have been open–but it was near impossible to tell given the profusion of St. Patrick’s Day knicknacks, shamrocks and such, covering the street in front of it and the signs leading down to the bar directly below it.

The Kati-Roll Company, for those not in the know, is an NYU-area fast-food joint that makes most of its money off Desi-hipsters and Desi-yuppie-couples who swing by the place till late hours to munch down on some pretty decent Indian fast food.

Now, this isn’t your old “Chicken Tikka Masala” you might get at Curry in a Hurry. The Kati-Roll Company is fairly faithful to its name: it sells Kati Rolls. And those Kati Rolls are somewhere between an Indian hot-dog and and an Indian burrito; beef or chicken cubes (spiced potato or pickled cheese if you’re a veggie) served up with red onion, masala spice and some tamarind sauce on a freshly made paratha (a type of flat-bread) and all rolled-up. They’re about the size of a hot-dog and two of them make a meal, one a snack. One of them will cost you about 4, two of them will cost you somewhere between 8-10. It’s generally worth it, since the rolls are yummy, relatively cheap and take a small time to make. Still when you get those two flutes of food in front of you, it can feel like a little bit of a rip-off.

And I guess it was all this that prevented me from going there. I knew that two of these Kati Rolls would not be enough to banish two meals worth of hunger and I didn’t feel like paying 13 dollars or so for three of them.

If I was going to pay that kind of money, I was going to get a real meal.

Indian Taj is a place I’ve generally lamented for their low-quality of Indian take-out, but you can’t beat the real gump, and the real gump of it is that they’re the only Indian buffet I know of without the long walk to 6th St or the 6-train to Curry Hill. While it is not literally “15 courses”, It does include an appetizer (something fried), some tandoori chicken, Chicken Tikka Masala, another entree (usually goat) and a choice of 3-4 vegtable dishes along with naan and rice and all that jazz.

For 10 bucks (Probably around 12-13 depending on what you tip), this is really a pretty good deal, especially for the sort of 11:30-ness I was pursuing. For your money, you got all you could eat of decent Indian food, which in itself was better than a lot of American with its complex flavors and variety and being able to mix curries gives me a satisfaction of sorts as you eat the whole delicious mess up with your rice and/or nan.

To tell the truth, I came real close to going here. The only thing that stopped me was, well, the manager. It was 11:18 and he shooed me off like a hobo or a ferret. At that point I felt pissy. I just wanted to go somewhere decent I could eat and I wasn’t going to wait for this douchebag who shooed me to let me in.

But this was bad. Already the hypoglycemia was setting in. I was becoming picky about where I ate, picky to a fault. I had to act quickly.

Qdoba, which I’d eaten at airports before it came to NYC, seemed like a strictly-inferior Chipotle to me, invalidated by the Tacos El Idolo trucks which had flooded the neighborhood.

I had already foresworn Chipotle deciding that food that makes you feel that bad can’t be good for you.

This sign was enough to turn me off.

***

Finally, I gave up.

I went back at 11:28 to my old hang-out, Jane, and they took me in.

Jane is the sort of trendy-brunch spot that celebrities frequent on Sundays but during the weekday it’s mostly abandoned for lunch given its relative distance from most of the office buildings down-over in the Hudson Square area.

Over the past year-and-a-half-or-so I’ve lived down in my legally-not-a-closet apartment, I have been a semi-regular presence at Jane, going there on days I need a rejuvenation or comfort food or just a fairly effective meal to soak up a hangover. The food is just plain American, brunch fare. But still, it has the best damn Grilled Chicken sandwich for my money I’ve ever eaten.

Grilled Chicken in two layers, Fried Red Peppers, Joe’s Dairy Mozzarella (Best in N.Y.C.) from down-the-block and homemade arugala-almond pesto to give it a bit more kick.

Oh and a mountain of Rosemary-flavored french fries, more than any sane man could eat.

This was the uber-meal I had been searching for.

It took discipline to take this picture before eating this.

I almost didn’t make it.

Till I did.

And there you have it.

***

Now, I’m not endorsing the 11:30 meal. It’s good for eating, but my breakfast-skipping has caused me trouble before, leading me to dangerous places like Johnny Rocket’s where I received a week or so of food poisoning along with my Turkey Burger with the smiley-face-ketchup drawn on it. That said, it’s a decent way to work up an appetite and the basic idea behind Brunch. So, if ye seek, ye shall find.

But that said, I used to eat A cheese-omelette, home-fries and buttered-wheat-toast from Delion every morning and that was pretty good. 🙂

And I still have a post on alternative breakfasts to write.

But till then, I’ll probably be off for another 11:30 lunch.

***

FOODFIGHT (not open yet)

Mini-burgers (presumably)

MacDougal between Bleecker and West 3rd.

ACEBDFV to West 4th.

THE KATI-ROLL COMPANY

Two Chicken Tikka Rolls- $8.50 (One for $4.75)

MacDougal between Bleecker and West 3rd.

ACEBDFV to West 4th.

INDIAN TAJ

15-or-so-course Lunch Buffet- $9.95 (plus tax and tip)

Bleecker between Macdougal and Sullivan.

ACEBDFV to West 4th.

QDOBA

Not worth mentioning.

JANE

Grilled Chicken Sandwich w/Rosemary Fries- $13

Houston St bet. Thompson and LaGuardia Pl.

1 to Houston. BDFV6 to Bway-Lafayette.

Twitter, Please.

One frequenter of this blog– web/new-media guru/sound-genius/generally-pretty-cool-guy Brennan McVicar has repeatedly suggested to me that I should “twitter”.

Now, all I know about “twittering” is that lame old fucks like John McCain and David Gregory do it and that that is no advertisement for it.

Also, it seems like the things can only be really short. What’s the point of reading: “my life sucs and i wish i had a gf, also i smell bad” in so few characters when I can string it out to 1000+ words?

Really.

But I am uneducated, a trogoldyte and a Luddite for certain (even though I probably would have started Twittering if Brennan was some sort of confused-yet-charming biracial girl), but I feel I must use a lifeline and ask the audience.

Blog-readers! Feitelophiles! Should I go where old folks have gone before and start “twittering”, despite the fact that it sounds like making musical noises with my thumbs! Advice, warnings, reports; all are welcome.

Sound off.

In Which Our Hero is Defeated by an Evil but Quite Nice and Effective Multi-National Corporation.

The title says it all really.

The ghetto-subway station was kind of awkward on the ride back, as it was me and a guy with some squash rackets for white people in the station and between the two of us I don’t know who was honkier.

I was on my way back from an afternoon of post-hangover ESPN (unusual) and regressive nerdy behavior with some cool-nerdos from back in the day.

The day of gaming had left me somewhat incapacitated. Though I had once had a profound lack of ability to tell what sinuses were, I felt a tingling somewhere near the front of my face and a strange wooziness, probably resultant from my encounter with an amorous cat in Rob’s house.

It was Rob, the owner of the house/foreclosed insurance brokerage we were gaming in, who had advised me not to take out my iPhone in the 21 Street-Queensbridge F station, but really, sadly, the iPhone gave me a sense of security and something to concentrate on other than my sense of racial tension.

It was then I noticed that my iPhone headphones were broken, strangely, in such a way that the left speaker would not play any sound, but the little “mini-surround” upper-speaker on that same headphone would. This caused much jostling and sideways-ear-sticking on the ride home from Queens and built in me a determination: I was going to go give Apple a piece of mind.

After all, this was actually the second pair of iPhone apple headphones I’d bought. I mean, the first ones had worked for like 6-8 months, but I had just bought this new pair a month prior. Scandal! Outrage! New headphones were 29 dollars and I wouldn’t stand for such extortion. I rounded up my friends and token Asians, Matt Chao and Kent Hu to go and storm the Apple store like one might storm the Bastille!

But then we were kind of hungry so we went to Pluck U.

Pluck U is a cheap-ola chicken-place over on campus which specializes in “Buffalo-ing” things. Wings, Fingers, Boneless Wings, Cold Pieces of Turkey, Veggie-Soy Wings, Grilled Chicken, Sammies–you name it; they’ll buffalo it.

I got them to Buffalo my “Fresh Chicken Sandwich” ($4.25) and had that with the medium from their list of sauces. The lady by the counter seemed somewhere between bemused and annoyed at my indecisiveness trying to figure out whether Buffalo sauce might clash with mayo or oil and vinegar, before she reminded me that the sandwich had Buffalo sauce on it–no other sauce was required.

The sandwich was yummy, fried and indeed, covered in Buffalo sauce and came with some decent lettuce on a seeded hamburger-bun. What’s more, the price was right and after stealing some wings from Chao, who is the sort of guy who leaves nothing remaining of his wings but clean, polished bones, we were off to the Apple store, to give them a piece of our minds, to declare war on shitty headphones and flashy silhouetted musical numbers!

But then we wanted Ice Cream.

Emack and Bolio’s was on the way after all and none of us were really in a hurry. I mean it was like, still light out. And stuff.

Emack’s is a Bostonian chain and thus I suppose I should bear great hatred towards them, but the fact remains: it’s some damn good ice cream. I got a scoop of “The Original Oreo” on a wafer (not sugar) cone ($4.00) and ate it up in several bites. My friends got some Butter Pecan and another flavor that slipped my mind. The Oreos were whole, embalmed and embedded in the cookies-and-cream ice-cream and the consistency was somewhere between Gelato and Edy’s Homestyle; light, but just about creamy.

Still, anyone who calls a milkshake a “frappe” should go hang themselves out by the front porch.

But not before they serve me, thank you, that was very good.

When we finally ended up at the Apple store, we were set (and full).

I went up with full spead and bearing to the friendly-looking lady in the orange shirt.

“Hello.” I told her. “My name is Nick.”

“Hi Nick.” she said warmly.

“Hello.” I responded.

An awkward pause.

“Well, so I bought these headphones from your store a month or so ago and, um. They don’t work. So, they are like the second pair I bought after the first one broke.”

“Oh no.” She commented sympathetically.

“Yeah,” I offered. “So, I was thinking you could exchange them.”

She smiled.

“Well, you know what, I’m sorry to tell you this…”

The wind-up.

“But you didn’t have to go buying them. We exchange them here for free. We’re actually out of the old headphones, so how about we just give you a brand new pair with an upgrade for free. Just go skip the line over there and we’ll have them for you in a second.”

I was near-instantly given a set of new headphones, these ones with a microphone and a new innovative remote that controlled volume, song choice and answering and ending calls. All with the click of a handy near-neck button.

And then I was out the door, dumbstruck.

In a minute-thirty flat, I had gone from a mild, but inspiring outrage, to something cool and free in my hands standing stupidly outside the door.

It was all anti-climax. And my Asian entourage abandoned me. Chao was off to see his Grandma from Hong Kong. Kent couldn’t Wii since he had a script to write. I was Asian-less.

What’s worse, I was enthralled by the new headset. I could press once to pause a song or play a song or pick up a call or end a call. Twice to skip a song. Three times in succession to go back one. I played with it as I walked home. I called my father to tell him how cool it was.

The failure was utter and complete.

I couldn’t even have a proper walk of shame. I was too thrilled. As I played “American Girl” followed by “The Only Living Boy in New York” and skipped the BeeGees for some Jeffrey Lewis, I forgot that I had been vanquished by an evil, sleek, hip multi-national corporation and that I was it’s tool.

But at least now I could enjoy those cool commercials with the silhouettes.

But my sinuses tingled in remorse.

***

PLUCK U

“Buffalo-ed Fresh Chicken Sandwich”- $4.25

Thompson St bet Bleecker and West 3rd.

ACEBDFV to West 4th.

EMACK AND BOLIO’S

“The Original Oreo” in a Wafer cone- $4.00

Houston between West Broadway and Wooster.

BDFV6 to Broadway-Lafayette.