Hell's Half Acre

more importantly, what would Jesus BREW?

If Jesus were a session drinker like myself -- it's great that there is a term for this -- Jesus would brew the Dogfish Head Festina Peche.

This is not your normal Fruit beer. In fact, I gave up on fruit beers back in the early 90s. The last fruit beer I had a crush on was a cranberry ale from Wynkoop in Denver, CO and that was back around Thanksgiving of 1993.  The great thing about the cranberry ale was its tartness. The bad thing about it was that it was only brewed in limited quantities.

The Dogfish Head Festina Peche nails the balance between sweetness and tartness. It's a refreshing palate cleanser reminiscent of a good crisp cold fermented sauvignon blanc. And, with only 4.5% alcohol by volume, it'll keep you in slightly drunk professor mode for as long as you want to hang.

Hopefully this will get all the kids off my back who make fun of me when I drink the light beer..

the new 46th and 8th

sadly, this is what will replace our haunt.

thankfully, we have met some good friends, one of whom also eulogized the hidey. Even more thankfully, our new friends live just down the street in glorious QUEENS!

P.S. - the moving is over and now the trip packing begins. I am having a hard time leaving beige tonight though and really would like to go someplace and chill for a bit instead of hustling back home to laundry and packing. Can I get one night off? Maybe I will wear the same clothes all week in Jesusland. this brings me to the following question:

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO??

he would check his credit card and see how feasible it will be to just go buy some new pants before his trip is what he would do. Jesus would also gulp down Smart Water to replace his electrolytes. Jesus would go to the Blind Tiger and sample one of the 14 Dogfishhead Ales on tap for tonight's beer event. Jesus would put a curse on the newest shiny new luxury condo going up on 46th and 8th (pharisees will live there and we know how HE felt about them.)

I want to be more like Jesus.

it was like the best house party ever

at one point I looked around and saw so many faces of people I had met throughout the years. . . there were a LOT of faces, because, well, I'd spent a lot of time there. When I looked around and saw so many people I knew, all together, in the same place, I'll admit, I teared up a bit.

That is before I started drinkng the Brooklyn Local One which is entirely responsible for my not making it until the end of the night. I did say that I didn't want to stay and watch the doors close for the final time.

So I didn't.

Yesterday, I drove up 8th Avenue and looked at the neon sign, which is now dark.  I looked at the locked doors which still have reviews from Zagats and Shecky's taped up on the inside.

I don't want to work on developing a relationship with another hang.  For one, I'm too old to NOT be getting enough sleep. I like being productive at work. Late nights + alcohol do not equal a recipe for success in this department.  Number two, I've hung in a lot of bars in a lot of cities and made a lot of aquaintances. Some aquaintances have trancended into "friends-beyond-the-bar". In the case of the hidey hole, the number of spot on people and friendships extending beyond the boundaries of the bar has been phenomenal. Besides this blog, this bar is the thing that helped me get a toehold in NYC. I was connected to a group of people who I spent holidays with (in and outside the bar), have lived with, and have even traveled with (poconos counts as travel.) Based on prior experience, I do not believe that this is a common occurence when hanging in a bar.

I will miss the hidey. As for friends of the hidey . . I won't miss you guys at all because I know where you all live and I will track you down if you go AWOL.

Cheers!

brand new day

once again, for the bazillionth time, I am hungover. not much news here folks.

it's  somewhere between 9am and 10am on a saturday. I should be up running around in the poconos but instead, I'm watching two good natured guys take my wordly possessions and load them into what looks to be an impossibly small van. whatevs. I gave the dimensions. I think it will all fit. 

good bye Collins.

good bye JC.

One of you will be missed. My hangover surely will not be missed.

ps. I can't believe I got a little teary last night.   well, with the moving, and the upcoming trip, and the resulting exhaustion. . . maybe it's to be expected.

jeebus was I drunky last night or what?

zipcar hijinx + web art

I was listening to WKCR last night while driving a zip car full of my shit over to Queens. Number one: I didn't even know Columbia had a radio station. Number Two: they had some really great programming. Number Three and most notably: I listened to this interview with the creator of explodingdog.com who apparently has started translating his website into gallery space which I think is a fascinating idea. The interview got into a lot of art shit I don't know anything about like reductivism, etc. I mean, anytime you add an ism to the end of a word it loses meaning for me. Still, the interview was great and so I had to check the site. Lo-tech interactivity where a person interacts with people and creates because of it. Kind of like blogs.

Digression: have I ever ranted about how much I hate "postmodern" as an adjective? It's ambiguous at best and has come to mean many different things depending on context. I don't get it.

Back to exploding dogs. I think I may have ripped off drawings from this website but I can't be sure. So, Dear Sam Brown, owner of exploding dogs. please forgive me for ripping you off and if you bother to comb through the catacombs of this blog and you see pictures that you yourself are responsible for, let me know and I will replace them with my own stick figure drawings as soon as I figure out how to hook my ancient non-usb wacom tablet into the gleaming new Optimus Prime. That is all. Thank you and good night.

oh . . .and zipcar? what a great fucking invention. four thumbs up. 

idle hands are the devil's plaything

not content to sit back on my haunches for too long, I have already started the Master's degree application process at The New School. They have a particularly decent program in Media Studies that looks like it will lead nicely into the PhD in Media Studies program at Goldsmith's in London. Best of all worlds. I may be able to play around more in the M.A. program with design and screenwriting, rather than the analytics and management stuff I studied at NYU. Also, I will get to take more classes that are part media studies/part sociology, which I freaking love. I am already thinking of possible PhD research projects which analyze aspects of pop culture and the media. I keep thinking about animation. Then there is the ubiquitous interwebs which I've been immersed in forever. . .it is almost like another appendage. I could probably do some assistantships or teaching around subjects in that vein.

wow. who'd a thunk it. Once upon a time I would never have considered this. I had trouble even making it through a two year stint at North Seattle Community College.

it's official

the diploma came in the mail on saturday. So it is all official and not just some weird dream that took place for four years. I should know this anyway; the nightmare of student loan repayment has only begun to haunt.

in other news, we have a new beiger who sits in front of me. he is a VP of something but I don't think he is the boss of me. It is very distracting because he has an accent from down under which is one of my favorite accents. He's only been here for an hour and already I have a crush on his accent. Don't ask me what he looks like. I haven't actually seen beyond the cube wall.

and in other other news, mini b gave me my half yearly review. Excellence once again prevails, with the exception of my perpetual tardiness. I have been fighting with attendance issues since I was in grade schools. Let's just say I never won the perfect attendance award. I think at one point the school actually called my mom and told her that I couldn't miss any more classes or I would be held back. I've kind of carried that little problem with me for awhile. My gramps had it too. I remember during his final years at The Lazy B (a.k.a. Boeing) there were days he just said "eff it" and stayed at home in bed. He was often depressed too, which is something else we have in common.

I am digressing here. in summary:

diploma = final confirmation
down under accents = insta-crush + distraction
Boeing = The Lazy B
things to work on = no more tardiness
krixfort = excellence

oh hidey hole. . .*sigh*

it is only days until the hidey closes its doors forever. the eulogies are starting to pour in. We mourn the closing of our gathering spot where plans were hatched, sorrows were drowned, friendships were forged, and life was celebrated.  We also mourn the gradual takeover of a neighborhood as the bar is torn down to make way for more chrome and glass condos which give the neighborhood the personality of the death star.

here is a nice eulogy/review from The Happy Hour Blog

extra extra! critics stunned by Hampaw!

SARAH PETERS
‘Being American’
Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street, Chelsea
Through July 21

In her first solo show, Sarah Peters breathes life into an obsession with the art and history of colonial America. The breath comes from a fidgety crosshatch technique rendered in pencil and black ballpoint pen that gives her images both a gauzy drift and an almost fingernails-on-blackboard screechiness.

read the NYTimes review here. . .

how fucking cool is that I ask you?

the anti-gym tranformer

For the last three days I have been carrying around this prop to make me look healthy and cool. It's called a gym bag. What is important about the gym bag is not actually to use it but to carry it so that it appears as if it serves a purpose. 

Today, I will once again attempt to make the prop bag functional but who knows. Yesterday the anti-gym won. I went to the dark side, a side which consisted of a million calorie burrito from Chipotle and an evening at the cinema with Optimus Prime (not the laptop.)

As for Transformers, how could I not go see this after obsessing about it for the last two weeks. The funny thing is, I did not grow up watching this. I know little, if nothing about this toy franchise. I do know that I could never put those friggen things back together after I had turned them into Autobots. Anyways, I went to see this and I have one question: Could Michael Bay possibly be the most horrible director ever? Tone down the music dude.  Ugh. He makes Jerry Bruckheimer seem like a minimalist. But Bay is the best exploder in the business, according to Wired, and he didn't disappoint.

I will admit, I was a little upset when Bumblebee was captured. I don't like to see scenes of robot torture. After the robot torture scene, I drifted off and slept throught the rollerblading chase sequence but I woke up for the grand finale showdown between Megatron and Optimus Prime where the kid from Shaker Heights has to do somthing with the allspice allspark cube. 

all in all, transformers was as entertaining as a summer blockbuster aims to be, not trying to be anything other than a fast moving, thinly disguised marketing blitz and Explode-a-thon. It was the perfect antidote for gymnasium fever.

Tonight, though, I will head back to the pain arena and try to transform back into mega-trainer.