Sunday through Tuesday Miscellany

As illustrated above, Sunday afternoon was celebrated atop the Young home in good company. Despite my best efforts to ruin everything, everyone, even I, had a good time.

Super-luxury automobiles are the new celebrities. On my way to the East Village on Monday (see the following paragraph for details on that) I saw my first ever Rolls Royce 2004 Phantom on the road (for the record, I’ve seen three Maybachs in the city so far). The sucker (absolutely enormous) was parked in front of Il Mulino, the Village’s most mysterious and hard-to-see-inside-of restaurant. Tuxedoed waiters loaded tray after tray of food into the saloon’s (it’s not a sedan, dude, it’s a saloon). The ride didn’t have plates yet, so I’m thinking it’s not impossible that its proud new owner was bringing home some serious takeout to celebrate his new $320,000 set of wheels.

Seduced by a newspaper article promising me the incomparable Sarah Silverman (a media lie [perhaps an error, at best] that drew plenty of people to the club), I went to Eating It at the Luna Lounge on Ludlow last night with Pete & Hannah and Visitor, who I’m pretty sure was named Patrick. Eating It is a weekly comedy showcase of fairly big-name talent who, for some reason, choose to come down to this bar and perform short sets for very cheap (even cheaper when the guy at the door turns out to be Pete and Hannah’s neighbor). “Eating It” is comedian talk for bombing, but in the case of this show, “Eating It” means “Putting forth a little effort, but not trying incredibly hard.” The comedians we saw – Ted Alexandro, Laura Kightlinger (I’ve been a fan of her’s for a while), Ed Helms (Daily Show guy), and Patton Oswalt – all told some funny jokes, but also managed to complain a bit about the long days they just had filming things for Comedy Central or whatnot. Even worn-out, they remained plenty funny, and, for those keeping track, the hot jokes right now seem to be all about the Chinese, the Mentally Handicapped (“retarded”), and Ronald Regan’s corpse.

On the sociological tip, it was an odd crowd that filled the Luna Lounge last night, there was a dude pushing 7’ and a girl coming up short of 5’ (pretty much satisfying my need to understand what Rachel Owlglass from Pynchon’s “V” looks like), and my joke-companions and I somehow wound up encircled by a band of East Eggers slumming it for a night, all that was lacking were tennis rackets and sweaters tied around the shoulders. Lower East Hamptons, perhaps?

Tuesday. Check this first sentence of a brief I read today at work:

“COMES NOW, the defendant-movant, xxxxx xxxxx, and moves this Court for an Order, denying petitioner Essex County short notice relief on the grounds that there are no emergent conditions which would cause petitioner to suffer immediate and irreparable
damage necessitating short notice relief . . .”

Call me a loser, but it reminds me of the first line of Finnigans Wake:

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

Tonight, after passing it on various occasions, suspicious that it might be good, I finally found out that El Maguey y La Tuna on Houston is a great restaurant. Good Mexican in Manhattan unearthed! Also found out that Napoleon Dynamite (or “Nappy-D” as I wish it were called) holds up quite well on its second viewing. Coming home I passed some guy I’ve seen on cable before, but I’m not even going to look him up on imdb because I’m sick and tired of celebrities following me around all the time. Why don’t they just get out of my life and shut up?