There was a Limonata in the fridge for a few weeks, so we drank it. Together!

Under the bridge on Pearl Street.

Brooklyn: Among the Ruins

By award-winning filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman.

This short film introduces audiences to Brooklyn-born Paul
Kronenberg. Paul is a 60 year-old subway buff who built a life-size
replica of a 1930s motorman’s subway cab in his tiny bedroom in
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Paul will be there to introduce and answer
questions about the film about the experience and why he decided to do
what he did!

Thursday, April 17, 2008 @ 7 p.m.

East 54th Street Recreation Center

348 East 54th Street (b/w 1st & 2nd Aves.)

Young Lucas at Iggy’s, circa 2003

I had my very first, life-changing karaoke experience at Iggy’s on 75th & 2nd one snowy night in 2003. Iggy’s is a cut above many other NYC karaoke establishments—features include free karaoke 7 nights a week, a comprehensive shot menu, the option to sing at a stage or while sitting at the bar, and an excellent catalog. The bar also once featured a velvet painting of Bruce Springsteen (above, right). Unfortunately, due to a recent renovation, it is no longer with us. The crowd is also surprisingly dive-y/trashy and pleasant. All in all, possibly worth the trip uptown.

In the last couple of weeks my loving look back to the early nineties has sometimes brought a tear (of joy, of course) to my eye. Witness the journey:

- a few weeks ago, Renda brought her old cds to the office. I filled in some of the gaps in my nineties music collection, including: the complete Beat Happening discography, a random Bratmobile album, Slanted and Enchanted, and some later Belle and Sebastian. That weekend, at an unrelated brunch, the formation of a Vaselines “tribute” band was discussed. Look out for us (Man / Boy) in Summer 08 when we tackle the Vaselines 19 songs.

- one Sunday morning, while riding the subway listening to the aforementioned Bratmobile album, I realized that although Riot Grrrl as a philosophy was hugely influential to me as a middle schooler, the music itself was not to a large extent, uh, listenable. (Disclosure: While in middle school I tried to form a riot grrrl band. It was fun but didn’t last long. The drummer had every distortion pedal known to man, and I liked that part a lot.)

- this led later that day to the attempted rental of the (not-so, sadly) classic romance Untamed Heart. For those of you unfamiliar with this 1993 gem starring Christian Slater, Marissa Tomei, and Rosie Perez, it’s set in snowy Minneapolis. Christian plays a busboy with major social anxiety – he doesn’t speak to anyone. We later learn that he is an orphan and he grew up thinking he had a monkey heart. Really! And Marissa Tomei, the too-nice girl-next-door, falls for him big time. It’s so good and heartbreaking and weird. There is no movie like this one.

- Sadly, the video store didn’t stock this film (”I’ve worked here for a long time, and no one’s EVER asked for Untamed Heart,” said the clerk. He knew everything about the movie, however, including the original title The Baboon Heart, which we both agreed would have been better.). Instead I rented Singles, which is much more fun to watch in your twenties than your teens. I also BOUGHT Untamed Heart (which you are free to borrow!) and …

- Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl , a documentary as good as it sounds. I was TOTALLY inspired by Kathleen Hanna, her first Bikini Kill concert in D.C., Ian McKaye talking about how she killed it. I was totally inspired by the riot grrrl convention, the riot grrrl manifesto, the zine-making, etc. I am so happy to be reminded of these things, and somewhat sad that I was too young for this at the time.

- Last but not least, in the spirit of all this goodness, I revisited my Sassy collection. Sassy, perhaps the most important publication for young women of a certain age and interest level between 1988 and 1994, has been sitting preserved on my bookshelf for the last 13 years. I discovered in this recent perusal not one but two gems from the October 1990 issue. 1) A Twin Peaks inspired fashion shoot. 2) Ian Svenonius as Sassiest Boy in America. This confirms my suspicions that Sassy was perhaps the best thing that could ever have happened to me. I have been excited to share these discoveries with others, including some 90s DC’ers, who had indeed heard of this Sassiest Boy in America article, but never seen the artifact. They say they remembered that haircut.

All in all, the nineties are alive in our hearts and minds, and maybe better than we remember.

That’s all from the courthouse. Case dismissed!

10 Jay Street is haunted by ghosts with pacifiers. (Party photo by Kirk Peterkin at pbase.com)

The ninth floor circa 2008.

On Tuesday afternoon, vibrations and general construction noise disrupted our otherwise pleasant workday. Where were the noises coming from? What was vibrating? Were we safe? Would the ceiling come crashing down? The Great Flood of 2007 proved that 10 Jay Street is a place to expect the unexpected.

On Wednesday morning, to our excitement and surprise, Dumbonyc reported that a stop work order had been placed on our building. The complaint (now unfortunately resolved): “While working on roof of the building, there’s a huge gap and the office space below is shaking and vibrating. Also building material is going right thru…”. On Dumbonyc, another tenant notes: “We’re in a corner office and there was a lot of dust falling from the ceiling before they stopped work, the office next to us had a computer crushed from a large piece of the ceiling falling onto it.” From this post we also learned that our office building was once home of the infamous rave space Lunatarium.

In October, Brownstoner reported that cabana structures were being erected on our roof, perhaps signaling the inevitable march to condo conversion. Curbed writes that it was actually prep work for the vertical expansion, but it did coincide with a substantial rent hike. 801a has seen several generations of studio-mates come and go. Andrew’s been here the longest, and he remembers hearing rumors that beer would sometimes leak through the ceiling during the parties that were once held upstairs. Through a bit of Google Journalism, we discovered the not-so-secret history of 10 Jay. The Lunatarium was a semi-legal 18,000 square foot venue located on the top floor of our building from 2001 to 2004. In 2002, before Jam Master Jay died, Run-DMC played their last show here. There are amazing photos of this alternate universe posted on Kirk Peterkin’s site and here.

(Photo by Kirk Peterkin at pbase.com)

The Lunatarium was somewhat notorious: In 2003, the New York Press voted it the Best Warehouse Fire Waiting to Happen. “We mean, really, what kind of venue would bring out a propane-driven version of Simon? (You remember, that toy where you had to repeat an increasingly complex pattern by smacking buttons in the right order?),” writes the Press. “We ask you, what kind of venue would allow a man in half-unbuttoned overalls to light this ‘Simon’ device, while a volunteer stood in a square cage of metal tubing, the corners of which were spouting 7-foot flames in random succession? What kind of venue, indeed, would conscientiously let its warehouse-raw brick-oven space cool down for 20 minutes before a kickball-pregnant woman with a makeup black eye dragged The Device out again, in the middle of a faux-redneck party, her thin, sweat-drenched wifebeater nearly slipping off?

“When we first went there to hear DJ Spooky spin, it wasn’t like they had flame dancers on a midlevel platform, while below a portly gentleman with a very large fire extinguisher was hardly obscured by sozzled loungers twirling in dangling cloth chairs.”

(Photo by Kirk Peterkin at pbase.com)

Playing fast and loose with fire hazards led to its eventual shutdown. “…Three weeks ago, on January 11 [2002], … a small fire started on the sixth floor of the building during an ambient party called Airport. The fire department came, put out the small trashcan blaze, and left. Two hours later, representatives from the New York City Social Club Task Force arrived and started writing violations,” writes NonsenseNyc.com. “Several fines later — for alcohol, for dancing, for occupancy — the party was shut down. (Irony alert: Yes, fined for dancing at an *ambient* event; apparently there were about 20 people grooving to a DJ spinning jungle in the small room, while approximately 800 in the main space were standing, sitting, and talking.)”

“Decompression” was a popular party at the Lunatarium founded by a group of Burning Man aficionados called the Society for Experimental Arts and Learning (SEAL). Above left, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey at 10 Jay Street. Photo via tranceamericana.org

According to its Wikipedia entry, by day, the Lunatarium was an electronics refurbishing company; by night it served as a free rehearsal space for the fire spinners who performed at events. Party-goers took the freight elevator to the ninth floor and watched pyrotechnics in the well-loved loading-dock / “shanty-town” area behind the building. Constructions such as inflatable plastic lounges (photos here and here ), giant see-saws, and art projects involving flame throwers provided entertainment for the 800 to 1500 partygoers that showed up each weekend night.

Preliminary plans for the 10 Jay Street expansion from 2004. They have been scaled back substantially, to 5 stories / 120 feet.

The Lunatarium ranks among the many forgotten art/performance/dance/exhibition spaces that populated a still-desolate, undesirable, and slightly dangerous Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium. Fleets of bicycles and the G train shuttled young people along the north-south trajectory of a disjointed network of collective-y lofts on the industrial edges of gentrifying neighborhoods throughout the borough. The Lunatarium was massive and oriented towards dance rather than rock culture — “The DUMBO space catered more to the post-rave crowd than the indie rockers who like electronic music only occasionally,” wrote Tricia Romero in a 2004 article in the Voice. Eventually, like most of the smaller impromptu, informal spaces passed from friend to friend, it eventually shuttered after rent increases and code violations, leaving no trace beyond the hazy recollections of the people who used to go there and unchecked Friendster profiles.

Unlike some people in the studio, however, I’m not opposed to video games. I certainly won’t claim any as art, but I’d hold a few up as entertainment of the highest order; wholly engaging mental exercises.

My boyhood loyalty lies with the now-obsolete text games released by Infocom in the early 1980s (though I didn’t play them until ’87 or so, when my family bought our first beige wonder, the Apple IIGS). In these games, the user navigates through a written narrative consisting entirely of dialogue and descriptions. All action occurs at a command line at the bottom of the screen, where a stripped-down syntax is used to interact with the story.

These are, far and away, the toughed games I’ve ever played – one taxing logic puzzle after another. Or illogic puzzle, really; the majority of these games were being written by programmers with a taste for the wacky non-sequitor. An example:

The ambassador wheezes loudly and hands you a brochure outlining his planet's major exports.
> look at the brochure

"The leading export of Blow'k-bibben-Gordo is the adventure game *** PLANETFALL *** written by S. Eric Meretzky. Buy one today. Better yet, buy a thousand."

The ambassador offers you a bit of celery.
> eat the celery

Oops. Looks like Blow'k-Bibben-Gordoan metabolism is not compatible with our own. You die of all sorts of convulsions.

*** You have died ***

That was taken from the popular game “Planetfall” (1983, Infocom), in which you play a man in space. I’m not sure exactly what you’re doing up there in space, because I kept dying before the plot got good. The text-only nature of these games meant that there was little chance of you accidentally solving a problem, because a successful action was the result of a very deliberate series of commands. This made it impossible to luck your way through, or to complete the thing on auto-pilot.

Incidentally, if you’d like to play Planetscape, there’s a java version here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/planetfall.html. If you’ve got a spare two or three weeks you stand a chance of beating it.

…

By the time my family had a computer, the text adventure era had mostly come and gone; the advent of computers such as the Amiga (and the EGA graphics it allowed) paved the way for graphically sophisticated animated games. The keyboard was used to navigate through the crude cartoon world, although the actual interface still relied on written commands – “open door”, “push button”, “give beer to child”, etc. The image below is taken from Space Quest (Sierra On-Line, 1986), a game I never really played but from the looks of things involves robots and shopping.

The command line gameplay that these games were structured around was soon replaced by an entirely mouse-based interface commonly referred to as Point-and-Click. Although entirely visual, this new interface was still structured around the application of verbs to nouns – but instead of typing “look at car”, the user clicked the “look” icon and then clicked on the car.

Enough has been written about the semantic leap from language to icon inherent in graphic user interfaces – I’m not going to break any new ground in this essay. I will note, however, that compared to the unforgiving nature of the text adventure game, the point-and-click graphic interface was warm and encouraging, like the god of the New Testament. Your mistakes were forgiven.

The above screenshot is taken from Maniac Mansion (1987, LucasArts), a game that wore its love of b-movies right on its diskette sleeve. It featured a wide cast of playable characters, including Jeff (a blonde surfer dude), Bernard (an Ed Grimley lookalike with taped-up glasses), and the inimitable Razor, lead singer of the proto-riot grrrl group Razor and the Scummettes. (You bet they have a MySpace page! Check out the theme song, it’s killer.)

The third dimension killed point-and-click games – that’s the aphorism, anyway. The common argument being that 3d games encouraged a different mode of gameplay, a wandering-through-space that was never particularly kind on the genre. Maybe that’s true; by the time the last wave of point-and-click games came out I had given up on computer games all together.

I’d argue that what really killed the genre, however, was the growing dominance of video game consoles – the Playstation, the Nintendo, the Xbox – with their miniature joysticks and multi-button configurations. There’s something inherently clumsy about pointing and clicking when the input device allows for neither.

…

That’s not to say that there are no longer any computer games worth playing. I think I’ve just lost my patience for most of them – the majority are twitchy, hyper-kinetic reflex exercises. For me, the stimulation quickly wears off; I’m left feeling mentally depleted.

I do still like the games that require me to focus on reasoning rather than reflex – especially the ones which present a cohesive world with its own set of rules. If this world and its mechanics are elegantly constructed, the user can be left to extrapolate or intuit the full range of gameplay possibilities from the initial rule set. An awesome and diverting example is the first-person game Portal (2006, Valve).

In Portal, the user must navigate a series of increasingly complex environments using a teleportation device; create an entrance portal on one wall and an exit portal on another, and then step through the opening to step out of the exit. Through elegant game design and clever voice-over from the omniscient antagonist/narrator, the user quickly learns to rely upon the fact that forward momentum is not stalled by travel through portals. Once the mechanics of portal manipulation have been intuited, the game becomes one thrilling rebuttal to physics after another.

In order to play Portal, you’ll need a souped-up PC, or an xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game console. Perhaps you do not have these things? Then I’ve got one final recommendation: Cursor*10 (2007, Nekogames). This is a Flash game that I do not want to unpack too explicitly, because the joy of playing comes partly from learning the rules. It deals with very specific conceits of time and repetition, and is as elegant a package as any online game I’ve come across.

…

People tell me they hate video games all the time, and their arguments are usually sound: The excessive violence and the aestheticization of suffering. The shift away from community and towards isolated self-pleasure. The terrifying and weird desire to live in a simulation, turning away from a real world with real sensations, with genuine and unmoderated and undesigned experiences, already packed with tremendous beauty and strangeness.

I think all of the above are true, and your standard critique of video game culture plays out like a page from Society of the Spectacle. I’m not a cheerleader or a champion of the medium – I just find some games to be rewarding recreational experiences.

But what is the ideal game? Maybe it’s one which allows for a constant re-evaluation of rules, where the players can mutually agree to expand or contract the boundaries as they see fit, turning each iteration of the game into a critique or defense of itself.

That doesn’t sound thrilling to you? Well, it’s just a hope, an open-ended model which could be applied to any of a number of possible game scenarios. Next time you’re at my house, let’s try it out. We don’t even need to untangle cords, find the controllers, or figure out how to plug this into that. We’ll get out the Axis & Allies board, figure out a better way to play. Or we’ll just pick up a deck of cards and start from there.

Note: This post was written in early December, but lingered in drafts for a month. Read it anyway! I revisit Philadelphia! PS: Check out this crazy Mummer’s Day parade video featuring my old crew dancing off global warming!

Train travel has never been so fast, so glamorous. Last weekend I took Amtrak for the very first time to my favorite neighbor to the south, Philadelphia.

I’ve spent a lot of time – I would guess the equivalent of one full week of my life — on New Jersey Transit trains , and after one ride on Amtrak, I am hooked. Expensive, yes, but so speedy! So efficient! Lovely! Apparently there are snack cars, and a quiet car (neither of thse were functional on my train). A brief recap in pictures:

Amtrak has its own in-train magazine. Colin Powell was on the cover. I am so excited to have a real ticket!

Leaving New Jersey: This sign reads “Trenton Makes – The World Takes”, which is always my favorite part of the trip. This is actually someone else’s seat. She had a small child with her – usually a recipe for traveling misery – and it wasn’t even annoying!

When I lived in Philadelphia, I was a member of an art collective called Space 1026. Once I arrived in Philadelphia, I went to the annual art auction at my old studio space. It was homey and fun, like the night before Thanksgiving at the local bar in your hometown with your high school friends.

Paddles for the art auction at Space 1026.

This was the most heated face-off of the auction. This young woman was apparently on the phone with London. The bidding for Alex da Corte’s piece went up to $800. I stopped at $50.

This is Philadelphia: MCAD alum Andy Beach, auctioneer extrordinaire Todd Kimmel, unidentified girl, 1026ers Roman Hasiuk, Alex Lukas, (unidentified bald man), and Aryon Hostelon.

I’m talking, of course, about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Yesterday, the bad boys of baseball finally announced that they were down with Jesus and dropped the “Devil” from their name. Ladies & gentlemen meet your The Tampa Bay Rays. They also showed off a new logo, a generic typographic treatment with a miniscule starburst element awkwardly dropped in right where the tail and the bowl of the R meet. If I had to guess, I’d say it was almost certainly designed by Todd Radom, the go-to guy MLB uses to keep uniforms looking uniform. Here’s a selection of logos he’s designed:

Unfortunately this isn’t the place to chart the birth, evolution, and eventual death-by-standardization of baseball logos. I’ll save that for my next little column about the crushing effects of design’s newfound ubiquity and the terrifying logical conclusion of a specialized design industry. Right now I just want an excuse to show my top ten (American) (major league) baseball logos!

A few notes before we begin: This is a list of logos, emblems, and marks – not of their utilization on uniforms. I’m as drawn to the stalwart bedrocks of baseball’s visual history as I am to the short-lived experiments and stunning outliers, but the majority of this list covers dead teams or hidden pasts of current franchises. There is no proper methodology I’m using here, but I do appreciate illustrative images with a certain vestigal evidence of amateurish origins. All images are taken from Chris Creamer’s amazing and exhaustive sportslogos.net.

10: New York Yankees (1936 – present)
I include this not because it’s one of my favorite logos, but just to note that the Yankees logo features a top hat covered in the stars and stripes. It might as well feature Steinbrenner in a three-piece suit clutching your rent check and beating up your kid brother.

9: St Louis Browns (1936 – 1951)
A really stellar logo of the sort rarely used in baseball, the traditional shield & logotype. Between the vertical lines, the color palette, and the figurative form, this feels like something out of the German football league, the Budesliga, which I may or may not have just spelled correctly. Clumsy in a charming way – the type, especially, is of an era where we just said of type, “fit ‘er in!”, and is not without its charm.

8: Toronto Blue Jays 1977-1996
Man do I love this logo, even though I do think it fails to streamline all the elements into one cohesive whole. There’s something very perfect about the red/blue/sky blue color palette, the inline type feels like a natural extension of baseball’s use of type, and the geometric bird face is so appealing. All the more so when compared to the current Blue Jays logo, which suffers from the unwritten law that any animal seen in a modern logo must be pissed off and, ideally, metallic.

7: Chicago Cubs 1949-1961
In the post-war era, as the balance of world powers began to shift, we briefly experimented with being the cutest nation on earth.

6: Philadelphia Phillies 1970-1991
Formally, pretty awesome.

5: Los Angeles Dodgers 1958-Present
When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, and broke my father’s little heart, they took with them a classic logotype upon which they wisely built. The logo was tilted, a meteoric baseball was added, and something genuinely graceful was born. The designers respected the past by adding a totally different element. One day I’ll write about the wonder of continuity and thoughtful change, but for now a nice and simple logo.

4: St Louis Cardinals 1960s-1990s
Picture it on baby blue. Later on they’d abandon the scotch typeface, but keep the great balancing cardinals. An illustrated logo that’s lasted the test of time and focus groups – a rare bird.

3: Montreal Expos 1961-1991
Amazingly, this logo is not meant to say ELB. It’s meant to be as E D and B, combining to form a big old M. Expos de Montreal Baseball. Roughly 25% of L train riders wear this ballcap at any given time.

2: Oakland Athletics 1988-present (though based off the old Philadelphia Athletics logo)
That elephant is balancing on a baseball!!!

1: Mr Met 1963-present
Then again, I’m biased.