We spent a chilly but very enjoyable weekend in New York, complete with a rock show, a museum, some bars, some photo booths, and lots of parking karma.

Thanks to my conversation with Mikey about Josh Rouse, I checked on Josh’s website, where I found out that he would be opening for The Jayhawks on their East Coast tour, going on now. No Boston date was in sight, but they’d be in New York Thursday and Friday. So, we got tickets (after a thankfully futile attempt to get tickets to their show in Lancaster, PA, before we knew they’d be playing two nights in NYC) for their show at Town Hall and drove down Friday afternoon. The drive was a little slow, thanks to an accident in New Haven, but we ended up pulling into the Rockefeller Center area around five minutes to showtime. We got parking for as many quarters as we had (metered till midnight? cruel) and headed over in time to catch the second half of Josh’s first song. The show was a lot of fun, and it’s always interesting to go to a concert and know the opening act very well, and not even know one name of the headliners. Seeing Josh Rouse here was a far cry from a show not long ago at the now-defunct Kendall Cafe (venue dead, website still working), where there seemed to be about thirty people in the small room, and about three feet between us and the “stage.” He played mostly songs from “1972,” and had a decently long set. I only knew the Jayhawks’ most recent album, and the songs they played from it sounded terrific, as they changed some arrangements up to some degree and revealed the fact that they write really well-written pop songs in the process. They indulged a little too much in their jammy tendencies on the last song of their encore, dragging it out way past its welcome, but the show as a whole was well worth it.

After an exit past the merch table where I had my pathetic encounter with Winona Ryder at the Wilco concert George and I went to 1999, Aimee and I headed out to find her ticket-less car, and we headed to the Bentley Hotel to check in, and then took off for the East Village.



After a frustrating round of ‘find a spot,’ we finally got some food at Benny’s Burritos before they closed at one (Boston, are you listening?), and then headed to 7B (aka Vazac’s Horseshoe Bar, or “the place where they shot the ‘That’s not a knife. This is a knife’ scene from Crocodile Dundee) for a drink and a shot at their photo booth.

We enjoyed the Bentley’s free breakfast (otherwise known as ‘free bagels, and if you don’t like bagels, well, we can’t help you’) and drove over to The Met to catch the Chuck Close show. Why are we driving all over the place, you might ask? Since we had a car, we had to do something with it during the day, and frankly, it’s easier to find parking here and there in Manhattan and Brooklyn than it is in downtown Boston. We used about ten quarters for the whole weekend, not least because we found the holy grail of Manhattan parking: an out-of-order meter on Madison Ave. one block from the museum.



The “FAIL” isn’t that clear, but it was there.

The exhibition was fascinating, showing layers and levels of Close’s work that I’d never seen before. We took our time through the show, and then wandered the rest of the museum, including the Temple of Dendur, outside which we saw this stone lion wrapped in plastic underneath a palm tree.



We took off to Brooklyn for the rest of the day, and spent some time wandering Bedford Ave. The pad thai at Tai Thai was great, and we popped in and out of the bookstores and antique stores in the area. I ran into Dan from WAMH on the street, and we ran through the thirty second version of our lives since college before moving on. We headed up to Enid’s in Greenpoint, for drinks, milk chocolate pudding, and their photo booth. I’d love to see it at night, but by day, it was very cool, with high ceilings, a dj on a Saturday afternoon, and signs for a Degrassi High-watching party a few months ago. Wow.

After finding the Union Pool not open until five, we headed to the McSweeney’s Store in Prospect Park, which was also closed, only a little more permanently, it seemed. We had a long talk with the bartender at Steinhof’s, where the clock shows Berlin time, and then headed back to the Union Pool, now open though still empty, and took advantage of their photo booth – a little faulty, but fun.

We returned from Brooklyn in time for a nap before meeting George for a delicious dinner at Zá Zá, at a table built for three. Sunday morning found us crouched over a Sunday Times at Grey Dog. Mmm.

With an early start and little traffic, we had time to finally go to Rein’s Deli in Vernon, CT. The reuben was delicious, the Dr. Brown’s soda terrific, and as for the bathrooms? Well, they’re down a hall called “Flushing,” the women’s room is called “Queens,” and the men’s room “Menhatten.” Nothing like combining a pun with a typo.