poconos? poco-yes!

boy are my arms sore from snowboarding.

i never would have guessed that that would be the case.

you'll all be happy to know that i had a very fun time on the mountain on friday. i sort of figured it out after a handful of runs, but never really mastered it. that will happen next time i hope. hooray for winter sports!

oh, and then we ate at pizza hut afterwards. wait, let me correct that: we obscenely ate at pizza hut. it was good though.

i didn't take any photos of any of this however. sorry. next time maybe.


the other big development this weekend was that i finally proposed to my girlfriend. it took a while, but i finally thought that the time was right. she's so great. i hope everyone can come out to our wedding in september!

oh, wait, no...what i meant to say was that i joined the greenpoint YMCA this weekend (everyone knows that i'd never get married in september). THAT'S right, time to ready the beach body for summer 2005. are you ready brooklyn?

you better be.

oh, and my only gripe with the oscars last night was that beyonce didn't sing with/for the counting crows. actually, just visualizing that in my head almost made my brain explode.

a plea for victory atop the mount

ok.

tomorrow i am going snowboarding for the first time ever.

i don't know where, but it's somewhere in the pocono's.

it's more fun to say pocono's than it is to type it.


i just hope that:

a.) halfway through the day, i am able to make it to the bottom of the hill without falling.
b.) i don't break any bones or get any stitches
and
3.) i make out with an adorable snowbunny while drinking hot toddies in the lodge.

wish me luck everybody!!

sabado gigante

hey all.

this last weekend, i was graced with the presence of two good pals of mine from way back, lisa and aaron. they were visiting from minneapolis for a few days. we spent a great saturday together.

here is a rundown of events...

1. the gates.

it was a bit cold, but we managed to enjoy them anyways. the park was CROWDED. oh, and we saw someone else there too:

a small motorcade came driving through and inside of this car was Christo and Jeanne Claude themselves. it was pretty funny to see them. it looked like they were being interviewed for tv. not many people noticed them.


2. chelsea galleries (not pictured)
we went to a few galleries, saw nothing too impressive, and then decided it was time for coffee. this led us to...

3. mud cafe in the east village (not pictured)
right before we went in, i got a phone call saying that a really, really great relative of mine had just died in pittsburgh. it was a total surprise and completely came from out of nowhere. she was one of the main reasons why i ended up in new york.

it's really a sad, sad thing.

here is a nice article about her.

after talking about this and all sorts of other things over coffee, lisa wanted to get some sushi.

4. shima sushi.


mmmmm....

but then we were thirsty, so...

5. holiday cocktail lounge.

one of my favorite new york bars. it's super cheap and super comfortable. we had three or four drinks here and then it was off to visit our friend jamila, who was at her permanent hangout, rififi.

6. rififi.
in the back room, they were playing great early 60's dance music. so...


it was really fun.


this was in the bathroom. batman hates irony. one of the many reasons why i like batman so much.

after a few more drinks here, we took a cab back to brooklyn. before we went to the next establishment however, it was time for pizza.

7. the pizza place on bedford avenue.

i have probably eated a million slices from this place.

8. the royal oak.

hmm. i still can't decide whether i like this place or hate it. some nights it can be lovely, but this night it pretty much sucked. there was no dancing here. (unless you consider dancing to be a hundred kids straight out of vice magazine smoking in the backroom.)

9. sleep.

it was a fun, sprawling day.

the next afternoon, i met aaron at the magnolia bakery in the west village. he wanted to get a cupcake. the line for the place was about 50 people long though so we decided to get a beer instead.

we headed over to the white horse tavern. this is the place where dylan thomas drank himself to death.

i thought i'd try to eat myself into a coma in his honor. they have the most fucked up tuna melts that you have ever seen.

they are soooo good though.

it was then time for aaron to catch his plane back home. i headed over to williamsburg to meet up with my friend adam at a bar.

later on, at another place, pete's candy store, i met another pal, eric, for a couple more drinks. on the way home, we decided to play this game where you had to hit a target with a snowball made from the freshly fallen snow before you could move on to the next one. sort of like frisbee golf, except maybe dumber.

wait, maybe not.


if you look at the bottom photo, you can kind of see this small white sign that we were trying to hit. the evidence of our drunken aiming surrounds it.

anyways, it took a really long time to make it home.

sunshine-y day

yesterday was probably the nicest day of the year here weatherwise. i think it almost got to 60 degrees.

it was the perfect day to go up to the park and check out the fully installed Gates.


i went up there with a bunch of my co-workers. i think we ended up spending 2 hours walking through the badassery.





for 12:30 on a tuesday, the park was pretty crowded. not in a bad way though. it was good to see all of the smiling people checking it all out.




along the paths, there are workers who will answer any questions that you might have. they also will give you a swatch of the fabric used on the Gates if you ask:



as soon as i got back to the office, i checked out how much these were going for on ebay.

i don't know though...it's seems kind of shitty to sell them. on the other hand, it could cover a nice dinner or something.

all in all, i give the much hyped Gates a solid A+. they kicks ass.

---------------------------

in other exciting news, yesterday i got tickets to see THE WEDDING PRESENT at the bowery ballroom on 4/29!!!
anyone want to come with me?

wooo hooo!!

my wet valentine

so, valentine's day ended up not being so bad after all. i went on a nate (a term that larry made up mean "non-date") with my good friend libby. awwww...


we ate at this place off of houston called thai thai and then had some drinks at the tile bar. it's actually called wcou radio, but everyone calls it the tile bar. go figure.


libby rules.

it rained the entire night, so we had a good backdrop for drinking.

being it was a monday night, i turned in sort of early. apparently not early enough for the stone cold retarded MTA (metropolitan transportation authority...the fools that run the subways and buses). i got to the L train at 11:50 and was greeted by a sign saying there would be no service starting at midnight. the thing was, they had already stopped the service, stranding everybody who was trying to get back to brooklyn.

that is the most annoying thing ever. i ended up splitting a cab back into williamsburg with three total strangers, two of whom were, ah.."variety performers". i was assailed by the lengthy descriptions of their acts the entire ride home. it's a good thing that i was too drunk to care.

once i got out of the cab, i still had about a 15 minute walk back my apartment.


in the rain.

oh well.

it was still a lovely evening.

a (valentine's) day that will live in infamy...


yep, so you either love this holiday or you hate it. and it all depends on your lovelife situation.

this year, i hate it.

love,
anthony

the gates (almost)

so, being a sculptor and all, it would be bad for me not to comment on Christo's new project 'the gates' in central park.

i think that at first it's really easy to dismiss or hate this project for quite a few different reasons, but once you are actually looking at it, it's pretty great. and by pretty great, i mean totally insane.

right now, they are still finishing up installing all of the gates. tomorrow they will unfurl the cloth curtains, completing the work. i wanted to see it as it is now, and then go back once it's finished. so...

here are some pictures that i just took during my lunch today:










hooray for art!

viva la minutemen

i don't know if i'll ever get to see this, but i hope so.

thursday forever

hi.

so i took yesterday off to work in my studio. all day long. it was great. that is what i should be doing every day. hopefully sometime soon.

in the evening i went to the opening reception for this. my gallery from minneapolis (the weinstein gallery) is showing there. it was good to see all of the folks again.

photo shows are a bit exhausting though and it made me hungry. luckily martin, the gallery owner took me out for a crazy late night dinner at the famous carnegie deli. if you haven't ever been to this place, it's hard to understand the sheer size of the sandwiches that they serve. maybe this picture of what martin ordered will help:



seriously, this corned beef and turkey sandwich was probably 10 inches tall. it's hilarious.

i got an egg salad. at times like these though i really wish that i ate meat. it would have been waaay more fun to dig into that meat tower sandwich.

aww nuts.

dead cats, dead rats

actually i should say dead mouse.

in my apartment.

in the trapdoor hole in the closet of my roommate's bedroom.

which is directly next to mine.

giving the apartment a strange, but very particular smell.

the smell of old death.

holy moses.

i pray that one of you reading this knows of some chemical or method that will return me to the land of the sane.

i have been looking on the internet for a while now to no avail.

we were going to try to reach into the hole to see if we could grab it out, but seriously, who here is man enough to blindly reach into a dark, stinky hole with the hopes of touching (let alone grabbing) a decomposing mouse. (pleeeease god, let it just be a mouse....)

wait, you know who IS man enough?


that's right...Flash Gordon!

remember when he had to reach into those holes and inside one of them was that scary-ass poisonous scorpion thing?
right on brotha!

he'll save every one of us!

arcade fire, dog sweaters, vodka

ok, so no update yesterday because i was actually busy at work printing out these abominations:



hundreds of them. it took forever and now i hate dog sweaters more than you can possibly imagine.
wait, i guess it's pretty easy to hate dog sweaters anyways...nevermind.

THIS JUST IN: i am dying from hang-overness. please help me. it hurts....
last night some pals and i went to this place called The Russian Samovar for drinks. and it's, well, very russian. and inside there are lots and lots of russians and lots and lots of different kinds of infused vodkas.

you basically order carafes (carafes!) of whatever flavor vodka that you want and then drink it out of these tiny lil' shot glasses. there are these huge jars of all of the different flavors at the bar and it's a bit strange to see things like ginger or dill or horseradish soaking in gallons of booze. it's pretty great though.

we had (i think): pineapple, cranberry, dill, peach, and plum. pineapple was so good. dill was nasty as shit.

so today i am tired and headachey.

in other news, here's my review of the arcade fire show:

it was pretty good. they went on super late because they were on conan o'brien right before. ugh.

there were two good openers though and that almost never happens. first was man man and i thought they were fun. mostly i liked them though because the lead singer/keyboard player looks like my dad when he was in his twenties. same moppy hair and big mustache and everything. i kept laughing at how awesomely my pops was rocking out. i think this video of theirs is pretty awesome.

the next band, or guy was called final fantasy. it was just one guy with a violin and a delay pedal. he built up some nice melodies, but i thought his singing was kind of weak. overall good though.

after waiting for a damned eternity for the arcade fire to set up all of their instruments and do sound check, they finally started. the first two or three songs sounded totally badass. then they played two or three songs that nobody knew and you could feel the life being sucked out of the audience. it kind of never came back fully either. bad set list organizing, i thought.

anyhoo, they really sounded amazing live and there's really nothing better than a stage full of like 10 people singing songs at the tops of their voices. i'll leave it to the million other folks (brooklyn vegan, daily refill, etc..)to speak more about it. plus they have better pictures and video if you are so inclined.

and now it looks like i missed the better of the two shows they played here. last night david byrne sand with them.

o well...i did get to see david bowie at mine. he was watching from the balcony.

ok, now i am going to go and lay down for a bit.

have mercy.

it's what's for dinner y'all

going through some really old things that were in my drawers at home, i came upon this coloring book. it was sent to me by dave e. a looooong time ago. i hope you enjoy and learn a few new facts from our friends at the North Dakota Beef Commision.













they sort of wrap that ending up quick-like, don't they? i guess avoidance works just as well as anything.

beyond that, not much else is going on. last night i spent almost a half an hour ironing my douve (is that how you spell it?) cover for my down comforter for some reason and found it to be a rather pleasant, soothing activity. o god...

tonight i am going to the arcade fire show at the strange Webster Hall in the east village. i plan on tying one on before the show since it costs like $7.50 or so for a bottle of beer there. that's awful even by nyc standards. i'll have a full report on the all-encompassing hype of this one in the morning. (actually probably more like the late afternoon the way things have been going lately...)

if i had sold both of my $15 tickets on craigslist, i could have gotten at least $180 for them. jesus...