This weekend was pretty decent.
The original plan Friday night was to have dinner with Rob and Michele, but since Michele wasn’t feeling good, she stayed at home while the rest of us went to some Italian joint in my old (though now much nicer) stomping grounds in Jersey City. Though afterwards MK & I were able to get Michele’s mind off her troublesome stomach with a combination of chit-chat and good old fashioned bitching about stuff. Things were just fine until I developed a stomach problem myself; you’d think at this point, given my rocky history with food poisoning (i.e. the near fatal e. coli incident), that I’d be much more careful, but for some reason I didn’t say anything about the baked chicken and pasta during dinner, despite the fact that it was actually cold in spots.
Saturday night was the live body painting performance at Live Fast and I was on-hand as there to take snapshots of the event for Joe (with the totally sweet D70 that I borrowed from work). As expected, Joe did quite a nice job… I’d share the pics, but the girl (Great Turbo of the Gotham Girls) asked for full approval of all the pics before sharing any with the public, which is totally understandable since she was nude and all. But here’s a pic of Joe with his hand painted…
Aside from checking out the paint job, MK & I got the chance to hang with Jay and his cousin Ian, plus beer drinking fools Richie and Mike, as well as Mike’s cousin Joey (full name “Joey Methadone”). The minute Richie showed up and Joe let the girls from the store know who he exactly was (basically that guy who’s singing in all the punk CDs that Joe plays there), they all screamed and Richie was an instant rock god. Jay, Ian, MK, and myself all headed out once the store became too crowded, and MK immediately stepped in some dog shit, which obviously sucked, though its something I’m all too unfamiliar with… I stepped in dog crap the very first night we hung out! We then went to a pizzeria where Ian briefly went over his long list of celebs he’d love to exterminate (and his reasons were not only completely valid but rather compelling).
Afterwards MK & I went grocery shopping and there was literally thirty people and one check-out clerk (mind you, this was at the Brooklyn PathMart, past midnight). We made dinner around 1 and then watched the Scientology episode of South Park (Travolta’s opening line had us rolling) which I had downloaded based upon Rob’s recommendation the night prior. I also tried getting the Patrick Stewart episode of Extras the night prior, but it hadn’t finished (as of this writing, its still at the 60% mark… fucking BitTorrent), so we instead watched some Robot Chicken episodes.
The next day we went to Chinatown for some early holiday shopping. And I gotta say… Chinatown isn’t what it used to be. Whereas it was once described as my “favorite place on earth” by an ex-girlfriend, its a shell of its former self: either the HK movie scene is dead of everyone is relying on BitTorrent, so the DVDs shops are hardly worth perusing… at its high point there was five or so awesome import game shops, and now there’s just two, and both offer meager selections and outrageous prices, at least now when you online shows like NCS, Play-Asia, and Lik-Sang…. every other store was brimming will all sorts of awesomely insane stuff. Now everything just seems so… lacking. Though one gift shop was selling plush tits, and that was certainly nice (I’ll try to take a picture next time). But otherwise, pretty disappointing.
Then we meet up with John, Marion, Alisa, Alisa’s friend Allan, and Marion’s friend Jeb (edit: sorry, its Jed!) at Zen Palate’s upstairs restaurant (yeah, I had no idea there was an upstairs part either). And then it was off to see Harry Potter 4…
In a nutshell, the movie was great! Well, I enjoyed it, though it doesn’t hurt that I’m a fan of the books and am therefore familiar with the source material, which helps to fill in the cracks. But its more of what the made the third movie so awesome: great atmosphere, top-notch visuals, excellent pacing, solid performances. It had that slightly epic but growing feeling from before, but with more of the interpersonal stuff that was more prevalent in the first two flicks. True, quite a bit was chopped out, resulting in a narrative that’s basically a patchwork, but virtually every omissions was totally reasonable and understandable. And now I have super high hopes for the fifth film; if that one manages to get rid of the fat and stick with the core story, it might actually trump the book, which was to a large degree, meandering and ultra boring (IMHO).
Afterwards, we all went to the Cedar Tavern (Marion insisted because she really wanted onion rings, and they were damn good), and amazingly enough, the kid who played Neville Longbotton was at the table next to us! By the time we had left, Marion mustered enough courage to say hi to him and ask for a pic. He turned out to be a totally cool guy, which is hardly surprising since he’s British and all guy from the UK are gents.
One last thing: as some might now, my roommate Stephy is a fine artist. Recently she’s been doing pieces based that incorporate images torn from some bizarre early 80′s health text books for little kids. Here’s her latest piece…
… My roommate is a fucking genius.
