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good times at Hank's Saloon
Saturday, March 9 2002
For most of the day I found myself working on my father's "ground-breaking" soil temperature paper. Because he's complained so much about the accuracy of my graphs, I tried to develop a generic system for making line graphs in Flash on the fly. Surprisingly, though, Flash doesn't provide any support for graphing. For example, there are no commands for drawing an arbitrary line from point (x1, y1) to point (x2, y2). So, after giving up on Flash, I tried to do it in Excel. At that point, however, I found that my Dad's data was in such a non-computer-readable form that Excel couldn't accept it in a simple cut & paste operation. Indeed, even after I'd entered it all successfully into an HTML table, there was no way to cut and paste it into Excel. You'd think cut and paste integration between HTML tables and Excel spreadsheets would have been implemented years ago. But perhaps I'm just stupid.
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In the evening Gretchen and I decided to go see the Fiery Furnaces playing at a Brooklyn bar called Hank's Saloon.
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Hank's Saloon is genuine rootin' tootin' saloon. Budweisers are $2.50 each. When we arrived the place was pretty well packed and the Fiery Furnaces had just begun their set. Their sound had developed a little since the last time I'd seen them. They'd added some songs and figured out proper endings for others. I've decided I rather like the endless noodling of the lead guitarist, even when (as he was doing tonight) his solos "sing along" with the vocalist (the guitarist's sister). Nonetheless, I got the distinct impression that the vocalist wasn't entirely pleased with this accompaniment.
My friend Mikila is the drummer for the Fiery Furnaces and she and her boyfriend Drew are always happy when we turn up for their shows. Between sets we drank Budweisers and joked about Michæl Moore's book tour, the war against evil doers, some of my recent satirical web projects, and the utter incompetence of the bald bartender of Hank's Saloon.
The next band that played was Black Lipstick, and it consisted of people Mikila knew back when she lived in Austin, Texas. Black Lipstick played with a bouncy tongue-in-cheekly upbeat Velvet Undergroundesque quality and their vocals were mixed so quietly that I had no idea how any of the choruses were. But I was feeling so good that I wanted to sing along anyway. So I alternated between shouts of "Bob Seeger!" and "Pop Secret!" whilst jumping up and down to the happy rhythm. Everybody crowded into the front row was an exuberantly dancing female, so the band was all excited, repeatedly shouting, "We love Brooklyn!" and "This is the best audience we've ever had!"
Black Lipstick left such a good impression on Gretchen that after the show she went up to the singer/guitarist guy and bought their CD. Then, as she doing the usual para-transactional chit chat, she told him, "We really want to take your girlfriend (the drummer) home..."
On the walk home, I had to duck into a Chinese food place for a bucket of chicken cashew, which I ate entirely without rice, saving that for Gretchen to eat tomorrow.
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