Illinoise at the Park Avenue Armory

Last week we saw Illinoise, a sort of jukebox ballet interpretation of the beloved Sufjan Stevens album which is not spelled that way.

I’m shy around this sort of high culture so I only took one photo, above, before the show started. And while I have no business commenting on modern dance, I can report that it was a pleasure to sit in a dark room full of strangers and listen to this music again. I hadn’t thought about this nineteen-year old record (wow) in forever, and was transported back to the era when every English major on the G train was reading either Middlesex or Kavalier and Clay.

Everything about the show is heartfelt and unironic in ways which seem intentionally designed to confront my Generation X sensibilities. Even the program is full of deeply felt emotion, containing a dozen hand-drawn pages from a character’s diary:

You miss Sufjan’s singular voice, but the band, with three singers festooned in butterfly wings, sounds gorgeous, so you can bask in the lyrics, like these from "Casimir Pulaski Day":

I remember, at Michael's house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning, at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared

All the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Oof. If that song fails to remind you of something unbearably sad from your own adolescence, congratulations.

And all of this takes place in the haunted mansion that is the Park Avenue Armory:

The show is a big hit, and we seem to have scored some of the last affordable tickets around, but go if you can.

What is happening with this fake pizza parlor

It popped up across the street from my office almost literally overnight. It had been an empty storefront among the rest in what’s left of the Financial District, lain dormant until it was time to transform back into a Spirit Halloween outlet.

Then one morning: poof, pizza from nowhere.

This would seem like an encouraging sign, but why does it look like a plywood backdrop from a movie set, or a cheap front for an NSA domestic spying station? I have walked by and peeked in, and there seemed to be G-men in paper hats selling slices to crisis actors dressed as tourists. If this is an attempt to gaslight me, it is a very high budget one.

Well played, “Norm’s Pizza Shop.”

Closing Time

Rob Harvilla wrapped up his brilliant podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s this week, going out on what must have been the easiest possible choice for a song. There’s a recent book, too.

I was a latecomer to this show but I’ve been eating it up, and I’m looking forward to whatever Harvilla does next, although I am mad at him for re-introducing me to this dorky earworm that I’ve had on repeat all week:

Damascus Chainsaw Massacre

The pine tree in the front yard was at least one hundred feet tall. The previous owner’s kids had liked to climb it.

But there was a crazy windstorm last week, and that was that. These guys probably didn’t help either:

When it fell, the tree crushed a portion of the fence that we put up two summers ago, and mostly blocked the road in front of the house.

So, this weekend all the neighbors came over with their tools, and we disassembled the tree like an Amish assembly line.

We had hatchets and chainsaws, a skid lift, and a fearsome hydraulic wood splitter that someone should really put in a horror movie. Imagine what this could do to Steve Buscemi:

I’m mad at trees for my own reasons (don’t ask, the trees know what they did) so converting this bastard into firewood was pretty satisfying. And it was amazing, as a pudgy urbanite, to see what a group of motivated people can do in a couple of afternoons. We owe them all big time.

We capped off the weekend off with dueling corned beefs for St. Patrick’s Day, although it wasn’t all that fair since Dave the neighbor did his in his hand-built pizza oven.

Our entry was a cheater’s store-bought beef cooked like this Andrew Zimmern recipe, served as sort of Jewish-Irish fusion with roast potatoes and grilled cabbage.

Sláinte.