Sundays are for Piano
Six Days in Brooklyn / "She's Leaving Home" (The Beatles)
It isn’t Sunday, but I forgot to post this song last weekend for my paying subscribers (I blame the Australian band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizards’ epic show at Forest Hills on Saturday night, which was loud enough to piss off the wealthy neighbors), and given that I’m in New York City, which is almost-prohibitively expensive, here’s to reminding ourselves not everything has to be paid for all the time.
Six Days in Brooklyn
I’ve been in Brooklyn for the past six days and it’s been a treat. The King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard show was one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen, not simply because of the band’s incredible musical talent, but because of their joyful playfulness, including an epic version of “Vomit Coffin,” a quasi-metal tune about an AI system that wants to feel human, which means to be able to vomit and to die:
Riding the J and F and G trains can sometimes make you feel like a robot, but only if you keep your nose in your phone and don’t notice the goings-on all around you (I’ll write about this more in the coming weeks).
Walking around the West Village, however, can make you feel extremely poor, especially if you’re just trying to find a dive bar (i.e. a place where you’re not made to feel ashamed when you question the $25 drink). It turned out finding anything cheap in the West Village was a Quixotic adventure, but the sights and sounds were pretty, and thankfully my father-in-law told me to check out A Bar in Greenpoint, BK, where I had the pleasure of discovering a fellow Substacker,
, happened to be spinning records there that night (New York is magic when you’re willing to explore and follow your own rhythm).If you haven’t yet pressed play on the above recording of “She’s Leaving Home,” you may enjoy listening while reading the rest of this short piece.
In addition to getting a last-minute ticket to witness the King Gizzard spectacle (I thank the cosmos and a friend who forgot to sell his extra tickets), I’ve eaten a pepperoni pizza at Joe’s, played 5v5 basketball on a concrete court with double rims, saw my friend play at an open mic at The West Brooklyn and met a fellow Substacker,
(we talked about film and writing and had a very well made old fashioned); I went to a weed dispensary because they don’t exist in Europe, and the extremely-high cashier tried to sell me 100mg weed gummies before I asked if he had something a bit lighter because holy hell; I saw Caribou, a Canadian DJ who’s been making music for twenty years (I listened to him in college), play a free pop up show in an adult skating rink called Xanadu:
I’ve eaten at least three Sausage Egg & Cheese Everything Bagels, toasted w/ hot sauce (Cholula or Valentinas, to be precise), and as I write you these words I’m looking at the clock because my favorite poet in Paris
told me I have to go check out a Russian Bath House on Wall Street for a few hours of luxuriating in hot and cold water before I complete my checklist of must-eat foods in New York City: chicken lo mein at Wo Hop on Mott Street.Onwards and upwards
Tomorrow I’m riding a Peter Pan Bus to Cape Cod (NYC—>Providence, RI—>Hyannis, MA—>Wellfleet, MA) and the name of the bus-line does seem fitting, because I feel like I’m back in my twenties again, if only for a week, sleeping on sofas and pull-out beds, saying yes to almost anything that sounds interesting, traveling solo up the east coast until my lovely wife
, who is currently in New Orleans for photography work, joins me on the beach for a few days of well-earned leisure before I do a book event at East End Books for my latest novel, The Requisitions.I’ll be writing a longer piece specifically to do with The Big Apple and all of its magical absurdities, but I need a proper writing session for that one and a bit of time to decompress.
The Color of Forgetting
Alas, this week I was hoping to post a conversation I recently had with
regarding her beautiful and thoughtful review of my latest novel, The Requisitions, but editing a 40 minute conversation + writing some new music (like I did last week for conversation w/ NY Times besteller ) requires time and technology I don’t have, so please do check out ‘s Nat’s thoughtful review below, and I encourage everyone to subscribe to her because she’s a real-life working writer who values the process as much as the result.
Voilà quoi.
Following my book event at East End Books in Provincetown on August 27 (come along if you’re in the area!), on
August 29 @ 2pm EST I’ll be doing a free VIRTUAL READING & discussion of The Requisitions (REGISTER HERE)
with Classical Pursuits, a Toronto-based company that specializes in intellectual history tours. We’ll talk about Viktor Frankl’s theory of the will to meaning, the challenges of writing a metafictional novel set during the Holocaust, and we’ll also have an open-ended discussion about life, literature and all the rest of it.
A bientôt,
Samuél
PS if you still haven’t listened to the recording up above, now’s your chance to listen and
One of my favorite Beatles songs👍
Sounds like a near-perfect NY trip, and Joe’s was a very good choice for pizza.
I don’t know what’s happened to Forest Hills; I saw The Who there only 53 years ago and nobody complained!