Blissed out at Relax Station; Freaked out by [•Rec]; cleaned up well by wash & fold
I’m All Lost in …
the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week (NYC version)
#48
1) About five minutes into dinner at Spicy Moon Vegan Szechuan on Tuesday night, a bowed waveform passed through my head. At first, I thought it was the ghost pepper-level heat in the cumin tofu entree hitting me, but then I remembered I was also drinking mezcal, a booze I don’t drink often, and which always slams my mind with a slow motion gearshift.
But it wasn’t until the following evening that I felt truly drunk as I stumbled east on Hester St. from Chinatown to the Lower East Side looking for a coffee shop where I could dissolve into a chair.
I had just gotten a delerium-inducing chair massage at Relax Station.
Tucked away on Mulberry St., where the scent of Little Italy’s bread and bakery gems waft from the clustered shops and combine with Chinatown’s ammonia fish aroma to conjure NYC’s signature sidewalk smell, Relax Station is located up a suspicious looking flight of stairs.
Upstairs off Mulberry St., 9/11/24
When I walked into the nondescript front room just to the right at the top of the landing, the guy I spoke with on the phone earlier that morning was sitting in a plastic chair hunched over his cell. He nodded like we were in a Raymond Chandler novel, and a young woman stepped from behind the front desk to greet me. She briefly tried to talk me into a table massage, assuring me I could keep my clothes on. I made my case that chair massages—thanks to the way the ergonomics open your back and expose your shoulders, neck, head and arms—are ideal.
With light classical piano music floating in the background, she proceeded to give me a solid 45-minute massage, systematically kneading her way through the aches and knots in my upper body, manhandling my arms, digging her fingers into my neck and twisting the nervous tissue between her thumb and forefinger, pressing her knees into my back muscles, and massaging my scalp with a smooth stone. I flickered in and out of consciousness during this last delight as the endorphin, serotonin, and dopamine rush overpowered my body.
Afterward, I swayed down the staircase like a noodle, slipping back onto the street, and made my way over to a stylish coffee shop at the corner of Hester & Orchard.
2) I watched two movies this week. On Monday afternoon, ECB and I went to MoMA, where they were having a 1970s film fest; we saw a matinee of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 oddity, Daisy Miller, based on Henry James’ 1878 novella. Starring young Cybill Shepherd and a lost-to-time actor named Barry Brown, it was Bogdanovich’s given-a-blank-check-from-Hollywood follow-up to his parade of hits, The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up Doc (1972), and Paper Moon (1973). I texted my pal Valium Tom, who loves languid, eye-candy cinema, my take on the movie: “An utter bore, but somehow wonderful. It was extravagantly irrelevant.”
As a turn-of-the-century period piece, including the hotels and castles of France, and the parks, operas, and ruins of Rome, it was, indeed, lovely to look at, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
Let me instead, recommend the other movie I watched this week (over at my friend Paco’s apartment, late Sunday night): [•REC], a 2007 horror movie written and directed by Spanish movie makers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.
Little girl turned zombie in Paco Plaza's horror classic, [•REC]
Yikes, this “found footage,” handheld-camcorder zombie freak out, combines Blair Witch Project and Night of the Living Dead (including reviving Romero’s classic sick, little-girl character and her doomed and defensive mother) by stranding a TV crew, a couple of firefighters, and government scientist in a suddenly, quarantined apartment building where a zombie virus has broken out among the residents; the feds cordon off the building with troops and wrap it in plastic.
The footage—which gives the movie a psychedelic rhythm and arty touch as it stalls or goes black or overexposes in between the live-cam view—comes courtesy of the TV duo, a go-getter reporter named Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her resolute cameraman, Pablo (who we never see, but grow to trust as our only protector).
[•REC], which stands for “record,” starts when the pair, on a shoot for their late night news show, accompany a couple of firefighters on a seemingly run-of-the-mill call to help an elderly woman. Things quickly get creepy when the old woman attacks one of the firemen, critically injuring him with bite wounds. The terror accelerates from there as the gore splatters the screen. The little girl, whose violent dog initially clued the authorities into the raging virus, is transformed into a vicious zombie midway through.
Eventually, Pablo, bites it (or, more accurately, gets bitten) in the penthouse apartment finale, where the Catholic-Demonic backstory is revealed in the guise of Patient Zero, a now-ghoulish girl named Tristana Medeiros who had been secretly imprisoned there by the Vatican. With the camera man down, the grim message becomes clear: this world is over.
3) There wasn’t a laundry room at the Bethesda Marriott on Pook’s Hill Rd. (where I stayed two weeks ago, during the seeing-my-mom portion of this trip) nor at the goofy boutique hotel in the Lower East Side this week. I had planned to wash my mounting pile of clothes at Gregory Samsa’s apartment in Brooklyn, where I stayed for a few days to save some money; there’s a washer and dryer in his building upstairs at his besties’ (and my old friends) Dave & Jen’s.
But then I discovered a fantastic service: Wash & Fold.
On Tuesday morning, I dropped off my suitcase, now stuffed with rumpled clothes, at a laundromat around the corner from Samsa’s on Hooper St called Pachamama Laundromat.
And then easy-peasy, on the way back to his apartment that evening to watch the big Harris-Trump debate, ECB and I took a slight detour to the laundromat where, for $12 less than they’d said that morning (so, $23 instead of $35) I retrieved my suitcase. I had been nervous because I hadn’t thought to leave them a laundry bag.
But when I got back to Samsa’s and unzipped the suitcase, a small black model I inherited from XDX, I found a tight cube of pressed, folded, and twinkling fresh laundry, set in a neatly tied plastic bag.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few other things from this action-packed week in New York: First, despite all the terrible things you hear about the subway these days—late and stalled trains, crime—I rode it everywhere without any delays or problems, the F to the 7, the J to and from Brooklyn, the F to the Q70 bus, and my new discoveries, the 42nd St. shuttle train on the way from Queens to Brooklyn and the LIRR to visit Aunt Judy in Great Neck; second, per usual, I got a couple of my improvised, sloppy, veggie hoagies—this time, a banana pepper, chickpeas, corn, mushrooms, black olives, green peppers, oil, and mustard sandwich; and third, the standout exhibit of the trip was the Vivian Maier 1950s and 1960s street photography show at Fotographiska NYC.
Vivian Maier exhibit at Fotografiska NY, 9/8/24
Paul Weller at Kings Theater, Brooklyn, 9/7/24
Finally, I did see Paul Weller in concert, which was the initial prompt for this trip (at Kings Theater, a gloriously ornate, old-timey theater in Flatbush). Mr. Weller, the founder of my favorite band when I was a teenager, the first-wave punk pop band, the Jam (he also founded the men’s shop pop band the Style Council), now has decades of banal rock LPs on his resume. He mostly played that. But I did get my dose of kismet and cosmic connection: One of the two Jam songs he played was “Start!,” the 1980 U.K. hit I sang in the 9th grade talent show.
For the record, my Weller pilgrimage was superseded by the U.S. Open, where I saw Aryna Sabalenka win on Saturday in straight sets over American Jessica Pegula, 7-5, 7-5. It was slightly awkward rooting for Daffy Saby against hometown favorite Pegula, but not really.