I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I got my merit badge in NYC buses this weekend. I felt like I took a million of them. I like the subway, even in this heat, more than busses. I avoid buses…. I always feel like its going to crash, and more crazy people are on them, but most of all I dread that when I put my card in, its not going to work and then the bus driver is going to kick me off the bus. I think this is going to happen every time. It didn’t happen this weekend though and with the L train out of service, I took alot of busses (as I said before).

We wanted to have tea that morning, but once again, had no idea where Tea and Sympathy was. We got lost the last time we went and vowed to look up the address. But instead we wandered through several West Village street fairs and farmer’s markets.

After a couple hours, we gave up on tea and decided to go to the “Big Apple Barbecue Fest,” even though I felt a little uncomfortable going back to the exact area I go to every day for work on the weekend. There were banners and it was all very Hatch-Show-Print designy. Because of the bus issues we got there at 1 PM, and the fest had opened an hour earlier. We saw Chris Gethard just going in as we walked up to the park and he was visibly excited. Then he said he was excited. So he was visibily and audibly excited to eat barbecued meat from around the country.

There were only 8 or so vendors, each with one booth. This is unlike BBQ festivals as depicted on Food Network’s many “BBQ Showdown” time-waster programs and indeed the BBQ festivals Kirk has been to in Florida, where there are dozens of booths, all displaying as many banners from previous cookoff wins as possible. The booths are 5-storys of BBQ boastfulness; NYC booths are discretely rust and mustard colored and all match each other, declaring only their name, pitmaster, and location.

Chris made a bee-line for the fist booth, selling pig snoot sandwiches, which had a good 25 people in line. I looked around for a snoot-less booth and found a ribs-offering one which had… about 250 people in line. The lines were confusing and really unclear which line went with which booth. There wasn’t much in the way of crowd control. Kirk and I walked around a little bit and then decided standing two hours in line was bullshit and we took off.

We didn’t know where exactly to go so we wandered a bit. We eventually gave up on upper-lower Manhattan and surrended to the default of Chinatown, found the 4-5-6 and took off. Despite a lump of tourists obstructing the entrance, the Excellent Dumpling House was pretty empty. We didn’t share a table with a Child Welfare Counsellor having a meeting or two field-trip kids from the UN Summercamp being forced to order things they didn’t want from their bossy Chaperone… both of which marked earlier trips to Excellent.

As Kirk was getting change, the lady asked where we had been? We hadn’t eaten there in a long time, she said, and she was mock-upset with us. Kirk was kinda thrown… he said we had been there three weeks ago and maybe she hadn’t been working that day. I think maybe we were skipping out because of the tourists. I guess we had achieved a new rank of regular-ness when they know you, know what your regular order is, and then note your absense.

We walked back up town and met Neil and Julie to go to the MoCCA indie comics fair at Puck Hall. We went to their house across the street first to wait for Eric Drysdale (who had already been to the fair earlier to get Kyle Baker’s autograph), Kupperman and his girlfriend Chorky. We waited a pretty long time for everyone to get there and then went over. I had never been inside the Puck Building. It was huge inside, and there were a lot of booths; it was like a regular comic convention, which I hadn’t expected, only less free shit. It’s like those fairs that are really common/mocked in animes like Comic Party. I forget the name.

I regretted that I hadn’t thought to bring stuff to sign… not that I’m a big collector or autograph hound, but there wasn’t much to do and no real reason to talk to the artists unless you were buying something or had something to sign. I saw Charles Burns, Evan Dorkin (he had a real Staten Island accent) & Sarah Dryer, and Adrian Tomine. I didn’t see Dan Clowes or Sophie Crumb, both of who were there. Matt Freazel walked by a couple times wearing the bizarre style of dress a lot of cartoonists seem to favor—the “Crumb” mix of old-timey duds and slovenliness. I didn’t talk to any of them.

I ran into a couple of people I knew and had some insignificant conversations. I didn’t really want to buy anything, since I could just get most of it at a store for the same price later (and most of the mini’s looked attrocious). I ended up getting “It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken,” since I’d been meaning to get it for awhile. Kirk got a “Paul” comic sample for free, I got “Paul in The Country” like a year ago and liked it pretty well. Neil looked bored, I’ll admit I got pretty bored as well. You could breeze through the whole place in 15 minutes and then… you don’t want to have spent $7 entry fee for 15 minutes so you go over everything again.

Like all communities centering over a fringe activity—comedy, comics—its probably more about and for the creators rather than the spectators. The con and the gathering is ultimately about doing things for their peers. That said, most of the indepentant and self-publishers I went by seemed to eb strongly in the “learning stage,” with some really shitty art displayed on many tables. Part of me is jealous of the focus (time, money, energy) that they have to put out their comics, but they were like the Channel 102 pilots of comics. Some of the freebees I got handed were even comics of people sitting around on sofas and talking (the hallmark of bad storytelling in two media!)

I still would like to do a comic at some point, I just haven’t found any story I particularly want to do. The guy who made “Paul” was a graphic designer for 20 years before putting out his first and it immediately won all kinds of awards. So, maybe in 10 years I’ll do that.

The MoCCA fair was closing so we decided to go eat something. Neil’s friend was driving in so he had to guide him through the tunnel. Two loud strange old people I didn’t know but apparently knew Julie had added themselves to the group and we headed to the Noho Star, which I had seen on Food Network but had never been to. It was like if Life Cafe on B had become really expensive. I don’t like eating in huge groups, especially if I don’t know all the people. The loud old people pointedly created the seating arrangement so that we got fucked, completely isolated from the rest of the table where the people I knew were sitting. I didn’t get to hear about Kuppy’s new comic or overhear him saying anything strange about spying on his neighbors. I drew doodles on the back of one of the worse of the free comics we had gotten but otherwise we sat in silence, pretty much.

We decided to leave after eating an appetizer, but that took impossibly long to come. Luckily, one of the wonderful elements of “local color” about the Noho Star is they have free hardboiled eggs at the bar. Kirk ate two. We got rained on during the walk home, so we went to Barnes and Noble for a while so the rain would pass.

When we got home I realized how sunburned I had gotten and then conked out and went to sleep at a ridiculously early hour. This happens more often than I’d like to admit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 11:30 am and is filed under Progress.