Art Before Death: Girls in Thai Places

1.  Began the night by trying to catch the opening of the Moby Dick marathon reading and discovered that it had started at Word in Greenpoint, not Housing Works in Soho.  Moby Dick moves to Soho tomorrow.  At Housing Works tonight was a Granta-sponsored reading.

Banana leaf!  This is the vegan version, the only version not rendered in pork fat.

2.  My family and I ate at Pok Pok Thai--where the menu is basically pad thai, three different ways.  The music was Thai versions of '70s hits like "Funkytown" and "Boogie Nights."  Pink Floyd's "The Wall."  Amazing.

2.  Did not want to go home so we headed to the reopening of the Clemente Soto Velez center--a hundred-year-old recently restored public school.  It's a hive of a place with a million rooms and theaters:  there were two gallery openings, a theatrical performance, video screenings, and on the main floor the most brilliant salsa band, performing as part of the Borimix Puerto Rican fest.  Women older than my 70-something mother had joined the band of their own accord onstage and were sexy salsa dancing, making the most of their bodies, dancing until they drop dead.  This music is more than just party music--something about the drumming and percussion, the slave origins of it, I find incredibly moving, especially live.  No one could stay in their seats.

At CULTUREfix, refusing to go to bed.

3.  Still didn't want to go home.  Ended up at performance art night at CULTUREfix.  A man in kabuki-inspired drag divided the audience in half.  One hummed "E;" the other hummed "C."  He arranged us around the piano and played through our humming.  That, too, was moving.

4.  All the lights are on; the art is on.  After six straight days of work, it was a good night for me.