Garage
Posted: December 25, 2012 Filed under: Greenwich Village | Tags: TUESDAY TOILET TALK Comments Off on GarageA restaurant that touts live jazz seven days a week, the Garage was relatively quiet when I arrived past midnight last Tuesday, technically Wednesday. The place seemed somewhat like a caricature, a cartoon character’s home with its humongous chandelier, a Christmas tree spinning upside-down from the ceiling and oversized wooden carvings of silverware and handyman tools. Large glowing orange orbs hung from the ceiling amidst the excessive holiday decorations depicting Santa Claus.
In addition to the upside-down tree, there were five smaller Christmas trees that I could see and more potted poinsettias than I could count. The Garage also seemed to be counting challenged, billing the ensemble of saxophone, guitar, bass and drums as a trio. Bassist Dave Baron led the quartet with Francesco Ciniglio on drums, Alex Wintz on guitar and Lucas Pino on tenor sax.
My first time finally meeting Lucas after seeing him around quite a bit, he first introduced himself as a photographer and then revealed that he is a pathological liar. Well, at least he is honest. Look out for his Thanksgiving album release—it’s sure to give Charlie Brown’s Holiday Hits a run for its money.
When you pull back the curtain under the restrooms sign, you’ll notice a 2 to 1 ratio of women’s to men’s bathrooms, with the women’s rooms on either side of the men’s in the center. A large hand sanitizer dispenser and a payphone furnish the dimly lit area. The storage for paper towels, cleaning supplies and such is located in a closet inside the women’s room on the left side. The women’s toilets are situated lower than usual so be aware if you sit instead of squat that the drop is greater than you’d expect.
Dave volunteered to be the men’s room correspondent and took photos of the men’s room for us. Watch out KMac, your “friend” is trying to steal your gig.
On this merry day, I’d like to give a shout-out to my friend Tierney for her sweet gift, a book of photos of bathroom signs from various countries with indoor plumbing. I received another book from my sister: The Birth and Death of the Cool by our favorite historian Ted Gioia, who deemed JAZZ TOILET the worst of hundreds of jazz blogs. I may take up my sister’s suggestion and do a book review in the new year.
Pianist Nial Djuliarso, who sat in on a few tunes, tells us how to say, “Where’s the restroom?” in Indonesian –
Fat Cat
Posted: December 11, 2012 Filed under: Greenwich Village | Tags: TUESDAY TOILET TALK Comments Off on Fat CatIt seems like people are always going to Fat Cat to hang out. Right off the Christopher St./Sheridan Sq. station, the place is bustling with people inside and out on the sidewalk. Upon entering, you’ll flash your ID and pay a small cover in exchange for a wristband and a Fat Cat stamp, which may stain your hand for days after.
There were too many people for my liking and I tried my best to not get jabbed by anyone playing pool, as I strained to carry on conversations with friends in the spacious basement space abuzz with everyone’s chatter. It wasn’t so bad once we were able to get a ping-pong table in one of the netted areas off to the side.
The band added to the noise and quite frankly, it made little difference who played what. Though there was a small attentive crowd on the couches surrounding the performance area, the majority was much more interested in playing games like chess, scrabble, shuffleboard and imbibing great amounts of beer. Likely because of that last interest, the place had large and clearly marked restroom signs in prominent places.
And while it wasn’t my kind of scene, I was glad to be there to celebrate a college buddy’s birthday. Many move out here from California for graduate school or work and I’ve a number of good friends from both undergrad and high school out here now. In densely populated Manhattan, I’ve randomly run into familiar faces from home quite a few times, passing by someone and thinking a moment later, “Hey, that’s the girl from rhetoric class freshmen year.”
The women’s restroom maintained the seedy dive feel of the rest of the place. The toilet in one of the two stalls was leaking slightly and there was a bit of graffiti on the wall, which surprisingly, I haven’t seen in the other clubs. I tried to get a peek into the men’s room but didn’t have a chance, as guys kept going in and out. In fact, in hovering near the restrooms, I noticed that the men’s room often had a line, maybe even more than the women’s did.
Other than the nightlife activities, Fat Cat offers other services, from chess to music lessons. Growing up, my dad, sister and I used to play ping-pong on the piano bench to determine who would have to do the dishes; I could take ping-pong lessons and show them up this Christmas.
Wojtek from Poland tells us how to say, “Where’s the restroom?” in Polish —
ShapeShifter Lab
Posted: November 27, 2012 Filed under: Brooklyn | Tags: TUESDAY TOILET TALK Comments Off on ShapeShifter Lab“Should we sit in the first row?”
We settled on the second of the five rows in the front section, as that would require only 80% focus on the music, according to Jack. Jack provides emergency tech support for us and restored the blog when I inadvertently made the entire site crash. He once again saved the day by assessing that the requirements of front row seating would be incongruent with our 80% brain capacity to pay attention to the band, after an early morning of Black Friday shopping and an even earlier morning at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade a day prior.
Though waiting for over three hours with popsicle toes, surrounded by angry people wanting to see oversized balloons of Hello Kitty and SpongeBob was worth doing once, parades are more fun when viewed on television—but not so with musical performances. Live performances are incomparable to recordings and I was excited to see four different bands live Friday night for the OutNow Records release party.
I was particularly interested in seeing drummer George Schuller again, remembering his gig years ago at Korzo in Brooklyn and thinking to myself that I would want my group to sound like his. RIBBS, the quartet he performed with this time sounded nothing like my memory of his group. The Yoni Kretzmer 2Bass Quartet that followed them had bassist twinsies with matching beanies, glasses and earth tone tops. 9 Volt, the last group we stuck around for rocked.
Jack photographed the men’s room for us. The men’s room seems a bit cramped, with similar square footage as the women’s room but partitioned off into three sections for the toilet, urinal and sink.
The women’s room felt open, bare and white, like the rest of ShapeShifter Lab. It had no mirror but perhaps they are still working on finishing up the restroom, as it is a somewhat new venue. The flower-shaped tiles on the spacious cement floor was a nice touch.
At ShapeShifter Lab, you can choose to sip on tea and use the free Wi-Fi at one of the back tables by the bar while listening to live music—like a jazz café of sorts. Or you can sit in one of the rows and admire the color changing light against the white brick wall behind the performers. Dress warmly because it gets chilly in there. I suppose the cool air is a part of its Brooklyn converted warehouse space charm.
I’m glad our West Coast emergency tech support, as well as another college friend Amy, could join us for this assignment. I love Jack and Amy so much that I may start an indie rock band named after them.
Dorjee from Tibet tells us how to say, “Where’s the restroom?” in Tibetan –
Smoke
Posted: November 13, 2012 Filed under: Upper West Side | Tags: TUESDAY TOILET TALK 3 Comments »Despite the nor’easter that followed on the heels of Sandy, I braved the first snowfall of the year last week to check out the ‘round midnight session at Smoke. I hadn’t had a chance to wear my snow boots yet, except once and very briefly last year’s Halloween weekend when it unexpectedly snowed, so I was feeling rather excited about getting bundled up. I purchased those boots along with several thermal shirts for an East Coast winter while still back in Cali, in faith that I would get into grad school in the city. And I did, but that winter didn’t come.
No longer merely the brunt of small talk, the weather has been noteworthy with life-threatening storm conditions one week and t-shirt and hoodie wearing afternoons the next. I do now feel justified for checking weather.com every hour. You never know what’s going to happen.
Saxophonist Roxy Coss led the late Wednesday night session with pianist Chris Pattishall, bassist Dave Baron and drummer Luca Santaniello. Dave and Roxy accompanied the toilet team on our first assignment to the Vanguard and Smalls back in February so it would have been a JAZZ TOILET reunion had our men’s room correspondent KMac made it out that night.
KMac felt bad he couldn’t come and not only that, he also felt ‘unmanly’ at my calling him delicate and weak sauce for not being willing to schlep his drums uptown in the snowstorm after his gig to hang. I’d like to issue a formal apology and say for the record that our men’s room correspondent conforms to conventional notions of masculinity with his diet of copious amounts of red meat and his robust physique. But make note that he can be particular about his moisturizer, as his skin is sensitive.
Smoke has one restroom directly to the left of the stage, which the horn players linger in front of when they’re not soloing. It’s a quaint restroom with a celestial lamp hanging from the ceiling that matches the décor of the rest of the small rectangular club. I appreciated that the door lock is the kind that tells you whether the restroom is red for occupied or green for vacant.
There is another door to the left of the restroom door marked off for employees. Dave told me that when the room gets really crowded, he has to go through the door and down the nearly vertical stairs to put his bass in the back. Can you imagine trying to walk down a ladder with an upright bass in your hands?
Ahmed from Saudi Arabia tells us how to say, “Where’s the restroom?” in standard Arabic —
Jazz Standard
Posted: October 23, 2012 Filed under: Flatiron | Tags: TUESDAY TOILET TALK Comments Off on Jazz StandardOn Sunday, I checked out the Jacky Terrasson Trio with Burniss Travis (bass) and Justin Faulkner (drums) at the Jazz Standard. With their nuanced and adventurous playing exploring the full range of dynamics, the trio breathed new life into old standards. I was reminded that the piano trio is the perfect combination, requiring no more and no less.
My cousin, who just arrived that morning on vacation from Korea, really dug it and asked if I get to listen to this kind of music everyday. Yeah, I guess I do—I hadn’t thought of it that way, having grown accustomed to the overflowing music scene here with many options for the jazz genre alone within a five-mile radius. Things I take for granted are often notable looking from the outside in.
I was relieved that we were able to make it for the late set after an extended afternoon of shopping in Chelsea and on Bleecker Street. My cousin absolutely insisted that she buy me clothes but whether my money or not, I couldn’t justify buying a dress that was essentially a couple pieces of lace sewed together for more than my entire month’s spending budget. I didn’t resist too hard because I realized that this is her way of showing me love, not to mention that I really liked an outfit she picked out for me.
I had never been to that part of Bleecker Street, even though it is just a few blocks away from where all the jazz clubs are in Greenwich Village. Although I initially distinguished New York from Los Angeles by its mixing bowl nature of diverse peoples converging in public spaces, I’m sensing more and more that it is deeply segregated in its own way. An educator friend told me about her work with kids growing up in Harlem who practically never go outside of the immediate neighborhood. Their experience of New York must be vastly different from the foreigner here for an internship, the workaholic who makes more money than he has time to spend, and the kid who attends an Upper East Side school.
Being a tourist in the city with my cousin so far has made for a different experience, from her offer to surgically widen my eyes so that I don’t keep closing them in her photos to shopping in boutiques without looking at the price tag in true Gangnam style.
Behind an entrance framed by grand red curtains, the Jazz Standard restrooms are excellent. Though the ceiling is on the lower side in the women’s room, the three stalls are wide and the staff seemed scrupulous about cleanliness. Both times I was in there, a hostess was wiping down water that kept collecting and dripping down from the edge of the sink.
They had a separate wheelchair accessible restroom, which I hadn’t noticed in a previous visit. I wasn’t sure how one gets down the flight of stairs to access the restroom but it has been brought to my attention that the Jazz Standard has an elevator somewhere for patrons in wheelchairs.
Aza from Kyrgyzstan tells us how to say, “Where’s the restroom?” in Kyrgyz –