Tag Archives: west village

I wanted to quote The Ting Tings here, but “Great DJ” doesn’t actually have any quotable lyrics whatsoever.

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 13, 2009 – 10:29 am
Filed under living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
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I went to Le Royale Saturday night with some trepidation to celebrate my friend Sonya’s birthday. See, we like to go to Le Royale on Friday nights for Robot Rock, where we can be sure to hear 80s new wave and current indie music. However, Sonya had to go and be born on April 11th instead of April 10th, so we had to go to what Le Royale was calling Grand Buffet Saturday. Not appealing, right? Unless you’re into Ponderosa and cheap Chinese food, I guess. (Which you are.)

But it turned out to be the best night ever! The DJ, I later learned, was named Vikas Sapra, and he’s now my favourite DJ ever. I’m the sort of person who has a reeeeeeeeeeally great time when the DJ’s playing a song I like and an inversely more horrible time when he’s playing something I don’t like/know. It’s definitely one of my more intolerable personality traits and something I feel bad for subjecting my poor friends to, but there it is all the same, and not even two fistfuls of vodka can make it any better.

Luckily, this Sapra fellow is a master of mixes. One second he’s playing “Kids” by MGMT and I’m going crazy, the next he’s playing some shitty hip-hop song that makes me want to kill myself, but then he’s playing Bowie’s “Modern Love” and everything’s great again. And he only plays the best 30 seconds of each song, which sucks for the songs I love but is perfect for the times I’ve reached for my razorblade.

My friend Beth and I spent the night right in front of the DJ booth in order to have enough room to flail our arms wildly like white girls dancing do and to look approvingly at Vikas when he played Blur and Nirvana and not-so-approvingly when he played One Republic (who I originally called New Republic until I just had the foresight to Google their name to be sure). Now my weekend schedule will officially consist of karaoke on Fridays, Le Royale on Saturdays, and “Celebrity Apprentice” on Sundays.

Banksy’s Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 6, 2008 – 2:10 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, super furry animals
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The night before Halloween, the good doctor and I went to see the second-to-last night of the Banksy exhibit, The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill. We weren’t exactly sure where we were going and wound up in a as-seedy-as-the-West-Village-gets part of the West Village full of gay bars and fetish shops and thought we were soooooo cool for going to such an underground, out-of-the-way showing. And then we realized it was actually on 7th Ave., right beside a SushiSamba and a Jekyll and Hyde. Lame!

There was a bit of a line, and some British-accented douchebags walked by and yelled, “You’re waiting in line for this?! It’s not worth it!” But a minute later, we saw him perched outside one of the windows, taking photos with everyone else. We were hoping one of them was secretly Banksy.

The sign outside welcomed us in for some mechanically-retrieved meats,

and the walls inside beckoned us to buy treats for our pets:

From the outside, a sleeping cheetah, complete with a swinging tail and belly that inflated and deflated to show breathing:

From the inside, a cheetah-print coat. AMAZING!:

A chimpanzee watching a pair of other chimpanzees on television, pausing during the humping parts:

An ancient-looking Tweety Bird, his feather lying at his feet:

A spider in a gumball machine, inexplicably:

My absolute favourite, a pair of swimming fish sticks:

This is the thing that–when I saw a video of it online–made me say, “I HAVE to see this!” And it was even better in person:

Many types of snakes, made of many different kinds of sausages, including baby snakelets:

Chickens made of nuggets, pecking at their sauce:

And a rather disgusting/awesome nugget just hatched out of its egg:

A pretty bunny:

A video camera bird with its birdlings in a nest:


Love the flashing “liquor” and “wines” sign in the background.

The obligatory penis in the guestbook:

And finally, a netted dolphin that we swear is actually always outside of Jekyll and Hyde and accidentally became a part of the exhibit:

I managed to talk Dr. Boyfriend into riding it while I videotaped, but I forgot to ever hit record. To compensate, he allowed me to take this picture, which is, I’m sure, the only time he’ll be near a farm. Even a faux one:

Funny how mechanical food can somehow seem cute, huh? I didn’t take away any bigimportant message about the ethical treatment of animals or anything, but I did take away feelings of amazement and awesomeness and a whole lotta gladness that I live in the city I do.

What’s the French Word for Breast?

Posted by plumpdumpling on September 5, 2008 – 3:49 pm
Filed under boobies, living in new york is neat
Tagged as , ,

So there’s this really adorable French store in the West Village called Pylones that drew my doctor boyfriend and me in with its intensely bright neon colors one Saturday night a few weeks ago while we walked around after dinner. It looks like anime exploded both all over the walls and on everything being sold, which is a pretty exciting juxtaposition to the otherwise dark Grove Street with its trendy restaurants.

While Kamran was attracted to the $45 thermoses, I really wanted the $25 hen handbag. And of course there’s the $16 magnetic bird that chirps when you touch it and then is still chirping three hours later but is so cute you don’t mind.

But the one thing we couldn’t figure out?:


What the hell is a titi spoon?!

Benny’s, B-Side, fat cat, and the Sadly Defunct Luca Lounge

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 18, 2008 – 5:37 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, par-tay, restaurant ramblings, super furry animals
Tagged as , , , , , ,

Last Friday night, a couple of my friends wanted to get together for happy hour, so we scoured drinkdeal.com and came up with Benny’s Burritos, because we pretty much want to drink giant margaritas all the time. And giant margaritas we had.

For $3, they’ll give you a tumbler of margarita. For $6, you get a Collins glass. And for $9? The biggest beer mug you can imagine. My friends Beth and Charles and I arrived early to take advantage of the deal, which is only offered at the bar, and by the time I finished my coconut-flavored margarita mug, I was giddy. Poor Boyfriend Kamran showed up all professional-like in his button-down and slacks to find me howling and slapping the table at everything Beth and Charles said.


Despite the fact that they live together, Adam has a hard time letting on that he actually likes Sonya.


This is Charles and Kamran’s attempt to look like badasses. SUCCESS!


Fake smile!


Everyone else really sucks at taking non-flash pictures on my camera. Why didn’t I become the steady-handed brain surgeon I planned to be?

And that concludes the Requisite Pictures of People Having Fun portion of this entry.

Not to make this a restaurant review or anything, but I have to mention that our food was pretty great. I’m on a corn kick right now and made Kamran share the corn fritters appetizer with me, which was a plate of little fried balls that resembled hush puppies. And the consistency of their filling was pretty hush-puppy-ish, too, only with CORN added. Best thing you can imagine? I thought so. The burritos were mission-style, so they were huge and full of the stuff you usually see as side dishes. I had the Grilled Mango Burrito, which came with enough mango salsa to douse the thing, and Kamran got the Chicken Chipotle Burrito, which was spice-AY.

Adam was in the mood for foosball, so we walked toward B-Side on surprise! Avenue B. Halfway there, Kamran brought up Luca Lounge, the bar he took me to on our first date lo those many months ago, where we admitted to the embarrassing bands we liked and I made a joke about his timing me while I went to the restroom before remembering that old cellphone commercial where the guy who asks the girl if she wants to time him on the toilet was supposedly a douchebag. Kamran described the red velvet Victorian couches, the backyard garden, the whoa-clean restrooms, and our friends were hooked. And then we got there and found THIS:


Sadly, no!

It was CLOSED! Like, for GOOD! Just then, my best friend Tracey called from Ohio, and when I told her about our bad luck, she reminded me that she and her last boyfriend went back to their first date restaurant on their fourth anniversary, found it had closed, and broke up soon after. NOOOOOOOOOOO! But she’s engaged to someone way awesomer now, so it’s cool. Kamran and I agreed that if this means the end of the line for us, it’s been a good run, and we’ll part without tears and bitterness. Plus, their menu was still lit up outside, and that has to mean something.

We returned to the original plan of B-Side, where we opted for the $5 PBR-and-a-shot-of-the-cheapest-most-painful-going-down-whiskey-you-can-imagine deal. We went to the back room, which was twelve to sixteen hundred degrees but made up for it by having a hugely huge wraparound couch with no apparent rat damage and concert posters for rad bands on the wall. We chugged our whiskey as a group (OR SO WE THOUGHT, UNTIL SOMEONE FOUND A FULL SHOT GLASS LOLLYGAGGING ON OUR TABLE LATER) and then played several thousand rounds of foosball, all of which resulted in outrageous wins for Adam, because he has a foosball table in his office and is a bastard. My camera battery had almost completely died at this point, so I kept turning the thing on for a second and snapping a picture as fast as I could, which resulted in a lot of shots like this:


Yes, Charles is indeed wearing an entire suit. And Beth looks like a mannequin.

Sonya and Adam knew I was starting to get a little sleepy and grumpy, so they dragged us to Le Royale for Robot Rock, ’cause I loooove dancing to some electronic indie whatnot. We ended up having to wait in line for 20 minutes or so, during which time the same guy walked by twice with his girlfriend and said mocking things to us like, “Did you get in yet?” and “I heard this place really sucks.” And when we got to the front of the line, they were trying to charge us $10 to get in. And even though Kamran was going to pay my $10 like the gentleman he is, I refused. WE DO NOT PAY TO GET INTO BARS!

Except when the bar is fat cat, which charges a mere $3 for hours and hours of entertainment. Sonya has tried to get me to go there a million times before, but I’ve always denied her because she’s way too excitable about these sorts of things, and I figured it’d turn out to be super-lame. But there’s pool! And ping-pong! And chess! And Scrabble! And live jazz! And a bunch of dorky hipsters everywhere! It’s a massive (at least by NYC standards) basement with a bunch of tables and chairs for drinkin’ and gamin’, individual netted rooms for ping-pong, and the sort of music that makes you feel like wearing a flapper dress and smoking from an obnoxiously long cigarette holder. It helps that I totally killed Kamran at ping-pong manymany times in a row, but that’s neither here nor there. So I started out my fat cat visit feeling miserable and wanting to leave immediately and ended it by being the last one to want to go.

A+!