6/22/02
Excellent Mermaid Parade today--slower-moving than usual (I think there were one or two particular floats/trucks that were the culprits), but Brooklyn appears to have more native freaks than ever. It was baking hot, and I somehow managed to get a little sunburn on one arm; maybe I sweated off my sunblock. But we ran into some friends, and saw lots of happy sparkly aquatically-themed people. I brought along the fish mask that we'll be using for Fish & Compliments, though I didn't really get to wear it. Also brought along Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay, which everyone's been telling me for years I need to read. Everyone, as it turns out, was exactly right.
Afterwards, we had dinner at another Sietsema pick: a Pakistani restaurant called Swad, in southern Brooklyn, where I had what I think is the best nan bread I've ever tasted, as well as some wonderful "sweet rice" (cooked with sugar water, as well as bits of candied citrus peel) and a spinach dish that had what I think were toovar dal mixed in with it, and maybe some other green I didn't recognize, too. While we were in there, another customer kept having staff and customers come up to him; a waiter explained to us that he was a famous Pakistani movie star (the name was a bit like Tahir Naswat, but that's obviously wrong), who'd just come in off the street--"he eats here, with the common people."