Got Crack?

Sounds...

It was one of thsoe kitchy movies that all the hipsters love, but there were some sweet lines.

http://www.collegehumor.com/news/2005-01-20.napoleon.php

Groundhog

My university has this groundhog event every advancing spring. Traditionally, it consisted of hundreds of people trespassing on some unused, wooded property, and drinking cheap beer for 36 hours until the grounhog appeared.

There was an alumni groundhog gathering here last night. No woods. No keg. A restaraunt on 3rd Ave. instead. There were two people I knew there and one person I knew only peripherally but with whom I had a number people in common; found out he lives in a 41-foot yacht - holy shit. Talked with some generally very nice married people and met a couple of people who graduated in long, long after me, which should have been especially depressing but somehow wasn't. We all ended up going to another bar in Alphabet City where salsa dancing was the prevalent theme. It was a pretty nice place, but I have absolutley no interest in dancing that does not include jumping up and down and mouthing the words to the song.

Björkestra

Last night I went to see Travis Sullivan's Björkestra at the Knitting Factory - orchestral, jazz-infused arrangements of Björk songs. It was pretty good. They started off with the oveture to Dancer in the Dark, which I have't heard since the last time I saw the movie a couple of years ago. It still hits hard. It was a good show, but I got easily bored with the long jazz riffs inserted in the arrangements. Technically, the riffs were great, but I can't get into jazz when I'm standing up. I have to be sitting down to enjoy it because there's no narrative line to the music. I'm just too easily distracted when I'm trying to see around someone and not spill my beer.

On another note, if I read one more thing about wunderkind (and my new neighbor, incidentally) Conor Oberst, I'm going to vomit. Yes, he's good, but this whole city is falling over themselves praising him since he moved here. What's the dealio, yo? I got over the folksy-angsty guitar shit a long time ago.

If only it could happen to me...

Last night on Smallville, a teenaged Clark Kent warmed up his date's cold cocoa with his laser-beam eyes. Now that was super.

Sculpture for living.

My corner.

iPod snow

Snow in Soho.

Freaks and Snow

Big ol' snowstorm Saturday. I walked around all day long, stopping breifly into the Freakatorium, a mini-museum on Clinton St. featuring wierdness of sideshows, two-headed turtles, elephant men, and the skeleton of the Mermaid of Fiji. Normally, this kind of this really gives me the creeps - a sense that something sinister and perverse is taking place. Well, it was perverse, but it wasn't sinister. This time, it was really just a fascination with realms of greyed and dusty otherness that took hold as I looked at the pictures of the Lobster boy, bearded lady, and the legs of parasitic twins poking forth from the stomach of a dapperly dressed Victorian.Today's the last day that the Feakatorium will be open. LESers, they've lost their lease. Same old gentrification story. Too bad. I can't say that I would ever go in there again anyway, but I'm glad that I saw it before it closed. So, after the Freakatorium I continued through the Lower East Side and Soho. I was surprised how few people there were out. It was such a different way to experience the city: quiet, few cars, uncrowded even in Soho. Like Thanksgiving holiday on a deserted campus. Blanketing everything and creating a spectral blue-white glare, the snow made a whole different city, one in which I was disoriented. A good Saturday. I ended it Dostoyevsky, two burbons, and a bath.