03.27.02 we are your friends


faster, pussycat! kill! kill! (1965) #
+ the hourglass figure gets the respect it is due. sort of.
- chauvinists' corpses dent beautiful cars.


sexy beast (2000) ##
+ ben kingsley is a fine villain. smart alternative to guy ritchie's lock, stock / snatch / madonna stuff, if one gets the hankering for UK crime flicks.
- cockney accents are hell. and i have no clue about the machine gun / rabbit-man sequences.


pickings are slim at video city, but they care about their clientele: when sexy beast finally came in, the clerk very sincerely hoped it would make joe happy. she phoned later to inquire about his happiness - it was mildly bizarre, but i needn't understand a joke to enjoy it.


feeling better about my dog rapport today - i'm trying to power through my management-mandated lunch hour on the patio at safeway, and folks keep abandoning their beasts outside the coffeehouse. everyone then sits on my feet: at present i have a black poodle and a cherubic sheltie mix. i am madge, patron saint of domesticated animals.

03.22.02 her hair has gotten wet


happeneds and to-be-happenings, friday


1. talked convictions (happy about the murder decision, i think) with my mandatory worker's comp doc, was assured that my bite wound won't prevent me from fighting the war on terrorism ("someone must be ready")


2. have hissed, will hiss at chuck for eating daffodils (kidney failure is bad) and molesting the crabs


3. bought fly pants (ha! ha!), boxers


4. returned the hunger (1983) ##
+ peter murphy sings "bela lugosi's dead", catherine deneuve / susan sarandon make sweet, sweet love
- david bowie hidden in old man makeup, then shoved in a box in the attic


5. rented, will watch faster, pussycat! kill! kill!, night on earth


6. toyed with guess the dictator or sit-com character, found that i'm buffy and joe is benson


7. was rained upon most foully


8. will tidy up bedroom, kidchamp


9. will wash dishes, crabs


10. will mail rent check, bills


11. opened empty inbox (where's the love, you misers?)


12. shimmied.




literature doesn't inspire songs, people do:

Reading created the inner landscape, as Sam Sheppard calls it. I would not be able to have put my own experiences into expression without the examples of writers like Sheppard and Kerouac, poets like Wordsworth, and thinkers like Beckett. Reading did not come easily for me as a kid.


(Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins)

the road to hell is paved with good intestines.

03.20.02 rose to her roman nose


i was desperate for calamity when i was small, but it never worked out - emily was the one who fell through a pool filter and tore her leg on the swing set, joanna the one who broke the same finger in two doors and got caught with a rock in the neighbor-kids / goat incident. me, i didn't even manage to catch chicken pox until junior high. i'd eat poisonous plants, jump from balconies - nothing. joanna puked on my head once, but that was about it.


the fixation was tasteless rather than morbid - i wasn't starved for attention, i was just bored. i'm a scar party these days, but my misfortunes are ridiculous - cosmic retribution, i guess, for being so flip about health. big scar on my back from a taco bell wheelchair access ramp. a nasty old burn on my arm, thank you muffin pan. today a rather substantial hole in my hand - big angry, um, poodle. like being mauled by an afro.

03.17.02 look back in angora


yep, god wants me to wear skirts. joe and i did our best to wrest new pants for me from union square, but we ended up with mediocre sushi and some clearance underwear. not so bad, but i hate being thwarted. and i'm tired: the boy scoffs at this, but jeans in particular are hard work. i would love to be able to purchase x-waisted and y-length stuff in whatever store, whichever brand, but ladies don't play like that - more like battleship, go with random coordinates and hope something happens. god help you if the clothes are too small and you get a sneaker stuck down a pant leg.


one would think i'd have learned something from all the h.p. lovecraft i've been reading. no, i sought knowledge where i did not belong, and a search for chicks on speed stuff yielded the boob monster. leave that link alone, or you'll be sorry.


next wave of friendmarriages is on the horizon - three before may so far. it is good to be single, goes the mantra, he must learn to love B movies before we set anything in stone. i should work on arizona and soul. to play with miniature guest tables, though, to fight with stationers, to dance and make people cry - i do all of that now, sure, but i hate being thwarted.

No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs right into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being one of those malenky machines.

03.15.02 oh please leave


lauren vs. pants, round 3: mine are falling down. i don't think it's Total Health Plan related - i've been off the wagon since new york - i think i buy bad pants. they loosen when i wash them, which flies in the face of all the garment science i know. maybe god is telling me to wear more skirts. that would be okay.


more on laurens, less on pants: as paul has said, LNYC is quite benevolent. fun was had when we coincided after the second magnetic fields show. i fear that she hates us for disappearing after she led us back to brooklyn, but i fear that about everyone. at any rate, i enjoyed our walk in the rain.


weird, self-congratulatory article in the latest alumni magazine: palo alto is a shabby excuse for a college town, and stanford is durn proud of it. much is made of old leland's fixation on prohibition and rich grads who move back to town and buy up potential student hovels. given my attention span as a student, i should be grateful that local night life was piss-poor; procrastination finds a way, though, and i probably contracted the plague swimming in lake lag instead of walking to spago. boo, stanford. i might forgive you if you let my sister in this year, but you're far from cool with me.

"There's enough to do [on campus] for me - hanging out with friends, going for coffee every night and watching videos," says sophomore Rachel Rubin, sitting with four friends at a table at the second-floor Stanford Bookstore Cafe.
Nevertheless, "I definitely see things I miss about Texas," says Veronica Flores, a sophomore from Fort Worth [emphasis mine, but jesus].

see lukas post. post, lukas, post!

03.10.02 the world over


fun with co-workers at the great american music hall yesterday afternoon. i haven't been there since paul and i saw rasputina, what, four years ago - simpler days of pseudogothery and spit-napkin versus an UNDER 21 hand stamp. now i envy people who get chairs.


tribe 8: the sex pistols + breasts + toddlers. joe didn't like their sweat-mopping; i thought it was kind of sexy.


chicks on speed: superlative work on cracker's "eurotrash girl". the rest of their set was fairly bad, but they either know karl lagerfeld or got mick jagger to revisit his saturday night live impression for their video montage. mildly intriguing, in any case.


le tigre: kathleen hanna, i love you.

03.09.02 the fat man's plan

i lost my print copy of the onion, but i found a rant flyer from brooklyn in my bag

I talk like a kid, but I'm older than a vampire bat. And I have demands. I need better drugs. My rent's too high. I miss the snow. I like the weather since the new mayor though, right?

, its reverse a seismograph from september 11th. i have real and shame-inducing difficulty associating cataclysm with the richter scale: getting under the reinforced dining room table was a competitive sport at our house, and earthquakes' magnitudes were, well, scores. 2.3 at the world trade center for 8 seconds, according to this flyer. knowing how sick it would be to sneer doesn't kill the urge.


if a position could approximate the trip, that one might do it. consistently inappropriate reactions to the Heavy and Notable.


i hate museums. no, i hate museums with proctors, and i was nearly removed from the met when i started touching fancy chairs. there's a don delillo passage about the most photographed barn in america - photographers photograph photographers' photographs ad nauseam and it's terribly post modern, our gazing at gazes. for pity's sake, i have no interest in starry night (5' away at the moma, woo woo) if i can't touch it. it will hang for centuries to come, and children's children's children could learn and grow through similar frustrations in that very moma spot when i am dead, and that may be a good thing, my whole starry night not-touching. it still feels wrong.


no touching at the butterfly conservatory in the natural history museum, either. we rushed across town and spent $6 to tiptoe through steaming greenery and not molest the butterflies. it could have been satisfying to know that no one would see what i saw when the exhibit reopened the next day: we saw mouthless moths who would burn through their body fat and die that night, maybe, and newborns who sputtered across the ground because they had no antennae. i'm not trying to say that i enjoy watching things die - i'd be a veterinarian in a heartbeat if i thought i could pull it together for that sort of thing. i'm saying that a butterfly left a docent's hand and landed on my forehead, and i loved our trip because of that.

03.07.02 bulldozer to study orchids


it's telling, maybe, that i was most comfortable at the white horse tavern and in central park. the former: deserted back rooms, a decent jukebox, dylan thomas death memorabilia, kind bartenders. a dolorous expatriate vibe. three friends i didn't have to impress. the latter: a variation on the time-honored coffee walk with dad (in town for a conference). scenery to dissect (nice variation, there, on our customary strip malls and stucco blocks), couples with dogs, stories of dad's summer in town thirty years ago. it seems that a lot of people go to the city in order to brag to people who aren't there, so we did that to my little sister. ha, ha.


paul and i agreed that kidchamp and metameat would detail the nyc trip in ignorance of one another. i expect overlap, but i think that it will benefit me: turn to him, dear readers, when i skip details. he's a stickler (1).


my inner taskmistress planned this jaunt: we all knew i was bossy, but no one expected a clipboard and checklists. we've been home for days, and i still wince when i think i hear the cell phone: where to meet? where's our host? which subway died? i actually made myself sick with anxiety on wednesday morning. i fear that the boys hate me for morphing into a kindergarten teacher, but the high school memory of driving to los angeles without $200 concert tickets still pains me (2). fun was had. i think. i hope.


there was a brief, shining, rock star moment: luke took us to the prada store in soho and dragged me to a bank of elevators that turned out to be dressing rooms. he ushered me into one and stepped on a gray globe on the floor, whoosh, the glass doors slid shut. the mirror had a picture-within-picture video feed of our backs, so we watched ourselves like a football game in the middle of friends. then he stepped on another globe, whoosh, and the glass door became opaque. the fabulous folk on the other side oohed and called their friends over to watch me play with the dressing room. i have never awed so many for so long.


the actual rock stars (stephin merritt, lemony snicket, neil-gaiman-or-neil-gaiman's-publisher) were much less dramatic when we brushed shoulders after the second magnetic fields show. i told stephin that freezing girl scout cookies will make them taste nice and stale, and he found me much less interesting than the contents of his snifter. being awed is the first big no-no in new york, i guess. it will take a while to tell all of this.


(1) he told me about the corpse that turned up in the park the morning after my walk with dad. jesus.


(2) probably because it was an alanis morissette show, but i was with a church friend. we've all got dirty laundry.