01.31.04

after years of talking about seeing henry rollins do his spoken word thing, i finally made magic happen at the town hall last night - quite capably, i thought, as i wangled fifth row comp seats for a sold-out show from the harried but receptive ticket booth guy. rollins's boxed life, a disc about layovers in phoenix and wayne newton and whitesnake, was my soothing bedtime headphone disc for awhile - he does bellow now and again, but his voice is very soothing at conversational levels.

in person, at ten paces, he's predictably huge, but he also looks a bit like george bush or my cousin tom. i still love the anecdotes about eating scallops in memphis with william shatner and the like, but his political stuff falls a bit flat. relatively well-researched and painfully earnest, sure, but all i'd really wanted was to know his pick in the democratic primaries.

me, i'm liking john kerry - not for his wins, but for his domestic moratorium on the death penalty. also the dean rants - not dean's, but his followers' - are questionable. maybe joe trippi's successor can tone down their hate a little - i mean, if rollins can be civil nay suave, given his history, i think we all need to have a talk with the man in the mirror.

01.27.04ii


on snow, re: tom re: jen, from the black table's weekly ratings -

THOSE CRUEL, CRUEL U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS ADS: Okay, in sitting on the subway in balmy September they seemed harmless. Oh ho, how droll: here the ice is for your drink. I get it! Learn the value of a sand dollar! But U.S. Virgin Islands Tourism Bureau: this is not funny anymore. Do you imagine that the R train is packed with confused rich people in furs, burning money to keep warm, thinking, "Well, I have all the money in the world and can jaunt away to anywhere I please for an unlimited amount of time, but I just can't imagine where on planet Earth it is warm while the Northern hemisphere is cold!" Seriously, U.S. Virgin Islands, it is so fucking cold here. We spend our rent money boozing away the frostbite. We have four different sweaters on under this coat. We won't voluntarily go outside until May. I swear to god, everyone who has the means to "schedule an appointment with a palm tree" evacuated this sub-zero hellhole back in November, so please just stop taunting us. If you take down these ads, I promise, I'll quit bitching about Poetry in Motion for the rest of my life. F-


(audrey ference)

01.27.04


angsty phrase of the day: part of me doesn't want to be married, and part of me doesn't want to be single, and you deal with it and that's life.


([recently] married co-worker)


crunk corporate phrase of the day: Professor Coffee described the poison pill as especially aggressive.


(hollinger dispute is hung up in delaware law, new york times 01.27)

01.24.04


how cold was it in times square last night? so cold that the pay phones ran away. joe and i got into a fight about whether or not i needed to wear a bigger coat - for the first half of the evening i was just fine, and i found it unreasonable that i should have extra clothing just so that he wouldn't worry. for the second half, when george and i were trying to get a cab and the wind was forcing us to make garry shandling faces, he was out of gloating range.


clothing for dogs: on the west coast, generally considered a cruelty. dachsunds in sweaters were passable, for dachsunds are unbearably cute on all occasions, but my co-worker at the SPCA who insisted on making her chihuahua wear a leopard print cowboy hat - unconscionable. out here, by contrast, people who drag their naked yorkies through the snow are just mean. if i could knit, i'd be handing out little ponchos on the corner. and severe beatings.


black ice: when newscasters first started talking about it, i thought gatorade. i still think gatorade, even when i see it on the sidewalk, but i also think of losing my innocence to a big slippery patch outside the apartment last week. i now have a bruise once described as 'the moonrise on a faraway planet.'


the mysterious, ghostbusters-lookin' office building across the street: apparently the headquarters for universal music. the security guards took pity when our building was on fire and smuggled us into the lobby, where joe solved the mystery. i'd been wondering why huge expensive SUVs had been beaching themselves on the sidewalk out front - the previous theory involved the all-you-can-eat meat restaurant next door, which may still have a role.

01.13.04


say what you will about society's constrictions, but given that tomorrow is predicted to be new york city's coldest day in a decade, i'm glad to have discovered that ye olde accidentally purchased control top nylons keep one warm like nothing else. could i up the ante with a whalebone corset?


also beating the freeze with help from the soup nazi. yes, he's as irritable as he was on seinfeld. yes, his soup is spectacular (soup kitchen international beat le cirque in the zagat guide a few years ago). the real revelation is that he also has the best strawberries i've tasted in years.

01.12.04


which democratic primary candidate are you...in bed?

01.09.04


as peevish joe and a concerned call from jen suggest, i should be more literal in describing the severity of our fiery adventure. all things considered, it was quite mild: aye, the hallway was full of smoke and our apartment reeks, but the serious stuff happened in the basement. our building was born before planners got wise about air flow. the firemen, bless them, smashed a lot of windows and doors in their vivacity, but that's what they do. our most harrowing moments, other than when joe was freezing his ass off on the street, were when we had to find a concierge preoccupied enough to rent us a room before he noticed our meowing luggage.


son of revenge of the movie cinquains -


halloween:


gave birth
to the notion
that, after kicking ass,
one should make sure one's attacker
is dead.


the shaft:


satan's
elevator
kills; odd 9/11
predictions outside my office
building.


kentucky fried movie:


airplane!
skits, excessive
gonads; hilarious
in the kung fu / wizard of oz
sequence.


cold mountain


jack white
vomits, escapes
death; the civil war sucks;
starlets in period dress get
oscars.

01.08.04

thought i couldn't compete with jen's punishing chicago weather, but aha! we win! though the mercury has been hovering at around fifteen-twenty degrees, we clinched the crappy living situation award when joe jolted me awake last night because, o yes, the building was on fire. though he found me a pimp coat and i found pants, he got stuck on the sidewalk in a plaid blanket from the salvation army. very, well, chief joseph. 95% of my injuries came from cramming the cats into duffel bags and shimmying down the fire escape.

lmo: so our building is on fire.
mom: ...
lmo: it wasn't me!