vicarious

SO, first of all, how cute was it to walk out of the subway on 7th Ave in Brooklyn and barely be able to walk through all the kids dressed as princesses, vampires, and witches. If only my camera was already here.

Also, I am sick. Not brutally sick, but enough that I feel awful and I'm not going in to work tomorrow. It's just a cold, so hopefully i'll be back at full strength in a couple of days. Which means - I skipped tonight's Mountain Goats show at the Knitting Factory, and I also skipped the Cake Shop Halloween show (bands dress and perform as their favorite bands). Can't wait to find out every detail of (both) Mountain Goats shows from Russo, and find out who was performing as Jesus and Mary Chain at Cake Shop. I wonder if i'll be better in time for Moveable Hype...

All sorts of other things:

Maureen Dowd had a great piece in this weekend's NYTimes Mag about Feminism and Relationships. One of the things she says is that men are intimidated by strong women. Which is both obvious and really stupid, as well as something totally foreign to me. Maureen's piece seems based at least in part in her own struggles to find a man not intimidated by her strong will/intellect (though it's anything but a personal essay). It's adapted from her new book "Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide," which comes out in November. I for one think she's incredibly sexy and would totally take her out to dinner if she'd let me.

Some more NYTimes stuff worth reading: the transcript of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech about how much he'd like to destroy Israel. I really don't like this guy.

Brighter news: The Times is finally hip to how hard Lisbon rocks. This reminded me that this is really the time for me to move to Portugal. the upsides are infinite. the lone downside: family pressure (grandmother, aunts, etc) to marry a "nice Portuguese girl" would go from subtle to overpowering. or maybe they're past that?

Remember Season 1 of America's Next Top Model? I had a clear favorite. Elyse is very smart and sooo gorgeous, has great taste in music/movies/etc (including an intelligent dissent on the virtues of the DangerDoom record!). She's modeling as a career now, apparently as a detour from the medical research she wants to pursue, and she's blogging about it here. It's awesome.


Pitchfork had a great feature today about how women (Cat Power, Fiona Apple) are treated with the fragile-damaged label while men in the same vein are viewed as geniuses. Basically it's a revealing hypothesis about Devendra Barnhart's hidden psychic wounds, and the walls he puts up to hide them. All of this starts with a personality typing of the characters in The Goonies. If you know who these people are (the musicians, not the Goonies) you should definitely read it. Pitchfork also had a nice interview with Antony. But nothing Line of the Day-worthy of late.

In my constant quest to discover new music, a lot of stuff gets downloaded, put in a folder, and never listened to. Well, not never, but the files sit there indefinitely. There's just too much new music coming in - cds, promos, mp3s, whatever - for me to possibly keep up. But this month I'm trying to wade through some of the huge stores of unlistened-to material sitting in my new music folder. So last night I walked around Park Slope while playing "Black Dice: Live at The Empty Bottle." And it's f'ing fantastic, exactly what I want from Black Dice right now. [I used to love them being the loudest band in the universe, full of noisy chaos and 'fuck you all' volumes and tones, but now that strikes me as less rewarding than their incorporation of ambient sound-construction.] The only problem is, I don't have any idea where I got it from, or when, or when it was recorded. Or for that matter, where the Empty Bottle is.

Update: apparently The Empty Bottle is in Chicago. that's a start.

Oh, and one more thing: "Scalito" is sketchy. I think this says enough.