Great times...

...but what kind of people refuse to get up and dance to Come On Eileen?

Wouldn't mama be proud.

Looks like someone is a chip off the old block.

So, he may not have completely lost his shit on HempNecklaceGuy, but the disapproval was palpable.

To tell the truth...

If Alex can bandy about rumors, so can I. Appropriate, considering that Joss Whedon has been tapped for the screenplay, but I wish he had cast his sights a little higher to the much more Amazonian Zoe.

"Your footsteps give you away."

It doesn't take much to propel me out of bed at 2:27 AM. My brain is usually dying for a stab at paranoia at that hour and my reflexes are unswerving yes-men in the dark. Last night it was a creak--or maybe a snick--that sent me up and about, exploring the undersides of beds, standing still and snuffling for long moments at doorways, coming eerily close to looking like some kind of barefoot invader myself. Probing corners, breath held.

And creeping to the window for the final check.

I never know what to expect when I look out. A flapping dog leash in the form of a noose. A ring of dancing jackrabbits (sinister animals). Maybe an eye peering back. But I was not prepared, in bending back the blind, for it to make the same noise that woke me. At that hour strange logic asserts itself and I felt sure that it could have only been me that I had heard minutes ago--standing there, dreaming myself back in bed and waking myself in turn. Or maybe I'd been late for my nightly appointment at the window and some ghostly impulse had given the blinds a sympathetic flick. Anyway, I was comforted where I probably should not have been, and followed my previous and future shades back to sleep.

Back in your crate.

It occurred to me last week as I blew past the open windows, shrieking inanities at the pup, that I should try being more selective with my invectives. Who is it exactly that the luckless passerby thinks I'm entertaining? What is the neighborhood left guessing as choruses of whosabadboy?s and nobiting!s and shameless cackles float out past the curtains into the early afternoon? Perhaps something a little less innocent than the game of tag with a tiny bulldog who's just pissed on my foot.

Idiot, slow down.

Thom Yorke's The Eraser released yesterday. Rhapsody's withholding it and I had to fight the impulse to trot down Elmwood and buy it sight unseen. I've since heard a few tracks and meh. But a well-written review always makes a shitty album seem worthwhile.

Doin' it for themselves.

I suppose it's only fitting that I offset a weekend spent marvelling (as an outsider) at the bonds of sisterhood with an ode to the two worst sisters in literature. Balance things out a little, as I'm sure it's not all mohitos and chocolate ice cream and shared sparkly shirts. Though I could be wrong.

Aside from a scheming duo in Arabian Nights that would switch out their sister's newborns for puppies, these two are the worst of the lot. Not to mention successful, having managed spots in the biggies of both mythology and fairytale. All despite the obstacles of merchant class mediocrity, and pinching corsets, and sub-par husbands. You've got to admire their persistence.

More of the same.

Me likey. From their upcoming album.

Season of the Shark.

Went to see this last night. Great stuff, if you like arthropodal makeout scenes and fuzzed-out guitars. The crowd was an improbable mix, the music was terrifying and beautiful and precise, and the ushers were appropriately ogreish.
Oh, and the band was selling t-shirts in the Shea's lobby before the show--next to the bar, under the painting of Lucille Ball, largely ignored. It was all pretty perfect.

Oh-joh-boh.

Or whatever cutesy noises you prefer.

Puppywatch 2006 has begun. This is Dooley. Or Duel-y. Or Duly. I'm not certain on the spelling, but considering we only get him for one shift a day, it doesn't really matter.

Magically delicious.

Purple sky. Orange moon. Something real cool is happening somewhere close.

Nods.

A hearty hurrah to the Garveys. We tipped our barbeque beefs to you at lunchtime. In all seriousness.

Congrats also go out to UltraViolet for unseating Daredevil as Shittiest Movie. Affleck had a good long run, but he fell to flaming swords, sharp one-liners, and the omnipresent pelvic area of Milla Jovovich.

Never enough.

My parents returned from the wastes of El Paso this past week.

They came bearing gifts, among which were spices, hot sauce, handmade Indian kitzch (the New Mexican natives have this crazy knack for nitelights), a set of godawful monogrammed coasters that by week's end will have been tucked away, and this:


It's an actual paper with actual articles and we're actually planning on framing and hanging it. So, feel free to either covet or condemn, according to your inclination.

Feed me banks of light.

God damn, I love being an American.

Snubbed a porchly Fourth in favor of rockers and fireflies. Ate some mean brats. Hounded other peoples' dogs. Followed a glittering line of connect-the-dots back into the city on a well-timed drive home. Listened to music that filled the dark corners perfectly. Sat under a flag.

Avatar.

Gotta run...episodes of Last Airbender are on YouTube.

Crazy Grandma.

Visited my grandmother today. I secretly enjoy what I can liken only to teatime in Wonderland. If I don't concentrate too hard it makes good sense, but after an hour it starts to unstring itself into pigbabies.

She set me to pitting fruit under the gay merman while she slippered around the yellow table. We drank tea and ate fresh cherries and peaches and scoops of cottage cheese from tiny crystal bowls. We made poor harmony chattering in our own separate senseless strains. I rumbled about orange light on sidewalks, she mused that the robins were "calling for rain". Sometimes there'd be a chorus of comprehension. More often not.

We retired to the living room, and on passing the bust of young Octavian I resisted, once again, the Pygmalian urge to kiss it. She sat in her Red Queen chair, I picked an armless lounge covered with largeprint roses. We held court with the lifesized Buddha and the ceramic frogs and the iron rabbit bookends and the two Indic goddesses. She pretended to read her New Yorker, I pooh-poohed my uncle's Basquiat, but neither of us payed much attention to anything other than the seacolored walls. And when the colors began to run and our sometime-similarities became a little too glaring for comfort, I stood up, ignored her plea for a hug, dodged the hornet gaurd on the porch, and pelted out into realtime.

"I thought it was already as heavy as can be."

I've wasted my morning. Dreaming of flying again in the half-light.

J and J. Part 3

More Jorinda and Joringel. I've got 'em riding a line of adolescence that might be pushing it. Grimm likes its heroes unfledged (read Snow White or The Snow Queen--no one peeps above twelve), but I get squeamish at the thought of too-young love. These two in particular share a lot of alone time. And, as it's obvious that 'woodland strolling' means something else entirely (blackberry picking, of course), I'd prefer everyone to at least be legal. Those thorns can get prickly for the unlicensed bumpkin.

No shit.

I read that these two are discussing lead roles for Atlas Shrugged. The wake of the news sent me into a flat spin that's most recently been marked by spoonfuls of molasses and a stubborn addiction to America's Next Top Model. My brain refuses to recover from the downward spiral.

But I suppose the casting is vaguely appropriate as the novel revolves around a woman who sleeps her way through the country's brain trust and in the end flies off in a jetplane to an intellectual utopia in the sky. (I liken it to that other great fifties epic, but with railroads rather than T-Birds, and doo-wop replaced with bright sassy odes to capitalism). The smarties are safe and cocooned and the dumbasses are left to their cotton candy and their beauty school drop-outs and their red-scare versions of WMD's.

Which led Alex to ask the burning question:
"Who cleans the shitters in a land where everyone is a supergenius?"

From a Basement on a Hill.

There was an old woman, lived under a hill.

And if she isn't gone, she lives there still.

Baked apples she sold, and cranberry pies.

And she's the old woman who never told lies.

To the nasty business of deconstructing a piece.