some birds are funny when they talk
corner



Fellows:

Aijung
Alyssa
Angela
Bobby
Carla
Dave
Ester
Jesse
Jonah
Josie
Kate
Lillie
Nori
Rabi
Rebecca

Mincetapes

e-mince

Photos!

Nice

Archives:

Stuck in my Head
"Kiss Me Harder" by Bertine Zetlitz
"Hot" by Avril
"Brain Problem Situation" by They Might Be Giants


Now Reading
Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Recently Finished
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Mad Tony and Me by Carl Hoffman
Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guaralnick
This Must Be The Place: Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century by David Bowman
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Movies Lately
Sicko
4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days
Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour
2 Days in Paris
United 93
The Savages
The Bourne Ultimatum
Sweeney Todd
The Departed
Juno
Enchanted
What Would Jesus Buy?
Ghost World
Superbad
I'm Not There
She's The Man
Superbad
Lars and the Real Girl
Romance and Cigarettes
No Country for Old Men
Into the Wild
Gattaca
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
Across the Universe

Shows Lately
Damo Suzuki/Stinking Lizaveta @ Mill Creek
Death and the Maiden @ Curio
Devon Sproule/Carsie Blanton/Devin Greenwood/John Francis @ Tin Angel
Assassins @ The Arden
Oakley Hall and the Teeth @ Johnny Brendas
Isabella and Flamingo/Winnebago and Map Me and Gatz and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Sonic Dances and Strawberry Farm and The Emperor Jones and No Dice and Hearts of Man and Principles of Uncertainty and Isabella and BATCH and Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's 20th Century and Car and Sports Trilogy and Explanatorium and Wandering Alice and Must Don't Whip Um and Festival of Lies and A Room of Ones Own and Recitatif @ the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe
Martha Graham Cracker and Eliot Levin and Kilo etc. @ the Fringe Cabaret
Lullatone and Teletextile @ Boulder Coffee [Rochester]
TV Sound @ the M Room
Aretha Franklin @ East Dell, Fairmount Pk.
Romeo + Juliet in Clark Park
Daft Punk @ Red Rocks
Spoon @ Rockefeller Park
Ponytail at Pony Pants' House
Mirah/Benjy Ferree @ the 1UC
Tortoise @ World Cafe Live
Hall & Oates...ish
"Nuclear Dreams" - Mascher Dance Group, x2
The Four of Us @ 1812
Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines by Rainpan whatever
Mascher Dance Group/Nathaniel Bartlett
Cornelius @ TLA
Sloan @ World Cafe
In Fluxxxx
Slavic Soul Party!/Red Heart the Ticker @ I-House
the Fantasticks @ Mum
Peter Bjork + Jorn/Fujiya + Miyagi @ fkaTLA
John Vanderslice @ Johnny Brendas
The Books & Todd Reynolds @ 1UC
Into the Woods @ LPAC
The Fishbowl @ the Frear
Caroline, or, Change @ the Arden
Low & Loney, Dear. @ 1UC




Saturday, October 20

Friday 19 October

I woke up seven hours later, by way of alarm clock, but I clung to the comforter until about fifteen minutes before Delia arrived, throwing my stuff into the pack, ingesting Bunny Munches. We stopped by the house long enough to pick up Mike, then to the station, where we were shuffled back and forth along the side of the tracks, ascertained the location of the Knitting Factory, got on the train. We walked through a tunnel and came up near where the vice president had spoken the night before; I had almost forgotten we had a vice president. But that's all stuff.

Cafe St. Bart's, on Park Avenue across from the Waldorf, is a gorgeous old ballroom now somehow connected with a church, and it's where Jazz at Noon has been happening for the last month or so. I'm ashamed to admit I had never been before. It was a fabulous experience. Benjamin does a good job of describing the show and the room, so I don't feel like I have to. The waitstaff were not clad in white tunicky pajamas as advertised (too cold), but they were cheerful enough, and happy to bring four crab cakes for the older portion of the contingent. I went with a blue-cheese-burger (I ordered bacon but it didn't show, as also didn't the onion roll it was supposed to come on), which was good but didn't make me want to give up vegetarianism; Ester's grilled cheese wasn't particularly inspiring either. The best part of the food was probably the medley of breads in a flower pot centerpiece. But who cares about food: the music was great - all standards, most of which I knew, although Myron didn't get to sing enough and wasn't miked enough. I especially enjoyed the drummer, a Mt. Sinai cardiac surgeon in a pink shirt who offered to let me sit in on a kit that "was old when we started" (nigh thirty-seven long years.) The bandleader's sax playing was the only weak link, an opinion corroborated by our most garrolous companion, Pat Thalheimer (she remembers me as the Ruben Bladés guy), who sat across from me. On her right was her more resigned husband, and on her left was my great-aunt Harriet, a marvelous lady with marvelous specs who had just flown in from Berkeley the previous night. She engaged Ben in a discussion of the Berkeley art scene and the significance of the American flag, while the Thalheimer's exchanged contact info with Ester towards a job for the summer at an Art Hall on 5th between 2nd and 3rd, and I watched the band.

We left early, as it turned out unneccessarily, because Amtrak stuff took next to no time, but we paid our proud Sikh cabbie and examined the blessings of Lubbockians, and patronised the automatic ticket machines. When our train was called, I got separated in the shuffle and so wasn't able to say goodbye to Ben, but Ester and I reunited on the train, and after I plowed through as much Celia as I was willing to deal with, had what she called a "trademark discussion." She really is my sister now. Sometimes I almost call her Martha, which she said is an uglier name than Ester. Anyway, we talked about Ben, the sort of stuff I said before, and we talked about Alyssa. I had let her read the e-mails from Al the previous night; the first of which was quick and said "don't freak out," the second, called "more information," contained digs that made me feel pretty scummy ("I made a principled decision - I didn't want to cheat on my boyfriend"), painful reports of tears in rice, earnest statements of understanding for my philosophy on the subject, cautious expressions of tentative openness ("if you dig her, go for it, but it's dangerous to us"), and a thinly veiled marriage proposal. Ester was as struck by it as I was, and dictated a response asking to be the flower girl and to her friend. (The response to that was that she shouldn't denigrate herself to flowergirl status and that she is "way totally" Alyssa's friend.) All of this was gone over carefully in the train discussion, at the end of which Ester pulled me into her lap and said "you know, you have a hard time accepting blame." Yeah. Well.

Fifteen minutes later I was on the R3 sitting behind Elaina Barrosso, just returned from her first trip to NYC via NJT, and less than an hour later I was trying to force my key into the lock on the 3S door. After exulting in my new CDs (six free, plus MJ Cole from BMG), I had some leftover lentils from a container marked "Michelle" and headed back to the station, NYT magazine in tow. Jogged/paced down to South Street, passing all the young dudes, to a crowd outside the TLA, forty-year-olds talking about Billy Idol and Ron Wood, groups of college kids bantering about the Strokes, hearing echoes of myself in their pudgy resident indie-guru, passionately asserting things I've been known to say myself "just his name is so great, I mean, does any name sound more rock and roll than Julian Casablancas?" I got a ticket for the Beta Band, but my travellers cheques weren't good enough for Roots tix. I snagged the Astralwerks samplers and stickers and pushed through the crowd, perhaps half female, multi-racial, multi-generational. Rather than a warm-up band, the Betas were taking turns spinning records; hip-hop mostly, everything from KRS-1 to Pharcyde to Notorious to funky disco and bouncy lounge to the Clash to a steel-pan version of the Meters' "Cissy Strut," all forming a backdrop to several video shorts that, I gather, were directed by the band, the most memorable being shots of London bobbies skateboarding, guzzling beer, writing graffiti, etc. The Betas took the stage a little after ten and began to play along with the last record, gradually veering away from it until frontman Steve Mason picked up a guitar and started the insistent strumming of "It's Not Too Beautiful," perhaps their best song. While the other three looked like astronauts in their blue coverall pajamas adorned with countless patches, Mason, with his thick black square-framed specs, rainbow guitar strap and elegant dark oriental silk robe, reminded me of a sort of amalgam of Harry Potter and the wizards from Magical Mystery Tour. They have an odd sensibility - the stage is strewn with garlands of flowers as well as countless instruments (many of which went unplayed until a final percussion jam), and their playful background videos (rapid-fire shots of LP covers and a dreamy sequence of a Hindu-ish goddess playing with a floating watermelon, but mostly the band members goofing off in silly costumes in locations around Scotland and around the world) and self-conscious eclecticism bespeak an undeniable silliness, and yet they seem to expect their audience to take them seriously. Mason said little (except "Thank You" in a series of goofy voices), but sort of glowered bewilderingly at the crowd, jutting his head from side to side, posturing like a rapper holding the mic cord at crotchlevel. He took off the kimono before long to reveal white T-shirt and sweats and neck-chains, and repeated the same odd farewell in his deep grunting brogue at the end of the set and the encore: "Been a fuckin' pleasure. Cheer!" As for the music, it was a fairly faithful rendering of the recorded works, with markedly few all-out jams. Unfortunately, they only culled one number from their brilliant, inventive self-titled disc, whose all-over-the-map arrangements would have made for keen entertainment, and instead focused on their latest album. The songs that are good on the record are good live, but too often the tepid tempos and limited melodies of many of the tunes were just as lackluster live. I was amazed at how many noises the four members could create; of course, seeing at least two of them spending a good deal of time hunched over black consoles makes me suspicious. They pulled out "Dry the Rain" as a mid-set crowd-pleaser, and closed with II of the Hottest Shots from the new one, "Squares" and the funky "Broke," which garnered a double-drum-set breakdown. The encore offered little different from the rest of set, neither returning to the first record's material nor pulling out all the stops with the hard-core hip-hop of "Won" from the new disc as I was hoping. All in all, it was a fun show, but - having seen now three bands that I've heard called the best band in the world (Beta, Godspeed, R-Head), I can safely say that the Beta Band is not that.

On the way out I ran into Corey Mark with Rachel Kane, Andrea from African, and ?Kristen, who let me ride back with them. They even stopped at Wawa, where I guessed at what groceries might come in handy (bananas, carrots, milk, bread, Edy's Dreamery.) I had time to do a bit of reading before the phone finally rang its long-awaited ring. Missa Lyssa, calling from Japan, said not to worry about the cult, reiterated some of the things in her e-mail, agreed that she (and probably I as well) had been concieving our relationship in somewhat different terms than how we had been explicitly discussing it. When she said this summer that she didn't want me to feel restricted by her as an absent presence, she meant not that I shouldn't let the thought of her dominate my actions, but more that if I for whatever reason wanted to become involved with someone else, I should be free to do so, but at the expense of our relationship. Foolishly perhaps, I took that at face value, while she felt that a more "traditional" arrangement was implicit. She said on the phone that she wished she was more comfortable with a more open attitude, in line with some of the things I had been thinking, but it was clear that she was struggling with it. If it makes her uncomfortable, as it seems to, I have no desire to continue, even if I thought we might be able to emerge unscathed. She thanked me for being so nice to her. My only reply was that I wouldn't not be nice to her. She used up a few phone cards, and as I was saying my sorry, the phone cut out. I went back to reading, but a few minutes later she called back again, so we could end it on a more decisive note- me: "we're going to get married." her:"later" me: "only if we want to."