Fun-o-Tron: girls gone wild at Landlord Jim's!
The introspection sets in. Lately I've been pretty restless again about what to do with my life. This usually happens when I'm working too many hours and I don't have time/am too worn out and stressed to work on what I really want to do (writing, music, travel). Looks like if all goes as planned I'll be back in school this summer, which will be a giant step in the right direction. I don't know. I really want to move somewhere for awhile. I have really grown to love this city and my friends here but I think a new environment would do me some good. Probably won't be anytime this year, as must finish school and such, but the thought is there more often again lately, stirring me up with its insistence that I'm missing something big if I don't do this. Then again, this happens every winter. Maybe if I tough it out til spring I'll decide, like I seem to every year, that this is home and why would I ever want to leave it. We'll see. God likes wrenches.
Live show rave of the month: Death Cab for Cutie/Pretty Girls Make Graves at SoMa. Tight, melodic, and a satisfiably less hip crowd than expected. It was fun while it lasted...
Album rave of the month: Neutral Milk Hotel- "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea". If Lewis Carroll, Jeff Tweedy, and the Greentrials had a menage a band, and you stuck the resulting offspring in a time machine bound for 1880, you would have "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea". Released in 1998, this album listens like a carnival freak's musical diary- earnest, oddball, thickly enchanted. We are introduced to characters such as the King of Carrot Flowers, who lays in his room with his lover while downstairs his mother screams and his father dreams of dying. Two-Headed Boy, "all pulleys and weights", lives in a jar and dances round to accordion music while the narrator attempts to Svengali him. Comely, a grossly obese girl, quietly falls apart as her loss of innocence is recounted through the eyes of her fallen object of worship. Jeff Mangnum's sepia-stained stories hold all the exquisite keenness of adolescence, but his characters are adults- sweet, sad, and achingly innocent, stumbling through love and death with acutely poignant results. This album "creates a world" better than any I've ever heard, and you will find yourself accepting ridiculous statements because even when you don't know what the hell Mangnum's talking about, it all sounds right, somehow. Beautiful. Like nothing you've heard before.
What else is in my CD player now: Ambulance Ltd- "Ambulance Ltd", A Tribe Called Quest- "Anthology", James Taylor- "Greatest Hits", Arcade Fire- "Funeral".
THE HOT LIST (according to me):
-A clean apartment. Anyone who knows me at all knows a clean apartment is... well, not my strong suit. And that's putting it mildly. In this respect, I toil not neither do I pick up dirty laundry. However, it's been clean now for like a week and I love it! I might even be inspired to change my ways... hahaha!
-Landlord Jim's. A sweet little bar-spot with a hip-yet-inclusive atmosphere and bomb vodka tonics. The music is great- underground and old-skool hip-hop with other choice stuff thrown in (the night I was there they played Steely Dan, how's that for random). What made me laugh: you can order L.J.'s tongue-in-cheek nod to the bar's location (16th and Broadway) in the form of "beer-in-a-bag".
Fun-o-Tron: girls gone wild at Landlord Jim's!
-Six Feet Under. Once again I'm magnetically drawn to an HBO Original Series and thus must watch hours on end of the splendor that is the Fisher and Sons Mortuary and their exploits. Favorite episode so far- troubled teenage daughter Claire is mortified when her ex spreads rumors at school that she sucked his toes, so she steals a foot from one of the dead guys and sticks it in his locker. Her explanation when confronted by brother Nate: "Yes, I know it's weird that I stole a foot, but it's also weird that I live in a place where a foot is available to be stolen." Ha.
-Popsicles. Preferably "Big Stick", the cherry and pineapple dream-come-true's they sell at 7-11.
-Sheila. My sis got into her first-choice colegio. Yeehaw! Congrats lil lady!
Quote of the Month:
"Honey I’m a prize and you’re a catch and we’re a perfect match/like two bitter strangers/now I see the long and short of it and I can make it last" -Pavement, "Spit on a Stranger"
© November 5, 2004 by me.