"Hot tears flow as she recounts / Her favorite worded token
Forgive me please for hurting so / Don't go away heartbroken no"
--Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem, Peter Murphy

I had been planning on writing a nice long entry once the events of my life had added up to be worth writing down. There would be wittiness and emotion, and whatnot, but now you're not gonna hear any of it. Due to the events of two days ago completely taking over my head, I'm just going to summarize the rest of it.

Bella Morte rocked. They're a bunch of punks.
My Vamp game started, yay for me.
Exalted and Mage, more gaming yayness.
Iris doesn't know how to talk online.
Anyone upset with Ali should explode. Eric and Sasha should hug her a lot.
Done.

On to the important stuff. Friday was Peter Murphy day. Collected a visiting Lisa over at Penn Station, went to eat in the Village, then headed up to Barnes & Nobles to meet up with Sasha. She was still with Julia, so got to see her for a second, which is always cool. Then we waited there for Karina, which was funny, because she went to the wrong side of the city. Silly Karina.

While killing time, I finally got a chance to read the 9-11 comics (You can find the DC Comics info here, and the Dark Horse part here). These things are incredible. I essentially stood there and read straight through two tradebacks and cried. It's some really powerful stuff. I started crying again looking through the sample pages they have up on the two sites. If you feel like making more donations to those who need them and picking up some of the best comic work I've seen in a long time, go to those sites or a store near you and pick up a copy. Marvel and Alternative also put out 9-11 collections, and you can find links to look at those and purchase them through the sites above. As an added incentive, one of the two books contains the first Sandman comic in a very long time.

The next big news is the Peter Murphy show Friday night. Words simply fail to describe how excellent it was - easily the best I've ever been to. Even just sticking to the highlights is gonna have me babbling on without managing to get my point across. The first thing is the fact that he had so much fun with it. Pantomiming the lyrics, spinning around, pretending he was a fish... just general good stuff. He turned around to show us his bald spot at one point, which earned him an incredible round of applause. Later on, someone handed a Peter Murphy doll up to him. It took him a second to realize what it was, but then he thought it was hilarious. He showed it to each of the band members, posing next to it for them to compare. That had them and the audience doubled over with laughter.

During one song (which I don't know the name of, still looking for a setlist), Peter Murphy cupped a lightbulb in his hand which pulsed along with the beat of the song. It seemed more like fire at first, illuminating his face from below with a warm glow. He watched his hands throughout the song as if amazed at what they held, offered it to his violin player as if needing to share what he had found. Eventually he passed it into the audience to circulate. Magical.

The night was filled with acapella renditions of his songs, including "Cool Cool Breeze" and "My Last Two Weeks." The best, though, was "Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem." A woman in the crowd had been screaming for him to sing it, and he couldn't understand her. So what does the evercool Peter Murphy do? He simply tosses his mic out into the crowd for her. She asks him to sing it and throws the mic back, sending PM diving for cover. He launches into an acapella rendition of the song, which is incredible in its own right. But with the audience joining in on the chorus... again, Justin runs out of words.

The best crowd reaction, though, came whenever the first few notes of a Wild Birds song. Crowd goes fucking nuts. "Subway, "Wild Ochre"... "Fall With Your Knife," among that compliment of ballads, has to be one of the most feel-good songs I've ever heard. It certainly had that effect on the crowd that night. As part of his first encore, he sang "Cuts You Up," and the first second was enough to have everyone screaming and bouncing.

Some of you may have noticed the fact that I said "part of" and "first encore." Very astute of you - there were four encores. Four. The first two were three songs long, then one song each for the third and fourth. I thought I would die of sheer happiness overload. As it turned out, I almost did. Encore number three began with Peter Murphy returning to stage wearing a feather boa, and accompanied only by his violinist. The song he sang?

"Space Oddity." Bowie's "Space Oddity." Ground control to Major Fucking Tom "Space Oddity."

Sasha says that she's never seen me look as happy as I did during that song. I probably never have been. I was so happy that I actually cried. If I never go to another show ever again, I'll be perfectly content remembering that one performance. Joy.

So that was my Friday. I return home to find out that not only was my grandfather hospitalized again, but it appears that my mother was drugged while out drinking with her girlfriends. Then I lost my college scholarship.

And then there was a riot.

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