2/15/02
Tonight, Lisa and I (and a few other people I know, including Robin Eisgrau, whom I hadn't seen in months, and Jodi Buonanno, who looks very happy to have quit her job) went to see Calvin Johnson, Ted Leo/Pharmacists and Sparrow at the Loew's Jersey City. This was the first rock show they'd had there, I think, and the first anythingthey'd had in at least ten years. The Loew's was apparently built in 1929, one of the last and greatest New York-area movie theaters in the Really Grand Style. The show was actually held in the cavernous and rococo'd-into-submission lobby; the high ceilings and wood and metal meant that the drums turned everything into excruciating gray noise (and I really like Ted Leo under normal conditions; at least I got to watch Calvin doing the Calvin Dance during his set). The atmosphere was wonderful, though, and Calvin J. was his usual ridiculous charismatic self (he actually held a question-and-answer period in the middle of his set, being careful to ask the name of everyone who raised a hand; it occurred to me right afterwards that I should've asked him if the Go Team's Archer Come Sparrow will ever see light again). And at Stacy Wakefield's suggestion, we snuck past the NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS BEYOND THIS POINT sign and bolted up a couple more flights of stairs to the theater itself, which is immense and beautiful and obviously the product of a long-bygone time; it seated 3000 when it had seats, which it currently doesn't.
Last night was devoted to the Makeoutclub.com/Insound show at Warsaw (the rock club attached to the Polish National Home in Brooklyn), and a pretty serious washout. There were some last-minute band substitutions, I think. Creme Blush (I think their name was) were a decent new-wave duo very mightily influenced by Pretty In Pink (they covered Giorgio Moroder's theme from "Midnight Express," a.k.a. the "early MTV incidental music" theme), the Witnesses were about the most godawful thing I've ever seen (really REALLY bad fake MC5, plus a thoroughly earnest version of Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders' "The Game of Love"), and Cex's set was truncated (so he could catch a plane) and the straight hip-hop he did last time I saw him, instead of the beats-plus-id-spasm I'd been told about. At least I got to talk to a couple of CMJ alumni for a while, and plot a practical joke whose nature I'll reveal once it plays through (in a week or so).
Also made a sort of zucchini-pecan halwa that's the first thing I've actually cooked from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian and Vegetarian Cooking, a gift from my mom (thank you, mom!). Zucchini candy isn't something I'd necessarily have thought of myself, but that's what cookbooks are for, I suppose, and it's really tasty.
As for Wednesday night: you know, come to think of it, while readings are good, readings from comics are not necessarily so good, especially when they're comics about 9/11 being shown as manually adjusted black-and-white transparencies on an overhead projector, while their text and sound effects are read aloud by their writer, and even more especially when they're preceded by an extended speech on the deep meanings of the phrases "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "a picture is worth a thousand words." The Gerhard Richter opening at MOMA was considerably more fun, especially the people-watching side of it. People have odd clothes.