5/16/02
I'm amassing little extravagances to reward myself--yesterday I mail-ordered a package from Corwood. I suppose I really should get in the habit of rewarding myself with one decent-sized present when I do something I'm happy about, or better still nothing at all, but buying records just about always makes me happy, and there are always more to buy. (Curiously, when I went to the comics convention last weekend, I noticed once again that I really don't buy back issues any more--there are no more to buy that I want all that badly. Well, there are probably five or six issues of Strange Adventures I'd be happy to have, but they'll cross my path sometime. I have a real thing for "The Atomic Knights," an optimistic little post-apocalyptic series that ran in every third issue of Strange Adventures for a few years.)
Tonight, I met up with Lauren, Aileen and Nora, and visited the 37th-best Asian restaurant in the city (according to Robert Sietsema), XO Kitchen on Hester Street. It was really pretty swell, especially a tofu-skin roll with a sweet sauce that had some kind of citrus rind in it. We had intended to go to the 20th-best, Cong Ly, but it closes early. Lauren and I agree that we have to go to the 1st-best, a Sri Lankan place called New Asha Café in Staten Island, sometime soon. The highest-ranked one I've been to is the 5th, my beloved Dosa Hutt out in Flushing.
All the way to the Mercury Lounge (where we met up with Lisa, as well as Andrea and Jay), Nora and I had one of those great high-school arguments (she started it! she started it!): who's the best '70s band of all time? She maintains it's Black Sabbath. I was like, no way, dude, what about the Who? She wasn't having it. Wire didn't work either. The only "worthy opponent" I came up with was Parliament-Funkadelic. The show itself was Clint Conley's new band Consonant, whose record is very good and improved by its lyric sheet--there couldn't have been more than about 60 people at the show, though, which was strange given that Mission of Burma sold out two nights at Irving Plaza. Maybe people just don't want to hear the new stuff, fools that they are.