6/9/02
Daily hits for this site continue to dribble downward, and why shouldn't they? I haven't updated the damn thing in six days. Sorry. If it's any excuse, I've been away--down in WDC, yesterday, where Lisa took photos of several dozen of my grandmother's paintings, and I took some of them back to Queens. We'd originally planned to make a quick and easy day trip of it, but everything always takes longer than it should, really, and by 11:30 PM we realized that we were starting to get pretty tired and weren't even at the Delaware border yet. So we spent an initially fruitless and ultimately fruit-filled 45 min. or so trying to find a motel that 1) wasn't entirely booked up, 2) cost less than $70 and 3) had non-smoking rooms available. We eventually located one, hauled the paintings into the room, crawled into bed and watched a VH-1 special on Queen and Iron Chef until we drifted off. (We'd been listening to an old mix tape of Lisa's in the car earlier, with Kurt Cobain singing "I fell asleep and watched TV"--I love that line, and it was applicable in this case.)
Otherwise: I've been eating out way too much this week (inc. a delicious and calorific breakfast at Waffle House this morning), but I think tonight is the night to test-drive the broccoli Godunov recipe from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I do seem to be doing an awful lot of pro bono writing right now, too--several assignments due tomorrow, which are honestly a bit more compelling to me than a lot of the paid work I'm doing at the moment.
Musical highlight of the week so far: on Wednesday night, we went to see Martin Carthy play a solo show at Makor. Now, Makor is scarier than I'd even thought it was: high ticket prices, two-drink minimum w/ free salty pretzels on the tables, literature all over the place that (as my friend Sara noted) is almost entirely indirectly demanding that New York Jews breed. And the crowd was not large. M.C., though, is my favorite living acoustic guitar player, and didn't disappoint me--I love his easy familiarity with his repertoire of traditional and quasi-traditional songs, and I love watching him play three or eight or twenty intersecting guitar lines at once (well, it seems that way). Don't love that he spends 5 minutes tuning before every song, but at least he tells entertaining "there was this gig in Germany in 1973" stories while he's doing it, and it was what I recall Tom Cora once calling, between songs, "anti-tuning weather."
Fabulous Jewlia Eisenberg/Charming Hostess gig at Tonic on Friday night, too, but I'm interviewing her tomorrow, so I'll have enough to write about that later.
Lisa and I have come up with a deeply twisted idea for a Burning Man project--it still wants a little refining, but the results should be pretty fascinating, I think.