7/15/02
One carrot curry (and a simple raita and some fresh green beans with a little salt and pepper) later, I'm doing the carrot belly bunny rock, just like the Li'l Bunnies did. I realized I hadn't actually cooked anything significant in over a week, so when Lisa asked me tonight if she should bring home Thai food, I felt virtuous about asking her to get a couple of potatoes and a red onion instead. She seemed to like it too.
I find that, with less than six weeks left to go until my freelance career as I know it ends (well, at least temporarily), I feel a bit freer than I have before--to turn down work, or do it a very different way, or in a couple of cases to risk my editors' wrath. Today, actually, I turned in something to one of my editors that I'd enjoyed writing but was sure she'd bounce right back at me as inappropriate and unusable. She wrote back that she loved it. So much the better.
More show-going last night: first to see Purple Ivy Shadows do an early show at Luxx. I don't think they'd played in town in at least a year, maybe more, and this was the first NYC show they'd played since Field Guide came out earlier this year. I was afraid that there wouldn't be enough people there. Fortunately, there are lots of PIS fans around yet--it wasn't crowded, exactly, but the turnout wasn't disappointing either. And the show was fantastic--I love how they're getting more calm and confident with time. "Stay Up To Stray" was so classic rock. I realized after the show that I've been going to see them play for more than ten years now. I think the first time I saw them was at the Providence Indie-Pop Festival in the spring of 1992, and I remember an incredible show in some little Lower East Side squatters' haven whose name I forget, maybe in the fall of '93--if I remember it correctly, Uncle Wiggly were on the bill too, and played "Eleanor's Pizza Party." But mostly what I remember from that show was being at the back of the room and thinking I was drowning in the waves coming from Purple Ivy Shadows' amps, and then realizing I could still breathe it, just fine.
We skedaddled into the city after PIS played, and went to Tonic to see Sue Garner and Franklin Bruno, both of whom had Ted Reichman and Rick Brown playing with them--I suspect that I may have opened some of the lines of communication there. Franklin's songs sounded amazing with the piano/accordion/violin/percussion lineup; hope he gets to record with something similar. He did a partly improv-based song called, I think, "Goods," which I can't imagine would work nearly as well in most of the contexts in which he usually plays. (And I think his movement toward American-popular-song-type lyrics is doing his songwriting some good--if he's trying to write songs that could pass for standards, "Another" et al. are getting there fast.)