Today's Defiantly Upraised Middle Finger goes to...
Tickets for Idlewild's show at Irving Plaza: $15.00 each
Ticketmaster's "Convenience Charge" for the above, PER TICKET: $6.70
45% surcharge = not very fucking convenient. I'm going to the box office. Screw you, Ticketmaster.
East Village Winter Sports
Found this picture on effinchamp.org. It's got me kind of missing the East Village, which used to be my regular wandering ground when I lived on the Lower East Side. Hani, who runs the site, has the Foreign Embassy on his "respectable" list, which is good enough for me. I'll take respect any day.
And in Grammy news, Norah Jones seems nice and all, but popular music as a whole is in a sorry state of affairs. I wouldn't even be watching, except for the fact that Bruce Springsteen is playing a couple tunes. I'll walk on hot coals for Bruce. I'll even watch the Grammys, painful as they may be.
Aaaand the winner is...not Bruce. He just got dissed by the Grammys. Twice.
Screw you, Grammys.
Reading
So I finished Lullaby on Thursday. Not bad...it started great, then kind of lost the thread along the way, and a little too clever in some bits, but a good read nonetheless. Thursday night, I stopped by my local independent bookseller and picked up The Last Detective, by personal favorite Robert Crais (if you haven't read The Monkey's Raincoat, please do so, immediately). Detective was one of those books you're so eager to read that you read it too quickly, without taking the time to soak it in, and now I'm disappointed to have finished it. So it's time to either dig into my pile of nonfiction that I've been meaning to get to, or head back to the bookstore...
A Tekserve Story
This happened a while ago, but I watched 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE tonight and I've been reading back issues of UNCUT for the last hour, and I feel like sharing a little odd music story of my own. Humor me.
So I'm at work at Tekserve, hanging out by the front, when a tall silver-haired man accompanied by an Asian woman walks past me on his way out the door.
"Was that David Byrne?" I ask the guy next to me.
He shrugs.
A moment later, the door flies open, and the silver-haired man comes back in the door and stands in the entrance. It is indeed David Byrne.
David Byrne proceeds to shout to the entire store:
"There is a bike locked to my bike! Has someone locked a bike to my bike? There is a bike locked to my bike!"
The place goes silent, staring at the gangly white-haired man who enunciates like he's teaching an English-as-a-second-language class. The last time I saw David Byrne, I was at a club in the Village listening to Jim White, and after a few too many Budweisers, I walked over to where he was sitting at the table behind me and announced that STOP MAKING SENSE was the best concert video ever made, hands down. He looked at me with wide, curious eyes and said, "That's very interesting you should think that." Or something along those lines. Right now, he's giving that look to the entire store. He tries once more.
"There is a bike locked to my bike!"
"This is not my beautiful bike," a wag from the crowd calls out.
The delivery guy from the diner down the block hurries out the door.
"Thank you," says David Byrne, and walks out after the delivery guy.
Our customer service guy watches David leave, then shakes his head and turns back to the customer he's currently servicing. He gives the customer an apologetic shrug.
"What a freak," he says.
Wanderings
I felt restless tonight. Left work and took the F down to SoHo, then walked over to Space Untitled on Greene Street, where I wrote for a while. Space Untitled's untitled space is beautiful, high ceilings and skylights, subtle artwork on the walls, comfortable couches and a low-key atmosphere, and I can't for the life of me figure out how they manage to pay the rent on that kind of square footage in SoHo when every time I'm in there it's three-quarters empty. Of course, I'm usually there BECAUSE it's empty, so I'm not complaining. The tourists can go wait for tables at Starbucks.
Writing worked for a while, then stopped working, and I headed east, ending up on the Bowery in a bar that I loved and hadn't visited in a while, Astor Lounge. Another beautiful, and nearly empty, space. I sat and had a beer at the bar, thought my thoughts and enjoyed being in a respectable establishment on a Friday night that wasn't filled with people and smoke. Call it "antisocial" if you want; I don't give a rat's ass. I just know that people can get on my nerves.
Walking out the door of Astor Lounge and finding the DV Dojo and its store of screenwriting books and supplies was a pleasant surprise, even if it appeared that I'd waltzed into a premiere party for a no-budget digital film. I didn't take any of the buffet food out of courtesy, but I did get myself a Guinness and a seat at the bar of the attached Bowery Poetry Club to listen to a silver-haired black man named Amiri Baraka spout beat poetry with jazz accompaniment, which was entertaining enough until the door guy told me it would be twenty bucks if I actually wanted to watch the show. I finished the Guinness while flipping through a screenwriting magazine that was about twenty pages long and had the production value of a Bazooka Joe comic, then hit the road. And ended up back home, wondering why screenwriting magazines tend to sport some of the worst writing ever.
I don't know why I get restless. It just happens sometimes, and I won't know what to do or where to go, and I'll be thankful to find a peaceful place to sit for an hour until the restlessness sets in again. It doesn't happen as often as it used to, and I think it's triggered by boredom or frustration, the latter of which can set in quickly when writing isn't going as smoothly as I'd like. But I have found that being restless in New York is a hell of a lot better than being restless in Westlake, Ohio, or worse, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. At least in Westlake I had a car, even if I did burn up a lot of gas. In Lewisburg, more often than not, I'd end up in a local bar shooting pool by myself.
It's a weird thing, a self-imposed loneliness. A weird thing to reject the company of people who would welcome you with open arms, because you want to be alone, and be lonely.
I understand myself a lot better now than I used to, but there's still a hell of a lot that I just don't get.
What I Want:
A detailed map of all wireless internet access points in the Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan area. NYC Wireless is a good effort, but their node map is inelegant and incomplete, showing only 132 wireless locations in the entire New York region with an ugly, poorly organized layout. Though it's nice to know that the Chelsea Market, which I've been meaning to pay a visit, is bathed in free Wi-fi.
To further strengthen my friend Michael Malice's conviction that I'm nothing but a materialistic whore, here's some other stuff I want.
I believe the correct term is, "Vertically-Challenged Prostitute"
My site got a hit today from someone doing a Goggle Search for "midget whores."
I feel oddly proud.
All Consuming
Erik Benson has something interesting going on over at All Consuming, a weblog which collects book-related postings from other weblogs, then collates the postings to give a ranking of the most-mentioned books. I've popped up on his list a couple times, it seems.
And I just noticed that he came up with a nifty little script that highlights the Amazon.com links on the weblogs on his list, when you click through. Neato.
Now, time to go back to reading Lullaby...
A Total Eclipse of the Don
Don McCloskey played his guitar in a little bar in the East Village tonight.
Don, for those of you who don't know him, is a freak. In his own words. On his own terms. He's a sincerely weird individual. And as such, he plays sincere, weird songs. Songs about love, loss, midgets and whores, and midget whores. And Bonnie Tyler covers. Don does an a cappella version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" with enough heart to light Milwaukee for a week. In winter.
Let me interject at this point: I Love music. Music, at its best, has an ability to inspire and incite emotion like nothing else. Picasso's great and all, but Blue Nude on an easel won't get a stadium of thirty thousand on their feet, screaming. Kerouac's no Beatles.
Call me biased, whatever. I fucking DIG music.
Back to the point.
Don ends his near-two-hour set with a quiet, simple song about a young man who decides he doesn't want to fight this war he's in anymore, because he no longer sees the point, if he ever did in the first place, and who needs war anyway?
As I said, it's a quiet song, easily lost in the bustle of a New York bar. Except this bar isn't bustling anymore. Because by the time Don gets to the last verse, this bar is still with a silence that's all too rare in this city, and people are hanging in the doorway to join it. Because Don's little song about a little guy looking for some peace has everyone who hears it moved beyond words.
That's why I love music, kids.
Music for the Masses
This is a reminder for me, and for anyone else in the greater Manhattan area who digs live music:
Nada Surf, unfairly written off as one-hit wonders after the popular "Popular," a single that can't even touch their best stuff, is hitting one of my favorite venues, Bowery Ballroom, on February 17. I haven't heard their new one, Let Go, yet, but The Proximity Effect was the best album you never heard in 1998, and I'll be getting the new release come hell or high water.
Idlewild, whose new album, The Remote Part, has been relentlessly spinning my iPod's hard drive since my lovely fiancée bought it for me from amazon.co.uk, is playing Irving Plaza on March 6.
Lastly, Godspeed You Black Emperor! (yes, you rabid GYBE fans, I know they changed the placement of the exclamation point, but I don't remember to where, and right now I couldn't care less) will be unleashing some more of their apocalyptic ambient post-pop whatever back at the Bowery on April 1 & 2. They don't come around often, and if you've heard anything they've done before, you know it'll be quite an experience.
And wouldn't you know it, I almost forgot to mention that the Big D, Don McCloskey, is playing at the Sidewalk Cafe on February 13 at 8 PM. As Don himself puts it, "In this crazy mixed up world of war, poverty, death and destruction nothing feels better than having your bottom firmly and yet gently slapped by the sweet melodious fury of the man they call Big D." If you don't know who Don McCloskey is, you're clearly living a hollow shell of a life and have but this one chance at redemption. If you know who Don is and he owes you money, which is more than likely, here's an excellent opportunity to threaten him with a broken beer bottle.
Have a good week.
Updating
So I haven't posted in a while. It was a busy week, and then I spent the weekend with the missus in a lovely inn up in Manchester, Vermont. Now I'm writing this up from my couch, courtesy of my laptop and the wonder of Airport. Long live wireless.
Found an excellent bookstore in Manchester and picked up Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, which I've been meaning to get for ages, and Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, which I would have waited for in softcover if I hadn't been sucked in by the elegant design of the hardback. I've only read the first twenty pages of Elements, but I can and do wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone who writes, which is pretty much everyone. Simple, concise, and brilliant. Lullaby, meanwhile, sucked me in with the first chapter.
I need more time to read.
I just noticed that ol' Chuck seems to have turned the design of his website over to the masses. A bold new step for web design? Or a feeble attempt to cut costs by giving the flashy previous designer the boot? Only time will tell.
Strike that last bit: chuckpalahniuk.net, the author's official website, is still up and a-running. The DIY chuckpalahniuk.com seems to be either a fansite or something Chuck himself is doing for kicks.
