BaRou is the New Bklyn

A pox on Blogger.com!

2007-10-31T08:36:00.000-07:00

So, I spent most of Tuesday composing the rundown of last week's road trip, only for it to get erased when I was sentences away from being done, even though it had told me it was saving my post all day long.

That was the deciding factor on moving my blog, which you can now find over at the more accomodating and attractive host Type Pad. Here is my new blog location. Read all about my trip there, and don't forget to adjust your bookmarks and links!

Thanks.

And please pardon the appearance of the new blog while I catch up with everything.

The Northeast: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

2007-10-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've been traveling since October 11. Today is what, November something? The magic of travel time is in effect, when you pack so much into every day that a week seems like a month. I'm somewhere in the middle of this country right now (which I'm rediscovering is quite enormous) but this post will recap the visit to the area I like to think of as civilization.

On the 11th I flew into Newark airport. On spying a Brooklyn Brewery logo on a bar, I wanted to start running like George Bailey at the end of It's a Wonderful Life: "Hello Newark Airport! Hey ohhh all you Italian-Americans!" [kisses one] The feeling reappeared the next day, as I went to pick up the bf in Williamsjerk (he'd taken a car from the airport): "Merry Christmas, Hacidic Jews! Happy Halloween, hipsters on old-time roller skates!"

Then it was time to rush up to the Berkshires for the bf's dad's wedding, the purpose for our trip. Southerners like to think Baton Rouge has bad traffic. Baton Rouge hasn't even seen traffic. We were hopelessly stuck for hours, surrounded by people escaping NYC for a weekend of fall foliage, and it felt like, Welcome back to the Northeast. But the setting for the wedding was just gorgeous.

The bf's dad (above) is a reader and now patron of this blog, because he upgraded his camera and gave me his previous high quality cam. Here's the first photo I took with it, from my favorite part of their house.

After just over 24 hours back North, the bf got on a plane back to Baton Rouge, unable to spare any more time out of the studio. I spent the next few days with my family. I also found a pair of ugly Prada flats for TWO DOLLARS at a thrift store. I had to buy them, because as my pal Julie pointed out, ugly Prada= still Prada. I have learned to like them.

I then departed for glamorous New York City in my bus Wolfgang, and we all know how that turned out (see last post). So it was a bittersweet return, having to settle the affairs of the dear departed (aka sell the dear departed) while there. After the van broke down, Karin put me up for a night in Jerse, then I took the train in retracing my old commute from my first city job ten years ago. Back then, the commute slowly ate away at my soul, but now I'd love to be only a train ride away from the city.

Not having my car while in the city really threw a wrench in the works, because I didn't have a home base, so I had to lug my bags around. I could stow some stuff at Therese's workplace in SoHo, but still had to schlep my heavy old laptop. But as the bf was jealously aware, pain in the ass time in the city= still time in the city.

Here's a shoe-repair guy I liked. I didn't get a good photo, but he was wearing a paper hat that said GOLGOL BORDELLO. I tried asking him if he was into that band but he didn't seem to know they were a band.

While loitering with my laptop at Union Square, I was reminded of all the damn weirdos you see in New York on a daily basis. One guy, with no introduction, started in to me about Ben Affleck, Ben's brother, Anthony Hopkins, and Denzel Washington. I think he stakes out the morning shows to get their autographs. When I apparently didn’t show enough interest, he said,
“Take care babe. Lookin' good, you got a computer machine out there.”
Then he walked off and settled down again about 8 benches away.
Later he puttered by again, going "Cleveland mob wowowow."

The next guy was wearing a crown with big crepe paper flower on it and had a dead animal fur around his neck, the kind with the face and paws included. He plunked down next to me and thankfully honed in on the gal on his other side:
"I am messed. Up. I lost all my youth. The city is trying to tear me apart." He went on about losing his teeth, being hauled into the police station, and how he tries to sleep all the time to escape reality, so that his dreams were his reality. He was even drawing stares from New Yorkers, and the guy sitting across from us gave him the thumbs up.

For its next act, Union Square presented a gothic cross-dresser in a pink flouncy skirt, walking down the park path like it was a runway, looking like the cat that ate the canary. This was much to the delight of the men across the way: "Yo! Grab the rail and bend over! I gotta condom!" And, "Halloween ain't here yet."

And in a cafe, I was reminded what a pain New Yorkers can be:
"What's the difference between the rolls in the front and the rolls in the back?"
"They're the same."
"Well they look different."
"They're the same."
"Let me have one from the front then."

I stayed with different friends on each of three nights, and on Friday, the last night in the city, friend and commenter julepandme and I met up with a few fellow blogging nerds for drinks, such as Jew and Clinton, and I also finally met Internet friend/ BaRou expat Amy.

Jew and I found some ridiculous fun when we went to get her a sandwich. Or should I say, SANDWICHE, because that's what the sign said.

You might notice that it also says BEYERAGES, BEGEL, and HAMBERGER. We certainly noticed, and I think everyone else in there noticed how much we were laughing. Jew insisted on saying sandwiche, pronouncing the e, about ten times while ordering, thus ensuring it would include all manner of bodily fluids from whoever prepared it.

As you can see, this section (which includes EGGS W. BACON POTATOES) is called MILK.

Then this clown came in and started hassling the woman, trying to order crack.

So of course he sits with us. I think we invited him.

Note his creepy facial hair and bloodshot eyes. As I took this pic, he was muttering "five bucks" over and over, but I was not having it. Nice try, clown.

By the time we got back to the others and they all descended on the sandwiche plus body fluids, Jew had streams of makeup down her face from laughing so hard, and prob also from posing with the clown. I returned early Saturday to New Jersey for the sad task of cleaning out ten years of camping supplies and general car crap out of Wolfgang: the final goodbye. I'm surprised to say I held it together and didn't cry until driving away in the 16-year-old dorkmobile my parents gave me. (Dorky vehicle= still a vehicle.)But all I had to do was remember the night before to cheer myself up.

Then Karin and hit a church sale and observed nature at the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, which was practically in my back yard when I was growing up.

The Great Swamp is one big reason Jersey's bad rap as a factory wasteland is undeserved.

That night, we went to carve pumpkins at the beautiful new home of some other Jersey friends. Mine's the owl on the right. FYI, It has pumpkin-scrap ear tufts.

We talked and laughed late into the night. The following day, other good Jersey friends held a gathering in my honor with tons of food and drink like this delicious homemade vegan cake.

I get a little choked up thinking about leaving my awesome friends again. And speaking of a little choked up, I sold Wolfgang. A gal bought it for her epileptic son, who's about to turn 16 but can't get his license yet until they figure out the proper dose of meds. Meanwhile, his mom got him the bus he's always wanted so he can work on it until he gets his licence. He's going to be thrilled. The story couldn't be much better unless it also somehow involved saving kittens. The buyer and her partner came to the gathering and we were both so pleased with the deal that we hugged. It's amazing how it all worked out the night before I left for this road trip that I'm now on.

I've packed in enough concentrated friend time to sustain me until the next trip, and while in the Northeast decided I have to return at least every other month. I already know when the next two visits will be. And now Leah and I are laughing our asses off across America. Stay tuned for the recap.

We had seasons in the sun

2007-10-17T14:37:00.001-07:00

So here I am in NYC. Yesterday afternoon I was traveling north to the city on the Garden State Parkway from my parents’ home. I had my trusty ’79 VW camper bus Wolfgang vacuumed and scrubbed, and all the cargo organized, and he was fresh out of a random foreign-car repair shop in south Jersey sporting a new inspection sticker. He was ready as he could be for the road trip back down South that my friend Leah and I had planned to begin on Monday, after I spend a few days in the city. Old Wolfgang didn’t have as much pep as I’d hoped him to have after the tune-up and other adjustments, and after about 40 minutes of driving, the power got weaker and weaker, the bus went slower and slower until I was only going about 30. Finally blue smoke came billowing out from the dashboard vents and I was leaving a cloud back behind me, so I pulled over. And I didn’t know it then, but that, on one of the biggest arteries of my home state, turned out to be the last gasp of my longtime companion Wolfgang.

It took two separate tows thanks to the rules of the Parkway by two friendly dudes who were both about five years younger than Wolfgang and ten years younger than myself, but I got the bus to my trusted mechanic. Long ago, I dubbed my VW specialist the Leprechaun, since he's a wee little man from the auld sod. Maybe I’d been foiled by that sketchy repair shop in south Jersey, but that wouldn’t happen with these guys. The Leprechaun’s son Billy, who loves me, welcomed me with a hug and asked had I been back to Ireland lately. As he told me about his recent visits, along came a guy from the next town over from where I grew up, who I learned was the uncle of someone I went to high school with. It was so comforting to be back where people knew me and knew where I was from, where people looked the way I was used to people looking, and where they assume everyone's cool with a little casual racism.

After the Leprechaun assessed Wolfgang this morning, Billy called me with the bad news: the engine was shot. It would have to be replaced, to the tune of several thousands of dollars that I do not have. And so I had to make a decision about my old friend who’s been with me through through modest speeds and slower for the past ten years.

Ten years ago, Wolfgang brought me to Florida for the wedding of my first friend that got married. She has divorced, remarried, and had a baby since then, and my other friend at the wedding has married, divorced and remarried since then. My brother went, too, and he’s married and had two kids since then. It seems like the only one those adult milestones have never reached has been me, and I'm still happily driving the same car a decade later. (By the way, the first tow-truck driver was astounded to learn my age, he claimed he thought I was more like 22.)I'm not saying the car equals eternal youth, but I might be saying that it has helped.

I've had more fun thanks to Wolfgang than most folks can attribute to a vehicle. Wolfgang has taken friends and I camping in Vermont, PA, NY, and NJ. I never had to worry about where I'd be crashing at night as long as I had driven. Since Wolfgang comes with two built-in, fold-out beds, I’ve been known to stay in the motel Volkswagen at the Jersey Shore or outside of friends' places when the couches were full. My friends all know the 'ganger, and he has absorbed some of their cassette contributions, which have in turn faded to uniform pastels. I've stocked the little cupboard under the sink with a collection of vintage camp supplies and cookware in the official colors of the '70s, which not coincidentally are also Wolfgang's colors: avocado green, goldenrod, and orange. And just to be extra ridiculous, I installed yellow shag carpeting inside, recycled from KarTek's house. Just the other day, my three-year-old neice called the camper van my house, which wasn't that far off; Wolfgang has been like a little second home on wheels.

Many people probably thought it folly to drive such an old car they assumed was a clunker, but I’d bet that Wolfgang broke down a lot less than most other cars, and at nearly 30 has had a hell of a lot longer lifespan. Other onlookers would just be happy to see the old breadloaf running; many was the time I'd stop for gas, see a certain look in an older dude's eye, and know he was about to tell me that he used to drive one of these years ago. Kids would just point and smile. And then there's the secret club of fellow VW beetle & bus drivers--we beep and wave when we pass another one. And, in a way, Wolfgang's continued functionality was a nose-thumb at the disposable culture of today.

After Billy gave me the news, I waited til the train pulled into Penn Station so as not to make a scene, then called the bf and bawled into his not-very-surprised ear, and he said it wasn't like it was a family member or a pet and I said that it was. Then I called my parents and cried into both of their not-very-surprised ears. My dad, reknowned for some of his folksy wit and wisdom, said with no lack of sympathy, "You ran the shit out of that thing. You ran it into the ground." And it was true.

The decision was clear even to stubborn old me, and even I had known embarking on such a long trip was taking a big gamble. One hour after I was first told I had a choice to make, I was walking downtown from Penn Station and sat down in Madison Square Park to call Billy back to tell him I was going to have to sell the bus. Like everyone has been saying, he pointed out that it's better the breakdown happened here than somewhere in the Deepest South. He's letting me keep Wolfgang there for two weeks while I find a buyer, no charge, and he's going to put the word out at the VW show this weekend. Just as I hung up, bagpipers at the other end of the park began playing a mournful song. It was not a tune of the happy parade variety, it was a sending-off-dead relatives song, a dirge for shooting Spock's coffin into space. I had to keep walking out of earshot so I wouldn’t dissolve into a puddle.

Goodbye, old friend.

(If anyone reading this sees me in the next few ~~days~~ weeks, it's probably best to not even bring it up unless you want the waterworks to start. And if anyone out there is interested in buying, let me know.)

Favorite costumes ever

2007-10-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

Colleen is traveling and not on the Internets quite so constantly as usual, but has thoughtfully prepared ahead and has some blog posts on deck. This is one of them. NYC-area blog buddies and other pals, the blog nerd and friend gathering will now be Friday night, location TBA.

I'd like to tell you about one or two of my best Halloweens ever, but parts of most of the best Halloweens aren't for general audiences--For awhile there, each Halloween was getting increasingly more debaucherous and legendary. But instead, I'll do a little show and tell about my favorite costumes.

In high school, I went as a guidette. This was late 80s/early 90s central Jersey, aka, the heart of Guido Country during the Guido Renaissance. I made a Z.Cavaricci label for my one diapery-cut, peg-legged pair of pants and tried to do my hair all big, though it always refused to go as big as I wanted. Real guidos didn't really notice because I wasn't in classes with too many of them, from what I recall, but in Spanish class we all had to stand up and announce what we were dressed as, and there probably were a few guids in that one. I didn't get my ass beat, though.

In college I went as Sally from the Nightmare Before Christmas (I was a little obsessed). Here I am with Gene Simmons doing our best Sears catalog poses. I wish now that I'd gone much heavier on the eye makeup; this was before I had false eyelashes. We went to a super fun party in a big old house, and I met a Jack Skellington! Fate! But somehow the dude I ended up dating from that party was dressed as a vampire and had frizzy long hair. I was way cuter than he was, WTF.

In 1999 or so I went with Amanda as Patsy and Edina from AbFab. I was Patsy, with a blonde beehive wig, miniskirt suit and stilettos, and carried a vodka bottle. As the night wore on, we only got more in character. The most fun part was when we'd theatrically fall down, then hang out on the ground for a bit. I would totally do this costume again.

In about 2000 or so I went as Vicki the robot from Small Wonder, and Amanda and I went to NYC's Halloween parade. Here we are being robotic (note the control panel in my back), but in retrospect, I wish that I'd cut the apron a lot shorter. That was one of the nights I can't tell you about.

What I can tell you is that giant towering drag queens in elaborate costumes pulled us into their party, and nobody got my costume, but they all adored Amanda's Cyndi Lauper costume. I felt decidedly not fabulous, and also robbed of the accolades my costume deserved. It was still an awesome night, though, and those queens live on fondly in my heart. (You're going to want to enlarge that photo.)

About three years ago, I went as a bad Valium mom from the '60s. I wore a fall and all vintage costume components and transformed my slide heeled mules into fuzzy marabou slippers. My props were a martini glass, a cigarette dangling from my mouth, and a bottle of pills in my muumuu-robe pocket. I can't tell you about that night, either. I attempted to wear that green polyester robe in the house recently and it was fervently vetoed by the bf.

Two years ago I went as the leg lamp from A Christmas Story. My roommate Hannah did an amazing job sewing up the lampshade. Some bum in the subway yelled, "You ain' THAT pregnan'!" (Thankfully, I wasn't at all pregnan'.) I flirted with some flirty williamsjerk who looked like the 70s but was not in costume (Hannah dubbed him "Bread" like the band), even though our respective eras didn't match and I don't think he knew what I was dressed as (nor for that matter do I imagine he was very quick on the uptake), until his model girlfriend arrived, then I was vexed. Ha HA! I do not miss being single and looking to mingle.

Last year, I went as Joan Crawford for the second time (drawing on the eyebrows and lips make the look) and carried wire hangers, but that's more of a backup costume, really. This year I think I'll just go as a majorly awesome writer working on her first book and handing out candy to kids from a house for the first time. (I know, they're not all winners.)

Now if only I could find the photos of my cat Gypsy's best costume ever, when she went against her will as Gypsy-Bot 5000. College kids can be so cruel.

Live from New Jersey, it's Saturday Night!

2007-10-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

So, the former love of my life/ full-time obsession Jon Bon Jovi
hosted SNL last night, and as KarTek mentioned in the last post's
comments, how apropos that I was able to watch it from our shared
homeland. So, a couple of observations:

JBJ: What a businessman. The first commercial during
the show was for their new album, and the band played during the
opening monologue and I think again later, even though they weren't
the musical guest, the Foo Fighters were. And he mentioned the new
album during the opening monologue. Which brings us to...

Richie Sambora: Drunk! Poor guy. He totally forgot
his second line out of only two!

David Bryan, formerly David Rashbaum, the keyboardist
who I have totally talked to on the phone when I worked at an
entertainment law firm: What is up with this man's style. His
aggressively curly hair was bleached blond and he appeared to be
wearing an oversized, wide-necked, bespangled '80s mom sweater. Is he
going through some sort of life change?

Then I fell asleep, because I've been traveling for the greater part
of the past three days.

Yesssss

2007-10-11T00:46:00.001-07:00

If I may, a couple of homecoming songs.

Somebody give this guy his own reality show (bf's idea). Rock of Dr. Love?

And, because you know I love cheese, and I am, after all, from Jersey:

I have to say, as someone who fully bought into all the cheese metal, then later came to my senses, some of Cinderella's songs hold up a hell of a lot better than the other hair bands. "Gypsy Road"? "Somebody Save Me"? I'd be stoked if those came on the jukebox somewhere.

And you've gotta love the semi-literate comments on YouTube--I found this in the comments under one of the Cinderella videos, a resource I highly recommend visiting if you want to get bowled over:

u cant compair tommy lee to neil pert. tommy lee is like a 5 year playing drums compaird to him

Bravo, sir, well argued! I hope you have reproduced.

Now off I go, into the wide blue yonder.

Status report on living somewhere not suited to me

2007-10-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

I'm nearly two months in here, and on Thursday I'm setting off on a journey I could not be more excited about: flying back home for a wedding, and visiting, and super concentrated NYC culture absorption, and getting my beloved VW bus, then road tripping back down to BaRou. Any friends or blog buddies who want to get together, give me a call or email.

I'm going to kiss the ground when I get back to the sweet familiar Northeast, only not at the airport because I'm flying into Newark. I'll wait til I get to my parents' place.

To be perfectly honest, if it weren't for the fun road trip aspect to ease me back down South, I don't think I'd be returning to BaRou so soon. If I think of this move in terms of the nearly three years that it is planned for, my brain goes into instant denial mode. So I just think, OK, it'll be fun til Leah leaves BR, then family is coming for Thanksgiving, then we'll be traveling to and fro for the holidays and I'll see my bff ecs, who'll be visiting from Australia. And then the second semester hopefully won't be as brutal for the bf so we'll spend more time together and he'll be more rested and relaxed, and then for the summer we'll hopefully live somewhere else entirely. And so on, with as much travel figured in there as financially possible.

Sorry BR readers, I am giving it a shot here, and there are some aspects I like and all, but that's just how I feel.

Even though exciting things are in the works, a little too much is still up in the air for comfort, and I'm nostalgic for nearly every other time in my life that isn't now. I happen to have gotten emails from three friends in the past week who are unhappy in their situations, and it seems like the one handling it best is my family member who is keeping herself busy with loads of activities so she won't dwell too much about the loved one she lost recently. She is doing something about her situation. So I have to remind myself that as glamorous as NYC seems now from afar, I wasn't satisfied with my situation there, nor was the bf, and now we're doing something about it, and it's not all going to be easy.

Here's a quote from Rufus Wainwright in June's Radar magazine, on why he recorded his latest album in Berlin rather than New York: "I love New York, and I intend to stay here and never forsake this town and always pay my taxes and everything, but I do feel sometimes, living in this city and this country, like there's an odd disconnect to what's really happening in the world."

I hear him. I am now essentially living in a foreign country, compared to where I spent my life up until now,with its own traditional ethnic music, its own cuisine, even the people here look different (not just fashion-wise, but in the face). And I'm not going to say that we're going to run screaming from here in 31 months (1000 or so days, but who's counting) never to return, but I'm certainly not ruling that out. Stay tuned to see how that all progresses... but first, I'm going home.

Fun on the BaRou Citysearch

2007-10-09T07:50:00.001-07:00

Just before I moved here, we all had a chuckle in one post's comments section (I can't find it now, lay off) because the editor of the Baton Rouge Citysearch page revealed on their home page that french fries dipped in a milkshake were her favorite treat. I suspected this website was an untapped wealth of further amusement, but hadn't explored it further.

I turned to that Citysearch on Friday because my trusty old laptop has some mysterious virus that plays the beginning few seconds of Madonna's "Lucky Star" more and more frequently througout the day (for real) and my old machine is now running even slower. I was sposedta inherit the bf's much newer laptop when he got his newest one, but right before we moved, the one I was going to get got knocked to the floor and now the monitor's effed. (That's not it above, but that's what the monitor is doing.) So I wanted to call a computer repair place to see if anything could be done.

At the front and center of the home page, Citysearch has a list called "Popular in Your Neighborhood" and holding it down at the number one spot was a funeral home. I really don't think I'm imagining the morbid undercurrent of this town. And now the editor is on about how bikini season is over so we can all pig out on--what is it we ladies all live for?--CHOCOLATE! What's the next topic going to be? Let me guess: It's the holiday season and you know what that means--SHOPPING! And then, it's the Valentine's season, and that means LOVE, JEWELRY, and MORE CHOCOLATE! And it'll still be three months until bikini season!

So anyway, then I did a search for "computer repair." The first listing I checked out had two user reviews written in the same broken English. Next! The second place, I called [Redacted] Computer Repair and reached a home answering machine of the [Redacted] residence. Next! Because of that, I X'd another business with the phrase "In House" in its name. Finally I called another place and reached a kindly old Southern lady whose voice, I have to admit, was comforting but didn't exactly instill confidence in her technological expertise. She took down my number and said she'd get back to me on Monday, as it takes a while to research the options.

I thought I might have just reached another private residence and she talked to me because she's lonely. Well, I'm kind of lonely too and she sounded really sweet. I hoped she'd call back and maybe share a good pecan pie recipe with me. When she called, she said they had some options and to bring in the laptop when a certain guy was in, and they'd see if they had a fit and would quote me a price, no charge or obligation, then she gave me full directions on how to get there from where I lived. Now, that's the kind of down-home service I like. Not the kind that's actually in some stranger's home.

A Cool Thing That I Have: All the Hot Guys!

2007-10-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

I have far too much stuff.
As previously noted, my multitude of cool items I don't need and refuse to part with made moving especially challenging. So in the spirit of "never again," I'm going to document some of it here, and maybe that will make sloughing off some of it easier to do. I'm NOT getting rid of these 90210 folders I used in high school, though*.

*Make me an offer

Random Rouge Friday: Picture time!

2007-10-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

Glorious, I think I've got your number. Sometimes you don't need any words. Just enjoy the sparkles.

Big Easy Rider I'm fast learning that local TV here is a treasure. I'll get to the dance-catillion-type show with Cajun music in a later post. Meanwhile, after that program last night came LA Rider. I'm not joking when I say that although I am a pansy about the possibility of getting maimed, this biker magazine program made me want to ride. I think co-host TW Robinson here, with her combination of grace and bad-assedness, is now my favorite lady in the state of Louisiana. Many Baton Rouge bike-centric businesses advertise on the show, including a nearby bar that has an open mic comedy night I've been meaning to check out...I have a feeling it'll be quite different from the comedy I'm used to back in NYC.

Zoinks! Scariest dry cleaner evs, in the latest Abandoned Baton Rouge. Watch out for Old Man Devereaux!

Mesmerization station Blogger Play shows you a neverending parade of every photo currently being uploaded to Blogger, such as the vintage clip art above. (Except porno! I guess there's no more porn being uploaded to the interwebs.) So much for getting anything accomplished ever again. You can click to find out what blog and post name it's being uploaded to, and where. I even saw a crazy guy in a corn maze. (Not that I was watching it for 40 minutes or anything.)

Special request and dedication to KLSU I value the service you provide of bringing the indie rock hits to the Baton Rouge community. But please, I beg of you, more variety! I have heard "It's Business Time" by Flight of the Conchords at least 79 times in the past month. Not to mention the cover of "Common People" by William Shatner, maybe 25 times. I'm even sick of hearing the cover of "What a Fool Believes" that initially filled me with so much joy. The whole thing with novelty songs is that they are novel at first. How about something by these guys? I found them on Blogger Play and haven't heard them, but they look like they'd be awesome:

RIP in the USA Finally, please pour out a little watery swill from a silver-and-blue can for old Harv.

SAD UPDATE: I was suspicious of the tombstone, so I did a little Googly-oogly, and found out Harv's memorial seems to be a fake. On the plus side, this means Harv is still alive and you can totally party with him at the Blue Oyster Cult show at the state fair.

SAD UPDATE 2: I just heard "Common People" and "Business Time" within a few songs of each other on KLSU, quite possibly because this post was seen by some young whippersnapper at the station. I'm done with that station. From now on, it's WFMU online all day baby! Where they've had DJs like Dave the Spazz for the past umpteen years, as opposed to Spazzy Dave here on KLSU.

Special delivery

2007-10-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

Monday was crummy. I was panicking about money and nothing was going the way I needed it to. It even seemed like all technology had up and revolted on me. As I do when fretting about money, I checked the mail about 50 times throughout the day to find nothing. I still can't figure out when the mail comes, because at least one time it came around noon, but usually it's late afternoon. I think our mailman might be one of those dudes you see hanging around the back of abandoned buildings in this part of town, while he's on the clock.

By the time the mail came, it was dark, but the mailbox was full of packages and a check with a complimentary note! Bringing it in, I had another tangle with a reptile, this one a wiggly curly lizard creature I hadn't seen around before. It was tiny, but it was a creepola. Creepo reptilian vanquished, I opened up my prizes.

My sister-in-law sent me photos of the kids and artwork by my neice, along with these two vintage cookbooks she found when packing up her grandmother's house:

This apparently came with a 14-speed Waring blender. I like its singular insistence that everything you make must do some time in the blender. (Guacamole? Macaroni and cheese?! Waldorf salad?!! No!) And also, it is pleasurable. This reminds me of Wendy McClure's awesome and gut-churning collection of Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. I do plan to try the gazpacho recipe, though.

This one, which went for $1 at Bamberger's, according to the price tag, is playing into my sweet desserty dreams as I prepare for colder weather. Every recipe calls for like 5 eggs, cream, and sugar. I would love to make something from this just to be making vintage recipes ("ice box cake") with my vintage kitchenware, though the bf wouldn't take the slightest notice of these aspects. This is the sort of area where I think a gay bf would come in very handy.

Finally, my librarian pal Ellen sent me this old discard from the Montclair public library:

It's about NYC, it's urban haiku, something I've touched on a few times here, and it's from 1970, one of my favorite eras!Gotta say, though...I've tried to like Beat writing, as I suspect the verses here may have came out of that movement, but I just think it kind of blows.

Here's one examp:

In the market place
The smell of something or other
The summer moon
--BONCHO

What? Boncho, could you try harder, please? Maybe smoke one less lid of reefer next time? To be fair, though, I think these were translated from Japanese and then paired with semi-relevant photos in the book.

I do like this one, though:

Living in town
One must have money even
To melt the snow down
--ISSA

Don't I know it, Issa. Anyway, Monday's mail call made the whole day. Thanks, ladies.

Party Titty flyer tyme

2007-10-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

(I got linked to on Gawker again. Thanks, Tracie; and Dana, Shine on, you crazy diamond.)

It's barely October, it's finally beginning to feel like fall here in my new locale, and despite having moved to a subtropical climate, I'm even getting into my sluggish/wanting-to-eat-everything-in-sight pre-hibernation mode. It still gets hot as summer in the middle of the day, when I seem to always walk on my errands, and yesterday I had to stop at Domino's to see if they possibly sold water so I could hydrate the dog, who was with me. No such thing as water for sale at Domino's, but the guy did run out to his pickup, get a Pepsi can, and fill it with tap water so I could give it to the dog. Part of my winter cravings this year is dessert cravings, so I almost wanted to ask him about their Oreo dessert pizza, because I'm still not sure it's even real, and then I noticed he was missing two teeth in the front and decided it probably was real after all. Nice dude though. He has six dogs at home.

I digress! October means one of my favorite holidays is around the corner, much like your man the skeleton above, but my least favorite part about it is this cheesy, lazy, lame notion that, for womenfolk, dressing like a whore = Halloween costume. No. At Halloween everyone has an opportunity to come up with a really clever or really asshole or really scary or really creative idea, but instead apparently tons of women suddenly become Heather from Rock of Love, like in the last ep when she called her aqua spandex stripper minidress a "sundress."

Nowhere is this phenom more apparent than the Party City circular. Look! Here's a whole ranch of ladies of the night, starting at 19.99!

Hope they like lots of slobbery attention from gross drunk guys! But now premade Halloween costume "sexiness" also includes kids.

You've got, who, Scary Spice in the front there, pirate girl with the come hither look, and up in the corner...a pimp?

Here's some babies. Not sexy enough, girls! You'll never find love this way!

And here's Stereotype Korner.

Jesters are always getting stereotyped as having skull faces.

Anyway, not everyone can make their own costume, I suppose, but to me this is the equivalent of buying your Thanksgiving dinner at McDonald's. It's lazy, wasteful, and the kids today with their baaaaaahhhh....grumble grumble

Much more Halloween fun to come, kids.

Funtastic fun

2007-10-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

Admittedly my life has been less swingin' lately, but I'm still a little too excited about going to a local corn maze with my pal Leah when we arrive in town from our road trip in a few weeks. (I command you to click that link and hear the song.)

Maybe it's the rollicking upbeat theme song, which is like something I'd come out with ~~when stoned~~ when I make up fake jingle-type songs, but more likely it's knowing that Leah and I will probably be doubled over laughing the whole time we're there. Which is how we often are, but this will be an aMAiZEing new setting.

I read about the Baton Rouge maze, called Porky-Pig's Corny Conundrum, in one of the local papers. The reporter marveled, How do they ever make these maze things? But he didn't bother finding out the answer to that question*. (Local publications, let me point out that Colleen Kane, professional writer from NYC, would have asked that relevant question, and clearly I am not above writing about corn mazes.)

I texted Leah the link to the corn maze website. Later she emailed:
"Which one are we going to? I like the one that looks like Oprah."
I hadn't been to the site yet and didn't know there was really an Oprah maze, so I thought she was talking about the Porky Pig one. Rude! And hilar.

*This story, however, from South Louisiana's paper The Advocate indicates that the method for corn cutting is a secret. I'm still puzzled about News 2 Louisiana and the paper sharing such an awkwardly-named website (2theadvocate.com), but maybe that's because The Advocate, the GLBT mag I think of whenever I see this newspaper, claimed their URL first.

Leapin' lizards!

2007-10-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

I was munching away on leftover homemade veggie pizza when I spied a tiny spider zigzagging around on a windowsill. There have been a few others about the house, and I wondered if I should do something about it. But the folk wisdom I heard growing up said that spiders are good; they eat other insects. They're like an environmentally friendly insecticide! Great, problem solved.

Then a much larger critter caught my eye at the top of the window: a huge gecko. INSIDE THE HOUSE. I'd been charmed by these guys darting around the yard, on big leaves and on the deck, but inside the house was a little different. This one, at easily eight inches long from tip to tail, was big enough that I had to either get him out or name him.

Not to mention the other day I found a roach in the bathroom that could have doubled as a belt buckle if I were to laminate it. I tried to laminate it with the only nearby aerosol, which was Lysol, but the roach only looked mildly inconvenienced and lumbered off from whence it came, now freshly scented. And let's not even get into that scuttling I heard across the attic the other day.

I am a fan of animals and all, but it's like, where am I, on safari?!

So, anxious that Gecky was going to jump into my face in his terror, and I'd flail around in a panic Lucy Ricardo-style breaking everything in the dining room ("Waaaah"), I somehow got the reptilian interloper into a paper bag and outside to freedom, and only gave him about 15 miniature heart attacks in the process.

To quote Culture Club, "Every day is like a survival," I tells ya.

Random Rouge Friday

2007-09-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

I don't got much today kids.

To market, to market I walked to the fancy-ish market Calandro's the other day for supplies. I definitely got the cold shoulder from the previously warm old-lady cashier after I offered up my cloth bags to the bagger and she carded me and saw my license was from the Jerse. Either she is suspicious of people concerned about the environment, or Jersey folk, or northeasterners, or Jersey folk who look way younger than their driver's license says, or all of the above. Bitch.

On the way home I noticed a new sit-down dining establishment called [So and So's] EAT PLACE. "Eat Place?" Was "Restaurant" too hoity-toity? I also noticed that just about anyone feels like they can talk to you if you're walking around down here, even some dude hanging out in front of the Walgreens.
"Can I holler at you for a few minutes?"
"Um, no thanks..."
I had hollering to do elsewhere. You know what I mean, though? Like I'm just walking around with two bags of groceries, but sure, let's have an old-fashioned Walgreens gab sesh.

ROOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAD TRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP My super fun pal Leah and I are going to be heading down in my VW bus from Philly to Baton Rouge a few weeks from now. (And then I'll have wheels again!) Your recommendations for: places to stop for the night that might be along the way, places to stop to look around that might be along the way, whether two women camping in the South would be recommended, how not to get murdered, etc. are most welcome. We're definitely stopping at a friend's ranch in Louisville, and may also stop in Nashville and/or Memphis.

What hath Jim Morrison wrought Speaking of Leah, we looove making fun of Jim Morrison, so I hope she sees this. A mindblowing audio and visual feast in a purple palate of manly mysticism, beast-within bears, noble eagles, and dream-catching dreamcatchers, Dreaming Bear is a website that keeps on giving. I can't stop looking at his Photoshopped montages, like this one, where he has angel wings and a tangle of baby bears is adorably roughhousing in front of thim. I think this one came after, and then the bear mauled him for getting so close to her babies.

UPDATE: [gasp] Dreaming Bear has a tramp stamp!

Ms. Cityfolk over here needs an explanation, please

2007-09-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

I assume this has something to do with scaring away unwanted critters? But I'm thinking about getting one just to mess with the dog and cat. And hey! It's only $7.99.

(This was in a collection of sale circulars that arrives at least once a week. I think mailing store flyers has been or is in the process of being phased out in NYC, as we hardly ever got them back home. How 'bout ending this wasteful practice, Baton Rouge? I don't need 10 sets of coupons for fake fast-food "pizza" a week. Or any, really.)

UPDATE: What, no locals are chiming in today? Nobody knows what this thing is really for? Come on people, enquiring minds want to know.

Playdate

2007-09-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

The two people I spent the most time with yesterday (that's right, TWO whole people!) were strangers I met thanks to the Internets. They were a rad woman and her 8-year-old daughter introduced by another Internet friend, the lovely and talented photographer (/commenter on this blog) Amy. They took me to lunch, and my first hangout with locals turned out to be good times.

I think it's great that someone I'd never met in real life offered up her favorite Baton Rouge friend, and then that busy friend was game to hang out with some blogger jerk from New York. She's already offered to take me out more again and have me over for cocktails. I really don't know that people would make as much of an effort back home.

And being around a smart chatty little girl reminded me how much fun kids can be. From my teenage years until after college, I used to babysit all the time, and some of those kids were my little buddies. I miss kids. (Jesus, you take me out of the city for five seconds and I start cooking meat, stop wearing shoes*, and wanting to push out some younguns. JK!!! I have a lot more to do before any of that baby grossout business, if ever. Start earning a respectable living for one thing, and getting over being grossed out by pregnancy, for another.)

Speaking of the kids today, here's a short story from a collection called The Weird Story that the young lady I met yesterday wrote and illustrated.

Kids
Hi we are kids
Kids

*This weekend was the first time I wore any shoes besides flip flops in almost a month, other than sneakers for mowing the lawn.

The chicken and the egg

2007-09-25T07:55:00.001-07:00

I think I love my boyfriend, if you couldn't tell by the fact that I moved with him to Baton Rouge from somewhere else not in Louisiana. Last night for his birthday, me, the 12-years-plus vegetarian/former vegan cooked him Southern fried chicken and risotto for his birthday.
I know: I am the best girlfriend ever!
/worst vegetarian ever?
/next soon-to-be ex vegetarian because I have commenced my descent on the slippery slope, as named by my now voracious carnivore/former vegetarian pal back in Brooklyn?

No, I'm pretty much just the best girlfriend ever.

Preparing took a bit of mental grappling. First I got some tips from my pal Julie, of the blog Vegetarian Marries Steak Lover. I realized this job would probably be on par with unpleasant tasks like cleaning up after the animals (which I'm used to), or as she said, cleaning the toilet.

In a way I was looking forward to the challenge, to see if I could do it. I carefully removed the ~~carcass~~ lump from the packaging, and Whole Foods' wrapping paper put my mind at ease, as it states their humane policies for their meats. No beakless chickens here. Without touching it, I put it in the steamer basket over boiling water to finish the thawing process. EWWW it's turning white! It's moldy or something! Oh right, chicken is supposed to turn lighter in color. I hadn't even come face to, er, breast with meat really since before Coolio had a hit.

Not only hadn't I cooked meat since Babe was in the theaters (and turned the actor who played the kindly old farmer vegetarian), I hadn't cracked an egg since Scary Movie was in theaters. I felt OK using these eggs, as they were the hippiest kind available at Whole Foods, the kind that practically promises they were laid piles at a time by hens swooning while Chicken Frank Sinatra and Chicken Bing Crosby croon for them.

I never miss meat, but the appeal of fried chicken is certainly not lost on me. Before I got into the veggie scene I was a big chicken eater, and there's just something so iconically mouth-watering about fried chicken. Over the years, I've made countless attempts at chicken-fried-tofu-type configurations, and my biggest DUH realization last night was how much easier recipes work with the real ingredients rather than hoping something known as egg replacer will serve the same function (for battering purposes, it really doesn't). I'd sought out fried chicken amalgams at NY veggie restaurants and am now over all of them, none are quite right. I'm not so into the fake meats anymore, though must shout out Quorn as my current favorite chicken-style cutlet.

I was maybe a little overzealous about contamination and washed the cutting board, implements, and my hands about 20 times throughout the process, and for fear of undercooking, I left the chicken in the steamer long enough for it all to be white before the frying process began. But overall, turns out the whole process wasn't that bad. It was still as satisfying to make something that I wasn't going to be eating and see that it looked, smelled, and apparently tasted the way it was supposed to. Then I used the same seasoning and battering process for my chunks of seitan, and we had a lovely dinner indeed.

Working hard and hardly working

2007-09-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Last night in New Orleans the boyfriend and I were treated to dinner at Emeril's French Quarter restaurant Nola, which very much "kicked it up a notch" in my belly! AHAHAHAH. Seriously though: ridiculously delicious. We all said "kick it up a notch" and "Bam!" about 47 times during the meal. Then we saw the end of the Liars' set followed by Interpol at House of Blues. I'm such an oldy that I couldn't stop yawning and couldn't wait to sit down, but felt I had zero right to feel that way, because our dinner friends had been quite drained from being on tour, not to mention my boyfriend who's been running on fumes all month. (In an entirely different way than I was running on fumes much later on.)

The bf has been working more hours than anyone I've ever seen this close up; between class and the studio he's putting in 20 hour days or close to it, every day of the week. I see him and his classmates doing it and still can't even imagine. Last night was only our third night out in over a month of being here, I think, and he couldn't help thinking how he had to get back. This morning he was beating himself up for "sleeping in" til 6:30. On his birthday.

Part of what's making this possible for him is a competitive drive to rank in the top of the small class. I find myself rather lacking in this helpful drive. The only thing I was really good and/or the best at in my classes as a kid was reading, writing, and art, and look where that's gotten me--the rewarding world of publishing! You might die of starvation, but look at how clever you are!™ Also, your pay breaks down to about $9/hour, but here's some free CDs!™ I wonder if there's some magical pill I could take to install a competitive drive this late in life. Possibly my namesake drug, but I'm going to pass on that.

Supposedly this is the worst semester for the program so my old man just has to power through two and a half more months or so before things return to a slightly more sane skedj. I'm inspired by how determined and dedicated he is, and the hope is that this difficult stretch will lead to much better, more fulfilling futures for us both.

In further navel-gazing news, it's also our one-year anniversary. It's been a big year, I must say. Here's the partial story of our first date.

Friday zone!

2007-09-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday there was a slight controversy in the comments touching on whether mega-popular comedian Dane Cook is funny and worthy of affection/hatred. A popular topic of late. While we're on the subject...

On this 21sth day of the Ninth month of 2007, I shall hereby and henceforth issue a decree:

* Seth, I mean as a performer. I laughed a lot during Superbad, which he wrote. Knocked Up, however, felt like it was 9 months long in real time, and I did not understand why it was such a huge hit. Sarah's just mean and relies on shock value. I'd be reluctant to be in the same room as her for fear she'd turn her gaze on me, like Medusa. She reminds me of this hair farmer from my high school we secretly called Pumpkinhead because her foundation was so orange in contrast to her big platinum hair. She would just say the first thing that popped into her mind to anyone, and it was usually cruel. I don't think hurting people is necessarily a sign of a funny person.

So what IS so funny, then?

This.
Also, thanks to Amanda for passing along this monstrosity: The Out of Gas Biker Baby Boy Doll, A whimsical sleeping baby boy doll celebrating the spirit of the open road, available only from Ashton-Drake. I'm actually getting mad the more I think about someone or numerous someones spending $110 on this. Still funny, though.

Finally, if you didn't already see this on Gawker, here's one of my new favorites, LOL Secrets.

I'm off to NOLA twice this weekend! Talk amongst yourselves.

In the words of Onyx, "Slam!"

2007-09-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday turned out to be a good day, largely due to my unexpected contact with humans. There was an accident that turned into a big to-do on my street in the early evening that I would have completely missed had my bf not gotten home right when it happened. He called me to alert me to the excitement, and first I was like, "Who is this and why are you home during daylight hours while I'm awake?" (He hadn't come home at all the night before from the studio and had come in yesterday morning for about five minutes to grab stuff before heading right back to the studio. That's why he and the rest of the class left so early yesterday, they were dead on their feet.) I went out to find most of our neighborhood out gawking at the accident at the end of the street. At first I was like, whoops, forgot my shoes, but your man here was quite comfortable in no shirt and penguin-print pajama pants, so I figured I was fine.

A UPS truck had flipped onto its side from the collision, but fortunately I don't think anyone was hurt, since no ambulance came.

Meanwhile, since everyone was outside to check out the hubbub, our street had turned into a social event. Cooper was running around like a maniac with a 12-foot branch in his mouth and we chatted with neighbors from a few doors up. Our friend Mary arrived, and it turned out she knew our other neighbor from high school in Austin. Just like when I was walking in Brooklyn during the big power failure of 2003 and in the darkness heard everyone out on their stoops with candles and snacks and drinks gabbing away to each other, it made me wish it was like this more often, instead of everyone being isolated in our technology bubbles.

Mary came inside for a bit, then later I made delish Mexican Cantina dinner (seitan burritos, kicked up with Chachere's, with fresh guac) and it was the most mexcellent meal since I've been here.

Later they covered the accident on the local news. Narrating over the footage of the overturned truck and broken bits of car, the wholesome anchor actually said, and I quote, "In the words of Onyx, 'Slam! Da da da,' yeah!"

I think I'm going to be watching more local news.

Boys' guide to hunting and fishing

2007-09-19T05:43:00.000-07:00

Hunting and fishing shows are on every night down here.

I was dozing in front of the telly last night and from what I gathered in my sleeping daze, there were three fully-outfitted hunters all lightheartedly teaming up to shoot this huge, motionless turkey. In my stupor, since I'd probably fallen asleep watching some comedy program or other, I thought this was a send-up of these local hunting shows, and thought it a jolly satire indeed. I was all, "Good one, guys." But no, once I woke up I saw it was a real show, called "Chuck Devereaux's Outdoors To You" although a less euphamistic title might be, "Chuck Devereaux and Pals Killing the Outdoors."

As an outsider, this TV phenomenon is funny and strange to me. It's kind of like the Crocodile Hunter, only instead of just sneaking up on the animal and wrestling it or whatever, it's a group of guys sneaking up on defenseless dumb hulk of a bird, and then they murder it. (Presumably. I thankfully wasn't awake for the money shot.) Still, this method of obtaining food seems more honorable than purchasing the remains of some creature that endured a horrible existence on a factory farm.

On a less hippy note, I'm happy to report having rejected the idea the bf and I were considering to start a compost pile. After a bit of online research, it seemed too sciencey, too much maintenance, and our yard's not large/isolated enough for the smell that could ensue, plus I would be the one doing it all. Also, we do not have a pitchfork. F that literal mess. I do like that we can even consider something requiring a pitchfork, though.

Compare and Contrast: the weaves

2007-09-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

You know, it's difficult living in a new place where everything is so different. It's like I'm a foreigner in my own country.

But then I see something like this:

A lone, castoff weave on the sidewalk in Baton Rouge. And it takes me right back to Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, back to the spring of 2007, a more innocent time when a vibrant weave grew in Brooklyn.

And I think: You know, there are some cosmetic differences between the BaRou weave and the Bklyn weave, but maybe...just maybe, deep down, we're not so different after all.

Where my bitches at? No really. Where are you.

2007-09-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

I know I have a lot of Southern readers now, so I've been slow to write this post, mulling over how to put this in the least offensive way. But something has been gnawing at me in the month since we moved to the Deep South. Where are the badass women hiding down here? Admittedly I haven't met many locals yet, so I'm going on what I see in the media and on my occasional ventures into public. But what I've seen has left me unimpressed.

Exhibit A: Beauty queens
Wow, so if I go to Washington Parish and eat watermelon, they'll give me a crown? I'm there! But no, those are beauty queens. Really? That's really a mainstream phenomenon down here? Apparently, yes. I already saw a bunch of beauty queens being all sparkly at that tailgate party at the River Center. And just look at them here at this Shrimp and Petroleum Festival that I regret having missed due to my stupid lack of a stupid car. Why does their queen have to be young and beautiful but their king is an old codger?

One of my pals from back home is originally from Florida and was Miss Pee Wee Ocala as a pee wee lass. Then someone told her she couldn't sing and she was all traumatized. She was like three. What three-year-old can sing?! Or do anything for that matter. F beauty pageants (obviously).

Exhibit B: Tailgating girls gone wild
Yesterday I got to borrow a car and I was inching in traffic past the tailgating bonanza at Tiger Stadium. A trio of girls holding brewskis were absentmindedly grinding on each other three in a row for the potential benefit of any drunk slob who happened to be watching. Lame, girls! Although I do realize that prob happens everywhere cheesy girls and boys go to party in America these days. Baaah! You young girls with your fake lesbianism to entice drunk frat boys! Pssst: You don't need to try that hard! They want to do you anyway!

Exhibit C: Football clinic for women
So this football clinic for women which took place at Tiger Stadium a few weeks back has been making the local news. When I first read about it, I thought, Oh cool, a football team for women, like the New York Sharks. Not my thing at all, but more power to the women who want to do that. Nope! This was a clinic to teach women "fans" all about football, presumably so they understand what their husbands and boyfriends get so worked up about. The organizers were expecting about 300 to attend, but the turnout was 650, ranging in age from 13 to 85.

*sigh*

What, do you have to like everything your man likes? I feel that if these women legitimately enjoyed football, they would have caught on to the game's rules themselves years ago as their interest grew. I mean, if a guy drunk on 57 cans of Bud Light can follow it, how hard is it to understand? Come on, ladies, step it up. If you don't like football by the time you're fortysomething (or eightysomething), it's probably because you don't like football. Not because it needs to be explained to you in a special for-girls way so you'll understand it. And that's OK. It's OK to not like football, even though it's a huge huge deal around here.

Maybe I was spoiled back home. I was accustomed to the women around me being all independent and brash and inappropriate and hilarious. An old Janeane Garofolo stand-up comedy special from like 1996 has been running on one of the HBOs lately. (It's like, I see I've missed a lot in the years I didn't have cable! Here's that special I watched when I last had cable 7 years ago.) I like to leave it on when I'm not cracking up on i.m. or email with my faraway friends, so I remember there are women who fucking rule. I hope there's some like that here. A gal gets lonely without her bitches.

Just another Random Friday

2007-09-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

* BR is freaky. I've ventured forth from the house again, am more confused than ever, and have a new Abandoned BR post up about it. It's much cheerier than the last, and thanks to the newly borrowed camera, it's also visually free of the blues.

* Remember Amy? Another discovery was made this week in the same drawer that yielded the paper towel of resolutions: women's laxatives. Bad Amy! Bad! Not HEALTHY!

* Exuhcise is good for you. Everybody loves my favorite funny ladies Julie & Jackie's video short, "Welcome to Our House." Finally, they released part two! (If you're new to this: Soap stars Natalie Hammer & Nina Hammer-Ortiz return to teach you how to "exuhcise," because the most important part of acting is not being fat. Inspired by Brenda Dickson's fantastic "Welcome To Our Home.")

* I had a dream, I had an awesome dream. Sometimes I am the biggest goofball. Monday morning I dreamed I had gone back to school. It had an awesome ending which took place in the school's 60s-style lounge area. My friend Leah and I were dancing to "Spanish Flea," doing synchronized air-morocca movements (was that because I heard Mo Rocca on NPR the day before?!) and I passionately declared, "I LOVE Herb Alpert!" I guess dreams really do reflect your innermost desires.

* Huzzah! Ye Olde Renne Faire. My Brooklyn pal julepandme, who hails from the South, and is often bored, sometimes reads Southern Cragslists. She recently shared this with me since I'm looking to make friends.

* Ms. greens beans. This recipe for Curried Mustard Greens with Kidney Beans friggin' rocked it. It's fast, super delish, vegetarian, and easy to make vegan (which I did). I love having a nice kitchen! Yay.

Swing out, sister

2007-09-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

The best somewhat-walkable market (though I won't buy much while on foot; I refuse to lug home heavy bags of groceries on foot now that I'm in car-land) in these parts is Calendro's. This, my friends, is an entire endcap of many different hot sauces. Yum.

In other Louisiana culinary news, I found these:

Curiously, their website copy is trying to take a "healthy" tack with these. Usually products in the pork rind category and those with names ending in an exclamation point are not marketed as healthy. Why not take more of a "SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM!" angle? Here, I'll try a new one out for them: [wrestler voice] "RIPPED RIGHT OFF THE BACK OF ONE OF THE PLANET'S SMARTEST ANIMALS, STRAIGHT TO YOUR MICROWAVE, THEN CRACKLIN' INTO YOUR MOOOOUTH! WHO'S SMART NOW?!"

I kid, but on an (optional) heavier note: I've been making a conscious effort to stay positive down here and establish productive work habits. But while missing my friends combined with my deadly tendency to procrastinate, I've been an Internetty Betty. And because I'm freelance, I'm always checking email to see if editors bit on my pitches, or checking the snail mail to see if a check arrived, which has led to fretting about money. And worry is the opposite of productive. I love that the Internets allows me to work from anywhere, but I'm going to have to pull out that umbilical cord from my laptop for a few hours every day and work on the most important thing: writing.

Early this summer I recounted how I'd finally visited a swimmin' hole with a rope swing for the first time that weekend. On the first try, I tried to hang on by my feeble arms and splashed right into the drink, then lingered on the bank, slow to try again, even though I wanted to do it right. The day's catch phrase as we egged each other on was "Quit bein' a pussy, pussy." Fortunately I have some very inspiring friends who are in effect now telling me the same thing about my writing (and giving me deadlines). Hesitating only invites more fear. Once I quit being a pussy about that rope swing, I discovered I barely had to hang on by my arms because there was a knot on the rope to sit on, and off I swung up into the arc, then into the water.

It's late and I don't know how to tie this comparison into a neat little bow, but hopefully some people will understand what I'm on about. If not, just think about MICRO RINDS!

Compare and Contrast: the Bedfords

2007-09-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

(Click photos to enlarge)
Bedford Drive in BaRou:

Bedford Avenue in Bklyn:

Bedford in BaRou: cute little houses

Bedford in Bklyn: "spaces"

Bedford in BaRou: unironic tiny lawn gnome, unironic support for a local sports team

Bedford in Bklyn: Well...you know how that goes with the irony and the Williamsburg.

Bedford in BaRou: names ending in -eaux

Bedford in Bklyn: names beginning in DJ or ending in Jr. or III

Bedford in BaRou: slow, children at play

Bedford in Bklyn: slow children at play

Bedford in BaRou: sketchy holes

Bedford in Bklyn: sketchy holes

The winner: Bedford in BaRou!

Thank you! I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress.

Sometimes when you dig, you find things

2007-09-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

Saturday was a big day; before having my mind blown by campus-wide tailgating, I also began gardening. I planted basil, Creole tomatoes, and poppies, not knowing much about what I was doing or if it was an appropriate season to be planting anything. My first impulse on digging a hole was, "Can't someone else do this?" But there wasn't anyone else around to do it, and once I began, I had small smile on the whole time. Then I found this lil' stone in the dirt:

Really? These things grow in the ground here? If I dug in the dirt in NYC, if there was much dirt to be dug, I'd probably find broken glass and a syringe. And as Amanda pointed out, I didn't even have to buy my dirt and lug it home to do this planting. Plenty of free dirt everywhere! This stone was like something you'd use in jewelry--ugly hippy jewelry, but still. Digging further, I found more pretty stones, though none as shiny as the first.

When I was a kid, my dad had a garden, but back then I didn't like anything we grew except the strawberries and watermelon. I did like helping him around the yard, though, and one time when we were digging holes to plant trees, I found an old-time ring a few feet down in the dirt. My Nana told me it was a moonstone, and in thinking back now to its style, it may have been from the 20s or 30s. I was hoping the ring would have magical powers but I could never get that part going on.

Anyway, I've found another quiet grownup pleasure, but don't think for a minute that I didn't send out several text messages announcing that I had just used a hoe.

heh heh.

"Hoe."

Shock and awe

2007-09-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Today was the big day everyone in Louisiana has been waiting for. It was the first home game of the football season. I'd heard that it was insane, and huge, and there were going to be superfans like I had never seen before, and I knew that it would be a shitshow. But I didn't quite comprehend until I got there, and even now, many hours later, I still don't really comprehend it (Click photos to enlarge).

In the afternoon, I walked to campus. It took nearly an hour walking at a brisk clip. At first it was crazy hot, but I thought, I'll just walk through it. No other option, really. Around five, it started raining just like it does almost every day, but for some reason I haven't caught on enough to bring an umbrella with me. And I thought, Eff you, BaRou. I will walk through your heat. And I will walk through your rain. You can't beat me; I'm from New York. And I will not even take off my sunglasses, even though I know it is raining. And I know I haven't eaten a meal since my tragic Walgreens meal 20 hours ago because I don't have a car yet, but As God as my witness, I will never go hungry again! And I shook my fist at the sky. And then a few minutes later, I took my sunglasses off. And then a few minutes later, it stopped raining like it always does.

The only thing I can compare Tiger tailgating to from my own experience is Ag Field Day at Rutgers, which is the day that everyone heads for Cook College, the agricultural campus, and parties outside doing drugs and drinking (a lot more so than usual). You know, pretty much every university has a day like that; It's called Trip or Treat at Hampshire at Halloween.

Here's one of my handful of photos from Ag Field Day taken on my pink and purple LeClic 110 camera (I'm old!).

That would be a bidi that I'm smoking--I don't know, it's some kind of Indian thing that makes you lightheaded. They made Patty there [photo right] drop like a sack of potatoes after smoking one. I just spotted bidis for sale last month at a liquor store here in LA. (Another unfortunately bad-quality photo from another Ag Field Day has my pal KarTek wearing her "Cool It" pillowcase dress that she made by following directions from Sassy magazine.)

But today was Ag Field Day by a multiple of 100, minus all hippy credo or sentiment, dressed in a campus-wide bruise of purple and gold. And this isn't a once-a-year occurrence; it's going to happen six times this semester. The bf compared it to a Dead show descending on the campus (minus, again, any and all hippy sentiment). Speaking of the old ball and chain, here is the design building that my bf and most of the rest of his first-year grad class were attempting to work in today.

The revelers might remember this building as "RESTROOMS," but they probably don't remember it as anything at all. Nonetheless, they were wandering about inside like zombies, silver-and-blue beer cans in hand, talking as loudly as you do when you've been drinking since 6 a.m. (not an exaggeration; the bf got to campus around that time in order to get parking, and people were already outside chugging, as they had been the afternoon and evening before).

Dear whichever paid-off jerk in the LSU bureaucracy who made the final decision to leave the design building open as RESTROOMS for drunken rubes to wander every floor, while your top-notch landscape architect first-year class had projects to get done for Monday, and while other buildings such as the architecture building were locked up tight: fuck you, dick. (Yesss! If I had said that in person, that would have been New York dick style!) I will say that the class extracted a small but rewarding revenge. That's all ah can say about thay-at [Forrest Gump voice].

So where do I even begin. Tiger tailgating is an orgy of American excess, as if we were lacking in examples. It's a bit ironic that this region is so influenced by the French, because I think many French folk would take issue with such wasteful decadence. (Just as I take issue with many French folk, but that's another post altogether. A post called, "Extra! Extra! CoKane hates snooty jerks!") My brain refused to even consider the day's impact from an environmental standpoint. Basically, the entire campus of LSU becomes one giant outdoor party, beginning on the afternoon before game day. The parking lot is lined on the borders with RV after RV. Each one of those RVs must be worth much more than I have earned in my life altogether combined. Not to mention that each was outfitted with satellite TV, sound systems, and who knew what-all else. And that's just somebody's party setup. Later when the game began, partiers abandoned their huge flatscreen TVs where they were to watch from the stadium, leaving them unattended. (What?!) Just the leftover booze from today could have gotten multiple third-world countries wasted (especially because they're not as fat as us).

Never mind that you know, everyone could have made a nice dent in the troubles of Darfur or Appalachia or, say, the blighted areas of Baton Rouge with all the money and food thrown around at today's game. But I'll quit being Debbie Downer and just show you around.

This is pretty much what the young folks look like, though shown here with an unusually high representation of non-blondes.

To give you an idea of the scale of things down here, Tiger Stadium is a colosseum on par with something like Giants Stadium in New Jersey (which was probably the last time I was in a stadium, to see Guns 'n' Metallica in like '92 or so). In the past (according to hearsay), the roar of the crowd in Tiger Stadium has registered on the Richter scale.

A lot of the young people had a message they felt strongly about today, and that message was "WOO."

B.A.T.T. had nothing on a party gang spotted elsewhere on campus called T.I.T.S.: Totally Insane Tiger Spirit. GET IT? TITS! LIKE BOOBS!

I don't know what that spinny wheel below is all about, but I suspect it has something to do with the 8,000 dead soldiers in the foreground.

The above photo might also be the most non-blondes I've ever seen in one place in this state.

Noticing a theme in the ladieswear? A whole lot of girlie, non-threatening purple and/or gold dresses. That's why I was so stoked to see this girl, who was tossing a football with another little girl and boy. Too bad she's wearing LSU-colored Crocs, but I made a lot of fashion mistakes as a kid, too.

This bus below may be Shaq's gangsta-themed ride, I'm told he was there. I don't really even know or care who Shaq is, so talk amongst yourselves on this one. [Due to Blogger sucking, for you Mac users the picture might be two down. Readers, should I switch this blog over to TypePad? I've about had it with Blogger.]

"Know what GRITS means? Girl Raised in The South," I overheard someone say. (It was a big day for acronyms.)

I have so much hope for the cranky-looking girl on the left there. But a lot of young girls raised in the South also seem to wear bows, like the young lady on the right. Speaking as someone who regularly wears fashions several decades old, this is still pretty astounding to me. Like, what, are we in an episode of The Little Rascals?

And these folks below were doing THE MACARENA. For the entire duration of the song. In case you forgot, it's 2007. Doing the Macarena was not even acceptable in whatever year the Macarena came out in, probably about ten years ago. I become mortified on hearing the first notes. It's like a very effective song and dance created for the express purpose of embarassment.

Just then, my borrowed fancy camera's memory card ran out, and I had my regular camera as backup, but I was just exhausted, and headed back to the design building to pick up a borrowed bike to ride home.

"Hey," Some round-faced redhead kid in a group of three said to me as I was stopped, getting my bearings on the bike. "Think the Tigers are gonna win it today?"
"Oh, there's a game today?" I said.
"Come on, don't play with my emotions like that," the kid said.
We all laughed, and I biked off, enjoying his sweetness.

And then I guess there was a game or something. I don't know. I hate sports.

I took my borrowed bike to my borrowed car, and finally got to Whole Foods, the place in town that was most like how I wanted the world to be, and bought stockpile amounts of food to ensure that I would never go hungry again.

I thought there was a virtue in always being cool

2007-09-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is a Flaming Lips lyric that keeps going through my head as I think about cool-ness, a topic that keeps popping into my thoughts since this move from New York happened. I'm 33. By a lot of standards, I shouldn't be concerned with cool anymore. By suburban standards, I should be a married homeowner with steady employment and 1.5 kids (not cool!). New York is a whole other animal, though.

But when I think of my friends who seem the most content and happy, it's the ones who aren't concerned with impressing anybody. Oddly enough, it's also the ones who are married with children (or wanting children soon) and/or the homeowners. One of these friends was the first person I knew to denounce the hipsters that I later came to term williamsjerks.

As for Baton Rouge, I keep hearing that there's cool stuff here somewhere, but I still don't have a vehicle and so have yet to see a lot of evidence of that. And I gotta tell ya, after nearly seven years basically living in the center of the universe, it gets to me. And it also gets to me that a lack of cool would get to me. I had an old-lady Friday night of watching TV, but that in itself wasn't the problem. What bugged me was in a few hours' span, I saw four people I knew personally on TV, taking up big chunks of programming time. I thought, I used to be where it was at. Where people were making it happen. Now I'm a consumer of what other people are making happen. Well really I'm not just a consumer--I'm producing my own art (for lack of a better term)--but I think what was getting to me was a sort of nagging, "I used to be with the cool kids" feeling.

And before my boyfriend got home last evening and got me to cut it out, I'd been feeling quite sorry for myself for most of the day. He's been putting in insane stretches of hours at the studio and our food supply has diminshed to nothing that would constitute a meal. After having cereal for lunch, I decided to play a new game called How Far Must I Walk to Find Food That I Eat? (Keep in mind I'm vegetarian, try to eat healthy, and live in a pretty crummy area outside of my immediate neighborhood.)

I set out heading west on Government, knowing there wouldn't be much but I hadn't walked far in that direction yet, stopping in a gas station's deli for a snack. It smelled like fried chicken, and all I could find was nacho Corn Nuts.

"Bikini...Kill," the Middle Eastern cashier read my shirt tentatively. I was drawing a bit of attention from several people in this deli, which became a theme for the day's mission.
"Yeah...it's a band," I realized I shouldn't have worn a shirt with any words on it when going on one of my expeditions in this strange land.
"Yo, you wanna get this for me?" a guy behind me was holding his water bottle toward me. That was a new one.
"You wanna get deez Nuts for me?"...is what I should have said, which I realized much later when I passed the station again on my way back.

I did find a promising French-style cafe amidst a compound of arty/antique-y stores, but they were closing for the day. I got more photos of a lot more abandoned shit, only under the gray sky and in this dicey neighborhood where I didn't dare stray off the main drag, it was all just depressing.

I also got offers of car rides from several different gentlemen, which I politely declined. I think it must be really unusual here to see a person walking who looks like she should be able to at least afford a bicycle.

I hadn't been expecting my bf home for dinner and there still weren't any fixins, so I'd walked to the nearby pharmacy trio corners and purchased a tragic feeling-sorry-for-myself bachelorette dinner of dill pickle potato chips, "Cruncheese" snacks, microwave mac cheese (the same brand I used to buy in college before I knew about better food) pizza bites ("Wow! Only 99 cents!") a frozen pizza about the size of a Sacajawea dollar coin ("Wow! Only 99 cents!"), and of course beer. It was as terrible as you'd imagine, and the bf went back out for some Cane's beakless chicken (his descriptive word, but I'm going to use it from now on, too). But now that I had human companionship the night instantly improved. (Lack of human contact: the classic problem of freelancers.)

I know it's going to get better once I have a vehicle and make friends here. I know today I'm scheduled for a guaranteed laff riot in a few hours when I walk to campus, as tonight is the first LSU home football game of the season, and the drunken tailgaters have already descended on campus beginning yesterday afternoon (oh yes, I am so going to blog this). I'm estimating the walk will take 45 minutes to an hour, but I'll be glad to work off all that garbage I ate last night. Stay tuned for Tiger Tailgating party pix.

Random Rouge Friday: And your little dog, too! edition

2007-09-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

I've been tagged by Hoosier Joe to do one of those meme things, so I'm going to work it into my Random Rouge Friday Roundup.
I'm supposed to elaborate on a list of words.

Pets I'm an animal lover. But there is a little rat dog next door that wakes me up with its miserable yelping/moaning about three or four days a week and I want to punt that fucker into orbit. (Today was one of those days.) I know that some people for some reason adore these mistakes of nature, but I think the world would be a better place if they all disappeared. My favorite is when Cooper is marking his territory by peeing on the fence right where that little shit is waiting on the other side, probably all trembling like they do. Hopefully Coop's giving little Ratso a golden shower through the crack. Good dog, Cooper! Too bad the little yipyip is probably into it anyway.

Religion

This came in the mail yesterday. The event has daily themes like Countdown to Eternity! Racing Toward the Rapture, and Unmasking the Antichrist. Amazing Facts, ehhh? It is amazing if you consider any of this "facts."

Accent I don't think I have one but some folks here might disagree. To me a lot of the older guys here in BR sound like Cleveland from Family Guy, although the voice actor who plays him is from Virginia. Also, I love hearing old ladies here say "Lord!"

I Don't Drink Well, that's sure not true. That will probably be less and less true the longer I stay here. Or, what do you think, is there a different vice I should pick up? Which one is the healthiest? I'm trying to figure it out.

Kids I don't have any, but if I did, I wouldn't let them trick-or-treat at this house:

Chore I Hate I don't know, mopping? That doesn't happen too often.

Essential Electronic Not even going to make some coy reference to something by Hitachi here...It's definitely the computer.

Perfume/Cologne Not really.

Gold or Silver YES, PLEASE! AM I RIGHT, LADIES?

Job Title Freelance writer who can always use more paying gigs. Anyone? Anyone?

OK there's more but even I am bored, so I will stop. You're supposed to tag others but I'll leave this meme as voluntary...whomever needs a topic for their blog, work away!

Ummm...

2007-09-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with these local ads? Discuss. (Click to enlarge, I finally stopped using TinyPic, and think Blogger's photo function is finally working for me.)

And with the second one, I don't mean that the place on the right is called "Corky's," and that tragically it's one of the only places that might deliver to my house. I'm talking about Hunan there.

I ain't missing Jews

2007-09-06T05:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we covered what I'll miss about Baton Rouge when I go. Today I'd like to touch on what I ain't missing about New York City, or should I say, JEW York City!

SECOND EXPLANATORY UPDATE: For the apparently numerous folks who didn't get this post, I am not following in Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic footsteps. Not everything you read or hear is literal. This is an adaptation of a popular song about someone who IS missing the person he is singing to, despite the fact that he's saying he's not. Sometimes people say one thing and they mean another. You can figure it out using context clues.
*Sigh.*

[To the tune of John Waite's 1983 hit, "I Ain't Missing You," (FIRST UPDATE/EXPLANATION:) a song about a guy who's saying he doesn't miss someone at all, but really he actually does miss that person like crazy.]

Every time I think of Jews, I always catch my breath
And now I'm standing here, and you're miles away
And I'm wonderin' why I left
And there's a storm that's raging through my frozen heart tonight

I hear your name in certain circles, and it always makes me smile

I spend my time thinkin' about you, and it's almost driving me wild

And there's a heart that's breaking down this long distance line tonight

I ain't missing Jews at all, since I've been gone away
I ain't missing Jews, now that I live in LA

I ain't missing Jews at all
Since I've been gone away
I ain't missing Jews,
Nor do I miss any gays

I can lie to myself

etc.

(New York, please send your hilarious Jewish comedians and delicious bagels. Louisiana, if anyone local randomly happens to be into any of those non-Sammy Davis comics above, please make yourself known. Also, I hear I may have a lot of new readers today. Welcome, and please check out my other blog, Abandoned Baton Rouge.)

What I'll miss

2007-09-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

Extended title: Things I already know I'll miss about this place that I never would have chosen to move to without this good reason.

Obviously we're going to get the hell out of Dodge the minute my bf gets his grad degree in spring of 2010. (Jeez...because it's also a sci-fi-esque movie title, that sounds like the very distant future.) But after a few weeks here, I've already grown so fond of some things that I know I'll miss them.

Cheap, readily available turnip greens Fortunately for this health-insurance-less freelance writer, I likes me some greens. I'd never tried turnip greens before picking up a bunch at Albertson's for seriously like 50 or 99 cents. They were great in greens 'n' beans without being all tough like collards or wilty like spinach. Throw a little Annie's Naturals Goddess dressing on them raw as a salad, and I probably just deliciously staved off cancer for another few months. Dare I say they're the perfect green?

Salted sweet cream butter from Smith Creamery at the farmer's market In another step away from veganism (to the delight of my bf), I adore this butter. It's insane on grilled corn, air-popped popcorn, and atop homemade vegan (heh) banana bread, and you can taste its creamy presence when it's baked into goods. After trying this, I realized I never had real butter before. Is this butter kidding me? No. It is so serious.

Buzz o'clock You can hear cicadas throughout the day, but they really go for it at dusk. It's a good natural transition for the end of the work day...though it often isn't the end of mine.

Baton Rouge expats, what do you miss?

Wherein we venture into the local rock scene

2007-09-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

Boyfriend and I went to see friends-of-friends' band Au Revoir Simone, straight out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at the Spanish Moon on Saturday.

We met some of the affable staff on the way in. The Spanish Moon is a cool space, like a mini-Irving Plaza set in a former warehouse, with exposed brick walls and second bar and a pool table upstairs. The show drew a respectable crowd, who of course were more enthusiastic than the stock-still indie audiences back home. Both of us felt we were being checked out, as the newcomers.

The "sit-downs" bathroom stalls at the club seem to have more than the usual amount of grafitti. If only I had seen that advice [in green] not to date band guys (musicians) about 20 years ago. Also I don't know if I want to be operated on by whomever wrote "Surgical Tech bitch."

Here are some local topical sentiments.

And this just made me laugh.

A group next to us provided mucho entertaining eavesdropping during Au Revoir Simone's electronic dreamy pop set. They'd already stood out as not being like the others at the show...I'd venture to guess they were visiting "the big city" from some outlying area. In my non-expert opinion, these were Baton Rouge's version of the oft-maligned bridge-and-tunnel party crowd in NYC...let's call them bridge-and-highways. When Au Revoir Simone took the stage one of them shouted "FREEBIRD!" and I'd heard multiple references to "Jaeger" and Jaegerbombs, but my interest wasn't piqued until the following quote:

"It's not that bad, just don't get addicted to it, 'cuz then it is that bad...I haven't done meth in probably about six months," said one of the gals. Now, I've been around folks who have tried all sorts of drugs, but until now have had slim-to-no exposure to dabblers in crystal meth, or at least folks who would speak of it loudly in public in an authoratative, bragging tone.

Now they had my attention. "She's tappin' the ra-ta-tat thang," one of them observed, referring to an electronic percussion pad onstage. The speaker was a guy with a ball-shaped bun of nappy blond hair.

And later, "GET A GIT-TAR!"

"They should be drinkin' beer on tha stayge and whiskey. Not water." So I guess Nickelback or Slipknot weren't playing that night, but I wanted to ask the bridge-and-highways why they were there.

"I'm goin' ta pee!" said one of the female bridge-and-highways. "Don't fall ee-in," said Ball Bun.

"She don't have any shoes on!" one of the characters observed about one of the Au Revoir ladies. "Neither do you!" my bf said in their direction, getting rather enraged with the hayseeds, as I tried to pacify him into non-confrontation.

"You guys are so cute!" One of the Au Revoir gals said to the crowd (from what I could tell, they couldn't hear our nearby commentators), then mentioned that their next song was on some soundtrack*.

"Oh you're that important," the drug-expert bridge-and-highway said, and then, louder, because this was going to be her big laugh-getter: "We don't lahke yew 'cuz you don't have tits!"

This description was hardly accurate, although part of the appeal of these lovely women, like with most indie-rock ladies, is tied to their not needing to flaunt said tits. I found myself in a most unfamiliar position of feeling defensive about Williamsburg. Williamsjerk might be polluted with rich-kid douchebags, but at least... well, I wasn't sure where to go with that defense.

We had a great view of the show, but couldn't wait to get away from the group of Jerry Springer refugees. Now I'm thinking hopefully, maybe that was performance art (I don't think it was), and thinking that several local commenters will probably know Ball Bun, and then I'll be a persona non grata around his future commentary.

After bidding bon soir and au revoir to Au Revoir, we went to the all-night diner Louie's Cafe, which at 2 a.m. was hopping with a soundtrack of Prince hits. My nachos had homemade salsa and the bf's home fries were also fresh-made; thumbs up. There we saw revelers from a local pimp-and-ho ball, or "Players' Ball," the euphamism used on the poster, and overheard a guy saying, "I been to Auburn and I been to LSU, and I will tell you just like any other red-blooded American man, that the girls at Auburn are WAY better than the girls at LSU. The girls at LSU are chubby. The girls at Auburn don't have no chub." Wow! What a wordly playboy! He might have been more qualified to comment on the subject if he were not pear-shaped, overflowing onto the chair next to him, and sporting a '90s-style Caesar 'do.

We were full of mirth on the way out to the car, and I wasn't successful holding back snorts and laughter as a man attempted to casually walk out from behind the parking lot's Dumpster. New York was never this entertaining.

Here's a relevant video by three different broads (four, really):

*Update: It's the Dedication soundtrack, which I just recieved today, and which I can say, halfway through the first listen, is totally up CoKane's alley. It's got Deerhoof (four tracks), Cat Power, and the Strokes as well.

Random Rouge Roundup

2007-09-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

I've been collecting mini-thoughts/questions that don't merit whole posts, and thought I'd put them in a weekend roundup, to tide y'all over until my usual Monday rundown of my weekend's antics.

* I think a lot of behavior the bf and I admire as "New York style" might just be considered "dick style" here.

* On another New Yorky note, do people here get offended by casual cursing? My pottymouthed bf is thinking maybe yes.

* When I walked the dog the other day, then he dumped it on someone's lawn, then I went back home for a plastic bag, came back and picked it up, was that the weirdest thing ever for a new neighbor to have potentially witnessed? It just felt so rude, leaving a big old dump to bake into charcoal on someone's lawn. Are you supposed to curb your dog here?

* A lot of people here still smoke. Smoking is bad for your health, you guys! Like, cancer bad.

* Everywhere around here still uses foam cups, plates, and takeaway containers. Styrofoam is bad for the environment, you guys! Like, cancer bad.

* I like that no one in town, even on the radio and TV sometimes, uses an area code, since there's only one area code for town-- 225. That, like being able to see the moon, and like lots of people smoking, and like styrofoam containers, and like calling women coeds, reminds me of the olden days.

My new coworkers

2007-08-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

I work from home now, and some of you may wonder what it's like to work alone. But really I'm never alone.

Here's my main man Cooper, aka Obsesso.

And that's Gypsy, wanting to kill Cooper as always. She works on the daybed in my office. ("Works"= sleeps)

...And that's Obsesso again.

Annnnnnd, Obsesso.

Ladies and gentlemen, Obsesso.

Repeat all day long.

Mama's got a brand-new blog

2007-08-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I took my shut-in arse out into the world and reintroduced myself to walking. I found this salon where I think I'm getting my hair cut every day, at least in spirit.

I admired the kids from the magnet high school having a wholesome lunch hour on the campus, tossing a frisbee and talking about the current fads such as pet rocks and what have you, and then took pictures from afar like a creep.

I was pleasantly surprised by how many errands I could run on foot. Then I was drawn in by one of the local abandoned businesses. And it made me realize: DUH. I am from New Jersey, where it's a rite of passage to hang out in/explore anything abandoned (most awesomely, we used to frequent an abandoned asylum in Edison, often at my older brother's instigation). I am squarely in the Weird NJ target demographic. I had temporarily forgotten that I LOVE abandoned shit; I love modern ruins. Why should I be bummed out by depressed areas of town? Baton Rouge is an urban explorer's dream!

And so I bring you: Abandoned Baton Rouge. My brother will be so proud.

That old angel moon

2007-08-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

I was quite charmed by this view last night.

The moon! I remember that thing! We used to see this same white orb in the sky when I was a kid. You don't see it so much now in the NYC area, where the night sky is a fuzzy pink-orange-beige color known as light pollution. And stars? Fuhgettaboutit. They're gone. There's not too many stars visible here, but still more than New York.

I loved how the moon had a white halo around it, and I also thought the sky looked very Southern.

Speaking of very Southern and not like New York City, um, I saw a couple of interesting items on the local news the other night. The anchor announced there had been one of those rankings of states' obesity rates and noted with a chuckle, "Louisiana is not the number-one state in obesity...but we're just a few doughnuts away!"

The top-ranked went like this:

1. Mississippi
2. West Virginia
3. Alabama
4. The state I now somehow live in

Nine out of the top ten were Southern states. They attributed it to sedentary lifestyles, but I'd throw in there that you might want to lay off the hush puppies, and if you eat vegetables, try cooking them in something other than pork fat.

But the upside, noted the chuckling anchors, is that LSU co-eds were named the top 4 prettiest. Wait...did they just call women "co-eds" on a TV news program? That's right, local news anchors, women attend college now! And good thing they're pretty! That's a very important attribute in being a co-ed.

Wow.

Things to do in Baton Rouge when you're a shut-in

2007-08-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons moving was such a bitch is that, just by existing, I amass tons of items like this little number.

One aspect that I always found tragicomic (one of my fave combos) about this Magnajector can be seen here:

Number one suggestion for usership? Shut-ins. Then they have a sick kid in a hospital bed who is delighted at the still image of a clown on the wall. Except everybody knows that no one likes clowns, and secondly, that kid probably has polio or something and a creepy clown is not going to help anything. But I digress. My point is that I am now a shut-in.

My loyal VW bus Wolfgang is not here in Louisiana yet, and the bf's truck is a stick shift, which I haven't learned to drive yet. So until I gain that new skill set, I'm limited to walking-distance errands, and actually my legs have gone a-tingling these past few days because I think they're saying, "WTF? What happened to walking? What happened to those four flights of stairs that kept us so shapely and alluring?"

That's OK, though! I can still do plenty of things! I can:

Walk to the intersection of Government Street and Acadian and compare the values between the competing pharmacies on three of the corners: CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid.

Cook with my super-fancy oven which has a thing which tells time and remembers what time you put your food in and knows when to take it out. I'm told this is called a "timer." It also has an interior light and a window on the door! (I was basically working with one step up from the Easy Bake Oven for the past 6.5 years--except even the Easy Bake had an interior light and a window on the door.)

Calculate the savings achieved by buying giganto multipaks of TP and paper towels (PT) instead of buying them one at a time at bodegas.

Watch for new awesome local TV ads. There's the one for the girdle garment I saw during South Park (!); there's the one for a handbook for raising your kids right featuring an expert who has a brush moustache (because nothing says "safe to be around kids" like a brush moustache); and there's multiple commercials for telephone dating lines, one of which takes a different approach from the usual cleavage-n-lingerie spokesmodel. It shows a woman hanging out in a park, then a skinny longhaired dude comes up to her and goes, "You have beautiful hair." She brightens. "Who's. Your stylist," he says, in a way that suggests he would like to be her platonic stylist. She wilts. Annnd, scene. Then it's pretty much like, "If you don't want this, call Tango! Because you might not know the Internet exists!"

Anyway don't cry for me, Astoria. I have tons to do, though I'd rather reverse the proportion of paid writing work and unpaid housework, I enjoy doing all of it, and this is a temporary shut-in situation. But it's another aspect that's throwing me for a loop. My life is so different now than it was a few weeks ago. Good thing I have my Magnajector clown projection to keep me company.

I've gone to live amongst the whitecaps

2007-08-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

On Friday night, four of us went for dinner at a Thai restaurant with the goal of later checking out this Tsunami rooftop sushi bar we keep hearing about. The Thai place was a windowless cinderblock building, making it look just like a strip bar from the outside. The inside had mirrored walls, continuing the effect. We got to check out the crowd for a good 20 minutes before being seated, and I felt rather glamorous by comparison.

All the whitecaps had put on their best going-out polos, cargo shorts, and of course, white caps for the occasion. One stood out by wearing his best sweat-stained going-out promotional bank visor. One benefit of wearing these outfits out for the night is that if a game of ultimate frisbee were to break out at the restaurant, they would totes be ready to go.

At 9:35 or so we were finally seated. We ordered about 10. Fifteen minutes later we got silverware and water, then we had to stop someone to ask for the beers we'd ordered, which then took another 5-10 minutes to arrive. By 10:30 our appetizers hadn't arrived yet, and we wondered if they were growing the soybeans for the tofu.

I was ready to go back through the kitchen and see which Motley Crue song the middle-aged Asian waitress was dancing to over on the other side, where it must still be a functioning strip bar. That could be the only explanation for the extended stretches of time between her visits. At 10:36 our apps arrived, then six minutes later came the entrees of my three dining companions, followed by mine four minutes later. The reason I have such precise times toward the end was that I was keeping sane by taking notes, which you would think would give the impression that I was a food critic and we might get better service. Nope. Our waitress said by way of explanation at the end that they'd been busy all night but, uhhh, the thing is, sometimes restaurants get busy! Especially on weekends! So have more staff on hand or move faster! Baton Rouge people, is this normal service for these parts? Please say no. We'd had a fun night heckling away, but decided not to attempt Tsunami since it was after 11, and who knew what the waits would be like there.

Saturday morning we went to the farmers' market in the downtown, which looks like this.

Notice that there are about ten cars parked in the downtown of this state capital. I don't think this photo was taken when inhabitants had evacuated due to a hurricane. From what I've seen so far, the downtown is usually about this populated. Ghost towns are kinda cool, but also kinda depressing.

The farmers' market was about the size of the one in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, only this one has a lot more okra, huge fresh shrimp, and grape-ish fruits called muscadines. When we asked about the mystery fruit, a tiny man in a purple-and-gold LSU-logo-print button-down appeared next to us: "MUSCADYYNES--YA MAKE WYYYNE FROM MUSCADYYNES." Gotcha. A wheelchair-bound man in shorts had a constantly-twitching stump below his knee. "Where I'm from, we cover that up," the bf said, and our visiting Austin buddy Adam mentioned restless leg syndrome. I couldn't help laughing, thinking I'm going to hell unless I start doing some major good deeds. We also bought a basil plant there from a man who sounded exactly like Justin Wilson, the Cajun chef (RIP). Hooooo-wheee.

A lot of the businesses around here that aren't aimed at the students tend to paint a pretty bleak picture of the non-university population. In my area there are numerous bail bondsmen, loan places, a pawn shop, and two tattoo parlors, one that I've dubbed "The Bad Idea Tattoo Parlor." You just know there's a lot of Tazzes and misspelled tributes getting inked onto skin in that one.

Later, we ran errands out on Florida Boulevard and Airline Highway, which to me is fuggo central, stark and lined with strip malls, discount stores, fast food joints, abandoned businesses, and seedy/sketchy/shady motels.

On the one morbid hand, it's intriguing local color. On the other, sadder hand I couldn't believe we'd moved here. I was feeling pretty down and my bf reminded me, "It's funny, remember?" And I clung to that, then when we saw this place, the bf pulled right into the lot, and we were ready for free entertainment.

According to the sign outside, you could get 6 TEETH for $150 in there. Sounds a bit like a little place I used to frequent in Brooklyn called the Fulton Mall! Then we reconsidered. If we stood out everywhere else in town, we were definitely going to stand out at this place. Locals, umm, is it advisable to go in **TH FLE MA KET**?

My beau said, "I almost want to go to that Perry Farrell show just to be around someone normal."

"You realize you just referred to Perry Farrell as normal," I replied, but I knew what he was talking about.

After the errand run, a malaise set in. There's a Winn-Dixie supermarket near us and I'm pretty sure it's permanently closed, but maybe it's just really pathetic- looking. Who can tell around here? But that evening we forced ourselves out to this LSU Tailgate Party at the River Center, figuring it was a guaranteed hilarious shitshow.

It did not disappoint: $20 well spent! Going in we passed a gang dressed as the Flintstones, and we also realized we'd be the only ones not in LSU colors (as usual). "Louisiana Saturday Night" was playing, some girls were dancing around to it, and I started singing along. And to our surprise they had some decent beer as well as of course the usual college fare. Because we were there, we had to do these disgusting Jaeger/Red Bull shots.

They tasted like college, although in my day, we didn't have no Red Bull. While in the shots zone, I also attracted the eye of a possible lesbian admirer in her late 40s or so, who immediately turned conversation to women leaving their husbands for other women. After I escaped, she would eagerly wave whenever I saw her that night.

By the time the bf and I found these ballroom dancers, we just hung out there for awhile, laughing, until we met our friends and departed for more beer.

They were dancing ballroom style to such hits as "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Brick House."

Later some pie-eyed, moon-faced boy who looked no older than 14 bopped my bf with his poster, going "WOOOO!" The bf responded, "YEAH, HOSS! WHAT'S UP?" and the kid just continued to "WOO" and my boyfriend tried to get him riled up, but it was impossible: "YEAH, JETHRO, HOW YA DOIN'?" No response other than WOO from our very enthusiastic young tailgater. I could not stop laughing. When we saw him again later, it was more of the same.

What I wish you could see in this picture is that a beauty queen and some sporto guy were giving away a ride-on cooler! Sporto is sitting on it.

As we reluctantly departed (the place was shutting down), the bf continued calling out, "AMY!" and "BRITNEY!" at the clusters of blonde girls in little yellow and purple dresses, just to see who would turn around. As we stood by the pickup bidding our pals adieu, we hear "WOOOOOO! LSU! WOOOOOO!" and who's leaning out the window at us in a passing truck, but my boyfriend's little pie-eyed moon-faced buddy. "YEAH JETHRO! SEE YA LATER!" The bf said.

Something tells me we will see him later.

OMG PTL

2007-08-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday, I have cable for the first time in like seven years. I found this awesome show last evening where everybody got saved! It had the trembling organ music and everything. This preacher lady was speaking in toungues just like the preacher lady in Jesus Camp. Not too creepy!

What happens is, each person comes up, and the preacher lady doesn't really waste time on what their problem or problems is/are, she launches right into the tounges action then pushes them back with her hand and they are HEALED! Meanwhile one or both of these other two evangelists have sidled up behind him/her to catch the newly healed lamb of God. Then the best part is, someone else comes in with a little blanket and drapes it over the healed lamb on the floor, just like the guy who used to bring out James Brown's cape!

And in case you wanted a closer look at the getup on the pink lady--I know I did--here you go.

You guys, I'm a bitch

2007-08-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

I made some resolutions for the semester, everyone! Just kidding, these are somebody else's goals that I found written on a folded paper towel in the house--or as I like to call it, "blogging gold."

In the process of unpacking and settling in, I've done a little investigative journalism and learned a bit about former occupants of this house. Let's call that above goal-writer "Amy," because I think that's her name, and because various other girls I've heard about since moving here have had that name, and I've only lived here for like five seconds.

I have reason to believe that Amy might also have patronized an establishment called Classy Nails, charged an under-$3 purchase at McDonald's, and sometimes needed a helper in the kitchen--a helper called Hamburger Helper, for which I now have a 50-cents off coupon. All part of Operation: "bod that we like--HEALTHY", I suppose. (And who constitutes "we?" Amy and God?) Why am I being such a bitch? But please understand, I physically could not stop myself from displaying this gold nugget for all to behold.

Yesterday was kitchen-organizing day and I fell in love with the dishwasher. I've never had one before, and had been rather anti-dishwasher, thinking them wasteful and a waste of time (I had this notion that you had to hand-wash the crud off dishes before loading). Boy was I wrong! In one day with minimal effort I got years of city grime off all my kitchen stuff, and got it more sparkling than hand-washing ever could. I wanted to put everything dirty I owned in the dishwasher, like appliances. I wish there was an invention that would clean everything, then I realized there is, and it's called "Mexicans." (I'm allowed to make that joke because the invention used to be called "Irish people," which you may have noticed I am.)

We went to see Superbad last night in a movie theater in an anonymous strip mall amidst other parking lots of strip malls that could have been anywhere except NYC. The best part was the $7.25 student admission (I'm a student of life) and that we didn’t have to go up 17 escalators to get to our theater; we walked three steps from the ticket taker (and cop who was stationed there for some reason?). But the saddest part was that with my snorting, I was probably the loudest person in the theater. (Horror movie crowds at Court Street in Brooklyn, I pour out my malt liquor to thee!)

We were the only ones not wearing LSU shirts and caps. There were four or five Amys ahead of us on line. They all looked like they patronized Classy Nails. Until one of them turned around, I was certain she was a mom to one of the other ones, but she turned out to be college-age like them. She was heavy, had platinum white-blonde hair with a little pink bow on top, and her giant velour bag looked like a craft store had exploded onto it, leaving a mess of appliquéd flowers, sequins, possibly even rickrack. I had never seen a woman under 40 up north who would choose this look. Of course they bought tickets to the romantic drama Becoming Jane. Oh, girls. Really?

When we got home, the radio was on, though we'd turned it off before leaving. And the stereo's dial was set on the phonograph function, so there was no way radio should be coming through the speakers! Finally we realized this must be what our neighbor was telling us about: the smooth-jazz radio station of the nearby magnet high school, which has a signal so strong it tunes in on everything. If I wore braces I'd probably be tormented by El Boring Boringson jams inside my head. For a moment there, though, it was like being haunted by the ghost of smooth jazz. The least threatening ghost ever.

I also had my first encounter with a palmetto bug in what was previously a most non-threatening kitchen. It looked rather like this. I'm not over it yet.

I'm a bit concerned that in this small town, everything local that I heckle will come back to haunt me. So far numerous specific places/people/phenoms/organizations I've written about have elicited commenters with personal knowledge of that person/thing. I don't want to offend (too much)...the people here are just so bloody nice. I've met like six neighbors without even trying, like they actually stop by and ring the doorbell to introduce themselves. You can even talk the utilities people into doing you a solid and, say, turning on the water on the same day instead of their policy of doing it the next business day. Talking someone out of company policy in the northeast? Fat chance. So anyway, yes. Everyone is supernice and that is supergood.

Oh, PS, we also spied some old lady who may or may not have been a low-priced hooker hanging out on a bus bench at a T-intersection after midnight when the sidewalks are all rolled up & no one else is on the streets. Locals, your thoughts on this phenomenon?

The story so far

2007-08-19T06:14:00.000-07:00

I'm back on the Internets! We had to go to Texas to get it, though. JK, BATON ROUGE!!! We just don't have all the utilities hooked up yet, and now we're in Waco, Texas getting an awesome set of midcentury furniture from the bf's mom. Here's what the week's been like. (Apologies for the blue tint in many photos, mama needs a new camera.)

Tuesday: Packing insanity

In retrospect (and in real-time-spect), it was absolute lunacy for us not to recruit more help for moving what must have been hundreds of boxes out of the fourth-floor walkup apartment. My bf had two friends help, one who came at the beginning and one many hot hours later at the end, and both were godsends. The packing never ended. Even at the end, when we were stuffing the clothes from the closets into trash bags, there was still more to pack. Then we just left things I would have normally taken, like the old-tyme typewriter I found in the Bronx. In the fever of packing, I began hating everything I loved: vintage Pyrex? Why in the world do I have so goddamn much of it? I know that I also appeared rather insane to the bf for hoarding this many things. John Lennon appeared in my head to impart wisdom from beyond the grave: "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can..." Unfortunately for all involved in this move, I can not.

The plan was to depart in the middle of the night whenever we finished packing the truck, but by the time we'd finished at about 4 a.m., we were beyond spent. We decided to crash for about two hours before taking off. A wink or two later we were up and decidedly not rested, but it was time to go. We took another load out to the trucks in a dreamlike state before one final trip up to the apartment to get the pets, when my bf started cursing: he'd left the house keys upstairs. We were locked out.

"Looks like it's time to go up the fire escape," says I. We retrieved the step ladder from the moving truck and brought it underneath the fire escape. But it wasn't nearly tall enough to reach the hanging fire escape ladder. The solution was that I'd climb the stepladder, then my boyfriend would lift me the rest of the way to the fire escape ladder, where I'd pull myself up. By this time we'd gathered a small group of onlookers comprised of the deli-manager neighbor and construction workers (none of whom were coming forth with any taller ladders).

"But I don't have the upper-body strength!" I kept protesting, even as I got into position, as there was no other option. He boosted me up, I pulled myself as best I could, and once I got my foot in the bottom ladder rung, I was fine. The rest of the break-in was a piece of cake. I climbed up to our floor, went in the window, back down the four flights for the 150th time in the past day, and let the bf in, whereupon he got to the bathroom and vomited. Jeez, I'm not that heavy, am I? (He has early-morning stomach troubs anyway.) Then he had a little rest on the ceramic tiles. It was an auspicious beginning to moving day one.

Wednesday: Brooklyn to Southern Virginia

We were off: me driving the moving truck with the cat, the bf driving his pickup with the dog. I'm happy to report that, despite the cancer of strip malls that's eating away at the nation, a lot of the country still looks like this.

Western PA and Virginia were all gorgeous rolling farmland. And the farther away we got from the East Coast, the closer we got to God, apparently. Roadside signs read: "REPENT! God will abundantly pardon," "The WAGES of SIN is DEATH" (is that proper English?), and the anti-Ayn Rand sentiment, "Who runs your life, Jesus Christ or Self?" I also spied a JESUS Hardwood Flooring Installation truck and an "America Bless God" bumper sticker. (1. What does that even mean? 2. Proper English?) I regularly spotted supersized crosses in fields, in both original single-cross format and the extra-morbid Golgatha triple-cross format. I thought, Golgatha would be a good band name, especially because it means "place of the skulls." (These guys thought so, too.)

Then I experienced almost hell in West Virgina, at the worst example of a Subway ever. There were four people in front of me and all told, the wait was 25 minutes. That means two kids took 25 minutes to make 5 sandwiches. This might be acceptable if all the components of the sandwiches were not ready to go right in front of these morons' faces. Also at least half of the people in the place were morbidly obese, which rather took away from Jared's weight loss example. I shifted from foot to foot, resisting the urge to go behind the counter and make the sandwich myself, telling myself that my cat was not dying of heat out in the truck. Then they didn't have the veggie patty even though it was on the menu, so I had waited 25 minutes for a soggy gross pocket of vegetables. Mmmmm! Note to self: patience. Not everywhere moves at the pace of a NYC Korean deli. In fact, nowhere else really does.

In southwestern Virginia, just after crossing Route 666 (nobody I texted was as impressed about this as I was...this is shamefully non-metal; Manowar would de-friend people for less) was the first of four or five states to come in which I noticed a creepy botanical phenomenon: to the left of the highway, all trees, rocks and all other structures were blanketed with the leaves of one unknown kind of plant, I'm assuming on vines. The covered trees created the effect of colossal Swamp Thing- like green zombies, frozen in motion. If anyone out there knows what this foliage is called, please tell me, but until then I will call the phenomenon Swamp Thing Zombie Plants.

We stopped for a nap in a Virginia rest area atop a picnic table in a treed area. The chorus of cicadas buzzed us to light sleep. We blearily pressed on but quit at a Super 8 before our goal of Knoxville, just above the border to Tennessee. Then it hit me that we'd really left, and I cried. The bf thought I was a little crazy and overtired. Then I cried and laughed at the same time. Then I slept like the dead.

Thursday: Virginia to Mid-Mississippi

Thursday took us through three states I had never been to before: Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. What stands out most about Tennessee was a super creepola radio station found at 930 AM, Pigeon Forge Radio in the Smoky Mountains, "your source for comedy and fun." I was transfixed by it nearly all the way across the narrow state. I'm not entirely convinced the station was of this time and/or world. There's something otherworldly and out-of-time about AM radio anyway; it always sounds so far away and tinny, but I wasn't sure that 930 AM was even being manned by a human. The canned announcer would introduce a comedy segment from their main man Milton Crabapple, who is the Sheriff of Crabapple County and who always provides "squeaky clean comedy." Then they'd play a segment from Jerry Seinfeld, then a little Tenessee trivia, then another bit from Milton Crabapple, and then another from (you guessed it) Milton Crabapple. They also threw in Ray Romano and one or two of those blue-collar comedians (Men and women are different! Yuk!), but mostly it was ol' Miltie. And to think I was worried that there wouldn't be any good comedy in this Jew-deprived land where we're moving!

Speaking of demographics, evidence of the existence of black people returned to the radio as soon as we crossed into Alabama. R&B and even a wee bit of hip-hop returned to the airwaves, whereas for most of the past few days all I'd heard was (mostly white) pop, rock, and a buttload of country and religious freakazoids.

Alabama has a lovely welcome center complete with rocking chairs lining a back porch. I took Gypsy out in her cage while I waited there to meet up with the bf. The heat and humidity were so oppressive that by the time we left she was panting--a rarely seen tragicomic cat phenomenon.

In Missisissippi as it started getting dark, my phone stopped working. This was bad, as it was the only way my beau and I had of meeting up to stop for the night. At first I thought his phone had the problem, as the message said his phone had been disconnected or was no longer in service. My brain started concocting a scenario in which the bf had been murdered on the dog path at the rest area and for some reason the murderer had also cancelled his phone service. Then I realized how silly that was, and realized my phone was giving that message for everyone I tried calling, and I stopped at a Motel 6 for the night and used their phone. Over an hour of no phone contact had elapsed, though, and my boyfriend was almost frantic when I got him on the phone, certain I'd met some horrible misfortune. But everything was fine. If I had gotten offed, though, I know who (would have) killed me. Probably somebody from here:

Friday: Mississippi to our new home in Baton Rouge

My phone started working again around Louisiana. And hey! Louisiana felt preferable to the previous few states. We finally got to Little Pink around noon on day three. Our yard's welcoming committee consisted of butterflies, geckos, and mourning doves.

Time to unload the trucks in the scorching midday sun. Our friendly neighbors gave us water since our water's not on until Tuesday (don't ask what we're doing about relieving ourselves), saying that Baton Rouge has the number-two best tap water in the country. "Yeah, New York has really good water, too," I replied, feeling like a jerk as I said it. I think New York has the number-one water. Also, this tap water tasted like chlorine. Still, I was melting in a bikini top and shorts, and I drank the hell out of it.

Later, as I began the unpacking, I wondered: what to do with all this storage space in the bathroom? I have an inordinate amount of toiletries and such, but this was far too much for even my collection.

Then I realized: this area must be what's known as a "linen closet." In non-NYC places where people have decent amounts of space, homes have whole closets just for towels and linens! I'll be damned.

After feasting on the first real food in days (from Whole Foods) we headed to the back deck to relax with our local Abita beer, tunes from the iPod and a soundtrack provided by nature: cicada or locust drones--they sounded like monstrous critters. We strung up some lantern lights and watched the dog run around like a goofball. Sitting there not doing much of anything for the first time in days, I felt like I was starting, just starting, to understand the slowed-down appeal of the South. The scariest part--uprooting from home--was over.

It's going to be okay.

Saturday: Baton Rouge to Waco, Texas

It was our first morning in the sunlit house, but we had to set out again that day for Waco. Before leaving, we took the dog for a walk around the neighborhood to check it out. The first unusual phenomenon we noticed was that everybody waves at you. Huh.

We decided to pop in on our friend Mary, who had just moved from Austin the day before (she's in the landscape architecture program with my bf). We soon learned that if you are walking in August in Baton Rouge, 1. It means you don't have a car and 2. There is no "popping in." It was more like sliding in, dripping sweat by the time we got to her place, after what should have been a ten-minute walk but was more like a twenty-minute leisurely stroll through a hazy sauna.

Mary lives in the Garden District, which is resplendant with enormous ancient live oaks and darling houses. Basically the Garden District makes our humble little neighborhood look like a piece of crap.

"We're in trouble," Mary announced quietly on their back deck. We didn't get the full story, as her roommates were in earshot, but apparently they had hit some of what were supposed to be the best bars in town the night before and she was quite disappointed. I don't think I'll have such a gloomy outlook on it as I'm not expecting anything impressive. I'm just anticipating funny material, like when the bf showed me a glossy flyer card for an ultimate fighting competition sponsored by a place called Daquiri's. The bf is glad he's over going out. Amen to that.

Then we were on the road again to Waco, this time we were all in one vehicle except Gyp (who was holding it down at home) with much togetherness.

At Houston we drove through what may have been part of one of those hurricanes that are swirling around about now. We also switched drivers and walked the dog just as a sandstorm hit.

We finished the trek through lovely rural eastern Texas. The funniest thing I wish I got video or a picture of but didn't was a pack of about 15 cows running their asses off, presumably for shelter from the pelting rain. Anyway, here we are in Waco, and today we got to pack up the truck again, before driving back to Baton Rouge tomorrow and unloading the truck again. Awesome! I am going to be so in shape after all this, so that means I get to drink lots of delicious beer and eat lots of delicious cheese.

Ahem. In Conclusion

Due to the time-warping nature of travel, Brooklyn already seems so long ago and far away, but also, you know, not. Those of you who said this would be an adventure were right. I'm glad you understand that's a good thing.

I'm going to get in trouble with the beau for cursing the rest of our move, but I can't resist saying that so far it's been a fortuitous one, considering the amount of things that could have gone wrong. It seemed that so many things happened the way we needed them to. I felt like our combined seven dead grandparents were watching and calling in favors for us (I almost ran out of gas twice and didn't; I missed an exit but the way I took back to the route I needed was scenic rural area and I didn't have to backtrack; we're both pretty banged up but no real injuries, etc.). In fact, I had kept my Nana's umbrella in the cab of the truck with me as a good-luck charm. Am I sounding like a crazy person? Please ignore those last few sentences.

Goodbye, cruel civilized world

2007-08-14T03:43:00.000-07:00

Last night was the last night of sleep that felt like home until the new place starts feeling like home. Today is my last day living here for awhile. It's the last day of packing. Last day of errands. Loading up the pickup and the moving truck, and setting off sometime during the night.

I started this post yesterday, as another form of procrastination from the neverending packing up of nearly seven years of living in one place. I have a feeling that despite my best efforts of the past week and a half packing with boxes, Duck tape*, and a Sharpie, the end part of this will be a shitshow involving desperately stuffing belongings into trash bags.

We're leaving during the night and aiming for Knoxville late tomorrow. Looking at the route highlighted on the map by AAA (which you may recall stands for Triple Awesome), I was excited that I'll finally be going through these exotic Southern towns and cities, though we won't be taking the scenic route this time. So you won't hear from me for a few days at least...do they have Internets in Baton Rouge? (I'm joking, Baton Rouge. You should have better self-esteem. Let's work on that together, Baton Rouge.) But of course I'll document this journey, and be sure to check in for my epic report.

***
To give you a little taste of what's in store when we get down South, here is a text-message exchange between myself and my friend who lives in the greater New Orleans area.

Cokane: Yo. Im moving 2 BR on wed. R u ready 2 teach me 2 shoot guns soon? Hope so.

Paul: Totally! Are you ready for a dull Southern town full of rednecks? I hope so.

Cokane: :( im ready 4 lots of writin time & free material 2 heckle. And ready 4 shootin!

Paul: Sweet.

And, scene.
***

...I'm kind of choked up right now as this is finally starting to be real. I'm leaving the place where I really came into who I am. The only place I've lived longer was my childhood home. I'll just busy myself, Lord knows there's enough to do and states to go before I sleep, so I'll put off feelings time until I'm driving the moving truck solo tonight and all day tomorrow. Friends are invited to text message me affirmations over the next few days. Otherwise it's going to be a road movie starring a whole lot of me and one very unhappy Benadryled-up cat.

* re: Duck tape: Although I disapprove of any brand name that reinforces misspellings, such as the car Expresso, if you are into huffing, this is the enjoyably-fumed packing tape for you.

Motley 'cue

2007-08-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

(Some content possibly NSFW? I dont' really know what's considered NSFW, as my last job was in a porno office.)

Somehow in the middle of the last few days of moving preparations, the bf and I threw a going-away rooftop barbecue kegger. It went rather smashingly; strangers became friends, old friends reunited one last time for now, and hilarious wastedness occurred. A lot of friends seemed really sad to see us go...it must be that they've absorbed the concept of me moving better than I have.

After about 8 hours of kegging, and like 50 trips up and down 5 flights to let people in, I'm rather dum and useless today so I'll keep this short.

Meet Dana. This standout BBQ atendee is bffs with Calisha Jenkins of that crazy band I keep trying to tell you about, Drunky Brewster. Here's Dana showing off her "BBQ grill," which is a grill she made out of barbecued sausage.

Later, she peed on the roof. Mind you, my apartment, which has a lavatory, was about 10 steps below where this took place. However, this choice kicked the party up a notch.

I have not hung out with Dana too much, but it's cool that she was so comfortable with me that she would spend like 5% of the total time we've ever been around each other urinating in my presence.

Lots of other fun was had, but none of the other photos were flattering so I shan't talk about it.

And this morning, a major breakthrough was made in inter-apartment cat-dog relations. After months of trauma because she's so scared of her somewhat-newish dog apartment-mate, Gypsy is finally starting to emerge from her self-imposed exile. Little does she know her entire small world is about to get tsunami'd* beginning in the wee hours of Wednesday morning when we move. This is the closest she's ever dared to get to the dog.

Note the red-wine stains on Coop's fur. Or maybe those are burns from Gyp's hate beams.

*(I took the high road and did not make the obvious Louisiana natural disaster joke)

NYTimes sez: Flaunt enjoyment of red meat and FIND LOVE!

2007-08-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

On the other end of the ridiculosity spectrum from vegansexuals is the category of singles portrayed in yesterday's New York Times article: Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye.

Gee, maybe if I read Maxim, and watch pornos with fake lesbians touching each others' boobies, and then get drunk and touch my friends' boobies in front of drunk guys, and eat lots of red meat, I'll be a "guy's girl" and then a frat boy will propose to me! Thanks, New York Times, bastion of quality journalism!

I'm procrastinating from packing again, by the way.

My soft rockin' friends

2007-08-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

This is in my head today.

Even though my move is in the opposite direction, and I'm not moving to NYC to become a male prostitute, and even though I'm not Angelina Jolie's dad, this opening sequence of Midnight Cowboy still has the right sentimental/major life changes/anticipation/dramatic feeling. (I also love the bit later when they famously show his face bobbing through the crowd in NYC, and used to think of that all the time when walking around.)

I also wanted to include a clip of Glen Campbell's "Southern Nights," as I was rocking out to that while packing yesterday, with about the last of my energy at about 5 p.m. (I don't know if you knew this, but moving is tiring!) Unfortch, there weren't any non-modern clips of Glen singing it, but I did find this horrifying version from The Lawrence Welk Show.

That show makes me terrified of white people.

Finally on a related note, my friend Amanda turned me on to this super-amusing Channel 101 series: Yacht Rock. I know I kind of "MISSED THE BOAT" on this series as it's been out a while, but if you haven't seen it yet, do check it out. I've only watched two but there's like ten of them.

Also, let me know if you're coming to the rooftop BBQ tomorrow & email me if you need info and are not a crazy maniac. It won't rain.

Vegansexuals: They won't beat meat-eaters' meat

2007-08-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

An article in a New Zealand paper has identified a new subset of daters: vegansexuals. That is, vegans who won't get busy with non-vegans.

It's like, wow, vegansexuals! Why not limit yourself more? Good luck! Have some of my agar while you're at it, I don't need it any more. In another article on the subject, someone said they didn't want to have sex with meat-eaters because their bodies were made up of animal carcasses. Huh?!

Now, personally, I'm a longtime vegetarian but don't go for vegetarian guys, at least the ones who look like the stereotype. They tend toward the too-skinny. I am glad my bf doesn't dig on swine and cows, though.

Once again, Cooper totally knows how to party

2007-08-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

I honestly hope this isn't the first of many pet-centric posts. I'm really very wary of becoming that minutiae-of-daily-life/poop/pet documenter, oh esteemed readership.

I just wanted to jump in and reiterate something much appreciated. As previously noted, my household's dog and cat are not coexisting peacefully. Also, I am a lifelong cat person, and until recently I very much thought I was heading directly to Crazy Cat Lady, do not pass Marriage, do not collect LeCrueset enameled cast-iron pots and pans. But now, there is a super good-natured yellow Labrador around, and no matter how much of a bitch my cat is to him (which happens daily), he never gives attitude. He never has an attitude at all, except the occasional grumble, and he's always in a good mood and eager to please and play. He is winning me over to being both a cat and dog person, if such a label is allowed to exist within this polarized topic.

Today after multiple errands, I was mid-packing when "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" By the Backstreet Boys came on my iPod's speakers. It's a very guilty pleasure, and I proceeded to private jubilation, dancing around like a moron. Here's the awesome part: Cooper immediately joined right in! (Well, he eagerly showed up with his weird dollar-store toy, ready to jump around for it.) That's something my cat Gypsy, who holds tight to something called "dignity," would never dream of doing. ~~Sometimes~~ Often Coop's enthusiasm manifests as "humping the guests," and consequently bringing shame on the family, but hopefully we can train this trait out of his repertoire. Yay for fun dogs!

Bad meaning bad and bad meaning good

2007-08-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

While doing everything else in preparation for the move, at I'm packing in culture every night while I can. And oh, the culture to be had! Monday night two of my pals brought over the 1973 film The Baby, a jaw-dropping stinker about a family of lunatic women that keeps a grown son as a baby (complete with overdubbed gurgles and coos) and they zap him with a cattle prod if he shows any signs of development. Also, his name is "Baby." Awesome!

Through luck of the Netflix draw, last night while rolling hundreds of dollars in coins, we watched the Jim Jarmusch "neo-beat-noir-comedy" film Down by Law, which happens to have been filmed in New Orleans and the swamps of Louisiana.

Despite the cool rep this movie has, I was surprised at what a piece of garbage it was. At different times I felt like I was watching a student film or play with bad acting, or a heist-gone-wrong B-movie from the '50s that you'd see on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a la Swamp Diamonds, starring Beverly Garland. It did get much more watchable once lovable foreigner Roberto Benigni came on the scene, but still. Based on the few films I've seen of his, I now offically don't like and/or don't get Jim Jarmusch.

Also on the fun skedj: Julie & Jackie at Invite them Up tonight, then their monthly show Obsessed tomorrow, then Richard Serra at the MoMA Friday (free on Fridays, don'tcha know) then our going-away rooftop BBQ Saturday. No sleep til BaRou.

My new rockin' friends

2007-08-07T06:18:00.000-07:00

I am most likely going to be hanging out with these guys down in Baton Rouge.

They're called Baton Rouge. As you might imagine from the photo, they had a minor hit in 1990.

I checked in on them on the Internets to see what they were up to so I'd know what to chat about when I saw them about town. They had the one hit album in 1990, then the one after that tanked because we all know what happened in music after that, Kurt Cobain! Then, for some reason they released another album in 1997. I was most interested in guitarist Kelly Keeling's website, which promotes his latest CD, "Eat a Pickle." Somebody named Reverend D says this about him:

"Kelly Keeling is one of Rock's most influential and prolific vocalist / song writer of our time, and without a doubt the most famous unknown musician on Earth." A bold statement but then consider his catalog of work. With 30 CDs and 4 movie soundtracks to his credit, not to mention the years of touring, this is one hard workin' recording artist!

Check out his discography or just pop his name into any internet search engine and watch what happens. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that you've been rockin' to his songs for years, and never even knew it! Take a stroll through this web site and expand your musical knowledge!"

Wow, pickles and doughnuts; that sounds rockin', all right. Like the link to John 3:16 at the bottom. I thought that particular Bible passage was for putting on signs at wrestling matches, though. All cattiness aside, I am intrigued to see all the rockers he's worked with, and studied his resume in case I'm called upon to play Six Degress of Don Dokken, as it seems the hard-rock musicians all shuffle around & work with each other over time. Note to self: ask him about collaborating with Alice Cooper.

The heckler becomes the heckled

2007-08-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

The first part of this post will be my traditional heckling of that which deserves to be heckled...but after that the tables will be turned when shame is brought upon the honorable CoKane name.

So, this was my "Goodbye Kanes, some of you for three years," weekend. I first had a goodbye Jersey bff's Friday night, then met the bf at the train in Red Bank, NJ, Saturday morning to eventually make it to a PA wedding that evening.

Since we were in Red Bank, we had to check out Kevin Smith's local self-erected shrine/promotional commerce vehicle, Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash comic book store, as neither of us had ever been there.

Being a woman and an adult, I am not a Kev Smith fan. Imagine if there were a girl version of his movies (as I often have):

[SCENE: 7-11,New Jersey, two unattractive women are working at their McJob (I just used that term because McDonalds is trying to erase the term McJob)]

JEN: Hey, remember Strawberry Shortcake?
MEG: I know, right, like this newjack Shortcake they have out sucks it!
JEN: Oh preach on, sistafriend.
MEG: That is the shit I am talking about.
JEN: I know, like what's next, mothafuckin' Rainbow Brite 2008? Care Bears to the Max? The Get Along Gang Solves Terrorism?
MEG: Seriously. Like Ecotourism with Monchichi on the Discovery Channel.

The thing is, some dudes are turning this kind of "culture" into box office gold: Transformers tbe movie? I rest my case. Grown men, please try to set the entertainment bar slightly higher than WHEN YOU WERE TEN. Thank you.

So anywayz, my man Tom Scharpling makes fun of old Kevin S better than I ever can, so go listen to his show, but I will tell you this: Kevin Smith's store attendant took a phone inquirer to task for using a double negative, therefore we can reasonably conclude that he's hoping to make his way into a future KS movie. Also, fans apparently leave birthday presents for KS at his store, and there is a table set out just for that purpose (these were addressed to KS, with birthday wishes):

And finally, several grungy outfits from the KS film roster are on display in the store, like this Silent Bob/Kevin outfit. This is the first and I hope only time I ever see a dude's sweat-stained (really: yellow sweat-stains) old cap in a plexiglas display case.

Then we spent untold hours in horrendous Shore traffic trying to get to my parents' place. The only saving grace was that we took an alternate route from the parking lot which was the Garden State Parkway, Route 9; and so we saw sights like these:

The world with these signs is is really the world I want to live in. Once there's no more of these signs and it's only strip malls left, please end it for me.

Then we were at my cousin's wedding and I was telling all my extended family (which is large, because of my super-Irish-Catholic dad's ten-plus brothers and sisters), about our move. I got a little misty watching my favorite uncle tear it up, ridiculous-style on the dance floor. Then a few dirty martinis in, I was in the ladies' room catching up with one of my aunts, when someone came in like, "Oh, it's the bouquet-tossing time." So, never being one for this sort of thing, but wanting to be a good sport, I went out and angled in at the back of the clutch of single ladies at the last minute. Please, while I still have some dignity, let me assure you that I was always that totally disinterested and possibly gay riot grrrrl who was like "Whatevs," with a capital "Whatevs," for this situation. So guess who the bouquet went directly to, but yours truly. I kind of batted it out of the way in self defense, but that only made matters more embarrassing: I was so clearly the person meant to catch (or in this case bat away and then have to actually PICK UP) the bouquet that there was no getting out of it. I offer this photo as proof. [a few notes of the Vince Guaraldi/"Charlie Brown Christmas" "Christmastime is Here" piano tune, comically used as sad music in "Arrested Development," should play here:]

I love that all the single young ladies in this photo seem to be pitying me, the impossibly old single lady (this wedding was in PA, remember; I'm probably 10 years older than the average bride there) who somehow almost caught the bouquet, but didn't? But officially did catch the bouquet.

In the moments following this, a few things happened: I became eternally grateful that there was no boy equivalent to this ceremony at this reception, no random drunk dude putting a garter on me. Then my head almost exploded with these infuriating Cathy-cartoon feelings: Oh no, I hope ~~Irving~~ my bf doesn't think I caught it on purpose! Everyone must think I'm desperate to get married! I wasn't trying to, I swear! Am I still a feminist? Of course my bf heckled me about it and there were predictably a few remarks from relatives. ("Should we save the date?") Then I was so annoyed that I'd ever have such a lame thing to fret over, and that I ever might be like stupid Cathy Guisewhite, and resentful of the tradition in the first place. It's one thing to be naming apple seeds and sticking them on your forehead as a little girl to determine who your boyfriend is. At this stage, this more widely-practiced similar weird ritual is just maje undignified.

Then I had another dirty martini.

We're moving south a week from Wednesday. It's the final countdown.

I don't know nothin' about the South

2007-08-04T06:46:00.001-07:00

The title here is paraphrased from the zaniest kid in my NJ high school and his pal, who were obsessed with being Southerners and one time attempted to start their dream of their new life down there by forging stolen checks.

Anyway, before I head down the Garden State Parking Lot to my parents' place at the Shore and a wedding after that, a quick post:

Welcome Southern readers! Just wanted to say, I obviously barely know anything about the South, and it wasn't very progressive of me to use the inbred banjo kid from Deliverance and this mulletman

when referring to your fine florid land. I apologize to some of you--but only the one(s) who have never made fun of my own homeland, New Jersey.

Cajun Boy, I'm looking at your hilarious posts tagged "guido."

So come on people, a little ragging on a place is fine, although people who are from that place are more allowed to do it. I promise promise promise to not snap-judge BR.

And with that, down I go to the Jersey Shore! Guidos ahoy!

Cold feet, heart sweating rouge

2007-08-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

And now it's time for my weekly "What the F-train am I doing, moving down South?" post. Don't think I haven't had my doubts about this move to Baton Rouge, moments of realization that I'm leaving everything familiar, where most of my friends and family live or are at least in visiting distance, to go live in a very sports-obsessed fast food nation. And I'm just guessing that Louisiana is a red state. (Red states: where the red stands for blood! Just like in the name "Baton Rouge.") After I whimpered over my worries to the bf the other night, he comforted me quite well, and the fact that he can do this is another comfort in itself.

Also helpful was this quote by actress-turned-musician Jena Malone (Donnie Darko, Saved!), about playing live, in a recent issue of the smart, grownup rock mag Harp:

"If you're not bleeding and sweating and worried and nervous and excited and shitting out of your pants, then obviously your heart's not in it. That's when you know that you really care about something: when your heart is fucking sweating blood."

Her quote really grabbed me. While I have not shat out of my pants, I've sure been productive on that front lately. And while this phenomenon may be attributible to an illness or anxiety, Jena's point is well made. Clearly I've needed a change. I've needed the freedom to be a writer, and wanted a house like real adults have (even your man above in my new Holy Shit We're Moving to the Deep South logo probably has his own house), which you can't come by in NYC without earning a shit-ton or being independently wealthy. I've needed a break from what I don't like about the city so I can remember what I do like. Mainly, though, I am going far out of my comfort zone, and this makes me feel alive.

Ten years ago now, I moved to Ireland by myself after graduating college. (I'm old!) That also scared the hell out of me, and I was very lonely at first, but it turned out to be easily one of the most fun times of my life and forever changed me for the better. While in Dublin, I found a postcard saying, "Do one thing every day that scares you," a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. It seemed like really good advice to the new, adventurous me, so I kept it. Another postcard (I think these were all ads for Guinness, like the whole country is) said, "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." And that quote was by...Mark Twain, a man whose praise about the lush flora of Baton Rouge I included in this post. See? Everything's circular, It's the circle of life, and I'll be back again, my friends.

P.S. That last sentence wasn't a weird way of announcing that I'm pregnant. [shudder]

Dear Everybody,

2007-08-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday there existed one moment in time wherein approximately one third of the Internets became aware of the existence of yours truly.

I heard from a lot of people. And I have to say, it was the best day of procrastination ever! There were comments about me on popular blogs to read and then decide to not read! There were personal emails from people with Baton Rouge/ leaving New York experience! There were sitemeters to check out! I didn't pack for the move at all! Awesome! It was just like college when it was finals time and I was watching my Magic Eye video instead of preparing for finals!

Dear Gothamist, Jezebel, and Gawker, thank you for noticing lil ol' me.

Dear Jezebel commenters, I love you, and only hope you are not making fun when you say that you think I'm too cool. If so, please let me know so that I can revise this comment to you. Until then, I assure you I am not too cool.

Dear Gawker-commenting jerks, (who didn't get as far as the interview, never mind my blog, and so aren't even reading this) Once I got the gist of your first 15 comments, which was, "We didn't follow the link to the interview but are immediately reacting to this blurb in hopes to draw attention to ourselves," I'm not reading the rest of your cowardly comments. Ha-haaaa! I'm pretty sure that means no one else read them, either.

Dear several real-life friends and associates who seem to be under the impression that I am as good as dead, and are too bummed to even remark to me personally on my move, because I will no longer be in NYC and in fact will be going somewhere nobody thinks is cool. Not true! We have something now in the world of technology called "The Internets"! I totally use it and learn about modern things such as indoor toilets and the even-more-modern "teen idols"! Also, I feel bad for people afraid to live somewhere uncool.

Dear strangers with personal knowledge of and fondness for Baton Rouge who emailed, I really will give the place a chance, and thank you for your dining & other suggestions. You are making a good Southern hospitable impression.

Dear strangers with personal knowledge of the South and the best of intentions who are basically telling me that by moving to Baton Rouge, I am probably doomed, There is no way that I can heed your advice right now! Everything is in motion! What will happen to CoKane? Keep reading and find out!

Shackin' up, part three: fooders

2007-08-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

Before my bf moved in, I read something in Marie Claire (it happened to be lying around, OK?) about couples' diet changes once they start cohabitating. It said that couples take on some of each others' eating habits, so women tend to start eating a little less healthily, and men start eating a little better. So far this has proven true on my own home front.

Left to his own devices, my bf pretty much only eats beige or white foods like ice cream, yogurt, chicken, and cheese and only drinks orange beverages. Much like my blog buddy Kitty's husband, he generally hates veggies. That means for me as chief of food prep and a vegetarian, I've got my work cut out. But here's the thing: I have a lifelong history of being the world's biggest pain in the ass with my eating habits, from a youth spent being just like Randy, the little brother in A Christmas Story, packratting food I didn't like in my cheeks at the dinner table, to more recent years of being a strict vegan, so I deserve any meal-planning angst that's coming to me.

I've started the packing process and today I was clearing out the kitchen, and found this remnant from my hardcore vegan days:

This Styrofoam-like substance is called agar agar, is made from a sea vegetable, and is used in place of gelatin for such crazy vegan projects as making fake cheese. That was before I realized: you know what's a lot better than running hither and yon for this obscure ingredient and then spending several hours to make something that vaguely approximates cheese? REAL CHEESE! My own quality of life has improved vastly since I admitted this. Now haunting cheese counters and shops and sampling new kinds has become a favorite activity of the mister and I.

So thinking it might be nice to stave off scurvy and cancer (though if you stick around long enough it seems to find everyone), I sneak in plant items to our shared dinners when I can. I'm particularly proud of last night's innovation, which utilized our fresh basil, used up two partial boxes of macaroni, and had my bf eating spinach without even realizing it (I didn't tell him until after his second huge helping). It's a pesto mac cheese with fresh mozz and grated parm on the top.

And it's good for me, too, because in my mind, the spinach cancels out the fat of the cheese. So while that bitch Marie Claire was right that my diet has gotten a bit worse, it's become more enjoyable. And my bf's eating a bit healthier, but he isn't any the wiser (sometimes). Everybody* wins!

* Except the cows who make the cheese, of course. And that's why I only buy organic cheese that promises they are nice to the cows**.

** That was a lie. I'd like to, though. I'd like to do a lot of things...

The return of Saying Something Nice About Celebrities Wednesdays!

2007-08-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

For the first half of this year, I dedicated each Wednesday's post to something totally uncool: saying something nice about a celebrity, as my little piss against the waves of mean on the Internets. Then I got a weekly gig saying something nice about green celebrities over at Plenty magazine's website (do check it out). I was a little less nice than usual this past Friday, and so to offset that, here's a SSNACW.

Jerry O'Connell and Rebecca Romijn got hitched a few weeks back. I've been fond of Rebecca since her Stamos days and enjoyed hearing about when she and Stamos would party with Howard Stern and his ladyfriend Beth. (Howard & Beth have named their bulldog in tribute to this love triangle: Bianca Romijn Stamos O'Connell.) I liked that Rebecca could have any mimbo she wants, but she goes for guys with a sense of humor. I know Jerry O'C has that goin' on, as I was all charmed by him when he was on Conan (and that's how I form my impressions of most celebrities; their performance on Conan).

And in addish to having a personality and seemingly not being a jerk, the former fat kid from Stand by Me is super-hot now. In fact, I saw him in Chelsea last year and creeped him out. A friend and I were standing near an open doorway inside a bar after her improv performance at Upright Citizens Brigade one Sunday afternoon, when we both saw Jerry about to come in the bar. He was in a tight white T-shirt with his blue eyes on high-beam, and lookin' fine.

We froze with our mouths gaping open, total deer-in-headlights style, which the man couldn't help but notice, and he turned and went back the way he came.

Awesome! I'm so smooth.

This is what happens when you grow up in Brooklyn nowadays

2007-07-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

Aren't they adorbs?

The night the lights went out at Cake Shop

2007-07-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to absorb what in tarnation happened last night in the small basement rock club at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side. My insane pals Drunky Brewster, who must be seen to be believed, played an historic show collaborating with their pals Mixel Pixel and I got to catch up with some of my friends from BUST.

The show began and the next thing I knew the place was a sweaty, singing, gyrating sex cauldron ("The Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down"), and at least two fireworks were sent off, the second one was a sparking missile shooting right into the crowd. This was an act so stupid that it didn't sink in for a minute that we all could have eaten it, Great White-style. And after the intial scream and realization that somehow, no one had shot their eye out, what can you do then but WOO?

The club got as stern as they could about the incident, which was, "Come on guys, no more fireworks, seriously!" And then the place was filled with smoke, and the fire alarm went off, with a strobe light and a whistle, which everyone assumed was just part of the show. The fire department arrived in full regalia and the band was shut off. The club asked that whomever had shot the fireworks off leave so we could continue with the show, and no one owned up to it (though I believe I know who it was!) but one Brewster Booster took a liking to one of the firemen, jumped him and they started dancing together. Some of the firemen stuck around to watch the spectacle when the show resumed--and no one was kicked out for the fireworks. Drunky Brewster has nine lives, I think.

Also they ended with a new song with my name, "CoKane," as part of the refrain. Um...beyond awesome?

I'm sorry if this description makes no sense; I'm still trying to make sense of what happened. You just have to go see the Brewster if you enjoy watching insane shows with very silly songs, numerous costume changes, props, wigs, hats, glass dildos used as instruments, and possible fiery death.

The aging face of indie rock, part two: Sonic Old People

2007-07-30T07:11:00.000-07:00

Saturday was Sonic Youth’s much-anticipated performance of the Daydream Nation album at McCarren Pool. There was supposedly a 50% chance of thunderstorms, but because SY is magical, the weather was beautiful and clear all day, and the rain didn’t come until Sunday. We missed the whole opening set by the Slits, which I am quite bummed about because they’re cool and I’m dismayed to hear that the crowd wasn’t into them. Why wouldn’t a Sonic Youth crowd be interested in a classic punk band from the original late-’70s era? Just from what I heard some dudes saying, I suspect it’s because they’re considered a girl band and therefore, for girls, or sub-par to the Sex Pistols and the Clash, who were peers the Slits hung out with and played with at the time. WTF? Is anyone going to make the argument that other punk bands they revere from that era were more talented musicians or had better songs? I think not.

Then came the headliners, one of my all-time favorite bands looking and sounding as cool as ever, playing probably my favorite album of theirs in its entirety. Naturally the best part of SY’s set was the first song, “Teenage Riot.” I haven’t had such a goofy grin at a rock show in years! It was so exciting. As for the rest, from what I recall, the show was great, but there were two major distractions: this mosh pit of dancing goofballs:

Oh wait, that last one is my friend Leah joining in.

Also two of my friends were tripping on mushrooms, one of them for the first time ever, and the first-timer was having a very bad time of it from the get-go, so I was getting updates and cries for help from the other friend, who was on babysitting duty.

Funny, because in one way this was an older crowd, but in another way, well, there’s a time and a place for everything, and it’s called college. The lesson my pals learned that day, which is one most people know by this age, is don’t trip in a crowd of a zillion people, especially not if it’s the first time you’re tripping. And that’s: one to grow on.

I wanna be domestic

2007-07-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

Confesh time: I've been jealous of my suburban friends who for years have had, even owned real domiciles with plenty of --what is it called?-- space and new furniture and appliances and washers and dryers. A few years ago or so my dissatisfaction with my shared, decidedly non-adult living situation got to be too much and I started wistfully perusing Craigslist for any private, nicer little house-like scenario with nature included that I might be able to live in while still working in the city. I routinely did searches for "bungalow" and "cottage" in NJ and upstate NY, but nothing affordable and close ever turned up.

Now I'm about to rent a whole house with yard and washer and dryer for the first time ever at the ripe old age of 33, and I can't stop fantasizing about the gourmet meals I will rock in the real kitchen, with counter space to spare! Instead of cramming my entire meal prep onto a one-foot wide molded plastic "countertop," I will use one whole new white ceramic-tiled counter just for one bowl! I will put a pie on the window sill to cool and it won't get instantly coated in city grit, like it would here! I'll twirl about in a dress, heels, and lipstick while waiting for the water to boil! Ding! [sparkle sound]

When I was a kid, one of my elder lady family members once made a dish for a family function called "Broccoli Surprise" that involved eggs, apparently was not very good, and would live in infamy in my immediate family's culinary discussions as an example of bad food. Well I recently made what I hope to be one of my last city- scrounge meals, which are bouts of cooking creativity that occur after I haven't grocery-shopped in a long time and it's unthinkable to go down four flights and several blocks to the store. The other night, while making an impromptu casserole to use up various food items including frozen veggies, veggie burgers, and couscous under the broiler with shredded parm on top, I think I accidentally made a surprise (and there was brocco involved). But no more! I will have so much food-storage space in Little Pink down South that I can fully stock up whenever I go grocery shopping.

Down South, I shall shop in a serene, non-chaotic Whole Foods. I can buy as many weighty juices and boxes of soy milk as I want and not have to carry my heavy groceries home on foot in canvas totes! I will drive there, and I will linger as long as I want in one spot reading a label in the luxuriously wide isle, and no one will need me to get out of the way because there is plenty of room! I can lie down in the aisle sipping a julep if I want! Take that, stupid jerk New York!

Goodbye, naked mens

2007-07-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

I have two days left, today and tomorrow, as an editor at Naked Man Magazine™. Although I'm nervous about moving, the closer I get to my last day at work, my spirits are rising more and more. (NO PUN INTENDED ABOUT NAKED MAN MAGAZINE! AH HA HA HAAAAAA. oooh boy.) That being said, I have a lot to do here, saving my contacts and such.

So, a few things: check out me & my pal Therese on WFMU tomorrow afternoon, on Scott Williams' show, around 2:40. We'll be talking about a few fancy beers and tasting them on the air. You can listen online if your computer lets you do that.

Also, we're having two going-away parties. The first will be after the Sonic Youth show at McCarren pool this Saturday [hyperventilating] in which [puff puff] they will perform the entire Daydream Nation album. OMG

Also, if anyone out there has freelance-writing leads for me (the kind that pays decently), send me an email and I will love you long time.

Turn on your white stripes

2007-07-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

OK, how did I live this long without knowing about this movie?!

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

It showed last night at McCarren pool, and I believe the members of the Sex Pistols & the Clash who were in the film might say it was fucking brillo, or use some other such Brit slang. (Did I make up "brillo" just now? Maybe.) This 1981 movie follows the rise of girl punk band the Stains, with a barely legal (actually not legal at all, she was 14 playing 15) Diane Lane as the badass singer who doesn't wear pants, and a darling baby Laura Dern as the bassist. I saw a direct line from this movie to the Riot Grrrl movement, and word has it Courtney Love was first inspired to be a rock star when she saw it. (I know, everyone wants to insert rude Courtney comment here, but shut up jerks, because she made one of the best rock records of the '90s.)

In the movie the Stains become an instant phenomenon, and the fans copy the white stripes the grrrls have bleached into their hair with contrasting black hair, and they wear sheer red blouses w/no bras like Diane Lane's character does. Coincidentally, the band and fans look like a possible inspriation for the look of the White Stripes the band, who played MSG last night. My bf did his trick of buying someone's extra ticket as the show is beginning, from people desperate to unload their extras, and so paid $10 for a $50+ ticket.

McCarren pool events and the ability to see an arena band for a ten-spot are two things I'm going to miss when we move. Something I'm not going to miss? I found a flyer at Enid's after the movie for some event called BBQ Chicken, featuring the following acts: Schoolly D (OK, that's totally reasonable); Bad Wizard, Panthers, Cheeseburger, The Jewish, Dragons of Zynth, and Puddin' Tang. Oh yeah, and 300 lbs of FREE BBQ CHICKEN!!! Is anyone else enraged by the rampant douchebaggery evidenced by these band names? Come on: Cheeseburger? I'm picturing short guys in tight pants with ironic moustaches as all the band members of all these irono-named bands.

Turn and face the strange

2007-07-24T06:52:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about this decision to quit my magazine-editing job and move to some unimpressive town down South, a decizh which probably appears insane to some folks. Pardon if I ramble a bit...it's a heavy time for CoKane.

Not long after I moved to New York, almost seven years ago, someone passed along this wisdom: "You don't decide when you're done with New York; New York decides when it's done with you."

At the time this seemed awfully grim, although little did innocent young me know how much New York City was about to kick my ass. But it was the kind of ass-kicking that makes you stronger, like when Mr. Miyagi is being such a hardass to Daniel-san. And as much as that saying above sounds like it's describing an abusive relationship, I think I'm OK with it.

All my significant dating happened here. My most traumatic experiences happened while I've lived here. I've been surrounded by some of the funniest friends ever. My career started to happen here. And I must have been born a writer, but I think I really came into it here.

But now, all around I see signs that if New York is not done with me for good, then at least it's saying I'm ready to see other places. The special Cheap Issue of Time Out New York just seemed like it was announcing, "look at what your pathetic existence will be if you keep living here." More scrimping, more dollar stores, and for what? I'm tired of having mostly secondhand clothes supplemented by the occasional H&M and hobag-store flimsy pieces. All thrift-store fashion, all the time is not as cute at age 33 as it was at 23. I recently stumbled on the new location of my favorite East Village morbid curiosity shoppe, Obscura--and somehow, the new version of the shop was too bright, too open, not as darkly creaky-floored attic-like and fascinating as it used to be. I ate so many times at the Burritoville near my work, which was once a favorite, that now I'm sickened by almost everything there. And looky here, it's another non-memorable edition of the Onion. Eh!

And then there's Kate's...And then there's Kate's. Kate's Joint, the famous vegetarian comfort-food greasy spoon in the East Village, has dominated my palate's desires since about 1999. Once I ate there three times in one day, and then was so disgusted with myself that I had to swear off their famous deep-fried tofu buffalo wings for a month. That is, Kate's ruled my world until last year, when it began fading, taking a sharp dive by the final quarter of 2006. It's just...not that good anymore. It's gross, in fact. I could only eat two of the buff wings the last time I reluctantly got them. I don't know if Kate's changed their cook or my tastes changed, or both. But those buff wings were the one thing I thought I'd have to import if I ever didn't live in NYC. Not so!

When I first moved to New York, I was dismayed to discover what a loser I was. I didn't have cool clothes or a cool haircut, as became painfully apparent the first big hipstery ~~fashion~~ rock show I went to, which was the White Stripes at Pier 54. I didn't know where anything was located, or anything interesting to do, and I barely had any local friends. We didn't even have Friendster back then, by crackey!!! How was a girl supposed to meet people? (The first headway I made in the making-friends department was by volunteering at WFMU, so I recommend that to any music fans looking to meet kindred spirits in the non-Internets real world.)

Now I have a more confident sense of self, I know tons of people, know where all the restauraunts/venues/bars etc that I care about are. And it's time to go.

Despite my love/hate relationship with NYC, I've long felt that it has ruined me for living in other cities, at least ones that might be trying to compete. Baton Rouge seems like it's not even trying to be a city, more like condensed suburbs clustered around a University. So we'll go there, get done what needs to be done, and return to New York (probably, or somewhere desirable) better prepared to live the kind of fancier lifestyle to which we will grow accustomed. That's the plan.

Melting brain cells at the Jersey Shore

2007-07-23T06:49:00.000-07:00

Quoth my home state troubadors Bon Jovi in a tourism commercial for New Jersey, "Who says you can't go home?" The boyfriend and I stayed with my parents this weekend down the shore. On Friday night we went to Atlantic City to see Interpol at the Borgata, a shiny purple new casino. The best part was the crowd's enthusiasm (unlike typical NYC crowds: dont' you know, that's so uncool) and the worst part was the drunks' enthusiasm. There's this New Year's Eve-ish aspect that some guys adopt for gambling scenarios, like you have to get the drunkest ever and smoke cigars and eat steaks and totally VEGAS BABY!!! WOO!!! Only like, they're not Frank Sinatra or even Vince Vaughn, they're whitecaps, and also it's not Vegas.

The new Harry Potter book went on sale at midnight, so my bf was chomping at the bit to get it. But when we asked the Borgata bellboy if there was a bookstore around, he could not have been more apalled: "A BOOKSTORE?! No!!!!" We slunk away, ashamed that we had not been asking him where we could pick up a few high-class hookers or some quality blow, like normal casino-goers.

Then on Saturday, I introduced the bf to the big dumb spectacle of bad taste that is the Seaside Heights boardwalk. The prizes are themed around whatever kids' movies are big; this year it's cockeyed-looking Shreks. As for the "hott bitch gear," i.e., tank tops and short-shorts, and dude shirts, there was all the usual propaganda about Italian girls doing it better, or the wearer having the biggest Johnson or what have you, but the mandate of this summer in every beachwear store on the boardwalk is "PARTY LIKE A ROCK STAR."

The hoi polloi walking the boards at Seaside Heights were interpreting this command thusly: by being very flabby, lacking the shame to cover up said flab (seriously: everywhere you turned there were shirtless or bikini-clad muffin-tops), and decorating their jiggling exposed flesh with very bad tattoos. Not always real tattoos, either: one muscleman walked around oblivious that his tribal neck tattoo was rubbing off black char onto his white tank top. Speaking as someone who grew up coming here every summer and hadn't been back in a few years, Seaside Heights is one place where the American obesity epidemic that's always making the news has become a noticeable reality.

We hit up Flashbacks, an arcade of all classic '80s video games, but after making it into the top 3 in every game I played, I poured the rest of my quarters into the more challenging and infinitely more satisfying House of the Dead 2, aka the best video game ever, where you get to shoot zombies.

We had some disgusting onion rings and a fruity drink overlooking the beach while privately heckling the bejeweled navel piercings (seven in close proximity--who knew they were more popular now than in the '90s?) and the young fellow with man-boobs and six inches of boxer- brief visible above his sagging bathing-trunks waistline. After topping that off with a double-size slice of grody pizza, I wanted to never eat again.

The quest for literary wizardry finally ended at a Wal-Mart located half an hour of strip malls away from the boardwalk. So yeah, people of the Jersey shore: not big readers. Also, the boardwalk doesn't do it for me as much as it used to. I don't necessarily think everyone should go to a museum on a beautiful summer day, but this wasn't as much fun anymore, other than for heckle value.

We settled at the quiet little beach near my folks' place: instant relaxation. The boardwalk yokels had given me a dose of the fear, but lying on the sand in the sun is one mindless activity that could actually benefit society.

2007-07-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia:

The French name "Baton Rouge" means "Red Stick" in English. In 1699, French explorer Sieur d'Iberville led an exploration party of about 200 up the Mississippi River. On March 17, on a bluff on the east bank of the river (on what is now the campus of Southern University), they saw a cypress pole festooned with bloody animal and fish heads, which they learned was a boundary marker between the hunting territories of the Bayogoula and the Houma tribes (the Bayogoula village was situated near the present-day town of Bayou Goula, LA; the Houma village was believed to be situated near the site of what is now Angola, LA).

Great. The tourist board has their work cut out for them.
"Baton Rouge: Where the 'Rouge' stands for 'Blood'!"

Speaking of slain animals, the largest private employer in town is Exxon. That's two BR Fun Factz™®©®™ for the price of zero!

But on the positive side, dig this:

[In regards to the castle-like state Capitol building:] Mark Twain, however, as a steamboat pilot in the 1850s, loathed the sight of it, "It is pathetic ... that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things ... should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place." (Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 40)
Despite his view of the Capitol, Twain was fond of Baton Rouge, "Baton Rouge was clothed in flowers, like a bride — no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now — no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snowball blossoms....We were certainly in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations — vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance — were in view." (Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 40)

Yay, flowers!

Panic on the streets of Manhattan

2007-07-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

I was here during the shit on 9/11. On that day, though, New Yorkers were kind of in shock, not used to terror as an imminent threat. And at least, as my coworkers departed from a Park Avenue office in the 30s where we'd watched the events unfold on TV, I knew a bit about what was going on. For me, for a few moments, yesterday was scarier.

I left work a bit late and was heading west on 44th street, less than a block from Grand Central, where I was going to rejoin my boyfriend, who'd been in my office for a few minutes. I noticed a rumbling sound that didn't stop, then came lots of sirens heading downtown, which put me on terror alert. What clinched the terror alert was when people came running towards me from Lexington Avenue, away from Grand Central, saying, "Go uptown! Go!"

Everyone turned and ran uptown, not knowing what had happened. I've seen this in so many B-movies, but had never actually been part of a fleeing crowd. Fear struck deep in my gut, and I was trying not to cry, and trying to call my boyfriend, who had probably been in the middle of whatever had exploded or happened. The boyfriend got through to me and urged me to just go, go, go uptown, at least to 50th Street.

I can't say I recommend group flight--but if you do have to be in fleeing crowd, let it be a New York one. We're getting pretty good at it. What was everybody running from? A tidal wave flood? An explosion? Dust clouds from a collapsing building? A huge Russian seafaring ship? (I've seen The Day After Tomorrow.) Godzilla? I kid, but this was the scariest thing I've ever been through here, at least for a few moments. I kind of trust that fleeing New Yorkers are fleeing for a reason. It may have been Midtown, but these were not fannypacked rubes running scared. These were Blue Shirts. (According to my beau, multiple tourists at Grand Central had had instantaneous meltdowns. Can't say I blame them.)

By the time we got to the high 40s, we seemed to be out of imminent danger and people seemed to be accepting this was going to be one of those special New York City days where you walk home from work. Maddeningly, blogging kept flashing into my mind the whole time.

Calls weren't going through, but the bf and I reunited at 50th Street via text messages. From Lexington we had a full view of the cause of the commotion less than ten blocks downtown: a black plume stretching from street level to up past the top of the Chrysler Building. It was Dr. McSteamy down there.

I realize in this phone-camera picture, it looks like Jesus has for some reason decided to descend from heaven amidst the heathens of NYC at rush hour. But if you imagine nearly all of that white part as black smoke billowing to the sky, then I've just made you do a lot of work for something that's supposed to be a photograph.

Sometimes I like to take major events that have nothing to do with me and say, This is a message directly to me from the universe. And so I would like to think of this as New York saying to me, "You're worried that you're going to miss the hell out of New York and you're not sure if you should leave? Don't let the door hit you on your way out."

By the time we got over to Sixth Avenue, nothing unusual was apparent. Time to stop in the nearest Paddy O'McClanahan's for a Jameson's, which was gone in .60 seconds.

Good thing nothing catastrophic ever happens where I'm going, down on the Gulf Coast.

Oh, wait.

Regarding my new tagline under my new blog title

2007-07-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

ME: Hi...uh...m-my name is Colleen, and I am a hipster.

READERS: [in supportive unison] Hi, Colleen.

Not long after moving to Brooklyn almost seven years ago, I came to use "hipster" as a disparaging term. When I used that term, I was referring to the kids I percieved as being the priveliged cool, the trust-funded gentrifiers, the soulless, the easily distracted, those who only want in on the next big thing until it becomes the big thing, and then once it does it's time to roll their eyes at it. They roll their eyes a lot, the hipsters in my mind. They don't admit to having feelings, either. It's all one big last night's party that they can't remember because of all the drugs and drink they did. But they sure looked glamorous at those parties in their carefully mussed hair and their striped shirts from wherever I can't afford and their Diesel jeans and their little boots and so on. You know: williamsjerks!

When my friend Kristina Wong, who has no tact, visits from L.A., she says things like, "You guys are always dissing on hipsters, but you are hipsters." And then I make some distinction like, "Nooo, hipsters are rich kids; we're just, like...cool." Yeah. That's it. The Socs and the Greasers.

Now it is time to face the independent music and admit that I am a hipster, for lack of a better term to simply explain our fish-out-of-water situation when we move in less than a month. I'm on the older end of the demographic, and I'd say one of the main things keeping me from entering "yuppie" or some category more suited to my age and lack of party stamina is my insignificant income.

But still, the bf and I both own Diesel jeans. Sure, I got mine for $6 at the Goodwill because the original owner got tired of them after dropping one caviar egg on them or something, but you can't tell that from afar. Diesels probs aren't even cool anymore but if I don't know that, they sure as hell won't know that in Baton Rouge. Next month the bf and I will be snorting because the band that was headlining the main music venue in BaRou when we visited was freaking 311 (OK: 1. they still exist!? and 2. they can fill a presumably large room?!), and lamenting that just weeks ago back home we saw Sonic Youth and the next day TV on the Radio (for free!) at McCarren pool. And I'm going to roll in there with my vintage owl-size sunglasses and probably look like some douchebag from New York who thinks she's better than this town, and I know I'm going to be conscious of coming off that way when I meet locals.

So anyway, that's the reasoning behind using that usually pejorative term. Kind of a shorthand for, My old man and I dig indie rock and various other cultural trappings associated with hipsters, stuff that you probably don't have here or know about (and BTW, you guys call that thing a BAGEL?) But like we're not a-holes like those other hipsters from NYC. Right? Right?

The Crazy Pigeon Lady of Boerum Hill

2007-07-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

Keeping with the pigeon theme of the last post, there's this crazy Asian lady who feeds the neighborhood pigeons every day, squatting down in loose garb with her bag o'crumbs. I always wondered what her story was; did she live around here? How did she pay rent if she's feeding the birds all the time? Was she from the neighborhood shelter?

Recently while approaching up the block from behind her, I spied a man in a suit who seemed to be trying to talk to the crouching woman. But her hand was up to her head; was she on a cell phone? After passing, I had to look back. There was no phone, she was plugging her ears up like a kid refusing to listen.

She has always been an odd one, though she seemed stable for all the years I've noticed her, but lately she's taken a turn for the worse. Lately, she'll switch from placidly squatting, to furiously yelling in a croaky witch voice in some other language at, well, nobody in particular who can be seen, and pointing accusations in all directions. She's down on the sidewalk, but it can be clearly heard four flights above in my apartment. Creep-yyyy...

The other night when I brought Coop for a walk at 11:30 pm, she was out in her usual squat, but there were no pigeons anywhere. And in addition to her typical breadcrumb fare, she had added french fries to the menu. Now, I've seen pigeons dig on almost their own kind (discarded chicken bones from the gutter), but I have never known them to be potato-eaters. No matter anyway, because none were about.

On the swing back, I noticed she was smoking a cigarette. A new factoid about the mysterious Pigeon Lady of Boerum Hill! She looked over and I smiled, and a ghost of a smile appeared on her mouth for an instant. Slight progress! She had never acknowledged me before. Then again, she'd never been trying to feed nonexistant pigeons french fries at nearly midnight before, that I'd seen. (Boyfriend has spotted her at all hours, 3 am, whenever.)

Oh New York, with your casual, non-threatening exhibits of insanity. I shall miss you.

The truth about cats and birds: they are friggin' weirdos

2007-07-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

So, in preparation for moving, the bf & I had a sidewalk sale just off of the heavily foot-trafficked Smith Street on Saturday. The day was bookended by two insane animal moments.

First thing in the morning, boyfriend called me into the office, which was formerly the bedroom of numerous roommates over my nearly seven years here. It has a loft bed that my cat Gypsy has been living on in fear, when she's not living in fear behind the futon. (As previously described in hilarious detail with illustration, Gypsy wants no part of her new-ish canine apartment-mate Cooper and has been in self-imposed exile for months.) The loft is now mattress-free since Gyp destroyed the mattress, presumably because she was afraid to leave it to use her litter box, so the loft is now used for box and cat storage.

The bf is a lifelong dog guy, and had to consult with lifelong cat lady me about the peculiar cat behavior he'd discovered in the office. "Uh, honey...? Can you explain this to me?"

What you are looking at is a substantial cat dump on the loft that she tried to cover up with the only nearby small items, which were leftover condoms and lube from a previous tenant. I explained that cats like to cover up their business when finished, while it sunk in that this was probably the funniest thing she'd ever done.

So we had our stoop sale (sans stoop) and it was really pleasant talking to everyone who stopped by, and spending the gorgeous day outside while earning a good chunk of cash for the move. It looks like a sausage-fest in the photo, but as we were between the projects and the gentrified shopping/dining zone, we got quite a cross-section of patrons. Near the end of the day I noticed that a nearby splatter of vomit (pink, so the unfortunate vommer had been drinking red wine or cocktails) had attracted quite a bit of attention from the local pigeon community.

Yep, they were in full chow-down mode. I've said it many times before and I'll say it again: Pigeons are such dirtbags. I will not miss them at all down South.

Holy Shit, We Are Moving to the Deep South

2007-07-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

[opening notes of "Dueling Banjos"]

I guess when you meet your boyfriend with this gun-toting pose as your main MySpace photo, and you had been hoping to meet a guy who's big, drives a pickup, wears pearly-snap Western shirts, and has a full-size (aka real) dog, it's only a matter of time before you and that guy move to the South.

Last week after much tortuous suspense, we finally got word that my bf was accepted to LSU's landscape architecture grad progam. And now we have a month to prepare to move to a city I had never been to and had never cared to go to: Baton Rouge. So on last Thursday evening, we set out in Wolfgang my VW camper for JFK airport, to fly to Austin for the bf's cousin's wedding, and traffic was so hopeless that we missed our flight. We were near Coney Island and Brighton Beach when we accepted that we weren't going to make it, so decided to have a cultural experience in the very Russian neighborhood Brighton Beach, then just spend the night in Wolfgang in the airport's long-term parking to catch the first flight out in the morning.

I'd heard there were some freaky Russian clubs in Brighton Beach, and we got a peek into two of them. I was just starting to take in the interior decoration of the first one, which was a masterwork of gaudiness, when we were swiftly ushered out by a waiter assuring us the kitchen was closed. What seemed more likely was that the shady dudes in the far corner were total Russian mobsters and we'd intruded on their meeting. On try number two we made it in to Primorski, which also took bad taste to new levels, from the movie-theater-style light strips on the walls to the stuck-in-the-early-'90s fashions everyone sported.

"Every woman here is a drag queen," the bf observed. After tasting my food, which inexplicably was mostly cold salads and pickled veggies (isn't it like, really cold in Russia?) I was happy we at least had some live entertainment who had no idea just how entertaining they were. It was two women accompanied by prerecorded synthesized easy listening dancey tuneage who traded off singing. One was clad all in denim, which was like, thanks for dressing up, but the other... Speaking of drag queens, she/he was a tall, slender Asian woman who sounded like Tom Waits after smoking 400 cigarettes in a row. The bf named him Tom Taints. I wondered what the audition process was like for their live entertainment, and if anyone had been turned away.

But after our spontaneous parking lot camping that night, we made the flight to Austin. I got to see some of the cool parts of town this time, and wished we were moving there instead. All of the bf's relatives separately gravely warned us what a culture shock Baton Rouge was going to be. My bf was a groomsman in the wedding, which was held at a Victorian home on Saturday. He tried to rein in the fidgety lil' ringbearer who then unintentionally nailed him in the jimmy. I'm pretty sure that's a sign of good luck for the marriage.

As you can see, it is an interracial marriage, and the presence of the bride's four sisters of color entirely ruled out any thought of I might have entertained about dancing at the reception. At the best of my dancing attempts, I'm like, Yeah, I'm kind of rockin' it right now. There's no way to control when that will happen, but it usually happens when no one's around. I was embarassed just watching the white people attempting to dance compared to the sisters turning this mother out.

On Sunday, we departed via a borrowed Lexus SUV (!?) for Baton Rouge to find a house to rent. As we approached Louisiana, but before even leaving Texas, we saw three signs in a row: Country Boys Country Store, Turtle Bayou Turnaround, and Gator Junction BBQ. This is the first thing we saw when we crossed into Louisiana.

Round about then was one of the times we both said, "Holy shit, we are really moving here." I comforted myself with a popcorn ball the size of my head, available at the local gas station.

We stayed that night just over the river (The Big River. The Mighty Mississip. Ole Miss. The Old Man.) before crossing into Baton Rouge, at a Motel 6 adjacent to the Crazy Horse Cabaret, a casino, and a Shell Station where a flamboyant gay with highly groomed brows and fake nails was at the register. I wanted to hug him: Please let there be more of you here!

Monday morning we crossed the Ole Miss for my first view of my new (temporary!) hometown. There were a handful of tall buildings off to the left. "That's it?" I was incredulous. For a state capital, Baton Rouge has less tall buildings than pretty much anywhere that calls itself a city in the northeast. The rest was all neighborhoods, many of which we went through later that day as we checked rental homes we'd found in the paper.

First stop was campus, which has these gnarly live oaks everywhere, many of them dripping with Spanish moss. Campus was most pleasant, other than the subtropical heat/humidity double whammy making it feel like walking around in a sauna.

As I mentioned in the last post, there was one little pink house we had our eyes on that we'd seen online, and as soon as we got out of the car there, we were like, "This is the one."

[Photo redacted, because I'm creeped out that everyone local recognizes the house]

The back yard clinched it before we even went inside.

The inside is too cute. Sunny, oldey-tymey (it's from the '40s with a '60s addish), wood floors, french doors out to the deck, brand new kitchen, brand new paint jobs, 3 BR, 2 bath, spic and span (no city dirt blowing in the windows here), and that luxury I've been dreaming of in addition to a house, yard, and the ability to grow a garden: a washer & dryer. And of course the rent is cheaper than our current rent.

That chair there in the corner is my equivalent of Kris Kringle's cane in the corner of the dream house in A Miracle on 34th St. We had to have Little Pink, but two interested parties were ahead of us, so we were on hold.

After checking out our other rental options, we saw the gorgeous garden/rich people districts of big old homes and Spanish moss everywhere, and also checked out the depressing, nearly deserted downtown, which all the Baton Rouge promotional literature inisists is developing and making a comeback. Our housing choices were down to a mega-cheap '20s bungalow-type charming home, Little Pink, and a '70s ranch house. We scrammed and headed an hour south to New Orleans for the night.

In the French Quarter we went into the famous Pat O'Brien's where the bf had a hurricane and I had a super-extreeeeeeme CATEGORY 5 MARGARITA. We hadn't eaten (there's not a lot to eat in BR, far as I can tell) and got schlockered on one each. Guess what? We weren't alone. Every rube in town was wasted and Bourbon Street smelled like vomit and beer. Then we got the call: we have the house. Little Pink is ours. Time to celebrate. We got a room with a balcony overlooking Toulouse Street and this rooftop featuring a rubber chicken, in earshot of the following soundtrack trifecta from Bourbon Street: "Brick House," "Play that Funky Music," and "We Want the Funk". Bourbon Street is FUNKY! No it's not. It's full of wasted yahoos and strip bars.

Check this out: Hope Puppet team, analyzing the fine merchandise for sale at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Free material to heckle everywhere!

There weren't a whole lot of dinner options (which was a theme if you didn't want to eat deep-fried everything and meat or seafood), so we ended up at a crap restaurant with amateurish undersea-painted mural walls and privately heckled the yokels.

This gang was across from us. The highlighted guy there is our brush-moustachioed waiter, who I named Wally after our old mailman who had the same 'stache when it was more acceptable in the early '80s. The baby's mom in this gang couldn't have been more than 20, and you know when she sees Britney Spears on TV she is like, "Your struggles are my struggles." I couldn't believe my bf was making fun of her baby's goggles until I pointed out the baby was retarded, which he hadn't realized. He'd thought they just had wacky glasses on him (possibly those New Years 2007 style where the 0s go over your eyes) because they were hicks partying in New Orleans. Then we overheard the manager of the joint sitting down a new waitress and telling her he didn't want to put her out there on the floor until she was truly ready...this guy was every small-time manager who thinks he's more important than he is. So we drunkenly tried to convince our waitress she didn't have to put up with that baloney and she'd be hired in a second in NYC. She giggled off our expert advice.

The next day, on the way back to Baton Rouge to sign our lease, we saw what might have been coyote roadkill. I also think I'd spotted the carcass of a bobcat or some such larger cat creature, and possibly a wild pig or else one that fell off some truck, and definitely an armadillo. In other parishes around Baton Rouge there were places called Slaughter, False River, and White Castle. Baton Rouge is doubtless surrounded by many scary things.

There really wasn't much to recommend the city we're moving to, on first impression (other than KLSU, the college radio station, which I hope to get involved with). We got our house, and that was great, but the only problem was, it's in Baton Rouge.

So we signed on for a year in Little Pink, then headed out for the third city of the day, the 7-hour or so trip back to Austin to return the car and fly home. We stopped for dinner at Shoney's, where I got this all-yellow meal comprised of all the only non-meat items in the food bar (ignoring the green beans and mushrooms that were floating in a yellow liquid I interpreted as melted margarine). Note the tic-tac-toe three-in-a-row of different potato formats.

As is probably often the case at all-you-can-eat food bars in the South, there was a morbidly obese woman there the size of Gilbert Grape's mom. We didn't bat an eyelash at the acrylic-nails man at the Shell food mart, but some of the extremely oversize people that are so much more common down there did give us pause. On the way out, my bf, in heckle mode again, asked the cashier about the puzzle for kids on the nearby placemats. "We do it ever' naht when wa get bored!" she said cheerily, adding "that or tha maze in tha payper." Oh, dear.

As we crossed back into Texas and got closer to Austin, I felt a sense of relief. You know it's bad when Texas feels less scary than the state you are moving to.

What the hell are we doing? Sometimes I think it's better if people don't know what they're in for.

Secret secret, I've got a secret

2007-07-05T05:47:00.000-07:00

Friends and readers, I have some big news: I am moving. We are moving, the beau (who will be a grad student) and I and the goofball dog and the cat who hates him. It's going to happen by mid-August, and we just got the definite word two days ago, so that means a lot of planning and angst has to happen in less than a month and a half. That also means this is the end of my posting for a few days, while we fly to a wedding tonight and then from there drive to the new place of residence to find a house. (There's a little pink one I have my eye on...ain't that America?)

And so, commenters and all the mystery folks who visit anonymously, a contest: What ridiculous place am I moving to? (No fair giving it away if you have insider knowledge.) Hint: it is someplace you've heard of, but would never have thought I'd move to. Winner gets me to write a post topic of their choice. Or alternatively, I could hook the winner up with some Naked Men Magazines or a cheap "massager" or two. (Brand new, of course.)

I have so much more to say about this as soon as I have more time. And once I move, there is going to be so much free material to goof on. This is stressful and scary, but I'm excited.

P.S. Best post-fireworks description from a little girl at the Brooklyn Heights promenade last night: "It was bigger than an elephant."

Honkies in the Catskills, part two: I got lucky

2007-07-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

My pal Leah and I have spent the past five or so Independence Day weekends upstate, so although the fourth falls midweek this year, we kept the magic alive this past weekend. Some of you probably recall word for word my post on last summer's fourth of July jaunt to the Catskills where we camped on a creek in Phoenicia, a tiny touristy village near Woodstock with just the right dose of creepy undertones. Although it had proven a costly camping trip last time, we decided to return a year later.

We got off to a very late start on Saturday and hit some mean traffic on the way out to the Thruway, but once we cleared the city we got cruising. Well, as much as my 79 VW bus Wolfgang can cruise when laden with three adults and two dogs. We were to get off at exit 19, but between exits 17 and 18, I noticed that Wolfgang was weaving an awful lot, as if we were being buffeted by wind (buses are decidedly non-aerodynamic and thus sensitive to wind), except there wasn't really any wind blowing. A truck pulled up alongside of me and the driver gestured wildly pointing toward the back of Wolfgang, so I pulled over. Flat tire! (Driver from Flying Pig Farms, I salute you, even though you work for a terribly abusive industry.)

Could be worse. This was the only time I could remember that my nearly-30-year-old vehicle had encountered a problem on a trip, and as car troubs go, this one was easily fixed. The bf could have changed the tire with the spare on the front, but the road was so busy and the flat was on the traffic-facing side, aka murder zone, so I was not having any of it. People get killed like that all the time; a kid I knew in college had died that way. So it was AAA Premiere time (you know, Triple Awesome?), and it wasn't long before the tow truck came, though every time a car or truck whizzed by the whole bus shook and frayed my nerves more.

So homeboy who looked all of 16 arrived and changed the tire with zero pleasantries, had no idea where we should go to get a new tire, and when we asked how we could reach that Wal-Mart in Kingston that we'd heard from the party-voiced campground lady was the only nearby tire center, he didn't know, and he also didn't bother to replace the hubcap. (We really should've taken back his prematurely given tip.)

Now we were riding a dried-out, cracked Mickey Mouse tire to the campground and losing light and still had to get supplies and all I wanted was to get to goddamn Wally World and have some goddamn relaxing fun. By the time we reached the campground in darkness it was raining and I was about to have 19 nervous breakdowns, but fortunately the bf passed me a mother's little helper.

The campground owner remembered us from last year and now that I'm a Lost viewer, he reminded me of the bearded creep of The Others fame. I kept expecting to hear him say, "Ya see the thing is, we're gonna have to take the boy." But in this case "the boy"= "your cash." Surrounded by their taxidermied collection of local critters, the Campground Family who live on the premises all seemed to be having a swell time as we signed agreements that we'd pay various fines for various infractions and forked over $90 for the two nights, which, if you are not a camper, equates to highway robbery. (In my experience, a prime waterfront campsite should go for like $25, $30 tops per night total and rates should not be per head as they were here.) Then they told us toilet paper would be a dollar if we didn't bring any. "WHAT?!" I cried. Party Voice Lady claimed that's how much she paid for it in town. (Like they do all their shopping in a tourist convenience store.) It was only a dollar, but what kind of evil misers charge that much and then don't even provide T.P.? Phoenician ones. But we showed them, and did not buy that T.P. Paper towels it is!

We'd also been predicably gouged getting supplies at the camp-enhanced convenience store, the only place open at our late hour, paying $80 for snacks, beer, charcoal and the only dinner-ish supply they had, grilled-cheese fixins. But on Sunday morning after a sad rain-snack dinner our first night there, I was ready to destroy an Irish-style grilled cheese with tomato and onion.

But I must take exception to this substance Heluva Good calls "cheese."

It was delish anyway, and we commenced camping fun times, once again hanging in the rocky island in the stream in the sun, and playing fetch with the doggers and having beers chilled by nature's keg-erator, the stream.

We were just downstream from the launch point for the local recreational water-tubing business. An obese woman slowly drifted down on an inner tube and became moored on a nearby rock protruding from the water. Keep in mind she was in water several feet deep, and for anybody equipped to survive in the world, it should have been no problem to unstick herself. I called out to see if she needed help, and she said yes, but then managed to free herself. Some almost-as-obese rafting partner of undetermined gender followed.

About 10 minutes later we were hailed for help by that second tuber (who turned out to be female), off in the distance at the bend downstream, waving her arms above her head and yelling. My gang went to investigate/help while I waited where I was in case they needed me to run for assistance. Turns out the first obese woman had gotten caught up again in some deeper part downstream, and the fishermen down there wouldn't help her. My eyewitness said she was stuck in a bit deeper, faster-moving water, but it was just a matter of her needing to buck up, get out of there and move on. But for our damsel in distress, this was a catastrophe, and by the time my bf got to her they had hailed two bikers from the road and had found a nurse to talk/pull her out, and she was hollering, "Just get me out of here!" while her tube drifted away. And I imagine that will be the last time she ever attempts anything out of her comfort zone until her life is claimed by some health problem relating to a sedentary lifestyle. Those unfazed fishermen must see this type of thing all the time, because later on we saw another size-challenged American make a slow way down the stream and get snagged here and there.

And thus, the original title planned for this blog posting, It ain't over 'til the fat lady sinks. But no, readers; I shan't be so crass. I have a higher message today.

Later, in the tiny town, I didn't get to check if the creepola abandoned diner was still there, but I made a point to revisit the Pharmacy That Time Forgot, which I am more than slightly obsessed with.

In fact, I had to disguise my enthusiasm/fascination so as not to appear a total weirdo. I actually had to buy something this time although I was pretty sure all they would have along those lines would be an olde tyme belt-and napkin-contraption, if you ladies of a certain age and older husbands out there dig what I'm saying. If you've read the original, non-updated version of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (theme of that young adult book being period talk for preteens is awesome), then you know.

Good thing this package of '80s hair-curling bendable rods is still there. It didn't photograph clearly because it's a ghost.

Same thing with Epilady, the ~~womanly torture device~~, "revolutionary way to remove hair," the package all yellowed by decades of sun.

Not shown: THE COILS! the coils! oh god the coils

It also gets this sad:

And this olde tyme!

AND my purchase was bagged up in a crisp waxed-paper bag by one kid of a staff of three including pharmacist, to the the soft sounds of Bing Crosby. And to think, my traveling companions had opted to miss out on this.

After a great marathon sesh by the fire Sunday night, we had to get a new tire Monday. We headed to historic Kingston, the first state capital of New York and now, apparently home to various wandering mentally challenged folks. We had to stop for directions twice since the first (drunk, pipe-smoking, law-enforcing) guy's directions only took us to some abandoned old warehouses where there were more disenfranchised souls roaming about on the tracks and such. At one point there was a huge guy inching down the street on either a Rascal™ or a motorized wheelchair, but his body mass overflowed too much to see what he was riding on. Finally the daytime gang in an awesome local bar were able to direct us to the Wal-Mart.

We had to camp out for two hours in the parking lot before Wolfgang was taken in for repair. A car went past with a sticker on its body saying "I got lucky" where there was damage from an accident. It occurred to me that I had gotten lucky, too, although many people would not see it that way. We'd been riding on a flat tire, and nothing happened to us. Then we rode on a barely-there spare, and again made it to our destination. Where someone else might see tragic failing independent business, I see a mysterious pharmacy that time forgot. It's all in your perspective.

This morning at 7 a.m. I was awoken not by the sound of the stream, rustling leaves, and birds chirping, but by a fight involving the construction guys next door, in which there was a pile-on in the middle of the street, a fight which by the way was attended by zero cops from the very nearby corner subway. Yep, back in Brooklyn again.

Shackin' up, part two: Making music

2007-06-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'm not gonna lie to you, blogland, the merging of the bf's and my CD collections caused me a bit of anxiety. At first it was hard to sleep. Then I remembered that every big life change has made me nervous like this. That's one of those good things about getting older: sometimes after something happens over and over, you actually remember it and see the pattern.

Between us there's dozens of CDs worth of overlap, which raises the question, what to do with all those doubles of Beck and Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo? So far they're just a few stacks of clutter in our already super-cluttered bedroom. The bf casually says we'll sell them. To me, who has never had a beau stick around this long before, who has been walked out on with zero warning after being professed love eternal, this is a bit scary. All of it: Transitioning from an independent permasingle to integrating my life with someone else. And back to the subject at hand, music, this sounds like a potential way to lose a bunch of CDs in the event that it's back to square negative one. But you can't focus on negative things that could happen, or you're just inviting them to happen.

Not to get all High Fidelity on you, but I'm about to. There is more at stake when you've merged your CD collections and sold off the doubles. For music nerds, that is true commitment. But again: poor is the woman who is afraid to have anything at stake.

The positive side that outshines the scary bit is that some some sweet complementary merges happened in our collection as well: the one Belle and Sebastian I don't have, he has. (I didn't like that album, the Storytelling soundtrack, but there's a dorky satisfaction in having them all.) I have all the Merge and Matador records promo CDs from the past two years, he has them from the previous few years before that.

Together, we have such a sick collection now, more than a thousand CDs (not counting 33s, 45s, 78s, 8-tracks, and my extensive sun-faded cassette collection residing in my bus, Wolfgang). Some '90s rock I now regret selling, he has. Monster Magnet? Checking...YESSSS! Various indie rock classix from Sebadoh and Pavement that I should've already known by now but have never heard? Yeah, we've got that. I look at the CD corner--because it occupies a whole corner, in bold defiance of less fetishistic music fans' clinical move to digital. My eyes unfocus and I'm back in the WRSU record library surrounded by undiscovered treasures that are all stickered with rude commentary from my fellow college DJs. No need to pare down the collection anymore for space considerations; we're in it to win it. For now, at least, these are our babies: our many enjoyable possessions and our pets.

Here is a real-life example of one of our music-nerd discussions:

"Know what's sad, between the two of us we have two Metallica CDs, and they're both mine."
"That's because mine are on cassette, because I was into them before CDs, douchebag."
"I have them on vinyl, douchebag."

Someone please decapitate us with a vinyl copy of Ride the Lightning.

Note to the possible beastiality practitioner in my readership

2007-06-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

To the prevert who found this blog by doing a blog search for "animal sex video": shame on you.

Were you looking for beastiality videos? Then I hope that someday you are violated by something that you wouldn't want to have enter you. Which, I imagine, since you already include the general term "animals" as potential objects of desire, would not leave a very large selection of candidates. In any case, I hope that fate has some rapey reward for you.

In the event that you were looking for a video of animals boning each other, that is not as repugnant, but you are still a damn prevert.

Damn preverts.

Our little girl is partially growed up

2007-06-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

I was in the Berkshires this weekend and finally got to try an iconic all-American summer fun activity: a rope swing over a swimmin' hole. See this 1982 Mountain Dew commercial? (You have to watch a few others first, but they're great, and God bless the Internets.)

Although I was thinking about this fine example of youthful rope-swing exuberance the whole time, my first turn on the swing was pretty much the exact opposite of that. Hanging from the rope, I was calling on upper body strength that just didn't exist, and plopped into the water after one second. I emerged from underwater to witness the utmost merriment from my cohorts, who I hated soooo much.

This reminded me of one reason I hate sports: I suck at them. For one thing, I don't run (unless there were fast zombies about), which alone rules out a lot of sports. The only ones I don't hate tend to incorporate activities I already enjoy. Like bowling--(that's a sport, right?)--in which you hang out with friends drinking beers and heckling each other. But as far as doing something for the sake of competition, or the team, or some kind of abstract athletic ideal, those concepts are lost on me. (This ethos is quite foreign to my sporting bf, who hasn't quite admitted to himself yet that I signed off on most athletic participation forever, along with all but the most basic math, when I graduated high school.) I do hope to start totally kicking ass at kickboxing or something, but that's pie in the sky right now.

So in order to avoid complete humiliation and disappointment in myself (and why is peer pressure such a big part of sports?), I tried it again. This time I happened to sit on the big knot on the rope which is there for just such a purpose, eliminating any need for upper body strength, and I swung all the way out, then dropped into the drink. Of course it was super fun, and as extreeeeme as several bags of Doritos washed down with a Monster energy drink.

That night we ate at Great Barrington's celebrated Mexican restaurant Xicohtencatl and I had Attack of the Wild Mushrooms. I felt like this was a mature choice, as I didn't go for something with a guaranteed cheese payoff. This was vegan, was made with locally grown organic shitake and oyster 'shrooms sauteed with chipotle, garlic, and cilantro, atop mesclun greens and jalapeno rice. I'm not sure how big organic mushrooms or mesclun greens are in Mexico, but I'll gladly let that slide. This meal was fantastic. It was the best thing I've eaten all year, and in fact was so delicious that I forgot all other delicious meals I've ever had that I could possibly compare it to. (I know a lot of people are disgusted by mushrooms, so try to imagine instead really well-prepared delicate meat that you enjoy, or try to imagine that you are not a mushroom wimp. To reiterate a phrase bandied about at the swimmin' hole that day, quit bein' a pussy, pussy.)

And here's some pics from earlier in the weekend, at a farm/ orchard where we picked a ton of succulent strawberries that later made their ways into strawberry rhubarb pie, strawberry martinis, and daquris. Good strawberry-hole-stuffing times.

And once again ladies and gentlemen: Cooper. A dog who totally knows how to party.

East coast rockin'

2007-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

So, for those of you who didn't grow up in New Jersey, there's this free paper of rock-show listings and coverage called The Aquarian Weekly, formerly known as East Coast Rocker (which is now, puzzlingly, a supplement inside Aquarian--not sure what the diff is).

I recently picked one up at the Virgin Megastore on Union Square for the first time in years, and it struck me, not for the first time, just how many terrible band names there are. Aquarian/EC Rocker is a treasure trove of these names:

Original acts:
Blondes Pass Out
Bowling for Soup (BOOOOOOOO!)
Jet Lag Gemini
Bedlight for Blue Eyes
Portugal the Man
Amish Outlaws
The Working Title
The Number Twelve Looks Like You
The Devil Wears Prada
From a Lacerated Sky
When Balance Breaks
What About Blanch

These names must just come from taking random words from columns A, B, and C. I don't know, the Working Title, if you can't bother to come up with anything good as your band/brand name, why should I want to come see you?

Tribute bands:
Bruce in the USA
Bad Medicine, "A hometown celebration of Bon Jovi"
Slippery When Wet (I'm just assuming this one is also a tribute)
Ron Jovi (I don't know what-all this nonsense is, but am filing it here)
There are also tributes to Zepplin, Queen, Pearl Jam, Sublime, No Doubt, the Ramones, more Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Metallica, and "Iron Priest."

This newest issue has an interview with one band that is the perfect example of the crap-name phenomenon: Dance Gavin Dance. (Not to be confused with another band listed in this issue, Play Radio Play. I kid you not.)

"I think the biggest question of all is how did you guys come to be named Dance Gavin Dance?
I don't know, Jonny came up with the name back when he was in his old band and nobody wanted to use it so when they were thinking of names for the band it was kind of just there and easy to remember and somewhat catchy, but there is no real meaning.
So there is no Gavin?
No, there's no Gavin at all. [laughs] I'm sure there's a Gavin somewhere and I'm sure he's dancing, other than that I don't know."

Look at this photo, scanned from the paper. Are they joking?!?!

You prob can't tell from this crappy scan, but the guy highlighted on the left has short hair spiked out in all directions from behind the longer hair, and the guy higlighted on the right has the most douchey feathered irono-mullet that ever douched.

Bring back the fight tonight, indeed. What fight do you suppose they are bringing back? The one for terribily-advised hairdos? Not since Big Orange Cone has a band name in EC Rocker enraged me more.

This full-page ad was quite enjoyable, too.

Not only does it totally match my blog's color scheme and feature a floor length keyboard scarf--twice--but it is also very Dick Craig. I'll be so stoked if anyone gets that super-Jerse reference besides Amanda.

Shackin' up, part one: animal collective

2007-06-21T06:28:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend and I are shacking up. (And we are not even married! Please don't tell Baby Jesus.) In many ways, the transition has been pretty seamless. And it's also cool: he's really going to be here, every night. No more G-train-and-littered-ugly-street commutes! No more roommates! Well, one more roommate (more on that later). But in one big cartoonish way, the transition has not been seamless: the classic clash of cat versus dog.

I have a big old grumpy calico cat, Gypsy, who has mellowed with age but is still one of those cats who mostly just likes me and will tolerate other people until it's time to swat them away. She has no tolerance for other animals, as I learned in a few previous living situations. We knew Gyp was going to be decidedly not pleased about her new housemate, Cooper the exuberant yellow labrador, but figured she'd just have to get used to it.

When Coop first entered my apartment to officially live here, their first encounter went so badly that Gyp's world is scarred to this day--but all witnesses had to admit it was also hilarious. Gyp happened to get cornered by Coop in the kitchen. Startled by her presence, Cooper barked his head off at her, causing her to try scrambling up the radiator (which was on), then launch airborne and finally land on the windowsill, where she remained behind the curtain for hours.

Here is a reenactment of the incident. Note: The role of Gypsy will be played by a Photoshopped amalgam of two less pretty cats, since Gypsy was unavailable to pose.

After this fiasco, there was one standoff where Gyp was being tuff, and she has left at least one claw and multiple clawmarks in Coop's curious schnozzle, but unfortunately this has not encouraged her to remain in the open. She has taken up dual residences behind the futon and atop my roommate Hannah's loft bed, only timidly emerging for our special "morning Mommy/cat time" when Cooper is locked in the bedroom, and sometimes to use her litter box. Even the litter box, not so much; she has adopted a liberal attitude about appropriate sites for doing her business. Apparently one of them is now Hannah's bed, where Gyp tried to cover up her dump with a pillow.

Speaking of Hannah, who is moving out next week and heading to Portland, Coop quickly tried to establish dominance over at least one member of our apartment's pack. This meant anytime he encountered her, it was time for him to do the humpty dance and for the red rocket to come out. Especially if she did something enticing like bending over. Fortunately, he abandoned this notion after terrorizing her a while, so we didnt' have to get him the sex doll for dogs.

I also had to change over from a relatively spoiled cat lady to become one of those city dwellers I never wanted to be: a dog-walker. Walking a dog in the city means you have to pick up their fresh hot dumps in a plastic bag. I have to say, it is disgusting, it does smell horrible, but you know what? It really isn't all that bad and has raised my threshold of disgust. Like, now I'm not as bothered anymore when the dog keeps licking me. I also came up with a few poop pickup tricks. If there's dirt handy, sprinkle that on for added fiber, creating a more solid mass to pick up. What's that, you say? You weren't too smooth with the pickup and got some poo on your hand? Curse vigorously, and then make use of some nearby moist leaves--nature's napkins.

And now whenever I'm home I have a new buddy, whether I'm in the mood to have one or not, following me everywhere I go, putting his head in my lap or a slobbery ball on my keyboard, so I have named him Obsesso. Other alternate names for Cooper: Pigpen (he frequently shakes his whole body, releasing hundreds of hairs to the wilds of our apartment each time), Enthusiasmo, Pooper, Blooper. Sometimes I think hangin' with Mr. Cooper is pretty similar to hanging out with President Bush. (Only Coop's smarter, of course! Wocka wocka!)

I am wary of writing one of those blogs that is like, "Look at our perfect Brooklyn brownstone life." "Look at these perfect vegan meals I make for my guaranteed-to-be-bullied child every day." (It's defiance of both of those sentiments that inspired my other dead blogs, Stoop to Our Level and Cheegan.) But I also have to be mindful of another pitfall of blogland, which is rampant cynicism.

I want to be reeeeaaaal, maaaaan, without heading too far into TMI-land or disclosing any ATM secret passwords. So here it is: It's great to be so comfortable with someone. In under a year, we've gone from complete strangers to reentering a room greeting the other one with, "...still scratchin' that, huh?"

We do spar a bit, but nearly all in good fun. The boyfriend will correct my pronuciation of vase, which brings us to a favorite topic of ours (fancy Connecticut mouse versus down-home New Jersey mouse), then later I'll correct his pronunciation of Moog. He can make fun of my Bon Jovi days, but watch out when I bring up his Grateful-Dead-following past! I love making up names for his former "on tour" cronies, like Hobo Johnny, Bojangles McGee, and Heroin Jack. That really gets him fired up, and he professes to hate me. But I know that "I hate you so much" really means "you are hilarious."

And so, hoping not to be fakey-braggy or corny or cynical, I present you: a fambly portrait, taken by the beleaguered Ms. Hannah.

Isn't it gross that we kind of look alike? We're like brother and sister, no? Special brother and sister.

Not pictured:

Mommy is so sorry, Gyp. Here, maybe these free-range chicken treats will make it all better.

Despite all appearances, no animals were harmed in the taking/making of these photographs.

Sometimes Auntie CoKane is busy

2007-06-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

I have a big post brewing but it won't be ready today. Meanwhile, if you have the time and are not a total lazewad, please enjoy the following hilarity that I've been meaning to share for a month now.

Comedy partners/BFFs/mother & daughter Julie & Jackie have made their own tribute to soap star Brenda Dickson's 1987 video "Welcome to My Home." First watch the gobsmacking original--even if only for a minute or two. But if you enjoy cheese as much as I do, I defy you to not keep watching through part two once you've started it.

And now it's payoff time. Here's Julie & Jackie's verszh.

This vid is why I love these gals.

Rock and pop dreams come true

2007-06-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

7:48 p.m. Exit apartment. I am going to a Duran Duran party. Almost everybody else in the world: not.

9:53 Post-roofdeck cocktails, Kim and I are finally cabbing to the party, on the West side in the 20s in a warehouse space. I tell her about the bet my commenters have going, $30 if I prank the guys in Duran Duran. She will give me $30 not to. Done.

10-ish: It turns out I'm wrong about almost everybody in the world not being here, as half of New York hipsterdom is here. The women are dressed just a little too ridiculously for a Monday night. Almost all are in high heels, myself included. Within seconds of exiting a freight elevator into the party, I spot Simon LeBon making his way through the crowd. OMG.
OMG. OMGOMGOGMGOMGOMGGMO

10:40 Kim, to me, as we stand near the corner throng where D2 is posing for photos and I can totally see John Taylor but only if I keep turning around: "You look like a giddy child."

John still looks great, though weathered. ("Weathered" here meaning "did a blizzard of coke throughout the '80s and possibly into the '90s.") I take a visual survey of the partygoers. Everywhere I look, women are gazing at the corner containing the Fab Five. (Wait, there's only four of them now I think but whatevs--Bop magazine used to call them the Fab Five.) The gals seem to have the same look on their faces that I must have, admiring these men both in their memory and in the present.

As we walk around, I realize something is different about this party. I get checked out by dudes in regular America, but am normally rather invisible among NYC hipsters. Here, guys are noticing me, looking at both of us. I formulate a theory about this, which Kim corroborates. Well, for one thing, we are probably glowing. But also, for once, these NYC men are invisible. They're not Duran Duran, so they might as well be eunuchs. Ha haaaa!, I think. For once, NYC women have the advantage in a market where we normally outnumber the men. We are the valued commodity here (besides, of course, D2). This is OUR TIME!

10:48 Seeing Simon work the crowd yet again is no longer so exciting. He looks rather like an aging British wiseacre, like a guy at your local pub watching the football match, only with highlights and fancy clothes. Kim knows from other parties that he's a dog with the ladies, too. We see him posing for photos and go, "One mo'." Kim and I look at each other and laugh. What a cheezer. Anywhere a D2 member goes, they get surrounded, like when someone's feeding the pigeons in a park.

10:55 Kim is asked by a random regular dude to take a photo of him with an older fellow in a fedora who I immediately recognize as Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees. Kim didn't make the connection until handing the camera back. Around then I declare this the best party ever. One of our fellow partygoers later describes Mickey's odd demeanor as "awkward first date." We also spot a guy from that reality show about the restaurant and think he is the culture guy from the show about the queer eyes for the straight guys.

11-ish There are cardboard cutouts of D2 to pose with. Kim and I are about to pose with those when we realize we are just now drunk enough to approach a real Duran Duran. Fortunately, the closest one at hand was also my favorite Duran Duran member ever, John Taylor. After slight egging on by Kim, I go for it. Tap tap. "Hi, [oh God, he could not be more bored with this scenario] can I get a picture with you?" In a way, I felt bad for not saying anything interesting and being just another meaningless interaction, but I'm over it. Kim takes the photo while using a fake British accent. Here's the money shot!

Doesn't he look like a wax museum model? In retrospect it was more the idea of meeting him than the actual experience that was such a thrill. I begin looking at the photo over and over.

I spy a tiny-featured pinner-thin model, realize it's probably a Mrs. Duran, and look for her mate, seeing the back of a Munchkin-short Nick Rhodes departing. The rest of D2 make their escape shortly thereafter. Mickey D is the last celeb to depart. When looking at him I keep seeing that dive at the beginning of that insane Monkees movie Head, but he's a long way from that look now.

11:55 Kim convinces me to join her for a monumental snack attack, viewing of Arrested Development, and sleepover at her apartment. I call the BF to tell him the plan. "Uhh, you sound really drunk," he says, pretending he thinks I'm hooking up with John Taylor, since I've thoughtfully shared my photo already. Me: "YOU soun' really drunk." (He doesn't.)

By the way, I don't know if you saw this:

UPDATE: When my 2 & 3/4 year-old niece saw this photo, she said, "That Tom is different." (Tom = the BF)

What does a girl wear to meet Duran Duran?

2007-06-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am lucky to be surrounded by so many creative people who are, as they say, "making it happen." Thursday I went to my pals Julie & Jackie's superfun comedy show Obsessed, for their gayer-than-ever Pride special; then on Friday I got to interview the hilarious comic Paul F. Tompkins and laugh my arse off at his show at Comix with a gang of awesomes also including the aformentioned Julie; and on Saturday I was wowed by my pal Kristina Wong's one-woman show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, and come to think of it Julie was there as well and might just be following me.

And now, Kim Gallina, another one of my megatalented writer pals, is making good on her promise to one day bring me to rub elbows with Duran Duran.

Duran Duran! Classic lineup, in order of cuteness, as they used to so thoughtfully list them in Bop magazine: John, Simon, Nick, Andy, Roger. Tonight I shall attend a party that will also be attended by D2. The thing is, I don't know if I can talk to people who I used to have as pinups on my wall as a child. I went to a Cyndi Lauper mini-performance a few years ago where it would have been easy to approach her, but I practically ran off and hid when she looked in my direction. And that was Cyndi Lauper--not a very intimidating person.

No good thinking about that now. Instead, I must focus all of my energy for the rest of the day on the urgent issue at hand: what to wear.

It really does help with creativity to be around people who are so productive; it makes it all the more shameful if I do nothing with myself. And if there's anything that can still penetrate the consciousness of a lapsed Catholic, it is shame. These days you have to be a rich kid or rich adult to live in NYC, but a culture-packed week like this illustrates why those of us who aren't endure crazy living conditions and go into debt [ahem] to live here.

Full report tomorrow.

Dog day afternoon

2007-06-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn's Prospect Park has a dog beach.

It rules.

Especially because it turns Mr. Coopington into Corpse-ington.

zzzzzzz

A short list which is gross but true

2007-06-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Things that make Cooper (the yellow dog)'s lipstick come out:

Metallica's 1986 album Master of Puppets
Being inside my VW bus
Taking a dump
The wind blowing

On this topic, I've seen more than enough. Here's hoping for a lifelong exemption from seeing junk I don't want to see.

Mom cocktails

2007-06-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

I got to talking with one of my BFFs recently about what adult beverages moms and aunts tend to drink. (Older ones, not our age.) Here are the findings, in our experience:

Moms & Aunts:

Box o' Wine
White Zin
Tom Collins
Strawberry Daiquiri (if really getting kooky, my BFF's mom would have two of these and be "shithoused")

Then I recalled what my Nana would sip once in awhile, only when company was over:

Grandmas:

Sherry
Manhattan
Tom Collins (using Bartenders brand powdered mix)

I was a bartender and am still not too sure what any of these are like.

What are some other mom drinks, gang? If you say like, Muscatel, or vodka in a plastic handle bottle with a handful of pills, or anything in a bag, that's just going to be sad. Please try to keep it light, kids.

*BTW, don't do a Google image search for "drunk mom" with SafeSearch off unless you are a prevert*

A tribute, more snack analysis, and Internets justice

2007-06-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

A few unrelated items:

1. Mr. Wizard, we hardly knew ye (were still alive).

2. Cape Cod Cheddar and Sour Cream potato chips: their sturdy kettle-cooked crunch and darker color says, "These might be healthier than regular chips. This is something I could potentially make in my kitchen." But their orange sodium-bomb tangy flavoring says "It's 1987 and I'm watching A Nightmare on Elm Street at a slumber party, one which prominently features orange-powdered fried snax as well as the party snack of the day, Keebler 'Tato Skins."
(Please pardon my idiot savant recall of the jingle that I haven't heard in 20 years, but which imprinted at a time when my brain was fresh: "'Tato Skins got baked potato appeal/ 'Cuz they're made with potatoes and skins that are real... [whistled interlude, while announcer discusses the virtues of TS]...Cheddar cheese 'n' bacon, sour cream 'n' chives, tasty baked potato, you won't believe your eyes/ They're made with potatoes and skins that are real/ 'Tato Skins from Keebler: baked potato appeal." YouTube confirms these memory skillz, if you want to watch the commerical.)

3. Time to help a good guy win--and crush a bad guy! CoKanes Bloggery reader, the very talented and pretty Sarah LeMieux, needs you to vote for her and her Super Blue Band on a site called Going. Going seems to be a social networking site, but with the goal of getting you off your expanding ass and into the real world. It's very easy to vote, all you do is fill in a few fields and upload a photo, then Sarah can win $1,000 and a cool gig.
Annnnd, you get to help her defeat her nemesis, who is also in the contest! As Ms. LeMieux put it, the nemesis "stole a bunch of votes out from under me in a horrible snake-like emailing maneuver." People, we cannot let this type of behavior be rewarded! As of last night Sarah was around 14th place, but there aren't all that many people in the running, so she could totally do it.
I know there are a lot more of you out there reading than are in my regular comment gang, so I hope you'll take a second to defeat evil. Thanks, dudes!

Everybody's an expert

2007-06-12T07:24:00.002-07:00

It's been a while since I posted about one of my pet peeves: relationship books for women, but the business is still booming, and I continue to get new ones all the time at my job. And apparently, anybody can write one. Here's one written by a bodyguard and former playa, Big Boom.

It features such pearls of wisdom as, "When a woman runs out there like a cabbage--all head and no tail, she's going to end up in the frying pan."

Phew! Good thing Big Boom's around to clear that up! This book is pretty funny. I think I'm going to keep it in the bathroom for some casual perusing.

Then there's this one:

Written by two guys who admit, "We're not psychologists or counsellors or self-proclaimed relationship experts," this is like a workbook with 150 exercises and scenarios for bringing that reticent male out of his shell. One exercise features a list of first names, and you are supposed to go through this list with your date and for each have him give the first person he associates with that name: polititian, TV star, etc. For example, the book says, if when you say "Howard," he says, "Howard the Duck," he may be too young for you.

By now, of course, that man would have run for the hills, but if he did stick around and say Howard the Duck then he may be just the fellow for someone who would see no problem in giving her date a prepared get-to-know-you pop quiz. Also-- "too young for you"? I'm 33 and saw this movie in the theater in 1986, possibly hoping because of the Lea Thompson factor that it would rule as much as the previous summer's blockbuster which she was also in, Back to the Future. (It did not.) That would put me toward the younger end of people who are aware of this character. Guess the authors are not really going for a younger readership.

The next exercise is a list of 20 fill-in-the-blank rules for when he's watching sports that you are supposed to ask your man to give you. (Did I mention that this book was written by two men with no apparent qualifications?) "RULE TWO: When the guys come over it's okay for you to say hello but..." And then I guess your man can say something like, "...but if you don't get right to servin' cocktail weenies I'll show you the back of my hand, bitch." "RULE THREE: If you're watching a recorded game, I should never, ever..." and then he'll be like "...say a word to me or I'm locking you in the root cellar again."

Unfortunately, I'm not making any of this up (except the imagined responses from the men in the last examples).

And coming in January 2008, Don't Be That Girl, by Travis Stork, otherwise known as The Bachelor from the Paris edition. I might have to agree with him, if "That Girl" means being like the ones he must have dated on The Bachelor.

Decidedly not loving it loud

2007-06-11T08:19:00.000-07:00

Sooo, I've mentioned that my apartment has been surrounded for months by very loud construction. This doesn't make for the best morning-time sleep conditions. Starting at 6 a.m. we get construction workers having their coffee out in front of the building calling back and forth to each other at high volume and laughing. One of my neighbors put up a note to them on the door addressing this, which was submitted to the highly entertaining blog Passive Aggressive Notes, but I don't think they've used it, and now it's gone. (Instead here are some other notes from that sign-writer, unfortch not including another great current one informing our front-door lock thief "You are being watched," with a primitive drawing of one ominous eye beneath.)

Anyhoo, last night I was woken by the sound of the dumpsters in front of the next-door construction being lifted, deafeningly emptied, and replaced at 4:30 a.m. for about 15 minutes. Boyfriend informed me that they do this every night around the same time. Jeepers, I thought to myself, this certainly was considerate planning on the part of some city employee. I would like to go to that city employee's place of residence and express this thought via bullhorn at 4:30 a.m. Ideally I'd be doing this to the city employee while hosting a dance party featuring such early-'90s hits as "Everybody Dance Now," and "Pump Up the Jam," and punctuate the proceedings with an air horn. But I guess my middle of the night racket would be illegal, whereas this one somehow is not.

My normally quite laid-back bf hasn't been sleeping well lately (go figure?) and so as we left this morning, him all grumpy, he ended up confronting the first jabbering guy he encountered outside the door about how people are trying to sleep in our building. Sadly, I don't think this chatty man was part of the 6 a.m. coffee klatch at all--he was a toothless old coot who might have been touched in the head and had probably just been babbling away to himself. I'm trying not to think about him too much or I'll feel bad...instead I'll think of how on Saturday some SUV jerk blatantly blocked the intersection after the light had changed, not moving when I beeped, and the bf yelled out the window of my VW bus with choice words about SUV-driving yuppies, looking like the angriest hippy of all. I had quite a laugh.

UPDATE: The bf insists that Old Man Toothless McGee is, in fact, part of the Construction Coffee-Drinkin' Loud-Talkin' Gang. Good, now I don't feel so bad.

inTouch People Stars are just like Us

2007-06-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

This is my nabe's most famous celeb couple several minutes ago. I got a phone tipoff from my BF, who had just departed, telling me to look out the window.

Boyfriend has been around many a famous folk, and is also the kind of person who always happens to be around for newsworthy/historic events (he was one of the lucky ones to be late for an appointment in the WTC on a certain fateful morning, so I can never be too mad at him for being late) and he also frequently spots celebrities that I would have missed. Whereas my work and interests often take me around well-known folk, I'm also usually the type who misses the chance encounters and historical things I've lived through and should have seen but somehow did not (Halley's Comet, Hands Across America, etc). Now, by association, I too shall be around or notice more of those exciting events and people. So yeah, I prob would have walked right by Heath and Michelle had I been down there just now, thinking it was any of the other interchangeable rich yupps of Boerum Hill. (I'm on the very edge of the 'hood, hence the garbagey corner.) Not that this sighting is super exciting, mind you, I'm just riffing like a jazz man.

Earlier this week, the bf's connection to a superpopular rock band gained us access to their sold-out (secret?) show and the after party at The Spotted Pig. There we had their famous sheep’s ricotta gnudi with brown butter and sage, which I inhaled in .05 seconds and declared the best thing I'd ever eaten. This was after numerous beers, but I suspect it would be the same without. Living in New York City can suck for sure (if you're not wealthy), but it allows for some pretty special experiences as well.

And finally, I just learned from reading an EXCLUSIVE! cover story in inTouch magazine, apparently Nicole and Angelina are SCARY SKINNY! I had not been aware of this Hollywood phenomenon, and am glad the fine journalists at inTouch are finally tackling this important subject with their exclusive expose. Nicole and Angelina should have some gnudi.

Support your local hippy

2007-06-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

I don't want to say that the showing of comments on my first Plenty blog last week was pathetic, but it kinda was. You can do better than that, Team CoKane's Bloggery! For shame.

This week's Saying Something Nice about Green Celebrities™ on the Plenty blog is here--and I'm told that soon my blogs on there will have their own place/link and not be mixed in with all the other stories. Reading my Plenty blog is rather like eating your vegetables, yes, but because it was written by me you can also count on some cheese.

That is all.