tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55246372012-02-08T10:40:15.548-05:00Mass for fat asses.Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.comBlogger3151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-61980501520854770822012-01-02T16:16:00.003-05:002012-01-02T16:18:14.862-05:00

I handed the reins of New Years Eve proper over to Nina, who responds to a challenge to celebrate with actual ambition instead of with annoyance, like I do. I spent part of the day up at the Practice Hole 2.0 participating in the awarding of The 2011 Argosies and working on a new song with the band. Then I rode the train downtown with Chris and Beau. Chris followed me to Park Slope, and we

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-13537314071103242212011-12-31T01:08:00.001-05:002012-01-02T16:19:35.286-05:00

Gentlefolk, here is my list.Best book I read: Elizabeth Costello; runner-up: Nineteen Seventy-FourBest album: Tie: David Comes To Life / UndunBest song: The Last Living Rose (Let England Shake); runner-up: We're Back! (Turtleneck & Chain)Best show I went to: Shilpa Ray, opening for Man Man at Music Hall of Williamsburg, May 31stBest show I played: Bel Argosy at Lone Wolf, July 15thBest movie I

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-76995985970803125342011-11-16T10:40:00.007-05:002011-12-28T01:11:47.489-05:00

The NYPD raided Zuccotti Park early yesterday morning, sweeping up tents, tables, books, signs, bins, bags, and people; clearing it out enough that you could actually see the light panels between the paving stones. (The park's owners even turned them back on.) The Occupiers had seen it coming, sort of -- they'd published a number several weeks ago that you could text to be notified of an event

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-16170341068153894112011-10-23T18:49:00.014-05:002011-11-25T16:31:58.338-05:00

Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one. The College Music Journal 2011 Marathon just finished, and I saw a bunch of cool shows! This year I used the strategy that worked well for me last year: Wait a frustratingly long time for the CMJ web site to publish the official schedule; ignore the silly music industry panel events; find bands that sound cool within the bounds of my after-work

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-41752968734549983942011-10-14T08:14:00.001-05:002011-10-29T23:45:20.231-05:00

Babies, it seems like everyone (well, okay, no one) wants to know what I think about the protests underway in Zuccotti Park. I've been (and am still) involved with projects and activism that seemed to me to be unambiguously and unequivocally The Right Thing, and getting anyone to pay attention to them has been a downright Sisyphean task. So at this stage of my political development ("Phase III:

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-35810735700351365702011-09-25T00:02:00.005-05:002011-10-20T00:55:05.981-05:00

Summer's over. I crushed it. Naturally I'm crowing about it for your benefit, dear reader, but also for mine, because I am, at heart, a whiner and a pessimist, and a paper record of a good time is something that I need to come back to from time to time to keep my spirits up. So this is just to remind myself that I had a great, sweaty, exuberant three months. To wit: Four outdoor movies,

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-54739342398016873292011-08-28T23:39:00.006-05:002011-09-15T22:33:47.343-05:00

Hey, everyone else is going with that hed. Why can't I?Nina and I took a trip to Brighton Beach the weekend before the storm. I'd been to Coney Island twice already this summer, but hadn't been to the beach at all. In between consecutive, obligatory inland LIRR trips, Nina was craving some sand of the non-buried-cigarette-having variety, but without a car or advance plans we had to settle.

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-66686239364388283882011-08-08T23:11:00.000-05:002011-08-28T23:37:38.399-05:00

I'm going to try to keep this on the short side, in the hopes that I can turn in more than one of these little dispatches a month. Will it work? Probably not. No. The heat wave arrived, and it was hot. We're on the top floor in our building, and we took the wooden roll-up blinds down from the living room window (apartment AIDS), so when it gets hot out, it gets hot in here, and it stays hot

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-51046089508686665772011-07-19T23:35:00.018-05:002011-08-07T23:08:06.742-05:00

Quickly, before it's too hot to think:My friend Beau, the distinguished lead guitar player of Bel Argosy and frontman of Robot Princess, has been working hard on the script for a movie (with Doug of MiniBoone), and last weekend we helped him film it. The movie is called "Vanderpuss Redux," and it's a comedy of errors, a dinner party farce set in the home of a failed lawyer. Beau cast me as the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-63057097005412893592011-07-06T07:50:00.016-05:002011-07-22T00:35:26.541-05:00

Summer continues, and with it the procession of predictably awesome shows. To wit: I went to go see Art Brut at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday. I'd been looking forward to seeing them, well, ever since the last time I saw them, a couple of years ago at Brooklyn Bowl, but then I got word that my friend (well, friend-of-a-friend) Doug's band, MiniBoone, was going to be opening! A

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-42145371277761554932011-06-19T11:26:00.007-05:002011-06-27T20:20:18.328-05:00

This year's Northside Festival is wrapping up. Here's what I did:Bel Argosy played a show at Legion Bar on Thursday, which is owned by the same people (and has sort of the same checkered-tile floor aesthetic) as K & M. That same Monday we played our final Otto's residency show, to an audience that just barely outnumbered the band. There would've been slightly more people in attendance but the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-70155880407851068852011-06-04T13:31:00.004-05:002011-06-05T10:59:47.786-05:00

Check it here, if I haven't sent it to you already. Let the anxiety and regret about time well spent kick in... now!Here's what I've managed to take in thus far. Last Friday, Nina and I hopped the G and headed to Brooklyn Bowl to see Fang Island, whose intricate guitar arrangements I'd really enjoyed when I listened to their Myspace cuts -- there are some complicated melodies in there, but the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-75073486656418113072011-05-28T18:39:00.013-05:002011-12-05T01:37:33.249-05:00

Nina and I just got back from visiting my sister, who's taking a semester abroad in Copenhagen right now. She's shaping up to be quite the math genius, much to the surprise of her decidedly non-quantitative family (myself included), and so what better place to study abroad than the hometown of, uh, Niels Bohr? She's taking a breather on the math stuff right now, though -- her emails are full of

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-85406381129610135162011-05-01T16:01:00.003-05:002011-06-24T10:02:25.223-05:00

April was not kind to me, babies. I started off the month by getting a ticket from the police for drinking a beer on a subway platform on a post-rehearsal Friday night. Lest you think, dear reader, that your author is a sad old boozehound who can't forebear to drink for, like, the paltry hour and a fucking half it takes to get from the "practice hole" at St. Mary's down to Park Slope, well...

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-440899332583555982011-04-17T22:19:00.009-05:002011-06-05T14:14:31.445-05:00

Folks, I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons.Back in February, at Nina's birthday party at Pacific Standard, Evan and Tom and I got to talking about old-fashioned, pen-and-paper role-playing games, and how one might go explaining their appeal to someone who'd never played. "It's just talking," we said to Nina and Winnie, whose skepticism had motivated our conversation. "Talking and drinking beer

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-70863327636198200342011-03-20T23:18:00.005-05:002011-03-23T22:46:38.700-05:00

I just got back from Boston, where I'd gone on my yearly pilgrimage to the Free Software Foundation's annual associate members meeting. Making it a one-day trip, as I do, can be a bit grueling, but as I may have mentioned before, part of the draw of attending for me is getting to spend eight or so uninterrupted hours with my laptop, working on a project of my choosing. The Acela's seat-local AC

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-59797212472780742342011-02-21T22:49:00.005-05:002011-05-28T15:53:22.317-05:00

Up on the chilly roof of The Iron Monkey in downtown Jersey City on Sunday night, surrounded by a constellation of auto-on lights of the towering office buildings, I was gripped by doubt. Were we alone out here? Had we crossed the Jersey border for nothing?Nina and I had PATH-trained it out there, lured by a "tweet" that I'd seen on Tom Scharpling's Twitter feed to the effect that he was going

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-42085171681860377492011-01-20T14:18:00.000-05:002011-02-17T23:54:38.805-05:00

This is my three hundredth "blog post!" I've been writing in this thing for, holy shit, about eight years. This thing has seen me through different jobs, different apartments, different relationships; if you scroll back to the beginning, you can see how the subject matter and style has changed quite a bit over the years. I guess if I've learned anything in my tenure as Navel-Gazer-in-Chief

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-4766363070007131392010-12-30T19:51:00.010-05:002011-01-30T21:19:54.873-05:00

You've all been waiting for it. I know. I know.Best book I read: Blood's a RoverBest album: Titus Andronicus, The Monitor. No contest.Best show I went to: Titus Andronicus, at Bowery Ballroom, March 6thBest new reason for donating to WFMU: Tom Scharpling, drunk.Best scone: Cranberry, Not Just Rugelach.Best movie I saw in the theater: Inception? I don't know, I didn't see a lot of 'emBest

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-37832504634780700732010-12-12T15:01:00.007-05:002011-01-06T01:09:02.610-05:00

Bel Argosy played our first show on Saturday the 11th at a not-quite venue (read: some guy's apartment) in Bushwick called Cheap Storage. We'd booked a performance at the venerable Cake Shop for the following week, but Billy and Beau are friends with a guy named Doug in a band called MiniBoone, and he got us on the bill, which included an assortment of other guitar-oriented Brooklyn indie rock

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-52681649371130961942010-12-07T01:05:00.011-05:002010-12-19T00:54:34.024-05:00

I'll get to that in a second.I was able make it through Thanksgiving with my bum tooth, although eating was an ordeal at times. My sister came down from college and we went to go see the penultimate Harry Potter movie, an experience that cemented my conviction that seeing movies in movie theaters is for shit: It costs a million dollars, and we sat through a good twenty minutes of previews before

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-59135524351750486532010-11-23T23:20:00.013-05:002010-12-10T00:16:08.295-05:00

Winter showed up. The apartment's working out well, I think. From the living room windows, I can see an undulating expanse of South Brooklyn, a sea of houses, all brown and red and pale yellow. I feel like I'm looking out at some Dutch exurb as I muddle with the French press in the tiny little kitchen.The last time I wrote, I neglected to mention the crazy hail storm we had at the end of

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-59663161772660546672010-10-21T00:04:00.010-05:002010-11-04T18:59:20.222-05:00

Many things; so many things!The Rase came to town last weekend and Nina's brother Michael and I went out for drinks with her and a mix of our mutual friends from college and high school. In true The Rase fashion, the venue chosen was a fancy shithole on Houston and Sullivan called XR Bar. When the place got too full of crummy debutantes, we hit the road for Arrow Bar on Ave. A, Sophie and some

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-55401571891352871822010-09-26T22:35:00.008-05:002010-10-25T00:22:37.641-05:00

We've moved again. Although we'd hoped to stay in the place we were renting from Kat for a bit longer, to help defray the cost we'd incurred by my ill-advised and failed attempt to break the lease (now it can be told) on the place I'd been renting down the block where the bathroom ceiling had fallen in five times, but Kat needed to move back in for family reasons, and so, a bit bummed out, we

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-11717375886283280642010-08-25T23:10:00.013-05:002010-10-05T07:35:44.044-05:00

Nina and I went to that Yankees game: August 16th, versus Detroit. I hadn't been to the new stadium yet. First impressions? It feels bigger, cleaner. Maybe brighter. Like they've sort of streamlined the baseball-watching experience, made it more intense. We set out for the Bronx a bit late -- there was a thunderstorm in progress, a proper summer drenching, finally. But it had largely

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-9503817976146082512010-08-08T15:27:00.005-05:002010-09-03T00:30:23.177-05:00

Hello, Internet! Been a while.I'm 29 now. My birthday passed without much fanfare -- the lack of which being my idea, although probably a bad one in retrospect. It's hard, though, getting older. I don't like it. I feel like Raistlin Majere, I said to people at work, the man with the hourglass eyes. Daryl went out and bought me a bunch of enormous helium party balloons and affixed them to my

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-20899018744051324732010-07-08T00:44:00.010-05:002010-07-23T15:35:43.535-05:00

Summer things continue apace. It is very hot, babies. We just had the hottest July 6th on record, apparently, although I don't think I was paying attention. Don't get me wrong. It was definitely hot.Last Wednesday I met Bill at Bruar Falls for a CD release party some of his friends were doing. I was feeling weak and hungry beforehand, so I went on a hike down Grand St. looking for grub and

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-43039419803632815352010-06-26T10:23:00.009-05:002010-07-08T00:41:41.128-05:00

...is in full effect. Scope the calendar itself for proof.What have I been doing? Not blogging examining my life, that's for sure. But I did manage to hit up a few shows at the Northside Festival. On Friday, this band-slash-dude called Fluffy Lumbers was playing at Matchless, which I struggled to locate, despite the fact that I'll always associate with a memorable bit of stomach trouble. I'd

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-80696440313035104862010-05-20T23:05:00.005-05:002010-05-30T11:36:18.332-05:00

Nina graduated from Columbia this week! She's got one more class to finish up over the summer (Microeconomics), but she got to walk with the rest of her class in the two-day graduation ceremony.Sunday was Class Day for the School of General Studies -- each school in Columbia's pantheon's got their own day, plus a big joint ceremony at the end. We got up real early, got ourselves into our

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-44222483527228618422010-03-21T20:48:00.006-05:002010-05-10T23:14:48.353-05:00

I spent Saturday mostly on the train, en route to and from the Free Software Foundation's annual associate members meeting in Cambridge. The conference is one of the highlights of the year for me -- good news delivered by smart people, bad news framed as motivation. And as, I think, one of the board members pointed out a few years ago, you get the superficial pleasure of seeing what they spend

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-1932602065186487712010-03-18T07:50:00.007-05:002010-03-21T20:07:25.876-05:00

Nina and I just got back from a trip to Puerto Rico!It was kind of a modified Spring Break: Nina's got an actual break this week, but my schedule was looking a bit hairy, so we wanted to go a little early. We put the whole thing together kind of at the last minute, too -- we didn't really know where we wanted to go, except that it had to have beaches and be warm; we wanted to do something purely

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-57180487913340726522010-03-05T19:10:00.011-05:002010-03-26T00:20:54.832-05:00

It looks like The Pogues are foregoing their annual St. Patrick's day Roseland performance, which is convenient, since this year I was planning on skipping it, Shane's new teeth and all.After two separate, abortive attempts at Union Pool, I finally saw The Muslims on Friday at Cake Shop. (They've since been renamed The Soft Pack, which is a way less punk rock name, but.) It was freezing cold

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-6771040295116061832010-02-01T14:54:00.007-05:002010-02-12T00:08:10.973-05:00

Do it!So says Henry Garfield. It's not a bad mantra at all.At the second rehearsal we played at St. Mary's, Chris told me something wondrous. He was moving, he said, from his apartment in Williamsburg to a sublet in Murray Hill, and in the process of boxing up his things, he'd found a videotape. "It's a video of this crappy Headliners show we played at Continental back in college," he said.

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-54745709021082363902010-01-02T22:20:00.002-05:002010-01-24T16:46:58.963-05:00

The New Year always feels like it comes too soon. I guess that's a pretty trite observation, but I feel like this past year, especially, ended without enough concrete deliverables -- I never got to see the roll-out of the final (working) version of the code I wrote at Rebel Monkey (hell, I haven't even been paid). I didn't juice all the juice out of the summer. The projects I laid out for

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-27321779567010174702009-12-22T01:13:00.003-05:002010-01-10T21:44:34.056-05:00

Hello everyone.It's the holidays already. What have I been up to? Not a whole lot -- or not a lot of the stuff I usually talk about on the online journal. Tom O'Donnell and I are hard at work on a project I hope we can unveil in the new year. My office job continues more or less peacefully. The weather got cold and rainy.Sunset Park's Business Improvement District put up their

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-22614646263502664382009-11-04T23:53:00.008-05:002010-03-21T20:16:36.366-05:00

It was Halloween! I toyed with the idea of dressing up as Donny Donowitz, The Bear Jew, but ultimately resolved once again to stay home and play grown-up by attempting to give candy away to trick-or-treaters. Nina and I carved a pumpkin! Evidence:Candy-wise, I picked a several-pound bag of individually-wrapped chocolate things and we emptied them into a bowl. Nina made a very nice

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-82314544122296990902009-10-27T23:13:00.005-05:002009-11-04T23:44:00.373-05:00

I ended up going one for three on CMJ.On Wednesday night, after an early screening of Lorenzo Lamas' Snake Eater at Chez O'Donnell, I tried to hit up the Hooray For Earth show at Crash Mansion, only to realize I'd written the info for the show down wrong. I could've stayed and seen Die! Die! Die!, but didn't.Friday was worse: I swung by the WFMU Record Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion after

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-34496477742496898962009-10-13T21:48:00.004-05:002009-10-19T23:23:14.073-05:00

Emma was on Jeopardy! She looked and sounded really professional, and answered so many questions that I can't believe she only came in second. Although, to be fair, Terry From Plano is clearly a trivia master, and Jeff Kirby has apparently done this before.On Saturday night, Nina and I went to the Peelander-Z show at The Studio at Webster Hall. I'd never been to that part of the club. We got

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-11156006088506169682009-10-03T16:11:00.000-05:002009-10-03T19:31:46.411-05:00

Eve and I went to Union Hall on Saturday to check out The Rifles, after eating delicious poutine at Sheep Station. We got to the 'Hall around 9:30, expecting to miss the opening act, and the place was practically empty. "Oh no," I said. "What if nobody came? I'm sorry if the bands suck." But it turned out that nobody had gone on yet. The first band was called The Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-80738047000689100922009-09-07T23:54:00.002-05:002009-09-16T01:09:17.893-05:00

Well, the furlough turned, predictably enough, into the full-on dissolution of Rebel Monkey (on my birthday, no less). I won't speak to the particulars, since some very important aspects of them are still being resolved. But, man, losing your job is really a drag. It's not like I don't have a full plate of projects to work on, but there's nothing like having all the time in the world to make

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-42242690313053963882009-06-21T00:32:00.006-05:002009-07-13T19:41:25.025-05:00

Okay, this rain shit has got to stop. It's making me moody and sluggish. It's been raining non-stop for like three fucking weeks! More, probably. I brought my lemon tree outside a couple of weeks ago, thinking it wasn't getting enough light / moisture, but now I'm worried it's gonna be washed away.Spinnerette played Bowery Ballroom on Monday. Committed readers will know that I've been a fan

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-89417510568721570172009-06-08T10:13:00.003-05:002009-06-21T00:29:00.311-05:00

Summer, I think? It's been inordinately rainy in June so far. Lightning wakes me up around 3:00 AM.Otherwise, Sunset Park has been a dream. The barber shop on our block up towards 5th Ave. was gutted last year and turned into a mini-warehouse for Coco Helado guys to store their carts. And a month or so ago, somebody parked an ice cream truck in front of it with a "For Sale" sign on the back.

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-69967852648680287562009-05-21T21:07:00.003-05:002009-05-26T22:54:03.805-05:00

Eve and I went to go see The Thermals play the Music Hall Of Williamsburg. I'd never been to the place, despite it having opened almost two years ago (and I'd never been to Northsix, either). I guess I'd forgotten that the place is owned by the same people who run Bowery Ballroom, but holy shit -- the layouts of those venues are totally fucking identical! Like, seriously, down to the shape of

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-62525614584654412702009-04-29T22:02:00.003-05:002009-04-30T22:16:54.069-05:00

You fuckers have been bugging me to watch The Wire for the past two years, and, like I've been saying, it's in there, man, it's in my Netflix queue. It's just down a ways, past some documentaries about globalization and the second Jackass movie. But Nina was willing to accelerate it a bit in hers, and so last night I finally saw the first three episodes. In view of the faux-momentousness of

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-43702780714163041922009-04-21T11:28:00.004-05:002009-05-21T20:57:27.252-05:00

Spring!After a thorough search for recipes for banana pie that actually involve bananas as something more than, you know, a topping, I settled upon this recipe and made it. It was difficult but ultimately pretty rewarding. Word to the wise: You cannot substitute half-and-half for heavy cream.On Friday the company was celebrating my friend Joe's birthday; we took him out for Korean barbecue at a

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-91490060563797973832009-04-11T15:20:00.004-05:002009-04-20T01:19:12.688-05:00

Just got back from a week in Sarasota, Florida, where I was visiting my grandmother on my dad's side. He was flying down there to help her take care of her taxes -- she's got a trust that my grandfather set up for her that keeps her in an assisted living facility for ladies who used to lunch. And it also happened to be her 90th birthday. ...And, embarrassingly, it'd been around five years

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-8656652327526681622009-03-21T12:51:00.005-05:002009-03-31T10:56:18.618-05:00

Libre Planet 2009, aka the Free Software Foundation's annual members meeting, was this past weekend, and this year the powers that be planned two days of software activism-related... fun. I emailed Greg to see if I could crash on his sofa again, but he replied to say that he was going to be NYC that weekend. I started researching hostels but secretly planned to get a private room at a commodity

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-6455151756541414432009-03-15T21:14:00.008-05:002009-03-31T10:33:45.601-05:00

[Ironically, after finishing editing a post about a conference where everyone was fretting over the ubiquity of not-free-as-in-freedom network services like the ones Google offers, Blogger freaked out and deleted this post -- from its internal database *and* from undecidable.net. It did this silently: the timestamps on the files on my site were the only indication that anything had changed.

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-8344736708209483232009-01-28T09:31:00.003-05:002009-02-24T22:11:15.850-05:00

Hey, so it is a new year and everything. Maybe I should say something about 2008?Best Chris Matthews moment - tie: Fred Thompson's masculine musk; What did Neville Chamberlain do?Best killing spree - Stephen Maturin, in The Fortunes of WarBest informercial - Snuggies: The blanket you die inBest Keith Olbermann impression - Ben AffleckBest song on the Spinnerette EP I bought, even though it was

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-78085840317131227392009-01-09T21:36:00.006-05:002009-01-28T12:35:54.204-05:00

The always-elusive Dickies played a bunch of East-coast shows shortly after New Year's -- they played a weird $45 New Year's Eve lock-in at some newly-fancy shithole on the Bowery, and then on the 2nd they did a show at Southpaw with The Kowalskis, a ticket for which I bought as soon as I saw found them on sale. I'm always a little worried they're never going to back out here.They opened with "

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-3927424643712907552008-12-26T18:03:00.003-05:002009-01-09T21:36:06.941-05:00

It's winter in Sunset Park. The B.I.D. has strung up lights across 5th Ave. and set up speakers at the intersection to play songs in English and Spanish. I managed to send out holiday cards (via Etsy) and do Christmas shopping this year (via Amazon, mostly), despite a somewhat surreal work schedule.Creepy salespredators from a company called IDT Energy have been prowling the building unbidden,

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-23852569897221226622008-12-06T18:36:00.004-05:002008-12-14T00:22:45.131-05:00

Nina's friend and co-Columbian Lauren, whom she met during her summer program in Brazil, got us tickets to go see Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at the Metropolitan Opera. So we dressed up (I brought a jacket and slacks to work in a bag) and I met Nina and Lauren and Victoria at Lincoln Center after work.I'd never been to the Met before. The lobby part looks like an okay hotel, red carpet

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-57426178680271062762008-11-10T01:20:00.000-05:002008-11-19T09:37:46.781-05:00

And then we elected a new president. It was an exciting, rapturous Tuesday, but I'll get to that in a second.Some of you may remember the election four years ago: The Democrats had yet again chosen an absolute, you know, winner as their candidate, and though we may have donated and even, Christ, spent a perfectly decent October afternoon ringing doorbells in shit-ass Pennsylvania for Kerry's

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-20149487957262408532008-10-27T10:32:00.003-05:002008-11-03T01:13:26.532-05:00

As recompense to myself for the crunch we just went through at work, I decided I was going to, you know, go out this past weekend. It's actually kind of un-easy to get yourself back in the mode of doing activities after you've acclimated to going straight home from work every night and compounding your tiredness with a cup of herbal tea, but sometimes you just have to launch yourself into the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-23758981826543634992008-10-06T00:16:00.005-05:002008-10-26T16:54:20.811-05:00

I was remarking to Ted a few nights ago (over blueberry kuchen and red wine in his lovely Park Slope apartment) that sometimes you look around you, at how dirty your clothes are, say, or how grimy the coffee table in your apartment has gotten, and you think to yourself, "man, I am a filthy dude."Case in point: I am a slobby programmer-type guy who needs to be eating junk food all goddamn day long

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-31362697064298151832008-09-03T23:41:00.003-05:002008-10-05T23:43:23.990-05:00

So the summer's over and I didn't blog it on its way out. The fact of the matter is that ever since getting back from Argentina, my job has been a bit of a hell ride. I've been locked in an apparently futile struggle to eke performance out of a software system that doesn't want to perform, and it's mostly my fault. But let's put that aside. Point is, I actually had a pretty bitchen summer --

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-51412470973738942522008-08-25T11:32:00.003-05:002008-08-30T22:38:43.281-05:00

I hate to say it, but summer's kind of winding down. I'm not ready to do a post-mortem; I'm at the point where I'm trying to pack a lot of good stuff into these last few weeks.The weekend before leaving for Argentina, I checked out King Khan & The Shrines at McCarren. King Khan is a chubby little Indian (via Canada) dude who plays James Brown-style dutty rock and has a voice like Screamin' Jay

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-63164140449765254952008-08-17T19:02:00.004-05:002008-08-23T15:41:04.227-05:00

Well, Palermo Viejo, actually. But, yeah, that's where I am -- Buenos Aires. Nina and I are staying in a very charming bed and breakfast-type place called La Casa Palermitano where we have an enormous green room with our own bathroom, a built-in heater (it's winter here), and fuckin' WiFi. The proprietress, Lorena, is impressively tolerant of our mangled castellano and has a parrot named Lucas

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-70377009498549078292008-07-21T13:20:00.005-05:002008-08-02T17:51:09.183-05:00

I'm 27! The day of (a Tuesday) I brought some cupcakes into work, and then later went to go see The Virgin Suicides in McCarren Park Pool (suck). Nothing to report, except that apparently there was a corpse in the pool? Didn't know. My parents took me out for Boyd Thai on Wednesday and gave me a very trendy-looking laptop bag.You guys may remember that in years past, Sophie and I did a thing

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-19667248791734012952008-07-08T17:59:00.004-05:002008-07-13T18:04:30.233-05:00

I went with Nina to the airport on July 4th to send her off to Brazil. It was sad, saying goodbye under the gray, arched roof of an empty Newark Airport. She'll have fun, though. (Fuck, I know she's already having fun on account of the video reports she's already wired back.) I watched the fireworks from far, far away while waiting for the AirTrain back to Penn Station, and then hit up

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-2806828165920026242008-06-22T19:15:00.004-05:002008-06-29T18:34:18.847-05:00

My sister Caroline graduated from Bronx High School of Science last week. They had a big (700 kids or sommat) ceremony that mom and dad and I went to over at Avery Fisher Hall, and Ira Glass gave the commencement speech. Don't be afraid to do something besides what your parents want you to do, he said, but be sensitive to the fact that this may hurt their feelings. The principal of Bronx

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-72127486776554051582008-06-07T21:41:00.005-05:002008-06-17T23:35:28.609-05:00

Like I've been saying. it's been crunch time at work. We had a big thing that was due on Monday, and we'd been working on it around the clock (literally, at times). Peter stayed in the office all night Wednesday to Thursday and promptly got sick; the testers woke me up at 4:00 AM Thursday morning to fix something. It was nuts. And Billy's wedding, with the accompanying bachelor party and

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-88586219027670169152008-05-31T19:18:00.004-05:002008-06-07T21:40:31.657-05:00

Well, not quite yet. But I did buy Kitty a leash and collar today at Petland Discounts. In a fit of pre-commute boredom -- and at Nina's repeat urging -- I did some Googling of Kitty's... condition. You know, the stomach thing. The Internet said that she was probably bored and depressed, and that getting her outside might help with that. Now, don't get me wrong, I done knew Kitty's emotions

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-25113733161569842952008-05-14T11:00:00.005-05:002008-05-25T01:43:53.143-05:00

Last Saturday, as I was returning home from picking up some dry cleaning, a fire truck passed me on 5th Avenue. When I got to the corner of my block, I saw why -- there was a guy collapsed on the street right smack in front of Super Pollo Latino II. He was a well-dressed dude, with a dark shirt and a black sports jacket on. He was out cold. A small crowd had gathered around him, and the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-79646421765809246672008-05-02T16:42:00.004-05:002008-05-07T17:16:27.848-05:00

Round-up of available Chelsea-area breakfast sandwiches:23rd & 6th - There's a guy with one of those bagel carts that also has a small grill, there. One egg on a small Portuguese-style roll with salt, pepper, and a liberal amount of butter runs you $1.25 and tastes pretty good. Hard to beat.666 6th Ave. - They probably make plain egg sandwiches, but if you're going to a deli, I feel like you

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-153333290426906252008-04-27T00:38:00.002-05:002008-04-29T23:45:53.114-05:00

Spring: bursting out all over. This is the kind of weather, I feel like, that you really have a duty to pay attention to, because the niceness of it, the temperature of the air, the flowers blooming, etc., kind of tricks your brain into thinking that the universe is a pleasant place to live in. That is to say, you start to feel like spring weather is the new baseline, when, in fact, it really

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-33228926492053805722008-04-17T18:51:00.001-05:002008-04-19T01:03:19.064-05:00

So it's been a while since I wrote anything here, and part of that's because of work, but part of that's also due to the fact that Nina's dad's health took a turn for the worse over the past few weeks, and he died early on the morning of Thursday, April 3rd. With Nina's permission, I'll say a few things about that.She didn't get much warning -- she'd been scrambling to order and arrange for the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-9045997594428389782008-03-17T22:31:00.002-05:002008-03-19T23:46:06.834-05:00

I caught the 7:00 train to Boston on Friday night for the FSF's annual Associate Members Meeting. Long time readers will know that this is a pilgrimage I make every year, although it's only recently that I've decided to stop making the 4-plus-hour trip on a Chinatown bus (Amtrak is several times more expensive, but, really, it makes the trip way more bearable). This year I made plans to stay

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-11590295472010215602008-03-05T22:15:00.003-05:002008-03-11T23:19:01.460-05:00

A few weeks ago a guy got killed in this restaurant called Tacos 2004 Viva Mexico about a block away from my apartment on 5th Ave. The news was calling it a restaurant, but really, the place is a bar where guys go to watch soccer (and apparently shoot each other) -- I went there once as part of a project I was doing to try as many of the different places in the neighborhood as possible, and it

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-83699449784090279522008-02-25T20:55:00.000-05:002008-02-29T00:43:22.423-05:00

M-Biddy made a surprise visit the weekend before last. It was great! Apparently Canada's got this national holiday that coincides with Presidents Day in the U.S. -- Family Day features a bit less presidential history and a bit more highest-rate-of-suicide-all-year-so-maybe-take-the-day-off -- so he and his lady friend were going to take advantage of this really great price they found on tickets

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-26333830301283302622008-02-11T19:31:00.000-05:002008-02-17T19:17:53.024-05:00

Nina's birthday was on Saturday. She's 27, or, as she likes to put it, "on the fast approach to 30." I think "the final descent to 30," would be better. It's like an airplane.Aanie and Eve came over in the morning, letting themselves in with a set of keys I'd given Aanie the night before, to sing Happy Birthday to her in Polish. She does this every year. It goes like this:Sto lat, sto lat,

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-89907244827080348972008-02-06T18:35:00.000-05:002008-02-06T23:26:37.146-05:00

Okay, so forget what I said about not wanting to talk politics -- well, blog politics; I'm always willing to talk politics -- Everyone's got Obamania! I didn't even know about this until last night when I went over to 680 to watch the primary results trickle in (and eat Colleen's frighteningly on-target root beer cake), but apparently everyone I know has been volunteering for the dude: Tom's

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-57229324577604292492008-01-21T23:20:00.000-05:002008-01-29T00:55:52.246-05:00

Ugh; got home at 9:40 PM tonight.The days in which I would write about politics in this thing are past. I feel like I've become a lot less sure about what to think -- not about what I think (abortions for all, tiny American flags for none), but about what the right way to convince people of it is, or even whether convincing them is feasible or, you know, just, or whether the issues are really as

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-19118353285162080122008-01-19T23:08:00.000-05:002008-01-21T00:11:01.613-05:00

Nina is moving into Randy's former room. I am excited but, you know, apprehensive. Can I say that in a place where she can read it? She knows. It's a stressful thing, moving -- I was sure wound up about moving in here, and I was ditching a junked-up money-sink of a place when I did that. She's leaving what's basically the best one-bedroom in the city, a palace, really, that's also notable in

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-59703804489474615682008-01-04T22:39:00.000-05:002008-01-04T22:40:15.304-05:00

Randy finished moving out a couple of weeks ago. The apartment is strangely clean and empty. Last night Winnie and Evan came over and played Scrabble and cooked this custom pizza for Randy with goat cheese and chorizo. We ended up opening some champagne that Eve'd gotten me a few weeks ago and we had quite a time. Randy has bequeathed me a number of... gifts, including two toy cars and a kind

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-49194497073078288212007-12-21T15:11:00.000-05:002007-12-23T14:38:23.673-05:00

Hey, babies. Happy Michaelmas.So I had my last day of work at DataSynapse on the 7th. Didn't do much in the way of celebrating -- whimper, not bang, you know -- but earlier in the week I did get all the pennies off the top of the fridge. See, for the past four and a half years, I'd been tossing my pennies up on top of the 50-cent soda machine in the office kitchen. My stated goal was to

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-76267840245342928422007-12-03T23:40:00.000-05:002007-12-04T00:01:16.745-05:00

So, something I've been doing for about six months and haven't been able to write about here is that I've been looking for a new job. And, again, for reasons of propriety, I can't really talk about why I wanted to leave the 'napse, but suffice it to say that I was feeling like I'd outgrown the place. So I started looking for something a bit less corporate and bit more

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-54090857165413025032007-11-18T13:04:00.000-05:002007-12-01T01:55:30.182-05:00

Emma had a birthday. We drank; then, later, Katharine and she and I watched Troll 2 together. I hadn't known what a gold mine that fucker is in terms of bizarre dialogue and delivery. You don't piss on hospitality -- true, that.There were a lot of fruit flies in the kitchen recently, and I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't blame it on Sophie any more, and, while I'm not great about doing

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-71930456279991338132007-11-02T12:32:00.001-05:002007-11-10T13:00:07.991-05:00

More show news, because I have to record what I do.Eve and I went to see The Thermals at Warsaw on Thursday, and, despite the fact that their openers were awful, it was an amazing show. There wasn't much of a crowd as Hutch & Co. were getting set up, and we were worried that people just weren't gonna turn out, but by the time they started playing, there was a great, vigorous throng. Their set

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-19094582132242714532007-10-29T12:26:00.000-05:002007-11-02T12:11:28.768-05:00

I've been watching AMC's monster movie marathon. It's pretty great. I love cable TV!What am I gonna do for Halloween, though? I feel like this past weekend was pretty much it for the grown-up Halloween festivities, except for kind of institutional things like the parade. I'm not dressing up, I think. The time for that is passed. But I did buy this perfectly hideous pirate skull dealie to

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-19115074106635829262007-10-25T12:32:00.000-05:002007-10-28T12:26:15.826-05:00

It's finally rainy and cold, which I would be hell of enjoying if not for the fact that I'm still recovering from the worst case of the grippe I've had in quite some time. But more on that in a second.My friend Squick came down to NYC from Boston on his vacation last Friday and stopped off at work to say hi. We hung out with PT at Bite and had some "drink," which was definitely welcome, given

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-40770483653951011032007-10-15T09:43:00.001-05:002007-10-18T20:12:42.095-05:00

It's actually a bit warm now, but last week was very cold. It made me strikingly sleepy (nothing like drowsing on the sofa during a cold, dry day), but it also stirred up, pretty strikingly, a bunch of memories from a few years ago. When I was at Wesleyan, I took a class on formal languages -- it was the first time I ever had to write serious proofs, and I spent a lot of time standing in front

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-30676269076134507982007-10-07T16:08:00.000-05:002007-10-10T21:56:45.644-05:00

So, yeah, I made some horchata. Ingredients-wise, the stuff is pretty simple, except that the raw vanilla beans were expensive as fuck, like $5.99 for two at Whole Foods. Yes, I know. I know that I got hosed. But I put all the shit in to a blender and pureed it for a while, and then I emptied everything into the tea sock that I'd bought. And I thought it would just, you know, work from that

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-61241256215179681612007-10-04T17:29:00.000-05:002007-10-04T17:29:38.615-05:00

It really is. This is my favorite kind of weather. Everything seems kind of clear and sharp, and the temperature is perfect for, you know, actually thinking about stuff. Plus, this is when all of my favorite things happen -- going back to school (used to get psyched about this when I was a kid); apple picking; Halloween; Thanksgiving.So I haven't posted in a while. Sorry! Laziness,

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-18589998152841045772007-09-12T21:35:00.000-05:002007-09-12T23:00:17.912-05:00

Randy's back, after going to California for 10 days. Did I make use of the "free house" in his absence? No. My mom gave me some plants for the apartment; she said they weren't going to survive the winter at my parents' place. It's like a jungle in here now!Have I mentioned that I totally love Sunset Park? This is kind of the first neighborhood that I've lived in that I haven't felt like an

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-76452422615174931092007-08-20T21:35:00.000-05:002007-09-12T21:34:44.688-05:00

So, yeah, I went to go see Direct From Hollywood Cemetery at Rock Star Bar last Monday, after trivia (this guy Dave from my office and I bombed as The Heaps), and they were amazing, as usual. And I still can't fathom what they're doing playing a Monday night show with horrible openers at a frankly kind of dumpy venue. I asked The Vegetable this question, too, having run into him on the way out,

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-34544686132688531602007-08-10T15:39:00.000-05:002007-08-13T18:07:39.360-05:00

I tire, babies. I didn't sleep that well last night.What's happened? Last weekend, Eve and I played Scrabble in Greenwood Cemetery. It was very beautiful. I almost, for the first time in my life, used all of my Scrabble letters by spelling out 'wolverine,' but was thwarted.On Tuesday, I went to go see Peelander-Z and Go!Go!7188 at The Knitting Factory. Go!Go! is from Tokyo, but I'd seen

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-27435383521757068252007-08-01T15:35:00.000-05:002007-08-03T19:34:37.657-05:00

Drink, drink, drink.Nina and I went to the They Might Be Giants show at the 'Ballroom, albeit with Nina's brother Michael and his friend Ari instead of Randy and Danica. It was great! The Johns described the show as being a collection of lesser-played material of theirs from the 90s, and, you know, true to their word, I didn't really know any of the songs -- except for one that my friend Kim

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-12093873651111802712007-07-01T15:12:00.000-05:002007-07-23T22:06:19.528-05:00

Short and to-the-point, because I haven't written in a while and many things have happened:Nina and I managed to get through Caligula -- yes, that Caligula -- which is long and disturbing but not particularly sexy (although I was inexplicably aroused by the scene where Malcolm MacDowell fondles the tits of this old lady) or good. I am making her watch (the extended versions of) The Lord of the

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-78408083439693283762007-06-25T10:23:00.000-05:002007-06-28T16:37:50.565-05:00

After work on Thursday I went down to White St. for one of the Make Music NY festival shows. I don't know who else was on the roster, but my friend Squick had told me a while back that his friend Nullsleep was someone to check out, so. This particular show was sponsored by a place called The Tank, and they'd gotten a permit to clear out the whole block. On the way there I saw an enormous

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-77797103092070354572007-06-11T10:58:00.001-05:002007-06-15T15:27:57.886-05:00

The Direct From Hollywood Cemetery show at The Pyramid last Thursday was fantastic! I still don't get why nobody but me is into them. Sure, they're a little stagey, which, if you weren't inclined to like them for other reasons, might only deepen your contempt -- but their songs are incredibly catchy and their playing is incredibly tight, considering they only play about one show a year. I was

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-59111564322984453292007-06-05T11:55:00.000-05:002007-06-06T22:29:11.021-05:00

Tom and Emma and I went to trivia night at the Greenwich Treehouse on Monday night, and I'm pleased to say our fortunes improved over the last time she and I'd gone. The Comancheros (nee Brooklyn Excelsiors) finished squarely in the middle -- as opposed to dead last. I give myself props for knowing that Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for Gone With The Wind even though I've never seen it, and for

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-28062897869189340542007-06-04T08:01:00.000-05:002007-06-04T13:23:49.342-05:00

I've basically finished painting my new apartment. That I painted at all may come as a surprise to those of you who have locked horns with me over my admittedly perverse inclination towards plain white walls, but I figured that, you know, this is the first apartment I've moved into entirely on my own and I'm going to make some bold choices. So the Saturday before last I went down to Home Depot

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-14809676286654163712007-05-21T14:13:00.001-05:002007-05-26T20:12:37.521-05:00

Well, I moved into my new apartment. Eve and Nina came over the two nights before the move and helped me pack everything up. Naturally, it was an odd experience to box up the past three-odd years of my life, but refreshing, too -- I got to jettison about five garbage bags worth of detritus that I and others had accumulated in that creaky old puke-stained place. The move itself was pretty much

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-26859694563381148452007-05-10T08:16:00.000-05:002007-05-12T17:05:04.118-05:00

As prophesied, Ted and Katharine and Eve and I hit up the Arcade Fire show at Radio City on Wednesday. It was great, although we were in the very last row of the mezzanine -- for the best, perhaps, considering what happened down below. I'd bought the tickets in part because I kind of liked the band, but, honestly, more because the High Line Festival was being promoted and discussed as being a

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-86804581409249363882007-05-06T15:16:00.000-05:002007-05-06T16:07:55.781-05:00

So, I found an apartment, I think. I mean, I signed a lease, so I hope so. As I should have expected, maybe, it is outside of my original price range, and probably a little too small, but I'm fairly psyched about the location: It's on 41st St. out in Sunset Park, very close to a wonderful transportation hub (36th St.) and my wonderful girlfriend (Nina). It was not easy to get, though. (All of

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-55738594454800897852007-04-12T08:51:00.000-05:002007-04-12T09:58:32.819-05:00

Pant, pant. Mo'Nique tired, babies.John, my landlord, called last Monday to tell me what I already knew, which is that my lease is coming up. He gave me the option to renew it, but I'd be hankering for a change of scenery for a while now, so I told him I'd be moving on. Au revoir, old 8th & 12th! I want to live somewhere a little less baby-centric, a little cheaper, and Jesus fuck on a better

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-72460622528768239382007-03-25T01:37:00.000-05:002007-03-30T19:20:16.827-05:00

I'm typing this up on Sunday morning on the F train back to 7th Ave. after de-busing off the Lucky Star bus from Boston. True to my word, I took the bus up to Brookline last night and stayed at Joel's. His new house is fucking huge, and, using some polite mathematical estimates, he got it for a steal -- I guess because it's a bit run down in some fairly significant ways. Whatever, man. It's got

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-67544001790364377822007-03-22T22:00:00.000-05:002007-03-25T16:20:48.657-05:00

The weather is finally acceptable. I feel practically optimistic! But not quite.I'm headed up to Cambridge tomorrow for the annual FSF meeting. Usually I wake up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning and high-tail it over to East Broadway to hop on Fung-Wah, but this time around, I thought I'd be smart and get there on time. I'm gonna head up after work tomorrow and spend the night at Joel's

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5524637.post-17605374352086959342007-03-19T09:54:00.000-05:002007-03-27T21:48:43.991-05:00

Pogues at Roseland; St. Patrick's Day! I'd been in kind of a bad mood all day, but not really for any good reason. I guess I was a little disappointed because some people I'd had extra tickets for had canceled on me, including my dad and Joel and Liz, the three of whom'd been sort of central to my idea of how the night was supposed to go. I suppose it was to be expected -- after all, I had

Julianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06332943996236597989noreply@blogger.com0