Direct From Hollywood Cemetery

Yeah, so I'm going to start writing in this thing again, I think. I just had to take a breather for a while. You don't want anyone to watch you try to swallow a pill that is far too large to swallow.

On Thursday Nina and Eve and I went to the Ted Leo show at The Hook, which is a rock club in Red Hook. The show was great, but the audience was probably one of the worst I've ever seen -- no one was dancing around, and it was all sort of mild-looking chubby dudes with huge beards wearing flannel shirts, and then these tiny little girls wearing fancy-looking clothes and hats. Look, it's been a while since I considered myself "up" on rock music, but The Pharmacists are basically a punk band, right? And if you're standing like 2 feet from the stage at a show, it's okay to dance around a little bit, right? I started shoving Eve and Nina around, but these girls standing next to me said, "Stop it." Christ.

Ted Leo says "thanks" when the audience applauds after every song. This would be pretty lame, except that he says it in a kind of snotty way that reminds me of Leonard Graves Phillips.

The two opening bands were Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, which I liked, even if no one else did, and Les Aus, which I hated, even if no one else did. Call me a contrarian; I can take it.

I just got back from my first driving lesson in about a year -- I'd tried to schedule something before today, but Lester's a real popular teacher and then I had to postpone a lesson I'd scheduled for the blizzard. Lester's as good a teacher as I remember, and within half an hour I felt pretty confident behind the wheel again. And, as usual, there was some excitement: We were practicing parallel parking near the Red Hook Project in Red Hook when we heard people shouting over at this bus shelter. When we got closer, we saw two girls kicking another girl who they'd knocked down. After a few seconds they ran off into the projects. Lester grabbed the wheel with one hand, heading us into the project parking lot ("Give gas," he said), and started dialing 911 on his cell with the other. We turned around a bend into this sort of cul-de-sac where we found a police cruiser just kind of sitting there. Lester jumped out and ran over to them, pointing at the fleeing girls, who were running in the opposite direction. The cruiser took off, but they didn't seem like they were in a particular hurry, and the girls got away, much to Lester's chagrin. He had me circle around the block several times, muttering all the while about the brazenness of a daylight mugging at a bus stop. And then he had me parallel park practically every car on the next two blocks.

Right now FOX 5 is showing this frustrating, moody Hal Hartley movie called No Such Thing. Do they know who watches TV on a Saturday afternoon? Okay, I guess they're right; it's me.

I'm feeding the cat of one of the IT guys at work, and as payment he is allowing me to host a karaoke party at his house using his Time Warner On-Demand Karaoke Channel. So far the response to my invitations has been... lukewarm. But we'll see what happens.