Peanut Butter Jelly Time

We finished the Conservatory at Second City on Monday.

I still don't know what the "what" is.

Oh, well.

I heart these kids.

Me Post Arty Photos Now

And write pseudo po-mo "observations" about the city.

Yay.












Oh, what the hell--let's tear the roof of this sucka. I am not sure what kind of hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil...smoke-no-evil?...this one illustrates:

Ticking Away the Moments That Make Up a Dull Day

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

--Roger Waters

Having spent the last 53 hours without walking no farther than across a Saturday-after-Thanksgiving-crowded bookstore, and back to the kitchen in my parents' house (or to check on the cake I baked), and also to the car after a movie last night, I am a lump. A slumping lump. A vapid, yawny pile of impulses. Eat now? Eat later? Too early for beer? Naaaah: beer now. Beer at 3:15 pm: good. Read On the Banks of Plum Creek for the 67th time? Watch Best in Show, or 1-AA football, or one-star 1999 Hank Azaria flick? (Don't they ever show Remington Steele, ER or, God, TJ Hooker, on cable anymore??)

I thought I was unmotivated back in Chicago, sheesh, I've devolved into a veritable over-nourished, under-stimulated, candy-popping (Dad loves Halloween candy year-round), disaffected suburban teenager since I turned the thermostat down to 63 (please don't freeze while I'm away, orchid-I-have-managed-not-to-kill-for-the-last-month!) in my apartment and left it Thursday morning. I should have an X-Box or Playstation and a bag of Flamin Hot Cheetos (with lime) to play just to make my recreant, newly adolescent self just picture-perfect.

About five minutes ago, I had an actual thought that wasn't about when we are eating again, if I should check Ebay to see if any new Mark Jacobs coats have been listed, or if I could wheedle my mother to take me to Fayette Mall tomorrow, instead of visiting my grandfather in the nursing home and because they hate it when I drive their cars--Christ, I am 16 again! The thought was: ... Oh, wait. Dammit. Damn it. I lost it.

...nooo, okay, yeah, it was: In Chicago, I walk an awful lot.

I mean maybe in the neighborhood of miles per day--depending if I am late for the express bus in the morning. Weekly miles and miles of treading, tromping, trawling necessitated by, well, existence. To work, to do, to live.

Thus and so, even after a couple low bipedal activity days, I feel absolutely stunted.

Because even if you feel like you're not moving, in the city, you are moving. Always going somewhere, about to do something, even if it's dropping off a four months' pile of delicates at the dry cleaners or taking out the garbage.

I miss how difficult life is in the city, because, however minuscule the destination, however much you feel like you're just waiting, waiting, waiting, however smothering the steely grey urban winter or grimy-hot street summer is--each step has purpose.

Liz Unphair

Liz Bashing Redux:

Maybe it's because I am still stunned she sold out (ha! punny! Sold! Out!) three nights at the Black Orchid (still locationally inexplicable), or that I'm stunned she's back again (Vic Theatre next Tuesday, thereby vitiating any sacred musical vibe left there by Tweedy and Co. during Wilco Week May 3-6), but I have to put forth another beautiful parenthetical slam on the former Blow-Job Queen, this time from Time Out Chicago's music calendar:

She's hired Sheryl Crow and Jason Mraz's producers for [her newest album], who have added more than a touch of Turning Leaf merlot flava to her Astroglide persona.

Am I going to fully (and in slobbery homage to the listings editor who's permanently sequestered behind a venti dark roast and a Mac who wrote this) bash Liz in these parts later?

Oh, hell yeah I am.

PS: Oh Christ. This just in. Now I'm glad I missed the Series game Saturday night.

"I'm Bare-Boned and Crazy... For You"

Dave Matthews' "Crash."

Unfathomably, gently gorgeous song.

...fall...

...whispered latticework promises from someone who hopefully won't be so peculiarly new for long...

...being 27 and open to love's possibility, to chance, tipsy kisses, cold gusts up skirts, snowflakes on cheeks, being pushed on a long, link-chain, rubber seat swing next to Belmont Harbor...

My first months here, I tramped around a city that had a golden belt of possibility cinching it, listening to this song.

I do, I realize that at the same time, this lovesick anthem has whirred and clicked in the cd changer of every Kate Spade-ed female Loop-bound Account Manager who ever lived on Broadway and Surf and got groped in Tai's Til Four and thought it might be love.

But, yeah, it might have been for me too.

Magic Nose Goblins and Other Things I Loved About 1993

Bloodsugarsexmagick
Drinking
"On the Pulse of Morning"
Snow
Import Night
Debaser
The Uptowner
Clinton
Divine Hammer
Groundhog Day
Radiohead before they became Radiohead
Beavis and Butthead
Pleasure
Siamese Dream
Riverwest Stein
Finger Lickin' Good Y'all
UW at the Rose Bowl
Pasties and G-String, Beer and a Shot
Sidney Hih
The Beautiful and the Damned
Scary hot dogs in the side bar at the Landmark
Walt Mink
Oriental Drugstore
My little brown wool thrift-store vest over a white mens v-neck t-shirt
Drinking
The Marriage of Bette and Boo
Hum
Brian Mitchell saying "My car was stolen and found over on 30th and Gibippy"
Exile in Guyville
More snow

We Got Less Than Nothing

Okay, I have opened the floodgates.

Ouch! That was the wrong metaphor. But you know what I mean...

There is just too much being said--and not widely disseminated--out there to avoid sharing, musing. And to stop thinking.

In a speech Tuesday in Congress, our own freshman Senator from Illinois, Barak Obama, got to the heart of it:

And so I hope that out of this crisis we all begin to reflect - Democrat and Republican - on not only our individual responsibilities to ourselves and our families, but to our mutual responsibilities to our fellow Americans. I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the Hurricane. They were abandoned long ago - to murder and mayhem in their streets; to substandard schools; to dilapidated housing; to inadequate health care; to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

This isn't political pontification. This isn't Reflex Liberalism, or its less diplomatic sibling, Knee-Jerk Reactionaryism (eg. "Bush doesn't care about black people"). This isn't even the unfathomably collossal fuck-up of FEMA and whoever actually has been running that organization besides two preppy former college roommates who are more accustomed to handling horseflesh and golfclubs than crises.

You and I saw it last week: it's real.

But that was Obama's conclusion. To start, he recalled his visit to the Astrodome in Houston:

...a conversation I had with one woman captured the realities that are settling into these families as they face the future.

She told me "We had nothing before the hurricane. Now we got less than nothing."

I urge you, read Obama's entire speech here.

It's Perfection and Grace: What's Not to Love about Steely Dan?

There's a couple of people walking a wiggly beagle outside the window right now--but that's beside the point. It's precisely the kind of scene you won't find in a Steely Dan song.

The top's down, palm trees nod overhead, we whoosh toward TJ. Glass-top tables and ice buckets puddling on a half-moon patio overlooking the sinful city.

Living hard will take its toll
Illegal fun
Under the sun, boys

My love for Steely Dan is both indefatigable and inevitably met with confusion and dismay.

I am alone in a Steely Dan-hater world. They are the ultimate players to hate.

Yeah, I mean you, all you player-haters.

I had thought SD was a sound my dad should check out--yeah, my dad.

"Those guys?" he said, sort of high-pitched. "Ah, hell, that one was just too scary to look at, I can't listen to him."

But no, Dad, Steely Dan's not to look at, it's to feel.

It isn't jazz, it isn't quite rock--it sure as hell isn't easy-listening. It's complex, it's syncopated, it's funky, it's just...escape.

I love a man who sings in an Aqua-Velva voice with Humbert-esque glee of girls who just started shaving, wearing high, tight shorts. Of the hallucinatory joys of tequila and the glitter of California mansions clinging seductively to desert mountainsides. Of sucking down scotch-and-waters in a palm hut bar in Antigua til blind, twisting a bitter peg in the hole of your broken heart.

Who are these outlaws? And where can I find them?

I'm a bookeeper's son
I don't want to hurt no one
Don't take me alive

Now, don't get me wrong, they truly are a couple of scary-looking mofos. Actually, nowadays they simply look like quasi-wealthy, fully-nerdy men in their late fifties. Like computer programmers, software guys, who started out in, say, '81 or '83, and, as we all know now, were wheelbarrowing cash up the street by '99. Or at least that's what they looked like the day I saw them on Rush Street a few summers ago. Well, I didn't see them, but my companions, my boyfriend at the time and our friend, did, because they stopped dead in front of Carmines after these mid-life crisis nobodies passed us, looked at each other, and screamed in unison like a couple of cheerleaders: "Steely Dan!"

Now, if these Glamour Profession wannabes can recognize Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (who never seemed to be clearly depicted on album covers or sleeves) on the street, it was worth checking out. Which I eventually, then obsessively did. I obtained Pretzel Logic through Gaucho by the end of 2001. At my workaday desk, I could envelop myself in tales of hard living, fast driving, faithless women, supple girls, and activities suspiciously resembling smuggling.

Endless nights and and bottomless drinks that would become watery memories during the car ride the next day. Afternoons stretching out on beaches where no one has a tan line and calls are made on phones ferried over on silver trays. Gauloises and Veuve Cliquot. Later, once the jet lands stateside, Bushmills and Marlboros.

I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whisky all night long
And die behind the wheel

One of the recent times I went home to see my parents, when my dad suddenly inserted an SD reference into the conversation in the car from the airport, slying saying, eyes on I-64, "Drink your big black cow and get out of here," I was vilified.

Last One in the Pool's a Polyester Bride

And then he said, "Do you wanna be a polyester bride?
Or do you want to hang your head and die?
Do you want to find alligator cowboy boots they just put on sale?
Do you want to flap your wings and fly away from here?"

"Princess, do you really want to flap your wings and fly?
Because you've got time."
He keeps telling me, "You've got time."
But I don't believe him
"You've got time."

I keep on pushing harder
I keep on pushing farther away
But he keeps telling me, "Baby,"
He says, "Baby, yeah."

Yup, it's Liz Phair. Posted here perhaps in honor of her reappearance as a live performer at the Black Orchid at Pipers Alley (whatever...). Not that I am going. Not that I want to go, because, as Jim DeRogotis eloquently cranked in the Sun-Times about her current output of "adult contemporary radio pap a la Sheryl Crow" (whose lyrics I would never post publicly even though I've been known to touch a couple at Karaoke):

My God, what happened to this woman's self-esteem, let alone her brains? What possibly could have inspired one of the sharpest songwriters of her generation to turn to writing such utterly banal crap?

I know who's a Polyester, Sarah McLaughlin-ized Bride.

Move Over

"I like to use the expression 'to get out of your own way'...if I get out of my way, I won't make any mistakes, I won't have any regrets, I can do something I believed I could do but didn't know I would do. I find that works for me in film, and it works for me in life."

--Bill Murray, 2004