Sandra Bridewell, the world’s most successful sociopath.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/artistlists/c/cross_david-05/

Ostensibly about a young girl who loses her shoes in a cockfight she mistakenly attends during Thanksgiving 1959, it’s really about the universal themes of loss, angst, candy and damp clothing. Taking its cue from the early commercial work of Deloite and Hughey and filtering it through the “I cut myself shaving” piousness of Throm Tillson, Pillow Logic re-works early sock hop chop flop and allows people like me to enjoy enjoying it.

Russian lake disappears, baffling villagers
19 May 2005 16:56:21 GMT
Source: Reuters
MOSCOW, May 19 (Reuters) – A Russian village was left baffled on Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

“It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground,” said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

“I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us,” said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.

Scholar, translator, critic, friend. She’ll be sorely missed. How many experts in French surrealism and artists’ books did we even have? We couldn’t afford to lose one. Not going to dine with her and Judd at Pescadou now.

http://www.hnet.uci.edu/frenchanditalian/faculty/rhubert/index.html

There’s a prize in her name for best Women’s Studies graduate paper of the year at UCI.

This Star Wars season, make your pet your slave girl.

“courtesy” do_not_lick

Don’t drive your race car on a race track, even though we use the word “track” a lot in the ads.

I’m almost glad I don’t have the sixty grand to buy one. Almost!

Boredoms tonight at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, courtesy genericus who had the foresight to get tickets.
IT WAS AWESOME.

Three drummers in perfect discipline who never stopped. Crazy guy yammering and making synths go woop. Loud as hell. The drumming was precise and powerful and it hit me in my face, pushing said face backwards. Insane dreadlocked Japanese guy capered about like a demon from a Lafcadio Hearn story, making shrieks and feedbacky noises and hurting the synthesizers. Occasionally he duetted with the woman drummer. He also played an instrument that appeared to be a set of lighted balls connected to a thing and another thing, that he juggled around, also dancing on some kind of DDR platform, making sounds and lights consistent with fatal electrocution, fire, and amplifier destruction.

The audience was about 20% Comic Book Guy, 20% Music Freak, and 60% hipster. There were a lot of guys there that I collectively call The Boyfriends, because every time I’ve met one of them it’s because it someone’s boyfriend. Tall skinny clean-cut white guys with glasses, collared shirts, shortish hair. I hate them all because they are boyfriends and I’m not. You could totally tell who was there for the music because they were funny looking and way too focused, and who was there because they felt they had to be there.

I only had to shove a couple of them to keep them from rolling over and crushing the_silent_one. By the way, it was she that pointed out that the Knitting Factory made the mistake of Having Nice Things in a rock ‘n’ roll bar, and then fixed this mistake by taking out the Nice Things. All of the very sophisticated lounge atmosphere of the place is scraped and gone, and it’s all caution tape and security guys and concrete and fuck you and a vague smell of urine. Still sounded pretty good and there was sufficient oxygen.

We had to go by the Star Wars Wrong Line morons on Hollywood Blvd. both ways. The second time there was some Dorkus McGorkus in a Darth Suit waving a lightsaber around on top of some structure, causing traffic confusion and also causing the locals to point and laugh.

DID I MENTION THAT THE SHOW WAS AWESOME? It was almost as loud as Glenn Branca at Schoenberg Hall in 1983. I really wish I had remembered my earplugs.

I didn’t understand the opening act very well, but I liked him. He was doing something between Moroccan trance music and Eno’s ambient, with lots of drumming. He shouldn’t use the guitar, because it just sounded like he was trying one at the shop, but I liked his drumming and ululation.

This is the second show in a row that the floor has been flexing for most of the time.

HIPSTERS STOP WITH THE PBR OR DIE

I had one of the worst dreams I ever get, last night. It was the one in which I prepare a party for someone and make this person gifts and the person does not show up, and later is derisive about my efforts. For some reason this hits me harder than any other emotion: the unwanted gift.

That appears to be the core of my self-dislike: I think that my attempts to please others are doomed, and that I’m going to be treated badly for trying.

In happier news, goat cheese pizza + Red Stripe is a nice meal.

A high school girl on the patio tonight said very loudly “IT GOT ALL OVER HER FUR PONCHO AND BURNED HER BOOBS.”

Here is a list of things that people around me love that I cannot get into, with rare and notable exceptions. Please note that this list does not represent a criticism or condemnation of any of its items. I suspect a deficiency on my part for most of these.

• Comic books
• Sad soft quiet indiepop
• Side scrolling video games
• 1970s nostalgia
• anime
• science fiction^*
• Dave Eggers
• zines
• crafts of any kind
• holidays in the sun
• stoner rock
• alternative medicine

^*I voraciously consumed sf and fantasy up until age 18 and then couldn’t read it at all. I still have a lot of affection for the genre but there aren’t more than two or three authors I can read. No idea why.

http://www.chocolatebarnyc.com/cbgb.php

Pure 1970s nostalgia is not about chocolate, really. When I think Debbie Harry, the Ramones, Television… truffles? No. But a collector’s box of cocaine, heroin, Dilaudid, diet pills, cheap cognac, assorted mixed speedballs, and qaaludes might be harder to advertise. You could add a bump-up to your order for five bucks a pop! One would think they’re making enough money selling CBGB hats and shirts to 11-year-olds.

Chocolate Bar celebrates CBGBs: Home of Underground Rock with limited-edition products dedicated to saving Manhattan’s cultural institution. For more than 30 years, the eternal downtown nightclub has with ragged pride, served as the incubator for much of the punk and art-rock which came out of New York over the last thirty years including The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Blondie and The Talking Heads. Founded in 1973 by Hilly Kristal, the now grandfatherly 73-year-old converted a Hell’s Angels hangout into one of the most famous venues for live music and in doing so established a New York City landmark.

Debuting this May, 2005, Chocolate Bar, in collaboration with Hilly Kristal unveils two edible lines of CBGB products including the CBGBs Punk Rock Box ($25.00); a 16 piece truffle collection embossed with the pioneering history and iconic imagery of CBGBs illustrious music scene. Served in a chocolate brown box, hot-stamped with the venues famed logo, it comes complete with a postage-paid petition to save CBGBs, a record-shaped biography, steel logo keychain and a collection of CBGB stickers. CBGB Retro Bars ($3.00 each); Inspired by those colossal flavors from late-night, post-show snack attacks, discover pure 1970 nostalgia with two new retro flavors. Each is wrapped in a limited-edition CBGBs keepsake, weighs an impressive 2.25 ounces and comes complete with a postage-paid petition to save the venerable venue.