One Halloween, Celeste and I dressed up as Edina and Patsy from Absolutely
Fabulous. I am absurdly proud of this, probably because we got
so in character that we frightened people. Major Kudos to Dean,
who was absolutely fabulous and styled my wig.
Yo La Tengo is the best live band I've ever seen. They're hard to describe -- they can be folky and singing sweet harmonies in one song, and then get into some feedback-laden, wailing, shrieking twenty-minute rave-up next. They look like people you'd know in real life, but they play better than almost any "rock stars" I've ever seen. Ira Kaplan is my guitar hero. Robin and I always stand right up front to watch them play -- sometimes I wonder if they've noticed and if they think of us as the Stalker Girls or something. Follow the link to the Yo La Tengo Homepage and learn more about them.
Dave Schramm always puts on an excellent show, whether it's with his band, The Schramms, or solo acoustic. He's my other guitar hero. And he runs his own homepage, The Schramms Check them out!
I've only had the chance to see Sleater-Kinney once, but it was an amazing show. As it happened, they were opening for Yo La Tengo, and it was at Tramps', my favorite venue because it's fifteen minutes walk from where I live. Basically, I couldn't have been happier. I went surfing for some sites on them, and I found two that looked nice and comprehensive, though neither has been updated recently, not even after the new album came out. Still, check out Sleater-Kinney Media Empire and Sleater-Kinney Obsessive Fan Page . How can you not love names like that?
I have an old copy of one of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe detective novels that has the definitive blurb. Ross MacDonald said, "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." I've only been in L.A. once, and my favorite part was the Art Deco district (there was a nice, pretty, renovated part, and then there was a run-down part where my then-boyfriend was doing a public interest job for the summer). I felt like I was going to meet Marlowe at any minute. I once wrote a pastiche, which you can find here . I couldn't find any major Chandler sites, but there's a nicely designed brief Chandler site
I never used to read comic books until a friend sat me down with The Sandman. Okay, I was visiting San Francisco, and I was jet-lagged. But I devoured them. Now Neil Gaiman is one of the lodestars of my artistic universe. Or at least, someone whose work I find compelling. Check out The Dreaming: The Neil Gaiman Page. Currently, I read the DC Vertigo follow-up series The Dreaming, which has gotten pretty intense since Caitlin Kiernan took it over, and the bizarre, blasphemous and yet oddly sweet Preacher. Other periodicals I read? The New Yorker, Vogue, and the Village Voice. Nobody has ever accused me of not being multifaceted. (They may have accused me of lots of other stuff, but not that. ;-) )
Check out Sluggy Freelance, an online comic strip which is the only site (other than the weather) that I check every day.
In high school I was one of those drama club geeks who could recite most of Monty Python by rote. But I got better . . . . no, really I did. See? I'm going to go for a walk. I feel happy . . . If you're feeling a relapse, you might want to visit a really good Monty Python website.
Just wandering around the web, I found this great site for the very
cool Chow Yun-Fat. Go visit Chow
Yun-Fat: God of Actors, and you will suddenly be seized by the need
to watch "Hong Kong's Cary Grant" (hey, the Village Voice said it)
in lots of well-acted but not well-subtitled movies. Or trace his
Hollywood career and watch his English get better by leaps and bounds with
each film.
