Friday, November 30, 2007

Dialogue, in Two Parts (Unrelated.)

W: I only want to see movies with starships, explosions, and superpowers.

L: Right.

W: And cute boys.

L: Right.

W: And cute boys with superpowers flying startships and making explosions.

--AND--

E: Maybe if I had the vaginal canal of a dwarf it would be okay.

L: What kind of vaginal canal do you have?

E: The kind of a grown ass woman.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Teaster Trailer #2

Pitiful, this breaking and entering. Pricking your Psyche, always the prettier sister.

She waits. No more dividing grains with the help of black insects—old news! Instead, she counts the hairs on her head, parting, cataloging, braiding. Pressing them into thick ropes of gold. They are heavy and precious, like a newborn is heavy and precious. Like your memory is heavy and precious. And braided. Psyche braids and braids, until her head weighs as much as stones and snaps her neck.

Not to mention rude.

You know that I will only allow you access to what I care to share. Some hardcore partitions went up years ago, in another millennium, built by mistakes and good intentions—but what is the difference?—with stone and string and bits of loving care so tiny and focused that no one can undo it. Not even me. Only the wind.

Monday, November 26, 2007

We Apologize for the Inconvenient

This sign is posted on the door of The Container Store on 6th Avenue. I thought it was a nice idea, to apologize for everyone's cosmically impossible tasks. Getting out of jury duty, combating cat hair, addressing SPAM.

So, thank you Container Store.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Gooble Gobble, 2007

It went something like this:

--Crostini of melted tallegio with figs and baby arugula
--Ground turkey with chestnuts, cranberries, croutons and mache.
--Tagliatelle with pesto and zucchini
--Chingale: Wild boar stew over polenta with swiss chard.

Then, the onslaught: Hazelnut, vanilla and fig gelatto, warm chocolate cake, olive oil cake with orange, various biscotti. There was also wine, and wine, and wine.

We forgot to take pictures.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Ms. Difranco at Town Hall, Night One

Ani Difranco played Town Hall last night, to a rather subdued, though excited audience. She still turned it out, the consummate professional. It's a reminder to all performers, whatever medium, that a quiet audience doesn't mean they're not out there--it just means that they're listening.

She played a series of old songs, "Dilate," "Not a Pretty Girl," "You Had Time," "If He Tries Anything," and pretty much avoided anything from the records of three or so years ago. She's happy now, at least that's what she's calling it. It shows: song choices, clothing choices, hair choices--all of it more womanly, more open, more relaxed than I have ever seen her. I've seen her on stage more than twenty-five times--okay, I'm a bit much here--and this year both last night, and in Brooklyn back in July, she keeps having more and more fun on stage.

She played "Good Luck," the song that has become the Loch Ness monster of Ani songs--which is to say that she played it once a year or two ago, and then it disappeared, no bootleg of it surfaced, and many fans began to think that perhaps it didn't really exist. It does exist, and it's, well, okay. The band seemed to really be grooving on it--which may be because they haven't played it a hundred times already. But I remember when I first hear songs from Revelling/Reckoning--I was in Amherst, and she played, one after the other, "Ain't That the Way," "Marrow," and "Rock, Paper, Scissors." I thought they were okay. But they grew on me, and now I love them. So who knows?

The highlight of the show was a spoken word piece Reprieve. There are times when you hear a song on the record and you think, oh that's good, and then you don't particularly pay much attention to it again. But then you hear the song performed live and something about the immediacy of the performance allows you to hear it better--poetry works especially well for this. I loved this poem last night.

The crowd was older, as her crowds are getting--of course she is getting older, too. Fans that found her in the early part of her career, the early nineties, are now fifteen years older. She's had a difficult relationship with her fans in the past--difficult is perhaps the wrong word; complicated is a better choice--and she's talked about that often in interviews, and, most notably, right there on stage in front of thousands of them. "I love you guys," she said last night. "I love you guys now, too." Everyone laughed. "Not just when you're all I got."

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Vacation Photos!

All the pics from Utah are now up at Flickr.
You can CLICK HERE to see the whole set.


Monday, November 12, 2007

Home Again

Back from Utah. Amazing. Many more pics to come, but until then: