from the TONYblog…

Holly Golightly

The weather outside is beginning to be frightful but my hat with a pom-pom on the top is delightful. Actually, it’s not really. I’m sad to report there’s some give in the pom and so it was really rocking back and forth as I walked down the street yesterday, like I had a tiny cheerleader on my head. It made me think of the way Brian described the physics of his teenage hair. But you know where you won’t need a hat? At a rock show. Those are notoriously sweaty. Speaking of, I once tried to use the word sweaty in every single blurb I wrote for a different publication. It’s just a good rock word, you know? But I don’t know that Holly Golightly, whom you’ll be seeing tonight, is sweaty per se. But if she wore my pom-pom hat she would be.

What will you be doing tonight, my pets? If you said going home to your dog-eared copy of TV Guide and going over your emergency television-watching schedule that you uploaded onto various media including your Palm Pilot, Treo, Sidekick, cell phone, digital watch, home-arrest ankle bracelet, automatic coffeemaker with LCD display and stupid iHome alarm clock that you hate, you would be wrong, wrong, wrong. You don’t even have a Palm Pilot. Instead you’ll be going to Joe’s Pub to hear Lucinda Black Bear, which is neitherwoman nor bear but the new quintet headed by Christian Gibbs, also known as C. Gibbs, whose albums I frequently listen to when the mood calls for something beautifully dark, dirgey and country-inflected, such as when I’m bundling up hay or lamenting the death of virtue. Also when I’m whelping, milking, shoeing or using a wheelbarrow to convey slop from one trough to another. I’m sure you understand. I actually have a story about a wheelbarrow and goat crap but I’m going to save that for another day. It may have been sheep waste, come to think of it. But back to Lucinda Black Bear: The record release is tonight at Joe’s Pub at 7pm and you’ll be sad if you miss it.

I feel dizzy.

You could do worse than seeing A Camp and Craig Wedren tonight, especially if you’re familiar with the way former Shudder to Think frontman Wedren has gone on to do the scores of a number of TV and movie things often involving The State and Stella guys. Speaking of doing worse, Rush is playing tonight, and while I’m in no way beating up on the Canucks, I personally can’t go because of what happened last time I saw them. Trip down memory lane with me? I call shotgun.

So there I am in high school at the Rush and Primus concert with a fellow goober and I’m having a decent time, but for some reason I’m extra-exhausted and have to sit down about halfway through, which is a shame because my style of concert dancing in my chair is not to be missed. That night I go home and sleep but…

—wait, I interrupt this not very compelling story to say that I just got a huge blast of Noxzema. Does someone use Noxzema in this office? Wow, very piney. Now everyone around me is noticing it. Kate thinks it’s sage. Michael wants it to be some kind of pricey Aveda product. Apparently I’ve rained on their parade by likening it to Noxzema. Howard also thinks it’s piney “and refreshing.” It’s not Dustin’s oatmeal. I think I’ve offended him.—

Anyway, so after the Rush concert I go home and go to sleep and at some point that night I come down with some crazy flu and have a series of sickly fever dreams in which I think I’m still at the concert and people are all crowding around me trying to get by, and no matter where I stand I have to keep moving to make room for them, and I wake up in a sweat, tossing and turning with “The Big Money” in my head. Like the effect of smelling tequila on anyone who’s ever gotten sick from it, the sound of “The Big Money” now makes me ill. Also, Noxzema.

Not to brag or anything, but I just got off the phone with my new buddyroo, Josh Schwartz, and we were talking about music, and I decided to pay him the compliment of talking at length about myself and all my various feelings about things pertaining to me, and afterward I was reflecting while checking myself out in a mirror and thinking that, as I was explaining to ol’ J.S., music used to be such a big part of my life—I mean, I used to play in a band for crissakes—and it just isn’t anymore. (Although I do really like the new Rilo Kiley album but I forgot to tell him that.) And part of loving music was loving going to shows. I can’t even remember the last show I went to. It was probably the first Woodstock! (I can’t remember it which means I was there.) Anyway, this is a long way of saying that you and I should go see Liz Pappademas this weekend because her music is dark and pretty (but not twee or tinkly, lest you get the wrong idea), and I bet her show wouldn’t be annoying, if by annoying you mean packed with things that make you think, Yep, this is why I stopped going to shows. She’s playing for free at 8pm tomorrow night at Pianos Upstairs Lounge. I’ll be the one with fantastic hair talking to and about myself.

You like to laugh. I know because I’d recognize that braying titter anywhere. I mean, I like it, don’t get me wrong. It’s just very recognizable. Especially when I have a headache. But don’t go changing because it’s what makes you you. Even if sometimes it’s what makes you annoying. You know? But like, in a good way. Anyway, take your lusty guffaw to a Comedy Central Presents taping, won’t you? You have to register on their site and then hope and pray for an opening. If it doesn’t happen you can bring your wet-sounding chortle to the Ritalin Reading Series at 7:30pm.

I’ve been posting quite a bit on the TONYblog. Maybe you want to read my posts over there? I think you do! Here’s today’s 1 Thing. It mentions movies and my inspirational prowess and then here’s a 1 Thing from Wednesday which mentions Brooklyn and Michael Showalter. And then here’s a delightful little post where I busted my coworker for his breakfast trysts. But wait there’s also this one! And surely you love this conversation about mumblecore. And some stuff about Fringe. And a very important You Gonna Eat That with Drew Toal.

Also, unrelated except not to me because everything relates to this: I saw a mouse in my apartment last night. If you were anywhere near me a year ago you know how I named the mice last time around with the hopes that I could convince myself that Chad, Rob and Grover were cute uninvited cohabitants instead of horrible frightening vermin. It didn’t work. Then a professional exterminator “rodent proofed” our apartment which solved the problem and was the best couple hundred and seventy five I could have spent. Well now a year later those whiskered assholes have chewed their way back in apparently. Or one has. He was hanging out near the foot of my bed seemingly surveying a box of beads which was down there too since the mini-move has put the wrong things in the wrong places. I just hope there’s only one of him. Regardless the exterminator is coming out tomorrow morning. I’ll be sitting up all night holding a jar of peanut butter, a wedge of cheese and a giant box. Probably a couple magazines, some triscuits, a paddle-ball, a Chinese finger catcher, a Chinese jump rope, some fortune cookies, a Magic 8-ball, an actual eight-ball, two cans of hairspray and a squeegee too.

When I interviewed Fiona Apple in late 2005, I thought that if I were somehow a different kind of interviewer, or maybe a different kind of girl, I would have known how to share lipgloss and become best friends with her. It felt, in the setting we were in—a rehearsal studio in Burbank, techs and musicians and guys all around; we were the only women there and we’re roughly the same age—that that’s what should have happened. I don’t know that I can explain it exactly, but if we’d been on a double date we should have gone to the bathroom together,and so I felt confused by my own inability to melt whatever vague frost sat between us. But the thing is that I knew deep down that what was bothering me wasn’t about the interview, because I’d gotten a good one, but about some voracious need to both earn the trust of and be accepted by the people I was interviewing, which is what fuels a lot of interviewers but is fairly suspect when you really isolate and consider it. And the relief and glee I felt when her dad called me to thank me for the piece? It surely made my day a little too much.

Think about that should it please you while watching Fiona Apple play Rusmey Playfield with Nickel Creek tonight at 7pm.

Culture jam

Greetings, my little string beans. I had a particularly disgusting weekend as I was the victim of a pernicious new wave of street crime. Little shits on bikes spit loogies at me! I suffered a ride-by phlegming! Allow me to recount for you: So there I was, walking unawares down Avenue B. It was around 9:40pm. I heard the sound of bikes to my left and I also heard the sound of phlegm collection which is that dry-to-wet kind of throat clearing, coughing up sound which is not unlike when your hard drive is doing something loud and you realize there’s something wrong with your computer. I greeted this sound with slight trepidation and a bit of nausea, as I have a real visceral reaction to street loogies glistening on the sidewalk like so much throat snot. Actually, it’s not just visceral, it’s intellectual too, because just thinking about it right now is turning my stomach. (I’ve been loogie hostile for years now. I’ll never forget watching, in high school, as a guy I’d had a crush on hawked a dangler into a nearby bush. This is the same lothario who at lunch one day announced, to a friend who’d been eating watermelon messily, “Dude, you look like you’ve been chowin’ box!” He was charming.)

Now where was I? Oh yes, so I’m hearing the pre-loog and I’m thinking that I need to be careful where I step because there’s about to be a shiny street deposit somewhere in my vicinity. I wait to hear the splatter but I just hear the launching followed by laughter—a kind I haven’t heard since grade school. Very slowly it starts to dawn on me that perhaps the laughter is directed at me, and I don’t really know how or why this occurred to me except that some vestigial grade-school survival skill set was trying hard to push through the fog of confusion about where the loogie went. So I turn to look at the little shits and the last one, the slowest, weakest and most vile of the bunch, apparently unable to coax enough lung juice from his still succulent windpipes, simply spits in my direction. And it wasn’t the kind of spitting one does when they get a little shampoo in their mouth in the shower, it was contemptuous and hate-filled and sadly, better aimed than its loogie compatriots. While the phlegm blobs never hit me, the spit grazed my cheek. I look forward to Hep B or some kind of boil or pustule in six to eight weeks.

Now where was I? Oh yes, you need some plans this evening. How about you go to S.O.B’s to hear the Tito Puente Orchestra with Ronnie Puente? Swell, it’s a plan.

Yesterday I told you that tonight your 1 Thing was going to be a wine festival and I’d be a no-good liar if I changed my mind, now wouldn’t I? But then again in yesterday’s post I told you I was a horrendous liar, so I’d be a liar if I kept my word. I’m like a logic puzzle! If I had a twin who was standing in front of a door and behind one of us was the door to freedom and behind the other, Bob Barker, which would you choose, provided you were allowed to ask only one question but knowing that I only wear pants on days starting with T and my twin only wears pants on days starting with S and she has six hatboxes and only four hats, one of which has to be returned to Marta by 3pm on Sunday?

If you enjoyed that, you’re a masochist.

Wait, no, what I meant to say is that if you like games you’ll love our Games issue (available online tomorrow). I tried to do some of the puzzles last night before getting frustrated by the cryptic crossword, which is the caviar of crosswords I’ve been told, which is why I recommend putting it in the fridge for about four hours and then eating it with a dab of sour cream.

Because you never miss an opportunity to get three sheets to the wind, which incidentally is a sailing term, sailor, I was going to recommend you take your enlarged liver and ruddy, bulbous nose to a wine festival, but then I realized that actually that wine festival is tomorrow, which leaves you with precious little to do tonight. Fear not, my prize melons! Tonight you’ll be tapping, high-kicking, macarena-ing, hustling, sprinklering, cutting the deck, and shuffling, cabbage patching and more at Midsummer Night Swing at 6:30 at Lincoln Center. Now, I should warn you that I’m a horrendous liar—an horrendous liar to be exact—and so really you’ll just be swinging and salsaing and doing that thing where you stand in place and bop around like you did to Def Leppard in seventh grade. But if you were to unleash a little Roger Rabbiting, I can’t imagine it would be greeted with anything but amazement, because your moves are magnetic, which is why I’d appreciate it if you’d stay away from my hard drive.