it's gray and cold out. can someone make me rich so i can join my friend vinnie in a few months at this carribbean island? oh man. i'm depressed.

nation in love with girl from record store. oh, onion. i also enjoyed "stuff on floor either cat food or cat shit."

losing my edge put up "countdown" by the yeah yeah yeahs, off the "pin" single apparently. grab it while you can.

margaret cho's blog. [via jinners]

all right, i'm off to jersey for a few days to hang with the fam. if you want thanksgiving words of wisdom, please check catchdubs. (though nick: REAL CRANBERRY SAUCE, all sugary OJ-infused goodness! come on!) there may be posting from my brother's basement lair, we'll have to see. enjoy your turkey. don't kill your family. peace.

i don't know, that bear looks pretty svelte to me. i kind of want to cuddle with that bear.

werde busts onto the arts and leisure page with a good piece on a creepy new technology: realistic synthesized human voices. it'll allow users to build "audio fonts" of, for instance, elvis or madonna or any of the teen pop clones, that could make future pop even more artificial.

fluxblog rips on whirlwind heat. thank you fluxblog, you nailed it.

ipod's dirty secret.

karen o interviews har mar. via fimoculous]

okay, this is hilarious: . [via the morning news]

can we just discuss how incrediby scary michael jackson's mug shot is? i'm going to have nightmares.

another random day off. gorgeous day outside, too. i am going to go take advantage of it. by, um, shopping for boots. later kids.

note to self: stalk tweedy.

fluxblog has my favorite track off the upcoming liars album for download. i scored said album from a friend of mine (it apparently leaked a few days ago). i'm not ready to pass judgment yet, but this song totally rocks.

tim harrington is engaged. wife-to-be: "he's really good at pretending to be animals. Really good. Like Gorillas and tigers. And lions, too!" rawr.

matos plays songs for the death cab guys.

"Top 10 things to do before your buddy comes over to help you move." i don't know if this is only funny when you know the principals, but i really enjoyed this account of golden boy's move from wilmington to philly on esteban's site. complete with long defensive commentary from the golden one and raunchy commentary from yours truly.

i must and will go to china. betsy is making me sooo jealous with her tales of pantomiming "achiness" at the drugstore and her pictures of mod phone booths. the photoblogging is tops, i tell you.

she's not actually dead, but: courtney love, a remembrance. a crapload of stories, including: the career eulogy (did i know she dropped her unfair-labor-practices suit against universal?), a look at hole's legacy, an all-courtney police blotter, and more. [thanks jami]

the season of the heirheads. i must admit i've caught rich girls a couple of times and found it quite fun. the other night the non-hilfiger one said that people in the midwest buy cargo pants not to wear with stilettos and nice tops for going out, but because they have lots of pockets, which are helpful when you have to "work in the fields."

warning: this story is mostly pointless. last night someone kept buzzing my buzzer. buzzzzzzzz. 10 minutes go by. buzzzzzzzz. over and over. "tams" and "tard," as they so affectionately refer to each other, were apparently dead to the world in the other room. finally, at like 1:30, i dragged my already insomnia-crazed, exhausted self to the buzzer and screamed WHAT??? into it. it was "sandy from upstairs," i learned after several attempts. sandy kinkel is his name. i do not like him. he looks and acts like fred durst. backwards baseball capped frat guy to the nth degree. he then pleaded with me to let him in, because he forgot his keys. "HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET IN YOUR HOUSE?" i demanded several times. rob's not waking up, the door is unlocked, please please please. i considered a moment. then i buzzed him in. then i went to the door, opened it, and screamed, "YOU'RE A FUCKING JERK, SANDY." it felt good, though i really wanted to kick his ass. anyway those idiots are moving out at the end of this month so if anyone knows four cool people who are not stupid frat boys, please put them in touch.

hey friends. how about a stupid creature for xmas or birthday (or, as is commonly the case, xmas-slash-birthday)? i give you permission to steal some of my rattier socks. [discovered via ms. sweater]

been annoyingly busy, sorry. the weekend is hardly worth remembering at this point, and plus, i didn't do much of anything. last night we sent kurt off with a few drinks at jp warde's, a bar there is really no reason to ever go to. kurt's on his way to a faraway place called Nagorno-Karabakh (which says is "in Armenia or Azerbaijan depending on which side of the conflict you are on") to clear land mines. crazy shit. this means a) he is a better person than i am (though i did right a certain moral slip-up from this weekend today), and b) i do not have to watch the simpsons for a whole month.

i don't think this quite gets at the level of insanity of your average hardcore fan, but nevertheless: nyt on GBV.

poor britney. no one looks good when they cry.

funny, i was just pulling out some dusty cds myself the other night. i am drowning in a sea of jewelboxes and needed to make room. seriously, why do i have so many primus cds? how many ass ponys releases does one human need? how is it that i have albums i have absolutely no knowledge of whether there is even one good song on them, nor remembrance of why i would ever have purchased them? so i cleaned a little bit of house. no really hard decisions, though. check out the new inventory; they're selling like hotcakes.

"we're guided by voices and we have eight hundred songs." that's a true fact, kids. which is great, because even if you're not completely thrilled with the current state of the setlist (i.e. the last couple of albums), you're still probably going to like at least half of the songs they throw at you in the average two-hour show. i reached concert nirvana early with the cool old gem "finks" off some japanese EP or something. i also reached concert intoxication. bob, thank goodness, was in jolly-drunk mode rather than bitter-drunk mode. i think the presence of julian casablancas in the crowd put him in a good mood. bob teased julian a lot from the stage (jami has more on that). then two big polish bouncers grabbed julian's fancy leather jacket and removed him for smoking a cigarette, and we laughed our fuckin' asses off. he was back five seconds later though, dancing in the pit with the rest of the hot freaks. (i wonder if julian made the old-guy contingent feel more or less cool?) i got an idea to do the pita wrapup as a series of fan portraits (including julian of course!) but i'd failed to charge my battery, so no pictures. therefore i was free to bounce around to the hits with jami and amy, as well as social-butterfly my way around the crowd. in short, i think we can sum last night up with an appropriate cliche: good times.

wednesday, november 12, 2003
me service announcement: for those of you important enough to have my work address, please do not email me there tomorrow or friday, okay? it's a luscious, random four-day weekend for me. tomorrow i'll be recovering from tonight's rock; friday i'll be in court answering for my stupid "crime" of several weeks ago. think it's okay to take a picture of the judge?

amazingly, some of you have still not seen the hold steady in action. let them rock you november 21 at the mercury lounge. that's a friday night, baby. no excuses.

bungee jumpers delivering cocktails??

united names new airline "ted"; united executives' drug of choice clearly marijuana. that is a high-dea if i ever heard one.

you can listen to four songs from the new album by the autumn defense, featuring the other cute guy in wilco, john stirratt.

i totally want the no-contact jacket. [via jinners]

we really did it! we walked the high line, the abandoned elevated train tracks on the west side. it was me and those two guys i met at a party a few weeks ago, ray and nate, plus sarah. we simply strolled through the open gate into the parking lot on 34th between 11th and 12th, up an embankment, and boom. we were on the high line. getting through the small spaces, aka limboing under jagged metal, was surprisingly easy. it was a gorgeous day, and it was so very cool exploring this weird, peaceful urban landscape, part garden, part graffiti artist's playground. we walked back the way we came because the half-missing staircase at 17th street looked really dangerous. i strongly recommend you check out the high line at some point before they knock it down or turn it into a park. it's not legal, but it's highly doable. ray, owner of a fancy professional-grade camera, took the most fabulous pictures above (#s 1, 4, 8, and 9). the rest of my pictures are here.

here's a pretty tiresome thread started by m. matos (we gonna fight), characterized (rightly, i'd say) by one poster as a "GBV SUX U R ALL GAY" revival (heh). i don't know how people can deal with message boards. by the way if you order the new gbv box set from matador, you get a 15-month gbv calendar, which is particularly great for me as i love both gbv and calendars. party!

i don't think i've ever linked group hug, that anonymous confession site. pretty hilarious (exhibit 1; exhibit 2) and really addictive.

if you have not done so already you need to look at joe lieberman's rock the vote commercial featuring hilarious ravey music. it's what the kids are listening to! uh, right? it's also pretty funny to hear wes clark pontificating on the fate of outkast.

i like fluxblog.

guide to friendster photo interpretation. [via yewknee]

gotta love monosyllabic's handy guide to the -ills bands. i was really having trouble with the difference between the thrills and the stills.

the kollege daily compiles examples of horrendous student writing. pretty fun if you can stand it.

tamar and i went to see lost in translation last night and were mostly unimpressed. it's pretty hilarious in places, but the meat of it didn't do much for either of us. which is to say, there wasn't much meat at all. and we like meat, yes we do. um. yeah, i cared not a whit for either character, which might have been helped if they, like, talked more, but they didn't, and obviously ms. coppola felt that she could skate along on style and bill murray and making fun of japanese accents. not really. i was bored, though the funny parts were really funny and made it sort of worth it. virgin suicides was way, way better.

jack white seems to be similarly underwhelmed by ms. coppola, who directed that white stripes video featuring kate moss pole-dancing in oh-so-arty black and white: "I don't have much to say about it," White explained. "It was completely Sofia Coppola's idea and I don't really have a comment on it."

if you have ever been out at a show and been like, "who is that old guy with the ratty white dreadlocks, spandex, and bare feet videotaping this gig like it's his fucking job?" then this article is for you. [thanks garage dream]

good vice fashion spread features big girls. right on. also: let's play guess the GQ fashion editor on the don'ts page!

october is now over. if you missed any of it, get it here: cmj, fake pumpkin madness, fun with pricing guns, Worst Party Ever, and much much more.

we are so cute i can't stand it. jami has compiled some amusing highlights of her birthday party over at w-w. my own personal highlight (though i did enjoy the "hey how ya doin" drink) was hearing "hey ya" for the first time and freaking out about how good it is. holy shit. dakota played goooood music all night long, on the itunes and on a very pretty geetar. i was compelled to start dancing pretty much upon arrival. good party. happy birthday, jami! you're still cute!

halloween night was a little bit low-key. eileen had missed her party boat in baltimore so she reversed course and headed back to the city, somehow convincing me to journey to the upper upper west side for a party. on the way i wished i could just walk around the city and take pictures of everyone's costumes, or maybe just sit in the second avenue F station and do the same. but applause broke out when i arrived at the party as mrs. mia wallace, syringe sticking out of my chest and black wig perfectly mussed. i rule, though judging by my referral logs and reports from the field, i have a feeling there were a few other mia wallaces out there too.

i also bought a bunch of cds this weekend. comfort shopping, mmm. outkast, d-plan remix, old oneida, new centro-matic.

and then last night stopped by the underrated motor city to hear what mr. emcee bard had to spin. some nice stuff. you could do worse things with your sunday night, that's for sure. i think he's there for a month of sundays. or...you know what i mean.

i love the new strokes and i don't care who knows it. speaking of, here is neil strauss on the strokes (the RS cover story) and chuck klosterman on the strokes. julian loves "yellow ledbetter" too!