Nick Cave: still making good music, reinventing ugly-hot

This past weekend, while driving with friends J. and J. and Dick through various rural parts of the southeast, I had my first taste of the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album. Back in the frigid northeast, it's still good, which means I wasn't just under the influence of hearing "In the Pines" while driving through the pines on the Georgia line. And how does Nick Cave manage to still make being an ugly man look so hot, especially with that skeezy hair and mustache? It defies reason.

yr friday zen

what i have been up to

1. Making Guinness cupcakes. The recipe.


2. Fighting the good fight against chaos in our apartment. We have fought with a) Ikea, b) "closet solutions," c) drilling, and d) donating things. I think chaos may still be winning.

3. Being very grumpy about New England and its present lack of sun and 70-degree temperatures.

4. Lying in bed all weekend with a nasty cold.

5. Desiring more Guinness cupcakes. Or really, any cupcake or cake-like food. Ice cream would do, too.

What have you been up to?

gifts for the sis

I made napkins and place mats for my sister's birthday with the fabric I bought at Sewfisticated the other day. Beige and white seersucker for the napkins, flowers for the place mats with blue-green stripy backs.



Every time I work with nice cotton I think, damn, nice cotton is really nice. The floral print came from the quilting section but turned out to be much more of a lawn, and the leftovers may end up as a skirt in the near future. The stripy stuff is nice and lightweight, and I have enough left to use to line a skirt or dress. I'm pretty much out of the seersucker, but when I was cutting it I kept thinking, "Mm, seersucker shirtdress." Though not until I've gotten through a good bit of my fabric stash. Which means, probably, next summer.

things you already know and further evidence thereof

-Dolphins are smart and helpful.

-U.S. sex education is inadequate.

-Iggy Pop eschews shirts. Madonna eschews opaque clothing. Justin Timberlake does not want to be eaten.

every depressing T station has a discount fabric store a block away

If only that were true. But really, Sewfisticated Fabrics makes up for the perpetually dismal, dinky little station at the end of the most annoying of Beantown's subway lines. Also, walking to the store I got to pass a business called "Superior Nut Co." I don't know if they are metal nuts or the food kind of nuts or some other kind of nut I haven't thought of, but I do know that they are superior.

Sewfisticated sells a variety of discount fabrics and notions: cottons for $2-3/yard, great upholstery stuff for $5.99, wool suiting, and some lovely silks that are actually made of silk (seriously, what is up with selling fabric called 'silk de chine' that is not, in fact, silk? you need to call that shit 'acrylique de chine.') I didn't find some of my holy grails of discount fabric shopping (100% cotton batiste, dotted swiss, aforementioned silk de chine made from silk), but the lovely things I did find more than made up for it. I even found myself encountering an entire wall of stretch polyester knits in an array of prints and thinking, "That's an impressive selection of poly knits" instead of "EWWWWW." Well, maybe I thought both, but ambivalence is a very generous attitude when it comes to poly knits.

I left with three different cotton prints to make napkins and place mats for my sister's birthday, plus a zipper for the sloper I promised myself I would work on this week.

sewing on the interwebs

How did I not know about burdastyle.com until now? In case you, too, are into sewing things and have missed the bus, they have free patterns you can download, and they're actually really cute. And they let people post pictures of their complete projects, and the website is easy to use, which makes it like if sewing.patternreview.com were not the nightmare of terrible, terrible navigation and annoying membership dues that it is.

I also found this site, which includes clear and relatively simple instructions for re-sizing a pattern. A time consuming process, no doubt, but it's nice to have that option.

JP* meal

Our JPmeal consisted of:

-Cheddar, apple, and dijon mustard sandwiches on bread from a local bakery (cheese and bread toasted in the oven first)
-Chowda (duh)
-Sam Adams' Boston Ale, brewed mere blocks from our apartment

Delish.


*Our Beantown 'hood, that is.

night of drunking

Last night turned out to be a bit of a party, seemingly in spite of my warning to Dick as we set out for the evening that it was not likely to be one of superlative partyness. The grad student party we went to was broken up by the Boston 5-O when it was hardly midnight. After the last people left the apartment, said cops were seen laughing heartily, no doubt at the notion that they had busted up a tame get-together of legally drinking adults.

We headed to a neighborhood bar and drank there until we forgot to wonder what time it was. Last call was signaled by a sudden vapor cloud of ammonia filling the entire place. It was noxious, and a very effective method of clearing an establishment quickly. I don't think we'll be going back there soon.

Then we somehow ended up at a fellow student's apartment, drinking more and having drunk conversations about Obama, the superiority of plastics of 30 years ago, and baseball. We staggered into our apartment at 4 a.m., and the cats gave us the "you've been drinking, haven't you?" look.

This morning I made biscuits and cheese grits to put together all of the parts that became unstuck from the alcohol. Yum.