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.

stay-inside day

The weather today is superlatively nasty - not snow, which is fluffy and nice, but raining ice and 30 mph gusts of wind. I have decided that it is a day for enjoying air-tight home construction. Dick, however, wins the award for most-hard southern transplant, as he has left to brave broken subway trains and a foot of icy snow on the ground to cover a faux Boston Tea Party (i.e., no actual tea thrown in the harbor) put on by supporters of Ron Paul for his blogging gig. Before the gross weather showed up I was going to join him, but instead I'm sitting in the couch under a warm blanket, eating delicious vegetarian chili, and watching season 1 of "Buffy."

Speaking of Ron Paul, is it just me or is his anthem the catchiest jangle pop I've heard in ages? Just wait for the organ and 'la-la-la's about three quarters of the way through.

it's the little things that bring me happiness

Specifically, the little things with very large ears. In this case, the long-eared jerboa.

where have all the drunks gone?

You would think in a town known for its Irish heritage, cold weather, and general orneriness of people, it would be hard to find a body not devoted to sweet delicious alcohol. And yet Dick and I find ourselves encountering a distressing number of teetotalers. Not that there's anything wrong with being dry, it's just that Dick and I have worked hard to cultivate a sophisticated drinking practice, and we like to exercise it regularly. Last night we found ourselves at a birthday party devoid of both alcohol and animal products. It was nice, and I had one of the best Hostess-style cupcakes I've tasted, and it was vegan. There were also kick ass ginger cookies, made with grated fresh ginger. What is it with vegans being such good bakers, anyway? It's uncanny.

Back to the subject of drinking, I saw this book at a store the other day, and immediately wanted to buy one for all the great drinkers in my life. It's a republishing of a book originally written in, I believe, the 1930's by a Scotsman who used the pseudonym Aeneas MacDonald "in deference to his mother."

holy fuck it is cold

I'm glad to be working in the heated buildings of Underfunded Public Art School, because it is motherfucking cold outside. I thought I was tougher than this - I mean, I remember back in college walking around when it was -10 degrees F, and it's only, like, 15 degrees now. Today has proven that my current glove arsenal is insufficient to keep my Raynaud's-afflicted hands from getting painfully cold. I have a plan, however, for a secret weapon of cold-fighting warmth: felted wool mittens with a cotton flannel lining or fleece sewn in. It will be a few weeks at least before I have time for things like knitting, but I may shift this project to the top of the craftiness to-do list.

In other news, I'm writing a paper on Cory Arcangel,who made this, which is actually playable in its original form:

"I shot Andy Warhol"

another victim of the cross-blog infection

I, like htrouser and raynorgrace, have a yucky cold thing that has had me in bed for almost the entirety of the last two days. Thus, I blame a new kind of virus or bacteria that transmits itself through blog-to-blog contact.

In other news, sickness is preventing me from doing anything productive, which is really sucky, because there is much I need to do. Blah, I hate being sick!

off to the midwest

I'm off this weekend to Cleveland for my grandfather's 95th birthday celebration. I'm bringing a Pentax 67 I'm borrowing from State Art School's equipment stash for picture-taking.

fun instead of unpacking

Last night Dick and I were feeling a bit down (living in an new city isn't always easy, you know), so we decided to eschew inside duties like unpacking for evening fun-seeking.

Stop one was the new favorite local Irish pub, which has proven to have the best selection of beer on tap in our 'hood, if not great (one of the disappointments of Beantown has been the mediocre selection at the drinking establishments). The bartender told us they will soon be installing a cooler for bottled beer that will further augment the choices. It's also dark, smelly, and lets people bring their pet dogs in. I like this; Dick is a little wary, but after a couple of pints even he can't deny the cuteness of a friendly doggy.

Next we tried a little Salvadoran restaurant, which proved to have a great menu and the cheapest food I've seen in town yet. Dick got two cheese pupusas for $3 and could not stop talking about how delicious they were for the rest of the night.

Then we hopped the T to the Esplanade. I was astounded by how beautiful it was, and how amazing the view of the Charles, Cambridge, and Boston at night. We walked until my feet started hurting (still healing from their adjustment to much more walking) and then back to home and to bed.

they say "fuck" a lot more, too

I got a local phone number for my cell phone. I was surprised to find that the change in area code came with a change in the automated voice on the phone - the soothing voice now speaks faster. Dick thinks it's an all new, northeastern accent; I hypothesize that there's one automated voice the speed of which the cell phone company adjusts depending on your geographic location.

the first beantown post

In the interest of reporting the many things happening over the last two weeks, I should have been posting more. What spare time I have had, though, has not found me in front of a computer long enough to type sentences. Thus, a brief review:

-The car is sold. I am car-less.

-The driveway here was not big enough for the PODS container. Five days and a trip to city hall for permits later, the POD made it to the street and was unloaded by people we paid to carry our things up the stairs to our third floor apartment. This felt extravagant, but worthwhile.

-School has started.

-Tanqueray gin is much cheaper in MA than my former state of residence. Much rejoicing.

things of a tuesday

-Tomorrow is my last day at work. This is scary. Also, I have way too much crap in my office. Some of it doesn't even belong to me, like Dick's Charlambides and Bardo Pond cds. But there are some things that must be preserved, like the coffee grinder and llama finger puppet.

-I bought this external hard drive (specifically, the red one, at 250GB). It really looks like a giant Lego. It worked well and fast, but the user documentation is crap. Seriously, tech companies of the world, hire a technical writer.

-The HR people at work recently created a group called "The Fun Club." Their mission is to plan fun things for us to do. So far that has consisted of "TV show lunchtime," when they show an episode of an old TV show in a conference room. Their selections so far: Bewitched and Charlie's Angels (episode: "Angels in Chains"). Maybe this series has secretly been curated by raynorgrace.

-I'm really glad that giant country in the north of Asia is called "Russia" again. When I was in grade school "Soviet Union" seemed so dull, like the name of a bank or a chemical company. "Russia," on the other hand, kindled ideas of a cold, hard country, furry hats and men doing that squatting kick dance and borscht. And what was with "USSR"? How does "Soviet Union" abbreviate to "USSR"? Ok, "USSR" is most of the letters in "Russia"...maybe they were into some avant garde word jumbling. Anyway, I'm glad its back to Russia.

who sells handmade cards in our fair city?

I need to send out some very tardy thank you cards to the kind people who wrote letters of recommendation for me for my MFA apps. They are brilliant and creative people, so I want to send them something handmade and out of the ordinary. In Boston I saw a few amazing letterpress cards in local gift shops, but for some reason neglected to buy them (probably I was distracted by a shiny object).

I haven't been able to find anything like that in our fair city. At least not the point of the geometric shape that is Ex-industrial Town. Does anyone know where I can get some?