Collections are Dangerous

Quebecwhaaa? Miss Stacia Goes To Canada (Part Deux)

2010-01-04T00:43:00.038-05:00

Continued from Quebecwhaaa? Miss Stacia Goes To Canada (Part Un)

Museums, Bad and Good:

Pointe-à-Callière, Musée d'archéologie et d'histoire de Montréal:

Nobody warned me you'd be full of children.

Up until I hit Pointe-à-Callière my vacation had been pretty much child-free. Not that I have anything against kids really, I just don't like your kids, up in my face, right after they've picked their noses. The underground portion of this museum - the permanent exhibit not devoted to pirates - is actually a fascinating documentation of the history of Montreal's ports and first settlements. But the upstairs exhibit on "Pirates, Corsaires et Flibustiers" ("Pirates, Privateers and Freebooters"), was a nightmarish, stuffy room, shaped like a boat and stuffed full of eight year-olds. The material covered was pretty elementary as well. Did you know pirates didn't have advanced medicine on their ships? Did you know they took turns sleeping in hammocks, and really, really liked treasure? The whole thing presentation could have been cobbled together by Mrs. Drange's fourth grade class. Argggggggh.

Canadian Center for Architecture:
The For Smarties guide highlighted the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal as one of the "must see" museums, but when even my cabbie didn't know where to find it, I started to second guess the recommendation. Turns out no exhibit could have been more up my alley than the installation, "Speed and It's Limits." The main thrust of the exhibit explored how the pursuit of speed - once theorized by the Futurist movement to be the beacon of all efficiency - will very soon push people, objects, even time to the absolute brink of tolerance/productivity/existence. On a vacation from the pressures of a life that moves pretty freaking fast, there couldn't have been a topic more fitting.

The exhibit featured, among other things, video installations of slugs languorously chugging along in nature, juxtaposed with the speed of man-made machines like cars and spaceships; video footage of the quick and beautiful demolition of entire buildings, folding into clouds of dust with a single explosion; and fascinating pamphlets, old photographs, and instructional videos documenting the rise of the assembly line systems in the workplace and the kitchens of the 50's and 60's.

I, of course, was most taken with a room of silkscreened posters, which were some of the first to use markings/shapes that signified or lent the appearance of motion in a two-dimensional medium.

If you are comprised of ink and paper, I will find you, and I will love you.

The effects of technology and of speed and quantity of information on human health and sanity was the focus of the last section of the exhibit. I, of course, needed to record all of these messages/points in my notebook and on my camera for further obsessive research/documentation/deconstruction/analysis, while also immediately texting messages about the exhibit to my Facebook and Twitter accounts from my Blackberry, right then, that second, cause that ish couldn't wait!!! Apparently it takes a while for the lessons of the of the installation to be absorbed and applied.

Special Events!

Jazz Fest:

Jazz Fest is, in essence, the true adult's music festival. Bonnaroo minus the sweat and mud, and plus a consistent setlist of listenable music. When I discovered I would be in town for the event, I immediately started looking up the schedule and sampling bands to see if I could find something I liked. I ended up stumbling upon one of my favorite bands of the year, who I would see perform on the last day of the festival. But mostly I just wandered between open-air stages, eating dinner outdoors; the sounds of the performances around me mixing in an unintelligible cacophany of environmental jazz. Stevie Wonder performed on opening night of the festival and over fifteen enormous screens were assembled up by the main stage to accommodate the expected crowds. Unshockingly, after three weeks of non-stop rain, the sky opened up again on the night of Stevie's performance. That evening I walked in the direction of the ponchoed masses, but as soon as I started to get close to the wet, sticky mess that was the "Superstitious"-loving crowd, I said to myself, "Self? You're pretty much over feeling like you're at Bonnaroo Regular, right? How would you like to turn around and order room service in the warmth of your own hotel room while watching 'Yes Man' on PPV?" (Oh no you didn't. Oh yes you did.) And so I took a leisurely stroll back to the hotel, capturing awesome marks like this along the way:

Church is closed. For JAZZ!

The real reason I didn't feel bad about missing Stevie Wonder was that, in my pre-Jazz Fest research, I stumbled on a band called Elsiane, categorized on a jazz blog as "Other" or "Strange," which, for a jazz amateur and lover of quirky music, was instantly the answer. I quickly found out that not only was Elsiane sort of the contemporary dark horse/wild card of the festival, but they were also Canadian (as not all of the bands are), which made the discovery extra exciting and relevant in my mind. Upon Googling the band I immediately came upon their Bjork meets Cirque de Soleil album cover and ALL WAS FULL OF LOVE.

If all women could do this, we wouldn't need men.

Elsaine live, did not disappoint. The band exists on record in a slow boil. Their tracks are pulsating and warm, many leading with an almost tribal essence and peeling into lush, electro-orchestral choruses. Live, the songs are even darker, edgier, more metallic. Otherworldly. All of this is enhanced by the voice of Elsieanne Caplette, the band's lead singer and songwriter, who wields on one of those rare vocal instruments that is truly gape worthy. First there's her epic range of ethereal highs and smooth, gutteral, Sade-like lows. Then there is the intensive control that affords her such a wide range of aural effects. I never would have thought the sounds she emits could be produced live, sans processing. In fact, in the month I listened to the record on a daily basis, I always assumed there was intensive, if creative, production work laid on Caplette's vocals. But to see the (stunning) woman pound her chest for echo or adjust her posture to manipulate pronunciation, or cup her hands around her mouth as in a birdcall to achieve sounds both of and beyond nature, is to recognize her work as both artistic musical performance, and a feat of science.

I walked out of the performance exhilarated. It's pretty rare you fall in love with something that continues to peel back new layer after new layer of enjoyment, consistently over a month's time. And then, just as I thought I couldn't love the group or their record any more, a block from the venue I overheard a duo of teenage girls discussing the performance behind me.

One spoke to the other with an air of tepidity:

"Whatever. It's good sex music, I guess."

Um, EXACTLY.

The song that made me fall in love.
The song that first creeped me out, then made me fall in love all over again.

The Walking Soundtrack:

In addition to listening to Elsiane about 300 times in preparation for the show (and because I COULD NOT STOP), I also listened repeatedly to one song off a self-titled record by another Canadian group called La Patère Rose, whose album I bought at the recommendation of my dear waiter at the Hobbit. The song of my obsession, called "L'éponge," bears a title that can either mean "sponge," or "to wipe the slate clean." The translation of the chorus in English boils down to: " I am a sponge that absorbs the matter," which really felt perfect at the time. Because all you're doing when you're walking in a city alone is trying to immerse yourself in sights and smells and sounds and the feeling around you. A groove like that of "L'éponge" definitely lends a certain air to the way you see and smell the world you're inhabiting. You swerve in and out of people and around corners like liquid. You run smooth in a smooth world. I have grown to really love this whole album since I've been back in the States, but I must have listened to that one song about a hundred times in my short stay in Montreal, and I credit it with a good portion of my relaxed mentality. Sometimes it just takes the right musical trigger to set your mood. (Note: The video linked above has a strange version of the song attached to it. I couldn't find the album version anywhere, but go out and buy it. Or ask me and I will get it to you. It's worth it to spread the love.)

Canada Day:

I didn't have a clue when I booked my trip that my stay would include the celebration of one of Canada's biggest national holidays, but not much could have been more exciting. I read about the celebrations in the paper the day before, and discovered the parade would pass directly in front of my hotel at 10am. I didn't even have to do any work. I just walked outside and started snapping photos. As you can imagine, much Canadian pride was on display, and I took it upon myself to hand out some special titles to those Canadians with a little extra national spirit.

The first recipient of one of Miss Stacia's Quebecwhaaa? Awards for Patriotism was Pimp Man Canada. He was about 6'3" wearing a red furry hat that most people only attempt to pull off in conjunction with a cane and a noseful of cocaine. When later in the afternoon, a woman walking behind me asked her friend if the strippers of rue Sainte-Catherine were represented in the parade that day, I cracked a smile, knowing Pimp Man Canada had 'em covered.

Pimp Man Canada, from behind.

With every parade, there are the tailgaters. These guys happen to have pretty amazing artistic skills and hand-eye coordination considering how drunk they must have been to paint flags on their bald heads and faces. Baldy, now known to all as Paint Man Canada, was extra brave, as it was blistering hot that day, and before his paint job was even done, the white had already begun to run down his sweaty head.

Or maybe nationalistic Canadian birds were crapping out flags.

Every holiday needs its Scrooge - the misanthropic, curmudgeonly old man who challenges the joy of the occasion, but who deep inside, embodies its true history and purest spirit. With a proud sourpuss like this one, how could Old Man Canada not be that grumpster? Adorable old men should be the official mascots for any and every occasion. Give all the old people flags!

Bah humbug.

Canadian Prom:
In addition to Canada Day and one of the largest Jazz festivals in the world, Canada was also host to a number of proms in the week I was there. Over the course of four days, in both Quebec City and Montreal, I was witness to three proms in which the Celine Dion tribute dresses were not to be ignored. And the fellas gave these 17-year old girls a run for their money. Shoes that match the suit that match the tie that match your date's dress? THAT's impressive.

Dresses inspired by Celine Dion, matching suits inspired by every R&B star of the 90s.

Michael Jackson Dies:

Is there anything more eventful than the death of the king of pop? On my second night in Quebec City, CNN emailed news of the coma and then the rumored death, and then the confirmed death to my Blackberry, and like everyone else in the universe, I went straight for the teevee. Two hours of CNN later, three things were clear: Le roi a été mort. Everyone was shocked/sad. The world was going to play the Thriller album on repeat, all night long.

I took a cab that night to a bar/club in the heart of QC's nightlife strip to entertain myself and expunge myself from the media tornado. That was the night of the bacon pizza, and it was the night I figured out that Canadians love 80's cover bands as much as sleeveless-shirt-wearing Americans. But most importantly it was the night I sang "Rock With U" with a cab driver on my way to who knows where, thinking about how the world was gonna live without MJ, and how that song "You Rock My World" was actually pretty good, and how so many kids my age's first concert was with the Man in the Mirror and how, even though his sister was more fun to follow in the 90s, Michael was the man who made hitting the dance floor a good time, for everyone, for all time.

The Rest:

On my last day in town, I was strolling in Vieux Montreal, looking for stamps to send out the postcards I bought on the first day of the trip (which will finally be sent out, six months later, using postage bearing American flags), when I realized I wasn't on vacation at all. I was on a research trip for Little Pim merchandising.

Becomes:

And so, in the end, I had to expense the whole vacation.

Quebecwhaaa?: Miss Stacia Goes To Canada (Part Un)

2010-01-03T23:15:00.027-05:00

Oh, Canada.

I booked my Summer '09 trip to Canada at the last minute, not knowing I would be hitting Montreal during the incomparable Jazz Fest until after my plane tickets were purchased, not expecting so many friends to offer up detailed itineraries that would run me frenzied around the city, not realizing the Canada Day Parade would literally march up to the front door of my hotel until I opened up my morning newspaper and walked outside for my daily oeufs.

The trip started of as somewhat of a clusterfuck affair when I realized my passport, which had expired on May 29, 2009, would be required to gain entry into and exit from our North American neighbor as of June 1, 2009. With fifteen days until my departure, Project Update Passport commenced. Against a background of white foam board velcroed over a wall of Mailboxes Etc. PO boxes, and under harsh flourescents used only to light corporate pack-and-ship institutions and the county morgue, a hyper-close mugshot was taken. In it, I resemble the cowardly lion on crack, thanks to a fourteen day stint of the most humid weather in New York history -- the ideal environment in which to prep for glamour shots that will stay with you for the next decade. But I guess it's better than the old photo, originally taken for a fake ID and swiped from my high school desk drawer by a mother with a nose for sniffing out rebellion, to be used on my actual passport. ("You saved me a trip!" she would say when she unearthed it.)

The last ten years, when the customs officers flipped open my little book and scanned their eyes from the passport, to me, to the passport, it was clear I was the kind of girl who wore makeup to the pool in her teenage years.

Would you let hair this big into your country?

Once that ugly deed was done, I crossed my fingers and launched my packet of materials into a bureaucratic hole of empty promises and extended processing times. But thanks to frequent and aggressive stalking of the passport processing hotline, and enough superstitious restraint to drive my airline ticket prices up another two hundred dollars, my passport arrived, five days after I sent it away. Once that puppy was in my hands I allowed myself to lift my cautionary ban on travel research and made some actual plans for how to spend my days using my nifty Montreal and Quebec City "For Smarties" guide.

Duct tape is the new graphic design.

From its conception, my Canada trip was a solo adventure, two nights in Quebec City followed by five in Montreal. I wanted to follow my every impulse without negotiation. If I wanted to sleep in and do nothing or, conversely, wake up at 6am to climb to the top of a 700 foot mountain, I didn't want to worry about how a travel companion would feel about it. If I wanted Italian food, I didn't want to be convinced to eat Chinese. I wanted some time to read and write and reflect and just be with myself in uncomplicated peace.

Or maybe I was just looking for an excuse to do more of this:

Who, me?

An onslaught of digital narcissism was inevitable, but it's hard to capture yourself in a meaningful way on film on a solo vacation. There are only so many ways you can vary a shot when working at arm's length. A lovely young woman did offer to take a picture of me at the Kondiaronk Belvedere (at the pinnacle of Parc Mont-Royal) after watching me struggle, arm outstretched, neck strained like a frightened peacock, trying to get both my upper quadrant and the entire Montreal skyline in the shot, using a device positioned two feet from my face. But though I let her wield my camera to capture the moment, I still like all the shots I took of myself better. They just capture the true spirit of my trip, and the intimacy I had with...well...myself. Also, in my experience, the close framing of the self portrait helps minimize the jewfro, which was at its peak in the humid Canadian summer air.

The Food:

Of course, food was a big deal to me on this trip. Before I left I knew dining and looking for places to dine would consume about 60-80 percent of my time. My perpetual hunger (and talent for seeking out food even when full) did not disappoint.

My first dining destination, which I hit about ten minutes after laying my bags down in a Quebec City hotel, was a rustic cafe called The Hobbit, which is the place nerds go when the concierge relays five suggestions, and one of them holds a Tolkien reference. Patrick, The Hobbit's scruffy and adorable afternoon waiter had just enough broken English to complement my rusty French (which I was testing in conversation for the first time in a decade), and after a few minutes of culinary contemplation I finally asked him the typical annoying patron question: "What's the best thing on the menu?" He told me he really liked the deerburger, and looked genuinely surprised when I said, "Done!" Operation Meatsploration had officially begun.

Tastes like children's tears.

The deerburger sparked a desire in me to try as many types of game as I possibly could, which by the end of the trip included venison, pheasant and bison (the clear favorite). Though the deerburger was pretty delicious, mostly I wanted to dig into my adorable waiter, who would later sit down and share a beer with me, exchange music recommendations, and tell me the wild story about how he can't visit the states, because his charge for possession of marijuana few years ago doesn't permit him to leave the country for another EIGHT YEARS. Say no to drugs, adorable Canadians. Do it for your...little Canadian.

Now. When you travel to Canada, you have to eat poutine. It's the law. When you leave the country, customs officers hook you up to lie detector machines and ask you if you've tried their "national delicacy," and if you haven't, they plug your nose and shovel in the french fries, drenched in gravy, and plunked with chunks of cheese curd. Then they make you tell them you like their calorie-laden concoction more than good ol' American diner disco fries. (UNTRUE.) I've seen all this go down, and it's not pretty. Which is why you should probably just try poutine at your leisure.

First Poutine, also known as, the coma.

Unfortunately between my first and second dances with poutine I didn't learn that this dish is only to be consumed when you're on the verge of starvation. Or when you're really, really hammered. In other words, poutine ain't no 3pm snack. When consumed in full, in the middle of the afternoon, on an empty stomach, it could lead to crazy, dangerous consequences. You could be eating poutine one minute, the next thing you know, you're in a full out coma:

The Allfather Poutine

One minute you're devouring Second Poutine, and the next, you wake up in a movie theater showing "The Proposal."

Did Ryan Reynolds put you up to this?

Other trance-inducing foods I consumed along the way included bacon pizza:

Also known as Meat-za.

A salty, smoked meat sammich from Schwartz's, the Canadian Katz's:

Also known as a Meatwich.

And the most AweXome brunch ever, which included just about anything I would ever want to start my morning with on one plate, including fluffy scrambled eggs, gigantic sticks of fresh, sharp cheddar, and the flakiest croissant that's ever touched this pastry lover's lips, stuffed with soft goat cheese, and of course, du jambon. (That's meat, kids.)

Also known as Meatfast.

But of all the places I ate, the Best/Corniest Menu/Restaurant Environment Award went to a place in the Mont Royal district of Quebec, called Cora (Chez Cora). A chain that serves breakfast all day, Cora is basically what you'd get if Friendly's opened in the Amish country.

The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.

With an emphasis on crepes, waffles and fresh fruit sides, Cora offered up some IHOP-inspired combination breakfasts, one of which kept me full one day from 10am-4pm. I was in love with their bright sunny menu, featuring their massive breakfast specials among scrawled pictures of huge suns.

I would like the fruit castle, please.

Cora's menu photographer is really big on tightly cropped mid-shots. Cora herself is really big on Halloween eggings.

"Let's get Mr. Wilson's house!"

All of the above were reasons I was immediately forced to go on the No Poutine Diet upon my return to the States. Yet, in spite of my personal boycott of decadent drunk foodstuffs, I brought you all back a Canadian culinary souvenir, which opened in New York the week after my fry-free regiment began. You'll have to let me know how the curdstuffs taste and whether or not I'm right about the superiority of the disco fries. Just don't express your opinion at the border. Those Canadians are serious about their poutine. They'll have Dan Akyroyd on your ass so fast, your head will spin.

The 'Tainment:
Things I did, (many of which I didn't initially intend to do) in Canada:

A long spell of wet East coast weather was still lingering by the time I got to Canada, and the sky happened to open up on a Monday in Montreal when many of the indoor attractions (like museums) are closed. Stuck downtown, contemplating the options immediately available to me, my first thought was, "Fuck the Leave-Your-TV-on-DVD-Obsessions-Behind plan, I should have brought The Wire with me." This was immediately followed by regret at not buying this book earlier in the day at Mortimer Snodgrass in Vieux Montreal:

Because most of us need the encouragement.

Luckily, around the corner from the closed galleries in the Belgo Building on rue Sainte-Catherine was a movie theater. Sadly, it was only playing "Transformers" (all I needed was to read this review to know I didn't need to go in for the sequel) "Star Trek" (which I saw twice on mother's day weekend, once with my nerdaliscious mama) and "The Proposal." It just so happens, while dining at the Hobbit, I read a review of "Le Proposal" in a French language paper that filled me in on the movie's major plot points. Basically, Sandra Bullock's character is a high-powered publishing executive who is about to get deported to her native Canada ("Oui! oui!" exulted the paper) if the sappy Ryan Reynolds (who is Canadian in real life!) won't marry her. Wet and stranded, in the middle of the afternoon, somehow I convinced myself that seeing "The Proposal" in Canada was akin to my seeing "MILK" in San Francisco. "It's relevant to the location! Historical/cultural research!" But after two hours of watching Sandra Bullock ape Meryl Streep aping Anna Wintour, and Ryan Reynolds sulking around like a limp french fry, all I'd learned was that Coach is still working, and that none of the magic of Canada was contained within the theater of an American rom com.

**By the way according to VOIR, the Quebecois French culture weekly that reviewed "Le Proposal," even the Canadians hated "Year One." And they love everybody/everything. These people have the friendliest reputation on the planet. Their independence day doesn't even celebrate separation from another nation, but rather marks the day a bunch of provinces got together and said, "We've been dating for this long, let's make this union official." Not even gentle, diplomatic Canada thought caveman-style Jack Black was funny.

Other things I probably shouldn't have spent time on in Canada included stopping even for ten seconds to photograph this:

Canadians Are Just Like Us!

I also took pictures of the international versions of all the Harry Potter covers to send to my sister, who was about halfway through the series at the time and going through a phase of making jokes and citing references last relevant in 1999. ("Alohamora!")

Posters, Graffiti and Tattoos: The Trifecta

As someone who spends most of her life on the hunt for awesome street art in a city with the most annoying public postering laws EVA, it didn't take me long to to notice the abundance of gigposters plastered all over Montreal's super hip Plateau neighborhood. They were everywhere:

Take a cue from the Canucks, NYC.

I also stumbled upon some fun, bridgeside graffiti in Montreal, on my walk to breakfast in Mont Royal.

Even less legible in another language!

At first I thought this adorable little tattoo shop in Quebec City was called "Tatouage," but it turns out that's just how you say "tattoo parlor" en Francais.

Sign stolen from the yard of the Disney Haunted Mansion.

The name of this place was actually Monster Ink, and it was manned by a fellow named Bert. No, I didn't know the Quebecois were allowed to name their children Bert either. I also didn't know tattoo artists named Bert kept impressive collections of rare rock posters and an endless number of vinyl toys on display in their quaint little tattoo shops, solely for the purpose of entrapping American women who might happen upon their shop on solo vacations, and who are obsessed with exactly these things. However, later reflecting upon my Brian Ewing, Lindsay Kuhn and Coop-inspired postergasm, I realized I probably have the same taste in art and cultural kitsch as ninety percent of tattoo artists in North America.

You seduced me, oh things I love.

As for how/why I left this little spot with a tiny star embedded in my wrist, again I blame the poutine. After consuming my first three thousand-calorie serving, I rolled into Tatouage, eyes in a glaze, and, in love with my lowbrow surroundings, had a mark that will forever be confused with a nightclub admission stamp or a sharpie doodle inked into my arm forever.

I will tell you now why you should not do this. The next time you see your Jewish parents, they will inevitably bring up The Holocaust. They will bring up the issue of your future cemetary plot, and how you will no longer be able to lie in eternal rest next to them, something you clearly should have been thinking about while you were on vacation. But worst of all, one night when you are visiting them on Long Island, forcing them to watch "The Hills," reality-ditz villian Kristin Cavailleri will, while sunning herself, look down at her feet and say, "I think I should add another star to my ankle," and you will have to be held down by your own parents from scraping your skin off with a steak knife.

Or maybe, months later, you'll just be glad you didn't eat poutine in Greenpoint in time to take advantage of 3 Kings' "Halloween Special." It's way harder to scrape a pumpkin off your lower leg than it is to laser off a 1/4 inch star.

BONUS! The Crafts:

The promise I made to myself regarding vacation purchases was that I wasn't allowed to buy anything in Canada that I could also find in the states. But living in New York, there isn't much I need or want that I can't find within a few square miles of my work and home. Crafted in a large underground studio in Vieux Montreal, Roland Dubuc's sleek, metal creations were literally the only thing that tempted me on the entire trip, and sadly they were too expensive for me to even consider. Dubuc, a truly visionary craftsman, creates each of his complex, geometric pieces of jewelry from one single sheet of carefully cut metal. Employing the main principles of origami (his models are all crafted first from paper), and an extensive background in sculpture, Dubuc cuts thin sheets of silver and gold from meticulously planned patterns, and literally folds and molds each piece into a winding, sculpted masterpiece.

Vive de l'architecture

There is no soldering of metal, whatsoever. Each piece is a work of great structural planning and impeccable execution. And Dubuc is adorably shy, impossibly sweet, and will give you a full tour of his studio if you simply ask.

Dubuc's table of paper models. The next logical step after learning the swan.

Feel free to peruse Dubuc's full line on his website, and pick out something nice for my birthday or Hanukkah, both of which just passed. That's right, you forgot to get me something. Make it up to me?

Continued in Quebeqwaaa? Miss Stacia Goes To Canada (Part Deux)...

CMJ Film Festival 2009 Preview

2009-10-14T22:31:00.002-04:00

(Published in Moving Pictures Magazine)

The 2009 CMJ Film Festival, newly invigorated with a spirit of ambitious scope and scale, is about to descend on a city of eager, discerning moviegoers, from Tuesday, October 20 through Friday, October 23. Held in various locations in New York City in conjunction with the CMJ Music Marathon, this marks the 15th year of the film festival, but the first under the supervision of Artistic Director Alex Steyermark and Festival Manager Frances Wallace. Over the years, the festival has always appealed to the hordes of music industry folk and Music Marathon registrants, but this year Steyermark and Wallace took aim at diversifying and multiplying their selections and expanding their outreach to lasso in the film industry crowd and the general moviegoing public as well.

“It’s probably a pivotal year in the film festival,” says Steyermark. “We’re sort of reorienting it going forward.”

This refocusing involves expanding the festival’s program to include 31 films, with screenings split between the Norwood Club on 14th Street and Clearview Cinemas on Chelsea’s W. 23rd Street. The selections range from larger-scale productions like the George Clooney and Ewan McGregor vehicle about psychic special forces operatives, “The Men Who Stare At Goats,” and the festival’s closing film, director Oren Moverman’s moving soldier story “The Messenger,” to first-time features like the Terror Twins’ dark comedy “The Invisible Life of Thomas Lynch” and hard-hitting documentaries like the controversial exposé of Dole Food’s farming practices, “Bananas!”

“The selection is very eclectic,” says Steyermark. “We’re not afraid to put big studio movies in the same program as maybe a little lo-fi but no less passionate music docs.”

In fact, this is the first year the festival has attempted to directly bridge the gap between music and film festival attendees through the content of the films, specifically with the Music Doc showcase. All films in the series — including “Searching for Elliott Smith,” a post-mortem biopic exploration, and “Mellodroma,” a history of the mellotron — will screen in five-hour blocks during the daytime at the Norwood (where the festival’s opening and closing parties – RSVP only – will also be held). And Friday night, the Clearview will hold a “Downtown Doc Double-Bill” featuring “Pardon Us for Living But the Graveyard is Full,” about the prolific if under-recognized band The Fleshtones, and “Kid Creole and My Coconuts,” a memoir of collected footage shot by Adriana Kaegi, the lead Coconut in an ’80s world-fusion band that was truly ahead of its time.

The music-to-film connection is also reflected in the film festival’s two panel contributions. The first, on “Breaking into Film Scoring,” features Nathan Larson, music supervisor for Moverman’s closing-night film, “The Messenger,” as well as Sue Devine, senior director of Film and Television Music at ASCAP, and will be moderated by Steyermark, an impressive music supervisor in his own right (“Malcolm X,” “The Ice Storm”). The second panel, entitled “Déjà Vu All Over Again,” explores the reality of the new film distribution model as it relates to changes already observed in the music industry. The panel, moderated by The New Yorker’s John Seabrook, will showcase authorities from both the film and music industries, including Ira Deutchman of Emerging Pictures, Matt Dentler of Cinetic Rights Management and music industry attorney Nick Gordon.

To access the full schedule of festival films or to purchase advance tickets or passes, visit the CMJ Film Festival website at www.CMJ.com/marathon.

Miss Stacia, Geek Bridezilla

2009-01-02T18:30:00.013-05:00

If, hypothetically, a man wanted to marry me today, we would have to become water brothers first. For the growing closer. We'd teleport everyone to San Francisco for a reception at the Museum of Comic Art where the main exhibit would be a Neil Gaiman retrospective, with a display of poster artists who have crossed over into comic books in the adjacent room. (Hello, Tara McP!) The first half of the night everyone would dance to Neo's "Closer," played on repeat. The second half of the night, "Closer" would alternate with "Crazy In Love," for old time's sake. The one slow dance of the evening would be to Taylor Swift's "Breathe," (our wedding song in spite of its melancholy theme) and every person, single and coupled, would be forced to play Snowball in honor of my illustrious bar-mitzvah dancing career. Graffiti artists would decorate our tablecloths and our party favors would be blind box Kozik Smokin Labbits with pictures of the in-love couple's faces taped to the bunnies' infamous buttholes.

My husband and I would don Wedding edition Nikes, and I would wear a white playsuit - something like this:

But whiter, and frillier, and with black tights.

Our invitations would be screenprinted by Kayrock and Wolfy and hand-delivered by Phillipe Petit.

I would throw a bouquet of chocolate-covered bacon to my bridesmaids before Edward James Olmos picked me and my man up in the Galactica to take us on our honeymoon on Caprica, which will have been rebuilt for the occasion and staffed by nothing but shirtless Anders' and red-dressed Model 6's. Our fidelity wouldn't last the week, but neither of us would care.

Sums and Summaries: 2008 In Mathematical Review

2008-12-31T18:16:00.011-05:00

The Basics: Counting One Through Ten (Albums)
1. Lil' Wayne – Tha Carter III (If you are "the best rapper alive," it probably means you're number one.)
2. Taylor Swift – Fearless (It only took the musical musings of a fifteen-year old to make me want to pick out a white dress and baby just say, yes.)
3. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (Drives home the heartache. Worth every falsetto-inspired tear.)
4. Lykke Li – Youth Novels (Electronically-engineered coyness. I Lykke a lot.)
5. Girl Talk – Feed the Animals ("No Diggity" over "Flashing Lights," over my first race of 6.2 miles. Not to mention a cameo by Rod-the-young-hearthrob-Stewart.)
6. Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue (Grand poeticism awash in indie country loveliness.)
7. Kaki King – Dreaming of Revenge (Humble instrumental contemplation.)
8. Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight (The Frames minus the movie deal.)
9. Vampire Weekend – Self-Titled (You can be pro "Oxford Comma," while remaining anti-Oxford comma.)
10. Why? Alopecia (Why[?] do I love thee? For your bar mitzvah references and Williamsburg Bridge companionship.)

Remainders
Fleet Foxes – Self-Titled (Breezy harmonies.)
Amanda Palmer – Who Killed Amanda Palmer? (Brash horns.)
Kanye West – 808's and Heartbreak (Vocoder soul.)

Now Ten Back to One (Songs)
10. M.I.A - "Paper Planes" (Thumping. Bass.)
9. Kaki King - "Pull Me Out Alive" (Heart. Aches.)
8. Beyonce – "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" (Man. Up.)
7. MGMT – "Electric Feel" (Throw. Back.)
6. Lil' Wayne - "Let The Beat Build" (Lift. Lower.)
5. Kanye West – "Love Lockdown" (Bang. Drum.)
4. Jenny Lewis – "Acid Tongue" (Sparse. Strum.)
3. The Dodos – "Fools" (Chorale. Rush.)
2. Lykke Li – "Little Bit" (Maybe. Love.)
1. Ne-Yo – "Closer" (Billie. Jean.)

Simple Equation for a Swedish Idol Sandwich: Lykke Li's "I'm Good I'm Gone" + Amanda Jennsen's "Do You Love Me" + Lykke Li's "Little Bit" = Syncopated Strutting Down City Streets

Fitness Routine Breakdown in Percentages
20% Ellipticalness: Robyn – Self-Titled (Inspiring Stacey's haircut '09?)
30% Weightensity: Rihanna – Good Girl Gone Bad ('07, so sue me.)
40% Treadmillocity: Beyonce – I Am Sasha Fierce (Run those thighs into '88 leotard shape.)
10% Abdomination: Lil' Wayne - "Let The Beat Build" (Over and over and beyond (8)'08.)

Who Says These Lists Have No Logic?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beyonce's I Am...Sasha Fierce (Disc 1) < Solange's Sol-Angel & The Hadley St. Dreams < Beyonce's I Am...Sasha Fierce (Disc 2)

THEREFORE:

Matthew Knowles = RICH
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" > I'm From Barcelona's "Paper Planes" (On the dance floor.)
M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" < I'm From Barcelona's "Paper Planes" (In the headphones.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IF:
Anyone who like Taylor Swift has something in common with eight year old girls.
AND
Miss Stacia likes Taylor Swift.
THEN:
Miss Stacia has something in common with eight-year old girls.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Random Data and Analysis (No Numerical Equivalent):

Electric show no one else (critic or companion) seemed to enjoy: M.I.A. @ McCarren Park, 6/6/08 (Put my neon Nikes to their proper rhythmic use.)

Oops! Forgot I had a ticket to: She & Him @ Terminal 5, 7/26/08 (Was it good? Anyone?)

Discovered I like leaning on the balcony more than standing on the main floor at: Wolf Parade @ Terminal 5, 8/31/08 (I also like a game of shuffleboard, some warm milk, and a nap after the show.)

Partied like it was my birthday at: Girl Talk @ Terminal 5, 11/16/08 (And nearly spent the midnight transition to age 26 on the coat check line.)

Most uncomfortable broadway show to see with your grandparents: Spring Awakening (Incestuous rape and live sex-simulation, followed immediately by intermission. "So how do YOU like it so far?")

How can I justify having watched so much of: The Pickup Artist (I claim research for self-defense against furry hats and goggles and terms like "kino.")

Biggest waste of Maggie Gyllenhal: "The Dark Knight Returns" (Better when Maggie is the dark one .)

Proof that a stellar cast, a decent concept, and a sprinkling of directorial fairy dust does not an awesome movie make: "Be Kind Rewind" (WTF Michel, I thought you HAD this!)

Best reason to stay home (or stay up drunk until 4am with your DVR) on Summer Friday nights: Battlestar Galactica (I heart thee Kara Thrace.)

Why the frak are they making me wait from June until 2009 for: The Battlestar finale. (This is Cylon-prison-on-New-Caprica-level torture.)

Movie That Made Me Want to be French (more than usual): "Man on Wire" (It also made me want to be muse to a man in leggings.)

Totally didn't need to see you twice in theaters: "Sex and The City The Movie" (Seppuku with a Manolo before viewing number 3.)

So glad I double dipped in: Murakami @ The Brooklyn Museum (Semen lassos! Breast-milk jump ropes! Anime-chicks transforming into airplanes!)

Proof that the lord is my personal curator: "Warhol's Jews" exhibit at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (Where screenprinting meets Golda Meir.)

Proof that Weezy groks the fullness of Robert A. Henlein's, Stranger In A Strange Land: The freaktastic lyrics to "Phone Home" ("We are not the same, I am a Martian.")

Almost lived up to the greatness of Sandman: Y The Last Man and Alias. (Is the fantasy to DATE Yorick and/or Jessica Jones or BE Yorick and/or Jessica Jones. I haven't yet decided.)

Got its ass kicked by the King of Dreams: Girls by the Luna Brothers (A hundred naked chicks per frame, all paling in comparison to Death's gothy hottness.)

Fortune Cookie Fortune Found At The Bottom Of The Wallet '08: You find beauty in ordinary things. (Like fortune cookie fortunes. And year-end lists.) Do not lose this ability.

Summer School Session 1: Old Men, Young Men

2008-06-05T16:13:00.010-04:00

Around age 10, after two years of tearful tantrums and rebellion against practicing on the Jones family’s glorious and virtually untouched baby grand, the piano and I parted ways, citing compatibility issues. The piano wanted me to learn how to play music in 3/8, and my decidedly non-mathematical brain said, “No fucking chance. Not gonna happen.” The notes promised me I’d know them by reciting things like “All Cars Eat Gas” and “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge,” but my heart said “All Cars, Who Cares?, and Every Good Boy Sort Of Has Cooties, But Is Also Sort Of Kind Of Cute.” Songbooks tried to win me over with remedial versions of timely pop hits like “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and “Take My Breath Away (Love Theme from Top Gun!),” but my advanced eight-year-old cultural meter proclaimed, “Bah! I am already over you, songs that will function only as nostalgia and punchline material in the future. To the television!” And so my prolific music career ended before it started, leaving me more time to memorize words to Mariah Carey (pop songs with longevity!), and fantasize about Zack Morris while watching him stop Jesse from ruining her life with caffeine pills.

Of course, in my adulthood, nothing has been as disappointing to me as my inability to play and read music. And as someone who has written pretty regularly about the subject, I often wonder if a deeper understanding of the technical components of music would lead to more pointed and poignant expression of my ideas. Is it really the minor key that makes this song to sound so morose? What is a minor key exactly? What makes up a key, period?

Since I’ve never been able to concentrate much on non-fiction or un-aided instructional readings, I decided to pursue my musical enlightenment in the only way the academic, structurally-inclined Jewish girl in me knew how – by signing up for a class at the Y.

My first attempt at the 92nd Street Y’s Beginner Music Theory class was short-lived. I made it to two classes – just long enough to review the bass and treble clefs using a set of meticulously constructed note-bearing flashcards - before I had to call it quits to take a job in the infamous Dub Room (a job that, in it’s earliest incarnation, occupied me from the awkwardly scheduled hours of 11am-8pm).

Nothing much stood out about the makeup of that first class, except that I remember hoping for it to be populated by hot Jewish guys with a fetish for evening hour extra-curriculars, and ended up swimming in a sea of old people. But since I have always enjoyed excelling in an academic environment, I consoled myself with the thought that even though I wouldn’t be making out with my classmates, I’d probably be kicking their wrinkled asses in class participation. (Mind you, there are no grades or tests and not even a modicum of encouraged competitive energy in this classroom setting, aside from the assertion to “challenge yourself.”)

When I walked into the classroom on the first day of my second attempt at Music Theory two weeks ago, the class element struck me as basically the same, if not a bit more fragrant with comedic possibility.

There are about fifteen students total, five of which are women in their late forties to mid sixties. This is the repetitive-question-asking contingent of the class. One woman in particular, who is taking piano lessons concurrently with the theory class, asks questions between every other breath, which explains why her instrument of choice is not the clarinet. At the end of the first class she addressed us all, asking, “Does anyone live near 55th and Lex? We could be study partners!” Much to her dismay, the entire class had decided, just that moment, to move to Brooklyn.

There is also a decent collection of early-to-late 20’s males, many of whom are trapped in the dorkiest of classical music clamshells (I love me some nerds, but I need a popoccultcha man. Or at least a sci-fi dweeb.). As the only class representation of the mid-twenties female, I get these sexy Beethovens AAAAALLL to myself.

But the classmates who are really going to make this class worth the rush hour trip on the green line, revealed themselves quite gloriously.

First was Elliot, who is roughly 200 years old. When our instructor asked Elliot if he had an email address for the class contact sheet, Elliott responded saying, “Yes, after four months I finally learned how to use it. It’s Elliot at yahoo dot com. Yahoo, like the drink.”

Yes, Elliot, like the drink! I am now working on an Elliot version of the Teddy Ruxpin doll in which a motorized, talking old man explains the origins of his email address over and over again.

In the getting to know you segment of the class, Elliot also revealed that he has been playing the harmonica for 70 years (!!!), the guitar for 50 years (!!), and the banjo for 5 (!). He’s a little winded, and his fingers are damned tired, but for the last two hundred years, he has found that an artificial chocolate drink both gives him the pick up he needs, while unlocking the key to new technology.

The other gem of the class was revealed immediately after Elliot in roll call. The name Karen was called, and a muffled, pubescent voice from the back of the room corrected, “That’s my mom. I’m Dylan.”

As we went around the room answering the questions, “What do you do?” and “Why are you here?” - answers that prompted others to say things like, “I’m in risk management and I’d like to read music,” or “I’m an actor and I want to play the piano” - Dylan responded in hilarious deadpan, “I’m in the ninth grade,” and then revealed that he plays guitar and is in a band, the name of which I’m dying to know. His expression throughout class suggested that the real answer to the question “Why are you here?” was “My mom made me come,” which makes me all the more desperate to co-opt young Dylan as my study buddy and facts-of-life advisee. I can only pray he lives in Brooklyn.

Thus, the promise of wisdom pearls from the class bookends of Elliot and Dylan may finally make it worth it for me to break out of my 4/4 shell. We’ll see how it goes.

A Black Dress Away From a Goth Girl

2008-04-03T14:03:00.043-04:00

An artists' representation of a hypothetical, 15-year old, comic-book loving Miss Stacia

Around page 9 of “Brief Lives,” otherwise known as Volume 7 of Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman series, I came upon a panel that first haunted me, and then changed my perception of my adolescence, forever.

In the panel, the character know as Delirium, one of the seven anthropomorphized, intangible forces known as the Endless, enters a nightclub on her search for her departed older brother Destruction. The nightclub is raunchy and replete with fishnet and leather clad club kids; a song pervading the background in wisps overhead with the words:

“All the word just stopped now. So you say you don’t wanna stay together anymore. Let me take a deep breath babe.”

I am waiting for my dinner date in a Japanese restaurant when I read this, and a soft rock soundtrack stunts my ability to place the familiar lyrics.

“Shit. I know this.”

…

“Oh my god, it’s Tori!”

The existence of a friendship/working relationship between Tori Amos and Neil Gaiman had been brought to my attention a few weeks earlier, when, in my desperation at not being able to find Sandman Volumes 3 and 4 in any Manhattan book or comic store (disaster!), I started reading Gaiman short stories to keep myself in the dream zone. In Fragile Things, Gaiman’s most recent story collection, I came upon reprinted program notes for Tori’s Strange Little Girls tour, written by the fantasy master at the request of the fiery songstress.

I happened to attend a show on the Strange Little Girls tour when I lived in Boston and I remember those glossy programs vividly. The concept of the album, which marked the point where my Tori fandom actually began to wither, involved Tori embodying a different female personality on each track, dressing in costumey garb for a series of comic (as in laughable) portraits and repurposing songs like Eminem’s "Bonnie and Clyde" to disastrous effect. Gaiman’s job was to craft short poems to complement each song/lady package, and the results were disjointed, strangely voiced, and lacking resonance, especially compared to his portrayal of females in his comic (as in book) work.

But discovering my latest dark obsession and my teen angst obsession had at one point converged, was at once electric and satisfying.

So I’m still sitting in the Japanese restaurant, eyes glued to the corner of a page in Volume 7, written eleven years before Fragile Things and six before the release of Strange Little Girls, and I'm still processing that by the time Gaiman had come to the tail end of his epic about Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, Tori had already crawled her way into his creative headspace. But I haven't yet answered the question of where the hell those lyrics are from, exactly.

I plug my ears with my fingers and the humming commences, while in my head I access:

All the world just stopped now
So you say you don’t wanna stay to-
gether anymore
Let me take a deep breath babe

...

If you need me and NEIL’LL BE…

(inner “HOLY SHIT!”)

HANGING OUT WITH THE DREAM KING

Now, I am not a lyrics person, generally speaking. I have gone many years only half-knowing the lyrics to my very favorite songs, and occasionally something will come out and clarify a particularly nonsensical Stacia translation and my world of references will be forced to adjust for accuracy. In the case of these particular Tori lines, for example, I have always ignored the fact that I had no idea who Neil was, and had translated the remainder of the lyrics as follows:

If you need me
Me and Neil’ll be
Hanging out with the Dream Team

For over a decade, as far as I knew, Tori could have been singing about the 1986 New York Mets.

Needless to say, when I discovered this Sandman reference, embedded in track 10 of my beloved Little Earthquakes, it triggered a moment of elation. It was like recognizing you and your boyfriend were at the same concert, sitting three seats away from each other, ten years before you ever met. My mouth hung open for the first minute and a half after I made the connection, and then I sat squealing, wanting to scream out to the heavens like a love crazed fool. I felt a desperate need to call someone and explain how I just discovered this beautiful overlap of two cultural loves of my life, but when I tried to think of someone who would appreciate the intersection, I came up blank. Finding people who simultaneously appreciate sci-fi and fantasy graphic novels and feministic piano-driven singer songwriters is a tough assignment, unless you’re smoking cigarettes on the middle school handball courts in 1995.

Suddenly, I thought of a girl named Jane, with whom I shared a relationship slightly above the acquaintance level in middle and high school. Jackie had a propensity for wearing black, brandishing smudgy eyeliner and spitting dark, sarcastic comebacks. She also had a sister who introduced her to The Cure and whose overall grumpiness found solace in the lyrically potent females acts of the early nineties. I was still inhabiting the land of bubblegum pop radio when Jane and I knew each other, but had picked up a Tori cassette tape on a cross country trip one summer, so the two of us occasionally talked about Tori or PJ Harvey or Fiona Apple, who may have been even a little too sensitive for Jane’s sensibilities.

Ten years later, it occurs to me Jane probably would have loved Sandman and may have even experienced it in its comic form. Did Jane experience the concurrent growth of Tori and Gaiman’s careers? Did she read the line from “Tear In Your Hand,” on page 9 in 1995 and let off a sarcastic smirk of knowing? And if Jane and my relationship had blossomed beyond Mrs. Chang’s history class, would I be long past (or deeper into?) the world of Gaiman right now?

When I first started reading Sandman, my awesome friend Comic Guy Mike informed me it was a book that, when released, was particularly embraced by goth kids. As someone with a pretty morbid sense of humor, a realistic-bordering-on-pessimistic view of the world, and hair that, if any darker, would take on a Betty and Veronica blue-black sheen, it's apparent I was probably an influential friend and a black dress away from life as a teenage goth girl. Which perhaps explains my newfound inclination to wear tons of deep blue eyeliner, the color of which can be found otherwise only on salesgirls at Hot Topic, and in the Dreamworld.

My New Theme Song

2008-03-10T21:52:00.008-04:00

"Hot Dog (Watch Me Eat)"

(Song by The Detroit Cobras)

Postercrastination!: And the Awareness that Awesome Band Names Do Exist

2008-02-27T19:09:00.010-05:00

The Darryl Strawberries? Really??? Why does this name make me want to give people high fives? Usually I'm into strawberries, but not strawberry flavored things. Why does this hit that sweet, fruity spot?

Perhaps because 'Darryl' serves as the flavor in this case, lending heartbreaking memories of glory turned to ruination to the band's identification. Maybe because this forename, so often chanted from the stands in the drawn and yawning, "Daaaaar-ryyyyyyyl," contrasts so nicely with the sweet sound of pluralized fruit. Perhaps because even though it's easy to love Darryl Strawberry in the same way people seem to love David Hasselhoff these days (ironically), I love the Strawb as my friend Sarah loves Baywatch's leading man -- wholeheartedly and a little more when he's shirtless. I could fill an-about-to-be-knocked down-stadium with genuine affection for the first baseball player I - the daughter of a lifelong Met fan - ever recognized by name.

I haven't been able to find much info on The Darryl Strawberries, but I did come across their Jersey-based doppelgängers. For some reason Darryl and the Strawberries doesn't work quite as well. (Though I do like their poster.) I don't want just one Darryl and some fruit. I want a band of fruity Darryls.

***UPDATE: The best part about being in a fantasy baseball league is that your fellow managers will send you pictures like this one (The Awareness that Awesome Photographs Do Exist) and have conversations like the one that follows, when you tell them you posted something about Darryl Strawberry to your blog:

C: I have two questions for you, unrelated
K: shoot
C: did Hassellhoff ever make a Simpsons cameo
K: not to my knowledge
K: unless it was post season 10 or something
C: and from Stacey, do people love Darryl Strawberry ironically
C: or do they just love him
K: oh
K: that's tough
C: ie, do they love him the same way people love David Hassellhoff
C: I say no
K: if you can call it love it's certainly not ironic. absolutely not
K: i love straw for the reason i don't love doc
K: straw overcame himself, at least as far as baseball
K: rather, he never stopped trying to beat his demons
C: I'm with you
C: hadn't made the Doc leap, but I like it
K: doc just never gave a fuck
K: both unfairly talented who did whatever they could to waste that talent--it just strikes me that doc was into it and straw was not
K: does she love straw ironically?
C: do you mind if I copy/paste this to stacey
C: I just don't want to retype it
K: no please do
C: she claims to love Straw wholeheartedly
C: and was saying most people love him ironically
C: I said no
K: ahh
K: i think straw proved himself w/ the 99 yankees

So people don't love Strawberry ironically. Everyone's just full of Berry nostalgia. It should be noted that though I'm in a fantasy baseball league and have been privileged to have a father with season's tickets to Shea since '88, I haven't really been measuring the way males in particular have felt about Darryl over the past fifteen years -- so I apologize for being one of the many to throw up her hands and claim irony at the first sign of complex cultural affection. Still, both Hoff and Sir Strawberry will end up on hipster t-shirts, if they haven't already.

Postercrastination!: Seek and Find

2008-02-27T00:17:00.010-05:00

Though concert posters with illegible text usually get under my skin (why bother making a poster only to obscure the information it's promoting?), I couldn't help but take to this poster by Fast Friends Inc. with its technicolor muppet doodles, perfected in high school detention. This is one of those hand drawn numbers that reveals its wonders both at a distance, like a magic eye, and up under the magnifying glass where you can take notice of its tiny, kindergarten-culled artifacts. While pulling mini treasures from my first grade teacher's rewards drawer and the toy chest at the dentists office, these guys still managed to spray the whole image in large-cocked ludicrousness. A stick(er)y recipe for success!

See if you can find all of the surprises:

1. elephant
2. hamburger
3. sunglasses
4. 2 kiddie pool tubes
5. Hello Kitty
6. the name Alice
7. Superman
8. blue crab
9. 5 magic mushrooms
10. large multicolor penis (spewing a band-name-explosion)

Le Groupe Cinématographique

2008-02-24T20:17:00.010-05:00

The following article recently appeared in the Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts, a paper I know exists because I swiped a few copies the day they landed on the stoop of Pharmacy Neapolitano (on the corner of Graham and Metropolitan), but whose inexplicable lack of online presence serves as a serious inhibitor to proof of print for anyone living outside of my immediate neighborhood. The piece was written for the paper's LOVE issue, and I'm posting it here so you can share in it. (The LOVE , that is.)

Love of Cinema Powers Rock from Williamsburg's La Laque

credit: Sean McCabe

La Laque’s sole collective asset as a band is a DVD of Tenacious D’s "The Pick of Destiny" that lead singer Devery Doleman picked up before band practice one day at the FYE on 6th Avenue for $9.99. This may appear to be an odd investment for a band whose elegant style and sultry sound seems derived more from classic noir movies of the thirties than overlooked stoner comedies of 2007, but it’s astounding how many films this Williamsburg quintet has effectively combed for inspiration.

“We’re all HUGE, HUGE movie fans,” says drummer Ben Shapiro. “It’s kind of all we talk about, and all we think about all the time.”

Though the band initially formed in late 2003, La Laque has been together in its current incarnation since 2004, weaving songs initially born as straight surf rock and 60’s pop pastiche, into darker, sexier compositions, fraught with dirty surf guitar and swathed in Doleman’s textured, breathy vocals. The band’s evolution into, as guitarist and main songwriter Michael Leviton describes it, “a dark indie rock band with French, surfy elements,” has pushed them far beyond the borders of kitch and gimmick. Their songs, lustful and tragic, paint pictures of smoke filled dives, intimate rendezvous, and haughty femme fatales.

Doleman is partially responsible for guiding the band down this storyteller’s path. Since the band’s inception, she has penned La Laque’s lyrics completely in French, both to take advantage of her incredible talent for manipulating the language’s vocabulary and diction, and because she simply finds her voice to be a suppler instrument en Français. This presents her bandmates with the unique challenge of creating music sympathetic to lyrics in a foreign language.

“Most of us don’t know what the lyrics mean,” says Leviton. “Leah (Hayes) and Devery do – but the rest of us are responding to a kind of story or visual feeling of what they evoke. What it sounds like it’s expressing, as opposed to what it’s expressing in words. We may react to something that seems scary, or intensely romantic, just as you'd write music for a movie, I think.”

Luckily, the band’s organ player and backup singer (Hayes) is a horror movie fanatic, their main songwriter and guitarist (Leviton) also writes screenplays, and their bassist (Brad Banks) and drummer (Shapiro) have been known to seek out screenings of Otto Preminger noir films on the weekends. The band's recently released, self-titles EP suggests There may not be a band better equipped to spin French-led songs into luscious, compelling, cinema-style narrative.

credit: Sasha Rudensky

Though the dramatic interplay of Doleman’s cool, delicate delivery with the dark, lush waves of sound summoned by the rest of the band is clearly articulated on record, on stage the vocals can at times be sacrificed to the energy of the band’s live show. But even if her voice can’t push through the raucousness of the rhythm section, Doleman serves as a guide through La Laque’s live landscape with her sleek stage mannerisms, punctuating Hayes’ organ chords with perfectly timed bats of her eyelashes and dancing to Leviton's guitar.

“Devery, as a focus for the band, channels all of that smoldering energy on stage out to the audience,” says Banks. “Kind of like a lens that we all focus thorough, all that heat kind of comes through her to the crowd.”

Thus, even in a live show that rocks hard, something classic and cinematic is transmitted – a reflection of old glamour, and the sexual potency and mystery of the films the band collectively adores.

La Laque’s self-titled debut EP is now available on iTunes.

Hatch Show Me Love

2008-02-14T12:14:00.009-05:00

(aka Holy Shit It's a Post About Posters!)

The first rock concert poster I ever bought was a White Stripes print of two adorable Asian cartoon karate kids against a geometric red, white and black background. The poster was designed by rock screenprint legend, Frank Kozik (though if you didn't know it you'd never guess, it's way too cutesy), and though that meant nothing to me when I purchased it in 2002, in 2008 all I can think about when I look at it is how Kozik's signature was most likely cropped and discarded when the dumbfuck at the framing place on Newbury Street cut the print to fit it in a standard frame. It's totally possible the poster I bought was a fake - I did purchase it on eBay - but the quality of the ink leads me to believe otherwise. I may never know if the piece is authentic, but my very first poster is still much loved and hanging on the Jones family walls (now at Raquel's new place):

Frankie, did you sign me?

The second rock concert poster I ever bought was also a White Stripes print, purchased at show I attended in Boston (I believe at the Orpheum Theater). The print had such a homegrown, familiar feel to it, a welcome departure from the slick, posed photograph band posters so popular in college dorm rooms. It lived in my Boston living room for one year, and it wasn't until the end of my senior year of college, at the tail end of a feature writing project I was doing on rock concert poster art, that I walked up to the poster, took a look at the tiny imprint beneath the bottom border and exclaimed, "Holy shit, this is a Hatch Show Print!"

My first Hatch Show in it's old UWS home

Hatch Show Print is rock and roll history. The oldest letterpress in the country, the shop has been handpulling bold, two and three color block printed posters since the 1920's, creating prints for everyone from Elvis and Louis Armstrong to, now, more contemporary acts like Tool and The White Stripes. Located in Nashville, TN, Hatch Show is now supported by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (since 1992), and in addition to producing some of the most striking block printed imagery imaginable, also serves as a forum for the historic preservation of the letterpress artform.

Tonight I saw Hatch Show's Lead Designer, Jim Sherraden, who has been with the print shop since 1984, speak that the AIGA, and he was pretty freaking awesome. So awesome, he - after showing slide of an intern proofreading a poster - poked fun at a typo on the event poster produced by AIGA and frog design that the event planners had DEFINITELY not yet noticed:

To be fair, it took me 40 seconds to find it.

I found out Jim was speaking through my usual means of poster-related procrastination. I was working (or looking for new ways not to work) on a piece about poster art in New York, and found myself trolling the usual poster and design sites when I happened upon Hatch Show Print's web store, where I became instantly infatuated with a series of Monoprints Jim has been doing since 1992. For these art prints, Sherraden takes odd woodblock images and screens them over each other with slightly transparent inks in bold colors. The results are euphoric -- messy and retro in their imagery, but modern in their collaged style and potent colors. I fell murderously in love with a piece that was already sold, and when I wrote to Hatch Show inquiring if there were other pieces like it, Jim replied to me himself telling me he is always working on new stuff and that I should come see him speak in New York in February.

I could not pass up the opportunity to go to an event with screenprinted wine labels:

Sherradan opened the show with a history of Hatch, reassuring his audience that he'd run through these points many times before.

"I figure it's about three minutes a decade," he said.

The man has a sense of humor, willing to exploit himself for jokes. The first thing I noticed when I took my seat was an old school projector in the middle of the room, and of course , when picking up the remote and drawing the tangled cord out five feet to the front of the room he raised his remote arm and quipped, "Being the true luddite!" adding, "The slideshow quit being cute about two years ago." During the slideshow he also showed a picture of himself in his high school wrestling outfit, and made a comment about his "eight inch stapler."

I am on board with this man.

I am also on board with the way Hatch Show Print is run. First of all, at their new location, where they've operated since 1992, there is a 54 foot WALL OF TYPE containing all of the original wood block fonts that have become Hatch Show's calling card. The shop is a non-profit or a "working museum," as Jim calls it, and part of the responsibility of the shop in Jim's eyes is to preserve the original woodblock fonts that have been collected by the shop for the last eighty or ninety years. This is why, although Jim encourages his fellow printers/designers (the terms are one and the same at Hatch) to create new image blocks, he refuses to accept any new type carvings into Hatch, so as not to "pollute the collection." Jim also believes in preservation through production -- the woodblocks he uncovers from the archives, he feels obligated to use in new prints. A large part of his impetus for starting the Monoprint production was to employ woodblocks that lay dormant for decades beforehand. The record of the ancient craftsmanship of letterpress and woodblocking in this way comes alive on paper.

Jim also talked a lot about why there has been a resurgence of interest in Hatch Show Print over the last few years, which has been a noticeable phenomenon. The shop recently did all of CNN's posters for the California debate. The network that used touch screen maps to show election projections during the primaries, also employed a hundred-year-old letterpress shop to make their posters. (Which are AWESOME, btw.) When Finding Nemo was released, Pixar had Jim and the crew make 150 posters, one for each animator. Hand-printed posters for the kings of digital animation? Wade through the irony there. How does Jim explain the enthusiasm for his seemingly antiquated artform by even the most digitally engrossed?

"The computer is the best thing that ever happened to Hatch. We're the antiheroes of digital design," he says.

And it's true, in a world where everything is slick and digital, people are still hankering for real, raw, handcrafted art.

But Jim does admit, "times are a changing -- nobody wants the big paper up in their storefront," and that posters "have changed from being practical items to being more decorative." Most of the posters Hatch Show prints these days are resold as "concessions." But if the posters Jim sells to bands and promoters for $3 a pop are sold off for $20 at the merch stand, he doesn't seem to have a problem with it. His number one duty is to keep ol' Hatch Show and the art of letterpress alive.

If the shop continues to produce work as stunning as what was displayed on the walls tonight, I don't see how it will ever die.

My new favorite.

5 More Things I Didn't Know About Hatch Show Print Before This Evening:

1. Hatch Show Print is one of the top ten tourist sites in Nashville.
2. BB King is currently Hatch Show's most active client. He commissions about 7,000 posters a year from the print shop.
3. Hatch Show has a lot of interns, some who work for six weeks, and some for six months. Jim says he has trouble teaching interns the value of a good border (something he believes in strongly, and uses often) because they are used to the full bleed of a computer screen.
4. The print shop, quite obviously obsessed with archiving, saves three of everything made, "even wedding invitations." The fact that Hatch Show prints wedding invitations just gave me a real reason to get married.
5. Jim is hoping to focus more on the Monoprints over the next 5-10 years so he can pull neglected woodblocks (about 40% of the larger blocks filed in the shop are out of use) into the printing rotation. What this means for Miss Stacia: A buying spree is inevitable. Hopefully by the time Jim is finished I'll have some damn money.

Cut and Play

2008-02-10T23:08:00.003-05:00

Avoiding the hi-top fade.

For women, getting a haircut is serious businazz. A bad cut can set a fella back for maybe a week or two, at worst triggering nasty sideburn envy after a shaving mishap, or forcing him to wear one of those douchebag beanie caps to cover up when a near-blind barber accidentally buzzes everything down with a one instead of a two. But for ladies, one trip to an overeager hair "artiste" can result in the way-too-short bangs from hell, or a Little Richard-style mullet that flaunts it's top heavy puff and tail for the better part of a month.

This is especially of concern to females with high maintenance hair, a category the frizzy/wavy/curly Jones family women have covered from every angle. My monster mop requires a hairdresser with an intimate understanding of Wavy Jewvolume, Straight Jewangles, and the curse-of-all-curses Jewfrizz-humidity factor. Once you find a scissor-wielder who is familiar with these tricky follicular properties, you don't let him/her go, which is why I have been returning to my West Village godsend of a stylist for the past three years. This woman - who I'll call Valerie - is nothing less than a genius, who in addition to carving the sexiest, most versatile looks into this mop of mine, also knows when to talk a woman out of chopping all her hair off (after a breakup), which she has done for me twice, much to my future relief.

In fact, only recently (three weeks ago?) did Valerie allow me to cut significant length off my locks, giving me a fun, gradual bob that prompted my mother to introduce me at a Superbowl party with the line, "This is my daughter, Posh Spice."

Beckham's bathroom is bigger.

When Miss Raquel (little sis), who has super curly hair, mentioned to me that she was looking for a new hairdresser, there was no doubt in my mind she needed to see Valerie, though I'd never seen the woman attack a head of curly hair before. And Miss Raquel's hair is no joke. Back when she was in middle school (when ladies are just beginning to learn how to work with what God has given them), it took a third of a bottle of green LA Looks gel to tame those crazy corkscrews. There was a closet in the Jones family basement that held no less than fifteen bottles of ecto-green, Level 3 gel (Maximum Hold, which trumps Extra Hold, FYI) in reserve. A seven day Mexico vacation would prompt the packing of THREE BOTTLES - God forbid there wasn't enough gunk to combat the extra showers, effects of chlorine, and Jewmidity. I imagine Miss Raquel carried around a pound of product in her hair each day. Not fun. The evolution of hair products, good advice from stylists and YEARS of experimentation have led Miss Raquel to a lower maintenance, green goop-free hair care routine, but the girl still has some serious (though gorgeous) hair to contend with.

Which is why I almost shit myself when I walked into the hairdresser to meet Miss R for brunch after her appointment with Valerie to find this

had been transformed into this

Miss Raquel is one of the few Long Island Jewish girls who didn't find it necessary to default to the long arduous straightening process and iron the fuck out of her beautiful curls in the high school days. Instead she embraced her curly genes (which for my father - before balding - produced the most magnificent 60's fro you've ever seen) and was undoubtedly more beautiful and less aggravated for it. I can only remember one time when, out of sheer curiosity, I tried to straighten the lady's hair and it was a nightmare -- over an hour of brushing and heat and sizzling split ends, resulting in all pouf, no gloss. 70's Diana Ross style results. But apparently it's standard procedure at Valerie's salon to finish cuts on curly manes when they're blown out straight, so Miss Raquel got the professional straightening treatment, and ended up looking way more polished than she did after my botched attempt, and just a touch more like...well...

Like moi! (Granted I don't wear glasses, but I'll meet her in the middle here.)

In the eighties we would have raked in the dough for Doublemint gum commercials. Now we'll have to settle for a career in twin porn.

My fascination with little sis' straight hair lasted for the seven or eight hours we spent together during a long, hungover Saturday. In between our catch up sessions and futile attempts to do work (which consisted of more childhood reminiscing and advice about men, punctuated by occasional exclamations of, "Okay, time to do work!"), I took about thirty pictures of Miss Raquel in various poses related to the unfamiliar silkiness of her hair. Since I has gone to bed at 5am on Saturday morning and woke up to join Rachel at the hairdresser four hours later, it took me a little while to realize the significance of this particular photo:

I took this picture of Miss R as she was explaining that she never gets to run her fingers through her (curly, gelled) hair, but what I didn't think about at the time is that this also means Rachel has gone through 22 years of her life without OTHER PEOPLE running their fingers through her locks. As a major proponent of (receiving) hairplay, 'twas a sad, sad moment when I realized ma chere soeur Raquel has been missing out on one of life's fundamental pleasures for all these years.

I'm a hairplay SLUT - I'll take it from who/wherever I can get it: mom, grandma, lady friends, and boyfriends (or nice boys who wanna make me loooooove them). It's kind of disturbing how much I enjoy the feeling of someone's fingers dragging through my mane from scalp to ends. My eyes instantly close. Sometimes I let out sex moans. Occasionally I even lift my leg and do a canine shake. OHMIGOD it's so good. If you're a lousy lay but you rub a mean scalp I'll keep you around, but not vice versa. You have to give good head.

The thing is, there are strict rules regarding when hairplay can and cannot be administered, especially for curly and wavy haired ladies (or ladies who do both straight and curly). Men, even the ones who are kind of touchy about their own hairstyles, never seem to understand that running your fingers through waves and curls will turn a lady's head into a ball of frizzy mess. There are ways to play with wavy hair that minimize style disturbance (scalp massage only), and special cases (right before washing) where curly/wavy hairplay is sanctioned, but I know it is difficult for fellas (who understandably don't really give a shit) to identify when their ladies are going to give them hell for trying to show a little affection. A boyfriend once suggested I draw up a chart outlining these guidelines, so I decided to finally make it happen. Hopefully it will serve as a worthwhile teaching tool for devoted hairplaying men around the world:

**Rules may be amended based on hair washing schedule, approaching gym time, and the promise of hot sweaty sex. Consult the owner of the hair in question for with inquiries about specific scenarios.

In the end it's pretty simple. If you move to play with my hair and I don't want you to, you'll know it. Otherwise, I will shake my leg uncontrollably and sigh. And probably put out.

And to Miss Raquel I say, HONEY. Take advantage of the straightness while you can. Make the boyf take a sick day and have him feed you grapes while he runs his fingers through all twelve inches of it for 18 hours, nonstop. Holy shit after 22 years locked in gel you deserve it.

And then go back to curly, cause I love you that way. Besides, the Doublemint days are over and neither of us are desperate enough to do porn -- though it is nice to know we've got that niche option.

Faith in Fashion

2008-02-10T20:12:00.000-05:00

Little Sis: What does one wear to an Orthodox bachelorette party?

LS: I'm going to wear my Hanukkah socks.

How I Met My (Potential) Roommate

2008-02-05T20:34:00.000-05:00

(20 minutes into our first meeting)

Her: So since I do the window design, I get a discount at Bloomingdale's.

Me: You should have walked through the door, shook my hand, and opened with that.

Her: They do Friends and Family, you know...

Me: I hate to tear down the hipster façade, but I happen to love department store shopping.

Her: Of course you do. You're from Long Island.

Oil Can

2008-01-29T01:37:00.001-05:00

A four year sabbatical from writing news or feature style articles will make a lady pretty rusty.

Eating Greenpoint: Peter Pan Doughnuts and Pastries

2008-01-14T00:15:00.000-05:00

It's a shame that for the last four years, anytime someone mentions Peter Pan I think of this and not this. But now, thanks to a long walk down Manhattan Ave, when someone mentions the boy in tights who won't grow up, I can think about Bavarian creme and hyperglycemia.

The window at Peter Pan Doughnuts and Pastries works hard to pull you in. Early on a Sunday morning, the racks are stacked full with donuts, twists and muffins of all varieties.

The case also happens to espouse Miss Stacia's mantra about eating, in general:

When I passed the glass this morning, the shelves were due for a refill, but there were still plenty of appealing options calling out to me. I took out my camera to capture a few shots of the fried dough, slathered in glaze, dipped in chocolate and garnished with enough toppings to appease Michael Scott on pretzel day, when a woman stopped in front of me, looking confused.

"Are you taking pictures of the donuts?" she asked.

"Why, yes I am." Is that not normal?

The donut I ended up selecting for myself was the same one I eyed the very first time I passed the bakery - a chocolate glazed number with a generous dollop of custard in the middle and half a spoonful of jelly crowning the whole affair. Put a tri-color cookie on top of this sucker and it's everything I've ever wanted out of life in a four-inch circle.

You are my destiny

I brought this baby back to my apartment and consumed it in between sips of Earl Grey tea, an attempt to balance this disc of sin with something prim and proper. Seven bites later I felt ready to explode. Seven hours later I'm ready for another.

Before the Dunkin Donuts franchise overextended itself - promising the delivery of stale, underglazed donuts at every location - I was a regular consumer, mainly of the marble frosted and Boston creme varieties. And nothing excited me more than the day I got to taste the Doughnut Plant donut that beat Bobby Flay. (Their signature tres leches cake donut is kind of worth it, but their yeast peanut butter and jelly one is better.) I even seriously considered making zeppoli after watching Giada Di Laurentis - who I usually can't stand - coat a batch of her homemade donut holes with powdered sugar on The Food Network.

The point is, I have eaten a lot of freaking donuts in my day. I am a qualified judge and can vouch for the validity of the following information regarding the Peter Pan donut I housed this afternoon:

Superlative this donut won in high school:
Best Dressed

5 Adjectives this donut would use to describe itself:
Sweeeeeet, Loaded, Airy, Decadent, (Fucking) Badass

Warning: Consumption of this donut may result in side effects including:
Heartburn. Sugar high. Sleep deprivation. Sunday Morning Pastry Addiction.

Peter Pan Doughnuts, I give you my hearty endorsement, but to the future consumers of your lightly fried, heavily iced wares I do advise: Proceed with caution.

Eating Greenpoint: An Introduction

2008-01-13T22:59:00.000-05:00

So glad I got the Diet Coke

There's never been a time when I've doubted my devotion to potato and cheese-filled dough, eight-inch long sausages, or meat-stuffed anything, but my obsession with hearty Eastern European cooking has reached new gut-busting proportions since my move to Greenpoint two months ago. I now live on the cusp of Brooklyn's largest Polish-American community, which means I can pull up a chair in one of twenty homestyle, pierogi-slinging restaurants before you can figure out how to pronounce "Żywiec." (Zhi-vee-ets.)

It's not my fault nothing gets me hotter than a potato pancake or a big kielbasa. Most of my grandparents originally came from Poland, so the Polish Comfort Food Fever is most likely a genetic condition. Whatever the case, I seriously can't get enough of the stuff, and my buttocks are slowly becoming as round and full as stuffed cabbages.

My latest obsession is red borchst with dumplings (pronounced more like "barchst" according to a Polish acquaintance of mine), something I had only tried once before moving to the new hood. I've been sampling the RBwD in just about every Polish eatery I've wandered into, and it's a dish that has changes very little from place to place. A super thin broth, that's deep magenta in color, served piping hot with three to five meat tortellini that often soak up the color of the liquid bed in which they bobble. The purple color of the borscht, for those who don't know Polish food, comes from the beet, which is the main flavoring for this soup, though I believe other vegetables and seasonings are used in the cooking, and then strained out before serving. Either way, the resultant flavor is warm and rich with just a touch of sweet spice to it. The earthy meat of the dumpling is a perfect contrast to the sharp flavor of the broth and is a nice change from the often over-flavored ground meat of Italian cuisine. Overall, the soup is simple and tasty - a reason to look forward to cold sleety days.

As I continue to eat my way through my neighborhood I plan to report on Polish food and other neighborhood delicacies, so stay tuned. In my recent experience I've found a restaurant's decor and vibe can really intensify the enjoyment factor of the eating experience (for example, the picture above was taken at a place called King's Feast, a restaurant that has two full suits of armor guarding the front door, and a soundtrack of Polish, 90's-style dance jams playing on full blast at 3 in the afternoon), so I will try to capture images of the defining environmental details when I can. And when I get through the easy staples and move on to pig's knuckles, you better believe I'm reporting it here. If I make it back alive.

But for now I will leave you because it's starting to snow, and I have to go dream of the dark pink soup I will consume as a result.

Mixed Messages

2008-01-13T22:13:00.000-05:00

My Hot Saturday Night

2008-01-06T02:27:00.000-05:00

It's 8pm on a particularly mellow Saturday night when I take my book to my favorite Greenpoint polish spot - my sanctuary - and prepare to relax, uninterrupted. I order red borscht with dumplings, the kielbasa and white sausage plate and a big bottle of Lech premium brew, and proceed to eat a long, slow meal, alternately turning the pages of my book and carving my meat into bite size pieces. Forty-five minutes later my is table is clear but for a half-empty beer glass, and I recline cross-legged, engrossed in my novel.

This book of mine is my first-ever Danielle Steel novel (which I am reading for a writing project, I swear), and it has proved an unbearable assignment. I am just beginning to hit my stride when I look up to see the waitress holding a second enormous beer bottle and a fresh, tall glass. "From the gentlemen at the bar," she tells me. I know well enough to be nervous. Slowly I turn my attention to the banquette in fear, curiosity, and to reluctantly give thanks.

My benefactor is grey-haired and probably sixty years old, smiling sheepishly from his stool. "Of course," I think to myself. "Who else takes themselves out to dinner on a Saturday night? Little Miss Stacia and desperate old men." This is a harsh and probably inaccurate appraisal, but the truth is, I have been approached many times by much older men while dining alone, especially on weekend nights when twenty-five year-olds who are expected to be out doing exciting and irresponsible things with their young lives must seem like easy prey. Here I am, gorging myself on pickled cabbage, reading romance novels like I'm eighty-seven. I am probably asking for it.

The grey-haired man beckons me over. His alcoholic donation makes me feel guilty enough to oblige. He tells me his name is Kazimir, but that I should call him "Kaz." Kaz tells me he moved from Poland to the United States twenty years ago and that he hasn't been back to Poland since. He tells me his mother still lives there and won't come visit him in the States because he's without a wife and kids. His quick declaration of singlehood signals to me early on that I'm in trouble, but for a while our conversation passes without incident. He asks me what I'm reading. I show him "Passion's Promise" and tell him how shocked my grandmother was to hear I'd never read one of Steel's novels before. I'm not sure how much of this Kaz understands, as his English is a bit shoddy, but he tells me his mother reads Danielle Steel in Poland and his sister reads her in Canada. "Everyone around the world reads this," he tells me. Then he holds the book up in prayer position between his two flat palms and says, "Whatever is in this book, it is life." This man has obviously never read any Danielle Steel. I am also hoping for his own sake, he's drunk.

"What are you doing this Friday night?" he asks me. "You will be here, no? "I'm having a birthday party here, Friday night, and you will come." It is time for me to get the check.

I ask the waitress to total me up, but Kaz has insisted he will pay. I just want to go home. Kaz won't accept that I'm not coming to his birthday party on Friday. He tells the waitress, apparently a friend of his, that he has "a situation," and that she should talk to me "like girls talk," about coming to his soiree. "I think I'm the one that has the situation," I tell her.

I thank Kaz for the drink and for dinner and wish him a happy birthday. He gets up from his stool to help me into my coat. On my way out the door I shake off the shadow of unwelcome advance, tuck my romance novel into my bag, and for the first time understand why women have ever wanted to read the damn things in the first place.

Free Cal

2008-01-01T13:44:00.001-05:00

I just looked at my G Cal (Google Calendar - the means by which I run my life), and was shocked to find blank square after blank square of unplanned days, evenings and weekends in January. In fact, my calendar is completely empty for all of 2008. As of this moment I have zero future commitments (birthdays, holidays and other recurring events aside), and I can't remember another time in my life where I felt so liberated from extra work duties, family functions, and social obligations. This year's new year's resolution: Spontaneity!

Now who wants to make some plans?

A Mother's Resolutions For Her Daughter

2008-01-01T10:41:00.000-05:00

1. Wear your retainers/rainboots/snowboots/hat/gloves/new thing instead of the same old thing.
2. J Date/ 8 Minute J Date/Attend temple singles parties.
3. If you're going to go to Dunkin Donuts, use a coupon. Here, it's two-for-one.
4. Listen to your mother.

You're In A Musical

2007-12-29T19:17:00.001-05:00

Perhaps it is fitting that I am sitting down after Sweeney Todd, to watch last year's musical glitzbomb Dreamgirls for the first time since it shook its spangles at me on the big screen. This will be my third musical in five days (Hairspray, Sweeney Todd, now Dreamgirls) and probably not my last as Once, an Irish movie musical I never even heard of until last week, just arrived in my mailbox between two pieces of red paper. I basically gave up on the musical when I left the middle and high school chorus days behind me in a fit of rebellion against RENT and too many years of musical theater nerddom. Since then, a musical has blipped on my radar every once in a great while- Dancer in the Dark, for example - and even then, only the involvement of someone like Bjork (and the promise of an unorthodox treatment of the musical format) has allowed me to invest myself. But these days I can't believe how much I've been looking forward to the movie musicals that seem to be popping up like dandelions. I fucking hate Abba - a holdover grudge from the bat/bar mitzvah dancing days (something about the lyrics "dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17" really rubbed me the wrong way, especially at age 17) - but damned if I'm not looking forward to a big screen version of Mamma Mia! that features a singing and dancing Meryl Streep.

Somehow I am always pleased, but never really that surprised when accomplished actors and actresses can sing. If you make a career out of manipulating your voice and tone and delivery, chances are you can belt out a decent tune. And yet the first notes out of Johnny Depp’s mouth of rotten Old Londonized teeth, about three minutes into Sweeney Todd, were nothing short of thrilling.

Quickly, Sweeney Todd is the story of a barber, Sweeney Todd (Depp), who is wrongfully imprisoned on the orders of a corrupt judge (Alan Rickman) who plans to steal Todd’s beautiful, flaxen-haired wife. Years later, Todd returns to London seeking the love of his wife and proper revenge. Instead of his lady, he finds Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the owner of a rancid meat pie shop below his old barbershop. As for the revenge, I’ll let you see the movie. Heads roll, and Johnny Depp sings about it. It’s all great fun.

Depp’s voice doesn’t exactly move the earth, but it’s hearty enough to get the job done, and his menacing delivery is spiked with just enough lovelorn angst to brand Todd as a both a murderer and a romantic. Helena Bonham Carter, another longtime muse of director Tim Burton's, truly stands out for the first time in her role as Mrs. Lovett, the nurturing and desperate would-be love of the demon barber. She is ghostly yet seductive, her corseted bosom, deliberately mussed bouffant, and grandiose, gothic rag gowns making her appear both doll-like and (taking her quirkiness into account) ready for the Oscars. Her twee voice and powdered visage always reflect the appropriate zest and/or tenderness. Some of my favorite moments of the movie occur during a solo song of Mrs. Lovett’s entitled "By The Sea" in which she describes to a brooding and unreceptive Todd, her dreams for their future. The song plays over a series of fantasy shots of Todd and Lovett, dressed in their palette of grays and blacks and blues and blood reds, against bright blue picnic skies and fanciful boardwalk scenery. And all the while HBC’s piping delivery of the light little tune plays contrast to Depp’s stubborn, boyish scowl, making for irrepressible laughs.

The other real musical highlights of the film are the duets. Moments in which two known actors have the opportunity to synchronize their instruments, even briefly, are magical when captured in Burton’s magical frames. In “A Little Priest,” Todd and Lovett are squared side by side in the window of Lovett’s pie shop, pressing their hands and faces to the dirty glass, looking out upon the London's streets while singing in perfect unison of turning various Londonites into meat pie filling. In “Pretty Women,” Todd and his foe Judge Turpin wax musical about one thing they have in common – their love of beautiful girls – as the two men, one in the barber’s chair, are cast against the dark, slanted window of Todd’s barbershop-turned-slaughterhouse. Rickman’s gravely bass is so classic and useful here, the perfect backdrop for Depp’s lead vocal, though I like to imagine Michael Caine could have swapped in for the same function. (He actually took on a similarly evil role involving an infatuation over “pretty women” in the movie Quills, which I double, no, triple heart.) I wonder if Sir Caine was on the casting list. Perhaps he was Rickman’s understudy.

When it all comes down to it, the strongest vocalists of the bunch were the kid actors. This is hardly surprising, as in these roles Burton had the advantage of seeking excellent singers without worrying about casting a known face. Ed Sanders as Toby, the small boy Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd take in after the mysterious disappearance of his caretaker, tackles the most famous song of the Sweeney score (with a bit of help from HBC). Three-quarters of the way through the film, I was amazed to hear Toby launch into “Not While I’m Around,” first of all because the song seems a bit sugary and sentimental buried in what is otherwise a comedic, horror musical, and second because I didn’t think I knew any songs from the show. And I didn’t just recognize the song; I knew every single word, yet I couldn’t figure out how or why. I was about to attribute the familiarity to my summer of chorus/theater camp (yeah, I know), when my mother enlightened me during the credits. “I didn’t know that song the little kid sang was from this show,” she said. “You know who sings that song? Barbra Streisand. That song has been played at every bat and bar mitzvah on Long Island.”

Wow. Of course it was Babs. I can hear that nasal bravado reach up for those high notes even now. She must be a friend of Sondheim’s because I don’t see how else the Funny Girl would have found her way to Fleet Street. Although she did always cover “Send In The Clowns,” another song of Sondheim’s. (And one that I don’t particularly enjoy.) The one thing that is certain is that I know way too much about this.

Barbra Streisand career does, however, provide a good example of a born singer summoning some acting chops for the big screen, which was the idea behind recruiting Jennifer Hudson to do Dreamgirls. It’s definitely an effective model for casting musical roles in a lot of cases. In Chicago, Catherine Zeta Jones nailed her song and dance routines, probably better than most could do on the stage, but when Jennifer Hudson delivered “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”, she laid down what will probably be remembered as one of the best recordings in the history of musicals.

I’ll tell you something about “ And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” That song is so close to perfect it’s scary. When those first notes landed in the theater, all of my normal bodily functions were suspended. (Well, my breathing was. Not my crying.) It is such an artfully constructed song, peaks in all the right places, a flourishing, incremental build, a funky ass breakdown complete with punctuating horns -- the perfect platform for a robust, soulful voice, with a message that resonates, simply stated. And then Hudson puts her fierce, womanly stamp on it and rockets it through you. I don't listen to musical soundtracks much anymore, but occasionally when I want to get hit with an earthquake I'll bring that song up on the iPod and let it knock me on my ass.

I say the song is nearly perfect and not absolutely motherloving capital “P” fucking Perfect because of a monster peeve I’ve developed over about four seconds towards the very end of the song. But this is really just nitpicking. Even with a few bars that grate on me, if I put that song on once, I’m listening to it twice. And as I am experiencing now, the second time around Dreamgirls entertains, but mostly it's just eye candy costumes and counting the minutes to J Hud's big moment.

Generally speaking though, musicals are kicking ass these days. I spent so long rejecting them on principle (see me kicking and screaming on my way to A Chorus Line and Hairspray on Broadway last year), that I may have to force myself to loosen up and accept that visionaries like Tim Burton can liven up tired genres, and that once I learned all the words to Cabaret and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat because something about staged and storied song and dance moved me. (For the Joseph obsession I also blame my parents, Hebrew School and years of unchecked, unfettered dorkiness.) Every once in a while I should prepare to be embarrassed and give in, because it’s likely I’ll fall in love with John C. Reilly’s performance of “Mr. Cellophane,” an eight-year old’s cover of a Streisand cover of Sweeney Todd, or an almost motherfucking Perfect Dreamgirls song.

Pretending I Paid Attention This Year: A List

2007-12-27T15:10:00.000-05:00

I forget about a lot of things immediately after they happen -- books read, concerts attended, albums ingested -- so in order to synopsize what I've been up to this year, I went back through tattered notebooks, iPod playlists and a hefty box of tickets stubs to jog my memory of where I've been and what I've been doing for the last twelve months. Below is a rundown of some of this year's best/worst/most influential/most fun and random, albums/songs/books/movies/places/etceteras.

Feel free to pluck and sample at your discretion.

Best Albums 2007
1. Nina Nastasia & Jim White - You Follow Me
(Listened to approximately 3xs a day, 7 days a week for a month, and pretty consistently after that. Still making appearances. The voice. The drums. Mmmmmm.)
2. Bird and the Bee - Self-Titled (Female lead vocals in my range. Song that uses the words "public relations.")
3. Band of Horses - Cease to Begin (Gauzy and beautiful. Male lead vocalist sounds more than slightly like a female.)

4. St. Vincent - Marry Me (Title references Arrested Development. Catchiest tunes in the universe.)
5. Radiohead - In Rainbows (Thank God.)

Runnerz Ups
Prodigy - Return of the Mac (for iron pumping)
The Long Blondes - Someone to Drive Me Home (for treadmill running)

Late to the Party For
Mos Def - Black On Both Sides (for Brooklyn living)
Joanna Newsom - Y's (for spelunking)
Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country (for belting on solo car trips)
Jon Brion - Meaningless (for brooding)
John Legend - Once Again (for reminding you that you used to love Babyface)

Albums I Listened to Exactly 1 1/2 Times
Kanye West - Graduation (I don't get it?)
Bjork - Volta (Personally, I miss Rahzel.)

Like Crack
Rihanna - "Umbrella" (Gimme more, like Britney.)

Fucking Overdose
Natasha Beddingfield - "Unwritten" (The perfect "dead inside" soundtrack for The Hills.)

Almost As Good As "The Denial Twist"
The White Stripes - "Conquest" (Or as a friend once lovingly spelled it: "Cah-ah-han -que-est!")

A Sad Year In Live Music When Your Concert Highlight Was On
January 9 (Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton @ Hiro Ballroom)

Also Pretty Fun
Band of Horses @ Terminal 5 on 11/4 (So many beards.)
Bird and the Bee @ Blender Theater on 11/18 (Blender has a theater? 60's-inspired stage outfits!)
Fiona Apple @ The Brooklyn Lyceum on 10/6 (Crazy - and brilliant - as I hoped she'd be.)
Nina Nastastia & Jim White @ The Mercury Lounge on 10/3 (So much buildup. Jay Dubbya was worth it.)

Rip Off Tickets Of The Year
Bjork @ Radio City on 5/2 (For 70 bucks I want "Isobel" AND "All Is Full Of Love." AND "Possibly Maybe." AND "Oceania." How about you just play for more than an hour and fifteen minutes and cover your catalogue? I say this with love...)
The Museum Of Natural History's Mythic Creatures Exhibit on 9/15 (Advertised a 50-foot dragon it didn't deliver and failed to present dioramas of mermaids under water. Do-over?)

Holy Christ, So Freaking Underrated!
Grindhouse: Planet Terror/Deathproof (Machine gun leg for Halloween next year?)

Don't Remember Seeing You At All
Live Free or Die Hard (But I have your ticket stub...)

Would Have Died In a State of Blissful Indulgence If Delivered A Fatal Blow During
Enchanted (More songs to add to my Disney repertoire.)
Paprika (Technically '06, but still freakish, anime fun.)

First Movie of the Year
Children of Men (Unless I saw something before Jan 15th)

Oops! Actual First Movie of the Year
Dreamgirls (Jan 14th!)

"First" Movie That Made Me Cry More
Dreamgirls (It also made me want to wear sequins!)

Movies viewed in the splendiferocity of the IMAX theater
300 (aka "300 Mins of Abs")
Spiderman 3 (aka "Why Sam Raimi, why?!")

Finally Got Around To
The Watchmen - Alan Moore (Mindblowing.)
The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller (Quicker. Darker. Better?)

Left With A Hopeless Addiction To
Neil Gaiman (A man who owns multiple sushi pillows is a man I can get behind.)

Best Meal of the Year
Momofuku Noodle, sometime this fall. (Go now. Don't fuck around. Get the grits.)

Year-long (ish) Unconquerable Late Night Cravings
Raw cookie dough (From the roll. Pillsbury over Nestle Tollhouse if at all possible.)
Wonton Soup (No less than five dumplings.)
Pierogies (With assorted fillings.)

Favorite Saved Fortune Cookie Fortune of '07
"It is necessary; therefore, it is possible."

A WARNING

2007-08-03T01:40:00.000-04:00

Things I lost when my hard drive died:

1. About 30 half-formed blog ideas.
2. A cheesy essay about getting my hair cut as it related to disconnecting myself from a boy.
3. A never-posted live review of Wilco.
4. A CD sleeve design for a 2003 mix entitled “Collections Are Dangerous,” comprised entirely of shrunken concert posters.
5. The lyrics to a song I believe an ex wrote about me that were promptly removed from said ex’s blog the day after they were posted.
6. A folder full of contact addresses and phone numbers.
7. The updated design templates for my professional website.
8. All drafts and Photoshopped clips from my recent work for The Hollywood Reporter.
9. PHOTOSHOP (and the accompanying serial number)
10. ILLUSTRATOR (and the accompanying serial number)
11. DREAMWEAVER (and the accompanying serial number. No seriously, I am weeping as I write this.)
12. My sanity.

Ladies and gentlemen, back up your computers. FOR RILL. Also, catalog your software and store it in a place where you can find it, WITH THE SERIAL NUMBERS ATTACHED.

My life’s work now skips from a college commencement speech to this here list. Which is pretty fracking sad. Cause this list isn’t even funny.

Jones on the Road

2007-05-28T23:44:00.000-04:00

Overheard on the trip from Long Island to Ithaca for Miss Raquel's graduation:

(As Papa Jones swerves around some roadkill)
Papa Jones: Didn't that look like scrotum?
Mama Jones: You have an appointment with the eye doctor in two weeks. This is why.

Mama Jones: (to The College Man who has just said something incredibly stupid) You're fucking brilliant.
Papa Jones: The kid's an orangutang.
The College Man: That's Orangu-TAN.

The College Man: (talking about his hot new girlfriend) Mom, as far as I'm concerned, the girl's a virgin. To me.

Quotes, Cha cha cha!

2007-04-25T22:47:00.000-04:00

I am sitting on a bed covered in no less than 8 memo pads, each stolen from work, each half-filled with the foundations of ideas worth fleshing out on this digital scroll. Things are going to start pouring out of me, perhaps in a less-than-sensical timeline, but I am determined to deliver my supressed brilliance to you, my faithful reader(s).

Today some random quotes that have amassed over the past four months shall decorate my frequently neglected little corner of the blogosphere. I'll do my best to allude to context if it enchances the fun. Let's dance:

"I like your tie." - Coworker 1 to Coworker 2
"Thanks, It's a Claiborne! -Coworker 2

"If you suck at blow jobs, you suck at life." - The College Man

"I'm not yet fluent in weave." - Dazrazzle, currently obsessed with lace-fronts.

"If I'm gonna cook, I'm gonna celebrate it with a costume." - Holly, from The Girls Next Door
(This is Miss Stacia's stance on homemaking boiled down to a sentence.)

"You look sexy! And younger!" - Creepy guy I see every year in Cancun, Mexico.
(Younger than 24???)

"To look around for a real girl and not fuck around with stupid skanks." - The College Man's New Year's Resolution

"I have heartingitis!" - New York, on the I Love New York Clip Show
(One of NY's many ailments that can't be cured with a cream.)

"Your sexual shakra is dead." - A psychic (to Miss Stacia)

"No shit." - Miss Stacia (to a psychic)

All is Full of Love and Ticketmaster Surcharges

2007-03-30T17:30:00.000-04:00

Miss Stacia if she forgets to put product in her hair before blowdrying:

Miss Stacia after the breast lift:

Miss Stacia taking the extra fifteen minutes to dry at the salon:

Miss Stacia when she heard Bjork was playing three New York shows in May; first at Radio City Music Hall, then at the United Palace Theater and finally at the Apollo Theater in Harlem:

Miss Stacia after she failed to acquire tickets to any of the three upcoming New York City Bjork concerts through Bjork.com's cocktease of a presale:

Miss Stacia when she realized she had another shot on Ticketmaster two days later:

Miss Stacia recruiting troops to increase the chances of ticket acquisition:

Miss Stacia with two tickets to the Radio City show on hold:

Miss Stacia while Ticketmaster took its dear sweet time processing...

and processing...

and processing her payment:

Miss Stacia winning the Bjork fan lottery:

Bjork at Radio City AND the Apollo?!!! The Pleasure Is All Mine...

*All delicious photos from bjork.com

The College Man: A Year From Legal Boozin

2007-03-06T00:41:00.000-05:00

Today is The College Man's birthday. I just called him. Shock of all shocks, he was sleeping.

In celebration of his almost-21st, Miss Raquel is on her way up to see the little bugger and I sent over a care package including a 72" inflatable monkey. Which gesture do you think The College Man will appreciate more? And what about his roomates? Will they be more excited by the arrival of Raquel, femme fatale, or Miss Stacia's plastic beast? Will The College Man even wake up today to give me the report?

Mama Jones Kitchen Tip #43

2007-03-04T22:17:00.000-05:00

"If you don't cook for a long time, anything you make tastes good."

Managers Jones & Jones - Season 2

2007-02-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

This year's fantasy baseball draft has started and my daily bonding sessions with Papa Jones have begun. By now Mama Jones has learned if her husband and daughter are on the phone during baseball season, they're most likely discussing the fate of their Yahoo team of sluggers. Last year, as my silent partner during my very first attempt at fantasy glory, dad advised me towards a team full of "reliable" geezers. The average age of our team was almost four years older than that of the winner's, but in spite of recurring injuries and the onset of osteoperosis, our old farts landed us in a respectable 6th place (out of 12). Supposedly three or four of my leaguemates threw in the towel mid-season, but I like to think they elected to quit after realizing they were getting their asses beaten by a girl.

I am no longer the only female in my league (there are two to beat this year, both Yankee fans. Grrrrrrr.), and I can't decide if I have more or less to prove. Dad has been a pretty good sport about our new girl-power teamname, The Flying Ginas (that's "Jy-nah"), mostly because I've given him no choice. He's also agreed to target some of baseball's younger talent and we have both made a pact to to avoid repeating the following sins of last year:

1. Drafting A-Rod.
2. Letting go of Francisco Liriano before the season starts.
3. Accidentally drafting Tom Jones instead of Todd Jones. (okay, that one was my fault)

We're already in the third round of the draft with Big Papi Ortiz and Jimmy Rollins taking their places at the top of Team Gina. I have confidence starting off with a Red Sox player instead of a Yankee player is good luck, and drafting a shortstop instead of Black Flag's lead singer is another step in the right direction. My turn to pick has come up once again and I put in a call to my father this morning to discuss my options. In the end, draft pick number three came down to Chone Figgins on Los Angeles and Troy Glaus on Toronto.

The process for making a draft decision over the phone can be long and taxing and usually goes something like this:

Stacia Jones: Okay, so we're down to Figgins and Glaus.

Papa Jones: Yeah, both great picks. Figgins will give you the speed you need. He's young, he's a hot shot...if you want to go young, Figgins is a great pick. But Glaus...Glaus will give you power. He's a powerhouse. He blasts the ball. Wait, check their numbers.

SJ: Figgins had 9 homeruns, 62 RBIs, 52 stolen bases...

PJ: See, I told you he was fast...

SJ: .267. And he's eligible for 2nd, 3rd and the outfield.

PJ: Okay, Glaus?

SJ: 38 homeruns...

PJ: See!

SJ: 104 RBIs, 3 stolen bases...

PJ: No speed...

SJ: and a .252 average. 3rd and shortstop.

PJ: Okay, I like it. I like them both.

SJ: But which guy do you think we need more? Do we need speed or power? We've got Ortiz's bat and Rollins is pretty fast...Wait, should we go pitching?

PJ: Naw, not yet. There are two hard, fast rules in baseball, two truisms that never fail. Fast guys always steal, and strikeout pitchers always strike out.

SJ: What does that have to do with anything?

PJ: I'm just saying.

SJ: Okay...

PJ: There are plenty of strikeout pitchers left. There hasn't been a run on them yet.

SJ: So Figgins or Glaus?

PJ: Hmmm, Figgins or Glaus... Wait, read me the top starting pitchers still available.

I search and read off the top starters to Papa Dukes...

PJ: Okay, now the closers...

Now check second base again...

And third???

SJ: Dad! Figgins or Glaus??!!

PJ: Okay, Figgins. I say, go with Figgins. Wait, wait, mom needs to talk to you.

Mama Jones, who knows little to nothing about baseball, gets on the phone.

MJ: "Make sure you get Figgins, and if you can't get Figgins, get eenie, meenie, minie, mo."

Momofuk Me? No, Momofuk-U!

2007-02-20T22:10:00.000-05:00

I love that this Eater guest post from Momofuku Chef David Chang (and tomorrow's highly anticipated Bruni review of Momfuku Ssam Bar) came a week after my very first trip to Momofuku Noodle Bar, which, as I've mentioned quite a few times, I've been dying to try since it opened. A few things I love about Chang's musings on what it’s like to wait for a review to drop:

1. He defaults to a chapter format, based on stars earned, to log potential responses to Bruni's review. (Almost a list! I approve!)
2. He projects calling upon drugs as relief from bad review-induced depression: "I would try crack, black tar heroin and crystal meth for the first time, possibly all three at once. Anything that would take me to a happy place."
3. He pokes lightheartedly at, but never denies the influence of one man's opinion on his culinary career: "Is he going to make us or break us? Is there a bottle of bourbon around here somewhere?"
4. He understands the limits of his charming little eatery, and doesn’t take his establishment more seriously than he should: “For fuck’s sake we don’t even have silverware and we use paper napkins. Our bathroom has a hand dryer.”

I’m pretty sure Momofuku Noodle had paper towels in the John, but it’s still an unfussy spot, focused on churning out some of the tastiest offerings to pass this Asian food-junkie’s lips.

Although it wasn’t quite as hectic as I expected for 6:30 pm on a Sunday, Momofuku was still filled to capacity with spare bodies huddled together at the door and a few growling stomachs beyond the glass window, pacing in the 16-degree wind. There isn’t much space to wait inside the skinny dining area, and it’s likely frigid temperatures kept away all but the most motivated of foodies, but even on a temperate traffic day it’s clear the only quick way into this noodle house is as a party of one.

I climbed atop a high stool that thoroughly tested recurring New Year’s resolution #1, and was handed the wonderfully concise menu, contained on a single laminated sheet. The majority of diners at Momofuku sit at a long bar facing the open kitchen and stretching from the front door almost to the bathroom at the opposite end of the narrow space, but I was seated at one of two smaller benches at the fore of the restaurant, away from the exciting action. My slab of dining surface was nailed into the wall, providing me about a foot-and-a-half’s worth of breathing space in front and even less room to each side where fellow cramped diners ate with chopsticks, elbows high in the air. Good thing I was in it for the food and not the view.

I enjoy dining solo, but I generally like trying new places with a partner in tow to increase sampling options. I remember reading a lot about the affordability of the Momofuku dining experience when it was in the first round of reviews, and if you share an appetizer with a date and each tackle a bowl of noodle soup, the total per person lands around twenty-dollars, which isn’t terrible for such tasty (and hyped) cuisine. But I’ve got big eyes and an endless pit of a stomach and you best believe after daydreaming for over a year about pork buns dressed with pickles and famous egg-laced ramen, I was letting loose with the ordering. I did an app and an entrée all to myself, and the still-slight meal set me back thirty bucks sans drink. Totally worth it, but I can eat six bowls of Chinatown Ramen for three Hamiltons, and probably a few pan-fried gyoza to boot.

But I needed to try those nine-dollar pork buns.

The dough of Momofuku’s steamed pork bun is less fluffy than that of the traditional dim-sum treat. It actually lays out more like an oval-shaped pancake, folding over once to enclose its contents inside like a money clip. The pork it houses is super-salty, enhanced by crisp, marinated pickles and warm, sweet Asian barbeque sauce. Two buns come to an order and I was glad to have them both to myself. The only utensils on the bar were chopsticks, quite impractical for picking up open-ended pork pockets, so I grabbed those suckers with my hands and put them each away in four or five bites.

Momofuku’s signature ramen was also as incredible as I expected. The broth is beautiful – slightly more textured than the traditional soup component, a bit unfiltered, like miso. Two different cuts of pork lie in the soup, one that falls right off the bone, the other tighter, and like the meat in the pork buns, lobbed into thick, meaty slices. The main vehicle for pulling the soup’s flavor across your tongue is the base of noodles. The wheaty strands are slightly undercooked to hold up to the liquid and accoutrements, the most decadent of which is a poached egg that bobs up and down until you spill its delicious cholesterol into the open water. The first bite of pork and yolk is scarily sinful. A real chest-grabber.

Like much Asian cuisine, the ramen went down warm and bold (Japanese “lumberjack food” to steal a byte from Amy Sedaris), but left me starving two hours later. So now I’ve hatched the master plan. Next time, Momofuku Noodle, then movie on 2nd Ave, and then the Ssam Bar.

No matter what Frank Bruni says.

Le mot du jour

2007-02-08T16:49:00.000-05:00

I love me the dictionary.com "Word of the Day," especially when said word derives from or is a working part of la belle langue Française.

So I was especially pleased when yesterday's mot sauntered into my inbox late this afternoon, four rosés deep and reeking of Chanel No.9:

idee fixe \ee-day-FEEKS\, noun:
An idea that dominates the mind; a fixed idea; an obsession.

(How great is the phoenetic spelling of the word "fixe," p.s.?)

It just so happens I am quite familiar with les ideés fixes, as the cultivation of such obsessions has become a trademark of my personality. Most of mes ideés are umbrellaed under the categories of la culture, mon travail (work), et les hommes (that's men) but when it comes down to it, there is potential for me to obsess about almost anything.

For now - since February has proven to strengthen my resolve on this long-standing, well-tread idee fixe of mine - I proclaim to you, the reader, and to the world, in the name of French scents and carbonated spirits, online dictionaries, silent l's and rolling r's:

I WILL WRITE.

Word.

Pollanology and Johnny Appleseed

2007-02-08T12:18:00.000-05:00

After reading the first chapter of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire this summer, all I could talk about for days was Johnny Appleseed.

Pollan’s book is divided into four chapters, each mapping a singular plant's - perhaps conscious - evolution and adaptation to the desires of humans that has resulted in the plant's propagation. Pollan first takes on the apple (tagged as appealing to the human desire of "sweetness"), where he reveals the story behind a plant that was "eager to do business with humans and perhaps nowhere more so than in America." The figure that facilitated more transactions with the shiny-skinned fruit than any human in history, was Johnny Appleseed.

Although christened John Chapman by birth, Johnny Appleseed did exist. And he did traverse the wilderness of America planting trees, but they were trees yielding the most wretched, sour apples imaginable. It turns out all apples planted from seeds are wild strains, and the only way to cultivate one of the carefully engineered apple varieties we are familiar with today is through the grafting of existing trees. John Chapman's nearly inedible apples were welcomed on the frontier, however, because of their usefulness in making cider. Johnny Appleseed, myth and hero of kindergarten tall tales, was perhaps the number one unknowing proponent of alcoholism in early America.

Even more ironic/fucked up: During prohibition, apple-growers devised the slogan "an apple a day keeps the doctor away," to promote the supposed healthfulness of the source of their beloved alcohol. Thus, apples became one of the first products pushed our way through the wagon-wheel cogs of public relations.

And to think -- though I never liked you, I believed in you, apples.

I haven't yet cracked open Pollan's most recent work, The Omnivore's Dilemma, but he recently wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine about "nutritionism," which I finally got around to reading last night (it's nine pages long).

"Nutritionism" or the switch in public consciousness from eating food, to consuming nutrients has been upon the United States for the last twenty-or-so years, and Pollan is successful at unveiling the negative effects of this ideology on our health and diet. When emphasis is placed on incorporating singular nutrients instead of whole foods in our diets, we miss out on the positive effects of micronutrients that have not yet been isolated as well as the beneficial chemical reactions incurred when nutrients are ingested in concert, within the context of natural meals. Instead of eating balanced meals, we add nutritional supplements (whose benefits and drawbacks we don’t fully understand) to processed food products (whose essential nutrients have been removed in the first place). And Americans are never told to "eat less" of anything, lest we upset the balance of a prosperous food trade. As with many industries ruled by agendas of profit and policed by a government susceptible to bullying lobbyists, the food industry - and our health in turn - is plagued by its own regulations. As Pollan notes in one of my favorite lines of the piece:

"Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness."

And sadly it still makes me feel better, when I breeze through two boxes of Cocoa Krispies a week, to find they're low in fat.

Pollan makes many other points about dietary over-generalization, the dangers of reductionist science and the effects of processed food on nutrition, that are worth absorbing and applying to your daily life (pending sufficient willpower). If you have the time, read the article. And eat a banana for God's sake.

New Year's Resolution #1: Finish New Year's Resolution List

2007-01-25T22:40:00.000-05:00

Miss Stacia's recurring New Year's Resolutions:
1. improve posture
2. floss more
3. learn Spanish
4. front a band
5. avoid unmarried pregnancy

And a Brief List of Goals for '07:
1. Choreograph tap dance to Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" (to flesh out resume).
2. Master the endless uses for the Hulk Hogan Ultimate Grill. (It bakes cookies, Brother!)
3. Perfect backup vocals/dance routine for mid-year performance of "One More Chance" at Knitting Factory's Hip Hop Karaoke. (Daz will never let me be Biggie.)
4. Pose for Robert Crumb (in France).
5. Rejuvenate Bat Mitzvah Dancing Career. (And bring back sequins.)
6. Marry hyper-cultured contemporary writer (J. Lethem?) and steal secrets of success.
7. Use Netflix movies (as coasters).
8. Write dissertation on why hip hop stars wear winter coats during performances in eighty-five degree nightclubs. (Postulation: The "ice" makes them cold.)
9. Read Gravity's Rainbow (to preschoolers as a volunteer in the afterschool program).
10. Make more lists. (Word.)

Why you might want to skip dinner with your parents before they go to the Barry Manilow concert at Madison Square Garden.

2007-01-17T19:47:00.000-05:00

Mama Jones: Hey Stace, you look great! Oooh, that sweater looks itchy! Is it?

(Touches it and recoils.)

Papa Jones: Hey Stace, what's new?

Miss Stacia: Nothing much.

PJ: What do you mean nothing much? What's going on with that interview? And your job search? Have you plotted out the next five stages of your career yet? Have you checked Career Builders? Where are you looking? How many jobs do you apply for a day?

MJ: Do you know they're running a deal now where you can get six months on Match.com for free?

PJ: No, it's that if you don't meet a partner within the first six months, you get the next six months for free.

SJ: I'm not doing match.com.

MJ: Why not? Listen to your mother. I want what's best for you.

(Pauses to look up at my hair in it's classic "pouf" updo and then reaches out very slowly to squish it down with the palm of her hand.)

MJ: I hate the bump. Why do you always wear the bump? You're beautiful without it. Listen to me, I wouldn't lie to you, Miss Itchy Sweater.

SJ: I hate you.

PJ: Come on, let's go.

MJ: Look, Stace! Your father and I are wearing our Barry Manilow outfits.

SJ: Your Barry Manilow outfit is a winter coat and knit hat?

MJ: (sings) At the Copa, Copacabana...

(Looks over at me as we head out the door.)

MJ: Where are YOUR gloves?!

Spelunk with me for a minute or two or three...

2007-01-09T00:03:00.000-05:00

Say from 6:06 to 8:39 on Track 2 of Joanna Newsom's Y's:

"Monkey and Bear"

And thanks to the awesome Genius at the Walt Whitman Mac Store for clearing up this MP3 posting business, once and for all.

Guest Collector: A Message From matthew K

2006-12-30T17:24:00.000-05:00

Greetings Danger Seekers,

While our dear Stacia is away crushing the freedom fighters of Quintana Roo, she has foolishly left me, matthew K, in charge of her blog. Now I, normally a mild-mannered and modest person, have gone mad with power and have extended my domain to include Stacey's desk at work. This turned out to be a much more boring venture than originally expected. Sure abusing Stacey's limited power at the office was fun but years of group therapy left me questioning this hollow existence. What was I doing to help humanity? How would rifling through her desk drawers honor her fading memory? How could I broadcast her final words to the world? Incidentally, her final words to me were: I'll see you next week. Don't touch my stuff. How could I commemorate Stacey's gifts to the world without having to work hard or spend any money?

Three hours and one grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation later, I was finally able to open the Stacey L. Brook Memorial Living Museum and Gift Shop. Here visitors can come and see an exact recreation of Stacey's workspace circa 2006. Our team of speedily trained yet historically accurate reenactors will guide you through a day in the life of the people of Stacia. From basket weaving to butter churning to microwave cookery, our historians have paid painstaking attention to every last detail of this people's storied culture, which seems to have mysteriously disappeared in late December of 2006.

While information is sketchy at best, our archeologists have been able to piece together bits of first hand accounts scribbled on 3M brand Post-It Notes to create a more complete idea of the final days of the society. Near as we can figure, this society's solitary export was year-end "best of" lists. Ranging among every single mentionable subject, the most prolific listographers mapped the best and brightest of the year in simple, concise columns. However, the only lists we have been able to reconstruct completely show a very different side to this well-cataloged social order; Lists that herald culture's disenfranchised, forgotten and finally-got-around-to's. The mysterious author of these lists signed only with "your pal, matt."

Five Cool Things from 2006 that apparently no one liked but me
(In No Particular Order)

1. Stranger Than Fiction
2. Built to Spill's You In Reverse
3. The Strokes' First Impressions of Earth
4. Arrested Development's Third Season
5. F Minus

Five Cool Things I found in 2006 that I was later told came out last year or earlier
(In a Very Particular Order to be Revealed at a Later Date)

1. Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia
2. Areas of My Expertise
3. Spaced
4. Stereolab
5. Stacey

(I heard 2007 is going to be lame.)

From Sand, Surf and Sun

2006-12-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

"The head bone's connected to the heart bone."
- Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito

Les Favorites d'Annee 2006

2006-12-20T00:35:00.000-05:00

My year-end culture consumption round-up. Good frakking times.

Top Ten Albums 2006
1. Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
2. The Dresden Dolls – Yes, Virginia
3. Ghostface – Fishscale
4. Regina Spektor – Begin to Hope
5. Beyonce - BDay
6. Lily Allen – Alright, Still
7. Clipse – Hell Hath No Fury
8. T.I. - King
9. Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
10. Thom Yorke – The Eraser

Honorable Mentions:
The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes
Lupe Fiasco - Food and Liquor
Devotchka – Curse Your Little Heart EP
The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea

Favorite albums consumed but not created in 2006
1. The Billy Nayer Show – Rabbit
2. Jose Gonzales – Veneer
3. The Pretenders –The Isle of View (Live)
4. Jens Lekman – Oh You’re So Silent Jens
5. Brian Eno – Another Green World
6. Francois Breut – Une Saison Volee
7. Nouvelle Vague - Self-Titled
8. Keren Ann - Not Going Anywhere
9. Cadence Weapon - Breaking Kayfabe
10. Kylie Minogue - Fever

Best Singles/Tracks 2006
1. "Ring The Alarm" - Beyonce
2. “Crazy” - Gnarls Barkley
3. “My Love” – Justin Timberlake
4. “Doctor Blind” – Emily Haines
5. “You’re My Flame” – Zero 7
6. "The Champ" - Ghostface
7. "No Friend of Mine" - Lily Allen
8. "Keys Open Doors" - Clipse
9. “Upgrade U” – Beyonce
10. “Strawberries” – Asobi Seksu
11. "Ain't No Other Man" - Christina A.
12. "I'm Talkin To You" - T.I.
13. "Launch Yourself" - Adem
14. "Get Myself Into It - The Rapture
15. “Go Baby Power Now” - Puffy AmiYumi
16. "Tell Me What You Want" - The Pipettes

Embarrassed to admit I loved:
“Call Me When You’re Sober” – Evanesence (Both the track and the video.)

Best Live Shows 2006
1. Amadou & Mariam @ Central Park Summerstage (July 16)
2. The Ditty Bops @ Spiegeltent
3. Regina Spektor @ Town Hall (Sept 27)
4. Radiohead @ The Theater at Madison Square Garden (June 13)
5. Devotchka @ Spiegeltent
6. The Billy Nayer Show @ The Knitting Factory (June 30)
7. Dresden Dolls @ Webster Hall (April 22)
8. Jens Lekman @ Bowery
9. Joanna Newsom/Neko Case @ McCarren Park Pool
10. Damsel & Fly @ Fat Baby (January)
11. Cadence Weapon @ The Knitting Factory
12. La Laque @ Mercury Lounge
13. Talib Kweli @ B.B. Kings (April 15)
14. Neko Case @ Webster Hall (April 7)
15. Metric @ Webster Hall ((March 10)
16. Bloc Party (yeah, I know) @ McCarren Park Pool
17. Nada Surf @ Webster Hall (March 8)
18. Belle & Sebastian/New Pornographers @ Nokia Theater Times Sq. (March 3)
19. Big Daddy Kane (opening for MF Doom) @ Nokia Theater Times Sq. (Jan 26)

Why did I pay good money to see:
1. Boyz 2 Men @B.B. Kings (July 15)
2. Madonna @ Madison Square Garden
(No seriously, why did I?)

Best on the Big Screen 2006:
1. Red (Kieslowski)
2. The Departed
3. Repulsion (Polanski)
4. Little Miss Sunshine
5. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
6. The Science of Sleep
7. Little Children
8. Casino Royale

Weirdest shit I saw all year:
Drawing Restraint 9 (I still heart you Bjork.)

Gingerbread House-Making Challenge!

2006-12-19T02:23:00.000-05:00

Over the past year or so The Food Network has managed to completely infiltrate my soul, but although my obsessive intake of Iron Chef America, Alton Brown's Good Eats and Bobby Flay Throwdown stokes my adventurous eating habits and inner food critic, these programs usually do little to awaken my long-dormant chef/culinary creativist.

The one show that really pushes me to the brink of pots and pans is the "Challenge" series, where professional pastry chefs battle each other in the construction of sugar sculptures and themed cakes and pastries. Edible arts and crafts are right up my alley and when I caught a Gingerbread Challenge on television a few weeks ago I started to build hope around the gingerbread house as a project I could tackle, even in my tiny, near-kitchenless apartment.

But what fun is building the gingerbread house without the "challenge" of kicking all your friends' asses in a friendly competition? Hence, the gestation of Miss Stacia and Jay-Z's First (Annual??!!) Gingerbread House-Making Challenge!

We hosted the competition Sunday afternoon at Jay Z's apartment where Jaz provided some scrumptious brunch for our competitors, and I provided most of the building supplies.

All of the white icing once found on the UWS now resides here.

We decided to go the graham cracker route because, let's face it, seven people can't cook real gingerbread with only one oven and besides, I'm no Betty Crocker to begin with. The full set of rules decided upon by Miss Jay-Z were laid out as follows:

1.Contestants can start building their houses as soon as they arrive.

2.Each individual (or team) is responsible for acquiring their own basic materials (graham crackers and or actual gingerbread if you're brave, icing, candy, etc.), but we will provide emergency supplies, utensils and sweets for additional flair. Giving some thought to what you want to build before Sunday (so you can pick up the necessary components) is especially advised.

3a.Judging will commence at 5:45pm.

3b.Because we believe in fairness above all else, Stacey Brook will serve as both judge and contestant.

4.Points will be awarded for: creativity, execution, resemblance of house to various New York City structures, flirting with Jasmine, bringing beer/other drink, helping clean up the apartment, cooking Stacey and Jasmine dinner, etc.

5.Points will be deducted for: blah-ness of structure, the lameness of non-participation, leaving a mess.

Most of our guests arrived pretty close to starting time at 2pm, and got right down to work.

The Harvard Gingerbread House-Making Club. Pass the protractor.

The first person finished was ma soeur, the lovely and talented Miss Raquel, who sort of cheated by using an OJ carton as her base, but who had one of the loveliest-looking end products because of it. Definitely the closest to the traditional holiday-style confectionary houses, Raquel's little cottage was lined in licorice and surrounded by a blue icing and M&M moat. The edible abode could have certainly been the demise of Hansel and Gretel.

Love the ironically appropriate box copy.

Jay-Faust was the next to finish, although not be her own volition. Weak infrastructure eventually caused the collapse of her graham cracker Flatiron Building, a sad defeat for the 1999 High School East Holiday Bûche Champion.

"Voulez vous bûcher avec moi?"

The other contestants completed their gingerbread (graham cracker) masterpieces soon after, and included Eric’s homage to,
umm, Eric:

A “brothel in the red light district”:

And a house made almost completely out of gingerbread men, which I thought was the coolest idea ever, hence my disqualifying its creator from the winner's circle:

I was pretty much the last one to finish. From the beginning I had my heart set on making a "Jewgerbread House." I bought silver and blue M&M’s in Times Square (at 9 dollars a pound at the M&M store, mind you. Holy ish.) for proper decorative accent, and planned a special signifying detail for the front of my piece, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about the construction of the building itself until I got down on the floor an played with my grahams. And then the epiphany hit:

You can’t go wrong with six corners.

I am something of a perfectionist, and it took me almost three hours to build, ice and decorate this sucker, but once I finished I was quite pleased. Especially when it came time to add my major accenting detail:

Unroll for edible Torah Portion.

Once the last chocolate button was secured in place, I stood up and took about ninety seconds to deliberate before declaring myself the official winner of the 2006 Gingerbread Challenge!

Six months of shaky waitressing helped prepare me for this moment.

Jay-Z you owe me a clock radio (our awesome grand prize).

The award winning sculpture now sits on my desk at work, accepting praise and piquing the curiosity of all who pass by. I wonder how long the Jewgerbread house will last. I wonder if I could shellac the whole thing and send it to my grandmother in Florida. Would it make it there in one piece? Would grandma's friends in the senior citizen's community try to consume my waterproofed, culinary work of art?

Will someone from Ace of Cakes please hire my ass already?

The Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series: Tad's Steaks

2006-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

Back in her Cornell days, Mama Jones’ boyfriend used to take her here.

“If you were lucky someone took you to Tad’s,” she told me.

According to the good woman, a meal for one person cost $3. And I thought my dates were cheap.

My friend Carolina’s parents had their first date at Tad’s, and she quoted an estimated $7 as the price of feeding an individual 12 ounces of flame-broiled stizzeak and a slew of carb-concentrated sides, which seemed a bit more realistic. Carolina has been to Tad’s many times with her folks and claims the prices have skyrocketed since her father wooed her mother over a 1/4 inch thick prime cut and a demi-bottle of rosé.

For me, the main appeal of the Tad’s experience was the potential to eat a red meat lunch for under ten dollars (and live long enough to justify a remedying jaunt to Del Frisco's to wash away the memories of steaks served fast food stylee). Sadly, the times of the bargain meal are truly at an end and unless we’re talking 25 cent Chinatown dumplings or Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches ($3.95 a pop) you're throwing down bones to eat out in this town. If you’re bringing your chick to Tad’s be prepared to throw down a twenty-spot, and then some.

My coworker Frederico and I have been talking about hitting up Tad's since he drunkenly touted its awesomeness at a work birthday party many months ago. After much procrastination we finally set last Friday as the date to chow down and ambled into Tads’ 34th street establishment in the late afternoon of the last and laziest day of the work week.

When we hit the storefront around 2pm the place was still bustling. Frederico and I spent our first ten minutes in Tad's taking in our surroundings as we stood on line, discussing cuts of meat. Both of us ended up ordering the same cut off the menu that was displayed above us in a series of numbered pictures arranged completely without regard to logical numerical order.

Because 7 comes before 4.

After calling out our orders for Tad’s “Traditional Cut Prime Sirloin” to the line chef, we watched her cut two thin, pink, slimy steaks out of their vacuum packaging and slap them to the grill with a sizzle. I ordered my meat medium for the first time in my life. I live for dripping, tender, bloody steak, but I also like living in the absence of severe abdominal pain, thus my taste buds and intestines opted to forge a compromise.

When my meat, a foot long, 6 inches wide and the width of a single subject notebook, came off the grill it landed on a shallow, ten pound ceramic plate that was immediately doused in gravy, no questions asked. A baked potato joined the party and another ladleful of liquid, this time melted butter, was poured onto the overflowing dish. Onions were added by request (and recommended by Caroline) and the plate was finally handed off to it’s future consumer with liquid spillage over the sides of the ceramic an inevitability.

Once the steak plates were resting peacefully on our trays, Frederico and I pushed past the massive wall of beverages - fruit juice flanking cheap bottles of white wine, beer shouldering half-carafes of vinos, red and blush.

A king's selection.

But the real kicker for me was the thirty pre-poured glasses of assorted wine, each capped with a single piece of protective saran wrap.

Sealed for safety!

Frederico and I nudged our trays beyond the alcohol to the cashier where we were rung up for our biftek.

The “Traditional Cut,” which seemed to be the special or at least most popular cut, was $10.99 including a baked potato, a monster piece of slightly undercooked garlic bread and a salad. Charges were accrued for all extras, of course, including:

Sour cream - $ .69
Onions - $ .69
Aquafina - $ 2.00
TOMATOES - $ .69

The tomato charge really got to me. Without tomatoes, salad is food for bunny rabbits. Frederico noted that he doesn't even really LIKE tomatoes, but ended up eating two-thirds of a dollar since he didn't realize we were charged for the acidic fruit until we examined our receipts at the table.

We were brought to our cozy little spot in the Sizzler-esque dining room by the maitre d who, by the way, was at least seventy-years-old and really has no purpose in a restaurant that serves their food cafeteria style. Tad's should just abolish the maitre d position and use his salary to gift their customers with complementary tomatoes.

By the time we actually got down to eating I was motherloving starving. And the food was actually decent. The steak was a little tough, but definitely not unmanageable, and the super-thin gravy lent a flavorful, necessary juice to the super-thin meat. The portions were extraordinary – I swear my steak was the size of your average Frisbee – and even Miss Stacia’s ever-expanding stomach couldn’t house it all. The highlight of the meal for me was the potato, perhaps because it’s typical American mentality these days to deny ourselves the straight-up carbs, but I really do think it was the butter that made the tater so delectable. It turns out that drenching baked potatoes in butter sauce is really the most efficient way to coat your spuds in the salt and fat you truly crave.

And globs of sour cream don’t hurt either.

All-in-all, steak and potato for lunch was a nice way to change up the routine, but at fifteen bucks when you’re expecting to spend ten, it was kind of a rip. For eight more dollars I’ve got a choice cut filet with a fancy vegetable at an established eatery with a wine list and a hostess and chairs that don’t put my ass to sleep. But I won’t have the references to parental romances budding in the seventies, and plates dripping with juices, and flames licking thirty steaks simultaneously, and wine covered in cellophane, and sometimes the ability to revel in those things makes it worth occasionally going for the medium instead of the rare.

Miss Stacia on Ice

2006-12-13T21:10:00.000-05:00

(Brought to you by Monday's Company Holiday Party at Central Park's Wollman Rink)

I was skating so much I missed the party. I didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I did, but after what had to have been ten skateless years, I took to that ice like a lezzie to the poonan. I dove right in and for two-and-a-half hours, I barely came up for air.

What started as a relaxed recreational activity quickly became an obsessively athletic pursuit as I sped around the rink in an attempt to perfect my form and make up for missing my workout in the AM. I even learned to skate backwards a bit, weaving my uncomfortably restrained ankles in and out of tiny, propelling figure-eights through a coned-off instruction area in the center of the rink. Sadly, my commitment to sport prevented me from properly socializing and taking advantage of the open bar with the work peeps, but luckily one of my many media-savvy coworkers recorded the highlights of the event and cut a quick video that gives a pretty entertaining overview of what the dub room players were up to from rinktime right through the Irish pub after party.

Keep an eye out for one of my three grand falls (I averaged about one hearty spill an hour) and see if you can get a glimpse at the Spanish dancer/lacy "goth child" skating costume I put together for the occasion. I was going for Pretty Pretty Ice Princess...Of The Night.

Oh and one more thing. It's not a burp, I swear:

Theme Song

2006-12-12T20:05:00.000-05:00

An anthem for women who are wired to repeat their mistakes:

Dresden Dolls - Bad Habit

Taking Inventory

2006-12-10T22:06:00.000-05:00

Although I've passed my local Tower Records a number of times since the liquidation announcement, I haven't had the heart to take my final tour of Broadway and 61st's familiar two-floor establishment until this afternoon. I am one of the few music fans who still enjoys buying physical CDs (although even I will admit that after I scan the liner notes once and load the music to my computer, the discs land on a stack of a hundred others, collecting dust), but there isn't a place to shop for music in my immediate hood. There is a fairly large and comprehensive branch of Kim's on the West side in the 100s, but I am almost always traveling downtown from my abode in the 80s, and the Tower skirting the northern edge of Lincoln Center has always been the most convenient outlet for satisfying my music needs. The store's catalog was never deep enough to quell every obscure itch, or indie rock craving, but my Tower proudly offered up "Fishscale" at 9am sharp the Tuesday of its release, and that's good enough for me.

Somewhere in the middle of a recent hip-hop post, Tom Briehan offered up some observations about the closing Tower stores, comparing them to graveyards and talking about the entertaining resigned relaxedness of the remaining Tower employees. Thinking about these reflections as I approached my NYC** Tower I was finally curious enough to go inside. Also, the condemnation sign in the window reading "Last 10 Days" assured me that although there were bound to be a few tempting items left for purchase, I wouldn't be walking into a probable spending spree (at discount, but still...).

**Note: There is a Tower on LI that has always been my record store, and it's going to tear me up to return home and see that corner storefront gutted.

A couple of today's Tower Records discount deals:

1. Every rap album costs $1.
2. Every CD is 60% off.

As a result:

1. There is not a single recognizable rap album left on the shelf (I dare you to try and find one.).
2. It's pretty slim pickins in the rock and pop department. Think “Glitter.”

I spent about twenty minutes walking up and down the rock and pop aisles, searching for records I had been meaning to listen to, essentials that were missing from my collection, or anything super-random to try blind for 5 bucks. A lot of the discs that were left were of bands I didn't recognize. Some newer bands with start-up followings had CD's left on the shelves as well. There were no Beatles albums - I'm sure those were the first to fly off the shelves. There were, however, about twenty copies of Blind Melon. Tower's liquidation sale is a popularity/longevity test for all acts in the music industry. If you've really made it (by industry standards), your CDs are gone by now.

I did manage to find a few things to buy as did my lady Lilly, who had great luck in the World section. I imagine pawing through the Foreign Film section upstairs would have proven fruitful as well, but after my thorough scouring of the first floor I was satisfied with my selection, having salvaged four newish albums for the bargain price of 30 dollars. Lilly copped 3 for 10. Ridiculous. My new acquisitions included:

1. Serena Maneesh - Self-titled (Heard a shiteload about this band and their awesome live show, but never got around to 'em. They're loud! And Norwegian!)
2. Grandaddy - Just Like the Fambly Cat (I heart this band, who happen to be the inspiration for one of my all-time favorite rock concert posters. I don’t know how I wasn’t aware they dropped a new album this year. Issue resolved.)
3. Matthew Friedberger – Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School (A double-disc. Probably would have stayed on my “To Buy” list for a while if it wasn’t so discounted, since I just this month got around to Bitter Tea. Was $19 before discount. Matt’s the expensive sibling.)
4. Puffy Ami Yumi - Splurge (My wild card, and an awesome one at that. Two Japanese chicks who have their own cartoon show and make bubbly rock and pop tunes. After reading a little about the album tonight I was reminded that the group was formed via a major label machine and everything they do is marketed with a ferocity meant to trigger Hello Kitty-style saturation. Inexplicably, I find this to be sort of endearing. Puffy – the group added the “Ami Yumi” when they released in the US to prevent confusion with Puffys of the Diddy variety – have a bunch of big names guesting on this album (Jon Spencer, Butch Walker) and I can’t imagine I will feel anything but love and butterflies and animated kisses for these girls. Also, I have to go to Tokyo, STAT.)

Some other things I noted while perusing the emaciated CD racks (also on sale for $39.95, I believe) at the Tower on Broadway:

Album I half-expected to be around and would definitely have purchased if it had been available: Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits. (Sadly, Lincoln Center is rife with Fans of Rod.)

Disc I was amazed to see still sitting on the shelf: A lone copy of Radiohead - OK Computer.

Which was especially pathetic considering: All copies of Paris Hilton’s album were gone.

So Tower dies in ten days. A chain store I can actually support bites the freaking dust.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting now in the 4th, yes 4th, Starbucks I attempted to work in this evening, the first three -

1. In the Barnes and Nobles on Broadway at 82nd Street
2. At the corner of Broadway and 80th
3. On Columbus at 78th

- being so densely populated, future table occupation seemed like a distant, tall, skim, foam-covered dream. But since there is a Starbucks every two blocks in this city, I have for the last three hours occupied a piece of prime real estate in the Starbucks on Broadway and 75th at the largest table in the place, right next to the front window, a power outlet conveniently within reach.

If only Tower Records had thought to put in some for-pay wi-fi. I totally would have toted my laptop to the record store before camping out for hours among sweatered teddy bears, cheesy Christmas compilations and the odor of burnt, drip coffee.

But alas...

On another sad liquidation note, one of my favorite UWS boutiques, Lord of the Fleas, is closing at the end of the month. LOTF was one of those lifesaver joints where you could get a plain black tank top (that you would wear under EVERYTHING) for twelve bucks, any time of the year. It was also home to funky, completely affordable dresses, jewelry and other accessories that would really dig you out of a hole when, say, you decide you hate everything in your closet and have nothing to wear the day before your company holiday party.

Please afford me this tangent to say that I am not by any means ungrateful or unappreciative of my employer's holiday party planning efforts, HOWEVER -

Tomorrow's holiday party is at Wollman Rink in Central Park. The company is setting up a tent outside of the rink and serving food that "will not be hamburgers and hot dogs." And of course, my coworkers and I will have the option to hit the ice, although I have a feeling some of my cohorts will refuse to allow me to exercise the option NOT to fall flat on my ass in front of all the people I see on a daily basis.

I don't particularly enjoy ice skating, and I'm not super-thrilled about spending three hours in a tent, but what really disappoints me about this setup is mostly the limits placed on my holiday party ensemble by the party location and activity. Since this jam is outside, I have to dress for the weather to a certain extent. And avoid heels just in case we are standing on grass or "dirt" as one coworker predicted. Also, I have to dress for maximum mobility so I have a fighting chance at remaining erect on the rink. This sadly means I can't wear my original outfit as planned:

So I'm reverting to my backup ensemble, which better suits the circumstances:

At least I don't have to give up the glitter.

Since Lord of the Fleas, having been in close-out mode for the last few weeks, was fresh out of matching gold leg warmers, I settled on snagging a gentleman-inspired, brushed blue leather vest to inject new life into my wardrobe. Not quite ice worthy (well, perhaps if worn by Rudy Galindo with some shiny, ball-hugging leggings), but for 22 bucks, a killer find and fashionable parting purchase from an underappreciated UWS gem. I’m sad to see the place go down.

When it all comes down to it, some businesses really do need our dollars and continual support.

So go to Tower Records. Try to find a hip-hop album in that massive stack of one-dollar wackness, and if nothing appeals to you, take your buck to the deli next door and put it towards a forty. Go out to the sidewalk and let some liquor spill to the ground for the death of an era. Then plug in your iPod, click on Ghostface, and move on.

Just pretend it's October.

2006-11-28T21:54:00.000-05:00

I've been dragging my feet on this Halloween post, mainly because I wasn't completely satisfied with my Halloween costume this year. I actually ended up breaking one of my cardinal Halloween rules and donned two different costumes, one on Halloween itself, and one for a party the weekend before. The costume tale is a massive one to tackle, so let's start with the main costume. The costume that required the usual number of active brainstorm sessions (50?), internet research hours (about 3) physical construction hours (1-2), full costume dress-rehearsals (1), and trips to Ricky's (3).

It was during a phone-storming session with my best lady Lill that it hit me to dress as "The Pop Art Marilyn Monroe." The vision swept over me as I was pawing through a Taschen art book on my couch while Miss L suggested I "go as a Lichtenstein or something." I somehow connected my ownership of a purple halter dress to the book and Lill's comment and landed at the intentionally off-register, wild-pallated print of Marilyn. About an hour later I realized I could have simply consulted my shower curtain for the notion.

Moley, moley, moley.

It actually wasn't very hard to pull this costume together, and I'm still kind of in love with the idea but I had a few major qualms with the way it turned out.

1. I am not a makeup artist and this costume is all about precise makeup application. The lovely Julia McMattress lent me a gorgeous Kevin Aucoin book that showed me, step by step, how to achieve Marilyn's signature look and I still couldn't get it quite right. I needed a thicker, deeper blue on my eyes. Matte, not shiny. A truer red on my lips. I wanted to find a way to reflect the black of the screenprinting in my facial features, but after the stress of spraying the wig (getting to that soon) I opted not to mess with the face too much. I do think my results were also stunted by the uncompromising fact that,

2. I look nothing like Marilyn Monroe. I don't look anything like Peggy Bundy either, but true resemblance mattered much less in last year’s costume. The spandex, the leopard, the eighties belt, the peep-toes, the HAIR - all very much gave away my persona (as did my constant whine of "Oh Al!"). The challenge of dressing as the Marilyn screenprint is that the face IS the entire costume. The hair definitely triggered the association, but a more heart-shaped face would have helped.

Just block out my mug.

Taking my god-given bone structure into account, I decided next year I'm dressing as Barbra Streisand. That's one I can pull off. I may even try and get together a group of cartilage-wielding ladies to represent Babs through the ages with me. There will be Funny Girl Barbra, Hello Dolly! Barbra, Yentl Barbra (That'll be a fun one. Shot not.), Oh-so-close-to-retirement-nope, nope-I'm-back Barbra... My grandmother will plotz.

I preserved the bump and hook for you Babs.

But back to my gripes...

3. Wig=Major pain in the ass. Especially a short wig soaked in two cans of spray paint (one yellow, one black), stretched over a foot and a half of thick, straightened Jew-fro. This sucker just did not want to stay on and pulling it down covered my hands in an ever-present, Sunday-Times-style grime. Smudging the face was also of concern throughout the night. Too high maintenance, even for Miss Stacia.

4. I chickened out. Part of the original plan was to apply Andy Warhol's signature to my Marilyn dress, a coveted summer gown I purchased at an UWS flea market last year, with Crayola washable marker. When I put the costume on for a test run and was only moderately sold on the overall effect, I opted not to risk the ruin of a beloved garment for the sake of added authenticity points. This is quite unlike me. But I opted to sign Warhol's name (quite skillfully, i must add) to a paper card instead and pinned it to my purple frock for identification. The majority of the effect was lost though. If I am the artwork, Warhol would have signed ME. Oh bitter compromise!

5. "Where's Andy?"
When I originally conceived the costume idea I thought it would be exciting to travel with an Andy Warhol by my side to aid the reference and up the ante. Andy and his Pop Art Marilyn would have kicked some major costume contest ass. I also loved the idea of playing muse for a night. Why the fuck not? I had my eye on a fellow to suit up in silver locks and he fell through in more ways than one, but that's the way it goes, eh. Again, next year it's Babs. She's served as inspiration for one of the most hilarious Southpark episodes of all time (Muse enough for me!) and I'm pretty sure she's what 70 now (?) and probably frigid, so she most likely won't notice if she doesn't have a companion by her side on Halloween night. Although, people who need people are the...No, no, fuck that.

6. Trend bitterness strikes. About three days before Halloween the Times ran an article on the return of Andy Warhol's presence in the public consciousness. Some designer at Lord & Taylor or Saks dressed up the store's window displays with Warhol theme, Warhol tote bags started appearing at shops in the Village. My decision to dress as Warhol's Marilyn had absolutely nothing to do with the article or the supposed return of Warhol worship, and this really is a minor and petty gripe, but I still felt like New York Times blew my load.

I must admit that in spite of all this post-holiday bitching, Pop Art Marilyn actually did go over pretty well. I strutted my electric blond to a party in the Billyburg the Saturday before Halloween and aside from a few scattered misses ("Madonna!," "Medusa!"), most people appreciated the Warhol nod.

But partially due to the overall discomfort of the costume and mostly due to the inappropriateness of the halter top in a corporate environment, I opted not to dress as Marilyn on Halloween Tuesday. There was no way I was going to work sans costume though. I toyed with the idea of doing a modified Bjork (less leg), but quickly rejected the recycling option and immediately experienced an uncharacteristic fit of costume construction spontaneity.

(Looking in my closet)
"I need to wear this tutu to work. Yes."

And that pretty much sealed it. I just wanted to be a Pretty Pretty Princess (That's TWO "pretties."). I purchased a tiara and a wand and rocked the pink high-top converse a la four-year-old ballerina, and had a fucking BLAST in the office. I danced and pranced and leapt and spun and granted motherfucking wishes, oh yes I did.

Please ignore Pretty Pretty Princess' black socks. Wednesday is laundry day. But feel free to compliment her Pretty Pretty pumpkin hand tattoo.

After work, Carolina, DazRazzle, J Faust and I headed down to the Halloween parade. We were blessed with impossibly practical Halloween weather, a 60-degree night, perfect for parading. I had collected a smattering of both horror stories and endorsements of the parade from my coworkers over the course of the day, but the ladies and I found the experience to be overwhelmingly positive. The parade is Candyland for a costume fanatic like moi, and my walk amidst this traveling freak show constituted some of my favorite hours of 2006.

As for costume specifics, the robots were cool...

and Salt n Pepa nearly killed me when I saw them.

But for some reason, the old school video game costumes came out on top. A few that really nailed it:

The Super Mario Crew

Mr. and Ms. Pacman

Tetris

The Tetris guys were awesome because they hobbled along in those stifling, unwieldy cardboard boxes, but stopped to assemble themselves for photo ops every few blocks (and they fit together quite nicely).

The only costume more photo-ready/friendly than Tetris was the toast. By far my favorite costume of the parade, maybe of all time - two dudes dressed like pieces of BREAD.

The toast of the town.
These guys are the jam.
The ladies and I came up with more when we first saw these fellas, but I done gone forgot 'em.

The toast guys are fucking geniuses because every person in the whole goddamn parade wanted their photo taken between two pieces of talking bread. Every sexy policewoman, every slutty firefighter (and you know the streets were overflowing with NY's half-clad bravest and finest) wanted to be part of a Halloween sammich.

I was no exception.

Pretty Pretty Princess Sandwich!

Nor was J Faust, who dressed as Olive from Little Miss Sunshine, complete with fully functional strip gear and authentic 3rd-grade glasses.

I'm in love with this photo. I want to eat it.

It should also be noted that the toast guys were completely goofy, not creepy as they well could have been. I doubt they realized how well the gag would go over. They seemed thrilled just to be in middle of it all.

I found myself sort of wishing I had worn my flashier costume to the parade, which was a runway for golden wigs, sexy dresses and high concept costumes. But the converse worked out well for me in the long run, seeing as how the ladies and I traversed at least 50 blocks, probably more, before night's end.

A few of the other random Halloween highlights included Carolina (that dirty Jeter-lover) sporting my Red Sox hat for her "Red Sox fan at a Yankee Game" ensemble:

The lady looks great in red.

And Daz's unexpected costume validation in the form of a Lady Sovereign promotional cutout plastered to a random parade barricade.

Well, your album DID drop on Halloween, Lady S.

Screw my obsessive-compulsive nature and perfectionist tendencies. Fooey on authenticity and precise replication. All hail creative costuming, walking artwork and cultural homages. Celebrate tutus and prancing and magic and "pushing it," and having two princesses but no Yoshi, and making giant sandwiches out of old ladies and ninja turtles and bongs and half-naked drill sergeants. And next year when the 31st of October approaches, stick with me peeps, and don't let anybody rain on your parade.

Miss Stacia, age 24.

2006-11-18T17:25:00.000-05:00

**Thanks to Shani for the lovely birthday portraits!

Twenty-four in 5-7-5.

2006-11-17T17:48:00.000-05:00

Miss Stacia loves haikus. Miss Stacia also loves parties. Miss Stacia loves kicking off parties with party-related haikus. Example, her 24th birthday invitation:

Nineteen eighty-two,
November the seventeenth,
doc said to mom, "PUSH!"

Yup, Miss Stacey's turning twenty-freakin-four. Come hang at Lolita Bar to celebrate!!!

The Deets:
When: Friday, Nov. 17th, 9PM
Where: Lolita Bar
Directions, yo!: http://www.lolitabar.net/directions/
Please reply in haiku form.

xoxo-
Stacey

I honestly did not expect anyone to report back with carefully crafted verses of their own, but apparently I'm not the only one who loves to break life down into three lines of simplistic syllabic consistency.

I received clever alerts:
The link did not work.
I don't know how to get there.
I'd still like to come.

Timely event-driven commentary:
Britney dumped K-fed
Dems win big: time to party
for Stacey, Dems, K-Fed
(forgiving the 5-7-6 structure on this one)

And straight-up RSVPs:
Be there with bells on
Ed and I will shake out butts
L.I.R.R. Home

i am so there, jew
this Friday will be fun
like pulling your teeth

Some were tagged with helpful supplementary info:
I hope to see you*
Almost a quarter century**
Are you a werewolf?

*tonight
**must be pronounced "sen-try" to work within the traditional syllabic structure of the haiku.

Some incorporated the traditional seasonal reference:
Let drinks flow into
Brook for another year. Too
bad I can't be there

And many took the opportunity to reflect upon age/birthdays:
Shit!! In 82 -
Saw Van Halen! Not quite birth,
but EYES dilated

let's get real silly
and drink to the fact that you
are not thirty yet

Twenty four is cool.
Thirty is even better.
Make the best of it.

Others were simply, well, fun:
Yes, it will be fun.
Oh yeah, that will be darn fun.
Seriously fun.

There were even a few notable responses that veered from the 5-7-5, my favorite being:
I'm born 5 minutes after midnight and I used to call my mother at midnight and scream into the phone :" Push Mami push...I'm almost out!"...

But most opted for the haiku, the rest of which I give to you now, in no particular order:

For my Cherry Chew
I would walk five hundred miles
But three thousand? Fuck.

Belated response
Positive, do not condemn
Two-four giddyup!

you can call me daz
if they play beyonce k
i will shake my ass

Twenty-four how fun!
A party with hats and drinks
Can I come naked?

On one Friday Night
We will all lift our glasses
And drink to Stacey!

Oh Stacey, My Love!
New Zealand is where I'll Be.
How I will miss you :(

my dear stacey brook,
so excited for your day,
but late i will be...

i do, with great joy
and anticipation, accept
your invitation

I would love to go,
but I'm up in Buffalo,
Happy Birthday, yo!

Though I would love to
and not miss out on the fun
Ben Folds beckons me.

Lolita bar - hmm
Why - It sounds quite familiar
Yes! I will be there!

Raise a glass for me
As tomorrow proves no good
I'm on Mommy time

Thanks for the invite,
Happy Twenty-Fourth Birthday,
I would love to come!

The present for you
A vibrator is your wish
Get the batteries

Birthday cheer to you
Good thing you’re not twenty two
Shish bam Bah Bah Roo

Wow and whoop-dee do
It is party time for sure
Jen and Dan will show

So sorry I am
Live to far to celebrate
You are in my heart

concert to attend
my heart fills with regret
Stacey's birthday, oh!

my name is the jones
if the beer flow like wine im sold
see you there bitches

Dear Miss Stacey Brook,
Happy Almost Twenty Four!
Love, Your Friend Jasmine

Your birthday's approach
I see a drunken evening
In my crystal ball

Celebrating you
Having to much Alcohol
forehead on the Bar

And one last one from Miss Stacia to the peeps:
Two-four at the bar -
less about the haikus
and more about Jager.

Okay, alright, no more frakkin haikus. Let’s do this thing.

Ven Don't

2006-10-30T23:34:00.000-05:00

I fancy myself an adventurous eater, and aside from super-spicy food, or the deepest of deep fried, I'm down to try just about anything. Alternately, my mother has always been somewhat of a conservative diner, passing on all things raw or tentacled (understandable), and warning quite often of the dangers of the dive restaurant. Avoidance of the cheapy eateries is a strategy I just can't abide by in New York City, as it would eliminate about 70 percent of the best dumplings, burgers and ethnic delicacies in town, and while scarfing down shumai in a Chinatown basement I occasionally congratulate myself on my well-rewarded rebelliousness. This shit is amazing! Mom doesn't know everything, now does she.

Street vendors have always been another big "no no" for Mama Jones. Pretzels, yes, but street meat, no way. I ate my first vendor hot dog at a cart in Times Square in the five minutes I had to kill between two New Yorker Festival events last fall. I vaguely remember spitting out a tiny pearl of what may have been plastic (or probably just congealed pig intestine), but aside from that, I remember tearing into that bun and feeling so alive. Just a New Yorker eating a New York hot dog. I've probably eaten street dogs about three or four times since, always with confidence that my mother's warnings of cart food illness were an exaggeration. Until it hit me.

Mom and pops came into the city yesterday afternoon to run a few errands and swung by my apartment to pick me up on the way. We drove down Fifth Avenue into midtown, the streets lined with smoking vendor carts that stirred a craving within me.

"Yes. " I thought. "I'm going to eat something from a cart, in front of my mother, right now. I will prove it can be done."

We parked the car but mom separated from pops and I on our way to get the grub from a lonely cart on Madison. I ordered mom's requisite hot pretzel, "and one hot dog please." My father's eyes lit up. He's the man who taught me how to chow down. He's the man who eats the fried shrimp heads - eyes intact - that come with his ama ebi sushi. The man who braved Woodstock-esque festival, Watkins Glenn, with only cans of cured oysters to keep him alive. The man is not afraid of any food item on the planet. And standing there ordering that little log of unidentifiable "beef" parts from the Pakistani vendor, I could see a gleam of sly pride in his eye.

I held mom's pretzel with one hand and watched the vendor flip open the lid of a metal compartment housing about fifteen tan links, floating in water. I thought about my friend Caroline's warning:

"I've seen the place where they keep all the carts at night. It's filthy. There are rats and roaches crawling all around. They never clean the carts."

Fuck that. I was starving.

The vendor dipped his tongs in the water, clamping down on one of the skinny dogs.

"No, the big one!" my father instructed.

"That's a sausage," the vendor told my father.

"Yeah, sure, that's what she wants," dad replied.

Umm, sure. A sausage. From a street vendor. A sausage that looks like a giant hot dog. Can't be any WORSE than a hot dog, right? I bit into the mustard-covered meat. A hot dog with a kick. Not terrible, but nothing I'd willingly buy again. Ravenous, I tucked the sausage away in under a minute, following with a bit of mom's pretzel and some Diet Peach Snapple to normalize my palette. Okay, feeling great.

Fast forward six hours. Errands have been run. A massive Italian dinner of beef carpaccio and tortellini has been consumed. I am curled on my bed in the fetal position and I think I might die. I call Caroline.

"I ate street meat today, and now I think I might die. I just thought I'd tell you so if I call out sick tomorrow, you can vouch for the fact that I am, in fact, dying of food poisoning."

"Awww, Stace," Caroline chuckles. "Did I ever tell you about the time I saw where they keep the car..."

"Yes, yes," I interrupt. "I should have known better, but whatever, what's done is done, and now I feel like..."

Belch.

"Gotta call you back Car."

And then the puke.

And then more puke.

It's midnight and I call my mother. She's sleeping. I ask her if she or my father was feeling sick from dinner and she answers that they aren't. I tell her I just vomited and that I think I have food poisoning.

"The fucking sausage," she says.

"Maybe, " I answer, "but maybe not. It could have just been the sheer volume of food I ate today."

"No way Stacey, that shit is poison! What have I told you about eating meat from the vendors. Pretzels, okay. Chestnuts, okay. But the street meat, that shit will kill you."

Now I want to die because not only is vendor sausage is wreaking havoc on my insides, but I know I will never hear the end of this vendor banter from my mother.

This morning I wake up feeling sick and call out of work. Then I call mom. She's in the office chatting away with the other ladies and asks me how I'm feeling. I tell her I'm feeling better and one of the girls in the office asks my mother what's wrong.

"My daughter ate a sausage from a street vendor yesterday," mom answers in obvious disgust. I can hear the ladies groaning, their matching squished up noses flashing across my brain. I feel my temper start to rise as my mother returns to the phone and begins yet another lecture on the dangers of the vendor hot dog.

I decide then and there that when mom is too old to care I will feed her nothing but street meat.

But regarding the more immediate future, I plan to stay away from the carts for a while. Until the tempting vapors of unidentifiable steamed meat reel me in once again.

Grandmas don't lie.

2006-10-19T11:02:00.000-04:00

An email from mine this morning:

you must have brought the mets good luck--hope it carries over to today. dad must be in 7th heaven. i was out playing mah-jongg last night but we had the radio on to listen to the game. the mets will come thru tonight. love you. grandma

Arugula is making a comeback...

2006-10-18T11:14:00.000-04:00

And broccoli rabe is the jam. But I just want some spinach in my motherfucking omelette already.

The Name Game

2006-10-06T15:14:00.000-04:00

Miss Stacia's afternoon musings on her parentally-furnished name, Stacey (Lauren) Brook:

1. A VP in my office, with whom I had had no direct contact before an interaction this morning, apparently attended a summer camp in upstate New York that contained within it's grounds, nature's very own Stacey Brook. As in the running stream of water bearing the exact same name, "e-y" spelling and all.

2. I already knew of the existence of said brook from a vain Google search.

3. For some reason I decided to inform the VP of my search engine-facilitated familiarity with his childhood tubing grounds. He did not seem impressed.

4. In addition to the aforementioned "Babbling Brook" (papa dukes' college radio tag) or "Stacey Stream" (nickname coined by elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Cyr), there also exists Stacey L. Brook, co-author of The Wages of Wins, a non-fiction book that has been described as "Freakonomics meets ESPN." I first encountered Stacey L. Brook's sports myth dubunkage in a New Yorker feature earlier this year, just as my Fantasy Baseball season was kicking off. Maybe my twin-in-name would have passed on A-Rod as her first round pick. She definitely wouldn't have chosen Edmonds over Lee in the outfield.

5. Stacey L. Brook is probably responsible for the heartbreaking unavailability of staceybrook@gmail.com. But I beat her to staceybrook.com, so we'll call it even.

Hip hip, José!

2006-10-03T19:25:00.000-04:00

Read my review of the Zero 7/José Gonzalez show at Webster Hall.

Do it. Now!

Yom Kippur with the Joneses

2006-10-02T20:30:00.000-04:00

Totally normal, break fast conversation for the Jones family:

(In the living room of the Cohen family in Annapolis, MA, about thirty minutes from the U of M campus. Papa Jones, addresses his friend Ricky from Podiatry school. Ricky’s 25-year old daughter Lindsay, the College Man and I are all in the room, clearly within earshot.)

Papa Jones: So after we all ate dinner together on Friday and you fed my wife that Grey Goose, I tried to get her in bed. She put on her nightie and I went in for it, and she told me she was tired and that she’d give it to me in the morning. So the next day I wake up to take a piss and get back in bed. My wife asks me what time it is and I say, “nine-thirty” and give her that look like, (sing songey) “It’s time!”

(By this point, the College Man and I have curled into the fetal position with our hands over our ears, and Lindsay is staring off in spacey denial.)

Papa Jones (cont’d): So when we’re finished, I look over at Debs and say, “Sorry honey, but I told a little white lie.” And she asks me what I’m talking about, so I say, “It’s only six-thirty!”

I know we just finished Yom Kippur, but in my opinion my father should immediately repent for telling this story in my presence. Adam would agree, but he’s too busy chain-gagging, while pushing these thoughts down deep in his subconscious.

The College Man: On Home Turf

2006-10-01T00:07:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I consented to spending four-and-a-half hours listening to Steely Dan in Papa Jones' hybrid to accompany the parents to Maryland for a long overdue visit to the College Man. After some much needed napping, an extensive NYC realty discussion and analysis and a New York Magazine read-aloud session from Mama Jones (she would have made a great first grade teacher) my parents and I arrived at the College Man's apartment around 6:30 where we examined his sweet and surprisingly clean living quarters. The bathroom was almost spotless and the kitchen, crumb-free, although there was a major explosion of titties all over the apartment walls:

"There seems to be a beer and tit theme to these apartments." -Papa Jones

It's Adam's sophomore year at U of M, and the man has learned a lot. He can maneuver kegs past his apartment security guards, no sweat. When multiple hos are primed and ready, The College Man knows where to go in for the kill.

One thing the man has not yet learned is how to make a good rumrunner. This drink in my hand is fucking toxic. But I can't hate on the kid for pushing his weekly kegger from Friday to Saturday night in my honor. I'm 99 percent positive I'm getting sexiled from his room later, and I'm being forced to listen to shitty 50 cent songs, but I'm ready to kick it College Style. Live blogging or morning reporting on this jam is soon to come. For now, stay fresh. Roll them blunts. Rock them hos. Or something.

Born Planner

2006-09-29T16:23:00.000-04:00

Jay-Z's impression of Miss Stacia, age 5:

"First, I'm gonna play Barbie. Then, I'm gonna bake muffins. Then I'm gonna take a nap, and tonight I'm gonna read myself to sleep."

I'm sorry, but it's never too early to set short-term goals and master time management.

Stacie Rose @ Sin-é, 9/21/06

2006-09-26T01:36:00.000-04:00

At the bar before Stacie Rose’s show at Sin-é this past Thursday, a friend attempted to describe Rose's sound, offering up the preview, “Her music matches her engagement ring.”

Rose and I have been coworkers for about six months now and I have never once looked down at her left hand. In fact, about a week ago I can remember being startled when she casually mentioned her husband in conversation, mostly because Stacie is vibrant and attractive, and at 23 years-old it never occurs to me to assume my social and professional contacts are committed to lifelong significant others. I finished my beer wondering how people come to get married, what this funky, talented promo producer’s dream wedding would entail and how her ring would sound if shot out her vocal chords through the speakers of Sin-é.

From the first notes out of Rose’s mouth I assumed the setting was platinum. The lady’s got chops. Her folky sweetness, unpretentious refinement and barrage of “oh oh ohs” led me initially to Natalie Merchant, but in her slower, softer moments she channels a coy whisper, Jewel sans yodel. When laying a little twang on the sugar and the polish, maybe LeAnn or Faith Hill. In her grander, stockier, ballsier moments, even a little Ethridge. It’s not a discount to Rose that she conjures thoughts of so many other female pop singers. You can never really point your finger at one because she’s gleaned the best from them all, fusing them together, giving her voice a distinct but immediately accessible shape.

This shape was bolstered by a full band, including electric and acoustic guitarists (Rose’s husband on acoustic), a bassist, a drummer, and a backup singer. It’s invigorating to see a singer-songwriter travel with such a deep crew, and the full sound enhanced Rose’s poppier compositions, swelling to meet her peaks and dropping out to let her shine in moments of melancholy and quiet triumph. But the standouts were Rose’s country-tinged numbers, acoustic laying the earthy foundation and electric guitar solos threading the seams between Rose’s uplifting vocal choruses.

Recorded, Rose sounds a touch bubblegum, but onstage she spits more attitude. She sings songs about disaster with sly pride. She banters about “guns and drugs and puppies.” She tells you she likes to write sad songs and then throws down “Sad But Blue,” a drum-heavy powerhouse that hardly seems sad when delivered with such unapologetic resolution. She sings, “I’m a lucky girl…I’m a happy girl…I’m a troubled girl..." on "Okay," her lyrics suggesting trust and graciousness, coupled with a distinct distaste for game playing. She cuts to the chase, and effortlessly.

That ring could be a promise string or a five-carat rock. Regardless, I’m sure it is precisely what the woman wanted.

Another Saturday Night

2006-09-24T01:42:00.001-04:00

Mama Jones and I just finished watching Say Anything (with commercials on Bravo - so annoying) and I am left with two lingering thoughts:

1. As Chuck Klosterman once postulated, Lloyd Dobler, or the dateable equivalent, does not actually exist. Coming to this realization while painstakingly studying Dobler's limitless devotion to Diane Court (played by the poor man's Jennifer Connelly) brought me to tears. Personally, I'd rather date Rob Gordon with his enyclopedic pop culture knowledge and endearing obsessive tendencies, but it would be comforting to know there is a man out there who might live for the opportunity to teach me to drive a stick shift, accompany me on adventures overseas, or even just call me every day. (Although, in life, the boombox schtick is a bit overkill.)

2. Jeremy Piven is way sexier at forty-something than he was in his early twenties. And I'm convinced his career began to soar the day he decided never to rap or beatbox on camera ever again. I bet most people don't even remember seeing the future Ari Gold in Say Anything, but trust me, he's in there and as my mother observed, "he hasn't yet grown into his teeth."

Indulge in my box.

2006-09-17T10:04:00.000-04:00

Next Saturday night, take some friends here. Once you start making the sake box jokes, you'll never stop. You will scream out things like:

"Wow, that's one tasty box!"

or

"Your box is wet, try not to spill."

or

"It's really best only to taste one box a night."

or

"I think our boxes are pretty comparable in quality."

You will take pictures of yourself indulging in your own box.

And your friends touching each other's boxes.

You will shoot an album cover for your new band, "Ham(ilton) and the Boxes."

From the forthcoming LP, Drink From The Corner

Your mouth will form the word "box" so many times, specific motor muscles will start to ache, and you will want to punch yourself in the face.

And then you'll just order another box.

Poetry Exchange: The Number One Stunna

2006-09-13T11:26:00.000-04:00

Sent to me in response to yesterday's haikufest (the author wishes remain anonymous):

*DISCLAIMER*
The attached poem is not based on any real life experience on the author's part. When writing a poem for/about a female, it is generally a good idea for the piece to be complementary in nature. The alternative could spell disaster for those in any proximity to the subject. Also, when writing single rhyme scheme poems, one is limited to a certain number of words. Therefore, the writer must pick a theme that works and run with it. This poem is a cautionary tale. Enjoy.

Let me tell you about this stunner named Stacey Brook
Sure she’s easy on the eyes, but her wardrobe is what gets the second look
Say you meet her, you chat, dance, girl has you on the hook
Maybe you get friendly and even score a little “nookie-nook”
Bored, she changes roles and becomes the cook
You’re the salt shaker, and dude you just got shook
You might feel bitter or feel as if advantage was took
The girl ran off with your heart like a common two-bit crook
Moving on is tough, I haven’t found the answer in a book
Until I do, I’m the king, checkmated, by Stacey’s rooks

Major points for kissing ass and giving me way more credit than I deserve. Minus a few for a wordy second line, earned back in bonus points for "nookie-nook" and the salt shaker metaphor.

Try and top it kids. I welcome all contributions.

High-Coup: Taking Down the Man With Third-Grade Poetry

2006-09-12T01:19:00.000-04:00

People express their job dissatisfaction through various outlets, some healthier than others. When I first started working for the Citi back in July '05, I was pretty miserable. The temp job was my first experience in a strict corporate environment and at first I found the atmosphere a bit stodgy, the people stiff, the work mundane. Eventually I came to love the Bonz, Ken Tailey, McMattress and the rest of the Citi crew. And I reveled in the hours of downtime, the likes of which I may never see again, by combing every New York City publication and gossip blog and hatching ideas like Experimental Fashion Friday. But in those first few weeks, before I started abusing my email account and reading Gawker shamelessly in front of portfolio managers, I nearly lost my mind among the suits and spreadsheets.

How did I cope? With Hai-freaking-kus. Yes, Haikus, the most simplistic poetic verse known to man, taught to me in elementary school and finally mastered in their application to the boring world of finance. At first I would simply text off-the-cuff verses to my boyfriend at the time, but after a while I began scrawling down pages and pages of spontaneous three-line poems in my notebook during work hours. I never really paid attention to the traditional
seasonal reference guideline, I just followed the basic five-seven-five syllable rule and let my random thoughts inform the subject matter. The majority of the poems dealt with my inability to comprehend my corporate surroundings. (I'll admit, I was very judgemental at first.) Some dealt with my insufferable boredom. Some were completely out-of-nowhere, and a handful were just plain dirty.

Below is a sampling of my poetic accomplishments. Ancient Japanese poets are rolling over in their graves right now. But at least they're not crunching numbers in pinstripes. Enjoy:

Oh ham, egg and cheese,
hope he doesn't break your yolk.
I like you messy.

Net interest margin?
Earning assests, average loans?
I failed statistics.

Some teachers sustain
healthy appetites for chalk.
What I learned in math.

When men wear work suits
hot, big, hairy animals
freeze out the women.

Next time, in fairness,
big boss man comes back to life
to work the mailroom.

Hall and Oates photo
Cubicles tell half stories
Oh lover of Floyd

It's four fifty-six.
Clock strikes five in four short ones.
In thirty I'm gone.

Nothing you can do
after failing the drug test
but light up a doob.

Confiscate my note
Read it in front of the class
All dirty haikus

Wasted life at work
Adding to the big green wad
No time for strippers

Prior to email
Had to talk to coworkers
Eighteen times a day

Tough when in common
all you have with coworkers
is Katie and Tom.

Albert Einstein, bah!
Cole slaw on turkey: GENIUS!
Fuck you, café wrap.

How many wires?
Building stuffed with computers.
Who sets this shit up?

Swim through humid air
Today all the amoebas
Get to work on time

Push a cubicle
Watch the dominoes sucker!
Office hazard deaths

At five twenty-two
Roseanne Barr on the treadmill
moves faster than time.

And a limerick for good measure:

At the heart of esteemed Citicorp,
sat a girl who found finance a bore.
If in work was enthused
as she was with haikus
she would be making money galore.

Things I Learned Today:

2006-09-11T15:46:00.000-04:00

1. The LIRR never runs on time when you need it to. (This was really more of a confirmation than an epiphany.)

2. Falling asleep on the train is a terrible idea, unless you can guarantee coffee consumption exactly thirty seconds after reaching Penn Station. (Tip: It is very difficult to make this happen if you are running late. See lesson 1.)

3. Fed Exing a package is ridiculously easy. Until you fuck it up.

4. I hate making mistakes.

5. I hate missing deadlines more. (Even when said deadlines are semi-negotiable.)

6. In my lifetime, I will make many more mistakes and maybe even miss other deadlines.

7. Forty minutes alone in a room with a laptop, Zero 7 and a bag of M&M's will alleviate the funk brought on by all of the above.

Thank you Ticketmaster.

2006-09-11T12:37:00.000-04:00

Dear Ticketmaster,

Thank you sincerely for notifying me today, Mon 9/11 at 12:25pm, that tickets are on sale for the New Yorker Festival. Although the tickets went on sale last Thursday at noon, with the celeb-sprinkled events selling out in less than twenty minutes, it is comforting to see the mass notification email arrive four days after the on-sale date, giving those who do their research and stay on top of New York happenings full advantage in attending these coveted events. Not that this even helped me all that much this year.

So much for catching a glimpse of Ed Norton or Steve Martin. See you at the global warming panel! (No seriously, I will be there. Tickets still available.)

Much love,
Miss Stacia

Give Me The Green Light

2006-09-06T10:31:00.000-04:00

If you receive emails from me today harboring a few extra periods or out of place consonants, don't blame it on my cheating in eighth grade keyboarding class, blame it on Beyonce for crafting one of the most bumpin songs I've ever heard in my life. The new album is a real booty-shaker - there are at least five SOLID singles in there (see "Green Light," "Upgrade U" and "Freakum Dress" for evidence) - but "Ring the Alarm" is the killer. I wish the office would let me strut around with my 1980's-era headphones on all day so I could dip and bounce to Lady B's enraged catcall while fetching the good peeps their tape stock. But alas, my shimmies and siren-inspired gyrations most likey won't fly in the corpo atmosphere, so I must be content shaking my shoulders and punching out emails, two fingers at a time, to "I'll be damned if I see another chick in your arms!!!" Unfortunately I can't quite keep up with B's rants about chinchilla coats and houses off the coast on keyboard percussion without compromising spelling and grammatical accuracy. Such is the sacrifice I am willing to make to ring it in here in tghe dub roomn..

The Ditty Bops @ Spiegeltent, South Street Seaport - 8/30/06

2006-08-31T02:46:00.000-04:00

Fans of cabaret-inspired bands are plain spoiled rotten. Constant stimulation and fanfare is the name of the game for a certain breed of band that counts Humanwine, the Dresden Dolls, and the Ditty Bops among its ilk, the latter of whom played Spiegeltent at South Street Seaport tonight.

A combination of sassy saloon jazz, plucky folk and vaudeville showmanship, The Ditty Bops were a perfect fit for the antique dramatics of the Spiegeltent setting. The “tent of mirrors” is over 80 years old, one of under a dozen traveling cabaret performance houses left in the world. Fanned out on the north edge of the Seaport’s famous boardwalk amidst strings of festive carnival lights, the self-sufficient structure brought an air of welcome festivity to Manhattan’s edge, shrouding a clan of impossibly eager fans in slim rectangles of stained color and aged wooden support beams showcasing endless panels of reflective glass. The Bops’ starlet duo, Amanda Barrett and Abby DeWald, who bicycled for nine hours straight in the pouring rain to make the New York tour date (they have cycled to EVERY show on this summer’s tour – 4,502.75 miles, thus far) were no doubt grateful for the magnificence of their temporary shelter.

The girls wasted no time pulling out the tricks, sending their Master of Ceremonies in on stilts for introductions. Amanda, on mandolin, sported a cop uniform, complete with signature hat, and Abby, on guitar, donned the jailbird ensemble. The duo breezed through numbers from their latest release Moon Over the Freeway, with an upright bass, piano, accordion, and host of Amanda-operated (literal) bells and whistles supplementing the angelic harmonies and invigorated strums. The set list included, among the new gems, two covers by Bops-endorsed group, The Boswell Sisters. Old favorite “Sister Kate” inspired an audience member to hop on stage, inciting jealousy in all those who weren’t wearing gold fringe to better “shake it like a bowl of jelly on a plate.” Audience participation, which often serves up snooze or cringe-worthy moments at live shows, provided many of the night’s highlights. The three volunteers called upon to sing “Wishful Thinking” to The Ditty Bops’ accompaniment, grabbed hold of the cheerful tune, even nailing some of the unpracticed harmonies. When asked to tell a story during the interlude of “a song about an obsessive love,” a balding, self-proclaimed Dungeons and Dragons geek in a priest collar (yes, that’s right) riffed about following two girls who rode their bikes across the country: “I’m not an athlete,” he delivered rhythmically. “I rode hard. It was at the 9th power, if you know D&D.”

The band was as playful as the fans, intermittently pulling from a trunk of props for visual and dramatic aids. Eye patches and skull-adorned hats came out for pirate-inspired chanteys. Juggling pins and playing cards were exchanged in soundtracked duels. Balloons were popped, used to create static electricity, and even inhaled for their helium, to hilarious effect, before harmonies.

Towards the close of the set, the MC creeped on stage to hastily apply black and white makeup to the girl’s faces before they stripped down to skeleton-screened t-shirts and shorts to play one of the band’s more ominous numbers. Now dressed in Halloween garb and harboring surprises still, The Bops followed with a song featuring a guest musician from New York, recruited through the band’s website to play the SAW (In case you’re wondering, you play the saw with a bow, and it sounds a lot like the ooooooooooo oooooooo’s you hear from ghosts in a cheesy haunted house).

The band closed the night with an encore set of two of their more traditional Ditty Bop numbers, the first featuring spectacularly racy lyrics like, “I ain’t the electrician, I ain’t the electrician’s son, but I will wire your box until the real electrician comes,” and raunchy variations on this formula (think “I ain’t the carpenter, I ain’t the garbage man”).

The last number, a simple, darling, hip-shaker, turned the fans’ attention back to the catchy simplicity of the recordings that brought them to Spiegeltent in the first place. The Bops write and sing great tunes. The rest is just icing on the big top.

Questions from my future readers

2006-08-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

As I was scanning my sitemeter this morning, I noticed a visitor whose referring URL was a Google search of the words "is eating bacon raw dangerous." Another Google search for "ladies crotch grabbing" also pointed a new reader to Collections Are Dangerous early this AM.

These are the issues that bring random people to Miss Stacia's forum these days. Hope I deliver what you folks are looking for.

And for my Japanophiles...

2006-08-29T17:31:00.000-04:00

Eat: Dressed up noodles

Attend: The Japanese New Music Festival

Read: Murakami and Murakami

Listen to: Asobi Seksu

Pour les Francophiles parmi nous:

2006-08-29T11:39:00.000-04:00

Trouvez: "Paris, Je T'Aime"

Voyez : Mon chère Devery

Lisez: Marguerite Duras

Ecoutez à: Françoise Hardy

The Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series: Red Lobster

2006-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

If you're one of the many people who has been hounding me to post about my Red Lobster experience for almost four months now, I must apologize. It took me this long to digest the (roughly) four pounds of shellfish I ate that night, and I'm just now starting to feel like myself again.

I could not believe how many people jumped to join me at my Red Lobster de-virginization. I mean LEAPT at the chance to eat heaps of food from a category that, even in top quality, can be responsible for the most vicious food poisoning ever to wash through your entrails. But somehow a group nine deep (including Jay-Z, Big Mo and K-Pun) came to inhabit a long dais of bargain seafood at the center of the universe: Times freaking Square.

Of the nine diners, my girl Jules, her boyfriend DC and I were the only Red Lobster novices. Jules, one of the original contributors during the gestation of the Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series' mission, had passed on rumors of the existence of mouthwatering "cheesy biscuits," Red Lobster's stab at the addictive, unlimited dinner roll. When we finally rounded up the crew and sat down to dinner we were starving, and those little popovers started disappearing at lightning speed. Jules and DC gave the warm, flaky bread nuggets rave reviews, as did the rest of the table, who claimed to have embraced cheesy biscuit comas in the past. But I was less than impressed, wanting an even warmer and fluffier conduit for a tangier, more obvious cheesiness. I'm also not that big into biscuits, so it could be my bias talking here, but the saltine simplicity of the Olive Garden breadstick is still the yeast to beat.

For the main course, almost the entire table opted for "The Ultimate Feast," a combo platter of fried shrimp, shrimp scampi, crab legs and a lobster tail, served with a potato in the form of your choice.

Sebastian has seen better days.

These mammoth platters of shellfish were hoisted out, four at a time, by the strongest waitress alive, and were granted to the members of our party at just over thirty bucks a pop, a deal that pleased and made me nervous at the same time. DC elected to order the televised promotion special of the month, 35 shrimp any style, which he bumped up to a mammoth 45 for a couple extra dollars. (N.B. It is noted on Red Lobster's website that all prices in the Times Square and Hawaii locations are higher than advertised. Figures.) T-Money, who is allergic to shellfish**, opted for one of the few non-seafood, dishes on the menu, which was a chicken pasta, covered in what else but alfredo sauce.

In my opinion the shrimp were pretty measly, missing the robust fleshiness required for scooping up cocktail sauce or marinara. But they were lying limp in a garlic butter sauce or crusted with breading on my plate, which hid their inferior quality well enough. I also thought the lobster tail was a little on the tangy side (although it could have all been in my head), but MAN were those crab legs sweet. I would go back to that place for the crab legs alone. The crab lags and maybe the drinks.

Now, I'm not ordinarily a fan of the frozen beverage, but when you're waiting for a group of nine to pull together at the bar, you're bound to peruse the special drinks menu. On a whim I opted to start the night with a pilsner full of Bahama Mama, a strawberry-injected pina colada. Nine dollars for ten ounces of crushed ice, two ounces of sugared food coloring and half an ounce of actual liquor. The Long Island Iced Tea that followed my tropical slurpee seemed to do more of the trick in bringing on the buzz. I typically fear the Long Island Iced Tea, as it combines just about every liquor I refuse to drink alone, tastes nothing like iced tea, and is named after a place that conjures memories of drunken adolescent behavior I am less than eager to revisit. But Big Mo seemed to be pleased with his first cocktail (he often starts his nights with the magic tea), so I decided to take a chance. The drink was the perfect cap to my seafood orgy, putting me in a coma that effectively numbed the pain of digestion. Strong Island represent.

Now, Mo sucked down his first concoction in no time and was ready for his second round long before the waitress brought our bounty of crustaceans to the table. It was on his second trip to the bar that the guy, in a bold vote of confidence in his manhood, decided to order a six gallon martini glass full of frozen strawberry daiquiri.

It takes a big man to order a drink that pink.

A warning to men who are tempted to pull a similar stunt in the future: As with the sporting of a pink mens shirt, don’t try to pull off drinking a massive, conspicuously girly drink if you don’t have a set of fucking bowling balls between your legs. Especially when the Red Lobster marketing team decides to call your tub of rose-colored slushie “The Lobsterita.” It's the most ridiculous name possible, the child of a brainstorming session in which everyone was on crack. It’s a name you love to hate to love. It’s the drink equivalent of worst band name ever. It’s fucking genius.

I don’t know if the Lobsterita tasted any good, and can’t remember if Big Mo even came close to finishing it, but I do remember the drink making frequent appearances in my overnight shellfish-induced hallucinations. (Morning-after discussions with DC confirmed that both of us awoke in discomfort in the wee hours, myself with visions and nightmares, DC "to drink a gallon of water.") The following Monday, none of my coworkers reported middle-of-night disturbances, although Big Mo made it clear Red Lobster would live on through the next week and beyond, interjecting shouts of "Lobsterita!" at random points during the day. For quite some time the drink was adopted into dub room vernacular to imply a number of things:

1. I need a drink. (In a desperate tone, with a look of exhaustion: "Lobsteriiiiiitaaaa.")
2. Fuck that. (Chris Tucker stylee: "Lobsterita motherfucker!")
3. Hand me that dub? (Pointing to the tape: "Lobsterita?")

This all-purpose exclamation has since exited our daily vocabulary, but as I finally put a cap on this long-awaited installment of UEE: Red Lobster, I feel it is only appropriate to blurt out, if one last time (a la Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects): LOSTERFUCKINGRITACOCKSUCKERMOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!!!

**Jay-Z is also allergic to shellfish, which is why she ordered shrimp, lobster, and crab legs for dinner. I'm actually pretty sure she ate the last half of MY lobster tail as well. It's okay, she looks HOT in hives.

The Tigress knows all.

2006-08-27T23:01:00.000-04:00

Partially in celebration of another excellent Neko show under the belt, partially in homage to the most heavily rotated Caseian creations, as of late:

That Teenage Feeling
I Wish I Was The Moon

Listen to the woman.

Hungover, I could take on that skinny hot dog champ, I swear.

2006-08-27T22:24:00.000-04:00

Last night I stayed up until 5am dancing to doo-wop and early MJ in a sweaty, smoky east village basement with a bunch of NYU freshman (Jay-Z, I don’t know HOW you convinced me to go you-know-where). This morning I awoke to the nausea invoked by three vodka tonics, a Jager shot (not my idea), a Corona and an infinite number of Stellas and Brooklyn Lagers. For the first three hours of bleating consciousness, I could barely think about downing the water required for recovery, not even touching upon the idea of food until about 2pm. But once the impulse hit me, I shifted into my usual hungover garbage disposal mode, working through the following in a matter of hours:

1. 6 steamed pork dumplings
2. 1 order chicken w/ broccoli
3. 1 pint white rice
4. medium tomato cheddar soup (best shit EVER) from Hale and Hearty
5. lots o' bread (w/soup)
6. 1 slice key lime pie
7. more-than-tastes of Jay-Z’s fruit and chocolate tortes
8. 1 spinach pie
9. 1 hummus and pita sandwich with cucumber and tomato

Cocoa Krispies are a good bet for later, and I’m pretty sure I’ve already consumed the adequate calories to last three days without food. How am I still hungry? Have to flip. The. Switch.

"Revenge of the Bookeaters" at the Beacon Theater, 8/23/06

2006-08-24T00:12:00.000-04:00

A few highlights from the “Revenge of the Bookeaters” show at the Beacon tonight (Quick because Miss Stacia’s got to go to bed and kick this cold before her Fran Drescher turns into a phone sex operator. If you've had a conversation with me recently you know what I'm talking about.):

1. Jon Stewart making an interesting observation about how Mac commercials kind of make him want to buy a PC (because presumably John Hodgman is the more likable of the two annoying spokespeeps.).
2. “Chicago” followed immediately by “Casimir Pulaski Day” from Sufjan Stevens and his sweet, six-piece band. Major score, and I wasn’t even crossing fingers for favorites like I usually do.
3. A silver-haired, cowboy-booted David Byrne announcing that he was going to do an entire country set, noting, “I’ve played all these songs before, just never all at once.”

But for me, the best part of the night, no joke, was exiting a killer musical showcase onto 74th and Broadway, a mere nine blocks from my apartment. This has never happened to me before, and may never again, as the typical bill for the Beacon theater these days features Linda Rondstadt* or Meatloaf (I shit you not, he was just there). Regardless, I could not stop reveling in the convenience.

Also, although I have seen a fair amount of hipsters make their way through Central Park for Summerstage, it truly tickled me to see them running amok on UWS city streets. An army of leggings marching towards my diner? A cluster of mullets and side-swept bangs in front of the Ruby Foo's?! I don’t think there was ever an occasion on which I could gaze at Zabars and catch so many pairs of thick-rimmed glasses in my peripheral vision. No strollers or little dogs, just a string of skinny chain smokers hanging across the street from the house that bubbe built.

*Sorry Linda, my heart belongs to Carly Simon.

The College Man: And the Trail He Leaves Behind

2006-08-22T21:09:00.000-04:00

I just opened my fridge to get a drink and was assaulted by a 22 oz. Bud Ice that wasn't there yesterday. I think the College Man spent a total of 44 waking minutes in my apartment between last night and this morning and we never went to a liquor store. Kid is a goddamn magician.

The College Man: Sophomore Send-off

2006-08-22T14:08:00.000-04:00

Last night The College Man and I went to see Talladega Nights and eat some delish Malaysian noodles while reconnecting for the last time before he returns to the U of Maryland. After waking the groggy bastard long before his typical rising hour this morn, I brought him into the office because I thought he might get a kick out of the studio and edit rooms, and because he had never seen a cubicle-ridden workplace before. I gave him a speedy tour, finishing in my dear friend Shanaberg's windowless equipment sanctuary before leading the way back to the LIRR. On our way out, The College Man turned to me and said, "This is kind of bleak."

No kidding sport. Welcome to life after college.

It should also be noted that The Princeton Review's list of the Best U.S. Party Schools was released today. University of Maryland clings impressively, if just barely, to the Number 20 spot.

Enjoy it while you can my brother.

A Hearty Thanks

2006-08-21T18:13:00.000-04:00

To the considerate woman who put up the "No Toilet Paper" post-it on my go-to stall in the ladies room. I salute you. Drip drying's a bitch.

Snakes on a Half-Empty Plizzane

2006-08-21T17:32:00.000-04:00

Reasons you should see Snakes on a Plane even though apparently no one else has:

1. To appreciate the screenplay's endearing commitment to a ridiculous premise. Says the movie’s villain of his decision to release snakes on the plane (to eliminate a witness who means to testify against him in a murder trial): “We’ve exhausted every other option.” Of course you did.
2. To witness Samuel L. Jackson’s dexterity in wielding random snake defense weapons including a tazer, a lance tipped with a broken beer bottle, and a hairspray-fueled blowtorch.
3. For a disturbing and hilariously predictable string of snake attacks on multiple genital/erogenous zones.
4. For the most ridiculously hedonistic-turned-gory airplane sex scene. See number 3.
5. For Sam Jackson’s PERFECT delivery of the line that launched the hype.
6. For Julianna Marguiles’ underappreciated hotness.
7. For David Koechner’s performance as mildly sleazy and freakishly resilient co-pilot, Rick.
8. To see a Tinkerbell-sized dog punted directly into the mouth of a boa constrictor. Sorry mom/Shayna, it was funny. And some little dogs deserve it.
9. For Keenan. Way more effective sans Kel.
10. For the rewarding epiphany that Samuel L. Jackson isn’t acting at all. He’s just a bad ass motherfucker. As he proclaims early in the film, “It's my job to handle life and death situations on a daily basis. It's what I do, and I'm very good at it.” Damn straight.

La Musique Transcendant

2006-08-10T12:12:00.000-04:00

If you like Francois Hardy or Serge Gainsbourg or my very favorite NYC faux-french seduction act, La Laque, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE achetez-vous Francoiz Breut's 2005 album, Une Saison Volée.

Aussi, a list of songs I may NEVER get sick of walking NYC to:

Widow and Son - Keren Ann
Before We Begin - Broadcast
Chicago - Sufjan Stevens
Us - Regina Spektor

Et une nouvelle favorite pour capituler à la force de l'orchestration:
I Hurt You (off the live Isle of View album) - The Pretenders

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

2006-08-08T01:42:00.000-04:00

I have been a Cocoa Krispies addict for as long as I can remember, thanks to mom and pops' lax policies regarding their children's consumption of sugar cereals. But never in my life, not even in my late-night cereal heyday (basically all of college), did I even come close to ingesting as much soggy rice and chocolate milk as I have in the past 24 hours. I estimate I've consumed about three-quarters of a box since about 9:00 am yesterday morning, which breaks down to around 12 of 16 possible servings and 168 grams of sugar (and I wonder why I can't fall asleep) in a little over 17 hours.

On the other hand, I've also sloshed down about a quart and a half of milk with my chocolate crack, so at least I'm working hard to keep osteoperosis at bay.

Somehow we missed the Rice-a-Roni factory.

2006-08-08T01:10:00.000-04:00

In addition to the Bonz's move to San Francisco this month, my good friends DC and Juju are also heading to Cali, as they're both from California and claim New York is lacking in natural wonders and relaxed vibes.

I don't know what the hell they're talking about (you mean Central Park isn't natural?!), but as I was recently reflecting upon the mass migration west, I started to tap into memories of the last time I was on the Golden Coast, during Spring Break '04. My roomate Scott and I rented a convertible in San Francisco and drove down US 1, hitting smog-enveloped Los Angeles on the way to our final destination of San Diego. I don't remember all too many specifics of the journey (which is not unexpected for me at this point - again, i blame heredity), although I do remember listening to a lot of Grandaddy and trying to maintain some kind of order to the long hair whipping in my eyes for all 15 hours we spent driving with the top down. I also remember rushing back to my Boston apartment with my digital camera, eager to upload the photos and create this egggcellent slide show with my newly acquired iMovie, posted for your viewing pleasure below.

I'm coming to visit biatches!

My Life in Bonz

2006-08-08T01:01:00.000-04:00

For those of you who are new to Collections are Dangerous, or who are unfamiliar with one of it's early stars, let me give you the quickie guide to The Bonz:

1. She pops the collar.

Heyyyyy!

2. She has the rack to beat.

Miss Stacia's left breast acting as an inadequate imposter.

3. She will put peanut butter on anything.

Peanut Butter Encrusted Meatloaf: A Bonz special recipe.

4. She dresses experimental fashionistas in her Lilly Pulitzer when she's wasted.

Yes, those are whales.

5. She innapropriately flashes the devil horns.

Old Fashioned Tomato Soup rocks, motherfuckers!

6. She encourages drinking beer from a cozie.

One of many from the Bonz's collection.

Proper lubrication aids the creative process.

8. She has an unhealthy obsession with Manhattan socialties.

Just call her Bonzley Mortimer.

9. She can shoot the duck.

Not this kind.

Or this kind.

But this kind.

10. Many things make her "uncomfy."

But not this.

The Bonz was my anchor of sanity while I worked for the Citi, and in addition to acting as a main supporter of the Experimental Fashion Friday movement (along with Jules McMattress), she was instrumental in the development of both the Wall of Faith...

Freedom of Religion and Bat-Mitzvah phone card giveaways for all.

and the Wall of Fashionable Orthapedic Shoes.

No way we're wearing Dr. Scholl's when we're 65.

Next week a much tanner chapter of the Bonz's life will begin in San Francisco. I'm sad to see the lady go, but the surf is calling for her preppy chic to wash over the boardwalks of California. All will be okay as long as you don't forget your roots Bonzie. The Upper East Side blondes will never let you live that down.

We'll miss you.

This post looks fake. No no, it looks real.

2006-08-02T00:47:00.000-04:00

Mama Jones has been dying to go to Madame Tussaud's wax museum for as long as I can remember, and a couple weekends ago, as a belated birthday present, Miss Raquel and I finally took her.

Personally, I have never understood the appeal behind a chamber of eerie, gelatin celebrity look-alikes, and I found the idea of visiting one in heart of Times Square to be doubly repulsive. For thirty freaking dollars, Jennifer Lopez’s frozen doppelganger ought to do more than blush when you blow in her ear – that thing better lap dance me to climax with it’s attractively disproportionate booty. (Apparently all subjects model for their sculptors, offering their bodies up to measurement for accurate replication.)

There are very few profundities to ponder and debate in a museum of wall-to-wall pop culture candles. The four basic utterances one repeats over and over until seizure ensues are:

“Yeah, that looks like her.”

“Eh…doesn’t really look like her.”

“Wow, he looks real!”

“Nah, he looks so fake!”

Of course there are minor variations on these these themes of accuracy:

“Well, it could be Trump in his YOUNGER years…”

“I don’t think Jessica Simpson can be THAT skinny and still be alive.”

and construction:

“Julia’s eye is looking a little lazy.”

“Ghandi’s got a crack in his shoulder.”

And on. And on.

On my visit I found myself occasionally drifting out of the standard debates to tune into the croaking conversation of some Red Hat Society members (A club of which I’m secretly DYING to be a member. Only 27 years to go!) as they hurled grating mispronunciations of “Madame Tussaud” at my pained, francophilic ears.

“Oh, there’s one of Madame Toos-uhd! Ethel, she’s so short!”

And then right back into the fire.

All museum conversation took place in between obsessive photo snapping. Because God forbid you miss out on the opportunity to take a picture with faux Pat Swayze, circa 1987. (Patrick Swayze is not actually represented in Mme. Tussaud’s, NYC, but someone should really get on that. Ken Tailey predicts Swayze will enjoy a rebirth in 2007 à la David Hasselhoff.)

The Jones ladies were pretty discerning about which figures to photograph, probably due to our unease in attempting to integrate the balls-of-wax-cum-celebrities into natural or funny poses. Yet despite our initial reluctance, we did manage to capture a few clutch images with some of our more personally influential icons:

The Direct Imitation

The Part of the Family

The Too Cool for the Wax Museum

The “Tsk Tsk.” (P.S. You look nothing like Lindsay Lohan.)

The Unintentionally Awesome

For me, the most exciting moment of the day came when I realized I could take a photo with the wax Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel, subject of my very first biography book report for which I was required to dress up like the The Iron Lady and read my work in front of my entire fourth-grade class. The wig purchased for my performance was later featured in my fifth-grade old lady Halloween costume, the first October holiday ensemble that instilled within me, pride in creative costuming.

Golda, your hair changed my life FOREVER.

Finally, in true perverted Jones family fashion, we instituted a crotch-grabbing series:

A bit more of a crotch-SMACK...

Miss Raquel jocks the jockey's jock strap. (Okay, jock can't actually be used as a verb.)

The swashbuckler that inspired the very first grab.

Because even wax museum-lovin Mama Jones agrees, nothing's fun if it’s squeaky clean.

Thinking About What I'm Thinking About

2006-07-21T23:09:00.000-04:00

Miss Stacia should never be asked to quantify anything complex, especially not the wavering, constantly mutating elements of her life and mind. Obsessive-compulsive freaks like me tend to get wrapped up in personal assessment (still working on my website bio, 2 years and counting), which often obscures more practical and easily-executed endeavors like cleaning the apartment, tackling the New Yorker and of course, making labels. But my dear friend Casiminowski sucked me into this weirdly addictive "percentage game" a few days ago, forcing me to break down and analyze the issues occupying space in my buzzing cortex. This, of course, has succeeded in driving me completely freaking insane.

Cas’ idea behind “calculating your percentage” started with his examination of the concept that men think about sex every 7 seconds. He began to survey the other subjects he spends time with on a regular basis and presented multiple revisions of a list mapping out his estimated thought pattern percentages, challenging others to undergo the same calculations.

This started as a fairly casual task for me, but as Casimir pointed out, coming to terms with your own method of classification is half the battle. I am a self-critical perfectionist and a chronic over-explainer (bullets reflect the breakdowns of the bolded categories) But that is how it must be, so deal with it.

The (estimated, ever-changing, mostly-complete) Thought Pattern Breakdown of Miss Stacia Jones:

10 % Family (If you don’t list this first you go to hell with all the folks who used their "dead grandmother" as a frequent excuse to get out of final exams. P.S. Hi mom.)
3% Independence and Personal Strength/Growth (I don’t need you, bitches!)
18% Relationships (I need you bitches!)
- (4) long standing friendships (The people who remember my past for me.)
- (3) making new acquaintances (Disregarding the Harvard events forced upon me by Miss Jay-Z and the two weeks a year I choose to put faith in internet dating.)
- (5) potential flings/infatuations (Every woman I know is drowning in these thoughts. Percentage is inversely related to length of time since last non-self-induced orgasm.)
- (5) current fires (If you're reading this, expect booty calls.)
- (1) old flames (And the near-impossible task of re-friendship.)
8% Creative Fulfillment
- (4) cultivation (retainment) of talent (Knock, knock, are you in there?)
- (3) career projection (Label making leads to food criticism in The Onion?)
- (1) effects of oversocialization and procrastination (Makes you think a lot about how you’re not writing about what a craaaaaaazy time you’re having.)
16% Cultural Exploration/Studies (Back to school.)
- (5) nyc live events (Life over TV.)
- (5) music (Thank you Thom Yorke.)
- (2) film (Thank you Meryl Streep.)
- (3) literature (New Yorker vs. the book club book)
- (1) the visual arts (Once upon a time, this blog was named “Collections Are Dangerous” for a reason.)
10% Food (Proudly gluttonous. P.S. Hi Rachie!)
- (3) current (pending) meal (Maybe sushi?)
- (2) past meals (If I don’t write about Red Lobster soon, the dub room will riot.)
- (5) future meals (Including Dumont, Momofuku, Peter Luger’s and Hooters.)
4% Self-doubt/paranoia (Do I really want to eat at Hooters?)
10% Activity Organization and Planning (Call a month in advance, and I can safely pencil you in.)
- (2) cheesy work activities (Unofficial director of morale.)
- (3) future live music (More Neko Case!)
- (5) upcoming weekend plans (Some overlap with the “future meal” category here. Crif Dog is always a consideration.)
4% The State of the World (Warring/Melting)
2% The Gym (Crizzunch!)
- (1) health (Feeling great.)
- (1.5) appearance (Looking grood.)
- (.5) hot trainers (Please aid me in stretching out my quads.)
2% Fashion (Miss Stacia stylee.)
- (.5) shoes and bags (and baubles, oh my!)
- (.5) event specific attire (ties, Halloween costumes)
- (1) cultivating style (Karen O meets Carrie Bradshaw?)
1% The Apartment (Dealing mostly with plans to clean and the rationalizations for brushing these plans aside.)
1% Fantasy Baseball (MUST beat the fellas. P.S. Hi dad!)
3% Blogging (And how NOT to suck like the revised Gawker.)
- (1) inspiration (Thank you College Man.)
- (2) action (This was easier when I worked a job where I did nothing at all.)
3% Money (How to be a Sugar Mama someday.)
5% Oh yeah, SEX (And why I never have any.)

Casimir chose to include a miscellaneous category, but in the spirit of adventure I decided any subject I have omitted will be automatically added to the Sex category (where everything belongs in one context or another anyway). The weather (.1%), abandoned puppies (.001%) and the shearing of sheep (.0000000000000000001%) are all now officially related to Coitus Maximus as far as I see it. So tell me what I missed.

Tie-Day Friday

2006-06-27T00:06:00.000-04:00

Since I left the citi for the dub room, I have had great freedom to explore my personal style . With jeans, sneakers, sandals and tank tops at my disposal, I can pretty much wear whatever suits my mood, as long as my nipples are covered. I do kind of miss the citi restrictions though. Sometimes I just long for a challenge.

Last week, in search of the corporate casual challenges of corporations past, I attempted to organize "Tie-Day Friday." I should probably clarify that by "organized" I mean, discussed wearing a tie to work with ONE coworker, Bryan. Bryan is one of the newbies in the office, not to be confused with Ryan, the quiet veteran who, after living with the only "RY"-sound name for a peaceful six months, gets quite peeved when you say "Bryan," and he thinks you've said "Ryan" or vice versa. At some point last week B-B-B-B-Bryan and I decided we would institute Tie-Day Friday to show off the irrepressible class of the dub room team. How refined are WE? We don't even HAVE to wear ties to the office, and we're gonna wear them anyway! There were initial plans to get our officemates involved in the cause, but our publicity effort was overshadowed by busy training days and impromptu performances of songs from The Little Mermaid. In the end, only the masterminds behind The Day of Ties flaunted the unexpexctedly conservative neckwear as a salute to the week's end. But boy did we REPRESENT.

When Bryan entered the dub room Friday morning he was wearing a short-sleeved button down shirt with a brown striped tie, looking very Revenge of the Nerds. It was perfect. I don't have any ties in my closet (although I've been seriously considering investing in a set of suspenders) so I asked Bryan to bring me one of his. He knotted my masculine accessory, a deep red number with beige and blue diamonds, and I slid it on. Not going to lie, at first I was a bit uncomfy thinking about walking around with a panel of red silk flopping against my abdomen like a single strand of spaghetti.

And then, I tucked it in...

Every once in a while, on Experimental Fashion Friday, I would hit on an outfit that was both an eyesore and oddly fashionable. Tie-Day Friday spawned yet another of those ensembles. Unfortunately, the unexpected success of my outfit further buried the TDF movement**. NO ONE asked me WHY I was wearing a tie! I did, however, receive three or four separate compliments on my getup, including one comment from an editor who said I looked like "a modern, 2006 version of Annie Hall." It doesn't get much better than that.

Can't wait for "Jewsday Tuesday." You think I'm kidding...

**Miss Stacia is an awful publicist. No news here.

Non-buyer's Remorse

2006-06-26T23:11:00.000-04:00

There is a test that is pretty commonly employed by female shoppers to help determine whether or not they should spend money on an item about which they are indecisive. The item in question is usually an article of clothing, in my case, almost always shoes or a bag, and in nearly all instances, impractical. When something is fashionable but serves no practical function in your wardrobe, sometimes it takes more than a little reasoning to make a wise shopping decision. Sometimes you just need TIME to gauge how badly you want something versus all the other crap you come across for which you have a passing desire.

The idea behind "the test" is that you leave the item you are lusting after in the store for the day, and if a nagging desire to own 4-inch, lime green platforms covered in cherries eats away at you until you can think of nothing but running back to the Bloomie's to rip the last size 7 out of the hands of some blond with a nose job, you go back to get the damn shoes.

Last weekend I took a trip to the neighborhood I most resent (Williamsburg) for the summer event I most LOVE (The Renegade Craft Fair). I discovered the craft fair last year and was overjoyed to find more than just the usual potpourri of beaded baubles, screenprinted notecards and homemade buttons on the NYC craft fair circuit (although there were plenty of each represented, fo sho). Metalsmiths and dressmakers and glassblowers all came to show their wares. Handmade stuffed animals shaped like T-Bone Steaks (shrink wrapped to styrofoam meat trays) sat in booths next to silkscreened Jay Ryan posters and made-to-order corsets. H-E-A-V-E-N. I made a few key purchases last year, buying a dress and a ring that both became staples in a wardrobe admittedly so overwhelming, many gems tend to get ignored. I escaped this year's fair with another dress (from the same woman who made last year's) and a necklace composed of antique charms, including a dog tag bearing a scrabble board covered in French mots. Tres, tres bien.

But since I left the fair around closing time last Saturday something has been haunting me. I've been feeling the emptiness of an opportunity that has passed, and nothing has been able to quench the burning desire I have for this bag:

Now, when the thing was hanging in front of me I didn't even consider purchasing it. I don't have any idea how much it cost or even the name of the artist who so realistically recreated Sir Tupac on the side of a vintage clutch. All I know is that I felt compelled to take a picture of it, mainly to capture the unparalled hilarity and outright GENIUS of the bow incorporation. But now I kind of wish I could stuff Tupac with some cash and Lancome lip gloss and take him out for a gin and juice. Perhaps the reason it never even occurred to me to buy the thing when it was in front of me had something to do with my (embarrassingly) limited familiarity with Tupac's catalog.

Stranger at the bar: "Oh, so you like Tupac?"
Miss Stacia: "Yeah, um, he's pretty good. But how awesome is this bow!"

Single Grey Female

2006-06-25T04:45:00.000-04:00

Dear Mom and Dad,

It was very nice of you to recruit furry companionship for me, your favorite daugther, and I realize you brought home the latest, unfortunately-named canine with my prosperous romantic future in mind. Moses was a very sweet, sensitive dog, but to be honest he was so clingy it made me want to vomit dandelions. In the beginning his aggressive pursuit was intriguing, all the nuzzling, licking, humping - let's face it, it had been a while. But the kid had his nose quite literally up my ass, twenty-four hours a day and it was too much hounding for even this pooch to take. You know how it is. Sometimes you just want to fall asleep to the Michael Bolton medley on the Adult Contemporary music channel without someone rubbing their little weiner up against you.

I'm guess I'm just a little surprised you thought I would take this arranged marriage lying down. That is one command I cannot follow, I'm sorry. A bitch can't choose who she loves. Besides, I'm still young and sprightly. I've got strut left in this stride and I haven't even finished making my rounds on our block. This may sound a bit immodest, but I'm a hot piece of ass. It's 2006. A dog can be whoever she wants, and I can be a sexually curious, emotionally hardened, independent female if I feel like it.

Anyway, Moses had to go. It was inevitable. Don't worry, he's in a new home, one without a female dog around to get his leash in a tangle. Maybe in his time alone he will do some soul searching and build up his self-confidence so he doesn't just play dead for the next bitch that comes along. I wish him all the luck in the world, now that the house is mine once again.

So please, I know they're furry and adorable, but no more suitors. Unless you can track down Comet from Full House. He's fucking hot.

Love,
Shayna

**Papa Jones and The College Man were allergic to the new dog, so unfortunately Moses is a Jones no longer. If you see my parents entering a pet store or animal shelter, please shoot them with a tranquilizer gun or taser to prevent further cuteness-induced adoptions.**

One Dog, Two Dog, Grey Dog, Jew Dog.

2006-06-16T01:46:00.000-04:00

Those of you who know my family well, know that above their own lives and the lives of The College Man, Miss Raquel and yours truly, Mama and Papa Jones treasure Miss Shayna Maidel, personality, princess...family dog. You can't blame them, really. Shayna, a beautiful grey malty-poo (white maltese father, black poodle mother), who was strutting her stuff down the corridors of Jones Manor long before the advent of the nauseating term "designer dog," is a motherfucking riot. She's small enough to cradle like a baby, but unlike other pussy Long Island petite pups, she's a sturdy specimen, exhibiting sharp instincts and genuine athletic prowess. At three-years-old Shayna can dance on her hind legs, sprint at rabbit speed and catch a soaring frisbee in mid-air (the ultimate "real dog" test).

Shayna Joyner-Kersee

Shayna brings out two main qualities in my parents, the first being insanity, the second, compassion. This is what I mean by insanity:

Yes, that is what you fear it is.

Shayna's extensive wardrobe also includes an embellished denim jacket, a yellow rain slicker (she didn't take to the booties), multiple winter sweaters and fleeces, and two Halloween costumes (the only doggie clothing I will sanction). And I don't even want to talk about the doggie stroller.

So logical.

Often I have to remind myself amidst my embarrassment: The parents lavish because they love. This is where the compassion kicks in. Since the dog has entered our lives mom and pops have given generously to shelters and animal abuse-related charities. And watched an shitload lot of Animal Planet. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I got this phone call:

(2:45 this afternoon)

Mama Jones: I'm holding our new dog!!!

Miss Stacia: Shut the fuck up.

Mama Jones: No really. It's what your father wanted for Father's Day. The dog's a malty-poo, we think. We're adopting him from a shelter. His name is Moses.

Miss Stacia: You're not serious. I'm sorry, but I won't stand for that.

Mama Jones: Stand for what?

Miss Stacia: A dog named Moses! We have to change the name. How about Fred? James? Little Stevie. Shit mom, call him Bowie!!! Please! Please! BOWIE!!! I'm willing to give up MY first dog name to our family pet as long as I don't have to call that dog Moses.

Mama Jones: Whatever, we'll talk about it later.

Miss Stacia: Fine. And take a picture with your camera phone...

Let my kibble go.

It turns out that Moses is already two-and-a-half years old and was taken from a disturbingly abusive home to be rescued by mom and pops. There's no way the pup is answering to any name other than Moses, and there's no way I can be mad at him for it. Instead, I will chastise another celebrity couple, Monster Paltrow and Fairy Martin, for their biblical baby-name brainstorming. Fuck you Moses Martin for stealing my dog's thunder.

And still, cursing out skinny blond celebrities and their spawn doesn't hide the fact that the Jonses are now the owners of a pair of obnoxiously Jewish pets, Moses and Shayna Maidel. What is this, Fiddler on the Roof? Mama Jones doesn't need more encouragement to buy doggie kippot and arrange "Bark Mitzvahs." Bitch is dog-crazy enough to go through with it.

When I told Dazrazzle about the new (predictably hairy) Jewish couple living under our roof, Daz asked if Mama and Papa Jones were going to "breed them and make little Isaacs, Abrahams, Sarahs and Rebekkahs." I say, why not. We're due for at least one more. One for mom, one for dad and one for Israel.

Dub Rotation will PUMP YOU UP.

2006-06-07T01:25:00.000-04:00

Earlier tonight, as I was trying to motivate my coworker CD into sucking up her post-work sleepiness to get to the gym, I inadvertendly stumbled onto what is sure to be the next big NYC exercise craze. I'm calling it Dub Rotation. It turns out, everything you need to get the toned body you desire can be found in the dub room of a major media corporation.

Some examples of Dub Rotation's simple, yet effective excercises:

The Paper Bag Bicep Curl

The Digibeta Pulldown

The Wheeled-Chair Tricep Bend (of Death)

The Client Services Couch Crunch

The K-Boogie Wants To Pretend She Wasn't Fighting Me This Whole Time, Trying To Convince CD To Go Home Instead Of Working Out

Even though K-Boogie spent the majority of today's Dub Rotation session advocating laziness and attempting to undo all my hard work, she did end up inventing the workout's signature relaxation reward:

The Garbage Pail Foot Soak

Now I know some of you will complain, "But I don't have access to a media company's dub room and all the advanced toning equipment it provides, Miss Stacia!"

To which I must reply, "Devote your life to making labels and your health and life will change for the better, my dear friends."

How Brad and Angelina have desecrated my childhood memories.

2006-06-05T20:55:00.000-04:00

My memory is absolutely awful, a fact to which my good friend Dazrazzle will attest with vigor. I especially have trouble remembering high school happenings, as around the start of my freshman year I became steeped in my inherited “selective memory syndrome,” blockading all long-term memories aside from the soundtrack to RENT and select reruns of Saved by the Bell. (Sadly, I can sing every word to the Ice Cream Sundaes’ music video.) For some reason my recollections of middle and elementary school are much more vivid and long-lasting. It turns out a cocky asshole calling you “gorilla legs” when you’re thirteen sticks out more than acing that eleventh grade French test.

Not all of my memories of the younger years are traumatic. Many of them are pretty random and hilarious. I remember listening to Weird Al Yankovic in Mr. Stern’s humor class, singing along to the classic, “Amish Paradise.” I remember giving a D.A.R.E. speech in front of my entire fourth grade class. (Some successful program THAT was.) I remember tripping down the atrium stairs of the middle school cafeteria while attempting to avoid stepping in a puddle of what appeared to be pee and arising giddy because 1. No one really saw me fall and, 2. I missed the pee.

One memory in particular that has always cracked me up took place in Mr. Abrams’ fifth grade classroom. Mr. Abrams was the epitome of the jolly fat man, a joker who took great pleasure in alerting his students to the reason why making ASSumptions is so dangerous. (ASS-U-ME) For the majority of the year I sat next to a girl named Maryann Jimez, and every morning when Mr. Abrams took attendance, he would tack the same inquiry to the end of Maryann’s name.

“Maryann Jimez. Did you bring in Shiloh today?”

Of course, Mr. Abrams was not referring to the glamour-bomb dropped out of Angelina’s cooch five days ago, but rather the Young Adult book penned by Phyllis Reynolds Nayer. The novel is a Newbury Award winner and according to the updated book jacket, tells “the classic story of a boy and his dog.” I never actually read the thing, but Maryann must have fucking loved that book. Or lost it. All I know is that there was never a time when I thought Mr. Abrams would call Maryann’s name to hear her reply, “Oh yes! I actually DID remember to bring the book in today.” After the first month of bookless mornings it was pretty clear to Mr. Abrams’ entire fifth grade class that Maryann planned to take Shiloh to the grave. Yet Mr. Abrams, for the entertainment of us all, asked about the book until the very last day of class.

So fuck you Brangelina. Fuck you both up the ass. Shiloh is not an African-born, celebrity-bred, paparrazzi-seducing bundle of puke. Shiloh is a book that will never, ever be returned to my elementary school library. Maryann made sure of that.

The Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series: The Olive Garden

2006-05-11T18:51:00.000-04:00

I never thought there would come a day when I would anxiously CRAVE The Olive Garden, but a few weeks ago I made my mind up to eat there and had to make it happen. I assure you, it was all about the breadsticks.

The Olive Garden breadstick is one of the perfectly crafted food items of our time, like the Gray's Papaya hot dog or the Dunkin Donuts blueberry muffin. The leavened logs are perfectly fluffy, just underbaked, slathered in olive oil and sprinkled with salt. Like their salad - also quite tasty if you get a good scoop - the Olive Garden's breadsticks will continue to come to you throughout the meal until you can't lift bread to beak. All-you-can-eat anti-Atkins comfort food.

My great Aunt Mimi, also a lover of OG breadsticks, used to wrap them in a napkin and steal them in her purse at the end of our Olive Garden outings. They WILL give you a styrofoam container for that Aunt Mimi, I swear.

I'll tell you what The Olive Garden isn't about. Authentic Italian cuisine. If you go in hoping for a step above Chef Boyardee or Ronzoni covered in Ragu, your expectations will be perfectly met.

The Olive Garden's big mistake is in the marketing of their dishes as authentic homemade. Their commercials feature big, obnoxious Italian families rounded up by plump, jovial grandmothers promoting the sharing of entrees off steaming platters. "Buon appetito!" Everyone clicks forks and snags bites from one another's plates, raising their overflowing glasses of Olive Garden house wine, (promoted in laughably painstaking detail by the OG waiters, btw) while an accordian rendition of "Mama Mia Pizzeria" plays in the background. How festive. Just like Italy. As my coworker Murph quipped one day, "All those commercials do is give you a license to be loud at The Olive Garden."

But the Olive Garden seems to take it's role as an authoritative Italian kitchen quite seriously. When D-Hardcore (my two-time UEE dining partner) and I plopped down in the eatery's synthetic leather booths a couple weeks ago, we immediately noticed little markings next to certain dishes on the menu, which indicated "Specialties Inspired by our Culinary Institute of Tuscany."

Wait.

The Olive Garden has a culinary institute in Tuscany?? And the best they could come up with was Chicken Marsala?

Other Institue options included the less-than-inventive Italian staple, Shrimp Primavera, as well as the moderately experimental Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo, which proved, as I once theorized, that The Olive Garden will cover just about anything in Alfredo sauce. Miss Stacia was not impressed.

But I didn't make the trip for the food. This chick came for the breadsticks.

After much deliberation I chose to keep my meal simple with spaghetti and meatballs while D-Hardcore went balls-to-the-wall with the Tour of Italy, a sampler plate consisting of lasagna, chicken parmesean and, what else, fettuccine alfredo. T-Money and Big Mo (Mo Money) informed me the morning after my meal that I had played it too safe with my entree selection, but I have serious doubts that the Olive Garden has a specialty I missed out on. I just wanted some red sauce to dip my breadsticks in, and that's pretty much what I got. A shitload of spaghetti with three, tennis-ball-sized meatballs that tasted like, well, meat. Covered in red sauce. Perhaps the scary thing about the food at this place is that it's not distinctive, but it's not inedible either. It kind of just is. Hardcore said his food was okay too, although even his six-foot-three frame wasn't up to the task of cleaning the monster portion plated for him on The Tour. I wasn't surprised to see the only dish of the trifecta he knocked off was the alfredo. (A sidenote about pasta alfredo: I understand a ton of people LOVE milky cheese sauce, but I just think that stuff is narsty. I can eat about two bites before I feel like I'm drinking cream for dinner.)

We decided to go in for dessert because I can never resist, sharing a raspberry swirl cheesecake that looked "delectable" in Hardcore's words, but was overrefrigerated and way too rich for my taste. That didn't stop me from eating it. We also indulged in coffee, although I'm not gonna lie, I kind of wanted to end my meal on the breadstick note.

Our meal came out to about 60 bucks between the two of us, hardly the IHOP bargain (about 15 dollars for just as much, if not more, food) but decent for a dinner out in New York City. After we paid the check I asked the waiter if there was any way to dine at the Olive Garden, ordering only breadsticks and salad. Apparently this IS possible. In fact, when I returned home stuffed full o' Prego and bread and chocolate crust, I flipped on the television, which immediately flashed a commercial for the Olive Garden's new lunch special: Soup, salad and breadsticks for $5.99. Now that's an AUTHENTIC bargain I can get down with.

**Apologies to Juju and Jay-Z, both of whom were promised an outing to the Olive Garden prior to my trip with D-Hardcore. For the sake of blog writing and curb craving, I gave into the temptation to visit early, but I will return again, if only for the breadsticks.

Everyone Loves Unidentified Meat

2006-05-10T12:30:00.000-04:00

Occasionally people bring goodies into the office to share with their coworkers. Most of these offerings are of the baked variety- brownies, cookies, an occasional birthday cake. The generous Mo Money brought in a massive tub of oversized oatmeal raisin cookies just the other day, and it didn't take long for the community stash to disappear in this office of junk-food-lovers. But nothing has disappeared quite as fast as today's random blast-from-the-past goody, the Slim Jim.

I have no idea who purchased the elongated red and yellow box, a cardboard container I almost exclusively associate with 7-11, but about ten minutes ago someone ran through the dub room sticking their hand inside the convenience store carton to distribute the salty sticks. Almost no one who was offered the snack refused. And these weren't the wussy mini-Jims, they were the real deal, foot-longers, the ones where about a quarter of the way through you can already feel your blood vessels turn to processed meat.

Now I LOVE those things. They smell like breakfast meat mixed with two-day-old sock, and somehow that is irresistable to me. I love Slim Jims in much the same way I love hot dogs. The satisfying snap of the casing, the so-salty-I-can-feel-my-blood-pressure-rise tang of the meat. What's REALLY in a hot dog? Not sure I really want to know. I didn't really want to know what is in a Slim Jim either, but my loverly coworker CD pointed out that the meat is not "unidentifiable" if you simply read the vacuum packaging.

Ingredients include: meat (very specific), mechanically separated chicken (praise technology!), water (in everything), SALT (duh), corn syrup, dextrose, FLAVORINGS (again, the specificity here), paprika, SPICE (and everything nice), hydrogenized corn gluten, soy and wheat gluten proteins (need your daily dose), SODIUM nitrate (more salt), lactic acid starter culture (to help you cultivate your very own supply of lactic acid).

I chose to skip out on the snack (even before reading the ingredients) as I'm still in breakfast mode around noon these days. But I did derive much pleasure from people's attempts to make snapping sounds as they tore huge chunks from their personal logs of stringy, smoked flesh, exclaiming, "I haven't eaten one of these since

a) I was a kid!"
b) the last time I was stoned!"

It's a communal snack of an overindulgent, sickening unhealthiness that will be hard to top. After all, it's pretty hard to share SPAM.

For my lovely sister on her 21st birthday: A blog entry all your own. Says Miss Raquel: "It's all I've ever wanted!"

2006-05-03T19:54:00.000-04:00

The College Man gets a lot of attention on this website, mostly because his late-afternoon incoherence and drunken antics fall in the sphere of obvious hilarity and allow me to reference things like bitches and blunts with rewarding frequency. But Miss Raquel Jones, middle child, homecoming queen, bookworm, and raging bull cannot go uncelebrated for much longer.

Besides, it’s hot mama’s 21st birthday.

The College Man forces Miss Raquel to get down to business.

Raquel, like Gravy, has a penchant for teen-dream eighties flicks (particularly those starring the insufferable Molly Ringwald) and when we were younger she adopted a saying she absorbed from the previously heralded Some Kind Of Wonderful, a mantra which seems more and more fitting in each passing year: “You mess with the bull, you get the horns.”

Now don’t get me wrong, Raquel is a warm, gentle soul and if you deal with her straight she will put her life on the line for you. She’s moral and trustworthy and what’s more, she’s always been effortlessly social. This is a talent for which I had little teenage aptitude. While I spent my time in high school strategically avoiding uncomfortable social situations, Raquel plowed through those uncertain years seemingly oblivious to the bullshit that festered around her. I obsessed over snide comments delivered by ignorant doorknobs and Raquel simply turned up her headphones (Hootie and the Blowfish was her preferred form of “white noise”) and buried herself in a bedroom full of books. It’s not that little sis didn’t realize high school drama was unfurling around her, it’s just she recognized it for what it was – completely inconsequential. “I don’t have time for this bullshit, bitches. I’ve got work to do.”

And where did this noncommittal strategy take the lovely and bookish Miss Raquel? Straight to the Homecoming Queen podium, no fucking joke. When my mother and I heard Raquel was in the running for the crown we looked at each other and both said, “She’s gonna win.” And you know what, for perhaps the first time in recorded history, a Homecoming Queen was chosen for the right reasons. Raquel’s peers, whether they had anything in common with her on the surface or not, had RESPECT for her. She brought a warm and witty presence to her scholastics and extra-curriculars and even though she’s always been a shoot-from-the-hip kind of girl, she’s really a silly fucker underneath it all and not afraid to show it. The College Man once described her as “the definition of down-to-earth.” And upon this diamond personality for twenty-one years Miss Raquel has thrived.

But the real reason Raquel is and will always be such a social success, is because she seriously does not take shit from ANYONE. It’s not a quality that is overt and grating, but rather it pulsates like a protective shield cast by one of Mario’s magic mushrooms. Without being snooty or snobbish or aggressive, the girl’s presence just DEMANDS respect. She is one of the few intelligent, beautiful women I’ve known who’s managed to wind her way through life, exhibiting her many gifts and reaping rewards without much backlash. She's got a gift. It’s like the girl is coated in Vaseline – she just slides on through.

The thing is, you don’t want to mess with Raquel. She’s a royal bitch if you cross her the wrong way. Last summer she was driving home from a weekend out-of-state with her boyfriend Alex and Alex's little sister Casey. Casey had mentioned to a few scumbucket girls at the day camp she worked at with my sis that her family would be gone for the weekend and that she might hold a small get together the last night before her parents returned (Raquel, Alex and Casey returned home a night earlier). Well, these ballsy bitches rolled up to Casey’s house and proceeded to throw a keg party in the front and backyard, trashing the place before Casey and Co. had even crossed back into New York State. The police were called and restoration ensued, but important to note is that the next day my sister approached the main girl rumored to have orchestrated the unsanctioned bash. Their conversation went something like this:

Stupid Bitch Who Throws Parties at People’s Houses When They’re Not Home: Oh Raquel! I’m so glad you came over to talk to me! I was afraid Casey would never speak to me again.

Raquel: You WISH I didn’t come over here, trust me. I’m your worst nightmare.

This is where SBWTPAPHWTNH started to cry. Raquel finished the tongue lashing regarding the respecting of friendships and people’s property – all the obvious stuff. Coming from Raquel, i'm sure it was terrifying. Cause most of the time my sis just wants to chill and make bead necklaces and chat about Grey’s Anatomy. You have to do something pretty fucked up to get her juiced. You mess with the bull…

When you’re related to the girl, your chances of avoiding the wrath decrease. As we’re both the stubborn spawn of Mama Jones, neither Raquel nor myself is likely to back down in an argument. (It’s notable that I have always been at least three inches taller than my sister and I’ve never for one second doubted that she could beat the living shit out of me.) But now that we’re older and have discovered the advantages of cooperation and collaboration (“family dinners” on the credit card?) we’ve managed to curb the bickering and hair pulling and “nails” attacks - where you dig your grimy claws into the flesh of your opponent until they scream for mercy - to a minimum.

Now we just get drunk together**.

Tonight we're gonna do it legally.

**N.B. The last time Raquel and I got drunk it was on margaritas at some obnoxious UES frat bar. The next day, nursing hangovers, we woke up to meet Mama and Papa Jones at the MET. It was there in the first hallway of Egyptian pottery that Rachel said to me, "I fell asleep sitting up, with my shoes on last night." Through our hysterical laughter I could hear my mother call out to Papa Jones, whose face was pressed up to a glass case in curious delight: "They're just BOWLS Steven."

The Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series: IHOP

2006-04-24T13:57:00.000-04:00

Obviously kosher.

It was the kind of breakfast you take a picture of. Especially if you’re a nerd about food like I am. But as my boy D Hardcore says, “Generally, all people are geeks about something.”

When D and I sauntered in to IHOP last Thursday morning I was a flapjack away from syruping my pants. Is that IHOP logo dishware I see? A coffee pot flipped open, waiting for the fill, at each individual table? A mini bar boasting four fruity varieties of melted maple sugar???!!! I had a suspicion the International House of Pancakes was trying to romance me. This suspicion was further confirmed once D and I settled down with our menus and let the IHOP soundtrack permeate our pancake-obsessed brains. “Three Times A Lady,” “Unbreak My Heart**, ”Lovely Day.” FUCKING PERFECT. This is the music your grandfather would seduce your grandmother to, present day.

Or maybe I just relate the whole IHOP experience to the elderly because before Thursday morning, the only IHOP meals I remember vividly were taken with my grandparents in Florida. And it was always a “breakfast for dinner” trip. I was never thrilled with the idea of consuming breakfast in the evening, but I also willingly combined lox spread and tuna fish on a cinnamon raisin bagel (the Jewish appetizing sampler) at eight in the morning, so what the hell did I know. Besides, my Poppy LOVED his steak and eggs (can’t take that away from the man) and when you eat at 4:00pm on a Sunday, it can probably even be classified as brunch (if you’re a lazy New Yorker). Or linner, yeah yeah, I know.

One very important development that came out of these night trips to the International House of Old People was the Jones children’s love of coffee. Poppy drank his coffee light and very sweet and whenever he emptied a half-and-half into his mug he would fill the tiny empty container with sugary brew for his grandkids to sip. Our enjoyment of this ritual began more with the novelty of drinking from a thimble-sized cup than from the coffee itself, but eventually The College Man and I were sucked into a lifetime of incessant caffeine consumption, and at a ridiculously early age (5 and 9, maybe). I’m surprised the two of us aren’t five feet tall. And one thing I never realized about the mini-coffee routine is that in order to pass on a pint-sized café to each of his grandkids at the beginning of a meal, Poppy had to suck down enough coffee to free up THREE cream containers - and he only put one in each cup of joe. No wonder the man went to the bathroom so often. I’m surprised he wasn’t chattering like a wind-up toy by the end of the meal.

The three Jones kids were still ordering off the kiddie menu when IHOP was in the Florida restaurant rotation and we pretty much ordered the same thing every time. The College Man fed his love of sausage and other unidentifiable, encased pork products, whereas Rachel and I mostly stuck to the Funny Face, a massive chocolate chip pancake finished with a whipped cream and maraschino cherry smile (dessert for dinner).

Side note: Maraschino cherries taste like balls of Nyquil covered in Sweet n’ Low. Those things are nasty. All her life, Rachel has been eating maraschino cherries for two.

My tastes have expanded a bit since I was nine, and in an attempt to stray from the Funny Face (which I haven’t been able to order for 11 years anyway) I approached my latest IHOP excursion with a few goals in mind. I wanted to eat basically every breakfast food I have ever had a hankering for in one sitting, and by ordering only one selection off IHOP’s insanely inclusive combo menu. I wanted to nail down the perfect combination of breakfast’s sweet and salty offerings. Fuck the West Side brunch. I wanted eggs AND pancakes. Chocolate chip pancakes. I wanted to sit down in an IHOP and drink my own full mug of delicious coffee.

I thought it was going to take me about forty-five minutes to choose the right breakfast combo off IHOP's eight page menu, but it turns out The Breakfast Sampler, first option on the menu, is the breakfast I’ve been searching for my entire adult life. Two eggs (over easy, of course), bacon, sausage, ham, hash browns, and two buttermilk pancakes. I submitted my order to the waitress and bumped my flapjacks up to chocolate chip. Best $1.59 I ever spent. D Hardcore went with the classic “Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity, ” which pleased me to no end, basically because I wanted to mention the RTF&F in my blog. Again, everyone’s a geek about something. D’s breakfast was missing the hash browns and traveled a little lighter on the salty meats, but the gist of the meal was the same. Eggs, then pancakes. His stack was topped with blueberries and a massive dollop of whipped cream.

A few reasons why everyone should indulge in the IHOP breakfast:

1. Toppings (blueberries, chocolate chips, etc) are both BAKED INTO and loaded ON TOP OF IHOP’s amazingly fluffy pancakes. This makes all the difference in the world. There’s no strategic saving of chocolate chips for the last bite here. My pancakes were tinged brown from their chocolate stuffing. Pancakes as envisioned by Willy Wonka.

2. The Whipped cream topping. For breakfast!

3. Hash browns that are actually cooked until they’re WELL DONE. I am so sick of raw breakfast potatoes. Note to the cooks of New York: EVERYONE likes potatoes well done in the morning.

4. Crispy bacon. See hash browns.

5. Unlimited coffee in self-serve percolators. No waiting for refills. Unlimited creamers for easily amused grandchildren.

Okay, so D and I consumed the better part of a breakfast fit for four and hopped on the train downtown. Hardcore, the lucky bastard, didn’t have to work until 4pm but I plopped down at my desk at 11:00am ready to give birth to the entire IHOP menu. “We need hammocks where we can lay and rub our bellies.” D said to me before we parted ways.

I was faring pretty well until about 3:00pm when I decided, although I was barely hungry, to eat a salad and add some greens to whatever was already swimming around in my body. And this seemingly harmless lunch was what put me over the edge. In fact, I wanted to post about my IHOP breakfast last week but I couldn’t even think about pancakes until I woke up this morning. I decided at around 4pm on Thursday that I would wait another year until I ate at IHOP again.

But when I do, you’re all invited. I’ll make you each a little coffee of your own.

**Toni Braxton, I SO owned your album.

The College Man: Observing the High Holidays

2006-04-20T12:02:00.000-04:00

Voicemail left on my phone at 2:29 am this morning:

The College Man: Yooooooooooooo. Happy 4/20. (Almost singing) Haaaappy 4/20! Heh heh. It's your brother, in case you haven't figured it out.

After hanging up, The College Man surely completed his sacred 4/20 ritual by gorging on matzoh, macaroons and other kosher-for-Passover products. Nothing quenches the munchies like unleavened eatables.

L'Chaim bitches!