Friday, February 15, 2002


All day today TechTV will be showing a ridiculous piece I did for the ScreenSavers in honor of Valentine's Day--if you get a chance to view it, it's really a hoot, featuring my wife in a knock-you-down red dress seducing me ON CAMERA! Good Lord! What won't they allow on television these days? There's a short synopsis over at TechTV's site of some of the signs that you're an Alpha Geek, but the real funnies are in the piece itself--it's not good enough to miss Olympic speed skating for (those bastards are fast!) but it's amusing enough if you're channel surfing. We'll have it here on the site in the fullness of time.

I've been sickeningly busy, so it's all been work, followed by intense relaxation--the kind where you plot and plan your free moments, making it hard to keep this place well updated. A radical exception to that was Tuesday night, when I went out on a Date...Jean-Michele and I work together and live together, so we don't get to play together as often as we'd like. She planned Tuesday without telling me what would happen, and then set up a great night. We started off in SoHo at Casa La Femme, for which this has to be the funniest and worst-formatted review I could find. While I don't know if it was an A+, it's a damn cool place--it's schtick is that you sit on the floor in little Arabian tents, all bejeweled and tarted up, and there are bellydancers and Egyptian food. Downsides are that it's over the top, so you need to have a sense of humor and the waitstaff is unaccountably quiet--they whisper everything, which perhaps they think is sexy, but just ends up making it difficult to tell if you just ordered the lamb or will be brought a sexy broiled sheep's head. Expensive, but I can definitely imagine going back.

Afterward we walked up to The Bottom Line for a show by the incomparably, eclectically kick-ass Jill Sobule, whom I have an undying, unquenchable affection for. I think of her as a more approachable, less freakishly iconic, female answer to Warren Zevon--she does songs about the French Resistance and car bills and raping the neighbor's dog in a lilting and baby-full voice that takes turns sounding playful and heartbreaking. I don't follow a lot of musicians (basically those two are most of my list) so it was a real treat. I wonder if part of my affinity for her is the fact that she had one hit song, which is all about her kissing a girl, and so far seems to be only remembered for that moment. Zevon suffers from a version of that for "Werewolves of London", and I have to wonder if my affinity for them, which started years ago, is fueled in part by a current pessimistic belief that I may be headed down the same road. Not that it's such a terrible fate--it's a cool ride, and there's power windows and good AC, so I guess I'll see just how far I can get on this horse.

Tonight I will be attending The Pumpkin Pie Show, a work by Clay McLeod Chapman whom I read with at the Red Room last week. It's the full show at a great space called The Zipper, and I haven't seen them do their work in a full-show format, so I'm excited. For lack of a better term, Clay writes and performs solo works that are modern ghost stories--not in the sense that the supernatural is always involved, but in the older sense of a ghost story--that memory and its loss are always tangled up, and his stories evoke a kind of emotional tang that is missing from a lot of more traditional horror. The book he just published is here, and complete details on Friday's event are located over here.