Saturday, June 05, 2004

Powerless over my disease

I'm obsessed with Dick Cavett.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

P.S.

It's official. This new project has a name: the World's Greatest Lovers.
Hometown

I was delighted the other day to get a call from bassist Chris Boeger, one of Madison's hardest-working musicians. He, drummer Scott Beardsley and front man Nathan Palan have for some time been the Hometown Sweethearts, party band extraordinaire and winner last year in Isthmus' reader favorites poll, category: cover band. But Nate, if you hadn't heard, is decamping to the East Coast in the fall with the rest of the Kissers, and this summer he and that Irish rock outfit are touring, so he'll be in town only selected Tuesdays to play the Hometown Sweethearts' fabulously successful Tuesday engagement at the Crystal Corner.

Which brings me to why Chris called: I'm sitting in. I'll be joining Chris and Scott at the Crystal two Tuesdays in June, two in July and three in August. After that, who knows?

The three of us got together and rehearsed last night, and I'm very excited. They're enormously gifted and resourceful musicians, and we ran through material like we'd been performing together all our lives.

I must confess I'm a little apprehensive. I checked out the Sweethearts' show this weekend, and good Christ. It was as a big a crowd of dancers and carousers as I've seen at the Crystal, and on a Tuesday. They tell me it's like this week after week, and now that I've experienced the gig, I can see why. The Hometown Sweethearts have perfected a potent shtick: oddball covers ("Bennie and the Jets"), sincerely rendered. People eat that shit up.

It's a tough act to follow, but I'll do my best. And I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to push myself and my repertoire a bit. One reason the Hometown Sweethearts are so strong an act is that Nate has fashioned their bizarre, surprising, delightful set list by digging deep into his twisted memories. I have learned well from this. I'm not going to try to duplicate the Hometown Sweethearts experience--I can't--but suffice it to say, I have a twisted memory or two myself.

Ah, music. It makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel, you know.

Monday, May 31, 2004

Robots are people too

Check this out.

Monday, May 24, 2004

It was bad enough for me when I used to call old girlfriends late at night

www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/26/kissinger.tapes.ap/index.html

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Kiss kiss bang bang

As I've reported before, one of my most enjoyable writing duties for Isthmus newspaper is producing two-sentence reviews of movies, most of them grade B or lower. If you're curious, I scanned my movie blurbs, and you can read them here and here.

Friday, May 21, 2004

Listed

This AP article reports that the name and address of Seymour Hersh are listed in the Washington, D.C. white pages. Hersh is, you'll recall, the journalist whose New Yorker articles have prominently documented the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and during the Vietnam War he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the My Lai atrocities.

So I just checked Google, and Hersh is indeed easy to contact at home. I'm not going to tell you his number, though, because he is a busy man.