Soul Quenched
Listening to White Rabbits (It’s Frightening)
What do you get when you bring together three college friends for a weekend without kids and husbands, or (if you’re me) kid and endless piles of work? You get Mayhem with a capital Crazy!
I exaggerate. We never needed the bail money we had set aside.
We couldn’t have been more disparate of interest or temperament at 19 yet, twenty years (give or take) later, Kathleen and Jen are two of the brightest stars in my sky. When in college we were pretty much oil, water and some other substance that doesn’t mix with oil or water; now we have endless topics to discuss, we amuse each other with tales of our children’s antics, we are completely on the same wave-length. They are among the first I go to when I need insight, a reality check or a belly laugh. It took us twenty years to grow into the people we needed to be to be blessed with such richness of friendship, and it was so worth the wait.
They came to NYC to visit last weekend. We did a bar crawl of Lower East Side favorites, dined at Taco San Loco, WD-50 and Pastis, and I made them a mix of all NYC bands, both old school Sonic Youth to new school Grizzly Bear. That mix will forever remind me of one of the best weekends I’ve had in a very long time. I’m still grieving that it’s over.
Talk of the all NYC bands mix brings me to my latest joy: blip.fm. I’ve found my online home: a site that cultivates my inner DJ and exposes me to endless streams of new music played by fantastically cool music lovers from around the world. I couldn’t even begin to list all the bands I’d never heard of before Blip that are now my faves. White Rabbits is one of them for sure. Bat for Lashes, Grizzly Bear, Los Campesinos, St. Vincent, Nouvelle Vague, Architecture in Helsinki… I’ll stop there. And I’ve met (read, “exchanged pithy comments with”) dozens of people with the most incredible (read, “similar to mine”) taste in music. This site is crack, which I guess makes me the strung-out addict. To see what I’ve been playing lately, go to blip and look me up: MissDiggity. The interwebs have completed me once again.
In more music news, PJ Harvey and I had an intimate evening together last Tuesday (our second in a little under two years - practically dating we are). Somehow about 2,000 (or maybe 10,000 – I’m horrible at these things) other people crashed our little soiree, including John Parish and a couple of my friends, Jessica and Kristin (thanks for the awesome pic, K!) I confess I’m not in love with her and Parish’s new album A Woman A Man Walked By, but hearing them do it live was amazing, and I find the whole album much more listenable now. And PJ… PJ was sooooo divine. I swear every time I see her live my %gay goes up. At this point I’m down to about 94% straight.
