A Sunday truly deserving of that name. After a stunning performance yesterday evening (the colors changed more than once even in the span of a short phone call with Ben), everyone's second favorite celestial body has been doing spectacular work today, streaming down through scant two tents (maybe one and a half) of cirrus and making it positively balmy. And I didn't even realize until this afternoon, when (after a productive first four hours - a good start on culture concept reading, scrambledeggstomatocheesesmartbaconpoppyseedbagel sandwich, helping Nori transform my old room into lavender, and the below review) I strolled over to campus, wearing just a painty t-shirt under the jacket that I soon took off. Matt was lying on his bed looking to be in some amount of pain; he has been recovering from a hangover all day, and didn't respond to either of my voice-mail messages which tried to subtly hint that we were supposed to play this morning, remember? (blasts of Les Savy Fav and Les Flaming Lips) So much for rock and roll. A few people were sitting in Willets courtyard - Elena and Nicole reading Aristotle, and Kate and somebody practicing Spanish - which was quite picturesque. Now I'm in the library, where my plan is to procure somehow some of the readings for HCC (the printers are out of order, so I'll have to go to Beardsley to print the e-res, and Jocelyn is still working on Fabian's "Time and the Other," which she says is "crazy") and take them outside and just dare the sun to distract me.

Last night saw yet another populous barn dinner (we've been having so many more people over lately), with Alyssa, Joe, and Ben. The only people on the scene missing were the Natural History, openers at Olde Club with whom Joel has something of a working relationship. The didn't respond to our invitation, so they lost out on a lovely quasi-Indian meal of dal, grill-pan-grilled eggplant, sauce for it, and round ethnic breadstuffs. Actually Ben didn't eat, he just slept on Rebecca's bed and grunted and rolled over when we came in to watch "L.A. Story" after cleaning up a bit. He and Alyssa and Joel had never seen it before, and Rebecca acquiesced to our choice of it over "Strictly Ballroom," which I would still like to see. It may or may not be one of my favorite movies, but it surely is fun, and the first two-thirds especially have so many great jokes and gags that laughter really is pretty continual. I even noticed some new jokes this time, mostly one-liners in background conversations that are quite easy to miss except on repeated viewings. And they range from stupid and punny to incredibly clever bits of dialogue and humorous inflection, as well as subtle/hyperbolic parodies of pretension, like the kitty blinking under the Shakespeare quote. A lot of the Shakespeare jokes don't work too well, actually, some are just embarrasingly bad, it's hard to tell why they insisted on so many of them. Also the movie doesn't work so well towards the end when it turns into full-on romance; or maybe that's just not my genre. It's kind of a funny shift. It's sort of hard to tell how seriously it takes itself in some of those parts.

The movie took until 10:30, so we missed all of the Natural History's set (except half of their last song), which was a shame, because it sounds like they were pretty good. Rachel said "like the Strokes but even better." The basement was full of hip-looking non-Swarthies, not all of whom were band-members and girlfriends, and some of whom were in the corner reading the Times and a math textbook(?), better food than I've seen at an Olde Club show in a while (Tropical Typhoon Mike and Ikes are good, and what's with this white cranberry-peach stuff? It tastes like candy juice -mmm), some actual furniture (perhaps some of it from the barn basement), and also some old indyfriends - shaggy anti-pop Caroline Bermudez, Priti Batta (who's forsaken wsrn for mkat), christy smallwood (note self-consciously cute use of lower case) who introduced me to people who have had Bobby Conn sleep in their bed, Jenny and Nate and so forth, even Henry the drummer from Scarsdale. Matt Pond PA featured, as promised, "violins and stuff" (actually cellos), and were so sedate that four of their six members were sitting down (okay, i can forgive the cellists and drummer, but Mr. Pond himself?), although the lanky drummer (in requisite glasses and dingy old mayoral campaign tee) was holding it down with complex beats and stick tricks and a shaker. Their melodies were nice and the arrangements were nicer, and his voice, though entirely uninteresting, has some passion at least. Afterwards the drummer asked me where to find some alcohol, and the best I could do was point him toward the Russian club party, but he declined and went to sit on the lap of a striped-sweater photo girl that Ben had been chatting with. Les Savy Fay ("you say it lay-sah-vee-fav," the bassist informed a group of us after the show as he passed out stickers) were a nicely stark contrast, the opposite of sedate. Ringleader Tim Harrigan (?) sweated and bugged his eyes like the crazyman(iac) with a hulking red shaggy beard that he is, and acted very much the performer of opportunities - he used what he had to work with, throwing the mic back and forth between his hands, standing on whatever amps and monitors were available, blowing excitedly on a pinwheel that someone in the audience held up, eating a plastic lizard, rattling the metal gate in front of the soundmachine room and then attempting to climb on it up to the balcony, disappearing into the room for a few minutes while still singing and then returning with a blanket draped over his shoulders, which he then threw on top of me, trying to climb under the stage, etc. For the first time about thirty seconds into the opening number, and every few songs thereafter, he lunged out into the audience and cut a swath into the center of the crowd - or to the far corner, or to the middle of the floor - and shouting at/thrusting the mic towards/throwing his arms around/licking the glasses of various audience members. He leered at me and then headed for me and gave me a big hug, or something. Then he climbed out the window and came back in through another, standing on the radiator to rip half of a gel off one of the lights and then move it back and forth over the crowd. All this time, of course, an extremely inadvisedly drunk Matt Rubin hollered excitedly and raised the sign of the goat towards the Man (David Berger was also ridiculously goat-signing for the whole time, as his Obie girlfriend swiveled bobbed up and down). Oh, right the music - they fall I'd say somewhere between At the Drive-In and the Dismemberment Plan for a visceral wedding of punk guitar throttle and Talking Heads-ish pfunk (apparently these guys are from RISD too), with some of the bizzareness of Need New Body, and slightly more melodicism and texture-experimenting than any of those groups. An unmissable live show, for sure, but I was enough sold on it (chiefly from lovely little melodic bits that got fairly crushed under the noise and frenzy, coming from ooh-wah backup vocals, funky basslines, cheesy sampler-synths) that I plunked down two fivers for the album, which after all has been gettin critical praise from all over. I stood around for a little while with Ali, Brigid, Stef, Wirzbicki, Sid Beveridge, Mike Camilleri, Heather Sternshein (who was mostly there to ogle the drummers, I guess: "I have no taste in music, I like anything that has vibrations" Sidney:"Then you should listen to double-yewess-awren, everything we broadcast has vibrations" "even the static" "I like static if it's artistic" "this isn't really artistic, it's more pragmatic. pragmatic static") and then walked up to Parrish circle with Ali and Mike and caught the shuttle (Kath Voll was in there - i look at her now and wonder why exactly i was thinking back then) back to the bran. Somewhat surprisingly, nobody was back yet. So I put in "Go Forth" (which has really frustrating artwork) and did some dishes. At first I was disappointed, but then I pushed the track button back and listened to some of the songs again, and they had already begun to grow on me. So we'll see. Might not have been such a dumb impulsive purchase after all.

first one name's sweet anne-marie and she's my heart's delight
second one is prison baby the sherrif's on my trail