so many names

I don't know if I've mentioned here that I've started to play the accordion. I've been playing the melodica for a couple of years, but I was convinced I didn't have the manual dexterity to play a keyboard with one hand, push chord buttons with the other, and drive a bellows with both arms. Then one night in Seattle a drunken accordionist dragged me out onto the sidewalk, strapped an accordion onto me, and gave me my first accordion lesson.

So a year later, I finally bought one when I stopped for coffee in Eugene, Oregon, and a few months after that I pulled it out from under a shelf and started getting familiar with it. Since then I've played out with it a few times, mostly with Philip Rodriguez (several of his songs, and we did a quietly menacing cover of Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails Song "Hurt") and Meredith Edgar (originals again, plus the happiest version ever of a Smiths song about being killed by a bus). BTW, I just learned from Dan Tripp that Meredith's CD is now on CDBaby.

Last night I went out to Lisa Dewey and the Lotus Life's CD release party. The first opening act was Tub, about the rockingest accordion-based band I've seen. I'm not sure whether it was a normal accordion being run through effects or some kind of cyborg accordion synthesizer, but it was very cool. There are a bunch of MP3s on their site; my favorite is the live one, "Promise", despite some glitches toward the end.

(no subject)

Two nice profiles: Nathan Lane and his new adaptation of Aristophanes's The Frogs, and Avi Arad, the smart and comics-obsessed head of Marvel Studios.

An article on lesbian style notes that gay women were the first people to wear trucker hats and cowboy boots, and that "in a business that often seems creatively dominated by gay men, the idea of lesbians still has the power to startle." Plenty here for the fashion industry cynic.

An article on the Cure notes that although Robert Smith "was considered a dreamy lightweight" by unidentified considerers, it turns out he's influenced a lot of current bands. Plenty here for the rock criticism cynic.

Film Forum is doing a retrospective of Mexican film. The worst thing about reading the New York Times every Sunday is not being in New York.

the war on terror

Worried about that Justice Department memo that said torture is okay? Don't worry, say unnamed officials: That memo wasn't about whether we should torture prisoners, it was about justifying the torture techniques we already were using. They've anonymously come forward because they want you to know the memo's author wasn't an advocate of torture, just someone who thinks torture is legal, and that's why it shouldn't bother you that now he's a federal judge.

Seriously.

In other news: ( Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia. )