I got a haircut today which left me with a great deal less hair than i am used to. Hopefully it will grow back soon so i can start feeling normal. I never know how to act when my hair's all short. I'm sure this is all very masculinist somehow, but i intend it less as such and more as an illustration of my aversion to haircuts, (or is it hairs cut?)

The London bombing is horriffic and upsetting. Giuliani's brazen attempt to extend his global brand on top of the ruinage is wholly unsurprising, and Blair's claims that the G8's colonial pronunciamentos are the civilized antithesis to terrorist barbarism dishonor the memories of the dead in attempting to obfuscate the far more complex relationship between imperial capital, colonial power, and radical militarist fundamentalist insurgency.

And it's hurricane season again.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Apartment Hunting, take, like, twelve.

Wish me luck

The show was good. Cantrell's backing band was superb (Ana swears her singing was a bit flat though.) Stephen Malkmus walked on stage in a Mets hat (and the Mets beat the first place Washington Nationals, by the way) and played a really tight, energetic, strong set consisting primarily of stuff off the excellent new record Face The Truth. The highlight of Yo La tengo's great set for me was "Stockholm Syndrome," though "Autumn Sweater" and "Tears Are In Your Eyes" were similarly wonderful. Their set was cover heavy - the Beach Boys (who were busy playing the Washington Mall sans Brian Wilson and any remnant of the great band they once were,) Grand Funk Railroad's "We're An American Band," not to be confused with the Yo La Tengo song of the same name, and, closing their encore, a faithful rendition of "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker." I was in good company, and I would like to announce that while i unquestionably dominate Celebrity/People in The Hat (particularly when personages related to the Federation of Hospital and University Employees are allowed in the hat,) i totally suck at Boggle.

Today would have been my dad's father's 93rd birthday (he died in 1988.) Yesterday was my cousin Kai's 3rd birthday. Tomorrow my brother returns from England. And then next sunday, i hit 24, which i'm feeling sort of ambivalent about, though i'm definitely in a better place now than i was a year ago, even with the drama and frustrations of apartment hunting.

Today is the free Laura Cantrell/Steven Malkmus/Yo La Tengo show in Battery Park, which should be a lot of fun. Fingers are crossed for YLT to eschew Summer Sun in favor of I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, and earlier stuff.

Further substantiating my conviction that Mean Girls owes an uncomfortable amount of plot and theme to Heathers is the revelation that the director of the former is Mark Waters, whose brother Daniel, in addition to penning such screenplays as Demolition Man, and Batman Returns, wrote Heathers as a sort of high school Full Metal Jacket and claims (probably in jest) that he initially wanted Kubrick to direct the film.

Mean Girls is no Kubrick - though it doesn't attempt to be -- and it too often substitutes a boring, moralizing, heavy-handed preachyness and a fairly racist reliance upon deeply problematic tropes of African barbarism and the sexual appetites of Southeast asian teenagers (and here we get Full Metal Jacket after all) for Heathers' far darker critique of the construction of "teen suicide" and the commodification and exploitation of the adolescent in popular culture and in the filmic genre epitomized by the work of John Hughes.

Plus Lindsay Lohan is no Winona Ryder, and no amount of inexplicable shoplifting is going to change that.

Clancy Eccles

Just found out that Clancy Eccles, socialist Jamaican reggae singer, passed away. Eccles was one of the people who may or may not have invented the word "Reggae."