1.21.2008

great weekend, really.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Too sick to blog, Meg? Really? Really. I think my body wanted to make up for all the sleep I've denied it in the past year all at once so it smacked me with a stupidly high fever and knocked me unconscious for 36 hours or something. Anyhow, enough disclaimers. The one productive thing I did do in the past five days (other than infect the internet with Colin Munroe's video -- check it out at the Frontside youtube!) was watch "The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)", which was actually probably the best film I've seen in at least six months, and if you haven't seen it, you should probably Netflix it. Like, right now.

I guess I should be pretty excited about this giant summer festival on the East coast this summer, All Points West Festival, to be held at Liberty State Park, no? From August 8th-10th this summer, Lady Liberty is going to be looking down on a different type of huddled mass yearning to be free -- the sweaty, beer-soaked, raucous rock show crowd. And though nothing's actually been said but everybody keeps mumbling *cough*Radiohead*cough* as the most likely headliners, as they declined Coachella because the lack of public trans makes it uber eco-unfriendly, and the metro area certainly has tons of public trans. But, to be honest, I'm not as psyched as I ought to be -- I've never really been much of a fan of the giant sweaty field festivals. I can tolerate sweat and beer spills and crowds in dark sketchy basements when the band is four feet away and the sound is great, but somehow straining my ears above to hear a few notes of my favourite songs wafting above the sweaty masses has never really appealed to me. Sun stroke and the inevitable dust bowl or mud pit that results from the whole thing -- nooooo dice, my friends. No dice.

In other general news, this morning I talked another new-New-Yorker into buying these seriously amazing little credit-card sized maps of lower manhattan and the MTA subway system from this store called Tiny Living over on 7th between 1st and A. You can get them of basically any neighborhood or public trans in the city, and they're seriously the most useful thing ever. I want to personally buy a drink for whoever invented these things. You know how you think you're all slick and you know the city like the back of your hand because you've been living here for years, and then suddenly for some reason you realise you've actually never walked down this random street in the West Village because since you graduated from NYU you've spent the past three years between the Bedford and Lorimer stops on the L and forgot that it went further west than Union Square? This makes that not so embarassing, because you don't have to, you know, ask someone and thereby reveal that you're lost, or even worse, pull out some huge tourist map, just discreetly glance at a little card in your wallet. I picked a bunch of these up for the Frontside guys when they flew out here for CMJ (some of them had never been to NY before!) and I mean, they all got back to Vancouver in one piece, so I guess it helped them out.

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