Tonight it looks like I'm going to see Babe the Blue Ox at Magnetic Field. I can't tell if it's gonna be crowded or what. Does anybody remember them? They haven't played a show in over 3 years, and I haven't seen them in 6. But they used to play my college town in the early 90's; Planet of Pants played with them at some point as well. I can't say I'm still into their sound nowadays, but they always put on a good show, and considering they were the first band I ever knew from Brooklyn, they had something to do with tempering my notion of what New York bands were like.
Anyhow, the 3 members of the band now have separate music groups they work within, all 3 of which are also playing tonight. Then BBOX is going on after, at maybe 10:30 or so (show's supposed to start at 8). First I'm going to Matchless to see Knife Crazy (I always picture the name with lots of unnecessary exclamation points, !!KNIFE!!!!CRAZY!!!!! ) from Buffalo. Where the hell is a full band gonna play at Matchless? The basement? I hope so.
We'll see if this little fella amongst the trashcans returns to woo Decatur. This guy, like many of the local felines, seems pretty tame. I wonder if it would do any good to get them into a trap-neuter-release program. If nothing else, I bet it would be a good way to get them to avoid hanging out near my house.
April 26, 2007 – 11:10 am
Oh no! Okay, I haven't been to the Brooklyn Inn in a long time, so maybe I'm somehow to blame for this, but I always liked that bar. Now comes word that the bar is to be repurposed into a bistro. What the fuck is a bistro, anyway? This sounds suspiciously like what happened to the Sweetwater Tavern in Williamsburg. It used to be a foul-smelling, graffitied-up liquor barn with a surly clientele, and then one day I walked by and it was a 'cute' little restaurant, with curtains and quaint lettering on the window. Eww.
The Brooklyn Inn wasn't all that special, but it had the sense to it that it had been exactly the same for decades. I don't even think it was all that cheap. But I used ot meet a friend of mine there after work, as it was equidistant from our respective homes. So now it's gonna be a frickin' bistro, I've moved to the other end of the boro, and my friend moved back to Cleveland. Is nothing sacred?
UPDATE: The bistro may not be true after all! What? Something on the Internet turns out to be false? What a world. Here's an Eater Update, sounds like it will remain a bar, albeit a lame one like Magician and Tile Bar. Whooppee.
This was quite a weekend, but before I get to any of that, I must mention the most bizarre moment of the past 48 hours. Saturday morning (er, afternoon), I was hanging out with the guys from the Makebelieves (they stayed at our house after their Glasslands show), and Al mentioned "What's with your neighbors and their big bird?" He directed me out to the back yard where, 2 yards over, there sat one ring-necked pheasant. Yeah, that's right. A pheasant. Whaa?
Sadly, my stupid camera's batteries were dead and we had no spares around the house (Incidentally, this makes me want to go on a long rant about how it's pissing me off that bodegas constantly sell mostly-dead batteries to me), but you must believe me that inside the chain-link fenced yard, strewn with garbage and renovation debris, a lovely example of this game bird strode about like he owned the joint. A stray cat was in the next yard, eying said bird with great attention. Reportedly, the cat had been in the yard but was actually chased away by the pheasant, which was somewhat larger than the cat.
According to my research though, this is not all that strange. Pheasants are all over the boro, and because nobody is really hunting them, they get along just fine. Still, there's something just plain odd about seeing such an animal in this environment.
