just got back from the interpol show. possibly the best use of light and fog at a concert ever, also possibly the least a band playing live has ever diverged from their album. they exude a sort of professionalism that i guess is at odds with random variation of the moment. but i like interpol. i like their album and their songs. even jean was entertained, comparing them to the smiths and some other bands i forget, all smashed into one.

have you listened to anything from damien rice lately? you should. download cannonball. he’ll be in asheville on my birthday. he’s irish. i’m tired. or should be. goodnight.

a storm blew through town just as i was leaving work. it knocked out power in carrboro, and though i thought momentarily about firing up the laptop (sans internet) to work on the database for tanzania, i decided rather to light two candles (thanks to jackie) and sit down with my book about the french revolution.

how much does anyone know about the french revolution? i remember having an english professor who used to tell us that it’s too early to tell the effect of the french revolution. i hate pompous and extravagant statements like that. so i think after seeing the surreal brotherhood of the wolves, i made a mental note to read something about this so-called “la révolution française”.

there are a lot of players in the french revolution. king louis the 16th. the nobles and aristocracy. the growing parisian bourgeois middle class. the peasants. the price of bread. the feudal system. marie antoinette. lafayette. the bastille. so lately i’ve been entertaining friends with tales from 18th century france. it’s kind of a lot like describing the movie titanic. i’m just about up to the chapter where louis bites it–in other words, things are about to get really ugly.

i feel how mena trott feels lately:

“Do you know that sort of block you get when you haven’t posted in a while and you just can’t bring yourself to take the time and think about all the stuff you’ve processed in the time spent away? That’s how I am feeling right now; as I write this, it’s gradually subsiding.”

meg hourihan blogs about her one year anniversary of eating at the french laundry and credits the wonderful book The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman as inspiration. first though, you should read his book about the culinary institute of america called The Making of a Chef. i love both of these books. Michael also helped write the abundantly beautiful French Laundry cookbook. i found out about the french laundry (old site) after reading a good book on the history of american cuisine, called american appetite which singled out the restaurant as the best in america.

The Making of a Chef is wonderful and scary, raw in the way One L is to prospective law school students. right now matthew is reading One L, recommended to him by uncle david at katie’s high school graduation, and he now wants to be a lawyer. i listened to One L by Scott Turow on tape with my parents as we drove from austin, texas to chapel hill, north carolina on the way to college. and it scared me senseless. i practically had a panic attack thinking my first year of undergrad at carolina would be as emotionally wrenching as the first year at harvard law. it wasn’t.

i just got back from an *awesome* concert at cats cradle. schneider TM, les savy fav, and the faint ROCKED! i can’t even put into words how great this show was except that i seriously shook my booty and came out dripping. charles and jackie emphatically concurred. you want a taste? download “the light 3000” by schneider TM (which is a cover of The Smiths’ “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”), “je taime” by les savy fav, and definitely get “worked up so sexual” from the faint.

one of the bands i find most alluring, but haven’t been listening to much of lately, is the white stripes. i found an excellent bbc radio interview of the jack and meg white where they discuss (among other things) the apparently overdone mtv movie award performance of “fell in love with a girl” and the upcoming movie Cold Mountain (based on the book by Charles Frazier) in which jack plays a folk singer and the husband of renee zellweger’s character.

i recently finished (actually devoured) a book that i picked up a few weeks ago at the sils booksale. a few years ago i took a creative writing poetry class and our teacher-poet, michael chitwood recommended we read this book, gap creek by robert morgan, a north carolina author. so i picked it up. and read it at night when i should have been sleeping.

the language was intoxicating–so apparently authentic to the appalachia region of north carolina and so different from what i’m used to that it was almost unbelievable. the story was very plot driven, picking up from the first chapter with an almost mythic event and proceeding at the same pace throughout. if anything, the only disappointment was the familiarity of the story–which follows the first year of a young and impossibly hard marriage in rural south carolina during the early part of the 20th century.