Urban Honking

I GOT PLAID The Northumberland Tartan, variously known as the Border or Shepherd Plaid, is also closely linked to the Percy family, forming the official dress of the Duke of Northumberland’s piper. Originally worn by shepherds tending their flocks in the Border area, the check is now the Shepherd family tartan and worn throughout the […]

Today’s cultural breaths: Joan Didion knows more about Dick Cheney than he probably does, having read 18 books on the matter for her NY Review of Books essay. Still, she cannot shed light into his motivation, which stumps me and everyone else too, maybe: what truly drives him? Is he, simply, a harbinger of evil? […]

“You looked so cool DJing last night,” Mo told me the next morning, sitting in the director’s chair in the kitchen. “You kept sticking out your butt and doing this” [makes hoochie-coochie motion with hands and shoulders] Mo missed the Portland vinyl years, when my signature move was cleaning the dust off a record by […]

One troubling aspect of taking semi-professional dance classes five-six times a week is the small faction of students whose apparent aspiration is toward the “fantasy” of the hip-hop dancer, as discerned by the gestural booty rubs that accompany a fixed gaze upon the self, a come-hither flick of the hair as if Ludacris were on […]

for re-winning her seat on the Bellingham, WA Court of Appeals, on her merits. “”I’m just pleased as punch,” Becker said Tuesday night after hearing the results. “I really am grateful of (the) level of support and I will do my best to deserve peoples’ respect that they gave me in this race.”

Chan Marshall of Cat Power on how Mary J Blige and Oprah got her through rehab. “I never really noticed [my audiences] liked me before,” she notes, stamping out her cig. “I was so enwounded with self-hatred and self-denial and just, uhhhh. I never knew people were coming to see me, play, before.”

Adventurous, wealthy Sugarcubes fan to finance our trip to Iceland this November. I cook you enchiladas, teach you Bjorklike choreography, and invigorate your mind with my deeply awesome mind spiral of the mind. Interested parties, dial J for fire ASAP.

The band, not a running count of the time they spend wishing they were Neu!: May God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. This album, self-titled, “swirls.”

Le Petit Lieutenant is playing at the Angelika: it is a film about a woman head-detective in Paris whose struggle with alcoholism reaches a head when she befriends a young lieutenant new to her unit (major crimes) and they investigate a series of stabbing/drownings across la Seine — star Nathalie Baye reminds me of Helen […]

to ponder what, exactly, is accomplished when dudes smooch at you on the street, especially before nine am? When I crossed the street this morning, the sun barely peeking out, this man driving a truck found the energy to not only make kiss noises — a wolf-call so commonplace on my block it blends in […]