It's a far cry to payday

First, the serious thing: I will not be at Worldcon. For anyone who was scheduled on a panel with me, I am sorry not to be there to talk poetry, influences, and bad art; between my finances and some family things, it just turns out not to be possible this year. Send me postcards, you people who have my address. I will hold out hope for next year.

The other things are better. Last night, Eric and I (and Anita and Eddy) ventured out into the Second Coming of the Deluge to hear Birdsongs of the Mesozoic at AS220 with humglum and greygirlbeast. Except for short clips off their website, I had never heard the group before. I knew they contained Roger Miller and Erik Lindgren, and that Eric once described them as "the world's hardest-rocking chamber music quartet." I am tempted to gloss them if Stravinsky did not exist, it would be necessary for mad scientists to invent him, but that would not do justice to their three keyboards, tape loops, guitar, record player, and washboard with Mr. T painted on the reverse. With sheet music. I type this and my brother suddenly stops short in the hallway and asks, "What are you listening to?" which happens to be the last piece on their self-titled EP (1983, although I'm playing it off their recent and fantastic compilation Dawn of the Cycads); it is called called "Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous" and features birdcalls, piano arpeggi, and multiple tracks of percussion. I hope that's a better précis. By now you can probably tell I like them. I should also mention the opening act, a man with three different kinds of squeezebox and two bows for his fiddle who played slip jigs, reels, a bunch of Playford, and led the audience in chanteys like "Haul Away for Rosie," throwing out casually technical asides of comparative musicology as he went along. I kind of want to hear "The Trim-Rigged Doxy" accompanied on a Hardanger fiddle now. In any case, terrific music and company, we survived our run-in with a very loudly drunk man on Empire Street, and we did not drown on our way back to Boston; it was a very good night all round. I am only disappointed that Birdsongs of the Mesozoic do not sell T-shirts, because I really want one.

And this afternoon, rushthatspeaks, weirdquark, and I watched Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate (1948), with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. This film may be indescribable. I can write that it contains a ballet sequence with Gene Kelly in artfully tattered hot pants and the stage on fire, or that Judy Garland performs, while hypnotized, a broadside-ballad number whose scansion depends on two different pronunciations of "Caribbean," or that the finale involves beating Walter Slezak with a hula hoop, but I'm not sure that really conveys the experience. There are the costumes. And the sets. And . . . In the middle of one dance scene, rushthatspeaks said in a tone of wonder, "Gene Kelly is pole dancing." She was not wrong. I do not think I will ever need to drop acid now.

I think that's it for the day. My brother's wedding shower is tomorrow. The recently discovered daguerreotype of Phineas Gage makes me happy. Tell me something strange.