So, cptmoll and I went to that live This American Life show last Thursday. It was pretty excellent. No, I still haven't forgiven Ira for moving the show to New York (and judging by the hissing from other parts of the audience, I'm not the only one), but he can still put together an entertaining program.

I actually liked Sarah Vowell's segment the least—the humor seemed a bit labored, or maybe it was a little too much like stuff I've already heard from her. David Rakoff and Dan Savage were both splendid, though. And I did enjoy the preview clips from the soon-to-premiere TV series, although I'm still not totally won over to the idea. But as I don't have Showtime and don't plan to get it, it doesn't really matter to me.

I was also thrilled to discover, after we got into our seats and perused the program, that the house band was to be Mates of State, whom I adore but had never gotten to see live yet. They only performed like five songs, but it was still pretty awesome. They did, after all, include their cover of Phantom Planet's "California" (aka the theme song to The O.C.). TAL does always have excellent music at its live shows. (And when Ira mentioned having seen Quasi play at the Empty Bottle, my respect for his musical taste only increased.)

So, definitely worth it. I had a most excellent time and cptmoll gave me some useful career advice. Then Friday leahrosmerta did a wonderfully generous thing and bought me some yarn, which is so pretty that ( I must post a picture of it. Yes, just a picture of yarn. )

Hee, this morning while I was listening to the WBEZ pledge drive I swear I heard Steve Edwards thank "Mikael Jorgensen" for his first-time pledge. Just another reason he's my favorite member of Wilco.

Aside to hobbitgrrl, were you at all considering going to the Cracker duo/unplugged show at Martyrs tomorrow night? I wasn't really planning on it, but if somebody else wanted to come with me...

My goodness, I can't believe I let it get so late in the day before sending out happy birthday wishes to Dan Miller. I hope he's enjoying the new Don Lennon CD as much as more than I did.

Anyway, I went with hobbitgrrl to see Ira Glass act like a goofball last night. Good times. She recapped the evening quite nicely already so I needn't repeat all that here...although I recall leaving a comment on her post which now seems to have disappeared. That's kinda weird.

And when I went to my office this morning I found that somebody had drawn quite a detailed penis on the whiteboard on the door. Oh, college students, so mature sometimes. :P

Whoa, I check my email this morning and find a message from WBEZ touting this event with Ira Glass on Sunday...any other public radio geeks out there interested? (I'm looking at you, hobbitgrrl. :P ) Also, there was an interview with Ira on 848 this morning, but the audio hasn't been archived yet (I suppose not surprisingly, since the show ended like half an hour ago).

Meanwhile my iBook power adapter has decided it doesn't want to work anymore. That sucks.

I read that Ira Glass is getting married. Oh no! I mean—congratulations, Ira! :P

I did so many fun things with zimbra1006 & Thomas last week that I can't explain it all here...going out once in a month is rare enough for me, so as you can imagine, three outings in one week is quite an unusual event. In keeping with the public radio theme I will just mention that we saw Sarah Vowell do a reading at the Harold Washington Library on Friday. It was most excellent. ♥ ♥ ♥ to Sarah. Not only do I find her funny and witty and really interesting, but I'm so envious that somebody like her (by which I mean: smart) can actually make a living from writing. I would love to be able to do that. I guess in theory, as a graduate student (and with luck, future professor of literature) writing is kind of my job. But it would be much nicer to write books that people would actually enjoy reading than to write useless academic articles that future grad students like me will only be annoyed by.

...and I find I can't end this after all without adding: Elvis Costello is simply teh greatest.

Doing my part to advance Erin's lexicographical crusade, here are the lyrics to the song that Linnell wrote using three obscure words that she provided:

you know what's wrong with me
you know phrenology
you saw my injury
you can tell just by looking at my skull

contrecoup, on the rebound
contrecoup, hurt me again
and the second was worse by far than the first
'cause it made me limerent

when my head was hit
I bounced away from it
or as someone who is craniosophic would say,
"the brain went the opposite way"

contrecoup, on the rebound
contrecoup, hurt me again
and the second was worse by far than the first
'cause the first just left me feeling inert
but the contrecoup woke my feelings for you
and it left me limerent

Neat.

Exciting event for today: I received my This American Life Lost Buildings DVD in the mail, and, well, wow. It really is beautiful, and it almost justifies the large amount of money I had to pledge to WBEZ to get it. (Only "almost" because it was a pretty large amount of money and I'm a poor graduate student.)

Anyway, so it's beautiful and of course I had to make some icons from it...which means I'm now at my limit of 50 userpics. I don't know what the hell I need so many for, except that making them is the funnest time-waster of all.

Gigantic was great fun, as was seeing unsupervised and her sister (as always). The movie was all very satisfactorily shiny and happy, but I was disappointed that almost all the concert footage was of Linnell songs. (Not that I don't think those are great songs, but it just didn't seem very balanced in that respect between the two Johns, though I thought the movie gave them pretty much equal time in all other respects.) One of my favorite bits: Danny Weinkauf talking about how thoughtful Flans is, how he'll stop the bus and go out in the middle of the night to buy Mountain Dew for somebody if that's what he wants to drink. And Dan Miller interrupts to say, "People don't realize that he's actually out scoring drugs." That totally cracked me up, I don't know why.

Afterwards Ira Glass interviewed the director (A.J. Schnack), which was a nice surprise. I mean, I knew those two were going to be there (that's why we chose that showing), but for some reason I'd assumed it would be a straight Q & A with the audience. The funniest thing about it was that the Music Box Theatre has a live organist during the downtime before the movie starts. He came back when the movie ended, and Ira asked him to stay during the interview. Then periodically during the interview, Ira would point to the organist and request music. So it was, in a really bizarre way, like one of Ira's segments on This American Life, with the musical bits interspersed with the spoken bits, and Ira beginning his next question as the music faded out.

The interview was fairly interesting (I thought it was great that Ira was doing it, because he's both experienced at interviewing and a fan of the band, so he asked questions that would be of interest to a fan), but now I don't remember most of the questions. I do recall Ira asking, "what was the deal with that guy with the puppet?" and A.J. explaining that John & John used to play backup band for that guy's ventriloquist act, and that that was the actual puppet head that inspired the song "Put Your Hand inside the Puppet Head." And A.J. describing how Syd Straw came in for her interview and seemed normal for the first two or three minutes, but then when he asked her how she'd first met TMBG, she went into this long story about how "when she was 9 years old and Flans was 25, she was living in Hell's Kitchen, and one day she heard this cacophony all around her..." and he was thinking that he knew she and They were near the same age, and then he had a moment of terror, realizing that she was going to tell nothing but lies throughout her entire interview. He also talked about how reviewing the hours and hours of footage of the Johns made him feel like he was super-close to them (because it was like spending so many hours in their company), and so he'd call one of them up and be all friendly, like, "hey, John, what's up?" and get a response like, "what is it, A.J.? We're kinda busy."

There were quite a few people there; quite a few of them wearing TMBG shirts, and then the people behind us in line, who asked us, "Do you know what this movie is about?" That made me wonder why they had bothered getting in the line. Maybe to see Ira, or maybe they thought it was a porn flick.

And seeing the movie has gotten me extra excited about seeing Them in St Louis on Friday. Every time I hear somebody say "St Louis" on the radio, or I see the name of that city in the paper or somewhere, I think, "St Louis! I'm going to be there this Friday!"

Pretty damn exciting.

I went to the This American Life live show on Saturday and had a fine old time.

Ira loves you. He said so.

Notes:

• Jonathan Goldstein looks startlingly like a slightly smaller, slightly (but only slightly) younger Peter Sagal. Doesn't sound much like him though.
  
• The story illustrated by Chris Ware was absolutely stunning. I feel sorry for all the people who are going to hear it on the radio and not get to see the drawings.
  
• I love Sarah Vowell. I didn't love her skirt. It was made of some peculiar shiny, but not, I think, stretchy material. Sort of like chintz. It was weird.
  
• The band (Jon Langford and friends):
  
  
  • I've never seen a guy wear his instrument as low as that bass player did. He could barely reach down far enough to pluck the strings. Meanwhile, the 2nd guitarist had his instrument way up in his pit, perhaps to balance out the other guy.
    
  • When there's a guy who can play both the theramin and the saw, he's just about got the entire spectrum of musical ability covered.
  
  
• Davy Rothbart's found-item piece was the funniest of the night, but I fear his will be the segment that will be cut from the show (to air next week). He was so genuinely amused by himself and what he was reading, he kept laughing so hard--it was great, even though I almost didn't hear his frantic shout of "It was not gay!" I'd actually read several of the items he read to us, in an article in the Chicago Reader a couple months ago, but Davy's delivery was inimitable.
  
• The Chicago Theatre is not designed for easy egress. There was a horrible crush on the way out, not helped by the mob at the merch table, buying stuff because Ira told us to. (Because he loves us.) I did finally get the squirrel-on-fire t-shirt I wanted; unlike the paint-by-number burning squirrel, whose tail only is on fire, the squirrel on the shirt has a flaming back. I know I shouldn't take pleasure in an image of a squirrel on fire. But it's awfully cute. Anyway, being crammed in this crowd was all the more irritating because of the group of twentysomethings near me who felt obliged to run down--loudly--all the things they had just seen, in order to prove that though they were hip enough to come to the TAL show, they were way too hip actually to enjoy it.
  

Good stuff all around.

( And I recorded it--well, most of it. Boring details here. )