At least the ACLU will condemn the illustrious city of Warwick (my hometown for all of two months after my apartment fire last year) and their decision to change the liquor license for the owner of a hip hop club where a shooting had occurred. Uncanny how both the Ohio shooting was invoked and that this occured within a week of the Oregon anti-hip hop club decision. Please, dear readers, keep sending me examples of this type of censorship for my paranoid mind to process.

bought 100 swift dollars worth of disco polo at Music Planet today, after having a sort of barfy little brunch at Enid's. i'm really into *into* Shazza at the moment, mostly for purposes of ye olde grad school paper. She's a 20 something polish-language pop star of the disco-polo star whose persona revolves around her fantasy have having been an Egyptian princess exiled to the desert for her love affairs. Whatever that means. I am listening to her music RIGHT NOW and it sounds like a cross between Erasure, the Sugarcubes and, well, every euro-house track you've ever heard.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Jon Fine, of Coptic Light, a band my band used to play with back in the day, has married Laurel Touby of the Mediabistro empire. Since it's a matter for the NY Times wedding section, I feel entitled to blog about it.

ROCK SHOWS:

Saw Joanna Newsom/Smog/Weird War last night. I am a hesitator on the Newsom front, mostly because that whole weirdo-grain-incredible-string-band vocal thing just sends me spinning, but it was of course truly magical and she is incredibly talented. maybe i'm nuts but it seems like the harp is a hard instrument to expressive with. She manages with indeed that voice, the Bjork-y burbles and screams, whispers and a healthy dose of ritardando. Smog was, smog (how many years can you play the guitar on stage without getting very much better at it?) and Weird War saw me saying the faux pas "Man, Ian Svenious should like, sue this guy for copyright infringement" which betrays to you 1) how much I usually don't pay attention to drag city bands anymore and 2) how insanely fallen and pathetic Mr. Svenious is in these days. He looked cracked, stared ackwardly and sang lyrics like "why do girls like boys..like that?," out of irony, but really, it became apparent that the dude is wholly out of the reality in which most everyone else around him moves. The round robin nature of the show made is so that people had to stick thru three songs for each, and Weird War made me not want to stay for the encore. Alas.