songs i've been obsessed with recently

1. Roy Orbison - Crying
2. Iggy Pop - The Passenger
3. Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight, Tonight
4. Beck - Peaches and Cream (it's the keep your lamplight trimmed and burning... part that gets me. totally transcendent)
5. Glenn Campbell - Wichita Lineman
6. Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder - Together in Electric Dreams
7. Fun Boy Three - Our Lips are Sealed

that last one is indeed the same as the gogos song "our lips are sealed." i don't know if it really counts as a cover because the frontman for fun boy three (formerly of the specials) was jane wiedlan's boyfriend at the time and they wrote the song together. i think this version is a bajillion times better than the gogos version and i like the gogos.

and i still hate giorgio moroder, but he is offset by phil oakey here. has anyone ever actually seen "electric dreams," the movie this song is from? i haven't, but apparently it's about a computer who steals some guys girlfriend, and i think the computer's voice is bud cort.

there's no new music on here which i guess is kind of sad. however, furthering my attention to old music, i bought an album by the new radicals for $3 and was horribly disappointed cause i really really like "you get what you give" but the album is pretty sucky. and that song is tracked second which is a shame cause it would have worked well last. instead, the highlight of the album is super close to the beginning which is just not a good idea.

trailers

just watched the trailer for "the fountain," which is easily the movie i am most anticipatory of right now. the trailer was meh, but i'm still pretty psyched for it. it would have been better with some well done music!

also looking forward to match point, the new woody allen movie which is supposed to be super awesome. the trailer for that is constructed so that it's all very non-woody allen (pulsing music, hot young actors, etc) and then at the end they just toss in "from director woody allen." when i saw the trailer last week with "kiss kiss bang bang," the audience totally fell for it, and when the woody allen credit came on screen there was an audible murmur throughout the crowd. whoever did that trailer should win some kind of prize.

speaking of prize winning trailers, if you haven't seen them, fake trailers that switch up the genres of famous movies:

• the shining as a romantic comedy
• west side story as a zombie flick
• titanic as a horror film

lunchtime ADVENTUUUURES (adventures... adventure... adventu...)

i've decided that detailing fun things that i eat is an excellent use of blog space. so!

today's lunchtime ADVENTURE took me deep into the east village (ok, not that deep) in search of bánh mì. bánh mì is a vietnamese sandwich. this would be my first bánh mì experience, and i really did not know much more than the country of origin. however, anyone who has ever had vietnamese food probably doesn't need much more coaxing than that, since vietnamese food tends to be like an asian food if made by the french.

i headed over to "nicky's vietnamese sandwiches" at 150 E2 St. (just off Ave A). there's a selection of 4 sandwiches, but since this was my first time, i went with the "special" sandwich, which contains:

• pâté
• ground roast pork
• vietnamese ham
• pickled carrots
• cucumber
• cilantro
• mayonnaise

they ask you if you want the sandwich spicy, which i inferred to mean "do you want us to put jalapenos on your sandwich." i did not get it spicy.

besides the pâté, mayonnaise and cilantro (actually, where the hell is cilantro from?), the european influence is borne out in the choice of bread, which is a nice crusty baguette. i usually don't like french bread and tend to prefer the softer italian hero bread, but this bread was really fresh and i wouldn't have changed it for the world. i tried to taste a piece of the vietnamese ham separately from the rest of the sandwich, especially since it was very pale (if you showed it to me out of context i probably would have guessed that it was processed turkey). it basically tasted like a generic cold cut, but i didn't really taste that much of it. there isn't much of each ingredient in this sandwich (one slice of ham, one sprig of cilantro, etc) but all together they make for a good size sandwich, certainly enough for lunch.

the sandwich really epitomized what can be so crazy wonderful about vietnamese cooking, which is that it's distinctly asian but go figure out why that is in the midst of pâté and mayonnaise. i think here it may have been the pickled carrots and whatever seasoning is on the pork, but who the hell knows. my one criticism of this place was that they fill the baguette instead of layering the ingredients. this way, all of the pickled carrots are on the cut side of the baguette and all the pork on the other side. this makes for sub-optimal mixing of flavors, but probably makes for a more stable sandwich.

all the sandwiches at this place are a very reasonable $3.95. yeah, that's right, four bucks for a sandwich that has fucking PÂTÉ on it.

here's a list of places to get banh mi in new york. reading that makes me feel like i totally missed the point by not getting jalapenos. well, it was good anyhow.

does blogger images actually work?

as is apparent by the post below, there appear to be some issues with the images. trying another one here...

by the way, that picture is from the cafeteria at the tulip gardens in amsterdam. (in amsterdam or near amsterdam... in the netherlands, in any case. there was a windmill.)

after some tests, it appears to be just pictures from my phone that don't work. great.

UPDATE: got them to work by feeding them through jpegtran w/ no args. i have no idea what's weird about the images, but whatever it is jpegtran is stripping it out.

demo

if you were walking around washington square today, you may have noticed that certain things had gone a little "retro".

it was because they were filming a movie on 5th ave and around the arch. the scene: vietnam war demonstration! they hung a ginormous peace banner inside the arch. how quaint. here is a horrible picture of what was probably the biggest demonstration washington square park has seen in some time... i was kind of worried that if i stood there so as to get a good picture, the crazy movie people who were yelling at pedestrians to walk in specific directions would get mad at me.