RoBoTNiK

Synopsis of our DramaSystem game about a hellbound 70s rock band, Part 2 of 3. (Here's Part 1, here's Part 3, and here's the podcast where we jawed about it.)

Southern Rock Opera : Act Two

Don’t sing with a fake British accent / don’t act like your family’s a joke

( Episode 4: Hotel California )

( Episode 5: I Wanna Be Sedated )

( Episode 6: To Beat the Devil / Angels and Fuselage )

( Interlude: Gimme Shelter )

papersource has already done the work of sketching out our trip last week to New York. It was a great time, with large doses of two things I do find myself missing in London: big city life, and my friends. We got to meet Steve’s new girlfriend, who is bubbly and cute and wry and fun and a delight, and to reconnect with a dozen or so people we haven’t seen in way too long. We ate extremely well, saw Syriana—the thriller that’s more depressing than Traffic!—and checked out the spooky-tawdry nineteenth century spiritualist photographs at the Met.



In honor of the spiritualists, I coughed up considerable ectoplasm. I was fighting a wretched cold the whole time we were in the city, but my strictly observed regimen of air travel, beer, lack of sleep, and stepping directly into every frozen slush puddle in Manhattan somehow failed to vanquish the bug. The worst was at the newly reopened observation deck on top of Rockefeller Center, all cool and art deco and crazy high and windy cold. I got some sort of super-combination hiccuping cough going there, and basically rained down loogies of pestilence onto the crowds milling around the giant Christmas tree, seventy stories below. (I don't feel too bad, really. They were in line to see Alec Baldwin host his umpteenth SNL; their sensibilities can't have been that delicate.) The sickness finally lodged itself in my throat and rendered me utterly voiceless for much of this week.

Say, that reminds me: I’m quite tickled by reports of this new(-ish) Lovecraftian(-ish) RPG(-ish), The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. It's the game that asks: "Are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization? Not even if it will help you get tenure?" Story of my life, man.

Now that's more like it. L&I just returned from a great, great weekend in New York. A very generous friend of mine lent us his apartment, which is in Greenwich Village a block from NYU, at the following highly auspicious address:



Highlights of our weekend included: killer deli, killer sushi, the brilliant Lower East Side Tenement Museum (what can I say, we're history geeks), a hugely enjoyable if not always entirely in tune set by a girlrock trio at Meow Mix (which is the lesbian bar featured in Chasing Amy) (and we were friends of friends of the drummer, so la-di-da for us), hanging with L's college buddy Toby, which I always love (all of the friends we saw in NYC are great, of course, but I particularly like seeing Toby—my Toronto posse will have a pretty good sense of what he's like if they picture an alternate-history Derek largely unreformed by Whitney), the front lines of the bitter feud between New York's bluegrass and old timey music scenes (from whence comes the subject line of this post—you probably had to be there), a Greek dinner in Astoria with L's gourmet-savvy friend Drew and a bunch of his friends that turned into a five-hour multi-restaurant Olympiad of fish and flesh and wine and garlic and endless Greek desserts. All this plus tons of quality L&R time, and the Village and Soho just exploding with energy and hormones from the first honest-to-God, warm-breeze, short-sleeve weekend of 2004.

Travel—vacation travel, I mean—is rejuvenating, regardless of where you go and what you do. It shakes up your patterns and frees your head. Even my daydreaming this weekend was more optimistic than it's been in a while—more creative, more fun. You know: all the books I'm going to write, the cancer cures, the sitcom about the sassy robot, that kind of stuff. None of the problems making me miserable this winter have been solved or abated or really gone anywhere, but you can only stay hunched over for so long.