Georgia is not just about peaches and pecan pie. Georgia is also about peanuts (though, disappointingly, not pistachios, peppermint, or pistols).

Peanut butter requires jelly, which leads us inexorably to the peanut-butter-and-jelly muffin (recipe from Eat At Home Cook).

Georgia music leads us inexorably to Athens, where I was sucked down the rabbit hole of local music mavens Athens Soundies (main youtube page). I’m going to select a few videos to highlight, but… man, every local music scene should be champing and drooling to put together a site like this. To whet your appetite, let’s start with the pitter-patter of Quiet Hooves (Bandcamp page).
Read the rest of this entry »

A sudden urge to make tamale pie is not a source of pride. Tamale pie is among the most Americanized of pseudo-Mexican foods, with the bonus onus of lacking the hipster cred that’s been accrued by giant corporate burritos.

Your mom probably made tamale pie. Mine didn’t. Mine made the similar recipe that involved Fritos.

However, tamale pie links two ideas that had been on my plate. One is the monthly Top 10 Workout Songs from Run Hundred (site so you can vote!), which reliably includes something musically provocative. This month, the ear-catcher was a punk remix of Nicki Minaj’s mega-hit “Super Bass.” Meanwhile, Maura Johnston’s 11 Most Infuriating Trends of 2011 had called out white people revamping urban radio hits. In general, I value trend-watchers’ insights because my bent is for short, intense projects, not for longer-term absorption of the zeitgeist. This one, though… we gotta talk. Let’s start with the Nicki Minaj original. Read the rest of this entry »

At top left are the key limes.

Below them are the auxiliary back-up limes.

It’s time to tackle Florida in the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project.

Florida started off as a problem child, not due to any difficulties with the Boston Phoenix’s state pick, as runner-up Emily Reo (Bandcamp) is soothingly moody, with implied yanking of chains and rattling of bones.

No, the problem with Florida was that the iconic state dish is key lime pie, and the holidays had already involved more than their fair share of dessert, including the (unblogged) cinnamon cheesecake with a brownie crust.

My Plan B was alligator, even though alligator should properly be Plan A, and bison should be Plan B, working our way gradually toward Plan W for wildebeest. However, frozen alligator filet at stalwart butcher shop Hobe is $19 per pound.

“But I only pay that much for fresh gator!” would be the proper cry of the foodie. All the alligator recipes I could find were identical to chicken, anyway, so we can guess what alligator tastes like.

Back to limes. And that’s when everything went sour. Read the rest of this entry »

Smash is cute. Smash is cuddly. Smash will curl up on your lap and lick strawberry ice cream from your spoon. Smash has big, winsome eyes, only two of which belong to Katharine McPhee.

Smash is coming to your local NBC station on February 6, after the Super Bowl. As the aptly adorable takeaway to the left implies, I’ve already seen the pilot episode.

Smash is what would happen if a brightly colored 1940s musical were to be remade by a team who’d gotten giddy from the fumes of spray-painting 19 gold top hats for the finale of A Chorus Line. There’s the odd feint at gritty realism, but our heroine is written as a wide-eyed naïf from the sticks, trying to get her lucky break in the Big Apple.

When she turned out to literally be from Iowa, I decided the writers must know perfectly well every cliché and trope that they’re trotting out, and they’re having fun with it. The result is great fun and may well deconstruct itself into something more complicated than “brown-eyed Mary Sue takes Broadway by storm.” But let’s talk about why it’s fun. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s meatloaf.

No, there’s no dirty joke here. It’s seriously meatloaf, from the Coronado Cafe, which thanks to its Best-of-Phoenix status fits #18 on my Life List. Since last year’s attempt at new year’s resolutions fell apart so quickly that all one can do is laugh nervously and change the subject, I thought this year, it might make sense to focus on paving the way for making progress on goals I already know I want to achieve.

First, though, let’s check into the highlights and lowlights of my adventures since starting work on the Life List in November.

Preening on Purposeful Progress (or Not)
Number 18 (try a new winner from the Phoenix New Times “Best of” every month) turned out to be a major happiness generator, as it led to discovering a good indie alt-rock station, multiple restaurants, and the public library’s free online courses, which in turn generated #48 (take a different online class every month for a year). My first online course is on feng shui, on the theory that maybe the closet can be persuaded to clean itself. Not doing so hot is #17 (see a different local band every month), due to inclement weather, work overload, and holiday commitments.

Number 5 (cook a dish from each of the 50 states) quickly turned into the 50 Dishes/50 Bands/50 States project, which has conquered as far as Delaware so far. In the process, I’ve cured my own salmon, tackled sweet potato pie, made candy sushi, heard a lot of shoegaze indie bands, and been motivated to start finding a broader range of music sources. Giant Guy Cat particularly appreciates the Alaska band’s “I write too many songs about cats” ditty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are 10 albums or shows that I keep returning to as touchstones for what made 2011 in music challenging, delightful, intriguing, and something with a beat I could dance to (listed in the order in which they happened). Click the band name for the link to its original blog entry.

Americana: The Civil Wars – Barton Hollow
Magic Vegetal Meatballs
This haunting album manages combines the plucking strings and wistful lyrics of traditional folk music with an aesthetic as contemporary as Showtime dramadies. The vegetable-stuffed meatballs are a dish I should revisit in my myriad struggles with ground turkey.

Post-Punk Collides with Electronica: Atomic Tom – live at Martini Ranch
It’s not just frontman Luke White’s ability to energize a crabby Grammy-night crowd (or our similar tastes in outfits): it’s a clever and energetic take on where rock could have gone if most of grunge hadn’t happened. “Take Me Out,” in particular, grabs the best of the very early 1990s, slaps it into shape, and gets your hands in the air.
Read the rest of this entry »

What you really want to know is how I got the cranberries to align with such precision.

The stars aligned, as December’s Improv Cooking Challenge and Little Nosh Tastetastic Thursday coincided with a burning desire to talk about alt-electropop band BacknBloom (official site), who have a recent album, Music for the Modern Monkey (listen here). Eggnog and cranberries — the challenge ingredients — called out to be combined into something vaguely Italian (you’ll see why in a minute) that is sweet yet sophisticated, with a thoughtful edge.

My first three tries went wrong in every way except burning: the panettone that didn’t rise, the donut muffins that entirely muffed it, and the flan that was anything but flantastic. Fortunately, the tide turned with eggnog-cranberry cake, which is based loosely on Marion Lowery’s Cranberry Cake (here). And that means it’s time to unveil the reason for my short-term obsession with Italy. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a banana. I don’t think it’s glad to see me.

My monthly email from Run Hundred about top workout songs turned up the gem that this month’s #1 workout song is an Elvis Presley remix. (Want the rest of the list? Subscribe here.)

Since this revelation led me into a wonderful and bizarre world of Elvis remixes and re-imaginings, it seemed appropriate to pair it with a modernized version of Elvis’ favorite nosh, the peanut-banana-bacon sandwich. Thus the banana. Slice it into coins and get ready to boogie to the King. (It’s safe to cook during the first video, which has no visuals.) Read the rest of this entry »

If we’re in Delaware, it must be time for crab puffs, right?

I’d girded my loins to tackle deep-frying… and then I priced crab. If one’s going to try a new and scary cooking technique, one doesn’t start with the most expensive available ingredient other than maybe foie gras, caviar, or pistachios. Meanwhile, frozen crab puffs were on sale at Kroger for $5.99 a four-pack.

So I went looking for another traditional Delaware dish and found corn pudding (Taste of Home recipe). My band pick to match is New Sweden (official site), whose sound is Americana, complete with mandolin, pump organ, viola, and banjo). The easiest way to get into New Sweden’s music is to go to its Reverbnation page (here) and press Play All. So please do. Read the rest of this entry »

For a small state, Connecticut poses large problems. My Virgil in the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project, the Boston Phoenix, led me to “dark metal” band Ipsissimus, which rendered me speechless. Second choice The Guru is more shoegaze, and my shoes have endured enough scrutiny lately (most recently, in Las Vegas).

Frantic Googling led me to CT Indie, the endlessly entertaining online publication about local-ish indie bands, and discovered that these nice people have a Soundcloud (here) that serves as a music sampler for acts they interview. This is how I found the retro Brit-pop stylings of The Brain Room (Reverbnation site) to help us with the traditional Connecticut dish of election cake (Washington Post recipe). Read the rest of this entry »

Back around Arkansas, I’d whined that all I asked for Colorado was a band that enunciated.

So of course, the Boston Phoenix’s pick is a house/rave mixer who deploys highly distorted vocal samples: Pictureplane (Soundcloud).

Meanwhile, you’re looking at that gorgeous yellow pepper, contemplating Colorado cuisine, and wondering: “Where are the Rocky Mountain oysters?” Even if I could find raw bovine testicles at the chi-chi-mart or the ultraluxe Kroger, I’d have to come up with an oven-baked version because I don’t deep-fry, and those low-fat modifications are never as good as the original. So I’m going to make a nice Denver omelet, following Macheesmo’s instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

You know the sort of antique shop or used-book store that appears unpredictably on a downtown street, visiting from another dimension? And it’s the most perfect antique shop or used-book store ever, with all the dust in the right spots, curiosities beyond curious, and (just coincidentally) the amulet or grimoire that leads to adventures? And if you read, as a teenager, the sorts of books in which these shops appeared, you then scanned the storefronts of your decaying downtown for your magically appearing shop, even as you knew damned well that these shops appear only in Greenwich Village, Berkeley, and maybe Toronto?

Phoenix’s new music venue, the Crescent Ballroom, is visiting from that dimension. It’s a funky converted garage with exposed bricks and exposed beams. It holds ~450 people in a space so intimate that the furthest seats (yes, copious seats around the edges!) are no further from the stage than the length of my biggest room at home. And it serves solid food, as in that burrito to the left.

I was there to see Rachael Yamagata (official site), who’s touring to support her new album, Chesapeake. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday night, I’d had the meal of a lifetime (recapped here), then taken a taxi back to my hotel to get my beauty sleep before tackling the more hipster side of Las Vegas.

But first, Friday morning requires breakfast.

Yes, that pancake is larger than my head.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of Part One, I had just discovered that the line for the lunch buffet at Bellagio was longer than many a queue of refugees waiting to escape tyrannical regimes… and the people stuck in it were starting to look surly.

Heresy

Bleak-hearted, sore-footed, and hungry, I wandered back into the mall or shoppes or galleria or whatever-it-is at Bellagio. The shoppes bear a vague family resemblance to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, but probably not on purpose, as Milan is too grungy and industrial to render as a Strip casino. Somewhere in the midst of artificial Venice, I’d figured out that the designer whose work I’d most like to emulate (should my sewing ever improve — Life List item #1) is Max Azria, so there was little research to distract me from the quest for lunch.

Roped-off restaurant entrances were followed by closed restaurant entrances…

Read the rest of this entry »

For Thanksgiving 2011, I was Canadian.

We had the big family-and-friends gathering on the prior Saturday, complete with two deep-fried turkeys, 26 hungry people, enough green-bean casserole to choke at least one turkey, two helpings of the butternut squash souffle that causes riots (I moved fast), applause for my blue-ribbon date bread (nobody believes I can cook), a promise to teach me to make pie crust, and only one inquiry about why no man has snapped me up yet.

On Wednesday afternoon, I got on the plane for Las Vegas.

Checking out Las Vegas is #16 on the Life List, having earned its spot way back when I read Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas. Venturi wrote about how the casinos on the Strip are “decorated sheds” that are splashy and noticeable for no more purpose than to be signs for themselves. They are celebrity buildings!

The fascination of Las Vegas’ celebrity buildings, to me, is that they’re not merely “famous for being famous” — they’re famous for pastiching famous places in ways that drain the place of meaning. So I stayed (for cheap) in a fantasy knock-off of Camelot in which valet parking was the closest approach to chivalry and protection of civilization. As far as adjacent New York, New York — don’t get any ideas about huddled masses. This is Vegas, baby!

Lust

In planning my trip, I hadn’t realized I’d get in relatively early on Wednesday night. My first thought was to try to squeeze in a show, but the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is not a great night for live performances, unless I wanted the sorts of shows where girls wear very little and then decide it’s too hot for even that. While I’m all in favor of broadening my experiences, I could see that locally for a lot cheaper. (Answer: it depends who double-dog dares me and under what circumstances. All dares must include the statutory two dogs.) Read the rest of this entry »

Arkansas turned me into road kill.

The purpose of the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project is to fulfill item #5 on my Life List. I’d skipped Arkansas in favor of California due to inability to buy duck on a Sunday, as I was going to make the 10-Minute Duck recommended by the Arkansas Fish & Game Commission. From there, the complications would take the biscuit… and indeed did. The full story, in all its culinary woe, follows after the jump.

First, though, we need to check the Boston Phoenix for an Arkansas band. The pick is minimalist, post-everything Brut Choir (Bandcamp page)… and you can pretty much see the tracks on my back, if not the tracks of my tears. Read the rest of this entry »

Marshmallows are in the process of evolving into something more.

Since it’s impossible to buy duck in Phoenix on Sunday, I’m swapping Arkansas and California in the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project. The Boston Phoenix‘s pick for California is Puro Instinct (Bandcamp page), a sister duo with an unfortunate habit of mumbling lyrics. I was about to move on to a different pick when I started reading the band’s press, including this article from Spin. At that point, feminist ire at how Puro Instinct is consistently defined in terms of hotness and hair — rather than by its music — provoked me to give them a fair listen. (I suppose male critics would say it’s impossible to avoid noticing that Piper and Schuyler Kaplan are hot; but how would they like to be noticed not for their body of work but for their bodies?)

The quintessential Los Angeles-area dish is the California roll… but making sushi means getting involved in special equipment and specialized techniques for the sake of reproducing something I can buy at every grocery store. So it’s time to follow Mommy Knows’ tutorial for making candy sushi! Read the rest of this entry »

Arizona — the state in which I live — presented a problem for the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project. The band is not the problem: the Boston Phoenix anoints psychedelic art-pop band ROAR (Bandcamp page), and since the alphabet didn’t align with my plans to see a local band, that’s fine.

No, the problem is the food. I’ve cooked a lot of Southwestern food for the blog, including salsa, chilaquiles, multiple variants on the enchilada, assorted tacos, corn muffins galore, and a variety of pulled meats. Everything left is either labor-intensive (tortillas, refried beans) or deep-fried (fry bread). I seriously considered trying to make corn tortillas… but I can walk to multiple stores that sell them in less time that it takes to earnestly press balls of damp masa between two dinner plates.

It was clearly time to hit the road for an iconic Phoenix dive experience: Carolina’s Mexican Food. We know it’s a dive because it’s in south Phoenix (literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks). And we know it’s a dive because it uses the Dive font on its sign. (No, we cannot sing “Dive fontin’” now — it’s dinner time!) Let’s take a listen to ROAR (who probably eat here) and see what’s in the styrofoam plate. Read the rest of this entry »

Feistiness is an excellent quality in both bread and bands.

My most delightful surprise this week was being introduced to the music of a band called Suddyn (official site), whose trademark is angsty, epic rock that combines a danceable beat with poetic lyrics and a definite sense of feistiness.

Since the band had its Irish period before heading to Los Angeles, it seems fitting to accompany its music with Irish soda bread. The highly observant will notice beans lurking in the corner and conclude that either (a) a full Irish breakfast is on the menu or (b) the music has me feeling full of beans. Soda bread is also to the point in that it gets its feist from baking soda, rather than yeast. While rock feistiness is typically guitar-driven — and Suddyn provides its share of catchy guitar riffs — some of the feist comes from rockin’ piano.

The band recently released a new video (“Nothing Lasts Forever”), so that seems like the logical place to start. Preheat the oven to 425, butter the interior of a Dutch oven, and prepare to move with the music. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a convoluted bar cookie for a convoluted thought process. Two of them, actually: mine and Billy Corgan’s.

The November Improv Cooking Challenge ingredients are pumpkin and cream cheese. When inspiration didn’t strike for constructing anything savory, I thought it might be fun to give an extra twist to the usual pumpkin-cream cheese muffin by adding cranberries, rather a lot of which are in my refrigerator. Some recipe-browsing determined that pumpkin-cream cheese “brownies” have no more fat and sugar than muffins — and are a lot simpler to construct, as well as to divide into sensible portions. My only deviation from the mission was to use “American neufchâtel,” as it tastes and behaves like cream cheese but naturally contains one-third less fat.

Pumpkin treats call for Smashing Pumpkins, which is in the midst of a complicated and prolonged high-concept project that is supposed to lead to a new album release in 2012. I sense a natural fit. Let’s explore it. Read the rest of this entry »

This salmon needs a cure.

Not The Cure. A cure. Stop #2 on the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project (#5 on the Life List) is Alaska, where the Boston Phoenix’s pick is experimental electronic band Pretty Birds That Kill (Bandcamp page).

Alaska is a rough-and-ready state where tough women cure their own salmon. Since my fondness for lox is greater than my budget for lox — a situation that results in a lox-out — I thought I’d take some $1.99/lb salmon chunks from Pro’s Ranch Market and see if I couldn’t cure my own salmon at home. Salon.com helpfully provided instructions for curing gravlax, so let’s see if the cure is worse than prevention. Read the rest of this entry »

Behold the kick-off of the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project, which is #5 on my Life List and a heck of a lot easier to break into manageable steps than items #1 through #4. Since my knowledge of music is more eccentric than encyclopedic, I have recourse to the Boston Phoenix’s top indie band picks for each state. (This project will not be done in 50 days, as there are upcoming albums and live shows that I also want to write about.)

First up — since I’m going in alphabetical order, and it’s too early in the alphabet for me to be confused yet — is Alabama, for which the band is The Sunshine Factory (official site). The obvious culinary choice for Alabama is sweet potato pie. Pie crust is insanely caloric, so the plan here is a crustless pie, using A Bird in the Kitchen’s recipe as the starting point.

Pie contains sugar. The Phoenix recommends “Sugar Cane” as the must-hear track from recent album Sugar. I say we start there. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to get sweaty?

Shortly after I wrote about seeing Incubus with Young the Giant, I received a charming email from the proprietor of Run Hundred, telling me that the Young the Giant song I’d featured (“My Body”) was on his monthly list of the top 10 workout songs (voting page is here), and would I like to see the rest of the list? Yes, I would.

It’s a nifty project, as songs are classified by beats per minute, in case you have a target tempo in mind. It also sucked me down the rabbit hole that is remixing. Ordinarily, I don’t follow dance/club music — the club scene out here runs heavily to astroturf mini-skirts with suggestively placed divots — so I hadn’t fully appreciated the multifarious remixes of Stockholm DJ Avicii, which we are about to explore. To give us energy for this adventure, we’ll need some granola. Ready… set… and one-and-two and one-and-two… Read the rest of this entry »

I could, at this very moment, be contemplating a morning listening to artist Lisa Congdon and an afternoon of learning to make balloon animals, had I but planned my life far enough ahead for Camp Mighty‘s weekend of developing useful skills.

The most compelling part of the program might be organized impetus to make a Life List of 100 items one positively wants to squeeze into one’s lifetime. My start at one is here: be warned that I led with ambitious goals, then calmed down.

And last night, I could have heard The Tontons (site), a psychedelic-indie-jazzy-bluesy band from Houston. But we’re going to hear them anyway! Along with a “bucket list” sort of recipe that fits “somewhere between Houston and Palm Springs” — I’ve thought about making seafood enchiladas for years but never have, as I can’t wrap my head around the cream-sauce interior, even though I make a decent Béchamel. That is all about to change. Shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

Men with paunches and wrinkles evaluate potential first basemen according to whether they have good bodies, fine moral character, or hot girlfriends. (A girlfriend of ordinary attractiveness is, so the major league scouts say, a sign of lack of self-confidence, rather than of fine moral character.)

The results on the playing field are, as one might expect, random. Baseball doesn’t give style points. Baseball is about hitting the ball and getting on base.

Moneyball sets itself up as the economics nerd’s heartwarming come-from-behind story. Faced with a tight budget and the loss of key players, Oakland A’s GM Billie Beane (Brad Pitt) assembles a team of the lame, the halt, the clumsy, and the over-the-hill, then… uh, then… well, then not quite what one expects. Real life is so friggin’ inconvenient to work into a story. Read the rest of this entry »

Whitesnake has been on my mind, a state of being that called for white pizza. There’s no snake on the pizza, as if there were, everybody would just claim it tastes like chicken, so it seemed simpler to use chicken in the first place.

Also, there was chicken in the freezer, while I have not yet quite evolved to being the sort of Arizonan who runs around the yard killing snakes with a hoe.

Whitesnake should properly be on one’s mind at least occasionally, as VH-1 named it the 85th greatest hard rock band of all time, a factoid that should make us grateful for the existence of music geeks who can take care of determining the fine distinctions between #83 (King’s X) and #86 (Foreigner). People who know me well will grasp that I’m not snarking: without music geekery, it’d be much tougher to figure out any larger patterns beyond one’s own preferences. Also, the band has a new album this year, Forevermore, which reputedly had bigger presales than Britney Spears’ latest oeuvre.

So are we ready to caramelize an onion?

Damn, that sounded dirty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night in Tempe, AWOLNATION proved to be all that and a basket of chips.

Well, actually, the fish ‘n’ chips are from Rula Bula, and now that I’ve mentioned the restaurant’s name, I’ve probably made a lewd suggestion to any friends who speak Gaelic. I’m a little embarrassed at having been here, as this is the sort of place — well, did you ever see Rumpole of the Bailey? Set it in Dublin, and the young, heavily starched, up-and-comers would have eaten at Rula Bula, whilst nattering about wine vintages and free-range caramelized onions.

My excuse is that Mill Avenue is surprisingly devoid of funky university hangouts, and also, the fish was excellent: moist, buttery, and crisp.

The agenda was an evening at the echoing barn that is the Marquee Theater, for a bill of AWOLNATION (previously discussed here, with Lebanese lemonade), supported by Twin Atlantic (previously here, with peanut oatmeal bread) and Middle Class Rut (not previously anywhere). Since  “rula bula” purports to mean “raucous good time,” I vote we have one. Read the rest of this entry »

These pyschedelic mini-cupcakes are a prime example of my thinking I was innovating when I was — oops! — following an already trodden path.

The inspiration came from this New York Times article on the irresistible cuteness of smaller confections. Upon multiple re-readings, my brain insisted on processing Baked by Melissa’s psychedelic mini-cupcake as a white cupcake with colored icing, when the article clearly says the opposite.

Since I dislike icing, I was on a quest for a way to make the cupcake itself psychedelic. My virus-addled brain did, however, retain that the musical connection is to the Grateful Dead. In keeping with the theme of discovering the road’s already been traveled, this is a band was generating a vast collection of fan-created concert recordings before Youtube’s founders were born.

And I still am not particularly familiar with its music. But that can be fixed. Let’s start with a famous Dead song that bass player and vocalist Phil Lesh wrote for his father, who was dying of cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

Triumph of the Cornish game hen!

I finally succeeded in weaseling out of Jayelgee1 her secret to Cornish game hens. It turned out to be well worth a weasel, and I’d even throw in two ferrets and a mongoose to be named later. (Always take your time over naming mongeese. Get to know them first.)

Listening to what bands make of fans (raising the question of whether some musicians have ever been fans) left me with the urge to explore songs about strong and successful women. Don’t count on Google for help with this, as online list-makers apparently think women are “strong” only when we’re kicking dudes to the curb, which would imply that woman’s major challenge in life is finding and keeping a man. Um, hello, career? Family? Self-knowledge? Myriad temptations to which flesh is heir?

Fortunately, Ani DiFranco is here to get us moving. Let us take a game hen and a gander at what she has to say. Read the rest of this entry »

Then there’s the moment when you’re dancing and clapping to a band you’ve never heard before that night.

Hallowe’en is a difficult holiday here in the Valley, as the culture runs heavily to the sort of party that calls for dressing as a slutty golf course attendant. While I’ll defend to the death other women’s rights to wear astroturf mini-skirts with suggestively placed divots, my own tastes veer more toward worn jeans and dive bars. So when a friend with trustworthy musical tastes mentioned Wild Flag (label site) and the band just happened to be coming to the Rhythm Room (dive music venue par excellence) on the very night I was looking for a party… kismet.

Kismet with zombies. Phoenix has regular Zombie Walks, though, so it’s entirely possible that the zombies had nothing to do with the holiday.

Wild Flag is a sort of female indie punk-rock supergroup — at least, the show promo touted them as “former members of…” with a quiz-worthy list of bands, most prominently Sleater-Kinney — that is touring to support its eponymous debut album. Read the rest of this entry »