Tom Kim

Kick off the new year with a story slam at the Standard Tap in Northern Liberties (901 N 2nd St) on Tuesday, January 9.

Ten contestants, five-minute time limit (~600-800 words), $5 registration to read. Proceeds go to cash prizes for the top performers.

Contestants will be judged by members of the audience on delivery and substance. Prose please; no set theme.

Sign up starts at 7pm, show starts 7:30.

Hosted by the Liberties Scribblers, a Northern Liberties writing group. For more information, write libertiesscribblers@gmail.com

I was privileged to meet Max from Black Landlord at the last Story Slam. His band sounds like the most fun one can accomplish in one night: rap, funk, spectacle, electronica, fly girls, hype man, live band, guitar shredding, turntabilism. Top it off with Electric Six (“Take me to the Gay Bar!”), and I can’t think of a better way to burn down one year and roar into 07. Get tickets to the Khyber for the 9 show. Now.

Assignment: Describe the room of a fictional character

“You can, uh, you can wait here in the hallway until he gets back.”

“Yes, thank you.”

Alice had to press herself against the wall as Gimpy squeezed past her and the bags of flour that crowded the hallway. It seemed that there was a tear in the seam of one of the bags, and the hall floor was coated with the scuffled eddies of the pale dust.

With both hands still clasping her hand purse, Alice stepped towards the room and peered in.

It was small, not much bigger, actually, than the customer bathroom in the bakery below. An unmade cot dominated the room.

A grated window gave a view of the alley behind the building. Next to the foot of the bed, jammed against a corner, were several sacks of flour with comic books strewn, like confetti, over them. Some of the comics were glossy and new and others looked decades old, their pages nearly torn and unhinged from their staples. The older ones looked gray and faded, as if they were slowly decomposing into pulp at the intent and constant gaze of their owner.

On the opposite corner, right at the entrance of the door, was a school desk — just like the standard issue ones in her classroom at the community college. It looked like it might actually have been discarded from a classroom; its corners were scored and whittled away and there were doodles and notes not in Charlie’s handwriting in patches along the wood and metal. A squat three-legged stool, a little too short for the desk, was awaiting like a little brother in front of the desk, a pencil and speckled journal carefully placed on top. That lonely pair of furniture brought an unexpected moistness to her eye.

The Leonard Lopate show has had several segments on the Tripoli Six, a group of doctors and nurses in Libya (possibly falsely) accused of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV. They have recently been sentenced to death.

You can download a recent show on this topic here and watch a documentary on the Tripoli Six here.

One of my secret reasons for anticipating my weekly Bible study meeting is to enjoy a really, really good cup of coffee. When the Lai’s came back from Australia, they were raving about Le Cube, a single-cup coffee maker from Nespresso — Nestle’s line of high-end boutique coffee products. They even got themselves an Aeroccino, an automatic milk frother.

Look, I’m not a coffee aficionado. It took me a long time to get used to the stuff, and I eventually started drinking my daily cup for the same reason everybody else does — the caffeine. I got in the habit of masking the bitter taste with lots of cream and lots of sugar.

I’m a recovering addict. I don’t drink coffee every day anymore; I actually find that it exhausts me more often than not, and is a potent diuretic for me. I also find that I simply do not like the taste of most coffee, including, and especially, coffee shop coffee. Starbucks, ugh. Did you know Starbucks deliberately amps up the caffeine in their coffee?

This stuff from Nespresso is glorious, though. It’s got a silky smooth mouthfeel. I don’t even need to add sugar; I can enjoy it on its pure merit. It’s like the difference between foie gras and liver.

It’s expensive, and I probably can’t justify getting one of my own in my current income bracket, but I would suggest you find a very generous neighbor, like I did, or maybe pool together some money with a bunch of buddies. Man, coffee… mmmmm.

Seems that since the summer the Philadelphia WordPress and blogger meetups have been winding down. I go today and find I am only one of a few who have bothered to show up. I might be reading into this, but Blankbaby looked a little dejected as he admitted the holidays are hard on the Meetup attendance record. Ivan, a newcomer, seemed a good sport about the meeting, though, and I wish him well on his venture.

Two noteworthy end-of-year posts:

Said the Gramophone has an interesting list of best-songs-of-the-year, several of which I didn’t know about.

Stereogum has created an year-in-summary mash-up mix with the help of team9.

The Parenthetical Girls have posted up a five song EP of Christmas songs. And they even rib on Sufjan Stevens’ box set a little bit.

I Am Fuel, You Are Friends has done some statistical math-fu with a number of bloggers’ best-of-the-year lists and tells us what the numbers say… with some sample songs to whet your curiosity.

Incidentally, I Am Fuel also posts some highlights from RuinedMusic.com where people contribute stories of songs that have been irreparably ruined for them.

I count down the clock all day long for winter break to start. I then go home, eat a bowl of cereal, read comic books, pig out on chocolate, and fall asleep.

I picked up a few books from the library, including the aforementioned comic books (I could not believe the Philadelphia Free Library had graphic novels of The Planetary and Doom Patrol — too cool), and two books of short stories:

Neil Gaiman – Fragile Things
Haruki Murakami – The Elephant Vanishes

The Gaiman book is relatively new and the Murakami book has been around a while. I haven’t read Haruki Murakami since A Wild Sheep Chase, and a quick perusal of his short stories has got me excited all over again.

One of my students has recommended to me The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zuton. What are you guys reading for the holidays?

Small Ages, an mp3 blog that focuses on not-lame children’s songs, has posted a passionate rant against the robbing of little girls’ souls:

These nine-year olds that are fed a constant diet of Disney marketing and beyond have one dream. It ain’t to be a musician, or to be an actress like it was when I was younger. It’s to be “famous.” They just want the fame part, the empty part. They don’t care about music or art. They’ll take whatever gets tossed down their throats and gobble it up and want to be it but “it” isn’t a musician or singer. It’s just famous. And that is so freaking depressing.