You're A Silly Little Goose

1. Song of the week: Caetano Veloso's lovely rendition of Irving Berlin's "Let's Face the Music & Dance", as performed at his 1997 tribute concert to Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina. Download here.

2. I've turned into a buy-local organic/natural hippie freak in the past three weeks. Luckily, I happen to live in the most perfect place in the world to be a buy-local organic/natural hippie freak. My quest to fulfill this unexpected destiny recently led me to the Alima Cosmetics website. It's a Portland-based natural mineral make-up company. But the best part? They sell samples of all their cosmetics online, so you can try them out before you commit to dropping $8-$18 for full-size jars. Oh yeah. They're a buck to a buck-fitty a pop & shipping's under $5. I ordered 19 different samples of foundations, powders, eye shadows, eyeliners, & lip balms yesterday afternoon - & they shipped this morning! Check it out. I'll update once I've had a chance to give 'em a whirl.

3. Hair - I finally made an appointment here to get a cut'n'color from him, on Friday at three. Which is apparently going to cost me at least $125. Plus tip, I presume. I am alternately horrified & amused that I am prepared to throw that much money at my freakin' hair. Also, I'm curious to see what Mr. Kane suggests, considering the overall strictness of my prerequisites: 1) absolutely no shorter, 2) not too much longer, 3) not radically different & 4) ease of styling & maintenance - my patience level for the amount of time I'm willing to spend on the rituals of girl-ness tends more toward deficit than surfeit. I've got about a five-minute attention span for that shit.

4. A friend & I are planning to go to Mexico to wander Mayan & Aztec ruins. Well, the ruins are my plan, anyway. And to get some tasty, tasty food. Mmm. Anybody wanna come? It's going to take me a little while to brush up on completely re-learn my Spanish & do some decent historical & cultural research (you know me, I can't just go somewhere without reading about it like a fiend &, if applicable, teaching myself how to botch the language). So I'm thinking of going sometime in the upcoming 12 months. Most likely during next fall/winter, for the warm sunny escape factor. Tickets look super-cheap into Mexico City - about $350 round-trip from PDX, anyway, so this international trip might actually happen. EDIT: Apparently Powell's entire stock of books on Mexican & Mesoamerican histories is on sale; this evening last, for $9 each, I picked up Mexico: Volume 1, From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest by Alan Knight; Mexico: Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze; & A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya by Linda Schele & David Freidel. They all look like nice solid texts, so I'm pretty excited to read them. It barely begins to cover what I want to know; but it's a start. Project!

5. Ooh, Lars von Trier's The Kingdom 2 is FINALLY out on DVD! No joke, I just about ran out & bought a VCR last year for the sole purpose of renting my video store's bootleg VHS copy of this. Only it's been so long since I've seen part the first that I'm not sure whether I really liked it enough to warrant my severe excitement or whether it's the unattainability of the thing that's made me so hot to trot for it all these years. Eh, who cares.



6. Speaking of hot to trot, my girlfriend's coming back to town on 23 February! Sweet. It feels like only yesterday, or possibly late October 2007, that she was gazing at me & touching my arm. I can't wait.