What will you do when your suntan is fading and the summer's gone?

So in the frenzy of adjusting to the newness and excitement of all things NYC, I was a little startled when I called my dad earlier this evening.

"Hey Dad. What's up?"

"Oh nothing, just reading this 'Pop Quiz' in today's Dispatch..."

"Wait, 'Pop Quiz..' Wha-"

Then I remembered. My music labels/Flaming lips package ran today!
http://dispatch.com/features-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/08/27/20060827-F1-00.html
http://dispatch.com/features-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/08/27/20060827-F1-02.html

And I'm ecstatic about the results from a clip perspective. Pat Kastner desgined a fantastic graphic to accompany the rock glossary, and I even assembled a batch of songs and bands to represent each genre for the web site:

http://www.dispatch.com/multimedia/multimedia.php?story=dispatch/2006/extras/genres/genres.html

A lot of them are dead giveaways — Dashboard for Emo, Fall Out Boy for pop-punk, DMB for jam bands, etc. — but I'm still proud of sneaking Goldfrapp and Camera Obscura on the Dispatch web site.

The story itself was written with the 60-year-old clueless grandparent with two teenagers to shop for at Christmas and birthdays in mind first, but with the would-be hipsters at Alive a close second. I'm sure someone has already blogged about the Dispatch's lame attempt to put their stamp on indie musical genres, but I don't really care. It was tons of fun to write and it looks rill pretty.

In other news, my love affair with New York continues.

Christie did in fact materialize — after what was apparently a marathon night of drinking in the financial district that left her surprised to be home safely in Flatbush and with a Dunkin' Donuts sandwich in her fridge.

So she took me to Ground Zero, which was too surreal and intense for me to process at the time. I was in too much of a happy-to-be-in-the-city mood to really take in the fact that we were standing right by the site of the most horrifying historical event of my lifetime. Luckily I still took time to look at all the photos, walk around the perimeter of the site and even check out St. Paul's Chapel, which was most powerful of all. The videos and the cot where victims slept on definitely got my throat all tingly.

In a rather abrupt shift of tone, we then ventured out to the Chelsea Pier and watched some sweet breakdancers and ate some truly terrible food court grub. I found myself rushing to a McDonald's to rid my body of the toxins supplied by the "Cuban" portion of the pier's food court.

I then returned to the Pier hours later with Joey, Mary and their Late Show friends to see Absinthe, a raunchy cabaret show increasingly growing in popularity around the city. It just got two big mentions in New York and Time Out last week, each with the same photo of a fire-eating burlesque performer. It was so popular that Joey was able to convince everyone that the free tickets he had booked us were "sold out," but, as he later confided in me, he didn't get the right manager to approve his comp tix so he was worried he might be in trouble at work the next day (he wasn't, thank God.)

So while we had no Absinthe, we did get some cheap ($3-$6, not bad) booze at my new favorite bar, Milano's. I say new favorite only because of how unimpressive it was. It's a narrow, claustrophobic, unassuming little bar in SoHo (right by the Will & Grace building!!!) with photos of previous clientele around the wall and a big bass drum with a vintage print of Sinatra on it. There was one bartender working the whole bar, and a noisy juke box that made conversations hard to carry in inside voices. I fucking loved it.

The rest of the night was a bit of a bust, and I spent wayyy too much money on booze for what amounted to no lasting buzz and no random play. Just a slightly tipsy subway ride home that was much safer than the one the night before.

As for today, it rained all bloody day, but I didn't let that stop me from window shopping for the better part of three hours in SoHo. I managed to weave in and out of every boutique and trendy retailer imaginable (H&M, Zara, Label, Puma, Paul Frank, etc.) and walked away with socks from Old Navy (I only brought three pairs of white ones!) and a Sunday Times.

And I will end this post by saying how much I love the fact that the Sunday Times is a full buck fifty cheaper than it is Ohio!!! And today's Fall Fashion issue — with surprising cover girl Catherine Keener — is a whopping 300 pages, making for one heavy ass newspaper. And I'm about to plunge into it for the rest of this wet, mellow day.