mushin no shin

So I was on vacation last week; between saving for a house and then spending a huge wad-o-cash fixing my car this year, I didn’t have a whole lot of disposable funds for taking a trip or doing anything extravagent. But still I wanted to make something of the week and not just waste it watching the tube. So anyway here’s my totally retroactively faked liveblog of the week’s highlights.

Friday, Sep 1, 7PM-ish

Overlord at the Belcourt. I’m not really into war movies but the nearly seamless juxtaposition of fictional film and historic footage made this one interesting.

Friday, Sep 1, 10PM-ish

Went to see Rocket from the Tombs at the Mercy Lounge. I’d never heard any of their work, but of course I knew the Dead Boys’ Sonic Reducer, and I’d heard some Pere Ubu way back when. They rocked, it was a great show.

This was also good because one of my goals for the week was to check out some places I’d never found the time or excuse to get out to before, and believe it or not the Mercy Lounge was on the list. So now I have. Seems to be a decent little club, perfect for that type of show. I think Frank Black is coming there soon, that might be worth coming back for.

Saturday, Sep 2, 10:15 AM

Yoga as usual

Saturday, Sep 2, evening sometime

Dinner at the Istanbul Cafe. This almost counts under my “new to me” theme, I’d only been there once before. Nice place. Turkish coffee kicks ass.

Saturday, Sep 2, later evening sometime

I figured, since I normally would insist to myself that I have to go out and do something on a Saturday night, the vacation-y thing to do then would be to spend a Saturday night sitting at home on my ass watching a DVD. So that’s what I did. I saw a sci-fi film called Immortal. The review I just linked sums it up pretty well: “Ultimately Immortal is a failure, but an interesting one.”

Sunday, Sep 3, 11 AM

Buddhist discussion/meditation with the sangha as usual

Sunday, Sep 3, 9 PM-ish

Saw Timbre playing at The 5 Spot. Timbre of course is one of the Cierpke clan I talked about previously. Since the time of that posting I’ve exchanged a few emails with Treble, and so I got to see her and catch up a bit in person.

The 5 Spot also counted towards new places. For that matter it was my first time out to see a band at any club in East Nashville, so it gets double points. It’s a nice club. A little creepy though — there’s no smoking and the place is immaculately clean; this of course is not a bad thing, but between the dark colors and the PBR sign they seem to be going for the “rock dive” atmosphere. And so a rock-dive without any, umm, dive? Pleasant actually, but still creepy, sort of in the same way that Cool Springs is creepy.

Sunday, Sep 3, 11:45 PM-ish

After the Timbre show I went to close out goth night at Decades. Not really out of the ordinary except for no Monday consequence for staying out so late. Well that and *not* getting hammered since I got there later than usual, had less time to drink.

Monday, Sep 4, 10 AM-ish

Mostly because it needed doing, and partly because many places were closed, but ostensibly just to be stubborn (”if I want to labor on Labor Day, I’m going to, damnit!”) — gave the car an uber-thorough cleaning, Windex, Armor All, cleaning all the gunk out of all the little crevices, etc.

Monday, Sep 4, noon-ish

Decided as part of “vacation from my usually pretty strict diet” to splurge on a Hardees sourdough thickburger.

Monday, Sep 4, 7 PM-ish

On my “new places” list, I tried La Hacienda Marisqueria. I suppose I may only get half credit for this one, since I have eaten at their sister location further north on Nolensville, plus I’d eaten before in this building when it used to be a Chinese/Mongolian place.

Tuesday, Sep 5, mid-morning or so

Takin’ care of business. Got the emissions checked on my car & put the renewal in the mail. Went to the county clerk to see about getting back my right to vote. Got jerked around on that since the clerk & the election commission apparently can’t be bothered to talk to one another. Waiting for the EC to answer me now.

Tuesday, Sep 5, early afternoon or so

New places: Athens Family Restaurant on 8th. Suffered from “sometimes service is too good syndrome”, whereby I was trying to decide on one of the more adventurous house specialty plates on the menu, but the waitress was all up on me for a decision, so I hastily cut to a standard gyro plate. The gyro plate was excellent to be sure, but I’ll have to go back and try something more exotic another time.

Tuesday, Sep 5, early evening or so

More New Places: “Thai Star”, a Thai place that opened up in the new Kroger center on East Thompson Lane. Eh, it was good, no complaints, but nothing really to win me over from my established love for Thai Taste and Siam Cafe. But it might make for a nice occasional change.

Wednesday, Sep 6, mid-morning

Went for a lovely stroll around downtown. Mostly getting a first glimpse at the Schermerhorn and scoping out parking and after-concert dining options. Saw a place called “Past Perfect” that looked like a good choice for some nights — however we would later find they have some sort of country songwriter night thing happening Wednesday nights, so we had to find another option at least for this occasion.

Wednesday, Sep 6, noon-ish

New Places: had lunch at Fido. I’d been meaning to check them out for a while. Looks like now I’ve got a good place to get a veggie burger after a Belcourt show. Well, after an early show at least.

Wednesday, Sep 6, 6:30 PM-ish

Schermerhorn preview concert.

Wednesday, Sep 6, 9:30 PM-ish

Dinner at Bound’ry. Another one for the New Places list. Had a magnificent dinner, though the restaurant may be getting points that really belong to my lovely companion : )

Thursday, Sep 7, 11 AM

Schermerhorn ribbon cutting. Lunch in the courtyard provided.

Thursday, Sep 7, 1 PM-ish

Stop home long enough to blog about the Schermerhorn related events of the previous 24 hours.

Thursday, Sep 7, 4 PM

90 glorious minutes of massage at the Adagio Massage Company. This was actually my first ever professional massage, so “new place” as well as “new experience”. And, well, a guy could get definately used to this! I’m going to have to put more of these in my budget.

Thursday, Sep 7, 6 PM

Out to the Belcourt for The Scopitone A-Go-Go Membership Party Night. Scopitones apparently are sort of like MTV for the early 60s, music videos that played on video jukeboxes. We watched these while snacking free food and imbibing cheap drinks. Good times.

Friday, Sep 8

Friday was mostly loafing. I did hit Best Buy and pick up a Nikon Coolpix L4 camera — nothing fancy, but should be good enough for my once-in-a-blue-moon picture taking needs. Went downtown to grab some Schermerhorn pics, but they had a big tent thing up front in prep for the gala which was blocking the view. Went for dinner at Las Chivas — not a “new place” but falls under “vacation from my diet” as they’ve got a fantastic chopped steak & jalepenos dish that I love but rarely let myself eat, gotta go have it at least once when the rules are offline.

Saturday, Sep 9, 10 AM

that blogger meet-up

Saturday, Sep 9, 1 PM-ish

Lunch from the Thai Kitchen in Berry Hill. I eat here all the time but did try a new dish, their “Spicy Tofu”, in preparation for maybe trying to cut out meat again, or at least take my already somewhat low consumption down another notch.

Saturday, Sep 9, 9:25 PM

Back to the Belcourt for 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was actually after a false start, attempted to hit the Shakespeare in the Park, but changed plans after getting there a tad late. Wandered around Hillsboro village a bit beforehand, checked out Pangea which is sort of a cool place, eclectic lefty multi-spiritual knicknacks and such. I *almost* bought a set of Tibetan prayer flags, might have to go back for ‘em sometime.

Sunday, Sep 10, 11 AM

Buddhist discussion/meditation with the sangha as usual

Sunday, Sep 10, 3:30 PM

Watch and record the Schermerhorn Gala on NPT

Sunday, Sep 10, 7:00 PM

OK this time I did make it to the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare in the Park, doing Macbeth. I’ll have to admit I didn’t follow it very well. Take the Bard’s already hard-to-parse language, add in amplified outdoor acoustics, a lack of a program (last night of the festival, they ran out), my having sat too close to the drummer, my mind being elsewhere anyway, and then throw in the occassional car alarm — and, well, the results are predictable. The Asian-themed sets and costumes were beautiful though, and the performances lyrically *sounded* fantastic…

Sunday, Sep 10, 11:30 PM-ish

One final “vacation from my diet” with a gut-bombing at Waffle House. Not a bad way to wrap up the week.

I should add that much of the glue time in between all of this was spent chanting Hare Krishna. But THAT’s a subject for a separate post.

All in all a pretty good way to spend a week. This morning I successfully got right back into my morning stretch/excercise/yoga/kata routine (which I had also “vacationed” from, along with karate and yoga classes which were cancelled for various reasons anyway) and now all is pretty much back to normal.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Babble, Music, TV & Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.