thanks. also, oh my god.

i’m disbanding the affect catalog on the grounds of what the hell was i thinking, the last thing i ever wanted was for this blog to turn into a glorified laundry list. plus, i’ve been inspired lately by messy, robust correspondences with nick and domenico, the latter on radio emo, which has driven me to download the most recent fall out boy and panic! at the disco records. i.e. another mess entirely.

new year’s lull. i’m moving back to new york to work here and put some more time into stylus, meaning, ostensibly, unmitigated fun and more encounters with young, art-school-educated women.

well, it’s about one month until valentine’s day, which means it’s about one month until the westminster kennel club dog show. you all may recall that last year, a wormy bull terrier named rocky’s top sundance kid took best in show, robbing the monolithically gorgeous carter’s noble shaka zulu of his rightful title. granted, the rottweiler hadn’t taken the working group in the show’s history, so it was a minor coup. year by year, carter’s noble shaka zulu. year by year. and he’s back again for 2007, while some wormy bull terrier is not. (this might have something to do with winners not returning on following years though; not sure.) either way, the bull terrier was, in some respects, a good sign for the wkc, like how spin—i know, surrounded by the stink of death, but—put tv on the radio on last month’s cover: edgy within reason.

the dog show is one of the most visibly stratified social events i’ve ever attended, a quality likely heightened by the fact that madison square garden is a stadium, and hence has stadium seating, which, if you’re housed five feet from the back exit, enables you to hang out with fat women in labrador sweatshirts and feel distant enough from the folk in black tie & evening gowns to enjoy a spicy sense of dickensian poverty.

i’ve fallen for beagles as of late, and was probably too numbed from all the plebe hollers for the golden retriever to even notice what a handsome-ass specimen last year’s 15-incher was. for some reason, most house-kept beagles i’ve met are porky. porky beagles are shaped like footballs and far from cute. not the case with the prizewinners, who serve as a constant reminder of mankind’s dazzling ability to manufacture beauty.

one short month.

(if i could only write about music with the same untethered excitement and total lack of self-consciousness with which i write about dogs.)