flea at laff #7: mile end/crop to cup.

snack: the ruth wilensky
drink: large iced coffee

oh brooklyn flea! how i've (sort of) missed you! what's it been, like a month or so since we last played? i'm truly sorry. i've been slightly broke & slightly busy recently & visiting you just hasn't been in the cards. plus, after a bunch of visits to you this summer, i've determined that for me, you don't have that much to offer other than the food. no, i'm not interested in a bunch of plastic, marquee-sized letters. i think i'm all set with that sparkly prom dress as well. ditto for 75% of the other non-food items you have for sale. as much as i try to tell myself that some end table or old-timey soda shop sign is going to one day catch my eye & come home with me, i'm only kidding myself...it's mostly just junk.

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#166 - back in black.

for most of my life, i've never been a huge fan of ac/dc. in my elementary school days, while i listened to a bunch of rock, it was mostly of the big hair variety. during my high school years, i got caught up in rap & by the time college rolled around, ac/dc was being kinda meh, putting out songs like "big gun" & working with uber-producer rick rubin & on 1995's lackluster ballbreaker. since then, they've only put out two albums, but i've been stuck in an indie rock mindset for a while now, meaning i was too cool for them. initially, not even landing a job at a company where they're one of the bands i work with was enough to make me like them. it took meeting the band & then seeing them live from the 4th row to really get what they're all about. they're just five dudes from australia who who play straightforward, eardrum-busting rock & choose a working-man's attitude toward their music over a rock star attitude.

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#165 - something's fishy.

something smells fishy around here. at first, i figured it was just the foul-smelling scent of city garbage marinating in the hot summer sun, but that smells more like cheese than fish. then i thought that maybe i'd forgotten to put on deodorant this morn. after a couple of sniffs of the pits, i ruled that out as well. was it actually fish? it couldn't be that. i hardly ever eat fish outside of a sushi joint. you know what? it's probably just a dead possum caught in the floorboards. oh, wait. i live on the basement level. i don't even have floorboards. i bet it's just a case of something that's metaphorically fishy, like the rod blagojevich trial or a perp's story on CSI or a BP solution, which, come to think of it, is both metaphorically & tragically fishy.

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#164 - 7/11.

we all remember 9/11. how could we forget it, really? it's a day where thousands of u.s. citizens were killed. even if we wanted to forget the date, there's the phrase that came with the day & was plastered on posters & bumper stickers all around NYC: "never forget." y'know, just in case mass death & the impetus for two wars & hundreds of thousands more deaths wasn't enough to make you remember. nobody really remembers 7/11 though. it's a date that's important not just because it's the name of america's most beloved chain convenient store. it's also a day jam packed with memorable, historical moments.

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#163 - middling tradition.

wow. we're already more than halfway through 2010. how time flies when you're having a so-so time! last year around this time, i took a look at my fave five albums of the year & five snack/drink pairings that i'd planned on writing about but never got around to. this year, i've decided to do the same thing, officially creating a tradition of sorts here at eat!drink!snack!

thus far, it's been a relatively solid year for indie rock (which is about 80% of what i deal in) & there's still a lot to come, with albums from favorites such as no age, superchunk, black mountain, blonde redhead, les savy fav, the walkmen, !!!, interpol, the thermals, menomena & the arcade fire scheduled to come out over the next few months. it's safe to say that i'm EXTREMELY stoked about all that new music. that's right. i said "stoked."

without further ado, let's get to it...my indietastic mid-year top five!

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