I went to see Sxip's Hour of Charm, the variety show Sxip Shirey is hosting on Wednesdays at the Bindlestiff Palace of Variety. Either I was just real lucky that night, or this is a very good show that you should all go see.

Sxip ("Skip") is a familiar face from lots of Brooklyn things and from his time with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. His music, which he produces with great physical effort from lovingly constructed wind instruments and electronic filters, sounds like a pipe organ on a steam train being bopped around in a ping-pong game on the moon. It's an acquired taste, which I'm happy to have acquired. My companion felt instead that it "sucked," but did agree that Sxip makes a great variety-show host. He was tremendously pleased to present the acts, and he also wore a very nice suit, from his bizarre day job which I won't try to describe.

The clown couple Planet Banana I'd also seen with the Bindlestiffs, and I sort of remembered the first bit that they did, and remembered that they were funny. I didn't know they were so funny I would just about die though. I guess it's a simple scheme—start out with something really silly and sloppy, let people adjust to that, then bust out with something that's also really silly but obviously requires considerable skill—I'm a sucker for it every time. And I learned that "knee-slapper" is not always a metaphor, since my companion got completely out of control and started pounding on my knee. Ow. Anyway, now they're off to Australia but if they come back around, go.

Half of the band Church of Betty played some music. Not their best night (Chris Rael was sick) but if you can see the whole band, or Rael's two-man shows with Deep Singh, go.

Rael is married to Penny Arcade. Penny ambled onto the stage and said she hadn't prepared anything. She chatted and changed her clothes a little. Then, apropos of nothing (except a random thought that "it's sad to think that the weirdest person on the Lower East Side now is me") she launched into a 15-minute monologue as Margot, the deluded and unflappable pseudo-British grand dame drag queen junkie hooker, romancing a spaced-out drug merchant. ("Bay-bee—I got all the hair-o-win in the world." — "!...Well! I'm very pleased that you do.") And she was so funny I just about died. Unlike her longer shows, this wasn't exactly the kind of thing that would make you want to go out and change your life. But if she is around, go.

Someone I hadn't heard of is Kerthy Fix. I had no idea what she was going to do, except that Sxip said it was important...

So this small friendly-looking woman walked on and started fussing with a projector. Then she faced us and said that the last time she did this, people had gotten confused—so she had decided to make the introduction longer. I had a bad feeling about that. Then she held up a big scribbly sign which was supposed to be a diagram of causality vs. synchronicity, and started trying to explain, or just allude to, how Carl Jung was sort of like quantum physics. It went on and on. She was so eager to get it across. I felt like disappearing into my chair. I thought there must have been some mistake. I thought maybe I'm just being a snob, but no, it's just really misguided. Well, then she finished the introduction and got on with what she was doing.

What Kerthy Fix is doing is going out on 42nd Street and asking random people if there's anything they want, or need, that she could pray or meditate for on their behalf. She does so silently for a minute, then asks them to do the same for a random request on a slip of paper from the audience. There's a video camera sending all of this back into the theater, live (and two of the people she buttonholed ended up wandering into the theater too, to watch the next encounter). As you might imagine, the reactions ranged from "I hope I get an apartment" to "No war" to "No, that's okay, lady—I've got it all!" This may sound sort of like a David Letterman bit, but in this case Fix is the anti-Letterman—she comes across as both vulnerable and ridiculously happy, sort of a New Age Lynda Barry character. I could be wrong, but I think there was at most 0.01% of condescension in the audience's bursts of laughter, when she accosted people and when she spoke to the camera ("Wow! Wasn't that great?! Oh my God, it is cold as shit out here!")—you'd have to have a heart of stone not to dig it on some level. I still think the introduction could go... far away... but don't mind me.

(One of the "what I need" request slips from the audience was "coffee." This was duly prayed for, and I firmly believe it was granted.)

It turns out Fix, like Sxip, is from Austin, Texas. I admit that after reading about some of her previous work, I wasn't sure how to reconcile her wide-eyed homemade-angelic persona with this or... this; what I mean is that she's a much more experienced and aggressive artist than first impressions here would reveal, and that introduction might have been something of a smokescreen. But that only matters if you think the piece is about personality; I think on the contrary, it's an entirely practical effort.

Finally, Chris Green and Matt Acheson played their very good musical score for a 1916 Russian stop-motion animation by the entomologist Ladislaw Starewicz, which represented the invasion of Belgium as a swarm of beetles attacking a lily. The movie is ingenious, though unfortunately this print was very hard to see.

The musicians explained that Starewicz's career in animation began because he just couldn't get live beetles to do what he wanted. May all our frustrations be so fruitful.

My sister lives near Florence, in Italy. Italy is currently being ruled by some of the worst people they could possibly find. Two years ago, during street protests in Genoa, Berlusconi decided to make an example in brownshirt style; protest organizers were beaten up in their sleep, and in case anyone failed to get the point, a man was shot in the head from the window of a police jeep, which then ran over him.

So it's not a surprise that Jo and her friends had a few qualms about attending the large anti-war demonstrations that took place yesterday in Florence. But I got the following message, which I present as a reminder that the Internet can actually transmit good news:

Well, the police reported 500,000 and the organizers said a million, so the truth is surely somewhere in between; at any rate, when a few hundred thousand one way or another seems like a moot point, I think you can call that a success.

We started actually moving around one o'clock, two hours ahead of the planned starting time (I think they suddenly realized that a whole hell of a lot of other people were still on their way, and we had to make room), and when we arrived at the stadium, five miles and about three hours later, it was a thrill to find out that not only were people still leaving from the Fortezza del Basso, but entire trainloads were still due in to the station. I don't know when the parade finally ended, but it was well after dark.

Five hundred thousand, at the least... that means the demonstrators outnumbered the entire population of Florence, not that plenty of Florentines didn't come out for the occasion, despite the genuine terror that the government and the press had managed to create. In the morning the city seemed more deserted than it does in mid-August when everyone's on vacation, no traffic, shops locked up—though without the signs "closed for mourning" that the journalist Orianna Fallaci had urged people to hang in the windows, comparing the peace march to the Fascist March on Rome—many even boarded up, prompting somebody to scrawl "chiusura mentale" (i.e., your mind's just as closed) on the blind wooden face that a café turned to the hungry crowds. For the first hour it really seemed to be just the demonstrators, varied as they were, and then bit by bit people appeared at windows, then in the streets, unmistakably Florentines in Saturday afternoon passeggiata mode, baby strollers and all.

Not a hitch, not a broken window, not a moment of tension that I was party to. A couple days before the Disobbedienti had splashed some red paint on a Caterpillar factory outside of town, and apparently a van from the RAI also got "bloodied," but fortunately they didn't go through with their leader's idiotic threats of deviating from the authorized march. A very small group of Black Blocs also tried to weave their way into the crowd at one point, but were isolated and expelled by the other demonstrators, and apparently not another peep was heard out of them. It was all so well organized that even the massive turnout, three to four times what they expected, didn't turn into a problem—there wasn't really room for everybody to mass up in front of the concert stage next to the stadium, so most just continued up the avenue back towards Piazza della Libertà, and the march became a huge circle.

And you have to hand it to the cops, they were very, very discreet. They were invisible. Obviously there were some plainclothes officers around, but the guys in uniform were massed at least three blocks off the avenues, in clumps small enough that no one could glance down the side streets and panic, thinking they were about to charge. There were even enough porta-potties. Of course the mayor is crowing and trying to rake in all the credit (some of which he deserves) and the government is claiming that if there was no violence it was solely due to the superhuman efforts of the police force, which makes one wonder what or who encouraged them to be less than human at Genoa. I don't care.

I can't even gloat for long about the egg on certain faces, I know how quickly it gets wiped in this country... a few weeks ago 26 members of the parliamentary majority were caught on camera during a major vote, voting two or three times by helping themselves to the levers of their absent colleagues; none even bothered to apologize, and nothing came of it.

Nor can I try to tell myself that it'll make a whit of difference in American foreign policy. What's important is the majority of people, myself included, were scared in the weeks beforehand, scared shitless, scared of getting arrested and humiliated, beaten and gassed and shot at, scared of seeing a city destroyed, scared of giving others the opportunity to link pacifism with terrorism in the public imagination. And they came out anyway. And they were beautiful, and innocent, and had a really good time, and there's no lie anybody can stretch thin enough to hide a million beautiful and innocent people having a really good time. At least not for today. So something that's been clenched up since Genoa has unclenched, just a little.

Learn about foo and SEX, as explained by Eric Raymond's hacker jargon lexicon.

And also a story about magic.

826 Valencia, a neat place, has become rather neater. (If you've never been there, be sure to check the Frequently Asked Questions.)

I must say, though, that despite or because of Chris Ware's many good qualities, he would not have lasted five minutes on a pirate ship.

The source of this rant about boring celebrity interviewees may be anonymous, but it's a safe bet that I've had to transcribe a fair amount of her life's work (or that of someone just like her). And the last time I did that (for a George Clooney interview, which was ridiculously pleasant) I was wondering whether that lady would quit her job before she lost her mind. Good for her.

The end of my Post Office box story is that I now have a box number in San Francisco, and it was no problem at all. I thought I might stop by and tell the local PO crew "HA HA, I told you so," but they'd just say California is doing things wrong, and besides, why bother. I love having a box number. It makes me feel very mysterious.

Otherwise, my moving plans haven't moved forward as much as they probably should have, but I do have a whole lot of boxes of packed-up books in my kitchen. I got rid of 120 more books a few weeks ago and told the bookstore lady this was definitely the last batch. Now I have about 40 more that must go. And I just started looking at the comic books... boy, do I have some embarrassing leftovers there...