I (Don't) Have Many Leather-bound Books

I hadn't seen my friend Matt Wu* for maybe two years until last night, when he asked me to dinner with him and his girlfriend so I could give my two cents on her prospective vegan-based internet venture (I have an Internet job – big surprise). After my advice-stream ran dry, she randomly busted out with a story involving pulling her suddenly horny, neutered 14-year-old cat off a screaming female cat. She then held up her pinkie. You can guess what that represented. Then she told me about the dog she'd found chained to a pole in five-degree weather. She stayed with the dog for two hours until it became apparent no one was coming back for him, then she adopted him. The dog lives with Matt Wu now. Matt Wu enjoys putting things on top of the dog and taking pictures: a running shoe, jeans, a Hank Williams, Jr “Original Bad Ass” t-shirt, a stuffed squirrel doll, a giant rubber exercise ball, a Yankees cap.

Matt Wu went to the Fame high school. He played saxophone, but now does business-y things. This is a good creative outlet for him.

His girlfriend is a very nice person who rescues animals and doesn't eat them. I thought that was the sum of it. But later, at a Bowery loft party for Barking Irons' new music-clothing video series**, we were talking to the girlfriend (wife?) of Stewart D'Arrieta (both above), an Australian Tom Waits tribute artist who periodically crashes America to perform his review, “Belly of a Drunken Piano”, which you should totally see, because Stewart totally channels Tom Waits, without losing Stewart, and clearly has some Waits-worthy stories of his own, and... So, we were talking to his girlfriend/wife, and AC/DC came up, as AC/DC must. Then Matt Wu's girlfriend sprung it on us that she'd once appeared in an AC/DC video (“Stiff Upper Lip”), and had gotten along with Malcolm Young so famously they'd exchanged phone numbers. Also, she was apparently once employed as a professional roller-skater. Matt Wu was as surprised as I was.

Which obviously just goes to show that you can't judge a book by its cover, even if the book refuses to be bound in leather, based on moral principles.

*Technically Matt Yu, but he thinks “Wu” makes him sound more like a spy
**Barking Irons: two brothers who started out making clothes based on historical New York characters – gang members, hobos, politicians... – before Gangs of New York was made