chickfactor attended dashiell hammett night at the horse hospital on saturday. it was a special evening celebrating the classic american crime fiction writer, where they had some folks do readings from three of his books (the american accents, when attempted, weren’t exactly convincing, but cathi unsworth and max decharne at least looked the part), showed the glass key starring my hair idol veronica lake and had some live blues in the 20s/30s style by the sandy dillon speakeasy quartet, who sounded all right but it was somehow hard to focus on the music because of the singer dillon’s kooky and intense onstage antics. my pal jennifer was hoping that ed harcourt was going to sing tonight but he was just a sideman (who played singing saw at one point). it was a nice and chilled out evening anyway, and we like the idea of mixing different media into one event.