I had a perfect night out on Thursday--and perfect company: me. Every now and then it's a good idea to spend a night alone, talking to no one, enjoying yourself, and doing something special. And going dancing is truly a wonderful way to do it.

Ben Watt, the London DJ who is the male half of Everything But The GIrl, comes to town far too infrequently for my taste. So when he does come, I go out of my way to dance to his beats. He plays house music (the Giant Step web site calls it "deep tender-tough house," whatever that means), which isn't necessarily my favorite music to listen to, but it's a fantastic music to dance to. Once you get into the groove you become like a marathon runner, going through phases of pain, exhilaration, exhaustion, second wind, and euphoria.

Watt's most recent CD, Buzzin' Fly, Volume 2, is terrific--electronic beats with lots of human soul. The mix he put together was inspired by New York's quiet mood after the 9/11 attacks. Watt writes in the liner notes: "I witnessed the mood change in New York after 9/11. I felt another story could be told. This mix starts with a character speaking, a lone voice pondering a future. I wanted to then go on a journey of re-assessment and re-discovery, utilising sounds from the history of house.... At times I've used voices to simply assert the unifying power of music. At other times they are statements of uncertainty, reflections by a tough survivor on a lost past. In the end they find love one way or another, a kind of route to a new life."

Good stuff for notoriously vapid dance music.

Thursday night, Watt was playing at Cielo in the Meat-packing district, so I went to Florent for dinner beforehand. I sat at the counter, ate a delicious filet of beef, drank a couple bottles of Perrier, and soaked in the love Florent always throws my way. I got to the club at 10.30. Ben Watt walked in at about 11pm, and as he hung out at the bar graciously posing for pictures with young Japanese fans and shaking hands with all who approached, I imagined what I would say to him if I were to go up and say hello....

Hi Ben, my name's David and I have to tell you that all of the music you've put out, from North Marine Drive through Buzzin' Fly Vol. II, has been the soundtrack to my life since 1987. I listen to something of yours every single day....

Alas, I was wearing my best New York Cool and resisted the urge to approach the accessible celebrity. But when he took to the turntables at 11:45pm, I took to the dance floor. At midnight I had my first goosebumps of the night as the music shifted into high gear and the energy of the crowd exploded into screams, laughs, whoops, and ecstatic flinging of the limbs. The rest of the night was a gentle shifting from cool down to easy-going to warm-up to high-energy to funky beats to 10-minute pounding jams to rib-rattling bass to ear-splitting hi-hats and back again.

I danced straight through the set, stopping only once for a five minute break of two more small bottles of Perrier. At 4:15am when Watt lifted his hands to say his set was over, the crowd erupted into joyous applause. He played one more for us--a soulful vocal track--then released us into the sweet, autumnal middle of the night.

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Speaking of sweet nights....

Last night I rode my bike home from work, and as I rode in the cold wind, I noticed that the city had finally lost its awful summer stench. In early May, the smells of wet slime, putrid garbage, dog and human piss, rodent feces, rotting food steam, and the unmistakable filth of unwashed human armpit settle into the very soul of New York and then bake into our nostrils for the next five months. Usually some time in October we get enough rain, followed by enough chill, to rid us of this foulness until humid May roars back the following year.

Finally, last night, not only was the stench gone, but the air was sweet. Is that the smell of Krispy Kreme?! Who's baking cookies?! Could the suffocating little trees in Little Italy be giving off the sweet smell of sap?! I couldn't believe my nose!

Well, it turns out I wasn't the only person delighting and wondering about the sweetness in the air. The New York Times reports: Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers: An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome. "It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant." ....Read the whole article.

I kid you not. It was weird. But nice.