Mike Daisey Rips Amazon.com; Sights Top Strokes; Reid Paley/Spirit Caravan; Nuns & Cyborgs

Well, the red-letter day happened?Amazon.com made money in fall 2001?and nobody gave a damn except for former employee Mike Daisey, who ranted about it on his website ("sweet justification for...the Customer Service department which was axed and moved to India"). Daisey's memoir 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com comes out this June; it details the cult-like inner workings of one of America's most deranged businesses in some of our most deranged times.

"It was very in vogue to bring your dog to work," Daisey reports. "That was the bonus for being at Amazon. So everyone brought their dogs, but no one put them on leashes because that would be 'ugh,' so they just let them run around. There were packs of dogs in the hallways... You'd see four, five, six dogs, all different sizes, just ambling towards you."

Daisey held onto these stories when he left Amazon, premiering a one-man show called 21 Dog Years in Seattle last February. That production came to the New York International Fringe Festival in August with reams of press; it's going Off-Broadway soon. The 21 Dog Years book, based on the show, is available for pre-order at, yeah, Amazon.com.

Daisey reads about his former employer at Red Room (85 E. 4th St. at 2nd Ave., 3rd fl., 777-6088) this Friday at 8 p.m. He's accompanied by novelists Clay MacLeod Chapman and Lawrence Krauser, poet Robert Elstein and kitschy postcollege klezmer band One Ring Zero. The venue is cramped, but the price is right ($10) and literary bar KGB is directly below if things get hairy.

...By the way, I hope Mike Daisey's frankness in reporting on "e-company" culture brings out some brave ex-employees of the New York branch of Kozmo.com. The ones I know paint a crazy picture of the delivery service circa 1999 and 2000, with CEO Joe Park doing Squawk Box in the a.m., and delivery guys getting stoned out of their minds before hitting small trucks, and a tremendous amount of porn being shuttled around the city (untraceable pornos, billed merely as "Kozmo.com purchases," were the company's biggest sellers). Ben Affleck was rumored to have been the best customer. He lived right near the Kozmo offices (so delivery took two minutes), allegedly ordered regularly and always tipped $200. Rock 'n' roll, Ben!

...Speaking of which, it's happening. The lackluster Strokes album Is This It sits at #33 this week on the Billboard 200 chart, with a sales gain of 60 percent. That means the Strokes are a Top 40 band and are probably headed to #1. Once they get there and are anointed the next Nirvana, I'm going to have to start believing all those older people who told me that Nirvana was a derivative, well-marketed version of the more vital underground music of the time. What a bummer.

Anyway, a more vital underground version of the Strokes comes to Don Hill's this Saturday. They're called the Sights; they're around 20 years old, from Detroit; they play 60s-influenced pop tunes with attitude and glasses. The band has a classic whiny shrimpy singer in Eddie Baranek, wild three-part harmonies and a set of songs that will appeal to anyone who likes the new Weezer record or Is This It or the Beach Boys or, you know, music.

Once again, that's the Sights this Saturday at Don Hill's (511 Greenwich St. at Spring St., 334-1390). The club owners will probably charge $10 plus, however many weak drinks they can con you into buying.

...In more rock news, two should-be legends play CBGB this Friday and you'd better pay respect, because one came in from Washington, DC, and the other from a scarier place: Williamsburg. The men in question are, respectively, Scott "Wino" Weinrich of Spirit Caravan and Reid Paley of the Reid Paley Trio.

Reid Paley is a bitter, bitter man who plays minimal blues rock with all-vintage gear. His voice would be right at home on that O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack; his CBGB set celebrates the German release of his fantastic 2000 album Revival. Be careful, he refers to his audience as "meatballs," and spits.

Wino, meanwhile, is just that: a guitar-toting traveler who's been living hard and kicking around in bands since the late 70s. What makes him special is that he founded the Obsessed and fronted Saint Vitus, two bands that helped define the stoner-rock sound of the 90s. (Check out StonerRock.com: 11,176 members and counting.) Recently, Wino played on Clutch's Pure Rock Fury record and ushered in his band Spirit Caravan's latest, Elusive Truth. He plays fiery psychedelic guitar leads night in and night out; if you haven't heard one in a while and you have yet to discover the New Mexikans, go see him.

The Reid Paley Trio goes on at 10 p.m. Spirit Caravan takes the stage at 12. The cover is $12 on Friday and the club we are talking about is, of course, CBGB (315 Bowery at Bleecker St., 982-4052).

..."Nuns are very easy to cyborg-ize, but cyborgs are hard to nun-ify," says choreographer Sally Silvers of her new work Strike Me Lightning, which has a four-day premiere run this week. The dance explores similarities and differences between two archetypes that we rarely compare: um, nuns and cyborgs.

"Both are sort of cut off from society and controlled by someone else. Both are very divorced from themselves," she explains. "Both are very confined, although you'll notice that the cyborgs take up more room onstage than the nuns, who move very carefully in a defined space."

Don't jump to the conclusion that the nuns and cyborgs are up at the same time, like in a Jets/Sharks fight sequence. Silvers begins the show with nuns and gradually brings the cyborgs into it, usually keeping the races separate. The sections of Strike Me Lightning have titles such as "Competitive Kneeling," "Kneeling Countdown," "Robo-Sapien" and "Cyborg Aerobics." There are six dancers ("one token male"); each plays both a nun and a cyborg, depending on the sequence.

This really opens up a lot of worlds for dance. "Apes and water-skiers!" I suggested to Silvers. "Water-skiers are tough," she responded. "Apes and geishas!" "Now that's interesting, because they're both knock-kneed," she said. See, I could do this. I just need to learn how to dance.

Strike Me Lightning premieres Thursday and runs through this Sunday at P.S. 122 (150 1st Ave. at 9th St., 477-5288). Performance time is 8:30 every night; tickets are $17.

...Mini-Blurbs: a Life in the Week of Ned: Went to friendly, yummy organic eatery Josie's Restaurant (300 Amsterdam Ave. at 74th St., 769-1212) on a Saturday night and made the mistake of being adventurous with the drink menu. I ordered something called a "cajun martini" and, well, I never had any idea that human beings could make a drink taste so much like rainwater taken from the inside of an old tire. It was incredible. You have to try it. New York's new endurance cocktail.