Author: brian

in case you were wondering…

ira glass was excellent and inspiring.
USC kicked ass last weekend.
beer pong was really fun and my girlfriend is amazing at it.
i haven’t stopped reading, in fact, i’ve read a lot lately, so…
i have a lot of summer books i’m going to write short reviews of soon.
and, i’m putting asterisks on my books to read list for a bunch i just bought this weekend and can’t wait to start, in case you’re shopping way too early for christmas.
our tokyo trip is less than seven weeks away and we’re looking for suggestions if you have any.
i’m getting at least one new pair of shoes soon, because mine are shot.
the lives of others was really good. so is tell me you love me.
i still haven’t finished bioshock, but i should have, because it’s one of the best video games ever.
work is still really busy and lately, challenging, hence the underwhelming blog presence.

cheers!

finally saw hot fuzz last night — or rather, finally saw it for real — and that was good stuff. maybe a little uneven in terms of lengthy buildup and huge payoff and not quite as loveable as shaun of the dead, but still really enjoyable. i wonder what their next movie project might be… a monster movie? a western? a sci-fi? there has to be another classic genre that could use a love letter with a touch of comedic parody.

there should be more to write about but i’m working a lot. can’t wait for this weekend though, where not only will there be an honest-to-goodness USC football game against a ranked team, but we’re also going to see one of my heroes, ira glass, speak on campus. at first i thought, ‘oh, shit, we’re going to some artsy intellectual talk and we’re going to be surrounded by drunk meatheads’. but then i realized the team is in nebraska this week, not to mention the game will still be going on when the show starts. scratch that mental picture of douchey frat guys throwing half-full red cups at poor, bespectacled public radio guy, thank goodness.

caught bill maher from a week or two ago on the tivo last night. halfway through this clip is a conversation about how naive the american people are for buying all the crap that politicians shovel for them, and john mellencamp defends their right to be naive, saying, ‘they’re honest, and they believe that people are generally honest with them’.

this is SO horribly wrong-headed i wish they had discussed it more — i think bill maher was so flabbergasted he didn’t even know what to say other than ‘that’s crazy’. but defending general ignorance as an ideal of purity in good old fashioned folks is ridiculous. i can totally give him the idea that no one wants to live in a world where no one trusts anything that anyone tells them, but accepting everything at face value is totally ridiculous. there’s a difference between trusting everyone outright, which will just get you picked up by a guy in a van who says he wants to give you candy, and having the basic mechanism of deciding who deserves your trust before believing what they want you to believe in their political speeches. as bill retorts, ‘there’s something to telling people, “be more cynical. it’s better than going through life swindled.”‘

days, you are so full lately. the trip to san fran was excellent as usual. flying up for the first time instead of road tripping it worked out nicely. taking the bart from the planes to our designated meet-up spot couldn’t have been smoother, and the flights were painless (except for the attendant on the way up who refused to get me two drinks when i asked for them. ‘we’ll see if we have time’ is no excuse, lady! don’t deny me my in-flight relaxation!). although i can’t say part of me didn’t miss the nice drive up the 5 rockin’ the ipod and patiently approaching the kettleman city in-n-out burger…

right from our arrival we set right about our task: drinking beer for most of our waking hours. over the course of a couple days we stopped by several cool little spots for more than several drinks. zeitgeist in particular was a lot of fun, sort of a hipster/biker version of a beer hall with a nice backyard vibe, all those picnic tables lined up and full of people draining pitchers of all those tasty local microbrews… oh, what a time. we managed to escape the super-heat of LA and enjoy the cool san francisco afternoons with a pre-usc-football bbq as well. even snuck in some beer pong. overall, it was outstanding.

plus i finally got to make that amoeba trip i’ve been planning to make for weeks. okkervil river is good as expected, i’m still enjoying the beirut and thinking i should have bought the full album and not just the new ep, and the new pornographers disc is different but great in its own ways too. the surprise though was the ratatat i picked up on a bit of a whim after seeing them open for daft punk a few weeks back. i don’t think i’ve listened this much to an instrumental band in, well, maybe ever. check out this pay day song and tell me it doesn’t get you rocking and strutting down the street. also perfect for bumping in the car, it’s called lex and it’s killer.

oh yeah; labor day it was hot and we were lazy and after trying to have a barbeque for like an hour we instead went and hung out in our apartment pool for a few hours, then came home and were lazy some more. that’s what national holidays are for though so i don’t feel bad in the least.

remiss, perhaps, but so productive outside of my bloggy boundaries! for example, i finally snapped some pics of our new pad for any family and friends too far away to come to our housewarming, in case you’re interested.

also, i’ve done a fair bit of cool stuff at work in the last week. i’ve been reading a fair amount. we went out for drinks on tuesday and couldn’t remember to save our lives the chorus to that cheesy bryan adams song from that robin hood movie — turns out it was, ‘everything i do (i do it for you)’, when all we could remember was the meat loaf song. duh, you say, how can you forget those years of couples skating? yes, i was rightly ashamed, but luckily a phone call to stacy and we had our answer in three seconds. she didn’t even blink. i’d say that’s what friends are for.

and last night i TOTALLY invented the lazarus vector and saved all the trees in arcadia, for any nerds keeping tabs on progress through rapture. yes, i am a bit obsessed at the moment, but was kindly reminded last night by pat how soon halo 3 is coming, which could change EVERYTHING.

been busy all this week, doing a mostly blogging-related project, as it turns out. so my own has sat idly by. what’s up?

this new kanye/daft punk video is a neat piece of film for a mostly just okay song. kanye’s one of the coolest mofo’s on the planet (those glasses! holy shit), daft punk are digital gods, so this collaboration should have blown my mind. i think the problem is that the song itself lacks any real moment of bigness or release. it’s just all sheen and no passion, totally missing the part that makes you want to get up and dance like the amazing trumpets on ‘testify’ from the last album, still his best single, i think.

saw superbad last weekend too (even snuck in some *ahem* beverages to help us enjoy the show, which turned out to be 100% perfect for the movie’s story) and meant to review it at length. thinking on it more though, there’s not a lot that needs to be said: it’s a hilarious and honest high school movie. if you think you’ll like it based on the other apatow crew’s movies or any of the trailers, you’re right, you will have a very good time laughing with these dudes. think i still liked knocked up slightly better though, perhaps because i’m a grown up now?

also picked up and started diving in to bioshock (holy shit!), and finished up a book i’ve been reading (excellent read), but i can get into those things more later.

all through high school and college, i carried a little 3×4 inch notebook in my pocket where i kept important lists of things, addresses, weird ideas i had to write down, girls phone numbers (in theory), and what have you. i think over a decade i probably drove two or three of these into the ground, then would meticulously copy all important contents into a new version when the duct tape and rubber bands just weren’t enough to hold it together anymore.

anyway, since maturing into less-baggy, large-pocketed clothing, and giving away that pocket space to a pack of cigarettes, i’ve since stopped carrying this notebook, and it resides more comfortably now in my backpack. the only problem being that it’s not always with me any more, and therefore less reliable for reference.

one of the things i always used it for was to keep a running list of books i wanted to read, so that i would never show up the book store with no ideas, or come across something that looked really interesting for later and then forget completely.

well, since this is the digital age — and also because my brother recently pointed out this information might be more useful if made public when gift-giving occasions arise — i finally transcribed the list in web form to put up here. it’s kind of scary, because now that it’s not tiny scrawls in a notebook, it looks a lot more formidable, to the tune of 54 books. 92 if you count comics. and of course, those are just the ones i took the time to write down, i’m sure i could easily double that with a trip to any of your garden variety ‘best books ever written’ type lists.

the problem is that for the past few years i’ve been averaging somewhere around 20 per year. so even if i stop visiting websites about books, watching shows where interesting authors might appear, or discussing anything writing-related with any of my smart reader friends, it would still take me several years to ‘catch up’. shit, my netflix list is hovering around 200, and even if i average one per week that’s four years. and then there are those video games that pop up to steal my life away now and then… and the fall TV season…

think my employers would mind if i quit coming in to work for about a year or so?

i haven’t posted a new track in ages because of a new music drought i’m going through, but i think an amoeba trip is pending now that the new okkervil river album is out. instead of waiting to get that and posting another song off there, since i already put up one of those a month ago, i’ll share the song that’ll probably inspire a companion purchase: the wonderful beirut track, elephant gun. it has a shared fanciful quality with certain decemberists songs via the trumpet, and also the soundtrack to amelie with its old-european flavor. could do without the drawn out ending, but if you catch the video like i did the other day on subterranean, you get to forgo that little epilogue and also see some great moustaches and a bunch of gypsy-looking people do crazy dances. it’s good stuff, trust me.

stardust – 4 stars

like previously mentioned here, there was no way i could have missed the first major film adaptation of a book by one of my favorite writers — even if it’s one of his strories i haven’t got around to reading yet (embarrassing!). so yes, i went in with pretty high expectations. but i’m happy to report that those expectations, although not entirely met, weren’t much let down either, which made me really happy.

skipping over the princess bride-meets-harry potter type stuff that could populate a full review on it’s own, yes, it’s a fairy tale story with magic and lots of special effects. in fact, my only complaint would be that some of the effects sequences went on much longer than they needed to, when it was the story and characters that were so much fun i wish they had more time to play in.

the hero is an extremely likeable, somewhat goofy young guy trying to figure himself out, and the falling star girl he meets played by claire danes is clever and adorable. watching their adventures, and of course their eventual romantic moments, could have been totallly cheesy if it were another romantic comedy with kate hudson, but instead was totally charming and sweet.

what pushed it over the edge was the well-balanced mix of dry british sophisticated humor with some childish wonder that reminded you to not take your fairy-tale glasses off, start trying to think about things too rationally and ruin it all. add on the excellent supporting cast, like ricky gervais in his typical genious style of banter, robert de niro in a hilariously a-typical role i won’t dare spoil for you, and a band of ghostly dead princes always hovering around enjoying the show themselves make for a great storybook experience that was just fun to relax and enjoy. if you’re not too grown-up to let yourself have a good time with a movie like this, i highly suggest you go out and see it.

and take a pretty girl too if you can, the way the star-girl ‘lights up’ when she’s happy is so cute you’re totally going to want to kiss someone afterward.

back from san diego, which was, as expected, several days of interesting followed by several nights of far too many drinks and not enough hours sleeping. i’ll say this though, it was far wilder and later and crazier last year in miami. san diego was nice but it had that very orange county/disneyland feel to it for a city. it’s like a city that’s still a suburb somehow.

now that i’m back i have to go straight to another night out for a departing coworker. i need a beerless night, please help!

i don’t really count last night because there was still the exhaustion of driving back from SD, and i spent an hour putting together our freshly arrived cd shelves from smart furniture. so modular, it’s genious! the only problem being that i have more cds than i thought, and it’s awfully close to full already. luckily that can be easily solved by thinning out the crappy old stuff in the collection or an easy shelf expansion pack! you can even design your own!