real quick stuff as i prowl the web a little on this friday afternoon.

we saw soulwax live last night and their ‘nite versions’ stuff was pretty great fun live, but i think watching them play it and feeling the bass literally rumble your guts is part of the enjoyment. i’m fairly sure on disc the album would bore me pretty quickly. and since we’re not jobless artsy club kids, we did not have the power in us to stay until 2am on a thursday night to see their 2manyDJs set, which was really a let down since that’s the main reason i went. lucky for me i got in free through a hookup.

catbirdseat’s ‘best of 2006’ music blogger cheat sheet is fucking brilliant and if they had included the mountain goats they might have had my prelim list 8/10. i’ll probably put a few more less artsy, more poppy albums on there, but then, that’s why i’m not a music blogger and just an all-around cool dude.

most importantly/surprisingly/interestingly, is that via the new gawker music site idolator, i hopped over here for the new my chemical romance song, and SHOCKING: i totally love it. not kidding an ounce. the resonator guy compares it to queen which i think is dead on and great, but no joke, i’ve listened to it about 10 times in the last couple hours. most triumphant!

The Protector (Tom Yum Goong) – 4 stars

i’m gonna make this quick, because let’s face it, it’s a kung-fu movie and there’s not much to analyze here. covering off on the key bases though, this is a real stunt movie, not a wire movie, so it already rises above some of that goofy mystical reality shit even though that can be cool too. certain scenes were downright amazing, as expected: the warehouse scene, the stairway scene, the capoeira guy, the ring of bone-crunching all had us yelling out loud in the theatre. so it’s definitely a worthy flick.

my only complaints were that it took an awfully long time to get to the first action scene, and the story was even more ridiculous than the thin premises of most action movies. beating down that many guys on behalf of livestock seems a little silly, and everytime tony jaa rushes into a room and yells, ‘you stole my elephant!’ to his enemies, i couldn’t help but laugh.

better than ong bak? i’m not convinced, because i felt like that one hung together better overall, and the ‘big final battle versus huge guys’ in this one was a little more absurd than in the last one. still, this was surprisingly the #4 movie last week when it opened, and i suspect that’s because even with faults, it’s still a way fun ass-kicking flick.

fairly triumphant weekend news to report: after weeks of searching and hoping for a great, local place to get a tasty breakfast burrito — which for some reason jessica and i crave regularly and strongly those lazy weekend mornings — we finally put in some serious internet research and found a winner. actually, we were fortunate enough to stumble on this guy’s blog entry which framed a similar problem, and lead to success for both of us: benito’s taco shop. of course, his story put him in the west LA location, but we were lucky enough to remember there’s one right nearby on the corner of beverly & fairfax.

and oh was it delicious! the common problem we find is that you can’t get ALL the best stuff in one burrito. eggs and cheese and sausage but no potatoes. or veggies but no meat. but wait, benito’s to the rescue! everything we were looking for (chorizo for me, beans for her) in one place. hooray!

i was so excited i had to post a review on yelp immediately in the hopes of helping out fellow neighbors find the answer to their own breakfast quests. if you’ll notice, i’ve recently discovered and developed an internet crush on this site, as it combines the novelty of myspace with the usefulness you wish citysearch had. as such, i’m trying to log all my favorite LA places over time into their system, and even put a nifty map plug-in on this site as reference for all my adoring internet fans, should they wonder where i spend my time in this city of vast entertainments.

in case you were curious, the rest of the weekend was also rad: friday the guys all played dead rising (excellent) at ted’s place then went off to see the protector (fairly excellent, review tomorrow perhaps?). spent saturday evening at a pool party in the hills with the lady, the roommate, his lady, and others. another excellent night. sunday night was delicious food and wine and the unquestionably cool willie nelson at the hollywood bowl. openers averaged out to null, as neko case was great and ryan adams was booooooring, but i could have guessed that going in.

overall, a very productive and full weekend, meaning this one coming up needs to be earmarked for relaxing and watching the USC game. if you’re reading this, you’re invited, but bring beer.

the mountain goats – get lonely – 5 stars

everyone knows i’m nuts about this guy, so allow me to defend this album against the accusations even i, a big fan, might level at it.

after (what, 10?) albums worth of singing loud about frustration and heartache, i think he’s earned the right to put out a quiet one and have people pay the same attention to his storytelling lyrics. maybe it’s not as catchy from end to end, although i’d argue that ‘half dead’, ‘get lonely’, and ‘woke up new’ have choruses you’ll sing softly to yourself well after the song wraps. and maybe it’s less fun and cathartic. but the writing still has depth, and in most places the punch has been replaced with beauty. is it as fun to shout along to on a drive home from work? no. but if you want a goats record for a lonely night of sorrow, now you’ve got a whole album that’ll do the trick.

[sidenote: the track ‘if you see light‘ is the most un-mountain goats song on the album, or possibly ever, thanks to the use of horns and some cool uneven percussion along with an almost spoken-word feel, which oddly enough has made it one of my favorites off get lonely, as well as this week’s pay day song.]

cursive – happy hollow – 3 stars

i fluctuate so wildly between feelings toward this album, i almost don’t know what to tell you. one day i’ll throw it on and love how it’s so brash and different from their old stuff, another day i’ll give it a listen and be outright annoyed at some of the blaring horns over chugging, repetitive guitar chords. my two favorite tracks are ‘dorothy at forty’, which is a screaming rocker with a pulse almost reminiscent of darker ska-punk from the 90’s (i’m as surprised as you), and ‘bad sects’, which is one of the softest cursive songs ever made, with a cool melody and mournful lyrics.

so frankly, i’m stumped. it’s not a masterpiece like domestica where you can get behind almost every song. i can tell already it’ll age more along the lines of ugly organ — where after a while of listening end to end and liking it well enough, i’ll only still really get into the best two or three songs, and if any of the rest come up on the ipod they will get skipped more and more often. and i have to say, that’s a bit of a let down after such a long wait between albums (flaming lips syndrome!).

so there it is, in case you, like my parents who are also new Very Large Television owners, are wondering what the new rig looks like. i won’t say i love it, because it’s not a deep emotional feeling. i do have an unbridled techno-lust for it, however, as right now it’s the second most beautiful thing in my life (kisses jess, you can’t be replaced by electronics, don’t worry). if one were able to have an affair with a plasma screen, though, it would be tempting…

normally i wouldn’t post to brag about a purchase, and i don’t really think i’m doing that right now. it’s just that one of the things i always thought getting into the professional world was, ‘someday i’m gonna be doing well enough to own a Very Large Television’, and i’ve finally done it. and so far it’s as good as i hoped it would be, and i’m not boasting that i’ve got it as much as recording my pride in having come to a point where it was even possible. good job me, keep it up. (as in, you better keep it up or they’re going to repossess it, but let’s not be dour).

anyway, playing video games on this thing is epic. and watching netflix movies just got to be so much more of a treat. we also started watching deadwood recently and holy shit, that swearengen fella is a whole lot more intimidating on a bigass screen where every angry wrinkle in his face jumps out to tell you to back the fuck off. overall, i’m tickled.

you should come over and watch football on the new HD tivo if you can, as it should be grand. just to sample the quality, i caught a few minutes of monday night football the first week after we set this bad boy up, and it nearly made me gasp out loud. please, just don’t jump up in excitement and knock it over, or i think i’d have defensible grounds for manslaughter.

on paper (or this reasonable approximation i’m writing on now), you might say this weekend was your generic holiday weekend. a group of guys on a small road trip to san francisco to see our two friends who live up there. we arrived friday night, had some beers and played halo. we woke up saturday, got burritos for lunch and played ping pong until our college football came on. then we barbequed and went out for drinks that night. totally standard.

but with this group it’s always so much more fun than it sounds, because these are easily my very favorite people in the world. we’re laughing and talking shit the whole time, and usually also at least partially drunk. and then there are always the little details that make it more noteworthy, like ted throwing up over a third floor balcony, josh shattering a glass table during a vigorous ping pong game, dan proving a miraculous talent for talking to girls whenever in the bounds of SF for some reason, people passing out in embarrassing positions, or the dangerous air quality resulting from that many guys crashing in a confined space.

so that was good. and even better, i came back exhausted to a nice laid back evening at the neighborhood bar with jessica, and a small easygoing barbeque monday with a few games of beer pong all of which i was on the winning side, including a one-on-one showdown with my trusty teammate/girlfriend, which i managed to pull out at the last minute for a fortunate maintaining of my manhood. cap it off with some good old deadwood on the big new tv and you got yourself one hell of a weekend.

now if only all that party-related exhaustion hadn’t given me this stupid head cold. my eyeballs hurt.

this weekend we finally had our carpets cleaned after 3 years of highly attended parties, college football days, and general disregard for regular carpet maintenance. the results, while impressive, still came with a certain cost both financially (almost 300 dollars for not even three full rooms?!) and emotionally, as it would seem fortune deemed it appropriate to send us the least responsible carpet cleaner of all time. so mainly for my own memory, as i will want to tell this story in the future, i’m going to get down some of the details of my encounters with this highly professional individual:

• appointment was made at 2pm saturday. he called to say he’d be a half hour late; he was an hour late, arriving at 3. partly because he went to the wrong house the first time… our address is on SOUTH detroit, not NORTH. that’s what the ‘S’ means, chief.
• on the elevator ride up to our apartment, he laments the fact that he was up til dawn trying to ‘get with this chick’ and boy is he tired. it was a shame her roommate wouldn’t just go to bed already and leave them alone, so he just passed out. also, ‘girls are so stupid sometimes’. apparently he met her at a really exclusive club, ‘where you have to pay to get in’, and kevin federline and prince were there. i was suitably impressed, of course.
• did i mention he had an off-center lower lip stud? it was tiny and gino thought it might be a whitehead at first.
• after spraying pre-treating chemicals all over our floors, he went looking for an attachment to the big steam cleaner he’d brought up, and couldn’t find it. checked the van, not there. he insisted that somebody had ‘jacked it’ after he unloaded it, though i watched him unload and never saw any such attachment, so i assume he left it at his last job.
• he then spent another hour looking for the piece, calling his boss to see if someone could bring him the piece, using the key i loaned him to get into our lobby weightroom to recharge his phone, and finally coming back up around 4:30 with nothing to show for any of it.
• he told me he’d have to come back the next day to finish, so what time was good? i suggest between 11 and 2 so i could maybe go play volleyball. he suggests 3pm because ‘i work at this church sometimes. with kids.’ i consent. no volleyball, i guess.
• in doing a small part of the room just to demonstrate what he’ll be finishing tomorrow, his machine leaks dirty water all over our kitchen floor, which he mops up with a dirty towel before leaving for the day. ‘see you tomorrow bro’, he says.
• i call his boss afterwards to complain and he really has nothing to say, giving in easily to my request for a price cut and, i suspect, inwardly wondering why he ever hired this young man.
• i spend the next morning putting together my new entertainment center (more on that tomorrow), and he calls at 3pm sunday to say he’s running a little late and will be there in half an hour. he was an hour late again. i go down to the street to let him in to find him hitting on a girl who’d been out walking her tiny dog. i wait for him to finish his conversation and we head up.
• did i mention the night before he called me at almost 8pm, long after he’d left, asking if he left his keys at my place and could i look around for them? not being at home at the time, i can’t help him, but offer to call if i find anything. i don’t, but am more concerned that this is all an elaborate scam to rob us at a time he knows we’re not home. he hasn’t yet, as i suspect his capacity for planning a theft to be akin to his punctuality.
• when emptying his steam cleaner after the first bit of cleaning, he asks to dump the dirty water out over our balcony. i suggest the sink might be easier, but he ‘thinks it would be cooler’ to dump it off the fourth floor into the alley below. i consent. nearly black water fountains down into air, luckily no cars or pedestrians pass at this inopportune moment.
• after cleaning the place, and dumping off the balcony a second time, nearly 30 hours after the original appointment was supposed to begin for a supposedly two-hour job, our carpets are (mostly) cleaned. he has no idea what the few remaining spots might be or what to do about them. ‘maybe they’re burn marks?’
• he shakes our hands, is glad to have met us, and shuffles off with his machine and bag of supplies — leaving a 3-foot length of plastic tubing sitting on our kitchen counter, which he does not return for.

on npr this morning, i heard an ad for the worst gumshoe story ever:

“curtains” stars frasier’s david hyde pierce as a detective with an eye for details and an ear for music…”

yikes. is there an offshoot genre called ‘rainbow noir’ that i don’t know about?

i didn’t write yesterday because i was gone all day watching and playing video games for work then i went straight to jess’s place once i was home (my life is so hard). watched syriana from netflix and it was really well done. even though i was a little lost at parts i even liked it then for daring me to keep up with it. i like movies that respect me enough to challenge me a little. it’s sad when one of your favorite actors gets exploded though. no fair.

today i thought i was in a bad mood but it turned out i was just anxious about a big purchase i was thinking about making, but tonight i just went out and did it, and come saturday when it is delivered i will be a very happy camper. netflix and video games are about to get SOOOO much better.

and while i’m here i’d love to review the new mountain goats and cursive cd’s i ran out and picked up tuesday night as soon as i could, but i have to say they’re a bit more challenging than i thought, so i’m still digesting them. no spoilers or anything until i figure out what i really think.

in the ‘upcoming events’ section, and speaking of the ol’ goats, i can’t wait for saturday night’s bookeaters show… what a killer combination of musicians and authors, with andy richter and somehow jake gyllenhaal too, however he fits in. tickets still available if you want to come too!

i’m hoping they have screenprinted posters to commemorate. what a sexy charitable purchase that would be to hang on my wall — especially if it says ‘bookeaters’ in nice big letters to proudly display what a nerd i am.

did you know you could do this? custom labels on heinz ketchup bottles for like 6 bucks? that seems like the perfect prank gift waiting to happen, but i’m having ketchup writers block at the brilliance you might be able to fit onto three lines at 18 characters apiece. so far all i could come up with were two referential pieces, one surrealist (magritte), the other pop culture (simpsons). so glaringly unoriginal.

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ps: the label on the final product obviously wouldn’t be as crappy as the mockups they offer on the site, they claim. but i didn’t have time for photoshopping this morning.