Author: brian

not to get too sappy/lame/stalkery or anything, BUT…

this evening i just happened to be doing the usual ‘see what search terms bring people to my site sometimes’ game with the ol’ collapsing (which passed the FOUR YEAR mark recently, no less, can you believe it? happy belated, collapsing). during the fun, i noticed that at least four or more people had come here in the last few months after i wrote a post mentioning the cute girl with glasses from a starbucks commercial for bottled frappuccino.

at first i was just happy that others shared my pseudo-crush, and hoped that one of those desperate searchers might eventually find some record of her which i might later enjoy.

then i decided instead to just become that desperate searcher myself.

of course i checked at the time of the original post, to no avail. but since then they’ve apparently posted the ad on their site, which means you can watch it from them.
[or if you really love it, download it from me.]

and if you have no idea what i’m talking about or why i ever cared, here’s all you should need to know (click for full size):

come on, it’s like the american version of amelie in the cutest thrift store sweater ever wearing sexy librarian glasses! i’m pretty sure that makes her the perfect girl, almost. and i still openly invite that if she ever discovers these posts, i can easily be reached via email to the upper right of this page. let’s get hopped up on ice mocha ‘cino’s together and dance the night away, because you’re the cutest girl ever and i bet you have great taste in books too.

weekend: fantastic. especially saturday and parts of sunday. brian is a happy camper. although no camping was involved. but let’s move on shall we? happy birthday again to those who deserved it.

summer reading, part one

so, should you have noticed that i haven’t reviewed a book in months and began wondering if perhaps i’d gone illiterate or just blind (brail is so hard! — not meant to be a pun), rest assured i’d just grown lazy and didn’t want to formulate lots of thoughts when i could be sharing tales of drinking and falling down, which i know is the real crowd pleaser. so to review my summer reading so far in sixty seconds or less, in reverse order of my having read them: i’ll recap what i’ve read so far with a sentence each of mine and a sentence each from the book. and the requisite stars, of course.

the fountainhead – ayn rand – 4 stars
read it because it’s a classic, and liked it despite it’s being a little obvious/preachy in its rand-ness, and i’m fine with that.

we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.

emporium – adam johnson – 3 stars
darkly funny, occasionally brilliant, and stylishly written, but a little hit-and-miss like most short story collections tend to be.

i float out into the parking lot and watch her red taillights disappear into the night, and know that she’s right, she’s free, that nobody gets shot in the heart twice.

sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs – chuck klosterman – 5 stars
i admitted to having a writer crush on this guy a while back, and this hilariously cemented him as a favorite (and by the way, i DEFINITELY read this before seth cohen was seen doing the same on an episode of the O.C.…that guy steals ALL my style).

it does not matter that colplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band i’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of travis (who sound like a mediocre copy of radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a fucking cloudy afternoon. none of that matters.

this is only fun for me – dominic bruno – 4 stars
it’s so pretentious to rate or review the masters thesis novel of one of my best friends so why try, when i should just be excited i have a friend who wrote a book that didn’t suck even a little bit?

i realize how much closer it is to being true because i’m that much closer to dying.

i won’t bother actually reviewing an album that’s two years old, but i did want to sing a little praise for casiotone for the painfully alone real quick. i picked up his album twinkle echo a few weeks ago and was pretty into the way it was so unabashedly lo-fi and outwardly heartbreaking. i also got into this bad habit of coming home from a party or a bar and sitting on my balcony, alone at 3am, smoking a cigarette with this cd playing out through the door. not so much because i needed a smoke as much as because it seemed like the most appropriate way to enjoy this album (i maintain that i am in no way addicted to either nicotine or hopeless romanticism — they’re both just nice to enjoy sometimes).

anyway, if you haven’t heard him, or haven’t heard enough of him yet, you should check out the overdue pay day song, roberta c — one of the album’s best tracks. for more i’d say the album is a solid pickup too, or at least head over to insound for a few more tracks. ‘jeane, if you’re ever in portland’, also off this album, is another solid winner. sweet and sad and great for a warm summer night of solitude.

school district to sell building naming rights?

okay, i’m sure plenty of criticism could be pointed at me purely for the fact that i work in advertising, because we’re encouraging materialism and eroding real values and yadda yadda. i disagree with that, obviously — i think there is a right and a wrong way to sell something to people who might find what you’re selling useful. the right way is to try to demonstrate a real value to the group of people who will find that real value adds to their life in some way. no lying and no pestering, just honest (hopefully entertaining/interesting) communication.

the absolute wrong way is to attempt a subtle brainwashing via a channel which impressionalbe children have no choice but to participate in. waking up every morning to go to Kellogg’s Elementary, eat lunch in the Oscar Meyer Cafeteria and have soccer practice on the Adidas Field? that’s scary and sad and wrong if goverments can’t figure out how to scrape enough money together to pay for school facilities and have to auction off their names like that. luckily it sounds like most companies agree with me on that and find it creepy, but that might just mean the shadier capitalists are the ones who jump at the chance. can’t wait to graduate from Philip Morris High!

in a testament to going all out on a holiday weekend, and of course my love for america, the past four days were a mostly beer-soaked affair with the added bonus of having left physical marks on my body. let them be a reminder that perhaps climbing on and/or jumping off of things that are twice your height might not be the best idea after hours of beer, beer pong, delicious beer-boiled bratwurst, and the resulting beer wooziness from a barbeque done right. today, it hurts to sit down because of the large bruise on my now red-white-and-blue upper thigh.

also, next time we want to set off explosives, our own apartment complex roof may not be the best place to do it. at least if we’d rather not be visited twice by the cops and have a police chopper do a few loops overhead. must remember that some neighbors just don’t love america as passionately as we do.

it was kind of nuts coming home from seeing war of the worlds last night and looking out my window to see what is normally a clear view of the downtown LA skyline replaced with a dark cloudy fog. that’ll make you do a double take alright.

the movie itself i can’t go on at length about, because although in terms of craftsmanship regarding directing, acting, effects, and so on it was great, i still found myself largely indiferent toward it as a whole. afterward i decided as we discussed some of spielbergs decisions (specifically regarding the end of this one), that his overall motive for making movies has been to illustrate how the power of love always wins. disagree if you like, i stick by this one.

more exciting to me, and further illustrating how cool i am (disagree if you like), i snagged the second volume of batman cartoons on dvd, which has me all aflutter. more so because joe scored it for me at a sweet insider warner brothers studio discount before his most recent film job ended. i am totally watching hours of caped crusader over this long weekend when i’m not drinking beer and/or enjoying the sun.

a weekend that promised to be good ended up being full of surprise bonuses that made each good day great. how can you beat that?

friday i made it out to the fearless freaks screening, which was set up in the courtyard in front of the laemmle sunset 5. a bunch of folding chairs with target-sponsored souveneir seat cushions and free ice cream. sadly i couldn’t find anyone to go with me, so i had to skip the ice cream to save my seat. however, who among us can say they won a free copy of the movie before they even screened it for knowing the excellent piece of flaming lips trivia, “which popular 90’s show did the flaming lips appear on, and what venue did they play?” well, that would be me, whose hand bolted up (after the words “90’s show…”, i’m so good) and answering the correct “90210, at the peach pit”. i am such a big winner. incidentally, check out the film if you like the band at all, they’re an interesting group of weirdos and it’s worth it just to hear wayne coyne talk about pretty much anything, really. coolest guy from oklahoma ever.

saturday i knew the mountain goats show would be good, and boy was it. then holy crap the crowd was so full of love they clapped and clapped through the turning on of the house lights and the rising of the house music for a supremely rare second encore at the troubadour, defeating the man with our darnielle affections and urging a huge performance of ‘no children’ — halfway through which his guitar went out somehow and transformed it into a massive sing-a-long that was easily one of my top five LA concert moments to date. and all that sandwiched between a beautiful afternoon of beach volleyball and a cool ass post-concert trip to jen’s party down the road. now that’s a full day.

sunday’s arcade fire show at the hollywood bowl was strange because i don’t normally see bands i like from more than a hundred yards away and several stories up on a hillside, but then again i also don’t usually have a wine-drenched picnic beforehand either, so all in all it was lovely. more like relaxing with some good tunes than a real concert as i like them, but still great. plus through either fate, luck, or a certain someone’s subtle planning, i ended up sitting next to exactly who i hoped i would in our group of 12, which was a nice bonus. AND david byrne wrapped up his set with an insane marching-band-backed cover of beyonce’s ‘crazy in love’, so tell me that wasn’t just about the perfect night either.

plus cubs take the sox two out of three? please, how much more good news can you fit into three days?

on the way to work today, sitting in my car at one of the stoplights, i swear to god the older asian woman in a car right in front of me was cutting her own hair. i mean, self-styled hair is sketchy on its own; but while driving a vehicle? this lady i as d.i.y. as they come. she doesn’t give a shit about what anybody says.

also, i switched desks today. i moved two spots over and now i face west instead of east. the aisle is on my right instead of left. and i arranged my stuff to be basically the mirror image of what it was before. this could either result in an exciting change in my right/left brain dynamics, or it could cause some sort of fun seizure/breakdown kind of thing in the next week as i go haywire. either way, should be fun, right?

right now i just feel weird though.

however, it is friday, and the flaming lips documentary fearless freaks is playing for free tonight for the LA film fest, and i think our team agreed to all cut out early today in a unified gesture of summerness, and the ever-amazing mountain goats are playing tomorrow, followed by the arcade fire sunday, so hell, man, what am i doing hanging out on blogger?

great weekend. party over here, party over there, fathers’ day barbeque with the peerless spencer and family. kinda rough staying up til almost 5am two nights in a row though… how do i do it? yet here i am fresh as a daisy monday morning.

and it isn’t like almost everyone i know hasn’t already seen it, but if you’ll just allow me to rave for a minute, please:

batman begins – 5 stars

continuing the too-good-to-be-true streak of 2005 blockbusters that could have been catastrophic letdowns but were actually better than i thought they could be, batman begins managed to succeed specifically in all the areas that i doubted it would. being a bat-nut, i knew i’d be forgiving either way and still enjoy it, but it surpassed my expectations and even, i think, almost all the other comic book movies i’ve seen.

see, i was afraid that a film so heavy on the backstory was going to end up dull. but bale’s acting and the attention to believability and character development pulled me right in; as a matter of fact one of my only complaints was that the first 15 minutes or so felt rushed, if anything, and i could have watched them flesh it out more if they had the time (i can’t really fault them, however, for wanting to get to the batty goodness sooner than later).

my other big concern was the scarecrow as a villain, who in cartoon incarnations was great because of his otherworldiness and use of hallucinations — could they really pull that off live actions without going into cheesy CGI? and i have to say this ended up being one of my favorite parts of this movie, they pulled it off so surprisingly well. the first time he uses his fear gas, i jumped in my seat, and every time after i was appropriately scared and simultaneously delighted at how little they were holding back on showing some real terror. spider-man 2 this ain’t, folks. the first time dr. crane (played SO well by cillian murphy) doses the crime boss (played equally well by tom wilkinson — seriously, what a cast!), did they ever let loose on the screaming. and it was perfect. as was every time after that, which i’ll spare for the few who haven’t seen for themselves.

otherwise, the batmobile was cooler than i thought it’d be; way cooler than driving into a fake dead end street, huh? and alfred was great, lucius was great, and the action was completely dead-on to the combination intimidation and quick dispatch method of how batman works. okay, the evil scheme was a little over the top and katie holmes might have been a tad unnecessary, but this was a comic book movie after all so that’s all easily brushed aside, because it didn’t distract from what was good.

overall, probably the most satisfying adventure movie i’ve seen in a long time, and i’m still debating whether this is my new favorite superhero movie or not. the spider-man and X-men sequels were both pretty strong, but i don’t know, this is the dark knight we’re talking about…

it’s friday, it’s been a good week, and i’ve got some fun lined up for the weekend (laundry! drinking! — no, not together). it may not be as full of dance parties and tree climbing as last weekend (see racoon-esque photo below), but it will be good. someone come with me to markie d’s, i’m dying for a cheesesteak!

also, enjoy a nice pay day song from death from above 1979, who i’ve been cranking in my car all week.