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so i found a youtube clip of kanye’s second show at the nokia, performing ‘stronger’, which was near the end of the set. yes, the intro involves a journey sample and kanye pretending to work his space-computer, leading into an elevated light-up platform. yes, it was pretty sweet.

no jessica again. i think this will mean plenty of online poker even though i seem to be on a cold streak. probably finishing the frey book tonight. and i’m thinking a quick trippy video game dose for the weekend going into next week’s inevitable grand theft auto black hole. good stuff.

if you’re not busy friday, i’ll be at justin’s serenading the dead show at genghis coen. some rock band and beers with the guys before and possibly after…

i went to my first seder dinner on sunday night, and had a wonderful time. it wasn’t the most strict or serious by any means — the haggadah was in a dr. seussish style and we kept making jokes throughout — and yet we still got to learn some about the tradition and eat some kosher food. well done, friends.

now a music post.

i went and picked up the albums i’d written about a few posts ago, and they seem to be pretty solid. i also grabbed the new raconteurs album on an impulse, and i think that turned out to be the best of the bunch. i really dig the first single ‘salute your solution’, and the general quality of the whole album. it feels so good to have a solid straightforward rock record to listen to. it’s not wildly different than a white stripes album, maybe just a little fuller sounding. and if it registers with people, my guess for the second single would either be one of the middle tracks that’s a little softer and balladesque, or even better, the title track, consoler of the lonely. that’s a great little track one kickoff song full of spit and fire that made me instantly like the album as soon as i popped it in. good pay day song.

then last night, we went to the nokia theatre downtown to catch kanye’s glow in the dark tour. sadly, this did not mean a replication of his utterly cool grammy performance (did i just use those words together?). instead, we got a crazily produced stage show with the premise of kanye crashing a spaceship on a strange planet and occasionally discussing with his female-voiced ship’s computer how they could escape. there were many starfield backdrops, bursts of steam, smoke, and flame, and an elevating platform. it was wild.

now prior to the show, several friends had been hating on kanye for his huge ego, and seeing this show puts an interesting spin on that. on one hand, it was utterly a showcase of him and him only. the ending involved the computer telling him that ‘he’s the brightest star in the universe’ and only he had the power to get them home. not exactly humble. but at the same time i have to give the guy a ton of credit. he was front and center for over an hour all by himself, singing and rhyming his heart out, sweating bullets, running and dancing all over the stage, never slowing down or letting up. it was a great, great show. possibly the best hip hop performance i will see for a long, long time. so ego or not, he’s certainly not resting on any laurels, and i can’t hold it against him that he thinks he’s amazing, because he basically was. can you really hate him for that?

i’m sorry, but not saying anything about this is simply not possible.

this weekend, the movie expelled: no intelligence allowed comes to theatres around the country. i’ve been subjected to ads for it on some of my favorite programs (jon stewart, colbert), and even as a sponsor of a political podcast on national public radio.

every time i see this i want to wretch. thankfully, it would seem no one with half a brain actually likes this movie, and that’s a rare point to our nation’s credit. but what makes me angry is that this even exists.

yes, i know free speech and free thought are our rights as americans, and i would never argue otherwise. but if i were to make a movie about how AIDS is a disease visited upon humans as punishment for open homosexuality in america, it would amount to about as valid an argument as the one that says intelligent design should be part of school curriculum. it’s rampantly false, anti-intellectual and stands for everything that’s wrong about the religious right.

i know religious people; all of the ones i know personally are not stupid. how hard is it for faith to live peacefully alongside the theory of evolution, that someone would insist their children be taught ‘the other side of the argument’ in a SCIENCE class? a place where the entire point is there is no other side, because it’s not an argument.

here’s your lesson plan:
–evolution is a fact based on hundreds of years of scientific testing.
–it works over vast periods of time when random mutations beget superior traits, and natural selection occurs.
–(optional for kansas, wyoming et al) allow those with strong religious aversions to anything being a matter of chance and not god’s will to substitute the words “divinely guided” for “random”. teach the rest as is, and voila! evolution IS god’s handywork, and everybody wins!

if you haven’t yet checked it out, might i make a friendly recommendation toward the new lewis black show, root of all evil? it may seem like a terrible premise for a show, but really it’s just a loose framework around which stand up comedians get to unleash bitter tirades on deserving targets. patton oswalt’s dick cheney rants were a highlight for me this week. check it out if you like stand up, laughing, that sort of thing.

i’m trying to zip through james frey’s book as quickly as i can to get on to some better fare, and started out kind of hating it. but as the guy becomes less of a self-hating junkie, i am also coming to hate him less. maybe that’s kind of the point? so i guess there’s hope yet that in the second half of the book i’ll decide it was worthwhile after all, just like i’m assuming he will decide about him life. how fitting.

jessica has just left on another trip, although this one’s only a few days. a fine time to finish half life, watch a kung-fu movie, and perhaps get up to some sort of manly shenanigans (wait, that doesn’t sound right…) this weekend? i need drinking company and/or someone to lose to at poker some more; please apply within.

speaking of books, i just got a box full in the mail today. exciting!

it’s funny how empty my room feels when the shelf usually reserved for the books in line to be read is cleared. starting that last book almost always means i need to go book shopping asap. getting a nice backlog going again is key to motivate me to finish my current selection. on with you, mr. frey, we’ve got several morning news tournament of books winners hot on your heels!

one of my favorite things about netflix, other than the obvious boon the service itself has been to me for going on six years, is the more fledgling community ‘notebook’ feature (formerly ‘my two cents’). being able to fire off two-sentence opinions on what i’ve seen is a great way not to forget to share my thoughts on something; a good conversation starter or substitute for the friends i don’t see as often. this way they still get to know what i would have told them if we’d had a conversation about it that week. plus, it’s a nice exercise in condensing and maximizing ideas into short form.

of course the other great part is reading them from my friends, but unfortunately most of them are not as diligent about it as i am. the one big exception being spencer, who i think, like me, sees it as a sport. and as someone whose opinion i respect, writing notes to and reading notes from someone like him has given a whole new layer of value to my netflix visits.

so of course i was more than willing to sign up when he found a similar system for books, and now i have a fun shelfari widget down there on the right. it’s set up to show two books; the last one i’ve finished, and the one i’m currently reading. the beauty part is, you can mouse over the bottom one and see my review in a popup screen. i’m going to try to apply the same system i do to the netflix ones — two sentences max to capture the essence of my thoughts. short and sweet. not to say i won’t still write the occasional longer, fleshed out post on here about a book i feel strongly about, but this is a nice, simple way to get thoughts down and share them easily.

in that spirit, if you’re reading this and are into either books or movies and haven’t yet, may i offer a warm invitation to be my netflix or shelfari friend and get in on the micro-discourse?

join shelfari.

be my netflix friend.

good: jessica’s coming back tomorrow night.
bad: i’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon for a work trip.

good: it’s up north, and i get to see old roomy mike!
bad: i’m traveling solo into client land with no coworker buddies to get my back. scary!

good: there’s another mountain goats show coming up soon. have to remember to get tickets.
bad: it’s in a museum? (…or is that a good? do they play underneath a dinosaur skeleton? that would be a super-good.)

after three quarters of a year of living with my lovely lady, i now find myself with almost a week home alone while she’s off on a work trip. saturday was fine, because i spent the whole day drinking beers, watching UCLA screw up their final four game, playing (and losing) poker, rocking some rock band, and so on. that was a good time not terribly unlike any other saturday.

but i wake up sunday — much later than normal, with no one to stir me — and am somehow totally disoriented by my solitude. normally a day of lounging around the house together, it becomes a weirdly quiet period of isolation. i find myself constantly asking, sometimes even aloud to no one but myself, ‘so, what now?’

not to say i was paralyzed by loneliness. i normally take these opportunities to plunge headlong into my less social pursuits; i watched maybe 5 episodes of battlestar galactica over the course of the day. i played in a 90-person poker tournament online that ended up taking, to my surprise, four hours; but which, also to my surprise, i took first place in. i went on a grocery run that was like a flashback to my first week out of college: root beer, frozen pizzas, sandwich materials. and i sat alone in my bedroom and read a book.

what might have been ‘a pretty good sunday’ only a few years ago, felt somehow eerie or empty in the context of my grown-up, co-habitating self. aware of my almost instant change in disposition after only 24 hours solo, i had to wonder — is this a sad sign of dependence, or a romantic pang of lovesickness? or can it be a little of both, and be a part of normal healthy coupledom?

so yes, i miss my jessica a bit and have a week of nerdiness ahead. of course, one thing that will definitely not happen is the oft-dramatized lonely/crazy housewife syndrome, where one’s days are joylessly occupied with the endless battle for a spotless abode. sorry jessica, it is weird without you and all, but not so weird i’d resort to any sort of scrubbing.

recently watched the documentary no end in sight, about the mismanagement of the iraq occupation by those at the highest levels — despite the plentiful advice from those better informed on how things could have been done right. if you’re interested, as i am, in better understanding the specifics on how incompetent and arrogant the bush administration has been, this was a great way to get a clearer picture of the details. before the film, i had a very good sense that they were cocky and poorly prepared for the eventualities of this war. but now i have a much better grasp of the issues involved, the chances they had to help resolve those issues, and their total squandering of any potential solutions that were offered to them. it’s really an uplifting tale.

on a similar topic, this week’s this american life podcast is really good too. again, about the arrogance and all-around jerkiness of the administration. seeing/hearing the two on back-to-back days makes a man awfully glad it’s only a matter of months until we get someone started on digging us out of the hole we’ve let ol’ dubya get us in to.

well after my intensive (and expensive) training at the hands of the online poker community, i still did terribly at our poker night on friday. i blame the jump from playing stone sober at fast-moving automated tables to the dual handicaps of several beers and much slower hands. the lack of inhibition and patience cost me twice over. blast! another good lesson learned, i hope.

our imac is in the repair shop this week, thanks to a disc drive which refuses to reject discs. the choice was either listen to the magnetic fields’ distortion for the next five years, or take it in. which means less poker practice, and no working computer at home unless i fire up the work laptop. funny how it effects your day-to-day life. that was our primary music player, so it’s quieter already. i stop by to check email usually once every hour or so, and now there’s just a big empty space there. plus i had downloaded and hoped to catch up on battlestar season three before it starts back up this week, but forgot to make copies before bringing it in. double blast!

i also find myself in a music drought lately, so i’ve been going out of my way to find something, anything to go pick up at amoeba this month. i think i’ve settled on these two, which perhaps you can dissuade me from or support if you happen to have heard them in their entirety. so here’s a track off both since i skipped the last pay day song.

cadence weapon – juliann wilding

the whigs – right hand on my heart

the former for it’s excellent sense of flow, the latter for actually sounding like rock music. i’m going through another one of my ‘all this indie shit sounds so mopey and weak’ phases, which might also lead me to pick up the new raconteurs album too.