something i thought about recently that i want to have a conversation with some smart and interesting people about: would your life be better or worse if you flat out were not required to sleep, ever? aren’t sharks like that or something? but the point being that your whole life is just one long, continuous day with light and dark periods. pros, obviously, you could do so much more, but cons then are theoretically a big deal. like would you then be expected to work 15 hour ‘days’? would the likelihood of going crazy increase with never getting to ‘shut down’?

as you think it over for my upcoming roundtable discussion, please listen to the new pay day song, some music that i’m sure will not put you to sleep. it’s from the new album by a band i only recently discovered (in the pages of urb no less — i know, right?): dat politics. i described this stuff to my friends as what you would hear if you had a pizza party for your 10th birthday inside an old-school NES, and instead of playing duck hunt you had a dance-off. yes, to me, that’s a fun concept. can’t you just imagine mario and the princess getting all crunk in 8-bit craziness?

oh boy is it good to be home. don’t doubt that miami wasn’t great — after all, a convening of many great minds such as the conference i attended is sure to have some high points, and a few nights in a place like that is sure to send a bunch of advertising people into a frenzy. gin and tonics were rapidly consumed in hotel bars in the evening, ‘dead or alive’ was heartily sang in a karaoke bar after midnight, hotel pools were perhaps inadvisably crowded into after the bars all closed at 4am. overall both highly stimulating and fairly draining both mentally and socially. glad to have had the experience.

then there was the weekend! i’m pretty sure jessica and i have figured out our vacation pattern after this one. that being step 1: go somewhere we’ve never been. step 2: eat and drink ourselves silly. step 3: come home fat and happy. now we just have to figure out step 4: come back afterwards and exercise like crazy to burn off all those calories. however, the delicious desserts, wines, cheeses, breakfasts, were all heavenly and so was having a great girl to share them with. so i’m a happy guy.

especially now that i’m back and i can get back to living my normal life, which is strange when you wake up monday morning thinking, ‘oh boy, i get to actually go to the office and sit at my desk today!’ without a hint of sarcasm. it really is good to be back to a steady schedule for this week; i can catch back up on the world outside of myself, get back to finding some of that inspiration we spent those days in miami discussing how to seek out and use for the bettering of what we do, and perhaps most notably, put my couch to some good use while i sit home and NOT drink alcohol for a change.

so i think what i’m gonna do tonight is swing by the record store, buy some hopefully great new music, and throw it on while i do domestic things over the next few nights such as clean my neglected bathroom. do my abundant laundry. hopefully squeeze in some netflix and backlogged daily show episodes. and overall be very excited to have a week lacking in excitement.

……

and oh yes, i will spare you yet another gushing mountain goats-based post (for now), but i just happened to notice while cruising around elbo.ws today that several tracks from the new album are popping up on their charts. i’m trying hard not to play all of them to death and just be excited the new album is weeks away, when i can properly digest it as a whole, which i always find does more justice to the songs. but, you know, if you’re inclined to sneak a little peek, there’s some beautiful piano work and soft sad songcraft you might want to indulge in just to whet your appetite… and i swear i’ll put a non-goats pay day song up tomorrow after my amoeba run.

Back home, but about to leave again tomorrow for an anniversary weekend…aww. Tell you all about both trips next week, promise.

in miami for a conference. life is so hard. See you wednesday, internet.

(ps: just logged in and saw this photo again… does it look to you like all those palm trees are in italics?)

netflix guilt is news? bitch please, i’ve been talking about this phenomenon since college, right along with harpers guilt, and i know the same thing occurred to me as soon as tivo entered my home. congrats, newsweek guy, for editorializing about something every media-hungry twentysomething has already thought of already.

but on the more positive side, i’ve found a cure for this, at least on the netflix front. first, get into a tv series available on dvd. then, put a season’s worth in your queue, and if it’s good, you are watching and returning those discs like nobody’s business. once you finish a season, stack a dozen or so movies between disc six of season one and disc one of season two, for example.

if you’re lucky, and you pick good shows, wanting to see the follow up on that last cliffhanger helps marvelously to propel you through that batch of films you’ve been meaning to see forever (i’m looking at you, spaghetti westerns and noir classics). or if you’re really gonna torture yourself, you can even insert the movies between discs of the series, although that prevents you from occasionally indulging in a 5-episode marathon of HBO genius, so plan carefully.

i was thinking the other day; if green lantern’s powers all come from his ring, why has no one ever just slipped some rufies in his drink and taken it while he’s sleeping? he’d be pretty much fucked at that point, right? then it’d be like when you steal your little sister’s doll or something and wave it over her head and she’s just whining and hopping and helpless to end your torment.

[ed: i just looked this up on wikipedia (see: power ring), and it turns out some iterations of green lantern through the years have been able to summon the ring back to them if it is stolen or removed. psh. easy out.]

regarding my actual life, i am utterly spent. the weekend in vegas was lots of fun, especially the first night when jess, mad and i found a lucky roulette table at the endearingly low-budget frontier casino, slogan: cold beers and dirty girls. the three of us made friends with an nice lady named gina who brought us good luck and thought we were a laugh riot, so it was all fun until she bailed and too our luck with her. weak sauce, team, we should know when to quit next time.

saturday was pool day and very relaxing, maybe so much so that by the time we got some drinks in us at the big conference party at the palms, we were zapped. of course, not until after we lost more money of course. i’m beginning to fear that my dear dear girlfriend may be the source of my bad luck on the past two trips to vegas. after all, the previous three i walked out at least 50 bucks ahead… but i’m really hoping it’s something else, like, you know, getting drunk and making dumb bets.

not to let a nice bad luck streak end, i returned home early sunday morning on a 6am flight, to walk back to a long term parking lot at 7:15 in LA and a car with an utterly dead battery. another 80 bucks down the drain. lucky for me the guys at the lot had a jump kit, which is kind of like a magic yellow miniature briefcase. so i drove home, slept half the day, and had to sweat through replacing the battery in my 90-degree garage.

then monday, i get up early, again, fly out for a meeting, and due to others going over time, come right back without having done anything all day but wait. find out as soon as our plane lands we get to go back for 9am the next day, which means waking up at 5:30. that’s three days of waking up before the sun. not to mention i had to go see the rakes show at the troubadour that night, and i realize during the set i’m not even really that into the rakes and i should have stayed home to eat ice cream and doze off on the new couch instead. that would have been so much more productive and delicious than a decent band with a singer who doesn’t really sing and getting stuck behind a guy with carrot top hair who just loves to bob and weave to the music.

alright, i’m descending into a rant now and like i said, i’m spent, so i will take tonight to recuperate and be cheerful brian again before you can say wednesday.

last night gino and i bade goodbye to our two purple couches. after three+ years of service on both their parts, traveling from college residences to young adulthood, sitting in a stadium-style two-tiered arrangement for football games and movie nights (goodbye to you as well, cinder blocks!), and hugging the walls, getting trampled, stepped, danced and spilled on party after party, it was time to move on.

now we take the giant leap into carpet cleaning, couch upgrading, and eventually new-tv-buying, as we transition out of the ‘free stuff we got from some guy’ phase and into the vaunted ikea-centric mid twenties. oh to be one notch above the bottom. although the few days of transition are quite funny, as the two of us sit on foldable beach chairs in the middle of our wide open living room, inches above the not yet unsoiled carpet, watching late night with conan just as we did that first year back in ’03. aaaah, memories.

part of me is hoping someone will come and rescue our couches from the curb, giving them another loving home before the los angeles department of public works comes to cart them off to their inevitable destruction. or perhaps we should have had a funeral pyre ourselves, to commemorate all those loving afternoons of calling seat-save or brushing nacho crumbs off between touchdowns. my best idea was to covertly set them up on the roof of the car dealership right outside our balcony, where we could look fondly down at them and chuckle at our absurd prank, but the lack of ladders and the surprising heaviness of furniture proved to be an obstacle. mostly i just hope that when i get home today they are already gone, whisked off to a better place where i can imagine them still happily cradling blissful youth as they intently watch sopranos or cheer for the home team, instead of arriving to find them the temporary bed and bathroom for swarthy hobos. [shudder]

my long holiday weekend was exhausting. it’s hard work having beers and barbeques and parties almost every day for five days straight. going to work was almost a welcome break if i didn’t have to get up at 7 to leave — that was a bit harsh.

i think i went for the circuit as far as party variety too. friday night mike and dom rolled in for the ‘late night beers and laughing with a small group of friends’ at my place. saturday we went the ‘afternoon beers, world cup, and video games’ route, then that night i threw my first and fully successful surprise birthday party for jessica at my place for the ‘big party with tons of people and drinks and loud music and dancing’ card (she was super excited, almost cried, and gave the definitive ‘best birthday ever’ afterward…one million boyfriend points awarded).

sunday was a day of rest sans drinks but with movie night (nacho libre was funny but so weird and that’s saying something coming from me), but we capped it off royally by hitting both the ‘pool party and barbeque’ as well as ‘rooftop barbeque with beer pong and fireworks display’ bases monday and tuesday respectively. dang, i’m exhausted just thinking about it and have been drinking water ever since to refresh this wearied body of mine.

i’m sure i’ll be able to catch up and relax with two concert nights in a row followed by a party this weekend; or maybe the weekend after while i’m in vegas… [deep breath]

this blog is straying farther and farther away from ‘brian’s thoughts and stories regarding his life’ and more towards ‘music and movie reviews plus some star sightings’. i’ll try to rein it in once i’m not so darn busy every moment of every day and have time to reflect or take part in some hijinx of some sort.

for now, let me just tell you that i’m on a hot streak with having celebrities walk past me. we went to an LA film fest screening of a scanner darkly last night and although there were no impromptu live concerts by 80’s rock icons — where were you on this one, devo? — on the way up the stairs leading to the seating entrance at the greek theatre, i nearly bumped woody harrelson out of my way without even realizing it. jessica had to nudge me and say, ‘hey, look who’s in front of you’. i’m kinda slow.

then later we saw him again coming down the aisle right before the movie, along with keanu reeves and richard linklater. it was quite a ‘whoa’ moment. (sorry, i couldn’t help it). also, for some reason, the guy from dead poets society with the big nose that gets beat up for stealing the jocks’ girlfriend, as well as the artsy black turtleneck main guy from the movie empire records. how about that?

if only the movie were as interesting as the random celebrity. frankly i was a little let down on the sci-fi scale and it came off as more of a drug-paranoia movie. the suspense was sort of lacking, there wasn’t really any ‘action’ per se, and i don’t know… it was just a little flat. not bad, just uninspiring. i think i’d rather go home and watch my waking life dvd again.

i’ve got to get these down before i manage to forget them, but i’ve had a star-studded past week. last monday at the futureheads show — a fine, fun performance which really sold me on the new album which i had previously doubted, but now quite approve of even if it may not be as energetic as the first — we were standing around near the bar after the opener (french kicks: like the walkmen without the creativity), when my friend jen pointed out that none other than seth cohen himself, adam brody was walking by right behind us! i think that’s now my second OC cast member sighting, having seen mischa barton briefly and from a distance a couple years back at coachella. my mission is to collect all 4.

then this weekend topped that by far. we were innocently going to an LA film festival screening of an inconvenient truth in a plaza downtown. one of those nice amphitheatre-type open-air corporate park sort of places. fountains, etc. word was that al gore was going to put in an appearance, which was kind of cool. i always approved of that guy, it’d be nice to get to clap for him and show support. then out of seemingly nowhere, after his required thank-yous and rallying cries, he says he wants to introduce his friend, and, shit you not, i heard the former vice president say, “and now, ladies and gentleman, JON BON JOVI!”

against all logic, bon jovi and his guitarist richie sambora (whose name i couldn’t have told you until this night, but apparently my friends were all quite aware of) emerged from the wings with guitars (richies was a DOUBLE HEADED ACOUSTIC), and played unplugged versions of ‘living on a prayer’, his recent country-ish hit, a cover of ‘peace love and understanding’, and finally, amazingly, ‘dead or alive’. it blew my mind, especially on a day i had most definitely NOT had the thought, “hmm, maybe today i’ll see a live acoustic bon jovi set”. wonderful evening.

the movie turned out to be really interesting, even despite the preaching-to-the-choir aspect. mostly because even those of us who appreciate the need for energy reform might not realize just how drastic the damage has become. he shows shome charts that simply make you shudder. i’d see it if i were you, then trade your car in for a bike. or a rickshaw maybe.