still in chicago trying my best to cram in as much as i can into about 72 hours worth of time on the home turf. baseball game, improv, wrigleyville bars all check so far. i have just slightly too many friends to be able to comfortable squeeze into this amount of days and have time left over to jet out and see the family, which is proving inconvenient and accidentally rude to those i haven’t set up time with. sorry so much if this was you, honestly i haven’t sat still for more than 10 minutes since i’ve been here.

can’t wait until i’m old enough (i.e. rich enough) to get a hotel room and a rental car and leisurely visit whoever whenever instead of hopping trains from here to there to visit this and that person and hope it all works out. plus: air conditioning in chicago’s version of august would be pretty choice come afternoon time. whew.

i’m sitting in a 10th floor hotel room looking out at the chicago skyline right now, and it’s pretty exciting. i like being back in the home state, it’s undeniable. i just get this odd feeling of comfort from the familiar types of trees and air and accents. plus i had white castle last night for the first time in over a year. now that’s a great homecoming.

so since i’m here conferencing and getting foolishly drunk with my coworkers i get to post from my shiny new powerbook g4, which i just got from work on friday. it’s gorgeous and silver and widescreen and fast. but the dvd player isn’t working because it needs an administrator to set the region code and therefore is useless as in-flight entertainment. blast!

oh and someone be a dear and buy me the new statistics album. i downloaded the pay day song, “final broadcast“, from their site last week and am all about it right now. it’s like this one guy is still holding out on that old-school emo style that’s kinda like far — sappy lyrics and heavy-ish guitars. enough of this dance-punk garage-rock crap already, let’s get back to whining about being lonely, because that rocks much harder.

i spent something like 14 hours over two days this weekend at the beach, making me feel more so-cal than i ever have. though between the excellent barbeque/bonfire and some intense volleyball action, i probably absorbed more radiation than i have in months prior, resulting in a nice case of molting. luckily once i’ve completed the cycle there should be a sexy, tan new brian underneath, and hopefully i can use the old husk to distract predators.

so has anyone done any digging on itunes yet for some podcasts that are consistently good? i’ve poked around a few that were mostly disappointing so far, although i do like the spin magazine one — a nice convenient 15 minutes per week of featured new bands, no bullshit. not always A quality but at least it’s digestible.

and thirdly, i just started dave eggers’ how we are hungry last night, and i feel like i’m lucky just to be reading it, it’s so elaborately bound. how can they possibly be making any money on those things when they have to pay to build in like two straps and textured inner covers and raised outer cover designs? is the paperback version going to just come with a five dollar bill taped to the back so they can keep the same profit margin?

how weird seeing the writer of one of your top five albums since 2000 ride by on a bike. (travis from piebald via phone.)

alright, never mind that first-ever moblog thing from yesterday, i was just geeking out over advancing technologies for a minute there. yes, it was really easy and convenient, but it’s sadly limited by the amount of characters i can send from my sprint PCS mail address by phone, which is 160. that’s like two sentences. when do i, mr. brian word-breath, ever confine myself to two sentences? now maybe if i can figure out how to make sure the picture thing will fit on the page right…

anyhow, i owe a bit of mention to the always lovely michelle who came out to LA to visit last weekend, and who i enjoyed seeing again very much. it’s nice to keep people on the ‘as cool as ever’ list even if you haven’t spent a day with them in six years, as opposed to having to realize that some people just don’t hold up over time. that list, by the way, i will not be disclosing.

we saw willy wonka friday which i am hesitant to recommend with enthusiasm, but you really ought to see sometime just for the reworking of the oompa loompa numbers. they are downright crazy-awesome-out there. that elfman, i tell ya.

for a better movie, if you just happen to have three hours to fill, check out robert altman’s short cuts. watched that last night with the roommate and i thought the impressively powerful scenes amid the swirl of bland moments and intersecting lives made it an excellent film, well-acted and directed. gino was more of the camp that it was a terribly boring waste of his life with no real point or message even if there were a few good scenes. guess you’ll have to see it to weigh in.

look out world, brian just figured out how to blog from his mobile phone. this post is boring because it’s just a test, jerks.

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!