two.points.collapsing

so i’m a full day back from my little brother’s BIG wedding weekend, which is why you haven’t heard from me in a week. there are plenty of things to tell which won’t fit all into a blog post, but a quick rundown would be most effective:

saturday: flew in, saw the family, went out to ESPN zone with the dudes for dinner while the bachelorette party was going on (my mom and sister at a chippendale’s show, weird!), lost about a hundred dollars gambling.

sunday: father’s day brunch, mimosas, sitting around not doing much during the day. bachelor party going from dinner at hooters, gambling in old vegas, then of course the obligatory strip club trip. lost and made back about 80 dollars, then spent more than i would have liked to on the rest of the night, but what can you do. we did get a free stretch SUV limo ride to scores though, which was pretty fun. drank one jaeger bomb with my brother and about a dozen or more beers. eesh.

monday: woke up still drunk, i swear, spent the day recovering, jessica arrived, we did lunch, wedding rehearsal in the evening, nice drinks & appetizers with the wedding party, lost back the 80 i rebounded with at the bachelor party while my girlfriend won herself about 70 playing blackjack. no fair. in between, squeezed in a few rounds with my lovely friend madilyne who lives in vegas and took us to a bar off the strip called the freakin’ frog which has FIVE HUNDRED kinds of beer. enjoyed several varieties of obscure ‘rogue’ brand products. finally met her boyfriend, who is totally rad.

tuesday: spent all day being nervous about the wedding that wasn’t even mine, dressed up real fancy-like (pictures to follow, hopefully), sweated through the ceremony, managed not to tear up. my sister and i did sneak in a high five though after we walked down the aisle together before taking our places on opposite sides of the altar. also, some crazy birds did a fly-by of the wedding party right in the middle and almost took our heads off.

the reception was great, some fun jewish traditions where my mom almost fell off a chair being lifted with her on it. lots of drinking dancing aunts uncles and cousins. jessica looked spectacular in her fancy dress and straightened hair for the special occasion. then i mistakenly thought wedding attire would bring me good luck and lost another 80 dollars gambling, while jessica ran her total winnings past the hundred dollar mark. sigh.

wednesday we pretty much just packed and left, returning to LA to spend the rest of our free afternoon making some apartment visits. we may even have one picked out as long as everything goes smoothly with our application, but i won’t go so far as to post a link or anything and jinx it. we’ll see tomorrow hopefully.

overall it was a great great time. loved seeing the family and spending some quality time with my brother. i’ll tell you right now though: four and a half days in vegas feels like double that, and is much too long for any future visits. give me one solid night to win or lose and drink and go home. good wedding though. now i have a sister-in-law who’s on a mediterranean cruise with my brother as we speak. crazy!

OH HOLY GOD don’t let me forget either, you absolutely cannot do without this pay day song if you haven’t already grabbed it from various quality outlets of musics like pitchfork’s forkcast or the good old catbirdseat monthly mix.

i picked up the last okkervil river album and liked it quite a bit, some songs even full on ruled. (side note: i can’t help but like how their website looks so much like the decemberists one either.) but if this preview track from their new album is any indication, that conundrum i spoke of yesterday on picking top albums of the year may be much less of a problem than i feared.

anyway, you have to have to HAVE TO check out ‘our life is not a movie or maybe‘. it carries a strained cry of heartbreak and disappointment in waves of pounding piano and feels like lost love in its purest, most rock and roll form. i swear i could listen to this on repeat for hours.

hot chip was great again, in case you were wondering. they turn some of the softer stuff from the album into major pounding dancey fun in the live show, i tell you what. some of the new songs are killer, too. definitely picking that up when it comes out, which they say won’t be til next year.

the opening acts, however, were like knives in my ear holes. the first band, the boggs, were just really mediocre guitar rock with some yelling and clapping and stuff, but at least got slightly better toward the end of their set.

the middle act, planningtorock (even their name is grating), was literally the worst live act i have ever seen. i didn’t like the boggs, they bored me. but at least i didn’t want to leave just to save myself from the torment of listening to them. i’ve not liked lots of opening bands, but watching this band actively depressed me. check out this planningtorock live clip and you might get some sense of how every minute of this act just made me angrier and angrier. who sees something like this and says, ‘yes! i should fund this brilliant artist and find ways to spread the joy of her talents as far and wide as possible!’. i can’t comprehend the person who is a planningtorock fan. i’ve never wanted to boo at a performer so badly in all my years of concertgoing. wailing loud non-words and spazzing around in funny hats in front of shitty faux-artsy video footage does not make you talented. it makes you an awful, attention starved annoyance that stands between me and a good band, and verges on ruining my night.

whew. sorry, i just had to get that off my chest. seriously, so so bad. to not end on such a sour note, please enjoy a fun hot chip video for ‘over and over’, a song which i already liked but which once you see live you will absolutely lose your shit over. that little scrawny singer is so adorable when he dances!

i had ice cream cake for lunch today. it was someone’s birthday and i didn’t feel like eating cafeteria food again so i just held out for the sweet stuff. i think the lack of nutrition, post-sugar rush combo is making me a little woozy though. such irresponsibility, i love it.

i have to go home and eat up though to fuel my body for the hot chip show tonight. after their coachella set, i know it will not be something to take lightly. none of that chilling toward the back nodding your head business; hot chip demand serious bouncing.

peculiar, if not surprising, how strongly my eyes light up when i see the words, ‘new montain goats’ on any music site, anywhere… pitchfork pointed me to a daytrotter sessions post of four live tracks i hadn’t heard before. they’re not even stand-out tracks, really — although with a catalog stretching past the 300 song mark, that only gets harder and harder to do, so you can’t hate too much — but i love them anyway.

and that brings up an interesting thought: if he’s not working on a new album due out by year’s end, this’ll be the first year in at least three that my annual top five is goatless… and in two that it’s decemberist-less! there really hasn’t been much else to fill the void either. how sad.

busy! still at work at almost 10 on a tuesday, so i won’t be able to give you too much juicy brian goodness today.

saturday on the way to a barbeque for our friend michael’s birthday, i finally saw one of those R2D2 mailboxes, all the way down in huntington beach. i figured they be all over the high traffic streets of los angeles, not in the strip-mall filled stretches of brookhurst avenue off the 22 freeway. maybe they’re worried about the city ones getting all vandalised up? what i really wonder is if any super-fans have gone so far as to try to steal one. i’d love to see a big sweaty nerd scurrying home trying to score his own artoo. ha!

in case you were wondering, the barbeque in question was also totally great, tasty burgers, many margaritas, and awesome orange county-dwelling friends who we don’t get to see often enough.

sunday, and last night as well, we began the dreaded task of apartment hunting, in which i sadly have no real news to report other than you probably shouldn’t start apartment hunting on sundays. i guess building managers think they have better things to do on the lord’s day than traffic in potential housing for youngsters like us, but hey, that’s their call.

lastly, oh man do i ever have a pay day song for friday, which you can and maybe have already heard elsewhere, but it’s so good i’ll be making extra sure.

speaking of death…

a long way down – nick hornby – 3 stars

i’m a hornby fan. i think the guy gets it. high fidelity remains probably tied for my favorite movie ever (star wars trilogy, duh). both that and about a boy are among the best books i’ve read in the past ten years. this one, i have to say, was totally solid, even if not his best work.

the problem was, it seemed almost too casual about itself, like it was trying too hard to be a good book perfect for translating into a decent movie. like light reading that was a little too light — i mean i breezed through it in less than a week, which for me is nuts. at the same time though, that can partly be attributed to the fact that it was a really good read: relatable, interesting, and funny for a book about 4 people who meet when they all consider jumping off the same building on new year’s eve. so maybe i’m being biased against pop-lit by saying ‘easy books aren’t great literature’. but then again, without that, i wouldn’t be the kind of person who inflicts don quixote on himself either, so there’s no turning back now is there.

but also speaking of the miracle of life…

knocked up – 4 stars

i’m a big fan of the whole crew surrounding judd apatow, freaks & geeks, 40 year-old virgin, etc., so i was willing to give a romantic comedy by these guys a chance, even though i almost never subject myself to the genre willingly.

lucky for me this was a whole lot comedy and only a little bit romance, and a really surprisingly hilarious one. it eschewed a lot of the trite parts where people have difficulties, overcome them, realize that love overcomes all, blah blah blah, and sticks with how absurd relationships, families, marriages, kids, and general life is when people try too hard to live them by the book.

this was helped in huge part by the main character’s housemates, a gang of dudes that sit around drinking, smoking, and talking shit pretty much all the time, making for a lot of the best scenes of the movie, as well as the moments that make almost any guy who lived with his buddies in college go, ‘oh my god, yes, these are my people’.

plus, the sharp transitions between that sort of slacker-immaturity and the daunting task of parenthood or marriage were a perfect illustration of how i think a lot of people around my (our?) age are approaching adulthood. in a generation of people who don’t feel like they should ever have to become ‘grown-ups’, the fact that huge life events kind of sneak up on you and all you can do is go ‘holy shit, this is crazy, but what the hell, let’s do it,’ comes across perfectly. and in the end, like in the movie, you realize you had it in you all along, and you don’t really have to give up who you are to come out okay.

not to get all deep on you or anything; i mean there are lots of sex jokes, and drug jokes, and a surprising amount of high quality beard jokes. it’s hilarious even if it seems a little longer than it needs to be. the supporting cast is awesome, seth rogan and paul rudd are amazing as usual, and it’s definitely worth seeing even if you don’t think about life at all and just laugh all the way through, which is easy to do too.

it occurred to me that i have a few friends, the kind of friends you only see or hear from a few times a year, who haven’t updated their blogs in over 6 months. and as morbid as it sounds, the thought has entered my mind that it’s not 100% impossible that they died, and no one thought to notify me.

it’s not that depressing, because i’m 99% sure that in fact they are not dead. if anything, it makes me chuckle at how dependent i am on the regular updates regarding things i care about that are so easily available in the internet age. so for you rare web writers, get back on the ball would you? let me know how not dead you are!

spent a lot of time on airplanes in the past week, which allowed me to finish another book already, and also saw a great movie this weekend. i’m gonna hold off on the reviews until tomorrow though. those can wait another day, when i’m even more behind on posting a pay day song as usual.

well i’m sorry, but i hadn’t quite been able to give the new dinosaur jr album the real in-depth listen i thought it deserved before deciding if i really liked it, or just plain liked it, at which point i was going to post a song. truth is, i still haven’t had the chance to listen to it the way it needs to be listened to, but i do know this: whenever the rhythm-change part in we’re not alone happens, half-way through the song when it gets a little twangier right before the soloing kicks in, i get a big old grin. try it out yourself!

you know what i don’t love? but i guess i wouldn’t go so far as to say i actively hate. so do you know what i mildly dislike? interviewing people. it should make you feel all important and finally definitively in the judging chair and not the being judged chair, but more often than not i just feel out of place. nothing against the people i end up having to interview either; even if they’re not perfect for the job, they’ve all been really nice, and in most cases totally qualified in a lot of ways. maybe it’s a reflection of my own insecurities as i transition from ‘guy just out of college’ to actual young professional (who may even know what he’s talking about).

you know what i also didn’t love?…

jonathan strange & mr. norrell – susanna clarke – 3 stars

one of those books that’s not bad enough to say, ‘god, i should just hurry and get this over with’, nor good enough to say, ‘god, i can’t stop reading this!’, i’ve been leisurely plodding my way through this book for over a month, and finally realized it was time to stop being so casual and put the fingers/pedal to the pages/metal. a perfect undertaking for a long weekend.

well, my final verdict has been that all in all the book was charming in its very dry, very proper, very old-time british way; but also a bit tiresome in its very slowly paced, very long-winded, very old-time british way. the book is fairly enjoyable, but would have been better had it been told in 500 instead of 800 pages. it made me wonder what it was that made someone recommend it to me those months or years ago, and as i drew to the end i never quite found it.

perhaps if you were especially fond of early 19th century england, magic, fairy beings, high society, or especially the combination thereof, you’d be delighted by a book like this. i, however, was merely distracted, and for a fair bit longer than i would have liked, making it tough to outright recommend.

no, i’m not going back on what i said i’d do just last week with the posting frequency, i’ve just been enjoying a little extra weekend than everyone else, and so haven’t been at a computer really. the three-day one was so full of activity i figured i’d take a couple days on top of that to have my own private time, which is working out great – clearing off some of the dvd shelf and wrapping up the book i’ve been reading for far too long. i even did housework. eww.

this after a cubs/dodgers game, SF road trip, and barbeque filled regular weekend. it was all fun and friends and good times, but to get honest, there aren’t any great stories to come out of it. no one got crazy or did anything dumb or extra funny, we just had drinks and cracked jokes and talked and had plain old fun that doesn’t make good anecdotes. makes me wonder, since we drove up to SF for dom’s 26th birthday, is this going to be the year where the ‘wild’ goes out of our parties? are we done doing stupid thing or getting so drunk someone pukes off a balcony or passes out so badly we can roll them off of furniture onto the floor without waking them? and is that to be mourned or celebrated? i’m sure the case could be made that maybe the stories aren’t worth the messes and/or bruises.