two.points.collapsing

*nerd post warning*

i’m stressing out today because we’re heading into a long weekend, a weekend where i’m taking extra days off just to have some relaxing fun, and i don’t have any video games to play. well, ones that i haven’t already finished, anyway.

with the summer being the traditional ‘drought period’ in video games, there’s really nothing new i’m dying to pick up, either. what do i do? settle for something just okay? dig up an old classic i missed? but then when you start going down that path there are almost too many choices.

grrr, what a weird and unnecessary problem to have. any nerds with a tip on how to remedy the soft months between now and late august (BIOSHOCK!), or willing to help me pass the time with some multiplayer gears of war or rainbow six, feel free to drop a comment. maybe i’ll suck it up and pick up god of war II for the old playstation on the way home from work.

i heard on the radio this morning on the way to work, ‘today on morning becomes eclectic, the bravery do an in-studio performance in the 11 o’clock hour,’ and my immediate reaction was, ‘ha, nice try guys. you only get to work up from being unknowns once and you blew it.’

poor bravery.

also, in the ‘my adult life is still like high school in a lot of ways’ department, our office had its annual basketball game against the rival agency down the street, complete with drumline, dance squad, pep rally at lunch, and signs saying that we rule, and our opponents, in fact, had problems controlling their salivation. sure, it was a good time (how can a kegger at 4pm at the office not be?), and i’m glad our team won by more than twenty points. i even, i won’t lie, clapped and cheered. but it does make one consider where exactly the line between fun/silly and bizarre/immature lies.

now i will go home to watch some batman the animated series and play video games, and consider this question at length.

i read an article a while back — in wired perhaps? they do have some of the most interesting stuff in print — about how netflix is using the clout they’ve built over the years to buy up struggling film festival properties and distribute them to their millions of subscribers, which not only sets them apart from other dvd-by-mail services, but also helps out blossoming film makers. i thought, ‘wow, that kicks ass. i love netflix even more now. i should check out some of these little indie gems.’

well last night i got one called the puffy chair, and had mixed feelings. it was decent, but it felt a lot like a first film. a little uneven, but with some great moments. my favorite was a line where the main character is on the porch with his dad, telling him how his girlfriend (who was so needy and annoying) is looking for some sort of affirmation of their relationship. the dad says to him, and i’m paraphrasing, ‘well son, you’re never gonna know any better than you do right now. if you’re waiting for some revelation or disaster to help you decide if she’s the one, it’s not gonna come…’

i thought that moment was probably the best part. the idea that there are no absolutes, no sure things, no romantic moments of clarity unless you make them happen yourself, for better or worse. maybe it’s un-romantic in the film sense to not believe in those magical points in time where zach braff decides he loves natalie portman or whatever — and don’t get me wrong, i love watching those movies as much as the next sensitive emo dude. but i’ve always thought it’s much more romantic in a real-life sense to accept the fact that maybe there are lots of people out there who could be ‘the one’ for you, and in the end you still have to choose that one person that feels right and commit to being happy together.

of course in the next scene they break up, which after the first five minutes you know is going to happen, so maybe it’s not the best example. what can you do? okay movie, really interesting thought.

good weekend full of peculiar situations. sunday we found ourselves surrounded by senior citizens as we went to watch josh perform as part of his barbershop quartet club, also comprised almost entirely of gentleman over 50, it seems. then with our good ol’ college buddy right there singing along with them. jessica remarked, quite accurately, that ‘i don’t think i’ve ever been around this many old people in my life’. and yet, josh fared well and it was almost a strange enough site to be worth the price of admission. mostly i’m glad i didn’t follow my instinct to duck out early and miss his spotlight moment in the last song, despite having realized that 2 and a half hours of old guys singing (in quartets or otherwise) may not be entirely up my alley.

saturday was: i spent it playing video games and then drinking at a whisky bar for sarah’s birthday with friends. strange again, because the whisky drinks i tasted were actually not so great — should have gone on the rocks instead of mixed — and people i didn’t know kept taking our picture for some reason. my guess: obvious hotness?

friday we saw paris je t’aime, which if you do not know, is 18 very short films about love in paris all by different directors, with a large cast of well-known actors. the trailer makes it look better than it is, but it was good. the most fun was discussing afterward who liked which shorts, and why. i realized later how odd it was that the coen brothers’ piece, which was pretty good, could have easily been a silent movie, as the main character played by steve buscemi doesn’t say a single word. what an odd choice that a pair whose works have some of my favorite dialogue in all of film would go that route, but ah, paris is a mysterious place.

so anyway, i have a new idea to try out, where i write either right before i start or right after i finish work every day, in order to keep things from going stale around here. you know it’s gotten bad when your mother, who if not for you might not know what the word blog even means, scolds you for not blogging enough. maybe if it sticks i can escape this rut of a single weekly post where i tell you how much fun i had the weekend prior, and return to having opinions and telling jokes and sharing interesting things occasionally. cross those fingers.

looks like i owe someone who would never ever read this blog a big apology in the way of a retraction/correction to my coachella review. having only ever seen neko case on one other occasion, from very very far away — opening for, hmm, maybe willie nelson, maybe belle and sebastian? — and thinking then, ‘wow, she’s a great singer’, i wrongly assumed it was her on stage with the new pornographers at coachella. i do remember thinking at the time how young she looked for someone who’d made such a name for herself.

apparently my wonderment was not unfounded, as i’ve since read that the lady parts were in fact done by kathryn calder for the coachella show, another sometimes-member of the NP’s and niece to ac newman, nonetheless. anyway, the praise remains: i must have told jessica about 5 times over their hour set how great a voice that girl had, whether she’s the more famous contributor or not. sorry for the mistake, but keep up the great work and hope you’ve got plenty of parts on the new album, kathryn.

someone’s fired up today: two blog posts in a day is like a 1400% increase from my lazy once-a-week habit of late. but after a crazy few weeks of work i feel balance returning in several aspects of life, to hopefully include more regular writing. for further evidence, see brian actually getting exercise twice so far this week after a roughly month-long stretch of stress-induced sloth.

that’s not what i signed back in to talk about though. what i was doing was reading the almost always outstanding catbirdseat, on the topic of the evolution of music appreciation, which came up in the wake of the experience music project conference recently concluded.

he wrote several posts which i rush to pull quotes from if only to reflect my total agreement with, and steer whatever traffic i can to his benefit, starting with an outside source which he himself was quoting:

The democratization of music crit– on mssg boards, mp3 blogs, etc.– seems to not be resulting in ppl sharing more ideas with one another, but falling over another just to plant flags.

then a few from his posts:

But the sad part of this situation isn’t the part about the fading of the “thoughtful” critic, it’s the part about the “kids” wanting their music (and their musical discourse) fast. Not only do critics no longer have the luxury of taking time to think about music, they don’t even have time to LISTEN to music anymore. But in today’s age, why should they? The kids are barely listening to it themselves. Music has become a sort of online baseball-bubblegum-cards scene– cheap and disposable, with people more interested in filling out their checklists and talking statistics than investing the time to listen to some music.

Remember that part in National Lampoon’s European Vacation? Where Clark Griswold, pressed for time, rushes around Rome and pauses for just a few seconds in front of each landmark on his list before bolting off to his next bullet point? That’s the “kids today.” I mean, sadly, “Is It Good?” doesn’t even matter anymore; the only thing that seems to matter is “Is It New?”

…and also…

Yesterday I noted my belief that the act of (A.) “Spending Time With An Album/Listening To An Album” is quickly dying at the hands of (B.) “Just Give A Quick, Cursory Listen To As Much NEW Music As Possible.” I would like to point out that I see a direct correlation to this in terms of live music, as well– which is to say, while the list of small independent rock club deaths gets ever longer, the list of giganto-normous music festivals continues to grow. To wit, the experience of the small, intimate show (A.) is quickly dying at the hands of the bloated, endurance-testing, all-you-can eat festival (B.) I mean, Christ, how many “Festival”-related news items has Pitchfork had in the last two days alone? Six? Seven?

which i find terribly interesting and relevant because in the face of the crushingly huge amount of new music that hipster credibility demands i at least try to keep up with, i find myself curling up in what might be deemed a musical foetal position, and consciously limiting my album purchases to one or two a month so that i can actually, you know, get to know those albums a bit. i’m still loving that windmill album i bought off itunes and am almost glad to be hearing nothing about anywhere (but there i go flag-planting), and still playing the new ted leo regularly to find more things to love about it.

in fact, last night as i hopped in the shower, faced with what music to throw on (a luxury relegated to evening bathing as morning music would be too much of a disturbance to sleeping roommates/neighbors), i noticed i hadn’t bought any new albums in several weeks. i considered the aforementioned, then decided to go even more the comfort-food route and queue up some good old tallahassee — a personal classic/favorite, something the modern listening environment described above by mr. birdseat could go so far as to render extinct someday. definitely something to consider.

[as are many of his music finds, by the way. and appropriately enough as i write this, i’m streaming tracks from the new dinosaur jr album of all things, straight from that band’s site, and loving the hell out of them. no flags being planted here, suckas, just some sweet sweet 90’s-style distorted alt rock.]

last weekend, the traditional first weekend of may, we had our third annual beer pong tournament of champions & summer kickoff barbeque. i only wish i had a camera or friends who were better about sharing the photos they took while attending, because it was a great big fun time. this year jessica and i were the ‘panda beers’ and had white/black baseball jersey shirts and little panda ear headbands and were adorable while kicking our fair share of beer pong butt. we didn’t win, of course, but our two losses were to the two final teams, so i didn’t feel too bad. i think i’m starting to prefer the idea of bigger teams and more cups per side, as it almost turns into a sporting event, with each team cheering for their comrades and tensions running even higher in the big clutch moments. if you missed this one, you definitely have to try to make it next time we play, it was great.

i also caught spider man 3 sunday afternoon, and won’t bother writing a full review because i was kind of ambivalent about it. it wasn’t as good as i’d hoped, but had its moments and a few excellent scenes, so there’s no real use in raving or complaining too much. i’m mostly interested to see if they continue on to a next one and if so, where it might lead. what cool spider man villains are left at this point? lizardman? the rhino guy? i think there was an electricity-controlling guy that would be pretty sweet, but beyond that they just need to devote more breathing room to the venom story and don’t try to pack a triple dose of bad-guy character development into one rushed and scattered movie. it made me ache for the next nolan batman movie, or just to rewatch batman begins.

speaking of adaptations, though, i popped in from hell last night from netflix since i’d read the alan moore graphic novel a month or so ago, wondering how it translated. let me tell you two things right now: the book is unbelievably good, interesting, well thought out, skilled, and gripping. if you like comics, history, or true-crime drama (think the movie zodiac but in turn-of-the-19th-century england), you owe it to yourself to check it out, it’s amazing. the movie, whatever merits it may indeed have as a film on its own, i will never know as a reader and lover of the book. i could barely make it past the half-hour mark because it was just so unfortunately far off from everything that made the book great. johnny depp as a young, psychic/drug-vision having detective? did you even READ the book, hughes brothers?

in non-negative review territory though, clever sketch comedy fans really ought to be checking out human giant on mtv2. i ran across these guys on the net a while back doing this excellent pitchfork parody sketch about tapes n’ tapes, and saw them in a magazine a few months ago that mentioned they had a show coming, and went to all the trouble to write a note to myself saying, ‘tivo human giant’. luckily, i often obey notes to myself and it definitely paid off — it’s quick and smart and really funny, like i’m sure lots of internet comedy short makers wish they could be. do most people even get mtv2 though? i feel like not enough people do, which is a shame. between mtv’s website and youtube though i’m sure you could at least dig up enough clips to see what i mean, i mean come on, i can’t do everything for you.

and yes, you may also notice that comments have returned at long last. sadly i had to let go my terminally unavailable old favorite, backblog, and switch to the more reliable haloscan.

this means very little to anyone unless you were a big fan of reading old comments to posts from the past, because sadly they have all been lost. so get commenting on the new ones so i can feel loved again! blogging is a two way street, people.

okay party people, let me tell you first off that i missed out on a lot of awesome things by not being able to make it to three full days this year at coachella. all i keep hearing about is, ‘bjork was amazing’, ‘rage was crazy’, ‘the klaxons went OFF’, etc. i also missed out on a lot of stuff by being there for only one day, and having the unfortunate inability to be in two places at once. apparently regina spektor was incredible, but there as hot chip to consider (more in a minute). and i love peter bjorn and john’s album like crazy, but how often do the new pornographers play live, with the unbelievable neko case on hand? yes, tough decisions were made, and even the one day i was there, i missed out.

but WAIT. that doesn’t mean i still didn’t see several of my favorite bands all in one day alongside some seriously surprisingly great ones, and that if you didn’t make it all, you still didn’t miss out in a MUCH bigger way than i did. i’ll enlighten you on the radness in ascending order of my experience:

the fratellis didn’t do it for me when i heard the album, but the live show was enough fun to make me give them a second chance, which is hard for any band to do, so good for them. and ipod picked the right song for their ad, that’s definitely the catchiest one.

new pornographers are not a big, showy, theatrical group, but they write incredible pop songs, neko case has probably the most amazing female voice i can think of, and ac newman is a pretty funny frontman. they didn’t blow the roof off of anything but they sounded excellent and it was good to see them after wanting to for a couple years.

arcade fire‘s new album is awesome, and sounded great live, but we just didn’t have the energy to push to the front of the truly massive crowd that gathered to see them, and so enjoyed their set mostly via the jumbotrons. really not the way to see this band, as everyone who got closer put this as their top pick of the whole weekend, but shit, i saw them at the troubadour on their first tour so i’m not sweating it.

lcd soundsystem does this great thing live where they almost play rock covers of their own songs that sound so abstract and calculated on the album. ‘daft punk’ and ‘yeah yeah yeah’ and ‘movement’ completely explode in the live setting, so despite this being our last show of the day i still managed to dance more than my little body thought it possibly could.

hot chip should be honorary first place for band that most surpassed my expectations. i really enjoyed the warning so i was expecting a good show, but those five nerdy white british dudes fucking BROUGHT it. at roughtly the hottest point in the day, in a tent crammed with people, we lost every speck of inhibition and danced our asses off to these guys. they were energetic as hell and obviously having a blast up there and like LCD, they took their tunes and put them on 11 for the crowd. i will not be missing any future hot chip live shows in LA, i promise you that right now.

the decemberists, well, you could have guessed that one. my friend joe said that morning at the camp site, ‘are you just going to see the decemberists and masturbate all over the place’, and i responded, ‘joe, you enjoy coachella in your way, and i’ll enjoy it in mine’. the actual set was of course far more enjoyable and less messy than that, even if they got off to a slow start with the first two tracks from the crane wife that were good but not as perfectly performed as when we saw them at the wiltern last fall. you could tell they really got into playing to a big crowd further into their set though, and being close to the stage really paid off. prompting dance circles and pogoing for ‘the perfect crime #2’ had the crowd suddenly energized and loving them, and closing with ‘the mariner’s revenge song’ was brilliant, getting everyone swaying back and forth in unison to the sea chantey bridge, and a crowd of thousands to scream like madmen at the appearance of a giant paper mache-looking whale costume at the climax. where some performances at coachella are intense, beautiful, energetic, danceable, or pure spectacle, the decemberists were simply the most fun set i’ve ever seen at coachella, both for a crowd of good-natured fans and a band that obviously just enjoys putting on a silly stage show. fucking great times. can’t wait to see them again this summer at the bowl with a symphony backing them up. that sould be goddamn transcendent.

i only wish i had been able to find some live mp3 recordings from the show to share, but instead i’ll just have to post a sidenote pay day song from the album i’ve been rocking most at work this week and the band i most wished had made the bill this year: mark ronson’s version of maximo park’s apply some pressure off his album, um, version. more trumpets in rock music, i say!

nothing like a rainy day in LA to remind you that what you’re really in the mood for is a nice 5-day weekend with nothing to do but read books and watch movies and not do anything really exciting for several days in a row. i gotta start thinking of the right time to get me one of those, hopefully in a couple weeks when i get some of the fat workload off my back.

i haven’t turned boring, i swear, just losing out on internet time. grindhouse was pretty much exactly what i expected and worth catching if the trailer appeals to you. the new ted leo album is decent if you like his past work. i’m trying to read more because i have a list of books i want to get to that’s stretching past the dozens at this point, and my desire to read them far outpaces my ability to sit down and do so. it’d be like feeling starving all the time but your mouth only lets you chew one bite per day — frustrating to say the least. hence the need for that long uneventful break i was telling you about.

on the productive side though i’ve ripped through some decent netflix movies and done boring stuff like finally get some cool posters framed i’ve had laying around for months. a couple are sitting right on the wall next to my desk as i type this and making my cubicle look significantly more artsy than it did previously. the real test is when an art director walks by and stops to say, ‘what is that? it’s cool.’ yeah, that’s right, i got mad design-school-graduate cred up in this workspace.

holy shit, coachella is only a weekend away… cross your fingers with me and pray to the goldenvoice gods that the arcade fire and decemberists sets don’t overlap.