ich bin ein auslander

First, let it be said that I don’t really like the Wiltern. The half general admission, half weird feeding stall setup kind of blows, particularly if it’s a sold out show and the floor is so packed you can’t really even move. I was originally happy to find out we had floor tickets, but we ended up in the back of the hall by the bar so we could actually see and breathe.

Not entirely thrilled with the show. Shirley looks great, having wisely ditched the femi-nazi look of the last tour. Eric’s playing bass and not only does he sound great with them, it looks like he’s having a blast. It’s much more of a rock-band sound now, which I had a bit of a problem with… I mean, these guys have been doing the electro-rock thing for ages, and it’s finally starting to be really popular (the bravery, bloc party, etc) so now they ditch it live and go for straight up rock interpretations of all their songs?

Maybe it’s just a matter of playing a few more shows and tightening everything up, but quite a bit of the set was pretty sloppy and sounded off. The new songs they played sounded the best, which tells me in advance not to expect too much synths on the new album. Oh well. The all have quite a bit more confidence on stage than before, which I guess is also good, but again, I missed the Garbage of yore. I’ll check them out again when they come back through town and see what time and road-testing does to the set.

The other thing - GREAT light setup, poor usage and design. If you’re going to blow all that cash on a kick-ass concept, why did you make everything look like cheesy screensavers?

Ah, how easily my life could have ended up that way. Thank god I found music.

Anyway, I’m sure most people know about the whole line-up thing for Star Wars III… they started a few days ago, lining up outside the Chinese Theater. Which won’t be playing the movie. It’s actually going to screen at the Arclight (yay! booze! tickets online! reserved seating so you don’t have the battle the fat guy that actually ran for the first time in 2 years to get a seat for himself and the life-size yoda he brought along!).

Anyway, it’s all pretty funny. If you’ve got a bit of extra time today, like I did, you can check out the bloggers scoffing at blogging.la, which is some great reading, or better yet, listen in on the internal politics of the dorks themselves debating their predicament at lingingup.net. Now that’s some seriously funny shit.

Used connections to score garbage tickets. Very happy. Eric’s playing with them now so it should be an interesting show; they’ve always been great live, even with the continued decline in album quality. First single’s alright, but reviews have been uniformly crap for the album. We’ll see.

We’ve recently got hooked on arrested development, since there’s no sopranos, battlestar galactica, west wing or 6 feet under at the moment. heard great stuff about it, and wendy added the season 1 dvds to our netflix batch awhile back. Burned through the season in a week. Funny show. Bittorennting all of season two now to catch up; tivoing and saving the new ones as they come in to watch in order. ain’t technology grand?

Probably off to see Fever Pitch tonight. Read the book ages ago, loved it… saw the original movie, pretty good. It’s about soccer, not baseball. But we’re going to see it with the biggest red sox fan in the world, which should make version 3 interesting at least. But my stomach is still churning at the thought of paying to see jimmy fallon and drew barrymore.

Skeely left for the tour yesterday… marie the day before.. it’s a bit lonely in venice. Only wen, myself and EJ are left. Oh well. It’s a short tour.

Wen and I both signed up for extension classes this semester.. it’s good to be back on campus. I’m taking a class is cosmology for shits and giggles. the prof is the science advisor for battlestar galactica and a total sci-fi dork. i’m going to enjoy this one.

ended up getting up to quite a bit this weekend… wen’s art show on friday… which she actually didn’t invite anyone to but people found out anyway, strangely enough. we actually missed mike and krista who came down from altavista or some other godawful far away place, but did catch michael, celine and carmen and ended up getting giddily drunk with them on cheap wine and beer in paper bags. saturday we ended up going to another art show with much the same crowd and headed back to their place post-show for more cheap beer… it was enjoyable but i apparently stepped on some inter-group dynamic toes that evening and ruined some guy’s night and stature with his posse. oh well.

today, off to the market with the skeelereno who’s taking off on tuesday to hit the road for a month plus… then lunch at finn’s where david joined us and filled us in on the continuing soap opera of his life… a brief break for nap and gym, then over to ej’s where a ton of randoms where around to catch a bit of the sox / yankees opener and drink beer and bbq strange beasts… before heading off to the ‘wood for dinner at tuk tuk with john and myra and discuss coachella plans. post dinner we ended up running out to the virgin megastore so i could catch up on a few things… in this haul, a lot of coachella bands i’ve been ignoring for too long…
the bravery… bloc party ’silent alarm’.. brights eyes ‘i’m wide awake it’s morning’ and ‘digital ash in a digital urn’… some other random things like beck’s ‘guero’, mars volta ‘frances the mute’, the church’s ‘el momento descuidado’ and morrissey’s ‘live at earl’s court’. of course, fischerspooner isn’t out until tomorrow so i guess that’ll be an itunes purchase..