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this would be my third show at JB’s in as many weeks, following the constantines show below and having to leave early during buried beds/american music club. i’d kind of been run down from packing all day and thought about staying in but i’ve been a big fan of EPDM for a while now and [...]

“constantines make music for people who like rock. everyone else can go listen to vampire weekend.” - peter botham, the news journal
i woke up on my couch early sunday evening in a complete panic, thinking that i had slept through that night’s constantines show. i threw on a shirt, jumped into my car and arrived [...]

photo by chriszak under creative commons’ attribution 2.0 generic license.
nicole & i went to see LSF at the fillmore at the TLA (or is it TLA at the fillmore?). it had been a while since my last visit, which was well before it becoming a live nation venue and quite possibly could have been the [...]

the movies i’ve seen over the past few months have included the oscar-winning (there will be blood & no country for old men, both sprawling and excellent), raspberry-worthy (cloverfield & jumper nearly halved my IQ after viewing) and downright confounding (with a huge battle scene involving armored bears, gypsies, flying witches and sam elliott standing [...]

the fact that there is so much i didn’t listen to this year makes me loathe to call this a “best of” list (also illustrated by the lack of debut albums). but i did enjoy the following records quite a bit, so you should check them out if you haven’t:
feist - the reminder
pela - anytown [...]

points if you recognize the title quote (no googling). i didn’t come close to reading 25 books this year but i did manage to discover some new authors and finish a couple from last year. the only book that was a bear for me to read was world’s end, it was quite dense and i [...]

woke up sore the next morning from saturday night’s M.I.A. show. i’d lost my cell phone since tuesday, so trying to meet up with alan & sara beforehand was a hassle and a half. i actually used a pay phone for the first time in years. did you know that it’s fifty cents to make [...]

relatively speaking, decent seats at the tower aren’t cheap but i’d never seen feist before so why not. while 2004’s let it die had some good songs on it, it never really grabbed me the way that the reminder has. it’s probably one of my favorite albums this year.
monica & i had a quick and [...]

$20 is pretty much my cutoff amount for going to shows. i’ll make an exception if it’s a band i really like, it’s at an interesting venue or an artist that i’ll never see again. but other than that i try to save my $$$ (this also offsets monica’s ticket-spending habits; she once paid an [...]

spoon was sold out at the bowery last weekend and i had no desire to see them at the starlight, but when maria told me that they were playing the stone pony (!) on tuesday i figured why the heck not? i hadn’t been there in years. i recalled asbury park as being run down, [...]