The Church “Reptile”

I think my favorite time of day in Los Angeles is really late at night/early morning….like after 3am, driving around listening to music and smoking. Without the static of activity that usually fills the frame.

Get Stoked: Fugazi “Song #1″

Woohoo….Tuesday. “Tugazi”?

Wow. On September 29th, 2009 I officially ran out of things to talk about. I need to issue myself a stamp to commemorate this.

Muse “Invincible”

How is it possible for a three piece to sound this huge? I bet there are like 40 other band members hidden beneath the stage.

Scissorfight “Appalachian Chain”

There was a moment in time when this band was the toughest band in the world. I mean look at that band name. Who thinks of something like that? Plus they worked on a fishing boat? Holyballs. They might as well have been fucking executioners from some medieval court.

And yet this is what they end up doing? The loss in brutality is shocking.

Yo La Tengo “Feel Like Going Home”

Sometimes I wonder if Los Angeles will ever feel like home. It kind of feels like this highschool I’ve been going to for 15 years.

Get Stoked: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart “Young Adult Fiction”

You want a reminder of the things that you are looking for and excited about in life?

Listen to this song.

Smog “Rock Bottom Riser”

Two things I’d like to do before I die:

-buy a well worn acoustic guitar
-go scuba diving

Phoenix “Armistice”

Ar.mi.stice:

–noun a temporary suspension of hostilities by agreement of the warring parties; truce: World War I ended with the armistice of 1918.

I wanted to reclaim this band from a pretty wretched night that ended in ugliness (street fight) after seeing them in concert. This seemed like the perfect song to do it with.

Pulp “I Spy”

Getting revenge might be petty. But not if it is presented in a grand way.

Nada Surf “Treading Water”

I had a conversation this weekend with a friend of mine tracking the trajectories of our artistic lives and I think I came up with a pretty good fridge magnet.

“You can do whatever it is you want to do…its just might be on a smaller scale”

The idea being, that if we are setting out to write the great American novel, or paint a masterpiece or make the best film in the world, then we might not ever start the process because we are not ready yet. Fuck that noise. Do what you can with what you can.

I read Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” this weekend. It is a graphic novel autobiography covering her life growing up in a funeral home in rural Pennsylvania with a very severe and distant father. It also covers her discovery that she’s a lesbian, her father’s death and the revelation that he was a closeted homosexual. But for the sake of this post, the point I want to make is that her mother, although carrying the burden of this family and it’s problems on her shoulders, would STILL find time to act in local plays.