Not quite a quarter century

Just a quick post to say thanks to all who celebrated my birthday with me and made for a fun and memorable weekend! From Friday through Sunday, I saw many of my favorite people and basically indulged in more food and drink than any reasonable person should over the course of three days (But if not for your birthday, then when?). From Chocolate Donut Beer at Dr. Dremo's and the Taco Bell drive thru line at 2:30 AM, to an amazing feast and one too many margaritas at Cactus Cantina, to an obscene amount of food at the Georgia Brown's buffet/brunch, to finally, a wonderfully extravagant home-cooked meal by my Mom (and three, count 'em, three birthday cakes), it was all worth it to ring in my 24th year!

And as Auddie reminded me with her elaborate decoration of my bedroom, I'm still obviously a child at heart...

Thanks again to all my family and friends. I couldn't have asked for a better weekend.

A few more on my Flickr, and hopefully more to come soon...

Please Do Not Let Me Go

Yesterday, at long last, I finally broke my concert drought with an awesome experience that combined two of my most favorite things: Charlottesville and Ryan Adams.

I drove down in the early afternoon with Huan, Molly and Auddie (her second concert experience -- what a lucky gal) to enjoy some of the sights and sounds of my favorite little town. Despite the fact that many of my desired stops were closed on Sunday, we were still able to enjoy some delicious waffle fries from Maarten's and dessert from Arch's before heading to the downtown mall for the show.

Let me start off by saying that the Charlottesville Pavilion was everything I wanted it to be and more. This venue was being constructed while I was at UVA, but finally finished and opened for concerts about a year ago. It's such an assuming venue; one just strolls down the quaint downtown mall and suddenly comes upon it, this large white tent snugly wedged into a little corner at the end of the promenade.

It was a perfect venue, in that every seat in the house was a good one. Whether you wanted to kick back and sit up on the small lawn in the back, get inches from the stage, or mingle anywhere in between, the pavilion setup allowed for a clear view of the stage from any vantage point. I, in particular, like any venue that is equal opportunity -- that is, even short people like me can see everything on stage without straining their neck or pushing their way up.

The venue, combined with a cold beer and lovely evening summer weather, set the stage for a great night of music.

The show opened with a performance by Neal Casal, who, aside from being Ryan Adams' guitarist in the Cardinals, is also an established solo act worth hearing. Check out this old post from one of my oft-read music blogs for a great sample track, "You Don't See Me Crying," which was actually performed by Neal during Ryan's set with the Cardinals.

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals took the stage just before 8:30, and instead of doing their usual 2-set performance, they wound up playing straight through for over two hours. In what was mostly a mix of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, highlighted by an inspired version of "The End," sprinkled with other standouts -- "Trains" --> "Dear Chicago" and "To Be Young" with a slow-tempo intro -- Ryan seemed to be in great spirits, engaging the crowd with goofy banter and moving performance. (See full setlist here.) Catherine Popper, the bassist, added to the great stage presence of the band, at one point remarking, "I think some guy up front here is looking for his friend -- Has anyone seen 'Rock and Roll'??" I gotta say, I'm a bit jealous of her... the awesome harmonies she sings, her ability to work the brunette-with-blonde-streaks look and get away with it, and the simple fact that she's a badass rocker chick.

Personally speaking, I think I'd give a slight edge to the 9:30 club show I attended last year, for its intimacy and killer setlist, even if it did play like a "greatest hits." But for overall experience, this show was pretty incredible. Great venue, great town, and Ryan and his band were simply solid. And I couldn't have asked for a better view.

More from C'ville on my Flickr.

Cartoon Auddie

Yesterday, Auddie got two of her wisdom teeth out due to some dental explanation which I still don't fully understand. She's only 13, mind you, but when I remind myself how she's 13-going-on-30, it all makes perfect sense. So today I came home and exclaimed, "Haha! It looks like you got punched in the face!! You look like a cartoon!" I can only say these things because I remember after I got my teeth pulled, I was pretty much down for the count for a solid two weeks, and still swollen after three.

Auddie was playing along and helped me pull up a photo of the cartoon character she most resembled. It happened to be Sharon Spitz as Braceface, another random kids' sitcom that I hadn't ever seen, in which Alicia Silverstone provided the lead character's voice.

Anyway, here's a great photo of her chipmunked face. Please pardon the poor quality/weird pixelation.

=

Digging myself out of the Rut

For the past few months I'd found myself stuck in a music rut. It's when I have nothing new grabbing my attention and when nothing in the ol' iPod seems terribly appealing. I actually blame the iPod for this; the thousands of songs at my fingertips make me completely indecisive and also cuts into my attention span. I was once content to put a new album on repeat for weeks, but now am more likely to feel like a week of not reading music blogs will leave me far behind what's new or what artist or album I should be getting into next.

Will Sheff of Okkervil River, in a messageboard post that has been traveling the Web, very eloquently describes his feelings on file-sharing in similar terms. Essentially, the ease with which technology has allowed us to obtain music these days makes us all a little less invested in the very music we so eagerly seek. Below is an excerpt of Sheff's post; or you can see it in its entirety here.

The internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.

When I was a kid, I’d listen to the same records over and over and over again, as if I was under a spell. The record would end and I’d flip it over again, doing absolutely nothing, letting the music wash over me. My favorite record albums become like a totem for me, their big fat beautiful gatefolds worked as a shield against the loud, crashing, crushing world. I would have laid down my life and died in defense of a record like Tonight’s the Night or Astral Weeks. I felt that those records had, in some ways, saved my life. These days, with all the choice in the world, it’s hard for me find the attention span for a single album. I put my iPod on shuffle and skip impatiently to the next song before each one’s over. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

Because my work is the most important thing in the world to me, I sometimes feel uncomfortable about it existing freely in the digital Library of Babel, these songs that I worked so hard writing and revising and rehearsing and recording and mixing (and re-mixing) and mastering (and re-mastering) shucked off the album and thrown up on the internet in hissy and brittle low-resolution versions with no kind of sequence or order, mixed in with odd leaked tracks and some sub-par live versions. In a world overstuffed with stimuli and choking on information, I feel like a musical album should have a kind of purity and a kind of wholeness, that every aspect of an album – from the sequencing to the artwork even down to the typesetting – should feels labored over and loved, and that the finished product should feel like a gift.

Anyway, point is, I'm recommitting myself to enjoying the purity and wholeness of an album, and trying not to get so caught up in the Next Big Thing. That said, after a long hiatus, I just picked up a few new gems, which I'm trying to appreciate one by one with the resurgence of my Grado headphones.

I started with a run through of Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche, merely composed of "outtakes and extras from the Illinois album," but which comes together as gorgeous compilation that is as worthy as any studio album. Like Illinois, it's lengthy (21 tracks and more ridiculously long song titles), but worth listening to for three new versions of "Chicago," including an "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version," among other standout tracks -- "The Avalanche," complete with banjo, woodwinds, and harmonies, and "Pittsfield," a simple, quiet, guitar-vocal harmony ballad. And just for fun, there are tracks like "Adlai Stevenson" which sound like they could be high school band performances.

Here is the title track for your sampling pleasure:
Sufjan Stevens :: The Avalanche

Next on the roster: Thom Yorke's Eraser. His highly-anticipated solo effort (though he's uncomfortable with the solo term) is full of drum beats and electronica and is sure to please Radiohead fans between albums. So the Kid A Radiohead was never my favorite, but this has potential so far...

Tales from Jersey City and beyond

I'm back from my first "Business Trip" (boy, never thought I'd say that!) to Jersey City and New York and it was quite the journey. Here's what I came away with:

-It's officially time to make Pouy my legal middle name. I'd looked up the process once before but decided it was too much work once I saw scary legal words like "judge," "notorized," and "affidavit." (Although one of the steps that excited me was the "notice of petition to the public, meaning an advertisement in a local newspaper." How cool would that be?? My 15 minutes of fame in the Springfield Connection!) But after my drama with the airports and having to get pulled into a special security screening area by TSA after my ticket reservation read "Pouy" instead of my legal name, I decided I was over it! I figure if I'm really trying to be Pouy in all facets of my life, I should at least have a piece of ID that shows that, right?

-There is such thing as cab driver karma. On my inbound trip, I had probably the worst cab driver ever, who insisted on driving a steady 70 miles per hour the entire trip, windows down, cursing at every car and leaving me praying I would make it to the hotel alive. Granted, he did cut down what should be at least a 20 minute trip to about 12. On the way out, however, I had the nicest driver I've ever met. He was on the phone checking to see if my flight was on time, scanned the radio station for weather and airport updates, gave me the option of writing out my own receipt in case I felt like ripping off my company and pocketing some extra cash (I found out he was testing me to see whether I was an honest person -- I passed!), and was basically a ridiculously genuine and sincere human being (not to say that's out of the question for a cab driver, but...). It was a little over the top, but he even gave me this big schpeel about how when he's behind the wheel it's his passengers first, and he'd never go all road rage crazy with anyone in the car, because it's his job and someone else's life. Anyway, point is, I was glad I got into his car, and in the end he got a nice tip.

-I had what was yet another random "only in New York" moment/experience on Sunday as I watched the World Cup final with Laura. Right around the bend from Lo's apartment is a little French café that, in honor of the final, placed a large flat screen TV in front of its storefront on the sidewalk and set up benches and chairs for some loyal patrons. Hours later, as the game entered overtime and eventually the PKs, there were probably close to 100 people crowded around watching the game, blocking the streets (that sure got the Po-Po's attention) as if it were a completely normal thing. And to make things even more interesting, sitting center stage in a seat right in front of the TV was none other than Andrew McCarthy, popular '80s actor of "Pretty in Pink" and "Mannequin" (or, as I like to remember him, "Weekend at Bernie's") fame. Like I said, only in New York.

-Bloomberg looks like the coolest place to work, ever. Ok, at least on the east coast (damn you, Google!). For one of our field trips -- the other was to see the NASDAQ opening bell, which was exciting, but admittedly not nearly as cool as NYSE would have been -- we got to visit an employee at the Bloomberg offices to check out how they use our company's services and basically what they do with it. What we found out, aside from very valuable information about how our clients use our news, is that Bloomberg takes good care of its employees. The interior of building itself was a ridiculous show of modern excess, complete with spiral escalators, tropical fish tanks, and basically lots of glass. I decided I definitely would love to work there, if only for the awesome free snack/café bar with fresh fruit and other tasty treats at my fingertips.

-During one of our classic corporate training sessions, I definitely confirmed myself as a combination of a "rational" (type A!!!) and "harmonious" (everyone's happy, right??) type after discussing the four communication/personality styles that people possess. Just ask Auddie about some of the conversations I'll have with myself about my daily schedules: "Ok, I'll wake up at 8:15, ready by 8:50, out the door by 9, arriving at destination at 9:30, allow 20 minutes extra for possible traffic/parking, etc..." Yeah, I'm nutso. It's amazing I'm ever able to settle on a time to set my alarm clock in the morning.

-Jersey City ain't so bad. Ok, so the hotel didn't exactly have my name under the group reservation and I had to throw down my credit card to book myself a room, and after much drama was told by an employee that I was just "the talk of the hotel all afternoon" as they tried to figure out where they screwed up, but in the end, they still gave me a warm and delicious chocolate chip cookie that seemed to be fresh out of the oven even though it was simply pulled from some mysterious place under the counter. And at least the room I got had a great view, right? (see below: looks just like the sunrise by the river house from last week, doesn't it?) Really, just a stone's throw to Manhattan...

Additional photos on my Flickr.

Little Break

I'm off to NY/NJ for work for the next few days, so that's my legitimate excuse for no updates 'til I return. Thanks and g'day.

Weekends by the Water

Spending time by the water is definitely becoming one of my favorite ways to spend my summer weekends. For the long 4th of July weekend, I was lucky enough to spend time at a family friend's river house right outside Annapolis.

Despite battling families of jellyfish who had moved in for the summer, it was still an awesome time and we couldn't have asked for better weather.

Aside from all the fun on the dock, in the kayak, on the rafts and on the wave runner, we managed to stay fairly entertained indoors as well. Between Wimbledon, the U.S. Open (gasp, Women's Golf!), World Cup, DVDs, and a ridiculous amount of food (are you surprised?), it was a perfectly relaxing weekend.

Wimbledon: Good job, Americans. Way to represent. Um, let's face it, Roddick, you're on a slippery slope to mediocrity, and I blame it all on your breakup with Mandy Moore.

World Cup: What an amazing game (Ok, so really, it was an amazing two minutes) between Italy and Germany. I'm telling you, this "football" is crazy, you watch the whole 90 minutes just for that split second of greatness, but it's so worth it to see the unbelievable plays they make.

And while I totally love the swapping of the jerseys between teams at the end of the games (can you imagine that happening after say, the NBA finals, or a Yankees-Mets game?), I can't help but think how disgusting it must feel to wear another man's sweat. Ok, except maybe David Beckham's. (Hah!) For more on why the World Cup is great, read Bill Simmons' thoughts.

Movies: I'm almost embarassed about how much I can't stop quoting "The Pink Panther," but Steve Martin is undeniably hilarious, and starring opposite Beyoncé, he gives a truly priceless performance. Also, I feel like a terrible person for having laughed so much at Johnny Knoxville in "The Ringer," and finally, despite what I thought was an aversion to Peter Pan-themed movies, I really enjoyed "Finding Neverland" and reaffirmed my love for Johnny Depp in any role he chooses.

For more weekend photos, you know the drill.

Happy 4th of July!

Hope everyone had a nice weekend and July 4th.

More on my weekend will follow, but for now, here's a shot from tonight's fireworks festivities downtown, this time from in front of the White House (notice in the foreground the silhouette of the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Square). It was slightly more foggy, smoky, and obstructed compared to last year's experience, but still lovely. Happy 230th Birthday, America!

Happy Independence Day Weekend!

I'm off to another long weekend by the water, this time in Annapolis.

In anticipation of July 4th, here are a couple patriotic Washington shots...

The atrium at my office building (The Homer Building):

And the Willard Hotel, just down the street: