Gregg's Momentous Moments

It was kind of like a dream. You know the one where you're in a familiar location—the house you grew up in or a relative's home—and you know the place very well, except there are doors or hallways where they shouldn't be and the whole layout of the place turns into something unexpected.

We went to The Echo last night to see The Walkmen. That showed, paired with The Jesus and Mary Chain show last Thursday, was our substitute for the 100º+ heat and long lines for Coachella, happening out in the desert this weekend.

We tried to time it so we would arrive between the second opening band and The Walkmen. The line was short to get in, and once we did, it was like I was somewhere else. Instead of giving our tickets at the entrance and walking straight into the small open dancefloor near the tiny Echo stage, we swerved to the right, down a stairway I had never seen before, and emerged in this huge space with a ton more people than the normal. Two full-sized bars compared to the single bar upstairs. An actual sound booth for the technicians to work from rather than the DJ platform upstairs. And a much bigger stage than upstairs.

The Echoplex. I had heard rumors of its existence, but for the first time I was seeing it, as if in that dream I mentioned. A band came on and everyone gathered. They had the right number of musicians, but we didn't recognize their first song (and admittedly we haven't been Walkmen fans for very long). Is that them? I looked for clues, like the singer's voice, and how densely the crowd was packed, and things the singer said between songs. We finally decided it wasn't the Walkmen yet, though we really enjoyed the set.

When the Walkmen came on, there was no mistaking the lead singer's voice, which my girlfriend astutely pointed out is a mix of Bob Dylan and early Rod Stewart. We didn't expect them to look the way they did – generally clean cut, healthy and not dangerskinny, wearing Oxford shirts tucked in to jeans and sort of coming off a a displaced group of fraternity brothers.

And yet they rocked. My favorite line was apropos of the evening:

When I used to go out
I'd know everyone I saw
Now I go out alone
If I go out at all

It feels like that now that we're well older than the median age of people at these shows.

Not posting to a blog snowballs over time, because then you feel like you're under pressure to come up with something really good. So I'm expressly deciding that this post will not be good. But here's an update:

1. Got bogged down with work responsibilities and projects
2. Had some health problems
3. Got better, went on vacation to Costa Rica and Belize

I'm back now, and can't make promises on posting, but my Twitter account is a lot more active if you're interested.

Last night we met a friend for dinner at Malo. She brought along some friends that were visiting from New York. They brought a friend who has been in L.A. for 5 months. We did an informal around-the-table canvas of what everyone does: tv producer, publicist, internet developer, fund-raiser, etc. When we got to the gentleman on my left, the one who has been in L.A. for 5 months, he said, "Oh, I'm in a sitcom."

My brilliant girlfriend replied, "So you want to be an actor."

He was a bit taken aback, and said, "Well I thought I was one."

She said, "No honey, so many people come out to Los Angeles from New York and I can't tell you how many people I talk to who haven't made it."

At the end of the evening, coming home from the bar down the street, my girlfriend said, "I guess he actually is on a television show, because everyone at the bar knew his name and said hello. But I've never heard of this show, have you? The Class?"

"Isn't that the new sitcom started by the producers of Friends?" I ask.

"Whoa, that's major!"

Congrats - TIME Magazine voted you "Person of the Year"!  What's your acceptance speech?

I'm afraid there's been some kind of mistake. I didn't win it, you did.

(boo)

I'm not sure why our downtown-dwelling friend KC chose to have her birthday party 20 miles away in Westwood. There's no good way to get there from Los Feliz on a Friday night, so we met up with the party at the end of a Persian dinner, in time for the present derobing (she and her coworkers are the wardrobe crew for a well-known television show, so my poetic license when I say "derobing" instead of "unwrapping" is allowed, if only I hadn't had to explain it here.) We had brought a great gift, an amazing wine carafe my girlfriend found at the MOMA store. It came wrapped in orange and silver, and the hot pink envelope from the birthday card I picked out at Uncle Jer's really fit KC's aesthetic.

MOMA Vin Eau Carafe

Meanwhile, there were a lot of candles and picture frames among the offerings, so we were pleased with our contribution. We were also pleased at the sight of Doughboy's red velvet cakes as the waitstaff brought them to the table. Unfortunately, the party had decided to move on to the W hotel, and so we were recruited to cart the red velvet cakes there. (A dangerous thing, to be sure — we envisioned a scenario where we showed up with only two of the four small cakes left and cream cheese all over our faces.)

We drove to the W hotel, dropped the car at the valet ($20 + tip), and got interrogated by the doorman. We weren't on a list, and everything on Friday and Saturday night is by reservation or invitation only. We managed to talk our way in, but the guy said we weren't allowed to bring the red velvet cakes into the bar. So we had to leave them at the concierge, whose podium bore in brushed steel lettering the single word: "WHATEVER". How corporately rebellious.

We went into the bar area, where a waitress actually asked people to leave a little sofa lounge area that our party had reserved. I wondered momentarily what it must have taken to reserve a spot in this over-the-top bar. I soon found out that the party was required to purchase two bottles of liquor for at least $600.

I know. "What?!?!"

I quickly did the math, and even if we had full representation from the dinner party, each share was going to come out to $50, which meant a $100 bar tab for me and my girlfriend. To give you an idea of the pricing structure, a bottle of Stolichnaya (for which my dog is named), which normally retails in the $25-30 range, cost $300. If you wanted to get really crazy with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label, which normally can go for $160-175, you'll shell out a cool $750 at the W (clearly heavily discounted compared to the Stoli markup).

Our friend explained that there was another friend who was also celebrating her birthday and staying at the W, and that likely she and her friends would cover that tab. If we didn't want in, we could go and order drinks at the bar. We were happy to take that option. We asked if she would like a drink, and she ordered champagne. That, a glass of truly awful Cabernet for me, and my girlfriend's "Blueberry Breeze" martini, cost $42, or roughly the price of our dinner and two glasses of wine before the festivities. And I think the bartendress was stoned.

In the plus column for the evening, I got to meet KC's boyfriend for the first time, and we had a conversation about his experiences in the ER at USC County hospital. It was somewhat unnerving to listen to listen to him casually talk about intubating a man with severe AIDS-complicated pneumonia and thinking, "Bye, do you know you've got a 5% chance of having this tube taken out of you while you're alive?" Eesh. He also talked about his 2 years in the Peace Corps in Honduras. I told him the closest experience I'd had to Honduras was a bad neighborhood in Alhambra.

Years ago, I managed to score tickets to a surprise Beck show at The Knitting Factory in Hollywood. It was a great show (Elliott Smith walked right past my girlfriend — that's how long ago it was). We figured that was the last time we would see Beck at such a small venue. This was confirmed a year or two later when we saw him at the Universal Amphitheatre from the nosebleed section.

Well, let it never be said that Beck has forgotten his 'hood. He played a show last night to a couple hundred people at The Echo in Echo Park (3 blocks from my old apartment). My girlfriend managed to get two tickets via our friend the browser Reload button at the Ticketweb site (even better: no money to Ticketmaster). We got there early enough that we were able to walk right up to the stage. How close were we? This was taken from my cameraphone:

Bottles and cans, clap your hands

We took a walk through our neighborhood Sunday afternoon, and as we were making our way home, my girlfriend suggested we detour down a little-traveled street parallel to ours. We were approaching a house with a fence made of vertical bars around its perimeter when we saw a little dog running toward the corner closest to us. It started barking in a hoarse, pipsqueak voice, running from point to point along the fence, clearly rather put out by our presence.

We laughed a little. We both love dogs and comment on whichever ones we see when we're out. This one was some kind of bizarre mix, like a Yorkshire terrier crossed with a poodle or Brussels Griffon. It was really small—note more than eight pounds—and had curly hair that got in the way of its eyes. The little guy was a strange-looking dog, so we continued to laugh a little.

As we were passing by the fence, my girlfriend said to him, "Oh, you're so cranky!"

He redoubled his efforts, bounding around the front yard, barking up a storm, ricocheting off the fence and generally being pissed off. As we got toward the center of the fence, we were at our closest proximity to him. This infuriated him, and he turned to spin up another furious protest...and ran through what looked like a severely trimmed back, possibly dead rose bush. His barks turned to screams as a branch broke off and stuck to him.

Our smiles immediately dropped. He was yelping and still running around the yard, stuck between a V of branches with thorns on them. "Oh my god," my girlfriend said.

I tried to beckon the little dog over to the fence so I could try to remove the branch, but he wasn't having any of it. He was utterly panicked. We looked to see if anyone inside the house was coming out. Nothing. The screams were loud enough to start drawing the attention of the neighbors. We looked around and shrugged our shoulders, and I thought I was going to have to try to scale the fence to help the little dog. He ran around the corner of the house, still screaming bloody murder, and then it stopped.

"I guess someone in the house got him?" my girlfriend said, I think trying to convince us both.

"I hope he's not dead," I said.

We walked on, unable to really do anything about the situation. By the end of the block we were already chuckling about it, but we still felt bad.

Windows, Mac, Linux - What's your preference and why?
Submitted by ramblingsbymark.

I've used a Mac since my dad brought the little beige 128K Mac home in 1984. I used to go with him to Mac User Group meetings at UCSD, and fall asleep until the very end where they demoed shareware games.

I strayed around 2000 and bought a Windows laptop. Then I installed Linux on my old PowerMac. I hated both. When Mac OS X came out, I knew I had found home again.

The two key questions I asked my girlfriend on our first date were: 1) dogs or cats, and 2) Mac or Windows.

She answered both correctly, dogs and Mac. From there on, the only religious debates we've had have been actual religious debates.

No, not Vox. And no, not Trott. [1]

Voxtrot. As in that hip new brit pop band out of Austin, TX that sounds like Belle and Sebastian, The Smiths, and every other hugely adored indie band you can think of.

We bought tickets the day of, and fuck you very much Ticketmaster. Our $12 tickets each had $9.50 added in service charges. What, did you send an individual messenger to deliver each ticket to the Troubadour box office?

The show itself was quite good. We arrived while the band was just coming on. The place was packed, with everyone looking at everyone else and thinking, "I didn't realize this many people knew about them."

Their songwriting is excellent. Their showmanship will come in time. Lead singer Ramesh Srivastava has a great voice, though it lacks some polish and subtlety, he's got a good indie pop range. Really, the only problem I had was with Ramesh's exuberance. He's like the president of the student body, gangly arms gesticulating wildly during a pep rally for his band. You can tell he's smart. But compare him with Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian or with Morrissey, and there's a lack of restraint. He's smart, but doesn't come off as clever, because he's literally spewing everything he can think of in between songs.

Maybe enthusiasm is the new cool, and I'm just getting old. I just doubt that Morrissey ever announced the address of an after party during any of his sets.

[1] Dave gets credit for putting 2 + 2 together.

They originally billed it as a wine tasting, but by the time we arrived at Cobras and Matadors just a few blocks from our house last night, it had been reworded as a Wine Pairing. This was their first event,  basically a prix fixe menu of some of their best tapas served with Spanish wines of their recommendation. It wasn't as geared toward wine tasting as the events we've attended at Silver Lake Wine (no anecdotal coverage of the wines themselves), and wasn't as scholarly a review as those we've experienced at the Irregular Wine Tasting at The Echo. It was really about the food:

• Asparagus and goat cheese croquettas (fried...yum!)
• Pork tenderloin with charred apples
• Bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese and almonds
• Apple and cinnamon bread pudding with vanilla bean ice cream

Each course was served with something just shy of a full glass of wine, except for the entrée, which came with two glasses. The pairings did a lot to highlight the food. And at $29 a head, it ended up being a really good deal (we've easily dropped twice that at a regular dinner there, for less food and drink.) Recommended! (Just don't eat lunch beforehand.)