Festivus (for the rest of us)

Summer approaches, and that means summer music festivals. I’ve got several options to choose from this year. I can stay nearby for the return of the Monolith Music Festival at Red Rocks (which was a great success, for me anyway, in its inaugural year but has yet to announce a lineup for this year) or the new, well-intentioned but somewhat mish-mash Mile High Music Festival at DSG Park. If I feel like traveling (which seems likely, since Radiohead has decided not to play a solo show anywhere within 1,000 miles of Denver), there’s the pretty spectacular lineup of this year’s Lollapalooza in Chi-town.

But as fun as festivals are, they also have their drawbacks. Weather (hot or wet), overpriced food and beverages, and general music fatigue from watching 30 or 40 bands over 2 or 3 days can sometimes make festivals a trying experience, not to mention the high prices promotoers can charge for gathering so many artists in one place. So to avoid all that, I decided that this year, I’m flipping the script and putting together a summer music festival the way I want it. To start, I’ve worked with different concert promoters to spread the bands out so that this is truly a “summer” festival. None of this BS 3-day nonsense. This puppy lasts four months (from May to September). By spacing the artists out this way, I avoid music overload, but get the privilege of paying the ridiculous food and beer prices on multiple occasions, not to mention getting to see a good number of the more disgusting bathrooms in the Mile High City. Plus, as an added benefit, this setup lets me give Ticketmaster a lot more of my money. And trust me, there’s nothing I enjoy more than paying an extra 50% on top of the ticket price in “convenience fees,” “venue fees,” “sales tax,” and whatever other bullshit those greedy bastards have come up with so that their fat fucking pig of a CEO doesn’t miss out on his $12 million bonus check this year.

Aaaaaanyway... I’ll be announcing more acts as they come along, but so far, I’m pretty excited about my lineup. (Confirmed means I have tickets, unconfirmed means I’m still debating.)

April 28: The Raconteurs @ The Fillmore Auditorium (I’m considering this a pre-festival warmup show—Unconfirmed)
May 2: Elbow @ The Bluebird Theater (Confirmed)
May 16: Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s @ The Larimer Lounge (C)
May 20: Sea Wolf @ The Bluebird (U)
May 29: The Kooks @ The Ogden (U
June 2: The Roots @ The Fillmore (U)
June 3: R.E.M./Modest Mouse/The National @ Red Rocks (C)
June 5: Rush @ Red Rocks (U)
June 14: Drive-By Truckers @ Westword Music Showcase (U)
June 21: Robert Plant & Alison Krauss @ Red Rocks (U)
July 21/22: The Police/Elvis Costello @ Red Rocks (U)

So far, so good. Rock ’n’ roll will never die. It just gets more expensive.

Road Trip

So, after spending my last few days of work feeling like a graduating senior, I continued that analogy and did what every kid headed on to the next phase of their life does... ignored all my responsibilities and took off on a road trip. In this case, AB and I headed down to meet my brothers and their girlfriends at the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, TN. We arrived Thursday night around 8pm and left Sunday around 7pm, and in that amount of time saw at least part of the performances by all of these artists: Andrew Bird, Ben Folds, Nickel Creek, Oysterhead, Death Cab for Cutie, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (who brought out Stevie Nicks for a couple of songs), My Morning Jacket, Rusted Root, Beck, Radiohead, Abigail Washburn (with Béla Fleck), Soulive, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Son Volt, Matisyahu, and Béla Fleck again. I also managed to see the US-Italy travesty... I mean, game, on Saturday in a tent with 850 people. Highlights for me were Andrew Bird, Nickel Creek, and seeing Béla perform 3 times on Sunday. The lowlight was getting some kind of flu/food poisoning thing that took me out of commission for most of Saturday, including having to leave Radiohead's show about halfway through because I felt so crappy. To understate enormously, that sucked. Otherwise, the weather was hot, dry, and dusty, but I had a really good time. That many bands in three days is pretty amazing. I figured my tolerance for live music would run short pretty quickly, but it never did. Lots of good energy there, both in the crowd and coming from the bands. Also, lots and lots of hippies. Check out some photos from throughout the festival.

Now back to real life. Three days of packing, then I'm off to Denver.

SOUNDS
Song of the Traveling Daughter, Abigail Washburn
The Sparrow Quartet EP, Abigail Washburn
Get Behind Me Satan, The White Stripes
Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane

9 to 5

...must be a nice way to live. Busy, busy, busy lately. I went to Chicago this past weekend and took a bunch of pictures. Someday I might even get a chance to post them, but today is not that day. Back to the grind.

No Place Like Home

Flew to Maryland for a visit with the fam this weekend. Frederick is absolutely gorgeous this time of year. We walked around downtown after brunch on Sunday, and appropriately enough for Easter weekend, all the trees and flowers were in full bloom. For a town that I couldn't wait to leave when I was growing up, good old Fredneck has its moments. There's some youth and money pouring into downtown, and a lot of houses and buildings that I remember as looking pretty rough have been restored, with plenty of new plants and fresh paint to go with some interesting stores and cafes. Last night I had a beer on the patio of the local brewpub with my brother and his girlfriend, and realized there's a bit of a European feel now, which is kind of cool. Of course, there were also still pickup trucks driving by with ten rednecks crammed into the bed, so things haven't changed that much.

On Saturday, my dad and brothers and I went down to RFK Stadium to see United take on the Houston Dynamo. Despite some rather, um, unpretty play, DC managed to score twice and earn a victory. And with better finishing, young Freddy Adu could have easily had a hat trick. Instead, he hit the bar and went just wide twice. As my high school coach would have said, "Unlucky!" I did manage to get a few decent photos (see one above), although I'm figuring out that the autofocus on my camera is really touchy. See more slightly blurry shots from the match here.

IMAGES
Elizabethtown
WORDS
Tyrannosaur Canyon, Douglas Preston

Year-end, shmear-end...

So I thought about doing a 2005 wrap-up like I did last year, but to be honest, I'm kind of tired of year-end lists. Instead, here's a few things I covered at one point or another this year. Some of them were released in years prior to 2005, but they're all things that made my year enjoyable.

• sudoku
• going to England for the first time
• Bloc Party's Silent Alarm/Silent Alarm Remixed
• Sufjan Stevens's Illinois
• Danger Doom's The Mouse and the Mask (and all of MF Doom's music that I heard this year)
• Eric Johnson's Live from Austin, TX
• Matisyahu's Live at Stubb's
• Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc"
• Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek"
• Weezer's "Perfect Situation"
• Doves at the Vic Theater, Chicago
• the 2nd night of U2 at the Wachovia Center, Philadelphia
• Gift of Gab & Lateef/Mike Relm/Twilight Sentinels at the Patio, Indianapolis
• Kings of Leon at the Music Mill, Indianapolis
• discovering Last.fm
• Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line
• the last two minutes of Layer Cake
• the fact that Batman Begins was nothing like Joel Schumacher's Batman movies
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• Chuck Dugan is AWOL by Eric Chase Anderson
• Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold
• My Name is Earl
• Arrested Development, on TV and DVD
• the Freaks and Geeks DVDs
• the Spacecataz bonus feature on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volume Four DVDs
• Cartoon Network's Star Wars: Clone Wars series

London Day by Day

First off, my photos are posted at Shutterfly. I apologize if anyone tried to get in and ran up against pasword protection. That should be disabled now. Email me if you're having any problems. Now on to the travelogue.

This trip came about because Todd works for a major airline and is able to fly anywhere they go as long as there are empty seats on the flight. So he suggested we try to go to England for a soccer game, and I, never having been out of North America, thought this was a fantastic idea, since he can also bring friends for a very cheap price. So we decided to try for last weekend so that we could see the Fulham-Blackburn match and get to see several American players plus Ryan Nelsen, a Kiwi who used to play for DC United. My trip began on Thursday night:

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Thursday
Drive to Chicago. Arrive around 8:30 Central Time. Look at flights with Todd. There are 5 possible flights, 3 from O'Hare and 2 from Washington-Dulles. Based on flight loads, we decide to try for the Dulles flights. Am a little apprehensive, because we could potentially sit in Dulles for 10 hours and not make it to London. Sleep very fitfully. Toss and turn while imagining all the things that could go wrong. I hate being a Type-A.

Friday
Up at 5:00 CT. Leave for Midway at 5:50. The El station is freezing. Begin the "Day of Airports". Check in for flight to Dulles, which is a fairly easy process. Get on the flight, departing at 8:30 CT. Arrive at Dulles at 11:45 Eastern. Go to gate for first flight to London, which doesn't leave for over 6 hours. Terminal is dark, crowded, and under construction, so we take a tram to a different terminal. Eat lunch, play cards, read the manual for my new camera, and do sudoku puzzles until 5:00 when we head back to gate and register for the flight. Lots of nervous nail-biting ensues. Todd checks at desk several times. Things seem to be looking good, but when all the passengers have boarded and it's only us and 8 other standby passengers left, the woman at the desk says she won't be able to add us to the flight due to weight restrictions. Crap. This means another 3 hours of killing time in the hot crowded international terminal. After dinner, we head back to the gate and begin talking to a couple who had also tried to get on the first flight. The man is a pilot for Todd's airline and tells us that the weight restriction is due to a fire at a fuel depot in London which has raised fuel prices and caused the airlines to want to conserve as much as fuel as possible on flights to London. He tells us that the flight we couldn't get on went out with 30 empty seats. We begin to feel very negative about our chances for the second flight, which is a smaller plane. This leads to more nail-biting, stress, and adrenaline rushes, but when the plane is only halfway boarded, the woman at the desk calls our names. We're on! We're seated in business class. I sit next to a Simon Cowell look-alike who's apparently on the Atkins diet, since he refuses to touch anything containing carbs. I attempt to sleep for most of the flight, but again sleep fitfully, waking at every small bump of turbulence and imagining the plane falling 30,000 feet into the icy cold North Atlantic. I hate being a Type-A.

Saturday
Arrive in London at 9:50 Greenwich Mean Time and are whisked through Customs. Stop to withdraw pounds at an ATM and purchase a 3-day Tube card, and then we're off to Covent Garden and our hotel. As the announcements say, we "mind the gap" as we "alight" at Covent Garden station, where it's only a short walk to Seven Dials and our hotel, the Radisson Edwardian. Check in, dump our stuff, wash up, and then head out again. Lunch at the White Lion pub. I have sausage and mash and drink London Pride. Yum. Then back on the Tube for the 20-minute ride out to Fulham, followed by a 10-minute walk along the river to Craven Cottage, home of Fulham FC. We take in the atmosphere and squeeze our way into the club shop, then enter the stadium, drink a quick pint, and take our seats. The stands quickly fill in. Only two Americans are playing, Brian McBride for Fulham and Brad Friedel for Blackburn. No sign of Carlos Bocanegra or Ryan Nelsen. After a quiet first half, Fulham scores just before halftime, soon after halftime, and gives up a late goal. According the diehards next to us, this is typical of the season, as is the referee's horrific mistreatment of Fulham (which neither Todd or I have noticed). These same guys also teach us several colorful new phrases. After the game, we go down to field level to take some pictures and notice a group of kids and parents being escorted onto the field. We surreptitiously attach ourselves to the group and soon learn that the pitch is laid down on a base of sand which allows them to control blah blah blah. In between yawns, we notice the players jogging on the field for their post-game cooldown, and at that moment, Brian McBride passes by. Todd flags him down and we go over to chat. This is the second time we've met (not surprisingly, Brian doesn't remember), and he is just as classy this time. In fact, we think he was inviting us to Fulham's Wednesday match if we were still going to be in town. We talk a bit, snap a photo with him, and then let him finish his cooldown. Todd and I leave the stadium, stopping at another Fulham store before taking the Tube back to the hotel. We set out in search of a pub where we can see highlights from all the other matches of the day, but after a long search through Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, we end up at an American-style sports bar, where we're able to see the last 15 minutes of Manchester City-Birmingham City as well as the New England-Tampa Bay football game. We eat dinner, but the food and beer are somewhat disappointing, so we head back to the pub across the street from our hotel, The Crown. I drink something on tap called Bombardier. Not bad. After drinking, we go to the hotel and crash. My Type-A neuroses take the night off, and I fall asleep within moments of lying down.

Sunday
Have croissants and coffee at a French bakery on the circle. Best latte I've ever had, hands down. We set off for a day of sightseeing. Weather is cold, but bright sunshine. So much for London's famous rain and fog. Start by taking the Tube to St. Paul's where I try to get in touch with my mate Neil. Can't figure out the stupid English phone numbers. A recorded woman keeps telling me the number can't be recognized. Sorry, Jamo. Take pictures of St. Paul's. My new camera rocks. Walk down to the Thames and cross the Millennium Bridge. See Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the house from Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and the site of the Clink Prison. Cross back over the river on London Bridge and walk along the river side to the Tower of London. Take a walking tour guided by one of the Royal Yeomen. Take lots more pictures. Finish our tour around 2:00 and decide we're hungry. Take the Tube to The Blackfriar Pub. I have fish & chips and mushy peas and drink some kind of bitter whose name I forget. Am surprised at how much I like mushy peas. Interior decorations are terrific in this place. While we're inside, clouds roll in and the weather becomes more what you would expect from mid-December London. After eating, we head to Big Ben and Parliment. Take more pictures. Am really loving my camera now. Walk past Westminster Abbey, but it's not open on Sunday. Head back to hotel, pausing on the way to do a little shopping around Covent Garden. Then back on the Tube to the Tower of London again where we meet Leslie, our guide for London Walks' Jack the Ripper tour. She's cute and has a great Irish accent. Grrr. She takes us (and 30 other people) through the East End, stopping at several murder sites and giving us an insane amount of detail about the murders and the case. Very enjoyable. I'm surprised again by how many buildings from the time of the murders are still there, in basically their same form. The tour ends at the Ten Bells Pub, where apparently the Ripper stalked several of his victims. It's too crowded, so we set off in search of dinner. End up in the Spitalfields Market at a place called Giraffe. It's a cafe offering fairly healthy food and is apparently partnered with the Putumayo music label, so we had our first healthy meal of the weekend accompanied by a great soundtrack. I order a Coke, which comes in a bottle and somehow tastes different, which puzzles me until I look at the ingredients. Aha. No high fructose corn syrup in English Coke, only pure sugar. After dinner, we're wiped, so we head back to the hotel. Watch highlights of the Tottenham-Middlesbrough and Arsenal-Chelsea matches from that afternoon and some kind of crazy English talk/game-show with a surprisingly funny Robbie Williams as the guest. Type-A is still on vacation, and I crash again.

Monday
Back to the French bakery for breakfast. Second latte is just as good. Spend some more time in the shops around our hotel. Pick up some gifts and find lots of shoes and clothes I'd like, but stop myself from buying anything by mentally calculating the prices in US dollars. Nearly give myself a heart attack on several items. Check out of the hotel at 12:00 GMT and head to the Tube for our last ride to Heathrow. No problems with the flight this time, as we only wait five minutes for our boarding passes. We're in first class for this trip. Beginning to get spoiled. We take off about 4:00 GMT. Spread out in my spacious chair and watch Crash (excellent) and Bewitched (utter crap) on my personal movie system. Eat the delicious 5-course meal, then play rummy with Todd for most of the rest of the trip while watching the progress of the flight on the map available on our video screens. Land at O'Hare at 6:10 Central. Slowly make our way through Customs, hop on the El and meet Cynthia at the other end. Show her my pictures from the trip, then load up the car and head back to Indy. Arrive home at 12:30 Eastern. Have been gone exactly 4 days, 6 hours. Feels like a month. Wish I could go back (although maybe minus the day of sitting in the airport). I may be wiped, but it was totally worth it.
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So that's the trip. I should pause here to say Todd is The Man. I would never have been able to take this trip without him, and I owe him big time. I loved London, and despite what several people told me to expect, I didn't find it dirty at all. Certainly the Tube stations were much cleaner than the New York subway. All the English we interacted with were very polite and helpful, even the ones who weren't in the service industry. I loved that London has so much history and yet feels very young. I can't wait to go back sometime.

The 77-hour tour of London

I'm still recovering and will have more details tomorrow when I'm not so groggy, but suffice it to say that in just over three days, Todd and I managed to see one Premier League match, Big Ben, Parliament, the Tower of London, a bunch of famous bridges, St. Paul's Cathedral, Piccadilly Circus, the site of three Jack the Ripper murders, the house from Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and the inside of several pubs.

I also got to try out my new camera with great results, and hopefully will be able to post a link to a Shutterfly album tomorrow. For now, enjoy my Clark Griswold shot.

Killing time

Well, I resisted it for a long time, but I've finally been seduced by Sudoku's wily ways. If there's still anybody out there who's been living under a rock, Sudoku is a Japanese number puzzle somewhat like a crossword. As you can see in the image, it's a 9 x 9 square, divided into nine 3 x 3 squares. The object is to get each 3x3 square, each vertical column and each horizontal row to contain the numbers 1-9, used only once in each sequence. I know a lot of people who have doing these puzzles for a while, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to try it. I've never been much of a puzzle guy. But I went to Borders today looking for something to read on my upcoming flight to London, and the first thing inside the door was a display of various sudoku books, all on sale at 3 for the price of 2. So after playing around with a sample puzzle, I ended up leaving with three books. So far, I've done five puzzles today, and I've already bookmarked WebSudoku.com. I forsee a lot of my time getting eaten up by this game, but I don't mind it as much as say, playing XBox. At least this way I'm using my brain cells instead of killing them.

Breathtaking

My friends Nikki and Tom, being the adventuresome couple that they are (you may remember them as my hosts on our Alaskan Adventure back in August and September of '04), recently took a trip to Churchill, Canada to see polar bears in their natural habitat.

It sounds like an incredibly interesting trip, involving several days on a tundra buggy that sounds like it was like a moving camp bunk, but it led to some amazing photos by Tom. As I've mentioned before (and as anyone who's checked out the links on the right side of the page will know), Tom has his own website and is a rather accomplished nature and aerial photographer, but these polar bear photos are some of the most spectacular I've seen from him. But don't take my word for it. Take a look for yourself. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. I'm particularly in love with "Peace on Earth Vertical". While you're there, please take the time to check out some of his other albums as well.

Save some time for me

Busy, busy, busy. Between work, going to Chicago last weekend, and getting ready to host Thanksgiving, leisure time's been at a premium lately. I haven't even watched last night's extended Lost episode yet! However, I can't completely ignore pop culture. Here's what I've been occupied with lately:

Holiday movies. I feel like I've hardly seen any movies in the theater lately, mainly due to lack of interest in anything out there. I mean, I see more 50 Cent than I ever need to in the 20 minutes of MTV I watch each month. However, my moviegoing frequency is due for an upswing now that the holiday season has arrived. Harry Potter, Walk the Line, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang are just a few of the earliest group of movies on my list. Luckily, with 5 days of Thanksgiving vacation rapidly approaching, hopefully I'll get to catch a few of what seems to be a promising crop of holiday films. And with event pictures like King Kong and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe looming on the horizon, I have a feeling there will be plenty of reviews in my near future.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. OK, I admit it. I am way late to the party on this one. This is arguably the most influential comic of the last 25 years, andhere I am getting around to reading it 20 years after it was published. After hearing how great this book is for decades and reading Entertainment Weekly's recent article on the far-flung influence Watchmen has had on popular culture as a whole, I finally got around to checking the collected series out of the library. Well, I'm on board. Alan Moore is a god. It is worth every bit of hype it gets, and I haven't even finished it. Aside from setting the template for pretty much every superhero comic written since 1985, it's also a great story, and one of the first to really examine what drives a man or woman to put on a mask and risk having the crap kicked out of them every night. Much like Moore's equally excellent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, once I got around to reading Watchmen, I regretted having waited so long.

"Perfect Situation", Weezer. When I first picked up Weezer's latest, Make Believe, I was a little underwhelmed. It just seemed a little too bland and harmless. But lately, Weezer's made frequent appearances on my iPod, and it's led me to reconsider some of the hidden pleasures on the new disc. "Perfect Situation" happens to be one of them. There's something about this track that hits me the right way. And they made a great video featuring Elisha Cuthbert as the band's orginal lead singer. My only question is, what did No Doubt do to earn this not-so-subtle jab?

Star Wars Battlefront II for the XBox. And finally, the real reason my free time has been so scarce. This game managed to incorporate more strategy and depth while retaining all the "blast the stormtroopers, Ewoks, Jawas, and pretty much anything else that moves" of the original. Totally addictive.

Caaaable Guy!

It's amazing how much you can get done while waiting for the cable guy to arrive. Thanks to my DVR hard drive having an "unrecoverable write error", I've been sitting in my living room since 9:00 awaiting what will likely be a 5 minute visit. In that time, I've been able to pack for my weekend trip to Chicago, go through all my mail from the past week, pay my bills online, file a bunch of papers, clean my kitchen, carry on two email conversations, check in with work, and play a few rounds of Bionic Commando (one of the many games on the Capcom Classic Collection that I got for my birthday). Maybe I should be trapped in my apartment more often. Apparently, I'd get a lot more done.

Great. Well, at least I had a productive morning. The f@%#ing idiots at Bright House are telling me they can't get here because one street downtown is blocked off for the Veteran's Day parade. Glad I burned a vacation half-day for this. Morons.

The City of Brotherly Love meets the City of Blinding Lights

I'm off to Philly in the morning to visit my friend Andy and see back-to-back U2 concerts. This will be my first (and second) U2 shows, and I'm pretty fired up. I'm in the midst of listening to their entire catalog on shuffle, and that's only increasing my enthusiasm. I've heard they're leaning pretty heavily on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in the setlist, but throwing some older gems in there as well. And they've been changing the set from night to night, so we don't have to worry about seeing the same show twice. Should be a good time, and as always, a welcome excuse to get out of town for a few days.

The Washingtonian

Spent the weekend across the river from DC at my cousin Brian's wedding and visiting my friends Matt and Katie and their 10 month old son, Conor. It made me a little homesick to be back in the DC area. It really is beautiful at this time of year. Warm, but without the summer humidity. Great walking weather, and rather nice for a wedding as well, especially since the reception was held at a library along the banks of the Potomac.

But enough about all that. On to more important things. Like the fact that I got to watch my first NFL game in hi-def this weekend (and even better, the Redskins managed to pull their usual late-game choke but still won the game in OT). After just a few hours of HDTV, I've decided I gots to get me one of those things. You could see every blade of grass on the field, and the color was so real, I might as well have been sitting in FedEx Field. Fantastic.

Come on in. Don't be frightened.

For those of you just joining us, welcome to our live coverage of MLS Cup ’97 from RFK Stadium. I’ve decided to start a blog. I know a lot of people tend to tie their blogs to some kind of major event in their lives, but I’m doing mine as a way to let my family and friends keep up with my life, whether they live in Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, DC, Michigan, New York, or anywhere else around the globe.

Upcoming events that will be covered on this page include: my first attempt at coaching youth soccer, the ongoing saga of redesigning Indianapolis Monthly (the magazine that pays my bills), my current obsession with Will Ferrell’s impersonation of President Bush, and my upcoming week in Alaska. Enjoy.