my friend leo dicaprio wrote me a letter…

asking me to help save the polar bears.

my mom forwarded it to me and wrote “oooohh… leo!” on the envelope. he asked me to sign a citizen’s petition, and to include twenty dollars in it (‘can you give $20 to throw polar bears a lifeline?’). sorry, i’m a college student, which means i don’t have twenty dollars to throw myself a lifeline.

keep in touch, leo.

jenny lewis & the watson twins – rabbit fur coat.mp3
animal collective – did you hear the words.mp3

everyone. everything. everywhere. ends.

i finally finished watching all five seasons of ’six feet under.’

for those who haven’t watched it, i would highly recommend that you rent it / become obsessed with it immediately. this show, very quietly, speaks volumes about death, relationships, youth, family and communication. i was seriously weeping by the time i got to the last episode because i was so emotionally invested in all of the characters and felt heartbroken when they were hurting and overjoyed when things went right for them. often times when i watch tv shows, i remind myself to be conscious of the actors acting, but in ’six feet under’ i just lose myself in it and it’s hard to imagine that these characters i feel like i know so well are just actors acting. alan ball, who produced ‘american beauty,’ also created and wrote most of this show, so if you know anything about him, you know that the writing is crazy and oft-inappropriate, but absolutely brilliant and real.

here are some songs that have appeared on the show:

arcde fire – cold wind.mp3
imogen heap – lonely little petunia.mp3
death cab for cutie – transatlanticism.mp3
sia – breathe me.mp3

i’m very sad.

one of the few good men left in hollywood died.

he was a brilliant actor dedicated to his craft, and a philanthropist who deeply cared about making the world a better place.

rest in peace, paul newman.

paul newman – plastic jesus.mp3

yesterday was a very good day.

look what i got!

a book of leonard cohen’s poetry! paige took me to half-price books, and true to form, i couldn’t resist buying something even though i bought eleven books from another hpb earlier in the day. it was six dollars, which is more than i would ever allow myself to spend at hpb, but it was leonard, so i had to.

leonard cohen – so long, marianne.mp3

new jenny lewis album! i love her so much that i actually bought it… it’s the first cd i’ve paid for in over a year. and it was well worth it: she duets with elvis costello on “carpetbaggers” and with chris robinson on “the next messiah,” and zooey deschanel sings backup on a handful of songs. and of course jenny is amazing. it’s a departure from ‘rabbit fur coat’… it’s obviously sans the watson twins, but it’s also a little grittier alt-country in parts, with a few beautiful heart-wrenching ballad-esque songs weaved in. basically, i dig it.

jenny lewis – jack killed mom.mp3
jenny lewis – godspeed.mp3
jenny lewis – the next messiah.mp3

kray-zay.

oh. my. goodness.

last night was utter madness. and i loved it! i attended one of the best (and craziest) shows i’ve ever been to.

SSION

gaaaah, so amazing! paige and i were going to skip the opening act since we were mainly there to see tilly & the wall, but i’m so glad we didn’t. the fellas had their faces painted as they do in the above picture, and the lead singer’s fu-manchu was beyond sexy. he came out wearing high-waisted, skin-tight black pants and a leopard print sleeveless shirt and a leather jacket that spelled out “boy” on the back. their songs were so hilarious and yet danceable at the same time, and they had a projector screen set up that played some fantastic visuals. the lead singer was a riot: at one point he was screaming and then spit a little and drooled all over his microphone, and a few songs later, he said to the crowd “take some pictures or something… i know you guys have cameras!” love it.
(ps. the pronunciation of ssion is “shun,” like a suffix. kind of confused me for a second.)

ssion – bullshit.mp3
ssion – warm glove.mp3
ssion – street jizz.mp3

TILLY & THE WALL

amazing, as always. when they were setting up, neely passed out candy to the people in the front row, and threw out a bunch of blown-up balloons into the crowd to keep us all entertained. so considerate. the guys came out in long wigs, and the girls were dressed in wild clothes as usual. jamie presnall’s tapping was impeccable, and i noticed that she cut all her hair off. they played a lot of songs from the new album, and between every song, derek presnall would yell “seaaaaaaaatle!” paige and i danced so hard… we were both drenched in sweat afterwards. when they were done playing, i went to their merch booth to buy a poster, and i was gushing to the merch guy how much i loved tilly & the wall, and how i danced so hard that people around me probably thought i was on drugs. his response? “fuck ‘em.” exactly.

tilly & the wall – dust me off.mp3
tilly & the wall – poor man’s ice cream.mp3
tilly & the wall – nights of the living dead.mp3

CSS

by the time css went on, paige and i were so dehydrated that we felt like we were going to pass out any minute, but we did stay for the first three songs… and luckily for me, they were my three favorite css songs. i’ve see some wild photos of the lead singer, lovefoxxx, in spin magazine, so i really wanted to see what kind of crazy get-up she would be wearing. when css came on, lovefoxxx bounded onto the stage in a giant hooded coat that looked like it was made of shiny metallic confetti. it made her look like a giant bear. she pulled her hood off when she started singing, and she had a gorgeous pseudo-beehive that i was very jealous of, and from the distance i was standing at, she looked like a brazilian maggie gyllenhal. after the first song, lovefoxx shed the bear coat and emerged wearing a sparkly unitard with a sash of huge colorful flowers. she was so adorable.

css – jager yoga.mp3
css – meeting paris hilton.mp3
css – this month, day 10.mp3

hrmph.

“burn after reading” was kind of a let down. it started out really slow, and all of the funniest parts were put in the trailers. not a bad movie, but not the coen brothers’ best work.

although, brad pitt was pretty hilarious.

he makes a decent movie every once in a while.

lots of good previews though! i’m very excited to see the oliver stone film on george w. bush, aptly entitled “w.” (and the tagline is “a life misunderestimated”… brilliant!), and the harvey milk biopic, inconspicuously titled “milk,” with sean penn as the title character. with gus van sant as director, you can’t go wrong.

ps. watched john mccain on “the view”… it was almost painful. those ladies were merciless, especially bawbwa wa-wa. they basically ripped him a new asshole.

!!!

my favorite redhead is putting out a new album!

ms. jenny lewis is releasing acid tongue on september 23rd, and then going on tour… and she’s playing with conor oberst and the mystic river band in seattle, and i already have tickets! best news of my life.

i downloaded a couple of her new songs and they are AMAZING. she does a duet with elvis costello on a song called “carpetbaggers,” and i remember her playing it when i saw her in 2005 after her first album came out… such beautiful music.

jenny lewis – carpetbaggers.mp3

viva la jenny!

what’s love got to do with it?

love is a gas. marriage for love is even more ridiculous.

think about this: the u.s., obviously being one of the most powerful and non-conformist countries in the world (in comparison to other countries whose citizens drive on the left side of the road and use the metric system), is one of the few countries that holds this cultural ideal of marrying for love. i guess this concept has become more popular in the last century or so among allegedly “civilised” countries, but there are a lot of cultures that still have arranged marriages today; and it wasn’t so long ago that marriages in the u.s. were arranged for economic and social gain. what was wrong with this system? nothing, in my opinion.

i think this shift goes along with the very american ideal of individualism, of feeling like you have the freedom to make decisions for yourself and feeling empowered by that. arranged marriages are strategic and are meant to benefit both families involved; it’s meant to be a partnership, though not necessarily a romantic one, between the man and woman to provide both with something that’s necessary/desirable to them: financial stability and support for the woman, and a way to carry on the family name by creating offspring for the man. everybody wins.

love, in the words of pat benatar, is a battlefield. love is so fleeting and entirely situational; even the lexicon surrounding it points to its instability: if one can “fall in love,” isn’t it just as easy to “fall out of love”? i think so. i don’t think marriage requires both parties to be in love; i think it just requires mutual respect and appreciation. and don’t you think it’s entirely likely that, even if you didn’t start with them, that some kind of affectionate feeling resembling love would grow in you toward the woman who bore your children or the man who keeps you and your children fed and clothed and monetarily sound? i’ve often heard it said of the british court that they marry the person they’re supposed to, and in private they sleep with the person they love. i’m not saying that this is the way to go about it or that i think infidelity is okay; rather, marriage is strictly nominal for these people, as opposed to americans who choose their spouses based on “love,” and a partial function of marriage being to proclaim that “love” to other people. interestingly enough, half of the marriages in the u.s. end in divorce… coincidence?

crush of the week, year, millenium, etc.

i don’t think i could be any more smitten with keith olbermann. he’s smart, he’s sassy, his penchant for purple ties always leaves him looking impeccably dressed; in other words, he’s perfect for me. he may be the same age as my father, but i was so ready to lay the smackdown on msnbc in the form of a very nasty e-mail when i read that neither he nor chris matthews were going to be anchoring the presidential debates. my next line of action was going to be to mass-produce t-shirts emblazoned with his handsome face and the words “free olbermann!”, but then i read on msnbc.com that he was okay with this decision, and that quelled my anger a little. i will fight anyone for you, keith… ANYONE!

it was a banner night in television for this lady tonight: keith interviewed obama, rachel maddow’s new show premiered, and my guiltiest of guilty pleasures, ‘the hills’, turned out to be a big lauren-audrina-cryfest. and i got to watch all of this over the sound of my mom drilling holes in our window frames to put up new blinds. excellent. i had to raise my voice a couple times to tell her that no drilling could take place while keith was talking.

ps. my dad was watching ‘countdown’ with me, and a commercial came on for chesapeake, the natural gas company, and i made fun of the guy on the commercial because his name was aubrey. my dad hadn’t been paying attention to the commercial up until this point, and he asked me if the guy’s last name was mcclendon; aubrey came back on the screen, and my usually mild-mannered father yells at the tv “that’s the owner of the seattle sonics that made them move to oklahoma!” and then flips him the double bird. my mother was appalled, and i have never been prouder.

i never liked her until i read this.

“I believe John McCain chose Gov. Palin because he truly believes that women who supported Hillary — an experienced, brilliant, life-long public servant — would vote for him because his Vice President has two x chromosomes. McCain’s selection of Governor Palin is a transparent and irresponsible decision all in the name of trying to win this election. John McCain has served this country. No one in this election is denying him that. But his selection of Governor Palin has demonstrated that he is willing to put his desperation to win this election above the welfare of the American people.” – Barbara Streisand

i think it’s safe to say that babs and i can be friends now.