My Hollywood Weekend

A few weeks back I left the dreary, hipster-loving and cynical enclave I like to call Seattle to visit my brother Bryan in West Hollywood. For a weekend, I lived the "L.A. lifestyle." We spent quite a bit of time in a recording studio tracking for a song that is going to be pitched to Keith Urban, we went out to eat for every meal, I listened to a guy my brother works with/for talk about writing a song for Lionel Ritchie's next record (he referred to him as "Lionel"), we watched an all-white reggae band with a lead singer who took his shirt off to reveal a massive Star of David necklace at the Whiskey A Go Go, and bumped into B.J. Novak. You know, the usual.

My brother is one of those people who doesn't seem too concerned with living life by the unspoken "rules." He says he's going to do something semi-ridiculous (at least to a "realist" like me) and then he usually does it. By the end of the weekend I felt like saying, You know, at 29 you aren't supposed to be an Executive VP of a company (Neoganda -- he's explained to me what they do but I still don't get it) and have a loft in the Hollywood Hills facing the Hollywood sign. Maybe he makes a ton of money or is in debt up to his eyeballs. Probably both. Nevertheless, I find his inner-drive inspiring and I'm proud of him.

One morning my brother woke me up and pointed down to the valley below. From my vantage point on the floor next to his bed I could see a massive plume of smoke rising from the giant Universal Studios complex. With a smile my brother said, "there's a fire at Universal Studios." I don't know if it was that I wasn't fully awake or the way that my brother said it, but I dismissed the fire as a film shoot for a movie, rolled over and went back to sleep. My brother woke me up again an hour later and showed me the current front-page story at CNN.com of the fire, which apparently was not the result of a film shoot but an out of control fire that was engulfing Universal Studios. The picture on the front page looked like it could have been taken from my brother's deck. Weird.

Another fun part of the trip for me was visiting the virtual vinyl-wonderland of Amoeba Records. The place is massive and disorienting but also includes the largest collection of new vinyl records that I have ever seen. It gave me the opportunity to get started on my annual Top 08 of 08, which I had begun to fear would be incomplete as we are now almost half-way through the year and I had not yet found any new music that had struck my fancy enough for me to recommend it to others. That all changed at Amoeba Records as I purchased Bonnie "Prince" Billy's latest, Lie Down in the Light. Stay tuned at the end of the year for a review if you wish.

To wet your appetite, I will close with a video parodying Kanye West's song, "Can't Tell Me Nothing" in which Bonnie "Prince" Billy participated (he's the skinny guy in the video). If you are familiar with his music, it makes a funny video that much funnier.