Hobby Watch 2010

(Is this thing on? Hello? ... Okay, it's been a while since we posted here. Let's kick off the cobwebs...)

We didn't really have time for hobbies in 2009. It sounds almost sad in saying it, but been adjusting to life in a new city, making new friends, getting used to new jobs, and, of course, wedding planning, there just wasn't room for us to steadily pursue hobbies together. We had some favorite activities (see below for more on one such examples) and favorite places to go, but nothing that fully advances to the scale of hobby.

2010 should, in theory, be different. We've both gotten to know and love this city; we've made some wonderful friends; the wedding planning books are packed away and ready to be given to another bride-to-be. Will is pretty well adjusted to his job, although Diana's on a new project (and that's a good thing). Though this quasi-mythical free time has yet to truly manifest itself through the first two months of 2010 ... well, we can dream can't we?

So, we find ourselves in the somewhat strange but not at all unpleasant position of being able to pick out some new hobbies: things that we can do together in our still somewhat new (okay, we just rolled 500 days last week) hometown whenever we have few free hours strung together. Thus far, we've had two main candidates emerge:

• Guitar. Will gets the credit / blame for this one; for Diana's birthday, he bought her a lovely acoustic/electric guitar. Diana returned the favor two weeks later, getting Will a classical guitar for Valentine's Day. We're looking forward to learning together.
  
  
• Racquetball. The credit for this one goes to Diana. Our local gym (which, somewhat bizarrely, is on Hollywood Blvd about two blocks away from Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the Kodak Theatre) has four courts, and we had a pretty good streak going of getting in ~5 games a week. For those of you keeping track at home, Diana is currently ahead in the standings, with a record of something like 7-4.
  

Depending on one's point of view, we're either dangerously or tantalizingly close to adding a third potential hobby here: salsa dancing. We ended up going on consecutive weekends surrounding Diana's birthday. We'll see how that pans out. To switch from the first person plural to the first person singular now, I (Will, in case you hadn't guessed) [Editor's Note: Hey, I also help ;) I am proof reading for us... ] want to do my geek out thing and examine what I suppose could be considered my leading hobby of 2009 (despite the argument above): reading. I probably read more books for fun in 2009 then I have at any point since high school, thanks largely to three factors: too much time on airplanes, a natural bedtime about one hour later than Diana's, and my Kindle. Yes, I do find that I read both faster and more on the Kindle--I'm not sure entirely why, but my best guess chalks it up to preventing eye fatigue by changing font sizes. Being a geek, I kept a log of everything I read last year. All told, I made it through 32 books cover to cover last year (or 31, if you are inherently biased against book-length graphic novels). Some fun stats on those books:

• 19 were Fiction, 13 were Non-Fiction
  
• 28 were books I was reading for the first time, while only four were re-reads
  
• 26 were eBooks (Kindle), 5 were physical books, and 1 (1776) was an unabridged audio book
  
• The average year of first publication was ~1845 (mean average) or 2005 (median and mode averages)
  
• Authors with multiple appearances: Neil Gaiman, Chuck Klosterman, David Foster Wallace, China Mieville
  

I won't subject you all to reviews of each one of these books, but I will call out my three favorites:

3. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks (2006). There is no way on Earth I could have expected this book to be so good. It was supposed to be a guilty pleasure of an airplane read. Kudos to you, Mr. Brooks! Not bad from Mel Brooks's son.

2. No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (2005). This one was a bit more predictable; the Coen Brothers film adaptation blew me away. The book is absolutely worth reading. The character of Ed Tom Bell (played extraordinarily well by Tommy Lee Jones in the film--but the film character is substantially different) rocks my world.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005). I liked the film Everything is Illuminated a good deal, but was still caught off guard by this one. Of course, I was reading this in the days leading up to our wedding, so maybe I was just in a sappy, emotional mood. But damn if Mr. Foer didn't get me emotionally engaged.

And lastly, just for good measure, I'll note that although neither of them cracked my top three for the year, my top two non-fiction books of the year were probably Killing Yourself to Live, by Chuck Klosterman (2005) -- probably the World War Z of my non-fiction list -- and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (2006), though something by David Foster Wallace would easily top both of those if I'd read a full book of his non-fiction.

Video Interlude: Sea Urchin

The weekend before last, Chhay--one of Will's college roommates--paid us a visit here in Los Angeles. He has cousins down in Orange County, and added an extra day on to his trip to come up a see us.

In addition to some of the standard LA activities, we went with Chhay down to the Redondo Beach Pier to meet one of Chhay's cousins along with his wife and daughter. It was our first time there, and we're really glad we went! We had some nice food, enjoyed a fun boat ride, and got to see some sea lions.

There was also a bit of a culinary adventure... captured on Will's cell phone for your viewing enjoyment!

Catching Up: Another Concert, Las Vegas

We haven't had a chance to update this blog in quite some time, but we have been up to some pretty exciting things.

Two weeks ago, Diana and I went to another concert--but believe it or not, this one wasn't at Largo. Instead, we went out to the El Rey theatre on Wilshire, just a few blocks away from our gym, the La Brea Tar Pits, and LACMA.


The evening's entertainment? The Squirrel Nut Zippers. But actually, the opening band was just as cool. We'd never heard of them, but that didn't stop us from really enjoying the Fishtank Ensemble--a strange, "cross pollinated gypsy" band. Yeah, that's right.


A strange mix of flamenco, Romanian folk, jazz, and ... probably about ten other things I couldn't name. My best way to describe them would be Django Reinhart meets Gogol Bordello. Definitely a lot of fun--check them out.

The main act was the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Some videos--taken by someone else, but at that night's show:

Put a Lid On It


Good Enough for Grandad

The set list for the show was just about perfect. From beginning to end, they played essentially every song I could want--and pretty much none of the songs I don't particularly like. Hot jazz, calypso, blues, American roots music--it was a touch of everything. They played only one song from their final album, but that one confirmed my suspicion that that could have been a good album if produced differently--some of the material was pretty good. Diana and I are both enormous fans of Katherine Whalen's voice, and I, at least, was a bit disappointed by her performance--but that was quite possibly a symptom of my unrealistic expectations.

So, we kicked the week off with the Zippers, and ended it with ZERO-G. Diana and I both drove up to Las Vegas for a half-day training course for coaches on ZERO-G, the parabolic flight company. We're both really looking forward to becoming full-fledged coaches sometime soon! More on that as we hear it--but we're both in the corps now, and that's the key first step.

We didn't have time to do too much in Vegas--we were there for work, after all--but we certainly did have a little fun. The highlight? Dinner at Spago. Oh yeah, and this:

Further Evidence

A little deeper investigation into the Phil-as-Violinist issue.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of Phil, looking like a jaunty pirate, and the LA Chamber Orchestra's violinist. Judge for yourself!

Bizarro Phil?

So, Diana's only met Philip -- the infamous author-cum-teacher -- once, whereas I've spent approximately a billion hours with him. However, she also has a much better memory for how people look than I do. So, I don't know, should I believe her when she says that the guy in this giant billboard looks just like Phil?

Cinematic Geography of LA

As we adjust to and learn to love our new hometown, I'm still amazed by the extent to which LA really is a movie town. I certainly expected to have a movie culture--after all, we live just outside of Hollywood--but I was not prepared for the way that the movie industry and that the love of film has permeated the very fabric of the city. It's amazing how many people I know are or have been in the business--nothing like figuring out a co-worker was in a 1990s sitcom or realizing that seemingly everyone here is a card-carrying SAG member. It was really driven home when we went to the gym last night during what is normally a prime gym time--but which happened to be during the Oscars ceremony yesterday--and found it a complete ghost town.

The flips side is to start recognizing the city itself as a character in movies. That happened for the first time last week, when we were watching the more recent "The Italian Job" remake and spotted several locations just within a few blocks of our house.

With that in mind, I present to you these two short YouTube clips about LA appearing in its own movies:

Back at Largo: Watkins Family

Diana and I made it back to Largo last night for our second trip. The night's entertainment? The Watkins Family Hour (apologies for the MySpace Link--ugh!). For the Pomerantzes in our reading audience, I'll point out that this is not the Watkins you are thinking of: rather, this would be Sean and Sara Watkins of the band Nickel Creek. With Nickel Creek on hiatus, the band members are all kind of doing their own thing--and lucky for us, the Watkins siblings must live here in LA, as they seem to play every week or so, usually at Largo.

I had the chance to see Nickel Creek as a whole once (at Bonnaroo 2006), and it was quite possibly the best show I've ever seen. The band has a great dynamic--and it should, given that it features a brother/sister pair and their childhood friend. Chris Thile, the band leader, is an absolute phenom on the mandolin. If I recall correctly, the Watkins's dad joined them on stand-up bass for a portion of the show, and danced a little jig. And as if that weren't enough, they did a totally awesome cover of an absolutely wonderful pop song most famously recorded by one Britney Spears (this isn't my video, but I must have been standing about 10 feet away from the person who did film it):

Don't hate on "Toxic." Britney or no Britney, that's just a great song.

Anyway, the Watkins Family Hour show was a lot of fun, though it didn't live up to either the Nickel Creek show or the Welch / Rawlings set we'd seen two weeks earlier. A few highlights:

• The show was billed as the "Watkins Family Hour with Special Guests". The guests turned out to be Glen Phillips (formerly of Toad the Wet Sprocket) and ... Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. What are the chances? The Welch/Rawlings part of the show was our favorite if for no other reason than it was great to see them playing the lighter, sillier stuff after a fairly somber set of their own.
  
• At some point after they introduced a song, there was a silent pause, and I yelled a supporting "Woo!" Sara then muttered something that I'm pretty sure was a Big Lebowski quote ("No, [like I said,] Woo peed on my rug!"). Awesome.
  
  
• Sean was sick, so only sang on one song, which was disappointing. The one song was pretty fun--a very short ditty called "Hello, Goodbye"--not the Beatles song. From a different performance:

• At some point, Gillian came out to inform Sean and Sara that she and David were tap dancing back stage.
  
  
• They ended the main set with a really fun version of "Hot Corn, Cold Corn"--just a fun ol' country bumpkin song.
  
  
• They ended the encore with probably my favorite song of the night, a cover of John Hartford's "Long Hot Summer Day." Just a great rendition of a really nice peice of music, and show's off the nicest parts of Sara's voice. I wish I had a recording with the full band (including Welch and Rawlings), but here's a good recording of just Sara:

All in all, a solid show. No very good videos of the Watkins Family Hour themselves on YouTube--this is the best I could find:

LA Experiences: Arclight and Largo

Although we've lived in Los Angeles for several months now, we really haven't spent much time out and about, doing "LA" kind of things. At first, we were focused on moving in; then there was a lot of travel; then there was recovering from the travel, et cetera. Our big chance to get out and start to explore the town was over the holiday / New Year's season--and while we did indeed see a good chunk of the town, getting sick really put a damper on those plans.

So starting this week, we finally started checking some things off on our "explore LA" list.

Since I started coming to LA for business, I've wanted to catch a concert at Largo. I first heard about it as sort of an artists' hang-out frequented by Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, and a number of others musicians like--I think I was reading about Fiona when I first heard the name. Evidently, Fiona Apple--who is notoriously uncomfortable on tour, will spontaneously take to the stage at Largo every now and again during Brion's regularly scheduled Friday sessions. But I never was able to get up there while on business, and even though Diana and I live fairly close by, we hadn't found the time to get there since making the move out here.


Well, we finally made it there on Thursday. We were there to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, the alt.country musicians who found some popular celebrity after Gillian was included on on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

Largo itself was a great venue. As I mentioned, it's quite close to our house. We met up after work and drove on over there in the rain (Southern California has, evidently, forgotten how to be Southern California, at least weather-wise). Largo is (now--it relocated a short while ago) housed in an old theatre called the Coronet, and definitely has that theatre-style set up, as you can see in the photo above. The audience members are seated in old wooden chairs, starting almost right at the foot of the stage. Whoever set up the audio did a fantastic job--the mics were perfectly placed, and you could hear every sound with crystal clarity.


The show itself was great, too. I'd never seen Welch and Rawlings before, at least not live and in person, but it was clear even to a first-timer that this concert was a bit different than their usual fare. For the evenings show, they were not even billed as "Gillian Welch and David Rawlings," in fact--instead, they were listed as the "David Rawlings Machine." Rawlings, who never gets enough credit for either his backing vocals or for his guitar picking, took lead for the night. It was great to see that role reversal, and to get to hear David a bit more--but regardless of who is playing lead, the killer thing about the pair is their minimalistic instrumentation, the great guitar work, and, above all, their harmony. Their voices are so in sync, and complement each other so well, it's just unfair. Just stunningly beautiful. Check out YouTube for some good examples like these.

They played mostly Rawlings tunes, weaving in a few better known Welch/Rawlings collaborations and some genre classics like "Jackson." For some songs, like a fun rendition of "Brand New Key," they brought up other musicians, adding (at one point) a piano, stand-up bass, another guitarist, another vocalist, a trumpet, and a percussion kit. It was really a lot of fun for both of us, even though Diana wasn't that familiar with their music before the evening started. But she sure did know this song they covered for their encore (not my video, not the best quality--but good sound):

Friday morning started early, with an X PRIZE breakfast for the attendees at TED--a lot of cool people in the audience. Having started so early, I was able to cut out a bit early with my coworker and friend Mike , who is in effect my resident LA cultural adviser. A musician, foodie, and movie buff, he's given me countless tips for fun events--and one suggestion I'd been waiting to to take was to catch a movie at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood--supposedly one of the best movie theatres in the country.


Arclight isof a different ilk than some of my other favorite theatres (the Uptown in Washington, DC; the Colombus in Providence): whereas those are old theatres with single, monolithic screens, the Arclight is a mutiplex full of high technology and modern comfort. We didn't make it to their big Cinerama Dome, but even in one of the smaller theatres, it was clear why movie buffs would enjoy Arclight. Great sound, good picture (well, we saw a 3D movie, so that may not be the best sample)--and you even got a bit of a welcoming speech from a staff member! Cool place, we'll definitely be going back.


The movie we saw, by the way, was Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Definitely a solid movie--we had some issues with the pacing in places, but the story is good and the visuals are stunning. Worth checking out!

After the movie, we went out a grabbed a meal at at Thai place called Palms. The food was good, but the Thai Elvis was great!