Because sometimes you just want friends to tell you about cool things… the Brew House team offers up its weekly mix of author-supported goodness.
PSA: Increasing Concert Awareness
Sleigh Bells performed at the Granada, here in Dallas, last week. I imagine this band plays a spectacular live show, particularly because they gave one of the best performances I’ve seen on Saturday Night Live. I don’t know this for sure because I didn’t go. I wanted to. I just didn’t realize they were playing until about two weeks after tickets went on sale.
I’m one of those people. I hear about concerts long after everyone else has. By the time I realized Sleigh Bells was playing at the Granada, tickets were sold out, going for $200 on StubHub. It gets worse. M83 is playing on May 20! I just realized it a few days ago – and yes, it has been sold out since the Reagan administration.
I really need to increase my concert awareness. There are simple ways. I actually receive e-mails from the Granada, from Ticketmaster, from LiveNation, but I never read them. I get so many KGB Deals and Groupon and Living Social e-mails that they bog me down to the point of where I hardly open any e-mails unless they come from a very trusted source.
As a result, I generally discover concerts of top artists through Internet osmosis. While this laziness can lead to Sleigh Bells and M83 induced heartache, all is not tragic. I am seeing Robyn and Coldplay this summer. Boom! – Mark Dent
TV Show: “Mad Men”
Touting the virtues of Mad Men online might be the least original thing anyone could ever do, but I feel like it’s necessary. After all, there might be a person or two in the world who – like two months-ago me – just hasn’t bought into the hype. I was fairly convinced that The Wire couldn’t be topped, so there was no point in investing hours, days and weeks in another show. I was partially correct. Mad Men doesn’t compare favorably to The Wire (but what does?), but it was certainly worth my time. I’m two-and-a-bit seasons in, and I’m addicted.
The writing is almost incomprehensibly good. The dialogue is more natural and real than that of anything I’ve seen since…The Wire. And the characters. Oh, the characters. Everyone is despicable, everyone is forgivable, everyone is relatable, everyone is human. David Simon’s masterpiece forced us to look in the mirror and think about what we are and aren’t as a society. Matthew Weiner’s makes us stare back into ourselves and evaluate who we are and who we aren’t. Both are uncomfortable, and both are necessary. – Asher Fusco
The Brew House 