The Brew House

Dec 05 2011

Music

#MusicMonday: VI

Every Monday morning. Music so good… it must be shared.

This week: “Heart to Hang Onto” — Pete Townshend and Eddie Vedder, live on David Letterman

It took me a few months, but I finally saw “Pearl Jam Twenty”, the Cameron Crowe project about the band’s first 20 years. Plenty of great stuff — some of the unseen footage from the early 90s might have been the most compelling part — but there was also a great moment where Eddie Vedder is talking about the first time he met Pete Townshend.

Vedder, he recalls, was paralyzed. This is Pete Townshend. His hero. What do you say? And then, (and I’m paraphrasing here) Townshend spoke.

“I’ve waited so long to meet you,” he said.

Tagged #MusicMonday, Cameron Crowe, David Letterman, Eddie Vedder, Heart to Hang Onto, Pearl Jam Twenty, Pete Townshend

Dec 02 2011

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Endorsements, Food, Music

Unsolicited Endorsements: V

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.

Album: “Nothing is Wrong” — Dawes

Ever since the first time I heard the first few riffy bars of “If I Wanted Someone”, I’ve tried to place Dawes in a certain time and place. By most contemporary definitions, they are not purely indie rock — at least, if we determine that a band can be classified as indie if a music director at a college rock station would want to put their album into rotation. And they don’t quite fit in with the stringy acts that have proliferated today’s alt-country scene — the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, the Devil Makes Three — or even the kings of the indie/alt-country world, Wilco. Continue reading →

Tagged Asher Fusco, bagel, bagel sandwich, black star, dawes, hip-hop, jay-z, kanye west, Mark Dent, rap, Rustin Dodd, sandwich, talib kweli, unsolicited endorsements, watch the throne

Dec 02 2011

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Essay

December

Here comes another month. Holidays and Christmas trees and drives down Ward Parkway with the fountains iced over. Kansas City becomes a different kind of city in December. Darkness comes early. And the people in this town focus on the good parts, forgetting about the long winter ahead.

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Dec 01 2011

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Essay, Travel

The Sound of Nothing

Nothing has a sound, and it’s predictably difficult to describe.

It comes in the moment when your own breath sounds like whipping wind. It comes when your shoe’s rubber-on-grass pad is audible from six feet up. It comes when the sky is clear and dark and the air is cold and crisp.

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Tagged Brooklyn, kansas, new york city, The Flint Hills, Tully Corcoran, Wichita

Nov 29 2011

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Essay, Humor

Feeling Strangely Fast

The announcer on NBA Jam used a plethora of sweet phrases to describe the windmill, one-handed, reverse dunks that players started from the half-court line in that video game. My favorite was always, “IS IT THE SHOES?”

NBA Jam* got this from an old commercial starring Michael Jordan and Mars Blackmon, aka Spike Lee. The shoes made the man. Or paying an exorbitant amount of money to further stuff the increasingly deep, not to mention imperialistic, pockets of Nike made the man.

*Quick Wikipedia tangent: It appears that the original arcade version of NBA Jam featured Drazen Petrovic for the Nets. He was not included on the Sega/Nintendo versions after his death. WOW. That would be insane to play with Drazen Petrovic. Someone send me an e-mail if they somehow own a video arcade or know the secrets of time travel and the location of a 1992 video arcade.

I bring this up because of the Nike Free shoes. The Nike Free shoes are for running, and they are Nike’s foray into the burgeoning movement of barefoot/minimalist running. They’ve helped me notice that it IS the shoes, and I’m not just talking about running.

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Tagged barefoot running, Is It The Shoes, Mark Dent, Mars Blackmon, NBA Jam, Nike Free, running, running shoes, shoes

Nov 28 2011

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Music

#MusicMonday: V

Every Monday morning. Music so good… it must be shared.

This week: “Knotty Pine” — Dirty Projectors and David Byrne, off the compilation album “Dark Was The Night“

Thanks for stopping by The Brew House

Tagged #MusicMonday, Dark Was The Night, David Byrne, Dirty Projectors, Knotty Pine, Rustin Dodd

Nov 28 2011

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New York, Travel

Vacation

In my six years of living in transplant-centric locations (Lawrence, Kan., and Brooklyn, N.Y.), I’ve come to cherish one of life’s more underappreciated delights: Staying put for the holidays.

Back in Lawrence, some of my favorite times included window-down drives on relatively empty summer-evening streets, enjoying the solitude of the Student Rec Center during its reduced summer hours and running the hills of the car-free streets just north of campus before the summer heat hit near mid-day. Staying in a snowpacked and silent Lawrence over winter break felt like being in on a beautiful secret that the rest of the world only stumbled upon twice a week at Allen Fieldhouse.
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Tagged Brooklyn, college towns, Holiday travel, kansas, Lawrence, new york city, Park Slope, Pumpkin Pie, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving travel

Nov 25 2011

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Endorsements, Literature, TV

Unsolicited Endorsements: IV

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.

Journalism: “Dr. Don,” by Peter Hessler, The New Yorker

It isn’t often you come across a story in one of the three best NYC-centric publications — The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine — that doesn’t mock life outside of the five boroughs (alas, East Coast provincialism, ignorance and brainlessness is a topic for another day), so this touching, thought-provoking and incredibly real portrait of life in tiny Nucla, Colo., was especially and pleasantly unexpected. Continue reading →

Tagged About The Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her, Awesomesauce, Dave Eggers, Dr. Don, How We Are Hungry, Peter Hessler, The New Yorker

Nov 22 2011

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Uncategorized

Thanking David Beckham (and Gurinder Chadha, Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra)

This post, which is not about soccer, begins at 6:45 p.m. on the Sunday preceding Thanksgiving, one hour and 15 minutes before David Beckham will don the Los Angeles Galaxy uniform for possibly the last time, trying to emphatically conclude an experiment, marred with record losing streaks, coaching changes, and superstar infighting between him and Landon Donovan, that had come so close to derailing as one of the sports world’s biggest busts just two years ago.

I might watch the game. I’m not sure. I’ve just been paying a lot more attention to Beckham the last few weeks, because I need to thank him.

*****
About a month ago, as I melted onto my couch in a post-surgical haze, downing bowls of macaroni and cheese and chocolate chip-cookie-dough ice cream because my operated-upon mouth couldn’t handle anything sufficient, I decided to watch a movie.* Continue reading →