How I Spent My Weekend

Things have been a little nutso in MNPP-land (behind the curtain, that is) so movie-wise I've fallen horribly behind. The last time I was in a theater was for Cabin in the Woods two weeks back (and I want to see it a second time so bad but I have no idea when I'll be able to) and before that there were a random smattering of preview screenings (Vamps and Damsels in Distress) but basically I've fallen far far behind my normal binge viewing habits. I'm running out of new things to say! I can only quote lines from Muriel's Wedding so many times!

Anyway I did get out to see a couple bands this weekend, so that's something. And I was the obnoxious guy holding up his camera recording half the shows, too! So I figured I'd share some, in case anybody wanted to feel like you were there with me, retrospectively. I know that's your dream!

First up, here's The Shins performing "Simple Song"

 at Terminal 5 here in NYC last evening:

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I also recorded "Phantom Limb" which you can watch here.

The night before I saw Death Cab For Cutie at the Beacon performing with a small orchestral section and I recorded a ton since I had a fantastic seat (third row center!). Here they performing one of my very favorite old songs of theirs, "Bend to Squares":

And here they are doing my number one favorite song of theirs, 

"Transatlanticism," which they closed the show with:

You can also see them perform "A Movie Script Ending," "Underneath the Sycamore, "Crooked Teeth," "Stay Young Go Dancing," "I WIll Follow You Into the Dark," and "Tiny Vessels" (tolda I recorded a lot) over here at this link. Great shows!
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And Then They All Stood Next To Each Other...

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... and it was really weird. Upon stumbling across the above picture (via) it took me a little while to figure out why the hell John Krasinski, Chris Meloni, Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard, Dominic Cooper, the dude who got to make out with Patrick Wilson in Angels in America, and the other two were doing in a picture together. Weird crowd, no?

Anyway if you don't know either they're all in Krasinski's directorial debut Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, I guess, which came out a couple of weeks ago to absolutely no fanfare. But hey, it gave the world this next picture, and that's something the world is better for, for sure.

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A Match Made In Cardigan-Swathed Heaven

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How'd I miss the news that Death Cab front-man Ben Gibbard and "indie darling" Zooey Deschanel got engaged over the holidays? You'd have thought the sound of a million emo heads exploding (both male and female) at once would've alerted me that something was up.

And yes, exploding emo heads make a sound quite specific unto themselves - they've got that extra pop of guy-liner and bad poetry.

Anyway, happy happies to the couple!
May they sulk together forever and ever, amen!
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"The Atlantic was born today and I'll tell you how."

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So I saw Death Cab For Cutie at the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, and it was quite the spectacle. Remember the big ol' storm that came tearing through town? Yeah... as the band performed "The Sound of Settling" this gust of wind came a'blowin and all the lighting over their heads went a'shakin'... I could've witnessed Ben Gibbard's death! No, they finished the song and Ben yelled good night and we all went stampeding for the exits. And then the sky exploded.

The ever-reliable Brooklyn Vegan has a good post on the show with scads of photos, including the two above which I swiped. I think it was my fifth time seeing DCFC and they rocked the house pool this go-round pretty hard. Or... as hard as these Emo-Princes rock, anyway. Good show. And Ben looked very skinny. The end.

PS - One of my other favorite bands, Rogue Wave, opened for them, and I had not a clue they were doing so. Yay to happy surprises!

PPS - Fuck you, B61 bus. I hate you.
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Ben & The Boys Hit Letterman Last Night...

... yet I am a turd and missed it. I speak of Death Cab For Cutie, by the way; their new album Narrow Stairs came out yesterday (street date!) and I didn't blog a godforsaken thing about it. For shame. Anyway, better a day late than a dollar short, as they say. Here I am! And here's the clip of DCFC performing "I Will Possess Your Heart" On Letterman:

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(via Stereogum)
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Narrow Stairs

I'm probably the only person looking at MNPP that gives a shit about this, but I don't care! I got the reins and I'll take us off a cliff if I want to!

Ahem. Apologies. Early, and all.

Via Stereogum comes the cover art for Death Cab For Cutie's new album!


It's called Narrow Stairs, and it's out on May 13th.

Have y'all heard the first single, called "I Will Possess Your Heart"? You can hear it also at Stereogum (or, ya know, find an mp3 somewhere on the internets...) Love it, I do. Can't wait for the album to leak be sold, legally, in legal-like places as in stores.
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The Ben Gibbard Blues

I'm seeing Death Cab For Cutie and Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard all by his lonesome in concert tomorrow evening (yay!), so the man's on my mind, so here's a link to a new song that he's apparently playing on this tour, called "Casino Blues".

I'll also add it to the Box Media Player down in the right-hand column there in a minute or two for everyone's listening pleasure.

Loves me some Ben. I'm also seeing the band Beirut tonight, though, and I already feel exhausted from all this concert-going and it hasn't even begun. I am so lame.
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Geek-Gasm

Ben Gibbard, lead singer of the band Death Cab For Cutie, is apparently going to be acting, yes acting, in John Krasinski (of The Office)'s film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story collection called Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. From Pitchfork:

"Eagle-eyed reader Trey Burke alerted Pitchfork to the movie's IMDB page, which lists Gibbard as playing a character named Harry. Other cast members include a guy who was in Snakes on a Plane (Bobby Cannavale), a guy from "Saturday Night Live" (Will Forte), a girl from "That '70s Show" (Mila Kunis), Krasinski's "Office" coworker Rashida Jones, and Krasinski himself."

I was just saying the other day my crush on Krasinski was beginning to bloom, and he's really aiming for my heart with this one, eh? He'll have to work a lot harder to ever come close to my affection for his Office UK counterpart, Martin Freeman, whom I just spotted as a co-star to Jude Law and Juliette Binoche in the approaching Anthony Minghella film Breaking & Entering, which I thought was already out but no no no, must wait til the end of the month.

Oh, also: Bobby Cannavale! Mmmm...

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Death Cab Vs. Franz Ferdinand

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I don't think I've mentioned I saw the Death Cab For Cutie & Franz Ferdinand show this past Friday night here in NYC at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Well... I did. And had a blast, I'm big fans of both bands and they both put on fantastic shows. I also, thanks to a good friend with "connections", got to watch the show from the uppermost private balcony, and man, I can't imagine a better place to watch a show from. I been spoiled!

Anyway, it was a boozy free-for-all up there, and I couldn't honestly tell you half of what FF played, because by that time, I was trashed.

But I bring all this up because I read my first review of the show just now, over at EW, and the reviewer takes a massive dump on DCFC, which... makes me defensive. This is the second time I've seen them play, and I thought they were even better this time... but then, again, I was very, very drunk. My opinion... slightly discredited.

But Boo! Boo on you, EW critic "Raymond Fiore"! You're dumb... and stuff.

Oh Ben

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I haven't even gotten a chance to listen to it yet, I just downloaded it now here at work, but I feel the need to share this link to a download of Ben Gibbard, Death Cab For Cutie and Postal Service frontman, covering Michael Jackson's song "Thriller."

Because, even unheard, the thought of this makes my toes curl.

Kids These Days

So I saw Death Cab last night. Great show. But if the audience at The Decemberists show I saw a few weeks ago made me feel old, the audience at the Death Cab show made me feel ancient. Like... a pedophile. Like the 16-year olds were looking at me wondering what grandpa was doing there with the audacity to be singing along with THEIR songs. I felt like the guy who keeps going to keggers with high scool kids long past his college graduation. ICKY.

Oh well. If my friends weren't LOSERS and even one of them had agreed to go with me I might not have felt so... icky. But standing there alone, with little cliques of tweens eyeing me suspiciously... yeah, icky. Sigh. When did this happen? I think I'm just projecting my own terror of impending 30 (I still have two years! Okay, 1.5 years...) onto it. It being... everything.

So... the show. Great! Not the best concert I've ever been to, it was a little short, but I guess the CHILDREN have curfews. And nothing will EVER beat seeing Radiohead when I first moved here anyway. But DCFC put on a good, fun show. I didn't write down the playlist and I don't remember every song they sang, but I do remember a few details (memory's first thing to go...).

They opened with "Marching Bands of Manhattan", one of my favorites of the new album. Sounded good. Ben G. got sweaty fast. Like really sweaty. Like that scary guy in Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" video sweaty. How's that for an old-timer reference!

I think next they did "Passenger Seat" off of Transatlanticism, which I love. Somewhere around here they did "Soul Meets Body" which has really grown on me since first hearing it months ago. I was only kinda meh about it at first, but now I'm really digging it. Yadda yadda, sangs some more songs and I don't remember what they ended the first set with.

Ben G. trots back out for the encore by himself, and does "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" acoustically, and it sounded awesome. Yadda yadda, band comes out and they do a couple more songs I don't remember, and they end with what I'd been waiting and hoping for the entire show, a back-to-back Transatlanticism best-of, "Tiny Vessels" and "Transatlanticism", my two all-time-favorite DCFC songs.

So the end was the most memorable part, and I'm glad my grandpappy legs didn't give out from under me and I stayed through the end. I swatted the youngsters outta the g-d'd way with my walker and rode the short bus home. Good times had by all! Even the infirm!

In Defense O' Death Cab

I hate it when your ticket to a concert says 6:30. The show isn't going to start at 6 fucking 30. Why do they say something like that? WHY DO THEY LIE????

Ahem. Anyway, I am seeing Death Cab For Cutie tonight, and am duly excited. I hate everyone who's been dissing DCFC lately. Do you hear me? I hate you.

Everywhere I turn is anti-DCFC rhetoric, and I'm sick of it. Just because some helmet-haired Penguin-polo'd nincompoop from a FOX soap opera likes them, suddenly it's the equivilent of having your "cool" raped by... ugly uncool rapist people.

Nonsense, I says. Nonsense.

And yes, I wear Converse low-tops and cardigans. Screw you, I'll cram my senstive-emo-boy fist up your holier-than-thou hipster rectum.

I've Got Plans!

My office gets free cd's sent to us all the time. There used to be a branch of my office that reviewed them for a catalogue we did, but that closed a couple years ago; that hasn't stopped some of these record companies from sending us cd's, though.

And since I receive the mail, and go through it first, I just snatch up whatever they send. It's a self-declared perk. Usually it's crap - I've got a huge bag filled with cd's no one would ever want to listen to at home that I've been trying to figure out what to do with for ages.

But every so often I get something good, and today's one of them days - I got a copy of Death Cab For Cutie's new album! Yay!

I am sooo pleased. I almost pooped my pants when I opened up the package. I'd already burned a couple songs that'd popped up online, but now I gots the whole damned thing. I rock.

From what I've heard about the album, it's not as great as their last, Transatlanticism, but really what could be? That album is amazing. I do like the few songs I've heard so far, and I'm just pleased as punch to have the new one, and for free! Can't beat free.

Well, if there'd been a twenty dollar bill in the package with the cd, that would've beaten free. But this is good, too.
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