susan recounts here the hilarious time we had at the beach playing the game of "celebrity," of which i'd never heard but enjoyed enormously because i am a pop culture whore. it's very easy - everybody writes 7 generally-well-known names down on scraps of paper, it's all put in a bowl, you split up into teams and one person from each team goes at a time, drawing a name out of the bowl and, in the first round, trying to get their team to guess who the celebrity is without saying their name. sounds almost too easy, but the subsequent rounds become more difficult - in the second round you must only use two words to describe the celebrity, and the third round, if you make it that far, you do charades.

the second round was a lot of fun, mostly because you don't use the phrases you might think for the two allotted words. for example, in the first round susan revealed when, attempting to get us to guess "sandy koufax," that he was a baseball player and she could never remember his name when he came up in other trivia (or something along those lines). so the second round, another team drew sandy koufax and merely said, "susan baseball," and that was enough. or, for ani difranco, as susan noted, we could say "ugly musician" and that'd work.

the charades are where it got pretty difficult, especially since we constantly seemed to be drawing jack osbourne. i ask you, how would you mimic jack osbourne? my instinct, which failed SPECTACULARLY, was to try to a) impersonate a bat (think short little bursts of wings and some circling around) and b) post-bat-attempt, mime somebody viciously biting the head off of something. i can assure you that this drew blank looks all around, and as the confusion spread, i only grew more panicked, hysterically flapping my arms and opening and shutting my mouth. when that didn't work out, i tried to mime, erm...birth. because you see. well. i thought perhaps in the subconscious understandings of my teammates' minds, they would have gotten the "biting off bat's head" thing and merely needed some sort of hint that we were looking for a son of ozzy osbourne here.

i have a question. have you ever tried impersonating birth? silently? it's not as easy as it looks. and i didn't even think to try to lie down or anything, so my birthing impersonation consisted merely of me semi-squatting and making a sweeping gesture wherein i sort of waved my hands in the general crotch area and then thrust them out over and over again. in my head, post-sixteen margaritas, trust me. it made a hell of a lot of sense. the miracle of life encapsulated in some wild squatting gesticulations.

which leads me to a second question, which i must know the answer to. how DOES one successfully impersonate jack osbourne in a game of charades? because, um, i already have some crazy plans for saturday night, and i'm gonna need to know.

...to brian, who presumably read my plea for spoon tickets and came through with a pair at - GET THIS - face value! i do love me some blogging. now, come friday, i can go drool on britt daniel like he deserves. thanks, brian!

What with all the fun, sun, and combinations thereof, I nearly forgot: Catherine and I saw the Bright Eyes / Faint show at the 9:30 club on Friday. I hadn't seen Bright Eyes live before, or heard anything by The Faint.

Well, in the case of the latter, I don't intend to hear much more. Catherine disagrees with me about this -- she says she thought they were a lot of fun. Personally, I think this band is what happens when hipsters eschew their responsibilities and refuse to euthanize a faithful trend. Fad-ownership is a big responsibility, you know. We had some good times with new-wave dancerock, I admit, and I'll always treasure it in my heart. But now it's just suffering. If you ever really cared for it, you would say goodbye, take it out back and put it out of its misery, presumably by purchasing some devastatingly sarcastic t-shirt.

The Faint had a bunch of cool lasers, and a strobe light that they seemed very enthusiastic about. They were also extremely tight musically. But the songs were just godawful. I can't tell you much about the lyrics, although one involved screaming "PARANOIA!" in the middle, and one was called "Agenda: Suicide", I think. But I can tell you that whatever song it might have been, you or I or anyone else without any musical talent could pick its single melodic line (always bass or synths, and never lasting more than one measure) out on a piano with one finger. That mind-numbingly simple melody was always surrounded by an impressively full and textured clatter of instrumentation and percussion (part of it prerecorded), but the songs tended to get very boring very quickly. The crowd was really into it, though -- well, by DC standards, anyway (the band still made a crack about everyone seeming bored).

So this wasn't up my alley, but it may be (ahem) up yours. But even if you love the albums, I'd warn against seeing them more than once. From the tightly syncopated light and video show, it was very clear that the arrangements are pretty well set. I doubt that the show varies much between performances.

Between sets was when I started to get worried. It was pretty obvious that the college kids in front of us had come to see The Faint (they kept referring to Bright Eyes as "they"). It also rapidly became apparent that they were kind of dumb (they endlessly repeated the same now-years-old jokes from Chappelle's Show and Best in Show) and, with the arrival of the evening's first round of Lemon Drops, likely to get dumber. Sure enough, they commenced screaming at each other as soon as Bright Eyes' set began. But after politely asking them to shut up I was able to enjoy the show, despite a steady stream of oblique (but quiet!) insults directed my way.

Alright. Enough bitterness. Bright Eyes played an expansive and impressive show, with fully ten people on stage performing material primarily from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Ten was perhaps a bit too many -- despite a desensitizingly loud set from The Faint, Bright Eyes' crescendos tended to partially dissolve into ringing white noise. I don't know whether the acoustic problem was happening in the rafters or the bones of my skull, but either way a slight volume reduction probably would've made everything sound a lot better. That's right, I am a million years old: besides those damn kids and their stupidly simple rock music, everything was too loud! Why can't those punks just list to some nice Artie Shaw in front of the wireless instead of all this concert hoopla?

Ah well. The performance itself was great: energetic, nicely arranged and earnest. At first I was convinced by the critics' consensus that I'm Wide Awake It's Morning was the better of Oberst's two recent albums, but now I'm not so sure. His songs about relationships and wanderlust are good all right, but so are lots of other people's. Not that many folks can pull off songs about consciousness and death. But Oberst can.

Maybe it's just that Oberst's probably-actually-silly philosophical impulses line up pretty well with my own. But when he added and dropped a couple of words from Easy/Lucky/Free and suddenly turned it from a peaceful coming-to-terms with death and into a distinct (but related!) half-frightening catharsis about meaninglessness and self-determination -- well, that kind of stuff impresses the hell out of me.

So, to summarize: Bright Eyes is good, The Faint is bad, and the state of America's Youth is, as always, deeply troubling.

another distraction/aid in helping me move to chicago: housingmaps.com. works in any city in the united states (that has craigslist). i have an appointment to see a nice little studio apartment when i go to chicago in a couple of weeks (cross your fingers for me that it doesn't get rented until i see it and charm the owner into letting me lease it!).

in other chi-news, i got a northwestern email address! firstname.lastname@northwestern.edu. i am all official and shit now. except for the 2 billion other things i have to do to attend the school (dr's appointments for health insurance, reading lists, finding out about financial aid, figuring out where the fuck i go the first day of class) - you know, the little things.

Yes, Virginia, there will be a sequel to Karaoke Revolution on the XBox.

The article claims there'll be better multiplayer support, duet modes, and the ability to incorporate a DDR pad into the game. The only announced songs so far: "Sweet Caroline", "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me", "Crazy In Love" and "I Don’t Wanna Be". It's supposed to be released sometime in the fall.

Dignity: totally overrated.

i know i've been bombarding you, but brian's italy photos are finally online! and they're lovely. check 'em out.

UPDATE: and julie's!