Wednesday night I scraped myself out of bed to go with Jon to see The Swell Season or, as they’re now more commonly known, the Oscar winning couple from the movie, Once. We found out that our friend, the famous Sizzle was going to be at the show. Sizzle, being the on-the-ball blogger that she is, summed up the show quite nicely here. Of course she had a different perspective on the show—she was front and center, while we were way up in the balcony. We don’t usually mind the balcony, our only problem was that we were seated near one of the entrances and could hear any lobby-conversation, clear as a bell. It got out of hand when the security guards—"Sgt. Hightower" and "Mongo"—with absolutely nothing better to do, decided to hang out right outside of the theater and talk philosophy…or maybe it was wrestling…Either way, Jon finally got up and asked them to go do something else, which apparently didn’t make them happy, but it did shut them up.

All-in-all, The show was just amazing. Plus we got to see Sizzle, who, as far as we know is the size of an ant (’hellloooo down there!’). And if THAT wasn’t enough, Sherman Alexie, winner of the 2007 National Book Award and writer of the book/screenplay Smoke Signals was sitting behind us. That’s right, we had better seats than Mr. Alexie.

If you have the opportunity—if they’re coming to your town, don’t pass up seeing The Swell Season.

There are a couple of triggers have gotten me out of the house lately. 1)When it’s warm and sunny and Charlie is determined to go outside. “OUUT? OUUT? OUUT? OUUT?” with his shoes in one hand reaching for the doorknob with the other. And 2)When the local high school marching band practices by marching up our street, dancing to songs such as ‘Thriller’ How can we resist our own personal parade?

this one got me out of bed and interrupted Charlie’s bath time. “THRILLERR…”

Last Friday was the Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis concert at the Paramount. The show was phenomenal, just as expected. I was a bit surprised that the legendary Brubeck performed first. Although, in retrospect, it made the most sense. The guy is…well, old; He’s about the age of Charlie’s GREAT Grandpa and if there’s any correlation there, he should have been asleep in his easy-chair midway through his set. Given the fact that his biggest songs were released almost FIFTY years ago, I expected the average age of Brubeck’s audience to also be on the older side. And, while I was righter than I thought, I was amazed by how energized the folks around us became during the performance. Especially the woman sitting next to me—I’m not sure she realized the noises that she was making, but I’ll just say they made us youngsters a liiittle uncomfortable.

"The Great Performer", Ramsay Lewis and his Trio were incredible. Although also not a group of youngsters, they brought a lot of liveliness to the evening that made me glad they closed the show.

In order to get the tickets to Brubeck as early as I did, I had to purchase a Seattle Theater Group package, which means I had to buy tickets to at least two other shows. One of those other shows happened to be Dan Zanes on Saturday. We knew Charlie was a little young to truly appreciate it, but we figured he’d enjoy watching the lights and shiny instruments. We stayed in our seats the entire time, but it didn’t take long for the aisles and area in front of the stage to become saturated with sub-five-year-olds. As the kids became excited by songs they were familiar with, they’d jump up and down making the room look like giant baby mosh-pit. I thought about crowd-surfing Charlie, but Andrea didn’t seem to think it was a good idea.

photo courtesy: Brian Romero

While I’m on the subject of music, ZooTunes released their line-up and it includes Andrew Bird and the Avett Brothers—two of the artists on my top-ten of 2007! I just saw the Avett Brothers at Neumos—a local venue—a couple of weeks ago and they were magnificent—more than worth seeing again. We’ll be in line for tickets on Monday AM. And lastly, I had lunch with Duff McKagen from G&R and Velvet Revolver last week. He’s friends with a co-worker (and also former-rock-star) and now officially sits on our advisory board. He was extremely nice and surprisingly down-to-earth.

I know you probably wanted to hear some details regarding Andrea and ‘Betababy’, but I figured I’d let her fill you all in on the gory details, cravings, and so forth. She’s been more-or-less out of commission, but as soon she’s able to open the lap-top and type without barfing on the keyboard, I’m sure she’ll tell you more than you want to hear. Or…perhaps I already did.

Since the new year, I’ve read several best-of-’07 posts in other blogs and thus have been inspired enough to give a bit of thought to what I saw or heard last year. Want to hear it? too bad. Here we go.

Movies:
Ok, i’ll be honest, we’re not big movie goers, especially since becoming parents. Even before that, we had a hard time finding the time to spend at the theater. Plus, you know that person who talks through the movie—asking irrelevant questions with obvious answers—and and kicks the seat in front of him/her? Well, without fail, I’m that person being kicked. With that, we saw two movies in the theater that were released in 2007. The Bourne Ultimatum and Juno. Both movies just splendid, especially Juno, and fall into my top 10 of 2007…top 2, in fact. We saw Superbad and Knocked-Up on DVD and have, but have not watched the latest Pirates of The Caribbean movie (great, now you know the level of our cinematic standards). I’d like to see the latest Coen Brothers movie, but will likely wait for the DVD. If anybody has any recommendations to fill in our top 10, we’d love to know what’s worth seeing.

Music:
Music, on the other hand, is almost always on in one form or another at home and I spend the bulk of my workday with larger than necessary headphones clamped to my head—mostly to drown out co-workers’ irrelevant questions with obvious answers, but also because I like music a lot. It gets me through most days. Also, Charlie enjoys dancing* along to whatever we happen to be listening to at home…including NPR talk radio, which is weird, but yet, so is his dancing. Anyway, 2007 brought us a lot of great music: Here are the top-ten that charlie enjoys dancing to:

*littlewhiteboy-style

10 : Iron & Wine The Shepard’s Dog

Sample track:

9 : Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Sample track:

8 : Beirut The Flying Club Cup

Sample track:

7 : Wilco Sky Blue Sky

Sample track:

6 : The National Boxer

Sample track:

5 : Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha

Sample track:

4 : The Shins Wincing The Night Away

Sample track:

3 : LCD Soundsystem Sound Of Silver

Sample track:

2 : Band Of Horses Cease To Begin

Sample track:

1 : The Avett Brothers Emotionalism

Sample track:

Some runners up—ties for 11th place are: Jose Gonzalez - In Our Nature, Radiohead - In Rainbows, M.I.A. - Kala, The Juno Soundtrack, Tegan and Sara - The Con and since this is music Charlie dances to, I will also include For The Kids Three. Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible is a great album, but they failed to make my top 10 because I happened to see them perform every song from the album live and their lousy performance tainted their album for me.

There you have it. Again, if anybody has anything that you think Charlie should be dancing to but is not, let’s ‘hear’ it.