Adolf Liebt Oasis

"What can I listen now to when I help Eva tidy up the bunker? You know she used to prefer Blur. But after 'What's the Story' she was hooked."

Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You

Riding in the passenger seat during a Friday night web surfing date with the wife, we found one of the most inspired and inspiring musical performances.

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

A year or so ago, I reviewed Frederick Hollander's score to The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, and while I made a mental note at the time to put this in our NetFlix queue, I had pretty much forgotten about it ever since. That is until Friday when I stumbled upon the soundtrack in a huge stack of unfiled CDs, and I decided to use a song from it on a birthday mix I was making for two friends. Coincidentally (didn't Jung and subsequently the Police call it Synchronicity?), the following night Ovation aired the movie, so I finally got to watch it in its entirety. While old musicals aren't my cup of tea, this one is strangely surreal for a Hollywood film made in 1953, and at times seems almost psychedelic. Maybe that's not so weird, however, when you consider that the screenplay was written by Theodor Seuss Geisel, yes...Dr. Seuss. The plot is based on a boy's nightmare, where he dreams that he is trapped in the kingdom of his tyrannical piano teacher, Dr. T, who has enslaved 500 boys, forcing them to relentlessly practice on a gigantic piano. While The 5000 Fingers isn't as strange as, say, the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory which came out two decades later, you can imagine that the kids who did see this in the day were probably freaked out, especially by the elevator ride down to the dungeon.

Date with Ikea

Ah....gotta love the Zipcar. Today, the fam piled into a mini-van and headed towards Red Hook for our date with Ikea. Having driven for 17 years before my move to NYC where owning a car is pretty much pointless, I forgot how great it felt to sit behind the wheel. Even if it was only a couple mile drive down the BQE, it had the same rush as driving across the Pacific Coast Highway. One-hundred and seventy-nine dollars later, we were headed back to the 'Burg, with a van full of necessities like storage containers, recycling bins, new giant laundry bags and a brand new dish drying rack...in other words, items that I don't know how we had been living for so long without. One thing that's for sure, the new year is going to be a far better organized one than the past few.

And speaking of, we bid farewell to 2008 with a nice mellow gathering at our place. Jes suggested that we follow a Cuban tradition, all of us eating grapes at midnight, which is supposed to bring everyone good luck in the new year. We forgot to get them during our first trip to the grocery store, so with only 30-or-so minutes left to go before the countdown, my brother made a quick trip back to Sunac with instructions to return with 200 grapes.

I guess we all got distracted from this pursuit of good fortune when little Auden woke up a few minutes before the ball dropped. Since it was a special occasion, we let him hang out with us for a bit. An hour or so later, I brought him to our bedroom to get him back to sleep. The next thing you know, I opened my eyes and it was 5:30am and the apartment was empty, save for Jes and the baby (well, not really a baby now) who were fast asleep next to me -- hard to believe much of my life had been spent going to bed about the time the sun was coming up. Anyway, I walked into the kitchen and amidst the empty bottles and a sink full of dishes and glassees was a Sunac bag overflowing with grapes, untouched from earlier that evening. Needless to say, so far, 2009 feels like the year of the grape.