About a month ago, I caught another Ted Leo set at the Echo, this time with the Pharmacists. This was the third time I’ve seen Leo, and the third different band configuration. The first time I saw him was with the five Pharmacists, the second time was solo and this time was the Pharmacists in a power trio configuration. It was a pretty good show but it didn’t really floor me like the other two. “High Party” had a good paranoid edge from the harsher arrangement and “Stove By A Whale” was a brilliantly long rave-up but a lot of the other songs just didn’t feel right.

I couldn’t really place why until I snagged a copy of Dirty Old Town: Ted Leo/Pharmacists vs Coney Island, the new concert documentary by Justin Mitchell. The doc follows Ted and the band just before and after their performance at the 2003 Siren Music Festival at Coney Island. There are some pretty basic interviews with Ted about his life and lots of shots of Coney Island, but the crux of the documentary is the live performance. For DVD, it’s not a superb soundmix, but it’s miles better than you’ll get from any bootleg, and it’s always a fun game to guess just how much Leo has sweated. The band lineup was actually even bigger than the one I saw, with six full members (two guitarists, bass, keys, violin and drums) in what Leo refers to as “The Full Dexy” style lineup. The different textures gained with the extra instruments were what I really missed, like the extra percussion on “Sin-Eater,” the way the full band just kicks in on the last part of “Timorous Me,” or the violin to close “Crane Takes Flight.” Leo’s voice isn’t top notch on this DVD and I still preferred it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that people should buy this DVD and never go see Ted Leo without the full Pharmacy in tow. Everyone should see Leo no matter what kind of show he’s doing, but be aware of the differences and adjust your expectations. The solo show tends to be very intimate with a pretty wild setlist that will include lots of covers. The power trio arrangement gives everything a punchy, DC punk feel. The “full Dexy” is pretty clearly my favorite setup, and the one that gives Leo’s songs the widest, most beautiful soundscapes.

Oh, I hear Duffy is on this DVD somewhere, but I couldn’t spot him. I think I saw Jack Osbourne sitting at the bar in the background once though.

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On the eve of its imminent Oscar victory, I finally saw Fog of War, Errol Morris’ fascinating documentary about Robert Strange McNamara, former Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and LBJ. Involved with firebombing of Tokyo in WWII and as the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara has a lot to look back on and his hindsight reveals his thought processes as well as his regrets. Despite his reputation as a stubborn know-it-all during his career, the 85 year old McNamara is able to recognize and acknowledge his mistakes. His theories remain frighteningly topical, and it’s not hard to see the parallels between the past and the present. There remain a few topics that McNamara won’t open up about, which is unfortunate, as I’m sure there are many insights left to glean, but probably wouldn’t paint anyone in a favorable, or even defensible, light.

From a cinematic standpoint, Morris is able to patch together the narrative with stock footage and symbolic montages that push the story underneath McNamara’s voiceovers. Philip Glass contributes an eerie score that lends an overwhelming sense of dread to the whole affair. When Morris chooses to focus on McNamara’s talking head, his patented INTERROTRON lets McNamara speak directly to the audience, which is an unnerving experience as an audience member. I HEART INTERROTRON.

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Most anyone that has known me for any length of time has probably noticed that I very rarely read for pleasure. By reading, I mean reading books, of course. I read magazines and essays and articles and every goddamn piece of crap on the internet, but books are usually beyond my attention span.

Now, I don’t know if fell on my head sometime around January, but I’ve cranked through about four or five books since the new year started. It’s been in fits and spurts though, as I finish books pretty quickly as long as I don’t lose interest. It’s a good habit to have I guess, and I’ve been assured that reading is sexy.

Anyway! The first thing I blitzed through was Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste, a collection of pieces by Lester Bangs. I’d read bits and pieces from Bangs before, and he really is as good as his reputation. Still, I wasn’t quite blown away by this because even if it’s really good writing about Emerson, Lake and Palmer, I just can’t get excited or angry about the ELP. A lot of the book is about artists I’m indifferent towards, and even Bangs couldn’t really change that. I’ve heard the first collection was much better, so I might have to check that out.

Andy Bellin’s Poker Nation was next, and I finished that in a night. It’s a collection of essays about poker and poker players, and gives us glimpses into all aspects of poker as a national obsession. It starts off with some basic strategy and then goes through profiles of lots of different kinds of players, from low-rent amateur hustlers to the top ranked pros. I think the greatest part of the book is just how unglamorous it is. It really breaks down the psychology of players, showing how basically everyone’s a degenerate gambler, one bad beat away from losing everything. When Bellin talks about a “professional” earning $35,000 a year, mindlessly blowing through hand after hand of low-limit hold’em … well, the glitz and relative glamour you see in the World Series of Poker is far, far away. Fun book, even though it does lack a general point and over-arcing theme.

NEXT! Bringing Down the House has nothing to do with that awful Steve Martin movie, but is actually about a blackjack team from MIT that won millions of dollars from Vegas by using legal card counting techniques. The prose in this book isn’t very good, but the story itself so captivating that it really doesn’t matter. The pages flip faster and faster as you want to find out what happens next to this band of nerdy, vaguely ethnic kids scamming Vegas with fairly simple math techniques. When I first heard of this book, I assumed it was set further back in the past on single deck tables, but it’s actually set in the late 90s, with kids counting six shoe decks. No, none of them were Rain Man savants either. Vegas didn’t switch to continuous shuffle machines recently, and a lot of the team tactics mentioned in this book would still be applicable in a lot of the smaller casinos in Vegas that are working on a multiple deck shoe. After I finished this book, I really wanted to go to Vegas and count blackjack for the hell of it.

I bought a copy of the Seabiscuit DVD and it came with a copy of the Seabiscuit paperback. I watched the movie first, and thought it was pretty good, but not great. The book, on the other hand, is spectacular. I knew virtually nothing about horse racing but loved learning all about it from Hillenbrand. In addition to telling the main narrative about the Biscuit, she was able to squeeze in all this other info, about handicaps and other horses and jockeys and jockey life and Depression life and everything else that it makes the movie seem skeletal in comparison. For instance, Hillenbrand’s coverage of Seabiscuit’s taming is a long, hard road for his trainer, as he has to experiment with various techniques to get Seabiscuit to respond to jockeys properly. In the movie, Chris Cooper takes the horse in a field and says “he just needs to learn to be a horse again.” Um… ok. Anyway, the book is rad. I’m not about to start hanging out at Santa Anita, as I hate the smell of horse poo, but the book is rad.

A couple of nights ago, I started and finished Michael Lewis’ Moneyball in one brutal sitting. I am an absolute baseball freak, on all sides. I love the lore and the sport, but I’ve also read all the new age statistical work and I love working through all these new baseball theories. Moneyball is about Billy Beane’s rapid ascension as the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, building a franchise that has made the playoffs year after year despite working with one of the lowest payrolls in the majors. Beane’s done it by ditching traditional baseball conventions and going with new results based stat work. Crippled by his budget, Beane’s been able to field teams filled with oddballs and riffraff, fat dudes and funky deliveries, good baseball players that have been passed over by everyone else because they don’t quite look like athletes. It’s a great baseball book, but it’s also being held up as an example in discussions of objectivity vs subjectivity, paradigm shifting and good old revolution. Lewis takes a few liberties with the portrayals, and he leaves out lots of details that don’t support his Us vs. Them narrative, but it doesn’t hurt too much.

I had particular interest in this book because Beane’s right hand man Paul DePodesta was recently hired as the general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It should be fun to see DePodesta apply some of the Moneyball theories with twice the payroll. With JP Ricciardi in Toronto and Theo Epstein in Boston, there are now four teams running with the new school. How long before there has to be anothe evolution, and when does Billy Beane become the dinosaur?

Anyway… I think my next book is Positively Fifth Street.

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Moments after polishing off my February mixtape I was able to find an mp3 of the Hives performing a new track called “Walk Idiot Walk” on an awards show from a little while ago. I’d heard about it a while ago but never was able to snag a copy and finally found one. I was all set to slap it onto my mixtape and be one of the first kids on the block to pimp it out.

Then I played and it kinda sucked. Oh well. It’s not THAT terrible I guess, but get this… it’s 3 minutes and 55 seconds long. A Hives song clocking 4 minutes is never a good thing.

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1) Millionaire – Songs For the Deaf – Queens of the Stone Age

2) Tell Me What You See – Pawn Shoppe Heart - The Von Bondies

3) Waffle House – Nothing New - Chisel

4) Joneses Rule of Sport – Secaucus - The Wrens

5) The Dark of the Matinee – Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand

6) Get Over You – The Undertones – The Undertones

7) Busy Signals – B-Side – The Exploding Hearts

8) I’m Gonna Run – Gallowbird’s Bark – The Fiery Furnaces

9) The World Isn’t Fair – The Randy Newman Songbook – Randy Newman

10) Deep Dark Truthful Mirror – Mighty Like a Rose Bonus Disc - Elvis Costello

11) The Long Grift – Wig In a Box – They Might Be Giants

12) That Dress Looks Nice On You – Seven Swans - Sufjan Stevens

13) 99 Problems - The Grey Album – DJ Dangermouse

14) Dirt Off Your Shoulder – The Black Album – Jay-Z

15) Paid In Full (Coldcut Remix) – Paid In Full – Eric B. and Rakim

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American Express recently sponsored a series of concerts at the HoB for “Blue for Music,” a program that puts money into music education. The tickets had to be bought via an AmEx card, which blew, but the concerts featured some serious names and are now archived here for web broadcast.

Right now you can listen to the Strokes, Elvis Costello or Dashboard Confessional. Being a man of great wealth and taste, I went straight for Elvis. I’ve seen Elvis probably six or seven times in concert (maybe more) but only once was it a traditional rock show. This broadcast is one of those, similar to the show I saw last year, with the revamped Attractions lineup known as the Imposters. For an “old guy” band, the band plays incredibly hard, especially Pete Thomas on drums, who just about drowns himself in his own sweat. Steve Nieve’s clever keyboard playing is as manic as ever and Davey Faragher subs in for the ejected Bruce Thomas. Costello isn’t nearly as volatile in his old age, but his voice has developed all these great nuances and he’s just a phenomenal singer. I’m not sure if this broadcast is the entire show, as Costello’s was regularly clocking three hour sets on his last tour. But check it out first. You can listen to the Strokes and Dashboard later.

Update: Checked them all and it’s a 40 minute set from Dashboard, a two hour and forty minute headline set from Elvis Costello and the Imposters and a 15 minute excerpt from the Strokes show. I don’t know if the Strokes content will be expanded to a full show or not later.

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