the whole shebang

my weekend started with an e-mail message from coiledsoul, asking if i wanted to come over and hang out with her friday night. i did. thus ensued a huge feast of takeout thai food, the consumption of margaritas, and the conclusion of life on mars S1. more sweet sam and salty dci hunt goodness, mmmm-hmmm (and the thai food was delicious, too). we tried to start watching S2, but the DVD she burned did not work. so we settled for a couple eps of heroes instead. which was thoroughly enjoyable in a crunchy-chewy kind of lite-snack way. i'd watch more, but i'm not left with an insatiable craving like with life on mars. but who can resist a show in which the time-traveling (or whatever) sam meets glam-rocker marc bolan in a nightclub and cautions him to drive safely (although bolan was a passenger in the 1977 car crash that killed him)? not to mention one that regularly plays bowie, slade, t. rex, the sweet, etc., on the soundtrack?

then on saturday, 00soul and i were off to largo to see grant-lee phillips perform. that's for a citybeat review, so you can get the whole story in there on thursday. i hadn't been to the club in quite a while; owner flanagan greeted us warmly, as always, and whipped out his cellphone to show us pix of his tiny new baby daughter. "look what i made," he said proudly. awwww. cute.

grant's set reached all the way back to the earliest grant lee buffalo albums, and when we got home i pulled out fuzzy and mighty joe moon. those albums and copperopolis all meant a lot to me once upon a time (and they still do). i played the first album on sunday, while driving across town to see the divine ms. m's palatial new spread in silver lake (and i mean palatial, complete with a garden fit for at least minor royalty). which ended up in another feast, this time at venerable mexican eatery el cholo, and some more margs. but before that, the surreal songs and plush fusion of noise and melody that is GLB seemed to attract fascinating pictures along my route. like, at gardner & hollywood i waited to turn left, gazing at a canopy of lavender jacaranda blossoms while a bent-over little old lady, dressed in the exact same shade of purple, wheeled her shopping cart across the street.

at franklin and western a white behemoth cast a shadow as it passed me in the right lane. i noticed that this huge SUV was called a nissan armada. armada! seeing that word emblazoned on the back of this tall-ship-sized vehicle sent me into fits of giggles. armada! rolling with your posse? that's like, soooo 15 minutes ago. nowadays, anybody who's anybody gotta roll with their armada! i got a way bigger kick out of this little personal joke than i do from the "denali," which i know is named after a place in alaska or something, but my brain always rearranges it to "denial," which seems like the perfect name for an SUV.

btw, did ya see that retail gas prices are higher than ever? (disclosure: i drive a gas-guzzling 1966 mustang convertible. which is a damn sight cooler and also gets way better mileage than the armada.)