I‘ve never made it to a music festival before (largely because I didn’t really get into festival-type music until a few years ago), but when this year’s Coachella featured several of my favorite bands I decided to spring for it, since it’s the biggest festival close enough for me to drive to rather than fly. And even though everything’s overpriced, it’s hotter than Hades, and I ended up only seeing full sets from seven bands rather then the eleven or twelve I wanted to see, it was worth it. The downside is I think I’ve caught the festival bug – I’m drooling over the Lollapalooza lineup Andrew posted the other day.

Anyway, here’s a recap of my subset of Coachella, which woefully underrepresents the available audio overload. Especially since I skipped Sunday altogether – fewer bands I wanted to see meant I didn’t care to spend the money for the extra day and night.

Details of bands after the jump.

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NOTE: There are NO Spoilers in this post, its safe to read.

As much as we fans of Lost cannot seem to shut up about it, and can generally agree that what we are watching is something special and ambitious that pushes the envelope of both science fiction and suspense, most of us are well aware of the show’s flaws, and bitch about them almost as much as we heap praise. Some people watch the show for the characters and the character development, while others, like myself, are really there for the island mythology and the mechanics of the show’s storytelling. Lost is a behemoth of a show, with one of the largest casts and one of the most convoluted narratives ever attempted on broadcast television. With so many balls being juggled it is no wonder the show trips up now and then, and it is almost miraculous that it has stayed this relatively coherent considering that Lostpedia counts over a hundred different mysteries posed by the show during its five season run. The following is a gripe list, and while it is mostly directed towards Lost, the observations are often general enough to apply to similar shows (i.e., Battlestar Galactica, for how great a show it is, still resorts to some of the same tropes). I am sure I have left something out so please add in the comment thread if you see an omission, or if you plain disagree with my choices.

Please remember to add spoiler warnings to your comments when needed. Nothing in my list is spoilerific.

1. Do not inventory the living characters on the front of dvd cases

Here me now and here me well: Timothy Olyphant kicks ass. Six out of seven doctors recommend him if you are going to get in a gunfight and need a badass western sheriff by your side. The Bible even says so. While Deadwood was the bomb diggity and probably the pinnacle of his career (it’s just that good – not an insult), Olyphant’s been solid in many of his other roles as well, including in what I consider a very underappreciated comedy, The Girl Next Door, where he lays on the sleaze perfectly. It’s a seriously underrated performance as well. Unfortunately though, he’s landed roles in a bunch of stinkers too, including Hitman (although I thought he did a swell job, just a lazy, mindless script) and Live Free or Die Hard (*shudders*).

Whatever. Point being, Olyphant is set to star in the pilot for a new FX drama based on a short story by the legendary Elmore Leonard. That story, titled Fire in the Hole, followed a U.S. Marshal named Raylan Givens who returns to his hometown in Kentucky. Then stuff happens. Bad stuff.

“He has a certain jaggedness, but he also loves his job,” executive producer Graham Yost said of the character Givens. “He is like an anachronism: He wears a hat, cowboy boots and a holster on his hip. It’s a little bit like he was born 100 years too late.”

Oh man, this seems like a role right up Olyphant’s alley. I look forward to hearing and seeing more. Production begins in May.

Source: Coming Soon

Even if I don’t really play video games anymore. Even if the last (and only) MMORPG that I played was Star Wars: Galaxies – and I’m talking buying that puppy the day that it came out. I bought it with such eagerness, back in the summer of 2003, I was salivating the entire ride home. I was so, so, so very excited… and never have I been so let down by a video game. What a piece of shit that game was. Still, it is tough not to feel a tinge of excitement here, although I would much rather have a Knights of the Old Republic III (the first two are such phenomenal games, two of the very few games where I felt extremely emotionally involved while playing).

There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.

-The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship by Charles Bukowski

I have to admit that when I saw Anvil! The Story of Anvil (our review), I never imagined the documentary would take off the way it has. Yes, it’s good and very highly recommended but Anvil! seems to be everywhere at the moment which, I’m sure, the group’s members are thrilled about.

There’s talk that the band has recorded tracks for the ever popular “Rock Band” video game, and in the past few weeks the movie has culminated into a bit of media hysteria popping up everywhere including CNN. Yes, that’s right CNN.

I love Lipps’ t-shirt. Where can I get one?

That’s not the end of it though. The folks at IFC.com had the boys in studio a while back and have put together a great little video about how to be a heavy metal rockers. It’s a funny video but I can’t help but think of the irony that we’re getting tips on being rock stars from a couple of guys that never quite made it. Still, it’s a fun video and in all honesty, Lipps and Rob are super nice guys (who I had a pleasure of meeting when they were in town with the movie last year).

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Last year’s Lollapalooza Music Festival in Chicago was certainly a highlight of the year – maybe THE highlight of the year. The logistics of how the entire thing was pulled off was nothing short of spectacular. If you missed it, never miss is again!

The official Lolla web site is pretty intuitive and as the concert(s) scheduled date approaches ever closer, the site will become even more interactive with band bios and streaming listening posts. Added this year is the social networking tool with which you can share your lineup and schedule with friends, post everything to your Facebook profile, get editable mobile schedule and of course a Twitter feed.

And now for the good news: today the full lineup was announced. Umm… holy shit?

Depeche Mode, Beastie Boys, Jane’s Addiction (a band I would cut off my pinky finger to see), Band of Horses, Neko Case, Kings of Leon, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, SNOOP DOGG!, Gomez, Silversun Pickups, TV on the Radio, Santigold, Crystal Castles, Of Montreal, Raveonettes, Portugal. The Man, Thievery Corp, Atmosphere, The Killers and Lou fuckin Reed along with a shit ton more.

See the full lineup over at the official web site. Barring death, I’ll see you in Chicago on August 7th!

Look out, post-apocalyptic RPG fans, a barren New Vegas is set to join D.C. in the world of Fallout with a full game release for Xbox360, PC and PS3 next year. (Pittsburgh, or “The Pitt,” was added to Fallout 3 via downloadable expansion pack a few weeks ago.)

The new game is to be a joint venture from Bethesda Softworks (who developed and published Fallout 3 and developed The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) as publisher and Obsidian Entertainment as developer. Not quite sure what it’ll mean in terms of the game’s quality for Bethesda to act only as publisher and not as developer in this case. However, Obsidian did develop the highly competent Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, picking up the reins nearly seamlessly from BioWare, so I’m pretty confident.

Now, if I could just find the time to actually finish Fallout 3. I’m way back in, like, chapter three. Per Bethesda’s Peter Hines, who broke the news at a Bethesda press conference this morning, Fallout: New Vegas won’t be a sequel to Fallout 3, but rather will be another story set in the same world. So if I’m still playing Fallout 3 a year from now (which is not really that unlikely), presumably I could play both concurrently? Anyone else still exploring fallout D.C., but excited about the prospect of getting to explore post-nuclear-holocaust Vegas?

-Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860

I have to confess that the first time I saw the Silversun Pickups, I was heartily unenthused. They opened for Snow Patrol on a tour in early 2007, and I don’t know what it was, but I just didn’t like them at all. Then last year I started hearing some snippets from their 2006 album Carnavas, and getting more and more into it every time until I finally got the whole album. And now, well, let’s just say Silversun Pickups are one of two or three bands I’m most looking forward to at Coachella next week.

Their new album Swoon drops next Tuesday (April 14th), and I’m liking “Panic Switch,” the first single off it. Here’s the video for it – warning, it may cause seizures. The Metric video I posted a couple of weeks ago was one shot. I roughly estimate that this one cuts somewhere around every five frames on average.

Hat tip: The Scenestar

It was a sad day when Michael Crichton passed away a few months back. While I hadn’t read a novel of his in years and years (at least six or seven, I’d say), his influence on my childhood – with both his novels I read and the movies made from them – were pretty significant. I plowed my way through his novels even during elementary school, mostly because I grabbed them out of my older brother’s bedroom and being entranced by the high-concept plot descriptions on the back. Plus, it was the guy that wrote Jurassic Park!

If you are still a fan and a loyal reader, you’ll be pleased to hear that HarperCollins will release two posthumous novels from the writer. Check out the official press release:

HarperCollins is proud to announce the global publication of two posthumous Michael Crichton novels. The first, Pirate Latitudes, will be published on November 24, 2009; the second, as yet untitled, will be published in Fall 2010.

Pirate Latitudes is an adventure story about piracy in the New World. Set in 1665, when Jamaica was a British colony holding out against Spanish dominance, the story centers on a plan hatched by the island’s governor and a notorious pirate called Hunter to raid a Spanish treasure galleon. Fast-moving and suspenseful, Pirate Latitudes is a historical classic from one of America’s best-loved authors. The novel was discovered amongst Crichton’s files and was written contemporaneously with Next, published in 2006.

Jonathan Burnham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Harper, says, “Pirate Latitudes is a fantastically enjoyable and light-hearted adventure yarn about pirates and profiteers in 17th century Jamaica. It is deeply researched and full of lively historical detail, and it shows Crichton going back to the territory he explored in novels such as The Great Train Robbery – old-fashioned entertainment, with a twist.”

In Fall 2010, Harper will publish his latest techno thriller which explores the outer edges of new science and technology in the way that only Michael Crichton knew how. The new novel will be based on the development of Crichton’s narrative on notes and files. “It is some consolation to the millions of Crichton fans out there that two or possibly more works are in the offing, and that the amazing legacy he has left behind him will be reinvigorated by these new novels” adds Burnham.

It may be about time that I pick up a Michael Crichton book again, because 17th century pirates in Jamaica could definitely awaken the child in me again. Ya-hoo!

Eminem is releasing his first album since 2005′s Encore, and I’d say the majority of mainstream rap fans are looking forward to it – or at least curious. While I definitely got out of my listening-to-rap phase during high school, I still kick it to some Warren G, some old school Tupac, or even some of Dre’s Chronic 2001 every once in a while. Like any genre, there is some good to go along with the plenty of bad.

I still remember vividly the first time I heard of Eminem, seeing his first hit single My Name Is pop up on MTV while at my friend’s house. We watched with fascination at this guy who was making fun of just about everything and everyone, from President Clinton to Pamela Anderson. “What is this?” we wondered to ourselves, much similar to how we felt about South Park which debuted around the same time. Mainstream rap hasn’t been the same since. Eminem’s influence is undeniable – and really, so is his talent, whether you personally care for the guy’s music or not.

I don’t see myself rocking out to Eminem’s new album (unless it’s 1:30 AM and I am at a college bar), but I’m curious enough to check it out still – because while his single’s are generally fused with pop and silliness, the guy can rap and there are always some catchy, well-made songs on his albums.

What do you all think? Care? Don’t Care? Indifferent?

While it is impossible to find his music video without embedding disabled, you can check it out still over on YouTube.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

- from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell by Bertrand Russell