Exciting events coming up in May:

--Ricky Gervais on the 12th at Madison Square Garden
--Josh Ritter on the 19th at Town Hall
--Maybe seeing a new off-Broadway play with John Larroquette sometime

Exciting, yes? Speaking of music, it seems like there's been a slew of good music coming out recently. Let me see if I can list it all in similar dash-format:

--She and Him's Volume 2
--Joey Cape and Jon Snodgrass' Liverbirds
--Josh Ritter's So Runs the World Away
--The New Pornographers' Together
--Minus the Bear's Omni
--The National's High Violet
--Band of Horses' Infinite Arms

And that's just the past month, I think. This is the most I've kept up with new music in a long time, and it's exhausting. Fun and entertaining and fulfilling, but exhausting. I haven't listened to The National's or Band of Horses' albums, I'm just expecting good stuff considering their oeuvre. Oeuvre. That's a cool word. Good for hangman, too, in case you're wondering.

Can I talk about The New Pornographers for a quick second? I don't know what it is about this band, but I just cannot get myself to get into them. They have the workings of an indie super-band (because they are), yet I don't really like their albums. I like certain cuts off the albums, but not the entire thing. My favorite New Pornographers release would be a mix tape of 2-3 songs per album. Maybe I should do that. But when I try to listen to an entire 45-minute record by them, I start losing interest pretty fast. Does this happen to anyone else? And I love me some Neko Case, too, so I don't like disparaging her work. Alas.

I'm reading another Murakami novel. Sputnik Sweetheart. I'm ready to distill the plot of every Murakami novel I've read into three sentences: A first-person male narrator, your average joe, falls in love with a girl. There's some sort of complication (herein lies the difference in his novels) so that he cannot be with the girl. In the end, he doesn't get the girl. That's the formula. Yet I continue reading them anyway.

Okay. It's a nice day. Enjoy it.