Don't miss Rush at their second show at the new Nokia Theatre tonight at 8. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster or at the box office.
This is their second leg of their tour supporting the Atlantic Records studio album Snakes & Arrows, which came out last year and their live record Snakes & Arrows Live, which came out a week or two ago.

They are a great band to see live and Snakes & Arrows - produced by Nick Raskulinecz - is fantastic.

Tune in later for some of my interview with guitarist Alex Lifeson...

After a lengthy tour around the US - including stops in Austin, Nashville, Canada and Denver - Larry Bagby is playing in LA again on Wednesday April 30th at the Cat Club. This time around, he is performing with Justine Bennett - with whom he just recorded the album 'Two not One.' They are also competing in the Nashville Star television show - like American Idol, but for country-esque music - and that starts airing in June with host Billy Ray Cyrus.

This will be Larry and Justine's only Los Angeles show before they hit the road again, so come over to the Cat Club Wednesday night. They play at around 10ish, right after Jim Carrey's daughter Jane Carrey and her band play. So you can see Daughter of the Mask followed by Larry - who appeared in the movie Walk the Line as Johnny Cash's bass player and in a KFC commercial that's running now. (The commercial has two kids and two adults at a table and one of the kids calls the woman 'Nancy' and she objects. Larry is the husband/father).

Check 'em out at the show...and also here.

What you do know is that Jason Segel's movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall - that he wrote and stars in - came out on Friday. What you might not know is that he is a Harvard-Westlake School graduate and was part of the Wolverines state basketball championship team in the 1995-1996 season. In fact, Segel actually quit playing ball in his senior season to focus on trying to be an actor - then he appeared in the movies Can't Hardly Wait, Dead Man on Campus and SLC Punk! two years later. His big break came in 2000 when he met Judd Apatow and began appearing in his many projects including the shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and the movie Knocked Up, among others. He is now a regular on the TV series How I Met Your Mother, which recently featured guest star Danica McKellar - also from Harvard-Westlake.

In a story about Segel that appeared in the Daily News on October 30, 1996, Segel said that he would invite his then-basketball teammates - including now-NBA players Jason and Jarron Collins - to his first movie premiere. I wonder if he did.

The great live band The Mornings is playing on Saturday night at the Mint at 10:30. The Mint is at 6010 W. Pico Blvd in LA. Excellent live show and they're playing with several cool groups.

As a teaser, here is a video to check out. Also look at www.myspace.com/themornings for more info.

There is this great band - based in the Valley - called The Mornings. I've seen them a couple of times and they are energetic and very entertaining with their blend of rock, pop and reggae along with some 70's Wurlitzer-keyboards and horns on occasion. Recently, they have been surprising with some unusual things in their live shows. The last time I saw them the lead singer Adam did this dance-hall reggae thing that sounded like Shaggy and then three of the guys did a rapid-fire rap, over this ambient beat - which was great as well as pretty funny. One other time I saw them, they had a show at the House of Blues that was inspired by LOST the TV show - complete with singing and playing the DRIVESHAFT song 'YOU ALL EVERYBODY' . (If you watch Lost, you'll know what that is).

Anyway, I say all of that because they are playing Thursday night at the Malibu Inn in Malibu at 9:45. Check them out...its a cool venue as well - located at 22969 Pacific Coast Hwy.

I'll think you'll dig 'em

Before the show, check out their tunes here
and their super cool video for the song HAPPY here

The 2007-08 Oscars have been handed out and whether you agree with the winners or not, you have to admit, this had to have been the most interesting and diverse group the Academy has ever nominated.
Here's the scorecard of some of the more interesting elements of some of the nominees.

Diablo Cody - winner, Best Original Screenplay - a former stripper with a big visible tattoo of a scantily-clad woman on her arm. Right after the Oscars, semi-nude photos of her showed up on the internet and were labeled 'controversial.' Uh, that shouldn't have surprised anyone. Hello...stripper?

Viggo Mortensen - nominee, Eastern Promises - along with an actor, he's a very accomplished photographer and painter as well as a published poet. His paintings were seen in his movie A Perfect Murder (1998). Speaks several languages, including Danish. The mother of his son is a famous singer from a punk band. Never mind the Lord of the Rings stuff.

Daniel Day-Lewis - winner, Best Actor - Like Mortensen, an extreme Method actor. Day-Lewis sequesters himself during movie shoots. He lived in the wild for a month before he shot The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and not only learned how the shoot that giant rifle he carried thoughout the movie, but he also learned how to hunt and skin animals and he built his own canoe. He is also a skilled woodworker and worked as a cobbler during a long break between movies.

Johnny Depp - nominee - Nothing needed here. We know about him. Particularly his playing the cross-dressing, classically-bad director Ed Wood in the movie of the same name; his creating the Jack Sparrow character by combining Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew together and the characters of Willy Wonka, Edward Scissorhands and real-life writer Hunter S. Thompson. Just the tip of the iceberg with this dude.

The Coen Brothers - winners for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director - very interesting material in each movie. Fargo (1996) illustrates the banality of living in the South Dakota/Minnesota area. While writing Miller's Crossing (1990) they got writer's block and turned to writing something else - which became Barton Fink (1991) - to solve the problem. Barton Fink is about a writer with writer's block (among other things). When they write their scripts, every single sound said by the actors in the film - including the pauses and the 'uh's,' 'um's' and the swearing - is scripted exactly. In each movie, they do everything themselves and together. They edit their own movies under the pseudonym 'Roderick Jaynes.' Even though it's them under an alias, they talk about Roderick Jaynes like that's a real person - an angry and bitter 80ish curmudgeon who they say was bitter about losing in the Best Editing Category.

George Clooney - He was Batman. Like Depp, started on television in the 80's. Was on two different shows about a hospital in Chicago. One called ER and one called E/R. His Dad Nick was a newscaster in a variety of places, including Ohio, where he also hosted a daytime talk/variety show. Aunt was Rosemary.

Paul Thomas Anderson - nominee, as writer and director - his Dad Ernie was an actor who created and popularized the character 'Ghoulardi,' the host of a horror night on a local Cleveland television station. Nevermind that the younger Anderson made Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). What's with the frogs raining down on people in Magnolia?

Tilda Swinton - winner, Best Supporting Actress - openly admits to having a open relationship. Is in a relationship with a painter who is 18 years younger than her, but yet lives platonically with the father of her twins - who is 20 years older than her.

Saorise Ronan - nominee, Best Supporting Actress - nominated at age 13. Her father is actor Paul Ronan. Paul acted with Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in The Devil's Own (1997).

Jason Reitman - nominee, Best Director - son of director Ivan Reitman

Tony Gilroy - nominee Best Director and Best Screenplay - His father Frank is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and writer.

Tamara Jenkins - nominee, Best Screenplay - after being a performance artist, wrote an autobiographical script that became the film The Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) that she directed. Her husband Jim has already won an Oscar for writing the film Sideways (2005).

Julian Schnabel - nominee, Best Director - also a painter and artist. Painted the album cover of a Red Hot Chili Peppers album By The Way. Directed Javier Bardem to his first Oscar nomination in the early 2000's.

Javier Bardem - winner, Best Supporting Actor - third generation in a family of actors. His grandfather performed at the beginning of Spanish cinema and his mother as still active in her career. Bardem doesn't actually drive, but yet did in No Country For Old Men.

Cate Blanchett - twice nominated in acting categories this year - at age 38, already been nominated five times. Twice for playing Queen Elizabeth I in two different movies that weren't related to each other and were ten years apart. Won for playing another Oscar-winning actress (Katharine Hepburn) and nominated for playing musician Bob Dylan in a movie where not only was she Dylan, but so was Heath Ledger and so was a black kid.

Ruby Dee - at age 83, became the second-oldest Oscar nominee.

We all know about Tommy Lee Jones going to Harvard with Al Gore. Oh and don't forget about Marketa Irglova - the young girl who won for Best Song and got the rare opportunity to come back out to do her acceptance speech after Bill Conti chased her off with music. Today's her 20th birthday.

It's official, according to the Hollywood Reporter: Sunday's Oscars telecast hit rock bottom in viewership.
ABC's publicity mill took more time than usual to release the fast-national results, probably because of the struggle they were having putting lipstick on this pig.
On the heels of early-morning metered market figures that did not bode well, the announcement late Monday proclaimed 64.13 million viewers ages 2+ across the country watched 6 minutes or more of the show. (Of course, at least some of those younger children in the 2+ universe probably sat through Robert Boyle's entire long-winded acceptance speech for his honorary award because they mistakenly thought they were watching home video of their great-grandfather.)
Having put a smear of lucious pink on some bacon on the hoof, ABC closes with this caveat:
"DVR penetration ... has nearly doubled from 13 percent at the same point in 2006, up to more than 22.5 percent currently. ... The only true valid year-to-year comparison would be one based on the Live +7 Day metric, once those stats are released by Nielsen."
Yes, I'll translate. ABC hopes that a lot of us who didn't tune in live on Sunday night will watch the whole bloody broadcast on our TiVos sometime this week, even though we know all the results and will have had plenty of time to watch the show's few compelling moments on the Internet. And ABC hopes that by next Monday, when those Live +7 Day figures surface, even the trades like Variety and Hollywood Reporter will no longer care.