I don’t really like these “week in review”-type posts, but I don’t have any time these days for more regular writing, so this’ll do. It’s been a long week, for some reason, though it hasn’t been as busy as other recent weeks. We had a good night at trivia on Tuesday, second place despite getting a fat zero on the last round; we thought, for some reason, that the Ford Model A came after the Model T rather than before, though everyone else in the bar did, too, and no one got any points.

The highlight of the week was the second Book Smart Nightclub at Largo, a benefit for 826LA. Largo is a great place; it was Aimee’s first time there, and she enjoyed it as much as I hoped she would. It’s intimate, quiet, and relaxed, and people are there to listen and enjoy the performances. We had great seats, right up front, had a nice dinner, and enjoyed the all-too-brief show from Todd Carlin (excellent, hilarious poetry), a reading (of one chapter of his book) by Glasgow Phillips, and an enthralling set of standards (plus “Extraordinary Machine“) from Fiona Apple and the very talented Dave Palmer on piano. We had a great time, and I immediately called to make reservations for the next edition, with Davy Rothbart, Patton Oswalt, and the Watson Twins. Should be great.

I caught another noir at the Cinematheque last night, this time Pitfall, starring former song-and-dance man Dick Powell. It was a good, solid noir, and the house was pretty full, mostly with now-familiar faces: solo, middle-aged white guys, often with bags of papers or books, wearing overcoats and talking to themselves. My kind of crowd…though the 4 year-old girl running up and down the aisle during the film was a new twist. I’m looking forward to catching one or two more films before the festival ends, and then not going back to the Cinematheque until they stop playing that awful opening one-two-three punch of the TCM Marlon Brando trailer, the unbearable KCRW anime ad, and the soul-crushing Fandango paper-bag puppet Bollywood commercial. Enough, please.

We’re giving ourselves a treat this weekend, or should I say, we’re taking Aimee’s parents up on the treat they gave us last year, a gift certificate for a night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We’re hoping to hit it right at check-in on Saturday afternoon and stay until they kick us out on Sunday, because we’ll probably never be able to go there again. While we’re there, we’ve got a dinner reservation for the Polo Lounge, and we’re hoping for some room service breakfast, too. It should be a lot of fun, though I’m not exactly sure how I’ll work in a 6-mile run one day and 12-mile run on the other. One way or another.