I Shall, I Do

That pretty picture is William Blake's etching of Isaac Newton. You get the feeling that Blake wasn't a fan?

Of Montreal turned out to be a really cool show, despite the fact that I had only heard a fraction of their music (and that fraction only once or twice) and the audience seemed to have a lot of people you wouldn't want to be stuck in an elevator with while they claimed they never listened to "popular" music. I kid because I love (or because I'm a sad, bitter soul who resents happiness and contentment in others). I never expected to enjoy a show that includes costume changes but not David Bowie.

In other news of only limited appeal, I bought a PlayStation 2 today, which brings me up to date with technology circa 2000. The Wii is a cool system, but the limited library of games that anyone would possibly want to play was dragging me down. I'd talk about the games I picked up, but I can already feel Stacey's attention waning.

Oh, and I've started a screenplay. Right now it's titled "Fellow Travelers: A Postmodern Love Song" and theoretically begins with a quote from Allan Bloom's pretentious Jeremiad "The Closing of the American Mind". I'm having a hard time coming up with a description of it that doesn't sound like the scenario for High Fidelity, but I really don't think I've stolen too much from it. Some of the characters are very loosely (read: not particularly loosely) based on friends of mine, so the upshot of the whole deal will probably involved shopping around for new friends.

Notes From The Other Side

So I got my new eMusic downloads. eMusic has apparently lost their deal with Epitah records, which sucks. No more of Tom Waits recent stuff, the Coup or Sage Francis. Anyway, among the stuff I picked up:
-The new Rob Sonic album
-Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer and the accompanying EP, in preparation for the show Friday night.
- C-Rayz Walz's 1975- Return of the Beast
- Graham Parker's covers of "Substitute" and "I'm Into Something Good"
-Mike Watt's cover of "Burning For You"
-Moves & Birdapres' Alleged Legends
-C-Rayz Walz and Parallel Thought's Chorus Rhyme
-Tortoise & Bonnie "Prince" Billy's The Brave and the Bold
-A Smithsonian/Folkways collection called Bound For Glory: A Young Dylan's Folkways Roots

I did write most of a review of the Atmosphere show, but what I wrote was mostly shit, and I don't want to put it up. I might try again tomorrow, but the short version is:
-Really crowded show
-Mac Lethal nearly stole the show
-Atmosphere played a bunch of new stuff, but did play "Angelface" and "Always Coming Back Home To You", so very cool.

I don't imagine that I'll do a write-up for the Of Montreal show, since I don't think I know enough about the band to really give anything resembling an informed opinion.

I'm going to watch Gordon Ramsey's reality/cooking show tonight. Hopefully there's more cooking this week, and less reality show angst this week, but I'm not confident. This might be the show's final chance with me. I have better stuff to do than watch a one hour program for about seven minutes of content I'm interested in*




*(Disclaimer: Rob might not actually have anything better to do)

House is Back

Tonight's episode was pretty decent. This search for the new team has the chance to either be awesome, or really annoying. It doesn't matter, though. Once again we're all basking in Hugh Laurie's warm glowing warming glow.

Nothing But Sunshine

I just now finished Philip Roth's I Married A Communist, and in doing so I finally finished Roth's 1990s Nathan Zuckerman trilogy (the other two books being The Human Stain and American Pastoral, but not in that order.) The book was very good, although not quite as awe-inspiring as the other two (at least in my opinion. Halpern called The Human Stain one of Roth's worst novels. Which makes me wonder if Halpern has read The Plot Against America which was essentially a noble failure.) Roth has another Nathan Zuckerman novel coming out soon, and I'll probably wind up putting it on the list of books I ask for at Christmas. I really want to read the earlier Zuckerman novels before this one. It's probably not necessary- I read these three books all out of order, but I kind of want to go about this next one the right way, especially since I'm now pretty sure that Roth is the best living writer I know of (sorry Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushide and Thomas Pynchon).

I'm still reading Woody Guthrie's autobiography, but I'm not entirely sure what "literary" book I'm going to pick up now. I have an enormous stack of books on my bookshelf that I haven't gotten to yet, and every night they sit there and mock me while I watch television or play video games. It's somewhat hard to intellectually justify rescuing the princess yet again when one still hasn't bothered to crack open Beckett's trilogy. At least, that's the way it feels to me sometimes. And then I really want to pick up Ulysses again, and there's that stack of books that the other James gave me a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven't opened the latest Pynchon 800 page era-defining opus that I got for Christmas last year, and I really should start in on Proust while I have no real responsibilities, and people like me really are supposed to have read more than one Jane Austen novel (and that one novel should not be Persuasion) and...it goes on and on.

Anyway. Tonight, unless catastrophe strikes again, I'll finally get to see Atmosphere play the Cat's Cradle. Two years ago I had a ticket to see the Twin Cities' finest non-Albino hip hop act, but then I broke my fucking shoulder and instead of seeing Slug and Ant (plus P.O.S. and Blueprint as the opening acts) I wound up with my arm in a sling, watching Six Feet Under reruns while comfortably doped. This show tonight should be good, but I'm curious about what the crowd will be like, or rather, how many people there tonight will be like some of the cats I spoke with at the Sage Francis and El-P shows- people who aren't really into hip-hop per se, but rather into one or two specific (and usually white) hip hop act. The kind of people, I think, that Sage had in mind when he wrote "This is hip-hop for the people./Stop calling it emo". Or maybe not, and I just like that line and wanted to quote it. I'm curious how many people at the Cradle tonight will also be there for the Ninth Wonder show in a few weeks, or when Little Brother returns to the Cradle in December, as compared to how many of them are more likely to be at the Of Montreal show on Friday. (Please take note- I'm not judging these people- after all, I'll be at both Atmosphere and Of Montreal myself. I certainly don't think that you have to be a hip hop head to like almost any given specific hip hop act. I'm just kind of morbidly curious about people who only listen to one or two hip hop acts, and seem resistant to the idea of branching out into all that the music has to offer. Hoom. I'm guessing that I've put my foot far enough into my mouth now, so I'm just going to stop.) At any rate, I really hope Atmosphere plays "Angelface" and "Always Coming Back Home To You" and maybe "Pour Me Another" and "If I Was Santa Claus", and I hope that I don't somehow give myself a catastrophic injury between now and 9:30 or so tonight.

Expect a review of the show in a day or two. Expect more bullshit hand wringing about my reading habits. Expect NC State to win maybe one or two more games this football season, and expect to be happy with that. Expect something good from the basketball team. Expect whatever you like, really.

Helpful Tips For Modern Living

What's up, party people?

Did you know that gatorade mixed with rum is a little better than you might expect? I'm torn between calling it a gator bite or a Spurrier cocktail.

This Game Could Be Your Life

Hi kids.

I saw "King of Kong" today. It's a documentary about the struggle for the top score in Donkey Kong, and it's really quite good. If you have 80 minutes to kill, you should think about seeing it, even if you don't really care about video games. Before the movie they showed the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, which I'm looking forward to (mainly because it's the new Wes Anderson movie, and even if Life Aquatic wasn't as good as his first three films, he still deserves your unquestioning respect). There was also a trailer for a new movie co-written by Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow and starring Owen Wilson, called "Drillbit Taylor", that has the pedigree to be good. At least, I hope it's better than the trailer made it out to be.

I'd try and write more, but I'm watching Donnie Brasco at the same time, and Al Pacino is demanding my undivided attention.

But the post office has been stolen and the mail box is locked

I applied for three jobs at the UNC library today. Or yesterday, rather. If the dice finally roll my way, that would be cool enough that I wouldn't even mind working in the belly of the beast for a while.

Kanye West's new album is somewhat underwhelming. So was Aesop Rock's new album. New Springsteen album is on the horizon- hopefully that won't be underwhelming. Right now I'm listening to Brother Ali, Johnny Cash, Graham Parker, Bob Dylan's early 90s folk albums, El-P, a Smithsonian Folkways Classic Mountain Music collection, video game podcasts and the Minutemen, mainly. Right now I'm reading Philip Roth's "I Married A Communist" and Woody Guthrie's autobiography. I just finished a biography of Cash, and a couple of 33 1/3 books, one on A Tribe Called Quest's first album and one on Sly and the Family Stone's "There's A Riot Going On". I have another 33 1/3 in my bag, about Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" album, which I'm going to be reading pretty much entirely out of a sense of completism. I'm seriously considering re-reading Ulysses. I can't quite say why. I finally saw "Superbad", which was quite good, although I liked "Knocked Up" more. I'm planning on seeng the documentary "King of Kongs" on Wednesday. "House" is back on television in a week, which is a good thing.

The other day, I was sitting in the Brickyard, reading, and a would-be Christian missionary was attempting to use Occam's Razor to prove that Jesus rose from the grave. He didn't use the term "Occam's Razor", but that was the thrust of his argument. I'm still not sure if I think that he just sucks at logic, or if he has real chutzpah. At any rate, that's the kind of weird thing that rattles around in my head for days on end.

Nevermind.

No mention of the Wii in this post

Stacey- You can tell how much Halpern wormed his way into our brain. I was at Barnes and Nobel on Monday, and I held a copy of Swann's Way for about ten minutes (before I went with my natural instinct and bought a copy of a biography of Johnny Cash). I've felt a very strange guilt lately that I'm not reading Proust. I'm pretty sure that normal people don't have these emotions. Right now I am also reading Nabokov's Real Life of Sebastian Knight, another example of how much of my psychic real estate Halpern laid claim to.

I liked Harry Potter, although I wasn't blown away by the epilogue. A little too clean and neat. I did take a slightly preverse pleasure in Rowling sneaking the word "bitch" into what is ostensibly a childrens' book.

Dillon, a rapper that Keith and I saw at the Cradle a couple of weeks ago, put some pictures of the show up on his blog, and Keith and I are more prominent in the photo than the rapper Akrobatik, who is theoretically the subject of the photo.