Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

So I finally finished reading The Iluminatus! Trilogy, (it's a long book).  It's clear to me that the two writers, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson are very clever and well-read individuals, and that they are good writers, without ever really approaching the level of great writers, even by the standards of "genre fiction"  (The book is classified as sci-fi, but that's not really appropriate.  It's more like "slightly psychedelic conspiracy metafiction", but most bookstores are still stubbornly refusing to include that section).  The ideas in the book are fascinating, and the range of allusions and references are impressive, but when I see that the cover boasts "0ver 100,00 copies sold" over thirty or so years, I think that's about right.  It's kind of like an article Chuck Klosterman wrote where he argued that My Bloody Valentine is one of the most perfectly rated groups in music history (as opposed to being overrated or underrated).  It's hard to imagine more than 100 thousand or so people enjoying the book, but of the 100 thousand who do read the book, most of them probably love it.  

Now I'm embarking on something I've been meaning to do for some time- re-reading Ulysses.   I started it last night, and I just finished the first section (the three prologue sections, following Stephen Dedalus around).  The first time around, I didn't actually finish the book (I suppose after I finish this, I should go back and actually finish reading Gravity's Rainbow) but I have confidence that this time I'll get through the whole thing.  I'll let anyone who accidentally arrived here know how it goes.

The O5R Book Club

So, last year I remember reading in Entertainment Weekly that Warren Ellis, author of such wonderful comic books as Transmetropolitan and Planetary, had written a prose novel.  I read the review, which seemed more befuddled than anything else, filed away the information that Ellis had written a novel, told one of my friends about it, and then promptly forgot about it.  Perhaps because, outside of Neil Gaiman, I've never read a novel by a comic book writer, probably for the same reason that I've never read a novel by a filmmaker (okay, I've read a collection of short stories by one of the Coen brothers, but that's it).  I know, for example, that Alan Moore, who is the greatest comic book writer alive, has written a novel, but I've never bothered to read it, because I can't imagine it being as good as his comic books (and from what I've read about it, I seem to be right, although I'm sure I'll wind up reading it someday.)  

Like I said, I forgot that the book existed.  Until I was at Barnes and Nobel on Saturday, killing time before going to see The Wackness (good, not great.  I'd say to wait until it is on DVD, but at some point, if you aren't doing anything more important, Ben Kingsley gives a performance that might be worth watching.) and I saw that the novel, Crooked Little Vein, was out in paperback.  Having nothing better to do, I went ahead and picked up the book.  I finished reading Gone Baby Gone, which I would have liked more if I hadn't seen the movie and didn't already know the huge twist that is central to the plot.  I had to take the car I drive into the dealership for an inspection and oil change, so I brought the book with me.  I finished it a few minutes ago.  It's... almost exactly what I expected, which is an odd thing to say about a book that is so weird.  The book is about a private eye, hired by the white house to find the secret "real constitution" that the founding fathers wrote, but that's little more than a MacGuffin.  The book is really about the profound weirdness of modern (or, if I was an asshole, I might write postmodern) America, and how the internet has basically made every bit of weirdness or perversion (and I say that with only some prejudice) into the mainstream, which is the kind of thing that permeates the best parts of Transmetropolitan.  Also, like Transmetropolitan, there are odd references to harpoons.  Just thought I'd throw that in there.  The book is good, especially for a first prose novel, and has a decent chance of becoming a cult phenomenon, but it's hardly essential reading. 

And that's my book report.  

Notes From The Mundane

So.

I've been 26 for a couple of days now, and I still haven't gotten the hang of it.  But I'm not too worried about it.  I've mentioned a couple of times that my sister is getting married in about a week, so my secret hope was that my life would re-enact Sixteen Candles, and everyone would forget my birthday.  Unfortunately, no one did, and I didn't get that magic moment with Jake Ryan.  I think I mainly wanted to meet John Cusack.  Everyone gave me cash in lieu of gifts- the one exception was a copy of the new David Sedaris book.  So that was all fine.  I used some of the money to pay for my ticket to the Rock The Bells festival in DC.  I bought new headphones, to replace the two pairs that broke over the last five days (one pair just gave out after months of abuse, and then I accidentally destroyed my back-up pair when I was taking a bag out of my car during a driving rainstorm- I was trying not to get too wet and didn't notice when I slammed them in the door.  I discovered them the next morning and had one of those moments where I vaguely feel like I've failed at life.  Because I was up so early, I went ahead to Target to buy a new pair.  Since I was flush with gifted cash, I felt like I should buy something else while I was there, which is an incredibly odd impulse when you look at it rationally.  If I had been thinking clearly, I would have bought the new Futurama DVD, but it was 8:15 in the morning, and that level of logic was inaccessible to me.  So I wound up staring at the CDs for sale.  I thought about buying the new Weezer album, but I couldn't bring myself to give up 16 dollars for something that I'm so sure will be a disappointment.  So I ended up buying the 25th anniversary re-release of Thriller, which was on sale.  In retrospect, I really can't understand why I did that.  I mean, it's a great album and all, but I'm not a Michael Jackson fan, and I can't imagine any other circumstance where the idea of buying the CD would have even occurred to me.  There are probably two or three valuable lessons to be learned here.  

The tracklist that I made for myself about my birthday goes as follows:

1. Pearl Jam- Corduroy (Live, from the Live on Two Legs disc)

2. Nirvana- Oh, Me (From Unplugged)

3. The Pogues- Medley: The Recruiting Sergeant/The Rocky Road To Dublin/The Galway Races

4.  The Rolling Stones- Torn & Frayed

5. U2- Vertigo (Live, from an EP I found on iTunes of U2 at the Brooklyn Bridge and only bought the one song)

6. Weezer- Perfect Situation (which is the one song off of the last album I actually liked)

7. Aesop Rock- Flashflood

8.  The Beatles- I'm Happy Just To Dance With You

9. Bob Dylan- Idiot Wind

10. Bruce Springsteen- Darkness On The Edge of Town (Live)

11. Buck 65- 1957

12. The Clash- The Guns of Brixton

13. The Coup- Busterismology

14. Neil Young- Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Live from the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary show)

15. The Stone Roses- Made of Stone

16. Mcenroe and Birdapres featuring John Smith- A Little Bitter

17. Radiohead- Anyone Can Play Guitar

I just finished reading the new Sedaris.  It's good, but I didn't like it nearly as much as the other ones.  I'm a little worried that he's begun to run out of past, so to speak, and is forced to write more essays about life as a middle-aged, mildly famous, neurotic gay man, which are inherently less funny than essays about being a twenty-year old hitchhiker or child who is neurotic even by the standards set by the rest of his family.  

Where I'm Calling From and Where I've Been

If I were a mixtape, it would sound something like this at the moment.

1. Nirvana- Aneurysm (Live version from a bootleg I have where the guys who printed up the liner notes thought that the title was "Come On Over") (key line: " Love you so much it makes me sick")

2. Aesop Rock- Commencement at the Obedience Academy "Must not sleep/must warn others")

3. Neutral Milk Hotel- Communist Daughter ("Bends toward herself the soothing")

4. Talking Heads- Take Me to The River ("Love is an ocean that I can't forget")

5.  Neil Young- Tonight's The Night ("As real as the day is long")

6.  Robert Johnson- Come On In My Kitchen ("Babe it going to be raining outdoors")

7. The Refreshments- Interstate ("I don't need a miracle but I could use a push in the right direction")

8. Soundgarden- Outshined ("I got up feeling so down")

9.  Mission of Burma- That's When I Reach For My Revolver ("But all of that is changed now")

10. Love- A House Is Not A Motel ("And if someone asks you/you can call my name")

11.  The Beach Boys- I Just Wasn't Made For These Times ("They say I got brains but they ain't do me no good")

12.  The Jam- That's Entertainment ("Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes")

13.  Graham Parker- I Discovered America ("Everyone said quit now and that's when I found hope")

14. The Flaming Lips- Waitin' For A Superman ("Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be")

15. Eliot Smith- Speed Trials ("But it's sure as fate and hard as your luck")

16. MF Grimm- Children Of Cain ("Children of Cain just nod to this")

17. Bruce Springsteen- Magic ("This is what will be")

18. Atmosphere- Tears For The Sheep ("The language was primitive, the listener complex")

19. The Replacements- Swingin' Party ("If bein' afraid is a crime we'll hang side by side")

20. Canibal Ox- The F-Word ("I'm more than just a shoulder to cry on")

Sometimes I'm pretty sure that most people don't go about things in the ways that I do. 

What I've been up to:

 

Reading: Dennis Lehane's Darkness Take My Hand and Sacred, The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns (it's kind of a precursor to The Wire. Actually, I picked up the Lehane books in large part because he wrote for The Wire.)  Slam by Nick Hornby, which was good but not great, and intended more for teenage readers than his other books (although it might have enough cursing to irritate some high school librarians, which I consider to be a point in its favor), I just started Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses,  and we'll see if I finish it, as it looks like a fairly demanding read.  Also, there's a slight chance that Islamists might go after me for reading it.  

Listening:  Besides the stuff I mentioned, I've been getting prepared for the Rock The Bells festival later this month by listening to some of the acts on the bill that I'm less familiar with, like The Pharcyde and Immortal Technique.  Beyond that, a lot of the usual suspects.  Plus I'm still working on the music for my sister's wedding reception, which is alternately fun and maddening.  Guests who know me will be able to tell which songs I chose, and which songs the increasingly deranged bride chose.  Also, do you really think Elvis Costello's "Allison" is appropriate for a wedding reception?  I get that my sister's future husband's sister is named Allison, but I can't be the only person who actually understands what the song about, can I?  I mean, why don't we just play all of Dylan's Blood On The Tracks while we're at it.  (Except for "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", which could potentially work.  And on some tv show, there was a wedding where the theme song was "Shelter From The Storm", but I think they only heard the parts about "I came in from the wilderness/a creature void of form/ 'Come in' she said I'll give you/shelter from the storm" and missed the entire rest of the song, which mostly consists of lost loved and Dylan comparing himself to Jesus, which is practically an entire sub-genre of Dylan songs.  But the show got it wrong by using the album version.  I would have used the live version from the Hard Rain album.  But that's just me)

Watching: Wall-E, which I liked, the second season of My Name Is Earl, which I started on Netflix after finishing the fourth season of The Wire.  I think Rome will be next.  I saw the new Narnia movie, which was okay but way too long, and The Happening,  (going to see it wasn't my decision, which I hope I don't even have to say.  As is often the case when I see a bad movie, there was a girl involved.  The only bad movie which I saw in the theaters by choice over the last few years was The Da Vinci Code, which I had to see after it got booed at Cannes.  I was hoping for a true train wreck, but Ron Howard could only produce a mediocre mess.)which isn't so much bad as inscrutable.  It's like a film made by aliens who had seen a few Earth movies, but really didn't understand them.  But it's also pretty bad.  I think I was the only person in the theater who wasn't so much pissed off as impressed by it's essential strangeness (strangeness in the bad way, not the awesome Night of the Hunter or David Lynch way).  I saw Indiana Jones, mostly out of a sense of cultural obligation.  It wasn't really bad, but it was staggeringly unnecessary, and the actors seemed to know this.  I finally caught up with Battlestar Galactica, which I had begun avoiding this season.  The final few episodes of the half-season were pretty decent, so I'll wind up finishing the ride when the show re-starts.  Oh, and The Venture Bros., which is still six kinds of awesome.  And my secret shame is watching Hell's Kitchen on Hulu.com.  I hate the reality show parts of the show (i.e. all of the contestants display sociopathic tendencies, pointlessly dramatic commercial breaks, inane contests) but I'm a sucker for Gordon Ramsay yelling at people.  I wonder if BBC America shows episodes of the British version of the show, which I'm positive is better than the Americanized version.  And if next season is b-list celebrities, then even Ramsay can't keep me there.

Playing: No one game in particular.  Some GTA: San Andreas, some re-playing of the original Half-Life on PS2, some Super Mario Galaxy, some Bully.  But there's no game that I'm obsessed with at the moment.  I picked up Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii, mostly because of how much I love the Lego Star Wars games.  It's pretty good, but by no means is it a must-buy, especially since it doesn't take very long to finish.   

The picture is Neil Young, but you already should have known that.  

Oh, and by the time I finished editing and rewriting this, I looked up and it was Thursday. I am apparently 26 now, which is slightly vexing.  I thought that 25 was a perfectly reasonable age to be.  

Don't Quote Me Boy, Cause I Ain't Said Shit

Sorry about the lack of activity lately. My computer has been acting up, and apparently needs a new hard drive to be content.

What I've been up to:
Reading- books about Shakespeare, specifically Stephen Greenblat's "Will In The World" and Peter Ackroyd's "Shakespeare: The Biography". I need to finish the book "Mansion on the Hill", which is about the corporate incursion into rock music. I got distracted by the Shakespeare books and need to pick this one back up.
Watching- The Wire on DVD, the season finales of 3o Rock, Lost (My bold prediction is that Locke is in the coffin. I'd almost be willing to bet on it) and The Office (fantastic season finale- so much to love about it, but I'd single out another sighting of the great Mose Schrute and Dwight convincing the new HR woman that Kevin is retarded), the movies "Iron Man" (good not great) and "Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" (way too long, and there was no need to invent scenes that aren't in the books to pad out the running time past the 2 hour mark) and "Clueless" in chunks on TBS. That movie is so much better than it should be.
Listening- A lot of The Pogues and Shane McGowan, the Mobb Deep song "Shook Ones Part II", which is an old song that I've been captivated by lately, the new Gnarls Barkley and Atmosphere albums, Cool Calm Pete's album "Lost", and while I was doing some editing work I couldn't stop listening to Oasis collections (specifically the greatest hits compilation "Stop the Clocks" and the B-Sides collection "The Masterplan". I really can't explain why the brothers Gallagher seemed so conducive to fixing typos.
Playing- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Bully, No More Heroes, which I picked up when I saw a used copy on sale for about 25 bucks and my curiosity about what a punk video game would really be like got the best of me, WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (although I'm still waiting for a pro wrestling video game as good as the ones for the N64 were), the download game Lostwinds on the Wii, which is really fantastic, albeit way too short.

Hopefully my computer will be fine on Tuesday, so I can resume semi-regular entries.

Is This Really News?

I saw a headline that said "Obama Gets Scant Support From White Voters in Mississippi". I hate to fall back on stereotypes (this might be a lie), but come on- did anyone expect that white voters in Mississippi would be voting for the black guy? Really?

Really?

Other news:
-Tucker Carlson lost his TV show on MSNBC. Which shows that Chipper Jones does smile upon his creations.
-Super Smash Bros. Brawl is awesome.
-Finished re-reading American Tabloid, began re-reading the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. Part of why I like these books is that sometimes, they are very funny. Sometimes reading them makes you want to take a shower to escape the grime. Sometimes, these two things happen at once.
-Schoolkids Records is closing in Chapel Hill, and I read online that the Raleigh store's lease is up in December or so, and they might move (again) or worse. This sucks.
-I've never watched American Idol. The closest I've come is having the last few minutes on, muted, while checking my email and waiting for House to come on. But I listen to Tony Kornheiser's podcast, and he is obsessed with American Idol, so I know a little about what goes on. Tonight, while I was looking for a song in iTunes for my mother, I noticed that the number one song in iTunes is Jeff Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". Now, this is one of my all time favorite songs, and Jeff Buckley's version is one of the more captivating things in music, but that doesn't explain why a song from a guy who drowned nearly 11 years ago, and was never all that famous, suddenly surged to the top of iTunes, which is usually dominated by the worst of the top 40. How did the late Mr. Buckley (I mean the late Jeff Buckley, not his father, Tim, who is also dead) make it to the top of the charts? I'm fairly certain it is because recently on the American Idol, someone sang the song "Hallelujah", and that led people en masse to start downloading Buckley's cover. Which is all really weird. But my deeper question is this: why didn't Cohen's (slightly inferior version, because of the different sets of lyrics he used in different versions) version make the charts? And now, do people think that Buckley wrote "hallelujah" the way that some people think that Lennon and McCartney wrote "Twist and Shout" and Hendrix wrote "All Along The Watchtower"? Also, it is incredibly fucking weird that Jeff Buckley is on the top of the iTunes chart in the year of our Jones 2008. That can't be overstated.
-I'm halfway through a book about My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album (which I put down a few days ago and need to pick back up) and I'm no closer to understanding why I like the album so much, given how many things about it seem like they would annoy me.

Talking Pat Sajak Union Blues

The picture is the only photograph of Thomas Pynchon I've ever seen. He doesn't really look like an enigmatic literary genius who only breaks his reclusive tendencies to appear on The Simpsons, does he? At any rate, it has nothing to do with anything, just something I grabbed off of Wikipedia months ago when I was looking for random pictures to illustrate this humble blog.

Okay. So, I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album. I have the television muted and on ABC, because I don't want to forget that I'm planning on watching the new episode of Lost at 9:00. (I know there' a State game on, but I don't think I want to watch it. I'm not overly pessmistic, but Duke is Duke. They get more tv time than Leave it to Beaver re-runs [Gods, don't we all miss Pete Gillen on some subatomic level?]. And although State's bigs should be able to dominate Duke in the paint, Duke's ability to force turnovers and run up the score with their Phoenix Suns offense manages to exploit almost all of State's weaknesses at the same time.) I also realize that the fact that I have to set the channel a good two hours before the episode begins doesn't exactly imply that I really want to watch the episode. But I don't watch much network television, so I have a hard time remembering exactly when shows are on. This is what happens when the majority of television you watch is actually on DVD (which is a much more satisfying way of watching most television series, it just means that you can't talk about the show until months after most people have seen them. But this is alright, since most of my friends don't watch that much television either.)

Anyway, Wheel of Fortune is on the television, but I don't really notice it until I reach the end of the essay where Klosterman argues that Empire Strikes Back set the tone for Gen-X. When I look up at the end of the chapter, they're doing the final puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. The category is something like "Fictional Characters" or whatever, and even after Pat Sajak spotted the contestant the letters, it was completely unclear what the answer was. And it turned out that the answer was "Happy and Grumpy". And this is fucking bullshit. I haven't watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune since I was in middle school, at the most recent, but everyone understands that the answers have to be idiomatic if they are multiple words. If the answer had been "Batman & Robin", that would be fine. Everyone associates the two. And if the answer had been "The Seven Dwarfs", that would be fine too. But who the hell would ever guess "Happy and Grumpy"? I thought that I didn't watch Wheel of Fortune because it was too easy. Now I know that I don't watch it because it doesn't play fair.


This weekend, I intend to go see either Juno or There Will Be Blood, depending on whether or not I feel like going to Cary (and, I suppose, on whether or not the theaters don't change the movies they are showing too drastically.) I have a stack of new music books to get through, which have pushed the Nabokov book that I put on top of my bookshelf a few weeks ago in order to motivate myself to go ahead and read it. But a monograph about the first Velvet Underground album or Johnny Cash's second autobiography seem more immediately interesting, even if they are less fulfilling for me as a person.

"You could call it an omen/point ya where you're goin'

So, I just spent five hours downstairs, waiting to sign for a FedEx package for my mother. I spent the time reading Chuck Klosterman's book Killing Yourself to Live and listening to Radiohead's Kid A album and a collection of Pixies B-Sides. And I'm worried about what that says about the kind of person I am, or maybe I'm just worrying about worrying about that. I'm not sure. Now I'm listening to Bob Dyan's "Caribbean Wind", a song that most people, even most casual Dylan fans, have never heard of, because I couldn't get the instrumental part out of my head, and I'm not sure if that means something either.

I've always been strangely hesitant to read Klosterman. I have no idea why, except I had a strange, vague and utterly irrational fear of becoming the kind of person who reads Klosterman books and talks incessantly about their favorite Wilco record (despite the fact that I like Wilco) and firmly believes that Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted is a better record than, say, Revolver, (although, again, I really do like Slanted and Enchanted.

The next track on Biograph, at least the parts of Biograph that I have copied on my iPod because only parts of the Box Set were previously unreleased is "Up To Me", which is an outtake from either Desire or Blood On The Tracks, and a really good song, but one that I can't bear to listen to, so I switch, more or less randomly, to the Ramones song "I Just Want To Have Something To Do" (this is the song that they sing in the bedroom in Rock n Roll High School, if that helps). It's not my favorite Ramones song, but it cleanses my sonic palate in the exact way that I want, and now I'm worried that I'm semi-consciously aping Klosterman's style, or at least that I think I am. Which is more troubling, I'm not sure, I'm just sure that I am troubled by it, which is troubling in and of itself.

The lesson here is that I can disappear into Mobius strips in my head way too easily. Especially when I'm reading rock critics.

Maybe my brain is punishing me for spending nearly 24 hours (non-consecutively) playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii and listening to podcasts about old video games.

After the Ramones song, I think about switching to the new Atmosphere collection that I downloaded the other day and haven't gotten around to yet, or listening to In Rainbows again. I know that I don't want to listen to one of the albums that I've really fallen into in the last fifteen months or so, which rules out Daydream Nation and Pleased To Meet Me and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and The Undisputed Truth and American Idiot and Low so I wind up putting on the most recent Springsteen album, mainly to hear "Radio Nowhere" and the title cut.

The stacks of CDs on my desk (which I never use anymore, since I have a laptop but not a chair) are pretty much openly mocking me now. I reorganized the hip hop section of my cds right before Christmas, which solved one problem, but because I had to take the down the shelf of random Reggae/Soul/Funk/Dire Straits/Velvet Underground/bunch of other stuff cds to make room for the weird assortment of new albums and things I picked up at all of the shows from the last six or seven months, but you'd assume that the size of the stack on my desk would remain the same- just differently composed. But that's not the case.

After hearing the Springsteen songs I wanted to hear, I change to a song by The Band called "Acadian Driftwood" that is heart-breakingly perfect, but because it was on a mediocre album called Northern Lights-Southern Cross most people haven't heard of. It makes "The Weight", which seems to be the most enduring song of the Band's on the radio, seem like an amateur effort in comparison. Levon Helm pretty much exists to do things so beautiful that you want to cry, but even so, this song is breathtaking. The picture is of The Band. At one point, Eric Clapton wanted to be in the band. But Robbie Robertson will always be secretly better than Clapton. I consider this to be almost gnostic wisdom. And that's slightly troubling.

Reading the part of the book where Klosterman visits the site where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil makes me think about the sheer number of words I've read about the significance of Bob Dylan choosing Highway 61 to revisit in a song and album title. And I marvel at the sheer weight of the bullshit that's piled on top of some music, and how I'm just as guilty of this as everyone else. Maybe Dylan wasn't really thinking about the musical traditions associated with that particular road. Maybe he just needed a street that rhymed with "God told Abraham, Kill me a son". It's really not that inconceivable. So I decided to stop thinking about music for a while and to just half watch a rerun of Malcolm In the Middle. I really need a proper job to take my mind off of, well, all the things I think about.

Quick Thoughts from the throes of insomnia

Keith's wedding turned out well, on the whole. I was more nervous than he was, as far as I could tell, but I managed to not lose the rings, and I completely failed to trip on my way to and from the front of the church. I could hardly have asked for more. In the end, it was decided that there would be no toasts. I had just about figured out what I was going to say, and I think that the words I had more or less settled on would have been appropriate and even somewhat lovely, even if they weren't particularly profound.

In other news, I heard that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. This is what we in the literary field refer to as "bad news". I've spent the past few months re-reading the Discworld novels, and I've been very pleased at how well they've stood up to second readings. I think it was a critic for the Washington Post who compared Pratchett to Chaucer, and I'm consistently jealous at not having thought of that myself. Pratchett's clearly not in the same pantheon as Chaucer, and I don't believe for a second that the Discworld novels will be held in anywhere near the same esteem as the Canterbury Tales, but there is a common worldview, and although I never studied Chaucer in the same depths as I studied Shakespeare or Donne or Nabokov in school, I feel like the old master would have appreciated Pratchett's sense of humor. It's just possible that the best of Pratchett's works (Small Gods, definitely, Carpe Jugulum, perhaps) might one day be required reading that undergraduates skim through on the night before the test. We can only hope.

I'm a little annoyed that three movies that I actually really want to see are all coming out on Friday: Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War and Walk Hard all look excellent, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to seeing all three in the theater, especially since I still haven't seen "No Country For Old Men".

Thursday night Slick Rick is doing a free show at the Cradle. At the moment, Keith and I are still planning on going. Really, the Little Brother show would have been the more poetic choice for the last show of a fantastic year in live music, but the bastards who control the schedules don't agree.

The Johnny Cash picture is just one I like. I guess since Walk Hard is in part a parody of Walk The Line (which was a pretty good movie that never bothered to flirt with greatness, if you want my opinion), I suppose the picture is somehow thematically appropriate.

Living for giving the devil his due...

Hi kids (note that I say "kids" despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, no one younger than me reads this with anything approaching regularity.)

I've been meaning to put more stuff up, but I've been busy watching baseball (You had to figure Cleveland would eventually remember that they were Cleveland EDIT: I wrote that when Boston had gone ahead early, but now in the fifth inning the Indians have closed in a little. The Indians might just ruin the plans of Fox executives who want a profitable World Series yet), pouring my hours into my PS2 (Beyond Good and Evil, Kingdom Hearts and College Hoops 2K5 mostly- it just occurred to me that I have no idea if one should italicize video game titles. I mean, if you think of video games as art, which I do, [The real question is whether or not video games are good art] shouldn't one italicize the titles? But I can't remember ever seeing someone do that.) re-reading Terry Pratchett novels (in an attempt to slightly brighten my worldview without sacrificing any of my trademark cynicism) and using the Netflix to catch up on movies I really should have seen by now (Walk the Line, Jacob's Ladder and 300 thus far, although I'm halfway through 300) all the while still trying to find a proper job.

James and I went to NC State's embarrassingly named "B-Ballin' at the Old Barn" on Friday night. It was basicly just an open practice for the men's basketball team, along with a few shooting competitions. The highlights were seeing J.J. Hickson for the first time (this kid is going to be really, really good. I just wish that there was a better chance we'd get him for three years) and seeing Chris Corchiani, who is my absolute favorite basketball player of all time. Between that and the ECU game, it's been a pretty good weekend for NCSU athletics, which is something of a rarity this time of year.

However, because life simply will not allow me to go through a single weekend without something that threatens to drive me to resorting to violence, I did read a rumor that Michael Bay is working on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Now, The Birds is my least favorite of Hitchcock's major films (hell, I like Spellbound more than The Birds) but still, Alfred doesn't deserve this. Even Tippi Hedren doesn't deserve this. It's bad enough that by the time I finish writing this Hollywood will have finished green-lighting remakes of all of my favorite 70s horror films, but now they're going to start working through Hitchcock? I always figured that the one good thing to come out of Gus Van Sant's attempt to remake Psycho in the late 90s was that it would cure the movie industry of any impulses to touch Hitchcock's back catalog. Of course, this made the key mistake of assuming that Hollywood has the capacity to learn from mistakes. I just can't wait to see how he explains why birds start exploding.

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.

It is Finished

I finished the new Harry Potter about an hour ago. I won't give anything away, except to say that it's good, if not quite as likable as some of the earlier books. I'm going to probably re-read it in the next week or so, since I probably missed a few finer points in my haste to finish the book.

Hogwarts Calling

So, as the last Harry Potter novel (theoretically, anyway) drops in about twenty-four hours. Based on previous experience, I'm guessing that my copy will arrive at my mailbox in about thirty-six hours. (I'm more than willing to wait that long if it means I can avoid the crowds of people wearing costumes at the book stores at midnight.) Right now, I'm doing my best to avoid spoilers- at this point I'm avoiding any wikipedia pages remotely connected to Harry Potter out of concern that someone will give away the ending, because people are stupid, vile creatures who do things like that.

But all that's beside the point, since I'm fairly certain that I've worked out how this thing has to end. It has to be one of a handful of ways.

1- Harry, Hermoine and Ron have finally taken out Lord Voldemort, and they go to a diner to celebrate. Harry orders the onion rings, and starts flipping through the juke box. The book describes a series of sketchy looking witches and wizards entering the diner. One menacing wizard comes out of the bathroom, you turn the page, and then there's nothing but blank pages. All the critics think the ending's brilliant, while the regular fans just feel ripped off.

2- The book begins with the death of Voldemort, who utters the single word "Fire Bolt" before he dies. The rest of the book is a series of flashbacks, as Harry and company journey through Voldemort's life, as remembered by those who knew him best. In the end, they decide that they might never know what the word means, as they take a box of his childhood belongings to be destroyed, they don't notice that on his first broomstick, the word "Fire Bolt" is etched into the handle. The book ends.

3- At the end of the book, Harry and his friends finally have Voldemort cornered. Hermoine suddenly realizes that what everyone thought was his face, disfigured by decades of use of evil magic, was actually a mask. They rip the mask off, only to discover that Lord Voldemort was actually the owner of the run-down amusement park near Hogwarts. The last line of the book? "And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids".

4- At the end of the book, Harry wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette. He tells her he had such a weird dream...

I'm pretty confident that one of those is the actual ending.

[I'm so lame]

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money....

Affirmation, baby. That's comment number two (thank you "Ken"), and once again, one from someone who I don't get a chance to harass about the blog on a regular basis. The masterplan continues to unfold.

I'm about to watch the final two episodes of this season's 24. I'm fully expecting to be utterly diasappointed. I missed them on Monday night because the power company still doesn't have it's atom-dancing act together and we suffered from blackouts here.

I have to man the office of the North Carolina State University Friends of the Library tomorrow afternoon, which I'm not happy about. I like my job well enough, organizing donated books, but I dislike sitting in an empty office answering occasional phone calls, ('cause the library doesn't have quite as many friends as one would hope for.)

For the members of my Infernal Book Club, I'm slowly reading Nabokov's Pnin, which is good. I'm also still working my way through the Billy Martin biography, but keep being slowed down by the fact that it isn't very great. One would expect more from a biography of one of the more interesting figures in baseball history. Actually, I'm kind of suprised there hasn't been a biopic about Martin. The problem, I guess, is that Martin's story completely fails to fit the formula for sports films, and has a most unhappy ending. Martin was an underdog of sorts, which is good for the formula, but was a violent, surly, paranoid
alcoholic, which is less great for the Hoosiers type mold.

I picked up a copy of Allan Moore's first volume of his run on Swamp Thing. The introduction Moore wrote is so good in and of itself that I found myself desperately wanting to con my way into a grad school ahead of schedule and start writing a thesis on Moore and his work.

The post title today is a reference to the great song by the wholy underappreciated and dearly missed Warren Zevon. Today, while I was watching The 40 Year Old Virgin on HBO I was struck by the admittedly strange need to change my cell phone's ring tone. It had been a NCSU fight song since I got this phone, and I grew a touch weary of it. There is no connection that I can think of between the film and the ring tone change, unless I subconciously think that Zevon will get me laid. While my ideal woman would obviously respect Zevon, it seems unlikely. I don't know. I saw Hot Fuzz the other day, and there was the trailer for Judd Apatow's new movie, I think it's called Knocked Up, and it looks like it might be really funny, like Virgin. We can only hope so. This summer is a wasteland of sequels and adaptations. (I say this, even though I know perfectly well I'll be seeing Pirates 3 and the Simpsons and Ocean's 13)

In other music news, on Sunday night it looks like I might see a show by the GZA at the historic Cat's Cradle. It's a very strange situation- the show doesn't have tickets for sale (some car company is picking up the bill- Scion, I think, Which is a model of some sort of vehicle, and a very strange car name in your narrator's humble opinion.) Anyway, no tickets, but you have to go online and RSVP at a website. Now, this does not guarantee you anything, apprently. You still have to show up early and take your chances. I'd rather just buy a damn ticket and know I'm getting in. Assuming I get it, expect a review of the show on Monday or Tuesday.

That's Telekinesis, Homes

Sopranos was intense last night. This season has been remarkable, and it looks like the showdown between Phil and Tony that we've been waiting for since Johnny Sack got pinched is finally about to start. This season it seems like each episode has kind of closed out one character- Janice and Bacala in the first episode, Johnny Sack in one, Paulie Walnuts in one, Christopher and Junior, respectively, and clearly last nights was A.J.'s. It still seems strange that they have so much to wrap up in two episodes, but who am I to doubt Chase at this point?

For all of you enthusiastic, ethereal bastards in the infernal book club, I've picked up the Bill Martin biography again. But you don't care.

None of you care. If you did, you would be reading this, but since you are not reading this...

Tonight is the season finale of 24. 2 hours long. I'm going to watch, mainly because I watched the first 22 hours of the show, and it's probably too late to start now. Tomorrow night is the last House of the season. Which is for the best, because the show needs to regroup after a vaguely mediocre third season. I'll finally be free on Monday and Tuesday nights, but it's not like I have anything better to do.

Which is vaguely depressing.

I just don't know what to think

So, the Braves get hammered by the Sox in the first game today- real ugly, Matsuzaka handled the team easily and Boston wins 13-4. So I'm pretty bummed. Then, in the second game, Smoltz pitches a gem, and the Braves score 14 runs while the Red Sox don't score at all. Talk about good news, bad news, yeah?


Anyway. I finished Thomas Pyncon's V. a few minutes ago. And I'm still confused. The book, as I've mentioned, is really good, and maybe one day it will all click, but I'm afraid I would have to re-read it to really begin to approach the book's mysteries, and I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing that. It's not the easiest read, and it's not the shortest book. Right now I'm torn between Nabokov's Pnin and Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth. It's pretty much a coin flip in my mind between the two, at the moment. When I have made my final decision, I will let all of you noble bastards in the infernal book club know.

And I went ahead and made a reservation for three nights in a hotel in New York City. I can still wriggle out of it, but it's begining to look a lot like Manhattan for your humble narrator. And my plans for the city are begining to take shape more clearly in my head. I think I'll probably try and see Spamalot the night I arrive, and a Yankees game my second night there. One day I'll probably devote to Central Park. And I'll definitely try and find a good cd store that sells some of the bootlegs I'm dying to own copies of (most importantly, a complete Basement Tapes compilation).

Dispatches from the Culture Wars- Literary Front

So, I'm killing time and half-watching the Rodney Dangerfield movie "Back to School", and there's a scene where Dangerfield is in his first English class, and the teacher starts class by reading the last part of Joyce's Ulysses, the "Yes I said yes I will yes" bit. And I wondered. I wondered if the movie was being made today- and this is ostensibly a relatively low-brow production, Vonnegut cameo aside- would the filmmakers and studio be that willing to trust that a decent portion of the audience would get the jokes here? The teacher says "I think Joyce is pretty hot too", and later, Dangerfield says of Joyce, "she's one of my favorite writers". You have to know that the novel she's reading was written by a man named James Joyce, or at least that there was a novelist named James Joyce, to get the joke, and I'm not sure if a-Hollywood trusts the audience enough at this point to make the joke, or B-that Hollywood is essentially right, that a lot of people wouldn't really get the joke. And I don't know if this pessimism is my basic pessimism, or if its justified, or if it's snobbery on my part. Probably all of the above. I know that even most college students don't read what we might call "the canon" for fun, only when they're assigned. And even then a lot don't. I don't know.

I'm half convinced that text messaging will eventually mark the end of modern English, and that in a hundred years people trying to read Dickens or Shakespeare will be like students today trying to read Sir Gawain or Chaucer. Hell, if someone hasn't already written an epistolary novel in text messages, I'm sure it's going to be published any day now.

I'm not concerned that reading itself is dying out, but that the books that people read are going to collapse into ever increasing banality. I know that this is the intellectual snob's eternal refrain. When the third book was written, the academics were bitching that it was nowhere near as good as the first, and that the form was dying. But when I was at Barnes and Nobel yesterday, they didn't have any poetry by Wallace Stevens, but a bunch of books of "poetry" called "Heart songs" written by some kid with some sad story behind him. I remember the Onion satire along those lines, but I swear to God I had no idea that it was based on something real, and that apparently become more important than WALLACE STEVENS. You just KNOW Oprah is somehow involved in this.

Okay, I know I'm something of a snob, especially about books and music, but I do read things like Stephen King and Harry Potter that sell millions of copies, I'm not as far gone as Harold Bloom in this respect. I don't know. Whatever. Nevermind.

Let's Go Steal Some Gasoline

The picture is the Israeli artwork for the Stones' Tumbling Dice single. All of you can be my partners in crime.

As part of my wholly undeserved but entirely appreciated assortment of graduation gifts, I was given a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble, which is about as great as it gets. And I rocked that thing too, the card was good for $100.00 and I managed to work it so that the final total, after taxes and the 10% discount, was a nickle. Because all of you are interested in everything that I do, my final selections were as follows:


The Road- Cormac McCarthy. I found a paperback copy without Oprah's "monstrous seal" upon it. Which was definitely a prerequisite for buying it.

Three Novels- Samuel Beckett. The three novels are Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. One of the great accomplishments of the twentieth century that I, embarrasingly, haven't read.

God is Not Great- Christopher Hitchens. I'm about halfway through it, and the writing is as good as one expects from the great contrarian, even if some of his targets are little more than fish in barrels.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets- J.K. Rowling. My least favorite Harry Potter book, but the one I was missing in hardback.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II- Alan Moore. I really needed a copy. Hopefully there's no chance of another terrible movie being made from this franchise.

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth- Grant Morrison. My five (or six, depending on how you count the two sequential Loeb arcs) favorite Batman stories:
1. The Dark Knight Returns- Frank Miller
2. Year One- Frank Miller
3. The Killing Joke- Alan Moore
4. The Long Halloween and Dark Victory- Jeph Loeb
5. Arkham Asylum- Grant Morrison


I include links to Amazon so all of you can join my infernal book club. Don't worry, it's all part of the masterplan.
All in all, a good haul. I also hit Borders, looking for the last two volumes of Transmetropolitan, which have been surprisingly difficult to find lately. I found book 10, but I'm still missing 9. I also bought the collection of Alan Moore's uncollected DC stories, which includes his amazing Superman stories, For The Man Who Has Everything and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, as well as the Killing Joke (which I already had). More or less essential.

House was pretty good last night, although I'm having a harder time caring about whether or not Forman leaves than I probably should. My sister wasn't surprised that I was taken with a story about a young punk who plays chess... I will say that back when I played chess competively (and managed to just keep my head above water by taking out the kids who didn't belong there and pulling off rare upsets of kids much, much better at the game than I will ever be) that smashing another kid's head in with a clock was a temptation that I only barely managed to resist.

The post's title is from a song by A3 called "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlife" (A Dylan reference I couldn't pass up, and a pretty decent song). A3 is mainly known for "Woke Up This Morning", the theme to the Sopranos.

Whitechapel Calling

It's been so long since I've picked up a copy of Alan Moore's "From Hell" that it feels like I'm about to read it for the first time. In preperation for the new reading of the massive, blood-soaked tome I have procured a copy of the Johnny Depp film, which is a wonderful bit of cinema even if it is only connected to the comic book by title and general subject matter. I have also directed my thoughts back to London in 1888, and applied the fruits of my academic training towards solving the vexing and lingering homicides that changed the way the world thought about its madmen.

My New Suspects (based on an extensive literary training):
Charles Dickens:
What better place to start one's examination of the most iconic Victorian crime wave than with the most iconic of Victiorian authors? Unfortunately, Dickens died in 1870, ruling him out as Saucy Jack. Besides, given Dickens' penchant for including casts of dozens, even hundreds of characters, there's no way he would have stopped at five victims.





Robert Louis Stevenson: While the murders were occuring, a stage production of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was playing in London. What better way to pump up interest in your strange psychological drama about the dark side within every man than by going out and knifing some prostitutes? It worked when Orson Welles did it to promote "Citizen Kane", and it might have worked for Stevenson.





Bram Stoker: Ah, but if we take a closer look at the stage production of "Jekyll", we notice that it was being produced at the legendary Lyceum theater in London. And what author is more associated with that theater than Bram Stoker, whose friendship with the Lyceum's biggest star, Henry Irving is legendary. What if, as a favor to his friend, Stoker decided to create a little buzz for the show? The plot thickens when one considers the famous "Dear Boss" letter of 9/25/1888, the letter which produced the name "Jack the Ripper" and includes the tantalizing sentence, "I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle". What author is more associated with blood than the creator of Dracula?


Oscar Wilde: However, the Jack killings might be a touch too theatrical for Stoker. It might be more appropriate to look at the greatest of the theatrical minds of the late nineteenth century, the divine Oscar. Unfortunately, Oscar did not have a new play out around that time, so we might have to reluctantly abandon our theory that the killings were a marketing technique (not unlike the Aqua Teen Hunger Force terrorist attack in Boston of 1/31/07). This leaves us with the potential that Oscar was doing early research for his own study of human degredation, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which he would publish two years later. Or, the murders might have simply been an example of Wilde's aesthics run a little amok. In his preface to "Dorian Gray", he wrote, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.". If one replaces the word "book" with "ritualistic murder and postmortem mutiliation of ladies of ill-repute", a damning confession comes to light.


Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Nah. It's well known within literary circles that Tennyson loved the hos. Way too much to start killing them.













Aw hell, who am I kidding. We all know it was a Freemason plot, in conjunction with renegade Catholic sects, the Royal family, the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Illuminati. Actually, according to the new official story, the Ripper looked a lot like this guy:













(I made up way less of the details than you probably think.)

Everybody Drops The Dime

This week your humble reporter is dispatching live from the beatfiul terror that is the city of Dis, located with a beatiful view in the sixth circle of the Inferno. And how have you been my blue-eyed sons?

The World Wide Leader has managed to irritate me twice in one day, first with the new graphic on the side of the screen during Sportscenter, then by not showing me Stump the Schwab reruns at 1:00 PM. I have few small pleasures, but the great pleasure of being home at 1:00 in the afternoon is watching Schwab. This will not stand. None shall pass.

And the coverage of Clemens' return has displeased me. I want more focus on the wisdom, if that's the word, on paying a million dollars a start to a 45 year old man who can go five or six innings a start. Anyone who thinks that the bastards of the Bronx just wrote the check that, when cashed, will buy them a seat in October is sorely mistaken, methinks. If the Rocket had returned to the Dirty Water of Boston as a third or fourth starter, I could believe that the playoffs were beckoning brother Roger, but that team in Gotham is too flawed for even the return of the best pitcher of our era to redeem. You heard it hear first.

The Sopranos, now. And boyos, the claret is begining to flow. Brother Christopher has finally snapped, and that's nothing but good news for the audience. My concerns for the last season have been proven mercifully unjustified. David Chase deserved not my skepticism.

As an example of how good I am at outsmarting myself, I managed to spend 70 dollars on Free Comic Day. Apparently, Alan Moore and Transmet trades weren't covered under the Free Comic heading. Ah well, I needed to pick Transmet up again. It's nothing less than a sin on my part to have lapsed from the true faith of Spider. Yes, we will build Jerusalem on America's granite and steel lands...

Brother Ali is tomorrow night. The truth is here, ladies and germs, and although I would dispute it, I eagerly await it. If only I had some idea for my plans for the rest of the day.

Mother's day is coming up my lads and lasses, do you remember that? Because she is unaware of the existance of my signal fires that I light on the interweb, I'll let you all know what I have procured for my mother dearest, and I highly recommend all three of you beg borrow and steal to obtain the same item- the new Van Morrison collection of his movie songs. Van Morrison is an authentic Irish Seraph disguised as the most heartbreaking voice in rock n roll and we are all lucky to have been graced with his genius. Consider this.

I have spent the day watching Boogie Nights for the first time in a couple of years, at least, and reading Transmetropolitan. I can already tell that I'm going to lose my mind, and soon, without something to do. Employment never seemed so lovely. I can go ahead and warn you imaginary, magnificent bastards that the posts are going to begin coming faster and thicker, trying to save my mind by poisoning yours. I still have no idea what I'm doing tomorrow and it is bothering me more and more with every passing moment.

It's probably wrong of me to continually edit posts instead of posting new ones, but that just how I roll. I now know what I'm doing tomorrow before the Brother Ali concert. Expect a full write up of the show if you like. Hell, expect whatever you want. But there's a chance you'll actually get the write-up.

Oh, and anyone who gets the specific allusion that the title of this post is making, then I both salute you and worry about you. I know that you won't get the answer from the first page of google results...

Keith has told me that you can get the answer through google. It's completely unfair if you use rudimentary knowledge of how search engines work against me.

Braves play San Diego tonight. Chuck James is pitching, and we're tied with the Mets for our first place birthright.