Year : 2005

'Twas a long year, full of many life changes. There were a few stumbles along the way, but everything seemed to shape up in the end. Character was built, good times were had, and even some new songs were made.

Recommend? Well, if you haven't done it by now, then you won't ever get the chance to do it again. Happy End-of-2005!

PS: Anyone know where I can download the trailer to 2006? I'd like to find a sneak-preview before it hits, and I'm running out of time....

Book: Kangaroo Notebook

by Kobo Abe. As everyone can tell, I've been reading an awful lot of books these last couple of weeks, but I must say that Kangaroo Notebook is the single strangest thing I've read in a loooooong time. The morning after being offered a raise for coming up with the vague idea of marketing a "kangaroo notebook," the narrator wakes up with radish sprouts growing out of his legs. The narrator goes to a dermitologist who immediately sends him into surgery. When surgery (or whatever happens during that time) is over, the narrator is pushed out onto the street on his gurney with a prescription to go soak in a sulfur hot spring. The narrator, still attached to his IV and catheter, is towed to a canal where he sent afloat into the underworld where he meets a woman who LOVES drawing blood, almost gets into a fist fight with his dead mother, develops a creepy attraction to a demon child whose elementary school troop builds towers out of stone.

Recommend: The narrator snacks on himself throughout the story. His bed becomes his friend and follows him around like a dog or a horse. Of course I recommend.

Book: A Wild Sheep Chase

by Haruki Murakami. Totally sweet book. There is a man dressed as a sheep. Sheepman rocks. You get to know what it means to be "sheepless." Read this book.

recommend: Man dressed as sheep. I say again, Man dressed as sheep.

Book: Money

by Martin Amis - the last book I'll be reading right now in my Martin Amis spree since I have yet to come across "Dead Babies." I have to admit, that title is intriguing, but alas it has nothing to do with the book "Money." However, money has a lot to do with the book Money, and so do sex, alcohol, blackouts, strippers, Hollywood, London, New York, the majesty of George Orwell's Animal Farm, and a mission of self-discovery through absolute hedonism. I've got to give Amis credit. His narrator is one of the single most depraved and loathsome characters EVER written, yet he is the hero of the story. And you end up liking him. Also, some great experimentation with narrator reliability, especially since the narrator blacks out all the time.

Recommend: yeah, but it's not quite as inventive as Time's Arrow or Success.

Book: Success

By Martin Amos. Good book. Read fast. Cool use of dual first person narrators that alternate back and forth. Also, both narrators are unreliable. The coolest thing is that you get different perspectives about the same scene, and, even though you know one narrator is a bigger liar than the other, you never really know EXACTLY what happened at any given point especially since you also get versions of events through the mouths of other characters who themselves are somewhat unreliable.

Recommend: Yes. Not as stylistically sweet or funny as "Time's Arrow," but it was a really interesting, entertaining, and well written story. Also, both main characters are complete degenerates, and everyone loves reading about degenerates.

Movie : Sahara

This movie was totally stupid. Matthew Mconanonaughey is maybe a salvage guy who looks for sunken treasure, but he used to be in the military, I think, where he learned to be a badass with his obnoxious friend, that guy that always plays the obnoxious friend in dumb action-adventure movies. Anyway, they go looking for an American civil war ironclad that somehow winded up in the desert in Africa. Oh, and some guy is about to destroy the world's ocean life with toxic waste, somehow. Maybe with super poisonous algea or something. I couldn't tell.

Recommend? Actually, I do. I was expecting dumb fun, and it was delivered, complete with a boat chase and the most unlikely functioning cannon fight ever. Rock, MacConnaugheey.

Book: Time's Arrow

By Martin Amis. Starts at the moment of the narrator's death. The narrator's awareness continues after his death, except that the narrative runs backward through the narrator's life. Literally. And not in the psuedo-backward Memento way. In order to eat, people sit on the toilet and suck the shit from the bowl. They then carefully remove the food from their mouths and reassemble them into sculpted dishes via a knife and fork. They then dismantle the scultpures and store them in boxes and cans on shelves until they sell them to supermarkets. People don't put hair gel in their hair. Their hair seems to excrete it into their hands, they bottle it up, and sell to the drug store.

Recommend: Oh, hell yeah. Read it in four hours. This is the only book I can imagine that could get away with having a narrator talk about a pimp punching the black eye off a prostitute's face. Need I say more?

Book: Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age

By Kenzaburo Oe. I was rather impressed with the bulk of this story, and the handling of the relationship between the father and his mentally handicapped son are strongly rendered. I can see why he is so popular in Japan. However, the fifty or so pages that try to explain a japanese translation of William Blake's poetry (which is, curiously translated back into English rather than returned to its original verse) grows tiresome. It works when used as a transitional device, but even though Oe's narrator is aware of his own misreadings of Blake, man, his explanations are confusing and, um, unique...

Recommend: Really a great book (overall) and a fast read. Don't expect Murakami, but he's kind of on par with Kobo Abe.

Movie : Van Helsing

The movie starts out in black and white... and then there is something about Dracula wanting to do something with Frankenstein's monster, but I'm not completely sure what because a minute into the movie I started losing interest. And then the movie turned to color (like that Wizard of Oz movie!), but at this point I was only half-watching and I started to play around on the internet with the movie on in the background. I think some blue winged women that were sexy in a creature kind of way flew around and hissed, and then I checked out some stats on the unbeaten Colts, and then I watched a few Strongbad Emails. At one point in the movie the main chick (who was a princess? or maybe searching for her brother?) was dancing with I think Dracula, and then Van Helsing swung down from a trapeze, and then I laughed and brushed my teeth and went to bed.

Recommend? I'm sure it's a fine movie.

Posts: This Post

This is the 101st post to this site. It is a short post and is pretty much self-referential with little to no basis or content outside of its own nature.

Recommend: Not really. Kind of shallow, maybe a bit flat. Really, you should skip this post and save the time it takes to formulate the letters contained therein into coherent meaning if you haven't made it this far already.

Music : Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans

My favorite Sufjan album so far. Just slightly tamer than the Michigan album, but in a nice way. Simple and pure. I am amazed at how all his albums are so great, and every song works with the rest. Seven Swans is a grand album.

Recommend? I've had it on constant repeat for almost 24 hours now.

RPG : Dragon Quest VIII - Journey of the Cursed King

Dragon Quest VIII is doing everything right. And Old-School. It's the best RPG I've played in a long time. Much better than, say, Final Fantays X-2, which wasn't very good at all. And Final Fantasy X, which was okay but not good enough to bother finishing. Or Morrowind, which was not much to my taste. It's the best RPG since consoles were 32-bits, that's for sure. This, of course, is excluding games I haven't played. Maybe there were some fine RPGs I missed. If this is the case, I am sorry. I will make it up to you by not playing them and continuing to play the crap out of Dragon Quest VIII. I mean, I've gotta catch that rascally Dhoulmagus. And I need to find more alchemy recipes. And I gotta work on my party's skills.

Recommend? Yes, the story line is simplistic(thus followable and engaging), the graphics look like a cartoon, and the world is huge. And you get to fight slimes, and metal slimes, and healslimes and...

Book: Maus

For those of you who don't know, Maus is a graphic novel about a graphic novelist writing a graphic novel about his Jewish father's experiences in WWII. The big twist is that all the Jews are portrayed as mice, the nazis as cats, the Polish are pigs, a la Animal Farm. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize - kind of shocking for a graphic novel, Maus is an insightful and unique portrayal of the events of the holocaust OUTSIDE the concentration camps, instead focusing on the Jews who survived in hiding a la a system much scarier than the underground railroad.

Recommend: Deep, unsettling, funny, well-drawn and well-told, I highly recommend Maus to anyone, particularly if you don't normally read graphic novels - not because it doesn't compare well to other graphic novels, but because it is a highly accessible piece that packs quite a punch. And besides, look at the cover. You've got to read something with a cover like that.