Which is better?

Should I call this blog videos are my only friends? Like the rest of the culture, I am currently obsessed with YouTube, but fear not, I will have more book info later, like a report on the so far excellent One Percent Doctrine.

Anyway, as is known I like covers, but it is interesting to see which version of a song people prefer. Here is a classic, Pancho and Lefty. The more famous version was by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. The original is by Townes Van Zandt. So which is better?


Here is Townes talking about the song.

Whither the soundtrack?

Soundtracks are just not as exciting as they once were. Or maybe I'm just not paying attention. I've heard plenty of people say "There's no good music these days," which is of course crazy talk. So maybe it's me. I did read something somewhere which mused that the spread of iTunes and other internet media makes it so easy to find the wierd B sides that often made soundtracks cool. Whatever, here are some good ones from the good ole days.

Pretty in Pink: Lots of good songs but Bring on the Dancing Horses and the title track are particular stand outs. The movie is supposedly about the horror of high school, but is really about the never-ending cascade of doom that we call life.

Repo Man: Is there a better 80s movie than Repo Man (that's a rhetorical question as the obvious answer is no?) No videos for Pablo Picasso Was Never Called An Asshole or Let's Have a War but for the crossover skate punk hit Institutionalized. While this movie appears to be about escaping the cosmic horror of everyday existance, perhaps it really is about the perils of not getting any, as Iggy Pop sings in the title track:"I didn't get fucked and I didn't get kissed, I got so fucking pissed." Words of wisdom Iggy, words of wisdom.

Decline of Western Civilization: I'll admit it, my favorite parts are the back and forth insults in the Fear set. But here's the Circle Jerks.

Singles: I liked this one a lot more at the time, although I still love State of Love and Trust (video has bonus Ricky Rachman sighting) and Birth Ritual. The other stuff doesn't really hold up as well (see: I Nearly Lost You There.)

Start saving airfare for Chicago

Oh man, oh man, oh man. Lovers of edgy (and I mean edgy) rock will want to know that BIG BLACK is playing the Touch and Go Festival in Chicago Sept 8-10. It's not going to be a full set, but this is probably your only chance to ever see this band again. A number of other bands are reuniting (and feeling so good) as well.

A map of the library

(via Marginal Revolution) Some folks have created a map of literature taste. On each map, the closer the author to your specified author, the more likely a person is to also like that author. There haven't been too many surprises for me so far, although when I put in Alan Furst, I got Ariel Dorfman, who was previously unknown to me. He also looks like he is into the moody thriller, although set in his native Chile. Nerds will be shocked to see Robert Jordan hovering so close to George R. R. Martin. There are issues as the data comes entirely from user data entry, so I found both Ayn Rand and Rand for example. Still, it's entertaining.

Bummer news for bibliophiles

(via Bookstore Tourism Blog) Apparently the Berkeley Telegraph Avenue branch of Cody's is closing. This NPR story has more. It's always sad to see a venerable bookstore go, but this one makes me personally sad as well. I used to live in Oakland, and a trip up to Telegraph to visit Amoeba records, Shakepeare and Co, Moe's and Cody's was a regular occurence. All is not lost, Cody's continues to exist in a new Berkeley location and down in San Francisco. I rather like this person's eulogy for the store.

This is one another famed but now gone bookstore that Steve and I visited together. Another is Ave Victor Hugo in Boston, where I believe Steve found his first Dorothy Dunnett. That may have been Walden Pond Books.

Become large with food

Since I gave Amazon some love it seems appropriate to give Powell's love as well. I was checking out the review for Two for the Road, the new book from the Roadfood people, Jane and Michael Stern when I noticed a user review. All lovers of Powells should help Powells out by writing product reviews for the site.

I have to disagree with the reviewer here who claims that the Sterns are glorifying "bad" food. There are no "bad" foods, unless of course there is a medical reason to avoid certain things. The problem is unhealthy food, it is too many calories and not enough exercise. Eat what you want but watch the calories. The reviewer points to these people as an vegetarian alternative to the Sterns travel guide. It's not for me, but I must admit they have some great travel links. For example, here is a cool site devoted to the notion of building your tourism around bookstores, a bookgasm if you will.

I would recommend the Stern's book to anyone who likes their radio snippets on the Splendid Table. Each chapter tells the tale of some adventure in a tucked away corner of a state. There is usually some misadventure involved, some colorful local characters (who are often very friendly) and then some recipes. The book is philosophically aligned with William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways. The Sterns like local and authentic, not nationalized and packaged. What is nice is that the local world that seemed to be disappearing in Blue Highways appears to be hanging on, at least in some places.

It's like getting paid to do BAMOF

Amazon has a bookstore blog now, which is new to me at least. Being Amazon they can get some nice interviews like this one with the author of The Places in Between. The downside of being in retail is that you have to be careful not to offend your supplier (the book publishers in this case.) The tone of the blog is non-shill so that makes me happy. They do take advantage of the fact that they are the bookseller in pieces like this, where they list available out of print cookbooks that were mentioned in a NYT piece. There are a lot of good topical posts like this one which lists terrorist books to check out when news came of Zarqawi's death. So yeah, I'm envious.

Speedmental

There should be a word for the sinking feeling we all sometimes feel on the way to the office in the morning (except for those of us who are smart enough not to work in an office, I suppose). I was having a serious attack of whatever that feeling is called this morning when the usually stolid NPR snapped me right out of it. I was half listening to one of their usual little thirty second musical interludes - the generally forgettable noodling that NPR intersperses between stories, where most radio stations would play ads - when I realized the tune was familiar. Really familiar. It took me a minute to recognize it as a strings arrangement of this song, usually played on a different kind of strings (and with stringy hair flying). A fucking plus, NPR, is all I have to say.

Of course, now all I can think of is double bass drums, which beats the sinking feeling but does not help with the billable hours.

Making you laugh

I was trying to think of truly funny music videos today. Sure there are unintentionally funny videos, but it is much more rare to see a really funny one. I could think of three:

Yo La Tengo -- Sugarcube: Funniest of the funny. The Mr. Show guys take Yo La Tengo to rock school. This one is such a winner.

Foo Fighters -- Everlong: The Foos are known for funny videos but this one is awesome. So many details. The sidewise "what's up" peace sign on the photo on the wall, the Sid Vicious look just after punk Dave takes out the bad guys, the Evil Dead references. So good.

Foo Fighter -- Big Me: The Mentos joke carries the video the whole way through. Esp the mockery of the soccer dude's face.

OK and that's it. There MUST be other really funny videos. What am I missing?

Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean its there

One of my favorite film genres is the paranoid 70s thriller. I have a small problem with the genre which I must clear up first. One of the messages of these movies is that dark forces control American society so any active involvement in politics is foolish at best, and dangerous at worst. This is such a pernicious influence that I wonder if THEY didn't make these movies with that idea in mind! (just kidding, don't get all fired up conspiracy theorists!)

Anyway, here are some of my favorites:

The Conversation: Gene Hackman plays a top surveillance expert spying on a couple and then feels that murder may in the offing. It's set in San Francisco which is one of the best movie towns around and is creepy. It is also a bit more relevant in light of all the wire tapping programs we are hearing about. Hackman does a great job exploring what it means to be a professional voyeur.

Three Days of the Condor: The most conventional of these movies, Three Days starts out with a bang. CIA analyst Robert Redford heads out of his NYC office for a sandwich and upon return finds out his whole team has been whacked. Then it becomes a chase movie, but a very good chase movie. I especially liked Max Von Sydow's assasin who details a bleak moral world view.

The Parallax View: This one should come with a warning label: Absolutely not for conspiracy theorists. It be like showing Open Water to someone afraid of sharks. It's that dark. What I liked about it, aside from some great scenes, like the opener on Seattle's Space Needle, is the depiction of what would really happen if an inexperienced person attempted to expose a massive conspiracy.

If you watched all three of these in a row you might feel the need to gather the family and head to the most deserted corner of your state. So take them slowly.

A maligned food

A Cambridge, MA state rep got into some hot water by trying to limit the availability of Fluff (the marshmallow cream or, perhaps, creme topping) as is used in fluffernutter sandwiches. Obviously this isn't something the kids should be eating all the time, but it isn't that much different than peanut butter and jelly. In fact, Fluff has no HF corn syrup, while many jellies do. So there. If we want to talk health for kids we should dial juice, jelly and jam way back and eat more whole fruit.

Who's in charge here?

Oh lucky day! Thanks to a confusing placeholder title on the Multnomah county library catalog, I was the first to place a hold on Ron Suskind's new book the One Percent Doctrine. Ok, even with the title it remains a bit obscure. The title refers to VP Cheney's belief that even if there was a 1% chance that a state or terrorist organization had WMD, policy should assume they do. The book concerns the influence of the office of the VP over national security policy, and how it is far out of whack. Take a look at this video (don't read the transcript!) for a little more insight. Amazing we don't hear more about things like this.

You can have your Haliburton conspiracy theories, you just need to read the National Security Strategy of 2002 to understand why the US went to war. The rise of extreme terror, the continued existence of rogue states and the proliferation of WMD created a new existential threat to the US, or so the report says. The invasion was meant as a first step to prevent these three factors from converging. For getting into the mindset of the Bush team, I recommend Rise of the Vulcans (and it's even bargain priced at Powell's, you can't afford not to read it).

I'm ready for my close-up

Following up on Tripp's post on books about the movies (and doing it as a post rather than a comment because I am too dumb to link to a comment), anyone with even the slightest interest in 1970s-era film-making should pick up Peter Biskind's Easy Riders & Raging Bulls. Biskind covers Hollywood in the 70s with the expected assortment of vile, horrible, immensely entertaining misbehavior. Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich stand out in their (quite disparate) awfulness, from which neither has ever quite recovered (Bogdanovich is probably best known now for playing Julie Melfi's creepy shrink in The Sopranos).

What saves the book from being a mere chronicle of excess (as entertaining as that would be) is the quality of the films themselves and Biskind's obvious love for them and for the tortured people who managed great work in spite of themselves. The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Exorcist, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Days of Heaven, Five Easy Pieces, Bonnie & Clyde, The Last Picture Show, The Deer Hunter - the list could go on quite a bit longer (although I confess that I've always thought Easy Rider was crap). Add in the birth of the blockbuster movie (Biskind makes a pretty good case that Spielberg invented the form and Lucas - however briefly - perfected it) and it is quite a story.

The last thing that recommends ER&RB is something that I find missing from many books on film. The fact that Biskind's focus starts in 1968 or so means that most, if not all, of the films he writes about are available and, more important, accessible if you want to go back for another look. I'm sure Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel are important advances in film, but have you ever tried to watch that stuff? Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Movies and traveling

Here are two fun lists of books about the movies. I for one would love to read Johathan Lethem's reflections on Star Wars and 2001. And 1,001 movies you must see before you die sounds like it is worth owning.

If you are in too traveling at all, 1000 Places to See Before You Die is awesome. As the Amazon user reviews indicates, the book is not for the Lonely Planet crowd. A good section of the book includes high end hotels. I for one love old, expensive hotels, but you don't need to stay in them to enjoy them. Just pop into the bar for one overpriced drink and you can enjoy the ambiance.
Or just stroll through the lobby. If you are fond of period novels or history, the old line hotels can be a lot of fun. I used it when travelling across the US and found it to be great fun. This shouldn't be the only book you use to travel, it is more of a dream book with which to explore.

No more words

Here is a good article about Will Shortz, the Times crossword and the rise of sudoku. My fave fact is that the hardest position in a crossword is the lower righthand corner. Also that Bill Clinton did crosswords while on the phone with world leaders.

Another one for the nerds

If a sci-fi novel is set in our universe (as opposed to one unrelated like that in Star Wars) the author has to create some kind of political and social structure and, if they are willing to work at it, explain how our society evolved to that point. A large, if not the majority, portion of authors like to hundreds or thousands of years out, as this allows for a wider range of technology, an expansion across stars, and massive social change. One part of the story is usually about how power shifts from Earth to the colonies.

The political model for the shift is often the American revolution. The colonies (be they on the moon, asteroids, Mars or further afield) are not held back by legacy social customs, businesses or inbuilt technologies. At some point, they grow weary of Earth's restrictions and given some provocation, they throw off the shackles and then become some kind of libertarian or socialist paradise. John Varley's Red Lightning, fits in this tradition.

The book is mostly set on mid 21st century Mars with a visit to a unpleasant Earth. The War on Terror never ended and the US has a police state in the form of the Homelanders and endless fighting. The economy is in the toilet. A terrible disaster throws the US into turmoil and for a reason explained late in the book, someone on Earth invades Mars in a form of response. It's entertaining light beach reading for those that like scifi at least.

Varley by the way, is the author of the Gaia trilogy, which begins with Titan. I missed reading this series entirely because of the book covers. Way too stylized, at least in the early 80s editions. In any case I was too busy with the likes of Heroes in Hell.

Are you psyched? Are you high?

There is plenty of talk in the land about when Americans become adults. There was this Time article, and a NYT article I can't find some other place. I submit it is fairly easy to say when the American (male at least) becomes an adult. It is the point when this becomes unappealing.

I'm pretty sure I did that at some point. I also did this, but in typical fashion failed to translate it into some play.

Cuz I got no self esteem

Sometimes I feel the abused lover who can't help but coming back for more. But I can't stay away from Star Wars no matter what Lucas throws at us. NBK send these photoshopped images on fark, which combine Star Wars and various Tarantino properties. You'll get a chuckle. (my fave is the jawa about six down). While I wallowed in my SW shame, I found that the Troopers (Cops Star Wars spoof) is on You Tube.

Gooseberry pie me oh my oh

The NYT has an article (with rhubarb pie recipe included) on piemaking and how it can be a calling. Along with Foodbound's article on the Pie cookbook, I have really been thinking about upping my pie game. I prefer pie to cake, perhaps because it is served warm, or perhaps because cake is so often made too dry. In any case, what I want to try next is the gooseberry pie, as we tried some dry ones and they were excellent. Here is a recipe for a sour cream gooseberry pie. Everything's good with sour cream, no?

I may have mentioned that one of my two greatest baking disasters was a shoe fly pie. To be fair, I got the recipe off of a post card from Amish country. So maybe I should try again.

Dark is a way and light is a place

I turned 35 yesterday, leaving (as Tripp so unkindly noted) the 25-34 year old demographic and in the process becoming less desirable to pretty much everyone. I considered attempting something profound about my advancing age but then remembered this poem from Dylan Thomas. Who needs my lackluster deep thoughts when his are so good?

As long as I'm posting poetry, my brother introduced me to Mark Strand a few years ago and I haven't been able to get this one out of my head since. Don't try to find a coherent theme to this post, just read the damned poem. You can thank me later.

What to Think of

Think of the jungle,
The green steam rising.

It is yours.
You are the prince of Paraguay.

Your minions kneel
Deep in the shade of giant leaves

While you drive by
Benevolent as gold.

They kiss the air
That moments before

Swept over your skin,
And rise only after you've passed.

Think of yourself, almost a god,
Your hair on fire,

The bellows of your heart pumping.
Think of the bats

Rushing out of their caves
Like a dark wind to greet you;

Of the vast nocturnal cities
Of lightning bugs

Floating down
From Minas Gerais;

Of the coral snakes;
Of the crimson birds

With emerald beaks;
Of the tons and tons of morpho butterflies

Filling the air
Like the cold confetti of paradise.