It's not late, Marty.....it's early

You know it's going to be a shitty day, when the first thing you do, is to accidentally throw your MiniDisc player to the ground, thereby breaking it. I did that yesterday, and let that be a lesson to you all, getting up at 4.30AM does nothing for your motorical skills! So now I'm looking around for a new MD, as it is one of the few things I cannot live without. Luckily they are not all that expensive, it seems that few people caught on to the whole MD thing... stupid MP3 files!

Since I have to get up at 4.30 for the next couple of weeks, and at the same time has caught onto the Black Books rerun craze, which is unfortunately aired around 11PM, I did the only reasonable thing. I ordered the 2 first seasons on DVD, from CDWow, and they should arrive tomorrow. Also arriving; the debut cd from The Ordinary Boys, a band I haven't heard a single song by, but they are championed by Morrissey, so what could go wrong? If nothing else, then at least the title, Across the Counter Culture is good.

A curious fact; 18 films are banned in Ireland, and I've seen half. Poor Irishmen, they must live without Freaks from 1932, and masterpieces like A Clockwork Orange, Evil Dead and... ehmm... Showgirls.

Combat Rock


What Pattern Are You?

There's more to life than books, but not much more

Finished Vernon God Little a couple of days ago. It's a pretty good book, but maybe I had expected a bit more.. after all it won the 2004 Booker Prize. Now I have to decide what new book to read. On my last trip t London I started rereading Hyperion, a brilliantly intelligent sci-fi book, with many references to the writings and life of Keates. I'm also trying to read the extremely complex House of Leaves. I first encountered the book when I took a course called "Narrators in Trouble" last year. The first line of the book goes "this is not for you", so it's an interesting story;

"House of Leaves is a multi-layered fiction--part horror-story, part philosophical meditation, and mostly very good storytelling. The Navidson family move into a house in Ash Tree Lane. Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, decides to document his family's domestic acclimatisation in a film, The Navidson Record, but it soon becomes apparent that something is very wrong with the house, and the film becomes a document of the growing disorientation and terror of the occupants. Later, a blind old man, Zampano, writes about this film: at his death, his papers are in disarray, and the strange narrative and commentary are reconstructed by Johnny Truant, a young LA slacker working part-time in a tattoo parlour. Try as he might, though, Truant can find no record that the film ever existed, but the unaccountable fear begins to haunt him too. [from Amazon]

But sometimes it's hard to stay focused on a novel, when some of the pages looks like this:




And on top of this I bought The Da Vinci Code because it sounded interesting when Per described it a while ago.

I'm right now listening to the very underrated Lightning Seeds album Tilt. That Ian Broudie, he can bash out a good pop tune or two.

Yesterday we saw Spider-Man 2, which is, when it comes to superhero flicks, one of the best movies I've seen. Afterwards I got ridiculed because I thought Alfred Molina looked and talked like a fat version of Gabriel Byrne, I still think so. Tonight I'll go and see the new version of Dawn of the Dead, which a lot of people has said nice things about.

And for a perfect example of what staying up all night, not drinking, does to you blog, take a look at the postcard over at Roy's.