Summer Madness!

It appears all of my recent blogs have been melted away by the summer heat.  That is unfortunate, as there is no other record of their existence.  You will just have to trust that their illumination upon the human condition and the rendering of humankind’s hopes in contrast to its heartbreaking realities was a bludgeoning of truth to the brittle, kleptomaniacal fingers that would keep tugging you back toward Plato’s dark cave.

And the dick jokes.  Oooh man, the dick jokes were transcendent.

Sadly, they will remain forever absent, liquefied into a digital soup by the summer heat’s blog-meltingly high temperatures.  This loss cannot be quantified accurately, but just know that there wasn’t a 5-month lag in writing – no way – just a meteorologically-induced Internet malfunction.

Moving on to the meat:

Summer Madness:  A concept that humans are simply not adapted to consistent 100+ degree temperatures.  It affects the human brain and may cause depression, obsessive compulsive behavior and a general cognitive decay.  Diets of beer and barbecue combined with confinement in either climate-controlled safe-havens or public pools yield separate yet equally damaging declines in one’s emotional and physical health.

Case Study #1:

Me, Ol’ Fat Fingers Justice.

My body is a temple where burritos go to die, and where humidity from large reservoirs of booze spawns black mold.  My mind feels rotten, is beginning to stink up my skull, and faint yet cringe-inducing whiffs escape from my ears whenever I try to concentrate, like something from a derelict refrigerator mistakenly opened a second too long.

And the heat for a hairy man is insult added to, or maybe multiplied by, injury.  I was once told I belonged on a Bee Gees album cover. Whether that was a compliment or a dig does not matter; it’s fact.

The Brothers Gibb were an amazing, allegedly heterosexual group of singing space travelers who brought us the technology of satin jackets and pants in the 1970s. They wrote "Islands in the Stream," later covered by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, a rendition bringing this blogger nearly to tears.

Austin’s already approaching a month’s worth of days over 100 degrees, and it’s only July 10.  I’m subsisting on pitchers of horchata, bowls of spaghetti and hours of Korean revenge movies on Netflix.  My only exercise is a pretty intense combination of angry fist-shaking and yelling through the curtains at the sun.  It’s a sad scene, a drama of strenuous impotence.

This heat-reenforced hermitry is affecting my social skills.  The last few times I’ve gone out I’ve been overwhelmed by people, by swarms of words and other bodies radiating heat.  Jabbering meat machines, sweat on brows and beverage rings on tables – it’s all a hideous damp jungle.  I swear when I looked at a sunburned woman the other night I saw legs and arms as oversized ballpark franks.  Red, swollen, sour sweaty meat through to the bone.

I may or may not have seen the Virgin Mary in a hipster’s pit-stain.

Look!  It’s even too hot for 70s-era Gene Hackman!  He is shirtless and forlorn.

“When, oh when,” ponders star of such 70s classics as the French Connection and The Conversation, “will I be able to wear long-sleeved shirts with my favorite windbreaker again?”

Too long, Gene.

It certainly feels like never.

I wish I could even quit my job and work from my bottom-sheet-only bed beneath the a/c vent.  I read recently of an opportunity which could afford me this very luxury!

Our government will soon be distributing these to the unemployed as an integral part of their bi-partisan recovery plan.

Grow rich while you sleep!  Have you always wanted to work less and nap more?  But you just couldn’t make ends meet on a nap-based salary?  Well, now’s your chance to dream yourself rich!

“What if I haven’t dreamt in 4 years because I haven’t gone to bed sober in 4 years?”

Fair question!  But no worries.  Even if you don’t remember how you got home last night, or why you awoke spooning a grilled cheese sandwich, you will never forget waking up on a big pile of rich, dirty money.  Who cares if you don’t remember your dreams?  You’re now wide awake and living…the American Dream.

Prestige.  Power.  Women and/or men.  Things that are fast and dangerous!  Rare action figurines.  Exotic, bejeweled totebags.  Cats that play the radio!

You’re rich.  You can have all of those things and more.  It doesn’t even have to make sense.  Alligator chair vodka helmet!  Someone will figure out what that means and get it for you.  And it will be the best kind!  The Cadillac of alligator chair vodka helmets, no knock-off or outlet mall version.

Grow rich while you sleep – you’ll always be on the cooler side of the pillow.  (Because you’ll be able to hire desperate laborers to gently turn it over for you, and you can shamelessly scold them if they wake you in the process.)

Unfortunately, the heat haunts me even in my sleep.  You see, my apartment’s thermostat is haunted by a cruel shithead.  That, or in a race to feeble, geriatric senility, I’m befuddled by this most simple of technologies.  I cancel all program settings and simply set it to run at 75, and yet, I’ll awake at four a.m., sweaty, to a thermostat reading 84.  Through a fog of sleepiness, I push buttons angrily.  By the time it turns on, I’m wide awake.  And still poor.

The other night, not the one where I may or may not have had the religious vision in a dinner-plate-sized, underarm sweat-ring, I engaged in a dating discussion with friends and a couple strangers.  A woman, not the ballpark-frank lady, talked endlessly about a guy she was dating but who had recently been acting strange and distant.  It was one of those, “Hey, this is what happened – do you think I’m crazy for being worried” kind of things.  A seemingly great month-long romance evaporated mysteriously over a weekend, with broken dates and promises, and should she continue to pursue it or confront him?

Little did she know she was asking someone whose paramount mission was to avoid summer madness, so my advice was not particularly welcomed.

I told her I had a new rule:  I don’t date in the summertime, and others should seriously consider adopting that policy.  It’s just too hot.  Plus, the nights are shorter.  You should drop that zero and find yourself a heroic fan.  Focus on what’s important – avoiding brain damage.

In conclusion, let me address a solution to the temperatures I’m sure many of your heat-radiated brains have been pondering.  You see, this summer madness causes many to indulge in something I find disgusting – public swimming pools.  I’ve never been a big fan.  It’s a meat soup.  The big chunks tightly strapped into nylon/spandex while little nuggets offer additional seasoning with stealth urination.  This soup will get in your mouth.  And yet, so many people will chase it with warm beer and keep laughing.

That’s ultimate summer madness.

Sometimes, dead bodies marinate in this soup, and nobody notices for days.  If you see me in a public swimming pool, kindly prepare me a padded cell.

But please, for the love of God, have it air-conditioned.

Saturday Movie Trailers – The Don’t Edition

Don’t indulge in these late 70s and early 80s exploitation horror trailers.

Don’t Answer the Phone

 

Don’t Go in the House

 

Thinking about opening that window?  Maybe getting a little fresh air?  Nope, don’t do that either.

 

Stop telling me what to do!  Although, “lusting vampires” do sound like something I’d like to avoid, so I guess I won’t be going near the park either.

 

 

A Consideration of the Mustache, Long Overdue

Austin businesses must begin catering to the mustache community by supporting a prominent cause.

Helping to reduce the scourge of wet whiskers.

Why, in a city so enamored with facial hair and never-ending, cyclical consumption of coffee and booze, do we still suffer the absence of mustache cups?  As far as I know, not a single cafe, restaurant or bar is helping to keep area mustaches dry.

Austin, where are you on this?  It’s embarrassing.

If you’re unfamiliar, this is a mustache cup, or rather, an array of mustache cups

Is this for lady mustaches?

It’s simple, yet brilliant.  As you can see, within the circumference of the cup is a ledge, or mustache guard, that keeps the drinker’s mustache clean and dry.  Invented in the mid-1800s, when the popularity of nose beards and regular beards mirrored America’s spirited frontier expansion in some sort of Manifest Destiny of hair, these must have been far more prevalent.  There were simply more mustaches.  And furthermore, more of those mustaches were waxed.  Imbibing hot tea or coffee would undoubtedly melt that wax, having it leak into the cup, resulting in a horrible coffee/mustache wax combination.

Today, while fewer mustachinistas wax the ol’ nose neighbor, the fact remains that nobody wants a leaky mustache.

If I’m reading in the BookPeople cafe, I don’t want to worry about coffee dripping on to the book I’m reading but too broke to buy.  That would guilt me in to buying it, and my mustache is supposed to make me money, not cost me money.  (See:  side employment as mustache ride owner/operator)

If I’m drinking coffee at work, I can’t have it dripping onto important documents.  I just can’t.

And, as I believe it a courtesy to the ladies to help avoid kissing some ol’ whiskey whiskers, mustache cups sure would be mighty welcome at the bar.

Although, perhaps not all mustache residue is repellent – I’ve heard a lot of women say it’s pretty sexy to have sugar sprinkles as a kind of mustache frosting.  Just eat some sugar cookies and let the cookie duster work it’s magic.  In no time at all, pretty ladies will be dying to chew on your saccharine-sweet philtrum drape.  (That sounds a lot grosser than I wanted it to.)

That's a philtrum. In some cultures, folklore holds that it's formed when an angel touches the baby in the womb, and whispers, "That's where mustaches go."

On a side note, I bet Sam Elliott has an awesome mustache cup collection.  I wonder if that’s what people always buy him for Christmas, and he’s growing tired of the same gift every year.

An angry Sam Elliott defends his right to a drippy mustache. If he wants to string cheerios from the damn thing, by God we ought to let him.

And on another note, I got beef with cupcakes.  The ratio of cupcakeries to Austin citizens is approaching that of a private school’s teacher-to-student ratio.  And sure, they’re delicious.  They’re cake.  In a cup.  I understand.  But empathize with the mustachioed for a moment.  Cupcakes are a cake medium unfriendly to mustaches.  Messy icing madness is only amplified with the nose beard  clinging to icing like…well, like icing to a nose beard.  And, while I offer no suggestion to this problem, I assure you I’m hard at work continuing to complain about it while still eating cupcakes. (That just gave me an idea to open The Cupcake Curmudgeon, my own cupcake dealership.)

A lovely left-handed mustache cup

Now, while I lament the absence of mustache cup accessibility, I would be remiss not to mention one local establishment’s consideration of mustache rights.  Hot dog utopia, coffee heaven and all around impressive bar, Frank, offers the ‘Stache Dog,” a hot dog (non-menu special request, I believe) with all the fixin’s beneath the dog, so as to minimize a post-meal mustache medley.   That’s a bold, innovative start to ending mustache neglect and championing its dignity, but we need more.

In fact, I think the Frank logo would look real handsome on a mustache cup.

The coffee at Frank needs no boosting, as their barristas participate in national competitions, but still - slap that on the side of a mustache mug, and it's a winner. (Photo by Matt Egan)

I hope to pitch this concept to the management of various establishments asap, for the struggle against sloppy ‘staches has endured too long.  Too long!  Austin needs to revitalize the mustache cup industry and promote mustache hygiene in a creative way.  We have the technology.  We have the vision.  We have the mustaches.  We will no longer stand (or sit, probably sit) idly by while mustaches exude shame, drip by drip.  Nay, we will demand drinking cups with protective ledges.  Demand mustache cups!  Demand mustache respect!

(There’d be a lot longer line for mustache rides if the fuzzy seats were not befouled with the day’s beverages.  Just sayin…}

From the tangled spaghetti noodles of thought, I extract a most meaningful meatball…

…only to drop it on the floor.

Or,

My refrigerator, like my heart, opened to reveal the paltry contents therein

I made spaghetti, and it needs cheese. At 27, employed, college-educated, of able body and sound (albeit, potentially out of tune) mind, I have no excuses for the following, somehow heartbreaking fact: I have no cheese.

Sure, there are explanations as to how I reached this dire circumstance, but they do not excuse this failure to possess an essential food staple. I mean, my god, I love cheese. Cheese loves me. There’s been a long, storied romance betwixt this blogging man and old, coagulated milk fat. I believe Nicholas Sparks is attempting to tackle our undying love in one of his Shakespearean, “dramatic epic love stories,” which will inevitably be adapted into a film. Ryan Gosling will play the mozzarella. Rosario Dawson is said to be considering the role of pepper jack cheese.

And yet, today’s chapter would take a tragic turn, as I dwell morosely on the faults of my character fating my cheeseless-ness. Primarily, I loathe going to the grocery store. (Is that a character fault?) The zombie mindlessness of the cart-pushing patrons, the fluorescent lighting, the overwhelming abundance of options leading to scrutiny wasted on the subtle and ultimately meaningless differences between one green bottle of shampoo and one blue bottle of shampoo. And the music? An absolute horror to anyone paying attention, which, admittedly, is not really the intention of the playlist.

How, in nothing but a world already destined to complete failure, can Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” be followed by the Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket?” Lest you think it some sort of consolation to hear that while looking for pulp-free orange juice amidst all levels of pulp inclusion or exclusion, I attest – it is not. It’s a painful irony all the more painful for its accidental nature. The grocery store music is not being DJ’ed by a clever hipster. It is commercial audio content to soundtrack consumerism in action. All music is reduced to hummable pap, and any subversive element to Strummer and Jones’ lyrics is lost on the free-sample grabbing audience.

I rant, and yet, it brings me no cheese. Yes, I hate the grocery store, mostly because of the people. But there are times when it is not so busy, like now. It’s midnight, and HEB is open. I could satisfy my cheese needs now. But let’s not kid ourselves. I’m not leaving this laptop, this bottle of tequila, this squeaky yet comfortable chair.

I am content to settle for cheese-less spaghetti, as long as I am able to pontificate and be grumpy about it. This makes me a curmudgeon, on top of being unorganized, unprepared, and let’s cut the crap – lazy. Lazy laced with impulse control disorder. I’ve been told this personality-cocktail makes for an incredibly attractive potential mate.

In an attempt to provide a visual break from all the words, I did a google image search of curmudgeon. The results included:

Statler and Waldorf, the ornery old Muppet characters

The late, great comic book writer and music critic, Harvey Pekar. His quote, "Life is a war of attrition," is not currently scheduled to caption any motivational posters.

Personal hero and still undisputed World Heavyweight Grumpy Ol' Bastard Champion, Andy Rooney.

So, I have no cheese.  And while I’ve accepted that for this particular helping of spaghetti, I can’t help but wonder if the cheese is more than cheese.  You know?  Like, is it a metaphor?  Is cheese a rewarding career?  Am I content to put that off until later, later than what?  To procrastinate?  To be happy with the bill-paying but bland sauce?  Or, is cheese a woman?  A relationship in which my fear of intimacy completely evaporates.  (Lady readers, you’re more than welcome to approach me with the line, “I’d love to be your cheese,” and we will laugh and hug and kiss like nobody’s business)

No, it’s probably just cheese.  In fact, even the title of this blog post – particularly the part about extracting a meaningful meatball – is bullshit.  It’s vegetarian spaghetti, with mushrooms and zucchini.  I just liked the alliteration.  I can’t even cook a meaningful metaphor.  (Boom!  still got in that alliteration)  What figurative value could zucchini possibly play?

(I am more than content if the only memorable, de-contextualized quote from this post is, “Is cheese a woman?”)

Obligatory (MUSIC!) List of 2010′s Shiniest, Most Super-Duperist Treasures

You’ve perused the book and movie part of my list.  I’m sure you’ve absorbed it and decided I’m an awesome dude because of all the awesome stuff I read and watched.  Good, good.  That’s how it should be.  That was a great advertisement for myself.  You’re welcome, self.

Now, let’s do the songs I liked from last year.  Albums?  Pfft.  I got shit to do, man.  I have only a ten-minute commute, and that doesn’t leave me time for a lot of album digestion, dig?  I need my songs punchy and gratifying within a 5-minute interval.  Give me suspense, give me shredding guitar riffs, give me climactic choruses, but do it quick.  I’m practically at work already.

In no particular order…

UPDATE:  How did I forget this song?  The lead singer was “carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees” and lived to tell about it!  Wowser!

 

Breathe Owl Breathe – I’m not a big fan of the name, but several songs from their newest record, Magic Central, were popular songs in my car this fall and winter.  This song is very pretty, adorable, and makes me nostalgic for shit I didn’t even do.

And then there’s this song.  I could not pick just one from these kids.

Breathe Owl Breathe – House Of Gold

 

I don’t understand why this next song didn’t get more popular, at least in the indie music blogodome.  It’s awesome, and the whispered threats just kill me.

Jai Paul – BTSTU

 

Heartbreaking, hopeful, just damned lovely.

Phosphorescent – The Mermaid Parade

 

I listened to this next one more than any other song.  It makes my ears feel nice.

Toro y Moi – You Hid

 

The entire Teen Dream record is great, and “Silver Soul” is probably my favorite song, but I already uploaded this one, and I’m too lazy to change it.

Beach House – Take Care

 

Again with the shitty name, but my god what a jam.

PS I Love You – Facelove

 

Guilty pleasure perhaps?  My second most-listened-to song.

Javelin – Oh! Centra

 

Do I really even need to include this one?

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Round and Round

 

Some of that there rap music.  This dude is great.

Freddie Gibbs – National Anthem (Fuck The World)

 

If you are a frequent patron of the Alamo Drafthouse, you know they produce exceptional promotional videos of upcoming events and movies.  The editing is great – they are masterful in their clip selection.  Furthermore, they always pick kick ass songs to soundtrack the spots, and I appreciate how they never forget to credit the musician/band.  For example, Fitz & The Tantrums.

Fitz and The Tantrums – MoneyGrabber

 

I like everything I heard from TOBACCO.  All of it.

TOBACCO – Lamborghini Meltdown (feat. Zackey Force Funk)

 

I’m sure a large part of my obsession with this next song  is due to the video, as it features one of my favorite television characters, from one of my favorite shows.

Or maybe I like it because I relate so closely to the narrator, Kid Cudi, and how he “Hides the pain with some pussy and mimosas,” with “Costa Rica next on [his] agenda.”  Yeah, that’s probably it.

Good god, now can we finally end with the list-making?  Can we stop with the top 25 lists about the top 100 things about the number 4 in 2010?  I have a lot of respect for people who can create, and actually assign a rank, to artistic creations.  I mean, I think it’s respect.  I don’t know what it is, because I eventually had to give in and relax.  I could have worked on a list all of this year and still not been satisfied.  Why did I even do this to myself?  This was hard, and I’m not even sure it was all that rewarding.

What a great ending!

Obligatory List of 2010′s Shiniest, Most Super-Duperist Media Treasures

I liked a lot of things last year.  A lot of things also offended my sense of taste, hurt my admittedly sensitive feelings, disappointed my not-even-that-high expectations, smothered my heart with a hot, stuffy pillow of rejection, and gave me tummyaches until I had a Maalox mustache.

But let’s focus on that very first sentence, shall we?  And I don’t mean the personal relationships forged, the professional goals achieved or even the spiritual insights attained.  Oh no, I mean the shit I bought.  More specifically, the music, movies and books I consumed.

Now, I tried to restrict it to media actually released last year, but that’s too hard.  It’s not really the way I consume media.  Who, beside the most self-consciously taste-making list creators, pays close enough attention?

My defense is that with constant access to ALL THINGS ALL THE TIME, pop culture time is collapsed.   I really don’t want to go in to what I mean by that – just read the damn blog, and allow me the liberty to present awesome things both 2010 and before, with me (somewhat) careful to point out which is which, for the discerning media consumer.

Books!  (Just in case you don’t recognize the objects in the above picture and thought it depicted a stack of painted Kindles)  The italicized text are passages from the books.

The Geography of Nowhere – James Howard Kunstler (First published in 1993)

This is a light-hearted romp through one man’s love of the American automobile obsession and the subsequently lovely infrastructure built and adoringly groomed to maintain and bolster it.  Sarcasm aside, it’s an essential read that will make you loathe your driving habit and look with newly disgusted eyes at the places we’ve created to live lives disconnected from nature and each other.

America has now squandered its national wealth erecting a human habitat that, in all likelihood, will not be usable very much longer, and there are few unspoiled places left to retreat to in the nation’s habitable reaches.  Aside from its enormous social costs, which we have largely ignored, the whole system of suburban sprawl is too expensive to operate, too costly to maintain, and a threat to the ecology of living things.  To lose it is tragic not because Americans will be deprived of such wonderful conveniences as K Marts and drive-in churches – we can get along happily without them – but because it was a foolish waste of resources in the first place, and it remains to be seen whether its components can be recycled, converted to other uses, or moved, or even whether the land beneath all the asphalt, concrete, and plastic, can be salvaged. In the meantime, Americans are doing almost nothing to prepare for the end of the romantic dream that was the American automobile age.

The road is now like television, violent and tawdry.  The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next.  They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise.  We don’t want to remember them.  We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time.  There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular.

 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed a committee to study the prospect of building a national network of superhighways.  The commission chairman was Lucius D. Clay, who also happened to be on the board of General Motors.  To no surprise, boosted also by the tireless promotion of oil, tire, asphalt, steel, and other such lobbying interests, the committee’s report enthusiastically endorsed the project.  The economy boomed, certainly, as it was the largest public-works project in the history of the world.

The distinction between the booming economy and what that boom yielded can’t be stressed enough.  The great suburban build-out generated huge volumes of business.  The farther apart things spread, the more cars were needed to link up the separate things, the more asphalt and cement were needed for roads, bridges, and parking lots, the more copper for electric cables, et cetera.  Each individual suburban house required its own washing machine, lawnmower, water meter, several television sets, telephones, air conditioners, swimming pools, you name it.  Certainly, many Americans became wealthy selling these things, while many more enjoyed good steady pay manufacturing them.  In a culture with no other values, this could easily be construed as a good thing.  Indeed, the relentless expansion of consumer goodies became increasingly identified with our national character as the American Way of Life.  Yet not everyone failed to notice that the end product of all this furious commerce-for-its-own-sake was a trashy and preposterous human habitat with no future.

Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community.  We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.

Hard Rain Falling – Don Carpenter (First published in 1966, republished in 2009 by the New York Review of Books)

This book will put hair on your chest.  It’s a prison novel populated with gamblers and pool hustlers along the Pacific Northwest.  It’s a story of drinking binges and rock bottoms and the complicated quest of an orphan struggling for money, women and that cliche yet powerful, true and elusive redemption.

He knew what he wanted.  He wanted some money.  He wanted a piece of ass.  He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings.  He wanted a bottle of whiskey.

One night an old man was brought in for assault with a deadly weapon.  They got the story from the deputies:  The old man lived with his son’s family, and his grand-daughter had been gotten pregnant by a boy, and there had been a conference of the two families in an attempt to fix the responsibility and decide what to do.  At first it was decided that it was the boy’s fault for making the girl go all the way; then they blamed the girl for allowing the boy to take these liberties with her (they were only juniors in high school), and then both sets of parents decided to blame themselves for not raising their children properly, and finally, after much self-recrimination, it was decided that modern society itself made it impossible to raise children properly, what with the movies and television and violence, too much sex in the magazines, and the way girls dressed these days; and the old man, who had been sitting in the background listening in disgust, finally went upstairs to his room and came back down with his double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun and terrified everybody by pointing the deadly weapon at the boy and telling him by God he would do the right thing by the girl or the grandfather would come looking for him and would find him no matter how far he ran and when he found him he would blow a hole through him, by God.  The boy let out a scream and jumped through the picture window, and cut himself pretty badly, and the boy’s parents called the police right after they called the ambulance. It did not occur to them to blame the grandfather’s actions on society.

 

The Book of Harold, the Illegitimate Son of God (2010) – Owen Egerton

Egerton is an Austinite, and I’m disappointed it took me over two years to discover this great local author.  The entire opening description of a nativity scene gone horribly wrong is amazing and hilarious.  Essentially, it’s the story of a man claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ, and the movement which springs up in support.  I thought it would be mostly satire, and while it contains just that, it’s also a fairly earnest exploration of faith.

Nothing happens and time is running out.  I know I’m dying.  It feels lonely.  I think it’s what’s made me lonely my whole life.  Not death as an end, but death as an always.  It’s like dancing on an iced pond, that cold water always just an inch below you.  You keep your feet moving so you won’t crack through.  But the cold still makes you shiver.  Always there.  And if you stop dancing, just for a second, that cold air creeps up your legs, soaks in.  Cold just below.  Death right there.  Trying to tell me it’s already in my veins.

God, you hear this?  You hear what the cold is telling me?  What nature keeps whispering?  How much this all hurts?  Do you hear this, you mute?  I put my ear to your chest and listen for a heartbeat.  I can’t hear a heartbeat.

Motherless Brooklyn – Jonatham Lethem (1999)

This is a detective novel bursting out of any genre limitations with help from it’s Tourette’s-suffering narrator.  He’s an orphan searching for the killer of his mentor/boss, consumed by verbal tics and hollers, annoying or upsetting everyone he encounters.  It’s funny and entirely believable in its depiction of the narrator/main character’s disorder.  A narrator with Tourette’s allows Lethem to dissect, explore and riff on language that is entertaining and inventive.

Instead of quoting passages, just do yourself a favor and “Search inside this book” on Amazon.  Those first six pages should hook you.

 

Fever Chart – Bill Cotter (2009, but I bought the 2010-released paperback.  Loophole?)

By far, this was my favorite book this year.  Hilarious, disturbing, and description-rich in an obsessive yet never tiring style.  Amazon’s product description is better than I can do:

“Having spent most of his life medicated, electroshocked, and institutionalized, Jerome Coe finds himself homeless on the coldest night of the century — and so, with nowhere else to go, he accepts a ride out of New England from an old love’s ex-girlfriend. It doesn’t quite work out, but he makes it to New Orleans, and a new life — complete with a bandaged hand, world-champion grilled-cheese sandwiches, and only the occasional psychotic break. Things get better, and then, of course, they get worse. From a writer who’s worked as a debt collector, book restorer, toilet scrubber, and door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman, Fever Chart is filled with a cast of Crescent City denizens that makes for one of the most vivid ensembles since Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.”

Take away my meds, leave me outside in the cold, sic violent pets on me, batten me to a gurney, but please don’t separate me from my toilet.  I could never, ever, ever be more than a few hundred yards away from a toilet, a good, clean, private lavatory, with an exhaust fan, some sort of high-decibel white noise, the essential side items, and a nonwobbling ceramic commode with suction like an airlock on a space station.

I had strange, pelvicentric feelings toward Daniel Day Lewis’s Adam’s apple.

So that was it then. My time with Julie had come to an end. She had to go to work. Maybe she’d let me come along on her rounds! Maybe I’d just follow her.  No.  If she caught me, she’d think I was a stalker and never, ever allow me near her again.  I had no choice but to go home and lie on the floor by the phone for hours and hours, while the jaws of lust and uncertainty ground me to a digestible paste.

Then, from above her mouth a wide red ribbon began to unroll. It followed the contours of her lips, and of her tongue, which had reflexively darted out to taste it.  A thick, lush ribbon; shiny, without a trace of weave.   The ribbon paused at her chin, then fell heavily.  I rushed forward with my hands cupped and caught the ribbon in midstream.  She jumped back and some of the blood splashed onto her white t-shirt.   It continued to pour from both nostrils, bright cadmium red.  In an instant my cupped hands filled with several ounces of her blood.  On the glass counter streaks and pools and splatters glowed around their edges from the fluorescent light below.

Movies!

Inception – Duh.

Winnebago Man – Sure, this was funny and compelling for the subject matter – a man infamous for an underground vhs tape and viral Internet clips depicting outtakes from his expletive-filled breakdowns while shooting an RV promotional video – but it became more than that.  I thought it really considered the roles of, and relationship between, documentary filmmaker and subject in a thoughtful way.  Following clip NSFW.

Leaves of Grass – I wrote this off at first, and would not have seen it if I didn’t have a free movie ticket to burn.  I would have missed a really great movie.  Edward Norton plays twin brothers that embody a dichotomy of intelligence – one is book smart and teaches philosophy, one is a street-smart and inventive hydroponic pot grower.  Just…just trust me on this one.

Machete – Brutal, hilarious, and Danny Trejo beds an insane of amount of pretty ladies.

Dogtooth – This may be weird for the sake of weird, but it has stuck with me far longer than most movies.

A Prophet – My favorite

 

Movies I have not seen, but I imagine are quite good:  The Social Network, Black Swan, The King’s Speech

 

Next post:  The music portion of our program…

Hint:  Train’s not on it.