For Some Reason...

...This makes me extremely happy.

Oh to put an audience through this myself one day.

JB

Tunes Currently Pulling My Plonker:

1) Little River - The Tallest Man On Earth

2) Chop Suey - System of a Down

3) So You're Leaving - Al Green

4) I Want The One I Can't Have - The Smiths

5) England - The National

6) Janglin - Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

7) Let's Roll Like We Used To - Kasabian

8) Because - The Beatles

9) Warning - The Notorious B.I.G.

10) Ball and Biscuit - The White Stripes

$5 Book Sale

I'm having a book sale. They are all 5 dollars unless otherwise noted. Most of them are in mint condition. I will note if they're not. In reading this through, I can't help wondering where on earth I found some of this sh*t.

Anyway, here is a complete list. Let me know which one(s) you want and I'll put them aside (the ones in Grey have already been claimed):

Fiction:

"The Road" - Cormac McCarthy

"Lullaby" - Chuck Palahniuk

"Trainspotting" - Irvine Welsh

"Marabou Stork Nightmares" - Irvine Welsh (bit scuffed on the cover)

"Naked Lunch" - William S. Burroughs

"Crime & Punishment" - Fydor Dostoyevsky

"Notes From The Underground" - Fydor Dostoyevsky - $3.00

"Catcher In The Rye" - J.D. Salinger

"American Tabloid" - James Ellroy - $3.00 (well worn but a great read)

"1984" - George Orwell

"The Trial" - Franz Kafka

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - James Joyce - $3.00

"The Darwin Conspiracy" - John Darton

"The Long Goodbye" - Raymond Chandler

"On The Road" - Jack Kerouac

Non-Fiction (Paperback):

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" - Hunter S. Thompson

"Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" - Hunter S. Thompson

"Mr. Nice" - Howard Marks

"Manufacturing Consent" - Noam Chomsky

"A Moveable Feast" - Ernest Hemmingway

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" - Tom Wolfe

"Imagine This: Growing up with John Lennon" - Julia Baird

Non-Fiction (Hard Cover):

"The Libertines: Bound Together" - Anthony Thornton - $7.00

"Banksy: Wall and Piece" - Banksy

"Gonzo" - Hunter S. Thompson

"Wild Ducks Flying Backwards" - Tom Robbins

"Poetry" - Oscar Wilde - $3.00

"Dead Children Playing" - Stanley Donwood (This book is basically Radiohead artwork spanning 20 years. It's great)

Film/TV:

"Screenplay" - Syd Field

"Screenwriter's Marketing and Resource Directory" - Deidre Berry-Fortner

"Making a Good Script Great" - Linda Seger - $8.00 (Unopened)

"Standard Script Formats" - Cole/Haag

"Woody Allen on Woody Allen" - Stig Bjorkman

"Rebel Without A Crew" - Robert Rodriguez

"Making Movies" - Sidney Lumet

"Heath Ledger" - John McShane

"Film Directing Shot by Shot" - Steven D. Katz

Comedy:

"Love All The People" - Bill Hicks

"How to Talk Dirty and Influence People" - Lenny Bruce

"I Drink For A Reason" - David Cross

"The World of Karl Pilkington" - Ricky Gervais

"Booky Wook 2" - Russell Brand

"Frank Skinner" - Frank Skinner

Graphic Novels:

"The Dark Knight Returns" - Frank Miller

"Watchmen" - Alan Moore

Scripts/Plays etc:

"Rosencrantz & Guildernstern are Dead" - Tom Stobbard

"Reservoir Dogs" - Quentin Tarantino

"Good Will Hunting" - Matt Damon (possibly Ben Affleck)

"Uncle Vanya" - Anton Chekov - $2.00

Self-Help Type Stuff:

"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" - John Gray, Ph.D.

"The Art of Happiness" - The Dalai Lama

"Meditations from Conversations with God" - Neale Donald Walsh

"A New Earth: Awakening Your Life's Purpose" - Eckhart Tolle

"The Virtue of Selfishness" - Ayn Rand

"365 Ways to Be Your Own Life Coach" - David Lawrence Preston

"The Kundalini Yoga Experience" - Guru Dharam S. Khalsa

JB

The Hilarious Truth...

JB.

Dialogue of the Day

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness...I hope you're getting all this down."

-- from "Love and Death" (1975)

Today

Is my birthday. I think this video is an accurate description of how my day will be spent...

Bloomin' hilarious!

JB

The Curmudgeon

"A curmudgeon's reputation for malevolence is undeserved. They're neither warped nor evil at heart. They don't hate mankind, just mankind's absurdities. They're just as sensitive and soft-hearted as the next guy, but they hide their vulnerability beneath a crust of misanthropy. They ease the pain by turning hurt into humor. They attack maudlinism because it devalues genuine sentiment. Nature, having failed to equip them with a servicable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit.

Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can't compromise their standards and can't manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.

Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor."

-- Jon Winokur

Quote of the Day

"I'm really sick of those left-wing, conspiracy theory people. Who are all like 'Hey, isn't it weird how every time there's bad news for the Bush administration, the terror alert goes up? There's over eleven examples of it...' Listen, let me tell you something, it's called COINCIDENCE, okay? Look it up in the dictionary. It's a coincidence that it went up right after that French report saying Bush knew about 9/11. And it just happened to go up after a report stating there was absolutely no link between Osama and Saddam Hussein, it happened to go up when mad cow disease broke and the government might have been implicit in it, it happened to go up whenever Bush's ratings plummeted....it's called coincidence you f**king hippie freak. These guys are out there on their 'computers' compiling cold, hard, irrefutable facts? F**k those guys! Yeah, I'll see you at Burning Man, hippie"

David Cross - "It's Not Funny" (2004)

Things I Love: Lost In Translation

The first time I saw this film was a particularly lonely night in Madrid. A leg of my european tour in the winter of 2004 wherein I got there a day earlier than the people I was supposed to meet. What is one to do in such circumstances? Well, find an English speaking cinema (that serves beer, obviously) and settle in for the night.

And there's not many better films to watch in a state of isolation, stuck in a foreign land, than Lost In Translation. From the opening shot of Scarlett Johansson's barely covered arse (really, is there a better way to start a film?) I was sold. Bill Murray expertly embodies a lonely old famous person as only he can, and the unlikely story of two complete strangers sharing a random moment in time among a distant, completely Alien world - Tokyo in this case - struck a chord with me that I've been unable to shake since.

It is hilarious. As are most things with the mighty Murray because his face alone is enough to make anyone laugh. It is also romantic, despite the potentially creepy age difference between the two stars, and extremely poignant. There isn't much dialogue, not really much action, it's just a perfect encapsulation of two people in a certain place, at a certain time.

Expertly directed by Sophia Copolla, beautifully shot and featuring a great cast all the way down to the Japanese prossie urging Bill to "lip" her tights. This film is a lesson in not spoon-feeding a story to your audience and just letting things be. Marvelous.

It also makes me really want to go traveling again....sigh.

JB