a great album that everyone should own and listen to at a very high volume

I just finished reading Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman, which I bought at a thrift store in lieu of buying a shirt. It's pretty good, although I am sure that CK is the kind of guy I would never be friends with and might in fact take a drunken swing at if he tried to say some smart shit to me. No, that's horrible. Maybe it's just the way I imagine his voice. Maybe it's that author picture of him on the back cover, that smirk that says "Heh." followed by something witty or some bullshit. But don't let that dissuade, the book is hilarious and I really like that CK likes stuff without irony. I don't really understand liking stuff ironically, or even those so called guilty pleasures, why should I feel any guilt about a badass song by the goddamn Scorpions, it fucking rules! So I guess I'm on the same page with CK on that. Basically the book is about Chuck driving through America stopping at the various places that rock and rollers have died, which is pretty cool/morbid, but there is a lot more to it, lots of memories and nostalgia and weird characters. Sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's funny and sometimes it made me think about memories and how sad and funny they are. I had a dream about someone I haven't seen in years and she told me that she was getting married and that everything was all good now, when I woke up I was kinda bummed out. I am blaming it on Killing Yourself to Live. I dug it and I would've gladly paid 2 bucks for it which is twice as much as I actually paid. There's a great quote "Rock'n'roll is only superficially about guitar chords: it's really about myth."

I'm halfway through Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami. It's a novel centered around escalating murders between 2, for lack of a better word, gangs of seemingly normal people. It's kinda dark but there's been a few moments where I have laughed out loud in real life, specifically on the train on tuesday night.

At work today I bagged up a bunch of candy to give away to trick or treaters on Halloween, which is really the happiest time of year. My boss was all "put only 3 pieces of candy in each bag." But if you have seen how small "fun size" candy is then you know that 3 pieces of candy is fucking sad. Instead I put a whole bunch of candy in each bag because Halloween is the happiest time of year. As a result of the heat/humidity and the vast amount of candy I ate I ended up feeling sorta pukey earlier, but I feel fine now. Or maybe it was just the lingering effects of K.Y.t.L. At first I had the candy in some big buckets that used to contain rat poison, mainly because my boss suggested it last year and I know a good gag when I see one even though he didn't understand why it was funny. One of my coworkers pointed out that I probably shouldn't do that. I said why not, told him that it's fucking Halloween, and pointed out that I had hosed them off. Later on he pointed out that it says on the label of the rat poison buckets to get rid of them by incineration if possible and NOT TO BREATHE IN THE FUMES. This amused me to no end. When I came back from lunch to find that he had replaced those biohazard green buckets with boring regular buckets. It's not like the candy is in direct contact with the bucket (which is hosed down anyway), there's the plastic bag and then the candy is wrapped up in its factory wrapping. A little rat poison never hurt anyone, in fact it adds tang. Furthermore: fuck you, bucket. I'll breathe in whatever fumes I damn well wish.

Last night I found out that people don't know that the Beach Boys used a theremin in Good Vibrations. Ever since reading about how twisted Brian Wilson is I can't help but notice the tinge of darkness that is in every Beach Boys song I hear. Of course I'm not constantly listening to them because I'd really rather listen to bands I actually like because they rock not just because they are weird. Judas Priest > Beach Boys. TALKING ABOUT JUDAS PRIEST, there's a Judas Priest tribute band playing this saturday. I might go.

At the thrift store I got a pair of jeans, the book, and 2 Ramnstein cds. I was over joyed to find a copy of a Sepultura's Morbid Visions but when I looked inside there was a copy of Limp Bizkit's Signficant Other, which is a real downer. No worries, I thought, there's the case for that right there. You know what was inside of that? A fucking Korn cd. There was a bunch of rock cds for sale, many of them lame, some of them good, but mostly not. It was like someone's own collection and they were forced to get rid of it, which would explain why they had a great album that everyone should own and listen to at a very high volume (Highway to Hell by AC/DC), and a plethora of terrible shit. That AC/DC album was left in the stack on accident, sadly packaged with Limp Bizkit and Korn and some other lame shit. What sorrow. I also looked for mixtapes but didn't find any. They are hardly ever good, but they are always interesting cultural artifacts. I often wonder what became of the mixtapes I gave to people. I guess I should wonder about the people too, but I am a terrible human being.

When I was getting lunch one a dude asked me if I had a moment for gay rights. I looked into his eyes, smiled, and said no. I think all people should be free and that no one is above anyone else. I agree that we should as a species try to keep the earth from a human caused apocalypse. I think it would be cool if people stopped hunting whales. But I don't have any fucking money. Next time one of those fuckers stop me I'm going to ask them if they "Have a moment for Bruno rights?"

Did you hear about the cop that was plotting to kidnap and eat women? Well, here it is. Fucked up.
Neatorama has a great series on legendary monsters from all over the world going on right now.

Here's pt 1 of the North American edition. I, like a jackalope, can also be caught if you use whiskey as bait. Until tonight I had never heard of the Loveland Frog.

Last week I caught the original Nightmare on Elm Street at the Logan Square Theater, it was a blast. (A shout out to Her Body Is My Coffin and Recalentado )  Earlier I ran into this article claiming that it was a real thing and now I am fucking terrified, the whole thing sounds even creepier than the movie. Of course Wes Craven could be making the whole thing up. Of course I could just be saying that to make myself feel better.

How does a robot smile?

For the last 2 weeks one of my coworkers has been saying he was going to let me borrow a book, The Invetion of the Americas. I asked him what it was about, he said, "Philosophy." "Ah. I'm not a philosophical guy." "No, you are. Whenever you ask 'why?' you're being philosophical and you tend to make fun of the system, that's philosophy!" "Okay, so what's the book about." Then he went on and on for a while when I was working on a good twitter joke that fell kinda flat I think, but that's something else entirely. Eventually I said, "Look man, just bring it, I will give it a shot." I am after all trying to read more non fiction. "Alright!" He brought me the book today. I went to the library to get the book because dude gave it to me in a weird format, photocopied pages in a spring binding. Of course they had the book in the library but only in annoying hardback, so I decided to stick with the copy I had. While there I decided to look around and I ended up getting books that I find much more interesting than The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity by Enrigue Dussel, translated by Micheal D. Barber, dear god why. Look I'm not saying that it's bad but I would never go, hey I want to read this. You know what I got at the library, perfectly bound, with fantastic design and in paperback? The Scud omnibus. It's much thicker than T.I.o.t.A. but it's much, much more appealing to me. Random sentence from The Invention of the Americas: Habermas, whose Eurocentrism resembles O'Gorman's, Suggests an intra-European definition of modernity which commences with the Renaissance and the Reformation and culminates in the Aufklarung. Sometimes I go a whole day without speaking so many goddamn syllables. Random sentence from Scud: I'M JESUS WITH A LASER GUN AND YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL! And you're not even getting the whole image because it's a comic book. So it's a smiling robot wielding a laser gun, dressed like Jesus, wearing a crown of barbed wire. How does a robot smile? When the robot paints a smile on its face with the blood of their foes. Look. I will try to read the damn book about... what the fuck is that book about? But it has to compete with a comic book about a robot assasin (!), who works for a cyborg (cyborgs!) mafia, and they have to fight an army of zombie (i love zombies) dinosaurs (i love dinosaurs!) controlled by a technovoodoo Ben Franklin (dear god). While at the library I read a wonderful adaption of the story of how Coyote is responsible for the night sky. I also read a large portion of Mark Smith's (of Bone) version of Captain Marvel, you should read that. Smith's art is the perfect fit for Captain Marvel, big and bold and wonderful Basically: comic books are the best.

A list of words from Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa (so far)

Tondero
vituperative
mimeticoseminal
mesocrat
oligophrenics
acromeglics

theory sounds cooler

In the City by The Jam

Oh my dusty blog. How dusty thou are. It's not like I have anything to say, but when has that stopped me? Exactly.

I am going to take a gamble and hope that I get a ticket at the door for Andrew WK this sunday. I will try. At worst I will end up not spending 25 bucks.

I'm listening to a pretty kick ass mixtape (playlist) by way of Suicide Watch over on ye olde tumblr. The song featured at the top of this post isn't featured on the mixtape, but I still like it. A few weeks ago I heard it at the bookstore on Clark, the one south of the Metro. It struck me as a great song to hear while killing some time.

I just finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stepheson. Part of the reason I picked that up was because all of his other stuff is intimidatingly tomeish, the other part is because I have been thinking about cyber punk for the last few weeks. It all started off with watching Johnny Mnemonic, which is a really cool movie based on a great story by William Gibson. Next time we hang out ask me to tell you about my Keanu Reeves theory. Actually it's more of a hypothesis, but theory sounds cooler. Gravity is just a theory. Snow Crash is about... a lot of things. It's packed with lots of stuff, but there are sword fights, hacking, dystopian neon future, rock and roll, virtual reality, and it's damn fun.

In an attempt to do something I have signed up for Script Frenzy, also because I like to torment myself with ridiculous things. I fucking know! Madness! Now that I'm actually typing it out the actual dread comes seeping out of the back of my brain and begins oozing forward. I was thinking about doing a bunch of short preposterous plays, but I don't read plays, I don't even go to plays. I did see The Crucible many moons ago. I do like movies. I watch a lot of movies. Every once in a while I read a script. So I decided to try to do a screenplay. What other genre other than action could I pick? Everyone knows the hardest part about coming up with a movie is the title. You can't have something too subtle or it'll get ignored, and you can't have something too ostentatious because it will not live up to its title. I want to call it Saint of Killers, but that's a character in the Preacher comics. Santo de Matadores? Nah, that sounds like it'll be very luchador based, plus it'll be yoked with the association of El Santo.

Talking about movies. I saw a great trailer a few weeks ago. I'm not sure where... BUT! It was an asian movie, not a martial arts or a crime flick, which I hold dear, but a low key thing. Time for love? A Season for Love? something with love in the title. The trailer was kick ass. I like it just because of that.

The rings makes Uranus look like it was titlted on it's axis (ha)

Sometimes I worry about the strangest things. One of them is whether or not humanity will ever get off Earth. There's a tv show on right now about the solar system, but I'm mostly getting that everything around Earth is inredibly hazardous and very far away. The distances are so vast that they are terrifying. A few weeks ago a big ass space rock flew by Earth, it was 20,000 miles away, that is relatively close, it's crazy.

Right now I'm reading Endymion by Dan Simmons, part of what I just learned is called the Hyperion Cantos. I read Hyperion waaay back when, I loved it, you should check it out. Basically it's the Canterbury Tales in space, but that's just the first one and even then it's pretty crazy. I gotta go back and read the Fall of Hyperion soon. I will also be keeping an eye out for The Rise of Endymion whenever I hit up ye old used book stores.

One of my goals for this year was to read more non fiction books than fiction books. I failed that goal miserably. I did manage to read a whole mess of travel books, being on of my favorite kind of non fiction writing it was super easy. I read a few science books. My favorite one was this fucked up one, there was elephants on lsd. I used to read a lot of true crime when I was a teenager, for some reason I have pretty much a stop to that. Oh sure, I still pick up a few of them, but not so much murder and serial killers, more focus on Yakuza and Prohibition. One of my favorite new subjects is the Crusades, that shit was bad! There were corpses being catapulted into cities to fuck with the inhabitants! Swords! Treasure! Mayhem! You really can't make this stuff up. The coolest non fiction book I read was Brandwashed, which is all about the nefarious and absolutely fascinating world of advertising. It's a most read for anyone who actually looks at ads and wonders how they work. But most of my nonfiction reading tends to center around modern warfare, Vietnam and on. Oh no wait! You gotta read With the Old Breed, it's about the Pacific Theater in WW2 and is one of my favorite books in general. It's so badass, like some hardcore whiskey, it'll bring a tear to your eye.

It shouldn't really be a complaint, oh no I read too much good fiction this year what will I do. It's ridiculous. I should really try to keep up my Goodreads account better, but I go through novels like a competitive eater at a buffet. It's ridiculous.