Category:

Nick is an ass.  He was the first to take advantage of the rule that, no matter what he recommended, I would be forced to read it.  Jerk.

I lived with Nick while I was studying for my master’s degree and he was a lowly peon still struggling for his undergrad.  Granted, that difference has little to do with skill or smarts and everything to do with age, but whatever.  While living with him, Nick taught me about World of Warcraft, indie and emo bands that mostly I don’t like though there are exceptions, and a complete acceptance of populace things regardless of what my elitist tendencies lead me to think.  I taught him about the somewhat misguided stereotypes of homos, disc golf, and the importance of trying sushi even though it sounds and looks like the scariest shit on earth.  It was a win-win situation.

With this in mind, I should have known that he would not steer me in the wrong direction when recommending The Alphabet of Manliness.  But seriously, look at the cover!  The only reason I would ever have any desire to pick up this book is because the guy has nice abs.  But even then, it’s in kind of a scary Fabio-gone-horribly-wrong sort of way.  And the thing is like an encyclopedia.  Those are good for maybe the first few entries, but usually become utterly repetitive by the letter E.

Needless to say, this book is effing hilarious.  Mind you, it’s hysterical in the most abhorrent and offensive of ways…but it’s still awesome.  Maddox is also the author of the self-proclaimed Best Page in the Universe (which, at its inception, could have been closer to truth, since it’s been around since 1997).  Maddox goes through the alphabet, covering one topic per letter (i.e. B is for Boner, K is for Knockers, and U is for Urinal Etiquette).  Each topic tends to come with an overview, detailed descriptions of examples, and numerous illustrations (all provided by fans of his site, some of which are excellent).

My favorite chapter had to be G is for Gas.  I laughed extensively throughout it (on the Metro, in fact) and read a few selected passages to friends.  I’m kind of a sucker for a well-played fart joke.  I would say it’s one of the few sections that Maddox isn’t horribly sexist and evil, but he manages to persist on that throughout the entire book.

The main thing that bothers me about this book is the guys that will take it seriously.  I read it, laughing, in hopes that everyone else thinks it’s as big of a joke as I do.  What I worry about are the men that read it and think, “Hell, yeah.  The only things women are good for are Female Wrestling (letter F) and Copping a Feel (letter C).  I know that guys like Nick don’t necessarily think along those lines, but there are certainly those that don’t know satire and what-not when they see it.  There is also some serious homophobia, but I tend to read it as a big joke as well.  It seems more along the lines of jokes by Colbert than jabs by O’Reilly, so I’ll just go with that.  Hopefully most others will do the same.

Category:

Craig is my little brother.  You can tell just by looking at the two of us that we are related.  However, that is where most of our similarities end.  He is detail-oriented, a natural with all things mechanical, and flies planes.  I am big-picture, prefer someone else fix everything, and have touched the controls of an aircraft once while in the air and almost shit my pants with fear.  All our differences aside, we both love action, adventure, espionage, and suspense movies.  He tends more towards explosions and car chases while I prefer the mind-bender flicks, but it is the one type of movie that we can pick out and agree upon.

Craig’s recommendation to me was a movie I’d never heard of.  Domino stars Keira Knightley as the title character with Mickey Rourke with Edgar Ramirez (who is pretty) as her sidekicks (of a sort).  It is the mostly-to-partially true story of Domino Harvey.  Domino left a decent modeling career to become a badass.  After whatever nonsense happens in her career (who cares? let’s move the story on), she decides to take a course in how to become a bounty hunter (which is a scam) and instead ends up learning things on the job from Ed (Rourke) and Choco (Ramirez – who is pretty).

There are lots of nice little surprises in this film.  Right off the bat, we get to watch Lucy Liu and Knightley in a battle of verbal abuse as Liu interrogates Knightley as an FBI psychologist.  Why is Domino being interrogated?  Because some recent job the bounty hunting trio has attempted has gone horribly wrong and she’s been busted.  Why a psychologist?  I really don’t know, but we get to watch Lucy Liu, so does it matter?

Also, along the way the bounty hunters get picked up to do a reality tv series, mostly featuring the petite but vicious Domino.  The pleasant surprise comes when Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering of 90210 fame, playing themselves, come to host the show.  What’s great is that it’s clear they want cameos similar to that of Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar – something so over-the-top and absurd that people would never believe they are actually like that in real life.  However, they portray themselves as just as ridiculous as they probably are.  It’s great.  Oh, and finally, Mo’Nique has a featured role in a quartet of divas from the DMV.  I love them.

All in all, this was a fun movie to watch and was surprisingly entertaining.  After this, I’ll be looking forward to Craig’s recommendations a little more often.  It’s totally not something I would have watched otherwise, and it’s no award winner by any stretch, but I certainly enjoyed it.  Except when they cut that guy’s arm off.  That was gross.

Category:

It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed anything, I realize that.  Part of the problem was this book.  The other part involves my personal life.  All of this will be explained in this post, so press on, brave reader.

I’ve been in therapy for the last year and a half.  Or rather, I was in therapy.  I terminated a successful run about a month ago.  Essentially, it took me 18 months to quit my job.  Once I quit the job, I didn’t really need the therapy anymore. Once I quit the job, I had basically resolved the problem I’d gone in with, so it was time to venture out on my own for a little while.  Along the way, my therapist recommended this book to me.  We had spent a couple of sessions talking about loneliness, emptiness, and an overall lacking sense of fulfillment and this was her suggested research.

We used bibliotherapy on more than one occasion.  I also read The Road Less Traveled per her suggestion (also a good one).  The hard thing about reading for your mental health: you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself while reading.  This certainly isn’t a bad thing, but it takes a really long time.  Especially when the book really resonates with how you are feeling.  It takes a lot of processing and defragmenting.  Man’s Search for Himself was no exception.

I didn’t do any research (I don’t always play librarian), but Rollo May had to have been quite the revolutionary in the 1950s.  He talks a lot about sex, rage against the social machine, and the absurdity in trying to fit in with the rest of the community.  In a time of suburbs and Betty Crocker you’re going to piss some people off with shit like that.  He certainly rides the wave of the Kinsey reports and quotes a ridiculous amount of Freud, who were both rebels of their own.  (He also spends a lot of time referencing Greek myths, plays and poems – was that a big deal back then?)

I was hesitant at first in reading this because I feared that a psychological work from 1953 might not be able to do a lot for me.  Surprisingly, May’s thoughts and philosophy speak volumes for today’s psyche.  One of his most impacting theories is of the hollow person.  Though much has changed in regards to technology and society, we still struggle with the concept of being complete people and not just walking shells reflecting the ideas of those around us.  The hollow people have “no definite experience of their own desires or wants.”  They merely conform to what everyone else is doing.  Anxiety has had such an effect on us that we do everything in our power to avoid feeling alone or ostracized, to the point of completely abandoning ourselves for something more pleasant and acceptable to the cookie-cutters around us.

As I have found with many books about the self, much of May’s best work is in the first third of the book.  The revelation of the problem is what’s so important to most people.  Becoming aware that there is a problem and what that might entail.  How one deals with that problem is often very personal and individual.  Perhaps most helpful is the chapter on loneliness and becoming comfortable with yourself when by yourself.  Loneliness is not a tragedy but an opportunity to know yourself better.  May goes on to discuss becoming a fuller person throughout the remainder of this work.  He writes at length about consciousness, maturity, the struggle to separate oneself from the home, and how to leave behind the shell in which many of us reside.

This book was a really good experience for me.  It came at the perfect time.  It helped immensely in the decision to quit my job and seek a different path in life.  That has been what’s sucking away most of my time.  Coming to the conclusion that you want something else for yourself is not an easy one, especially when you leave so many behind that could benefit from your hard work.  However, each needs to seek the path that’s best for him or her.  In the end, it’s how you’ll help the most people and yourself.

Category:

Kenneth is a friend of mine from before they days of high school.  After the nonsense that was Seven & Senators and our own high school musicals, while I made my way slowly out of the Midwest and out to the East Coast, Kenneth went west and began (following a dream? his career in film? looking for his leading lady?) a life at least slightly removed from his Midwestern roots.  He studied film at USC and, just as Alex was a natural choice for music recommendations, Kenneth seemed a good pick for movies.

Film being such a major part of his life, I rarely see Kenneth for any period of time without eventually seeing a movie with him.  Before we went off to Mexico with some guys for his bachelor party, we made sure to go see The Bourne Ultimatum.  The first time I went to LA, he took me to Mann’s Chinese Theater, just to experience it, and sadly the only thing showing was Spy Kids.  But hey, the theater is pretty damn cool even if the movie wasn’t really…anything.  He was the only person that would go see Fantasia 2000 with me on the big screen and the only friend I know lucky enough to work on The West Wing (consider me jealous many times over on that one).

One of Kenneth’s recommendations (he has his max three in the line-up) is the self-declared masterpiece of German filmmaker Fritz Lang, M. As a recommendation, this movie fits Kenneth so perfectly it’s ridiculous.  It has this amazing mix of thriller and psychology that you crave when you want to see a movie that’s suspenseful, creepy, and upsetting.  I’m not sure how I’m going to tie this in as a movie Kenneth would recommend, but it just is.  If our roles had been reversed and he hadn’t seen this, I would absolutely send it his way, because I know he would love just how damn smart Fritz Lang is as a director and artist.

M is about the hunt for a serial child murderer in Berlin before World War II.  Mothers are frightened to send their children to school for fear that they will never return home.  The villain is played by Peter Lorre, who has to be one of the schiziest men to ever be caught on film.  Every model for a child molester or skin-crawly serial killer must somehow be based on Peter Lorre’s portrayal of Hans Beckert.  The moment you see his face for the first time there is no mistaking him as the murderer of little kids that is clearly insane.  I want to just type creepy over and over again, because it’s the only word I can think of while recalling his face.

As Beckert haunts the streets, the genius of the tale comes in the writing of Lang and Thea von Harbou’s (Lang’s wife) and their understanding of sociology and the way groups of people function.  The murders have so disturbed the community that even the criminals, who are constantly disrupted by police raids, are rallying to catch the killer.  There is one particular pairing of scenes that exemplifies the effects of group think.  Simultaneously, both the police force and some criminal masterminds are forming action plans to catch the child killer.  Between the way the scenes are filmed and the way the two conversations just flow into one another, I just sat there in awe and amazement at this well-thought out and accurate portrayal of human behavior.

This was Lang’s first film with sound after the amazingness of silent movies like Metropolis.  It’s hard to know how to close an entry on what is so clearly a great movie that has been watched and appreciated by so many others.  I’m not going to miraculously say something original about a work that has been picked apart piece by piece and then put back together again (kind of literally).  Let’s just leave it at I thought it was great and cannot imagine what it was like to be able to create such a new piece of art with words after having to work so long with actions and printed subtitles.  If I had been given the opportunity to suddenly create something so different, I probably would have taken the time to make sure it was my masterpiece too.

Courtney has a knowledge of subculture.  It’s great.  And it isn’t the subculture that all my friends know about it.  All of my friends seem to have some basic knowledge of the same underground stuff (which is probably why they are my friends).  Courtney’s awareness is somehow different.  She has an understanding of these things that I know nothing about whatsoever.  I don’t know how she finds out about them and I don’t really care.  What I like is that she shares them with me.

Flirting isn’t that outside the mainstream, but in my eye, it’s just so unknown.  I took a glance at the cover and synopsis and glossed over a couple of reviews.  To be honest, I was thinking, “Why am I watching this, Courtney?”  Then I found out who was in it (or rather, I knew who was in it, but I looked them up on imdb and realized who they are and what they’ve done).  Thandie Newton (of Crash and other fame), Noah Taylor (who played Hitler in Max and has had a number of other well-placed roles), and Nicole Kidman (of just general fame) all star in this movie before any of them were known.  It debuted a year before Nicole Kidman starred in Far and Away with Cruise.  Naomi Watts also makes an appearance playing a somewhat whiny boarding school girl (as though there are really any other type of boarding school girl).  Of course, Courtney probably isn’t having me watch it because there are famous people in it (at least, maybe).  I think she wanted me to watch it because it’s a kind of a nice love story, of the normal and not Hollywood kind (well, at least kind of).

Danny (Noah Taylor) goes to a boys private school in Australia which is a across the river from the girls school that Thandiwe (Thandie Newton) and Nicola (Nicole Kidman) attend.  At an academic debate between the two schools in which the newcomer Thandiwe completely trumps the sophisticated and socially dominant Nicola, Thandiwe finds Danny the outcast to be of an intriguing sort.  They meet covertly at the next dance and, though you can tell their emotions are strong and that there is great comfort in their shared ostracism, it isn’t a grossly outstretched teenage romance.

Rather than harp on true love and an emotional awareness of which most teenagers aren’t capable, the film shows more of the desire of wanting to be something that you’re not quite ready to be.  Danny would like to rid himself of the torments of his fellow students and Thandiwe would like to take part in the growing social system of Africa.  While they are both willing to do just that, they aren’t actually capable of it and their young minds get in the way.  Taylor and Newton do an excellent job of portraying that struggle and showing both the depth and simplicity of what it’s like when you’re an intelligent and socially-aware adolescent surrounded by idiots.  At its worst, this film has moments where cliches about boarding school run amuck and stereotypes about pretty blondes play a big role.  At its best, some good character development about outsiders’ adolescent love (and lust) is portrayed by some great, young actors.

No more scary movies at night.  In the dark. In my basement apartment.  By myself.

I hate you, AG.  I tell Ann that I need a movie recommendation.  Out of nowhere she’s all, “Oh, Session 9.”  It was completely out of left field and then I realized I hadn’t told her why I wanted a recommendation.  So I explain the details, but then I realize that she’s recommended it to me and, according to the rules, I have to watch it whether she changes her mind or not.  The next day we are having drinks and she decides she’s going to stand by her recommendation.  She also tells me that she doesn’t really like scary movies and kind of watched this randomly.  Now I’m thinking, “That’s interesting.  I don’t really like scary movies either.”

I used to love them.  I used to enjoy sitting on the edge of my seat and getting the piss scared out of me.  However, at some point, that seemed no longer fun.  Well, no, that’s not true.  Watching scary movies is still a lot of fun.  It’s either the watching them alone (which I often seem to do, thanks to services like Netflix and my currently extended singledom) or the after-efect that’s become bad.  My imagination has started to get the better of me and sleeping after scary movies has becoming an increasingly difficult problem.  Session 9 is no exception.  It’s not really that scary, but it forces you to spend a lot of time thinking about it afterward.  Or rather, thinking afterward about how disturbing it is.

So there’s this guy, Gordon, and he runs a hazmat cleaning business.  The movie is in the horror/suspense category, so he and his buddies are either going to be cleaning an abandoned house, abandoned school, abandoned hospital, or abandoned insane asylum.  Well, of course, it’s the insane asylum.  The condemned  building is uber creepy, as is the musical score, and so I’ve got my feet off the ground in the first 15 minutes (removing my feet from the floor during a movie is the sign that I’ve become completely freaked out – it has something to do with the virtual reality of this).

Things only get scarier when one of the workers finds a room full of patients’ records.  The first thing he dives into are recordings from the sessions with Mary Hobbs, who had three or four personalities to her credit.  The only normal sounding voice on the recording is Mary’s (like actual Mary, not the crazy people that talk through her) and she is constantly screaming.  Her other personalities have unsettling vocal timbres that will chill your bones.  The doctor that interviews her doesn’t lessen the tape’s creepiness either (he has this total 70s thing going for him that is at once machine-like, careful, precise, and manipulative).  These sessions play the backdrop to a work crew that is under too much pressure with work-relationship tensions to boot.  Oh yeah, and they wear a lot of masks and protective clothing and have to walk in tunnels in the dark.  Scary.  The audio of the tapes and the visuals of the crew working are woven together to great affect.  The institution really plays a whole other character, causing a number of justifiable references to Kubrick’s The Shining by a number of critics.

In the end, it’s a tense flick with a whole lot of audio that makes you want to cover your ears like hearing chalkboard scratching and visuals that make you want turn around and walk the other way.  I loved it.  And totally hated how it made me freak out afterward.

Movies and music tend to come to me without recommendations.  With those, I am more likely to base my decisions on previous experience, my mood at the moment, or some really good advertising.  Books, however, are completely different.  Books are time consuming and to pick one up that you are not likely to enjoy is a drain on your life.  For this reason, my book choices – more than any other media – tend to be based on the recommendations of other people.  Either that, or positive reviews and ratings on websites.  Life is too busy to waste one’s time in a book that isn’t very good.

The great thing about recommendations is that every once and a while you get a recommender that throws you a curveball.  Most people tend to know what you like and suggest to you something along those lines.  A major exception: people at work.  Your coworkers, unless they have become your friends, often don’t know you well enough to know your tastes.  Conversations about things you like don’t often have the shared spot on a Venn diagram, but if someone is emphatic enough, they may get you to try something anyway.

Enter Carol.  Carol is new to my building this year and probably a more avid reader than I (which is somewhat depressing because I’m the librarian and her job is way harder than mine, but that’s not today’s topic).  Discussing books one day, Carol told me of a must-read.  She described the book and, being in the middle of another thought, I completely forgot what she said within no time whatsoever.  Not too long after, I found The Wasp Factory in my office mailbox.  I was pleasantly surprised.  It’s always nice to get a recommendation that you don’t go searching for, but ends up on your shelf anyway.

To backtrack a moment, you’ll remember my saying that I had completely forgotten what Carol had told me about this novel, named one of the 100 Top Novels of the Century by The Independent.  I don’t like reading blurbs or synopses (they tend to ruin books in the same way that trailers can ruin movies – though I love watching those) and so I went into this knowing naught into of what I was getting…into [umm...sic?].  Carol is not an overly alternative, smarmy, risque, or subversive character – so you can imagine my utter shock when I started reading this totally effed up book.

The tale is of Frank Cauldhame.  He seems a somewhat normal, though slightly odd and isolated, teenager.  He lives on a small island just off the coast of Scotland with his father.  Things get strange rather quickly.  We find Frank’s brother Eric is in an insane asylum where he was sent after burning dogs alive and feeding maggots to children (?).  At the outset, Eric has just escaped and is headed back to his old home.  Frank already knows because the factory has told him, which from the title you know is made of wasps, so it’s a really intriguing opening paragraph.

We also quickly find out that Frank has a disturbing past.  He certainly has his own way of dealing with the world.  He doesn’t function well with other people, which is most likely because he never had a parent he could trust – he is convinced that is father is always lying and withholding information.  He displays a destructive personality that allows him to do all sorts of things to animals and nature, exhibiting an unruly god complex and a warped sense of reality, morals, and really everything.  However, he has been beaten down by society more than once and its clear how much he pains inside.  It almost makes you feel bad for him.

The initial paragraph aside, this book was a little difficult at the start.  However, the more you learn about Frank, the more you want to know and understand (this sort of novel apparently has a name).  Banks keeps you in the dark about almost everything and reveals the pieces like a path of well-laid bread crumbs.  With every bit, you search for meaning about the character, personality, and motivation of this strange and unholy young man.

One thing I should mention before I launch into this 156 adventure: I should not be starting with music, it is not my strength at all (odd, coming from the former music education major).  I have very few skills in describing music well.  Also, I don’t pay attention to lyrics, which could make this whole writing about songs every week process a little difficult (on both me and my reader).  I can write a wicked book review, but music, not so much.  That being said, here we effing go.

Alex is kind of a god among music maniacs (the remainder of this paragraph will merely serve to feed his ego further).  Legend says that you can find him at the record store every Tuesday, because (in case you were unaware) that’s when all the new releases come out.  At trivia night, he is our saving grace during the audio speed round.  Whether or not we want to admit it, we typically fail that round when he’s not there.  It is for these reasons that I went to Alex for my first aural recommendation.

True to form, this album is a fantastic find.  Apollo Ghosts is a band hailing from Canada (Hastings Sunrise is a neighborhood in Vancouver, fyi) and they are not known at all.  They have a MySpace, but even my mom has a MySpace for music.  Somebody (Catbird?) at The Catbirdseat describes the band and album as “a perfect blend of ’70s Punk/New Wave/Power Pop, ’80s College/Jangle, and ’90s Slack Mofo Indie/Twee.”  Personally, it’s statements like that which cause me to hate talking to people that get obsessed about music and bands and knowing stuff about it that I don’t (care to know about at all).

However, none of that matters because this album is delicious.  I have to admit, it’s the accordion that grabbed me from the start.  How can you not love an album that begins with an accordion?  (I have Amelie to thank for this belief.)  “Dobermans” is just a great entrance (but sadly the accordion never returns?).  Then, to utilize a horribly common phrase, they completely switch gears on the next track.  Yet, I didn’t care at all.  “Land of the Morning Calm” sounds like some punk band, it’s true – but I like it.  Things tone down a little after that (pun intended).  There’s some lyrical witticism about a ghost (that seems friendly, but they yell at it anyway), heading to Peking, and a nice little punk diddy to Yokohama – which is a tire company?  Wait, what?

Then I got totally sold.  “Maybe with Me” is a great track that I can just completely sink into.  It’s catchy but not in an overcrowding way.  There’s a back and forth between the lead singer and this girl (I tried to research, but they are unknown and I didn’t try that hard), then trumpets come out of nowhere, and the guitars are strumming gorgeously.  I love it.  It’s followed by “Angel Acres”, which reminds me of Ben Folds Five’s “Fred Jones” in its slow play on words awesomeness.

The rest is all equally fun.  The closing title track, while not matching much of the rest of the album, sounds closer in a way.  The acoustic guitars, while not making their first appearance, just bring you in for the finale perfectly.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Alex for getting things off on the right foot.  I pressured him with being the first of the 156 Recommendations and I feel as though things are off to a (wordily) good start.  Coming up later this week: a murderer and all around sociopath and a hospital that speaks through audiocassettes.  I am freakin’ pumped.

This blog will be about recommendations and the people who recommend them.  Specifically, recommendations of books, movies, and music.

I have found that some of the greatest friendships and relationships I’ve had were fostered and even created by a common love of some media: Nikki and I met because of The West Wing (post 9/11 episode “Isaac and Ishmael”) and our friendship grew from there; in college a small group of us created a small cult dedicated to The Broken Hearts Club; Sam and I have a mutual and dedicated love for Rufus Wainwright; my friendship with Shannon intensified because of an obsession with Katamari Damacy; and Justin and I have had more than a few great conversations about Ender and Scott Pilgrim.

In the hope of fostering more such relationships and common bonds, I have decided to listen to, watch, and read the recommendations of my friends, family, colleagues, and even people I’ve just met for the next year.  One from each category each week, totaling 156 recommendations.  There are no doubts that I won’t like some of them and will absolutely detest others.  Perhaps, however, other melodies, passages, and scenes will bring about new friendships and shared experiences.