Now Reading/Watching

With the spectre of employment casting its dark shadow upon my coming days, I'm doing my best to veg out via books and movies while I still can. Some hits and some misses - all of which are profiled below.

Now Reading:

• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - NERD ALERT - the adjectives "wicked" and "awesome" alone would not suffice as descriptions of this wicked awesome sci-fi novel. I read all 324 pages for the first time between 4pm and 2am yesterday and it FU@%ED me up! I couldn't get to sleep afterwards and laid in bed wondering if it's true that we can't truly hurt somebody unless we understand them completely; and that the only way we can truly understand someone is if we make the effort to love them as they love themselves. Love as the only conduit to truly harm someone has been a theme of pop music for decades, but the thought of learning to truly love someone as they love themselves so that you may destroy them is CUCKOO. What's really gonna bake your noodle is thinking about what if Jesus understood that. Oh dip...
  

• Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo - Meh. I haven't read any of DeLillo's other novels. Perhaps I started with the wrong one. I found the characters unengaging, the dialogue hard to follow and the narration very unfriendly. Perhaps that was the artistic intent of the author though - to create a reading atmosphere resembling the cold, calculating persona of a post-modern king of finance. Whatever, I don't like it when authors do that. Hulk Smash.
  

• Law School Confidential by Robert H. Miller - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will admit publicly that I'm still thinking about it. I've been doing some research up here in St. Paul, hanging with a law school pal and taking it all in. Granted, law students in their second semester of their third year don't set the best examples of the rigors of studying law but I get the picture. The advice from the book is clear: either commit to law school early and don't look back or don't do it at all. At this point, I think I'm willing to pledge to commit and not look back until I see my LSAT score. Baby steps...

• Conversations with Tom Petty by Paul Zollo - OK, so if you're a really, really big Tom Petty fan and you dream of one day sitting down with the man himself in order to chronicle his thoughts on every song he's ever recorded and will accept "Yeah, I really love that song, too" as an insightful response - I'm sorry to break it to you, but Paul Zollo has already written your book for you. To be fair, there are many great stories peppered throughout the book, including Petty's gushing recollections of the Heartbreakers touring as Bob Dylan's back-up band and what it was like being a Wilbury (Answer: super-cool and freakin' awesome, respectively).

• Guns, Germs and Steel, A Brief(er) History of Time (Books-On-CD versions) - I have a long ride from Minnesota to Philly ahead of me and I discovered I have little to no recall of the stuff I learned when I read these a few years ago. AKA I'm not the guy you want to help you remember the combination to your bike lock. I am gonna be wicked smart by the time I get back to the East Coast though.

Now Watching:

• The Aristocrats/Comedian - For those living in bubbles impenetrable by all things humorous, The Aristocrats is a documentary dedicated to the telling of a single joke. The initial set-up and punchline vary slightly according to the teller but the narrative that connects the two ends is completely up to the person telling the joke - and it's completely filthy everytime. Comedian is a lesser-known documentary that follows Jerry Seinfeld's on and off-stage efforts to build an all-new stand-up routine. The best part of both movies for me was getting to watch professional comics talk about their craft; about what makes "funny". I could watch Carlin, Seinfeld, Cosby, Drew Carey, Colin Quinn, these "comics' comics" talk about what works and what doesn't for hours. And I did. The other interesting thing I noticed though was that there was absolutely no overlap in comics between the two movies. There must have been easily a hundred comics featured between the two movies and not one appeared in both. It's as if there are two comedy "camps" - the "Seinfeld" camp and the "Penn from Penn and Teller" camp. That's obviously not the case but it's fun to imagine.
  

• The Fog of War - Rent it. It's like someone gave Robert McNamara truth serum. You'd hate to see the same thing happen to Rumsfeld - too soon.
  

• Paycheck - it's not often that a film title can also sum up the apparent motivation of all creative entitiess associated with it. Good for the first hour and then it everyone on both sides of the camera said, "Eh, who gives a shit" and went pants-optional from there on out.
  

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Opposite of Paycheck. Really disappointed until the Tri-Wizard Tournament started. Kinda disappointed that Fleur was not hotter or that Krum didn't have a unibrow you could rest pencils on. Also, the actor playing Ron needs to pop in a tape of the VH1 Corey Feldman Behind the Regrettful Career Decisions and see what happens to kids that are too cool for school and lack talent. Apologies for not posting a NERD ALERT at the start of this review.
  

• Chapelle's Block Party - More funny than Aristocrats and Comedian combined PLUS the greatest hip-hop concert ever recorded. ?uestlove did a helluva job putting the music together. The marching band playing Jesus Walks and Lauryn Hill tearing up Killing Me Softly made my eyes well up. No joke. I'm a sucker for magic moments. Like that part in The Natural after Hobbs shatters Wonderboy and says "Pick me out a winner, Bobby"? Killer.