The Empire Posts Back

Updates abound this weekend. Update Rexojunkies.com, update myspace (gasp that's right, there's myspacin' going on these days), and of course updating of my blog. Since the last post : went skiing on the annual ski trip. '06 may be the best so far. Shacked up with the best house crew ever, and just chilled for the three day weekend. It was cold as balls but the fire in the place and the fire in my fingers kept me warm. Unfortuantly team Italy lost the Fuzzball championships to team Ireland. I partook in some thc induced jam sessions and chilled with my lil nig Oreo. Props to Bruno at the Poplar Cul de Sac.
Still on the job hunt. If anyone out there has a connect let me know, I got my resume primed and ready to go.
Been listening to a lot of music lately too thanks to my xmas mp3. I will start reposting my popular "off the back wall" reviews again.
Still haven't got xbox 360 yet. It's like trying to track down a ham sandwhich at a hobo convention. Better luck next month.
In the meantime, picked up The Movies game for the pc. This should fill my time for a bit. It's the first pc game I've bought in a few years.
Check out the best part about fark, the boobies.
Brokeback to the Future, it's keeps getting better I know.

SOME MORE ROCK AND POP MISCELLANY FROM Q

Records Banned During the Golf War :

Bangels : Walk Like an Egyptian

The Beatles : Back in the USSR

Phil Collins : In the Air Tonight

Cutting Crew : I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight

Elton John : Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Bruce Springsteen : I'm on Fire

Quote : ( I see it fitting being that my memory is shattered)

The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting

Milan Kundera 1980

Oh yeah what book to read next? Chronicles by Bob Dylan? Ham on Rye by Bukowski? Cannery Row or East of Eden by John Steinbeck? Let me know.

Book # 5 BlueBeard by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's 13th book is my fifth(fif) and is turning out to be hands down one of my favorite Vonnegut books of all time. This will probably be my last Vonnegut book for a while and talk about going out with a bang. So it's the autobiography of Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, a minor character some of may remember from Breakfast of Champions. Living in the Hamptons with his cook and her premiscious daughter he meets up with a widow from Baltimore who stays with him and encourages him to right his story. The whole time she pretty much turns his house and friends upside down and at times against him. All the while the book jumps back to his parents coming to America, his migration to New York as a teenager to study under a great Armeian artist, his days hanging out in Union Square with Jackson Pollack, and of course the mystery of what's in his potatoe barn. Which, by the way, that meddling widow is always trying to find out what exactly is in there. OK I don't know if this makes any sense but you'll just have to read it to take in it's awesomeness.

Here's a summary from Library Journal :
Vonnegut rounds up several familiar themes and character types for his 13th novel: genocide, the surreality of the modern world, fluid interplay of the past and present, and the less-than-heroic figure taking center stage to tell his story. Here he elevates to narrator a minor character from Breakfast of Champions , wounded World War II veteran and abstract painter Rabo Karabekian. At the urging of enchantress-as-bully Circe Berman, Karabekian writes his "hoax autobiography." Vonnegut uses the tale to satirize art movements and the art-as-investment mind-set and to explore the shifting shape of reality.

Some Stats:

Published in 1988

336 pages

10.1 oz is the shipping weight

babyshit brown - read it to find out

First sentence of the story : Having written "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving gusts: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen

Book # 4 Deadeye Dick Part II Completion

I should have done this a while ago, but I finished this book a few weeks ago. Eh, I thought it was all right. This murder which supposedly had a cataclysmic effect of catastrophes on this guys life kind of fell flat in my eyes. I found the character of his father, the failed artist/Hitler sympathizer to be a more compelling character. If anything you get some good recipes (yes as in food) from this book. I'm sure I'm glazing over this a bit (pardon the pun) but I felt there was something missing. From the murder that changed this boys life, to his first and fleeting love, to his short lived success as a playwrite in New York, to his later years as a pharmacist I feel nothing was ever fully expanded on.
Style. The book has that. I don't know if it's just these three Vonnegut books I picked out but they are filled with flashbacks. Rehashing of past events in character's lives told by the narrator in the future. I'm no expert but I have to say no one does this like Vonnegut. Also, I may not be singing the praises of this book, but something about the way Vonnegut writes no other author can make 50, 60 or 100 pages disappear like him. A book which I found mildly interesting at best still kept me compelled enough to not notice time flying while I was reading it. Fluid. Like a colonic.