September 2013
2. Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance -- Galaxie 500 are all-time greats. And I like Luna after reading this book too. Stanley Demeski gets to play observer as a sort-of old man stuck with a bunch of middle age guys
who've hit it big. Dean’s greatest strength as a writer for me, here, and with his music too, is in the perfect understatements. See: Strange off On Fire or him recounting an episode hooking up with a girl in Spain and watching TV all night. A rock and roll lifestyle is defined by normalcy--Zenward but still commonplace everdayism…which comes off cool as hell.
1M – WarGames.
Mathew Broderick and Ally Sheedy bring us more into the idea that people will never listen the message
behind movies like this; double for Fail-Safe, DS:OHLSWALAB, or Terminator.
3. Because of Mr. Terupt. Read for school; good, quick
read with an inspired set up as complex as middle school age kids are. The plot structure is also, for lack of another comparison, a little like White Noise with the snowball event anchoring two polarities of the story. I also threw a snowball at a teacher one time, but he didn't go into, like, a coma.
4. The Brotherhood of the Grape. John Fante’s Bukowski-like and I want to thank the recommender Nick on this one. BotG is a
more settled in Ed Abbey; Henry Lightcap who has been on more of a trajectory. In the book it is Henry Molise's father who is the loafer hero. Fante's likeness here is instead a begrudging 50 year old for the first third who begrudgingly
follows his dad into a Dostoyevsky-laden, heavenly world of wine and
Diabetes. It's more accepting realism at the beginning had me uninterested but it gets going into the dream-like winery stuff and I ended up re-reading it.
2M – Thief. Finally; James Caan is awesome in this and Michael Mann has that stylized kind of film-making which is perfectly understated.
