here's where i'll post my recommendations on everything from poems to books to cd's to movies. well, okay, those four pretty much cover it. i wanted to call it something snazzy like "picks of the week," but when i had stopped rolling on the floor i got serious and realized that i'll never update this weekly, and even monthly is probably pushing the limits of my organization. so without further ado, the picks of whenever i got around to picking them...
elizabeth bishop
she's kind of a classic 20th century poet, but definitely someone you should know if you don't already.
short bio and poems you can read online
BOOKS
house of leaves
by mark z. danielewski
i don't know what to say except that this book is freakin' amazing. it's complex, funny, horrifying, and sad. it may take you a little persistence to get into the style of the book - it's a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, and it's not your traditional book. there are footnotes, colors, passages that have been struck out, and sections with only one word on a page. but the story itself is captivating. a somewhat marginalized loser character named johnny truant discovers a manuscript in the apartment of his dead neighbor. as he reads and reconstructs this manuscript, the story it tells begins to consume his life. it is a criticism of a film that was found - a film made by a famous reporter who moved into a new house and decided to document on film the transition into his new life. it starts out fairly innocuous until the reporter makes a strange discovery: his house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. it seems fairly harmless at first, if a little odd, but soon the story takes off into deeply unnerving territory. danieleswki lulls you into a sense of security and then plays with all of our fundamental beliefs about time, space, the world around us, and even the nature of god. don't read this right before going to bed - parts of it are downright frightening. also, don't start it if you have somewhere to be, because it's impossible to put down!
MOVIES
donnie darko
starring jake gyllenhaal, maggie gyllenhaal, patrick swayze,
noah wyle, drew barrymore, mary mcdonnell, jena malone, and james duval
if you haven't already guessed about me, i like things that fuck with you a little bit.
this movie does that, and it's also beautiful.
CDs
i get wet
by andrew w.k.
ok, so he doesn't write pulitzer-prize-winning lyrics. yeah, well, he DOES know how to rock. and party. and this cd defies you not to turn the volume all the way up and scream your head off. he tells us right off the bat, "IT'S TIME TO PARTY!" and party he does. in fact, the word party appears in three of the song titles. it's metal/rock/punk with a message: party hard and do whatever gets you off. i couldn't agree more, andrew.
a crash course if you need to get cool in a hurry
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