Wednesday, July 18, 2007

 

arts & culture review time!

I finaallllyy bought "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" - Miranda Lambert's new CD. And I love it. So much. It's so country, and she's so ballsy and bold and passionate and proud. Much to my delight, npr.org chose the first track on the CD, Gunpowder and Lead, as the song of the day. You can listen to it here:

Miranda Lambert: Perky and Menacing

Here's the chorus from Gunpowder & Lead:

I'm goin' home, gonna load my shotgun
Wait by the door and light a cigarette
If he wants a fight well now he's got one
He ain't seen me crazy yet
He slapped my face and he shook me like a rag doll
Don't that sound like a real man
I'm going to show him what a little girl's made of
Gunpowder and lead


I also bought Blake Shelton's new CD, "BS"...and...well...um...as much as I hate to say it, it's pretty much a dud. The lyrics are laughable. The melodies are familiar and done before. I don't recommend the CD at all, except for the single Don't Make Me. But since he and Miranda are dating, hopefully she'll buy him dinner once in a while.

Anyhow. On to literature.

I just read The Futurist by James P. Othmer, and it was very interesting. The main character is this guy who made his living by predicting the "Next Big Thing," then marketing it. He's shameless, and described as

"He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. He was once asked by the New York Times to write an Op-Ed piece on the death of literacy in America, and he had his assistant ghostwrite it. He once took batting practice with the New York Mets, pretending not to notice the eight-year-old boy with leukemia from the Make-A-Wish Foundation whom the PR director let him cut in front of because he had a plane to catch."


And so on. There are some really key insights in there, and it made me think differently about various topics, e.g. being true to oneself, what really matters, hedonism's place in our society (and hedonism's place in your life), etc. I think a few of you would enjoy it...especially MT and B3, and possibly Bub. So do with that what you will.

Right now I'm reading Up Country by Nelson DeMille. Okay. A little background. I read The Lion's Game by NdM freshman year of college, and it scared the crap out of me. Gave me bad dreams and everything. While I didn't relish the nightmares, I did treasure the way the book completely sucked me into its world. Finally recovered enough to give another NdM book a try, I picked up this one with more than a little excitement.

Annnd. It's boring. I keep thinking that it's going to get better, that right now I'm just in the midst of character development, and setting the scene, and blah blah blah, but I'm already on page 303 (holy crap, I'm on 303?! This is ridic), and I'm considering giving it the ole Moby Dick heave ho, because I still have more than 600 pages to go. I'm still holding out hope (because that's what I do), but if I remember correctly, The Lion's Game was a page-turner from the very first paragraph.

Up Country has (had?) great promise: a former army guy is sent back to Vietnam to search for a witness to a murder that happened during the Vietnam War. The people who sent him on the mission have been lying since the beginning, and the girl who's been tagging along seems a bit too savvy.

Maybe the book is boring to me because I didn't actually experience the Vietnam War? I'm sure VW veterans who have read this would relate an entirely different book experience. Every description of the country would bring back a memory, and probably an unpleasant one at that. But for me, it's full of teases of suspense, terror, and sex, but it hasn't paid up yet.

I'm not going to give up on it, because it is semi-interesting. It's keeping me entertained. I'll keep you posted if the action picks up, and I end up loving it. But the outlook is not promising.

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