WOOOOOOOOORDS

FUCKING WOOOOOORDS

Never has globalization been as inconvenient as when I'm trying to find Mexican movies to watch. There are very few films made in Mexico to begin with, and out of those few a good chunk of them are Mexico/Spain co-productions which usually means that it was produced with Mexican money, but has Spanish actors with Spanish accents.

El Mariachi.

I didn't read very many books in 2011, which I blame mostly on the fact that War and Peace took me a month and a half to finish, and the stories I read for a fiction workshop ended up taking a lot of my time.

K.

In high school I had a crush on one guy, among many, who was a year older than me. He was cute and popular and somewhat funny in a jackass-y kind of way. He asked out a girl in our class who was the same age as me. She turned him down because he was shorter than her, actually said that to his face. He was a short guy, but I was shorter, which is maybe why I didn't mind the height, still had a crush on him.  The class we were all taking was an English class and the teacher, who would later divorce his wife and move to China to find himself, thought he was a literary genius, or an editing genius or something and encouraged us to write our own short stories. They were mostly terrible because we were dumb sheltered high school kids, but the guy I had a crush on wrote this amazing, passionate story. 

I really care about this.
HURRRRRR MY CRUSH IN HIGH SCHOOL all right time to grow the fuck up.

I was excited about it, not only because it validated my crush on him, but also just because I enjoyed it. I had never read anything like that. The teacher who would later go to China made some cryptic remark about Catch-22 and inspiration and blah blah blah which I didn't pay attention to until I read Catch-22 myself and realized that my crush had ripped the thing off. He had read the book, absorbed the writing style and then regurgitated it back out on the page. It was disappointing. 

Oh we all grow up to be disappointed.
I take it back. This is a brilliant narrative with a completely unique conclusion.

I did a writing workshop a few months ago during a really low emotional period. I spent most of the time feeling under-read and dumb and terrible, like I had nothing worth while to say. At the same time as I was feeling this I was also feeling a lot of loathing for the people in my workshop. A lot of their work felt dishonest. Like they were writing overly dramatic things that had no emotional core, these over-wrought stories that were about no ones with nothing inside of them. There was this one story that was written by this white kid from the suburbs that I thought was just terrible. It was all about this woman getting repeatedly sexually violated in this aimless way.

WOOOOOW.
WRITING WORKSHOPS, AM I RIGHT PEOPLE?
It's like people who would find themselves in a writing workshop have no talent or something.
Imagine~

Stories of Your Life & Others boasts an incredible pedigree and came to me highly recommended from a wide variety of individuals. Virtually every story in the book has been previously published by a big name literary magazine (Asimov's, Omni, etc) and have won awards. I came to the book with high expectations and was left  disappointed.

The problem with Stories of Your Life is one that is often levelled at sci-fi writers by its detractors; the ideas are good, the writing is flat.

Read Inquisition War if you want some scifi that has writing that pops.
"EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERCE REDEEMER OF MAN, YET WHAT WILL REDEEM US?"

I've been hearing amazing things about Inception all summer. Many people whose opinion I respect touted it as a smart summer blockbuster, and spared no praise when describing the film to me. How disappointing then to see it for myself and realize that the movie is nothing more than a very dull heist movie which badly utilizes some interesting concepts. 

Of course Warhammer is more appropriately called "science fantasy" I guess.

Way back when (AKA 2002) Naomi Watts was following up her powerhouse performance in Mullholland Drive with one in the hit film The Ring. Everyone was going crazy for the movie back then, but, ever the purist, I decided that I should go to the original source material. Did I go for the original Ring movie, a hugely popular Japanese horror flick? Nope. I went straight to the novel that inspired it all, Ring by Koji Suzuki. 

Wow you were a hipster before it was cool--
a meta hipster, Jesus Christ.
Also Mulholland Drive = zzzzzz
there was that one cool scene where a guy describes a nightmare he had at a diner he was currently at with his buddy then it maybe happened as he described it.
It's a recursive nightmare holy shiiiiiiiit fuck that movie.

The second I heard Eminem and Rihanna's Love the Way You Lie I was instantly in love. The lyrics are clever, insightful and damaging, a lyrical tribute to abuse that is shown through the eyes of the abuser.

Holy shit you're a douchebag. 

Even as it attracts you it invites your dismay and revulsion; you may find yourself caught up in the lies of the narrator/abuser only to be disgusted by the final lyrics which shock the listener out of whatever romantic illusions they may have held. 

Pretty sure I was just revolted at the reality of listening to a song collaboration between Eminem and Rihanna. 

I read a lot of feminist blogs and most of them seem to respond with a uniform repulsion. I empathize with their disgust:

Me too.
Holy shit, Eminem. It's time for you to fucking go, I think. You had that one kinda cool song you did with Dr. Dre, can't you be happy with that?
And don't get me wrong, the only reason that song is cool is because of the awe inspiring number of times they managed to fit the word "fuck" into a song.
This blog has 3 cuts.
I didn't even know Livejournal had a function like this. It's a shitty 3 minute pop song from some asshole and some dumb slut. Do you really want to devote this much thought to it?

I hadn't ever heard about Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart until quite recently which is a tad embarrassing as it is considered a seminal work of African Literature (and more specifically Nigerian Literature). 

zzzzzz I almost had to teach that.
Then I graduated, thank fuck.

The achingly simple title Things Fall Apart (which is taken from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming") is perfect for this deceptively simple work. The novel is divided into two parts both following Okonkwo a man who is severe in his desire to appear as a tough and admirable man. In the first half of the novel we witness traditional life in Umofia. During the second half things do indeed "fall apart" as Christian missionaries begin to invade the villages surrounding Umofia and finally Umofia itself. 

It's heartbreaking to watch Okonkwo as he struggles to battle to preserve his culture, his status, and his family and then watches as they all slide away.

I have to admit that at first I was almost underwhelmed by the book.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
You've been underwhelmed by every book you've reviewed so far though so fuck you too, bitch.
Holy fuck I just looked to the left and here's her quote on the side:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.

Anyway, a long time ago I made a list of my favourite music videos AKA ones that didn't just feature random dancing, ones that were interesting, clever, funny, aesthetically pleasing. Later on when I started noticing directors I realized that 90% of them were directed by the same few people. Good directors, unsurprisingly, direct a lot of good music videos that stand apart from the pack.

The best music video of all time is Hungry Like the Wolf.
Boring review of some book--
Last entry.
Good, time for bed because I HAVE WORK AT FUN O'CLOCK TOMORROW