Finally, some closure

I never thought "third times a charm" would ever truly apply to me, but it truly does. I left Books-a-Million a first time back in '08. After a weak attempt at finding a new job, I went back to beg for my job. I came back in May of the same year and enjoyed a nice summer at work with some new friends. When school started up for the fall, BAM started waying back down on me and I tried to leave again, but once again failed to find another job. So, after a FOUR week notice, I ended up staying. And from there, a year and a half passed me by...

Now, I am free from the shackles and found my second job. I may have just started at Walgreen's, but I know one thing. I will never be pulled back. I can go to Books-a-Million to enjoy myself and read or maybe buy a book. I will never wear that apron, deal with creepy regulars, and most importantly above all...

I WILL NEVER SELL ANOTHER DISCOUNT CARD.

Today is a beautiful day.

Don't tell anybody anything...

A biased review of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


      I have found through extensive research (aka going on GoodReads.com) that readers of The Catcher in the Rye can be broken up into two categories: People who can identify with Holden Caulfield and people who can't. It appears that whatever you side you fall under weighs heavily on whether or not you enjoy the book.

     I at, 21, was 17 only four years ago. I still struggle to find the road to my destiny and give or take a few thoughts of Holden's, I felt like I was him. He is a guy who loves everyone when they are not around and hates them when they are in front of him. Holden has a distorted view of reality induced by movies that he loves to hate and assumes that everything is going to go the way he envisions it. Every kid knows that the world is filled with disappointments, but they don't remember this fact until they experience the disappointment up front.
    Holden Caulfield is a private school drop out disillusioned to believe he is destined to go somewhere in life above the assistance of proper education. He has 4 days before he is to report back home, so instead of wasting away at the school he runs away to experience a little vacation in the city. He goes to night clubs, rents hotels, goes in and out of taxi cabs. He even orders a prostitute at one point. Holden wants to be an adult doing adult things. Done being a kid, he wants to start his life.

   This just an example of the product of the Instant Gratification Generation (My Generation). All of us feel the way he does at one point. They don't see the point in wasting away in textbooks and listening to some nobody blab away about nothing we care about. "Things like that just kill me. I mean it really depresses you," (Catcher in the Rye).
        Movies, books, music, TV, all show us how cool it is to be an adult. You see all the stars playing, smoking, and hanging out in bars picking up beautiful women. These are the things that Holden wants to do. He is extremely intelligent and sort of knows what he wants to do but he doesn't posses the maturity level to go out and do it. Who can't relate to that? He is a lot like me.

      I think there is a lot more to life than being born, getting an education, getting a job, having a family, rinse and repeat. Holden has a dream, however bizarre, that he means to follow. I have my own dream, less bizarre , to become a published author. Perhaps this blog about the Catcher in the Rye isn't the best advertisement, but I want to effect people the way this book effected me.

 To appeal to the other side of the "loving this book" argument, I will address the part about Holden I did not like. He spends a lot of time talking about how he hates flits(gays), perverts, and the like. He goes on record to say he has had a run with them 20 times in his life. The interesting part is the fact that he has a bizarre fascination with children. When looking for his sister in the New York park, he runs into a little kid he doesn't know. Instead of asking the kid about his sister, he decides to attempt to hang out with them. I don't believe he is a pervert himself, but a lot of people do.

This book immediately emerged as my favorite book. Just sayin'

7/5 IT IS JUST THAT GOOD

Diary of a Wimpy T-Bastard

We can all thank some of my Goodreads friends for the recent surplus of the amount of books I am reading. Four in two weeks is impressive for me, but with each passing book comes a blog about it. Who is reading me type these out? Probably just me. I continue...

I have a plethora of books on my shelf that have been dying to be read. As soon as I am about to pick a book up, something far more interesting catches my eye. Now, I am broke and I do not believe anything interesting is hitting the shelves until May. I finally chose to read the copy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid that I bought some six months ago. Frankly, I am glad I did.

It took maybe three hours total to read through it, but they were hours well spent. Everybody had an awkward time getting through middle school. That is what those years are for and this book captures every moment. I enjoyed this book because I felt like I was reading words that I would have written back then. The main character/narrator (Greg) is one of those kids who thinks the world revolves around him. He is just a lonely kid trying to make it with the social hierarchy. He is a kid who thinks he is too cool to hang out with anyone else in his grade, but chooses to settle for Rowley--his geeky neighbor. Read this book for the funny animation and just to pass the time. I can't wait to read the other books. I am now traveling from Repo Men to Diary of a Wimpy kid to Zombies. I start reading Johnathon Maberry's Patient Zero tomorrow.

Normal stuff...

Please go see How to Train Your Dragon. It is epic, funny, and at times--moving. It is worth the 26 dollars I spent to see it in 3D.

The Repossession Mambo vs. Repo Men

This a split review of the movie and the book it is based off of. (Heavy Spoilers Ahead)

Don't get me wrong, Repo Men was an ok movie at best with a creative concept. It has great characters and the story is engaging up until the little plot twist that drives the last 30 min. of the movie. But, the movie could have been so much more. It could have given me more Jude Law and Forest Whitaker screen time. They were great together. Even at the end where you find one chasing after the other to take a heart back to the Union, they were fighting but the friendship was still very much intact.

The movie focuses on Remy(Jude Law). Remy is a man working for the Union in a world where there is an organ shortage, which causes companies to step forward with mechanical organs that are not only resourceful--they are far superior to regular organs. They have the capabilities of keeping someone alive beyond their years. The only problem is they are extremely expensive and the interest rates are ridiculous. There is a 90 day grace period if you fall behind on payments. After the 90 days are up--A REPO MAN WILL COME AND YOU'LL PAY FOR THAT SURGERY, SURGERY. (Sorry RTGO fans, I had to).

Remy gets himself shocked on one of his last repo jobs and it forces him to undertake a Jarvik-13(mechanical heart). He falls behind on payments and then goes on the lamb. The movie focuses heavily on the chase. The book, on the other hand, focuses on the back story that got him to where he is.

The Repossession Mambo is confusing to follow at first until you realize that you are reading the manuscript of  a book the narrator is writing as it is being typed. The book will jump from his past, which he is typing for his son he never gets to see, and will quickly jump to the present of him hiding in shady apartments and basements to hide from the repo men and Geneco ( I mean the Union. The patients are also addicted to Q instead of Zydrate. In this book's defense, it was written and/or thought about a few years before the stage play happened). The book one ups the movie and focuses heavily on the relationships that got the narrator to where he is. You see the origins of Jake and the narrator's friendship and all of the marriages and failures at love the narrator has experienced.

The narrator has been married 5 times and has divorced for 5 different reasons. Some of the reasons are hilarious, some sad, and one very notably is horrific. The theme throughout the book, though, is that the narrator has the capability for love. He finds it in the one woman he does not marry, bonnie. Bonnie is similar to Beth in the movie. Beth is actually a prostitute in the book who we only see for 20 pages tops. Bonnie is a girl fitted with every artiforg(mechanical organ) you can think of except for her lips(sort of) and her heart, which is all natural.

Other than a few origin stories, the end of the book kind of plays out the same way the movie does. It is a little more gruesome, but neural nets as featured in the movie are not  mentioned or I did not notice them. If you have seen the movie, you understand my hatred for the involvement of the nets in the final climax. You are forced to sit through a half hour of a movie that really never happened. It may work for every other action movie or any old action movie, but this movie didn't want to be any old action movie. It just ended that way. The only neat thing the movie has is an intense sex scene involving Remy and Beth. It is disturbing, but kind of hot. The book ends differently.

The narrator is about to go off on a conquest to push the plot line in the movie's direction. He goes to say goodbye to Bonnie before he is knocked out. He wakes up in surgery. To save him instead of vice versa, Bonnie has gotten a doctor to switch out the narrator's mechanical heart for her natural one. He never sees her again, he gets to be free of the Union's chase and ultimately retains his friendship with Jake (Forest Whitaker's character in the movie). It was a surprise and gave me one of the few great endings you find in books, lately.

Repo Men 2.5/5     The Repossession Mambo 5/5

All the ladies, Little ladies

So, Monday night I made my first trip to bottletree and can I begin by saying that is the best venue in the area. It has a great bar and the place seem to be tailor made for intellectuals and music lovers everywhere. My buddy Neal and I met an interesting couple from Huntsville. The woman has an entire art collection of gnomes and clowns paintings that she created. After a few beers the music began.

DJ Coco opened the set and there was one guy standing up and heading bombing while we are all getting sexed in the eyes by the visuals he had playing in the background while he played his tracks. It was neat, but it was keeping me from seeing We are Scientist, which is the whole reason I was there in the first place. What I did not know that a band was going to follow him that would instantly catch my interest...

Drink up Buttercup is a band from Philadelphia that is tagging along with WAS for the tour. I don't know if any description I provide for them could give them justice, but I will try. It was like early 60's psychedelic rock had sex with Phantom Planet, Elvis, and you can throw John Lennon and Paul in there too. They were incredible. They had decapitated manikin heads on their drum set and keys, which helped to encase the crazy atmosphere they were trying to provide. They were heavily liquored and the singer is a dead ringer for Zack Galifinakis. The best part of the band was every member possessed the capability of operatic vocals. Several times in the set they would back away from their mics and just sing out producing a sensation I could only compare to ear sex. Needless to say, I bought their cd that came out today. It is just as good, but seeing them live puts their music in a different perspective.

We are Scientists went on at 12 and played for an hour. They were exactly as I expected them to be. They opened up with two or three new songs from their forthcoming new album. They were great songs and I cannot wait to own them so I can become more familiar, but I was there to move and belt out lyrics and they delivered that opportunity in spades. They rocked out their well known hits such as "Nobody Move, Nobody Gets Hurt," "Impatience," and "After Hours" amongst many others. It fluttered my fan boy heart and I can chalk them up as one of the few live acts I see that get to retain me as a fan. Sometimes I am put off by certain bands' asshole attitude and/or their rude fan base. They played their songs, seemed like they were having a fun time doing so in front of a small crowd, and the stage commentary they shared was hilarious. There was one interesting occurrence that is worth noting...

There was a very peculiar girl at the show who I assume was my age, but I don't think she was there for the bands. She was just there to have fun with the douche bags she walked in with and sometimes that is ok. But, half way into WAS' set, she started rolling around the walls of the venue in what I can only assume was her attempt at avoiding to throw up. At one point, to the singer of WAS' disgust, she grabbed the singer's beer from next to his foot during a song and chugged it before setting it back down. All can be said about all that is: I was at a bar.

Great show at a great venue that I cannot wait to return to.

Thomas are Scientist

I am so excited.

What's it feel like to be a ghost?

A review of Ghost Writer-the new Roman Polanski film.

This was truly a great film. It might also caught my attention as a great film because I saw Repo Men just the night before, but that review will be saved for when I finish that respective book (p.s. that movie sucked). Anyways...

Ghost Writer stars Ewan Mcgregor as the new ghost writer of Adam Lang's (Pierce Brosnan) auto-biography. The plot gets moving quickly because Ewan's character is replacing a man who held his position just a few weeks prior before he was found washed up on the side of a beach. Interesting? Very.

The movie is 90% talking chased with a shot of a few chases, but somehow way more exciting than two men disemboweling the world. Pierce Brosnan's character is a former British prime minister whom recently has been accused of terrible war crimes when he was in office. All of this occurs while Ewan is just trying to make his book more interesting. The work is practically done for him.

It has a great ending and is filled to the brim with interesting characters. I saw this movie on a whim and I am more than happy with myself for doing so. Great movie.

5/5 Stars