Where's Doctor Gonzo?!?

"One makes a beast of himself to get rid of the pain of being a man..." Dr. Gonzo

So, some updates on me...

I talked the wife into letting me buy that expedition rack for my Jeep. Woo-hoo! She’s still not happy, but I can be persuasive. (That or persisitent enough to piss her off to the point of just letting me do it. Hey, it’s not necessarily an honorable thing to do, but it works.) So, in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be heading up to Chicago on a road trip. Should be fun…

My buddy Phil and I went and saw Underworld Evolution when it came out a few weeks ago… all I can say is that, although the movie was only okay, Kate Beckinsale is one of the hottest frickin’ women on the planet. Holy crap! If she wasn’t on my official ‘List’ before (and believe me, she was), this movie would have clinched it. Over at awfulplasticsurgery.com, they’ve got pictures of her bad boob job, and they must be fake, but - - do you know what? I. Don’t. Care. I can’t wait for this to come out on DVD. Man oh man, I’d leave Mrs. Zombie in a minute for Kate’s vampire character Selene. There’s something about the black hair and skin tight black leather outfits that does me in. That’s the kind of chick I always imagined myself with… hot and vampire-like. Mmmm….Kate. Dear, sweet Kate….

So, after the holidays, I picked up The Cure’s B-sides box set. I love this set! I’ve said it before, I hate bands that feel the need to ‘evolve’ their sound. I like you because you sounded the way you did… not how the record company feels you should in order to appeal to a younger, newer market. Robert Smith has done a really great job of avoiding this, but there has been some change of the standard Cure sound over the last few albums. It wasn’t until Blood Flowers that they went back to the classic Cure sound I know and love. This 4 disc box set, though, this is just what the good Doctor ordered. It goes all the way back to the beginning of their career and there are a ton of songs that I’ve never heard before. The best part is that they are new songs to me, and they are classic Cure - - the Cure I discovered in high school and listened to endlessly in college. It’s funny really, I’ve listened to a lot of music over the years, and I have some pretty eclectic tastes, but I always end up coming back to Robert and the boys. It’s like having an older Goth sibling who never really gave it up. And, in the course of reading the liner notes, I discovered that there is a DVD out there entitled Trilogy. This is a recording from Paris where Robert and the current Cure incarnation played, over the course of three nights, Pornography, Disintegration, and Blood Flowers. I must remember to pick this up! As for the Box Set… Highly recommended…

Speaking of The Cure, I found this list of the one hundred best first lines from literature. It’s a great list, especially considering that there’s at least one novel Robert Smith from the Cure wrote a song about. The story is Albert Camus’ The Stranger (Killing an Arab). I also suspect, but haven’t been able to confirm, that Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle may have been the source for the line Robert sings in 10:15 on a Saturday Night. (“…and I’m sitting in the kitchen sink.”) As for The Stranger, I read this a few years back and it wasn’t a bad book. I did find that Camus wrote it in typical Gallic fashion and that the protaganist lacked emotion and was very unsympathetic, but that was kind of the point. When I found the link initially, I began pouring over it, immediately expecting certain novels to be there without question. All were, save one. I may be biased as I think the one omission is quite possibly one of the greatest books of the 20th century, but I think it should have been included regardless. The book I’m referring to is, of course, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It has one of the best first sentences put on paper. What kills me is that many people will look at this list as a starting place for filling out their classical literature education, and that Dr. Gonzo’s drug fueled rollercoaster ride won’t be part of it. Fortunately, anyone who is serious about literature will find it on their own and love it for the amazing piece of American art it is. I do have to say I was pleased to see the first line from William Gibson’s Neuromancer was on the list. I love this book and it says much about the appeal that Gibson’s unique vision has, even across genre lines. I’m glad to see that Science Fiction and Fantasy is finally getting the literary appreciation it deserves.

And, on that note, I’ll leave you with the first paragraph of HST’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…

“We were somewhere around Barstow, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel lightheaded; maybe you should drive…”. And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was filled with what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’”