Around the block...

- Bob Mould has a new cut up on his "Bob Blog"- The Suburbs World War III with his own personal memories of the Twin Cities scene circa 1978. Read it here.

- Tom Wolfe has a new book coming out entitled I Am Charlotte Simmons. I enjoyed A Man In Full (read it twice) and Bonfire of the Vanities for his ability to skewer everything at once. Unfortunately, his website has not been updated. Wolfe would make great online journal, doncha think? Here's Amazon's description of the plot - I'm intrigued and glad to see Wolfe is coming out with another long-form novel:

Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jayjay Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

- I don't know about you but I am becoming very overwhelmed by all the music blogs out there now. It's like an avalanche. I don't aggregate on MP3blogs.org because many of my posts don't have MP3s appended to them but I found it very convenient for my RSS feed - but now I think I might have to do what Fuzzy does and create my own aggregator because it seems everyone is now on that thing and its hard to make sense.

- Finally... I'm tired -- I just finished a first draft of a hard-to-write essay on a very difficult film in my movie blog. At first I hated the film but then as I watched it a second and third time, I started to see that the director was making some sense and wasn't just trying to exploit the viewer. I don't totally agree with what he has to say but I think it's very a very clever way that he did it. Anyway, the review is here on my other blog (and apologies for shamefully plugging it but I would like to get some other people's take on what I wrote). The movie is Irreversible and it was pretty controversial last year. Anyway, if you have seen the film and have an opinion or just want to read mine - it's here. I have some more ideas to add to it (mainly the relation to Kubrick who also made films about subjects that aren't always immediately identifiable), clean it up a bit so it has some better structure and, of course, as with all my writing it needs to be proof-read several times to fix my dyslexic mistakes.