Ian Fleming, Albert Broccoli, Roald Dahl, c’mon, there is no doubt in my mind that this is the most perfect example in its genre but just wait til the version comes out where I edit away the two songs that just don’t live up.
I guess I can see why Dr. Seuss hated the way this turned out but still it is a must-see and don’t forget to look for things that ended up in The Simpsons.
This book is more or less a page-burner version of Lake Wobegon Days.
I wouldn’t mind if this guy just kept writing and writing on this story. I most certainly would read and read, as long as the pages kept coming. It has the languid, lazydays feel of all the greatest “growing up smalltown” novels (ie To Kill A Mockingbird, etc) but with a murder mystery woven in.
This brings up an extremely interesting character in the book who is incidentally a failed writer of just this sort of thing. I’m not going to say more about it cuz I really hope you all find this book and read it. With summer right around the corner I feel that this is “just the thing”.
Have you read This Side of Paradise ? Holy fuck. Read the first two sentences and weep. Man am I gonna love this. We should call our record The Dandy Warhols are The Father and Mother of Amory Blaine.
And the story that happens between his dizzying feats of sentence writing isn’t half bad either.
Well I finally got back to and finished this book. If you’re into Henry VIII like I am, you should definitely read it.
As I said earlier, the writing style is a bit shotgun in its approach. It’s basically a few hundred pages of anecdotes and assumptions/insights into Henry VII as an old man and Henry VIII as a young one in their respective courts and its a great study in the motives and manipulations that made European empires back in those days as well.
Since this book ends quite abruptly at the introduction of Thomas Wolsey, I suggest that you have ready a book about Henry’s adult years. Perhaps beginning with the end of his first marriage so that you don’t find yourself lying there in bed thinking “damn that ended abruptly”.
This is the kind of writing which I love and there’s a small abundance of it here.
I’d love to tell this guy how much I love and admire his attention to prose and from the perspective of “clarity IS style”. Opon further consideration I had to temper it with the reality that his style of storytelling is most reminiscent of two elderly yet passionate, drunk yet focused, Tudor geeks having a long drunken jack-off at a bar session with the elegance to let each other speak fully before clipping off on a somewhat relevant tangent.
This is what I’ve been obsessively into lately. This guy is a friend whose band has had us open for them on a couple Frenchy festivals. This track is so exactly what I love. It just kills me.
The writers were showing off, the cast and crew were showing off, the dp the editor the director the agents everyone to the point where I guess if you wanna make a movie this profound its gonna take a lot of fuggin show offs.
So I didn’t think about missing three days of actual work when my MacBook was out sick this week. No, I only really thought about what if the Apple people were to find my cache of Johnny Weir fan fiction. But now it’s Friday, my MacBook is home, and it’s time to catch up on things you have missed.
ITEM: Beat The World has a winner in the Guild Guitar contest, and that winner is Pat, from Huntsville, Alabama. Pat wins the Guild GAD-JF3012, like the one Pete played in the “Dreamt of Yes” video. Ten other winners received digital downloads. Which are great, because the computer plays them for you. Thanks to Guild Guitar, Ryan at Beat The World, and our guitar tech Elliott for all the back and forth.
ITEM: Last night I had a dream that Logan Lynn and I were BEST FRIENDS! It was pretty fun. Coincidentally, did I tell you that Logan has covered the Dandys’ 2003 hit “The Last High”? Say what? Yeah, it’s pretty great. You can buy the single at at loganlynnmusic.com.
ITEM: Courtney has a new review of Educating Rita, as well as a couple more flicks, on his movie review page.
ITEM: From the burying the lede department: Yes. We are recording a new record right now.
I found the text here not quite shocking but definitely surprising. This was taken a couple years after WWII in Marseilles.
CAPTION: “IN A PADDY WAGON quarrelsome prostitutes loudly protest against being bundled off to jail. Legal prostitution was abolished in France last year, thus creating an additional enforcement problem for the Marseilles police.”
