Giuseppe Zangara

I'd be willing to put Scary Monsters over Low, but the former's "Fashion" is just a little too slight.

So is this thread marked for deletion?

Lists! Bowie 1. Hunky Dory 2. Low 3. Scary Monsters 4. Aladdin Sane 5. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars Dylan 1. Highway 61 Revisited 2. Another Side of Bob Dylan 3. Blonde on Blonde 4. Bringing It All Back Home 5. Blood on the Tracks Stones 1. Sticky Fingers 2. Beggars Banquet 3. Exile on Main Street 4. Their Satanic Majesties Request 5. Some Girls

Twin Cinema is pretty good up to and including "Sing Me Spanish Techno." After that, yawn. And while I think Neko got the best songs from the first two albums, the ones she sung on TC were only okay. Bejar—who I really like in Destroyer but not so much in New Pornographers—gets "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras." which is a great song.

I already know that that massive, new Pynchon novel coming out in November will be devouring my whole winter break. Yay.

What is a shoes head.

If what I've read so far is any indication, not that many. He's what, 29 when the book takes place? He's only mentioned four or five women. That's not a lot. There's a part in here where he mentions not losing his virgnity till he was 19, so it wasn't like he was some Casanova when puberty set in.

My second least favorite passage is when he's imagining the conversation between him and the three ex-girlfriends. It's a transparent attempt to dump a lot of exposition into just a few pages, while being self-referential. But there's the magic phrase. Klosterman has one of the girls criticize him for using such a phony device for so self-serving a purpose and still not being able to do a good job of it. She—Klosterman, that is—accuses him of failing to give each of the girlfriends their own voice, having them speak as Klosterman himself speaks. She/he is right, of course, but I hate this whole notion that doing so is okay, as long as you admit right there in the text that what you're doing isn't very good. You're right, Chuck, it isn't very good. Maybe you shouldn't have written it.

Oh, that was the worst part. He's also fond of adverbs, to the point of annoyance. He says "profoundly" a lot. I briefly considered going back to the beginning and counting each time "profoundly"—or any other adverb—appears, but decided against it. I'd read a handful of his essays in the past. I didn't feel like reading a whole book of him, but then I felt I wasn't doing my part as a good white, college-educated, music-obsessed twenty-something—i.e. a great number of my friends—by not reading him. Now I know.

Someone probably said this in the original thread, but it's simple: Marvin keeps passing on the opportunity to get somewhere with a girl because if he did try to get to know one better, only to have it fail, he'll then think it's his personality—or, much more deeply, who he is on the inside—that is what's really unappealing to women. As long as he avoids them, he can blame his lack of lovelife on his hairlessness and weight, factors that are (mostly) not his fault. Thinking otherwise could be devastating.

Halfway through Killing Yourself to Live. I generally hate repeated pop culture namedropping and this book isn't proving to be an exception. Chuck Klosterman is also smug and condescending; we'd probably get along were we to ever meet, but I'd tell him that, honestly, I'd rather not read one of his books again. The upside to all this is that this book is an incredibly quick read and can be finished in a free afternoon.

Speaking of Bowie, I finally got around to Lodger. It's a little so-so—definitely the weakest of the Berlin trilogy—but it has a couple of real good songs, no real bad ones and it's all over in 35 minutes.

It was the viewing of that film earlier this evening that inspired me to listen to it for time in ages. Reed should've mined more of this dirty, gutteral blooze sound back then. Street Hassle is a far more compelling listen than any of the other trips in his decade-long identity crisis.

I decided I can still listen to and enjoy Street Hassle, so there's a Lou Reed album I still like. The title track is glorious, in particular.

banky is only suffering like any good Catholic should.

I've already bookmarked the Astroboy thread for future reference. Don't know what took me this long!

LooseCannon is still the best guy to ever post here.

I was prepared to insult Kinetic here, but he sent me a wonderful pm, so now I can't. I wish he'd stick around.

Kinetic's occasional appearance on these fora makes me embarassed that I never left, in spite of whatever accomplishments I've made in the real world.

Anyway, I'm not trying to portray wildpegasus as some poor, defenseless martyr, but really, you people were the ones who kept him going. You got what you deserved.

I remember when I started the thread where I posted it, the first few posts in response were people ragging on me for making up such a lame, unfunny story. Now look.

Self-defense. After the bench-fucking story got out (which, shit, I was responsible for, so sorry about that), people here started hounding him relentlessly across the board. While the weirdo certainly deserved it, how was he supposed to react? Was he supposed to sit there and take it? He couldn't make a normal post—well, normal for him—without someone saying "Shut up, benchfucker" in response.

So, Absent Lovers is real good. And check out this Adrian Belew video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8jIItdTUks Hilarious. For me, that I actually remember seeing that video a number of times on MTV during my childhood makes it even better.