An Exercise in Procrastination

I'm reading Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem right now, and it's a clever riff on the detective novel, with the notable twist being that the main character suffers from Tourette's, which makes him bark, touch strangers, and say things like, "Eat me Bailey!" without intending to. As you can probably guess, this makes investigating the death of his mentor/boss relatively difficult. It kind of reminds me of Brick, since it's done with so much love for the genre and its conventions, but there's something completely unique about the way it's approached. My favorite part of the whole thing so far was a scene in which the book's protagonist nervously leads a homicide detective into a corner store, where he begins to tic...only he's trying to pronounce the unpronouncable glyph that stood in while Prince was "The Artist Formerly Known As."

I finally got around to reading Black Hole, by Charles Burns (who illustrates the covers of The Believer) which took a grand total of two days and creeped me out like nothing else. I hope the film adaptation keeps the same atmosphere of weird mutations (there's a girl who sheds her skin, and a boy with a mouth in his chest) mixed with the horror of high school. The graphic novel was done in a 1970's horror movie style, lots of extreme shading, people have sex and things start to go wrong, etc. The director slated to work on the movie is responsible for Haute Tension, which was your standard homicidal-escaped-mental-patient-attacks-resourceful-lesbian-but-there's-a-twist-ending film, and Neil Gaiman is slated to write the screenplay, so I have high hopes.

Finally, everyone should buy the new Wilco album. It's different, and much quieter, and it may take a few times through to grow on you, but then you'll love it. It's called Sky Blue Sky and comes out on May 15.