Recommendations

I think I'm gonna start making recommendations for various things now and then, just so this blog does something more constructive than telling you to not ride your bike home in the rain.

Though, it'd probably be more constructive for me to write the novel analysis for my Category Fiction class that I'm supposed to be working on. Oh well.

Music You've Probably Never Have Heard Of:
The Gaslight Anthem - Think of Springsteen fronting a punk band and you'd get the general idea. They're even from the same part of New Jersey as The Boss, so the vocalist, Brian Fallon, even has a similar accent.
The Vision of A Dying World - Folk rock from San Diego. I was lucky enough to receive and review these guys last three releases for Independent Clauses. I especially enjoy their latest full length, "...And the Grammar Lamb." They're pretty eclectic though, so they'd be an acquired taste for most people.
Drag The River - Alternative Country at its absolute best. Chad Price and Jon Snodgrass are incredibly talented songwriters and vocalists. This music basically sounds like indie rock that just happens to be country. It's fantastic.

Books That You Might Have Heard Of:
The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - I just read this one not that long ago, and I admit, it took me a little while to get into, but I definitely enjoyed the mix of the supernatural with the techno-thriller genre. This is the latest in a series that follows the highly intellectual FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast, so you might want to start from the beginning, Relic, but I had never read any of the other books and followed along well, aside from a few references.

Films That You Might Have Heard Of:
Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961) - If you don't like subtitles, don't even bother. This classic of Japanese cinema is probably my favorite film by director Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. This film was later remade into Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, which established Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name. Both a blessing and a curse, the film was carefully transferred to DVD on the Criterion collection, giving it an excellent transfer and special features, but giving it a walloping price tag of $35 or more new. Fortunately, you can generally rent it at Hastings for $2.99

I suppose that will be all for today.

Adios.