I don’t know why I picked these two songs because the whole album is great, really. You should buy it. Perfect, sincere garage pop songs that sound like good times in warm weather.

Oh hai guys!
This is the best/worst movie you will ever see.

What people are saying:

“[Wiseau] is a tantalizing mystery stuffed inside an enigma wrapped in bacon and smothered in cheese. Tommy looks out of place, out of time and out of this world.”
- IMDB reviewer

“As if a deer made a movie about human interaction, unable to comprehend what it is to be a human being.”
- IMDB reviewer

“[Wiseau] is able to take monkey poop and turn it into a well-polished turd.”
- IMDB reviewer

“A film with the passion of Tennessee Williams.”
- Tommy Wiseau

From Ghostwritten by David Mitchell:

When I was younger I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD, or stage a coup d’état.

Samples two crazies– Charles Manson and Lil’ Wayne

Berzerkulosis – “Big League Chew” from David Lombroso on Vimeo.

For an abridged version, here is a video of three guys performing an 80s synth hits medley:

The following images are all untitled from the “Aila” series, 2003-2004.

From Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami:

I enjoy shopping at [the fancy-schmancy Kinokuniya supermarket]. You may not believe this, but the lettuce you buy there lasts longer than lettuce anywhere else. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they round up the lettuce after they close for the day and give them special training. It wouldn’t surprise me. This is advanced capitalism, after all.

Nearly all of my friends who have read Murakami say they dislike his books because they don’t like the narrator. Murakami’s narrators are similar in that they all seem to represent the postmodern everyman — detached, deadpan, resigned to the fact that the best of days have long passed. The big complaint is that this character is annoying because he is apathetic and you don’t wind up loving him or hating him enough to find him interesting. Dance Dance Dance is only the third Murakami novel I’ve read (the others being A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood) and I have to say that I find the narrators to be introspective and relatable, the perfect windows into Murakami’s surreal worlds. Very Nick Carraway-esque; I’m sane and everyone around me is crazy — or is it that I’m crazy and everyone else is sane?

There is a full house of devoted fans behind this camera, by the way. When Alexa is sitting atop the acoustic scene hierarchy in the near future… Well. You heard it here first.

Legitimizing pot hasn’t created more users; it has just produced more annoying ones, who now apply Whole Foods-ian levels of snobbiness to the differences between Hawaiian Sativa and Humboldt Indica.

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers:

I pull up to a light, next to a bunch of young black kids. Maybe they’ll shoot me. I’m in the zone of all probability. I cannot be surprised. Earthquakes, locusts, poison rain would not impress me. Visits from God, unicorns, bat-people with torches and scepters–it’s all plausible. If these kids happen to be bad kids, and have guns, and want to shoot people like me, it will be me, the glass will break and the bullet will come through and I will not be surprised. With the bullet in my head, I will drive my car into a tree, and as I am waiting to be pulled from the wreck, nearly dead, I will not panic or yell. I will think only: Weird, this is exactly what I expected.

A very honest, accurately articulated voicing of what must go on in peoples’ heads all the time. Like in those instances when you feel like the only stationary entity as the world continues to move rapidly around you. (Special bonus: not-so-thinly-veiled racial prejudice.)

The first three tracks on the new album, Seek Magic, are absolute money. Give “Green Knight” a listen–yes, that is indeed a basketball game sample about a minute in. Genius? dude yeah.

protect ya neck with 50% symbolism and 50% reality. it ain’t safe no more.

this quilted bulletproof vest is perfect for traditional hunting as well as urban guerilla warfare. there’s always someone who wants to put an end to you if you kill compromises like others kill flies. if this someone aims sharp enough, at least you’ll take your last breath with sueded shoulders.

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:

[B]eauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise–the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music–we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Seems like Kundera saw it coming back in 1979, pre-blogosphere. Gives more weight to that “unbearable lightness of being” he wrote about five years later doesn’t it?

Foreign Policy has a nice photo essay with some images from the same collection also on view at D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery.