22 January 2009

Get Drunk Eat Chicken

The new Chicken and Waffle place across from the Jack London Barnes and Noble (formerly the Jack London Inn) has 2 for 1 drinks and complimentary chicken wings every day from 4-7.
You need to know that.

The Hamlet is Faulkner's funniest novel. It's also bloated, but that's another story. The sections on Eula Varner, physically precocious fecund mama-child of the soil, whose 12-year old curves drive her teacher to give up a law career to bask in her presence and kneel at her recently departed desk so he can place his cheek to the seat where her bottom left its heat, and on the Idiot Snopes who falls in love with a cow, which Bill renders in the prose of knightly courting and yes, our lovers consummate their relationship, over and over again, are pants-wetting hilarious. This is arguably (after Sanctuary?) his most underrated work.

Lost in La Mancha is a decent documentary about Terry Gilliam's failure to finish his dream project about Don Quixote. Trouble, it comes their way. Think of it as a poor man's Hearts of Darkness with Johnny Depp's sexy hair as garnish.

Reprise is a Norwegian film about two young men desperate to make their names in the literary world that clearly shows earnest young men of letters are universally wearisome. Interspersed with flashy rapid-fire snapshots pondering alternate fates (oh Run Lola Run what you have wrought on the young filmmakers of Europe), this is most entertaining when the group of friends (that includes our heroes) is giving each other shit. One of the guys was in a punk band with the hit, "Finger Fucking the Prime Minister", and his verbal drive-by of a pretentious editor is the best scene in the film, clearly illustrating that punk is better life training than literature.

Caught a Hubert Selby doc that was mostly friends saying how great he was. And Last Exit to Brooklyn is extraordinary and underappreciated, but I'm weary of buds-only interviews and still shots. Documentaries are not video fanzines.

Starting Out in the Evening is a surprisingly thoughtful examination of a hungry young grad student desperate to make her name by exhuming the reputation of an out-of-print 70-something novelist. She compares herself to Malcolm Cowley and offers herself to a man on death's door. It is quiet and slow and subtly complex, as the generational divide makes obvious the death of literature as serious art and cultural force usurped by flashy magazines and self-help books. Yes, she gets her comeuppance, sort of, but the ad men still win in the end.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post and the photo of the chicken and waffles is simply pornograhic. That place along with the rib spot near the UC campus need to be on our to do list.

Back to back? Lunch then dinner? That would be something for the ages.

Ray Ratto now has a blog which he writes for dily. I find that...awesome! It is titled "And The Horse You Rode In On."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ratto/index?

sonny house said...

what kind of mid-life crisis are you suffering?

RATTO IS YOUR NEMESIS! What's next, spritzers and vichyssoise?

By the way, your lunch/dinner suggestion is a MUST. We are, after all, only mortal.

Anonymous said...

that photo should be the flag of oakland.

i'll get on hamlet; is the cow named ophelia? i'm almost done with Devil in White City, a history of the world's fair in Chicago in 1893, and a serial killer who liked dismembering and incinerating chicks he met at said fair. tuna, dig this book.

also bought coetze's waiting for the barbarians for $0.25 at the library. cant beat that price.

knee deep in that alan mcgee bio; finished Dubliners and half of Montaigne's selected essays. that dude knew how to tell a dick joke...

sonny house said...

I sucked more pleasure out of The Hamlet than any novel I've read in ages. Loads of fun

sonny house said...

I bought Lie Down in Darkness and Herzog for the same quarters at probably the same library. Picked up The Plot Against America in hardback for a buck at the Lafayette store, which has a bunch of great dollar bargains for hardbacks, if you ever make it through the tunnel and past Orinda, which I highly doubt

Anonymous said...

lafayette is bo's and the round up to me. honestly never been anywhere else...

fair warning; Plot is not funny. neither is ray ratto.

this styron phase intrigues me...

Anonymous said...

mink snopes dragging the body of armstid around the county, trying desperately to find the best place to dispose of it, is one of the best/funniest/most desperate things i've ever read, and one of my favorite.

Anonymous said...

I like how Mink jumps up and down on it trying to stuff it into a tree- desperate corpse trampoline