Inventory

I have been a long-time fan of the A.V. Club's take on pop-culture. While parent publication, The Onion, gets regularly compiled in book form, there has only been one A.V. Club book thus far -- the [quite good, by the way] interview collection Tenacity Of The Cockroach, which was published in 2002. The A.V. Club is finally putting out a second book this October, this time a collection of writings their "Inventory" feature -- which one could probably deduce from the title:

Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists

It's the type of thing I enjoy way more [perhaps] than I should.

On a related note, I'm curious to check out A.V. Club head writer Nathan Rabin's new memoir (a genre I tend to approach cautiously) which is due out soon:

The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop-Culture

From the advertising copy:

Rabin writes movingly about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment -- throughout a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents.

I have a soft spot for the "saved by pop-culture" idea. Always have. Probably always will. I might have more to say on the subject at some point, but my laptop is doing the overheating thing again (which is fun, because it starts making sounds like Chewbacca fucking a Roomba) so, I'm just going to cut this short for now.

Tape ain't gonna fix it...

One of the most influential and important books to me in the past was Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path. In it he describes how the world is essentially going to fall apart unless we radically change our approach to a number things by the year 2000 -- a date which has, obviously, passed us by. I can't help but think about that a bit when I think about the last eight years.

The book also contains a great deal about the way Buckminster Fuller approached his life. The thing that influenced me the most was his idea (to really paraphrase it) that if he tried to do positive works -- if he could use his ideas to better the world -- than the world would in return take care of him. It's a romantic notion, but that he put it to the test and succeeded is wonderful.

This is what I happened to be thinking about, standing on the porch of my friends' house where I have been staying.

Unrelated, the music I keep listening to lately when I've been driving:


"Tape Song" by The Kills