Kick Out the Hot Rats From the Hot Tub

Music on CD

The Big Bang!: the best of the MC5 by The MC5. From the booklet:
The West Coast was another story altogether. For the hippies, we were a big problem. West Coast hippie music had a gentleness; it was a goofy, "la-la" kind of electrified folk music that they all seemed to identify with. Bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver [Messenger Service], The Youngbloods, et al., represented mass-marketed peace-and-flower-power crap. Here come the MC5, from Detroit, with our sequined stage outfits and 100-watt Marshall stacks blasting. We just couldn't connect out West with our leaping, spinning, knee-dropping stage show, ranting and raving about gun-toting politics and "Kicking out the jams, motherfuckers!" We opened a free concert in Golden Gate park with a balls-out version of "Tutti-Frutti." The crowd stood there transfixed, dumbstruck. We thought it was great.

Hot Rats by Frank Zappa. No one else in the system has this album and I think it should check-out well.

DVD

Hot Tub Time Machine starring John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Crispin Glover, others. Middle-aged guys drink too much and end up in 1986.

The White Ribbon starring [Germans]. German village in pre-World War One has "strange accidents" and then more bad things happen. I think. I have not seen the picture.

NonFiction

War by Sebastian Junger. Junger spent a year of on-and-off living with an airborne unit on a mountain in Afghanistan. Boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom, SHOOTING!, boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom.

Medium Raw: a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook by Anthony Bourdain.

Spoken From the Heart by Laura Bush. I screwed up on this one. I never heard of the book until I saw it listed on the bestseller list.

Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories edited by Sarah A. Larsen and Jennifer M. Miller. Book version of the public television series. Extensive interviews with Badger veterans of the Vietnam War. There is a guy in town who was a Radar Officer on one of the destroyers during the Gulf Of Tonkin incident. Local guy Scott, the guy with the dog, mentioned that the correct answer on the SAT question on the Tonkin is that the whole thing was made up. Radar Officer guy says, "Baloney, I was there."

Book Excerpt: "Nature Noir" by Jordan Fisher Smith

Book Excerpt

Nature Noir by Jordan Fisher Smith, 2005.