Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

I didn`t really know that this fellow already existed back in 1965 but it seems that Donovan may be older than I thought him to be. This album has only one song that I knew previously - a cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie`s "Universal Soldier" which is one of the best folk songs I`ve heard in my life and certainly among the most impressive anti-war messages of the 1960s. Other songs include the moody "Colours" which sounds as if Donovan was at least 50 when he sung it. The lyrics to it are kind of dumb "Blue is the color of the sky when we rise. That`s the time I like best." yet it`s still a damn good song. Overall this is a nice little album that sure had no chance to change the world for it doesn`t strike the listener momentarily but is a record of well recorded and well produced hippy/folk music. Of course, in terms of lyrics he`s no Dylan or Cohen, but at least his voice is more likeable than that of Dylan and he`s guitar playing is more advanced than that on Cohen`s records.

Johnny Depp and Leo di Caprio in the same film! One of them is crazy, the other is not! Their mother is as big as a whale! A good alternative film! A very lazy me!

Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, What`s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Don Juan deMarco, Dead Man, Donnie Brasco, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Sleepy Hollow, Chocolate, Blow, From Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, Secret Window, Finding Neverland, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride. That means that "The Ninth gate" is the 18th Johnny Depp film that I`ve seen so far. Sadly in terms of quality it`s one of the worst of his films that i`ve seen so far, and that`s not good. Depp plays Dean Corso, a rare book dealer who`s asked by a very important client to determine which one of the surviving three copies of a satanic book is the real one. The problem is that the film ain`t particulary interesting - whilst the first hour of it is a bit creepy, later on the film doesn`t develop into anything special. It`s supposed to be a mystery/horror/thriller, yet there`s no sign of horror in this film and I can`t say that I was especially thrilled by it. Actually it wasn`t scary at all, I mean visually it was very good, but the content lacked something to put it all together, sometimes becoming absolutely ridiculous. And one more thing - why is Roman Polanski such a fan of satan (I`ve seen 3 of his films so far, and two of them are about the dark prince. is he a worshipper of LCF himself or what?)

I`m not really sure why, but I believe that there is a tendency for me to rate collections of stories higher than novels (in average). And "Lunkenbergs fest" applies for this rule. The book contains 11 stories and most of them are good. The first one - "Das Totenschiff" - is a strange tale about a man who somehow kidnaps the tourbus he`s on, although he has no intentions for that. So he decides to ask as the kidnapper for the following - he asks his boss to let his workers leave work one our early today for there`s a holiday coming up, yet his boss refuses to speak to Ebert. "Der neue Mann" is a story that goes to her mother`s place for Christmas to meet the mother`s new friend but the whole thing doesn`t go very well. "Das Los" tells the story of a East German man who won the lottery in the West but wasn`t informed about that. "Kleine Taenzer" is a funny piece about an old rock band playing a boring event (by the way it`s dedicated to a song by Elton John - "Tiny Dancer"). It`s followed by the best story of them all - "Samstagsspiel mit Sallinger" - it`s about a dad who tries to be cool for his kid (and being cool means listening to "Green Day" and "Papa Roach") but who doesn`t convince the boy and who still regrets that many years ago he didn`t go to meet again a woman that offered him to read a book by Jerome Sallinger. At the end the book gets a bit boring though, so I won`t go into any more details.

It`s year 2006 out there. Elvis is long dead and buried. Slobodan Milosevic is long dead and buried. Rock`n`roll is long dead and buried. Ozzy has completely sold himself out and turned into a joke. Sparks still do the same kind of twisted piano/strings pop they did back in early Seventies. Their lyrics are still funny, one of them still has a very impressive voice. The opening "Dick Around" gets a bit heavy in the second part of the song and I can`t say that I like it as much as the first part of it, before the guitars kick in, still the "All I do know is dick around" chorus is cool. "Perfume" has the same dirty guitar noise in the background, put up to a steady bass rhythm. The first real highlight on the album doesn`t follow the "Propoganda"/"Indiscreet" pattern as closely as the preceeding numbers and it sounds a bit messy to be honest, yet it`s once again saved by a perfect chorus: "Baby Baby, can I invade your country?" "Waterproof" is the most typical Sparks song on the entire record with the goofy operette meets rock music attitude that Queen lifted from Sparks. Come to think of it, another brilliant song is "There`s no such thing as aliens". The band is still capable of delivering the goods, that`s for sure, but I still see that they have to try harder in order to be in top form than it was for themselves when they were young - occasional moments of sloppines don`t let "Hello, Young Lovers" to take the same level of "Big Beat" and some other their records from the 1970s in my heart.

First I learned about this band`s existance in late 2004 (or it wasn`t that late, nevermind) with the poppy and cabaret-like song "Coin Operated Boy" which instantely stuck in my head where it still remains. After that came a brief introduction to this band by a friend of mine who somehow thought Dresden Dolls to be one of the best modern bands. Since I normally don`t care about other people`s opinions I never listened to the bands debut album, so "Yes, Virginia" came to me as the first experience with the band in the LP form. I can`t really say (paraphrasing one of the songs of the album) that it was "The first orgasm of the morning" (although I did indeed listen to it in the morning for the first time - if you call 12:30 morning, of course). Actually now I`ve been listening to it for four hours. The most characteristic aspect of this duo of piano and drums is the theatrical/broken rhythm which somehow makes the listener believe that Dresden Dolls could have been performing in pre-war Europe, although they haven`t for sure. This is one of the rare cases when I don`t mind an album for being too monotonous (although it certainly is a very far cry from diverse), for it somehow works well on almost every level. The songs aren`t too sticky, but most of them have a strong backbone to hold them together. My favourites include "Shores of California", "Mrs O", "Dirty Business" and the already mentioned "First Orgasm" (which by the way starts off like one of the songs on the debut of Matching Mole).

It would be a sin for me and my wife not to visit a museum of erotic on our trip to Berlin. After all, everyone knows that Berlin is the European capital of both sex and drugs. Not of rock`n`roll though, that`s not an area where Germans have excelled in the past few decades. But who needs rock`n`roll in a museum of erotics? Sadly we were a bit dissapointed with the museum. We had already been in a similar place in Prague and there it was much more interesting - for there were lots of ancient technical sexual appliances - both funny and gross. Here the museum mostly consists of "erotic" works of art - drawings and sculptures with vaginas and penises. To me the most interesting aspect of this museum was looking at other visitiors. Actually I do find it kinda peculiar seing single men and women in this museum. I can completely understand how a couple can go to a place like this, or even two friends but what sort of pathetic people go to a sex museum alone?

The Berlin Zoo is one of the oldest and biggest zoo`s in the world. I had been there some ten years ago, but for my better half it was the first visit. There`s lots of animals in here and they are kept nicely, but who am I to write about animals? In comparison to the Budapest zoo this one is certainly better, so it is better than the zoo in Riga, yet a zoo is still a zoo - a place you visit once you go to a big city - but not a place you think much about afterwards.

We went to this place in order to see the biggest skeleton of a dinosaur that any museum has in its collection. Yet the skeleton wasn`t there for some reason, so we spent some time looking at rocks. I can`t say that I find rocks particulary interesting. There were a few dinosaur bones though but that`s not really the same as a dinousaur itself.

A man returns from a war and stays at a woman`s place. He is a bit mentally disturbed. She is a doctor herself and tries to help him. They stay together. Boring.