The author has obtained a Nobel prize. I coudn`t achieve reading this book until the end, giving up on it at the half of it. Basically it`s a psychological porn story with some witty remarks in it. Not interesting to me, as a matter of fact. If you`d count how often the word "dick" arises in this book, you`d get a very big number. Sadly I can`t rate it to that number.

One of the films of Lars fon Trier about America. Selma is a Czech woman that has left her socialistic country somewhere in the sixties for America where she needs to find enough money for an operation for her son which would allow him not to go blind as she already is losing her eyesight. She has already got close to what she needs when a neighbor of he (in whose trailer she lives - and pays the rent for it, of course) tells her that he`s got a lot of debts that not even his wife knows about and that he`s close to suicide. Selma on the other hand tells him as the only living soul about her eyes and her son`s problems. The neighbor tricks Selma and finds where she hides the money for the sons operation, afterwards he steals the money from her and Selma is forced to kill him in order to regain her money for she has no chance to prove that it`s her money really. In the end she is executed by hanging. The film is very dark and depressive, it`s partly a weird musicle where Bjork plays the title role. Certainly the film is good, but not as good as "Dogville".

It took me nearly three years to finally find tickets for this performance, and as a matter of fact, it still was worth it. The play is based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov titled "King, Queen, Knave". Franz arrives from the country in the big town where his rich uncle lives with his wife. A relation ship develops between Franz and his auntie very quickly. The uncle doesn`t notice anything even until the time when lovers decide to kill him in order to gain all his money. What was interesting about the performance was that it was played in a very small room with something like 80 spectators. Most of those spectators didn`t even notice when the play started because at first two out of three actors participating in the play were sitting among the spectators and one of them started talking without a big part of the spectators realising that it was the play already what they heard. Overally the thing was acted supperbly, the material behind the performance is good as well, so no complaints from me.

It makes me wonder how I managed not to see this film until yesterday. Not only did it win a heap of Oscars in the size of... a rather big heap of Oscars, but it had the screenplay written by Tom Stoppard, one of my favourite playwriters, the author of the legendary "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead". The title role is played by Joseph Fiennes, brother of Ralph Fiennes, but there is be no performance of Elton Wilde reading poems by Oscar Wilde in sight. William Shakespeare is young, a bit crazy and in a desperate need to finish his latest play "Romeo and Ethel, the pirates daughter". Yet when he meets Viola - a rich man`s daughter and a passionate lover of theatre - good ol` William falls in love and his never existing story about pirates falls apart. From this film you learn to know what the spectators at theatres around the world want - comedy with dogs and blood, blood, blood. Quoting the film about Ros and Guil: "Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can`t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They`re all blood, you see." This film isn`t essentially the best I`ve seen in ages but it`s essentially a very good one.

A true classic, this one. Probably the Pistols weren`t a real band but clearly a bunch of marketed kids whom the mastermind villain Malcolm McLaren used in his evil scheme to portray punk as a return of the worst traditions of teenybop, forming a group of "pretty" or rather "punk" looking kids who didn`t know how to play their instruments, how to sing or how to do the poo-poo. But in fact they did know how to play and they did know how to write pretty catchy songs. Not all of the tracks on this album are brilliant but there`s surely enough of songs that will make you jump around as if your ass was on fire and destroy the passerby, the EMI and the Queen (especially that John Deacon, he`s such a bigmouth who doesn`t know where the duck stops). Highlights: "Holidays in the Sun", "God Save the Queen" (marvelous), "Anarchy in the UK", "Pretty Vacant", "EMI". I can`t say that this album is particulary diverse, but it`s so punk, so "I don`t care" in every way that I can`t say No to it.

Why on earth would I read a novel by an unknown German writer titled "Baikonur"? I do know that Baikonur is the place where Soviet spaceships got their start. So what? This former pilot named Beck after the death of his girlfriend (or was it wife, who cares) gets a real Sojus spaceship. But he doesn`t care about it very much, he just wants to find the place where the woman died. So he goes on a roadtrip to Hungary, where he knows she rests in a place starting with F. On the road he also takes a used car salesman, a young Czech woman named Jana and a female friend of his deceased lover. The story isn`t particulary interesting, nor is it particulary believable. One thing I totally didn`t get is why is extremely cold in Russia not far from Baikonur, since it certainly isn`t in the North, but probably H.Geyer knows more about temperatures than I do. I can`t really say that this book was no-good, but it wasn`t good as well. So you`d probably still say that it was no-good. Mainly it was second-class literature that you probably could read on a train or on the road to work (which is exactly what I did).

Robbie Plant was the voice of legendary Led Zeppelin. He wasn`t the main songwriting force of the band though. But he does a solid solo career of his own. He hasn`t gone very far away from his Led Zep legacy, still doing music quite similar to that of his younger days. For me this album is a bit too slow-paced, not that Led Zep ever played speed metal, but I ask for more energy. On the other hand it may be just my bad mood because of the stupid email system at my work that doesn`t work properly all this week. In fact it doesn`t work at all. Man, does this disturb me! All those assholes calling and asking what`s wrong and: "Can I punch you in the face as if you were a sack of shit?" They drive me mad! And Robert Plant can`t do nothing about it.

A film about Cuban musicians that emerged before the socialistic revolution of Fidel Castro. T`is a documenary. Music was good but I didn`t understand much of what was said in the film (most of it was in Spanish which is not a language I know and the only working subtitles were unremovable and in French. It was possible to get the meaning of some sentences but to understand everything in a strange language isn`t a task I can perform).

I`m too lazy to write about this album. The Darkness Mark 2. Not very good, a bit too-Darknessy, a bit too serious for The Darkness.

Emir Kusturica doesn`t have any fresh ideas lately. That is a conclusion I`ve come up with after watching this, one of his earliest, works. It has most of the elements that Kusturica has been using in his films ever since - there are gypsies, there is his favourite gypsie music, there are people running around in boxes, there are fragments from old movies, etc., etc. I don`t mean to tell that this film was no good, on the contrary - it was good. It probably has some problems with continuality - quite a few times it seemed to me that one scene had very little to do with another. Or I just wasn`t paying attention too closely, that can be also sure. Ok, this film is much more serious than one about cats but I didn`t enjoy it very much, and that`s what matter.