Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

What makes days sleepless? If you are waking at the day, why should you worry that you don`t sleep at the time? Or are you some nasty pervert who works at night but still can`t sleep at day? This novel tells us about a teacher named Simrock who suddenly feels some pain in the heart while he`s teaching his students at school. When he comes home and tells it to his wife Ruth, she doesn`t treat that as a big problem. After that he decides that he has been living his life in the wrong way (btw., he`s a partly orthodox communist in East Germany). He leaves his wife having realised that there`s no love left between them - only routine is left. After that he finds himself a brand new lover Antonia. While he has his summer vacation he takes a job at a bread factory and even finds a friend there. Together with Antonia he goes to Hungary, from which she tries to flee to Austria, but unsuccessfuly. The book left a good impression on me, it was interesting to read and even had some nice ideas in it.

The title is very promising indeed. The legendary Minotaur is living among us until today, he doesn`t eat virgins anymore, he`s become a cook in North Carolina, he`s lonely and his life is miserable. I guess, if the same story would be told about some simple man it would sound pathetically boring and uninspiring (ok, losers are interesting sometimes, as they are in "Sideways"). Minotaur has problems communicating with his colleagues because he can`t speak clearly through his bulls mouth. He ain`t very smart, but he isn`t dumb. He falls in love with a waitress named Kelly with very big breasts. The novel has quite a lot of sex in it, at some moments totally pointless. Overall this book isn`t really anything - it`s neither funny nor dramatic, neither pretentious nor minimalistic. I`ve surely read worse but I`ve read better as well. With the idea of placing Minotaurus in the modern wold much better things could certainly be done. So it has become just a boring pointless experience.

Imagine a B movie and take the square root of it. Then divide it by ten and let it rest in a waste basket for a year or so. And then you`ll have this film in a nutshell. "Suckers" has to be one of the least mainstream and popular films I`ve seen in my entire life. Ok, I may have seen a lot of European crap that has less votes on the IMDb than this one but I know that they were at least popular in their native countries. "Suckers" doesn`t have much to brag about - everyone involved in this film is very far from popular (if you don`t count actors that have participated in a few episodes of some sitcoms), the video quality seems to be screaming "VHS" out loud (although this even isn`t designed to be a TV movie) and the script is hardly realistic. But it does give some insight. And insight to what? It shows the life of used car dealers and of the way they think when they trick you to spend twice as much as your car is worth. The owner of the car plaza in this film is a complete moron who knows how to take the last penny of you so that you`d end up broke one day, and he just love taking IT from the poor! The hero is a good person in his heart, of course, but he just can`t change the way things go for he really needs the money (he`s in debt to some criminals). In the end there`s a big showdown when drug dealers, car dealers and gangsters organize a great massacre of one another, but that`s no surprise in a low form film like this one. Yet some of the jokes are pretty good and this certainly is a film to learn from. Well, maybe you can`t learn much useful stuff from it, but who cares anyway - the main thing for me now is being very, very careful when I buy the next car. Although I might choose buying a car from its previous owner, for that could turn out to be a little less dangerous.

"The Rutles" can be called the equivalent to "One" by the Beatles, putting all the hits the prefab four had on one single disc. Still there is a tiny difference between the two - the Rutles never bothered to have other songs than those on this record. This is the soundtrack to the film that I liked quite much and there would be no reason why I wouldn`t like this record. First, I like the Beatles. Second, I like a good parody, and that`s what it is in essence. Neil Innes is very good at combining elements from different Beatles` songs, adding lyrics that could have been penned by the Beatles if they had been in a very silly mood and thus we have a record that even the Beatles themselves would have found to be pretty goood. Almost every song on this record could have been a hit, had it been recorded in the sixties and had the Rutles been a real band. My favourites include the sad and sweed "Between us", the goofy Ringo-styled "Living in Hope", the give peace a chance "Love Life" ("love is the meaning of life, life is the meaning of love"), the upbeat piano ballad "Another Day", the crazy "I have always thought at the back of mind - cheese and onions" and the tribute to "Get Back" - "Get up and go" and of course, the biggest hit ever - "Hold my hand", but on the other hand songs like "I must be in love" and others aren`t worse than those either. A very good record, not the best of the century surely, yet very enjoyable.

Of course, it isn`t the first time I listen to this record, not at all, but I had never listened to it 3 times a row, and now I have. That`s not a particulary hard task, of course, since the album is only 35 minutes long. That was the second album Cohen ever had, and it is one of his best. Cohen never had very much melody in his songs, as you know, he mainly does some guitar strumming, accompanying his singing, which isn`t that much of singing as well. He`s a poet from the beatniks, you know, and he`s very good at writing lyrics (or was way back in 1969). "Story of Isaac" is one brilliant example of his writing skills, telling about a man who goes mad and decides that he must kill his children in order to praise the Lord. Another song about God is called "The Butcher". A nice vision of God, isn`t it? To be short, I like all of those songs, although they aren`t really songs, but if they are good, what more do I need?

Although the name would indicate that - with the Byrds being an equivalent misspelling for the Beatles, the content of their music wasn`t that beatlish at all. This album is much closer to a country/pop/folk record than to the Beatles. The album opens with the terrific "Turn! Turn! Turn!" (I`m not sure that I`ve bothered to listen to its lyrics carefully enough to understand, why should I turn but who gives a damn if it`s so damn (once again) catchy). The next song "It Won`t Be Wrong` has a title similar to "I won`t be long" but I don`t know why I came up with such a comparison. Overall I guess this sort of music hasn`t aged especially well - it`s just your average (well, maybe way above average) middle aged man`s music, so I wonder how the Byrds were cool in the 1960s in the first place. I have nothing against this kind of music but it somehow lacks some sort of energy for me to be able to enjoy it without restraints. And why did they cover "The Times They are a Changin`" adding some 50% to the perfect pace Dylan had given to this song? Out of the western styled songs I enjoy "Oh! Sussannah" the most, with it`s nice banjo sound and the very fast country train tempo.

This is Jurek Becker`s most highly acclaimed work, and not without a reason. Jakob is a Jew in a gheto close to a small village in Poland who accidentally hears over a German radio that the Soviet army is but a few hundred kilometres away. When telling these news to other jews he knows that he would need to tell how exactly he heard the news, but that he can`t do - `cos it was in a German institution where he amazingly escaped death but he knew that the jews wouldn`t think that he was saved just for nothing. Anyhow he tells that he got a radio hidden at his place and that it`s where he got news from. And after that little lie he starts providing imaginary news to the jews everyday, in this way keeping them alive and hoping. But it`s not that easy for himself, for Jakob is no hero, and many times he`s close to giving himself in. What happens in the end is not really clear - the author provides two versions - in one of which the Soviet army comes fast enough to save the jews, while in the other case - it doesn`t. This book reminded me of the film "The Pianist" by Roman Polanski, only in a less pathetic manner.

My acquaintance with Manfred Mann started when I was some ten years old and my dad put "Nightingales and Bombers" on a tape machine (by "tape machine" I mean the huge thing that played those large round casettes). I remember quite liking that record, but that wasn`t really recorded by "Manfred Mann" (the band) or by Manfred Mann (the fellow who gave his name to the band) but by "Manfred Mann`s Earth Band" (a later band founded by the same individual who was a real jerk by the way - as far as I know he was only the drummer in all those bands and not the singer, the songwriter, the guitar player or at least the girl that the latter three have occasional sex with. Yet how can I say - just a drummer. Is the drummer less important than the lead vocalist just because nobody cares about him and wouldn`t mind him exploding on stage? No, drummers are very important. Take Phil Collins, for example, or all those 17 drummers "Spinal Tap" used to have).

A few years ago the Libertines were selling better than hotcakes and the entire world was raving about them. And then they split up. Or their lead singer died from OD-ing. Or there was some other reason, why the band split up. Anyhow, nowadays only very few people remember about how good this band used to be. I don`t mean that they`re forgotten, but if you`d ask the average listener what he thinks about the Libertines, most likely he`ll say: "Artic Monkeys rule!" or something like that.

This is a book I read as a part of my "learn the best from the soviets so you no longer would be an uneducated bafoon" project. Actually that`s the same story of book binding I mentioned here some weeks ago. This Bykov fellow seems to have been a Belarussian writer who specialized on WW2 stories, having been there himself. This one is about two partisans who want to escape from the Germans and locals following them but they don`t succeed and one of them dies in the end, while the other one starts cooperating with the Germans. What`s good about it is that it`s no black and white story, no one is completely good or completely bad, everyone has some concerns of his own that have made up him to be what he has become. What I didn`t like was the subject itself and the writing manner - a bit too trivial for my taste, that`s certainly not my cup of tea - this kind of writing. I guess I`d rather choose something more adventurous. I doubt that I`m going to read anything else by this writer in the upcoming years.