'El Norte'

A beautifully sad and poignant movie that rings incredibly true 25 years later. Maybe more so.

Rosa and Enrique are teenage brother and sister living in the jungles of Guatamala when their father is murdered by government soldiers after plotting to start a union. Later, the mother disappears leaving the pair unattached and afraid in their home country. The pair decide to migrate north into the United States.

Through their trials and tribulations, they wind up in Mexico successfully where they meet their "coyote". They crawl through a drainage pipe to the United States where they are viciously attacked by an army of rats. They eventually make it to the States, they rent an apartment and start working.

Dodging immigration, the pair sink their teeth into the United States, Enrique as a busboy moving up the ranks at a nice restaurant and Rosa as a housekeeper. She contracts typhus from the rat bites while Enrique is offered a good job in Chicago. Before he leaves in the middle of the night, he learns his sister is dying. He leaves the job laying there and sees his sister before she breaths her last death.

It's commentary on immigrants, prejudice and the lose-lose situation for many trying to make a better life for themselves in a country that doesn't really want them, but needs them for their dirty work.

'Swing Time'

Here's an odd statement: There isn't enough Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in this film. It's disappointing. If I were directing an Astaire-Rogers film, they'd be dancing in 80 percent of the film.

What's interesting is that there aren't films anymore that are based on one or two people doing a singular thing like dancing or singing. Nobody dances or sings anymore anyway.

The only exception is pornography. Eight percent of a porn is screwing. The other 20 percent is thinly-veiled plot development.

All Astaire-Rogers films should follow the same rule.

'Rings Around The World'

The reason most of us like lists, critics and the like is because every year there is art being created and released. So much that it would be impossible for any one person to absorb it all.

Therefore we depend on lists to help us capture the top 10 percent or read critics so they can tell us the general feeling and opinion about a record or book.

Even then, we're still capturing about three percent of all books, albums and films released in a year (maybe) and doesn't include the millions of titles already released over the past 500 years.

Another way we keep up with the assembly line of pop culture is through friends or friends with blogs.

A good friend of mine is a relatively big fan of the Super Furry Animals. I know that he's seen them in concert and sings their general praises whenever the time arises.

How he could not direct my attention toward "Rings Around the World" is mystifying. We all work so hard to ingest as much beauty as we can while we're on this Earth, and, yet, we still work to fight each other. And not share records with each other.

Asshole.

'Tuesday Night Music Club'

My parents initially split up when I was 13 years old. They subsequently reunited (for the kid, of course), which didn't last long. They eventually split again, for good this time.

Obviously, given my age, this was very tumultuous. It was probably a lot more tumultuous then I actually remember it being. If someone asked me now to talk to their kid about divorce and how to cope, I'd slap the kid on the back and say, "You'll get over it."

Once they got divorced, a weekly ritual included my mother picking me up from my father's house on Wednesday afternoons, when I'd stay at her house before going to church that evening.

Every week, we'd go to Taco Bell (at the time, it was brand new and the first ever Mexican fast food I'd ever had ... and it was more than delicious) and then to her house where I'd watch Nickelodeon or, more likely, MTV, a station that was not available through my father's satellite.

In 1993, that same year, an unknown hot piece of ass, Sheryl Crow, released her debut, "Tuesday Night Music Club." This is seminal because she was by the far the hottest musician/musical artist I'd ever seen and "All I Wanna Do" was a really cool song.

That album spawned four other hits and four other music videos. I'd practically listened to the album (at least the best songs) on TV. If I made an anthology of my life, Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club" would represent this time period.

Listening to it now is boring. It's extremely adult contemporary at times. I don't even really remember ever listening to "Run, Baby, Run," "We Do What We Can" and "I Shall Believe."

"The Na-Na Song" is interesting only because it was another chapter in the upbeat pop song where the lyrics are hodgepodged together with pop culture references and delivered in a hurried, break-neck fashion. Much like Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" and REM's "It's The End Of The World As We Know It." These songs, I do not like.

"All I Wanna Do" is still listenable. The lyrics aren't as good. But the music is really good. The bass and drums lay down a perfect backbeat. The steel guitar is beautiful and that little electric guitar riff just before the chorus is simply divine.

'The Driver's Seat' & 'The Girls Of Slender Means'

Really knocking out Muriel Sparks' short fiction.

Given the characters in "The Driver's Seat" and "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," I always wonder how autobiographical these people are in her stories.

Maybe not very much, but it's interesting how close Lise and Jean Brodie mirror each other as delusional, self-involved neurotics, neither of which seem to know which end is up.

Sparks' mid-century portrayal of the young women in Europe is extraordinary. "Girls of Slender Means" is a great snapshot of these different, independent and intelligent women seeking to make their own mark in the world despite all the tragedy and deadends they might actually find.

All of these stories are incredibly tragic, which might be an insight into Sparks' real life more than any of these characters.

'Beauty And The Beast'

I have a three-year-old daughter and her most recent discovery is Disney's "Beauty and the Beast."

It's pretty good. Jean Cocteau's version is pretty good, too. I really did feel the beast was really good in this version. He seemed legitimately scary without being overly goofy.

The cartoon version is odd because the beast is far better looking as the animal compared to the doofus he turns back into once the spell is broken.

A big difference between the two versions is that Avenant, Belle's non-beast love interest, is not killed like the correlating Gaston in the Disney version, but instead himself turns into a beast as the original beast turns into the charming, good-looking guy with the killer personality.

Of course, none of this actually compares to the 1980s TV series starring Ron Perlman as the greatest beast of all time and the manly Linda Hamilton.

'A Grand Don't Come For Free'

I've had a pretty shitty day. I feel downright awful.

I bought this album today and listened to it and it just made me frustrated and angry.

It's been a bad day.