'Mama's Gun'

Took me forever to find this album. Strange because I live in Erykah Badu's hometown, so you'd think there'd be plenty of copies hanging about.

Badu's been a person I've wanted to get into for a long time. Mostly because she has style. I often comment on the cover art on a book and what a difference my perception of that book compared to how I would actually enjoy that book.

Same with musicians. I'm addicted to the style and mystique as much as anyone. Badu has it. She's cooler than the other side of the pillow and the scary thing is, she knows it. It's not beauty that scares men shitless. It's confidence. Only someone as brash as Andre 3000 could make Badu swoon.

Anyway, it's a really good album and it whets the appetite to go out and find more. She's a beautiful, talented woman and if she needs someone to dissatisfy her physically and emotionally, I'm free.

Call me.

'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots'

I never gave The Flaming Lips a chance. All this despite them peaking artistically as I was peaking aesthetically.

I remember this album coming out and the reason I have never listened to it before now is because Wayne Coyne -- lead singer, lead man -- seems like a smug prick. He's like 50 with that curly, unkempt hair and the vests and whatnot. I figured anyone as desperate to be cool like that can't possibly make good music. Then I've seen them live and they're surely obnoxious in person. All the people in costumes. Coynce in the big ball. Artsy-fartsy bullshit. Just play the songs.

I also always got The Flaming Lips mixed up with The Screaming Trees, a band I liked quite a bit as a teenager.

I've been wrong before. This is one of those times.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the Lips' 10th album, which seems remarkable considering I can only name two. And its good. So, no hard feelings.

By a million miles, The Flaming Lips are the best band from Oklahoma, right? ("Do You Realize??" is the official state rock song.) I guess it's them, Hanson or Color Me Badd.

'Say Anything ...'

Isn't it weird how timelines get mish mashed as you lose perspective.

I could have swore Say Anything ... was closer to the mid-1980s, related more to his earlier films. It was actually released in 1989, after John Cusack portrayed Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out. In one he's a 25-year-old scrappy third baseman and in another he's an 18-year-old kickboxer.

I have a bit of a man crush on Cusack. I latched on in high school when I watched his early work like The Sure Thing and Better Off Dead then The Road to Wellville and Grosse Point Blank, which had this rad soundtrack with The Clash and Violent Femmes on it. By college, he'd done A Thin Red Line, High Fidelity, Pushing Tin, The Cradle Will Rock and Being John Malkovich. Really, not a bad slate of films.

I would put his top 10 films against anybody elses. At least for me.

Say Anthing ... is a super odd film. It's not necessarily funny, something Cusack was known for. The characters are quite obnoxious. Lloyd Dobler and Lili Taylor should have just gotten married. The dad's crime situation is really weird. It distracts from the love story and yet I couldn't imagine the film without it. He's a passive-aggressive prick, who seems like the greatest father in the world for 40 minutes. However, it was a plot development that nobody in the 1980s making a teenage flick would ever try.

I still don't know why Ione Skye looked like a heroin addict at the end of the film.

'Orpheus'

I never realized the breadth of Jean Cocteau's artistic output.

I knew he was a writer. His literary output was well known to me in addition to his criticism, poetry, screenwriting and plays.

He directed 11 films, including Orpheus in 1949. He even wrote ballets. He is listed as a designer and a boxing promoter on his Wikipedia page.

Cocteau was simply born at the right time in the right country. If nothing else, he was lucky and, yet, incredibly talented to put all of this together.

He was born in 1889 near Paris. By the time he was 20, he was living in the cultural epicenter of the world where art, literature, thought, creativity and everything in between was absolutely bursting at the seams. He collaborated with or simply hung out with Andre Gide, Pablo Picasso, Edith Piaf, Erik Satie, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Marcel Proust and dozens of other artists.

It's one thing to be talented. It's a completely different thing to be hobnobbing with some of the greatest artists that ever lived when boundaries were being demolished. What a time to live and work.

'The Sea' & 'Wide Sargasso Sea'

I plugged these two novels together mostly because they both have "sea" in the title despite "sea" not necessarily being a big player in either.

They were written by different people in different times. Jean Rhys was born in 1890 as a white Dominican. John Banville was born 55 years later in Ireland.

Wide Sargasso Sea was a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which was written 90 years earlier by a woman born in Yorkshire, England. I really need to read Jane Eyre now.

I also combine these two novels because they were really hard to understand and keep up with. The Sea jumps from the narrator's youth, the death of his wife and his currrent situation. Wide Sargasso Sea goes from the narrator's youth to her time at being married and introducing new characters left and right. It's good thing it's a prequal to Jane Eyre because it's as confusing as a 19th century novel.

'Youth' & 'The Life And Times Of Michael K.'

J.M. Coetzee has eight dozen books on the 1,001 list and this is just two. Granted, none of his books are extremely long, but I think it says something about the man's massive need to tell a story.

Youth is a volume of Coetzee's fictionalized autobiography retelling the author's departure from his native South Africa to England, where he worked as a computer programmer for IBM. The character in the story is wayward and without any real vision, which is the case for a vast majority of us, but it's a symptom that we think evades creative stalwarts like Coetzee. The need to fit in and shadow someone else's rise and fall, ins and outs and lifestyle. To read the right books, live in the right city, have sex with the right women, do the right drugs and so on and so forth. Not everyone can be Hunter S. Thompson.

The Life and Times of Michael K. is an earlier work of Coetzee from 1983 while still in South Africa. It's a dystopian novel much like Nadine Gordimer's July's People, published two years before (both Gordimer and Coetzee are the only two South Africans to win the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, both were openly anti-apartheid and both are white).

The Life and Times ... chronicles the nitwitted Michael K. a disfigured gardener in Capetown, who is forced to take his sick mother to Prince Albert after a civil war breaks out in the capital. Much like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the pair are tried as they slowly make their way to her birthplace. She eventually dies and Michael K. is forced to roam aimlessly with just a bare notion of survival.

Both novels are actually quite similiar: Two lonely young men attempting to fix something within themselves. A common theme. Now, to read those other eight dozen Coetzee novels.

'American Graffiti'

An extremely sentimental and unrealistic of the United States in the early 1960s. I have no problems with sock hops, waitresses on roller skates and hot rods. However, that's like saying Huckleberry Finn was about a raft.

The 1960s -- the so-called good ol' days -- were no different than the present nor where they probably much different from the 1890s. You had teenagers doing dumbass shit and older people not understanding why teenagers are dumbasses. Trade drag racing for texting. Swap out the hamburger joint for Facebook. It's all the same. ]

We want to believe that decades past were "better." George Lucas, I think, surely wants us all to think this after watching American Graffiti. It's sentimental bullshit. The calvacade of early rock and roll, the outfits, obsession with sex and cars. How inane. How dumb.

Meanwhile, all these poor shits would soon be shipped to Southeast Asia and have their guts blown all over the map, the counterculture was already in full swing and it would only grow as the 1960s rolled along. American Graffiti is not a time capsule or a homage to a "better time" as much as its lipstick on a pig.

Plus, it's slow, poorly written and monstrously directed. But it is George Lucas.