'Celebrity Skin'

I'd like to thank Courtney Love for making a guitar-pop Christian rock album.

This might be the worst major-market rock albums I've ever listened to.

The songs are awful. Written by an eight year old. Or Billy Corgan. One in the same.

Then there's Love's hounddog wail like she's the lady in the church choir that can't really sing, but she sings loud and you can't kick her out because ... well, you're a church choir.

'The Killers'

This adaptation was the first to pull Ernest Hemingway's short story onto the big screen. Actually, only the first 20 minutes or so are from Hemingway's story. The rest is completely original.

It would be remade two other times, the first by a 19-year-old Andrei Tarkovsky and then 10 years after that with Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin.

Ava Gardner had a thing for Hemingway. She not only starred in The Killers, but also The Snows of Kilmanjaro and The Sun Also Rises.

Gardner was a bit of a vixen. She married Mickey Rooney (how he got so much tail, I don't know), Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, and she had an affair with Howard Hughes. After her divorce with Sinatra in 1957, she went off to Spain and lived with Hemingway, althought it's not certain they were necessarily lovers.

Reportedly, she skinny dipped in his pool and he ordered that the water never be drained.

Anyway, I doubt it's an accident that Gardner was in all these Hemingway adaptations and she goes and hangs out with him, going to bullfights.

'The Black Cat'

I love the Wikipedia page for The Black Cat. It has general information and also a summarization of the film's plot.

It goes into detail of the train ride, the accident and all of the tension and bickering between Bela Legosi's and Boris Karloff's characters.

Then, as almost an afterthought, whoever wrote this plot mentions that Karloff's character is going to sacrifice the girl in a Satanic ritual. No big deal. Just a sub-plot of human sacrifice.

Speaking of, I heard one of the Tea Party candidates, just before the recent elections, opined on the very real problem of human sacrifice in the United States. She was not elected. I don't know why.

The Black Cat is a very dark film in case the inclusion of Karloff or Legosi wasn't clue enough. It's very much in the same vein of Edgar Allen Poe, who is credited in the film; however, the film itself bears nothing in resemblance with Poe's short story of the same name.

Karloff's Poelzig was created with the famed occultist Aleister Crowley in mind. And nothing's creepier than Mr. Crowley.

'If Can You Believe Your Eyes And Ears'

I hold this record in very high regard.

Growing up, we always had a turntable and hi-fi, which I didn't really know how to use for the longest time. Or it didn't work. Either way, it was tough for me to listen to the LPs my mother had because I couldn't hear the music. However, thanks to the vinyl record, you could place it on the turntable and start it and hear the slight sound of music as the needled glided over the grooves of the black record.

This was my introduction to rock and roll. And the Mamas and the Papa's best-selling album was my gateway drug that would envelope the rest of my life.

I still own that record as I do a number of my mother's records. It's still in the original cover with the four members of the group in a bathtub and the toilet right there. They'd later release it with song titles over the toilet because it was just too indecent for 1960s America.

Apart from being an important album for me personally, it's also a really good album. Their hits ("Monday, Monda", "California Dreamin'") are really good songs and other tunes such as "Straight Shooter" and "Got a Feelin'" are better than most other bands' top hits.

Sadly, the Mamas and the Papas didn't last long. Just four years only getting back together in 1971. Just five total albums. A legacy that most bands would kill for. Still, you get the feeling they peaked as artists and that is OK.

'A Room With A View' & 'A Room With A View'

People always tend to forget that every generation looks super fucking weird to every generation before them.

No one's exempt from this. No telling what the older people during the Renaissance thought of the artists of the time.

If you are over the age of 35, you think everyone younger than you is screwing things up in some form or fashion. It's a vicious cycle because in 20 years, today's 21 year olds will be bitching about the 15-year-old kids in their flying cars and gelatin capsule meals.

In A Room With a View, we find a certain amount of tension amongst the generations. The medieval older generation that believes in a certain set of standards. Then there are the Renaissance characters that seek a certain amount adventure, art, music, romance and true love based on mutual attraction and regardless of class or circumstance.

The Renaissance always wins out because everyone wants to secretly be one whereas nobody really wants to be medieval.

One of the medieval characters is Cecil. He's Lucy Honeychurch's fiance once she returns from Florence. He's a bookish dweeb, a classist and a sort of party pooper. Lucy finally breaks up with him after he won't play tennis with Lucy's brother and George Emerson.

He is portrayed by the great Daniel Day-Lewis, who achieves a certain amount of acting cred when he makes the Cecil character 100 billion times more obnoxious than the guy in the book.

Although, Cecil is caught in a tough spot. He doesn't want to play tennis. He's no good at it, he doesn't like playing so what's the point in forcing himself to do something he doesn't want to do?

It's a familiar spot for all men. For generations, men have been forced to do shit they don't want to do only because it's expected of them. It doesn't make any sense, but it beats being alone or fighting all the time. It's ultra frustrating that Lucy wouldn't even kiss him.

It's a book that spans generations of male frustration.

'Again'

Certain expectations and opinions of the members of Buffalo Springfield in future endeavors skewed my feeling about this album.

The truth is, I love Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash and all other albums associated with everyone involved with this album including The Wrecking Crew.

Unfortunately, we catch them here before they achieve a certain level of understanding what truly great music is. We catch them at that split second when the filament pops in the light bulb, but it's illuminated. It glows, but there's no light.

Over the next 15 years, those guys on this album would proceed to make some of hte most brilliant rock and country-rock music the world has ever seen.

That brilliance was not on display with Again. This is a dated piece: A relic of the 1960s with fuzz guitar, plodding baselines and sophomoric lyrics. I sit disappointed, but assured that they would do much better.

'Jurassic Park'

Jurassic Park was released in 1993, square in my early-teenage years.

I don't know why, but I took a strong philosophical stand against Jurassic Park. At 13. It's inexplicable because I barely have any principles now and I can't imagine having many at 13. I was more interesting in girls and heavy metal bands.

Anyway, I vowed never to see the film after seeing how utterly commercial it was. The studio spent $65 million in promotion. That means before the film was even seen, there were stores full of Jurassic Park apparel, toys, lunch boxes and junk. I was pretty punk rock in my own way.

Seventeen years later and I finally watch it.

And it's quite possibly one of the worst films I've ever seen.

There's not a redeeming quality to this film mainly because they cover up all the bloody parts with a well-placed branch or never opt to show the bloodshed. Jurassic Park is made in 2010 and we see Samuel L. Jackson getting treated like a Lunchable.

The cast is ridiculous. Laura Dern is the best we could get? Sam Neill. Cripes. The writing is awful, but the acting is worst. That little boy should have been taken in the jungle nad shot. He made me throw up in my mouth about a half dozen times.