Books and movies

Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a great read. It's a charming, sort of magical story about two young men in China during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in the 60's. I had never heard of this book before. It was a random buy one day when I realized I didn't have anything to read on the train. It caught my eye because it had a pretty cover, and it was small enough to fit in my purse. I've bought other little books with pretty covers that turned out to be disappointing. Not this one, though. It draws you in with its tale of youth, love, friendship, literature, and politics. It's one of those books that you can't seem to put down, but when you finally get to the end, you read the last paragraph over and over again, hoping that there was more to read.

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Note to self: Do not read any more David Sedaris books in public. You had been warned and yet you insisted on reading Holidays on Ice in a packed R train whereupon your distinguished gentleman of a seatmate glanced at your book, saw "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" in large print, and looked away in whiplash fashion. It didn't help that you were coughing slash guffawing every five minutes, you weirdo.

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Requiem for a Dream was based on a novel written by Hubert Selby, Jr., who claims that his umbilical cord was wound around him 36 hours before he was born causing cyanosis and subsequently, brain damage. It is a fascinating film, with many beautiful shots like the ones of Coney Island, Brooklyn (director Darren Aronofsky's hometown), the infamous hiphop montage shots, the split screen scenes of Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and Harry (Jared Leto) and that cool scene where Sara (Ellen Burstyn) frantically cleans her apartment.

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Ooh, speaking of movies, there's a glitch in the netflix system which we accidentally discovered. So now we get six DVDs at a time instead of three. Woohoo!



{Things Are What You Make of Them, Bishop Allen} - I was spending my days with my demons, yeah