I've just never gotten The Last Waltz. Dylan is great, but everything before that only sounds good on paper.

And along those lines, the emergence of Elvis.

I wish I could go back in time and see my parents watching 2001 in the theater! I can't believe they apparently sat through the whole thing.

Strangely enough (as a very infrequent theater goer), I did see three of these picks when they were new, including Pulp Fiction with no idea what it was going to be like (having only seen the commercial where two guys in suits shoot a guy who had just shot at them).
The original run of Twin Peaks is an excellent pick. …

I watch that and I feel like it's from some other planet than the one I live on.

And the ol' "try to find a way to hold the highest public officials to at least some minimal ethical standards" gambit.

Let's say the vaguest things we can! The thing that bothers me most is all of this!

Wasn't a bad decade for Tom Waits, Ween, Elliott Smith, The Flaming Lips, PJ Harvey, Dr. Dre, Tool, Bjork, the Melvins, The Magnetic Fields, Ministry… Not too hard to name others.

Layne Staley is presumably on the nod in the corner.

I'm comfortable just dismissing his solo career. And I honestly don't think I've listened to Audioslave even once in my life. But good grief if Badmotorfinger and Superunknown don't just completely define their era. Even in the midst of that big scene they were supposedly a key part of, Soundgarden always…

It seems to me that if you're going to count Training Day, you're duty bound to mention that it's a shit of a fuck of a lot better movie.

Nice!

The system of checks and balances presupposes that government officials be mature adults willing to act in the interest of the country.

But I think it was actually pretty obvious from the start that he was an unconscionable sociopath.

That dialect is like a Singapore English, something like that, is that right?

Right. I missed that fairly narrow window of opportunity to read it and say, "it'd never happen here."

"(and 4 volumes? meh.)"
You know that he wants to stretch that thing out over twenty-seven frickin' volumes, right?

Did you also read Soul Mountain?

My copy of House of Leaves came unbound as I was reading — I think because of the weird foldout flap thing on the cover. This was during a hot summer in which I didn't have air conditioning, and I remember reading the book on my bed with a fan blowing on me. By the time I was finishing the book, some of the first…

I'd be interested to know if The Familiar books are a worthwhile venture. I feel like they probably aren't, but at the time, I really liked House of Leaves.