Finished two books today: polished off the last of Chris Moore's "Island Of The Sequined Love Nun" and I tore through the entirety of Moore's new book A Dirty Job tonight. I was planning on killing some time tonight playing God Of War, but the game is unpredictably buggy (some of the save points don't work, and it occasionally freezes when loading cut scenes). Its a damn shame, too, because its a fun game, and quite inventive at times (I especially dig the fact that an entire part of the game takes place in a temple CHAINED to the back of the titan Chronos).
And now, for a rant:
I love working at a book store. Everything about the job is immensely pleasurable with one major exception: the music. There is a certain vague "noise threshold" rule we have at the store, so we can't play anything too loud and offensive. In other words: jazz, early country, blues, world music, and classical are all A-Okay. Anything rock and roll + rap related? Negatory, peeps (although I have managed to sneak some questionable discs into rotation: the Cocteau Twins were playing for awhile, and a copy of The Zombies "Odyssey And Oracle" that I sold to the store is still in rotation). Every day at work, I'm assaulted by lukewarm, mediocre shit merchants like Norah Jones, Michael Buble (that last name, just looking at it typed out makes me want to teleport myself to his exact current location and jam his face in a pie tin full of whipped cream and heated shards of glass), Jamie Cullum (I think that's his name, he's a British guy who does boring-as-hell covers of Jeff Buckley and Radiohead on a piano, my boss has an unfortunate love of his music), Gypsy Kings, A Very Chipmunk Christmas (its not playing now, but I was assaulted with it for an entire month straight, and I now that come December that abomination will be going back in the disc changer), and a lot of other things that I would gladly pay cold hard cash to the person /s who can wipe said musical artists and their collective work off the face of the earth. At least the music person at our store hates reggae: it spares me from having to listen to Bob Marley for the millionth time.
Its a shame that bookstores have this natural aversion to loud music (go to Borders, Barnes & Nobles, Changing Hands, etc etc... all of them are playing something mild and completely inoffensive). I think a lot of it is due to people's conception of reading being a quiet and placid activity, which I think is ludicrous. To me, there is nothing (well, almost nothing) more jarring, more exciting than a book. I don't want to listen to some 21st century hack recycling Sinatra tunes when I'm reading a book. I want to listen to My Blood Valentine, I want to listen to the Go-Betweens, I want to listen to Slick Rick, I want to listen to P-Funk, I want to listen to something that sounds like the way I feel when I read a book. Listening to the kind of shit we're forced to play in bookstores, its no wonder that literature has an image problem. Still, one can't frighten the old ladies away with that loud music... and contrary to what most people think, annoying crotchety old ladies with Harlequin paperback/James Patterson fetishes are what's keeping used bookstores afloat. Hipsters just don't come into the store often enough to challenge the spending power of the almighty Prunefingers dollar*.
*In a small way, the primacy of old ladies vs. hipster readers is kind of a blessing. My friend Kevin works at Zia records, and he always bitches to me about how they keep playing Bob Marley and Ryan Adams albums over and over again. Frankly, few things say "the yawning, all-consuming suffering of the Abyss" quite like a work environment saturated in Marley and Adams.
And now, for a rant:
I love working at a book store. Everything about the job is immensely pleasurable with one major exception: the music. There is a certain vague "noise threshold" rule we have at the store, so we can't play anything too loud and offensive. In other words: jazz, early country, blues, world music, and classical are all A-Okay. Anything rock and roll + rap related? Negatory, peeps (although I have managed to sneak some questionable discs into rotation: the Cocteau Twins were playing for awhile, and a copy of The Zombies "Odyssey And Oracle" that I sold to the store is still in rotation). Every day at work, I'm assaulted by lukewarm, mediocre shit merchants like Norah Jones, Michael Buble (that last name, just looking at it typed out makes me want to teleport myself to his exact current location and jam his face in a pie tin full of whipped cream and heated shards of glass), Jamie Cullum (I think that's his name, he's a British guy who does boring-as-hell covers of Jeff Buckley and Radiohead on a piano, my boss has an unfortunate love of his music), Gypsy Kings, A Very Chipmunk Christmas (its not playing now, but I was assaulted with it for an entire month straight, and I now that come December that abomination will be going back in the disc changer), and a lot of other things that I would gladly pay cold hard cash to the person /s who can wipe said musical artists and their collective work off the face of the earth. At least the music person at our store hates reggae: it spares me from having to listen to Bob Marley for the millionth time.
Its a shame that bookstores have this natural aversion to loud music (go to Borders, Barnes & Nobles, Changing Hands, etc etc... all of them are playing something mild and completely inoffensive). I think a lot of it is due to people's conception of reading being a quiet and placid activity, which I think is ludicrous. To me, there is nothing (well, almost nothing) more jarring, more exciting than a book. I don't want to listen to some 21st century hack recycling Sinatra tunes when I'm reading a book. I want to listen to My Blood Valentine, I want to listen to the Go-Betweens, I want to listen to Slick Rick, I want to listen to P-Funk, I want to listen to something that sounds like the way I feel when I read a book. Listening to the kind of shit we're forced to play in bookstores, its no wonder that literature has an image problem. Still, one can't frighten the old ladies away with that loud music... and contrary to what most people think, annoying crotchety old ladies with Harlequin paperback/James Patterson fetishes are what's keeping used bookstores afloat. Hipsters just don't come into the store often enough to challenge the spending power of the almighty Prunefingers dollar*.
*In a small way, the primacy of old ladies vs. hipster readers is kind of a blessing. My friend Kevin works at Zia records, and he always bitches to me about how they keep playing Bob Marley and Ryan Adams albums over and over again. Frankly, few things say "the yawning, all-consuming suffering of the Abyss" quite like a work environment saturated in Marley and Adams.