It’s Monday at Yoyodyne Industries.

  • Just fin­ished V. Don’t know what I think about it yet. My short response is I think we’d be much bet­ter off if more polit­i­cal nov­els were writ­ten that way, that is, cir­cum­spect in their analy­sis of right and wrong, while pre­serv­ing a stri­dent moral clar­i­ty. Maybe Kurt Mon­dau­gen’s sto­ry embar­rassed Pyn­chon as a crude anal­o­gy to the Holo­caust, but the voyeurism and sadism cap­tured there­in is with­out equal when it comes to eroti­cized polit­i­cal violence.
  • Com­plete­ly shift­ing gears: I’m hooked on Xbox 360. Real­ly. This new game Bioshock is unbe­liev­ably beau­ti­ful and pret­ty hor­ri­fy­ing at the same time. Be my friend on Xbox Live — my user­name is Mutant Dis­co!
  • Oth­er things I’m into right now: local blogs. I’ve been read­ing The Pover­ty Jet Set and Fun Vam­pires reli­gious­ly late­ly for a num­ber of rea­sons. When I first start­ed blog­ging I thought it was best to main­tain some sort of nar­row focus and cul­ti­vate an ‘expert’s’ per­spec­tive. I’m off that now. Well off. I’m thrilled to read blogs that incor­po­rate mul­ti­me­dia extrav­a­gan­za and are all over the place in their cov­er­age. Sure I still read plen­ty of rig­or­ous­ly nar­row blogs, the lat­est addi­tion being End(-)of(-)World Music (via Zoilus).
  • Also God & a Bot­tle. In the scant five plus months I’ve been at the new gig, I’ve found myself seek­ing out blogs well-estab­lished crit­ics who end­ed up in new media some­how or oth­er. Joe Keyes has been doing his thing for quite some time and I’ve been read­ing him just about that long. Since I rarely ever pick up whichev­er local week­ly he’s writ­ing for here in Philly any­more, I usu­al­ly swing by his blog to catch up on his lat­est mus­ings. And it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to be remind­ed which movies I’m not see­ing because I don’t live in NYC any­more. It’s always great to read some­one who’s already churn­ing out loads of copy every­where, yet finds time to take a deep breath and just get out those ran­dom, sum­ma­riz­ing thoughts that order wild­ly dis­parate projects.
  • Swing by and read Bryan’s Max Roach obit, writ­ten through a review of Mon­ey Jun­gle.
  • What’s next? Lawrence Williams’ The Fiery Fur­nace, How to Eat Your Water­mel­on in White Com­pa­ny (and Enjoy It), This is Eng­land and way more Bioshock.
  • I’m crazy look­ing for­ward to launch­ing BMIML 2.0.