I love this.

DJ FLACK presents: Beyond the Valley of the Smurfs a multi-genre Ableton Mash-up of epic proprtions.

Tracklisting: 01. My City Was Gone - The Pretenders
02. Sun is Shining Instrumental - Abijah
03. Port-au-prince - Deadbeat
04. Connections Vocal - Leaders of The New School
05. Connections instrumental - Leaders of the New School
06. Not Green instrumental - 40 Glocc
07. Ravers Suck Our Sound - La Funk Mob
08. Come to the Party - The Smurfs
09. Rhythm and Sound - Burial Mix Jah version
10. Papi Chulo Instrumental - Funkdoobie
11. The Potion Instrumental - Ludacris
12. I'll Be Around Instrumental - Cee-lo
13. I'll Be Around Vocal - Cee-lo
14. One Draw Riddim
15. The Boat Family - The Roches
16. Money Maker Instrumental - Ludacris
17. Calling All Absentees - Kid Gusto
18. Music for Martians - Danny Breaks
19. Full Tilt - Warlock
20. Gasolina Instrumental - Daddy Yankee
21. Gasolina Vocal - Daddy Yankee
22. Galang Instrumental (Dave Kelly Mix) - MIA
23. Cowboy - Bad Brains
24. Jump Up and Rail Instrumental - Ms. Thing
25. The Boomin System - LL Cool J
26. Mad Ants Riddim
27. June 16th -The Minutemen
28. Thioa Thoing Instrumental - R. Kelly
29. One Thing Leads to Another - The Fixx
30. Supafine - Soulja
31. Boardwalk - Dj Technics
32. Fat Larry Skank - Benny ill, Kode9
33. Spiderman shit - Dukey Man
34. Skrew Dat Instrumental - Mike Jones
35. Born To Roll - Masta Ace
36. Ch Ching Instrumental - Lady Sovereign
37. Shanty Town - Mr. Scruff 38. Twista - Scuba
39. Crosseyed and Painless - Talking Heads
40. Roll that Shit - Dj Class
41. Jah Love all Aliens - Heavy Metal Dub
42. Mr Soul - Buffalo Springfield
43. Saigon Killer - Clipz
44. Birds Appear - Dj Flack
45. Holland Daze - Dj Flack
46. Lookin for a Contract Inst.- Yaggfu Front
47. Three Car Jam - The Minutemen

Download it as one hour-long MP3 here: http://www.djflack.com/smurfmix.html

9. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1774. Most people know what this book is about before they read it I think, but if you don't here come spoilers: it's about Werther, who falls in love with a woman engaged to another and eventually offs himself. Might sound kinda pathetic, but the character and the writing make this little book a gem. If I had to compare it to anything I'd compare it to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. It is epistolary for the most part and a philosophical consideration of love and unrequited love, as well as nature, art and God. When Werther killed himself I felt like it was the right thing for him to do under the circumstances, or at least that I could understand why he did it.

7. The Sport of the Gods - Paul Laurence Dunbar

1902. Great book. Very plot-driven and gut-wrenching. A black family with a simple life in the South is shattered when the father is framed for a crime. Not even really framed, just blamed and convicted on absolutely no evidence. His family find themselves unable to get work and move to New York City where they fare no better. The odds were stacked against them at every turn. A well-written gem about the ugly truths of racism at the turn of the century.

8. Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis

1922. Really liked it. Sinclair Lewis writes so beautifully that he can make even a middle class businessman's life lyrical.

The novel deals with traditional conservative ideals like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and unquestioning patriotism and loyalty. Babbitt briefly entertains a liberal thought. He sympathizes with the labor movement for about thirty seconds, cheats on his wife and drinks too much for a few months, and loses all his friends and most of his social standing.

Then his wife gets appendicitis and he rushes to her side to be the perfect husband once again, and he conforms to the standards he was living by before, with just a bit of niggling doubt left in his mind. He places his hope of ever breaking out of society's mold in his son and hopes he does a better job of it.

For someone who basically upholds views I disagree with for most of the book, Babbitt is wonderfully human and loveable. He struggles with real-life questions which I think nearly every one can relate to. His life gets too routine and he experiments, but returns to the safe, straight and narrow path before long. And the dialogue is tip-top!

Dashing Sinclair Lewis in a bow tie and three-piece suit and a watch fob!

5. Jimmie Dale and Blue Envelope Murder by Frank L. Packard

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
These Jimmie Dale books are solid if a little repetitive. This one had a great twisty plot full of disguises and smugglers and murders. It's set in New York City and on Long Island during prohibition. Dale and his fiancee make up a sort of vigilante team bringing crooks to justice when they've managed to elude the cops. Unfortunately I've finished the whole series now, but would heartily recommend them to fans of E. Phillips Oppenheim, Valentine WIlliams or Gerald Kersh.


View all my reviews.

6. FRANNY AND ZOOEY by J.D. Salinger

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Haha. My review. Okay. I can't believe I just read this finally at 42. Actually my wife read it to me.



To me the joy of Salinger is in the details. It's practically like reading Proust in some ways. The action is incredibly slowed down by the dense narration of every infinitesimal second as it passes.



It seems quaint. The smoking, the telephones, the plots of Zooey's television scripts. The New York-ness when they don't even leave the apartment. Most of all the books. No those aren't quaint, they're loveable, the sagging shelves of dog-earred paperbacks.



How does the Glass family manage to be so charming, loveable, tragic and broken all at once? And a little loathsome with their self-aggrandizing, painfully over-intellectualized, rants at each other and themselves?



And what about the religion in it? Does Zooey really believe there's a bit of Jesus in every one of us, in every member of any audience, and that he (as well as Franny) has to act his best for them? And that makes Franny feel better after her intellectual crisis, which in a way was really about how unbearably stupid the rest of the people in the world seem to be if you're a Glass? And lastly, am I an insufferable idiot for empathizing with that feeling? Or does everyone feel that the rest of the world is unbelievably moronic too? During the reign of Bush II this certainly has seemed often to be the case.


View all my reviews.

4. Hi, Barney! by Marie McSwigan

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book, written right after WWII, is about an 8-year-old boy, Barney. He's relatively well-off it seems, but he hasn't yet learned the prejudices of his family or grasped the idea of class. He talks to the black garbage man and plays with the colored children, to use the laguage of the book, and invites the Italian gardener to his birthday party. At first it seems like it's going to be a good moral tale about how he brings round his stuffy grandmother and gets her to let him play with the black kids he likes instead of the stuffy rich kids from his school, but it doesn't turn out that way. It kind of tries to walk a middle line showing things for what they were at the time, but not judging. The black family he befriends initially bring him home when he's lost and then they willingly accept charity from his rich grandfather to help their sick daughter. The tension between the races and classes are occasionally alluded to delicately, but most of it is just assumed to be understood by readers.

( Read more... )

Can u dig it?


So who is up in Boston? According to my careful painstaking personal research: ( Read more... )

Started the year off with a bang with:

1. Lesbian Limbo - Rita Dean

1963. Women become lesbians because they are abused and raped by evil men, because that's the only logical reason any woman would turn away from the dick, right? Ew, and excuse me?! This was either the worst book I've ever read or the second worst. The Frantic Ones by Ken Mirbeau was worse written, but it had a slightly better and less revolting plot. In this one the women are predictably won over by sensitive, but manly, men. Except the truly incorrigible one who gets her just desserts. Arg!



2. The Haunted Bookshop - Christopher Morley

1918. Great book. Dreamy bookseller becomes entangled in an extremely unlikely plot. This book has everything, romance, treachery, lots of Morleyesque bookish digressions on human nature and the nobility of the bookselling profession. Set in Brooklyn, but on made up streets. Loved it.

45. The Golden Spur - Dawn Powell

1962. A young man from Ohio goes to the Village to try to find his real father. He finds many men who think they could be his father and has a crazy time with the bohemian art crowd on the way, but I'm not sure he ever figured it out. The ending was a bit ambiguous. Great time to be in New York, great details, excellent writing, good plot.

2007 was a really good year for reading for me. I was unemployed for most of it. In 2005 I read only 27 books, in 2006 I read 33, in 2007, 45. Yay. I wish I read more and faster, but that's how I am, so hooray for small gains.

1946. A Jewish guy with an abusive father and a lesbian sister goes through psychotherapy during WWII. They smoke constantly in therapy. He figures out how he feels about his family and moves on form the way he was stuck in life. A good protrayal of what therapy can do for a person. Good character development. Jewish issues. Oh and he's a newspaper photographer which is pretty cool. A lot of focus on how the seder has affected him year after year as the youngest son, reading the questions, but feeling that his father was desecrating what ought to be sacred just by being there. Dense, but worth the effort of reading.

43. Rat Pack - Shane Stevens

1975. Four black youths go on a crime-spree in New York City. Awesome gritty detail. I really felt sorry for them and almost wanted them to get away even though by the end they'd robbed numerous people, stabbed a woman, raped another and finally killed one by accident. Oh, and blown up a police car, lest I forget. It really let you see into their heads, into how they felt they had no decent choices in life. Read it in a few hours.

41. Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue - Frank L. Packard

1922. I read the series out of order. It doesn't matter much; they're all pretty similar, but there was one plot point I knew all along that kind of ruined the big surprise. The gray seal alias Jimmie Dale and his beloved, the Tocsin, take on many identities in this series and it is better not to know who they are before hand. The criminals also take on many identities. Packard is pretty heavy-handed with foreshadowing so it's not to hard to guess what will happen, but I would have preferred not to know. So try to read them in order.

It takes place in New York City and they are always on the Bowery and the Lower East Side and in opium dens in Chinatown. It's pretty cool.

42. Slake's Limbo - Felice Holman

1974. This is one of those 70s young adult books that you can't help but think they wouldn't let kids read today or perhaps even publish.

It's about a really down and out white kid in NYC. He's abused by his aunt who he lives with. He has a cot in her kitchen. He always hungry. He's short for his age so the kids beat him up a lot and take his stuff. He's near-sighted and he doesn't have glasses.

So what does he do? He runs away and lives in the subway. It then becomes almost as cool as From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where the kids run away and hide in the Metropolitan Museum. Except that it's so sad and pathetic in a way. Atmospheric, with great seventies details.

I suppose it's supposed to be a parable for what the spirit can endure and rise above, but unless your kids were really so desperately unhappy they needed such a book, or so incredibly stable that it wouldn't effect them, I wouldn't give them this one. Very depressing and liable to encourage them to run away and try to live in the subway. And not much hope at the end either...

Male fantasy of a spaceman landing on an entire planet of women who have built up a mythology that the men will come for them some day. They war over him and they all want to sleep with him. Hilariously good read, but so puerile.

My Flickr account. Who's on Flickr? Represent!

This one is signed J. Oval. ( Read more... )

Sleep is now impossible. Oy. I'm doomed.

I read this a few years ago, but I've come to the conclusion that the cover art by Tom Huffman needs to be more generally appreciated and available online. Jewish bullfighter in Mexico with VD and whores. Very strange. Very 1968.

The Red Sox just won the world series. Even though they won in Colorado, a huge crowd has gathered around my house near Fenway Park, honking their horns, playing drums, someone is even playing a tuba. The cops are here now but I don't think there's all that much they can do. I expect it will be noisy for at least two more hours, luckily I wasn't planning on going to bed.

It's nowhere near as exciting the second time, I don't care what anyone says. But it's nice. People were yelling Yankees Suck. That always cracks me up.

39. Parnassus On Wheels - Christopher Morley

1917. A bookseller with a wonderfully outfitted horse-drawn wagon decides to sell the business to a women he meets during his travels. They journey together for a few days, meet with foul-play, sell some books and end up getting married and opening a book store in Brooklyn, the adventures of which are chronicled in Morley's 1919 The Haunted Bookshop.