Herman's sermons

If you like your movie reviews to only contain the words "good", "sweet", "stupid" or "retarded", then look no further than Herman's Movies. Purporting to be a 15-year-old boy from the United States who loves video games and Macdonalds (I have my doubts), Nick Herman writes pithy but devastating reviews, culminating in a no-nonsense thumbs up or thumbs down verdict. Of Vin Diesel movie The Fast and The Furious, he writes, "This movie was cool espcially with all the sweet cars yeah there pretty hot sweet rides." Legend.

The Mexican

Last night me and flatmate Jamie found ourselves sitting in our lounge eating Jalapeno pepper flavoured popcorn with a Mexican called Griselda who neither of us had met before, watching Rock School. "Embrace the randomness," Jamie whispered to me.

Search and you shall find

Inevitably, some visitors to this blog have stumbled upon it from search engines, like Google blogsearch, or MSN search. The poor fools! Luckily, thanks to modern technology (thanks sitemeter), I can see what visitors to Electric Goose searched for to find me. Here's a sample of recent ones:

• rinky dinks
• old nudist couples
• diane arbus
• Jacqui Electric Company
• devendra banhart
• circus freaks pics
• val kilmer postman always rings twice
• dylan brixton
• Hugh Dennis
• Rock School
  

What does this mean? I don't know. But you know your life has gone desperately wrong when you find yourself searching the internet for "old nudist couples".

Booked up

Sometimes a man just has to make lists, and December is the best month to do it… Here are the ten best books I've read this year (obviously not necessarily released this year, that would be crazy - though some are). I’d recommend these to anyone, so if you need something to read...

1) Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
2) Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
3) American Pastoral – Philip Roth
4) Lolita – Vladimir Nabakov
5) Stuart: A Life Backwards – Alexander Masters
6) The Accidental – Ali Smith
7) Dispatches – Michael Herr
8) The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
9) The Rum Diaries – Hunter S Thompson
10) Saturday – Ian McEwan

A toast to 24-hour drinking

This morning at around 8am, my friend Dan got up, had two slices of toast, a cup of tea and two shots of glacier mint vodka. I don't know whether this was to celebrate the introduction of 24-hour drinking, or in eager anticipation of our forthcoming weekend trip to Bristol, where GM vodka was our tipple of choice - and I'm sure to some his breakfast antics might seem like the very pinnacle of excess. But I like the way he didn't go overboard on the toast.

Behind NME lines

"Despite it being hailed by all and sundry as a masterpiece upon its release in 1996..." begins NME's review this week of Belle and Sebastian’s live version of their If You’re Feeling Sinister album. All and sundry? Not quite. One music paper bucked the trend back in 1996, giving the album a lowly 5 out of 10. The paper? None other than, er, NME.

Albums of the year

As nothing that’s any good is going to come out before 31 December apart from Bryan Adams’ Greatest Hits, it’s probably the time to name my five albums of the year (plus five more that deserve a mention):

1) Funeral – Arcade Fire
2) Arular – MIA
3) Get Behind Me Satan – White Stripes
4) Medicine Box – Sons and Daughters
5) Bang Bang Rock and Roll – Art Brut

Also great:
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
The Alternative to Love – Brendan Benson
The New Fellas – The Cribs
Martha Wainwright - Martha Wainwright
Silent Alarm – Bloc Party

They just like peace

Went to see Salman Rushdie talk and read from his novel at the South Bank centre last night. Unfortunately I have some kind of ultra-flu and was dosed up on these extra-strong cough sweets my boss gave me, so I can’t really give any credible or coherent insights about the man, except for the following thoughtsentence.

Yes, it’s true, he looks like an owl academic with beard and when he arrives onstage, he faces the crowd, and waves like a little boy – it’s surprisingly endearing - and he thinks the Indians and Pakistanis should just leave the Kashmiris the fuck alone, they’re not cowardly to like peace (as the old Indian joke goes), they just LIKE PEACE, what’s wrong with that? and the law banning incitement to religious hatred is, like, bullshit, because you should be able to criticise all ideas freely and that includes religion, as long as you separate the intellectual from the personal, just protect freedom of speech and all the other civil liberties follow and please stop going on about Midnight’s Children, that was 25 years ago...

The new Lowe

Went to see Rob "West Wing" Lowe in Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin's play A Few Good Men on Friday. The play appeared on Broadway in 1989 before it became a Hollywood film starring Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson. For those unfamiliar with the plot, naval officer-lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Lowe) has to defend two young marines accused of murdering a weaker recruit during a "code red" procedure (a ceremonial dressing down, which might include shaving the offender's head, or beating the shit out of him). The code red may or may not have been ordered by the marines' superior, Colonel Jessop. Courtroom drama and lots of shouting ensues.

The whole thing was enjoyable, watchable and surprisingly really good, though the characters are never quite more than the high-quality dialogue they speak. But Lowe has enough charm to keep the most jaded cynic smiling wistfully for days. If you've seen the film, what was strange about the play was the fact that the actors played it for laughs on a surprising number of occassions - and got them.

Contrasting strongly with the West End glamour of Rob Lowe's perfect hair was the grainy violence of the "initiation ceremony" footage of British marines that emerged on Sunday. It shows two naked marines fighting each other in the mud while others (also naked) stand around egging them on. When one of the men appears to refuse to fight, a superior officer, dressed as a surgeon (the other is in schoolgirl grab), kicks him in the head, knocking him out. The footage seems slightly speeded up, giving the whole thing the appearance of an old-fashioned silent movie, with the costumes adding to the surrealism. It looks like some weird ultraviolent playground. Media reaction so far has been flippant, unshocked - they are marines after all.

Dissing Devendra

Read my Devendra Banhart single review here.

No offence to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's keyboard player is intended.