A couple of pointless lists

1. Three records I bought in one fell swoop at Renaissance Records in Dayton OH one Saturday in the fall of 1986:

(l-r Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill LP, Smiths "Ask" 12" single, Egg Hunt "Me And You" b/w "We All Fall Down 7"... just saying - what an amazing time to be alive! "Hey, Geoff! What's new?" and this is the haul for a random week. I mean, I do enjoy the fact that music is basically free now, and the attendant moral ambiguities thereof. But there was something very wonderful about the pre-internet days of being excited about a record's impending release. Also hot was spring '87, getting Louder Than Bombs and Sign O' The Times the same day.)

2. Three books I have actually thrown across the room whilst reading:

How Soon Is Never by Marc Spitz (no, not the swimmer); this book was about a devoted fan's effort to get the Smiths back together and fails utterly both as fan-tome and novel. It doesn't get rock-geek enough for rock geeks and the narrative and writer's style both fail just hard enough that, and I may be misremembering here, when the narrator actually meets up with Johnny Marr for drinks, I was moved to actually heave this bodily (librarily?) across by then-boudoir with a repulsed "Goddammit!"

Smashed by Coren Zailckas: This autobiographical tale of a "drunken girlhood" made me nuts, especially when she gets to the end of her tale and just quits drinking. I wonder all the time if she's still dry. She goes to a bldg where there is an AA meeting, freaks at the people standing around smoking, then goes home to her drummer boyfriend. Maybe twice; I forget. BUT, where I was driven to throwing was in the acknowledgements where she thanks Pete Doherty and Carl Barat from the Libertines and (prepare, you just may throw your keyboard out the window) "Windows '95." She thanks Windows 95.

In My Blood by John Sedgwick - this guy is Edie's cousin and his book purports to be a look into "six generations of madness" in one family, and I bought it for cheep on Alibris hoping for additional Edie dirt, as one does.

Every thing he says re Edie Sedgwick is cribbed from THE Edie book, that is the Jean Stein one. But everything. He merely moves the sentence order around and uses phrases such as "A friend said..."

I have to admit I didn't have very high hopes for this because I had tried to read his novel The Education of Mrs Bemis a couple of years ago and had to let it slide from my hands when coming across an author intrusion-intensive reference to a character parking her car while listening to Counting Crows. I could just picture old JS calling his 23-year old daughter to see what was hip and old SkiDaughter McBigHips saying "I dunno, Dad...Counting Crows?"

I spilled some aftershave on this moving, which is how it happened to move to the top of the to-be-read stack. SO this is a very recent development. And for the sake of verisimilitude, I will now [pause] throw the book.

Done!