Book: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. The inspiration for Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work, Nickel and Dimed documents the life of the poorly paid in the US. Better written, more humorous and generally a lighter read than Toynbee’s diatribe, this one’s recommended for everyone.

CD: It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah, by Black Grape. The drunken genius of British pop that is Shaun Ryder made one helluva comeback with this record in 1995. Full of great groove, lyrical gems (my favourite being probably ”Jesus was a black man / Jesus was Batman / No no no wait / That was Bruce Wayne”) and out-of-tune singing, which is very hard to master. You can probably pick this up for pennies at your local used CD store, so go check it out now.

DVD: The Family Guy, season two R2 DVD. Still happy for finding this at £12 at Kelly’s Records. Actually I haven’t even had a chance to take a look at the episodes, but I just know they’re gonna be great. That and the fact that I’ve seen some of them on the telly. Ahem. So.

Book: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind – A compelling account of New Hollywood, the highs and especially the lows. My only complaint is that it concentrates on a handful of directors and producers and almost completely ignores the actors and non-movie brat directors. Still, definitely worth buying.

CD: Version 2.0 by Garbage – The sophomore album was a slight disappointment when it came out, and it took me all these years to take a second listen and realize how good it is. Here Garbage perfect the up-tempo pop song (Temptation waits, Push it, Sleep together) that was blossoming on their debut (I’m only happy when it rains, Stupid girl), do few mighty fine slow ones (The trick is to keep breathing, You look so fine), and don’t blunder as many times as they did before and after. Highly recommended.

DVD: The commentary track on the R2 release of The Man Who Wasn’t There by the Coen brothers – Compared to, for example, the otherwise interesting comment track on Nightmare Before Christmas, the Coens and Thornton are a barrel of laughs, while still – amazingly – managing to talk about the movie as well. Any commentary that points out the protagonist’s erection has to be worthwhile.

In a surge of originality, I’ve decided to start a periodical (weekly, biweekly, don’t know yet) listing of All Things Cool here. I’m struggling with Blosxom, Perl, and plugins to get the list integrated into the sidebar but meanwhile you can get it here, amongst all the other inconsequential entries. Enjoy.