Chapter 27

• On a cold evening in early December, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a disturbed drifter from Hawaii, met ex-Beatle John Lennon. Moments later, the entire world was shocked senseless Based on chilling true events, Jared Leto is unforgettable in his mental and physical portrayal of an unhinged and angry man whose descent into madness led him to commit one of the most infamous crimes of the 20th century.

On a raw, cold evening in early December, 1980, Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto), a disturbed drifter from Hawaii, met ex-Beatle John Lennon. Moments later, the entire world was shocked senseless. Based on chilling true events, Jared Leto is unforgettable in his mental and physical portrayal of an unhinged and angry man whose descent into madness led him to commit one of the most infamous crimes of the 20th century. It is a psychological portrait like no other that will leave you stunned long after it! s nerve-shattering and tragic conclusion.

Dig!

• Running Time 107 Min System Requirements: Filmed over seven years (1996-2002) and culled from over 1500 hours of footage by rising director Ondi Timoner, DIG! plunges into the underbelly of rock n roll unearthing an amazing true tale of success, self destruction, friendship, and the ultimate rivalry between two up-and-coming bands; Brian Jonestown Massacre led by the tormented, self-destructi

Seven years in the making and culled from over 1500 hours of footage, DIG! plunges into the underbelly of rock ‘n’ roll, unearthing an incredible true story of success and self-destruction. Anton A. Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor of the Dandy Warhols are star-crossed friends and bitter rivals â€" DIG! is the story of their loves and obsessions, gigs and recordings, arrests and death threats, uppers and downers, and the delicate balance between art and commerce.

Italian fabulist Italo Calvino observed that there are two kinds of artists--those who are prolific and successful, and the tortured geniuses, each gazing at the other in deep jealousy and admiration. The two rock bands chronicled in the documentary DiG! fall easily into this equation. On the side of the tortured geniuses is the Brian Jonestown Massacre, led by the psychedelic and volatile Anton Newcombe. Portland's the Dandy Warhols, fronted by Courtney Taylor, fulfill the role of the artists who, while unable to plumb the artistic depths of their friendly rivals, achieve a fair degree of popular acclaim (in Europe, anywa! y). Shot over seven years and containing some astonishingly in! timate f ootage, the film represents a labor of love for director Ondi Timoner, who befriended, lived, and traveled with the bands. DiG! will likely be most remembered for a remarkable scene of rock and roll implosion--a show in LA's Viper Room after which the Brian Jonestown Massacre were expected to ink a record deal. Instead, the band erupted in a fist fight onstage. Among themselves.

Does it go uphill or downhill from here? Depends on your definition of the terms. While! dooming their careers, the Brian Jonestown Massacre manage to crank out an insane number of self-distributed albums--including three records in a single year. Courtney Taylor and the Dandies regard the musical output of their peers worshipfully and find themselves virtually ignored stateside but huge stars across the pond. While tens of thousands of fans in Germany and the UK sing along to every word at sold-out festivals headlined by the Dandies, Newscombe leads his crew in a nine-hour set in a dingy club for an audience of ten. Throughout the film there are controlled substances imbibed, clothing shed, sitars broken, punches thrown, arrests made. Taylor performs double duty as narrator of the film, begging the question of whether to accept his assertion that he fronts "the most well-adjusted band in America" at face value. The destined-for-greater-things Joel Gion, BJM's tambourine player, is the thief of every scene in which he appears, playing Flavor Flav to Newscombe'! s Chuck D. For those who want even more immersion, the DVD inc! ludes th e option to "zoom," or expand, various scenes--a very cool feature. Those responsible for the hilarious excesses of DiG! have made a movie worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as This Is Spinal Tap, as mixed an honor as that might be.

DVD Features

The second of this set's two discs is practically its own sequel. Director Ondi Timoner had 1500 hours of footage to work with, so there was plenty of good material left on the cutting-room floor that found its way onto this supplemental disc. The deleted scenes include an unintentionally haunting pre-9/11 interview on a New York! rooftop with BJM's Anton Newcombe; the twin towers loom behind the singer as he attempts to justify singing about love yet engaging in violence, drawing tenuous parallels between himself and militant prophets throughout history. This, and Newcombe's delight in listening to Charles Manson's musical recordings, is about as heavy as it gets, though. Other extras include various videos by the bands, with the conspicuous absence of the Dandy Warhol's David LaChapelle-directed "Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth." (The omission is understandable in light of the Dandies' sour grapes over the $400,000 video.) The Where Are They Now features find various members of the bands a little older and reflective, with new families and new gigs, reminiscing fondly on the seven years spent under Timoner's watchful spycam. As is the case with the film proper, the mood picks up whenever Joel Gion appears. When is this guy going to get his own talk show? For fans of Timoner's commentary o! n disc 1 there is--get this--footage of the director and her p! artners recording that commentary. Why there's no footage of Timoner watching and commenting on the footage of herself recording the commentary is anyone's guess. --Ryan Boudinot

Dig These Discs by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective	Strung Out in Heaven	Bravery Repetition & Noise
And This Is Our Music	Thank God for Mental Illness	Bringing It All Back Home Again

Dig These Discs by the Dandy Warhols

Welcome to the Monkey House

Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia

The Dandy Warhols Come Down

Dig These Documentaries (and One Classic Mockumentary) on DVD

!

This Is Spinal Tap (Special Edition)	Metallica: Some Kind of Monster	Hype
X (The Band): The Unheard Music	End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones	Gimme Shelter

Choke

• ISBN13: 9780307388926
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting “saved” by fellow diners who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine.Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-s! chool dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.

"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlic! h.

Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk terri! tory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."

Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pa! ges: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels