Just in at The Rabbit Hole, a slew of heavy CDs from top metal bands and guitar gods of the last 25 years. Check out our tower of a CD display featuring loads of Metallica, Megadeth, Lynch Mob, King’s X, Queensryche, Ozzy Osbourne and many others. In the same stack, find the majority of the Joe Satriani and Steve Vai catalogs, plus G3, Yngwie Malmsteen, and more. These are in outstanding condition and priced in the $5 range!
We’ve also doubled the cassette inventory and re-arranged our upstairs space for easier record shopping and better viewing of our many events (see our Events page).
We are doing it again. Hosting another after hours show here. This time we have three experimental, noise bands lined up for March 6th, beginning at 7:00 and going until the audience can’t take it anymore or the speakers catch on fire.
Speaking of free shows. I just watched the below video of Will Crum sneaking into Ikea, setting up, and proceeding to do a live, uninvited set. Pretty funny. Of course, management reacted in a predictable way, attempting to negate all fun. Reminds of that other video we posted here about the crazy book store in Salem.
We plan on having D.B. Johnson here sometime in April, after his new book is released. We make sure to keep his excellent children’s books in stock: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg and Henry Climbs a Mountain. Here is the trailer for the new book, Henry’s Night:
The video below is Neil Gaiman promoting the new movie adapted from his book, Coraline. Filmed in his house, in Alfred Hitchcock style. Also in Gaiman news, his book The Graveyard Book, won the Newbury award.
A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King’s The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.
Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel’s grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, typed over and over again.
Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as “a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King”, has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.
We all had a good laugh about this Shining trailer edited as if Nora Roberts penned it rather than Stephen King:
One of those brilliant works that takes explanations we take for granted and demolishes them just by looking at them with fresh eyes. For example, Jacobs turned the usual prehistorical explanation of agriculture and urbanism upside-down. According to Jacobs, cities predated agriculture. Agriculture could not have happened without a city somewhere.
After persuasively demonstrating how that had to be the case, Jacobs uses the concept of “new work†and import replacement arising in pre-neolithic urban settlements to trace the whole history of urban life from Catal Huyuk 10,000 years ago to Los Angeles and Tokyo in the 20th century.
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan has to be the best musician’s autobiography ever written.
Dylan opens up more than he ever has about himself and his history, but charms the reader with his sympathetic observations of other artists, often ones you wouldn’t expect like Frank Sinatra, Jr. The following passage about Dylan hearing a Ricky Nelson song on a radio while sitting in a folk club kitchen with Tiny Tim is a good example:
One afternoon I was in there pouring a Coke into a glass from a milk pitcher when I heard a voice coming cool through the screen of the radio speaker. Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, “Travelin’ Man.” Ricky had a smooth touch, the way he crooned in fast rhythm, the tonation of his voice. He was different from the rest of the teen idols, had a great guitarist who played like a cross between a honky-tonk hero and a barn dance fiddler. Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn’t sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you’d never mistake him for a shaman. It didn’t feel like his endurance was ever being tested to the utmost, but it didn’t matter. He sang his songs calm and steady like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurling past him. His voice was sort of mysterious and made you fall into a certain mood. (pp. 13-4)
The book begins with Dylan, in New York, being introduced to Jack Dempsey around the time he signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond. After that it’s one legendary figure, some famous, some not, after another. Dylan spends a lot of time on the early days in New York and the Greenwich Village scene of the early sixties, jumps back to his home state of Minnesota, then jumps ahead to his disillusionment with mega-fame in the late sixties, back to the early days in the Village then ahead again to recording Oh Mercy in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois in 1989 after having recovered his mojo recording with the Grateful Dead.
What a life he led! What a collection of experiences and observations. If it is true that the purpose of our existence is to view and experience creation for the Creator, then the Creator got his/her money’s worth with Dylan.
… Ellis traces a twisted path through the perverse underbelly of America. It’s the story of a disillusioned detective named Michael McGill and his sexy young sidekick, Trix, as the two set out to find the one thing that can save America from itself: a second, secret Constitution of the United States.
The book got great reviews, but it is not from the squimish or the easily offended. I would recommend it for those who – oh, who am I kidding? I have no idea to whom I would recommend this book to, or at least I would not want to describe the kind of people who might like it in a blog that has a mixed age, mixed interest readership like this one.
Perhaps, but not necessarily, at the opposite end of the spectrum we are also stocking See You in a Hundred Years, which has the tagline, “Discover One Young Family’s Search for a Simpler Life…Four Seasons of Living in the Year 1900. The Library Journal says:
How many of us have wished for a simpler life, free of high-pressure careers, traffic and communication gridlock, pollution, terrorist threats, etc.? Adventure travel writer Ward (An Explorer’s Guide to the Field Museum) did more than wish. With his lawyer wife and two-year-old son, he left high-pressure New York City and moved to Virginia to live (as much as possible) as they would have lived in 1900. One of the more amusing parts of Ward’s account is how much modern technology was required to prepare the family for living without modern technology. But live in the early 1900s they did, and the reader, courtesy of Ward’s vivid prose and gift for characterization, lives with them. From learning the mysterious ways of farm animals to deciphering the riddles of a wood-burning stove, from realizing the possibility of self-sufficiency to becoming part of a community, from trying to rescue a marriage of detached individuals to celebrating a truly committed union, we follow this family’s story, finding that we are as reluctant as they for it to end. It is difficult to imagine any library, public or academic, that would not want to purchase this book, informed throughout by Ward’s wry sense of humor, passion, and objectivity. —M.C. Duhig, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh
Just in at The Rabbit Hole, a slew of heavy CDs from top metal bands and guitar gods of the last 25 years. Check out our tower of a CD display featuring loads of Metallica, Megadeth, Lynch Mob, King’s X, Queensryche, Ozzy Osbourne and many others. In the same stack, find the majority of the Joe Satriani and Steve Vai catalogs, plus G3, Yngwie Malmsteen, and more. These are in outstanding condition and priced in the $5 range! 
