As a lifelong New Jersey resident, the fact that I hadn’t sworn my life to loving this album is almost criminal. Well, I finally got around to falling in love with Greetings. I heard of a Rolling Stone review of this album where the author says something to the effect of… “Greetings is Subterranean Homesick Blues played at 78RPMs. Each song has more words than this review.” That’s how I like it.

The album kicks off with “Blinded by the Light,” which makes you wonder why Manfred Man ever decided to ruin it by changing “cut loose like a deuce” into “wrapped up like a douche.” Springsteen writes a long form poem about nothing and crams it into a 5 minute song. It’s so Bob Dylan and so awesome.

Next comes “Growing Up.” This track sounds the most like Springsteen now. It’s a total American youth anthem.

“Mary Queen of Arkansas” is a more somber tune and it properly placed. Things slow down before they heat up again, but the emotion is still cranked to “11.”

“Does This Bus Stop on 82nd Street?” has all the trappings of a hipster folk tune. Springsteen had the forethought to record a song with a question for a title and no chorus. This upbeat tune ends almost abruptly with a somber piano outro and a visual lyric about a Spanish woman throwing a rose out of a Harlem window. Or is it a bull fighting event? It’s both.

“Lost in the Flood” is a headbanging piano-driven ballad (is there such a thing?) with a long, visual story about a racecar driver’s untimely demise.

“The Angel” is one of the slowest tracks on the album. It continues the theme of painting vivid metaphors about fast cars on sad highways, Springsteen’s calling card.

Dancing commences on “For You.” The Boss has the uncanny ability of making you dance and cry at the same time and he executes this perfectly on this tune.

“Spirits in the Night” is probably one of the strongest tunes on the record (along with “Blinded by the Light.” A minor key song that makes the fingers tap and the hips sway, “Spirits in the Night” actually seems to have narrative structure and plot development. This song sounds like a Kerouac novel reads.

“It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City” concludes the adventure, packed with shifty characters. The shiftiest of them all (as I picture it) is Asbury Park.

Having spent a big chunk of my childhood in the Asbury Park area (Bradley Beach to be exact) the pictures in my head all revolve around a dying beach town where circus clowns and side show freaks are being replaced by pimps and drug dealers. Meanwhile, a few teenagers with big hearts sort through love, loss and adolescence in the strange city. This album is truly inspiring.

Choke might have been my favorite fiction novel of all time. The movie adaptation was poor. The only good thing about it was the concepts (which I was familiar with from the book), but cramming a 220 some-odd page novel into a 90-minute film means you get liberal and rewrite a little bit. Make it into a movie, don’t just shove a book into a screenplay!

Chuck Palahniuk’s other book-turned-film, Fight Club, worked so well because David Fincher took a good idea and made it into a new movie. This guy took a book and made it a film exactly based on the book. Every theme from the novel (Sex addiction, choking in restaurants, visiting a nursing home, building something with rocks, working at a Colonial theme park, running from the cops with your mom) was squeezed into the film without giving anyone time to even like the characters.

In Choke (the novel), Victor Mancini does weird things and has weird things happen to him every day. In the film, Victor Mancini seems to have one big fucked up day that, to him and the other characters, isn’t weird or fucked up at all. So it seems like a movie about nothing. Very disappointed. I wonder what I would have thought had this not been my favorite book. I probably wouldn’t have even cared about this movie one way or another.

Ok, so we all know this movie won Best Picture in the Golden Globes. And we all heard the great reviews. And we all had our friends tell us how great it was. So after months of prodding, I checked this one out.

Now, I had no clue what to expect and here’s what we get: a movie, partly in English, partly in Hindi (?) with subtitles about something totally alien to most westerners. A poor kid wins India’s version of “Who Wants to be a millionaire?” and the cops decide to lock him up on suspicion of cheating!

Now why in God’s name would you lock up a poor kid for getting rich on his own pluck and wit? Well, it ain’t America, kids! That’s for sure!

As if the foreign-ness of this movie (directed by Danny Boyle, who is English and was known for doing 28 Days Later and Trainspotting) totally made sense at the end when a bunch of strangers break into Indian dance at a train station.

Then it dawned on me. I had just watched my first Bollywood film! Had someone told me this (or something else about seeing a strange foreign, artsy film) I would have enjoyed it much more.

But in any case, the movie was great. It was thoroughly entertaining, though kind of strange.

The first Ben Stiller movie I ever saw was “Meet the Parents.” That film and this one have at least one thing in common, they make me horribly uncomfortable. The situations he gets himself into make me cringe! But I guess that’s the point. Overall, this was a cutsie rom-com without the standard happy ending. I hear its a remake, but I never saw the original.

I’m a big Chuck Klosterman fan, mainly because he’s the only “academic” with the balls to write about 80s heavy metal and appear serious (see “Fargo Rock City).

I did like “Sex, Drugs and Cocao Puffs” during a few points, but overall, I feel like in 2009, this book is irrelevant. Honestly, Saved by the Bell will always be relevant, but since 2004 (seriously?) many things have changed, particularly with regard to such fluid things as Internet porn and reality TV.

I was born in 1982, so GenX is technically somewhere between my parents and I. These are the kids who were in college when I was 12 and, now 40, they seem to think that analyzing pop culture like an anthropologist is still novel. It’s not. He comes off as exactly the kind of pretentious, wine-and-cheese eating jerk he claims to be against when he talks about how its okay for Midwesterners to love the Dixie Chicks and for a Guns ‘n’ Roses cover band to enjoy their lives.

I guess I’m probably jealous of the fact that Klosterman makes the same half-assed arguments in support of low-brow culture I make while arguing with my friends, only he made his arguments into a published book without counterpoints placed in between.

It’s really just a bunch of rants from some 30-something dude who likes Star Wars, heavy metal and sugar cereal. Where I come from, you don’t have to pay to hear that.

Tropic Thunder is a masterpiece. Right around the time the Dark Knight broke box office records, Ben Stiller slipped out a mega-big budget Vietnam War film-parody making fun of all things Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr. pushes the envelope as an Australian actor in black face while Jack Black farts and does drugs. And it gets better…

My favorite thing about the movie is the advertisements for other works the characters have acted in. There are trailers for the fake movies. There is an action film starring Stiller’s character as a Sly Stallone-style “one man against the world” action flick. There is a Eddie Murphy-Nutty Professor movie starring Jack Black as every member of a farting family. There is a Brokeback Mountain-type movie called “Satan’s Alley” with Downey Jr. and Toby McGuire as gay priests in the dark ages. Finally, there is a hip-hop entrepeneur character who advertises an energy drink called “Booty Sweat.” They also mention a movie where Stiller’s character plays a mentally challenged farm boy who can talk to animals.

Stiller (who wrote the script) totally nails bullshit Hollywood and the culture of blockbusters, Oscars and primadonna actors and their greedy agents. A-plizzus.

Eagle Eye is a high-octane thriller sure to make you wait for the video game adaptation. Love the pretty pictures and try not to cringe when it gets on its high horse and tries to make a statement about post-9/11 America. The machines are taking over! Grab the popcorn! w00t!

I’ve been a Michael Moore fan since “Roger & Me” and I definitely enjoyed Sicko. As with anything Michael Moore does, you take him with a grain of salt and you have to be very aware of his agenda.

I won’t get into much of a critique of Michael Moore’s stance (obviously, he thinks nationalized health care works and basically made a whole movie showing why our system is broken and why other systems work).

In any case, Moore continues to be funny and outrageous. My favorite anecdote he gives is when he talks about how the government will actually go to your house and do your laundry in France and at one point he attempts to take his laundry to Washington to do the same in the states.

In all seriousness, though, the American system is broken and Moore is sure to make you pissed off at the government and keep you laughing while he fans the flames of your anger. If you’re going to watch a left wing propaganda film, you may as well watch an entertaining one.

Beach Blanket Bingo provides a post-modern critique of sexism, media control and the concept of love. The film paints a vivid picture of the hardships faced by California youth in the 1960s with a particular focus on surfer culture.

In all seriousness, this movie is amazingly bad and worth a watch for a laugh. Take extra LactAid pills and brace yourself for a heaping pile of cheese!

It’s fair to say that Y: The Last Man is a life-changing story. The tale of the last man left on Earth makes you fall in love with the characters while exploring themes such as feminism, global politics and cloning. At the same time, it’s still a comic book and it packs in plenty of boyish humor and wacky pop culture references. So what happens to the last man on Earth? Must he screw every chick on planet Earth to save the species? Well, yes and no. Worth a read for any graphic novel-loving mammal.