I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE CARS-Greatest Hits (2002).

For the longest time I didn’t like The Cars. I got really sick of them, especially around the time of “You Might Think.” I guess I was watching a lot of MTV, because I just couldn’t seem to get Rik Ocasek’s face out of my head (your sympathy is appreciated). Anyhow, Sarah had said something about getting their Greatest Hits; so we did. And I’m glad.

The first ten or so songs on this thing are really great, it’s practically their entire first album, and it’s a bounty of new-wave delights from just before they got really commercial. Of course, the commercial songs are also here, but after all of these years, the commercial songs sound pretty good too. For me the best thing about the record is that it conatins “Moving in Stereo” the song that will make any red blooded young lad of around my age immediately envision Phoebe Cates climbing out of a swimming pool and…. Doesn’t anybody fucking knock anymore?

[READ: October 10, 2007] “So Far from Anything.”

This story has a gimmick. Although it is a publishing gimmick and not a story gimmick. The gimmick according to Esquire is this: The story is such a page turner, that we are going to print it along the bottom of every page of the magazine (about fifteen words per page).

I really only read it to see if it would be as irritating as it sounded. In fact it wasn’t. Although in a magazine that has as many ad pages as Esquire does, and the story is not included on the ad pages, there was a lot of flipping. I suppose it did seem to make the story go faster, what with the psychological nature of page flipping, but I don’t think I’d recommend it on a regular basis.

As for the story itself, it was a page turner. In a nutshell, it’s a story about how you would react after hitting another person with your car. The story was set up nicely with the various events leading up to the incident being dispersed into four sections. And, it certainly was an adrenaline rush of a story. But, honestly, there wasn’t an original idea in the whole thing. Imagine the story that you would write about hitting somebody with a car in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with nobody around…. Yeah, it pretty much writes itself.

It might be worth reading if you’d like to try the page turning format, though.