Just started reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, for class. It concerns itself with the spread of trends, social epidemics, what I've heard called memes in the past. The second chapter is about the people who can spread information, the tastemakers. People with lots of acquaintances who they can reach easily. Which I am not, even though I would like to be one of the information-spreading people. Then there's things like charisma, and a certain type of knowledge... Basically, I am not a tastemaker. With that said, let me discuss the two movies I watched last night. They made up a double feature that cost me $6.50.

Monster. What a piece of shit this movie was/is. God. Because of the whole double-feature thing I can view it like I saw it for free. But it took up my time. If you place any credence in my opinions regarding movies, don't see this.

Big Fish. Pretty decent, I wasn't even bored with the whole Billy Crudup/Albert Finney parts. Didn't make me cry or anything like that, but I didn't hate them when they were on screen as other people did. Yeah, Big Fish was nice.

Oh, and at the movie, because it's a film society and it's all wacky and such, there are ticket drawings/raffles. The prize for the winners was a comic, handpicked by the people who work at the comic shop. At the first screening, the actual comic wasn't announced, but I thought that the giveaway was a cool way for the shop to promote itself, and then thought about comics that people would like. It turned out they were giving out an issue of Stray Bullets. I've actually considered writing about Stray Bullets here. Stray Bullets is pretty fucking great. I don't own any Stray Bullets, though. Here's the deal, which is pretty retarded. Each issue is kind of self-contained. It's a complete story, but there's also arcs. The book's collected in paperbacks that collect four-issues in a go. The paperbacks are relatively cheap, but kind of the worst format to read it in, as the arcs aren't in sets of four. The first one was seven issues, the second was eight, the third was seven, I don't know about after that. I read it when Jason bought the cheap paperback collections. I am sure that the best way to read it is in complete arcs. The complete arcs are only collected in big hardcovers, with really over-the-top production values. I think each one probably runs like $35. It's pretty bullshit. I wish there was a way to get a complete set of each story (which, in most cases, is really just a series of vignettes, but they come together well, and the second story was all sequential style.) for cheap. If there was, I'd recommend you all buy and read Stray Bullets. It's like the anti-Monster, in that way. I guess one could buy the single issues in sets of seven or eight, if they were at a place that had all of the issues available.

The guy who did Stray Bullets, David Lapham, also did another comic that is available in one cheap collection, called Murder Me Dead. But Murder Me Dead is not nearly as good as Stray Bullets. Murder Me Dead is like a homage to classic fifties noir, Stray Bullets is its own original animal. Stray Bullets will break your heart and your face.

What I'm getting at is this: Stray Bullets is really fucking great and you would all like it. Well, the third arc, Other People, that one's pretty weak. I heard that was just a weak moment, and it gets a lot better after that, but I don't know. All I know is that the first two are fucking aces.