I’ve been listening to Wilco’s Summer Teeth all morning – three times through so far, and I appreciate the CD better with each listening. Melodically, the album pulls away from Wilco’s alt-country roots, gravitating towards a Beach Boys-esque thickly orchestrated pop sound. Tweedy’s surprisingly bleak lyrics ride on top, beautiful in their subtlety – witness the ballad “She’s A Jar,” which begins as a tender love song (“She begs me not to miss her”) and slowly degenerates (“She begs me not to hit her”).

Wilco’s newest album, the self-released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is set to hit shelves in a little less than a month. Supposedly picking up where Summer Teeth leaves off, the album is already receiving wide-ranging acclaim in pre-release reviews. *Sigh* It appears Amazon will be siphoning off yet one more chunk of my disposable income.

In many ways, Tom Perrotta is the closest thing America has to a Nick Hornby. Both build loosely plotted novels around complicated yet likeable characters. Both have a thoroughly modern, bitingly ironic sense of humor and a solid understanding of vague, aimless, GenX slacker angst. And both can turn a sentence with far more style than the average novelist. Finally, both authors are similarly moviefiable – witness Perrotta’s Election and Hornby’s High Fidelity, two gems. There is, however, one major difference between the two: in recent years, Hornby has become something of a household name in the literary world, while Perrotta has labored on for a surprisingly small cult following.

Joe College, Perrotta’s fourth book, seems destined to change that. Coming off Election’s movie success, and boosted by a solid NY Times review, the novel is almost guaranteed bestseller status. That’s a bit unfortunate, however, as Joe College is probably the weakest link in Perrotta’s bibliography. Don’t get me wrong – as one reviewer points out, Perrotta at 80% is better than most novelists at 100%. But especially in terms of plot, the book pulls up a bit short.

Still, Joe College is worth the read simply to experience the beautifully rendered stream of consciousness of its protagonist, Danny, a Yale Junior trying to reconcile his snotty Ivy League education with his blue collar New Jersey roots. For any Yale alums, the book is even more enjoyable – Perrotta, a Yalie himself, catches the school’s every idiosyncrasy, from weenie bins and the Whiff’s to secret societies and the Jello endowment.

So, in short, read Joe College. But if you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and read Perrotta’s other books first (especially The Wishbones and Bad Haircut). If you move fast enough, you just might still be able to say you were reading Tom Perrotta before he became the next big thing.

The problem is, there are a lot of movies. I try to watch at least two a week in my continued education as a novice film producer, but my Netflix queue is already over 250 movies, and new pictures are released into theater every weekend. That doesn’t even begin to count the movies I should rewatch, which range from those meriting frequent repeat viewing (such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Thomas Crown Affair – taken together, my blueprint for life) to those that I watched so long ago I might as well now consider as having never been viewed (including such classics as the entire Indiana Jones series).

Yes, at times I feel like just giving up, unplugging my DVD player and receding into a wasteland of cultural illiteracy. But then it hits me: movie people are vastly better looking than tech people, and if I forsake the movie part of my professional life, I’ll be forced to look at geeks all the time. At which point, I fire up some popcorn and settle in to my seat – it might not be easy, but a serious devotion to the celluloid past more than pays off. Besides, there are many worse ways to spend an evening than bathing in the flickering glow of a truly American art form brought to life.