2B - Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.cam

2B - Thursday, September 27, 2012 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom

ARTS RECOMMENDS
In this feature, Daily Arts writers will give their endorsements
for the arts you need to experience to help you deal with current events.
"House of Leaves"
An old man dies, and bin sprawling manuscript
is found by a down-on-his-luck tattoo artist. What
follows is a wondrous, often strange, twisting
story. A parallel universe, where a documentary is
made of a house that won't stop growing new hall-
Z Eways and passages, permeates not only the imagi-
nation of a feeble-minded senior, but into the dark
recesses of a troubled individual.
PANTHEON
Against the Wall
- Kat Graham
Supa, dope, funky, fresh: Lyrics from Kat Gra-
ham's "Supa Dope," or words used to describe her
EP, Against the Wall? The four-track album hones
in on Graham's skills as an entertainer, providing
catchy beats and sassy lyrics. Dance the night away
to "Heartkiller" and get yo' man with a sexy ren-
dition of "Graffiti," just don't hurt yourself in the
A&M/OCTONE process.

JUDGING
E A BOOK
BY ITS
NAT, ACOVER

0

Daily Arts writers go
against the famous
idiom, choose a

"Scream 4"
"Scream" is a legend for any fan of horror, with
its brain-wrinklingmeta and badassery. "Scream3"
happened, and we lost faith in the franchise's lon-
gevity. But the only thing worse than the "Scream
3" script is overlooking "Scream 4." In "Scream 4"
-which was filmed in Ann Arbor - Sidney Prescott
and the series get back to their roots, offering more
meta than ever, and an ending almost on-par with
SioN the original's flawless closing act.
"New Girl"
"New Girl" returned Tuesday with two solid
episodes. The show's first season was up-and-
down, especially as it strained to figure out its
tone and characters, but it eventually grew into a
charming and funny hang-out show. The second
season needs to develop the two other core mem-
bers of the cast (Jake Johnson's Nick and Lamorne
Morris's Winston), andthe premiere takes encour-
Fox aging steps in that direction as well.

* You wake in a cold sweat,
shivers shooting up and down
your spine.
You twist your neck to the
left, then to the right. There's a
pain lodged between your skull.
Slowly, your vision comes into
focus, You lift your head from its
resting position and you notice it,
the gray. All around you, above
you, the colors coalescing into a
dull blend of water and sky.
It's suffocating.
And then, from the grey,
another color emerges: red.
And those haunting words that
stand imprinted on the clouds,
the work of some demented sky-
writer, "Once Upon A River."
You reach for something,
anything to shield your eyes

from the horror; but to no avail.
There's only you and the words.
Such is the beginning to Bon-
nie Jo Campbell's tour de force
of a novel.
At once spy thriller and sci-fi
epic, Campbell tells the story of
Tao, a man who awakes to find
himself inexplicably stranded in
a canoe in the middle of the Nile
River. He has no past, no fam-
ily and no life. At least, so far as
he knows. All he knows are the
giant red letters that beckon him.
onward, his guiding light amid
chaos and confusion.
What do the words mean?
Why is he in a canoe? Where
did his clothes go? Why does he
have an insatiable appetite for
Belgian dark chocolate? Like the

random book and
make assumptions
about its contents
based on the cover art.
master storyteller she is, Camp-
bell unfolds the answers to these
questions one suspenseful chap-
ter at a time.
It's a psychological portrait of
a man tortured by the recesses
of his own fractured soul that
will invoke comparisons to Con-
rad's Colonel Kurtz for years to
come. Because, as she elegantly
demonstrates, Campbell's world
exists somewhere between
heaven and hell; a world plagued
by savages, government con-
spiracies and Tao, a character
who will persist throughout the
pantheon of English literature,
forever doomed to wallow in the
purgatory he builds for himself
within, yes, a wooden canoe.
-JACOB AXELRAD

CsVOTING FOR ROMNEY?

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