We rented In Bruges on Friday night. It was a fun British gangster movie. Now we have some more sights for our list of stuff to see in Bruges when we are there next week.

Afterwards we tried to get a table at Elemental. Just a warning to those readers trying to search out this restaurant: it has no street access or sign. Its on the ground floor of a new-ish condo building across from Gasworks park, up some steps on the eastside. There is really no other businesses around there open at night so if there is a light on that should be the place. (Or someone’s ground floor condo.) As with most new small hip restaurants they do not take reservations, but they also did not hire a host. We showed up at 7:30 and were greeted with an unfriendly sign saying: “Sorry but we are full and can not help you right now. Usually tables are available after 8:30.” With no place to wait for an hour we took about appetites to Pair instead where the friendly host quickly found a seat for us at the bar. Maybe we will try for Elemental again on a slower week night.

The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.

From the descriptions of him he seemed to channel Charles Bukowski.

For the nerdier Sci-Fi fans they have a piece on the revival of sorts of MST3K. Canceled in 1999, the creators have a new gig, called rifftrax, creating alternate alternate sound tracks for recent movies, instead of old B-grade sci-fi movies. Thanks to broadband you can now download their sound tracks as MP3 and play them along on your computer while watching the DVD. You have to get your girlfriend (if you have one by now) to do the robot puppets on the bottom of the screen. Sounds like a party to me!