{"id":162658437,"date":"2026-05-15T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=162658437"},"modified":"2026-05-15T07:18:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T12:18:41","slug":"friday-links-sheep-everywhere-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=162658437","title":{"rendered":"Friday Links: Sheep Everywhere Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\u201cThe only way to get out of that worm universe is to dream another symbolic dream.\u201d – Haruki Murakami, \u2018A Wild Sheep Chase\u2019<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

All I really mean by that title is that I saw Sheep Detectives<\/em> this weekend. It’s impossible for me to objective about a movie I’ve seen in the theater with my seven-year-old while said seven-year-old was having a good time. If you, like me, love movie theaters and want to pass that love along to your under-10 children, go see Sheep Detectives<\/em>. It’s no Babe<\/em>, but it’s a cozy British murder-mystery with sheep that talk to each other (the humans can’t hear them tho). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, we got a new Lazy & Entitled Podcast<\/em> this week! I interviewed Tom Urwin from Chicago noisepunk band Weaklung, Brendan and I talk about things we see on the sidewalk that make us happy, and there’s a reading from Studs Terkel. Apple<\/a> | Spotty<\/a> | SoundCloud<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I’ve Been Reading Lately<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A book that also posits that there is more to sheep than meets the eye. A book that breezes by while also managing to have depth. A book that I was reminded was really good when Sean deLone blogged about it a few months back<\/a>. A book that’s been sitting on my shelf at least 17 years, and finally got its first re-read. I love re-reading good books. I’m talking, of course, about A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> by Haruki Murakami.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> by Haruki Murakami:<\/strong> the second Murakami I ever read, some 16 years ago. I\u2019ve only done this one, After The Quake, and Kafka On The Shore. Why haven\u2019t I read more Murakami? I think the length of some of those novels put me off. It\u2019s been so long that this was almost entirely new to me, and boy was it a delight. It does all the good noir things: aimless, sort-of-lost-everything-but-still-fine protagonist, shadowy crime syndicates, mysteriously cool women, long-lost friendships (not unlike The Third Man<\/em>), but then it adds in a dash of the magical. Are people possessed by sheep in this novel? What exactly do we make of The Sheep Man? But I get ahead of myself. The thrust is this: our narrator works at an advertising agency. His best friend, whom he hasn’t seen in years, sends him a letter with a picture of a sheep pasture. He uses it in a print ad, and it attracts the attention of a crime syndicate. In the sheep pasture, you see, is a sheep with a star pattern on its wool. The right wing head of the crime organization wants that sheep. They had a prior relationship, this right winger crimelord and the star sheep. And so it is demanded that the narrator find the sheep. There’s also, for the record, some interesting stuff about the history of sheep-raising in Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a sense of the otherworldly, especially since the course of the novel takes us away from Tokyo and into the frigid mountains of Hokkaido. Not a lot of people are named. Our narrator has an ex-wife, an business partner he breaks up with, an old friend known only as “The Rat,” a new girlfriend with beautiful ears, and a hometown bartender known as J. It’s not hard to see why 20-year-old me loved this\u2014that sense of living in spite of impending likely doom, with a healthy helping of whiskey as both an aid and the thing that keeps me from seeing exactly what the threat is. Either I forgot or it didn’t register that the shadowy cabal threatening the narrator was specifically right wing, with their tentacles already covering all of civic life before the good people had a chance to get their shoes on. What do you do in a world like that? Romantically, a lot\u2014fight, resist, save someone, whatever. Practically? Sometimes you just do whatever the right winger threatening you makes you do. You don’t learn much, but you do change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Either this book fizzles at the end, or I finished it on a Sunday night. The narrator\u2019s girlfriend got a raw deal, I hope she\u2019s doing okay. Then again, it\u2019s possible that a good noir is most exciting when the mystery is still in the air, when the inevitably hollowed-by-capitalism center is revealed. Famously, no one can explain The Big Sleep<\/em>, not even Raymond Chandler. I watched The Maltese Falcon<\/em> with my parents one time and they felt deflated by the end. I said something like \u201cI think the point is that \u2018stuff that dreams are made of\u2019 line\u201d and I don\u2019t think that interpretation did much for them. The end of Under The Silver Lake, a movie that I love, makes me feel about as hollow and hopeless as anything I\u2019ve ever seen. It\u2019s not the biggest tragedy, life can move on, but you feel like you\u2019ve taken a few body blows from the world. So me dragging through the ending because I wanted better for a couple characters feels like it\u2019s a pretty successful noir. I want to read Wind\/Pinball <\/em>and Dance Dance Dance<\/em> soon, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something to listen to while you browse? How about some Weaklung? After all, one of their guitarists is on the podcast this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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