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BOOKS
FILM
ACCORDING TO
—AS TOLD TO
J.R. SULLIVAN
TELEVISION
038 SEPTEMBER 2019 MEN’S JOURNAL
Notebook SEAL OF APPROVAL
First Blood (1982) Vietnam vet
John Rambo escapes jail and
stages a one-man revenge war
against a local police force.
First Blood Part II (1985)
Rambo, behind bars, accepts
a mission to Vietnam in
exchange for his freedom, then
ends up freeing some long-lost
U.S. POWs, because of course.
Rambo III (1988) Rambo is
building a temple (naturally)
when he learns he must go
save his mentor in Afghanistan.
Rambo (2008) Rambo kills a
bunch of pirates and really
freaks out some missionaries.
TRAVEL I really enjoy
vacationing in
Roscoff, Brittany, a
fishing village in
northwest France.
There’s not much
there besides these
ancient teeny-tiny
houses, but it’s
freaking beautiful.
BOOKS I haven’t read a
lot of Franz Kafka, at
least not since college.
But recently on tour, I
was in a bookstore and
stumbled on The
Unhappiness of Being
a Single Man. Some of
the short stories are
only, like, a paragraph
long, and there’s a lot
of abstraction going
on, which I like.
MUSIC I listen to a lot
of classical music,
primarily from the last
hundred years or so.
Today, I’ve been sitting
on the beach listening
to The Soldier’s Tale,
by Igor Stravinsky.
The music has some
dissonance, but it
doesn’t slap you
across the face and
drag you to hell with it.
GEAR I’ve never
successfully kept up
with or used a money
clip, but I recently got
a Nebo Clipster, so I’ll
stop dropping cash on
the ground whenever I
go to buy something
and so my money
won’t be in a big ball.
The Clipster has a
sharp little built-in
knife that I love, too.
Connor Ratcliff
The UCB Theatre
vet has appeared in
Amazon’s Marvel-
ous Mrs. Maisel and
is an improv ace.
Dulcé Sloan
The Atlanta comic
and Daily Show
correspondent has
serious Southern
sass.
Tim Dillon
The host of the Tim
Dillon Is Going to
Hell podcast is as
morally suspect as
he is hilarious.
OUR IDEAL SNL
Three comics that Saturday
Night Live (back this month)
needs to hire to save itself.
Etgar Keret doesn’t
avoid a punch line.
The f iction writer
and This American Life
regular tackles Big Important
Subjects in his work—death,
family, war, etc.—but he does
so in a way that’s not, well,
a bummer. The characters
that populate his latest,
quick-reading collection, Fly
Already, include a circus-cage
cleaner, a cafeteria worker,
and an angel left to tend
heaven after God dies. By
embracing the comic and
the absurd, Keret achieves
something rare among mod-
ern short-story writers: He’s
actually worth reading.
LAUGHING STOCK
An Israeli writer is making short stories fun again.
The frontman of the Pixies—whose
new album, Beneath the Eyrie, drops
this month—discusses a Kafka
collection, a French fishing village,
and his other recent obsessions.
Black
Francis
RAMBO REVISITED
With Rambo: Last Blood out
9/20, here’s a refresher on the
franchise’s totally insane plot.