Girl in a Cage

On Second Thought...

Those of you not following the WGA strike as closely as I am may have missed the "Speechless" videos that have been circulating. Basically they are a solidarity gesture that a number of actors are making, showing how writers are essential to their business. This one, starring Jason and Justine Bateman, is fairly typical:

But now the "Speechless" people appear to have gone seriously off-message. I have no idea what to make of this:

So if I understand this correctly, without writers, Maggie Gyllenhaal will have to stop making brilliant but unwatchable character studies like Sherrybaby (unwatchable to me, anyway--having gone through a heartbreaking tragedy in real life has pretty well killed whatever appetite I had for that kind of thing on film.) and start making hot, cheesy, girl-on-girl soft porn.

Uh, I mean, am I missing something here? Aren't these videos supposed to make us want the strike to end?

Quail Before The Power of My Blog Again!

Yes, I am clearly the epicenter of power in the pop cultural universe. Just a few entries ago, I chided writers and producers alike for not getting back to negotiating, and now they are apparently having "informal, off-the-record" talks in hopes of getting a settlement in time for the Oscar broadcast. (And they've taken reality tv and animation off the table, just as I said they should.) Clearly they read my blog and were suitably chastened by my clear-headed analysis to get back to negotiating.

And then, after I've complained at least twice about the relatively poor quality of this season's Simpsons shows, last night they had an episode that not only didn't suck (it featured a pretty spot-on Nirvana parody as Homer, the lead singer of Sadgasm, free associates and screams), it also featured a little visual shout out to my alma mater! Yes, there on the campus of Springfield University was the same broken button sculpture that sits outside the library at the University of Pennsylvania. It's like they're practically begging for my approval!

Finally, after months of my praising the genius of Dexter, CBS has agreed to show edited versions of the Showtime original series. Okay, okay, here I'm totally lying. I haven't said a word about Dexter because I just got the DVDs and watched the first episode last night. But the first episode totally kicked my ass and has stuck with me way more than most hours of tv do. I don't know how they're going to play it on CBS--I guess it'll mostly be editing out the gore, but maybe the tales of the loveable serial killer vigilante crime lab blood spatter expert will still be compelling.

Oh yeah, also, my novel Long Way Back is available in paperback at last, starting tomorrow, Tuesday January 29th. If you love music, your siblings, your spouse, or life, this book is for you; it's sure to be a big bestseller, so get your copy early so you can brag that you read it before your friends.

Branch Bows Out

So Fred Thompson dropped out of the presidential race. (Cue the Caesars' "Over 'Fore It Started.") (Actually, if you don't already know the song, it's kind of impossible to download, so here's the video: )

This is because the conservative attack machine spoke up and told this know-nothing pampered actor to go back to swilling his Chardonnay and keep his mouth shut on political matters every citizen has a right to speak up about. Ha! Just kidding. They only do that to liberal actors. No, actually, he dropped out because nobody voted for him.

I must confess that I'm a little surprised at this turn of events. As a Democrat and occasional Law and Order viewer (Not a huge fan of the flagship of the franchise, but My Lovely Wife likes it quite a bit), I was scared of Thomson entering the race.

Because on Law and Order, he was always this awesome gruff authority figure. I'm pretty sure there's a video clip of Thomspon's performance as Arthur Branch in some online definition of "avuncular." Branch was tough but fair, grumpy but loyal, and, above all, knowledgeable and authoritative. The kind of boss you'd like to have. Maybe, I thought, after years of a president who is not only not knowledgeable, but no kind of authority figure at all (memo to lame duck--authority figures don't get petulant and pouty when they're disagreed with.), this guy's persona would be really appealing.

This is why I am not a political prognosticator: when I heard Thompson was entering the race against a pretty weak G.O.P. field, I figured there was no way he could lose.

But, of course, there was a way he could lose: by being himself. It turns out Fred Thompson is not Arthur Branch. He doesn't come across as authoritative and knowledgeable; he comes across as a guy trying really hard to appear folksy.

I guess I kind of forgot that Arthur Branch is a creation of Fred Thompson the actor and all the writers who put words in his mouth. Without good writing, Thompson apparently lacked the chops to appear presidential.

I don't know what to conclude here, except that it's very difficult to remember that the qualities an actor, especially one playing the same character week after week, conveys on screen may have nothing to do with who that person is in life, or in politics.

Two New Favorites

So I've read two books on my Kindle so far. I'm still infatuated with it, but I did discover a few new drawbacks. One is that I was due to spend some time in a waiting room, and I grabbed my Kindle, only to discover it was out of juice. That has never happened to me with a regular book. The other is that when I finished a fairly substantial book, I didn't have the feeling of accomplishment that I normally get from putting a completed book on the shelf.

Okay. On to the books! One was China Mieville's Un Lun Dun. Still out in hardback, but I got it for only ten bucks! And it's amazing. It features his usual awe-inspiring imaginitive power, his usual good turns of phrase, and, since it's technically a YA book, it avoids the, shall we say rather leisurely pacing that plagues parts of The Scar and which sank Iron Council altogether. It's about two girls who fall into a kind of negative image of London and find that they have to save it. I've seen it unfavorably compared to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which I also liked, but it's superior to Neverwhere in every way. And yeah, this alternate London comes after the alternate London Gaiman imagined, but nobody's ever accused Gaiman of ripping off Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground. This may be because I am the only person to ever read Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground, which I found while browsing in the library one day. Great book, by the way.

My favorite thing about Un Lun Dun is the way Mieville turns the conventions of stories like this on their head. There is a chosen one and a quest, but the chosen one gets kind of un-chosen, and the quest is completed in a completely unorthodox way. Most fantasy novels feel familiar, and, apart from the alternate, parallel London thing, this book feels completely new. It's not like Mieville is playing with familiar ideas in a pleasing way; he's really paving new ground. Un Lun Dun is a masterpiece, and Mieville's best work since Perdido Street Station.

All right. On to another author I admire rather immodestly. I read Charlie Huston's Half the Blood of Brooklyn, the third of the Joe Pitt casebooks--noirish crime novels about the travails of a vampire private eye. It's a quick , entertaining, and brutal read, and what I really liked about it was the way Huston reverses the pattern of the first two books. In the first two, Joe's private life and the relations of the vampire clans are essential, but they're kind of in the background of the mystery that drives the book. Here, the mystery is not that much of a mystery, and it's really in the background of what's going on with the clans and Joe. You really can't read this without reading Already Dead and No Dominion first, but everybody should read those anyway.

So there you go. New books from two of the three most talented writers working today. Now if only I could get my hands on a new Brendan Halpin novel, I'd have the trifecta. Ah! I see his Long Way Back is coming in a sexy paperback edition next Tuesday! I shall go forthwith to the bookstore to reserve my copy!

Of Comics and Brows

I recently got two collections of comics.

The first is DC Comics' Batman--Vampire. It's labeled "Tales of the Multiverse," which I guess is DC's version of Marvel's What If. It's three tales from the 90's of Batman as a vampire. That sentence will either make you want to buy it immediately or run screaming from the room. Needless to say, I was in the former group. It did not disappoint at all, except for this. It features an introduction by Eric Van Lustbader, best known as "That guy who wrote the horrible ninja book we used to read the dirty parts from at Danny's house when we were 13." At least that's how he's known to me. Anyway, he writes the following bit of idiocy: "The dark, grimy urban swamp has become a nightmare world so like many of our post-modern urban landscapes, inhabited by shambling untermenschen, seemingly irredeemably decayed."
I mean, I'm not expecting anything spectacular in the way of analysis from Eric Van Freaking Lustbader, but this is just a spectacularly dumb take on urban life. Yeah, real cities are just like this comic book--the rain is inexplicably red, and a plague of vampires stalks the streets. Ah, well, I guess I'm just a shambling untermensch, so what do I know.

The other book I got is An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, edited by Ivan Brunetti. This is a gorgeous book--the kind of book that's a joy to look at, the kind of book that ensures that real books will survive the advent of the Kindle. There's a bunch of different stuff, but it's pointedly non-superhero related, and since it's published by Yale University Press, it's mostly fairly "serious". Some of this is good, and some of it is bad (I really didn't need the graphic depiction of a child being sodomized--it actually made me put the book down and not pick it back up. And by the way, if you got here googling the phrase "child being sodomized" please go kill yourself.)

And, I mean, so this is an attempt at serious art as opposed to lowbrow genre art like Batman--Vampire. One of the things people complain about in genre fiction, or comic books, or whatever, is its formulaic nature. But serious comic art has its own conventions and cliches. Like, for example, the pointless autobiographical reminiscence. Alison Bechdel wrote an amazing graphic memoir in Fun Home, but most of this stuff is like, "The time I wet myself in fifth grade," or "The time I didn't get asked to the prom." The other convention is "Sour, usually bespectacled man makes sour observations about life and has bad things happen to him." These two genres cover probably half the stuff in this book.

Now, I've read enough comic books in my day to know that a lot of them are crap. But so, it appears, is a lot of "Graphic Fiction." It seems the absence of muscular guys in tights is no guarantee of quality.

The WGA Strike and Me

As the seemingly interminable writers' strike drags on, I thought it was time to offer my two cents. I should add that I'm not a WGA member (though I probably would have joined years ago if they offered health insurance in Massachusetts, which they did not in 2004). Nor do I have any inside information, other than what I read on Deadline Hollywood Daily.

But just because I'm not a guild member doesn't mean the strike's not affecting me. For one thing, I'm reduced to watching crap like Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew instead of my favorite scripted programming! (Who am I kidding--I'd watch this anyway! Yeah, I feel dirty and ashamed when it's over, but man, is that compelling TV! I can't wait for Thursday's episode! I think the American Idol girl is going to vomit on camera again!).

I have sold a few movie options on my books. This means that, in exchange for a small but non-trivial sum of money , I agree not to sell the movie rights to anybody else for a certain period of time. Now, like I said, this isn't big money, but all the options are being automatically extended because nobody can get anything done because of the strike, so the renewal date, when I might conceivably hope to have the option renewed and receive another small non-trivial payment, has been pushed back. Not to mention the fact that, with not much happening in Hollywood, nobody can use their option to make a movie and buy the rights, which involves a much larger sum of money. Not to mention the fact that, with nothing happening, nobody will be optioning my books that are not currently under option right now.

So, okay, the strike is costing me money, though certainly nothing like what it's costing people who are full-time TV or movie writers. But I still support the goal of the strike, which, if I understand correctly, is ensuring that writers are fairly compensated when their work appears on the internet, on cell phones, and on media that haven't been imagined yet. So far so good, and the producers should just give them what they're asking for on the internet stuff. It's really far from outrageous. The corporations will hardly notice the missing money, and it will be much fairer to the writers.

Having said all this, the current impasse in negotiations is really dumb. As far as I understand it, the WGA was asking for the right to organize reality TV and animation writers. I think everybody understood this was a bargaining chip--something to put on the table so you'd have something to take off later. I mean, especially with a strike on, the producers are never going to agree to eliminate reality tv as a fallback in the event of another strike. And the strike is really about new media money, not reality tv.

Okay, so this is how negotiations work. You ask for more than you actually want so that you can give stuff back and end up with something close to what you wanted in the first place. But the producers demanded that the WGA take reality tv off the table before they would continue negotiations. In other words, they made caving in a condition of negotiating, when the cave-in was almost certain to come about as a result of negotiations. The WGA said no way, we're not taking this stuff off the table, the producers walked out, and here we are.

So people are out of work, and my longshot chance of seeing a movie with the "based on a novel by Brendan Halpin" credit has gotten even longer, all over what amounts to a pissing contest. The producers knew the writers would cave on reality tv--so why not just negotiate it away? Why walk away from negotiations? Having said that, the WGA is staying on strike and refusing to negotiate because they don't want to give in to a demand to give up something they were going to give up anyway. This seems kinda asinine. Yes, the producers were wrong to walk away and set conditions for negotiations to continue, but what's being gained by not going back to the table at this point? It might be time for the WGA to swallow their pride and give in to the producers' bad-faith negotiating tactic just to get what they really want out of this strike anyway.

That way, the inevitable feeding frenzy for film rights to my work can begin!

In Which I Explain The Success of an Unlikely Franchise

Well, way back on New Year's Day, my whole family started 2008 off right. My Lovely Wife went to a yoga class (no easy feat with a still-healing broken ankle, but she's made of very strong stuff) while the kids and I took in National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

All of us loved it. As the kids get older, this is an increasingly uncommon phenomenon. Usually at least one of the kids will dislike the movie, or else they all like it and I want to hang myself. But this one really was fun for the whole family (well, the 80% of the family that attended), which probably explains its financial success.

Some things I liked about it:

1. )I love it when filmmakers are smart enough to hire a supporting cast that can actually act. Jon Voigt, Helen Mirren, and Ed Harris: all very good actors who elevate the material, and quite possibly everybody else's performances. I don't hang with professional actors, but I'm guessing if you're doing a scene with Helen Mirren, you bring your A game so you don't wind up looking stupid on screen.

2.) The heroes are nonviolent. Nobody's made a big deal of this, but it really is incredibly refreshing. The heroes use their wits and knowledge of history and computers to get by. The films aren't exactly nonviolent, in that our heroes are shot at, etc., but they don't win by hurting people. Now, this is coming from someone who counts Drunken Master 2 among his favorite movies, so I'm by no means against violent movies, but there are so few action movies that are genuinely thrilling in which the heroes don't hurt people that it makes the National Treasure movies remarkable.

3.)It's unashamedly corny. Perhaps another sign that the Age of Irony is coming to an end. Nicolas Cage's character has a genuine passion for American History, and the plot turns on his unfeigned, unironic desire to clear his great-grandfather's name. Villain Ed Harris is motivated by a similar take on family honor. Now, as for me, I could give a shit about my great grandfather's name, but my personal family tree has more than one "drunk and abusive" branch, so maybe I'm not a good example. Even still, I found the characters' belief in this corny ideal to be charming. Similarly, when Gates tells the President that he believes he's an honorable man simply by virtue of the fact that he's President of the United States, it was all I could do not to laugh aloud. But the script beat me to it. "Nobody believes that stuff anymore, Gates," POTUS says. "But they want to believe it, sir," Gates replies.

I admit it-- I rolled my eyes at that line. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be true. People do want to believe that their presidents, like the one in this movie, are intelligent and honorable, especially after nearly eight years of neither, and twelve years before that of intelligent but not especially honorable.

Master of My Domain

Well, since I don't know how to maintain my other website and I can't really pay anybody else to maintain it, I'm pointing my personal domain, brendanhalpin.com, to this page. (I'm trying, anyway. I've screwed up something either on this end or the godaddy end, and all I've managed to do so far is to make my old website disappear. Hopefully I will be able to overcome my technological feebleness and get it done.)

What this means is that I'll be adding some info on the sides here, and I may also deviate from my stated purpose of pop culture commentary to add "what's going on with my writing" posts from time to time.

Those of you searching for a way to email me can still reach me at brendan at brendanhalpin dot com. And, you can be my friend on myspace or facebook, or trust me on mog. See you on the internets!

I Got a Kindle!

So my big Christmas present (apart from the USB turntable, which I wrote about here) is my fancy new Amazon Kindle.

Okay. A few things. First, I do not want to see the death of real bookstores. Ever. Second, yes the good old traditional book is a really spectacular piece of technology. It has excellent battery life and best of all, from my perspective, you can spill a cup of coffee on it without making it useless.

And now a couple of guilty confessions. One is that I don't read nearly as much as I should, especially given that my job is stealing from other writ...uh, I mean, writing. I mean, I usually have a book going at all times, but what with the three kids and the dog and the kitchen that stubbornly refuses to clean itself, I've got a lot of stuff competing for my time, and during the school year, anyway, I don't often find myself with big chunks of time I can devote to reading. (My video game time shrinks to nonexistent, which I suppose is not really a bad thing.)

Another guilty confession. I love me some gadgets. I'm still using my nearly 3-year-old ipod, and my computer is about the same age, but I like ogling gadgets, I like things with cool features. Sometimes on a busy afternoon, the computer calls to me in a way a book doesn't just because it's a cool gadget. And I do end up reading on the computer a lot, but it's emails and blogs and newspapers and not books.

So, here's one thing I love about the Kindle. It's a gadget--that contains books! I'm all set to read more. It's a toy and I want to play with it, and the way you play with it is by reading.

Also cool is the whole wireless thing. Read about a book, own a book within two minutes. That is hot stuff. I suffer from a disorder many people I know suffer from, which is that the book I was looking for goes out of my brain the second I walk into the bookstore. So that's cool.

The screen looks great, it handles illustrations credibly (I've been reading China Mieville's Un Lun Dun on it, and the illustrations look really good. I mean, photos and stuff it probably wouldn't handle that well, but the pen and ink illustrations look really cool. ), you can size the type for the comfort of your personal eyes, you can look up any word in the text with two clicks...all this is just so cool I can hardly stand it.

The battery life is very good, especially with the wireless connectivity turned off. (And since I only use that for shopping, it's fine.) Not as good as a traditional book, but pretty good nonetheless.

New books are ten bucks, so I don't have to wait for the paperback to get an affordable version. (of course, if you factor in the cost of the gadget itself, it will take you 30 or 40 books before you come out ahead. But I got it as a gift...) If this thing catches on, I think it could help a lot of writers, particularly fiction writers. I'm willing to gamble ten bucks on just about any book, but I pretty much never plunk down 25 for a book by an unknown quantity.

I like the fact that I can carry several books in it. I've often had the experience of heading to a doctors appointment or something and being almost done with one book and having to carry two. Also, if I happen to want to read some big cumbersome book (like that omnibus edition of His Dark Materials I was reading last week), the Kindle is way easier to carry.

Things that are weird but not necessarily bad: there's a momentary flash of black when you "turn" the "page". You can still get lost in the book, but it does take a little getting used to. Also, since you can make the text any size you want, the pages aren't numbered. Instead you have "locations", of which Un Lun Dun has several thousand. I'm not sure exactly what the locations pertain to, since they're not line numbers or words or pages, but anyway, it's somewhat harder to judge your progress through the book when you can't flip through the pages. I don't know if this is good or bad. It's easy to bookmark pages, and if you turn it off, you come back right at the same page you left off on.

What does it all mean? I don't know. All I know is that I'm reading a kick ass book on a really cool gadget, and I've already got the new Charlie Huston on deck.

Stuff I Liked in 2007, Part Four

As requested, on with the music!

I've decided to just go with the songs I liked this year. For a variety of reasons, I didn't get a bunch of albums I was excited about, and though I've listened to most of them on Rhapsody, (Mog.com, where I hang out and do a lot of music stuff, became "Rhapsody enabled" or "Rhapsody enhanced" or something, and, for the time being anyway, I've taken the kool-aid. ) I don't feel like I can completely pass judgment on them yet. So, in no particular order, on to the songs.

Lily Allen "LDN"--I love the happy, catchy melody matched with the incredibly cynical lyrics. I liked this even before I saw the youtube thing where she shows her third nipple.

Silversun Pickups--"Lazy Eye". What the hell's it about? I have no idea, and frankly, I don't care! I love the whole "Feelies meet the Pixies" vibe, and I always turn it up when they get to the screaming part.

Spoon--"The Underdog". Horns! Horns! More horns! The horns get me every time!

Amy Winehouse--"Rehab." I'm a little sick of it now, and it's become sadly ironic, but she can really sing, and that old school soul sound is fantastic.

The Hives--"Return the Favour". Yes, they've spelled favor in the British, also known as "incorrect" way, but this song rocks my socks off. I really like their new album, especially because Howlin' Pelle Almquist appears to have decided to become Singin' Pelle Almquist, which just improves the sound tremendously. (No official video for this one yet, so we've got a rather crappy live excerpt, which still sounds pretty good to me--just imagine this longer and clearer..)

The White Stripes "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" The return of the song title with parentheses! I feel like it's the 80's again! I'm kinda in awe of Jack White's talent, and this song, to my way of thinking, has it all--the wonderful melody, the face-meltin' guitar, and the great lyrics. Like all the best White Stripes songs, this one sounds like it's a classic that's been around for years.

John Fogerty--"I Can't Take it No More." Fogerty's back, and he's pissed, and he's one of the few musicians daring to take on the war.

The Apples in Stereo--"Can You Feel It?" "Same Old Drag"--the two best songs from their New Magnetic Wonder album, which is really good as a whole. I voted for "Can You Feel It?" for official song of summer, but nobody counted my vote. Great upbeat power pop that I never get sick of.

Feist--"I Feel It All". Usually the female acoustic singer-songwriter is right up there with dental surgery among my favorite things, but this is a great song. I was won over by this clip of her singing it on the bus with Jimmy Kimmel.

Okay, one album. Rentacrowd by the Len Price 3 is the album I listened to the most, and the album I listened to from beginning to end more than any other in 2007. These guys have channeled the early Kinks and Who and put together a fantastic record. It's all great, but here's the video for the title track: