Girl in a Cage

Happy Thanksgiving!

Drive Safe!

Visceral and creepy

It's kind of impossible to explain the thrill I got from buying a 39 year old copy of Creepy. There's just something really cool about turning the yellowing pages, seeing the ads for super 8 versions of horror classics, creature from the black lagoon figurines, etc. And of course reading the creepy stories as they were meant to be read--on cheap paper in glorious black and white!

Uploading photos of the treasure from my phone, so I don't know how this is gonna look...

Stories For Shorty

As I write this in Boston, there's a book release party going on in Cincinnati for the new anthology "Stories for Shorty".  The anthology is a collection of recollections of the Jockey Club, the legendary (among a select few) Newport, Kentucky dive that was the home of punk rock in the Greater Cincinnati area in the 1980's. 

The Jockey Club had a huge impact on me--the scene in Long Way Back where Francis touches Dee Dee Ramone on the Chuck Taylor was inspired by my own first visit to the Jockey Club, where I got smooshed up against the stage and touched Dee Dee on his Chuck Taylor.  Anyway, I have a nonfiction recollection of the Jockey Club in the Stories for Shorty anthology, and proceeds from the whole deal go to charity. 

You can buy Stories for Shorty at the party at Shake It Records in Cincinnati, or order it from the cool people at Aurore Press by clicking right here. 

The More You Know...

Something I've been thinking about:

Whenever I've been to a good funeral,  (I mean, yeah, they all suck pretty much by definition, but some are well done and some are not) someone's gotten up and given a eulogy that really captures the essence of the deceased.

And in these good eulogies, the parts that always make everyone feel warm and fuzzy and nostalgic and really miss the person who's gone are the parts where the eulogist mentions the deceased's annoying quirks.  "Yes," people say in the pews, nodding their heads and smiling through the tears, "that's uncle Alphonse all right."

So, here's just something to chew on--those little annoying quirks that people have that drive you nuts are the very things you're going to miss about them when they're gone.  I've been trying to keep this in mind in my dealings with everybody, and it's not easy, but maybe the time to admit affection for those weirdnesses and annoyances that make someone quintessentially who they are is actually before they die.  Just an idea. 

And that's... one to grow on....

My New Favorite Line

For years, my favorite line from a television show ever was from season 2 of Get a Life.  Chris makes a time machine by putting watches in a blender and goes back to the 70's to try to save Gus's job as a police officer.  Or something.  He arrives at Gus's 70's abode in the midst of a party; the captain walks into the living room and bellows at Gus, "your cockfights suck, you bastard!"

And yet, this line may have been supplanted by a line from the latest episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  The Gang Gets Extreme: Home Makeover Edition featured Frank crashing in the bedroom of the house the gang was going to extremely make over.  He emerges hours later and pronounces:  "That broke bastard's bed is soft as shit!"

You Become What You Hate or You Hate What You Become

In my teens, I really hated rock radio because of the terrible injustice of it all.  Controlled by middle-aged guys who mistakenly thought they were cool, the radio stifled innovation by sticking to the familiar and refusing to play anything new.

Listening to "alternative" radio yesterday, I realized that my generation is now the middle-aged would-be hipsters controlling the radio.

We've come a long way:  in the 80's, the radio played the same 5 Led Zeppelin songs over and over; 20 years later, the radio plays the same 5 Red Hot Chili Peppers songs over and over.

Blu Ray's Killer Ap

The 70's brought us a wave of American auteur film directors, the quantity and quality of which have not been repeated since. 

I don't think there's much argument that Scorcese is the best of the lot in terms of consistent quality over time. (I could listen to a Spielberg argument, but I would reject it.)

But two other directors actually made two of the best movies of all time.

One, of course, is John Carpenter, whose Halloween and The Thing may be the best American movies ever.  (Also excellent:  Assault on Precinct 13, Dark Star, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and Big Trouble in Little China).

And the other is a little-known  director named Francis Ford Coppola.  While many know Coppola for One From the Heart and The Black Stallion,it turns out he also made two excellent movies in the early 70's: The Godfather, and The Godfather, Part Two. (He also made an overblown mess of a Vietnam movie later, but that's not what we're talking about.)

Because I am a fan of obscure cinema, I grabbed the restored 4-disc blu ray Complete Godfather.  I needed a coaster, so the Godfather 3 disc came in handy, but I decided to actually watch parts one and two, along with the special features.

Holy crap.  If you are looking for an excuse to upgrade to blu-ray and HDTV, I think this is it.  I've only watched the first Godfather on VHS and regular DVD before now, and it's like I hadn't seen it at all.  It is just gorgeous on blu-ray.  The story was always stunning, but now the visuals match.  It's incredible.  I don't have the adjectives to do it justice, so all I can say is, if you like this movie even a little bit, you must own this. 

Rich Guy Fight!

So last night my friend who shall remain anonymous so this post doesn't get him in trouble, gave me and the boy his Celtics tickets.  Just a few short rows off the court!  My friend rules! 

It was one of the best games I've ever seen--Celtics won 103-102 on a Paul Pierce jumper with 0.5 seconds left on the clock.

But I'm not here for sports reporting.  No, what I'd like to write about is a little anthropological study of The People in the Expensive Seats. 

I sat behind a couple-- a guy I'd guess was about 65 and his wife who I'd guess was in her early 50's.  She spent the entire game IMing on her Blackberry, manipulating the tiny keys with surprising dexterity given the fact that her long, manicured nails got in the way. 

Of course I read her texts over her shoulder---she and her pal were talking about how much they hate the "queers" they work with.  When the Hawks blew a 14-point lead, somebody wrote "I told you those nizz in the NBA get lazy when they get a lead."  Ah, we've really made a progress in America. We've got a black president-elect, and makeup-laquered rich ladies are texting about lazy "nizz" s at the Celtics game. 

(aside--are variations on the n-word becoming something white folks can say?  A commenter on this very blog, whom I know to be white, called somebody a "Zach Galifankis (or whatever)-looking nigga."  I would have used "mothafucka" in that sentence, but then, I'm an old mothafucka.)

But the highlight, people-watching wise, was the overgrown toddler on the court who kept screaming at the Celtics.  "No more points for Mike Bibby!  No more!  No more!" Perhaps he thought he sounded authoritative, but he sounded petulant and babyish instead. 

Apparently the "lazy nizz" lady's husband had had enough of this after a while, so he and the toddler guy had words.  The toddler guy pointed to his seat and screamed something about how much he paid for it, and, more or less, if his accuser were man enough, he would have the thousands of extra bucks it would cost him to sit on the floor. 

Back and forth it went, with another old guy getting into it, until, with under a minute left in the game, two old rich guys were in each other's faces, looking like they might start brawling, and not paying attention to the b-ball masterpiece unfolding before their eyes (that they had paid hundreds of dollars to witness from that spot.

Here's my modest proposal--reverse the expensive and cheap seats, so that people like the pugnacious senior citizens in front of me or the sales guys behind me who talked brands all night could do their socializing in seats far from the action that everyone recognized as expensive while people who actually cared about the game could get close enough to get Kevin Garnett's sweat on them.  Just an idea.

Rethinking

So I recognize that I need a web presence. I also recognize that I'm a little overextended right now. When I was writing full time, I had plenty of time to maintain this blog, my myspace and facebook accounts, my mog page, and whatever other social networking sites I could find.

Now that I'm back to teaching full time, though, I barely have time to write, let alone network and blog. 

This blog is supposed to serve two purposes:  One is simply to give me an outlet to pontificate on popular culture.  Those of you who know me personally understand that this is a pretty significant need, and the existence of this blog is probably helping me maintain my personal relationships better, since I'm not burdening my loved and liked ones with my know-it-all opinions about stuff.

The second purpose is to help me sell books.  Here, I think this blog is failing.  My focus is not narrow enough to attract much of an audience outside of people who know me either personally or professionally, so I can't be like Cory Doctorow and leverage my blog audience into a bunch of book buyers who will overpraise my didactic, dull young adult novel.  Well, my young adult novels are neither didactic nor dull, but what I mean is that Cory Doctorow has a huge blog audience that he can whip up into some excitement over his books.  I have a tiny blog audience and even if I whip you all up into a frenzy, and I hope I do, we're still only talking about a handful of books.  Don't get me wrong--I appreciate every purchase--but I haven't built a big loyal blog audience that I've been able to convert into a big loyal book buying audience.  

And I don't have a large enough fan base for my books to drive a lot of people here to be fascinated by what I think about VH1 Celebreality or whatever.  

I'm averaging 40 hits a day right now, and if you subtract from those 40 the people who are looking for stuff about the novel called Girl in a Cage, people looking for BDSM porn involving cages, and people searching for pictures of people who've appeared on Celebrity Fit Club, I'm probably down to 10 or 15. 

And I appreciate those 10 or 15 people a lot-- but I'm not sure pontificating at a handful of friends is something I should be spending time on right now. 

I'm wondering if I should just post stuff here about what I'm writing and what's happening with my writing career, since I think that would be of some interest to people discovering me through my books, and just bag the pop culture stuff for a while, thereby simplifying my life and forcing me to devote more of my limited time and creative energy to writing I can actually get paid for.  

But I don't know. 

Thanks, Dennis Haysbert

I'm thrilled that Obama won, I'm thrilled for everything it says about this country, but this is primarily a pop culture blog, so I have just one thing to add to what's going to be a lot of discussion about the implications of Obama's victory: thanks, Dennis Haysbert!

While people have rightly blamed 24 for inuring us to the idea of Americans torturing--remember how often Jack Bauer was invoked in the Republican debates?--I think 24  also may have gotten people used to the idea of a black president.

I remember watching season 2 of 24  and wishing that President Palmer was real--that we had a smart, decisive president at the helm instead of the boob we actually had.  And President Palmer was black.  The show, to its credit, never made a big deal of this--it just so happend that this strong leader was black.  The guys who were out to kill him in season one weren't deranged racists--they were Serbs or something.  

Anyway, so whatever harm 24 did, I do think Dennis Haysbert planted in America's collective consciousnes the idea that we could have a competent, intelligent president who was also black.  And now we really do!