Girl in a Cage

Ain't That America

Something's come up recently that I find kind of interesting.  I've been seeing more hate for Boston sports teams on twitter and on the pages of my non-Bostonian facebook friends. 

At first this puzzled me.  "Boston sports teams?" I thought. "Who hates them?  They're the loveable losers made good!"  This, despite the great success of our teams in the last few years, is how most Bostonians still think of our sports teams.  They're scrappy underdogs who you can't help but love!  (I still root for Boston teams, but right now only the Bruins qualify for the loveable losers made good label, and who gives a shit about hockey anyway).

But, of course, most of the rest of the country doesn't look at our teams that way. They look at big, rich, free-agent heavy teams that have come to dominate, or at least alway seriously compete in, their divisions.  To people outside of Boston, our teams aren't loveable scrappy underdogs--they're hateable bullies!

This, I realized, is a microcosm of how we Americans view ourselves and how the rest of the world views us.  Our national image is the loveable scrappy underdogs who beat the odds and thereby the British, and then who came through and saved the day in 2 world wars!  But, of course, the rest of the world doesn't see us as loveable underdogs, but rather rich bullies.

Not sure what the lesson is here.  Just something I was thinking about.

I Am a Terrible Person

Thinking too much can ruin a good time.  Thus spake the Minutemen in "I Felt Like a Gringo", and I have found this quote applicable in my own life on numerous occasions.

Like now, when I can't even really get my snark on without wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

So I follow Neil Gaiman on twitter, and he posted a link to this blog entry, which, in turn, led me to this blog entry by Amanda Huginkiss.  I mean Palmer.

If you don't feel like clicking through, here's the upshot.  Students at Lexington High School are creating a play based on Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, mixed with the diary of Anne Frank, with help from Amanda Palmer. I am not making this up.

When I read this, my eyes started rolling, and they've barely stopped since.   Now why can't I just let the kids have their fun and embark on some kind of artistic adventure that sounds horribly misguided to me but actually would probably be lots of fun?

I dunno, but it bugs me.  A couple of reasons.

1.) Stupid pretentious band name.  Stupid pretentious album name.  My friend Dan assures me this is a good band, but he's inflicted enough Stereolab on me that I'm a bit wary of his endorsements.

2.)Class resentment.  Lexington MA is the 17th richest community in Massachusetts.  Out of 435.  Boston, where I live and work, is 266. I've also worked in towns in the high 100s.  I guess I just feel like, geez, my kids, who attend Boston Public Schools, will be lucky to have any theater at all, and here's the rich kids with their fancy-pants celebrity-endorsed theater project.  I mean, yeah, rich kids need the arts too (one might argue that they, who will be running things for the rest of us in ten years,  have a special need for the arts, which force a recognition of our shared humanity).  Still, knowing that these kids who already have every advantage in life can chalk up yet another advantage just feels like adding insult to injury.

3.) Self hate: full disclosure, before my friends storm the comments with gotchas:  Though I grew up broke, I got a scholarship to attend private school with the richest kids in Cincinnati.  And I was big into theater.  And we did a big experimental two-night adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley's turgid, anti-male Arthurian saga The Mists of Avalon, and it was a bad experience for me and, if my friends and family members were honest in their assessments, the audience too.

So what do I want?  Rich kids to stick to Our Town?  Celebrity authors to blog about schools where arts programs are on life support?  Hot, weird musicians whose music I don't like to co-create projects I approve of? People doing new theater projects to do something more like this?

Maybe all of the above. Or, perhaps, none of the above.  Perhaps I'm just a really bad person.

Blu Ray Whore

  Please note I am not talking about Ken Russel's 1991 movie Whore, which I haven't seen and which isn't even readily available on DVD, much less Blu Ray.   (If you're interested, the available DVDs are a German pressing and available for 50 bucks.  I think you'd have to be a pretty big Ken Russel fan to go for that.)

No, what I mean is I will watch anything on Blu Ray. 

The joke here is on the boy.  When he began his Playstation 3 lobbying campaign, a large part of the pitch was the console's ability to play Blu Ray discs.  "It can be for the family too!" he said.

And now, much to his chagrin, it is.  "Pop FIFA 09 out there, it's time to watch Twilight," we'll say, and he'll grumble.

And grumble he might, and though it's not a good movie (But God, those trees and mountains look absolutely stunning on blu ray!), it's actually better than the book-- the bad vampires are actually set up before the baseball game, so it's not like this bizarre threat totally comes out of nowhere the way it does in the book.  The running looks silly, the baseball game is still stupid, and Bella, while still annoying, is far less annoying than she is in the book because the filmmakers have the good sense to dispense with most of her annoying pining over Edward and being annoyed at the mortal boys who have the temerity to be nice to her. Say what you will about Hollywood types--they do understand how to construct a story, apparently much better than Stephenie Meyer does.

Anyway, did you see how I had to interject about how great the trees look on the blu ray Twilight?  I do that every time we watch a movie on blu ray.  It's beginning to annoy the hell out of my family.  "Just look at those colors!" I screamed as we watched The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (It's too long, Terry.  We didn't make it all the way through.)  "Wow, London looks amazing!" I cried as we watched Run, Fatboy Run. "And Thandie Newton ain't too shabby either!"  (This is a great movie.  We all really liked it.  It was funny and had a heart, which, yes, I must admit surprised me when I saw it was written at least in part by Michael Ian Black, who is intermittently funny if annoyingly omnipresent on VH1, but whose work has never seemed to have much of a heart to me before.  I recommend.)

So yeah, Netflix is screwing us on the blu-ray access (only 1 extra buck a month!  Oh, did we say 1?  We meant 4! The next increase has to be on the horizon), and you need a player and a fancy tv, but really--it is like having a movie theater in your house.  It just looks freaking amazing.  I know at some point the thrill will fade and I'll just get used to super-sharp pictures and vivid colors, but for now, it is frickin' awesome.

Tonight at the BPL

The main branch of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square is worth visiting because it's a gorgeous building.  (Well, the research side is gorgeous.  The circulating side....not so much.)

But tonight, there's an even better reason to visit!  At 6pm, a local author's panel featuring Lynne Griffin, Mary McGarry Morris,( whom you may know as the author of the Oprah's book club selection Songs in Ordinary Time, which I always get confused with that Doris Kearns Goodwin book, but of course that one is called Stuff I Plagiarized) and, of course, me!

I always try to make these things funny, so expect some smartassery from me, at least when I'm not trying to steal Mary McGarry Morris' Oprah Book  Club mojo.  (Where do you suppose one hides the Oprah's Book Club mojo?  Well, I suppose if I go through her bag, I'm bound to find it.)

Hope to see you there!

Stuff I Dig

I've recently been listening obsessively to "Our Most Beloved", an album by James Kochalka Superstar.  I keep thinking of the word "autodidact" to describe this guy, though that of course is the wrong word.  But he's one of those guys who you suspect would be doing his own idiosyncratic brand of pop in his basement  even if nobody else would listen to it or buy it.  I get the idea that Ween are like that.  Maybe some others.  Anyway, with songs like "magic finger" (the magic finger in question is, as the song says, "my dick."), "show respect to Michael Jackson", "Don't Trust Whitey" and "Monkey Vs. Robot", the humor takes center stage, and I suppose it's one of those things you either think is funny or you don't.  I do. I should point out that I am the only member of my family who does.  "Oh, God, are you listening to that penis song again?" they say as they wander through the kitchen.  Or possibly, "not another monkey song."  (There are two on this record.  Anyway, so if Ween meets Flaming Lips sounds appealing to you and you think you might enjoy some songs about monkeys and penises, you should pick up this record.

I also recently read Paul Tremblay's The Little Sleep.  It is a killer detective novel with a narcoleptic detective.  So it's not the same damn thing you've read a million times--especially because the mystery of the book is at least half caused by the main character's narcolepsy.  The title and the concept make it sound like a goof, but it is a pretty straightforward noir detective novel.  I highly recommend.  If you enjoy Charlie Huston's books (and why wouldn't you?  What the hell is wrong with you anyway?), you'll like this.  (Bonus:  set in Boston!)

Finally, my amazing wife dimly remembered some movie she'd seen late one night in the 1980's.  We pieced together that it was Waxwork, a straight-to-video gem from 1988.  Words cannot describe the awesomeness of this movie. But I'll try.  David Warner and John Rhys Davies are the only real actors in the movie, and they both throw themselves into their cheeseball roles with gusto.  But the main actors are Zach Galligan--just 4 years removed from Gremlins and already fallen so low! and, um, that girl from Real Genius.  No, not the cute smart girl--the evil professor's daughter.  The dumb kids wander into waxwork exhibits and are transported to the scene depicted to become werewolf or vampire bait or whatever.  Somewhat surprising acts of extreme gore ensue.  It is frickin' awesome.  And the sequel is on the same DVD!  Queue this up immediately!

This is why people are cynical

Last night I was walking my dog in Franklin park when some young men getting high on a bench stopped me to inform me that a 4-year-old child was missing from a street near my house.

My wife drove by the scene, which was crawling with police and K-9 units, thus confirming the truth of the story despite the possible unreliability of my original source.

A couple of weeks ago, someone stole one of the "Make Way For Ducklings" ducks from the Boston Common.  Here are some links to blog posts about the duckling theft.  Here are some links to news stories about the duckling theft.

I cannot provide any links to blog posts or stories about the child missing from Egelston Square last night.  I hope that, like the bronze duck, he has been safely recovered and is back with his family.  But I have no idea.  www.bpdnews.com, the Boston Police's blog, was all over the important duckling story but hasn't mentioned the missing kid.  Ditto for the Boston Globe and Boston Herald.

We can only speculate if things would be different if the kid (Hispanic,according to my informants) were white or wealthy. 

But here is what I know.  Even in 2009 with a black man in the white house, in one of the most liberal cities in this country, a poor Hispanic child is nowhere near as important as a bronze duck.

UPDATE:  Kid is found and safe.  Got that via private message from @Boston_Police on twitter!

#Amazonfail

Twitter has been all, um atwitter about this all day, but for those who, as Stephen Colbert so memorably put it on the Today Show, have not twatted all day, here's the scoop.

Amazon has removed certain books from its sales rankings.  Read all about it here and here.  The books in question include a large number of gay and lesbian titles.  (My own DONORBOY, sadly, has not been removed from sales rankings despite its gay-friendly content.  Find it holding down the #678,372 spot!)

As I write this, Amazon is claiming it's a "glitch",  angry twitterers are calling shenanigans, and somebody's posted some barely-comprehensible thing about how the whole thing is bantown, ie, the result of trolls seeking meta-lulz.  I have no idea what the hell that means.

A couple of things:  even if this is an infuriating Amazon policy, it's not censorship.  All the de-listed books are still available to purchase both on Amazon and elsewhere.  It is not against the law to print, read, sell, or own these books.   (I know.  Wordsmithing.  English teacher, what can I say.)

Thing 2:  either Amazon is trying to filter gay and lesbian books out of their searches or some anti-gay group has found a way to tag things as objectionable and get them out of the searches.  In either case, this would not be a problem if Amazon weren't so darn big. 

I think the problem here is not Amazon's stupidity, but rather its size.  Any time a company dominates a market, any stupid thing they do is going to have huge implications.  And companies do stupid things all the time. Because they are run by humans, who are often stupid.

We did this, folks.  We loved the savings, the convenience and the wishlists and all that crap, and we allowed one company to dominate online bookselling.  And now that one company is doing something stupid and/or evil,and its a big deal.  But its only a big deal if Amazon continues to be an 800-pound gorilla.  Maybe we should all be more conscious of our buying behavior so we can encourage competition.  This helps keep companies honest and helps keep our local businesses (and, therefore business districts) healthy. 

If you are alarmed by Amazon's weird anti-gay policy, as I am, instead of spending a lot of energy railing against Amazon, why not spend some money keeping their competitors afloat? (may I recommend an actual bookstore?) So that way, the next time they do something dumb, it won't be such a big deal.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

What do you get when you cross an awesome book with an eye-rollingly cheesy one?  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. (Not sure on the co-author there, since he does not hold copyright to his part of the book.  The publisher, Quirk books, holds the copyright.  I suppose it's one of those "book packaging" deals.)

First, the awesomeness:  a zombie plague in 19th-Century England, and our heroine is a fierce and fearless slayer of the undead, trained in Chinese Kung Fu, among other deadly arts.  She is looked down upon by some members of society who feel that Japanese ninja training is superior.  Scenes of excellent, zombie- and ninja-killing violence abound.  My favorite is when Elizabeth takes on Lady Catherine's ninjas, strangling one to death with his own intestines, and taking a bite of the still-beating heart she's extracted from the chest of another.  All of this is written is a witty style and is tremendously enjoyable to read.

The eye-rolling cheesiness:  at its heart, this is a romance novel---well, no, that's understating.  It's porn for book nerd girls.  Yes, only the smart, snarky one can tame the heart of the bad boy who's really good! Puh. Leeze.  (Interesting--write cheesy wish-fulfillment porn for men and find yourself a soon-forgotten genre author.  Write cheesy wish-fulfillment porn for women and find your books labeled timeless classics!)

So is the awesomeness of the zombie mayhem enough to carry us through the tedious comings and goings of trivial people?  For the most part, yes.  The love story is dull almost beyond belief, enlivened only by a fair amount of double-entendre around the word "balls." (I'm pretty sure this part is not in the Jane Austen original.) The trivial characters with their trivial concerns are given some weight by the apocalyptic zombie plague they are living through.  Much as in any zombie narrative, the extent to which the characters in a society falling apart at the seams cling desperately to the vestiges of what they consider civilization is interesting here. 

Overall, this is a pretty brilliant cross-pollination.  Lovers of the original will find the same tedious, predictable love story they treasure in these pages, and will likely find the transformation of their beloved sharp-tongued heroine into a killing machine itching to behead both living and undead pleasing. Lovers of horror will find enough gore to please them, enlivened by a witty narrative voice that is normally almost completely absent from the horror genre. 

Thumbs up from me.

Don't You Forget About Me

A while back, I thought I'd try my hand at screenwriting.  Obviously, it didn't work out, but I did have some fun playing around in a new format. 

The first thing I tried my hand at was a sequel to The Breakfast Club. 

Those of you who are around my age (40) will probably understand immediately why I wanted to do this;  those of you younger or older will probably be mystified by this choice. 

For me and many in my generation, The Breakfast Club was a touchstone, a movie that moved me in ways I still don't fully understand, probably in ways that you can only be moved by something when you're 16.  I can see the flaws in the original movie now, but it hasn't really diminished my love for either the movie or for the characters.

So I decided to age the characters and imagine what would happen if they all, at roughly my age, got thrown together again.  What I've got here is a second draft, so it's still rough and flawed in a couple of places, but I do think there are some good things about it.  Though a real Breakfast Club sequel will probably never exist, I've got one in my mind that I like a lot, and so I thought I'd make it available to you too.

My current novel, I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW, is probably my last book for adults, and I have really appreciated those of you who have expressed dismay at this idea. I appreciate everybody who has bought, liked, blogged about, favorably reviewed, and recommended my adult novels, so please consider this file a little thank you gift--since you've shelled out for my work when others haven't, here's a little freebie for your trouble.

If you've gotten here due to a firestorm of interest in the internets (unlikely, but I suppose you never know) and you've never heard of me but get some enjoyment out of this, please consider clicking over on the left and buying one of my books.

Anyway,click to download Download BreakfastClub2Halpinfull.pdf (148.6K); It's in PDF format, which means you'll need Adobe Reader to read it, but you probably already have that.  If not, find it here.

I don't know how to translate this file into a format that will be more compatible with your Kindle or Iphone.  (I made it with MovieMagic Screenwriter.) If you have any insight, feel free to post a copy in a mobile-friendly format and I'll link to you, or email me at brendan at brendanhalpin dot com and tell me how to do it here. 

Honestly I don't know the legal implications of this work, but I'm posting it here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. Feel free to copy it, send it to any and everybody, and post it on your own site, as long as you say it's my work.  (Um, except for the whole based on characters created by John Hughes thing. No idea how this works. I guess if you're John Hughes and you want me to take this down, lemme know.)

Breakfast Club 2 by Brendan Halpin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.brendanhalpin.com.