Girl in a Cage

Giving the Devil His Due

I have not been kind to metal in this space.

When I went to Ozzfest a couple of years ago, I was pretty down on the whole experience, with the exception of the mind-blowing showmanship and awesome 80's-metal-style songs of Finnish monster band Lordi.  Who are awesome.  Seriously, if they come to your town, catch this show.  You will not regret it.

But the other bands were a bunch of joyless, stand in one-spot and pummel the guitar, "sing" like cookie monster bands.  Who needs it, thought I.

But then I was working on a YA novel (going out for submission this month!) with my friend Trish Cook, and I wanted my protagonist to be an angry, alienated teen.  Though I am an aged punk rock fan, I decided that my character should be a metal fan.  Because I think metal today is a lot like punk was when I was a kid--thriving subculture of alienated, angry fans, no radio airplay, and parents, even those who grew up on Minor Threat, can't stand the stuff.

In order to get into this character's mindset, then, I had to start listening to his music. I created a Dimmu Borgir station on Pandora.  Dimmu Borgir, for the uninitiated, is a Norwegian black metal band. Or maybe dark metal? Symphonic black metal? I must confess I'm still puzzled by all these distinctions.  I picked Dimmu Borgir because back when I was active on Mog.com (fantastic thing when I didn't have a real job--now no time), I read something someone wrote comparing them to Kiss in that they wear hokey makeup and spiky boots.

Well, I can now report that I bought my first Dimmu Borgir album the other day.  (Death Cult Armageddon, for those keeping score at home.)

Why did I feel the need to own a Dimmu Borgir album? It does feature the mandated metal guitar sound as well as the mandated cookie monster vocals.  The lyrics are a bunch of Satanic hooey that, as I've written before, you really have to have been a committed Christian at one point in your life to take seriously.  And yet, I dig this music.  One thing that's compelling about this particular album is that it features the stylings of the Prague Symphony Orchestra on most songs.  There's something compelling in the interplay between heavy guitar riffs and swelling string parts.

And I think this, ultimately, is what gives Dimmu Borgir  something most metal bands lack:  a sense of fun. Now it may be that the fun here is completely unintentional, but either way, it's fine with me.  Guys in silly outfits with silly makeup singing silly (I'm sorry, but yes, silly.  Very,very silly) lyrics while a symphony orchestra creates a sense of grandiosity behind them--it's all just so awesomely over the top that it completely won me over. 

And yeah, I'm closing in on 41 and it's kind of fun to like music that most people can't stand.  Last night I appalled a car full of teens with a Dimmu Borgir track.  One of them described it as "Black Sabbath on Crack."  I think that's pretty apt. 

Here they are, those Norwegian fun merchants Dimmu Borgir with "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse" (hee hee!)

District 9

The boy and I went to see District 9 over the weekend.  It was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time.

Let's get this out of the way:  District 9 totally works as a violent, fast-paced science-fiction thriller.  What sets it apart is that it's also a thought-provoking, poignant, and incredibly well-acted movie.  Sharlto Copley in the lead role turns in a real tour-de-force performance that carries the movie.  The script is smart and deals largely with transformation and redemption, but the movie would fall apart if the lead couldn't carry it all off.  I feel confident in saying that Sharlto Copley will not win a best actor Oscar, but I also feel confident in saying you won't see a better performance this year. 

Now, I mean, I like a lot of big, dumb, loud Hollywood thrill rides:  I enjoyed the first Transformers thoroughly, though the second was a giant steaming turd of a movie.  But normally you walk out of one of these movies and the entire thing evaporates from your brain.  It was fun while it lasted, but nothing sticks with you. 

I can't get District 9 out of my head, though.  There are images and ideas from this movie that keep playing in my mind over and over.  The last shot of the movie in particular is just incredibly affecting. 

I hope this movie makes buckets of money because that might convince people to take a chance on more movies that are smart fun instead of dumb fun.

A little caveat--this is a pretty gory movie.  That's a recommendation as far as I'm concerned, but if you are going to be bugged by the sight of people exploding into bloody mist, for example, you should probaby avoid this one.

Book Sales Figures Revealed!

Don't worry.  I'm not here to complain.

I understand very well that I've been fortunate beyond belief to have people actually pay me for my writing.  Better yet, I was able to write full time for 4 and a half years (Well, I probably should have called it quits after 3 and saved myself a lot of ongoing financial headaches, but it was a dream job and I stretched it beyond where I probably should have.). 

So I got statements from Random House for three of my books the other day, and I thought I'd share the sales figures with the world, just because if you don't have access to Bookscan, this info is kept pretty mysterious.  People talk a lot about the publishing industry without a lot of hard numbers to look at, so maybe I'll make an interesting case study for someone.  Let's go to the numbers, and then I'll share some conclusions (All sales numbers are as of September 2008.  Yes, I just got them. When there's no money attached, these things move pretty slowly):

Losing My Faculties: (Published September 2003)

Harcover: 3,846  copies

Paperback: 4,479 copies

Number sold March-September 2008: 246 paperbacks.

Total electronic books sold:  3

Donorboy:  (Published August 2004)

Harcover: n/a.

Paperback: 12,415 copies.

Number sold March-September 2008: 152

Total electronic books sold: 6.

Long Way Back (Published January 2006)

Hardcover: 1,679 copies.

Paperback: 357 copies.

Number sold March-September 2008: -296. (6 hardcovers sold, 302 paperbacks returned.)

Total electronic books sold: n/a.

Point of comparison:  I remember reading that when Oprah selected The Corrections, FSG went back for an additional 600,000 copies.  So there's a pretty big range in how much professional writers sell.

So, Losing My Faculties, a memoir about teaching, seems to still be selling. I know it's used in a few ed schools, and I know people give it to new and prospective teachers a lot, probably in the fall.  So it's got a constantly renewing audience.  It's obviously not burning up the charts or anything, but it's selling enough to stay in print. 

It was the apparently disappointing hardcover sales of Losing My Faculties that led the chain stores to refuse to carry another hardcover from me.  Thus Donorboy was published as a trade paperback original.  This remains my bestselling book for adults due, I think, to a couple of factors:

1.) with one of the protagonists a 14-year-old girl, this book had YA crossover appeal and was recognized by the ALA with inclusion on the Best Books for Young Adults list as well as an Alex award.  So those fabulous librarians helped spread the word.

2.) Paperback.  Since I was (and, let's face it, still am) a largely unknown author, more people were willing to take a chance on a 13-dollar paperback than they would have on a 20-dollar hardcover.

3.)Front table at the chains.  I met another author who said this is the only factor that matters in selling books.  Not sure I agree with that assessment, but the data are provocative.  This is the only one of my books to have been rolled out on the front table at both major chains, and it's also the only one to sell this well.  I hope this isn't the only factor contributing to its success, but it certainly couldn't have hurt.

Long Way Back is obviously an incredible sales dog. My worst-selling book ever.  Also, I think, my best book.  Go figure.  Not much to say--having had decent success with a trade paperback, the publishers chose to go back to hardcover with this one.  It was dumped into bookstores with no fanfare or real promotional effort.  Some people, as the sales figures show, will buy a book that they have to hunt for, but not too many.  Interestingly, the hardcover image of a male guitar player in silhouette was replaced with a hot woman for the paperback, with the idea that more women would buy it if they saw a hot babe on the cover. (The logic still escapes me, but whatever.)  Looks like that didn't work.  I probably could have sold this many paperback copies out of the back of my car.  And maybe I should try. This one's headed out of print, probably very soon.

Clearly as of September 2008, nobody was really buying ebooks, at least not ones written by me.  There's this, though:  I make more than twice as much money for a ten dollar ebook than I do for a thirteen-dollar paperback.  (I say make money in a purely theoretical sense--I feel confident saying that, without an Oprah selection, none of these three books will ever earn out their advances).  These contracts were negotiated in a time when ebooks were more theoretical than actual, so it may be that the publishers gave the electronic store away because they knew very little real money would actually be involved.  I think, though, if they're willing to give the authors such a generous cut, they must be making even more, and the current suggestion that the 9.99 price point isn't supportable should be met with some suspicion.

Those are my conclusions, but you should feel free to draw your own.

The Quality of Mercy

I was an American student spending a year in the Scotland when the plane was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing about 300 people including a fair number who were American students spending a semester or year in  Europe.

Though I didn't know anybody on the plane, this one hit home to me more than probably any other terrorist attack, because I had the sense that it really could have been me or any number of people I knew and cared about on the plane.

And now Scotland has gone and released one of the people responsible for the bombing so he can go home and die of prostate cancer.

I was initially as pissed as anybody else about this--why should this killer get a peaceful death surrounded by loved ones when his actions (despite his denials) deprived 300 other people of such a death?

And then I thought, well, what, exactly, consitutes justice?  Killing another person is such a heinous act that there's really nothing that feels like justice to me. 

So there's this:  the battle between secular democracy and religious fundamentalism is taking place in people's minds all over the world, and this is a tremendous PR victory for the good guys.  How evil exactly can secular democracies be if they will show mercy to even such a heinous killer?  Doesn't this make it harder to paint the good guys as tools of Satan?

What I don't really understand is why so many nominal Christians are up in arms about this.  Isn't forgiveness pretty much the central tenet of this religion?  I mean, sure, it's also the most challenging, but really--I don't know why people who get all up in arms about violations of the Leviticus code and believe the hooey about God knocking up a virgin don't also speak out for the importance of mercy and forgiveness. Who do they think Jesus was talking about when he urged people to love and forgive their enemies?

If we've learned anything from Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Marvin Gaye, it's that only love can conquer hate.

Or, to put it another way:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Last night we watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. (Streaming via Netflix on my Xbox 360! And may I add that the bootleg wifi booster I attached to my router, which consists of an index card covered in aluminum foil bent into a parabola that sits behind the router antenna, has made the video quality pretty consistently watchable.I'm telling you, folks, this is totally the wave o' the future.)

Michael Cera is Michael Cera, if a slightly less awkward version of Michael Cera than he usually plays (Don't get me wrong-- I love the guy),  Kat Dennings is adorable, and the movie is a really fun, really cute kind of After Hours Jr.  It's also a love story that is genuinely sweet rather than saccharine.

The movie has a serious message at its heart aimed at women and girls:  if you've never had an orgasm, seek out a somewhat nerdy guy.  I hope for the sake of current high school dorks that this message really hits home. 

I would also like to say that the sex scene is handled incredibly tastefully and cleverly--probably the least awkward and cringeworthy sex scene I can remember in a movie.  Weird stuff immediately afterwards where they both appear to be essentially fully clothed. And wearing pants, yet.  I suspect this was some sort of compromise to allow them to keep the PG-13 rating.  (is the MPAA crazy or what?  It's okay to listen to teens clearly engaged in sexual activity as long as they appear to be fully clothed immediately afterward.  Let me just say the sounds they were making were clearly not dry-humping sounds, and so this ends up looking like some kind of weird continuity error that distracts from the story.)

Anyway, it's a fun little fantasy and definitely worth your time.

And I say this despite the fact that I have a little grudge against this movie.  It was cited as a reason that a movie version of my (brilliant, and almost criminally neglected) novel Long Way Back might be difficult to sell.  At the time, I couldn't understand why, but now, having seen Nick and Norah, I understand.

Michael Cera plays a bass player, the only straight member of an otherwise gay three-piece band.  And Francis, the protagonist of my novel Long Way Back, plays bass as the only straight member of an otherwise gay three-piece band.  The novels are otherwise pretty dissimilar, but it's kind of weird that there's that little specific thing that's the same.

My novel came out two months before the Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist novel, so there is really no way either book could have influenced the other. Which is too bad because I would have totally sued their asses.

Forty Years Later

A couple of 40th anniversary notes.

After 40 years on the air, Boston's legendary rock station WBCN went off the air last week.  I, for one, am dancing on the grave of this station.  When I moved to Boston in 1991, BCN was the 800-pound gorilla of rock and roll stations, and they used their considerable clout to nurture and support new music.  Ha!  Just kidding!  Actually they were like most rock stations at the time, serving up a steady diet of Aerosmith and Tom Petty and very little else.

The station did a maudlin, self-congratulatory farewell to itself last week, and nobody mentioned the years in which it stifled new music.  And I heard several people talking about how great their old afternoon DJ Mark Parenteau was, too.  I suppose the fact that he's a convicted pedophile doesn't necessarily negate his DJ skills (I always found him insufferable on the air, but not because I had any kind of insight into his profound sleaziness), but still, it kinda irked to hear this guy praised on the air.

People crying in their beer about this station forget that they refused to play anything "alternative" until after Woodstock 95 made it commercially safe.  The hell with them, I say.

And speaking of Woodstock, you may have heard that it's the 40th anniversary of that legendary concert, that was a really significant cultural event because...um...well, see...they made a movie...um... a lot of people got high...

Yeah. 

It was only a concert.

And a concert, I might add, at which Sha Na Na performed.

'Nuff said.

Summertime is Reality TV time

It's been distressingly long since I wrote about reality TV. 

Until a recent DVR mishap (I believe this had to do with the children deciding to set a timer for one of their shows that is on every half hour and assigning it a high priority) we were enjoying I Survived a Japanese Game Show.  This is a pretty standard reality competition show except that the participants competed to stay on a Japanese Game show which, as you may know, involves a lot of elaborately humiliating competitions. (My favorite was called "sour milk for kitty" in which contestants dressed as cats with big bowls on their heads had to pass sour milk down a staircase via the bowls on their heads.)

It's compelling to watch the ridiculous competitions, but I do think the producers made two crucial errors in the casting department.  One was failing to cast my friend Trish, who made it through a couple of auditions.  Another was that the mix of contestants just wasn't that interesting.  (It makes you really appreciate the job that the Project Runway producers do putting together an interesting cast every year.) The episodes I watched featured the elimination of the interesting people (token fat guy, ultra-religious 25-year-old virgin librarian guy) at the hands of a bunch of fundamentally dull but jocky people.  Where's the backstabbing?  Where's the "coming back from poverty/abuse/serious illness contestant? Where's the obvious villain?  Boo! 

Last night I caught MTV's Bully Beatdown for the first time.  (Interesting story, kids:  MTV used to actually be a music channel!  No, really!) What an amazingly great show.  People who've been picked on nominate their present or past bullies to participate.  The bullies, being arrogant lunkheads, always agree to the contest, which is this:  Bully faces 2 rounds in the cage with a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter.  Round one is only grappling, and every time they tap out due to being about to lose consciousness or a limb, they lose a thousand bucks, which goes to the victim.  5000 bucks on the line.  Round 2 is the punching and kicking round.  If the bully survives the 3 minute round, he gets 5000 bucks. If he's knocked out or quits or the ref stops the fight, the victim gets 5000 bucks. 

It is just a brilliant show.  It would be hard to watch the brutal beatings these guys take if you didn't know that they were bullies.  I watched two episodes, and neither bully landed so much as one punch on the professional fighters.  So, basically, you watch douchebags get the snot beaten out of them.  What's not to love?

Cool Stuff Happening in Comics

There's exciting stuff happening in the comic book world.  Let's get right to it, shall we?

1.Wednesday Comics from DC Comics.  This is just so freaking cool I can't believe it. In a nutshell, every week DC is putting out what looks like a big Sunday Comics section, only printed on good paper with good ink.  Each page is devoted to a different character and storyline--thus there's a Batman page, a Superman page, a Kamandi (!) page, etc etc. When you unfold this thing, it's just stunning--really thrilling to see so much beautiful art in vivid colors.  The writers and artists are pretty much a who's who of comicdom these days, and best of all from my point of view, you don't need to be up on the continuity of each character's world in order to enjoy the stories.  (This is one of the things that's actually quite daunting about picking up a superhero comic in general--there's always all kinds of story, deaths, name changes, etc. etc, that you're not familiar with and probably don't want to take the time to get caught up on.)

They've done five of twelve issues of this, and I really recommend it to everybody.

2.Comics iphone app from Comixology.  It's 99 cents and comes with about 30 comics you can dowload for free.  Bargain!  Here's the best part, from my point of view: the reader goes through the comic panel by panel, so you really get to appreciate each panel.  (This is often a problem for me, as I tend to whiz through comics very quickly without really savoring the art in each panel.).  Additional comics are available to purchase, in a range of 99 cents to 1.99.  I haven't bought any additional comics, but a lot of really good ones are available.

3.Batwoman in Detective Comics.  New storyline, sexy lesbian crimefighting hero, art that is really amazing--there's no reason not to buy!

4.Seamus Cooper signing at Friendly Neighborhood Comics in Bellingham, MA.  The author of the awesome humorous horror-related adventure novel The Mall of Cthulhu will be signing copies of his novel this Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:30.  Pick up your Wednesday new releases and get an awesome non-graphic novel signed by the author!

Some Thoughts on the Occasion of John Hughes' Death

I'd be lying if I said I felt personally affected by John Hughes' death; I've lost enough people I know and care about that celebrity deaths don't really move me much.  At least not since Joey Ramone died.

Still, I thought John Hughes' death (it's a death, not a passing.  Passing is what you do in the left lane; it's what you do with gas.  Dying is what you do when your life ends.) was a decent occasion to revisit some of what I've written about John Hughes in the past. 

If you were a white teenager (sadly, this distinction is important) in the 1980's, John Hughes' movies had a colossal impact on how you thought about yourself and your place in the society you lived in.  His movies had a huge impact on popular culture, but they also got into our heads in a way that few other movies did. (Repo Man and Buckaroo Banzai were others that had that effect for me, which probably explains why I'm a little out of step).

The Breakfast Club got into my head so much that I felt compelled to write a sequel.  You can still download my Breakfast Club 2 screenplay by clicking on the "Free Stuff" link on this page, or go to the original entry with the link here. The original entry containing my sequel was probably the best obituary I could have written for the guy.  I doubt he ever saw it, but at least I wrote it while he was alive.

My recent reassessment of Sixteen Candles is here.

I still want to know the deal is with Hughes writing the Beethoven movies as well as Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes. It suggests he, like his pseudonym, may have been plotting an elaborate, decades-long, ultimately hollow revenge on his enemies.  I guess he didn't live to see it happen.

The Machine Girl

Vacation is the time to catch up on all kinds of things, so last night I decided to catch up on my Japanese Extreme Gore movie watching. 

I sneaked into the one corner of the house where I can get a wireless signal and watched The Machine Girl streaming on Netflix.

It was fortunate that I'd eaten several hours earlier, since this movie is a stomach-churning gorefest. 

It's a revenge tragedy, it's a comedy, but most of all, it's an excuse for the filmmakers to stage some of the goriest kills I've ever seen on film.

Quibble: there was some CGI gore, which always feels like a cheat to me, but in this case it just added to the cartoonish vibe the filmmakers had going in certain scenes.

You know that scene with the 88 yakuza in Kill Bill Part 1?  That would have been the tamest thing in this movie. This movie also has a real sense of humor, as opposed to the smug sense of self-satisfaction that passes for a sense of humor in Tarantino movies. 

Also, there are ninjas. And a heroine with a machine gun arm.

This movie is most certainly not for everyone.  If you'd like to see a movie where an evil woman is stabbed in the back of the head, and with knife protruding from her mouth, she proceeds to vomit and then bleed all over the disembodied head of her dead son which is floating in the soup pot, well, congrats.  You are just as sick as I am, and you should watch this movie. 

If that description doesn't appeal to you, do not under any circumstances watch, or even be in the room while someone else is watching, this movie. 

Here's the trailer for you sick bastards: