Guinea and Guyana

Ever wonder what the origin of the term “Guinea” is, since it used for so many different things? Me, too.

“Guinea” is used as a place name for, count ’em, three different African countries: Guinea, Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. It was applied to the whole southern curve of West Africa. In the days of Colonialism, there was French Guinea, German Guinea, Spanish Guinea, Dutch Guinea, Portu-bloody-guese-bloody-Guinea. You will see from the above 1736 map, “Negroland and the European Settlements,” that the “Slave Coast” was part of the region.

“Guinea” is also a type of rodent and a type of fowl. It was used for an antique UK currency, it’s a tri-racial Virginia clan, and it’s a racial slur against either the Italians or the Spanish, depending on which decade of which century you’re using it in. The Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester have Royal Navy sailors using it for the Spanish during the English-Spanish wars; there, a far more common N-word is also applied by the British sailors to the Spanish.

Then there’s the similar term “Guyana” or “The Guianas,” referring to a region of northern South America (now Guyana, French Guyana, and Suriname). In the U.S., if you lived through the late ’70s, Guyana is virtually synonymous with mass suicide, owing to the 1978 Jonestown Massacre (and mass suicide) in the Jonestown intentional community in Guyana, led by People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones. More than 900 people died there.

The Jonestown Massacre remains the only time a U.S. Congressional Representative was killed in the line of duty, as The Honorable Leo Ryan had traveled down there to investigate the cult. Ryan was one of five people murdered when the investigative team was ambushed attempting to board the plane and leave. Current representative Jackie Speier, who represents part of San Mateo County and the southwestern corner of San Francisco, was a Congressional aide at the time. She was shot five times by members of the People’s Temple. She survived after waiting 22 hours for help.

The Jonestown mass suicide/murder occurred the same day. It’s unclear how many at Jonestown committed suicide, and how many were murdered by being forced to drink poison by other cult members. The slang term “drank the Kool-Aid,” meaning to believe some godawful bullshit sold by a weird group of psychos, is derived from the Jonestown Massacre, even though they actually didn’t drink Kool-Aid — it was reportedly Flavor-Aid. I think over at Kraft Foods, some Marketing Manager has a Google Alert on “drank the Kool-Aid” and to this day probably has a conniption fit every time someone uses the term.

Well, according to my wise Aunt Wikipedia, the two place names Guinea and Guyana are not related. The African name may be (but no one knows for sure) from the Berber language term “Akal n-Iguinawen,” which means “land of the black people.” In Berber, it has variously referred to either the Guinea region of Central-Western Africa, or to the Sudan. Berber is the language of the Mahgreb (western North Africa — everything except Egypt) that predates the domination of Arabic following the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. Berber languages persist to this day in North Africa, in the form of Moroccan Amazigt or Tamazigt, and many other related Berber languages.

“Guyana,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from a Native American word meaning “land of many rivers.” They appear to be unrelated terms…each for a region with a grotesque history of Western excess. Hooray.

Was Bogart Born on Christmas Day?

Slapsgiving cheer via user and bartender Paddy at The Fedora Lounge.

Close on the heels of my incisive investigation (aka Google Search) as to whether Mr. “When You’re Slapped You’ll Take It and Like It” was at one time the Gerber Baby, I decided to tackle another pervasive rumor using my top-notch investigative reporting skills (aka a slightly higher than average typing speed).

Sadly, as to whether Bogart was born on Christmas, as another longstanding Bogart myth claims, IMDB is of relatively little help, its information having been garbled by an insidious computer virus known as “crowdsourcing.” IMDB dismisses as incorrect the New York Times’ claim Bogart was really born on 12/23/1899 but publicists decided “A guy born on Christmas can’t be all bad.” IMDB says, “Copies of two census forms from 1900 show this to be incorrect,” but doesn’t say which part of the NYT’s claim is incorrect…that publicist changed Bogart’s birth date, that Bogart was born on Christmas, or both?

Bogart’s IMDB trivia page goes on, then, to claim that Bogart would morosely screen “A Star Is Born” every Christmas Day — his birthday — because “I expected more out of myself.” IMDB doesn’t source that claim, other than (vaguely) to director Richard Brooks, in a story that sounds potentially apocryphal.

Nonetheless, the IMDB page for Humphrey Bogart still lists his birth date as Christmas, 1899, as does Wikipedia, which also claims the fake-Christmas-birthday story is baseless, owing to birth notices in early 1900 that list Bogart’s birth date as 12/25/1899.

I can’t imagine what kind of boneheaded publicity hound would make up a fake birthday, but hey, it’s been done before, right? Am I right? Only my parents and my identity thieves know for sure.

In any event, Bogart wasn’t that unusual. Based on the current population, something in excess of 800,000 people in the United States alive today were born on Christmas. In 1900, the figure would have been about a quarter of that.

So…Bogart was not the Gerber baby, but he was a baby-food model, and he was born on Christmas. And don’t forget to attend the Humphrey Bogart Film Festival next year in Key Largo. My guess is, the Key Largo Hilton won’t have baby food, but they’ll have martinis, reportedly Bogart’s favorite drink. As Bogart saw it, “The problem with the world
is that everyone is a few drinks behind.”

Was Humphrey Bogart the Gerber Baby?

You know the Gerber Baby? It’s probably the best-known single baby image in the world, more recognizable to more people, even, than any single image of the infant Christ….which is a scary thought. It’s also the subject of a major urban legend.

Longstanding rumor has it that the model for the campaign was Humphrey Bogart, or occasionally Ernest Borgnine or Liz Taylor. It wasn’t. Bogart was 29 years old when the sketch debuted as the spokesbaby image for Gerber Strained Foods, in the fall of 1928. Ernest Bornine was 11; Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t born yet. Bogart also wasn’t born on Christmas,

Bogart’s mother, Maud Humphrey, was a commercial illustrator and did use her sketches of her son, including one for a campaign for Mellin’s Baby Food. She also used Baby Bogey as a model for Ivory Soap, for an illustration that, for a time, was almost as iconic as Gerber would later become (though not quite as long-lived). As Bogart put it, related in his son Stephen Bogart’s book In Search of My Father, “There was a period in American History when you couldn’t pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser in it.”

The model for Gerber was 2 years old at the time of Fremont Canning’s model search, but it was an old charcoal sketch by a neighbor. Her name was Ann Turner Cook. She did become mildly famous, but as a mystery novelist, according to Wikipedia. You can even find her books on Amazon. Here’s one of them.

Also according to Wikipedia, Cook’s father was Leslie Turner, a cartoonist who would later take over the syndicated action/adventure comic strip Captain Easy for decades following the departure of creator Roy Crane, having drawn the daily strips in the ’30s while Crane did Sundays. (The 4-volume Fantagraphics reprint features just the Crane years Sunday strips).

But it was a neighbor, Dorothy Hope Smith, who submitted the rough charcoal sketch of the young Miss Turner that became the baby food’s iconic trademark. Smith was a professional artist, and told Fremont Canning Company she intended to finish the sketch professionally if it was chosen. They decided to use it as-is.

The image of the Gerber Baby debuted in an issue of Good Housekeeping in late 1928. And the rest is weird history…

 

The Lives of Evan Hunter

I love this old Evan Hunter cover posted by Nancy A. Collins to her Facebook page. The book appears to be a pretty obscure one; I found it on Amazon here, but there’s no description. Pulp of the Day has the cover as the source for a caption contest but nobody seems to have read it.

It looks like a hell of a pulpy potboiler. I was under the vague impression that Evan Hunter’s work under his own name tended toward the, er, literary, but this sorta undermines that idea (which is based on nothing, anyway). Then again, even Hemingway had some awesome covers back in the day, so who knows?

In case you don’t know, Evan Hunter is the man who wrote the novel The Blackboard Jungle, made into a 1955 film starring Glen Ford and featuring a young Sidney Poitier. Hunter is now probably better known by his pseudonym, Ed McBain, under which he was the author of about a bazillion novels in the 87th Precinct police procedural series, beginning with 1957’s lovably simplistic and powerfully satisfying Cop Hater.

The 87th Precinct books are what they are, and I’ve enjoyed several of them. If you’re a fan of straightforward police procedurals, well…they’re a model for many later works (and plenty of crappy TV shows). To my reading, Cop Hater feels dated in a way that many of the sleazier, more violent and duplicitous crook-not-cop books from the same era and a little later just don’t. Enjoyable as it is, Cop Hater‘s uncomplicated morality hasn’t aged well. I’m more given to eye-rolls about that moral simplicity than I am about its clunky prose, which I find charming.

If I found Cop Hater‘s prose clunky, however, it isn’t because McBain couldn’t tear up the keys with the best of the ’50s noir badasses. He sure as hell could. His style is crystalline in a much more interesting book, at least to me: The only stand-alone work of McBain’s I’ve read, The Gutter and the Grave. It was reissued in paperback by Hard Case Crime a few years back. Gutter is a classic ’50s down-and-outer private eye story in the general style of the Fawcett Gold Medal books I love so much.

Since the current page on Amazon claims an April, 2011 publication date for it, The Gutter and the Grave appears to have been re-re-reissued by Hard Case‘s new incarnation, distributed by Titan Books in the UK but still helmed by cofounder Charles Ardai. I believe I read the HCC paperback back in about 2006 or 2007, so 2011 must be the Titan Books edition.

However, it pains me to say, nowadays paperbacks give me hives. I avoid bookstores the way a cleaned-up dope fiend avoids NA meetings. As a lifelong hoarder, I finally made the jump to e-books and GOD DAMN my life has never felt easier. The $250 I made unloading books at the garage sale was no compensation for feeling like I was having my liver ripped out every time some squid from down the street pawed an old John LeCarre paperback and forked over 50 cents for it, but all that liver-wrenching agony was salved by the ensuing exultation as I discovered I could, for the first time in years, actually walk around my goddamn apartment. It was as if I’d spent 30 years being harried by drifting piles of leprechauns who turned my every step into a stumble whether I was trying to hit the john at 3 a.m., romance one of those nice ladies passing out Watchtowers, or pack for a quick Manteca vacation. Now, those ankle-biting fuckers have to make their asses scarce when I hit the OFF button. It’s glorious.

Sad to say, I couldn’t find a Kindle edition or other e-book of The Gutter and the Grave; as far as I can tell, there isn’t one. For what it’s worth, if you’re slightly less obsessive than me, but obsessive enough to give a damn in the first place, Gutter is well worth tracking down in the recent Titan/Hard Case paperback. It’s a great read.

In the meantime, the Thomas & Mercer e-book of Cop Hater is easy to grab for little more than a mouse-fondle and a small bit of damage to your Visa. As much as I might badmouth McBain’s early prose, he was OG. Cop Hater is well worth a read if you like old pulpy cop novels.

McBain’s 87th Precinct novels also hold an absolutely incomparable place in cop-novel history, so armchair scholars and cranky old men like me are advised to ignore them at their own peril. I may have joined the space age by switching to e-books, but inside I’m the same old sweater-wearing son of a bitch with loafers and a scowl. You’ll find the 87th Precinct books stacked up on the virtual table next to my recliner, right next to the Dewar’s, the improbably complicated TV remote and the .38 Police Positive just in case those hoodlums from the local middle school try playing stick ball on my lawn again anytime soon.

If you’re walking by the fridge, can you grab me some ice?

A Brief Slapstick Interlude

Normally I try to keep the air here at Thomasroche.com kinda, you know, rarefied and shit. I mean, who’s to keep the intellectual traditions of Western culture alive if I descend into potty-mouthed slapstick? It’s like Frank always used to tell me back when I was fronting 2 Live Crew: “Kid, you don’t have to work blue.” He was wrong, but I do try to keep my Three Stooges interests to myself…most of the time. There’s no cashola in that shit, baby. The slapstick, she’s not a winning proposition for yours truly. On the other hand, if you want me blue, you gotta cough up the green. It’s that simple. Otherwise, I’ll lecture your ass on motherfucking Stalin, and put your hand in warm water once you goddamn fall asleep.

Unfortunately, this Buzzfeed article, “19 People Who Are Having a Worse Day than You,” has undone all my bourgeois pseudo-intellectual pretensions, so I’m just going to say fuck it. The article has been making its way around Facebook, and I’ve now seen it three times. It made me laugh so hard I peed myself. Do not watch it if you are a genuinely nice person. If you are mostly a nice person but still like to see people fall down and get hit in the face with hats…well, then it’s your call.

Nobody gets majorly hurt, mind you, but there are many wacky pratfalls. They’re all GIFs so you can just view them in a big strip and pee yourself, like I did.

I got it from Wayne Allen Sallee, but many others have been passing it around. Blame him. Blame them. Blame anyone but me, I don’t give a damn. Oh, man…that’s some crumpin’.

Ross Lockhart's 'Chick Bassist'

 

Ross E. Lockhart, Managing Editor of Night Shade Books, was my editor on The Panama Laugh, and a damn fine one he was. He wrote the short novel Chick Bassist, which just came out from Lazy Fascist Press to so far pretty rave reviews. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks bad-ass.

Chick Bassist welcomes you into punk rock hell, the friendless disillusionment of waking up in a shitty motel room in California with half a joint and an empty six-pack, radio blaring Lou Reed, concrete ocean on all sides and a blazing inferno within.

The Humphrey Bogart Film Festival

Hold on to your fedoras, there’s gonna be a big blow! The Humphrey Bogart Film Festival is coming home…. “Home being Key Largo,” naturally. It’s May 2-5 in Key Largo, Florida. The Festival is hosted by one Stephen Bogart, Bogey and Bacall’s son and a frequent keeper of the flame as regards both their legacies. He’s reportedly named after his father’s character in To Have and Have Not, the first of the four films Stephen’s parents starred in together. (The others were Dark Passage, The Big Sleep, and — of course — Key Largo.)

Here’s a snippet from an update at the Humphrey Bogart Estate’s Facebook timeline, and a great pic of the younger Mr. Bogart in the restored African Queen.

We hope you’ll agree there’s a lot to like about our Humphrey Bogart Film Festival in Key Largo. It’s hard to pick a favorite element, but being able to take a ride on the real African Queen has to rank right up there. Here is a photo of Stephen Bogart taking the first ride after the boat was fully restored.

Let’s not forget, incidentally, that the book on which The African Queen‘s great James Agee/John Huston script was based was written by another of my favorite historical figures, the great C.S. Forester, author of the magnificent Horatio Hornblower series as well as many fiction and nonfiction books about seafaring men. One was Sink the Bismarck!, which I read well before I knew who C.S. Forester was. It was a defining book of my early childhood. (I believe it’s still known as The Last Nine Days in the Bismarck or Hunt the Bismarck in the UK, and was made into a tolerably good film in 1960.)

And while we’re at it, if you haven’t seen the 1948 film Key Largo, which inspired the festival’s location, you are missing out on a hell of a movie featuring three of the greatest performances in American film history (Bogart’s, Bacall’s, and Edward G. Robinson’s). Lionel Barrymore is also fantastic in this flick. You can also see the brief appearance of Jay Silverheels, who would later play Tonto to Clayton Moore’s The Lone Ranger, as one of the Native Americans wrongly accused of a crime in Key Largo. (Silverheels, incidentally, was also a poet, writing about his experience in First Nations communities.)

Far more than just a great crime movie (which it is), Key Largo is one of the films in American history that walks that line between crime thriller and closet drama without falling prey to the shortcomings of either genre. It is a study in great scripts and great performances. Key Largo was based on a Maxwell Anderson play in which the Native Americans were Mexican banditos and the war of which the main character is a veteran is not World War II, but the Spanish Civil War, which will remind any dedicated Bogeyhead of Casablanca, where Rick Blaine was (allegedly) a Spanish Civil War veteran…or, at least (allegedly) a gun-runner.

 Sadly, Key Largo is not available as Netflix Instant View, or I think I’d watch it right now. In fact, none of Bogey and Bacall’s collaborations can be found instant-viewable on Netflix. But The African Queen can be found there, and on Amazon you can instant-view The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and To Have and Have Not, as well as The African Queen and Casablanca. But not Key Largo, my very favorite of the batch. Bummer. If you want to see it, resort to DVD — it’s more than worth it.

Teller & Shade Rupe's 'Play Dead' premiere, December 1 in San Francisco

I’m thrilled to say that my good friend Shade Rupe co-directed the film Play Dead, which premieres December 1 at the legendary Roxie Theatre in San Francisco as part of Another Hole in the Head. Shade will be there for the screening. See it!

Here is the blurb:

Famed silent magician Teller of Penn amp; Teller and Coney Island showman Todd Robbins thrill and delight a live audience with gory ghastly spectacles surrounding real-life killers and psychic pranksters in this dramatic recording of their off-Broadway show PLAY DEAD, recorded live at The Players Theatre on Manhattans historic MacDougal street. Expect brutal onstage beatings, nubile nudity, and chunks of the show performed in absolute darkness. Even the exit signs go off! Be welcome, and BEWARE! Dir: Shade Rupe, 2012, USA, Digital, 75 mins., 7pm

Congratulations to Shade, Teller and all involved. I can’t wait to see it!

Another Hole in the Head Starts November 28 in San Francisco

A great hardcore cutting-edge horror film festival is returning to the Roxie in San Francisco. I’ve screened (and reviewed) many of their features in the past, and they have always been so far out there it’s just impossible to describe.

AHITH was where I first saw one of the most brilliant horror films of all time, the The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s B&W, silent “Call of Cthulhu.” While we’re talking great horror, if you haven’t seen that film, you should. It’s incomparable.

I haven’t looked at what’s playing this year, but I have no doubt that it is the jagged, bleeding edge of what is possible, conceivable and advisable in horror film.

Another Hole in the Head opens November 28 at the Roxie in San Francisco and runs through November 9. If you’re in the areaand you love cutting-edge horror, don’t miss it.

Got this via my good friend Shade Rupe.

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War by W. Craig Reed

Craig Reed’s Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War is a hell of a book. Both the author and his father served as U.S. submariners, and he knows his stuff on the U.S. side. But the reason it’s so damned fascinating is the extensive coverage of Soviet operations during the Cold War, based on only recently declassified sources.

The politics is a bit thin, but that doesn’t hurt the book; it’s a periscope view of the field. It’s the science that is so fascinating to me — the many troubles involved in locating an enemy sub, for instance, and the way that technology has developed to make it possible. I found it utterly fascinating.

One thing I would have liked was more coverage of the nuclear technology involved in subs. That wasn’t really the author’s focus, but I would have liked to consider it more in the context of the other submarine technology as it developed throughout the Cold War.

Great book. I enjoyed it a lot.

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert Kaplan

I finally read Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon after quite a while wanting to and never getting around it. I’m glad I did, but it wasn’t quite the work of genius that I thought it would be.

As far as I can tell, Kaplan is a fairly balanced moderate, politically speaking, when it comes to world affairs. More importantly, Kaplan seems to have traveled extensively around the area and many of his country portraits are utterly fascinating.

However, the book’s weakness is that format…it sort of starts with an argument, then jumps from country to country. I love that, but it inhibits the book’s coherency. In a sense, Kaplan fails to make a coherent series of arguments because there are so many competing influences to paint portraits of.

That said, it does make one convincing argument: American single-superpower global hegemony is eroding in favor of a more diffuse distribution of power.

I would add the observation, which Kaplan doesn’t make, that the ascendant nations of the Indian Ocean region have very different concerns and challenges than the U.S., but in many ways their expectations are framed by the U.S.’s largely unsustainable model of consumer behavior. Ooops. There’s no way to distribute resources with current technology and not engender disaster within the next fifty years. Without some revolution in sustainable energy, and a second revolution in the use of water, life on Earth is going to get… interesting.

That’s not Kaplan’s focus, however. His focus is geopolitics, and to a lesser extent culture. In that context, it’s an invigorating read.

Its central arguments are in pretty much the same territory as The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria. However, Zakaria was born in India, and strongly focuses on India in that book. This one, while professing a smaller focus, actually covers more ground.

Kaplan’s perspective doesn’t differ that much from Zakaria’s, but Kaplan goes deeper into the culture of the countries of the region other than India.

One of the most important points I get from all my reading on the region is that U.S. policy toward India during the Cold War was problematic. I also consider it tragically wrong-headed. Yeah, that could be said about a lot of places, but in the case of India it’s particularly disappointing.

I could write another 10,000 words on why that is, but I’ll give you the short version. The U.S., with its Cold War view, was pissed off by India’s insistence on remaining non-aligned. Successive U.S. administrations saw the developing flavor of socialism in India to be “pink.” The U.S. spent the next fifty years punishing India politically in various contexts.

It should also be added that Indian immigration to the U.S. was considerably less than it was from other countries, population-for-population.

However, India was NEVER in the Soviet orbit, so the Sino-U.S. Chinese relationship becomes that much more bizarre when compared to U.S.-Indian relations. Anyway…it’s all changing radically, and in fascinating ways. A book worth reading.

In Search of Michigan County

For years, I assumed Bruce Springsteen’s iconic song “Highway Patrolman” was set in Michigan.

I can’t tell you why, other than the fact that Joe Roberts, the protagonist, “musta done 110 through Michigan County that night” while pursing his brother Frankie on suspicion of murder toward the end of the song.

But there is no Michigan County in Michigan, I discovered. No problem, then…it’s probably Ohio. Hell, Joe feels like an Ohio guy, right? He reminds me a bit of Ted on “How I Met Your Mother.” Ohio it is!

Doh!! You can’t drive to Canada from Ohio. You can drive to Canada from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pensylvania, New York…but why would Pennsylvania, or New York, which don’t border Michigan, have a Michigan County? They don’t. Neither does Ohio. Michigan as a place name is based on a French pronunciation of a Native American word, so it is very unlikely that the name could exist in Pennsylvania or New York predating the state of Michigan.

Now, that’s not the end of the story, because county names in the U.S. aren’t quite as simple as all that. Many counties have historically changed their names, been incorporated into other counties, and even switched states. The song is set in the ’60s and possibly the early ’70s. So, hey, who knows, right? Maybe there wasone.

In fact, there isn’t a Michigan County anywhere inthe United States, there wasn’t in teh 1960s, and as far as I or any other obsessive Springsteen fan can tell, there never has been.

Yes, in case you were wondering, I felt silly when it finally occurred to me to look up the Wikipedia page on the song. Especially since I’d been using Wikipedia trying to find out if there was a historical Michigan County. To be fair, I think when the question first occured to me a while back, there was no page for ‘Highway Patrolman’ the song. But apparently others before me performed the same weird search that I did. Then one of them said, “I think I’ll start a page for ‘Highway Patrolman’ and mention that there is no Michigan County.” Thanks, guys. Obsessive Guy Time Wasters Task #133,675 completed, with honors. Now moving on to the ballistics pages to try to figure out if you could really kill ten people with a sawed-off .410.

Joe is also a sergeant out at Perrineville, which could have been “Perronville,” which is an unincorporated area in Michigan’s Upper Penninsula. But it’s not. I’d never really looked at the lyrics in print. Why would I? As with all the songs on Springsteen’s Nebraska, the lyrics clearly anunciated. Hell, it’s like listening to a damn audiobook. It’s one of the things I like most about the album — because on Nebraska, Springsteen pairs both narrative subtlety and thematic clarity to evoke my favorite part American landscape — the night side — in a way he hasn’t done before or since. I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to say that the album is American noir. There’s a cleanness to writing about real locations, even in noir fiction. Atlantic City, the New Jersey Turnpike…they’re real, sure, but there’s a different feeling, an atmospheric one, to writing about invented places. Gotham, Arkham, Metropolis, Sunnydale…maybe Michigan County is Springsteen’s Sin City, where you do 110 down the right back highway you can find anything…anything.

On Nebraska, nothing is what it seems. As in a Hitchcock movie or a Cornell Woolrich story, no word, phrase or gesture has only one potential meaning. On first listen, from some perspectives, the lyrics seem credulous, credible, almost boneheadedly simplistic. The stories they tell sound like soundbites from the nightly news if you don’t read them too deeply. But in fact, not a single line on Nebraska is meant at face value. Nor is the album laced with comic irony. Hey, Springsteen is a good-natured guy, I think. He’s mostly too nice to be snarky. And isn’t it always the nice ones who turn out to be serial killers? Springsteen’s irony, on Nebraska, has one intent, and that’s to fuck you up so bad you won’t know what hit you.

Oh, sure, Springsteen might be making a point about the American Dream, about family, about sin, redemption…whatever. That’s all the counter-text to a credulous subtext. It only works because it’s vicious. It’s meant to leave you bleeding. If you think Springsteen thinks it’s all right that Joe Roberts let a killer escape, you’re off your rocker. If you think he’s making a statement that Joe did the wrong thing, you’re equally whacked. To my reading of the song, Springsteen doesn’t know what the hell Joe Roberts should have done in Michigan County that night. He’s just glad he’s not Joe.

Except that he is, and we all are, and that’s why it works.

Bruce usually isn’t ironic. Oh, sure, he can be kinda funny at times. I get the sense he’s a good-natured guy. Having seen him twice in concert, I am glad he was never my toddler. I imagine he cracks jokes, siles a lot, slaps his friends on the back.

But he isn’t usually ironic in the way he is on Nebraska, where Even my favorite Springsteen song, “Thunder Road,” is mostly unironic throughout. There’s one exception, and I think it makes the song. I imagine the narrator smiling when he says “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re all right,” as if he were talking to a sisterly friend he grew up with, and used to tease because he liked her… and she just happens to have become the love of his life. He gives her shit because he likes to see her blush. Beyond that one line, I read “Thunder Road” as being desperately straightforward.

Anyway, “Highway Patrolman” is not desperately straightforward, and it’s not set in Michigan. It’s not set in Ohio. And as to what Joe should have done, well… all options sucked. That’s the point.

Here’s to you, Michigan county: Speed limit 110, no waiting to cross the border.

Fred Rogers' Titanium Huevos, Elvis, Warhol and the Duality of Nature

 

This picture, and its attendant heartwarming story, have been going around Facebook today. They appear to have originated at FilmmakerIQ.com’s Facebook feed:

Most people have heard of Koko, the gorilla who could speak about 1000 words in Sign Language, and understand about 2000 in English. What most people don’t know, however, is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fan. When Fred Rogers took a trip out to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immediately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she’d always seen him do onscreen: she proceeded to take his shoes off.

If a gorilla tried to take my shoes off, I think I would kinda freak out. But then, Fred Rogers has balls of steel, right? Didn’t he storm Omaha Beach at Normandy? Didn’t he hump the boonies in Nam? Wasn’t he a Navy SEAL? Marine sniper? Gorilla wrestler on the novelty circuit? Cross-dressing Mossad assassin?

No…just a Presbyterian minister with balls of steel.

According to various rumors that occasionally go around (wait for it…) FACEBOOK, Fred Rogers was a Navy SEAL or a Marine sniper. In the time I’ve been using Facebook, I’ve seen the “Fred Rogers was a trained killer” meme do about three laps around the park.

He wasn’t. Or at least, that’s what they WANT you to believe. They also want you to believe he died in 2003. The powers that be don’t want you to think that Fred Rogers is kicking it with Koko and Elvis in a super-secret bunker smoking phatties of that medical-grade stuff they won’t let hit the street because one puff and you’d see the system for what it is, man.

As a fan of cultural psychoses of every stripe, I love the rumor that Fred Rogers is a killer. It speaks to our hunger for duality. Like Lou Reed’s portrayal of Andy Warhol in his Kazantzakis-inspired “Dime Store Mystery,” Rogers needs to be “fully human, fully divine and divided,” because otherwise his story’s just too damn perfect. As a species, we can’t stand that. We want to rip him down off his perch, because if he’s that good, then maybe we suck. Toppling the mighty is at the heart of comedy and tragedy both. On his show, we don’t see Rogers’ Gethsemanes.

Rogers, a devoted theology student who decided before graduation he had no desire to preach, would probably appreciate man’s need for duality. But there’s no secret killer lurking under the Rogers’ legend. His story, and those of many other educators, is far simpler than people want it to be. There’s duality everywhere, but not in educating children. There, the truths are simple, and most adults don’t give a shit about them. If they did, they’d stop what they were doing and bawl their eyes out.

Being a child is dangerous, because the kids don’t have the barriers adults erect to keep themselves stupid. Kids come at the world with a fresh set of eyes, by definition. In childhood, every moment is potentially a naked lunch, where everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork. It takes huevos of steel to handle that level of unpredictability on a daily basis.

As a culture we bleat constantly about protecting children, but when it comes time to cough up a sheckel? Well, then “I’m sorry, Jim, I love Big Bird, but…” And yet, if Fred Rogers was a trained killer, “lower-my-taxes conservatives” would be happy to fork out the big bucks to “further his work.”

Educating kids, though? Yeah. That’s just not an “essential.” Poor kids, who are disproportionately affected by cuts in public funding for things that are provided to the public free of charge, are draining the public coffers by getting something for free.

Maybe that’s why Romney “loves” Big Bird so much, because Big Bird likes poor kids exactly as much as he likes rich kids. That is a heinous crime in Milton Friedman’s America, where it’s bathtime for Democracy. And anything goes at bathtime, right?

Rogers did spend his life preaching. He preached moderation and kindness. And he also preached public sector support for education — to . the Senate, in support of public funding for PBS, where he reportedly gave one conservative Senator goosebumps. He’d give Mitt Romney goosebumps, too, if Mitt bothered to pay atention.

Even bringing up Mitt Romney’s ludicrous, ill-informed and somewhat pathetic attack on PBS during the debates. He lost, right? Romney is nothing more than a footnote in history, right? He’ll never run for office again, and Ryan is hamstrung by his poor performance in the campaign, right?

Actually, whatever Ryan’s future is in politics (and I’m pretty sure he’s cooked), Romney is LESS than a footnote in history. He was not a presidential candidate — he was a comprompose. He’s a wobble in the battle for the conservative soul. It’s a death match between those conservatives who genuinely believe that government should be smaller and those who believe government should allow a conservative Christian worldview to control every aspect of society. Unfortunately, those are the same people.

What interesting lives those people must lead. Their Gethsemanes must be self-satisfied reassurances that it’s all justified because making rich people richer is God’s work. Because, as I recall, Christ never shut up about how important that is, right?

Born-Again Christianity as a political movement no longer seriously worries me. It did in the ’80s and the ’90s, but I think the United States has shown its stripes. Our nation likes its secular lifestyle. Our citizens like our secular pleasures. And people espousing the most right wing forms of a born-again Christian view of politics tend to go stark-raving batty. Often enough to prove the trend, they say severely fucked-up things that no moderate conservative would ever stand by. And then, when challenged, they double down and plant their feet.

The truth is, Christian logic doesn’t hold up under rational scrutiny, because religious faith doesn’t hold up under rational scrutiny. That’s why it’s called faith. It doesn’t belong in the political arena. Allowing it there is not just counter to the Founders’ intentions…it’s dangerous.

Wanna know why? Because the U.S. is founded, partially, on religious freedom, which includes not just the right to join or not join particular sects, but to practice as you wish within those sects, at least as far as the government is concerned. If I, an atheist, interpret Jesus’s comment to “Love thy neighbor” as “provide public services for thy neighbor,” and a conservative anti-tax Christian interprets it to mean “don’t tax thy neighbor, but put thy neighbor in prison if she tries to get an abortion,” well, fine. We’re never going to get anywhere arguing the right and the wrong of it. Save that shit for the pulpit. It’s the job of policymakers to argue the public good, not theology. I believe that most Americans know that.

What does worry me is the conservative crusade, originating with Milton Friedman’s disciples, to “shrink government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who seems to think that the way to get lower taxes is to kill the government. Because if there’s one thing that history has taught it, it’s that countries without governments are awesome.

The society built by by people like Mister Rogers is built on moderation and kindness…values that do not come naturally to children any more than cruelty, brtuality, or selfishness.

If you think Big Bird is safe because Romney didn’t win — or because Romney, and whatever lower-my-taxes rich asshole comes after him, really does “love” Big Bird — then, fine, go ahead and sleep soundly.

But we shall know Romney’s kind again, and Grover Norquist’s, and Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s.

And there’ll never be another Fred Rogers.

Kinds of Negro y Azul

Like seeing old, weird and slightly unsavory friends… Bob Odenkirk plays a sleazy lawyer in Season 2 of Breaking Bad, making an Alastair MacLean reference, then later making a DB Cooper reference. DJ Qualls is a narcotics cop in the same episode. That’s the old comedy partner of David Cross (Tobias on Arrested Development) and the keyboardist from Hustle and Flow, respectively. I think Vince Gilligan and I have a few interests in common. Viva Heisenberg!

The Taste of Laphroaig in the Morning

Do you drink Scotch? Religiously? Then you probably know Laphroaig, which produces the most “challenging” product of all widely-distributed distilleries.

Weirdly, I was just thinking about Laphroaig this morning, when I hit Facebook and it is the first thing that I see in my Facebook feed after being away from FB for days. That’s because Night Shade Books editor Ross E. Lockhart, who performed the development edit on my 2011 novel The Panama Laugh (and did a hell of a job) digs Laphroaig, apparently, and marked it as a “LIKE.”

And that was the very first thing I saw on FB after thinking of Laphroaig while I was walking the dog. I mean, like, did anyone else just get chills or something? I mean, like, I think a butterfly just flapped its wings over Jung’s grave, right? I think Sting just had a Tantric smugness attack, right? Am I right?

It’s pretty unusual for me to think about Laphroaig, especially before breakfast. I don’t think about Laphroaig more than once every couple of years, or whenever I pass a burned-down seaweed processing plant.

Laphroaig drinkers may not want to continue, as it may inhibit the apparently religious experience they have not so much when they drink Laphroaig, but when they talk about it. They can go off and, I don’t know, drink Laphroaig or something.

But for those of you who don’t know, Laphroaig is a Scottish distillery that produces some exceedingly distinctive single-malt Scotches. Laphroaig tates like no other whisky in the world. Most dedicated Scotch drinkers speak of it as if it were Communion wine. I can’t stand the stuff.

Y’see, while I love many things about the sea, for the most part I am not a fan of the edibles that come from it. Though I’m fond of blowing the top off my head with the occasional meal of wasabi-drenched sushi, I’ve never liked the salty taste that permeates seaweed.

Seaweed in Scotch, you say? Why, yes, yes. Seaweed. A significant number of Islay malts have the taste of of seaweed to them that those who love it simply swear by.

Y’see, Scotches have a smoky flavor. It’s more pronounced in Scotch than in whiskey from other regions, though in my experience all good whiskey has some smoke to it, whether subtle or otherwise. That’s (mostly) because the process of making Scotch involves a lot of burning peat, which is essentially decomposed vegetable matter. It gives Scotch whiskys many of their distinctive characteristics.

I would argue (as would others) that the burning of peat makes Scotch more connected to the land where it’s made than any other distilled liquor. (Hey, maybe it makes getting hammered kind of like some earth-based ritual, right? At least, if you can afford it…) The importance of peat (along with the large number of distilleries and the hundreds of years of tradition preserved in making Scotch) is one of the things that make Scotch whisky so different than other whiskies.

Owing to different processes, some Scotch whiskys are much smokier than others. Some of this comes from the aging process, where whiskies take on characteristics of the wood in their aging barrels. (Some whiskies are aged in charred oak barrels, for instance — this gives them a much smokier flavor.) But for very smoky Scotch whiskys, the peat used is paramount.

Scotch is thought of by region, with distinctive characteristics peculiar to each region (along with an enormous amount of variation). The Islay region of Scotland is where Laphroaig is made (as are many other Scotches). I haven’t really kept up with my Scotch drinking in recent years, and I was never a seriously dedicated Scotch drinker. But as I recall, to my palate the Islay region may actually have the greatest variation among distilleries.

Islays tend to be very idiosyncratic whiskeys. I find that Scotch drinkers with a taste of adventure — and a real appreciation for evocatively unusual flavors — often turn out to be huge fans of the Islay region.

The Islay region gets its name from the fact that it’s a maritime area — Islay = Islands. That’s why Islay malts have a lot of sea-borne vegetable matter in the peat. That’s right, seaweed.

As Scotch whiskys go, Laphroaig falls on the “very smoky” end of the spectrum.

I do tend to like somewhat smoky Scotches, in general.

But to me, drinking Laphroaig is like smoking a dirt cigar laced with shredded cod.

I think it’s safe to say that if you are a casual cocktail-drinker — that is, if you like some drinks because “you can’t even taste the alcohol!” then you probably do NOT want to try Laphroaig.

Scotch fiends will tell you that you do want to try Laphroaig.

They’ll get this far-away look on their face, like they’re talking about their first love, or the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, or reciting the Declaration of Independence.

“You should try Laphroaig,” they’ll say rapturously, breathlessly. They may even have tears in their eyes. “It’s wonderful. It’s like…tasting the soul of the universe. It’s like reading the mind of God. You know, one time I went to this Scotch bar downtown and I drank Laphroaig, for 12 hours. That taste, that smoky whisky taste. I love the taste of Laphroaig. Tastes like…

“…VICTORY.”

When a Scotch drinker tries to get you to try Laphroaig, don’t listen to them. Just throw your appletini in their face.

Unless they’re buying, of course.

Then, go ahead and guzzle as much as you can. Good whisky is EXPENSIVE.

 

 

 

 

NOTE: In the question of whether to use “whiskey/whiskies” or “whisky/whiskys,” I have gone back and forth. According to the Associated Press Style Manual, “whisky” is usually correct only when talking about Scotch whisky, in which case the plural is “whiskys.”

Some sources now say that “Scotch inspired beverages” can be referred to as whisky.

As a whisky/whiskey drinker, I think that’s psycho. What the hell is a “Scotch-inspired beverage?” It’s either Scotch or it’s whiskey, and if it’s Scotch it’s also whiskey, but Scotch is Scotch. All whiskies are “inspired” by Scotch to some degree. Bourbon is inspired by Scotch, for fuck’s sake — a few hundred years on, but that’s not the point.

I’ve probably mixed it up above, because that’s the way it goes. I’m not a copyeditor anymore, so I play it fast and loose with the foodie terms, homie. That’s how I role.

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

I’m finally reading Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.

So far, I like it. It seems pretty balanced and Kaplan seems to have traveled extensively around the area. Pretty much the same territory as The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria (who was born in India). Their perspectives don’t differ that much, but Kaplan goes deeper into the region. That’s understandable since Zakaria was covering, supposedly, the whole world.

One of the most important points I get from all my reading on the region is that U.S. policy toward India during the Cold War was utterly inexplicable. Or maybe explicable…just tragically wrong-headed. Yeah, that could be said about a lot of places, but in the case of India it’s particularly weird.

Celebrate, Dance, Have Awkward Threesomes

 

I’m telling a story tomorrow night at “40 Years of Sex in San Francisco,” celebrating the 40th anniversary of San Francisco Sex Information (SFSI), for which I’ve volunteered since 1993 (yeah, that’s almost 20 years!) It’s hosted by Dixie De La Tour of Bawdy Storytelling and features stories by Carol Queen, Dossie Easton, Fakir Musafar, Cleo Dubois, SFSI co-founder Maggi Rubenstein, and more! There will be dancing after the storytelling.

Note: Speaking in the royal We, in fact SFSI’s values ARE “Our values,” and they are quite earnestly typified by the above image, which shows not only how free-wheeling and loosey-goosey we SFSI alumni can be, but just how awkward we look when trying to start a threesome.

In its original incarnation, however, this bizarre image is intended to convey how dangerous San Francisco is. It is a screencap from this hilarious 2008 campaign video from Missouri.

NANOWRIMO Day 2

 

This year I’m participating in NANOWRIMO; I’m just getting a late start.

For those of you on the same page as me (the one with nothing on it), 50,000 words divided by 29 days is 1,725 words a day.

My opinion is that trying to make up the extra 1667 words today if you drew a blank yesterday is the wrong way to go.

Setting your daily or weekly goals too high is a good way to have no fun at all writing a novel.

When writing a novel is no fun at all, you’re more likely to go do something reasonable and productive with your time instead…something like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, or nailing your foot to the floor and spinning around in a circle squawking.

Both of which are also options. Hell, why not blow off today? 50,000 words divided by 28 days, after all, is only 1,785, right?

New Write Sex Post: "Make a Fool of Yourself"

My new post is up on Write Sex, in which I encourage you as a writer to make a fool of yourself:

You probably already know that there are a million reasons projects don’t get finished — whether they’re novels, short stories or freeway overpasses. For the occasionally-published writer or the frequently-published writer who has a project or two they never get around to, the reasons are often creative or structural.

But for people who never get anywhere — not just who think they might like to write and never do, but who sit down and write, but never finish a project, or finish it but never get it published — the reasons tend to be far more amorphous. Novels are one thing — they’re long. Finishing one to the point where someone might like to read it is, in my opinion, a bitch.

But with the advent of e-books, you can self-publish a 3,000-word short story in about six clicks on Amazon.com. It bewilders me that people who want to be writers don’t do that, just to test the waters. I don’t care how wretched your execrable prose is, it’s a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff I’ve paid money for. And yeah, you might sell only one copy of your 3,100-word werewolf romance epic — to your mom, or maybe your therapist.

Read the rest at WriteSex.net

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I'm Telling a Story at SFSI Presents: 40 Years of Sex in San Francisco

I’ve volunteered with the nonprofit educational service San Francisco Sex Information since 1993. SFSI was founded in 1972 by Maggi Rubenstein, Margo Rila and Tony Ayers. I’m very flattered to be asked to tell a story at the upcoming event for its 40th anniversary, 40 years of Sex in SF, hosted by Bawdy Storytelling‘s Dixie De La Tour.

You can buy tickets at Brown Paper Tickets, and like the event on Facebook if you do that sort of thing.

In 1993, SFSI’s then 56-hour sex educator training was not my first introduction to the sex-positive activist community in San Francisco, but it was probably the single most influential experience in my developing interest in sex education. In 1993 it was the very best thing I could have done to help me feel that San Francisco was my base of operations. This now 60-hour training is a hardcore professional introduction to giving sex information. Though I’ve taken a break from helping teach the last two trainings, it’s a joy to help teach when I can (and I’ll hopefully be back at it in the Spring).

In case you’re wondering, “SFSI” is not pronnounced “sif-see.” it is pronounced “sfis-see,” to rhyme with “sissy” or (sometimes more appropriately) “pissy,” but with a unified “sf” consonant at the beginning that is used in no spoken human tongue.

This pronunciation was chosen because of the organization’s worship of ancient, dark gods from beyond space, whose minions have seven tongues and who wish to enslave humankind consensually — as referenced in the mystic incantation you will hear time and again in the training, “Thahassa-N’Auth’a-R’aap!”

Yes, that’s an inside joke. Cults are like that.

"What Vacations Are For" in Best Bondage Erotica 2013

Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Best Bondage Erotica 2013 is coming out December 11, 2012 from Cleis Press. My short story “What Vacations Are For” is in it. It’s a romantic tale of public bondage set at an overlook just north of the Golden Gate Bridge; it’ll probably be familiar to anyone who’s traveled much around the SF Bay Area.

You can preorder the print edition or the Kindle edition at Amazon. Check out the table of contents on the book’s blog at bestbondage2013.wordpress.com. Here’s the blurb:

Some say bondage is the ultimate intimacy. Once you have allowed yourself to fully explore your fantasies of giving in and surrendering to pleasure, you may find you need a firm but gentle hand to guide you. Let Best Bondage Erotica 2013 be your guidebook of everything BDSM. Editrix Rachel Kramer Bussel and her writers put it all out on the page in stories using everything from silk ties rope to shiny cuffs, blindfolds, wires and everything you can imagine and MORE. Best Bondage Erotica 2013 offers erotic insight for newbies and experienced players alike. These stories of forbidden desires and sexual fantasies, penned by the “masters and mistresses” of the genre, will shock, scintillate, and mesmerize.

Representative Joe Walsh vs. Lieutenant Colonel Tammy Duckworth

I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican (or whether you’re lucky enough to still have your legs), but Congressman Joe Walsh’s insistence on REPEATEDLY bringing up his opponent Tammy Duckworth’s military career so he can berate her for “Talking about her service too much” is completely inappropriate.

She’s not the one talking about it, Joe. If that’s the way he feels he needs to win an election, and voters are still willing to vote for him, that’s pretty pathetic.

Duckworth, in case you don’t know, is a Bangkok-born US National Guard helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq.

I do not mean to suggest that is, in and of itself a good enough reason to vote for her.

But it’s a good enough reason to WATCH YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, Representative Walsh.

SyFy's Face Off Commits Seussicide

I’m a big fan of the SyFy Channel series “Face Off,” where movie makeup artists compete in a reality series format. (And yeah, I hate calling it SyFy, but whatever.) I’ve seriously enjoyed every episode up to now, though not all of them are equal quality. As a lover of movie monsters in every form, I enjoy seeing the way concept can become reality. Sometimes, the results are sheer genius.

But the format lends itself to exposing enormous faults in the movie industry’s overall self-image and structure. The show’s transparently cynical marketing placements are gross, but goofy little fans like me do enjoy seeing videogame tie-ins now and then. There are times, however, when it all goes horribly wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s how it went this week, resulting in the worst episode the show has ever aired.

But it wasn’t just a bad challenge, with icky results. This week’s episode blatantly displayed the lack of respect Hollywood gives to animation as opposed to live action. The show itself is not to blame for that, of course; hell, make-up artists are another one of the professional categories that rarely gets its due in Hollywood. The show itself goes a long way toward remedying some of that, and as such I applaud it every damned week.

But “Face Off” can be blamed for its own crimes of quality, which are legion in this episode.

“Face Off” committed an assault on Dr. Seuss, asking its competitors to spawn — I’m not making this up — human hybrids with Seuss characters from The Sleep Book. Because of the show’s habit of shameless product placement, I assumed that meant The Sleep Book is currently being adapted into a (sure to be bloody STELLAR) live action film. As far as I can tell, it is not. How did they settle on The Sleep Book? At first I thought must have dozed off or suffered a psychotic break, ’cause I missed it. It’s a weird, weird choice for a Seuss book to adapt, but who knows? This is low-budget TV, after all. Maybe that’s the most widely-known Seuss book they could afford the rights to, I thought.

No, it turns out The Sleep Book is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, having been published in 1962. Does that make the choice seem less random? Not really. Maybe one of the producers is a dedicated Seuss fan and spends all their waking hours thinking about The Sleep Book. Maybe it’s like me and Lou Reed or something. Maybe The Sleep Book is the “Love Makes You Feel” of Dr. Seuss books, or that weird lengthy instrumental guitar and piano coda that was on the original cassette commercial release of Berlin but not on the vinyl, or the lost VU-era lyrics to “Ride Into the Sun.” Or maybe The Sleep Book is just way more popular than I’m giving it credit for. After all, I’m basically a “Walk on the Wild Side is pretty cool” type of fan when it comes to Seuss.

Anyway, the “human hybrid” concept is equally telling. “Face Off” routinely lapses into science-fiction cliches, and the “human hybrid” idea is a favorite of the producers. I can only imagine it comes from a spirited argument around the producer’s table. Someone wanted humans, someone wanted Who’s…”Let’s do hybrids!” It feels like that happens a lot over at SyFy.

The “hybrid” results on this week’s “Face Off” are…grotesque. And not in a good way.

Perhaps these people forgot that Seuss himself was involved with a brilliantly weird live-action film, 1953’s The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T. The title is more than just a saucy euphemism for the increased libido experienced by some female-to-male transsexuals upon first initiating hormone treatment. It refers to the eponymous mad scientist’s plot to make five hundred boys take piano lessons whether they like it or not. (And the headgear!!!)

Still via Cockeyed Caravan.

 

While it was far from a perfect movie, the visual concepts in The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T represented a bewitching import of Seuss’s brain-bending illustrations to the real world. The sets were cheesy, but they were adorable. Most importantly, they felt honestly inventive. Any attempt to bring Seuss to life should take a page from this campy, weird slice of cult history. But no live action Seuss film thus far seems to give a damn.

Dr. Seuss’s illustrations, by their very design, violate every conceivable law of physics. In fact, it is that violation that provides much of the humor and gives Seuss’s work much of its inspiring quality. Trying to make movie make up and costumes do that seems like a noble endeavor, but it’s not. It’s a slap in Seuss’s face, because in purporting to love him, it hates him. It’s like the stereotypical Mom who loves her truck driver son, but always wonders why he didn’t go to med school like his cousin. If Seuss is a genius, great. But woudln’t he be that much more of a genius if his work existed in the “real” world?

Well, he’d certainly be more profitable. And Hollywood’s conceited fat-cats’ money wouldn’t have to be “trusted” in the hands of animators, who have always been treated like a weird, untrusted wild card in Hollywood.

I’ve long been irritated at Hollywood’s increasing need to take beautiful art and bugger it up. It’s been getting worse in recent decades as the money resulting from a successful movie gets huger and huger, leaving other art forms in the dust. And because live action films make more money than animated films, Hollywood tries to shoehorn things into a live action format that simply don’t belong there.

I find this a bothersome enough tendency when it comes to superhero films, but at least there’s a lengthy history of bringing superheroes from comic books to the big screen. And superhero comic books are not Dr. Seuss. Superhero books have their own unique physics, but it operates at something like a forty-five degreen angle to normal physical laws.

In the world of Dr. Seuss, on the other hand, the laws of physics perform a series of pirouettes, nose dives and force-starts. Keeping up with them would be more than a make-up artist (or The Doctor) could begin to handle.

Plus, my objections are more emphatic to superhero movies than Dr. Seuss films because several of Marvel’s recent offerings are actually acceptably watchable films, even if others are not. They follow the basic tenets of storytelling and don’t seem to think the appeal of their source material boils down to juvenalia — far from it. Even when superhero movies screw up royally (and so many of them do), they’ve got a sense of self. They can end up being watchable even when they suck. recent ones often seem not just to be dishing out fan service, but to integrate it…at some level. I’m not saying Marvel’s recent films are great, but they’re…movies. The revolting live-action versions of The Cat in the Hat and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas…well, I’m not entirely sure what they are. They’re not genuinely creative adaptations, that’s for sure. My kinder self says maybe they’re just cinematic fuck-ups. If I let my blood get boiling, I’d say they’re puerile insults to the motion picture arts and sciences.

This is not just me blowing a gasket because I don’t like a given film or genre. I see Hollywood’s prejudice against animation as an infective hubris spread by financing. Such live-action adaptations send the message that illustration and animation are not “real” art forms — that an animated film is one thing, but it takes “real actors” to make a “real” movie.

Stuck-up Hollywood idiots get enough smoke blown up their asses, and apparently that smoke has a laxative effect. I think one of my favorite shows just took a steaming one all over Dr. Seuss. I sure hope the Cat in the Hat can loan them his steam-powered riding-majigit to help clean it up before next week.

Review of "2 p.m. Biker Bar" in 'Morning, Noon and Night'

 

Steller erotica writer Sophia Valenti wrote a lovely review of my short story “2 p.m. Biker Bar,” which appears in Alison Tyler‘s anthology Morning, Noon and Night, which comes out November 13 from the wonderful Cleis Press. I am flattered beyond all reason. Sophia says in part:

Thomas is a tease—in the best possible way. His story “Two P.M. Biker Bar” is a sensual piece of verbal foreplay.

There’s more; check it out here, or just buy the anthology here and get a whole day’s (and night’s!) worth of hot stories!

Thank you, Sophia, and thank you, Alison! And thanks to all of you who read and enjoy.

Lips Like Sugar: Women's Erotic Fantasies

I wrote the introduction to a new edition of my good friend Violet Blue‘s Lips Like Sugar: Women’s Erotic Fantasies, due for release on October 16 from the wonderful Cleis Press. It is an excruciatingly hot book, and it was a pleausre to write my exploratory essay about what women’s erotic fantasies mean, or can mean.

It also got me a nice mention over at Alison Tyler‘s blog, Trollop With a Laptop — the second in as many days, which makes me realize how remiss I am in blogging. Hi, Alison!

Current Listening: The Rough Guide to the Music of Mali

 

Currently listening to this very entertaining piece of culture, The Rough Guide to the Music of Mali. What’s interesting to me is that a substantial amount of Malian music seems to have an American blues influence, something I knew from my listening to Tuareg fusion group Tinarawen. It’s worth suggesting this might be selection bias on the part of the record label. Regardless, it makes for some gorgeous listening.

Current Listening: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945

 No more punk rock today — back to research. Current listening: the audiobook of Barrett Tillman’s Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945.

The weird thing is that it’s read by Mel Foster, who also narrated T.J. English’s flawed but still hugely entertaining Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba…and Then Lost It to the Revolution. The result? The voice I hear in his narration is not a serious evaluation of the influence of air power on history, but a swaggering, sleazy octogenarian barfly pouring me a double Dewar’s neat and giving me the inside scoop on what Cuba was like in those days, and what Desi Arnaz and the Latin music craze of the 1950s has to do with Meyer Lansky.

Even weirder? IT WORKS FOR ME.

With Whirlwind, currently I’m about half an hour in; interesting stuff about Giulio Douhet as well as Billy Mitchell‘s famous 1921 demonstration of the potential of bombers against warships, and his subsequent court martial for accusing the US military leadership of incompetence in early management of aviation. The great thing so far is that according to Tillman, Michell’s air power vs. sea power demonstration was at least partially hoaxed — that’s right; Mitchell says he cheated. That he turned out to be right only showed that he was less crazy than brilliant, but — as with Patton — that wavering line is what makes him so fascinating.

What does all this have to do with an army of zombies at the center of the Earth? Hopefully, that question will serve as some small motivation for the rest of you to refrain from chopping my head off for the next couple of years — like Scheherazade, I have only an army of laughing zombies and the Norden bombsight to save me.

 

Lead image: Italian air power pioneer Giulio Douhet.

William Meikle's The Island of Terror, a Professor Challenger Novella

 

A writer named William Meikle wrote a novella about Professor Challenger, protag of The Lost World and my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE Arthur Conan Doyle character. Sherlock holmes has NOTHING on this “Homicidal Maniac with a turn for science.”

William Meikle’s novella is out tomorrow and more info about the event can be found here at the Dark Regions website or here on Facebook. Famous Monsters of Filmland has a review here. I don’t see the page for the book at Dark Regions, but here’s a link to Meikle’s books from them.

Oysterband Doing New Order's "Love Vigilantes"

It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone has been living life without knowing British folk rock ensemble Oysterband‘s mercilessly tender 1989 rendition of New Order’s ultimate dreamgoth war tragedy haiku, Love Vigilantes, which my friend Michelle introduced me to many years ago. But in case you’ve missed it, here is a live version that feels far too cheerful for the song’s subject matter.

The softer, tighter, almost brutally gentle studio version on their 1989 album “Ride” breaks my heart every single time. So soft, so obvious, so credulous, and yet, here I am again, bleeding on the floor.

This small-venue live version may make you dance, but that’s okay…it’s still gorgeous.

If you like it, it’s worth checking out the whole album, which is filled with gorgeous contemporary British folk. And Oysterband is still around, touring hard in Canada this month, then Denmark in November, then back to the UK for December gigs and continuing into next year. These guys are friggin’ road monsters. But then, I can imagine that their loose, improvisational, emphatic and empathic flavor of folk must be a HELL of a lot of fun to play live. It certainly sounds like it, however heart-rending some of their songs are. Sometimes music feels like a pure shot of joy, a mainer to my vain, and this album, it gots it.

Here’s the original “Love Vigilantes” — a classic. When I first heard the Oysterband version, I had never actually known the title of the New Order song, and didn’t even realize I’d heard it a zillion times while half-drunk on Captain Jack and pining in dorm rooms for gorgeous goth girls with bigger record collections than me.

This is an iconic guitar sound, a breathtaking riff and a great song. Just a little push, and you’ll be living in the ice age:

You know how back in the day — assuming you’re my age and an overgrown art goth who suffered the sneers of your fellows — Joy Division freaks would always badmouth New Order? Well, I was one of them. To me, New Order was middle-class shrubhead music for hoop-earringed trendies with bad taste in boyfriends, whereas Joy Division was pure doomed working-class Baudelaire with a Jim Carroll chaser. I was a pinhead; luckily, at some point my smarter-than-me girlfriend J. set me straight. She did it with the laudable kindness of someone who sees both points of view. But J., more than me, was free of pretension. She knew how to quest for that perfect riff, that most beautiful phrase, that  ecstatic instant when chills go down your spine. If the occasional New Order song doesn’t do that to you, I submit that you oughta check your pulse.

I’ll always prefer Joy Divsion, too, because they were so much further out on the edge. Still, I think it takes an extremely limited palate to love Joy Division and hate New Order. Though their very early work was unquestionably a series of retreads as they got their footing after Curtis’s suicide, New Order later produced some magnificent work in a related but significantly different genre than Joy Division. The thing is, the members of New Order also championed many new bands. Suggesting, as is often done, that Joy Division is influential on a level comparable to the Velvets or the Stooges, but New Order is little more than a new wave footnote, is stark raving crazy. It’s douchebag-punk talk, valuing a simple and compelling aesthetic over complexity and the building of a practical life as an artist. Not everyone is here for the consumer’s amusement. How many friends have I seen plunge down the rabbit hole of “Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Compellingly Deathrock Looking Corpse?” Too many.

Still, you simply can’t beat music like this:

Nor, just to get totally random about it, can you beat sheer genius like the other bundle of brilliance J. introduced me to once upon a time, during a rough time in our life when her kindnesses were far too many and mine far too few:

 

 
I would say I can’t listen to Ani DiFranco’s “Not a Pretty Girl” without thinking of J., except that I’ve probably listened to it 1,000 times since then, so…sorry, some albums are so friggin’ good they obliterate all memories except the ones they implant on their own.

But what I do think about, and somewhat often, is where Ani, after Pretty Girl, failed many of her followers. In one of the dichotomies of my life in those days, J. was utterly alienated by Ani DiFranco’s followup, Dilate. She wasn’t alone.

Dilate can be argued to be a self-indulgent and ultimately shallow attempt by DiFranco to justify affair with a married man, as far from the bitterly self-empowered punk intensity of Not a Pretty Girl as it is possible for an album to be. I have no idea what J. thinks about Dilate now, or if she’s even listened to it since. But at the time I agreed with her.

That didn’t last long, because, as I see it today, if I were Ani DiFranco I would — unfortunately — be only one-tenths Not a Pretty Girl Ani and nine-tenths Dilate Ani. This is not something I’m particularly proud of, but nobody exactly asked me whether I’d like to be crazy or not. Hell, I’d rather be the calmly menacing, evocatively inspiring No-Drama Obama of Not a Pretty Girl-era Ani any day, since once upon a time she served as an idol to at least half a dozen bi women I’ve known.

With Dilate Ani, there’s less to shake one’s fist at…other than Ani herself, who (I’ve heard argued) deserves it. Certainly, I understand why those looking for Activist Ani did a big “WTF?” when Dilate came out. But while Ani DiFranco’s activist impulses are deeply personal and at times simply incomparable in their visceral qualities, they were never quite what convinced me she was a genius.

Wanna know what convinced me she was a genius? Alongside the fact that she is one of the most innovative, lyrical and brilliant guitar instrumentalists ever to play pop, rock or folk music — and will never, mark my words, get the credit for it — what I like is Ani’s ability to find the place where your heart hasn’t started bleeding yet, and slice it open with a D-string and a capo. She does it as clearly in “Not a Pretty Girl” as she does in “Cradle and All,” but with utterly different agendas, for different kinds of nightmares.

Listening today, what troubles me most is not Ani’s stridency but her claim that “Don’t you think every kitten in a tree figures out how to get down whether or not you ever show up?” I know, and I’m confident Ani knows, that in fact, some don’t. Some of them die up there.

Anyway, within a small number of months after I first heard it, I’d decided that “Dilate” was fantastic. I made up my mind that this deeply human album was brilliant — and that, maybe without intending it, DiFranco had uncovered the nightmarish underbelly of both hero worship and romantic obsession, in perhaps the most awful way conceivable.

To those of you who know the two albums, it is my opinion that Dilate is an album that “Cradle and All” hints at — but Not a Pretty Girl’s equally brilliant title song absolutely does not. It’s the two sides of being a bad-ass chick, or anyone bad-ass if you like. DiFranco may be a frenetic bundle of up-yours and in-your-face and take-it-or-leave-it and not-on-my-watch, but at some point, like the rest of us, she’s got to slow down and put her head on the pillow, and sometimes that’s when things get ugly.

 

 

It’s far too weird for words that my next extended relationship after J. featured an extensive mutual fixation on DiFranco’s Dilate, particular the title song above, as well as on The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

Especially this song, performed here in 2009 at Coachella in hugely modified form but with the at once brutally anarchist and mystically surgical labor pains of its guitar introduction left largely intact:

 

 

With his shrubby hair and his Stevie Wonder sway, Smith feels twenty years wiser — and yet no wiser at all. I feel his pain.

And there, I do not go, out of respect for all the many females “The Kiss” has, in retrospect, been about to me over the years, through no fault of their own whatsoever. None of you had any idea what you were in for, ladies…and for that I apologize. The secret that all of you seemed to know at the end, but never at the beginning, was that every character in a nightmare is a reflection of the haunted. In a dream, we all get to be ourselves.

Patti Smith at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Patti Smith in Germany, 1978. Photo by Klaus Hiltscher.

 

I didn’t see Patti Smith today when she played at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco, but I’m told my roommate Arielle did. Of course I had to Google that shit. I found this video of her performing her iconic version of the Van Morrison’s 1964 Them hit, “Gloria,” at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in 2010. I know it’s hot fanboy-on-fanboy action and all that, but check out the second comment on YouTube, about the guy who ran into her coming out of a shop in the Castro, for a cute tale of a humble rockstar. That’s why Patti’s still punk, no matter how huge a hippie she is (and probably always was, in some ways, since labels are sour to an artist destined to live forever).

…and since we’re on the topic of Patti Smith being perpetualy and eternally bad-ass no matter how deep she travels into Bob Marley territory, here is a deathless blast from the good old days, her Jimmy Iovine-produced album version of “Because the Night,” which someone on Youtube has laced over photos of Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe, her boyfriend. In my mind, this song stands up against any top 40 hit from the ’70s AND any underground NYC punk hit (yes, even including “Marquee Moon,” even “Little Johnny Jewel,” even Iggy’s beautiful 1978 version of “China Girl.”)

And just on the off chance anyone out there doesn’t know it (kids! I’m talkin’ ta you!!), “Because the Night” was cowritten by Smith and Bruce Springsteen. For years, occasional holier-than-thou wannabe-artpunk douchebags would express disbelief when I told them this, because Bruce was not considered cool. Au contraire, posers; there’s a whole page in the Cool Encyclopedia for both of these people.

Springsteen does a blistering version of the song with the E Street Band in the amazing box set Live 1975-1985. Here they are performing it live in 1980:

Here, Springsteen, Smith, and U2 perform “Because the Night” at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame:

 

Lead photo: Patti Smith, Germany, 1978, by Klaus Hiltscher

Nuclear Ghosts

Whenever I start reading about nuclear weapons, I can’t help thinking about the photo above, one of the most amazing images I’ve ever seen in my life. It sums up so much of the cognitive dissonance one has to experience, in retrospect, when considering post-WWII nuclear policy.

It’s a photo of the Upshot-Knothole Grable test, part of an attempt to develop an artillery-based delivery vehicle for a tactical nuclear device. That’s right, they wanted to shoot a nuke out of a cannon. The gun you see in the foreground is an 11-inch artillery piece. You can see video of the test here.

In an immediately postwar military context, such a delivery vehicle is completely crazy…and yet not crazy at all. The miserable truth is that the exploration of tactical nuclear options may have been a relatively moral impulse within the war machine, compared with the drive to create weapons in the megaton-range — which, by 1960, would result in RAND Corporation rocket surgeon Herman Kahn popularizing the term “megadeaths” in an attempt to distinguish between two “tragic but distinguishable postwar states.”

Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War posited those two states following a nuclear war to be one in which the numer of civilian deaths was two million and one where they numbered 160 million — or 2 to 160 “megadeaths.”

Does that seem crazy to you? It does to everyone, I guess. But the great thing about being me is that I understand what Herman Kahn is getting at. I can also understand why the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons seemed like a great idea, given what many thinkers thought was the inevitability of an East-West conflict. Kahn was talking about strategic nuclear war; in a limited nuclear exchange, civilian deaths would be much lower…theoretically. In early-to-middle Cold War thinking, if there was a nuclear exchange, the trick would be to make the greatest use of the smallest number of weapons. That problem seems a lot more interesting to me in historical terms than the later Cold War problem… which was for both sides to expend a great deal of resources maintaining huge arsenals of relatively large devices that must never be used.

Is it that the development of tactical nukes might have limited an early Cold War nuclear exchange to military targets, thus resulting in fewer civilian casualties than a conventional war? Or is it that tactical nukes would have made it more likely that a regional conventional conflict would go nuclear?

History seems to imply neither, since there has not been a military nuclear exchange since Nagasaki. (Knocking on wood.) One could also argue that it was strategic weapons development that created a balance of power that prevented a full-scale war on the level of World War II. Since both views require indulging in moral dissonance on an epic scale, both views, to me, are both equally arguable and equally bankrupt.

But who would you rather invite to dinner, these guys:

Or these guys?

In both cases, as Ronald Reagan would say, “They’re from the government. They’re here to help you.” In this case, those words really are terrifying.

It’s easy to spew platitudes about how awful nuclear weapons are, but I consider that to be the luxury of the comfortable. It was not so very long ago that Europe lay in ruins, which is why nuclear weapons development, deployment, and policy serves to expose the fundamental challenge of all attempts at moral violence — and, more importantly, attempts to resist committing it. American pacifism in the 1940s could have saved anyone from Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno or Baba Yar. A world suspended in the balance of nuclear terror was the world in which the Vietnam War, the Cambodian Genocide, and so many other atrocities occurred. Almost all of them were aided and abetted by the Cold War. Many were directly attributable to it. Those that weren’t were permitted to happen partially because powerful countries were fighting an ideological battle in which the bodies of innocents were secondary. If things haven’t improvd all that much since the Cold War, it’s because we as a species are still fighting it, albeit with different players.

The point at which any one person crosses from scientist to executioner, from warrior to murderer, from statesman to psycho, is not always clearly defined. Disaster comes slowly, by whispers. It arrives in the night, not as a haunting — but on the nights when you sleep, unhaunted, having forgotten about the screams, or maybe never having known. As a species, only our ghosts can save us from the nightmares.

Amir D. Aczel's Uranium Wars

I just finished Amir D. Aczel’s book “Uranium Wars.” I enjoyed it well enough, but I feel like it’s a bit of a superficial treatment of the topic of the discovery of fission and the development of the Bomb. It seems kind of credulous at times. However, it did give me an excuse to go watch the DOE video of the Trinity and Ivy Mike shots, which, disturbingly enough, always makes me happy.

Uranium Wars

 

I’m reading Amir Aczel’s Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Ignited the Nuclear Age, and while I’m enjoying it, a few things here and there keep nagging at me. They’re somewhat illuminated by all the negative reviews the book got on Amazon (and elsewhere).

I’m enjoying the book, but I can’t really disagree with the criticisms of the obviously superficial attempts to create drama. And while my grasp of nucleart physics is tenuous at best, and my knowledge of chemistry even less acute, it does seem like the occasional factual error (or simple lack of clarity) has crept in, somewhat unforgivably.

Sounds like the worst crime is yet to come — the portrayal of the Nazi nuclear program as being “just behind” the Manhattan Project, which is utter poppycock. However, it’s common currency in popular culture, from Hogan’s Heroes to Star Trek. It has no place in a serious history, but I’m not so sure that Uranium Wars is a serious history. It’s certainly not a complex or critical historical work, and I can’t imagine it appealing to chemists or physicists, since the research details are too basic for them. On the other hand, it spends a lot of time on nuclear physics and chemistry, so it’s not that valuable for someone like me who doesn’t have a physical sciences background.

I think this is a problem of Aczel’s washing his clothes in warm water — it’s neither science nor history, nor scientific history, unlike Jeremy Bernstein’s Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element, which I LOVED — but which was pretty confusing with the chemistry. That said, Plutonium is a way more interesting element. And yes, I have favorites among the elements. Wanna make something of it, Actinium-lover?

Still enjoying the book, just because Meitner, Hahn, Fermi, Bohr, Curie et.al. are all so just damned interesting.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael Oren

Six Days of War at GoodReads.com — at Amazon.com — at Audible.com.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren

Overall, I found this to be a well-done book. The author, Michael B. Oren, PhD, is an American-born Jew, served in the IDF as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon War, and is the current Israeli ambassador to the United States. He’s had his speeches disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters on numerous occasions. Other readers may assume that means a de facto pro-Israeli bias, and it’s impossible to ignore the fact that objectivity would be a tall order for someone in Oren’s role and with Oren’s background. But good historical writing is good historical writing, and I honestly believe that with the honest study of history, any single writer’s bias, evident or covert, should ultimately be irrelevant, because no savvy historian, amateur or otherwise, should ever believe a goddamn thing he or she reads. I’ve always found complete distrust of everyone to be the best policy; it allows utter credulousness. This is a privilege that I enjoy as someone who does not have to make policy. Every time I read modern history, I am damned glad I never plan to run for office.

While I’m on the topic of bias: In my experience, American and British books on the region tend to show a pro-Israeli bias…strangely, sometimes more than Israeli books do. Israeli writers are often more willing to acknowledge the moral ambiguity in the choices made by Israeli leaders. So it shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose, that I found this book to be acceptably balanced, or that I found the view of Nasser, King Hussein and the other Arab leaders to be remarkably nuanced. To my reading at least, it doesn’t show an overt tendency to demonize them or to take their actions out of context. The coverage of the internal Israeli politics is more extensive than the equivalent events on the Egyptian side — but it’s all so damned interesting that it doesn’t bother me one bit. I would like to read a similar history from an Arab writer, for the sake of balance. But Israeli politics of this era is so unbelievably fascinating to me that every page of this book was like crack to me.

In any event, there is no way in HELL I would recommend this as an introductory text to the conflict. I have done a fair amount of reading on the Middle East and I was at sea much of the time. I needed to check Wikipedia, literally, about 100 times, trying to bone up on the period in question. And this is FAR from the first book I’ve read on modern Middle Eastern history.

I ended up loving the book. It is basically a very sharp, very good popular history, not an academic work per se. I would recommend it to someone with a good strong background in the Cold War politics of the era, and of the players in the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and even Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

When it comes to the Israeli pantheon of the time, I’m not sure if I’m just more familiar with those politicians and military leaders, or if the book does a better job of giving the basic background. Certainly, Oren’s coverage of the US diplomatic and political background is cursory, so I wouldn’t have understood the book very well if I didn’t already know a certain amount about the Johnson administration.

Short version: Great book, but not for beginners. I enjoyed it, but I wish I had read this AFTER having read a book about the events immediately preceding the 1967 war.

Bill Brent's Memorial Tonight in San Francisco

As you may know, one of the most influential figures in the San Francisco sex underground, and in my life, is  the publisher, writer, editor, bisexual activist and event organizer Bill Brent, publisher of the influential magazine Black Sheets and organizer of Black Sheets Parties, as well as an amazing writer and a passionate radical fairy, bisexual activist and HIV-services advocate. He killed himself some weeks ago by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

I wrote about him here and at Tiny Nibbles; Carol Queen wrote about him for Good Vibes Magazine and Liz Highleyman wrote his obituary for the Bay Area Reporter and his longtime collaborator Lori Selke collected some links about him after his death. Chris Hall wrote about him here at the SF Weekly Blog.

There is much more to say about how important and influential Bill was and is, and how many peoples’ lives he touched. But for now, we at Deception Press merely want to pay our respects by inviting you to gather at the Center for Sex and Culture tonight at 7pm for a memorial service honoring Bill’s life and legacy. Though many tears will surely be shed — I’m shedding some now — what is far more important to what Bill represented is that those who knew him, admired him, or merely admire what they’ve heard about him gather together to dream.

Get all the details here. If you’re in San Francisco, I hope to see you.

Happy Birthday, Tony Soprano

 

Happy birthday to James Gandolfini, a seriously great character actor in such films as True Romance and Crimson Tide well before he became the immortal Tony Soprano, first among equals in a cast of brilliant actors and actresses, in four seasons of what may be the best damned television ever created.

Why, yes, yes in fact, that’s what I said. Four seasons…that’s all there were, right?

Happy birthday, James Gandolfini!

Prometheus

I avoided watching Ridley Scott’s Prometheus for quite a long time, because I was pretty sure I would hate it. Explaining why I thought I would hate it would take a week, so just let that one pass.

But that I have finally seen it, I have this to say.

Charlize Theron’s character needed to wear more hats.

Indifferent Cats in Feminist Paul Ryan Gosling Porn

Over on Twitter, I made a crack about my new business idea, “Indifferent Cats in Erotic Stories,” which would be a (hopefully more lucrative) ripoff of the hilarious Tumblog Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn. My fellow erotica writers are thus far unimpressed.

In “Indifferent Cats in Erotic Stories,” cat owners would pay authors like me to have their cats mentioned as disinterested observers n written porn. No, they wouldn’t participate. It’s not like I’m sick or something.

This strikes me as the perfect gift for your cat’s birthday or other celebratory occasion. Yes, the cat is indifferent, but how often do you buy them a mousey friend and find they could give a shit about it? This way, you already know they’ll be indifferent.

Personally, I think this could be as big a hit as my other business idea, Feminist Ryan Philippe, which no one seems to undrstand could blow Feminist Ryan Gosling out of the water. Of course, the meme’s bastard stepmonster, Paul Ryan Gosling, has fucked everything up for entrepreneurs like me…as usual. Thanks, Paul Ryan.

First Trailer of Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

 

Yahoo Movies’ article about Lincoln has some interesting info about it — like the fact that Lincoln’s voice was much higher than most actors have played him. Here’s crossing my fingers for Day-Lewis and the other principals in the film, most of whom I admire very much. As RuPaul would say, “Don’t fuck it up.”

Sadly, I find myself wishing I could say that to Hollywood far too often in recent years. What the hell happened to movies?

You see, I love movies, but Hollywood makes so many pretentious, godawful monsterpieces and eighth-rate comic book knockoffs nowadays that I find myself actually (gasp!) reading books instead of watching movies. I love big, sprawling epics, and while they seem like, sure, they’d be hella hard to make, the boners Hollywood productions pull are usually simple matters of plot and story, whereupon neither Syd Field nor Lawrence Block have been consulted. This trend started as the ’90s indie boom petered out. Storytelling has become anathema to Hollywood productions.

My hopes for Lincoln would be high if I didn’t feel like I’d been burned so many times by hoping movies wouldn’t be shit. Now, I just can’t bear t hope anymore. Unfortunately, historical films often go horribly awry, and films about the Civil War still more so.

From this trailer, the upcoming Lincoln looks like it could easily go more than just awry…it could go horribly awry. To my mind, the quality of the pacing is going to determine that, and pacing is part of the batch of story fundamentals that Hollywood seems to be forgetting about in its desperate quest to make huger movies. Whether it’s Academy-worshipped self-satisifed garbage or cynical comic book adaptations, the pacing is so often all wrong. Say what you want about Die Hard — it’s shit on a whole ‘nother level. But it follows a well-defined path that storytellers have mapped out since the Golden Age, and perfected in the ’70s. Too many contemporary films respect that.

Unfortunately, I feel like some years shit movies get drooled over by the Academy for no good reason. Daniel Day Lewis himself was in one of th emost egregious examples a few years back — the inexplicably lauded There Will Be Blood, in my opinion a piece of shit if ever there was one. His performance was impressive, as most of his performances down the years have been, but the film overall had nothing to recommend it in my mind, other than the line “I Drink Your Milkshake,” which has long since entered my personal lexicon (and often serves to enliven otherwise boring conversations).

This did not prevent the Academy from throwing itself at the feet of that film, the same year that it bypassed that film and selected the (perhaps) even more (or at least as) godawful No Country For Old Men, a pathetic waste of celluloid that bore no hint of the genius that created Miller’s Crossing and Raising Arizona. Seriously!!! That shit came from the Coen brothers. Duh-WHA!!???!!!!

Day-Lewis is unquestionably a genius of sorts. But, bewilderingly, he shows a grotesque tendency to be a great actor in shit films. The quintessential example in his career is his brilliantly delivered Bill the Butcher in the hugely disappointing Scorsese atrocity Gangs of New York, in which Scorsese crawled into my steampunk childhood gangster dreams and personally urinated on them. Read Herbert Asbury’s brilliantly macabre, comic, and bizarre work of yellow journalism it was based on to understand just how wrong Scorsese went. Sometimes genius follows a crooked path. Other times, it’s not genius at all, just self-satisifed delusion.

 

 

Great Guitarists: B.B. King, "The Thrill is Gone," Live at Montreaux

 

 

As a dedicated fan of Chicago blues (and the drunker the better), I acknowledge the criticism of many of my blues-loving friends that B.B. King tends to be too glitzy, too overproduced, too Hollywood and Vegas to capture the real essence of the Chicago style. I don’t even really disagree with them.

But my God, that man can play guitar.

Here he is in 2001, live at Montreaux, 76 years old and bending a note or two on his signature tune and biggest hit, “The Thrill is Gone.”

When it comes to pure dirty blues enjoyment, I’ll always love Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, and many others more than B.B., because of the fact that his work is often seamlessly produced and doesn’t have the edge that some others have. But I will always respect the hell out of him as a showman and particularly as an instrumentalist — not because he is so technically proficient, but because he could so beautifully wring the soul out of Lucille. It’s like watching a prayer.

BB in 2009:

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