Dead End Follies

Book Review : Don LeLillo - Falling Man (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Order FALLING MAN here

(also reviewed)
Order WHITE NOISE here

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.

One can hardly fathom what it's like to be Don DeLillo. You're well in your seventies and you're about the most legit, successful writer in American letters. You have already conquered the heard of several thousand readers with works of epic ambition such as WHITE NOISE, MAO II, LIBRA and UNDERWORLD. You have won several awards and your new publications are literary events in themselves. So what is there left to do? Write novels like FALLING MAN, things inspired by the world he is currently soaking in. It was my third crack at DeLillo, after the underwhelming RUNNING DOG and the manic and byzantine WHITE NOISE, which I really loved. I had the same reaction than most people to reading FALLING MAN: is it possible to make a compelling, literary novel about the events of 9/11?

FALLING MAN comes out of the gates roaring. A man is walking out of the ruins of one of the towers, in a street darkened by ashes and debris. He is confused, shell shocked and is trying to wrap his mind around what the hell just happened. That man is Keith, a lawyer who used to work in the now destroyed World Trade Center. Prior to the events, he was recently trying to put the pieces of his wedding back together with his wife Lianne, but the specter of the towers complicates everything. Keith has an affair with a woman named Florence Givens, who's briefcase he saved from the disaster. Presumably because they share a proximity to the devastation that they don't feel anybody else can understand. There are angry Arabic people evolving in periphery of the Keith/Lianne plot, but I won't elaborate on them because their pertinence in FALLING MAN is dubious at best.

Maybe I am stunted by my own limited understanding of narrative arts, here. To my knowledge, the motor of a novel is change. Transformation, if you will. In genre novels, it's traumatic events that lead more often than not, to a loss of innocence. I'm aware that it's a lot more subtle in literary fiction. But entropy being what it is, people change and the past can never be lived again. That makes people melancholic a lot, ask Jay Gatsby. It's evident that a change operates within Keith and his family during the first fifty pages of FALLING MAN. That's cool and I got nothing against these fifty pages. They are Don DeLillo at his finest. But passed that, the novel falls into a bizarre trance and doesn't seem to know where to go. There are a series of vignettes about people who are shell shocked about 9/11 and they are shell shocked for a long time. FALLING MAN explores the impossibility to overcome trauma and the integration of this trauma to everyday life. It's just that the sequence of transforming events happens within the first third of the novel and then...cliché as it may sounds in a book review...nothing much happens.

"It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking it's an accident."

"Because it has to be."

"It has to be," he said.

"The way the camera sort of show surprise."

"But only the first one."

"Only the first," she said.

"The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're all a little older and wiser."

I don't want to give you the impression I hated that book. I sort of liked it? On an aesthetic level, I mean. There are very little people who are still breathing, who are as qualified as Don DeLillo to find poetry in things. By "thing" I don't mean it as a general statement, but as in "objects". No other author I can think of can pack so much meaning and tension in descriptions. His portrayal of chaotic Manhattan, buzzing around Keith is gripping and masterful. The scenes where Lianne leads a workshop for early stages Alzheimer patients have an awkward beauty to them. The austere simplicity of his dialogue carries weight too. I don't have much to complain about the form. FALLING MAN is beautifully written and that alone makes it enjoyable. It's the content that hurts. It's not outrageous or anything, but it runs thin passed page 100 (and I'm being generous here).

Could Don DeLillo have made FALLING MAN more alive? It's presumptuous to even ask the question, but I had ideas. The character of the falling man is used as a symbol throughout the novel. He is just seen by the various protagonists, who are either enthralled or outraged by his performances. Including him into the narrative, without necessarily subjecting him to an All-American witch hunt (which might very well have happened if he was a real person) would have made sense to me. But it's easy to discuss ideas like that. Most people who sat down to try and write something longer than a thousand words know that it's another ball game to make it a reality. Maybe DeLillo tried that, I don't know. What I know is that FALLING MAN is a demonstration of his amazing talent rather than an a very pertinent novel on 9/11 and I doubt that he wanted that.

THREE STARS

Movie Review : Killing Them Softly (2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:55:00 +0000

KILLING THEM SOFTLY was an unlikely film to be financed, in this day and age. It's not especially cool or fast paced, it focuses on giving legendary crime writer George V. Higgins' dialogues the breathing room necessary to grasp their austere beauty and more important, it doesn't have a hero. Yet, that film was not only financed, but also shot and released, by Andrew Dominik, the man behind THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY COWARD ROBERT FORD. I can't think of any reason why anybody interested in making money would have financed such an idiosyncratic movie in the post-seventies, because that's where KILLING THEM SOFTLY belongs. I liked it. I thought it was a little deliberate and obtuse at times, but it's a celebration of everything that's good about George V. Higgins' fiction. It's just that, you know...it's an auteur movie. Not only it feels slightly anachronistic, but it was also a weird choice of source material to craft art around.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is based on a George V. Higgins' novel originally called COGAN'S TRADE. I don't know why the title was changed to something cornier, but I suppose it doesn't matter. The Cogan in question is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), a mafia hitman brought in by a Massachussets crime syndicate in complete disarray, to restore order in town after a card game heist. The problem seems straightforward enough since the card game had already been heisted by its very organizer Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) in the past and Trattman got away with it. Jackie immediately understands that it's not as simple as it seems, but restoring order in town takes precedence on simply punishing the culprits, so a certain course of action must be taken. Jackie happens to be the man you need for this type of situation.

I was saying, it's an auteur movie. It left me unsure whether Andrew Dominik wanted to honor Higgins' novel or use it to make a point. For example, the movie starts with a shot through a tunnel, with garbage floating in the wind and a lonely man, walking through, looking broken while a Barack Obama speech is playing in the background. I thought it was clever enough. A little obvious maybe, but still clever. Only problem is that Andrew Dominik turns that idea into a gimmick that follows the character throughout the whole movie. There must be seven or eight scenes where a character is walking into a setting and a political speech is playing in the background. Brad Pitt's character Cogan even comments on it once. One time would've been fine, but it takes a disproportionate place throughout the film, which is ironic and comes off as judgmental because the director is not American. He is Australian, born in New Zealand. The heavy handed political message was unnecessary.

Richard Jenkins didn't have a big part, but as usual, he's excellent.

It's too bad, because when the film sticks to the material, it's quite enthralling. Andrew Dominik's long, slow scenes have a strong, distinctive identity. The actual card game heist scene left a deep impression on me. Dominick films the two robbers, played by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, actually walking to the card game from outside the building. My heart rate raised as they walked into the hallway up to the game, and the player's chatter became gradually louder. That was really well done and focused on tension rather than action. In crime fiction, tension without action can work, but action without tension is just a random series of violent events and the fiction of George V. Higgins is all about tension. Dominik gets that and it translates whenever he's busy translating the actual material on screen.

The cast is a tremendous help. Brad Pitt knocks it out of the part again as Cogan. He is cold, professional and seems to have that rational interest in the work. He helps tremendously to build a strange, yet loveable persona around Jackie Cogan which is central to the storyline. Ray Liotta's performance is also of an admirable accuracy, now that his face seems jammed in botox and other rejuvenating products. Richard Jenkins is his usual badass self. Only part I didn't quite get was James Gandolfini's. I didn't read COGAN'S TRADE, but I have no idea what his character was supposed to mean in the movie. To me, it seemed that they hired James Gandolfini to be James Gandolfini on screen, for whoever was nostalgic of Tony Soprano. That character could have been cut from the screenplay. Loved that there were no lead female character. Gritty crime fiction is always a tad more credible when it's a sausage fest.

I'll say it out loud, KILLING THEM SOFTLY was a good movie, but it too self-involved and pretentious for my own taste. I'm a believer that filmmaking should be first and foremost a narrative art and taking a great story to ride, so you can pass your own socio-economic message is a sure way to make me cringe. Andrew Dominik is a talented artistic mind, but he loves himself quite a bit. If you love what you do better than your fans do, I got an issue with that. Southern writer and bottomless pit of wisdom Harry Crews said it best: "Just tell the storeh." The good ultimately outweighs the bad in KILLING THEM SOFTLY, thanks to the immortal strength of George V. Higgins' words and a terrific, passionate performance by most of the cast. Don't expect the world out of KILLING THEM SOFTLY, you can't knock a movie for operating outside the conventions with so much gusto. It will take effort, you will roll your eyes a few times, but it won't leave a bitter taste.

THREE STARS

The Hoops Nerd

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:11:00 +0000

Hi.

Quick word this morning to tell you I started a side-project blog. The Hoops Nerd. You might have guessed it by now, it's a place where I discuss my renewed passion for the business of basketball. I stress the word "business" here and "management". I am huge a sports management nerd. It became evident over the last few weeks of playoffs on social media that I needed an output for this, so here it is. It's alive and it has a name. So visit, comment, bookmark. Do what you have to do if you like basketball - The Hoops Nerd. It's going to have its own .com soon enough.

Now, back to your usual programing of book, movies and shenanigans. Thanks!

Movie Review : Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:07:00 +0000

I grew up with a Star Trek fan for a dad. He wasn't exactly a Trekkie. He didn't dress up or speak Klingon. He never went to any conventions. He just happened to believe Star Trek was the greatest thing to ever happen to television. He's still convinced of that. So I spent countless hours on the living room couch with him, watching them all: the originals, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, all the subsequent movies, etc. You'll understand that I have a special fondness for the show, but that I don't take it too seriously. To me, it's all about people wearing silly uniforms in space, silly humor, phasers and crazy looking alien species. I enjoyed the hell out of the initial reboot of the franchise and unlike for most gritty reboots, it seemed to me like a good idea to go on. I went to see STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS into whopping, revolutionary 2D last Saturday and had a wicked good time.

You don't need to have seen the 2009 movies to understand STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS, but it's preferable if you're familiar with the characters. It picks up right after the events of the first movie as the U.S.S Enterprise and its crew are on an observation mission on an endangered planet and not following protocol in order to save its primitive species (business as usual). In the midst of the sanctions against James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine) and his crew, Starfleet was attacked by a mysterious man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch). Kirk's mentor Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) is murdered in the process, so Kirk offers himself for a very dangerous mission: go into Klingon space and murder John Harrison. He quickly discovers that Harrison is in reality a man from another era named Khan (yeah, THAT Khan). Shenanigans ensues (that's barely sarcasm here).

I feel I need to address Devin Faraci's scathing review of the movie, because it bummed me out and made me feel stupid for even liking it. I usually like to read Devin, but I can't for the love of me, understand what was he expecting out of this film. I don't know why would anybody expect something different than a summer popcorn movie out of it. There is no Cronenbergian complexity to it. There is no contemplative tension like in Sergio Leone's movies. I was sitting, laughing and slapping my knee for most of the film, thinking: "Am I really enjoying it this much?" Of course I did. What STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS is, is basically a series of well-crafted, blood-pumping action scenes, witty humor that understands the flavor of the series and special effects. A lot of special effects. But really, the action scenes are the glue that keeps things together here.

It also stars my favorite working female actress, next to Jennifer Lawrence.

Of course, it's not perfect. The script is a little weak. I say that, it's on a line-by-line basis. I have no problem whatsoever with the story STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS is telling, but the more emotional moments are sappy at best and director J.J Abrams seems self-conscious about it, as most of them are rushed through to leave the necessary breathing room to the long and oh-so-awesome action scenes. I'm usually all about tension over action, but not in this case. Abrams does wide scope action amazingly well. The other bad thing about this movie is Emo Spock. Abrams has to stop with Emo Spock. We love him for having no emotion whatsoever, not because he's wrestling with them. I can understand the occasional outburst because of his dual nature (half-human), but you gotta stop this, even if it means letting Zachary Quinto walk. He is physically perfect for the part, but he doesn't have the Vulcan vibe. At all.

Other than for Quinto, the acting is in general solid despite the weak script. Chris Pine "gets" Jim Kirk. He doesn't have the effortless swagger of William Shatner, his performance is very technical, but who can blame him? Shatner was such a natural, he seemed to be playing himself, back then. Happy to see Zoe Saldana get work too. She's a competent Uhura and God knows she's the only one out there that's not afraid to show she has aged on screen. Much power to her for wanting to be a woman and not a botoxed lizard. Karl Urban is surprisingly accurate as Dr. McCoy and there is Simon Pegg. A man who mastered the art of being funny without really doing anything. In STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS, he even runs funny. Can't pass Benedict Cumberbatch under silence either. "Sherlock" doesn't really have anything to do with the original Khan, but I prefer that he went his own way rather than turn into a weak parody of the character.

I loved STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. It didn't insult my intelligence because it didn't pretend to be something it wasn't. It didn't try to look cool or edgy. It's about a break-neck spaceship captain and his kind-hearted crew. If you're walking into this movie with the expectation of seeing anything else but people beating the crap out of each other in space for more than two hours, you might feel ripped off. Like I said, it's not intellectual filmmaking. J.J Abrams is the television-generation answer to Steven Spielberg. He grew up with STAR WARS and INDIANA JONES like us and now he's making movies like that. I can't think of anybody better to have taken the reins of the Star Trek franchise. Unlike other movie franchises, this one felt like it had untapped potential due to financial and technical limitations. This is not the case anymore. Welcome to Gene Rodenberry's wet dream.

FOUR STARS

Book Review : Craig Wallwork - Quintessence of Dust (2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:56:00 +0000

Order QUINTESSENCE OF DUST here

My father said that the best way to a woman's heart was through her sternum. I took that literally and enrolled in medical school after leaving sixth-form college.

Try saying "Craig Wallwork" out loud, several times. It's tremendous facial gymnastics. Give it enough repetitions and your smile will pack enough power to atomize any form of resistance to your charm. Aside from being a workout for your face, Craig Wallwork is also an up-and-coming British author who likes to take fashiony selfies and give poetic titles to his work, like: THE SOUND OF LONELINESS, TO DIE UPON A KISS and the short story collection up for review today QUINTESSENCE OF DUST. By the way, while you can get a paperback version for a very advantageous price, the eBook is free. The short story collection format makes it difficult to assess if the fiction of Craig Wallwork lives up to his persona, but I'll tell you as much: he has the potential to.

It's not uncommon in short story collections to start off with one of its most solid stories. QUINTESSENCE OF DUST is no different here as it starts with NIGHT HOLDS A SCYTHE, which I thought was the most beautiful story of the collection and THE most beautiful short story I've read so far in 2013. A father and his young daughter are tying to escape a terrible plague that makes sleep deadly. They are tired, hypercaffeinated and yet, clinging to an abstract hope. In that story, Wallwork confronts innocence and fatality without falling in the easy pitfalls. There is no ready-made plague that hunts the father and the daughter. No nazis, no zombies, nothing that could distract the reader from the bubble of manic hope the father created for the two of them. It went straight to my heart and I don't let much things go there. Expect to hear about it again during award season, next fall.

RAILWAY ARCHITECTURE doesn't pack the intensity or the emergency of NIGHT HOLDS A SCYTHE, but it is beautiful, poetic and mythic in its own way. While the first thrives in simplicity, here the story is driven by complexity and structure and yet, it discusses the same theme: innocence. I believe this is what Wallwork does best, to explore simple, beautiful themes such as innocence, childhood and love. Whenever he tackles something more complicated, like in the story ANAL TWINE, where the metaphorical pertinence gets lost amidst the shock value. It's a funny story sure, but it doesn't draw a bigger picture the way Wallwork shows he can within the same short story collection and sometimes using shock value in itself, like for the story SKIN. Wallwork has the tendency of using shock and sexual imagery just for the sake of being shocking or funny and whenever he does that and loses the big picture, the story usually suffers.

In Amsterdam, the appendage that made you a freak and had previous lovers wince at the thought of it inside them, has the allure of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal or Empire State Building: nobody would believe something so big existed unless you're photographed next to it.

As author/reviewer Caleb J. Ross pointed out, there is a duality to Craig Wallwork's fiction that fluctuate between bizarro fiction and magic realism. If QUINTESSENCE OF DUST pointed towards anything is that Wallwork's potential for magic realism is unlimited. He has the originality, the poetic vision and the prose to be a standout writer. I'm not familiar enough with bizarro to say if he stands out in that field, but I lost interest quickly in his more grotesque stories. Whenever he's in his best shape, think of Craig Wallwork as Chuck Palahniuk meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His fiction wields amazing power whenever he doesn't take the easy road (which he unfortunately sometimes does). QUINTESSENCE OF DUST is a small, cramped window into the strange, dreamlike world of Craig Wallwork. He is an author who walks to his own drum. I was sometimes very impressed, sometimes annoyed, but Wallwork got strong emotional reactions out of me, which I believe was the point of the exercise.

THREE STARS

Judas Priest - The Hellion/Electric Eye

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:15:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, NBA player Jason Collins came out of the closet. It's a very courageous decision, considering that professional sports is the last safe haven of macho men in a constantly evolving society. Most players supported Collins publicly via Twitter, but it will be something else on the court next year. Considering that Collins is a marginal player on the wrong side of thirty, he might not even have a job next year.

Heavy Metal music is also a rugged subculture and during the eighties (arguably the finest decade in metal), nobody rocked harder than Judas Priest. They were Gods on the stage. Imagine the surprise of life-long Priest fans when frontman Rob Halford declare his homosexuality about a decade and a half ago. Worshipers of the band were confused. Truth is, Halford is a great rock n' roll mind and his sexual preferences have no bearing whatsoever on his ability to rock out. Press play for hard evidence.

Judas Priest - THE HELLION/ELECTRIC EYE

Up here in space
I'm looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you've private lives
Think nothing of the kind.
There is no true escape

I'm watching all the time.
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam.
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean.

I'm elected electric spy
I protected electric eye.
Always in focus
You can't feel my stare.
I zoom into you
You don't know I'm there.
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove.

Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
's nothing you can do about it.
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows.
Protected. Detective. Electric eye.

Book Review : Noam Chomsky - Power Systems: Interviews with David Barsamian (2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:56:00 +0000

Order POWER SYSTEMS here

Solidarity makes people hard to control and prevents them from being passive objects of private power. So you have to have a propaganda system that overcomes any deviations from the principle of subjugation to power systems.

There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they're any better. For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of school does undermine solidarity and mutual support - dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.

Whenever I review a book, I try to keep two main variables in mind: form and content. Genre authors will tell you form is subjugated to content and literary authors will tell you the opposite, but as a reviewer, I believe they are equally important to your book. If you mess one of them up, your book will suffer. I don't have any major problem with the content in POWER SYSTEMS. Noam Chomsky seems like a knowledgeable enough guy about global politics and everything he claims is documented in an extensive end notes section. I got major issues with the form, though. I don't know who's responsible for putting this book together. I don't think it's Noam Chomsky or David Barsamian, but I don't think POWER SYSTEMS accomplished anything, aside from affirming that Noam Chomsky is a source of information about modern politics and lots of other stuff.

I didn't know much about Noam Chomsky coming in. I knew he was a leftist philosopher and that this book was called POWER SYSTEMS, that's all. 178 pages later, I still don't know what a power system exactly is. The book is not even trying to define that concept. The discussions between Barsamian and Chomsky are loosely based on thematic chapters and yet the discussion seems to be build as a best-of, most-elaborate questions of longer discussions. You go from global politics to U.S intern politics to geopolitical history, there is nothing that ties these questions together, except a short, enigmatic chapter title, such as: "Domestic Disturbances" and "Aristocrats and Democrats", you know? What the hell does that even mean? Terms like that only have values when they are explicated, but in POWER SYSTEMS, they are the explanation.

Like I said, the problem is not Chomsky or the nature of the questions David Barsamian asks him. Despite that I didn't know Chomsky's discourse at all prior to reading POWER SYSTEMS, I know that this presentation doesn't advantage him. David Foster Wallace, whom I'm a lot more familiar with, was often asked questions about a wide array of subject that had nothing to do with literature (his field of work) and it resulted in Wallace not going deep into any issues, because he was asked to solve one of the great issues of modern society in every questions. POWER SYSTEM was most certainly not meant to be an introduction, I just don't know what it was meant to be. An interesting detail that makes this question a lot thicker than it already is: according to other reviewers on Goodreads, a lot of the content in POWER SYSTEMS is recycled. So I repeat my question: what was that book meant to be?

Every night when I come home and start to answer the day's hundreds of e-mails, a fair number are from young people saying, "I don't like the way the world is going. In fact, I can't stand it. What should I do?" By now I receive so many that I'm almost compelled to resort to form responses. And what I point out is that you,re well on the way to answering the question yourself, because you recognize there's a problem. There is no general answer for everybody. There is no right answer for every person, in all circumstances. It depends on who you are, what your concerns are, what your options are, how much you want to devote yourself to it, what your talents are. But you're probably pretty privileged. Otherwise you wouldn't be writing me a letter on the Internet. That means you have a lot of opportunities - much more than your counterparts in other countries, or even here a generation ago. So there is a legacy that you can use. It's not going to be easy - it never is. But you can make a difference. You just have to find your own way.

Ultimately, POWER SYSTEMS is disappointing, because it doesn't help the left-wing discourse at all. It's self-important and insular in its form. In this day and age where discussing important issues has lost interest, you can't allow yourself to release a hermetic, confusing product like this. You could argue that politics are not supposed to be fun and that you need to invest yourself into these questions, but I disagree. Learning is one of the variables that trigger human enjoyment and it's possible to present heavy material in a way that will make people feel smart for enjoying. POWER SYSTEMS doesn't have any direction. It's just two very smart guys, talking about politics. It's structured in a way that you don't feel like they're speaking to you. The book makes you feel like you're eavesdropping at best and you're left trying to piece it all together. No disrespect to Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, but I don't believe you have anything to gain from reading this book in particular.

TWO STARS

A Method, now on IndieGoGo

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:14:00 +0000

I don't go on crowdsourcing sites (IndieGoGo, Kickstarter) all that often. Not that it's not full of interesting projects (most times it is), but it's the kind of thing that's hard to stop doing if you start routinely browsing their site. I make exception when friends of the site have projects up. Movie director Paul Von Stoetzel, the man behind Killing Joke Films, has launched an IndieGoGo campaign to get the necessary funding to finish his first feature film A METHOD.

I wouldn't bother posting about it if the movie didn't look incredibly cool. From the trailer, it looks like what BLACK SWAN would be like, if it was written by Jim Thompson. I'm a fan of psychological movies, I'm a fan of Paul, so if you're a fan of either, you should back that wonderful project, even minimally. A fearless artist is turning to the community to help gather funds for a tremendous project, so let's answer accordingly.

A METHOD follows Nina, a professional documentarian, and her crew as they chronicle the acting process of Andrea, a young and successful theater performer, in her first major role in a feature film. Andrea’s process becomes risky as she is encouraged to delve deeper into the dark reality of her character. Nina is there to record everything as the line between what is real and what is performance becomes dangerously blurred.

For more information, you can:

Visit the official web site

LIKE the Facebook page

or better yet,

Visit the IndieGogo campaign page

I do not have anything to do with the production but like I said, Paul is a long-time friend of the site, he has all these cool ideas and he is an Indie artist at heart, has his own production company and everything. So let's help destiny for once and make A METHOD the success it should be.

Movie Review : The Great Gatsby (2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:13:00 +0000

THE GREAT GATSBY was released last Friday under a shower of bad critics. Some said there was too much Luhrmann and not enough Fitzgerald, other found it artificial, some thought it was overblown and incorrectly interpreted, the usual suspects flung enough poo at the flick to get me curious. See, I'm a Francis Scott Fitzgerald fan and I have read THE GREAT GATSBY four or five times, although the last occurrence was around 2007 *.Strange thing maybe, I'm also a Baz Luhrmann enthusiast. I thought his adaptation of ROMEO AND JULIET was flawed by incredibly ballsy and I dig the hell out of MOULIN ROUGE! **. So really, what were those critics talking about? How could it go wrong? THE GREAT GATSBY is most certainly flawed, but it gives us occasional peaks into the seamless magic of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's universe. For that, it is already a successful film.

If you don't know THE GREAT GATSBY's story, you're missing out. But I'll fill you in. Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) just rented an old house in Long Island, surrounded by the extravagant mansions of rich people. His new world is separated in two poles. West Egg, where the newly rich reside and East Egg, where the centennial family fortunes are. Nick is in West Egg, but his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) lives in East Egg with her husband Tom (Joel Edgerton). Nick also happens to be neighbor to the mysterious Gatsby (Leonardo di Caprio) who has been throwing lavish parties lately and who is the talk of the town. As Gatsby takes interest into Nick, he finds out him and his cousin know each other from a long time ago. From a lifetime ago. A lifetime where they promised each other things and where they were different people. Gatsby wants this life back.

So were the scathing critics right? Yes and no. There are some elements to Luhrmann's movie that are so out of place, they feel grotestque. They are part of his trademark approach and I usually love them, but I do think he got them wrong this time. For example, the soundtrack. I understand Kanye West and Jay Z are luxuriant dudes, but they don't have their place in this movie. Neither does club music during parties. This is a a story about the Jazz Age, dammnit. Wouldn't it have been hard to put some jazz in? Have the contemporary songs interpreted by a big band at Gatsby's party or something? I mean, it wouldn't have been that hard to think this out of the box. Otherwise, you do have to be at least familiar with Luhrmann's style to not let it throw you off. I don't think anybody else could've have extracted the extravagant magic of the setting as well as he did in this movie. Luhrmann understood the fantastic nature of the world, seen through Nick Carraway's eyes.

There are, through THE GREAT GATSBY, short lived moments where the film seems to perfectly understand the novel and translate all of his beauty. It rarely last longer than a minute at the time, but when it happens, oh, the bliss! For example, the scene where Nick meets Gatsby the first time and talks about his unique smile. Leo di Caprio is a magnificent bastard as Gatsby and more than ever in this particular scene. He radiates Gatsbiness through the screen. He goes a little heavy sometimes on the Daisy worship, but as a party host, he truly is The Great Gatsby. Carey Mulligan maybe is the weakest cast here as she goes hard into the jaded Daisy and clashes with the more restrained game of her cast members, but just from her physical game, I thought her performance was acceptable. She looks exactly how I pictured Daisy Buchanan to be. Also, kudos to Elizabeth Debicki who plays Jordan Baker to near perfection.

So THE GREAT GATSBY isn't the vapid atrocity the release-day critic have lead you to believe it was. It's not a transcendent adaptation of Fitzgerald's transcendent novel either. I wish it was, but it's not. It's a good movie, though. THE GREAT GATSBY will beat time and occupy its rightful place in Baz Luhrmann's legacy. If you don't like Lurhmann, you'll probably hate this movie. But I like his work and believe nobody else could have breathe such life in Fitzgerald's work. They were a match made in heaven, despite that Lurhmann sometimes work with blinders on. If you pictured THE GREAT GATSBY, the novel, as an understated, contemplative update on the Victorian drama, this is not for you. But if like me, you read it as a fantasy journey through the eyes of young and naive Nick Carraway, you ought to give the movie a chance, because that's how Baz Luhrmann pictured it too.

THREE STARS

* I'm one of these dudes who was totally turned to Fitzgerald by Haruki Murakami. Weird, I know. Norwegian Wood, baby. Norwegian Wood.

** Might come as a surprise to some, but I love musicals.

This is Water : The Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:39:00 +0000

This video has been moving along nicely on social media for a week or so now, but here it is again. According to my Goodreads account, I have read eight books by David Foster Wallace and I believe none deserve your attention more than THIS IS WATER. What started as a commencement address to Kenyon College graduates became Wallace's most accessible and moving piece and now there is a short movie made about it. I'll admit it's a rather corny movie, but it has an interesting value by the mere fact that it was made. Now you can't say you won't read THIS IS WATER because you don't read. There is a freakin' movie about it. Only nine minutes to sit through and pay attention. That was already a manageable investment of time, now it's a really manageable one.

Another beautiful thing about this movie is that it's not the entire piece. Of course, it is available elsewhere on YouTube, but you'll have to sit through twenty-two minutes of a still image if you want to hear it. I don't consider this to be piracy or anything. I'm sure Wallace himself would have loved to see this message spread around like that. The majority of his work is so lengthy and complex anyway, it's impervious to any form of piracy anyway. You are not going to sit through a YouTube of WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY and even less of INFINITE JEST. So I believe THIS IS WATER was his gift to everyone who can breathe and think.

Part of me hopes this won't launch another wave of unchecked David Foster Wallace worship. Dead-eyed hipsters will tell you he's a genius, a cryptic figure like Kurt Cobain who's impossible to fully understand. They have his words tattooed on his skin and don't understand why. They pride themselves in saying they took three months to read INFINITE JEST, with the help of a dictionary.I'll say it before and I'll say it again. I like Wallace's non-fiction better than his fiction (although his fiction can me amazing at times). I think he gave us better access to his own mind than through any mind he could have created and achieved his goal of clarity best through his essays. I'll let you be the judge. Watch THIS IS WATER and tell me what you think.

Book Review : Vincent Zandri - Godchild (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:29:00 +0000

Order GODCHILD here

Order THE INNOCENT here

Sometimes, when the world appears to be slipping out from underneath your feet, you don't ask questions. You just go with the flow, place your trust in gravity.

There is nothing about Vincent Zandri that I haven't already said. He is an inspiration to us all. He pulled himself from the jaws of publishing oblivion years ago to become one of the biggest success stories of the eBook era. On top of thing, Zandri now travels the world like Hemingway, along with his son Bear and lives life with burning passion, for all of us sinners. Naturally, first thing I wanted to read was what got him in and out of publishing trouble, his Jack Marconi novels. THE INNOCENT left me agreeably surprised and nodding to myself in approval. It was daring, original and that intangible edge that I love but don't often see in noir. Something that makes the setting genuinely troubling, a place you wouldn't want to even dream about. The sequel GODCHILD is a rather different novel, yet it was written with the same energy and style. In the often unsatisfying business of book series and recurring characters, Vincent Zandri is a force to be reckoned with.

After the events of THE INNOCENT, Jack "Keeper" Marconi left his job in the prison system to become a private investigator. On the day of his wedding, he has a sight that paralyses him and makes him run away from the altar and into the nearest tavern. The bald man, who has murdered Jack's first wife Fran a few years back, shows up at the cemetery as Jack was saying his last goodbyes to his old life. Jack's lawyer and friend Tony Angelino finds him at the bar and brings him back to his office, where he offers him work. A client of his, a man named Richard Barnes, wants to hire Keeper to break into a Mexican prison where his wife is being held up for smuggling dope. She is a "method writer" and was posing as a "burro", a drug-smuggling housewife, in order to get material for her new story. Keeper understand Barnes wants him for his prison expertise, but he's not too crazy about embarking on such a kamikaze mission. He changes his mind when he stumbles upon a detail that mysteriously ties Barnes to his wife's murder.

GODCHILD is in many ways more conventional than THE INNOCENT was. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just quite an unexpected turn of event as a protagonist who occupies an often maligned role in crime fiction (a prison warden) leaves his role to become a classic anti-hero (a private eye). The best way I could describe GODCHILD is Raymond Chandler meets Andrew Klavan. Keeper is smooth, educated and strong with the verb, as Philip Marlowe was and yet he lives in a paranoid underworld where the rich always get what they want, no matter how perverted, which reminded me somewhat of Klavan's DON'T SAY A WORD *. It's a successful mix and with the tremendous scope the novel had (Albany-Mexico), GODCHILD shows considerably more ambition than your run-off-the-mill P.I story.

"Right now I'm safer dead than alive," I said.

"Aren't we all?" he said.

Vincent Zandri understands what makes detective novels enjoyable probably more than I do, because I kept turning the pages of GODCHILD without knowing why. It lacks the originality and somewhat the grimness of THE INNOCENT, but the support cast, especially Richard Barnes and his wife Renata, kept GODCHILD going strong. Zandri put a lot of effort into creating atmosphere also, in the Mexico-based chapters in particular. I'm going to be honest here and tell you it felt deliberate at times. Some of those scenes really clued you in about the nature of Jack's investigation. I can't really knock an author for making atmosphere a priority (which Zandri does, in my experience of him), but in GODCHILD, it's not as seamless as in THE INNOCENT and borderlines caricature at times. Be aware that this criticism is centered around one character and the scenes that involve him though. It's a problem, but it's an insular problem and doesn't plague the novel completely.

I'll be honest again, I read GODCHILD in a little more than forty-eight hours. Vincent Zandri has the rhythm and the fluidity to his style, that makes him easy to enjoy. I have read several detective novels in the last three or four years, but nothing like this one. Zandri has a nose for mixing the right variables to make a story stand out from its competitors. So many novels of this genre are about a disappearing girl or about drugs or weapons, these variables are completely left out GODCHILD which makes it feel fresh for the genre. Reading Vincent Zandri, it's understandable why he found success. He is committed to the right things: originality, accessible and enjoyable writing, picking the right media stories to craft around (this time, the corruption of power in Mexico). Overall, GODCHILD comes up a tiny bit short of THE INNOCENT, but as far as detective novels go, it's a satisfying experience.

THREE STARS

* If you have seen the movie only, please know that it's an extremely watered-down product. The novel is as disturbing as literature can get.

Pascale Picard - Smilin'

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:52:00 +0000

There should be a musical genre called "cute girls singing folk rock with an acoustic guitar." Pascale Picard would belong to that genre. She's one of the few french Canadian artists that deliberately sings in English. The reasons she cited to do this, in interview are fascinating. She writes and interprets in English not because it's easier, but because she's too self-aware about what she writes and she felt it gave her a layer of camouflage. Most important, she's good at it. I'm not overly crazy about her catalog of songs, but I love SMILIN' because it narrated her difficulty to deal with the change that success brings and there is something so feminine about the way she words it. Anyway, I thought this would be a nice discovery for you guys this morning as the didn't make much noise south of the border and across the sea, yet. Enjoy!

Pascale Picard - SMILIN'

I am not gonna make it
I can see the crowd around me
Is getting bigger, & as it is
I'm trying to figure out
Why I feel so isolated
I have my friends
But don't have much time for them
I have my house
A tiny pocket in my luggage
I have my boyfriend
But he's also so tired of listening to me
Every single day
Seems like a mountain to climb
Every single word
It takes all my strength to get it out
I'm tired of talking about me
But in fact, it's the only thing
I get a grip on
I feel like I'm not gonna make it
I really feel like I'm not gonna make it
But it might be the best thing
That ever happened to me. so now

Hey little girl keep on smiling:
Cause they don't want to hear you complaining
You're a lucky girl
Your life's so exciting
So I'll keep on making bad jokes
'Cause you think I'm strong
& it might be the way you like it
Oh how I need you to like me...

I have tried as hard as I can
I have tried to go through 9 to 5
was like a train
Between work and bars
Never found out what I was travelling for
Now I have my car
But I ain't got no safe place to go
I still hold my drink
But I'm not as thirsty as before
I have my voice
But I heard lately that people
Don't want to hear sad songs
Every single place
It's all the same to me
Every single face
I know it wine replaced
By another smiley one
Who will also be left soon
Somewhere behind
I feel like I'm not gonna make it
I really feel like I'm not gonna make it
But it might be the best thing
That ever happened to me, so now

Hey little girl keep on smiling
'Cause they dont want to hear you complaining
You're a lucky girl
Your life's so exciting
So I'll keep on making bad jokes
'Cause you think I'm strong
& it might be the way you like it
Oh how I need you to like me.

Please now just don't count on me
I can't handle it anymore
& don't ask me why
If you don't want me to lie
But dont be alarmed
Don't you see that I'm just down
Just dont worry soon
be back on the tracks

Smilin'.
'Cause I'll get tired of complaining
I'm a lucky girl
& I'm doing exactly what I wanted
So I'll keep on making bad jokes
'Cause I need to be strong
It might be my only chance to get out of it
& now I really need to make it !
& now I really need to make it!!

Book Review : Joe R. Lansdale - Mucho Mojo (1994)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:07:00 +0000

Order MUCHO MOJO here

Order SAVAGE SEASON here
Order THE BOTTOMS here

I thought about Hanson. I wanted to be mad at him, but he hadn't done anything but respond to what was there to respond to. Hell, I liked the big bastard. Really. He was a swell guy. I just hoped his dick would fall off.

I consider reading a Joe R. Lansdale novel to be a win-win situation. It's like eating sushi or playing a sport you really love. It's both a pleasant experience and good for you. Lansdale is a true original who created his own paradigm in pulp fiction. I can't say enough good things about the guy. The Hap & Leonard series is known amongst his fans as some of his best work. After reading SAVAGE SEASON last fall, I had to agree. East Texas' most unlikely couple are some of the most charming, witty amateur sleuths you will find in the publishing industry. If the gorgeous characterization and the deep and subtle plot of SAVAGE SEASON made me drop to one knee, MUCHO MOJO made me consider invest in knee pads because this is an eleven volumes series. Sincerely, I will try to remain rational throughout this review but I am slowly learning that I like Lansdale's novels to a point I somewhat lose sight of why I do. I don't like 'em. I love 'em.

MUCHO MOJO picks up right after the events of SAVAGE SEASON. Leonard is still nursing his injuries from the Trudy fiasco. Thing is, Leonard learns that his uncle Chester, who raised him and shunned him after learning he was homosexual, has passed away and gave him his house. He asks for Hap's help to sort his uncle's things out, so Hap moves in with Leonard in Chester's old house for a while. Going through Chester's business, they find out a series of alarming things that will lead them to a child's skeleton under the floorboards. Was Chester a child killer? Grieving, confused, Leonard refuses to even ask himself this question and the duo starts investigating that grim discovery. That will lead them on to the last months of uncle Chester, who died in a very dark place, next to a crack house, facing the worst possible kind of monster.Was that monster himself?

I gave you a pretty exhaustive synopsis of what was going on, but it's impossible to give it to you completely and that's what makes a Joe Lansdale novel what it is. They are complex objects. I'm not even mad about it, because that will leave you at least two dozens of things to discover I can't even get into here. One thing I will address though is the theme of mortality. It's part of what makes MUCHO MOJO so strong. Hap and Leonard are both confronted to a tragic death (Uncle Chester) and to the frailty of life (support character MeMaw). With these two variables, Lansdale is already cheating the classic trope of tough guy novels where death is handled like candy. Lansdale examines mortality through the existential questioning of Leonard and through the grim observations of Hap and because of that, every death that occurs through MUCHO MOJO weights heavier and heavier. Lansdale doesn't treat death as a commodity and ironically, that contributes in making is novels feel more alive than most.

"You could just put the trunk back in the hole, you know. He's done what he's done, and now he's beyond punishment and can't hurt anyone else. You could just go on with things."

"You don't mean that?"

"No...Just a small, sad part of me means it."

When I say I'm trying to be rational here, you have to know that I like my fiction to have precise things. A slow pace? I love when things don't cascade down the page. It creates tension. MUCHO MOJO has that. A heavy atmosphere? It's the name of the game for me. Your book could be about someone doing his groceries, as long as he's doing them in a concrete wasteland, that the neon lights are throbbing and that creepy bystanders are ogling him, I'm going to read it and like it. MUCHO MOJO has a thick, suffocating atmosphere. A deep emotional range? That's a tricky one and not many writers aside from Joe Lansdale do correctly. If everything is always dark and sad, I'll feel you're trying to pry an emotion from me. A deep emotional range will give me reasons to like your characters and even more reasons to like your book. Lansdale, in MUCHO MOJO uses the friendship between Hap and Leonard to go into things that go way beyond his storyline. I loved that book, I'm not afraid to say it, but I loved it for reasons that are entirely subjective. You may hate MUCHO MOJO, but if you do, I'd probably hate everything you love to read and do, in general.

So do I have some criticism or what? Yes, I do. Although it's very minor. Let me put my Captain Nit-Picky hat for a second. See, Hap and Leonard are chasing a child killer. I don't like that figure in fiction, the child killer. It's too easy to hate. Two other things I like in fiction are subtlety and moral ambiguity. The only weakness of Hap and Leonard for me, is that they're an indestructible unit * that fights evil. But really, this is highly subjective and really, really minor. I enjoyed MUCHO MOJO, even more than I enjoyed SAVAGE SEASON. It's slower, darker, has a predatory pace. Our two heroes are still beacons of light, but they are in the darkest depths of oblivion, here. Knowing that I have nine more volume to go ( a tenth is also schedules sometime before 2020) maybe me giddy. It's common knowledge that Joe R. Lansdale is a black belt in several martial arts (and it's also obvious he knows the fight game when you read Hap and Leonard) and if there were black belts given for storytelling, he'd be a tenth degree, grandmaster. Not many people can tell a story as well as Joe Lansdale and that's what makes his book releases happenings in the crime fiction community.

FIVE STARS

* In the sense that they'll always be together and understand each other, not that they're immortal.

Charles Ramsey and The Cleveland Horror

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:03:00 +0000

Another one of these terrible, decade-long horror stories of sexual slavery has been exposed this week, in Cleveland, Ohio. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, three girls who disappeared about a decade ago (from 2002 to 2004) and were presumed dead, have been discovered and rescued. 52 year old school bus driver Ariel Castro has been arrested and charged for their kidnapping and rape (I think). Takes a special kind of psycho to reduce somebody else's life to your twisted sexual desires for a complete decade. Takes an Olympic champion of psycho to do this to three girls at once.

There is still death penalty in Ohio and like many of you, I hope Ariel Castro rides the needle. I hope he does after a long, emotionally draining legal battle and that on execution night, there is a painful mishap with the lethal cocktail and that he goes out drowning in pain. He doesn't deserve any better. As a storyteller though, I can't help but find this story fascinating.

What differentiates the Cleveland horror from the Natascha Kampusch or the Elizabeth Fritzl case, is that they were three, young girls about the same age, living this nightmare together. How was it? Were they friends or did Castro make them compete with each other in sadistic games? Could they talk to each other or were they kept in separate, isolated room? What happens now? Have they formed a bound that will keep them close forever or will the mere sight of each other will make them relive this unspeakably long ordeal? Being almost adults and having each other will either made surviving this a lot easier or a lot tougher.

Like many others, I am fascinated by Charles Ramsey, the colorful neighbor who saved the girls. He sounds like he escaped from a Joe Lansdale novel. Seriously, how humane is that dude? I agree his initial interview was uproarious and fully deserving of making him a social media darling. The guys behind the Huntsville Bed Intruder Song even made him the supreme honor of giving him his own song Dead Giveaway. In case you doubt the good intention behind that move, read about what it did to Antoine Dodson, the "auteur" of the Huntsville Bed Intruder Song. Not bad for a kid who lived in the project and didn't have much of a future in life.

Beyond that, I find Ramsey even more fascinating during serious interviews. In this interview or in this one, with Anderson Cooper where he recalls the small, mundane details of his life as Ariel Castro's neighbor and tries desperately to find meaning to them. He had been living there for only a year and he feels guilty about it. He's visibly a hard, working-class man who must have been saving all his life to afford that house. He said to Anderson that the only thing who kept him up at nigh before was money, so paying mortgage on that house must've been the challenge of his life before it happened.

Ramsey doesn't think he's a hero. He claims he just did the right thing. I beg to differ. The word "hero" is being thrown around in multiple situations, given multiple meanings, but what Charles Ramsey did last Monday I believe was truly heroic. You don't need to risk your life to change one. But Ramsey took a rather important risk. He went on his neighbor's property and busted down his door. He didn't know the extent of the horror on the other side, but if it was anything less than that, he would have run into legal problems. A friend of mine cynically remarked on my Facebook page that the cops would find a way to charge him for breaking and entering. That was meant to be ironic, but sillier things happened. Maybe it was mindless, but not everybody would have done what Ramsey did.

Charles Ramsey is a hero, whether he wants it or not. He turned down the FBI reward for finding the girls on air with Anderson and nobly offered to give them to the girls, showing his pay check on air. His life will forever be tied to the house of horrors he lived next to. I hope we'll make up to him, somehow. I hope McDonald's will hold its promises to him. I hope the iTunes royalties from Dead Giveaway go to him and help him pay his mortgage. If anything, he has earned the quiet, carefree life he seemed to have been longing for, before any of this happened. He will forever remain a symbol of everything good about humanity in the internet age.

See what I see in this story?

Movie Review : Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

I don't usually go out of my way to see Oscar-nominated movies. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK actually won one and was nominated in seven others. The mystifying Jennifer Lawrence went home with the trophy for best support actress, which was something bound to happen since she killed it in WINTER'S BONE in 2010. Romantic comedies are even less my thing, but SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK has been directed by David O. Russell, who had floored me with his dirty, crummy, realistic account of Micky Ward's life, THE FIGHTER. So it doesn't matter what colors they're wearing because it's the players that make the team, right? So how was it? There was some good and some bad, but SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is a very good film overall. Thought it bent backwards a bit to satisfy the romantic comedy demographic, but there is no major transgression here. The movie has a cohesive vision and a clear purpose. That's already a lot.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) has been institutionalized for some time after beating the ever-loving shit out of his wife's secret lover *. He leaves the psychiatric facility to go live with his parents and get his life together. He has only one this on his mind though, get back together with his wife Nikki (Brea Bee), who happens to have a restraining order against him. Pat suffer from a heavy from of bipolar disorder so he starts obsessing with Nikki really bad. Over at his friend Ronnie's (John Ortiz) one night, he meet Ronnie's wife's sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) who seems as deep into her problems as he is. Her husband died, she lost her job and has lost control of her life. She immediately shows interest in him, but all he can think about is Nikki, so Tiffany tells Pat Nikki's a friend of her sister and promise to deliver her a letter he wrote. In exchange, Pat accepts to participate to a ballroom dancing contest with Tiffany. I'm sure you can figure out what happens from here.

What SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK does very well is portraying mental diseases in a realistic light. There are no straight jackets in that film. Nobody hallucinates or gets murderously violent. There are people obsessing over things, showing disregard for their own health and the physical and psychological integrity of the people they love. The scene where Pat is looking for his wedding video at 4 A.M and wakes up the entire household is beautiful, difficult, hilarious and heart-wrenching. Speaking of which, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are gooood. Not good. They are goooooooooooood. Lawrence's performance makes it crystal-clear why she won the Oscar. She can empty her stare completely. She has those scenes where she looks completely gone and all that's in her eyes is the all-consuming disease. Jennifer Lawrence can reach peaks of emotional intensity no other working actresses can.

The romantic storyline between Pat and Tiffany bugged me a little. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK took such a no-bullshit approach to mental diseases, it makes the sugar-coated romantic approach dissonant with the movie's biggest strength. It's so...conventional? Pat and Tiffany are two highly unstable people who visibly find each other attractive and are put in sexual tension situations all the time. They should let the beast go wild, tear each other apart, reconcile, wash, rinse, repeat. No, they both act like teenage heartthrobs in each other's presence. I get it. It's the whole he's-THE-ONE-so-I-want-everything-to-be-perfect approach, which is familiar and comforting and it could be explained through Tiffany's tragic background, yet it's a missed opportunity to stay true to the terrific characters. Oh and that ballroom dancing scene ** is a ridiculous exercise in corny symbolism. If Pat and Tiffany would've danced a fiery tango it would've 1) been a much more beautiful, cohesive and less obvious scene between two capable actors and 2) it could have expressed their struggle with mental diseases a lot better.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is a movie for serious romantic people. I liked it. It has its flaws, but there are a bunch of good, minor decisions taken in satellite of the Cooper/Lawrence duo that makes up for them. Robert de Niro as Pat's father is particularly moving, as he tries to mend fences with his son through sport. The portrait David O. Russell traces of what sports means to men in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is both emotional and accurate. One of my favorite scenes of the entire movie was seeing Pat, loosening up and having fun at a football game. Overall, SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is an interesting compromise film that you can enjoy along with your girlfriend/wife. There is truth and romance co-existing in this movies, not always well but Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence work hard enough to make most of the issues inconsequential.

FOUR STARS ***

* That said, if the same exact thing happened to me, with the same exact words said, I don't know if I would've kept my cool. The scene was beautiful and horrific all at once.

** Because they eventually make it to the contest. I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that.

*** Giving it a ranking was hard. I hesitated between three or four, but in the end, the corny romantic aspect didn't frustrate me or anything and there's a limit to how you can downgrade a movie for not being everything that it could've. But I would have really loved Pat and Tiffany to dance a soul-stealing tango instead of doing that stupid mash-up thing that's suppose to represent bipolarity.

Observations on...Breakout Kings

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:38:00 +0000

Josie and I have recently went through the entirety of BREAKOUT KINGS, a small show that lasted a little under two seasons on A&E. The premise is gimmicky at best: two U.S Marshals, Charlie DuChamp (Laz Alonso) and Ray Zancanelli (Domenick Lombardozzi, better known as Herc, from THE WIRE) are leading this new special team where cons help them catch other cons. Instead of following the old saying that "you have to think like a killer to catch a killer", DuChamp and Zancanelli hire consultants to do it at a rate of one month off their sentence at each capture. I know, it sounds like cynical capitalism put like that, but I promise it's not that bad.

You might be wondering why I cover to little television. See, that's the thing I do with Josie and we have this nasty habit of not finishing series we started whenever the quality drops a little. It's a hobby that takes a lot of time and we rather do something productive than sit through something we don't like. MAD MEN for example. Great first season. There is an aura of duplicity around Don Draper, which he uses to be good at his job. But that's it. We threw the towel early into third season. Anyway, without further ado, here are my observations about BREAKOUT KINGS.

This show was made in the wrong era. If BREAKOUT KINGS had been produced in the nineties, it would have been way more popular and went on for ten seasons, or at least until the cons wiped off their sentences. Between the post-Sopranos era where television fiction has to be complex and deep and the CSI era, where spectator are flooded by the episodes of the same damned show, structured the same damned way *, BREAKOUT KINGS had very little place to exist.

It's a good show. It's simple and not very deep, but you don't need much to make good television. Good writing. Original ideas. Patient casting. That's it. BREAKOUT KINGS is not high art, but it's not mindless entertainment either. I loved how it blurred the line between law enforcement, control and power. The cons are clearly the lead characters here and they're written with one purpose in mind: make you understand they're brilliant, charming human beings too. It doesn't do much more than that, but it does that very well.

Speaking of which, can somebody explain to me why Jimmi Simpson is not a superstar yet? The guy is brilliant. Of course, he had the best-written character in the show, but his interpretation was deep, subtle, vulnerable and hilarious. When the credit to the series finale rolled, I knew Dr. Lloyd Lowery would be the thing I would miss the most about BREAKOUT KINGS. The character could have been obnoxious and annoying, but Simpson made him an endearing, asocial freak.

That finale. Anybody else saw it? Knowing that the series got hacked before its originally scheduled ending, is it me or that finale was the biggest fuck-you from a show producer to network executives? They leave you right in the middle of a huge moral dilemma. Probably the biggest moral dilemma of the entire show's existence and they just slam the door at you without giving you proper closure. I guess it was meant to get the fans all riled up and wanting more, but truth to be told, it's not hard to imagine what went on from there.

One of the biggest weakness in those a-crime-a-week shows is that over time, every week turns out the same. BREAKOUT KINGS does a good job at working around that, by finding great ideas for antagonists. Amongst others, there were: an ultra-nationalist white power dude, a Ted-Bundy insipired figure, an ultra-violent momma's boy, a Bonnie-and-Clyde inspired duo, a psychotic crime lord who happens to be a woman, a man who went off the deep end with religion...there is a lot of variety to the antagonists and it helps keeping the show fresh. It's not a strong feat of originality, per se, but the screenwriters took the time to research, brainstorm and do things properly in general.

The show got weaker towards the end as it reached for a continuous story line. That reeked of network executive interference. Other shows were doing it, so they wanted BREAKOUT KINGS to do it too. But it wasn't what the show was good at. Clichés started popping up with more regularity. Screenwriters started taking easy decisions to keep the drama growing. They took weird decisions along the line too, like eliminating lead characters. I tried to research if the actors took other engagements that would have explained these decisions, but came up short. They just liked to kill off their darlings like George R.R Martin.

I don't have any major criticism of BREAKOUT KINGS. It is what it is: a small time, comedic crime series. It understands its nature very well. Domenick Lombadozzi playing almost the same exact role than in THE WIRE was a let down. The marshals could have been written better also, I suppose. Screenwriters kept alternating between the realistic let's-not-mingle-with-the-inmates-and-be-dicks-to-them stance and the more dramatic let's-listen-to-the-inmates-we-could-learn-something. That made for two half-baked characters that didn't incite much interest. But the show is not about them. It's about the cons and their chance to earn their freedom by doing good.

Anybody saw that show? What did you think about it?

* You know, the a-crime-a-week thing.

Book Review : Heath Lowrance - City of Heretics (2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:24:00 +0000

Order CITY OF HERETICS here

Order THE BASTARD HAND here
Order DIG TEN GRAVES here
Order MILES TO LITTLE RIDGE here
Order THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL here
Order THE LONG BLACK TRAIN here
Order THE SPIDER TRIBE here

He said, "Is that...is that Crowe?" Crowe nodded and Rad said "No shit. Well I'll be damned. Crowe is back."

And then, "That can't be good."

Heath Lowrance is the closest thing we have to a hardboiled/noir historian. His knowledge of the craft, the history and even its socioeconomic evolution is ridiculously detailed. Also, Heath Lowrance writes books. The adventures of his boy Hawthorne, retribution specialist in the Old West, is one of the best arguments for the return of serial fiction as a mainstream source of entertainment. CITY OF HERETICS is his second full-length novel. I wasn't too sure what to think about it when I picked it up. Call it a lack of curiosity. It lasted for about six pages before I got pulled in. Noir has changed a lot since the eighties and became somewhat a sister genre to psychological horror, but in CITY OF HERETICS, the classic tropes live strong. Don't mistake it for pastiche though, for it carries its own weight, its own themes and shows some historical perspective on the genre. Plus, it's full of terrible people. CITY OF HERETICS had everything to seduce me and it did.

Crowe just spent the last seven years in prison before being spat back on the streets of Memphis.Trouble is never far for people like him. His old colleague Marco Vitower is now running the show (Vitower put a hit on Crowe in prison) and needs him for a very dangerous mission. Kill Peter Murke, who murdered Vitower's wife Jezzie in the most sordid fashion. Murke is about to be transferred to a psychiatric facility for trial evaluation, so the opportunity is there. But the transfer wagon gets hijacked before Crowe and Vitower's men can do anything about it. A small crew of murderous freaks extract Murke and make him disappear, leaving a trail of dead people behind. The boss is angry, Crowe is angry and he goes after Murke to get square with the boss and with the people who thought they could muscle him away from a target. It's about the worst thing you can do to someone like Crowe. Things get hairy.

Readers who have a decent background in noir will notice the elephant in the room: Jim Thompson. It's kind of like a Thompson novel, but not really. I'd say it's Jim Thompson meets Albert Camus. I suspect this is why such a good novel didn't get any love from major publishers. There is an obvious influence from Thompson, especially in the atmosphere. Everybody is crooked and have hidden agendas in CITY OF HERETICS. Everybody is a con, including the cops. My favorite character (except for remarkably badass Crowe) was the Internal Affairs policeman Radnovian, who also happened to be a functioning heroin addict. That places CITY OF HERETICS in some sort of segregated underbelly that will make you wonder where the normal people vanished. The only writer that did it better than Lowrance is Thompson himself. So yeah, there is influence, but it's not passive aping. Lowrance understands what made Jim Thompson's novels so good and transferred elements to CITY OF HERETICS.

"It's not a secret society," she said. "For God's sake, you make it sound like some sort of conspiracy or something."

"It is a conspiracy, you stupid bitch."

Another retro goodie in this novel is the protagonist Crowe. He is an old fashioned man and a tiny bit of a psychopath. I kept picturing him as Lee Marvin while reading, so that suggests an accurate character definition *. There is an existentialist edge to both the character and the novel and this is where CITY OF HERETICS gets really interesting, intellectually speaking. Unlike for most conventional/classic noir, there is nothing material at gain. Crowe is merely fighting for his soul against a bunch of religious nuts that fell off the deep end. Sounds a little tacky said like that, but the dialogues between the pragmatic and austere Crowe and the "enlightened" are the single best thing in CITY OF HERETICS. They trigger an evolution within Crowe where he is forced to examine the way he's been living and to word precise answers. In that regards, Lowrance's novel is a tremendous existentialist character study.

I often say badass characters always have a cause to defend, even if that cause may be the most self-centered motive in the world. Crowe might be the exception that confirms the rule and that's another reason why he's great. Motivations are being stripped from him as you turn the pages, so you get the feeling that he's trying to close this issue just because he wants to be right. That makes him slightly maladjusted. Just enough to remain entertaining. CITY OF HERETICS is retro, sure, but it's also violent, action-packed noir loaded with unforgettable dialogues. I'm happy Snubnose Press decided to publish this little gem, because it adds to their already impressive catalog and places it in better position to get the recognition it deserves. I'm not sure when is going to be the next Golden Age of Pulp Fiction in literature, but when it'll happen, CITY OF HERETICS will be referred to as a tough-guy classic.

FOUR STARS **

* By the way, Lowrance contributed to a Lee Marvin Anthology published by Crime Factory. Didn't read it yet, but am sure it's great. I've never seen the Factory shit the bed so far.

** I flirted with the idea of giving it FIVE STARS, but only flirted.

My Chemical Romance - Teenagers

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 05 May 2013 17:13:00 +0000

Never in a million years I thought I would post a My Chemical Romance song on a Sunday. All I knew of them was these meltdown-like songs where everything seems to melt under an August sun, including the music and the lead singer's hair. But last week I read EATING THE DINOSAUR, by Chuck Klosterman and he mentioned this song TEENAGERS. It's a brutally self-aware narrative about what it is to grow old as a rock n' roll star. It's unusually funny and quirky for the such self-important music and it's the catchiest thing I've heard in a long time. I must have played it about fifty or sixty times this week, just because I liked to mumble the chorus under my breath. That makes TEENAGERS the most listenable and the most rock n' roll song My Chemical Romance ever recorded. Hopefully it'll make you sing under your breath and tap your foot the same way it did for me.

My Chemical Romance - TEENAGERS

They're gonna clean up your looks
With all the lies in the books
To make a citizen out of you
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on you, son
So they can watch all the things you do

Because the drugs never work
They're gonna give you a smirk
'Cause they got methods of keeping you clean
They're gonna rip up your heads,
Your aspirations to shreds
Another cog in the murder machine

They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

The boys and girls in the clique
The awful names that they stick
You're never gonna fit in much, kid
But if you're troubled and hurt
What you got under your shirt
Will make them pay for the things that they did

They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

Ohhh yeah!

They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

All together now!

Teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me
[x2]

Book Review : Frank Bill - Donnybrook (2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:01:00 +0000

Order DONNYBROOK here

Order CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA here

"If State Police forensics match fingerprints and ballistics from that brass on the floor to the other two murders, I'd say Harrison Country has got more than a meth problem. It's got a world of shit."

Frank Bill is bound to become a culturally important writer. In fact, he already is. He published pieces in high-profile magazines such as Granta, Playboy and the New York Times. What I'm saying is that he's bound to be a lot more popular than he is now. He will become remembered-and-read-long-after-he-died popular. It's because his crime fiction addresses the stark reality of the good people of Southern Indiana. Bill speaks his own vernacular and narrates the most terrible situations with a broken tenderness in his voice. DONNYBROOK is his long-awaited debut novel. In 2011, CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA conquered everybody's heart, including mine and raised the bar for Bill's first novel, the object by which we measure an author's legacy. DONNYBROOK is quite different from its predecessor, but it got the job done. Frank Bill, you have raised the bar on yourself again.

There is this three-day long bareknuckles fighting tournament in Southern Indiana called the donnybrook. It's a last-man-standing kind of deal and it costs a thousand dollars to get in. So only the most rugged, desperate men enter the tournament, hoping to cash-in on the mythical payoff that would grant them a new life. Among these men, Johnny "Jarhead" Earl, a family man down on his luck, who will stop at nothing to provide; Chainsaw Angus, once a legendary fighter, now a meth addict and several other shadowy figures who take interest in the donnybrook for their own reasons: gangster and martial artist Fu Xi, methhead Ned and strange mystic Purcell, who seem to read into the events one step ahead of anybody. There's a lot of money hanging over a lot of people who don't have much and don't have a lot to do, you can expect things to go south. This is one hell of a euphemism to describe how bad things go.

I took a while to understand what DONNYBROOK was about. This is a quite different book from CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA who was slower, quieter and more contemplative. DONNYBROOK is wilder and more lyrical. Anthony Neil Smith, a favorite of mine and arguably the first person I've met that championed Bill's writing said it best: "I felt like reading a redneck space opera in another language." That embodies DONNYBROOK better than I possibly ever could. There is little of that intimate point of view, very little people to root for, just a flowing river of death and blood where damned souls gleefully dive in. Bill achieved the seemingly impossible when it comes to crime fiction and made his novel NOT about "the money", instead tuned himself into the vivid despair and the alienation of his characters to create something both unique and theatrical. More than anything, Bill's unique style is the star of the show.

Ned reached with both hands and tugged at his leg, the tibia and fibula chinked and spurred. His boot filled with blood. He'd stepped into an old, rusted animal trap.

Liz shadowed over him. Her face resembled smashed prunes as she took in the pulpy moisture that spread through his jeans. His knuckled lips twitched, and he begged, " Don't just stand there gawking, you morbid cunt. Help get my ankle free."

What I also found interesting, is the vision Frank Bill showed when using the term: "donnybrook." As he implied when he gave the definition in the epigraph, it's not just about the fights. A donnybrook is a disagreement, an uproar, an explosive situation. So there is a donnybrook within the donnybrook, feel me? The whole novel revolved around a chain of events that started because of the fights. The novel follows the chain of greed, despair, destruction and death provoked by one man's personal desire to hold the goriest possible backwoods fighting event. This is where DONNYBROOK score some cultural points as it rather gracefully exposes something that's going on in the U.S right now: normal people being pushed in unfair places by private interests.

I dug DONNYBROOK a bit like I dug THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, as a spectacle. It doesn't mean it's not deep, but it's meant to be enjoyed in a cathartic way. When you willingly drag the worst out of men, you have to abandon the idea you control anything, whatever you think money and power can buy. I'm sure DONNYBROOK will polarize the fans and critics alike because it's very different from CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA, who was a charmer and that it embraces something that's quite unnerving: the path to chaos. Obviously, I was charmed but not every reader likes to be disturbed like I do. Frank Bill won't escape his fate. He is bound to do great things and DONNYBROOK is one of them.

FOUR STARS

Interview with Dan O'Shea, Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:53:00 +0000

Read PART ONE here

Order PENANCE here
Order OLD SCHOOL here

In case you didn't remember, this week is launch week for Dan O'Shea's debut novel PENANCE. You might have missed my review, but I may or may not have called it epic, ambitious, complex, humble and understated all in the same sentence. I try not to say stuff like that unless I really mean it and Dan's novel didn't leave me any other alternative.

So in the later part of this interview, Dan and I talk about his other publication OLD SCHOOL, his frequent use of mortality as a theme in his fiction, writing, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin and his long path to publication. Hope you enjoyed it, don't hesitate to pull the trigger if you see PENANCE in your friendly neighborhood bookstore. You can drop by and thank me after you read it!

In OLD SCHOOL, you openly tackled the issue of old age and discuss death as a part of life, rather than the ultimate punishment, like most crime fiction does. To a certain extent, PENANCE embraces this vision too. What is it about growing old that fascinates you? Why do you think it meshes so well with your blend of crime fiction?

Mortality is the engine of life. If it weren’t for the yawning maw of the grave, none of the rest of it would mean anything. There’d always be more time, another chance, no real possibility of loss. But that’s not how it works. We are all on a short clock, we just don’t know how short.

In most crime fiction, the only deaths are those that result from crimes. But death is all around us, all the time. That makes murder more heinous – to accelerate that final loss.

I don’t know if it’s my age, that might be part of it. But I’ve always had a weakness for the elegiac. Whatever you want to call the genre, whether it’s hardboiled, crime fiction, noir, whatever, without the context of mortality, then all the violence is just mindless brutality, more violence porn.

What are the issues you think are plaguing art in this day and age, namely narrative arts like novels, movies and television series. Do you think your fiction addresses any of these?

Ah hell, now you’re asking questions above my pay grade. I wish people read more, or really that more people read. I think that television has supplanted movies as where the best video narrative art is being made these days. When I was a young man, you had movies like TAXI DRIVER and MIDNIGHT COWBOY and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. You went to the movies for serious, thoughtful narrative art. You watched TV to see Fonzie jump his motorcycle over the shark tank. The movies were for grownups, TV was for dumbass kids. Now the studios are tripping over themselves to release the next G.I Joe film or the next Transformers film or some piece of shit based on a video game. And TV is giving us THE WIRE and JUSTIFIED and THE WALKING DEAD.

Don’t know what if anything that means. And Jesus, I’m just a schmuck publishing his first novel. I’m not trying to address any great deficit in popular culture. I’m just trying to write a decent story.

Dead End Follies has been (and still is) critical of the writing advice market. What are your opinions about it? Did you use any to help you write to publication?

Not unless you mean Strunk & White.

All the necessary writing advice there is everybody already knows. Read a lot. Write a lot. Other than that, you’re pretty much on your own. It’s an esoteric process. What works for you is what works for you.

You catch nuggets here and there that are useful. Be suspicious of adverbs. Don’t get carried away with dialog attribution. Stuff like that.

Over the years I’ve had people give me a few writing advice books as gifts. Probably my fault. I’d talk about writing fiction and never wrote any, so they probably figured I didn’t know how when the real problem was I just wasn’t making the time. The only one of those books I thought was worth a shit was ON WRITING by Stephen King, and it wasn’t really advice, more of a memoir along with some reflections on his process. He wasn’t selling anything (and certainly doesn’t have to).

Even back when I hadn’t gotten serious about fiction writing, when I was freelancing, just doing the tax and finance stuff, there was all this advice rolling around about how to make that work. But everything important I remember learning I learned on my own. I remember one of my former in-laws giving this book they’d picked up at a garage sale – HOW TO MAKE 25 000$ A YEAR WRITING. I just smiled and said thank you. Didn’t have the heart to tell them I was making four times that.

Mandatory manly question. Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin? And why?

Lee Marvin. Because Clint Eastwood has never had a Crime Factory anthology named after him. I wasn’t even man enough to contribute to that one. Cam Ashley asked me to. Liam Jose even made a trip to Chicago to beg me in person. But I knew I was unworthy.

Anybody you wish to thank for making PENANCE happen?

My agent, Stacia Decker. When I finally got off my ass and wrote a novel, I knew exactly fuck-all about the writing business. I wasn’t online, didn’t know anybody, had no idea whether getting published was even realistic. Here’s how informed I was. When I was happy with the draft, I Googled “I wrote a novel, now what do I do?” Google said “Get and agent.” So I Googled “How do I get an agent?” Anyway, I ended up signing with Stacia pretty quickly and am damn glad I did. I know there’s this whole self-publishing world out there and all this talk about traditional publishing dying, people going on how agents and publishers are just evil gatekeepers trying to maintain some outdated order for their own benefit and yada yada yada. And I don’t know near enough to weigh in on all of that. All I know is she was the first person with a track record in publishing, whose opinion actually carried some demonstrable weight, who told me that my work was good enough. Then she helped me make it better. And then she spent three years selling it and found it a home. To date, the 15 percent she has to show for all that maybe covers the drinks she’s bought me at various Bouchercons. I know writing is a solitary business and we have to be self-motivated and all of that. But if I hadn’t had that early validation, that support, who knows? I might have said “OK, you wrote your damn novel, got that off your bucket list, now get on with your life.” Instead, I’ve got my first novel coming out, I’ve got three more under contract, and I’ve become part of this whole crime fiction community that Stacia pretty much dragged me into.

Look, compared to most of her client list, I’m small potatoes. Joelle Charbonneau’s already got a hell of a track record in her unique little not-quite-cozy corner of the mystery market and now she’s about to go thermonuclear in the YA world with her Testing trilogy. Frank Bill’s got a growing rep as the raw voice of America’s post-industrial underbelly. John Hornor Jacobs has a pile of well-deserved recognition in both horror and YA, and just wait until his Romans in the demon-infested American west stuff comes out. Chuck Wendig is the interweb’s favorite writing guru, his Miriam Black novels are hits and he’s got enough other irons in the fire to make Andrew Carnegie look like a piker. Adam Christopher is a rising sci-fi star. The buzz over Fiona Maazel’s WOKE UP LONELY just keeps building. Seth Harwood, Jon McGoran, the list goes on. I just hope I can keep up. That’s a hell of a peer group to be part of.

So you can say all the bad shit you want about agents. PENANCE would not be hitting the shelves if Stacia hadn’t helped make it happen. If that’s self-serving gate-keeping, I’ll take all of it I can get.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Emlyn Rees, my editor and the head honcho at Exhibit A, along with the larger Angry Robot family. Given the state of the publishing world, it took some stones to say “You know what the world needs? Another crime fiction imprint. Oh, and you know who the second author we sign oughta be? This old fart in Chicago who nobody’s ever heard of.” As far as I can tell, the Exhibit A business model isn’t the usual timid follow-the-market mentality. It’s find books we love and push the hell out of them.

And my dad. Probably wouldn’t have ended up as a writer if I hadn’t been raised in a house where reading was cool and you couldn’t turn around without tripping over a book. I know regrets are a waste of time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them. The biggest regret I have over all the years I didn’t write is that my dad isn’t around to see my book come out. He would have got a thrill out of that.

Movie Review : Django Unchained (2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:30:00 +0000

Quentin Tarantino is fascinating for all the wrong reasons. The transcendent success of PULP FICTION took everybody by surprise in the nineties and should have technically ushered a new golden era for pulp fiction if moviegoers would have understood there was more to it than a title *. But his career truly became interesting and problematic at the release of his subsequent effort JACKIE BROWN, a film you cannot fully appreciate if you don't love and understand the books of Elmore Leonard (which I fortunately do). That curve in the road sent Tarantino in the most bizarre place. He started making movies to please people. He took movie genres that people felt nostalgia about (kung fu movies, western spaghetti, grindhouse, war movies, etc.) and added the best thing he could offer to it, his excellent writing skills. Normally, this is where your career goes down the crapper. But not Tarantino's. He became amazingly good at it and created somewhat his own paradigm within the movie industry. DJANGO UNCHAINED might be his most polished effort since he abandoned the straightforward crime genre.

U.S of A, circa 1858. Two years before the American Civil War. Django (Jamie Foxx) has been sold to auction and separated from his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) whom he attempted to escape the plantation with. Along the path of despair comes Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) a crazy German bounty hunter with unfinished business with Django's old workplace and a powerful distaste for slavery. Together, they find and kill the good doctor's targets and begin both a friendship and a professional association. Django (now Django Freeman) is a natural at hunting white people and Dr. Schultz enjoys his company, so they make a deal to work together for a winter and then go after Broomhilda. Only problem is that Broomhilda has been sold to Candyland, one of the biggest plantations, owned by the wacky Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio) for whom slavery is way more than a job.

Since the release of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS in 2009, Tarantino has refined himself a little bit. He started taking more chances behind the camera and while it feels like déjà vu in IB, it's a lot more personal in DJANGO UNCHAINED. Tarantino is not afraid to take slow, large, atmospheric shots. Makes you appreciate how much of a movie's personality is lost to violent editing and "fast pacing". There is nothing fast about DJANGO UNCHAINED and it works in its favor. There is a particular sequence where Django and Dr. Schultz travel with Calvin Candie and have to witness the gruesome execution of a wrestler-slave. By the time you reach the end of the trip, it feels long and grueling, like trips must have been, back then. Both the viewer and the characters are exhausted.

DJANGO UNCHAINED sprawls over almost three hours, but it doesn't feel self-involved. Quentin Tarantino goes into micromanaging mode to make sure this is 1) historically semi-accurate and 2) that it provides some perspective on the era and its problems. It's an attention to detail I appreciate as a moviegoer. It's easy to make a movie about the end of racism and paint everything black and white **. There are satisfying scenes of racial comeuppance, such as the already immortal scene where Jamie Foxx whips M.C Gainey and his brother into a mush, but the portrait drawn by DJANGO UNCHAINED is more complex than that. It's best illustrated by antagonist Calvin Candie, who gleefully tortures and kills black people and thinks of himself as source of scientific knowledge about white people's superiority. That and Candie's relationship to his horrible servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) alone show how convoluted the racial issue was back then. Tarantino deserves his Oscar for best original scenario.

In my experience of Quentin Tarantino's movies, I find at least three or four retarded things to dislike. Childish indulgences that have no meaning whatsoever, except to beg for your love. There was only one in DJANGO UNCHAINED and its a small detail, really. The bullet wounds. Every bullet wound in the movie is gushing in the same, spectacular, overt way. It bugged me. First, it clashes with the understated nature of a western spaghetti. It was a useless distraction and second, I understand DJANGO UNCHAINED is a pastiche of the aforementioned western spaghettis but this kind of gory spectacle is a detail that belongs to pastiches in themselves and not to a genre (except maybe grindhouse), so it feels like Tarantino is mocking his own movie and deliberately turning your attention towards him during firefights: "Hey, look at me. I'm Quentin Tarantino. I make badass movies with nasty gun fights. Love me."

Overall, I enjoyed DJANGO UNCHAINED better than I enjoyed everything Tarantino since KILL BILL 2 ***. It's as mature as I've even seen him as a director and it has the best-defined identity since his crime fiction era. Of course it's not perfect. There are nagging details that remind you who you're dealing with, but that's what makes Tarantino who he is. You don't go see a Tarantino just to go see a movie. You have to accept the shadow of his overbearing, unpredictable self on his work and to some extent, that's what makes him inimitable (unlike, let's say, David Fincher, who every young director loved to rip off). I don't know if I'll ever consider myself a Tarantino "fan" per se (it requires a bit of an irrational commitment), but he sure is a breath fresh air in this era of cramped up sequels, cynical cash grabs and mindless, formatted garbage. DJANGO UNCHAINED ranks in his top 5 best films.

FOUR STARS

* It may sound judgmental, but it took a few years to my teenage self to figure it out. I was eleven years old when PULP FICTION came out. I was absolutely nuts about it, but I couldn't explain why to save my life. As it is the case for many other young intellectual males with a chip on their shoulder, it took FIGHT CLUB to emancipate me.

** Pun 100% non-intended.

*** Please know that I abhorred KILL BILL 1. For those who haven't seen the movies, they couldn't be any more different.

Interview with Dan O'Shea, Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:48:00 +0000

I reviewed Dan O'Shea's debut novel PENANCE, last month and gave it a perfect FIVE STARS rating. I don't do that often. In fact, it was only the third time since November, so that makes roughly a 6% of my total reading output. I reserve this to novels that both floor me by their execution and their emotional charge. PENANCE is that kind of novel.

So I asked Dan if he could spare a couple minutes to answer my questions and he gentlemanly agreed to do so. He was generous enough in his answers that this interview will be posted in two parts, one today and the other on Thursday, May 2nd. Other than his smashing good looks, Dan is know for his quirky, understated charm and his no-bullshit approach to the writing game. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed leading it.

If Dan's words convince you to buy PENANCE, you can order it here. I also suggest you check his debut short story collection OLD SCHOOL, which I also dug. If you're broke or don't like fiction at all, you can always read Dan's blog GOING BALLISTIC. Dan always has something interesting to say. Without further ado, here is the proof of that outrageous claim.

PENANCE struck me as a genuinely original conspiracy novel. It's a rare thing since most of these are about JFK or about the U.S government foreign policy one way or another. Where does that interest for conspiracy originate form and how did it develop into PENANCE?

Hmmm... I guess I never really thought of it as a "conspiracy" novel. To the extent there is a conspiracy, it's just the usual outcome of corruption and human nature. When someone does something wrong and it looks like they're going to get found out, they can do one of two things. Admit it and accept the consequences or lie about it and try to get away with it. On the small scale of our everyday lives, the consequences of the later approach can be dire enough, but the damage is usually limited by our own limited resources. When the great and powerful try to get away with something, the reach of their influence inevitably compounds the damage.

The word conspiracy, at least to me, implies some kind of proactive, intricate, preconceived plot. Say Lincoln’s assassination, where Booth and his cohorts not only meant to kill Lincoln, but also Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. Pretty much a grand scheme to decapitate the US Government. Yet when I look at most of history's famous conspiracies, say Watergate, what I usually see is a reactive attempt to cover up some stupid, half-thought-out plan. "Gee, let’s break in to our opponent’s campaign headquarters; see what kind of information we can get!" That plan, in all probability, was not even vetted all the way up the chain of command. But when the press started picking at it, you got this huge, haphazard, ad hoc attempt to stuff the genie back in the bottle. What usually happens is that the cover-up snowballs until the damage to everyone, the conspirators and the victims of both the original act and the attempted cover-up, is far greater than it would have been if the bad guys had just admitted everything in the first place. That’s the corruption of power, the idea that somehow you will always be able to bend the world to your will.

So I guess where you say conspiracy, I'd say that PENANCE is really about the corruption of power.

The other problem for me if I try to think of it as a conspiracy novel is this. That would imply that I had some grand plan from the start. I didn’t. When I started writing the novel, I had one idea about a sniper with a bizarre religious motivation. (That was an idea that had been kicking around my head since theology class in high school.) Then I started writing and all the rest of it just sort of emerged as I went along. At every turn, I had to ask myself “Why is the killer doing this?” or “If I were a cop, who would I talk to next?” The answer to each question would lead to the next question and the next chapter. I was better than three-quarters of the way through the draft before I knew how it was going to end.

Did you use some sort of method to plan and plot something so deep and complex or did you just go with the flow?

For me, plotting is an organic process. I don’t plan plots, they just emerge. What I need to start a story is a character I’m invested in who is in a situation I find interesting. How that character responds to that situation dictates what happens next. How far ahead I can see changes throughout the drafting. Sometimes I have a little breakthrough where I suddenly understand a motivation clearly or envision a bit of back story that buttresses a plot line and then I’m in happy writer land where I can sit down and crank out five or six thousand words at a go. Other times I sit down having just run the characters into a dead end and really struggle to find a way forward. All I can do then is ask myself “If I were this character, what would I do next?” Then I write about them doing it. Eventually, they find their way forward. Frequently that leads to some wasteful meandering – they make some false starts before they get a new foothold and I end up with a few chapters I have to cut. But almost always, when they do find their way forward, it is in a direction I really like and never could have anticipated in an outline.

I like to think, at least, that it keeps my plots from being predictable. If someone gets a few chapters into PENANCE and can predict how it’s going to end, then they are way smarter than I am. Because I didn’t have a clue when I started writing it.

I know there are writers who swear by outlines and I’m not claiming that my way is better or anything. You just have to do what works for you.

Did you always know your destiny involved writing a novel, or did it dawn on you at some time? What lead you writing fiction?

Great. Now for the shameful confessions portion of our program.

First off, I’m not your usual punk-kid debut novelist. I’m on the wrong side of fifty. And it ain’t that I woke up a few years ago and thought “Gee, I should develop a hobby to entertain me during my creeping dotage. Think I’ll give this writing thing a try.” The fact is I’ve always wanted to be a writer and, professionally, I’ve always been a writer. And good thing, too, because stringing words together is really the only marketable skill I possess.

But I sorta accidentally backed in to a weird little corner of the writing world. Started out as a proofreader at a major accounting firm, got promoted to editor because, frankly, I suck as a proofreader, but my boss liked the way I ripped up some of the copy. I eventually spent so much time writing and editing stuff about the tax code, finance and similar topics that I had the background necessary to deal with that type of shit.

Profitable niche. There are a lot of companies out there that will pay good money for that stuff. But it’s not like, when I was a kid and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, I was thinking “Boy, I hope someday I get to do five thousand words on transfer pricing planning for multinational corporations.” I wanted to write novels.

And I messed with fiction writing from time to time. There are a couple chunks of PENANCE that date back almost twenty years. But I never got serious about it, disciplined about it. I excused that by telling myself that hey, I had a family to support and I didn’t have time to fuck around with this fiction crap on spec when there was real money to be made. Told myself that dreaming about being a novelist was like dreaming I was gonna play third base for the Cubs. That I was a grown-up with grown-up obligations and no time for childish things.

A few things happened. Some people died. My best friend died. My father died. I realized that I only had so much sand in the glass and that, if there was anything in this life that I actually wanted to do, then I better get to it. That I wasn’t going to be on my death bed pissed I didn’t squeeze in another few dozen articles on capital gains taxes. I actually got serious about writing fiction maybe five years ago. I don’t have any more time now than I had all those years I only toyed with writing fiction, but I’ve written three novels now, a mess of short stories. I watch a little less TV. Waste a little less time. Mostly, I just stopped pissing on my own dreams.

You hear how publishing has changed, about the good old days. And I think sometimes what might be different if I hadn’t been such a dumb ass, where my writing career might be today if I were twenty years into it instead of just starting out. But I try not to. Nothing to be done about it.

So, a cautionary tale. You wanna write, then write. Don’t wait for some better time.

You have a way of writing dialogue and intimacy in general that is very striking and yet, I can't really pinpoint what writers you remind me of, on that aspect. Who were your main influences on that aspect? Has a writer ever gave you an epiphany?

I’ve been writing dialog in my head my whole life. I hear somebody saying something and I’m translating it into what I think they should have said. Sort of my own private Cyrano de Bergerac.

I don’t know that there’s a good answer to the influences question. Everything you read influences you in some way, I suppose. Even bad stuff. Just when I was getting serious about writing, but back when I still had that “I don’t know if I’m actually good enough to get published” crap clouding up my head, one of my kids bought me a Vince Flynn novel. Hated it. Transparent plotting, cardboard characters, clichéd dialog. Seemed like Walter Mitty violence porn. But it helped. Guy sells a lot of books. I figured if he could get published there was no reason to think I couldn’t. (That’s probably stupid, I guess. I haven’t sold shit. What do I know? Probably not supposed to say anything bad about anyone else. Vince Flynn could be a prince of a guy. But that was an important moment for me, so there you go.)

The intimacy thing is maybe a pet peeve of mine. I hate throw-away characters. Gotta be careful how I phrase this so I don’t tip over into pretentious bullshit territory, but I feel an obligation to the fake people I make up. Big role, small role, each of them should still be a human being in this universe I created.

Maybe it’s because I am older, I don’t know. But in recent years it’s really hit me that each of us is a universe entire unto ourselves. Sure, we all inhabit the same planet, but each of us lives in the center of this immense web of experience and interpretation that only we know, that only we can fully understand. With every person’s death, an entire and unique psychological ecosystem of their own creation disappears, one that was only partly ever understood by anyone else and that will never be again. I drive down the street sometimes and the idea of all that experience, all that longing and loss and hope and despair and joy and pain that we only really fully understand in the context of our own lives, that every person on the sidewalk, the lady smoking in the minivan next to me, that all of them are carrying around this entire world that I’ll never know. There’s an almost crushing melancholy to that sometimes.

I was editing a scene in my second novel, MAMMON, in which a young gangbanger is killed. Guy’d never been in the book at all before that scene, wasn’t going to be in it again. He was, frankly a plot device. But when I was going back through the book and I got that scene, it really pissed me off that I was treating a human being, even a fake human being, like a Kleenex, just something to blow some writer snot on ‘cause I needed to clear a nostril. So I fleshed that out a bit. Even sent that off to Shotgun Honey as a flash piece in its own right

So yeah, I want readers to feel like they’ve been inside the characters to some extent. I suppose writers I really love helped engender that – Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, even genre writers like James Lee Burke. But every writer has their own mental blender. Everything goes into it, gets pureed up, and then you pour it out, and I don’t think there’s any way to tell anymore what came from whom. Just they are all on the ingredients list I guess.

Doesn't it drive you mad though, this sense of responsibility? What were the biggest challenges you've faced writing something with such a sprawling scope like PENANCE?

I dunno, calling it a responsibility makes it sound like work. What’s satisfying to me is writing a story that I can connect with on more than a completely superficial level. Yeah, the plot matters. You have to have a story. But books that are just plot or that are mostly plot where the author doesn’t really bother developing characters I can dig into, those bore me. If I just trotted out stereotyped tropes for characters, I’d feel like I was writing crap and then I wouldn’t be enjoying myself at all.

Because PENANCE was my first novel, the biggest challenge was just finishing it. The organic story development approach I use is great and all, but there comes a point where I realized I had to force things to some kind of conclusion or the book would go on forever. There are still a couple of points, reading back through it, where I cringe a little, where the plot seems forced to me. But I guess that’s part of the curse of being an author – you know what you did. I hope the seams don’t show as much to anyone else.

The sprawling part? I didn’t set out to write a sprawling book, and I’m not sure what makes a book sprawling or not. Yeah, there are a lot of characters, the plot gets pretty involved, but that’s just what happened. It does make rewriting kind of challenging sometimes, just making sure you keep things consistent.

One thing I did notice. My first two novels, PENANCE and MAMMON, are written in third person with multiple points of view. My third novel, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is told in first person. That switch changes things a lot. I couldn’t just introduce a new character and a new point of view to move the story along, everything had to filter through a single character’s experience. That certainly kept the story from being as sprawling.

The conclusion of this interview will be posted next Thursday, May 2nd. Leave comments, ask your own questions to Dan, I'm sure he'll drop by at least once or twice to answer them.

Book Review : Max Wilde - Vile Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:55:00 +0000

Order VILE BLOOD here

(in chronological order)
Order DUST DEVILS here
Order ISHMAEL TOFFEE here
Order CAPTURE here

She tried to talk herself into a calm space: there are just men, no matter what they do to you. But her heart raced like a crazy thing, hammering at her breastbone, and she felt her muscles and her limbs expand with half-remembered and unwanted strength. And her fear turned into terror as something stirred and twitched low in her gut.

Max Wilde is a pen name for South African author Roger Smith. I have established an odd, yet efficient relationships with Smith's books already. I pick them up from the TBR for no reason whatsoever, except that it's Smith's turn and he patiently waited for it and end up passing out on my living room couch at 3 A.M with his book on my chest, not because I'm exhausted, but because I forgot to feed while reading. I was already afraid of South Africa before being familiar with his work, but his Cape Town thrillers gave me both a pathological fear and fascination with this city. I didn't know anything going into VILE BLOOD, except that it's his first foray into horror and that's why he used a pen name. Diving into the unknown is part of what I call "The Roger Smith Experience."

Unlike the three first books of his I had the pleasure to read, VILE BLOOD isn't set in South Africa. While I don't think the location is once named, think of it as the middle of Nowhere, U.S.A *. Skye Martindale is the sister of local lawman Gene Martindale. She happens to be quiet and introverted, because she lives with a demon inside of her, literally. When Skye is exposed to extreme stress "The Other" takes over her body and leaves nothing by carnage behind. One night, hoodlums follow Skye on her way back home, thinking she'll be an easy prey. That was the last thing to go through their head before "The Other"'s fangs. While this should have been an empowering display of what "The Other" could do, it turned out that this outburst endangered the quiet balance of things around her and endangered the few people she loves.

Think of VILE BLOOD as EVIL DEAD meets THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. This sounds irreconcilable for a premise and for a few chapter, it seems to be. There are many characters introduced quickly and that makes it hard to 1) keep up with what's going on and 2) get interested in some characters, especially those introduced later. I struggled with caring about Junior Cotton. But one thing I learn reading Roger Smith is that you need to trust him. However much time he takes to place his pieces on the chess board, he never loses sight of the ending line. One of the best aspect of Smith's books are the rich and complex story lines and VILE BLOOD might be his most ambitious yet. I'm aware to be in minority here, but I love when an author requires me to be patient. To me, literature is a business of relationship and I love when an author, such as Smith, takes the necessary time to build them.

Minty wiped herself and, still sitting on the toilet, spotted the razor blade lying on the floor and even though Skye tried to hide her cut wrist beneath her other hand, the older woman craned forward and saw a drop of blood floating in the water like an accusing question mark. Minty, smelling of booze and man, reached across and embraced Skye saying, "Oh baby, oh baby." And Skye just let go and sobbed, holding onto Minty who stroked her hair saying, "Nothin' and nobody worth that baby. No way."

I loved VILE BLOOD's story line, but reason why it didn't make me fall off my chair is that it could've used more breathing room. The book is self-consciously short, which is understandable given its experimental nature, but the form gets in the way of the content. While I thought the Martindales were well-enough developed, I could've used getting to know VILE BLOOD's antagonists a little better. Smith doesn't focus on them, though. The focal point of this novel is the duality that inhabits Skye Martindale. That itself is where VILE BLOOD transcend its genre and goes into psychological horror and even literary territory. By never explaining directly the nature of "The Other" **, Smith makes it an uncanny companion to his protagonist. One that she keeps trying to mend fences with and understand better. Good psychological horror works this way: you can only give a certain part of the answer to the readers.

I can rank this book better as a part of Roger Smith's canon than on its own merits. I would place it in between ISHMAEL TOFFEE and DUST DEVILS. It's a good book, that understands that you need to tell a good story above all things and yet I missed Smith's trademark locales and the precision of his human drama. In that sense, I'm sure it was a lot harder to write than his conventional books because so much more came straight out of Smith's mind. You have to appreciate an author willing to gamble like this, just because he can. It's also his third publication for 2012, which is admirable. VILE BLOOD is an experiment with genre that will satisfy hardcore horror readers, who will find everything within the pages from guts and gore to an understated supernatural story line. I always spend a wicked good time with Roger Smith's books. I have to say I like him a little better than Max Wilde though.

THREE STARS

* Nowhere South, probably, because there are frequent allusions to the Mexican border and "the cartels."

** Smith/Wilde explains where "The Other" comes from, but never exactly what it is. At least, not explicitly.

The Bronx - Heart Attack American

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:29:00 +0000

It can happen at the rock show. You come to see a band, wait all night to see them and right before they come on stage, the final opening act kicks you in the balls, steals your wallet and leaves you prey to a frenzied crowd. It didn't quite happen last month at Bad Religion, but it came quite close. Opening act The Bronx topped their set with that song, HEART ATTACK AMERICAN, where the frontman Matt Caughtran descends into the crowd and signs the entire song IN the mosh pit. While I liked their entire performance (a lot), this song had a special energy to it. The kind of energy that makes you want to punch walls and break things. The good kind. When I play HEART ATTACK AMERICAN I realize I haven't completely lost touch with whom I once wanted to be. Enjoy.

The Bronx - HEART ATTACK AMERICAN

I'm done telling you that I'm in love
What I have will never be enough
Come on baby go live life on your own
Everything inside is breaking down
And you don't want to be hanging around
I don't think I want to leave myself alone

I'm done having to apologize
I'm done living inside your eyes
When the lights go out what's left to know
Nothing ever makes sense to me
A broken branch of the family tree
Kill the lights now baby watch me explode

There is no revolution
And I'm done doing things I don't want to do
There is no restitution

And I'm done living in this decline
I'm done watching you redesign
Come on baby let's go walk out the door
I'm done showing up to fucking work
Taking orders from a fucking bitch
I'm in the chair now go ahead and flip the switch

I'm done doing things I don't want to do
And I'm sick and tired of setting up to be like you
Fucked up thrown out and overdue
I'm fucking done

There is no revolution [3x]

Book Review : Chuck Klosterman - Eating the Dinosaur (2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:56:00 +0000

Order EATING THE DINOSAUR here

(in chronological order)
Order FARGO ROCK CITY here
Order SEX, DRUGS AND COCOA PUFFS here
Order KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE here
Order IV here
Order DOWNTOWN OWL here

We have been trained to connect conversation with soft, interstitial laughter. It's our way of showing the other person that we understand the context of the interaction, even when we don't.

This is not the only reason Germans think Americans are retarded, but it's definitely one of them.

Most people in the era of social media know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is. He is that soft, friendly-looking man who says deep, smart things on YouTube videos and Facebook postcard thingies *. Chuck Klosterman is considerably less popular, despite having a purpose eerily similar to NDGT's. This might be explainable by the fact deGrasse's fields of interest are science and Greater Truths (religion and all that jazz) and therefore his simple, well-structured arguments make people feel better about themselves for understanding the functioning of the world. Klosterman's aim being pop culture, it sometimes frustrates readers that they didn't notice the meaning of a certain Nirvana album or of a Pepsi advertisement campaign, so they get defensive, argue that it doesn't have meaning at all and dismiss Klosterman as a pedantic weirdo. I'm one of these people who believe my everyday life is loaded with meaning, so I quite enjoy Klosterman's straightforward and democratic approach to picking apart pop culture. EATING THE DINOSAUR was uplifting in that regards, although I'll admit it's his most abstract and theoretical work so far, so it's not an ideal introduction to the author.

EATING THE DINOSAUR contains what might be the most beautiful and intimate thing Klosterman has written, so far. His essay FAIL (at the very end of the collection) discusses INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE, by Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as Unabomber. Klosterman finds himself agreeing with some points and mostly distraught by how well Kaczynski identified what kind of person he is. Before being a domestic terrorist, Kaczynski was a child prodigy turned college mathematics teacher, so despite being a horrible, demented person, he can make a point. His argument was that technology is evolving too fast for mankind and that it's actually making us stupider and emptier **. In his essay, Klosterman recognizes he is exactly the type of person who Kaczynski hates: people that understand the situation and do nothing about it. He admits his powerlessness to change his troublesome relationship to technology and even admits he hates himself, which is a pretty loaded thing to say. That can happen when you cross paths with a more powerful mind than you, vehemently disagree with everything it stands for and find out that mind/person is right ***.

But this essay is rather different than the rest of the collection. If I earlier said that EATING THE DINOSAUR was abstract and theoretical, it's because it questions something theoretical: reality. The fist essay, SOMETHING INSTEAD OF NOTHING is half-built with interview bits with documentary director Errol Morris and questions the reality of the interview process. How real is an interview? How much does it differ from a casual conversation. My second favorite essay in EATING THE DINOSAUR is T IS FOR TRUE, which examines our relationship to irony. It's a subject that has already been debated, notably by David Foster Wallace, but Klosterman takes a different angle and examines society's relationship to public figures who don't do irony very well, such as Weezer's frontman Rivers Cuomo, director Werner Herzog and political underdog Ralph Nader. The essay highlights that we have established a language of irony and that we're losing touch with people who don't speak it.

I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year. However, I do know that it's not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it. Every day, random people use Britney's existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy. She - along with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all those androids from The Hills - are the unifying entities within this meta era. In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity andf the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money.

Not every essay is successful. Part of what makes Klosterman as fascinating is that he always dresses a clear portrait of what he's talking about. He tried very hard to do that in his essay FOOTBALL, but since the very subject addresses a technicality of a sport I know nothing about, I ended up skimming. I can understand the enthusiasm, would've totally understood if it was about hockey, boxing or basketball, but football is way above my head. His essay on time travel also fell flat, but for slightly different reasons. It's a subject that's been debated to death before and despite that Klosterman's aim is to examine its representations in pop culture, there is hardly any fresh material to what he's saying. My dislike of his essay about road movies is 100% personal. It's probably very interesting, I just really dislike road movies. They often are a profound exercise in intellectual masturbation. Ironically, I really liked his road adventure KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE, but there is always the possibility that I would hate the movie version ****.

That's it. I just disliked three essays out of fifteen, which makes it really unfair that I dedicate a complete paragraph to them, but my main preoccupation is being truthful and fair to my readers, first and foremost. EATING THE DINOSAUR is another great essay book and long-time Klosterman readers will find it a natural evolution, where his purpose is more precise while his subjects are as varied as ever. His essays about Ralph Sampson, Garth Brooks' strange alter ego, the strange paradigm ABBA created for themselves, rock n' roll and Pepsi's cynical advertisement are all worth the money and time investment. I feel like I failed to transmit what it truly is to read this book, but it's not uncommon when I review Klosterman or when I review something I really like. This feeling that I understand exactly what another consciousness is preoccupied about only poorly translate in words. I have tried to find other essayists that feel as uplifting as Klosterman, but so far, he is ahead of his competition. The sexy thing to say would be that I like David Foster Wallace better, but in all truth, Wallace often loses me with his long, labyrinthic arguments and Klosterman does not *****.

FOUR STARS

* Some of you might not know, but he was a killing machine in his youth.

** It's probably more complex than that, but I haven't read the thing.

*** I'm not saying Kaczynski was right to send bombs. Obviously, he wasn't. But the old geezer saw the Twitter generation arrive WAY before its time.

**** This is doubtful. At least in my mind, it's a great fuckin' film.

***** Maybe it's Wallace's merit to require multiple readings, because I do understand him better a second and third time around. Klosterman might not require more than two or three, but I do think it's something Wallace was aiming at. Reading Klosterman feels like he's talking to you as reading Wallace feels like he's talking to himself, except maybe for THIS IS WATER.