The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Twelve Days of Commerce #16: So You Missed the Cheap Shipping Deadline

2009-12-18T12:30:00.001-05:00

We all know that, as a holiday shopper, you're both lazy and cheap -- you don't want to go to any effort, and you don't want to pay more than a pittance. So traveling to a jam-packed mall is out, and paying for express shipping is also out.

But how can you get those gifts that you really have to have, without any serious effort? Particularly since you've dawdled until this late, and lost out on all of the free shipping offers?

How about a gift card you can print out yourself? There's no shipping -- though it will use up some of your precious Strategic Ink Reserves -- and you can bask in the glory of being yet another shmoe who bare-facedly says to the recipient, "Here: you'll have to pick your own present this year. But I can make you shop at a particular retailer!"

Pointless Fun Facts, # 2194

2009-12-18T09:42:00.002-05:00

There is a town in southern Virginia named Rural Retreat. But where do the inhabitants go when they want to get away from it all?

Quote of the Week

2009-12-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

"I am tired of this sort of thing called science. We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the past few years, and it is time it should be stopped."
- Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, attempting to cut off funding for the Smithsonian Institution in 1861

Electrical Trouble

2009-12-17T23:00:00.001-05:00

I came home from work today to find that a variety of random electrical outlets in the house weren't working -- including all of Thing 2's room, the microwave in the kitchen, three of four outlets in my bedroom, most of the outlets in the basement...and the furnace.

With the help of a neighbor who actually knows something about electrical circuits (unlike myself and The Wife), the furnace was brought back to life for the night. And I managed to run an extension cord to get power to the cable modem (and the router), so that Internet and phone service were restored.

But my main computer is still powerless (pending work from a real electrician), and we spent most of the evening wandering around plugging things in, flipping switches, and making sure that the house wasn't burning down. (Our last electrical trouble, a few years back, was smoke from a fluorescent light in the middle of the night, which rousted us all out of the house in the middle of winter and brought the fire department in.)

So I didn't manage to write a "Manga Friday" column for tomorrow, or any other substantial blog content for her or anywhere else. I hope we'll have an electrician in tomorrow, and my life will be back to normal soon afterward, but we'll see.

Say That Again, Mister, and Smile This Time

2009-12-17T13:51:00.000-05:00

I just got an e-mail with the subject line of "Yeni Açılacak Eğitimlerimiz." [1] I don't think I should be offended, but it does mean the Turkish spammers are back.

On the other hand, I kinda wish I knew how to pronounce it, since it looks like a really impressive curse, with the diacritical marks and all of those harsh consonants.

[1] Google thinks it means "Our study opens new."

Twelve Days of Commerce #15: Give the Gift of 1955

2009-12-17T12:30:00.000-05:00

Amazon rummages through its drawers and shelves. Surely there must be something else it can present as a great gift? Auto parts or biology textbooks? Patio furniture or jock straps? The atmosphere is getting desperate.

Suddenly, Amazon leaps forward -- that's it! A fan of paper greets you: Marie Claire, The New Yorker, Kiplinger's, Seventeen. Surely, in this 21st century, this world of the Internet and smartphones, what your loved ones really want is....a magazine subscription.
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Listening to: Southeast Engine - We Have You Surrounded
via FoxyTunes

Twelve Days of Commerce # 14: Shop Distant, Consume Hydrocarbons

2009-12-16T12:30:00.000-05:00

In this time of cheer and fellowship, it's only natural that we should be thinking about buying items manufactured vast distances away and shipped with the maximum amount of consumed hydrocarbons possible. But we definitely want to avoid paying for the flagrant use of carbon and other pollutants.

Amazon is here to help: today is the last day to take advantage of their free Super Saver shipping and still receive your planet-devouring goods by the 25th.

I particularly recommend the blood diamonds.
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Listening to: Emma Pollock - New Land
via FoxyTunes

I've Been Cataloged!

2009-12-16T11:11:00.000-05:00

The fruit of a lot of my work for the past four months -- along with vastly more work by many other marketers, editors, book designers, copywriters, and plenty of others -- is now available in handy web-enabled form, as the Wiley Spring 2010 trade catalog.

My books are not limited to the "Accounting" section, but they will generally be the ones a general, non-specialist audience would find the very most boring and dry in the entire catalog. (We all have weird things to be proud of; this is mine.)

I don't expect anyone reading this will have a burning desire to catch up on Applying IFRS for SMEs or Designing Successful Target-Date Strategies for Defined Contribution Plans or even One Strategy, but it's my blog, and so I get to toot my own horn, even when that horn puts entire cities to sleep.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

2009-12-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

Some titles just jump out at you from the shelf, and that's what happened with The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. I saw it, I picked it up, and then I had to read it.

Bartlett expands her article of the same name from San Francisco Magazine about book thief John Gilkey and the "bibliodick" who caught him (more than once), Ken Sanders, into this book, giving some more depth to the stories of Gilkey and Sanders but not much more action. (After all, how much action can there be in the story of some middle-aged book lovers? Even if one of them is a thief.)

Gilkey, to put it in a nutshell, stole large numbers of credit card receipts from part-time seasonal jobs at Saks in San Francisco, held onto them for a while, and then used them to obtain books and other goods (hotel rooms, restaurant meals) illegally, over the course of several years. Sanders, then the voluntary security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, realized that a string of book thefts were the work of one man (or gang), organized the response, and convinced police to find and prosecute Gilkey. Gilkey has spent the last decade in and out of jail for various theft-related crimes; Bartlett met him in 2005 and interviewed him repeatedly for this book, meeting him semi-regularly in San Francisco. (She also met Sanders in person, but less often, since his home base is his store in Salt Lake City.)

It's a short book, and somewhat superficial -- it does feel like a good magazine article stretched out to exceptional length, and not like a story that really needed to be a book -- but it also tells its story without too much frippery. Bartlett does drop some obvious hints early on that she becomes too involved in her story, but that really just consists of listening to Gilkey's stories and obsessing about whether she's culpable for any crimes if she doesn't immediately inform the authorities. The case is not as enthralling as Bartlett would have the reader believe, and she doesn't dig as deeply into Gilkey's psyche as perhaps she might -- or, perhaps, she tried, and this is as far as he'd let her see.

But those are quibbles: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is a breezy true-crime account that lives up to its title and will be enjoyable to everyone who likes books just a bit more than is reasonable -- which is anyone who bothered to read this far, I expect.
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Listening to: 65daysofstatic - When We Were Younger & Better
via FoxyTunes

A Brief, Self-Satisfied Note

2009-12-15T19:50:00.000-05:00

The month is only half over, and I've already posted more times than in November. That was a damn tough month, and I'm glad to have seen the back of it.

Joe Haldeman Will Be the Next SFWA Grand Master

2009-12-15T19:46:00.001-05:00

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced today that Joe Haldeman will get the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award at next year's Nebula Award ceremonies. (I saw the story first at Locus Online.)

I'm torn in my reaction: I like Joe personally (I had dinner with him once, I believe at another Nebula award weekend, and he's one of the greatest menschen in SF), and I wish him well. I've read a number of his book with great pleasure, and one of his stories so affected me in the '80s that I unwittingly rewrote it for a creative writing class. (I realized the copying, though none of my fellow students did -- I was the designated genre fiction guy in the first place.) And The Forever War is definitely one of the major books in the field.

On the other hand, the rest of his work isn't quite as obviously trend-setting; he's written plenty of good books, but probably only that one great one. And the timing of the announcement, so soon after Joe's recent health problems, reinforces the image of the SFWA Grand Mastership as an award to the generally liked SF writer who is closest to death. That's a grisly thought, and I hope Joe will confound that reputation, much like Jack Williamson did before him. But it is the reputation of this award, and giving it to Joe Haldeman practically the moment he leaves the hospital does not tend to lessen that reputation.

SFWA has now had a Grand Master every single year since 2003. I humbly submit that the SF field does not actually have as many "Grand Masters" as SFWA would like it to, and that the award should be allowed to lie fallow some years in order to increase its prestige. I admit that SFWA has never followed my advice before, and is unlikely to do so in this case, but I'll say it nonetheless. The award may need to be straightjacketed, as it was in the past -- only so many to be awarded in a decade, or something similar -- to make this happen, but it would be worth doing to protect and maintain the prestige of the award.

Oh, and, while I'm complaining, "Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master" is still too long and a bit silly-sounding; it evokes a minor building on the campus of a third-rate college. I understand the urge to recognize Knight's work, but, for SFWAns, all they need do is remember Christopher Wren -- SFWA is his memorial.

The Realm of February Awaits

2009-12-15T12:31:00.000-05:00

My February graphic novel column for Realms of Fantasy was squeezed out of the magazine by a plethora of fiction -- and, honestly, that's as it should be; my column is at the very end of the magazine because it's the furthest from the audience's core interests, and should be jettisoned first in a lifeboat situation -- but it is not dead.

You can read that very column on the web, at the relaunched Realms of Fantasy site. I could give you a direct link, but I won't -- go to Realms and click on "Reviews" (in the top navigation bar) and you'll get to my column very quickly. If you want to stop briefly to ooh and ahh at the snazzy new design, please do so.

I reviewed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (adapted by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young from the L. Frank Baum novel) and Kull: The Shadow Kingdom (adapted by Arvin Nelson and Will Conrad from the Robert E. Howard story) there, and both are pretty darn good.

Twelve Days of Commerce # 13: In Which We Resort to Stereotypes

2009-12-15T12:30:00.000-05:00

Amazon, in the best mid-90s-stand-up-comedy standard, endeavors to make a joke about women and their shoes. Why do they have so many pairs, huh? And they're so expensive, too!

The audience sits, sipping overpriced and watered-down mixed drinks, stony-faced. Watches are glanced at openly. Blackberries and cheaper phones begin to light up the gloom.

Amazon's lower lip trembles, on the verge of an Imelda Marcos reference that will be no good for anyone.

Please help stamp out the horrors of bad comedy. Buy shoes online today.

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Listening to: The Deathray Davies - It's Hard To Run Uphill On Stilts
via FoxyTunes

Three Hard Cases

2009-12-15T08:30:00.001-05:00

I recently read three books from Hard Case Crime, and decided I might as well consider them all together:

The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake

This is a very early Westlake novel -- from 1960, making it the first Westlake book to be published under his own name, rather than being a soft-corn porn book written pseudononymously -- that was originally, and through most of its reprintings, called The Mercenaries. It's not a novel about mercenaries, though, so I can see how that title may have annoyed Westlake over the years.

Clay -- just Clay, though his full legal name does come up later in the novel -- is a fixer for mob boss Ed Ganolese in New York, which is usually a pretty cushy job. But, very late one night, a junkie and low-level drug dealer called Billy-Billy Cantrell (he stutters) shows up on Clay's doorstep with a tale of woe. Someone doped Billy-Billy -- not difficult -- and left him in an apartment with a dead woman, from which he managed to flee just ahead of the arriving police. It was obvious a set-up, since the cops already "know" it was Billy-Bill and are looking for him -- they arrive at Clay's apartment not much later.

Normally, Clay would just turn Billy-Billy over to the cops -- or make him "disappear" -- but there are extenuating circumstances, so the junkie must be kept safe, and Clay needs to find the "cutie" who set up the frame. Through some suitably noirish proceedings, he does -- but Westlake has a great ending for Clay's story, right up to the last line.

The Cutie is Westlake in what would later be the mode of his alter ego, Richard Stark -- tough and no-nonsense, full of sudden death and nasty customers -- rather than the kind of books Westlake wrote under his own name (most of the time) later in his career. But it's still recognizably a Westlake book, and it's quite accomplished for a first novel and what was a cheap paperback original fifty years ago.

Killing Castro by Lawrence Block

And this is another early book by a later Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster, though a more obscure one -- I'd hadn't even heard of it before Hard Case announced plans to reprint it. It was originally published in 1961 -- two years after the revolution, the same year as the Bay of Pigs "invasion," and a year before the missile crisis -- under a pen name that Block never used before or since. (The details: Monarch published Fidel Castro Assassinated by "Lee Duncan.") It's pretty clear that Killing Castro was a quickie, knocked out at speed to hit a news cycle, but it's a solid thriller, even if it feels slightly alternate-historical at this remove.

A group of Cuban revolutionaries -- no, not the Marxist Castro revolutionaries, revolutionaries against Castro, and likely somewhat to his right, though that's not what anyone cares about -- gathers five American men and brings them to Cuba to take part in an assassination attempt on Castro, whose rule is still fairly new and (the revolutionaries fervently hope) shaky.

The five men are all very different, with serviceable but off-the-rack motivations, and they don't entirely get along with each other. They also, in best Gardner Fox fashion, soon break up to work on different assassination attempts separately, with no coordination. (One begins to suspect that these revolutionaries are not the most organized possible, nor that their likelihood of success is high.) There are assassination attempts, as there must be in a novel like this, but Block was enough of a pro (even then) to give himself ways out.

Interestingly, Killing Castro has almost precisely the same kind of ending as The Cutie, which I don't want to describe further than that. (You might read one or the other book, after all, and, as it is, I might just have "spoiled" the one you didn't read yet.) I think this is probably just a typical paperback thriller ending, particularly since criminals weren't supposed to get particularly happy endings in the fiction of the early '60s.

Killing Castro isn't quite as successful as The Cutie, and it's harder to see the mature Block in it than it is to see the mature Westlake in The Cutie. But it's cleanly written and sharply plotted, and even a reader who knows that Castro wasn't assassinated in 1961 will find himself wrapped up in the story.

The Dead Man's Brother by Roger Zelazny

Dead Man's Brother is also an old novel unearthed, but -- unlike the two books above -- it was never published the first time around, nor is it from a writer known for his thrillers. Zelazny probably wrote this in the early '70s -- an afterword from his son Trent pegs 1970 as the earliest it could be written, and, from the style and background of the story, I don't believe it was conceived much later than that -- and aparrently sent to his agent at some point. For whatever reason, it was never published, and it was forgotten until last year, more than a decade after Zelazny's death in 1995.

It's an international thriller, in which Ovid Wiley, art smuggler gone straight as a dealer, is caught up in murder and intrigue after he finds the body of his old partner in his New York gallery the morning after a party. The NYPD assumes he killed Carl Bernini, mostly because (in that old-fashioned NYPD way) assuming anything else would be more work, and Wiley will make a perfectly good person to send away for the crime. But then the CIA jumps in, and sends Wiley off to investigate a priest who embezzled three million dollars from the Vatican and then disappeared -- because Wiley is incredibly lucky, and they thus think he can make headway that they couldn't.

Dead Man's Brother goes on like that, with a sequence of thriller-novel plot points that seem to make sense at the time, but don't actually add up to form a coherent world. Once things start cross-connecting, it gets even more odd -- it's always easy to follow, but it doesn't consistently make sense.

In fact, Dead Man's Brother reads in places like the first draft it probably was; Zelazny also has Wiley and the narrative voice alike avoid contractions for no obvious reason, which subtly wrong-foots the supposedly zippy and tension-filled story, and he also makes Wiley prone to ruminate at length about various things without integrating those ruminations well. This book really does read like a try-out for a potential series, with a lot of things thrown in to see if they work (or fit) and an expectation that a further draft later would give the book better organization and focus.

All that is true, but still: Dead Man's Brother is a new Roger Zelazny novel, more than ten years after we had any hope of one. His distinctive voice is muffled here -- as he works in an idiom we didn't expect, and also taking into account early-draft issues -- but it is still Zelazny's voice. Any fan of his work will want to get and read Dead Man's Brother.

Turn Me On, Dead (Bat) Man

2009-12-14T12:51:00.000-05:00

Today, over at the ComicMix, I have a review of two recent books from DC about this season's hot dead superhero, Batman -- Neil Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? and Grant Morrison's Batman: R.I.P..

I go on at great length and am more than ordinarily snarky and dismissive -- you have been warned.
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Listening to: Hallelujah The Hills - Sleeper Agent (Just Waking Up)
via FoxyTunes

Twelve Days of Commerce # 12: How Angry Is She?

2009-12-14T12:30:00.003-05:00

Today's message is just for the men out there. No, let me be more specific: for the guys. Men have self-respect and savoir-faire, but guys are downtrodden schlemiels (if not outright schlimazels) beaten by life from pillar to post and then back again. They can do nothing right, and their Significant Others know, and count on, that.

You've done things wrong this year; you know it and I know it. But how bad were they? Are they nice-dinner-out bad? Big-bouquet-of-roses-at-work bad? Massive-shoe-shopping-spree bad?

Or has it gone beyond that? Do you need to reach way back into the Guys' Bag of Tricks and pull out the nuclear weapon of relationship repair, the diamond stud earrings?

You poor, dumb bastard you. You're ruining the curve for the rest of us, you know that?
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Listening to: Markéta Irglová - The Hill
via FoxyTunes

Another Voice of Reason on E-Book Costs

2009-12-14T12:14:00.000-05:00

Someone known on LiveJournal as Barbarienne [1] -- who, as a production person for a substantial publisher, knows what she's talking about -- talks numbers on what savings a publisher has (and doesn't have) on an e-book.

Some readers and commentators will note that they don't care what it costs a publisher to make a book, and it's their right not to care...but the books you enjoy were created because those costs were covered, and that professionalism always does cost money. If you're satisfied with amateurism, the slash porn is an easy Google away -- go to it. But don't ask for caviar at ground round prices.

[1] Yes, it does sometimes seem problematic to cite someone as an expert when that person is using a colorful LJ handle. Chalk it up to the pseudonymous web culture, I guess.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/12

2009-12-14T08:30:00.008-05:00

It seems that I've only just finished one of these weekly posts and I'm already starting the next one; it's one of the worst parts of growing old that life keeps coming at you faster and faster until it finally buries you. (And, my, aren't I cheery lately?)

The inevitable disclaimer: these are books that arrived in my mailbox last week. Some books were expected; others were surprises. I haven't read any of them yet, and it's very possible that I won't manage to read any specific book. The thoughts below are what I can figure out or deduce (or already know) about these books, in the hopes of drawing the attention of readers to books that they might enjoy.

I have a large number of manga this week, so I'll start off with those. They're mostly from one publisher, but the outlier is Mia Ikumi's Only One Wish, a standalone manga story being published by Del Rey Manga on December 29th. It's a modern update on an old folktale-ish idea: there's a spirit that will grant any person one (and only one) wish. The modern bit is that this spirit only accepts wishes via text message. The characters in this story seem to be primarily schoolgirls, and I suspect the wishes are in line with that -- queen-bee problems and school crushes.

The rest of the manga I saw this past week are all from Tokyopop, and all publishing in January:

Happy Cafe, Vol. 1, by Kou Matsuzuki, is, as you might guess, the first in a series. This one is also categorized as "Comedy/Romance," but it looks funnier to begin with -- the main character is Uru, who seems to be a teenage girl, but lives alone after her mother's remarriage (kids living on their own is a huge trope in manga, and again I wonder if it happens commonly, or at all, in Japan). Uru is also, as required of any shojo heroine, a super-klutz and ridiculously young-looking for her age. She gets a job at the titular eating establishment, which, as required, leads to massive wackiness.

Love Hurts, by Suzuki Tanaka, is a collection of "boy's love" short stories -- "boy's love" is, as best I can see, like yaoi but not as graphic, or perhaps without the bad press, like "speculative fiction" is to "science fiction" -- that's categorized as "Comedy/Romance" on the back but opens with a story in which one young man is covered with the blood of another (dead) young man. I assume it can only get funnier from there....

From the lands of licensing -- rather than directly from Japan, like most of the other books on Tokyopop's list -- is StarCraft: Ghost Academy, Vol. 1. It's written by Keith R.A. DeCandido, with art by Fernando Heinz Furukawa (which is either a pseudonym for three people or one of the most awesome cross-cultural names I've ever seen). It's related to the StarCraft game in a way that you'd have to ask someone that cares about. And there's a woman with perfectly spherical breasts on the cover -- though, with that look on her face and that gun, I'm not going to be the one to tell her.

And then there's Re:Play, Vol. 3, by C. Lijewski, which is the finale of a punk-rock romance trilogy that reads left-to-right.

Princess Ai: The Prism of Midnight Dawn, Vol. 2 has some of the most convoluted credits I've ever seen on a manga: Created by Courtney Love and Stuart "D.J. Milky" Levy; Story by Stuart "D.J. Milky" Levy; Written by Christine Boylan; Art by Misaho Kujiradou. So this is the plaything of some famous people who couldn't even be bothered to write the story, which makes me wonder why I should bother to read it. From a quick perusal, it looks like a standard manga version of a medieval fantasy, with added singing.

Hiro Fujiwara's Maid Sama!, Vol. 3 has back-cover copy that is entirely impenetrable to the new reader -- which is an impressive trick for what's still early in a series -- with references to "the Dress-Up Race," "the Idiot Trio," "Little Sister Day" and many more flying fast and furious as your humble Hornswoggler looks on in amusement. The set-up, if I can decipher the text-filled introductory pages, is that there's a tough girl who is student council president of her highschool by day and a waitress in a maid cafe by night, and crossing the streams would be Bad. ("How bad, Egon?")

At this point, I'm getting into the higher volume numbers, and finding myself more and more at sea. But let's press on to V.B. Rose, Vol. 7, by Banri Hidaka. Um, let's see...what can I say about this? "V.B. Rose" seems to be a place -- I'm going to guess a restaurant, but I could be utterly wrong -- and the story is a romance. And that's about it.

tactics, Vol. 8 -- by Sakura Kinoshita and Kazuko Higashiyama -- calls itself "Comedy/Fantasy," and seems to be a hunting-demons story with a humorous overlay. This volume is also the last part of the Chimera arc, for those early awaiting the end of whatever-that-is.

And last from Tokyopop is Mine Yoshizaki's Sgt. Frog, Vol. 18. I know I've heard good things about this series -- though I can't quite remember where or when at the moment -- so I'd like to figure out what it's about. OK, so there are these little frog-like guys, and they all have military ranks on the map of characters at the front of the book. From the "next volume" teaser at the end, it looks like these dudes are trying to invade Earth -- or maybe some place called "Pokopen." Nope, it still doesn't make sense....

And now we move into books that aren't manga, with the new paperback edition of Lisa Rogak's biography Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. The Thomas Dunne imprint of the St. Martin's Press division of Macmillan (itself the American arm of the von Hotzbrinck publishing empire) will release this on January 7th, to the delight of the Stephen King who really want to read a biography of him, but not quite enough to spring for the hardcover.

From another piece of that same publishing empire -- Tor Books -- comes Halo: Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe in trade paperback on November 25th. The cynic in me wonders why, if these stories are so essential, that they weren't part of any of the games that are the center of this fictional universe? But let's leave aside that for now. This book, which doesn't credit an editor and is copyrighted by the Microsoft Corporation -- universally believed to be the sweetest, happiest, and most consumer-friendly monolith ever to bestride the globe with its sandaled feet -- contains fifteen new stories by such names as Tobias S. Buckell, Karen Traviss, and Eric Nylund. And you know that buying books like these only encourages corporations like Microsoft and pushes authors -- who might otherwise be doing books about things they thought up in their own heads, care more about, and are more invested in -- into doing more of these yardgoods, right? So on your own head be it.

Ian C. Esslemont's first "Malazan Empire" novel, Night of Knives, was relatively slim for an epic fantasy book, but his second, Return of the Crimson Guard, nearly reaches the size of the Malazan books written by his friend and co-conspirator Steven Erikson. It's coming in April from Tor -- simultaneously in trade paperback and hardcover, which is fairly rare -- and I don't expect I'll get to it any time soon, since I'm two novels behind on Erikson and still haven't gotten to Night of Knives. The important point to keep making, of course, is that Esslemont and Erikson created the Malazan world together -- Erickson just made it into print several years earlier.

And last for this week is another Tor book, Orson Scott Card's Hidden Empire, the sequel to Empire and the video game Shadow Complex. From what I have seen, these novels show Card in his primarily political mode, which will thrill dedicated readers of Baen Books and horrify anyone to the left of Newt Gingrich. There was a nasty civil war -- started by those war-mongering secular liberals, I believe -- in the first work, which was presumably put down by the god-fearing natural aristocracy of America. This book sees the shadowy figure behind that civil war installed as all-powerful imperial President, which I'm sure Card will carefully keep from having any parallels with the real world. (Damn, I'm just burning out the sarcasm key today, aren't I?) I'm being amazingly snarky about it, but I'm sure a large number of people -- many of you readers among them -- will be happy to read Hidden Empire after it's published in hardcover on December 22nd, and it may not even be as axe-grinding as I suspect it is.

Movie Log: How To Be

2009-12-13T16:15:00.000-05:00

Robert Pattinson's extended audition reel to be a sparkly vampire -- moping about in the center of the screen for about ninety minutes -- is the main reason why people are watching How to Be, a small-scale dry British comedy about dysfunctional (or perhaps just British) families and one young man's quarterlife crisis. But the movie itself deserves better than an audience of Twihards checking out a time when their idols cheekbones weren't quite so chiseled and his soulfulness wasn't taken at all seriously.

How to Be focuses intently on Pattinson's Art, who wants to be a singer-songwriter, though -- as we see very early -- he's so far been let down by his lack of talent and his shoegazer-meets-folksinger stage demeanor. Art also works at a supermarket (for pay) and at some kind of residential center for retarded adults (for free), but he's not particularly invested in (or good at) either of those jobs.

To be blunt, he's the typical self-absorbed "artistic" young man -- and he doesn't get any less self-absorbed when his girlfriend Jessica (Alissa Arnah) breaks up with him and kicks him out of her London flat in the first reel. Art moves back in with his parents (Rebecca Pidgeon and Michael Irving), who are equally as self-absorbed, but in a much quieter and more British way.

Art is mildly annoying, though not as bad as his friend Ronny (Johnny White), which makes the audience like him better. And Pattinson does play him as essentially likable -- as a guy who wants to be a better person, even if he has no idea how to do that or even what really is wrong with him. (He keeps trying to get into angry-young-man-style arguments with his parents, which his father completely ignores and his mother smothers by repeatedly saying "Sometimes I wonder about you.")

So Art hires Canadian self-help guru Dr. Ellington, played with sprightly earnestness by Powell Jones. Ellington arrives in London, moves into the spare room, and follows Art around, spouting Dr. Phil-esque doubletalk with a huge smile on his face.

I'm probably not making How to Be sound very funny, but it is -- a dry, insinuating humor that encourages the audience to laugh at its characters for their foibles and problems, even as they don't realize that they're funny. I laughed out loud a number of times, and so I found this movie a success on that level.

The actual plot does get a bit muddled before the movie ends, though of course Art does end up finding a successful way to make himself a better person. How to Be is just a diversion -- but it's short, and quite funny once you get in tune with the tone and style of its humor. Three or four much worse movies are released every weekend, so I'd have to count How to Be as a success.

Twelve Days of Commerce # 11: One Shiny Penny

2009-12-13T12:30:00.000-05:00

Look! Amazon is holding up a single, bright penny. See it sparkle in the light! How bright it is, and how small! The smallest denomination of American money -- it's practically worthless! And then Amazon murmurs low, "What would you say if I told you that you can buy a fancy smartphone for one little penny, like this one in my hand?"

Enthralled by the glimmer, you don't even notice the deadly Required Service Plan creeping up on you...until it's too late.
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Listening to: The Dollyrots - Kick Me To The Curb
via FoxyTunes

Twelve Days of Commerce # 10: De-Packaged

2009-12-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

It is rumored that Jeff Bezos's hands are soft, tiny and milk-white, precisely like those of the Celestial Emperor's favorite concubine. There are whispers that he has never wielded an old, rusty boxcutter in frustration at a heat-welded slab of plastic. The old women proclaim that all ways and packages spring open at his merest touch.

For the rest of us, Amazon has assembled a selection of deals on toys in "Frustration-free" packaging. (Trust me on this: you can never eliminate frustration from the lives of your children, nor should you try to. But not getting gashed on the wrist from a clamshell case is nice, too.)
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Listening to: Say Hi - Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Paper Heart

2009-12-12T08:30:00.000-05:00

Paper Heart presents itself as a documentary -- as the true story of young actress/comedian Charlyne Yi examining the concept of true love, and her own belief that love doesn't really exist -- but it is actually a fiction, constructed by Yi and Nicholas Jasenovec (who, in a neat bit of metafiction, is also the director, but is played as the director of the documentary that Paper Heart pretends to be, by Jake M. Johnson).

So there are wheels within wheels here, and I'm not sure it's entirely kosher to pretend to be a documentary for fictional purposes. The heart of the movie is Yi's relationship with Michael Cera, who is playing himself and pretending not to be playing at all. Their courtship is as Michael Cera-ish as any viewer could expect, with Yi even more tentative and awkward than Cera himself, as unlikely as that may seem. (They both seem to be entirely devoid of the hormones that, in most people their age, are what drives people towards each other in the first place.)

So some of the scenes in Paper Heart are Yi interviewing various people about love, from long-wed couples to schoolkids -- and, of course, finding out that all of them, most especially the schoolchildren, are wiser and more thoughtful and serious than she is.

And then the rest of the scenes are of Yi and Johnson-as-Jasenovec, talking about making the movie, and pretending to be behind the scenes, with and without Cera, as the boyfriend who hasn't figured out why a boy might be interested in girls, anyway. (To forestall the inevitable comeback: Cera's characters, particularly the distilled essence of Cera he plays in this movie, are even less interested in boys, if that is mathematically possible.)

As usual, the audience cuts a documentary extra slack, because it's real -- but this is a "documentary," and not real...or not entirely real. As a complete fiction, it's quite plotless and erratically structured. As a complete documentary, it has a number of touching moments and thoughtful passages -- though most of those do come from the people Yi interviews, and not her interactions with the Platonic Michael Cera. So Paper Hearts isn't a failure, precisely, but it's not quite successful as whatever it's actually trying to do. And it will probably frustrate a large percentage of the people watching it.
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Listening to: The Octopus Project - An Evening with Rthrtha
via FoxyTunes

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

2009-12-11T19:13:00.000-05:00

Some people cope badly with early success, and spend their lives trying to get back into that charmed circle once they fall out of it. (And everyone does fall out of, eventually, for a while or forever -- and the more charmed and mass-popular the circle, the more precipitous the drop.) David Byrne, on the other hand, helped to shut down Talking Heads without rancor when its time was over, and has spent the past two decades doing various other things -- all in the realms of art and entertainment, one way or another -- with the same energy and interest, even as they've all had a much lower profile in the world. Sure, it's a problem we'd all love to have had, but Byrne has been an exemplar of the best way to go on with an exciting, interesting life once the spotlight passes by.

Like so many of us, Byrne has been blogging these past few years, particularly about his travels -- he both creates visual art and writes, records, and performs music with various groups and accompanists, so he travels frequently -- and he's now gathered up many of those blog posts, reorganized and rewritten some of them, and wrapped them up into a larger narrative. It's organized by city, but the real organizing principle is Byrne's bicycle -- since the early '80s, he's used bicycles as his major means of getting around Manhattan (where he lives) and, more recently, has been using folding travel bicycles as ways to get around the cities he travels to.

Bicycle Diaries should feel scattered and random, but it doesn't -- Byrne's interests are enough of a piece, and his references to bicycles and riding frequent enough, that the book hangs together as a single narrative. It's the view of the world -- or at least some pieces of the world, viewed carefully -- from one man on a bicycle. Byrne is predictably in favor of bicycles and art, but entertainingly in favor of them. He's also not against very much here -- he lets himself mildly dislike American Bush-era paranoia, but that's about as far as it goes. The reader definitely gets the impression that Byrne prefers to focus on what's interesting and pleasing to him, which is a great object lesson.

This book probably only was published because of Byrne's residual fame and coolness, and most of its readers -- myself included -- were attracted to it because it was David Byrne's thoughts on urbanism, bicycling, various cities, and art. But Bicycle Diaries delivers -- it has that cool, amused, not-quite-as-detached-as-it-would-have-us-believe voice that we remember from True Stories, and what Byrne has to say is well worth listening to.
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Listening to: Great Northern - Warning
via FoxyTunes

Manga Friday Gives You That Look That Rattles the Shutters

2009-12-11T13:02:00.000-05:00

No, not that look. The other one. The psychic one.

This week, I reviewed three books for ComicMix in which young protagonists turn out to have strange and unlikely abilities -- the first volumes in the series Pandora Hearts, Karakuri Odette, and Night Head: Genesis.
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Listening to: Mono In VCF - We Could've Owned The World
via FoxyTunes

Twelve Days of Commerce # 9: The Death of Print

2009-12-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

Yes, you too can contribute materially to the death of the printed word and the DRM-ification of everything! And all you have to do is decide to give a Kindle as a gift this year.

Remember, "Kindle" is a few letters away from "Kindling," which is what Amazon hopes you'll think of all your old books as once you buy their zippy Buck Rogers box. Tie your reading life down forever to one retailer! C'mon, it'll be fun!
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Listening to: White Rabbits - I Used To Complain Now I Don't
via FoxyTunes