PFA goes insane! About time!

The good folks at PFA have finally got their act together and put together 3 amazing programs that should occupy most of your evenings in July and August. The first is a celebration of United Artists' 90th anniversary, and the second features must see widescreen classics - if you've only seen these on DVD you're kidding yourselves that you've seen them. The third is a good noir mashup featuring the works of David Goodis. Goodis was the first Walter Tevis.

Hots on for Nowhere

James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia may or may not be his best book. It’s the first book in his LA Quartet and certainly his first major work. I read early period Ellroy about eight years ago and none of it resonates save for his first book Brown’s Requiem which was not good. The Black Dahlia is something quite different from early Ellroy and the entire hardboiled genre. It’s a procedural with a first person narration, and that’s about the end of similarities with other novels set in postwar LA. The narrator is a buck tooth pug turned cop named Bucky. Children make fun of his face. He has a Kraut father who had a wartime crush on Hitler. Bucky ratted on his two best friends – two innocent Japanese kids – to get his job with the LAPD. His mother died from drinking bad moonshine.

This is not your mother’s Sue Grafton novel. This is hopped up pistol whipping pimp shakedown negro wasting Los Angeles. The city’s a nightmare of brokedown and built up, and as Bucky and the other cops move between the scum and glitz they lose their cool and calm. Then the body of a girl is found near the corner of 39th and Norton – she’s been cut in half, organs removed, and tortured – and cops lose their minds.

The press plays up the case and the PD hunkers down to find out who did Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. Turns out Ms. Cut-in-half wasn’t much of a wall flower; she tricked and tossed and rubbed knees for cash, drinks and cigarettes. Bucky’s partner Lee gets hopped on speed to counter the horror of the dead girl, and it turns him into a near lunatic. Ellroy investigates smart angles and there are no short cuts in the book. Ellroy has fun with historical and made up names and gives a pretty good conclusion to a true life murder case that remains unsolved.

Walter Tevis’ published his first novel The Hustler in 1959. The film version that everyone knows came out two years later, and the surprise in the combination of narrative and film is that they are vastly different works of art and both are superb. In Tevis’ book we find a rather straight redemption story with Fast Eddie Felson as the protagonist who has to unlearn the smalltime hustler’s game. He wants the brass ring and needs to graft the traits and thoughts of a winner onto his brain. Assisting the education is the selfish character Bert who guides Eddie toward the brass while Eddie fights the lessons instilled by his former manager and flunky Charlie.

The book’s centerpiece, whereby Eddie receives the thunderbolt of epiphany, comes during a billiard game at the home of the swishy Kentuckian Findlay. The breakdown that Findlay suffers as the game progresses gives Eddie a glance into his own horrible meltdown against Minnesota Fats, which is the book’s first big showdown scene.

And then there’s the woman. In the film she’s Sarah Packard but in the book she’s just Sarah and she all but disappears when Fast Eddie breaks for Kentucky with Bert. At that point the book and film diverge and they both conclude admirably. It’s Eddie who emerges as the ferocious individual, replacing Bert and his cronies in their grownup schoolyard power games. The book is slightly ambiguous about Eddie’s signoff at the end, but only slightly. A reader knows Eddie’s got the upper hand imprinted in his psyche now, and he can use it wherever he finds the next big score.

Name the Author

Today's "prescient" quiz- name the dead American writer who penned the following on September 12, 2001- googlers will be shot-

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.

The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.

My Amis True

The weekend is here, so avail yourself of some Kingsley Amis on Drink-

One Coping with the Physical Hangover

If your wife or other partner is beside you, and (of course) is willing, perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can. The exercise will do you good, and- on the assumption that you enjoy sex- you will feel toned up emotionally, thus delivering a hit-and-run raid on your metaphysical hangover (M.H.) before you formally declare war on it. Warnings- 1. if you are in bed with somebody you should not be in bed with, and have in the least degree a bad conscience about this, abstain. Guilt and shame are prominent constituents of the M.H., and will certainly be sharpened by indulgence on such an occasion 2. For the same generic reason, do not take the matter into your own hands if you awake by yourself.

The ideal arrangement, very much worth the trouble and expense if you are anything of a serious drinker, is a shower fixed over the bath. Run a bath as hot as you can bear and lie in it as long as you can bear. When it becomes too much, stand up and have a hot shower, then lie down again and repeat the sequence. This is time well spent. Warning- Do not do this unless you are quite sure your heart and the rest of you will stand it. I would find it most disagreeable to be accused of precipitating your death, especially in court.

On Coping with the Metaphysical Hangover

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness, (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

The Boozing Man's Diet

The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree. Well, and it should be simple: no charts, tables, menus, recipes. None of these pages of fusspottery which normally end- end, after you have wasted minutes ploughing your way through- "and of course no alcohol" in tones of fatuous apology for laying tongue to something so pikestaff-plain. Of course? No alcohol? What kind of people do they think we are?

Music of 1H08

This is it to date-What I listened to so far this year. Please give me your best of/worst of and we can compare notes (ie fight).

The Black Keys- Attack and Release. The use of trendy Danger Mouse as a producer could have really sucked. Instead it adds some nice touches. Love Dan Auerbach's fat blues guitar. Hot shit.

Cheap Time-Too Late. Good, but not as great as I had hoped. The vocals sound way too kid-like and precious. Be a man and quit with the cutesy shit. B-.

CoCoComa- s/t. Solid garage rock. I could do without the organ, which sounds rinky dinky at times, but worth it over all. B+.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring (1st one)- A Ken Derr rec. Extremely catchy. My 17 yo little sister likes it too. Reminds me of Wire. A.

Hex Dispensors- s/t. Sort of like the Ramones, but heavier. Every song is in the same time measure. But what the fuck? It works. B+.

Looking Glass "Brandy" Absolutely brilliant song. It has it all- story lyrics, over the top instrumentation and terrific arrangements (check out the horns). This is what 70s session musicians sounded like, I guess. Terrific. A+.

The Pink Fits-super mini lp. Maybe the best album here. Just straight up rocknroll, all loud and ragged as hell. A.

Black Time- Blackout. Kinda sucks. The Cramps without talent. D+.

Beasts of Bourbon- Little Animals- 2 or 3 good songs. The rest are poorly written and just so bleak in sentiment it bums me out listening to this for more than 10 minutes straight. C.

Carbon/Silicon- Jones and James are UK punk royalty. Sadly age hasnt provided any insight. Tell me how a 50 yo can seriously write a tune called Why Do Men Fight? The answer obviously is bc they're forced to endure trite shit like this. My God. D-.

Dirtbombs- the latest one. Still sounds crappy. Just bad songs IMHO. C.

Betty Wright-I Love the Way You Love. Mojo mag had a guide to the best of female soul singers. This was on it. Betty has a terrific voice and the whole album just exudes a 70s black vibe that I totally dig. The last golden era of black music for me. A-.

On The Road

The past weekend's getaway to the upstate was grand but too short. The fiscal year is closing and I'm getting antsy. North? Far North? South? Guatemala? I'm getting the urge to burn some rubber, mark some long hours, and see the world. Your presence is requested. I have one blocked weekend in mid-July but the rest is crystal in the clear. Where in the world can we go?

Apocalypse Orange

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, June 23 (UPI) -- Thousands of people in the Netherlands say they expect the world to end in 2012, and many say they are taking precautions to prepare for the apocalypse.

The Dutch-language de Volkskrant newspaper said it spoke to thousands of believers in the impending end of civilization, and while theories on the supposed catastrophe varied, most tied the 2012 date to the end of the Mayan calendar, Radio Netherlands reported Monday.

De Volkskrant said many of those interviewed are stocking up on emergency supplies, including life rafts and other equipment.

Some who spoke to the newspaper were optimistic about the end of civilization. "You know, maybe it's really not that bad that the Netherlands will be destroyed," Petra Faile said. "I don't like it here anymore. Take immigration, for example. They keep letting people in. And then we have to build more houses, which makes the Netherlands even heavier. The country will sink even lower, which will make the flooding worse."

More film at eleven...

Over the Edge (1979) – The first Matt Dillon movie features a no name cast of believable kids and occupied adults in suburban hell. The film believes in the kids and when they do what every kid dreams of – locking up the parents who have assembled at the school and then bashing and blowing up all the folks’ cars – you feel you should have done more damage to old people with your own youth. A semisweet love story, some beautiful scenes of the desolate landscape, and enough Cheap Trick in the soundtrack to justify more than one viewing. This movie should have killed John Hughes but they banned it from theaters and gave that shitbird a career.

The Warriors (1979) – The flipside of suburbia finds a Coney Island street gang having to make for home after a summit goes wrong in the Bronx. Somewhat aspiring to Anabasis with a touch of The Odyssey (the sirens are a girl gang, the Lizzies), the film moves with true action pace. The Warriors battle toughs from all boroughs and there’s time for a little smooching with a burnout whore. It’s a night movie with vitality and edge, and lost New York is the stage. There’s a perfect subway scene involving prom-date kids and the Warriors, and when the whore tries to straighten her hair and is stopped by gang leader Swan, you know the meaning of dignity and honor in a vital, simple cinematic method. Walter Hill uses the city to terrific effect no matter if he’s shooting underground or the mean streets. Michael Mann must have loved this flick because when his features took off in 1981 he borrowed from Hill’s score, technique, and unflinching belief in his protagonists. One is forced to root for the Warriors and shelf whatever wisdom from Leo Buscaglia one hopes to share with shattered youth.

Cassandra’s Dream (2007) – Woody Allen tries to reinvent Crimes and Misdemeanors. This UK drama leads two brothers to murder to help an uncle and right their own spiraling lives. It works best with the set up as the characters develop in real time and the viewer attaches sympathy to the brothers, especially Ewan McGregor as he makes a stretch for a life beyond his means. Sympathy is rare in any Allen film, and the feeling wanes as the post-kill movie is played out in too much capital D Drama. C&M had a good mix of funny with the anguish, and in this flick Woody goes straight for dark Dostoyevsky and he can’t pull it off. Allen’s probably afraid of comedy unless he’s playing it, but he’s too old and disgusting to make fans of his yesteryear laugh. It was compared to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead but it’s nothing like it. It’s better than that waste of time, but that’s not enough.

Endless Love (1981) – EL is a bad interpretation of Scott Spencer’s perfect novel of the same name. There is little of Spencer’s wonder in the movie, and the cinematic vilification of Hugh Butterfield is tantamount to criminal. I’ve dreaded viewing this since I first saw it 300 years ago, but I shouldn’t have. On its own it is rather pleasant. EL works on a couple levels. It’s smart about its two main characters; their teenage lives, however fantastic, are real enough to the kids and they make good on the chance to play adult. I’d probably like it less if Brooke Shields wasn’t one of the best uses for eyes. James Spader as an ass, and Tom Cruise’s first movie – he’s in it for less than two minutes, a requirement that should have been mandatory for his career.

Last of the Mojitos

James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder is the story of Jennet Stearne, daughter of a Master Pricker and niece of a philosopher and scientist burned at the stake. The flames convince young Jennie that she must produce an argumente grande using Newton’s Principia Mathematica to show that demon forces are not the prime movers behind the evil that befalls us. Her quest is our tale, and it is a romp- part historical fiction, intellectual inquiry and rousing adventure tale- clearly the nine years Morrow spent writing were interspersed with serious research on everything from Native American tribal domesticity, Ben Franklin’s amorous exploits and 17th century freak shows. Delivered in the style of said century, the novel’s prime target is fanaticism, whether in the form of witch burners or political theorists. Certainty, especially the moral variety, is the dangerous beast Morrow seeks to slay. And while he straddles the line between precious and clever a tad too delicately at times, the man delivers the big issues with a spoonful of sugary adventure. He may also try a little too hard to tell you how much he knows, but even the odd contrivance of having Newton’s work “narrate” the story and drop in a la a Greek chorus to comment on the action, doesn’t unravel the narrative thread too wildly. Amidst the 523 pages of hacking and hawing about the origins of human suffering, it’s Newton who produces Morrow's thesis: “Demons are but desires of the mind.”

Tomorrow is the big day!

"Dumpster Muffin" (right) resists workers' efforts to remove her from her perch 100 feet above the Cal campus. Decision on training center due Wednesday; feces throwing hippies dragged from trees!

Too Much Cinema

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Untitled Record Reviews

Two quick recommendations from bands delivering that rare listening experience- the instant winner. Time will only tell (I've only heard both about five times each) how these will hold up, but The Pets' Misdirection and the new Eddy Current Suppression Ring came jumping out of the speakers in equally compelling but very different ways. The Pets bring convertible punk for your summer- mid-tempo punk anthems with all the hooks and background yeas yeas that will make that drive down the PCH so filled with hope as you make your way to that Big Sur campground. Five songs per side with no stinkers, ballads or noodling. Lean to the aural bone, the perfect soundtrack across the bridge and over to Sam's for afternoon beers and seagulls. Same three chords in all the right places- I'm betting this be like that summer romance that thrills for six weeks and then gets placed quietly in the backburner of your mind. But what a six weeks...

Eddy Current's second applies the hook adhesive and keeps it sticky all the way through, but these guys ain't afraid to stretch it out and jam a little, assuming your idea of jam means repetitive hypnotic dance grooves and not stoned Gauchos doing couch axe training. A bit slower than the fantastic debut, this one ain't afraid to find new ways to get your fat ass moving without alienating dear listener with indulgence musique. It probably helps that the rhythm section are clones bred in George Clinton's Lab for Funkbringers. Now, would somebody get my belated father's day gift by dropping the import price load to get the vinyl in my greasy mitts?

The Way Some People Die

Let us now praise Ross Macdonald. In the course of eighteen novels featuring private investigator Lew Archer – pious ex-GI whose idea of health food is a breakfast of crisp bacon, four fried eggs and black coffee – Macdonald showcases southern California as a cesspool of wasted days and lives. His clients are either super rich or brokedown nobodies. Someone, usually a girl, is missing. A parent makes a plea or a pitch, and Archer agrees to check it out. ‘Check it out’ needs to be clarified; ‘check’ alludes to getting way up in the noses of people who’d rather not be bothered, ‘it’ implies a drug connection, a ransom scam, or a dead of night kidnapping, and ‘out’ refers to a lot of blood being spilled, some of it Archer’s, most of it the previous fuel of the scum of the earth.

Macdonald’s scenarios are sometimes forced, but the action isn’t, nor are the payoffs. Archer cracks wise with dimwits, and unlike Chandler’s Marlowe, there’s little in the way of back and forth. Archer works in a hard post WWII world, and the people he’s after are on the outs with the 1950’s boom time. The hoods are small time mixing it up with big, and they’re making moves only idiots would try. Sometimes the idiots are in the mix with muscle, and Archer gets his share in a throwdown. Red harvest indeed.

Most of the victims are young, most would like to blame their parents for their mixups, but that wasn’t the fashion back then. Kids just cut out and tried to make a go. No wonder Kerouac became a god.

The best Archer and the one I started rereading again as I make my way down the list is The Way Some People Die (1951). A woman wants to find her daughter, and Archer obliges even though she frowns when he lights a cigarette in her house. Galatea Lawrence is on the lam, and tied in with some major league heroin operations. Archer trips north to San Francisco where the herion junky is a damsel in dis-dress, and the dealer stooges and operators are sensitive fags. Dead and broken bodies pile up, but along the way, between Archer driving to this place and that in SoCal, we get gems like this, which comes after he questions a pug:

I thanked him. The drumming of the bag began again before I was out of earshot. After a while he’d be a fighting machine hired out for twenty or twenty-five dollars to take it and dish it out. If he was really good, he might be airborne for ten years, sleeping with yellower flesh than Violet, eating thick steaks for breakfast, dishing it out. Then drop back onto a ghetto street-corner with the brains scrambled in his skull.

Violet is a fat nosy neighbor listening in on the interrogation, and ‘yellower’ is not a word, but I can’t think of much from 1950’s narrative that matches that paragraph for a complete picture of the universe pre-JFK and pre-Watts.

There are many lines like that in the Archer books, and some, especially in the later novels, come off poorly. Macdonald was an environmentalist and events like the Santa Barbara oil spill crept into his books, but all Archer really cares about is a steak with mushrooms and a good beer.

One needs a small shelf to store quality hard boiled. Hammet’s Red Harvest and The Glass Key, Chandler’s The Long Goodye, a couple of mid period Jim Thompson novels (he might be better than Macdonald, but that’s for another review) and the first pair of Highsmith's Ripley books - you could get Highsmith’s bio and her The Price of Salt too, but those go on the dyke shelf. Macdonald’s first four or five Archer books are must haves, but even a later book like The Blue Hammer (1976) resonates.

Take me home take me home

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- U.S. politicians are already protesting Belgian brewer InBev's unsolicited $46 billion bid to buy Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. and absorb the iconic brewery to create the world's fourth largest consumer products company. But it appears lawmakers have little leverage to stop the deal, which might ultimately be approved on antitrust grounds.

"It's going to cause a lot of the angst and hand wringing," said Douglas Cogen, a mergers and acquisitions attorney with the Fenwick & West law firm in San Francisco. "In the end, there isn't a lot of regulatory clearance that this deal needs."

There are signs Anheuser-Busch is trying to thwart the deal. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the brewer has begun preliminary talks with Mexico's Grupo Modelo SAB about a possible merger. The paper cited anonymous sources who said Anheuser-Busch approached Carlos Fernandez, chief executive of Modelo and an Anheuser-Busch director, about a deal in recent weeks.

Hairy Palms

I missed the porn train as a lad. No crinkled pages wedged covertly under the Encyclopedia Brown series. No Mexican playing cards poking out teasingly from the spokes of my bike tires. I heard about Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein and Bob Guccione, but their pubs remained mysterious terrain in a pre-Internet era when forbidden images still held mysterious sway over the imaginations of shy suburban boys. I had no older brother to filch from, and I was way too timid to shouldertap; “Hey mister, can you score me a Hustler?”

Allan MacDonell’s memoir, Prisoner of X, about his years at the helm of Hustler, pulls back the curtain of the dark wizard Larry Flynt and fills in some of the holes in my childhood education. It’s also pretty damn funny. Flynt and his not-so-merry band of smut peddlers come off even weirder and more perverse than legend would have it. I’m guessing Althea’s family ain’t inviting Allan to any remembrances, as he paints the woman Courtney played as an angry smack whore. Larry doesn’t come off much better, although moments of guarded affection slip in between bouts of terror and loathing. Mr. Flynt ain’t easy, and our hero, who opens self-deprecatingly, inevitably turns egomaniacal and nasty. Not a lot of kindness gets slung across these pages, but I suppose that just don’t sell. Once again we get a man in middle age who never tires of reminding us how smart he is and how grotesque just about everyone around him is, but he doesn’t quite reach the heights of bravado in this week’s other porn memoir, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.

If stories of a sex tape showing Jane Fonda buttramming Ted Turner with a strap-on while Georgia's Silver-Haired Fox pummels a saucy brunette while barking orders to the cameraman, “Make sure you get all of it!” excite you, you’ll really go wild for Chuck Berry’s escapades with female excrement. Yes, it gets that gross. But it also has moments of a less scatological nature- remember when the impeachment process was hitting high gear and Larry put an ad in the Washington Post offering up to a million dollars to anyone who could document sexual liaisons with powerful Republicans? Hell, they brought down the next Speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, without producing any real evidence. They bluffed, he bought it, and then he resigned. The party in Larry’s office must have cooked that night.

Working under a drug-addicted, emotionally volcanic and seemingly fearless fucker like Flynt probably does its damage, but clearly, our hero found some perks- power being arguably the greatest aphrodisiac in this rise and fall tale. Yes, in the end, MacDonell gets canned after his skewering of Larry at the latter’s roast cuts too close to the grizzled bone. So we get this story, and if you too missed out on a child’s pornographic rite of passage or you just want to find out what’s on those Berry tapes, I’ve got a book for you.

Wasting away in Hickville

Just finished my first Simenon and it was a letdown. Having read the rave John Banville offered the LA Weekly, I should have known better. He describes Simenon's Maigret novels as formulaic, and that's an understatement. Maigret at the Coroner's is a thin piece of junk.

Maigret is in Arizona watching a coroner's inquest. That is the bulk of the novel. There are some funny 1950's pre-PC set pieces (putting blacks and Chinese in their undeserved places), and having the Frenchmen Maigret observe them is rewarding. He doesn't pretend to know how to act in the southwest, and simply can't relate to the 'howdy partner' nonsense of it all.

That said, the book I read is junk. It's a court transcription interlaced with a few Maigret encounters. I don't care about Maigret or his insights. The books Banville wrote about seem of a different color, so I'll take a shot and hopefully suppress any disappointment until I find a winner.

Winning quotes:

"Do Chinese, like certain blacks, have any particular predilection for white women?"

"I know a little about the Chinese," he said now.
"What do you think of them?"
"Nothing!" he said ironically.

"That's because we're richer. This is the only place in the world wher there are poor people who have their own car. The blacks who pick cotton almost all have an old jalopy. We've cut the losses to a minimum. We're a great people, Julius."

Chapter 8 is entitled: The Negro Intervenes

Leaf blowing assholes; shut up and use a broom!

My patio needs beer drinkers; it's hot!

Housekeeping Blows

I have twice failed to make it through Marilynne Robinson’s acclaimed 1980 novel, Housekeeping, but I was impressed with her article in Harper’s, so I picked up her collection of essays, The Death of Adam, on a whim, and it’s the most powerful set of non-fiction pieces I’ve read from a conservative since Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It. Robinson is a devout Protestant who champions John Calvin and the Puritans and rips Nietzsche and Darwin, so she ain’t exactly on my team. What she does, though, is challenge liberal dogma with great erudition and intellectual rigor. She refuses to accept judgments about thinkers without deep and pointed attention to the primary texts. She certainly broadened my understanding of Calvin, but more importantly, she reminds you that far too often we have ossified opinions about ideas and people and events we know little about. She makes a powerful case that much of our so-called set of opinions is received, and often that has been passed down from folks who’ve gotten it and on we go. It’s so much easier to read articles about someone than it is to go back and start digging. And while she cherrypicks Nietzsche unfairly to suit her case, the strength of her writing, the clarity of her argumentation and the specificity of her evidence made this my most engaging reading experience of the last few months. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Slayer bio to finish.

Will work for food

Knut Hamsun's Hunger is the first modern novel. The nameless narrator starves and pawns and vomits and goes berserk throughout latter day Oslo (then Kristiania). The novel is broken up into four parts equally disturbing. When he catches a break - sells a story to a newspaper editor - he is right for a few days, but Hamsun picks up the action when the man is on the downswing, and he never lets up; he shows a man at frayed ends and pulls each strand of dignity and sanity until the chap comes undone.

Hunger is a difficult book in that the reader feels for the man while he internalizes and displays his frustration, rage, and hunger. He has no one, save a few acquaintances left over from his flush days, and his encounters with people he meets on the fly degrade into immediate conflict. After he bullshits an old man in the park into thinking he's a man of means, he turns on the fool and berates him for swallowing his lies. When he makes a pretty girl he can't keep his insane tirades from ripping her to shreds, and this after she shows him her tits.

I'm reading Hamsun out of order, and I think Pan is his best book. It's the uber-Hamsun, a perfect record of all he wanted to do with his early books, and what he hinted toward in his latter work. I don't know why he's not read by more people; perhaps they're afraid, perhaps the oft-cited Nazi affection Hamsun bestowed on Hitler and Goebbels marks him as a tool. I don't care about that shit: he's got the goods. I'll get to either Mysteries (again), Victoria, or Editor Lynge soon enough.

Waking up is easy

Crimson Tide of Alcohol

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080609/ap_on_sp_fo_ne/fbn_stabler_dui_arrest

I can't decide which photo is more disturbing, but you can purchase Kenny's children's book on his site http://www.kenstabler.com/

Goldstein for VP

Remember when the memoir was going to bury fiction? Remember Mary Karr? I have been sucked into enough hypes in my lifetime, but that wasn’t one of them. So, you’re going to deliver conversations verbatim from your 8th birthday party and we’re supposed to nod along as we bathe in your verisimilitude. This cyst on my cheek is real, Mr. Memoir- your book is not. So Sir Bradley was telling me about this book sale in downtown Berkeley, my least favorite part of my least favorite city. Some weekends, however, require desperate measures to beat domesticity by buying something that clearly illustrates my transcendence over the average consumer. I picked up four books, and I’ve almost read them all. Here's a mean-spirited take on one-

Mike Edison used to drum for The Raunch Hands. That might mean something to about three people, and while I can identify the band, I can’t relate to the sound. That said, tastemaker extraordinaire Tim Warren put out a troughload of vinyl by ‘em, which means one thing- mad crazies shouldn’t put out their friends’ records, or at least they should put one of those Tipper Gore disclaimers on the cover that states said relationship. Edison’s claim-to-memoir (It's called "I Have Fun Everywhere I Go") is not his time on the skins, however, but his duties at Screw, Hustler, and High Times. Porn and punk rock, hozac, can you dig it? I could, for awhile, as the boy can write and the stories bring the requisite madness, but way too much self-stroking and score-settling ruin the broth. Short, fat, balding Jewish dudes should not go on and on about their sexual conquests. Fine, tell us about your witty comebacks every time some fool dares to contradict your final wisdom, but do we have to hear in excruciating detail every blind drunk lay? He never once writes “mercy fuck.” I find this confusing. The punk rock tour sections are great fun, but the tedium of recounting every incompetent employee heavily weighs down the second half. Like a lot of these life stories, it needs 200 pages, but everybody has to go 300. The life is rich- can you feel it in the thickness of this hardcover? I wish tales of this sort would come in pulpy paperback with all the ego cut out- you don't need Max Perkins for that.

Look, this is well-written and pretty entertaining for 150 pages, but he does not have a 300-page life. Hey, most of us don't, especially by the age of 40. I'd recommend purchase from the remainder table, if you're hungover and looking to relive the Crypt glory days while wifey poo spends and spends. I'd also recommend a Metrx protein shake and a Thai chili bloody, but that's another subject for tomorrow.

Hup Holland! And beyond...

Tunes for all my friends

Terry Reid was almost in Led Zeppelin. That I knew this fact and ignored Reid for decades seems foolish, for his River LP is at the top of my record rotation these days. It's hard to explain what River sounds like; the best I can come up with is it's like early Santana without electricity or the endless noodling crap associated with Carlos. It's also fair to say that Reid uses his voice where other noodlers prefer horrid guitar lines. Santana blows, and Reid doesn't, so my description fails on all fronts. Just buy the damn record and if you don't like it stop listening to music. River broke in 1973 and was apparently ignored by the world. It's a wonderful treat of seamless songs that makes one wish for an total album of greatness in these modern times.

Dr. Feelgood - Down by the Jetty - top notch bar boogie that sounds a lot less like Huey Lewis and the News and more like an The Stooges without distortion. A bunch of catch, hook, and play. It's weird how the songs blend and do not sound the same; if that last phrase sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, I dont.

The Kinks - The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society - The Kinks never made a great record. They have no great records. They have very good singles, a few album sides that sound ok (Side 1 of Kinkdom is still my favorite), and then they have Village Green. It might be there most cohesive effort. It probably has the most number of fairly catchy Kinks tunes. I just wish it meant more to me.

Grant McLennan - Horsebreaker Star - I've been using Horsebreaker Star as a go-to Sunday morning record for about 5 years. It's one the great records of the 1990's in that it doesn't sound dated, it means more to me know than it did when I first bought in on the blind, and the performance of it, on a purely song-by-song basis, is superb. I don't know anything about Grant other than that he died recently, and the Go-Betweens were never my thing. Playing that jazz called rock and roll, indeed. Here's a link to Christgau's Horsebreaker Star review, and to his obituary for Grant.

Nicely done, Holland

Rein, you win. Good show.

Abort this Child

Lee Child is the author of ten Jack Reacher thrillers…*

Jack Reacher is a drifter with means. He travels light, a toothbrush and a passport. He is ex military MP and he’s tall and tough when he has to be. He likes to make arrogant statements about who people are, what they do, and what they think. He is often wrong and not funny, yet he never admits mistakes or tells an off color joke to lighten the mood. He likes the Beatles; he considers them ‘his’ music as he was part of that thick generation. He has no remorse and his version of putting things right often involves killing people because he feels they have to go.

Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in forty-three nations in twenty-nine languages.

Jack Reacher is a fucking moron. He gets hot and bothered by female fascist versions of himself, like the ex-FBI blondie in the book I just finished, The Hard Way. In Child’s stupid hands, we get to hear (read) Jack Reachers’ internal thought process as he evaluates a crime scene, cases a building, evades a tail. This is supposed to make us see how smart Reacher is. It makes me want to punch Child in his nuts.

Child, a native of England and a former television writer…

The Hard Way is a bad book. I know something about the genre, and I can tell you a number of things wrong in the details as presented by Child. Reacher knows nothing of his environment, and Child thinks that by listing street names and intersections, he’s making Reacher seem smart; he’s not – he’s making him a priggish cunt. Reacher has insight into everyone and everything. When he walks into a café, he knows how they make their money. When he hears of a man’s past military experience, he knows whether or not he can take them. What he doesn’t know is how to be human.

…he is at work on his eleventh Jack Reacher thriller…

This is one of those mysteries where the ‘aha’ moment came and went about 280 pages in, and having seen it coming 150 pages prior, I lingered at that point and said aloud “why the fuck am I reading this? Lew Archer would verbally disarm Reacher until he had tears of blood pouring from his eyes. Hammet’s Continental Op would have brained the prude Reacher with a sap by page three and gotten on with a romp of a story. Parker’s Spenser would have had Hawk empty the .44 Magnum into Reacher’s gut just for being a bore. Good ol’ Phil Marlowe (and I’m not a fan) would have mentally toyed with the goon Reacher until he begged for mercy and forgiveness. Any of Ellroy’s cat’s would wipe the floor with Reacher while disarming Jack Ruby at the same time.”

Lee Child enjoys sex with goats and lesser farm animals.

Child has no idea what he is doing. Women dig and buy his books. His Reacher is a handsome, available, vigilante thug, just like Dick Cheney, if Dick Cheney looked human. Do you want your women fantasizing about Dick Cheney? Me neither. Do you want to stick the broken half of a Heineken bottle into Lee Child’s writing hand? I do. And like Jack Reacher, I’d call it justice.

*Italics denote line items from Lee Child’s ABOUT THE AUTHOR section and some shit I made up. They also denote, in the book I read, when and what Jack Reacher is thinking. See how easy it is to get inside someone’s mind? Italics!

New house rules

Glad you liked the Lizzy clip.
I've deleted it becacuse I'm sick of videos and pics on this site.
Let's keep it text.
We're smart. Not dumb, like people say.
And please use the Title field when posting.
And please no bold text at all: italics make the world go round.

Thanks,
Grumpy T. Editor

Dumb and Dumber

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone is the funniest book I've read in a long while. It's almost a laugh a page, and it reads like Wodehouse: well-to-do idiots live in posh environments, backstab and plot, and wind up in outlandish situations. Sadly, there is no Jeeves-to-the-rescue in Imperial City - there's only tens of thousands of dead people everywhere.

Imperial City is the story of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that was set up to run Iraq after one of those mad western countries - name escapes me - invaded it in 2003. The book pretty much obliterated everything I thought I knew about Iraq. Honestly, I stopped reading the news accounts and listening to the BBC dispatches less than a year after the invasion. I couldn't stand the reporting, the stupidity of it all, the news that wasn't news.

I learned that Jay Garner was an alright guy for a leader completely out of his league; he knew shit when he saw shit and wasn't afraid to buck when necessary. Too bad he didn't think it necessary more often.

Paul "Jerry" Bremer is possibly the biggest fool unearthed and put into a position of undeserved power since Bud Selig. He had the design and the nerve and the authority to order and decree life and liberty in country, and he fucked it in alarming fashion.

I like the book because it didn't focus too much on the shitheels the New Yorker liked to write about, the neo-cons and the DOD numbskulls, because they weren't going to tell you the truth anyhow. Rajiv C did a fine job of sourcing low, mid and senior level accounts for his book, and the stories they tell - and there were a lot of people admitting fuckups - ring true.

Lurking behind the wall of the green zone and the book itself is the mystery man al-Sistani, who for better or worse brought the CPA to its knees. I need to read a book about that strange old cat; hopefully Rajiv can write one.

The future?

Please Kill Me

Knut Hamsun's Pan is considered by some to be his best book. It's certainly entertaining and odd and frightening - just what you'd want from good ol' Knut.

Lt. Glahn lives in the mountains, hunts and fishes for his food, and leads an aesthetic (pantheistic?) life in a brokedown cottage. He meets the daughter of a businessman, Edvarda, takes a shine to her, and they begin a romance where nothing is sacred. They love and hate each other, console and berate each other, publicly and privately praise and chastise one another. They pretend the balling on the side the other does doesn't bother them, and they control their fury until they can't: Evarda's eruptions are met with Glahn's passive aggressive ambivalence, and the cycle begins again. It's a perfect scenario.

In periods of isolation, Glahn drifts between madness and awe at the God who created the Norwegian nature wherein he finds himself. At the novels end, Edvarda asks to take care of his dog Aesop as he prepares to ship out. Glahn agrees - he shoots Aesop in the head and has him delivered to Edvarda. Love is grand.

But that's not the end of the book. A nameless narrator takes over the epilogue. Glahn and the narrator are in India per their orders. They shoot and hunt and make plays for the one sexy Tamil girl. I won't spoil the ending. They book is Gatsby length, so read it your self.

One of the worst parts of going domestic is that you don’t have any funny stories to tell. Yea, you can tell cutesy kid tales, but ain’t no single friends gonna do much more than nod impatiently at those. At best. How about my shower drain is clogged? They fucked up my cable bill? My neighbors are sniffing downward at the congregation of unraked leaves praying at the curb? I paid 20 dollars to a babysitter today so she could watch my kids for an hour and a half so my wife could tank up before the urban Burning Man that is Sex and the City. I made myself a tortilla with taco sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese and smoked turkey, and the kids had microwave hot dogs. After I threw the dishes in the sink, I patted myself on the back and failed to relax in the lazyboy- one nameless girl had a load in her pants and was oddly not enjoying the sensation. Bribes were made and blackmailed resolved, and with two miracles in bed I watched while a third leaped high into an indoor sky to swat a party store balloon and landed hard enough to send my newly purchased needle skidding across my 17 dollar gatefold Electric Eels record like a diamond-fine pebble across an EB White lake. I no longer have the energy for anger.

Please come to the bar with tales of heroic gustatory prowess and deep sea holy divers. Currently, I am defeated. Tomorrow is another day.

A king has died...

Bye Bo Diddley

Goodnight, weekend...

Sunday Morning Comin' Down: What did you listen to this fine Sunday?

Charlie Louvin - Lonesome is Me- my current favorite country singer, sounding a lot like Lee Hazlewood at times and cross-referenced in the creepy and oddly compelling documentary, Vinyl (thanks Bradley- I think).

The Raunch Hands - Payday- still not very exciting on record, but I'm reading this memoir by a guy who used to write a lot of porn and play in a bunch of punk bands, including this one, so there you go.

James Carr - Best Of- you can have Otis, I'll take James...

Gene Vincent - The Day the World Turned Blue- every time I listen to this guy I think, man, I'd love to cover that song, if only I had a band that could play their instruments. I thought that again this morning while reading Frank Rich.

David Bowie - Scary Monsters- the last great Bowie record was released in 1980. That's a long time ago.