Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a third rate thriller, a failed homage to Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, which is a vastly superior book. Bingham did take Stone one step further, though, by OD'ing before he could see this one published, but that's his only "victory." Let's see, we have our seedy East Asian (Cambodia) location, our drug and alcholic-addicted protagonist, our brainy, hot Stateside drug accomplice, our amoral drug trafficking thugs, and our plot that has it all go wrong. You don't need this one, but check out Dog Soldiers, or even the movie version of it, Who'll Stop the Rain, with a young Nick Nolte and a ravishing Tuesday Weld. Ooh, Tuesday Weld.

Death of a record store
Famed Rhino Records shop in L.A. has last gasp
By Chris MorrisThe Hollywood Reporter

LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- They're throwing a wake of sorts for the Rhino Records store Saturday and Sunday.
Founded in 1973, the venerable record shop officially closed its doors after the turn of the year, hard on the heels of the folding of crosstown competitor Aron's Records.
But, in a final gasp of Rhino tradition, old customers will gather at the Westwood Boulevard location to paw through boxes of CDs, LPs, DVDs and videocassettes at the store's final parking lot sale.
Rhino, a Westside institution for three decades, never recovered its footing after moving into a large new space about five years ago. The old shop, left open as an outlet for used and budget product, closed within a year. A partnership with the Golden Apple comics store failed, and an attempt to rebrand the shop as Duck Soup with the addition of high-priced collectibles never caught fire.
These stabs at instilling new life into Rhino coincided with a precipitous decline in the music business. Owner Richard Foos says: "As bad as it is for everybody, it's much worse for independents. I don't know all the reasons. It's so complicated. There's literally hundreds of reasons."
Foos adds dispiritedly: "There's too many other things to do and too many ways to get your music without paying $18 for a CD. ... I don't see a great future for physical product."
The demise of Rhino hits home on a very personal level for this writer. For years, it was my neighborhood record store, conveniently located between my Westwood Village apartment and the Santa Monica Boulevard office of the film exhibitor I worked for.
It was the hip shop on the Westside -- one of the few places you could buy that hot import album or that cool local punk 45. There, music obsessives gathered to buy their records, socialize and, frequently, argue with the store's highly opinionated clerks. In a gambit worthy of "High Fidelity," Rhino for many years maintained a "Worst Customers List," posted prominently behind the counter; the more obstreperous patrons -- including, on more than one occasion, myself -- were duly namechecked there.
As combative as things could get, the store also spawned its own tightly knit community. When Rhino's fledgling record label wanted to promote one of its early novelty acts, the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, the store drafted some of its regulars to march through Westwood Village, where they serenaded passers-by with kazoo renditions of "Whole Lotta Love" and other classic-rock chestnuts.
The era when music lovers on both sides of the retail counter bonded is long gone. Foos notes with some astonishment that there are now no free-standing independent stores selling music between West Hollywood and Santa Monica. The options are Best Buy, Borders and Barnes & Noble.
"The days of going into a place like Rhino and saying, 'What's the cool new import?' -- forget it," Foos says.
Things aren't any better for the big mall music operators: Witness the bankruptcy filing last week of the 869-store Musicland chain.
Does this reflect a paradigm shift? Of course, but, if a new study from England's University of Leicester is to be believed, it also reflects a basic difference in the way consumers are looking at music. The school's psychologists noted last week that music had "lost its aura," and was now viewed as simply a commodity.
Says Foos with a sigh: "It's really sad and dangerous. Everybody's like a silo."
Ave atque vale, Rhino Records. For some, you were a way of life.

It's the new European immigrant experience, and it's exploding all over the pages of Euro fiction. You want to ship those Moroccans, those Turks, those Indians and Pakistanis and Jamaicans and Indonesians on over for cheap labor to build the Eden that is post-Marshall Plan mambo security net Western Europe, you best expect that those second-generationers, the ones who refuse to return to the fatherland, or who ain't hooked up with the West-hating fundamentalist gangs or who aren't bitterly running corner stores, are going to document their in-between experience, and it's gonna be a mishmash of failed multi-culti and cries of "They'll never accept us" and "Where the white women at?" and "Where's the Allah motive for getting me some dead whitey payback from this decadent society that won't love me?" Euros want the brown man to assimilate but to stay in his place, to speak the language but to deliver the curry. To do the jobs no self-respecting white Euro would lower himself to do, but to stop taking self-respecting white Euro jobs. Euros want freedom of expression and freedom of religion as long as women wear cleavage-bearing halters, crack-revealing jeans and pouty, ready-to-suck mouths. Veils are such a downer. God is to be taught only in the History Department, and conservatives are to be shipped back to Berlin for sensitivity training. Americans are to be publicly ridiculed, easily dismissed and aggressively obsessed over. Marriage is to be tolerated but winked at as quaint.

Well, our list could go on and on and perhaps you think I exaggerate, but you, dear lover of the museum of Europe, would be wrong. This is the cake-and-eat-it-too house of cards that is modern European society (excuse my mixed metaphors- I'm on a Heineken deadline- the hypocrisy extends in both directions), and it is on that canvas that Zadie Smith lays her first novel, delivered at the suicide-inducing-jealousy age of 24. What more can be said about the precocious one's first assault on the public domain? Let's try a few obvious questions for non-believers and disdainers of chick lit.

Is the hoopla just cuz she's young and hot? Only minorly, although indeed she is both of those things. She also has wit, craft, talent, knowledge and occasional wisdom. Not that those things necessarily mean a complete success, but to deny them is to call yourself a bitter, middle-aged, failed novelist, which may be good enough to get you in the back door of The Graduate, but you'll only be hanging with Zadie at all the best parties when you bend over to replace her butter knife.

If you threw out her age and sexy mouth, how would you rate the book? I'd applaud, with reservations. She has produced a work that tackles multiple time periods, cultures, subcultures, dialects, family relationships, BIG societal questions, and more. She is also very funny. She is also overly precious at times, and her insistence on providing the back history of every character (including one on page 398 of a 448 page book) bogs down the plot and suggests bravado on her part, or even formula. The end borders on miraculous magical realism, and she has no moral point of view. That vacuum leads one to believe that she's one of those Berkeley relativists, never condemning and always offering explanations and justifications for characters' behavior, however reprehensible.

Did you enjoy it? Yes, I did, but I would have taken out close to 100 pages, and it would have been a better book, because I am the undiscovered Max Perkins of my generation.

Will you read another book by Ms. Smith? Yes, but not until I drag several people down to the new Indian restaurant for another round of tandoori and pilsner. A man needs motivation, after all, which should come via your generous offer to pay for my insight. I'd prefer a table by the window.

Italian Whine
After listening to Tuna whine for months about his inability to post, all we've gotten is a dinghy. A dinghy. Stick your head between your knees and beg your ass for forgiveness. A fucking dinghy.