Different Strokes

An interesting article was recently posted on Rolling Stone's web site. Apparently, Larry Wachowski, one-half of Hollywood's Wachowski Brothers, goes above and beyond in pursuit of an alternate lifestyle. But since he's certainly got the bucks to afford it, and if nobody gets hurt, good for him. Plus, he was behind one of my favorite movies, so he gets a little extra credit in my book.

Nevertheless, it's certainly a lurid tale. Enjoy!

Fuck the Bullshit It's Time to Throw Down

The Smoking Gun has published a very intriguing takedown of A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s best-selling drug abuse diary and recent Oprah’s Book Club selection. It’s a lengthy, exhaustive critique, but here’s the gist: Frey is full of shit.

The Associated Press (via ABC) weighs in thusly, but Gawker's two cents are more succinct: "… It’s clear that Frey has taken some serious dramatic liberties. And that might not be such a big deal if he hadn’t consistently, appearance after appearance, insisted that all the events — even the little details — in the book are 100% true. Hell, he even brought Oprah to tears. And if you make Oprah cry under false pretenses, well, we just can’t stand by that."

No offense to Oprah or her fan base, but it probably doesn’t take all that much to move a bunch of sheltered suburban soccer moms to tears.

Now, from a purely technical point, Pieces is an annoying piece of crap. Frey has an extremely irritating writing style that features random capitalization of certain Words and Nouns which gives his Prose a pompous, Teutonic air that looks ugly on the page and somewhat hampers the readability of same:

"My closest friend is some kind of Mobster. My Roommate is a Federal Judge. My other friends are Crackheads and Drunks. I sort of have a Girlfriend, and she's a Crackhead and a Pillpopper and she used to be a prostitute...”

He doesn’t use quotation marks, either, a stylistic tic that draws attention to itself (“Look at me and my literary affectations!”) while, yes, greatly hampering his writing’s readability. And he uses the word fuck and its various permutations throughout the book because, you know, he’s just that much of a tough guy hardcore bad-ass motherfucker (the fact that Frey feels the need to constantly reinforce his image of tough guy rebel indicates that he probably isn’t nearly the hardcase he thinks he is and deep down, he knows it).

Indeed, most if not all of the press releases, articles, reviews and interviews that accompanied the publication of A Million Little Pieces boasted plenty of self-aggrandizing macho posturing on the part of Frey in which he proclaimed not only his greatness as an author, but also his Fury (sic), his raw intensity, his in-your-face realness, his utter bad-assedness, man, and if you can’t handle it, well then, fuck you, you sissy motherfucker. He has the acronym FTBSITTTD tattooed on his arm; it stands for “Fuck the Bullshit, It’s Time to Throw Down.” You know Frey’s straight up for reals now – he’s got tattoos, yo.

Frey is hardly the first self-obsessed hack to hit the jackpot with a self-consciously “dark” and “harrowing” memoir (see also: Elizabeth Wurtzel). What Frey actually is, however, is a pampered little rich kid who couldn’t handle his drugs in the long run, so he ended up scribbling out a 382-page love letter to himself about the whole tedious thing, which in the end kind of makes him the sort of sniveling pussy-ass writer he claims to despise.

Via his offical web site, Frey responds: "So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response."

I guess that settles it, then. Suck on that, bitches!

That's Not a Knife

Saw Wolf Creek last weekend -- in an honest-to-God movie theater. Happily, the crowd was well behaved. As for the movie, it was a decent, gritty horror flick, no more, no less. It had a resolutely downbeat ending, which I liked because it fit the tone of the movie. The two female leads were cute as buttons, which made the events of the film all the more disturbing. John Jarrat as Mick was really good. But back to the audience: I saw a mom and dad bringing two small kids into this rated R movie full of bloody violence and implied sexual assault. Way to go there, Ward and June.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore Redux

Rationality wins over willful ignorance and religious fanaticism, this time in Pennsylvania.

Board Rescinds "Intelligent Design" Policy

Faking It

While checking out some of my regular web haunts one fine November morning, I stumbled upon a unique offer on Sam Sugar's very cool (but NSFW) blog:

If you run a blog on any topic, and it's been going a couple of months, email me your URL, name, and address, and I'll send you a free copy of Craig's first book The Contortionist's Handbook. You don't have to promise to write about it or, if you do, say anything other than what you feel. I think the quality of his writing will speak for itself. I just want you to read the book.

I'm a sucker for free stuff, and I met the criteria, so I e-mailed my info and a few weeks later, an autographed copy of Craig Clevenger's novel The Contortionist's Handbook turned up in the post. As I was working my way through a few other books, the novel sat at the bottom of the "to read" pile for a while, but I finally got around to reading it.

The book tells the story of John Vincent, a guy with a talent for forging documents who has spent much time in various juvenile detention halls, prisons and psych wards. Plagued by an extra finger on his left hand that brings him unwanted attention and, more seriously, painful headaches ("godsplitters") that he self-medicates with ever-higher doses of whatever narcotics he can procure, Vincent ends up in a mental hospital being questioned by a shrink who thinks the godsplitters are all in his head (get it?).

Vincent is a likable antihero and Clevenger's book is a good, compelling tale. His prose is well crafted and highly readable, for lack of a better word. There are a few self-consciously "writerly" passages scattered throughout the book, but that's to be expected in a debut novel. Regardless, I always like stories with a strong "how-to" component, and Contortionist's Handbook features passages that describe the tricks of Vincent's trade. It's cool to learn insider stuff, and as presented in the novel, it's totally believable. Whether Clevenger painstakingly researched how to forge birth certificates and passports or just made it all up is beside the point -- it's believably written.

I'd like to read more of Clevenger's work. Especially if Sam Sugar wants to send me more free books.

Auld Lang Syne

All told, 2005 was a pretty shitty year for me. I won't bore you with the details. I hope that 2006 brings us all a more enjoyable 365 days.

Happy Birthday, Jesus!

Christmas, Christmas time is here. Time for joy and time for cheer. I still want a hula hoop.

Believe it or not, I do enjoy the holiday season, if only for the gifts, time off from work and oh yeah, the family bonding shit. Thankfully, frontline warriors like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson were able to save Christmas 2005 from all those godless pinko commie faggot pro-choice ACLU feminazis out to destroy America. Every time you say "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas," an angel dies in heaven. It's true.

So, paraphrasing the great theological scholar Krusty the Clown, have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a kwazy Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet and a solemn, dignified Ramadan.

Pretty Pictures

I never cared for Mike Allred's writing. I find it a little too self-consciously faux retro hipster smug and cute for its own good, like he's more concerned about letting the reader know how hip and cool he is as opposed to telling a coherent story. But the boy has a pleasing art style:


Better still, Allred isn't scripting this new book.

Also, the Marvel Mangaverse stuff doesn't interest me in the slightest, but check out the Black Cat's new and improved rack. Spidey's wasting his time with Mary Jane.

Too bad her face is drawn just like that little fucker from Elfquest (which -- surprise! -- I also loathe).

The War on Xmas

Slate redeems itself after the puppy-fucking cartoon earlier this week with the latest installment of Christopher Hitchens's "Fighting Words" column, wherein Hitchen's weighs in on the so-called "War on Christmas."

The following paragraph is especially incendiary:

"Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether."

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

This just in:

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A federal judge has ruled "intelligent design" cannot be taught in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district.

'Tis the Season

...for bestiality over at Slate. Couldn't the cartoonist have chosen a less, er, suggestive angle?

Bush to Iraq: "Whoops. My bad."

This just in:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Wednesaday accepted responsibility for the decision to go to war against Iraq based on faulty intelligence.

“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” the president told The Woodrow Wilson Center on the eve of elections to establish Iraq’s first permanent, democratically elected government. “And I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that.”

Easy on the Lip Gloss, Danni

Danni wins Survivor.

Danni and Stephanie were plenty cute and sexy when they were on the island -- sweaty, dirty and no access to cosmetics. On the big reunion special, they both looked like truck stop hookers, sad to say.

A good, solid season overall. Not the best ever, but far from the worst. Honestly, they're all starting to blur together for me. I should spend my time a little more wisely, but who am I kidding? I'll watch the next season.

It Was 25 Years Ago Today

...that John Lennon was murdered, of course.

I remember seeing the front page of the Evansville Courier on Dec. 9. I wasn't a Beatles fan at that point, but I still understood the magnitude of his life and work. At the time, I obsessively listened to Casey Kasem's Top 40 countdown every Sunday morning and Lennon's "Starting Over" had peaked and was falling off the singles chart, but after his death, it went #1, sadly and literally with a bullet.

One wonders what might have happened had Lennon survived the shooting or even better, not been shot at all. Maybe Lennon was lucky, in a perverse way -- he never had to slide into middle aged mediocrity and irrelevance like all the other '60s artists.

Sucking in the '70s

It's a great time to be a thirtysomething comics nerd with a little disposable income. Marvel Comics has been putting out their "Essential" series for several years now, and DC recently launched the "Showcase" series. What both lines do is cram 20-30 back issues of various characters into one massive volume. The stories are all printed in B&W on pretty cheap paper, but as mentioned, you get 20 to 30 back issues of comic titles that ceased publication during the Ford administration, all for around $17.

Marvel has released several volumes of their A-list properties (Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers) but they've also released books featuring characters that can charitably be described as "also-rans." And for some perverse reason, I often find these books to be the most intriguing and gratifying. These are the comics I remember from my early childhood; titles whose basic premises, and sometimes their names alone, were guaranteed to pique the interest of any red-blooded 6-year-old: Ghost Rider, Killraven, Werewolf by Night, the Defenders.

If you ask the 2005 me if the books hold up, the answer is an emphatic CHRIST, no -- beside the fact that these books are all fairly dated, these titles rarely attracted Marvel's top creative talents -- you'll find plenty of vile Sal Buscema and Vince Colletta hackwork scattered throughout various Essential titles -- and when name professionals or even solid craftsmen were involved with the art, a palpable sense of phoning it in pervades many of the stories. (Mike Ploog's work on Werewolf was pretty distinctive.)

Yet there's just some kind of indescribable crazy funnybook mojo at work in those very same pages and I just can't get enough. I freely admit that the nostalgia factor serves to tint these books in a pleasant rose-colored glow, but these books weren't self-consciously edgy and dark like so much of the shit that's published these days. There's a purity there that just can't be faked. I'm hoping that Marvel sees fit to release Essentials editions devoted to Jungle Action, Deathlok and Warlock on the near future. Master of King Fu would be super ultra mega kick-ass, but I beleive that the rights to Fu Manchu et al would preclude that.

On a related note, DC's Showcase line just published a Jonah Hex collection that's real purty, and the level of professionalism involved is at a higher level than in, say, The Essential Power Man. There's even some Doug Wildey art.

I know what I'm axing Santa for this year.

Better Than Nothing

Comedy Central to Show Chappelle Sketches

Damn skippy. Chappelle's Show is/was the funniest sketch comedy series since The Kids in the Hall. Entirely different sensibilities between the shows, obviously, but both could be brilliant at times.

Nice Package

Picked up the Criterion release of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. As always, the folks at Criterion have gone above and beyond the call of duty with the DVDs, but this version even contains the source novel by Walter Tevis. Impressive.

By the way, I love the design used on the cover of this Criterion release:

I may have to rent it from Wild & Woolly for shits and giggles.

Auf Wiedersehen, Asshole

Even though I don’t post about it too much these days, I still watch Survivor. And last night’s episode was one of the most satisfying I’ve seen in a while. The loud-mouthed, bullying halfwit Judd was voted off the island.

There have been dozens of jackasses on Survivor and while I’m unsure if Judd was the "Biggest Survivor Jackass Ever," he’s definitely Top 5. Judd was one of those contestants who likes to climb up on his high horse and complain that other players are the lyingest liars who ever lied, while characterizing himself as constitutionally incapable of uttering a falsehood himself. Naturally, there were frequent instances shown on TV wherein Judd did in fact, fib his fat ass off. It’s as if he honestly (heh) believed that the cameras weren’t there or something.

During his graceful and classy exit, he called the remaining contestants “scumbags,” which was pretty much to be expected. But then, that’s why I watch reality TV: seeing people at their worst always makes for compelling viewing.

Hey, I'm an Idiot

...but you knew that all ready.

I have the "moderate comments" tag selected on this thing and I haven't checked it for a week. Heh heh. I thought I was gonna have to start posting deliberately inflammatory stuff (e.g., AIDS is God's wrath upon the homosexuals, the Holocaust is a lie perpetuated by the Jew-run media, George W. Bush is a great president) just to get a rise out of you.

Carry on.

Best Band Name Ever

I haven't heard a single note of their music, but I all ready love the Test Icicles. Sound clips are available on their web site, but I'm afraid to listen, in case they stink.