Books

I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.

Guess what? You’re not normal.

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You're not normal, Seattle, WA

Not a bad day at all today. Woke up at about 8am, looked outside, and realized that we were in for a gorgeous spring day — mostly clear skies, bright sun, and just a hint of breeze. Perfect for going out wandering…so wander I did.

I started by heading up the hill and heading down Broadway, keeping an eye out for more stickers to add to my sticker graffiti collection on Flickr. I found a ton of stuff to add — Broadway being something of a center point for much of the city’s “freak” population, it’s got a wide collection of graffiti (stickered and otherwise) to choose from. While I found a lot of good stuff, I think my favorite from the day was this one Chickens ate my Baby Sticker Graffiti, Broadway, Seattle, WA — a ‘dollar bill’ emblazoned with the text, “Yo, chickens ate my baby!!!” Other favorites include a plea to boycott certain Safeway employees, a reason for the stickers and these teapots.

A couple weeks ago, Prairie and I noticed that a gorgeous old church on Broadway right across from the Seattle Central Community College was due to be demolished. This was kind of a bummer to find out — while neither of us had ever gone there, it was a nice building, and it was a shame to see that it was to be torn down rather than renovated. When I passed it today, the work crews were in the midst of the demolition process. I’ve got to admit — while I hate to see the building go, it was kind of neat to get to watch some of the work (must be my inner six year old).

I managed to find a couple conversations as I continued down the street, too. First was a gent who I saw debarking from a bus wearing a khaki Sport Kilt, which led to a conversation about kilts and cameras that lasted for a couple blocks. Later on, one of the many street kids that prowl Broadway for spare change asked me about the kilt, and I ended up chatting with her and a friend of hers for a few minutes — Leah and Shy were their names, I think, though I could easily be wrong about that, as I’m absolutely horrid with names.

Bailey/Coy Books, one of the bookshops along Broadway, always has a sign out front Bailey/Coy Books, Broadway, Seattle, WA with the first line from a book. If you know the book that they’re quoting from, you get 20% off — and today, for the first time, I was actually able to identify the quote! Determined not to let this opportunity go to waste I headed in and picked up The System of the World, the last book in Neal Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle, which I’d been wanting to get since it came out last year. I’ll get around to reading it as soon as I’m done re-reading the Harry Potter series, which I decided to do after Prairie and I had a “Harry Potter Weekend” a couple weekends ago and watched all three films over the course of the weekend.

Once I hit the end of Broadway, I decided to continue on and head up to Volunteer Park, which I’ve never wandered through on a “normal” day (I usually end up there for the Pride Day festivities). After a wander around I started heading back out when I was called over by a small group of kids hanging out at the amphitheatre. “We’re having a parade,” they said, “come and join us!” I wasn’t entirely sure about joining in a parade, but I headed over to chat and see what was going on.

Pre-parade gathering, Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA As it turns out, this is something they’ve been doing for the past few weeks, and intend to keep doing — get a bunch of friends together, dress up, find some noisemakers, and go wandering around Capitol Hill in their own little festive parade. Why? Why not? “Everybody gets out to march in protest, pissing and moaning about things — but nobody ever just celebrates a good day,” said the guy who seemed to be more or less in charge. “It’s a warm spring day, we’re here, nobody’s dropping bombs on us…why not have some fun?”

Seemed like good enough rationale to me, so I decided to wander along with them as photographer (not generally being one for random prancing, hootin’ and hollerin’, but still a great supporter or random silliness and fun). After a few more people showed up, it was declared time to go — and we were off.

Join the Parade! Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA This little motley group of assorted oddballs (and yes, I most definitely include myself in that) headed up and out of Volunteer Park, down 15th Avenue to John St., down John to Broadway, and up and then back down Broadway, prancing, dancing, twirling, shouting, chanting, singing, banging on gongs, bowls, and other noisemakers the entire way. “We’re having a parade! Join the parade!” they shouted at passers by and into windows of stores and open doors of shops. Some people weren’t quite sure what to make of the spectacle, but overall, I saw lots of amusement on the faces of the people we passed — they might not want to join in (though a few did eventually), but the sheer absurdity of the event was enough to bring a smile to quite a few people.

And in the end, what more excuse do you need to do something silly?

Once the group made it to SCCC they camped out on the lawn for a few moments to decide where to go next, and I took my leave of them. By this point I’d been out wandering around for about five hours, and it was time to head home and rest for a bit. I came home, napped for about an hour, then after a quick chat with Prairie before she headed out to a night at the opera (Central Washington University just got a new music building, and this was their inaugural performance), showered and headed up to the Vogue for a night of bouncing.

Bouncing accomplished, I’m home again, and now that this mini-opus is done, it’s long past bedtime for Bonzo.

iTunes “Power in the Blood (Acoustic)” by Alabama 3 from the album Acoustic Power: Underground Acoustic Sessions From the Steam Room (2003, 2:31).

The Last Unicorn

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I have no idea what the status of this is, how close to completion it may or may not be, or whether it will actually ever see the light of day — but there’s a live action version of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (previously produced in animated form) in production.

In theory, this could be a very good thing — though I must admit, I’m a little more excited about the live-action version of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — apparently the first in a planned seven-film series covering the entire set of books, with special effects by the crew of Weta (you might have heard of them — they did the effects for a little series called The Lord of the Rings). Apple has a short look at Weta’s work on the film and another on director Andrew Adamson.

iTunes “I Love Saturday” by Erasure from the album I Say I Say I Say (1994, 4:02).

Hunter S. Thompson

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Seeing all the many varied reports of Hunter S. Thompson‘s unfortunate demise reminds me that I’ve actually never read any of his work.

I’m a big fan of the Terry Gilliam/Johnny Depp film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I also have a great 3 of the book. I even used to have a hardbound copy of Fear and Loathing — unfortunately, the only times I opened it were during one ill-considered period where it was a convenient (and seemingly appropriate) place to hide the sheet of acid I was in the process of selling. I may still have the book buried somewhere in my boxes, but I’m not entirely sure.

So, then, a question for those more familiar with Thompson’s work than I am: while Fear and Loathing seems to be practically the only book that ever gets mentioned when eulogizing Thompson, I’m sure he wrote more than that one tome. Any recommendations? Should I pick Fear and Loathing up (or dig through my boxes to see if I can find it), or are there other books that I should search out instead/in addition to that one?

iTunes “Say Hello” by Anderson, Laurie from the album United States Live (1984, 5:01).

Hitchiker’s Trailer

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Amazon has the full trailer for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on their home page right now. It’s Flash-based and kind of small, but at least it’s there.

So far, things look promising.

Update: Waxy has a QT version.

I found this much higher-quality Quicktime trailer, that seems to be a copy of the internal workprint with time signatures and “Do Not Duplicate” warning. Oh, well!

iTunes “Shoot That Laserbeam (Re-Recorded)” by Army of Lovers from the album Army of Lovers (1991, 4:22).

Reason interview with Neal Stephenson

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There’s a great interview with Neal Stephenson at Reason right now. Every time I read something by Neal, whether a book or an interview, it amazes me how unassumingly intelligent this man is.

My favorite question and answer from the interview:

Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy’s recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms—social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?

Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world’s richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse.” If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

I have got to pick up the last book in the Baroque Cycle soon.

iTunes “Thunder Kiss ’65 (The Remix That Wouldn’t Die)” by White Zombie from the album Nightcrawlers: The K.M.F.D.M. Remixes (1992, 6:10).

Consequences of an Overactive Imagination

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I don’t think I’ll ever cease to be amazed at how strongly the mind can react to things — and which things it chooses to react to.

I’ve always had an extremely active imagination, a quality which has both good and bad points. Growing up, I often retreated into my own little fantasy worlds instead of dealing with the real world around me, and that’s something that has never entirely ceased. While I’ve long since ceased hiding within myself as an escape from things I didn’t want to deal with or as a defense mechanism, I can’t say — and really, I wouldn’t want to — that I’ve ever ceased letting my imagination run away with me from time to time.

Walking down a hallway, someone might notice a small twitch of my hands from time to time, though it’s most likely they wouldn’t. Just a small gesture, perhaps just stretching my wrists a bit, nothing really worth paying attention to. Of course, that’s only because they can’t see the blast of power I just released careening down the hall, rushing past them, sweeping papers and debris in its wake as it crashes into the locked gate at the end, bursting it open with a horrendous shriek of tearing metal as the hinges shatter and fall to pieces.

People passing me on the streets at night never know of the creatures stalking them. Wingless batlike creatures the size of large dogs, walking on their forelegs, hind legs slung up and over their shoulders and terminating in wicked-looking claws. Needle-sharp teeth beneath an eyeless face, the cries of their sonar echoing from building to building as the pack converges on another unlucky derelict passed out in an alleyway. Curious how few rats this section of the city has.

Okay, perhaps it’s a little juvenile. Silly daydreams built on many years of fantasy and science-fiction novels. That doesn’t make these worlds any less fun to play in from time to time, however.

When I was younger, my fertile imagination would often get the better of me. Certain television shows would keep me up for nights. The Incredible Hulk — or the “crumbly hawk”, as I deemed him — was an especially potent terror for a time. I didn’t see Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller‘ video until long after it was released when I was only nine years old, and even into my early teen years, horror movies were a rarity.

I once tried to watch the sci-fi horror movie Lifeforce during one of HBO’s promotional free weekends after our family got cable, because of the naked lady at the beginning — but all puberty-driven fantasies were driven violently out of my head when she sucked the very life out of some poor hapless man, turning him into a horrible desiccated corpse before my very eyes, and I don’t think I slept well for a month afterwards.

Even the trailer for Gremlins was enough to give me nightmares when I saw it, and I never saw the movie in the theaters. I read the novelization to try to get an idea of how the movie was, and oh what a mistake that was. At one point in the story, the gremlin Stripe escapes from being studied by a teacher in the school’s science lab. While in the movie Stripe simply jabs the teacher with a single hypodermic needle, the book described seven or eight needles, maybe more, being stuck into the teacher’s face. It was literally years before I got the nerve to watch the movie (and then was somewhat chagrined to see how tame it was compared to the images I’d had seared into my brain when I read the book).

As I grew and began to be better able to separate the fantastical worlds inside my head from the real world around me, I started to develop a fondness for some of the more disturbing images that I hadn’t been able to cope with as a child. I started watching all the horror movies I’d heard about for years, but never been able to watch. Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and other similar authors started appearing on my bookshelves. The Alien movies introduced me to the artwork of H.R. Giger. Discovering David Cronenberg‘s films led me to Naked Lunch, and then to the literary work of William S. Burroughs. My musical tastes, while never having been particularly mainstream, started skewing more towards the gothic and industrial genres. Black soon became the dominant color in my wardrobe.

Finally being able to explore and embrace this darker imagery helped me a lot through my teen years, and still does today. While I wasn’t always the happiest teenager around — I had more than my fair share of whiny, angsty moments — I never ended up succumbing to the depression that so many other people seem to. I’ve never been suicidal (in fact, quite the opposite, as I’m somewhat frightened of death, and have never found myself in a situation where suicide seemed like an even remotely good idea), and while there were certainly some stumbling blocks over the years, I think I’ve ended up becoming a fairly well-rounded and well-grounded adult (oh, lord, did I just admit that I’m an adult?).

I have my ups and downs, same as anyone else, of course, but on the whole, I’m a fairly chipper and easygoing guy (chipper…who talks like this?). That “dark side” is still there, of course, manifesting itself primarily through my tastes in music, movies, and an often bitterly bleak sense of humor, but rather than dominating my personality, it’s just another aspect — and, importantly, one not incompatible with a love of childlike (and sometimes childish) silliness (a double feature of Hellraiser and The Muppet Movie isn’t something I’d find particularly unusual, for instance).

For all that, though, there are times when my imagination can still play games with me. What it latches onto now, though, aren’t the fantastical elements of horror movies. I can watch Freddy suck Johnny Depp down into his bed in a geyser of blood, watch Pinhead flay the flesh off of Frank’s recently resurrected body, or watch Jason skewer horny teenager after horny teenager without batting an eye — heck, I enjoy ever last little blood-soaked minute of it, and sleep soundly as soon as the movie is finished.

What gets me now are the real possibilities — and, more specifically, the really realistic situations, as redundant as that might sound. Kill Bill, for all the hype it got over its extreme amounts of blood and gore, didn’t bug me simply because it was so ridiculously over the top (in a good way) that I didn’t feel real. It may have been live action with real flesh and blood actors, but it felt like a comic book, and so my brain quite happily filed it away with all the rest of the blood and gore from all those silly horror movies.

It’s when it’s something that could conceivably really happen that I get the willies.

Pulp Fiction is a great film, and The Rock, while certainly not great, is a lot of fun. Those two films have one very important element in common, though: an adrenaline shot straight to the heart. I can’t watch either movie without cringing and turning away as the needle plunges into the character’s chest and into their heart — heck, I can’t even write this paragraph out without rubbing my own chest due to the sympathy pain I feel.

Last week Prairie and I watched Deliverance, which I’d never seen before. Just after the disastrous run through the rapids as the boats break apart and the men go tumbling over rocks and down the river, Burt Reynolds pulls himself up and out of the water onto a rock, revealing the compound fracture sending his legbone tearing through skin and muscle and jutting out the side. “Oh, God,” I said — if it was even formed into actual words — and immediately curled into a ball on my side, rubbing my calf as my oh-so-eager-to-oblige imagination sent spasms from my own suddenly shattered body up my leg.

Tonight — because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment — Misery was the movie of choice. Okay, I knew the hobbling was coming. Even without having read the book or seen the movie before (that I can remember, at least), that scene is so much a part of pop culture that it would be nearly impossible to really be taken by surprise when it comes up. That certainly didn’t make it any easier to watch, however. The sickening crunch of splintering bone as the sledgehammer pulverizes his ankle, and at thirty-one years of age, I’m curled in a ball on my bed.

Honestly, in some ways it’s as funny as it is exasperating. I can laugh at the absurdity of having such a strong reaction to these things even as I’m still trying to drive the residual twinges out of my ankles. I wouldn’t trade my imagination away for anything…but I’ll freely admit that there are times when I wish I could just turn it down a few notches.

Book of Blogs II

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Earlier this month, I linked to a project by Tvindy to collect and anthologize some of the better weblog posts by a number of contributing authors. I really liked the idea, and nominated a few entries for potential inclusion.

Tvindy’s hoping for a little more assistance in culling worthwhile posts, preferably posts chosen by regular readers of the participating weblogs, rather than solely author-nominated work.

As readers, are there any posts that stand out in your mind as particularly noteworthy, for whatever reason? They don’t have to be long, or serious, or anything in particular aside from standing out in one way or another. If so, toss ’em in the comments here — if you don’t want to dig through the archives yourself, just throw up whatever details you can remember, and I’ll track it down.

Not only will this help the project, but I’d be interested to see what — if anything — comes out of this.

iTunes “Conga Fury” by Juno Reactor from the album Bible of Dreams (1997, 8:06).

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: July 16th, 2005

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It’s official, folks: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will be released July 16th, 2005.

Retail price is \$29.99, but pre-ordering through Amazon currently gets you 40% off, just \$17.99! C’mon, click the links and send a penny or two my way, you know you want to! ;)

Mary Grand Pre will be illustrating the cover again, as she has for all prior books. It’s also apparently “a bit shorter” than Order of the Phoenix.

Year Six is on its way…

(via The Leaky Cauldron)

Quick Review: ‘Salem’s Lot

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Part of Prairie’s scheme to familiarize me with Stephen King’s work has included renting some of the many adaptations of his work to film. Quality varies, of course, but when they’re good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, it’s generally fun to look at the differences between the original story and the filmed version and see what went wrong.

This past weekend, we went with a recent TV miniseries version of ‘Salem’s Lot.

It started out rather promising, with a strong cast (Rob Lowe as Ben Mears, Donald Sutherland as Richard Straker, Rutger Hauer as Kurt Barlowe, and James Cromwell as Father Callahan), and the first half of the show was overall fairly well done — while there were definite alterations made, due both to moving the story to the small screen and updating it for a modern setting, most of them weren’t very troubling, and the tone of the film was dead on.

There were two definite “What??” moments in the first half, though. The film opened with a scene (Ben attacking Father Calahan and hospitalizing both of them after a fall out of a second-story window) that was not anywhere in the book, and had Prairie and I both quite confused, as it didn’t seem to make any sense for either of the characters — though we decided to give the film the benefit of the doubt, and see where things led, especially when the next few scenes covering Ben’s arrival in the town were handled quite well. Also, the doctor was combined with another character in the book, which ended up drastically changing his character for the worse. That bothered both of us, as he was one of the nicer characters in the book.

Other changes were more acceptable, though — various characters being combined, slight tweaks here and there — and most of what we noticed were differences in interpretation. For instance, we had each pictured Straker as far more slick and smooth, and very politely menacing, while Sutherland played him a little more wild. Still, the feel of the book was captured quite well, so even with the slight changes, things seemed to be going fairly well.

Then we hit the second half, and things suddenly starting going downhill. Mark, the boy hero of the book who survives in large part due to his childhood innocence and open acceptance of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night, is made far more cynical and something of a troublemaker, robbing his character of many of the qualities that allowed him to survive through the book. The changes made to the doctor’s character continued to eat away at our perception of him, making him far less sympathetic.

But the real crimes were in the sudden and drastic deviations from the plot of the book as the movie drew to a close. Ben’s encounter with Hubie Marsten in the old Marsten house is substantially changed, and ends up being nowhere near as creepy or effective as in the book. Susan’s death, one of the big moments for Ben in his struggle to deal with the situation, doesn’t happen when it should, instead being pushed into an absolutely ludicrously silly final confrontation near the end of the movie. Father Callahan goes from being a very interesting and ultimately tragic figure to being little more than evil and rather dumb. The vampire “dusting” effects are just silly — surely they could have found another way to distinguish their vampire deaths from those of other shows without having the vamps suddenly levitate towards the ceiling and explode into glitter. And Barlowe’s final moments are just laughable.

In the end, it was one of the more disappointing adaptations I’ve seen, simply because it seemed to start so well — to have it take such a drastic turn for the worse was more frustrating than if had simply been bad through and through from the start.

iTunes “Kiss, The” by Cure, The from the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987, 6:14).