Every once in awhile, I'll seek out these types of headlines. This one, as recently as last year, asked, Is the Pixar Brand Failing?
The article - written in the months before Up was released - goes on to quote a lot of stuff about metrics and how inflation is artificially raising the purported box office tallies. Specifically, it targets Wall-E and Ratatouille as indicative of this supposed "failing". But Wall-E cost $180M to make and domestically made $224M - a nice profit. Worldwide it made $533M. And when I look at the worldwide box office for Ratatouille ... look, I just don't understand how a movie that makes over half a billion dollars can be seen as a flop/bomb/failure.
The article quotes a New York Times story that stated, "Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for Up as a reason." And once again, this happens because short-sighted bean counters didn't see the potential. Up ended up making nearly $300M domestically and $727M globally, making it the studio's second biggest hit after Finding Nemo. It went on to be the second animated film ever nominated for Best Picture. Pixar's brand is definitely failing.
This weekend, Toy Story 3 garnered $109 million dollars. In literally four days. It's Pixar's biggest opening weekend ever, shooting past that of The Incredibles at $70,467,623. It becomes the eleventh Pixar film - out of eleven - to open at #1 at the box office. No Pixar film has made less than $160M, and the film that did that was A Bug's Life, which had the second-lowest budget of any Pixar feature and was released in 1998, when $160M was still considered a staggering blockbuster. Every Pixar film has been a critical and commercial success. Even its weakest film, Cars, received generally positive reviews, and has generated the studio's biggest merchandising revenue stream - as of last year, over $3M in merch alone. There's a reason why Cars 2 is currently in production.
I'm not sure where the almost rabid desire to see Pixar fail comes from. Professional jealousy? Good old schadenfreude? There was a big to-do this week about "the only two reviewers who hate Toy Story 3," which has received almost universal praise elsewhere. The "reviewers" - I'd hate to call them critics and demean the profession - didn't seem to have really seen the movie. One of them states boldly that, because real branded toys are used in the film, it's not a movie, it's an advertisement. The other one doesn't really discuss the film at all, focusing more on the MPAA rating and the budget.
So it seems that the people who are determined to see this studio take one in the chin are looking at the metrics, the budgets, the ratings, the inflation, the business. In all this, people seem to forget what drives people to Pixar movies: a good story that happens to be unique and universal at the same time. Good writing, good directing, good acting. That's it. That's all. It's simple and it's stupid, but that's the formula. Make a good movie and people will come see it. Maybe it doesn't work out that way for every film - a lot of deserving movies fail and a lot of crap succeeds - but it works for Pixar, and it keeps working for them.
$109 million in a single weekend. Is Pixar's brand failing? What do you think?
Monday, June 21, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Glisk
When I was sixteen, I had what I thought was the most brilliant idea of my entire life. I was going to somehow merge the two overriding elements of my existence - being a homosexual and being a Stephen King fan - into one. I would call my group GLISK (an acronym I went giddy for because I was 1. a huge nerd and 2. a huge gay) and it would be short for Gays & Lesbians Into Stephen King. This was going to be massive, and I'd find other gay fans of King, and we'd hang out and talk about how we all had crushes on Steve Kemp in Cujo, despite the fact that he was pretty much a tool. A sexy, sexy tool.
A few things prevented Glisk (the acronym has now become a regular word due to my familiarity with it, like Epcot) from happening. (1) I'm not really good with organizing, and (2) a lot of gay people think Stephen King is homophobic.
There are a lot of reasons for this, I think. There's a scene in It where a gay guy is brutalized and murdered, and cries of homophobia following its publication were rampant. King explained the scene saying that it was pretty much - no pun intended - straight reporting. An actual gay murder happened in Bangor, and King used it in the book as a way to tie into It's targeting of the fringier members of society. Reading the chapter carefully, you'll actually find a lot of pro-gay sentiment in it, including some thoughts from a straight bar owner who sort of accidentally opens a gay bar and is relieved to find that his clientele "has found a way of getting along that straight men haven't."
In The Stand, a bisexual woman kills herself ... but it's a heroic death. In "Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption," there's a lot of gay rape, but King is careful to mention that there are other, non-rapey relationships that go on in prison that work just as well as straight ones. After King's daughter came out, there was a huge uptick in gay supporting characters, including heroic ones in Insomnia and Cell.
Yesterday, I picked up 'Salem's Lot for the first time in a few years because I need to do a review for an upcoming book. In the first hundred pages, I ran across a number of epithets - fag, queer, sissy, etc. But what struck me weren't the words so much as the sentiment behind them. The characters in 'Salem's Lot are using hurtful words, but people seem to accept "gay" as a fact rather than something gross or aberrant. At one point, one blue-collar worker remarks to another that Barlow & Straker, the new people in town, "are probably queer for each other. Going to redecorate the house and make it look nice. Good for business." And that's it. And that's interesting. They go immediately from the concept that these guys are probably gay to their good business sense. And these aren't high-education people, but grunting moving dudes. Later on, someone mentions he buys his used books from "a sissy fella" a few towns over. It's mentioned, sure, but there's no revulsion or even pause with it. It's like saying he buys his books from an Irish guy.
Now, look. Maybe I'm being overly apologetic. There is a scene in It where the mere suggestion of homosexuality drives someone insane. But I honestly think this is a character-by-character basis. The same character is a racist, half-nuts bully who also poisons a dog and shoots his father, sort of susceptible to going full-on psycho.
I've long thought about writing a book on the subject, or a long essay, but the truth is, it's a really narrow subject. I'm not sure anything like this would sell, or even be interesting to any section of the population. But still, I find it interesting. So maybe I'll write it sometime anyway. Thoughts?
A few things prevented Glisk (the acronym has now become a regular word due to my familiarity with it, like Epcot) from happening. (1) I'm not really good with organizing, and (2) a lot of gay people think Stephen King is homophobic.
There are a lot of reasons for this, I think. There's a scene in It where a gay guy is brutalized and murdered, and cries of homophobia following its publication were rampant. King explained the scene saying that it was pretty much - no pun intended - straight reporting. An actual gay murder happened in Bangor, and King used it in the book as a way to tie into It's targeting of the fringier members of society. Reading the chapter carefully, you'll actually find a lot of pro-gay sentiment in it, including some thoughts from a straight bar owner who sort of accidentally opens a gay bar and is relieved to find that his clientele "has found a way of getting along that straight men haven't."
In The Stand, a bisexual woman kills herself ... but it's a heroic death. In "Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption," there's a lot of gay rape, but King is careful to mention that there are other, non-rapey relationships that go on in prison that work just as well as straight ones. After King's daughter came out, there was a huge uptick in gay supporting characters, including heroic ones in Insomnia and Cell.
Yesterday, I picked up 'Salem's Lot for the first time in a few years because I need to do a review for an upcoming book. In the first hundred pages, I ran across a number of epithets - fag, queer, sissy, etc. But what struck me weren't the words so much as the sentiment behind them. The characters in 'Salem's Lot are using hurtful words, but people seem to accept "gay" as a fact rather than something gross or aberrant. At one point, one blue-collar worker remarks to another that Barlow & Straker, the new people in town, "are probably queer for each other. Going to redecorate the house and make it look nice. Good for business." And that's it. And that's interesting. They go immediately from the concept that these guys are probably gay to their good business sense. And these aren't high-education people, but grunting moving dudes. Later on, someone mentions he buys his used books from "a sissy fella" a few towns over. It's mentioned, sure, but there's no revulsion or even pause with it. It's like saying he buys his books from an Irish guy.
Now, look. Maybe I'm being overly apologetic. There is a scene in It where the mere suggestion of homosexuality drives someone insane. But I honestly think this is a character-by-character basis. The same character is a racist, half-nuts bully who also poisons a dog and shoots his father, sort of susceptible to going full-on psycho.
I've long thought about writing a book on the subject, or a long essay, but the truth is, it's a really narrow subject. I'm not sure anything like this would sell, or even be interesting to any section of the population. But still, I find it interesting. So maybe I'll write it sometime anyway. Thoughts?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sex In the City II
There's a reason why Sex In the City 2 is like Grease 2, but we'll get to that in a minute. The real shocker of Sex in the City 2 isn't that it's overlong and borderline atrocious, it's that it's leagues better than the first film. I'm not sure if this fact should shock or dismay, but mostly it just fills me with dull ambivalence.
The first question has to be: is the movie bad? The answer? I'm not sure. It's not good, that much is obvious. But there are good parts, and that's what's most infuriating.
No. No, wait, I take that back. Most infuriating is that Sex in the City 2 features, as its main character, an unlikable shrew of a woman with whom we are all supposed to relate. This shouldn't be hard, I think. I recall relating to her (mostly) on the TV show. Despite her expensive tastes, she seemed somehow earthy and interesting. A little self-involved, perhaps, but still a formidable main character with whom the audience's sympathies could easily lie.
In Sex In the City 2, Carrie is at turns shrill and unbearable, unreasonable and ridiculous. And she wears this one hat that could almost literally house a small, poor family. Her marriage problems almost border on existential, and in a better movie, that angle could have been played up. Every time she says she enjoys something, even slightly, her husband (Mr. Big) chooses to escalate those enjoyments to an unreasonable point. She likes a couch and he makes it his nest. She likes an old movie on TV, he installs a TV in their bedroom. She takes two days off from him to go write in her old apartment, he institutes it as a weekly occurrence. It's not that these aren't valid concerns a wife might have every right to complain about. Instead, she nags that they don't go out every single night, and eat take-out once in awhile. And she doesn't do it in a way that elicits any sort of sympathy, either: she's like a demanding, cartoon shrew.
The other women fare a little better. Miranda's new boss is a sexist (though the utter lack of any other women in her entire office seems suspect), Samantha's fighting off menopause, and Charlotte is finding out that motherhood is not all about baking cupcakes in vintage clothing. (Roger Ebert makes a note about that in his review; after some thought, I think Charlotte wearing a vintage dress making cupcakes actually fits for the character, trying to literally have it all at once.) These all seem like realistic, albeit heightened, problems - all of which are far, far more interesting than Carrie's. To be fair, though, a time-lapse video of plaster hardening would be far more interesting than Carrie's problems.
When, via some plot mechanations, the girls fly off to Abu Dhabi to "go someplace rich," things really start to skid off the rails. (1) New York City, for these women, IS someplace rich. There's lip service paid to the sagging economy, but it's one of those "show, don't tell" moments authors learn to avoid in, say, 5th grade Comp. (2) This is when the movie decides it has a Theme, and that Theme is Women Are Oppressed the World Over. It's not a bad theme, as themes go, and in a better movie with some smart handling, it can absolutely work. In this movie, womens' consciousness is awakened with the subtlety of a jackhammer on asphalt. During one otherwise okay moment where Our Girls sing "I Am Women" at karaoke, a number of Abu Dhabi women watching in the crowd seem to have a spiritual awakening. Oh wait, they seem to be thinking, those American women are right. I AM woman! It's pandering and insulting, not just to women, but all moviegoers.
(Oh, and speaking of insults to moviegoers: a cardinal rule in filmmaking is that you never, NEVER show clips of better movies in your crappy movie. It's why you don't see anyone watching Citizen Kane in Leprechaun 4. SITC2 has the audacity to not only show bits of It Happened One Night, but also rip off one of its central gags. Does it work? Eh, sort of. But mostly we're reminded that It Happened One Night won the Top 5 Oscars, and that we're still watching Sex In the City 2.)
Okay, so here's how this film is like Grease 2: smack dab in the middle of the movie is a scene that belongs in a better movie. Charlotte and Miranda are talking about motherhood. It's a scene they have to themselves. In it, they're bonding about why motherhood is harder than it seems to be, and why it's okay to admit it. The women in this scene seem real. They also seem like friends with a long, storied history. Better: the scene is well-written, with a silly confession drinking-game gag that fits in. The actors even seem to step up their game, knowing that they finally have something fun and interesting and real to work with. Then Samantha gets arrested for causing a boner and the film shrieks back into suck territory.
The main message I took away from this movie is that you can solve equal rights issues worldwide with (a) shaky puns, (b), a steady supply of haute couture, and (c) being over-privileged. I also learned that the best way to relax is by putting on your most expensive clothes and sitting sideways on an uncomfortable couch and flipping through a magazine so far away from your face that reading it is likely impossible. I am woman!
The first question has to be: is the movie bad? The answer? I'm not sure. It's not good, that much is obvious. But there are good parts, and that's what's most infuriating.
No. No, wait, I take that back. Most infuriating is that Sex in the City 2 features, as its main character, an unlikable shrew of a woman with whom we are all supposed to relate. This shouldn't be hard, I think. I recall relating to her (mostly) on the TV show. Despite her expensive tastes, she seemed somehow earthy and interesting. A little self-involved, perhaps, but still a formidable main character with whom the audience's sympathies could easily lie.
In Sex In the City 2, Carrie is at turns shrill and unbearable, unreasonable and ridiculous. And she wears this one hat that could almost literally house a small, poor family. Her marriage problems almost border on existential, and in a better movie, that angle could have been played up. Every time she says she enjoys something, even slightly, her husband (Mr. Big) chooses to escalate those enjoyments to an unreasonable point. She likes a couch and he makes it his nest. She likes an old movie on TV, he installs a TV in their bedroom. She takes two days off from him to go write in her old apartment, he institutes it as a weekly occurrence. It's not that these aren't valid concerns a wife might have every right to complain about. Instead, she nags that they don't go out every single night, and eat take-out once in awhile. And she doesn't do it in a way that elicits any sort of sympathy, either: she's like a demanding, cartoon shrew.
The other women fare a little better. Miranda's new boss is a sexist (though the utter lack of any other women in her entire office seems suspect), Samantha's fighting off menopause, and Charlotte is finding out that motherhood is not all about baking cupcakes in vintage clothing. (Roger Ebert makes a note about that in his review; after some thought, I think Charlotte wearing a vintage dress making cupcakes actually fits for the character, trying to literally have it all at once.) These all seem like realistic, albeit heightened, problems - all of which are far, far more interesting than Carrie's. To be fair, though, a time-lapse video of plaster hardening would be far more interesting than Carrie's problems.
When, via some plot mechanations, the girls fly off to Abu Dhabi to "go someplace rich," things really start to skid off the rails. (1) New York City, for these women, IS someplace rich. There's lip service paid to the sagging economy, but it's one of those "show, don't tell" moments authors learn to avoid in, say, 5th grade Comp. (2) This is when the movie decides it has a Theme, and that Theme is Women Are Oppressed the World Over. It's not a bad theme, as themes go, and in a better movie with some smart handling, it can absolutely work. In this movie, womens' consciousness is awakened with the subtlety of a jackhammer on asphalt. During one otherwise okay moment where Our Girls sing "I Am Women" at karaoke, a number of Abu Dhabi women watching in the crowd seem to have a spiritual awakening. Oh wait, they seem to be thinking, those American women are right. I AM woman! It's pandering and insulting, not just to women, but all moviegoers.
(Oh, and speaking of insults to moviegoers: a cardinal rule in filmmaking is that you never, NEVER show clips of better movies in your crappy movie. It's why you don't see anyone watching Citizen Kane in Leprechaun 4. SITC2 has the audacity to not only show bits of It Happened One Night, but also rip off one of its central gags. Does it work? Eh, sort of. But mostly we're reminded that It Happened One Night won the Top 5 Oscars, and that we're still watching Sex In the City 2.)
Okay, so here's how this film is like Grease 2: smack dab in the middle of the movie is a scene that belongs in a better movie. Charlotte and Miranda are talking about motherhood. It's a scene they have to themselves. In it, they're bonding about why motherhood is harder than it seems to be, and why it's okay to admit it. The women in this scene seem real. They also seem like friends with a long, storied history. Better: the scene is well-written, with a silly confession drinking-game gag that fits in. The actors even seem to step up their game, knowing that they finally have something fun and interesting and real to work with. Then Samantha gets arrested for causing a boner and the film shrieks back into suck territory.
The main message I took away from this movie is that you can solve equal rights issues worldwide with (a) shaky puns, (b), a steady supply of haute couture, and (c) being over-privileged. I also learned that the best way to relax is by putting on your most expensive clothes and sitting sideways on an uncomfortable couch and flipping through a magazine so far away from your face that reading it is likely impossible. I am woman!
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Iron Man 2: A Ridiculous Review
Okay, so I just got back from Iron Man 2 with Shawn. As I stated on the Twitters, the early reviews were ranging from, “What a terrific film, balanced by action and intense character work,” to, “it’s like Hitler came to life and started raping babies.” I will seriously never understand the entitlement aspect to fanboys, and the concept that if a film isn’t exactly their vision, they have been betrayed and let down and I’m never reading comics again and I’m taking my ball and going home. I mean, seriously? Daredevil was a mediocre film but I got through it somehow.
Anyway, in your Kev’s humble opinion, Iron Man 2 is not only a wonderful film, it’s the best of the year. It’s got a few new characters, but it never feels overcrowded. We get deeper into Tony Stark’s neuroses, and his way of using his image as a shield to hide behind. Somehow, Gwyneth Paltrow is appealing, and Scarlet Johanssen kicks a bunch of ass, and there’s a lot more of John Favreu on the screen. This is never bad, though I would have preferred shirtlessness. Plus, Mickey Rourke is a believable bad guy, and the action sequences are delightfully actiony, and there’s exposition but it never goes on forever, and Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Furying just enough, and it’s all awesome. Just awesome!
But that’s not the main reason I loved this movie. No, I loved this movie because it’s so Disney I had like seven nerdgasms in my seat. And not obvious Disney. Not anything that will distract anyone who hates or doesn’t know Disney. But for Disnerds, you guys, this is a treasure trove. There’s a whole thing about the Stark Expo ’74, which is a near-exact replica of Disney’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in ’64. There’s a video showing Tony Stark’s Dad and he looks exactly like Walt Disney doing his promotional videos. And biggest of all? There’s a song associated with the expo that plays early in the movie and then again over the credits. I whispered to Shawn, “This is like a re-write of ‘A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,’ which was in Horizons and the Carousel of Progress.” Then the song credits rolled and I actually shouted in the theater. “SHAWN IT WAS WRITTEN BY RICHARD SHERMAN! WHO WROTE ‘A GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW’! AND ALSO ‘IT’S A SMALL WORLD’!”
He looked at me. “You know, I know who the Sherman Brothers are.”
Me, wide-eyed. “You do?!”
“Dude, I bought you that CD for Christmas!”
You know, I know a lot of people were crazy nervous when Disney bought Marvel, but if this is the direction? If they’re going to do things cleverly and interestingly without being obvious and stupid, I am on board. I am so excited about this movie. I want to see it again, right now! OMG and then there was a post-credits thing! SERIOUSLY STAY FOR AFTER THE CREDITS, especially you, Dave P. ESPECIALLY YOU!
OMG there was also a Spaceship Earth! YOU GUYS WAY TOO MUCH SQUEE!!!
Okay, better.
EPCOT!
Seriously, better now.
Anyway, in your Kev’s humble opinion, Iron Man 2 is not only a wonderful film, it’s the best of the year. It’s got a few new characters, but it never feels overcrowded. We get deeper into Tony Stark’s neuroses, and his way of using his image as a shield to hide behind. Somehow, Gwyneth Paltrow is appealing, and Scarlet Johanssen kicks a bunch of ass, and there’s a lot more of John Favreu on the screen. This is never bad, though I would have preferred shirtlessness. Plus, Mickey Rourke is a believable bad guy, and the action sequences are delightfully actiony, and there’s exposition but it never goes on forever, and Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Furying just enough, and it’s all awesome. Just awesome!
But that’s not the main reason I loved this movie. No, I loved this movie because it’s so Disney I had like seven nerdgasms in my seat. And not obvious Disney. Not anything that will distract anyone who hates or doesn’t know Disney. But for Disnerds, you guys, this is a treasure trove. There’s a whole thing about the Stark Expo ’74, which is a near-exact replica of Disney’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in ’64. There’s a video showing Tony Stark’s Dad and he looks exactly like Walt Disney doing his promotional videos. And biggest of all? There’s a song associated with the expo that plays early in the movie and then again over the credits. I whispered to Shawn, “This is like a re-write of ‘A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,’ which was in Horizons and the Carousel of Progress.” Then the song credits rolled and I actually shouted in the theater. “SHAWN IT WAS WRITTEN BY RICHARD SHERMAN! WHO WROTE ‘A GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW’! AND ALSO ‘IT’S A SMALL WORLD’!”
He looked at me. “You know, I know who the Sherman Brothers are.”
Me, wide-eyed. “You do?!”
“Dude, I bought you that CD for Christmas!”
You know, I know a lot of people were crazy nervous when Disney bought Marvel, but if this is the direction? If they’re going to do things cleverly and interestingly without being obvious and stupid, I am on board. I am so excited about this movie. I want to see it again, right now! OMG and then there was a post-credits thing! SERIOUSLY STAY FOR AFTER THE CREDITS, especially you, Dave P. ESPECIALLY YOU!
OMG there was also a Spaceship Earth! YOU GUYS WAY TOO MUCH SQUEE!!!
Okay, better.
EPCOT!
Seriously, better now.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Blockade Billy, by Stephen King: A Review
A simple story, well told.
Blockade Billy tells the tale of William Blakely, perhaps the greatest baseball player ever to put on the gear, and who was summarily erased from the record books and forgotten by the world. King’s novella is primarily concerned with the questions raised by these opposing histories: why Blakely was the greatest, and what made him disappear. The answers lie in George Grantham, former third baseman coach and equipment manager for the New Jersey Titans. Grantham – Granny – spins his story of the 1957 season that introduced William Blakely to the big leagues. It’s an uninterrupted first-person narrative, the kind King used to great success in Dolores Claiborne, and that success is matched here. Only Granny isn’t speaking to fictional, off-screen listeners is Blockade Billy; instead, King cleverly inserts himself as the one taking dictation. While King’s presence doesn’t intrude (he is only mentioned by name three or four times), it adds a certain verisimilitude to a story one believes actually, tragically, could happen.
Clever, too, is the setup. King tackles old-time baseball the way he tackles prison life in The Green Mile or “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” or the way he tackles small towns in ’Salem’s Lot or Needful Things: he assumes the reader knows nothing about it, and builds from there. One of the subtle pleasures of Blockade Billy is that readers don’t have to be baseball fanatics to love the story; similarly to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the reader is given just enough information so that one cares about the outcome of the game as much as the characters do. Unlike in Faithful, King does not overwhelm the reader with baseball lore and stats. He is instead concerned with getting you invested in the suspense of what’s happening, and why.
That suspense lies at the heart of Blockade Billy. Stephen King has long been a master of the action sequence, those amped-up moments of intensity that make the rest of the story feel like a single held breath. Witness the dog attacks in Cujo, the painting sequences in Duma Key, or the psychic flashes in The Dead Zone. Here, the same treatment is given to Blockade Billy’s baseball games … and what happens when someone on the opposing team goes up against Billy directly. Billy’s single-minded devotion to baseball and to his team drives these scenes, spiking in what seems to be inevitable violence. It’s not whether the Titans win or lose, it’s how Blockade Billy plays the game. And the crowd eats it up.
So many of King’s fascinations are on display here, and it’s a delight for longtime readers to see them deconstructed and reassembled into this fantastic new book. Blood sport has been central to King’s imagination since The Long Walk; even though Blockade Billy focuses on baseball instead of dystopian-future game shows, blood does indeed spill. In his depictions of the crowd’s enthrallment with violence, King recalls The Running Man and, again, The Long Walk. A startling scene near the end brings to mind certain scenes in Hearts In Atlantis, and King’s ongoing interest in the William Golding book Lord of the Flies. If the technique is reminiscent of Dolores Claiborne, the voice is similar to that of Paul Edgecombe’s in The Green Mile, or even the older men describing the central mystery of The Colorado Kid.
In fact, Blockade Billy – whose cover, like that of The Colorado Kid, was painted by the amazing Glen Orbik – almost works as a spiritual cousin to King’s Hard Case Crime outing. Though the stories are wildly different, they read the same, and have the same feel. There are two essential differences here, though: first, the mystery of Blockade Billy is never asserted as a mystery. The reader has only just begun asking serious questions about the central character before the truth begins to emerge. And second, the truth does emerge. Unlike the origins of that body on the beach in The Colorado Kid, just where Blockade Billy came from and how he got there are startlingly revealed.
Coming so close on the heels of a mammoth novel like Under the Dome, Blockade Billy is refreshingly slender. It’s short enough for a reader to gulp down in one sitting, and compelling enough that he or she is helpless to do anything but. A small masterpiece of voice, pacing, and situation, Blockade Billy once again proves that Stephen King is a master of the novella.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Wetware: On the Digital Frontline With Stephen King
Cemetery Dance Publications Announces WETWARE: ON THE DIGITAL FRONTLINE WITH STEPHEN KING, by Kevin Quigley
WETWARE: On the Digital Frontline with Stephen King
a chapbook by Kevin Quigley
About the Chapbook:
Stephen King has long been at the forefront of experimental publishing. As the world grows more digital each day, King has consistently remained on the edge of breakthrough trends and technology, finding new ways to publish and interpret his stories. King's digital journey has been strange and fascinating. Wetware is your guide.
From the prehistory of King’s involvement with digital media such as the Dark Half video game and F13 to his online release of the lost work, The Cannibals, Wetware covers it all — in a concise and engaging pocket history. Explore the controversy surrounding King's online serial publication, The Plant. Relive the groundbreaking excitement of King's landmark e-book publication, Riding the Bullet. If you ever engaged in interactive fiction with The Mist, were intrigued by the Kindle-only release of "UR," or terrified by the motion comic "N.," Wetware is essential reading.
To read more about Wetware or order your copy today, visit the Wetware purchase site on Cemetery Dance today!
About the Author:
Kevin Quigley's website, Charnel House has been a premiere Stephen King resource for nearly fifteen years. Charnel House was the first website to feature full-length reviews of every Stephen King book; today, it also includes up-to-date King news, a section focused on books about King, and a comprehensive listing of unpublished and uncollected shorter works. Quigley is also the author of two previous chapbooks on King — Chart of Darkness and Ink In the Veins — and co-wrote the upcoming Stephen King Illustrated Movie Trivia Book. In addition to his works on King, Quigley is also the author of several novels, and has recently published a collection of poetry, Foggy At Night In the City. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his partner, Shawn.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
All In Good Time
I managed to get my hands on an early copy of the new Barenaked Ladies album today, and before you call me a thief and a pirate, know that I preordered the album from iTunes and my paid copy is coming to me next Tuesday. There were some advantages to preordering, namely that I got one track early (“Every Subway Car”), and two tracks – “All In Good Time” and “She Turned Away” – were only available if you did the whole preorder thing. Those bonus tracks didn’t come with my early copy, so I’m going to the opposite of the Bruce Springsteen message board and reserve judgment on them until after I hear them.
All In Good Time is BNL’s first album without Steven Page, and regardless of whether you like the record or not, the absence is immediately noticeable. Ed Robertson has a perfectly fine voice, but Steve had a very distinctive voice, and going a whole BNL album without it will take getting used to. Kevin Hearn, who also has a very distinctive voice (a little thin, but definitely interesting), steps up with lead vocals on three tracks. Jim Creeggan, who provided one or two odd tracks on BNL’s earlier albums, and the interesting “Peterborough and the Kawarthas” on the more recent Barenaked Ladies Are Me, offers up two lead vocals here. This democratic voicework is fresh and interesting – I like that BNL has been moving back to this since BLAM – but I’m not sure how successful it is here.
Unfortunately, because Ed’s voice is mellow and unassuming, a few of the tracks on All In Good Time sound remarkably similar. Despite different musical directions, songs like “Ordinary,” “I Have Learned,” and “How Long” border on indistinct. Even the slow-jam groove of “Summertime,” can’t quite escape the samey-ness.
Kevin Hearn’s offerings suffer a bit, too, although with only three tracks to work with, they do so less. Though “Watching the Northern Lights” is the only unlistenable song on the album, “Another Heartbreak” is sweet and sad, and “Jerome” is terrific: a slow calypso that ranks among, say, “Hidden Sun” and “Another Spin” as Hearn’s best. Creeggan’s two songs – “On the Lookout” and “I Saw It” – are perfectly fine, the latter perhaps about Steve Page’s leaving the group.
Ed Robertson, too, has some issues with Steve’s absence; Ed Robertson is most comfortable here when he’s angry. “You Run Away” is pissed-off and plaintive, and “Golden Boy” is a raging screed. One can’t help but wonder if both are about Steve Page’s decision to abandon the band. “The Love We’re In” is also good, musically recalling Stunt’s “Long Way Back Home” and lyrically romantic and devastating. “Four Seconds” sounds the most like what people expect from BNL: a fast-paced novelty song in the vein of “One Week,” but its staccato rhymes (Ed manages to rhyme “orange” not once but four times) never make the song feel rote or compulsory. All In Good Time might have benefitted from more of this sort of idiosyncrasy.
As it stands, All In Good Time is a good album, not a great one. Maybe four of its songs – “Golden Boy,” “You Run Away,” “Jerome,” and “Four Seconds” – can stand among their best work, with two or three more perfectly good songs. It’s an interesting new direction for the band, and I’m intrigued to see where they go from here; I just wish their first step without Steve Page hadn’t been as shaky.
All In Good Time is BNL’s first album without Steven Page, and regardless of whether you like the record or not, the absence is immediately noticeable. Ed Robertson has a perfectly fine voice, but Steve had a very distinctive voice, and going a whole BNL album without it will take getting used to. Kevin Hearn, who also has a very distinctive voice (a little thin, but definitely interesting), steps up with lead vocals on three tracks. Jim Creeggan, who provided one or two odd tracks on BNL’s earlier albums, and the interesting “Peterborough and the Kawarthas” on the more recent Barenaked Ladies Are Me, offers up two lead vocals here. This democratic voicework is fresh and interesting – I like that BNL has been moving back to this since BLAM – but I’m not sure how successful it is here.
Unfortunately, because Ed’s voice is mellow and unassuming, a few of the tracks on All In Good Time sound remarkably similar. Despite different musical directions, songs like “Ordinary,” “I Have Learned,” and “How Long” border on indistinct. Even the slow-jam groove of “Summertime,” can’t quite escape the samey-ness.
Kevin Hearn’s offerings suffer a bit, too, although with only three tracks to work with, they do so less. Though “Watching the Northern Lights” is the only unlistenable song on the album, “Another Heartbreak” is sweet and sad, and “Jerome” is terrific: a slow calypso that ranks among, say, “Hidden Sun” and “Another Spin” as Hearn’s best. Creeggan’s two songs – “On the Lookout” and “I Saw It” – are perfectly fine, the latter perhaps about Steve Page’s leaving the group.
Ed Robertson, too, has some issues with Steve’s absence; Ed Robertson is most comfortable here when he’s angry. “You Run Away” is pissed-off and plaintive, and “Golden Boy” is a raging screed. One can’t help but wonder if both are about Steve Page’s decision to abandon the band. “The Love We’re In” is also good, musically recalling Stunt’s “Long Way Back Home” and lyrically romantic and devastating. “Four Seconds” sounds the most like what people expect from BNL: a fast-paced novelty song in the vein of “One Week,” but its staccato rhymes (Ed manages to rhyme “orange” not once but four times) never make the song feel rote or compulsory. All In Good Time might have benefitted from more of this sort of idiosyncrasy.
As it stands, All In Good Time is a good album, not a great one. Maybe four of its songs – “Golden Boy,” “You Run Away,” “Jerome,” and “Four Seconds” – can stand among their best work, with two or three more perfectly good songs. It’s an interesting new direction for the band, and I’m intrigued to see where they go from here; I just wish their first step without Steve Page hadn’t been as shaky.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Princess and the Blog
Thank God for Twitter. Until just before lunch, I had forgotten The Princess and the Frog had come out on DVD today. My temp job is right near one of those maxi-mini-malls, with two big anchor stores and a bunch of depressing eateries and closet stores that lurch gaspingly toward significance and never quite make it. Happily for me, the two anchor stores were Best Buy and Target, which meant the inherent glee of comparison shopping and coming out three dollars ahead by going an extra twenty feet to Target. Which, by the by, also has a Starbucks inside of it, rendering this temp position not nearly as desolately located as I’d assumed.
But getting back to the purchase itself, let’s talk a moment about The Princess and the Frog. This was the film that was supposed to usher in the Third Disney Renaissance; its return to hand-drawn animation, a musical structure, and an emphasis on Princess Tiana being the first African-American Disney Princess were supposed to do for the Animation division what The Little Mermaid did in 1989. (Some insist the second Renaissance began earlier, with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, making the modern-era corollary Bolt, the first Disney film under the purview of Pixar creative chief John Lasseter.)
The reality didn’t play out exactly as Disney hoped. It was critically lauded – Time magazine voted it the best film of the year – and the box office seemed promising. In its opening weekend, it debuted at #1 at the box office and became the highest-grossing animated film ever released in December. It went on to gross $104,000,000 domestically, which would have been seen as a blockbuster as recently as three years ago, but now seemed disappointing in an era where success seems to begin at $200M. A less dubious detraction was that the budget of the film was almost exactly its gross, meaning that – domestically, at least – the film only broke even. However, accounting for worldwide totals, the film actually came out well ahead, grossing $247M globally.
Even so, Disney saw this movie as a failure – perhaps because so much had been riding on it. Many factors were blamed, but what seems to have unfortunately gained traction is the notion that the film wasn’t universal enough – i.e., didn’t cater to boys. Now, despite the successes of the Pirates of the Caribbean films – and their cross-gender appeal – and the classic roster of characters and films, the Disney Princess brand is one of Disney’s primary moneymakers. It’s so prevalent that they are devoting an entirely new section of Fantasyland in Disney World to them. But theme park and merchandising successes don’t necessarily translate into feature film successes, at least in Disney’s way of thinking.
Therefore, Disney has decided to be proactive with its next film, the long-gestating and highly anticipated film Rapunzel. The film uses breakthrough computer animation, differentiating it from other CGI films by basing its palate on classic paintings. Disney fans have been drooling about the project for over a decade, but now, because of the slightly disappointing returns on The Princess and the Frog, are changing the name … to Tangled.
I think this is a short-sighted decision, especially since the name Rapunzel has such a resonance to it and Tangled is a past-tense verb that just sort of lays there. Maybe it’s meant to evoke Enchanted? Plus, despite names like Snow White and Beauty & the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Cinderella, those films managed to appeal to everyone. It just rankles me that Disney is willing to trade on its legacy of fairy-tale films by changing the name to something so bland.
There is hope, though, starting today. In one of his lecture specials, Kevin Smith referred to theatrical films as “ads for the DVD.” Maybe that will happen here. The Princess and the Frog is a film that will play very well in homes – especially since they’re pushing the Blu-Ray sets (which are the only sets on which you can get special features, another bit of angersome news for those of us without Blu-Ray players). With its release so close to a holiday partially known for gift-giving, this could still take off.
Look, do I have a personal stake in whether a Third Disney Renaissance happens? Sort of. The Princess and the Frog was a damn good movie, and Atlantis and Treasure Planet were not. I’d love it if this kind of creativity and forward-thinking were rewarded in the market, so we can continue to get good, quality projects like this.
But getting back to the purchase itself, let’s talk a moment about The Princess and the Frog. This was the film that was supposed to usher in the Third Disney Renaissance; its return to hand-drawn animation, a musical structure, and an emphasis on Princess Tiana being the first African-American Disney Princess were supposed to do for the Animation division what The Little Mermaid did in 1989. (Some insist the second Renaissance began earlier, with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, making the modern-era corollary Bolt, the first Disney film under the purview of Pixar creative chief John Lasseter.)
The reality didn’t play out exactly as Disney hoped. It was critically lauded – Time magazine voted it the best film of the year – and the box office seemed promising. In its opening weekend, it debuted at #1 at the box office and became the highest-grossing animated film ever released in December. It went on to gross $104,000,000 domestically, which would have been seen as a blockbuster as recently as three years ago, but now seemed disappointing in an era where success seems to begin at $200M. A less dubious detraction was that the budget of the film was almost exactly its gross, meaning that – domestically, at least – the film only broke even. However, accounting for worldwide totals, the film actually came out well ahead, grossing $247M globally.
Even so, Disney saw this movie as a failure – perhaps because so much had been riding on it. Many factors were blamed, but what seems to have unfortunately gained traction is the notion that the film wasn’t universal enough – i.e., didn’t cater to boys. Now, despite the successes of the Pirates of the Caribbean films – and their cross-gender appeal – and the classic roster of characters and films, the Disney Princess brand is one of Disney’s primary moneymakers. It’s so prevalent that they are devoting an entirely new section of Fantasyland in Disney World to them. But theme park and merchandising successes don’t necessarily translate into feature film successes, at least in Disney’s way of thinking.
Therefore, Disney has decided to be proactive with its next film, the long-gestating and highly anticipated film Rapunzel. The film uses breakthrough computer animation, differentiating it from other CGI films by basing its palate on classic paintings. Disney fans have been drooling about the project for over a decade, but now, because of the slightly disappointing returns on The Princess and the Frog, are changing the name … to Tangled.
I think this is a short-sighted decision, especially since the name Rapunzel has such a resonance to it and Tangled is a past-tense verb that just sort of lays there. Maybe it’s meant to evoke Enchanted? Plus, despite names like Snow White and Beauty & the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Cinderella, those films managed to appeal to everyone. It just rankles me that Disney is willing to trade on its legacy of fairy-tale films by changing the name to something so bland.
There is hope, though, starting today. In one of his lecture specials, Kevin Smith referred to theatrical films as “ads for the DVD.” Maybe that will happen here. The Princess and the Frog is a film that will play very well in homes – especially since they’re pushing the Blu-Ray sets (which are the only sets on which you can get special features, another bit of angersome news for those of us without Blu-Ray players). With its release so close to a holiday partially known for gift-giving, this could still take off.
Look, do I have a personal stake in whether a Third Disney Renaissance happens? Sort of. The Princess and the Frog was a damn good movie, and Atlantis and Treasure Planet were not. I’d love it if this kind of creativity and forward-thinking were rewarded in the market, so we can continue to get good, quality projects like this.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
It's a Party
Here's a question: would Judy and Johnny really be so insensitive as to start dating on the night of Leslie Gore's party? I mean, Judy might be some sort of heartless bitch with a vendetta or something, but why would Johnny do it right then? And so obviously, with Judy ostentatiously wearing his ring. Maybe Johnny wanted to keep it secret, though, and Judy was really all about parading herself around, because she's a big fan of upstaging anyone in the limelight. Then again, you have to look at Johnny's particular wishy-washy nature. Johnny almost immediately runs back to Leslie, who, after being publicly humiliated at her own party, decides to take him back. Though now we get the sense that Johnny's sort of a pawn in a weird little revenge game Judy and Leslie have with one another. Maybe Johnny figures hey, I'm getting laid (wait, it's the fifties; hey, I'm holding hands) with two chicks. I don't care if they're crazy, I want in.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Foggy At Night In the City
It's here.Foggy At Night In the City: It's midnight, but the hunched, frightened clocks refuse to strike. Cold rain has blasted the hot asphalt where lovers scramble and madmen skulk. It's foggy tonight in the city, outside curtains where lust meets violence, where indulgence becomes addiction, and where dreamers explore the dark terrain of the heart.
Foggy At Night In the City the first collection of verse and poetry by novelist and diarist Kevin Quigley. Inside you will find stories of love and hate, of airships and footraces, of life and death. Alternately light and dark, sunshine and shadows, Foggy At Night In the City is an eclectic anthology that will pique your curiosity and challenge your perceptions.
Folks, this new collection of poetry and verse represents nearly two decades of work. The poems might have come hard for me, and some of them take you to dark, dark places, but I think you'll like them.
To reiterate: Foggy At Night In the City is an actual book, one that you hold in your hand and whose pages you physically flip through.
Two Ways To Get It
Bonus Material: Six Poems
The first 50 purchasers of Foggy At Night In the City will receive a bonus PDF from me - a small collection titled Six Poems, featuring six pieces I didn't feel fit in the main volume. "Fantasies Of A Maniac," "No Show," "There Must Be Something Good for Dinner Tonight," "A Place With Picnic Tables," and "Fissure" represent the best work from my earliest days of writing through my more inward-looking recent poetry. Three of these poems are flat-out horror stories, including the award-winning "Fantasies Of a Maniac." I've stayed away from horror verse in later years; it's a pleasure to share it now.
If you have purchased Foggy At Night In the City, please comment here with a valid email address, and I will send you Six Poems. Sorry, Six Poems does not come separately.
The Foggy Future
As we roll out publication on this book, there's still more to come. In the upcoming weeks and months, I will hopefully be publishing Foggy At Night In the City on several ebook platforms. The Kindle is the first, with the Sony Reader, the Nook, and of course the iPad - I am in negotiations now to get this book in the hands of electronic readers as soon as possible. Keep an eye out!
The Final Word
Foggy At Night In the City is available from both the publisher and Amazon for the amazing price of $7.95. It is a large-sized paperback, also known as "trade" or "quality" paperback, and features thirty-five pieces of poetry and verse, along with an introduction. And that's not to mention the bonus PDF, bringing the total number of pieces up to forty-one works. Even if you generally aren't a poetry reader, I urge you to give Foggy a try - quite a few of these pieces read more like prose. I have tried to make this volume as accessible as possible, without sacrificing the work.
Thank you for your time and consideration, and thank you for taking a chance on pioneering authorship.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Looking For Robert Parker
Robert Parker came into my life in the early 1990s, when my friend Tracey admonished me to oh my God, read someone who wasn’t Stephen King. The first book I read was a slim little volume called Looking For Rachel Wallace, featuring a tough-guy private eye named Spenser investigating the disappearance of a prominent lesbian-rights activist. What struck me at once was how all the characters seemed instantly real: Spenser, his psychiatrist girlfriend Susan, his best friend Hawk, and Rachel Wallace herself. The fact that the burly man’s man who appeared on the back cover had written a sympathetic, real individual in Rachel Wallace – and allowed Spenser’s reactions to her be real – surprised me. As it turned out, Robert Parker wasn’t done surprising me.
I plunged in at one, relishing the how the seeming simplicity of the writing masked the complexities of the plots. Of course, sometimes the Spenser adventures could be just that – fun, entertaining jaunts punctuated by Spenser and Susan bang-a-thons and extremely detailed descriptions about food and clothing. The more interesting ones, though, were those that delved into deep character development. Early Autumn, which was a departure from the Spenser formula, and for the better. Potshot, a later book that cast Spenser and his cronies become The Magnificent Seven. Small Vices, in which Spenser is shot and partially paralyzed. Spenser is friends with sympathetic hookers and madams, hitmen and Mafioso, gay bodybuilders and police officers. He’s everything to everyone, and despite his mythic status, he always seems real. It becomes easy to ignore that in the early books, Spenser was a Korean war veteran, and in the more recent ones, he was just approaching fifty. What isn’t easy to ignore is that there won’t be any more Spenser stories.
Relatively late into his career, Spenser developed series around two other characters – small-town lawman Jesse Stone and female P.I. Sunny Randall. The first Jesse Stone books seemed hungry, necessary – the work of a writer who has been doing one thing for so long, he needed to make some sort of change. The Sunny Randall books started off as a weird experiment and then got more interesting as they went along. And Wilderness, one of his stand-alone books, is one of the best suspense novels I’ve ever read.
Robert Parker wrote his college dissertation on Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, but when he wrote, the voice was his own. When I decided to start writing novels, it was Parker’s voice that resonated with me, especially when working on my Wayne Corbin books. The man was such a master of simplicity and grace in his writing – making the difficult look easy, but never frivolous. I had the chance to meet the man two years ago, in his home. It was such an honor to stand with the man in his place of writing, and shake the hand that had written such wonderful stories.
Every year, I pick up a Robert Parker book or two that I may have missed and plow right through it. They go down easy, his mysteries, but they stay with you. The idea that that seemingly endless supply of books now is finite is a crushing thought. He was one of my heroes, and I’m going to miss him terribly.
I plunged in at one, relishing the how the seeming simplicity of the writing masked the complexities of the plots. Of course, sometimes the Spenser adventures could be just that – fun, entertaining jaunts punctuated by Spenser and Susan bang-a-thons and extremely detailed descriptions about food and clothing. The more interesting ones, though, were those that delved into deep character development. Early Autumn, which was a departure from the Spenser formula, and for the better. Potshot, a later book that cast Spenser and his cronies become The Magnificent Seven. Small Vices, in which Spenser is shot and partially paralyzed. Spenser is friends with sympathetic hookers and madams, hitmen and Mafioso, gay bodybuilders and police officers. He’s everything to everyone, and despite his mythic status, he always seems real. It becomes easy to ignore that in the early books, Spenser was a Korean war veteran, and in the more recent ones, he was just approaching fifty. What isn’t easy to ignore is that there won’t be any more Spenser stories.
Relatively late into his career, Spenser developed series around two other characters – small-town lawman Jesse Stone and female P.I. Sunny Randall. The first Jesse Stone books seemed hungry, necessary – the work of a writer who has been doing one thing for so long, he needed to make some sort of change. The Sunny Randall books started off as a weird experiment and then got more interesting as they went along. And Wilderness, one of his stand-alone books, is one of the best suspense novels I’ve ever read.
Robert Parker wrote his college dissertation on Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, but when he wrote, the voice was his own. When I decided to start writing novels, it was Parker’s voice that resonated with me, especially when working on my Wayne Corbin books. The man was such a master of simplicity and grace in his writing – making the difficult look easy, but never frivolous. I had the chance to meet the man two years ago, in his home. It was such an honor to stand with the man in his place of writing, and shake the hand that had written such wonderful stories.
Every year, I pick up a Robert Parker book or two that I may have missed and plow right through it. They go down easy, his mysteries, but they stay with you. The idea that that seemingly endless supply of books now is finite is a crushing thought. He was one of my heroes, and I’m going to miss him terribly.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The Truth Outside the Lie - A Review of "Stephen King: The Non-Fiction"
I didn’t think I could be surprised anymore.
I’ve been reading books by Stephen King since I was twelve, and reading books about him for almost as long. My first such book was The Stephen King Quiz Book, and it neatly kicked off my fascination with the stories behind the stories, and behind the man. Have I read more books about King than I have by King? I’m not sure, but it’s close – to the point at which I was convinced that the only new subject to cover would be new books by King himself.
I have rarely been happier to be wrong.
Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks’s Stephen King: The Non-Fiction puts the spotlight on an element of King’s writing that is woefully underappreciated. When I first heard of the title, I assumed it would be some sort of bibliographic text, a list of all the non-fiction stuff I was already familiar with. Again: wrong, and wonderfully so. The Non-Fiction can be used as a bibliographic reference, certainly, but authors Wood and Brooks take the time and effort to actually review all the pieces they talk about. Starting with the higher-profile work such Danse Macabre, On Writing, and Faithful (along with King’s Garbage Truck and Pop of King columns and introductions to his own work) they quickly move into less charted territory: opinion pieces, book reviews, website updates, and unpublished work. Included in the text is a reprint of the little-known King work, “My Serrated Little Security Blanket,” a short bit of nasty fun.
Every work listed receives an explanatory or critical note, along with instructions on how to track down a copy (especially useful for the more obscure pieces). Some are accompanied by tales of the authors’ great lengths to which they’d gone to secure copies, illustrating the immense level of dedication and care it took to craft this book. While other books on King have discussed his non-fiction as an adjunct to his fiction, this is the first book to take on the subject comprehensively. Not to mention the fact that Wood and Brooks are actually terrific writers – this book is as compulsively readable as it is meticulously researched. I was blown away by this book.
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction is an entirely new sort of book on King. If you’ve ever been curious as to King’s truth outside the lie, this book is an absolute must.
(You can get it here.)
I’ve been reading books by Stephen King since I was twelve, and reading books about him for almost as long. My first such book was The Stephen King Quiz Book, and it neatly kicked off my fascination with the stories behind the stories, and behind the man. Have I read more books about King than I have by King? I’m not sure, but it’s close – to the point at which I was convinced that the only new subject to cover would be new books by King himself.
I have rarely been happier to be wrong.
Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks’s Stephen King: The Non-Fiction puts the spotlight on an element of King’s writing that is woefully underappreciated. When I first heard of the title, I assumed it would be some sort of bibliographic text, a list of all the non-fiction stuff I was already familiar with. Again: wrong, and wonderfully so. The Non-Fiction can be used as a bibliographic reference, certainly, but authors Wood and Brooks take the time and effort to actually review all the pieces they talk about. Starting with the higher-profile work such Danse Macabre, On Writing, and Faithful (along with King’s Garbage Truck and Pop of King columns and introductions to his own work) they quickly move into less charted territory: opinion pieces, book reviews, website updates, and unpublished work. Included in the text is a reprint of the little-known King work, “My Serrated Little Security Blanket,” a short bit of nasty fun.
Every work listed receives an explanatory or critical note, along with instructions on how to track down a copy (especially useful for the more obscure pieces). Some are accompanied by tales of the authors’ great lengths to which they’d gone to secure copies, illustrating the immense level of dedication and care it took to craft this book. While other books on King have discussed his non-fiction as an adjunct to his fiction, this is the first book to take on the subject comprehensively. Not to mention the fact that Wood and Brooks are actually terrific writers – this book is as compulsively readable as it is meticulously researched. I was blown away by this book.
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction is an entirely new sort of book on King. If you’ve ever been curious as to King’s truth outside the lie, this book is an absolute must.
(You can get it here.)
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
I'm In Love With My Car, and Other Stories
You want to hear something funny? So, I was going through the list of all the books I read this past decade, January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2009. The mission was to make a big definitive list of the Top 50 Books of the Decade, which as you might have gleaned didn’t happen. Yet.
Of course, there’s been an obvious trend in my reading. I read a lot of Stephen King this past decade. Okay, yeah, you knew that, but what I thought was kind of interesting is how often I read King during this decade. It certainly wasn’t as much as in decades past, but it was a pretty sizable delving. Aside from the young adult novel Singularity, King’s books are the only ones that have benefited from re-reads, and as I went throughout my lists, I thought it would be fun to figure out which ones I re-read the most. I was a little taken aback at my findings. A brief chart!
King Books I Read Only Once: Dreamcatcher, Desperation, Needful Things, Everything’s Eventual, Firestarter, Cycle of the Werewolf, The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla, From a Buick 8, The Shining, Song of Susannah, Silver Bullet, Black House, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cell, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, Rage, Faithful, Insomnia, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, Blaze, The Mist, Dolores Claiborne, Different Seasons, Under the Dome, The Dark Tower
King Books I Read Twice: Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Misery, Hearts In Atlantis, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Roadwork, It, The Colorado Kid (back to back!), Pet Sematary
King Books I Didn’t Read At All This Past Decade: Carrie, Night Shift, The Dead Zone, Danse Macabre, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Skeleton Crew, The Tommyknockers, Four Past Midnight, Gerald’s Game, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Storm of the Century, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
And the Only Book I Read Three Times This Past Decade: Christine.
Seriously? I read Christine more than any other book in the decade? What the French toast!?
* * *
And for those of you who don’t care about Stephen King,here’s some stuff about the books I read last year!
It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite book I read last year. I read eclectically. Buzzing through Ruth Reichl’s entire oeuvre in under three weeks was kind of a huge rush. Tender At the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic & Sapphires, and Not Becoming My Mother were all pretty kick-ass, even though Mother was a tad bit pricey for what amounted to a gift book. While Julie & Julia the year before introduced me to food writing, Ruth kind of stabilized my love for the genre. Of her books on food, I liked Comfort Me With Apples the most, because I’d gotten used to her voice by then and I felt cozy with it, even when she was being selfish and strange.
Speaking of food writing, I totally incongruously dug Born Round, by Frank Bruni. A lot of the book details his struggles with weight, and ends up on the decision that thinner is better – at least for him. Which should offend me to my core, except that Bruni’s journey is a personal one, and he doesn’t make any huge pronouncements about fat automatically equaling bad. It’s just his thing. Plus, he’s a terrific writer and a gay dude, and despite his crazy-femme author photo, I really related to him.
Trends I was not in favor of? Follow-up books which totally failed to live up to their predecessors. I was coerced into reading Tom Standage’s A History of the World In Six Glasses and couldn’t put it down. Then he puts out An Edible History of Humanity and it was dull as shit. Ironically, not even the section on the spice trade was spicy. Same happened with Audrey Niffenegger. I literally read The Time-Traveler’s Wife largely in one sitting. I kept thinking I should put it down, go walk, get exercise, perhaps go to the bathroom. No. It was compulsive. Then she releases Her Fearful Symmetry, which has a kick-ass title and nothing else going for it. One of the plot twists is so contrived and out of character that I had trouble even finishing it. It’s maybe not a bad book – there are character pieces I loved, and the structure was fun – but it fell way, way short.
I kind of fear that I’m taking authors I love for granted, so I want to highlight four that deserve special recognition. While I liked and respected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, I found it hard to love; I far preferred Take the Cannoli, which I read for the first time this year. If it’s maybe not as good as Assassination Vacation, it’s absolutely better than Radio On and on par with The Partly-Cloudy Patriot. Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur might be his best collection of essays, despite a chapter on football (though, helpfully, he says we can skip). Nick Hornby’s last collection of book essays, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, is maybe not his very best one – that distinction probably goes to Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt – but it was delightful to be back in his voice and tone again, and I got some good recommendations, which is kind of the point. And A.J. Jacobs, who has yet to disappoint me, released The Guinea Pig Diaries. If The Year of Living Biblically felt a little heavy after The Know-It-All, this is a return to light reporting about his weird, experimental life. Light, but not fluffy. You get a little substance with your dessert here, and now I want a new book.
Some big surprises this year? Shawn brought home I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto, by Dave Thompson, which I scoffed at because I thought it was going to be a lot like John Seller’s atrocious Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. I snatched it out of Shawn’s hand to read the introduction and didn’t put it down until the next day, finished. It’s cranky but readable and understandable. I don’t agree with all his points, but I don’t think you have to agree with an author to like him. Same with Tattoo Machine, by Jeff Johnson, a short but comprehensive story about the recent history of tattooing from someone who was there. There’s a lot of really cool stuff about tattoo trends, stories of crazy people, drunk people, bad tattooists, good tattooists, portrait ink, all that. It’s amazing.
I was also gratified by Charles Ardai’s crime book Fifty-To-One, which is the fiftieth book published by the Hard Case Crime imprint. The goal of the publisher is to put back in print classic crime novels from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and also release new novels by current authors writing in that style. Fifty-To-One manages to title each chapter after each of the preceding books, and was a terrific crime caper in itself. The Abstinence Teacher was a very good follow-up to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children – more readable suburban ennui, dealt with deftly and accessibly. It’s depressing, but not so much that you don’t want to keep reading. Bev Vincent’s The Illustrated Stephen King Companion was a first-of-its kind for King fanatics, featuring removable documents that reprinted unpublished King stories and early drafts from his novels. At once, it became one of the best books on King ever published.
Finally, Stephen King himself put out a new book this year, Under the Dome, which I liked a lot but had some problems with. Almost everything in the book – from the weirdly balanced characters (bad people doing heroic things, heroes fucking up big time) to the interesting movie-camera point of view (used more sparingly here than in Black House) to the ending that skirts a big battle in a really interesting way – works. What doesn’t work is the same thing that didn’t work in Cujo and almost didn’t work in The Stand: big plot turns relying on coincidence. There’s this file folder that, if found, would probably have changed everything in the book, but it keeps getting lost and almost found and it’s frustrating as hell. Despite this, though, the book has a lot to say about Big Issues without ever making them feel like Big Issues, and the characters are very real. (I actually wrote a huge full-length review!)
Huh. I did it. Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? For further elucidation: Everything I Read In 2009.
Now, onto reading in 2010!
Of course, there’s been an obvious trend in my reading. I read a lot of Stephen King this past decade. Okay, yeah, you knew that, but what I thought was kind of interesting is how often I read King during this decade. It certainly wasn’t as much as in decades past, but it was a pretty sizable delving. Aside from the young adult novel Singularity, King’s books are the only ones that have benefited from re-reads, and as I went throughout my lists, I thought it would be fun to figure out which ones I re-read the most. I was a little taken aback at my findings. A brief chart!
King Books I Read Only Once: Dreamcatcher, Desperation, Needful Things, Everything’s Eventual, Firestarter, Cycle of the Werewolf, The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla, From a Buick 8, The Shining, Song of Susannah, Silver Bullet, Black House, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cell, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, Rage, Faithful, Insomnia, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, Blaze, The Mist, Dolores Claiborne, Different Seasons, Under the Dome, The Dark Tower
King Books I Read Twice: Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Misery, Hearts In Atlantis, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Roadwork, It, The Colorado Kid (back to back!), Pet Sematary
King Books I Didn’t Read At All This Past Decade: Carrie, Night Shift, The Dead Zone, Danse Macabre, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Skeleton Crew, The Tommyknockers, Four Past Midnight, Gerald’s Game, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Storm of the Century, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
And the Only Book I Read Three Times This Past Decade: Christine.
Seriously? I read Christine more than any other book in the decade? What the French toast!?
* * *
And for those of you who don’t care about Stephen King,
It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite book I read last year. I read eclectically. Buzzing through Ruth Reichl’s entire oeuvre in under three weeks was kind of a huge rush. Tender At the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic & Sapphires, and Not Becoming My Mother were all pretty kick-ass, even though Mother was a tad bit pricey for what amounted to a gift book. While Julie & Julia the year before introduced me to food writing, Ruth kind of stabilized my love for the genre. Of her books on food, I liked Comfort Me With Apples the most, because I’d gotten used to her voice by then and I felt cozy with it, even when she was being selfish and strange.
Speaking of food writing, I totally incongruously dug Born Round, by Frank Bruni. A lot of the book details his struggles with weight, and ends up on the decision that thinner is better – at least for him. Which should offend me to my core, except that Bruni’s journey is a personal one, and he doesn’t make any huge pronouncements about fat automatically equaling bad. It’s just his thing. Plus, he’s a terrific writer and a gay dude, and despite his crazy-femme author photo, I really related to him.
Trends I was not in favor of? Follow-up books which totally failed to live up to their predecessors. I was coerced into reading Tom Standage’s A History of the World In Six Glasses and couldn’t put it down. Then he puts out An Edible History of Humanity and it was dull as shit. Ironically, not even the section on the spice trade was spicy. Same happened with Audrey Niffenegger. I literally read The Time-Traveler’s Wife largely in one sitting. I kept thinking I should put it down, go walk, get exercise, perhaps go to the bathroom. No. It was compulsive. Then she releases Her Fearful Symmetry, which has a kick-ass title and nothing else going for it. One of the plot twists is so contrived and out of character that I had trouble even finishing it. It’s maybe not a bad book – there are character pieces I loved, and the structure was fun – but it fell way, way short.
I kind of fear that I’m taking authors I love for granted, so I want to highlight four that deserve special recognition. While I liked and respected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, I found it hard to love; I far preferred Take the Cannoli, which I read for the first time this year. If it’s maybe not as good as Assassination Vacation, it’s absolutely better than Radio On and on par with The Partly-Cloudy Patriot. Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur might be his best collection of essays, despite a chapter on football (though, helpfully, he says we can skip). Nick Hornby’s last collection of book essays, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, is maybe not his very best one – that distinction probably goes to Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt – but it was delightful to be back in his voice and tone again, and I got some good recommendations, which is kind of the point. And A.J. Jacobs, who has yet to disappoint me, released The Guinea Pig Diaries. If The Year of Living Biblically felt a little heavy after The Know-It-All, this is a return to light reporting about his weird, experimental life. Light, but not fluffy. You get a little substance with your dessert here, and now I want a new book.
Some big surprises this year? Shawn brought home I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto, by Dave Thompson, which I scoffed at because I thought it was going to be a lot like John Seller’s atrocious Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. I snatched it out of Shawn’s hand to read the introduction and didn’t put it down until the next day, finished. It’s cranky but readable and understandable. I don’t agree with all his points, but I don’t think you have to agree with an author to like him. Same with Tattoo Machine, by Jeff Johnson, a short but comprehensive story about the recent history of tattooing from someone who was there. There’s a lot of really cool stuff about tattoo trends, stories of crazy people, drunk people, bad tattooists, good tattooists, portrait ink, all that. It’s amazing.
I was also gratified by Charles Ardai’s crime book Fifty-To-One, which is the fiftieth book published by the Hard Case Crime imprint. The goal of the publisher is to put back in print classic crime novels from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and also release new novels by current authors writing in that style. Fifty-To-One manages to title each chapter after each of the preceding books, and was a terrific crime caper in itself. The Abstinence Teacher was a very good follow-up to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children – more readable suburban ennui, dealt with deftly and accessibly. It’s depressing, but not so much that you don’t want to keep reading. Bev Vincent’s The Illustrated Stephen King Companion was a first-of-its kind for King fanatics, featuring removable documents that reprinted unpublished King stories and early drafts from his novels. At once, it became one of the best books on King ever published.
Finally, Stephen King himself put out a new book this year, Under the Dome, which I liked a lot but had some problems with. Almost everything in the book – from the weirdly balanced characters (bad people doing heroic things, heroes fucking up big time) to the interesting movie-camera point of view (used more sparingly here than in Black House) to the ending that skirts a big battle in a really interesting way – works. What doesn’t work is the same thing that didn’t work in Cujo and almost didn’t work in The Stand: big plot turns relying on coincidence. There’s this file folder that, if found, would probably have changed everything in the book, but it keeps getting lost and almost found and it’s frustrating as hell. Despite this, though, the book has a lot to say about Big Issues without ever making them feel like Big Issues, and the characters are very real. (I actually wrote a huge full-length review!)
Huh. I did it. Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? For further elucidation: Everything I Read In 2009.
Now, onto reading in 2010!
Friday, January 15, 2010
Bitches On the Radio
I was at Spike’s yesterday and for the first time, I heard Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” on the radio. I paused by the door, wanting to see if they’d cut down the bridge like they did on the karaoke version, when I heard something startling: they’d bleeped out the word “bitch.” As in, “walk, walk, fashion baby / work it, move, that *** cuh-razy.”
Dumfounded, I wracked my brain, trying to recall whether bitch was among the naughty no-no words on the radio nowadays. I know God is, except in pious cases (despite the hard work of The Beach Boys, whose “God Only Knows” was banned from some radio stations for not using “God” in a religious fashion), and especially when used as part of the word goddamn, even though silencing it generally plays hell with meter. Ditto fuck and shit, and of course cunt, which actually may have finally trumped fuck as the Worst Swear Ever. But bitch?
I know I have heard Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” on classic rock radio. Same goes for the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch.” Heck, in 1997, thirteen years ago, we were treated to Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch,” which was heard as a sort of feminist paean to mood swings. Maybe there’s a loophole if the song has “bitch” in the title?
Or maybe there aren’t rules about this. When Christina Aguliera’s terrific big-band homage, “Candyman,” came out a few years ago, my friend John wrote about the odd disparity of bleeping out the term “makes my cherry pop” but keeping in “makes my panties drop” – in essence, condemning the sexual innuendo part but being totally okay with the actual sexual part.
It seems arbitrary, that’s all. Lady GaGa can’t declare herself a bitch on the radio, Jay-Z can’t mention references to drugs – even when condemning them! – in “Empire State of Mind,” and Panic! At the Disco can’t say “closing the goddamn door,” but everyone’s cool with Britney Spears spelling out “F-U-C-K me” with wordplay so transparent it might as well be onionskin paper soaked in canola oil.
Look, bitch isn’t even on George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” (although, weirdly, “piss” is, even though they used to say “pissed off” on Friends all the time). Remember that billboard advertising Melrose Place featuring nothing but Heather Locklear and the word BITCH in capital letters? That was a decade ago. Come on, radio. We’ve grown up. Shouldn’t you?
Dumfounded, I wracked my brain, trying to recall whether bitch was among the naughty no-no words on the radio nowadays. I know God is, except in pious cases (despite the hard work of The Beach Boys, whose “God Only Knows” was banned from some radio stations for not using “God” in a religious fashion), and especially when used as part of the word goddamn, even though silencing it generally plays hell with meter. Ditto fuck and shit, and of course cunt, which actually may have finally trumped fuck as the Worst Swear Ever. But bitch?
I know I have heard Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” on classic rock radio. Same goes for the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch.” Heck, in 1997, thirteen years ago, we were treated to Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch,” which was heard as a sort of feminist paean to mood swings. Maybe there’s a loophole if the song has “bitch” in the title?
Or maybe there aren’t rules about this. When Christina Aguliera’s terrific big-band homage, “Candyman,” came out a few years ago, my friend John wrote about the odd disparity of bleeping out the term “makes my cherry pop” but keeping in “makes my panties drop” – in essence, condemning the sexual innuendo part but being totally okay with the actual sexual part.
It seems arbitrary, that’s all. Lady GaGa can’t declare herself a bitch on the radio, Jay-Z can’t mention references to drugs – even when condemning them! – in “Empire State of Mind,” and Panic! At the Disco can’t say “closing the goddamn door,” but everyone’s cool with Britney Spears spelling out “F-U-C-K me” with wordplay so transparent it might as well be onionskin paper soaked in canola oil.
Look, bitch isn’t even on George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” (although, weirdly, “piss” is, even though they used to say “pissed off” on Friends all the time). Remember that billboard advertising Melrose Place featuring nothing but Heather Locklear and the word BITCH in capital letters? That was a decade ago. Come on, radio. We’ve grown up. Shouldn’t you?
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