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.

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.

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

CreateSpace, the publisher, is still selling it directly.

I'm really excited about this: Amazon.com is now carrying the book.

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.

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.

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'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!

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?