Wassup haters time for Battle Old Women Writers up in this bitch, shit’s about to get real violent! Beverly Cleary’s over 90 years old but she still wields an Ostrogoth mace like it’s nobody’s business. Shit, just the other day I saw her cleave a hog’s head in twain and then cure its hock into bacon with her mind rays all whilst dictating a story where Beezus learns a lesson about gumption in the face of adversity. The woman is clearly hard as rock.
Then there’s Judy Blume who’s got some sort of Dorian Gray thing happening. Seriously, look up some pictures of her and you’ll see she’s looked exactly the same since the early 80s. See that picture above? Yeah, she’s in her 70s. Are you there Judy, it’s me Whole Milk and I’m in love with you, please sign my buttcheek so I can tattoo it on. Because it’s real. Both of these women should get a Caldecott Medal for kicking ass and taking names, but you know how this game works. The Choice Is Yours…
They’re a funny thing, children’s books. Some people seem to think that to craft a great one is somehow easy, an exercising in pandering and restricting yourself. But let’s just look at the name. We don’t call other books “adult books” (well, not those anyway) and why? Because we understand they just don’t appeal to all adults and are rather books for historians, or depressive, or chick-lit or any number of other things. But a true children’s book has the immense and awe-inspiring power to capture the hearts and minds of all children, to collectively delight the world’s most precious commodity.
Maurice Sendak, author of Where The Wild Things Are, arguably the most enduring children’s book of all time passed away today at the age of 83. Where The Wild Things Are is the story of monsters and dreams, yes, but also of escape, perceived independence, and finally the confidence to know that you’re not alone and indeed don’t want to be. Sendak wrote a book with beauty, intellect, and a deep empathy for the mind of the child. All too often our youngest citizens are condescended too, but Sendak refused this. That’s why his work will endure long after his death.
Cue the tumblr theme song. Is there a Tumblr theme song? The dream state quad-dimensional sine wave of it might look like Whatever Zine. The technicolor wonders of net art stretched to its holographic ends. I like how in this issue, they are using iPhones as a medium to display art, yet also be the subject it self. This issue features work from Teen Witch, Mollysoda, Jesse “Stoopid Jesse” Saint John and more.
There are a ton of tumblr based artists being represented inside the flash based zine. Shit is actually kinda out of hand. They have a dope illustration of Bart Simpson wearing the Jeremy Scott pieces that bear his image. Don’t have an ironic cow man. Plus, there is an amazing Tumblr Tarot card section. Spiritual. This zine is very #based and #rare, and it definitely warrants your undivided attention both URL and IRL.
This week’s Village Voice has an article on our boys from Queens, Action Bronson, and Party Supplies! The article gets into the some of the tails of Blue Chips, their new stellar release. If you don’t already have it (what’s wrong with you?), you can download it for free. GO DO THAT NOW! The Voice article introduces us to lesser known knowledge about Bronson’s love for 5 series BMWs, tattoos of the Carhartt logo, and Jason Giambi sunglasses. The most interesting part of the article is describing Bronson and Party Supplies’ creative process.
It describes their youtube parties, and trying to come up with insane phrases to search. Once they found something they liked, Party would sample the audio from the video using an MPC, loop it, and Bronson would write lyrics. The article also goes into the scope of Bronson’s appeal, and how he is becoming one of the most recognized people in Williamsburg. Check out the article to get even more background, and information on Blue Chips.
The L.A. Zine Fest is rapidly approaching and it looks really awesome. Jon Vermillyea, has illustrated some awesome designs for us and is tabling at the Fest. There are going to be over 70 other amazing artists there! Artists like Tom Neely, who along with Igloo Tornado (Neely plus Gin Stevens, Scot Nobles), draws and writes the awesome Henry & Glenn Forever. The real Henry Rollins will be there, interviewing subculture legend V. Vale, the creator of Search & Destroy and RE/Search magazines.
If I was in L.A I would be hitting this up, but since I’m not you definitely should if you are in the area. Admission is totally free, so you can save your money to buy zines. Duh. There are so many dope artists at this zine Fest it’s kinda insane.
Sunday February 19th, 2012 The Last Bookstore
453 S. Spring St.
Los Angeles, 90013
It’s no secret that I’m a little bit obsessed with comic book artist (and sometime writer) Mike Allred. Though his finest creation remains Madman, it is followed closely by he and Peter Milligan’s short run on Marvel’s X-Force, which later evolved into a 26 issue original splinter series X-Statix. Taking the X-Force out of the hands of shoulder-pads-n-oversized-cups Rob Liefeld in 2001, Milligan and Allred crafted one of the finest satires I’ve ever read, while also accomplishing the monumental task of giving the exhilaratingly flippant series a hefty emotional weight.
If you’ve never read the story of the pop-band-esque team of Anarchist, Orphan, U-Go Girl, Phat, Vivisector, Venus Dee Milo, Doop, and more, then now is the perfect time. Marvel has finally collected everything X-Statix into a gorgeous Omnibus, featuring all 40 original run issues plus like 10 affiliate title issues. It’s worth it just for the larger format reprinting of Allred’s still breathtaking art.
This is the way you’re supposed to experience the tragic romance of Mister Sensitive and Edie Sawyer (not to mention Myles Alfred and Billy Bob Reilly), the silent trip inside the mind of the mysterious green goop Doop, the rollercoaster rise and fall of the X-Statix team in the eyes of the (sometimes) adoring public, the battle with The Avengers (!), and so so much more.
So I’m obviously geeking out over this a bit (a lot) but it has instantly become one of my favorite collections I own. Though reading them as they came out was fun, it’s even better getting them all in one big magnificent hunk ‘o book. If there is one comic related item you buy yourself with any leftover holiday earnings, it should definitely be this one.
If you’ve been into this hip-hop thing for long enough, you are most likely tired of it. Just like most genres, I guess. You get back to it every now and then because there’s nothing like it – but it still bores the hell out of you to sort through all the crap that is being played and said and made and swayed these days. If you’ve been into hip-hop for long enough, you have most likely heard of J-Zone – or one of his productions. While I am not a huge fan of everything he does, as a rule I am entirely puzzled by the fact that he never hit payload off a ghost production somewhere. To me, he has always been the weirdo Pete Rock, the choosy DJ Premier, a big name sound without all the big name drama. He has a style that’s instantly recognizable, and any beat you pick out of his catalog will make you at the very least nod your head in appreciation. But his instrumentals are so complex and rich that it takes only the most ridiculous lyricists to benefit from the win-win relationship that is to be able to spit on a J-Zone beat: Cage, Celph Titled, Wordsworth, Biz Markie, Rugged Man, GM Grimm and… a handful others. Zone himself can’t quite get on par with his own beats, people of his entourage did a better job than he did, but at least he says funny stuff… That is neither here nor there though, because J-Zone has been into this hip-hop thing for long enough to be tired of it and he retired himself from the game with zero Soundscan hits under his belt.
When he wasn’t rapping or producing, he has been writing a column for The Source and more recently Egotrip’s blog, where he shared his thoughts and archive with the world. That is also where the masses were introduced to his droll journalistic style (no tumblr). That is where Root For the Villain is coming from. Subtitled “Rap, Bullshit, and a Celebration of Failure,” it is part autobiography, part exposé. The first chapter goes right for the femoral as Zone traces his intellectual and physical lineage to his two grandfathers, characters and chroniclers in their own rights. They gave him his sense of humor, his sense of self, his first musical experiences. When his skin color made him a target for bullies, rappers provided him with role models and enough material to tread water in trash talk territory. One by one, he connects his defining moments with rap releases, as we watch him grow from a teenage jive turkey up to a grown ass man of few words, from intern bathroom cleaner in a recording studio up to working overtime as main engineer in another. He meets his idols along way, tours around the world, his crew forms and falls apart and he touches on good and bad times with the same candor. My ONE gripe with this part, and it’s entirely personal, is that we don’t learn a thing about where HUG and Shid have gone.
The second part of the book contains a series of rants, treatises, short stories about being a New York resident, a reformed indie rap producer, a single 34-year-old black man in 2010. While the first half was more about him being a man-child who grew up both faster and slower than his peers, this one is about him being a child-man who gets pissed off at the internets and generally yells at cloud. Both parts of the book are equally entertaining to read though because even his most melancholic recollections are treated like they happened to someone else.
There is no weeping, no preaching, no gossipping; just a list of what J-Zone has been through, and what kind of man that made him. You can only sympathize with his tour stories. I did feel my gallbladder being yanked out of my stomach when I read that his Live @ The Liqua Sto sold less than 50 copies upon release; partly because I bet I can find more than 50 people with the album on their hard drive right now, partly because I had no idea how badly overlooked he was. I do know many underground artists have stories much like his, being abandoned by a crappy promoter halfway through a tour in rural France or running after artists who haven’t paid him for beats. However I am not sure how many have bought mega record crates from crackheads and how many are living with their grandma. This is the kind of unique anecdotes that make the book an interesting read even if you had no idea who he is as a musician. The epilogue/third part of the book (which is only twenty pages deep with a lot of pictures) is called “Word to the Nerds” and it is where he gets the most personal, and the most nerdy. No boring details, technical stuff, perhaps even a lack thereof.
“Rap, bullshit and the celebration failure” are the soundtrack to J-Zone story. You can hear each of them oozing out of every reference, every rhetorical figure, every blunt moment of honesty. But I suppose it’s not a very marketable title; Root For the Villain is much catchier, but I can see nothing villainous, or even remotely ill-meaning about the dude. Shit, if it were another column, I would call him kuudere. He doesn’t conform, he doesn’t care, but it’s not like he didn’t try, and he’s not missing out on much anyway. A bit less than 200 pages for about the retail price of a record, entirely worth it. So go villain go!
Does that look like the face of someone who could mistakenly wipe out an entire alien race? Apparently so, for 14-year-old Asa Butterfield has been cast as Ender Wiggins in the upcoming adaptation of Ender’s Game, the classic sci-fi novel written by frothing, homophobic lunatic Orson Scott Card. Since its publication in 1985, there’s been a plethora of failed attempts to adapt it for the big screen, but in 2009 Odd Lot Entertainment got the ball rolling and brought on director Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine haha).
For those unfamiliar with Card’s book, Ender’s Game is about a bunch of kids who are sent to a military training academy for geniuses. Despite being a shrimp, Ender Wiggins is the star student. He begins leading his classmates in simulation exercises and mock battles against the Buggers, humanity’s greatest threat. It’s a kickass novel, although I prefer Card’s follow-up, Speaker for the Dead.
Ender’s Game is currently scheduled for a March 2013 release date but you can see Mr. Butterfield do his thing next weekend in Scorsese’s upcoming family film Hugo.
I would hate to be selling books in this day and age. For one, book reps are becoming peddlers of 0s and 1s, intermediaries between the company that makes money from pimping authors and the company that makes money from selling e-readers (both of which are fast becoming one and the same). Also, I find that we-readers are awfully discriminating. Take me, for example (please). When in a bookstore, it would never occur to me to venture in a category other than fiction. I think I’m at a point where I own or at least have read the classics, I won’t magically stumble upon some old gem I have never heard of. And as much as I only care about fiction, I really only would consider reading a select few subgenres. Actually if I am to trust my bookshelves, I mostly like authors from specific points in time and place. To say that I am picky would clearly be an understatement: in the last 15 years, my favorite book from France would rank maybe a B in my grand brain of things. Maybe. On a good day. At a glance I would say that 90% of the books I enjoyed in the last 15 years are from Britain – the remaining 10% are friends and random picks at some airport, somewhere.
The ONLY reason I started picking up The Strain books is Guillermo Del Toro. I have never hated anything that he has done, which is a lot to say. Chuck Hogan I probably don’t know well enough to reliably talk shit about, but I picked up The Standoff a while back and thought it was ok – a bit contrived but worth sitting through – whereas Devils In Exile I thought was boring as hell even though the protagonist was kind of a cool guy. Neither book made it back home. So yeah, I kept my expectations midrange. But to me Del Toro has a special talent to create atmospheres that are both powerful and weird, the kind that me and my mother-in-law can agree on. And I heard that he writes crazy intricate scripts so at thought that at worse this would be like reading rejected pages from his Blade movies, which I can live with.
As any good vampire story, The Strain establishes its own lore, which can be summed up in the fact silver is the only viable vampire killer. No crosses, no garlic, no stakes. They do shy away from sunlight (no glitter) but there is no occurrence of vampires dying in the sunlight. That is because they are a pretty ruthless bunch: by the end of the first book, Earth is essentially conquered. Their fearless leader is affectionately, fittingly called “the Master”: they function as sort of a hive fathered by the Master with everyone on the same wavelength and the Master being the Master that he is can actually manipulate that wavelength to see through the eyes of each and every vampire, whenever, wherever, he can even speak directly into people’s brains with it because he is the Master. We also discover at some point that he is sun-resistant, though not all the way sunproof, so yeah. Ordinary vampires still communicate telepathically, they can even hack into human communication networks with brainpower, and they do possess a special mental bond with people they knew before being turned. Vampirism is the strain of the title: it is a worm/parasite that gets passed on to others via a stinger that shoots out of under the tongue, and is up to six feet long. Once turned, former humans lose all their body fat because they’re on a blood from then on, their middle fingers turn into a talon-like appendage that they can fight with, and they become all pale and smooth I guess from moisturizing in sewer water. They also lose all sexual appendages, which is a cute nudge to all your slutty vampire books.
So the Master is pretty BA. We are introduced to him firstly via the childhood memories of Abraham Setrakian, a holocaust survivor who was told stories of Josef Sardu, a giant who had the habit of capturing misbehaving little Romanian kids like him. After he saw him with his own eyes, he began to obsess over Sardu, gathering all kinds of intelligence about him. In his contemporary shape, the Master arrived in New York by plane, on a Boeing that turned completely off upon landing. First man on the scene is Ephraim Goodweather, a CDC doctor sent to investigate a possible terrorist threat. He is recently divorced, not quite over his wife and definitely tied to his kid Zach. Once he gets on the plane, he and his teammate Nora Martinez find out that there are only 5 survivors, everybody else is dead, with no trace of poison or fight. It’s crazy. Meanwhile, in the City, Vasily Fet is a rodent exterminator who has seen his target population (the rat) fleeing the city and/or becoming super tough to the point of attacking babies to find sustenance. Gus Elizalde is a Mexican thug who witnesses some crazy dude causing trouble (a vampire) and kills him straight up. He ends up back in jail but he figures that’s safer than in a world of bloodsuckers. These are the characters who will somehow put their brains and weapons together to fight the Master, with the help of the “Occido Lumen” a book of vampire knowledge being offered for auction just that week by some anonymous bidder.
The story is told through the eyes of all these characters, by way of journals or direct discourse. Narratively, everything is very well tied together: each of them has their own voice, knowing just enough about what is going on (and the world at large) that there is not a dull or confusing moment. Actually, I would like to make a personal note that between the various characters and the three-installment format, there is maybe a tad too much repetition of some elements. Sure, it does make sense that different characters would have the same thought, and sure, it does create a sort of oppressive atmosphere as man, woman and child observe the same little bummer or a detail. However sometimes I got the feeling that the writers thought I was some kind of idiot, repeating the same thing three times within thirty pages. Anyway. You get to see each character slowly unfold, growing from scared to determined to scared again as they quest to understand what is exactly going on, and how to get rid of the strain. Overall, that’s some really tight storytelling with enough description for you to get a clear visual of what is going on, and enough left out so you can piss your pants on occasion. It’s precise, incisive, cutting. No gobbledygook, and actually not much depth either. There’s no time for depth as far as the characters are concerned, they spend a good part of the trilogy just understanding what is happening. I think it helps that a good bulk of the drama takes place in New York, in places that have received enough media exposure (the subway, La Guardia, Ground Zero) so that even if you have not set foot in New York you will be able to recreate some of the ambiance. As a reader, that means you keep a good grip on the bigger arc and you can keep in touch with the various subplots through geography.
There is a but. A sizeable one (I am quite fond of those, I shall not mislead you on this). The story finds its resolution in a manner that will undoubtedly make a lot of people unhappy. It doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but nothing leading up to the final moments would have prepared you for it. Except maybe that as the number of pages stuck between your left index and thumb dwindles, even the arrival of Quinlan the half-breed vampire who gets in league with the good guys for his own reasons, you get a pretty good sense that none of this situation will work out easily. While I did keep the possibility in mind that everybody would die for a very anticlimactic ending, the end is alter-climactic instead. It’s not what you/I expected, but it’s also probably not what you/I wanted. It’s cinematic to the point that you wonder whether the book came with a script option. Let’s put it this way: if watching The Matrix pissed you off in any kind of way, you will have the exact same feeling. You’ve been warned. But if you are willing to look past your sense of ironic detachment, be prepared to enjoy this book cover-to-cover3, sweating your shirt off at the end of the first two volumes, and scratching your head when you close the last one.
Everyone has that one author who really gets them into reading. For me, that was Stephen King. When I was a kid, his books were the first that I really devoured, my first experience with pleasure reading. I’ve seen moved on to “bigger and better things” (whatever that means) but I will always have a place in my heart for the King man, and will without fail read his new books.
Last week saw the release of his newest tome, 11/22/63, a story of a man who travels back in time to prevent the Kennedy Assassination. Sweet! I have it sitting at home waiting for me, but in the mean time it’s got me thinking about my other favorite King works. I know a lot of people hate on him, which seems insane to me, but I also know that there are tons of you out there who love him just as much as I do. His bibliography is so expansive and varied, that everyone’s bound to have different Top 5′s. So here’s mine, and be sure to chime in with yours in the comments!
—–
Honorable Mentions: Short stories, and Under the Dome(2009)
First off, I wanted to limit my top five to novels, because there are just so many great stories, but I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t mention at least some of the amazing fiction nuggets held withing Night Shift, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and Skeleton Crew (my favorite collections of his). Whether is be the sci-fi terror of “The Jaunt,” the Cthulhu mythos love-letter “Crouch End,” the paranoid narrative of “I Am The Doorway,” the goofy gore of “The Mangler,” the dark summer erotica of “The Raft,” the isolation of “Trucks,” or… damn there’s a lot of good stories.
The other work I wanted to shout out is Under The Dome, one of his more recent novels. It came after a string of books (Cell, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, etc.) that I liked but didn’t love, and I sorta was wondering whether the old man still had it in him to crank out a 1000+ page barnburner. Boy did he ever! His tale of the town of Chester’s Mill’s imprisonment in a translucent biosphere was classic King, with a vast cast of characters, small-town intrigue, violence, and (an attribute that is now endearing to me) third-act issues.
It is, in many ways, the prototypical King work. The large cast, comprised mostly of children. The perpetuation of evil over vast amounts of time. The Maine setting. Metaphysical horror buttressed right up against things like Dracula and killer clowns. The story of The Losers of Derry Maine and their lifelong struggles with the ancient evil beneath it is exhausting, invigorating, terrifying, and finally wonderful.
Perhaps now more remembered for the Miniseries version (one of the best King adaptations), the novel is infinitely deeper, more disturbing, and just generally better in every way. This was the first King mega-tome I read and it really exemplifies his ability to juggle a multitude of characters, moods, and themes, while at the same time delivering a straightforward and engrossing story.
Nothing supernatural. No ancient evils, no magical beings. No giant cast of characters, no town. Just Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes. Another work more recognized for its movie version, the story is actually greatly benefited by the slowing nature of the novel. As Paul recuperates from his accident in the care of the possibly unstable Annie, the slow ratcheting of tension becomes almost unbearable.
By the time the novel’s most famous scene rolls around (spoiler alert, it involves a sledgehammer) it’s all you’ll be able to do to stay in your seat and hold the book steady enough to read. An exercise for King in stripping away the recurring characteristics of his milieu, Misery is a comparatively quiet human story that nonetheless is full of scares, and also runs as a great meta-commentary on what it is to be an author.
