Read and Burn

Back when I was writing press releases for the University of Florida, I had a professor turn the tables and start asking me questions. He wanted to know what newspaper I read. I told him the St. Pete Times, and I’m sure I had a good rationale because I was in my 20s and had lots of reasons and justifications and speeches for why I liked or disliked things.“That’s a good paper,” he said. “But they go overboard on all that ‘the moon hung lightly in the fog-misted night’ stuff. Sometimes I just want to know who got murdered, you know?”

The professor had a point. I’m not opposed to a little poetry or finesse, but journalism school, years of simple punk rock, and my shattered attention span have me screaming, “Get to the point,” or “take that ‘word symphony’ back to creative writing class,” when an author gets too overblown.Which brings me to Love and Death in the Sunshine State, a book about the disappearance of a motel owner on Anna Maria Island which is about 10 minutes from where I grew up. It's where we went to the beach. My first girlfriend lived there. I was interested to see how it described the place, especially since the book got pretty good reviews.

Man, did that thing make me mad.

Author Cutter Wood hangs out on Anna Maria Island for a week, gets obsessed with the murder/disappearance and halfway attempts to investigate. Actually, his half-assed investigation is my favorite part of the book, where he’ll sleep until 10 or 11, show up to interviews unprepared,  and try to guilt the motel owner into giving him a reduced rate. Hell, I’d totally read a book about a lazy detective. Somebody get on that!

I think I hate Cutter Wood. I want Oprah to make him cry on the TV like she did to that Million Little Pieces fraud. I want him to be forced to grade his dumb students’ short stories for eternity while Jimmy Buffet plays on a loop. I want Donald Trump to be his roommate. I want the stupid typewriter he uses (yes, of course he uses a typewriter and has to mention it) to run out of ribbon right before he types out another overwritten “poetic” description of Florida.

Incidental characters sound like mashups of Tom Waits and Jimmy Buffet songs, and I don’t really think Woods actually talked or listened to them giving their “I’m just a sunburned carney worker propping up the bar here, but let me tell you some hard-earned wisdom about women and life” jazz. I grew up in Florida. I’ve ridden busses. I’ve worked terrible jobs. I’ve heard those guys all my life. They’re not that poetic.

It's also full of mistakes that are easy enough to fix in the age of Google. Mr. Bones is a bbq restaurant, not a bar. I don’t even think they have a bar. Hernando DeSoto died near the Mississippi River, not in Florida. The name of "The Sarasota Paper" is the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Tourist season is generally in the colder months. After mistakes like these, I’m a bit leery that he really saw a cook give himself a blood sugar test in a greasy spoon that smells like nail polish remover because it’s next to a nail salon in a strip mall. I also don’t believe the young woman that takes a birth control pill and a Flintstones vitamin every morning.  Do they even make Flintstones vitamins anymore?

You could say that the true crime book started, or at least turned respectable with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s blending of reporting and novelistic tools to create a work that was able to get into the characters’ thoughts and motivations. You know what Truman Capote didn’t do? Dedicate over half of his book  to chapters about the author falling in love and moving in with his elementary school crush and teaching students he thinks are stupid and attending parties.

He also, from what I remember didn’t cover the thing in the most florid, overwritten prose that I’m not going to give an example of because I’ve already returned the book and trying to remember it angries up my blood. 

Sometimes you just want to know who got murdered, you know?

Reviews!

You want something that will make your life more majestic and cinematic? Check out "Ecstasy of Gold: Killer Bullets from the Spaghetti West." It's a series of super-limited (750 each) double vinyl collections of spaghetti western music. These sub-Morricone songs are all full of distorted guitars, horns, and shouted choruses. It makes a trip to the grocery store seem epic. You probably won't be able to get the actual vinyl, but you're pretty smart. You can probably find the MP3s somewhere on the internet.

You should also check out "Bleeding Skull: A 1980s Trash-Horror Odyssey." Hundreds of reviews of forgotten '80s horror movies. Skipping more mainstream stuff like the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik focus on forgotten gems like Demonwarp (Bigfoot running wild ripping off heads!), Black Devil Doll from Hell (just watch it), and even Gainesville's own Twisted Issues. Saving most of their love for homemade shot on video masterpieces, the authors have written an informative and funny guidebook to a whole new chunk of movies to look out for. Now if Netflix would get on the ball and get a copy of Demonwarp, we'd all be a little smarter.

Reading List

Few things in life give me more pleasure than seeing movie punk rockers, so I pretty much had to buy a copy of Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks of Film since Santa crapped out. The thing is huge; at over 450 pages, it will stand as the definitive guide to movie punks. The size is justified, if there was a guy with a mohawk being booked in the background of a scene for 30 seconds, the movie gets a review.

Editors Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly keep a conversational tone throughout, with an overall feeling of talking movies with a couple of your buddies. With review summaries like, "A stupid, unattractive man is denied intercourse," you know you're in for a good time.

They also have a good eye for Hollywood shortcuts and cliches: "...Wearing black means you're depressed; if you're male and a hairdresser, you are most certainly a flaming homosexual; dyed hair and headphones means you're probably a shocking and eccentric babysitter at the door of Steve Martin or Tim Allen,"

Movie punks were all over the place in '80s and '90s movies, whether showing how wild and weird the big city was, how things regressed after the Road Warrior inspired apocalypse, or just as zany sight gags in stories of nerds trying to get laid. Because of this, not only have Carlson and Connolly compiled an exhaustive tome on movie punks, they've created an amazing record of trash cinema, one that brought back memories of working through Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia to Film back in the early '90s.

Mixed in with the more cliche movie punks are longer reviews of what I guess would be considered the punk movie canon, Repo Man, Suburbia, Another State of Mind and Rock and Roll High School. Interviews are featured with actors, writers, musicians and directors, even a page-long interview with the patron saint of cinema nerds, the great Eddie Deezen.



Eddie Deezen!

The authors are opinionated, funny and rude when needed, yet are still able to convey what makes a movie like Suburbia stand out from the more exploitative fare, and to enthuse wildly about classics like Surf 2, Get Crazy, Rollerblade, and Class of 1984. Well, they're classics to me, anyway.

If you have any interest in punk rockers, trash movies from the '80s or fun in life, get a copy now.

I also managed to read Unbroken: a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption over Christmas, written by the lady that wrote Seabiscuit. It's the story of Louis Zamperini, who started out as a juvenile delinquent who decides to start running track, comes close to breaking the 4 minute mile, goes to the Jessie Owens Olympics, shakes Hitler's hand, causes an international incident by stealing a Nazi flag, survives 47 days at sea after his bomber crashes (fighting sharks with fists and oars), then survives brutal conditions in a series of Japanese POW camps for years. I, on the other hand, couldn't ride my bike on the trail yesterday because it looked like rain.

After coming home, Zamperini suffered from PTSD, and he figures the best way to deal with that is to go back to Japan, find the commander of the Japanese POW camp, and kill him.

Obviously not as light-handed in tone as Destroy All Movies, Unbroken is a great non-fiction page turner, one that's inspiring and awe-inspiring without giving in to "greatest generation" hokum. I mean, look at that sentence up there! That's material for like 3 or 4 awesome books! Read it and go hug an old person.

A Real, Actual Promotional Quote from the back of a Book

"Like Hunter Thompson on acid." - P.J. O'Rourke.

Not only is the whole, "like X on acid (or steroids)" my least favorite critic phrase ever (well, 'Mats' for The Replacements is up there, too), but wasn't Hunter Thompson Hunter Thompson on acid? And it was written by P.J. O'Rourke, who actually knew Hunter Thompson!

Too Much Horror Business

If you've read any of my stuff before, it is apparent that I have no taste or discrimination at all when it comes to media. Hell, I'll watch just about anything. And if that thing is Halloween-themed, I'll watch it even quicker. So after going home sick today I popped in my latest Netflix treat, "Paul Lynde's Halloween Special." I figured the cold medicine would enhance it.

Now, I knew going in that it wasn't going to be good. But I figured that it couldn't be that bad.

Holy crap, was I wrong.

Bad musical numbers and jokes you can see coming from a mile away make you wonder, "Was this for kids?" "Slow people?"

I suppose it can be instructional in showing the kids today how shitty TV could be back in the '70s, and Kiss does a couple songs, but other than that, stay far, far away.

You'd really think Paul Lynde would be much more discriminating in his choices of roles.

In happier media news, I finally got volume 5 of the 42nd Street Forever exploitation film trailer DVDs. Man, I could watch those things constantly. The best thing about this volume is the crazy juxtapositions between cheap-ass kid shows like "Pinocchio's Birthday Party" up next to the barbarians and boobs epic "Sorcerers" next to kung fu and science fiction trailers.

You should totally get that from Netflix. Hell, you should actually pay for it. Just stay far, far away from Paul Lynde.

Turning an Epic into a Short Subject

I've been re-watching Lord of the Rings lately. While it's as awesome as ever, the whole Gandalf summoning the birds at the end always seemed like a huge cheat, especially after I found the following early draft of the script. I don't want to say that your life will be in danger after reading this top-secret leaked script, but I have heard that Peter Jackson's people can be quite ruthless. Enjoy, but don't tell anyone where you read it.

Scene One. interior, Frodo's house
Gandalf: "Frodo, this cursed ring's power is mighty and horrible. You must destroy it. You have a choice. You can either walk for months, facing terrible monsters and going up against great odds. You will lose friends and the comforts of home, but you will also learn about friendship and have the satisfaction of doing the right thing. Or I can use my wizard stick to summon these huge eagles, we can hop on their backs, drop the ring in the lava and be back in like an hour or so. Your choice, really."

Frodo: "I think I'll take that second one. The one without the monsters."

Gandalf: "Good Choice."

Scene Two. Their task done, Gandalf and Frodo are eating magical ice cream from a constantly refilling bowl back at Frodo's house.

Frodo: "This ice cream is great. Magic is the best thing ever!"

Gandalf: "It sure is, my little friend. It sure is."

End

Thanksgivingness

Went down to Gainesville for Thanksgiving with the in-laws. I wasn't in the best of moods, as Christie and her mom convinced me that they were having a ham for Thanksgiving. I sort of suspected they were messing with me, but the more they stayed on message, the more worried I got.

Was I going to have to be a dick and not eat any ham? I like ham alright, but ham on Thanksgiving? Unacceptable. Was I going to have to call Homeland Security or Martha Stewart and drop a dime on my commie in-laws who were blatantly showing their hatred of America by serving ham on Thanksgiving?

Luckily, it was all a joke and we had a wonderful turkey. I don't especially see what's so funny about joking about Thanksgiving, but I'll let it slide. This time.

My mood improved a bit after I got a tour of my friends Pat and Cindy's swank new pad. To make things sweeter, Pat gave me a couple CDs - one of which I'm listening to right now called "The Get It: Raw Funk of '67 - '69."

I don't think any genre compilations have burned me more frequently than funk. At least with reggae or country or rockabilly or garage comps, you'll find a couple keeper tracks buried alongside the doo-doo, but I don't know how many damn funk comps I've bought that promised "raw, greasy funk" with a picture of some cool looking dudes in matching suits, only to hear a bunch of ballads or half-assed disco.

But man, Pat must have been out of his mind to let this one go. Everything is tight, raw and funky, and I haven't skipped over a track yet. You know when the songs include titles like "Shake a Poo Poo" or "Finger Lickin' Chicken" you're getting something good. A good 3/4 of the songs start with some guy saying something like, "This here's a new dance called the ___" and feature lots of shouts and grunts.
This is gonna get played weekly once cookout season starts up again.

Pat also included this cool little thing:



Check it out, it's a mummy choking two explorers who were foolish enough to disturb his slumber. Apparently Michaels, a store I get dizzy in just crossing the threshold has a ton of stuff like this if you want to build your own spooky train set or Halloween town or whatever.

So for these treats, and the fact that we actually had turkey like normal people, I am eternally thankful.

Edited Version

I read a lot of books. I generally have one book at work I read on lunch breaks so I don't have to talk to people if I don't want to, and another one at home to read before I fall asleep. And hell, after 10 years of marriage, it's not like there's anything else going on in that bed anyway.

I'm not one to make a big deal about it or anything, like wearing READ buttons or sighing when people talk about "American Idol" and reprimanding them for not reading Plato or "The Federalist Papers" or something.

Lately, however, my reading has only served to make me angry. I was reading this book called "Heavy Metal Islam" at work. Basically the premise of the book is that young people in repressive, war-torn countries in the Middle East are increasingly turning to extreme forms of music, which could possibly incite a Velvet Revolution-type situation. Pretty interesting, huh?

So I'm going along fine, until the author mentions Iron Maiden's mascot, Freddy. Freddy? Jesus, who with a passing knowledge of metal doesn't know his name is Eddie? He also confuses a couple album titles for band names.

I still finished the book, although that Freddy thing still bugged me.

Then I was reading this book called "In Heaven, Everything is Fine," about this flamboyant dude who wrote the song that the lady in the radiator sings in "Eraserhead," and who starred in "New Wave Theater," which was apparently a nexus for National Lampoon/early Saturday Night Live people and Los Angeles punk.

Although opening with a fight between Fear and Chevy Chase will pretty much guarantee that I'm going to read it, the thing hurt my head with all the fact errors and generalizations. Black Flag and the Circle Jerks had their heyday in the early '80s, not the mid '70s. Full body tattoos were more likely to be seen in the circus in 1984, rather than a punk show. Nobody was "moshing" in 1981, they were "skanking" or "slamming." You'd pick "New York's Alright if You Like Saxophones" as an offensive Fear song? Really? Over "Beef Bologna?" "I Love Livin' in the City?" "We Destroy the Family?" A Boston band was splitting their set between reggae and jazz in the late '60s? Reggae was barely born in the late '60s, would a band in Boston really be playing it and expecting people to care? Doesn't the abbreviation LA mean Lousiana instead of Los Angeles? Was Eddie Murphy even a cast member of SNL in 1981 when Fear appeared? Well, OK, that one seems to check out, but I shouldn't have to be fact checking for a book unless I'm getting paid for it.


Every time I catch something like that, not only does it take me out of the narrative, but I wonder how much other stuff the author got wrong. I mean, if you can't get Eddie's name right, why would I trust you when you tell me about death metal in Iraq?

Don't publishing companies hire editors anymore? Why can't I just relax and fall asleep reading a book instead of getting upset that nobody bothered to tell this dude that Iron Maiden's mummy guy is not named Freddy?

Stagecraft

My all-time favorite stage move has always been when James Brown would act exhausted after giving his all to the audience and would fall to his knees shaking his head in a gesture of I-can't-do-this-anymore, whereupon one of his dudes would drape a cape around his shoulders and lead him offstage, only to have James throw it off, run up and grab the mic, re-engergized by his kick-ass band.

Second place? Probably a tie between the humping the guitar/machine gun guitar and the '70s Elvis karate demonstrations.

In fact, my friend Pat and I got quite a bit of milage joking about how indie rock would be a lot more entertaining with a bit more showmanship (and a good editor). How awesome would it be if Sebadoh would break down mid song, then have a dude put a ratty thrift-store cardigan or horn-rim nerd glasses on Lou Barlow and have him re-energized and ready to (theoretically) rock the house?

Anyway, couple weeks ago I got this Stax Records documentary from Netflix. I put it on and was doing something else while the DVD played. It was pretty interesting, but since I've read a couple books on Stax, I figured I didn't really need to pay attention too much.

Then they show a clip from the Stax 1968 European tour. Sam and Dave are playing "Hold On, I'm Coming." Like most of the live Stax stuff I've heard, the song is much faster and grittier, making you forget all the times your dad's friends felt all Blues Brotherey after a couple beers and would attempt to sing that or "Soul Man."

So the song is ending and getting faster and faster and they're both doing this crazy dance that looks like they're trying to pull up their pants while shimmying all over the stage. As the song accelerates, they're pretty much just yelling "hold on" over and over to each other.

Then one of them passes out. Two dudes grab him and take him to the side of the stage. Then about 10 seconds later he shimmys across the stage to keep screaming out "hold on" some more.

That just might be the greatest stage move I've ever seen.

Natural Mystics

I had "Mystics in Bali," this Indonesian horror movie at the top of my Netflix queue for about 2 months. I pretty much gave up on ever seeing it when it arrived in the mail a couple weeks ago. After a period of quiet reflection, I understood why it took so long to arrive.


Netflix was testing me. Would I give up after a few weeks and pick another movie for my top pick? If so, then I wasn't really worthy of watching the awesomeness of "Mystics in Bali." Luckily, I persevered, and Netflix noticed and rewarded me.
I am so very, very glad I passed the test.


In the movie, an American woman is writing a book on black magic. She learns that Indonesian Leyack magic is the strongest magic in the world so she goes out in the field to complete her work.

She meets a witch who can extend her tongue about six feet and speaks like an evil Yoda. The witch agrees to teach the woman her secrets, but of course, this knowledge comes at a price.

I've seen some crazy stuff in movies. Back in Gainesville, I would regularly walk over to my friend Keith's apartment, where he had all sorts of wonderful and strange VHS tapes. Kung fu movies where vampires enlist the aid of Dracula and eat placenta and urine to grow stronger. Another kung fu movie scene in which a group of turtles get on their hind legs and dance to Roxy Music. "For Your Height Only," featuring Weng Weng, a two foot tall Filipino midget as a James Bond superspy. A movie about a lady who fell in love with a corpse and keeps his pee-pee in the refrigerator. All sorts of Jackie Chan or John Woo stuff that is pretty commonplace now, but at the time was pretty mind-blowing. After a lot of these movies or scenes, whoever was gathered in Keith's apartment would sort of look at each other to make sure that, yes, we really did see that.

But the scene in "Mystics in Bali" where the woman's head pops off her body and flies away with her lungs, heart and entrails attached flapping in the breeze? That just might be the damndest thing I've ever seen.

Oh yeah, the head/guts fly around looking for blood to keep the witch young or something. In one scene, the head throws a midwife through a wall like Popeye, then gets down between a pregnant woman's legs to suck out a baby.

Luckily, there are some good monks who agree to fight the black magic, who also give all sorts of information on Indonesian magic. If anyone walks in on you watching "Mystics" and accuses you of watching trash, you can always select one of these scenes and you can say you're working on an anthropology degree in folklore.

So yeah, "Mystics in Bali." You might have to wait a while or prove your worth to the gods of Netflix, but it is totally worth it. Now if I can just appease the gods to send "Flash Gordon," which has been number one in my list for like a year, I will have all the secrets of the universe.

Saturday in the Dark with George

Last Saturday night with George Romero commenting over “Night of the Living Dead” was awesome. I fully intended to write something up about it, but got lazy and got scooped.

There’s not much I would have said that Alonzo didn’t hit, but I will say that I was surprised Romero downplayed the politics that have been read into the movie (A movie made in the midst of the Vietnam War featuring children eating their parents lends itself to all sorts of political readings), but he mostly dismissed that as something Cashiers du Cinema took off with and he sort of went along with.
Most of his talk was more on the cooperation between the team that made the movie, and the rigors of the filmmaking, as well as frequent plugs for his new zombie movie which he promises to be more in the spirit of “Living Dead” than the “Land of the Dead,” which won’t really be that hard.

Oh yeah, and he hates fast-moving zombies.

I was also able to use the movie as a way to unveil this year’s Amateur Film Contest. We’re going with a zombie theme this year. As with the other years, all you have to do is make a short movie with a zombie theme, submit it and possibly win valuable prizes.
Expect to be hassled about this from now until May.