small drunken cog in a giant destructive empire*

yo, ya boy's got words...word???

2012-02-10T17:54:00.000-05:00

Monkeytown has found a home, and a nice one, too. S A M Publishing -- a small, spanking new outift that publishes extreme fiction, horrific poetry, splatterpunk, and all that gooey stuff -- has picked up the novel, release date TBD. I always knew that the book would be a really tough sell, especially in a mainstream market dominated by YA, non-fiction and various cookbook bullshittery, and indie presses that are going for a very specific aesthetic or are backlogged for years with forthcoming titles. I've been looking for a new press like this one for at least two years, and major props to Duotrope for connecting me with S A M. 

It's crazy to think back on the genesis of Monkeytown, which is really the genesis of me writing fiction. There's passages still in the book from stuff I was working on in the first creative writing class I took in the fall of 2005 with novelist Josephine Humphreys (who would probably be appalled at the monster I've become) all the way up to the stories I was writing senior year of college and the summer after. The first real attempts at a draft of the book, originally titled Fifth Beach (lame), began my first semester at Columbia in 2007 after a story I'd submitted for workshop got completely trashed. I was in a super dark place in my life for a bunch of different reasons and I started to write a super dark story. I said fuck it I'm going to be the next Bret Easton Ellis and bang this book (which became my thesis) out during a two-week meth binge and get a six-figure advance. Right. Didn't help that I was a full-time student with part-time jobs, but yeah I'm the most epic of procrastinators and a lazy drunkard not a meth head and should have known it would take until April 2010 -- two weeks before my thesis was due -- to crank out a serviceable version. 

[most important thing for me as a writer is to not set an imaginary timetable for anything. Shit happens when it happens when it's meant to happen.] 

Then came a very critique-heavy but encouraging thesis defense and another few months of drinking and adding an additional 40 pages and editing everything else intensely. Then came the rejections. Lots of them. Then I tried to join the flash fiction crowd. Not my thing. I feel like getting Monkeytown a home provides closure for an entire era of life, moving to NYC through finishing grad school and being in my mid 20s, solitary days of self-annihilation and squandered chances, but also some of the happiest craziest moments in the only place I want to live. I hope the second novel will come faster; it should, it's a comedy, although a qualitatively fucked up one. Until then, I'm happy to be indie brah, and so stoked to be rid of such a filthy beast.

Loose meats!

2012-01-17T15:30:00.001-05:00

This is Stab Pyramid's postal brethren

Upon opening the package that contained my copy of Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes (Blue Square Press, 2011), I discovered a much smaller nugget of unbridled poetical prose in a handbound black Moleskine-like cover, numbered _ of 42. Stab Pyramid by Sean Kilpatrick & Blake Butler is a treat, if you like treats that taste like “chocolate swastika-kissed anvils, seats grafted fat with toddler head all pushed from me” or “the paling below raked clit.” Grizzled domesticity championed by a father figure who delights in goring baby-skin and “sucking the pulp out of a picture of the glitched.” The mother only implores us to “stop acting like my pussy is an ambulance for the world.” And, yeah. This little fleshy gulp of sin and topical-brilliance-in-Tourettic-OCD-language-expulsions-slash-murders makes for an excellent prelude and tremor-smeared companion to the similarly themed fuckspaces, perhaps one of the fuckiest. As disjointed as they are freaky, these impure exaggerations ream me the burnt cornea treatment I’ll be unable to shake, even if I wanted to: “I slept in a newspaper wide enough to crown my wave and considered a microphone shitting sons from the knotted tunnel of a senator’s hysterectomy.” Thanks fellas.

but I don't want brain damage

2012-01-03T18:10:00.002-05:00

The Flaming Lips have always been a band that eschews conventionality and categorization. From the group’s quirky, acid-punk indie releases in the 80s to its transition from guitar-heavy alternafunk to sonically ambitious trippy studio syphonika in the 90s and 2000s, the vibe has remained as consistently unpredictable as it has stayed awesome. That the Lips are still, after three decades, putting out a steady stream of innovative work and touring relentlessly is not as noteworthy as the fact that they’ve put out more music in the last 12 months than anybody. That’s right, in terms of sheer hours of music (probably more than 35) they are the most prolific. This kind of output is ridiculous, but the way its been released is innovative on an insane level, even for a band that features duct-taped spaceships, human balloons, 20-foot-tall digital vaginas-slash-doors and three-feet-long synthetic hands as part of its standard stage act.

A vague January2011 promise of one song per month exploded into a constantly churning neo-psychedelic machine, as, starting in March, the Lips released, in monthly succession: the EP “Flaming Lips 2011: The Flaming Lips with Neon Indian”; the "Gummy Song Skull" EP, a seven pound skull made of gummy bear material with a gummy brain-slash-flashdrive; the EP "The Flaming Lips with Prefuse 73”; a live-in-studio recording of the band's 1999 album "The Soft Bulletin" on a flashdrive embedded in a marijuana-flavored brain inside a strawberry flavored gummy skull (as well as a best-of compilation entitled "Everyone You Know Someday Will Die" put together by drummer Kliph Scurlock); the "Gummy Song Fetus" EP, which consists of three songs on a flashdrive embedded in a bubblegum-flavored fetus made of gummy bear material; "The Flaming Lips with Lightning Bolt", a collaborative EP with experimental rock group Lightning Bolt; a six hour-long song entitled "6 Hour Song (Found a Star on the Ground” packaged with two other songs and released with a set of spinning discs with animations on them; a 24-hour song entitled "7 Skies H3" made available for purchase as a hard drive encased in an actual human skull; and a 12" EP collaboration with Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band.

Yes, they recorded a 24-hour song. And novelty is great. Novelty is as American as Oklahoma. Gummy skulls and spinning discs are super rad. They are. But for those of us who would rather surf YouTube for free shit than purchase a $5,000 skull-slash-USB cable, we’re going to be more concerned with how the actual music sounds than how it’s packaged. And how does it sound? Is it even possible to succinctly and coherently analyze, in a single review, hour s of music made with several (vastly aesthetically different) collaborators over dozens of recording sessions in a variety of lengths and formats (live vs studio)? Yes it is, in four words: Mindfuckingly brutish yet sextacular.

Actually it’s impossible, mostly because I’m lazy. But also because I don’t have time to imbibe all the shrooms necessary to listen to a 24, or even a 6-hour song in its entirety. I will say, though, for the casual listener who thinks “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” is cute or who finds “She Don’t Use Jelly” catchy, this is a post-Embryonic Flaming Lips that is darker, much more experimental, mostly devoid of intelligible lyrics, and only completely accessible to those with a proclivity for consuming multiple narcotics within a short time frame, or simultaneously. This is music for those who would rather tackle Pynchon than James Patterson. A slightly less snobby way of saying that this is conceptual art. And seriously, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Lips’ music has sort of mimicked the trajectory of the world at large for the last dozen or so years. From the pre-dot-com triumphant fanfare of The Soft Bulletin, to At War With the Mystics’ cable-friendly garbage spewed at a time (2006) of cheaply made foreign goods and a deceptively surging economy, to Embryonic’s crunchingly dark experimental dirge in 2009, to the seizure-inducing, haunting, eardrum-molesting maelstrom that is 2011. As if to say, “Shit is getting crazy, kids, we know, we’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through the sins of your past and the mango-colored bliss that your future can be, if you’ll only trust us.” Abstract art was born from social and political turmoil. We need a break from straight-lines and convention, the Drudge Report blinking on the Subway-ride Kindle. An escape to the rapidly deteriorating fuzzy zones in our headspace. We must defeat the robots (hint: they hate gummy skulls).

Below are links to some of the 2011 tunes that may not require hallucinogens to be enjoyed by the average young professional, and a couple for which you might want to light up:

1. "Gummy Skull #1: Drug Chart"

2. "Is David Bowie Dying??"

3. "What Is The Light? / The Observer"

4. "Heavy Star Moving"

5. "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" *cool video

6. "Evil Minds"

A constant stream of the 24-hour song is here.

welcome to the end times

2012-01-02T14:21:00.001-05:00

Had a couple reviews come out last month -- J.A. Tyler's "A Shiny, Unused Heart" in The Brooklyn Rail and George Williams' "Gardens of Earthly Delights" in Prick of the Spindle. Both of these guys are in my top 8 books of 2011, so check 'em out, now. Actually, now that I mention it, I should just share my top 8 books of 2011. Why keep you anxiously salivating? And why 8? It was my number in baseball and water polo and I'm too lazy to think of 10. Boom. 

1. Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young (Word Riot)

2. A Shiny, Unused Heart by J.A. Tyler (Black Coffee Press)

3. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo (Scribner)

4. Gardens of Earthly Delight: Stories by George Williams (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

5. The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant (Patasola Press)

6. Us by Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books)

7. The Blue Tower: Poems by Tomaz Salamun (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

8. Animals by Janey Smith (plain wrap press)

Also, I was going to announce to the five people that read this sporadic attempt at bloggery that I would be taking a more or less complete hiatus from posting for the next several months because of my involvement in two top-secret projects. However, one of them, a movie-related thing, has fallen through as those things tend to do. So my list of covert projects has been reduced to one, a kind of online literary monstrosity, a collaboration with novelist John Reed that is so totally sweet that the coolest hipsters are already checking it out before it exists. So needless to say, I will still be posting, probably with alarming frequency. I'm sorry. 2012 is the time to step one's proverbial game up (and to get pumped for Ridley Scott's ancient aliens-influenced Prometheus). Let's do it.

PETA Killed Jesus: Can't-Fail Holiday Playlist

2011-12-06T17:31:00.005-05:00

Besides coma-inducing rum cider and horrific sweaters, the key to a successful holiday party is, of course, the music. A lazy host might simply throw on a David Hasselhoff or a Keith Sweat Christmas album and be done with it. But a pro understands the need for diversity -- classic rock, boy bands, the sentimental, the silly, the makeout-friendly. The best part is that you'll only need about 80 minutes of fresh holiday jams, because by that point your guests should be drooling eggnog like autistic snowmen and popping squats behind the tree. And if they aren't, you need to re-dose that cider ASAP. In no particular order, these following tunes will also help to unkill the buzz. You're welcome. (image from here.)

1. Mariah Carey / "All I Want For Christmas Is You"

This is not only one of the best things about December but also one of the catchiest songs ever recorded. This is why my girl Mariah was the unrivaled shit in the '90s. I don't care if you praise Allah, if the smoky intro and sleighbell-infused and joy-oozing beat doesn't at least make you smile, you're a horrible person and deserve only meaningless death and suffering for the rest of your Christmases and all the time. Any self-respecting playlist maker will play "All I Want" at least every four songs.

2. The Flaming Lips / "Christmas At The Zoo"

This one's a little weird, like all The Flaming Lips' stuff, but it's endearing and pleasantly quirky, and who doesn't like rescuing animals in the name of Santa. Don't worry it's not an homage to PETA. After all, PETA killed Jesus.

3. Bruce Springsteen / "Merry Christmas Baby"

This is the epitome of what I love about the Boss -- a testosterone-laced carol where everyone rocks out, gets laid, and feels nostalgic about it for years to come. I can envision myself getting into a bar fight with some knuckleheads in the Dirty Jerz while this song plays.

4. Peanuts Christmas / "Christmas Time Is Here"
This is better off played early in the evening before people get too drunk to feel genuine human emotions and only wants to blast "All I Want" on repeat.

5-6. Adam Sandler / "The Chanukah Song Parts 1 and 2"

I'm sorry my Hebrew friends, but you don't give me many party-friendly options. Barbra Streisand even sold you out and made a Christmas album. I think Matisyahu needs to take the initiative here, until then, we're left with...

7. James Taylor / "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"

This is when you a) locate the mistletoe, and b) find that random cousin that someone brought that's been chugging your death cider because she doesn't know anyone, and who desperately wants to make a bad decision. Let James do the rest.

8. Paul McCartney & Wings / "Wonderful Christmas Time"

In order to fill the one-Beatle quota, it's either this or John Lennon's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" which is about poor people and AIDS and other sad junk. No thanks.Caring about things is what New Years resolutions are for.

9. Frank Sinatra / "Winter Wonderland"

"Your Christmas spirit doesn't scare me, I've chunks of Elves like you in my stool!" - Santa

10. Madonna / "Santa Baby"

This sounds like it's being sung by one of Chris Hansen's jailbait minions, but it's quite conducive to drunken grinding.

11. *NSYNC / "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays"

Don't act like this doesn't get stuck in your head every time you hear it. And check out Gary Coleman as an elf in the video, RIP.

12. South Park / "Mr. Hankey The Christmas Poo"

Everyone might not be down with this timeless South Park treasure. But if you know people who don't like South Park, why are you inviting them to your holiday party?

13. Boyz II Men / "Let It Snow"

If James Taylor fails, this is your foolproof Plan B. Unless you're already passed out in your own puke under aforementioned mistletoe.

14. Snoop Dogg ft. Nate Dogg / "Twas The Night Before Christmas"

After Grandma's in bed and the snitches have gone home, that's when you break out your festive 40 oz and candy-cane flavored blunt wraps! And the next three songs.

15. Afroman / "Violent Night"

16. Tha Dogg Pound / "I Wish"

Segue to standard non-holiday fare, or put "All I Want For Christmas" on repeat. Either way, you won't remember it.

I lived in a city with a misspelled French name, you bathed in corrosives: Secular December Party Playlist

2011-12-05T17:11:00.001-05:00

Parties aren't just for holidays. But for dark parties, it's dark out! Start off slow, no dancing, a little country rock, some spacey Lips stuff, a lotta Lips stuff. Drain the punch, punch your legs to the groove, heat up. Then slow it down, a sad slow dance. Fuck that, someone spike the punch. Dubstep and step into a trip. Badass rock anthems save lives. Now go back to slogging 'nog and jamming to Paul McCartney, you ugly-sweatered floosies.

1. Guided by Voices / "I'm Cold"
2. Flaming Lips and Neon Indian / "Is David Bowie Dying?"
3. Beck w/ Flaming Lips / "Lost Cause (live 2002)"
4. Guided by Voices / "Smothered in Hugs"
5. I'm From Barcelona / "Battleships"
6. Ween / "Your Party"
7. David Bowie / "Stay"
8. Smog / "Left Only With Love"
9. Nu Shooz / "Point Of No Return"
10. Sageone / "The Legend of Mumm-ra"
11. Flaming Lips / "Gummy Skull #1 'Drug Chart'"
12. Diarrhea Planet / "Fauser"

Last night I had a horrible dream

2011-12-04T15:26:00.001-05:00

5 Tent City Poems

2011-11-30T17:21:00.001-05:00

Avant-Girl 2011 (Washington Square)

The azalea,

she said,

means temperance,

passion,

sisterhood,

good-luck drum circles

and fragility.

We waited

in her tent,

smoking.

Minority Report

Face it, blondebeards,

waves burned

this prairie

more than twice:

Our time is moot.

The Media Materializes as a Schaffner Film

Apelike quadrupeds

with widescreen lenses

strip us in vitro.

Time to stop drawing

prosthetic crucifixes

on the sidewalk.

PTSD is So 2007 (Rubber Bullet Sonata)

“The least coolest person on TV,

more interesting

than anyone here,”

sings Private Jimmy

while we sponge

his vegetable legs.

Historical Context

When asked why he felt so compelled to douse his body in flames, the elderly monk replied, “My feet hurt.”

Twitterectomy

2011-11-10T16:02:00.001-05:00

#sometimesyouhaveto

#occupy

#butitshardwhen

Zombie Apocalypse

#remindsmeof

Ronald McDonald

#iftheworldends

Happy Birthday Madonna

#whitepeople

#neverforget

I read a lot which means I'm cool and increases my chances that people wearing glasses will like me

2011-11-09T16:59:00.004-05:00

I fell a bit short of my goal of reading 100 books in the past year (yes, I start my years in November -- so radical, I know), still, 72 books isn't bad for working more than 40 hours a week, and I'm not even counting 25 or so chapbooks of less than 20 pages. I wanted to write a mini-review for each book, which, sadly, is far from a novel idea. So I'm ratcheting it up a notch by writing each review as a quincouplet, which is basically a five-word poem with two words in the first line and three in the second. The form was originated by Benjamin Krause of twenty20 Publications and Diamond Point Press, in whose forthcoming quincouplet anthology I'm happy to have a few of my pieces appear. So yeah, five words per book, except for the ones I've already reviewed, because I've spent enough time thinking about them.

“The Blue Tower” by Tomaž Šalamun: Slovenia’s genius / happy nihilist trees

"A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat” by Arthur Rimbaud: l’enfante retourne / ma tête brûle

"Gardens of Earthly Delight" by George Williams: review forthcoming / sometime next month

"Betty Superman"by Tiff Holland

"In Lieu of Hartshorn" by Travis Brown: Greying ghost / makes nice things

"Animals" by Janey Smith

"Sex at Noon Taxes" by Sally Van Doren: language games / can get naughty

"Nemesis" by Philip Roth: grandpa’s ramblings / still, polio sucks

“Illuminations" by Arthur Rimbaud: l’enfant terrible / c’est mon favori

"A Shiny, Unused Heart" by J.A. Tyler: review forthcoming / The Brooklyn Rail

"The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals" by RaeBryant

"In Watermelon Sugar" by Richard Brautigan: don’t, tigers / eat less parents

"Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World" by Donald Antrim: coral do-gooders / delusions from fish

"Another Bullshit Night in Suck City" by Nick Flynn: best memoir / I’ve ever read

“Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin: historically trite / well-formed but sleepy

"Emotionless Souls" by David S. Grant: how come / this is published?

"Love in a Time of Paranoia" by Howie Good

"Rushing to Paradise" by J.G. Ballard: bored Polynesians / make nice bombs

"The Trial" by Franz Kafka: this feels / like contemporary non-fiction

"Meat is All" by Andrew Borgstrom

"The Laurel Poetry Series: Byron": this dude / got some ass

"The Body Artist" by Don DeLillo: ethereal freak / not much happens

"Wild Animus" by Rich Shapero: self-published drivel / could use editing

"Martini: A Memoir" by Frank Moorhouse: drink, drink, / drink, drink martinis!

"The Iguana Complex" by Darby Larson: dreamy mindfuck / felines elicit resentment

"The Fermata" by Nicholson Baker: epic perversion / but no boner

"Micro-Fiction" edited by Jerome Stern: short flash / some really flashy

"Story of My Life" by Jay McInerney: cocaine schoolgirls / always a hell

"Us" by Michael Kimball

“Killing Yourself to Live" by Chuck Klosterman: tragic roadtrip / culture-subverting truth monkeys

"Trust" by Liz Waldner: these poems / make me scrunch

"Burning Girl" by Ben Neihart: Baltimore love-thing / stranger than anticipated

"Drinking Until Morning" by Justin Grimbol: dude drinks / weird things happen

"The Illustrator" by James Robison: bohemian pederast / gets more bohemian

"The Rainbow" by D.H. Lawrence: modernist porn / Lawrence’s a boss

"Bright-Sided" by Barbara Ehrenreich: thinking positive: / pretty darn stupid

"Hot Teen Slut" by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

"Train Wreck Girl" by Sean Carswell: girlfriend dies / future looks brighter

"I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill The Clone and Eat It" by Sam Pink: bottled rage / seldom this insightful

"Out Of Touch" by Brandon Tietz: Emprise Review, / where’s my review???

"Ham On Rye" by Charles Bukowski: your childhood / wasn’t this bad

"Things Are Happening" by Joshua Beckman: I love / all your words

"Affluenza" by David LaBounty: weird neighbors / are probably mass-murderers

"The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett: men once / were hardboiled badasses

"Homo Thug" by Asante Kahari

"How Can I Help?" by Ram Dass: Hindu gurus / make nice houseguests

"Vox" by Nicholson Baker: phone-sex paradise / no plot necessary

"Naked Glances" by Carl-Henrik Björck

"The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford: post-WWI masterpiece / Englishmen were sneaky

"Go" by John Clellan Holmes: Beat precursor / better as concept

"Factotum" by Charles Bukowski: odd-job perils / booze away dogma

"You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense" by Charles Bukowski: how sparrows / like drowning happily

"The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster" by Richard Brautigan: hippie’s lament / time to grow

"Bring Me Your Love" by Charles Bukowski: Crumb cartoons / make Chinaski monstrous

"Charles Jessold, Considered As A Murderer" ByWesley Stace

"Generation A" by Douglas Coupland: bees gone / Shytengart’s future’s worse

"South of No North" by Charles Bukowski: early drunk / before real decay

"Hello, Darkness" by Howie Good

"The Gospel of Anarchy" by Justin Taylor

"Waiting For Godot" by Samuel Beckett: god laughs / at bumbling Frenchmen

"The Suburban Swindle" by Jackie Corley

"Panopticon" by David Bajo

"Look! Look! Feathers" by Mike Young

"The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008" by Gordon Massman: insanity is / the fucking shit

"Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart: near-future ache / China should frighten

"Good, Brother" by Peter Markus: mud people / fish solicit violence

"Tales of Woe" by John Reed

"My Father's Tears and Other Stories" by John Updike: Rabbit runs / out of time

"Without Wax" by William Walsh: 18-inch lovemeat / even sadder anomalies

“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike: this guy’s / a real jerkoff

“Fragments of Sappho” by Anne Carson: lesbian poets / write radical verse

“How It Ended ” by Jay McInerney: I wish / I’d written these

losers, lesbians, perverts

2011-11-09T13:54:00.001-05:00

My review of Tiff Holland's Betty Superman is up at Used Furniture Review. I really loved this little 32-page book, made me wish I had a super dysfunctional childhood. Much thanks again to David Cotrone at UFR for the acceptance!

Budweisers and copyediting stole my 26th year!

2011-11-08T14:46:00.002-05:00

You guys should check out an essay by the inimitable John Reed, “Arthur Phillips Stole My Bike,” in this month’s Brooklyn Rail. There’s a lot going on here: A heated dialogue about how best to create a new Shakespeare play using the Bard’s own hallowed (or hollowed) words; the value of community in a literary world that too often caters to isolationism; the controlled chaos inherent in being a working writer and professor; a touch of nostalgia for a Manhattan childhood and young adulthood; the complexity of getting anywhere on time in New York; a mysterious theft. 

As personal essays written by NYC fiction writers are wont to do, I found myself considering my own situation as it pertains to literary things (solipsism alert!), and realized that this year has been somewhat of a setback. Sure I’ve tinkered with my novel a bunch (which hasn’t slowed the slew of rejections), published a bunch of reviews, an e-chapbook and a few poems, but I could have done so much more. I’m not talking about writing 2,000 words a day and finishing a novel and two books of poetry in six months, I mean in like, life. 

Like, it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to sit on my boxered ass all day every day taking six hours to complete freelance work that could easily take three, thereby destroying any time to do work I actually wanted to do. Like, going to the same seven or eight bars and making no effort to look on either side of the Budweiser pressed to my rotting lips. Like, feeling fine continuing as a doorman for way too long when other opportunities have continued to slap my jaw and I do nothing but shirk. Like making, uh, not much effort at trying to meet girls and forming what could be considered the loosest of interpersonal post-friend-level bonds, and heroically sabotaging anything that might actually be good for my lonesome ass. Like, failing to immerse myself in the many coteries of writers this fine city offers (What John’s saying about the need for community and collaborating, duh) and remaining a mostly anonymous curmudgeon. 

This ineptitude, coupled with the fact that my freelance contract of 1.5 years has ended without much of a warning (putting the “starving” back into my job description), has me feeling better and happier than I can remember. Spending one’s time working alone can only be justified by meaningful work, not mind-numbing “editing” work for a major corporation that will probably tank within the next few months. What my week now lacks in a nifty paycheck, it makes up for it with TIME. Time to write what I want, to finish/start projects I’ve been brooding over for months, to work on the literary magazine that I know can do big things. Not as much money to decimate my once-youthful body with toxins and lard, and I've never felt so fucking energized, baby!!! 

Events will be attended, group projects will go down (including a Monkeytown screenplay collab I’m not at liberty to discuss)! Time to get excited, 2012 might actually turn out OK. Until December 21. 

Also, I just wanted to mention that Short, Fast, and Deadly in its current incarnation has put out its final issue. I am eternally grateful to SFD for publishing many of my flash fictions and poems in the magazine and in the 2010 Anthology. I’m more stoked that I will be the staff chapbook reviewer at the bigger, badder Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly, dropping this January. Watching the empire grow from within. 

Stay posted, and stay fulfilled! Hoo-ah!

so, like, y'all do jaga bawmbs n champang, dog?

2011-11-01T17:22:00.001-04:00

A few observations working the door in the West Village during the Halloween parade:

* I can’t look at girls wearing 1920s flapper costumes without thinking about Nucky Thompson’s Gollum-like sex scene in this week’s Boardwalk Empire. Thanks for ruining Prohibition for me, Buscemi.

* Seeing Pokey without a Gumby is a very real sadness.

* Manhattan high schoolers are ballsy. Sorry kid awesomely dressed as MacGruber. I appreciate your ID that’s not only printed on a sheet of China-grade cardboard but also has been expired since 2006, and the $200 of your allowance you’re offering to get you and your generically slutty teeny bopper friends with no IDs in the bar. Come back when there isn’t a police blockade grilling me from across the street. You’re probably undercover cops aren’t you, little shits…

* Being “sober” on Halloween sucks. Being sober while wearing a costume would be worse, I guess.

* There is an inverse relationship between wearing a costume and enjoying oneself at a small, intimately lit bar where mellow jazz is being played. If you are wont to ask doormen, “Yo B, how much it cost to check out this fly downstairs club, dog?” you probably won’t have a good time. I’ll take $100 though.

* Haven’t seen this many Impalas on two wheels since the last time I YouTubed Dr. Dre.

* Best costume award goes to a girl wearing a parasitic twin dressed as a vampire from Twilight. I’d like to think that this is apt satire commenting on Twilight’s – and junky YA in general – suckling of America’s collective diabetic teat, but even if she’s just #TeamJacob, it’s still hilarious.

* 200-lb black lesbians dressed like Scottish warriors from Braveheart are some of the very nicest people.

* More of a general thing, but it’s really obnoxious when people walk up to me and ask if we’re closed. Yes, because most drinking establishments employ guys to stand outside just to tell people that they aren’t open. I’m a humansignpostipede!

The baby elephant gagged on it a little

2011-10-26T16:10:00.005-04:00

Just finished the first offering of what is sure to be much awesomeness from Plain Wrap Press, Janey Smith’s Animals. This unassuming creature sneaks up with major oh-you-think-this-but-really-uh, like, you wake up at the crack of dusk, casually chilling, when, excuse me, a giant polar bear sidles up on its belly all who’s-the-boss and totally infiltrates the Zen of your nose-picking and self-dithering session. What? Many more pleasant oddities ensue – the plight of the Joey (the infant kangaroo, not Lawrence), a bossy pet pygmy, more baby animals feeling the sting and shirk of that bigger beast, Capitalism – all in a neat 66 mini-pages. Animals’ super-cute, compact and pale packaging (and isn’t that the best kind) almost made me feel bad for putting it down when I was done, as if to say, “Dude, you’re going to ruffle through me, leave my pages all dog-eared and finger-moist, and you’re not even going to spoon with me for an episode of Toddlers & Tiaras?!” One of my friends thought the book would make a nice coaster for his PBR tallboy (damn hipster). Another tried to use it as an effective, if far-from-deadly ninja star. Some of my friends don’t read good. But if you do read, you should do yourself a favor and give this little guy a scratch. It won’t bite too hard.

it takes less muscles to smile than to swallow a snowball

2011-10-23T15:00:00.001-04:00

Got a couple new reviews up. Andrew Borgstrom's Meat is All, -- another awesome Nephew of Mud Luscious Press -- at Outsider Writers Collective. This book is seriously insane, both visually and thematically and whoa dude, gave me nightmares, but good ones, the kind I wish I could always have, only problem is I think it's sold out. If you're nice, I'll lend you my copy.

Haven't done a lot of music reviews recently, but I couldn't resist writing a few words about Diarrhea Planet's debut LP, Loose Jewels. The review is up at DeckFight, a really cool Southeastern rock blog and chapbook publisher. DP -- Punk meets pop meets just raging out and loving life. This CD will be my workout mix and my pre-party pump-up jam for months to come.

Thanks to the editors of both websites for being nice enough to sully their screens with my words.

The Five Things That Piss Me Off The Most While Bouncing in Manhattan

2011-10-21T16:29:00.005-04:00

To support my meager freelance earnings and non-existent literary earnings, I work at a bar where I mostly man the door. Said bar is one of downtown Manhattan’s swankiest neo-speakeasies, an underground mixology nerd’s wet dream, where bartenders slang $13 cocktails and the wait to get in is seldom less than 20 minutes on a weeknight. While “bouncer” is an accurate description of what I do, the bar’s clientele – off-duty bankers, successful creative types, NYU hipsters armed with Daddy’s PIN – aren’t usually in need of being bounced, and at a slightly out-of-shape and pasty 5’10”, I don’t cut anywhere near as intimidating a figure as my burly counterparts manning the gates of posh Meatpacking District clubs and frat-soaked yuppie-pits in Murray Hill. So I’ve tried to keep the following list of things patrons do that never fail to irk me as universal as possible, in the hopes that the city’s barflies might realize the mental anguish they enact on my brethren and me each long, tumultuous eve. Not that they’ll change, but I can still gripe.

1. Guys Who Wait for Girls to Show Me Their IDs Before They Show Me Theirs

This may not seem like a big deal. What’s the problem with a guy trying to act courteous, it’s the same as holding a door or pulling out a chair, right? The problem is that when you see a social gesture as pointless this one again and again, it begins to gnaw at your soul in the worst way.

Real-life example:

Guy comes up to the bar with his female companion. Seeing that they are dressed business casual but are on the young side, I ask for identification. Of course the girl is the proud owner of a monstrous satchel whose ideal purpose seems to be transporting large human body parts. While she scours through the expanse of fabric, I am dutifully holding the door (a super heavy old-school metal door) open. The guy has his ID out but for some reason is declining to give it to me. After 45 seconds of me extending my hand to this character like a mongoloid and his girl still digging around, I say to him, “You know, I can see your ID now.”

“I’ll wait.”

Uh. More digging.

“So why don’t you just show me your ID now.” Still holding the door, arm getting sore.

He looks at me like I just crapped jelly beans out of my nose. “It’s called being a gentleman.”

“Oh?”

Girl: “Yeah! He’s a gentleman!” Makes loopy flutter-eyes that make me want to expell jelly beans out of multiple orifices.

Fast-forward through way too many seconds of my life and the girl finally finds her ah, NEW JERSEY driver’s license. The guy, who’s been grilling me like I’m some kind of ingrate for longer than I like, gracefully allows his stiletto-heeled plunder to saunter down the stairs. He nods at me grotesquely, follows. I finally close the door behind them, stretch my arm, and that’s it.

So a guy waited for his girlfriend so she could give me her ID first. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if his reasoning had been different. Because as I see it, part of what defines a gentleman is a combination of courtesy and tact, shown not only toward the objet d’heure (the insipid and unremarkable Jersey girl), but to all rational souls he encounters. Considering myself to be rational for the most part, I find it a little ungentlemanly that someone would want to make me hold a heavy door like an idiot for any unnecessary amount of time. It would seem more gentlemanly to make the process as efficient as possible for all parties involved (especially given the fact that it was cold and rainy on the night in question) and to escort his lady as quickly and as safely as possible. Unless you consider bouncers to be somewhat less than human, which seems to be a fairly common opinion.

2. Talking

The cold, misanthropic door guy is a pervasive stereotype, and a valid one. If every bouncer you encounter seems more content to keep his arms crossed and stare into space or constantly check fantasy football stats on his phone than strike up a conversation, it’s because of what those conversations will inevitably entail. 75 percent of the time when guys in line interrupt me from my mobile Drudge Report, it starts well enough: “Hey man, how’s your night going? What drinks do you recommend? You don’t look like a bouncer, what do you really want to do?” And that’s cool, until the real reason for bothering me rears its douchey head: “So, like, I’m trying to come here next week with a girl. Will we, you know, have to wait in line? I mean, we’re practically best friends, I know you’ll remember me. Just in case, give me your number and I’ll call you so you won’t forget. Thanks so much, bro!” Bouncers, and especially those who work at places where there’s a wait to get in, don’t want to make friends. We want to survive a drama-free shift, avoid tranny crackheads on the 4am subway and watch re-runs of Ancient Aliens until sunrise. Giving us a hefty bro-pat will not help to differentiate you from the hundreds of obnoxious faces we cringe at on a nightly basis. You won’t be receiving the James Franco treatment, or even the Paul Giamatti treatment.

And ladies, I’m not stupid. I know what you’re trying to do every time you gush about how crazy it is that we both went to boarding school in Connecticut (OMFG!), how I could be a stand-in for Pick-Any-Conventionally-White-Movie-Star-of-the-Past-Decade, how you think it’s so noble that I freeze and/or sweat my ass off outside a bar for seven hours at a time to support my, like, TOT-ALLLLLY interesting artistic endeavors. Not to say that I don’t find the cleavage-pops, the pouty faces and the inappropriate touching at least a little amusing, but it still won’t help you get in.

Advice to both genders: Save your vocal chords for your actual friends. Quiet and respectful always trumps faux-friendly douchebaggery. Unless you’re familiar with the Ben Franklin Handshake. Provide one of these and not only will you get in immediately, but we can also discuss the latest advances in biomedical engineering or how much you hate the new Facebook for as long as you want.

3. Checking Women’s IDs

This is your classic no-win situation. If I ask a group of women for proof of age, they will most always roll their eyes while digging through their heinously large bags and mutter something about how they haven’t been carded in, like, for-EV-errrrrrr! If, however, I decide to be generous and save these same women the trouble of rummaging through godknowswhat and let them in sans IDs, I’ll get the same eye roll tinged with more than a hint of utter desperation: “But, but…I feel so old! Do I really look that old?? I’ve never not been carded, wah, wah, wah…” It’s not flattering for anyone involved. Also, failing to acknowledge that it’s a woman’s birthday (And why anyone would want to celebrate any birthday after age 21 is beyond me) is apparently equivalent to hoarding child porn. Hint: We only look at the year on your ID, as in, we don’t care.

On a side note, my friends always ask me how I fail to pick up more women at work. Valid question. I let any number of gorgeous girls pass me by with nary a nod. I’ve already explained why I avoid talking to women. Seriously, if a young lady wearing shoes that cost more than my monthly salary and wielding a monstrous piece of stow-away luggage also known as a “purse” rolls up with older dudes, suited or otherwise, who are all clearly balling, I doubt she’s on the prowl for some side bouncer action. That may sound defeatist, but what else do I really have to offer? My MFA degree? Ooooh, those are really sexy, and profitable! If a woman is genuinely interested in me she should probably stop drinking outrageously expensive vodka tonics because she’s going to have to support my writing struggles for the next, well, until I stop writing.

4. Europeans

The bar where I work gets a lot of tourists. The majority of these are from Western Europe. I don’t know what they write in NYC guidebooks, but I do know that these books are in desperate need of some editing. To my friends from across the sea (especially the French, Italians, Germans, hell, everyone), let me simplify things. 1. In America, we card. I don’t care if you just got off a plane, if you left your passport in the hotel, if “In my country we do not do this,” if your accent is in fact pretty sexy, I still need to see your ID or you’re not getting in. 2. “But what is this line you speak of? In my country we do not…” Stop right there. You understand the concept of a line. Tribesmen in Indonesia who have never had the pleasure of going through airport customs understand the concept of a line. You should be so lucky. 3. Loud soccer chants are unacceptable. Chanting of any kind is generally discouraged. 4. I know the Euro has taken a hit recently, but if you leave less than $5 on a $91 tab, the bartender will send me pissed off texts with frowny faces and chances are you won’t be receiving the same quality of service upon your next visit, because if I recognize you, we’re going to magically be at capacity the rest of the night. 5. Not all Americans, especially New Yorkers, are monolingual heathens. If you’re two feet away talking shit about me in French or relatively coherent Spanish, you’re going to be sober for a long time. ¿Comprende?

5. “Is this a line, or are these people just…”

I know we’re all oblivious to what’s going on around us most of the time. You’re cruising down 7th Avenue, earbuds blasting Katy Perry just loud enough for no one else to hear, hoping your boss doesn’t email you with any extra work, wondering whether the Gchat your OkCupid date sent you an hour ago contains kinky undertones (why all the barfing emoticons??), hoping your date loves swigging Old Fashioneds as much as you do, I get it. There’s a lot going on up there to distract from the here and now. But when you approach your drinking destination and fail to notice the 20 people neatly lined up double-file against the side of the building, all glaring at a guy in a suit in front of the entrance ignoring them and playing Brick Breaker on his Droid, it’s obvious what’s going on. I can’t count how many times I’ve had a person saunter past me and reach for the door, only for me to explain that all these people currently stabbing him or her with their eyes are waiting to get in and that he or she needs to promptly take a position at the back of the, what’s it called? Oh yes, the line. The once-dead eyes light up with indignation. “But, but…I thought all these people were smoking.” No one is smoking. “I thought all these people were standing around.” Yes, because people in New York love to stand in an organized fashion observing the bricks on the side of an otherwise nondescript building! Then there’s my favorite: “Oh, I didn’t see the line.” Granted, these responses could just be covering up for failing at a rather stupid ploy to gain early admittance, in which case, congratulations, you now look stupider than if you had just gone to the back of the line. And if you really are that oblivious to your immediate surroundings, you’ve got much bigger problems than having to wait in line for a drink. In fact, you should probably quit drinking and never bother me again. Have a GRRRREEEAT evening!

Honorable Mentions

6. Using the word “cheers” for anything besides toasting

7. Using the word “queue” for any reason

8. Name-dropping

9. Asking how long the wait is going to be

10. Australians

*If my bosses read this, just kidding about the Ben Franklin Handshake

flutter-shaping on your skin

2011-10-11T04:23:00.004-04:00

The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant

Patasola Press, 2011

173 pages

Rae Bryant’s first collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, is so good it makes me angry. Firstly, because I’d never checked out any of her stuff before digitally stumbling upon this book. And more importantly, because her mastery of short stories and flash fiction makes my own half-baked efforts look like the work of a lazy neophyte who’s got years of training before he can hope to come close to crafting something even resembling Morals. Enough about me. Fractured human relationships lie at the core of most of the stories. A brief oil change from a technician named Jesus (pronounced Jeezus) puts a vicious dent into an already deep rift between a gracelessly aging husband and wife, a naïve country girl is almost seduced by her creepy cousin, dysfunctional anguish creeps into much of what artists perceive: “never leave an artist alone gazing into the face of death. The artist will likely fall in love.” Though the stories vary greatly in length (six words to several pages), and Bryant experiments with an impressive variety of narrative techniques, each possesses a pitch-perfect and gut-jabbing emotional weight, frank and disturbing, yet necessary eroticism, and a rousing postfeminist badassitude. The prose’s genius lies in the effortless way it condenses a fury of psychological heft – shockingly cold sexuality, a simultaneous need and revulsion for physical contact, a desire to emasculate and to remain subservient, a fierce confidence in identity – all in the course of a few carefully crafted phrases:

“Clothed, sitting, shoes back on, I turn to him before leaving. ‘Is this who I am? Plastic, smooth and pretty?’ And as I say it, my shame is there, but so is a wish for these shallow things. To be what is expected of me might make the days easier.”

Sandwiched between the stories are nine artworks by 19th-century erotic symbolist Gustav Klimt onto which Bryant has scribbled an array of sometimes caustic, sometimes dark and sardonically humorous musings. Though I didn’t find “Klimt Redux: A Study in Desecration” as enthralling as the fiction, I do think it provides a worthwhile visual component to themes rehashed throughout the book, and Bryant does a great job subverting what Klimt’s work represents to her – “Woman as appropriated through the eyes of a man’s brush” – and absorbing it into her wryly empowering ethos. This is certainly one of the best story collections I’ve read this year, and an equally impressive full-length debut from Bryant and the folks at Patasola Press. Check it out!

The creases spread horizontally

2011-10-09T16:09:00.001-04:00

I recently posted a couple of new Monkeytown excerpts here and here at Fictionaut. Also, still looking for more submissions at Apocalypse Piñata. We've got some good stuff lined up for the first issue, but we could always use some more.

Our summers were idyllic. Maybe that makes us weird.

2011-09-21T13:48:00.001-04:00

I've got a short chapbook, Recurring Childhood Nightmares, up at Ten Pages Press. The book is comprised of 10 flash-fiction "nightmares" that each correspond chronologically to a year in the life of a 26-year-old narrator. There's also a bonus poem about hipsters.

Six of the pieces -- "Buddy," "Why He Went to Guernica," "The Parents Were Made of Gas," "Virtual Zuckerbergian (un)Reality Blues," "American Hubris," and "Homesick at Adult Camp" -- originally appeared in Short, Fast, and Deadly. "Nobody Likes a Pragmatist" appeared in Staccato Fiction a while back. And I put up "Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About" on Fictionaut a couple weeks ago. 

Much thanks to Craig at Ten Pages Press and the editors of the journals where the fictions originally appeared.

The MILF Effect: How Porn’s Use of the Acronym Promotes Healthy Reproductive Values

2011-09-11T14:07:00.004-04:00

The acronym MILF, since its inception in the late 90s, is clearly defined: a physically desirable woman who, at some point during her fertile years, has produced at least one offspring. Or, according to Urban Dictionary, “A HOT mom you’d wanna hit all night long.” The term, by definition, is not age-specific (as in cougar, puma, etc.), yet when one is asked to provide an example of a MILF, he or she will usually describe a woman in her late thirties to early fifties whose voracious yet charming sexual appetite and flirtatious demeanor does more than enough to offset any appeal lost in the aging process and often renders the bearer of said title more attractive (i.e. Stifler’s mom, Bridget Moynahan, Heidi Klum). Less frequently, though no less correctly, the term is applied to much younger women who have engaged in the joy of childbirth and retained or enhanced their pre-partum charm (Jessica Alba, Jennifer Garner). “MILF” has also been uttered in the same sentence as Bristol Palin and Kourtney Kardashian, both of whom fall out of my personal range of acceptability.

Keeping in mind the term’s fluidity, I am interested in how it is used almost universally by the adult film industry. I was recently doing some important research for a novel when I came upon a video clip of famed starlet Jenna Haze (known for her work in such classics as Four Finger Club 19 and Nymphetamine) that had been relegated to this particular website’s “MILF” section. Surprised, I reasoned that although she’d been a vital cog in the porn machine for a better part of a decade and is on the cusp of her 30th birthday, Haze has largely survived the ravages of her profession admirably, and has retained the schoolgirl physique and unrestrained vigor that had earned her such high marks in her debut in The Oral Adventures of Craven Morehead 8. There is no mention on the Internet of her having had children. Conversely, contemporary actresses Cytherea and Kayla Marie became pregnant while in their mid 20s (and continued to perform in scenes well into their respective third trimesters) and were not referred to as MILFs in subsequent work.

Though the MILF niche on most streaming video (or “tube”) sites is traditionally dominated by stars in their early forties like Lisa Ann and Brandi Love, Haze’s inclusion in this coterie signifies an age-specific definition of MILF as it pertains to porn. One can then safely assume that once a performer reaches 28 or 29 years, there is a very real possibility that she will be classified as a MILF, until approximately 60, the accepted age of GILFs.

This categorization seems like yet another example of ageism in an industry where 18-year-olds routinely receive top billing. But perhaps there’s more to it. According to WebMD, the risks associated with a first pregnancy increase significantly after age 35, and even more dramatically after age 40. These include birth defects such as Down’s syndrome, a greater frequency of stillbirths and the sudden onset of high blood pressure and diabetes in the mother. Other drawbacks include a decrease in egg production and changes in hormones that result in altered ovulation. Interestingly, according to the U.S. Labor Department, women’s financial status, at least as it pertains to men of a similar age, actually decreases after age 35. The increase in income gap apparently is due to many women choosing jobs in lower paying fields such as education and health care, as well as the obvious prevalence of women forgoing lucrative career opportunities due to pregnancies. What this all means, statistically speaking, is that a 28 to 32-year-old woman (especially one with a stable source of income and no children, e.g. Jenna Haze) is financially and physically at her prime to begin sowing the foundations of a happy, healthy and economically secure family.

Pornography is a pretty big deal. The industry, according to NetNanny, takes in more revenue than Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Netflix combined; about 30,000 people look at porn online every second. The demographics swing to the masculine – familysafemedia.com found that 53 percent of male Internet users admitted to looking at porn within the last week, a much higher percentage than the women surveyed, a number that is probably much lower than the actual statistic, to say nothing of those old-school gentlemen and sneaking teenagers watching adult acts on VHS and DVD. Even when we subtract the gay audience, it is safe to say that heterosexual males, specifically those younger than 40, are responsible for much, if not most, of porn’s extensive viewership. Naturally the MILF category appeals to this group, a demographic weaned and inundated by the golden age of advertising, one for whom visual stimuli represent the root of most major decisions, both commercial and personal. And is it really a stretch to assume that the adult industry would have its largest customer base’s best interests in mind? After all, sperm counts greatly diminish after age 35, as well as overall libido. Jenna Haze then becomes not some victim of Hollywood’s (and Silicon Valley’s) ultra-vapid age bias, but a paragon of ripe success and health (minus the probable STDs), and therefore fertility to her male audience, many of whom might be in a quandary about whether to take the next step with their spouses or girlfriends, or even wondering whether or not to unstick themselves from their beloved streaming videos and start dating. The earthy goddess, master of sex, perfectly suited for birthing, has been a prevalent cultural totem since prehistory.

But are the makers of adult-themed websites concerned with perpetuating ancient pan-cultural iconography? Could the entire existence of the MILF category hinge upon the fact that it is a far more appealing term than “Mature” or “Older & Bolder”?Are webmasters just superficial and lazy? Middle American morality, herpes and the rapid spiral into drugs and unfortunate tattoos on the part of many of the industry’s performers aside, watching porn does provide numerous mental and physical benefits to some viewers. These include adding to the repertoire of sexually stagnated couples, education for bedroom novices, and much needed tension relief for the chronically lonely and anti-social, as well as those psychotically inclined degenerates for whom an hour spent salivating over extreme online content that might elicit acute revulsion from your average non-closeted Republican congressman could be the difference between said mental cases calmly exuding their repression at home or taking it out to the full horrible extent on an unknowing young woman or farm animal. Would there have been a Son of Sam or a Ted Bundy if they’d had access to unlimited streaming content and rotten.com?

Obvious conjecture there, but whether intentional or not, the “MILF effect” can be included as a healthy influence on both genders’ psyches. In a business that generates more cash than multiple Fortune 500 companies, nothing is done arbitrarily or on the indolent whim of a lethargic executive. In my opinion, these cash-flush skin moguls are creating their own version of what a MILF should be to ensure that their business will remain as insanely profitable in years to come by making sure that today’s babies – porn’s rookie class of 2029 – are as hale and hearty as possible. And Jenna Haze, regardless of how she’s categorized, is still the 12th most popular pornstar out of approximately 2,550 on 4tube.com and promises to continue to satiate the darkest dreams of schoolboys and lunch-hour bathroom smartphone jockeys for years to come. God Bless America. And MILFs.

submit!

2011-09-06T18:06:00.002-04:00

The Apocalypse Piñata Submission Manager is fully operational! Send stuff now. Launch will be in October. Or if you want, you can still submit to apocalypse.pinata@gmail.com. Whatever works best for you.

a nice, good chap

2011-09-06T03:47:00.002-04:00

I'm stoked to be the chapbook reviewer for the forthcoming print publication Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly, which will be launching in January 2012. I'll also be posting 420-character reviews on Deadly Chaps Press' Facebook page as soon as I get some scribbles down. On that note, if you wrote or published a chapbook or echapbook you want reviewed, please send it to me and I will be happy to promptly take a look at it and write about it. If you know of any chapbook or echapbook that is awesome or not so awesome, I would like to look at it and promptly write about it. Get in touch with me at christopher.vola@gmail.com because we all like chaps and you seem like a good person.

Also, I wrote this novel called Monkeytown when I was in grad school. It's a transgressive thriller about an orphan named Josh from Connecticut who gets involved with a bunch of faux-terrorists in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I'm going to start putting chapters up on Fictionaut because I can't figure out what to do with it just yet: more submitting to skittish presses or the incinerator? Feel free to check it out and hate it and comment on its sophomoric vapidity and gore-porn. Or maybe you'll like it and don't want to comment. Either way.

I just ate two KFC Double Downs

2011-08-30T17:17:00.001-04:00

Got interviewed by this literary blog, plain wrap. I'm not special, they interview all their Facebook friends, which is a pretty cool idea.

Any movement / can be part / of the dance

2011-08-17T15:57:00.002-04:00

[Love in a Time of Paranoia is the first installment of Diamond Point Press's twenty20 Chapbook Series, produced by the folks at the always inimitable twenty20 Journal. The book is comprised of 20 poems of 20 words or less, ergo a 20-word review]

Love in a Time of Paranoia by Howie Good
Diamond Point Press, 2011
26 pages

Each Good word a heart-headed stalactite, poems a cavern battered by the smallest front-page raven. Carnage-mongers, our time is moot.

frighteningly universal gut-wrenching

2011-08-15T14:32:00.001-04:00

My review of Michael Kimball's "Us" is up at Word Riot. Great book, check it out.

barfing and winking emoticons

2011-08-15T14:07:00.001-04:00

New story up in Short, Fast, and Deadly's latest issue. Some good stuff in there.

Into the Rabbit Hole with Goals (and Guidelines)

2011-08-06T23:50:00.001-04:00

examiner.com

I’m about to start reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Redux so I was checking out his Wikipedia page and I saw that a feminist critic once described him as a penis with a thesaurus. Which is pretty hilarious if you try to picture a penis reading a thesaurus. Anyway, I also like writing book reviews and I was reminded that Updike’s personal rules for literary criticism (first imparted in Picked-Up Pieces, a 1975 prose collection) are probably the best guidelines for how to write solid reviews, whether you’ve been reading freelance gigs at The New York Review of Books or working at a college paper. I always use the rules as a checklist before I send something out.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition or enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never…try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Even during his peak period, Updike was known as a purveyor of the old school, but as long as books remain jumbles of letters on pages or screens, his rules will always be a great starting point for how to approach talking about literature. Check out any good review and you’ll see all of these rules. Long live the educated penis!

July Playlist: SMOGGY SUMMER

2011-07-26T17:59:00.001-04:00

         http://www.timmcmahan.com/smog.htm

For some reason, summer always feels like the right time for obsessions. Perhaps the free time from school, the days of sun. Middle school was swimming and skateboarding, and before that building forts in the woods based on the American Boys Handbook. Or maybe it’s the things you do to get out of heat, the indoor hobbies – Legos from age 4 to 8, after that comic books, baseball cards, rocks, hieroglyphics (??), playing drums and going to DMB and Weezer shows in high school, Budweisers in 12th through 18th grade. This is the summer of Smog. Not the air pollution derived from vehicular emission from internal combustion engines and industrial fumes that react in the atmosphere with sunlight to form secondary pollutants. I mean the band/man, otherwise known as Bill Callahan. Never heard of Smog? Neither had I until a couple months ago during a feverish Wikipedia surfing session. Since then, I shit you not, I have listened to literally nothing besides this band (except for bar tunes and Chucky the Greek’s housewarming party). This has had an undeniably detrimental effect on my mental and physical wellbeing. My writing has been at its most unproductive in probably the last five years, I have become even more of a recluse, if that’s possible, seldom, if ever leaving the confines of my cave-like ground floor apartment and even cave-ier bedroom. Women have not entered the equation in what has now become an inordinate number of months. Ironically, or perhaps naturally, Smog’s themes of alienation, deconstructed relationships and an unrequited solipsism has gelled with the hermit ethos, and has prolonged it in a way that I am certainly not complaining about. Smog – in one sentence: If Leonard Cohen and Willie Nelson adopted Beck and Jandek’s illegitimate lust-spawn and taught him to self-produce in a slightly less insane and more self-awareu version of Daniel Johnston’s basement. That’s what’s up. Pseudo-country grooves, introspective minor-chord guitar jaunts, out-of-tune experimental crunch-fests,  a vocal poetry equal parts Plath, Ginsberg and Joshua Beckman. The band started as a one-guy operation in the early 90s. Bill recorded his first albums on shit-beat instruments in his basement before moving to indie studios, where the tunes were luckily still shit-beat. The star-fucking ramble can only take one so far in the way of appreciation. The playlist tracks are there for their sonic diversity (lots of choices with 12 albums to cover), but the core of the operation is the same: “Tonight I’m swimming / to my favorite island / and I don’t want to see you / swimming behind”.

1.       “Dress Sexy At My Funeral”

2.       “Chosen One” 

3.       “The Hard Road”    

4.       “Hit The Ground Running” 

5.       “I Break Horses”  

6.       “Your Wedding”

7.       “Held”

8.       “Cold-Blooded Old Times”

9.      “Teenage Spaceship”

10.    “37 Pushups”

11.    “Strayed”

12.    “Strawberry Rash”

13.    “Our Anniversary”

14.    “Goldfish Bowl”

15.    “I Was A Stranger”

16.    “Bathysphere”

17.    “Everything You Touch Becomes A Crutch”

shortness is cleanliness

2011-07-06T17:25:00.002-04:00

Got a super short (6 word) poem up at Twenty20. The issue required contributors to submit stuff in a particular form -- but no haiku allowed. Mine is a reverse hay(na)ku, which, if I remember right, means three words in the first line, two in the second, one in the third. Not sure if there are any other stipulations. Anyway, it's a cool issue (and site) and perfect if you're into the whole brevity thing. I didn't even write a bio.

Ser Charming of House Mickey

2011-06-13T17:16:00.002-04:00

All I'm saying is I hope Disney got theirs when HBO jacked one of the company's most popular villains. Also I'm saying that I hope Jaime gets stabbed a bunch of times in the next episode. And that there will never be anymore Shrek movies.

10 anniversary 9/11 story (yeah it's June, whatever)

2011-06-07T13:16:00.001-04:00

Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About

Katie stood in the back of the student center, near the coat closet with its dull polyurethane hooks, hands clasped over her stick-jaw pelvis, eyes on the blue sky and bluer smoke being projected through the TV. I thought about us in ten years: I would ask if I could buy her an appletini. There would be functions to attend, pills to swallow, clubs, nipple slips and brunches. Probiotic baby food, His and Her bidets, nurses at four in the morning, IV needles. I shifted my weight and pressed my face into the crook of her shoulder. She shoved me away. “My uncle was in bonds,” she sobbed. “Well, hopefully somebody unlocked him,” I said. Katie gave me this death-by-airstrike look. No one else laughed at the joke except for Carl, who kept laughing until the Sustainable Oblivion Police dragged him off campus. That night, Katie waited in her bedroom, smoking and checking her inbox. Her mother had been on the phone since the lines opened back up. It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

2001

We were never holding back (belated May playlist)

2011-06-01T23:15:00.001-04:00

May. A lot of rain and cold. Rain and cold makes mellow. Mellow things here. Also some beachness. Was at a beach for a few days there. Anyway, listen in a dark room with good friends. Or in a bright room with liars. Which means everywhere. June is spicier.

Please Don't Take My Sunshine Away / Sparklehorse

Just Another Day / Brian Eno

Celestica / Crystal Castles

Brian and Robert / Phish

Reckoner (80s remix) / Radiohead

Drugs / Simple Kid

Rumpus / Karen O and the Kids

Stars / Hum

Delicious / Sleeper

Foolish Fool / Sublime

Work Song / Dan Reeder

The Wagon / Dinosaur Jr.

Being Boring / Pet Shop Boys

Opel / Syd Barrett

Oh yeah, and this.

Anatomy of a DOOSH Part 2: The Southern Doosh

2011-05-19T15:46:00.006-04:00

Dooshy image from southernandpreppy.blogspot.com

Some social gestures are so pointless I want to stab myself. Self-mutilation is a little extreme, I know. OK, so I'll stick to stabbing the perpetrators. Not really, but I want to. I work at this bar downtown, see. Where I sometimes work the door. Yeah, most of the time I work the door. I'm not a bouncer. I don't bounce anyone. I just tell them to wait in line because the bar's usually full or to leave when they go from the wow-that-guy-just-pounded-four-cocktails-but-hes-ZackGalifiniakis-funny to everyone-wants-to-murder-him-or-escape-GaryBusey-drunk. Other than that, it's pretty mellow. So instead of being stressed by patrons trying to shank each other, I spend my nights analyzing the ever-expanding schemes people devise to make my life much more miserable than it has to be. The inevitable transformation from man to DOOSH[1].

More often than not, said Dooshes will be oblivious to how douchey they're actually being. Sometimes they are so enveloped in the lipglossy-summers-in-Nantucket bat shit smothering their brains[2] that they are virtually unaware of, and unable to empathize with any foreign perspective. Although this is really, really annoying, it’s somewhat understandable. Getting yelled at by your boss all week and letting all that entitlement flow out of you like elephant piss on Saturday nights, I get it. What pisses me off is when people act douchey and try to justify it in an equally if not more douchey way. You know, the old “I own every Thai-Congolese fusion restaurant in a 3-mile radius, I know everyone that works here and I’ve been coming here the second this bar opened so you have to let me cut everyone in line,” line, or, “I’m the female lead of the now-defunct Spider-Man film franchise but I haven’t done a good movie since Jumanji and I’m a notoriously drunken shitstorm who looks like a troll on her best days. You HAVE to let me in.” Gross.

Those are obviously obvious examples. Most violations of my sanity would be imperceptible to the untrained eye. One such incident occurred last night and was perpetrated by a creature I’ll call the Southern Doosh.

Very generally speaking, there are two kinds of people that come into the bar. There is the Artsy/hipster/celeb/fedora-friendly Doosh, who, though occasionally snarky and possessed of a certain shit-don’t-stink, are usually good peoples. And then there’s the all-pervasive Suited Doosh, bane of my humble nightlife existence. The Suited Doosh (SD) may not actually be wearing a suit (especially the female variety, the FSD), but it’s safe to say that he/she has lived in Murray Hill, does live in the Upper East Side or whatever trendy new neighborhood he/she read about in GQ (which is totally not gay), and spends a significant amount of time vacantly staring out of office windows downtown or in the east 50s and is more than proficient at all those little keyboard tricks on Excel. Not so much Patrick Bateman as Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. There are a variety of theories as to why the SD and/or FSD is generally the dooshiest entity in any given location, but as far as I’m concerned, there can’t ever be one answer. Also, I’m speaking in rampant generalizations. Every corporate employee is not an SD/FSD, and every organic flaxseed blogger from Brooklyn isn’t a hipster. Well…

Anyway, back to the Southern Doosh from last night. Some background: The Southern Doosh is a variation of the SD where the suit jacket is replaced by a corduroy Izod jacket. Add a salmon-colored Ralph shirt, a half-ironic Bass Pro Shops cammo hat, and Crocs (for sunglasses) featuring an SEC football team’s logo. Instead of an MBA from Tufts, he went to UVA. Not a big difference. Going to school in Virginia with many of these characters, I can safely say that on the scale of DOOSH, these guys are toward the bottom of the list. The one thing they do that pisses me off is that they try to perpetuate this façade of being “true gentlemen,” that they are somehow the standard bearers of some nearly forgotten ancient code of morals. Like sounding like sleazy Matthew McConaughey adds a level of chivalry to your persona. Fuck that. I’ve seen enough drunk sorority girls get tricked by these gentlemen into consuming enough dip-spit and other bodily secretions under the pretense that it’s dark beer or lemon-lime Gatorade to have my doubts.

So this Southern Doosh comes up to the bar last night with his female companion. Seeing that they are on the young side, I ask for identification. Of course the girl, who appears to be an FSD, is the proud owner of a monstrous satchel whose ideal purpose seems to be transporting large human body parts. While she scours through the expanse of fabric, I am dutifully holding the door (a super heavy old-school metal door) open for my customers. The Southern Doosh has his ID out but for some reason is declining to give it to me. After 45 seconds of me extending my hand to this SD like a mongoloid and his girl still digging around, I say to him, “You know, I can see your ID now.”

“I’ll wait.”

Uh. More digging.

“So why don’t you just show me your ID now.” (Still holding the door, arm getting sore)

He looks at me like just shit jelly beans out of my nose. “It’s a Southern thing.”

“Oh?”

“It’s being a GENTLEMAN.”

FSD: “Yeah! He’s a gentleman!” (Makes retarded googly eyes that make me want to expell jelly beans out of multiple orifices)

Fast-forward through way too many seconds of my life and the FSD finally finds her ah, NEW JERSEY driver’s license. The Southern Doosh (from Charlotte, NC), who’s been grilling me like I’m some kind of Yankee ingrate for longer than I like, gracefully allows his reverse carpet-bagged plunder to saunter down the stairs[3]. He nods at me dooshily, follows. I finally close the door behind them, stretch my arm, and that’s it.

So you’re wondering what the big deal is? The significance? So a guy waited for his girlfriend so she could give me her ID first. No big deal, brah. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if his reasoning had been different. Because as I see it, part of what defines a gentleman is a combination of courtesy and tact, shown not only toward the objet d’heure (the insipid and unremarkable Jersey girl), but to all rational souls he encounters[4]. Considering myself to be rational for the most part, I find it a little ungentlemanly that someone would want to make me hold a heavy door like an idiot for any unnecessary amount of time. It would seem more gentlemanly to make the process as efficient as possible for all parties involved (especially given the fact that it was cold and rainy last night) and to escort his lady as quickly and as safely as possible (which, if you read footnote 3, you’ll see that this attempt resulted in failure, albeit a common mistake).

This post may seem nothing more than an overblown diatribe from a second-rate misanthrope, but believe me, when you spend 7 hours standing in roughly the same place constantly fending off unappealing hipsters and all manner of Dooshes, all the little annoyances quickly amplify. “It’s the little things that kill,” sang Gavin Rossdale in the mid-90s, and it’s hard to deny that he was writing from the perspective of someone in the service industry.

As you’d imagine, the opposite is also true. If you’re polite, unobtrusive, and can hold a conversation without resorting to weak office-speak sarcasm, then I love you dearly. You are a burst of hope in a vapid, soul-sucking blackness. But the more I think about it, it’s not even worth exerting any energy trying to become the latter type of individual I’ve just described. The bottom line is that some people (probably in the service industry, and especially disgruntled doormen at swanky cocktail bars) are going to hate you, no matter what you do, even if you think you’re not doing anything. The best you can hope for is that they’ll let you into the bar.

[1] I prefer this spelling of the word when talking about people. Douches perform a welcome cleaning service, whereas dealing with Dooshes makes me feel anything but clean.

[2] For instance, I wrote about women who carry inordinately large bags with them while watching me card everyone in front of them, only to give me stink eyes for the next 10 minutes as they search through the black hole at the bottom of said bags for their own IDs.

[3] Common sense and traditional courtesy indicates that when a couple is about to walk down a staircase, the man should go first, in order to verify the safety of the stairs and to be there to protect his lady in case she trips on one of her obnoxious Gucci heels he used up half of his monthly paycheck to buy her. Granted there are very few establishments one enters where one must descend a set of treacherous stairs. I could care less whether this practice is observed, the point is that a “real” gentleman should be aware of the appropriate protocol.

[4] It would seem to me that such a display of common decency would help to win the affection of aforementioned FSD. But what do I know? I’m just a doorman from the emotionally frigid Northeast. My bad.

Thank Allah and E! News for the opportunity

2011-05-16T02:12:00.001-04:00

So I just got back from shall we say a brief jaunt in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my buddies Chucky the Greek and Uncle Tony aka Bootnechi. The amount of irreversible damage done to my liver, wallet, and self-respect is still being calculated, and needless to say, I'm happy to have made it back in mostly one piece with only a gross sunburn and an addiction to Sonic breakfast sandwiches. The tales that could be told about this trip are all sordid, no doubt, including an equally horrific and props-inspiring encounter during one stretch of bumper-to-bumper traffic during the hellish 10-hour drive home. But I'll save these yarns for later when they'll find their way into my "fictions".

Speaking of fiction, I've got a new story -- Ex Dictator on TMZ -- up at Weirdyear. After shit started going down in Egypt and Libya, I was watching my lovely friends the Kardashians and found myself thinking about how utterly different their lives and concerns are from say those of Gaddafi or Mubarak. Then I thought about what would happen if their worlds sort of thudded together like some messed up Claymation puppet creature. Then I grilled a lamb-burger and wrote. Then I realized that their worlds were maybe not so dissimilar, and that I spent too much time caring about Charlie Sheen.

And, because sometimes when I read something that is so completely badass I have to explain why it is so badass in more than 1,000 words, here's a review of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's "Hot Teen Slut" up at Used Furniture Review.

internet robot never forgets

2011-05-09T01:46:00.002-04:00

Ah, self-Googling. Ah, college. Found some super old stuff I first published in The Messenger, University of Richmond's lit mag. Or, should I say, the first things I ever got published. Two short stories, The Ride [pg 1, pg 2, pg 3, pg 4, pg 5, pg 6, pg 7, pg 8] (first "real" story I wrote in 2005) and The Wheelchair (later published in the now-cryogenic VerbSap), as well as La Fille blonde, a French sonnet cuz I used to speak French real nice-like. Makes me want to violently shake my current self into some semblance of productivity. What a precocious youth I was. Now I feel forced into going for a run. Yes, it's 1:46am. Uhh, maybe I'll just try to write a good story. That would be odd. In a good way. Plus, it's going to take more than a sweaty mile to reclaim the girlish figure once seen below. Streaking seemed to be a better idea in suburban Virginia. Still pale as fuck though.

WHO WE BURNIN'? (April Playlist)

2011-04-26T16:44:00.002-04:00

Transitory early spring ghosts. Disaster-suckling fault lines. Rain, rain, rain, snow away. Big '90s throwbacks because I said so. Covers because why not. A little country-rock, sloppy pop and crappy country in this slappy country. Second time around is sweatier. Bowie for good measure. Phish, too. Who we burnin' in effigy? Jam out to these bad, bad friends.

1. "I Just Can't Take It Anymore" / The Lemonheads

2. "Mykel and Carli" / Weezer

3. "Ashes to Ashes" / David Bowie

4. "Window Licker" / Aphex Twin

5. "Mr. Dobalina" / Del The Funky Homosapien

6. "Beastie Revolution" / Beastie Boys

7, "Effigy"/ Uncle Tupelo

8. "Monkey" / Bush

9. "AC/DC Bag (7/12/91)" / Phish

10. "Glynis" / Smashing Pumpkins

11. "Awesome Sound" / Ween

12. "As Far As I Can See" / Phantogram

13. "Please Let That Be You" / The Rentals

14. "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" / Pavement

15. "Sexual Healing" / Soul Asylum

16. "New Style" / Beastie Boys

17. "Saturday Night" / Weezer

18. "Layin' With Linda" / The Lemonheads

19. "Waiting For My Ruca" / Sublime

20. "Hey Nineteen" / Steely Dan

21. "Salvation" / Rancid

22. "Fake Empire" / The National

23. "Out Of Touch" / Hall & Oates

24. "The Gaudy Side Of Town" / Gayngs

length: Waves, big waves.

piles of dirty iPod fingers

2011-04-08T18:55:00.001-04:00

I've got two new poems, Postmodernism Isn't Fun Anymore and Emaciated Factbook, in the latest issue of Psychic Meatloaf. Definitely feels nice to be a small part of what looks like a gnarly and bizarre publication. Plus it's always nice to see your writing on dead trees instead of dead screens.

Bend. System. Collapse.

2011-03-28T01:59:00.001-04:00

New story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly. Celebrate the end of the flu season. But the cold season's still here. Detox begins now.

a rare type of pomegranate

2011-03-20T16:37:00.001-04:00

Got a new story up at Staccato Fiction called "Nobody Likes a Pragmatist." Look at it. Or don't. Anyway, I'm out of Budweisers. And Caroline Doty is hot. By the way, call me Chris from now on. You're not my mother. And if you are, hi mom. God bless Obamacare.

She needed to be, in one moment, destruction and restoration

2011-03-06T18:55:00.001-05:00

Double-header: got a review of Wesley Stace's latest novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, up at The Brooklyn Rail, and a new story -- The Parents Were Made of Gas -- up at Short, Fast, and Deadly. Have to give a shout to my buddy and fellow future publishing magnate Garrett McDonough because I definitely stole the title from something he wrote. Sorry, Garrett!

Fan Appreciation

2011-03-02T13:27:00.001-05:00

a single chimney-brick

pushed its way

out of the mortar

and fell

to stare at

my new kicks

He was an animal by his very savage upbringing

2011-02-22T18:29:00.003-05:00

Homo Thug by Asante Kahari

Harlem Book Center, c. 2005

246 pages

I was walking home from the bar a couple weeks ago at 4am, post-work, McDonald's sack dripping with burger sweat that would serve either as delicious artery padding or as a handy talisman to thwart the occasional rabid subway creature, when I noticed a book protruding from one of the city's lovely sludge-gray snowbanks. No book, even something written by James Frey, should have to suffer this kind of rotten fate. So, risking bed bugs and/or hepatitis, I rescued the paperback from its filth-choked grave, much to the chagrin of a pair of Hudson River bound Vietnamese (or Thai?) trannies wearing translucent heels and a pleather Hello Kitty mini-skirt, respectively. These methed-out he-shes couldn't possibly understand how apropos their appearance was at this moment, reader, because the book I'd saved was none other than that classic coming-of-age tragedy of a young man gone wrong, a man whose circumstances force him to dabble in the most taboo and "unnatural" aspects of his psyche and his sexuality. As you might have guessed, I'm writing about Asante Kahari's tour de force, Homo Thug.

I'd often been intrigued by some of Harlem Book Center's other titles -- The Lesbian's Wife, Mandingo: The Golden Boy, The Streets of Harlem, Tamika: The struggle of a Jamaican Girl -- sold by street vendors on 125th Street and Malcolm X Ave (the scene of my weekly White Castle fix). Needless to say, Homo Thug did not disappoint. The novel rehashes the sordid young adulthood of Michael Fraser, a street tough whose abusive Caribbean-born mother, together with a childhood surrounded by the poisonous environment of New York City's projects, cause him to succumb to a life of crime. At 15, he is convicted for a "robbery gone bad," from which we can infer that murder was the case that they gave him. Instead of street code, Michael must now familiarize himself with the prison system, because he "had a long time and I wasn't about to live like a bitch being bartered out for goods and services by every swinging dick in the joint." In order to avoid getting his ass beat (or plowed) he joins a group of Muslims led by this dude Mustafa who will protect him as long as he remains celibate. But after a few too many trips to the showers, his hormones kick in...

...and that's as far as I got. Because as interesting as I found the book, as fascinating as I found Kahari's searing psychological portrait of a gangster ass boy-toy surviving the confines of his debilitating circumstances in the best way he knows how, I honestly had a lot of better shit to do (and read). However, I did skim through the novel's final 150 or so pages, and from what I can tell, Michael falls in love with a tranny named Dee Dee, who doesn't want to keep their love a secret. Mustafa puts a hit out on Michael but somehow he serves his sentence without getting injured and after having a lot of freaky sex with Dee Dee. When he's free he starts selling rock and that he'ron with his old crew, has sex with a lot of women and men before realizing his true calling as "Michelle." There's also a beef with another rap/drug-slinging crew named "G-unit" led by guys whose names are strangely familiar: Half Dolla, Stop the Bank and Young Gun. Hmm. Maybe I should have read the rest of the book.

I did manage to extract a bunch of great quotes that I've included below, as well as a few that were lovingly copied onto the book's back cover by an anonymous (most likely female) hand. Which leads to the question of why, if the book was seemingly so appreciated by its owner, did it end up rudely tossed into a snowbank in the West Village? Was it a conflict of ideologies? A forced rejection when the sheer homo-thuggery became too much? Maybe just an unfortunate misplacing. Maybe the trannies knew more than I did. Also, it's clearly evident that the fine people at Harlem Book Center wanted to maintain Homo Thug's authenticity, it's raw emotional gravity, it's "realness," so much that they felt it unnecessary to perform a basic spell check or employ a copyeditor. They're/their/there? Who gives a fuck, son? THIS SHIT IS HARD.

"I would jerk off so much that I would not have enough strength to make it through the rest of the day."

"I think he would have killed concrete for that little Spanish red pepper."

"Their rationale behind that is, why should I have to suffer when this mother is in here fresh to death and he can't hold his shit down?"

"Too add to that, she was a plump heifer and very unshapely, with her fowl odor."

"No one likes a n----- that falls from grace. All of the people you stepped on, on your way up will certainly be waiting for you on your way down either to kill you, or to use you."

"A secret can be agony on the soul, if allowed to swell up to the point that it blossoms on the spirit like a cancer."

"Even though I wasn't thinking about no faggot shit, those fags made me feel a little uneasy, uneasy in the sense that I was getting hot flashes thinking about Dee Dee. That alone told me I needed to get the fuck out of there."

"Each passing day fueled my perversion, and I was increasingly becoming my own worst enemy. I felt like I was losing myself. The heavy burden of jerking off so much took a toll on my balls. They started to look disfigured and saggy. I had exhausted all of the semen from my testicles to the point that I was ejaculating blood. It was a truly sickening experience."

"My gums was as red as sugar cane."

"As soon as the door to her apartment opened I commenced to taking off her clothes like a reckless wild animal...I had to see if she would let me top the night off with a little ass shot."

"I am sorry I had to lose two people to find that out. I am saying goodbye to Michael and hello to Michelle. See ya'll in Baltimore!"

**Also: Apparently Kahari's autobiographical first novel, The Birth of a Criminal, was based on a guy committing bank fraud and was actually used to convict the author for the same crime that he actually committed. Completely badass or dumbass depending on how you look at it. Funny nonetheless. More here.

And for more information about the Street Lit movement, here's an interesting article from PopMatters.

And a review by someone who actually read the book.

The Deadliest of the Deadliest of the Deadly

2011-02-04T15:27:00.002-05:00

Short, Fast, and Deadly released its 2010 Anthology, "Deadlier Than Thou," a couple days ago. Edited by Joseph A. Quintela, it's an 88-page collection of the weekly e-mag's deadliest two pieces from each of its first 55 issues, as well as a poem and a story representing each month of the year. A story of mine snuck in, and I contributed the June poem. You should buy it. Seriously. Don't be a douche, support indie lit. Also, it makes a great roach swatter or 40 oz coaster.

I'll write a review of the other stuff in it besides my own (which is obviously awesome) when my copy comes in the mail. Hopefully Amelia in 1B won't be keeping it and not letting me know, as she's been doing with my rent checks (and probably the last 6 books I've ordered that mysteriously haven't arrived) for the last few months. NYC postal system is wack. This anthology isn't.

11 words makes a --

2011-01-27T18:53:00.001-05:00

New super short poem at a handful of stones.

Dirty, Smelly, Devout Punks

2011-01-26T17:38:00.001-05:00

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

Harper Perennial

Release date: February 8, 2011

256 pages

Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy slices deftly through a pop culture haze, extracting some of its juiciest vapors – extreme spirituality, politics, alienated youth – and congealing them into a gripping mosaic that is both monstrous and sublime. It is a beautifully dark first novel about the need for genuine connection, both human and holy, in an era that too often seems cold and sterile.

Set in pre-Y2K Gainesville, the book follows the listless exploits of David, a University of Florida dropout who works at a brain-numbing office job and trades Internet porn at night. A chance encounter with a group of local punks convinces him to abandon his old life and shack up with a coterie of neo-Luddite loafers and pseudo-cultist anarchists who get the inspiration for their anti-establishment lifestyle from a mysterious, recently disappeared former housemate named Parker.

The characters are not particularly groundbreaking or interesting in terms of the ideology they represent, as the young, grubby, hyper-opinionated libertine is by now somewhat of a clichéd persona. However, Taylor’s highly polished and deeply psychological prose breathes fascinating life into the heretofore familiar, revealing a dark and poignant yearning, a dire scream for transcendence in a McMansion wasteland and its always-tragic prospects. And while long segments devoted to the actual text of the “gospel” the punks worship seem a bit like overkill, the book remains impressive for instilling a paradoxically religious fervor in characters who have shrugged off the chains of all higher powers, both spiritual and secular. The reader is left with a profound respect for their earnestness in a fog of late 90s cynicism, for “how they give credence to ultimate concerns, the rhetoric a little windy, sure, but the passion undeniable, the attraction intense. They lived as if the fate of the very universe were perpetually at stake and in their hands.”

Yet Taylor’s greatest asset may be not only his ability to cannily craft a series of vivid, perfect post-postmodern moments, but also his power to imbue otherwise mundane scenery, this seen-it-before suburban milieu, with a somber weight of Biblical proportions. Half-finished housing developments, an unassuming pizza spot, frat bars and cul-de-sacs. To David, these are the totems of a Gomorrah fueled not by any devil’s pleasures, but by the brain-dead, Wonder Bread machinations of traditional American dogma. A sugar-dipped squalor that eventually becomes unbearable. Though the novel takes place before the true proliferation of the Internet and the ubiquitous cell phone explosion, images of technology’s potential for the perverse and the mind-numbing (pornographic pictures of an unknowing ex-girlfriend electronically traded by sleazy chat room voyeurs, the soul-crushing hospital glow of a telephone survey taker’s cubicle) are equally ghastly. Perhaps more so given the cultural developments of the last decade.

Ultimately, Taylor’s intense and thorough characterizations and his superior writing chops are what make The Gospel of Anarchy a timely and potent read.

The refrigerator's glow

2011-01-16T18:17:00.003-05:00

New (depressing) story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly.

Naked and Honest

2011-01-11T13:19:00.006-05:00

Naked Glances by Carl-Henrik Björck

Deadly Chaps

Pub date: August 2010?

34 pages

Carl-Henrik Björck’s debut collection of 29 micro-stories and poems condenses an impressive amount of the universal stockpile of post-postmodern “human-ness” – nostalgia, love and its inevitable demise, an eerie sangfroid in the midst of disaster – into a series of glaring snapshots that are captivating, revealing, and occasionally disturbing. It’s a stark sequence of images whose focal points are made more compelling by what’s left blurry beyond the edges.

A native Swede writing in English, Björck employs a crisp, direct prose and a simple straightforwardness that belies many of the stories’ complex, ghostly tension. These transitive “glances” offer the reader a glimpse at the middle of the photo album. We know things have happened, we know more things are going to happen. What we’re given is the pregnant glimmer, the crux of the affair. The most common theme in the collection is intense and gnawing remorse at the inability (of anyone, it seems) to maintain any sort of connection, romantic and otherwise, a fundamental miscommunication of the body and mind. A phone number not given. A fly stuck to a window. The girl in the shop who can’t utter what she wants to say. The unrequited echoes of an infinite number of squashed possibilities. This underlying current of intense emotion endows the most heretofore passing physical details – raindrops on a dead-end road, “a blue stone necklace hanging down deep”, the reflection of streetlight in a woman’s hair – with a bruising importance.

This is not to say that Naked Glances’ narrators are engaged in a constant attitude of passivity. The collection’s best stories benefit from wicked twists that are shocking not only for their unforeseen abruptness, but for the deadpan, nonchalant way in which they are described. A woman is crushed by a car moments after a happy rendezvous with a lover. The unanticipated insertion of a child’s plea at the critical moment of an argument between his parents. Each time, a bomb has been dropped. We don’t know why. All we can do is watch the second of impact and imagine what happens next. There is also a call to the future, death to sympathy and tradition, a need to forget and move on. My favorite example of this grit is also my favorite story in the collection, “Saturday Night”, which concerns an encounter with a smelly bum: “…he says that God will bless me if I help a blind man who has nothing to eat so I kick his can over and keep on walking and I hear the coins clink against the gutter and now that also belongs in the past.”

I will say that the majority of the book’s 10 poems didn’t do it for me. Many employed a loose ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme that I feel distracts the reader from the stark naked ironic realism Björck so skillfully conveys in his prose, and adds an unwelcome element of juvenilia to an otherwise sophisticated collection. Other major ish? This might be a little MFA workshoppy nitpicking, but the stories’ titles (McDougal Street, Wedding, Short Love Story) are often greatly outdistanced by the quality of the stories themselves. Maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it is. What is clearly evident, though, is that like that other finely crafted Swedish import, Björck has produced a durable, aesthetically sparse and pleasing, and emotionally charged piece of literary furniture. It’s a quick read that will stay with you long after you put it down.

I left it open

2011-01-07T12:48:00.002-05:00

New poem up at a handful of stones.

A black hand clutching a bottle of el mundo!

2011-01-06T15:32:00.001-05:00

New poem, Ticklish Yuppie, up at Clutching at Straws. Really cool site. Also, below, is a really cool tree.

You fell asleep being aliens.

2011-01-03T02:07:00.001-05:00

New story, "Tonight is Losing Teeth," up at Snow Monkey. The story is creepy, like the above sweaters. Maybe more so. The holidays got weird this year.

...in the bombshine

2010-12-31T12:37:00.001-05:00

New story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly in the "Revolution/Revelation" issue.

Look! a book review

2010-12-30T10:17:00.001-05:00

Got a new review up on The Rumpus -- Mike Young's story collection Look! Look! Feathers. As much as I'm a writer and a reviewer or whatever, I'm hesitant to recommend anything for people to read. Maybe because most people only read books about vampires or zombies. Maybe because I'm one of the last pretentious dicks who thinks you should read poetry on a regular basis. Maybe I'm hungover. Definitely hungover. Anyways, if you read one book that's come out in 2010, read this book. It's awesome. It's funny. It's not about vampires. It captures the zeitgeist, whatever the fuck that means. That's my spiel, take it or leave it. Just take it.

Omne Vivum Ex Ovo

2010-12-26T15:37:00.001-05:00

We got high and watched the morsel of tinned apricot sink between the broken recesses of heaven, the streaky clouds burning in golden veins. Actually, we were at Wendy’s. My brother didn’t like me. He was older and had a shitty case of acne, the only kid in our family who did. Because of this, his mind was untroubled by philosophy. He bathed in antifreeze. He ate lard like air. His girlfriend had scabies and he liked to “tongue-punch her meat wallet.” Seated across from me in the red pleather Wendy’s booth, he flicked that same tongue, hurled a dollop of Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger onto its wrapper and slid the wrapper toward me. “Piggy,” he said, “tell the scarecrow-assed bitch at the counter that this is cold.” I just sat there, staring at the gray, half-chewed glob. My brother tightened his knuckles, gave me that look. He knew what I wanted. I wanted to wriggle in it like a slug drowning in salt rain.

Hello, Small Awesome Book

2010-12-16T20:17:00.003-05:00

Hello, Darkness by Howie Good

from Deadly Chaps

pub date: July 2010

33 pages

Though Howie Good’s recent chapbook, Hello, Darkness is advertised as a collection of both poetry and prose, the distinction is a superficial, almost pointless question for Form 101. Good is a poet, a damn nice one, and his book is no slouch either.

It’s a disturbing and sublime jaunt to the brain’s bleary edge, the spaces in between, those gaps in the synapses that are only illuminated by “the sort of stuff you think about late at night.” That dark, naked hour before the dreams set in. The book’s 31 pieces (ranging in size from a ten-word pebble to a Facebook update) drip with quiet tension and an Anthrax-dipped apprehension of all the random shit that might go down. Of what usually does.

Unforeseen happenings drown in the chaos of an anything-goes half-awake where the scope of what’s contemplated ranges from the pleasantly esoteric (the length of a pig orgasm, a circus strongman who quotes Kafka) to the paranormal (rabbis flying in mini-vans) to the incredibly eerie (a famous historical figure’s genitalia impaled by an arrow, a former student’s body is found because of the odor emanating from it). The specters that are supposed to remain along the edges have crept to the forefront of the heretofore familiar.

But the journey to darkness isn’t just a passive one. The book’s longer poems are possessed of a distinctly self-aware personality that plays the dual role of imaginative observer and deadly participant: “Down in the street, terrible dreams pass each other with a nod. I wouldn’t trust someone like me either.” To follow the voice is to entertain the possibility of an evil that may not be the lesser of two (or three), but one that surely offers the best chance at revelatory potential, a long look at the sun without glasses, at tasting what’s really behind the curtain. It could be worse. This glimmer of morbid clarity is summed up wonderfully in the concluding lines of “Dance of the Iron Shoes,” one of the collection’s best: “Sunlight clanged against the window. Flies crawled around inside my mouth. It was often like this back then, the sky brightening enough just for me to see what wasn’t there.” And enough for the reader to see what is.

Yet Good, in my opinion, excels most brilliantly on the smallest of canvases. That one super-packed moment, unsprung like a shockwave, a zen-slap to the spinal cord: “Bombs Kill 95 / the headline says / beside the sunflowers / in a milk bottle”.

Hello, darkness. I think I’d like to hang out with you, too.

2010?

2010-12-13T11:45:00.001-05:00

Got a new short story up at Short, Fast, and Deadly called "American Hubris." The theme for this week's issue is "The Year in Review." When I thought of 2010, three images came to mind. Oil, flashing computer screens, and people being self-centered dicks. Let's see if all that comes through. The dick part probably will.

Four Poems

2010-12-08T13:26:00.001-05:00

the bottle makes its slow trek

across the table

and I let it fall

quietly to the floor

chewing gum, popping it loudly

iPod static

I thought I might kill him

we waited

in her bedroom,

smoking

trucks, black trucks

bellowing across the shit-towns

bearing loads

Don't Look At The Cameras!!!

2010-12-08T13:20:00.002-05:00

I've got a new review/essay up at The Brooklyn Rail. Check it out. In it, I detail why David Bajo's newest book "Panopticon" isn't the best thing I've read this year, but why it also freaked the shit out of me. It's all about surveillance cameras and how sinister nerds can basically steal your life and make a twisted movie out of it. I did some research and found out that not only is the technology very real, it's probably happening to you, to me, to the guy on the subway with two different sneakers, right NOW. The world is quickly becoming like Minority Report. Oh well, 2012 is coming up. Can't get too much worse before then, right?

The Return of the Lord of the Deathly Hallows

2010-11-27T22:50:00.001-05:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Warner Bros. Pictures

Release date: don't care, saw it last night

An epic and scenic quest through the wilderness to destroy a dark lord. A few invisibility-producing magical items (i.e. cloaks) used to thwart that evil being's cronies who happen to be chasing the good guys. A powerful evil talisman that contains a part of that same dark lord's soul, and that, when worn around the protagonist's neck, produces negative feelings and pisses everyone else off. An ancient sword reclaimed by one of the good guys (not the protagonist) that is used to defeat the evil things. A dumbass but lovable sidekick who eventually proves valuable. A friendly wizard who gets killed. Gnarly dudes in black who fly around and try to maim/destroy the good guys. Annoying British accents. A lot of character names, places and jumps in continuity that would be much easier to understand for viewers who have taken the time to read the book that the movie is based on. Elves.

I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books, so I may be a little late on this one, but doesn't this latest Potter movie seem a lot like another popular series of books/movies about good triumphing over evil in a world that isn't our own? It looks to me like J.K. Rowling might have had a little writer's block when she sat down to write Book #7, which is understandable. But it also looks like she pulled down her favorite J.R.R. Tolkien edition from her bookshelf and did a little more than draw inspiration from it. Maybe that's what happens when you live in a castle, I don't know. Like I said, I haven't read the books, but if I were to draw a comparison with this to Lord of the Rings, the entire Harry Potter series would be like if Frodo and his buddies chilled at Rivendell for like six years learning a bunch of useful stuff before setting out on the final quest thing. I don't know, maybe not. I fell asleep halfway through the movie due to a turkey hangover.

And I'd take Hermione over Liv Tyler with elf ears any day.

Thanks emmawatsonon.blogspot.com!

My uncle and dad looking gangster in 1968

2010-11-11T17:27:00.001-05:00

This is Jersey. This is Good Writing.

2010-11-10T15:35:00.004-05:00

The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley

So New Books, 2008

99 pages

I haven't been reading enough contemporary female writers. My bad. It's not intentional. I won't bother with the lame excuses -- women speak to an experience and a perspective I'm just not interested in, I can't think of the phrase "contemporary women writers" without picturing Curtis Sittenfeld, J.K. Rowling, and that Mormon chick who wrote Twilight. Puke. Even though that's partially true, there are some badass ladies whose work I eat up whenever I get the chance, two of those writers being Lydia Davis and Anne Carson. Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that books like Jackie Corley's 2008 short story collection "The Suburban Swindle" remind me that there are a lot of younger women writers out there putting out raw material with teeth (and not fangs).

Corley kicks the reader out of her beat-up Nissan and immediately skids off, leaving him in the wrong part of town. A battle-scarred suburban wasteland, that circus of human dregs otherwise known as New Jersey. Everyone knows that the Turnpike is gross, but the book suggests that what lurks off the exit ramps might be a little more harrowing -- a white-boy gangster who carries a butterfly knife and takes pleasure in kicking the shit out of punks at the local diner, a drop-out drifter who engages in a sexually abusive relationship with her cousin, a filthy alcoholic that only gets off on being speared by a used-up stripper's high heel. These are fractured souls, wonderfully splintered post-school waste-cases who have been molded as much by who they've been hanging out with as by the landscape they inhabit, a place they grudgingly know they'll never leave. The wild-eyed boy held back from the prospect of adventure by the violent shards of a masochistic high school romance. The Manhattan reporter who wakes up on the bathroom floor of her ex-boyfriend's apartment as he's absentmindedly pissing on her. The Jersey tractor beam, Death-Star-strong, always pulls them back.

But what ultimately makes the stories so addictive is not in the misery they project, but in their inherent holiness. There is religion here, maybe not sainthood or even catharsis, but certainly a form of transcendence through martyrdom. A secret joy in clinging to the beaten (and beaten down) path. As much as the characters gripe and grimace at their everyday circumstances, you get the feeling that the unbearable ball of energy that governs the minutiae of their lives is also what sustains them, lets them shine with a light that, if nothing else, is their own. It's what makes the characters, as the narrator of one story puts it, "not attractive, but compelling."

Regardless of the stories' geographical setting, the plight of the early 20s small-town burnout, of being too young and too old and caught in the intertia, is universal. Maybe you're the coke-bruised and booze-weary native son whose face is melting into the same cup of coffee at the back of the diner. Maybe you're his now-prim ex-girlfriend who's broken the tractor beam -- degree, job in the City, banker fiance -- but has come home for the weekend and decided to walk into the diner to revisit the ghosts of a life you forfeited. We all know soldiers in both camps. What Corley's suggesting is that the wreckage of home is far more interesting and vital than the gem-like sheen of "out there." That the wreckage is the gem.

Short, Fast, and Awkward

2010-11-07T18:14:00.002-05:00

Got a new story out on Short, Fast, and Deadly. It's called "Recurring Childhood Nightmares 16 & 17". It's weird so I thought I'd explain it a little. For those who haven't checked out the site, it's comprised of really, really short poetry and prose pieces, "literature for the ADD generation." The site's fiction pieces are shorter than a Facebook status update and the poems are shorter than a tweet. The story itself started as an assignment for this poetry class I took in grad school. Basically we had to write a poem about recurring dreams we'd had. When I was a kid, I always had nightmares about having a sibling, usually an older sister. I say 'nightmares' because, being an only child, I never wanted a sibling. Who would want to actually have to share toys and Christmas presents with someone else??? Not to mention your parents' undivided attention. I think it would be cool to have a brother or sister now, but back then I was a spoiled little shit. In the dreams, Sibling A or B and I would go on adventures that always ended with random, creepy events like a dog I didn't own in real life getting smacked by a truck. Lovely. I'll shut up because this post is now 158 words longer than the story itself. Later.

2010-11-02T14:37:00.001-04:00

Jack the Pumpkin 2010 - 2010

2010-10-26T15:46:00.003-04:00

Warning: the following images are pretty messed up!

It was only a matter of time. Two days, to be exact. Yesterday morning I went to the store to pick up some Very Vanilla soy milk to complement my Lucky Charms (marshmallows only). Having just done the dishes, I'd forgotten to lock the kitchen cabinets.

Jack was already gone when I returned. The damage was done. I followed the trail of empty Windex bottles and cracked whippits from the living room to my bedroom. The debris ended in front of my open laptop. Two windows were open on the screen: One showing Sasha Grey doing something unmentionable to Bree Olson, and the other showing my most recent blog post: The Twisted Tale of Jack the Crackhead Pumpkin.

My breath caught in my chest and the panic and fear set in, the same way I imagine it does at the end of a date with Chris Brown. The mentally unstable pumpkin had read my unauthorized biography. He'd seen how many hits the post had gotten, knew that his sordid exploits had been broadcast across the world. And the world was laughing at him.

I quickly started thinking about which local PCP den Jack might have wandered off to, when a sound from the back patio silenced my thoughts. The sound was brief, but LOUD. What could best be described as a cross between a cherry bomb and a weak Oprah fart. The sound of a life ending too soon.

It was then I knew that Jack must have made his way to the roof of my building. That the escape he needed couldn't be achieved by any amount of sweet, sweet embalming fluid. He needed a permanent solution. I ran out the back door of my basement apartment and saw what was left of poor Jack. As you can tell from the above picture, it wasn't pretty. The next few minutes were a blur -- paramedics, sirens, police tape, old ladies tearing their hair out, children weeping -- but luckily (or unfortunately) a local Manhattan Valley slimeball named Brad had been trying to videotape his neighbor in the shower and accidentally captured Jack's fall in its entirety. The following video is extremely upsetting.

Reports of a suicide note are unconfirmed. If one surfaces, I'll be the first to report it. Until then, though, Jack really is gone forever. A cold lesson for pumpkins and pumpkin enablers everywhere.

***

A few hours later, E! News heard about the tragedy and sent Ryan Seacrest to interview Paris and Lindsay. The two were hanging out at their friend Khloé the Gator's house, slurping down White Russians by the pool.

"It's like, totally sad," Paris squeaked. "Jack was super cute, I guess, but now he's almost as irrelevant as my career."

Lindsay lifted her head out of her drink, gave Seacrest her best Botox pout. "Who the heck is Jack?" she asked, clearly confused. "And why don't you look like my usual dealer? Where's Julio?"

What Seacrest didn't realize was that he shouldn't have done the interview at all. Because Khloé the Gator hadn't had anything to eat in almost an hour, and her trainer Lamar was too busy playing basketball to feed her. So while Seacrest was busy with Lindsay, Khloé slid her massive, Jabba-like body out of the pool, snuck up behind him and screamed "Garghghghghahhh!!!!" in the creepiest baby voice imaginable. She swallowed his head in one gulp, then spit out the plastic pieces.

RIP Ryan Seacrest. He never saw it coming. Sort of like Jack. But not really.

The End (maybe)

The Twisted Tale of Jack the Crackhead Pumpkin

2010-10-21T19:34:00.004-04:00

Warning: Sad!

The story of the drug-induced celebrity downward spiral is an old one, as old as Hollywood itself. It's always the same – riches to rags, iPhones to crack pipes, rocking the mic to rocking the glory hole stall at truck stops. The reason I'm relating the following cautionary tale is not because of its originality, but because of how close to home it hit. Jack's saga shows that NO ONE, not even a pumpkin, is immune to the seductive twin devils that are fame and Lindsay Lohan.

Chapter 1

I brought Jack the Pumpkin into the world with my own two hands nearly two weeks ago. Sort of like Geppetto, except my Pinocchio was perfect, without imperfections, a testament to my diligence and the battery-powered pumpkin carver I bought at Rite-Aid. It was an act of love, nothing less.

His smile was infectious, his teeth perfectly rectangular. His eyes shone with the intensity of an early 90s Mickey Rourke bender, like a phoenix rising from the ash of Lady Gaga's crotch. His face had a roundness only rivaled by Kim Kardashian's finest asset(s).

It wasn't long before young Jack realized the potential power and worldly glory his physical gifts could bring him. His was a beauty that could not, must not, be ignored. Jack was granted access to the hottest clubs in Manhattan, where he became a fixture on the dance floors and in the VIP rooms, always being swarmed by packs of inflamed ladies clamoring and clawing for just one glance, just one drop of seedy, cinnamon-hot pumpkin sweat. And speaking of ladies, Jack quickly locked down the hottest, coolest actress he could find. Life was good for our young gourd.

Then, one cold October day (about a week ago), Jack made the fateful decision that changed his life forever. He was shopping in SoHo for a birthday gift for his girlfriend, when he accidentally bumped into a Hollywood casting director in front of the H&M store. The casting director was in town looking for body doubles for The Nightmare Before Christmas 2, and you can imagine the look on her face, dear reader, when she was confronted by the lovely Jack.

"You must come to L.A.!" she screeched in an amphetamine-laced drawl. "You're perfect for the part, for a dozen parts. We need your face, we need your body, WE NEED YOUR SOUL! Also, I've been told that they're doing a sequel to Sleepy Hollow. What do you think?"

Jack didn't know who the they're referred to, and he didn't care. The prospect of being a movie star was better than his current plans for that evening. Which involved buying his girlfriend a ridiculously overpriced present and then taking her out to a trendy, pretentious bistro whose Moroccan-Asian-Cajun-Somalian-Irish-Mesopotamian fusion cuisine would give him little more than indigestion. The choice was easy. We said our goodbyes, he gave me first dibs on his girlfriend, and hopped on the next direct flight to LAX. The pumpkin had left the city.

Chapter 2

California was awesome. Jack had an agent and was going to auditions every day. He was hanging out with cool people in the condo the casting director (his new lover) had hooked up for him. Besides his new friends, Jack also loved California's laws. He had always had a severe case of glaucoma, and now he could go to the doctor and get a special card to buy a special kind of medicine that was still illegal in most other places, including New York. Jack was the happiest pumpkin in Hollywood!

But then one fateful evening, Jack went to some super trendy parties in the Hills. And we all know what happens there. At only his third party of the night, our naive pumpkin was confronted by two of the most shady, diabolical characters he'd ever seen. Two vile harpies whose mere presence had derailed and demolished the careers and dreams of countless aspiring whatevers, most of whom were stronger than Jack. They were a rat named Paris and a fucked-up redheaded clown-thing named Lindsay.

Chapter 3

In only two days, Jack transformed from a lovable and handsome aspiring actor with a lot of talent into a smelly, filth-mongering party whore. He was hanging out with Paris and Lindsay non-stop, completely and irreversibly immersed in their vapid lifestyle. There were dinners to attend, pills to swallow, parties, after-parties, after-after parties, nipple slips and brunches. Jack was out of control. He couldn't stop and didn't want to. He'd gone too far.

Then he really let himself go. His once-perfect teeth began to rot and congeal into a pumpkin-pie-like mush. His eyes had lost their fire and were now rimmed by black spots, burn holes, and tract marks. His round face was hollow and his nose was at Michael Jackson danger levels, on the verge of total collapse.

Paris and Lindsay, realizing that hanging out with such a ghastly monster (on the outside) might destroy their already mostly tarnished images (and draw the attention of their parole officers), told Jack he was done. There would be no more parties, no more TMZ exclusives, no more booger sugar. They handed him fifty bucks, kicked him out of their pink Bentley and told him to get lost.

With tears stinging his rotting eye sockets, he stumbled back to the casting director's condo. Jack knocked feebly on the door and stared at the casting director with the look of a forlorn puppy who has had his mischief and wants nothing more than to return to the loving arms of his master. The casting director called him a dickweed pumpkin-junkie and slammed the door in his ruined face.

Jack was alone, homeless, wandering the streets, drinking Mad Dog 20/20s and trying to give migrant workers sexual favors for a couple pesos. They told him he was too ugly and stomped him with their white New Balances. Now in pain, and in need of shelter, Jack stumbled to a rundown shack in Echo Park that he had visited once with Paris and Lindsay to pick up party favors. The crackhouse's proprietor, Julio, welcomed him with open arms (and baggies). Our brain-addled pumpkin, sad reader, spent the next 48 hours huddled on a bed made of old Lunchables boxes, smoking crack, doing speedballs, drinking 40s, snorting/shooting/smoking meth, swearing and having unprotected sex.

Then, a curious thing happened. On the third day, Jack woke up as usual, head pounding, lungs on fire, dollops of Cheez Whiz and paint thinner crusted to his upper lip. But then he noticed something different -- a bright shaft of sunlight piercing through a hole in one of the room's stained window curtains. Intrigued, he pushed a passed-out hooker off the Lunchables pile and stumbled over to the window. He opened the curtain and was instantly blinded by the brightness of a Southern California noon. When his vision cleared, Jack saw palm trees, old Toyotas and new Hondas, obese babies in baby strollers, teeny boppers blabbering into rhinestone-encrusted smartphones, ex-hippie postmen in Bermuda shorts, the eclectic and beautiful movement of average Americans on a wonderfully average American day.

I thought I was done, Jack said to himself, still staring at the deliciously plump baby. I thought there was nothing left for me out there. Nothing for me to do, nothing for me to feel. But I was wrong. I can be a new man!

This is what he did: he dusted the crumbs and roaches off of his face, showered the possibly-dead hooker with the rest of his money, took one last hit of crack, walked downstairs, opened the front door and...

...HE WENT ON A CANNIBALISTIC MURDER SPREE!!!!!!!!!

Epilogue

Today, Jack spends all of his time huddled in a corner of my apartment, hiding from the FBI and huffing a wide variety of household cleaning products when I forget to lock the cabinets. Another tragic end for a once-promising starlet who fell in with the wrong crowd.

Is there a moral to this story? Don't smoke crack? Don't hang out with Paris and Lindsay? Don't go to Los Angeles? All pumpkins go to heaven? I don't know for sure. What I can tell you, well-informed reader, is this – Do not carve a pumpkin unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences. They can be worse than you've ever imagined and may even take you to L.A.

(And don't snort meth.)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

This Is A Cry For Help (and Tweets)

2010-10-20T13:19:00.004-04:00

from http://twitter.com/#!/MikeFrancesaNY

You should be my friend on Twitter (@ChrisVola). Or follower, whatever. We may not know each other. Maybe you hate me. Maybe we sucked face and I never talked to you again. Maybe you're a 14-year-old Russian hacker trying to access my personal information through the blog (good luck, won't find much there you commie bastard!). I will embrace you all. Even Mexicans. Especially Mexicans.

What do you have to look forward to as my follower? Oh I don't know, a couple to several tweets a day, ranging from links to useless crap I find interesting, links to assorted junk that other people think is worth putting on other Web sites, links to blog posts like this one! Pretty much a lot of links. Also, an array of provocative, authoritative nuggets of truth about my favorite sports teams and any media object (book/movie/CD/concert/foxnews article/porn movie) with which I may have interacted that has been momentarily worthwhile in the glorious scheme of my life. And some weird conversations with my boys Willie aka Primetime Slimetime and the Party King. Things that make me no different than any other pale sucker wasting his time on Twitter.

Actually, I thought Twitter was pretty damn dumb until recently. But it's actually cool for news updates, following comedians and fake celebrities, sending direct messages, keeping up with your favorite band/writer/politician, finding interesting people, wasting time in cubicle-land, what you do already. Also, a bunch of other reasons that sound lame until you try them out. ALSO, publishing companies and presses are starting to ask for how many Twitter buddies you have when you submit a manuscript. I have 25 friends. Which sucks. It's kind of like the kid who brings cream of corn soup or steamed brussel sprouts to lunch and expects to trade them for my chocolate AND vanilla Handi-Snacks. And he has a cleft lip. And he smells like rabbit pee. Fuck that kid. Stay away from him! Some of my friends aren't even real people, they're just advertisements for porn sites disguised as sweethearts with big boobs.

So, in the end, this is all about ME.

If you're not convinced, here are some more reasons why you should join Twitter/follow me:

- If you follow me, I will follow you (sounds like a gay 80s jam), giving you one more ~~friend~~ follower, and thus increasing your popularity!

- If you're new to Twitter, you can follow me (thus giving you one automatic follower). Some porn advertisers will probably take notice and follow you, too. You'll have more friends! You'll be on the road to success! In Twitter!

- You can get a book/movie/TV/music/stripping deal!

- MikeFrancesaNY, GaryJBusey, SarahKSilverman

Oh yeah, I carved this pumpkin. This is what it looked like before it started to rot and resemble a toothless Corky from Life Goes On:

And I tweeted it.

Poetry the poison, poetry the lie, poetry the venom shot through rattler fangs

2010-10-14T16:30:00.002-04:00

The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008 by Gordon Massman

Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009

182 pages

There's a lot of hyperbole on the Internet: Lindsay Lohan is the MOST fucked up stupid coke-whore EVER! OMG I have the coolest friends EVER for writing more birthday shout-outs on my wall than ANYONE, EVER!! This Jimmy Johnson-endorsed penis enlargement pill will transform you into a FUCKING SEX GOD and allow you to conquer third-world countries!!!!!

Clearly there's enough of this kind of stuff going around on a daily basis, which is why I'm not going to review Gordon Massman's quasi-recent collection of poetry, The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008. Because if I did, I'd be tempted to write that the book is the MOST viscerally disturbing, psyche-jarring jumble of words my young, impressionable eyes have EVER analyzed. That this is possibly the MOST IMPORTANT work of genre-bending literature to come out in the last five years, and if you read it, your blood might congeal and give you the BIGGEST, MOST HARDCORE brain aneurysm anyone's EVER documented. That your eyes might dislodge and your legs turn into rat shit as you crumple before its SHEER AWESOMENESS like a slug drowning in salt rain. But I don't want to sound like a bigger tool than I already have. And I have a hunch that Massman really detests assholes like me who get off on the worthless task of writing about writing.

So I'll let him tell you about the poems himself, in the form of an interview he did a year ago that appeared on Trickhouse's Web site. It's some really interesting stuff. Sort of like taking the line between genius and insanity and shoving it up god's ass until it bursts into a pinata laden with candy. But what do I know. If you feel prepared to be enlightened, you can check out the whole thing here. Or here. Or maybe here. Choose wisely.

However, if you lack the attention span or the give-a-shit to read the entire interview, here are some of my favorite chunks:

- I throw as best I can, as believably as I can, the billion colors of human existence through the prism of myself. Over long and intense personal interior struggles I have unearthed my otherwise unspeakable capabilities and visceral dark emotions: rage’s boiling mud, shame’s hot cauldron, the alligators of self-loathing. Not only am I a beautiful child, I am a hideous monster.

Like us all.

- I want to insist that my sometimes disturbing visions are more or less within everyone, with slight variations. Hasn’t every father fantasized infanticide? Doesn’t every husband want to binge on lovers. Doesn’t murder and suicide lurk in every man?

- This kind of clinical monster does not back down or mutate into something else. My clinical obsessions have numbered over thirty at any given moment, which I had to perform in a specific order at threat of having to repeat them beginning with number one, ad infinitum, through the night without sleep or rest. These involve locks, clocks, ovens, toilet seats, numbers, body lotions, dental floss, defecation, urination, noises, bottom sheets, light switches, hunger, toilet paper, and edges of desks.

- Surely “form” solidifies subject, is in fact subject, as subject is in fact form. My “form” is the brick of terror, guilt, shame, pain, horror, hope, rage, love, and innocence jammed into my head, square, compositionally shifting, and lodged like a bloody bludgeon I can only exorcize it by duplicating it on the page, repeatedly and, perhaps, eternally.

- The confusion is this: I am my poetry.

I discovered Massman's opus while perusing Tarpaulin Sky's Web site, because they tend to put out rad books. I was rewarded for my absentminded mouse-clicking when I stumbled upon The Essential Numbers' back cover:

Not giving a fuck is all in good fun, as long as you can back it up. And Massman does, in a big way.

And finally, some favorite lines from the book:

Dear God, I wish to register my unhappiness about a few things: mortality is a crock of shit, I could pop you in the mouth for that; genocide sucks, you deserve a penitentiary gang raping

I exacto-knife toadstool tip of penis, lift it off, the pee-slit forms a lovely salt-shaker

I masturbate to fashion photos of anorexics, Auschwitz ladies hips crooked outward slathered in blue cotton panties, elbow pelvises, furrows and funnels, cheeks like eaten stone, imagine fucking grasshopper bodies so close it rubs bone, wire sculpture of horror harboring a wet pussy

I petrify through the regal and towering land, the mesmerizing eyes, the vitality strands, the royal cataracting blood gorges of the beautiful and sad, once a breathing gaping hole, I grey among the statuesque

Hi, I'm Gordon, I'm a sex addict

Have a nice day.

Mitchell Heisman: A Review of an Obituary

2010-09-29T17:31:00.003-04:00

Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman

Self-published, 2010

1,905 pages

I don’t know how this stuff finds its way to me, but such is the Internet. For those who haven’t read the story, a week or so ago this 35-year-old bookstore worker with a psychology degree named Mitchell Heisman shot himself on the steps of Harvard’s Memorial Church. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Which meant it was crowded – lots of students, lots of old people. But it wasn’t so much what he did that makes Heisman unique, or even interesting – it’s what he left behind.

Five hours after his death, 400 people – Mitchell’s friends, family, coworkers – received an email containing a link to http://www.suicidenote.info/. The site contains a PDF file titled, you guessed it, Suicide Note, Mitchell Heisman’s 1,900-page treatise on his own self-imposed extinction.

Yes, this crazy asshole really wrote a 1,900-page suicide note.

As a student of literature (morbid nerd), I was actually fascinated when I first read about this epic work. Many writers have been driven to suicide, but I’d never heard of one who’d completed something of this magnitude with the end goal being suicide. Heisman didn’t work very often because he had been living off an inheritance from his father, I thought to myself, which must have meant that this clearly well-read guy had had plenty of time to create an attention-grabbing and thought-provoking, if seriously delusional book.

I was wrong.

Skimming through the nine-page table of contents initially gave me hope. In it, Heisman promises to tackle a vast array of complex, far-reaching and (for me) prescient topics – transhumanism, nihilism, the relationship between the rise of Nazism and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, “The seditious genius of the spiritual penis of Jesus” – en route to some kind of radical, pause-worthy justification for his suicide. However, after having floundered through the prologue and the first section, (An Experiment in Nihilism), and having barely reached the halfway point of the second section (God is Technology), I was well into skim-mode.

It’s not that the ideas aren’t interesting, it’s the way he presents them. The prose, at best, is a vaguely coherent slush-pile of academic jargon and references. At its worst, it is the incomprehensible psycho-babble of a pseudo scholar with a penchant for big words that signify nothing. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed plowing my way through some heavy academic texts, but having to deal with gems like – “If the hereditary or genetic inclinations of humans are looked upon the bases of a political-sociobiological ‘system’, then God represents the ability to ‘joots’ or ‘jump’ out of the ‘system’, i.e. the Egyptian political-sociobiological pyramid-hierarchy system” – on a sentence-by-sentence basis is way too much for me to deal with, no matter how fascinated I am by the author’s death.

Sorry Mitchell.

Even the note’s conclusion, the place where I thought I’d finally get that “Ah ha! So that’s why he did it!” moment, was vague, unsatisfying, what amounts to a sort of cop out. In the most direct portion of this segment, Heisman gives his real reason for blowing his brain-matter on the steps of a church in front of children:

“But wait a minute. Why am I doing this? Ah, yes, now I remember the punchline: I’ll try anything once!”

Obviously this statement is meant to be sardonic. It’s a tone that pops up periodically throughout “Suicide Note” – “What good suicide note would be complete without a bibliography?” – a dry humor that, instead of providing a degree of levity, only serves to remind us of just how mentally twisted and lonely this guy must have been.

Naturally, “Suicide Note” has attracted a good deal of chatter on Internet comment boards. As expected, the responses range from the sympathetic: “We all bear our own crosses. May he find love and healing in Paradise” to the angry: “Can’t [you] kill yourself in the woods or something so people are not traumatized by your moronic behavior and thank all for him just killing himself” to the mocking: “At least he went out with a bang!!!”. One particular comment of the funny-because-it’s-true variety caught my eye:

DOUBLE_CHINNED_PUPPETEER (09/25/2010 8:29 PM): Heisman was very foolish as no one will read his long note. He should have posted a video on YouTube instead!

The book may be the longest suicide note ever written, but it’s far from the best. In our visual-crazy, ADD digital world, Hesiman would have reached, I’d guess, a whole lot more people if he had condensed his manifesto into a Youtube video, or a series of them. No one is going to read 1,900 pages of anything today, let alone a garbled plea for death written by someone whose greatest accomplishment was apparently not leaving his room for inordinate periods of time. In his prologue, Heisman predicts that, for whatever reason, his manifesto will be “repressed,” perhaps by the coalition of evil, scaly old men who control the Internet. More likely, it will be forgotten. Mitchell Heisman will be a moderately popular Google search for a couple weeks until he, and the brain-matter stains he left on the church steps quickly fade into digital and actual obscurity.

(I poured my existential guts out for 1,900 pages, shot myself, and all I got was this lousy Wikipedia page???)

I guess the reason I’m spending this much time on Suicide Note is that even as a writer, I still possess enough empathy to believe that someone who’s spent years of his sad life spewing his deepest, most honest analysis of himself and the world as he knew it should at least be acknowledged. And, as a writer, I can relate to Heisman in that I understand self-imposed isolation, of spending hours and days locked in your room, hell-bent on discovering something less than tangible. But I also know that books, philosophy, and the lonesome (and ultimately impossible) search for truth and self-actualization aren’t what make life worth living – It’s the smell of woodsmoke and the flutter of yellow leaves on the first crisp day of fall. It’s a shitty bottle of bourbon shared among friends who know all the words to the Phish song playing in the background, a song that conjures its own memories of past glory. It’s the tiny soft fingers of a beautiful girl at 8am, rubbing away the hangover gremlins coaxing you toward another skin-filled embrace. The hushed magnitude of a moonlit snowscape. Porn. Whatever.

The saddest part of this whole story is that had Mitchell Heisman taken a couple minutes to escape his books and the nightmare visions that swarmed his head, he might have found joy in one of the things I just mentioned, or five billion others like it. He might have understood (through experience, and not some arbitrary human creation like nihilism) the basic principle of existence, not just for humans but for every organism trying to eke its way along on the planet: That life is good.

Do Not Read Before Bedtime

2010-09-19T14:26:00.003-04:00

*Warning: Do not click on the Tubgirl hyperlink unless you’re a vile, filthy, vermin who wants to go to hell and likes eating babies

Tales of Woe by John Reed

MTV Press, 2010

199 pages

OK, Let’s start off by acknowledging that I like literature that’s dark. How dark? Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and Glamorama were probably the three books that convinced me to try writing fiction. Not exactly some limp-wristed nonsense from Nicholas Sparks or that chick who wrote The Lovely Bones. How dark are some of my other favorite books, like Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Ellis’ American Psycho? Pretty fucking dark and/or disturbingly dark.

How dark is Tales of Woe? John Reed’s chronicle of unabated misery is so goddamned dark that even the book’s pages are colored black. (Well, not all of them. There’s a bunch of artwork, but we’ll get to that later.)

What sets Tales of Woe apart from the other books I’ve mentioned, at least in the Obvious Department, is that its 25 stories are more or less journalistic accounts of recent true events, and not the product of some deranged novelist’s warped psyche.

In most of the popular fictional American “arts” – drama, literature, movies, television – the contemporary reader or viewer has been conditioned to expect some kind of redemption, a clean resolution, the faintest glint of hope even in death. (This inherent need for positivism is also abundant in non-fiction: The junkie who writes a harrowing autobiography is now a sober, well-adjusted member of society! The oil spill in the mostly bleak environmental documentary can still be cleaned! Those pelicans will fly again!) The problem with this (and thus the desperate forays into the fairy-tale land of escapism) is that much of what goes on in our twisted “real world” is vile, senseless, pure, un-refracted evil drinking from a tall glass of hopelessness. Yummy. And though journalism has been called (by DeLillo, I think?) the last great literature, because it so accurately captures the essence (in a format that requires little to no attention span) of our society, there are many stories that only appear in abridged form, that aren’t given an appropriate follow-up or a long enough news cycle, and that are ignored completely by the major media simply because the relentless suffering they describe is too much for a cookie-baking, Sunday-school-teaching mother from Indianapolis to handle.

These are the stories in Tales of Woe. A baby whose brain is devoured by a baboon in front of the child’s mother. A 15-year-old Russian girl whose father makes her become a prostitute, then rapes and brutally murders her. A toddler left alone for three weeks to die. Nothing but grief, squalor, disappointment. Just..the…WOE (or whoa!). Each of the stories is related in Reed’s spare, polished newscaster’s prose, a dead-pan delivery so bereft of sympathy that many of the tales are rendered more unbearable and horrifying than the most splatter- and semen-filled descriptions from Ellis and Palahniuk. And Reed doesn’t stop there. He’s gone to great, almost obsessive lengths – sifting through thousands of interviews, perusing Internet chat room threads, court, government and legal documents, and pouring over pages of statistics and primary sources – to ensure that every gut-scorching detail is “fleshed” out. That each tale, in as little space as possible, transforms into a fascinating, three-dimensional ball of unrequited sadness.

from http://elisa-alba.com/blog/?p=4

And so, the big question is, Should you read this book? My roommates, whose minds have been hardened for years by the likes of rotten.com and Tubgirl, felt disturbed enough to put Tales of Woe down after only reading a couple stories (or perhaps it was the more-entertaining Snooki whoring her troll ass around the TV screen). I was in a shaky mental state myself (from seeing an upskirt of Snooki) and I almost did the same thing. But I’m so glad I didn’t.

Because the more I read, the more enthralled I became. It wasn’t a feeling of schadenfreude (gaining personal happiness from others’ misfortunes) because there is no joy in Woeville; and there wasn’t a catharsis in the redemptive, American, Forest-Gump-like sense of the word. There was only relief, and an overwhelming thankfulness that I’m not an albino in Tanzania who’s prized by witch doctors for my genitals, that I’m not so poor that I have to sell my kidneys to an illegal organ harvesting ring, that my own tale of woe has not yet come to fruition. And, of course, a genuine respect for the extensive detective work Reed underwent in order to unearth the tragic underbelly of these sinister times we all have to share. This is some real shit.

But Tales of Woe isn't all darkness. The book features dozens of colorful illustrations by a handful of deviant artists like 8Pussy and Michelle Witchiepoo. Depicting events from the stories, the drawings are cartoon-like, ghoulish, amusingly grotesque, what I imagine are tacked to Suicide Girls' bedroom walls (and other freaks who spent too much time at Hot Topic in middle school). The unrealistic nature of the images adds some levity to otherwise dire situations. Also, anyone with a particularly morbid sense of humor will find the stories' titles -- "Bouncing Baby Baboony", "Bloody, Squishy Pipe Dream" -- to be pretty hilarious.

What this all festers down to is that Tales of Woe isn't for everyone. But if there's one thing most Americans love as much, if not more, than a happy ending, it's the shock value of a horrific crime scene. Or, stated more succinctly by a police investigator working on a case about a teenager who crashed her Porsche and had her head sheared in two: “I defy you not to look.”

The Most DISTURBING book of the year! (Probably)

2010-08-23T13:50:00.001-04:00

Just wanted to let y'all know that John Reed's long awaited Tales of Woe (MTV Books, 2010) is now available for purchase!

Already being described as one of the most disturbing books to appear in recent memory, Tales of Woe, in simple, stark language, recounts several true stories united by a feeling of absolute misery without any prospect of redemption. Cannibalism, rape and incest are the norm here, along with a sense of unrelenting terror and disgust. Each story is accompanied by an often-gruesome, anime-like illustration. Sounds like a great Labor Day beach read!

John is an indispensable chronicler of postmodernity (Snowball's Chance, The Whole, All The World's A Grave), as well as an invaluable professor and mentor. I was able to get a brief glimpse at some early proofs of the book, and can't wait to check out Tales of Woe in its entirety. More to come soon!

Less Than Negative One

2010-07-11T17:19:00.001-04:00

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

June 15, 2010

Knopf

169 pages

The harrowing and sublime sequel to 1985’s Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms fast-forwards 25 years to a movie-industry-obsessed Los Angeles that, because of its author’s maturity, outshines its previous incarnation as a grim and deeply effecting dystopia, one void of compassion and saturated with a sense of distrust that seems frighteningly universal. This smoothly rendered thriller may lack the scope and wit of previous works like Glamorama, but Ellis’s portrayal of Clay, now a successful screenwriter, and his increasingly despicable circle of friends, cuts satisfyingly to the core of a bleak tunnel with no existential light at its end. In an era where blond bangs and Ray-Bans have been replaced by Botox and botched eyebrow lifts, Clay must ask himself what it looks like to be aging in a city that exists only for the young. The answer: not pretty. Ellis reaches his usual quota of (real or imagined?) squirm-inducing torture scenes and ultra-depraved, drug-fueled sex trysts. But the book’s quietest moments – the vibration of an iPhone, the digital billboards beaming images into the desert night, the condo lights left on when no one’s supposed to be home – are often its scariest, perfectly capturing an odor of uneasiness and of time being frozen, of a middle-aged man’s struggle with, and eventual acceptance of the darkest moments that have come to define his sad, plastic life. Equal parts Raymond Chandler L.A. über-noir and spot-on postmodern satire, Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’s most polished, succinct novel to date, and his most disturbing since 1991’s American Psycho.

Philip Roth Is A Dirty (Awesome) Old Man

2010-07-11T14:11:00.003-04:00

The Humbling by Philip Roth

November 2, 2009

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

140 pages

Although it lacks the scope and detail of Roth’s masterworks like The Human Stain and American Pastoral, The Humbling presents a convincingly haunting – albeit too brief – glimpse into the complex darkness of a decaying star at his lowest and most vulnerable. The prose is disturbing, the characters more so, and the brusque plot is generally riveting. For his thirtieth book, Roth departs from Newark, his longtime muse, to impart the novella-length tragedy of Simon Axler, an aging stage actor who, at 65, finds himself unable to act, and engaged in an invigorating yet confounding affair with an ex-lesbian 25 years his junior. In much of Roth’s most recent work (Everyman, Exit Ghost), the dialogue appears unrealistic to the point of being distracting. However, in The Humbling, this self-aware (in true Roth fashion) “soap opera” speak, far from seeming stilted, embellishes the suffocating sense of the primary characters only being able to exist and function in scripted roles that are either ill-chosen or unknowingly thrust upon them, roles that can only be renounced by carefully conceived deception or spontaneous violence. Also featuring some of Roth’s raunchiest (and best) sex scenes since Portnoy’s Complaint, The Humbling is a late-career bright spot that deserves a larger canvas.

Page 39

2010-06-10T14:56:00.004-04:00

I’M RIDING SHOTGUN, breeze-happy in the Automatic Climate Control. Billy’s chiefing on a joint in the back, bobbing along to Big L’s “The Heist”.

The plan is to spend the night in Southwest Harlem – four blocks from Columbia – at the apartment of one of Davis’ friends. A pit stop on the nostalgia train for me, and, more importantly for Billy, a sweet squirt of debauchery in the Lecherous Apple. It just feels good to get out, to be moving again, like running downhill. No more vibrations in my pocket.

I-95 South is an asphalt hell-hole, suffocating, fume-laden at the tail-end of rush hour. A twenty-foot black-and-white Derek Jeter eye-fucks his new Movado timepiece. McDonald’s crucifixes coax their congregations with promises of the holy trinity– High Trans-fat! High Sodium! Free Happy Meal Toys!

Billy tosses the roach out amidst a thick cloud. An elderly couple in a Lincoln glare. “At least we’re not going to die soon!” he screams at them, clown-smiling. They pull off the highway. Davis’s CDs cycle endlessly through his unique brand of nineties minutiae – Mobb Deep, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Nas, variations of alternative, jangle-pop, post-hardcore punk, trip-hop. The Ghosts of Genres Past. I drift in the familiar guitar chords, the middle-school-dance mystique. A breath of old-fresh air.

Traffic crawls.

Davis keeps checking his iPhone. Just after we pass Exit 18 in Southport we see the cause of the congestion, across the median in the oncoming lanes. A truck has skidded perpendicular to the road, four huge tracks of burnt rubber streak the asphalt. The cab is facing us, windshield smashed. Gobs of blood, gray and brown pieces of clothing are splattered across the white hood, a messy abstract canvas. A compacted heap – what might have been a yellow Nissan Altima – rests against the median. Pieces of glass litter the road like parade confetti. People are talking on two-ways, drinking Dunkin Donuts iced lattes. Two paramedics rush past, wheeling a man in a stretcher toward a nearby ambulance. A third paramedic, his sleeves and latex gloves soaked, tries to hold in the strings of glistening hamburger meat seeping out of a gash below the man’s ribcage. Billy rolls up his window, lights another joint, keeps saying Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ between hits. I rifle through my backpack, open a few of the orange bottles, swallow what I hope are a Zoloft, a Percocet, and a Prozac. Davis gives me this look in the rear-view mirror and I know what he’s thinking. In front of us, an old beige Chevy truck with a navy blue bumper sticker that says, I’m Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone…

…and I’m walking past the baggage claim at JFK two-and-a-half years ago, talking on my cell phone to Lauren who’s at school, trying to avoid the young couple that had been sitting in front of me on the flight, making out the entire time, exchanging handjobs under the complimentary blanket. Lauren’s trying to hold it together, but she’s sobbing, telling me she loves me and I’m not crying and I can tell she’s really drunk.

Maybe it’s because, given what’s happened, she feels extra bad about fucking Archer Hamilton on the back seat of a charter bus headed to a Young Democrats formal the night before, something I won’t find out about until I get back to school two weeks later.

Lauren’s saying that everything is going to be fine in between sobs and swallows of what I’m assuming is a mixed drink involving watermelon vodka or something equally sinister. Aunt Susan’s on the other line. She’s calm, sticking to facts, mapping out the next couple of days, the lawyers, the medical examiner’s office, the funeral director in East Fairport, which of my cousins are staying with me for the service and I’m not really listening to any of it and the couple in front of me is sweaty, gleaming, making out roughly on the escalator.

Davis is waiting outside the automated doors in a dark gray suit, leaning against his father’s Maserati. He tucks away his cell phone, smiles sadly, takes my bag.

“Thanks,” I say, “I really appreciate you coming to –”

“It’s the least I could do,” he says. “Your parents, you know how much they meant to Dad, to the whole
company. It’s…” he trails off, looks at the ground.

“I know, it’s been –” I stop and realize everything. I’m starting to fall, not faint, but toppling against the weight of my own legs. Davis is pulling me up and saying I’m here, I’m here, don’t worry before I feel the taste of tears running down my cheek and neck, staining my tee shirt and Davis is taking three Lexapros out of a bottle he’d had in his pocket and is feeding them to me and I’m swallowing and the ride back to East Fairport takes no time at all.

Rockin' the Suburbs (Is a Good Idea for Even the Biggest Asphalt-Addicted, Tight-Jeaned Burnout City Freak)

2010-06-08T14:20:00.003-04:00

A recent trip to upstate Connecticut, the land of Huskies, steamed cheeseburgers, and most importantly, my birth, has given me a much needed breath of filth-free air, a reminder of why the first twenty-odd years of my life were zenlike when compared to the gonzofied sensory-explosion monkeybomb world I currently inhabit -- and more than a few reasons why I will ultimately return to live out the rest of my days in a kingdom of soccer milfs and weed whackers. I'll list a few of these until the "pizza" delivery guy shows up with a fat bag of "pizza", or until the technology-induced ADHD kicks in, whichever comes first.

Trees. Yes, Central Park and Riverside Park offer the occasional unspoiled leafy glen, and all the biking, tennis, cross-country skiing, frisbee, and sunbathing options that any urban treehugger could possibly desire. But they also offer more than the occasional glimpse of foaming junkies getting their tweak on, and Puerto Rican hookers having their asses eaten out next to busy playgrounds. Not to mention the major highway that runs alongside Riverside, or the European tourists make the Great Lawn seem like a Great Place to swallow a bucket of lighter fluid. In CT, I went on a 15-mile bike ride through a quaint town center, a primeval forest that has been unchanged since we gave smallpox to the Pequots, a nature preserve, a river that doesn't have a highway next to it, rows of endless tobacco fields, a cemetary with stones from the 1600's, the pristine campus of my prep school, and a dirt road next to a turf farm where my buddies and I used to "study" after school. Not once during this entire ride was I accosted by a crackhead or subjected to the constant ruckus of taxi horns, packs of creepy obese children, garbage-day stink-smells, and crosswalk stagnation. Besides the occasional car and dog walker, this was Nature on my own quiet, bird-call-filled terms. Wide open (if manicured) spaces, the pump of the bike, the empty blue of the sky and my peace-starved head. Transcendence ahoy!

NO HIPSTERS!!!

Real dogs. People actually have real, outdoorsy, L.L. Bean Catalogue-worthy labs and retrievers, not the pathetic, yappy punt-worthy rat-creatures I have to avoid stepping on all the time. And the dog in the 'burbs are much happier, free to roam, to chase rabbits, to be actual dogs, instead of crying blankets for miserable 30-year-old single women who get stood up by their match.com dates.

Pickup trucks with the occasional racing sticker.

Golf. It's crack for white people (except for the white people who actually smoke crack). I didn't realize how badly I missed it until I played a round. The attraction is simple: Take the Nature idea and add open boozing and swearing and hitting things with a metal stick. There is nothing finer on God's earth. Besides porn. And "pizza".

Did I mention no hipsters?

In the suburbs, there's much less room for dissatisfaction. When the choices of what to do on a Friday night are limited to a dozen restaurants and a handful of decent bars, there are two options: either stay inside or make whatever you're doing fun.[Not to forget house parties. Not sweaty, forty-assholes-cramped-into-a-tiny-apartment parties, HOUSE PARTIES. Like "let's go out back to the barn or skinny dip in the pool or be able to have a conversation where I don't have to smell your breath or count the open pores in your face!"] New Yorkers will spend an entire night working their way through 15-20 bars/clubs in one neighborhood looking for the perfect vibe, only to realize that it doesn't exist, and that the search has depleted most of the week's paycheck. Sure, people and places in the 'burbs may be simpler, but that simplicity generally makes happiness a much easier state to attain. I'd rather hang out at the same local, familiar pub with my best buddies night after night than have my brain explode while trying to figure out which of the 85 Thai places to go to within a three-block radius of my apartment.

There's also something to be said for being able to drive for hours on open stretches of road and highway, letting your arm catch the breeze outside the window, blasting your tunage with the unshakable confidence of knowing that you will never be a slave to the hell-colored stoplights of the All-Mighty Grid.

Not to say that the suburban life is total nirvana. There's plenty of reasons why I stay in Manhattan. Career progression, 4 am last calls, exotic polychromatic women, getting a bacon-egg-and-cheese and a 40 oz whenever I damn well want. And most importantly, there aren't any pizza guys in the suburbs. And like clockwork, as I write this sentence, the buzzer is ringing. I wonder what delicious toppings he'll have today. The suburbs, for now, are only a distant Disneyland dreamworld. And one day I will sleep there in the carefully crafted fantasy that is Connecticut. But until then, I have more pressing business. Lunch is served!