Sorry - Here's the New Pictures

So I promised pictures and I didn't deliver right away. I apologize.

I have a few bigger projects connected with this site percolating right now and they, plus work, plus wedding have led to distractions. I did manage to drive around and collect some cool pictures but I failed to get them up in a timely fashion. Let's go.

This is the intersection of Port Richmond Avenue and Richmond Terrace in, naturally, Port Richmond. Once the commercial center of the western side of the North Shore, the neighborhood fell on hard times with the opening of Forest Avenue Shoppers' Town in the sixties and died with the opening of the Staten Island Mall in the mid-seventies. It struggled on for years, trying unsuccessfully to reinvent itself as a location for furniture dealers. When that failed it became a neighborhood for Mexican immigrants, legal and otherwise.

Now on a typical morning you can see dozens of men shaping up to bust their humps for inadequate pay. The old Jewish and Italian owned shops have mostly been replaced with dollar stores and Mexican delis. The old apartment buildings and apartments over all the stores are now packed to the gills with far too many people to be safe for their inhabitants.

I first noticed this particular building when I took to biking along the Terrace to get to the Bayonne Bridge. At the time it looked like it probably did at the turn of the last century. It was built by a local industrialist and by the eighties had become a residence for older, single men.

Since then, about 1982, several of the buildings on the left have burned down and the whole area has fallen down the tubes. I think the building on the right was still open as a bank, but now, after a fleeting time as evangelical church it's abandoned.
I wasn't able to get the exact same perspective as the original picture because there are buildings on the spot the original must have been taken from.




When I first saw the picture of St. Mark's Place in St. George from the 30's I thought I recognized the turreted home on the left. When I went to get the comparison shot I was disabused of that notion. Nothing in the old picture exists anymore except part of the stone retaining wall. The beautiful homes and the small stores are all gone, replaced by some of the ugliest buildings on the Island. The original Brighton Heights Dutch Reform Church, built in the 1820's, burned down in 1996 during a renovation project gone awry when heat guns went wild.

I've also added a picture cribbed from Staten Island historian, Thomas Matteo's book, "Then & Now Staten Island". It's a closer look at the church and the pretty brick home next to it that's tantalizingly unclear in the first picture. Today its lot holds an ugly little building that used to house a Manufacturer's Hanover bank, then a church and now, nothing, I think. Ah, architectural progress. Can it get any better?





I have no specific knowledge of the Stork's Nest or the Stork's Nest II. It's one of those neighborhood bars that I've seen from the bus all my life, but not living in the exact neighborhood (Tompkinsville) never really knew anything about or anyone who went there.

At some time in the past it was obviously some sort of big deal. Now it's subdivided and the ornamental stork has long flow the nest. It's a little hard to tell from the present day picture (the park across the street from where I'd need to be to get a matching shot is fenced off for renovations), but the left side of the original Stork is now a Central American restaurant.

When I was little, Tompkinsville was heavily Italian with some black families starting to move in. Later the older Italians died off and their kids moved out of the area. At some point a lot of the clientele of the methadone clinic in Stapleton seemed to be living in the old apartments above the stores in the area.

In the nineties the neighborhood changed again. Like in Port Richmond there was a sudden influx of immigrants of both legal and illegal status. Many of them are from Honduras, Guatemala and the rest of Central America. Over the years their presence has led to the establishment of shops geared towards their tastes and wants. This is one of those places.

The Staten Island Historian

I just came across the site for our borough's own historian. The Staten Island Historian, is an unpaid post that was occupied by the late Dick Dickerson for many years. The new man, Tom Matteo, has got a nifty website going but it left me a little disappointed. He's got the same NYPL Digital Collection links I've got but he doesn't offer any additional information. One of the drawbacks of the NYPL's collection is that there's too little detail about the pictures. Too many give little real indication of their locations and dates. I was hoping the Borough Historian would have access to information the rest of us don't.

Nonetheless, there's plenty of great stuff on the page and it does bring the NYPL pictures together by easily searchable categories (ex. churches, schools, etc.). Definitely worth examining.

Upcoming Things

Work and labors for my upcoming wedding have prevented me from getting out and getting the pictures I need to show in contrast to the olde-timey postcards and photos. Be happy with these little tidbits for the moment and I'll get something more substantive done over the weekend.

Why I Do This

The first inkling of what would become the present version of Ape Shall Not Kill Ape came about when I saw the following poster:



The utter dumbness of the ad and the cheap shade of orange reminded me of so many ads of my youth that I was compelled to get a picture of it. Then I was faced with what should I do with the picture. I've got lots of pictures tucked away in various directories on my computer that just sit their in digital silence and are eventually forgotten. WondeRoast demanded more of me than oblivion.

I remember the reds, blues and oranges of the window ads and sale signs in the five and dime stores of my youth: Woolworth, of course, but also Kresge's, W.T. Grant's, Kress', McCrory's and Lamston's. My mom would go off shopping for socks or whatever and I'd wander the toy aisles and pet section. That silly WondeRoast ad managed to rekindle some of those odds and ends of my memory and I owed it something for that little blessing.

So here's WondeRoast. It hangs in the northfacing window of La Mexicana Deli and Grocery on the corner of Broadway and Cary Avenue in the poorer section of my own neighborhood of West New Brighton. Hey, it might even be good.

What I've Read Since January, 1, 2008

Reeve, Philip Starcross
Carroll, Lewis Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis Through the Looking Glass
Chesterton,G.K. The Everlasting Man
Pushkin,Alexander The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
Durrenmatt, F. The Pledge
Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory
Bloom, Harold Novelists and Novels
L'Engle, Madeline Walking on Water
Powers, Tim The Drawing of the Dark
Burke, James Lee Crusader's Cross
Burke, James Lee Pegasus Rising
Burke, James Lee Tin Roof Blowdown
Lehane, Denis A Drink Before the War
Lippman, Laura The Power of Three
Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle

To the Center of the Earth

THE CAUSEWAY AT SILVER LAKE PARK

In 1980 and 1981, New York City suffered one of the greatest droughts in its history. Its reservoirs dropped to around a quarter of their capacity and Ed Koch popularized the beautifully cheesy "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down". As a fourteen year old it really didn't seem to have any bearing on me whatsoever. However, it did lead to one of the coolest adventures my friends and I ever had.

For one reason or another we wandered into Silver Lake Park on our way back to my friend Alex's new house on Howard Avenue after a trek down Victory Blvd. to Luke & John's Deli for sandwiches. It was the start of summer and Alex and I had just finished our freshman years.

When we entered the park we were startled to see that the lake's level had dropped an easy six or seven feet. It was amazing. The sides of the causeway were exposed and we could see the place beyond the stone shoreline where it dropped off to the lake bottom. We had to get closer and see whatever else there was to see.

We went down to the lake and climbed the low black fence that borders it went down to the water's edge. We started walking along the shore skipping stones and looking for anything that might be considered cool. About fifty feet from the north side of the causeway on the lake's east side we found the sort of thing we hoped to find - a concrete tunnel.


AS IT LOOKS TODAY - THE TUNNEL ENTRANCE SUBMERGED

The tunnel appeared to run eastward from the lake into the heart of the hill that rose up from the shore and to Victory Blvd. Under that hill was the actual reservoir (the lake itself is merely decorative) and who knew what else.

We ran to Alex's house and grabbed flashlights. We got back to the lake as fast as we could, switched on our lights and entered the tunnel. We didn't go that far the first day. Our lights weren't that illuminating and the tunnel seemed endless. Its ceiling was high enough for all to stand in but only wide enough for us to be comfortable if we went in single file. We walked into the hillside only far enough to know we'd need to plan more thoroughly and be better equipped.

That night we planned our big incursion into the Silver Lake tunnel. We got big dry cell battery flashlights and rope. We didn't know where we'd actually need rope but it always seemed to indicate that whatever you were doing was going to be serious. We also got markers so we could leave signs to keep from getting lost and a crowbar to break things if needed.

The next day we undertook our great expedition. There was myself, and my three friends , Alex R., Jesse B. and Jim D. We went around noon time when the sun was high and rest of the world was at work. There were some adults swimming and sunning themselves around the tunnel entrance but they clearly didn't care about what we were doing.

With a rising sense of excitement we walked into the tunnel. Now well lit, the tunnel revealed itself to be a bare, cement construction that ran in a straight line into the hillside. We walked for about ten mintues, keeping a slow pace so as not to be surprised by anything, before the we came to the stairway.

Rising up at the end of the tunnel was metal staircase with grating levels. We, of course, started walking up them.

I don't remember how many levels we climbed but memory makes it seem like a lot. Finally we came to the top of the stairs and into a concrete gallery. There were metal rungs set into the wall facing Victory Blvd. leading to a metal hatch in the gallery ceiling. Towards the lake side of the room the wall only went up to our waists. With our flashlights in hand we looked over the wall and I think we all gasped.

Like I said, the hill housed the real Silver Lake Reservoir. I have slight memories from my childhood of construction going on the park but this picture does better justice to what's under that hill than anything I can describe - - -


UNDER THE HILL

Even with our big flashlights we couldn't see to the other side of the reservoir. We were basically where the bulldozer is in the picture above. The holding tanks are vast and silent and our lights made only the slightest dent in the dark space. Moved by the scope of what we were seeing I decided to commemorate the moment by writing my D& D character's name on the wall. Today there's probably still a little chalk scratching proclaiming that "Alzhak was here".

The final stage of our inward journey was to climb the rungs. I mean if there's a ladder at the end of a journey you can't not climb it. We assumed that the ladder would bring us into the control house and we were right.


THE CONTROL CENTER

The hatch in the gallery ceiling was silver colored and lifted right up when Jim pushed it. The rest of us were right behind him. We found ourselves in a control room with panels with meters and dials. Gaguges monitoring the water level and quality hummed with quiet electrical life and little lights blinked on the consoles in seeming random sequences.

Then the alarm went off and we hightailed it out like cats with their tails on fire. I'm not sure if the alarm had anything to do with us or with problems caused by sewer work going on out on Victory Blvd. but we quite sensibly assumed it was our fault and we climbed down the ladder, flew ourselves down the stairs and hightailed it down the tunnel as fast as we could managed without killing ourselves.

When we got back out into the light the adults asked us if we saw anything cool. We told them heck, yeah.


We went back the next day hoping to repeat the previous day's undertaking and spend more time in the control room but it wasn't to be. When we got to the top of the stairs we could see that the hatch was open. Before we even climbed out into the gallery a guy stuck his head down and told us not to move. Which we did. We were out of the tunnel even faster than the day before.

We went back one more time a week later and found that the tunnel had been sealed forever. Thick metal bars had been installed in the tunnel mouth and cemented into place. We had been thwarted by the city from carrying out any new expeditions.

Coming Soon - Beneath the Earth

Later today I hope to post pictures and a story about one of my more noteworthy adolescent undertakings.

Gary Gygax - RIP

My friend's brother went to school in Wisconsin and discovered Dungeons & Dragons in its early pamphlet form. My friend brought the books along on our Boy Scout camping trips, showed them to me and even reffed a few loose games. I'd already read "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" and coupled with the beautifully terrible illustrations of such wondrous things as Owl Bears and Black Puddings, I was hooked.

Eventually I stopped playing D&D. My buddies and I took our role-playing too seriously to stick with such a flawed and restrictive system. We moved to SPI's Dragonquest before settling on the HERO System. Our games became more engrossing and more complex. Looking back over my shoulder, though, I think that had more to do with our growing up and maturation than a different game system. For all the fun we had after D&D I don't think I ever recaptured that early falling in love with becoming submerged into games that were as much fairy tale as Howardesque sword and sorcery.

A socially misfit, fanboy, geek never had a such a friend as the man who created fantasy roleplaying. So thank you Gary Gygax and rest in peace.

Cool SIRT (Staten Island Rapid Transit) links

When I was a kid, my mom would take me and my sister to New Dorp to go shopping or in the summer see a Disney matinee at the Lane Movie Theater. Since we didn't drive we'd catch the old 103 bus in front of Trinity Lutheran Church at the foot of Cebra Avenue or we'd walk down and catch the train in Stapleton. Mostly she opted for the convenience of the bus but I remember plenty of rides on the old trains with wicker seats and conductors collecting fares.

When I was older my friends and I took to long, exploratory hikes around the North Shore. One of the coolest ones took us along the abandoned overpasses of the South Beach rail line. Now they've been pulled down and the old right-of-ways have been filled with houses.

So here are some pictures from several different sites. All are worth spending some time with and any native Islander should have some memories tugged by some of them.



Third Rail's SIRT issue

Forgotten New York - SIRT photos

Joe's SIRT photos

Someone else's cool SIRT photos

New Link

There's a new link on the page. It's for the NYPL's "Staten Island on the Web" section. I forgot to put it up last time so here it is. There's lots of fun stuff to be found. I was particularly looking for photos of the Bethlehem Ship Yards in Mariner's Harbor building destroyers during WW II but they're gone. Someday, maybe, I'll find them again and put them up.

Postcards by Grimshaw

So I found out about the postcards. All I had to do was type "W.J. Grimshaw" and postcards into google and it took me to the Grimshaw family page. I always feel extra stupid when it takes me a week to actually do the five seconds of work needed to solve a problem or answer a question.

William Grimshaw was born on October 14, 1830 in Accrington, Lancashire and emigrated to the U.S. in about 1847. After living for a brief time in Pennsylvania, he moved to Bordentown, New Jersey where he apparently married Emily Brown in 1853. After living there for more than 20 years, the family relocated to Staten Island in 1873, where William was engaged as a carpenter for the remainder of his life. William and Emily had at least four children -- William J., Frank P., Lamar C., and Margaret Grimshaw. William died in 1905 and Emily passed away in 1908. William's oldest son, William J., operated a stationery and confectionery business that became later focused on selling ice cream when it was first introduced.

Now Mr. Grimshaw and his son's postcards are collected for our pleasure on the NYPL's Digital Collection pages. I've said it before, check them out.

Richmond Terrace Apartments - the present

So here's the other building shown in the postcards posting. If the Prospect Gables have seen better days, then this place REALLY has seen better days.

It sits at the foot of York Avenue and Richmond Terrace. I'd wager that the postcard was created back when the Jersey Street area was still a thriving working class commercial strip for the surrounding homes on Westervelt and York. There was at least one synagogue, a Polish Catholic church and all manner of shops. There was a public school, PS 17, and supermarkets.

When I was a boy the area was already on the way down. The A&P closed and many of the old tenements were abandoned and sank into ruin. In the later 70's the school burned down (though there was already another school nearby). The Richmond Terrace Public Houses had gone from being a diverse working class bastion to a place where the hardworking tenants were force to live cheek by jowl with individuals of the least reputable sort.

Now the area has achieved a stasis. In the early 80's I watched several blocks of old building be torn down and replaced with little attached homes. The commercial strip of Jersey Street between Pauw Street and Castleton Avenue struggles on. Working class families have reclaimed many of the older homes on the streets branching off Jersey and there's been a stabilizing effect on the whole neighborhood. Despite all that, the Jersey Street environs are still a marginal place with more crime than much of the rest fo the Island and general shabbiness that never seems to go away.

Later criminals began preying on the neighborhood and

Prospect Gables Redux

Located only a few houses and across the street from the albatross that is the home I purchased two years ago and still can't live in, the Prospect Gables have clearly fallen down on their uppers. I feel like I remember seeing the Gables with their fanciful roof top adornments still intact but I could have taken crazy pills. You can clearly see the once painted patterns used to create the fake Tudor effect in the postcard picture. The old concrete stanchions are still visible at the bottom left of the picture. The lower story windows are bricked up today, probably a reminder of the neighborhood's less criminally averese days.

I still am puzzled by the postcard's existence but I'm thankful for it. These postcards (and the NYPL's easily accessible collection) will give me things to write about whenever I run out of my own trite ideas.

Postcard from New Brighton

These were real postcards printed at some distant time in Staten Island's past. Both building still exist (with modern pictures forthoming) and have suffered considerable aesthetic deterioration and their blocks have tumbled down the economic ladder a few rungs. There also continues to be no reason for the postcards to exist. Perhaps I can do little research on the history of postcards of such everyday domiciles. I mean it's cool to be able to send a painted picture of your house to friends and family but it just doesn' make any sense.

New Links

I added a bunch of new links today. The first two are the most valuable but all have good things contained within.


Forgotten New York is one of the coolest sites for pictures of the five boroughs bar none. It's creator, Kevin Walsh, has been doing hist site for ten years and recently he wrote a book called "Forgotten New York". Go to the "Street Scenes" section and check out the Staten Island articles. The man's collected some amazing things and gathered good information.

The New York Public Library Digital Collections is a great picture resource. Just enter what you'd like to see in the search and go for it. Unfortunately there's not a lot of good information attached to the pictures. Sometimes there's a note scribble onto the image or there's a caption indicating date or location but more often than not it's all a little vague.

The last two sites are similar to my own. They're personal sites with things of special interest to their creators. Nonetheless, for the interested Staten Islander they do provide a wealth of interesting pictures from across the decades. They also have their own sets of links to other Staten Island biased sites. Check them out and if you find fun sites on your own, let me know and I'll put up a link.

Old Church Building

It's still a beautiful neo-Gothic structure. There's some minor changes (the old steeple spires are missing (which is not visible in my mediocre picture) and there are windows over the bell openings), but it's still the same building from the postcard. Reading about Zion's history from there website, I discovered the building was opened in 1921. The congregation had started as a simple Norwegian Sunday school meeting in a building on Avenue B (which was just torn down) and had finally reached the point they could afford to erect a real church. Then a mere forty-three years later they moved on to the lifeless structure on Watchogue Road.

Zion Lutheran Church

I guess that Zion Lutheran moved to its present location in Westerleigh from Port Richmond in the mid sixties because they wanted a larger building and many of its parishoners had moved to that neighborhood. Whatever the reasons, who'd want to trade this beautiful gothic building for this lifeless example of modern architecture?

The old Scandinavian Lutheran Church is now St. Philip's Baptist Church and appears to be maintained in good condition. It is one of several churches in the area and one of the two directly along the park that once formed the heart of one of Port Richmond's nicer residential sections. I forgot to get a picture of the building's present condition (because I'm a dope) but I'll put that up next.

Same House - Different Picture

So here's what the house looks like today. It's a pretty little house that's been kept up rather well. You can see that the clapboard sheathing has been replaced with wider boards and the decorative trim at the top of the left hand chimney is gone but it's still a splendid reminded or Staten Island's long ago Dutch settlement.

Van Santvoord House

This cool little brick and wood house sits at the bend in Richmond Terrace at the foot of Pelton Avenue. I'll post a picture of the house at it looks today. It's still beautiful. Now, unfortunately, it's been chopped up into multi-family. What are you gonna do. At least it's still there.

Staten Island

I love Staten Island. If you know me that probably doesn't come as any sort of a surprise, but I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else bored enough to be reading this. I can't think of leaving Staten Island. I know, I know. Staten Island's a provincial, conservative town with stupid, classless people.

First, with almost half a million people it's only as provincial as you want it to be. Whatever cultural attractions we lack are simply in another borough, that is, in a different part of the city Staten Island belongs to.

Secondly, it is conservative. People who own homes, worry about earning enough money and sending the kids to school usally don't have the luxury or time to not be fairly conservative. Suits me fine.

Finally, they're really no less classy than any bohemian wannabe in Manahattan or Brooklyn. Look, we live in a pretty tacky society in general these days. For every NASCAR or wrestling fan there's some hipster going to a pompous show at PS 1. We live in a day of cheap spectacle and crazy social antipathies. If you like junk I don't it must be tasteless.

Coming on to Staten Island from any of the bridges or the ferry can still take my breath away. Masonry towers and old wooden houses brek through a seemingly endless green cover of sycamores, oaks and maples. The same vantage point shows the Island as a black space floating in front of me bound together by the yellow-orange street lights and rushing bands of car lights. I'm still moved when I look out over the borough from the crest of one of our bridges and I get just a bit excited when I can pick out a house I know between the leaves and branches that seem to be ready to smother it.

I like its houses and I like its people, even the ones I can't stand on a day to day basis. That's probably because I know I'm a bit of a jerk and I only feel superior because they don't like what I like or act just like me. I mean there's just no rational foundation for me feeling I'm any better than anybody I meet on the street and when I stop looking down my nose long enough I remember that and I can tell myself to shut the heck up.

I'm not foolish enough to think I'm anything but a product of this borough and I know I'm not "better" than the vast majority of them. Just because I think I'm smarter than so many of my fellow Staten Islanders doesn't make it even occasionally true. Everyone likes to think they're smarter or cooler than everyone around them (and everyone knows how cool I am).

These are the people I've known all my life and will probably know till the day I die. They have the same concerns for how the Island evolves and grows in the future that I do. If we don't agree on precisely how things turn out we at least all know what's important to think about.

If I was to go anywhere else I'd feel unmoored and set loose in a very discomfomrting way. It happened during my years in Albany (admittedly a small, anti-cosmopolitan outpost in New York's northlands) and I suspect it would happen wherever I moved to.

I love the tree covered hills and the evolving prairies growing on the remnants of the Fresh Kills Landfill. I love our French Provincial Borough Hall and the abandoned derelict Seaview TB hospital. I love the handful of ancient colonial homes scattered around the North Shore and old Victorian homes vainly struggling against development in Tottenville.

I'm going to start posting pictures from the Island throughout time. Some I'll snag from books and websites while the others I take with my handy little digital camera. If you have any ideas or comments please feel free to leave them and I'll see what I can do.

What I've Read

Mignola/Arcudi - BPRD: The Universal Machine
De Hartog, Jan - The Peacable Kingdom
Marshall, William L. - Yellowthread Street
Cotterill, Colin - The Coroner's Lunch
Kirk, Russell - Watcher at the Strait Gate
Rowling, J.K. - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
McWhorter, John - Authentically Black
Wangerin, Walter - The Book of the Dun Cow
McCarthy, Cormac - No Country for Old Men
Marshall, Michael - The Intruders
Bellavia, David - House to House
Pratchett, Terry - Making Money
Cook, Glen - The Fire in His Hands
Cook, Glen - With Mercy Toward None
Lindsay, Jeff - Darkly Devoted Dexter
Lindsay, Jeff - Dexter in the Dark
Cook, Glen - A Shadow of All Night Falling
Shlaes, Amity - The Forgotten Man
Erikson, Steven - Gardens of the Moon
King, Stephen - On Writing
Erikson, Steven - Deadhouse Gates
Dalrymple, Theodore - Our Culture, or What's Left of It
Long, Jeff - Deeper
Barlough, Jeffrey - Bertram of Butter Cross
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Coady, Roxanne, ed. - The Book That Changed My Life
Lermontov, Mikhail - A Hero for Our Times
Dostoevsky, Feodor - Crime and Punishment
Reeve, Philip - Larklight

A little bit of everything; non-fiction, scifi, fantasy, crime, etc. Some were very good (House to House) and some were very (very, very) bad (The Intruders and Harry Potter).

Catching Up

So I haven't written anything on this useless blog in several months. for what it's worth, since July, I've read 28 books and gotten a job. The latter had a lot to do with making the former possible.
My job is a beautiful post at the College of Staten Island. I'm employed as a college assistant and I spend my days hooking up A-V equipment for professors and getting movies off the racks for students to watch. Much of my day is spent sitting at the front desk answering phones or just waiting for my next scheduled delivery. This gives me some time to read. Enough time that I've been able to get myself back on track to the sort of scale of reading I used to do.
The job is actually very cool. My bosses are decent and, unlike some I've had in the past, look out for the staff. My coworkers are a great assortment of students and retirees. Both are taking advantage of the job's great benefits package and comfortable working conditions.
If I'm not sounding to emotional one way or the other it's because it's just a nice job that I don't dislike going to and it gives me money, healthcare and pay. At this point I don't really want to ask for more out of a job.

"Freedomland" - Richard Price

While not a sequel to "Clockers", "Freedomland", from 1998, is set in Richard Price's fictional New Jersey cities of Dempsy and Gannon. Respectively they're stand-ins for Jersey City and Bayonne with fictional room to spare.

There's still crime and drugs on the streets around the Armstrong Projects in Dempsy and their mostly black tenants but it's not like the crack era depicted in the "Clockers". In fact it's barely alluded to in "Freedomland". In the first book, black-white interaction seemed to be limited to white cops and junkies and teenage black crack dealers. flying squads of narcotics cops are constanly storming the parks and playgrounds in "Clockers" rounding up everyone they feel like. By the era of "Freedomland" that doesn't seem to be the norm anymore. The cops, instead, now exist to establish a cordon sanitaire around the projects and keep blacks out of Gannon.

"Freedomland" opens with a wounded white woman, Brenda Martin, wondering through the Armstrong Houses and into the local emergency room where she says she's just been carjacked by a black man. Eventually she also lets the interviewing detective know her four year old son, Cody, was in the back seat of her stolen car. From the moment that information is relayed to police headquarters the two cities, white Gannon and heavily black and brown Dempsy, begin moving towards an explosion in slow motion.

The inevitable disaster, and Price makes it clear from the beginning that it is inevitable, is seen through the eyes of Det. Lorenzo Council and Jesse Haus, a reporter for the Dempsy evening paper. Council is older and black and lives for the job. His range is the Armstrong Houses and he will do whatever he needs to keep things calm, help those in need and ensure that deceny is given a chance and the tenants are treated with respect. Haus is young and white, the child of communist party parents who still live in projects because moving out when they turned black would have been a racist act in their eyes. Both are drawn to Brenda by their job and become entangled in her story.

While both Council and Haus suspect that Brenda isn't telling the whole story they and the rest of the city's law enforcement apparatus and regional media have to proceed on the information at hand. Soon there is a blockade around the Armstrong Houses, long outstanding minor warrants being enforced and violent roustings being conducted. There are no surprises in the book and I think that's one of Price's goals.

We all know that there's crime in the projects, that there are struggling working people there and that most of us (by which I mean middle class educated white folks) couldn't care less.

When a cute little white kid goes missing it's bound to be the lead news story. When a cute little black kid goes missing it's going to be on a middle page of the paper. There's just too much history to point to dismiss that. It's not the cops' fault, but it is the law enforcement hierarchy and media's fault.

We live in a country where we willingly tolerate cities becoming hollowed out shells and abandoned many of the people left there when our parents and grandparents moved to the suburbs. As long as the police kept the criminals in those cities and away from our nice streets we didn't care. When moments arises like the book's plot we want an immediate military style crackdown. At some point there are bound to be explosions.

As the truth is teased out by Council, Haus and group of semi-professional missing child finders Dempsy and Gannon's clash slowly builds from a series of skirmishes to full dress battle. Over a few days and nights years of black-white tension come to what Price portrays as foregone conclusion.

While "Clockers" raced to its end, "Freedomland" moves with at a funereal pace. The book is packed (and padded) with incident and incidental characters. There's just too much. Price's prose is soul wrenching at times but it's not enough to overcome the book's ridiculous length. When the story's come to its end there's still one hundred more pages to go. Since there's no mystery he needs to give his readers more than endless repetitions of the same points and that's what the book does.

Not since "Bleak House" have I taken this long to read a book. It's not a bad book and Price's book is about things we don't talk and scream about till something's done about them. It's about the rage and devastation that lives on the periphery of our own comfortable lives and it's a story told with appropriate rage. It just doesn't have to be so long.

"Clockers" - Robert Price

One of the authors praised by Stanley Crouch in "the Artificial White Man" for examing America and race in depth, is Richard Price. Actually, he writes about Tom Wolfe, whom he praises, giving a speech in which he extolls Price for moving into Jersey City for over a year and striving to understand the place down to its sinews and guts and then producing the novel "Clockers".

Published in 1992, "Clockers" is about race, murder and drugs in Jersey City (called Dempsy in the book) in the early nineties. We see the violence and devastation through the eyes of 19-year old, ulcer ridden dealer Strike and just shy of retirement homicide detective Rocco Klein. Both are men at their limits of mental endurance and achingly striving to understand how they managed to lose control of their lives and how can they climb out of the pits they dug themselves.

Strike and Rocco have grown up, like all of us, with strongly held notions of how the world works. For years nothing they've encountered has discouraged their prejudices. When a fast food manager is murdered and it's discovered he's dealing from the restaurant things begin spinning out of control for Strike and Rocco become obsessed to the point of possibly screwing up his looming retirement.

Strike's brother, a church-going, hard working man who always does the right thing confesses to the murder. Strike can't believe his brother did it and neither can Rocco. Strike tries to find out what happened in hopes of saving his brother. Rocco too disbelieves the confession, instead believing in Strike's guilt. As the two fight their way through the streets and bureaucracy of Dempsy to discover some sort of truth we're given a deep tour of economic despair, drug abuse, racial hatred and simple police callousness.

Price writes gorgeous prose (at time a little too so) that sounds believable even when coming from dangerous thugs. Strike's boss, the mid level dealer, Rodney Little, with dreams of legitimacy while Faginishly building new teams of juvenile dealers to move his product, is one of the most disturbing villains encountered in recent realistic fiction. Rodney's manipulation of Strike is Mephistophelean.

"Clockers" exposes the war on drugs as a failure and the urban decay that robs too many American's of any sort of hope and ultimately the rest of the country of the contributions of too many of its citizens trapped in the rotten hulks of long lost cities.

"The Thanatos Syndrome" - Walker Percy

I was looking up some background on the late historian Shelby Foote and found a lote of references to his friendship with another Southern writer, Walker Percy. From there I decided to check out Walker Percy. I found a few articles and interviews with Percy that made me want to give his books a whirl. The theme he explored until his death was the creep of relativism and how it natuarally undermines a larger, societal morality.


"The Thanatos Syndrome" takes that theme to its darkest conclusion and tries to pull it apart and expose the snake coiled around its heart. At what point does abortion lead to proactive euthanasia of the disabled and elderly? When does the belief that mankind is perfectible lead to re-education camps and ultimately the ovens?

Percy's hero Dr. Tom More, a psychiatrist recently released from prison and returned to his old home in Louisiana. Beset by family problems, diminished faith and a general seething rage at the world around him he quickly finds out things seem to be getting horribly strange in his town. People are emotionally flat but sexually aggressive. Some of the same people are suddenly possessed of great calculating ability and utter geographical recall. There are also signs of child molestation at his children's private school.

Soon More realizes that his town is the center of some sort of experiment being conducted to improve mankind. If it all recalls some seventies medical thriller (like Coma, just not as boring) that was exactly Percy's goal. He hoped he could bring the issues that moved him most by deliberately creating a blockbuster style thriller. He almost succeeded.

Parts of the book are too dry and pendantic which is a shame. Percy's ideas are important and worth examinating but a times the book just slips into a little too slow a gear. Is mankind perfectible? As a Christian I of course don't think so and that's the basis of Percy's argument. He makes a strong case for what are seemingly logical outcomes from the dismissal of any sort of greater morality from human interaction. What happens when man takes it on himself to try to reform man? What doors are opened and how dark a place do they lead to?

Maybe a non-fiction work would have been bettered suited to Percy's examination of the questions he wanted raised. Unfortunately he tried to write a thriller and his skill just didn't meet the task he set himself. The action sequences are sloppy and confusing. The dialogue is too long and drawn out to be part of a potboiler and is overwritten for where it's placed.

I haven't read anything else by Percy yet but I suspect that the thriller just wasn't something he'd schooled himself in well enough to actually write a really good one. I've got some of his other books and "The Moviegoer" is always showing up on lists as one of the most important American books of the last century so I sort of feel obligated to give it a try someday.

"The Artificial White Man" - Stanley Crouch

"The Artificial White Man" is Stanley Crouch's most recent collection of essays on all things American, artistic and political. Crouch is a curmudgeonly New York writer that I first encountered twenty years ago in his arts writing for the Village Voice. I'd never read anyone who combined indignation, rage and what seemed like a heavy dose of common sense before. My own views were only starting to coalesce into traditional conservatism I tend to favor these days and finding a liberal who wasn't simply vomiting up the standard liberal lines on the arts and culture was enlightening.

I admit I also loved his thick style awash in seemingly endless trains of adjectives. Again, I'd never read a style like Crouch's up till then. I even got a subscription to the New Republic because he was listed as an associate editor at the time. Unfortunately he never wrote a piece for it during the years I got it.

Over the years as my reading scope widened I saw the verbal bloat that Crouch suffers from. I also realized that too often his essays are limited by his pugnacity and strong prejudices. I still enojyed his newspaper columns but I didn't buy his novel when it came out.

So why did I buy "The Artificial White Man"? I've come to the conclusion that I love essays. I like their succinctness and tight focus. Too much non-fiction I encounter is crushed down with minutiae that I don't care about and I can barely imagine the authors even have regards for.

I started reading the Atlantic Monthly because it features some of the best non-fiction writing I'm aware of. People like Christopher Hitchens and Sandra Tsing Loh are regular contributors. Robert Kaplan, Mark Bowden and all sorts of amazing authors regularly write great dispatches on the wars.

That's a long way of saying I'll always grab a book of essays that looks interesting when I'm in need of something new to read. Crouch's book seemed to fit the bill.

The book is a mishmash of determinedly provacative essays on white justifications and fetishizations of black social patholgies, the unwillingness of American writers to confront race (as well as anything outside of their immediate social zone) and paeans to some artists who happen to do all the things Crouch wants them to.

Can you tell I thought the book was a little too much? I mean it only cost me about $13 (thank you little beige Barnes&Noble member card - absolutely worth the $25 per annum if you buy more than three of four books a year) and he does have an interesting take on things. Race is still the monster underpinning and undermining so much of what goes on in this country these days and we don't really discuss it.

"Hostage" - Robert Crais

I'm a pretty solid Bruce Willis fan and will check out most movies with him (okay, I will not see "Perfect Stranger") and one night I stayed up and watched "Hostage". There's not all that much to it but it's an entertaining enough hour and a half.

Sometime later Otto Penzler strongly recommended the original book and wrote pretty emphatically that its author, Robert Crais, is one of the best hard boiled writers around. So, ever the ready fool, I took Penzler's advice and rushed out and found a copy in the increasingly disorganized stacks of books at the Barrett Book Trader.

Yeah, well, I know Penzler's one of the most knowledgable fellows around when it comes to the history of crime and mystery writing. I love his weekly column in the New York City Sun and would actually pay to own them in a bound collection someday. I don't, however, think I'll fork over money for another book he pushes quite so quickly anymore.

"Hostage" is pretty much, well, it is entirely nothing special. Grizzled hostage negotiator burns out and moves out of LA and becomes the chief of a small town police force. A group of young punks invade a house and unintentionally take a mob accountant and his kids hostage (work that title). When the mob gets wind they force our hero to devise a way to get their records out of the house without any one finding out.

The book reads like a slick Hollywood treatment from the start and reeks of high concept and no originality. There isn't a character or a situation that doesn't feel old and tired. The villains might as well be twirling long mustaches. Crais needed to find a way to hide the neon "I'M THE VILLAIN" signs hanging about their necks.

No, this is not a good book for even whiling away mass transit time or laundry time or any sort of time you have to waste on potboilers. There's plenty of good crappy thrillers out there (can you say Preston and Child?) to spend money on instead of "Hostage"

"The Grave Tattoo" - Val McDermid

Val McDermid's the author of the "Wire in the Blood" series of serial killer books that I haven't read but I have watched a lot of the BBC movies based on them. They were sort of okay. Pretty much run of the mill in these days of CSI and its tiresome ilk.

"The Grave Tattoo" chronicles the adventures of a low level Wordsworth academic searching for the connection between a two century old tattooed corpse in an English bog, Fletcher Christian of HMS Bounty fame, and William Wordsworth, long winded, now deceased, poet laureate of England.

The reviews made the book sound pretty cool, I swear it. But it wasn't. McDermid threw in so much ancilliary crap (such as a clever mixed race tough girl with a penchant for poetry, conniving gay male friends, untrustworthy ex-boyfriends and jealous brothers) that none of it really helped move the story along and kept it from ever really achieving any sort of depth. In the end it felt like a sort of politically correct Agatha Christie singleton with none of the true cleverness the old dame brought to a mystery.

"Every Secret Thing" - Laura Lippman

I was reading an article about "The Wire" and discovered that series creator David Simon's wife, Laura Lippman, was a writer of mysteries set in Baltimore. Since becoming a fanatic regarding the show and slightly addled and obssessed about all things Baltimore I decided to check her out.

I quickly learned she has a series detective character and a batch of standalone books. The latter are more concerned with the psychology of people involved in tragic, violent events. I went for one of the second group.

"Every Secret Thing" opens with two mismatched young girls who are not really friends being kicked out of a birthday party. On their way home they find a seemingly abandoned baby in a carriage. The next thing the reader knows is that the baby is dead and the girls are convicted of her death.

Seven years later the girls are released from juvenile incarceration and returned to their families in Baltimore. Soon their are new incidents involving young children being temporarily taken from their mothers. Eventually all the people involved in the past murder begin to converge around each other again.

There are the two girls, the deliberately bohemian mother of one of them, their public defender, the cop who discovered the body of the dead girl and the victim's politically connected mother and a reporter. Soon all are weaving around each other trying face the past or their inability to do so.

The book's not really a mystery. It's similar to Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine books. Lippman's opening up the minds of two broken young women and the people who's lives they changed. There actually is a question of what really happened on that day the baby was found but it's important only as to unveil the deepest nature of the girls.

"Every Secret Thing" is a despairing book with damaged characters unable to staunch the flow from their wounds. There's nothing happy here and nothing heroic. There is a good book about wounded minds and the weight of murder and revenge.

"The Road" - Cormac McCarthy

"The Road" is somehow Oprah's new book club selection. I'm curious how her fans will take to one of the grimmest reads I've encountered in a little while. Simply, "The Road" details the journey of a man and his son from Tennessee to the Gulf Coast in an America devastated by nuclear winter and beset by marauders, cannibals and encroaching doom.
As a genre fan by birth, I'm always wary of non-genre authors trying their hands at basic sci-fi tropes. They usually are ignorant of other work and write like they've come up with something new that says "I'm important" in loud, pretentious tones. They also always seem to insist that they're not writing science fiction (witness Margaret Atwood).
Nonetheless, something about the reviews of this book made me want to actually envision reading it one day. With its paperback release that day has come.
I tried to read McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" some years ago and couldn't get into his style. There's limited punctuation and lots of pure dialogue. In "The Road" it served the story beautifully. It conveys the personalities of the man and boy struggling to hold onto their souls and lives as the world disintegrates around them exquisitely.
The book is filled with descriptive passages of icy beauty and black terror. I've read everything McCarthy wrote in "The Road" in other books but never with such perfect prose.

The Straw Men Trilogy - Michael Marshall

The first book in Michael Marshall's Straw Men trilogy is called,aptly "The Straw Men". While never as great as I hoped it would be it's a great idea with some solid writing. Great, crazy plots, towering demonic villains and dark secrets in the background that aren't too easy to figure out are all in there.

The first book opens with a series of seemingly random acts of violence: mass murders in a fast food joint, girls abducted from the street and car crashes. We promptly meet our protagonists; a cop who retired when his own daughter was abducted several years before the novel's opening, a CIA employee who's parents die in a that car crash and LAPD detective. Within pages we are shown connections and intimations of motives linking the events and characters.

In the ancient past, all humanity was given to indulging its violent desires. There was no moral imperative to rein in such impulses. Then came the infection. Most of humanity was infected with a virus that encourage socialization, urbanization and peaceful coexistence.

The Staw Men are those who are uninfected and are manipulating world events for their own ends. What those ends are and how they'll be achieved are the mystery that occupy our heroes.

The books weave in classic conspiracy theories and urban legends as well as all the more typical serial killer trappings. Unlike most of the sub-Red Dragon crap being churned out these days, Marshall takes his plot and characters to levels of almost high camp and ultra-violence that overcome the inherent unbelievabilty of the material. Instead of suffering from trying to present essentially comic book materials seriously, "the Straw Men" revels in its pulpishness. Find these books and give 'em a whirl.

Truly heavy music

A couple of months ago in the New York Times one of the guys from Mars Volta mentioned a great new ultra heavy band from California called "Mammatus".   I tracked down the album at Vintage Vinyl and have been listening to it constantly.   It reminds me of reading Heavy Metal when I was a kid, particularly "Conquering Armies" by Dionnet and Gal.   I can picture armored men cutting through jungles in search of lost treasures to only fall short of their goals and die.   Very heavy then very spacey and then really heavy.  Cool stuff with a dragon on the cover.

So last night I finally did a little research on "All Music" (one of the 2 or 3 greatest resources on the web) for similar bands.  I found them and now I'm finding them as downloads to preview.   So far so good.

The first one I found is simply called "the Sword" and their debut album is "Age of Winters".   Where Mammatus only gives us four long songs 9one clocks in over 20 minutes), these Texicans hold the times to near radio-manageable lengths and go for more riffing and song structure than the latter's heavy, exquisite drone.

From "Age of Winters" we get a pretty Arts and Crafts maiden on the cover and songs about Norse goddesses and wolves (with howls) inside.  There's not a hint of irony or self deprecation.   These guys, like Mammatus are doing what they love without a hint of post-modern distancing involved.   I think if they even felt like they had to avoid that they would fall apart.   These albums work because they're played by utter true believers.   Definitely thunderous stuff.

There's more stuff I'm trying to find right now, particularly "High on Fire" and "Turn Me On Dead Man".   It's pleasing to learn there's a generation of people who know where to look for musical inspiration (the early 70's - Zep, Sabbath, and, well, that's sort of it.  OK, maybe a little early Floyd like "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" for the spacier bits) and then know what to do with it.   

For years I've complained about the lack of variety in music, especially heavy stuff.   I don't want another  (I really don't want any) metal/hip-hop band singing about their crappy lives.   Even when I loved hardcore I was more into the political than the personal.   I mean lyrically what's all that different from any filthy little emo-band and some modern metal act?   You don't have to sing about dragons and harpies (though I'm drooling at the thought), but c'mon.   I'm forty now and I don't really care about the misery of some teenager's problem.   SO give me my super heavy riffs and keep singing about them ruins and dragons.   I'm a happy listener for the moment.

"The Night Gardener" - George Pelecanos

"The Night Gardener" is the latest book by George Pelecanos. I've never read him before but I'm familiar with his insanely great work on "The Wire" (the single greatest tv show I've ever seen). I'd read a couple of good review for the book so I picked up a copy.
The book opens with 3 Washington DC cops at the discovery site of the latest victim of a killer of children. The first is an older black detective who's been working to no avail on the case for several months. The other two are two fairly new white patrolmen. All are indelibly tagged by the crime which goes unsolved.
Jumping ahead 20 years events occur which lead to a reexamination of the opening scene's crime and the commission of several new crimes. The older detective is long retired and diminished by a severe stroke. One of the patrolmen was forced to resign for inappropriate behavior and now runs a small time chaffeuring business. The other patrolman is happily married detective and is primarily concerned with helping his son avoid the pitfalls of adolescence.
Pretty swiftly Pelecanos plunges his characters into the investigation of a series of murders, some seemingly related and others not. There are gangster obssessed petty criminals and one-time criminals hoping to avoid temptation and stay straight. Pelecanos' style is sharp and realistic and his cops sound and act like the ones I've known.
I'm still not sure if I really like the book. Pelecanos strives for a realistic portrayal of the lives of several cops, their associates and criminals but the book suffers from a little too much mundanity.
The serial killer plot line is great. Too often such characters are presented as super genius gamesmen. The real serial killer is usually a creepy loner who kills a handful of easy victims until their craziness leads to their capture. The weight that his crimes have burdened the three central characters with seems true and their sadness over their failure is palpable.
However, in the end there's too much going on. Pelecanos is striving to create a real police unit and its series of ongoing investigations. The problem is that none of the plotlines really are served well by what's a relatively short book (384 pp). I wanted a lot more of each bit.
When he has the luxury of hours of development as parts of an ongoing tv show that goal is attainable. Here it's a little distracting.

Anybody out there?

Just checking to see if anybody's actually out there. If you are are you reading this directly from the Ape Shall Not Kill Ape site or the main FLA site?

"The Complete Sixth and Seventh Seasons"

With the arrival of "Columbo - The Complete Sixth and Seventh Seasons" the DVD release of the original Columbo shows is complete. I'm glad they're here and like with all the previous seasons' releases I've bought them as soon as they were in the store. However, as with all the previous seasons' collections I'm equally dissappointed with the overall quality of the productions that Universal has put forward.

First off let me say that the picture quality of the DVDs is alright. They're clean and precise but that's not where my problems lie. For such a seminal show with a great cast of faded stars and up and comers and some of the best writers and directors in the history of tv, there's just nothing going on here but a straight presentation of the shows and some episodes of the utterly atrocious "Mrs. Columbo" with the nascent Cpt. Janeway, Kate Mulgrew.

Alright, I admit it. I've been spoiled by DVDs including documentaries and great commentaries. I've been spoiled by the inclusions of outtakes, screen tests and all sorts of video goodies. So what if I've been spoiled, I don't think it's too much to ask for a little something extra.

William Link's still alive. Does he refuse to talk about his most famous creation? I've heard enough interviews with Peter Falk to know he won't stop talking about the show. Would it have been so hard to get something on film? I wonder what Patrick McGoohan has to say about his involvement in the show as actor and director. what about Bruce Kirby or Dennis Dugan? What of the rest of the surviving cast of regulars?

Don't get me wrong, if you have any liking for "Columbo" pick up the DVD sets. You can't go wrong if you want to have something you can put on and always get a kick out of watching. Falk's like something crazed Italian leprechaun in most episodes and there was a real effort to create an array of villains from the detestable (ex. Jack Cassidy always, Louis Jordan) to the sympathetic (ex. Ruth Gordon and Donald Pleasance) and nifty plots and clues. So buy them and watch them and once in awhile imagine how much more Universal could've given us to waste away some more of our lives' with.

"Polyphemus" - Michael Shea

 "Polyphemus" is a 1987 collection of horror shorts by Michael Shea. I guess he's better known for his Nift the Lean books (which I have still to read), but he does a have a fine little batch of other stuff to his credit.

This past October, comedian Patton Oswalt listed a favorite horror story each day of the month. I found out about it from Stevie D. and was pleased to discover he had a love for the real foundational authors of the genre (Machen, Lovecraft, James, etc.) as well as good modern ones. One of the stories he listed was "The Autopsy" by Michael Shea in the above named collection. I found it cheap on Amazon and had it within days.

The story was fun and bloody. It involves aliens, Appalachian mines and lots of gore. It's the higlight of a book of equally fun and bloody delights. It's the sort of stuff you used to be able to find each year in the late and terribly lamented Karl Edward Wagner's Year's Best Horror antholgies or still find in Stephen Jones' Best New Horror antholgies.

"The Thousandfold Thought" - R. Scott Bakker

 "The Thousandfold Thought" is the concluding volume of R. Scott Bakker's "The Prince of Nothing" trilogy.   The Holy War called in the first volume is tempered by blood and fire and arrives at its destination.  Numerous plots and machinations reach fruition and tens of thousands die.   The book is nothing if not vast in its intentions.

Bakker has serious things going on.  He has undertaken an intriguing study of all the things I described in the previous entry. This is good stuff.

The Prince of Nothing has the epic scale of Tolkien and the viciouness of Glen Cook. Bakker has created something worth the investment of time. When I see the shelves of crappy D&D franchise books and know that kids buying them aren't reading Bakker, Cook or P.C. Hodgell (more on her some other time) or a stack of other talented writers I feel woozy. It's just depressing.

The Warrior Prophet - R. Scott Bakker

"The Warrior Prophet" is the sequel to "The Darkness That Comes Before" and left me gasping for breath.   Sure there are a few talky sections where Bakker's status as a philosophy PhD candidate shines through but they're worth working through.   His characters possess complex and believable psychologies and act based on them.   They don't act like plot puppets you might find in a Terry Brooks' story.

Alongside the conversations are huge battles, assassinations and overwhelming displays of magic power.   These are described in often beautiful prose and with a sense of true potency.   One school of wizards have to summon the likenesses of great dragon heads in order to bathe their opponents with flames.  There is an ancient evil disguised as a small black bird with a pale human face.   The feeling for a world of empires built atop the bones of long lost greater empires equals Tolkien's portrayal of that abyss of time and back story.   Bakker has created some spectacular examples of genre writing.
  
The book is a fascinating exploration of faith, tradition, reason and power set in an original but still recognizable fantasy setting.   Without aping the psuedo-North European tropes of too much fantasy Bakker still manages to work his story into a tapestry with clear elements of the Crusades, Byzantium and the Arabic Caliphate as threads.   The resultant world feels both original and familiar.

"The Warrior Prophet" follows the Holy War called in "The Darkness That Comes Before" as it lumbers south towards the Holy City of Shimeh.   Numerous forces, all with different agendas, most in conflict with everyone else's, begin taking over events and turning the Holy War into something no one predicts.

Bakker is an intriguing new writer and if you have any interest in what epic fantasy has the potential to be then you really need to check these books out.

"The Darkness That Comes Before" - R. Scott Bakker

"The Darkness That Comes Before" is the first volume of a mere three volume fantasy trilogy by Canadian R. Scott Bakker. I discovered its existence during my recent hunt for non-crappy and non-standard fantasy books (see the earlier post on "Shaman's Crossing"). I read a few very cool interviews with Bakker and his defense of epic Tolkien level plotting and traditional fantasy so I decided to give the man's books a shot.
This is definitely one of the best and more original fantasy books I've encountered in some time. The world is more Mediterranean and Middle Eastern in its appearance than European. There is a tremendous feel for the world's history, cultures and languages. There are also no kitchen boys who are really heirs to some throne or brave sword maidens or even witty dwarves. There are wizards who are all considered heretics, there are truly horrific barbarians, devout religious men who range from humbly so to fanatically so. There are conniving emperors and plotting hierophants. The whores don't have hearts of gold and some men are simply cowards.
I don't really want to give any plot away. There's ancient evil as well as present day venality. A crusade is called to recapture long lost holy lands from the heretics and secret monastic orders re-enter the world for goals that are inscrutable.
This is a series that I look forward to finishing with tremendous relish. I keep getting the Games of Thrones stuff pushed at me and I'll probably go at it at one point, but I can't help it, it doesn't look like it holds anything to this in originality or overall originality.

"Shaman's Crossing" - Robin Hobb

"Shaman's Crossing" is the first of a stack of new fantasy books I picked up in hope of finding something that didn't stink. While I don't agree with Michael Moorcock on a whole lot of stuff, like him and "new wierd" writers such as China Mieville, I don't have any use for the vast quanity of fantasy being produced these days. I don't want another boring piece of crap with woodsy elves, taciturn dwarves and chaotic orcs dancing across a medieval fairy land. I don't want princesses and druids and witty bards. I want something that hasn't been done to death and indicates at least the barest hint of imagination.

Robin Hobb wrote for years under the name Megan Lindholm (her real name's Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden) with moderate success. Unfortunately at some point she either felt the need or was pushed to restart her career under a new name. Ahh, the vagaries of the book writin' business.

"Shaman's Crossing" is an interesting take on fantasy. There's none of the usual Tolkienesque northern Europe tropes with lordly elves and dour dwarves. Neither is there any of the deliberate oddness of the New Weird with its echoes of Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance.
Instead, there's a sort of American frontier motif being worked. A wounded and weakened kingdom at an appproximately 19th century level of technology is expanding into steppe region sparsely populated by nomadic barbarians. There's old, pagan magic as well as strange alien magic practiced by beings that live beyond the edges of the barbarians' lands.
Set in this world is a conflict between the new elevated battle nobles and the old gentry. The book concerns the adolescence and early schooling of one a battle noble's second son who by tradition is bound to enter the army. Along the way he becomes an inadvertent player in a greater war between his people and the strange magic rising beyond the plains barbarians.
I've never read any of Hobb's books before and I'm not sure her earlier stuff looks that appealing ("Assassin's Apprentice"), but this book was blast of freshness among the stinky waste that is modern fantasy. I like elves and dwarves, but dang, here's proof that there's a lot more going on out there.

"World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" and "The Zombie Survival Guide" by Max Brooks

I received "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" and its predecessor "The Zombie Survival Guide" by Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft)as belated birthday presents recently. The former is an oral history in the models of Studs Terkel's numerous books and Sir General John Hackett's "The Third World War" and the latter is a straight up guide on how to survive the zombie apocalypse.

"World War Z" is a blast. Through a series of interviews with a cast of character ranging from Chinese public health officials to con men, politicians and soldiers, Brooks creates a vivid picture of the emergence, spread and onslaught of zombies on the entire world. His logic of how a virus based zombie apocalypse would spread is ingenious and actually logical. The depiction of how governments would respond is also evilly logical and something I found cold enough to be believable.

"The Zombie Survival Guide" on the other hand is a bit of a bust. It's too dry and too long to really be any fun. There is a section at the end detailing zombie outbreaks over the last four millenia that's fun but it's not enough to salvage the rest of the book's tedium.

"Wizardry & Wild Romance" - Michael Moorcock

I just received and read "Wizardry & Wild Romance" by Michael Moorcock. I have a decent little collection of non-fiction books about fantasy and swords & sorcery literature so I assumed anything by Mooorcock would be a welcome addition. As a young man he revolutionized the field with the creation of the brooding heroes Elric of Melnibone, Corum of the Silver Hand and Dorian Hawkmoon. As editor of New Worlds he also helped revolutionize the entire field of science fiction and fantasy. I guess I wasn't wrong but I was disappointed.

What purports to be a reasonable survey and critique of the field of fantasy fiction is instead the ultra-cranky rantings of a bitter old man. It's not that his attacks on Tolkien, Lewis and several other writers of the old guard are totally off base but they often seem over the top to no real effect.

If there's any hint of conventional morality, un-skeptical characters or actual heroism, Moorcock seems automatically down on a book. There's a place for his rejection of tradition in fantasy but of course tradition shouldn't be rejected just because it doesn't mesh with someone's modern beliefs.

It's an interesting overview by an important writer but it's not essential. It's a shame.

"Velocity" - Dean R. Koontz

So I succumbed and bought "Velocity" the other day. I'd been checking it out since its initial publication last year because of its cool seeming setup. A seemingly mild mannered and disinterested with life bartender leaves work one evening to find a note under his car's windshieldwiper. It lets him know that if he involves the police a elderly woman involved in charity work will be murdered and if he doesn't a pretty, young school teacher will be killed. Things only intensify from there.

I tend to avoid Dean Koontz because my few interactions with him in the past have been amiable. He tends to zoom right up at you with a terrific concept, being you along at break neck pace and then crap all over you with a short and curt ending. I hoped things would be different. Alack, alas, they were not.

Look, he's a gifted writer of sharp prose and ideas at times. The main character is revealed slowly and with precision and it's great. Unfortunately the end is tossed off in a couple of pages. If you can get it cheap or from the library, give it it a shot. He reads super (super) fast. If you're faced with having to pay full cover, hold off. If you're lucky you might find a remaindered hardcover.

the coolest thing ever.....

the copper wire octopus scalp massager

Five Years On

So it's five years later, it still sucks and we're all gonna die and everything's changed. Forget the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, forget the mistakes and calumnies of the Bush adminstration and the childish statements of the Democratic candidates. Forget that Bush was didn't pay attention to Islamic terrorism for the eight months he was in office or that Clinton, Bush pere and Reagan didn't do all that much over the preceeding 20 years even while hundreds of Americans were murdered by Hezbollah, Libya and Al Quaeda. Forget the right wing wingnuts and left wing moonbats. Forget all the crap that makes you and me partisans for whatever side we prefer to be on (but let's admit we are where we are by choice and not reasoned argument). Forget all the peripheral crap that we give voice to on a daily basis and remember what happened.

Remember that almost three thousand people were murdered by a handful of men driven by a deep rage and religious zealousness. Remember that we are faced with an homicidal enemy driven by non-negotiable positions and a hatred of the West and the Jews that is boundless and unappeasable. We are indeed in the midst of a clash of civilizations and we need to figure out what to do because we clearly haven't.

When four planes were hijacked on a beautiful late summer morning the US had only done one thing truly wrong. We hadn't taken the murderous hatred of the facet of Islam represented by Al Quaeda seriously. For that failure thousands died.

"The Shadow of the Torturer" - Gene Wolfe

After years of dillydallying I've just finished the first volume of Gene Wolfe's "Urth of the New Sun" tetraology. I remember trying to read it back when it came out in 1980 but found it too stylized for my adolescent taste. Now, however, I get to wear big boy pants and I can read adult books. And this time I liked it a whole bunch and breezed through it in a few days.

"The Shadow of the Torturer" is the first volume of the recollections of journeyman torturer Severian as he travels the environs of a earth so deep in the future that the sun is turning red, food and resources are scarce, and glaciers are moving north from the south pole.

Much of the atmosphere of Wolfe's book is derived from Clark Ashton Smith's tales of a red sunned Earth (his, unfortunately unavailable, Zothique stories) and Jack Vance's Dying Earth" stories and novels. Both series portray an incredibly ancient Earth with little real knowledge of the past and presents deeply immobilized by ritual and that lack of historical understanding.

There is a clear parting of ways, though, after Wolfe's Urth is created. Smith and Vance's stories are both arch, cynical and tend to be peopled entirely by rogues and mountebanks. Wolfe is going for something else and I'm not quite sure what it is yet.

Severian presents himself as someone possessing a perfect memory as he begins his memoirs but also someone capable of lying. He is also writing with the advantage of hindsight but appears unwilling to reveal too much before he deems it appropriate.

Severian is a journeyman of the torturers' guild who is exiled to become a small town headsman after he sneaks a knife into a noble woman being tortured to death. The first volume details Severian's adventures and the insights he makes as he begins his trip to his new home. There are traveling players, duels with poisonous flowers and secret notes and lost religious artifacts.

Wolfe's prose is dense at times and demands close reading to maintain a piture of what's occurring at a given time. It's also beautiful at times and combined with his general inventiveness provides a heady, often drunk inducing vision of a world slowly, and with juggernaut like implacablity, winding down to its absolute end. Can't wait to finish the second volume, "The Claw of the Concilliator".

"Three Days to Never" - Tim Powers

"Three Days to Never" is Tim Powers' lastest book and as usual portrays a supernatural world underlying our mundane one. This time we meet Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Mossad agents and a collection of disturbing conspirators.

Powers' last few books ("Declare", "Earthquake Weather" and "Expiration Date") dealt with huge canvases; The fate of the West, Noah's flood, the Second World War. This time he confines his action to a handful of people, several of them family, and few locations in California. "Three Days to Never" is more akin in feel to one of Powers' compatriot James Blaylock's California books ("Winter Tides", "Rainy Season", etc.). It's not a bad thing but it did take me a few pages (or more) to change my perspective of what I guess I've come to expect from his books.

There's time travel, stolen concrete footprints, cryptic videos and remote viewing. All is presented in a matter of fact way and seems utterly reasonable as explained by Powers. That's one of his strongest talents. Whereas Blaylock, Leiber and Bradbury present their stories like dreams, Powers gives us the seemingly plausible mechanics behind all the missing and oddball bits of history and makes them real. Like in most of his books, he takes real, though unexplainable or unclear, true historic events and personages and builds a dizzying story around them.
It is a little confusing this time around. I remember the first time I heard about Powers was a review of "The Anubis Gates" in "Whispers" back in 1984. The critic liked the book but felt it was too complicated at times and often not easy to follow. He was content to go along for the ride but he did caution to reader.
So I didn't seek the book out. Then a friend lent it to me and I was hooked. What satisfied me particularly was that it was really complicated. It's a great book that's held up to several re-readings but never that complicated.
With "Three Days to Never" Powers finally got me. There are several moments that left me shaking my head and turning back the pages for re-reads. It's the time travel, the crazy shifts of perspective and alien things that haven't been explained yet. But it's also, I hate to say, Powers' writing. It's not as sharp as it needs to be and that's disappointing.
In the end, though, seek out the book. Aside from Powers' usual display of ingenuity and plotting razzle dazzle there is a sometimes touching examination of father-daughter love of several different varieties. Often Powers' characters have to bear the salvation of humanity on their shoulders. This time the scope's much more manageable and intimate.

Comics, comics and more comics

So a few months ago I was exposed to the joys of download whole decades long series of comics via bit torrents. Yee ha!!!!

I found all (ALL) the Batman and Detective Comics from issues 1 up till June 2006. Utterly amazing. I could never find or afford these sorts of collections and they simply aren't available.

Along the way I discovered Jeph Loeb's Batman books. Written as direct sequels to Miller and Mazzuchelli's "Batman: Year One","The Long Halloween", "Dark Victory" and "Catwoman:When In Rome" are great, fan boy friendly books. They play with all the tropes of the character and his rogues gallery in fun and intriguing ways. Very fun.

I also read "Astro City" which I ultimately enjoyed most of, "Arkham Asylum" which I most assuredly liked none of, and a few other things of varying quality. Loeb's Superman books are pretty decent but his Daredevil and Spiderman books were so-so.

I never really read superhero comics as a kid. I pretty much stuck to DC's horror (I got most of them) and war comics (working on "Our Fighting Forces") which weren't episodic and it didn't matter if I missed an issue or two. When I did get around to reading them in high school the prices spiked and I sort gave up on them.

Over the past decade or two when I did look at what was coming out I was pretty much left cold. I can't help it but I want my heroes to be heroes and not miserable psychopaths. Rereading "Watchmen" leaves me cold (aside from all its lack of originality {which I ain't going into again}).

So now I'm pillaging the past and tracking down the handful of things worth reading now. Heck, the animated Justic League is head and shoulders above pretty much any superhero book I've seen in the past decade. Oh, well, and so it goes.

"Life With Father" - Clarence Day

"Life With Father" is the basis for the classic William Powell (to whom we should all genuflect towards as a paradigm of martini drinking class) movie about the eponymous Father and his family in 1880's Manhattan. The book is a collection of New Yorker pieces written by Clarence Day about his father, also named Clarence, describing events from childhood to adulthood.
Father is a successful Wall Street broker and more than set in his ways. He was a man who would try to force the world to move concert with the tunes he demanded be played and more often than not succeed. Between his sons who he often saw as undisciplined and his wife who he saw as occassionally frivolous, Father found himself having to move the world, or at least his immediate environs, off its normal axis more than a few times.
There's a companion book called "Life With Mother" that I have read yet but I look forward to doing so at some point.

"The Nasty Bits" - Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain is the chef de cuisine at a French restaurant in Manhattan who achieved a degree of notoriety a few years back with a tell all autobiography of his life as a journeyman chef in New York called "Kitchen Confidential". "The Nasty Bits" is a collection of essays and articles he's written over the past several years things from dining in Vietnam to how a Central American and Mexican cooks are the real engines behind even the most upscale American restaurants and it's a great thing.
Bourdain is an ex-junkie and is clearly a food and adrenaline freak now. He writes in a sharp, profanity laced style that makes you want to try exotic ingredients and visit strange locales. He also provides numerous descriptions of how a kitchen works and how professional cooks operate. I admit to being enthralled by even simply adequate descriptions of competent people working at their crafts and trades. Bourdain is much better than merely adequate.
He had a show on the Food Network that was cancelled for not being downmarket enough. Now he's on the Travel Channel and was recently caught in Beirut during the war's outbreak.

"Strange Places" - Mike Mignola

"Hellboy: Strange Places" is the latest collection of recent Hellboy comics and after the hit or miss nature of the BPRD books is a great addition. "Strange Places" lets the reading public in on where Hellboy went after leaving the too warm embrace of the BPRD (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) at the end of "Conqueror Worm." Great book but only if you've read all the rest.

"A Year in Van Nuys" - Sandra Tsing Loh

Tsing Loh is a very funny writer and radio personality from southern California. I first heard her years ago on Market Place on public radio and was hooked. She writes very scathingly about the ridiculousness of much of modern mores, particularly the sort of elite snobbishness that tries to portray itself as simply an enlightened attitude towards parenting, social standing, education and the like.
The book is her take on the year surrounding her effort to break her writer's block and develop a tv pilot from a concept of hers. The insanity and inanity of dealing with the tv industry has been covered before but she has a degree of snarkiness and sheer unbelief that she's really being allowed to help steer the creation of a pilot that makes it seem fresh.
Along the way she also comments on her daily struggles with a musician husband who's forced to travel much of the time and a very successful and often overbearing older sister. Very funny stuff even if some of it feels like it's been done before.