When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time at the base library where my mom worked. This was at the now derelict George Air Force Base outside of Apple Valley, California. Many days I would to to the library after school and wait for my mom to finish working and ride home with her. Because of that, I spent a lot of time sitting around reading.

One of the books that made a lasting impression on me was this book called In a Dark, Dark Room by Alvin Schwartz. Alvin Schwartz then went on to do the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, which is notable for it’s insanely disturbing illustrations.

I only remember two stories from that book. One was a story about this dude who is walking home and he keeps meeting dudes with big teeth, and each guy’s teeth get progressively longer as he gets farther along. That story was stupid.

There was this other story though called The Green Ribbon.

Basically, the Green Ribbon was about this dude who meets a chick who wears a green ribbon tied around her neck. The dude is like “What’s up with the green ribbon?” and she’s like “Don’t worry about it” and then they fall in love and start dating and the dude is like “Seriously, why do you wear that ribbon?” and the chick is like “Dude fuck off, I’m not telling you” and then they get married and on their wedding night the guy is like “Okay, NOW you have to tell me about the green ribbon” and the chick is like “JESUS CHRIST WOULD YOU DROP IT?! I’M NOT TELLING YOU!” and then the chick gets sick and is dying in bed and she’s like “Dude, come here…” and the guy’s like “yeah?” and she’s like “check this out. Untie the ribbon” and so the dude does and HER FUCKING HEAD FALLS OFF.

THE END.

Now, I won’t say that the storiy particularly scared me, but I did appreciate it’s gruesomeness and style. Something else I got from the library (and routinely took home) was an LP by a guy named Jack Prelutsky called Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep.

Now, this thing actually was scary. It was silly as fuck, but it was also pretty damned gory and disturbing for an album geared towards kids.

For instance, this:

The gruesome ghoul, the grisly ghoul,
without the slightest noise
waits patiently beside the school
to feast on girls and boys.

He lunges fiercely through the air
as they come out to play,
then grabs a couple by the hair
and drags them far away.

He cracks their bones and snaps their backs
and squeezes out their lungs,
he chews their thumbs like candy snacks
and pulls apart their tongues.

He slices their stomachs and bites their hearts
and tears their flesh to shreds,
he swallows their toes like toasted tarts
and gobbles down their heads.

Fingers, elbows, hands and knees
and arms and legs and feet –
he eats them with delight and ease,
for every part’s a treat.

And when the gruesome, grisly ghoul
has nothing left to chew,
he hurries to another school
and waits…perhaps for you.

That’s some fucked up shit. And it was fucking AWESOME when I was a kid. Especially the way the guy read the poems on the album. He was so damned serious about it. I don’t remember much about it, specifically. Just little snatches of lines. “The Kraken has awakened at the bottom of the seas” and “The clatter and the chatter of their bare, bare bones” and “He rides upon the wind tonight, he rides upon the wind. Galloping, galloping, galloping on, out of the great oblivion”. It’s good shit.

I’ve come to learn that it was also a book, but I only ever had the album and that’s what I remember. Thinking of that album tonight is what actually prompted me to write this post about the Green Ribbon story, because I’ve been on the computer for the last hour and a half trying to find an MP3 of that album. I know I had one at one point, so I know that someone, somewhere, has it as well. It’s gotten me thinking about all the weird horror stories I used to read as a kid.

I wonder how much influence this guy has had on horror fans my age. I wonder if there are a lot of kids of the eighties running around with the image of that chick’s head falling off burned into their subconscious. I bet there are.

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-vagina-ass-of-lucifer-niggerbastard/10891067

Well… maybe not the dumbest. But up there.

I once knew a chick who was very proud to say that she doesn’t read Stephen King. Stephen King, she claimed, writes at a seventh grade reading level. I imagine this is something someone once told her, perhaps a pretentious English teacher. She said that at least three times over the course of my having known her (which wasn’t very long). Saying this seemed to give her some feeling of superiority.

In the same conversation, she would then go on to sing the praises of Dean Koontz.

Now, I don’t hate on Dean Koontz. I’ve read a few of his books. Maybe seven or eight. Lightening was good. The Bad Place was good. Most of the others were pretty damned average. And they all seem to be identical.

But my point is that Dean Koontz has always struck me as a dumbed down Stephen King. It’s like he takes the ideas that Stephen King thought were to lame to make into a book and then he writes them. It’s like he takes King’s leftovers and then fleshes them out into books, but without all of that pain in the ass “character development” and “Story”. Koontz books, to me, are like outlines for Stephen King books. A basic quick series of character sketches and then a list of events.

Again, my point isn’t to hate on Koontz, but damn, don’t call Stephen King dumb and then talk about how awesome Dean Koontz is.

So, when I was a kid, I was the proud owner of a book called Cruel Shoes. It was Steve Martin’s first book, a collection of short stories and little drops of creative weirdness. Some of it was funny, some of it was just beautiful. Some of it was ridiculous.

Over the course of my life, I’ve probably bought this book four or five times, replacing copies that have either been lost, given away or simply inaccessible.

I just found the entire book online and thought I’d share the link for anyone who hasn’t read it and is interested (or, for those who have, and would like to take another look, like myself).

I don’t know if it’s even still in print. Probably. It’s certainly worth the buy.

Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin

Here’s a couple of selections.

The Day the Dopes Came Over
I was sitting at home, peeking through the blinds at my neighbor’s wife, minding my own business, when my doorbell rang. "Who’s there?" I shouted. "We don’t know," came the reply. I immediately knew the dopes had come over.
I opened the door and invited them in. I was happy to have company even if they were a bunch of dopes.
"Well, what brings you over this way?" I queried.
"Yup."
"Yup."
"Yup."
"Yup." they said.
"Would you like some coffee?" I asked.
"Gol," said one dope, "how long have we been here?"
"About two minutes."
"Gol, we should have left hours ago!" And they packed up some of my things and lumbered out.
"Goodbye Dopes!" I shouted.
They turned to me and shouted back, "Goodbye, you big fuckin ‘idiot!"

Sex Crazed Love Goddesses
Little Billy Jackson had to go to the store for his mother to pick up some postage stamps. When he got there, he found the stamp machine out of order, and decided to walk the extra three blocks to the post office. On the way there, he passed a hardware store, a variety store, and a lamp shop. The line was short at the post office and he got his stamps quickly and returned home. His dog, "Spider," bounded out to greet him as his mom waved from the porch. Billy’s mother was pleased at the job he did and congratulated him on having enough sense to go to the post office when he found the stamp machine was broken. Billy had a nice dessert that night and went to bed.

A Letter to The New Yorker

New Yorker Magazine
24 W. 43rd Street
New York, New York

Dear New Yorker:

I thought you might be interested in independent film reviews while you are looking for a permanent critic.

ALIEN

I’ve got to see this one again! I took seats on the side so no one would sit in front of me but it was in stereo and I’m afraid I may have missed a channel. Anyway this crew of space travelers is hauling ore back to earth and they wake up in a completely different star system. They land on some planet and get out of the ship and and pick up an Alien egg; I don’t want to give away too much because this one is a must see. I overheard some people say it’s by the same special effects people who made Star Wars. I didn’t see the director’s name at the top of the picture and even if I did I probably wouldn’t have remembered it through the whole picture anyway. I was going to find out, but we left by the side door and there were no posters up so I just said forget it. Driving home I remembered this one part where the guy that was supposed to be on the side of the guys in the spaceship when you found out he was the guy who was sent off to pick up the Alien in the first place. He got his head broken off when Parker hit him with a canister, but I won’t tell you the surprise ending (it turns out he’s a robot). Harry Dean Stanton was real good in it especially the part when he gets eaten by the Alien. The girl, I didn’t catch her name either but I figure she’ll be in another picture for sure and I’ll get her name then, was great! I thought she looked like Jane Fonda but she still had her own style, style being a real important quality to make it. I’ll admit I experienced as much tension at the end wondering whether she was going to take off her T-shirt as when the creature burst out of a crew-member’s chest.

By the way there was a cat in the picture that when I saw it I nearly jumped out of my seat. It looked just like Morris! It could have been him because the movie may have been shooting before he died, but then I thought the producer wouldn’t have used Morris unless he was looking for a name. Since none of the other actors were big names I figure he was just trying to cash in on a look-alike.

I hate to criticize a picture like this because it’s obvious that some guy put his guts into it. But this entire spaceship, and I mean it was gigantic, was run by seven people, with only two repairmen. Maybe the computer was capable of fixing everything but I think it was to save money on actors. I mean you don’t go pay Burt Reynolds two million dollars to get his head bitten off in the first thirty-five minutes by a special effects gadget that also cost two million bucks. If I were in the producer’s shoes, and with talent and a little luck I hope someday I will be, I would have made the same choice. Your audience would forget about the discrepancy as soon as the egg bursts open and creams the guy’s face. Heck, Citizen Kane had flaws, but I don’t think they had color then.

Despite the flaw, I think the makers of this film are really sitting in the catbird’s seat now. I’d give anything to be in the room when they make their next deal: "And what movies have you made?" "Only one of the biggest grossers of all time." This is the way deals are made in Hollywood. If you have a good track record, you can get away with murder for your next two or three pictures, then you have to start scoring and scoring big. But if while you’re making it big you can put away some of it and don’t go crazy, you can be pretty well off for a long time.

Then at the end when you realize the Alien is defeated by the girl you love it and figure she’ll be saved from space, get married, but she’ll always have fond memories of Dallas or Alice, I couldn’t hear the guy’s name who played the captain. In a movie like this if you don’t think something like that you can go nuts driving home. I didn’t see any of the credits at the end because people were standing up in front of me so I left thinking I’d see the poster and you know what happened to that bright idea. A lot of the dialogue was blurred by sound effects but I think that was intentional. It gave a mood to the whole picture but I couldn’t help wonder what they’d do in Europe. Maybe they’ll put the subtitles in black so they’re hard to read or just skip every other word. Anyway the guy who made this is going to make a bundle if he made the right deal. The final test of a movie for this reviewer is when I’m leaving the theatre if I wish I had a percentage of the net. This is one of those pictures.

Steve Martin

So I finished Stephen King’s latest behemoth of a novel. Like most of King’s recent work it kind of left me feeling sad.

I’ll explain why in a minute. First, here’s what the story is about:

Duma Key is about a guy by the name of Edger Freemantle (who, for some reason, shares his last name with Abigail Freemantle from The Stand) who is in a horrific accident on a construction site and is almost killed. His leg is fucked up pretty bad, he loses his right arm and his head is bashed in. The first part of the story focuses on Edger trying to recover from his near fatal injuries, and coping with the loss of his arm. This part of the story isn’t really surprising since King has been writing here and there about his own near fatal accident (when he was hit by that van a few years back) and this seems to be the natural culmination of that incident.

The accident leaves Edger somewhat brain damaged and it takes a lot of therapy (both physical and mental) to get him functional again. Over the course of this his wife leaves him (because of an incident he doesn’t remember when he suddenly choked her for no reason) and Edger decides to move to Florida for a change of scenery. His therapist suggests that he take up drawing or painting, because he used to like to draw when he was young.

Edger moves to this small island in the Florida Key called Duma Key and realizes that he’s a prolific and talented painter. He meets up with this dude who lives down the beach named Wireman and they become friends. Wireman is an in-house caregiver for an an old woman named Elizabeth Eastlake. Mrs Eastlake has a mysterious past.

Eventually, Edger comes to realize that he’s able to paint things (or at least occurrences) into existence and that there are dark and sinister meanings behind the surrealistic paintings he does.

That’s the gist of the story.

Now, why does it make me sad?

It makes me sad because it’s a pretty good read up until the last hundred pages or so. The before that (the first five hundred pages. It’s another one of King’s incredibly long winded tales) the book is a pretty interesting story about a man coming to terms with loss and discovering the power within himself. Reading the story, I really wanted it to just be about THAT. King could have easily written a story just about a guy who loses his arm and his family and discovers he’s a talented artist.

But then those last hundred or so pages come around… and that’s when Steve suddenly scrambles to try and fit a monster in there. It’s like he was really grooving on this interesting story and then when he hit the point when he probably should have ended the book, he goes "Oh fuck, these people are gonna want some scary shit to happen" and so he throws together some bullshit villain that the main characters have to band together and fight.

The worst part of it is that he spends maybe a total of fifteen pages in the whole thing actually explaining what this villain is and what she has to do with the story and then expects us to actually be invested in the horror. There was no horror. It was just some tacked on bullshit.

What was even worse (worse than the worst part!) was that the characters in the story had it all figured out when King himself obviously didn’t even have it figured out. They take a few menial clues as to what this thing is and they band together like Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker and Lucy’s suitors to go and kill the monster. They’ve got this attitude like "You never should have fucked with us, you bad monster!" and it’s just SO stupid. They’re so sure of everything, even though they don’t have any indication as to what they’re actually dealing with. Just a bunch of guesses. It’s depressing. These characters who were interesting and well written suddenly turn into boring, stupid Stephen King characters.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think Stephen King wants to write horror stories anymore. I think he went on that Harry, Carrie and Garp tour, hung out with John Irving and realized that he just wants to write stories about people doing what people do. But he feels some kind of obligation to be the horror guy.

He did the exact same thing with Lisey’s Story. It was a book about a woman grieving her husband and trying to hold onto his spirit, and then at the last minute he brings in this random ass bad guy who tortures her and fills the bogey man role. He did the same thing in Gerald’s Game (which was a horrible story even without that retarded grave robber dude with his long monkey arms and basket full of baby bones) and he did the same thing in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. He can’t just write a straight story. He’s gotta throw in some stupid, contrived bullshit bad guy to appease what he apparently thinks are his stupid fans.

There was a time when Stephen King was the name in horror. He was great at writing long, deeply involved horror stories. He created characters that were interesting and fun to read, and he spent the entire novel developing truly evil and scary villains. I mean, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is a fucking great villain and a perfect example of the kind of horror King is (or maybe, was) capable of writing. Randall Flagg was a great villain. Shit, even Christine was a great villain.

But not all stories NEED scary villains. And when you try and force one into a story that’s not a horror story, it just comes across as kind of sad and obnoxious. I mean, the characters in Duma Key never even interact with the villain. For the entire duration of her involvement in the story, she (the villain is some mysterious woman named Perse, short for Persephone, the queen of Hades) just stands on the deck this ghost ship that’s hanging out in the ocean outside of this dude’s house. That’s ALL she does. Oh, and she talks to Edger in his head a few times, telling him "Don’t even try to cross me, mister, or I’ll fuck your shit up!" and sends a couple of zombies to, I guess, threaten people, even though they don’t really do anything.

It’s just so bad. So so bad. That’s why it makes me sad. I would have liked it so much more if King had just written a normal story about a guy dealing with his life. He’s certainly capable of it. He doesn’t need to try and appease the horror fans. I don’t think anyone is reading Stephen King because he still writes scary books. People (if they’re anything like me, at least) are still reading Stephen King because they keep hoping he’ll just write something good again. He’s not scary anymore because it feels like he doesn’t really care about scaring people. All of his best books have been human dramas anyway. I mean, people fairly routinely (myself included) tout The Stand as his best novel, and it’s not even a horror story. It’s, at the most, a somewhat disturbing drama. Horrible things happen in it, but they’re horrible like "that would sure suck if my family died of the flu" rather than "Holy Christ there’s a fucking clown in the sewer!".

I reread Danse Macabre before reading Duma Key (read someone besides Stephen King? That’s crazy talk!) and it made me miss old Stephen King again. More so than I usually miss old Stephen King. Danse Macabre was King’s nonfiction, novel length essay on the history of modern horror. At least, modern horror for 1980 or so. It covers pretty much the last century and then touches some on three of the classic horror stories, Dracula, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It made me sad because it was pure Stephen King. Just his voice, which is what I think most Stephen King fans read his books for. Reading Stephen King, for fans of him at least, is like having a really awesome uncle who tells the best scary stories. You sit down with one of his books and you know exactly what it’s going to feel like and exactly what it’s going to sound like. You keep turning the pages because the feel of King’s presence is comforting and pleasant. There’s no pretentiousness there and there’s no feeling like he’s trying to impress anyone. That’s what I love about Danse Macabre. It’s like having a really interesting conversation with a very likable, intelligent and laid back guy.

But reading his books now is almost like visiting someone in an old folks home. You go and you appreciate them for who they were and you respect them for the person you loved your whole life… but now… there’s something missing. It’s depressing. You keep going to visit them partially out of respect and obligation, but also because you keep hoping to get a little of that person back again. And sometimes you do. I mean, it’s still THEM. It’s still that person… but it’s not the same. They’re tired and bored and don’t have the energy or drive or inspiration to be who they used to be. They just sit in that home and fester. Sometimes you get flashes of who they were before and it’s wonderful and nice and you feel like a bastard for forgetting that they’re more than just this obligation. But those flashes are becoming few and far between.

A perfect example of this is King’s Dark Tower series. For those who don’t know (and I imagine, if you’ve made it this far, you probably DO know) The Dark Tower is an epic seven book non-horror series. It’s essentially a post apocalyptic western with metaphysical overtones. The first three books were full on King, doing what he did best. They were exciting, well written and the characters were great. Then, by the time the fourth book came around, he started to stumble and stammer and repeat himself. He got caught up with the mythology of his stories and, for some reason (something he’s been doing more and more lately) he also started constantly linking his books together. He brings in characters from other, completely unrelated books and stories. He even eventually wrote himself into his own book (ala Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions, though not nearly as awesome) as a character. By the time the last book came around, the entire story was just a drooling, mongoloid mess. Through the course of that series you can almost watch Stephen King go from a bright, shining light of talent and inspiration to a tired, bored and completely uninspired old man churning out book after book simply because he knows he has to get them out before he dies.

A few books back he attempted to write an out and out horror story. It was a zombie book called Cell and it was just awful. It didn’t work at all. The characters were two dimensional, the story was rambling crap, and the villain (if you want to call him that) made no sense what so ever and was completely uninteresting and non-threatening. The zombies themselves were alright, because, well, it’s hard to fuck up zombies. But the book was just a mess.

I just don’t think he has horror in him anymore. Maybe it’s because he’s older and his kids are all grown up and living their own lives (his son, Joe Hill, is a fantastic writer himself) and he doesn’t really have to do anything other that write, watch TV and go to Red Sox games. I think that maybe he’s run out of things that are scary because he doesn’t really have to worry about anything anymore. Maybe getting hit by that van knocked all the horror out of him. But then again, he seemed like he was done with it well before then. I don’t know.

But I might be painting him a little unfairly. It’s not like he’s dead or something. Like I said, I really did enjoy the first two thirds of Duma Key. It didn’t feel like the King of yesteryear, but it was a good read. I’m content to let old Stephen King go, because he simply isn’t that guy anymore. He’s never going to put out a really great, really scary novel like The Shining again, because the guy who wrote those books is gone. He’s apparently grown into the writer he is now, and I think both his fans and he himself would really be better off if he’d just embrace the material he’s writing now rather than trying to cram it into the horror box his older books fit so nicely into.

Oh well. I’m still a constant reader, and I imagine I’ll keep on reading until one of us dies. I’ve already invested twenty years into his books. I may as well follow through till the end.

So over the course of my blogging career there have been many posts that have sat half written in draft form. Sometimes for months, sometimes never finished. Usually they end up forgotten and half written and never read. Here are three posts that I started writing at some point over the last year or so but never finished. I know that I’ll never get around to actually finishing whatever I was trying to say, so I may as well post what I’ve got for archival purposes.

In N’ Out Burger

I swear to Christ on his Jesus that if I don’t get some In N’ Out burger, like, really fucking soon, bad things are going to happen. There will be blood… oh yes, there will be blood.

I am sick… literally sick… of the lack of decent junk food in this god forsaken wasteland. It’s next to impossible to get a good fast food burger up here. They’ve got no middle ground. You’ve got A&W on one end of the spectrum, with their rectum flavored bullshit burgers and then on the other end you’ve got like, actual restaurant burgers like, Red Robin and Montanas and shit like that.

In between? Not much. There’s Wendys, but really, I don’t count Wendys. Wendys doesn’t count because who the fuck do they think they are making their hamburgers square? What kind of bullshit is that? Do they think they’re impressing people? Make that shit round!

Stupids. Besides, Wendys burgers taste homemade, and while it’s a refreshing change of pace, I can make a burger that tastes home made at home. And their fries taste like butt.

They’ve got ONE Burger King here and it honestly doesn’t taste like real Burger King. It’s somehow slimier and doesn’t taste right. And it doesn’t SMELL like Burger King, which sounds weird, but it makes a difference. I figured that out when we went to a BK in Washington and I was reminded of what it’s actually supposed to smell like. Like raw beef sizzling on a grill. That’s what Burger King smells like. The Burger King up here smells like a hamburger that someone dropped in a mop bucket… after someone just finished mopping the bathroom in a West Hollywood Popeyes Chicken.

Of course, there’s McDonalds. And there’s McDonalds and more McDonalds. There’s a McDonalds on every corner, just like in America.  And I frequent them more than I should. But I do so simply because there is no suitable alternative. I’m so fucking sick of McDonalds I fear I may go mad. McDonalds isn’t even really hamburgers. Yes, it’s fried ground beef in a bun with processed cheese… but it’s just… McDonalds. It’s like everything at McDonalds is made from the same McDonalds flavored paste like Soylent Green. I remember that we used to go to a Walmart that had a McDonalds in it that served Hot Dogs. Like, McWieners or something. I got one once. It tasted exactly like everything else at McDonalds.

When I first moved up here, one of the McDonalds here served pizza. Little individual pizzas. I knew I HAD to try that shit. And I did. And it tasted like McDonalds in a pizza shape. It was trippy.

I’m not just talking about a lack of burger places either. There’s no Taco Bell. No Carls Jr. No Bob’s Big Boy. No Jack In the Box. No Long John Silvers.

Yes, they have fish n’ chips here, and yes it’s delicious. It’s fantastic and I’m grateful for it. But you can’t eat fish n’ chips in the car on the way home from work. And I don’t always want to spend thirty bucks. Yes, it’s great, but it’s hardly convenient. And that’s what we’re talking about here. Convenience.

They’ve got some bullshit up here called White Spot. These people fucking LOVE White Spot. I don’t get it. White Spot is fucking weak. They serve burgers that taste like they were made in a school cafeteria for seven fucking bucks. The fries are bland and basic.

But these fuckers think White Spot is the best thing since Jesus rolled that rock back. I’d like to believe that they just don’t know any better, but I know they do. I don’t understand what’s wrong with these people. I really don’t. They’ve been to America. They know what they’re missing. They just CHOOSE not to get delicious food up here and are content to stick to their subpar Canadian bullshit.

Back to the issue at hand.

In N’ Out burger.

A few years ago, during my little emotional and mental breakdown that resulted in my living in California for three or four months, I ate at In N’ Out burger at least twice a week. It was a fortyfive minute drive home from work and In N’ Out was about fifteen minutes in the other direction, but I didn’t care. It was worth it. The drive through line was always at least ten minutes. I added almost a half an hour onto my drive home from work just to get those delicious burgers and fries. It was heaven.

In N’ Out Burger…

They’ve got the simplest menu you’re going to find at a fast food joint. It’s essentially “Burgers. Drinks. Shakes. Fries.” and that’s about it. That’s all you need to know. They’ve also got this crazy, cult like secret menu that was like, crafted by the Templar Knights or the Masons or some shit.

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My New Favorite Porn Star

I tend to rotate favorite porn stars on about a bi-yearly basis. For a while it was Rocco, but then he retired and then I think he’s back again, I don’t know. 

Either way, I got kind of tired of seeing pretty much the same movie over and over again. It started to get really routine and boring. I’ll certainly give Rocco the credit he’s due for reinventing porn, but I’ve outgrown him. Plus, I got tired of having to explain to people why my favorite porn star is a guy. I do still really respect him as a porn star. He was kind of one end of an  aspect of porn he helped popularize, and that dominates porn now. That kind of blatantly misogynistic, male superior porn. Rocco was on one end and Max Hardcore was on the other. Rocco had a way about him that was entirely contradictory to the style of porn that he was making, and that’s what made him interesting. He was very good at acting like he actually cared about the women that he was performing with, even when he was doing things that many people would consider incredibly degrading. There’s an air of “Hey, this is just the kinky stuff we’re into” about Rocco’s movies. Max Hardcore on the other hand does his best to make sure you know exactly what he thinks of the women he’s working with, to the degree that I don’t even watch his movies. Not because I’m offended, but because it goes beyond sexy and into some seriously dark shit that I’m not entirely comfortable exploring. Once a chick starts crying, the mood is pretty much killed for me. I just don’t need to see that. Especially if she’s crying because some gnarly, leathery old Hunter Thompson looking fuckhead in a cowboy hat is plowing her ass much more intensely than she expected. And the chicks pretending like they’re twelve is just… creepy.

But this post isn’t about Max Hardcore.

So yeah, I liked Rocco, but when I grew tired of him, I moved onto Belladonna.

I was way into Belladonna for a long while. She had a very different vibe to her than other porn stars I was familiar with. For one, she didn’t look like a porn star. She’s covered in tattoos, she has a big gap between her two front teeth (not like, missing teeth, just a space) and she wore her hair short. She was the total opposite of what the traditional porn star looked like. Best of all, she came across like she really enjoys what she does. There’s a part of me that still holds onto that myth that women in porn are these lonely girls who want to be “real” actresses and just got caught up in the dark and seedy world of porn. I don’t rationally believe that to be the case for mainstream porn, but on some level, I still feel kind of bad for female porn stars. On the surface I know that the porn industry doesn’t actually work that way. They don’t want anyone there who doesn’t want to be there. Porn is under way too much scrutiny to try and get away with exploiting anyone. And female porn stars are the ones who make the money. With the exception of a very select few, male porn stars don’t make shit. They’re a dime a dozen and can be replaced at the drop of a hat… and they rarely have to do anything except have a decent sized cock and the ability to cum on cue. It’s a thankless job, being a male porn star… unless you’re Rocco or Ron Jeremy or Peter North or John Stagliano or someone like that… and all of those guys make their real money behind the scenes. But a successful female porn star has it made, financially at least, provided they’re smart enough to manage their money correctly. Jenna Jameson is a multi-millionaire many, many times over. Marilyn Chambers is insanely rich, and she was only in like, five or six hardcore porno movies in the seventies and early eighties before retiring… and then her “come back” in the nineties. And those are just a couple of extreme examples. Porn can be an incredibly lucrative business for a woman if she’s got what it takes.

Anyway, back to Belladonna… aside from her interesting look and her apparent joy in her job, she also, surprisingly, fit quite well into this male dominant style of porn that’s been the trend. It was weird because she fit in on both sides of the equation. She was fully capable of being submissive for male dominated porn, but in the next scene, she played the male with another girl, and treated other female porn stars the same way that the guys were treating the women. And it worked incredibly well. It was hot. It worked so well that she went a good three or four years doing nothing but girl-girl porn, usually playing the dominant role.

Belladonna’s role in porn was almost like a feminist statement. It was like the old song “anything you can do I can do better” and it was true. Watching a Belladonna movie you’re struck with two very firm facts. Number one: she knows exactly what she’s doing and she enjoys it. And Number two: She’s in complete control of the situation she’s in. It isn’t a prima donna thing or a sense of entitlement… it was simply a matter of that she is was very good at what she does and she knew it, and everyone else knew it as well. She was respected by everyone involved. The people she was performing with, the people she working for and the people that worked for her. When Belladonna enters a porn set, you know that you’re about to be schooled on how to make a good porno movie. Every aspect of it. Which is, I’m sure, why she started her own production company and started writing and directing her own movies, sometimes not even appearing in them.

Unfortunately, she seems to have lost a grip on what she’s doing. At least, that’s how it seems to me. She had a baby and shaved her head and got married and things just seemed to change. I’d like to think it’s a good thing… that maybe she’s just settling down a bit, but I know that’s not true. She’s still making movies and still very active in the business, but I get the feeling that she’s lost the inspiration for it. Reading her Myspace blog, I kind of get the feeling that her husband doesn’t treat her very well, and I think that’s also part of my disillusionment with her. Of course, I could be completely wrong, but either way, the magic is gone from Belladonna in my eyes, and I’ve moved on.

So who’s my favorite now? I’ve auditioned a few potentials, but Joanna Angel has won by a landslide.

In many ways, she’s like a much more user friendly version of Belladonna. She’s like a cross between Belladonna and like… Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. She’s got the tats and the penchant for making more “alternative” porn. Like Belladonna, she doesn’t look like someone that should be in porn, and like Belladonna, she seems to have an intense love for her job, and she’s very good at it. Unlike Belladonna though, she never comes across as intimidating or untouchable.  She’s got a very “girl next door” vibe to her, providing you live next door to a tattoo parlor/dildo shop. And unlike Belladonna, there isn’t a sense of a dark undercurrent. Watching Belladonna’s movies, I always got the impression that she probably has some serious issues brewing behind those intense eyes. She seemed like she has much darker fantasies than anything I could ever handle, and while that was hot, it was also kind of scary as well. With Joanna Angel, it’s like she’s doing exactly what she enjoys and wants to do, and that’s it.

She comes across as totally approachable and cool. With Belladonna, I could never imagine sitting down and having a conversation with her. Not because I think she’s super important, but because she seems to live in a completely different world than I do. With Joanna Angel, it’s surprisingly easy to imagine getting coffee and talking about whatever movie we just saw or whatever book we recently read. There aren’t many porn stars I can say that about.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that she’s Jewish, which is surprisingly incredibly rare in porn. At least in female performers. There are tons of Jews behind the scenes, but only a handful in front of the camera. Especially women. There are a few, and most of them are incredibly successful. Ron Jeremy is the obvious success story.  Randy West and Adam Glasser (Seymour Butts) are Jewish. But you could count the number of popular female Jewish porn stars on one hand. Jenna Jameson is apparently Jewish, though I’d have never guessed it. That goes to show that in the porn business, like in mainstream Hollywood, Jews seem to know what they’re doing.

It seems that the most successful people in the porn business are Jewish. It also should be mentioned that the most successful people in the porn business are people who had a good grasp on what they were selling and how to sell it. These are people who understand that porn is one of the biggest markets on earth, and that it will never, ever dry up.

Look at Ron Jeremy.

Well… maybe don’t look directly at him… but look at his career. Here’s a guy who dedicates his entire life to marketing  himself. He’s barely in porn movies anymore, but works behind the scenes and in other aspects of media. He’s a guy who spends almost all of his time selling himself as a product, and he’s been extremely successful because of it.

The same goes for Jenna Jameson. She’s arguably the most popular porn star in history. That’s not because she’s particularly attractive or amazing in her films. It’s because she understood very early in her career that she was a product and that she needed to market herself as such. She got in very early with her website and production company. She understood that if she wanted to be successful in this industry, she had to market herself the same way you would market a Corvette or a candy bar. She reached out beyond the porn world and garnered attention anywhere she could get it.

And she, like Ron Jeremy, looked at porn and then looked ahead in porn. She anticipated trends and was sure to be the first to ride them. She was smart about her career, and it worked out for her.

Now, does this have anything to do with the fact that she’s Jewish? The knee-jerk PC part of me that still hasn’t quite died yet wants to think no, but realistically, I think it does. It might come across as anti-Semitic to assume that someone is a good business person because they are Jewish, but I think that there is something to it. Some people, because of their culture, history and possibly even their genetic make up are sometimes inherently better at something than others. Is it racist to suggest that black people are better dancers than white people? Or better basketball players? I don’t think so. Yes, there are plenty of good white dancers and basketball players, but some things seem to come more naturally to some people than others. It’s just worked out that way.

Now, before I paint myself any further into the corner with the Jewish thing, I should probably get back to Joanna Angel.

Joanna anticipated a trend that has become particularly popular now, and she got in on the ground floor. That’s what’s being called “alt porn.” It’s porn with a kind of punk rock, almost pretentious sensibility, made extremely popular by the website Suicidegirls.com.  Belladonna really kind of got the ball rolling on that one, because she looks so drastically different from your typical porn star. She has a kind of punky vibe to her with the tattoos and the the spikey hair. But the attention on Belladonna seemed to focus a lot more on “what kind of crazy shit is she going to put in her ass this time?” rather than the style of porn she was making. It became about trying to top the extremity of whatever she’d done last.

With Joanna Angel, she seems to be comfortable letting other porn stars like Belladonna and Sasha Gray and Taylor Rain work out the extreme submissive aspect of porn and has focused her attention on creating a sort of middle ground between “extreme” porn, traditional porn and this “alt porn” style. For one thing, she’s taken the Suicide Girls format (which is essentially modern pinup and a Playboy-on-a-budget style photoshoots, with that punk style mixed in) and applied it to hardcore pornography. She’s very invested in the internet and blogging and keeping herself approachable and relatable. Fans of Joanna Angel know what kind of music she likes and what kind of movies she watches and books she reads. She doesn’t build herself up to be a fuckable Barbie doll or a porn celebrity. She keeps herself totally on the level with her fans. And her fans seem to be people who share a basic interest in the things she’s interested in outside of porn. Metal heads and movie geeks and book nerds. That’s on top of people who just like to watch her fuck.

Watching porn got to be pretty monotonous after a while. It was all just these interchangeable plastic women with big poofy blonde hair and the same goofy fuck faces. These are women who I don’t know anything about, nor do I care to know anything about them. I don’t know their names or where they’re from or what they’re interested in, because they don’t give any of that information up.

With Joanna Angel, I knew all of that stuff before I ever even watched one of her movies. I stumbled upon some pictures of her and thought she was interesting looking and started looking into who she was. By the time I actually watched one of her movies, I knew what music she liked and what she read and where she was from and what exactly she does in the porn industry. It was completely refreshing. It helps that we have a lot of shared interests. I mean, hell, one of her many tattoos is of a Kurt Vonnegut quote. It’s the line “So it goes” which was the line Kurt Vonnegut used repeatedly in Slaughter House 5 when someone died. How could I not get into that?

And she’s obviously got good taste in movies because of the parody porn movies she’s made. Rather than going with the obvious stuff like Edward Penishands and Forest Hump, she’s made movies like The XXXorcist and The Re-Penetrator (a parody of the movie The Re-Animator, which was based on an HP Lovecraft story.) That says it all right there. One of the things she’s tried to do is make “horror porn” which is an incredibly odd experience. I mean, watching a porno movie based on The Exorcist is just… weird. It’s weird and fun. It’s weird because, well… I’m not used to seeing people fuck while wearing Linda Blair Exorcist make up and puking pea-soup all over the place. I’m also not used to seeing priests performing “sexorcisms” and watching characters that are mother and daughter eat each other out. I might not be used to it, but damn if it’s not entertaining.

So aside from the tattoos and the style she brings to porn, the real draw is the personal level she interacts with her fans. That’s what really sells her. Watching a Joanna Angel movie is like watching a really hot friend getting fucked.

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

So I finished one of the few Stephen King books that I never got around to reading the other day. It was called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I never read it because it came out in that wave of really REALLY shitty Stephen King books in the late nineties. That wave of estrogen filled female centric books that I’m about 95% sure Tabatha wrote for him. Books like Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder, Bag of Bones and the incredibly girly forth Dark Tower book, where a story that was carrying on just fine as a killer post apocalyptic western and then abruptly changed into a crybaby fruity love story and a completely ridiculous Wizard of Oz thing that made absolutely no sense.

So yeah, when, around that time, he put out the book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I didn’t even bother. A story about a little girl lost in the woods? Pfft. Whatever.

But after reading Blaze and getting borderline obsessed with The Shining again (which I seem to do once a year or so) I was looking for something to read and picked it up.

It was surprisingly much better than I expected. It certainly wasn’t his best work, or even close to his best work, but it was halfway decent at least.

Something I hadn’t considered when I first rejected reading it, was that two of King’s strengths are writing about kids and his non-supernatural stories. And this book fit into both of those categories.

The story itself is incredibly simple. It really is a story about a girl lost in the woods, and pretty much just that. We follow around one character (a nine year old girl named Trisha McFarland as she veers off the path she’s walking with her mother and brother in the woods to take a leak, and then gets progressively more lost for the duration of the novel. There’s very little more than Trisha’s internal monologue through the whole thing. That’s the novels real strength.

Like most of King’s stories that focus on kids (The Body and It stand out as the best examples. The Body, of course, was the basis of the film Stand By Me) The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a fantastic example of a writer treating a child as a fully realized character. Rather than using kids as a prop or plot point, King actually treats them as real people with their own strengths and weaknesses. Trisha is both smart for her age and incredibly naive in the way a real child can be. She isn’t a miniature adult posing as a kid or a smart aleck know it all punk. She’s just a regular little girl desperately trying to deal with an incredibly difficult situation. She infuses her surroundings with the kind of imagination and semi-magical perception that only a child can do.

Reading this book you actually root for Trisha not only to make it out of the woods alive, but to do it by the strength of her character. She’s resourceful enough to keep barely scraping by, but she’s naive enough to make huge but understandable mistakes. As things get more and more intense for Trisha, she delves into reserves of strength that I believe most adults wouldn’t expect kids to have. People tend to forget that kids deal with a LOT of intense shit, and more often than not, they persevere. This story is in part a tribute to the resilience of childhood.

Huh…

Somewhat unrelated…

I just spent about two hours reading a shitload of Wikipedia entries about various Stephen King stories (which linked to entries about HP Lovecraft stories, movies based on King books, George Romero, EC Comics, Lord of the Flies and Edger Alan Poe among many other things… I get distracted so easily) and I just finished the entry about Creepshow. Remember how I posted about Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son who is now a successful writer himself?

Well, I just found out that he played the little kid in the wrap around story in Creepshow.

Neat.

Anyway…

Uh…

Oh yeah. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

The book is also a pretty blatant religious story. Religion is a fairly common thread in most of King’s work. This time it’s almost a little TOO blatant. Trisha is obsessed (the way many little girls are) with her celebrity crush, Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon.

Trisha has issues with her faith in God. Her father believes in something he calls The Subaudible, which is basically a cold, unfeeling, indifferent force that encompasses everything. Trisha doesn’t really buy this, but as things start to get dicey for her, she tries various forms of praying to get out alive. None of this comforts her, but as she progresses through the story, her faith in her hero, Tom Gordon. As she starts to somewhat lose her mind in the woods, Tom Gordon begins to appear to her and keeps her company and guides her at crucial points. This is all well and good, I guess. It’s an interesting idea at least, that God shows up in whatever form you put your faith in. The choice of Tom Gordon is perfect for this both because of his (very real) signature move of pointing up at the sky after he saves a game, as well as the letters in his last name. By the end of the story, Trisha accepts Tom Gordon as her saviour, and subsequently, I guess, her faith in God in general.

If this aspect of the story had been slightly more subtle, I’d probably dig it a little more. It doesn’t feel like preaching or Christian Rock in novel form, but I think it could have been a little less obvious.

But whatever. It still worked alright.

I imagine that someone that doesn’t know or care anything about baseball (or even more specifically, the Red Sox, King’s favourite sports obsession) might get slightly bored by the reoccurring baseball theme. Being a Red Sox fan myself, it didn’t bother me at all, but I could see where someone who didn’t give a shit might not be able to relate.

One thing that did bother me was King’s need to insert the supernatural into a story that really didn’t need it. He tends to do that. Anyone who has read The Body can, I’m sure, remember scratching their heads when the boys are about to find the dead corpse of Ray Bowers and suddenly a massive fireball flies over their heads for no reason whatsoever and then is never mentioned again. I was like, twelve, when I read that story the first time and even then I was like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!”

In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in the last half of the story, she’s being stalked by some kind of beast in the woods. It’s very Lord of the Flies, and like Lord of the Flies, the beast turns out to be the evil within us all or some sort of silly bullshit like that. Either way, this thing is essentially The Devil and there’s a very forced confrontation at the end of the book. Again, like with most King books, the story is fine until the last five percent or so, when everything falls apart. Steve seems to have a real problem ending his books. It’s almost like he gets tired of writing and he just goes “And then… uh… like… God comes down and blows up Las Vegas and kills Randall Flagg and all the bad guys die and like, yeah, that’s it. The end.” or “

I probably should have reviewed this right after I watched it, but Christmas and laziness and work got in the way. So here I am now, ready to discuss I Am Legend, the third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel of the same name.

I should start off by saying that I haven’t read the book, nor have I seen The Omega Man (the second film adaptation) or the Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth (the first.) I knew pretty much nothing about the story before I saw the trailer for this incarnation.

So I was a clean slate going in.

I suppose one could argue that pretty much any zombie movie that takes place after the world has succumbed to “infection” could count as an adaptation of this story. 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead both share many story elements. But technically, yeah, there’s been three full on film versions.

BTW, I’m a little bit drunk as I’m writing this, so if I ramble, that’s why. Rum + Coke = tasty. Rum + Egg Nog = not so much.

I’ve always kind of liked Will Smith. I never thought he was amazing, but he’s charming and a decent actor generally delivers on whatever he promises. His cheesy movies are cheesy but fun and his dramatic turns are well acted and interesting. This was a case of one of his more dramatic turns.

One thing that concerned me going into this film was that Will has a tendency to be funny and entertaining. A kind of a class clown, without the negative connotations. I was worried that what could potentially be a very interesting and serious look at a man going insane with loneliness could lose it’s impact if it’s stretched around one liners and sassy jokes. Luckily, Smith approached this role with very little humor. Sure, there was the odd joke here and there, but it was always coupled with enough sadness to carry it through.

I’m jumping ahead too much. Hold up.

The setting of I Am Legend is what has become a kind of cliche in zombie movies. It’s set in New York after everyone has either died or been “infected” by a new strain of disease has ravaged the earth. What was initially intended as a cure for cancer became a cure for, well, not being a zombie/vampire. Will Smith plays Dr. Awesome. I mean, Dr. Robert Neville. It’s three years since the virus killed everyone and he lives, for all intents and purposes, alone in New York City. His only company is his dog and a shitload of monsters who come out at night and feed on… I don’t know what, since everyone else is dead. I guess squirrels and pigeons and such.

So these monsters are a kind of cross between zombies and vampires. They’re like zombies in that they’re all fucked up looking and act like mindless animals and want to eat you. They’re like vampires in that they’re pale and can’t come out in the sun and… want to eat you.

Because Will Smith is the scientist doctor guy who was apparently involved in some way in engineering (or trying to) the cure for this infection before it killed everyone, he’s taken it upon himself to set up a lab in the basement of his sweet town house and continues his work. He captures the zombie/vampire people and studies them and does tests on them, trying to find the cure.

By the point we come into the story, he’s been at it for three years and has a decent routine going. He gathers food and supplies (and dvds) hunts deer and captures monsters for his tests.

And, slowly but surely he’s going insane.

That’s the fun part of this movie. He’s going nuts all by himself much like Tom Hanks in Castaway. In fact, there’s a lot of Castaway in this movie.

Like in Castaway, there was a very obvious problem in making a movie where a character is alone for an hour and a half. He has to have someone to talk to. In Castaway, they created Wilson, the volleyball and Tom Hanks’ best friend. In I Am Legend, we have Will Smith talking to his trusty German Shepherd, as well as a series of mannequins he’s set up to be his friend. This aspect of the film was incredibly interesting and fun to watch. I have to give Smith credit, because there aren’t many actors who could not only be interesting enough to watch exclusively for an hour and a half or so but also convincingly play that slow spiral into emotional and mental breakdown.

Will pulls it off seemingly with ease and it works fabulously. Kudos to him for that. It helps that the writing and direction were both interesting enough to carry us through what could have been an incredibly boring and silly film.

With all that being said, I’d like to get to a couple of things I didn’t like about this movie.

The first thing is the monsters themselves. People have harped on the CG actors playing these monsters. And they’re right. It didn’t work.

Here’s the thing.

I rewatched Jurassic Park not to long ago. Maybe six or seven months ago. As I sat down to watch it, I gave myself a brief little talk about how far computer generated special effect have come since Spielberg and ILM blew our minds eleven years ago. Then, as I watched the movie, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the special effect hold up. They’re still pretty much as good as anything I’ve seen recently. At least in regards to computer generated creatures interacting with real environments and people. It was really damned good.

I think part of the reason it was so good was that we have no frame of reference. Nothing to compare dinosaurs to, other than lesser interpretations of them. It worked because we had no REAL dinosaurs to compare them to. And, also, because ILM fucking rules.

But with I Am Legend, they were using computer graphics to create people. Yeah, they were fucked up looking people, but they were essentially just people. Cartoon people interacting with REAL people. It really pulled me out of the movie because it was so easy to spot the animation. It was frustrating.

It’s also kind of sad that we (or, at least I) have been spoiled by special effects. So many movies have seamlessly integrated computer generated special effects into movies. It wasn’t THAT long ago that I happily watched Clash of the Titans and didn’t rally care that the monsters Perseus was fighting was stop motion animation by Ray Harryhausen. Now things like that can seriously damage a movie for me.

I don’t mind CG effects in movies, as long as it’s done well. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s not and it bugs the shit out of me. I recently watched the movie Shoot ‘em Up. It was a completely mindless exorcise in violence and adrenaline and it was loads of fun, for what it was. It would have been a million times better though if they hadn’t decided on using computers to generate almost all of the blood in the movie. It seems like it’s next to impossible to recreate a realistic splatter of blood with a computer. Either that, or way too many film makers simply aren’t trying hard enough. It’s a problem I’ve seen in a lot of movies recently and I really, really hate it. It’s cartoony looking and simply doesn’t look real. I hate sitting in a movie and watching something that is obviously computer generating when the real thing is so easily accessible. It feels like a cheat and even worse, it feels lazy. Especially considering that the technology for spraying actual, realistic looking fake blood has been around forever. I believe this is a perfect example of “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” and I wish people would either figure out how to do it as well as the old way, or simply stick to the old way.

Which is what I had such a problem with when I was watching I Am Legend. They used computers to create monsters that looked like people, when they could have simply used actual PEOPLE to play the people. From what I’ve read, apparently they actually filmed scenes with real people wearing special effects make up and playing the “infected” but then ended up scrapping that for the CG people.

Here, this is from Wikipedia:

Lawrence explained, “They needed to have an abandon in their performance that you just can’t get out of people in the middle of the night when they’re barefoot. And their metabolisms are really spiked, so they’re constantly hyperventilating, which you can’t really get actors to do for a long time or they pass out.”^[14] While the infected become vampires in the novel, the film depicts them as “dark seekers” (Anna’s term for them)^[17] who consume living flesh, with a design inspired by the concept of their adrenal glands being open all the time. The actors remained on set to provide motion capture.^[20]

So yeah, he wasn’t getting what he wanted from actual actors so he decided to go CG. That, in theory, is an acceptable reason to turn to CG. Unfortunately, that only works if the CG is as believable as real actors would have been. The CG didn’t work (didn’t work for me at least) so the whole thing didn’t work. That aspect of it at least. They were not only cartoony looking, but simply not particularly scary. I felt the threat of them in Will Smith’s acting, and the  way the scenes were shot, but not in the creatures themselves.

There was even a scene when Smith has one of them captured and she’s strapped down to a table like Frankenstein’s Monster and completely sedated (by dilaudid… sweet sweet delicious dilaudid) and she’s just laying there, breathing but otherwise still… and it was STILL CG. I mean, it could have easily been an actor laying there, but instead we had this cartoony looking person laying there looking like it was pulled out of an Xbox game. It was an entirely unnecessary use of CGI, but they did it anyway, and it still didn’t work.

The other problem I had with this movie was the last half hour or so. The first two thirds of the movie were fantastic (except for the CG monsters of course) and interesting and held my attention. Then it just kind of fell apart. It was like they realized that they had established a really great setting and beginning of a story but then were left scratching their heads not really sure what to do next. I don’t want to get into specifics, because there’s some seriously spoiler potential if I go down that road.

What I can say is that it felt like they had maybe three or four potential endings and then got in a fight with the studio about which one to pick. And then the studio won, because it suddenly felt like I was watching a retread of a couple different movies. Specifically Signs and 28 Days Later.

The actual ending was the worst. Like I said, I won’t say what happened, but I will say that it felt like someone said “You know, I liked 28 Days Later, but I wish it had been happier!” and then tacked that on at the end. It was weak and obnoxious.

Okay, fuck it, I’m gonna talk about the ending. If you haven’t seen it yet, please stop reading now. Your part of the review is over. The rest is just for us what have seen the movie. Stop reading.

Now.

Seriously…

Now…

Stop reading.

…

Still here?

GO AWAY! SERIOUSLY!

….

Okay, so there should just be people who’ve seen the movie reading this part. Are we good?

Good.

So like, when that chick and her kid go to Vermont and knock on the door of that military base/sanctuary, didn’t you expect those skeezy army dudes from 28 Days Later to open the door and be like “Oh yeah, it’s rape time!”

I did. It was lame.

Currently Listening: ZZ Top – 99th Floor (Moving Sidewalks)

So, like I said in my last post, I went out today to do some Christmas shopping for Sandra and go to the movies. While I was out, I stopped at the local book shop to see about picking up a copy of The Shining and IT. I wanted to grab The Shining for the obvious reason that I’ve started another futile attempt at writing my screen adaptation. I wanted IT just because it’s been a while and the last time I tried to reread it, I found myself too disturbed and didn’t get too far.

Of course, I have copies of these books already. In fact, I’ve got probably five or six copies of The Shining and at least two copies of IT. I have so many copies of The Shining because for some reason, every time I want to read it, my books are packed up somewhere. So I buy another copy, read that, and then eventually, it gets packed up too. Right now, all of my books (save for maybe five or six that I bought since we moved and three or four that I deliberately left out) are packed up, including all of my Stephen King.

Oh, and I also wanted a copy of The Bachman Books, because I felt like rereading Rage, but I didn’t expect to find that since King let them go out of print in North America after Columbine. I’ve also got at least three copies of that book packed up.

For some reason though, it seemed like they had every Stephen King book except for the ones I was looking for.

Since it’s impossible for me to go into a store with the intention of buying something and then leave without buying something, I picked up a copy of Tommyknockers for three bucks.

I grabbed Tommyknockers because it’s one of the few Stephen King books I still haven’t read. I’m not sure why I haven’t read it. I’m pretty sure I remember my mom getting it when it came out and saying that she didn’t like it. So I never bothered to read it.

In addition to Tommyknockers, I’ve never read Cujo. I saw the movie when I was a kid and it totally traumatized me. For most of my life I’ve been pretty sensitive about animals being hurt (or, at least, witnessing it) so the idea of a story about a killer dog that ends up getting killed, plus the totally downer ending that was spoiled for me, I still haven’t read it. I probably should.

I started a few of his more recent books and never bothered to finish them. Bag of Bones I got maybe a third of the way into before pushing it away in disgust at how terrible it was. Rose Madder was the same. Dolores Claiborne I started and just kind of got bored with.

Right now, I’m about two thirds of the way through Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, which I’ve been trying finish for the last year. I picked it up again last night and realized that I’m closed to finishing it and I still feel like it hasn’t started.

I’m getting a slightly bored with Chuck Palahniuk. I mean, I’ve enjoyed the majority of his books. I didn’t really like Choke, but I liked Fight Club and Invisible Monsters. I really liked Survivor, Haunted and Lullaby. Diary was just kind of indifferent for me.

What’s bugging me about his books is that it seems that every character is an expert on some sort of anti-social, depressing subject and constantly drops little miserable factoids. I really want him to just write some realistic, believable, relatable characters. I’d like to believe he’s capable.

Anyway.

When that’s finished I’ll probably give Tommyknockers a shot. This bathtub has done wonders for my reading, which used to be limited pretty much exclusively to shits and smokes.

Currently Listening: Alice Cooper – Take It Like A Woman

So yeah…

In theory I like it… in execution… I dunno. We’ll see. I like Zooey Deschanel and Richard Dreyfus. I dunno.

Dicking around in photoshop…

and sans-silly photoshop filters…

So I was thinking about it…

I could make a Stand movie almost exclusively using the cast of Deadwood. I totally could.

The main question to tackle would be who would I get to play Flagg… Ian McShane or Powers Booth?

They’d both be great for different reasons. They’re both intimidating as hell. They’re both funny, in a kind of scary way, not sure if you should be laughing with him or not sort of way. Powers Booth has that kind of classic southern badass quality to him that sometimes seems appropriate for Flagg. Ian McShane has a kind of almost unhuman evil and creepy look to him that is also quite appropriate. Powers Booth has a voice that could rip the sky apart if used correctly. Ian McShane has eyes that could stare at you and send you screaming, insane off into the desert. They both look good in boots.

I’d probably have to go with Ian.

Keith Carradine (Wild Bill) would have to play Stu Redman. Brad Dourif (Doc Cochran)  would be the only choice for Lloyd, Flagg’s right hand man. Tim Olyphant (Seth) would play Larry Underwood. Molly Parker (Alma Garret) would play Franie Goldsmith. William Sanderson (E.B. Farnum) would play The Trashcan Man. Gerald McRaney (George Hearst) would play that judge. Brian Cox could play Glen Bateman. Sarah Paulson (the chick that played Alma’s badass backstabbing assistant) would play Nadine Cross. Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane) would have to play that lesbian chick, Dayna, who impaled herself on a broken window in Flagg’s office. W. Earl Brown (Dan) would play Tom Cullen. John Hawkes (Sol Star) would play Nick Andros.

There’s still no one for Mother Abigail and Harold Lauder… mostly because there aren’t any wicked old black chicks or young teenage boys on Deadwood to my knowledge. And I still haven’t used Powers Booth or Paula Malcomson (Trixie) or Kim Dickens (Joanie Stubbs)

But yeah, it could almost be done. I think I covered the major characters.

Oh… btw, I’m back from Disneyland.

So I’m on a Wall kick again. I seem to get into a Wall kick about every three or four months.

Right now I’m looking up covers of the song Run Like Hell on youtube. There’s some interesting ones, but something I don’t get is this: Why do people keep saying “with your nerves in tatters as the cockleshell shatters?”

That’s not how it goes…

I’m listening to the album version right now and he’s clearly saying “with your nerves in tatters as the conch shell shatters” which is a reference to Lord of the Flies about the point when civilization breaks down.

This totally bugs me because it’s one of my favorite lines on the album.

What’s even tougher is that when I do a search online for the lyrics, I always find the song with the “cockleshell” line.

WTF? I mean, I’m sitting here listening to the song on repeat, and he’s saying “conch shell” and it makes sense. It makes a lot more sense than “cockleshell” which I also looked up and is apparently a small row boat.

Luckily, I’m not the only person on earth who is positive Waters is saying “conch shell” because I’m also listening to a cover of the song by a chick named Corinne Sheehan and she’s very clearly saying “conch shell” and damnit, that’s the right way to say it.

I’m gonna download a live Gilmore performance to see if he says conch or cockleshell.

While I’m at it, I’ll download that fucking horrible Kittie cover of the song as well. Hell, I might as well download every cover I can find, just to compare. And I’ll see if I can find a Waters version.

brb.

Okay… stupid Kittie says “cockleshell.”

These kids from the School of Rock said ”conch” so even though their performance is kind of… well… childish, they get mad points for getting the words right.

Damnit… Gilmore says “cockleshell” which just goes to show that I know Pink Floyd’s lyrics better than David Gilmore, current lead singer of Pink Floyd does.

Then there’s these dudes (and chicks) who are apparently some sort of spanish speaking people doing a fairly decent cover of the song, but in somewhat broken english.

The guy says “cockleshell” but then again, he’s like, his spandex or something, so he probably doesn’ t know any better. They make the synth solo sound like The Cars or something though which is kind of cool.

Alright, this is weird…

Here’s Pink Floyd performing the song in 1980 during the original Wall stage show. It’s Waters and Gilmore taking turns singing lines. Gilmore actually gets the line in question, and here he says “conch” so I don’t know what the fuck to think anymore. Apparently, somewhere between when The Wall came out and when The Delicate Sound of Thunder came out (which is where the previous Gilmore vid comes from) David Gilmore felt the need to change the line from “conch” to “cockleshell” which is just goofy.

Goddamnit The World, I’m right on this one! The line is “conch shell shatters!”

In my vampire movie, one of the characters (Jack the Ripper specifically) references The Wall by saying “Who let all this riff-raff into the room?” at a certain point. Now I’m going to have put a line about the conch shell shattering in a future movie. It will probably be somewhere in Delta Washington vs The Vampires, which is the sequel to Delta Washington vs The Zombies, and takes place after the world has been destroyed by zombies and they’re finally dying out. Delta will explain to some people that “the conch shattered well before any zombies showed up” meaning that the world was already well on its way to falling apart, and the zombies were just the final straw.

Well… maybe.

I’m a sucker for documentaries. Like most Americans, I’m typically too lazy to actually do my own research so I tend to believe whatever if fed to me. That’s why I’ve been so critical of documentary film makers over the last few years. It bums me out that people (myself included) just take things at face value without actually questioning the intentions and integrity of the person making the film. That’s why I hate Michael Moore so much… not because I disagree with the things he says (I do a lot of the time, but he says a lot of things I agree with as well) but because I disagree with the way he goes about saying them. He, like many documentary film makers these days, makes political propaganda, just as slanted and misleading as the line of bullshit the government gives us.

The particular little collection of clips and points is interesting to me though. If anything, it raises some questions.

Like most celebrities that commit suicide, it’s very hard to swallow that Hunter Thompson actually killed himself. I can’t say I was surprised when I heard the news, but I certainly didn’t expect it either. He seemed like too stubborn and weathered of a guy to actually end it himself.

But that comes back to the basic need of fans to not want to believe that their heroes would do such a thing. The sickening and depressing feeling that comes along with hearing the news that someone you respect has committed suicide isn’t just the sadness of their death, but the disappointment in having their image changed in your mind. It’s hard to be disappointed in a hero. It’s hard to believe that they gave up. Especially when you’re someone like me that has struggled with suicide in their life.

People need to believe that it just HAD to be something else. Michael Hutchence’s suicide was an accident. Kurt Cobain was murdered. Jimi Hendrix just partied too hard. And now Hunter S. Thompson was silenced by the government.

The Jimi Hendrix thing has always been a bit of a pet peeve for me. It’s just assumed the he was a druggie and took it too far. The man took a fist full of sleeping pills and washed it down with a bottle of wine. You don’t do that to get high. You do that to die.

As for Hunter… I don’t really doubt that Hunter died by his own hand. This thing did make me think about it though. If there was anyone in America that was going to get silenced by The Man, it was Hunter S. Thompson.

The Kill Bill Diary by David Carradine

This journal captures the two years Carradine spent making the two-part feature film Kill Bill with director Quentin Tarantino. As he describes the pre-production, production and promoting of the film, Carradine, who is best known for TV’s Kung Fu, gives readers a glimpse into the up-and-down life of a B-list actor. Excited about landing the role of Bill, once ticketed for Warren Beatty, Carradine is simultaneously nervous about canceling the autograph conventions on which he pretty much supports himself. Along with subtly pointing out that he has worked with Martin Scorsese and won a Golden Globe, Carradine also knows that a Tarantino movie is his best shot at stardom, and it’s that eternal hope, not his résumé, that pervades the book and makes him a narrator for whom readers will feel genuine affection. Along with laying bare his personal deliberations, Carradine also provides an informative exploration of the world of filmmaking, from what it takes to shoot in China to how many (soon to be bloodied) shirts you need for a fight scene. It’s apparent that one of Carradine’s longest-running love affairs, however tempestuous it might be, is with Hollywood. And for those who share that feeling, this book will remind them why, for better or for worse, they feel that way.

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride 

It’s a new documentery about Hunter S. Thompson. I haven’t seen it, but they’ve got clips on the website. Fairly interesting, though fairly routine interviews with a few celebrities about Thompson.

Johnny Depp mumbles and looks shy as usual. Benicio looks stoned as usual. Harry Dean Staton looks glad that someone is talking to him. John Cussack comes across as likable, though slightly arrogant and pretentious, but that doesn’t surprise me.

The really interesting one is Gary Busy. He’s in the last two clips. It’s interesting because I’ve always known that Busy was crazy… but here he comes across as like, scary crazy. Usually he just seems whacky crazy. Like, entertainingly crazy. Here he’s like… creepy. I never want to meet Gary Busy.

current music: Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones

I just realized that of the three collections of “novellas” that Stephen King has put out, I’ve only read three of the four stories in each of them. It’s weird because I’ve read almost everything that he’s mass published (there are plenty of short stories and essays and things that never made it into collections that I haven’t read) up until the last ten years or so. But for some reason, I seem to have missed one story in each collection.

In Different Seasons, I never got around to reading The Breathing Method. I read Apt Pupil, The Body (which became Stand By Me for the movie) and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption, but for some reason skipped The Breathing Method entirely.

In The Bachman Books (which is really a collection of four early short novels he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) I read Rage, The Running Man and The Long Walk (one of my favorite King stories) but never got around to reading Road Work.

In Four Past Midnight, I read Secret Window/Secret Garden, The Library Policemen and The Langoliers, but never read The Sun Dog.

What’s even weirder is that I have no idea what any of those three stories are about. I had no reason NOT to read them, I just never did.

There have been King books that I’ve chosen not to read in the past. I’ve never read Cujo. But I chose not to read that book because I saw the movie and it depressed the shit out of me, and I know that the book is even MORE depressing, so I just opted out of that one entirely. There have been a couple of his books (mainly his more recent books) that I started and never finished. Most notably would be Bag of Bones (was so crappy that I think I threw my copy out) Rose Madder and Delores Claiborn. All three of those are perfect examples of evidence in my theory that King wasn’t actually writing his books in that period of his career. I have no interest in reading Tabitha’s books, so I didn’t finish them.

In recent years there have been King books that I just simply wasn’t interested in reading. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I just didn’t give a fuck. I only read two of the five stories in Hearts in Atlantis. The first two did nothing for me, and I was getting sick of King trying to tie everything into The Dark Tower. Don’t get me wrong, I dug The Dark Tower, but come on man, not EVERYTHING comes back to the stupid Crimson King and Roland and bla bla bla. ESPECIALLY NOT THE TALISMAN YOU BASTARD.

Sorry, it REALLY bugged the shit out of me when King started weaving The Talisman sequel into the Dark Tower series. Fuck that noise.

Anyway, so yeah. I guess I should get a copy of those three books and read those stories. I have no reason NOT to read them. I imagine I’ll enjoy them.

Right now I’m reading Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut. Unlike King, I really don’t know which of Vonnegut’s books I’ve read. I can rarely remember much about them when I’m through. I know I’ve read Slapstick before, because parts of it are familiar. That’s a weird spell that Kurt Vonnegut casts on me with his books. I can read them, and then a few years later reread them because i can’t remember them. I know that I absolutely LOVED Godbless You Mr. Rosewater, but damned if I can remember what it’s about.

I’m rambling. I’m not sure what I’m avoiding, but it’s something. I usually ramble like this when I’m avoiding something. Maybe I’m avoiding writing.

Writing can be intimidating for me. Well, writing something that I want to try and sell to someone at least. Writing pointless shit like I write here comes very easy and natural to me. I’m quite comfortable with running my mouth about whatever opinion I feel like expressing at the moment. Especially when it’s about meaningless pop culture stuff like I usually write about.

It’s when I start writing something that actually needs to follow some sort of structure and have goals and like, a point, that I start getting intimidated.

So I’m going to go watch a movie. Then I’m going to probably go to sleep. Then I’m going to wake up and check my email and fart around on the internet for an hour or so. Then I’m going to write until it’s time to go to my interview at 2:30. Then Sandra will be home and we’ll watch TV or something. Then she’ll go to bed and I’ll be right here again, writing about something just as unimportant as what Stephen King stories I have and haven’t read, and avoiding writing something that actually means something to me.

Okay, so I’m part of the way through reading susurrant_voice’s essay about cannibalism in fairy tales. I generally don’t spend this much time actually READING online, but being that I’m always interested in the darker side of children’s stories (hence my fucked up Alice in Wonderland screenplay that the agent I’m talking to just asked to read and I’m freaking out because I’ve only done one draft and haven’t proof read it for grammar errors or like, shittiness) and the fucked up things that people tell kids via fairy tales, I’m working through it. I just finished the part about Little Red Riding Hood.

The version I’m most familiar with is the Grimm version where the girl is taking cake and wine to her grandmother, meets the wolf, the wolf boogies over to the grandmother’s house, eats the grandmother, Riding Hood shows up goes through the whole "what big eyes you have" bit, the wolf eats her, then some woodcutter dude shows up, cuts the wolf open and out spill Riding Hood and her grandmother, and they kill the wolf by stuffing him full of rocks.

But not the original version. There was a "spoken" version that came before it (as well as another written version) that was even MORE fucked up than the "sanitized" version that the Grimms presented.

Here’s how I would tell this version to my kids:

Get in bed and get ready for sleep. I’m gonna tell you a story.

K.

Once upon a time there was this kid. The kid’s mom told her to take some shit to her grandmother on the other side of the forrest.

What kind of shit?

Shut up. I’m telling the story.

K.

So the little girl starts walking through the forest and meets up with this werewolf.

Oh shit!

No kidding!

Did he eat her?

Shut up.

K.

So the werewolf says "are you going to go the way of pins or the way of needles?" and the girl is all like-

WTF?

What?

The way of pins or the way of needles?! What the fuck does that mean?!

I don’t know. Just go with it.

K.

So the girl is all like "i’m gonna go the way of needles" so the wolf goes the way of pins, which is faster, and gets to the grandmother’s house before the girl, because the girl was busy collecting needles.

Were they hypodermic needles?

Sure.

K.

Can I tell the rest of the story now or are you gonna keep talking?

I guess. It isn’t very good so far.

Fine then, you get nothing. No night-light either. Your mommy doesn’t love you you know. I don’t either.

OMG okay tell the rest of the story.

Sure?

Yeah, okay.

So anyway, the werewolf eats the grandmother and then puts some of her meat in a package and some of her blood in a bottle and puts them like, in the fridge or something.

Jesus!

Hey, it’s a werewolf. They’re bad dudes. So anyway, the little girls shows up and the werewolf is wearing the grandmother’s clothes. Remember when I made you watch that movie Silence of the Lambs and that one Buffalo Bill dude was putting on make up in front of the mirror with his junk tucked between his legs and he’s all like "Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me." and he’s listening to Joy Division or someshit?

Yeah. That movie gave me nightmares.

Yeah, it was like that. Except it was a werewolf and like, grandma clothes.

I don’t like this story.

Shut up, it builds character. It gets better.

K.

So yeah, the little girl shows up and she doesn’t notice that her grandma is this werewolf because he’s all tucked into the bed. Then the werewolf is all like "have some of that meat and wine in the fridge. It’s HELLA good." and the girl is like "Kthnx"

FUCK!

It gets better. So then after the girl eats her own grandmother, the werewolf is like "take off your clothes!" and the girl is all like "wtf?" and the wolf is like "seriously, take em off" and the girl is like "Okay, whatever, where should I put them?" and the werewolf is all like "throw em on the fire, you won’t need them anymore" and the girl is like "okay!" so she takes her clothes off and throws them on the fire and snuggles her naked self up next to the transvestite werewolf.

Uh…

So then she says "Jesus grandma, you’ve got big claws!" and the wolf is like "that’s so I can scratch my balls" and then the girl is like "Fuck! Grandma, you’re all hairy!" and the wolf is like "yeah. Yeah I am" and then the girl is like "And your nostrils are friggin HUGE!" and then the wolf is like "that’s like, so I can snort tobacco and shit" and then the girl is like "and you’ve got hella pointy teeth" and then the wolf is like "yeah, that’s so I can eat you."

This girl is stupid.

Wait, no she’s not. Check this shit out. So then the girl is like "Uh… I gotta take a shit" and then the werewolf is like "It’s totally cool if you want to shit in the bed" then the girl is like "No, really, I wanna go outside and shit on the ground" then the wolf is like "Alright, fine, DON’T shit in the bed. I don’t care." and then he tied a rope around her foot so he could make sure she didn’t run away.

That’s not gonna fucking work!

And it didn’t, little one! Because the girl was like "SYKE!" and tied the rope to a tree and booked back home. After a while the wolf went outside to find out why the girl was taking so long to shit and then saw that he had been tricked and was like "shit." The end.

Dad?

Yeah.

You’re fucking retarded.

I know son, I know.

THE END

No, no, they’re making a movie about him.

Well, okay, yeah, he’s dead, but they’re still making a movie about him.

Leo to play Timothy Leary

Like, seriously though, fuck that. Timothy Leary was a fucking douche bag.

I’d much rather see Leo take that time and money and invest it into a movie about a 60s counter culture icon and do a movie about Hunter Thompson. Sure, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was great… but it was more of a fantasy than a biography, as the book was. I’d love to see a movie about Hunter just reporting. Doing his Hunter Thompson thing. Maybe a movie based on Hells Angels or The Curse of Lono.

But Timothy Leary? Come on. They’re probably going to paint him as this important, misunderstood figure in American history, when in reality; he was a scumbag who sold out his own ideals and, more importantly, his friends.

So I just watched the first two episodes of Luckie Louie.

It’s an interesting (and long overdue) concept. A sitcom, taped in front of a live studio audience, without any kind of restrictions. Full on R rated. No limit on swearing or content.

Louie CK is a hilarious stand up comic and they do a fairly decent job of translating his style into the sitcom format.

The acting is a little rough, but it’s also the first two episodes and there’s always room for improvement.

One thing was kind of weird though. It’s his wife on the show, Kim (played by Pamela S. Adlon)

There was something really wrong feeling about hearing her say a lot of the really dirty things she says on the show. The first two episodes both had story lines that revolved around sex, and there was a lot of sex talk. Every time I’d hear her talking about her pussy or getting fucked, something in my brain kept saying “this is SO wrong!”

At first I thought it might just be because of the format of the show. It’s a very standard sitcom scenario. We’ve got the lower class family living in an apartment building with different characters, and a crew of funny, silly friends (including Laura Kightlinger, who I’ve kind of missed seeing on TV) in fairly typical sitcom situations.

But her character was the only one that I felt kind of dirty and wrong about.

Then, when I looked her up on IMdb, I figured out why that is.  Pamela S. Adlon does the voice of Bobby Hill on King of the Hill. Now it makes sense. It felt dirty and wrong because it’s this fairly hot chick talking about orgasms and getting fucked, but in the voice of Bobby Hill.

Anyway.

I’m starting my new job today. I slept like complete shit last night. Went to sleep at 11:30 and woke up at about 3:30 and then only slept off and on till about five when I finally said “Fuck it” and got up. I’m completely incapable of just laying in bed and trying to sleep for hours on end. If I’m awake, I’m up. I don’t have the attention span to just lay there and listen to Sandra breath.

I’m all caught up on Lost now. Man, they just kill people left and right on that show!

One of the many things I was thinking about last night/this morning when I was trying to get back to sleep is It.

More specifically, Pennywise The Clown.

Ya know, when I first read that book, I was in the sixth grade. I was on a major Stephen King kick and I made it my mission to read as many of his books as I could. So when I read It, I was more interested in getting it done so I could move onto another book (perhaps one that wasn’t fifty thousand pages long)

Plus, I didn’t fully appreciate just how scary that book was at the time. I took everything pretty much at face value and I was mostly just trying to find out what happened next, rather than really stopping to think about some of the imagery in the book.

But as I was laying in bed, thinking about this book that I haven’t read in years and years, and it occurred to me just how fucked up it really is.

I mean, the idea of walking down the street and seeing a clown standing out on the surface of a lake, just fucking LOOKING at you. That’s WAY creepy.

Or, even worse, the thought of playing on the sidewalk and looking down into the storm drain and seeing this clown fucking looking back up at you. And he KNOWS YOUR NAME! Fuck dude!

Like, really think about that. Put yourself in that place. You’re a kid and you’re outside playing in the rain. Your little toy boat goes down the storm drain and you get down on your knees to see if you can see it in there, and there’s A FUCKING CLOWN STANDING IN THE SEWER!

AND HE’S GOT YOUR BOAT!

That shit would just completely break my mind. Clowns are scary enough as it is… but a clown in the sewer?! Forget about it!

Not only is there a clown standing in the sewer, looking up at you from the drain, but he starts talking to you. And he knows your name. And he has your fuckin’ boat! Dude. FUCK THAT. He can keep the fuckin’ boat. Talking about “They all float down here!”

Yeah. I’d just crap my pants and pass out. You know that phrase “shit and fall back in it”?

That’d be me. I’d shit and then I’d pass out.

But not Georgie. Georgie’s all like “hey! Gimme my boat” and then Pennywise is like “well, just reach your arm into the drain and get it!

DUDE!
FUCK THAT!

Seriously. I’d have to write that boat off. The creepy sewer clown can KEEP that motherfucker.

But no. Georgie reaches down into the drain… and guess what? THE FUCKING RIPS HIS ARM OFF!

Now… when I think about that… when I think about Stephen King sitting at his word processor in 1983 or whenever he wrote it… I just want to tap him on the shoulder and say “dude. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

I feel like Lee on the Tenacious D show “You… you’re… you’re SCARING me! And… I don’t ever want you to stop!”

It’s a shame that his books have gotten so shitty over the last fifteen years or so. Aside from the Gunslinger books, I think the last really good book he wrote was Needful Things, and even that was far from his best.

Oh well.

OH SHIT!

I want to go to THIS!

http://stephenking.com/hcg/

An evening with Harry, Carrie and Garp. Stephen King, JK Rowling and John Irving doing a reading together. Rock on.

I have to get ready for my new job now. Wish me luck and shit.

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

`I don’t much care where–’ said Alice.

`Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

`–so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.’