Jay Busbee.com

Southern lit review: Jon Clinch's Finn

2008-06-10T23:26:00.006-04:00

Just finished up an exceptional book, Jon Clinch's Finn, which tells the story of Huckleberry Finn's father from before Huck's birth to just before his final appearance in Twain's novel. Finn, as he's called here, is a brutal, cruel man, lustful and petty and violent and indifferent all at once. Clinch has done something fascinating here, taking perhaps the best-known work of American literature -- Hemingway called it the wellspring from which all American fiction sprang -- and offering us a chance to view it in a completely new, yet utterly appropriate, light.

The entire book stems from these few paragraphs in Chapter 9 of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck and Jim come across the corpse of Finn himself in a ruined cabin:

"It's a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He's ben shot in de back. I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face -- it's too gashly."

I didn't look at him at all. Jim throwed some old rags over him, but he needn't done it; I didn't want to see him. There was heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the floor, and old whisky bottles, and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures made with charcoal. There was two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women's underclothes hanging against the wall, and some men's clothing, too. We put the lot into the canoe -- it might come good. There was a boy's old speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that, too. And there was a bottle that had had milk in it, and it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck ... Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of it, but, barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find the other one, though we hunted all around.

Every single item named in that list there plays a significant role in Finn, and it's only after reading both together that you see how seamlessly Clinch wove his story around Twain's. The narrative loops around and around; the payoff for certain events hinted at in the book's final pages actually came in the opening ten. It can be confusing as hell, at first, particularly with the apocalyptic William Gay/Cormac McCarthy Southern gothic tone and vocabulary, but once I finished it I literally flipped right back to the start and reread the first hundred pages to get the full sense of what had happened.

And while Huckleberry Finn is taught in middle schools -- at least, those not held prisoner by illiterate ideologues -- Finn is most definitely an adults-only book. Cannibalism, perversion, coldblooded murder -- this is not a book for the squeamish. But Clinch has created a classic American figure out of the sketches Twain left behind, even adding a fascinating new twist to Huck himself that helps explain so much of why he did what he did. But Finn's tragedy is how he never even thought to light out for the territories the way his son would.

Fly the friendly skies of Tegucigalpa

2008-06-03T12:15:00.003-04:00

When I was dating the lovely woman who would become my wife, we used to grab a couple sandwiches, go to a little field just north of the National (now Reagan) Airport runways in Washington, D.C., and sit and watch the planes fly right over our heads. I can't imagine that's still possible now -- any of my DC-area readers verify this? -- because it damn sure looked like you could bounce a tennis ball off the underside of the plane.

And that's nothing compared to this, a landing in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where a plane skidded off the runway last weekend. (After seeing the video, all I have to say is, "only one plane?")

You see stuff like that, and you start to think that maybe donkeys aren't such a bad transportation option after all.

Marvel 1985 #1: Letting loose the inner geek

2008-06-02T23:23:00.003-04:00

Ah, 1985. A watershed year in comics, a year in which the last of the old innocent Silver Age comics died out and the first of the grim-n-gritty comics slouched onto the main stage. A time when The New Teen Titans and the Uncanny X-Men ruled the world, when Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars revamped all of comicdom. John Byrne's depowered Superman and Frank Miller's dehumanized Batman were still a year in the future.

In short, it was a damn good time to be a young comics geek.

Now, Marvel has produced "Marvel 1985," a six-issue series set in that year, but in this world. It's like a mainline jolt of nostalgia, so fierce and sharp I feel like I ought to be listening to Rush and pretending like I don't hear Mom calling me to dinner. The plot is pretty simple: villains from the Marvel Universe cross over into ours, and hell breaks loose.

Or not; this issue was all setup and very little action. Written by Mark Millar, who's always had an air of calculated cool to his work that veers between kick-ass and contrived, 1985 looks like it's going to be a hell of a good series that knows it's going to be a hell of a good series. Make sense? No? Well, hell with it, then. Here's my favorite two-panel sequence from the book, when the young protagonist goes to visit the strange visitors who have moved into the previously abandoned house in his neighborhood:

That's the Red Skull there leering out of an upstairs window, and that right there is badass creepy. Dunno if 1985 can sustain the skin-crawling strangeness it's set up -- I'd much prefer that to an all-out battle -- but yeah, I'm on board.

Lost Season 4 Finale: Give a little, get a little

2008-05-30T14:44:00.002-04:00

So after a five-hour-long swim meet -- at which my kids swam for a total of about four minutes -- I came home last night, collapsed on the couch and cued up the Lost season finale. I'm no Lost maniac -- I only occasionally scan one of the many Lost websites, and I've never played any of the games or whatever on the site -- but I'm fairly knowledgeable about the show. I'm also a big fan of several of the writers/exec producers, comics guys like Brian K. Vaughan and Jeph Loeb.

I don't think I'm exactly breaking new ground here by saying that this season was the finest since One. This one answered more questions than it asked, and the mysteries it posed were all in the context of previously established storylines. (No more four-toed statue feet.) Having the end zone in sight has definitely allowed the writers to flourish and drop clues that will certainly pay off.

Some thoughts here, and SPOILERS may be present. What I dig about the series is the way it can constantly recontextualize itself -- after last night, the show's present is now "our" present, 2008, and it's done this pretty much seamlessly. There are still gaps to be filled in -- what happened to the rest of the Castaways on the island? What went on during the three years between the rescue of the Oceanic Six and the death of Jeremy Bentham? -- but what's clear is that now we're looking at moving forward in time WITH the cast, which for some indefinable reason is infinitely cooler than the perpetual flashback that the series had become. Plus, the reimagining of familiar faces -- led by Sayid as a James Bondian hitman -- is satisfying on both a storytelling and an entertainment level.

ET has its usual great wrapup of the series finale right here. Well worth a read. While Lost hasn't yet approached the greatness that is the Wire, it's still probably among the top five TV shows ever, in my humble opinion. Lost still has a couple storylines that just don't interest me as much -- the Others in the woods have never done it for me, and neither did Claire and her "bay-bay" until she got all dead and creepy -- whereas every scene in The Wire was riveting. But hey, 99 percent is good enough for me. Just sucks that we have to wait until January for the next round.

The Greatest Collection Of Bass Players In The Known Universe

2008-05-29T12:18:00.002-04:00

So this is one of those wandering posts, where it starts out being about something and ends up being about something else. I was going to riff on the news that Stonehenge has been a burial site for centuries, and then bounce from there into a video of Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge" (where the demons dwell!) So then I went YouTube trolling, and found this -- the greatest collection of bass players in human history:

Sweet. I love bass that sounds like it's pulling your guts out through your big ... toe.

RIPPED cover art, with the promise of more goodness inside

2008-05-28T15:46:00.004-04:00

This right here is some sweetness -- the cover to RIPPED, the original graphic novel (or OGN, as the kids say) by myself and Jason Flowers. (Premise: time travel/conspiracy.) Not bad, eh? The promotional push is starting soon, but for now, art:

Nazis! Trojans! Soldiers! A punk kid! This one's got it all, folks, including the secret role that an iPod played in the JFK assassination! Coming very soon from Arcana Studio.

Comics art: Once again, I have chosen the right friends

2008-04-25T14:13:00.002-04:00

Here's some extraordinarily cool artwork from a couple of upcoming projects I'm writing. First, from Kade: Rising Sun #1, a samurai epic from Arcana Studio:

Man, that's badass, and it's just dudes drinking tea! At the opposite end of the spectrum, we've got a piece from the upcoming anthology "Dear Santa, I Can Explain...", a collection of tales of Christmases gone horribly wrong. Mine's a story about dressing up as Santa for my kids, but before that, I used to don the beard in college:

Those of you who were at those old Flat Hat parties back in the day will remember--that's exactly what it was like. No artistic license taken by the spectacular Mr. Wes Molebash whatsoever. (The final version will be in full, glorious color.)

The Kade series is scheduled for later this summer, with the Christmas anthology slated for -- imagine this -- Christmastime.

USA Today & The Eisners

2008-04-23T23:58:00.003-04:00

Some fun news of late ... I made it into an issue of USA Today a few days back when this post I wrote for Yahoo! Sports got picked up by the national media. Seems Forbes decided Atlanta was the nation's most miserable sports city, and I tried my best to fight back. I think you can read it there, midway down the second column:

Yep, I may be the first person in history to get the phrase "Thanks a pantload" into USA Today. My parents raised me right!

In other news, the amazing Postcards anthology, for which I wrote the story "Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland," has been nominated for an Eisner Award. For those outside the comics industry, the Eisners are comics' Oscars, the most prestigious awards in the industry, and I'm just glad I didn't torpedo the book myself. If it wins, I'll officially change my name to "Eisner winner Jay Busbee," even if I only deserve 1/32nd of the credit. Huge congrats to my man Jason Rodriguez for some well-deserved recognition for pulling the whole damn thing together.

Stupid Writers! Nobody Reads Magazines Anymore!

2008-04-02T17:23:00.003-04:00

When I was a wee lad of about sixteen or so, I had dreams of moving to New York and going to write for Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the other big-name glossy magazines. Well, soon afterward, I found out that you could write from wherever you were without having to survive on table scraps and ketchup packets in New York City. And then along came this thing called "the Internet" that reworked the whole conversation.

So moving to New York isn't in the immediate plans any longer. But I remain fascinated by magazines -- I'm a regular subscriber to RS, Esquire, The New Yorker, the Oxford American, and plenty of others. They pile up in my office, threatening to crush small children.

What's interesting is that I'm apparently part of a dwindling breed, at least according to The New York Observer. In an article entitled "Freelance Fizzle," writer Dorree Shafrir breaks down the many ways in which the once-dominant magazines have lost their hegemony, their influence, and their status as nirvana (lower-case n) for young writers:

“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”

Hey, he's talking about me! (The first part of that last sentence, not the second. I still haven't won an Academy Award.) Anyway, it's a fascinating look at the "decline and fall," as the subhead goes, not just of the freelance magazine writer, but of the magazine industry itself. Well worth a read. Oh, and the comments are good too, both the informative ones and the nakedly jealous ones too.

Back from LA

2008-03-17T17:27:00.003-04:00

This past weekend, I hit Los Angeles for your basic whirlwind tour of the Wizard World LA comics convention, signing books, shaking hands, and seeing almost nothing of the city except for the two-block stretch between the hotel and the LA Convention Center. (In that two blocks was the Staples Center, where the Pac-10 tourney was going on, but alas, no chance to see any college hoop.) I did see the Hollywood sign as I was cruising to the airport an hour later than I intended -- hung around to catch editors leaving a panel. Thank God there was NOBODY in the security line at LAX. Never would've made an Atlanta flight.

It was a lot of fun, roaming the floor and signing copies of INCURSION at the Platinum booth. Also bugged a few editors for work and stalked a comics creator or two. No truly great con stories this time around; the Wizard party at the Hotel Figueroa was held outside by the pool, and with the weather dropping into the 40s and the time passing 3am body-clock time, I was faaaading fast.

But I did stock up on some reading material for the next few months; picked up volumes 1 and 2 of the Complete Frank Miller Daredevil, a volume of the Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men run, and a bunch of other stuff I can't quite remember now. Also got a copy of my man Jorge Vega's Gunplay, winner of the 2007 Comic Book Challenge. Get your hands on a copy, trust me.

Overall, a fine show, even if Boushh there wouldn't let me borrow her thermal detonator. (Little short for a stormtrooper, ain't he?)

Beginning The Indoctrination Over At Yahoo

2008-03-05T17:08:00.002-05:00

So I've been writing for Yahoo!'s From the Marbles NASCAR blog for about three weeks now, and here's one thing I've discovered pretty much immediately:

NASCAR fans have no sense of humor.

Okay, that's not entirely true. There are a large majority of NASCAR fans who actually do enjoy a good laugh, who can appreciate it when some idiot blogger makes fun of their favorite driver. But there's a good chunk who takes even the slightest insult to Dale Jr. as a critique of their entire lifestyle, and reacts accordingly. In the first few weeks, I was called an "idiot," a "homo," a "d1ckhead" (gotta get around the censors), and told to "get a life" because I was not an honorable man for daring to have a little fun at their favorite driver's expense.

To which I say: damn straight.

Right now, we're in the Indoctrination Phase over at Yahoo!. That's where I go balls-out with what I'm going to do, and it either pisses people off so badly they don't want to return--in which case we're probably better off without 'em--or it forces everybody, commenters and blogger, to raise their game to a higher level. It's painful but necessary, and once we get everybody on the same page, the site will be that much better for it.

And it's working--take a look at the progression of comments in this post right here. Soon, all will kneel before Zod...er, Busbee.

Stopping By The Blog On A Snowy Evening

2008-03-03T21:54:00.003-05:00

A warm evening, actually. But it's been so damn long since I've been here regularly that there's dust everywhere, roaches running all over the place, that strange smell wafting up from the basement--oh, crap, I forgot to feed that drifter I had chained up down there...

Anyway, it's been a lively few weeks. Most significant is the new gig I've got over at Yahoo! Sports. (That exclamation is mucho important.) I'm running their NASCAR blog there, and having a damn fine time doing it. (Click over there on the right for the link.) I'm also still running the show at Atlanta Magazine's Right Down Peachtree blog. Sports Gone South and this one have, for the nonce, gone a bit quiet, but we'll see about changing that.

In other projects, I've got comics aplenty coming out; INCURSION just wrapped its four-issue run and did well enough that the boys at Platinum greenlit not one, but two sequels: INSURRECTION, due out later this year, and INDOCTRINATION/INCULCATION/INFATUATION (we haven't settled on a title yet, obviously) closing out the trilogy late 2008-early 2009. RIPPED is nearing completion, as is THE NETWORK, and holy crap are those gonna be good. I'm working on the scripts for the second issues of WHITE EYES and KADE: RISING SUN; more details on those in a bit. And SUNSHINE STATE is back up off the deck, slated tentatively for a summer release from Arcana. I'm also finishing up a story for the DEAR SANTA anthology, and...and I think that's it for the comics.

Book work on the Braves and Bulldogs books proceeds apace, and I've just submitted a proposal for another book that I don't want to jinx by talking about until we've inked some deals. And the regular article-writing continues for BLUFF, CHOPTALK, and a buncha other places.

So there's your ego-trip post. Actual content coming tomorrow.

(That photo? I dunno why it's here. It makes me laff. Just remember, Hillary-bashers, in the 2016 election, those kids all will be of voting age...)

Incursion #2 Out, Incursion #3 Cover Up

2008-01-13T23:01:00.000-05:00

Incursion #2 has hit the stands, leaving a smoking hole of excellence. In this issue, our intrepid band of Air Force commandos trapped in the mystical dimension of Twilight basically blow the ever-lovin' crap out of everything they see, while on earth their sergeant works furiously to try to bring them home! All this, and the first time the phrase "Tuscaloosa mudslide" has ever been uttered in American comics...or, according to Google, anywhere in recorded history! Getcha copies now!

And here's a look at #3's cover, by the amazing Tone Rodriguez. Choice, huh?

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T23:49:00.000-05:00

Hey howdy ho. Hope 2008's a good one for you, dear reader. I'm gonna be stuffing plenty of goodness your way, between three blogs, half a dozen comic series in the pipeline, and a buncha articles. So, you know, get your rest. There will be a quiz.

The Most Wonderful Day Of The Year

2007-12-13T07:53:00.000-05:00

Hey, it's my birthday today! Me, Sergei Federov, Jamie Foxx, Steve Buscemi, Ted Nugent, Dick Van Dyke, Pope Sixtus V, and the immortal Jewgeni Petrow (no, I don't know either) will be celebrating today, but probably not together.

Everybody loves their birthday, but mine's been quite a significant day the last few years. In 2000, this was the day that Al Gore finally conceded and George W. ascended to the presidency. In 2003, this was the day that Saddam Hussein was dug out of his hole. And today will see the release of the Mitchell Report blowing the whistle on dozens of steroid-using baseball players. Man, now that I think about it, lots of people have reasons to hate my birthday. Sorry, folks...cake's on me.

Flickadaweek: Grindhouse

2007-12-11T13:03:00.000-05:00

So I'm scalp-deep in pre-holiday deadlines--sucks now, but damn, son, am I going to be chillaxin' this holiday--but I finally ended up seeing both halves of Grindhouse, so I gotta write about it:

Check out that poster. Sweet, huh? And yet, almost nobody saw the movie when it came out earlier this year. Why not? I can hazard a few guesses, but after seeing both flicks, I've got to say that the folks who stayed away had at least half of the right idea.

The best part about both movies was the fake trailers for other, unmade flicks. Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving"--about a massacre on Turkey Day--is flat-out spooky thanks to the Blair Witch-style camerawork and dead-voiced narrator. And if Robert Rodriguez doesn't make a full version of "Machete," starring Danny Trejo as a revenge-crazed psychopath--one guess as to his weapon of choice--well, there is no justice in this world.

First of the two films was Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," which threw together zombies, horror, barbecue, military conspiracy, and love gone wrong into a nut-crunchin' good time. Freddy Rodriguez probably made himself a legit career with this movie, and Bruce Willis, Naveen Andrews (Sayid from "Lost"), and everybody else chews scenery like...well, like the zombies chew brains. Highly recommended for a beer-and-pizza Saturday night.

More problematic is Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof," starting with the fact that I don't know who it would be recommended for other than Tarantino himself. One of the problems with being a trailblazing visionary, which Tarantino was with "Pulp Fiction," is that once you've blazed the trail, others are going to catch up with you. "Death Proof" has at its heart the concept of a stuntman who can never die as long as he's strapped into his car. Nice idea, if not quite as transcendent as, say, a glowing suitcase. But the problem is that "Death Proof" comes off like a parody of a Tarantino film--endless meandering talk that goes nowhere, chicks with attitude a mile long and no real reason for it, geekout references to long-forgotten pop culture ephemera, loving/fetishistic shots of bare feet. It's all here, and it all adds up to far less than the sum of its parts. True, Kurt Russell has one of the best lines of 2007 in it: taking a young woman home, he pulls to a three-way stop. He asks her if she wants to go right or left. She says right. He replies, "That's too bad. See, if you were going left, it would be a while before you got scared. But since you wanted to go right, you're going to have to start getting scared right now." And off he goes to the left...and eventual oblivion. A shame the rest of the movie was such painfully forced "cool."

Tarantino's supposedly still at work on his WWII epic "Inglorious Bastards." And yes, I'll line right up to see it. But if it's full of soldiers yammering about the metaphoric implications of Rosie the Riveter and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," I'll be flying out to Hollywood to kick Tarantino's ass...and I'll probably have to stand in line when I get there.

The Incursion #2 Cover

2007-12-04T18:06:00.001-05:00

Check it, y'all:

Scheduled to hit hopefully later this month. Remember, nothin' says "I love you" at holiday time quite like a comic full'a demon spawn!

You Just Can't Beat The Classics

2007-11-30T13:20:00.000-05:00

My daughter is learning to play the cello, which I'm sure will one day sound beautiful but for the moment sounds like a small animal having its internal organs gnawed out by beavers. We take her to lessons at a local music store, and when it's my turn to take her, I always channel my inner fifteen-year-old and head straight over to the rows of guitars. I'll throw on some headphones, crank up the distortion, and wail out a little "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" or "Sweet Child O' Mine." (Anything with apostrophes.)

The other day, I was hanging there when six or seven little early-teen goofballs came in, half with dirt-lip moustaches because they weren't yet sure how to shave. They picked up the twelve-string guitars and immediately launched into "Over The Hills And Far Away"--the exact same song I play when I grab the twelve-string. The road goes ever on and on...and I can tell my kids that I was right, my music IS the best. Hell with Hannah Montana, it's all about the Zeppelin, baby.

The New Musical Obsession: Sonny Landreth

2007-11-29T14:19:00.000-05:00

Music hits you in the strangest places. (Yes, sometimes even the groin.) Last night, I was walking into the den to shut off the TV for dinner when some music caught my eye (and ear). PBS--left on by my Dragon Tales-obsessed son--was playing the full concert of Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival from this past summer, and some cat was completely tearing up the stage with a combination of amazing fretwork, slide, and melody--three things that almost never go together. I was freakin' mesmerized. After getting hollered at by the entire family to GET IN HERE, DINNER'S GETTING COLD, I did a little research on the web and found that the dude's name was Sonny Landreth, the tune was called "Uberesso," and hey presto, here it is:

Not bad, huh? Check out some of the other videos where he hangs with Clapton Himself. (Clapton's got a habit of coasting musically, but when a big-time player challenges him, he comes up huge.) Far as I can tell, Landreth's never released this particular song commercially, but he's got some other great material out there, which I immediately vacuumed off iTunes. And go check out SonnyLandreth.com, where he's got some free stuff for download. (It's in the "Lagniappe" section.)

Great music. Oh, and yes, I'm well aware of the fact that I'm trolling PBS for music means I'm old and in the way. Tough.

Incursion #1: The Commentary Track

2007-11-27T19:31:00.000-05:00

Incursion #1’s been out for almost a week now, so you should all have your copy. So now it’s time for the first of what will, hopefully, be many DVD-style commentaries on my comics. I’ll do up one of these for each issue, giving you a little insight into the creative process behind the books. And away we go…

Incursion’s my first hired-gun book, the first one where I didn’t come up with the idea and push it through to completion. Which was, to be honest, very nice. Work-for-hire’s got its critics and its drawbacks, but it also means somebody else is playing production traffic cop…and signing checks. I got hooked up with Incursion thanks to Sean O’Reilly, top dog at Arcana Studio (which published my 2006 miniseries Sundown: Arizona) and newly-hired VP at Platinum. Sean called me this past summer—like any struggling young writer, I think I was actually on the golf course when he called—and offered me the gig. Obviously, being a struggling young writer, I accepted on the spot.

Platinum had some detailed notes for the four-issue series that they wanted me to work off of, but they—led by editor supreme Dave Collins—were more than happy to let me wander a bit from the prescribed path. The book was created by Platinum head honcho Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, and its original title was “Twilight War Book One: Incursion,” which ought to give you some clues as to where this whole affair is going. Anyway, let’s begin.

This opening page, with the young Ray wandering out on a tree branch, was inspired by an incident involving my little brother. He climbed a tree and fell out—there was nobody there to catch him, unfortunately, and he landed on the chain-link fence that separated our house from our neighbors. He was fine, but to this day nobody can remember which side of the fence he landed on.

The construction of the opening page—which is something I added in to the original plot—is an outgrowth of my MFA grad school learning. Establish a theme, always a theme. The title of this issue, which wasn’t included in the credits, is “Balance.”

Next, we’re in Afghanistan. The Packers reference is because the Packers happened to be on in a preseason game when I was writing the script. There is no real-world analogue to the girlfriend story, which is a shame.

Back at Edwards Air Force Base, I tried to channel Warren Ellis with my explanation of how the XCE works.

“The Billies” is my own creation for Afghan rebels, an oblique reference to “The Skinnies”—the term for the Mogadishu rebels that brought down American planes in Black Hawk Down. Hopefully I didn’t accidentally back into some racist term.

My artist, Axel Medellin, did a good job with the badass pictures, huh? Check that one on the bottom of page 6.

Page 8—That’s the old English-major theology influence coming out there with the story of the monk and the knight. I was surprised at how well it ended up fitting into the overall theme of the story, but sometimes you get lucky that way.

Ray’s hint on page 10 of not sharing everything with his own men…you don’t think that’s going to backfire on him, do you? Not at all…

The scene on page 12 where the billies show up in ever greater numbers is a direct reference—I mentioned it in the script—to that scene in Return of the King where you see some orcs popping out of the ruins of that old city waiting for the charge of the heroes from Minas Tirith, and every time they cut back to the orcs, there are more and more and more of them, and you can’t imagine how there could be any more, and then there ARE, and then you think, oh boy—our heroes are screwed…

Page 15—Wait a minute! How the hell did Kyle’s dog tags end up in California? All will be revealed…

Page 18—My grandfather used to have those clicking-ball office toys…that is, until I slung them so hard that they all knotted up. This is my little way of saying sorry.

Page 19—Whoops. Reid just did the same thing I did to those little swingin’ balls.

Page 20—Whoa! Visual symbolism there in panel 1! That broken cross can't possibly represent anything bad coming down the pike, can it?

Page 21—My favorite demon in this whole thing is the big furnace-throated bad guy there in the top right. If I write another Twilight series, I'm making that guy a key player. Second place is the dude in the center with the sword; he’s either wearing two eyepatches or some sunglasses. Either way, he’s a badass.

Page 22—Zombies. Everybody loves zombies. How can you not?

And then we’re done. Oh, wait, the ads. First off—Kade. Hmm. Interesting character, that Kade. And later on, Scott calls my work “nothing short of brilliant”—thanks, man! And I can’t recall the last time I was called “up and coming,” but hey, that’s cool too.

Here endeth the commentary for the first issue. No. 2’s scheduled to drop—man, that’s an unfortunate sentence construction—sometime in mid-December. Order now!

The Endorsement: The Dark & Stormy

2007-11-26T14:56:00.000-05:00

So how was your Thanksgiving? Good? Turkey, family, shopping, blah blah? Great. I spent a significant portion of mine in a pleasant buzz thanks to my personal drink of choice, the Dark and Stormy. (Screw the mojito--that's so 2006.) It's Gosling's dark Bermuda rum combined with ginger beer, and if you're lucky, you can pick both up in a handy all-in-one case at your local hooch shop. I got addicted to the things back in the summer of '06, when I accompanied the wife to her business junket to Bermuda. While she attended training classes and such, I drank more Dark & Stormys than water. It was a good trip.

So, yeah...that's what I did over break, and as you can tell from the in-depth content of this post, I'm not yet hitting on all literary cylinders. Anyway, go get yourself a Dark & Stormy yourself. It's a little chunk of Bermuda right there in your glass.

I'll take my endorsement fee now, Goslings.

Sebastian Bach Deserves A Nobel For Figuring Out How To Get Axl Rose Off His Ass

2007-11-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

Sebastian Bach's gotta be full on in careful-what-you-wish-for mode. The former Skid Row lead singer just released his first solo album in seven years, Angel Down. And while it's pretty solid post-hair-band metal--melodic with thick bass and doubletracked guitars--all the talk about the album centers on the reclusive yeller who shows up for three tracks, fella who used to go by the name Bill Bailey.

Longtime readers of the site know that Axl's one of my--well, "heroes" ain't the right word, more "fascinations." So, yeah, when I read that Axl was going to be performing on Bach's album, I was there before you could say ooooooooaaaaaaaAAAAAA (cough, cough) OOOOOOOWWWwwwuuughh. (Transcription of 2000s-era Axl trying to nail that opening scream on "Welcome to the Jungle.") Axl duets on three songs--an utterly perfunctory cover of Aerosmith's "Back in the Saddle," a paint-by-numbers Whiskey-A-Go-Go tune called "Love Is A Bitchslap," and "Stuck Inside," a juggernaut that's by far the best of the bunch. Of course, I bought 'em all. The rest of the album is like visiting your old school after years away; it's instantly familiar, completely comfortable, and will annoy the hell out of anybody who didn't live through that past with you.

One of the ironies of this album is that when Skid Row put out its monster "Slave To The Grind" CD back in the summer of 1991, all anyone could talk about was how it was a perfect holdover for the then-delayed "Use Your Illusion." Now, Bach's solo CD is a bit of an appetizer for "Chinese Democracy." Of course, Illusion was delayed by only a couple months; Democracy's going on thirteen years delay. And yes, whenever it does come out, I'll be right there at the front of the line, oxygen line and all.

Getcha Free Taste Of Incursion Here

2007-11-20T18:07:00.000-05:00

Another quick post because as the holiday nears, I'm swamped with oh-my-God-where-is-my-article-you-lazy-ass-writer emails. But Incursion #1 is out tomorrow, and I'll be heading over to Great Escape Comics to pick up my copy, along with the Dark Tower hardcover and the second Hawaiian Dick trade. If I had in-laws coming in town, I'd have plenty to read in the crawlspace while I hid out from them.

Meantime, why don't you head over to Platinum's Drunk Duck mini-site and read the first few pages of Incursion? I'll be doing a DVD-style commentary in the next few days.

"Mister Moore, will you sign my DVD of Watchmen Babies?"

2007-11-19T20:28:00.000-05:00

Awesome.

Non-geek translation: Alan Moore, who wrote some of the best comics, like, ever--Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--guested on the Simpsons last night as himself. And Moore has a long history of loathing how badly his characters get raped once they make the jump from comics to other media. Hence, "Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation!" Hence, geek-out funny.

Screw That Lightsaber Crap, Luke Should've Just Busted Vader In The Grill

2007-11-16T17:25:00.000-05:00

A little Star Wars silliness to kick off the weekend...

Have a good one, all!

Incursion #1 Out Next Week. World WILL Take Notice.

2007-11-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

Incursion #1 hits this Wednesday from Platinum. Go get it. Then write me by clicking here and telling me what you think. Anybody that writes gets a copy of the script to issue #1.

Incursion's gonna be the finest book published this year. Don't believe me? Believe this press release, bitches:

PLATINUM CAUGHT IN TWILIGHT THIS NOVEMBER

Incursion #1 Out Later This Month

LOS ANGELES, Calif., November 09, 2007 – This November, Platinum Studios Comics (www.platinumstudioscomics.com) and Jay Busbee capture the gritty essence of sci-fi horror with the release of Incursion. Axel Medellin Machain, a two-time Top 50 Comic Book Challenge (www.comicbookchallenge.com) contestant, joins the Incursion creative team on pencils and inks.

The story opens deep in the battlefields of Afghanistan and culminates in a war-torn dimension known as Twilight. The four-issue series combines thrilling action with rugged humor as our heroes fight to save the souls of humanity. “Our main characters, Sgt. Ray Montgomery and Dr. Rebecca Drake, are under constant pressure to make incredibly difficult decisions,” says scripter Jay Busbee. “It’s been exciting to chart their path from disgrace to redemption as they traverse a warzone not of this world.”

“As the Editor-in-Chief of Arcana Comics and now VP of Publishing and Animation at Platinum Studios, I’ve read many comics in my career,” adds Sean O’Reilly. “I am blown away by the visually stunning artwork in Incursion. With covers by Tone Rodriguez (Radioactive Man), Nei Ruffino (Return to Wonderland) on colors, and Axel Medellin Machain on pencils and inks, this team creates a distinctive visual style that will command the reader’s attention.”

Incursion Issue #1 with cover by Tone Rodriguez will be available in comic stores and on DrunkDuck.com late November.

Technorati Tags: Incursion Issue #1, Jay Busbee, Tone Rodriguez, Comic Book Challenge, comic book, Platinum Studios

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About Platinum Studios

Platinum Studios, an entertainment company that controls an independent library of comic book characters from all over the world, which it adapts, produces and licenses for all forms of media, including print, film, online, mobile / wireless, gaming, and merchandising. Platinum Studios’ library contains more than 3,800 characters, spanning a full range of genres and styles, and also includes properties such as www.DrunkDuck.com, the industry’s preeminent Web comics community. Working with leading companies in the entertainment and new media sectors, Platinum is a recognized leader in the creation of new content across all media platforms.

Platinum Studios - Comics Fueling Media EVERYWHERE!

Platinum Studios Safe Harbor Statement

Matters discussed in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein.. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of Platinum Studios and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: the impact of economic, competitive and other factors affecting Platinum Studios and its operations, markets, product, and distributor performance, the impact on the national and local economies resulting from terrorist actions, and U.S. actions subsequently; and other factors detailed in reports filed by Platinum Studios.

# # #

The Evil Atari-Chuck E. Cheese Connection

2007-11-14T08:48:00.000-05:00

Terrifying fact of the week, brought to my attention recently by my pal Jordi of The
Serious Tip: the guy who invented the joy that is the Atari 2600 also
created the godless hell that is Chuck E. Cheese, apparently to indoctrinate
the young'uns into loving video games. (Apparently, back in the olden days,
people were actually concerned that kids wouldn't take to video games like rats to
crack.)

Anyway, in honor of this little factoid, here's an Atari quiz for y'all to
jones on:

Some Treasures To Excavate On iTunes

2007-11-13T08:22:00.000-05:00

So here are a couple things you ought to seek out on iTunes, 'cause they're, you know, good:

-First, check out the Camp Jam All-Stars' "Money In A Card (This Christmas Day)." Camp Jam's a rock-and-roll fantasy camp run by a couple friends of mine, including Jeff Carlisi, the former guitarist for .38 Special. One day I'll tell the story of how he taught me how to play "Hold On Loosely," which, for an '80s kid, was nirvana itself. (The state of being; the group was still several years off.) Anyway, this song is by a bunch of kids from the camp, and it's well worth your 99 cents.

-And speaking of 1980s salvation--the gods of my high school music, Led Zeppelin, have finally reached iTunes. I've got all these albums, some in--no joke--LP, cassette, CD and MP3 versions, but you know what? I'll probably buying "Mothership" anyway for the car. You should get "Over The Hills and Far Away," "Immigrant Song," and "Fool In The Rain" right now.

-Finally, iTunes is deep into audiobooks at this point. If you happen to spend a whole lot of time in traffic--I don't, ha ha ha--pick yourself up a few of these. And start with Brad Meltzer, a great writer of thrillers and comic books, and a hell of a nice guy besides. (His readings are not to be missed.) All his books are on sale, and for a little while, you can get The Millionaires for free. Free! Get it! Now!

Norman Mailer, R.I.P.

2007-11-12T11:55:00.000-05:00

Norman Mailer died Saturday. Not an entirely unexpected occurrence; the guy was 84 years old. But a tragic one nonetheless. Mailer was a singular American writer--as he himself would be the first to tell you--heir to the writer-as-tough-guy tradition of Hemingway. He penned some of the finest works of the twentieth century, including the apotheoses of both the war novel (The Naked and the Dead) and creative nonfiction (The Executioner's Song). He jammed himself right into the middle of most American conflicts of the mid-twentieth century, everything from Vietnam to the Rumble in the Jungle. And like Hunter S. Thompson, he always reminded you that he was right there during it all, shaping it in some way himself.

It seems Mailer could never be what people wanted him to be; he'd wriggle out of expectations and frustrate the hell out of those who supported him. He was both Voice of a Generation and shrill curmudgeon, relentless Author With Big Ideas and pretentious self-promoter. But here's the important thing about Mailer--he tried. He shot for immortality, and if he perhaps reckoned his genius a little too pervasive, well, so what? Better that than the mewling, whining neuroticism that consumed American fiction in his wake--if I ever met Raymond Carver, I'd've kicked his minimalist ass for the damage he did to literary fiction--and better to dream big than to continue staring at your own little world, day after day,
year after year. Mailer gets these kinds of snide swipes from pissant little writers who hide their terror at confronting big questions behind dismissive irony; check out this obituary for evidence. Tom Junod's profile of Mailer from earlier this year wondered about this phenomenon, too, and Junod delivered a fine verdict on Mailer, even if most current writers won't.

Just a few weeks ago, in New York, Mailer put forth the basics of his own bizarre theology and notion of the afterlife. I don't quite get it--it seems kind of jury-rigged together--but hey, it's Mailer, which means it's worth at least considering. This week, I'll dig back into The Naked and the Dead and mine The Spooky Art, his book on writing, for a few more insights. And then I'll raise a glass to the man. Probably won't be stabbing my wife like he did to one of his, though. That would be a bit much.

Flickadaweek: Flags of Our Fathers

2007-11-08T12:07:00.000-05:00

Stephen Spielberg's got himself a mini-World War II franchise going, what with Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and now ("now" being a relative term) Flags of Our Fathers, the Clint Eastwood flick Spielberg exec-produced. All of these works have some themes in common--the nobility of the soldier, the equivocation of the higher-ups, the skeevy weaselishness (is that a word?) of the rear-echelon chickenhawks at home. They're also all filled with brutal battle scenes--no "Sarge, tell my girl I love her!" as a soldier gently closes his eyes here.

Flags focuses on the way imagery can be manipulated in wartime to produce the desired bloodlust in the American public. (Man, I'm having a hard time seeing how this could possibly be relevant today.) In this case, the image is the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi atop the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima. Interesting thing is, that photo was staged--the actual flag-raising was done long before. And several of the participants in the "real" flag-raising died in insurgent attacks before the photo-op one occurred.

The movie jumps back and forth between the battle for the island and the battle for public perception. The military wants the flag-raisers stumping for war bonds, and the soldiers themselves feel a range of emotions from survivor's guilt to glory-hounding. In the end, however, the movie strives to answer the question of Why...Why would these men--boys, really--sacrifice themselves for a chunk of land thousands of miles from home? It's a question that never would have occurred to pre-Vietnam filmmakers, but it's a question every war movie simply must ask now.

Eastwood told the other side of this story in Letters from Iwo Jima, which I'll watch soon and offer up for analysis here. Till then, go check out Flags of Our Fathers...and try not to sit on a couch and eat chips and salsa while you do so, or you're gonna feel seriously guilty. Trust me.

Gather Round, Kids. Got Some Wisdom For Ye.

2007-11-07T17:49:00.001-05:00

Hey, wanna learn something about writing? No? Then beat it, punk, there's educatin' goin' on here. This is the text of an interview that my pal Eric Angevine (visit his site) did with me. Eric wrote the whole thing into a fine article, but I, uh, kind of lost it. Sorry. Anyway, here's the raw feed. Enjoy.

What’s the most powerful attribute a writer can develop - style? a thick skin? Sheer, plodding, bloody-minded persistence?

Good question. All three are important, as is a good sense of what makes for a good story, and also what Hemingway called the “bullshit detector”—the ability to know when what you’re writing just sucks, and needs to be put out of its misery. However, of all those, I think persistence is the most important. A writer can get by without a whole lot of style, can get by being overly sensitive—but no writer gets very far without persistence. Even the crappiest Harlequin romance or by-the-numbers spy novel was created by somebody pecking away hour after hour, day after day.

You started out at William & Mary. Did any of your experiences there contribute to your ability or desire to write?

Absolutely. Main thing was writing for the newspaper. I was the sports editor there, and had the freedom to write pretty much whatever I wanted. It was a weekly paper, and I wrote a weekly game-picking column which, now that I think back on it, was really the Cro-Magnon version of what I’m writing these days on Right Down Peachtree—sports knowledge shot through with pop culture references and rampant smartassery. And this was eighteen years ago. Too bad there wasn’t an Internet back then, huh?

You also went to grad school (Memphis?). Do you feel today like that experience honed your skill set?

Yes, and in some unexpected ways. Grad school for writing can have a pretty rigid code of behavior—back when I was there, third-generation Raymond Carveresque nihilistic minimalism was all the rage, and the writing style (fictionally speaking) that I specialize in—black comedy, in the style of Carl Hiaasen—was looked down upon. I spent a lot of time—and wrote a really bad novel—in an attempt to create what I, at the time, thought was “serious” literature. It took me awhile to recognize that just because my talents didn’t run in certain literary directions didn’t mean my stories weren’t worth writing. So, from that side of things, I learned to follow my own voice, even if everybody else wanted me to speak a different language. (Hey, metaphor!)

But that paints grad school in a far too negative light. More than finding my own voice, I got exposed to a full range of others. I dug deep into every kind of literature I could get my hands on, and I got taught its nuances by experts in the field. You might not think that Virgil or Shakespeare or Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have much to do with sportswriting, but it’s all writing, it’s all creation. It’s all using language to craft something out of nothing. It may be an epic tale of love and loss, it may be ten goofball sentences on what Michael Vick and Van Halen have in common. But if there’s truth behind the effort, if there’s style behind the execution, they’ll both pay off. And that’s the kind of insight and instruction that I couldn’t have gotten on my own.

Was your first published piece about sports, or something else?

Technically, my first published piece was in the Atlanta Journal when I was in third grade, but that was part of a school project. (I analyzed school lunches. Deathless prose, it was.)

I think my first published piece outside of school writing (I was on the high school paper) was for a weekly neighborhood paper—one of those kinds that specializes in high school sports scores, garden club meetings, and overheated reports of City Council town halls. I did do sports for them, mainly because the sports editor there was an extremely cool guy and gave me my first lessons in dealing with coaches and players. (Lesson No. 1: They need you as much as you need them. Remember that, even if they don’t. It’s a lesson that’s served me well when dealing with pro athletes.) But I started out writing about high school football and basketball, swimming, track, whatever.

From there, though, I spent an awful lot of time in the “Living” and “News” section of the paper. I spent about six or seven years writing book and music reviews, doing investigative pieces, doing long-form creative nonfiction, stuff like that. Sports always seemed to draw me back, though, and even now it’s the part of my career that’s consistently breaking big.

Good God, this sounds egotistical. I swear I’m not this much of an insufferable bastard in real life.

How much of your daily routine is devoted to contacting editors and pitching stories?

Not nearly enough. I’m fortunate in that I’m at a point in my career where editors come to me with assignments, or I have standing assignments (columns) at multiple locations. And just keeping up with those can be daunting and time-consuming enough that I don’t pitch as much as I should. You’re supposed to spend up to 20 percent of your time pitching for new assignments; I’d say I probably do, at best, half that. God bless the Internet, though; it’s a lot easier dropping an email than the old-style way of mailing a query letter with a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) and waiting three, four weeks for a reply…or none.

How much of your daily routine is devoted to interviewing subjects? actually writing?

Depends on the article for interviewing. For a 1,000-word article with three interview subjects, you’re looking at probably 30 minutes for each interview, 30 minutes of prep time, an hour to 90 minutes per interview of transcription and editing, and another 2-3 hours of compiling the whole mess into a readable article. I probably work about 50-55 hours a week and spend about 35 of that actually involved in physical writing tasks (which includes editing, interviewing, rewriting). The rest is pitching or planning. Oh, and scanning the Internet. That counts as work, right?

I have a list of “dream publications” that I would like to see my byline in. Who’s still on your list? Do you feel like those remaining names are attainable?

Hell yeah, I have a list. Rolling Stone is at the top of it. Sports Illustrated. The New York Times. The print versions of ESPN and Esquire (I’ve made it into the .com versions). And yes, I think it’s possible to get in. It’s a matter of combining good timing, good luck, a good pitch, and a good pipeline to the right editor.

I’m having a hard time envisioning the process of writing a graphic novel. Since most of your deathless prose is turned into visual art and word bubbles, how much background and development do you have to write in order to keep the overall story real & coherent?

Depends on the artist and what I’m trying to get across. “Hero punches villain in the face” is pretty straightforward. But if I’m trying to get across a mood, if I have visual symbols that are necessary to the story, I’ll write a paragraph of prose for each panel in a comic page. All of that doesn’t have to be cute and literary; it’s the equivalent of stage directions in a play. The artist is the only one reading that, but he’s in many ways the most important audience of all, because he’s the one who’s got to communicate my vision to the masses.

Comics/graphic novel writing requires a lot more precision than anything else I’ve ever written—you’ve got to compile your story into 22 pages, 4 to 6 panels per page—there’s not a whole lot of room to get flowery in your dialogue.

How did it feel to score the winning touchdown? (sorry, started feeling like a sideline reporter there).

Well, you know, I first have to thank my Lord Jesus Christ. And I wouldna gotten nowhere without my teammates. These guys have the heart of champions, you know, and when everyone was doubting us, we wasn’t doubting ourselves. We took what they gave us, we gave 110 percent, we played ‘em one game at a time, we…you look so cute. I wanna kiss yew.

You are currently writing a book, with a second on the way. Is there much tweaking of the idea during the proposal process, or did your concept come through fairly well unscathed?

I got incredibly lucky—the book I’m writing on the Georgia Bulldogs was suggested to me by my agent. He was having lunch with an editor who noted that SEC books always sell, but there hadn’t been a good Georgia one in awhile. So I got to thinking, and boom, the idea sort of blew out of my head full-grown.

My agent—who friggin’ rules—knew that the editor wanted the book. So he packaged it as a two-book deal—you want the Georgia book, you take another one by my boy. So I sold the entire Braves book on the basis of a single paragraph in an email.

The proposal itself, for both books, hasn’t changed significantly, no, so I was fortunate in that regard. But it did require a lot of prep work before I was ready to show anybody.

Have you always been good at meeting deadlines, or did you have to develop some new skills?

Decent, yeah, not great. I’m always looking for new ways to streamline what I do. And I’m having to resist the many temptations that are out there—the Internet, the TiVo, the Playstation, the whole bit. My major problem is one of overcommitment—taking on too many projects without finishing off the ones I’ve already committed to.

Interviewee’s choice - Your chance to wax poetic about how your family has inspired/enabled you, and stuff.

Hmmm…how about “Why does someone so devilishly handsome chain himself behind a computer in solitude?” No? So we’ll go with the family one. I was lucky enough to grow up in a very stable two-parent family in suburbia—lucky from a “good psychological foundation” perspective, but bad in the sense that I didn’t get that dark, brooding sense of imminent doom that torments and haunts most artists. However, I came from a large family, meaning that I had to be quick, loud, focused , and funny in order to get heard…all elements that have served me well even today.

Now, I’m lucky enough to be married to an insanely talented and driven wife who’s a partner in a law firm. She’s also an ex-UVa English major, so she knows enough to be able to tell me when my writing is just garbage. She’s completely supportive of my work, and there’s no way I could get as far as I have without her. And she doesn’t even know I’m writing this…but she probably should. It’d get me out of trouble once.

My kids love checking out my writing, but they’re spoiled little punks. I shamelessly abused my press pass to get them down close to the field before a Braves game and got Jeff Francoeur to come over and say hello and sign their stuff. Now, they’re pissed that I can’t get John Smoltz to come to their birthday parties.

Who Did What To The Who Now?

2007-11-06T22:58:00.000-05:00

Ever watched little kids on a playground? (If you're a single guy without kids, it's probably best not to answer that.) Anyway, if you've ever seen those little spinning merry-go-round things, where the big kids push the rails and the little kids hang on in the middle? And there's always one fat, dumpy kid who's trying and trying to jump on the merry-go-round, but always gets thrown off to the side? Well, friends, that fat kid is JayBusbee.com. While the cool kids, like Right Down Peachtree, get the primo spots on the playground and steal everybody's desserts, poor little JB.com goes neglected for weeks at a time. What can I say?

Well, I can say that with a bunch of non-sportswriting stuff on the horizon, it's time to get this site back up and running. I've just turned in the final script for the Incursion miniseries, a four-issue comic whose first issue is scheduled to hit two weeks from tomorrow. And I've got a few other comics projects in development and, potentially, back from the dead. Plus, there's some unfinished business on this site--those 23 Shows You Need To Be Watching, for instance--and I've got some good ideas for new posts, too, like where I actually go in and fill in some cultural gaps in my life (really listening to Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, for instance).

So, yeah--plans are for more to happen here on this side of the fence. And if not, well--blame the cool kids.

And no, there is absolutely no connection between that photo and this post. It's my first LOLCats, and I'm proud of it, so there you go.

Three Shots Of Happy, One Shot Of Sad

2007-09-26T23:26:00.000-04:00

Good day today. Wrote a piece over at Right Down Peachtree on ESPN's Michael Vick Town Meeting last night, and ended up getting quoted by both Deadspin and USA Today. (Same quote, but still.)

Next, this afternoon, I did an interview with Phil Niekro, one of my childhood heroes, while sitting in a Burger King parking lot. (It was a cell interview, though Phil may have been in a BK parking lot too.) It's for a Smoltz profile in ChopTalk next month.

Then tonight, I hit a headquarters-launching party hosted by TopRight Partners (who I've done some writing for in the past) and Camp Jam (who I...well, can't say anything yet.) Anyway, Camp Jam includes former members of .38 Special and guys who've played with Billy Joel and Sheryl Crow, among others, so the party had basically the coolest cover band of all time--except that you can't really call them "covers" when the guys that wrote those tunes are up there playing them. "Caught Up In You"--say what you will about '80s music, that's one of those solos that puts me right back in high school, so it was sweet to see it played live by the guy that wrote the tune in the first place. Music is cool.

What's not so cool is getting a pitch passed on. I don't know if I can mention this yet, so I won't go into details yet. But it involves comics, and the fact that the continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic book form has been a runaway success. A company I'm writing for asked me to envision what I'd do to continue a certain well-known series that recently ended. Pretty big assignment for just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world, like myself.

Anyway, The Powers That Be passed on the whole idea of a comic series. Hopefully I'll be allowed to post the pitches--one for what happened before the series millions saw and loved, one for what happened immediately after. But if not--hit me up sometime and I'll give ya the scoop.

Tomorrow...who the heck knows?

The Return Of 23 Shows You Should Be Watching: #17, Sleeper Cell

2007-09-25T21:18:00.000-04:00

Hey, we're back with 23 Shows You Should Be Watching. It's taken me so long to do this damn list, we've had some shows end and others begin and force their way onto this list. In order to keep things moving and close the door on this particular feature, let's dispense with the previous formatting and just rant a bit.

Okay, to start: Showtime, as a channel, is kicking HBO's ass. For shows that are still running, Dexter and Brotherhood top anything on HBO except The Wire. And Sleeper Cell was the top of Showtime's second tier, the kind of challenging terrorist-themed show that the networks wouldn't touch.

Basic plot: terrorists are all around us, plotting our doom even as they watch us at the shopping malls and restaurants. Sleeper Cell tries to give us a look inside the mindset of what makes these men tick, and I'd bet that some of the impetus from the series came from those stories of the 9/11 hijackers living it up in strip clubs on the night of September 10.

Sleeper Cell doesn't make terrorists sympathetic characters, but it does humanize them--which has the effect of making them even more terrifying. A trip to Dodger Stadium with kids is a cover for a reconnaissance mission; a mis-timed phone call to a relative results in horrifying consequences. The first season is much better than the second, which relies a bit too much on Roger Ebert's Law of Character Economy. It sure looks like we won't see another season, which is a shame, but you ought to check out Sleeper Cell Seasons 1 and 2 on your NetFlix, Blockbuster or iTunes. Good stuff.

Previous Shows:
#18: Heroes

#19: The Black Donnellys

#20: South Park

#21: The Simpsons

#22: Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip

#23: Friday Night Lights

You Will Think Less Of Me After Reading This Post

2007-09-16T23:15:00.000-04:00

God help me, I've got a P!nk song in heavy rotation on the ol' iPod. It's called "U + Ur Hand," and this may permanently obliterate my right to comment on music for any number of reasons:

1. It's a dance tune.
2. It's got that groovy new "text-message" typography right there in the title.
3. It's about a chick telling a dude to go jack it and leave her alone.
4. There is no 4.
5. It's P!nk, for chrissakes, a chick who puts punctuation in her name. And I thought Gn'R abbreviating the "and" to "n'" was goofy.

But man, there's something about this tune. I blame my wife; she's all into that Pat Benatar/Billy Idol '80s brassy in-your-face punk/dance hybrid junk, and that's exactly what "U + Ur Hand" is. It's like osmosis crossed with Stockholm Syndrome, man; stuff seeps into your brain and after long enough, you actually convince yourself you like it.

I think I need to go listen to some Cannibal Corpse to cleanse my palate.

New Book Pimpin': INCURSION

2007-09-04T18:45:00.000-04:00

And now it can be announced--I'm writing a new four-issue limited series from Platinum Studios entitled INCURSION. This is work-for-hire material; on this one, I'm the equivalent of a midseason pickup for the pennant drive. But I shall do my best Mark Teixeira impression--the baseball player, not the comics guy. (In this crowd, you need to make that distinction.)

The plot: a special ops team testing an experimental communications device in Afghanistan suddenly vanishes into thin air, leaving behind only their very confused sergeant. But they're not dead, just passed over into a world known as "Twilight." It's a world of perpetual war--so what happens when men trained for killing enter a land where they're not the predators, but the prey?

Nothing good, my friends. Nothing good at all. Except for the story itself. That's so good you'll throw your first-edition Hemingways in the trash to make room for CGC'ed copies of the fantabulous first issue!

INCURSION #1 hits this November. Contact your local comic shop to reserve yourself a copy, or order it online by clicking here. Get on it, man! The fate of two dimensions is in your hands!

Some News On RIPPED and THE NETWORK

2007-08-29T23:44:00.001-04:00

The comics business, she's a slow ho. Publishing schedules, creator schedules, shipping schedules--there are glaciers that move faster. But at last, it looks like we're getting RIPPED and THE NETWORK (click on the titles for more details) out to you, the buying public, early in 2008. Both are coming from Arcana Studio, and are scheduled to be out in April and March, respectively. Also, both will be graphic novels--a shift from the planned individual issues. We shall keep you posted here, friends.

Quick Podcast Link For Ya

2007-08-28T11:38:00.000-04:00

Check out my agent, Adam Chromy, on the Writers on Writing podcast (link to the iTunes store here). Some very useful information for aspiring writer-types. Enjoy!

"Am I Outraging You! I'm Trying Really Hard To Be Outrageous! Are You Outraged Yet?"

2007-08-05T17:01:00.000-04:00

From today's e-mail newsletter Bad Signal by Warren Ellis, who's clearly phoning today's entry in:

"I have no idea what happened the fateful night that Ms Lohan cracked the crust of stale, blood-flecked coke off her crotch and said to her soon-to-be-ex-assistant while snorting cough medicine up into her forebrain, 'shove your arm up there, girl. I want to come on your elbow.' Because the very rich are not like you and me..."

http://suicidegirls.com/news/culture/22049/

Come on, Warren, enough with the paint-by-numbers celeb/drug/sex nonsense. You've worn a groove on that riff deep enough to drive a truck into. Warren's a good writer, but from him, this kind of stuff's about as unexpected as Bill Simmons referencing '80s tv shows or Faulkner expounding on faded glories.

Or, you know, me shorthanding a post by quoting someone else. Whatever.

"Wow. Who'd've Thought That Voldemort Turned Out To Be Harry Potter's Father?"

2007-07-27T17:58:00.000-04:00

I succumbed. I bought the last Harry Potter book on Saturday, tore through it, enjoyed it thoroughly, and finished it off at lunch today. The verdict? Well worth the 10-20 hours it'll take you to finish it. Payoffs all around.

Here's the funny thing...I was reading the final, climactic showdown (come on, that's not a spoiler, you knew there was going to be a showdown) when what should come up on the restaurant's speakers but Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'". Now that's some franchise-ending synergy, pairing Harry Potter and the Sopranos. And while Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows doesn't hard-cut to black, there's still...well, I don't want to spoil it. We can carry on a spoiler-filled debate in the comments, if y'all are so inclined.

And on my way home, I started coming up with a Sopranos-Potter matchup, a genius work of parodic...uh, genius that would rule the Internet. And then I found someone beat me by a month. Damn zeitgeist! (Read it anyway, it's good.)

POSTCARDS Drops Today!

2007-07-24T20:44:00.000-04:00

For a writer, there's no thrill quite like seeing your work in print. And it's the goal of every writer to walk into a bookstore and see their work there on the shelves. I admit it, I'm a glory hound--every time I'm in a grocery store or bookstore carrying a magazine I've written something for, I flip to my article and point out my name to my kids. (Which is always followed by, "Fine, Dad. Can we get ice cream now?")

Today was a little different. Today saw the release of POSTCARDS, a landmark comics anthology featuring a ton of high-profile comics talent...and me. (Here's the backstory.) The brainchild of my pal Jason Rodriguez, POSTCARDS is the product of years of hard work (on Jason's part; mine was done in a dozen hours or so), and it absolutely shows. Plus, it's a hardcover book, and there's nothing quite like seeing your name on something that could cause actual physical damage when thrown. (One of my secret ambitions is to write a book large enough to be used as a weapon in a CSI episode.)

Anyway, go buy POSTCARDS. Trust me, you're gonna love it. And if you don't, you can throw it at your enemies.

Workblog, and Chicago Sports Weekly Piece

2007-07-23T15:22:00.000-04:00

Working on several different quick articles this week while trying hard not to chuck it all and read the rest of the last Harry Potter book. (Yes, I succumbed. But I passed it off as a birthday gift to my daughter.) Here's what's up:

-A piece on the Atlanta Kookaburras, the city's Australian-rules football team.
-A piece on the Chicago Cubs' minor-league system, and how it's finally paying some dividends.

Here's a piece I wrote on NASCAR for the Chicago Sports Weekly, with maybe my favorite headline ever: Speed, Greed, and Alcohol.

POSTCARDS comes out tomorrow. Big post on it coming.

Everybody Say Hello To Our Sister Site, RIGHT DOWN PEACHTREE. No, You Can't Date Her.

2007-07-20T13:43:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, it's with great vengeance and furious anger -- no, wait, with great pride and furious joy --- that I'm announcing the latest entry elbowing its way into the sports blogosphere: Right Down Peachtree.

"Right Down Peachtree," the phrase, refers to a pitch thrown right through the heart of the strike zone. Right Down Peachtree, the blog, will be a division of Atlanta magazine, which is in the process of revamping its entire web presence to take advantage of this whole Internet thing, which looks like it might just stick around awhile. And the powers that be at Atlanta have tapped yours truly to run the show, and it's my aim to make this the first, best stop for news, commentary, and silliness on all things Atlanta sports. Gosh, if only there were stories coming out of Atlanta these days to write about...

Anyway, I'll have podcast capability too, with the eventual intention of getting various Braves, Falcons, Hawks, Thrashers, Bulldogs, Jackets, and assorted journalists/bloggers/local celebs/opinionated fans on the line for some yapping. Atlanta is also giving me a monthly print column, which will pose a bit of a scheduling challenge -- six weeks' lead time for the print version, six seconds for the blog.

Launch date for the blog will be September 1. Trust me, you'll be hearing a thing or two about it before then. And if you have recommendations or features/ideas/stories you'd like to see explored, email us or post your thoughts here. And join me on Peachtree in six weeks!

The First Pages Of POSTCARDS

2007-07-19T15:49:00.001-04:00

Jason has posted the first page of every story from the upcoming POSTCARDS anthology at the Eximious Press website. Check 'em out. Mine and Tony Fleecs' is the one in the top right corner.

New Project: Dear Santa, Let Me Explain...

2007-07-19T15:36:00.000-04:00

I'm at work on the second draft of a very cool project hatched by my man James W. Powell of Eximious Press, half of the editorial braintrust behind POSTCARDS (hitting next week!). Entitled Dear Santa, Let Me Explain... , it's an anthology of Christmas stories gone horribly wrong. My own entry, entitled "Heir to the Beard," will be about the lineage of Santa impersonators that runs through our family. My dad used the beard to entertain the kiddies; I started out using it to get college chicks to sit on my lap. (Whatever works, bro.)

The anthology won't be ready until XMas 2008, but it's going to be a fun ride getting there.

Don't be naughty, bitches.

The New JayBusbee.Com Manifesto

2007-07-18T17:09:00.000-04:00

Friends, readers, countrymen (and women)...I'm in a conundrum. As you can see by the date of the post just previous to this one, I haven't exactly been updating this blog with lightning speed. 48 days in Internet time is, like, what -- six years? I've been juggling multiple assignments of late, and JayBusbee.com has been the ball that the juggler drops and kicks to the side, lest it slide under his foot and totally screw up his entire...well, you get the point.

But, since this site does bear my name, I feel something of an obligation to, you know, not let it wither and die. Bad karma, that.

What, then, to do with JayBusbee.com?

In poker terms, I'm tightening up. I'm refocusing this site to be All About Me. (Hey, self-love is the purest love of all...even if it's often forbidden.) There are plenty of sites that do half-ass book and movie and comic and TV reviews; once in awhile I'll be one of 'em. But I've got a ton of material coming out over the next two-plus years, stuff that needs some serious pimping and stuff that I'd love to give you behind-the-scenes looks at.

So here's what's on the horizon, now and in the future:

-Sports Gone South continues to hum right along, picking up server-crushing links from Sports Illustrated and others every so often. Read it for your daily fix of Southern sports idiocy.

-I've got a new gig relaunching a sports blog for a major publication, but since I don't know if I can talk about it yet, I'll have to keep quiet about it for another few days. Launch is scheduled for August, and it's going to put my sophomoric humor in front of a crapload of people, whether they like it or not.

-Two new comics, RIPPED and THE NETWORK, are nearing release dates. More info on them here.

-Also on the comics front, next week, POSTCARDS hits, with my short story "Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland" within. Check the home site for more info on it; I'll post the reviews that mention my contribution here. The rest of them can go screw.

-And still more comics -- I'm writing a four-issue miniseries for Platinum Studios. It's a scripting gig--the story's already compiled; I'm just putting words in the characters' mouths. Hopefully nouns AND verbs. Maybe even an adjective or two, if I'm lucky. Contract's in hand; I'll announce it as soon as I'm permitted to. Scheduled for release January-April of 2008.

-Whew--even more comics -- A one-shot for Arcana Comics that's kind of like...well, remember how badass that scene in Fellowship of the Rings was when everyone was trapped underground in the dwarf mines? It's like that...except not fantasy.

-I'm also a regular contributor to the Chicago Sports Weekly, Bluff, Atlanta, ChopTalk, and the William & Mary Alumni Magazine, and have stuff coming out from each of them in the next few days/weeks/months.

-Finally, down the line, I've got three books in progress -- one on the Braves' playoff dynasty (scheduled publication: Spring 2009), one on the Georgia Bulldogs' championship season (scheduled publication: Summer 2010), and a third that I don't want to talk about yet because I haven't submitted the proposal but it's really cool and will have some GREAT behind-the-scenes stories. Hold On Loosely, that's all that I can tell you...

Amid that, I still do environmental and other business writing.

So there you have it. More frequent updates, more solipsism. Come back soon, y'hear?

Southern (Sort Of) Lit: Robert Stone's Prime Green

2007-05-30T13:03:00.000-04:00

Something about the Sixties has always both fascinated and bugged the hell out of me. While I've always been fascinated by the darker margins of the era -- the climate that led to assassinations and Hunter S. Thompson -- I've never had a whole lot of patience for the determined naivete of the hippie movement, which wrapped admirable goals and ambition in a gauzy, almost childlike haze from which modern liberalism has never really recovered.

Which is exactly what makes Robert Stone's memoir, Prime Green, such a maddening book. Stone was one of the few people present during several of the Sixties' highwater marks -- Ken Kesey, San Francisco, Vietnam -- with both the vision and ability to put his recollections into coherent form. Stone, the author of several outstanding novels including A Hall of Mirrors, had an astonishing opportunity here to put an authoritative stamp on a much-examined period of history...but rather than a home run, he ends up with, at best, a ground-rule double.

In the memoir, we follow Stone from his Korean-war era days in the Navy through an enviable progression across the world, from New Orleans to California to New York to Paris to Vietnam. We get some fascinating snippets, like the story of a cross-country bus trip that nearly turns tragic when some military men get a good look at the bearded, countercultural Stone, but ultimately this book comes up short in presenting anything of real depth. Stone's an exceptional writer but an essentially pessimistic one, and he misses the chance both to give in-depth perspective on an era and to dig into self-examination -- his own children get scant mention.

Bottom line: there are outstanding, timeless books about the Sixties -- HST's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test first among them. It's a shame Stone didn't make the pantheon.

Southern Lit: Tim Dorsey's Hurricane Punch

2007-05-23T15:21:00.000-04:00

Tim Dorsey's a writer you either get or you don't. He's slapstick combined with absolute on-the-ground realism, social commentary woven within satire so broad you can't even see the edges of it. And man, any time he's got a new book coming out, I'm right there.

His latest, Hurricane Punch, came out earlier this year, and I finally had a few minutes to finish it off last weekend. See, a Dorsey novel isn't something you can flip through while waiting in line at the bank or whatever. No, it requires a mindset, preferably with some Buffett on the radio and a cold beer at your side. This is literature as lifestyle.

Dorsey's specialty is Florida crime, in that genre that combines comedy and violence into a hybrid that nobody's seemed to come up with a good name for -- "black comedy" doesn't quite get it (and has some unfortunate connotations for anybody not particularly well-versed in literary theory), and "crimedy" sounds just stupid. Whatever -- it's crime, it's humor, and the two mesh perfectly.

With Dorsey, the destination's not nearly as important as the ride. He picks a theme -- the film industry, Florida politics, ecoterrorism -- and cuts his two creations, Serge and Coleman (sort of a more homicidal version of Earl and Randy Hickey, though created years before) loose to wreak intentional and unintentional havoc. Hurricane Punch's theme is in the title -- no, it's not punch -- and Dorsey does his best to batter his state with as many hurricanes as possible in a single season, wrapping them in a murder mystery, psychotherapy, kidnapping, and delusions of Hendrixdom. (You kinda have to read the book.)

With Serge, a serial killer with a conscience, Dorsey is in an enviable position for a writer. He's created a character who can literally become anything -- politician, actor, doctor, Mafia don -- and it'd not only be believable, it'd be conceivable. Serge's fascination with all things Florida gives Dorsey a limitless canvas on which to work. I'd imagine many of the bars mentioned by name in here have their own little paragraphs framed up and mounted on the wall. (Reminds me of the time I was in the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen, famed stomping grounds of the late Hunter S. Thompson. Framed right next to the exit was a blank waiter's ticket on which Hunter had scrawled, "I promise never to throw smoke bombs in the bar again. HST.")

Dorsey's also got a kind of metafiction going on in his books, where certain of his characters act like their equivalent cliches -- the hardboiled Raymond Chandleresque detective, the hardbitten crew of roughneck marines, the naughty pair of gorgeous hitchhikers -- but it's done in a winking, knowing way. It's tough to explain, but it's clear that Dorsey knows he's playing with someone else's toys and having fun with their limitations, like a master chef cooking up Pop Tarts.

The Serge/Dorsey freight train could literally run another fifty years; in Florida, when they ran out of land, they built bridges over the water. I wouldn't mind seeing another departure from Florida; Serge has visited New York and Hollywood, but D.C., New Orleans, and -- God forbid -- Europe and Asia remain as yet untouched.

So Tim, if you're reading this, see what you can do about sneaking Serge and Coleman onto a Chinese oil tanker. They'd be a hell of a lot more fun to see in action than Jack Bauer.

The Best Music Of 2006 (Yes, 2006.)

2007-05-22T21:10:00.000-04:00

We're within spitting distance of Memorial Day and summertime, so hey -- why not a post recapping my favorite music of 2006? (Shut up -- I've been busy with Sports Gone South.) Anyway, we did this in 2004 and 2005, so here's the latest version:

Song of the Year: "Dani California," Red Hot Chili Peppers -- Yes, it sounds exactly like Tom Petty's "Mary Jane." So what -- the roaring chorus and the Hendrixian outro solo make this the best "Snow Peppers" (as my boy calls them) song since "Suck My Kiss."

CD of the Year: "Stadium Arcadium," Red Hot Chili Peppers -- Hey, a twofer! The Peppers' CD was overlong, yes, but man -- every single one of these songs sounded at once new and completely familiar, and I mean that in a good way. They tuned into something primal on this one...this is the Platonic ideal of a Chili Peppers record.

Late to the Party Award (for the song I discovered after the rest of the world): "Sugar, We're Going Down," Fall Out Boy -- Yes, I seriously jammed on Fall Out Boy this year. No, I'm not a fifteen-year-old girl. Yes, I'm very, very sorry. But the beats and the rhymes were so dope...

"Gravity's Gone," Drive-By Truckers: Subpar (for them) CD, but this all-timer of a song, which includes the best lyric of the year: "She woke up sunny-side down and I was still thinking I was too proud to flip her over."

"World Wide Suicide," Pearl Jam: You want an award for mid-career revival, you've got to look to Pearl Jam. After nearly a decade of meandering albums, they turned out a self-titled blast of rock that was a worthy companion to their early-90s high-water mark.

"Old Dan Tucker," Bruce Springsteen: The Boss got no end of grief for his decision to turn to a 15-piece folk band for his most recent CD, but man, if this song doesn't get you moving, you're an idiot. Sorry.

"When You Were Young," The Killers: Springsteen's self-styled heirs had a bit of trouble matching his verbal dexterity--what the hell does it mean to be "burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane," anyway? But it was fun rock, even if it wasn't as great as the band seemed to think it was.

"White Unicorn," Wolfmother: ROOOOOOCK! These guys brought back Deep Purple/Zeppelin arena rock without irony, and damn, did it sound good. A bit like eating warmed-over pizza, but that's usually still pretty good.

"This Is How I Disappear," My Chemical Romance: Wow. For an emo band, these guys damn near tore heads off with this song.

"Idlewild Blue," Outkast: I don't know what the hell they were doing with that whole "Idlewild" project, but this funk/flapper mashup was one of the smoothest tunes of the year.

"The Man," Pete Yorn & the Dixie Chicks: Great slice of beautiful/creepy alt-country.

"I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor," Arctic Monkeys: These Brits sound so damn snotty you want to beat them on general principles, but they can write a hell of a tune.

"High School Never Ends," Bowling For Soup: See Fall Out Boy above. Again, I'm sorry. I can't help myself. It's my hair-metal roots. Big guitars get me every time.

"Rise," Eddie Van Halen: Like here. This was a soundtrack to a porn movie, for chrissakes, and I still dug it.

"Cosmopolitan," Nine Black Alps: Where the hell did this song come from? More snotty punk with chainsaw guitars, but damn good.

"Fragments," The Who: Kind of a legacy vote here for one of my favorite bands from high school. This is okay, I guess, but outside of the slick production, the cascading keyboard notes are straight outta 1973.

"James River Blues," Old Crow Medicine Show: Neo-Appalachian folk that name-checks some of my old haunts. Like Springsteen above, a little goes a long way...but that little works damn fine.

Okay, that's probably enough for now...there were some other notables, like U2's "Window To The Skies," Beck's "Nausea," Kasey Chambers' "The Rain," Vaux's "Are You With Me?", and Jimmy Buffett's "Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On," but this ought to serve. Please don't hate me.

Pimp My Portfolio: Esquire

2007-05-21T16:02:00.000-04:00

Ever feel like buying a pro sports team? Your dream could be closer than you think...assuming, of course, you've got six figures or so of disposable income. (What, you don't?) Check out my article for Esquire by clicking here, and you too can learn how to become a lil' Steinbrenner.

Flickadaweek: Casino Royale

2007-05-21T15:52:00.000-04:00

I have kids. I have a writing career that pulls me in seventy-three different directions. As a result, I generally don't get to see many movies in the theater. So I'm pretty much seven months behind the rest of American society when it comes to the Movies You Must See. (Exception: I saw Spider-Man 3 the weekend it came out. When it's a summer movie, you gotta love the energy of a crowded theater. Any other time, you're tempted to test that limits-of-free-speech bit by lighting a fire in the sticky underseat goo.)

But anyway. I finally got around to seeing Casino Royale, the new Bond flick, and man, was it worth the wait. Hands down the best Bond flick ever, and probably one of the top five action movies ever. Bond-o-philes, that desperate crew of Dwight Schrutelike wannabe secret agents, wailed and moaned when relative unknown Daniel Craig was tapped to be the new Bond. Turned out to be a franchise-saving move. Pierce Brosnan brought a haunted, evil edge to Bond, far better than anybody since Connery, but Craig gives him the empty conscience of Tony Soprano, but with a stronger moral code.

The plot -- well, this is kind of like "Bond Begins," in that we see Bond before he's ever earned his "Double-0" status. He's tasked to bring down Le Chiffre, a French financier whose cataracted eye is the only nod to camp in this whole movie. In the course of the movie, you've got unbelievable chase scenes, both by car and on foot; the requisite (but still astonishing) hairsbreadth escapes, and an agonizing post-Abu Ghraib torture scene that will have you clutching your own double-0s.

Plus, the flick does what 24 has never seemed to figure out -- heightens the tension by breaking it now and then. Early in the movie, Bond and a nameless villain are fighting atop a crane. The villain empties his gun, then in classic '30s bad guy style, throws the gun. Bond catches the gun and fires it back, Roger Clemens-style, right at the bad guy's skull, nearly knocking the guy off the crane. Great stuff...and not a single Bond-gadget scene with Q.

Anyway, you see this, and it gives you hope for intelligent action movies. Highly recommended.

Flickadaweek: The Wild Bunch

2007-04-16T14:08:00.000-04:00

There aren't many more famous images in cinema than the one that kicks off The Wild Bunch. It's just after the turn of the twentieth century, and we're in a tiny Texas border town. A bunch of kids are giggling at something in the street, and the camera pans in to see what it is: an enormous, venomous scorpion being overrun by hundreds of tiny ants.

You don't need to be a film critic to see the metaphor at work here.

The Wild Bunch is the kind of major-studio picture that can't be made anymore. We don't have the actors, we don't have the attention span, we don't have the studio will to get this kind of unsettling tale made any longer. We need happy endings now, or violence so far detached from our reality that we can keep it at a distance. The Wild Bunch has neither.

It's the story of a group of aging bank robbers on the run from bounty hunters, trying desperately to bargain their way out of the end that they know is imminent. You've got crusty guys like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, guys who don't know how to live life within shouting distance of the law. They watch as one of their number, the young, impassioned Angel, methodically gets everything stripped from him-wealth, dignity, his girlfriend-with a kind of sad detachment. They know that time's a bitch, and as they look at the wreckage of their lives, you can't help but look at your own history in the same way.

I'm not enough of a film scholar to talk in more than the vaguest terms about this, but this sort of apocalyptic ennui runs through a lot of the films of the late '60s and early '70s-Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Bonnie & Clyde...hell, even Planet of the Apes has this kind of end-of-the-world vibe to it. Maybe it was the specter of Vietnam, the end of American invincibility, the end of JFK's Camelot, Nixon's betrayal of the American people...whatever it was, this was a seriously dark period for movies. (Star Wars stopped that movement dead in its tracks, and we'll never recover from the big-budget excess it inspired.)

Like many of the films of the era, The Wild Bunch these days works more as metaphor than as story; there are too many fits, starts, and pregnant pauses for contemporary audiences to digest easily. But it's still a worthwhile film, one with ambition and meaning. Well worth seeing.

POSTCARDS: True Stories That Never Happened

2007-04-12T16:59:00.000-04:00

Cool picture, huh? That's an image from a story I contributed to POSTCARDS, a kick-ass new comics anthology that's coming out in June from Random House and Eximious Press. This thing's a work of art -- my own contribution notwithstanding -- and you're going to want to get your hands on a copy. I'll tell you how in a moment.

Some background info: POSTCARDS is the brainchild of Jason Rodriguez, a longtime friend whom I've only actually met once. (God bless the Internet.) A few years back, Jason and I met on a messageboard commiserating over the state of a Marvel Comics initiative to bring new writers into the fold. (It was a good idea but mishandled from the get-go.) Jason's not content with the traditional pitch-pray-bitch route of the wannabe comics writer; he worked his way into a job editing the late, lamented Western Tales of Terror anthology, then developed an entire website devoted to making comics better, and now is putting his money where his mouth is by creating one hell of a good anthology.

The basic premise of POSTCARDS stems from some postcards Jason found while antique shopping with his girlfriend--surely the one instance in all of recorded history that a guy dragged along on a shopping trip ended up with something rewarding. Each of the weathered postcards he found contained some cryptic note about war, quarantine, lost love, hopes, dreams, fears, you name it. It was fertile ground for storytelling, and Jason decided to see who he could bring aboard to help him tell the "stories" behind these postcards. He recruited some serious heavyweights in the industry, and it's to his everlasting credit that he didn't forget his friends, bringing aboard me and some other relatively inexperienced types as well.

I may be the Christian Laettner on this Dream Team, but thanks to my artist, Tony Fleecs, I've got a pretty damn good entry in the anthology, if I do say so myself. It's called "Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland," and it stars the two young ladies pictured above. I don't want to give anything away, but it's absolutely unlike anything else I've ever written in my life. No strippers, no wiseass gunplay, no explosions...just a story of missed opportunities and prayers for forgiveness. The quote at left is a line from the original postcard that inspired the entire story.

So, how do you get POSTCARDS? Best way to do it is order it through your local comic book shop. If that's not an option, go to Amazon through this link and pick yourself up a copy. Trust me, it's going to be some rewarding stuff.

Click on the banner below to visit the POSTCARDS site and learn about all the other cats who've made this book so great:

Then Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland...or I'll hunt you down and kick your ass.

Poker On The Down Low

2007-03-27T22:02:00.000-04:00

As I type this, I'm playing in a $3 + $0.30 no-limit hold-'em tourney over at Full Tilt Poker. And I'm going down fast--we're up to 150/300 blinds and I've got only about 1000 chips left. I'm currently placed 176 out of 197 players still alive (started with 566), and the top 99 will cash.

Why am I telling you this? Well, first, I want to see if I can finish this post before I get blinded out. (I've just been dealt three straight 4-hands--4-3, 4-5, 4-2, all off-suit. Thanks, dealer!) But next, I just want to make sure everyone's fully aware of how easily some douchebags in Congress--hey, 4-9, getting higher--can disingenuously wrap themselves in "patriotism" and casually screw millions of people. Last year, several sleazes in Congress attached a midnight rider to a port security bill that chokes off most sources of funding for online poker. Since Congress wasn't going to halt the port security aspect of things to protect poker, boom--online poker players suddenly found themselves having to leap tall buildings just to keep playing their games.

(Disclaimer: this is in no way comparable to the ways that people really get reamed by the government--see Katrina, Iraq, et cetera. It's just a dismaying, disheartening pain in the ass, is all.)

(Oof. And I'm out. Had a 4h-Qh--fours were on me like stink on Tara Reid tonight--and got beaten by a guy who flopped a set of Aces. Ah, well. Finished in 159th place.)

Anyway, if you're a poker player, or a fan of individual liberty, or--or just an American, dammit--you ought to consider throwing a couple bucks to the Poker Players Alliance to help get this horsecrap bill overturned--and, potentially, make it fully legal to play poker online in the United States.

And if you don't know how to play poker, by all means, let me teach you. Won't cost much.

The Week That Was @ Sports Gone South

2007-03-25T16:55:00.000-04:00

Here's what was shaking over at my sports site, Sports Gone South:

--Dogs have had enough of NFL players pushing 'em around, thank you very much.

--You never know what the winter thaw will bring to light...the story of a strange little discovery on a Chicago golf course.

--The Atlanta Hawks are winning...why aren't we happy?

--A recap of a Braves spring training game, with assorted Michael Jordan references.

--A postmortem of the Virginia Cavaliers' broken basketball season.

--The last word on NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow, courtesy of Dante and Randal from Clerks.

Entertainer-Fan Relations: Two Case Studies

2007-03-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

There's probably nothing more annoying at a concert than seeing some douche jump onstage and throw his arms in the air like he'd just won the New York Marathon. The only saving grace comes from seeing security dogpile on the guy. Except when they don't. Here are two examples of very different ways to handle fans onstage. First, the ever-recalcitrant Bob Dylan:

Personally, I prefer the more hands-on approach of Keith Richards:

That'll leave a mark...hopefully.

23 Shows You Should Be Watching: No. 18, Heroes

2007-03-22T21:01:00.000-04:00

Synopsis: Everyday, normal folks all over the world are suddenly finding themselves imbued with amazing powers. It's nothing that us comic-book geeks haven't seen several hundred times, but for the rest of y'all, it's brand-spankin'-new.
Why You Should Watch: I'll spare you the whole treatise on how comic book fans have been on to something all along because humanity's truest, most resonant tales are those of people empowered to mythological proportions (Gilgamesh, Achilles, Superman, Anna Nicole's rack). Heroes works because there's not a single costume to be found anywhere, because the person, not the power, is at the heart of this series. Again, this kind of street-level characterization of godlike beings is the kind of thing that the X-Men was doing back in 1973, but hey--whatever works to get the rest of the world to dig on comic-style stuff.
Key Scene: Every revelation of powers has been a good one, particularly those that misdirect--we think Peter Petrelli can fly, but it turns out he's only leeching off the powers of his brother, who can. And the real-world use of superpowers is dead-on--who wouldn't use invisibility to swipe a purse or knock over a jackass or two? My personal favorite, though, involves Hiro the merry time-stopping Japanese guy. Trying to save his beloved from having her skull opened like a can-opener, he disappears from a diner, leaving his friend Ando sitting there alone. And then, Ando walks over to a wall of pictures and sees Hiro in one of them, in a picture taken six months before.
Key Quote: "Save the cheerleader, save the world." It's all there--apocalypse and goofiness, destiny and tongue-in-cheekiness.
Fun Fact: NBC is going all-out on promoting Heroes, from running free episodes to publishing a graphic novel to putting together a video game to...jeez, who knows. If you've got more time than I do, though, you could get seriously lost in the NBC Heroes mini-site.

Southern Lit: "The Night Johnny Ace Died," James Lee Burke

2007-03-21T21:47:00.000-04:00

If you consider yourself any kind of knowledgeable reader--or any kind of writer at all--you need to check out James Lee Burke, the reigning king of Southern crime lit. I've written about his Dave Robicheaux novels before; check this link for my thoughts on that series.

He's also a damn talented short story writer, and he's got a collection called "Jesus Out To Sea" coming out this summer. I'm assuming his latest, "The Night Johnny Ace Died," will be in it, but in the meantime, you can get it for free by clicking right here and going to Esquire.com to read it.

"Johnny Ace" is the story of a couple of rockabilly musicians in the '50s who sit right on the cusp of breakout and crossover success--they're white and planning to record with black singing star Johnny Ace, but this is how the story begins:

He and Big Mama Thornton were taking a break backstage when it happened. The dance floor was covered with Mexican and black people, a big haze of cigarette and reefer smoke floating over their heads in the spotlights. White people were up in the balcony, mostly low-rider badasses wearing pegged drapes and needle-nose stomps and girls who could do the dirty bop and manage to look bored while they put your flopper on autopilot. Then we heard it, one shot, pow, like a small firecracker. Johnny's dressing-room door was partly opened and I swear I saw blood fly across the wall, just before people started running in all directions.

And with Johnny dead--either by his own hand or from outside forces, we don't know--it all goes downhill from there. In just a few thousand words, Burke packs in a novel's worth of heartache, longing, betrayal, desire, and regret, plus an appearance by Elvis himself (referred to here only as "The Greaser").

Whether you like Burke's brand of florid, over-the-top description probably depends on whether you're the kind of person who groans in delight or pain when Mom brings another overstuffed plate of food to the Thanksgiving table. Still, for all his rhetorical excesses, you can't deny that Burke's got some serious chops:

You know the secret to being a rockabilly or country music celebrity? It's not just the sequins on your clothes and the needle-nose, mirror-shined boots. Your music has to be full of sorrow, I mean just like the blood-flecked broken body of Jesus on the cross. When people go to the Assembly of God church and look up at that cross, the pain they see there isn't in Jesus' body; it's in their own lives. I'm talking about droughts, dust storms, mine blowouts, black-lung disease, or pulling cotton bolls or breaking corn till the tips of their fingers bleed. I went to school with kids who wore clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks...What I'm trying to say is, we come from a class of people who think of misery as a given. They just want somebody who's had a degree of success to treat them with respect.

Good stuff. Click the link, take 15 minutes and check it out. How many times can you see someone getting kicked in the junk on YouTube, anyway?

Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back

2007-03-20T21:39:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, my family used to vacation up in Virginia on this tiny little spit of land called "Deltaville" that jutted out into the Chesapeake. One summer, I remember I rode from Deltaville back to Richmond in my future aunt's convertible Camaro. Just her and me. She had long black hair that blew in every direction in the Lower Eastern Shore wind, and as we cruised the beachfront town, she put in Born to Run. And even though I was ten years old, man, I got it. And for two hours, I was living inside a Springsteen song.

It took a few years of wandering through the musical hinterlands of Rush, Zeppelin, Van Halen, et. al. before I made my way back to Springsteen. I've been hooked ever since, even though I'm living a life about as far as one can imagine from the Jersey Shore. I'll write some other time about the Springsteen live show I saw in Memphis, a singularly transcendent experience that was the finest concert I've ever seen.

Today's topic is the neo-Springsteens -- should I call them "Newce Springsteens"? No, no, I should not -- who are yelling and pining their way to the tops of the rock charts with a combination of soaring ambition and earthly subjects, ferris wheels and beaches and boardwalks and open highways and One Last Chances and all that flat-out awesome Americana. Kids too young to understand the mythology they're goofing around with are turning out some damn fine work, even if they're doing a lot of color-by-numbers.

The Killers have made the biggest popular smash, even if they seemed to construct their lyrics from a Springsteen magnetic-poetry kit, as with their hit "When You Were Young": "We're burnin' down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane that started turning when you were young..." I don't know what the hell it means, but with all those majestic guitars, it sure sounds cool. Lucero's "I Can Get Us Out Of Here Tonight" carries "Thunder Road"'s DNA like a child; it's one of the best songs of last year. The Hold Steady nails the epic guitar-piano-sax-glockenspiel sound of the best Bruce, rendering even the idea of puking at a concert in bold strokes. And Jesse Malin, whose Glitter in the Gutter was just released today, goes straight to the source, drafting The Boss himself for a duet entitled "Broken Radio." (Links take you to the iTunes store.)

The amazing thing about Springsteen is how relevant he remains; even putting aside last year's foray into folk music, he's still putting out incisive rock. I'm not sure how long any of these off-brand versions will be around, but it's damn good music while it lasts.

(Check out that shot of the Atlantic City boardwalk. Looks like it could have come from the '70's...but there's a Starbucks there! That's what you call blog-post synchronicity, homes.)

Flickadaweek: The Black Dahlia

2007-03-19T23:00:00.000-04:00

L.A. Confidential is one of the finest movies of the last 50 years, and I'll beat anybody who says different. Thus, any movie that treads in the same gumshoes has a huge mountain to climb. Of any contender, The Black Dahlia from last year brought the most storied pedigree to the table--the source material was the book of the same name by James Ellroy, the same cat who wrote L.A. Confidential. But the movie comes off as a TV-movie version of the same '40s-era Los Angeles.

Basic plotline: a couple of L.A. cops in love with the same gorgeous sex bomb find themselves enmeshed in a horrific crime investigation--a young would-be actress is vivisected, cut in half, and left along the side of a road. Naturally, there are no true "good" guys, and everyone owes a debt that comes due--often in bloody fashion--by the end of the movie.

The thematic structure is similar to Confidential, as well, which does Dahlia no favors--Josh Hartnett is a watery copy of Russell Crowe; Scarlett Johannsen is smokin' hot but doesn't have the black widow charisma of Kim Basinger; Aaron Eckhart is the best of the bunch but still can't match the manic intensity of Guy Pearce. It's got some fine and creepy moments--you can't go wrong with a bisected, leering corpse--but it also dissolves into some serious scene-chewing camp by the end of it all.

It's not a bad movie, certainly; director Brian de Palma nails the look of the era. But we're in the midst of a crime-drama renaissance on TV, so movies have to be much better than "not bad." This one ain't.

The Week That Was Over @ Sports Gone South

2007-03-18T13:58:00.000-04:00

I've moved all my sportswriting over to Sports Gone South...but let's not leave my loyal JB.com readers out in the cold. Here's what happened over there this week:

--I make the case the NBA hates white people (sort of), and some hoopsters in the know respond.

--We learn to love The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

--Falcons QB Mike Vick--who's dodging as many trainwrecks as defenders these days--opens a new restaurant. Absolutely no jokes ensue.

--In which we rant about taking the little guys seriously in the NCAA tourney.

Comics For People Who Don't Read Comics: Fables

2007-03-18T13:37:00.000-04:00

Continuing in my attempt to show that not every comic book is a teenage-male power fantasy where every problem's solved with angst and fistfighting, and every chick has a gigantic rack...not that there's anything wrong with that.

It begins with "Once upon a time," yet we're not in a mythical, faraway, pastoral land. We're in the heart of New York City--our New York City--which makes it all the more unsettling. Fables, an ongoing series from Vertigo, starts off by peeling back the mythological curtain, Wizard of Oz-style: every single fable, every single story, from Pinocchio to Snow White, the Three Pigs to creepy Middle Eastern tales you've never heard--they're all true. And not only are they all true--they walk among us unnoticed.

But Fables isn't some goofy unicorns-and-rainbows treacle. It pinballs between murder mysteries, conspiracies, detective stories, political intrigue--Grimm's Fairy Tales blended with James Ellroy. One of the series' overarching plot threads was the role of the Adversary, a mysterious, evil figure who drove most of the Fables out of Europe. The more human-looking Fables, like Snow White--now a powerful woman, and ready to kill anybody who mentions that business with the dwarves--settle in New York City. Less-human Fables like the Three Little Pigs are restricted to a farm in upstate New York--and they aren't exactly pleased. And the identity of the Adversary? You already know who he is--a well-known figure from literature--and while his identity would surprise you, it makes perfect sense in the context of Fables.

The canvas on which Fables creator can work is almost infinite; he's already turning his gaze to other cultures' fables for inspiration. Fables is well worth checking out; read the entire first issue by clicking here, and get the rest in collections off Amazon. Trust me...you'll never read Pinocchio the same way again.

23 Shows You Should Be Watching: No. 19, The Black Donnellys

2007-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Synopsis: Four Irish brothers find themselves awash in crime, drinking, brawling, gunplay, and broken hearts. It sounds like Stereotype Hell...but somehow it both embraces and transcends these well-traveled streets.
Why You Should Watch: Because it combines humor and violence, hope and hopelessness in a near-perfect balance that you don't often see on television. Most shows trying to balance on that line -- The Shield, say, or Rescue Me -- tilt too far in one direction or the other. The only reason The Black Donnellys is ranked this low is that we're only three episodes into the series -- there's plenty of time for it to move up the list.
Key Scene: At the end of the first episode, Tommy Donnelly realizes that the Italian mob is going to kill his brother Jimmy for kidnapping one of their bookies. So Tommy, until now a law-abiding guy, ices the head of the local Italian family -- and, for good measure, the head of the Irish family who was there to sell Jimmy out.
Key Quote: "He could have made it out, only he was never gonna let his brother get hurt again. And so Tommy became everything he never wanted. And whether he realized it or not, with Huey dead, Tommy'd just taken over the neighborhood." --Joey Ice Cream, friend of the brothers, recounting in an interrogation what Tommy did to the mobsters.
Key Quote 2: "Not those bodies." --One of the detectives, after Joey Ice Cream had told the hour-long story of Tommy's descent into the abyss. The episode began with the detective asking, "Where are the bodies?" and ended with the detective belting the camera -- Joey's POV -- with a telephone book.
Fun fact: The series was originally titled "The Truth According To Joey Ice Cream." Thankfully, that horrific title didn't survive to the second draft.
Fun fact 2: You can watch all the old episodes, plus an ultra-violent "web only" episode too rough for TV, by going to NBC's Black Donnellys site. Enjoy!

Southern Lit Review--"Deliverance," James Dickey

2007-03-14T23:54:00.000-04:00

It's tough to review Deliverance -- or, for that matter, any work that has so completely permeated the culture -- with anything remotely approaching objectivity. Deliverance, in both book and movie form, has arguably done more than anything short of Klansmen to damage the reputation and image of the South. Sure, inbred banjo-pickin' and sodomy existed long before James Dickey used them like machetes in his book, but Deliverance brought them to the mainstream. You can't even think of the story without thinking of Ned Beatty's "squeal like a pig" scene. (Beatty apparently came up with the line himself just before the one and only take of that scene; he's reportedly never spoken of it since.) And just to hear the opening notes of Dueling Banjos is enough to send a shiver up to all but the reddest of necks.

Anyway, the story: four Atlanta businessmen decide to go canoeing in some uncharted river territory in north Georgia. Being suburban, and thus stupid, they assume they can either bluster or buy their way through the rural country-ass society. They make enemies fast, and before you can say -- everybody at once now -- "squeal like a pig," they're in deep, the bodies are piling up, and the choices before them are ugly indeed. To tell more than that would spoil the story for those of you who don't know it. Suffice it to say that the horrific situations these men find themselves in don't sound nearly so funny when they uncoil around you like a nest of snakes.

The title is one of the most fascinating and unexplored elements of the book. "Deliverance" implies passivity -- a need for an outside entity to do the delivering. The question for these poor bastards is, who -- or what -- is delivering them, and what kind of world are they delivering them into? Our narrator talks at length of keeping settled in his humdrum, everyday existence; one of his colleagues continually rants about the need to bust out of that same box. And when events force them out of that hole, never to return to its comforts, well...it's not hard to project yourself into their shoes. Hopefully not Ned Beatty's.

Deliverance is one of the best novels of the 20th century. Read it...and beware of banjos.

On The Other Side Of "Have You Seen Junior's Grades..."

2007-03-13T22:56:00.000-04:00

Last night was a night I had been looking forward to, in some small way, for about twenty years. Last night, one of my all-time favorite bands, Van Halen, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Put aside the fact that America's one-time preeminent goofball rock band actually made a Hall of Fame...what's creepy is, I remember back during the days when I was really into the group, and I remember thinking, "They'll be eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2007 -- Christ, that's forever from now." And yet, here we are.

Now, I've written before about the influence Van Halen had on me as a kid, so there's no need to go back down that road now. What was sad about last night is how anticlimactic it all was. As you may or may not know, Van Halen has been a joke of a personnel mess for something like ten years now. Eddie Van Halen has gone through something like seven lead singers -- with David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar coming and going several times -- and the group most recently brought in Eddie's kid Wolfgang to play bass, ditching founding bassist (and luckiest man alive) Michael Anthony. Not to slag on Wolfie's bass skills -- I'm sure the kid's fifty times better than me while fast asleep -- but the kid was years away from being born when "Jump" ruled the world.

Eddie's in rehab, sadly, unable to kick the bottle. Alex, apparently, has no thought that runs counter to Eddie's. Ever. And Roth is a flat-out nutjob, the classic Old Guy In The Club, zap-a-doodle-ing long after everyone else has left the party, gone home, gotten jobs, and raised a kid or two. It's a little pathetic, the way he hangs onto the golden days of a quarter-century ago, but the poor bastard doesn't have much else going on in his life, apparently -- he's done tours as a radio DJ and an ambulance paramedic ("Wow! Hey hey! That leg's gonna get amputated today!")

Which leaves other lead singer Sammy Hagar and Anthony, the two most normal members of this absurd crew, and the only ones able to get their shit together to accept the induction. It was more than a little sad, seeing just the two of them onstage, beefier, a little frazzled and off-key, happily warbling their way through "Why Can't This Be Love?" And then poor Sammy got dissed beyond belief during the final jam number; Patti Smith and Michael Stipe are all about peace, love, and understanding, except when it comes to letting overgrown frat guys take the mike.

Okay, so there's not much left in the tank with Van Halen. And everyone outside the band now refers to them in the past tense. Still, raise a beer for these guys. For a few years, they were as good as rock music got...and a few years from now, when the neo-Eddies take over music once again, let's just hope the master's still around to lead 'em.

"Why In Pluperfect Hell Would You Pee On A Corpse?"

2007-02-16T16:55:00.000-05:00

The buddy-cop genre is so hackneyed at this point that it's impossible to envision how it could breathe again anytime soon. ("Okay, they're both cops -- but one's an alien! No, wait, they switch bodies! No, wait, they're buddies...but they're really the same person!") (Hang on...that last one has promise...)

Anyway, one of the men responsible for foisting the buddy-cop genre on us -- Shane Black, who wrote most of the Lethal Weapon flicks -- delivered this absurd little gem of a flick a year or so back. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang stars Robert Downey Jr. -- who's a hell of a fine actor, though nobody seems to remember that -- as a bank robber who stumbles into a career as an actor. There's also Val Kilmer -- another guy whose nut-job rep has overshadowed his acting chops -- as a gay detective who's so gay he's back around to straight. Add in several dead bodies, some hot chicks, dialogue that's so clever it knows it's being clever, and the line that kicks off this post, and you've got a damn fine two-hour flick. Check it out...you'll never handcuff a gay man without frisking him again.

A Way To Find 'Lost'

2007-02-15T10:59:00.000-05:00

Lost geekout alert on.

So I'm watching Lost these last couple weeks, and all I can think is, Holy crap -- these guys get guest stars from every cool TV show ever! I mean, we've already had Mal from Firefly as Kate's husband, the DA from Homicide as Judith's bus-smashed ex, and this week, it's Ma Caffey from Brotherhood as some kind of Oracle figure. (Best was Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia as one of the Others. If Charlie had shown up drunk in a hoodie ready to kick Sawyer's ass, Lost would instantly become the best TV show ever. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go to iTunes and download this free video of the funniest scenes of Philadelphia. Do it.)

Anyway, the show has kind of passed its sell-by date now that we're getting backstory on everybody and their freaking dog. And the mysteries aren't getting resolved, just strung out. When the promos say that "Next week, THREE BIG QUESTIONS will be answered!" you know you're heading toward Twin Peaks territory. If the show was proceeding logically, we wouldn't need to KNOW that questions were going to be answered...we'd be okay not knowing when that was going to happen.

That said...I like ol' Desmond, and I love the idea that Lost is actually a show about him. How cool is that possibility -- that the entire plane thing is actually incidental, that this is a show about one man being lost and his true love trying to find him? It's a great idea...not sure it's what the writers have in mind, but it's a lot more interesting than three-toed statues and big black Adebisi-killing clouds.

Oh, and some obsessed fan has already created a website about Desmond. God bless the Internets.

(Yes, I know that's a picture of Charlie. But it's an action figure which is kind of creepy in its detail. Oh, and it doesn't move. So...inaction figure, then?)

Same Room, Different Worlds

2007-02-04T17:27:00.000-05:00

Strange little weekend here that hit the gamut of my career. Saturday night, I was a guest of ChopTalk magazine at the annual banquet of the Braves 400 Club, the 40-plus-year-old fan club of the Atlanta Braves. Got to hang with Dale Murphy, Phil Niekro, and Sid Bream, who scored the most famous run in Braves history. It was 1992, final game of the National League Championship Series. Los Bravos were down 2-0 to Barry Bonds and the Pittsburgh Pirates, bottom of the ninth, two out. But the Braves rallied to score three runs, the final one coming on Sid's gimpy-kneed hobble toward home as Bonds' throw went wide. The Braves won the game and perpetuated the dynasty that won another twelve division titles. It's one of the finest moments in baseball history, hands down.

The birth of my kids was pretty cool and all, but Sid's Slide was right up there.

So the next day (that would be today), I went to the exact same hotel in the exact same room to hang with artist Jason Flowers and sign promo copies of my upcoming book RIPPED. Also added to my original art collection by buying the original of this page from Civil War #5:

So, yeah...Braves, comics...a good weekend.

Deleted Scene: The Racist Relations

2007-02-02T17:33:00.000-05:00

Here's a lead I wrote and discarded for an upcoming Chicago Sports Review story on black coaches in the NFL:

We’ve all got a version of the story I’m about to tell. Here’s mine.

I’ve got a relation who’s about as racist as you can get. But not in the burning-crosses-on-the-lawn kind of way; he views the races the way a baseball fan views his favorite team. The white race is his Red Sox; blacks are his Yankees.

In one of those grand little cosmic jokes, he was a National Guardsman sent to keep the peace at Ole Miss in 1962 when James Meredith broke the color barrier. “Can you imagine that,” he once laughed, “me guarding a—” …you can finish the sentence yourself. But he delivered it in the bemused tone of a Sox fan asked to wear a Derek Jeter jersey.

Thing is, thirty years after that operation, his daughter happened to meet one Michael Jordan at a bar somewhere and got her photo taken with him. The photo hangs on his refrigerator to this day. I once asked him how pissed he’d be if his daughter brought Michael Jordan home as her new boyfriend.

“Not a bit,” he said. “He’s one of the good ones.”

Southern Lit Review: "Nature Girl," Carl Hiaasen

2007-02-01T20:27:00.000-05:00

I'm an idiot. The biggest sporting event in the world is coming to South Florida (the Super Bowl, for my too comics-obsessed readers), and I just left Miami Beach. But it was good while it lasted. I spent several January afternoons hanging by the pool, surfing my way through Carl Hiaasen's latest, Nature Girl.

I can't be remotely objective about Hiaasen; the guy completely reshaped the way I look at (and write) literature. He's witty, funny, lushly descriptive, openly agenda-driven, and eminently readable -- five categories that you'll hardly ever find applied together to most post-World War II literary elites. He may not have created the wacky-Florida-crime genre, but he brought it to the mainstream. Plus, he's counted among his friends Warren Zevon and Jimmy Buffett, which makes him a lot cooler than any writer this side of Hunter S. Thompson has any right to be.

His latest, Nature Girl, is classic Hiaasen. We've got the classic semi-psychotic independent single mother, the unreflective sleazebag, two hotties, a precocious kid, a sex-addled stinking lump of a man, and a goofball half-white Seminole Indian. They all get slammed together in the Everglades' Ten Thousand Islands, and gunplay, sex, and murder result.

The plot? Really, it doesn't matter, any more than the "plot" of a rollercoaster. But if you must -- Honey Santana, the single mom, gets an insulting phone call from telemarketer/sleazebag Boyd Shreave. She invites Shreave and his ladyfriend to Florida under the guise of selling them Everglades property; on the journey out there, they run into Sammy Tigertail (the half-white Seminole, formerly known as Chad McQueen) and a Florida State coed (also a Seminole) who's attached herself to Sammy like a horny barnacle. They're also getting chased by Louis Piejack, a lust-addled fishmonger who got several fingers nipped off by stone crabs and then reattached -- in the wrong places.

Sound good? It's some bizarre stuff, definitely, requiring a particular sense of humor. Hiaasen doesn't translate well to other media, but that's probably a good thing -- he's best taken in immersive form. While Nature Girl may not be his best -- there's a bit of get-t0-the-point,-Carl that starts to creep in in the last 50 pages -- it's still Hiaasen, and I'm still there for it. Check him out for yourself.

Oooof. And Hmmm.

2007-01-16T22:26:00.000-05:00

Gone for a month? My God, what a slackass I am. (Okay, I have been blogging...just not here. Go over to www.sportsgonesouth.com for a more updated blog. All the cool kids are over there.) Anyway, yeah, I haven't blogged. So what. You get what you pay for here, homies.

A bunch of backed-up stuff is on tap, including the rest of the 23 Shows You Should Be Watching, 2006's Top Tunes and Hall of Fame, and updates on all the various books, comics, et cetera I'm working on these days.

But first, to whet your appetite, a little eyebrow-raising scene. From my own Sundown: Arizona #2 back in late '05:

...and now a page from this month's Jonah Hex #15. Note the similarities in the unconventional use of a seating device:

If Hex descends into nearby mines and starts shooting vampires next month, heads are gonna freakin' roll.

23 Shows You Need To Be Watching: #20, South Park

2006-12-06T20:55:00.000-05:00

Holy crap...you make one blog post, you turn around, it's a week later. My God, time is flying. Good stuff coming up to report...but not now. Now, we gotsta get back to the TV.

20. South Park
Synopsis: As with The Simpsons, if you don't know by now, my friend, there ain't no helping you.
Why You Should Watch: You've got to love a show that not only skewers every sacred cow imaginable, but grills 'em up and serves 'em with fries. Anybody can make fun of the handicapped or the mentally disabled, but South Park has reached this weird house-of-mirrors level where creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone know they're going over the line, then their audience knows they're going over the line, then they try to go even farther, then the audience pushes them even farther still, and everybody collapses in a heap of "holy crap, are we really laughing at this?" And unlike the desperate, pandering Family Guy, you generally don't catch South Park trying to be funny...it is or it isn't, and if a show doesn't work, the guys hose it down and move on to the next target.
Key Scene: Last season, Paris Hilton stumbled into town and announced opening a store called "Stupid Spoiled Whore." So far, cinema verite. But then, during the grand opening, she demonstrated exactly how much of a whore she was by stuffing an entire pineapple...well, you figure it out. Then Mr. Slave, the gay lover of Mr. Garrison, leaps up in the air and swallows up Paris Hilton in several gulps, boa constrictor style. However, he's not using his mouth. If you can figure out what happened--and if you're not sufficiently horrified--then South Park might be the show for you.
Best quote: "I would never let a woman kick my ass. If she tried something, I'd be like, 'Hey! Woman! Get your bitch ass back in the kitchen and make me some pie!'" --words to live by, by Eric Cartman.
(Yes, I know the picture isn't from the show itself, but from a video game. Still, Cartman...Hitler...can't go wrong with that combo.)

Previous shows
#21: The Simpsons
#22: Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
#23: Friday Night Lights

23 Shows You Need To Be Watching: #21, The Simpsons

2006-11-29T23:30:00.000-05:00

More on my look at the 23 best shows on TV today...

21. The Simpsons
Synopsis: Oh, come on.
Why You Should Be Watching: Look, if you're not by now, you never will. It's a cultural icon, a touchstone for the late twentieth century, blah blah blah. It's one of the best tv shows ever, and the only reason it's so far down on this list is that it's deep into retread mode now. After what, 17 years? it's only natural for the show to lose a few feet off its fastball. It's settled into a comfortable rut...this week, Homer becomes [insert occupation] or the Simpsons visit [insert exotic location]. It's still funny stuff, but it's mostly very, very familiar funny stuff.
Key scene: Where to start? My personal favorite was the Halloween "Harry Potter" episode where Bart was to turn a frog into a prince, but he forgot to do his homework and so just babbled out nonsense, turning the frog into a vomiting half-human that gurgled "kill me!" The show also still has a surprise or two, as with the recent Halloween episode that mocked the U.S. occupation of Iraq--and ended with a long, silent shot of a demolished Springfield.
Best line: Again, so many to choose from..."Hoy! Hoy!"..."Alcohol--the cause of--and solution to--all of life's problems"..."I wash myself with a rag on a stick"...and so on, and so on, and so on.

Previous Shows:
#22: Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
#23: Friday Night Lights

Haya Doon, Y'all?

2006-11-28T23:21:00.000-05:00

Goddammit, I've lived in the South my whole life, and I end up with a "Midland" accent? (Though the "big southern cities" bit is dead-on, I guess.)

I blame TV. But then, I apparently should be working in it, too.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The South
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The West
The Northeast
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

23 Shows You Should Be Watching: #22, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip

2006-11-28T12:32:00.000-05:00

Continuing my breakdown of the twenty-freaking-three TV shows I'm watching these days...

22. Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
Synopsis: Behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-esque show. Not the one with Alec Baldwin.

Why You Need To Watch: Because it's Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing. He's a hell of a writer, spiraling out dialogue like a lawn sprinkler, with one of the few distinctive visual and literary styles now on TV. Plus, Matthew Perry actually has range as an actor...who'd'a thunk it?

Key Moment: When NBC announced that Sorkin would be doing the show, and it would star Chandler and Josh Lyman. Since then, it's been...well, I wouldn't say disappointing, but there's just something about a bunch of millionaires working to fill a 90-minute sketch comedy show that lacks the gravitas of the moral and social dilemmas of the West Wing. Plus, there are weak-ass cheap shots at red-staters that underline Hollywood's leftward tilt while claiming to deny it. So at the moment, it's like watching Allen Iverson in a church league.

Quote: "We're all being lobotomized by this country's most influential industry that's just throwing in the towel on any endeavor to do anything that doesn't include the courting of twelve-year-old boys. And not even the smart twelve-year-olds, the stupid ones, the idiots, of which there are plenty, thanks in no small measure to this network. So why don't you just change the channel? Turn off your TVs. Do it right now. Go ahead." --Studio 60's outgoing executive producer. It's a good message, but the way that it's force-fed down your throat, it's almost like a double-helping of broccoli.

Previous Shows:
#23, Friday Night Lights

23 Shows You Should Be Watching: #23, Friday Night Lights

2006-11-27T22:08:00.000-05:00

When I decided to write about the TV shows I watch, and you should too, I scared the hell out of myself. As it turns out, I make time for TWENTY-THREE shows, not counting all the ballgames, flip-arounds, and gotta-stop-and-watch'es (Raising Arizona, Goodfellas, the Godfathers, the Man With No Name westerns). It's a depressingly huge number, only slightly mitigated by the fact that not all of these shows cycle at the same time.

What's weird is that I almost never just sit and watch the tube -- I'm always engaged in something else at the time, like, say, writing blog posts. Still, the volume of this list, combined with the fact that I can't stand 90 percent of the "top" TV shows -- the CSI and Law & Order franchises, reality TV, Desperate Housewives/Gray's Anatomy -- leads me to believe that maybe, just maybe, TV isn't quite the vast cultural wasteland it was even five years ago in the pre-Sopranos days. Maybe, just maybe, HBO and FX and Showtime have managed to offset the tidal wave of prime-time crap, and more choice actually does allow for more quality.

Or maybe I just don't have the attention span to read anymore.

Anyway, for this little affair, I'm focusing only on shows that are currently on the air. So we won't include work like Homicide or Arrested Development, NYPD Blue or The West Wing, Cheers or Miami Vice, Keen Eddie or Lucky, Boomtown or Line of Fire. You should definitely look to catch those shows -- every one rises to the level of art at one time or another. But for now, let's just focus on the ones you can TiVo. Anyone who guesses what #1 is wins a script to SUNDOWN: ARIZONA #1.

23. Friday Night Lights
Synopsis: The story of a small Texas town in autumn, where everyone values God, guns, sex, and football...and most definitely not in that order.
Why You Need To Watch It: Because it's dying in the ratings, and unlike most shows, it doesn't deserve to. This show could have gone wrong so many ways, and goes right every single one. The acting, the music, the direction, the storylines...this show takes Faulkner's approach of finding the secrets of the human condition in a tiny postage stamp of land, and pulls it off.
Key Scene: The hush that falls over the stadium in the very first episode when the star quarterback takes a paralyzing hit. In most other shows, he'd get up and walk to slow, building applause and overwrought orchestral music. Here, with less than sixty minutes of show under our belts, we already know the quarterback's ending won't be a storybook one.
Great Quote: "Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to realize that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all at some point in our lives fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special. That it can be taken from us. And that when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested. It is these times. It is this pain that allows us to look inside ourselves." --Coach Eric Taylor, speaking to his team outside fallen QB Jason Street's hospital room. It's a scene of quiet, powerful dignity, and once you realize it won't be spoiled by Hollywood cheese, it hits you all the harder.

Southern Lit: "Smonk," Tom Franklin

2006-11-26T22:41:00.000-05:00

Good God, is this a violent book. I'm talking violent in a way that makes Al Swearengen look like Roy Rogers. You pick up Smonk, you'd best avoid pizza...and hamburgers...and milkshakes...and, well, pretty much any kind of eating or drinking. And every time you read this one, you probably ought to take a couple minutes to recompress lest you throw a few C-bombs at your significant other or mom. Tom Franklin is a great writer, heir to the fine Southern tradition of brutal realism, but this book blows right through the standards of every single community up to and including Sodom. Rape, incest, dissection, castration, murder in all its many forms...the violence is so pervasive that it's almost symphonic.

Oh, and a swallowed glass eye gets recovered via sword surgery. It's all here, folks.

Anyway, the plot: it's Alabama, early twentieth century. Much like Faulkner's Barn Burning, we first meet E.O. Smonk on trial in a country courthouse. Unlike Barn Burning, though, Smonk doesn't get thrown out of town; instead, he does his best to haul every male in town straight down to hell with him. We'll soon see that it's classic Smonk, the kind of horrific bloodshed and death that the man specializes in. As the dying judge remarks ruefully after Smonk escapes,

Who wouldn't admire the gall of a fellow brings a machine gun and a peck of hired killers to his own goddamn trial? Who wouldn't admire a fellow never leaves a trail of evidence? That's got this far in the world and galled so many folks and killed twice that number and cheated the rest, all without being blowed to itty bitty pieces or hanged by his goddamn neck or succumbing to one of the countless infirmities he seems to collect like a goddamn hobby, hell yeah I admire the sonofabitch.

Also involved in the Smonk affair are a young woman named Evavangeline (not a typo), a whore who responds to the brutal advances of men by simply eviscerating them; Phail Walton, an absurdly devout "Christian Deputy" who has a most unique (and painful) method for controlling his sexual urges; and the town of Old Texas, Alabama, where the men are dead (thanks to Smonk) and the women are...er...engaged in a pursuit that would make Edgar Allan Poe blanch.

This is the kind of hard-edged fiction that, like Cormac McCarthy, treads the line between the grotesque and the horrifying. Flannery O'Connor once remarked that all Southern writers are toiling away on the train tracks, with the freight train that is Faulkner always bearing down on them. That may indeed be true -- but E.O. Smonk is the first guy who could skin O'Connor's Misfit and hijack Faulkner's train.

Highly recommended...as long as you know what you're getting into.

Song Hall of Fame: Guns n' Roses' "Paradise City"

2006-11-15T12:34:00.000-05:00

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve wrapped up each year by channeling my inner Ryan Seacrest and coming up with an annual list of the best songs of the year. I’ve put 2004 and 2005 online, and 2006 will show up in a month or so. I’ve also begun my own personal Hall of Fame; the initial class of nominees includes Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain” and Van Halen’s “5150.” Here’s the next one.

Guns n’ Roses was the last great larger-than-life rock band. Not saying there hasn’t been any good rock made since G n’ R; far from it. But Axl, Slash, et. al. were the last band in the long line of epic groups that began with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and “Paradise City” was the last great epic rock song. From its strum-and-arpeggio opening major chords designed to call a crowd to worship to its naïve-yet-desperate lyrics to its tsunami of a close, “Paradise City” encompasses everything rock n’ roll should be, could have been, and never will be again.

There are a few songs that completely changed my perceptions of music the moment I heard them. Styx’s “Renegade,” with its “hangman’s comin’ down from the gallows” refrain, scared the unholy shit out of me when I first heard it in second grade (and chills me for entirely different reasons today). Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” somehow managed to fill a suburban Atlanta elementary schooler with existential angst. The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” touched the same societally-repressed chord in me that it did in millions of other white boys. And Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sliced through the early-‘90s glop of Hammer, Vanilla Ice and, yes, the by-then-bloated Guns n’ Roses like a machete.

G n’ R’s “Welcome to the Jungle” was the same way for me. The first time I heard of Guns n’ Roses, it was from my little brother, who’d seen them opening for Motley Crue back in the ‘80s. Back then, my brother laughed at the fact the lead singer of this wack-ass new band leaped into the crowd to fight a security guard, then got decked and thrown out of the arena—two songs into their set. Who’d have known that in a couple years, this skinny idiot would be the most famous rock star in the world?

Anyway, my brother had a cassette tape of “Appetite for Destruction,” and my buddy Tom and I decided to play it one afternoon. We never got further than the first song, “Welcome to the Jungle.” That opening riff, the scream, the menace, the power—holy shit, this was like getting hooked up to a car battery. We must’ve played that same song six or seven times in a row, PLAY and REWIND, PLAY and REWIND.

“Paradise City” was the sixth song on the album and the closer of Side 1 (back when albums had sides, ya whippersnappers). That was the “Stairway to Heaven”/ “Sympathy for the Devil” position, where true rock artistes placed their most devastating tracks. In seven minutes, it embodied rock music in general and Guns n’ Roses in particular—both devastating and overlong, both simplistic and world-weary. It was the kind of song that could bring a hundred thousand people to frenzy—I remember being on the field at RFK Stadium in D.C. when Guns n’ Roses closed their set with it, and the energy running through the crowd was flat-out primal. And, ten years later, it was the song that Axl wheezed through during one of his fitful “comebacks” with his journeyman band. He couldn’t have tattooed the words “GnR 1988-1992” on his forehead and been any clearer that the band’s best days were long past.

There’s a rumor that “Chinese Democracy,” which would only be G n’ R’s third full-length album of new material, believe it or not, is going to hit stores in the next few weeks. I’ve written about this before; I’ve heard half a dozen of the new tracks, and there’s only one twenty-second break in “Better” that even comes close to approaching the power and edge of “Appetite.” In the end, though, it doesn’t matter—as long as there are guitars and vaguely discontented kids, “Paradise City” will be waiting for them.

One Day You, Too, Shall Be Steve Spurrier's Bitch

2006-11-12T21:08:00.000-05:00

So here's a post from Sports Gone South of which I'm particularly proud:

We fear for Jarvis Moss.

Moss, a player for the University of Florida football organization, blocked two kicks attempted by Steve Spurrier's South Carolina Gamecocks yesterday, including a potential game-winning field goal. And while Jarvis Moss and the Gator Nation may believe the game ended when the ball deflected off Moss's meaty paw, the truth is, this game won't end until Steve Spurrier has the last word. Will Moss find the head of a gator in his bed? Will his offending left hand, severed and bronzed, one day adorn Spurrier's desk? All we know is that someday, some way, Steve Spurrier will have his revenge on Florida.

Why? Because Steve Spurrier is evil. And we can prove it.

With a tip of the visor to Chuck Norris, we present:

Steve Spurrier Is Evil: A Case Study

-"Steve Spurrier" and "evil" nets about 25,800 hits in Google. "Steve Spurrier" and "messiah" returns 813. "Steve Spurrier drinks the blood of Tallahassee infants" gives you one...for now.

-Steve Spurrier casts no reflection and no shadow, and only appears on television via a complex motion-capture program developed by those Lord of the Rings guys.

-Steve Spurrier names his bowel movements after various SEC coaches, depending on his degree of success against each one. He can drop three Fulmers and be back on the sidelines before the play clock runs out.

-Steve Spurrier advised Donald Rumsfeld on appropriate Abu Ghraib information extraction techniques, noting that "You can't spell 'total, uncompromising victory' without 'torture.'"

-If you should point out that there is, in fact, no "e" in "total, uncompromising victory," as there is in "torture," Steve Spurrier will simply have all traces of you erased from existence, like he did with President McDaniel.

-Steve Spurrier's visor, when thrown by Steve Spurrier, is capable of slicing through the hull of an aircraft carrier, and more than likely will come out the other side.

-If you rearranged the letters in Steve Spurrier's name, they would simply revert to spell "Steve Spurrier." No man alters the name of Steve Spurrier.

-Steve Spurrier has downloaded the souls of seven university presidents into his iPod, and forces them to dance to Fergie.

-If Steve Spurrier became the villain on '24,' Jack Bauer would be fetching Steve Spurrier's coffee between the hours of 7:00 am and 8:00 am, then cleaning up after Steve Spurrier's dog between the hours of 8:00 am and 9:00 am, then...

-Steve Spurrier once ate an entire Seminole Indian. He then stood onshore for three months waiting for a hurricane on which to dine, but none materialized.

-Steve Spurrier has never been dealt anything but pocket aces.

-Steve Spurrier has never lost a game...he's just been plotting an appropriate agonizing demise for every player on the other side of the field when time ran out.

-We're not saying Steve Spurrier had anything to do with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but when you place satellite images of Dealey Plaza atop images of Spurrier's Florida Fun n' Gun formation, the match is exact.

-Steve Spurrier has impacted today's NFL more than any man alive. How? Steve Spurrier so shattered the psyche of the boy who would become the NFL's Great White-And-Blue Hope that Colts opponents ought to tape Steve Spurrier head shots to their facemasks.

-Steve Spurrier knows the cheat codes to NCAA football...and we're not talking about a video game.

Feel free to add your own findings below.

Pimp My Portfolio

2006-11-03T17:35:00.000-05:00

Most of my sports writing is over at Sports Gone South these days. Every so often, though, I spread the love a little wider. Here are two outlets upon which said love has been spread.

--Over at the Chicago Sports Review, we made a case for a football Dream Team. You know it's time.

--And over at ESPN.com is the Internet version of a piece I wrote for Bluff magazine on poker players staking other players. Kind of makes one wonder if, say, Pedro Martinez might not have owned a piece of the Cards' action this season...

Enjoy.

Lit Review: Brad Meltzer's The Book of Fate

2006-11-01T23:34:00.000-05:00

I love a good conspiracy theory. I could tell you ten different convincing suspects for who killed JFK. I love the thought that people actually think we faked the moon landing. And if you can get past the fact that three thousand people died, there's something perversely fascinating about the fact that people really believe someone planted explosives to bring down the World Trade Center.

So when I heard that Brad Meltzer, one of my favorite writers, was penning a book on the Freemasons and their secrets, I was in without needing any more. The Freemasons are legendary for their secrecy, and may or may not be pulling the strings on the whole world. For "proof," check out the site of this guy right here, who claims an evil conspiracy that encompasses everything from McDonald's logo to the godawful Oliver Stone film "Any Given Sunday."

Meltzer's book tells the story of Wes Holloway, a presidential aide who takes a bullet during a failed assassination attempt at a NASCAR race. The president's deputy chief of staff dies in the firefight, and the president loses his election bid when a photo of the attempt makes it appear he's hiding behind the wife of one of his big donors.

Flash forward eight years, and Wes sees--or thinks he sees--the allegedly dead chief of staff sneaking into the former president's quarters in Malaysia. And that sets off a whole chain of events that...well, I won't say more, except to say that Meltzer specializes in setting up a mystery, then pulling off the Purloined Letter trick of having the answer to the problem hiding right there all along in plain sight.

It's a damn good wintertime reading book, filled with the kind of nuance and detail that comes from dedicated research. While I would have loved to see some more Washington-based intrigue--most of the action takes place in South Florida--what we've got here is a book well worth checking out.

Bonus: visit Meltzer's website for some secrets about the Masons.

You've Gotta Work Hard To Be This Mediocre

2006-10-17T00:57:00.000-04:00

Over at Sports Gone South, my take on the Atlanta Falcons, a team for whom inconsistency would be an improvement. (Pictured below: a representative sample shot from yesterday's woodshedding at the hands of the New York Football Giants.) Enjoy.

Comics For People Who Don't Read Comics: The Other Side #1

2006-10-16T21:50:00.000-04:00

Gather 'round, younguns, and I'm going to tell you of a time before your "Internets," a time before the word "spoiler" even existed, a time when everybody found out at the same time what happened in your favorite movie, tv show, or comic book. Nowadays, you spoiled kids learn about everything months or years in advance. Spider-Man unmasks, Henry Gale turns out to be one of The Others, Jack Sparrow meets his apparent doom at the tentacles of the Kraken, and the whole world knows it--hell, can see it--moments after it's released.

Which makes discovering a book like The Other Side so sweet.

I was at the local comics store--shout out to my boys at Great Escape, yo--this weekend and picked up the usual haul--Azzarello's Loveless, Digital Webbing Presents, B. Clay Moore's The Leading Man, the fanboy wankfest Infinite Crisis hardcover--when a book I'd never heard of before caught my eye. You can see the cover right there on the right--two soldiers, Huey helicopters, jungle background--you can already predict exactly what this story's about, which is a very good thing. Vietnam, in comic form. Put out by Vertigo, which, when it pulls its head out of the third-generation-Sandman-copy clouds, puts out some of the consistently best books on the market.

So. The Other Side. It's a Vietnam story told from two different points of view. On the American side, we've got Billy Everette, a boy from Alabama drafted into Uncle LBJ's army. On the Vietnamese side, we've got Vo Binh Dai, a kid from the village of Nam Phong, which looks pretty much like the Alabama of North Vietnam.

This first issue is fairly standard setup--we see both boys going through their versions of basic training, which includes a pretty heavy dose of indoctrination. Billy's experience is straight out of Full Metal Jacket, including brutal drill sergeant and rifle begging to be put in the mouth. But since TOS's writer, Jason Aaron, is a cousin of Gustav Hansford, whose book The Short Timers became the inspiration for Full Metal Jacket, we can cut him some slack--it's all in the family.

Where TOS diverges from FMJ is the metaphysical aspect. Both boys are haunted--Billy by the ghosts of horribly massacred soldiers, Dai by the expectant spirits of his ancestors. The artwork renders these figures--as well as dramatic jungle scenes, such as the North Vietnamese army camping at the front steps of a decrepit French plantation--in vivid, utterly believable detail.

Ironically, if this were an HBO series, it'd be getting tidal waves of critical accolades. Only in comics can a series this real and ground-level be out of the mainstream. Hopefully the sales will keep this book afloat; if not, a Wolverine guest appearance may be in order. (Don't laugh--when Marvel's late, lamented Vietnam series The 'Nam began floundering sales-wise, the powers-that-be injected The Punisher, in his pre-costume days, into the series to goose buyers.)

Anyway, TOS's first issue--"If You're Lucky, You'll Only Get Killed"--is a solid start to the series, and highly recommended. I'm on board for the long haul, and you ought to be too.

Bullfeathers

2006-10-15T22:59:00.000-04:00

Posted a new bit on how the NCAA has, once again, proven its collective head is surgically fused to its collective ass--this time, they've forbidden the College of William & Mary from using freaking feathers on its logo. (No, really.) Check it out over at Sports Gone South.

"The Perfect Place To Be If Your Thumbs Have More Skills Than Your Pimp Game."

2006-10-12T17:47:00.000-04:00

No disrespect to Hannah Storm, Erin Andrews, Suzy Kolber, et. al., but our new favorite sideline reporter is the lovely Charity Hodges. Ms. Hodges--she's the utter mess there at the right of your screen--is the sideline reporter for NOPI Tunervision, a SpeedTV show about--well, we’re not quite sure what the hell it’s about, frankly, only that there are lots of boobs and cars.

Apparently edited by a hypercaffeinated ferret--no shot lasts longer than three seconds--NOPI Tunervision is a show where tattooed (and heavily sponsored) dudes talk about widebody kits, superchargers, and 12-inch GRW-7s, which would really impress us if we knew what the hell they were. It’s also a show where insanely hot chicks shake their butts for membership in the “Apple Butt Club” and frolic in the sexual-assault pregame show known as a “Bubble Bath Bikini Contest.” Oh, yeah--and there's Xbox competitions too, which is where the title quote comes from. And through it all, the lovely Ms. Hodges wears a low-cut blouse showing cleavage deep enough to hide a toddler. She may not know NOPI Tunervision from a Hopi reservation, but really...who cares?

Check it out like we did--for free--by clicking here and downloading it off iTunes. Then, like they say on the show, keep your right foot angry...or whatever.

Mouthing Off, Pro Division--A Sports Gone South cross-post

2006-10-05T09:56:00.000-04:00

A quick roundup of some of the South's sports stories of the moment, taken from my new site Sports Gone South:

-Apparently, the Bobcats' practices need the Benny Hill theme music as a soundtrack.

-In other Bobcats news, if you drive the lane against Sean May, there's a decent chance you're going to get eaten.

-Hey, guess what! Pat Riley sez training camp is easier if you’re coming off a world championship. In totally unrelated news, Stan Van Gundy's corpse was found in a Baltimore row house covered in lime.

-"Haynesworth! For the love of God, man, stop stomping the butler!"

-Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist goes on the DL after rupturing metaphor muscle while comparing Wake Forest to Tickle Me Elmo.

New Website! Go! Now!

2006-10-04T15:31:00.000-04:00

I've just set up a new website, Sports Gone South, which will host all my sports musings on all things south of the Potomac River. Go check it out. I'll be cross-posting here for a bit. Here's the first one, all about the NL playoffs...
-----------------------------------------

Ah, early October. The warmth of summer's still hanging around, but the nights are getting crisp. Football's in full swing, basketball's training camps are open, and hockey...nobody cares about hockey. And baseball's playoffs are just beginning, and, as usual, Glavine and Maddux are on the hill:

...oh, yeah. I forgot.

The Glavine-Maddux showdown which was likely for Game 2 won't come to pass, which is a shame, because I was looking forward to seeing how it would be physically possible for both Hall of Fame pitchers to simultaneously dig their teams into huge holes. Sort of an "irresistible force/immovable object" quandary in reverse.

Me, I'm taking the Dodgers in this one--no offense to Glavine, who's always been one of my favorites, but anything that brings misery to New York sports fans brings joy into my life:

My own postmortem of the Braves' dynasty is right here.

Read This: Into The Buzzsaw

2006-09-26T10:38:00.000-04:00

Some bad craziness went down last week in the world of sports journalism, with two writers being sentenced to prison for refusing to disclose their sources in a book on Barry Bonds. (For those of you keeping score at home, that's now four people sentenced to prison in the Bonds case, none of whom is Bonds himself.)

Read my take on the whole thing here, at the Chicago Sports Review.

And yes, a Braves postmortem is coming in just a bit.

New Column: The National League Bridesmaids' Brawl

2006-09-06T20:42:00.000-04:00

The latest Chicago Sports Review column is up, in which I compare the contenders for the National League pennant to a horde of bloodthirsty chicks fighting for a bride's bouquet. Watch for name-drops of Kyle Wright, Scarlett Johannsen, and Malcolm Gladwell; Bobby Abreu as a Kanye lyric; some borderline pedophilia; what guys really want from Jenny McCarthy and Jillian Barberie; and the definitions of Woo Girls and the mysterious "sweater roll." Oh, and maybe some baseball, too. Read it by clicking here.

Southern Lit--James Lee Burke's "Pegasus Descending"

2006-09-05T22:16:00.000-04:00

I first heard about James Lee Burke back in 1992, when my buddy Todd Scott pointed me in the direction of a book entitled In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead. You saddle a book with a title like that, you'd better deliver some epic-level Southern fiction. And Burke does exactly that, year after year, book after book. His latest, Pegasus Descending, is typical Burke--which is to say that it's a melange of southern Louisiana lowlifes, byzantine plot twists, the chokehold that the past holds on the present, and healthy dollops of Catholic imagery counterpointed by scenes of stunning violence. In short, it's the best damn "detective fiction" out these days, and I'd put it toe-to-toe with most "literary" fiction as well.

Burke's protagonist, Detective Dave Robicheaux, marks his 15th book with Pegasus. In this installment, he's working out his guilt for being too drunk to rescue a friend when an early-70s Miami bank heist went awry. Now, in 2005, the friend's daughter shows up in New Iberia, Louisiana, where--conveniently enough--the man Dave suspects was behind his friend's death now lives in wealth and comfort. From there, the book whirls through New Iberia society, from drug-slingers to rich frat kids, from casinos to churches. And it all culminates in blood just as Hurricane Katrina roars ashore.

Having an impending storm symbolize a coming crisis is a hack device used by damn near every writer you can imagine--including this clown--but Burke manages to make it seem fresh and new. For instance, check this section, Dave's recollection of Hurricane Audrey coming ashore when he was young and working on an oil derrick in the Gulf:

There was no sound at all. The wind stopped, the water around the drill barge flattened, then seemed to drop away from the steel pilings, as though all the water were being sucked out of the bay. The gum and cypres trees and willows along the shore straightened in the stillness, their leaves green and bright with sunshine, then the world came apart.

All the glass exploded from the windows in the pilothouse. The instrument shack, made of aluminum and bolted down on the stern, was shredded into confetti. The crew chief was shouting at everyone on the deck, pointing toward the hatch that led down to the engine room, but his words were lost in the roar of the wind. A curtain of rain slapped across the barge, then we were inside a vortex that looked exactly like millions of crystallized grass cuttings, except it was filled with objects and creatures that should not have been there. Fish of every kind and size, snakes, raccoons, blue herons, turkey buzzards, a pirogue, uprooted trees, possums and wood rabbits, a twisted tin roof, dozens of crab trabs and conical fishnets packed with enormous carp, hundreds of frogs, clusters of tar paper and weathered boards--all these things were spinning around our barge, sometimes thudding against the handrails and ladders and bulkheads.

Tell me you're not right there with him.

In the same way, he takes the devices he uses throughout every single novel--lush description of the Louisiana bayous, Dave's ever-present penchant for alcohol-fueled violence, the portentous dreams, the way damn near everybody Dave ever knew in his life ends up in New Iberia trailing a boatload of problems--and still makes the old seem new. It's familiar territory, but it's still worth reading, every single time.

Oh, and Burke comes up with the coolest names imaginable, book after book. Somebody needs to make a list of these evocative handles; "Pegasus" includes Bellerophon Lujan, Yvonne and Cesaire Darbonne, Wee Willie Bimstine, Nig Rosewater, Prospect Desmoreau, Monarch Little, and Whitey and Slim Bruxal. Whew.

Burke's good stuff. Read him. Check out his website here, and listen to an interview with him on the book here.

Art Blast: The Network #1

2006-09-04T13:09:00.000-04:00

Here's an in-progress page from The Network #1, pencils by Martin Morazzo. You may not be able to tell from this angle, but the supervillains are in the process of destroying Turner Field in Atlanta. The way the Braves have played there this year, that may not be the worst thing.

For more about The Network, including the complete first few pages, click here.

Updated Archives

2006-09-03T18:46:00.000-04:00

I'm in the process of overhauling the whole site, which includes a fresh look at the archives. I'm compiling a list of damn near everything I've ever written for mass-market consumption, but while you're waiting for the box set, here's the greatest hits:

The Archives

Enjoy.

The Braves: Probably not, but you never know...

2006-08-31T10:04:00.000-04:00

I'm off to cover the Braves-Giants game tonight--working on a piece on Smoltz for Choptalk--and if Atlanta can pull out a win, I'm starting to feel good about their chances for at least making a run at the wild card.

I'd always set 2 1/2 as a benchmark--if we were 2 1/2 games out or less at the end of August, I wouldn't pack up the plantation. Best-case scenario, we'll be 3 out, thanks to the Padres' recent hot run. But the rest of the National League is such a crew of nancies--the topic of my upcoming column for the Chicago Sports Review--that anybody who makes a run is right there in the mix. (See the Marlins, who reeled off 9 wins and went from 9 down to 2 down in that time.)

Our pitching, outside of Smoltz, Wickman, Chuck James, and occasionally Hudson, absolutely blows. Fortunately, our bats are some of the best in the league. Now as long as we can score 23 runs a game, we'll be set.

No margin for error now. And the two series against Philly and the Mets this next week are--without hyperbole--the most critical regular-season series Atlanta has played in a decade.

This time next week, we'll have a good idea of whether it's worth watching the rest of the season...or making plans for 2007.

Darth Vader: From Overlord To Punk

2006-08-30T13:31:00.000-04:00

What is it about Darth Vader that makes everybody wanna take him down a peg or two? I mean, start with this cutie-pie Darth Hello Kitty:

Then move on to Darth Granny:

And finally, check out these vids featuring everyone's favorite Sith lord.

First, we see that in addition to being pure evil, Vader's kind of a jackass.

Next--the Japanese are okay with being Godzilla's bitch, but they're gonna put Vader in his place.

And finally, here's an example of a marriage that's on real solid ground. If I were the lady, I'd dump the dude for his weak writing ("Tonight you DIE!" That was the best you could come up with? Really?) and godawful film editing skills.

Stay classy, Darth. Stay classy.

Southern Lit--"Through Hell And High Water"

2006-08-29T23:18:00.000-04:00

Back when I was in college, my buddy Jay Kasberger (when you find this on Google, email me, Bone!) and I used to while away our dateless evenings—which were few and far between, believe you me—by going to the local Giant food store in Williamsburg, Virginia. There, we’d take full advantage of a poorly-planned store layout that had situated the comic books and bulk foods right next to one another. Bulk foods, for those of you not in the know, were gigantic bins full of pretty much any kind of nonperishable food item you could imagine. But we weren’t interested in the dog food, flour, or birdseed. No, we’d load up Hefty bags full of candy—malted milk balls; yogurt pretzels; Goo Goo Clusters; and pretty much everything ever manufactured in the medium of gummi: gummi worms, gummi fish, even gummi fetuses. We’d load up these sacks, rationalize that we were acting in the tradition of Robin Hood (who’s poorer than a college student?), and go hang next to the Hey Kids! Comics! rack for a couple hours, trolling through X-Men, Teen Titans, Hulk, Avengers, and all the other classics of the age.

Hang on, I’m going somewhere with this.

I treat iTunes the same way I treated that Giant. Sure, I buy plenty of stuff from iTunes. But brother, I download any freakin’ free thing I can get from that place. I’ve gotten more crappy pseudo-electro-lounge-funk tunes and halfwit DOA pilot episodes than you could possibly believe. And when Apple started offering podcasts, well, I could’ve loaded a 60GB video with all the free goods I’ve downloaded.

Which brings me to “Through Hell And High Water,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s 22-part series on two downtown New Orleans hospitals trying to weather Hurricane Katrina. (From Gummi fetuses to iTunes to Katrina. That’s how we roll.) I’d read pieces of the series when it came out in the paper, but it wasn’t until the whole thing came out in a podcast—on iTunes, and hence free—that I downloaded it and began absorbing the entire four-hour saga. And now, on the anniversary of Katrina, at a time when the Bush-administration spin is running fast and furious (The checks are coming, promise!, the president said today, while shills like Sean Hannity claim that that mainstream liberal media glosses over the fact that New Orleans had a better than 95 percent survival rate after the floodwaters hit! Why aren’t we celebrating that, huh?), this story of hospitals left to fend for themselves is a necessary one to know.

It’s a painful read (listen?), because writer Jane O. Hansen accurately delineates how the crisis unfolded through multiple pairs of eyes. The series details the way two hospitals—the well-financed private Tulane facility and the poor, public Charity Hospital—dealt with the ever-escalating threats from Katrina. From the hurricane, to the flood, to the diseased waters, to the roving bands of thugs and snipers, to the desperate attempts at evacuation, this series takes us right into the blood-and-feces-stained halls of the two hospitals. Hansen avoids the easy rich-hospital-bad, poor-hospital-good bias, noting that the way that Tulane’s parent corporation mobilized national resources for the relief effort was a model for future disaster planning. If anybody comes off looking bad, it’s the media for erroneously reporting—twice—that both hospitals were evacuated, even as hundreds of critically ill patients and staff watched those reports on CNN. The government’s incompetence is a given, every bit as expected and as implacable as the rising floodwaters.

I expect “Through Hell and High Water” will become a book—which would be a good thing, because its sole flaw is the fact that there’s not enough backstory here. (Understandable because of the column-inch limitations of the newspaper medium.) I’m not sure it’ll win any awards—alas, heart-wrenching Katrina stories are kind of like redemptive Red Sox stories in October 2004—but it deserves to be read, or heard. And it’s free, so you’ve got no excuse.

Go to the AJC’s “Hell and High Water” website for the iTunes link and photos from the hospitals. It’s another reminder of a national debacle that shouldn’t ever be forgotten.

Art Blast: RIPPED #1

2006-08-28T13:53:00.000-04:00

Here's an in-progress page from RIPPED #1, art by my man Jason Flowers. The scene here is that our boy Fitz has found himself right in the line of fire in Dallas 1963. As you'll see, not everybody gets shot the way they're supposed to.

Oh, and the Tarantino-movie-looking cat who shows up there in the last panel somehow already knows Fitz's name. Hmmm....

Postcards banner--pass it 'round

2006-08-11T10:18:00.000-04:00

Here's a banner for the new Postcards anthology I'm hooked up with...more details forthcoming. Click on the pic itself to go to Postcards central.

Postcards is an anthology of some of comics' greatest creators--and, um, me--composing short stories based on actual postcards from decades ago. It's gonna be a hell of a work.

Poker In The Front, Liquor In The Rear

2006-08-10T22:26:00.000-04:00

Sorry 'bout that headline.

Anyway, the Chicago Sports Review has my latest column, entitled "Stone Cold Bluff," up now. It's about why poker is NOT a sport...and why that's a good thing.

Go, read.

Southern (Cali) Lit--Charlie Huston's Six Bad Things

2006-08-07T23:04:00.000-04:00

So I'm getting waxed at online poker as I type this--isn't there some kind of human-rights commission that a brother can appeal to when he gets dealt three straight two-seven off-suits?--but here we go with another rambling book review. It starts, as all good book reviews do, with iTunes. Specifically, a podcast I heard on iTunes. Super-specifically, this podcast right here, from Marvel Comics and starring writer Charlie Huston. Huston's writing the revival of Moon Knight, who was created in the 1980s as a goofy-yet-cool Batman knockoff. "Goofy" because even though he's supposed to be this crusader of the night, he prowls the rooftops wearing all white. (After Labor Day, even.) Cool because he's got a backstory where he has multiple secret identities, and depending on the writer, sometimes those secret identities don't even know the other exists.

So anyway, Huston pitched a good game on this podcast, and I checked out his three Moon Knight issues (you should too--damn good stuff.) Then I went looking for his writing that didn't have any pictures--you know, novels. (As he laughed in an email to me afterward, "Moon Knight; it's like the cheap crack I use to reel people into the upmarket stuff.") I picked up Six Bad Things, which I didn't realize until later was the second book in a trilogy. Getting the second book first wasn't quite as dumb as seeing Empire Strikes Back first, or as incomprehensible as seeing Two Towers first, but nonetheless I've kinda spoiled the first book, Caught Stealing, for myself.

It's an acceptable loss. Six Bad Things is a hell of a book, and much of it reminds me of nothing so much as the vastly underrated flick True Romance. Basic plot: Hank Thompson is hiding out in Baja California. Why, we don't know--unless we read Caught Stealing, of course--but the fact that people with strange accents are starting to come around Hank's remote village gets Hank a mite nervous. And when Hank has to go on the run--taking the ill-gotten gains from the first novel with him--well, he kicks off a Jack Bauer/John Constantine-esque wave of death and destruction that sluices around him but manages to drown pretty much everyone near him.

Huston's got a gift for composing the kinds of violent, intricate set pieces that characterized the aforementioned True Romance and other, similar flicks. One small mistake--a missed turn, a missed phone call--leads to problem upon problem, and pretty soon the characters are like that guy on Craigslist who started with a paperclip and ended up with a house--if the house was, you know, full of bloodlusting, crack-jacked Mexicans or something. Scenes in Hank's childhood subdivision and a Vegas stripper's rented house escalate so quickly and so violently (both for the reader and for the characters) that you find yourself stunned at how even the most innocent of situations can, with the wrong individuals involved, turn tragic in a moment's time.

I hate it when plots are spoiled for me, so I won't give you any more details than I already have. Suffice it to say that Huston's book gets the highest possible recommendation from me. You won't learn anything new about the human condition--but you'll learn many new ways it can get snuffed out.

Check out Huston's website--www.pulpnoir.com--for occasional musings, too, and buy his books--guys like him need to be encouraged. Preferably from a distance, but still.

Bluff City excerpt: The GFE

2006-07-20T22:16:00.000-04:00

While I finish out a deadline for the Chicago Sports Review, here's a little nugget from Bluff City, my novel-equivalent of "Chinese Democracy." More news on BC coming very soon; for now, here's a little chapter involving Kevin Madden, a soon-to-be-former reporter for the local paper, and his...er, "date," concluding matters on Kevin's last night in Memphis. Enjoy.

-----------
“You seen my panties?”
Mandy was rooting around in the corners of Kevin’s bedroom, overturning books, CDs, and the occasional pizza slice, and Kevin had to marvel at how he could watch a hot naked woman do anything.
“I think they’re somewhere out on Union Avenue,” Kevin murmured. “Hey, careful with those books. They’re in a very precise order.”
“Uh-huh. And I’m Oprah Winfrey.”
“Then you should know the value of fine literature, ma’am,” Kevin said, rolling to sit on the edge of the bed. “You know, you could come to New York with me. You’d love it there.”
“Sure. And you’re going to set me up in the lap of luxury, right? Diamonds and pearls and all that?”
“Well…I’ve got a studio apartment. I could spring for a venti latte every so often, though.”
“Pass. Do you know how many men come through my club looking to take me away? I was almost Mrs. Michael Jordan, did you know that?”
“I did not. I’m honored to be in your presence, ma’am.”
“And well you should be.” She wiggled into her jeans and t-shirt, laced up her high heels, then stood up and extended a hand. “Moment of truth.”
Kevin slapped her open palm. “Been awhile since I’ve given five for loving, but hey—it was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
“It was. And now it’s time to pay for it.”
Kevin scowled. “Pay? You have got to be kidding.”
Mandy smiled. “Come on, player. You’re good, but you aren’t that good. Nobody picks up a stripper in fifteen minutes. This is a fee-based arrangement, plain and simple.”
Kevin pulled on his boxers—it didn’t seem right to negotiate business in the altogether—and stood up. “But we were—you know, kissing and holding hands and stuff.” Kevin almost reverted to thirteen and said, “I thought you liked me,” but caught himself just in time.
“Aw, sweetie,” Mandy said, pinching his cheek. “You didn’t pick up on the whole GFE deal?”
“GFE?”
“Girlfriend Experience. You know, kissing you on the lips, holding hands, talking nice about you to your friends…”
“Take all my stuff and call my mother to tell her what a bastard she raised?”
“That comes later. Now, though—pay up.”
Kevin sighed. “And here I thought I was the friggin’ mack. Okay, how much?”
“Usually a home visit with full GFE runs three hundred. But since you were so good—and since you’re leaving town—” Mandy said, leaning in close to give him a full kiss—“it’ll be five hundred.”
“Eh. Still cheaper than being married.” He reached for his pants—which had been flung over the screen of his laptop—and found them disturbingly light. He looked around his desk—nothing. And then an image came to him, surfacing from the alcoholic mire of his memory—himself and Mandy fumbling around on his desk at the newspaper, planting her fine ass right on top of yesterday’s edition—and laughing at the picture of the mayor that smeared onto her left cheek. And somewhere in the course of the workplace gymnastics, he remembered his wallet popping out of his pants—and remembered thinking that he needed to remember to grab it—and then not remembering to remember.
Kevin smiled a sickly grin.
“Take a check?”
---------------