2009 is almost over, and I've still got that pellet in my leg

So 2009. Pretty good year I guess. I read a lot, I saw a bunch of movies, I wrote...with somewhat less frequency than I'd like. And I think that things turned out ok.

So here are a few things that made this year good. Not neces
sarily a 'Best of' list but things I enjoyed, including a few ideas for stories that I'm going to start working on in the new year.

Films

District 9: Simply one of the strongest, most original science-fiction movies I've seen in a while. Blomkamp was able to expand on his short (something hard to do sometimes, see (the animated) 9) and work within a limited budget, albeit with a huge-name producer, and come out with something wonderful.

Watchmen: Nerd pleasure here. I enjoyed it, if only for it's attention to detail and obvious love of the source material.

Where the Wild Things Are: A fun yet dark art-house kids film. Beautifully realized and something apart from the original picture book. The giant wild things are some of the greatest puppets since Jim Henson first sewed felt onto two halves of a whiffle ball (I don't know if that's how it happened, but it looks like it, yeah?)

Up: Pixar does it again. One of the most emotional experiences I've had at the movies in recent history.

Video Games

Batman: Arkham Asylum: You ARE Batman. You get to do everything you've always dreamed of, hanging upside down from gargoyles, striking fear...all of it. And the inclusion of voice actors from the classic 90s Animated series along with a plot by Paul Dini make this feel like a reunion. Wonderful.

Professor Layton and Diabolical Box: If you like puzzles, Sherlock Holmes, Studio Ghibli, and charming Victorian storytelling, you need this game and it's predecessor. They're a great, often frustrating, time and with the downloadable challenges, they last a fair amount of time.

Scribblenauts: Just buy it. You will have a blast. My favorite thing that I summoned thus far is... well no, the fun of this game is the ability to find stuff out for yourself.

Books

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer: I really dug this continuation of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's books. I reviewed it here, so just scroll back if you want a fuller take on it.

The City and the City by China Mieville: Same deal here. Reviewed earlier this month. Great stuff.

The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert Reddick: I read this as a galley and it was a case of getting to the end and hating the fact that it ended on a "To be continued" note. A fantastic debut swashbuckler featuring a setting as interesting as anything Mieville or Gaiman has come up with.

I seem to read a lot of science fiction don't I? Hm. There are a ton of other great books that have come out this year, but I've been catching up on older stuff that's still brilliant. So I assure you, I've read other genres this year, they are just books that didn't debut in 2009.

Music

Blakroc: The Black Keys teamed up with a variety of rappers, including Mos Def, Jim Jones, Billy Danze, Ludacris, ODB and more, to produce one of the greatest stoner-rap-rock albums in recent memory. An amazingly laid back rap album, it's worth tracking down.

St. Vincent - Actor: St Vincent's smooth pop and dynamic lyrics are conveyed well here, resulting in a treat for the ears. Has some bizarre moments, but nothing too dischordant.

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest: You need to own this. Beautiful, ambient chamber pop. These are compositions you can sink into, where you'll float on the almost-too-quiet vocals while your brain tries to figure out which way the instrumentation is going to turn next. A convoluted way of saying how great this is, but this record deserves it.

Japandroids - Post Nothing: Lo-fi, yelled vocals on top of a guitar and drum kit. The charm and earnestness of songs that really only have maybe five different lines repeated over and over again keeps these guys in my head.

Chuck Ragan - Gold Country: An underrated folk artist, Ragan used to head up Hot Water Music before moving on to his solo project. The album has a working class mining/logging/railroad charm that is present in classic folk music, but has been missing for a while. Check him out.

I could keep going on all day. I'm just going to list 10 more that I thought were great this last year.

Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
K. Flay - Mashed Potatoes
MC Lars - This Gigantic Robot Kills
Tom Waits - Glitter and Doom Live
Bob Dylan - Together Through Life
The Mountain Goats - Life of the World to Come
Bat for Lashes - Two Suns
Matt and Kim - Grand
Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Karen O and the Kids - Where the Wild Things Are OST

So there you go. For lack of a better term, that's my best of 2009 list. It's a lot of great stuff, and you should check it out.

As for my story ideas, I've got two. And as soon as I type them here, someone will come out with a book based around that idea. Or someone will point out that it's been done before. So yep. That in mind.

The first came from a conversation I was having with a co-worker about history books. We were basically talking/wondering what certain historical figures were like, Jesus primary among them. And the thought that sprang to mind was: What if Time Travel was invented? Would laws be enacted to make sure that we didn't check up on facts? Like to make sure Jesus existed? So there's a story there and I'm going to start working on it tonight.

The second is a more general idea brought on by the title of a book I walked past in the young adult section today. It goes this way. What if all of the world leaders were assassinated on one day? What would happen? Would the world fall apart? Those are probably words I shouldn't type on the internet in this day and age, but it's just a short story idea that seems compelling to me. We'll see.

For now, I hope that those that celebrate them had a wonderful Christmas or Channukah, and those that didn't are filled with love and joy in general. We need to be, anymore.

The world has a lot of problems; let's stop creating them for one another.

Extra-Short Story

I hitch-hiked across the country last week, a 22 pistol in my backpack cuddled up next to a book on tattoos. I only had to draw it once, a bar in Idaho, where a man with a guitar tried to punch the woman he was with. After he drove off, she and I went into the parking lot and fucked on the hood of a station-wagon. She dropped me off next to the Oregon border and I watched her tail-lights from the visitors' center as the rain turned the forest into green mud.

3 days later, I woke up in Michigan, fourteen dollars in my wallet and two shots fired. I ditched the gun in Lake Huron.

It's been a good Christmas.

I think my feet are bloody nubs but I am too afraid to look...

(Theoretically existing maybe) Lord, deliver me from retail.

I love my job. But I am sick of the Beach Boys' Christmas album. I am sick of saying that we're out of the Lego Star Wars Visual Dictionary. I am sick of telling people to put their socks back on. And I am really sick of the Beach Boys' Christmas album.

On the plus side, science never takes a holiday. We might have found some dark matter. Which is awesome. Or maybe portends the end of the world. Whichever:
Come out of the dark, jerk.

Alright I'm headed back out on the floor now after a break. Pray to that same theoretical deity as before that I survive this holiday season.

Seasonal Affective Blogorder

I feel I should apologize for the lack of posts lately. The combination of late hours at work due to the holiday season and my general lack of sleeping at normal hours have combined to create a Frankenstein's monster of laziness.

The holiday season is kind of a downer for a lot of people. Folks who don't have family around, people who are lonely, those who don't celebrate... these are the ones who are left out in the cold this time of year. It doesn't help that this is the time when Seasonal Affective Disorder fucks with the minds of a fair number of people out there.

With that in mind, I want to share this smile-making video from the good folks over at Improv Everywhere. They picked a Salvation Army bellringer (ignore the controversy about the organization, this was just about the one person here) and brightened his, and a lot of New Yorkers' evenings.



I don't like to use emoticons, but really there's one way to sum that up:

:)

The Christmas Music, It is unusual.

So this holiday season has resulted in some unusual releases, including the 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force Christmas Album' and a couple of fun ones this last week.

First among these is experimental hardcore group, Fucked Up's version of (usually terrible to listen to song) 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' featuring Andrew W.K., Tegan and Sara, David Cross, Bob Mould, The GZA, Yo La Tengo, and more. You can pick it up here and best of all, your 99 cents goes to a good cause.


Second, we've got a song that is less about Christmas, and more about what a particular rapper wants for Christmas. That rapper is Sage Francis and the song is called 'Gimme Dat', produced by Buck 65, and available for free here for a limited time.


So there you go. Two Christmas Jams from people who probably aren't huge Christmas fans, but will at least put something a little different in your ears this holiday season.

Review: The City and The City

There are weird places in the world. The Antarctic, unbroken vistas of ice and snow. Madagascar, an island of creatures found nowhere else. And somewhere in Europe, or Asia, or far more likely, in between, exist the twin countries and cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma.

Occupying the same space at the same time, Beszel and Ul Qoma have a strange symbiotic relationship. The citizenry of each are trained to un-see the other, not acknowledging it even when they might almost be run down by a car that to them, isn't there. Doing otherwise is to risk breaching, and a run in with the secret police of the same name. However, there is a rumor of a third city, hidden between the two. And when a brutal murder is committed, Beszel Police Inspector Tyador Borlu begins to suspect that agents of this other place may be behind it.

That is the basic premise behind China Mieville's latest novel. Released this past May, I had for whatever reason not touched my advance copy until this last week, despite having loved his previous work. Maybe it was the distancing from straight-up steampunk/fantasy to a more crime-procedural format, but The City and The City stayed off my radar for far too long. And having read it, it seems that turning his typical style on its ear was just what he needed to stay fresh and continue to be one of the most unique voices out there.

The novel is brilliantly structured, a slow build into the idea of these two cities that occupy the same geographical and temporal space, the first five chapters getting us used to the idea. At the same time, he manages to make what could be a cheap gimmick into something functional. Unseeing a person that is right next to you is accomplished not through some strange technological gadget but by the cooperative denial of citizenry of both places. And coordinating a murder investigation across both cities lends itself a whole new group of issues.

The characterization is well done. Much like in Mieville's modern classic, Perdido Street Station, the main character is an ordinary person who, being pushed to extraordinary lengths, becomes someone we're interested in. His characterizations are almost uniformly beautiful, though a few of the secondaries suffer. A third act resurrection of a minor personage had me flipping back to earlier pages to refresh myself. Overall though, the citizenry of Beszel and Ul Qoma are living breathing people.

A hallmark of Mieville's novels are the settings. He has a knack for creating a fascinating location and stories to populate them. Once more, perhaps the most major character in this story is/are the city/ies. Through the everyday occurrences of traffic accidents and children playing in the park, we're able to understand more about this world than anything Inspector Borlu tells us. Something as minor as a person bending over to pick up some litter becomes insight into the way this world functions. Mieville is a visual artist working with words.

The book is a triumph. As mentioned before, it could slip into cliche or gimmickry but never does. He manages to build a believable world, a fantasy that exists. The novel itself is a parallel of its story, its events taking place in the world we currently operate within, a world of worry for terrorism and liberal/conservative head-butting. We see these things paralleling our every action, and un-see them as alien or frightening. Mieville doesn't. He stares them down and puts them on the page for all of us. Because of this, he remains one of the most unique and intelligent young writers operating today.

The Coney Island Effect

I stink.

My sister works for Victoria's Secret out in Denver. Apparently there is some kind of employee sale going on at the moment, so she called me.

"Lincoln, go try on the colognes and let me know which one you like the best."

Nevermind that there are 600 different colognes/perfumes and the 3 male ones aren't set aside in their own spot. Nevermind that apparently our mall's VS is understaffed. Nevermind that this store is relatively undiscovered country for me, a single male.

So after a lovely young lady took pity on me and helped me find the men's colognes and I spritzed my wrists with the two that smelled the least like my current stock of colognes (a wide stable of 2 scents) I went back to work. I am making my female co-workers smell me. Or my wrists rather, the other statement sounding decidedly inapropriate.

Thus far I'm a bit undecided. I like them both, but the combination of the two is swirling and creating in my nostrils the scent of, for lack of a better term, douchebag. So we'll see. I'm leaning to my right wrist, which I think was called Vertical.

I've decided something about the whole Susan Boyle phenomenon. If you don't know who that is then...I can't even say you're old or live in a cave or anything because the young generation knows how to use youtube, while the oldsters are who her music is aimed at. In any case, she is a good example, with her 701,000 albums sold the first week, of something that I am going to call the Coney Island effect.

I'm not belittling her or her story. Far from it. I think that it's extremely inspiring that we live in an age where someone can come forth fairly humbly and become a sensation. No, what bothers me is people reacting to her.

A conversation at the register the other day:
"What cd is that? Oh, is that the ugly woman?"

I feel like this is a lot of the buzz around her. Sure she has a nice voice, and yes, her story is inspirational, but would a beautiful, younger woman who had come out of nowhere have generated the same buzz?

Taylor Swift says no. Or at least her initial cd sales do.

So what does this say about human society as a whole? I'm not sure. I'm not an anthropologist, a psychologist, or a host of other words that end with -ologist who might be able to shed light on this. But I don't feel good about it. How much of this is genuine admiration and how much is hearkening back to Coney Island freak shows, sitting in awe of the dumpy single woman with the pretty voice?

Gabba Gabba.

Katamari theme, over and over, says Lincoln's brain

So the start of another month, the last month of the year, in fact, and we still have no snow. A lot of my co-workers are excited about this fact, praising the ease with which they get to work. I'm a skier, so thats my first problem with our lack of snow, but a more troubling one is the whole global-warming issue. But wait! We know that doesn't exist now right? I mean, what with climategate and all.

All I have to say on the subject can be summarized here: Just what is in a “political agreement”? (Hat tip to Charles at LGF.) When even the climate change advisor at SHELL says you're a bunch of moronic criminals, then you probably are.

"I think that the science now tells us more than enough to warrant action. Certainly there remain uncertainties, but not on the issue as a whole.
With regards the private e-mails posted on the internet, I think the story is a simple one and it could apply to any one of us. Think of all the e-mails you have written over the past 10 years. Now imagine that someone criminally breaks into your e-mail account and downloads all of them, handpicks a few and posts them on the internet to cast you in a particular light. We could all be shown to be saints or sinners or anything in between.
Now look at what has happened with these scientists going about their work in much the same way anyone of us might attend to our job. Enough said."

I think he sums it up pretty succinctly. I mean, the whole thing was illegal, and if you go through anyone's e-mails you're going to find some stuff that can be misinterpreted.

Today was a pretty laid-back mess. Quiet enough that while sitting at the back register, I caught myself humming video game themes to myself. Katamari Damacy dominated the bizarre mixtape in my head.

And now a brief amount of fiction word-salad. Might not make sense, but fun to write anyway.


'Bulbs'

Stranger days have happened. I woke up to a goose standing on my back step once, hissing as I tried to edge past him. Work was a man down that day. There was the morning of the wind that blew in from all directions, my door shattering closed with each gust, locust leaves across the fake hardwood.

This morning though I woke up to every light turned off.

It wasn't just my apartment. Or my block. Or my city. I could tell. We'd all gone dark.

Even the sun.

In the night of 9 am, before my phone died and my watch was no longer wound correctly, I could see no lights in any direction. My neighbor across the street was on his front lawn and asked if I knew what had happened. When I shrugged, laughed, pointed at the church, he smiled and went back inside, the loud click of a bolt thrown after him.

The lights didn't come back on though. We're not really sure when they will. I flip the switch, and lean close to the bulb, and I can hear it humming, but no light is given off. I contacted a professor at the University, and he said they're still detecting the correct wavelengths from the darkened bulbs, they just aren't lighting. Or they are, just not so we could see them.

I look at the church more and more. I was never a religious man. But it's a church.

And I'm out of candles.


Goodnight.