Scott D Parker

Book Review Club: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2012-01-04T09:45:00.003-06:00

(This is the January 2012 edition of Barrie Summy’s Book Review Club. For a complete list, click the icon at the bottom.)

I’m in a science fiction book club and there are pros and cons to that. The best part is that, in a group of four, I get to read three books I might not have normally have read. It’s a good thing that broadens my reading horizon. The most recent novel was Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, a novel I would not have normally chosen. Each time my group meets, we give the current novel a grade and a few reasons behind it before delving into deeper discussions. My summary of The Hunger Games is this: while I didn’t think the plot too original, the character too new or different, or the entire scenario too memorable, I found myself enjoying this book every time I plugged in my headphones (audio version). I found myself wanting to return to this future world and devised chores around the house that required no thought but allowed me time to listen.

Set in some sort of futuristic, post-apocalyptic North America, The Hunger Games is a story told by Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in District 12, more or less the Appalachian region of West Virginia. In plain prose suitable for this young adult book, we watch as Katniss volunteers to be the female tribute from her district in the Hunger Games, a reality show in which 24 tributes—a boy and a girl, all teenagers—fight to the death in the faraway Capital (Rocky Mountain region). This forced death match is punishment meted out by the Capital on all the remaining 12 districts (used to be 13) that rebelled against the rulers. Katniss, a poor girl whose family ranks among those who mines coal, volunteers when her younger sister’s name is drawn from the large bowl (think Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” for an obvious example). Accompanying her, as the male tribute, is Peeta Mellark, a baker’s son from the town. No sooner are they selected than they are whisked away to “Colorado” and, after making a spectacle of the “opening ceremonies,” are charged with fighting the other 22 tributes.

Post-apocalyptic stories are rarely my thing. Whereas Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury, from the vantage point of mid-20th Century America, saw only promise in the future, more and more SF “sees” the future as something to dread. An earlier book selection in our group was The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a book I didn’t finish on account of the constant depressing storyline. I’m not a Pollyanna, but I want to be entertained, something The Road failed to do and something The Hunger Games achieved. Having said that, however, there are few things “futuristic” about The Hunger Games. Yes, there are cameras that can see every aspect of the contestants’ movements, some timely supplies dropped from an unknown source, and some unique genetic mutations perpetrated by humans to animals, but, once the games begin in this large woodsy area, the story could be set in 2012, 1912, or 1812.

I have a love/hate relationship with world building. I hate it for the sake of itself. That is, if an author builds a world and writes pages and pages of description about the political and ecological nature of the world and it has no bearing on the story, leave it out, please. If that information is crucial to the plot, give it to me. In the Hunger Games, Collins has very little world building, largely as a result of her narrator being a teenager who, like most her age, does not care about the larger world other than her small sphere of life. That’s cool and I didn’t mind not knowing how stuff worked.

One of my fellows commented in our meeting last night that the violence inherent in a book about kids killing other kids was Disney-fied. That’s true, but, as another friend pointed out, that leaves your imagination free to fill in the blanks and make it as gruesome as you want. That’s a good thing, if you ask me. Death is death and writers don’t necessarily need to go on and on about how a death was made to get the point across.

Of the four men in our group, two have already read the second book in the trilogy and are on the third. As for me and the grade I gave it, it’s a solid B. I can’t really explain why I liked the story or why I kept coming back to it other than this: it entertained me. And there are times that that is all I ask of a book. If you need another thing to think about, here it is: I will likely read the next two books in the trilogy. I liked the story and the character just enough to want to know more. I just hope I’m as entertained as I was this time.

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@Barrie Summy

Book Review Club: The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

2011-12-07T06:00:00.003-06:00

(This is the December 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For a complete list, click the icon at the bottom of this review.)

If I had to sum up my thoughts and feelings about Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, it would be this: if you close your eyes and just listen to the audio book, you would think you were listening to a story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. That, and a little A. A. Milne thrown in for good measure.

The spirit of Doyle is alive and well in this new Holmes novel, as well it should. In the decades since Doyle died, this is the first officially commissioned and recognized by the late author’s estate. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that The House of Silk is now the 61st story in the canon.

And with whom did the descendants entrust Holmes and Watson? The man behind the Alex Rider young adult series and one of my all-time favorite TV series, “Foyle’s War,” was an excellent choice to write this book. Horowitz is a professed amateur Sherlockian himself, and his prose stylings are just as if John Watson himself wrote the novel.

When tasked with the job of writing this book, I imagine one of Horowitz’s favorite jobs was to make The List. What list is that you say? This would be the list of all the things that he would want to have in a Sherlock Holmes story. Think about: 56 short stories and four novels from which to draw all your favorite characters, scenes, and events to put into your own book with your own spin. Sherlockian’s everywhere will smile and nod as they see Horowitz’s grace notes as he writes this compelling novel. Lestrade is here, as are the Baker Street Irregulars, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, other little nuggets for you to find, and a certain unnamed character who, in fact, needs no name for the reader to know exactly who his is. In fact, it’s almost like Sherlock Holmes’s Greatest Hits.

Edmund Carstairs calls upon Holmes and Watson with a typical story: a man in a flat cap is stalking Mr. Carstairs, an art dealer. This flat cap chap is, presumably, a member of an Irish gang out to take revenge on Carstairs for a botched train robbery. For the next few chapters, Horowitz basically delivers a nice Holmes novella. It is only at the end of this little sub-section where things take a more drastic and sinister turn. A brutal murder—intended as a message to any who might tread on this case—move this case from mere dread to one of a more dire nature. It is here where the modern storyteller Horowitz turns up the heat on our Victorian heroes and leads them to place that Doyle would never have gone.

The pacing is good through the novel. An avid Sherlockian myself, I was never bored and often raced back to my iPod to listen to the next chapter. By the way, if you are an audio fan, the book is narrated by none other than Derek Jacobi, and I highly recommend this recording. The events had a modern way of piling on our heroes, so much so that, even though you knew certain things would happen, you just didn’t know how.

Horowitz just plain had fun writing this story. If you know the original canon well, you will note the nice little echoes and homages thrown in. For example, at one point, Watson is conveyed by carriage to a secret place. The windows of the carriage are draped—almost exactly like another carriage ride in “The Greek Interpreter” short story by Doyle—so as to prevent Watson from knowing where he’s going. Another point has Watson hunting down a clue and ends up asking a rather out-of-left field question to another person. When asked how the question pertains to the case, Watson, tongue firmly in cheek, gets to reply “I have my methods.”

If you know your other Holmes stories written by a myriad of other authors, you know all the places Holmes has traveled and the people he’s met. One rather famous example are the stories written by Laurie King, which has the old detective still alive and well during World War I. This story, now being officially canon, jettisons those other stories as non-canon. It’s as if George Lucas decided to make new Star Wars movies set after Return of the Jedi. As soon as that celluloid hits the screen, all the Extended Universe stories are moot. Thus, when Watson—ostensibly writing during 1911—comments that Holmes has already died, it didn’t jive with the other stories’ timelines. I kept having to adjust.

Now, you may be wondering why I namedropped A. A. Milne at the first of this review. It’s simple: Milne and Horowitz nailed the melancholic wistfulness of days past. Remember the ending of the original Winnie the Pooh movie and the part where Christopher Robin and Pooh are talking. Christopher knows that he has to go off to school and learn things. He also knows that everything is going to change and that he’ll never again be that carefree little boy. He longs for his past and promises Pooh to always be there for him. That’s how Watson is portrayed in this novel. Watson aches for his friendship with Holmes and the good doctor clearly knows his days are numbered. More than once, he comments that, by his writing of this last case, he has been in the presence of his good friend again. It’s a remarkable book that can both excite the senses and, yet, bring on the longing to such an extent that one might get that lump in your throat. That’s what this book did for me. I absolutely loved this book and hope Horowitz gets the invitation to write another. If not, the next author has some tall shoes to fill.

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Forgotten Music: Chicago 25

2011-11-24T07:12:00.003-06:00

(Note: Chicago has released its third Chiristmas CD, O Chirstmas Three, this year. Look for that review in the coming weeks.)

Back in 1998, Christmas arrived in August. Well, it did if you were a Chicago fan, that is. You see, it was in that month, the hottest down in here in Texas, when the then-thirty-year-old band released their first ever Christmas CD. And wouldn’t you know it was numbered twenty-five?

When you stop to think about it, you had to wonder why one of America’s most successful rock acts never recorded even one Christmas song. Peter Cetera did a one-off, semi-countrified version of “Silent Night” and Robert Lamm recorded “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” but that was it. The closest the band ever got to a winter song was “Song of the Evergreens” off of Chicago VII.

Chicago 25, coming three years after Night and Day, Chicago’s CD of newly-arranged big band standards, the expectations among the Chicago fan base was quite high for the Christmas CD. What songs would they select? How would the band stamp their indelible sound on time-honored classics? And, honestly, how could they add anything new to the endless steam of Christmas music we hear year after year. And would any of these versions become definitive?

I could certainly give a track-by-track run down of Chicago 25 (and I have, to many friends and fellow Chicago fans) but I’ll point out a few high points of this CD. As I have mentioned before in previous reviews of Chicago records, the sheer number of instruments and vocalists in the band brings a multitude of possibilities to any one song. These seven musicians are professionals who can evoke any number of nuances from their instruments. Walt Parazaider brings all of his saxophones and his flute is featured on many songs. Robert Lamm’s piano playing, including electric piano, is a joy to hear throughout the fourteen songs of Chicago 25 but especially “The Christmas Song”. Bill Champlin’s vocal arrangements (“What Child is This?”) can give boy bands like N*Sync a run for their money to say nothing of his tickling the keys of his B3 organ. Keith Howland’s guitar embellishments interspersed in the songs evoke a jazz feel more than a rock sensibility. Back in 1998, trumpeter Lee Loughnane was undergoing a renaissance in the band as his trumpet playing markedly improved in the concerts and showed up on Chicago 25.

All the songs selected and arranged got the typical Chicago treatment. Some of the tunes are better for it. A few surprises do pop up. “Feliz Navidad,” originially sung by Jose Feliciano, is one of the happiest Christmas songs out there. I dare you not to tap your toe when this song starts its inexorable march in your brain. Under Lamm’s reading, the song is a slow, moderately-paced song of beauty. In a nice touch, Lamm adds some xylophone and marimbas. It’s one of the unexpected yet understated songs on this record.

You can’t say Champlin’s bluesy “Santa Clause is Comin' to Town” is unexpected, however. To say that Champlin is soulful is to understate the obvious. But the rest of the band—especially Jason Scheff’s bass playing—really gets into the act. This is one of the funkiest cuts in Chicago’s catalogue and it gives the horns a chance to stand and just wail. What makes this rendition so much fun is Champlin’s lyrical riffs. “You better be cool\y’all gotta chill\you gotta behave\you all know the drill.” And the B3 just weaves in and out of this track. A highlight if you like your carols just a little bit dirty.

“Christmas Time is Here” is the Vince Guaraldi song from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Lamm acknowledges his appreciation to Guaraldi with a delicate version of this newer classic. The horn arrangement is quite good as is Howland’s guitar licks. You'll love Lamm’s electric piano. He noodles in and out of the melody and his own vocals. Loughnane’s muted trumpet ends the piece, setting a lovely mood that can sweep you away back to your childhood.

The next track, however, will wake you up. Chicago’s secret weapon in 1998 was Lee Loughnane’s vocals. Yes, the trumpeter sang a few songs back in the 1970s (on Chicago VII, X, and XI) but had not stepped behind the mic since. So “Let it Snow” was a wonderful treat. In a version that would be at home down in New Orleans, Loughnane’s pulls a Louis Armstrong, singing and playing. This song proved so popular in 1998 that the band recorded a version in Spanish. “Let it Snow” even found its way into the summer tour set list. It was a little weird hearing this song in the heat but the feel of the song will melt snow or your margarita.

As good as these renditions are—Feliz Navidad” is a nice change and other songs, like “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" are my preferred versions—most of these songs don’t quite reach the level of definitive. One exception exists. Chicago’s reading of “Little Drummer Boy” puts all the other versions—and, yeah, that includes the Bowie/Crosby version—to the back of the line for me. The song itself, while nice, never had the heft of other Christmas songs, secular or sacred. Chicago changes the equation. In a fade-in, the drums kick up a shuffle beat, not fast, not slow, but just enough to get your toe tapping and to make you realize this is something different. As Bill Champlin’s soulful voice begins to sing the first verse, producer Roy Bittan’s (E Street Band) accordion colors the feel of the song, giving the song an acoustic quality underneath the main beat. Champlin makes it through the entire first verse with only the horns offering the answering counter melody. As you first listen to this version of the song, you’ll probably think “Okay, this is a great song and the horns are wonderful and discreet.” Then the chorus kicks in. And, in a first for Chicago, there is a choir: twelve additional singers to go with the three main Chicago vocalists. The result is somewhere between magical and sublime. Verse two brings in Jason Scheff’s high tenor, floating above Champlin and the choir. During this vocal onslaught, the horns continue to wail away and the accordion drones on and on. The horn charts are so stamped in my head that I hear them even when listening to another rendition. I consider this song one of the best songs in Chicago’s entire catalogue and a definitive version of "Little Drummer Boy."

Five years after Chicago 25, Rhino updated the disc with six additional songs and renamed the collection Chicago Christmas: What’s it Gonne Be Santa? It’s a testament to a band with vocalists growing out of the woodwork that five of the six new songs showcase a different lead singer. Again, the newer songs give that distinctive Chicago stamp on old classics. Lamm’s “Winter Wonderland” is pure Chicago circa 1973. In retrospect, “Winter Wonderland” provides a nice clue to the types of songs Lamm would release a year later on his excellent “Subtlety + Passion” disc. “This Christmas” has Scheff in full R&B mode while the acoustic “Bethlehem,” an original tune, provides a nice, acoustic glimpse of the three kings.

Just as “Little Drummer Boy” stood head and shoulders above the other tracks on Chicago 25, “Jolly Old St. Nicholas” is the best song from the extra tracks. Simply put, this is one of the flat-out most fun songs Chicago has ever recorded. The newest—and youngest—member of the band, guitarist Keith Howland, arranged this song and sings lead. It’s a fast, up-tempo song that brings to mind “When is This World Comin’ To?” off Chicago VI. The horn charts are fantastic and, as is my wont, the bari sax all but blats its way out of your speakers. In the original lyric, the final verse lists the various toys that kids want. Howland tailors the final verse to instruments for his band mates. At the end, after he’s questioned Santa on what treat will be left for him, Howland shouts out “How ‘bout a shiny electric guitar?” and lets rip a guitar riff and solo that would have made Chuck Berry proud. It’s an exuberant ending to an exuberant song. It’ll leave you smiling and tapping your foot long after the song fades away.

Christmas is all about memories, usually from childhood. At times, it’s even about memories you never had but a nostalgia induced by music. Nat King Cole’s reading of “The Christmas Song” is definitive and no Christmas would be complete without hearing it at least one (fifty?) time. Ditto for Crosby’s “White Christmas.” But if you want something fun, occasionally different, but altogether satisfying, you can’t go wrong with inviting Chicago into your house for Christmas.

Forgotten Music: November 2011

2011-11-24T07:08:00.002-06:00

It's Thanksgiving Day here in America. I'm on the hook for homemade cranberry sauce. I'll pick up any newcomers later today with the summary. But, for now, here are the regulars.

Sean Coleman

Bill Crider

Eric (Iren)

Jerry House

Randy Johnson

George Kelley

Todd Mason

Charlie Ricci

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 8 vs. Cleveland Browns

2011-11-07T08:29:00.004-06:00

It's good not to fret.
It's good to beat lesser teams.
It's good to dream now.

T'was only last year
When the defense was a sieve
Now, it is a wall.*

Winning without 'Dre.
When he returns, look out, man!
We could be scary.

Cleveland Browns - 12
Houston Texans - 30

Record - 6-3 (1st in AFC South)

*Thanks Wade Phillips!

How I Wrote My Novel

2011-11-05T10:04:00.003-05:00

If you've ever wanted to know how I went about the process of writing my Harry Truman novel, head on over to my column at Do Some Damage today. All of us at DSD spent the week writing about how we write novels. We'll have a new theme for next week, starting with Joelle Charbonneau tomorrow.

Book Review Club: The Magicians by Lev Grossman

2011-11-02T06:00:00.002-05:00

(This is the November 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click on the icon after this review.)

What would Harry Potter have been like in Magic College? What would happen if you had a bunch of magicians and no bad guy? What would happen if you wrote a book and the plot never arrived? What if the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.") were expanded into a full-length book with a little bit of magic and nothing else.

Those are some of the thoughts I had when trying to come up with a banging opening sentence for my review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians. None really had the oomph I wanted, so I threw them all in that first paragraph in a vain attempt to be witty and wow you readers into thinking I had something to say. Which is, now that I think about it, a little like Grossman did for his book.

I'm in a science fiction book club and this was the October selection. I didn't choose it, but the premise--older teenagers go to a magical college--was promising. The dust jacket was interesting. But the execution was just wrong. When the four members of my club gather, we each give the book in question a letter grade (I picked "C" because it was exactly in the middle; others included a C-, a B, and an A). This is the first time in which I preferred that Agree/Disagree spectrum because it had that one place, right in the middle, where you can say "I have no opinion one way or the other." It was just a few hundred pages of "meh."

The novel centers on Quentin Coldwater, a seventeen-year-old New Yorker who is a morose teenager. He's the third wheel with his two other friends and his parents are all but apathetic to his presence. Thus, when he learns there is a magical college, he accepts. Now, anyone who has been exposed to the Harry Potter universe will have fun comparing Hogwarts with Breakbills College for Magical Pedagogy. Honestly, that was the most tolerable part of the book because I didn't really expect anything to happen other than school stuff. It was a nice change to have magical students drink and have sex since I'm accustomed to the Hogwarts version of things where the worse thing those teenagers did was snog.

The biggest problem with the rest of the book is that stuff never happened. The most interesting scene during the school years sequence was when a creature appears. Ooh, I thought, now we're getting somewhere. Then the creature left, admittedly after doing a horrible thing, and nothing much happened. Ever.

If you read the hard copy of the book, you will see the map of Fillory--the stand-in for Narnia in Grossman's universe--so you know it occupies a huge portion of the mind's of the characters. In fact, Quentin is a Fillory fanboy, the only one who still reads the books while at Breakbills. It's not a spoiler--why else would the map be in the inside cover?--to say that Fillory makes an appearance and Quentin and his friends go there. Give you one guess what "happens."

Among the four members of my book club, two finished the book last week while I finished the book and am writing this review on the same day. The Last-Weekers say that the book has stayed with them, and that they are liking it more and more because they keep thinking about it. One member even went so far as to say that Quentin is the most complex character we've ever read in our nearly two years doing this book club. That may be so, but he's still a whiner to me. Yes, says my friend, but he's true to himself no matter what happens.

After I finished the book, I read some reviews and learned many readers appreciate that Grossman tried to turn the conventional quest/fantasy novel on its head, to write a mainstream fiction novel with some fantasy elements. Notably, other readers took note of Grossman's nuanced, post-modern take on the aspects of fantasy literature. I'll grant him that, and agree with them.

But I still want a story, a plot, or some sort of device that moves the action. I still want something that propels me forward other than a desire to finish the book because I was in a book club.

A member of my club said that The Magicians might be a book he'd give to a person unfamiliar with science fiction/fantasy as an introduction to the genre. I don't think that's a good idea. But if you're steeped in the genre and want to see how a non-genre-ian, but admitted geek, takes on all the tropes of fantasy literature, The Magicians might be a good choice for you. There's a new sequel (The Magician King) with a premise that sounds mildly more interesting than this book, but I'll be content to read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I want to know what happens to these characters, but not enough to read another book.

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@Barrie Summy

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 8 vs. Jacksonville Jaguars

2011-10-31T16:24:00.002-05:00

Played down, yet again.
But the vic'try was hard won.
Still too soon to dream?

We have a defense!
Offense good. Now, hone the brains.
Complete team, are we?

Jacksonville Jaguars - 14
Houston Texans - 24

Record: 5-3 (1st in AFC South)

Falling Out of Love with an Author

2011-10-29T08:00:00.002-05:00

That's the focus of my post today over at Do Some Damage.

Forgotten Music: October 2011 - The Summary

2011-10-28T17:00:00.002-05:00

Thanks to all who participated.

Sean Coleman - The Byrds

Bill Crider - The Ventures

Eric (Iren): Jeeves and Wooster (theme melody) by Anne Dudley

Jerry House - Side by Side & Gordon Bok

Randy Johnson - Trouble Is... by Kenny Wayne Shepherd

George Kelley - Wall of Sound: The Very Best of Phil Phector, 1961-1966

Todd Mason - Tolkien, Swann & Elvin; Mussorgsky/Vishnevskaya, etc.

Scott D. Parker - Chiller

Charlie Ricci - The Jayhawks Live at The Keswick Theater

Until the last Thursday of November...

The Evolution of the Bat-suit

2011-10-28T14:34:00.002-05:00

My essay on the evolution of Batman's costume is now live at Criminal Element.

Forgotten Music: October 2011

2011-10-27T06:00:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the October 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Sean Coleman
Bill Crider
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Perplexio

Forgotten Music October 2011: Chiller by Erich Kunzel

2011-10-27T05:59:00.000-05:00

Mozart never made a concept record.

No, I don’t count opera. It wasn’t until the 1800s that instrumental music made a natural progression and created pieces that evoked a sonic landscape with a unified story or theme. A concept record before there were even records.

What am I getting at? Program music—-that is, music with the intended purpose of creating images in a listener’s mind—-didn’t flourish until the Romantic Period in the 1800s. And it wasn’t long before music evoking a pastoral landscape gave way to things that scared us: demons, witches, and death. Often referred to as tone poems, some of the best are collected in the 1989 CD “Chiller,” by the late Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.

Kunzel made a niche market of popular movie music being recorded and packaged together to go with a common theme. “Round-Up” features western music, “Star Tracks II” showcases some great themes from science fiction films, while “William Tell and Other Favorite Overtures” shore up the usual pops orchestra material. So it was natural that they tackled the music of the macabre.

One of the fun things on a Kunzel CD is the sound effects. “Round-Up” begins with sounds around a campfire. The CD that includes music from “Jurassic Park” starts off with the sounds of a T-Rex stomping through the forest. So, as you can expect, “Chiller” starts off with a scream. A very loud scream. You hear thunder and rain, a mewing cat, and footfalls running up some wooden steps. Three knocks of the door knocker boom and the door creaks open. The woman, so happy that some is home, turns to look at...the thing in the doorway. She screams. The thing screams back. The short piece ends with the door slamming shut and immediately, the opening to the Andrew Lloyd Webber's “Phantom of the Opera” kicks in, the pipe organ played to full volume. It's fantastic.

After the Phantom has left the stage, the remainder of the CD’s first half (time wise; these are long pieces) meanders through the great supernaturally-themed orchestral pieces from the 19th Century. All the great ones are here save one. “Night on Bald Mountain” blows through your speakers with its accustomed ferocity. You hear the intense string line flurrying around and, then, suddenly, the thunder of the low brass bolts from the sky. Having played this piece before, it never gets old.

My personal favorite supernatural piece of music is Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre.” Musically, you hear night fall and the ghosts rise, led by Death sawing through his violin concerto as the dead dance. Kunzel and the orchestra nail this reading of the piece, bringing forth all the innuendos of the instruments: xylophone as dancing bones, harps tolling midnight, the oboe as rooster, among others. This piece just floats along and, man, you can just see the skeletons and ghouls prancing in the graveyard and over the tombstones. It all climaxes in a fantastic melding of two scales, one ascending and one descending, being played over each other. Just like when you turn up the volume on your car radio when you hear “Hotel California,” I always crank up the volume when these scales do their thing. And then it all ends at dawn.

The rest of the classical music includes two pieces from Berlioz (“March to the Scaffold” and “Pandemonium”) and Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt, a piece that can always leave you panting. The one piece whose inclusion would have made this CD perfect is Paul Dukas’s “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” You’ll have to get it elsewhere. “Classics from the Crypt” includes it as a few other pieces not on this CD. I have both and pretty well have all the great supernatural orchestral pieces out there.

The second half of “Chiller” is a let-down after the spectacular music from the 19th Century. It’s film music from the 20th Century. None of it is bad, it just suffers when compared to the older music. Moreover, the carefully-crafted mood evoked by the classical music is broken with happier-sounding material like the overture to the movie “Sleuth” or the theme to the movie “Without a Clue.” If I had selected the music for this disc, I would have included more pieces like the Herrmann music from “Psycho,” complete with the exact sound effect you’d expect from the famous murder scene. The theme from “The Bride of Frankenstein” does its job well, bringing to mind all the fantastic images from that horror film of that era.

The fact that there are images associated with the film music is why I enjoy the older tone poems better: they were intended to stir up, in the listener, images of their own imagination. Film music, by its very nature, compliments eerie pictures on a silver screen. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some great music is out there to correspond to some great horror films: the theme to the movie “Halloween,” for example, or the music from “Silence of the Lambs.” But so much horror film music is best experienced within the context of the film. The classical music on “Chiller” is of itself and the images are entirely yours. Yeah, I’ll admit that I can’t listen to “Night on Bald Mountain” and not think of the demon from “Fantasia” but that’s the exception (and, oh boy, what an exception!).

What made these concept classical pieces of the 19th Century so compelling was that we, as humans, didn’t know as much as we 21st Century citizens know. With our ultra modern lifestyle, we can keep the supernatural at bay more easily than we used to. Heck, we keep nature at bay. To some extent, with greater scientific knowledge comes with it a greater understanding that supernatural things our ancestors were scared of are merely figments of our collective imaginations. Death doesn’t rise from the grave and play a violin. There is no supernatural witches’ sabbath. With nature largely conquered in the western world, the things that scare us are falling stocks, serial killers, terrorism, or bio-warfare, things all man-made. We don’t get scared at the supernatural anymore.

Which is why “Chiller” is such a wonderful CD. With the classical pieces included here, you can get a sense of the frightening wonderment audiences experienced two centuries ago in the concert halls. After an 1870s concert featuring “Danse Macabre,” I can imagine a few folks looking around shadowed corners as they walked home or rode in carriages. Horror films do the trick for us nowadays, but there’s a part of you that knows, logically, that the amputated leg is fake, that the demons in a film use fake blood, or that it all is created on a computer.

Not so with this music. It’s all in your head. Which is why I would have loved to experience a demonic piece by Mozart. With his brilliant orchestral work, can you imagine how messed up and scared the citizens of Vienna would have been if Mozart trotted out a “Danse Macabre” or “Night on Bald Mountain”? I know your smiling one of your devilish smiles at that delicious thought. I am, too.

Thoughts on Acting: Part II

2011-10-25T12:06:00.003-05:00

Dress Rehearsal

As I wrote yesterday, I recently participated in my first play as an actor. Writer that I am, I am putting my experiences in words.

I left off at the dress rehearsal where we actors would have to perform for an audience of ten that included our senior minister, and where I’d chosen to perform on stage by myself since one of my two co-stars had obligations that prevented her from attending. Now, the real shame of my fellow actress missing dress rehearsal is that the audience did not get to see her perform her monologue. I know she was disappointed to miss the rehearsal, and the audience definitely missed her presence on stage.

So did I. I’ve made no secret that I was extremely happy to have been paired with other actors rather than be given a monologue. Had I been assigned a scene in which I was the only person on stage, my worry level would have risen quite a bit more than it did. For one thing, having another person on stage means that the audience is only looking at you half the time. Whew! More importantly, however, we can help each other. Forget a line, the other person can finagle something to prompt you back on track. I needed the practice on stage with mics, even if that meant reciting both sets of dialogue.

I spoke both parts. It was weird, talking to a person who wasn’t there. I rushed through the lines, but did a passable impression of a dialogue. My “woman” voice—the slightly whisphery lilt I gave myself when I recorded that MP3 to help me learn my lines—rapidly decayed into my own voice for both male and female. Frankly, I think I confused the new audience members, but I got in the practice.

The rest of the dress rehearsal went well. Me and my other co-star—also a rookie in this acting business—performed well together in our skit (the driving one). We stage hands honed our prop moving abilities and our camaraderie backstage, and the entire cast did great. Driving home Thursday night, I was excited. I couldn’t wait until 3pm the next day when I’d leave my office and prepare for my first time under the lights. I felt good. All was well. Until 3pm on Friday.

Worry About the First Performance

When 3pm rolled around, I left my office and the butterflies swarmed into my stomach. You know that feeling you get on a roller coaster when you drop on that first, huge hill? Yeah, well, multiply that by ten. A great big ball of stress descended upon my shoulders and just hung there. Walking down the five flights of stairs from my office to the parking garage, I felt lightheaded. When I got to my car, I did the one thing I knew to do that would help: prayed. I prayed to God to help me and everyone involved to do their best, to help me remember my lines, and to calm my nerves. And, literally in the span of a minute, most of the stress and butterflies vanished. There were still a few, stray butterflies, but that was to be expected. I’ve read from just about every actor or singer who goes on stage that if you don’t have any nervous energy, you’ll likely do less than your best. As I drove home, windows open, classic Chicago blasting out of the speakers, my good feelings returned.

Backstage

We all arrived 75 minutes before show time to get our makeup applied. Now, I don’t wear makeup and I had already made arrangements to have one of the ladies pretty me up. I watch “Project Runway” every week and there’s always the shot of the models getting their look applied. The auditorium where we performed isn’t huge—approximately 200 seats—so it surprised me and a fellow male rookie actor that we’d have to wear makeup. But, from the images I’ve see taken from the vantage point of the audience, it does help show off the face and lips. My markup artist did a great job on me and, naturally, some of the girls promptly informed me, upon my transformation, that I looked like a girl. Examining myself in the mirror, with foundation, a spot of rouge, eye liner, and mascara, yup, they were right.

My fellow co-star, the one who had missed the dress rehearsal, and I ran through our scene a couple of times. Interestingly, there’s a bit of dialogue where she corners me, and she told me she was going to hold her intense stare while I gave my weak rejoiner, and then flip her hair and stalk across the stage. My writerly instincts were amazed again. Here we were, backstage, less than an hour before going on stage, and we were changing things up. It made the scene funnier, but, darn, I’d have to remember one more thing.

As I said, the best part of my two scenes was that I had another person on stage with me. The second best part is that the eye-wandering husband scene was the first overall scene. When the lights dimmed and the opening monologue started, we were on deck. We were first! It’s wasn’t going to be a situation where I’d go on after a half dozen scenes were in the can—where I could hear how the audience reacted to things, where those butterflies might return in earnest—my co-star and I went in cold. To be honest, just writing this and remembering that feeling, a few of those butterflies have found their way back to my stomach. The seconds slowed down, the butterflies fluttered, I could feel the sweat trickle down my back and in between my fingers as I held the shopping bags that formed the basis of the scene, the house lights dimmed, the opening voice over started, and then it stopped, and then it was time to go on stage.

First Performance

And everything changed.

Think of any movie in which a character has one of those moments of clarity and the special effects wizards dampen the sound down to almost nothing. In the movie, all you can hear, maybe, is the character’s heart beating, all the other people in the scene are talking as if they were underwater. That’s how it felt going up on stage Friday night for the first time.

I said the opening bit of dialogue (“Come on, honey.”) to which my co-star replied, “Don’t ‘ah honey’ me, you know you did it.” She then proceeded to drop her bags on my foot, spilling the contents on the floor. That didn’t happen in rehearsal, but it worked because it allowed me a few extra seconds to say my next line as I cleaned up the mess. What happened next surprised me and proved one of the key factors that helped me during that first performance.

After my co-star’s next line (“Then explain why you tripped over the bench and fell into the planter.”), the audience laughed. To date, no one had ever laughed at that line. Like you see the actor’s do in sitcoms that were filmed in front of a live, studio audience, I had to wait to deliver my comeback or else have the line be drowned out. Those few seconds reminded me that there was another component in the mix heretofore absent: the audience. After all, this entire performance was for them, right? It’s why we rehearsed and practiced. Now, the audience was present. And they were laughing, at the moments I expected laughter and those I did not. Organic is an overused word to describe the delicate interaction of performer and audience, but it’s a cliché that’s true. For the rest of that scene with my co-star, we finally were not just two people reading lines and walking across the stage. We were actors, conveying a story, for a receptive audience. And it was magical.

Another thing helped me through that first, crucial performance: my co-star. She has experience on stage and it showed. Immediately. For all of the rehearsals, I thought that the audience was just going to watch a domestic scene and find a few chuckles. I never knew we were supposed to engage them in the conversation. She taught me—without words, there on stage, live, on the fly—what it was like to act on stage with an audience. There is an ebb and flow to all scenes performed in this production. With one line, one character gets a laugh, the next, the other character gets the laughs. It was like that throughout all 28 skits, and all of us learned to adapt. Some of us rookies learned under the lights which, frankly, might be the best possible way.

The rest of the Friday performance went amazingly well. By the time it came to my second scene, I had already done the first one and I had moved props on and off the stage as a stage hand. Interestingly, the mere presence of being on stage even in the dark carrying something helped to ease the nerves. My second co-star, also a rookie like me, cut her teeth in her Act I monologue. For all the nervousness I had of being on stage with another person, she went up there by herself and nailed it. Our scene together went fantastic and, seeing as the subject of the vignette was a man and a woman in a car, driving, the laughs came naturally. So did our interaction between each other. The lights helped, too, as they blinded us and we literally could not see the audience. For all intents and purposes, the world came down to just the two of us.

The first night rocked, and all of us actors, transformed in our costumes, aced our scenes. I drove home on a high I’ve literally never felt before. Finally, after months of preparation, I knew I could perform on stage. Now, there was only one more hurdle to leap: perform in front of my family.

Second Performance

For whatever reason, all during my preparation, I learned my lines without my family seeing or hearing any of the dialogue. Once, my son heard me rehearse the driving scene with my co-star and his only verdict was “There’s a lot of sass going on.” I’m not some Brando type who only wanted to rehearse with my co-stars, but that’s ultimately what happened. It worked out well, and it allowed my wife, son, friend, and parents to see the entire thing on stage and it be fresh.

Unconsciously or not, in the minutes before the second curtain, I located my family in the audience and took note of where they sat. And promptly made a decision not to look their way. Not that I could see their faces in the dark, but, with only one performance under my belt, I didn’t want a stray glance from them to throw me off.

Joelle Charbonneau, a fellow writer over at Do Some Damage, has performed many times on stage. I had emailed her after the first performance about my experiences. She gave me two great pieces of advice that late Friday evening. One, audiences are all different, especially second ones, so be prepared to adjust. Two, go to sleep and get some rest. I did, but I kept turning over in my mind the things on which I could improve.

And improve I did. The second night’s audience was different. The laughs came at different times or not at all when compared to the first night. Having learned about interacting with the audience on Night #1, I tried to do a few things differently on Night #2. A fast talker normally, you get any sort of nerves in me and I speed up. The director called me on it a couple of times and I slowed down my delivery. I didn’t succeed as well as I would have liked to, but I did learn. Above all, I just had fun. We all did.

Afterglow

I’ll admit something: as soon as the house lights came up after the second performance, I already started missing the experience. For weeks, this play and my part in it occupied a lot of my waking moments. And, just as easily as the house lights came on, it was gone. Truth be told, after my second scene on Night #2, some of that wistfulness left. As I told many of my fellow actors, I would have loved a third performance, a matinee, to top off the entire experience.

Alas, we only got two. But those two nights of theater arts ministry were pure magic.

I’ve experienced what it’s like to graduate from a school, say “I do” to the woman I love, hold my newborn baby after delivering him myself, finish a novel, see something I wrote published, and many more things. Each are special and without equal in their own way. They cannot be compared and I don’t even try. But, after this past weekend, I can happily add one more thing to the incomparable list: performing on stage.

I’ve performed on stages countless times with a saxophone in my hands, but never like this. To date, I’ve enjoyed entertaining people with my written words or my saxophone. With my horn, I don’t necessarily tell a story. With acting and writing, I do. My God-given storytelling instincts took over during this entire acting experience, widening not only my part in the blessing that is the theater arts ministry at my church, but also my outlook on my writing. Even in these early days after this first acting involvement, I can tell that my approach to writing has changed. How and in what form, I don’t know yet, but I just know.

There is also the high of knowing that I can do anything I set my mind to do. Back in June, acting was a whim. Sure, why not, let’s give it a try. As the date got closer, the ominous nature of it, the knowledge that I’ve never done any acting and who knows if I can or should, slowly slithered into my thoughts. With enough practice and preparation, however, I overcame those doubts, and was rewarded more than I’d ever would have imagined. This kind of dedication—to the rehearsals, to the learning of lines, to the interaction with other actors, to accepting constructive criticism from the director—is addictive. I plan to parlay these good thoughts first, to my writing life and later, to my next acting work.

Finally, there are the people with whom I shared this remarkable time together. Shared experiences bring people together. Some experiences are dreadful—war, disaster, unforeseen events—while some, like this production, are much happier. A bond formed between all of us in this group—the actors, the directors, the sound folks, and the stage hands. In a big church like mine, we formed a little mini family brought together for a common cause: to share the talent which God gave each of us. To laugh, and to cry. And, most of all, to share in the telling of stories. Those of us in this production gave of ourselves and we got back blessings that cannot be counted. They can only be cherished.

And cherish them we will, when we see each other in church hallways, the pew rows, or happenstance at the grocery store. With each glance and a smile, we’ll remember this wonderful time we had together. With good fortune, we’ll all return, together again, for another production and another set of memories.

As for me, I’ve had a mountaintop experience, one that I’ll be talking about for a long time. It changed me. A new part of me I didn’t know existed is now open. I’m thankful for it, I thank God for the talent he gave me, and I want to continue to share it.

Thoughts on Acting: Part I

2011-10-24T12:50:00.001-05:00

It's a rare day when I can surprise myself.

I am a writer. It's what I do. I am always thinking about ways to say things, to communicate an idea, a feeling, or, as in my day job, a product. Most of the time, the words flow pretty well for me. It makes my day job as a technical writer working on the account for an oilfield services company somewhat easier. It can also make my fiction writing go a tad easier too, although that can be tougher, oddly enough.

At age 42, I'm relatively set in the things I know about myself. I know what kinds of TV shows I like to watch, what kinds of books give me the most pleasure, and how best to drive my car in Houston traffic. My daily routines are just that: routines. A friend of mine asked me once if I like structure. I said no right off the bat, thought about it for a few more seconds, then conceded the point. My wife thinks I'm high maintenance and she's right. But, unlike Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally...", I'm a high maintenance person who knows he's high maintenance, but occasionally does low maintenance things.

When it comes to things that surprise me, music and food provide the most variety nowadays as I'm always got my ear listening for something new and different, and my palate seeks out new, unexplored tastes. I know myself pretty well and, if I get off course, my wife's there to help me back on the right road. So it was with unexpected pleasure that I discovered something about myself this past week: I like acting.

Why Acting?

Looking back now, I can’t say for sure why it was that I wanted to read for a part in my church play. I had never done anything like it before. I play saxophone and the closest I’d ever been to participating in a play was as a member of the orchestra in my high school’s production of “The Music Man.” Frankly, I was content to be a musician and continue to enjoy my time in my church’s jazz band and orchestra.

Nonetheless, back in June, I went to the reading. The few of us that were there that day read through some sample scripts. This new production was a collection of vignettes about family life, church life, and the humor and sadness that comes in both. I had fun, and ended up reading a script with a lady I would eventually co-star with on stage. Now, “co-star” is a weird word, but it’s one I’m going with. There were over thirty actors involved in 28 scenes, and, for my first time doing this, was fortunate enough to act opposite two ladies, one in each of my two scenes. Other actors had monologues while some scripts had as many as five parts to them. Thankfully for me, I wound up on stage with someone else so, if I faltered, I’d have some much needed back up.

The Scripts

We got our scripts mailed to us in August. I was to play two different types of husbands. The first scene, “An Innocent Look,” was a humorous and poignant scene of a young couple. The wife and husband have returned from shopping at the mall and she’s furious with him for looking at another woman. He is wearing glasses and, yet, tells her the reason she “thought” she saw him looking at another woman was because his contact was out of place. The scene has funny moments, somber moments, and ends on a high. My second scene, “Circle of Love,” was of another married couple and their exploits driving in a car. Naturally, he thinks he knows where he’s going, she wants to stop for directions, and, well, the scene pretty much writes itself. It closes on a nice note as both of them realize that they’ve been focused not on each other, but on stuff that just doesn’t matter.

Practices and Rehearsals

Late in August, the rehearsals started. The show was schedule for 21 and 22 October and, from the vantage point of pre-Labor Day, October was a long, long time away. But, darn, you had to memorize the scripts. Well, duh! The first few rehearsals were easier, with scripts in hand, and in front of the director and her husband. Each of my two co-stars had monologues so my rehearsals with them were sandwiched in between their monologue rehearsals. Thus, at most, the audience was three. With the driving scene, my co-star and I sat in chairs, so it was quite easy to hold my script and treat it like the steering wheel. The “An Innocent Look” scene had me puppy-dogging my co-star as her character’s anger would not let her stand still. It was a little more difficult to hold the paper and look at her, but we managed. Our director kept saying the same thing: once you get out of your scripts, the character nuances will emerge and you’ll be much more free to, well, act (as opposed to read).

Boy, was she ever right—about this and everything else. I don’t know how others memorized their scripts, but I did a very 21st-Century thing: I recorded myself reading both parts of my two scripts. Then, I loaded them onto my iPod and was able to do anything—run, bike, weed the garden—and listen and learn my lines. Granted, more than a few people probably thought I was crazy as I walked to my boy’s school talking to myself, but, hey, we actors are weird, huh? But, it did the trick. Once I had the lines in my head—and knew the cue words from the ladies’ lines—I was ready to rehearse without scripts.

As a writer, I’m accustomed to creating everything for all my characters: backstories, motivations, looks, traits, dialogue, etc. It’s one of the best things about writing. With these scripts, the motivations and the dialogue were already there. The only thing left was to inhabit the words, and here’s where the fun began. For both scenes, my co-stars and I could try different things: change the intonation of voices, build the anger, make one of my characters more cocky, and other things. I found it remarkable how much I enjoyed the process. When I’m writing, this is all in my own head. Being able to work with others in a collaborative project and get “it” out of my head is quite liberating. Above all, the experimentation was the key takeaway from this acting gig to my writing life. To date, I’ve become so set in how my written characters Must Behave that I don’t let them be themselves. After this acting experience, I’m going to give my written characters room to breathe and tell me exactly how they’d react given a certain situation and give myself the leeway to change something that I thought was set.

Stage and Microphone Rehearsals

A week ago, we had our first rehearsals on stage with microphones. My church has these small mics that go around your ear and have the pick-up just near your mouth. A lot like what you see Peter Gabriel or Lady Gaga wear on stage. Needless to say, it’s a strange thing to hear your voice booming out of the loudspeakers, and it caused me to adjust how I spoke.

Now, up until our first stage rehearsal, we’ve been rehearsing on the floor of another room. Getting up on stage, with the set in place, the tape marks on the floor, a whole new world opened. We actors now had to be aware that we could literally walk out of the light. We had to make sure our shoes didn’t clog around on the wooden stage. Out went my original idea of footwear for my eye-wandering husband, in came my Doc Martens. Those quiet shoes came in handy, too, since I and another actor also took our turns as stage hands, getting props on and off stage with precision.

As I’ve said, up until these stage rehearsals, the audiences have consisted of the same 2 to 4 people. With 28 scenes, no one other than the directors had watched all the vignettes. I was looking forward to seeing what my fellow actors had been doing since August. This troup—come on, since I’m waxing on about this acting thing, allow me an actor’s trope—is a diverse group, ranging in age from ten to the golden years. The level of talent for this production was fantastic. We had folks who have acted on and off their entire lives mixed in with folks like me who decided, on a lark, to give it a go and see what happens. We actors performed some over-the-top funny scenes in which I laughed each and every time I saw them, some scenes that made me nod with commiseration, and a few that were heart-wrenching. Heck, in one rehearsal, I shed a tear or two. All in all, I could not have asked for a better group of people with whom to share my first acting experience.

Then came dress rehearsal last Thursday. For me, I considered dress rehearsal to consist of two things: you dress in whatever clothes you’ve decided to wear and you perform in front of new people. I was looking forward to it as the final time to get everything correct—and, believe me, I needed the reps—until I learned two crucial facts. One, our senior minister was going to attend as he would be unavailable on Friday or Saturday. A jovial, warm man as friendly as can be, he’s still the senior minister. I always had expected him to be one among many in the audience of a hundred or more. Nope. He was one of ten. Lovely. The second problem I personally had to face was to perform without one of my co-stars. She had another commitment that she had to do and could not attend our dress rehearsal. Lovely, again. So, not only would we be rehearsing in front of a smaller-than-anticipated crowd that included the senior minister, I chose to read both parts to a scene (the eye-wandering husband one) in which I would have no one opposite me.

Gulp.

Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you how it all turned out.

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 7 at Tennessee Titans

2011-10-23T20:36:00.001-05:00

Yes! A statement game!
Texans played all four quarters.
Take lead in the South.

Houston Texans - 41
Tennessee Titans - 7

Record: 4-3

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 6 at Baltimore Ravens

2011-10-16T18:10:00.001-05:00

My dream Texans' team:
Last year's offense, new defense.
The corner's not turned.

Fourth quarter play calls.
Four-yard dinky throws. The hell?
We needed long bombs.

Houston Texans - 14
Baltimore Ravens - 29

Record: 3-3

Pardon me while I go bang my head on something hard...

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 5 vs. Oakland Raiders

2011-10-10T09:55:00.002-05:00

As always, words fail.
Schizophrenic Texans team
Found a way to lose.

Note:
As heartbreaking as it is as a Texans fan, I can imagine that this game will live long in Raider lore. Thrilling win. In this age where corporate types handle things with kid gloves, Al Davis was an old-school throwback. He told it like he saw it and if you didn't like it, tough. That kind of spark is often missing nowadays, in sports as well as the rest of our culture. Mr. Davis: you shall be missed.

Oakland Raiders - 25
Houston Texans - 20

Record: 3-2, tied for 1st in AFC South

Book Review Club: Heat Rises by Richard Castle

2011-10-05T06:00:00.005-05:00

(This is the October 2011 edition of Barrie Summy’s Book Review Club. For the entire list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

Tell me if you’ve heard this one. A priest walks into a bondage bordello and… No? You haven’t heard that one? Oh, you think my joke is tasteless. My apologies, but I’m not the only one telling stories like this. The new book by Richard Castle, Heat Rises, starts the same way. Really? Well, go on then, if you’d rather read that book and not hear my joke.

Anyway, Heat Rises is the third in the Nikki Heat series of books in the ever meta world of Richard Castle, the TV show “Castle,” the actors that portray the characters, and the still-mysterious person writing these books. Oh, my bad. It’s really “Richard Castle” writing these books, and I’m here to say that he should increase his proficiency and bust out more than one book a year. I love these things.

In this new mystery, Detective Nikki Heat is called to the S&M dungeon where the body of man who turns out to be a priest, Father Graf, is found strapped to an apparatus, dead, with evidence of torture. Was that torture part of some hidden, kinky game Graf was involved in, or something worse? Heat, her partners, Ochoa and Raley (standing in for Esposito and Ryan from the TV show), have little to go on, but soon uncover a rather intricate plot that waxes over numerous suspects and leads.

In the season finale of the TV, it was revealed that Captain Montgomery was a part of the conspiracy surrounding the death of Kate Beckett’s mother. In this book, the author has Montgomery’s stand-in—Montrose; need a scorecard?—involved with this murder. He’s been acting strange and re-directing Heat’s investigation to a direction they both know will lead nowhere. Why might the captain be doing that? What is he hiding? As the evidence mounts, Heat is convinced, but doesn’t want to believe, that her mentor and captain is in on this thing.

One subplot is Nikki Heat’s potential promotion. On a lark, she took the promotion written exam and aced it. The open secret is that Heat will earn her lieutenant’s bars, and the interview portion of the process is a mere formality. Castle handles the politics of promotion so well that you get the impression that’s how things really go. Guess he learned that on his ride-along with Heat a few years ago.

The problem is, of course, that Heat gets too close to the truth and is stripped of her badge, her gun, and her job. Suspended, she has to turn to the only person who has the freedom to help her: Jameson Rook. Now, a word about Heat and Rook. Every week, the writers of the TV show have perform the delicate dance around the relationship between Beckett and Castle. Many viewers fear the “Moonlighting” Effect—that is, once the two leads get together, the show goes downhill. You could make the same case for “Lois and Clark.” Can’t speak to “Bones,” but by the time Mulder and Scully got together, “The X-Files” was already a pale shadow of what it used to be. I, for one, enjoy the dance and don’t want to see Castle and Beckett together anytime soon. But I do expect them to have their moment.

In the mirror universe that is the Nikki Heat books, they two leads do get together, and it can serve as a nice blueprint for the TV show writers. Heat and Rook clearly like each other, but things still get in the way. Since these books are almost exclusively told from Heat’s POV, you get to understand just how important it is for her to have a man like Rook—a non-cop—act as a refuge from the daily grind of the job. I find the relationship to be just right, and look forward to seeing how it plays out in future books.

In all three books, there has been a central action sequence that is written with such style and professionalism that it’s almost a textbook example of how to do action. The first book, Heat Wave, had Nikki fighting an intruder in her apartment after she’s left the bathtub. The second, Naked Heat, had Nikki battling a professional killer in Rook’s apartment. In this third book, the stakes are raised by ten. Nikki is trapped in an underpass, with a black suburban driven by a sniper behind her, and three trained riflemen approaching from ahead of her. She gets off a few rounds, but then loses her gun. How she escapes is pretty remarkable.

I have enjoyed all three of these Nikki Heat books, the second just slightly more than this one. But all are wonderfully enjoyable and Castle the writer—or whomever is really writing these things—has an effortless grace with his/her prose. It’s a page-tuner, but not the typical cliffhanger-every-three-pages type thing. It just moves and moves.

For those who watch the TV show: there’s the scene in this season’s premiere episode where Beckett and Castle talk after one of his book signings for Heat Rises. They discuss two things. One is the dedication. I’ll go ahead and divulge it here since it’s not a spoiler:

To Captain Montgomery, NYPD

He made a stand and taught me all I need to know about bravery and character

(Doesn’t your head spin with the meta nature of it all?)

Two, they obliquely discuss the ending of the book. Here’s a link to the episode online.

Beckett: Must’ve been hard to write that ending.

Castle: Yup, considering the circumstances.

For that to truly ring home, folks, you’ll have to read this darn good book.

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@Barrie Summy

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 4 vs. Pittsburgh Steelers

2011-10-03T12:06:00.001-05:00

Any given game
Turns on key plays and players.
Defense won this game.

With the Offense slow,
Texans' D turned up the heat.
Foster ran away.

Dre out. Cause for fear?
Nah. Someone will step up, lead.
Pave our playoff road.

Pittsburgh Steelers - 10
Houston Texans - 17

Record: 3-1

Forgotten Music: September 2011

2011-09-29T07:34:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the September 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Sean Coleman
Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Richard Robinson
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

Forgotten Music: David Bowie in the 1990s and the 2000s

2011-09-29T06:56:00.003-05:00

(This is the September 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project.)

David Bowie, in the 1990s, played the most important character of his career: himself.

Many critics and fans consider Bowie’s 1990s output mediocre. His 1993 album Black Tie White Noise is the point, they say, where the slide began. However, when you examine Bowie’s entire career, the 1990s are not a slide but a rebirth.

Even if you think that Bowie’s hits began with 1969’s “Space Oddity” and followed with 1971’s “Changes,” I think most folks will agree that David Bowie really hit it big when he became Ziggy Stardust. For the rest of the 70s, phases of his career were noted by which character appeared on stage. You had Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, the Thin White Duke, or that weird clown he played in the “Ashes to Ashes” video. Even in 1983 when he went mainstream with “Let’s Dance” he was more the Thin White Duke’s brother than Bowie himself (although, when you look at the number of album-cut songs he played on the Serious Moonlight tour, he was closer to his true self than ever before). Even in 1987 and his overtly and, in retrospect, too bombastic Glass Spider tour, you could make the case that it was the characters that mattered more than the music. Heck, if you hear “Suffragette City” or “Let’s Dance” or “Scary Monsters,” you think more of how Bowie looked than how good the songs are. Bowie has said that he staged the Glass Spider tour—with a giant, translucent spider hovering over the stage—because that’s what people had come to expect of him. The music didn’t matter. Only the image mattered.

But, for Bowie, the music mattered most and his 1990s catalog proves it. Many fans at the time wondered about the ill-fated experiment that was Tin Machine. (Now, as we celebrate that most un-forgotten album by Nirvana, "Nevermind," it's fascinating to listen to the Tin Machine album, since it amounts to a prelude to "Nevermind") Why was Bowie trying to be just a member of a band? Doesn’t he know that’s impossible? Yeah, it probably was impossible, but he was doing something he needed to do: get back to his roots. Get back to why he wanted to be a musician in the first place. In the mid-1960s, Bowie, then going by his given name of David Jones, was a member of a series of bands. After he had changed his last name to Bowie—so as not to be confused with the Monkees’ Davie Jones—Bowie became a solo artist and meshed all of the smorgasbord that was 1960s London into his own unique sound.

Bowie’s Tin Machine experience placed a bookend to the first phase of his career. After putting his extensive back catalog to rest in the 1990 Sound + Vision tour, Bowie returned to what got him first interested in music: jazz and playing saxophone. "Black Tie White Noise" (1993) is the result. With this record, Bowie pays homage to his musical heritage that influenced him in the 1950s and early 1960s, while still sounding modern. Nile Rodgers produced the album, their second collaboration after the multi-platinum Let’s Dance album. Lester Bowie, the avant-garde trumpet player, is featured heavily and Mick Ronson and Mike Garson, members of Ziggy’s band, the Spiders from Mars, also beam into the studio. The semi-autobiographical “Jump (They Say)” is the most popular from this CD. The video shows just how good a profile Bowie presents to the world. The rest of the music, including some instrumentals--a first since the 1970s--gyrated between pop, dance, jazz, and fantastic, yet underrated ballads. Sinatra would have been proud. Oh, and while Bowie is known for his often dour outlook on life as reflected through his songs, his then-recent marriage to model Iman made Black Tie White Noise altogether ebullient.

Later the same year, he recorded and released music for the BBC program "The Buddha of Suburbia," a collection of experimental music for which Bowie is quite proud. The music--almost all performed by Bowie and Erdal Kizilcay--was fresh. You could hear Bowie's pure enjoyment in the anonymity of the instrumental music. The title track is usually the only tune you hear from this album.

Having been musically born again, Bowie reviewed his career before he tackled his next album. For all the hit records and personas, fans and critics generally agreed that his trilogy of albums with Brian Eno—Low, “Heroes,” Lodger, (1977-79), sometimes referred to as the Berlin albums named for the city in which they were recorded—marked a creative moment in time for which Bowie could be proud. With that in mind, and giving a nod to his earlier theatrics, Bowie and Eno collaborated on 1995’s Outside. A concept album, somewhat bloated by its strict adherence to the overall story, Outside marked yet another example of what Bowie has done throughout his career: take stock of current musical trends and take a step ahead. The grunge movement was in full sway but there was also an undercurrent of industrial-rock that was bubbling up to the surface.

Characterized by a furious guitar-driven wall of sound as well as the moody, ambient synthesizer of Eno, Outside is Bowie return to the familiar, desolate sound of isolation in the midst of the modern. The tour that followed, co-headlined with Nine Inch Nails, exposed Bowie to a new, younger audience who must have wondered why Bowie, the original author of “The Man Who Sold the World” but made famous by Nirvana’s Unplugged set, was covering a Nirvana song. For the older fans, Bowie’s 1995 tour was a pleasure with new, industrial readings of old songs (Scary Monsters, Look Back In Anger, or DJ) and the dusting off of rarely-heard songs (Andy Warhol, My Death, or Teenage Wildlife). Popular songs from this album were “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” (good song, but somewhat out of context when heard on the radio; check out the horror-film-like video), “Hallo Spaceboy” (pile-driving rocker with blistering guitar work, here, live with Trent Reznor), and the subtle and wonderfully melodic “Strangers When We Meet," my personal favorite from the CD, especially live with Mike Garson's beautiful piano work.

After Bowie’s experiment with industrial music, he noticed that the clubs in London played what was described as jungle/drum-and-bass music. You could certainly make the case that jungle/drum-and-bass was to London what hip-hop was the America, namely, an urban musical form with its own vocabulary and styles. In the mid-90s, this style was still more a jumble of musical types superimposed on each other, the result somewhat mish-mashed. Leave it to Bowie, with his perfectly maturing voice, to inject a degree of melody on rapid-rhythm drum-and-bass on his album Earthling (1997). He created something altogether unique in his career as well as the 1997 musical scene. Highlights of this CD are “Dead Man Walking” (original and the gorgeous acoustic version) and “I’m Afraid of Americans.” As with "Dead Man Walking," in certain concert settings, Bowie unplugged these songs, stripping away the techno music to reveal the beauty of his music and voice underneath.

When examining Bowie’s entire career, you can see trilogies emerge. The aforementioned Berlin trilogy is one, the trilogy of albums surrounding Ziggy Stardust—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane, Pin-Ups—is another, and the 1980s albums—Let’s Dance, Tonight, Never Let Me Down—is a third. The early-to-mid 1990s albums just discussed is another trilogy and, yet, Bowie gave us a fifth. Beginning with 1999’s …hours, Bowie began to reexamine his own career in an overt way. Upon listening to the sedate musings of the then 52-year-old man, …hours sounds very much like the answer to the question: What would Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory sound like if it were recorded in 1999? With its acoustic stylings and meditative reflections, …hours was the answer. And it was a distinct break from the previous three albums. “Thursday’s Child” was the lead single, followed soon after by “Seven” and “Survive.” Back in 1999, you had to wonder if this were one of the few stand-alone albums Bowie had released throughout the years—The Man Who Sold the World, Young Americans, Scary Monsters—or the beginning of another cycle.

In 2002, Bowie released his most critically acclaimed album in years, Heathen. Produced by Tony Visconti, the soundboard genius behind most of Bowie’s albums in the 1970s, Heathen all but returned to the sound of the Berlin trilogy. Dark, moody, introspective songs like "Slow Burn" punctuated with loud bursts like Bowie’s cover of the Pixie’s “Cactus,” Heathen arrived on store shelves in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and seemed to pose new questions. In interviews during 2002, when Bowie was asked if the attacks had inspired any of the songs on the record, Bowie usually responded by stating that this particular pessimistic outlook on life had been a staple of his entire career. So, nothing fundamentally different but again, it was a prescient Bowie being one step ahead of the rest of us.

Then, in 2003, came his latest (last?) album, Reality. And it is here that Bowie embraces something altogether positive: the spirit and essence of New York City. Just listening to the tracks like "New Killer Star" you can all but smell the odors wafting along the Avenue of the Americas or hear the sounds of the city. There are obvious post-9/11 depressive lyrics—“See the great white scar/Over Battery Park/Then a flare glides over/But I won't look at that scar”—as well as more surprisingly optimistic lyrics, perhaps as the result of his fourteen-year marriage to Iman or the joy that the couple’s then three-year-old daughter bring to their life.

But there’s also something else. There’s a sly wink and a smile by Bowie to all of us. He tells us that he’s never gonna get old. During the Reality Tour, he delved into every phase of his catalogue, bringing out album cuts that hadn’t been performed live in decades. The DVD that documented that tour contains thirty songs (just drool at the set list and look at the stats of the tour), a three-hour experience that showed a performer, musician, and icon still performing at a peak many other artists would envy.

Smoking and touring finally caught up with Bowie in 2004, enough so that he had to cut the tour short. In the years since—going on seven—it is the longest drought of Bowie’s career without a new record. He has recorded one-off songs here and there but performed rarely. You would be foolish to think there won’t be another Bowie album out there. But Ziggy is 64 and, as much as I hate to admit it, it is possible that we have all we’re going to get. It is an all-but certainty that the Reality tour stop in Houston the spring of 2004--mere weeks from his heart attack--will be the last time I see him live. If so, he went out on such a high note that I'm completely satisfied.

Either way, do not dismiss the 1990s (and 2000s) albums. Collectively and separately, they constitute some of the best music of Bowie’s career. And if we do get that one, last album, you can bet David Bowie, The Thin White Duke, will probably be one step ahead of everyone and beckoning us to follow.

CSI: Miami - Season 10 Premiere Recap

2011-09-26T10:07:00.002-05:00

My take on the CSI: Miami Season 10 premiere, "Countermeasures," is now live at Criminal Element.

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 3 at New Orleans Saints

2011-09-26T08:26:00.002-05:00

Yes, it was a loss.
But the Texans played with heart.
The dream grows some more.

Red zone offense. Argh!
Need more touchdowns, less FGs.
Nearly stole it, though.

Houston Texans - 33
New Orleans Saints - 40

Record: 2-1

"Castle" Premiere: "Rise" Recap

2011-09-20T10:27:00.003-05:00

My recap and take on last night's Season 4 premiere of Castle is now live at Criminal Element. Head on over and have a read, see if you agree with me that the show about a writer who tags along with NYC homicide detectives just gets better and better.

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 2 at Miami Dolphins

2011-09-18T19:49:00.003-05:00

The New Man: Ben Tate
Churning up yards, eating clock.
The hope grows some more...

Two and Oh again.
But we have been here before.
To a new place...go!

Houston Texans - 23
Miami Dolphins - 13

Record: 2-0

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 1 vs. Indianapolis Colts

2011-09-12T06:32:00.003-05:00

First drive? Typical.
The rest? Pretty tres awesome!
Dare we hope again?

Indianapolis Colts - 7
Houston Texans - 34

Ahh! The sweet smell of NFL football! It's been a long nine months (since the Texans played a game). Even before yesterday, there was a sense that maybe, just maybe, perhaps, if all goes well, this might, just might, be a year of something special. Granted, we had that thought last year after beating the Colts (with Peyton Manning) in game one, but this year still feels different. We'll have to wait and see.

As a fan of the NFL, I missed Peyton Manning. He is truly one of the great players ever to play the game and, frankly, I always enjoy watching him play. The way he choreographs his team is like a master potter making beautiful art out of clay. I hope he returns soon and wished he would have been able to continue his consecutive starts streak.

Still, football is back!

Book Review Club: The Gentlemen's Hour by Don Winslow

2011-09-07T06:00:00.003-05:00

(This is the September 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

Remember the thrill of first love? That inexplicable, special something deep down in the pit of your stomach that feels like it's left earth's gravity and is caroming off into outer space? It happens with your significant other or spouse, but it also happens with books, too. The first time you discover an author, the special ways the prose is styled, the particular nuance of storytelling, it's magical. That's how I felt when I read Don Winslow's 2008 book, The Dawn Patrol. It was, by far, the best book I read that year and, had The Dark Knight not premiered in July of that year, Winslow's book would have been the best thing I consumed all year.

Finally, three long years later, the sequel arrives. The Gentlemen's Hour does exactly what a sequel is supposed to do: return you to the place you discovered, to the fictional people with whom you have a bond, in prose that breathes life into nonexistent folks. Boone Daniels is a man's man, the kind of guy someone like me pines to emulate but knows, in reality, could never be. He likes to surf with his friends. That's kind of about it. Whereas Anthony Bourdain has the mantra "I write, I travel, I eat, and I'm hungry for more," Boone Daniels would probably say "I surf, with my friends, and watch the sunset, what more do I need?" He's a PI only so far as to keep the lights on and pay for food. As bohemian as that sounds, it's not a lifestyle to be admired.

Which is why he basically takes almost any job that comes his way, seeing as he doesn't have a line of potential customers outside his door. Unfortunately for Daniels, the job that comes his way is with the defense attorney for Corey Blasingame. You see, Blasingame stands accused of killing one Kelly Kuhio, the absolute zen master of surfdom in SoCal, the kind of man all sides admire. This doesn't sit well with Boone's core group of friends: Hang Twelve, Hide Tide, Dave the Love God, and Johnny Banzai. They all think Corey should just be lynched. As does the rest of the SoCal surfing community. Heck, Johnny, a San Diego cop, was the detective on Blasingame's case, so any headway Boone can make on the case, he has to take on Johnny and take him down a peg or two. Not a good way to keep your friends.

Then there's Petra Hall. Hot British chick, lawyer for Blasingame's attorney, uppity, and definitely not a surfer. She's basically the one main female character in a book populated by macho men, so she has to hold her own. She and Boone have a thing, but neither know precisely what it is. Sunny Day, the one female surfer from The Dawn Patrol, is absent from this one save for a scene. For most of the book, Petra and Boone struggle with determining what, if anything, they have together. There's the professional sides of both of them, and then there's that magnetism where opposites attract.

As you can imagine, the deeper Boone digs into the case, the deeper the fractures become among the Dawn Patrol. Friendship hang by a thread and loyalties are questioned. I'm not as versed in PI literature as other people are, but I know enough to know that many PIs are loners. Not Boone. He relies on his friends and hates to pursue this case. But he does it because that's what the dead Kuhio would want him to do. It's almost as if Kuhio is the Obi Wan Kenobi to Boone's Luke Skywalker.

For as powerful a writer as Winslow is, as completely as he controls the pace, the prose, and the scope of this book, if you don't have a good ending, the entire book could be tarnished. Have no fear. He delivers an ending that completely satisfied all that I wanted in this book. And he does it in a language so "of the area" that it makes me want to hope on a board and surf...even though I can't surf. Winslow's sense of place is that palpable.

The number one problem most of us have with sequels (or series titles) is the sameness of it all. Meh, we might say, I've seen that before. Or, whatever, there was just too much. Not so with The Gentlemen's Hour. Here, we have character progression in Boone, but his core remains the same. He still possesses that which we fell in love with back in The Dawn Patrol, but this is clearly not The Dawn Patrol II. That's what makes a good sequel.

To quoth the sage of surfdom, it was epic macking crunchy.

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@Barrie Summy

Forgotten Music: August 2011 - The Summary

2011-08-31T12:06:00.003-05:00

Here is the summary for August 2011.

Sean Coleman: Neil Young - Trans
Bill Crider: Robert Earl Keen, Jr. - The Road Goes on Forever
Eric (Iren): 26 Soundtracks: Still Crazy
Jerry House: Mac Wiseman
Randy Johnson: Cheap Trick
George Kelley: The Ike and Tina Turner Story
Todd Mason: Where the Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968
Charlie Ricci: The Legendary Story of Sun Records (2002)
Perplexio: Survivor - Caught in the Game (1983)

See y'all back in September...

Forgotten Music: August 2011

2011-08-25T08:30:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the August 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Sean Coleman
Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Richard Robinson
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

What Would You Do?

2011-08-09T06:33:00.003-05:00

I think every writer around keeps a journal of some sort filled with ideas. I keep more than one, if truth be told, and a couple electronic ones, too.

Picture this: an idea you once had a year or three ago reasserts itself in your mind. You turn it over a few times, checking to see why, perhaps, it returned to the forefront of your mind. Satisfied that you might want to work on it again, you face a dilemma: do you re-read your old notes from way back when or do you charge forward, assured that either you will remember all the ideas you had about this topic the more you write OR do you let new ideas filter in?

Book Review Club: Fun and Games by Duane Swiercznyski

2011-08-03T09:12:00.004-05:00

(This is the August 2011 entry for Barry Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of my review.)

Job I would not want: Person trying to classify a Duane Swiercznyski book.

Sure, “crime fiction” is a nice umbrella if you want to use it, but that doesn’t quite do justice to the types of books Swiercznyski writes. Okay, early books like “The Wheelman” are straight up crime-y things, but some of his more recent books—The Blonde, Expiration Date—are not. Put his newest hard-to-classify tale, Fun and Games, into the latter camp.

Charles Hardie makes his living an interesting way: he’s a professional house sitter. He’s also a former Philadelphia cop who is fleeing personal demons from the past. Only things he requires other than the paycheck are booze and old movies, preferably on DVD. His latest contract is the LA home of a musician who has been called away to Europe.

Lane Madden, B-movie actress and A-list druggie, is driving in the Hollywood hills. She, too, has demons in her past, as the tabloids are quite eager to exploit. Those headlights she sees following her? They’re getting closer. Thinking the driver will pass her, she stops (dumb move). She’s attacked, but escapes into the night.

Think these two stories tie in together? Natch. Hardie arrives at the musician’s home and the keys aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Long story short, he has to break in to said house only to be attacked by a woman who turns out to be Madden. She thinks Hardie’s one of Them. Notice the capitalization? “Them” are the Accident People, killers hired to off high profile celebrities and make the deaths look, well, accidental. Hardie doesn’t believe her, until some stuff hits the proverbial fan.

Job I would not want: People who clean up after bloody death scenes.

I’ve read enough Swiercznyski books now to know one of his patterns: many of his tales take place in a short timeframe. The Blonde, in book time, lasted about twelve hours, Severance Package even less. Fun and Games, if I had to count up the hours, maybe clocks in about a day, give or take. The brilliance of this technique—where a reader is halfway through a book realizing only then that only a few hours have passed for the characters—is the distillation of the action down to a science. Jumping in and out of characters’ POVs, Swiercznyski is able to describe the action with balletic grace, giving nuances to violence reserved only for slo-mo shots in action films. Speaking of action films, there’s a great moment when Madden, faced with her own death a few times, relies on all the training she did for her B-movies. Even as she’s kicking ass, she’s marveling (and thanking) all her hours of training.

I’m usually a slower reader, but reading a Swiercznyski breaks the curve. Fun and Games travels at such a high rate of speed that I was devouring this book in chunks, not chapters. And the pop culture references are a scream. It’s one of Swiercznyski’s trademark prose stylings to reference just about anything at a given point. Since he and I are roughly the same age, he knows what I know, and I love it.

Another fun aspect of Fun and Games was the setting. Swiercznyski’s a Philly guy, the City of Brotherly Love plays a vital role in his books. Fun and Games is a California novel. In the afterward, you learn the thing Swiercznyski experienced that triggered the germ of this story. I’ve only visited California a couple of times, but I seriously got the vibe from this book. Heck, now I want to visit again.

The Accident People. Now, this concept is scary, but, in Swiercznyski’s hands, they’re a little bit funny, too. Don’t get me wrong. They kill people, staging the deaths as accidents. But you get enough background here to want to know more about these guys. Best thing about the book: the cliffhanger ending. You see, Fun and Games is the first of a trilogy of Charlie Hardie stories. Usually, Swiercznyski’s characters are so beat to hell by the end of the book that any thought of a continuing series is moot. Well, Hardie gets his ass handed to him again and again, but he keeps getting up. Yeah, the book ends on a cliffhanger, but guess what? You get chapter one of Hell and Gone, the next book, as a bonus. (Checking the calendar) How long until October?

Classifying a Swiercznyski book: pulp fiction, pure and simple, just like they used to write back in the day. Guy and gal get into a bad situation and have to fight their way out of it. Are they gonna make it? Read and find out.

Job I do want: Reader of anything Duane Swiercznyski writes.

P.S. Once you are done reading, head on over to Do Some Damage's book club. We're chatting about Fun and Games this month.

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@Barrie Summy

The Great Pulp Fiction Treasure Hunt

2011-08-01T12:06:00.000-05:00

Call me General Zaroff.*

For those of us who like old-school pulp fiction, antique stores are a treasure trove. They are real-life treasure chests to be opened, explored, and plundered, albeit with honest cash versus theft. The more I learn about pulp fiction, the more authors and titles I learn, and the more I keep an eye out for those hidden nuggets of pulp goodness.

Donald Lam and Bertha Cool are among those gems for which I constantly search. Honestly, I had never heard of them until I inherited a box of old paperbacks from my grandfather. Among all the westerns lay some Ellery Queen, Perry Mason, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and a couple from author A. A. Fair. According to the covers, A. A. Fair was the name Erle Stanley Gardner used to write the stories of Cool and Lam. It was then, on that day, I made a connection: Cool and Lam were the characters from the third book from Hard Case Crime, Top of the Heap. Since the Hard Case Crime books were my personal library for my pulp fiction self-education, my esteem for my granddad grew knowing that he had Cool and Lam in his library.

I read a few stories and quickly grew to love these characters and Gardner’s style (actually Lam’s since he’s the narrator). Thus, I made the decision to search for these old books, 29 in all. Here’s where the fun begins.

With the help of the internet, I could find each and every book I don’t have. I could have them all on my bookshelves in two weeks. But what’s the fun in that? I’m being honest here. How many times have you gone to a used bookstore, perused the shelves, and found a book by your favorite author? You know how cool that is, that feeling of the find? We’re all a little like Indiana Jones here, I think it’s safe to say.

I made the decision with the Cool and Lam books to find them myself rather than having them sent to me. There’s joy in the search. I had some of that joy over the weekend when I was down in Bill Crider’s neck of the woods, Alvin, Texas. There’s a great antique mall down there and one of the booths is filled with old pulp fiction. I’m talking Ace doubles (usually SF), old magazines, and the like. I found about five or 6 Cool and Lam books, including a first edition of Top of the Heap, the title Hard Case Crime reprinted. I pulled out my trusty list from my pocket—yes, really—and compared the titles on hand to the titles I still needed. Lo and behold, I found four I needed. (I also found a Day Keene book, Sleep with the Devil) A couple of them—Crows Can’t Count (#10) and Fools Die on Friday (#11)—brought me up to eleven the number of titles I have in a row. With only 29 total books and no one writing anymore, I have also made the decision to read them slowly, savoring each one, and, while I’m at it, read them in order.

The thing I’m coming down to is this: I bought #10 and #11 (and the Keene)…and put the others back. That leaves 13 vacancies on my bookshelf, but that also leaves 13 times in my future where I’ll have the joy of the find.

Anyone else do stuff like this?

*Bonus to you readers who recognized the name of the antagonist from Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” who let his prey evade capture twice before the ending.

Forgotten Music: The July Summary

2011-07-31T21:36:00.002-05:00

Thanks to all who participated. Let's get a few more bloggers for August, shall we? Spread the love around.

Sean Coleman: Stephen Stills - Manassas

Bill Crider: Connie Francis

Eric (Iren): 26 Soundtracks: Tjenare Kungen

Jerry House: Tennessee Ernie Ford

Randy Johnson: Etta James

George Kelley: Hearts of Stone by Southside Johnny and the Ashbury Jukes

Todd Mason: The Witches of Lublin

Scott D. Parker: Chicago Transit Authority

Charlie Ricci: Five 60s Pop Bands (The Grass Roots; The Association; Paul Revere and the Raiders; Gary Puckett and the Union Gap; The Happenings)

Richard Robinson: Carmell Jones

Perplexio: Supertramp - Famous Last Words

Until 25 August...

Forgotten Music: July 2011

2011-07-28T06:00:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the July 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Sean Coleman
Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Richard Robinson
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

Forgotten Music: Chicago Transit Authority (1969)

2011-07-28T05:59:00.003-05:00

First albums can be tricky and they usually come in one of two forms: fully-formed or the first step to something else. Take Bruce Springsteen, one of my favorite rockers. While his first two records (Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle) are good records for what they are, you could argue that it was only with his third record, Born to Run, that Bruce arrived. That is, he got on record what all the fuss about his live shows was all about. The same holds true for David Bowie, Genesis, Peter Gabriel (solo), and other rock acts throughout the years.

In the former category, certain acts spring from the speakers fully formed. The Beatles come to mind. Hendrix of course. The Doors, the Police. The first records by these bands grab you by the collar and force you to reckon with them. This is what we are. We hope enjoy it. But if you don’t, get out of the way because someone else behind you does.

This attitude brims over during the 12-song sequence that is Chicago Transit Authority (1969). Regardless of all the changes that have occurred in the past forty plus years, the eponymous Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) was, and still is, a force to be reckoned with. Some long-time listeners hear CTA now and lament the loss of one of the tightest bands in rock history. The seven members of Chicago, all in their early twenties, excelled at their instruments but, combined, created something greater than the sum of its parts. It created something magical. And it’s all there for the listening.

When one thinks of Chicago, the one differentiator is the horn section. When the seven guys met, they had one mission: create a rock band with horns. Sure, other bands had horn sections but they were usually relegated to playing riffs in the background. Not so the trio of Walter Parazaider (saxes), Lee Loughnane (trumpet), and James Pankow (trombone). Together, they made up the fourth “voice” of Chicago, alongside Terry Kath’s soulful cry, Robert Lamm’s smooth-as-silk voice, and Peter Cetera’s clear-as-day tenor. Together on CTA, these four voices take you on a whirlwind tour of what is possible in music. And it all starts with an introduction.

“Introduction” is my favorite Chicago song. Period. End of story. And it’s the first track on side one of CTA. It’s a biography song, sung by Terry Kath, that lets the listener know who Chicago is and what they are all about. This one song almost has it all (the only things missing are Lamm’s and Cetera’s vocals). After two verses, you get this great syncopated rhythmic bridge by the horns over Danny Seraphine’s wildly improvisational drumming. After a short break, the song segues into a nice ballad with the lead “vocal” handled by Pankow and his trombone. Loughnane’s trumpet picks up where Pankow ends, melodiously taking the listener through an imagined summer landscape. And, lest you think Cetera is only a good singer of ballads, just listen to his moving and melodic bass lines throughout this slow section. All of this is merely prelude to Chicago’s ace in the hole: Terry Kath’s frenetic guitar work. This is where words like "blistering" and "scorching" come to mind as Kath gives the listener merely a taste of what’s to come on the rest of the record. The rest of the song returns to a last chorus and then, the coup de grace: all seven instruments (including keyboards) join in on a final chord. The essence of Chicago is really all there, in one song. The cool thing is Chicago gave you 11 more ‘bonus’ tracks.

Lamm’s piano skills are featured in the intro to “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”, a concert staple since the 60s and one of the most fun songs Chicago has ever recorded. “Beginnings” is next, with Lamm’s silky vocals hovering over Kath’s 12-string guitar strumming. Beautiful as a California beach. “Questions 67 and 68” establishes Cetera’s tenor as a counter to Lamm and Kath and demonstrates, again, how the horns form the fourth voice.

The twofer of “Poem 58” and “Free Form Guitar” are a one-two punch in the gut at the brilliance of Terry Kath’s guitar playing. “Poem 58” is a ten-minute guitar jam surrounding a Lamm-sung love song. The background vocals of “I Do Love You” stayed in their subconscious, reemerging on the next record in “In the Country.” “Free Form Guitar.” What can you say about that? It’s six minutes of Kath, a guitar, an amp, and noise. It’s a shot over the bow at the rock world saying that Hendrix and Jimmy Page, as brilliant as they were, were not the only guitar gods out there.

“South California Purples” is a straight-ahead blues jam, here featuring Lamm’s improvisation skills on the electric organ. After you have listened to the album version for awhile, check out the 15-minute versions on the fourth album, Chicago at Carnegie Hall. Back in 2003 when they remastered the Carnegie album, Chicago added a fourth disc of bonus material. There’s a second version of “South California Purples,” also clocking in close to fifteen minutes. It’s a treatise on guitar soloing and band cohesiveness. Chicago’s Latin-tinged cover of Traffic’s “I’m a Man”—complete with a 64-measure drum solo; yes, I counted one time back in the day—shows off their ability to take someone else’s song and make it their own.

“Someday,” the second-to-last track, shows off a side of Chicago prominent in the early days but has gone by the wayside in the years since: political commentary. Yes, the band that sings about inspiration, hard habits to break, and big surprises used to talk about bringing down the system. Don’t think so? How about this quote from the liner notes of Chicago II: “With this album, we dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution. And the revolution in all of it's forms.”

“Someday” starts with a recording of the chants outside the Democratic convention in Chicago 1968. The chants—“The whole world is watching”—has its own rhythm which seamlessly blends into the opening drum beats of the song. The chanting reemerges later in the song, giving the listener the impression that Chicago the band agrees with the spirit of the protesters outside the convention hall getting beaten by the police. Some modern listeners will be sad that spirit died in Chicago. But look around. That spirit, the spirit of openness, of change, of the belief that the young really can change the world, died everywhere, not just in a band that now frequents the adult contemporary charts rather than the college music charts. The world changed, but Chicago persevered. (The chanting reemerges in the song "All the Years," on their long-lost, now released 1993 album, Stone of Sisyphus. Here in this song, Lamm mourns the loss of that late-60s spirit and the opportunities lost.)

The last track is the coup de grace of CTA. “Liberation” is a 14-minute guitar jam. And I don’t use that word “jam” lightly. If Kath’s guitar work throughout the album teased at his prowess, if “Poem 58” and “Free Form Guitar” was a one-two punch, “Liberation” is the knock-out blow. Just listen. You'll hear Kath going everywhere, trying different things, and Serephine’s drumming, Lamm’s keyboard riffs, and Cetera’s fantastic bass playing going along for the ride. The horns are mostly absent from this tour de force. But that’s okay. This is Kath’s time to shine and boy, does he shine brightly. As the song ends and you exhale, only then realizing you were holding your breath, read the liner notes about this song and you’ll find a whole new meaning of awe: This track was recorded entirely live. The performance embodied in this recording is complete and uncut.

One note on the recording itself. I don’t know recording technology at all but the sound quality is such that you get the impression all seven guys were in the same room at the same time recording these songs. It’s a quality that isn’t there starting with Chicago II and onward and it certainly isn’t there in modern music. You get the organic listening experience with CTA. It’s one to cherish.

If you have one Chicago CD in your collection, don’t let it be a greatest hits compilation. You can hear all of those songs on the radio. Buy Chicago Transit Authority. Buy it for the great songs, the great vocals, the soaring horn charts, the frenetic guitar work. Buy it for the spirit of the times that wrapped up seven guys and made something special.

In an age where we all make lists (favorite movies, TV shows, books) and those lists often change and vary, Chicago Transit Authority has been my favorite Chicago album for years now. Once I was old enough to understand what they were trying to put down on tape—magic and time in a bottle—I realized how special CTA really was. And is. You just can’t escape the feel of this record. I was alive, barely, when this album was released but the spirit of the times lives on through this recording.

I have attempted to write my impressions of CTA but, honestly, the liner notes of their producer, James William Guercio, do a much better job of it. I’ll end with his quote:

The purpose of this commentary, however, is an attempt at documenting the complete rejection of any name label, title or verbal reference relative to the performance contained herein. Corporately as well as individually, this artist endeavors to be judged in terms of contribution alone rather than through the tag affixed upon it. The printed word can never aspire to document a truly musical experience, so if you must call them something, speak of the city where all save one were born; where all of them were schooled and bred, and where all of this incredible music went down barely noticed; call them CHICAGO.

Footnote: Once you’ve listened to CTA a few times, head on over to Wolfgang’s Archive and take a listen to a 17 August 1969 recording of Chicago at the Fillmore West. It’s a gorgeous soundboard recording of the tunes from CTA as well as “new” songs they’re still working on for their next album, including “25 or 6 to 4,” still the epitome of a rock band with horns. In fact, they are so new, they still call themselves Chicago Transit Authority, something they would abandon the following year. What you discover with the new songs is the band still working out the kinks and arrangements. For example, “Poem for the People” at the Fillmore is sung by Cetera. The official album version a year later has Lamm singing his own song. A magic time truly.

Calvin Carter Returns in The Traditional West:

2011-07-27T08:14:00.005-05:00

Exciting news broke over the weekend. No, not news that the NFL lock-out was coming to an end. The first anthology from the Western Fictioneers, The Traditional West, debuted on the Nook and the Kindle.

Along with tales from such luminaries as James Reasoner, Robert Randisi, and L.J. Washburn, I've got a new Calvin Carter tale, "The Poker Payout." I am very excited to have this new story out for all to read, and I'm just as excited to read all the other stories in this anthology.

Head on over to Western Fictioneers to view the trailer and read the rest of the press release.

For all you paper folks, the trade paperback is coming soon.

Mercury Men is Here!

2011-07-25T07:44:00.004-05:00

I've been waiting over two years for this web series to debut. As of today, it is up at Syfy.com.

Here's what I wrote back in August 2009 when I first learned about this project:

It's difficult to overstate how much I'm looking forward to the new web series, The Mercury Men. I've written about it on my science fiction blog, SF Safari, but I think it also has a place here, considering pulp fiction is one of the topics I address here in this blog.

The Mercury Men is a glorious throwback to the Cold War days and science fiction adventure from the days long gone. If you like the Republic serials of the 1930s, the movies of Indiana Jones, or the new novels of Gabriel Hunt, then you enjoy good, old-fashioned cliffhanger storytelling. That's exactly what the creators of The Mercury Men are tapping into and putting up on the web this fall. What caught my attention was the varied influences writer/director Christopher Preksta distilled into his work on the Mercury Men, especially the original Star Wars movie.

Take a read at the synopsis from the Mercury Men website:

Edward Borman, a lowly government office drone, finds himself trapped, when the deadly Mercury Men seize his office building as a staging ground for their nefarious plot. Aided by a daring aerospace engineer from a mysterious organization known as “The League,” Edward must stop the invaders and their doomsday device, the Gravity Engine.

The look and feel of the project are pure Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. This serial would have found a home right next to these 1960s seminal SF programs.

Now, it's arrived. Be sure also to check out the behind-the-scenes stuff, especially the one about fleshing out the greater Mercury Men universe and how it relates directly to Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

The icing on this wonderfully nostalgic cake is the digital collectible stuff. That is, pictures of magazine articles, trading cards, collectible paraphernalia, etc. as they would have been back in the 1970s. The nine-year-old kid inside of me (that truly never went away) just drools. These guys thought of everything!

What better way to spend a few minutes each day in July?

Oh, and isn't that poster just the coolest thing? I'd easily hang that in my writing room.

New Gig with Beat to a Pulp

2011-07-07T23:04:00.002-05:00

As you might have heard, David Cranmer asked if I'd help out with the editing over there at Beat to a Pulp. It was a no-brainer. David is on the cutting edge of all things pulpy, and I'm proud to have had my first professional story published under the Beat to a Pulp banner. I'm looking forward to the job, and I thank David for his confidence in me.

Forgotten Music: June Summary

2011-07-07T12:12:00.004-05:00

Yeah, I'm a bit tardy, but there you go.

Bill Crider - Jimmie Rodgers

Eric (Iren) - CQ (soundtrack)

Jerry House - Herb Jeffries: The Bronze Buckaroo

Randy Johnson - Rick "l.a. Holmes Holmstrom: Lookout!

George Kelley - Neil Diamond: The Bang Years, 1966-1968

Evan Lewis - The Bee Gees: Odessa

Todd Mason - Aretha Franklin's soul recordings for CBS

Charlie Ricci - Thelma and Louise (soundtrack)

Scott D. Parker - Clarence Clemons: Peacemaker

Perplexio - I-Ten: Taking a Cold Look

Until 28 July...

Book Review Club: Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles by Edward A. Grainger

2011-07-06T06:00:00.003-05:00

(This is the July 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click on the icon at the end of this review.)

Present at the creation. Those are the words that came to mind when I downloaded and read Edward A. Grainger's Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles. This writing business is a funny thing. No matter when you start--either reading or writing or both--there are, at that moment, old masters, seasoned veterans, and fresh-faced rookies. It's natural to form a professional bond with those who find themselves at about the same place you are when you start, each with a similar goal: write stories that others want to read.

David Cranmer, the man behind the pen name Edward A. Grainer, is one of the first writers with whom I made a connection back in 2008. In preparation for this review, I went back and read through some of our earlier back-and-forths. It's a fun little time capsule. Over the years, he and I realized that we like similar stories, and we traded reviews and recommendations back and forth. When David saw an opening for an online pulp e-zine, he created Beat to a Pulp as a showcase. I'm proud to say that my first published story found a home within those illustrious pixilated covers.

Somewhere along the line, as writers are wont to do, David asked if I'd be game for reading one of his short stories. It featured a U. S. Marshall in the old west named Cash Laramie. I said sure and he passed along one, then another, and another. I enjoyed each adventure of Cash and his partner, Gideon Miles, and, frankly looked forward to additional requests from David.

But I read those tales piecemeal, in rough drafts, with endings that weren't entirely sussed out. The beauty of this first anthology of the adventures of these two marshals is progression not only of the characters but of the writer.

Cash isn't completely John Wayne, all good and honorable, but he isn't William Holden from the Wild Bunch either. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, merely human. He wears a badge and that badge dictates many of his actions. His job, with his partner, is to bring in the outlaws. Now, the means by which he accomplishes this feat is left largely to his discretion. I've just finished reading the new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, and there's a good deal of that outlook spicing these tales. Cash and Miles recognize the validity of law, but also the vicissitudes of the real world. "Under the Sun" is a good example of the partners dealing with life as they find it rather than life as it should be. One of the greatest pleasures in reading a new Cash Laramie story is, after being presented with the crime or the mystery, wondering just how Laramie and Miles will react.

For fans of the traditional western, Cranmer has you covered. "The Wind Scorpion," the opening yarn, opens with Cash in a world of hurt. After being nursed back to health by a lonely woman, he sets off to find his quarry. Lead flies in all the stories, and the body count rises. That's the spirit of the spaghetti westerns that Cranmer writes, in the introduction, were a large inspiration for the character of Cash.

It is Cash's humanness that often shines through and takes a story to the next level. He gets hurt. I like that in a character, for it is the hurting that often dictates a man's actions. When Cash hurts on the inside that he can be most dangerous. "Melanie" tells the story of a young girl who sells flowers in town. After Cash rescues her from being trampled, he discovers evidence of abuse. Infuriated, he seeks justice for the young lass. I will not spoil the ending here, but I'll say that this story's ending is, probably, my favorite here in this collection. Then there is another type of justice, as shown in "The Outlaw Marshal." It is a testament to Cash the character and Cranmer the writer that most readers will find themselves liking and identifying with both of these stories.

Now, some of you reading this review might demur on this collection with the statement "I don't do westerns." On the whole, I don't either, but I'm branching out and reading more. Despite my father and grandfather devouring westerns and having just about all the Louis L'amours printed and despite me inheriting my grandfather's numerous boxes of non-L'amour westerns, I'll go on record and say that the number of westerns I have read up to now can still be counted on one hand. But here's the secret: good stories are just that--good stories. Yeah, they may take place in the 1880s. But that doesn't change the fundamental nature of the tales nor the fundamental nature of the characteristics of a good protagonist.

If you like westerns already, this anthology is a no-brainer. But if you've never given westerns a try, I urge these adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles to be a nice sampler. Who knows? You might start liking westerns so much that you might even go out and buy yourself a pair of boots. If you do, I know a good place here in Houston that'll give you a good deal.

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Forgotten Music: Peacemaker by Clarence Clemons

2011-06-30T06:34:00.003-05:00

Most should know I’m a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. As a sax player, Mr. Clemons had a tone I envied. When Bruce’s music called for an old-school sax solo (a la “Born to Run”), the Big Man delivered in spades. But, to me, Clemons really shined with the slower pieces. Just as David Gilmour can “say” more with a single extended, held note than other guitarists can with fanatical fretwork, Clemons’s sound was luxurious and full. I’ll even namedrop Miles Davis because Clemons knew the value of silence in his music. For you Springsteen fans out there, I’m talking “Jungleland,” “Secret Garden,” “Back in Your Arms Again,” among others.

His 1995 album, Peacemaker, is a slow, peaceful, meditative offering. At its base, Clemons is merely soloing over soft percussion, mostly non-western in origin. This is night music, the kind free from worry and other noises, the kind that can mingle in the shadows of your house or apartment and breathe life into the mysterious places in your soul. In the spirit of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, this album is Clemons’s thank you to God for bestowing upon him the talent to play sax. I listened to it in a Barnes and Noble sixteen years ago and immediately bought it. Now, it is one of my Top 10 desert island CDs. That is, if I can only choose 10 albums to listen to the rest of my life, this makes the cut. Last weekend, when I learned of Clemons’s death, I put Peacemaker on and drifted to another place.

Here is a cut from Peacemaker: Into the Blue Forest

And here is Springsteen's eulogy for the Big Man.

Forgotten Music: June 2011

2011-06-30T06:31:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the June 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Richard Robinson
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

Louis L'amour's Place on the Bookshelf

2011-06-19T08:09:00.003-05:00

I went to four estate sales yesterday. The historian part of me drooled (and sweated a lot) at the treasure trove of magazines in one garage: Life, Saturday Evening Post, Time, among others. I picked up the issue of Life from 1971 with the cover story about the opening of Disney World (two words back then). I also found the first issue of Time after JFK's assassination. Cover: President Johnson.

While those were good finds, I was struck by something else. In two of these homes, the man of the house literally had shelves of nothing but Louis L'amour westerns. Mostly they were paperbacks, a mix of the Bantam titles (with the black spines) and the more recent white ones (with the westerny font on the spines). One house had what we now refer to as a man cave but was, probably, just the library. With all the stuff of a certain age, the L'amour westerns did not seem out of place. In fact, they seemed almost a requirement. I say that because, when I was growing up, my dad and his dad both had their collections of L'amour westerns on their respective bookshelves.

Which led me to this question: is there an author's work nowadays that is required reading for a man? In forty years, at estate sales in 2051, will some future buyer look at the bookshelves of men who lived in these early 21st Century decades and think: "Ah, right, it was altogether fitting and proper for a man to have read those books."

Collateral Damage - A New Anthology Inspired by Father's Day

2011-06-13T20:48:00.005-05:00

Fresh off the Kindle presses is Collateral Damage, the second anthology written by the eight authors of Do Some Damage. I'm one of the eight, in case you don't know. We've spun a few tales inspired by the only holiday in June that doesn't involve a flag, Father's Day.

Here's the blurb from Amazon:
This collection boasts stories from Joelle Charbonneau (SKATING AROUND THE LAW, SKATING OVER THE LINE, the Paige Marshall mysteries), John McFetridge (LET IT RIDE, DIRTY SWEET), Dave White (WHEN ONE MAN DIES, WITNESS TO DEATH), Russel D. McLean (THE LOST SISTER, THE GOOD SON), Sandra Ruttan (THE FRAILTY OF FLESH, SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES), Scott D. Parker (TREASON AT HANFORD: A Harry Truman Mystery, BEAT TO A PULP: ROUND ONE), Jay Stringer (OLD GOLD, SCORCHED EARTH), and Steve Weddle (NEEDLE Magazine).

As I was with Terminal Damage, our first collection, I am immensely proud of my collaboration with the other seven writers in this group.

Taking a cue from Steve Weddle, I'm including the first part of my story, "Anne Chambers and the Case of the Father's Day Murder."

In far southwest Houston stands a memorial to the Vietnam War. In the middle of a Vietnamese-American shopping center parking lot, a roped-off area contains a small plateau of nine, white steps. The peak of this plateau has a granite, oval block, about four feet high, with a bronze relief showing a scene from the war. Atop the oval, two bronze soldiers share a constant vigil. The taller man is an American, clad in late-60s fatigues, army belt with canteen, rifle at a high angle, ready to bear down on an enemy. Next to the American is a South Vietnamese soldier. He is a head shorter than the G. I. He, too, clutches a rifle, staring ahead with the American.

It was on the American’s rifle the body had been impaled.

Houston Police Detective Anne Chambers gazed up at the male victim. Limp, with clothes tattered, the body’s fluids had gathered around one side of the dais. They had run down and stained the white steps. His clothes, where they weren’t ripped, looked haphazard: one tail of his shirt was untucked, the suit jacket had a slash along the side, and the man wore loafers without socks. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

Resting against the base of the step was a crane, the kind city electricians use to repair traffic lights. The cage was a mere two feet from the victim. Anne circled the scene, piecing together what happened. The killer had cut through the chains surrounding the memorial, run the crane as close as possible, loaded his victim onto the pedestal, and thrown the victim onto the bronze rifle.

She turned and scanned the growing throng of onlookers. Men and women, hands over mouths or pointing at the victim, cell phones to ears or held out in front, snapping photos. Behind the crowd, the first news van was parked. She checked her watch: 3:34 a.m. Time to retrieve the body. Giving a thumbs up sign to the two medical examiners in the crane’s cage, Anne said “Any idea how he got up there, Gary?”

“We’ve already asked for the security feed,” Patrolman Gary Ward said. “Figured you’d want it.” He chinned the body. “You seen the front of him?”

Anne nodded. “They look like medals of some kind. They ours?”

Ward shook his head. “Don’t recognize them.” He pointed to the blood-stained steps. “One of ‘em fell off.”

In the center of the blood, a small military medal rested on the edge of a step while the silk ribbon and pin dangled over the side. Anne squinted her eyes. The medal didn’t look familiar.

Ward nodded to a man who stood facing the body. “How you think he’s taking it?”

Anne turned to look at her partner, Detective Harry Tran. “Probably not well.” She pursed her lips and watched as the body was lowered to the pavement. The two medical workers placed the body on a waiting gurney.

Walking up next to Harry, Anne said, “You doing okay?”

Harry’s lips were a thin, hard line. When he spoke, his voice was husky. “His name is Dat Nguyen. He is one of the giants in our community.”

Anne gave him a sidelong stare. “Listen, Harry, if you don’t want…”

He turned and strode to the gurney. Her mouth still open, Anne cocked her head, then followed him.

A coroner was examining the body. The suit jacket covered what looked like a pajama top. The slash on the arm had dried blood, darker than the blood on the chest. The mouth was half curled in a snarl of agony.

“Nothing unusual here,” the coroner said, “death by exsanguination caused by the impalement on the bronze rifle.” He turned the body on its side and examined the handcuffs. “The bruising and contusions along the wrists indicate he put up quite a struggle.”

“Time of death?” Anne asked. Harry stood, stone-faced, looking at the dead man.

“Pretty recent, I’d say,” the coroner said. “An hour or two.”

They all shielded their eyes as a vehicle entered the parking lot. It stopped nearby and a man emerged. He started running towards the crime scene. Two officers halted him. After a brief conversation, Ward walked over to Anne and Harry.

“That’s the guy who can get us a look at the security cameras.” He eyed Harry then Anne. She shrugged and head motioned for him to take care of the security footage. Ward nodded once and walked with the newcomer to one of the locked storefronts along the strip center.

With a grunt, Harry started walking towards their car. “Let’s go.”

Anne hurried to catch up. “Where?”

“Mr. Nguyen’s house.”

Book Review Club: Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann

2011-06-01T06:00:00.003-05:00

(This is the June 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For a complete list of participants, click on the icon at the end of this review.)

Buck Rogers had one. Flash Gordon had one. Batman has had one throughout the years, especially in the always-entertaining Brave and the Bold cartoon. Tony Stark certainly has one. Heck, even James Bond had one back in 1964. Know what I’m talking about? Jet packs. For as much as we’re living in the future of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, we still don’t have jet packs or flying cars. But in the world of Ghosts of Manhattan, at least one person possesses jet-powered flight in an alternate 1926. That would be the heroic vigilante, The Ghost.

In George Mann’s novel, America is in a Cold War with Great Britain since the end of the First World War. Coal-powered cars, with their black effluvia, clog the atmosphere above Manhattan, where the air is filled with dirigibles and biplanes capable of launching upright because of rockets on their wings. In this environment, the police have their hands full not only with run-of-the-mill crime but also with a criminal boss nicknamed The Roman. Like any good villain, he leaves a calling card: two Roman coins on the eye sockets of corpses.

Into this justice vacuum swoops The Ghost. Black-clad, with a duster-length trench coat, fedora, and enhance red goggles, The Ghost, in the opening chapter, foils a bank heist using deadly force and flechette guns (tiny steel darts). If you’ve seen Batman Begins, specifically the scene where Batman first does his thing, you’ll love this opening chapter. I did. It grabbed me, and I happily went with it.

What’s fun about this adventure with a masked hero is the steps Mann deploys to keep the reader guessing The Ghost’s alter-ego. I’ll admit it didn’t take a huge leap of logic to surmise the truth, but he still made it interesting. Gabriel Cross is a bored millionaire, known for his parties and his ladies. One lady in particular is Celeste Parker, a singer at a night club and a necessary component in The Roman’s plans. Felix Donovan is a detective in charge of the investigation into the murder of a famous senator. It doesn’t take too long for Donovan to meet the famous vigilante. From there, they team up to battle strange things and, with any luck, survive.

The book is fast-paced, a true modern pulp novel in the spirit of The Shadow and Batman. The history of this alternate America is delivered piecemeal and mostly in shorter paragraphs and bits of dialogue, a helpful way to show the broader world without stopping the action for pages and pages of tedious world-building. The Ghost is a believable hero. He relies on his wits and his gadgets–he’s got jet packs on his legs, allowing him to fly!–more so than martial arts and fighting ability. He also adjusts his strategies along the way as he encounters adversaries who cannot be defeated using his conventional weapons. In fact, these particular adversaries almost overcome The Ghost in their first encounter.

The book isn’t without some flaws. I thought the lead-up to the big finale seemed to come out of nowhere. Unlike, say, Gabriel Hunt at the Well of Eternity or Dan Brown’s more famous novels, there aren’t a lot of clues that build upon one another, stumping the reader and the heroes along the way. It was almost as if Mann just needed a few action set pieces in order to build a larger story. True, the set pieces were good, and the down time wasn’t boring. I just felt a lot of drive to get to the end, even though I was not given a lot of clues as to what the end was going to be.

One of the things I liked about this novel is that Mann doesn’t feel the need to explain everything. Bi-planes have rocket packs for vertical lift-off. Okay. But there’s no mention of Robert Goddard or the history of the invention of the rockets. They just are. I’ve been told that this 1926-era world is the extension of Mann’s earlier, Victorian-era novels featuring Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes. I’ve not read those books, so, perhaps there’s a longer explanation there.

Speaking of unexplained things in Ghosts of Manhattan, halfway through the book, I kept waiting for something science-fictional to occur. This novel is released by Pyr Books, a prominent publisher of science fiction and fantasy novels. I’ve seen the gorgeous covers (this cover art should stop people in their tracks) and read some of Pyr’s books, so I know what I’ve come to expect from them. Frankly, Ghosts of Manhattan is the exception. You take away the rockets, the coal-powered cars, and other paraphernalia decorating the scenery (including the big finish), and you end up with a book Lester Dent might have actually written in 1933 for Doc Savage. I don’t consider Doc to be science fiction. What’s so science-fictional about this book? Moreover, what’s so science-fictional about this type of alternate history?

When it comes to alt-history, I see two categories. There are stories like Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, which has time travel. Obviously, that’s SF. But what about Turtledove’s other Civil War book, How Few Remain and its sequels, which take a “what if” question and answer it from a non-SF point of view? Same could be said for Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was nominated for an Edgar (mystery) and a Hugo (SF), winning the latter. There’s no SF trope in Chabon’s novel, just alt-history.

I posed this question to Pyr editor Lou Anders, and he gave me some food for thought. Citing a Norman Spinrad article from Asimov’s magazine, Anders wrote the following:

Basically, alt history has historically been maligned by at least a subset of SF culture as pretend “What if” stories that, as you point out with the Chabon, don’t have any other SFNal tropes/elements in them. But these days, when you have every physicist using the word “multiverse” and the most likely explanation for all the quantum weirdness is that we are in only one of a number of possible realities, while at the same time have people like Charles Stross debunking the idea that we will *ever* achieve human-crewed ships engaged in interplanetary travel, suddenly all the space opera starts to look like make believe wish fulfillment and the alt history like that which actually has some bearing in science.

But these are quibbles, hair-splitting when what is really important is whether or not the book in question is entertaining, moves you, and has something to say besides.

Ghosts of Manhattan is certainly entertaining, a true summer thrill-ride of a book. I’m looking forward to future installments of this character and his world. Do yourself a favor this summer: see Thor, Captain America, and all the other superhero films, and then head on over to a bookstore and pick up a copy of Mann’s book. In this day and age, you just can’t have enough heroes.

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New Post at Criminal Element: "Gotham Central"

2011-05-23T08:15:00.001-05:00

My take on the entire Gotham Central run by DC Comics is now live at Criminal Element.

"Castle's" Season Finale Shocker

2011-05-17T12:23:00.002-05:00

Were you as surprised as I was last night with the season finale of "Castle"? I've got my take on it over at Criminal Element.

CSI: Miami at Criminal Element

2011-05-11T12:19:00.002-05:00

My take on the CSI: Miami season nine finale is now live at Criminal Element.

Two Posts at Criminal Element

2011-05-09T17:15:00.002-05:00

My second post for Criminal Element, Incognito by Ed Brubaker, is now live:

This follows the first one from last week about The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke.

Head on over to that excellent resource and give it a read.

Book Review Club: It's Superman by Tom De Haven

2011-05-04T06:00:00.004-05:00

(This is the May 2011 entry for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

I've always been a Batman guy. Even as a kid, I gravitated towards the Caped Crusader with his more outlandish villains, his humanness, and his tales that seemed just a bit more real. As a kid, I loved Superman, but I liked him best when he was with other characters. My Superman comic collection fits in probably one-and-a-half comic book boxes (approx 250/box). My Batman collection spans three boxes at least, perhaps four. Even as an adult, I still kept up with Batman while Big Blue just seemed to fade away.

So how to explain the sudden desire, about a month ago, to read a Superman tale? The author, to be exact. Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is just about the best Superman story I've read in a long time. Not hard to do considering I've not read a Supes story in years. Morrison recaptured that whimsical Superman pre-1986, when DC Comics rebooted Kal-el's story from the beginning.

But I've always wondered about Superman's true beginning. Since his debut was in 1938, that makes him a Depression-era hero. For all the years of telling and retelling his origin, writers have always tried to update Clark Kent's story. Where was the tale that put Clark back in the 1930s? Tom De Haven must have had the same question, but he answered it with his novel, It's Superman.

When you get right down to it, some of the best Superman stories are, in fact, Clark Kent stories. A good friend of mine--a member of my little SF book club--commented that, since Superman is so strong and so invulnerable, the only good Superman story is an origin story. He might have something there. Case in point: TV's "Smallville" has stretched Clark's discovery of his alter ego over ten years. Jeph Loeb captured an excellent, modern retelling of Clark's story with "Superman: For All Seasons." But not since the Depression has there been a good, honest story about Clark Kent and Superman in the 1930s.

Superman, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, is an American story of the Depression. Tom De Haven captures the look, the feel, the smells, the sounds of the Depression with intimate detail. Not hardly a page goes by without some reference to how we lived in the middle of the 1930s. It served as a wonderful touchstone to the types of lives that Siegel and Shuster lived as they created the first, great superhero. To be honest, this tale is more pulp than SF. Heck, it's almost Steinbeckian in its slowness and non-action.

Not that that's a bad thing. De Haven allows all the characters to breath on their own. The story is the origin of how Clark went from a farm boy in Kansas to a reporter and superhero in New York. And, yes, De Haven sets the story in NYC, not the fictional Metropolis. It's yet another piece that makes the story of this alien more real.

Lois Lane and Lex Luthor play their obligatory roles. Lois is almost the most fully realized character in the book. She is not some modern 2011 woman trapped in the 1930s, complete with winks and nods to us 21st Century readers. She is a modern, 1930s-era woman. She wants to be taken seriously as a reporter--something the male reporters don't do--but, also, upon meeting one character, tries out his last name with her own first name, wondering about marriage and kids.

Lex is fabulous. This isn't the mad scientist of the Silver Age of Superman's history. Lex, now, is more in line with the post-1986 rebooting of the character: a rich, brilliantly intelligent man, an Alderman, and a gangster. He doesn't want to rule the world, he just wants to rule the organized crime groups in NYC. Unlike Clark, Lex knows that his intelligence makes him an outsider among the more "normal" people.

Lex's brains is a nice counterpoint to Clark's brawn, a usual aspect of Superman stories. But, in this retelling, Clark isn't very smart, constantly doubting what he should do. In fact, it is Clark's constant questioning of his powers that, depending on what kind of story you want, will sway you one way or the other. For those of y'all (like another member of my book club) who read the word "Superman" on the cover and wait for Superman to do something super, you'll be disappointed. For those of y'all (like me) who enjoys the human side of Clark's story, this novel will be right up your alley. In the world of 2011, if one discovers one has superpowers, we'd likely try to get a TV deal. For someone like the Clark Kent of the 1930s, he almost doesn't know what to do.

Superman, like Batman, James Bond, and various animated characters, has adapted as the decades have passed. With my reading of It's Superman coming around the 900th issue* of Action Comics--the comic where Superman debuted--and it's modern, super-smart, SF version of Superman, it's fascinating to read a novel that takes Clark/Superman all the way back to his beginning.

*Don't let the news-making storyline of Superman renouncing his American citizenship rankle you too much. It wasn't a part of the main story and, frankly, I'm wondering if this little short story isn't truly canon. Another thing about the actual citizenship story: the end panels show Supes flying away after standing in the plaza of Tehran (I think) for a day. As he flies away, leaving only the protesters and the soldiers, one protester gives one soldier a flower. The one soldier lowers his weapon. It's almost as if the author is saying Iran 2011 equals USA 1970. It's really ironic that everyone's so up in arms over this one, potentially uncanonical story that, in the end, symbolizes American ideals anyway.

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@Barrie Summy

Forgotten Music: April 2011

2011-04-28T05:59:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the April 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Richard Robinson
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

"Criminal Elements" is live!

2011-04-26T12:06:00.004-05:00

The secret is now out of the bag. The new mystery/crime blog from Macmillan, Criminal Elements, is now live and ready for reading.

I have contributed a few entries so far and plan to be a regular contributor. To date, I've written about crime and mystery comics/graphic novels, but have already started to widen my scope.

I am extremely thrilled to be a part of this new web presence for crime fiction. And I look forward to reading all the great content, too. And, for you SF fans out there, be sure to check out Tor.com.

Here is the official press release:

NEW YORK, NY, 4/26/2011--Macmillan announces the launch of a new crime and mystery-focused community website with a focus on sharing and enriching the experience of crime story fandom. Liz Edelstein, Senior Manager and editor at Macmillan Community Network, made the announcement, and said that the site will highlight different areas of the genre, from noir to cozies and everything in between.

The site will feature pre-release excerpts, original short stories from various authors in the space, topical blog posts, and will eventually be offering downloads and podcasts. It’s a place for fans of the genre to come together in one exciting online space. At launch there will be excerpts, original fiction and articles by authors Joseph Finder, Steve Hamilton, Rosemary Harris, Charles Ardai, Luis Alberto Urrea and more.

Much like its successful sister sites, science fiction community Tor.com and romance community HeroesandHeartbreakers.com, CriminalElement.com is "publisher neutral," meaning that it will include author participation from all publishers and other content creators, and is not exclusive to Macmillan authors.

“This is not a typical review or promotions site,” says Edelstein. “We think of CriminalElement.com as a community for fans, by fans, and the focus is on editorial content rather than on marketing.”

CriminalElement.com will have a social media presence on both Facebook and Twitter as well; visit www.facebook.com/crimehq and www.twitter.com/crimehq respectively.

With CriminalElement.com, Macmillan is leading the charge in creating a themed community for authors and fans to interact and share their love of crime fiction and nonfiction.

So Close the Hand of Death - Giveaway Winner

2011-04-10T20:53:00.003-05:00

Thanks to all who replied. I really liked this book and I'm looking forward to reading other Ellison books.

After writing down each name on a slip of paper and having my wife draw a name, the winner of a copy of So Close the Hand of Death is Kathy.

Kathy, please send me your snail mail address and I'll get a copy of the book out to you. If you want to, you can send me your information via email. My address is linked to my profile.

Thanks to all who commented. Today, I finished the book that I'll likely review for Barrie's club in May. Hint: it combines historical fiction as well as contemporary fiction...and two mysteries.

Book Review Club: So Close the Hand of Death by J. T. Ellison (+ Giveaway)

2011-04-06T06:00:00.004-05:00

(This is the April 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

I've been meaning to head on up to Nashville and meet Lt. Taylor Jackson for some time now. Ever since I first started reading the Murderati group blog a few years ago, I've been wanting to read J. T. Ellison's series but, for whatever reason, never got around to it. Last month, when I was contacted about reviewing the latest book in the series, So Close the Hand of Death, I paused. Here was opportunity knocking. Dare I answer it? Dare I read book #6 first? Would I be hopelessly lost, not knowing the relationships or the back story?

I needn't have worried. Ellison eases the new reader into the fray. Well, “eases” is a poor word choice. Chapter one has four scenes, three of which involve murder, all of which are introduced by e-mail messages from three different cities. Each killer--not giving anything away here--is committing the crimes in the style of the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, and the Zodiac Killer. As the book progresses, you get to experience these killers' road trip across the country. They are converging on Nashville, and to one person: Jackson. Who are they and why are they after Jackson?

When we first see Taylor Jackson, she is tormented by what has happened to her sergeant, Fitz. It seems her arch-nemesis, a serial killer nicknamed The Pretender, has decided it's time to "play" and has used poor Fitz to initiate the game. The bulk of this early section with Jackson does a good job of filling in new readers like me who hadn't read the previous book. The action seems to indicate that this book picks up right where the last one ended. If that's the case, Ellison must've packed one heck of a cliffhanger.

But she packs a pretty good punch early this book, too. Jackson and her fiancé, Dr. John Baldwin (FBI) fly out to North Carolina to collect Fitz. Can't let slip the next, surprising, sequence (because I didn't see it coming), but needless to say, the action kicks into high gear. Quickly, Jackson and Baldwin and their friends in Nashville must race to answer a simple question: who is the Pretender and why is he so fixated on Jackson? And they need to answer it fast, because he is coming for her. The thing is, she's ready for him. Or thinks she is.

For all the exciting stuff and action set pieces, where this novel really excels is in the quieter moments. I don't know what Jackson was like in the five previous books, but she's skating very close to the edge in this one. Her hatred for the Pretender is palpable, exuding off the page. It's so strong that you, the reader, can taste it. Over and over, Jackson questions her darker actions--carrying an unmarked weapon, all but ordering her bodyguards not to follow her, making herself an obvious target--and wonders from which place inside herself this hatred is bubbling. Yes, she's a cop and used to dealing with unlikeable people more than the rest of us, but I got a good sense of her normalness as well. Could we hunt down a killer and off him in cold blood?

Another aspect of Jackson I enjoyed was her femininity. Too often, the tough gal in a book or movie is overly macho, like it's supposed to be a man character with long hair and breasts. She forgets to be a woman. Jackson's pretty darn macho in this tale, but she's still a lady, a lady in love, mind you. Little tidbits here and there are sprinkled throughout the book to help you remember: a look between Jackson and Baldwin, the complicated nature of a romance between law enforcement types. For every action she decides to take, it’s believable and not just something that propels the action forward.

As an author, it's our job to tell the story the way we want to, manipulating our readers whenever we see fit. In almost every scene in which Jackson appears, she's the main POV character. Sometimes, when Ellison wants to reveal something about Jackson, she changes the POV and has other characters comment on Jackson. Tellingly, in one interrogation scene, the POV shifts to the person being interviewed by Jackson. It's extremely effective because the reader gets to see how hard-nosed, take-no-bull a homicide detective Jackson really is. In that other character's mind, Jackson comes off pretty gruff. I can't help but wonder if Ellison did that on purpose.

This is an onion book, with Ellison having Jackson peel away layers until the core truth is revealed. The tension is sustained well, even during standard investigation scenes because you just don't know what Jackson will uncover. The ending is pretty shocking, with uncomfortable echoes of current events. I can't say any more than that without giving anything away, but, needless to say, I am so there for the next book.

This is a very good book, one I'm glad I read. I'll certainly be reading the other books in this series. If you haven't given J. T. Ellison a try yet, there's no better place to start than So Close the Hand of Death. In fact, I'm going to be giving away a copy of the book to a lucky commenter of this post.

Here's how it'll work: Just comment on this post. After two days (Friday, 8 April), I will put the name of each commenter on separate slips of paper and have my wife draw a name. I'll contact the winner and send out the free copy of So Close the Hand of Death. Good luck!

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@Barrie Summy

Forgotten Music: Stone of Sisyphus by Chicago

2011-03-31T06:00:00.004-05:00

When the seven guys formed the band that became Chicago, they had a mandate: create a sound that was a rock band with horns. And they did. Brilliantly. The first five years of their recorded output, Chicago walked the tightrope between longer pieces and radio-friendly shorter songs. Artistic craftsmen that they were, they knew how to write the three-minute pop song with the best of them. And, obviously, as the hits kept piling up, the pressure from the record labels to write singles kept coming. Then, when they had their first #1 hit, wouldn’t you know it was a ballad. From then on, for better or worse, Chicago became a ballad band. Sure, the fans knew the truth, but the casual radio audience (and the record executives) knew only one thing.

This kind of pressure had side effects. Outside writers were brought in to write a “Chicago ballad.” The horns became less of the fourth vocal component of the band’s sound and was relegated to the background, when they were even used. The composition of the band changed, whether through death or departure. Through it all, Chicago adapted. They made disco records that sounded pretty good. They incorporated the 1980s synth sound into their music and moved forward. And, as good as those 1980s records were, some folks got the impression that their heart was not in it.

When Peter Cetera left the band in 1985, the second replacement guitarist, Chris Pinnick, also left. Into the band came two fresh faces, Jason Scheff (bass and vocals) and Dawayne Bailey (guitars). Bailey was something to behold to suburban teenagers like myself. He looked like something straight out of Woodstock and had the stage presence to boot. Plus, he shredded like Van Halen. So, for the teenagers in the 1980s who thought that Chicago 16 was the band’s first album and that Chicago only sang ballads, the live concerts showed another side. Once again, Chicago was a rock band with horns. Don’t think so? Try “25 or 6 to 4” (1989); "Stay the Night" (1993); or “Along Comes a Woman” (1990).

But on record, it was still the same old soulless thing everyone had come to expect. Until 1993.

In 1991, Chicago released Twenty-1. It was a typical 1980s Chicago record complete with saccharin ballads and good album cuts brimming over with horns. During that summer, I, like other die-hard fans, couldn’t wait to hear those songs live. They never came. In the pre-internet days, we didn’t know why the band didn’t perform any songs live. And the one song they did—“You Come to My Senses” on Arsenio Hall’s show—was subpar. And that’s putting it nicely.

What we now know is that the members of Chicago had had enough. They wanted to make a record that *they* wanted to make, like they did back in 1971. And they found a producer, Peter Wolf, who shared their vision. In one interview, Walt Parazaider said that Wolf told him to bring all his woodwinds: all his saxes, flutes, clarinets. In that interview, Walt’s grin was huge. What was also huge was the enthusiasm within the band. You don’t believe me? Just listen.

The album that emerged was to be Chicago 22. It had heart and it had soul. The song “Stone of Sisyphus” kicks the socks off a lot of the material from the 1980s. Shoot, if you closed your eyes, you might even think that the seven young musicians called Chicago Transit Authority had transported forward from 1969 to 1993. Sappy love songs have fake emotions but I dare anyone to listen to the song “Bigger Than Elvis” and not get a lump in their throat. You see, Jason Scheff’s dad, Jerry, was the bass player for Elvis. Yeah, The Elvis. The song is about a young Jason watching TV, seeing his dad, and thinking it was his show.

Kick-butt rock songs and emotional ballads not enough for you? Well, how about funk? Mah-Jong, written by Jason Scheff but sung by the blue-eyed soul crooner Bill Champlin goes where no other Chicago song has gone before. And Jason really lets his bass playing shine here. Speaking of songs where no other Chicago song has gone before, how about rap? That’s right, rap. Granted, it ain’t Eminem or anything, but it’s Chicago does rap. And it doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds all right, too, to say nothing about the lyrics.

Lyrics. Remember back in the day when Chicago wrote songs wishing Richard Nixon would quit (“A Song for Richard and His Friends”), the plight of pollution (“Mother”), the burden of war (“Dialogue”) or the general dilapidated state of America (“What Is This World Comin' To?”)? Well, that’s okay. No one else does, either. They stopped recording those kinds of songs by the mid 70s. Sure, tunes like “We Can Stop the Hurtin’” surfaced every now and then but they were few and far between. Not on SOS. Those kinds of songs came roaring back, with “Cry for the Lost” and “All the Years.” The latter song has a bit of Chicago’s own history throughout the lyrics and, in a bridge section late in the song, a direct link back to their first record.

So happy were the guys of Chicago to be making a record they liked that they even penned a song lambasting the modern recording industry. “Plaid” told it like it was for all of us who didn’t know. Remember when I wrote that Walt was asked to bring in all his woodwind instruments? You got bass clarinet on this tune. Bass clarinet in a rock song! Can someone say Miles Davis and “Bitches Brew”?

When it was all said and done, all recorded and put on tape, the album that was to have been Chicago 22 had it all. They loved it, they were proud of it. They even decided to name the album “Stone of Sisyphus” instead of Chicago 22. It was to have been something different, something special. It was, to me, the most personal album Chicago had made since their last double LP, Chicago VII (when they basically made an LP for themselves [1st] and an LP for the radio [2nd]). SOS was also the most adventurous CD since VII. They were ready to redefine themselves as a rock band.

Give you one guess what the suits thought. Upon listening to this CD, the suits knocked Chicago to its knees. The suits shelved the CD because “it didn't sound like Chicago.” I bet these were the suits who thought 16 was Chicago’s first album. When the suits locked the demo tapes in a vault, never to be heard by anyone, some of Chicago’s heart and soul stayed in that vault. The band's reaction was where we are now. Dawayne left and, taking nothing away from his replacement, Keith Howland, Chicago ceased to be a *rock* band with horns.

The next two releases, Night and Day: Big Band, and Chicago 25 (The Christmas Album), demonstrated Chicago’s incredible talent for arranging and performing. The rest of the 1990s saw the release of two greatest hits packages and a live CD, each album coupled with two new songs. These songs were good, mind you, but were cut from the “now traditional Chicago sound” mold. None of the songs had the fire that SOS had.

The bootlegs began filtering out in the mid 1990s. I’ll admit that I acquired one. When some of the tracks made their way onto foreign CDs, I snatched those up, too. I did anything to get good sounding copies of these songs. And I took great joy, tremendous joy, in playing certain cuts of the album and asking people to guess who was singing. Even thought they knew me and my love of Chicago, they rarely guessed right. You see, Stone of Sisyphus was a unique album. It was an album by eight guys plus their producer making music that they liked. Not the suits. Not even their more recent fans. This was an album that lived and breathed freedom, the freedom they used to have back in the early days.

I still consider Chicago’s first two records to be their best. I put SOS at #3. It’s that good. And, with it being a bootleg, I could rarely share it with anyone other than to play songs in the car or at home. I never ever thought I’d get a chance to go to the store and buy an official copy of this monumental album.

This forgotten album found official release in 2008. Eighteen years later, Stone of Sisyphus is still my third-favorite Chicago album. It was the return of the Rock Band With Horns mentality. Chicago 22 may not have burned up the charts had it been released at the time, but the music was real. It was honest. It had heart. It had soul.

Isn’t that what we want from our music anyway?

Forgotten Music: March 2011

2011-03-31T05:59:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the March 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

Do Some Damage Nominated for David Thompson Award at Spinetingler

2011-03-30T08:13:00.004-05:00

Do Some Damage, the group blog of which I am a part, has been nominated for the David Thompson Community Award over at Spinetingler. Not only do I love blogging with seven other fantastic crime/mystery writers, I am truly humbled to be up for an award named after my late friend, David Thompson, of Murder by the Book and Busted Flush Press.

I congratulate the other nominees, especially fellow DSDer Steve Weddle, whose year-old, ink-on-paper magazine, Needle, has also been nominated.

CSI: Miami - "Hunting Ground" - Episode Review

2011-03-14T22:57:00.003-05:00

It's been almost a year since I wrote my last recap of "CSI: Miami" for Bookspotcentral. One of the main reasons I stopped was the show's move to Sunday nights. Not only do I think CSI: Miami belongs on Mondays, but I also didn't want to have to deal with the vicissitudes of NFL games on Sunday. I didn't want to have to monitor shows I don't watch just to hope to catch the opening of Miami. (Actually, the CSI: Miami Facebook page did a great job at informing the public of the time delay all last fall.)

As this season has progressed, I've begun to wonder how fun the recaps would have been (had I been writing them) since this season's shows are mostly above average, across the board. I told my wife on Sunday, as we watched "Hunting Ground," that all involved with Miami must have been peeved about the time/date changes and wanted to make sure to produce higher quality episodes than normal.

"Hunting Ground" has already become a favorite of mine this season, and I've only seen it once. Granted, I have it running on my Mac as I write this, but I was immediately captivated, more than usual. The first thing that tipped my interest was the writer and director: Adam Rodriguez. For those of you who don't know, Rodriguez plays Eric Delko. I'm always fascinated when series regulars for long-running shows decide to step behind the camera. Usually, that's all they do, since these types of shows have their look and feel so firm that it's often difficult to distinguish one from another, even if the director was the lead actor (David Duchovney, "The X-Files"; Jonathan Frakes, "Star Trek: The Next Generation") or a stunt director (Quentin Tarintino, "CSI"). Not many actors decide to have a crack at directing an episode in which they star, fewer still take pen to paper and write one.

Frankly, I expected the show to be the same stuff. I was wrong. Yes, "Hunting Ground" had the familiar visual tropes of Miami: perpetual sunset, funky optical effects during the lap sequences. Rodriguez, however, brought a little something different to the table. He showed angles I'd never seen before, visual effects (sub-titles) that were fresh, and just enough uniqueness to make this episode stand out from the rest.

Then there was the subject matter: humans hunting humans. Modern television cop shows deal with some serious stuff, gruesome at time, immoral at others. Humans hunting humans is pretty over the top. But, as my wife mentioned, for every episode, there's a real-life headline somewhere.

The darker subject matter gave David Caruso another opportunity to show his dark side. Yes, folks, he has one, so please stop rolling your eyes. Horatio Caine is among my favorite TV cops that I've ever had the pleasure to watch. Most often, we get to see his compassion, especially with the children. It's that quality--present from episode one--that enamored me to him. But his dark side can be quite scary. It's not giving anything away--(spoiler if you want to see the show)--to say that the CSIs find the culprits. Caine, shotgun in hand, delivers his own brand of justice in a manner distinctively his own. Yes, we viewers want Caine to blow a hole in this guy's abdomen. Yes, we might have cheered had that happened. But, we're talking about Horatio Caine, a character who probably had the same urge. But if he can allow his wife's murderer to go to prison rather killing him outright, you knew Caine was never going to create that hole. Still, Caine made his point.

Another wonderful trait of this episode is the character interplay. Rodriguez, as an actor in the show, might have just a tad more insight into his character and those of his co-stars than mere writers since he's the one speaking the words. That isn't to say that writers (!) can't find the inner nuance of a character, I'm just saying I enjoy the little things in this episode: Frank's interview with the orchid guy ("Orchids?!"), Natalia and Ryan in the field with Ryan “experiencing” nature, Caine and Wolf as partners in the field, an unspoken connection between the two. Even Horatio got to perform his patented compassion when he had to break the bad news to the new widow and the new fatherless child. The little gesture of touch he gives her, and the camera, focusing on his hand on hers, the dreadful soberness on Caruso's face was flawless.

It also directly led to Caine's first small step over the line. When CSI: Miami began, Caruso wore a lab coat more often, the science being the number one thing. As the years have moved on, Caine is now more a cop with a little science thrown in. Too often in modern forensic cop shows, the science gets the bad guy. Nowadays, Caine uses the evidence presented him and makes educated guesses on a criminal's next move, using not only his intuition but also his cop sense. Immediately after consoling the new widow, Caine threatens a person of interest with branding. You see, the victims, the men who are prey, have been branded. Caine got his information, but he didn't have to go all Jack Bauer on the guy either. Thing is, Caine could if he wanted to. He just dances up to that line, occasionally puts a toe over it, and then moves away. Shows he's human, and yet, knows there's also the law.

I have loved CSI: Miami from day one. Over nine seasons, there are few episodes I don't like. None come from this stellar season. "Hunting Ground" is already one of my favorites for the year, and probably will end up being a well-remembered episode for the entire run of the show. If I had my way, I'd get Adam Rodriguez to write and direct at least one episode per season from here on out.

For anyone who hasn't watched CSI: Miami in a long time, seek out this episode. (Facebook has it; so does CBS.com) I suspect you'll enjoy it. For those of you who don’t give it a second thought, give it a try. You might be surprised.

Enter Abraham Lincoln

2011-03-04T07:46:00.002-06:00

On this day, 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States of America. Thus, changed the course of history...

Book Review Club: Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker

2011-03-02T06:00:00.005-06:00

This is the March 2011 Edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

In order to get a good handle on this book, you're going to have to use your imagination. Think of a celebrity chef, one that specializes in French cooking, but not one of those bombastic ones. Now, add a dash of detective, the old-school one from the golden age of the detectives. Not one of those obsessive compulsive detectives like Monk or Peroit, but a newer vintage. Now, set a story in the provincial countryside of France, mix well with a little dash of murder, a lot of good food, and you pretty much have an idea of the character of Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police.

I don't particularly like the word "foodie" but that's the modern term for people who like food, the preparation of food, the discussion of food, and pretty much all things about food. Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, I guess that makes me a duck, or a foodie. So, when I received Walker’s book out of the blue last year from the publisher asking for me to review it, I had no idea who Walker was much less his character. But blurb at the bottom of the trade paperback cover sold me: "a nice literary pairing with the slow-food movement…" That's a quote from Entertainment Weekly, and, to paraphrase "Jerry Maguire," it had me at "slow-food movement."

Benoit Courreges is the chief of police in the small French Village of St. Denis. But to all the people in the village, Courreges is simply Bruno. He lives by himself in a restored farmhouse, he showers outdoors, he walks around the village every day, and the hardest part of his job, as the book opens, is helping all the purveyors of the various traditional French food markets avoid being fined by the European Union's food investigators. Along the way, Bruno extols the virtues of good coffee, good food, where to get the best truffles after the rain, and the languid life of a country policeman.

Enter into this pastoral scene a murder. The victim is an elderly Algerian war hero, who fought for the French in Germany in 1945 and later in Algeria. What makes the murder of Hamid particularly offensive is the swastika carved into his chest. Seeing as he is an immigrant, the local villagers began to suspect that the murder was an ethnic killing. Naturally the politicians see opportunity and descend on St. Denis like ants at a picnic. French-born residents of the village don't like all the attention paid to their small little town, and start to chafe against all the unwanted attention. Naturally, it's up to Bruno and the national police, including one young female policewoman, Isabelle, to solve the murder and avoid any political difficulties. And, since we’re in France, a budding romance blossoms as well with all the shadowed delicacy of Bruno’s former life as a soldier in Bosnia brought to the fore.

Walker is the senior director of the Global Business Policy Council and formally worked for the Guardian of Great Britain. The historian part of me relished all of the intricate details about France during World War II, the deep-seated animosity between the Vichy French and De Gaulle’s group, the immediate post-war period, the Algerian war, and the war in Vietnam before the French left in 1954. The history aspect is a gift, but there is one better: the food. It's a rare day when I can read a book and start a hankering for the food that the characters are eating, but it happened all the time and this book. The descriptions are so good that you can hear the bread crust crunching under your fingers, you can smell the yeasty goodness that only comes from French countryside bread, making your mouth water with lust. He even makes the water—the water!—sound like the sweetest thing you'll ever taste on the Earth.

I’ll say this about the book, though it's not really a criticism, but it has to be noted. The book has a languid pace. If the cover blurb references the slow-food movement, you could almost call this a slow-mystery book. Not a lot happens on the surface, but a lot happens just below the surface. This is a book filled with nuance, and subtle characterizations that I've found very appealing. You go into various online sites—including Audible.com, where I downloaded the audio book—and you'll find comments from some reviewers that state the book was boring. One man's languid is another man's boring. I didn't find the book boring in the least, but, then again, I love food. So during the times when the mystery part of the book stopped, the characters were usually talking about food, something I enjoyed. If you are a reader who doesn't like discussions of French food and its preparation, or if you like your mysteries to possess a more rapid pace, Bruno, Chief of Police might not be the book for you. Rather, if you enjoy all those BBC productions we get here in the States via PBS, glorious descriptions of food, and a character that has enough of a complicated back story that makes me, at least, want to know more, I recommend this book.

You could almost call this a summer book since the story takes place in the summer and the descriptions and actions bring to mind one of those bright, Mediterranean Monet paintings. This book is like a brochure at a travel agency: it makes you want to visit France. You can, with Bruno as your guide. You just can't eat the food.

P.S., Walker has created a fun, little meta-fictional blog as written by Bruno, complete with recipes and other food discussions.

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@Barrie Summy

Forgotten Music: February 2011 - The Summary

2011-02-28T17:15:00.001-06:00

Thanks to all our regulars. Here's a challenge for March 2011: Invite a friend. Let's work on expanding this little project as 2011 moves forward. Let's start in March.

Bill Crider - Girl Groups (His link isn't working properly)

Jerry House – New Lost City Ramblers

Randy Johnson – The Cult

George Kelley – Bob Marley, Live Forever

Todd Mason – The Weavers: Reunion at Carnegie Hall 1963

Charlie Ricci – The Mix Tape From Hell

Scott D. Parker – Brian Setzer Orchestra – Wolfgang’s Big Night Out

Perplexio – Juggernaut – Hunters and Collectors

Until the last day of March...

Forgotten Music: February 2011 - Wolfgang's Big Night Out by the Brian Setzer Orchestra

2011-02-24T06:00:00.004-06:00

Brian Setzer can travel through time. Want proof? Just look at his resume.

In the early 80s, when synthesizers and flaming pop metal ruled the radio airwaves, Setzer jumped back in time thirty years when he led the Stray Cats in a pseudo rockabilly 50s revival. It lasted for something like two albums and two quite famous and toe-tapping songs: “Stray Cat Strut” and “Rock This Town.” Then, for most folks, the felines on the fence got the boot thrown at them. They fell off. We all dusted our hands and nodded at a job well done.

But ten years later, in the mid-90s, Setzer went back even further in time, this time, sixty years. In a world filled with grunge, Setzer landed in the 30s, arriving just in time for the mini swing revival that crested prior to the millennium. His 17-piece big band helped to lead the movement and, for an alto sax player like me, gave me something really fun to get into. In fact, as the swing craze set the 90s ablaze, many folks had thoughts like this: “Wow. This is some good music.” Uh, yeah. What took y’all so long to realize that? Just look what they did to the Stray Cats hit “Rock This Town.”

Setzer and his band produced four studio albums (the third, The Dirty Boogie, is my favorite) and two Christmas CDs and a few live albums. The first Yule collection, Boogie Woogie Christmas, featured a big band, jazz rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite.” I remember seeing the track listing on the jewel box and thinking “Seriously?” Could a piece of music played in straight time ever come off as a swing number? The short answer: yeah, it can. And it’s really good.

So it was a natural progression for Setzer to travel back further in time and tackle an entire CD’s worth of classically inspired jazz pieces. And Wolfgang’s Big Night Out is the result. And you know what? These classical composers can swing, baby!

The album is basically a greatest hits record of classical songs and themes. “Take the 5th” kicks off the album and the music is only half the fun. All the song titles save one are themselves jazzy, Vegas-lounge inspired riffs off the original pieces. Thus, “Take the 5th” morphs from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. And this piece could have come directly from Benny Goodman’s orchestra circa 1936. The thing about this track and most of the other tracks is Setzer’s guitar sound. It’s straight 50s and early 60s: very little reverb, very little distortion. It’s a clean sound although Setzer is not shy about the whammy bar. Not only do you get 30s and 40s era swing arrangements, you get 50s and 60s guitar sounds to boot.

“One More Night With You” is the only song title that’s not a direct take-off of the original piece. And this is the only vocals that Setzer delivers. The theme is Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” and the music is quite good. The lyrics are all about how Setzer doesn’t need all the bling associated with success if he has the woman of his dreams. The female backup singers channel the Andrew Sisters as they vocally prance their way behind Setzer’s warble.

You know Mozart can swing so the title track (AKA “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”) is pleasant and uneventful. Ditto for “Yes We Can Can” (I don’t have to tell you what that song is from, do I?) and “Sabre Dance,” a song that keeps its title and its intensity.

Setzer is an underrated guitarist. He’s flashy but not as well known as, say, Clapton, Page, or Van Halen. Setzer’s genius is in his picking techniques, put on glorious display in “Honey Man” (“Flight of the Bumblebee”). Yes, it would be much easier to do a Van Halen and play only with his fingers on the fret board and not pick each individual note. Heck, if Setzer did that, the song could have been played much, much faster. Instead, the song blows through your speakers at a rapid clip and Setzer picks every single note. Impressive.

Perhaps the most unexpected arrangement is the modifying of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” into “For Lisa,” a gypsy jazz piece that would have made Django Reinhardt proud. In the only song that doesn’t feature the entire band, Setzer and a few mates (violin, bass, drums, clarinet, and Setzer himself on acoustic guitar) present a soft, acoustic piece that evokes Parisian cafes at the turn of the century. Setzer’s albums are usually loud and bombastic. This little piece just floats along, making you smile and wanting some coffee.

To say that there are some missteps puts a damper on the tracks themselves. None of the songs are bad; some just work better than others. “Swingin’ Willie” (“William Tell Overture”) is a decent enough track but the swing seems a tad forced. The same is true for “Some River in Europe” (“Blue Danube”), a song that stays hews close to its classical inspiration, rarely veering into swing territory.

Wolfgang’s Big Night Out showcases one true blender song on an album full of them. By blender, I’m talking about when you put a bunch of different influences into a blender and turn it on. “1812 Overdrive” does that a bit at the beginning of the song as the Latin-tinged drums and percussion give you that Louis Prima, jump blues vibe. But the shining star of blender songs has got to be “Take a Break Guys” (“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”). If you count jazz and classical as the two base motifs, then you have to include Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing” (tom-tom drums), surf guitar (at the beginning), an introduction that could have come from a James Bond film, and, then, the coup de grace: Jimi Hendrix. During the phenomenal guitar solo, the rhythm shifts to straight rock time and Setzer begins to shred, a la mid-70s rock gods like Terry Kath (Chicago) and Joe Perry (Aerosmith). The horns come back in for the second half of the solo but then Setzer breaks out the wah-wah pedal and does his best Hendrix impersonation (think "All Along the Watchtower" among others). From there on out, he keeps the wah-wah going but funkifies it, just like you’d hear in an early 70s Isaac Hayes tune. As much fun as the other eleven tracks are, this is the track to take home and share.

A recommendation: I first heard this CD while driving in my car. As such, I couldn’t just pick up the CD case and look at the title of the song whilst driving at sixty-miles-per-hour. So, the fun thing was to try and determine, as quickly as possible, which classical piece was Setzer’s inspiration. Some are easy: Beethoven’s 5th and "Take the 5th" both start out with the same four notes. Some are much more fun. If you’ve already bought this CD, try this: put away the track listing, set your CD player to random, and just revel in the fun. You’ll be tapping your toe in no time.

And speaking of time, I wonder where Setzer time travels next? Gregorian chants as jazz songs? In Setzer’s capable hands, anything is possible.

Forgotten Music: February 2011

2011-02-24T05:59:00.001-06:00

Welcome to the February 2011 edition of the Forgotten Music Project. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

Book Review Club: Skating Around the Law by Joelle Charbonneau

2011-02-02T06:00:00.004-06:00

(This is the February 2011 Edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list of today's reviewers, click the icon at the end of this post.)

Have you ever had a situation where you weren’t looking for something, and yet you stumble over it and discover something brand new? A song on the radio catches your fancy and you seek out the artist and buy the CD. The trailer of a movie of a type you don’t normally watch finds you in the seats on opening day. Well, that happened to me with Skating Around the Law, the debut novel by Joelle Charbonneau.

Let’s go ahead and get the disclaimer out of the way: Joelle and I are among the group of eight writers who blog under the Do Some Damage banner. I met her when she had a signing at Houston’s Murder by the Book last October. I bought her book and read it. As a reader, I don’t normally choose the lighter, fun, effervescent type books. When it comes to written mystery fiction, I trend towards hard-boiled, gritty material. Not so with television, where “Castle,” “CSI: Miami,” and whatever’s on Masterpiece Mystery rule the day. Having said all of this, I intended to read Joelle’s book, like it enough to compliment her, and then think nothing more of it.

Skating Around the Law did nothing less than shake the foundations of my reading life. Suddenly, it was as if an entire section of the bookstore was opened to me, the section I so assiduously avoided. While the book doesn’t precisely fit within the strict definition of the cozy, it is a close relative. Thus, this book is the first of that type of book. And it won’t be the last.

The novel features Rebecca Robbins, a young professional in Chicago who returns to her small hometown with one goal in mind: sell the roller rink her deceased mother bequeathed to her and get back to the Windy City. There’s only one thing that’s bringing down the value of the rink: the dead body in the bathroom. When the police don’t really seem that interested in solving the death of Mack the handyman, Rebecca takes matters into her own hands. With a colorful cast of characters and the able assistance of her randy grandfather, Rebecca starts to poke her nose where most of the town thinks it doesn’t belong.

Perhaps the most charming subplot of the novel is that involving local veterinarian Lionel Franklin. That would be the the six-foot tall, ruggedly handsome Dr. Franklin, the very man who also happens to own Elwood the camel. Playful tête-à-têtes are alway good and Charbonneau gives Rebecca and Lionel plenty of time for spars, longing looks, and come-backs. To be honest, the romantic in me wanted a tad bit more, something she assures me is in the next book of the series.

Charbonneau’s prose is sharp, pointed, and quick. The heroine’s first person narration is natural sounding, full of observations with which any modern woman (or man) will be able to identify. I found myself chuckling aloud at certain passages that charmed me, even reading a few aloud to my wife. One of my favorites is this one: “I blinked as Lionel set me back down on my own two feet. What happened? Did I have eclair breath?” The grandfather, Pop, is hilarious, dating just about every single senior citizen in town. The structure of the mystery should satisfy even the most ardent of readers, and even I didn’t see the culprit until the very end.

One of the things that makes a book or television series work is the answer to a simple question: would you, the reader, want to return to the setting and the characters. For me, it is an unqualified and resounding yes. I have not had this much fun reading a book in a long time.

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@Barrie Summy

One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago Today...

2011-02-01T06:00:00.002-06:00

Around 11:00 am, one hundred and fifty years ago today, the Texas Secession Convention voted 166 to 8 to leave the Union and join the Confederacy.

That’s a long time ago, all but ancient history to modern Americans, especially since we know how it all turned out. Let me ask you, however, if you can remember the election of 2010? Can you? It’s only been thirteen weeks since the GOP took control of the House of Representatives, causing many pundits to consider Obama’s days of importance numbered. And, yet, in this baker’s dozen of weeks, the tides have turned, haven’t they? Obama and the GOP reached some compromises, the tragic shootings in Tuscon have shocked us all, and now events in Africa have us riveted to our TV screens. My, how things have changed.

I bring up these events not for any modern political reason but to give you a sense of the passage of time since the election of 2010 and today, the anniversary of Texas claiming its sixth flag. Things can change on a dime here in the 21st Century. Not so much in the Nineteenth. By 1 February 1861, six states--all in the deep South--had left the Union (or entered a state of rebellion if you lived in Chicago). The secession crisis of 1860 had become the crisis of 1861, the southern states falling like dominoes. For all Americans in 1861, there seemed only one, inevitable result: war.

I’m not sure how my state is going to celebrate the vote today. It was, after all, just a vote. Union sympathizer Governor Sam Houston did all in his power to slow the proceedings or get the Texas Legislature to declare the secession convention illegal. The Legislature acted...by allowing the convention to use the House chambers to meet.

Houston did manage, however, to get the convention to put the question of secession to a public vote. The people of Texas responded on 23 February: 46,129 to 14,697. With renewed vigor, the convention reassembled and we finally got an event. Here is a passage from my Master’s Thesis on the Fourteenth Texas Infantry of the Civil War.

“The Texas secession convention required that all state officials swear allegiance to the Confederacy. Convinced that his beloved state was taking the wrong course of action, the governor remained holed up in his office on the day Texas state officials were to take the oath to the new government. Three times the cry carried through the halls of the state building in Austin for Governor Sam Houston to come to the podium and take the pledge, and three times the cry met with silence. Declaring the office vacant, the victorious convention member called for Houston’s successor. Never one to let an opportunity pass, the tall bearded lieutenant governor eagerly stepped forward and proclaimed his loyalty to the infant Confederate republic. Edward Clark of Marshall was now the eighth governor of Texas.”

Edward Clark would only serve for eight months. After his defeat in November, he left Austin to form the 14th Texas Infantry. But that is another post.

Time feels funny when it’s deep in the past. In these next fours years, however, we will get to experience the Civil War in real time, as the sesquicentennial anniversaries of all the major events and battles are celebrated. In doing so, we will have to remember where we were when we heard the results of the 2010 Election, our touchstone to the Election of 1860. April 9, 2014, may seem like a long way away, but, at least we know that date is coming. Try to imagine yourself a Texan on 1 February 1861, knowing the worst is coming, but knowing not when it will end. Or what it will cost. Kind of like the folks in Egypt now...

A Minor Rant on Violence

2011-01-29T06:00:00.001-06:00

I've got what ended up being a minor rant about violence in our stories over at Do Some Damage today. It's not what I intended to write about when I started the essay, but that's how it ended.

Take a read and let me know what you think.

Forgotten Music: January 2011 - The Summary

2011-01-27T22:51:00.002-06:00

Well, it seems the gang got along just fine without me. But I'll be back with an entry next month.

Bill Crider - Calypso
Iren - Pushing Daisies Soundtrack
Jerry House - Two Jimmies
Randy Johnson - Rawlins Cross
George Kelley - Tammi Terrel
Evan Lewis - Lightnin' Hopkins
Todd Mason - Lambert, Hendricks & Ross
Charlie Ricci - Fanny
Perplexio - John Barry (Themependium)
Paul D. Brazill - Manu Dibango

Well, I don't think I made any errors. Thanks to all who participated today. And let's try to wrangle some more folks into our little project.

Until the last Thursday of February (24th)...

Forgotten Music: January 2011

2011-01-27T06:00:00.003-06:00

I'm writing this in a haze of the flu crud and the over-the-counter meds I'm taking to make the crud go away. Thus, I don't have an entry today.

But our stalwart regulars do. Here's the usual. As always, if I missed someone (or if someone joins in for the first time), I'll add you to the summary.

Enjoy.

Bill Crider
Eric (Iren)
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
Charlie Ricci
Perplexio
Paul D. Brazill

(Think I got this all correct. Apologies in advance if I screwed up on a link. I'll fix it later.)

Forgotten Music: January 2011 - Call for Entries

2011-01-25T17:25:00.002-06:00

Just to remind everyone, we've got our first Forgotten Music Thursday for 2011. Post on your blog and let me know if you're playing.

And, more importantly, I'd like to call out an initiative for 2011: Bring in more participants. If anyone you know wants to do one, just give them my blog address and email address. I'll put them on the list. We will expand our offerings in 2011 and make it a global phenomenon!

Overlooked Movies: They Were Expendable (1945)

2011-01-25T08:17:00.003-06:00

"They Were Expendable" (1945) is a terrific film by John Ford and starring Robert Montgomery and John Wayne. It tells the story of a PT boat squad in the Philippines starting December 1941 and moving through the next year. Montgomery is the captain and Wayne the executive officer. The squad starts the picture with five boats (IIRC) and is trying to convince US Navy brass that the PT boat is a good fit for wartime activities, not merely ferrying messages back and forth.

As any student of history knows, the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Japanese also attacked the Philippines. You get a sense of dread during the opening minutes of the film because you know (as well as the audiences in 1945 knew) what was about to happen. As the attack happened, Montgomery ordered his boats out of the docks in Manila Bay, away from Japanese dive bombers. His instincts proved true as his squad was the only boats still operating after the attack. I'm not sure if there were any conspiracy theories about FDR and Pearl Harbor by 1945 (that is, he intentionally kept our ships in port to provoke an attack and, thus, get the US into the war) but you could certainly see Montgomery's actions as such.

A good historical point made in the film was with Donna Reed. Not here, per se, but in the scenes, later in the film, with the officers of Montgomery's crew. When she came to dine with them--she a nurse still dressed in a one-piece khaki suit--the men stared at her googly eyed. You see, once our boys shipped over seas, most of them rarely saw an American woman. As one of the veterans said in Ken Burns' excellent "The War" series, the men sometimes had to be reminded what they were fighting for. When a woman, especially an American, found her way into camp for whatever reason, the men remembered all that they needed to know.

That the movie takes place in the Philippines during 1941-42, I kept thinking "How can this picture end on a good note?" Most of the war pictures made during the war served the dual role of propaganda and moral booster. I was hard pressed to see how they were going to pull this one off, especially as the film wore on and the PT boat squad was ground down, boat by boat and man by man. Montgomery's crew got to see some action, none more perilous than taking none other than General Douglas MacArthur to an island with an air strip and, then onto Australia.

The closing shot of the film with the words flashed on screen and the stirring music are worth the price of the film. According to IMDB, the film was released in December 1945, less than four months after the war ended.

Another historical aspect I appreciated with the film is how the characters operated under the giant machinery of war. Each man knew he was but a mere cog. Some cogs are more important than others and all the characters seemed resigned to their fate. There's a great, yet somber, scene with Montgomery and a superior officer. The officer explains what's what and the meaning of sacrifice (in the baseball sense). The true meaning of his words is not lost on Montgomery, the superior officer, or the viewing audience. Indeed, as the film ends, you don't know the fates of all the characters, something I found perfect for a film like this.

On the back of the DVD case, Leonard Maltin comments that this movie is one of the best all-time war movies ever made. I'm inclined to agree with him.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: "Pi" (1998)

2011-01-18T03:14:00.008-06:00

(Todd Mason is jumpstarting the Tuesday's Overlooked Movies (and other A/V) Project started a few years back. I decided to join in on the fun. Check his blog for the complete rundown of today's participants.)

Let's get one thing straight: Pi (1998) is one weird-ass mind trip of a film and it's not for everyone. However, it's one of my favorite indie movie and a dang good SF film.

And Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford can rest easy: there's really not a lot of math in this movie.

Max Cohen is a reclusive, paranoid math genius cursed with headaches who knows--just friggin' knows!--that there are patterns in nature that follow certain mathematical precepts. Here are his assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

The thing he's trying to solve is the stock market. He's doing this for the joy of discovery, not for monetary rewards, as he yells at another character later in the film. To help him analyze patterns, Max has built a gigantic supercomputer, named Euclid, in his New York apartment. After a particularly trying day, Euclid crashes but not before spitting out a 216-character number and a single stock pick. Pissed off because the stock pick just can't be correct, Max throws away the printout of the number. Later, he meets with his former teacher and mentions the 216-digit number. The teacher, Sol, gets immediately interested. Max then learns that the stock pick Euclid predicted was accurate...but he can't find the printout.

Soon, he meets Lenny, a Hasidic Jew, who also is into number theory as it pertains to the Torah. Remember the Bible Code from a decade ago? Same thing. Basically, every letter in Hebrew corresponds to a number. Thus, the Torah is both a written document and a large series of numbers from which patterns can emerge. Lenny wants Max's help and he agrees. Add into the mix some shady types (who may or may not be criminal or governmental) and Max is seeing spies everywhere he looks. In order to rebuild Euclid, Max takes from the shady types a new super microprocessor. He turns on the computer and starts analyzing the Torah. Again, Euclid crashes and again it produces a 216-digit number. Since the computer won't let him print, Max starts writing down the number...and finds a pattern.

Here's the key: according to tradition, the true name of God is a 216-letter word. Max's teacher, Sol, thinks that Euclid became sentient and, in that moment, the computer saw the Almighty. Lenny's Hasidic group wants the number because they want to reverse the code and find the true name of God. The shady types want Max to help them do evil things. Max just wants to be left alone.

Filmed in black and white, this is Darren Aronofsky's first film. Most of the tropes and film techniques he uses in subsequent films (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler) are evident here. To be honest, the black and white noir touches make this film. The paranoia Max experiences is heightened by the shadows and the fear of what truly lies in the darkness. It's brilliant. And there are some genuinely weird moments in this film (a brain in a subway that seems to be connected to Max’s psychosis) that would make Salvador Dali proud. Another noir trait is Max's self destruction as he spirals downward into madness. I make it sound light--it really isn't--but in this film, I love it.

The electronica score by Clint Mansell (in addition to songs by Orbital, Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, and others) adds to the weirdness. Coming out a year before the Matrix soundtrack, this was a major entry point for me to electronica and I've followed some of the artists in the decade since. Mansell later scored the music for the Duncan Jones movie, Moon (2009), and he vividly captured the loneliness and isolation of the lunar surface using only a piano.

I originally saw this film when I was dating my future wife. She hated the film at the time and has successfully resisted every invitation to re-watch the DVD (yeah, I bought it and have watched the DVD at least five times). I think what really strikes home with me is the nature of God as portrayed in the movie and how we humans can get but a glimpse of the beauty and order of the universe (and God?) via mathematics. It's an awe-inspiring concept and is the touchstone for this great film.

Here's the trailer.
Here's the official site (oddly still active 13 years after the movie's release)

P.S. bonus points to you, the reader, if you noticed the time stamp on this post.

Joelle Charbonneau Answers That Question

2011-01-13T09:26:00.003-06:00

You know the one: How did you come to write this book?

Patti Abbott has started a series over at her blog that asks this question of various authors. If I wasn't already a regular reader of Patti's blog, I'd have started just to read this series. Today, she has lassoed my fellow Do Some Damage scribe, Joelle Charbonneau, into answering this question about "Skating Around the Law," her debut novel. Head on over to Patti's blog to find out Joelle's answer.

And, as I wrote in the comments section on Patti's blog, I am less that 100 pages from the end of of this book. I'll review it in full once I'm done. As of now, however, I can say that this book is very entertaining and downright fun. And, since I still don't know whodunnit*, I can say that the mystery aspect of it is well crafted.

*Last night, I might have an idea of the culprit. We shall see...

"The Cape" - A Review

2011-01-10T06:00:00.001-06:00

After a lengthy marketing campaign--could not watch Sunday Night Football without seeing at least four commercials for it--NBC’s “The Cape” premiered last night. In the little bit I read about the before the debut, I knew that it was going to wear its comic book self squarely on its sleeve, or, rather, its cape. (Yeah, I know. Couldn’t resist.) Taking the show for what it is--live-action comic book based on no existing comic book character--I enjoyed two hours of fun.

Right off the bat, we learn that the action takes place in Palm City. For all the neatness of the Marvel Comics universe existing in our world, “The Cape” took a page from DC Comics--Gotham City, Metropolis, Star City--with a fictional, west coast city. I liked the vagueness of the town’s name. It could be anywhere.

Now that it’s 2011, there is almost no new origin story for a super-hero and The Cape has your standard issue protagonist. Vince Faraday, good cop in a corrupt town, can’t save the new chief of police from being murdered by a villain named Chess. Played by James Frain (The Tudors; “24”), Chess is a masked criminal mastermind (is there any other kind?) out to wreck havoc on Palm City. His alter ego, Peter Fleming, runs a private police service. With the chief’s murder, Fleming’s company, Ark, moves in a takes over. And promptly captures Faraday, puts him in Chess’s mask, and sends him out to be captured and killed.

Except Faraday survives and is saved by, wait for it, a band of circus people who are also bank robbers. (This is the point where, if you haven’t figured it out by now, you need to check your brain at the door. It’ll only get in the way.) The ringleader is Max Malini, played by everyone’s favorite voice actor, Keith David. Faraday wants revenge on Fleming, to clear his name, and rejoin his family. Max just wants to kill Faraday. They strike a deal: Faraday hands over a passcard with the codes of all the banks in Palm City and Max teaches him the fine art of deception.

Whereas Bruce Wayne dons the cape and cowl to scare bad guys, Faraday dresses up as The Cape to send a message to his son, Trip. The boy loves to read a comic book that features, yes, The Cape. Faraday can’t out-and-out see his son, but he can do the next best thing. He even makes an appearance to the young man. Thankfully, the boy is only comic book smart otherwise he’d have figured out that The Cape is really his dad, especially after the hero tells the boy to mind his math homework. I’m predicting now that young Trip already knows.

The bad guys are here, too. Chess, mask wearing criminal leader, Scales, the Russian-type dude with bad skin, Cain, the poison-making former chef, and the previews of future episodes promise new opponents. Other than the circus crew, The Cape has an ally in Orwell, played by Summer Glau. Basically, she’s what Barbara Gordon (original Batgirl) is now: a computer whiz who can help The Cape get information. Or she’s Alfred. Just don’t call her a sidekick...yet.

“The Cape” breaks almost no new ground here but its devilishly fun. The special effects are kept to a minimum. Faraday makes numerous mistakes as he tries to become a super hero. And there’s some humor in there. More than one character who learns the name of the new vigilante pauses. A store owner who had The Cape prevent a robbery calls after the hero “You’re still working on it,” a not-too-subtle jab at the name. Later, when a capeless Cape (just go with it) tells a new ally his nom-de-plume, the ally points out the obvious fact: “But you’re not wearing a cape.” Made me chuckle.

And the entire show just made me grin. It’s pure comic book fun. Don’t think. Just enjoy.

The two-hour premiere is running again tonight and next week the show lands in its usual time slot of Mondays at 8pm CST. That’s right before “Castle” for those of y’all scoring at home. My Monday nights, already great with my favorite show of the week, just got a little more exciting.

New year, new layout, new resolutions

2011-01-08T07:00:00.003-06:00

I decided to shake things up here and give my blog a new coat of paint. I've written about my professional resolutions over at Do Some Damage today. But, so that my personal blog will have a record of it, I'll re-post them here:

Reading resolution for 2011: read more than seven new books.
Short story resolution for 2011: write more than two stories and submit them.
Novel resolution for 2011: finish my second novel by Bouchercon in September.

Simple, easy, measurable. Now, comes the hard part: doing them.

Happy Birthday, Sherlock Holmes

2011-01-06T09:26:00.002-06:00

Ring 157 candles on a huge cake, folks, because today's is Sherlock Holmes's birthday. Don't believe me? Here's the proof. And, as I did last year, James Reasoner has posted a review of the excellent graphic novel, "The Trial of Sherlock Holmes." He enjoyed it as much as I did.

Time for a sequel, Dynamite Comics...

Book Review Club: Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

2011-01-05T06:00:00.005-06:00

(This is the January 2011 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

I think that, for most of us readers, devouring books is a way of life. It’s why we writers do book reviews once a month here with Barrie. We talk about books, we live with books. For some of us, books are our best friends.

But we’re adults. We’ve had years to cultivate the love of reading. What prompts a young person to read? For some of us, we can remember exactly what book that opened our eyes to the power and rapture of reading. Others may have only a vague memory of some distant book in the past that was The One. Rarely, however, am I present at the creation as I was late last year when my boy picked up Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

I’ve been aware of these books from a distance. I saw them at bookstores and thought little of them. I wasn’t even tempted to thumb through one. But then my boy was loaned a copy of the first book and, soon, he was hounding me to find the second book. Read in four days. And then the third. Read in two days. By middle December, when my parents suggested that they could purchase books four and five for Christmas, I told them not to bother. He’ll be done before Christmas Eve. And he was.

When my boy was sick last month, I read part of Book 5 aloud to him and I found myself laughing out loud at many of the passages. Being the type of person I am, I told my boy that I’d read the books but I had to read them in order, starting with book one.

Most of y’all know the story of Greg Heffley, sixth grader. In an effort for him to get in touch with his feelings, his mom bought him a *journal*, not a diary, thank you very much. Yes, he knows that the word “diary” is printed on the cover, but that does not change the fact that he’s writing in a Journal. He hopes to use it in the future when he’s famous and all the reporters want to know what his childhood was like. Clearly, Greg is thinking ahead.

Through text entries and line art, author Kinney channels his inner middle-schooler. Greg has to put up with a tormenter of an older brother (Rodrick), a younger brother that can do no wrong in the eyes of his parents (Manny), and his parents who seem to want Greg to be, well, like them, the best that I can tell. Then there’s Rowley, his best friend. Mentally, he’s still a kid in elementary school, still wanting to “play” rather than “hang out,” and takes abuse at the hands of Greg throughout the book.

What comes through in the book (as well as the movie; yes, I’ve seen it, too) is a theme: being yourself is the only way to be. Greg tries and tries to be cool and get himself noticed--joins the wrestling team; submits cartoons for the school paper; becomes a member of the safety patrol. He usually fails miserably or, in a self-serving way, gets others in trouble. Rowley is comfortable just being himself, and he wins accolades. Greg can’t figure it out, the truth just skirting his consciousness even through the last sentence of the book.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is nothing without the illustrations. They make the book. There’s a sublimeness to the simple art in the same way as the illustrations in Ian Falconer’s Olivia books. Sure, the drawings are supposed to be made by a sixth grader, but there is so much more to them than pencil and paper. Even if you only looked at the pictures, you’ll get the story. But it’s the interplay of text and illustration that make this book special. And dang funny.

My boy likes to play library with his books. Like a good collector, he has all the Wimpy Kid books lined up on the shelf. Not coincidentally, there’s an empty space where book #2 should be. Um, gotta go now. I have another book to read...

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@Barrie Summy

Wild West eMonday

2011-01-03T08:44:00.002-06:00

Gary Dobbs, over at the Tainted Archive, is again hosting Wild West Monday. It's an initiative to bring to the public's mind the idea that the western, that quintessential American genre, is alive and well. He's bringing the project into the 21st Century today by dubbing the event "eMonday." He talks up all the ways the western is making inroads into the ebook marketplace.

But if that wasn't enough, Edward Granger (nee David Cranmer) has a new Cash Laramie short story titled "Melanie." I think it's one of the best to date. It behooves you to head on over to the Tainted Archive, catch up on what's been going on with westerns, and read the latest Cash Laramie story. It'll make your Monday start off well.

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 17 vs. Jacksonville Jaguars

2011-01-02T23:01:00.003-06:00

The season's over.
Week One was Cloud Nine. This week
Was euthanasia.

Barring a firing
"Wait 'til next year" sounds hollow.
So tired of "Next Year."

Appreciate the
Owner standing by his man.*
Only wins now, team.

T'was a weird season.
Foster's the man! Schaub's on fire.
Way too much heartache.

Wade's got a huge task.*
Only place to go is up.
Dare we try to hope...?

Jacksonville Jaguars - 17
Houston Texans - 34

*Based on the rumors that Gary Kubiak will remain as head coach and Wade Phillips will be hired as the defensive coordinator. As of this writing, it's not official.

Until next year...

Forgotten Music: December 2010 - The Summary

2010-12-31T09:10:00.002-06:00

Just because I didn’t have a chance to write my own Forgotten Music essay doesn’t mean that others found the time to write one. I want to thank Todd Mason for not only writing and posting his own essay, but also for collecting the links of others who found the time to post yesterday. I’ll get my act together by next month.

Bill Crider - Recitation records
Jerry House - Cisco Houston
Randy Johnson - Joe Satriani - Surfing with the Alien
George Kelley - Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records
Evan Lewis - Jerry Landis (AKA Paul Simon) - "The Lone Teen Ranger"
Todd Mason - “Sunday Night/Night Music” (NBC-TC); Dave Brubeck on CBS Radio
Charlie Ricci - John Bosell - Festival of the Heart
Patti Abbott - Hoagy Carmichael - "Am I Blue?"

Until the next Forgotten Music on 27 January 2011

"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (Annotated) - A Review

2010-12-28T15:34:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, as I have done the past few December 27ths, I re-read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's only Christmastime Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." Only this time it was a little different.

For Christmas, I was given the first two volumes of the new annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie S. Klinger. These volumes, hardbound and in a slipcase, are gorgeous. Any self-respecting Holmes fan simply must own a copy of this set.

What I expected was the typical definitions of random pieces of Victorian tidbits that modern readers wouldn't know, starting with the original publication date of January 1892. Moreover, a note describes how Dickens and the Victorians "invented"Christmas as we know it now, while another gives light as to how gems are measured, or how long The Times had been in existence. That kind of detail, along with the illustrations by Sidney Paget or contemporary photos of 1890s London, is a boon to the reader.

What surprised me was the scholarship devoted to figuring out if Holmes's deductions were correct or not. I know all about the gentle fiction that supposes Holmes and Watson were real people. I don't have a problem with that. That's kind of fun, really. It's the need to, I assume, outwit Holmes, or, at least, point out where he erred. I wonder where that need arises? I guess that's the true treasure of this new, annotated anthology: we get, all in one place, a century's worth of criticism.

Part of me wonders if all this nitpicking isn't just a veiled attempt to point out the flaws in Doyle's writing. "Blue Carbuncle" is one of the stories that has an addendum, a separate essay related to the events in the story. This story earns "A Winter's Crop," a complete discussion of whether or not a goose has a crop. Interesting scholarship, to be sure, and worthy of discourse. But, seriously, does the fact about the existence of a goose's crop add or subtract to the reading of the tale? Or whether or not Holmes inferences about the hat hold water? No.

I glanced at the dates of the stories in front and behind "Blue Carbuncle" and noticed that they are a month apart. Thus, Doyle is writing these stories, one per month, from July 1891 to June 1892. He still has a day job as well as a wife and one kid. He didn't have the internet to double-check to see if a goose has a crop. I suspect he wrote these tales in a flash and edited afterwards, if at all. Also, the reading public in the 1890s probably were not the avid geeks many of us are today.

All this is to say that while it is a fun exercise to go back and see if Holmes's reasoning is sound and to point out where it isn't, one should enjoy the story as it is. Give Doyle some slack. He's only a writer. It's not like he was as good as writer as Watson...

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 16 at Denver Broncos

2010-12-26T23:46:00.000-06:00

Don't have it in me
To attempt a haiku now
How long 'til next year?

Game was such a snooze
That I almost forgot to
Write these few poems.

Late in the contest
I just knew we'd lose somehow.
Did not disappoint.

It's almost funny
How talented we are at
Not earning more wins.

Houston Texans - 23
Denver Broncos - 24

Scott D Parker

Book Review Club: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Book Review Club: The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

Forgotten Music: Chicago 25

Forgotten Music: November 2011

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 8 vs. Cleveland Browns

How I Wrote My Novel

Book Review Club: The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 8 vs. Jacksonville Jaguars

Falling Out of Love with an Author

Forgotten Music: October 2011 - The Summary

The Evolution of the Bat-suit

Forgotten Music: October 2011

Forgotten Music October 2011: Chiller by Erich Kunzel

Thoughts on Acting: Part II

Thoughts on Acting: Part I

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 7 at Tennessee Titans

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 6 at Baltimore Ravens

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 5 vs. Oakland Raiders

Book Review Club: Heat Rises by Richard Castle

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 4 vs. Pittsburgh Steelers

Forgotten Music: September 2011

Forgotten Music: David Bowie in the 1990s and the 2000s

CSI: Miami - Season 10 Premiere Recap

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 3 at New Orleans Saints

"Castle" Premiere: "Rise" Recap

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 2 at Miami Dolphins

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 1 vs. Indianapolis Colts

Book Review Club: The Gentlemen's Hour by Don Winslow

Forgotten Music: August 2011 - The Summary

Forgotten Music: August 2011

What Would You Do?

Book Review Club: Fun and Games by Duane Swiercznyski

The Great Pulp Fiction Treasure Hunt

Forgotten Music: The July Summary

Forgotten Music: July 2011

Forgotten Music: Chicago Transit Authority (1969)

Calvin Carter Returns in The Traditional West:

Mercury Men is Here!

New Gig with Beat to a Pulp

Forgotten Music: June Summary

Book Review Club: Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles by Edward A. Grainger

Forgotten Music: Peacemaker by Clarence Clemons

Forgotten Music: June 2011

Louis L'amour's Place on the Bookshelf

Collateral Damage - A New Anthology Inspired by Father's Day

Book Review Club: Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann

New Post at Criminal Element: "Gotham Central"

"Castle's" Season Finale Shocker

CSI: Miami at Criminal Element

Two Posts at Criminal Element

Book Review Club: It's Superman by Tom De Haven

Forgotten Music: April 2011

"Criminal Elements" is live!

So Close the Hand of Death - Giveaway Winner

Book Review Club: So Close the Hand of Death by J. T. Ellison (+ Giveaway)

Forgotten Music: Stone of Sisyphus by Chicago

Forgotten Music: March 2011

Do Some Damage Nominated for David Thompson Award at Spinetingler

CSI: Miami - "Hunting Ground" - Episode Review

Enter Abraham Lincoln

Book Review Club: Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker

Forgotten Music: February 2011 - The Summary

Forgotten Music: February 2011 - Wolfgang's Big Night Out by the Brian Setzer Orchestra

Forgotten Music: February 2011

Book Review Club: Skating Around the Law by Joelle Charbonneau

One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago Today...

A Minor Rant on Violence

Forgotten Music: January 2011 - The Summary

Forgotten Music: January 2011

Forgotten Music: January 2011 - Call for Entries

Overlooked Movies: They Were Expendable (1945)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: "Pi" (1998)

Joelle Charbonneau Answers *That* Question

"The Cape" - A Review

New year, new layout, new resolutions

Happy Birthday, Sherlock Holmes

Book Review Club: Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

Wild West eMonday

Houston Texans Haiku: Week 17 vs. Jacksonville Jaguars

Joelle Charbonneau Answers That Question