RIP Jerry (and George Carlin)

Jerry Rodriguez...award-winning indie filmmaker, Brookyn in his blood, Puerto Rico in his soul. Fellow author. Pal. click here to see how tall this dude stood. His novels are instant classics; we'll dedicate the Darker Mask to him if the publisher can slip something in...

George Carlin. Lord what else can be said about him? I don't like the word "icon." Neither did he. But hell. Look, unlike most Americans he was insightful enough (a premium these days), to hold George Bush, Fox News , etc. in equal contempt with most liberals. Here was a man who could make something as banal as local TV news-sports-weather funnier than anything new comics can muster. He spanned eras. Oh yeah, here's one for you, George--FUCK the FCC!!! RIP, da bof' a youze. We'll keep fighting the good fight.

RAFBN-Week 6

OK, I'm breaking a rule here. I vowed NOT to showcase an "annointed" book by an "annointed" author (he's one of Oprah's)...items where the PR machine's already chugging away. But Andre Dubus is cool. House of Sand and Fog was great. The film was great (prurient crush on Jennifer Connelly notwithstanding, though I met her at a party at the UN last year and let's just say I'll stick with my fantasies and visions of her in earlier movies like The Hot Spot or Mulholland Falls). The Garden of the Last Days (W.W. Norton 2008 ) dropped on Monday. Buy it here. Already they (the literatti pr types) are saying this is the first great 9-11 novel. And of course the dumbasses out there are giving us the hook line: "Is America ready for a 9-11 that shows a "postive" side of terrorists? Well, this isn't truly about 9-11. Nor are we seeing any "positive" side of friggin' terrorists. Andre seeded this by trying to write a short story imagining a life--and appointment with destiny (I always loved that phrase) based on the stripper who danced for a cadre of 9-11 hijackers in Daytona Beach this place called the Pink Pony. If you recall, Florida was the spot where these dickheads paid cash to rednecks to learn how to fly, and from where one cell migrated north to seize American Airlines flight 11. Everything crazy happens either in Florida or Germany. Anyway, the manuscript grew and grew to something his editor whittled down to 535 bookprint pages.

I'm about halfway through it. I love it. Now, here's the rub. This book is just a new flavor in a now amorphous genre which, like an amoeba, seems to send it's gelatinous pseudopods out to capture all kinds of strange themes, pairings of real and imagined people, etc. I'm doing it too in upcoming works. You take a situation in history and some real people and inject it into a fiction plot. You expand on secondary or even tertiary characters in great films, classic literature, etc. You re-interpret villians from those same works, or the protagonists themselves. Does this mean the book biz is out of ideas, and so are authors? Now we just mine...scavenge...old stuff? Well, fresh ideas are there, but, like the music biz, no one wants to be bothered with them. Not enough $$$ in it, and it would involve raising the bridge for the American public, rather than the usual lowering of the river. But folk like Dubus have the balls and the talent to make this type of story work...and yeah, to make murders "human," (and human here don't mean positive, fanboys and girls), to weave in it a conflicted, flawed fictional character and that sense of phony and seedy that is south Florida (I guess the non-comic analog to Hiassen). Here is crappy corner of the world, populated by crappy people, on September 10th...

Like Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) said about John Lennon in The Departed: " He said 'I'm an artist. Give me a fuckin' tuba and I'll get something out of it for ya.'"

Dubus is an artist. This novel is art for our young, insipid century. The Garden of Last Days. Read it and learn.

RAFBN-Week Five

This, of course, is my follow up to a 6/13/08 post on the inspid new kiddie flick Journey to the Center of the Earth. My RAFBN choice for this week: the novel by Jules Verne. Most dumbasses in our text messaging/Sportscenter/Dancing with the Stars culture MAY have heard of him. Then there are some who say "Oh yeah--science fiction...20,000 Leagues Under the Sea...Captain Nemo...From the Earth to the Moon....Around the World in 80 Days...whatever." To say they don't make them like they used to is the friggin' understatement of the millennia. I know there're a bunch of you still worshipping Tim Russert as an exemplar of our era. He is--but not for the right reasons. Especially when you compare him to this cat with the interior designer-sounding name. Jules Verne. He wrote over 200 novels, essays, newspaper articles, travelogues; indeed only half related to "science fiction or futurism." He was a journalist, public intellectual. Unappreciated as a fiction author while he was alive, he's still often place behind dudes like Dickens and Twain as titans of the 19th century literatti. But of course here's the rub: Jules Verne lived over 120 years ago and just about everything he wrote about in fanciful stories came true--often in detail: from race relations/civil rights to atomic submarines to concrete superhighways to globalization to radical environmentalism to space travel. It's about time to rediscover this man and his body of work. Read and learn: Journey to the Center of the Earth and everything else this man wrote...

Friday Funnies-Bill Clinton: it's summer but he's in winter...

My Princeton classmate Todd Purdum, whom we're lining up to help grace our happy crew at the nascent Hoya Journalism Department with some wisdom in return for grossly underfunded honoraria, stirs the pot again vis. his wifey's ex-boss. Yep Todd's married to former Bubba White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. Digression/explanation/boasting here, fanboys & girls: Todd is part of my class's Legion of Super Heroes/Mt Olympus/'36 Yankees/'70 Orioles line up of journalistic cool m-fs: Barton Gellman, Joel Achenbach, Liza Mundy, Lisa Belkin Gelb, Michael (Money Ball) Lewis, and let us not forget Martha McCully, HGTV celeb and former Editor-in Chief of every woman's favorite waiting room at the OB-GYN's office magazine, InStyle.

Getting back to it, in his new gig as Vanity Fair gadfly and general pundit (note I did not say public intellectual), Todd has been de-constructing the deconstruction (demolition?) of the Clinton dual monarchy. Here's one piece: click. You decide. What's the 411 on Bill's albatross-like drag on his equally bizarre-acting wife? Goes back, as always, to that Twilight Zone above his neck, not what's in his pants. Explains everything: the mental toll of the bypass surgery, to his Lucifer the Morning Star-like tumble from Soul Brother Numero Uno to the level of Hell just above Karl Rove's. The E! and Fox newsie element is Todd's whispering over Bill's supposed penchant for Gina Gershon. Gina is of course the vampire-mouthed actress who made stylized lezbo scenes a mainstream, hetero male fantasy in Bound and Show Girls (as opposed to reality: think the LPGA Tour and WNBA). Of course Gina's lawyers are sending letters and Bill has blown yet another gasket, though keeping on the pointless message that somehow Hillary was subject to a vast anti-woman conspiracy. Um...it's called "malice," and "damages" Gina, Bill. If you are a public figure, you have to show reckless disregard for the truth, and damages. Which is why seldom do libel suits go forward. The damages part always tickle me when a jury says yeah, you've been libeled, defamed, but based on your rep we award you $1 plus a few grand in attorneys fees. Ha! I have no doubt what Todd plumbed and Vanity Fair printed is true...somewhat true. Sorry.

Here's something else instructive from the piece...and well, almost banal: "Yes, Obama is a daring opponent who thinks he is hot shit and has benefited from the same enthusiasm, energy, and fresh-faced appeal that a fella named Bill Clinton once elicited (but he has suffered from some of the same skepticism, too). It is Clinton’s invariable insistence that his problems are someone else’s fault, and that questions or criticisms of him, his methods, motives, or means are invariably unfair, that is his unforgivable flaw."

My take: the underlying reasons mined by Todd for Bubba's meltdowns, continued geriatric HBO's Entourage-like behavior and paranoia might be groundbreaking to some NYC/DC/LA literatti and journalism snobs. To me? Meh... I see it all the time. It's the "old playa at the club." Not something so regal as the Lion in Winter. Nope, merely old playa who cannot play on. A tragedy only R Kelly or Eurpides and Aeshylus could love. Todd's just putting the usual uber-serious whiteboy over-gloss on it. I'd like to chronicle the Winter of about 75% of the Congressional Black Caucus myself...Vote Kevin Powell!