"Just when you think it's safe to add the Chicks back into rotation," KZKX Lincoln, Nebraska, PD Brian Jennings says.
In case you missed it, the Dixie Chicks are pissing off the country music industry again. At the Academy of Country Music Awards show, Natalie Mains wore a shirt with the letters FUTK on it. Toby Keith has been one of the people on her case since she dissed our idiot president onstage.
Well, guess what. The guy is an idiot, and it's not unpatriotic to say so. Patriotism is love of country, not love of whatever jackass manages to get into office. I love this country. I love what we stand for when we manage not to be jerks to the rest of the world. I don't love the wooden-faced peckerwood in our white house. If you call that unpatriotic, you're unclear on the concept.
The arts have always been about questioning and challenging, and the best time to do that is when everyone around you suddenly starts chanting the same stuff in unison. Individualism and independent thought are two of our great natural resources. If they're contrary to mass opinion, and the chanting masses get in an uproar about it, well, that's pretty much the DEFINITION OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, isn't it? That's WHAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING. Doing it in the face of certain commercial loss may be stupid--or it may be personal integrity.
Okay, granted, a FUTK shirt wasn't so much an integrity thing as a big finger to a hated source of irritation. But the fact that "the Dixie Chicks issue" has become as big as it has just points out how little Americans really care about freedom of thought, let alone freedom of expression. Standing up for those things, which are fundamental elements of what we're supposedly about, is patriotic.
I've never liked country music. Just ordered my first Dixie Chicks CD today. More power to them.
And FU Clear Channel. But that's another day's rant.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2083044/
So I'm reading Slate at the day job, because it's really slow today, and there's my old car.
It's actually Brooke Williams' old car. The grille on mine was straight, and it still had the Valiant logo, but still, there it was. A 1966 Plymouth Valiant. Mine had the 170 cubic-inch slant-six, which would last forever, through the worst abuse, until the rest of the car fell apart around it. The story is that my grandfather was laid off, so he went to the Plymouth dealership and put a deposit on a new car, then went home and told his wife. "What color?" she asked. He didn't know--had to call the dealership. "Blue," they said. "Blue," he said. "All right," she said.
I got it when I was 17. It had a bleach bottle where the washer fluid reservoir used to be, and the sprung driver's seat had been padded with newspapers, floor tiles, just about anything flat. In the trunk were six bald spare tires and a piece of wood that said WHEEL BLOCK on it. I drove it to Alaska and back two years later. I rebuilt the engine twice, the first time with my friend John. We did something wrong with the bearings; they seized while I was on my way to register it. When the leaf springs went, I bought air shocks, and drove around for a while with the back jacked up. Eventually it was time, and I gave it away and bought a 1990 Ford Bronco II, which all my music gear fit into better, and which didn't strand my girlfriend in bad areas of town when she borrowed it.
I gave it away twice, once to a friend who needed a car, and once to the main character in my books, who gave it to another character, who, as far as I know, still has it.
And then we moved to New York, and I don't even have a driver's license anymore.
Contains spoilers...
_ _ _
Although I sometimes manage to be about two years ahead of trends in music, I am ten years behind everyone else with TV shows. This is only partly because I'm too busy, only slightly because I just don't care, and only mostly because I can't justify $50/month for cable when that money could be better spent on my tea habit. So I have yet to see an episode of THE SOPRANOS, SIX FEET UNDER, or SEX AND THE CITY, and I only saw the pilot of THE WIRE because I was over at someone's house. However, I've finally made up some of my deficit.
I'm almost done with RED DWARF.
I got the first two series on DVD from Netflix, because a friend at my day job liked them. Then I bought series 3 through 8 on VHS, from Amazon. We're now almost through series 7. Around series 3 or so, I started looking at Red Dwarf websites and newsgroups, and gathered that season 7 disappointed a lot of long-time fans. Since I've made a couple of left turns in my book series, I looked forward to seeing whether it was actually bad, or whether people just weren't getting what they'd gotten used to.
It's not actually awful. It's not actually great, either. But suddenly a comedy got turned into a halfway serious sci-fi/action show, and the things that made it work (the characters) were suddenly different. Not deeper, not expanded--just different. Lister, a semi-slob of a chicken-soup-machine repairman who once accused an arrogant hologram of "spoilin' for a rumble" (one of my favorite of his lines) now dispatches an enemy with a karate kick and knows how to shoot a crossbow.
Nothing wrong with that kind of character in a sci-fi/action show. But wasn't this Lister we're talking about? Lister who pulls nose hairs with vegetable tongs?
There's also a lot of grumbling on the newsgroups about a new character, Kochanski, and how she just doesn't fit in. Well, I think she fits the sci-fi/action genre quite well. What she doesn't fit is what RED DWARF was in seasons 1-6 -- which is a successful comedy. But she's stuck with two comedy characters (Kryton, the increasingly insecure robot, and The Cat, who's... well, why don't I talk about him in this next paragraph.)
The Cat is a humanoid life form descended over three million years from a housecat. In the first two series, he's vain, agile, not too bright, territorial, and faces down enemies by trying to make himself look big. But after that... not only does his repertoire never increase (where's wanting his butt scratched? Lying in warm places? Hoiking up hairballs? Running when a can's opened? Fleas?), but he suddenly becomes entirely non-catlike, so that now, he's just some dumb vain guy. The missed opportunities are really disappointing.
So it's a semi-realistic character, Lister; a slightly more realistic character, Kochanski; and two entirely unrealistic characters, Kryton and The Cat, and they don't carry it off. It's not funny enough to be a comedy anymore, but it's also not compelling enough to be good drama. The best thing about it is that we get to revisit old friends... but they're not doing much that would have made me want to see more of them if I didn't know them already. I like it when established people try something new, but despite Craig Charles' screen likeability and Chris Barrie's impressive range, this just doesn't work.
I'd complain more, but I have to go see whether my Red Dwarf coffee mugs and the Series 1 Bonus DVD came yet.
Smoke me a kipper. I'll be back for breakfast.
The Jason Keltner series has been optioned for the movies! More details when I'm sure what the right wording is.
Seriously, I'm gritting my teeth and vibrating like a jammed circular saw, waiting for the OK to spill it. Maybe tomorrow...
"If they're going to toss you aside for 'Game Show Moments,' where's the integrity and dignity in this business?"
--Steve Levitan, executive producer of JUST SHOOT ME, known for its integrity and dignity.
Apparently Steve heard the words somewhere and decided to try them out.
I should have some pretty cool news in the next few days, but I can't tell you yet.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
I don't believe the press.
I don't believe the government.
I don't believe the left.
I don't believe the right.
Where am I supposed to get reliable information? Gnomes?
All right.
Back in December when I started this thing, I said I'd talk about what I've been working on—just as soon as I finished up one last task from an old project. That task has been finished.
I've had a day job for the last 15 months. It's in Long Island City, a leisurely 35-minute bicycle commute from home. Another 8 minutes East after work brings me to the Brasil Coffee House, two blocks from the East River. The whole neighborhood has a nice view of Manhattan, at about the same latitude as the Empire State Building.
Walker & Co. shut down their mystery line right after THE NIGHT MEN came out. Not only did I not owe them another book, but I didn't even have another book in mind. Given a few more weeks to think about it, I'd have come up with something, but... 9-11 was still pretty fresh, and it seemed nobody was reading, and for some reason, THE NIGHT MEN got almost no reviews. Not bad reviews—what press it got was almost universally great, with a couple of exceptions by people who didn't get it—but almost no reviews. This was discouraging, but on its own, it wouldn't have mattered much. But what with everything... well, it just seemed like a good time to figure out what I really felt like doing, and do it.
What that turned out to be was a screenplay that I'd been thinking about for, I dunno, ten years? So around February 2002, I made the decision to commit to a project I loved, a project that was exactly what Hollywood was expressly not looking for at the time: A screen musical.
Since this is a blog, the story doesn't have an ending yet. But that's what I've been up to all this time. Since you asked.
And there's actually more to it than that, but at the moment... I need to punch out and get over to the Brasil Coffee House.
How about some music?
CDs:
Jimi Hazel: "Heavy Metal Soul" from the former 24-7 Spyz guitarist
Weed: Ambient/triphop/electronica/whatever
Red Hot Riot: Afrobeat/hiphop/R&B Fela tribute album
Streaming Internet stations:
Limbik Frequencies: Ambient station. Good for writing, if you can't deal with hearing lyrics.
I realize this is a tiny thing to be annoyed by, but wouldn't it be nice if US broadcast correspondents as a group were less self-important? If there's really a story, which there is in this case, it speaks for itself--that same serious, self-impressed singsong is annoying when they use it to report on city council meetings in peacetime.
I appreciate having the information, but when the situation being reported really is serious, I find egotistical primping by thrill-junkies sort of repugnant.
An undated letter my mom gave me while I was in Los Angeles for Left Coast Crime:
Dear Keith, Thank you for your interesting letter to Henrietta. She purred to know that you are thinking of her. She is fine and is not scared of Bob Dog anymore after she found out that he was tame. X enjoys learning about new things and so we could pretend that he is excited about the new things he learned about Owl History. Your poem about cats is a special one. Isn't it great to be able to write some of the things you're thinking? I am glad to know that you like to create with words. You are a very special person, and I like you exactly as you are. Your television friend, Mister Rogers |
I wanted to find out more about Shoshana Johnson, the woman who was captured in Iraq, so I went to google groups and typed her name in. The first thing that came up was sexual fantasy about torturing her.
I'm no vice cop, but I'm a big boy, and I'm not naive. I am rarely made physically sick by the perversions of other human beings.
But Jesus Christ.
"Morning!"
"Morning!" the cabbie says as I sling my backpack in and slide onto the seat.
"Going to Long Island City. Any idea how the expressway is this morning?"
"It's Friday," he says. "Traffic always not too bad on Friday. Queens Boulevard's always a little bad once you get past over there." (He points.)
"Okay," I say. "The expressway."
I'm reading in the cab. When I bother to notice where we are, I realize we haven't traveled as far as I expected, and the traffic is really awful on the expressway.
"What do you think?" the cabbie says.
"Must be something in the city. What's that next exit? Is that Greenpoint?"
"Greenpoint."
"Let's just get off at Greenpoint."
We do. It's as bad as the expressway. Finally, I just tell him to drop me where we are, and I'll walk the last few blocks to work.
"Sorry," he says. "Sorry about the traffic, I would have dropped you at work."
"Not your fault. Just give me... seven bucks back."
"Have a nice day."
"Drive safe."
The cars overhead on the expressway are crawling, and the cars on Borden and Greenpoint are making little end-runs around a triangular traffic island and then cutting back into line, maybe four cars ahead of where they started. I'm walking and dialing my cell phone.
"Hello?"
"Have you heard anything?"
"I heard they closed one of the tunnels. We're just sitting here."
"Where are you?"
"On the bus." She leaves for work before I do. She's usually there by now.
Maybe it's just an accident. Nobody's heard anything else. We end with "I love you. See you tonight."
Meet up with Gary, standing outside the door at work, and we talk books for a few minutes, then see which way an ambulance turns onto Borden. It's away from the city, so we figure things may be okay. Then I walk in with Mike when he gets there. He's running later than expected because his train was delayed. Nobody knows what's going on.
As we're walking in, Veronica the receptionist says, "You guys wanna hear something weird?"
Sure. She picks up the phone, hits a few buttons, puts the voicemail on speakerphone: It's Mariama calling in late. She says two men were seen leaving packages on the Williamsburg Bridge and then scaling down the side to get off. The Williamsburg Bridge is closed.
"This explains a few things," Mike says. I say yeah and redial my cell phone.
