TheLoveColumn

Comparing Townie to Los Angeles Diaries

2012-02-13T05:21:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Diaries by James Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the middle of reading Andre Dubus the III's Townie, I got this book in the mail. Partly because I misplaced Townie and partly because from the first paragraph through I couldn't stop reading James Brown's autobiographical Diaries, I still have to go back and finish Dubus' memoir/autobiography. But, when I do finish Townie, I want to go back through both these books and see why it is that I like Brown's Los Angeles Diaries and consequently Brown, as both a person and a writer, so much more than Dubus and his book Townie.
The similarities between the two books are startling, you'd think I was reading books from a syllabus for memoirs of American male writers at the turn of the 21st century. Both writers have tough stories, come from broken homes, white, lower middle class to poor, latch key upbringings with '70's/'80's adolescence dirty with drugs, alcohol and petty crimes. Both families have been strewn with tragedy. Both writers confess to a great deal of repellant behavior, Dubus with his lust for fighting eventually stomping and getting away with a brutal, public beating of a group of minors in a restaurant, Brown bailing on his family for long stretches of time on meth and alcoholic benders set off by seemingly trivial set-backs and frustrations.
To me, Brown is a much better writer, earned and artful prose compared with Dubus' voice which in my memory yields strain and something like a juvenile vanity, with expository explanations for his misbehaviors and psuedo-tough-guyness? Above all, I have to admit that Dubus' story of submitting his first short story to five different magazines and getting it accepted at Playboy for $2,500, at 24 years old, pains me with envy and discolors him as being spoiled by blessings. But, it's gotta happen to somebody.
Brown's book is laid out in twelve chapters that are more like short stories with Brown and his family as the common thread. The stories bounce back and forth through time periods and are obviously arced and polished off individual pieces that have appeared in other publications in years leading up to this compilation.
This makes for compact revelatory reading whenever a fella like me with only brief pockets of time to steal for such luxuries, gets to it. This works strong.
The risk of rounding off chapters of one's life like this is the slop of getting didactic or preachy, the reward is beauty and revelation. The tightest Brown walks this line is at the end of the chapter called "On Selling A Novel to Hollywood";

My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears from the bookstores and soon another rejections slip from the New Yorker arrives in the mail. It sounds like the same old story but something has changed this time. Something about it feels brand-new. Maybe it has to do with that third strike. Maybe it's about the other close calls, too, the hopes they inspired and my coming to realize how few ever get the shots I've had. I'm sure of one thing, though. It's not about Hollywood anymore, or getting drunk and wasted, and in some ways it never has been. This is a bigger story now. One about change. Adaptation and acceptance. The drafts are endless but it's the writer, not the story, who undergoes the most important revisions.

View all my reviews

Woodrell's Outlaw Album Just Makes You Want More!

2011-12-18T09:05:00.001-08:00

The Outlaw Album: Stories by Daniel Woodrell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Woodrell is the best writer going. I was so stoked to see this book on the shelf that I bought it at a used bookstore, when it was brand new and I paid full price without hesitation. Not since Thom Jones came and went has there been a more thunderous and subversive voice in the landscape of my readings. Woodrell's use of language reminds me of my grandpa's Mississippi renderings, if my grandpa were willing to come forth with all the darkness southern upbringings dragged through foriegn wars and brought back home have made.
A collection of short stories of 167 pages I made short work of in a few scattered hours with a juice that don't normally flow for readin', I had read "Twin Forks" and "Night Stand" before as I am a committed disciple of the Esquire Magazine. But "Uncle" and "Black Step" will strike a nerve in you like a tuning fork on fillings. Then the language, the brutal beauty of the Ozark/Missouri descriptions, dialogue and punch lines of "Two Things" and "The Horse in Our History" kick in with a swell I can only account for as delicious.
"Them days, boy, furniture'd really start a-fallin' of a Saturday night over on [the] Hill, there. Somebody'd a-get to fussin' with somebody else 'til furniture started flyin' and a-fallin', and that fussin'd go on and on 'til the makin' up started, which was usually louder." pg. 98.
"He wasn't much higher'n a belt buckle, but he was stronger'n Limburger cheese." pg. 103
But the bird Mister McCoy. The bird is soaring over death which is an old car wreck. The poet is wanting to be that white bird winging it free above death. What it really signifies is that Cecil wants to be let off from having to die. That is the point of it she says.
Now to me this point is obvious but I feel sad for a second about Cecil. Two things he never going to be is a white bird. pg. 88
I can only hope that this collection of short stories has been fed to us in order to stave us off a little while longer before Woodrell's next novel comes out. In the meantime, I hope they keep making attempts as turning his other novels into movies with as admirable effort as last year's Winter's Bone turned out to be.

View all my reviews

The Valley Joe Six (2000)

2011-12-17T13:56:00.000-08:00

The night before last, we’re driving back from a post-Thanksgiving get-together at my Dad’s - from one part of Northern California to another - `we’ being my woman, my three young sons and myself -and I’m too tired to make it home and the traffic is like molasses, so, we nab a room at a Motel 6 in beautiful, side-of-the-freeway, Vallejo.I recognized that we were in an action packed neighborhood at the front desk when a young brother came in, (from the street? from one of the rooms? from the office?) and needed a paper clip to fix the clasp of his gold chain. The front desk woman who knew this boy asked him how his clasp came to be broken and he told her that his mother had pulled it off his neck. The chain was thick and long, not Run DMC rope, but just shy. The woman behind the counter asked him, “Now wait a minute, why did your moms have to pull this chain off your neck?”There were six or eight people waiting in the small front desk room now, as I’d mentioned traffic was tough out there and it was a Saturday night. The boy was sheepish, answering, “because the clasp is broke now and I just need to fix it.”To which the woman behind the counter replied by facing the strangers who’d gathered in the small office and saying to all of us, “He went from `moms pulled it off my neck’ to `because it’s broke and I need to fix it’.” Head swivel, finger wag, big smile - we were the audience of the Rikki Lake show. Right on cue, Moms comes into the office from outside? or a back room? and asks “What’s goin’ on out here?” Laugh track, pause for character introduction and it’s better than a talk show, even more spontaneous with a touch of blaxploitation sitcom - Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Valley Joe Motel 6.Counter Woman:He say you had to pull the chain off his neck and now he needs a paper clip to fix it.Moms:Oh, he said that, huh? Boy you better get your lies straight before you come up in here.Boy:The clasp is broke.Moms:Uh-huh.Counter Woman:Yeah.Dorky White Man:Can I just get a room please?A mid-eighties, maroon El Dorado with a white vinyl top and a crumpled front side panel was parked closest to our room. A shadow or two rolled out, became folks with lived in clothes and brown bagged beverages then rolled back out of my head downed, tunnel visioned view - get everybody and everything we need into the room.The room was fine, (clean sheets on two firm beds which was what I’d been wanting from the car in traffic), for a crack shack. The top of the tv had the melt marks of a spoon, the bath tub and bathroom floor were marked with burns, melts and wax drippings. I felt a little vulnerable being on the corner of the building with windows facing out onto the parking lot, but, I’d been lazy and wanted the bottom floor, so, I’d have to live with the drive-by exposure. After a brief argument with my five year old boy about the degrees of McDonald’s desserts, “you got apple pies and that’s not fair. Milk shakes are not sweet enough to be called desserts. They are not sweet enough!” We rented a movie about chemical warfare and passed into sleep by the blue glow of the tv.

Louis Owens' Bone Game

2011-11-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

Bone Game: A Novel by Louis Owens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is books like this that make you fear when you will find another one as good. The Sharpest Sight is the other book by Louis Owens that I have read. This one is better. More full and whole, the prose is strong and the narrative is quick paced, Native American-noir, a term Owens should have capitalized on.

Similar to all his fiction books, the main character, Cole McCurtain, is based on Owens himself. He was a half-breed Choctaw/Irish. A professor of English/Creative Writing and Native American studies at UCSC for a short time which was where I came to know him and where the setting of Bone Game takes place.

Owens mixes Santa Cruz Mountain murder legends in with his own mystical Native American dreamscapes with the irresistable UCSC hypocritical hippie student culture vibe. But he doesn't do it cloyingly as other books I have read do. He doesn't rely on the quirkiness of Santa Cruz, the university and its students. He underplays all that and rolls it into a canvass of much deeper tones, undertones and movements. The cover art for Bone Game, "Melting Retreat" by Veloy Virgil is strongly compatible with the book.

Satisfying is what you walk away with. Bone Game even helps to assuage the hole, (albiet ever so slightly), that Owens left with his inexplicable suicide in 2002.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2002-10-06/li...

View all my reviews

You Get So Alone At Times It Just Makes Sense - Revisited

2011-07-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"well, that's just the way it is..."

sometimes when everything seems at

its worst

when all conspires

and gnaws

and the hours, days, weeks

years

seem wasted-

stretched there upon my bed

in the dark

looking upward at the ceiling

I get what many will consider an

obnoxious thought:

it's still nice to be

Bukowski.

...we order beer for starters, we sit there as she searches her purse for cigarettes, then I get up, move toward the jukebox, put a coin within, come back, sit down, she lifts her glass, "the first one's best," and I lift my drink, "and the last..."

outside, the traffic runs up and down, down and

up,

going

nowhere.

View all my reviews

Finishes Like A Downhill Runaway Train

2011-06-16T00:13:00.000-07:00

Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld by Kim Rich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book started out interesting and then along about Chapter 11 it became un-put-downable. The story is the non-fiction account of a young girl with wild, itinerant, outlaw parents who wind up in Anchorage, Alaska both because they believed there was opportunity for them and because they'd conceivably run out of road. Mom's schizophrenia gets the better of her after Dad's hustles eventually spiral down to him pimping her out on occasion. Mom gets shipped back to a Michigan insane asylum and after a brief stay in Michigan herself, our narrator/author, Kim Rich, is reunited with her father in Anchorage and her strange life continues. Johnny Rich, Kim's dad runs gambling rooms, prostitutes and any other corner he can cut to make a buck even in his temporarily legit business fronts. Eventually, Johnny Rich makes good as an underworld figure through massage parlors but his arrival at relative success brushes with a set of terminally bad characters that lead the reader through the last 100 pages or so of this tome at breakneck, true crime speed.

Kim Rich is a good writer. Not surprisingly though, this may have taken it all out of her. She sets up this narrative tenderly and informatively, relating great details about how Anchorage was and what it was like to come up there through the '60's and 70's and then BAM! the thing turns into a true crime novel that hits and sickens like a James Elroy piece. Her descriptions of her father, his hustling, bargain-hunting, jailhouse lawyering and his dogs-playing-poker, Cadillac, dark blue topaz cuff link style - are terrific. Her research, interviews and remembrances mesh her scattered jigsaw puzzle of a family together into a cohesive photo. The more I think about this book, the more admirable and unique a piece of work I think it becomes.

I'm reaching back up to the top of this review and changing it from three stars to four.

View all my reviews

2011-02-21T21:09:00.000-08:00

Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex by Andrew Wilson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good read about a debauched, pervy, writer of crap who did a great deal of cocaine, spent all his money on the high life and chasing tail around the world and died in debt. As it should be.

View all my reviews

The Beer Was Good

2011-02-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

My fandom for Bill Murray goes deep. Unabashedly deep. Meatballs, “it just doesn’t matter…” Stripes, “I’ve gotta party with you.” Where the Buffalo Roam, is an amalgamation of two all-time iconic heroes of mine. I saw Ghostbusters four times in the theatre with lawn-mowing, car-waxing money, I was so enamored with Murray’s self-assured, slob-cool, Dr. Peter Venkman, “Janine, sorry about the bug eyes thing I'll be in my office.” Scrooged, just gets better every time you watch it. What About Bob? Brilliant, (and the quandary of Leonard Samoylenko, my best friend and neighbor, knowing virtually every line). Groundhog Day is a completely unique monument of creation. Ed Wood. Kingpin. The Man Who Knew Too Little, (what my dear friend, Erik Homan, calls the most underrated comedy of all-time). The sweet, sadness and purity of Rushmore, (my wife’s favorite movie,) “get them in your sights, and take them down.” Lost in Translation completely captured that alien dream that is being in Japan as an American man on business. The Royal Tenenbaums. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, hilarious and heroic, if only in parts. And lately his cameo in Zombieland has kept him in the minds of kids these days.

All of the above before even mentioning Caddyshack which is, in golf circles, inarguably Murray’s masterwork, his piece de resistance, his magnum opus, his jewel, his all-time motherfucker. The quotes of Murray’s Assistant Greens Keeper with the six year schedule, Carl Spackler, slur and drool from every screening of Caddyshack like a rare delicious molasses that might also be the cure for cancer. I include them in an appendix to this column.

So, now, you can begin to imagine the surreal thrill I had this last Saturday when, working with a catering crew at a house that’s backyard scapes into the tee box of number 14 at Pebble Beach, D.A. Points and Bill Murray’s party were approaching. I’d just delivered a vodka cran to George Lopez on 14’s fairway by his request. He kissed me, told me I was beautiful and that he loved me, in that Hollywood way, fist bumped me and blew me up. So, I was feeling a little like anything was possible when one of the patrons at the house we were catering for spoke up and suggested that if I “get a cold beer out here, Murray will come up and get it.”

I called my wife to see if she could google what kind of beer Bill drinks. No response. So, I decided to go with a woman’s intuition, (which is always the way to go by the way). I asked Rachelle, one of our contractually specified, attractive female bartenders to decide what beer she thought Bill Murray would want and she pulled a brown bottle of Mirror Pond Pale Ale from a bucket of ice and snapped off the cap.

I put the bottle on my serving tray and headed out to the lawn. Murray hit a fine shot off the tee to much fanfare and as he headed up toward the fairway in his oversized Elmer Fudd hat, folks from the party around me hollered at him that this one’s for him. He acknowledged us, (and the beer) and turned his direction up the rise toward the golf cart path.

I hold the bottle with one hand onto my tray so as not to spill it on my way down a flowered, planted, landscaped embankment, watching my steps and then I’m in front of Bill Murray and a full camera crew with a boom mic guy, a key grip, two cameras, the caddy. An entourage. And suddenly, I feel like I’m in a reality tv show. Wham. Like that.

I manage to pull my gaze up from the strange sheep skin cover on the hovering boom mic and make eye contact with Bill Murray. I remember the pores in his face. And his eyes. Kind eyes. He shakes my hand. He takes the beer.
“God bless you for this,” is all he says.

Then he took a hit of the beer. Tipped it all the way back.

“Ah, Mr. Murray.” I stammer. “Mr. Murray, I just wanted to say…I just want to say you’re my all time favorite. Really. I just think you’re the best.”

Bill Murray looked at me and gave me a half a nod. But kind eyes, you know, like, ‘don’t go gettin’ all respectful on me now, kid, we’re at a golf tournament.’

“So, now look up at the peanut gallery with me,” I say, slipping my arm around his shoulder and looking up at the lawn I came from. Ten to twelve cameras from the patrons of the party we’re working are snapping photos of us from up there.

The Murray entourage has got to keep moving. I put a hand on his shoulder as he started back toward the grass and told him, “you have a good day now. And kill’em all!” which is what I tell my sons whenever they’ve got a game to play.

Looking back I’d have to say I performed rather like a muttering fool, but I still feel pretty good about it. There should be a contest for people to write in all the things I could have and should have said. So go ahead.

Through the rest of that day I was famous amongst our staff and the two to three hundred guests we served. Lenny and I celebrated at a bonfire on our street when I got home that night with a number of less prestigious, more mass produced beers than Mirror Pond Pale Ale. The next day another co-worker of ours said that his girlfriend had seen Murray on television referring to the beer he’d had on 14 and that he’d said it was “good” on CBS.
We knew he’d be coming by again that day. Apparently Lopez had already been by and taken a tequila before I got there. We also knew that Murray and Points were in the hunt to win this year’s AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. So, we were prepared as a staff and as a party for the second coming, as it were, of Bill Murray for his beer.

I was asked if I was going to do it again. Of course. Asked to have my picture taken as a ‘before’ shot. I was coerced into imitating Carl Spackler’s Dalai Lama speech more than once. And finally taken aside by one of the guests, (Golf Guy) who had witnessed my performance from the day before.

Golf Guy
So what are you going to do this time?

Me
Uh, you know, I behaved a little like a mumbling school girl with a crush yesterday, so, I’m just gonna try and play it cool, you know.

My Boss (interjecting)
The best thing you could do Bryan is just not say anything at all.

Me
Yeah, well I’ll definitely take that under advisement.

Golf Guy
No, really let’s think about this a little bit. You don’t want to go all mumbles like you did yesterday.

Me
Yeah. You’re right. I appreciate that.

Golf Guy
So, what are you gonna say? What are your favorite Bill Murray lines? What are your favorite movies of his?

Me
Well, you know Rushmore is my wife’s favorite.

Golf Guy
Just don’t go Caddyshack on him. He’s got to be hating Caddyshack lines anymore. What you’ve got to think about is that he’s in the hunt. He and Points are just a couple strokes off the lead for this thing.

Me
Right, no, I was thinking about maybe combining a little something about, you know, “Rudy the wabbit, Rudy the wabbit” from Meatballs with the line from Rushmore about getting the rich kids in your sights and taking them down.

Golf Guy
Well, you don’t want to get too complicated on him now. You’re only going to have a few seconds. So keep it clean and simple.

Me
Oh no, yeah, of course. I’ll keep it clean.

Then in my mind I saw exactly how it was going to go down. Bill and I would meet at the golf path, just like the day before. The crazy entourage-reality-tv media crush would be all around us. I’d turn him toward my new found fans up on the lawn up there and sling my arm around his shoulder. I’d make a couple of conspiratorial looks around for show and then I’d say, “Look, Bill, I’m not a big golf guy, exactly, but since yesterday I’ve taken a little interest in you and where you’re at in this thing and here’s what I think…” at this point I’d bend my knees and get him to squat down there with me. Me and Bill Murray, squatting down in the cart path at Pebble Beach like I’m going to draw out a pattern in the air with my finger for him to run here on the 14th fairway so I can toss him a ball.

“What I think, Bill, is, I think you got a chance at the whole ball o’ wax here today.
Now, on open ground these guys could take you but you’re here at Pebble Beach. You got a chance. You’re more experienced and you can hit the ball through the bushes faster. You’re like a little rabbit. You’re Rudy the Wabbit, okay?
When you’re playing, think, ‘I’m Rudy the Wabbit.’
Stay right behind them until you get to the woods. When you get to the woods, pass ‘em. Don’t even look in the rearview mirror.
Be ahead of them when you get to the edge of the woods, ‘cause when you get out…
There’s open ground and that’s where you’ll have trouble. You gotta have a hell of a lead when you get outta the woods.
All right, what’s your name?”

“Bill Murray?” he’d say.

“No. It’s Rudy the Wabbit. What’s your name?”

“Rudy the Rabbit.”

“You’re the winner. Let’s hear it for him.”

We get up shake hands. Applause. Laughter. Bill drinks beer. Murray and Points go on to win the 2011 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, the crystal trophy is hoisted the million dollar prize goes to the journeyman from Pekin, Illinois. Representatives of Deschutes Brewery ship me a case of Mirror Pond Pale Ale, you know, for the effort. And we make the whole thing a tradition that goes on as long as Murray can walk the course.

What actually happened yesterday was a little more anti-climactic than all that, for me anyway. I mean yeah, Murray and Points did win the Pro-Am and all that and I’m completely happy for them. But, when Murray tee’d off at 14 yesterday he botched his first drive and took a mulligan then proceeded to pull his next shot directly into the gallery hitting a spectator. So, the Murray entourage was pulled to that spectator and that side of the hole, away from me, with other concerns and attentions. I still took the beer over though. I blubbered out that maybe he needed this one more than yesterday. Murray took it and said, “thanks for this,” and he was on his way, understandably a little shook up over beaning some upper management/golf fan. I did manage to blurt out, “keep them in your sights and take them down,” but it hardly made any sense and fortunately no one even noticed I’d said anything.

I was still welcomed back to our catered event with a hero’s welcome, pats on the back and so on. Murray did tip the Mirror Pond all the way back as he marched up the cart path toward the fairway. (What did they do with the bottle? Did he really pound the whole thing down?) Points eagled 14 spectacularly and then birdied 15 to sew up the win for their pairing. The beer was “good.”

Ellroy Pulls Reader Through Personally Imagined Loopdee-Loops

2010-12-31T11:06:00.000-08:00

American Tabloid by James Ellroy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Okay, there's a certain unbridled geeky imagination spun unedited from a wild man's room thing going on here that's got to be addressed. It's like when you're a kid set free to walk in the wilderness with or without your dog and the beauty of the Manzanita and Evergreens just isn't enough for your comic book fueled imagination so you bust out on these holy terror, blood and guts, end of the world tangents with an adolescent hero at the fulcrum of a story with a nexus based loosely on something the hippies in your household were all upset about on tv last night. The scenario goes on and on as you walk around for a couple of hours until you come to a realization on your way back to the house that this whole convoluted fantasy world you've been absorbed in, is a little too personal and embarrassing to impart to other people or even to write down. So you don't.
James Ellroy doesn't have that filter going on for American Tabloid. He spins some insanely out there yarns about CIA run mob funded Cuban refugee anti-Castro KKK cooperative military training camps in Florida and Louisiana and full-blown fictional beauties like Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, Lenny Sands and Ward Littell, working behind the scenes with and eventually against the Kennedy’s (with weird side-cars of Howard Hughes along the road). It all winds up with a gorgeous ending almost justifying all the loopdee-loop interiors Ellroy takes a reader on with him, but you’ve got to have the patience for that is my warning. The violence and language, the one part in ten sex pulp and the teasing hints at actual history intersecting Ellroy’s madness pulls a reader through the 576 pages like a dominatrix might lead an executive client through a crowded restaurant on a fishing line.
You know, three stars.

View all my reviews

To All My Friends Teaching Second Semester High School Biology

2010-11-14T08:53:00.001-08:00

Mendel's Dwarf by Simon Mawer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Masterful. Ingenius. Brilliant. Also, a little technical and biology specific. So, you know, I highly recommend this book to my friends who are teaching second semester high school biology, or are taking biology right now or have an acute interest or fetish with biology and genetics. The science of genetics, frankly and unfortunately, has left this book, published in 1998, far behind, but it is a beautiful story of the way things were way back in the late nineties.
This would be a decent movie. The history of Gregor Mendel, the friar who first discovered the science of genetics through his pea experiments in the gardens of his monastery in Brno, Austria-Hungary, is presented well enough that I don't know, now, if I'll get around to reading Robin Marantz Henig's, The Monk in the Garden. And you can not read a single page of the narrative that follows the devious mind of Dr. Benedict Lambert, the book's achondroplastic protagonist, without picturing actor Peter Dinklage in the role.
The story is excellent and the information you absorb during the course of Dr. Lambert's affair with Miss Jean Piercey, is magnificent. There are great meditations on the true discoveries that Mendel made during his lifetime that were 35 years ahead of their time, (and recognition) and on the implications and ramifications and ultimate ironies of his making these discoveries as a monk at a monastery. Further, there are very revealing and enlightening passages about the inaccuracies and smudgey work of Darwin and his followers and processors. I may well read this book again.

View all my reviews

2010-10-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

On the Books-I-Was-Supposed-To-Have-Read-In-High School tour, this is, of course, another great one. Like Catcher in the Rye, I would definitely read this book again if given the time and chance, and I don't think I've ever read a book twice yet. The layers and levels of resonance that work with seemingly too many themes for one tome to carry is astounding. They all come together and work and feel genuine and organic and all that because Scout, or Jean Louise Finch, our narrator is established as abnormally smart, savvy and sophisticated while starting out with us, she's just about to enter kindergarten. So, the innocence of a child is our perspective, albeit a child with a vocabulary and understanding unevenly seasoned from her single parent, southern, attorney-father upbringing.
The lessons brought to us from Atticus Finch through Scout's consciousness are as poignant and vital as the Golden Rule should be. Don't judge a book by it's cover. Stand for what you believe is right. All men are created equal. Civil rights. Give folks the benefit of the doubt.
And I haven't even addressed the fantastic story that ushers all this into the reader's consciousness. Jem, Dill Harris and Scout's fascinations with Boo Radley. The Ewell/Robinson case. The sexism, the racism, the classism, the tabooisms, the set-up of the town's social network and the spread of gossip are all impactfully, succinctly and seamlessly lain in to the woodwork of this masterpiece.
The ending is so strong and beautiful that the film comes back to me from however many decades ago that I watched it disinterestedly because it was what my grandfather insisted we watch. But I remember the power of that ending effecting me then too. Gotta go back now and watch it again.
And, of course, I love the story of the book itself. Harper Lee's only book she ever wrote. Her prose diamond hard and clear painted with southern language and truisms that make you wish you were brought up in such a town and such an era when perfect metaphors fell from the man on the street as well as the neighborhood ladies and the occasionally ultra-bright little girl. "...a black dog suffered on a summer's day."
Her neighbor in real life was Truman Capote. I could just picture the young, imaginative, fey little boy Capote as Dill Harris in every scene. Pulitzer Prize winner in 1961 and then on to assist Capote with his In Cold Blood project. If there were still a good place to use the word class without irony, it would have to be with Harper Lee.
"Hey, Boo,"

View all my reviews

girls, girls, girls, girls, girls i do adore

2010-07-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

girls: A Paean by Nic Kelman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A tough, dirty, and significant, little book. As obnoxious and disgusting, as ruthless and as amoral as the voices of the narration are - it is also nearer to the bone of the truth of inner male dialogue than most are willing to admit to or want to admit to. I certainly wouldn't admit to thinking this dastardly about the fairer sex, especially the nubile targets of the narrator(s) of girls.
Overall this thing is disturbing. Woven throughout is good writing, undeniably interesting, sometimes even sexy and erotic scenes and it is wildly un-put-downable, dragging you through by your own carnal curiousity like an accelerated, 21st Century Lolita. I think I read it in a day and a half, which for me is rabid.
The author, Nic Kelman's background is something to consider here too as he studied science at MIT where he conducted "among other studies, research on the effects of orgasm on problem solving in males." Then went on to Brown University's Creative Writing program where girls became his award winning thesis.
So, there's lots of good science references and you almost don't remember or notice on the first read through, the constant references to The Iliad and The Odyssey which serve as loosely connected/related deviations to the modern scenes. The patchwork narrative format is truly innovative and radical and works. This is a better book the more I think about it.

View all my reviews >>

Under the Bright Lights

2010-06-07T17:07:00.001-07:00

Under the Bright Lights by Daniel Woodrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Everything Daniel Woodrell has written is more than worth reading. I believe that he's gotten progressively better with each book though, culminating with Winter's Bone, and this seems to be his first novel, published in 1986. It is set in a fictional town in Louisiana which doesn't play to his strengths as much as when he writes about his native Ozarks, creating the genre of his own origin, Hillbilly Noir.
Without meaning any detriment to the book, the most memorable part, to me, is the quote in the preface which is so good, I feel like I've been looking for it all my life.
You can map out a fight plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the way you planned, and you're down to your reflexes - that means your [preparation:]. That's where your roadwork shows. If you cheated on that in the dark of the morning, well, you're going to get found out now, under the bright lights.
- Joe Frazier

View all my reviews >>

Cornell Woolrich, A Rich Discovery

2010-06-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommended to me by Eileen McGowan and tripped up a little by her sister CJ who hit me with a key spoiler about the plot when she learned I was reading it. I'd never heard of this book or writer, Cornell Woolrich, until Eileen loaned me this book. And now I'm hooked.
Woolrich was apparently as openly gay a writer as one could be in the '30's and 40's when his work was either successfully pre-dating or coinciding with the pillars of the noir edifice, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, Erle Stanley Gardner, (another name I just learned due to this book), and Jim Thompson and James M. Cain.
The writing is rich with the hardboiled lines and dramatic prose that I love. You can open to nearly any page in the book and catch a gem.
"Because they'd first met, you see, when she was seven and he was eight. And they'd fallen in love when he was eight and she was seven. Sometimes it does happen that way." p. 1.
"Something with red headlights, a chariot from hell, was jockeying around out there, backing into position." p. 6.
"He knew her way of smiling complacently, eyelids half down, in a way that infuriated women, but wasn't meant for them anyway." p.30.
"They went over and sat down, under a bleaching needle-like shower of violet-white arc rays."p. 74.
"These good dames," said Rusty, tightlipped. "Give me a bum like I am."p.86.
"From the theatre, at half past eleven, they went to a Chinese restaurant and dance spot. Pseudo-Chinese. The waiters were Chinese and the food was the "Chinese" food that China never knew but that Americans think is Chinese. But the band played "The Jersey Bounce" and the biggest seller at the bar seemed to be the Martinis. And the man whose money was invested in it was named Goldberg." p.109.
"She dialed a number. She made the wheel go around so fast it sounded like rain hitting a tin bucket."p.121.
"You're going out with Madeline Drew. If you say you're not, you're a liar." The adjective he used to modify the noun was unprintable. p. 125.
"When a girl's not in love, she hates it if you're not a gentleman. When she is in love, she hates it if - you are." p. 130.
And so on. Gorgeously.
Knowing that the author was a gay man made me notice some sort of generalized intimations and capabilities Woolrich brought to the narrative that I found unique. At one point an investigator uses fashion details to try and time-date a photo of a source. And the masterful coverage of the depth of the senses and perceptions of the chapters following a blind victim I chauvinistically attribute to the sensitivities of a gay male narrator.
The suspense, the premise for the story and the timelessness of Woolrich's treatment, teasing the reader along, deliciously, painfully - it's quite an accomplishment. I look forward to reading more of his works. A short story of his, "It Had To Be Murder" was apparently the nexus for Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and consequently 2007's Disturbia starring Shia LeBeouf. Another 28 films credit his writing as the source story. As usual, the joy of discovering a writer of this magnitude and talent is a boon to a reader, like me, and a crime that Mr. Woolrich and his work is not better known and as celebrated as that of his peers.

View all my reviews >>

Michael Jordan; Dick

2010-06-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

When Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan's Last Comeback by Michael Leahy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So you read this book and you gather the very documented impressions that Michael Jordan is a mean dick, Doug Collins, (recently hired as head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers) is a spineless, emotional mess and that the author, Michael Leahy, is, or at least put himself in the position of, a creepy, sniping voyeur of sorts.
Scathing. Revealing. And ultimately, so what? Jordan's career as a basketball player still out-beautifies any rotten, entitlement-type behavior he could subject the people around him to or executive shortcomings he may have.
Interesting history and notes on Washington Wizards owner, (recently deceased) Abe Pollin.
Interesting to go back in time in the NBA, even if it was just seven years ago, and read about how things were for a season or two and compare how things have changed.
Also, Leahy makes many interesting observations about sport and media and culture throughout.
"We romanticize the banal, and catalog the silly. We have churned out so many of these stories, competently, even artfully, that at some point long ago we succeeded in making the ridiculous relevant." p. 112.

View all my reviews >>

Porn Stars Are...Cool

2010-05-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

Sinner Takes All by Tera Patrick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I cannot help my fascination with porn stars. This book is just a shade under Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star in overall quality and there you have Tera Patrick in a nutshell, I guess. Second only to Jenna Jameson in the porn industry, worldwide.
Her candor about her firsts in the business, her relationships and particularly the money she earned and spent and negotiated and was taken for and created are the nasty, dirty nuggets that tease you through from start to finish, but there's more going on.
What amazes me, without exception, about autobiographies is the text that rises above the narrative. The unintentional impressions that the author creates about themselves while they forge through the narrative of their lives as they've interpreted it.
Tera Patrick or Linda Ann Hopkins from Fresno, presents a daring, even courageous, if sometimes hilariously shallow and in the end, wildly hypocritical, life for herself during the course of Sinner Takes All.
Finally, the last chapter is a stunner and a novel and telling commentary on celebrity relationships and how they go. So, more than a torrid read through the sex, drugs and rock and roll adventures of a porn star, (more than enough reason to read any book), Sinner Takes All is a study in autobiography with an unprecedented-type of up-to-the-minute, head change ending.
There is a quote from Evan Seinfeld, Tera's husband in the book, on page 134 which made me laugh out loud and which I hope to carry with me always with the hope of having the opportunity to use in conversation some day.
And then there's this bit of melodrama;
It was the hardest thing I've had to face. I took my Hello Kitty suitcase and my dogs Chopper and Mr. Big Time, packed them in the pink smart car Evan had given me on Valentine's Day, and headed off.
...I cranked up Madonna's "Jump" and Linkin Park's "In the End" and drove and cried the whole way to Vegas, never looking back.

View all my reviews >>

500 Teapots while substituting Ceramics Class

2010-05-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

500 Teapots: Contemporary Explorations of a Timeless Design by Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I found this book while substitute teaching Ceramics yesterday and read the whole thing during my prep period. Surprising that it drug me through from beginning to end. It is, after all, a book about teapots. But what I found interesting was the distinct styles that caught my eye. What artistic styles and techniques attracted me.
Additionally, the introduction by Kathy Triplett had some insightful quotes.
"I have been surprised at every turn how the clayworker's ingenuity persists in finding new resolutions that push the envelope even further."
Her comparisons of the teapot to the human body with its parts referred to as the lip, foot, neck, shoulder and belly as well as the metaphor of the body as teapot or vice versa, carrying fluids as its purpose.
And;
"As all clayworkers know, control has to be forsaken at times and the tension between expectation and unpredictability must be embraced." This quote is pretty all-encompassing. You could substitute the title "clayworkers" for any station in life.
Also;
"[The Teapots:] inspire the hands back into the clay, to return to that unpredictable dance between intention and randomness. There will always be room for new ideas." - pretty inspiring stuff regarding teapots.
Some of my favorites are;
"Proud Catch II" by Richard Swanson on page 191. "Nurse (Fetish Series I) by Karen Marie Portaleo on page 257. The really perverse works of Ilona Romule of which there are several. All the works by Robin Campo of which there are several and all have a sort of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach meets Tim Burton random cragginess to them. Paul Dresang's amazing teapot thing coming out of a purse masterpiece on page 287. And my #1 favorite, "She Wore Her Favorite Hat #1" by Patricia Watkins on parge 389. It's a crazy little gem of a picture book to take in overall.

View all my reviews >>

Where Can I Find ZZ Packer?

2010-05-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer

These are good short stories. I find myself in love with ZZ Packer and looking, searching for more, unrequited. She may be at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas right now - I don't know.
I think my favorite story was "Speaking in Tongues" because it's the raciest, with street people and a little sex and violence mixed in, but that's just my bent. They are all very good and none of them boring or slow.
Her writing is rich with those writerly woman currents of metaphor and lines that subtly indicate the story as a whole and where it's going and then reaches beyond the story. In the midst of a seemingly logistic paragraph she mentions that her main characters swerve out of the lane their driving in and "Cars behind us swerve as well, then zoom around us and pull ahead as if we are a rock in a stream." (from "The Ant of the Self"). You will find indicators like this set in all of her stories collected here cementing each story with real art.
Her descriptions of black people and their expressions and their ways are so on point as to be a quality separating Packer from other writers in and of themselves.
"Man, did you smell them?" Arnetta said, giving the girls a slow once-over, "They smell like Chihuahuas. Wet Chihuahuas." Their troop was still at the entrance, and though we had passed them by yards, Arnetta raised her nose in the air and grimaced. (from "Brownies").
The last line of each of the eight stories herein resonates with significance and meaning and metaphor. It can be easy to get cynical about and make fun of, but, of course, Packer's stuff is just too pure for that.
"The sky had just turned her favorite shade of barely lit blue, the kind that came to windows when you couldn't get back to sleep but couldn't quite pry yourself awake." (from "Doris is Coming").

View all my reviews >>

Thank You For The Portable Ashtray!

2010-04-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company continues to be the most dynamic, grass roots, creative, marketing savvy, appreciative, conscientious and coolest company on the planet! I dug the "share your story" campaign, the free pack coupons are terrific and now the Portable Ashtray! I haven't smoked since August of last year, but when I did I was definitely guilty of flicking my butts out the car window, a horrendous breach of my hippie, no-littering, respect-mother-earth upbringing and a thousand little karma ticks against me out in the cosmos. You all came up with a great solution!
Praises to you all Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company! Keep up the good work! And keep me on your mailing list!

Sincerely,

RB Love
Santa Cruz, CA

Piss And Vinegar releases "Thigh High Leather Boots" on REVERBNATION

2010-04-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

Mainly composed of what one guy thought would be a good name for a band, Piss And Vinegar has released its' one and only existing single, "Thigh High Leather Boots", on REVERBNATION over this last weekend.
The single has a distinctly informal, garage sort of production quality which stems from the overtly affected artistic strategy the band posed by getting together informally and recording in a garage-type studio.
The overpowering monologue which holds the piece together is delivered by 48-year-old, rock and roll ingenue Mary Kay Love. Rumor has it that the loose, disjointed and seemingly spontaneous delivery of Mrs. Love's monologue was recorded in just one take, no small achievement when you consider Love's reputation for being tight, locked, loaded and rigid.
The rest of the band is a virtual super group with Alex Quinn of Los Angeles' LANTVRN on drums, Long time Chico music scenester, Dan Quinn on bass, Santa Cruz High basketball's starting two guard, Cody Love, on guitar, award winning essayist Ty Gideon Love on keyboards and Piss And Vinegar's Chief Visionary Officer, Arby Love on backup vocals.
Piss And Vinegar will embark on their Tour of the Mind schedule whenever they think about it or whenever you think about it for that matter.
Listen to Thigh High Leather Boots obsessively and make it #1 on the REVERBNATION charts for Santa Cruz, Ca.

Check Out Piss And Vinegar's Thigh High Leather Boots on REVERBNATION

2010-04-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

2010-02-19T23:11:00.000-08:00

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow. That was a good one. And I love that the title is like a non sequitur left to interpretation. Camus wrote that he was inspired to write The Stranger after reading Postman. It has that forsaken, death toll, resonance to it. Only more delectable for me because it is written in the hardboiled vein. The hardboiled's hardboiled in fact. James M. Cain was so much darker and harder than Chandler, I think.
The dialogue and what a lech Frank Chambers is, are what makes the whole thing so sickeningly beautiful.
She was standing there in a red kimono, as pale as milk, staring at me, with a long thin knife in her hand. I reached out and took it away from her. Whe she spoke, it was in a whisper that sounded like a snake licking its tongue in and out.
"Why did you have to come back?"
"I had to, that's all."
"No you didn't. I could have gone through with it. I was getting so I could forget you. And now you have to come back. God damn you, you have to come back!"
"Go through with what?"
"What he's making that scrapbook for. It's to show to his children! And now he wants one. He wants one right away."
"Well, why didn't you come with me?"
"Come with you for what? To sleep in box cars? Why would I come with you? Tell me that."
I couldn't say anything. I thought about my $250, but what good was it telling her that I had some money yesterday, but today I lost it playing one ball in the side?
"You're no good. I know that. You're just no good. Then why don't you go away and let me alone instead of coming back here again? Why don't you leave me be?"
"Listen. Stall him on this kid stuff just a little while. Stall him, and we'll see if we can't figure something out. I'm not much good, but I love you, Cora. I swear it."
"You swear it, and what do you do? He's taking me to Santa Barbara, so I'll say I'll have the child, and you-you're going right along with us. You're going to stay at the same hotel with us! You're going right along in the car. You're - "
She stopped, and we stood there looking at each other. The three of us in the car, we knew what that meant. Little by little we were nearer, until we were touching.
"Oh, my God, Frank, isn't there any other way out for us than that?"
"Well. You were going to stick a knife in him just now."
"No. That was for me, Frank. Not him."
"Cora, it's in the cards. We've tried every other way out."
"I can't have no greasy Greek child, Frank. I can't, that's all. the only one I can have a child by is you. I wish you were some good. You're smart, but you're no good."
"I'm no good, but I love you."
"Yes, and I love you."
"Stall him. Just this one night."
"All right, Frank. Just this one night."
Pgs. 37-38.

View all my reviews >>

2010-02-15T17:29:00.000-08:00

When the Game Was Ours by Larry Bird

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A little repetitive maybe. Repetitively great! Tons of anecdotes and going overs of the exploits of Bird and Magic. Makes you realize how significant they were and what a renaissance that was for basketball in general and the nba particularly.
One section was so significant, like an allegory beyond the book itself, about the differences in acumen between Magic and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I feel obliged to re-type it here;
"Thank God Kareem was my teammate, because I used to cringe at the way he treated peopl," Magic said. "There was a way to say no if you didn't want to sign an autograph. You could say,'I'm Busy right now,' or, 'Sorry, not today.' But Kareem didn't do it in a very kind way. Sometimes he's have people in tears. It's hurt him now that he's done playing."
More than a decade after both men retired, Kareem approached Magic to learn more about Johnson's business acumen. Abdul-Jabbar had struggled to find his niche since he stopped playing, and he was looking to Magic, who had made millions off the court, for advice.
"I want to be like you," the center said.
Magic shook his head.
"No, you don't," Johnson answered. "To be like me, you've got to shake hands, hug people, attend luncheons. You've got to be nice to people all the time. You've got to make small talk. You've got to be on."
"Well, maybe I can do it another way," Abdul-Jabbar said.
"There is no other way," Magic explained. "You have to be cordial. You can't treat your teammates without any courtesy, or humiliate reporters, or blow off fans."
Magic shared a story with Abdul-Jabbar that happened in his second season in the pros and resonated with him for a decade. The Lakers were finishing up a pregame shoot-around when a man and his young son timidly approached Abdul-Jabbar and asked, "Kareem, can we please get a picture?"
"No," Abdul-Jabbar snapped without breaking stride.
Magic, standing nearby, could see the young boy was crushed. Johnson was not yet and All-Star, an MVP, or a household name, although he was well on his way to accomplishing all of that. He walked over to the father and said, "How about a picture with me?"
As the grateful father lined up the shot, Magic joked, "Maybe I'll be in the Hall of Fame someday too."
Twenty-two years later, Johnson sat in a boardroom representing Magic Johnson Enterprises with hopes of generating some new business. After he made his pitch, an older gentleman approached him.
"We met before, a long, long time ago," the gentleman said. "You posed for a picture with my son. Kareem blew us off, but you were very nice."
The son was a grown man, a successful attorney in Los Angeles. His father was the CEO of the company Magic was soliciting.
"My son is 29 years old now," the man said,"and he still has that picture on his wall."
As Magic walked out of the meeting with a new multimillion-dollar client in his portfolio, he thought to himself, "See, Kareem? It could have been you."

View all my reviews >>

2010-02-07T22:56:00.000-08:00

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I finished the book this morning and then watched the movie, (made from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay adaptation) tonight after the Super Bowl. I can tell you that the film was a lot more edgy, dark and less fun than the book. Although both representations are meritorious. I've come to idolize Chuck Barris since I read You and Me, Babe years ago. The whole thing is an interesting read what with the whole fantasy about Chuckie Baby doubling as a CIA assassin. But, Barris' real life stuff is what fascinates me most. "Palisades Park" then crazy television success into his current status as a writer. At the end of the film, the camera intimates on the then septuagenarian Barris' face while Sam Rockwell's voice over tells of an edifying new game show Barris has thought up. That stays with you in a way the book does not. From the film you are left wishing that Chuck Barris could just appreciate what he did and what a spectacular life he's led and that, critics be damned, he did make worthwhile hilarity on tv, he did buck the system and he seemed to have more laughs than anyone else. Reading the book, you get a sense that maybe he did know some of those things.

View all my reviews >>

2009-12-27T18:14:00.000-08:00

The Devil's Redhead by David Corbett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm a sucker for the genre. Crime/Noir. Jim Houston introduced me to David Corbett at a reading he gave at the Capitola Book Cafe years ago. So, I had always wanted to read one of his books. I'm married to a redhead and I'd read Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red earlier this year, so,...The Devil's Redhead.
After a whirlwind romance followed in short order by a bust, our protagonist, Danny Abatangelo, comes out of a ten year stint for running weed, unable to deter himself from reconnecting with Shel, the whirlwind he'd had to part with. Shel is tied to a new beau who's a frustrated flunky for a Bay Area crime family made up of hillbilly meth-type characters who are all delicious in their own ways. And we're off to the races.
The book is about 100 pages too long for the thrill ride that it really is. There's so many seemingly detouring lefts, sub-plots, characters and some of them sudden and unexpected, some of them, maybe unnecessary.
There is also a great deal of masterful writing. One section in particular, sustained such a strength of prose that I'm sure it must have been excerpted somewhere, somehow. Chapters 22 and 23 run a gambit of Reservoir Dogs-like power scenes of violence, dips of relief and salvation, back through tension, disgusting gore and then poetic empathy.
"Rendered green and hazy...the figures seemed strangely innocent through the lens, as though their images were projections - not their real selves. Their real selves remained elsewhere, asleep in bed with their alibis." Page 337.
Also, pages 325-333 describing a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome in which the main female character's captor reveals the strange and desperate love he's formed for her after she's stitched up his bullet torn arm is strong, strong stuff. Overall this thing feels like a solid hit after you're done reading it like it's maybe taken longer than you thought it would but when the swing hits that sweet spot in the bat all your minor complaints just disappear and you can still feel the ball resonating from the connection it's made as it sails out there.

View all my reviews >>

2009-12-05T07:16:00.001-08:00

Lucky Town by James Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Dust rose from the desert floor and spun around itself, and though I knew nothing for certain, I believed that if I only walked fast enough I'd find myself somewhere in the middle of this storm.
Ends, Lucky Town, by James Brown. A fine novel about a boy, Bobby Barlow, and his outlaw father, Floyd and their misadventures fueled by Floyd's obsession with a younger woman. Melinda, an ex-prostitute, would-be law student, is fianced to a Seattle muscle-head, cop when Floyd first sees her. A stolen Cadillac joy ride with the boy in tow follows and Lucky Town is off and running.
Coming of age. Bildungs Roman. Call it whatever, it's very good. Strong. The writing, the detail, the protagonist is sympathetic, empathetic, and you are with him all the way. Nothing is too unreal and yet, the situations Floyd and Bobby find themselves in are outrageous, thrilling, entertaining and frightening. There is a great deal of subtext about freedom here. The frightening, liberating paradox of freedom and something in the ending makes me feel like a guy with no family but bad family who cuts himself free may know a different kind of freedom than the rest of us.
I'm looking for James Brown's other books now and wondering what he's been up to as Lucky Town appears to be his last and it's from 1994.
Correction - The Los Angeles Diaries, 2004 and I'm on the case.

View all my reviews >>

2009-11-28T09:42:00.001-08:00

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Chabon is the best writer in America that I know of these days. His style and prose are the standard. This a a grouping of his essays, mainly from Details magazine that apparently held him on their masthead as a contributor for some time. His quirkiness and idiosyncracies as a fanboy, a comic book-star trek-Dr. Who-Legoland-baseball card-loving, Jewish/American kid all add up to identifyability and a building of warm kinship with the reader in this tome. A much needed series of reflections on the world our generation has come through, where we are and what our children are missing and what they have to look forward to.
"This is our life happening...and it's happening righ now." From "Cue the Mickey Katz" - the last piece in the book.
Strong reflections on parenthood and the status of childhood and on being a man in today's world.

View all my reviews >>

Black Mamba Battles The Answer in All-Time Scoring Fest, Tonight!

2009-11-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

Allen Iverson became the 16th player in NBA history to score more than 24,000 points in a career two days ago in a losing effort against the Golden State Warriors. Iverson wound up that game with 24,012 total career points. Kobe Bryant’s career point total is currently at 23,986, just 26 points behind A.I.
The Los Angeles Lakers, (Bryant’s team, for those who don’t follow,…anything), and The Memphis Grizzlies, (Iverson’s team, for those who follow NBA basketball closely and stay on the pulse of their disintegrating heroes), play tonight. So, this means that #16 on the all-time scoring list, (The Answer), will be going head to head with #17 on the all-time scoring list, (The Black Mamba is Bryant’s most appropriate nickname), and they are separated by a mere 26 points. Kobe could potentially leap frog Iverson tonight.
A more exciting statistical-geek-perfect-storm has not occurred since, I believe, April 9, 1978 when the scoring title was stolen from David “Skywalker” Thompson by George “The Iceman” Gervin by seven hundredths of a point. On that day David Thompson seemed to have secured the scoring title with his 73 point performance against the Detroit Pistons giving him a 27.15 points per game scoring average for the season. But then the San Antonia Spurs played the New Orleans Jazz later the same day. The Iceman had the Spurs PR department break out their calculators to find out what he’d need to take the scoring title and, so many finger rolls and praying mantis lookin’ jump shots later Gervin had poured in 63 and won the scoring championship with a season ending average of 27.22 ppg.
Even with Iverson relegated to coming off the bench for his fourth team in three years, he’s going to get his 18 points tonight. He got 18 for the Grizzlies against the Warriors without making any noise whatsoever. I don’t think most folks knew he was in the building. So, say he gets 18. Then Kobe would need, 26 + 18 = 44 to tie AI on the all-time list, 45 points to pull ahead. We all know Kobe is capable of this. He’s gone over 40 points nearly 100 times in his 953 game career. And then, of course, there was that one night in Toronto. (January 22, 2006 Jelly Bean Bryant’s son scored 81 points).
AI, having endured dozens of well documented injuries and suffering the unforgiving nature of the NBA’s market value will never be able to catch back up to the still rising abilities of Kobe Bryant. It is entirely conceivable that we could see a step-over move as literal, metaphorical and as dramatic as Iverson’s physical step over the Lakers’ Tyronne Lue in the 2000 championship series. Tonight.

Thigh High Leather Boots

2009-09-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Download and play the Love Family single, "Thigh High Leather Boots" featuring monologist Mary Kay Love, with guest intro by Granny Irene Quinn. Ty Love on keyboards, Cody Love on guitar, Uncle Dan on bass, Cousin Alex on drums and RB Love back-up vocals.

Never, Ever Bring This Up Again

2009-09-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

From Esquire’s This Way In, letter from Editor In Chief, David Granger…
Anchoring this month’s Insurrection-themed issue is the dizzyingly, liable story of sex columnist, Stacey Grenrock Woods’ wild, excursion/interview with California’s freshly anointed, multi-media, mogul, Russell Bryan Love, or Arby Love, or RB or Bryan or whatever he’s called. (Never, Ever Bring This Up Again, p. 91) Grenrock Woods captures both the revolutionary magnitude of what Love has accomplished with his porn-to-mainstream films and HBO series and the frenetic pace and fear that drives Love’s life and mind. We, here at Esquire, still vacillate between taking credit for Love’s mercurial rise to fortune, fame and power and shouldering the blame as his, clever, self-referential, and totally fictional account of himself being interviewed by our own Stacey Grenrock Woods, was selected as the winner of the 2009 Esquire Fiction Contest and was, according to Love himself, the impetus for his personal insurrection upon the world of entertainment during the year 2010.

Never, Ever Bring This Up Again

by

Stacey Grenrock Woods

“Don’t call me Russell,” he tells me, in the elevator, as we head down to meet our LAX limousine shuttle, “no one’s ever called me Russell. My uncle’s name is Russell. Only policeman and professors have ever called me Russell.”
Because it’s on his birth certificate and his driver’s license, I’m guessing. Russell Bryan Love. That’s his legal name. Chief Visionary Officer of Love Productions, is the title he’s given himself.
“I hope,” Love continues, “that with this interview, we can put to rest a number of misnomers and misunderstandings and clarify enough details about me, so that I can say ‘never, ever, bring this up again,’ to so many of the things I waste so much breath on day in and day out. Starting with my name.”
“So, please,” inside the crisp, new, leather smell of our limo, now, “take notes or record this or whatever you’ve got to do.”

I had, fortunately, managed to borrow a digital voice recorder for this assignment. I had been warned, by a number of sources, that summing up an interview with Mr. Love would be like collecting blasted buckshot from a haystack. I clicked on the device as Love handed me an opened Coors Light from the limousine’s bar, snapped one open for himself and rattled on.
“Anybody who knows me, I mean, knows me-knows me, from before I had any real, success, which really goes back less than a year at this point, knows me as Bryan.
R. Bryan Love, is what I sign my name as on legal documents mostly, actually my signature is just BLove with an R whipping through there, if you want my autograph,” he smiles here acknowledging this as ‘not really a thing that happens to me.’
“But, anyway, R. Bryan Love. And then RB Love is what I wanted to be known as, as a writer, I thought that had a certain flair to it without taking myself too seriously, like TC Boyle or WC Fields, PJ O’Rourke or DB Cooper with the sound of like, Arby’s the roast beef sandwich chain, which led me to the name Arby Love for my name as a singer because it’s appropriately cheesy and loungey and associated with roast beef, a love of roast beef, like beef cake, which is such a juicy phrase, remember the pro wrestler, Brutus Beefcake, with all that zebra-striped Spandex and the hair? Yeah, like that! That’s what I was goin’ for with all that.” A singer? I was left guessing.

The “real success” Love refers to is, of course, primarily from Tall Tails, (which at the time of this interview had already swept the major awards at the 2010 Adult Video News awards in Las Vegas, was well on its way to becoming the highest grossing XXX rated film of all time and hailed as, by far, the most successful crossover picture, porn-to-mainstream, ever made,) and Bernie Blue, the artfully R-rated Larry David vehicle about a daytime TV director who, through a series of embarrassing life turns, winds up bringing his talents to the porn industry resulting in a Navin R. Johnson-like success story. Love wrote the screenplays for both of these mega-blockbusters. He also managed to negotiate producer credits and back end points on both ventures, “taking advantage of their inherent risks,” he explains. The resulting deluge of money and Hollywood favor has been like if Steven Spielberg won the MegaMillions, put it all on a roulette wheel number and won. Twice. Inside a ten month period.

The straight up insurrection that these two films have caused cannot be underlined, highlighted or even exaggerated enough. For although Hollywood and cable television had made overtures toward incorporating porn in recent years, with films like 2004’s The Girl Next Door, Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno, even Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, (to the extent that he used a well-known porn star for the film’s lead) or shows like Showtime’s Family Business and HBO’s Hung, and certainly the porn industry had made their share of clumsy thrusts toward the mainstream, going back as far as the Mitchell Brothers’ Behind The Green Door in 1972 through Digital Playground’s Pirates series, in recent years, (not to mention whatever Caligula was in 1979), the Hollywood/Cable efforts were all necessarily too light and the assertions of porn, always too heavy. It seemed that although Porn and Hollywood shared the medium of film, or at least now HD digital video, the two were definitively separate breeds, like mare and ass, and that the mixing of the two, at best, could only produce some sort of donkey show, (with a mule in the lead as the donkey?).
Never before had the melding of these two sides of the hill come to as watchable a fruition as the comic ridiculum of Tall Tails, or the more fulfilling story of Bernie Blue. Of course, Tall Tails owes a great deal to the direction of Harold Ramis, to the career resurrecting performance of Madonna and to the buzz of George Clooney’s cameo. And Bernie Blue is simply Larry David’s crowning achievement. But the avalanche, the plate tectonic shifts, the volcanic rise that these films created is the point on top of which Love now stands.

“Listen,” Love tells me at a much more lubricated point during the course of our interview, “This is another, ‘never, ever bring this up again’ thing, okay? But I mean look, the secret to the success of Bernie Blue and Tall Tails and even more so of [the upcoming television show] PornSoap is as obvious as lighting a fuse under a powder keg.
“Naked-funny-sexy is going to blow up. Who doesn’t want to see that? The ones who protest the most are the ones that secretly dig it the most, which is a whole other ball of goo we could get into, because...
“And we never, ever want to bring this up again, either, but nothing promotes my projects greater than stirring up the religious right. By God, protests are promotion apotheosis for me!”
Yeah, it’s all recorded. And by lubricated, I did mean drunk.

Love Productions, formed during the success of the films, moved briskly into the cable television market with a 12 episode season of PornSoap, an offshoot from the Bernie Blue plot, already picked up and in the can for HBO with season two in production. (Love took me to the San Fernando Valley shooting of the first episode of season two, after this interview. Suffice it to say there is definitely an alchemical art to bringing off modernized sections of Othello with actors performing a position called “paying the rent” in the foreground.) Further, Love Productions creates and controls all of the online content affiliated with its films, television shows and promotions. Through Love Productions, for example, Love’s weekly thelovecolumn.com is consistently one of the top 100 most trafficked blogs on the internet.

Before I was able to meet any of Love’s incarnations, I had to wait a half hour beyond our scheduled meeting time in the receiving room of Love Productions’ 35th floor Century Plaza offices. The delay was due to Love’s meeting with executives from Paramount Studios in an attempt to green light or obtain the rights to one of Hollywood’s most unattainable jewels, A Confederacy of Dunces. (To learn more about just how quixotic an undertaking the idea of making Confederacy into a movie has been, google that title and the name Scott Kramer).
While waiting, I had the pleasure of spending time with Irene Tsuprake-Holombo, whose official titles within Love Productions include, COOOO, (Chief of Operations, Organization and Oracle of all of Oz), HBIC and Vortex. She manages the many branches of Love Productions, and has known Love since she managed the successful mobile deejay company for which Love worked in the ‘90s. She thoughtfully described her working relationship with Love as, “combative, creative and on crack.”

Having given it a full 30 minutes, I was just about to forgo my scheduled interview and leave Love Productions’ reception area with Irene toward cosmos on her company card at French 75 across the street when the Paramount meeting let out.
Immediately, the Sesame Street song, “one of these kids is doing his own thing,” began playing in my head as Love, with his chop and spike, grey-to-silver-tinged ‘do and goatee, made sure to lock eyes with each Clooney-cut, Fioravanti-suited, exec he shook hands with. Eyes with their volume turned up to match the blues and greens in the Madras pattern of the oversized, velour, short suit Love was wearing and the energy coming off the fresh, white, size 14, Jordan 1 Retros, he gunboated amongst the half dozen pairs of size 10, Italian leathers the execs were shifting their weight on. Love cut through the glad-handing; “good meeting you,” “lunch?” “See you at Gladstones,” and “what are you doing this weekend?” niceties from the suits with a firm, “Monday.
“Let’s focus on Monday at the lot, gentlemen, or we need never, ever bring this up again.” He winked. They were gone and we were in the elevator.

“So, anyway,” Love continues, back in the limousine, “my friends call me Bryan. Certain friends call me B-Love. You can call me sir or Mr. Love, just to keep things casual.” He flexes some formidable cheeks into a grin at me when he says these things and twists the cap off another Coors Light, handing it to me.

From the Love Productions office to the street to the limo to LAX through security and into our first class seats, I caught up on the immediate Love Family History.
Born Russell Bryan Love to teenage parents who were shuttled off to Tucson, Arizona from their San Joaquin Valley hometown of Visalia, so that the mother, (now head of a drug and alcohol awareness program at Chico State), could attend a high school for pregnant teenage girls and so that his semi-hood-of-a-19-year-old, aspiring musician, father, (now a successful entrepreneur and court appointed mediator in Sacramento), could make an honest woman of her. It is true, verified from various family and friend sources, that no one ever called him by his first name. Instead, he was always called by his middle name, Bryan, or more immediately, “the ugliest baby I have ever seen,” by his maternal grandfather, Jay Gideon Quinn. The story related to me by his Granny, Irene Quinn, was that after first seeing our subject as a baby, Jay, her husband, begged off returning to the Tucson hospital saying, “I don’t really have to look at it again, do I?”
Additionally, paternal Grandpa, Clyde Bundy Love, a lifelong hell raiser and drinker to that point, swore off liquor completely the day our hero was born. It has never been clear whether Clyde quit drinking as a tribute to his first grandchild or because he’d never seen anything as grotesque as the baby born to his eldest son that December 27, 1966. A day, on which, it merits mention, snow fell in the desert town of Tucson, Arizona – which serves as metaphor for the very existence of Russell Bryan Love and the circumstances leading to this interview as much as anything else.

Less than a year before our meeting, Love was transitioned from a mental disability leave of absence from his payroll services job, where he’d been for five years, to unemployed. At 42 years of age, father to four boys aged 18 to four, acutely disinterested in finding another job, and spending as much as two hours a day “studying” internet porn, Love was losing serious ground in his struggle to justify why Mary Kay, his beautiful, second wife of three years, should stay married to him, as he continued to try and reign in some of the ADD powered ideas that shot forth from his unruly head like boulders from medieval catapults.
“My greatest fault, as I’m sure anyone will tell you,” Love confides to me much later during our time together, “and I hope to never, ever bring this up again, (because, I believe it’s all about momentum, or lack thereof), has always been organization and follow through.
“I still get distracted.”
And this changed how? Asked the interviewer with the similar faults and the somewhat less than nine digit annual income.
“At the root, it changed through frustration. I was fed up with never finishing anything. With not having much to show for all the seemingly ingenious visions I was winding up cursed with. So, I bore down and figured if I could just finish one thing. One thing first and, and, you know, get it in the mail. Then I could move onto the next thing.
“I remember very distinctly getting up at 3:30 in the morning, May of O-nine, and going downstairs to start writing the story for Esquire’s fiction contest,” Love tells me this story from his home office in Santa Cruz as he arches his back and cranes his head upside down over the extra large, black exercise ball he substitutes for an office chair. “That was the first thing.”
“Then, of course, practically speaking, after that, the differences were collaboration and organization. I realized that by collaborating with people smarter than me on ideas I had, that there was not only the benefit of working with other people, brilliant other people with more refined skill sets and minds and abilities than me, there was also the responsibility of feeling beholden to them to do my part, hold up my end to see a project through.
“And then ultimately, I had enough going on to persuade Irene, the most capable, organizational person I know, to come on board and help run all that has become Love Productions with me.”
C’mon, I push. Are you really trying to tell me that you go from crossed fingers at the mailbox for correspondence from EDD to pushing Paramount executives into handing over the Hollywood Holy Grail by putting one foot in front of the other and surrounding yourself with good people?
“Well, no,” Love admits. “There is the fucking.”
“I mean let’s face it,” he goes on, “people love fucking. People love to watch fucking.” And on, “People especially like to watch people fucking, while they’re fucking. The market for fucking is international and unending. You can keep going to that well until you come out the other side, and you’ll still be soaking wet.” Buh-dum-bum.
Yeah, and what about that? What about the idea that all this success, all the status, all this sudden power, is built on smut, lowbrow work and playing to everyone’s most base elements?
“It’s completely fantastic, I think.” Love beams, “It’s like Hugh Hefner sitting down at a typewriter in 1953 and dreaming up Playboy from nothing. I mean, there’s much more to it, of course. I mean, I never, ever want to bring this up again, right, but there’s really a great deal of literacy and plotting I slip into these projects, you know. Behind the grudge fucking, the gang bangs and the obligatory 3-eyed turtles, I’m pulling from Shakespeare as much as anything.”
No shame? No cringing at what your Granny might think or how to answer your critics?
“Hey, to paraphrase one of the great philosophers of our time, David Lee Roth, from his autobiography, Crazy From The Heat, `if I’ve made you laugh or feel something or pissed you off or made you horny, now that’s a story.’ As a writer, as an artist, that’s all I think we can hope to do.”

We arrive in San Jose on time, 5:34pm, and are whisked directly from the steps of the plane into another limousine waiting on the tarmac before any other passengers have a chance to exit the aircraft. Our conversations on the way over the slippery Highway 17 are interrupted first by Love checking in with, Mary Kay, by a business partner in Austin, and finally by band members at sound check. Sound check? I’m wondering. Did I hear that right?

There was also this left on the still running digital voice recorder I found in my handbag the next day:

“I have known since I was 16, 17 years old, and saw Breathless with Richard Gere and then Against All Odds with Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward, in short order there, that I wanted to write for a living. Folks I grew up with will tell you that they knew this was what I was supposed to do, much, much earlier than that. I just never really, executed. I never got anything done. Until I finally started which, in my mind, was much, much too late.
“Because at 16 and 17 I thought I was going to be the first Bret Easton Ellis two years before Less Than Zero even came out and Bret Easton Ellis even became Bret Easton Ellis when he was an old fart at 21.
“So, I’ve got ground to make up.
“Which reminds me of this old son of a bitch they called The Professor, who was a regular at the Compass Lounge, which used to be what the bar at The Dream Inn, [in Santa Cruz], was called back in the day.
“Best job I ever had in my life, The Dream Inn, to this day. First I was Cabana Boy, handing out towels, hustling burgers and drinks to the poolsiders. Worked my way up to bartender. 1990. So I was 24. Lived up the street on Beach Hill in a place we called The Prison of Fun. Used to roll into work after the beach all day, goof off and then hit the bars, money in hand. After hours parties back at our place. Stellar bunch of guys, a solid line up of natural-born beauties. Rinse and repeat.”
There is a pause here, presumably for Love to shake the wispiness of these recollections out of his head.
“Anyways, I’m bartending and this bastard-fuck, The Professor, says to me, ‘son, you must do the things you came here to do, because you appear to be aging at an alarming rate.’ Which really should have lit a fire under my ass way back then, come to think of it.”

Our destination in Santa Cruz was Caffe Lucio’s, an Italian restaurant run by the iconic Lucio himself, a wild, loud, Italian chef who resembles Einstein so much that a great deal of the décor is dedicated to one or the other’s image. Walking in we were greeted like it was a surprise party. For us! Yells of recognition came from several tables, over already loud disco music, (I’m pretty sure “Shake Your Groove Thing” scored our entrance). The greatest outpouring came from the furthest table back where the vivacious, scarlet-maned, Mary Kay Love and the three younger Love boys were waiting. Love’s oldest son, Dylan, lives on a Cal Poly campus where he is a freshman and was not in attendance. The three boys who were there are referred to in thelovecolumn.com as The Baller, The Lanky One, and The Ice Monkey, all of them sandy blond Santa Cruz boys.

Sufficiently warmed by a glass or two too many reds, breads, pasta, insalata, and some marinara, we glided through Lucio’s into more black leather smelling seats. Then a limo door opened into the hallowed, sub rosa of Santa Cruz’ Catalyst Club, (with just a tiny bit of cool fog air in-between those doors).

Leaning against a partition in a wing off The Catalyst stage I watched a band warm up the crowd with what I came to recognize as a nasty rendition of Booker T. and the MGs’ “Green Onions”. I found myself asking The Lanky One, who was completely too young to be standing next to me in this late-night backstage scene, where his father and Mary Kay had gone off to.
“They’re getting ready.” He answered with a raised eyebrow.
Then black and purple low lights became a big, bright, white and orange spotlight on a lead singer in nothing but a loincloth, prescription Ray Bans, and Converse All-Stars. “Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a big Santa Cruz homecoming welcome to our very own, Arby Love and The Foreplayers!”
Nearly naked, now, and revealing a fair patchwork of ink, Love launched into “Bonge-de-Bongo” a rocker co-authored with his uncle Dan, (leader and lead guitarist of The Foreplayers), when Love was a 6th grader. Love’s cousin, Alex, (Dan’s son), manned the drums, The Lanky One pointed out to me. “And there’s Grandpa Jack on bass,” he told me pointing out Love’s former semi-hood-of-a-19-year-old, aspiring musician, father. The Lanky One stepped away from me and onstage for his keyboard part. I recognized The Baller on rhythm guitar. The show swelled, loaded with kitsch, spoken word, a light show and back film, (played with great effect for their rendition of Gene Wilder’s tunnel ride from Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), even larger than life marionette monsters came out for a strange, rock and roll performance of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky in which The Ice Monkey played the “beamish boy” with violent aplomb. Love proves to be part Diamond Dave, part Leonard Cohen, part Sinatra-cool as a showman. But the highlight of the show came when the smokin’ hot, 48-year-old, Mary Kay Love, stepped out on the stage in a diaphanous`60s mini dress and white, leather, thigh highs to deliver a monologue reminiscent of Moon Unit Zappa’s “Valley Girl” over a deeply grooving bass line between the choruses of a song called “Thigh High Leather Boots.”
The audience’s enthusiastic participation and knowledge had the vibe of a late night screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which set me back. Nowhere, in my research for this interview had I run across anything about Love being in a band or having any musical aspirations whatsoever. As the former booker of talent for The Viper Room in Los Angeles I was awed by the idea that Arby Love and The Foreplayers had been kept such a secret. So, imagine my complete mind wash when Love came out for the encore in a suit, tie and fedora and began singing his original duet, “Love in the Fast, Fast, Lane” over a clinking glass of bourbon, a cigarette and a baby grand and when the female part queued, from out of the opposite stage wing, in a full evening gown, long gloves and jewels, came Courtney Love, (no relation).
The crowd erupted. I nearly fainted.
As the duet finished, The Foreplayers cranked it back up to full speed and Love and Love, jumped into full screaming raves of AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie”, “Rocker”, and ended the night with a laughing run through Hole’s “Olympia,” repeating over and over the lyric ‘we even fuck the same’.

The Jack Green Project

2009-07-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

Check out the trailer for the documentary that me and the kids have been working on! Leave your comments and spread the word!

I Live In Pleasure Point

2009-06-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

I live in Pleasure Point. It’s an unincorporated neighborhood between Santa Cruz and Capitola, hammered into the Monterey Bay by another neighborhood called Live Oak. I have wanted to live here since moving to the Santa Cruz area in 1989. In fact, the first place my sister and I lived when we came here was only about five or six blocks from the house I live in now. By my measure, what I consider to be Pleasure Point is from Schwann Lake on the western side to the actual Point on 41st ave. and for me to be really classist or even more narrowly neighborhoodinest, I’d have to say that you’re not really living in Pleasure Point unless you’re on the ocean side of Portola – which also means you have to be inside of 17th ave. (This puts me outside of The Point by the way – I’ve excluded myself by these parameters).
maps.google.com/maps/ms?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&split=0&gl=us&ei=KrJGSsW4FJWIMZC7kLAC&hl=en&msa=2

The Point is sometimes referred to as a surf ghetto. This is a ridiculous assertion since even in today’s real estate market, you can look up virtual shacks listed in this neighborhood way out of whack with what you might get for the same in say, oh, the Philadelphia area, http://www.movoto.com/real-estate/homes-for-sale/CA/Santa-Cruz/207-32nd-Ave-100_80926806.htm vs. http://www.weichert.com/23651081/
Or Oregon, or Fresno or Austin, Texas if a body had a mind to live in any of those places.

But, the neighborhood does have the look of a white trash paradise. Lots of rundown vehicles letting the salt water air have its way, as many overgrown yards, trees and brush as are kept, leaning fences, lotsa chipping paint, cardboarded window panes and straight plywood walls every now and again. The Baller and I saw a front yard with its plants potted in the shells of an old drum kit yesterday. Originality and creativity if you’re kind or with it. Slovenliness and trailer park cache if you’re, I guess, a dick.

I call it Never, Never Land. Folks never seem to grow up here. Hell, even the people who just come in to surf the spots regular seem younger for it.

Walking from my house to The Lookout and back I saw “Jack” Green, the subject of our documentary cruising down Portola on his mountain bike, no hands, beard and hair blown back from his speed, his eyes reflecting the ocean that’s ever rolling through him, on his way back to 7th ave. or beyond. He gave me the word that old “Vodka Scotty” passed away a couple weeks ago. Just laid back in a bank parking lot and fell into the next world. “At least he didn’t have to go through any of that hospital bullshit,” according to Green.

After The Cove, I walk by The Dream House, which for me is a two bedroom almost cabin looking place with a front porch facing out onto East Cliff Drive toward the ocean, strips of ratty lawn all the way around, little else. The dream is to sit on the front porch, ratty couch, dog, ever-present pony keg, strum a guitar and jerk my chin up at passers-by as they recognize or are recognized, “Eh, uh.” That’s it. That’s the dream.

Passed Rodeo Creek, three radio tours sprouting from its swamp on the backside of KSCO radio station and the view of our new Live Oak Library, (which is beautiful and awesome and at which The Lanky One volunteers every Monday), dipping down East Cliff Drive by Pat O’Neil’s ridiculously sick house/property which braves the quickest, most aerial and skilled short boarders ripping toward its backyard everyday. (In my imagination, Pat used to scout talent from his wall sized bedroom window or from his second story, pool-sized hot tub).

By Moran Lake and The Slab where all the cool kids hang, (from 14 to 60 and beyond), tattoos, bikinis, American Spirits and 40’s.

Up to just before Elizabeth’s Market I run into Pappa Ponza, unemployed, doing some side work for the contractor he was working for who no longer has any work and is on the hook for rent at the place he just moved into. “I don’t care about being a millionaire,” Pappa tells me, “I just want to be the lowest paid grunt doing the shittiest job out there so I can skimboard and go home.”

Peter Mel crosses the street in front of me, wetsuit clad, just out of the water as I approach the seawall project, (how did they get those cranes down the cliffs onto the beach?) We’ve never met, but Green made me cruise by his house at 3am a couple of times and blare the beginning sound effects of The Dramatics “In the Rain”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMn4Nwio3Bk
as some sort of inexplicable tribute. Mel is one of several world class surfers who make their home here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmmF-U9N2sk
who have, in fact, came up in this neighborhood. See also, Adam Replogle, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q69wLUa-ndc
Jay Moriarty, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCUEDloC7og
and Ratboy Collins, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1NsE7HLUwk
off the top of my head.

The Pleasure Point Seawall Project with its cyclone cordoning of East Cliff Drive, its many workers and earthmovers takes my attention some, but damn if First Peak isn’t goin’ off at 6 foot or better and guys are working out there, making the most of the sun, the ocean spray, the shape and size. Carving. I am not the only spectator seeing through the cyclone.

Just before Jack O’Neil’s house, {the only house between 33rd and 38th that’s on the ocean side of East Cliff, (Jack O’Neil, of course, inventor of the wetsuit, http://www.oneill.com/#/women/americacanada/company/)}, a whole brand new fucking house has gone up since the last time I made this walk.

At 37th I wave to the ageless Dennis Godfrey, “our lord,” as Green calls him, working shirtless on one of his many landscaping accounts. No one better exemplifies the stoppage of time for humans living in Pleasure Point than Godfrey, who came to this spot from Florida in his late 20’s? Maybe early 30’s? Decades and decades ago and is still landscaping and surfing and looking like he’s in his late 20’s, maybe early 30’s.

I loop around, take Portola passed Coffeetopia, Paula’s breakfast place, The Corner Pocket, 30th ave and on down to 26th, passed Kong’s Market, back to East Cliff, by Moran’s Lake, (the backside of the radio station and the library), the dream shack, across the sand of The Cove this time to 15th and then back home to write about where I live.

<

A Sliver of the Moon

2009-04-23T03:45:00.000-07:00

Artwork by Andrew McLester

A Sliver of the Moon

Faithfully yours for a sliver of the moon
Candy-coloured baby sniffin' love from a spoon
Sun keeps screeching up
Stopping decadence of night
Crabby cutting handcuffs
Clamp the empty pipe

The fast are always running
Out to PCH
Enamel negro panthers
Rooms discounted rates

The old man drops his drawers
For some naked bunny butt
Shedding cash and self and sense
And he's balding
And he's gut

Purple lips of broken bottle
Part a glisten smile
Go away
The bed's too small
I want to sleep awhile

She's strange-flighty-wierd
In a practiced floating cloud
Haze under the nightgame lamps
Playing to the crowd

Snake-bite sexy
Mysterious and cold
Just a puncture and an exit
No fight
No hold

Tell me that you love me
Or tell me the truth
Fuck her on a matchbox
While I'm smoking on the roof

She's searching for that distant drum
Straining for the tune
And you be happy
That she's faithfully yours,
For a sliver of the moon.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESSICA ROBIN LOVE!

2009-04-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

WHEREVER YOU ARE!

the sketches for Spelunking by Jonah Roll and R. Bryan Love

2009-03-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

http://splunkadilla.blogspot.com/

Smoking Lounge

2009-03-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

Good Reads

2009-03-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

2009-03-08T15:04:00.001-07:00

Running With The Ice Monkey

2009-03-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

The Lanky One, The Baller and The Ice Monkey are at the beach down the street. The Eldest is kayaking in the bay. Mommy K. is at the Tattoo expo with The McGowan Girls at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The house is empty and I am writing.
Meanwhile, the house is also, shadowed with the blinds drawn while the most beautiful weather in weeks blossoms outside. I cringe in my sin.

But, I have been wanting to write about my adventures with the Ice Monkey for several months and, as per usual, catch as catch can.

The boy is called the Ice Monkey because, he is part monkey, as evidenced by the day, over a year ago now, that he spontaneously stuck a complete round off out of sheer exuberance over the applause he was getting from the performance of his repertoire of nerf hoop dunks. Also, he eats ice cubes. As in, crunches them with his teeth. Nothing grates on the nerves as much as the ice breaking, grinding sound of him chewing ice except for the way he grits his teeth in his sleep.

A character, doesn’t begin to describe this meteoric kid. He has his own brand of humor and intelligence and his own ideas of how things should be done and what he can do.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6hhBADJ4XI

I was trying to explain to him that “idiot” is not a word people appreciate and, typically, during the protracted course of my explanation I ran out of appropriate language and turned to a cruder explanation that I thought he might relate to in a more significant way. In the end, I wound up explaining to him that “the family that ‘idiots’ together ‘shidiots’ together,” inexplicably.
Later, while brushing his teeth with his brother, The Baller, that night, I heard him trying to repeat the wisdom I had imparted to him. He said, “You know, (Baller), the family that ‘idiots’ together, shits together.” Did I mention that the boy is only recently four years of age? Alternative Education Theories, by RB Love.

We earned the Ice Monkey, (or IM abbreviated), by making two days worth of frantic calls into the quagmire of state agencies who had intervened in his life back in November. Since then, you will know if he likes you right away by whether or not he introduces himself with “I’m (IM), my parents are in jail,” or not at all.

On leave from work, call it Family Leave Act, IM and I have been on a number of adventures.

Highlights

One November day we went to a meeting with Kopavi Sargent, where we were introduced to a local electrician that Captain Sargent has known. The Electrician has been sending all of his spare monies from the past decade to a pair of theoretical scientists in Oregon who believe they have the formula for leaping time and as a result, have the ability to move objects, in Star Trek beaming fashion, from one point to another.

www.unitel-qht.com/uni/

They need funding and want someone to seek it out for them in exchange for a piece of the revolution. That, presumably, was where Sargent and I have the opportunity to be involved. IM fell asleep in my arms during the meeting, in spite of the monumental possibilities.

Early December is when IM celebrated his fourth year on earth. He won every round of Musical Chairs, walked with every prize there was to win, beat a Batman piñata with a plastic bat, without a blindfold, imploring a violence as disturbing as any police brutality video until the likeness was ripped in half. And then he wore the bottom half of the piñata for pants, as if to further insult the corpse of his conquest. Like some sort of toddler version of the Columbian necktie.

We are currently without a nerf basketball hoop having gone through an average of one per month at the hands of IM’s gorilla dunks.

Songs he has taken obsession with and then tossed aside, “Dead or Alive” Jon Bon Jovi, “I Can Ride My Bike” Flobots, “The BBC” Austin Powers, “It Was A Good Day,” Ice Cube and “Balls to the Wall” by Accept.
IM sings Lupe Fiasco below!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSnJh5_4b4

Also;

February 17 at 9:08am.

AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, February 9-15, 2009

Source: www.attpbgolf.com

The AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am is a 72-hole PGA TOUR golf championship dating back to the 1930’s when Bing Crosby gathered a ‘few friends’ to raise money for charity... and have a little fun.

The Ice Monkey, Kopavi and I followed Greg Kinear, Luke Wilson and the guy from the All State commercials around Spyglass. IM drew a crowd on the practice green, putting with the handle of his umbrella. We had to sign a release form for photos taken of the boy holding his backstroke in the tent booths at Pebble.

ou posted a link

February 17 at 9:03am.

AMGEN Tour of California

Source: www.amgentourofcalif...

Thomas Peterson (Garmin-Slipstream) won stage 2, while Levi Leipheimer (Astana) grabs the yellow leader jersey. Stage 3 begins Tuesday at noon PST.

The Ice Monkey and I were there at the finish. Madness.

Lightbulbs Popping Across America Under A Tequila Fueled Trojan Horse

2008-09-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

Back at work. On the job. On the hustle. Gotta get that paper, G. Workin' in a coal mine, hup, da, dow, dow, now. Takin' it off over here, Boss. 'Take it off, there Dragline.'
Vote for my 1800 bottle of Tequila there on the left. Ten long if she wins. I'd love just to take home a bottle with my artwork on it. They go for nearly $500 if you want to buy one. I'll help you drink it:)
This computer goes away tomorrow. There's a Trojan inside of it. Which I believe insinuates a virus of the Trojan horse variety. Maybe it comes in looking like a gift, like something irresistable, an email from a lady, a lady with wanton needs, or a simple contest where if you can name the president of the United States you will win a trip to Seaworld or maybe a graphic comes up on the screen looking like a,.. a wooden horse. Anyway when you click on this "gift" I imagine all manner of micro-spider, seek and destroy legions run uncontrollably, rampant and destructively through the electronic veins of a system, cramping file movement until total siezure locks us down.
So, in case it is another fortnight until I'm able to write again, here are the items we will need to catch up on;

Spelunking, the children's book collaboration with the artist Jonah Roll, http://www.jonahsart.blogspot.com/

The Chris Green Project, or what I'm thinking might become, A Pleasure Point Walking Tour with the Legendary Jack Green, or something to that effect. (It's a documentary-type film I've been working on since May with the ardent Peter Sargent, Zack Weathers and Brooke Palmieri, (put your palms in the air-y, like you just don't care-y, we're making a film with Brooke Palmieri) of B&Z Productions. See;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbJf3v2Zvl0

and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sZJoxaGxqc&feature=related

even, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qE2MRRtRVI (Brooke's dad, keep in mind, now, "nice guy? i don't give a shit. good father? Fuck you, go home to your kids. You want ta work here you close." - excellent.)

We need to get more filming done and get our trailer up on a website of the project's own. Write me if it hasn't happened. Write when it does.

I will have a new chapter of Darci, in to Narrative Magazine for their fall fiction contest. I'm thinking of submitting a hybrid of The Elevator Races, into the scene where Tim Sparks gets into his work van to get some extra stops done on his vending route on a Saturday and gets the crap scared out of him when Darci's hands clutch the metal grating between the front seats/cab area and the candy, soda and chip cargo in the back. And she's buck-ass naked having spent the night in the van, sleeping into the mid-morning and waking up in a dark, blue, metal box enclosed in southern California sunshine.

Beyond those projects are the biggies -

Treatments for Darci, The Making of Porn Soap, Tall Tails, and maybe Game and Dominique the Freak, to the Screenwriters Guild.

Karaoke Night, novel.

Get "Thursday", the short story out.

And the game plan for State of the Nation Tour III, (SoftNTIII)with the boys, Big Larry, and Larry's Dad, at least. Ideas for SoftNTIII, include;

Letters and cds summarizing and demonstrating the material from '89 and '99 and proposing sponsorship to;

Sony - cameras

Oprah - for the story

Some sort of Alternative Fuel - for the trek pub

Maybe Converse, 76 gas stations and Playboy since we said we were sponsored by them in '89.

?Maybe B&Z Productions will be able to tag along and record everything, reality style, so we won't have to think about handling cameras?

The big idea is, of course, to work out some sort of miracle to get Larry's sons, Nick and Jackson to go.

Places we're lookin' to get to and see are;

Chuck Berry http://www.blueberryhill.com/events/

Tupelo, Mississippi - the mother land

The Maharishi University of Management, IA http://www.mum.edu/about/

The Muhammad Ali Center http://alicenter.org/Pages/default.aspx

Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, SD http://www.crazyhorse.org/

Mesa Verde, CO http://www.nps.gov/meve/planyourvisit/guided_activities.htm

The Airforce Academy, CO http://www.usafa.af.mil/index.cfm?catname=AFA%20Homepage
The United States Mint in Denver, http://www.usmint.gov/mint_tours/index.cfm?flash=yes&action=StartReservation

Memphis, TN http://sunstudio.com/index.aspx?bhcp=1

http://www.bealestreet.com/home.html

Graceland http://www.elvis.com/graceland/tours/elvis_overview.asp

The Grand Canyon http://grandcanyonskywalk.com/

The Utah planets of, Bryce, http://www.bryce.canyon.national-park.com/Zion, http://www.nps.gov/zion Arches http://www.nps.gov/arch/ and The Narrows http://www.nps.gov/archive/zion/ZionNarrows.htm

The northern reaches of Montana to Glacierhttp://www.nps.gov/glac and then down through Yellowstone http://www.nps.gov/yell/ heading down to Utah and then home.

Certainly not in that order and with full consideration to deviations, eliminations and aggressive demonstrations.

But, I do want to have tours and such worked out ahead of time. I even have visions of getting press releases and packages to all the stops on our itinerary so they'll know we're comin' and who knows what that'll develop into?

Meanwhile, I'm hustlin' payroll and ATMs.

RB Love

Fun Week

2008-08-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

I used to have a web page called TheLoveColumn.com, 2000 - 2001, I'd say. Wrote a number of columns and then stopped paying the host site, did not renew the url and as far as I know it's all vanished into the ether.
So, TheLoveColumn.com part deux is long overdue. Especially since there is blogger and facebook and coolpoints and myspace and theblogonmyfacebook etc. There's been no excuse.
So, I'm back and I'm bad, iron clad, always mad, fly brother takin' off from a heli-pad, to paraphrase the once respected Ice-T, (who has since lost his mind on youtube embarrassing himself calling out Souljah Boy...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCE1Ezgvpzk Triflin').
Just to run it down for you who've just joined TheLoveColumn or those who found their way back, my name is RB Love, I write an interactive column once a week, fire it off into space and see what comes back.
Since I just started this one tonight, I'm going to work on some promotional and aestheic angles to this monument mainly and keep the narrative short and sweet. Mostly because some of it's embarrassing and some of it hurts, here's the haiku version of this last week for RB Love-san;

after fights with wife
took a beating at the bar
excerpt rejected

But, hey, everything's peaches and cream now. Will write more next week.