Bookpusher

I finished Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, and it is very fine. Like Carter Beats the Devil and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, books that it emulates, Peril takes creators of American myths and turns them into myths themselves. Two of the most popular authors of pulp fiction in the 1930’s put aside their professional rivalry and team up to solve the murder of a collegaue that quickly blossoms into an adventure that resembles the stories that they write. It’s a bit slow to develop because author Paul Malmont has an obvious love for the time period and his descriptions and conversations sometimes get in the way of the action, but it’s well worth it. Especially the minor characters who pop in and out of the story and who you’re meant to recognize, especially a cowboy who recites poetry and a hard-nosed, tough-talking Brooklyn newsboy. Great fun.

Monday night is quickly becoming my favorite night of television with the back-to-back NBC lineup of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “Heroes”. “Studio 60″ remained strong with its second episode and the premiere of “Heroes” completely knocked it out of the park. The show about normal people who develop extraordinary powers pushed all my gee-whiz buttons without ever taking itself too seriously or getting too cheesy; for long suffering comic-book fans like me, I understand there’s a fine line between Unbreakable and “The Misfits of Science.” It’s a show that’s fantastic as well as believable, a perfect mixture, and for that reason it’ll probably get cancelled and replaced by a Pauly Shore vehicle around mid-season.

Last night’s Project: Runway was as riveting as ever. Next week’s the finale, and I still think the show is Laura’s to lose even though I’m rooting for Michael to somehow pull off a comeback win – I picked her to go all the way after the first episode and I’ll stick with it. Any person who uses the phrase “full-tilt-boogie” in conversation without irony I just have to root for.

To celebrate, I’ll be reading some of the books banned from the Blue Valley School District here in Johnson County, Kansas. I’m making my choices from this list of books that the parents objected to, which thay have rated for sex, violence, and other ‘adult’ content.

Check out this Google page that has links to famous banned books, as well as the page from the American Library Association.

This weekend’s a school weekend, so I’ll soon be toiling in Emporia’s vast library mines. My paper’s written, the group presentation is ready to go, and I’ve even read all most some of my reading assignments.

The book I’m bringing with me to read during my off-class hours is “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” by Paul Malmont. I’ve had my eye on it for a while - not only because the book has such an amazing title like “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril,” but also because of the cover: a pretty Betty Grable-esque redhead pressed against the body of a iron-jawed man, his top lip curled against his teeth in determination, firing bullets from a .45 to an unseen menace. I don’t care who the author is, you just can’t possibly beat that. Gore Vidal probably would have sold more books if his books had covers like that. The back cover has a positive blurb from Glen David Gold who wrote the amazing Carter Beats the Devil, a book about the golden age of stage magicians.

I’m about midway thorugh ”Peril” and I’m enjoying every word. It’s a pulp adventure that features the creator of the Shadow, Walter Gibson, and the creator of Doc Savage, Lester Dent. Other characters include H.P. Lovecraft, Chester Himes, and a young writer on the make by the name of Ron Hubbard. It’s not on the level of Carter, but it’s fabulous stuff and a hell of a lot of fun. Pulp-tastic!

I had heard decent things about the new CBS drama, Smith, about a family man who leads a double life as a high-stakes thief. I caught the premiere last night with low expectations but I was curious to see if it would deliver the goods. It certainly has a great cast to back it up: Ray Liotta as the leader of the crew, Amy Smart as a con artist and master of disguises, Simon Baker and Jonny Lee Miller as triggermen with funny accents, and the always-fabulous Virginia Madsen as Smith’s wife who isn’t supposed to know about her husband’s double life, but really does know, without him knowing that she knows.  

The show is beautifully shot and uses the familiar flashback sequence to tell the story -we open on a masterfully prepared robbery of an art gallery that soon begins to fall apart, and at the climax of the heist we flash back to how the team was assembled and the backstory behind the whole thing. (The art gallery is the library from “Seven,” incidentally, in the scene where Morgan Freeman met the security guards who were playing poker.)

The problem was that there were absolutely no characters – besides Madsen – who are even remotely likeable. This is driven home with a scene where Madsen’s character is subtly sexually harassed by her dentist boss for no other reason but to make us feel even more sympathy for her. The Amy Smart character is a cold manipulator who has a history with Jonny Lee Miller; he holds her responsible for his recent stint in prison, but then turns around and joins the mile-high club with her on the plane ride back from the heist. We first meet Simon Baker while he’s cheerfully assassinating two people on a secluded Hawaii beach. This is a group of Really Bad People who have few, if any, redeeming qualities.

Also, anybody with common sense will notice laughable holes in the plot. There’s actually a scene where Smith and the triggermen repeatedly pace through the museum, talking aloud about plans for the heist, as if a museum with million-dollar peices of art wouldn’t have security guards to overhear them or security cameras to tape them.

Oh, and Ray Liotta has not aged well. No wonder he wears that white mask in the previews – viewers are not going to want to watch his face.

(cue Colbert balloon drop.)

If you’ll kindly recall this post I made a few months ago, please note that I correctly called the upset winner of Rock Star: Supernova. My comments on the rest of the field were fairly spot-on, too. So suck it, haters!

(That said, Toby should have won. Evs, mate.)

(And why does my talent for picking winners only extend to crappy reality television shows, and not things like college basketball office pools or lottery numbers?)

I love it when it’s been so long since I placed a book on hold that I forget about it and then all of a sudden it pops up on my hold shelf, like a gleaming, sparkling birthday present, just for me.

I discovered George Pelecanos about a year ago when I noticed that Michael Connelly, one of my favorite authors, gave him a positive blurb on one of his books. My respect for Pelecanos went up another notch when I found out that he’s one of the writers of HBO’s fabulous The Wire. He is a mystery writer, but like most excellent mystery writers, his novels go beyond the usual whodunnits that you can knock out during a short airplane flight or a sleepy afternoon.

His novels are set in and around urban Washington D.C., featuring rough but noble characters brought up on the streets, who know the lure of the culture of drugs and violence but know that resisting them is sometimes the most courageous thing a person can do. They are wounded characters who seek to redeem themselves, often with a cause tied in to the novel. Pelecanos is also the most gifted writer I’ve ever read when it comes to the character’s voices - his characters live and breathe and hurt on the page, and his dialogue is so seductively real you feel like you’re in the middle of a shaky-camera documentary rather than a novel.

The Night Gardner follows three characters who were on the scene during a series of murders in the 1980s. Two patrolmen and a detective never solved the case, but the murders suddenly stopped and the three drifted apart. In the present day a murder occurs that has very similar markings and the three are pulled back into orbit again. The detective is now an old man, retired, who does little but sit at home, listen to the police scanner, and dream of somehow fulfilling his promise he made to the parents of the murder victims twenty-five years ago. One of the patrolmen quit the force under shady circumstances and is now an alcoholic who drives a limo but still thinks of what kind of officer he was and what could have been. The other patrolman is now a straight-arrow detective with a son who shares similarities to the murder victims. These three personalities provide the center for a novel where these and other characters collide and mesh and interact in ways that would make other novelists hang their heads in awe and shame.

It was one of those books where you close the cover and put it back on the shelf, but the characters still exist in your head, living with you for a little bit.

So yeah, I guess you could say that I liked it.

Marvel babies.

Shoot me now.

Aaron Barnhart, television critic for the Kansas City Star, is a guy who I like and respect. He writes an excellent blog, too. He had a contest where randomly-chosen winners got to attend a screening of the best new fall television programs at the Screenland Theater on Wednesday night. I was lucky enough to win a ticket, so I took a friend, watched some television with a couple hundred of my closest friends, and had a fabulous time. Here are some of the shows we watched:

Runaway: a drama starring Donnie Whalberg and the Woman With Short Hair Who Played Keifer Sutherland’s Wife on the First Season of 24. He’s prosecuted for a crime he presumably didn’t commit and takes his wife and kids on the run with him while being chased by Shadowy Forces – presumably, whoever really did the crime. The clip we saw left me unimpressed, but might be worth a look.

30 Rock: the comedy that Tina Fey left Saturday Night Live to create. This show gives SNL the Larry Sanders treatment, voyeuristically peeking behind the scenes of a late-night comedy skit show. This is the first of two shows NBC has greenlit this season that use this formula – you know SNL’s on a bad run when the network thinks things are funnier behind the set than in front of it. This does have Tina Fey as the head writer of the fictional show-within-the-show and Alec Baldwin as the wacky and bombastic boss. Baldwin single-handedly carries the show on his back.

Heroes: if you’ve been within spitting distance of an NBC show the last month or two you’ve probably seen commercials for this hour-long drama about eight people whose lives are changed when they inexplicably get superpowers. As a long-time comic book fanboy, I really wanted this show to work as soon as I learned about it. I’m now glad to report that it lives up to my very high expectations - it’s well-written and well-acted across the board, but the storyline does seem a little complex and might not capture the attention of a mainstream audience. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I predict that it’ll dance on the edge of cancellation for most of the season. The characters are all believable and the producers have followed the Lost formula of having no real stars but a few hey-it’s-that-guys you may recognize: Ali Larter, Greg Grunberg, and Adrian Pasdar. This one’s worth getting behind, gang.

The Knights of Prosperity: the writers behind Ed reunite for this quirky comedy starring Donal Logue as a loser who, along with a motley collection of loser friends, decide to rob Mick Jagger’s apartment after seeing it in an MTV Cribs-style show. In an inspired bit of casting, Mick Jagger plays himself. It’s actually pretty funny and certainly not without charm: seek this one out.

Shark: we’ve all seen the promos with James Woods spitting out that snappy “Justice? That’s God’s problem!” line. It’s what you would expect, as the show is essentially House with lawyers instead of doctors. Woods is a magician in the courtroom surrounded by a small group of acolytes who are always a step or two behind. But hey, there’s always room for another lawyer drama in your life, right? And nothing can beat James Woods spending the hour gleefully chewing scenery. Everybody wins.

Daybreak: Taye Diggs plays a cop who’s Framed for a Crime He Didn’t Commit. Nothing you haven’t seen before, right? But the twist here is that he wakes up the next day and finds himself repeating the day over again, sort of like NYPD Blue meets Groundhog Day. It kept my interest, and ABC is confident enough in it to fill the slot vacated by Lost when it goes on hiatus, so we may be forced to watch it while pining for Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest of the gang. Incidentally, Jayne from Firefly plays an extremely believable jerkhole cop. I kept waiting for him to growl “I’ll be in my bunk” during the episode.

Jericho: Skeet Ulrich is trapped in a small Kansas town when a nuclear bomb goes off nearby. I’ll go ahead and stop here before I make a joke that gets me in trouble. Hideous show; don’t even bother.

The best show of the night, however, was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the other behind-the-scenes-of-an-SNL-show created by Aaron Sorkin, mushroom imbiber and creator of SportsNight and The West Wing. This one sings, people. Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford are comedy writers who come back to run a show that was once cutting-edge but now an empty shell of itself (sound familiar?) while dealing with their own personal demons, pressure from the network, and over-eager cast members. I was never a big follower of Friends, as Matthew Perry’s Chandler just seemed like so much empty schtick, but here he shows a gift for comedy and really shines as the center of the large ensemble. Other notables are Steven Weber as the asshole network chair, Ed Asner as the distant but affable boss of the media conglomerate that owns the network, and D.L. Hughley as a rising star on the show.

One small problem. Amanda Peet plays the new network president who takes a chance on hiring the two writers. She’s supposed to be the dream boss, a buffer between the creative people who work on the show and the cynical higher-ups in management, the calm eye of the hurricane in the crazy show business world that swirls around her. (And, of course, a sure future romantic subplot for Matthew Perry.) But here’s the thing: she comes across as ordinary. She’s mediocre in a role that calls for her to be transcendent. It’s really my only complaint and admittedly it was the first episode, so she may well prove me wrong. I hope she does. Other than that? A sure thing – as sure as you’re going to get in the television industry, anyway. Set your TiVos now.

Special thanks to Aaron for giving me a grand time out. I’ll be sure to catch it again next year.

Granted, I don’t normally pick up books that sound like the title of a bad Russ Meyer movie, but of late I’ve been buried under a small mountain of academic articles for school, and dammit, I needed to give my brain a break.

This is a vampire detective novel, which apparently are all the rage these days. With a title like this, I was expecting something silly, bizarre, completely off-the-wall, and perhaps something with a naughty part or two as well. (Again, just to give my mind a break. Not for any other reason. Nope. Not at all.)

What I got was not silly or absurd at all. Well, yeah, the story does deal with a Latino vampire who falls for a forest dryad while investigating a Department of Energy site where all the female employees suddenly get nymphomania and might possibly have to do with a government conspiracy and the remnants of the UFO crash at Roswell, but oddly enough, the book treats all this seriously. And it works.

The Nymphos of Rocky Flats is Acevedo’s first novel. The book’s protagonist, Felix Gomez, was bitten while serving in Iraq and now uses his vampiric powers on a strictly freelance basis. He won’t drink human blood, however, because of the innocents he killed in the war. He gets pulled into Rocky Flats by an old military contact, and while at the Colorado base, Gomez unravels a government conspiracy. Even though the vampire story is all but a tired cliche by now, Acevedo breathes some new life into it (pun not intended. Really!) and writes this story not with a smirk and postmodern yeah-yeah-we’ve-all-read-this-before wink to the reader, but as an entertaining, witty thriller. The ending falls a bit flat, but since Acevedo is making Felix Gomez into an ongoing series, what little mess he leaves can be easily cleaned up in the next book. Two fangs up!

Either there’s one guy out there who’s awfully persistent or there’s more of these people out there than I thought. Crazy world.

Carry on.