I really, really wanted to like Minister Faust’s new book, From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, but I had to give up about a third of the way through. It’s too bad – Faust is one of the most dazzling writers I know of, and his first novel, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, is the very height of uber-cool geek lit. His writing includes constant and repeated references to every element of American counterculture in the last thirty years: role-playing games, comic books, science-fiction television, old school hip-hop, blaxploitation movies, and dozens upon dozens of others. When I heard his new novel was about a psychotherapist taking on a group of costumed superheroes, I thought it was going to be right in my wheelhouse.
The book was witty as hell, and fun to read, but the schtick of deconstructing people who wear spandex and can juggle Buicks is a tired one. Even though superheroics are doing well at the multiplex, most fans know the films on the silver screen are telling stories that are at least a generation old; for the past ten years or so, superheroes have been going through a crisis of postmodernism. Writers like Kurt Busiek and Warren Ellis have created stories looking back at the superhero genre, trying to reframe and redefine the past. Peter David was bringing the Hulk and the X-Men into the shrink’s office back in the early 1990s. What Faust is doing with From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain has already been done and will be instantly familiar to anyone who travels in the geek culture.
All that said, it still makes for a good read: Faust does a great job with the aw-shucks drawl of Omnipotent Man, the brooding and darkly fascist Flying Squirrel, the hip-hop jokester Brotherfly, and the bubblegum-snapping Power Grrrl, more interested in her album sales than saving the world. It’s all great fun. However, I was just looking for something more.
I’m still waiting on the list at the library for the DVD set of first season of HBO’s The Wire, acclaimed far and wide as the greatest television show ever. I caught the first two episodes in syndication on BET, but annoyed at how much they had to edit out the naughty language, I knew I had to bite the bullet and wait for the real thing. While I’m waiting, I read the very hefty Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, producer of The Wire as well as the TV show Homicide: Life on the Street. Simon, as a reporter, spent the whole of 1988 as a fly on the wall in a handful of inner-city Baltimore homicide units. The result is one of the best looks inside a police department I’ve ever come across.
And I’m glad I ran across it. Homicide falls solidly into what has become a very fashionable genre: narrative non-fiction, books recounting fact but have the feel and the dialogue of a novel. Devil in the White
City, Seabiscuit, and Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers are other examples, all of them solid bestsellers. I wouldn’t call this a true crime book, as it’s short on lurid CSI-ish details and is written from the point of view of the detective as a regular guy trying to do a difficult job under extraordinary circumstances. I instantly knew how influential the book is because I can tell that every cop show on television in the past twenty years has cribbed furiously from it. Of course, these cops were real, so they’d eat Sipowicz for lunch.
Simon doesn’t just look at the cases the detectives deal with. Often, piecing together the evidence and nabbing the bad guy isn’t enough, as one of the detectives goes on a legendary multi-week murder-solving spree but has rotten luck at trial, losing his cases in court. Simon also gives us a look at the interrogation room, where detectives have to somehow finesse people into talking to them when every reasonable sense screams that there should be a lawyer present – it’s a strange tightrope walk that these people have to do every time they get in the box. Detective work, even though it’s glamorized in mystery novels and television shows, is one of those jobs that demand the impossible on a daily basis and it takes a certain personality to do it effectively. Simon takes us into that familiar yet foreign world and gives us a look behind the fiction.
Book reviews returning soon, I promise. But first, a rough transcript of a conversation over dinner last night.
Wife: Do you remember back in elementary school when you’d decorate a shoebox, cut a slot into it, and other classmates would come around and drop valentine cards into it?
Me: Oh yeah! Back then I was so shy and had such low self-esteem, I totally feared Valentine’s Day. I went to school thinking that no one would give me any valentines, so the entire shoebox thing was just going to be a waste of time. And when I actually did get valentines, I thought people were just giving them to me out of some sort of pity or obligation, not that they actually liked me or anything. So the more valentines I got, the more guilty I felt.
Wife: (pause.) You are not telling that story to our children.
for Thursday night’s and Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t know if I’d call it the best show on television, but it’s one of the few shows that’s getting stronger and stronger by the week. ABC’s not paying Shonda Rimes, the show’s creator, enough. It’s got me rushing to the TiVo for what most people refer to as a chick show.
In fact, it’s a show that’s on the upward swing while many other shows I watch are otherwise stagnant or just holding serve – Lost continues to shove our faces in the fact that it will never answer any of our questions, ever. Studio 60 is falling apart and is heading for cancellation. Heroes is great, but I’m getting no real sense of any urgency in its pacing – the show has stayed at a consistent level since day one. (Apparently New York is going to blow up. I know this because multiple characters have mentioned it. I don’t get the sense that it’s gonna actually happen, though and if it does happen, there will be little build up; it’ll just start off as a regular episode, then boom.)
I don’t want to slag other shows while praising Grey’s , because I love all those other shows, too. It’s just that Grey’s is doing everything right, even with a completely unlikeable lead character. The pacing is tight, the characters are intertwined, interesting, and romantically involved, the plot goes forward and yet surprises you every week, it can be funny and maudlin in the same episode – it’s all I want in network episodic television. Keep it up, Grey’s.
Oh: and Kate Walsh is a undiscovered comedic genius. It’s a crime that an actress this good hasn’t been allowed to shine before now. Addison calling Sloane a “man-whore” on the elevator last night – and the expression on her face when she did it – was the highlight of my television week.
The class on globalization went stunningly. It was an interesting topic presented well - our prof did an excellent job of splitting the information into lecture, group work, handouts, and multimedia, so things never got boring. Whenever I go to a class, I tend to sit in front and to the teacher’s left – this is because I am deaf in my left ear and want to be in a good place to hear everything. Glad I did, because the prof has a thin voice that didn’t carry well.
We got a crash course on globalization, culminating in a tape of Thomas Friedman, the columnist from the New York Times (the subject line above refers to the term that the political blogger Atrios uses for Friedman.) I myself was not to fond of Friedman, who is a Times columnist has been far, far too soft regarding President Bush’s adventures in the Middle East, but after watching the man speak I do admit he knows his globalization. I may have to break down and read his latest book. Just don’t tell anybody.
This week has been a brief respite until I journey to Emporia again this weekend for yet another class. Yes, I’m tired.
Going to class, of course, for my 806 Global Information Infrastructure class that was supposed to happen last month, however an ice storm happened to get in the way. But there’s some football game that you may have heard of that going on as well, and barring some further weather disaster, I’ll be rooted to my easy chair with a bowl of chili Sunday evening watching it.
Not that I’m really looking forward to it this year – as a football fan, there’s not a lot of compelling stories to grab onto. Chicago has an excellent defense that’s fun to watch, but their quarterback, who is about as consistent as Pauly Shore on a triple espresso, would be a third-stringer on any other team. The Colts have Payton Manning, who has fantastically gaudy stats but has about as much charisma as wet cardboard; you all know this because he’s the only NFL player who’s allowed to be in commercials any more. And after making about fifty of them this season, it’s obvious that he hasn’t gotten any better at it. His main goal in life – aside from bad commercials – is to make life miserable for Kansas City fans like me, so he’ll probably score three touchdowns in the first quarter to put it out of reach and make the rest of the game thoroughly unwatchable.
The teams haven’t played for two weeks, which means play will be sloppy well into the second half. The commercials will suck, as no one wants to be creative anymore – having K-Fed hawk your product is what passes for creativity this year – and since the networks have been gun shy since Janet Jackson flashed her nipple ring at millions of viewers, halftime entertainment will be the pinnacle of visionary performance circa 1983.
Other than all that, I’ll be sure to enjoy the game.
