Reading Between The Lines

I’m sitting in a bookstore and this novel captures my attention, so I pick it up.  I don’t know books very well, because I don’t read that often.  This book could be like a hundred or a thousand others I’ve seen in my lifetime, but something about this one is different.  So, I open it and I begin to read. 

Part of me doesn’t want to actually sit here and read it because I have so many other things to do.  And that’s a lie I tell myself because I just don’t read that often.  Reading takes more work than I’m used to doing.   I liked reading, when I was younger, but I never read for me.  I read because it was required.   Beyond that, I’ve always been a visual person, so I would rather watch the film and not have to think.   I would rather cover the material in two hours of time instead of days or weeks.  I guess I’m just lazy.

But I begin to read this one.   It’s harder to understand than the others.  The words aren’t monosyllabic and cutesy.  They require me to look up a couple of definitions in order to make sense of what I have just read.  Honestly, this book is slowly starting to madden me, because I have to work at it.  I could have watched a movie or a video and had been done.  Hell, I could have gone to Wikipedia and just looked up the thing and got a synopsis, but here I am still reading.  Damn this book.   It frustrates me to no end.  It actually requires me to think, to feel, to listen.  And I don’t mean just the story, I mean the entire book.

I feel the texture; the way the spine dips in and out, the lip of the cover as it hangs there over the material, the horizontal stack of pages between the front and the back.  It brushes against my skin and feels like it was made to be touched by hands in need of something stimulating.  It’s not a glossy paperback with a flashy well drawn character on the cover.  It’s not even bare or nondescript with simple titles.  It's somewhat classical, in nature, and the cover feels good against my fingertips.  I like it.   I like holding it.   I like running my finger along the cover, tracing the raised letters in the title.  I like the grooves and the curvature of the pages as I feel the exposed side of the book, running my fingers up and down the sides.

So often we lose the idea that physical books are important and we turn to technology to make it easier to read and learn.  But a tablet or eReader can't replace physical books and we are slowly losing sight of them in our lifetime.  You have to pick up a book and hold it.  You have to support it with your hands.  You have to manually turn the pages.  You have to provide yourself with the right light to see it.   Reading a book isn’t just about moving your eyes across a page.  You have to physically and emotionally invest yourself in reading it. You have to work at it and it demands that aspect of you without even muttering a word on its own.

And it makes a distinctive sound, too.  Have you ever thought about that?  That dulcet thump you hear when you tap the cover, the depth that the book has from the sound reverberating back to your ears.  You know that the deeper the tone must mean it carries more weight and is full of knowledge and wonder.   The sound that emanates from it as you gently grasp the page, turning it, anticipating what is going to happen next may go unnoticed by some, but it echoes out and signals something important to you.  That sound has such a pleasing timbre, yet it goes unnoticed anymore because we just don't get to hear it enough in our day.  We're used to the clacking of keys and even the slick acetone texture from sliding our fingers on a magazine page.  Those are noises, disruptions in an otherwise quiet mind.  The turning of this book's pages is like a symphony of paper, rich and weighted.

And the story.  The story is like nothing else.  I’ve only scratched the surface with a couple of pages and here I am engrossed to the hilt.  Normally, I would just skip to the end and see how it all turns out because I’m always in a hurry.  I don’t have time to sit and invest myself in this.  But this story keeps throwing twists at me.   And the more the story throws roadblocks between the characters, the more irate I become with it because it’s just a book, right?  It’s something that should be so easy to get through.   In fact, a couple of paragraphs irk me so much that I want to put it back on the shelf and say, “No, I will not do this to myself.  I have better things to do with my time.”   I have even been to the point where I’ve actually closed the book, attempted to put it back on the shelf, and walked away, only to just huff and open it again, rereading a couple of paragraphs to see if I missed something important; some clue to help make me understand.  And just like that it draws me back in and hours go by like seconds.

Then I realize that I do have to move along and I do have to put the book down for awhile.  I have other things going on that need my attention, right now.   And I have every intention of coming back to it and hope that it will still be there, but I realize that this is a rare thing to find and someone else has to be looking for it, too.  It's probably someone more suited for the task, someone with a better mind to understand it.  The fact that I'm monopolizing it is wrong and I'm probably keeping it from being somewhere better off than with someone like me, who doesn't usually read.  But I worry about it.  Odd thing to worry about, because it's in a bookstore and not with you.  But, I do.  It’s liable to be gone as soon as I walk away from the door.   Gone forever.  Days can go by, but I think about it all the same.  Wondering if perhaps it's still there.  Wondering if it wants me to come back and read some more.

Every so often, I can check in on the book and try to fight the taskmasters in my life for a chance to read a few pages.  I enjoy my time and it gives me such pleasure. To have the chance to be around such a fascinating thing is always a good thing.   Someday, I may have all the time in the world to devote to reading, but right now, I can’t.

But, I’m also afraid of that prospect.  I’m afraid of how it will end.  In fact, I’m afraid of actually reaching the end.  What then?  I can always go back and read the story, again, but it will never be like the first time.  And, I will have already known how it will end, because I’ve read it.   I run the risk of ruining it for someone who may appreciate it more because, until now, I've never cared about reading.  I invested so much time in the story, in holding the book up, in listening to and feeling the pages, and I don’t want it to end.  

In fact, now I’m so pissed at myself because I should never have picked it up in the first place.  As long as the book exists, and I know some of  the story, it will always be perfect in my mind, right?  The story won't end.  And, I can’t ruin it by not taking proper care of it, so I should just leave it where it is.  I mean, after all, the damn thing is too wordy and I just don’t have the patience for it.   I worked overtime at figuring out the plot and that was excruciating, because it just wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.  It just kept holding back and allowing me to do all this work just to understand a fraction of it.   

I’m serious.  Remember, I don’t read.  I’ve done the bare minimum in terms of work when it comes to reading.  Whatever this book is trying to tell me is just the most infuriating and exasperating thing I’ve ever read.  I find myself lying in bed, debating over something I read earlier and literally grinding my teeth at how I had to work out a passage in my head, because it was so hard to read.

The gall of this book for making me work so hard to enjoy something so refreshing and unique.  How dare it make me feel for a story like that?  What gave it the right to draw me in, have me read word after word, turn page after page, and just begin to even put in a tenth of the amount of work I’m used to just to get through a few chapters? 

Oh, yeah, that’s right.  When it’s good, it’s supposed to do that.   That means it’s not only worthy of my time, but that I should feel all those things.  A book should do that to your mind and your soul. 

I should keep reading.

The Future of M.A.M.S.

While I’m not convinced that my longevity as a blogger is a given, I do understand that if I don’t put out content, people won’t read. Even if it’s crap, it’s out there and someone will eventually stumble over it like a tricycle in the yard. However, the demands of my real job are going to cut into my ability to keep up with this. Why? Because, I spend more time on the road and have less time in the evening to write. I have to balance this with other stuff like shirt designs and family. So, it’s safe to say that I may not make my long standing quota of three posts a week. Believe me, if I could do this for a living, full time, I would.

In fact that segues right into my point, the future. Call it “Writing as a white space.” For those of you not familiar with the term, it means that exploring a part of the business that I have not yet capitalized on, yet. I started out blogging. I moved onto shirt design. I moved into social media. I blogged more about how all of those concepts work together. I made money on the shirt side, but not the other stuff. Granted, some of the shirt money might have come from those other input channels but most of my sales are because someone went searching blindly on a shirt site or search engine and landed on my designs and clicked “ADD TO CART”.

So, why not use the shirt business to sell some books? Now, I’m talking about selling other people’s books. I’m talking about writing my own. It’s something I’ve been kicking around for awhile now and I better jump on it soon. Why?

Self publishing is right up my alley because I’m a cheap ass, lazy entrepreneur. As a kid, I had this dream of being a writer. When I was 12, I wrote my first story. When I was thirteen, I wrote my second one. When I was fourteen, I wrote my third one. When I was fifteen, I quit writing.

Why?

In those three years, I wrote the stories but did nothing else with them. I had delusions of actually being a paid writer and didn’t think about getting a publisher or what it costs to print and sell a book or the actual need for my work in the market. When I realized that, it was either never going to happen or take a while to happen, I switched game plans. In either case, it was not profitable. But, I held onto the works just in case. Hell, those stories are probably sitting on a 5 ¼ “ floppy disk somewhere in my parents’ house.

20 years ago, I could never conceive of actually becoming a published author, but, in today’s world, a writer can simply write, upload and sell their work for Kindles and Nooks and bypass publishers all together. Some have actually sold a million copies of their books, strictly through ebook sales. So, I am going to try an experiment. I am going to write a book on exactly what I’ve done in the last few years from the business side. I will then attempt to sell it on Amazon or through my site (Those details are sketchy). If I can make a case to myself that it is worth me putting forth the time to write something with the expectation of being paid for it, then I will revisit the idea of creative fiction. Believe me, I still have stories floating around in my head that my nearest and dearest friend/editor has told me to get written.

The caveat is that I have to see a significant interest in this venture before I take the time to attempt a 300 page novel. I just don’t have that kind of free time. Not to mention, I have a few friends with degrees in English and teaching that would probably want to see me DIAF if I actually wrote something and tried to sell it for profit.

The reason I am trying to fast track this experiment is that the new fad smell of self publishing and Kindles are probably going to wear off, soon. Stephen King had once said (paraphrased) that “Ebooks would account for probably 50% of all book sales by 2013. Maybe 2012.” However, he also says that people get tired of the new toys.

By that note, I have an ever shrinking window of opportunity to establish myself before the fad of ebooks or self publishing becomes the MySpace or worse, Friendster of writing avenues.

I still plan to blog as much as possible because I have a great source of material, my kid. Still, the point of MAMS was to rant and rave over the decline of entertainment via the distorted view of a pop culture observer. Those posts take a lot more time to prepare and vet and I have neither the time nor the ambition to do actual research.

I do hope those 4.5 readers I still may have will keep on reading but don’t be surprised if you wake up on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday and don’t see anything new… or worth reading for that matter.

Print Is Dead

PRINT IS DEAD

That’s what Egon Spengler said to receptionist Janine Melnitz in Ghostbusters. This was 1984. It was almost a decade away from the age of the Internet. Yet, what Egon says is probably true. Print is dead.

It’s a bit sad, if you ask me. On one hand, I grew up despising the chore of reading. I read as little as possible. Whenever we would have to go to the library in grade school and check out a book, I would always check out a book about drawing or a Peanuts comic strip collection or I would continually check out the same juvenile books that involved anthropomorphic fruit or vegetables. I never read them. I was just going through the motions. Eventually, I was called on the carpet by the librarian, who asked why I continually checked out the same book. ‘What an invasion of privacy,’ I thought. From then on, I would pick random books to check out and then leave them in my book bag to be returned later. By junior high, I was dead set against reading and even made up a few book reports on what I thought the book should have been like. By high school, I had forgone reading unless I had to.

Sorry, but I was always a more visually inclined person. It’s kind of contradicting to my nature of wanting to be a writer, or even an actor, when I grew up. There’s plenty of reading to be done by actors and there is even more so to be done by writers, I imagine.

I ended up growing out of that aversion to reading and have done more reading in my 30s than I probably did during my school years. Still, I have to be in the mood to read. Meanwhile, my wife clips along through books, mostly paranormal romantic fiction, at a quickened pace.

The one thing I do remember fondly, as a child, was that there was always a morning paper in our house. Actually, there were at least two; The Daily Courier and The Herald Standard. My parents would sit at breakfast and read the paper every day. Hell, for seven years, I delivered The Daily Courier. When I started my first real job out of college, I read the paper, too. Granted, it was the USA Today that was left outside the doors of the guests at the hotel, where I worked. Mostly, I read the Life section and a few of the front page stories, ending my morning bagel on the Crossword Puzzle, which I always did in pen.

However, nowadays, I don’t read the paper. I don’t even get a paper at my house. Yet, I realized that every morning I perform the same ritual as my parents did all those years ago. I sit, with my breakfast and read. I drink my coffee while I scan through stories and other news items. It just so happens that those bits of information are just that, bits, or perhaps bytes would be a more relevant term. I read blogs and my emails and news stories while I wait for everything else to load on my computer. I dig through shirt designs on other sites and check out my Facebook news feed. I look at analytics for my sites and jot down a few ideas for stuff to work on when I get home. I probably read the equivalent amount of words online that most people would read in a newspaper.

Print IS Dead. It’s all electronic and accessible through the Internet in today’s reality. Newspapers are going belly up or hiding their articles behind pay walls. Everyone is downloading eBooks for their Nooks and Kindles and Tablet PCS. The only benefit to this is that the need to cut down trees to make paper will lessen. The downside to that is that printers and binders and other jobs associated with the construction of printed material will shrink from existence.

The demise of Print is still sad to me, though. For someone who is visually stimulated, I also like to have something tangible in my hands. A book has a texture that adds to its value. When you pick up a book, the weight felt in your hands is history. The sound of a page sliding across one and flipping over to the other side of the book adds resonance to the material. The feeling of the pages, that heavy weighted stock, tingles in your hands. There is nothing more immersive than reading a book that is three dimensional and in your hands. Scrolling a mouse or sliding your finger across a screen will never give you the same experience that holding a book will. In the future we may lose the need to use our limbs, instead relying on audio or mind

Response to Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years

I often find myself catching up to pop culture because real life just gets in the way. But that’s the thing about Pop Culture, it waits for you. Sometimes it waits a long while, keeping dinner warm. Only something worthy of being an icon of Pop Cult could endure the time it takes for me to get around to it and it lasts for years. There is no expiration date for a truly great piece of PC history. So, it wasn’t until this past week that I finally got around to reading EW’s article on the 100 greatest characters in the last 20 years. For once, I’ve lost my appetite for a dinner that should be piping hot even after two decades.

Now, I am usually pretty quick to go after EW online for it’s shameful lists. I may not even be a mediocre writer, but the people they get to write up their top whatever of the whatever lists needs a serious slap in the face from a tuna. Plucking through the written pages of the actual magazine usually derives more satisfaction because this is you’re A-Team working on the articles. Yet, the author gives us such tripe that I expected to it be written for my blog. That’s how bad I regard my skills.

First of all, why 20 years? Could it possibly be a running theme with EW as of late? They’ve been waxing nostalgic about “20 years ago, this week” in the mag, bringing me back to my Sophomore year of high school. The problem is that some of the more iconic characters they are choosing share their roots with pre 1990 Pop Culture. In fact their number one pick, who I don’t necessarily disagree with, got their start in 1987. So let’s dissect the biggest offenders an then, as usual, I will offer my own truncated list of 20 in 20.

Homer Simpson from The Simpsons
There is no denying that Homer Simpson is one of the greatest. But to say that he’s the greatest of the last twenty years makes me say wonder if EW is really so smart, s-m-r-t. Homer got his start as a crudely drawn loud mouth father, featured in animated shorts on the Tracey Ullman show in 1987. It wasn’t until December of 1989 that The Simpsons became a full fledged show on its own. Even then, the draw to The Simpsons wasn’t the bumbling everyman but his sarcastic, rotten son named Bart. Look back at the first part of the 90s and you’ll be pressed to find Homer on every other t-shirt. Bart was the real iconic character of the early years. Homer was dumb and slovenly but It wasn’t until the second and third seasons when Dan Castellaneta dropped Homer’s voice from one that sounded like Coach Buttermaker to one that gave him greater comedic freedoms that Homer finally took his place as the face of the show. So, I guess it’s debatable as to when Homer finally was born into the Pop Culture lexicon.

Harry Potter from the Harry Potter series
I have no arguments with Harry Potter being in the top 10. I have some concerns about him being number 2.  Books, movies, video games, amusement parks, you name it. That’s a true sign of Pop Culture proliferation.

Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I’ll be the first to admit that I am shocked and elated to see Buffy on this list. The character represents a great deal of girl power...more so than the Spice Girls. Strong, witty, honest, loving and tough to kill she’s equal parts Ripley and Cher from Clueless. But I think a better choice for the number three slot would be to take a page from Buffy herself. In much of the series and especially in the final episode, Buffy broke the rules of The Slayer. For millennia The Powers That Be stated that it was always a solo gig, when the Slayer dies, another one is “activated.” One girl against the forces of evil. That disallowed attachments for family, love, and life. However, the Scoobies evolved as a desire to not tackle the demons in the world alone and in a final act of teamwork, Buffy devised a plan that involved using her team to activate every potential Slayer in the world at the same time, allowing her to attack the First Evil head on with her own army. So, that act of selflessness and teamwork leads me to nominate someone else in her place....further down the page.

Tony Soprano from The Sopranos
No complaints with Tony being on the list. Welcome to the club. Much deserved.

The Joker from The Dark Knight
I was all prepared to blast this one away as a moment of pretentiousness but the more I read that title, the more I see this as preserving a moment in the life of the character. The Joker is 70 years old and has been played by Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill (voice), Andrew Koenig (Growing Pains’ Boner), and Heath Ledger. To be fair, the cutoff of 1990 excludes Jack Nicholson’s performance however, how could you not think of at least Cesar, Jack, and Heath as the trinity of Pop Culture Jokers on film? Heath’s portrayal and academy award for The Dark Knight is bittersweet in that it’s up in the air as to the lasting impression his performance would have made had he not died.

Rachel Green from Friends
Another deserving to be on the list but I don’t know if I would have put her above Hannibal Lecter. Rachel Green inspired a hair style and a love of the idea of a spoiled rich girl actually seeing the love of her life in the form of her childhood best friend’s dorky older brother. Ross and Rachel embodied a triumph for all of us schlubs who pined for the pretty and popular girl in our home town but never got her. Friends was a decade long love affair with a close knit group of twentysomethings that grew up with us and to not acknowledge one of them would have me knock my fists together with my thumbs out at you.

Edward Scissorhands from Edward Scissorhands
Great character, great portrayal, wonderful addition but top ten? Meh. Jack Sparrow belongs in the top ten in Eddie’s place. Sorry, Johnny, but you are better than you.

Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs and its sequels
It puts the doctor in the top five or else it gets the hose. I’m slightly torn. Once again, EW looks at a microcosm of a character, a performer. That’s not to say that Sir Anthony Hopkins didn’t chew up the scenery with some fava beans and a nice Chianti, but the “Character” was born into existence a decade earlier in the novel Red Dragon. Lecter was also played by Brian Cox in the 1986 adaption of that novel. Still, I will give props to Hopkins for turning Lecter into the icon he is today but to put him at number eight behind Edward Scissorhands and Rachel Green is something that makes the lambs scream.

Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City
I will not dismiss SATC as a piece of Pop Culture history, however, putting Carrie Bradshaw in the top ten is ridiculous. And since EW found it ok to list two characters for the price of one throughout this list, I say you need to have all four characters from SATC to be accurate. Together they are better than their individual parts. Alone, Carrie is not memorable, it’s only the addition of and observation of her close friends that makes her interesting. Without them, she’s just a goofy girl on the corner in a tutu.

SpongeBob SquarePants from SpongeBob SquarePants
Oh, how I wish it weren’t so. But, yes, SpongeBob is a part of Pop Culture. To put him in the top ten above another kid targeted icon is a huge fail for EW. Listing SpongeBob at 10 while Elmo is at 38 is crazy. And with that, I will give you my gripes with the rest of the list.


OTHER GRIPES WITH THE TOP 100

19. Morpheus from The Matrix series
Why not Neo? After all, he is the one. Hey, I love Laurence Fishburne and Morpheus was a great character but dude, Neo or even Mr. Smith was a greater character.

33. Sarah Connor from Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Yeah, the 2.0 model of Sarah Connor was more kick ass than 1.0 but still, the character was born in the 80s. Shouldn’t be on this list with these parameters.

40. Ron Burgundy from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
You mean to tell me that Ron Burgundy is a greater character than Jack Bauer or Tyler Durden. Stay Classy, EW.

46. Jerry Maguire from Jerry Maguire
Tom Cruise didn’t win the Oscar, Cuba Gooding, Jr. did. Jerry Maguire was not as great as Rod Tidwell in terms of character. Hell, the kid was a better character than Jerry Maguire. Rod Tidwell should be in the number 46 slot.

57. Clayton Bigsby from Chappelle’s Show
Great, yes. Better than Chappelle’s Rick James? No. Oh, but Rick James is a real person and he was from 40 years ago. If you are going to allow characters from previous decades a place on this list then the second season’s inclusion of the actual Rick James as a commenter on his life being recounted by Charlie Murphy should be allowed if you can’t handle Chappelle’s portrayal.

63. John Locke from LostLocke is an awesome character. But LOST produced so many of them that they are all great individually. And with the season six finale revealing that John Locke truly was dead and his image was being used by The Man In Black, the actor, Terry O’Quinn made the guise of John Locke that much more interesting. However, if I had to pick one character from all of LOST that summed up a “greatest character” representation I would have picked the island. And if that doesn’t suit you, I say Benjamin Linus as a very close second. Michael Emerson’s portrayal of Ben is hands down one of the greatest in Pop Culture, ranking up there in the shadow of Hannibal Lecter.

93. Game Boys: Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series; Kratos from the God of War series; and Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV
Nathan Drake, Hell yes, Kratos, ok. Niko Bellic? Maybe, but if you want to really look at the Grand Theft Auto series as a part of Pop Culture then you need to take a step back and look at a character that thrust GTA into the annals of PC and that would be Claude Speed. Not good enough for you? Fine. Then Tommy Vercetti. Still not good enough for you? Then how about ALL of the main characters from GTA. Since Master Chief got his own slot, Nathan Drake can have his own on the 100, too, preferably above Mary Catherine Gallagher.

100. Tim Riggins from Friday Night LightsI have never seen Friday Night Lights in movie form or television form but if you are going to cap off your list with Tim Riggins and neglect having Walter White on this list, you need to have your head examined.

MY TOP 20 OF THE LAST 20

20 Senator / Emperor Palpatine (Star Wars Episode I – III)
19 Wolveine (four movies)
18 The Genie (Aladdin)
17 Sue Sylvester (Glee)
16 Lara Croft (The Tomb Raider Series of games and film)
15 Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar (Waynes World movies and SNL sketches)
14 Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (The Big Lebowski)
13 Walter White (Breaking Bad)
12 The Joker from Dark Knight
11 Andy Sipowicz (NYPD Blue)
10 Benjamin Linus (LOST)
9 Shrek (Shrek movies and television special)
8 Harry Potter (From the novels and films)
7 Verbal Kint aka Keyser Soze
6 Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean)
5 Cosmo Kramer (Seinfeld)
4 Elmo (Sesame Street)
3 The Scoobies / Angel Investigations (The Whedonverse)
2 Hannibal Lecter (Hannibal films and novels)
1 Homer Simpson (Simpsons)


SUBSTITUTIONS

I can’t say that I’m completely familiar with the entire list but there are some glaring omissions and I’m going to replace some people who should have made this list. I’m not going to reorganize the placement of the list but some will probably move up or down based on my substitutions.


OUT
Hancock (Hancock) Sorry will, I didn’t really like the movie all that much and it didn’t hit Pop Culture all that much.


Tim Riggins (Friday Night Lights) See above


Tracy Flick (Election) I can think if ten other characters that are greater, but she is pretty awesome so she’s gone.


Mary Katherine Gallagher (SNL and Superstar) There are much better sketch characters than Superstar MKG The Spartan Cheerleaders, Nat-X, The Church Lady (who appeared in the 90s and 2000) and my substitution listed below.


Mary Jones ((Precious) The next ten years, maybe we’ll go back and include her. Like Avatar, the characters are too fresh on the canvas of PC


Allie and Noah (The Notebook) meh... just meh


Wikus van de Merwe (District 9) Same reason as Mary Jones. Too soon.


Tracy Jordan (30 Rock) I substituted a better character from the show below.


Jerry Maguire (Jerry Maguire) See above


John Locke (LOST) I hated to do it but Benjamin Linus is a better choice.


Clayton Bigbsy (Chappelle’s Show) See above


Austin Powers (Austin Powers Movies) great character, but if you are going to recognize Mike Meyers in that movie a better choice would be Dr. Evil


Cal Stephanides from Middlesex I admit it.  I've never read the novel and I really don't care.  I just needed to get rid of somebody to include The Borg.
 
IN

Leo McGarry (The West Wing)  The late John Spencer was the greatest straight man in a show about a bunch of screwball West Wing Staff, he was the glue that kept the daily operations together. I could have chosen Toby Ziegler, C.J. Cregg, Josh Lyman, Sam Seaborn Donna Moss, or even President Bartlet but Leo McGarry made them all better characters with his excellent wrangling of personalities.


Angela Chase (My So-Called Life)  Before there was Dawson, Pacey, Joey, or Jen, there was Angela, Rayanne, Brian and Jordan. It was a short lived show that had it aired two years later would have been picked up for more seasons.


Spider-Man (The Spider-Man films)  With great power comes great responsibility. If X-Men proved that superhero and comic book films were not dead, Spider-Man gave the genre eight legs to run amok. Spider-Man in the hands of Tobey MaGuire made the geek king and allowed a vulnerable teenager the chance to play God and figure out his way in the world of duality. The man you are, the legend you’ve become, the legacy you leave.


Lenny Briscoe (Law & Order franchise)  How could you not include such an iconic character as one of New York’s finest hard boiled detectives. His legacy is only stunted by the fact that Jerry Orbach died before he could assume the lead in his own spinoff.


Robert Langdon (Dan Brown novels) Bookish yet devilishly adept at fending off assassins and terrorists, Langdon emerged as a thinking man’s hero on the pages of Dan Brown’s controversial novels, Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. In film, Tom Hanks brought a whole other facet to the character, as well as a weird hairstyle that reminded us of bad coif choices like Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent.


Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy films and novels)  People will debate who was the better Captain of the Enterprise, James Bond, and Jack Ryan for as long as there will be a bar to sit in and debate the topics. For my money, I loved Harrison Ford from Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. A friend of mine will defend Alec Baldwin with his life. No one is willing to touch Ben Affleck, though.


Jack Donaghy (30 Rock) I admit that I don’t watch 30 Rock due to my hatred of it in light of winning the sketch show within a show war against Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, however I cannot exclude Alec Baldwin’s excellent portrayal of the Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for GE. All I have to say is three words, porn for women.


Troy McClure (The Simpsons) The late Phil Hartman had so many wonderful characters, Anal Retentive Chef, Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Bill McNeil, Frank Sinatra, Frankenstein, to name a lot. However, Troy McClure represented a great pitch man and washed up movie actor. McClure had become one of Hartman’s most popular characters and voices and it’s only fitting that the character was retired after Phil’s death.


Rod Tidwell (Jerry Maguire) See above


Ben Linus (LOST) See above


Rick James (Chappelle’s Show) See above

Dr. Evil (Austin Powers movies) Mike Meyers nails down at least four characters throughout the three films but none of them, not even the International Man of Mystery can hold a candle attached to the head of a frickin shark to Dr. Evil. Case in point...

There you have it. My soap box is now gone. EW, you really missed the boat on this one. For shame.

The Boy Who Read: Part Three

The Boy Who Read Part Three… I promise this is the last one…maybe.

In Parts One and Two I went on at length about my dislike of reading as a child and my newfound addiction in the form of the Harry Potter novels. While I might have made it clear as to why I decided to read the sixth and seventh novels before seeing Half Blood Prince on film. I never really revisited the entire series as subject of debate. I will say that I have spanked that 24 year old that treated the novels and the overall series as childish and unnerving. If anything, J.K. Rowling has relit the pilot light of inspiration in me to continue writing and perhaps make a more concerted effort to finish a piece of work. Of course, commitment to a diet holds about as much weight. With this I offer five things I love about the Harry Potter series and two things I dislike. I won’t go so far as say hate because I went into the books knowing how it ended so a lot of guesswork was taken out of one of the ‘dislikes.’

1. My first ‘love’ associated with the books comes from a background of loving language. I never met a pun or rhyme I didn’t like. Rowling has a firm grasp of etymology and linguistics which really delighted me in her usage throughout the series. The names of characters, locations, and objects such spells have this very soothing shape to them. Whether this can be attributed to her being English or just a lover of good study is beyond me. Looking at Tolkien or Lewis as standards in British Popular Literature, Rowling has earned her spot alongside some of the better writers in her use of language. I always looked at George Lucas’ use of language to create names for characters in the Star Wars universe as my own personal standard of yumminess, being primarily a fan of film and visual media, but Rowling now takes that mantle.
   
2. My second ‘love’ of the books is the way in which she treats the reader. While the books are written in the third person perspective primarily associated with what is happening to Harry, it kind of invites the reader into the story as a first person narrative. I attribute this to an understanding her audience, a kid who can identify with the main characters and the adults who live vicariously through their children or their own childhood. I also believe this to be attributed to her style of writing, specifically her descriptiveness of the action and environment. It is very to imagine the locations and looks of the characters through her descriptions. My biggest hang up with reading is my imagination, which oddly enough is probably more refined than any other trait I possess. I can think of something ten times more horrible under my bed than what could actually be there when I was a kid. Jaws and The Blair Witch Project are favorites because of this acuity of my mind’s eye. Another great thing about how Rowling treats the audience is that she is great at tying things together without letting the reader feel like they’ve tread upon old ground. There are paragraphs and passages in the last books that reference action that took place in the first or second book and it felt like new information when I read it.
   
3. Love number three is the story which is accessible to everyone. Remember, I was a skeptic. I admit, when the books first came out, I was totally against the idea of this school for wizards and witches setting. My gold standard for fantasy or science fiction has been either been based on Star Wars or JRR Tolkien. The idea of trying to fit a story about school and childhood into a medieval style or modern British world made me want to hear nails on chalkboards nonstop as an alternative. The fact that adults were gobbling up the books as much, if not more than, kids was disconcerting to me. Then, as time went by I started to soften a little. I had to admit from a cultural standpoint that this was a positive thing for kids. We were at a point where there was a definite shift from books to more visual media had occurred and then along comes these books that gets kids reading again. Not to mention, families are spending time together reading and discussing the books. It was a small check in the win column for family values. Of course, then the fundamentalist groups get in the way and start shouting “Satanic” and “Occult” and it sours the experience.
   
   As I let the fad, which by now had become a pop culture juggernaut, start to play out and plateau, I picked up the first book and was immediately sucked into it. A friend recently quoted C.S. Lewis to me regarding my change of heart. “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” I never realized that I had already boiled down that beautiful quote years ago into, “I may get older, but I’ll never grow up.” I forgot that somewhere along the way. Once I allowed myself to accept the story for what it was, I was able to enjoy it. As the books progressed, the story matured as did the writer, I believe.
   
4. My fourth love of the series is its hero structure and quest motifs. The story plays on the levels of the hero’s quest without relying on the standard convention of allegory on the surface. Yes, there are definite overtones of love vs. hate, family vs. solidarity, and good vs. evil, but it’s the subtext that really drives the action. By all accounts Harry Potter should not have lived until the age of two. Every step of the way he has someone there to help him. His mother’s love shields him and saves him as a baby. Dumbledore provides him with the tools to solve a lot of his problems. His friends sacrifice themselves time and time again for him to succeed.
   
   In all seriousness, Harry Potter hardly takes a stand and fights back until the end of book two and that was after he was given help in the form of the Sorting Hat from which he pulled Gryffindor’s sword. From then on he still has other people doing things to advance his march towards victory until well into the last two books. But what is really going on here, besides the Christ like referencing is that Harry isn’t alone in his quest even though he is pretty much an orphan. Yes, the Dursley’s provide basic food and shelter but he is emotionally on his own for a decade. It’s not only the prophecy, but the willingness by nearly everyone to believe in him that gives him the strength to be victorious. There comes a point in Deathly Hallows when it finally clicks for Harry. Until this point, he’s never asked to be a hero. He’s a mediocre student but he has the potential to be much more, a leader. A great leader is someone who does the job without asking for it. The first hints to this are in Order of the Phoenix when he forms Dumbledore’s Army. But the realization to Harry’s need to be a leader happens when he buries Dobby.
   

   
   Get Not a Horcrux on various items
   From Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! the store.

   You can say that it happens when Dumbledore entrusts Harry with the task of finding and destroying Horcruxes, but Harry still hasn’t taken on the position of leader. He knows what needs to be done, but he doesn’t understand how to do it. He’s just following orders. You could also point out that when Harry continues to force Dumbledore to drink the potion in the cave to retrieve the locket has taken on the role of leader, but at that point he is still following orders as well. But after he buries Dobby he sees the power of sacrifice in the name of the cause. So much so that he himself has to do it as well in order to save himself and everyone around him. As he stands in the great hall overlooking the dead and wounded, he sees his friends lying there. In his mind, he struggles with the thought that they are there because of him and he accepts his fate and is prepared to die. It’s a leap of faith and he takes it. Yet, he still does not face death alone. He surrounds himself with fallen loved ones and accepts that he needs help from others, especially adults.
   
   The greatest lesson to be taught isn’t just the nature of love and good conquers hate and evil. It’s all about the journey. Voldemort is so obsessed with making things happen in order to become the most powerful, the he neglects to see the fine print. He rushes off into battle without first looking at the playing field. That’s why he loses. Harry only acts once he has enough information to secure his upper hand. This is another milestone for the boy who was willing to go off after Sirius when he thought him a killer and Voldemort when he returned. Over the course of the series, Harry follows in his father’s footsteps of arrogance and entitlement but learns to curb his temper and allow things to take their course. Thus, knowledge and defense become Harry’s greatest weapons over Voldemort. Yes, he was recognized as the master of the Elder Wand but if Voldemort had known that, he would have chose to dispose of Potter in some other fashion. Harry lets Voldemort destroy himself.
   
5. Love Number Five is Rowling’s decision to not play it safe. In children’s literature, much like the upbringing of children these days there has been an inherent decision to not let kids fail. This is my biggest pet peeve against our society as it stands today. My kid falls down a lot and I tell her to get back up. Now, if she’s really hurt, I go get her, but she fails at the age of two. She doesn’t like it but she is starting to understand it. For a story aimed at kids, there is a reluctance to take a chance and push the boundaries in regards to the safety of your characters. Happy endings come with little sacrifice in some stories. But Rowling isn’t afraid to kill her characters, regardless of their popularity or overall goodness. Apart from the killing of Harry’s parents, no other major character shockingly dies until Cedric Diggory in the fourth book. I don’t count the other deaths in between because they are either peripheral or not as intricately tied to an emotional attachment. Having Wormtail kill Cedric, a teenager proves that this is no longer just a children’s story. People die in violent and tragic ways and by the time we reach book seven, the gloves are off in terms of who is safe and who is cursed.

Now, unfortunately, my two dislikes.

1. Number one is Rowling’s use of Deus ex Machina. In the first book, Harry survives the Quirrell’s assault because he was protected by his Mother’s love. Albeit a stylized salvation, to simply end a climax by saying he was burned by love is pretty much phoning it in by my thoughts. In book two, Harry is first saved by Fawkes the phoenix when he blinds the basilisk and delivers the sorting hat which produces Gryffindor’s sword. Then he saves a dying Harry by producing tears that have healing abilities. Here Rowling has built into the early part of the story the significance of Fawkes and his abilities but even so, it still stands to serve as a “Just in time” salvation. As the books progress, the usage lessens or at least is subtle in its application which could account for the maturing tone of the novels over time.
   
2. My other dislike is Rowling’s attention to detail. To say that she is overly descriptive sounds wrong. Her world is fully realized and her intention in moving the story from point A to point B is sound. However, over time you begin to build up an attachment with certain characters who either become important in terms of development of story or just because they accentuate the action in the right spot.
   
   Case in point, Lupin and Tonks. Remus was a childhood friend of James and Sirius. He is an important part of Harry’s life in the third book but he stays out of Goblet of Fire. He comes back as part of books five and six but then only pops in and out of the story at certain moments in book seven to either deliver news or be sent away as a coward by Harry. He is regarded as a master duelist, yet he is hardly referenced at all in the Battle of Hogwarts except for whom he was fighting and that he died. The same goes for Tonks who has the same amount of action and is ultimately killed. Preference over character appearances aside, it’s the assumption of how both characters died that gets me. Both of them are seen sparsely during the battle and they are both killed off page. He get no real explanation other than the assumption that they were killed by their duelers. We get this passage about Fred dying and being placed in an alcove away from battle, but nothing about Lupin or Tonks. And what about Cho Chang and Lavendar Brown, did they survive? Accoding to the book, it's unclear, although Rowling states in an interview that Cho married a muggle. But what about Lavender? She was being attacked by Greyback and then Trewlaney smacked him in the head with a crystal ball. Did she survive? It seemed as if Rowling had too much going on and some to a footnote or explained afterwards. You see a lot of this over saturation of characters in television shows when cast members are continually added to an ensemble, creating a traffic jam of plotlines.
   
   Also, right after they escape the Ministry, there is a lot of story downtime during the search for Horcruxes in book seven. It especially drags after Ron leaves. Now, the one great thing about books over movies is the ability to take a story and shape and progress it without rushing towards the end. Look at Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. He builds and builds up action from the beginning to the end of book three. Then in book four, he stops it all to tell you another story from the past. It’s a kind of bait and switch tactic that works on paper but can drive someone mad if they’ve built up momentum in their reading. You hit that wall and your eyes nearly fly right off the page.
   
   Additionally, her ability to create a romantic development between characters seems to be a weak point. For the life of me I couldn’t resolve Harry’s affection for Ginny. It just seemed forced. Hermione and Ron’s affections are easy because they are rooted in conflict and that is a natural attraction but the payoff happens abruptly in the last chapters of book seven. I guess you can deduce that Ron’s compassion for the House Elves working in the kitchen is what spark the move for Hermione to eat his face off, but it didn’t read very well and it kind of broke my reading momentum. I hate having to go back and reread something once I've got a steady pace going.

For now, though, my head is not burning any longer. I have decided to take a small break in order to attend to other things that have been put on hold while I dive head first into the world of reading. I don’t think I will abandon it all together like I have in the past. I will probably make a more concerted effort to read something other than a magazine article. Just for a little while though, I need to enter a 12 step program and get myself clean. My wife is into book four of the Twilight series and even though she’s clipping along at a good pace, she seems perturbed at things that have happened in the fourth book. She has described in great detail the chemistry between these two characters and it really moves her. However, she is pissed. There is all this build up towards a payoff only to have the consummation of those desires be relegated to being alluded to and mentioned afterwards. It sounds as the author is great at setting the scene but can’t actually commit to writing about the icky stuff. I have my own thoughts on why, but I won’t get into a discussion about it here. I watched the movie and I feel as if I just watched a bad high school production of Into the Woods. My wife says the movie didn’t do the book justice. I think the producers and director went for marketing the film towards the OC and The Hills demographic and disregarded a lot of the text because they couldn’t keep the attention of the audience, otherwise.So, there you have it. I’m done. There is no more left to write. The Boy Who Read has grown up and is looking forward to the next good book. I’ve been given some suggestions and I will take them to heart. For now, the book is closed.

The Boy Who Read Part Two

Part Two

In part one I gave you a preface to my disdain of reading. Part Two specifically tackles a renewed interest thanks to a phenomenon in the popular fiction realm of literature.

In 1999, I worked as a Banquet Captain for a hotel. I worked with a variety of people ranging from high school seniors to senior citizens. It was at this time that I really took notice of the Harry Potter phenomenon. The book series was already a critical success and the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban had been released with much fanfare. By this time in my life, I had already felt the grumpiness of adulthood settling into my soul. I was living on my own after graduating college. I was in the infancy of a new relationship after suffering an emotional setback in another, the previous August. I was working a job that found me gravitating towards the AARP group of coworkers instead of TRL generation and I generally hated people, especially teens, at this point.

My usual shift saw me working the mornings to mid afternoon. I would usually get to leave and hour or so after the changing of shifts. At that time teeny boppers came flooding in with their bags and belongings cluttering up the department office which had become my imaginary base of operations. Usually, I would get there, set up the morning meetings, making coffee, putting out beverages, and then I would relax behind the big wooden desk for a half hour filling in the USA Today crossword puzzle and reading the Life section. When the afternoon crew had come in, they overtook my serenity along with the available desk space in the office. Between the two, a link was found, Harry Potter. In the mornings as I read the paper, stories, reviews, and graphs charting millions of money made by the books bombarded me as I sifted through the entertainment section of the paper. By the afternoon, the conversations among the kids were about the newest book and even a few copies littered the area.

Within here lies the problem. Was I grumpy because I felt some sort of social detachment from everyone else that shared in this pop cultural saturation or because I inherently felt that this kids book was just that, silly children’s literature? It’s not that I was some kind of literary snob, far from it. It’s just that I couldn’t understand how a fantasy novel about a school for witches and wizards could capture an entire world’s attention. I pushed the thoughts of even becoming slightly intrigued out of my head and went back to my, “Get off my lawn” attitude.

Moving along to 2001. I had changed jobs and was now working with adults my age or older. I was further into my relationship which had progressed towards my engagement in 2003. Also, the first Harry Potter novel, The Philosopher’s Stone just debuted as a movie, directed by Christopher Columbus. My girlfriend had a job that kept her busy on the weekends leaving me with some free time to go to the theater. Having absolutely nothing better to do, I decided to take in a matinee performance of The Sorcerer’s Stone, as it was now called, and had mixed feelings about it.

Ok, I admit, I allowed myself to get caught up in the magic and grandeur of this medieval looking modern day world of wizards and dragons and giants. The acting was pretty good and I was delighted if not surprised at the number of established and well regarded cast members, which for the most part are all British, mind you. What I found a little hard to swallow was the circumstances by which the characters resolve their problems. It’s a sort of convention by which in a novel or story, with children as protagonists, the adults play the fool or refuse to believe the impending danger that is set to besiege them. The kids, feeling abandoned or rebuffed, decide to take on the conflict themselves because only they can complete the task leaving the adults to either still not believe them or feel bewilderment as to how they could have beaten such a foe being only children. I found it a little contrived that all the time the answers would magically appear and only Harry and his friends were able to see the truth and tackle it. In the real world, these dangers would have been near fatal for kids their age, magical or not.

Still, I praised the film for its delivery, not knowing that it had taken some liberties with the arrangement of action in the book as well as some geography of Hogwarts landmarks. However, I wasn’t about to give the series my full attention and relied on letting the films serve as an acceptable version of the novels. While I allowed myself to see the first movie in the theater, I waited until they came to DVD or even cable to watch them.

By 2007 I was married, had a child, and had seen each of the Harry Potter films numerous times on television. ABC Family’s continual airing of all the films over weekends detracts from my getting anything else done around the house. Even worse was when I had HBO for a year and The Order of the Phoenix aired every other day. It had become my favorite, to date, although I did hold a spot for Azkaban in my heart because of the cooler color palate used in the cinematography and the antique style of fade outs used in Harry’s Dementor attacks. My only sticking point with the film was that I had already established a connection with Richard Harris playing the role of Dumbledore. With his passing and the role being recast with Michael Gambon, I initially found it hard to accept him in my mind as the character but I think it plays a lot better as Dumbledore’s role increased with the later books. Not every wise old character can fight like Yoda, CGI or not.

It was at this time I made a conscious decision to try and read the books. Another reason became the ability to read them as pdf versions instead of reading the actual book. Finding some websites that offered them as free downloads; I pilfered the first few books and began reading in what spare time I had. Like The Da Vinci Code the year before, I breezed through the first book and actually enjoyed it. Once again, I already had the voices, looks, and environment added from the films so it was easy to read. When I would sit at night in my room and read, I tried to read at least 20 pages and that was pushing it as far as my attention span was concerned. Now, I could churn through a hundred pages in my lunch hour. Yes, the conversion from book to electronic copy left me with a few misspelled words and head scratching. Was that word supposed to be like that because of the writer or was it a bad translation? After finishing the first book, I allowed myself to realize that reading wasn’t so bad.

I was still a long way from ever picking up Moby Dick or War and Peace, though. Over the next year I read another book, The Zombie Survival Guide. This was actually a really good book and I highly suggest reading it. It's a sort of metaphor for post 9/11 survival tactics during a breakdown of society from zombie outbreaks. I am just about ready to get eyeballs deep into World War Z because the movie is about to be made. However, reading once more took a back seat to other distractions. Playstation 3 and Wii gaming along with creating designs for my CafePress store occupied my free time and I couldn’t push myself to read more books. That was until the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince movie.

Now, remember in the last post how I mentioned that my love of films prompted me to read both this book and the last one before seeing The Half Blood Prince film? Really, you don’t? Well, click here…I’ll wait. Finished? OK, moving on. I made the decision to read the last two books because I felt I owed it to myself to at least see what I was missing from watching just the films, especially now that the stakes had been raised. I knew that this penultimate Potter book was going to be important to the overall series. It sort of jumps the shark…but in a good way. Until this book, primarily all of the action either happens at Hogwarts, or The Dursley's. In Half Blood Prince we see more of the "muggle" world and a few new locations. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but unless you live in a Utah religious compound, you probably know how it ends. Someone important dies. Someone betrays Hogwarts. This is why I felt the need to read the book first. Now, it is probably a fact that I will be disappointed in the movie. After all, I’ve seen all of the previous films before I read the books. The extra scenes and dialogue, that were left out of the films serve as a sort of director’s cut with deleted scenes for me. I even know how the last book ends, but I didn’t care. I wanted to read this book before the movie came out, even though it was already over two years old. I just didn't look forward to reading over 600 pages.

I read it in two days. Between lunches, and every spare moment I could muster, I read 652 pages in two days. I have never read that many pages in that little time. I immediately downloaded a faithfully converted copy of Deathly Hallows and read that in three. That’s how addictive it became to me. Now, my wife has eclipsed me by reading three of the four Twilight books in less time. She has probably read three books in her life and they were all pregnancy related while she carried our daughter. One of her piano students recommended reading Twilight and she is hooked. She keeps trying to sway me, but I still won’t touch that series. We even borrowed the film to watch it and I protested over watching it Sunday night. We had taken our daughter to the zoo and she was hell bent on wanting to watch it. I told her I would not stay up until 2:00 AM watching that film on a Sunday night.* She agreed to wait.

Reading popular fiction has become a sort of heroin to us this last week. We’ve certainly neglected our daughter’s needs. Even though we are in the same room with her, we have our noses buried in these books as she is left to fend for herself. Although, I will say the effect has rubbed off on her. She has brought me the same ten books every day, asking me to read them to her. Sometimes, we read them twice in one day. We’ve gotten to the point where we have become so engrossed in our own reading that we told her to read her books herself. She’s only two and the other day she sat on the couch, reciting almost word for word, Goodnight Moon. As she turned the pages, she recited the words on them. While it is probable that she has memorized the story, it was still a sight to behold. Perhaps she will be a reader early on and make her old man proud.





*By the way, I stayed up until 1:30 AM Monday morning to finish it, getting only four hours of sleep before work. Hey, a half hour is a half hour.

Next up Part Three.

The Boy Who Read

PART ONE

I hate to read. Let me rephrase that, I loathe reading. This is quite an odd statement from someone who had an insane desire to be a great writer, huh? That being said, I just finished books six and seven in the Harry Potter series in just under a week. Why? Because I love movies.

Now, before your head explodes trying to analyze that statement, let me take you back to the end of the 70s. It’s 1978 and I am only three years old. I cannot recall myself the events that took place in this recount, but I can relay what I have been told by family members. The tale itself has become the stuff of table talk during holiday gatherings among my family. By this time, my brother was at the age of ten and my sister was 13. By requirement, reading literary works was thrust upon us in certain classes by some teachers who were of age during the 60s. One of which made it a point to have his class read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series as well as The Hobbit.

Now, it was at this time that Ralph Bakshi released an animated version of the first two books in the trilogy under the name of The Lord of the Rings. It was memorable because of its style of using live action battle scenes rotoscoped to produce an animated look. It was also remembered as being only half a film because there was no mention of a Part One anywhere indicating that the movie would be continued later. I remember it…yes I said I remember it…because it was the first movie I ever saw. Let me clarify previous statements made by me saying that Star Wars: A New Hope was the first movie I ever saw. I should say that it was the first movie I ever remembered seeing. Lord of the Rings came out a year before I saw Star Wars in the theater when it was rereleased a second time in 1979. I remembered seeing Lord of the Rings, but did not realize that it had occurred before Star Wars because I did not realize that I saw the later version. Make sense? No? Good, moving on.

Anyway, the reason why this is a story told around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas is because apparently I explained it to my parents. That’s right; a three year old explained the plot of Tolkien’s story to his parents. Like I said, this is what I have been told by my family. I don’t remember adding commentary to the film. I’ll take their word on it.

Recollections aside, this began a pattern in my upbringing. “Why read the book, when you can watch the film?” I thought. So much time could be saved by spending two hours in front of the television instead of reading hundreds of pages over the course of days. Well, as you all are aware, part of the argument is that filmmakers get it wrong nine times out of ten when it comes to adapting a literary piece of work. They also get it wrong when adapting a video game but that is a tale for another time. The other, more important, half of that argument is that reading taps into that one thing that drives the five senses, the mind. When you read something, your imagination has to fill in the gaps on the page. What does the character and his/her surrounds look like? How does their voice sound? What does the world smell like? Feel like? Taste like? These are things that the reader supplies on the journey from Chapter One to The End and it makes for a much more enriched experience. I never got that at a young age. I was all about, somebody else can do the work of filling up the canvas, I just want the end product. Regardless of what television characters like Jeffrey from Voyagers or Cap’n O.G. Readmore had tried to pound into my brain about going to my local library, I would rather watch the film than read the book. Imagine the scene in Back to School where Sally Kellerman tells Rodney Dangerfield about several books to which he replies, “great film.”

Still, I read for class but never for fun. It was hard to cheat and watch the film in those days because home video was still in its adolescence and not every classic that had been adapted into a film was available as a rental. Sometimes, I just faked it and it showed in my papers for school. I can probably count on one hand how many books I actually read for assignments and how many I bullshitted my way through explaining in a book report. There was a Hardy Boys book that I butchered, piecing together bits of plot and making up the rest. I was supposed to read Brave New World for an Eighth Grade English assignment and instead read parts of Stranger in a Strange Land because I just couldn’t get into the other book. I also figured that perhaps the teacher would know I was lying because she would have boned up on my original title in order to grade my paper. Switching at the last second might have thrown her off her guard. It was still on the reading list but she seemed very perturbed that I shifted gears and didn’t tell her. Of the books I actually read in their entirety, I can list Animal Farm, Johnny Tremain, Call of the Wild and White Fang as the only ones that stuck out.

Sometime in my mid teens I had a slight change of heart. It was around 1988 and Stephen King had come into my world. I had seen Firestarter, Christine, The Running Man, The Shining, Creepshow 1 and 2, Cujo, Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive, and Stand By Me by this time and thought…maybe I should try reading one of his books. That book was The Gunslinger. The first part of the Dark Tower series. It had been released six years earlier in print, but this was the first time I had ever seen it when it in paperback. I snatched up a copy and spent my evenings just prior to falling asleep going through this book with as much fervor as I had watching Star Wars growing up. I was sucked into the world King created without even realizing that it was interwoven with all his other stories. In essence, The Dark Tower was the source from which all his material sprang forth into the ‘real world’ if you could it that. I was like a child who had grown up inside a house, content in my surroundings, not realizing that an even bigger space waited on the other side of the door. I soon found myself reading the second and third book as well as Christine, It, The Body, The Running Man, and The Tommyknockers. Then I branched out into other popular fiction writers like Dean R. Koontz and read Phantoms and Watchers.

In high school I hit that same wall I hit before; reading classics for class was boring. The Red Badge of Courage, the Last of the Mohicans, and other required reading was given a cursory glance instead of my full attention causing me to try and pass tests and write papers with minimal knowledge of the subject. It seemed as though I was only interested in 80s and 90s popular fiction, but not classics. After high school, that suffered as I only picked up a few books from which I had already seen the film like Jurassic Park and The Silence of the Lambs. I had even picked up the fourth Dark Tower novel, Wizard and Glass, but to date, have not finished it. Though, I have it and Wolves of the Calla in audio format and have heard most of book four. Required reading in college had put an overall end to my leisurely reading and I had not read another book until 2006.

For someone who prides himself on being a historian on pop culture, full of useless trivia and quotes from film and television, I found myself not jumping on the bandwagon of fads at their onset. Like I had mentioned, The Silence of the Lambs and Jurassic Park were bestsellers when they were released but I didn’t bother to pick them up until years after I had watched the film versions, using them as a primer for envisioning the voices of the characters and their surroundings making for a much quicker read. That was the pseudo basis for my reintroduction to the printed word in 2006 when I began to read The Da Vinci Code. Once again, we are talking popular fiction, not classics. But this time around, I read the book before I saw the movie. Still, I had cheated a little because I could see and hear in my mind the voices and likenesses of Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, and Alfred Molina. I’d say I came a long way in terms of accepting books again into my life. The next year, I found myself revisiting a phenomenon that had began 10 years prior of which I swore I would not belittle myself to reading. And that my dear readers is where Part Two picks up and the aforementioned puzzling statement about reading books because of a love of film will make more sense. Stay tuned.

The Stuff Blog Posts Are Made Of

The mind is always at work. Every single day, I am usually on automatic pilot with the repetitive tasks while my mind plots new ways to find solutions for my everyday woes. Unfortunately, my thoughts are as organized as my house. Everything is shoved into a place that was designed to be that objects container. A spare bedroom is a junk room, storage room, Santa’s Workshop, or closet for work clothes. Another closet serves as a document management repository. Two filing cabinets, tucked into the wings, serve to hold all of our bills, paychecks, savings info, and pretty much all of the user guides or instruction manuals to everything that I put together of an electronic or wooden nature. Of course, it also holds overflow from other areas. My garage was meant to hold a car, yet it is a labyrinthine of objects that have no connection to one another yet construct a path from the door to the a freezer and refrigerator that is also used for storage.

While trying to plan for my impending beach trip, I am forced to confront this state of disarray. I have to organize some stuff, buy some stuff, and pack all my stuff. I am going take a portion of my stuff to some other house for a week. I will then buy more stuff there and bring it all home to be added to this mess.

As I looked around at this mishmash of objects in different locations of my house. I immediately thought of three things, a dumpster, a match, and George Carlin. He had this whole piece on stuff that is truly a work of genius. Then man was a master of his medium. Now, while I will undoubtedly infringe on his work, I am expounding on some concepts that he introduced.

Carlin said it best. All I need a place for my stuff. A house is literally just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. My house is a huge pile of stuff with a tiny cover on it. Sometimes I’d love to throw some of my stuff out. My wife would really love to throw all of my stuff out. But she calls it shit. Just like Carlin indicated. I would love to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff like decorations that we haven’t used in years. But that is neither here nor there. Those are things that are not going to change. I am always going to have stuff and I need to find a place to put it. Sometimes, I think that I do not live in my house, my stuff does. But that’s what life is. Going from place to place with your stuff, you move around while your stuff stays at home and sits.

We are born with no stuff. We start to acquire an overwhelming amount but we are not responsible for it . Our parents, friends of parents, and other family members contribute to that pile of stuff early on leading to a diminishing organization and storage of all that stuff. The bigger we get, the smaller our toys are. We go from huge monstrosities of molded plastic held together by cheap screws that strip easily, running off of a handful of batteries to smaller, more complex devices that in essence can hold our electronic stuff. We trade the toy box for the blackberry. We go from physical representations of stuff to electronic applications and games that comprise our stuff. Where do you keep your addresses? Where do you play most of your games? It’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

We move from toy box to pencil box. Now our stuff is mobile. We can take it with us. Sure, it’s not exactly fun stuff, but it can create fun stuff. Soon we graduate from pencil box to locker. Now, we must be acquiring some good stuff, because now we have a lock on it. This stuff must be important. Then we break down that locked up stuff into a smaller container to go with us. It’s our homework or schedule or whatever else we carry throughout our day. I can’t believe that I managed to survive this long leaving a turkey sandwich, with mayonnaise and cheese no less, in my locker, unrefrigerated for four hours before eating it. How did I not end up with salmonella?

Once we reach a certain age, we move on from a small metal box of stuff to a large metal box of stuff…on wheels. Yes, once we are old enough to drive we obtain a rolling cover for some of our stuff. It holds tapes, CDs, books, clothes, maps, papers, and money. It goes with us and then we stop, take some stuff out and go somewhere else.

College? A larger place for your stuff. I stayed in the dorms for my entire collegiate career. Why? Because all I needed was a place for my stuff. Seriously. I had a TV, VCR, PC, Radio, books, magazines, refrigerator, hot pot, CDs, tapes, Food, clothes, bed, chair, bookcase, cabinet, and dresser all contained in a little pie shaped stuff holder. My stuff sat in one place and the rest of the campus was where I lived. There was no need for an apartment that was overpriced and probably in violation of several building codes. I want my stuff to be safe from the elements and intruders.

We graduate and sometimes move back into our original stuff holder, Mom and Dad’s! I get a call every now and then from my Mom telling me she’s going to get rid of the stuff from my childhood. There is a ton of stuff in our garage that is labeled, “Yard Sale.” That’s a name we give to stuff that we no longer want, but never get around to unloading. We always make plans to have a Yard Sale but that’s a euphemism for being a pack rat. It deflects the problem because it may go away some day.

Then we migrate some of our stuff into our car, again, to try and find a good job so we can buy more stuff or at least more expensive stuff. We get a computer that holds a lot of our stuff like resumes and contacts. We go online to social networks and we create email accounts. That all becomes containers for our stuff. Hell, this blog is just a place for all the inane and weird stuff that is in my head. I’m trying to get it out of there to make room for more important stuff. Maybe, one day, I can put it all together and have someone get a red pen out and fix it so I can write a book. Perhaps, you will have a copy of my stuff sitting on or next to your stuff in your home. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Then we buy that house or rent that apartment and try and fit all of our physical stuff from our various containers into one place. Eventually there is no room for us. So, we look into buying a bigger place, not get rid of stuff. We move and acquire more stuff that we need to complete the rooms in our new place for our stuff. We add those children I talked about and their stuff. We get pets and of course, they have to have stuff. Often, my cats tend to take my stuff and treat it as their own. My daughter hides my stuff when I’m not paying attention. Usually, it’s the phone of remote that goes missing.

One day, I may be able to get a bigger cover for my stuff. If I had my choice, I would build instead of buy. Why? Because I want to make sure there is room for my stuff. I want to allow for the acquisition of more stuff, and as I take a tractor trailer sized wide turn back around to my original point, I want better organization of all my stuff. After all, that is what I do for a living. I organize and hold other people’s stuff. That stuff is knowledge. It’s all electronic and it lives in one place. We managed to get rid of a lot of the paper stuff. It gets old and outdated and not everyone has access to it. We find the need to lock down those important items and we also make sure that our stuff is approved. With that in mind, I need to make sure that where I go next, I have a place for my stuff and it’s appropriately organized.

I would love to get rid of all of that paper that resides in those filing cabinets. I think that a Kindle type device would work well in a document management type setting. If I were smart enough to configure a system in my home to house all of my important documents, then I could probably use something like a Kindle to retrieve those documents when needed. Say I am working out in the garage and I have to find the instructions for some tool or project I’m working on. Instead of rifling through my cabinet or travelling back and forth from my desktop computer to the location I’m working at, I can just grab the Kindle and call up that document. Better yet, what if my wife is cooking and she needs a recipe? Instead of sifting through all of them, she can locate them by using this hand held device that can be propped up like a cookbook. On the phone with a utility or other service like insurance. Call up your last bill or medical records. Now, of course, you would need a backup of all this stuff. If there’s a power outage or something crashes, you would need to get to this stuff. But a backup copy still takes up less space. You could even box up all the other stuff and store it in a smaller container instead of a huge filing cabinet. You would always be able to get to your stuff. These are of course all pipe dreams because the initiative to do those things take time and money, which is stuff I don’t have.

If you stop and think about it, you literally have stuff everywhere. Your stuff is all over the planet. That online account I spoke of. It’s probably housing your stuff in a server overseas somewhere. You have little containers of stuff scattered about the Earth like a trail of Matryoshka Dolls. One set of stuff breaks down into smaller containers of the original. Our house becomes our car, which becomes our purses or back packs, which then becomes our wallets, and then our pockets.

When we die, most of our stuff finally leaves our possession. I inherited stuff, that is in my house, from relatives, who died. My poor kid(s) will eventually have to go through my stuff and decide to keep, sell, throw out, or God forbid, mark “Yard Sale.” Some people take some of their stuff with them. People put little trinkets and remembrances of our lives in a casket with us. If we decide to get cremated, someone will either scatter our ashes or keep us in an urn. Thus, we become stuff that gets put together with other people’s stuff.

I don’t know about you but that’s some scary stuff there.