Thursday, July 27, 2017

Literateur: A Couple Re-Reads

For the longest time, I never re-read books. I felt like: been there, done that. Next!

Since I'm cranking out prose now, I get curious about how my favorite authors pulled off their tricks. Because I want to rip them off.

So!

Just finished re-reading Stephen King's The Tommyknockers. I liked it well enough at age 14. As an adult, its faults are glaring. 

Woman discovers alien ship buried in her backyard, unearths it, finds it gives her strange mental powers, then the dormant alien force gives everyone in her town mental powers...except for one guy who has a metal plate in his head. Mayhem ensues as people are trapped in the town. It's like a rough draft for Under the Dome, with elements from It thrown in for seasoning. 

King gives us two likeable main characters up front, then makes the mistake of turning it into an ensemble epic about the entire town and the two people we like get pushed to the background. The townspeople just aren't that interesting, making it all feel like a drag. 

King admits Tommyknockers is his least favorite of his books, written heavily under the influence of drugs, with lotsa drug allegories throughout. (The same could be said for Misery, but that one integrates the drug allegories better and was more concise.) Its biggest problem is terminal bloat. This thing is 750 pages when it should be half that, at most

Then the ending just farts in your face. Way too much death and doom, not emotionally earned or resonant. It misses the mark in almost every way that It perfectly hits the mark. Both books have similar endings and similar plots. And they were written around the same time. Interesting to see an author hit and miss with such similar stories at a similar time.
The so-so 1994 TV miniseries adaptation starred Jimmy Smits as the guy with the metal plate in his head. That's how they labeled him in the credits: "Guy With the Metal Plate in His Head."
Another reread: William Peter Blatty's Legion. The author of The Exorcist wrote this semi-sequel to his notorious classic in 1983. It was filmed a few years later (by the author, writing and directing!) as Exorcist III. And it wisely ignores the events of the atrocious Exorcist II: The Heretic

It's a gem. Although structurally a murder mystery, the mystery and supernatural aspects take a backseat. It's mostly the old Jewish detective character philosophically rambling about the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people. Which sounds horrible (I normally hate it when authors whine about this issue because they're usually just sloppily soapboxing), but it totally works. 

And Blatty reaches a surprisingly original conclusion at the end: an answer to why the world is the broken way it is, all of which went way over my head when I read it as a kid. 

Ready for it? Here you go: the giant flash of light that we know of as The Big Bang was Lucifer ("Lord of Light") falling from heaven. And evolution has been the slow process of Lucifer trying to form himself back into an angel of light. Thus: we are all Lucifer.

Your mind blown yet? It should be! 

It's so rare for me to find an original idea anywhere anymore, so even when a new idea is bonkers, I like it because I haven't heard it before.


-Phony McFakename
 
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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Earworm Analysis: My First Song

This is a very special episode of my blog where I actually share a personal story rather than just a list of whatever I've seen/read lately. Gird your loins!

Circa 1985, my parents got this eight-track player and a bunch of eight-tracks (an ancient technology, even in that ancient year) at this rickety place we were spending the summer. And one of my earliest memories was seeing Dionne Warwick's Promises, Promises eight-track and putting it in the player and the title song came on. 
Looked about like this.
I had no frame of reference for what music was, but I liked the noise it made. And I jumped around with the playing mechanism (eight-tracks are weird, I still don't understand them) until I found the title track again and I would listen to it over and over. Never cared about the rest of the album. This was the song.

But here's the part where it got weird: I always assumed that song was a huge hit. It had to be, right? I was telling my wife about it and Googled Dionne Warwick and a list of her songs came up and I scrolled down looking for "Promises, Promises." After a ton of scrolling, I still hadn't found it. Wha?

I'd never heard of her other songs. But admittedly, I wasn't a Warwick fan. So I just Googled the song title and found it and played it for my wife. I hadn't heard it in over three decades. Turns out Burt Bacharach wrote it, so it's got a strong big-band vibe to it. Decent lyrics. It's okay. 

But then I looked up the album on Wikipedia and it turns out Promises, Promises was Warwick's 11th album. It's a nonexistent blip on her career radar. There was like one radio hit on there and it wasn't the title track. So it was surreal because I always thought Promises, Promises was Warwick's biggest hit album and the title track one of her biggest songs because it was the only one I knew by her...but it was NOTHING! 

I'm having a hard time articulating how weird it was to find this out. I might have to write a book about the mental reversal it did on me.

My parents happened to visit last weekend and I asked them about that whole setup and my dad was like, "Oh yeah, we randomly bought that eight-track player and a handful of eight-tracks from some garage sale, just for the heck of having a music player over the summer." So the album meant NOTHING to them, either!

To their credit, one of those eight-tracks was Elton John's greatest hits, which had the SECOND song I was ever over-and-over addicted to: "Bennie and the Jets." I still totally back that song. And just about every song on that album. ("Rocket Man" is a bit played out, though.)

My subsequent first cassette that I ever owned was not cool and I have no bragging rights, but to keep it real: it was the Young Einstein soundtrack. Almost none of it holds up, except for this song, which was my over-and-over fave on there and to this day makes me drop whatever I'm multitasking with, pay attention, and feel something vaguely melancholy and beyond my grasp deep in my soul every time it pops up on a mix CD or shuffle mode.


-Phony McFakename

 

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Favorite Quotes: July 2017

"Sure, naked galactic vampire movies are a dime a dozen, but Hooper’s big-budget career-wrecker tears through all competition and stands tall as the ultimate example of the form...Do what you like, but skip this movie and you’ll be missing a telepathically-possessed Patrick Stewart deem himself 'the perfect woman' before kissing a dude right smack dab on the lips.”
-Review of Lifeforce, from Destroy All Movies! 

“Where’d you get your clothes, the poor store?”

“Where’d you get your manners, the rude store?”
-Video Game High School 

“Mummy, come back, ‘cause the water’s all gone”
-David Bowie, “Glass Spider”

“Hey, let’s not have a blame-storm here!”
-Netherbeast, Inc. 

“I’ll turn my home
(Check in, check out)
Into Bates Motel”
The Hitmen, “Bates Motel” 

“We're pretty good at finding demons to be afraid of.

The other.
The one in the shadows.
Change.
The family member we can't possibly please.
Competition.
Critics.
The invisible network of foes conspiring against us and what we stand for.
It turns out, though, that the one who usually lets us down is us. 
Our unwillingness to leap, to commit, to trust our own abilities.
It's the internal narrative that seeks disaster just as much as it craves reassurance. 
That's the one we ought to be vilifying, fortifying ourselves against and frightened of.
It gets less powerful once we are brave enough to look it in the eye.”
-Seth Godin


-Phony McFakename


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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

"Eric Roberts 2: Acoustic Boogaloo" by Phony McFakename

Oh, yes. It has finally arrived.

The long-awaited sequel to the legendary Eric Roberts: The True* Story!

That's right, folks. It's time for Eric Roberts 2: Acoustic Boogaloo!

Read the further exploits of the legendary actor Eric Roberts!

Explore the many churches that have been built in Roberts' name!

And learn the TRUE history of the 2007 financial crisis, when Roberts fought the Wall Street fat cats with his ancient Slamurai ninja skills!

And may Eric Roberts bless and keep you. 


-Phony McFakename

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.