Oscars? Bleah.

This says everything I was planning to say about the Oscar show last night(Link snagged from Defamer). The rest of the show? Safe as milk and just as boring. The only good thing about it was that it was over before midnight.

R.I.P. Dr. Gene Scott.

Dead from a stroke at 75.

When I was a kid, before the days of infomercials, Dr. Gene always seemed to be on whatever empty syndicated channel had some time for him. Now I'm not into the evangelism, but Dr. Gene was so solidly loopy that you couldn't help but watch him. And for all his insanity, the man KNEW his bible.

Hopefully, he's explaining to Jesus right now what that whole Spiderman comparison was all about.

R.I.P. Dr. Gonzo

Hunter Thompson commits suicide at 67.

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—that kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run. . . .
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

It's a dreary, snowy President's Day as I write this, and the world seems somehow less without him. Yes, his writing was erratic the last few years, and yes, he was probably not as crazy as his writing suggested, but he was an icon to me and to others, and the literary world is that much dimmer without him.

More later, maybe.

*edit - changed the story to ESPN's because the WaPo one required registration*

Yeah, ESPN~!

From IMDb's news, today.

ESPN Gives NHL's Shutdown an Icy Reception

ESPN reacted angrily Wednesday to the decision by the National Hockey League to cancel the remainder of the season and warned that it might very well decide that it can do without hockey on its schedule. Mark Shapiro, ESPN's executive vice president for programming and production, told today's (Thursday) Chicago Tribune that the NHL's decision represented "a dangerous strategy" and a betrayal to "the true, passionate fan." Asked directly whether ESPN would resume its hockey schedule next year, Shapiro replied, "What next year? As far as we're concerned, they're on lockout. At this point, we have to make other plans."

Attention Gary Bettman, NHL Owners, and for that matter, NHLPA.

GO. FUCK. YOURSELVES.

That is all. More later, maybe.

Illumination comes so hard...

*Warning - whiny LJ-style post ahead*

A couple of days ago I realized something. For the last eight months, I pretty much froze one of the best friends I've ever had out of my life.

I was dumb to do this.

Background: my friend and his wife appeared(hell, they were a pair of signatures away) to be on the way to divorce. This divorce would also affect me, because my wife and I live in a two family house with them. As a result, I was forced(well, not really, but it's the most logical situation) into accepting my father-in-law's offer to build an extension onto their house. This has caused some friction in my marriage, among other factors. (My wife's diabetes, and her lack of responsibility about it, has a lot to do with it also.)

So rather then being a normal human being, and talking to my friend about this, I chose to freeze him out. Irrationally, I chose to blame him directly for all the stresses that I was putting on my own self.(This move is going to be very expensive for me, though having my wife back with her parents, who can keep a better eye on her diet and such, is a good thing. Plus her mom can watch Laura, so my wife can go get a job and contribute to the family income.)

I also felt marginalized by the fact that he'd found a bunch of hip new friends, though that apparently turned out bad for him. I felt like the only thing I was good for was the once-a-month hangout for PPV, and that I was no longer part of his crowd. (Never mind that I don't have a lot of time in my own schedule for social time.)

As a result, I treated him like dogshit for the better part of a year, and I feel bad for that. Sorry, bro, mea culpa. (Things are better now, by the way, at least on that front.)

4500 pages later, I'm kinda disappointed.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Seventeen years ago, I opened the trade paperback edition of Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and fell through the hole that King had set for me. I polished it off quickly(it was barely 200 pages), and eagerly awaited the second book. In 1999, when King was seriously wounded in a car accident and suggested he might never write again, I believed that we'd never see Roland reach his goal.

Seventeen years and seven books later, I finally finished reading The Dark Tower this afternoon. It ended, well, it ended in a way that I didn't expect, and I suppose that's a good thing. Further thought on the subject between the time I put the book down(about 3 or so this afternoon) and when I began typing these words has made me realize that I should have expected the ending at least since the third book in the series. Suffice it to say that, just like you can't look at The Sixth Sense a second time without seeing all the clues you should have seen the first time, careful consideration of all that has gone before makes me realize that the end was obvious.

Truth be told, I was expecting a different sort of ending, and King acknowledges as much, by giving the reader the chance to stop reading about four pages prior to the end. But 4500 pages needs the final four, so I kept right on going, even as I had a sinking feeling of what I was about to read.

Now, don't get me wrong. With the exception of Wizard and Glass(which was a one-time only read), the whole story is an amazing read if you have the time and the patience. It is King's Shannara, his Wheel Of Time, his Lord Of The Rings. He openly acknowledges as much in "On Being Nineteen", the new foreward to the latest paperback edition of the first three novels. There is a snap to much of the story, an epic scale that escapes even Tolkien.(If they were to film this, it'd be on HBO and span a number of years, not hours.) And it reveals a conceptual continuity(tm Frank Zappa) running unconsciously at first, then consciously, through virtually all of King's novels. Nearly all reference the saga in some way, and Insomnia and Hearts In Atlants bear directly on events in the final two books of the saga. A fictionalized King even turns up as a major character in the last two novels as well(his 1999 accident is fodder here, as it was in Kingdom Hospital). His appearance serves as a (according to him, fairly exaggerated) demonstration of what it's been like to be enslaved by the tale. After all, King once wrote in Different Seasons, "It is the tale, not he who tells it."

But King's appearance and the idea of continuity never detract from the tale. Rather, much like the books that Tolkien wrote after LOTR, they serve to enhance the idea that The Dark Tower is the sum total of everything Stephen King's ever done.

Just wish that ending had been a little better.

R.I.P. Max Schmelling

The man who beat Joe Louis is dead. He was hailed by Hitler as an example of the Aryan superman, right up until Louis destroyed him in their rematch.

(And the celebrity trifecta is complete.)

R.I.P. Ossie Davis

Rest in peace, Da Mayor.

"Doctor, always try to do the right thing."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"I got it, I'm gone."

It's too bad that the CNN obit doesn't mention "Bubba Ho-Tep", but then I didn't expect it would. He was still plugging away at 87, though.

R.I.P. John Vernon

Rest In Peace, Dean Wormer.

He was a hell of a character actor, even though you knew he was evil the second you saw him. He also did voices in "Batman: The Animated Series" and the "Incredible Hulk" cartoon from the 90's.

But he'll always be known for "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." and "Double secret probation".

An alleged update.

Very busy lately with work and the BT site that I spend way too much of my time at. I'm a mod now and the new point man for the Cult Erotica section(read: pre-1990, pre-silicone), and it seems like I spend all my off time there. In the real world, we're in the midst of store resets, so my brain is stuck on what product goes where and I just come home and decompress afterwards.

In the spare moments, I've been working my way through Kinji Fukasaku's Yakuza Papers film series. It's amazing stuff, even though there's a lot of characters, and sometimes you forget who's who. Fukasaku had such a completely unique style, and the movies just seem to transcend the normal run-of-the-mill 70's Yakuza films.

GO EAGLES~! (Had to work that in.)

Longer update to come at some point when my brain is not mush.