When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes!
For all my fellow pseudo-existentialists, you’ll be delighted to hear that Greg Fiering updated his site (at some point in the recent past, I’m not sure when), and is even releasing new Migraine Boy strips on the site.
I picked up Migraine Boy: Fair-Weather Friends several years ago when I noticed a Fiering strip in the liner notes of R.E.M.’s “Monster.” I loved it, and you probably will too.
I’m trying to get through some shorter books in an attempt to get back on my 26 Books track. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard to read a book every two weeks. But when you read and write and sit at a computer for a living, literature can often the last thing you want to look at when you get off work. But anyway, on to the review.
I’ve never been to Hawaii. Nothing has ever attracted me there. It seems like of an isolated place. But I suppose there could come a time in my life where isolation might seem nice. But they don’t want any more white people there anyway, so it doesn’t matter. We’re like weeds. And so are drugs.
At least, that’s the analogy Johnson tries to draw with this graphic novella, that methamphetamine has invaded the society of Hawaii in much the same way that invasive plant species — brought over by the damn Whites — have taken hold of the islands themselves. The story is beatifully illustrated and the characters move and speak with a depth and resonance that is a wonder considering how few pages they are given to develop.
Overall, it’s an enjoyable short story, and doesn’t try to be any bigger than the TPB that contains it. Bravo.
Next book, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]
Pilot Butte is partially obscured by smoke, and you can see the smoke’s effect on the horizon.
Where I come from, a “wildfire” is something that happens when an idiot farmer knocks over his burn barrel and destroys half his hay bale crop for the season. In the High Desert, it’s something entirely different.
Slowly, almost stealthily, the strong wind today has moved a cloud of smoke over Bend from a nearby brushfire. (The Bulletin has the details.) The smoke isn’t thick, not really. You can’t see it in front of you. But you can see it down the street and across town. You can smell it in the air. It stings your nose and makes you want to clear your throat. Your eyes water.
It’s strange, I’d always had this notion that a fire was something that would go out if you didn’t tend to it. But in this case, with brush and forest fires, a fire is something that won’t go out until you tend to it, or until the beast consumes everything that it can.
Fires out here is treated like an environmental phenomenon, like earthquakes or tornados or hurricanes. There is a season for them, and people always seem to dread their arrival. Except, the fire hasn’t arrived in Bend. It’s not even that close by, and it’s not really headed this way. And yet, we all know it is near, as our homes and businesses are enveloped in an enormous cloud of campfire smoke. It’s widespread, as far as I can tell. I drove around a bit, and I couldn’t get away from it. From across town, where I work, the same butte shown in the above photo was probably 50 percent obscured by smoke.
It was striking.
I finished “Hell’s Angels” book on the plane ride back from my college roommate’s wedding. (Congratulations again Stephen and Lin. Don’t get lost in the Bahamas!) It’s my third Thompson book.
Written a few years before Thompson’s most famous book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Hell’s Angels” describes in great detail the author’s year-long experience with the famous outlaw motorcycle gangs of California in the mid-’60s. Honestly, I didn’t know that much about the Angels before this read, other than the whole Altamont thing and the character in “Raising Arizona,” who is almost certainly a charicature of what the so-called “1-percenters” embodied.
Over the years, the Hell’s Angels title has certainly been watered down. Now there are chapters in many countries and thousands upon thousands of motorcycle riders enthusiastically claim membership. But in the 1960s, the only real Hell’s Angels were located in a few urban areas in California, such as Oakland, Sacramento, and the like. Thompson drank, partied and interviewed various members of several chapters over the course of a year, eventually earning their trust and then eventually getting stomped by them.
While there is probably more fact in this book than most of his others, Thompson’s raw and entertaining prose is ever present. In one passage, he describes a the purity of some Benzadrine pills that he consumed at one Angels gathering.
When I realized that the first two were having no effect, I took several more, and then more. By dawn I had eaten twelve — which, if they’d been honest, would have caused me to gnaw down trees like a beaver. As it was, they only helped me to stay on my feet about four hours longer than I would have otherwise.
The book is a much fairer take on the Angels in an era when most news media outlet headlines treated them like subhuman, invading Huns. While none of the characters are by any means noble creatures with true purpose in the society they live in, Thompson is able to lift back some of the mystique that they apply to themselves and that law enforcement gladly shovels upon them. They are violent, they are criminal and they don’t have the best hygiene. But they don’t do it because they’re trying to be criminals. They do it because they treat the law like it only kind of exists, more as an obstacle to avoid than rules to live by. They chain-whipped people when the Angels thought they deserved it, but they weren’t wanton murderers or rapists. Most of the damage they did happened when they were just trying to party. But I’ll let Thompson sum it up best:
The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment … and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon that will shortly become extinct now that it’s been called to the attention of the police.
In any case, the California outlaw motorcycle gang culture of the 1960s can be added to the long list of things that America has given to the great memory of humanity.
Next book, Night Fisher by R. Kikuo Johnson
[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]
I’ve done this before, so I thought I’d add a sequel.
First off, I’m a loser and just saw “Donnie Darko” for the first time this weekend. A truly bizarre and fun film. I’ll go so far as to call it excellent because, if nothing else, I wanted to watch it again as soon as the credits finished rolling. Not many movies can do that. Plus Jake Gyllenhaal is fun and engaging as an ’80s private school kid with issues. I’m not going go into this one too deeply, because others have stomped that horse into the ground. All I’m going to say is that if you’re confused, just search for “The Philosophy of Time Travel” with your favorite search engine.
For those of you who know me, we’ve probably already discussed this movie at length. To sum it up, yes, it’s as much fun as the original. Captain Jack is back, although a tad tamer, as are a swell group of character actors, all of whom are fun to watch play pirate. (Although the movie probably wouldn’t have suffered all that much if Orlando and Keira had sat this one out.)
The only problem is that it suffers from middle child syndrome. It will probably get lost when the trilogy is finished. It assumes you know too much at the beginning and doesn’t resolve enough at the end. In essence, it leaves you hanging in a bad way. The viewer wants the movie to have a real ending, not to give him the cinema equivelant of blue balls. (Sorry.)
Actually, I guess those are the only really interesting movies I’ve watched lately. I saw most of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Also “Runaway Jury.” Hmm… Did I mention before that I saw “The Proposition”?
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