My Love is Vengeance That's Never Free

Andrew Aiken Rooney

January 14, 1919 - November 4, 2011

R.I.P.

After listening to the "Dirt" album by Alice in Chains for the hundredth time, I turned to Michael and said, "I just realized that all the lyrics written by Layne Staley are about drugs and all the lyrics written by Jerry Cantrell are about death."

"Yup. And we know who won that face-off," he said.

I nodded. Beat. Then we said in unison, "Death."

.................................................

Over the holidays Michael and I were flipping channels one day and came across "Attack of the Clones" on television. It sparked a good-natured debate on the merits of the first three episodes of the Star Wars epic. Michael conceded that George Lucas should not have directed any of them, he should have handed directorial duty over to someone like Spielberg. THAT lead us to conjure up a list of directors who, although completely wrong for the job, might have produced a more interesting, if not necessarily better Star Wars trilogy. Some highlights:

Woody Allen
Martin Scorsese
Pedro Almodovar
John Carpenter
Michael Bay
Clint Eastwood
Penny Marshall

and my personal favorite...

Spike Lee

Last month my brother Michael was invited to write and read a narrative piece for the Soundtrack Series. The Soundtrack Series "is a live monthly reading/storytelling event where six writers tell the memories, stories, or tirades triggered every time they hear a particular song of their choosing." All the performances are recorded and later uploaded to the Soundtrack Series website as individual podcasts. I had wanted to go and see Michael read, but I had a scheduling conflict and couldn't attend. So I've been waiting for his podcast to get posted.

His piece went up on the website today. I just finished listening to it; laughed my ass off the whole time. The minute I heard him say the words "angsty break up story" I knew exactly what story he was going to tell. I was fourteen the year it happened, and he didn't get over it until after I turned twenty!

Really, you all have got to hear this. The piece is fifteen minutes long, but it's worth every second.

Here's The Soundtrack Series – Featuring Michael Criscuolo

As a postscript I would like to add that this is the song Michael had playing on repeat in his CD player for eight months following those events:



And, just in case I haven't mentioned it lately, I love my brother :-)

Greg and I went to the roller derby last night. Greg enjoyed it, but I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. In fact, I found the whole thing down right boring.

The game is split into two thirty minute halves, and each half contains an unspecified numbers of Jams. A Jam is a two minute play during which each team's Jammer (point scorer) tries to lap as many members of the opposite team as possible. They receive one point for each member of the opposite team they pass. There's more to it than that, but that's the gist.

Between each Jam the teams rotate players and are given thirty seconds to set up for the next Jam. Changing players every two minutes, sometimes less, kept the game from building any momentum. Just as I was getting excited about what was going on, the Jam would end and thirty seconds of shuffling would commence. Lame.

I also found the scoring system really hinky. I felt it gave an unfair advantage to whichever team was in the lead and prevented the trailing team from catching up. There were times when I was certain that one team or the other had scored, but when I looked at the scoreboard, discovered they hadn't. I had no clue what was going on even with the rule sheet sitting in my lap the whole time.

Finally, I didn't really like the crowd which was made almost entirely of hipsters from Williamsburg. They were all white, tattooed, pierced, and obviously well off. They seemed almost offended they had to sit in cramped, smelly, college court bleachers to watch the game.

While I'm glad we went, and I'm glad Greg had fun, it's not something I'd ever want to do again.

Last night was horrific. The temperture got up to 106 during the day, and when I arrived home at six the thermometer said it was 99 degrees in my apartment. I started the AC immediately and made sure it was set to the coolest setting, 60 degrees. For hilarity's sake, I spent the next eight hours documenting my AC's progress through Facebook status updates. Here is the basic run down:

I started the AC at 6:00 PM and the temperature was 99 degrees.

By 8:00 PM the AC had been running for two hours and the temperature in my apartment was still 99 degrees.

The sun finally set around 8:30 or 9:00 PM. No more sun shining directly into my westerly facing window.

By midnight the temp had dropped to 90. Progress, finally.

By 2:00 AM it had gone down to 88 and I went to bed.

I spent another hour tossing an turning, too uncomfortable to sleep. I'd spent most of the evening prior to that laying naked and motionless on my bed with the air vents blowing directly on me, and even then the sweat was running down my back, my stomach, my sides, my thighs. Hell no longer frightens me because now I've been there and I know what to expect.

But, this is what happens when you live in an attic apartment, though in the five years I've lived there it has never gotten so hot that the AC simply could not cool the place down. A lot of people have asked if there is something wrong with my AC, and as far as I can tell there isn't. It works fine on days when it's not 106 outside!

I'm going to spend the rest of the week camped out on my mother's couch.

After finishing The Raw Shark Texts yesterday, (good book; kind of like "Momento," "The Matrix," House of Leaves, and "Jaws" all rolled into one), I picked up the copy of Dead Until Dark that has been sitting on the office book swap shelf for ages. I read three pages, and put it back.

I have an aversion to characters who tell me how drop dead gorgeous they are on the first page. A start like that tells me a lot about what is important within the narrative: beauty, sexiness, romance, and sex. They usually come hand in hand with cliches, unrealistic relationship development, shoddy writing, and cringe-worthy sex scenes. None of that interests me. I don't like reading about pretty people, particularly pretty people who bitch and moan about how they can't get a date. Three pages of Sookie Stackhouse was all I could take.

Having abandoned Charlaine Harris, I turned to one of the urban fantasy books I acquire through PaperBack Swap - Guilty Pleasures, the first book in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series. Like the Southern Vampire Mysteries, I've never had any strong desire to read the Anita Blake books, but was willing to give them a go because 1) everyone loves them so much, and 2) they are basically considered urban fantasy "canon."

Laurell K. Hamilton pretty much invented contemporary urban fantasy. Guilty Pleasures was first published in 1993 when epic fantasy was still the industry norm. It came out four years before Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit television, and roughly ten years before urban fantasy became a driving force in fantasy literature.

I'm up to page fifty, and though I'm not impressed, now I know where every urban fantasy cliche originated: the generic, sassy, opinionated heroine; the sexy, yet sensitive and overly protective vampire lover; the ridiculous, comedic side-kicks. They're all there. Hamilton's writing is serviceable, but that's about it. Nothing dazzles on the page. Anita herself has virtually no personality. Fifty pages in all I know about her is what she does for a living and that she hates vampires. She has no interests, hobbies, quirks, or defining characteristics. She's a blank slate.

I think the urban fantasy novelists who have taken Hamilton's formula and run with it over the last ten years have improved upon it greatly. Writer's like Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine, and Richelle Mead give their characters actual personalities! They give their romantic subp-lots time to development in a realistic fashion. They come up with fleshed out secondary characters who are just as charming as the protagonists. They bring an improved awareness of craft and technique to their books. They have zeroed in on the problem areas of the urban fantasy formula and fixed them. So it's kind of sad that new urban fantasy writers still try to imitate Hamilton when they could be trying to imitate her successors, or better yet, coming up with something totally new.

Problems aside, I do plan to finish reading Guilty Pleasures. It's good enough and short enough, and it's not as off-putting as Dead Until Dark. But it's going to have to get A LOT better for me to move on the second book.

Thanks to PaperBack Swap I've accumulated a small library of urban fantasy books I was never interested in spending money on but am perfectly willing to sample for free. I've got the first book in Kim Harrison's Hollows series, Jenna Black's Morgan Kinglesy series, Vicki Pettersson's Sign of the Zodiac series, and Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series. To be perfectly honest, I'm not optimistic about the quality of these books, but feel I should at least give them a chance because I'm fond of the genre. And, you know, I have been wrong in the past. I wasn't optimistic about the Georgina Kincaid books either and they turned out to be freaking awesome! So, who knows?

There was a time when I didn't hesitate to write journal entries about nothing. Check out any random post from 2002 and you'll see what I mean. Of course, back then I was still new to online journaling, still kind of awestruck by all it could do, all it allowed me to do, like be totally candid and anonymous at the same time, (even though I was never really anonymous). I hadn't yet learned about the many benefits of discretion or the limitations of honesty. Back then entries were just whatever brain vomit I could hurl at the screen. And, since I'm running low on contemplative, analytical brain food at the moment, I think I'll just try saying nothing, and maybe someone will say nothing back.

I am loving PaperBack Swap. I've already unloaded thirteen books, many of which had been sitting around on chancexchange for YEARS without a single person ever requesting them. My primary beef with chancexchange is that since it's so small and so few people use it you end up sending all your books to a very small circle of users. Most of the book requests I got were from the same person, Karen from Missouri. And though I'm sure she's a nice lady, I don't want to send all my books to Karen in Missouri. If you're going to end up sending all your swappable books to one person what's the point of even offering them up to begin with? Might as well just cut out the middle man, dump 'em all in a cardboard box and send them straight to their house.

PaperBack Swap has tons of users. All of my books have gone out to different people in different states. They've gone to California, Oregon, Arizona, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Georgia, Colorado. And more users means a greater selection of available books. I've already requested four - mainly books I've been wanting to read but not badly enough to actually spend money on them - and I can't wait for them to arrive. Now that my "to read" pile has become a little more manageable I'm allowed to acquire new books once again.

Oh, and speaking of books, this week I finally got around to reading The GenX Reader that gender_euphoric sent me last October. Now I understand why so little of it held his interest. All in all it was pretty dull. Most of the essays lacked direction, and by trying to showcase the diversity of Gen X social, political, and philosophical thought the editor came up with a hodge podge of musings with no unifying theme. Pieces were pulled from zines (remember those?), computer forums, and now out-of-print books. Most of the essays and excerpts, taken out of context, didn't really go anywhere. They meander about looking for a central concept to latch on to, and never really find one. If these are the best voices of my generation (and you could make the case that they aren't the voice of my generation depending on how you define the tern generation x) no wonder the boomers thought (think?) we're fucking idiots!

I gotta admit though a lot of it was amusing in a "when I was your age" kind of way. Hugh Gallagher's "Seven Days and Seven Nights Alone With MTV" is delightfully dated. He rambles on about how the crowd on The Grind are the best looking clubbers he's ever seen, and how Yo! MTV Raps "could kick the whole channel's ass if a full-out broken-bottle brawl busted out." (And, sure enough, rap did exactly that when it came to dominate air play in the late 90's.)

There's an interview with Ice Cube from a 1994 issue of The Source in which Ice goes on about how hardcore he is and how he'll never lose his edge. Very funny considering an entire generation has grown up associating him with family friendly comedies rather than gangsta rap.

Generation X's distrust of the media is summed up in "Seize the Media" where Greg Ruggiero and Stuart Sahulka advocate public seizure of the mainstream media by creating "public production libraries where we can each and all produce cultural print, radio, television, and radio broadcast materials in library studios equipped with desktop publishing facilities, graphics technology, multi-track audio recorders, film and video cameras, and editing equipment." It sounds kind of silly until you realize that through the power of the internet and the wonders of social media, the public has seized it. Most of the people I know get their news from individual bloggers rather than the mass media these days. Seeing how media has evolved over the last sixteen years I wonder at Ruggiero's and Sahulka's optimism. They seemed to think a public run media would automatically be fair and unbiased, which we all know is bullshit. Individuals have agendas just like corporations and political parties. And I wonder what they think about the way social media has become a self-marketing tool as oppose to a way to disseminate objective information.

Though the GenX Reader felt very fragmentary it did convey, however inefficiently, a few of the defining characteristics of Generation X: distrust of the media, advertising, and government, disinterest in politics, faith in realism as oppose to idealism, a deep love of pop-culture, and a healthy respect for sarcasm and irony.

Still, much of it sounded like your run of the mill youthful self-absorption: "We don't believe in labels," "Adults don't understand us," "Institutional anything is BAD, "Damn the man! Save the empire!" The authors, most of whom would probably hate me for saying this, sounded like the boomers in their youth, mouthing off against corrupt government, social and economic inequality, and demanding that adults give them the respect they "deserve." In retrospect, gen xers weren't nearly as original or revolutionary as we thought we were.

The same night I finished the book I stumbled across this blog post in which Maddie Grant poses the question "Has Generation X sold out?" The comments are kind of hilarious, full of gen xers trying to prove they haven't "sold out" by taking comfortable jobs and starting families. Though, a point that gets brought up again and again is that "selling out" isn't so much about choosing to live a conventional life but failing to stay true to yourself. Another good point brought up in the comments is that we define each phase of our lives differently, and what was true of us as young adults isn't necessarily going to be true of us during midlife. To evolve from rebellious youths into responsible adults is a natural shift. The boomers did it, gen x is doing it, the millenials will do it. There's no avoiding it. We are all destined to end up in rocking chairs with the television volume cranked to eleven complaining about "these kids today."

Moving on, it's been a while since I last posted poetry by anyone other than myself, so here are two really awesome poems that recently won my heart. A couple weeks ago I finally read "Unmentionables," Beth Ann Fennelly's third full length book of poetry. It was okay; I still think "Open House" is her strongest collection. Even so, "Unmentionables" contains some really great work. My personal favorite is the first poem, "First Warm Day in a College Town." As I read it all I could think was "Oh my God, this is exactly how I feel." Check it out.

And a couple months ago I stumbled onto "The Seven Deadly Sins of Marriage" by Sherman Alexie while reading a back issue of Slow Train. The line "We'd have sex with our books, if only we could" had me in stitches. I think that pretty much sums up the whole writer mentality. You can read it here. It's the second poem down on the page.

*looks up at all she has written*

Hmmm.

I guess I had more to say than I thought I did.

Six weeks ago there were twenty-two books in my "to read" pile. Now, there are only ten :-) I aimed to reduce the size by one-third and wound up cutting it in half. I am very proud of myself. Sure, most of the books I read fell somewhere between "eh" and "please shoot me now" on the enjoyablity scale, but I accomplished what I set out to do so, really, who cares?

The best book from the pile: A Mercy by Toni Morrison
The worst book from the pile: The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Shadow Souls by L.J. Smith

Now I have a small mountain of books I need to get rid of. I only have enough shelf space in my apartment to accomadate about five hundred. That may seem like a lot, but for a voracious reader like myself that's tiny. Since I can only afford to keep the books I really, really, REALLY love, I'm constantly weeding my collection, tossing books that have failed to leave a lasting impression on me. The current batch mainly consists of romance novels left over from my exploration of the genre, and old new age books I no longer want. I'd post a book grab entry like I used to in the old days but most of these books are so bad there is no way I'd pawn them off on people I like. So, I'm joining all the various book swap websites and seeing if I can pawn them off on strangers. I've been a member of chancexchange for years, and last night I joined Paperback Swap. If I can't move all my books through those channels I'll join Book Mooch and Bookins. And, if all else fails, there is always ReLITNY.

Changing topics, I realized something today. Of the forty-six people on my LJ friends list only thirteen of them still update on a regular basis. The rest have either stopped journaling or they only update, like, once a year. I used to get at least five comments for every entry I posted. These days I'm lucky to get one or two. That is partially my fault. Having filtered and privatized most of my entries I'm not generating much public content, and to most passing visitors it probably looks like my journal has gone dead. I can't generate interest if I'm not posting anything. Not that I plan on changing my posting habits. I'm just saying.

But I miss the community of friends I used to have out here. I miss the conversation. I wish they'd return, but I suppose they've outgrown LJ. It no longer serves their needs. I started keeping on online journal so I'd have a reason to write everyday. I hoped that having an audience would encourage me to do so, and it did. But now, more often than not, I find myself talking to myself out here. And even though there are times when that's exactly what I want to do, there are other times when I want interaction. How do you sustain a public writing practice when you have no audience?

Yesterday sucked big, fat, low-hanging cow balls. Here is why:

1) I was running on about three hours of sleep.

2) When I got home from work I discovered there had been a water main break on my block and the water in my building had been turned off.

3) When I turned on my computer I discovered it had somehow become infected with malicious spyware that I then had to spend all night trying to get remove of even though all I wanted to do was fall down and sleep.

Thankfully though, I DID end up getting seven and a half hours of sleep, the water came back on at midnight, and I think I finally wiped out that spyware this morning. Tonight I need to back up all my computer files and see if I can update some of my anti-virus, malware, and spyware programs.

Oh, and I need to do laundry. Tonight is all about the bed linens.