I have the Gin Blossoms in my D: drive… Congratulations I’m Sorry, I believe… I’d meant to throw in their first CD instead (the one where nearly every track was a hit, I’m shallow that way) but this one isn’t bad. I’d listened to it once when I bought it, hadn’t liked it much, and had tossed it towards the back of my stacks, but hearing it now, I probably should have given it more of a chance.

My pathetically few regular readers should make an effort to check out Ask A Bastard!, a sort of greatest hits I put together from my brief lived parody advice column of a few years back. I reread it a few days ago and it’s still pretty funny, even after I changed all the mean Kurt Busiek fat jokes (to mean Sam Kinnison and David Crosby fat jokes). It’s a bit dated these days (a lot of the TV shows it refers to have long since bitten the dust, for one thing) but it’s still pretty hysterical, I think. Take a gander, you’ll probably enjoy it. (Okay, now put the gander down again, that farmer has a gun.)

Not much news here. I walked up to the bank today and got out $200, stopped and chatted with cuz in law Mel for a little while on the way back here, then gave Paul $150 for next month’s rent (I just love typing that… $150 FOR NEXT MONTH’S RENT!!! IS THIS PARADISE OR WHAT??? I am now officially white trash). Which delighted him, since, wastrel that he is, he promptly turned around and rented some street basketball game that he and Pat have been wanting to play. In a burst of welcome but unexpected consideration, Paul actually took the late night posse next door to Jeff’s to play the game, apparently being aware that I’d dozed off in my room about ten p.m. tonight.

I’d pretty much despaired of the Claritin working after a mostly sleepless night last evening, and had gone ahead and taken another tablet around 8 this morning, which finally seemed to let me nod off around 8:30. I slept until around 2:30 in the afternoon, I think… something like that… then got up. I’ve been relatively clear headed all day, though, and as I said, I dropped off for about three hours at 10 p.m. before getting back up again, so maybe the stuff just has to build up a bit in your bloodstream. I hope that’s true; my allergies have been killing me. I’d welcome some relief.

It’s been three days since I got any email at all other than spam, and honestly, it’s just annoying. I used to have regular e-correspondents and I don’t think I owe them any email… I’m not sure, though. If so, it must be from before my move; the move itself happened so fast I might have let something slip through the cracks. I should go back and look at my local Juno directories here on the C: disk and see if there’s something I didn’t answer from Hartmut, or something.

It could just be that all my regular correspondents post comments to the blog now, though. I’ve noticed Hartmut is doing that more, these days.

Actually, okay, I’m lying, a couple of days ago Hartmut (speaking of him) dropped me a note that was little more than a link to some other blog, where the author was having a jubilee because his web novel had been picked up by a major fantasy publisher, apparently without him ever submitting it. According to this lucky lucky BASTARD, one of the big name liberal political bloggers is actually an editor for TOR or ROC or some such. So, lately, I’ve started hanging comments on this editor’s blog… hell, if I’d known he was an editor at a fantasy publisher, I’d have been kissing his ass shamelessly for months now.

As with my own blog here, I’d really stopped doing the political comments thing on other people’s blogs, because if I do that on conservative blogs, I get a lot of death threats, and if I do it on liberal blogs, well, those people are smarter and better educated than I am and they slam me on my factual errors. And, sure enough, two comments on this big name political blog and I’m already getting called on my ignorance (apparently, one simply DOES NOT BRING UP Nazi Germany references on political blogs these days; people get UPSET with you). My historical knowledge mostly comes from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Barbara Hambly, Robert Heinlein, and SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOES comics, so it’s easy for me to make embarrassingly stupid factual mistakes when I get into the rarified and erudite political blogging stratosphere. A few people beat me up pretty bad for it. But I’ll hang in there. If this guy follows my links, skims my novels, and buys one, it’s worth any amount of bitch-slapping I might take. No way for me to control that, but it worked for someone else, so you never know, right?

Of course, that particular editor in chief is probably reading this right now and getting aggravated with me for being so manipulative, but… hey, dude… 41 year old wannabe pro writer with 7 unpublished novels (and that’s the LEAST of it) here. I’d do considerably worse than start getting pummeled on a political blog to slyly get an editor’s attention if I just had the chance.

If said editor IS reading this right now, I’d like to point out that the fact that I’m an ignorant idiot politically doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t write a good fantasy/SF novel…

I just switched CDs and put in the first Gin Blossoms disc. No reason to tell you that other than verisimilitude, I guess.

One thing I failed to mention in last time’s review of Buffy Season 4 was how interested I was to hear several of the commentary tracks mentioning how influential Alan Moore’s Promethea had been on Joss over the course of the season. Now, I don’t think we should really blame Promethea for the bad points of the season, so let’s just give Moore credit for all the good stuff, and move on.

MALL BRATS

I watched Mallrats today. Every single review I ever read of the film, and every opinion anyone ever gave me of it, led me to believe that this was something truly horrendous… not quite on a Superman IV: Quest For Peace level, but still, a staggering cinematic grotesquerie useful only for inducing projectile vomiting in unwanted relatives and acquaintances who just won’t shower.

Within that context of expectations, I was surprised to find myself enjoying a lot of the movie. Oh, anytime Jay and Silent Bob are on screen it’s pretty much a necessity to find the fast forward button ASAP; in fact, visions of Clarence Boddicker from ROBOCOP using a Cobra Assault Cannon on Jay, at the very least, kept dancing in my head whenever I inadvertently let him get a line of (really obnoxious) dialogue out through being too slow with the remote (an ED-209 hosing him down with M-50 bullets and then firing a rocket or two into his bleeding remains also may have made a visual appearance in those fantasies as well; I TRULY loathe that character).

But for the most part, the rest of the film is perfectly acceptable video fare, especially given I was watching it for free. Ben Affleck is in it, granted, but he plays a loathsome creature indeed, which I always enjoy; the only thing the movie really needed was a scene where mutant bikers from some weird post-Apocalypse timeline showed up and beat him into scrapple before dragging him off behind their bikes to be their toadie-bitch.

As far as I can see, the reason so much opprobrium got heaped on this movie is that apparently, a lot of serious movie critics watched Clerks and thought it was something really brilliant and off the wall and avante-garde. I gather they must have figured that the unknown writer/director Kevin Smith must be some kind of guerilla genius at slacker social satire, and only the nearly non-existent budget, the vestigial talents of his non-actors, and the pretty much microscopic production values had kept his brilliance somewhat muted. Give this guy a hundred million dollars and some real stars with real talent, their musings must have gone, and he’d give us a post-post-modern/retro/grunge Apocalypse Now for suburban tract house dwellers.

Apparently, Mallrats was not at ALL what they expected from the entirely hypothetical Kevin Smith they’d created entirely within the shallows of their putative minds.

However, I’ve seen (and pretty much loathed) Dogma, and I’m very aware that Kevin Smith, while he’s probably a genuinely nice fellow I’d really enjoy hanging out with for an afternoon talking comics with, simply has no vague clue how to direct a goddam movie. The lousy cam-corder quality of Clerks forces one to make allowances, but while George Romero’s sheer raw directing talent still comes through in low budget stuff like Night of the Living Dead and Martin, Smith simply doesn’t have any to be brought out by bigger budgets and better production values. He does write some really funny stuff (sporadically, as I say, a lot of his material doesn’t work for me at all) but when he’s given a budget and some big name marquee stars to speak his lines and act out his storylines, it pretty rapidly becomes obvious… this guy is simply a fanboy who got phenomenally lucky.

I mean, who among us geeks wouldn’t kill to have Kevin Smith’s life? I don’t know if he actually sleeps with actresses, but I’m sure he could if he wanted to. He gets to write pretty much any superhero comic he feels like (a specific form of access I personally would at least maim for), and apparently can at least get major Hollywood producers and talent to take his calls if he wants to pitch another movie project. Now, I grant you, he’s also friends with Ben Affleck and that’s not something that I can easily forgive, (if I had access to Ben Affleck I’d most likely drown him in his own toilet) but overall, he’s living the life… the problem with Mallrats mostly seems to be, Smith is just not a very good movie director, and after Clerks, most reviewers really thought otherwise.

While a lot of the alleged humor in the film is simply way too vulgar and crotch (or anus) driven for me to enjoy, still, there’s an almost charmingly naïve innocence about movies like this, and Smith’s other similar celluloid fodder like JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK. Our world is going straight to hell in, well, whatever container you may have closest to hand, and that’s never been more evident than it is now, and yet, we still have movies like this one, in which a bunch of emotional retardates spend an enormous amount of energy doing little more than trying to patch up their emotionally retarded relationships with slumming hotties Claire Forlani and Shannen Doherty. It gives you faith… in something, I’m not sure what… and hope… again, for something I can’t quite articulate, and am not sure I’d like if I could… the enduring power of vapidity and mere mundane existence, I guess. As long as there are movies in which Silent Bob swings on a rope and Joey Laurence Adams shows us her lovely tits for no reason at all, the terrorists haven’t won. I guess.

Paul, who is a devoted Kevin Smith freak (sad but true) tells me that Kevin really regrets the brief and utterly gratuitous topless scene with Joey Laurence Adams, and, well, I have to say, Kevin, if you’re going to make mediocre slacker comedies about pop culture full of hotties both well known and obscure, and then feel guilty when you strip ‘em down on camera, well… first, you must be gay, so stop equivocating about it and start dating men, dude. And second, shape the fuck up. We straight geeks want tit in our films, big guy. If you’re going to be living the life of Riley, writing whatever comics you want, banging Ben Affleck and Jeremy London, cashing that Hollywood movie check every single week, and directing really really bad movies, the least you can do is give us some female full frontal in every single film. Consider it your duty to your fellow geeks who are still struggling on the underside of the downslope, and stop whining about it.

Conversely, you could just send me my Hollywood movie check, and I’ll shut up and let you direct whatever the hell you want.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.