The Luxury Yacht Review

BEAR FLAVORED

2011-08-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Luxury Yacht Review Readers,

Dear People Who Stumbled Onto This Page from Russia or Possibly a Wealthy Nordic Country While Searching Google to Research Your Next Luxury Yacht Purchase,

I have a new blog. It is called Bear Flavored Ales. It is about beer. Beer reviews, the beer industry, and homebrewing. I would love for you to visit it. That address is, again, www.bear-flavored.com.

I will update it a great deal more frequently than I ever updated The Luxury Yacht Review.

I may still update the Luxury Yacht Review every now and then, should the need arise.

But mostly, www.bear-flavored.com.

Thank you,
Derek

BEAR FLAVORED ALES: CITRA IPA

2011-07-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

As much as I love making beer, my true
strength is as a food photographer, clearly.

Citra IPA ver. 1
6% ABV / 90 IBU
brewed on June 3rd
age at tasting: 7 weeks

2.5 gallon batch

Grains: 0.3 lb cara-pils / 0.25 lb wheat
Malts: 3 lb extra light DME / 12 oz clover honey
Hop Schedule:

1 oz centennial @60

0.5 oz citra @15

0.5 oz citra @0

1 oz citra dry hopped

Yeast: Wyeast American Ale II

If you don't care about any of my rambling preface, feel free to skip down a bit. I'll mark where the actual review starts and the explanations / backstory / bullshit stop.

So here we are, the very first completely Bear Flavored ale of my own design. While my peach hefeweizen was sort of an original creation, the base hefe recipe was taken from Brooklyn Homebrew and simply adapted to my needs. This, though, isn't based on any recipe whatsoever, just my own whims.

Here's the inspiration: the world of beer is a magical, growing world. IPAs have been especially fun in the last 20 years, because unlike other ingredients used in alcoholic beverages, new hops are being developed all the time, creating totally new, unique flavors. One of the newest and most interesting breeds of hops is called "citra," and since it was just created in 2008, not many breweries have had a chance to work with it yet. But after trying a few beers that used it, and reading descriptions online, I knew I had to give it a try. Citra hops have this unbelievably potent aroma — it's a nice hoppy smell, but with hints of mango and peach. It's... amazing. I want candles made of it. I want clothing made out of it. And obviously, I wanted to use it in some beer as soon as possible. So it was time to design an IPA around it.

I read from a number of homebrewers online that citra isn't great as a bittering hop, despite its relatively high alpha acid content, and might lead to some weird flavors instead of the nice clean bitterness I wanted. I decided to use centennial as a bittering hop instead, as it met all those qualifications — mid-level alpha acid content, floral fruity qualities, and a clean unaggressive bitterness.

Here's where I screwed up a bit. It's summer, I needed to ferment my beer at reasonably cool temperatures, and therefore, the beer needed to fit in my temp-controlled mini fridge. So I started brewing smaller 2.5 gallon batches. And for half sized batches, I figured I could mostly just cut the amount of ingredients in half, with a few adjustments. For an IPA, I'd want about 5 or 6 ounces of hops per 5 gallons — here, I decided to use two ounces of hops in the boil and another ounce for dry hopping. I didn't consider that I just couldn't split things in half like that without also adjusting the timing of the hop schedule. True, I was only adding a total of two ounces of hops to the boil, but I was still adding a full ounce of centennial at sixty minutes, and with half as much wort, that led to far greater hops utilization. Long story short, when I put my recipe into some brewing software, I realized I had brewed an IPA with 91 IBUS. Most IPAs land somewhere around 50 to 70 IBUS — 91 is hitting imperial range. But Imperial IPAs usually have double the malts too, to give them enough sweetness to balance things out. I was using pilsner malts with very little of anything that would add malty sweetness. In fact, I was purposefully trying to go in the complete opposite direction from my first, recipe-based IPA, which was way too malty. I had brewed this IPA to be as dry and hop-focused as can be. Whoops.

Well, my first taste of the beer after a week of aging confirmed what I feared — there was absolutely no sweetness, and it was incredibly bitter, dry, and tart. It was a lot like drinking grapefruit juice. I liked it, but I knew it was absurdly unbalanced and only major hopheads would enjoy it. Then I let it age for another two weeks, before trying another bottle.

Actual Review: You'll hear it a lot from homebrewers, but what an incredible difference just a few weeks of aging makes. This IPA went from an overwhelming bitterness that washed out any other flavors, to a dry-but-smooth, super citrusy west coast style IPA. Don't get me wrong, it's still unbalanced. It's still bitter, but somehow, the bitterness seems smooth and fairly refreshing now. I'm actually really happy with this one. I like IPAs on this end of the spectrum, and it has a good amount of fruitiness to make up for its lack of sweetness. It's smooth and drinkable and extremely hoppy. It doesn't taste exactly like any other IPAs I've had, but there's no weirdness to make it unique in a "Oh huh... that's... different" kind of way.

This won't be my go-to IPA recipe, obviously. It fits a particular whim, but it also doesn't really satisfy what I was trying to accomplish — an IPA based around the strong, unique character of citra hops. After recently discovering a few other breweries with citra IPAs (and you can read those reviews here) I've concluded that maybe citra hops are just very difficult to make taste the way they smell. I know it can be done, because I've had at least one beer like that. But most citra IPAs have a unique taste that isn't necessarily directly fruity — the fruitness is there, but alongside something else. My IPA, unlike those others, took on more of a grapefruit flavor, wrapped around some tasty citrusy hop flavors. Citra creates a very interesting mouthfeel, but I think the trick to getting those strong aromas to come out is a massive amount of dry hops. In this case, I obviously leaned a lot more toward a bittering hop profile, and that clearly took over. I'd like a citra IPA to have modest IBUs, I think — otherwise, citra may as well be any number of other American hops.

Future Revisions: In this case, having ordered extra citra hops, I ended up brewing a version 2.0 not long after this one, so I'll already have a comparison in a few weeks. I actually didn't change that much for the second version, and I still kind of messed up the IBU calculations. Number 2 is end-hop loaded instead of front hop loaded, though, so there should be some differences. We'll see. Other than that, I guess I would just tweak my recipe to make it more "balanced," with maybe gold malt extract instead of extra light DME, even less bittering hops, and at least double the amount of dry hops.

SOME OTHER CITRA IPAS, REVIEWED

2011-07-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

Kelso IPA #4 — B+
Mikkeller Single Hop Citra IPA — B+

Kelso Brewery is one of New York City's few true "local" breweries — by which I mean, they actually brew everything here and don't outsource the majority of the work to Utica. (In fact, they contract brew for Heartland Brewery, which is oddly one of the few brewpubs in NYC. For a city with so many hipsters and beer nerds, it's sad that we're so lacking in actual beer production.) Anyway, despite their legit local cred, you tend not to see Kelso's brews all that many places — they seem to have a small fraction of the distribution that Sixpoint enjoys. So when I saw that they were brewing an IPA remarkably similar to the IPA I was attempting, I was like "Hey, that's cool." I don't know anything about what went into this IPA other than its hop profile (nor do I know the hop schedule) but nonetheless, Kelso's IPA #4 was a citra-centered ale with cascade and centennial hops backing it. And that is essentially what I did — cascade and centennial are considered extremely similar sister hops, with centennial having a higher alpha acid content, and therefore being most often used as a bittering hop. Which is what I did, though I didn't add in any additional cascade. So anyway — sounded similar; I had to try. Of course, if you've read my assessment of my own beer, you know that it didn't come out anything like your typical, balanced IPA.

I'm not at all surprised that Kelso's citra IPA and Mikkeller's Citra IPA taste nothing like mine, but it is bizarre how little either IPA tastes like what I expect from citra. See, actual citra hops, before they're put into beer, have this remarkable, incredibly fruity mango/peach flavor, but from something that's still distinctly hoppy. It really might be one of my favorite smells in the entire world. I expected citra hops to taste like this once added to beer, but they don't, really. Both Mikkeller and Kelso's citra IPAs taste pretty similar, with what I'm guessing was a more-or-less comparable amount and variety of malts. Both are sort of malty and sweet, as far as IPAs go, similar to other east coast IPAs. Oddly, I think citra benefits from a beer that isn't too sweet, and definitely not too malty. Both seemed like they would have gained from being lighter, letting the juiciness of the hops shine through. Or maybe — as I might have learned from my own citra IPA — citra comes out as kind of tart and grapefruity when it's allowed to contribute to the bitterness. If Kelso and Mikkeller wanted to avoid that, I can see why they would have gone darker. As I concluded before, I think citra is best used, and certainly most unique, as an aroma hop.

As a flavor hop, it's still kind of different in a way I can't quite explain. It still has some fruitiness, but the flavors are all melded together into this rounded, very smooth taste that somehow also has a sharp bitterness at the same time. It's interesting and unexpected, but it's hard to pick out or describe individual flavors. It creates an IPA decidedly unlike other IPAs, and yet it's not as bursting with flavor as I would have expected, or hoped. So, pro's and con's, I guess. It's definitely still a fantastic hop, and both of these beers were among the better IPAs I've had recently. I don't remember either specifically enough to review them individually, but I tasted them a few days apart and was definitely left with the impression that they were quite similar. Single-hop IPAs usually have a hard time achieving complexity, for obvious reasons, so the fact that these were quite good — judged against their general style — just makes me want to see citra used in more creative ways.

A WHOLE ****TON OF IPA REVIEWS

2011-07-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Weyerbacher Hops Infusion (PA) — B-
I think hops tend to fall into about four approximate categories: citrusy (and juicy), spicy, piney (which can blend into spicy), and floral (which can blend with piney.) Weyerbacher's IPA embodies the spicy end of the spectrum, with a very dry, spicy, and slightly piney taste. The bitterness is extremely prominent, with little in the way of sweetness rounding it out, and the spicy character of the hops themselves lending to a consistent mouthfeel and dry aftertaste. If you love hops doing that kind of thing, then this is an IPA for you. Personally, not being a huge fan of spicy dry hops, I'd rate this one as average, though it's good for what it is.

Ballast Point Sculpin IPA (CA) — B+
While I don't know that I'd consider this one of the best IPAs I've had, I can see why Sculpin is often mentioned amongst the top tier of IPAs in the country. It's not overrated, it's just a quintessential IPA that's perfectly executed. It's a little dry and not quite as juicy as I'd like, but I suspect if I had this beer fresh, on tap somewhere, it would be more impressive. As it is, the bitterness is a bit monotone, but tasty nonetheless. There's a nice clean grapefruit taste that accents the light-body lack of sweetness. I don't mind unbalanced IPAs — I like the west coast style because I prefer that they not be overly malty — but I am honestly surprised at how unbalanced Sculpin is, tending toward that dry-mouth bitterness. I would certainly get this one again, though I doubt it'll ever enter the ranks of my all-time favorites.

Great Divide Titan (CO) — B
For an IPA, this beer is intensely smooth and malty, and tastes a lot more like the English variations of the style than what you'd expect from a Colorado IPA. I could be mistaken — or maybe I just got a weird bottle — but I thought Titan sported the unique taste of British yeast, something you don't find much from that part of the US. There's a definite hop kick to the aftertaste, and a bitterness that lingers on the tongue, but otherwise you could convince me that this was a nice creamy Scottish ale. It's tasty though, and a nice unique blend of styles. Even though I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, I wouldn't mind drinking Titan on a regular basis.

Ithaca Flower Power (NY) — A
Flower Power is one of the driest east coast IPAs that I've had; it seems much more like a west coast beer. And it really lives up to its name. Floral and crisp and light in color like a thick golden pilsner, it's shocking to find that Flower Power packs an 8% ABV. Yet as drinkable as it is, the hops are still what sells this IPA. Flower Power embodies the floral side of the hop spectrum, with enough of a hint of pine and citrus to balance things out. It works well for the beer, especially given its crisp body and mouthfeel. Well done in every way, Flower Power is probably in my top 3 IPAs.

Lagunitas IPA (CA) — A+
This is one of those rare cases where a beer is ubiquitous not just because the company has excellent distribution — although that's probably most of the reason — but also because it's just an all-around excellent (and sessionable) beer. Not that I was paying much attention at the time, but I remember this IPA as one of the first that got me into the style. (And thank god for that; what did I even drink before I became a hophead convert?) It's no wonder to me now. After sampling nearly every IPA I can get my hands on, I keep coming back to Lagunitas as my perfect IPA — perfectly bodied, pleasantly bitter, with mouth-watering citrus / floral / juicy hop flavors. It's everything I want in a beer, and it looks beautiful too. Now, don't get me wrong, I know it's not a very adventurous IPA. But we all need a beer we can come back to anytime, and easily kill a sixpack of, and right now, this is it for me.

Stone IPA (CA) — A-

The hops here are focused on a nice clean bitterness, and only as it warms, on certain sips, do the juicy citrus hops shine through. In another words, this is a pretty quintessential west coast IPA, fairly similar to Sculpin. It's lighter, though, and despite the very present bitterness, it's still quite flavorful. One of my favorites, though I can't think of much else to say about it. Stone knows their way around hops.

Victory Hop Devil (PA) — B+
If east coast IPAs are more your thing, this should probably be one of your go-to beers. Well balanced between malty, hoppy, bitter and fruity, this a great representation of the style, probably one of the best. Since I like my IPAs a little less malty, I'm not sure if I consider this one of my favorites. I can't really pinpoint anything remarkable about it, just that it's good.

Butternuts Snapperhead (NY) — B-
This is a quirky little beer, and not just because it's one of the first IPAs I saw appear in (and only in) cans. Despite its billing, this one doesn't seem much like an IPA; I'd say it's like a cream(y) ale mixed with a pale ale. Judged by those funky hybrid standards, I thought it was pretty good: it's beautiful, creamy, and drinkable, with a pleasant mouthfeel that brings traces of hops, citrus and smooth light maltiness. Don't quote me on this, but I believe I also detected British yeast, adding to the smoothness of the beer's profile. If you're a hophead, this might not be your thing, but it's a decent beer for what it is.

Southern Tier IPA (NY) — B+

While nothing groundbreaking or particularly unique upon first taste, this is one of few IPAs I've had where I can really pinpoint the melding of various hop flavors (without it being jarring or weird.) At first, it seemed not unlike the Lagunitas IPA, as it's the same color and achieves the same almost-creamy smooth mouthfeel, with light malts, a darkened gold hue, and a nice floral/citrus aroma typical of the style. But this one is less juicy or fruity, and actually has a lot of those spicy / peppery hops kicking around. Which sort of masks the fact that this one isn't very bitter — hoppy, but not that bitter. This isn't my favorite combination of hop-types, but it's very well done.

Redhook Long Hammer (WA) — C+
Long Hammer's main selling point is its price — sixpacks are usually a few bucks cheaper than any other IPAs in the beer aisle — so I wasn't expecting anything great here. In that sense it met my expectations, and it's not bad per se, it's just a little... wonky. The hops don't seem to be quite balanced right, and don't quite blend together. The maltiness is a little off and the carbonation, rather than making the beer pleasant to drink, seems to add a bit of a weird metallic bite. I can't tell if this is the result of capable brewmasters just trying to make an IPA that's more affordable — which is fine, really — or an IPA that for whatever reason didn't come together right, but got released anyway. While I thought it was drinkable, I probably wouldn't buy it again unless I was feeling particularly cheap.

Sixpoint Bengali Tiger (NY) — B

I've had Bengali Tiger various times on tap, but since Sixpoint just released their four main beers in cans, I figured I needed to include their IPA in this roundup. It's a nice blend of the various 'types' of IPAs, with a bit of citrusy, spicy and floral joined together, but not quite as malty and sweet as many east coast IPAs. It makes for a nice well-rounded beer, but also an IPA with nothing particularly distinct going on. Beers like this are great when you're out at some generic bar, and it's likely to be one of the best things on tap — but nothing I'd stock my fridge with on a regular basis.

21st Amendment Hop Crisis (CA) — B-
Technically, this one shouldn't really count for an IPA roundup, but I've sort-of been collecting 21st Amendment's line of interesting cans and badass boxes — which, I have to admit, are usually superior to the beer they contain. Fittingly, Hop Crisis is an okay Imperial IPA, but nothing particularly special. The ABV is on the high end of the spectrum even for the style, at 9.7%, despite the smooth golden color the beer pours. While it's light, it's also a bit syrupy, and the alcohol is a bit too warm and noticeable. The hop flavor is nice and juicy, but I could have gone for even more hops. There's very little bitterness, just a nice citrusy flavor that merges into the sweetness. Okay, but underwhelming.

THE SCAR (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

2011-07-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Published 2002, 656 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: A
Poignancy: B+

I've read a lot of China Mieville books in the last year. The Scar is probably the best of the those books, on a technical level, though it's not my favorite. Here, Mieville seems to recognize his strengths while trying a bit too hard to shy away from his weaknesses, creating a novel that is consistently good and often great, yet never quite so stunning or impressive as Perdido Street Station.

The Scar, like seemingly all of Mieville's novels, takes place in a city that eventually begins to shape the plot through its own quirks and circumstances. The Scar is set not long after the events of Perdido Street Station, following an exile named Bellis who had to flee her home following the events of that previous novel. That is the only connection between the two books, really — the events of one set in motion the events of the next, but you could easily read The Scar on its own. Proceeding with the plot summary: Bellis is captured by mysterious pirates, who take her to Armada, a legendary floating city composed of thousands of stolen ships lashed together, existing for hundreds of years as a vagrant metropolis, impossible for anyone to intentionally track down. Of course, the story only begins there. The novel deals with a city of pirates, but the story isn't as topical as that tease-y synopsis suggests — stupid Johnny Depp — as pirating actually has very little to do with the plot. Once Bellis arrives in Aramada, she's soon involved in a complicated conspiracy and a hard-to-explain-without-giving everything-away plot to lead the city into a new era. Shit gets real.

Like with Perdido Street Station, the strength of the novel is all the odd, imaginative stuff that goes down. But Perdido Street Station reads like a fireworks display of creativity, with ideas bursting and arcing away out of nowhere, making little contribution to the plot, yet stunning nonetheless. The Scar is more balanced. The plot unfolds at a steady, well thought-out pace. Everything is well structured. Most of the random ideas Mieville throws out make an obvious contribution to later events in the book. And that's both an improvement and a detriment. The Scar is probably a better novel on a technical level, but it never really blew me away. The plot is more structured, and cleverly executed, there are moments when it doesn't feel quite satisfying. The characters are amongst the strongest Mieville has created, but as I've noticed in his other novels, many of them feel like a tease, as if he doesn't quite know what to do with them once they're there — developed to the point where you'd expect some last development from them that never comes. Mieville is also very distant with some of his plot points in The Scar — in particular the Avanc, which he seems to consciously keep at an arms length from the reader, as if worried he couldn't do it justice.

While not his most sprawling or ambitious work, The Scar is a fantastic novel and proof that Mieville has a deep understanding of his craft, an awareness of his own strengths that allows him to create a chaotic, vast world that somehow seems perfectly organic and tangible. In tone — if not in feasibility — The Scar and Perdido Street Station are perhaps the most realistic fantasy-type novels I've ever read. (Uh-oh, gritty... dark... pirates... vampires... how has this not been made into a movie yet?) Mieville's ideas are so impressive not just because of their variety and uniqueness, but because they fit together like jigsaw pieces, creating something more impressive than any one of them, and somehow, also, creating a rich and compelling narrative.

EMBASSYTOWN (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

2011-06-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

Published 2011, 368 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Embassytown is a good book, an OK sci-fi novel, and a slightly disappointing China Mieville novel, given his demonstrated potential. Of the four Mieville books I've read now (I'm concurrently reading The Scar, but that review won't be up for a few weeks) Embassytown is probably the least-great. Probably, that just goes to show how strong Mieville is as an author. Yet here, he shies away from the those things that previously made him such an interesting, unique writer, even as he seems to embrace the same themes and stylistic decisions that should play to those very strengths. Embassytown, like all Mieville novels that I've read, is as much about the city in which it takes place as any of the other plot components. The city is a character — though here, it never becomes the main character, which is maybe the primary difference.

Embassytown only embodies that theme in its setting, a human ghetto set within the borders of an alien city on a frontier planet — it never really deals with the nature of cities within cities the way Mieville's other stories did. Embassytown is the name of a human colony nested within the city of the Hosts, aliens who speak an extremely unusual language. The nature of language itself, rather than that of cities, becomes the main "character" of the novel. There are two quirks to the language of the Hosts: first, they have two mouths, and so their language is layered, a dual language of simultaneously spoken sounds, thus making it impossible for a human to physically reproduce. Secondly, the Hosts are stuck in some bizarre stage of evolutionary psychology, and are not sentient in the way that humans are sentient, despite having evolved society, cities and complex bio-technology. This is also due to their unique language, which isn't a language to them at all, but manifested thoughts. To the Hosts, their words are not 'words' but simply shared, pure reality; they have not evolved the concept of signifiers or metaphors or language as humans understand it. As a result, Hosts cannot lie; what they speak can only directly relate to the world around them. Also as a result, all other organized language is gibberish to them, including their own when not spoken by another Host. In order to communicate with the Hosts, humans have bred special clones, identical dual ambassadors that are able to speak the dual language as one mind. Eventually, naturally, this tedious and imperfect system causes an upset in the balance between the species. Hilarity ensues.

So Embassytown is about language, more than anything. Every plot development is a result of language. The main character herself is caught up in the concept of language — as a child, she was forced to undergo a sort of performance for the Hosts in order to become a living simile, as the Hosts are only able to refer to things that have actually occurred. Embassytown deals with linguistic playfulness far more directly than any other sci-fi book I've read in the past, yet it makes the theme seem obvious and necessary. With an alien civilization, wouldn't the differences in language dominate everything, every relationship and interaction between those societies? And yet, with this interesting and undoubtedly unique conceit, the book takes on a directness that is simultaneously a great idea and its main flaw. Mieville's strengths are in his imagination, and his imagination seems to be best when he gives himself a lot of material to play around with. Embassytown is so straightforward in the themes it addresses that it misses out on the atmosphere and intrigue that usually go with Mieville novels. This isn't a fault — there's nothing wrong with what's actually there, just the sense of missing pieces that could make the story better. The plot seems weak and thin, and so do the characters. Mieville's past novels generally hinge on some mysterious outside force driving the action, but since it's the characters here who push things forward, their flaws become more problematic. I just didn't buy — or even understand — a lot of the developments in the second half of the novel, because I felt no connection to the characters' logic. Worse, a lot of the characters were wholly pointless by the time everything wrapped up.

Embassytown is still good, purely through Mieville's strengths as an author. While much of the book felt a bit thin and arbitrary, it was also consistently interesting throughout, and raises a few interesting concepts — just not as many as I've come to expect from Mieville, and not handled as well. It's easy to criticize a lesser book by a brilliant author, because they've already established their skill, making it hard to ignore when those talents are missing.

FIRST THREE BEAR-FLAVORED ALES

2011-05-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

Bear-Flavored Pale Ale #1 (26 IBU)
5 gallon extract batch
Grains: 0.5 lb American crystal 20L / 0.5 lb cara-pils
Malts: 3.3 lb light LME / 3 lb light DME
Hops: 1 oz Perle (bittering) / 1 oz Cascade
Yeast: Safale US-05 dry ale yeast
Expectations: I didn't have every high expectations for my first Bear Flavored Ale — capturing the flavor and essence of bears is notoriously difficult. #1 didn't turn out terrible, in the general scheme of things, but it's so far removed from what I was expecting that I am definitely a bit frustrated with it. Basically, this beer is just too sweet. There are so many things that could have affected the outcome, given my limited knowledge at the time of brewing, that I'm already done worrying about it. Mostly, I think the outcome was a problem shared between the recipe I was using and my own techniques. For one, this recipe didn't have much in the way of hops, so they were never meant to pop through in the flavor end. But to make matters worse, I think I let the hops go a bit stale, and I'm also pretty sure that I added the flavoring/aroma hops too early in the boil. The beer came out very bready, kind of thick with a definite yeast flavor. This, too, confuses me. These first two recipes came with dry yeast, which most homebrewers recommend avoiding — so partially, it could be that I wasn't using great yeast. But I also wonder if maybe the fermentation didn't quite go right, and maybe cut out before it was meant to. Since I wasn't taking gravity readings, I have no way to know. Lesson learned.
Taste: If I told you that this was some kind of sweet light brown ale or something, you might not be disappointed. It's not terrible, and some bottles have hit me better than others, but the sweet maltiness is just a bit overboard for my tastes, and that yeasty, bready flavor is never going to seem right to me. I can't say that I've ever had a commercial beer with a similar profile. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid it in the future.
Keeper? No. When I return to brewing a pale ale, I'm going to go for something hoppier, dryer and not as bready. There's nothing here worth borrowing from — just a number of things to learn lessons from. But that's why it was my first brew.

Bear-Flavored IPA #1 (43 IBU)
5 gallon extract batch
Grains: 1 lb crystal malt 60L / .5 lb crystal malt 20L
Malts: 3.3 lb light LME / 3 lb light DME
Hop Schedule:
0.5 oz Kent Goldings @60
1 oz Galena @60
0.5 oz Cascade @45
0.5 oz Cascade @15
0.5 oz Kent Goldings @0
Yeast: Safale US-05 dry ale yeast
Expectations: If you understand what IBU's mean, you'll already realize what I wish I would have known before I brewed from this recipe. 43 IBUs isn't very hoppy for an IPA, and is actually more in line with an American pale ale. Unsurprisingly, this came out tasting like what I expected from my pale ale — except it's still got some distinct yeasty / bready flavor that I can't quite pinpoint, and definitely don't like. I think it's mostly the grains, partly the yeast, and very likely the methods I used during the brewing process. Still — you can at least taste the hops in this one, and while it's much darker and maltier than I would like, it's serviceable.
Taste: There's that something about the flavor profile in this IPA and pale ale that I'm not a fan of. It's not bad, but it has something going on that just isn't right for the style, and maybe not right for ales in general. It's definitely a larger issue than not using enough hops — though in addition, there are not enough hops, so. There aren't any subtleties going on, and while the mouthfeel and carbonation and all that are fine, this beer just doesn't have a whole lot of character. Even the hops are a little bland and generically bitter, from what you can notice of them. Having said that, I do prefer it over the pale ale.
Keeper: I'll likely be brewing IPAs more than any other style, so it's possible that I'll return to something vaguely similar to this. But as with the pale ale, there isn't enough that I like here to base another recipe off of, so I doubt I'll ever tweak this one intentionally.

Bear-Flavored Peach Wheat (Peafeweizen)
5 gallon extract batch
Grains: 1.75 lb wheat malt
Malts: 3.3 lb wheat malt extract / 2 lb extra light DME
Hops: 1 oz Hallertau (bittering)
Yeast: Wyeast #3068 Weihenstephan Wheat
Adjuncts: 3 lb peach puree (added to secondary)
Expectations: For this beer, I finally strayed from a basic recipe kit and set off into Adventureland, so I had high hopes. Unsurprisingly, and reassuringly, I think this is by far the best beer of the three, and inarguably the closest to the expectations of its style. This tastes like a hefeweizen. Whew. There's none of that bready, yeasty flavor that overtook my first two. Of course, few things are ever perfect, and I'm haunted here by one glaring flaw. For some reason, this beer didn't carbonate properly, and most of the bottles I've had so far have been kind-of flat. Sigh.
Taste: I really am shocked at how much this came out tasting like what I wanted. The peach is on the subtle end of things, but you can actually notice it if you know it's there. Instead of an overpowering, sweet flavor, it contributes more of a general fruitiness and a slightly tart, slightly sour profile that I think goes well with the wheat base. Everything together is fairly subtle, with the effect that this tastes like your basic hefeweizen, except not quite. I really came so close here, but I can't quite be satisfied since — and I'm not quite sure how — the priming sugar hasn't quite done its stuff. After two weeks of conditioning, this is still coming out with very little head, and mostly flat. Fortunately this doesn't affect the taste very much, but it does reduce the enjoyability of the beer — and it's annoying. I have no idea why wouldn't have carbonated properly, since I added the usual amount of priming sugar, but wheat beers are generally pretty high in carbonation, so it's sad to see this one so lacking. Hopefully a few more weeks of conditioning will help a bit.
Keeper: Most likely I will keep this recipe around to play with in the future, although it has a few things working against it. For one, peach puree is really goddam expensive, apparently. It cost almost as much for the peach as it did for the rest of the beer, and the flavor is so subtle that I wonder if it's really worth it. (Probably why you rarely, if ever, see any commercial peach beers). While I am enjoying this, I'm not enjoying it significantly more than I would a standard hefe, so it'll likely be a long time before I revisit this recipe. When I do, I may increase the percentage of peach or try to bring out some more unique flavors in order to differentiate it, because, why not?

SOME THOUGHTS FROM A NOVICE HOMEBREWER

2011-05-23T19:31:00.000-07:00

Beer is the greatest thing in the universe, so it stands to reason that you'd want to make your own. Congratulations. You’re basically entering a long, delicious period of forced alcoholism, only you have to work harder at it. If you're curious about the beer-brewing process, and wanted to hear the perspective of someone who just barely knows what they're talking about, then you've come to the right place.

Now, I'm a sucker for the DIY thing, but such activities are rarely entirely practical — we started mass production of consumer goods for a reason, after all, and there are very few things you’ll be able to create more cheaply and more easily than their manufactured counterparts. Sometimes you can make them better. Mostly, you can enjoy just knowing how they’re made, and do something more productive with your time than working on sculpting your ass imprint into your couch as you watch endless reality TV show marathons. It feels good to do something, to make something yourself. And in the case of homebrewing, the result is 5 gallons of beer. That’s 50 bottles. Of beer. After a hard day of work, there's really nothing more comforting than knowing that there is yeast living in a bucket in your closet, farting out alcohol for you to drink.

Still, there are some important questions. Why brew beer, you may ask? A reasonable question, I suppose, if you hate having fun, are a terrorist, or drink wine. In this blogopost, I will attempt to answer this question, and other questions. Why brew beer? In all seriousness, the answer as the same with any DIY venture. It is fun, it makes you cooler and more attractive, and you can make a convincing (if still bullshit) argument that it's educational. And eventually, if you are good enough, you will get beer out of it. (So basically the exact same reasons people learn to play guitar.) However, homebrewing is not necessarily cost-effective, and it's definitely not a time saver — pretty much for the same reasons you wouldn't start a band with the goal of obtaining free music. If you’re going into it for financial reasons, maybe reconsider. You should brew beer because you love beer and want to understand what makes beer so much better than all other available beverages, and also, to impress other dudes with beards.

Probably the first issue anyone is concerned about is cost. The cost of brewing your own beer is a difficult thing to address, but consider that the most important factor is your own mindset. A basic brewkit can be obtained from anywhere between $85 to $150 dollars, but it's very easy to spend twice that after your first few batches on little conveniences here and there. After doing it for ten years, you might have spent a thousand dollars on equipment. It's certainly possible — you can get elaborate keg set-ups and fancy custom-built stainless steel equipment and all sorts of gear for the sake of convenience. But technically, you can get everything you need to brew beer for under $150, maybe even less than $100 dollars. I started by purchasing an $85 dollar equipment kit which had everything I needed to get started. In retrospect, I regret not buying a more inclusive kit, but as a beginner you unfortunately don’t really know what the hell anything is, or how it’s used. I bought a large, 8-gallon aluminum kettle at the convenience store for cheap (no equipment kit that I've seen comes with a brewing kettle, but chances are you don't have anything large enough already sitting around in your kitchen.) Soon after brewing my first batch, I decided a few more things were going to be worth the extra investment. I upgraded my hose with an auto-siphon, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Trust me, you don’t want to have to dick around with physics and gravity and magnets and bullshit like that. After deciding to do a peach wheat beer, I needed a secondary fermenter, so I was back at the homebrew store picking up a hefty glass carboy, which don’t go cheap. And other things — a decent stirring spoon to avoid gross contamination from cook-ware, a funnel, PBW to remove bottle labels, extra sanitizer, extra bottle caps, etc. Plus, once you know you need to start saving up empty bottles, it’s even easier to justify picking up another sixpack at the store. It’s for Science.

Sooner or later, but probably sooner, I’ll very likely pick up more odds and ends. For example: my apartment doesn’t have central AC, and yeast start to get pissy when it gets too hot — like above 75 degrees. (Temperature control, surprisingly, is one of the most important factors to consistent homebrewing. Sanitation is the other. And your recipes, obviously.) While there are ways to keep the temp down on a fermentation vessel, it’s a lot harder to keep 50 or 100 bottles at a reasonable temperature for an extended period of time, especially during a muggy New York summer. I’m currently looking to buy a mini-fridge from some college kid moving out, which wouldn’t be a big investment. The thought of having to give up brewing for the next three months is devastating, since I'm just getting into it.

Still, equipment is more or less a one time investment, and not that much of one. Ingredients generally cost around $30 - $40 for a 5 gallon batch. So, that's not bad. Sixpacks of decent beer rarely cost under $10. Looking at just the cost of ingredients, brewing your own beer costs less than half of what you'd pay for beer of the same style in the store. Of course, there are cheaper options out there — but you'll still probably beat the cost/taste ratio of medium-grade stuff like Yeungling or Lion's Head. PBR and Budweiser will start to edge you out in the price arena, and beers cheaper and worse than that, well, they'll always probably be cheaper and worse than what you can manage. Here is one of the great ironies of homebrewing: lagers are much harder to make than ales for the homebrewer, despite being drastically cheaper (usually) at the store. This is because lagers ferment at colder temperatures and require an extended fermentation process, meaning they require additional equipment and attention. Plus, lagers (especially pilsners) generally go for a much cleaner, lighter flavor that leaves no real room for error. If the concept of 'no flavor' being difficult to achieve perplexes you, consider that a slightly off flavor in a rich, complex beer like a stout will be masked by everything else going on, whereas your Bud Lites and so forth are calculated to have as little taste as possible, thus leaving nothing to mask any fuck-ups or inconsistencies. Weird, but it does make sense. Even crappy beer is still complex, and there's a lot that can go wrong. The Big Guys have multi-billion dollar budgets. They have equipment you will never in your life have access to. They have an automated process that allows them to brew watered-down lite beers very very cheaply. To me, the amount of work necessary to create a "decent" pilsner, a beer that will never approach my favorite IPAs, wheat beers and pale ales, just isn't worth it. If you are a fan of pilsners, you can certainly try them yourself down the line, but the general consensus is that newbies should start out with ales.

For me, the most difficult thing was just understanding what I was doing the first time I brewed. There are a lot of things to manage, and the process can seem long and strange. I still don't fully understand what effect every little detail can have, much less the variations and outcomes of every potential ingredient that goes into a beer. For the first few times, it's going to be easiest to buy a pre-assembled recipe kit. Make sure everything is fresh, and the recipe includes "speciality grains" and hops. (If there are no hops in your recipe kit, you've been sold shit.) Once you're brewing and get past the stress of that first batch, the most difficult thing is waiting to brew again, to perfect what you've learned from last time and try out new ingredients (especially if your last batch was drinkable but not great.) I'm a little tiny bit obsessive, and a perfectionist, so I've been spending hours online reading homebrew forums since I started, trying to pin down basic recipes for ideas I had. Possibly the most difficult but also exciting thing about beer brewing is the sheer, absurd variety of ingredients. You really begin to appreciate how absurdly complex beer is when you're staring at a list of dozens of hops, grains and yeast, all of which have their own specific attributes. There is literally no beverage in the world that can match beer's complexities and subtleties and variations — not coffee or tea or soda or wine or milkshakes. The combinations just within the three main ingredients are nearly limitless — to say nothing of adjuncts — and if you have the right personality, you'll undoubtedly get caught up in searching out new combinations and tweaks. At that point, it can be excruciating waiting to brew your next batch.

Will your beer be good? That depends. I'm not even going to get into all the techniques involved in the actual process, since this post isn't meant to help anyone who's already started brewing. But to summarize, there is extract brewing (slightly simplified) and all-grain brewing (which requires an extra step, and therefore additional equipment and opportunity for errors, but also greater control and freshness). Either way, homebrewed beer has the potential to be as good as anything you can get in the store. I will comment (in another post) on my first few brews, which I can confidently say are not poisonous. One of the most appealing things about homebrewing, to me, is the imagination involved. You can pretty much make anything, from clone recipes of hard-to-find favorites, to wacky experimental beers that no one will want to drink. You learn a lot about beer in the process. If you need a hobby, some way to feel like you've actually accomplished something with your evenings and weekends and blooming alcoholism, it's hard to beat homebrewing for its resulting satisfaction.

HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE (BY) CHARLES YU

2011-05-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

Published 2010, 231 pages
Characters: C-
Writing: B
Plot: C
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Every now and then a book comes along that seemingly every Big Name in the literary world decided — possibly through a show of hands after poetry readings at KGB Bar — to just jump on and overhype. It's a great thing for an up-and-coming author, and I guess I can understand the appeal for an industry type, hoping to toss in their hat before everyone else does, so later they can be all "Hey I called it!" So every year, a few books come out that seem to receive all the buzz. (Side note: this happens in music too, obviously.) Late last year, How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe was one of those books. I first heard its praises sung at my local bookstore. Then, seemingly everywhere. It has a glowing review featured prominently on its Amazon page from an author whose novel I quite enjoyed. Lots of people thought this book was a poignant masterpiece from a new literary hotshot. But still, the literary world was restless. "What did Derek Dellinger think of it?" they asked. A free copy of the book was quickly ushered along to me, all for me to read and ponder and review, before it's due back at the library. Well, ever the contrarian, I'm not quite so impressed as everyone else. There are some interesting ideas here. It's reasonably well written. It's a bit of a third-rate Vonnegut knock-off, which I'm surprised no one else mentioned. "It was okay." - Derek Dellinger.

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is about Charles Yu (hey! that's the name of the author AND the main character!), who repairs time machines for a living. The novel means this in a quote unquote kind of way, because mostly Charles just floats along in between dimensions hiding in his time machine with his dog and his sexy interactive software personality, TAMMY. There is very little repairing. Or interacting. Mostly, Charles reminisces about his dad and his own life and how he sucks. Then a thing happens and he thinks he's trapped in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same events over and over, and the only way to fix things is to reminisce about his dad and his own life and how he sucks. (Could it be possible that time travel and recursive loops are metaphors? I'll give you a hint, it's TOTALLY possible!) And that's pretty much it. I won't spoil anything. Not that there's much to spoil.

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is a slim book, in every way. My main problem was that there just isn't enough to it. Charles Yu is essentially the only character in the entire book, and as a narrator, he's never particularly interesting. He's not funny or clever enough, he doesn't inspire much tension or drama; he barely manages to push the plot forward. The only "person" Charles actually interacts with in the course of the narrative is his on-ship software, TAMMY, who isn't any more interesting than Charles is. (She's an operating system that's become depressed and doesn't think she's any good, like the beginning of an idea Douglas Adams might have had and then forgot to run with.) There's a dog with hardly any role in the story, and then Charles' absent father, who he spends the majority of the novel thinking and moping over, essentially just an emotional MacGuffin.

I mean, okay. It's a story about time travel. I'm not complaining that essentially everything that happens, happens in the "past." But even then, nothing much happens. I suppose a large part of my problem is that I'm entirely fed up with Daddy Issues in entertainment. I have never and will never find Daddy Issues remotely interesting. Sorry. I don't care that your dad didn't love you enough. Being a teenager sucks, I know. Family dynamics are hard and most people felt mistreated by their parents and whatever, yeah, okay. I just really was hoping we could move this whole Daddy Issue business now, in our post-Lost world. But I guess the entertainment industry is never going to give it up.

Too bad this book didn't have any more on its mind, because Yu seems like he has the potential to be a clever writer. There are some good ideas here, some decent writing, even if everything is overly-satured in an air of Literary Poignancy. There are some attempts at humor, and some of them land. But mostly they blend into the whole post-modern air of Too Clever For Its Own Good. In a way, this really does remind me of a third-rate Vonnegut book. Obviously, I love Vonnegut, but the man wrote a ton of books in his career, and sometimes his ideas just got regurgitated, spread too thin. That's what it feels like here — moments of cleverness and insight, but drowned out by the overwhelming assumption throughout that it's all a grand statement on the nature of life and regret and memory and humanity. Really, there are only a short-story's worth of memorable ideas here. I read this book very casually, never more than a few pages at a time, and I found that pace to be indicative of my opinion of it. I never disliked it, I was never bored, but otherwise, it seemed a whole lot more interesting before I actually started reading it.

PERDIDO STREET STATION (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

2011-04-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Published 2001, 710 pages
Characters: B
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: A
Poignancy: A

Perdido Street Station is the most impressive book I've read in a long time. One of the best, too. It's not a perfect book, but goddam does it feel good to be blown away by an author's sheer imagination sometimes. It's why I got into this whole 'reading' nonsense, isn't it?

Last fall, I read China Mieville's The City and the City. It wasn't a perfect book, and the end lacked a certain punch that might have made it truly profound, but it was nonetheless a vividly atmospheric read, dripping with creativity and literary ingenuity. Perdido is another love letter to Mieville's baroque, labyrinthine cities, somehow both gritty, convincing and surreal at the same time. The two books of his that I've read share a similar impact, but Perdido is bigger, more ambitious, and simply better.

Unfortunately, it's not even fair to give a basic plot summary of Perdido Street Station, as the twists and turns the story takes before settling into its main trajectory are a big part of the fun. The back cover blurb is wonderfully misleading, but for good reason, so I'll try to mimic it. Perdido Street Station is sort-of about an unorthodox scientist named Isaac, who finds himself forced into new avenues of research when he's hired by a mysterious foreign visitor to research the mechanisms of flight. Of course, that doesn't begin to explain anything. In the first hundred pages or so of the book, the story seems poised to go in any number of directions, before finally committing to an eerie, thriller-esque plot. And that plot is fine, but it's not actually what makes Perdido Street Station shine. It's the messiness of the whole thing, the many imaginative tangents Mieville is willing to take for the sake of atmosphere and immersion, and the hundreds of seemingly unimportant details he tosses out along the way. The man is apparently a fountain of knockout ideas. Any given ten pages of Perdido Street Station could have formed the whole concept behind another novel, but Mieville somehow finds room for them all here. I cannot stress enough how vividly imagined this book is; it's what I really loved about it. The Weaver, the ribs, the Construct Council, the moths, the Ambassador, Torque and all the rich history that's dished out just for passing conversation — Mieville doesn't seem to mind whether his creations affect the plot for five pages or 500, they're all inventive and interesting and actually suck you into this impossible city.

Because really, this novel is about the city where it takes place more than any one component of its plot. All those details and tangents that seem irrelevant, or tangential, are not. By the end, the city of New Crobuzon seemed more likely and believable a place to me than, say, Detroit. In another, broader sense — embracing the themes rather than specifics of the story — Perdido is about the state of crisis. Multiple disparate events, each as unlikely as the one preceding it, all joining impossibly to propel things forward. Perdido Street Station could have had a very simple plot. If it was made as a movie, it would seem like a standard genre thriller that just happens to have an interesting gothic backdrop. Only a book this long and rambling could capture that theme, the sense that chaos often coagulates in unlikely ways, driven by its very unexpectedness.

Of course, as a messy book, Perdido can't be perfect — just really impressive. I thought some of the plot threads resolved in unsatisfactory ways, and the book is definitely at its best when it's introducing all its inventive ideas, rather than shutting them down toward the end. Still, for a book this dense, it sticks the landing far better than most. The characters are interesting, if not particularly memorable, and Mieville's writing is consistently excellent, matching the tone of this dark-fantasy steampunk sci-fi horror hodgepodge. (A sidenote that I'd like to address, even though it's not directly relevant to the review of the book: Fantasy novels always seem to take place in some technologically frozen world, where society has remained static for hundreds or thousands of years, never advancing beyond Medieval sciences. This is rarely explored or mentioned outright, and I'd love to see some more deconstruction of the reasons for this, other than plot-necessity. It almost makes sense, really: the introduction of 'magic' to a world would confound science, or even replace it. I loved that Perdido Street Station addressed this indirectly, once more tossing off a brilliant idea as if it were nothing. The novel features a society that seems to have integrated what we'd call 'magic' as simply another branch of science, creating an industrial age society that's in many ways as advanced as our own, its wildly multi-cultural society progressing and developing while still laboring under an oppressive authoritarian government. Once again, it's a subtle, creative blend of ideas, where steampunk technology and old-world ideals lead to slightly-weird union labor strikes as often than surreal adventures.)

I rate Perdido Street Station five out of five Orson-Welles-slow-clap.gifs.

THE RUNNING MAN (BY) STEPHEN KING

2011-04-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Published 1982, 336 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B-
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B

It's not terribly important that I decided to pick up the Running Man because I read countless discussions online pointing out its similarity to the currently-popular Hunger Games trilogy, which I read in March. But out of the dozens of novels Stephen King has written — which I will probably never entirely catch up on — that's why I decided to pick up this one just now.

Though nearly three decades separate the publication of the novels, the similarities are pretty glaring. The Hunger Games is an almost perfect synthesis of The Running Man and Battle Royale. Stephen King's 1982 novel is only set in 2025, and as with the best, most convincing near-future sci-fi, not much is all the different — everything is just a bit shittier. The people tune in to a series of increasingly dangerous reality-TV show contests for amusement, run by a sinister government entertainment Network. A man named Richards, desperate for money to save his diseased young daughter, enters into the most dangerous and popular reality program in the country: The Running Man. It's pretty much what it sounds like, a nationwide manhunt which nearly everyone watches, and in which anyone can participate. If Richards manages to survive for 30 days, he's set for life, rich beyond meaning. In the history of the game, no one has ever survived more than 8 days.

So you have the evil corrupt government, the death-game, the reality-TV angle being used to control and manipulate the masses. The main reason I bring up these comparisons is because The Hunger Games utilized that reality-TV angle so poorly, when it was clearly a goldmine idea with a lot of potential. It was never clear who watched or who cared or what significance any of it might have in the world at large. King clears that problem here, making it all feel tangible and believable, with plenty of first-hand demonstration on what effect this reality-TV population control has, and why people in a society like ours might even buy into it. He does this while breezing through the action of the novel, too, integrating exposition with pacing and plot development. It's impressive, and only the beginning of the novel suffers for it, with the first few beats of the story seeming a little rushed and jarring.

The world is convincing, and the story is tight. There's really not much beyond that — like The Hunger Games, this is a lean book and a fast read. (I read nearly the entire thing on a four hour bus ride back to Lebanon.) It's appropriately gritty and uncompromising, and Richards makes for a sympathetic, jaded, smug, noir-ish narrator. I should note that The Running Man was written under King's long-defunct Richard Bachman pen-name, and thus there are some interesting and fitting stylistic differences from King's usual stuff. The prose is much leaner and harder, less folksy and rambling than typical. Richard the character fits Richard the pen-name, and everything fits this grim but sardonic world.

One last thing: that Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name is, in fact, based off of this book. I have never seen it. I doubt it's very similar but I'm curious to check it out. King doesn't pull any punches with the ending, and without changing that part around significantly, this is one story I can guarantee that Hollywood will never be tempted to remake.

IN THE DOLL HOUSE (BY) DANDY LIONS

2011-04-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

Indie / Pop / Gypsy Folk
2011, Self Released
Free Download: Bandcamp, last.fm

I'm always a sucker for male/female vocals, so I wasn't terribly surprised to find the Dandy Lion's songs frequently getting stuck in my head. It's not particularly rare to find indie bands with dual male/female vocals these days, but few bands have such an instinctive knack for shaping songs around the strengths of those vocalists. The brother/sister songwriters behind Dandy Lions — Dante and Lena DeLeo, joined by drummer Ben Goldstein and bassist John Feliciano — don't have the typical voices you'd expect from such a duo, either. Their deep, forceful vocals and stretchy tricks of enunciation add to the unique vibe of this ethereal baroque pop, music that isn't afraid to wear its oddness on its sleeve even as it pushes an unashamed, unpretentious reliance on melody.

At first, I just accepted that the Dandy Lions were going to be much poppier than the dreary stuff I normally listen to. While never depressing, the music is a bit moody — not melodramatic, and less stiff and awkward than other baroque sounding stuff, but there's a bit of a haunted edge creeping in. Songs often come unhinged without warning, devolving into a chorus of shouts and frantic instrumentation, adding an off-kilter sense of unpredictability to what starts out as bouncy upbeat indie-folk. It's frenetic pop music with a surreal edge. Some bands successfully pull off quirk, and plenty of bands succeed with catchy accessibility, but both at once is a much rarer feat. The duality that forms the basis for the Dandy Lion's music somehow allows them to be both — accessible, and yet weird enough that you can't quite pin down whether you've heard anything like it before.

The vocals of the singers – which are themselves just a bit different, and yet entirely natural when balancing each other — provide the backbone. Dandy Lions take excellent advantage of the back-and-forth, male-and-female style, writing songs that compliment both voices, rather than just using one as seasoning for the other. It's fine that most bands with male/female singers write like that: one vocalist dominant, the other joining here and there as a sort of lyrical accent. But these siblings' voices are a perfect fit, and their dependence on this good fortune shapes the album, giving it a sense of confidence and sincerity, a refreshing lack of cynicism and calculated aloofness. Many recent indie bands passive-aggressively embrace their pop aspects, combining semi-catchy melodies with a stuffy twee sensibility that runs the risk of making the music feel stilted, and distant. With the Dandy Lions, there's no awkward over-instrumentation or insecure dancing around the band's poppy nature. Everything contributes: those complimentary dual vocals, the forceful rhythm section, the rarely-dominant but never-superfluous accordion, which compliments the guitar with a similar playful back-and-forth as the musician's vocals, neither one truly leading the other. Goldstein and Feliciano provide genuine, pounding energy to match, pushing the music along at a speed that prevents any chance of it all seeming too-cute.

Bands that focus on melody often focus only on melody, which usually leads to me quickly losing interest. Melody creates catchyness, but melody itself generally doesn't contribute to texture or depth. If the Dandy Lions didn't have a distinct personality — a moody duality and an off-center sense of unpredictability — they would be just another redundancy in the recent surge of quirky indie-pop bands, bands that make up for a lack of interesting songwriting by copping interesting musical trends. But nothing here is trying to be trendy, cute, or desperately different. Dandy Lions let their music carry itself with the confidence that their songwriting is interesting — and it is — rather than propping it up with splatters of semi-interesting flair to support a limp essence. Quirky charm like this works as well as it does because the band — for all their skill — gracefully lacks pretension.

UNIBROUE SIX/MIX PACK

2011-04-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

La Fin Du Monde
With a name like La Fin Du Monde (so badass), I'd almost expect something more aggressive, or darker. Yet Monde is a fairly light example of the style — almost light and citrusy enough to seem like a very yeasty white beer. The smell is a bit strange here, almost too floral for its own good, but the floral fruity yeast taste is pretty standard. Again, there's an almost orange-like flavor at the back-end, but it adds a bit to the smoothness of the mouthfeel. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this triple is how creamy it is — it's really, really drinkable, even at 9%. You definitely run the risk of drinking this one too fast. I don't drink Belgian triples too often, so I feel I'm always a bit off when trying to describe them. The more of this one I drink, the more I'd like to claim it's one of the best triples I've had, but that may just be the ABV talking.

Maudite
Maudite is listed on BA as a Belgian Strong Dark Ale — a strong "amber-red" according to the box — but it'd be awfully easy to mistake this for a double. There's that creamy, bread-like feel to it, and a caramel brown-sugar taste with hints of fruit. The hints of fruit add a sweetness, but muted — everything here is tightly controlled. Perfected, I'm tempted to say. Even the high alcohol adds a hit of warmth, rather than bite. The carbonation compliments the sweetness, and makes this extremely drinkable but not too light. If you like this kind of beer, you'll like this beer.

Trois Pistoles
Halfway through the sixpack now, I'm noticing some trends. Unibroue beers have something characteristic about them, something in the mouthfeel or the yeast. They're all solid — not crazy, or particularly complex, but still tasty and on the drinkable side of the spectrum for such Belgian styles. The lighter, weaker presence of the beer makes them go down easier, even if it sacrifices a bit of complexity. Trois Pistoles is another Belgian Strong Dark Ale, so it's obviously a bit similar to Maudite, and maybe even a little thinner. Thin and light doesn't have to mean it lacks taste, fortunately. This one is sweet, with a sharp burst of that sweetness hitting right away, alongside the malts. It lingers pleasantly and doesn't stick or leave any unpleasant tastes behind. The high alcohol content is extremely well hidden, and there's a nice warmth that hits well with the plum/raisin fruitiness. Unibroue knows what they're doing with these.

Ephemere
I'm glad this one isn't sweet. I expected it to be — I think I may have had all of one apple beer before, and it was as cidery as you'd expect. Not here. Ephemere is almost sour, with a sugary apple taste that's almost like candied fruit, something savory and tart but not obnoxious. It doesn't taste fully natural, and I'm sure there's no way they got this result just by tossing a few apples into the brewpot. Still, even if it doesn't taste natural, it tastes good. There seems to be some kind of wheat-beer base, something light but substantial enough to actually provide backbone. Fruit beers need that, they need to have the taste and mouthfeel of beer, otherwise they just taste like syrup. Ephemere manages a strong but balanced blend of taste and consistency, which can't be easy to do.

MOCKINGJAY (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

2011-03-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

Published 2010, 390 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B

Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy could have gone either way for me after its second installment, the disjointed and choppy Catching Fire. Book one, The Hunger Games, was an unflinching speed-read, even if it wasn't particularly inventive or well written. All those problems came to a head with the middle installment, but Collins makes an impressive effort to right them here. The writing improves, just enough. The plotting improves, just enough. The characters — alright, the characters are still either surprisingly dark or totally bland, but I suppose its forgivable. These books were always about plot, and here again, Collins writes like she knows what she's doing.

After Katniss wins her first Hunger Games, wrapping up the main conflict of the first book, Collins was obviously in something of a bind. The hero of the story needed something to do in the second installment, so Collins had her accidentally spark a rebellion — which, it turns out, is a surprisingly passive role anyway. Still lacking anything direct to do with Katniss halfway through, Collins threw her into a second Hunger Games, which helped to develop the action, but not the story or the outside factors shaping it. Finally, in Mockingjay, Collins figures out what to do with the larger world, forcing Katniss to participate in the war against the Capitol as rebellion sweeps across the land. When the bad guys eventually crumble, it feels inevitable and unearned, but it's still exciting. When Katniss and her pals launch one last huge offense against the Capitol itself, it feels satisfying, like the series is at last achieving what it was meant to, even if it's not doing so in particularly groundbreaking fashion.

The real strength of the trilogy was never Collin's originality, whether in the broad scope and direction of the plot, or the little details that provide the mayhem. At its worst, the series could sometimes feel like a video-game, a series of arbitrary problems with arbitrary solutions that the characters never had to work for. What made the trilogy work — especially as a YA series — is how dark Collins was willing to go, and that's really the case here. Mockingjay gets dark. Never particularly visceral or gory, which would have almost been easier; some of the directions the plot takes are unnerving in a subtler, stranger way, things you wouldn't expect to pop up in a story meant for a younger age group. What makes the plot here stand out — to become maybe the best of the trilogy — is how that sense of darkness and cynicism creeps into the background and tone of the story, creating a world where, remarkably, a battle of rebels against their tyrannical government doesn't just turn into an easy case of good versus evil. It would have been simple for Collins to leave out the shades of gray, but she doesn't flinch. The deeper into the story we go, the more clear it is that there are no good guys and bad guys. While Mockingjay may lack the nuance of social critiques like 1984, it also has the good sense to maintain a completely sincere "trust no one" cynicism.

These unexpectedly dark turns help to conceal what remains one of Collin's greatest weaknesses: the dullness of the series' side-characters. As before, Collin's choices as an author remain more interesting than the choices her characters make. Many side plots end in ways that I did not expect at all, despite revealing nothing new or interesting about the characters making those choices. (The love triangle that strung out through the whole trilogy certainly ends differently than I was expecting, without resorting to cheap melodrama.) Ultimately, the trilogy works as a series of action novels, as long as you aren't expecting anything particularly clever. Here in the last book, Collins must have felt obliged to up the ante and add some craziness, but she just doesn't seem to have the imagination for it. The last third of the book reads like a video game, with a silly, extremely-forced series of challenges set up to provide danger to the characters. The big dramatic climax is something of a let-down as well, and kind of nonsensical — odd, considering how tight the action in the series generally was. Collins can't seem to break out of a certain formula of violent adventure sequences, even when those sequences make no sense to the world she's scripting.

Then there's the whole reality-TV angle the series takes — a major background device that I haven't even discussed before, because I honestly don't know what to make of it. Collins seems to be attempting some sort of commentary on war as spectacle, the role of television in both controlling the masses and inspiring them. The idea is there, the basic framework to draw out some kind of statement, but she just never does anything with it. It sits awkwardly at the fringes of the plot, like that weird college dormmate who would come into your room, sit on your bed, and watch you write from over your shoulder, and you were like, "Hey Zach, did you want something?" But he didn't want anything. He was just sitting there, with nothing better to do, like the reality TV subplot of The Hunger Games. There's the assumption throughout the series that everything Katniss does is going to be televised — first for the Capitols' benefit, because I guess they're into that real horrorshow stuff, and later to keep the rebellion going. But once the Capitol is being invaded, the last battles are being fought, who's sitting at home still watching their TV? And why? Everyone we see is described as poor and overworked. No one, in the entire series, is ever shown even watching a television, or owning one — they're just forced to watch some big screens in the town square when the Hunger Games are being broadcast. It feels like Collins is writing a device for our world, not this one — TV shouldn't have much impact on these characters, and she never even attempts to explain why it would.

With the nature of the world around Katniss so unclear, the actions and directions of the plot seem sort of context-less when you think about them too much. Things just happen because, well, they happen. So much here serves the action, makes the danger momentarily more thrilling, but actually reduces the overall coherency of the book. These issues didn't ruin any one of the books or the impact of the series as whole, but they were bothersome enough to keep anything from really resonating with me. I was entertained, but not particularly impressed. Still — if I had kids, I would give them the series. The Hunger Games trilogy may not answer any profound questions, but at least it sort-of, kind-of raises them.

CATCHING FIRE (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

2011-03-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

Published 2009, 391 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: C+
Plot: B-
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B

I don't really understand how Collins does it, but Catching Fire (aka book 2 of The Hunger Games trilogy) continues a series that is somehow, simultaneously, one of the catchiest yet sloppiest series I've ever read. Random internet visitors who accidentally stumble upon my site while deciding how to spend their government bailout dollars by purchasing a large boat, multiple crates of red wine, and copies of their favorite YA action-adventure series will no-doubt jump down my throat in the comments section for this slight. So don't get me wrong: I'm still plowing through the series like a fat man going down a flume-ride poured with gravy. And I'm definitely still enjoying the ride. These are some catchy books, but Catching Fire begins to form noticeable cracks that irritate the critic in me. The Hunger Games showed signs of those same flaws, but its relentless pacing and well-written action bullied them to the side. Here, facing middle-book-of-the-series syndrome, only a sense of momentum really keeps the novel from falling apart.

Sadly, most of the book's flaws are fairly obvious. Collin's strength is as a plot-architect, not as a writer, but she undermines herself as both here. A good chunk of the story, particularly in the first quarter of the book, is basically told in expository chunks of summary. As a first person narrative, obviously a lot of the tale will be internal musings by Katniss, its main character. But when you're writing around a fast-paced, action-packed plot, its a really bad idea to have half the action happen not only off-screen, but in the past. Katniss spends an awful lot of Catching Fire summarizing what happened in the first book, then explaining events going on in the present that she's just not around for. Other great books have violated that fundamental show-don't-tell principal — specifically, I'm thinking Lord of the Rings, which had a lot of off-screen action summarized neatly for the audience, but only because the world was so big and dense and rich. Everything about the Hunger Games trilogy, on the other hand, already seems sparse. We're never directly shown enough of the world in the first place to make those off-screen events truly resonate. And with Collins forced to move away from the simple brutality of the Games, into the complex political tensions of the Capitol and its districts, I remembered why the running background tensions of longer series like Harry Potter led to a real sense of urgency and in-world reality — because we had time to get attached, to care about places we'd already been to. The tension of the Hunger Games world — the struggle of some peasants against their tyrannical government — rushes through standardized emotions and developments that work mostly because they're so familiar. There's not much to feel here, just a lot to experience.

And fine, Catching Fire doesn't need to be an exquisitely detailed book. I think 90 percent of its charm is its rapid pace, its thin-ness, and a more structured narrative would work against its lightning plot. But the plot of Catching Fire should have been stronger, that's all. When all the summarizing and plot-setup are finally out of the way, freeing the story up to move forward, what does Collins do? Give us a second-half twist that turns Catching Fire into a rehash of The Hunger Games. It does move the plot along, but as fun as it is, the change of pace basically destroys any tension, like there's even less at stake than the first time around just because everything is so rushed. Once again, few side characters are given a chance to develop. And while Katniss herself becomes a more interesting heroine than I expected, the people she bases most of her emotions and actions around never have the chance to demonstrate why. One of Katniss' main motivations in the book is, at least as she explains, saving her younger sister from any more pain. But that sister is only in the book for a few pages — and not many more in the first installment — making her something of an emotional human MacGuffin. Same with Gale, one of the two boys competing for the affections of Katniss. (Rather inexplicably, considering she's a selfish asshole most of the time, but that level of unlikeability is actually one of the most surprising, interesting things about the series.) Gale is never developed, or even really described, as anything more than a handsome, surly teenager, yet this blank slate of teenage hormones drives half the things that happen in the book.

For all its shortcomings, Catching Fire is still an entertaining book. And The Hunger Games trilogy is still a series I would recommend that anyone check out. I should probably be about 14 years younger than I am to fully enjoy it, but I do think it's better — and darker, and more daring — than most of what I likely read at that age. I don't think it will go down as one of the classics. Not unless the movies are gangbuster, anyway.

THE HUNGER GAMES (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

2011-03-10T19:58:00.000-08:00

Published 2008, 384 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A
Poignancy: B

The many thousands of loyal readers of The Luxury Review may have noticed that it's been a long time since I posted a book review. Well, that's because it's been a while since I've been able to finish a book. Pretty sad, I know; I feel nightly remorse about this. These last few months, I guess I just had too much on my mind. Too much stress to detach from my own world and enter another. I couldn't get through anything — dense, intricately-written literary medications were just not appealing to me.

I guess that's exactly why books like The Hunger Games remain incredibly popular.

Usually I don't spend much time writing out a plot synopsis for the books I review. Here, I don't think I really could. The plot of The Hunger Games is literally Battle Royale. Haven't seen or read it? Well, here: Kids are drafted via lottery by the evil government, tossed into a giant playing field and forced to fight to the last-man-standing in a sort of reality TV brutal death game. Our heroine, the unfortunately named Katniss Everdeen, has to try not to die. Boom. It's straightforward. It's short and lean and uncomplicated. It is also, thankfully, riveting.

It would be tempting to say that writing a "young adult" book limits an author, since you can only get away with so much gore and sex and darkness and pain when you're writing for teenagers. But it works both ways, and I think Suzanne Collins made a smart, calculated choice when writing this series for a youngish audience. As a "regular" book, The Hunger Games would be accused of lacking complexity. There's never a sense that there's much out there, beyond the walls of the arena or the simple narrative. Granted, this is just the first book of a trilogy, a trilogy that was planned from the start, so maybe the scope opens up a bit with later installments. Regardless, it seems okay — it's obvious that Collins set out to write this book for a specific audience, so it never feels like she's just being lazy (I'm not saying teenagers all have short attention spans. Obviously, the latter Harry Potter books were gigantic, but books trying to break in to a younger audience are expected to be fast-paced, quick reads, regardless of their length.) Of course, writing a book this fast and lean and engaging takes skill too, just of a different sort than writing dense Pynchon-ian epics. You have to know what to cut, what to leave, and how to make the little material left in your streamlined plot as engaging as possible. Short and lean can still be boring, but not here. There isn't a dull moment or unnecessary page in this whole novel. As simple as the tale is, Collins knows how to tell it well.

So while I found The Hunger Games entertaining, even refreshing, it's not without its surprises. And it's certainly not without weaknesses. Despite what I just said about YA adults not getting away with as much complexity as "regular" novels, The Hunger Games does get surprisingly dark. This is a book about two dozen teenagers forced to brutally murder each other, after all, and Collins doesn't take easy outs even when she could. Some of the scenes in The Hunger Games are genuinely disturbing, despite the characters driving them lacking depth. In other ways, Collins does take the easy way out, tossing in a half-dozen deus ex machinas that she could have easily worked around. The nature of the game itself is sort of a DEM, since the Gamemasters can control everything and anything within the arena, apparently — they control the temperature, the weather, the food, the animals, the water, etc. And this is where the lack of depth in the world at large becomes problematic — when writing about an evil dystopian government, it helps to give them some context, some general clues as to the scope of their powers. Cameras film every move of everyone in this vast forested arena, but no character ever mentions seeing a camera, or any piece of technology at all. (I guess the cameras were some kind of omnipresent nanobot swarm or something.) And while there's suspense, the book remains fairly predictable. The surprises deal more with how than what, since the actions every character takes seem a bit pre-ordained by their generic types. In other words, Collins' choices as an author hold more surprises than any of her characters do.

Still, The Hunger Games is designed to not need context most of the time. It's kill or be killed, and everything is just solid enough to hold up that premise without cracking. Side characters are archetypal, and never have enough page-time to develop the quirks and habits that might make them truly believable. The world, too, is generic, but it's never the focus of the book, so it doesn't matter. Everything here is so focused on what does matter — survival, etc. — that there's no chance to look away, and no point when you'd ever want to.

21ST AMENDMENT BEERS

2011-02-28T20:34:00.000-08:00

Back In Black - 21st Amendment (CA)
This beer has a bit of identity crisis, but as Americans — a hodgepodge mix of those bold immigrants who found refuge here over the years, after rebelling against their imperialist governors and slipping into the sweaty, moist-palmed embrace of democracy — don't we all have a bit of an identity crisis? It's a question that, I can only assume, 21st Amendment is trying to pose with Back In Black, the brewery's black IPA. This style's been popping up a bit more in the last year, but black IPA's are still far from common. And for an IPA, this beer is extremely malty. It's sweet not in the way many double IPA's are, or even 21st Amendment's Bitter American — it's sweet in that slightly-tangy, almost grapefruity way Belgians sometimes are, with hints of coffee and brown sugar. Like a Belgian double got mixed in with an pale ale. The hops are present, but aren't the focus at all, which tips the balance oddly far from bitter. And as dark as it is, the mouthfeel is a bit like a porter, making the combination all the stranger. It might not be for everyone, but I think it works. If I have a major complaint, it's that the overall effect could be a little smoother. The tangyness is a bit much, and it's almost like drinking juice, but it fades quickly enough into sweetness that I never really cared. This isn't a beer you would want to drink a sixpack of all at once, but I enjoyed every one of them on their own.

Bitter American - 21st Amendment (CA)
The can rules. This beer rules — definitely my favorite of the three, easily. I'm having a hard time pinpointing exactly what 21st Amendment's "thing" is. It seemed like maybe they aim for the more experimental side, little subtle differences that compliment the uniqueness of their packaging. Yet Bitter American is just all-around solid. For a pale ale, or even just a hoppy ale, it's very drinkable — an easy session beer for a few reasons. It's well-blended, well-balanced, and slightly sweet, with a more noticeable malts presence. The hops are surprisingly subdued, especially for a beer with "bitter" in its name. It's light and sweet almost to the point of being creamy, and only in the aftertaste do you get a bit of that floral, spicy hoppiness, with a bitter kick that might have some of the aluminum-can taste jumping around. Or that might just be my imagination — you hardly notice it, either way. The ABV on this one is low, so that probably helps. Too bad this is a seasonal, because I'd be quick to drink this all year round.

Fireside Chat - 21st Amendment (CA)
Riding on top of a strong, already-sharp prune flavor, this is the only beer of the bunch where I definitely noticed some metallic flavor lingering from the can. It wasn't significant, and really, it might have all been in my head, or even part of the spices. Those spices end up rising sharply into the aftertaste, making the beer seem initially flat and almost bitter, and later leaving a lot of 'leftover' flavor in the mouth. Regardless, I would not advise drinking this straight from the can — or any of these, for that matter. For the love of god, pour it into a pint glass. At least as Fireside Chat warms and mellows out, the mouthfeel becomes smoother and richer, rather than sharp. This one is a lot like other winter spice beers, similar even to a Belgian double, just without the complexity. Not bad, and perfectly drinkable, but not as interesting as I was expecting.

THIS WILL DESTROY YOU (BY) THIS WILL DESTROY YOU

2011-02-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

Post-Rock / Ambient
2008, Magic Bullet Records
MySpace / Last.fm

More than any other form of entertainment, I think
relationships with music are a lot like relationships with people. Chances are, I'm going to listen to an album I like dozens of times in a year, and there's really nothing else that I interact with to that extent. I might watch my favorite movies once or twice a year, at most. My favorite books? A few times in my life. As with people, I'm surrounded by music constantly, and as with people, that relationship is often complicated and unpredictable. Sometimes you meet someone that throws you off at first, even if you can't pinpoint why. Maybe something about them doesn't quite click with you. Maybe they bore you. Sometimes those people end up being the closest to you, as much as you wouldn't have thought it. Or maybe the opposite — sometimes the most interesting-seeming people turn out to be pretty superficial after getting to know them. It's the same with some albums. It's the reason music means so much to people — it is entirely possible, and only slightly weird, to have a relationship with an album that changes and grows over time. (And while you can't hug or cuddle an album, you can stare lovingly at their album covers in your candle-lit room at night. Not that I've done that.)

I really liked This Will Destroy You's first album, Young Mountain, when it came out. A lot of people accused them of being an Explosions In The Sky rip-off, but I thought Young Mountain was better than anything Explosions had ever put out — less cloying, more dynamic and structured. Then, in early 2008, they released their self-titled, and those comparisons died a quiet death. Sadly, so did my interest. Despite the tongue-in-cheek goofiness of the album cover, their self-titled saw the band dropping most of the song-structured prettiness, moving away from obvious emotional hooks toward expansive ambient soundscapes. Songs still follow a typical post-rock formula, but at an unhurried, linear pace, shrugging off melody in place of texture. All at once, TWDY stopped writing songs that sounded catered to triumphant movie trailers — this album feels like the soundtrack to some actionless, indie Western. It's patient, layered and purposeful, rather than a collection of pretty-sounding tunes. I wasn't very interested in that, two years ago. Post-rock often ignores easy hooks, but this was ambient even at its heaviest. It demonstrated an interesting new direction for the band, but it just didn't hold my attention.

Still, since I didn't dislike the album, I kept it around. About a year ago I started throwing it on every now and then when I needed something droney, something that wouldn't distract me. And I realized something odd. Even though the music didn't quite hold my attention, I still enjoyed it. A lot. Now, I had other albums I kept around as background music. Music that's just kind of there, and nice enough that I don't mind it being there. But TWDY's self-titled was different, somehow. It was engaging, so long as I didn't focus on it too much. This album is a musical Magic Eye — I could see the big picture (a sailboat) only when I let my brain go a bit fuzzy, when I absorbed the album without staring directly at it. And I enjoyed the big picture immensely. All it once it clicked how much this album is right up my alley, with its melancholy warmth and its open, Westerny sense of space. So I kept putting it on whenever I didn't mind zoning out, and it turned out that was pretty often. It put me in an almost meditative mood, and despite the fact that I rarely gave the album my full attention, soon enough I was addicted to it. For an album with few hooks or obvious emotions, I've come to crave the experience of listening to these seven songs, the way they run around you rather than through you, blinking into your attention before dissolving into haze.

Ultimately, the difference between this and other patient, slow-paced post-rock might be little more than tone — which is really what defines post-rock to begin with. Most instrumental bands fall on bright melodies if they want to inspire, or cold, moody guitar-work if they want to depress — obviously. It's easy enough to make that work when your sound is structured around tone. On their self-titled, TWDY doesn't go for those easy emotions. Their tone is almost neutral, evocative without being cluttered or cloying. The guitarwork is felt more than heard. It's as if the music has been stripped of its top layer, the melody that other bands might structure songs around, leaving just the droning, reverby undertow. More and more, bands like Explosions In The Sky and Mono sound like meandering strings of pretty melodies to me — but here, every moment of the album is part of the greater whole, building toward a tone and atmosphere that sneaks a vast panorama right in under your nose. It's what makes the music hard to pin down initially, while giving it such deep, resonating impact — this album is beautiful, it is emotional, but it wants to steer you toward these realizations, rather than dowsing you in them immediately. There is a sense of direction, a linear narrative that tugs you forward like the pull of a river, and the songwriting is often deceptively straightforward. You could call it simplicity, I guess. But for as simple as it is, I've found that very few albums are paced with such confidence. There are few flourishes, few stylistic surprises — some glitch-style electronica overlays the guitar melodies here and there, and somehow conveys the mesmerizing, crackling warmth of a campfire instead than the cold industrial vibe you'd expect. Nothing is a distraction here, much less superfluous.

This Will Destroy You paints a clear picture of an abstract feeling, and I just couldn't see it at first. Few bands can pull that off. Since I've already established my pretentiousness by comparing music to landscapes, I'm going all out here — this is what makes music stick around for me, not catchy Top 40 hooks. Sure, you'll enjoy those earworms in 10 years out of nostalgia, but complexity allows a relationship to actually grow. Lots of artists can paint a clear picture of a simple feeling, and that's important too. But simplicity generally doesn't build long-lasting relationships. More often, you find acquired tastes are the ones that stick around.

127 HOURS AND INTO THE WILD

2011-02-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

127 Hours - Danny Boyle, 2010
Into The Wild - Sean Penn, 2007

It's not easy for a director to make a film where the ending doubles as the selling-point, where there's no real potential to surprise your audience with the outcome. Sure, maybe there were a few people who innocently went to see the movie about "the guy who gets trapped beneath a rock," wondering what would happen to the poor fellow. I'm extremely curious how such a person's reaction to 127 Hours might differ from someone who went to see the movie about [SPOILER?] "the guy who has to cut his own arm off to escape from under a rock." The focus of the movie would seem to change completely — likewise with Into The Wild, a story about [again, SPOILERS, I guess, but you might as well stop reading and just go see the movies] Chris McCandless, a young kid with a bad case of Kerouvac Syndrome, who hiked into the Alaskan wilderness, lived in an abandoned bus for four months, and never made it back out. Most people know how these stories end, but that's not the point. They're still remarkable stories, made much more remarkable because they actually happened. The danger for those translating them to film is how easily they demonstrate a few really obvious lessons. The same holds true for almost any non-fiction account of tragedy, but the important difference here is the tragedy is self-perpetuated. It's an unwritten law of cinema that any movie about a hiker / adventurous type (see also: people who have survived the apocalypse) must scream in 72 point font, Comic Sans: HEY SO OTHER PEOPLE ARE REALLY IMPORTANT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY VALUE THEM IN YOUR LIFE. Of course, no one realizes this until they're hallucinating and on the verge of death. Because, let's face it, if the value of other people has never impressed itself upon you before, you're not going to have this epiphany waiting on the platform for the G train at 9 in the morning. Or in your cubicle, listening to your coworker's stupid story about spooning his girlfriend and throwing his back out. This lesson is so broad that it will mean a lot more when we, as viewers, understand why it has to be learned in the first place.

Hikers and outdoorsy types come in any number of varieties, like any demographic big enough to have entire department stores catered to them, but there are a few broad archetypes. Aron Ralston, as depicted by James Franco in 127 Hours, seems to be a classic adrenaline junky. Into The Wild's Chris McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, is what I'd describe as the "misguided hippie" archetype. The obvious link between these two men is their love of the outdoors. An adrenaline junky could get their fix in any number of ways, but a climbing nerd is a special sort, in it for both the nature, the spectacle and the rush. McCandless undoubtedly felt the need for adrenaline as well, but his appreciation of the outdoors is a more thoughtful, patient sort, influenced as much by literature and some deep-seated family issues than the pure embrace of adventure. These two archetypal mindsets strongly influence the direction and pacing of their respective films, which makes sense. Unfortunately, like the men they're based on, both take it just a bit too far, and neither quite nails the landing.

Comparing any two films is an arbitrary exercise, of course. They're not competing against each other and they were not intended to compliment each other, but these are similar films with similar messages. James Franco does a terrific job capturing what Ralston went through in 127 Hours, the nuances of a man who can barely move but watches his life flash before him over the days he's trapped. Yet it's Boyle's direction that truly drives the emotion — even when Franco doesn't have much to do but shout and scream in pain. Boyle proves that it required a full movie to show us Aron Ralston's plight — and maybe in some unintended ways, as I would argue that the movie doesn't show enough. Eventually the screaming / shouting / pain comes to an end, and the movie finishes on the most obvious of lessons: people are important. Totally don't ignore your mom's phone calls. Is it effective? Yes. I was very moved, even inspired. The movie leaves you feeling good, but when I thought about it later, I wanted more. 127 Hours is a bit of an adrenaline junky itself, rushing toward that quick fix, the broad, bold conclusion. It's a technical accomplishment to film an action movie where the main character can barely move, but technical accomplishments often aren't as interesting as their context. The nuances Franco manages to convey by reacting to his limited environment are impressive, but we're never given a hint of why he is this way — the psychological background that would make his eventual triumph feel like catharsis, rather than just relief. What makes an adrenaline junky the way he is? And how much of a loner was he, anyway? Boyle offers hints of explanation, indications that he could have been closer with his parents, that he misses an ex-girlfriend, but these background issues could apply to nearly any character ever. Telling us that Ralston is pining over some failed, undefined relationship leaves vague loose-ends tangling in the past of the character.

It's interesting that Franco's character only begins to appreciate the sexual interest of his three female co-stars when he's on the verge of death. In Into The Wild, Chris McCandless is even more asexual, never once pursuing a romantic relationship, even when he's offered one flat-out. But it's not just romantic relationships that he walks away from, it's all relationships. Hirsch's character seems incapable of forming any permanent bonds, yet he's happy with his lifestyle. He knows what he wants in his life, and creates a charismatic specter of wish-fulfillment that sucks in those around him and leaves them heartbroken when he so casually moves on. It's not that he doesn't get along well with people. He's great with people, excels in their company in fact, but he views these interactions as experiences building up to something greater, something more personal, more about Chris McCandless. Ralston and McCandless are men who are in love with nature, and probably, in love with themselves. Neither film addresses this head-on, but it's obvious, and Into The Wild does a far better job of character development simply due to the structure of the film. We understand the relationship McCandless had with his parents. We figure out how he could leave behind his old friends so easily. And while he's never shown with any sort of romantic past, it's easy to see why. Though 127 Hours is a marvel of direction, and the superior movie on a technical level, Into The Wild nonetheless manages to tell a more developed story.

There's really no reason Into The Wild couldn't have been told the same way as 127 Hours. Chris McCandless only spent about three or four months in the Alaskan wilderness, and in the last week or two of his life, he was also trapped. Not by a rock, but trapped by a river and his own recklessness. Both films could have unraveled their stories with a similarly narrow focus. Yet Into The Wild wisely chose to spend much of its running time showing the past of the character, cutting to his time in Alaska only for brief scenes. Penn is far from the director that Boyle is, and in a sense, he had to take this direction — Boyle's character lived, giving him a lot of artistic freedom in building up to that moment, whereas Penn's tale would have been much more of a downer without that broad context and character development. I don't blame Boyle for taking the material he was given and trying to make his movie as unique as possible; he pulled it off. But Into The Wild manages to explain a great deal of what 127 Hours leaves dangling. To be fair, Into The Wild is far from perfect itself. Apart from some odd directorial choices, there's simply too much material crammed into its running time, making the same point so often that the ending seems almost insincere. We understand everything McCandless abandoned to reach his final destination, even if we never do see him really cherish anything. Only on his deathbed does he seem to miss the company of other people, and even then, his drive is still sort-of selfish: "happiness only real if shared." Aron Ralston only learned to update his Facebook status so people know where he's hiking. (Too bad we'll never get the sequel, "127 Days Later.") 127 Hours isn't a failed movie due to its lack of context. Into The Wild demonstrates how too much context can drag a film down, but I still believe a lot of the most interesting material in Aron Ralston's story was dropped because it didn't fit into Boyle's dramatic vision. And anyway, that's okay. Sometimes drama is self-fulfilling. I'm not sure whether I'd call 127 Hours a great movie, but it is a great experience. No matter what you believe about the importance of people, you have to admit — great experiences are pretty sweet too.

ANCHOR STEAM XMAS, SARANAC VANILLA STOUT, ET AL

2011-01-29T16:09:00.000-08:00

Our Special Ale 2010 - Anchor Steam (CA)
VERDICT: Good winter beer (B+)
Every year, Anchor Steam's Christmas Ale (aka Our Special Ale) is apparently slightly different — I don't know how different, but I do know that 2009's and 2010's have been two of the tastiest winter beers I've had. This "winter warmer" is sweet and rich, with a sort of malty, spicy molasses taste not far removed from a Belgian double, but toned down for drinkability. Despite the dark mahogany color, the Special Ale is relatively light, almost creamy, with only a slightly sticky mouthfeel hindering its smoothness. The spices manage to create a distinct Christmas flavor, and while I remember liking 2009's recipe maybe slightly more, this is still a delicious seasonal beer that I highly recommend grabbing if you find it.

Saranac Vanilla Stout - The Matt Brewing Company (NY)
VERDICT: Good stout, could use more vanilla (B)
Saranac (aka Matt Brewing Co) is one of my most trusted breweries, consistent and workmanlike as the Adirondack mountains they call home, but their lineup can be surprisingly adventurous too. Their caramel porter really impressed me, so I was excited to find a vanilla stout in my winter mix pack. The idea of a vanilla stout is as appealing to me as a folk-influenced post-rock band comprised entirely of bears, but I've only found one other example — Southern Tier's Creme Brule Stout, which is incredibly delicious. Saranac's vanilla stout is much more down-to-earth, as one might expect from the brewery, and the vanilla flavor is just not strong enough. It's there, making for a smoother, cleaner mouthfeel (and giving the beer a pleasant smell), but it doesn't do enough to distinguish this beer from other stouts. It's like a milk stout but not quite as smooth — in fact, the vanilla seems to somehow blend in with the slightly-bitter hop notes rather than smothering them. It's not that this beer is lacking in taste, though — beer drinkers who prefer their experiments on the subtle side should enjoy this one, as it's an all-around good stout, well-balanced, drinkable and very tasty.

Pumpkin Ale - Kennebunkport (ME)
VERDICT: Pumpkin-flavored soda (C-)
At six dollars for a sixpack, Kennebunkport's pumpkin ale is the cheapest pumpkin beer I've ever seen, but since I got it at Trader Joe's, that didn't seem too unusual until I realized that it was brewed by a genuine brewery from Maine. Then I noticed that the bottle reads "ale with natural flavor added," which makes this the only pumpkin beer I know of where the pumpkin flavor is added via some kind of syrup, instead of incorporating it into the brewing process (or skipping pumpkin altogether and just throwing in pumpkin pie spices, as most do.) At first, I was surprised — cheating on the pumpkin at least gives this beer a stronger flavor than most, and the pumpkin taste is extremely pronounced. Unfortunately, it's just not very good. The beer is so light, the syrupy pumpkin flavor so clear, it's more like drinking soda than beer. There's a sort of sticky sweetness that might be initially pleasing, but wears out its welcome quickly. Pumpkin flavor is inherently too subtle to be overpowering, but this is the pumpkin ale most likely to disgust avid beer drinkers.

Josephs Brau Dunkelweizen - Trader Joe's (CA)
VERDICT: Good, and cheap (B)
If you've had any of Trader Joe's store-brand beers before, you should know what to expect: solid representations of traditional styles that taste better than they have any right to, while remaining ludicrously cheap. Their hefeweizen remains one of my favorite American takes on the style, so I'm not surprised that their recently released dunkel similarly impresses. Appropriately dark and rich, this dunkel isn't notably different from the hefeweizen except in color and a heightened reliance upon malts. Which is not unusual for the style, though some might knock it for not being bolder, and for being slightly watery. Personally, the taste and mouthfeel are pleasant enough that I don't mind it being a little unadventurous — it's hard to imagine a beer with as nice of a flavor as this being any more drinkable (or cheaper.) Sure, I'm grading this beer on a scale. Nonetheless, it's delicious and a great deal.

SUBURBAN DISCONTENT: AMERICAN BEAUTY AND REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

2011-01-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

Until I sat down to write this review, it hadn't actually occurred to me that Sam Mendes directed both American Beauty (1999) and Revolutionary Road (2008). I remembered that he was responsible for at least one of them, but I figured I was getting myself confused and couldn't remember which. So that wasn't why I decided to write this joint analysis — honestly, I just happened to watch both films within a week of each other, and I was struck by how well they complimented each other thematically. And now... that makes sense. Both are films book-ending the era of American suburban expansion, examining jaded, former idealists — and taken together, they add up to a unique statement on American suburban ennui. I wonder where Sam Mendes lives?

I already agree with the angle Mendes seems to be honing in on, but I suspect it isn't terribly important to what's going on here. These films aren't about the suburbs being good or bad on their own. They never attempt to demonstrate that suburbs are culturally bankrupt compared to other modes of living, or inferior to cities, even if their inhabitants are shown in a harsh light These aren't films about societal sustainability — they're about cultural sustainability. Mendes falls upon the suburbs as a symbol of a lifestyle that was becoming quintessentially American around the time of Revolutionary Road, and by American Beauty's era, had established itself as the status quo. In another sense, the suburbs are simply a metaphor for failed American idealism.

Back before I realized that both had the same director, I was especially struck by how much these movies are inversions of each other. Revolutionary Road is set in Connecticut in the 50's, and follows a couple (Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) forced to settle down because of their kids. They are a pair of vaguely-artistic self-appointed outsiders; they consider themselves better than the system, and want to move to Paris to regroup and figure out what their calling in life is. Friends of the couple consider them immature and slightly crazy for wanting to pack up and leave — like many idealists, DiCaprio's character seems to have no idea what he's running to or what he's running from, and that's where the trouble appears. After all, 50's America was a time of finally embracing normalcy, when suburban societal rhythms were being established and America as a whole was transforming into a middle aged version of itself, rich and ready to pay for reliable comforts and picket fences. On its own, Revolutionary Road is a fascinating look at the underside of an era when media, advertising and government were bizarrely united in portraying a simplified, sterilized image of regular American life. "Normalcy does not inspire happiness" could be the tagline of either of these films. American Beauty takes place presumably at the same time it was filmed, the late nineties, and once again develops around a married couple who appear normal, who try to act happy, and are neither of those things. It's another story of a marriage falling apart, another warning that one day you might wake up and out-of-nowhere realize how miserable you are. Both stories spiral toward tragedy due to miscommunication and discontent — or maybe inevitability. On the surface, these films would seem to more or less make the same statement, but it's the differences in tone that captured my interest — like I said, they serve as book-ends, not only to the way culture changed (or didn't change) in the five decades between their characters, but also in the decade separating their creation.

American Beauty is very much a 90's movie, both in its setting and feel — flippant, jaded, sarcastic. Everything is slightly tongue-and-cheek, yet with that undercurrent of anti-corporate, anti-establishment cynicism that cropped up after the Reagan era but never congealed with the focus of the 70's punk era. It's no fluke here, and the cynicism may not all trace back to Mendes. While rewatching Beauty, I was struck how close in tone it is to another movie from the same period: Donnie Darko. These movies wouldn't seem to have anything in common on the surface, but if you strip out the metaphysical sci-fi from Darko, the rest is strikingly similar in tone and ideology. It's the era, not specific filmmakers, of course. That cynical, middle-finger sense of humor can be found in other 90's movies like Office Space, Clerks, Fight Club, and so on. A lot of the material in American Beauty could have been even darker than it was, if not centered around such a relaxed, enjoyable actor as Kevin Spacey. Yet compared to Revolutionary Road, Beauty seems tame, almost a comedy. There are fewer sinister events in Revolutionary Road, up until its ending, yet the film feels much colder. It lacks humor; its characters seem doomed — there's an almost apocalyptic air to it, as if innocent young America were ambling along obliviously into decades of chaos and war (well, okay.) That the story is so simple, the character's struggles so domestic, only makes it seem more tragic. Decades later, America had suffered plenty, and suddenly the same suburban discontent is skewed from the other end. The same unanswerable questions about marriage and happiness and success — suddenly it's not that you're looking ahead and seeing dark clouds on the horizon, you're looking back, thinking, "Oh, whatever. That sucked. F**k it." It's a perspective uniting both the cultural background of the movies, and the characters themselves: in Revolutionary Road, the couple is young, eager, looking forward to life; in Beauty, they've endured a thankless marriage for years, and are bored with their suffering. Even their young daughter has already become resigned, ready to run off with a boy who shows some hint of unconformity and passion.

It's probably suggestive that the dread Road builds around was best captured in the 00's, despite it serving as a period piece. The mood is straightforward, haunted, capturing the feeling that something big has changed and god knows what those changes might mean. The suburban lifestyle was well established by the 90's, but that feeling of despair over mere angst has reappeared in strength these last few years. Except this time, it isn't a sense of naive idealism that's failing us — it's the ability to survive through apathy and sarcasm. And not in a good way. We found no relief in the 00's, in the honest, unadorned tone of films like Revolutionary Road. By the end of the movie, the characters don't really know how to react — they simply are where they are, and there's little they can do about it until their lives return to something that appears normal.

MONUMENTS (BY) DEAD EMPIRES

2011-01-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

Metal / Progressive / Instrumental
2011, self-released (download here)
MySpace / Facebook / Last.fm

I've heard heavier albums than Monuments, sure. Heaviness often results from context, and there are bands that write grimmer, denser, eviler songs than Dead Empires. But for an instrumental three-piece that doesn't rely on dark atmosphere, Monuments is one of the most concussive albums I've listened to in a while. Real deep heaviness usually goes hand-in-hand with the grim processional style of doom metal, or the thudding straight-forwardness of sludge metal. It isn't easy to make music this pulverizing that still sounds unique, that doesn't smother its tone in one crusty monolithic texture. Maybe it works because Dead Empires writes music that also happens to be very fast — and maybe that's enough to disguise their influences — but these don't sound like guys who sat down to write heavy instrumental music because any one band inspired them to do so. If anything, it sounds like a fan of sludge metal got together with a fan of thrash metal, added a prog metal dude, and then, with no one dominating their influences, combined powers equally like some awesome metal version of Captain Planet (please, someone, for the love of satan: make Metal Captain Planet and the Metalteers happen. "From Sweden, Vegard, with the power of black metal! From Portland, Haughm, with the power of pagan folk metal!") Heaviness often comes at the cost of dexterity and intensity, but not here: Dead Empires is never so intent on maiming your senses that they lose focus on interesting songwriting and forward monument. Monuments doesn't have the emotional darkness that often makes metal seem heavier than it is — in this case, it's just really heavy and genuinely intense.

With any instrumental band, there's always going to be some asshole who comments: "It's good, but it would be better with a vocalist." If you're a fan of such music, you've learned to ignore these people, because they're impossible to reason with. (I bet there was someone who said this to Mozart, and he probably listened to whatever the 18th Century equivalent of Avenged Sevenfold was.) Dead Empires make a good case for the versatility of instrumental music, as I suspect they weren't particularly influenced by any of the major post-metal players anyway. Isis, Pelican and Russian Circles have been ripped off by dozens of bands, and for good reason. Their songwriting style and skills are perfectly suited to creating a certain atmosphere, and that atmosphere becomes synonymous with the band — then an entire, narrow subgenre. Not every band is so creative, or has their own 'tone,' and so many bands keep their influences close. But when you're channeling a band whose success is based on atmosphere and identity, the music you write runs a risk of sounding watered-down — it's no longer a matter of borrowing a few guitar techniques or a vocal style, as when broader metal subgenres were still forming fifteen years ago. At this point you're mimicking the actual emotion of another band's music, and therefore, yours is going to sound false and stale. Dead Empires doesn't shoot for a particular atmosphere; they kept their focus on intensity and songwriting. The music here is dense in addition to just 'heavy,' and that's what ultimately dispels the "should have had vocals" bullshit. Where are there even room for vocals here? I wouldn't say that it's necessarily easier to write songs based around lyrics, but doing so can give a song structure; instrumental bands have the added challenge of compensating for that backbone, and many fail to write music that speaks for itself. Monuments has enough crammed into every moment that full vocals would seem almost superfluous. The band had plenty of other ideas to explore. That sort of density isn't particularly common among instrumental metal, and it's refreshing to find here — a band that didn't set out to write music with an inspirational agenda, and wouldn't have room for lyrics anyway, once all the riffs are in.

Monuments isn't a particularly genre-bending album, but it's influences have been blended perfectly, to the point where it's hard to say that it sounds like anyone in particular. Dead Empires doesn't fit into any current scene that I can think of, but I hope that doesn't work against them. There's the heaviness of contemporary sludge-metal, and even some of the meandering prog tendencies that Mastodon and Kylesa have both explored with recent albums. But there's also a bit of unhinged, hardcore restlessness that gives the album such a jolt of adrenaline, not to mention the punch of thrash and death metal. And while I don't think Dead Empires was influenced to write atmospheric soundscapes, don't get the impression that tone isn't important here. Guitarist John Bryan plays with an almost jammy psychedelic smoothness that blends a sense of groove into the galloping, obliterating riffs of songs like "Villains" — instead of sounding like the band is switching from 'heavy moment' to 'texture-building moment.' The rolling drums and bass pound along perfectly, and give the album its snap, helping the music merge heaviness and intensity without noticeably changing pace. Even at only four songs, Monuments runs through a lot of material, but all of it packs a punch. Heavy usually just sounds like heavy — or another band's brand of heavy, a certain guitar-tone brand of heavy — but Dead Empires manages to circumvent that identity crisis, and only one EP into their career.

BLACK SWAN (2010, DARREN ARANOFSKY)

2011-01-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

Black Swan makes a pretty good first film to review, it turns out. It's a really well made movie, objectively, yet I didn't particularly enjoy the experience of watching it. Movies like this contain some interesting lessons in the subjectivity inherent to enjoyment of films, something that film criticism often ignores entirely. Black Swan is a psychological horror movie, and probably the most painfully tense movie I've seen since No Country For Old Men. Don't watch the trailer (more on that later.) All you need to know, plot-wise, is that this is a heavily tone and character based movie about a ballerina losing herself to the music, the moment. (This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.) It will be enjoyed by those who enjoy horror, and it deserves to earn Oscar noms for Aranofsky and Natalie Portman. It's an impressive and interesting movie, certainly. But if you, like me, have never learned to savor horror-tinged tension, cringe-worthy scenes of fingernail clipping, body mutilation and creaking, bloody feet, all enacted by off-putting, obsessive characters, there's very little else here to enjoy. (And, Jesus spinning Christ, I never want to see anyone's foot ever again.)

On a technical level, the movie is nearly impeccable. Aranofsky's direction embodies both the technical perfection and unhinged madness discussed throughout the movie, even if he tries maybe a bit too hard, getting a little overblown toward the end and tossing out too much over-thought cinematography, such as Vincent Cassel's absurdly black-and-white apartment full of swan imagery. Portman is perhaps the best thing about the movie, and shapes her character effortlessly.

I mentioned not to watch the trailer. Don't. If you know anything about the movie at all, there are few surprises here. Really, that was my greatest disappointment: everything happened exactly as I expected it to. The story does hold a few surprises in the end, but only in the specifics — I assumed it would have a certain 'type' of ending, and it did. Aside from cringing at the many uncomfortable scenes, I felt like I was watching a movie I had seen a few years ago and forgotten about. It's not that the trailer gives anything away; it's more that there isn't much to give away, once you get a handle on the characters and style of the film. Of course, the storytelling in Black Swan is far from lazy; it's just based on the assumption that you enjoy tension. Granted, I've enjoyed many other tension-filled movies, but most of them have some form of payoff. No Country For Old Men was almost unbearable to watch, but I'd say I enjoyed the film because of its unique characters and mixture of Western and Noir tones, the message that tension was sculpting. And that is, of course, boiling things down to my personal taste. Black Swan is a very dry movie. If you like the tone here, then you'll like the movie. If you don't — well, there's little else going on except the impressive direction and acting. There isn't a single moment of comedy, nor are there really any character or societal insights. It's fine for a movie to be so singularly focused. It's why film criticism so often misses the point. Black Swan isn't trying to appeal to everyone. (It might be trying a little too hard to appeal to the Oscar crowd, but I digress.) As a very well-made, artistically accomplished film, it has nothing else to prove; it does what it does quite well.

Grade: B

LZ-'75 (BY) STEPHEN DAVIS

2011-01-06T15:44:00.000-08:00

Published 2010, 215 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: C+
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Fact: Led Zeppelin is the greatest band of all time. There are very few bands that I would be interested in reading a book-length account of, much less a book focused specifically on one tour, but I would read just about anything detailing Zeppelin's zany shenanigans. At the peak of their power, they weren't just the most popular, highest-selling band in the world — they crafted a cult-like mystique around themselves, birthing bizarre urban legends, rumors of black magic and deals with the devil. The mass media hated them, journalists feared them, and interviews were rare. It didn't matter that Rolling Stone refused to acknowledge their existence for six years — Zeppelin had no trouble selling out massive coliseums in a matter of minutes.

By the release of Physical Graffiti in 1975, however, it was hard to ignore Zeppelin's dominating presence, and the American media started paying attention. Stephen Davis — a music journalist who, by his own admission, was only passingly familiar with Zeppelin at the time — wanted in. He got in, of course, flying around with Zeppelin in the Starship on their rocky-but-pivotal American 1975 winter tour. Unfortunately, LZ-'75 isn't the first thing he's written as a result of those experiences. In fact, it's the third, but after churning out an article and another book, he somehow managed to lose most of his notes from the tour. When Davis rediscovered them a few years ago (and obviously, realized how much money he could make by milking another book out of them), he decided to turn them into LZ-'75.

Judging by the reviews on Amazon, there's not much here that isn't covered by other Zeppelin biographies, or even in Davis' other pieces. I haven't read any other Zeppelin accounts, so that wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but LZ-'75 is certainly on the anemic side. Davis was granted fairly extensive backstage access, and writes about the band with appropriate reverence and knowledge. Yet it's clear that Davis was never really an insider. He writes like a journalist, and only ever had the access of a journalist. Though he adds some personal backstory, musings and scant analysis, most of the narrative is taken up by descriptions of Zeppelin's performances. Reading about shows is nowhere near as exciting as experiencing them, however, and after some early-tour drama and set-backs, each performance begins to sound fairly redundant. Davis delves deep into his thesaurus and does an admirable job of describing each song in a dozen different ways, but he's not a great music writer, and the strain shows by the end. As a product of the 70's, Davis' prose (or maybe Davis himself) can get a little hammy, and most of the time he simply tries too hard. It's not the 70's anymore, and though it's fun to see that energy captured in moments, too much of it makes LZ-'75 read as sensational rather than revealing. Personally, I was never close to bored, but this is definitely one for fans of the band — aficionados of rock'n'roll history can probably find more thorough accounts.

THE TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2010

2010-12-26T15:23:00.000-08:00

10. Fang Island (by) Fang Island
Math Rock / Indie Rock / Everyone High-Fiving Everyone
Fang Island seems to be having such a good time playing their eclectic brand of math-rock that it's hard not to wonder if they aren't, you know, fucking with us. These dudes have the rare ability to make fun music without pandering, probably because fun rarely sounds this musically unique. Completely lacking in the hipster irony you'd expect since pop-punk died, Fang Island is as packed full of delicious post-rock textures as it is whiplash inducing riffage. 2010 was a year of fantastic summer albums, and Fang Island's little burst of relentless, guitar-driven optimism should be on everyone's playlist when warmer weather arrives. Or really, when you just want to pretend.

9.The Wild Hunt (by) The Tallest Man On Earth
Folk / Singer-Songwriter / Blues
It's not important that Sweden's Kristian Matsson happens to sound like a very famous folk musician. Pretty much every review of The Wild Hunt mentions it, but Matsson deserves all the recognition he gets for his own ample song-writing talents. And really, it's not much more than obvious talent and a no-bullshit approach to folk that makes The Wild Hunt such a standout album. Matsson is a master guitar player, and his songwriting is tight, lyrical and concise. Confident, affecting, and yet very catchy. There are few flourishes to the album, but it doesn't need them — Matsson's voice carries these blues, while his feverish fretwork provides the momentum.

8. Marrow of the Spirit (by) Agalloch
Dark Metal / Atmospheric Folk / Progressive
I had incredibly high hopes for Marrow of the Spirit — possibly higher than for any album in the last year or two. Really, I was certain that any new Agalloch would take the Album of the Year spot, regardless what year it was released. So for Marrow of the Spirit to land this low is actually a bit of a shock, though I may very well be undervaluing it at the moment. Agalloch's albums are always unique and slow to unfold, each with its own defined personality; quintessential "growers." This is a fantastic hour of music, full of haunting textured guitars and powerful, earnest soundscapes, though Agalloch's songwriting seems a bit less focused than on 2006's Ashes Against the Grain. Possibly on purpose, since that feeling of openness and sprawl allows Marrow of the Spirit to avoid the claustrophobia of true black metal, even as the band occasionally dips into their bleaker roots. It's a harsher, icer sound that mostly lacks the warmth of their last two albums, but still finds moments of serenity, redemption, and plenty of atmosphere, making this an album one might easily get lost in on a cold winter night. Hell, even NPR loved it.

7. Foreign Tapes (by) Parades
Indie Rock / Math Rock / Pop
If you like Broken Social Scene's experimental-indie, jittery pop-rock aesthetic, but think they're a little too sprawling and "anything goes" to make a coherent album, then Foreign Tapes is just what you need. This haunted summer album manages to hold on to a consistent tone throughout, though that's not to say that Parades doesn't reach to new and strange places. Track to track, they throw dark, Zeppelin-ish riffs alongside intoxicating drum crescendos and frantically pounding electronics, male / female duet vocals, math-like guitar leads and blaring horns. It's a strange but fluid menagerie, and shows a personality stronger than any I've heard in indie rock for a long time.

6. The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer (by) Red Sparowes

Post-Rock

Sometimes a band just needs a few albums to get it right. That's clearly the case with Red Sparowes, who had never particularly impressed me before 2010. With this, their third album, not much has changed on the surface — they just finally nailed it. Songs are less meandering, more focused on melody, and Red Sparowes manages to give each track personality without losing the journey of the album as a whole. Take "Giving Birth To Imagined Saviors," which features one of the best melodies I've heard in a post-rock song in years, or album-closer "As Each End Looms and Subsides," which has perhaps the best climax. This is the rare case where I'm glad the band didn't try something more experimental, because everything falls into place so flawlessly.

5. Spiral Shadow (by) Kylesa
Sludge Metal / Psychedelic / Progressive
Kylesa may be one of the densest, heaviest metal bands out there, but somehow these Georgian guys and gal have managed to become one of the most accessible too. On Spiral Shadow, their sound takes one giant evolutionary step into progressive metal. If the Melvins and Built To Spill decided, for some (awesome) reason, to form a super-band, it would sound like this. On first listen, it might seem as if the music is leaner, relying more on atmospherics and psychedelia, but it's more likely that Kylesa just learned how to cram their hundred influences into every moment of riffage. Psychedelic guitars spiral and bounce back and forth; everything else rumbles along with that good-old buzzsaw crunchiness. Aided by more forward male / female dual vocals, songs like "Don't Look Back" sound like they could have been radio hits in the early nineties. It all makes for more opportunities to air-guitar (and double air-drum) than ever.

4. Kvelertak (by) Kvelertak
Metal / Punk / Black'n'Roll

When I first laid eyes on that amazing John Baizley album cover, I figured I was in store for something good, but beyond the Baroness' Stamp of Approval I had no idea what to expect. Certainly not an Object Lesson in how metal can be unironic, unrestrained, and fun. If Converge gave you the chance to figure out just what the hell was going on before you got knocked out, it'd be this: black'n'roll, punk metal, blackened punk with a dose of sludge. You know how sometimes you're listening to a band that has so much energy, you can't help but appreciate how vibrant and exciting the world can be, and you just want to run up to the nearest person and punch them in the face? That's this.

3. Dust Lane (by) Yann Tiersen

French / Indie / Folk

"French," as a genre tag? Yes. I maintain that a few countries are their own genre — somehow, through whatever instruments become standard and whatever cultural associations happen over time, some countries just have a vibe. The same way you can listen to gritty slide-guitar and instantly conjure images of the southern states of America, something about France has created a tone unique in the world of music. Yann Tiersen is of course no newcomer — most would probably know him as the composer of the Amelie soundtrack, something which is very, very French. Tiersen is known for his quirky, folky neo-classical compositions, but Dust Lane shouldn't be taken as anything other than an indie-rock album. And it's an odd album, to be sure, just not in the way Tiersen's fans may be used to. Every song features vocals, though most are not exactly singing — Tiersen's voice mixes with that of a female guest in a series of echoey, monotone monologues that somehow fit these songs perfectly. The mood is dense and yet spectral, the songwriting nearly impossible to pin down for style. Many indie bands sound like they're throwing a dozen instruments at you just because they can, but Tiersen never shows off; he's just using the right tool for the job, whatever it is he's doing. A combination of things that are entirely familiar in-and-of themselves, yet produce a sound unlike anything else out there.

2. Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées (by) Les Discrets

Blackgaze / Post-Punk / Folk

If you've been following the underground French music scene over the last few years, you may have witnessed a rare event: the birth of a genre. It started with Neige, of Alcest, who realized that shoegaze is basically reverse black-metal — and with that wistful French aesthetic and a good dose of folk drizzled on top, you have a style that can't be described with any existing genre tag. Now, a few years later, Neige's buddy Fursy Teyssier has formed Les Discrets and pushed the music further away from its black metal undertones and deeper into some strange folk / post-punk fantasyland. Some have started calling the scene "blackgaze," and it's as fitting as anything else. There's a sense of darkness and mourning to Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées, the tone a Grimm's Fairy Tale would have if converted into music. It's dense, too, but that brings us to the shoegaze, the thick, eerie post-punk sound. That the lyrics are all in French only adds to the atmosphere, as Fursy's voice drifts through songs like a dense but small fog, sometimes joining a female vocalist to brighten the atmosphere without abandoning melancholy. The album occasionally seems hurried to deliver, but when Fursy takes time to slow the narrative and open up each piece, Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées displays some of the most beautiful, surreal sounds I've ever heard.

1. Gifts From Enola (by) Gifts From Enola

Post-Hardcore / Post-Rock / Progressive
When I reviewed last year's phenomenal From Fathoms, I spent some time trying to figure out just what makes Gifts From Enola so memorable and fresh, for what seems at first like standard guitar-driven post-rock. But by now, it's obvious that post-rock was a red herring. Surprise! Gifts From Enola is actually an instrumental post-hardcore band that happens to have a love for post-rock atmospherics. While From Fathoms remains my favorite of their albums — it's more sprawling and more of an adventure, and I happen to like every detour it takes — the Gifts guys wisely acknowledged their sudden identity-acceptance with this self-titled. The meandering post-rock subtleties of their very early material is mostly gone, replaced by confident, denser songwriting and nuclear stockpiles of energy. Vastly improved production values help showcase that unbridled hardcore adrenaline, but these songs would still sound relentless if Justin Bieber's backup band covered them. This album could hurt you. Drums are pushed way up in the mix, thudding and propulsive as a cannonade; each hit sounds like something died as a result. Every bass line sounds something you'd pay money to ride. The guitars drive it all to a breakneck pace, and remain some of the most versatile in any scene, instrumental or otherwise. Nothing is outright super heavy — there are no breakdowns like in last year's monstrous "Trieste" — but only because the songs move too fast, mixing grittiness with serenity, and often at the same time. Take Alagoas, which has quickly become one of my favorite songs of all time (and probably would have been my Album of the Year even if they'd released it as a single.) The song is a perfect summary of everything Gifts From Enola does so brilliantly, without being too flashy about it. I can't think another post-rock or post-metal band that's able to conjure as many fantastic riffs as these guys, and still spin that guitar-driven density into something that's also multi-layered, suggestively textured and fully coherent. For every shift and switch-up, the music never loses focus, and Gifts' personality is clearer than ever before. It may not be their most ambitious album, or even a perfect one, but this is unquestionably their defining album. Gifts From Enola's music has a remarkable vitality, the ability to sound fresh and interesting even after dozens and dozens of repeated plays. An achievement like that takes more than creative genre-bending, or even passion. There's no equation I can think of to give a record such energy — but whatever it is, Gifts From Enola has it.

THE TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2009, IN RETROSPECT

2010-12-20T21:47:00.000-08:00

It's become a sort of obligatory internet tradition for music sites to post their "best of" lists at the end of each year. I enjoy the tradition as much as anyone, but I'll be the first to admit that it's a flawed concept. Once music passes a certain point — arriving in the mercurial netherworld of Objectively Good Music — it becomes extremely difficult to critique or compare it without stumbling through the magical wardrobe of Extreme Subjectivity. If you've found ten albums from a year that were all excellent, what makes any one of them better than the others, except that you liked it more? Past a certain point, your own personal appreciation is all that matters. Thus new music often goes through a cycle: discovery, heavy rotation, over-exposure, then sitting around for weeks without another play. This makes it hard to decide what albums even you yourself really liked at the end of a year, since some of them may be fresh releases, while others have been in your collection for nearly a year already.

That's why, here at The Luxury Yacht Review, I'm going to take the time to check back in a year later and re-evaluate what lasted the test of time — and what albums I may have simply missed the first time around, despite my best efforts to listen to everything and anything. And I will also admit — many albums I listened to in 2009 just didn't hit me until much later. But now is the time to make amends. In retrospect, 2009 was one of the best years in history for my music collection, though I scarily realized this last year. My favorite albums from last year just became favoriter, and releases I only discovered after my list was compiled ended up blowing me away just the same.

Here is my Best Of 2009, as it stood last year:
1. Sol Eye Sea i (by) Irepress
2. Daisy (by) Brand New
3. From Fathoms (by) Gifts From Enola
4. Gin (by) Cobalt
5. Hollow Be My Name (by) Eleventh He Reaches London
6. Sunden (by) The Waters Deep Here
7. Dyad 1909 / Found Songs (by) Olafur Arnalds
8. Axe to Fall (by) Converge
9. The Other Truths (by) Do Make Say Think
10. Eras (by) Apse

It was an okay list, full of albums that impressed me with their originality and innovative genre blending. But technical merits don't always equal lasting, emotional resonance, and with the discovery of a few newcomers (that is to say, albums from 2009 that I only discovered in 2010), my list looks quite different today. But one thing hasn't changed: the top half of the list was extremely hard to rank, and any of my new "top 4" albums could trade blows and take the Album of the Year slot. Many of these albums have settled into my record collection as all-time classics. So here it is, my revised Best of 2009.

1. Sol Eye Sea i (by) Irepress
2. From Fathoms (by) Gifts From Enola
3. Blue Record (by) Baroness
4. Daisy (by) Brand New
5. Gin (by) Cobalt
6. Axe to Fall (by) Converge
7. The Great Misdirect (by) Between the Buried and Me
8. By the Throat (by) Ben Frost
9. The Other Truths (by) Do Make Say Think
10. Hollow Be My Name (by) Eleventh He Reaches London

Baroness' Blue Record first grabbed me only a week or so after I published my original Best of 2009, yet quickly blew away almost everything else on that list. From January to March of this year, I listened to pretty much nothing but. In any other year (including 2010, actually), it would easily grab Album of the Year status. The Blue Record is like a sludge-metal version of Led Zeppelin III, just faster and denser and heavier. This is perhaps the pinnacle of the booming Georgian metal scene, a perfectly written, relentlessly energetic bombardment of rock. Pretty much an all-time classic. The Great Misdirect is another album I was unfortunately late to the party on. Over six songs and one hour, Between the Buried and Me races through a half dozen genres and more switch-ups, solos and tangents than I could possibly keep track of. You might find this sort of restless, ADD musicianship unfocused, and maybe it is. Maybe The Great Misdirect will never go down in history as an example of pioneering song-writing, but that doesn't stop it from being a hell of a lot of fun. In spite of its eccentricities, The Great Misdirect still sounds more grounded than the majority of progressive metal, maybe thanks to its earthy, gritty textures. Ben Frost's By the Throat sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a profoundly disturbing film — could be, though it's already the most frightening album I've ever heard. The soundscapes you'll find here are blacker than the blackest black metal without laying down a single guitar riff — instead, Ben Frost crafts an subtle, ambient story of sounds, creaking violins and throbbing electronic bass. This isn't an album you should listen to for entertainment — or alone in the dark — it's an experience.

FULL DARK, NO STARS (BY) STEPHEN KING

2010-12-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

Published 2010, 364 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B

At this point in his career, Stephen King has nothing else to prove. As a "popular" author, King gets very little credit for just how versatile and innovative of a writer he is — though after his dozens and dozens of novels, he can be forgiven for sticking to "competent, consistent but unadventurous," which is how I would describe this new collection of four novellas. While King doesn't attempt to dazzle with creativity, his mastery of the short form is evident.

Did you like The Shawshank Redemption? How about Rob Reiner's classic coming-of-age tale, Stand By Me? Add in a slightly less well-known film, Apt Pupil, and you have the three movies based on three of the four novellas in Different Seasons, one of King's earlier novella collections. Not a bad track record. Though the nine-billion page The Stand is possibly King's single best work, he's at his most consistent with the medium-length style. King's major flaws are less grating in his shorter fiction, and he makes efforts to subdue them altogether in Full Dark, No Stars, mostly by toning down the ambition. It works, to some extent — the four stories here are all perfectly competent and enjoyable to read, despite their grim, off-putting subject matter. But the darkness running throughout these tales mostly just hides the fact that there's little drama or tension. The good guys (actually, good women, so far as it applies here) don't have too much trouble resolving their hideous problems, and the simplified conclusions are just a little too convenient. It's not a major blow, but the material in Full Dark is just not as memorable as anything in Different Seasons, making this a satisfying read, but far from essential.

The best tale here is the first one, "1922," and the closest the collection comes to classic horror. Each of these stories is about murder, to some extent, and "1922" deals with the subject most directly, by dropping us into a first-person account of a Kansas farmer who felt he had no choice but to kill his wife. King gets a lot of mileage out of the rustic countryside atmosphere, helping the surreal ending stick its landing, and the story takes a few interesting turns along the way. "Big Driver" — your basic "Hey lady, don't take that deserted country road shortcut home, you might blow a tire and run into some creepy yokel!" tale — is perhaps the darkest of these stories, but its bleak subject matter makes its convenient, all-too-easy ending feel mostly justified. "Fair Extension," a "make a deal with the devil to cure your cancer" story, is short, simple, and gleefully perverse — and makes its satirical simplicity work for it, by simply leaving off just when you think King would be forced to give the plot another twist. Much like "Big Driver," "A Good Marriage" ends a little too conveniently, but its simple intentions make for an interesting psychological experiment. It's an earnest examination of all the little things one knows about a person after years of intimacy, and the way larger, darker truths can still slip through the cracks.

Though everything works well enough, nothing works itself into your mind the way the best King stories do. Some of his more annoying writing habits pop up too often — King is excellent at writing about average people, and his characters are often more fully-fleshed than those of most literary darlings, but he still relies far too much on hokey inner-monologues and witticisms. King's characters all think in goofy puns and folky nonsense-phrases that they just love to repeat to themselves. But aside from that, King remains a fluid, clever writer, and unlike the majority of his peers, remains impressively self-aware of his strengths and limitations even after decades of dominating sales charts.

THE LAST AMERICAN MAN (BY) ELIZABETH GILBERT

2010-12-15T10:01:00.000-08:00

Published 2002, 268 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

It's rare to find a biography as thorough and intimate as The Last American Man. Of course, there aren't many subjects out there like Eustace Conway. Since a very young age, Conway has taught and lived self-sufficient living, but he's more than just a naturalist and mountain-man. He's a man that can conquer seemingly any goal he sets for himself, a man that seems to have nearly superhuman physical powers, and a mind to match. At the age of seventeen, Conway left his parent's suburban home, built a tee-pee in the wilderness, made all his clothing out of deer-skin, and has more or less lived like that ever since. Conway's is a complex story that could have easily been told through a lens of hero worship and idealism, but Gilbert does an excellent job of unraveling Conway's complicated motivations, aspirations and frustrations. The two have been friends for years, and it shows in her writing, which is deeply personal — affectionate, yet candid and critical. In trying to demystify this man — who has already become a legend to many — Gilbert leaves out nothing. No one this passionate achieves success without having a dark side, and The Last American Man takes the psychoanalytical risks to show why so many people idolize Conway from afar, then practically flee when given the opportunity to know him up close.

Eustace Conway is the owner of Turtle Island, a nature conservatory and ultra-primitive, self-sufficient farm in North Carolina; a sort of non-profit haven for preaching and teaching his message of environmentalism. Yet despite building and running his own utopia from the ground up, Conway doesn't seem to stay in one place for very long. He has broken multiple world records for long-distance horse riding and hiked the entire Appalachian Trail with only a small knife, wearing a loin-cloth. He makes his own clothing out of animal skin. He's hardcore, to the say the least. Many would be quick to pin him as a hippie, a bleeding-heart liberal tree-hugger. But Eustace Conway turns out to be far more complicated than that. For one, he's shockingly conservative, and a brilliant businessman with a head for self-promotion. He's a strict authoritarian, and often complains that he would run Turtle Island like a rigid military dictatorship if he could. A man like Conway couldn't achieve success without being a control-freak.

While reading The Last American Man, it struck me how similar Conway's basic personality traits are to those shown by Mark Zuckerberg (as he was portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg) in The Social Network. The lives of these men would seem to have little in common on the surface, yet both embody the same relentless drive, the need for absolute control, the perfectionism, the uncanny intellect and talent — and as a result, the tendency to drive away everyone close to them through the sheer intensity of their personality. These men were born to succeed beyond measure, but might as well wear a plaque around their neck that reads: "... at what cost?" What makes The Last American Man (and Eustace Conway) so fascinating is not just the adventures Conway has been on, but the way people react to him. This includes the author, who can't seem to help interjecting her own thoughts and witticisms into the narrative, especially when deconstructing Conway's personal relationships (though to be fair, this might just be her writing style.) That Gilbert is fascinated and perplexed by Conway even after knowing him so well — indeed, after writing such a thorough book on the man — is telling. Many of the apprentices that come to Turtle Island to learn about the primitive life seem to look to Conway as a father figure and spiritual guide, and most end up leaving disappointed, jaded and even heartbroken. Conway has had poor luck with his sexual relationships as well, though he seems to have had no lack of them either. He is a man who is immediately and obviously compelling, who is described as constantly drawing people into his orbit before suffocating them through the intensity of his personality, the extreme demands he places upon himself and others.

As a book, The Last American Man is not perfect. Gilbert's intimacy with Conway gives the reader access that few authors would have been able to obtain, or understand, but her tone is occasionally so casual that it's hard to take at face value. Still, for this style of writing, she could do much worse, and the book has a nice flow and a vibrant, excited energy to match its subject. The pacing suggests Conway's own trajectory, from capable young idealist to jaded, disappointed businessman. This, in a way, makes The Last American Man an unintended but insightful commentary on the very nature of idealism, structured around an idealist who did not himself fail, like so many hippies and would-be-Utopians. Eustace Conway tackled every goal he set up for himself, and he had just as high hopes for America — he truly believed he could save our country by teaching us how live a primitive, knowledgeable, hard-working lifestyle. He really figured out how to do it, showed us that it works. But most people are not like Eustace Conway, and the same problems he saw in his youth are looming larger than ever. Watching this man recognize his own futility through the pages of a mere biography is a tremendously fascinating experience.

KORZO HAUS

2010-12-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Middle-European / Hungarian / American
178 East 7th Street (between Avenues A & B)
New York, NY 10009
[CASH ONLY]

Korzo Haus is tiny. Nearly everyone that I've gone there with has immediately commented: "Wow, it's even smaller than I thought." Yet Korzo is not meant to feel exclusive, just intimate. There are only around ten tables, and Chef Steven Reese cooks from a small kitchen area exposed to the rest of the restaurant. Of the three times I've eaten at Korzo, all on weeknight evenings, it's never been packed. Partly this is due to Korzo's recent opening, and its minimalist exterior practically hidden behind scaffolding on the south side of Tompkins Square Park. The contemporary-rustic, vaguely-Germanic facade is a good indication of the menu, but Korzo Haus has enough surprises in store to make it one of my favorite little-known secrets of New York City.

The main attraction — at least for a poor freelance writer like me — is Korzo's weeknight dinner special. From Monday to Thursday, 2 pm to 7 pm, order one of Korzo's house burgers and a pint of beer for only 10 dollars. Now, already that's a great deal, but a deal that I've found other places — and restaurants with cheap food deals are usually cheap for a reason. Not here. Few burgers in New York, regardless of price, are in the same ballpark with Korzo on quality. These burgers are thick and packed with flavor — nor do they skimp on the fries, or even the red cabbage, or apple slivers. Korzo's menu is always changing, but two burgers are currently included in the 10 dollar beer & burger deal: the Korzo Burger and Haus Burger. Better yet, there are two ways to have them prepared. (Not only is it a cheap burger, it's also unique and innovative!) The Korzo Burger, served as suggested, is deep-fried in Lángos dough along with apple-smoked bacon, Allgäuer Emmentaler cheese, mustard and pickles [pictured, with sides.] It's an interesting tactic for serving a burger that I've never seen anywhere else, but it doesn't mean your meal comes out as a greasy, sopping mess — on the contrary, the deep-fried shell around the meat keeps things neat and firmly encased, so there's no leaking or sliding around as you bite in. Which is good, because Korzo doesn't skimp on the beef, which is juicy and perfectly prepared. The Korzo Burger is easily one of the tastiest burgers I've had anywhere. If the deep-frying has any effect beyond practicality, it's to give the burger a richer, saltier flavor than you might be used to. You can, of course, have it served traditional — you know, between a bun — though I preferred the deep-fried treatment. (The Lángos dough is tasty enough on its own, and can be ordered as a side with cheese.) Even the beer is a great deal: while Korzo features only two on tap, their "Korzo Organic Ale" is a unique recipe that Korzo came up with in cooperation with Peak Organic. It's a crisp, not-quite-pale ale with enough bite to accompany a rich entree, but that holds back on the hops so as not to compete with your food.

Though I preferred the Korzo Burger, the Haus Burger is also tasty and theoretically healthier, and can be deep-fried on request. Other burgers come and go depending on the day, including a brat, a vegetarian portobella option, and an experimental new burger called the "Slav" (which is sadly not included in the 10 dollar burger deal). A combination of beef and pork, I really recommend getting the Slav deep-fried to contain its other toppings: bryndza cheese, house-made sauerkraut, caraway seeds and most interestingly, juniper berries. That might seem a little strange, but the berries add a slightly bitter crunch that compliments the rest of the burger well. It's a great example of Korzo Haus' aesthetic, and flexibility to adjust its menu on the fly. The restaurant is so small that chef Steven Reese can make menu decisions based on what he finds at the local market. Korzo has even begun a menu selection called "Village Choice," where locals make daily requests through Facebook or Twitter — Reese will pick one and serve it. A focus on fresh, local ingredients makes this possible, and makes the small menu work as well as it does.

I have little to complain about when it comes to Korzo; I've had a great dining experience each time I've gone. Service is casual but prompt, and everyone is friendly, especially Reese. I could always wish for more beers on tap, but a diverse bottle selection helps make up for it. Though the restaurant is small, I really like its simplified, rustic aesthetic and general atmosphere of calm and quiet — rare in NYC, where "calm and quiet" is usually an indication of sky-high prices, or suspect quality. The seats are slightly uncomfortable, but I wasn't paying attention to my stool as long as there was a burger in front of me. Korzo aims to be a low-key neighborhood establishment for the Village, yet despite living a few train transfers away, I will keep coming back.

BRIGHTON ROCK (BY) GRAHAM GREENE

2010-11-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

Published 1938, 247 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B+
Plot: B-
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B+

Given the time period, the tone, the air of danger that pushes the book to its swift start, one might expect Brighton Rock to be a noir, or at least an gangster thriller. But dark as the novel is, Graham Greene has a different agenda. Brighton Rock is more of a character-piece than a noir, a meditation on the nature of good and evil rather than their methods, and its memorable young villain quickly steals the focus of the story. It's nice little twist, and Greene's skill at unraveling characters' motivations in powerful literary bursts drives the novel to interesting depths.

Brighton Rock is mostly the story of Pinkie, a 17 year old gangster struggling to hold on to a feeble criminal empire. After the murder of a journalist results in a few too many witnesses, Pinkie is forced to go to great lengths to keep them silent — and it's those lengths that make up this story, his mounting desperation at the incompetence of his allies, and his reconciliation at his own inadequacies. Pinkie makes for an interesting character, a young, somewhat naive boy described as "pure evil" more than once, who understands better than anyone else what he is and what he's capable of. He feels little remorse, and is portrayed as almost inhuman, incapable of relishing the joys that those around him partake in. He doesn't drink, has no interest in women, doesn't take the time to savor all the stereotypical vices that gangster characters are known for. He is cast almost entirely in moral darkness, while his adversary — an overly-happy, overly-noble woman named Ida, determined to avenge the death of a man she barely knew — engages in "good" simply for the virtue of it. These characters are assessed again and again from each other's perspective, but whatever his message was meant to be, Greene had the insight necessary to make each perspective believable. When Pinkie and his girl address why they don't want to be good, like Ida — who comes off as kind-of obnoxious and self-righteous — it's fully believable, even understandable.

Greene is exceptionally skilled at short bursts of character insight — one or two sentence denouements wrapping up some character action — and its a testament to his powers of characterization that the villains of the novel are often more sympathetic than the woman who would be the hero. His prose is strong throughout, but in these moments it manages to achieve lasting poignancy. Interestingly, Greene consistently focuses on such small, action-related revelations, yet does little to explain the underlying motivations of his characters. Pinkie is interesting enough, but when he's presented again and again as simply evil, with no explanation or even backstory, it begins to pull apart the drama. Convincingly scripted characters can still benefit from complex motivations, and everyone here mostly acts a certain way because it's the way they are. They're the sort of characters you want to take by the shoulders and shake, until they get some sense. Brighton Rock is far from the crime-thriller it seems to be at first — everything is a slow burn, good and evil laying their plans but rarely coming face to face. The pacing is so steady that I sometimes found it difficult to read more than a few pages at once. It's the sort of book that is savored, and contemplated later, but is just gripping enough to get you through.

MORE PUMPKINS, WINTER CIDER, VERTICAL EPIC

2010-11-17T19:47:00.000-08:00

La Parcela - Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales (MI)
VERDICT: Surprising and unique (B+)
The running joke with Jolly Pumpkin was that, the first time anyone sees one of their beers, they assume it's a pumpkin ale — except Jolly Pumpkin is just the name of the brewery, and until very recently they didn't even make a pumpkin beer. However, Jolly Pumpkin has quickly and deservedly earned a reputation as one of the most interesting micros out there, and when I saw that they finally made a pumpkin, I was all in a tizzy of excitement. It's a pricey one, yet not as potent as I expected: the ABV comes in under 6%. But with Jolly Pumpkin you can always expect something solid, and not only does this hold true here, but La Parcela is easily one of the most unique pumpkin beers I've had. Though the pumpkin barely comes through, it's spicy and tasty in such a strange way that I'm willing to forgive it. In fact, La Parcela is a shockingly wine-like beer in taste and mouthfeel, aided by a surprising, puckery sourness. Once you get passed that, there's a whole bunch of other things going on — it's pleasantly carbonated and has a nice medium body, a solid, smooth mouthfeel, making it almost a cross between a sour ale and caramely Belgian double. If anything, the pumpkin gives it a bit of a "funky" taste. Overall, one of the most enjoyable beers that I've had this year, but it's also not taking the right steps to reach the upper-echelons of pumpkin beer champions.

Frog's Hollow Double Pumpkin - Hoppin' Frog (OH)
VERDICT: One of the better pumpkin ales (B+)
A tasty, lighter pumpkin, the secret to this one is probably right in the name. The flavor and mouthfeel isn't much different from your standard pumpkin ale, just richer, sweeter and better — as if they took the recipe and doubled everything good about it. This one is closer to Weyerbacher's Imperial Pumpkin than it is to Southern Tier Pumking, but the lightness also seems to allow for a bit more pumpkiny flavor than Weyerbacher's. The trailing-off at the end is smooth, almost too smooth, but keeps Frog's Hollow quite drinkable despite the sweetness. I only found this one at the Whole Food's beer room on Houston late in the season, but it's worth keeping your eye out for.

Pumpkin Pie - Chelsea Brewery (NY)

VERDICT: Surprising but not satisfying (C+)

This is honestly one of the most unique beers I've ever had, yet I can't decide if I even like it. It's certainly a strange pumpkin beer, and I'm glad for all the new entries into the style that are making an effort to do things differently. None of them has entirely succeeded, in my opinion, but they're at least being creative. Chelsea's doesn't even look like a pumpkin beer – it pours a murky, opaque gold, like a hefeweizen. It basically tastes like all the spices of a pumpkin pie, minus the actual pumpkin. And true to its appearance, it's very light, despite its strong spicy taste. Though I heavily criticized Coney Island's Albino Python, I'd say Pumpkin Pie isn't far off from that – a spicy white lager of sorts, but here the taste is smoother and more palatable, with the spices coming in richer. It does become somewhat off-putting halfway down the glass, with a bit of a menthol aftertaste burying the more pleasant characteristics of the beer. Worth trying, though – the nice thing about the recent variety of pumpkin beers is that there's probably one out there to capture what you envision the style should be.

Winter Seasonal - Woodchuck Hard Cider (VT)
VERDICT: Unsurprising but still satisfying (B-)
I'm a pretty big fan of Woodchuck's cider. I have to give them credit for the diversity of their main lineup, plus the creativity they show in coming out with a number of seasonal ciders, something that no other cider brand really attempts. Woodchuck's Fall cider is one of my favorite beverages ever, and while their other seasonals are nowhere near as exciting, they're still solid. Winter seems to be their attempt to make a somewhat more complex cider, and I suppose on those grounds, it's nothing astonishing. If you don't drink a lot of cider you probably wouldn't even be able to tell the difference, but there are hints: aged in oak barrels with vanilla, these little touches do add some interesting aftertaste to the cider, though not enough to greatly shape its profile. The vanilla is most noticeable in the body, making it just slightly smoother and tastier, while the oak-aged treatment seems to have added a bit of sharpness and bite to the initial taste. These extra touches aren't terribly exciting, but they're worth savoring, and if you like cider anyway, the same holds true as always: it's a very drinkable, refreshing beverage.

10.10.10 Vertical Epic - Stone Brewing (CA)
VERDICT: Solid, but not quite epic (B+)
10.10.10 is a one-off beer by Stone, and you can probably even guess when it was brewed. Stone being mostly known for badass-levels of hops in their beer, I was fairly surprised to see them making a Belgian, even if it is a Belgian Strong Pale Ale. At 9.5% ABV, you can smell the alcohol faintly, but it's well hidden in the mouthfeel of the beer itself, which packs a nice, immediate flavor without being overpowering. It's smooth yet complex — I would have expected more hoppiness, but Stone went toward the sweet end on this one, adding in some grape varieties that give it a lighter, wine-like presence. Really, anyone trying this one should check out the brewing process Stone used, and all its crazy ingredients: things like a "legendary Ardennes strain of Belgian yeast," "triticale (a cross of wheat and rye), hopped with German Perle hops, and steeped with chamomile"... "Muscat, Gewurztraminer, and Sauvignon Blanc grape varieties." Jesus Keg-Standing Christ. While not the best example of the style that I've had, 10.10.10 is interesting enough to justify its experimental brewing status.

NOTHING TO ENVY (BY) BARBARA DEMICK

2010-11-11T17:47:00.000-08:00

Published 2009, 294 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: C
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B+

I've been mildly fascinated with North Korea lately, probably just because it's so hard to find any information about the place — it's perhaps the most bizarre, backwards country on earth. In my research, I came across Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea, which sounded like it might address exactly what I was wondering: what are ordinary lives like in North Korea like, and should I envy them? Sure, the title is a bit awkward and nonsensical. (Isn't it a bit like titling a book Not Particularly Delicious: How Enriched Uranium Changed Western Energy Consumption?) Still, Nothing To Envy is a fascinating look into this real-world 1984, even if it's not meant to be a comprehensive one.

Demick, at the time of the book's release, had been to North Korea a number of times herself, though the North Korea government only allows select visitors into its showcase capital city, and allows tours into the countryside only with special government guides. Most of her research for this book was through defectors from North Korea now living in China or South Korea — she says she interviewed over a hundred, as well as various humanitarian organizations and groups, but Nothing To Envy primarily follows six or so North Koreans throughout their lives, up to their escape into South Korea. Much of the book deals with the terrible famines the country experienced in the 90's, and which most North Koreans probably still have to deal with today. As a result, the narrative is paced somewhat strangely, jumping back and forth between its "characters." Demick spends varying amounts of time with each, since some of their stories are inherently more interesting — like a boy and girl who fall in love as children and maintain a secret relationship all through their years in North Korea, yet never reveal to each other how they long to escape their country. Yet both of them do, eventually but separately, and then find each other again in South Korea — except the woman has married and neither can remember what they saw in each other now that there's no longer a tyrannical government keeping them apart. These stories are interesting, but Demick jumps in and out of others, all of which are ultimately about starving, jobless people with little to distinguish their lives, all eventually escaping over the Chinese border. The pacing suffers as a result, with some stories seeming under-developed and hard to tell apart from one other.

I can't fault the book for its content — even when the pacing is a bit sloppy, the stories are always interesting. Demick sticks to these "ordinary lives" and doesn't write much about the government and politics of the country, or anything much outside of the cities where her subjects lived. If there is a major fault to Nothing To Envy, it is the tone it takes, or perhaps just Demick's writing style. She is clearly a journalist and not a novelist, and unfortunately her book reads like it. Her writing never drifts or loses focus, but it's lifeless and even a little cheesy when trying to convey the pathos of its subjects; it doesn't drive the story the way many successful non-fiction authors are able to do. At times, Demick seems to skip narrative tangents that could have explained a great deal more about how these people lived, and since she writes without citations or specific references (because most of the stories were related to her orally), I often felt a strange disconnect as a reader, having to remind myself that this is a non-fiction book. She repeatedly refers to the habit of North Koreans having to forage for weeds and grass to eat, and multiple times mentions that older women would leave their jobs in the afternoon and go into the mountains to collect wild plants. It's a very sad thought, but as an image, it doesn't really click — maybe just because I'm a hiker, but how are these starving, middle-aged women going from an urban center "into the mountains" to collect weeds that barely nourish them? How are they getting there and back in a matter of hours? I was genuinely curious, but perhaps Demick herself could not flesh out all these strange curiosities.

While the writing in Nothing To Envy doesn't give the book the spark it should have had — with such unbelievable, dramatic material — the material is still interesting enough to make this a great read, and Demick does seem to be a good researcher, uncovering anecdotes from her subject's childhoods, and allowing them to open up and speak their minds about the horrors they escaped. In all of this, North Korea as a country comes out seeming the most flat and confusing of all, because it is such a contradiction. Rather than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship, it is a country where the military cannot afford to give socks to its soldiers. The government is undoubtedly brutal, but from the comfortable distance of this non-fiction account, it often seems naively incompetent rather than sinister. More than anything, it is astonishing that such a a regime still survives, when most have been predicting the country's collapse for over two decades.

I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE (BY) SLOANE CROSLEY

2010-11-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

Published 2008, 228 pages
Characters: N/A
Writing: C+
Plot: C
Pacing: C+
Poignancy: C

In my recent review of The Thieves of Manhattan, I complained that maybe humor books just aren't for me anymore. While my lament was certainly relevant to that novel, it was equally inspired by I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which I had started previously and, after struggling through a few stories, put down in frustration. I almost never picked the book back up, knowing there was little chance I would like it. But I have a blog, and therefore a mission, and thus an obligation, dammit. The book had to be reviewed. And guess what? I did not enjoy it. I Was Told There'd Be Cake is a collection of "humor" essays — modern confessional essays in the vein of David Sedaris, focusing on the wacky things that happen in the author's life and her self-deprecating reactions to said wacky things. It's probably unfair to compare everything in this genre back to Sedaris, just like every other review of I Was Told There'd Be Cake does, but whatever — Cake is essentially a watered-down version of Sedaris without any of the insight or humor.

Ultimately, anyway, humor can't really be analyzed, since it's mostly subjective. Nonetheless, I'm perplexed as to what in this book was meant to be funny at all. I hate to be so cruel, but this collection reads like an assortment of LiveJournal entries that some college senior shipped off to a publisher. It's choppy, banal and never says anything interesting or insightful. Sure, any slice-of-life story can be funny if told the right way, with a strong voice, and Crosley doesn't go for cheap shocks or obvious hyperbole. It's undoubtedly grounded in reality, no question. But that's just the problem. These are the sort of stories you tell your own friends, while wasted, to maybe get a few chuckles. The sort of stories you write while pissed-off over the day's events and later read to your writing workshop so you can vent — and maybe get a few sympathetic smiles. Crosley establishes herself as an average person from a wealthy suburban background, who's never had to work all that hard, who's suffered the same mild embarrassments and set-backs that everyone has suffered, but still manages to find time to condescend to those around her. She's had bosses that were mildly irritating, and yelled at her — but don't worry, she found a new job the day after she quit anyway, the day after 9/11 no less! What luck! She's self-deprecating, in an attempt to make herself seem even more average, but self deprecation is an art that she can't quite pull off, and instead it just makes her sound self-absorbed.

I don't want this review to sound like a character critique when it's a review of a book, but such things are hard to get past when dealing with confessional essays — the writer's personality often is the story. The main problem with Cake, and my primary confusion with how Crosley got this published in the first place, is that Crosley is just not a very good storyteller. Her tone is generic and predictable; her every-day subject matter is never elevated to anything else. She's not witty; she just sounds exasperated. Her narratives jump around clumsily and rarely have anything like a satisfying resolution. Some of the stories here are strangely hard to follow for lightweight humor essays, and others end so abruptly and pointlessly that I began checking my copy for missing pages. Without humor, without poignancy, without gripping storytelling or well-crafted prose, there's simply nothing here.

2010 PUMPKIN BEER ROUNDUP

2010-10-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering, pumpkin beer is legit. Fruit-flavored beers don't have the best reputation, and usually for good reason. They're often just generic ales with syrup added after the brewing process, instead of fermenting the fruit itself — frankly, some of them could pass as soda. With the exception of lambics (a great style that bucks this trend), beer was rarely made with fruit until recently. Yet pumpkin ale has been around for hundreds of years. In Colonial times, American brewers couldn't afford to ship expensive ingredients overseas from England, so they used what they had around. And what did they have? Well, aside from apples (hard cider is perhaps the most patriotic of all beverages) they had pumpkins, the greatest of all vegetables (they are vegetables, right?) Pumpkins, it so happens, work really well in beer, blending well with the natural bitterness of hops, and adding a unique flavor that doesn't overpower the beer or end up tasting like chemicals. And thus the two greatest things in the world were paired, creating one of the most potentially delicious substances of all time.

GREAT:
Pumking - Southern Tier (NY)
The Great Pumpkin - Elysian (WA)
Despite all my enthusiasm for pumpkin beer as a style, I don't think it's been perfected by most modern brewers. Only since the mid-2000's has the style become popular, and though just about every micro has a pumpkin beer of their own now, many of them just aren't that great, or original. Southern Tier and Elysian provide the exceptions: two wildly unique pumpkin beers with no rivals. Despite the large number of beers on this list, no others come remotely close to these two, either in taste, style or sheer perfection. And yet, each is completely different from the other, proving that there's more than one perfect pumpkin beer recipe — the sign of a truly worthwhile style. I hope to see more beers compete with these two in years to come, but for now, they are without question among the best beers in the world, of any style.

GOOD:
Imperial Pumpkin Ale - Weyerbacher (PA)
Smashed Pumpkin - Shipyard (ME)
Night Owl Pumpkin - Elysian (WA)
Fisherman's Pumpkin Stout - Cape Ann Brewing Company (MA)
Punkin' Ale - Dogfish Head (DE)
A few steps down from "Great", these are still solid beers — better than many of other styles, and certainly better than most other pumpkins. They all earn extra points for uniqueness. Weyerbacher's entry is like a sweet brown(sugar) ale, smooth and rich with spices, simply tastier than most. Shipyard's special, rare pumpkin (they have another, inferior entry on the list) is lighter in mouthfeel but also high in ABV, and has an interesting, earthy vegetable profile, like a chunk of raw pumpkin, somewhat similar to Night Owl, the second Elysian beer here (and nowhere near as good as their first, The Great Pumpkin). Cape Ann makes the only pumpkin stout that I've ever seen, and as you might guess, the stout taste overwhelms the pumpkin, but nonetheless makes for a very smooth, tasty beer, similar to a milk stout with a more complex profile. Dogfish Head, generally one the best breweries in America, came up with one of the first pumpkin beers in the microbrew movement. Possibly as a result, their try is surprisingly tame for a Dogfish and not strong in pumpkin flavor — basically a brown ale with some funky caramelized flavoring. It's nonetheless a delicious and unique beer.

AVERAGE:
Pumpkin Ale - Blue Point (NY)
Pumpkin Brewster - Sixpoint (NY)
Leaf Pile Ale - Greenport Harbor (NY)
Saranac Pumpkin Ale - The Matt Brewing Company (NY)
Pumpkin Ale - Captain Lawrence (NY)
Will Stevens' Pumpkin Ale - Wolaver's / Otter Creek (VT)
Pumpkin Cider - Woodchuck Hard Cider (VT)

With any style, an "average" is going to be established eventually, a standard for the style that most breweries will tend to work around. It's already happened with pumpkin beer — a good sign for its establishment as a mainstream style, I suppose, but rather disappointing when you're trying to find something interesting to drink. I have to assume a bit of it is laziness, as all the better pumpkin beers are rarer and pricier, whereas these beers are more easily found, often populating grocery store sixpack aisles. The taste of this "average" is generally not strong in pumpkin flavor, and at this level, many breweries barely use any actual pumpkin in the making of their beer, resorting instead to cheap "fall" spices that give a vaguely pumpkin pie-like flavor. Blue Point and Sixpoint have new entries for 2010, and rise a bit above the rest; certainly, they're worthwhile beers to have on any occasion, even if they aren't particularly unique. Saranac Pumpkin is a personal favorite of mine for its strong vanilla aftertaste, but once again, the pumpkin flavor is not very prominent. Woodchuck's is of course a cider, not a beer, but still deserving of placement on the list. The pumpkin flavor is barely noticeable, adding more to the smooth, crisp mouthfeel than anything else, but it's an excellent fall drink.

SUB-PAR:
Pumpkin Barrel Ale - Fire Island (NY)
Pumpkinhead Ale - Shipyard (ME)
Pumpkin Ale - Buffalo Bill's (CA)
Pumpkin Ale - Smuttynose (NH)
Post Road Pumpkin Ale - Brooklyn Brewery (NY)
Smiling Pumpkin - Heartland Brewery (NY)
Compared to the entire world of beer out there, none of these are exactly bad beers. If you see one in a bar and don't have many other options, by all means, give it a try. But Smuttynose and Brooklyn Brewery unfairly hog grocery store aisles with their sixpacks, crowding out many superior pumpkin beers that just didn't land widespread distribution deals — and that annoys me. Most of these are very similar to the "standard pumpkin beer recipe" I talked about above, but with a few tweaks that bring out the more unpleasant characteristics of the beer. If you like bitter, sharper beers (but not as a result of hops, which are barely noticeable) then this may simply be a difference of opinion. I find the mouthfeel watery and unpleasant and the pumpkin taste almost gimmicky. Still. Could be worse.

AVOID:
Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ale - Coors (CO)
Jack's Pumpkin Spice Ale - Anheuser-Busch (MO)
"Worse." Avoid. Don't ask questions. Just walk away.

THE CITY AND THE CITY (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

2010-10-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

Published 2009, 312 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: A-

Unfortunately, I don't think any book could ever be as badass as the cover of The City and the City suggests, but China Mieville's intricate, atmospheric mystery gives it a pretty good go. Though the story is framed around a political murder, and never strays too far from other noirish police procedurals in scope of plot, the setting that steers most of Mieville's novel is unlike anything I've ever read. With the feel of very dry magic realism and gothic dark fantasy, Mieville's style has been described as a cross between Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and I can't really improve upon that. That, I hope, should be endorsement enough.

The two cities of the title are Beszél and Ul Qoma, conjoined but separate cities somewhere in Eastern Europe, each essentially its own country. Parallels to real-life separated cities are obvious, like Berlin during the Cold War, but Mieville pushes well past social commentary and into elaborate mind-game. Beszél and Ul Qoma — though distinct cities with their own unique cultures, languages and histories — share the same, overlapping physical space. Rather than divided down the middle, each city is spliced together with the other, necessitating a complicated system so that citizens of one town do not "breach" into the other. The population learns from birth to "unsee" the other city, memorizing which streets exist in which jurisdiction, what shops belong to their nation, and even which cultural signifiers make citizens of the "other" place practically — though not literally — invisible. It sounds like an outlandish concept, but there is no magic or fantasy involved, only politics. Mieville plays it so dry that it's easy to accept this scenario as plausible, even if no government could ever realistically make it work. For obvious reasons, a good deal of the novel is expository — sort of like Inception, which I seem to be referencing a lot lately, in that both are standard thriller plotlines, easy enough to follow on their own but tied to a complicated central structure. Those anticipating many layers of strangeness and surrealism beyond the basic pitch will be disappointed, but Mieville is able to extract so much from his premise that it really shouldn't matter.

The setting is easily malleable enough to provide its own twists and turns, and therefore a great deal of the narrative is spent establishing the nature of Beszél and Ul Qoma. Mieville is clever enough to make these the focus of the book — really, its main characters — without ever going off on tangents, or driving his story into the absurd. Unfortunately, his other characters are never quite as strong, and the structure of the story prevents them from developing much beyond their occupational roles. This is not to say that the characters are unbelievable or poorly written — they are bland and not particularly deep, but in the way that many real people are bland and not particularly deep, and their actions are always well-scripted and fully convincing. If The City and the City suffers from one chief weakness, it is that the ending fails to impress after the steady brilliance building up to it. The conclusion simply lacks the imagination of everything preceding it — many of the red herrings tossed out along the way might have led to a more interesting ending, and the final showdown requires so much exposition as it's unfolding that any tension or suspense is lost. I had hoped Mieville might have taken the metaphor inherent in his setting a bit further, or add more layers to the many he had already concocted, but the climax is true to the grounded tone the rest of the novel takes. Mieville has defended this arc as a sort of anti-fantasy — after being given a glimpse of potential, a hint that the book could expand into entirely new worlds, the narrative instead dips down and touches ground again, adhering to the boundaries of reality. Even if you, like me, are frustrated by this less-exciting turn, The City and the City is still one of the more adventurous, interesting novels to come along in years.

THE THIEVES OF MANHATTAN (BY) ADAM LANGER

2010-10-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

Published 2010, 253 pages
Characters: C-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: B-

I suppose I should just accept that comedic books, especially satires, aren't really my thing. I mean, I enjoy comedy — who doesn't? — and I like the concept of satire, I like the depth and precision a book can wield, and everything else that should make me appreciate comedic books. But it's happened a lot lately: I'll read a book, conclude that it was cute enough, but ultimately a bit flimsy and forgettable. Wondering what the book was missing, I'll look at other reviews and notice everyone calling it "laugh out loud funny," or whatever, and realize — oh, this book was supposed to be comedy? It's not that I thought the jokes didn't work. If forced, I'm not sure I would be able to point out what was even meant to be funny. Which is not to say that The Thieves of Manhattan a bad book. I enjoyed it well enough as goofy, lightweight satire that sort of missed the mark but was pleasant to read. I guess I'm just not the market for goofy, lightweight satire.

Thieves is the story of an aspiring memoirist, Ian Minot. He lives in a world where the publishing industry publishes only outlandish memoirs — at least that's the impression I got, given every character's bizarrely dismissive attitude toward fiction; but then again, maybe this was part of some broad satirical statement, and maybe the fact that the satire was so difficult to pinpoint was part of the problem. Ian interacts with loud, generic morons and struggles to find a publisher for his work, until a strange man informs him of a scheme to hookwink the publishing industry. With extremely little effort, they hoodwink the publishing industry. Who knew it was so easy to achieve rampant success! Of course, shenanigans ensue.

I think the problem for me is the tone such novels take. Thieves is a satire attacking memoir writers, liars and greedy editors, with a bit of a metafictional bent, which for obvious reasons intrigued me on paper. But satire in novels always seems to end up so broad and goofy, whether it's the raunchy randomness of Palahniuk or the slice-of-wacky-life essays of Sedaris. And there's a good reason such writers adopt a lightweight tone and zippy prose: they want to make you laugh, and if the prose is feisty enough to begin with, you'll already be in the mood when the jokes land. If they land. If there are jokes to begin with. The satire in Thieves is so broad and cartoonish that I'm guessing the tone was the joke; that the reader's understanding of the publishing industry is meant to be filled in, a self-provided punchline. But the characters are all too ridiculous, the situations too contrived, the repercussions cliched and silly. Langer gets a few good jabs in, of course, but jokes about the publishing industry more or less write themselves. One main character is meant to satirize James Frey and other such writers who have published "memoirs" full of outlandish, impossible-sounding drama. The character is as generic as a character could possibly be, a loud, crass thug who ends every sentence with "yo", even if that sentence is a written blurb advertising another book. There is no context or background for his success, but it's meant to seem ludicrous — as if just making the improbable happen in a fictional novel will somehow prove a point. Another character can't get published because his mystery thriller novel isn't "true." Okay, satirizing the industry for latching onto bullshit memoirs, that I get. But a novel that sounds awfully like Da Vinci Code can't get published because it didn't really happen? Because a thriller novel wasn't a memoir? Seriously?

Whatever Langer had to say about the publishing industry gets lost in a haze of conflicting messages and unbelievable behavior. The tone remains cute even when the action picks up, and there are plenty of in-jokes to make sure that literary types understand that this one is for them. But cute is all it really is. If that's your thing, this is a good book for you. It's enjoyable, it's silly, it reads fast. I'm just not altogether sure what the point was.

CLOUD ATLAS (BY) DAVID MITCHELL

2010-09-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

Published 2004, 528 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I'm walking around a bookstore scouting for something to read, it's always irritating when books are missing a summary — as if publishers are knowingly trying to kill impulse buys and give Amazon more business. A lot of times, of course, the summaries on the backcover are so vague or poorly written that they might as well not be there anyway. It would be difficult to tell what kind of book Cloud Atlas is just by giving it a quick look-over, so while the back cover summary may seem frustratingly elusive, this happens to actually be the kind of book that can't be captured in Marketing Speak. With Cloud Atlas, the events that occur aren't as important as the structure of the narrative, the way the pieces fit together. Because this book isn't one story, but five separate narratives nested within each other like Russian dolls. Each takes place in a different time period, moving forward chronologically, and therefore each is written in a radically different voice, style and genre from the others. The first is a sort of Victorian adventure novel, the second a novel of letters set in 1931, both written in the style of their time, and thus distinctly archaic sounding. The following two pieces are the closest to modern novels — the first, set in the 70's, mimics a pulpy paperback thriller; the next is the only tale set in the present day, a first person account from a cantankerous old man trying to escape his life's many debts. After that we move into the future, and finally, the distant future. Making a plot summary even more impossible, the first four "threads" of the novel are split in half, each ending in a cliffhanger before jumping to the next time period. Only the fifth and final tale is told in one piece, and when it ends we travel back to the previous stories in reverse chronological order, so that the novel ends where it begins, having spanned a few hundred years of human history.

Difficult to explain, of course, and after all that I've not even attempted to summarize what actually "happens" in Cloud Atlas. It's somewhat beside the point, but if Cloud Atlas is about anything, it's reincarnation. Smaller threads and minor themes begin to tie each of the five stories together, and it's strongly hinted that many of the protagonists are the same soul, reincarnated. It's a remarkably bold concept, and Mitchell executes it brilliantly. Though he at times spells out the reincarnation bits a little too explicitly, he has a lot of fun throwing clues to the reader here and there. After crossing the halfway point and realizing I would again be returning to each of these worlds to discover its unique conclusion, the experience became one of the most satisfying and thrilling I've had with a novel. Mitchell builds up his themes gradually, letting characters make their points as best they could based on their lives and social atmosphere, but these personalities all add up to a few stunning, beautiful statements about life and the burden of being human.

Mitchell's ability to switch between styles and genres is nearly superhuman, and though he never holds back, it doesn't seem as if he's showing off either. He plays these genres against each other, and against themselves, often re-appropriating tired genre cliches by placing them adjacent to a wildly different storyline, adding new meaning through context. Read any other way, one would not think to compare the smaller details, the universal constants — but here, together, Mitchell is able to draw attention to the fundamentals of each world by the reader's natural tendency to force comparisons, instead of heavy-handed narration. If one were to critique some of these stories on their own, a few of them likely would not hold up... but that's okay. "Half-Lives," the 70's thriller about a corrupt nuclear energy company, is written like an airport novel, and therefore bears all the faults of the genre — awkward 3rd person narration, internal monologues delivered in italics, dastardly villains that seem to know everything at every turn, a preposterous conspiracy that seemingly everyone and their mother is in-on. It may appear to be poorly written at first, but it's done intentionally, and in the context of the novel, it works. The first section, "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," is somewhat tedious to get through, as it reads like a journal from the 1850's actually would, and is certainly the slowest-paced thread in Cloud Atlas. None of these issues are necessarily flaws, and they don't detract from the novel's overall impact. Mitchell's writing in other places ranges from deadly accurate to beautiful. His plotting is precise and creative, and it's impossible not to admire the easy grace with which these stories were assembled.

Mitchell doesn't necessarily have one direct message to impart, or one clear story to tell, and the significance of the novel may accumulate in your mind rather than dropping on you all at once. Themes of slavery, oppression and endurance somewhat tie everything together, but hints of reincarnation and the vast scope of the novel make everything more profoundly melancholy than any of it would seem on its own. Indeed, simply struggling through each character's individual problems knowing how encased and limited their lives are, both physically and existentially, is quite affecting. While Mitchell could have taken this concept in any number of directions, the result is pleasantly subdued, letting the results speak for themselves without getting too flashy in their delivery. I have never read another novel quite like Cloud Atlas, and while it's often a challenging, strange hybrid of styles, it's also one of the best books I've read in recent years.

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (BY) PAUL AUSTER

2010-09-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

Published 1990, 308 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I first read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy two years ago, I did not know what to make of it. It's a purposefully obscure book, with each of the three interconnected novellas offering its own difficulties, despite each telling similar stories. I thought I liked it, but I could not have told you specifically why. To appreciate the Trilogy, you should probably enjoy detective fiction, meta-narratives, elaborate, abstract metaphors and writers writing about writers writing about writers (often with more layers and levels than Inception). After this second read of the Trilogy, I still can't claim to understand everything that Auster was trying to convey, but I can say that the New York Trilogy is probably now on my list of favorite books. It's difficult, it's depressing and bleak, it's slowly paced and full of possibly impossible riddles, but Auster writes with confidence and deliberation that few other writers can match. There is always the sense that he is simply that much cleverer than you — the Trilogy is willing to hold on to its secrets, but you could unravel them with enough effort. As the narrator reiterates throughout, there is never a wasted word, never an insignificant thought.

It would be nearly impossible to describe the plot of these novellas without sabotaging the book's meticulous construction, but there are general themes and structures that hold each together. Each story is, in a way, the same story: that of a detective stuck on a dull, uneventful case for such a long time that he eventually turns his analytical eye upon himself and faces an existential crises. In two of the novellas, the "detective" is only a writer forced by chance to play the role of a private eye. By necessity, then, nothing happens for long periods of time, so it's easy to see how some could become bored with this. (It's almost inevitable that you will be frustrated, if not bored — I certainly was, even the second time around). The Trilogy has all the trappings of a noir at the start, but it's only a detective novel in the meta sense, turning the conventions and grittiness of noir on their end in order to unravel the identity of character, writer and reader. It's a brilliant move by Auster, and though the book is certainly paced on the slower side, I was never once bored. Everything is so carefully constructed, literally no image or abstraction is wasted. It's certainly a complicated novel, but the narrative itself moves forward linearly, and it's never difficult to discern what's actually happening — it's only difficult to figure out the significance of what is happening. The mysteries here are of a vague, internal sort, sprinkled with strange subplots and metaphorical overtones. One side character is obsessed with the Tower of Babel, and a detective is forced to follow him on cryptic scavenger hunts throughout the city as this man attempts to create a new, perfect language. In the second (probably most obscure and frustrating) story, every character is named after a color: Black, Blue, White, etc. The narrator of the third story claims that he wrote the first two, and elements from each bleed into one another — sometimes names, mostly themes, and surely the anxiety each narrator faces. Another winking discussion involves the true author and significance of Don Quixote, and its many implications — characters-as-writers and writers-as-characters, duplicity and subversion — likely serve as a linchpin to unraveling the meaning of the entire Trilogy.

Auster is as careful with his language as he is with his plotting, and his assurance that every obscurity has its secret meaning is what keeps the Trilogy from becoming another pretentious exercise in lazy ambiguity. His workmanlike prose fits the style of the stories, and though I would call his writing poignant and sharp, it rarely tries to be beautiful on its own. This is not a poetic novel, and Auster wisely refrains from stacking metaphors and similes upon each other in order to describe the difficult world of his characters. The prose is descriptive, clean, precise, but grounded in reality, making the strangeness of the plots seem all the stranger. In this sense, The New York Trilogy could almost be considered magic realism, a genre that should contrast sharply with noir. Yet it works, mostly because Auster has something to say. So much to say, in fact, that it doesn't seem to matter if you miss a lot of it. Unlike a detective novel, it's not the specifics that are meant to add up. It's the general feeling of unease, the realization that there's more than you can possibly keep track of, more details than you can make sense of — there is significance in this, not the specifics themselves. The feelings that the Trilogy leaves are not comfortable ones. This book is never graphic or disturbing in the conventional sense, and there's almost no violence at all, but certain scenes and thoughts left me feeling unsettled and unhappy, even horrified. It would be easy to transpose those negative feelings back onto the novel. But then, you realize what Auster has done.

RED HARVEST (BY) DASHIELL HAMMETT

2010-09-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

Published 1929, 216 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: B-

The protagonist of Red Harvest is a man known only as the Continental Op, a jaded, semi-moral agent for a powerful detective agency in 1920's California. A ruthless voice of justice who seems to lack any ambitions or passions of his own, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op would shape future detective characters, an early hardboiled noir anti-hero, just as Hammett's stylish narratives helped to glamorize the nation's prohibition-era problems of gang violence, crooked cops and bought-out politicians. The details of the Op aren't particularly important, his background left to speculation, and even his motivations often ambiguous. He's hired to solve a murder in the corrupt mining town of Personville, and when he realizes that no one crime could be solved without cleaning up the whole place, he sets out to shake down the town and set Personville's warring gangs against each other. Like most noir, the specifics of the plot are often confusing or hard to grasp, and it's generally not worth trying to parse out all the twists and turns. It's style that carries the book.

As a sort of proto-noir, Red Harvest is lean and streamlined despite the intricacies of its plot. Noir hadn't been around enough at the time for genre conventions to come into effect, so femme fatales in Red Harvest aren't quite what you'd expect, and the Continental Op doesn't spend much time in shadowy bars or dark alleys. Yet one can see how Hammett became a trendsetter in the genre — his writing style is perfectly suited to taut, no-nonsense crime drama, even if his plotting is a little loose and unnecessarily convoluted. Scene changes happen fast, like everything else — almost too fast, especially given the number of players involved. The Op makes wisecracks, sneers at danger; the dames are strong-willed and sassy. Everyone is corrupt and out to cause trouble, but there's little drama in it, since no-one's motivations are revealed until after the fact. Hammett's two main leads are reliably interesting characters, easy to follow and successful at carrying the narrative momentum. But there are dozens of bit players, most of whom aren't alive long enough to be notable. Some add nothing to the story at all. Halfway through the book, the Op calls his agency headquarters and asks for backup. He gets it, in the form of two other detectives sent to work on the same case — something that's certainly not common in noir, so often built around a lone-wolf anti-hero. But in the end these two other characters are no more than two new names to keep track of, and they vanish from the story off and on, adding nothing but a slight touch of realism and scale. Which is nice, but there's already a lot to keep track of in Red Harvest, and the Op's unrealistic detective abilities don't make things any easier. Solutions to crimes aren't solved so much as announced, and then quickly passed over. The murder that opens the novel could have easily sustained most of the plot, but it ends up as only a minor step along the way. The Op often just knows — who killed who, and why — but the reader hasn't a chance of keeping up with his revelations until he dishes them out. It's a little disorienting, and makes each new reveal seem weightless and insignificant. Still, there's no doubt that the book's pacing is exhilarating, and the action is always fun, the dialogue always snappy. Hammett was a genuinely skilled writer. The narrative shares the easy, pushy confidence of its protagonist, so you won't find a dull page here. I expected Red Harvest to serve mostly as an interesting glimpse into history, a genre retrospective, but its punch still feels fresh. There's no point in trying to keep up — this is a roller coaster ride, a fun one, but there's no chance of straying off the tracks or even guessing where they're headed.

AVERY #5 (BY) VARIOUS AUTHORS

2010-08-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

Published 2010, 185 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A
Plot(s): B-
Pacing(s): A-
Poignancy: B

Avery caught my eye a couple weeks ago while browsing through literary magazines at a bookstore on St. Mark's Place, and being impressed by the clean, interesting layout design, I decided to give it a blind buy. Though it's a twice-a-year literary publication, Avery looks and feels like a genuine book of short stories, which is why it bills itself as "an anthology of new fiction." Unlike most literary magazines, Avery is all short stories — no poems or essays or interviews here, and the only artwork is a series of (very nicely done) watercolor and pencil sketches on the title pages. I'm often let down by short story compilations, whether by one author or various, but Avery was clearly put together by editors with a consistent vision, and managed to genuinely impress me.

The differences between Avery and other anthologies are probably not all that great — literary fiction usually covers a sadly narrow range of subjects, but collections like the extremely hit-or-miss Best American Short Stories 2009 are so disjointed and imbalanced that even the successful pieces are dragged down by the many flat ones. Most short stories just don't feel very imaginative or meaningful to me. Authors tend to rely too heavily on a subdued, ambiguous ending, or they put all their stock in over-written sentences packed with too many analogies, similes and metaphors. The stories in Avery sometimes suffer slightly from these problems, and in retrospet, none of them are particularly surprising or innovative. But the writing is fresh, exciting to read, and consistent. Considering that there are thirteen stories here by thirteen different authors, Avery #5 manages to establish a running tone that never really slumps or feels stale (with maybe one exception). The editors should be congratulated for their skill at matching these pieces together, as this collection has a distinct personality, even more so than many I've read from a single author, but without the redundancy that most one-author collections face. The level of writing all around is excellent, and the plotting, while somewhat unadventurous, is nonetheless tight and interesting.

The best of the collection is possibly "The Boy Who Jumped and Lived," by Steve Almond, and as the first story, it gives a good indication of what will follow. It's neatly plotted with interesting, enjoyable characters, but Almond's voice is what truly carries the piece, as he casually drops fantastic lines without getting bogged down in his own abilities. Almond's story never feels pretentious or self-important, and though the subject matter is somewhat serious, it manages to be quickly-paced and fun to read. Other stories in the collection have similar strengths, though perhaps not to the same degree. "Devices" by Chelsey Johnson is possibly the most experimental story here, and does a good job of pushing the pace of the collection while adding to its originality. Most others are simply solid, carried by a strong, consistent voice, all working well with their neighboring pieces. The only story that felt somewhat out of place to me was "Beyond Any Blessing" by Stuart Nadler, in part because of its length, and in part because it felt like a wearingly typical "literary" story, unlike the others here. It's almost twice as long as anything else in the collection, but never really earns it. The writing itself is still solid, but lacks spark, and for a relatively long story, I never felt that it went anywhere interesting.

Overall, Avery #5 is certainly one of the stronger short story collections I've come across. Despite lacking a unifying theme or thesis, the stories are so consistent and well-chosen that each makes a better impression than they would have on their own — the real test of a short story collection, in my opinion. So, well done, Avery House Press, and all involved. You've helped to restore my faith in the genre, and I'll be picking up issue six.

INTERPRETER OF MALADIES (BY) JHUMPA LAHIRI

2010-08-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Published 1999, 198 Pages
Characters: A
Writing: A-
Plot(s): B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

In the title story of Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, an Indian tour guide guides an American-Indian couple around the historical sites of their native land, a country they associate with but have never visited before. He begins to take an interest in the wife of the group, projecting his own marital problems onto this stranger's relationship. Yet as a guide, he can do no more than observe from behind a social wall and go home with no real revelations except some faint disappointment. In a way — and likely for good reason, as it is the title piece — this short story works as an abstract for the collection as a whole, and maybe even this whole subgenre of literary fiction. Lahiri writes beautifully crafted, endearing character pieces that tug at a few melancholy emotional strings before fading away, with no clear lessons learned. Like the interpreter in question, Lahiri plays the role of a listener as well as narrator, and refrains from explicitly stating her judgements.

Lahiri is far from alone in realizing that subtlety leads to a more organic relationship between reader and character. But unlike the many, many who attempt this style — the ending so ambiguous you might not even notice it's over, the depressed, doomed protagonists — Lahiri's prose is exceptionally strong and her characters more vivid than average. There's a healthy amount of variety and creativity in the plots of these shorts, putting her ahead of peers like Lorrie Moore, as far as I'm concerned. There are, of course, the multiple stories about doomed marriages and mid-life romantic failures, but Lahiri attempts a few more experimental pieces, and is much better than most at letting her characters stand out through their own personalities, rather than seeming mere avatars of the author. Almost every piece is based around Indian culture in some way, but never to the extent that it becomes the primary driving force of the story.

If I have any criticism of Lahiri's style, it's that she is perhaps a little too passive in too many stories. Few writers are as skilled at pulling themselves back as a narrator and letting each story reach its end with no real conclusion or catharsis, but even so, Lahari doesn't quite escape the trap of this type of story. Though this is a short collection, under 200 pages with just nine stories, only a few of them left any real impression on me. Lahiri falters in most of the pieces set in India, where she attempts to mix a more traditional-sounding narration with quirky literary character pieces. Other stories simply feel too small. With such vivid characters featured in the best stories here, those in between feel more arbitrary in comparison, and lacked 'punch' in some important way. Still, this isn't so much a criticism as a result, and in any short story collection, a reader is going to focus most on the stories they connect to. I wasn't able to fully connect with everything here, but this isn't really Lahiri's fault. Interpreter of Maladies deserves a solid recommendation as a collection full of natural characters and sophisticated literary craftsmanship.

BLOOD MERIDIAN (BY) CORMAC MCCARTHY

2010-08-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

Published 1985, 335 Pages
Characters: C+
Writing: A
Plot: D
Pacing: D
Poignancy: B

Reading Blood Meridian isn't so much like reading a traditional novel as watching hours worth of old historical footage spliced together with no narration. Set around the US / Mexico border in the 1850's, during a series of violent raids and military skirmishes, there is never enough focus or plot to seem like, well, a novel. Like those old sepia-tinted movies, it's all wide-shots, jumpy unclear footage, sudden cuts from one scene to the next. You can tell you're following the same group of characters, but the camera rarely ventures close enough to learn anything about them, and most of the time all you see is one big mass moving about the screen. And like watching three hours of historical footage, it becomes increasingly tedious and disorienting the longer you stick with it — even if the scenery is nice and individual scenes, taken on their own, seem interesting enough at first.

Blood Meridian was probably one of the most difficult books I've ever tackled. It is a novel, technically, but the actual experience is more akin to reading a 300 page prose poem about gratuitous violence and desert landscapes, written in a sort-of stylized Biblical language. Blood Meridian follows a group of Americans wandering throughout Mexico, stopping at a dozen towns that all start to sound the same, fending off wildlife, Indians, angry Mexicans and ultimately killing lots and lots of people. That's it: there's no overall plot, no sense of momentum or purpose or change. Every chapter feels the same as the last, but with a few details changed. The group wanders, kills, rides, fights, kills. Characters join the group and soon leave, rarely staying long enough to be given a name. Without a plot, the book is disorienting enough as it is, but Blood Meridian lacks even a main character to center itself around — and this, ultimately, prevented me from every really becoming immersed in the story. Some summaries and reviews will try to tell you that "The Kid" is the protagonist of Blood Meridian, but that's bullshit. For the first 50 or so pages, The Kid is the driving force of the story, which at least seems like it's going somewhere in the early stages. Blood Meridian would have made for a fantastic novella, as it could have made its point without repeating itself over and over. But after the first few scenes, The Kid quickly fades from the picture, never amounting to more than a passive participant, just another member of the group. McCarthy goes for entire chapters without mentioning him at all. Open up Blood Meridian to a random page in the middle and the most common pronoun you will see is "they." "They" are the main character of the novel. If you wanted to be really flippant, you could boil the plot of Blood Meridian down to McCarthy's favorite pronoun + verb combo: "They rode...."

It's hard to review Blood Meridian for its various merits, as they are ultimately so lopsided. McCarthy clearly had a very specific goal in mind when he wrote the book, and its "thesis" is interesting enough: this is an anti-Western, an exploration of the endless cycles of violence that actually made up the Old West, rather than heroics and clear-cut gun duels. But as with performance art, your reaction will likely depend on how far you believe a 'statement' can sustain art. Is the mere statement or idea enough, without anything developing overtop of it? Blood Meridian is not a particularly deep book; maybe my attention-span was just so shot that I didn't notice its layers, but it seemed pretty one-note to me. They ride, they kill, people die. Violence is bad but unlikely to change, see? Do we need 300 pages of interchangeably gruesome events to make this point? Or at least, why couldn't McCarthy make this point while still crafting a plot?

This is a debate that I will likely end up on the losing side of, but it's nonetheless a huge beef that I have with the literary world today. There seems to be an unquestioned bias among literary readers that well-written prose is the primary goal of a story — and that plot, being on the other end of the spectrum, is not only cursory but even unnecessary. McCarthy seems to agree with this philosophy. I can't in fairness say that the plot of Blood Meridian is "bad" because he literally made no attempt to craft one. But why is this excusable, much less preferable? I should mention, if it's not too late, that Blood Meridian is considered not only the best of McCarthy's books but one of the best works of literature in the last half century by many smart people. Now, I can understand why some would enjoy it — the writing is absolutely fantastic on a technical level — but really, a landmark of contemporary literature? Frankly, I don't see why McCarthy's difficulty with plot is any more excusable than Dan Brown's inability to not write like a 5th grader. Sure, Brown is a truly awful writer, on a technical level, while McCarthy excels at this. But McCarthy cannot write plot, and Brown — for all his many flaws — knows how to shape a riveting story. My opinion of Brown as a writer is very low, believe me, but I'm merely trying to illustrate a point — why is there such favoritism for the various elements of a novel? Why is plot not considered important to a book's worth, when it's so crucial to the actual process of reading for many people? I found many sentences in Blood Meridian to be utterly stunning; some so well-written that I literally went wide-eyed. Yet even so, the book remained a chore to work through, and when I would sit down with it again, I was frequently unable to tell whether I had read a certain scene already or not, as they all end up sounding so similar. There's nothing more frustrating than that sudden, bitter feeling that there may be no point in actually reading a book to its end. As someone who enjoys the "story" aspect of "stories," a clear, strong narrative would have allowed me to enjoy Blood Meridian as more than a long string of beautiful words. No matter how beautiful the scenery, no matter how vast and striking the landscape, if there's no path to give you a sense of direction, you're eventually going to get lost.

FAR NORTH (BY) MARCEL THEROUX

2010-08-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

Published 2009, 314 Pages
Characters: B
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

If you know me, you know that I'm obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction. I've read pretty much everything out there, but it's been a weird relationship, as I'm never really satisfied with what I find. It's strange, but post-apocalyptic books always seem to lack imagination. Most of them end up dealing with the same themes, same situations, same stoic but jaded characters. Far North is the upcoming selection for a book club I joined, so I had no knowledge of the plot whatsoever going in. But I had hope. Much like the character of a post-apocalyptic novel, I believed that maybe this time could be different.

It's not that post-apocalyptic books are usually bad. I wouldn't be able to sustain my fascination with the genre if that were the case. It's just that they're usually "alright", and frankly, I want more. Even the best ones — say, Stephen King's The Stand — usually end up having some huge, awkward flaw. Far North doesn't really expand any horizons, doesn't really have any original ideas, doesn't demonstrate anything new about human nature, but it is at least well written. It's gripping and fairly well paced. But I wish there were something more to stick with me, because the plot is basically the plot of every post-apocalyptic novel. This time, it was global warming. A group of pilgrims established a new frontier in northern Siberia, taking advantage of the receding temperatures, and a couple years later the rest of civilization went to shit. This time, the main character is a woman — except she acts like a man in every way, to the point that other characters spend most of the novel believing that she's a man, so a bit of a missed opportunity there. This time, there isn't even a side-kick along for her adventure. This is basically a "road" novel, as most post-apocalyptic novels are, except this journey is shaped in little futile loops, and there's never a clear goal or threat. True to life, I suppose, as our protagonist just sort of wanders around randomly and deals with the various situations she finds. This is a book of random encounters, fleeting danger that's inevitably resolved within a few pages, so there's never any great tension or suspense.

Post-apocalyptic novels so often deal with hardship, society's healing or reforming, the cruelty of men cut loose from civilization. And that's fine, but not when there's nothing else to it. Here, the side characters never stick around for long enough to develop, and without side characters the book lacks even a sense of danger. There's a clipped, casual quickness to the pacing of the book. Though well-written, Far North isn't particularly profound. It doesn't make any great statements about civilization or human nature that haven't been made before — although it does make them better than most. At times, it actually starts to steer towards something unique, only to shy away at the last minute. Set in the wilds of Russia, it never takes advantage of its unique scenery or the mystery that is the vast Siberian landscape, which was a huge disappointment. I assume that Theroux has never been to Siberia, as there's no sense of unique personality to the place, and it could have been set on almost any landmass with no changes but in the names of towns. Once a mysterious region called "The Zone" is introduced, I was hoping Far North would at least have the good sense to borrow some of that awesome Russian creepiness from STALKER, but alas, this too is barely developed. The main character wanders. The main character perseveres, no matter how unlikely. And so on.

All this disappointment does not make Far North a bad book. I always do this, getting caught up in the flaws of a novel, only to claim at the end that it's pretty decent — but whatever, Far North is pretty decent. While it lacks creativity, it isn't really derivative or cliche either, and makes up for this in readability. There's a lot of attempted poignancy that falls flat, but Far North works on a structural level better than most books. So if you haven't read all that many post-apocalyptic books, this wouldn't be a bad start. It doesn't cover any new ground, but it nonetheless makes for a reasonably satisfying journey.

INCEPTION AND THE DEFENSE OF IDEAS

2010-07-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is not a review of Inception. I'm not going to discuss Inception in-depth, either, so there will be no spoilers here in case you haven't seen it yet. It will hopefully become clear later on in this editorial that I thought Inception was a dashingly-crafted good time, and a movie that got a lot of mileage out of eluding people's guesses of what it would be. Going by the vague premise unveiled in teasers and Christopher Nolan's previous filmography, many likely expected a movie full of crazy plot twists, another film like The Prestige or Memento scattered around a shifting dream-world matrix. Yet the plot of Inception is fairly straightforward in-and-of itself (despite the complexity of the in-world rules dictating that plot), propelled mainly by the strength of its central idea. Much has been made of the fact that Inception was one of the few movies released this summer not based on previously-existing material, but I will argue that its originality is far more significant than that: Inception is the rare movie that starts almost completely from scratch. So this is what I would like to discuss today: ideas, whether they are in decline, and how Inception makes a damn good case that those in the creative arts cannot lose sight of them completely.

So what is a film's "idea"? Admittedly, I don't have a concise explanation for what, exactly, I'm talking about, as a movie can bring new ideas to the table in a variety of ways. Ideas permeate every stage of a movie, but for the most part I'm talking about a film's general, central premise. Boil the plot of a movie down to one or two lines, as simple as possible, and you have its premise. Compare that premise to other films and see how many start to sound the same. Very few completely original ideas exist anymore, and this is another logical inevitably. Someone more knowledgeable in economics than I will have to tell me the term for this, as I'm sure there is one — like oil, dinosaur bones, or rare Magic: The Gathering cards, there are a finite number of purely original, unused movie plots, and thus their discovery will decrease over time. A film — or a work in any mode of storytelling — can achieve success, I believe, in two broad ways: its idea, and its execution. Of course, a film doesn't require a new idea to be good; it doesn't even need to alter an existing idea all that much in order to set itself apart. In other words, it's more important to have a well-executed "story" than a totally original premise. A good premise can still lead to a bad story, after all, and even a good story can be poorly executed. (In case this is confusing, the "story" of a movie is the more specific way in which its "premise" unfolds, the way its characters bring about resolution — but for the sake of simplicity, I'm not going to discuss the originality of story here). Now, to further simplify, I'm going to suggest the somewhat less-than-scientific proposition that a premise can be measured for originality, and that a premise can be varying degrees of original when compared to other films.

Here's an example. "A soldier arrives in a foreign land where his people are seeking valuable resources, despite the protests of primitive natives. After falling in love with one of the natives, a beautiful princess, he questions his allegiances and helps to reconcile the differences between the two cultures." That description describes the plot of Disney's Pocahontas, but it's also the exact plot of James Cameron's recent blockbuster Avatar. (I am far from the first person to note the similarities between the two). Of course, Avatar got quite a bit of backlash for its lack of originality, so let's look at some other examples. Many of the best movies made in recent years are not necessarily based on original ideas — which isn't a problem, so long as they establish their creativity on different terms. Take the premise of There Will Be Blood, which isn't particularly novel: "An oil prospector and his son make their fortunes in turn of the century California." It's simple, and its success lies in the many elements that make up the unfolding story: its execution. Of course, in lumping all the elements that make up a film into one category, I don't want to dodge the fact that any of these smaller elements can make or break the film. There Will Be Blood succeeds, and establishes its originality, through its cinematography, acting, soundtrack, and characters, et cetera. Similarly, a film can present ideas on a smaller scale, even if the general premise itself isn't necessarily that inventive. A good example of this is the original Star Wars. Here's the premise: "A sheltered farmboy, anxious to leave his home, finds himself caught up in a plot to rescue a princess and overthrow an evil Empire." Taken on such a basic level, Star Wars doesn't sound all that different from various "epic quest" stories that proceeded it. Like Avatar, Star Wars: A New Hope can't be given credit for taking an old story and just transplanting it to space. However, if you view both ideas and execution as intertwined and thus layered, Star Wars gets more original just one layer down. Let's take a slightly expanded premise: "A sheltered farmboy, anxious to leave his home, finds himself caught up in a plot to rescue a princess after her home planet is destroyed by a seemingly-unstoppable new weapon under the control of an evil Empire." Star Wars was designed to show off original ideas within its various layers of execution: as set-pieces, plot-points, or even as characters. Darth Vader, though not unique in his actions as a villain, is fairly original taken in the context of the full movie — in his design, rank, powers, and motivations. To further illuminate how ideas can set a film apart at every level of design, one only has to compare the original Star Wars trilogy to the new one. The "prequels" are unoriginal and uninspired in nearly every way that a film can be, often stealing scenes wholesale from their predecessors, relying on flashy effects and overly-stylized, emotionless action-sequences. It's as if Lucas were merely referencing his original ideas rather than thinking up new ones. Where the original film gave popular culture the idea of a "lightsaber," the new films try to dazzle you with smoke and mirrors: a character with a double-bladed lightsaber! A character that fights with two lightsabers! A robot that has four lightsabers! In my opinion, there is hardly a better example of why we need original ideas.

People are talking about Inception for a number of reasons, of course, but the fact that it has mastered both idea and execution is chief among them. I wrote this editorial with Inception in mind because the film is itself about ideas — the importance of ideas. Christopher Nolan isn't the first person to capitalize upon this sort of meta-commentary, but he built a film around it in a way that few others have. Inception can be taken as a metaphor for the shared experience of watching film, and itself serves to highlight just how a good, bold idea can take hold in people's minds. An idea is "the most resilient parasite," but the act of "inception" is not limited to a single mind — Inception is itself an act of inception, and I believe this was fully intentional. Of course, the art of ideas is not entirely lost, and I hope the success of Inception goes to show why it cannot be. There are many ways for a film to make money, but few ways to build a reputation as a landmark filmmaker. Take Charlie Kaufman, one of the few scriptwriters in Hollywood to have a large following — and he's earned it. Kaufman's films are terrifically rich with both idea and vivid execution, setting him aside from nearly everyone else in film today. Charlie Kaufman is successful for his ideas, and this reputation — the strength of the ideas he has set to film — will outlive money-makers like Michael Bay, who contribute very little. Pixar is another contributor of inventive ideas lately, and most agree that their track record is nearly perfect. Their reputation is equal to their creativity. Or, for a more complicated example, take the bizarre career of M. Night Shyamalan, who made a name for himself as a creator of original, odd ideas. For a while, this worked as well would be expected — take the "idea" behind The Sixth Sense, and consider just how permanent it has become in the cultural consciousness. Yet interestingly, Shyamalan soon turned this strength against himself, making films that grew ridiculous and uneven, sinking under the weight of expectation that his ideas would come in the form of an astounding and increasingly preposterous "twist." Ideas are hard to come by, and unfortunately, they're also easy to ruin.

All this hopefully makes the case for Inception. As I said, this is not a review of that film, and thus I don't want to write too much as if in defense of it. But for comparison, here's the premise of Inception, the basics of the film stripped down as much as is possible: "A team of thieves is able to extract information from the mind of a target while the target, as well as the team, are in a shared dream. After a job gone wrong, the team is hired to do the opposite: plant an idea in a new target's head." In essence, Inception follows the structure of a heist movie. Yet how many films would be even partially be described by that summary? Any? Could you confuse it with The Thomas Crown Affair or Inside Man? How about films dealing with artificial realities within the mind, like The Matrix, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or even The Science of Sleep? Even the basic premise would not be at all similar. Regardless, this is not to say that Inception was executed perfectly: that's been argued, discussed and shouted-about elsewhere, and even if you disagree, I'm not here to debate the point. My claim is simply that Inception marks an increasingly rare kind of movie — a movie that is entertaining, successful in its use of cinema as technique and art, but a film that also contributes to the shared popular mind, our cultural dream state. Ideas are scarce, and for every new one, for every Inception, there's suddenly another benchmark. In the future, any movie that leans a little too close to Inception's territory will at once be compared to it and torn down accordingly — and thus, a little more of that available pool of ideas is taken away. Let's be fair: it's hard enough to execute pre-existing ideas, to shuffle things around enough so as to find an original story, much less an original premise. It's damn hard, and rare, to make a movie as well executed as There Will Be Blood, and who cares if it has superficial similarities to Citizen Kane? But to do both — to invent, and perfect, within the same film — is no longer commonplace in cinema, and is thus understandably lauded as a landmark accomplishment.

1776 (BY) DAVID MCCULLOUGH

2010-07-18T14:35:00.000-07:00

Published 1996 , 294 Pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: A-
Plot: n/a
Pacing: A
Poignancy: A

If you aren't familiar with David McCullough, one thing is important to know before reading one of his pop-history works: McCullough isn't writing for academics, history buffs or researchers. A book like 1776 is the written equivalent of a History Channel special. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that. If you want an intense study of the Revolutionary War, certainly look elsewhere. If you just want to read a book — an entertaining book, even — and finish it knowing a bit more about history, than 1776 is just right for you. In fact, it's perfect.

Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant of most historical periods past the fall of Rome. The last time I studied anything related to the American Revolution was exactly a decade ago. My judgment of 1776 is based purely on its merits as a book, not as a historical analysis — but since it was given to me by a Revolutionary War reenactor and Thomas Jefferson impersonator, and has received fairly universal praise for its Pulitzer Prize winning author, I'm going to assume that its accuracy is beyond me to question. This is a highly focused examination of one year in America's history that rarely strays from the side of General Washington, his generals and the British men facing him in battle. Don't even expect to learn how the American Revolution ended, because 1776 — as its title implies — cuts off after the pivotal battles of Trenton and Princeton, long before the end of the war. The Declaration of Independence is barely mentioned, the Continental Congress operates in the background, and the reasons for the war's beginning are only alluded to. Is it somewhat odd for a non-fiction work to only barely scratch the surface of its subject? Certainly it's a bold move, but the rewards are great. I do wish that McCullough had continued all the way to the Siege of Yorktown and the end of the war, but only because he knows how to tell this story so well.

After all, there's a reason for the surge of pop history books becoming bestsellers in the last decade: most people don't want to bury themselves in a long, unrewarding academic tome. Few people can absorb such large volumes of information, and histories are easily bogged down by the dozen branches their subject matter takes. If the experience of reading such a book isn't rewarding, there's even less chance of remembering the history you wanted to study in the first place. In this respect, 1776 succeeds magnificently: it reads like a novel, and a good one. Few books this year have compelled me to turn the page as this one has; a doubly remarkable achievement considering I already knew the ending. The suffering and setbacks faced by the American soldiers is real and fully-explored; McCullough injects suspense and tension into the events simply by layering his sources for maximum effect. There were times when I thought to myself: "Wow. I really want to know what happens. And I'm reading this on Independence Day, so..."

That's about the best praise I could think of for a book like this, but 1776 isn't soft on the historical details either. McCullough offers little commentary of his own, though his assessments of the "character's'" thoughts, strategies and worries is always timely, useful and reasonable. By sticking close to his source material, McCullough keeps the information grounded and even manages to create some historical atmosphere. Indeed, the ultimate reason that 1776 is so readable both as a book and a history is McCullough's prose, which is clear, strong and enjoyable. This is a man with a sure command over the English language, and he uses it to his full advantage, creating a historical narrative that earned its place at the top of best-seller lists.

THE MAGICIANS (BY) LEV GROSSMAN

2010-07-12T20:49:00.000-07:00

Published 2009, 402 Pages
Characters: B
Writing: A-
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

A lot of reviewers have branded Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians as "Harry Potter for adults." It's an obvious selling point, I guess, and I can see how a lot of people would get distracted by the novel's highly referential first half and conclude that that's all this is. A few hundred pages of The Magicians does indeed take place at a secret magical school hidden from normal society, and Grossman goes beyond just glancing similarities — the characters themselves reference Harry Potter on multiple occasions so we don't have to, as well as Tolkien and probably a dozen others. Which is the point: this is meta-fantasy, a novel about the sort of people who read fantasy novels rather than the adventure itself. After all, what is fantasy? The general structure, whether taking place at a magical school or in a far-away mystical land, is that a troubled youth is whisked away to discover how special he is, and finds his place in his world by mastering the art of magic. The idea is that, wherever the character goes, he or she is entering, literally, a fantasy.

The Magicians takes a fairly obvious but nonetheless clever step back from all this, acknowledging that most of us grew up wishing for these very fantasies to take us away. The novel's protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, grew up reading a famous fantasy series called Fillory and Further, novels which are very obviously meant to fill in for The Chronicles of Narnia (though they work as general archetypes as well, if you've never read Lewis' series). The Fillory series mirrors The Chronicles of Narnia in nearly every single way, and goes far beyond mere background reference — without giving too much of the plot away, let's just say it's an extremely integral part of the story. So it's surprising to me that The Magicians is compared to the Harry Potter series so often, when in many ways it serves as a direct rebuttal — almost a re-writing of — The Chronicles of Narnia.

As you can probably tell, Grossman is trying to pull off a lot of tricks for one mostly-self-contained novel. While he never reaches quite the same level as the novels he's referencing, The Magicians is easily one of the most interesting, daring novels I've read in some time, and I found it to be incredibly addicting: even with its substantial 400 pages, I finished the entire novel in four days. It's definitely a page-turner, and a smart one, which I attribute mostly to its unpredictable and fast-moving plot. In retrospect, I have to admit that the plot isn't half of what it could have been, and Grossman plays his cards safer than I was imagining. Yet as I was reading, I truly had no idea what to expect — it's one of those novels that maintains a sense that nearly anything could happen within a chapter or two (even if it doesn't, really). Possibly this is all just a result of the brevity with which Grossman deals out his plot points. The Magicians would have earned its Harry Potter comparisons if the characters had stayed in school for longer, yet these five years of the character's lives only take up the first half of the book. Brakebills College for Magic isn't central to the plot the way that Hogwarts is — it's mostly there to be there, to establish the world that the characters inhabit. Even in the pivotal final third of the book, few plot elements are given much attention, despite most of the sets being interesting enough to carry a novel of their own. Though it would have been rather crass of Grossman to have given this the series treatment, The Magicians could have been at least twice as long with few ill effects. At times, it does feel as if there are chapters missing, or scenes that perhaps got cut down. While the brisk speed at which the narrative moves might patch over the pacing problems Grossman might have faced in a longer novel, some could view this is a pacing problem on its own: too much speed and too little substance. But to be fair, this only really bothered me in the later half, when the plot suddenly opens up and has the potential to go in any number of crazy directions, only to settle for what was probably the safest possible route.

All of this, I suspect, was done in order to make sure that Grossman's thesis wasn't lost amongst all the fantasy tropes he's exploiting. Grossman wasn't really writing a fantasy, after all: he was writing about the sort of people who get sucked into fantasy novels, and why such an obsession can be as dangerous as it is tempting. Though Quentin is sometimes unlikeable and occasionally downright annoying, he's fairly realistic for a main character. The side characters are somewhat weaker, and though Grossman is a good enough writer to provide each with an authentic voice, most of the characters never develop or change, and a few are ultimately irrelevant. But it's the lessons that these characters learn that ultimately resounds, and the reason I can so easily forgive the novel for its disappointments. It isn't easy to write a novel spilling over with genre-tropes and cliches and yet have it seem original and fresh, but that's just what Grossman's done. So it isn't the plot that matters in the end, or even the nature of the fantasy itself, but the very fact that we're being brought back to it, seeing what we've seen before in an entirely new light.

SUMMER: BEST TIME OF YEAR TO GO FOLK YOURSELF

2010-07-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

I enjoy making mixtapes. Who doesn't? I like all kinds of mixtapes: mixtapes with subliminal messages, mixtapes as birthday presents, mixtapes for new friends, mixtapes that strongly urge you to consider settling this out of court, mixtapes with codes that will lead to hidden treasure, and mixtapes that are actually just Led Zeppelin III. I also quite frequently associate certain albums and songs with seasons of the year, so I like making mixtapes with that in mind too. A few years ago, while totally high on boredom and Lucky Charms cereal, I decided to undertake the ambitious project of making mixes for all four seasons of the year. It was fun, and highlighted a very specific way that I listen to music, but I soon realized that it was not something I could continue to do. I simply don't have enough season-specific music to make a new, original mix every year. So now, three years and a couple hundred albums later, I'm back at it — but this time, I'm only doing one a year, moving a season ahead every year. In other words, "summer" in 2010, "fall" in 2011, "winter" the year after that, and so on.

"What," you may ask, "makes certain music feel like summer?" I suppose that's highly dependent on each individual person's taste, as well as their feelings toward summer, but I think most would agree that summer music is ideally fun and upbeat. I would add that it's a bit edgier than spring, maybe even a little wistful, with a sense of urgency, yet not as melancholy as fall. It should feel warm, yet not overly-superficial or sterile. "Also," you may now point out, "You sound like a pretentious hipster douchebag. Wistful? Urgency? You're such a dick."

You know what I have to say to that?

SUMMER: BEST TIME OF YEAR TO GO FOLK YOURSELF

1. Settler (by) Balmorhea

2. Come Talk To Me (by) Bon Iver

3. Write It All Down For You (by) Elliott Brood

4. Sideswiper (by) Fang Island

5. Some Are White Light (by) Caspian

6. Catch Hell Blues (by) The White Stripes

7. Bron-Y Aur Stomp (by) Led Zeppelin

8. Liner (by) Justin Vernon

9. The Gnashing (by) Baroness

10. Aves (by) Gifts From Enola

11. Þau Hafa Sloppið Undan Þunga Myrkursins (by) Ólafur Arnalds

Many would likely make a summer playlist of super-dancey pop tunes, and while I wanted to go for a warmer, more simplistic feel, I didn't want to get far away from that frivolous summer energy. This year I've been discovering a lot of folk music, a genre which I had always under-appreciated, and it turns out that a lot of it is pretty good for conveying the warmth and earnestness I associate with summer. Balmorhea opens the mix with a Westerny twist on chamber music, spinning together handclaps, happy gang-vocals and what basically amounts to a neo-classical hoedown into one of the best songs I've ever heard, and one that would put me in a good mood even if a doctor were simultaneously telling me that I'd just been diagnosed with leprosy. Bon Iver then proves how godlike he is by turning a Peter Gabriel song into a stupidly catchy, slow-burning folk tune full of remorse and longing, and making it fun at the same time. Elliott Brood kicks it up a notch with their self-styled "Death Country," and Fang Island then proceeds to shred some nasty riffs all over your face. For an instrumental interlude, Caspian demonstrates how heavy and thick a song can go while still retaining atmosphere and beauty, slipping some pedal steel guitar all up in there, just in time before Jack White leads us to hot water with one of the nastiest, beastly riffs I've ever heard. Seriously, the slide guitar in "Catch Hell Blues" should have its own theme park ride. If Led Zeppelin's entry doesn't have your foot stomping, well, I'm sorry about your amputation, but I hear prosthetic limbs are getting better all the time. Justin Vernon takes it down a notch for some introspection before Baroness bounces right back with a rollicking, unstoppable monster from their recent Blue Record, one of my favorite summer albums. Gifts From Enola's entry is paced quite differently than most, and nearly twice as long as any other song on here, but hang in there: last year's From Fathoms is also a perfect summer album, and this closer tosses more killer riffs in your direction than everything else on the mix combined before cooling things off a bit. Finally, with summer ending, Iceland's Ólafur Arnalds combines a sense of optimism, nostalgia and wistfulness in a stunningly emotional, neo-classical epilogue.

BLUEBEARD (BY) KURT VONNEGUT

2010-06-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Published 1987, 318 Pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

I generally hate being asked "Who's your favorite author?" I like to think of myself as well-read, yet I don't seem to process books in a way that would allow me to answer such a question. There are very few authors where I can say I really like more than one or two of their books. For example: I loved The World According to Garp, but then Irving just kept re-writing it, and his recent books have been a disaster. Then there are authors like Stephen King, who has written literally dozens of solid, entertaining novels (and the best book On Writing you'll likely find), whose output to consistency ratio would be extremely hard to beat. But none of King's books on their own would make it onto my all-time favorites list, so how could he? Or what about an author like J.K. Rowling, who has written one perfect series but nothing else? Would that be fair?

Point being, Kurt Vonnegut is the only answer I got. Of the fourteen novels he wrote (in addition to hundreds of short stories and essays, published in numerous collections), I've now read all but four. A couple of his books are all-time favorites, and none of them (that I've read) were worse than mediocre. Vonnegut's bibliography is about as solid as any author can hope to achieve while still being as prolific as he was. Needing something reliable for once, I picked up one of his later works, Bluebeard. Bluebeard isn't usually considered essential Vonnegut, and while I agree that it doesn't reach the heights of his best novels, it just goes to show how strong of an author he was. Even as one of his more average books, it's still quite good. And like most Vonnegut, it's a quick, engaging read, short and "easy" but nonetheless bearing some weighty philosophical musings. Perhaps it's easily overlooked because it isn't one of Vonnegut's more ambitious novels. The story is fairly simple: ostensibly the autobiography of an Armenian abstract expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian, the narrative rarely pushes any further than its "old man looking back at his life" structure. Vonnegut divides the story into past and present, and while the two perspectives can be a bit lopsided and don't always merge as well as they should, they successfully move the book along at a brisk pace, even adding a dash of mystery and tension rarely found in Vonnegut novels.

In Karabekian's past, he moves from his childhood home to be the apprentice of a famous American painter in NYC. Eventually, (inevitably, perhaps, since this is a Vonnegut novel), he gets involved in WWII, before returning to America and becoming part of a circle of famous painters, alongside Pollack and Rothko. Not nearly so much happens in the "present" thread — Karabekian has retired to his beach house in the Hamptons, where he debates the merits of his own art and art in general with his best friend, an old quirky writer, and a young widow who seems mysteriously keen to pry out the old recluse's secrets. The present is probably the weakest narrative, and the least developed, not focusing quite enough on these underdeveloped side characters but still dishing out a few morsels of insight. Yet for the shallowness of the side-stories, it all leads up to an unexpected, well-written denouement. It's not a complex novel, or even a particularly deep one, but this allows Vonnegut to focus and play to his strengths, developing the voice of his main character into something sharp, consistent and funny.

Vonnegut does a great job of tackling the art world, and Bluebeard could be viewed almost as art-critique, although I don't think it was intended as such. Most of the insights come in other areas, and through the strength of his signature writing style, which is so earnest and easy and playful that it could carry satire of any kind. Unlike Palahniuk, whose writing I found so forced and processed and wink wink self-aware that it became almost painfully robotic, Vonnegut has always had a natural, sincere approach to the subjects he takes on, and Bluebeard is hardly satire at all — Vonnegut, let's say, examines things, rather than satirizing them. Some of the flaws common to his later books do pop up here, but not enough to distract — the man had a habit of aping his own style almost to the point of self-parody as he aged, but Bluebeard has only a few moments of overly-silly prose.

Bluebeard deals with many of the themes that Vonnegut tackled in other books, but avoids regurgitating any of them. I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first Vonnegut novel, since it does cover some familiar ground in a more toned-down, indirect manner. Yet for those same reasons, it's one of Vonnegut's strongest later-career novels, offering new perspectives and plenty of engaging, fresh material.

BLUE RECORD (BY) BARONESS

2010-06-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

Progressive Sludge Metal / Southern Rock
Released 2009

When I put together my Top 10 Albums of 2009 list at the end of last year, I spent weeks scouring blogs and forums and online review sites looking for any albums I might have missed. But even with all my intended thoroughness, I still made one glaring error. The Blue Record got a lot of press after its October release, and ended up on many "best of the 2009" metal lists, often finishing in the top 3. So I downloaded it, listened to it, and decided it was worth keeping around, but it didn't grab me right away. Every now and then I gave it another spin, until eventually, only a week or two after I published my own Top 10, I suddenly found myself playing the Blue Record more and more and more. By early January I was listening to almost nothing else. It's an album that's perfect for any mood or occasion, that I can always throw on after work and find myself caught up in its infectious energy no matter how dull or shitty my day has been. The Blue Record deserves to be spun all summer long, but it got me through an entire winter. It's one of the few albums that stands as entertainment of its own right, a soundtrack to 45 minutes of spastic air-drumming.

The thing is, I can pinpoint exactly why Baroness didn't grab me at first. They're from the elite Georgian school of sludge metal, the same state that's also somehow brought us Mastodon, Torche and Kylesa. I like all these bands well enough, except for one thing: their vocals. If you've heard any of them, you know what I'm talking about, because their vocals are all pretty much the same, down to the rhythm and structure. Each verse is pretty much delivered like this: shout shout shout / shout shout YELLLLLLL. It's simple and repetitive, and the "drunken bearded man shouting at a bar" vibe always really turned me off. A lot of metal has this problem, from Isis-derived post-metal to stoner metal and back to sludge. Not that metal vocals are inherently bothersome, of course — the ones that work, work really goddam well — but that metal listeners tend to be unnecessarily forgiving of genuinely bad vocals. As much as I respect all of the above bands, I could only take them in small doses because of their vocals.

Baroness was no different, but I sensed that the music underneath was within my tastes, moreso than their more traditional peers. For one thing, Baroness isn't nearly as classically sludgey as, say, Mastodon was with their first few releases, nor nearly as wanky-prog-metal-y as Mastodon became with their latest effort. There's an unmistakable southern vibe to the music, down to the folky acoustic interlude "Blackpowder Orchard" and it wonderfully compliments Baroness' unrelenting, upbeat energy — like a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Melvins with the record player set at 45 rpm instead of 33. Instead of wasting all their time trying to find the [fucking] heaviest [fucking] guitar tone ever [dudeeee] Baroness sends nearly every song galloping out of the gate with a stampede of drums and riffs so blazing, you may find yourself spontaneously air-guitaring on a crowded subway platform. [Not that I've experienced this myself. I've... read about it.] Instead of morphing into some prog-metal, seizure-inducing bonanza, Baroness keeps every song tight and perfectly coordinated, each filled with a ton of texture, little tangents and details and experiments enough to still earn it the "progressive" label, but these elements are always secondary to the pacing of the song, instead of being responsible for it. Baroness never meanders enough to get distracted. Songs move fast, almost too fast to keep track of. The drums are unrelentingly propulsive, like this album is being shot at you out of a cannon. Yet it's fun. It's coherent. It's never boring, it never loses focus, because these guys have their style down to an art. Baroness doesn't have to be the heaviest band on the scene when the Blue Record contains some of the tightest song-writing you'll ever find south of the Mason-Dixon line.

So after a few listens, something strange happened: I grew to not mind those vocals. Then, inevitably, I guess I liked them. Now I can't imagine the Blue Record without them — shouty and rough and incredibly repetitive though they may be, no other style would really fit the energy and intensity of Baroness' music, and I dare say they work much better here than over the slow, heavy march of other sludge bands. The Blue Record is pretty intense, and dense as well, yet even at its most technical it never loses sight of being fun. (And there's nothing wrong with metal being fun). This is an album I want blasting from my porch all summer long. This is that album that makes me want to own a car again, badly, just so I can rock out to it while tearing down the highway with the windows down. This album will give you whiplash.

SURVIVOR (BY) CHUCK PALAHNIUK

2010-06-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

Published 2000, 289 Pages
Characters: C
Writing: C-

Plot: D
Pacing: B

Poignancy: C-

Chuck Palahnuik wants to write satire. He wants to be a hybrid of Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo and Napolean Dynamite. He wants you to think that he's outrageous, shocking and insightful. His efforts earn him blurbs on the back of his book like this: "A wild amphetamine ride through the vagaries of fame and the nature of belief in America at the close of the twentieth century." Lots of people tell me how much they love Palahniuk, so he's doing something right, I guess. I hate sounding so negative in reviews for books that aren't, honestly, all that offensively bad or totally without merit, but Survivor is just not a well-constructed book. It's a clusterfuck of plotting and characterization, it's aimless, cheap satire, and it tries so desperately to be shocking and clever and post-modern that it's nothing but contrived. But it isn't a difficult read. It's not painful, and it moves fast. Even if you're as bored with it as I was, you'll have no problem finishing it. If you're into Palahniuk, you'll probably enjoy it. But as far as I'm concerned, Palahniuk's forte is finding a million clever ways to say nothing at all.

I blame his reputation largely on "Fight Club." Don't get me wrong, "Fight Club" is a great story, and I consider the movie to be one of the better films of the last 20 years. The book, too, is good. If the movie had never been made, I would probably hold the book in high esteem. But David Fincher went ahead and directed a great film, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter were fantastic in it, and as a result, Fight Club is one of the very, very few instances where a book is not as good as the movie based off of it. It's not worse, per se, it just doesn't add anything to the story — it reads like a novelization of the movie, with no added depth, detail or development.

Survivor takes all the dark quirkiness and zany randomness of Fight Club and wastes it on an aimless story and pointless satire. That, I think, is my main gripe — Palahniuk is obviously trying to take the piss out of American media, celebrity society, religion, social elitism, economic elitism, our fixation on physical beauty, the superficiality of suburban America, et cetera; he's trying to blow us away with a zany nonstop narrative of flippant satire. He's not afraid to tackle anything! He's not afraid to show us how fucked up we really are! He's not afraid to talk about sex and murder and religion openly, frankly and provocatively! But it's all so stupidly lightweight and ADD, I'm still not even sure what he was getting at. Palahniuk has the attention span of a 4 year old, and never settles on any plotline or "hook" long enough to make a single one of them work. Satire isn't satire if you just take a bunch of exaggerated, wacky situations and throw them together. You have to actually be saying something. Palahniuk seems to be writing a different story from one chapter to the next, yet none of them manage to advance the plot naturally or develop Palahniuk's "characters."

The problem isn't that Palahniuk lacks imagination, obviously. He's just not a strong enough writer for any of his ideas to cohere into something meaningful and interesting. He writes with the same consistent voice, the same clumsy, contrived gimmicks, the needless post-modern sentence rearrangement that makes his writing read like something from your Junior year fiction workshop. Even though the novel is supposedly being spoken into a recorder by the main character — he's delivering his life story while waiting for the plane he hijacked to crash — all the reader can hear is Palahniuk's own generic, choppy voice. Characters don't act of their own accord, they just stumble into situations, they react glibly, satirically, like neutered ironic hipster puppets. When, about a quarter of the way through Survivor, a secondary character describes the protagonist out loud, there's a disorienting jolt from seeing how the character is supposed to seem compared to the impression of him we get from his voice and habits.

Palahniuk wants to bring his satire down to a rapid-fire, hard-hitting salvo, and falls into a lot of grating habits as a result — sentences that endlessly repeat each other, paragraphs broken up into one-by-one list form, pointlessly rearranged grammatical structures. His struggles with poignancy aren't a dealbreaker, and they don't really derail the book, just make it slightly annoying to read. Its Palahniuk's resulting inability to focus that hurts the story the most. Survivor is a satire that never bothers to explore the things it's satirizing, and the things it's satirizing are so broad or vague that it's hard to be sure whether they need to be explored to begin with. It's a book about fame where the protagonist is never shown being famous. It's a satire of celebrity culture where the character becomes famous from one page to the next, with no reason given. It's a take-down of superficiality where the character never cares what he looks like, or has any reason to. Survivor is trying to be a lot of things, and doesn't achieve any of them. Fittingly, it's not even a terrible book, just a completely unnecessary one.

OVERLOOK MOUNTAIN HOUSE

2010-06-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of Alison Yuhas. Other photos taken by Derek Dellinger unless otherwise noted.

When the Hudson River School of painters began to romanticize the quintessentially American Hudson river valley in the early 19th Century, well-to-do Americans suddenly saw in their own backyard an untapped region of beauty and adventure. Scantly populated even today, New York state has always offered views of farmland, mountains and river vistas without a lengthy trip to Europe, where socialites had previously traveled for vacations. No sooner had the region become fashionable than luxury hotels sprang up through the Catskills and surrounding regions — among the earliest and most prominent of them the Overlook Mountain House.

Situated near the peak of Overlook Mountain, which rises above the town of Woodstock, the ruins of the Overlook Mountain House can still be found today. The remains that stand are actually of the fourth hotel to be built on the site — as with many buildings of the 19th Century, fires frequently leveled the facilities and forced reconstruction. The original Mountain House was built in 1833 and maintained through the Civil War before a second version of the hotel was put up in 1871. It burnt down four years later. A third hotel lasted a few more decades until the fourth and final Mountain House began construction in 1928 — and, though it remains today, this hotel was never actually completed or used. Eventually, the state bought the land and boarded up the abandoned house, which nonetheless managed to suffer damage in yet another fire in 1941. (Prompting the question: is Overlook Mountain a volcano? Since I have not found any evidence to the contrary, I'll have to assume that it is.)

At around 3,200 feet, Overlook is far from the highest peak in the Catskills, and the parking lot where one begins is already something like 1,800 feet in elevation (driving there feels like that first leg of a rollercoaster, when you're being ratcheted up the hill). The path to the top isn't a true hiking trail, either, but an old carriage-way now laid with stones. It's straight and smooth and mostly unshaded, but such trails are often deceptively unforgiving compared to traditional hiking trails, especially when you're marching more or less straight uphill. There are no switchbacks and no views, and thus there's little to break up this hike except jealously at fellow hikers passing you as they come down.

When you finally make it, it's well worth it. The main building of the Mountain House can be seen from a distance, but there are others scattered throughout the woods, including the stone foundations of a large circular fountain. The Mountain House is so easily accessible from the trail — which itself is only a short drive from the town of Woodstuck — that it will be visited by dozens of people on any given nice day, so there's no need to worry about the legality of your visit. The building is relatively safe considering its age, and since the upper floors have all collapsed, there's nowhere to walk but on solid ground. For this reason there isn't a whole lot to see, either — mostly walls, a few remaining staircases, and the trees that have invaded the interior. The other, smaller buildings have even less to offer, and probably aren't worth exploring in-depth.

Continuing up the path toward the true peak of Overlook Mountain will bring you to the Overlook Mountain fire tower, one of only a few that remain standing (and accessible) in the Catskills. The tower is only a half mile from the hotel ruins, and equally worth seeing. During the summer months, volunteers are stationed in a small ranger cabin and will gladly give you a history lesson. The tower can be climbed during any season, day or night, but it's definitely best experienced with the gale-force winds that often blow across the top of the mountain. Climbing up the frail exposed structure with little beneath you, little above you, little around you and blasts of wind beckoning you into the void, you will stare into the Expanse and come face to face with your own humanity. The observation platform at the top is at least enclosed in plexiglass, with a number of tools at your disposal to triangulate the location of forest fires. Despite the mountain's relatively short stature, its location and exposure give a fantastic view of the entire Catskill region.

The town of Woodstock is a worthwhile destination of its own, especially if you're into eyeball-searing 60's fashion aesthetics. Beyond the novelty tie-die t-shirts, it's a cute artsy/touristy town with plenty of restaurants and coffee shops and quirks.

Further reading:
hudsonvalleyruins.org
wikipaltz.com

Photo courtesy of Alison Yuhas

NEVER LET ME GO (BY) KAZUO ISHIGURO

2010-05-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

Published 2006, 304 Pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+

Plot: B
Pacing: B+

Poignancy: B+

Set in an ever-so-slightly-alternate universe England over a period roughly analogous to the end of the last century, Never Let Me Go is a retrospective first-person tale narrated by a 'carer' named Kathy. Kathy lives in a world that seems hostile to her very existence, but this is not quite dystopian lit. It's a world where science has led us in new directions, but it's not quite sci-fi. It's hard to gauge just what Never Let Me Go is, exactly, and Ishiguro wisely keeps his cards close to his chest. This short novel has no action, few characters and only a couple barely noticeable scene changes, yet unravels with such precision and deft timing that it should be a quick, engaging read for almost anyone.

Though this is not a mystery novel, either, Ishiguro creates an artificial one as his main hook — we know from page one that Kathy does something strange and possibly dangerous for a living, but we're never told directly what. There's a general feeling of inevitability and fear that plays out beautifully in the narration as the smallest of details clue us into the fact that her world is different from ours — and after all, when are alternate universes ever not malicious places? We're told of Hailsham, a special private school in the countryside where Kathy grew up and was prepared by secretive teachers to do... something. The characters, when children, are as oblivious to their purpose as We The Reader are, but as we skip around in time and they age, they seem to absorb an understanding of their purpose through rumors and whispers, while we do not. Ishiguro loves foreshadowing — a little too much, perhaps, though his writing is solid in every other area — and Kathy is a bumbling, hesitant narrator, so it's clear that the children are at this special school for some strange and sinister purpose. But what? To become wizards? It's an entirely artificial mystery, especially when Kathy and her friends are teenagers free to explore the outside world, but it doesn't quite detract from the story. Without it, the slow pacing would become a distraction, but as it is, the story slips by as quickly (and blurrily, and often confusingly) as a memory. Unlike certain writers and producers of Lost, Ishiguro doesn't use his narrative mystery to force artificial tension or misdirection — it's simply there, lingering in the background, with the understanding that we're to pay attention to the character's interactions rather than try to unravel any secrets a few pages early.

Never Let Me Go is wonderfully paced and nearly-always engaging, but this brevity could be taken as a weakness as well. I often wished for more depth, in nearly every area of the story. The school, Hailsham, is established as an enormous emotional investment for Kathy, yet I never felt it come to life. Most of her classmates — including Kathy's friend Ruth, one of the most important characters in the novel — are adequately characterized, but little more. Even the novel's main foil, Kathy's friend and sometimes love-interest Tommy, isn't given enough time to bond with Kathy, which severely diminished the ultimate payoff. Their relationship is convincingly sketched out, earnest and natural, yet I felt it never really went beyond the page — it never became emotional to me, and maybe not even to the characters themselves, who remain strangely distant and guarded throughout. For all the little details that Ishiguro slips in to "show" rather than "tell," their relationship simply isn't there for long enough to make the reader feel as much as they could.

Ultimately, Never Let Me Go is still incredibly readable and largely satisfying. It is a novel that lacks any show-stopping faults, but it isn't a heavy-hitter either. I'd recommend it, but I wouldn't rave about it. Considering how poorly constructed the majority of novels are, when you really analyze them, Ishiguro should be commended for this solid and thought-provoking genre-bender.

NAKED (BY) DAVID SEDARIS

2010-05-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Published 1998, 224 pages
Characters: N/A

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B

Poignancy: B

It's always an interesting experience re-reading something you enjoyed a great deal in the past. I was a huge fan of David Sedaris in college, so I've already read every one of his books. Recently I needed a quick book to kill some time, and there was Naked, sitting on my shelf, untouched for probably six or seven years. I was curious to see how it fared, since I seem to be awfully jaded when it comes to comedy, of late.

Naked, like all of Sedaris' stuff, is a collection of autobiographical short stories, mostly detailing his childhood, family, wacky college adventures and difficulty coming to terms with his homosexuality. The events in Naked are probably mostly true, but embellishment is part of Sedaris' authorial voice, so there's really no point in pondering how he could possibly remember a detailed conversation from 30 years ago. It's the events that matter, and the rest is clearly filled in by the author, writing retrospectively. With that said — and having read his other books, which cover various other periods of his life — Sedaris has lived a remarkably tumultuous life that gave him plenty of material. It's often difficult to believe that all these stories are about the same man, especially when the focus of one piece — his OCD, for example, which must have been a major part of his childhood — disappears entirely from the rest. This is partly due to Sedaris' casual, flippant story construction. He shapes each piece much like a sitcom, taking unrelated elements and weaving them into a purpose-driven plot, usually ending in some conclusion or retrospective revelation. The fact that his OCD provided the basis for one story seems to have been enough, and he barely mentions it again — a sign of good focus and plot construction, I suppose, but it gives the collection a lightweight, surreal tone. This is comedy, after all, and given the "PG-13"ish rating of some of the material, Sedaris plays it very tame. Nothing really carries any weight — not his OCD, not his near-rape encounters with strangers while hitchhiking, not even his mother's death. And that's fine; it fits his style. Sedaris manages to produce tales that seem sharp and quick and enjoyable, regardless of their content.

If I can pinpoint one main reason that I failed to enjoy Naked as much as I did the first time around, it's that the stories are too tidy. Everything is so droll, skipping from one event to the next with little fanfare. Cleanly-presented material needs a bit of shock value to produce laughs. Being older and more jaded, nothing in the collection was cringe-worthy or outrageous anymore, and most of the time it seemed like Sedaris was going out of his way to interact with the stupidest, most-ignorant people he could find. He plays himself off as incredibly passive, a naive victim blundering from one bizarre event to the next with a sort of recklessness and ambivalence that eventually begins to raise flags. How could someone so passive find himself in these situations again and again? It's not that I don't believe him, but you start to see through his tone, and the authorial voice seems like just that — a style, something manufactured and deliberated upon. Since Sedaris mostly reacts as a narrator, and rarely as an in-the-action character, he seems to be merely drifting through life, prodding those around him in the hope that they'll produce material. Despite this, there isn't a whole lot of comedy in the prose itself. There are no jokes, per se, just funny situations. It's entertaining, easily-digested, and little more. I know I laughed the first time around. But now, I honestly had a hard time trying to decide what was supposed to be funny about these stories.

So perhaps its best to put aside expectations that this will be an outrageous laugh-fest, as most reviews would have it. It's decently funny, in the way that a competent sitcom is decently funny, or at least entertaining. And really, that's all it needs to be. Considering that his material is far beyond anything you'd find in a sitcom, Sedaris doesn't take many risks with his narrative. I suppose part of my disappointment is the contradiction in this — for everything that happened to him, for all the insanity he faced, Sedaris himself should be at least slightly unhinged, and yet he comes off as far too even-tempered. He's condescending and snarky, but he never makes much effort to earn it, as if he's worried one of his victims might still find him out. Still, by all means, read Naked at least once. Just don't expect to die laughing. Life is weird enough as it is, and it's all in what you make of it.

TALES (BY) H.P. LOVECRAFT

2010-05-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

Published 2005, 807 pages
Characters: C-

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B-

Poignancy: A

Most people have heard of H.P. Lovecraft, or at least something he created, but many that I talk to don't seem to realize it. Mostly unknown during his lifetime, with no singular novel or story to stand as his masterpiece, Lovecraft's immense catalog of short fiction was left to slowly seep into the public consciousness, creating the sort of cult phenomenon that people casually reference without fully understanding. A pioneer of macabre fantasy, Lovecraft clearly took after one of his idols, Edgar Alan Poe, and the two are together responsible for nearly every trope and cliche of modern fantasy horror. Lovecraft introduced the world to Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and a mythology of cosmic terror that drew from the forward-thinking pulp fiction of the day. For a reader only now discovering his writing, it's hard to know where to start, but a bit of research led me to Tales, The Library of America anthology of his most notable works. Even at 800 pages, it still excludes a great deal of Lovecraft's stories, but by all accounts includes all the vital ones.

Undoubtedly the best time to read Lovecraft is when you are a 15 year old boy. That's not to say his work is immature, or won't appeal to anyone else, but there is a reason why fantasy is extremely popular in that demographic, and Lovecraft really hones in on that sense of unbridled imagination and limitless fantastic potential. Possibly to the point of fault — his stories, no matter their length, pretty much all follow the same formula. Characters are secondary to Lovecraft's vision of vast, secret planes of reality and lurking ancient terrors, and his protagonists are unfailingly upper-middle class white males of an inquisitive yet reserved nature. They are generally from an intellectual background, so as to be appropriately skeptical, and upon discovering a hint of intrigue, they investigate and uncover, expressing strained disbelief, shock, fear, and ultimately revealing some terrible, dangerous secret that threatens their very sanity. In many of the stories, nothing actually happens to the protagonist himself — he merely uncovers some earlier events, or discovers a mystery so terrifying that he must flee it at once. Lovecraft didn't write tepidly, and it's both the reason for his success and the major flaw of his stories. Everything that happens is so earth-shattering that grown men regularly faint with terror, and these revelations are usually described with every colorful, antiquated adjective Lovecraft could get his hands on. By the end of the collection, you'll wonder if he was getting paid by the number of times he used the word "eldritch". It was clearly not the strength of his prose that made Lovecraft a horror-fiction icon, but his imagination.

With that said, I very much enjoyed this collection, despite Lovecraft's flaws. It's the sort of fiction that functions best in hindsight, in the reader's own imagination, where it was meant to exist. Lovecraft was ahead of his time in the scope of his stories, yet somewhat limited by his own technical abilities and publication niche — I can only imagine the sort of tale he would have been forced to concoct if he'd been contracted to write a full-length novel. His world is a grim, hopeless place, where mere humans are helpless against the ancient gods that sometimes awake to harass them, and the overwhelming sense of entropy and nihilism in his stories is one of the reasons Lovecraft endures so well, and remains unique. His protagonists are helpless to confront the things they face, often questioning their own sanity as a result. Unlike most fantasy authors, Lovecraft never suggested that any man would be able to stand in the face of true evil and survive. It is the primary reason for there being so little action in any of Lovecraft's stories, and the reason his expositional narratives ultimately work. In most of these tales, the protagonist is forced to flee, and human bravery rarely has any consequence. When the world of humans survives for another day, it is not by heroics or cunning but sheer luck. Lovecraft made it explicitly clear that he expected our species to be extinct within a short time, that we were but one of many intelligent civilizations that might inhabit the earth. Such a dismal view of humanity is still quite rare, even in horror fiction.

When his stories are taken together, it's clear that Lovecraft often flailed about, finding horror in far too many things to be taken entirely seriously. Every run-down house or distant hill, every gust of cool air or strange smell, every cave and crevasse and distant mountain range might conceal some terrible secret. Foreigners are all "swarthy" racial stereotypes linked to a sinister cult — The Horror at Red Hook is interesting if only because it so clearly links the "otherness" Lovecraft feared from supernatural horrors to the "otherness" born of racial tensions in 1920's New York City, revealing both as essentially the same psychological mechanism, the fear of the unknown. With such broad material, Lovecraft often comes across as just a paranoid, racist old man. Nonetheless, there was an astoundingly rich vision behind these tales, a mind that was imaginative enough to write about entities so vast that no human could fully comprehend their existence, and yet realist enough to see that such things were contrary to our own existence, that even glimpsing such unnatural beings only meant that our end was near, like an ant finally comprehending the great shadow above it moments before it is crushed.

NEW YORK CITY FARM COLONY

2010-04-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've now visited the New York City Farm Colony twice. Though this massive complex of ruins is within sight of a a major road, it isn't without its own devious obstacles — located in the dead center of Staten Island, hopeful visitors must make a long, perilous journey into the heart of that nasally-accented suburban darkness. I took boats, buses, I walked along shoulderless roads, past unkempt lawns and finally through a tear in the chain-link fence separating the historic campus from suburbia. As far as I can tell, visiting the New York City Farm Colony isn't technically illegal, as there aren't any "no trespassing" signs posted. The land is owned by the Department of Parks and Recreation, and was designated an official landmark in 1985 after being abandoned in the late '70s. So as far as daring adventures go, I've risked far more dangerous. But I'm evidently not alone in finding the deserted dormitories of interest. On both occasions that I've visited the Farm Colony, a group of paintballers were already there, pelting each other with pellets in the deep woods. Trespassing is so much more fun when there's gunfire all around you.

I was slightly alarmed at first, and went out of my way to avoid being seen. The Farm Colony is a massive, thickly-wooded campus of rotting buildings and shattered asphalt pathways. Amidst that secretive landscape, when one is already trying to avoid confrontation with cops or locals, a group of young men running around shooting each other and screaming is slightly unnerving. Still, all the forced secrecy added a bit of a thrill to the trip. On our second visit, my Exploring Partner and I decided to throw caution to the wind and make our presence known. Trying not too hard to stare, we walked stiffly past the group of young, camouflaged men (who did not shoot us, or even verbally harass us) and went forth to do what we had gone forth to do: take pictures of abandoned buildings. When, after an hour or so of exploration, it began to rain and the paintballers went home, we discovered the reason for that two-time coincidence: there is a full-featured paintball "course" set up in the middle of the Staten Island Farm Colony, featuring obstacles, metal shield-walls and a paint-strewn approach to an equally paint-strewn ruin. [Paintball photo taken by Alison Yuhas. All other photos taken by me] I can understand their being there all the time; it looked wicked fun. They even seemed considerate enough to stick to the field they'd set up, keeping the paint damage to a minimum, and redecorating one of the old buildings with lovely shades of pink and orange. So, if you ever venture forth to the Farm Colony yourself: don't mind the gunshots. Consider wearing goggles.

The Farm Colony was deserted over three decades ago, yet it's hard to get a sense of just how old the place is when walking around. Though the current H-shaped dormitories were built in the early 1900's to sustain a population of almost 2,000 workers, the colony itself was established in the 1830's. The majority of the residents were elderly, even though they were expected to do agricultural labor in exchange for room and board. The buildings have now fallen apart to the point of featurelessness, yet the size of the Colony makes it feel like more than a ruin. Whenever we thought we had seen the last of it, another stone structure would pop out of the trees ahead. 2,000 people is, after all, a lot of people. It's very much like exploring a college campus that has been left to nature. There are hints that certain portions were adapted to the modern age — electric light fixtures and circuit-breakers can be glimpsed here and there — but many of the buildings have a vague timelessness about them, a mixture of the aforementioned amenities alongside strange mechanical contraptions and a rustic sense of minimalism. Elevator shafts are gutted with debris and stairwells have collapsed, or are covered in leaves and dirt. Though the graffiti is inescapable (and kind of a shame, for a historic ruin), it fits the vibe of the place and hardly stands out next to all the crumpling brick and stone.

Most of the buildings are large — three floors was the average, each with multiple wings. The wings are usually mirror-images of each other, identifiable only through the uniqueness of their decay and the careful path one must plot up their stairwells. Each building, too, is fairly similar to the last, and if one weren't forced to remain so hyper-aware of their surroundings due to paranoia and claustrophobia, it would be easy to become disoriented, or lost. With almost every building quickly losing its identity to a mix of long hallways, small featureless siderooms and main chambers divided by cubicle-like walls, there isn't technically a whole lot to see within — it's the specific strangeness of the decay that is interesting, the rare finds amidst the emptiness that make the emptiness itself somehow significant. In one terrifyingly dark hall, in a building where every window has been boarded up, a tentative survey of the dark interior revealed an empty hospital gurney in a bleak tiled room. It was a simple scene, yet incredibly disturbing, the kind of foreshadowing that precedes distant screaming in a horror movie. In another room, not far beyond, a fold-up bed sat in the middle of the hall for no discernible reason. Bathroom urinals were smashed, or clogged with dirt. One building could not be reached at all without crossing a narrow stone bridge over a 20 foot drop — and the bridge, sunken in the middle, had collected its own ankle-deep moat, a pond of brackish water that could not be avoided without toppling over the edge.

There's little left to suggest the Farm Colony's original agricultural purpose, save for the ample space between buildings and the many pathways that seem to spiral off to nowhere. 63 of the Colony's 104 acres were at one time used to cultivate crops, but now harbor only trees. Whether one sees the site as creepy, historic, or a good place for sport, few residents of New York City would imagine that such a sprawling ruin exists within their city borders.

While most of the buildings remain in relatively good shape, structurally, use high caution if exploring. Courtyards and basements are mostly choked with debris, and many staircases have collapsed. However, most of the stairs that appear to be intact are, luckily, relatively safe. Watch out for stray paintballs.

GOING POSTAL (BY) TERRY PRATCHETT

2010-03-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

Published 2004, 377 pages

Characters: C

Writing: C+

Plot/Pacing: B

Poignancy: C

Going Postal was recommended to me specifically as a follow-up to John Dies At the End, and reading the two together does make for an interesting comparison — though a rather unfortunate one as well, something my Recommender clearly didn't intend. Going Postal is the kind of book that makes you appreciate other books more. Where John Dies At the End was endearingly imperfect, Going Postal has a rehearsed feel to it, as if the writing of the novel came so easily to Pratchett that he neglected to include anything interesting on top of it all. This makes sense, given that it's the 33rd installment of the "Discworld" series. Though Pratchett isn't nearly as well known in the States as he is in his native Britain, he is in fact one of the most read authors in the English speaking world, and other reviews of Going Postal seem to indicate that this is a good place to start, one of his strongest efforts. To Pratchett's credit, you hardly need to know anything in order to understand the story, yet the world behind it still feels extensive. The possibility for a long and varied series is obvious even from this one installment. Yet, as a result of its place in this greater world, Going Postal is almost the opposite of a fantasy epic. Instead of showing one piece of a larger story, Going Postal is like a single episode of a sitcom, where nothing that happens ultimately matters.

Surprisingly, Pratchett's deliberate plotting is still Going Postal's strongest feature — it's somewhat original and flows quickly, though predictably. With as many novels as Pratchett has written, he must be fairly desperate for fresh material, so Going Postal deals with a rather, uh, unique conflict: the failing post office of the fantasy land of Ankh-Morpork. Our hero must save it, by competing with the Large Greedy Corporation running a competing service, sort of a steam-punk version of the telegraph. This new technology has been threatening to put the post office underground, and now only one man can save it! Our hero invents the postage-stamp, woos a lady, hatches various schemes, and saves the day. Or whatever. For all the negative things I can and will say about Going Postal, it's never a bad book, just a dull one. There are no outright failings (nothing to earn the FAIL tag from me, anyway) and I never found it particularly frustrating or offensively incompetent. In fact, it's almost offensively competent, and no more. To coyly reference a much better novel, Going Postal is... mostly harmless.

It's hard to read Pratchett without thinking of the master of British comedy-literature: Douglas Adams. Both men very obviously draw from the same comedic well, write the same sort of novels, and enjoy that quintessentially British goofiness that Monty Python made ubiquitous. Yet here is where the comparisons get a bit dicey. Pratchett is hugely popular to this day, his career dating back to the 70's, and yet for all his assets, his novels seem (to me) like the sitcom version of Douglas Adams. Partly this is due to their very context — as one installment of a 30+ part mythology, Going Postal obviously isn't going to have the weight of a more self-contained effort. And yet the feeling of triviality goes deep, and I never found myself caring much about the characters, or plot, or even the humor, ostensibly the book's main appeal. Everything seems lightweight and manufactured, as if Pratchett were yet another Frank W. Dixon, R.L. Stine or Stephenie Meyer. This is, possibly, the very appeal of a long-running series, and thus probably not so much a fault. Such books are meant to be light-reading, time-killers, easy amusement: exactly the same as a sitcom. Do you like those things? Do you like "Theoretical British Humor"? Then by all means, check out Pratchett.

The humor, unfortunately, is only ever theoretical. Theoretical British Humor is the what happens when a British author, writing Standardized British Comedy, believes that the mere knowledge of his Britishness, plus a few silly names, will produce laughs. It's the turns of phrase, the casual absurdities, the mild satire, the tendency to use certain non sequitors and witticisms, except nothing is actually very witty. You can spot where the jokes might go, you can see him teasing his prose and dancing around them, shaping his sentences to make room... but they never come. It's as if the mere comedic tone were meant to provide the comedy. Unfortunately, a comedic tone without actual comedy just makes everything feel casual and unhurried, destroying tension without providing any payoff in its place. Unless, of course, you find "silly" character names to be uproariously funny. Do you? Good, because every character in here has a silly name. If Silly Name Humor is your thing, then this might very well be your Led Zeppelin.

For all the wrong reasons, Going Postal is a good companion read to John Dies At the End. The latter book managed something extremely difficult, blending earnest humor, genuine horror and realistic characters while rushing forward at an unrelenting pace. Going Postal obviously must entertain a certain crowd, given its reputation, but if you, like me, don't find it particularly funny, then nothing else in the book is willing to step forward and save it. This is ultimately what makes a comedic book memorable — humor is so subjective that it can hardly be relied upon, and authors like David Wong and Douglas Adams understand this, injecting a bit of scale and drama into their writing so that their novels are more than just throwaway gags, even if the humor doesn't work for you. Going Postal feels skeletal, everything flimsy and cheap. The characters are wholly unremarkable and the plot, while speedy and effective, merely brings you to the end, no more.

FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM (BY) UMBERTO ECO

2010-03-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

Published 1988, 623 pages

Characters: C+

Writing: B

Plot/Pacing: D

Poignancy: B-

Umberto Eco, an Italian medievalist and semiotician, wants you to know that he knows a lot of things. About a lot of things. That's why he wrote Foucault's Pendulum, a conspiracy-theory driven mystery novel, forever dooming himself to comparisons with Dan "Encyclopedia" Brown. Though The Da Vinci Code was written over a decade later, you can hardly find an Amazon review that doesn't compare the two. (Great. Now this review does too.) Eco, often praised in literary circles as a "difficult" and highly "intellectual" writer with "demanding" "labyrinthine" plots, has expressed amusement over the irony of this situation, since Foucault's Pendulum is actually about the foolishness of conspiracy theorists and the obsessive personality required to buy into such fantastical beliefs, even calling Brown "one of [his] creatures" in interviews. I see another level of irony in this comparison: both men are arrogant writers with grossly exaggerated opinions of their own talent, flaunting their research skills at the sacrifice of literary standards. Both would do well to realize that "informative" is not the same thing as "intellectual." Foucault's Pendulum is informative, no doubt — to the point of tedium. But does this make it smart?

The problem with Eco's novel is (again with the irony) the exact problem that Brown doesn't have — Foucault's Pendulum does not want to thrill you. Ignore anyone who says this book is a thriller. Foucault's Pendulum does not want you to turn the page, but rather linger on all the clever witticisms and decades of research Eco poured into the pages you're already looking it. If at any point that Eco's interesting premise begins to build suspense or tension, he runs up and buries a pickax in the skull of Narrative Momentum. Here's the summary presented on the back cover of the book: A Colonel Ardenti starts it all: He tells three editors that he has discovered a coded message about a centuries-old Knights Templar plan to tap a mystic source of power greater than atomic energy. The editors, bored with rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult and amused by his claims, decide to cook up a Plan of their own. Into their computer they feed manuscript pages on Satanic initiation rites, Rosicrucianism, the measurements of the Great Pyramid — and out comes a map indicating a point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled, a point located at Foucault's Pendulum in Paris. Sounds intriguing, right? Eco certainly doesn't think so, which is why the Colonel Ardenti who "starts it all" doesn't appear in the novel for over 100 pages. Well, alright, Eco. That's cool. He had a lot of research to get out of the way — not exposition, really, but he had to set the tone for the novel and introduce his characters as pompous blowhards who will pontificate at every and any academic tangent. But, begrudgingly, he's got to get to the story we all came to read. Eventually. He has to, right? Of course he does. After 365 pages.

For fuck's sake, man.

I realize this is partly a marketing issue, which probably isn't really Eco's fault — maybe he had a different explanation of "what the book was about" when he was writing it, and never intended to position it as a thriller with, you know, a plot. I'll give Eco the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't excuse his meandering, disjointed storytelling, or using his characters as thinly-veiled avatars to show us how much he knows about... everything. Again, it's not intellectualism to accumulate decades worth of obscure knowledge. It's just research. Some of it is interesting, and Eco certainly has a fine understanding of secret societies and medieval cults, as well as the particular mindset necessary to cultivate their mythology. This, more than anything, is the real strength of the novel, and likely the reason it's regarded as a minor classic of the genre. Foucault's Pendulum is ultimately satire, an anti-Da Vinci Code. Yet even Realism is not enough to excuse your main character going on holiday for 50 pages immediately following the first major turning point of the novel, presumably because he wants to take a break from Dramatic Tension.

When the main character isn't vacationing in Brazil with his girlfriend, talking to various professors about the occult over drinks, he's lounging about Milan with other academic types, talking about the occult over drinks. None of the characters are interesting enough to justify their verbosity, considering the entire novel is carried by dialogue. Eco does provide a solid backstory for some of his characters, but as with everything else in the novel, it's tossed out in big awkward chunks that seem to go nowhere. It isn't enough to simply present more and more information to the reader, as if information were inherently self-justifying. This is not the internet, Mr. Eco. As an author, you're obliged to also present that information in such a way as to make it interesting and engaging.

"Hey, what's this about [Obscure Secret Society] during the [Obscure Historical Period]?" one character will ask, causing another character to take an exposition dump all over your face for the next 10 pages or so. Foucault's Pendulum is the poster child for "show, don't tell," and oh, does it tell. Granted, this structure is intentional and designed to make a certain point, but the fact that the novel was designed this way doesn't justify the tedium. Eco's point, after all, could have been made in about 300 pages, maybe even in 15 pages. He found a rich, interesting setting in which to place his novel, and perhaps if the characters spent more time doing, well, anything, they might have been able to carry the slower passages. As it is, their lives and background are buried, becoming irrelevant when they don't disappear entirely. Still, I can see why others might praise Eco's work — if the subject matter interests you, this is undoubtedly your best resource, and the book's thesis is surprisingly sound, its denouement fairly memorable. Ultimately, this is a book that will make the extremely patient feel that special, masochistic feeling of accomplishment, and all others feel desperate and a bit panicked.

THE FIRE IN OUR THROATS WILL BECKON THE THAW (BY) PELICAN

2010-03-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

Post-Metal / Sludge / Atmospheric
Released 2005

I was recently having a discussion with some peers about which albums most influenced our lives — albums that have not only stuck with us, but after first discovering them, drastically affected what music we listen to and how we listen to it. I can pinpoint many albums that were, in retrospect, important to my current tastes, but most of them were simple progressions of things I was already listening to, another evolutionary link. Other albums got me into new habits — my flirtations with metal were spread out over multiple years and many extremely different albums — but didn't themselves make a lasting impression, and in retrospect only presented a few easily-digested morsels that encouraged me to pursue new things, new tastes.

When a friend introduced me to The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw in the spring of my junior year of college, the timing couldn't have been more perfect. For a few months, I had been seeking out experimental, heavy music. I already had a hunch then that I would never be a real metal-head, but I liked a lot of the things metal bands were doing, even if I was having a hard time getting past the often-difficult vocals. Though I'd been occasionally listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor since high school, I didn't really have awareness of instrumental music at that point. GY!BE still seemed to me like a soundtrack lacking a movie, and like most people, I didn't understand why a band would decide to remain instrumental. So Pelican came out of nowhere — I had truly never heard anything like it before.

Now, kids these days can easily describe entire subgenres of instrumental metal by the degree to which they rip off of Pelican (and other forebears of the post-metal movement), but hearing such a thing for the first time, or describing it to someone else, is like trying to explain to a blind man what "green" looks like. I remember once telling my father that Pelican reminded me of Pink Floyd — a comparison that's so laughably erroneous four years later, I haven't the slightest idea what I might I have been referring to. The Fire In Our Throats is, for lack of a better word, glacial — not usually a word I'd use to describe music, but I can't think of anything else that fits so well. It's cold and stark and huge, slow-moving and dense, but most importantly, it's a glacier in retreat, one leaving behind a vision of spring and growth and possibility. There's a deep-rooted, earthy sense of beauty in Pelican's music, little touches of warmth and grace amidst all the thundering walls of riffage and distortion, not to mention their extremely unique, perfect executed acoustic transitions. Amidst the calamity, The Fire In Our Throats evokes the sense that one has finally reached The Last Day of Winter (and whatdayaknow, that's the name of the first song!) Within such an unsubtle musical style, it's an unexpected touch of subtlety that other bands trying to bogart Pelican's thunderous tone seem to completely miss. A wall of sound becomes boring eventually — we want to be led somewhere, and sludge-metal is at best a way to move us. Where many other post-rockers tend to paint a scene that's other-worldly, or post-worldly, The Fire In Our Throats is intensely familiar. Rather than nostalgia, it evokes a sense of expectation. It somehow makes the air around you feel fucking crisp. If you listen to it in winter, you will feel striking disappointment when you step outside and see a gray, snow-filled sky. Studies show playing it once a day will cause plants to grow 34% faster. (It's science!)

One particular memory perfectly captures all the feelings that Pelican still evokes in me. As I said before, the timing of my discovery couldn't have been more perfect. It was spring. Metal is generally considered depressive stuff, but Pelican is anything but. That winter had been a particularly difficult time of my life, and it's no exaggeration to say that I felt totally buried in frustrations and anxieties. Timid music wasn't going to do anything to move me, but The Fire In Our Throats is as uplifting and inspiring as it is loud. Like spring, there's a sense that mounds of filth are being washed away — forcefully, cathartically, and jarringly. I needed that, then, and so I took a walk on the first day of spring, past all the sun-tanning sorority girls and shirtless jock douchemonkeys, and went down to the Hudson. It felt good to get off campus and out of sight. I found a spot above a cliff and watched car-sized chunks of ice floating down the river, I stared at the mountains that surrounded me, and I realized just how fucking much I loved the Hudson River Valley — everything except that small vortex of suck that was Poughkeepsie. I could feel the cold whenever the breeze picked up, but it was still warm enough to wear a t-shirt. And somehow, Pelican was playing exactly what I was feeling and seeing — without words. I had never experienced that from music before. Suddenly I was getting punched in the face by a sort of frontiersman's spirit, awed by the severity of nature and music with the ability to capture it as textures and sounds. I felt, dare I say, inspired.

So, Pelican got me into instrumental music, heavy music, and oddly enough, hiking. (Cool story, bro). The sense of gravitas and yearning their music evokes has never worn off, and I always feel an urge to put it on when I venture out to Upstate New York. Sadly, their last two releases have been solidly mediocre, and their sound has since been regurgitated by dozens of bands, bottled and packaged as a tepid subgenre. It's obvious in retrospect that Pelican's strengths also demand a rather inflexible formula, and after creating such a perfectly-executed landmark album, they'd basically written themselves into a corner. (I should note that their first album, Australasia, is nearly on par with The Fire In Our Throats, yet presents a markedly different atmosphere). The Fire In Our Throats still stands as one of the most evocative and emotional albums in my collection, a testament to the (seldom-realized) fact that beautiful music doesn't have to be timid or cloying.

JOHN DIES AT THE END (BY) DAVID WONG

2010-03-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

Published 2009, 373 pages

Characters: B+

Writing: B

Plot/Pacing: B-

Poignancy: A

John Dies At the End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pagrin aka David Wong, has a history almost as complicated as the story it tells. Originally written as an online serial before transforming into the hardcover available in bookstore's today, Wong's publishing success is a heart-warming DIY underdog tale, just as John Dies At the End is a heart-warming underdog tale of one man's obsession with his own penis. Secondary to that, it's also the story of two friends confronting supernatural evil and the fragile, tenuous nature of reality. As pure page-turning entertainment, Wong's novel succeeds so effortlessly that one might not even notice just how unconventional the book's narrative and voice are. JDATE is a headcrab that clings to your skull and just won't stop humping your brain. It's possibly a classic of its genre — assuming you can settle on a genre to put it in — the rare story that successfully combines comedy and horror without ever trivializing its characters or sacrificing inventiveness. So yes, the horse I'm trying to beat here is this: John Dies At the End is original. Shockingly so — and I mean that, despite the comedic, casual tone, this book is actually shocking. The horror isn't just there as a sort of foil to bounce penis jokes off of — well, sometimes, maybe — but with all the wild ideas presented in JDATE, some of them are going to keep you up at night.

The comedy is largely driven by the novel's nonchalant protagonists, eccentric video-game generation small-town twenty-somethings Dave and John. The two serve as both straight-men to the increasingly surreal events unfolding around them — glib and dismissive in the face of supernatural evil, as if the possibility of humanity's extinction was just more bullshit foisted upon them by a world they already knew to be unrelentingly stupid — and also the source of the comedic tone, nearly matching the surrealist horror around them for batshit crazy unpredictability. Yet they aren't played cheaply — their deadpan, cynical view of the world is increasingly linked to a dark, very-real childhood. With a few deft moments, Wong connects the cruelty of adolescence with something far vaster and more terrifying. For all the cheap laughs, Dave in particular becomes a vivid, wholly original character, and one that remains recognizable and real even when he's bouncing between a haunted shopping mall and an alternate dimension he dubs "Shit Narnia." Even the side characters — though often hazy, due to their limited screen-time — reveal Wong's discerning eye for small town eccentricities, and I suspect that JDATE will be far more poignant to anyone who grew up in a middle-of-nowhere suburban dive. The voice and tone are perfect for capturing this secondary source of horror and humor, one that acts as an undercurrent to the main story — that sense of going nowhere in a place that you truly can't stand, of having no options. It mirrors John and Dave's confrontations with evil itself — they are not heroes, they are not on an adventure, and the best they can manage is to dodge every life-threatening encounter in time for their next shift at the local video rental store.

With such subject matter, it would have been easy for Wong to render his plot as silly and inconsequential, but the drama here is often poignant — there's an unrelenting sense of danger and dread, of hopelessness and futility, even if Wong scripts a few too many Shock and Awe moments into the proceedings. Some may find the rapidly escalating plot in JDATE overly surreal and confusing, but I believe its wild ambition to be the reason the novel resonates so well. Wong doesn't stop with the usual sampled staples of supernatural horror: ghosts and arbitrary Christian iconography. Those elements are there, but they're brought into a universe much vaster in scope, tied to a conspiratorial narrative that's only superficially similar to the basic "demon wants to invade earth" structure.

John Dies At the End isn't perfect, of course. Even with its unique, possibly alienating approach to an already narrow genre, it's a messy, flawed book, though not in a particularly negative way. Shouldn't horror — especially of this scope, with this voice, with multiple levels of Unreliable Narrator — be a little messy, anyway? Nonetheless, it is often apparent that Wong's book was written in segments, despite many edits and additions. The pacing is consistently relentless, but if you think too hard about how some of the plot elements go together, things start to get a little confusing. I'd much rather read fiction that overreaches than an author playing it safe and predictable, so I don't hold it against Wong. There's nothing particularly tidy or safe about the narrative voice to begin with — John Dies At the End deserves abundant praise for realizing that dumb, flippant humor can exist without dragging the whole story down to the same level, and Wong is anything but lazy with his ambitions. The result is a real bender — clever, original, both exciting and disturbing. It gets in your head — an achievement that should never be overlooked or discredited, no matter the methods.

BIRDS OF AMERICA (BY) LORRIE MOORE

2010-02-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

Published 1998, 291 pages

Characters: B
Writing: A-
Plot/Pacing: N/A
Poignancy: B

When I suggest that someone is or is not a good "writer", it's rather frustrating that I could easily mean one of two things (or two of two things). Writing can be successful on both a small and large scale, and the actual construction of sentences, imagery and metaphors is essentially as important as the overall impact of a piece. Writing is one of the few mediums in which the quality of the craftsmanship is immediately obvious to any observer — Dan Brown can tell a compelling story, and thus is a decent "storyteller", but seeing him struggle with the English language is as embarrassing and uncomfortable as watching a retarded blind double-amputee try to win an Iron Chef competition. So when I say that Lorrie Moore is a fantastic writer, there are a few caveats (I got caveats like Dan Brown has plot twists, buddy), but whether or not she succeeds as a storyteller is ultimately going to be up to the reader's personality and view on life.

How does this sound: stories that render ordinary, hopeless lives with astounding accuracy, scooping up many poignant details and observations along the way but, as a result of never developing any genuine conflict, ending abruptly and without payoff. Does that sound like it has the potential to be beautiful and revelatory to you, or just tedious? Being as objective as it's possible for me to be, I'd say it's a bit of both. Moore makes some truly great insights, though of the "subtle implication" sort, but she also gets a bit too caught up in what she's doing. Birds of America practically runs on metaphors and similes, which one senses are meant to carry the narrative in lieu of other more conventional propellants. This isn't a plot-heavy book, after all. It's about small characters leading pathetic lives, doing little with those lives, and reaching no real fulfillment in the end. The details they notice along the way are what's meant to endear Birds of America to us as well — and mostly, this works. Moore's writing is usually sublime and profound, and is enough on its own to push the stories forward. Unfortunately, Moore is hyper-aware that over-studied details and cute linguistic tricks are her selling-point, and she's quite relentless in making sure we get our money's worth. There were a few sentences that made me stop and stare at the page for a moment — in the very best of ways, in appreciation, understanding and a bit of jealousy — but there were also some similes so forced and stupid that I had to close the book and take a moment to recover. While the bad ones were rare, the real issue is that Moore has surprisingly little restraint for a writer dealing which such low-key subject matter. The first time she used a double or triple simile to describe something, I nodded my head in agreement and respect. Her words are undeniably powerful. But she doesn't stop. Is there a malfunctioning toaster that can be compared to a bird with a broken wing as part of a deeper metaphor for the futility of our protagonist's life? Expect at least three pretty, whimsical metaphors to follow. There's not enough happening in the background to justify getting stuck on every line, and her stories quickly run the risk of becoming over-long poems. Why am I being so harsh on her writing, when I gave it a rare "A"? Because nothing bothers me more than a writer who's become so impressed with themselves that they lose control, and with just a bit of editing and restraint (or even more variety in the actual stories), Moore's writing could be damn near perfect.

As for the larger picture, there's not a lot to say, which is another of the damn Catch 22's that seem to go hand-in-hand with Moore's writing. Moore has an exceptional command of voice, and every character in this collection is vivid and believable — however, I get the sense that I was reading the same character over and over, a bit like how Woody Allen will try to convince us that he's a sports writer in one movie and a comedy writer in the next, and you wish he'd just drop the damn pretense and play himself already. In almost every story, our third-person protagonist is a middle-aged woman with a repressed, whimsical sense of humor and a feeling of crushed pride, who faces the fact that her life has gone nowhere and that she's dating / married to some slovenly Joe Average dipshit who isn't good enough for her, although she's so passive aggressive that he ends up being the one to screw her over. There are slight variations on this theme, of course, sometimes introducing cats, children or cancer — the Big 3, innit — but ultimately, each explores a character stoically dealing with the slow, sad atrophy of their life.

Just writing this out makes it sound as if Moore has created a swan song for horribly stereotypical suburban housewives, but don't get me wrong — these stories are powerful enough to transcend their simple material and become something much more universal. And though I was overall impressed by Birds of America, it began to grate on me by the end for reasons I expect have become obvious by now. Since I didn't particularly care for any of the characters that much on their own monotonous merits, I was increasingly unmoved by their awkward revelations, their "Oh! Isn't life like that!" moments. Moore is such a good writer and observer that everything here is compellingly relatable, but it's also exhausting. I've been told that Moore's writing is "funny", and though I don't think she ever really goes for outright laughter, I can see how some might find humor in these situations. Personally, I'd describe them as "amusing" — frivolous in tone, generally placing us in awkward social entanglements without ever condescending to its characters the way that, say, The Office does. Each story on its own is a fine accomplishment, with few outright weak points, and for the right person in the right circumstances, Birds of America could be quite powerful. For others, to whom these characters aren't quite so endearing, Moore's book should at least serve as an engaging tutorial on the usage of simile and metaphor.