I Repeat, Bieber Cannot Win

Today is Halloween, the one night each year we willingly force ourselves into terrifying situations, be that by spending a night in haunted house, or watching Linda Blair projectile vomit pea soup onto handsome Greek priests, or in my case, capering about West Hollywood in search of a drag queen that looks like Lady Gaga.

Yet, even H.P. Lovecraft, in the darkest, most grotesque ends of his imagination could not foresee the true Halloween horror I would face on this year’s holiday: Justin Bieber.

Oh, you rancid diabolical fiend with your moppet hair and your dimply cheeks! Van Helsing himself would have quaked in fear upon spying the teeming hordes of young female zombies beating down doors and trampling innocents peasants to follow his siren song.

The day began like any other; sleeping in too late after spending an evening dressed as Hester Prynne for a friend’s Halloween party. I dragged my exhausted corpse out of bed to grab some delicious though nutritionally questionable lunch, and then head on over to the local Barnes and Noble, my sweet refuge of fiction and chai tea, to get some writing done.

Not today, Steinho! Not today! The doors to sanctuary were barred, because some higher mind than yours truly thought it would be the most excellent of ideas to have Justin Bieber sign his new book at my Barnes and Noble on Halloween. Are you kidding me? A Bieber singing in a bookstore? Bieber has no place in a bookstore! Everyone knows that today’s teen girls can’t read, and if they can, they read Twilight, which in my one hundred percent honest opinion isn’t reading at all. It’s tossing your brain into a blender and then teleporting your feminist powers back to the 1950s, where women vacuumed in pearls and got sexually harassed by Sean Connery.

I don’t know what is more horrifying, being kicked out of my own local bookstore because of a teen pop star, or that the woman at the top of the escalator asked to see my Bieber wrist band. Do I look like someone who supports the Bieber cult, Madame? Young though I may appear, I would have hoped that the dark circles of dehydration under my eyes and my constant scowling at other young people would have developed a certain aura of bitterness about my personage.

You know, I never hated on Bieber before. I was a tween once, with posters of New Kids on the Block papering my walls. I get it. Bieber is adorable. Bieber lays golden eggs. Bieber will one day be adopted by Oprah and together they will bring a long awaited era of peace and tranquility to our violent world. But after having a security guard gesture wildly at me, shouting I must immediately vacate the science fiction and fantasy section lest dire action be taken, I’m feeling less than friendly towards the little scamp. There were helicopters circling The Grove. Helicopters. Are you telling me that those helicopters had nothing better to do than protect Bieber’s safety? Is Bieber’s safety really a national crisis? Maybe it’s because of that one concert where somebody threw a bottle at his head. The helicopter pilots must’ve been off that night.

Back to my initial question. What is this floppy haired Muppet-come-to-life even doing in a bookstore in the first place? The short answer is that Bieber has a book. Bieber’s book is most eloquently titled “Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever: My Story.” Is this a joke? Did one of my childhood enemies become a zillionaire mad scientist with the two goals of both destroying the English language and torturing me? Let me interject that this is further proof text messages are making us all illiterate. The book is meant to be a tell all, but considering the kid is only sixteen years old, how much is there to tell? And what does that title even mean? Maybe we should wait a couple more decades before we start throwing around words like forever. Or perhaps the title is a subtle hint to the Dorian Gray-esque painting Bieber keeps in his attic to suck up all the evil and horrors he commits on a daily basis. I know your secrets, Bieber. I’m on to you!

Stand strong, fellow academics. Even Bieber’s fame will pass someday. He will grow old and tired. His non-threatening youthful gyrations shall no longer tempt the masses. When that days comes, I’ll be ready.

Bieber cannot win. The fate of the universe depends upon it, and this time, it’s personal.

Steampunk! Now with 40% More Robot Monarchs!

On the off chance you one day find yourself trapped inside a steampunk novel, it is always best to be prepared for what lies ahead. It might help to know exactly what the deuce steampunk is.

Surely you know what steampunk is! Surely! These days you can’t throw a rock without hitting a nerd wearing goggles and yammering on about his pocket watch that turns into a laser gun, because he simply must get back to his airship before Queen Victoria‘s robot army comes after him.. I think it’s safe to say that steampunk has thoroughly infiltrated all aspects of life. Not just the world of books, and movies and entertainment, but life. People decorate their homes with steampunk interior design. Couples get married with steampunk wedding cakes. If you haven’t heard of steampunk, you better have just gotten out of a time machine from the year 1812, which would sort of make you steampunk yourself, and therefore I forgive you.

For all of you who may or may not come from a time when it was perfectly acceptable for women to wear giant birdcages under their skirts, let me catch you up to speed on the wondrous miracle that is the steampunk subgenre. Put in simplest terms, it is science fiction set in Victorian times where steam is the main source of machine power, hence the name.

Pardon me, while I geek out for a moment. Some cite the 1980s as the birth of steampunk, the red headed stepchild of science fiction. I’d argue, however, that its roots run far deeper. Likely they were unaware of it at the time, but such delightful gentleman such as H.G. Wells and every science fiction nerd’s best friend, Jules Verne, gave the world their first dose of Victorian sci-fi. To be fair, these men weren’t setting their stories in this time period out of nostalgia, but simply because that was the era in which they lived and wrote, which makes them extremely farsighted and original, and me extremely jealous. Credit must also be given to one K.W. Jeter, the author who first officially coined the term steampunk to describe his own work. Whether or not you’ve ever heard of him, it can’t be denied that Jeter gave name to a phenomenon that has since exploded all over pop culture like a zombie brain when jabbed with an old fashioned steampunk laser cane.

What also cannot be denied is how I would sell black market orphan organs if it meant a magical portal to a steampunk dimension would open up and suck me in. In case you’re with me when that happens, here are a few tips to recognizing the brave new world you’ve tumbled in to. Is there a man having amorous relations with a robot lady? Are there airships? Not planes, but honest to goodness dirigibles, usually piloted by sky pirates. Is the heroine wearing a bustle but also shooting some sort of futuristic weaponry, possibly powered by steam or robotics or both? Is Queen Victoria present, and has her life been extended even longer by some infernal contraption involving a plethora of cogs and gears and futuristic science? I swear to you, in every steampunk novel, Queen Victoria is now 100 years old and part cyborg. Nothing hit’s the genre home quite like the most proper British woman ever to live being turned into the Terminator.

To illustrate my point, let’s consider a few of my favorite steampunk novels.

“The Affinity Bridge” by George Mann. Think Mulder and Scully in the 1890s. On their first case together, they investigate an airship crash, full of zombie plague victims, driven by mechanical pilots with human brains.

“The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters” by Gordon Dahlquist. Celeste Temple, a plucky but well-mannered British lass chases after some mad scientists who brainwashed her fiancée into dumping her using a curious blue ore from Eastern Europe. She karate chops her way to the truth, ever striving to maintain a sense of respectability. More than once, Celeste escapes danger on an airship.

“The Edge Chronicles” by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Mistakenly classified as young adult novels in my opinion, these books make Harry Potter’s adventures look about as dangerous as a Nancy Drew mystery. Set in a floating college, young academics study the weather while sky pirates hunt for a supernatural substance that keeps their city aloft. Airships, airships, airships.

There are a veritable surplus of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres. Cyberpunk. Alternative histories. Space operas. Why has steam punk stuck in a way others haven’t? I’d answer that it’s the perfect genre for the nerd who doesn’t like to make choices. Consider the popularity of “Star Wars,” which is itself a genre blend. Jedi 'knights' fight with swords, only instead of boring metal blades, they're made of lasers. There are queens and courtly politics, sage old wizards and diabolical sorcerers. What is Luke Skywalker but an Arthurian space man, come to face off in a battle of father versus son? Listen, I took a Comparative literature class in college. Trust me, it’s all in there. With subgenres, we get to have our “Lord of the Rings” set in a galaxy far, far away. With steampunk, you get to wear a top hat and monocle and live on the moon. Two words. Robot butlers.

Spoiler Alert! The Shark Eats People!

Dear Blogomatopoeia,

Now that the summer is over and there is no chance of me swimming in the ocean anytime soon, I decided to read the book, “Jaws” by Peter Benchley.

How many people actually know that “Jaws” is based off of a book? Well it is, movie goers! Your precious 1975, first ‘blockbuster’ movie ever, was based off a book! With paper and pages and nothing visual about it! Okay, that’s a lie. Within the first few pages, Benchley describes a woman getting attacked by the shark in such a graphically visual way, I almost threw up in the middle of Chipotle. I really, really need to stop reading horror novels at meal times.

In the great tapestry that is my writing education, I have heard over and over again that crusty adage of “hooking the reader” in the first few pages. Well, Mr. Benchley had me by page two, when he described the horror the first victim felt at reaching down to feel her wounded foot. Only, there was no foot left. The foot was gone. The shark, or “the fish” as Benchley refers to it throughout the entire text, had eaten it. There was something both creepy and ironic at this decision to demean the shark down to simply a fish, as if it was someone’s overfed pet, or something on a menu right between the chicken dishes and the pasta. You know, if all fish were like Jaws, I doubt we’d be worrying about people killing them for food. Let that be a lesson to you sharks! It’s you or us! Somebody’s eating somebody tonight and I don’t taste very good covered in lemon butter sauce!

No, no. I would never eat a shark. I think they’re misunderstood and misrepresented and I like animals and we should take care of our planet so please don’t get mad at me environmentalists!

Moving on. I’m not going to get into an analytical discussion comparing book and movie. That’s not what Steinho does. Steinho is all about gut reactions, and right now my gut is telling me to finish this blog post and get myself over to the Thai restaurant before my stomach’s volatile acids start devouring organs for nourishment. Just like Jaws did! See how I brought that back full circle?

There were so many elements that surprised me when reading the book. How about the fact that in the book, Hooper has an affair with Ellen Brody. Or how about how Brody himself is not an outsider. See, that’s why Ellen has the affair. She took a huge social plunge marrying dear, local man Martin Brody, and so when rich, sassy, shark-obsessed Matt Hooper comes along, she yearns for playing tennis and fancy dinner parties. Fortunately, Hooper dies in his little shark cage. Overall, it’s safe to say none of the characters are as lovable in the book. They’re all kind of jerks. Even our dear hero, Brody, comes off as a passive, whiney, fool who allows himself to get pushed around by the local government. Did I mention the mafia is also involved? Yes, that’s the real reason they can’t close the beaches. They mayor owes the mafia money. I can’t believe my drunken screenplay idea of Mafia vs. Shark was already stolen by Peter Benchley seven years before I was born. How dare he!?!

Going back to my gut, what I personally felt the book was lacking was a whole lot of shark eating people. The shark ate a total of five people in the book, and you only got to see three of them happen. In fact, there is a whole middle section of the book that the shark is not in at all. This is the part where Ellen throws a dinner party, has an affair, and various townspeople complain to Brody. Also, several newspaper people act obnoxious and Brody does a lot of lamenting. There’s a secret selectman meeting and some mysterious mafia dude breaks the neck of Brody’s cat. But no shark. Just a whole lot of talking about it.

Am I saying that in this one case, the adaptation is better than the original? The movie better than the book? Please! Everyone knows books are always better and anyone who disagrees is a ninny! However, I might be tempted to say that Spielberg, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb and Benchley made some excellent decisions in adapting the book into a film. In books, people can talk all they want. They can do nothing but talk and stare at each other, and if the writer is skilled enough, you’ll be on the edge of your seat. In the movies, you need a little something extra. Like Quint spitting up blood as he slides into the shark’s gullet. I love that part!

There is a reason “Jaws” was such a hit in 1975 and continues to be so thirty-five years later. That reason is crappy 1970s animatronics. If the shark hadn’t malfunctioned, Spielberg would have kept it in the film more, and it would have ended up looking a hot, cheesy mess. All those thrilling scenes where you know the shark is lurking nearby, but you can‘t tell where, would now have a giant robot fish in the middle of it. Have you ever been to the ride at Universal Studios? If you have, then you know how not frightening that thing looks. And if you haven’t been to Universal Studios, just picture the little kids from the “It’s a Small World” ride and try to pretend you’re afraid of them. Okay, that actually might be scarier.

Now that I think about it, Peter Benchley knew exactly what he was doing. It was excruciating reading through that middle section, not knowing when they were going to go out into the water again, not knowing when the next person was going to get killed. All while the characters were slowly gabbing on at each other and being miserable, you could never forget that in just a few pages, somebody was going to dive into the water and come out a limbless pulp.

Besides, only a man who knew about real horror would write a sex scene for a character played by Richard Dreyfuss.

Stop Apologizing, Take Your Copy of The Giving Tree and Go

Note to self: Having spent over a year and a half working at a large chain book store, NEVER EVER read another horror novel where the workers at a large chain book store are driven insane and then eaten by British swamp monsters.

I honestly can’t even tell you if this book sucked or not, because I was too busy suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. At this point, I’m not even positive I read a book at all. Any moment, I might wake up to find the past year some sort of blissful dream, because I’ve merely passed out from exhaustion in the break room at the Barnes and Noble in Marina del Rey. If that’s true, I hope that the part about the mud monsters coming to kill the bookstore employee is also, because man, I really don’t want to get yelled at by customers ever again.

Let’s take a step out of Steinho’s Wacky World of Reading-Induced Nightmares for a moment, shall we? The novel that caused me such mental distress is called “The Overnight,” by British horror author, Ramsey Campbell. Now, this chap seems to have authored quite a few novels in his day, clearly a sign of substantial success. Therefore, either his books are well-written, or entertaining enough to somebody that his publisher kept throwing sacks of cash his way. “The Overnight” discusses that age old quandary: What happens when you build a huge, corporate retail establishment on top of a British fen steeped in evilness. If it were the dark ages, we’d all turn on our fellow villagers and brain them with whatever farming implement we had handy. In the modern world, as Campbell sets up in “The Overnight,” hoes and pitchforks are replaced with emotional barbs and psychological warfare. The cast of characters, who I personally felt were all obnoxious twits, begin simply by bickering with each other. Accusations fly about who messed up who’s section of books, and who isn’t really carrying their weight in terms of work load. By the end, personal vendettas bubble up and turn into physical confrontation. Imagine “Lord of the Flies” set in your local Borders.

The text had a poetic, darkly whimsical style, further exaggerated by Campbell’s decision to write the story in present tense. The result was a fifty-fifty cocktail, partly pretty description and partly pretty pretentious. For example, he describes one bookseller wandering the parking lot, searching for the security guard, saying “His shadow smears itself across the whitish door like another example of vandalism as he reaches for the metal handle.” Smearing a shadow sounds like a messy job. I feel like I should be citing these pages with a proper bibliography and start talking about how Campbell’s use of the vandalism metaphor suggests a belief that the true monsters in today’s society are the misguided, urban youth, and since a shadow is something we all possess, we must acknowledge that potential darkness within ourselves.

Or it could just be a creepy scene about a guy in an empty security guard booth.

Going back to my initial point. What freaked me out the most about “The Overnight” had nothing to do with Campbell’s endless blathering about creepy fog, though I will say, there were more than a few chill-inducing scenes. If I can come up with any criticism, it’s that there was too much of the people as monsters to each other vs. actual mud monsters suffocating terrified booksellers with their slimy, malleable bodies. Now I’m going to contradict myself by saying that the parts that affected me the most though, were those that specifically focused on the stress of regular, old retail life. For example, I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to seriously cry when I returned to the children’s section after break, only to find that a single, tiny unsupervised and evil toddler had managed to destroy my entire area in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. These children are like demigods of destruction and entropy. When Madeleine, the children’s lead in “The Overnight” returns to find her section trashed, only there’s no one in the store but the other employees, what is she to think, but that someone is trying to mess with her? Then to read her anguish, and desperation and sorrow, and for the other characters (all horrible human beings) to simply tell her, ‘Oh! You must not have done as good a job tidying as you thought. You’re just tired and missed a few disorganized shelves,’ well that made me want to cry a little, too.

Then there was the store manager in “The Overnight.” Dear managers who I worked under, thank you for not being as insane and obsessed as this character. Thank you for being human beings with souls! To start with, this fellow’s name is Woody, and while all the other characters are native Brits, Woody is American, which I suppose was Campbell‘s way of explaining his insane capitalist drive. Woody goes around telling everyone to smile and keep working after one of their crew has been run down by a phantom child in a stolen car. When he finds another girl, choked to death after being trapped in an elevator, he carries her body off, not because he cares about her, but because he needs to start cleaning up for when the customers arrive. Of course, it’s the running theme of the book that the evil swampland they work upon is what causes everyone’s darkest inner thoughts to spill over into reality. This makes most of the employees grow antagonistic towards each other, but it just turns Woody into even more of a sales-obsessed, villainous corporate zombie. His condescending tone and constant mocking of workers he feels are performing less than perfectly made me want to go inside the book and harpoon him in the face. The fact that he alone doesn’t get murdered by the mud people is the most disappointing twist ending since M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village.” Now that, Ramsey Campbell, is just plain monstrous.

You can't solve mysteries with a name like Smith.

Guten Bloggen,

I never much cared for mystery novels. Or thrillers. There’s a thin line between horror and thriller, and usually that line involves some sort of demon child or clown or haunted filing cabinet that’s hiding in a dimly lit office, just waiting to bite the hero’s face off. Thriller and mystery novels are usually the boring kind of scary. They contain stories about government conspiracies, and lots of running done by guys in suits. In a horror novel, the suit would be stuck to a politician’s skin, slowly choking him every time he made another unjust judicial decision. Horror equals fun and exciting. Mystery equals boring things my mom would read.

Sorry, Mom.

But, as with any point of contention, I am prepared to stand corrected when contrary evidence is laid before me. In the past month I read two mystery novels, both on recommendations and both, oddly enough, having the word ‘tattoo’ in the title. I didn’t hate either of them. I didn’t hate either one of them at all.

The first, “Bangkok Tattoo,” was part of a spec-freaking-tacular series by John Burdett. It focuses around a Buddhist detective in Bangkok named Sonchai Jitpleecheep, who spends as much time covering up crime and helping his mother run a brothel as solving murders. The story lines are bizarre, sexy, and violent. They frequently comment on western culture in such a honest way that it‘s hard to do anything but laugh at yourself, while playfully shaking your fist at Mr. Burdett‘s photo on the dust jacket. An unexpected side-effect. Sonchai is forever describing the delicious Thai food he’s consuming, which left me in a constant state of craving for pad thai and curry.

On to the second mystery of September. Maybe you’ve heard of it? I even mentioned it in a previous blog post. It’s a little novel called “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” by Stieg Larsson. This dark story follows Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist hired to solve a forty year old murder, with the help of a genius, though asocial, punk girl named Lisbeth. Along the way, Mikael has lots of sex, discovers some clues, uncovers a few conspiracies, and almost gets kissed by a serial killer. He’s that sexy.

Now, I often use my sister as a good judge to tell if a book has truly made the rounds. My sister, for those of you who don’t know, is a doctor. She’s an anesthesiologist to be specific. In other words, she is infinitely smarter than me, which is why she gets to vacation in Peru and New Zealand, while I am living in an apartment in Los Angeles that costs less per month than certain pieces of her wardrobe. If my sister has heard of a book, then most likely it’s popular. I say this only because my sister is an incredibly busy woman, and doesn’t have the time I do to wander aimlessly for hours through the shelves of her nearest book selling establishment, or google the top steam punk novels 2010 to see which whimsical tale of airships and technomancers she should add to her library. I’m fairly certain my sister doesn’t know what a technomancer is. A couple months ago, my sister was about to go on a vacation, and asked what I’d heard about “this dragon tattoo book.” And thus, you could officially say, everyone and their sister was talking about Stieg Larsson.

However, unlike many mass appeal novels that have overtaken our literary sphere, this one does not make me want to vomit from my soul. It’s popular… and well written! No! How can that be?? Most likely because the author was Swedish and a journalist and not a lonely housewife with nothing better to do. It’s like Harry Potter, only for adults, and also there’s no magic, and Harry‘s a forty-year old journalist instead of a wizard. But he does hang out in a dark little room solving forgotten mysteries and many people do die and they all have very silly names. Hehe, Blomkvist! So yes, it’s exactly like Harry Potter.

All joking aside, I never would have picked this book on my own. It was just too well known, too talked about. But like with Bangkok tattoo, I was surprised by the open discussion of sex, the dark and graphic violence, not to mention all the contradictions to our own, tight-laced western culture. The book weaves together multiple stories of sexual violence against women, and what those women do in response, a topic usually reserved for overly dramatic, flowery, stories likely to be mentioned on the Oprah show. Not so much with Mr. Larsson or Mr. Burdett for that matter. These two novels are gritty, their heroes’ actions morally ambiguous, or at least questionable. I suppose this makes the stories more real. It certainly makes them more fascinating to read.

I lift my glass to these novelists, for redeeming the mystery genre in my eyes. I gave you old ladies holding magnifying glasses. You exchanged it for a hot blond dude and Thai hookers. Good sirs, I am eternally in your debt.