Apparently. . .
Apparently, I love and want to marry every video the band OK GO makes:
OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.
Yay.
Author Archive: jsomers
Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.
Bar Paradise
Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few.
When you live in Hoboken, you either live there in spite of the ubiquitous bars, or you live there because of the bars. And there are a lot of bars, that’s for sure—wherever you live in Hoboken, you are within three blocks of a tavern of some sort. So you’re either sitting up late at nights with a shotgun across your knees, gritting your teeth in rage because of all the noisy drunkards screaming in the street, or you’re one of the screaming drunkards. Or, like me, you once were one of the screaming drunkards and look back on that time fondly, vomit and all.
Living here, therefore, you learn pretty quickly how to navigate the bars. It’s a survival skill. And the first thing you learn is that there are, fundamentally, two types of bars. There may be infinite sub-categories within, but every bar can be boiled down to one of these: Old Man Bars, and everything else.
The Old Man Bar is a phenomenon that crosses borders, cultures, and, apparently, time. Sometimes referred to with the misleading term ‘neighborhood bar’, the Old Man Bar is a simple concept: It’s that bar you walk into and stop three steps in because staring back at you, blank-faced with disdain, are men uniformly over the age of fifty (with a couple of possible exceptions). Instantly, you know you’re not supposed to be in this bar, and you get the heck out of it as quickly as you possibly can.
Of course, there are plenty of men over fifty who don’t spend their days in Old Man Bars, and plenty of people over fifty who quite happily hang out at bars you wouldn’t term “Old Man Bars”. It’s not that all old men go to Old Man Bars, it’s that, invariably, Old Man Bars are peopled exclusively by old men. There’s nothing wrong with this, either, of course—live and let live, I say—but the fact is that if you aren’t already spending your time in an Old Man Bar, I know two things about you without having met you: One, you don’t want to be in an Old Man Bar, and two, the old men don’t want you in their bar either.
Aside from the unfriendly glares from the old men, you can tell an Old Man Bar from the uncannily consistent features it will sport:
1. It will be populated, but never crowded. There will be plenty of elbow room, and a sprinkling of patrons, most men over fifty—however, there may be one or two women, also over fifty, and even one or two of those old-before-their time younger men who have decided to get it over with and begin the serious business of drinking.
2. There will be a single pool table, much abused.
3. The jukebox will be playing something from 1973 when you walk in, and there won’t be an album more recent than 1980 on it.
4. There will be, at most, two beers on tap. It’s possible one of the taps won’t even work.
The best thing to do when you arrive inadvertently at an Old Man Bars to just back out silently and never return. Any instinct to be polite will not be appreciated, and will be uniformly painful for both sides. Besides, the bartenders in Old Man bars are usually bartenders by avocation, and any cocktail more complex than a Boilermaker will require a quick glance through a bartender’s handbook, not to mention a disdainfully raised eyebrow, so any request for a Cosmopolitan or a Dirty Martini will probably go unanswered.
No one knows, I don’t think, why this phenomenon is so common. Certainly a time comes when you’re too old for the crowded, loud, singles-oriented scene that most of Hoboken’s bars offer, but maybe you still want to meet friends for a drink once in a while, or every day, or just spend your time sopping up as much alcohol as possible before cirrhosis takes its toll. We all probably have an Old Man Bar in our future at some point, when the music gets too loud, the air too smoky, and the crowd too young. We’ll wander onto the dimly-lit side streets of Hoboken, croaking out our mating call, eventually hearing an old song from our youth on the warm air. And when we trace it to its source, we’ll find the Old Man Bar of our future, sparsely populated by people who know the same trivia as we do, and there’ll be plenty of room at the bar, and no screaming kids ordering sweet mixed drinks, and the occasional entertainment of watching a group of youngsters stumble in, stop dead, and quietly back out with wide eyes and trembling lips.
Gadget Malaise
One thing I always try to keep in mind when trolling the Internet, magazines, newspapers, and random cocktail napkins found in the gutters of the world for something to read while I drink my coffee in the morning is this: Writers need something to write about. Even I, sitting here in my secret underground bunker with crates full of cheap Canadian whisky stacked up around me, wake up every now and then and decide I need to update this blog (like, say, this morning) and stew for a few moments wondering what in the world I can write about. This makes me deeply suspicious of a lot of media; there’s a lot of doom and gloom and alarmism out there, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with the need for content and the fact that pessimism always sells better (IMHO – YMMV).
Recently, I was reading about the supposed “rapid generation gaps” we’re experiencing, wherein every set of kids learn a whole host of technologies that their older siblings, merely five years older, are completely unfamiliar with. For example, people of my generation grabbed onto e-mail with gusto in the 1990s and haven’t let go since, but the generations that followed us view e-mail as a business thing for the old folks, and spend their time texting or IMing or, who knows, inserting their souls into cyberspace and interacting in The Matrix.
Sidenote: By using the words “cyberspace” and “Matrix” in that sentence, I have dated myself dangerously, and the kids are now cheerfully mocking me on IRC channels I’ll never hear about.
I don’t doubt the truth in that article: I’ve seen with my own eyes how people 10 years younger than me use technology differently, and people 10 years younger than them use it differently from them, and so on. Technology is evolving rapidly and kids will be in the forefront of it because unlike folks my age, its kids who by and large use these new technologies at first. When I was a kid, all technology trickled down from my parents. Today it’s the kids who want the new phones, the new media players, the new game systems. So, sure. By the time I’m old enough to retire, there will likely be a baffling array of technological gadgets I can’t comprehend.
But here’s the thing: So what?
Who cares if 10-year olds are communicating using gadgets I’ve never seen and probably couldn’t figure out how to use? They are ten. I will never wish to speak with them.
This is a general rule of thumb I apply to everything like this. If a group of people are using a technology or tool to socialize, I ask myself: Do I really want to hang out and communicate with them? If the answer is “no” (and it almost always is, as I am misanthropic) then I cease to care about whatever it is we’re talking about. This works out much better than you might imagine.
There is, I think, a general fear of growing old and becoming dumb, fueled by the rapid pace of change and the fact that people my age have vivid memories (possibly from yesterday, literally) of having to painfully show our parents or grandparents how to use what we consider simple technologies, like the television after the recent digital signal switchover. We’re used to being the smug hippies who know everything, and it terrifies us that we might one day be sitting in puzzled humility while a cretinous child who doesn’t know anything about good booze or classic pornography smugly teaches us how to use our Teleportation Stick or whatever. Of course, it’s entirely possible to live a full and happy life without knowing anything about the latest gadgets (hell, I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager), it’s just a fear of being left behind that drives this kind of insanity.
Which brings me to a gadget that makes me leaden with boredom despite what the marketing droids want me to believe: 3D Television. If there is a more useless upgrade in the universe, I am not aware of it. While 3D visuals are kind of fun, and I don’t mind wearing stupid glasses, say, once every decade, the fact is I can’t imagine anyone who wants 3D television. But the electronics industries fear nothing like the end of a constant upgrade-cycle; I’m convinced one of the reasons for the fierce resistance to MP3s as a standard digital music format had nothing to do with DRM or quality issues, but rather the simple fact that MP3s can be played on any device these days, so you may never have to purchase another music content delivery item (a CD, for example) or a content decoder (a CD player, for example). For the last 30 years there’s been a constant stream of upgrades that people have bought, and now, there’s little reason to. But I digress.
The point is, no matter how hard they try, no one will convince me that I must have 3D TV or risk being irrelevant to society. I already am irrelevant to society, in that sense of the term. I don’t need wacky glasses to prove that. And so it goes.
This Week’s World’s Best Reader
Sometimes the folks who read my books turn out to be amazing, talented people themselves. Case in point: AMMSII from the forum, who sent me this:
Writes AMMSII: “The Electric Church influenced 2 songs for my band, and when we performed on mischief night, I had my keyboardist dress and act like one of the Monks. I’m the dude singing. One song is called Pusher, and it’s about the scene when Kev pushes the monk. The other song is like persuading people to join it.”
Hot shit, that looks like a band I’d like to go see. AMMSII also sent me this kick ass piece of audio, which is “?a reading from The Electric Church, page 122.” This kicks ass as well:
TEC Page 122 (with apologies to AMMSII as I reduced the quality to make it a better size for streaming etc).
Wow! I’m amazed.
Stapler porn
For those of you who make print zines, this might appeal. After switching to a double biannual issue, I found that my trusty old Stanley long reach stapler couldn’t hack it any more. Sadly, I had to replace it with . . . this:
Monster Stapler can destroy worlds with its awesome power. And possibly staple my hand to my thigh if I try to make zines drunk.
The Five People You Meet in the Laundromat
Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few.
THERE are few indignities associated with city living more consistently aggravating than the laundromat experience. Dragging your soiled linens to the laundromat is sort of like adult acne: Something you were promised you wouldn’t have to deal with once you graduated school and grew up a little, but which persists in afflicting you well into your middle age. The salt in the wounds in the New York City area, of course, is that we’re all paying ridiculous amounts of money for our tiny, cramped dwellings, and still must carry our weighty sacks of laundry to the coin-op laundry. I have, in the past, attempted to register my protest of such conditions by refusing to do laundry at all, but this proved unpopular with my coworkers, friends, and wife, and I was forced to relent.
If laundromats were glorious, sunny places you could enjoy going to, it wouldn’t be so bad, but let’s face it, laundromats—at least the ones around me—are sort of hygiene gulags, tiny, drab, and crowded. Also, often damp. Every laundromat I’ve ever been in has been uniformly depressing: Grey and featureless, with leaking machines, crowds of angry people, and sad, minimalist vending machines. When you arrive, sweaty and wearing your emergency underwear (sometimes, wearing only your emergency underwear, if it’s a real emergency), the scene that greets you is not exactly inspiring. Neither are the people you rub elbows with while trying to scrub the shame out of your clothing.
Societal breakdown is never far away in cities; too many people plus not enough space equals simmering tempers and revenge fantasies. In the laundromats you have an ill-advised further concentration, crowding people into a small, resource-starved space—it isn’t long before a Lord of the Flies scenario erupts over the possession and use of the washers and dryers. Under such stresses, the true nature of people is revealed. Some writers would hesitate to boldly categorize the entire human race into a handful of generalizations, but not me: There are five types of people you meet in the laundromat. Not six, not four, but five:
The Brood Leader: Invariably there will be people who, for one reason or another, must bring their entire family with them to the laundromat. Nothing wrong with this, of course, and many people have no other choice—the laundry’s got to be done, and the kids can’t be allowed to burn the house down while you’re out doing it. Aside from the cloud of children swarming around them, you can identify these poor souls by the flat look in their eyes that hints that a lost child or two wouldn’t bother them too much.
Single Guy:We all know this guy. Heck, I was this guy. Charmingly clueless, he arrives with laundry in a plastic garbage bag, recklessly purchases soap and bleach from the ancient vending machine in the corner, mixes whites and colors, and overstuffs the washer so it explodes into suds and water that covers the floor in a pinkish, slippery film. Inexplicably, he never returns to claim his clothing.
The Relativity Theorist: The worst part of spending time in a laundromat is spending time there, of course, and this brainy customer isn’t afraid to bend the laws of physics to their will in a bid to reduce their sentence. Noting that lots of laundry crammed into one or two dryers will take a few quarter-driven cycles to completely dry, they spread their laundry out amongst as many dryers as possible—the ultimate goal being one article of clothing per dryer—in hopes of getting out of there after a single twenty-minute cycle. And more power to them.
Angry Angry Territorialist: Ever walked into a laundromat and found every washer or dryer occupied—a large number of which have stopped? After waiting a polite period of time, you start investigating, seeking to claim one of these units for your own use. The exact length of that “polite period of time” is a subjective matter, of course, but no matter how long you wait, at some point you will place your hands on the washer or dryer containing the clothing of The Territorialist, who will appear as if out of thin air and demand to know what you think you’re doing. No matter how long they’ve let their laundry languish, it is their firm belief that while their laundry resides inside a washer or dryer, they in some sense own that washer or dryer, and heaven help you if you trespass on their property.
The Quiet Professional: Once in a great while it is the honor of every laundromat refugee to witness an awe-inspiring display of laundry-management that puts the rest of us to shame. Someone will come in and so competently manage the washers and dryers that they’re preparing to exit from the laundromat while you’re still trying to remember which washer actually contains your clothing. They crisply smooth, fold, and hang their clothes on some sort of semi-professional laundry-transportation device that makes your college-era duffel bag look foolish in comparison, and march out of the building with a confident, no-nonsense stride that says “I am going home to starch and iron, fools!”
It’s enough to make you contemplate slinking home and doing your wash in the kitchen sink. Which I would not recommend, by the way, unless you really are down to your emergency underwear and nothing else.
Lost: The End
My god, this actually happened:
The other night, after dinner, my wife was puttering down on the first floor with the TV on in the background, and the execrable show I Get That a Lot came on. If you have never encountered this, um, program, it goes like this: The producers find some celebrity – say, everyone’s favorite accused murderer Snoop Dogg – and have them pretend to work at some normal job, like gas station attendant or sandwich maker. When people tell Snoop that he looks like Snoop, Snoop makes a joke and says “I get that a lot.” Whoo, it sure sound funny, don’t it?
After a while I went downstairs to join her for some light television watching, and she casually unpaused the TV and sat down. I stood there for a moment, stunned.
“Wait,” I stuttered. “We’re watching this? That unpausing was serious?”
It was: To my horror, my wife thinks I Get That a Lot is hilarious.
This is one reason I can’t wait for Lost to return – so I can avoid moments like that. Lost ain’t a perfect show, but it’s an interesting one, and I’m personally very excited to have some smart SF back on TV. There’s more and more SF with big budgets on TV and on the movie screens these days, but a lot of it just isn’t very smart, in my opinion – sort of like the movie Avatar. There’s a science fiction concept there at the core, but it’s mainly used to tell a story that completely – you might say purposefully – ignores the implications and consequences of that concept in favor of telling a much more conventional story. The central SF ideas in Avatar, for example – the Avatar technology itself, Pandora, the ecologic, economic, and social situation on a future earth that drives everything else – are completely ignored. Completely. Basically, the movie says, hey, here’s avatar technology, where we grow an alien body with some human genes implanted and then a human gets in this tube and bam! the human can operate the alien body as if it’s his or her own. And you stop and start to ask a question about that and the movie makes a face and says “Moving on, here are some action sequences and romantic subplots and obvious villains whose demise you will get to cheer later when they are killed in poetic ways!”
Anyway. . .
This is the final season of Lost, and it’s going to be one of those rare TV shows that gets to have an actual, planned-for ending. Most TV shows in America, of course, limp along until absolutely no one is watching and then just turn off midstream like they never existed in the first place, and this is usually true even concerning serials with ongoing stories – which is one reason why the networks prefer shows like the Law & Order franchise, which has no ongoing arc plots and thus can be shown more or less randomly without eroding the audience. But Lost will escape that fate, which is good, but this also puts the show on the precipice, because despite six seasons of (presumably) intriguing plots, funny moments, delicious mysteries, and fine performances, the legacy of the show is going to hinge on its ending. In other words, if the ending sucks, that’s all anyone will ever remember about Lost.
When I was in college, my friends and I discovered the old TV show The Prisoner, which was recently desecrated by a new version no one wanted or watched. Originally aired in 1967 in the US (I think) we discovered it some decades later and it blew our minds. We were mildly obsessed with it for a while. But I’ll tell you: If you mention it in mixed company and anyone actually knows what you’re talking about, all you’ll hear about is the incomprehensible mind-trip of an ending, which outraged viewers at the time and continues to anger people to this day. The ending of The Prisoner is possibly the single most baffling climax of any TV show, ever, and it is the show’s main legacy at this point. As another example, consider St. Elsewhere; the only thing most people truly remember about that show is the bizarre ending (if you’re not familiar with it, you ought to be). The ending to St. Elsewhere has even sparked an ongoing theory about its narrative as related to other TV shows. No one talks about the show any more, but people are still talking about the ending.
So, Lost is up against it this year. The ending could be brilliant, it could be dull, disappointing, baffling, or simply weird. Who knows? I’ll be there, delighted to find out, and then we can begin discussing it. Or, in the worst case scenario, not discussing it. because the worst thing they could do with that show is have an expected, conventional ending that everyone watches, shrugs at, and walks away from searching for a snack.
Question of the Week
Recently, the Illuminati (Hoboken Chapter) decided to bless my little town with a movie theater. It’s not huge (5 screens) and it’s located on the butt end of town right under the shadow of the world’s rustiest overpass, but hot damn, a real-life movie theater in walking distance! The last time I had a movie theater I could even theoretically walk to I was 12 and sneaking in R-rated movies in the State Theater in Journal Square, Jersey City. Since then it’s been a depressing series of suburban and mall gigaplexes, swamped with shitkickers and a good half hour’s drive under ideal conditions. So: HOT DAMN, a real-life movie theater!
As a result, The Duchess and I have gone to several movies recently that we would not have seen until pay-per-view some months from now. The modern moviegoing experience is tragic: Overpriced, overcrowded, and stuffed full of kids who have more money to spend in one Saturday night than I had my entire childhood. Bitter? Not me. I just despise children. Don’t hold it against me.
So we don’t make it out to too many movies these days, trying to avoid sitting in a darkened room with assholes. We’ve tried going to movies at 10AM, but this just replaces young assholes with elderly assholes. Trust me: The whole world is populated with assholes, and assholes ruin everything. But the fact that we can walk to the Hoboken theater is too great a lure, and we’ve seen 2012, Avatar, Sherlocke Holmes, and It’s Complicated there within the last month. That’s a record for us. And we only had one asshole moment in those four movies (a group of kids who found their conversation too delightful to end, but they were literally stared into terrified silence by a man a few rows down from them). I can guarantee you we wouldn’t have seen 3 of those movies if we’d been forced to gas up the car and drive to them.
So here’s my Question for the Week: If you suddenly had super evil SuperVillain powers (or, why not, SuperHero powers) would you a) actually put your time and energy into dominating/destroying/saving/protecting the world, or would you just spend your time making a nice fortune and possibly turning loud kids in theaters into toads?
Me, I’ve never understood the assumption that people who develop super powers of some sort (either genetic, magical, or technological) would immediately give up their lives of desperate labor to take up . . . desperate lives of labor. I mean, taking over the world is tough work: You have to seize trillions in assets, hire yourself an army and staff it properly, monitor your minions for betrayal, build underwater bases – whew, I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Now, I can better understand superheroism once the Super Villain is in place: I can imagine someone with psychic powers just making a nice comfortable life for themselves until a Super Villain starts mucking everything up, and then, after a good nap and a sandwich, the Super Hero decides, well, this guy’s ruining my stock portfolio, better take him down. But the Super Villainy just mystifies me. Not the idea of using your powers for your own gain, but the idea of putting so much drama into it. Why not just use your powers to start a really cool Ponzi scheme?
Sure, everyone likes to picture themselves in a cool costume, lording it over an army of redshirts, but the work, man, the work involved! I mean, if I can use my super evil powers to get free drinks at the local bar, all well and good. But administrating a mercenary army of thousands? Who wants the headaches? And then, after it’s all said and done, what have you accomplished, really? You’ve made yourself CEO of a corporation. An evil corporation, sure, but a corporation nonetheless. I’d rather nap in the afternoons.
New Year’s Resolutions
Like everyone else, I greet every arbitrarily-chosen day that indicates a new calendar year with rage, skepticism, and vows to never ever drink something handed to me by a stranger on the street. I also vow to develop my own calendars and system of time, enabling me to claim August 5th as New Year’s Day and January 1st as New Year’s Day (observed).
But as usual: I digress.
Since the wizards and alien astronauts who invented the world decided more or less at random that January 1st is the New Year, it’s a natural time for folks to make resolutions, and I am no different from anyone else. Or, yes, I am extremely different from everyone else due to my flagrant lack of pants and my unusual, Dick-Van-Dyke-in-Mary-Poppins inspired system of hygiene, but in this respect I stand with my brothers and sisters and declare the following things will happen in 2010 (or, in my own personal calendar system, Fred):
1. Develop Super Powers: It’s about damn time. I’m tired of not being able to fly, or shoot bolts of energy from my hands.
failing that:
2. Develop Super Weapons: If I can’t fly or shoot energy bolts, I’ll at least create the world’s largest slingshot and hold cities hostage for trillions of dollars.
That’s it. I figure if I succeed in either one of these resolutions, all sorts of exciting things will be very easily achieved, so why put more effort into it than necessary?
The Entertainment. . .Will Wait
(Use of CAPS in this post courtesy of Dan Krokos).
Back home after some holiday family-visitin’. For some reason when I am travelling I don’t update my blog or twitter feed or anything very much. Part of this is sheer laziness. Part of it is the immense amount of whiskey my relatives pour into me. Part of it is the recovery time I require after flying everywhere and having TSA employees ask me, in perfect seriousness, if I have anything lodged within me that could explode under any conceivable circumstances. What, they don’t ask you those kinds of questions? Must be the protective body armor I wear whenever I fly. But I digress.
I’m an old cranky man (did I SAY I wanted my whiskey on the rocks?!?! I’LL KILL YOU!), so I accept that my childhood was vastly different from what kids today (or just in the “recent past”) experience. I remember when you had to rush out to see movies before they faded from the theaters, never to be seen again (unless you were lucky and they were run, edited and split by commercials, on TV) and had to make plans to be home at the right time in order to catch shows and specials on TV. That’s right: I remember life before VCRs, DVRs, Pay-Per-View, even the humble video rental. OH MY GOD I REMEMBER 1979. Hold me.
Anyway, I was thinking about this recently because someone asked me if I was going to see Avatar, and my answer was: Maybe, I have to think about it. And it struck me that there was a time when I wouldn’t have had the luxury. I can wait, now, and if I miss the movie in theaters I will have approximately one million more chances to watch it before I die. It’ll be on pay-per-view, or on HBO, to which I subscribe. It’ll show up on DVD. It’ll be shown on airplanes, eventually on network TV or basic cable, and I will likely shuffle from this mortal coil having seen the fucking thing 13 times whether I want to or not.
This revelation removes the sense of urgency. I can literally take all the time I want to decide if watching Avatar is something I want to do. For an old bastard like me who remembers the first time my father brought home a movie on VHS – well, it’s kind of cool. I can remember a sense of desperation when a movie was fading from the theaters and my chances of ever seeing it were slimming down towards none, and I had to make plans to hitch a ride across three states in order to attend the last showing. Nowadays I can just add it to my NetFlix queue, or buy it on 23rd street for $5. Actually, it was available on 23rd street back in November, somehow. HOT DAMN THEY HAVE INVENTED TIME TRAVEL! What a time to be alive, as Frostillicus would say.
The same is happening in slower motion with books, natch. Books have always had a greater sense of permanency than other media, seeing as they don’t require any special technology to view (or at least, they didn’t used to – DAMN YOU EBOOKS!) but they did in fact fade from the market after a while. Sure, some classics are always in the book stores, but the kind of books I read voluntarily as a kid, staying up until 4AM with a flashlight, were not always on the shelves – you had to pounce. There were libraries, of course, but libraries have budgets and have to make their best choices, and even if they do purchase a book they had to clear the shelves now and then for new stock (of course now they can has eBooks and keep every book they purchase forevers and evers – BLESS YOU EBOOKS!). So it was a similar process, just slower.
But now, even that limitation is lifting, because of the aforementioned eBooks and the fact that used books can now be tracked down on the Internet like fugitives and mailed to your house. So I don’t have to read books within the first year before they disappear – I can wait decades! This is good stuff.
Of course, life is transient and this new attitude might mean I’ll be lying in my death bed a hundred years from now (my robot body badly rusted from misuse) and I’ll suddenly realize there are 255 movies on my To-See list. So maybe I should get up and see Avatar. Well, maybe after a sandwich.