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.

Don’t Be Eaten by Bears: Your Humble Editor Has an Adventure

Author: jsomers January 13, 2014 2 Comments

Note: The events described here happened exactly ten years ago, when I was a much younger man with a healthier liver and better dance moves. It previously appeared in the March, 2004 issue of The Inner Swine.

This is how I remember it.

PIGS, personally I believe that exercise is probably stunting our race’s evolution. Only a few decades ago it was easy to imagine that in a few thousand years the human race would transform into ugly, huge-brained beings with scrawny, useless bodies and huge, pulsing craniums trembling on narrow chicken-necks. The combination of increased automation and developing psionic powers looked likely to make any kind of physical effort unnecessary, and the slow, rubbing fingers of evolution would take over and mold us into the Superbeings we were destined to be. We’d use our immense brains to move mountains with a thought, to communicate instantly via thoughtwave, and repel invasions by the hideous Apes from Planet of the Apes by joining hands and concentrating our immense mental powers.

And then, this glorious future got ruined. By exercise.

Suddenly, people somehow didn’t want their muscles to atrophy, their limbs to wither, their heads to swell up horribly. Suddenly, people wanted to live longer, and in better health, than ever before. A wave of terrible fitness swept over the world, a sort of global inanity wherein people did crazy things like running when there was no need to run (like, say, because a hungry bear was chasing you) and lifting heavy things over and over again despite the fact that there were no jealous Greek gods forcing them to do so. It was madness, and I was born right at its beginning, so by the time I reached maturity many of the people I knew had been swept up in the chaos. My own wife, The Duchess, quite cruelly partakes in this healthful exercise on a constant basis, tormenting me with her marathon running and ability to cross the room without getting out of breath. Do you see? I’ve been betrayed by my own wife.

All this physical exercise has undoubtedly ruined any chances we had of evolving into hideous brain creatures. Our DNA’s been keeping track, and as our collective muscles get used more and more, more and more evolutionary grease is sent their way, trust me. Now, instead of being able to float things through the air with brain power, our descendants will merely be able to run longer and faster. This depresses me, and causes me to drink, which in turn causes me to wander out into the rain, shouting things, pass out, and wake up in a gutter without my pants. Blame evolution, dammit.

So, when The Duchess suggested that what was missing from our relationship was a good old fashioned hiking trip, I was dubious. Personally, I’m all for staying home and trying to make my own psychic powers manifest all on their own, through a demanding regimen of trying to float beers from the kitchen into the living room. So far, no success, but I am fully confident.

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine

Writing Under the Red Gaze of the Single Unblinking Eye of Facebook

Author: jsomers January 4, 2014 2 Comments

Back when I still put a print version of my zine The Inner Swine out, I once wrote an essay about someone I knew that wasn’t particularly complimentary. I didn’t know this person very well, but in my essay I portrayed them (accurately!) as an insane person more than likely to kill me, dry my meat, and make me into sausage or something like that.

And then, much to my chagrin, this insane person requested a copy of the zine. That particular issue, in fact. I realized that if I gave them the issue as it was, I would soon wake up in a pit with the Crazy One telling me it puts the lotion on its skin as it lowered a basket down to me. So, I did what any coward does: I created a single special issue of the zine with the offending article replaced by something else and handed it to Crazy One with a straight face. As the Somers Family Motto goes, Congratulations on a Job: Done.

Of course, I was only able to save my skin in this way because of the primitive time this took place in, a glorious time before social media, before Facebook, before Twitter. Because if I write something viciously meanspirited, completely unfair and yet totally fucking hilarious today, the Crazy Ones out there will see it no matter what I do, become enraged, and arrive on cue to kidnap me in their Rape Vans and imprison me in their Karmic Penalty Boxes. Or just punch me in the nose.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine, Writing

Gone Girl

Author: jsomers December 27, 2013 2 Comments

So, after much cajoling by The Duchess, I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It’s going to be a movie next year starring Ben Affleck and several dozen other people you’ll recognize, produced by Reese Witherspoon and most probably being the talk of the town for a week and then disappearing. As films do.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this book. Because it could be used in a creatve writing class to simultaneously demonstrate how to pull off some writing tricks well while also being used as an example of how to pull off some writing fundamentals really, really poorly. You don’t often find books that are simultaneously clever, well-written in spots, and disastrously bad nonetheless. It’s sort of made me obsessed with the book, frankly: On the one hand I am breathlessly jealous of Flynn for her genius twisty concept. On the other I am angry at the way she frittered it away. Let’s talk about it.

The Good

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

First of all, let’s be positive, the way they teach us in writing workshops. The twist is super clever, and cleverly handled, in my opinion. The creative use of unreliable narrator totally sets you up for the reveal, and it works. The first half of the book is very well observed, with both narrative voices working. I believed the marriage between Nick and Amy, I believed their slow descent into disdain and anger at each other, and I believed the ancillary characters. The mystery of what happened to Amy was intriguing, and overall I was sold.

The reveal itself was great, for a while at least.

What Flynn does very well is create a mystery. A down-home, old fashioned mystery. What happened to Amy? What’s Nick hiding? It’s set up really well and I was sucked in. The problem is that the books is all set up. It’s so much all set up that Flynn herself seems to lose interest in the book after the big reveal.

The Bad

So, spoilers: You know the basic plot, I guess, if you’re reading this. Nick’s wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, after much marital water has gone under the bridge. It looks very much like Amy was abducted violently, and that someone cleaned up the crime scene. Nick falls under immediate suspicion. The story is told in alternating first-person narratives, Nick in the present day and Amy via diary entries that seem to detail a romance and marriage falling apart, and a husband getting angrier and more abusive. Then, it’s revealed that Nick is having an affair, Amy knew of it, and she stages her own kidnapping in order to punish him, by framing him for her murder and watching him rot on Death Row.

Yup, it’s quite a twist. It’s borderline ridiculous, but could have been sold if Flynn had handled it better. The audacity of the twist almost sells the book by sheer power, in fact. The problem is simple: Flynn plays dirty, so dirty that the second you get over your amazement at the reveal you get pissed off.

Using faked diary entries from Amy – written by her but intended to present the police with a totally false depiction of her life with Nick in order to set him up as an angry, abusive husband – totally works because, as with all unreliable narrators, we’re fooled into thinking it’s real. That’s a simple trick. The problem is that while the Fake Amy in the diary makes sense to us, the Real Amy whose distasteful, sociopathic Voice takes over in part two of the novel is so awful you simply cannot believe for one second that anyone likes her, much less marries this monstrous woman.

Yes, she’s pretty. And we’re told a lot of other things about her to explain her ability to lure people into thinking she loves them while simultaneously being horrible to them. But that’s the real problem with the character (all the characters, really): We’re told these things. The characters themselves do not behave in any way that makes sense.

We’re told that Amy is brilliant, yet she acts incredibly foolishly beyond her clever frame-up of Nick. We’re told that Amy is vindictive and dangerous, yet when she is victimized at one point in the second half of the book she takes no revenge and meekly allows two grifters to steal all her money. This is a woman who frames her husband for her own murder in order to punish him, yet when two minor characters rob her she does nothing. We’re told that Amy can charm people and make them feel like they’re special to her, but we don’t actually see how that’s possible because the Amy we see is awful, all the time.

Nick’s an unreliable narrator as well, and that’s where things get stupid, because we’re in Nick’s head. Amy’s diary was a fake, so it’s acceptable that she’s lying – it’s done purposefully. Nick’s narration has no such device. He’s just narrating his life to us. Why in the world would he purposefully not think about the woman he’s having an affair with for the first third or more of the book? No reason, aside from Flynn’s clumsy need to keep his affair as a twist to shock the reader. We’re also told a lot of things about Nick that his actual behavior doesn’t support, like his feelings about his father and his feelings for the woman he’s screwing around with. Nick is a device, Amy is a device. Neither are characters.

The Ugly

Now, all of this would have been gleefully forgiven if the book had ended well. I’ll stipulate. If the book had a great ending I would have mentioned my carping about narrators and show-dont-tell and all that other stuff only after a few drinks and some encouragement.

The ending is not good.

The ending is so not good, you can literally feel Flynn running out of steam. The chapters get shorter. The writing more terse. She’s barely there, just tapping out contractually-obligated words to give the whole mess some sort of form. Characters behave in increasingly ridiculous ways, all justified by the supposedly awesome, unbelievable power of Amy, who is apparently, by book’s end, simply an elemental force. Unstoppable. You have to either believe that Amy is absolute power personified, or the ending become ridiculous and unsupportable. And I don’t use the word unsupportable lightly. The ending is so bad it requires not just a suspension of disblief, but a willing disregard of the concept.

And as I said, the worst part is the perfunctory way Flynn writes these last chapters. We’re called to believe that a) Nick cannot in any way prove Amy’s actions despite having a high-powered lawyer and a pretty good idea of exactly what she did – and a sympathetic police ear, b) Despite knowing how awful she is he would allow himself to be bullied into living in the same house with her, c) Despite knowing how awful she is he would remain married to her and d) when she performs her final repugnant act, impregnating herself with semen culled from masturbatory tissues Nick just left lying around the house (really! REALLY!) Nick would simply roll over and resign himself to spending his life living with a sociopath.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a writer, but Flynn presents these final chapters as brief sketches. There’s so little effort and detail it’s almost surreal. I could literally picture her just grinding out those final few thousands words with her agent or editor’s edit letter on the desk next to her and a half-finished bottle of liquor by her hand.

It’ll make a better movie, I think. And it’s not that the book isn’t enjoyable. It just made me angry.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

2013: The Year in Review

Author: jsomers December 23, 2013 6 Comments

Almost Done.

So it’s the end of the year again, that totally made up and random moment in the incomprehensible existential flood we call life where we decide that this day is an ending and this day is a beginning. Or, as I like to think about it, The Week When I Can Day Drink Every Single Day and No One Organizes an Intervention.

As a writer I must naturally write everything using words because I am told constantly that because I’m an author I must have some sort of sacred holy love for words that I’ve had since before I was fully formed. Because writers can’t just be smart assholes with a penchant for dialogue and daydreaming, we have to be Holy Fools who are constantly covered in ink and muttering story ideas to ourselves. So! I will write out a Year in Review for 2013 to put everything into context. What happened? Why? What did it all mean? You lucky ducks. Let’s take it month by month:

January: Started off with a really great dinner and some drinks, then quickly trailed off into disappointment and chores. My life was changed forever when I discovered via a re-watching of The Sting that you can’t smell Vodka on your breath and thus my Year of Drinking Dangerously Began.

February: Publish my 7th Novel, Trickster. No one bought it and the Year of Drinking Dangerously became disturbingly literal. I ate falafels. I may have battled sentient garden gnomes and saved the universe, but the evidence is sketchy and boils down to a blurry photograph that’s either me wielding energy beams against giant arachnids or me falling down a flight of stairs while holding a flashlight. Also: I made several dozen Harlem Shake videos and forgot to post any of them. Also, my amazing agent sold my 8th novel, Chum. I got the news as I was preparing to perform Daffy Duck’s trick you can only perform once, complete with Devil Costume. Which I am still wearing.

March: Annoying yellow skin tone dating back to Week of Day Drinking 2012 finally faded to a healthier pink hue. I celebrate with several rounds of Tequila Fanny Bangers and wind up back in hospital where I am kept for six weeks for experimentation due to the fact that all evidence points to me having died in 1989. Had a chip implanted that plays Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke whenever I enter a room. Am just starting to regret this.

April: Celebrating the decision to finally remove Jay Leno from our televisions, I overdo it and find myself in May.

May: Somehow the highlight of May 2013 was an Eddie Money concert in New York City that, against all odds of sanity, I attended.

June: I decide that this writing thing isn’t working out and that I need a new goal, which turns out to be to get Amanda Bynes to call me ugly. Efforts are ongoing. At some point I went to Ikea to buy some shelves and lost about six weeks of subjective time.

July: <in Ikea screaming; shoppers think I am a ghost. Google “Ikea Ghost Jersey”>

August: What began with a triumphant escape from the Ikea time warp using a DIY sonic screwdriver curdled into existential horror as I had Yet Another Birthday (YAB). Next year: No birthdays. My wife, The Duchess, begins singing songs from The Sound of Music in preparation for the Christmas season. I go slightly more mad.

September: A sweet, fat cat dies, and we fill his spot here with a demonic creature we name Homer Spit. Homer proceeds to ruin everything. He is ruining this post right now. I also find myself in Montana, of all places. It is cold and my gout acts up. GOUT. I can feel death’s icy fingers closing about me. Chum publishes and gets good reviews, but so far no dumptruck filled with gold coins (as stipulated in my contract) has arrived at the house. I hold a contest to give away copies of Chum and almost no one enters, which is … not good for my self image.

October: I went to NY Comic Con and was swallowed by the gaping, apathetic maw of pop culture. Signed a gazillion books at the Pocket booth and saw things I cannot unsee.

November: The Duchess and I celebrate one year without a hurricane turning our house into a swamp by getting pants-shittingly drunk and singing sea shanties. At some point I have a meal with author Sean Ferrell that doesn’t end with sea shanties for the first time in our shared history. It ends, however, in shame, right as scheduled.

December: I write a Year in Review post. No one reads it.

Bullshit

Arrant Knaves All

Author: jsomers December 13, 2013 0 Comments

Holly was the sort of girl who frightened people with silence. The sort who would wake up one day and decide she didn’t need you, and that would be it. No discussion. She had always been able to do this, just walk away. She managed somehow to convey this fact to everyone she met within a few minutes. It was an unsettling ability. People would be sitting with her, conversing, thinking that she was charming, in a dark way, and pretty, in a pale way, and suddenly the thought would creep in:

I don’t think she’d ever need me

and the whole feel of the day would be changed, subtly.

Holly wore black most times, matching her dark hair and shadowed eyes. She had a wary grace that made her seem to always glide, albeit away from you. She was slim and insubstantial and disturbingly physical for all of that; despite weighing nothing and seemingly constructed out of dark smoke and bright lights she pushed and hugged and slapped and held hands and punched with wild abandon, expressing herself without speaking a word. Which was useful since she often went hours without saying anything, which fooled some people into thinking she was some sort of genius, tortured and mute. She wasn’t. She often simply had nothing to say.

The first night her brother’s ghost came to visit her she’d been sleeping over Roger’s apartment. Or not sleeping; after making love with Roger she’d felt sleepy and content and ready to stay in bed until afternoon, it being the weekend, but then despite the warm blankets and physical exertion and Roger’s pleasant breathing nearby she’d laid awake, staring at the ceiling. At three A.M. she’d given up and crawled into the living room to switch on a light and do some reading. She picked up something dull that Roger was reading, something pretentiously intellectual, impenetrable, and probably not really understood, by Roger or anybody.

Can I love someone who reads stuff like this on the train every morning? She wondered. For Holly, it wasn’t an idle question. She pondered it for a few moments, wondering where she and Roger, who she’d been dating for a few months, were headed.

Glancing up over the top of the book from the easy chair by the window where she sat curled up with her legs tucked under her carefully, she found her dead brother sitting on the couch across the room. Watching her. Looking exactly as she’d last seen him: stitched up, starched, and squeezed into a ill-fitting suit. Looking slightly glandular and peaked. Hair stiff, mouth sewn shut.

They regarded each other carefully. Holly purposefully shut her eyes and counted to five. When she reopened them, he was gone.

She stood up and put the book back where she had found it. Padded back to the bedroom, resisting the urge to look behind her. Crawled into bed as clumsily and noisily as she could. Wrapped her cold arms around Roger and rested her head on his shoulder.

“Ummph.” he grunted, shifting against her.

“Shhhh.” she whispered. “Shhhh.”

She lay awake until dawn.

(more…)

Free Short Stories

Everything Old is New Again: Doctor Who

Author: jsomers December 10, 2013 1 Comment

As River Song would say: SPOILERS.

SO, Doctor Who. I remember it, vaguely, form my childhood. My older brother, always a sucker for old-school monster stories, liked it for a while during the gory, gothic-tinged Tom Baker era and being a younger brother I naturally avoided it in public and then watched it secretly a few times and was scared witless by Tom Baker’s Insanity Grin. Then I forgot about it for a long time, and when it was reborn in 2005 I barely paid attention. Over the years I’ve occasionally heard a few things about it, seen come clips on YouTube etc., but generally ignored it, as any good American should.

Recently, for no reason whatsoever beyond being intrigued by the hype surrounding the 50th Anniversary of the show, I started watching. I sprinkled in some of the classics and a few of the older new episodes, but mainly I started watching the Matt Smith era for no other reason than there seemed like there were some interesting details in there. And for those who are already wondering: Yes, I watched Blink. It was actually the first episode I tried out, and based on it’s success I forged on. So stop asking me if I’ve seen Blink. I have.

Anyways, Dcotor Who has always been problematic for me, and remains problematic. In the old series I was always bothered by the slow pace, rough editing, terrible special effects, and the silly costumes. In the modern series they’ve solved many of those problems but some of the plot problems remain. All in all I think I’m in a Love/Hate relationship with this show at the moment. It’s sort of like an old friend from elementary school who comes back to stay with you for a while. You have fond memories, and you find him good company sometimes, but it’s just kind of strange.

Or maybe I’m more haunted by Tom Baker’s Insanity Smile than I’m letting on. LOOK AT IT (you can’t look away):

HOLY SHIT

The World is Ending! Again! And Again! And Again and Again!

So, let’s keep in mind that I am mainly familiar with the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith era. I know a lot of the general backstory and some specifics from previous incarnations, but let’s stipulate that I’m playing with half a deck. Still, I have observations about this most modern version of the show.

The first is simple: It is a lot of fun.

People often say that Doctor Who is a children’s program, and it is, to an extent. The science is all wobbly and the history is too, but there is an awful lot of fun in the stories, the sense that danger is fleeting, death impossible, and that we’d all prefer to be flying around the universe rather than, say, going to work. Yes! That. There are dramatic moments and even deaths from time to time (not counting the 12 times the Doctor himself has ‘regenerated,’ stated as canon as a type of death, since what makes him him dies and his memories are reborn as someone new) but generally speaking this is a show where the universe is a playground and even the most dire of threats are resolved by the end of the episode – or the story arc, at the very least.

The characterizations are fun, too. The Doctor himself is played with an affecting mix of boyish charm, wonder, curiosity, heavy sadness, and insane temper, but always with a human heart somewhere under all the alien physiology. The companions I’m most familiar with, The Ponds, make for fun people as well, and have supported some very effective dramatic beats in the story.

Overall, I’m saying: Don’t take any of my criticisms to mean I’m not a fan. I am! I really enjoy it.

But.

The problem with the modern Doctor Who is simple: The world is always ending. The world is always ending and Amelia Pond is always near death or being tortured or abandoned for 36 years or having her baby torn from her loving arms. Always. Always. This is an effective strategy for telling interesting, compelling stories … until it isn’t, because my dramatic/end of the world chip is burned out.

Moments

The modern Doctor Who always wants moments – which is to say, Steven Moffat, the showrunner, wants moments. As in, Moments. The show craves those big, dramatic, emotional moments like a writer craves booze. That is, constantly. Few episodes go by without a big emotional beat between characters, or the end of the world, whichever is happening sooner. After so many partings of the way and heartfelt declarations of affection and epic this and epic that, my Epic Emotion Chip gets a little burnt out. These sorts of moments are meant to happen rarely in any story. Not every single episode. Not to mention the fact that Amy Pond has, let’s see, been abandoned several times, suffered childhood psychological trauma, been assaulted and near death, been kidnapped and had her baby taken away from her to be raised as an assassin, been split into two versions one of which was left to rot and fight robots for thirty-six years, robbed of her ability to have more children, and eventually banished to the past to live out her years decades before her own parents and everyone she knows is born. And yet at no point is there any serious suggestion that Amy has suffered, you know? Because she got to go on adventures in between these horrific moments.

After a while you get tired of The Girl Who Waited and want her to get some peace and stop being Moffat’s little Emotional Beat monkey.

Of course, part of this is a product of binge-watching – fair enough. I’m not waiting weeks or months for the next episode – I’m just porning my way through them, and why not. The thing is, once you release a work, you can’t force people to watch in some very slow way so your emotional beats feel measured. That sort of thing has to be baked in.

The Bandage

Part of this is, I think, a reaction to the fact that Doctor Who has never had the greatest plots. Now, 800 or episodes is a lot of storytelling, so I will grant that not only have some of them been very good, but Doctor Who has a certain structure and feel to it that remains even in the new version. It’s a Monster of the Week serial and always has been: Most episodes can be boiled down to a few basic plot points:

1. Doctor and Companion arrive somewhere, usually unexpectedly

2. There is mystery. Doctor surmises alien of some sort is behind it.

3. Doctor investigates/opposes, seems out of moves and about to lose

4. Twist = Victory!

Now, certainly not every single episode follows this pattern – but most do, and it works well enough, even when the Monster of the Week is the Daleks Yet Again or the Cybermen Yet Again. But the point is it works precisely because Moffat et al have created characters we really do care about. The Doctor is kind of charming, especially with the spice of his darker side emphasized. The Ponds were charming and hilarious, and their back story in regards to each other and the Doctor was affecting. That stuff worked, and it distracts from the fact that most of the mysteries are explained, somehow, via timey-wimey and a sonic screwdriver. In other words, Moffat basically writes himself into a corner and then shouts TIME LORD!, throws a smoke bomb, and escapes yet again. You can do that when your character has 50 years and 800 episodes of history, but goddamn it, Moffat is abusing the TIME LORD/SMOKE BOMB button. If you ask me.

Which no one has. Am I thinking too hard about this? Likely. I tend to get all obsessive with things like this – I ignore them for years while others are telling me to check them out, and then suddenly, as if it was my idea all along, I dive in, burrow deep, and live and breathe it for a while.

I do enjoy the show and will keep watching it. But that doesn’t mean the Smoke Bomb’s gonna keep working on me.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

The! Inner! Swine!

Author: jsomers December 3, 2013 0 Comments

It’s that time again, kids: The Winter 2013 Issue of The Inner Swine is out! Here’s the TOC from the issue, which has a vague theme of faith:

EDITORIAL: It’s All Downhill From Here, Isn’t It?
AMERICAN HORROR STORY: America’s Got No Fucking Idea
FROM THE BLOG: Where Gone Home Went Wrong
FROM THE BLOG: Writing as a Reader
FROM THE BLOG: Essays about Breaking Bad
AMERICAN HORROR STORY: America’s Next Idiot Model
COMMENTARY: THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY
COMMENTARY: How to Survive the Crushing Inevitability of Your Own Death
FROM THE BLOG: Sinister Horror Clichés
FICTION: Up the Crazy
FROM THE BLOG: The Freaks are Winning Part 65,678

HUZZAH! Available ONLY on Nook and Kindle, sadly, but well worth the 99 cents, bubba, if I do say so myself.

BAM!, The Inner Swine

We Need to Talk About Maggie Grace Running in “Taken 2”

Author: jsomers December 2, 2013 7 Comments

I have not actually watched Taken 2, which is the sequel to Taken and which has basically the same plot (as sequels must): Liam Neeson is a retired intelligence/black ops badass just trying to reconnect with his family who gets kidnapped by enemies and forced to break out his murder skills in order to save himself and his daughter and wife from the clutches of evil non-Americans. As a sort of subtly jingoistic “American Murder Skills ROCK!” kind of story, the original was entertaining mainly because Neeson is an unlikely but effective action hero: He’s big in a loose-limbed way but also conveys intelligence, allowing me to believe that he’s a man who knows what he’s about when it comes to instantly analyzing a room full of toughs for the best way to American Murder them all. It helps that the setting allows Neeson to always be swathed in voluminous sweaters that can hide the fact that he doesn’t have a Van Damme sort of body.

I’ve seen snatches of Taken 2 on cable these past few weeks, and I was struck not by the badassery of 60-year old Liam Neeson or the cynical way the sequel repeats the basic premise of the first film, but by how Maggie Grace runs, especially in this scene:

This clip doesn’t really give you the best view of it, but trust me: In this scene Maggie Grace is supposedly a 20-something girl in good shape who is running for her life. And Maggie Grace runs like she has an invisible bear riding on her shoulders, or like she’s secretly a 909-year old woman with two hip replacements. The complete lack of urgency and believability in the way she runs in this sequence is simply shocking: Whatever thin verisimilitude the movie had built up to this point was destroyed by the fact that the bad guys could have played a game of gin rummy while Maggie huffed and puffed her way across the rooftops and still managed to catch her. Probably as she carefully and slowwwwlllly made her way over a low wall of some sort.

Seriously, it’s like watching a training montage from an old Police Academy movie.

Now, I can accept the fact that Maggie Grace was hired for her looks rather than her athletic (or acting) skills. In the first film, where all she had to do was play “on heroin” and “in lingerie” that worked just fine. But running? Man, a few million bucks in CGI would not have been wasted in making her look like she had ever run before in her life. Like, ever.

Or, you know, go old school: Stunt double. No shame – well, yes, there is some shame in this, but it still would have helped the scenes tremendously. Because Maggie Grace runs like she is a much larger person that we just can’t see, like Jack Black looking at Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal.

Bullshit

Sunday is Guitar Day

Author: jsomers November 24, 2013 0 Comments

What a time to be alive: I live in a day and age where I don’t have to socialize with a bunch of psychos just to play music. I can get my computer be my backup band, and afflict the world with THIS:

Here, songs:

Song605
Song607
Song609
Song610
Song611
Song613
Song615
Song618

Right about now I’ll bet some of your are wishing we lived much further in the past than we do now.

The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.

Bullshit, gee-tar

In Praise of Wasted Time

Author: jsomers November 19, 2013 0 Comments

This originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 12, Issue 4

FRIENDS, as loyal readers of TIS you know well that I am obsessed with time and its ravages upon me. All intelligent beings should be obsessed with time, because that’s time behind you, fucking you in the ass on a daily basis. And then you’re dead and buried, my friend—because Time finally killed you—Time will still be there, and will still be fucking you in the ass, for a while at least, as it takes your comely form and transforms it into a horrorshow of bugs, rot, and general decomposition.

So, normally I go around whining a lot about wasted time. I hate to waste time. I hate to stand in lines and will gladly go elsewhere to avoid it—people who will stand in line for things mystify me. Like taverns—who in fuck waits in line for a bar? Idiots, I think. Idiots who don’t realize that the same booze and the same quality of drunken, morally-loose people exists just about anywhere that a bottle of Jagermeister is kept. Or coffee—the lines at Starbucks enrage me. The other day I was at an airport and went seeking coffee, and the line outside Starbucks was wrapped around the fucking concourse, while two or three other coffee sources were abandoned. Starbucks coffee sucks balls, but if you actually like it, is it really so much better than all other coffee in the world that you’d rather stand in line and waste some of your precious life staring at the ass of the stranger in front of you than just take a chance on another brand of coffee?

That’s the power of brands, I guess, the lure of having everything be exactly the same all the time, guaranteed, but that’s the subject of a different article, isn’t it.

No, I go to great lengths, usually, to avoid wasting my time—but it can’t always be avoided. Sometimes you have to sit in waiting rooms, or on airplanes, or at your desk at work. Sometimes you have to speak with your fellow humans for long periods of time during which all your mental energy is used up maintaining faked interest in the conversation and imaging your head exploding, splattering brains and blood everywhere. Sometimes you’re informed that you’ve already called in sick twenty-three times this year and one more will mean your dismissal. Sometimes, like it or not, you simply have to waste some of your precious time. Think of time-wasting as if Time were blood. Imagine you sometime have to tear open a vein and spill some blood, and that you could never regenerate the blood you lose, so that someday you’d spill too much, run dry, and die. That’s the way to think about wasting time.

I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding time-sucking scenarios, or at least at modifying them to my advantage. Once you realize you’re an adult and can make your own decisions, you can trim down the wastage pretty fast simply by choosing not to do things—like waiting in lines unless absolutely necessary. You do, after all, have full power over your life in some sense, so you can structure everything around not wasting time, from your job to your home life. Go for it.

Me, I’m too sleepy. I handle not wasting time by transforming it into time well-used. While I firmly believe I am the first human smart enough to have thought of this (a few ultra-smart Dolphins have probably already invented this), there is always the possibility that other geniuses are applying this technique quietly across the globe. I will ignore this possibility, however, and claim it as my own. The trick is simple: Always have something constructive to do with you. Me, I’m a writer, so I bring a notebook, a book, and sometimes a laptop. These amazing tools allow me to transform just about any otherwise wasted moment into a productive one, doing something I love.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine