Girl in a Cage

Overcaffeinated music observations

Cleaning my kitchen with my Pandora power pop station playing, and I drank too much coffee and need to get this stuff out of my head before it explodes:

Green Day's "Brain Stew" is really just a slowed down cover of Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4".

I've developed an irrational hatred of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  Mother's Milk was their last album I can stand to hear any track from.Note to Pandora--whatever Weezer/Chili Peppers connection you're making doesn't work for me.

Robin Zander's vocal performance on the Budokan version of "I Want You to Want Me" is one of the best in the history of pop music.

Not sure what AC/DC's doing on my power pop station, but I wonder how Brian Johnson can even talk, much less sing after 30 years of singing like that.

Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away" is a great pop song. They successfully painted Diamond Dave as the bad guy at the time, but Eddie hasn't been able to keep anybody but his brother in a band with him.

Many lyrics are so bad because lyricists don't have editors.  This is why partnerships--even seemingly unequal ones like Hall and Oates--are always better than the subsequent solo work; each partner keeps the other's excesses in check.  Would Morrissey make such turgid crap right now if he still had to bring the songs to Johnny Marr?  Don't even get me started on the post-Beatles excesses of both Lennon and McCartney...

Pandora-- Just because I put Weezer into this station doesn't mean I want to hear every semi-alternative band from the 90's.  Pavement is one of the most "meh" bands ever.

That's all I got for now.  I'm off to see Ninja Assassin.

When We Were Kings

A propos of nothing, I found The Proclaimers' "Sean" in my head this morning. Well, actually, that was because I was running around the house trying to get out and swearing loudly and colorfully in a bad Scottish accent, which reminded me of the Proclaimers, which led me to "Sean."

"From kings is where you come," The Proclaimers sing in that song. 

This reminded me of a colleague I had once who became slightly unhinged in a meeting.  "We come from kings!" she screamed, referring to African Americans like herself.

So this idea runs through a lot of cultures, and it's complete crap.  Many people are descended from societies that had kings, but very few people are descended from kings.  In the past, as now, the great majority of people on earth were not kings--they were subjects.  And, you know, poor and hard working and not walking around dressed in robes of gold or anything. 

"How do you know he's a king?" they ask in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  "He's the only one who doesn't have shit all over him," is the answer.  Most of our ancestors, no matter our ancestry, had shit all over them.  And so, really, in this way, we're all one big shit-covered human family..

Eating Animals Review

First, this is not really a pro-vegetarian screed.  It's more of an anti-factory farming screed.  Foer argues that vegetarianism is the only sensible ethical response to factory farming which is horrible from both environmental and animal cruelty standpoints.  Bottom line: our food system is terribly broken, and Foer believes not eating animals is a way for individuals to have an impact on this.

So this is, I think, an important book.  But I don't think it's a good book.  I bought the electronic edition, and after going through the sections on poultry, pigs, and cattle, I thought the book was wrapping up.  This, I thought, is an excellent book.

And then I saw I was only halfway through.  This, I thought, is a book I am never going to finish.  It's packed with good information told in a readable way and distinctly lacks the smug, shrill tone that many vegetarian polemics have.  I liked the fact that it's kind of a rambling narrative that adds up to a damning case. But, geez, enough is enough. It's not that I couldn't stand the gory details of factory farming--it's just that after half the book, I got the point pretty thoroughly and wanted to read something else.  I think this would have made an excellent long magazine article, but it's not an excellent book. 

And really, you can get most of the important information in this book from this handy 12-minute video:

Good News for 2010!

Hey everybody! I'm thankful that I get to write and get paid for it.

I'm also thankful for the following bits of good news: 1.)NOTES FROM THE BLENDER, a Young Adult book I co-wrote with Trish Cook, of the Chicago Cooks, has found a nice home at Egmont USA. They'll be publishing it in the fall of 2010. I'm very excited about this because a) this book rocks, and b) this is a small publisher with a small list. They'll be paying a lot of attention to the book, and they seem to be very into social networking and other innovative ways to sell books.

2.)Disney/Hyperion is launching a campaign for their summer releases called Un-Required Reading. They'll be doing a big promotion for all their summer releases, including THE HALF LIFE OF PLANETS, the love story I co-wrote with Emily Franklin. I think they're even going to send us on a mini-tour in June. So I may be coming to a city near you!

3.) A talented screenwriter is shopping her adaptation of DEAR CATASTROPHE WAITRESS around. Fingers crossed.

4.)My  pal Seamus Cooper, is doing a guest-blogging gig during the month of December on Tor.com. This is a very big deal site in the Speculative Fiction community, so this will hopefully be a nice boost for THE MALL OF CTHULHU.

5.) 3, count 'em 3 releases from me in 2010: THE HALF LIFE OF PLANETS, SHUTOUT, and NOTES FROM THE BLENDER. (!)

And, of course, I'm grateful for all of you who have done so much to support my work. Follow me on twitter: @bhalpin.

My good friend and hanger-on Seamus Cooper asks me to remind you that you can follow him on twitter: @seamuscooper.

Seamus is also freeloading off my typepad account and blogging intermittently at http://www.brendanhalpin.com/food_court_of_fear/ on horror-related subjects.

Finally, if you've read and enjoyed THE MALL OF CTHULHU, Seamus is looking for beta readers for his sequel. Email him at mallofcthulhu at gmail dot com if you're interested. Thank you all--see you on facebook, twitter, and of course, here.

Stuff I'm Thankful For

Like many writers, I've been known to complain from time to time.  Oh, my publishers don't promote my books enough, I've never been an Oprah book selection, none of my books have been made into movies, I'm less successful than people who aren't as good as me, etcetera etcetera.  If you hang out with writers for ten or twelve minutes, you'll hear most of these complaints. Unless you're hanging with like, I don't know, Patricia Cornwall or somebody. 

And yeah, I've sometimes aired those complaints in this space, which is the danger of giving a writer a platform without an editor. 

So given that yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the United States of America, I decided that I would focus on my incredible good fortune as a writer and list some stuff I'm thankful for.

First and foremost, I'm thankful that I and my pseudonymous friend have had 9 books published to date.  I'm proud of all my work and know that many people labor for years and years without getting published.  I've walked into bookstores and seen books with my name on them on the shelves.  And that is damn cool.I'm thankful for the British and German publishers who paid huge, un-earn-outable advances for my first book, It Takes a Worried Man.  This cash really improved the quality of life in our house during the last years of my late wife Kirsten's life.  Most importantly, it allowed us to transform the asphalt-covered lot that was passing for a yard at our house at the time into a real yard with nice plantings where Kirsten enjoyed sitting as she was dying. 

I'm thankful for the following incredibly cool things I've gotten to do as a result of my writing:

1.)Going on the Today show with Al Roker!  I heard Matt Lauer make a dirty Mike Tyson joke off the air! 

2.)Going on the Rosie O'Donnell show with Rosie O'Donnel.  She gave me a Gamecube!  Good look!

3.)Flying to London and staying in a really nice hotel to promote It Takes a Worried Man (more money down the toilet--sorry, Hamish Hamilton!)

4.)Going to Chicago, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia and staying in nice hotels in each on my whirlwind tour to promote Donorboy.  

5.)Going to the Broward County Libraries' Literary Feast in March 2008. I met a lot of really nice people and got treated really well and was in Fort Lauderdale in March, which was a nice break from Boston in March, lemme tellya.

6.)All of the communication I've had with people who read and enjoyed my work.  It is still thrilling to me to find that people have actually read and enjoyed something I wrote. 

7.)Getting to work full-time as a writer for nearly 5 years.  Financially speaking, it probably should have been 3, but that's my fault.  I was able to write full time and be home for my daughter right after being widowed.  I also didn't have to do a halfassed job as a teacher at a time when my heart wasn't in it.

8.)Lots of people fall in love.  I got to write about it in the New York Times.  This was a thrill all on its own, but also led to me getting hundreds of emails from other people who were widowed and had fallen in love.  I felt really lucky to be able to touch a lot of people with that piece.

9.)I currently work in a nonprofit and do very satisfying, life-affirming work that feels important.  I also don't make nearly enough money. Those two often go hand in hand, sadly.  Right now I need a second job, and I'm lucky enough to have one that I love. I look forward to the times when I get to do my second job instead of dreading the time I have to drag my sorry carcass to a second job. 

10.) I've gotten to communicate with students about writing and about my work, and this has been very cool.  Through the magic of Skype, I recently talked to classes in Georgia.  Nice!

Overall, I am a lucky bastard, and a thankful one too.

The New Jonathan Safran Foer Book

I am reading the new Jonathan Safran Foer book.  I didn't read Everything is Illuminated because the whole "There's a character in this book with my name" has worked for exactly 3 authors:  Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and Tim O'Brien.  Also, really, I've read, heard, and seen enough about the Holocaust in my life and will never willingly read, view, or listen to any Holocaust-involved stories again.  Unless maybe there are zombies involved.  Because that would be cool.

I own but have not read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  I hear it's good and feel like I should read it but am worried that it might be one of those "Manhattan and/or Brooklyn is the center of the universe" books. And, I mean, I like New York. I might even say I heart it, even though it's where the Yankees play.  But sometimes New York-based fiction gets annoying in its insistence that the particulars of Manhattan (or, increasingly, Brooklyn) life are just inherently fascinating.

But I bought and am reading Eating Animals.  This is largely because I am a vegetarian, and despite the growing numbers of vegetarians, it's still a fringe phenomenon, a diet that most people in this country think is freakish and annoying.  Though I know no militant vegetarians (I mean, I know they're out there, but none of the vegetarians I know personally are militant like that) I know plenty of militant omnivores who think nothing of lecturing me about  protein intake or looking for hypocrisy in the way I live the rest of my life.  And vegetarians, when acknowledged in popular culture at all, are typically presented as either ridiculous hippies or hectoring killjoys. 

Writing this book in hopes of affecting how anyone eats is an act of tremendous and admirable optimism that I would never be able to undertake. I'm cynical enough to believe that humans will gleefully kill themselves for a few moments of convenience, so the idea that a large number of people would ever do anything that would be even slightly inconvenient  represents a positive outlook I just don't have. Many people won't even read this book because they kind of know that farming (not using factory farming here because that's pretty redundant) is a deeply screwed up process.  We (counting myself, as I continue to eat dairy and eggs, which involve horrific amounts of suffering, so I'm not exactly on my high horse here) willfully shut our eyes and minds to the horror behind what's on our plates, because if we really allowed ourselves to know what we're participating in, we would stop.  And then what would I have on top of my pizza? 

So, since most people won't read this book, I wanted to share a particularly gross tidbit that's got me thinking about chicken.  It's about how chickens are killed and processed, but the horror of this is unrelated to animal welfare and suffering.  Take it away, Jonathan!:

Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds' body cavitites...

Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled.  Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named 'fecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around.  By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you're practically assuring cross-contamination."

While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems... It's not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird's carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as "fecal soup"). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination.  But that would also eliminate an opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars' worth of additional weight in poultry products.

He goes on to reveal that chickens sold in the US can be up to 11% water by weight. 

Enjoy your lunch!

Pop Music Roundup

I have children who insist on listening to top 40 (though, really, it's more like top 20) radio, so periodically I vent my thoughts on the stuff I hear.  Here goes:

Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me".  Despite Taylor Swift's winning performance on Saturday Night Live a couple of weeks ago, I loathe her bland pop country pap.  This one feels particularly cynical because it's a tale of unrequited love in which the rival is a total straw man.  "She wears high heels, I wear sneakers..." what girl can't identify with that?  Because nobody wears high heels to high school!  It's brilliant marketing, really.  And I'd rather tell kids pining after the wrong boys or girls, "Don't pine!  Move on!  Their bad boyfriend/girlfriend choices indicate issues you'd rather not deal with anyway!"  Or, in any case, that's what I'd like to tell my 16-year-old self.  And then again my 18-year-old self.  Sigh.

Miley Cyrus, "Party in the USA" Another cynical pop confection that plays on Miley's image--oh, she's just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world, at sea in this world of celebrities!  So it appeals to middle america's smug sense of superiority to the superficial coasts (hey, I grew up there--I can say that.  The coasts have their own smug sense of superiority). Here's what I like, though--she name-checks Jay-Z.  This shows two things:  1.) that Jay-Z is really, officially, totally over, safe enough to be name checked by teen stars and 2.)that the cynics who write pop songs for Miley Cyrus recognize that even the Middle American white kids that "Party in the USA" is aimed at love hip hop.  I just love that a pop/country/dance singer is given a song that references a hip hop mogul. It's not using music to divide and balkanize--it is, in its own cynical, market-driven way, using music to bring people together.  Oh yeah, and the chorus is catchy as hell and I annoy the hell out of my coworkers with it.  So that's cool too.

Jay-Z with Kanye West and Rihanna "Run This Town."  Boy, there's really no song here at all, and Jay-Z's forgettable verses show he can barely be bothered to show up for his own song, which is dominated by Rihanna's singing the hook.  Kanye's verse is actually kind of good (and how humiliating is it to be outrapped by Kanye West in any setting, but especially on your own record?) and very revealing. "What you think I rap for? To push a fuckin' Rav 4?"  This is why commercial hip hop totally sucks right now.  I mean, yeah, good for you Kanye, glad you got a nice car out of the whole rap deal, but I know kids who rap because their freaking heads are going to explode if they don't.  We've all been to concerts where professional musicians went through the motions for the payday and concerts where musicians looked like they had to get the music out of them or it would harm them.  The latter kind are the good ones.  Seems odd but I guess admirably honest that Kanye admits that for him, it's all about the money.

Cleveland, Homer, and Cliff

So, yeah, I like The Cleveland Show.This surprises me because I don't much care for Family Guy, which The Cleveland Show is spun off of.  It's not that Family Guy is never funny--it's just that it's often too mean for my taste.  And, I mean, I'm a jerk, so that's saying something.

And the Cleveland Show also has its mean moments, but, unlike Family Guy, it also has a heart.

Also, since I live in a blended family, I like depictions of blended families on TV.  And unlike, say, Drake and Josh or The Brady Bunch, The Cleveland Show doesn't just set up "this is a blended family" and then pretend it isn't a blended family: at least so far, we've seen a bunch of acknowledgments that it's not a seamless transition to blended family life.

Having said all this, it's pretty much of a Simpsons ripoff.And so, like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and countless live-action sitcoms since 1989, we've got a well-intentioned (usually) but not especially competent dad at the center of the action.When The Simpsons dethroned the Cosbys as TV's first family, (not too tough, since Bill had already decided to move from funny to sanctimonious, where he's remained since, while adding crotchety and profoundly creepy to the mix) it was refreshing to see a dad who was human and screwed up.  It was a nice corrective to the My Three Sons, Leave it To Beaver, The Cosby Show model of the semi-divine patriarch. (or possibly just a throwback to Herman Munster and Fred Flintstone)

But, enough already.  Art both shapes and reflects culture, and I wonder if all these numbnuts dads reflect the anxiety that men felt upon finding that they were expected to do more in the domestic realm than come home from work, read the paper, and dish out the occasional beating. Or maybe it's just that The Simpsons was a runaway hit and people imitate success, and all these dumb dads are Homer's fault.In any case, can we please get a TV dad who's not a hapless boob?While we're waiting, here's a nice episode of The Cleveland Show!

Virtual Class Visit!

I was having a lovely class visit with some 8th graders in Georgia via Skype when we were rudely interrupted by a network failure that shockingly was not on my end.  They had great questions about Donorboy and writing, and so, after receiving them via email, I answered questions from students who didn't get to ask their questions.  And so, here are their questions and my answers!

Some Thoughts on Michael Jackson's Music

On the occasion of the release of This is It, some brief thoughts about Michael Jackson's music and not his personal freakishness and alleged pervitude.

1.Certainly he was a genius performer and singer.  Not a genius songwriter, though.  Why do all his most beloved solo songs come from the albums produced by Quincy Jones?   Possibly because after 1987 was when he really went off the rails on a crazy train.  Or possibly because there was a musical genius at work on Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad, and his name was Quincy Jones. Post Q= mostly unlistenable crap.

2. Only a handful of former children will ever really know for sure whether MJ's incredible self-hatred was justified, but here's something I haven't seen anybody else say:  the surgeries showed such a reckless disregard for his gift that they could be seen as trying to destroy it. 

I learned a couple of things about singing when I took lessons with the most excellent Pam Wolfe, and here's one:  your voice resonates in your nose.  This is why Barbra Streisand maintained her famous honker despite the fact that a nose job might have led to more movie roles.  And this is why Michael Jackson's voice, one of the best in modern popular music, was nearly destroyed by his desire to erase all traces of his blackness. 

Don't believe me?  Listen to the vocal tone in these two hits, only four years, but at least one rhinoplasty apart.  Michael's voice in "She's Out of My Life" is incredibly rich, and his singing is unadorned--except for the fake crying, there aren't a lot of gimmicks--the beauty of his voice sells the beauty of the song.

And now, from Thriller, "Human Nature"--notice how he's already relying on the whispering, the grunting, and all the other vocal gimmicks that would make his singing a parody of itself in the 90's and beyond.  He comes up with all these tricks to sell songs because his best trick--that amazing voice--is gone by 1983. 

It's really striking to listen to these songs back to back and compare the thin, reedy 1983 voice with the rich, buttery 1979 voice.  Especially considering these are studio recordings, so we have to assume that the best studio trickery of the day was used to make his voice sound better.

I think you know my thoughts on what kind of human being Michael Jackson was, but as this movie causes people to lament yet again what a great talent we've lost, let's remember that he destroyed it ages ago.