It’s Not Happening

I was prepared to dislike this book, for no good reason, but ended up being charmed all to pieces. Bishop’s first novel is a mashup using elements of fantasy in an existentialist Western setting, and it’s a nice blend. The freaky business is just freaky enough to slide beyond magical realism into genre, but not so deus-ex that the reader can stop paying attention and let the book read itself. A frontier doctor and a gunfighter, veterans of the losing side of an old war, wander into a new city and set up shop. There’s fightin’ and lovin’ and sass-talk, but there’s also much more thinkin’ and philosophizin’ and vision-questin’ than I expected. All in all, good stuff, with strong characters, big ideas and subtle execution. I look forward to her next book.

I tend to enjoy Bowles’ writing quite a bit, though his style is off-putting to many people who see it as somewhat chilly, even inhuman. He does evoke a distance from real life, much more so than a typical third-person narrative, that sometimes verges on pharmaceutical. The Sheltering Sky is a good example, while Up Above the World, written much later in his life, seems to focus more on its characters’ interior lives.

The plot relies a bit too much on deceit and twist for me to feel comfortable revealing any of it, but it centers on four unlikable characters each trying to deal with life in Central America. Power, helplessness, mind games – add a leather mask or a lit candle and you’d have S&M porn. The ending, which reads like the last chapter of a mystery novel, gives far too much away and made me want to throw the book against a wall. Read Bowles’ short stories to see if you’ve got the taste, then stick with his earlier novels.

Coined by Julian Sanchez, with whom I am unfamiliar – but I recognize a good neologism when I see one. His usage seems to focus more on the ignorant display of iconic images, phrases, etc., by those who couldn’t possibly have been present for their introduction, but I think the word is more potent when used to describe the feeling of regret over not having been present for some event or era through no fault of one’s own.

That feeling welled up in me yesterday – why couldn’t I have been in New Zealand, or maybe Australia, or failing that the UK, during the mid-70′s to have soaked up at least one Classic Split Enz show. Let’s back up a few steps. As a few of you know, I dropped my MP3 player a week or so ago, losing ~50GB of music until I figure out how to fix the damn thing w/o dropping enough cash to just buy a new one. Realizing that it’s stupid to rely on a handheld device for long-term storage (it is, look it up), I bought a 1TB desktop drive and started filling it up. Yesterday, while transferring the Split Enz discography, I decided to check out their Wikipedia page and fell in love again.

They were my last favorite band, back when I still had favorite bands. It was a fairly short path that led from The Cars (yeah, like yours was better) to Wall of Voodoo and stopped in New Zealand. Do people even think about bands any more? Anyway, I loved their stuff, though their first couple of albums seemed boring and not-in-a-good-way-freaky to me, so I bypassed them, but now I think they’re great. The old band was like Peter Gabriel-era genesis meets Cirque du Soleil, only fun. I’d give an awful lot to tunnel back in time to check out an early show, especially if that meant watching a skinny, geeky, teenage Neil Finn sweat his way through playing hte guitar he had only just picked up a year ago (that’s him in the glasses below).

But seriously, if I was a Kiwi and born 10-20 years before the Real Authentic Rob Lightner, I wouldn’t have gone. Lord knows I had all kinds of opportunities to see Nirvana and Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden when they were playing tiny, shitty clubs and house parties when I was in college – I lived with a KCMU DJ, for chrissake – and instead I sat at home reading, just like I did yesterday. But it’s nice to chew on cold regret every now and then.

This was a fun little book exploring the work and, to a lesser extent, the messed-up life of Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man. I had a pretty sizable comic-book crush on Plas as a kid (as well as the other stretchy heroes like Mr. Fantastic; make of that what you will), so I was glad to plow through some of Cole’s work. Spiegelman’s biography feels a bit skimpy, but Cole didn’t live long enough to amass a big body of stories. What we get we’ve heard before: an inventive perfectionist is frustrated by the market. Still, he helped to develop the visual vocabulary of comics and deserves every last prop.

Chip Kidd’s design is, as ever, too good to bear – it’s almost embarrassing how perfectly he captures what he’s trying to present. There’s something fetishistic about the whole package, but that’s not a misstep.

Replying to an off-hand comment from a teammate, I muttered at too-high volume: “Don’t torment me with your sauna fantasies!”