Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Greg Oden's Apology - Micro Blog

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In news from Oregon, Greg Oden, Trail Blazers’ first round draft pick in 2007, has apologized for… Actually, I’m not entirely sure what he apologized for. A few years ago he used his cell phone to take nude pictures of himself & sent them to his, then, girlfriend. This week the pictures, which he thought were private, made their way on to the internet. Now, he’s apologizing. HE’S apologizing?

People typically apologize when they’ve done something wrong. Taking nude pictures of yourself and sending them to a lover is admittedly kinky, even dirty, but wrong? What did he do that numerous others haven’t done? What rule/law did he break? In my opinion, the sleaze who made the pictures public should apologize to Greg Oden, but Oden himself doesn’t need to apologize to anyone.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

R.I.P. Robert B. Parker

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Hard-Boiled Mysteries were originally found in the "pulp" detective magazines, but reached literary excellence in the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The genre typically features a lone-wolf private detective who’s cynical yet quixotic, ambiance on the mean streets of the city, characters from both the professional criminal class and the criminally rich, and liberal additions of violent action, alcohol consumption, and sex.

By the early 70s, this genre was essentially as dead as its Hollywood counterpart, Film Noir. However, a professor at Northeastern University had grown up as a fan of characters such as Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade. In 1973, Robert B. Parker’s first Spenser novel, “The Godwulf Manuscript,” breathed new life into the genre. This first book ignited a writing career spanning over 50 novels.

This week, the world lost this mammoth talent to the cold embrace of death. According to NPR News, “Parker and his wife, Joan, had breakfast together Monday and he was perfectly fine. She went out to do her running and when she came back about an hour later, he was dead at his desk.”

I could talk about the awards he’s won, the four series of novels he wrote, the TV shows & movies which have been inspired by those novels, or the fact he updated the hard-boiled mystery story by being the first such author to use gays, blacks, and other minorities as heroic characters. If anyone wants to sit down with me over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, I can, and happily will, talk about such topics, probably exhausting their ability to listen. However, this piece is more about personal loss, my personal loss.

ANYONE, who knows me knows I began writing my first book immediately after 2004’s general election. Yet, there were many things I didn’t know about writing a modern first person narrative. I’d heard of the Spenser series and knew they were modern first person detective stories, so I picked up Cold Service, then School Days, and on, and on…. To date, I’ve read around 55% - 60% of his work. The books have answered many questions for me regarding chapter structure, voice, story flow, and how to write a scene in which the narrator is absent. These are all valuable lessons for a writer who took social sciences, namely psychology, in college.

It may sound silly, but I had this fantasy that one day he’d read my work and really like it. That will never happen now. This week, his family will hold a private ceremony in his honor, then there will be a public memorial service for him, next month, in Boston. I’m not typically a beer drinker, but some fans refer to his work as “beer & bullets” books. Thus, since I can attend neither service, I will mark both events by having a beer in his honor.

Given his writing style and his sense of humor, if he’d known his body would be found slumped over his work at his desk, I have no doubt the he himself would have remarked, “Live by the typewriter, die by the typewriter.”

Robert B. Parker, you will be missed.


Monday, January 18, 2010

Sherlock Holmes: The Movie

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For the last few weeks I’ve been making fun of the movie Sherlock Holmes. It was suggested I should actually see the film before calling it mind numbingly stupid and an insult to the classic literary character. Fair enough, trailers don’t always do a movie justice. I saw the movie on Sunday, and I’m sad to say my initial analysis was right on the proverbial money.

OK, let’s be fair. If all you want is an action flick where good guys fight bad guys for two hours, this is a fun piece of eye candy which won’t tax your brain in any way. However, if you’re a fan of the character, and know anything about Sherlock Holmes, this movie is a piece of garbage.

If I had umpteen more hours in the day, I could address every inconsistency in the movie. However, having a finite amount of time at my disposal, I’ll just address a few of the low lights.

Yes, Sherlock did box as a youth. However, even the few times he was involved in fisticuffs with thugs, he was careful to observe Marquess of Queensberry rules. Being a gentleman, the thought of fighting any other way would have been unthinkable to him. Thus, his participation in extreme fighting was preposterous. Equally ludicrous were his & Watson’s Batman & Robin style brawls against bad guys. These were thinking reasoning men, armed yes, but hardly action heroes. What we saw, was more of a James Bond style movie with some Robert Langdon-esc plot twists thrown in because Dan Brown’s books and movies are popular right now.

On a final note, I must say I don’t begrudge Robert Downey Jr. his Best Actor Golden Globe for the role. He did the best he could do with what they gave him. The fault was with the writing.

Next, I suppose we’ll be treated to a machine gun wielding Hercule Poirot as he takes out those filthy Nazis. I can see the tag line now, “Hastings, I love it when a plan comes together.”

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Sherlock Holmes: So He Smoked?

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The Hillsboro Library is changing its Mystery Genre stickers because someone complained they had Sherlock Holmes smoking a pipe. That's completely insane. He's a classic character from an era when smoking was a social norm.

First appearing in print in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has become the embodiment of the classic detective. The archetypal pairing of an independent investigating sleuth and loyal intelligent companion has inspired numerous other fictional duos including Poirot & Hastings, Wolfe & Goodwin, Mason & Drake, and Spenser & Hawk among others.

In addition to his effects on the genres of mysteries and crime fiction, Doyle’s stories also changed the real world of criminology. When Holmes was first published, it was generally assumed that crime was solely the endeavor of the lower social classes. Suspects were depicted, by news artists, as having low brows and less evolved ape like expressions. It wasn’t until Doyle wrote his Holmes stories, some of which depict the nobility committing crimes, that police began acknowledging the concept of criminal behavior emanating from all social tiers. This new way of thinking directly lead to the recovery of the Crown Jewels, which had been stolen by a member of the Royal Family as a gift to his gay lover. Stories of the master detective also inspired the real world adoption of forensic techniques including, but not limited to, the analysis of tobacco residue, blood, hair, and fingerprints.

The total influence of Sherlock Holmes on our world is incalculable, yet his image can no longer represent mystery fiction because he smoked. Because he smoked? What?!? Yes, smoking’s a bad habit and we don’t want to influence our kids to take it up. There’s a difference between acknowledging a classic character with a bad habit, which by the way was perfectly acceptable at the time, and giving out free smokes on the playground. Hell, many classically iconic characters smoked including Matt Dillon, Joe Friday, and Santa Clause, yes Santa Clause. Plus, let’s not forget major historical figures who lit up including FDR, General Patton, and Queen Elizabeth among others. Are we going to expunge such people from our collective memory? How about, just for a change of pace, teaching our kids they can acknowledge, even celebrate, such characters & historical figures even though they had a bad habit which shouldn’t be emulated?

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

If We're Gone Tomorrow

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My friend, Alizabeth, wrote a blog today about a friend of hers whom she lost contact with until the friend died. A few hours later, another friend, Jo-Jo, tweeted about the 2012 apocalypse prediction. The theory is that when our planet passes through the Galactic Equator/Plane the magnetic shift will lay everything waste.

I could easily express awe at the Mayan’s ability to predict an event which we could only predict after using the Hubble Telescope. I could debate whether such an event necessarily spells our doom, or whether or not this event correlates with the “7 years of tribulation” predicted in the Bible. These are interesting questions, but they’re not what weighs heaviest on my mind this day.

Assuming we’ll all be dead in two years, just assuming, what are we going to do with the time we have left? It occurs to me, we should spend as much time with the people in our lives as possible. We should cherish and nurture these relationships, and make now THE most precious time of all.

Now, I'm not saying that I wholeheartedly buy the idea that a single cosmic event is going to bring about the end of days. People have been forecasting the end of the world, practically, since the world began. We survived the wilderness of the stone age, the fall of Rome, the crusades, the trek to the new world, two world wars, the cold war, Y2K, 9/11, and we’ll probably survive the upcoming alignment. Even so, life is unpredictable at best. Any one of us can be gone tomorrow due to a freak accident or random blood clot. Thus, living as though we’re on a deadline, celebrating our relationships, and packing as much joy into our lives as possible, seems not only desirable, but responsible, even necessary.