In Which In A Manner of Speaking I Just Want To Bleed

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There are about seven different words that mean gratitude in Japanese, and about half of them figure the word 'resentment' into their definitions. These are the same people that brought the world that most splendid of energy drinks for the young vampire, TruBlood. Do yourself a favor and mix a little O negative in with that broth you're cooking. It's a change you won't regret.

But yes, thanking someone for real ended when the Old West did; shortly thereafter it turned itself into an insult except for a brief period during the Jimmy Carter administration when it was a pun. No good deed goes unpunished, and few creatures of this world can appreciate that.

But Marianne (the delicious Michelle Forbes) can. Her inner monologues go on and on in Latin, and she's a Dionysian one for sure. She brought ne'erdowells of color into her well-apportioned home, and she can make shapeshifters shit diarrhea when they're busted back to their canine form. Be thankful! What exactly is so bad about accepting your host's graciousness? Guest rights were common when Marianne first burst on the scene. Now if you plan ahead to stay with your relatives they wait for your after-dinner walk to sample the sherbet you so desperately crave.

To prevent his store from being looted in the wake of the Lakers' championship, a shopkeeper had an unusual idea. Put a sign up that said, "Free! Going Out of Business!" and you wouldn't even have to put a guard at the door. People hate being offered things, and they certainly can't accept kindness, whether it comes from a human, or whatever Marianne is, exactly.

The first season of True Blood was provincial, this season the show can really start to spread its wings. Gosh, we haven't met a single wolf yet, although for my money Tara's ex-con seductor looks like he might bite. Everyone is just so beautiful in this backwards town that Anna Paquin is starting to look piqued under her eyes and tits.

Last week's premiere ended in make-up sex, and it's where last night's episode picked up. Sookie and Bill are having major problems, huge problems, problems accepting that each other's problems are problems. Vampire-human love will never work, there's too much going against it. You can hit the same artery multiple times and it'll come back, but veins are tougher, and it's only a matter of time before Sookie loses the ability to create scar tissue on her neck and bleeds out for good.

why aren't you watching this show again?Yes, Bill will soon be parted from Sookie's ample bosom. In the books there was no teenage vampire Jessica that Bill had to care for to step between them - she's a fiction of the show, which needed a reason to separate the happy couple short of Bill's research. (Bill attempts to put together a vampire Who's Who in Charlaine Harris' series. As a dramatic action it's somewhat lacking.)

Meanwhile, the consumers of vampire blood are struggling through rehab. Lafayette is about to undergo a serious transformation, and it is true he would make one stellar vampire. But poor Tara! Deprived of her cousin's once-questionable humanity, is she the only non-supe in Bon Temps?

Jason Stackhouse is doing his part to help Tara out. Off at vampire hate camp, he captured the flag, along with the erotic intentions of his host. It's just good to be Jason Stackhouse. He loves everyone, whether it's Stephen Root, the chick from Cloverfield, or the wife of a preacher. Bro is just full of it. You have to wonder how far Alan Ball is prepared to push the church camp satire. As of now, he probably has some viewers thinking they accidentally stumbled on EWTN.

The new Eric Northman should come as no surprise. If he really has his eye on Sookie (and let's be honest, the only reason to dress like Sporty Spice is for ass), he's going to have to stop chowing down on her friends.

As of this very moment, however, he might have an opportunity. Sookie's a fragile creature right now. When you could always read minds, and suddenly can't because you're stepmother to a teen vamp - you can be talked into some pretty crazy things. I suggest the show's producers consider a Vampire Jessica world tour, dragging the evil ginger who plays her around the world to flash her fangs at opponent of homosexual marriage and cry red. When best utilized, fear can do us all some good.

"Don't you dare threaten me," Marianne tells Sam Merlotte. She's not going to let anyone ruin her good time, whether it's her devoted servant who stopped Tara from banging whatever it is that black drug dealer actually is, or the good rodeo-loving people of Bon Temps. Trouble at home and abroad - this is show is life.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls it all here.

"Out of the Wilderness" - God is a Whale (mp3)

"Maybe You're Right" - God is a Whale (mp3)

"Birds and Pears" - God is a Whale (mp3)

 

In Which We Are Underneath The Ground, Hoping To Grab Your Feet

Hell Is Other Loan Officers

by ALEX CARNEVALE

For me, hell is being a loan officer at a California bank. For others, it's a delicate heaven, and Justin Long is a trained psychologist and also your boyfriend, and his mother wants him to marry a lawyer, and you're not good enough. Sam Raimi's incredible return to the horror genre takes this basic dismaying premise and makes things so much worse I was begging for sweet relief.

'i sense that you are juno's understudy...does this word 'juno' mean anything to you?'I have never been particularly good with horror films. A book can be put down; you can't see it, anyway. A light can be turned on in a dark closet. A grizzled old man who brushed against you accidentally on a crowded train can be reported to the police. But a film - that is a different story altogether. The only way to get around the diegesis, in this case, is to realize that the only thing that lurks in those shadows is death, and death is not really all that scary - in fact after watching an episode of Nurse Jackie, it's a welcome revelation.

Sam Raimi and his older brother Ivan have gotten around this by creating a series of hells, all of which exist in the real world, and have to be dealt with. There is actually something in all those shadows, there's no Macguffin making it all happen, no trick ending waiting. There's just eternal damnation, and running from it as fast as you possibly can.

sup?Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is in the pickle I described, and she has to think of a way out of it. She's a bright, well-meaning young person, the kind of woman that under other circumstances you'd like to know or even impregnate, but not these particular circumstances, no. Her face is perfect for Raimi's purposes - even in quiet confidence it betrays an inner fear. Replacing Ellen Page, Lohman is a dead ringer for the androgynous young person, and she's as talented an actress.

go ask obama, I'm totally sure he'll write you a checkAfter denying a disgusting Gypsy woman another extension on her mortgage to impress her boss (David Paymer), she gets cursed with an object that marks her as fodder for a demon called Lamia. Demons! They just don't understand fiscal responsibility. The fact that Raimi turns this into a joke is hilarious, but there is also a major truth underneath this well-timed setup.

The banks were blamed for targeting the weak, for okaying loans that couldn't possibly be repaid. Little condemnation has come in for those who couldn't make their payments. Probably there is blame on both sides, and since the government bailed out only one of those sides, I'm not even sure who to be sympathetic to. That is where we are in American life - there are no winners, just different levels of losers in hock to a federal government that has no idea when to stop spending.

Thankfully it is in Drag Me to Hell that Judgment comes, Raimi-style. It doesn't matter who you are: if you have a button on your shirt, you're going underneath the ground where Hell is.

this happens at every single seance i go to

In order to avoid this fate, Christine gets barfed on, she kills animals, she throws up, she bleeds out, she tries anything to get herself uncursed. And as funny as this all should be, it's seriously frightening to know it's not in her head. She's a dead woman, but she won't die -- she'll live on in Hell.

By the end of the film she's trying to find a reason to justify condemning someone else to her fate, even wanting to bop off her sniveling Asian coworker before thinking better of it. The decision she comes to, and the ending the film spirals toward in the 99 minutes it holds you I won't spoil here, but it is more exciting than anything else that will hit theaters this summer.

lamia also nabbed david carradine recentlyWhat makes Raimi such a masterful director? When he's taking himself seriously instead of delivering another hammy Spiderman sequel, he is the best at stringing together action and humor, a relentlessly eye for how things should pile on top of each other to create something surprising and funny, but wholly real.

With Spiderman, he took a series of increasingly nonsensical scripts, and made a film completely foreign to them out of their mediocre dialogue and situations. He turned the superhero genre into comedy, and in doing so made all other like movies over-serious and dull. As in Spiderman, everything here holds a demonic menace: a messy psychologist's office, a medium's goat, the button on Christine's shirt. The next day, you can't even look at a doorknob without imagining yourself going through it full bore. There is no one better in the genre, and we can hope he finds reason to come back to horror again after Drag Me To Hell.

The film's had some moderate success at the box office, and while it is devoid of big stars, I think I have some idea why audiences didn't exactly flock in droves. It's pretty much the September 11th movie all over again. We have no desire to relive these horrors when worse is befalling us every day, in the seeming safety of what was America. We won't be safe again, not here. We will tear each other apart even if big banks lend more and people are able, again, to buy beyond their means. Once you've been cursed, you can't go back.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Reborn as a Wind Chime" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3) highly recommended

"Rise of the Foundling" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3)

"Bullet Holes" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3)

Silent Paper Radios myspace

In Which We Found Something You Can Get For Your Dad

12 Books Even Your Dad Would Love

by ALEX CARNEVALE

We can't all have a father, but some of us have fathers, and they require presents this time of year. The book is the perfect gift for Father's Day (Sunday!) because it tells your dad that you love him but you're not in love with him. Here are some books for their pleasure which will make them believe.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein's classic tale of lunar revolution is a page-turner on an epic scale, nurturing your daddy's interest in global politics and differential gravity. Heinlein's masterpiece is compulsively readable; it is also the best textbook on government ever conceived. All it's missing is the sex, and your pop probably is used to not getting that. One of the greatest American novels ever written, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress beats the shit out of anything published this year for sure.

The first novel of the poet Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle has had a strange cult following since its release that I think the CIA should be looking into. It's a relentlessly funny smart book. If your dad is crotchety and boring like Tom Brokaw, I don't say that this is the right move, but if he's more like Woody Harrelson, I think you're safe.

John Derbyshire is a Brit who lives on Long Island. He's on the crotchety side, is a lot old-fashioned, but these are the kinds of exacting people who you want writing a serious history of mathematics. His chronicle of Bernard Riemann's story is a masterful retelling on the level of Dava Sobel's equally entertaining Longitude. For the dad that makes everyone listen to his stories.

'Popular military historian' isn't a thing you grow up wanting to become. Victor Davis Hanson is the finest of the kind, having written a memoir/history of California's immigration problem (Mexifornia) and a terrific book on the Pelopennesian War. Ripples of Battle is a great gift for the kind of dad who drives a pickup truck and believes he's smarter than he actually is. VDH will appeal to him on every conceivable level except his love of sweater-vests.

While many science fiction writers have become household names because of movies, Hollywood hasn't come calling for Robert Silverberg. This is regrettable, because as SF fabulists go, Silverberg's among the smarter conceptualists and better executors. His novella 'Nightwings' became the first part of his novel Nightwings, and it won a major shitload of awards at the time. It's the perfect fable. The protagonist is even old. It's what derlies love to read about, and it has alien invaders and a future dying Earth and pretty much anything I've ever asked for in a work of fiction.

Unlike most people I know, I went through a serious phase in which I read a lot of serial killer novels, the kind you take with you on planes and throw in the garbage somewhere in the middle of the Colorado rockies. The finest of such novels in my mind is Jeffrey Deaver's The Empty Chair. I have some small but meaningful requirements for a novel of this kind. First, it must have explicit sex. Second, the protagonist should have to overcome an incapacitating physical failure - in the case of Detective Lincoln Rhyme (played by Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector) he's a quadrapilegic. Third is a Southern setting. The Empty Chair has all three, along with a kickass villain and enough twists to puzzle even the wisest soothsayer. You won't be sorry you got him this one.

Poker books. I've read and masticated myself to the tune of damn near all of them. If your Dad is actually good at poker and wants a strategy guide of sorts, be sure and pick him up a copy of Gus Hansen's Every Hand Revealed. Gus is one hilarious chimichanga and he takes you through his amazing thought process at every level of a million dollar tournament that he dominated. Fascinating one of a kind stuff. If your dad is more of a casual gambler, charity God and legendary cash game player Barry Greenstein's autobiography-cum-poker guide Ace on the River is good for succeeding in business or at most anything. Priceless advice, incredibly beautiful book, hilarious as well.

Horror: it has never gotten any better than Richard Matheson's Now You See It... I'm not sure that it could get any better. Magic and murder! If someone would get on the ball and cast David Blaine in a stage adaptation of this, they would be able to wipe their ass with money. A brilliantly twisty and scary journey with another quadriplegic. This book is everything that's right about the genre. 

A man, even one such as your father, wants a book that makes him feel weak instead of strong (esp. in light of how The Hangover made him feel like he was six years old). Worry no longer. When it comes to well-meaning self-helpery, second best to Ayn Rand are the inspirational words of Jesus Christ, and best after that is the immortal autobiography of the Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico. Witty and wise, de Chirico's real life story has a worthy fictional counterpart in Kurt Vonnegut's best novel, Bluebeard. Warning: sampling both back-to-back could kill you with paint fumes.

As we get older, we become crotchety. This is the inevitable result of time's onward march. No one has put this perspective to better use than Thomas Sowell, and dude has reason to be pissed. Born in Harlem, Sowell was an iconoclast before the term was invented. The pioneering economist had a tough life, and the lessons he learned in war and peace, government and academia, are highly amusing. You can't go wrong with this autobiography, which the longtime columnist titled A Personal Odyssey.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording, and most likely knows your father better than you do. He tumbls here.

"Capturing Moods" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

"The Good That Won't Come Out" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

"Paint's Peeling" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)