My buddy Jim loaned Tom Robbins’ Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates several weeks ago. He explained to me at the time, “most people say the first Tom Robbins book they read is their favorite. This is mine.” My only experience with Tom Robbins is a hyper ability to confuse him with Tim Robbins. Clearly it was time to become familiar with the guy who did NOT pitch like a girl in Bull Durham.

At the time, I was still in the midst of figuring out whether I wanted to read The Sot-Weed Factor. At one point I read the first 30 pages of Fierce Invalids, only to go running back to The Sot-Weed Factor like a girl a couldn’t dump. Finally , I gave it up in earnest and started Invalids fresh.

The book is about a CIA agent named Switters, a ball of contradiction. He’s a pacifist, but he carries a gun. He’s a ladies man, but he’s attracted to innocence, so much so that his love interests are a Lolita-like 16 year old step sister and Nun. He’s a pragmatist, but he believes in voodoo and curses (to HILARIOUS effects).

In short, he’s a fairly unique creation. I imagined Johnny Depp from the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If you like Switters, you’ll probably like the book.

As for plot, well… readers of this blog know I don’t like to regurgitate plot for purposes of review. Let’s just say that it involves Prophecy, the Catholic church, and occasional anal sex with nuns. Despite the startling simlarities (y’know, except for the anal sex thing), I enjoyed it much more than The Da Vinci Code (though it predates Dan Brown’s dud by several years).

My final feelings on the book a fairly ambivalent. The characters are all well drawn, highly original creations. The plot… didn’t move me and felt like a contrived series of coincidences designed to get an odd group of people to intereact. I enjoyed it, I thought it was funny, but in the end it seems somehow forgettable. Which is not to say I’ve forgotten anything about it, but rather that I feel I will forget about it someday.

The Wachowski brothers, creators of the Matrix, are making a film based on the Alan Moore graphic Novel V for Vendetta.

Note: Do not be fooled. This doesn’t mean they’re directing it, as I first thought. The brothers are producing it. Personally, I don’t like it when the producers, capitalizing on their success as directors, use their name to sell a film. Producers should be like Batman, attacking from the shadows.

Or something.

Anyway, the upcoming film stars Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving and it looks intriguing enough that I picked up the original graphic novel. I haven’t read a lot of Alan Moore, but I LOVED Watchmen. I’ve been meaning to read more of his stuff.

V for Vendetta, written in the 80’s, imagines a 1990’s where a fascist regime takes over England. In the middle of the Neo-fascism is a terrorist with unknown motives seeking to take the government down in order to establish anarchy.

His name is V and he’s our hero.

That’s a pretty cool concept—making the terrorist the hero—making the anarchist the hero. But among Moore’s points, when the alternative is fascism there’s not a lot of room for compromise.

But beyond the idea and skillful interplay of supporting characters, I didn’t enjoy V that much. Moore committed the one sin you can’t do when your book revolves around the actions of one main character: he made V a TOTAL pill. V is always off dancing on rooftops, talking to statues of liberty, reciting poetry, and singing weird little songs. Y’know, cause that’s what anrchists do.

Or something.

I appreciate the notion of taking the action hero into a more Phantom of the Opera direction, but this just didn’t work. Still, we here at the ol’ Mojo appreciate Moore’s effort and will penalize him only with a bland little kitty cat—really no penalty at all—yet hardly an endorsement. V for Vendetta, meet the Meh Cat.

or a number of years I’ve had a copy of John Barth’s The Sot-weed Factor sitting on my bookshelf. That book has moved with me from Ohio, to West Virginia, to Maryland, to Wisconsin.

It’s not a small book either.

I’m not ashamed. Anyone with a bookshelf worth anything has this type of book on their shelves. I probably have a handful more.

So I finally got around to reading the damn thing… and guess what.

I didn’t like it. I barely got through the first 100 pages (but I did, notably, make it that far).

A book is not like a film or a half hour TV show. If you don’t like it, it’s probably better not to waste weeks or the better part of a month reading it in the vain hopes you will start enjoying it more.

So last night I officially Put… (must resist!) It…. (Noooooo!) Down (Ahhhh. Feels good).

It’s not easy, but it had to be done..

It was just… too damn meandering.

When I told my lovely life-mate that the book was officially put down, she replied “Does this mean we don’t have to take it with us when we move to Baltimore?”

That’s EXACTLY what it means. We won’t need to buy toilet paper for awhile either.

A few months ago I stumbled on a website called The Morning News that had a really cool idea: A tournament of Books. The idea was to take the best books of 2004, and put them up against each other in a bracket tournament. Think of the NCAA tournament but with books. I was interested in the process and enjoyed watching the bracket whittle it’s way down to an eventual winner: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. After following it’s ascent to the top, I couldn’t very well not read it. If there’s one thing the ol’ dubya-dot knows about me by now, it’s that I’m a nondiscriminating consumer of media. Film, blogs, books, whatever. I love a good yarn and I’m rarely without a novel. So I marked my reading list accordingly, finished Everything is Illuminated, and tackled Cloud Atlas.

Awesome Fucking Novel.

Seriously, I could end the essay right there and you’d know all you need to know about Cloud Atlas, a rollicking journey through time and genre.

It’s that last bit, genre, that really gets me. I think it’s not so atypical to tell a story that moves through time. But Mitchell accomplishes something really special by inhabiting not just time, place, and character, but also genre. Every tale is told in a different way. In a vacuum, each section is completely true to itself and avoids any cheekiness that might arise from such an experiment. Taken together, it becomes irresistibly fun as the reader asks what is this guy going to do next?!

You’re telling me one of the coolest things about this book is form, not content?

Yes and no—Yes, the form itself is loads of fun. The reader follows 6 stories. In the first half, each story is interrupted to make way for the next section. In the second half, we work our way back through each story’s conclusion. One character, a musical composer, writes an orchestral sextet that mirrors the form of the book and describes it thusly:

"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year's fragments into a "sextet for overlapping soloists".... In the first set each solo is interrupted by it's successor: in the second each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until finished."

To be fair, it’s hardly revolutionary, but if it’s gimmicky, the gimmick works.

But like I said, the real joy is in the content and how the substance overlaps in each story. Cloud Atlas tells the story of the same soul who is continually reincarnated through time tracing society from the 1800’s through the modern day, a distant future, and finally a post apocalypse. The overarching story is that of a society that builds itself upon the foundation of slavery, business, and consumerism before coming tumbling down in a presumed anti-technological disaster. Though, sci-fi in concept, it hardly comes off as science fiction much of the time because so much of the book takes place in the past or the present. The first story is told in a Melvillian journal style while the later entries are modern, cheeky, and finally the very best of science fiction. It is a dazzling mastery of not just genre, but an ability to inhabit the soul of Mitchell’s various creations.

In the end, It’s the very best of a Robert Mitchum historical Novel and an Isaac Asimov Science Fiction tale. The only thing is, I never really liked Mitchum or Asimov because those authors, in the works I attempted, never really placed any emphasis on character. Here, character is Mitchell’s primary focus as he traces a soul’s movement through time and story:

"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Somni the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' the clouds."

Best book I’ve read a long time.

A strange thing happened to me at the video store the other day. I spotted a film I never heard of. The case looked intriguing. The film synopsis seemed right up my alley. Most interestingly, it was covered in laudatory comments from media outlets and writers that I read and trusted: Variety, the New York Times, Rolling Stone. It even won the Grand Jury Prize Documentary at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

How in the world did this film fly under my pop culture radar? What black hole sucked it from me periphery? What vortex.. alright alright… It was a movie I missed—it happens, right?

Anyway, the movie is called DiG and here’s the DL:

The filmmakers cull over 7 years of video footage and journal the tribulations of two bands: The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The bands are very similar: Both are lead by charismatic and artistic frontmen, Courtney Taylor of the Dandies and Anton Newcombe of BJTM. Both are influenced by 60’s acid rock and glam. Both hold up the other as inspiration and friendly competitors. Both don’t seem to shower and sport fairly questionable hair styles.

That’s right. They walk alike. They talk alike. At times they even…. I always forget that next line. Smoke pot alike?

Two of a kind they may be. The same coin, for sure. But they are definitely different sides of said coin.

Witness:

Taylor is more together and more responsible. He wants to be an artist, he wants to defy convention. He wants to be a bad ass with a capital BAD. But he’s not. He’s not bad. Who’s bad? His band, following in his image, is fundamentally drama-free.

Newcombe on the other hand, is self destructive, conceited, unreliable, drug abusing, ass. But here’s the rub: Newcombe’s music is better. He’s more in touch with his art. He wants to share his art with others, but apparently not at the expense of having a real job and acting like a mature adult. Hey, I don’t fault him. The dude sees something horrible in record companies and any system designed to generate dollars for the latest pop hook. He believes it to take the purity away from what he does. He’s probably right.

So the movie documents Taylor’s move towards catchy ditties and Newcombe’s propensity to sabotage his own shows with brawls and band in-fighting. It presents alleged artistic superiority versus reliability (even if reliability occasionally pitches a hissy fit).

So who get the big record deal?

The answer to this question says a lot about what it takes to be a “successful” band with a recording contract. Sometimes, it’s not about being the great artist, sometimes it’s about showing up for work on time and doing your job. And unfortunately, sometimes the great artists get left out in the cold. Sometimes, it’s their own damn fault too.

The film shows some absolutely priceless moments—the best of which involve both Newcombe and Taylor in the same space. It becomes apparent that Taylor idolizes Newcombe and wants to emulate him—but not at the expense of jeopardizing his band. Taylor playing Newcombe the Warhols mid-nineties pop hit “Not if you were the Last Junky on Earth.” Taylor is clearly looking for approval from Newcombe, and Newcombe clearly hates the song. Later in the film, Taylor accompanies the Brian Jonestown Massacre on tour and witnesses first hand a fight and cancellation of a show. He squats in front of the camera in mock disbelief as obscenities hurl behind him and whispers jealously “this never happens to my band!”

It’s full of great moments that suck you into these people’s lives, their desires, and the differing ways art and commerce check each other.

Very cool flick.