wishing everyone an awesome new year full of energy and the kind of enlightenment that would open the world to the road you must follow to fulfill your dreams…….and finally tell the man that he can suck it, you made it!

:)

Oh, poor little (actually, it was huge) fella!  So sad :(

As I type this, Gogol Bordello is in the middle of a 3 day residence at Webster’s Hall, Manhattan.  I could have been there but something better has come up:

I’m going to be attending their New Year’s Eve concert down in Philly with a good friend of mine I haven’t seen in ages. It’s going to be a night to remember. Ima be soooo drunk, so wasted, Ima wake up with the mother of all hangovers…..and I can’t wait!

In honor of all things Gogol Bordello, here’s their Wonderlust King video:

I didn’t title this *best of decade* simply because that sounds pretentious, like I have a final say on what’s good or bad.  *My favorites* is just that: what I loved, what I liked, my personal opinion and therefore I can say/pick whatever I want without being subjected to people yelling at me for pretending to be the all-knowing of the literary world.

I of course spent the decade drinking WAY too much and didn’t get to lots of books I wanted to get to and therefore I’ll be adding *read more!* to my list of things to do this next decade. (did you catch that I didn’t add “drink less?” I could never!).  I also spent the decade reading books that came out before 2000 and therefore ineligible for inclusion here. Also, you won’t find many of the standard award winners/praise all over the world literary books that critics treasure ’cause I usually don’t read those books.

I only read one book that came out this year so I won’t make a *favorites of 2009* list.  I would have posted this sooner but I was waiting on finishing Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay which had been recommended to me by so many people I thought it would really be something, alas, it wasn’t much of a book for me I guess. I’ll be posting a review in a few days.

Without any more yapping from me, here are my favorite books of the decade. Those I’ve already done a *classic* or regular review for, you can click on the link to read the full take, otherwise enjoy the short reviews below:

1-Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004-bloomsbury).  It was very hard for me to decide which book would take the cake but at the end of the day, my love for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was just too immense to be ignore.  This gargantuan of a sprawling masterpiece, complete with footnotes and drawings, is a stunning debut novel that combines the fantastic and historical fiction into a flawless delight that should be read by every single person on the planet. It would make you believe in magic. It is that good.

2-Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s La Sombra Del Viento/The Shadow Of The Wind (2001-planet/penguin books). An epic story that reads like a poem to literature encompassing every genre from romance to horror to historical drama to mystery to thriller to the supernatural to a touching and tragic coming-of-age tale unlike anything I’ve read before. And it is quite funny too.  A marvel of a book you can’t put down and something that leaves you in awe.

3-Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006-Knopf).  With the most sparse dialogue/narration and simplest of vocabularies, Mr. McCarthy makes real for us a tale of love, survival, and both: the ugly and the remarkable side of humanity in a post apocalyptic world not too far into the future.  This may be fiction and all but it feels so realistic that it isn’t hard to imagine the catastrophy and despair found within its pages as real as your own fears.

4-Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002-Morrow). You have to know your scriptures to be able to enjoy Lamb to the fullest (and no one is more religious than me, not even the Pope).  Christopher Moore’s absurdist fictional take on the life of Christ is both hilarious (specialy as told by Biff) and also moving, even respectful to the actual scriptures. You really have to be a total sour-puss to get offended by it.

5-Mark Z. Danielewski’s House Of Leaves (2000-pantheon books). Scary, disturbing, annoying, touching; a total spookefest that crashes under its own larger than life ambitions. An structural fuck you, a literary temper tantrum than haunts its protagonist and you the reader at once, for it feels like the book is sucking you in the further you get into the story.  A must read for any aspiring writer just to see that there are no boundaries to what you can do with a book, no rules.

6-Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006-Knopf). No other book this decade kept me up at night racing to get to the end as much as The Ruins.  Without any chapters, any breaks, Scott Smith wtf? tale of unnatural horror uncoils itself and lashes out at you in vibrant, searing details that put you there and you feel the book’s words crawl up and down your skin. Disturbing is putting it mildly. A screamfest you won’t soon forget and a shame the movie version couldn’t even summon half of its malice. But perhaps that’s a small blessing in desguise; no movie was probably ever going to recapture the evil of the novel.

7-Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006-Atria books) Definitely the book that sort of snuck up on me and hit me upside the head with how good it was after I had sort of dismiss its beginning.  Like The Shadow Of The Wind, The Thirteen Tale is a love letter to literature and the art of writing a good yarn full of ingredients: romance, mystery, coming-of-age, supernatural, and like Shadow of The Wind it revolves around a secretive author.  This is sort of like the female cousin of Shadow Of The Wind, not as amazing but just as gorgeous and spellbinding on its own right.

8-Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006-Shaye Areheart books). Stephen King called this: “a nasty piece of work” as a compliment and that’s pretty accurate I say.  The family at the center of the story is just plain evil but not in the conventional sense of malevolence but in the corrosive, mean-as-hell, cold-calculated-no-redeemable-qualities-soulless-human-being kind.  And our main character is one fuck-up, emotionally damaged person that knows exactly how fuck-up she is and doesn’t want your pity.  The writing is just as cold as the characters and the plot just as creepy.

Spots #9 and #10 aren’t so much as rankings but acknowledgements to consistency for Chuck Palahniuk and John Saul respectively.  Chuck gave us lots of great stories, some utterly disturbing: Haunted 2005, and some amazingly disturbing: Choke 2001, Lullaby 2002, Dairy 2003.  John Saul had a very uneven decade but he did give us three novels that were “classic Saul” and hugely entertaining in their horror: The Manhattan Hunt Club 2001, Midnight Voices 2002, Perfect Nightmare 2005.

Since I can’t bring myself to separate them as individual novels for single inclusion into the list, I’ll simply named J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books as the series and biggest literary phenomenon of the decade, hands down.

Now the opposite.

Books I read that were a complete let down(spoiler alert):

1-Alice Sebolb’s The Lovely Bones (2002-Little, Brown): I cannot stress how much I hated how Ms. Sebolb completely betrays Sussie Salmon and the book’s story on the third act.  She destroyed her own book and that to me is just unforgivable from a writer’s perspective.  I was ready to forgive the pandering and emotional string pulling she utilizes through out but once we get to Sussie possessing her best friend so that she can finally have sex with Ray because gosh, that’s all a dead girl can think of! forget for a second that she was supposed to point out to people where her body was, her ghostly virginity is way more important!  Horrible not to mention appalling.

2-Peter Straub’s Lost Boy/Lost Girl (2003-Random House): It just wasn’t scary and it was trying way too hard to be hip and cool with the internet usage/lingo, and then the wtf? ending that makes no sense whatsoever? A link to a youtube video showing boy and girl by the beach? what? they became ghost in the digital world? Absurd.  I cannot stress enough how much a bad end would always ruin the whole book.

3-Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001-Morrow): If Neil (whom I love and pains me to say this) secretly wanted to write a book about Americana and the quirky little town/places he visited while cross-country-ing the USA then he should have done that and not waste our time with a supposed clash of the Gods that he really didn’t care much about.  One long-ass boring book.

4-John Saul’s Nightshade (200-ballantine): I love John Saul, I own about 85% of his novels.  3 of his 2000-2009 books were disappointments but none more so than Nightshade.  It was way to close to his other books but unlike them, this was a sleep-inducing tale that didn’t amount to too much at all. Hands down his worse book ever.

5-Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007-Canongate): This debut novel tried really, really hard to be unique and it would have succeeded if it wasn’t because Steven Hall ran out of ideas a little after the middle point and from there, the story free-falls rapidly and it ends with this glaring aping of Jaws that should be investigated under copyright infringement laws.

6-Anne Rice’s Blood Canticle (2003-Knopf): Anyone who’s read Anne Rice knows that every now and then you have to be patient with her storytelling, but the way she ties together and concludes her Vampire Chronicles and more important (to me) The Lives Of The Mayfair Witches, was just a bit of a slap on the face.  Forget Lestat, she makes Mona even more insufferable than she already was, while Quinn from Blackwood Farm is just this puppet with no personality and worst of all, her portrayal of Rowan Mayfair was a complete betrayal of the whole Mayfair clan history.  And like Peter Straub, she tries to be hip and cool with the internet.  Maddening!

There you have them.

I would love to know what other people picked as their favorite books of the decade, that way I can add them to my list of things to read–God knows I need to be reading more books–so if you can list them on the comment section or simply leave me a link to your list, I would really appreciate it.

Whereas Rob Marshall has become a bona fide *one trick pony* with the release of his musical Nine, Guy Ritchie has been happily living up to that term his whole directorial career. From his debut Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, to Snatch, to Revolver to Rock&Rolla, all of his movies have been a sort of slight variation on the same premise of the London underground mafia.  And they have all been shot in that quick cut, adrenaline rush, frenzied editing and omniscient voice over narration he just loves so much.  The sole exception to this rule was his remake of Swept Away with Madonna, which showed he could slow down the camera and make something that wasn’t stamped with the “for guys only” label, proving that he isn’t so much a *one trick pony* as just someone who has too much fun working within his comfort zone and doesn’t really care to stray from it.

With Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie tries to find a middle ground between his style of movie-making and that of a more standard commercial Hollywood production.  The results are sort of uneven, not bad at all but not as amazing as this movie should have been.

Robert Downey Jr’s not particularly good British accent aside, the movie has lots of moments going on for it and it is wholly enjoyable–there’s lots of hilarity through out to keep it floating–it’s just not fully kick-ass.  To put it in terms of popcorn movies: it’s like popcorn without the salt….or butter if you like butter on your popcorn (I don’t).  And that’s a shame really because the potential to be the season’s *must fun at the movies* champion is there, just wasn’t set up properly.

As a buddy duo, Robert D.Jr and Jude Law have good chemistry and play well off each other.  Mark Strong (whom I love) as the villainous Lord Blackwood is just darkly mysterious enough and even though his remaining in the shadows is necessary for the plot, I wished there would have been a bit more of him.  Everyone with a small supporting role does fine as well.  My biggest complain of course, and something that I can’t fully forgive the movie for, is their complete, COMPLETE! misused/underused of my beloved Rachel McAdams. She really is given very little to do here and that’s a crying shame! If you’ve seen the trailers then you’ll see while watching the movie that whole scenes with her in it were completely changed and/or exorcise out of the final cut.  Example: that scene in the trailer where she’s fighting with Robert D.Jr and she kicks him in the crotch area and then bends forward with a smile like a sexy/pretty minx while watching him fall sideways has completely been erased from the film and changed into a more subtle/emotional exchange between them.  Why? Beats me. I can tell they were trying to show they care a bit more for each other than just being rivals but it really doesn’t accomplishes more than what it had already been establish up to that point.

Then there’s the plot itself.  It is a good plot but somehow it and its conclusion doesn’t add up to the frothy climax a blockbuster-in-waiting such as this should have.  It sort of keeps you entertain but it doesn’t excite you enough to look forward to the end and cheer the good guy’s victory.  I believe that the fault lies on the fact that the movie starts setting up the inevitable sequel about a quarter into the film INSTEAD of at the end or the third act.  Because of that, this first movie’s plot loses a bit of steam and can’t recover.

Guy Ritchie keeps the movie going without much pause but not so fast as to lose the audience and though he employs a bit of his camera work frenzied jump/cuts here and there, nothing is so glaring or disjointed as to annoy the viewers not familiar with his work.

As I said, not the movie we were promise but still a good time at the theater. Lets just hope that they tighten the belt around the sequel and give us something to feel awe and cheer in excitement about.  Grade: B

With Nine, Rob Marshall proves that you shouldn’t try to recreate your past triumphs because it just won’t work.  There’s a reason lightning doesn’t strike the same spot twice, but he tried anyhow and in doing so makes Nine look like nothing more than a Chicago wannabe or at the very least, the leftovers.

Ignoring the fact that doing Nine was going to tag him as a “one trick pony” he could have avoided that route and really challenge himself with the material, but he chooses to be a lazy filmmaker and simply utilized the same gimmick that propelled Chicago to so much acclaim, and gave audiences a way to follow the story and enjoy characters suddenly bursting into singing and dancing.  The dance & song numbers are all part of Guido’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) daydreaming just as in Chicago they happened within Roxie’s (Renee Zellweger) mind.  The only problem is that they aren’t as coherent/don’t segue into the story as streamlined and well, they aren’t as sexy/campy/fun as they were in Chicago.

I don’t know anything about Nine the stage musical except for the footnotes of how it all came to be, so I can’t really judge the movie version strengths but I doubt it lives up to it.  Also, the songs itself are as instantly catchy; they don’t have that lasting impression factor.

Another thing the movie has going on against it is the amount of characters and their screen time.  In Chicago, the bulk of the singing was done by Renee, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere, and they also carried the movie. With Nine, the movie belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis completely; everyone else has minor roles that limit them to one musical number a piece with the exception of Marion Cotillard who gets two.  So it plays more like a revolving door and doesn’t give you time to care about them in general, they are shiny, pretty, sexy props to the rest of the production.  And those musical numbers just aren’t as lively as they should have been.  Penelope Cruz gets the sultriest of them and yet not seductive enough, Fergie and Kate Hudson get the loudest, fastest, liveliest, with Kate’s ending up being just flashy, while Fergie’s works the most because her strong vocals carries it to an almost exciting level. There’s nothing remarkable about Nicole Kidman’s or Sophia Loren’s which are quiet and understated, while Judi Dench’s tries to be fun and it’s just mildly amusing. Marion Cotillard’s gets the most serious one as the done-wrong wife and she carries them well and gives them the exact amount of attitude; she’s the only one who sort of acted through her numbers instead of just “performing” them and therefore made them better.

There’s really no acting require on this one, Marion and Daniel have the most non-singing scenes. Marion does her part well while Daniel gives the role some gravitas (how could he not?) unfortunately (the man is fantastic, uber talented and I could marry him but) singing is sadly not part of his arsenal of strong skills.  He isn’t bad, just average and you can hear his numbers would have benefit from a stronger more assure voice.  He sounded a lot like Ralph Fiennes did on Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt, to give you and idea.  Ralph came off better only because his voice suited those songs, on Daniel’s case they really don’t. Which is a let down because Rob Marshall kept Daniel’s singing from the trailers because he claimed it was the film’s secret weapon and he wanted audiences to be blown by it upon viewing.

In the end, it wasn’t a bad film at all, just not unforgettable or lots of fun. It doesn’t add or takes away from anyone involve in it with the exception of Rob Marshall who’s really gonna have to do a 180 if he wants to prove he’s more than a one trick pony.  Grade: C+

Base solely on the opening trifecta of: “Animal,” “Dia Cero,” and “El Duelo” this album is rock perfection in any language.  But to give credit to La Ley, INVISIBLE turned out to be an album full of awe-inspiring rock offerings beyond those three songs and much more.

La Ley (“The Law”) were a  Grammy winning rock band from Chile formed in 1987, remaining active until 2005 when they disbanded for good.  They released a total of 7 studio albums, 1 MTV Unplugged, and a Greatest Hits Compilation during their career.  Though several of those albums helped them become recognized as one of the best and most accomplished-not to mention popular-bands in Latin America, INVISIBLE, their fourth release, has remained not only a fan favorite but their most critically acclaimed work…and for damn good reasons.

Expanding their sound by experimenting with electronica, in addition to their more organic instruments and letting the music become influenced by a varied array of rhythms from European to American to Soul to Jazz to Bossa Nova to even Mexican folk.  They even broke out of their Spanish language comfort zone and performed full songs in English and French, making INVISIBLE their broadest album.

And yet the album as a whole is a much darker affair than anything prior or since. The lyrics are particularly dark and some of the songs take on a bit of Gothic-Rock. All of this can probably be attributed to the death of their band leader on a motorcycle accident, months before the recording of INVISIBLE.  And yet, the album is technically flawless; engineered in a crystalline sonic sheen that it is at once, innovative and highly commercial in its accessibility.  15 years after its release, not one bit of it sounds dated.  La Ley were in mourning and in need to be daring and to pay tribute to their lost comrade with a stunning album that was way ahead of its time and they succeeded on every single count.  Grade: A+

I haven’t been very productive in terms of writing……or anything else for that matter this month.  December has been like a jolly-Xmas-y-black-hole to me. I have been super busy and then the internet going all haywire last week (it’s still fucked as of this writing; next week’s fixing can’t get here soon enough) and other excuses have kept me from being productive at full speed.

I sort of knew this would happen (the busy part, not the internet fiasco) so I’m not completely irritated by it all but to a certain degree.

BLACK TIDE & THE BROKEN set sail as you know, about a month and some change ago and it was all smooth sailing until…….. I happened upon my first storm a week and a half ago and I’m still in it.  It isn’t writer’s block or that I wrote myself into a corner; I extensively sketched out a literary map of everything the novel was going to deal with, down to every plot twist, detour, revelation, character’s background, development, whose life would be intertwine with whom and their fate down to the last detail……EXCEPT for one  tiny glaring thing I somehow–not missed, but neglected to iron out completely:  a very crucial sequence of events that get revisited a few more times through out because they hold vital information.

So I’m basically on a time-out,  juggling these events up in the air while my brain lands upon the key on how they should all lay out so that nothing is amiss.  If I don’t get their sequencing/timing right then the whole novel would basically fall apart and I would dutifully beat myself against the wall for being an idiot.

I may have said on a previous project update that the ending and beginning of a novel are it’s most important components, and thought I stand by that assessment from a reading standpoint, this issue I’m having? this sequence of events? truly is the most vital from a writing standpoint.  Everything else depends on me getting this just right.  I just hope–really hope, this doesn’t take me weeks/months to solve.  I flat-out refuse to think that I can’t find an artful way of getting what I want and have that “yessss!!!” eureka moment, you know what I mean?

So I ask you writers out there: have you identify that slice of the story that holds everything else in place and have you struggle to make it stick?