Alien Update

People have asked me whatever happened with that eBay auction I got involved in, for the 1979 Kenner 18-inch Alien action figure. Well...I won it. And by "won," I mean I ended up working several days of overtime to pay for the thing. But it seemed to be worth it -- after all, it was advertised as coming with nearly intact original packaging, and the original dome and hard to find spike pieces.

Finally, yesterday, it arrived at my house. Everybody was in bed and asleep when I got home from work after eleven PM, and carefully, ever so carefully, opened the package, slicing away layers of bubble wrap like a surgeon to finally reveal the dark jewel hidden within.

It was beautiful. It was everything I'd hoped -- tall, imposing, scary, with shiny metal jaws and a long bizarre head. After taking it into a dark room to ascertain that its face did indeed glow creepily in the dark, I sat back and cracked open a beer to share with my new Alien friend that had cost me so much, but was so worth it.

Then his arm fell off.

I couldn't believe it. It felt like part of my heart fell with it. The thing had been out of its box for ten minutes. I looked closely at the empty socket and saw that the plastic pivot piece adjoining the shoulder to the torso had snapped clean off, probably long ago, and had been faultily repaired by the previous owner. I went upstairs, sent a message off to the seller telling him what had happened, and went back to finish my beer, staring glumly at my one-armed Alien.

What was I going to do?

Clearly, I needed this guy.


You remember Geri, don't you? The toy repair guy from Toy Story 2, who carefully inspects and repairs Woody, and says, "You can't rush art"? Yeah, that's exactly who I needed. So this morning, I started calling hobby shops and model train shops, and this afternoon, after I dropped Jack off at kindergarten, I dropped my Alien off with an old man who looks astonishingly like this fellow in the picture. He had a long, well-lit workbench full of small, specialized tools, and I watched as long as I could as he carefully opened my Alien's left arm to retrieve the broken piece of rubber connective tissue that was rattling around inside. We hunched over it together discussing possible courses of action and he outlined a plan using a piece of rubbing tubing fitted over the current amputated pivot that would allow the Alien full restored use of his arm. Then he gave me a small paper claim ticket and sent me on my way.

I expect to hear from him sometime soon.

I hope my Alien will be okay.

And to the seller who sold me this figure -- I'm giving you until tomorrow morning to respond to my message.

After that, it's feedback time.

No Country for Gold Men

I can't really remember the last time I stayed up to watch the Oscars in their entirety but I have to say I enjoyed seeing the boys walking away with their much-deserved gold last night.

And then there's this guy --


Seeing Cormac McCarthy in Kodak Theater with his son was just the icing on the cake. Given all the years of serious, don't-mess-with-Texas author photos that have appeared over the years, it was awesome seeing Cormac on his feet, open mouthed with delight and hooting like a cowboy on a Saturday night, as No Country won best picture. Anybody got a screen-capture of that?

Weather is the Music of My Writing

I used to write to music. I don't anymore. Not because it's particularly distracting, but because at some point it became more or less completely arbitrary. The moment that I started really getting into whatever I was writing, i.e, the moment the writing process actually really started, I tuned the music out and completely ceased paying attention to it. I could be listening to Foo Fighters, Tom Waits, Miles Davis or Public Enemy...it's not a factor.

So, I don't do it anymore (except when I'm rewriting, or editing, in which case for some reason the choice of music somehow becomes a vital part of the revision process, as in the case of the massive Eat the Dark revision, which required a completely programmed iPod with 5,000 odd songs on it, but that's another story); instead I have found an interesting correlate.

These days, I've discovered that the weather is the music of my writing.

I don't have an office anymore -- my son took it over as his bedroom -- so my "desk" tends to be wherever I'm working, a figurative location, like the foreign desk of a newspaper. The one criteria is that I need a window onto the weather. And it turns out that, although on one level I'm as oblivious to the weather as I was to music, I'm subconsciously very aware of the weather, to the point that it actually influences the work, or at least helps it along.

I think my favorite weather to write to has always been snow, which we don't get nearly enough of here in central Pennsylvania. I remember reading Misery for the first time, before the movie came out, envisioning Paul Sheldon in his corner room writing as Rocky Mountain snow fell outside like individual piano notes. Rain is also great. In fact, the more disruptive or inconvenient the weather, the better the writing tends to go. Conversely, brainless blue sky sunny days provide very little help to me...although, oddly, sweltering summer afternoons can be good, the same way that adding heat into an equation can catalyze the reaction process.

There are limits to these meteorological influences, of course. The days in Ann Arbor when I sat in a crappy off-campus apartment with shaky wiring, typing through weather-related blackouts on a manual typewriter with a candle melting across the gray torpedo of its cylinder, are obviously gone. But there's no question that, regardless of how you feel about it, the weather, like ambient noise, is always going to be there. As a writer, the only meaningful decision is how you use it.

The Best Paragraph I've Read in a Long Time

"For years after, there were tales told in Colorado of the amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve, 1899. Next day'd be full of rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions--but that night there was man-made lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie, electricity flooding up through the iron of their shoes, shoes that when they finally came off and got saved to use for cowboy-quoits, including important picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or steel, that's when they weren't collecting souvenirs on their way through the air--gunmen's guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out from under pants legs, keys to traveling ladies' hotel rooms and office safes, miners' tags, fence-nails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that long-ago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got to humming through their bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers' offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed."

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

What Have I Done?

He is Alien.

Produced by Kenner in 1979, he stands 18'' high, complete with the original packaging. Particularly rare because he was judged too frightening for the toy shelves of the day, he commands instant respect. He comes complete with the full spine pieces and head dome that are often missing because they were so easily detached. He is a magnificent specimen and fiercely pursued on eBay.

The auction ends in just over two hours.

And right now, God help me, I am his highest bidder.

My wife knows I bid on him. In fact, she actually placed the bid herself while I stood over her shoulder and watched. That doesn't change the fact that I must be high.

Stay tuned.

Five New Books You Need to Read

Christa Faust's Money Shot is out now from Hard Case Crime, and I so need to read it. It's paperback noir with an ex-porn star at its filthy little heart, and that's all I need to know. That, and the fact that I can buy it off the Giant Foods grocery store racks while I'm stopping off for a pound of bacon and a pint of ice cream. Hard Case Crime, I love you.



If you haven't already figgered it out, Mark Henry's Happy Hour of the Damned comes out February 26. You need to read it because Mark's zombies are as scary, sexy and as fascinated with human excrement as Mark himself is, and that's saying a mouthful. Wait, did I just type that? Arrggh!



Just because Duane Swierczynski's successful career as an armored car robber has allowed him to quit his day job as Philly's best loved city weekly journalist/editor, doesn't mean that you shouldn't go out and buy multiple copies of his upcoming bloodsplattered office noir-fest Severance Package. Nobody does visceral spray like Swierczy. Reading this book, if you put your ear to the page, you can actually hear the cartilage pop.



To be totally honest, I don't know anything about Peter Abraham's Delusion, due out April 8th. But you know what? It doesn't matter. It's Peter fucking Abrahams. The man is the ultimate pro, and he can do more on a page than James Patterson can manage in his entire career.



Finally, Richard Price is back next month with Lush Life, his newest New York opus. Nobody -- nobody -- writes character and dialogue like him. Samaritan was one of my all time favorite novels anywhere, ever -- it pretty much singlehandedly plucked me out depression in one of the harder years in recent memory -- and I can't tell you how pleased I am to have him back with something new.

The Poems of Alex Dangel

When Christina and I lived in Boston, she worked as a nanny for a woman named Betsy Dangel. Besides being a singularly kind and generous woman, Betsy was also the inspiration for the character of Susan Young in Chasing the Dead.

Between the years of 1998 and 2000, it was my great pleasure to help Christina take care of Betsy's son Alexander, who is now ten years old.

Alex is autistic.

This past week his mother sent along some poems he had written.

Trembling Promises

I made a promise
And it shook
Like an earthquake.
The earthquake gets too strong.
It explodes.
Did I keep my promise?
No.


There's a Roller Coaster in Me

There's a roller coaster in me with gears that clank
and painted like wood.
It roars like gears.
It moves like a race car.
It lives in my brain and makes me fall.
It makes me want to go to Lagoon Park.
It makes me feel like dropping.
I wish I did not have a roller coaster in me.

Clintonfield

So I came out of the multiplex at the Gateway in Salt Lake City at ten PM -- midnight my time -- to find crowds of silent strangers gathered underneath jumbo-screens watching election results pour in.

All I can say is that it is very weird watching Cloverfield for the first time in an unfamiliar city on Super Tuesday.

Salt Lake City - Day One

I’m writing this from the lobby of the Marriott in Salt Lake City. It’s for my MRI job, a training conference for the new machines we’re installing.

My hotel room looks like this.



Nothing special, but there is a mountain outside my window, so that’s cool.



And look, it’s the poster art for John Carpenter’s The Thing!



I got on the plane yesterday and realized I’d forgotten my headphones, so instead of watching Double Indemnity at 37,000 feet, I ended up reading about two hundred pages of Michael Chabon’s excellent The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. This book came out last year and I don’t remember how it was received, but friends, it is excellent. Chabon is one of those writers who takes so much joy makes you want to write.

So in the spirit of that, I present to you, today’s story seed:

In the early 1940s, during the Nazi occupation of France, a brilliant artist, dying of tuberculosis, flees Europe leaving his wife and children behind. He winds up living in Colorado under an assumed name, where he encounters a young boy on the run from his mother and abusive stepfather. The artist takes the boy in, and slowly and methodically begins tattooing the boy’s body with his final work, adding elements until nearly every inch of the boy’s body is covered in ink. Within a month, the boy’s small pale body has been transformed into the Sistine Chapel.

Flash forward sixty-five years, to New York, a hotel suite at the Plaza Hotel. The boy, now an old man, sits on the corner of the bed in a bathrobe, anxiously sipping his tea as the sounds of traffic rise up from Fifth Avenue. There’s a knock at the door and a beautiful old French woman walks in, her face made all the more lovely by grief and time. She is the last surviving child of the artist in exile, the only one to outlast Hitler’s war machine. She looks at the man, who slips off his robe, and for the first time the woman lays eyes on the masterpiece that her father abandoned her and her family to complete.

Where does it go from here?