Beware Werewolves on Horseback

Without the internet to distract me, I’m always looking for something light to read while eating breakfast.  The local library has this great little monthly “Book Page,” which is filled with reviews of all the latest books, author interviews, a few columns and, naturally, many advertisements from publishers that are nearly as entertaining as some of the reviews.  

I have a bad habit of reading about stories rather than the stories themselves.  Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide gathers no dust in my house.  I probably haven’t seen the movie you’re talking about, but I can summarize it and maybe even name some of the actors.  (Recently someone asked me if I’ve ever seen Never Been Kissed. “You mean the one where Drew Barrymore is an investigative reporter who goes undercover at the local high school and has a student fall in love with her, even though she’s falling for one of the teachers? Yeah, never seen it”).

“Book Page” fulfills my literary needs in the same way.  Literary fiction doesn’t hold my interest.  Current murder, suspense and crime stories are too dark for my taste.  Biography, history and memoir have to be about something or someone I’m very interested in for me to invest that much time.  But I’ll read about anything and everything.

I’m ashamed to say, the first page I look for is always the one with the reviews and ads for the latest romance novels.  Again, books I’d never read, but the summaries are insane.  Here’s one from this month’s “Book Page” that I promise, I am not making up: “New York Times bestseller [redacted] takes the passionate action way out west, as a vamp and a werewolf go undercover at a Wyoming dude ranch… with sizzling results!” [ellipses theirs].

Wait, what?!?  Even in a post-Twilight world, this is weird.

Characters Matter More Than Plot

Last week I accidentally watched the entire first season of Castle in two days. I say “accidentally” because I didn’t realize I was done until the disc threw me back to the menu.  And I guess I technically didn’t watch the entire first season.

See, my new used DVD player is about ten years old. It’s about the size of a VCR and has issues reading discs that are anything less than pristine. Pretty much everything I get from the library has to be washed in soap and water if I’m going to have a chance of getting through it. The library should probably wave all my library fines in thanks for my hand washing all of their discs.

Fragile – This Side Up – Handle with Care

The other night as I was watching The Tourist (yes, more Angelina Jolie), after recently watching The American, all three Jason Bourne movies, inhaling a series of books about a globe-trotting FBI agent, and before watching the new Casino Royale, I realized something. I really like stories set in exotic locales, with characters who can traverse them with ease.  Maybe because I’ll never be one of those people, or go to any of those places if I can help it.

Where's the speedboat? The explosions?

I admire traveled people.  There’s something about a traveled girl who speaks multiple languages that I find instantly attractive.  But me… I’d just as soon stay at home with my books.  You’d think that I’d want to be out, hoping to meet a charming, mysterious, well-traveled, multilingual young lady on a train.  But I don’t.  Actually, I once did meet a charming, mysterious, well-traveled, multilingual young lady on a bus (we still keep in touch via Facebook), but that’s another story for perhaps another time.

Dating 101 - Leap Year

Against my better judgment, I’ve decided to go ahead with the romantic comedy experiment (henceforth known as the RCE). Realizing that my natural cynicism may get in the way, at the suggestion of a friend I’ve decided to watch them with my trusted female guide Kelly Garmin. The first movie I watched for the RCE was Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and some Irish Guy. Not in the stack of movies loaned me by the boss-ladies, it is a favorite of my little sister’s. I think she likes looking at Ireland (where the movie takes place), and I think I like looking at Amy Adams.

Yes... yes I do.

Amy Adams plays a doe-eyed, red-headed (therefore: Irish) young woman who is tired of waiting on her boyfriend of four years to propose. This is accentuated when at their anniversary dinner he gives her a ring box with earrings in it. He then suddenly exits to perform emergency surgery or something, because that’s what jerk boyfriends in movies do. Next thing we know, he’s flying off to Ireland for a conference. Amy Adams decides to follow him there to take advantage of a tradition that allows the woman to propose on February 29. Of course, it’s never that easy, and she ends up traversing the Irish countryside with a scruffy Irish rogue. I won’t spoil the ending… she ends up with the Irish guy.

Books Are Like Vacation Photos

Right now I’m reading a book on rereading. I don’t think I’ll read it again once I finish it. The author, a woman in her 70’s, talks a lot about her own experiences in rereading. She shares how the Alice stories, which she discovered at age six, have read differently and similarly to her over the years. The editor of an annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, she talks about why so many people revisit the works of Austen annually.

Honestly, I’m not much of a re-reader. Certain friends of mine can find so much amusement in a Terry Pratchett novel that they will finish it on Friday night and start all over again Saturday morning. Perhaps it’s a more active form of how I can watch the same music video several times in week. But a novel requires a much larger time commitment than my four and a half minute Michelle Branch video from the early 2000’s.

The Wizards Harry

With Potter-mania still a force to be reckoned with and my own literary obsessions flitting around as they will, I’ve been thinking about fantasy stories and why I like some and just can’t lose myself in others.  For most of 2010 I read hardly anything that didn’t center around the adventures of a wizard named Harry… Dresden.  Yet whenever I’ve tried to go to Hogworts, whether in book or movie form, to visit with that other wizard named Harry, it’s felt like a chore.

Dating 101 - Course Overview

Earlier this year I went out on something that may or may not have been a “date.” Old, inexperienced bachelor that I am, I’d have to say something like, “Would you go out on a date with me?” and have her say, “Yes, a date with you would be nice!” before I knew for certain. I suppose I could still ask after the fact (“So, was this, like, a date?”) but that seems like poor form.

Must be a guy thing.

Anyway, a young lady and I went to see a movie together (I paid—because she lost her debit card) and then had dinner (she paid—because she found her debit card). A good time seemed to be had by all. However, when I saw her a few weeks later, she seemed a little cold and distant. So I went to my boss-ladies in the bookstore to find out what I did wrong*.

Why I (Probably) Won't Buy the Tomb Raider Movie on Blu

I’m starting to doubt the need for physical media.

Back when MP3s starting becoming the norm, I’d still buy CDs and rip them, keeping the CD just in case the computer crashed. But just the other day I bought an MP3 album from Amazon, who is kind enough to store a backup copy for me on their “cloud” server. Google has a similar service. I could lose my computer tomorrow, yet the album would still be available to me. Or, I could be on my parents’ computer and stream it from the cloud instead of filling up all of that hard drive space they’re saving for pictures of grandkids.

Lately it’s gotten me to thinking, why buy DVDs? With the amount of streaming content on the internet growing all the time, why buy movies at all? Well, okay. Say I love Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and watch it several times a year (just being hypothetical here). If it’s not streaming for free, I don’t want to pay $2.99 to rent it every few months. That I might (hypothetically) buy. But do I need to scrounge up a copy of the Blu-Ray in some Best Buy bargain bin?

Behold, my giant head and tiny shoulders

No, because just like with music, I could get the digital copy and store it on a cloud somewhere. If I had internet access, I could stream it to any device capable of that. Or if I knew I wouldn’t have internet, I could download it to an appropriate gadget. At this point, I’m starting to doubt that I’ll ever even buy a Blu-Ray player. Give me a tablet or netbook with an HDMI out, and I can (in theory) have my entire movie collection with me at all times.

As HDTV sets become the norm and storage/streaming devices become more common, making a run to the video store, or even not being able to find exactly what you want to watch, will become a thing of the past. No more perusing your roommate’s DVD shelf. All his favorite movies will be on his computer.

I used to see my DVD collection as a reflection of who I am. People could come into my apartment and look at it and go, “So that’s Trevor. How many Angelina Jolie movies can one person own before his friends call an intervention?” Now, they’ll never know (and neither will I).

If I didn’t like physical books so much, I could even see doing away with my heavy, heavy library. Moving would become much easier if just did all my reading on a tablet, keeping the brunt of library on some server in the sky. I’d also have a lot more shelf space for… Ramen noodles and dust and cans of Spam, I guess.

Am I missing something? Do I have too much faith in the cloud? If a solar flare kicks up an electromagnetic storm and wipes out their servers, my DVD player isn’t going to work anyway. Or am I getting ahead of myself?

John Carter of Mars… Earth?... Mars!

I love the idea of retro sci-fi. That’s not to say that I search out 40’s adventure serials or read old science fiction magazines from the era of the pulps. Honestly, those things bore me. But retro sci-fi re-imagined, like the underrated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, can put me on a high that lasts for months. So when I bought the soundtrack for Disney’s John Carter and heard the sweeping strains of an epic film, I got excited.

One Christmas break during my early college years I read A Princess of Mars, the book on which John Carter is based (apparently they thought calling the movie John Carter: A Princess of Mars sounded silly). The next Christmas I read the second book, The Gods of Mars. Even though it ended with a cliffhanger, for some reason I never went on with the series. But the grand adventure of Burroughs’ story stuck with me.

For a brief time the director of Sky Captain, Kerry Conran, was attached to make A Princess of Mars movie and I was thrilled. Then, as things often do in the film industry, the project fell apart and there was some doubt as to whether or not the world would ever get a John Carter movie. Also disappointing, Kerry Conran seems to have disappeared from the film industry. For all I know, the Grand Rapids native was the guy sitting behind me at the midnight IMAX screening who said at the end, “Well, it was better than Avatar.”

Yes, John Carter is much better than Avatar. And yes, I was at the midnight screening. I said I wouldn’t pay extra to see an inferior presentation (post-production 3D), but they were giving everyone who bought tickets to the midnight show an awesome poster. I couldn’t help myself. And the 3D actually wasn’t terrible.

Buy this $15 limited edition poster--get free  movie tickets!

A born fighter who was on the wrong side of the Civil War, John Carter has realized the futility of war and lost everything that was dear to him, even his identity, along the way. Now all he wants is to get rich and be left alone. A chance encounter in Arizona cave changes all that. Suddenly finding himself on Mars, an entire planet steeped in war and violence, he finds himself called to save a planet that seems bent on destroying itself.

The story seemed to linger too long in some places, particularly Earth. However, once we hit Mars (or Barsoom, as the natives call it), the story almost moves too fast, giving some of the more interesting characters barely enough time to introduce themselves before we’re off to the next mind-blowing set piece.

But oh how good those set pieces are! The last movie I saw at the theater was Stars Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I’d actually never seen it before. The world looked great, but the movie itself drove me to a place of boredom I’d never before experienced in a theater. The world of John Carter looks just as good, just as developed, and the action was every bit as epic as a space opera’s should be.

In the end, I didn’t mind paying the extra to see it on IMAX. I really, really want this movie to do well domestically so that we get sequels. I’m ready for another trip to Barsoom. 

Reading Addictions

My sister, the classical musician, once asked me why I don’t write more frequently. She observed that she plays music all the time—not just for practice, but because she loves it. If I think I’m a writer, shouldn’t I be writing with the same frequency and passion? Well, yes. However, the comparison doesn’t quite hold up. She plays, but she doesn’t compose. Writing is composing. Reading, however, is more like practicing.

Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write. I think he advocates reading for three or four hours a day, on top of writing 500 to 1,000 words every day. Then again, he’s filthy rich and has a mental twitch that compels him to write in the same way alcoholics are compelled to drink. I’m not the former, and lack the latter.

But I do read. Blissfully free of internet access in my apartment, with a broken DVD player and lots of time on my hands, oh how I read. And while I don’t have a writing addiction, I do tend to get hooked on certain authors or series. Here’s a snapshot of what I’m presently hooked on, after the jump. 

Introduction to Trevor

Sometimes the muse comes to you. And sometimes, you have to go the muse, club her over the head and drag her back to your cave by the hair. It’s a tenuous relationship.

Anyway, the muse has been striking me a bit more as of late (yes, she has her own club… and it’s glittered), so I thought I’d take the opportunity to start a fresh blog. Since Facebook isn’t as accommodating to notes as it used to be I figured I’d move my writing elsewhere and make it something a little more publically accessible. If you like what you read, be sure to send your friends here to join the fun.

I’ll be discussing the things that interest me, like pop culture, technology and surviving as a bachelor in a culture that expects you to married with two kids by the time you’re my age. Hopefully we can have some fun discussions here, so that this isn’t just a platform for my ramblings.

If you just stumbled on here and have no idea who I am, let me introduce myself. My name is Trevor. I’m in my late 20’s. There’s a war going on inside me for my musical tastes being waged by a 14 year old girl and a 20-something guy. Consequently, I listen to about as much Ke$ha and Kelly Clarkson as I do Bob Dylan and Foo Fighters. I’m an aspiring (but not perspiring) novelist, who, like most great artists, self-medicates more than he makes art. My drug of choice is coffee, and I make the best.

So that’s me.  This is my blog.