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Review – Team Seven by Marcus Burke

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 5, 2014.

Team Seven, while well-written, suffers from a lack of a coherent timeline and organization, lending significant doubt to its character’s actions, language, etc.

Perhaps unfortunately for my opinion of the book, it came on the heels of the excellent novel “Astonish Me” by Maggie Shipstead, which has a similar structure and pacing. While Shipstead’s novel clearly placed time in which each chapter took place, “Team Seven” lacks any sort of grounding.

Admittedly, “Team Seven” is Burke’s first novel. For this, he deserves credit for a well-written novel.

Even so, “Team Seven” is not without its glaring errors.

The book starts off with the narrator and main character, Andre, discussing his father’s “vitals.”

“I would ask Pop about his strange-smelling funny-cigarettes but I’m afraid to ask him questions anymore. He’s always in a rush and never tells me where he’s going when he leaves.”

So, we’re made to understand, the narrator is a youngster. Yet, this problem remains through the entire narrative: there is only rarely, or never, indication of time and the character’s respective ages/grades in the context of the time.

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Review – Death’s Acre by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 25, 2015.

“Death’s Acre” is not what it claims to be: “Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales.”

It’s Bill Bass’s bloated memoir, brimming with useless information, bogging down readers and serving no purpose.

It’s also Bill Bass’s chance to stand up and accuse men and women, not convicted in a court of law, of being murderers. More on that later.

Bass writes about all sorts of things, including a few of his cases and cases of his colleagues. He writes a little about the “body farm” and its genesis, but, not that much.

He complains about journalists, the scoundrels, and then bemoans when newspapers (written by journalists) didn’t cover a murder, disappearance or found body he deemed newsworthy. A little bit of cake-and-eat-it-too going on.

As much as Bass might bemoan journalists, he could have done with a journalistic editor. He jumps around, across, over, under and through time without much, if any, concrete groundings, concrete dates, concrete years to orient the reader. There is no timeline and the memoir is not ordered chronologically.

Result: Confusing and bloated. Too much useless fluff opinion. Bass tries to be a philosopher, to make great, profound points at the end of his chapters. Really, life is short and brutish and no amount of sugared words will mask that fact.

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Review – Professor Kompressor by Nils Andersson

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 1, 2014.

Professor Kompressor gets visited by agents with an agency so secret, they refuse to name it. He makes a series of inventions, visits a foreign country, flies over a bunch of others, and makes a bunch of inventions.

Professor Kompressor under cover (sic) certainly has a little charm, but glaring errors take away from that charm. In short, the book either needed an editor or, a much better one. And a couple of proof-reads. (For the record, the professor is not under the covers, rather, he is undercover.)

The biggest issue is the use of direct quotes. Most style books, and readers’ sanity, dictate the following: If a quote goes over a single paragraph, the end of the first paragraph, and all subsequent ones except for the last, do not have an ending quotation marks. Each quote encapsulated on both ends by quotation marks is supposed to mean the end of the quote: the next should be a different person’s quote.

Example, page 121:

“What are you doing with this battered old car, though?”
“Are you training to become a mechanic?”
“Doesn’t quite match your usual invention, does it? A bit too down to earth”

Because all this dialogue, in a row, is said by the same person, the quotation marks at the end of “though” and “mechanic should be left off, to mark it’s the same speaker. This lack style adherence makes the book much harder to read than it should be.

As a person who works in print, spacing issues equally struck me with chagrin. Indent-long spaces between words in the same sentence seemed like the paginator feel asleep at the keyboard.

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Review – Dr. Vigilante by Alberto Hazan

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 1, 2015.

The concept is ripe for a novel: doctor uses his access to patients, and trends, in the emergency room to carry out a war on the male criminal elements in the big apple.

The inherent tension in the idea would, seemingly, be enough fodder for a brilliant story. After all, it’s about a doctor who hurts people, and then proceeds to treat the people he’s intentionally harmed. A doctor violating his oath.

Dr. Vigilante does not live up to the lofty concept. It lives up to the pretension of a rich, hunky doctor living in New York City, who is written as a toned-down version of Batman.

The pretension, along with the terrible stereotypes and blatant sexism built into the plot, into the characters, even into the setting, helps drive this book down, down, down.

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In defense of YOLO and why it is not dying young

A recent The Atlantic article took on the concepts of “You Only Live Once” or “YOLO” in popular culture, specifically, pop music, in very contemporary terms, along with “Live fast, die young.”

Leah Sottile, alas, made out “YOLO” to be not only synonymous but the same as the concept of “Live fast, die young” or “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.”

I was driving and the M.I.A. song “Y.A.L.A.” — short for “you always live again” came on the radio. Only hours before, I had (uncritically) read Sottile’s essay on dying young in popular music.

I posit that “YOLO,” only living once, and life fast, die young are two entirely separate, although related, concepts and are, by no means, yet another indicator that today’s youth and pop culture are on a suicidal slide.

The concept of only living once is not the same as dying young, for multiple reasons. Only living once implies that there is no afterlife (such as Heaven or Hell) and that there is no second chance ( à la reincarnation.)

Only living once, rather than being a banner for living so hard that one incurs an early death, is actually a call, and a reflection in our larger society for, a change in how we behave. Only living once means that individuals only have one chance at this life: there is no afterlife to look forward to, nor is there another chance to look towards.

YOLO is an existential and an atheistic theme, I think, reflective of greater changes in our culture. Rather than being the rallying cry for why one should not care about the future, YOLO is a reflection of why we should care: there is no other chance. The only chance for good we have, in fact, the only chance at all, is contained within a singular life. Rather than a call for hard living, and early leaving, it is a call for the cherishing of life.

I will admit, Ke$sha’s “Die Young” is an appeal to the live fast, die young ideal. However, Icona Pop’s “I love it” is not. Besides being a lyrically-empty song, the entire contents played within the first thirty seconds, the song does not call for young death, as Atlantic writer Sottile posits. Rather, it is a call for a loosening of inhibitions.

The acts “I love it” describes are as follows:

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Night walks and lightning

The sun had set, dinner was long past, I still had a bill for my car insurance, and its accompanying check, I needed to drop into the mailbox. I donned some pants and shoes and I did. I walked down the road to the mailbox, and then I continued on until I reached La Puebla’ cemetery, adorned with presumably solar lights on a variety of graves. Alas, that is a post and a series of photos for another day.

On my way back a man in a pickup truck slowed down as he passed me. I looked to my right, thinking it was a cop — I had been expecting that contingency as soon as I started walking past the mailbox. As I walked around the graveyard, I was waiting, just waiting, to be accosted.

But no. The truck continued on, after creepily pausing next to me. Finally I got to my neighbor’s house (neighbor used within reason, 3-4 houses up.) My neighbor was in fact a man I had met only hours before when he came to pick up packages UPS had mistakenly left at our complex of houses rather than his own.

Two of them stood behind the fence. At first they asked me how it was going.

“Fine. It’s a beautiful evening. How are you?” I was cordial.

They started in, a vicious cadence.

“What’re you doing here? Who are you?”

“I’m out for a walk. My name is Wheeler Cowperthwaite. I’m the cops and courts reporter for the Rio Grande Sun. I’m Kathy’s new renter.”

The second man laughed, my neighbor that is, Mr. Tony Maestas. It was the same Anglo he’d met not an hour ago when picking up the packages.

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Reno’s got film

I may begrudge Santa Fe a lot of things: the lack of a Costco (marinated artichoke hearts by the three quarts), the over-all expensiveness, the lack of decent things offered on Craigslist and the subsequent over-pricing of thrift stores and ridiculous costs of things offered. Everyone seems to think torn-up couches are worth hundreds of dollars. Thrift stores, especially Good Will, think that coffee makers that cost $8 new at Walmart are worth $12-15 used.

That and the old white people. Going through Trader Joe’s is always some kind of terrible gauntlet, yet, I love Trader Joe’s, the wine, the tahini sauce, the pita bread. The gin.

All those gripes aside, Santa Fe has a pretty incredible movie scene, especially for a town so small. Hell, even for a large town. One movie theater is situated inside the university, another is a “United Artists” inside of a mall, yet a third was revamped and now owned by George R. R. Martin, although the screen is smaller than many in-home projections. And there’s another, one I have yet to go to, is the Center for Contemporary Arts.

The three arty theaters rarely overlap their movies, which is great. There are even foreign films, although, alas, rarely any German ones.

All of that preface because I went to see a film because it was set in Reno, although more appropriately, Reno and Sparks.

This Is Martin Bonner had an incredible score on Rotten Tomatoes, 92 percent. The audience rating was precipitously lower, hitting 67 percent, still a high rating.

I went in hoping for the best. It’s not the kind of movie, based on the synopsis, I’d normally see. Too benign. Too boring sounding. Reno, though. Represent.

The film is about an Australian who moves to Reno to help run a prison rehab program. Interesting enough premise. But the movie, the dialog, the plot all fall flat. The climax is hardly one at all and the movie just flatlines.

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Hiking by hitch

The cops and courts reporter I replaced at the Rio Grande SUN, as our style has it, moved on to North Dakota. With seemingly all that free time, he’s started writing again. He’s The Feral Scribe (www.theferalscribe.com) and his is a site I read when its updated, which is, as of late, often.

He writes what I strive to write here and elsewhere when I’m not on work time: observations, dispatches, anecdotes, a meaningful log of life, thrumming with a little bit of power, of the human experience, of something greater than itself.

I do try to reign myself in, reign my expectations in. Each web property I have, whether it’s Fat Grey Tom’s Cider, Cooking with Wheeler or Wheeler C. Photography, has its own purpose. Brewing, cooking column with cooking videos, photography portfolio. Even this blog has its own purpose: spillover. No greatness: striven for or attained. It’s a blog, after all, not articles or dispatches or meditations. Often, it is a spillway from my life. Other times, a spillover from my cooking. A log. Sometimes more.

Sadly, pen pals can only absorb so much of the human experience, when there’s more to express, more to tell. I try to use pen pals to bear some of the force of the human experience, to use that chance to connect and describe the world around. Alas, even one reliable pen pal is never enough. Two, three, four, reliable pen pals. That is enough. Maybe.

Which brings me to something The Feral Scribe had told me about: hitchhikers. Pick them up, he said. Often, they would drop stories on him as he ferried men and women to and fro, a legitimate form of transportation here.

When I lived in Reno, I rarely saw hitchhikers and if I did, I usually spotted them long after I could safely stop, pull into the right lane, or I wasn’t going anywhere, just to another part of town to get groceries. Even if I were in the right lane spotted them, going slow enough and with enough room for one, two three people, rarely would there be a net progress or movement to an ingress or egress. There would be no point for them to get a ride.

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Local flavor, local art

My New Mexico move came in a fit: driving from Reno to Santa Fe, with only the things I could carry in the back of my car. To be fair, I had a little extra room at the top I could have filled the car with. But, have not, want not, it’s all just material possessions. It’s not like I was trying to move my 18-year-old cat. (She’s living happily with my dad in Carson City.)

All the art I collected from Reno’s fabulous thrift stores (I write truly and without a hint of irony or sarcasm) had to be put into local storage. I had no room to bring it with me, I had no space when I arrived. The collection stayed behind.

I’ve since moved from the first space, in Santa Fe, where I could not feasibly put my own collection up. (Most of my former roommates were artists themselves, their work adorning the walls.) The move was to a one-bedroom casita, with a kitchen that flows into a living room. Lots and lots of wall space.

On Sunday, I was out and about in Santa Fe. Specifically, I went to see a play called “Revelations,” an unfortunately unfunny comedy. The actors and actresses were primed to pause for our laughter. Alas, it never came.

After that, I went to go to a local box store to pick up a over-the-door shoe holder, an attempt to try to get some of the under-foot clutter out of my bedroom and hanging somewhere. It was a success and I was right next to the Goodwill in Santa Fe, so I popped over.

Lo and behold, one of the favorite paintings I’ve yet collected was there, ripe for the cheap buying, which was a surprise. Normally the Santa Fe Goodwill overprices everything: $150 for a torn and ripped couch, $1-$5 for glasses (which cost $1 new), etc.

Goodwill: $7.99. It looks like the artist was aping the Gorillaz style.

A beautiful oil, with so much local flavor. It goes perfectly in the casita.

And then, a painting sans frame, this time much larger. Again, it was affordable. Again, I felt a desperate need to fill my walls back up, to make a house a cliched home. Plus, I just leave collecting used art.

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New job & state & county & time zone

Santa Fe, NM — I already wrote about the actual driving from Reno to Santa Fe. It wasn’t particularly hard and my friend’s parents were gracious enough to host me for a night so I could make the trip in two days.

I’m always hesitant to write about my life, about the personal, about the “I.” No, I’m not hesitant. That’s some word-mincing. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of exposing myself, I’m afraid of exposing bias or some vulnerability or something I didn’t think would be a weakness but, in fact, is. Among other things, I’m always afraid (read: paranoid) something personal I write will then be used against me.

The truth shall set you free, that’s said, right? I don’t believe it, but I can want to believe in it.

I started on July 9, 2013 as the cops and courts reporter at the Rio Grande Sun, a weekly newspaper featured in a documentary I have yet to see.

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