RED COFFEE Suspense Novel OUT NOW!

Red Coffee is my latest novel, and it's about young model Lois Angelus, grabbing any modeling job she can, whether it's posing for sculptors, posing for high-end department stores, or even providing eye candy for a tenth-rate slapstick comedy short feature. Everything seems to be moving steadily for Lois until she’s witness to a murder of a prominent banker. That's when her troubles begin, and they never slow down in this hard-boiled horror tale.

It's the story of a woman caught in the crossfire of a class war in Thirties Los Angeles. My novel blends elements of urban horror and roman noir with a feminine viewpoint through it all. I originally serialized this novel on my blog about ten years ago, and now it can be enjoyed as a standalone novel.

The prototype for Lois is based on my favorite actresses of the post-silent and pre-code era like Ann Dvorak, Aline McMahon, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Leila Hyams, to name just a few. The way they combined feminine grace with a tough inner core inspired me to create a character in tribute to them.

I put this project on delay for all these years because it was such a radical departure from anything else I've written I didn't really know what to do with it, but now I feel confident enough to release it on its own merits.

Red Coffee is a hard-boiled amalgam of the pre-code cinema of William Wellman and the moody horror films of Val Lewton, creator of Cat People and The Seventh Victim. Prepare to enter a world of deadly scarecrows, murderous folksingers, academics tripping on LSD, slanderous séances, white supremacist terrorists, and birds, birds, birds!

Red Coffee is available as an eBook for only $3.99, and can be purchased through these eTailers:

Amazon Kindle: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B0892PPSSC&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_ooPZEbD3QRBJT

iTunes: https://books.apple.com/us/book/red-coffee/id1514799647

Barnes & Noble Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/red-coffee-andy-seven/1137067297;jsessionid=E86FAA41AB4A3B7B80B38689E1390E9D.prodny_store01-atgap09?ean=9781098315139&st=AFF&2sid=Goodreads,%20Inc_2227948_NA&sourceId=AFFGoodreads,%20Inc

Kobo (Canada): https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/red-coffee

My new novel can probably be found at other sites besides the ones mentioned above, so check it our wherever it is. I hope you enjoy it, and as usual, I guarantee outrage on every page!

Andy Seven Ltd. · Sometimes I (2020 Remix)

Writer's Block Can Be Deadly

I'm going through a pretty long period of writer's black. It's been going on for about a year already. There are several factors involved: the destruction of my marriage by my insane ex-wife, an exhausting seven-day a week work schedule that begins with a 5 am wake-up call, and the realization that the United States has embraced both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as its current role models. I feel so agitated that sitting down to punch out another punk rock crime potboiler has become downright impossible. The distractions and destructions have become paralyzing.

But in the words of super-clown Leo Sayer, The Show Must Go On. My writing can't stop and damn my eyes for stopping. Even crap writing is better than no writing at all. I'll make an effort to produce more work in the coming year. I'll try to balance it along with my folk music project (as mentioned in a previous blog). In the meantime, what do you think of the new Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood? Interesting that, a story about a grade-Z western TV actor who hangs out with a stuntman and gets implicated in a famous murder in the swinging Sixties? Sounds like my novel Crash walker, a lot like my novel Crash Walker. Ha!

Well, I gotta go now. Got to do my goth clown videos and other trash hobbies and damn, maybe even squeak in some writing. I've got a job to do, damn it.

My Goat Can Totally Beat Up Your Goat

A few decades ago I attended Los Angeles City College to study the art of screenwriting. The teacher wasn’t very good, in fact he was rather lazy and instead of instructing us how to write for film he merely had us write our scripts and then have us read it to the rest of the class. Groan. This wasn’t screen writing, this was a bad creative writing class.

What kind of scripts did my classmates write? One graying pipe-smoker of a fella wrote a coming of age tale which took places in the Fabulous Fifties and included slow motion scenes of wrist cutting and other suicidal rituals. There was also tedious dialogue between man and woman about “going all the way”.

Another classmate wrote about a plucky woman trying to make it in the food catering business. It wasn’t very funny and it almost read like a diary of her working day. While she read I stared at her metal braces and concluded she looked a bit like a shark.*

What’s the point? Well, sometimes when I read social networking sites it reminds me of that screenwriting class. Everybody’s got something to say but they’re not saying it very well. The irony is that everyone has a great story to tell, but they usually need someone else to tell it for them. Illiteracy breeds inarticulation.

I enjoy watching videos of writers discussing how they plot their story. I like the ones from Harlan Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, etc. I skipped the one from Joyce Carol Oates because her stories take forever to get going and her advice meandered just as badly. Stephen King’s advice is better than his actual writing. Paul Auster was drawn out and boring I had to turn him off after five minutes. He just took so long to get to his point. I wonder if he ever took a screenwriting course.

Charles Bukowski inadvertently gave advice in his German TV interview when he criticized other writers, saying that very sentence should move the action further and that overly describing things was deadly. A similar remark was made by Alfred Hitchcock when he was interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show. Films should be about action, not second unit footage of the scenery and the sets. Keep things moving!

I’ve always been accused of writing too briefly and not being too overly descriptive. This is good. This means I lie in the Buk/Hitch camp of storytelling. Keep things moving! Do you really want to read three hundred pages of this:

“You know, I was contemplating the early years of my life, those summer years of red sky dawns and cold frost forming on the windows of my Northeastern home. The newsboy pedaled by our house in his new Schwinn, throwing the paper with his expert right hand. Father read the news at the breakfast table as Mother prepared a hearty American breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, erc………………” The scary part is reading books where this prattle goes on for pages and pages. You want to cut your throat reading it.

Yes, my writing is very tight and spare. People want you to get on with it. Time is tight. If I ask you to describe an automobile accident nobody wants to know what everyone wore or how big their noses were. I want to know who did what to who and how did one car hit the other one. The name of the game is action. As in movies, so in writing.

*By the way, my screenplay was pretty bad, too. Six months after I wrote it I burned the stupid thing, but I do recommend you try writing one to get a fine appreciation of dialogue and scene staging. It will help your writing.

Damn The Darkness

Last month I was in Las Vegas and visited the much heralded Kiss miniature golf course. Prior to going there I fantasized of being in a cool, fun miniature golf course filled with crazy rock & roll props and stuff. It was a little bit like that, but then again…

The KISS miniature golf course can be found at the end of a completely empty strip mall, and unlike many mini golf courses, is indoors. Inside the walls are all painted black with paintings of the band and other images (‘70s hookers) in either blacklight or fluorescent paint. The images are painted with a heavy hand by a man who was probably blind in both eyes.

There are some interesting statues, like a big Gene Simmons head (no pun intended) with an enormous protruding tongue you need to tee your golf ball into. There are lots of fake amplifiers and giant phallic guitars to putt your way through.

The music piped through the PA is largely composed of material spanning the band’s entire career, solo albums and non-makeup period, as well. When a Paul McCartney & Wings track played over the PA it was met like an unwelcome intruder, so yes, there’s some scattered vintage rock tunes programmed in addition to the KISS songbook. By the way, it’s very hard to play below par to “Beth”.

The golf course also had a rock & roll party lounge roped off from us slobs, a fully stocked bar, as well as a KISS souvenir shop. The people who worked there were pretty nice so I don’t want them to feel like I’m fucking with them, but nevertheless, it had a low budget ghetto vibe about it.

I suppose it could’ve been worse: imagine an Oasis or a Smiths golf course. Yeah, a KISS golf course suddenly sounds pretty good.

*********************

While I was standing in line at Amoeba Records yesterday the store played a video of Donny Darko, the Magna Carta to all Emo kids the world over, on the monitors. The film raised a multiple series of questions about mortality and other major life issues, but the grim attitude it shipped is what struck me the most.

Every cool person in the movie is pale skinned and glum and all the smiling, happy people came off looking like idiots. Well, fuck us happy people! I was also amused at the myopic view given towards Graham Greene’s story “The Destructors”. Donny interpreted the story of a bunch of street kids mindlessly destroying an old man’s carefully constructed house as “creativity through destruction”. There’s no reference made whatsoever to the story being written shortly after World War II, and that it’s more likely about the brutal bombing of London.

I remembered how ten years ago I threw all my black clothes away and began wearing more bright colored clothes. As ridiculous as it may sound, doing that was more subversive than wearing flat, empty black.

I also discarded that fey hipster negativity, my new mantra being “Damn The Darkness”. It’s too easy to embrace the dark and the grim. It’s not fatalistic; it’s passive acceptance of a grotesque, ugly, horrible world without creating an alternative. You don’t have to wear a stupid pink sweatshirt screaming “CHOOSE LIFE”, but you’re going to have to do more than just frown and say “Everything sucks”. Putting shit down all the time doesn’t make you cool.

Illustration by Yuki Ramaro

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Several plateaus are reached when you work on a novel. The first one is obviously getting all that insanity down on paper and the third plateau is putting the final touches to your work. Right now I’m reaching the middle plateau, doing rewrites of all the things banged out for the first draft. Wow!

If you’re a serious writer you’ll know how great rewrites are. You get to read the whole novel back to yourself and keep all the good parts and fix all the shitty, jacked-up sentences and paragraphs, etc. etc. You also get to beef up all the parts that you kicked out so quickly you neglected to fill in with enough details.

The joy of rewrites is being able to step back and fix an already exciting project you’re working on. It’s not unlike Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film “The Mystery of Picasso” where the great master steps back, looks at a brilliant section of his painting, you’re thinking “That’s so brilliant”, and then he literally paints something else right over that section! Picasso’s approach can be applied to all artists. That’s rewriting for you: your novel might read really cool, but you can always make it even better.

Do Spiders Dream of Electric Flies?

Not so long ago I stood in line at an auditorium waiting for the doors to open for an important meeting. I stood by a rather boring floor-to-ceiling glass window. Then, something caught my eye that completely demolished any semblance of boredom.

A fly positioned itself lazily on a steel beam in front of the window, and as I quickly looked into the window, where perched on the curtain on the other side was a spider. The spider positioned and re-positioned itself to get closer and closer towards the fly lying on the steel beam outside.

I wondered if the spider thought the fly was within reach of trapping and eating? Did the fly not move because it was afraid of the spider on the other side? Were they both aware of the fact that there was a window separating them? Bees have been known to fly around plate glass windows for hours hitting themselves against the plate thinking they can fly out.

The whole rite of eat or be eaten became very perplexing with no answer in sight. There was no outcome to be seen, nor would I even see any attempt made since I was called in for my meeting. In less than five minutes I saw the meaning of life told in front of me: Someone will survive and someone will die and we’ll never know why or when.

Last year I sent a submission to a literary zine I respected. It was based in London. It dealt with mostly LGBT subject matter and clamored something awful for works that were truly OUTRAGEOUS and TRULY ORIGINAL. This is something I used to hear record companies crying for all the time, but once upon hearing my music they’d turn turtle and play dead, so I knew this hustle was horseshit. Nevertheless, I sent them some of my writing.

While I was waiting for my answer from this zine I looked through their stuff and there was a lot of bad lesbian poetry, just awful stuff that sounded like a woman whining to you in a coffee shop about her disloyal girlfriend. There was one thing that was kind of glam rock but was so rife with comic book stereotypes of glam rockers. The writer sounded like he knew nothing about the subject but found cross-dressing titillating.

After sitting around watching my hand grow and reading the zine’s editor tweeting over and over about SEND US YOUR SUBMISSIONS and more claptrap about OUTRAGEOUS and TRULY ORIGINAL I lost it. I tweeted back, “Hey, my story, have you read it? Are you a beggar or a receiver?”

Mister English LGBT Zine probably bristled at my tweet rejoinder because he snarked back, “We are currently swamped with submissions BLAHBLAHBLAH”….Then why keep begging for submissions, matey?

A week later I finally got my response from this character. It went something like this, and I quote:
“We regret to send you the news that your story didn’t make the grade, however out of all the rejected submissions yours had the most potential”.

(Okay, you didn’t care for my story. Life goes on, but then Mister Swamped goes into a critical analysis of why my writing wasn’t good enough for his obscure zine, which was under no circumstances requested).

“Your writing shows a marked lack of subtlety. Your plotting is brash and overly violent. Your dialogue and descriptions are executed with a primitive crudeness which could use some refining”. I don’t recall even encouragement to submit to them again which other publishers routinely throw out as a beau geste.

The arrogance of someone topping the news your work is unacceptable by offering unsolicited criticism in superior tones was enough to piss me off for the better part of a week. Then I read and re-read his remarks until it finally hit me, and then I laughed. And after that I laughed some more.

His remarks flashed back at me in neon letters: “LACK OF SUBTLETY”…”BRASH”…”OVERLY VIOLENT”…”PRIMITIVE”….In other words he said I wrote like a fucking American. Well, that’s how Americans like to write. Jim Thompson. Charles Bukowski. Jack London. William S. Burroughs. America. No apologies intended. And certainly no changes needed either, Mister Obscure Literary Zine. Have fun with your little cottage publication. Your tame glam rock stories don’t even recall my glory days of the Seventies. Do some fucking research. There’s my unsolicited advice to you.

As long as we’re giving advice about writing, here’s mine: writing doesn’t have fuck-all to do with ideas. You can cart around the world’s oldest idea for a story and still make it work. The success of a story is contingent upon two elements: ATTITUDE & APPROACH.

Attitude is your story and how you SEE it; Approach is your story and how you TELL it. Attitude can also be called the POV (Point Of View). A good example would be the writings of Jack London and Jack Kerouac, two writers who wrote about riding the rails, taking on odd jobs and traveling across the United States. The stories aren’t particularly gripping but their attitude is what sells the tale. Both writers have a distinct attitude on the same situation that makes their writing breathe. Their POV aka their eyes see a similar landscape but everything gets processed in their own style.

A cinematic example of that would be The Killers (1946) which is told from the POV of the insurance investigator, and then we see the same story in 1964 as told from the POV of the killers themselves. Our vision of what the writer sees through his eyes is told through their ATTITUDE.

Approach is the way the tale is told. This is a little different from attitude because now we’re reading our story from a different voice. I can write a bank heist novel but because of how I tell it, it won’t read like W.R. Burnett, who writes in a lean, taut style, or like Ken Bruen, who peppers his crime writing with a lot of Irish slang. To put it simply, it’s the singer, not the song.

In other words you could write the world’s oldest shaggy dog story, but if your APPROACH is different then it’ll still read like something new. The telling of a tale is mostly sold on the writer’s reporting of the events, and originality be damned. I’ve read countless books with original concepts that suffered from shitty story-telling. Don’t worry about having original ideas, they don’t mean shit if you can’t tell a story well. So go write your crazy, unoriginal story.

And don’t be afraid to write like an American.

What Is And What Should Never Be

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
-Stephen King

While I understand that a gym isn't a gathering place for all persons and things intellectual there are times when I hear things that are a little too ridiculous to be believed. While I was flapping my pins on the thigh abductor I overheard some young guy talking to an older gent about his college courses.

"Yeah, I'm taking English at UCLA but I really want to write for movies and TV", the 22-year old crowed. "I like all kinds of movies and I know how to write for them". I guess everyone's entitled to their daydreams but nowhere in the conversation did this kid say what kind of books he read and what sort of novels he enjoyed. The entire realm of literature didn't come up once in the conversation. And he talked about becoming a writer.

Let's talk about the guys that wrote for the movies, the greats: Stirling Silliphant, Dalton Trumbo, Robert Towne, Rod Serling, Charles Brackett, to name a few. Did any of them say when they were young, "I want to write for the movies?" No, I'm pretty sure they dreamed of writing brilliant novels but somehow got roped into the screenwriting game. And I'll wager anything they all had extremely prodigious libraries full of books and spent all their leisure time reading them.

The scary part is when you ask a clueless guy like Gym Kid who his favorite writer is and he'll probably say "Hitchcock!" People like this are completely oblivious to the fact that if it weren't for the writing of Cornell Woolrich, Robert Bloch, Patricia Highsmith and Daphne Du Maurier, to name a few, there wouldn't even be anything for Mr. Hitchcock to film at all. He knew it, too: one of the first credits beginning each episode of his TV show names the writer of the story. Hitch even had a mystery magazine back in the day.

I once knew a hammerhead whose favorite mantra was, "I don't read books, I don't need books, I depend on my looks". What an asshole. Needless to say he now works in the motion picture industry.

Here's another story for you: Rebecca met a fast-talking blowhard who kept up about how he was going to write a novel and then write for the movies and went on and on about it and of course didn't divulge about what the hell he was writing.

"I couldn't stand him! You've already written two novels and this guy kept talking like he was King Shit just because he was starting some dumb novel he wouldn't talk about. I just wished he'd shut up!"
"I know how to shut him up", I said.
"How do you do that?"
"Ask him who's his favorite author", I smiled. "That always shuts them up".

One of my favorite mottoes is "In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books". I'm not joking, either: we have friends who say, "I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT MY EXPERIENCES AS A STRIPPER IN SAN FRANCISCO". Okay, even if it's a memoir there needs to be plot development, character development (i.e. someone who started out as a rival becomes your best friend towards the second half of the book), fact checking, so on and so forth. And then what style is the book written in: Will it be funny sleaze like Bukowski, dark decadence like Hubert Selby Jr., erotically charged like Genet, what's your POV?

To say you want to be a writer without reading books is like saying you want to be Governor of California without knowing The Declaration of Independence (um, wait a minute, I just described Arnold Schwarzenegger, scratch that). It's like saying you want to play guitar without knowing who Les Paul, Hubert Sumlin, Chet Atkins or The Ventures are. Without an understanding of the history of your craft you're flying without a pilot's license, which means you'll crash and burn.

It also means your memoir of being a stripper in San Francisco will never be published. Read a fucking book. It'll probably change your life.

Illustrations by Rebecca Seven

Desert Island Short Stories

In 1942 the BBC programmed a radio show called "Desert Island Discs" where celebrities would come on and talk about what eight records they would take with them if they were stranded on a desert island. Since then there have been millions of variations on that concept, and I'm going to borrow it myself to list ten of my desert island short stories.

Short stories probably have more of a chance to reach a larger audience than ever before due to the rapidly decreasing attention span in most people these days. You could probably get more people to read a short work of fiction than a full-length novel, which isn't necessarily a bad thing considering how many great short works there are waiting to be read and enjoyed.

It's also interesting how many writers are better served by the short fiction medium than they are by full-length novels, writers like Paul Bowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John O'Hara, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and many more. I think brevity in storytelling wins the game every time.

Anyway, for all intents and purposes here are my ten favorite short stories I could read again and again if I were stranded on a desert island - kind of like Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode where he's alone in the library with millions of his beloved books after the planet's been blown up and everybody else is dead - in no particular order:

1. A Distant Episode - Paul Bowles: An American professor of linguistics arrives in an Arabic Maghreb town conducting a survey. Everyone is gruff towards him, but nevertheless he maintains a friendly demeanor. An irritable guide leads him to an increasingly darker part of the desert to buy local goods, where he is abandoned by the guide and abducted by a gang of thieves. The thieves tear out the linguist's tongue and tie a stream of tin cans around him like a common dog, making him perform tricks like an animal. Although he has been degraded to being treated like a common animal, even an animal eventually turns on its master.

One of the best things about this story is the way Bowles shifts the topography of the desert sets the mood of the story, ranging from bright and hilly to dark and flat. This is one of those short stories that stays with you forever.

2. Torch Song - John Cheever: Torch Song is told from the POV of a man named Jack who has a crush on a woman named Joan. Both newly relocated to New York City, Joan keeps spurning Jack as he watches her date creep after creep, Jack's love always unrequited by her. As she keeps turning him down he watches her descend lower and lower in her taste in men.

Well! This is as believable as it gets. I can't even count how many fucking losers I've known like Joan, sinking lower and lower into the toilet with their bad romantic choices. By the end of the story we finally get an idea why she picks the damaged men that she loves, and it's pretty creepy. I also loved The Chaste Clarissa, O Youth And Beauty!, and The Swimmer. John Cheever may be the greatest short fiction writer I've ever read.

3. Billenium- J.G. Ballard: The most claustrophobic story ever written, one where staircases are crowded with dozens of people living and sleeping in. Tides of people moving in waves against the direction the main character's headed in, a simple task of going somewhere takes hours! People sitting on top of each other like nests of roaches, it's one of the most powerful statements on overpopulation ever written.

4. Exactly Eight Thousand Dollars Exactly - John O'Hara: A wealthy industrialist gets a visit from his brother, a snotty, deprecating snob who's only dropping by to put the pinch on his brother. As the story progresses we discover that the corporate building was once a country club both brothers frequented in their youth. We also learn that the prosperous CEO was bullied mercilessly by his less industrious brother. The industrialist writes a check to get his brother out of his hair, the snobby brother maintaining an ugly, unrepentant attitude.

Although John O'Hara wrote many great short stories, this is my favorite. It's one of those stories that reveals more and more as you continue reading, not letting you really know the score until you reach the end. There's a rawness in the emotions and an ugly truth so many writers fear to tread.

5. Big Blonde - Dorothy Parker: Big Blonde is the classic tale of a woman who measures her self-esteem according to her ability to make men happy. Written in the Roaring Twenties, it is as relevant today as it was when it was first written. Big Blonde is the story of Hazel Morse, better known as Haze (dig the irony) who's the ultimate party girl, and like all party girls dumped by one man after another as the years go by.

It has often been said that both Dorothy Parker and Patricia Highsmith wrote misogynistic stories, but I don't think the men fare any better than the women in them. I believe both writers don't harbor any hatred for women, but more likely don't think much of women who use men left and right like Hazel Morse.

6. The Ice Palace - F. Scott Fitzgerald: Ice Palace begins with the main character Sally Carrol looking out her window in her home in hot and torrid South. Engaged to be married to New Yorker Harry Bellamy, she travels up to New York with him to visit his family and friends.

The trip turns into a revelation of sorts for Sally when Harry drops his guard and shows his snobby, insensitive side to her, cursing all Southerners among other things. On a cold and wintry night the pair go to a large auditorium carved out of ice to watch a hellish pep rally. Sally's snooty fiancee disappears during the rally into a dark, narrow channel of ice with Sally following him, eventually becoming lost in the cold, narrow darkness.

Ice Palace may very well be Fitzgerald's Fuck You to New York and literary society, depicting small town Southerners as a soulful bunch and meat head Yankees as a load of loud, boisterous Pagans. Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless, Ice Palace is a brilliant work.

7. The Hyannis Port Story - Kurt Vonnegut: Published shortly before the Kennedy Assassination, Hyannis Port Story is a very funny story about old Commodore William Rumfoord, a staunch Goldwater Republican who's unlucky enough to be the neighbor to President John F. Kennedy's off-duty hideaway. The Commodore's already pissed off to death that his small hometown has turned into a shrine to the President complete with gift shops, noisy tour guides and even noisier tourists.

Yes, The Commodore is so pissed that tour guides refer to his house as "The Ugly One Next To The President's" that out of spite he posts a huge billboard of Goldwater's face with spotlights all around it. The last straw comes when The Commodore finds out from a Secret Service agent that his pride and joy son has been sneaking around with a Kennedy relative.

I liked this Vonnegut story over his others because he didn't seem to try as hard as he did with others. I felt a very effortless humor in this one that I found very appealing. I also liked Next Door and The Foster Portfolio, too, and Vonnegut's sense of humor never fails.

8. Memory In White - Budd Schulberg: Washed-up boxer Young Pancho Villa The Third makes a go at being a ring announcer by buying a white suit and a megaphone in a pawn shop. He shows up at the gym he used to box at and announce all the fighters sparring in the ring. Trouble is he has a thick Puerto Rican accent as well as a sever speech impediment. Through the miracle of annoying persistence he graduates from gym announcer to all-time ring announcer. His debut as a legit ring announcer is of course met with tragedy.

Schulberg was a genius at capturing the sounds and mood of the New York streets, never romanticizing them but breathing them to life, warts and all. Although he will always be known as the writer of On The Waterfront and A Face In The Crowd his short works definitely deserve to be rediscovered.

9. Confessions Of A Man Insane Enough To Live With Beasts - Charles Bukowski: Probably the most compressed version of the Bukowski legend that many remember from the Barfly and Factotum movies. There's the story of his awful skin problems, even more awful jobs held at rock-bottom wages, and the girl he meets in a bar who brings him home to the nutty old yacht-boating sugar daddy. Everything you ever wanted to read about Bukowski is distilled in this 21-page story.

10. The Monster - Stephen Crane: This is actually a novella rather than a short story, but I added it here, anyway. Henry Johnson is the black coachman for a well-to-do white family in upstate New York. He forms a strong bond with the boss' four year old son, Jimmie Trescott, which supercedes any racial barriers. When Henry isn't working for the white family he courts the prettiest black girl in town and dresses like an absolute dandy.

While on his date the town goes into an uproar over a fire at the Trescott's house and Henry runs over to save Jimmie by racing into the burning house to save him. Consequently he is severely burned beyond recognition from the fire and has lost what was left of his sanity. Out of guilt Dr. Trescott keeps him at home, away from prying eyes. The whole town, white and black alike have now ostracized Henry Johnson for his disability in spite of the fact that he committed a completely charitable act.

The Monster is a brilliant mediation on racism, societal intolerance and personal guilt. It's arguably Stephen Crane's finest work, a writer more people should seek out. The Blue Hotel and The Open Boat are pretty brilliant, too.

Unfortunately I've left out many great short fiction writers like Graham Greene, Joe R. Lansdale, Harlan Ellison, Elmore Leonard, Bernard Malamud and Raymond Chandler, to name a few, but that's the beauty of libraries and books. There are a million stories to be told and it's all in your grasp, anytime, anywhere. Even on a desert island.

A Perfectly Safe Book Review That's Still Guaranteed To Manage To Offend Absolutely Everyone

Social networking, like cancer is here to stay and probably won't ever leave and will take our lives away from us in varying degrees. While I'm proud of my abstention of Facebook - big deal -I'm still linked to Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, You Tube, Instagram and probably a few more digital dungeons that have slipped my mind at the present time. One of the more unusual phenomena in the social networking stratosphere is the review site, i.e. Yelp for vendors - Yelp is The Devil, by the way; Goodreads and Shelfari for books, Rotten Tomatoes and iMDB for movies to name just a few.

Writing reviews for Yelp started out as a bit of fun in the beginning but all good things must come to an end, eventually. Even with over 200 followers I still had people screaming at me for reviews that were less than completely worshipful of their favorite burger stand: "ARE YOU TOTALLY RETARDED????? HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE IN 'N OUT??????? DUDE!!!! I CALL FOUL!!!"

Somehow it wasn't enough for them to love an overrated dump like In 'N Out (My Anus), I had to join the choir of colon abusers singing their praises but because I didn't I had to endure hateful comments and PMs (Personal Messages).

Things finally got out of hand when my wife and I got out of our car in Koreatown on a Saturday morning at 9 am, and a disgruntled Yelper down the block honked his car horn several times and gave me the finger. Just to make sure I got the message he got out of the car and screamed "FUCK YOU" at me several times. When he noticed my wife and I laughing at him for behaving like a retarded dragon biter he nervously ran back to his car and quickly sped off.

After leaving stupid Yelp and its idiotic drama I joined Goodreads, way better but things are starting to get psycho in Book Review Land, too. Although I have loads of followers and friends (you're all awesome) there are a few wing nuts that scream at my reviews for "revealing spoilers". A spoiler, for those who aren't familiar with the word, is a surprising twist in the story that usually alters the climax or denouement of the novel.

The spoilers that I have been accused of revealing were not major plot points but nevertheless inspired more screaming comments on the order of "DUDE!!! YOU JUST RUINED THE BOOK FOR ME!!! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING????"
Another angry comment came from a midget from Bulgaria who said, "OBVIOUSLY YOU'RE A TROLL (not with over 225 followers I'm not) AND I WILL HAVE YOU KICKED OFF GOODREADS FOR GOOD!!!!"

By the way, most of these hysterical protests seem to come from the male camp. Women seem to spend more time actually reading books instead of whining about book reviews. Apparently life to these whistle blowers seems unbearable in the knowledge that someone somewhere doesn't like something they've enjoyed for years, and until they scream their insane heads off at you for not liking their favorite book, movie or record the world will never spin properly on its axis again.

Let's talk about this spoiler business, and I'm going to be harsh about it. If a film or a book is over 30 years old it's perfectly okay to mention the ending or any other part of it because everybody on the planet has probably already read or seen it, okay?

If you don't believe me, read numerous interviews with Alfred Hitchcock discussing the ending to Psycho or Orson Welles discussing "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane or Robert Aldrich explaining the reason he changed the ending to Kiss Me Deadly. Would these same Goodreads ass clowns run over to these legendary directors and scream "DUDE!!!! SPOILERS!!!" to their faces? I think not.

So, with that in mind I present to you a book review tailor made to satisfy even the most petulant of spoiler queens. The book I'll review today may or may not be a collection of short stories called "Welcome To The Monkey House" authored by (spoiler alert) Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This collection of stories is bound with a front and back cover made of card stock with an attractive illustration on the front. In between are many pages with stories published in them. I hope I haven't given anything away so far!

This book begins with a (spoiler alert) preface by the author which lasts three pages. It's a fairly mild preface but actually pretty dull. There, I said it. Good thing it was so short. Most of the stories were written in the Fifties and early Sixties and perfectly capture the blandness of the American middle class during the Cold War era.

Like all short story collections the quality of the tales vary wildly from largely satisfying to totally pointless, (SPOILER ALRT, DUDE!!!!) Long Walk To Forever had a lame ending, likewise More Stately Mansions. Lame endings.

I also found Vonnegut's science fiction writings to be dry and dull. He does shine, however, when he approaches the eccentric middle class in stories like The Foster Portfolio about a man with a big secret (DUDE!!!BRO!!!), Next Door and Go Back To Your Precious Wife And Son.

I also found Vonnegut's compassion and insight towards people outside of his ethnicity poignant, as in his heart breaking tale of a black German orphan in DP or his tale of a Holocaust survival couple in Adam.

But the crown jewel in this collection is an extremely funny story called The Hyannis Port Story which lampoons the crass commercialization of the Camelot-era Kennedy presidency, published just months before the President's untimely death in 1963. DUDE!!! SPOILERS!!!!

Yes, there will be thousands who won't agree with my review. Start lighting your torches and sharpen your pitchforks. You can burn me down in Koreatown.

The Greatest Book Ever Written

Back in the day when I actually cared about having a band and brought guitarists on board this wonderful guy from Tempe, Arizona joined my band. His name was Mikhail Bohonus but liked to go by the name Mr. Bohonus, just fine with me. He looked like a punk rock Gary Cooper, almost seven feet tall and thin as a rail. He never did drugs or drank but he smoked like a chimney and chugged Big Gulps like a demon. All those sugary soda drinks made him act like a speed freak, hyper to the max and constantly imploring me at rehearsals to write new songs on the spot. "Come on, let's wrote some new stuff" - A.D.D. musicianship at its most scary, and good luck writing with him because he'd break into these rapid Robert Fripp guitarisms, surprisingly not punk rock so we never wrote shit together. He wrote the guitar line to "Phantasm III" but I had to harness it to a rhythmic booty shake so girls can enjoy it.

What Mr. Bohonus did better than anyone else was write and put out his own demented chapbooks. Screw that old whore Henry Rollins, this was underground writing at its finest. His short prose collections "Green Piss" and "Orange Donut With Sprinkles" were wild collections but he really hit his stride with "7 Steps To Hell", a collection of Jack Schick cartoons with obscene captions replacing the original holy roller sermon Schick schlock.

His magnum opus and my vote for the greatest book ever written is a genius work of art called "I Hate You", which sports a black cover and no title because the hate is real. This masterpiece is a scant twenty-six pages long, bears no punctuation or capitals and is a veritable Mobius strip of hate. The book begins with, and I quote: "you suck and i hate the fuck out of you and i want you the fuck out of my neighborhood you slimy sick excuse for rotting flesh that you are and you are too because thats all you fuck is rotting flesh your mother was a fucking corpse anyway and ill with countless sexual diseases because she got them from making it with the trash that your kind do it with and you live like a slob you dont even flush your toilet or use deodorant so you smell like the crack of a bums ass the kind your sister licks at lunchtime to get her nourishment at least when she isnt near a dirty scummy toilet she can lick and chew on the lumps of toilet paper that are filled with hard peanutty lumps of poop and thats what makes up her brain cause she is stupid and drives a really shitty car the kind they use in maaco commercials..." Blow me, Lydia Lunch. You wish you were this radical.

Let's fast forward to Page 6: "...get the fuck out of here i am going to rip you to pieces and cram them down the sewer so the rats can eat you and shit you out of their asses because you are a rats ass and rats shit and its what you deserve today right now you lazy fuck go die get leave and go stick your fat head on a railroad track so it can get squashed or i will nail you to the front of a semi truck and drive it over a fucking cliff you son of a bitch..." No screaming caps, no exclamation points, all subdued but pissed lower case. Genius.

Page 15: "...you are a walking comedy you are so dumb stupid and pathetic you dont even know how to play candyland and even if you had candyland the company who makes it would find out cause all of a sudden all the other candyland games would stink when children opened them up the company would take it back from you and slap you in the face for even thinking that they made the game for you..."

The greatest book ever written, and if you don't agree with me, "...i hate you the gods even hate you especially zeus he is just aching to pump countless bolts of lightning into your ass he will bring back to life every roman gladiator and they will slaughter you one by one over and over yes it will be a glorious undertaking the klingons will have their turn too and so will everyone else that has ever lived in fiction or nonfiction they will pay me huge sums of money to get a chance to destroy you and i will have a penthouse and women and you name it motherfucker i will tear you and punch holes in your tongue with an awl ya baby..." Nobody ever wrote a book this good, and no one ever will.

P.S. Mr. Bohonus currently lives in Seattle, Washington and has an Alec Empire-type electronic band called Warworld, a sort of musical counterpart to "I Hate You", abrasive and A.D.D. to the max.

Creative Writing 101

It's been said that one of the the brilliant things about Thelonious Monk was that he knew what not to play in addition to knowing what to play, which believe it or not most musicians don't understand. Many of them just run off on their instruments without editing or leaving out something that might sound lame.

The same can be said about writing; Most writing is simply people running off at the mouth (or word processor) without realizing how awful they truly sound. With that in mind I grappled with a dozen topics I wanted to write about, such as:
1) Scarecrows: Nicer Than Real People
2) How Hollywood Boulevard And Las Vegas Will Make You Hate America
3) Show Business, All Business And No Show
4) MySpace: Elephants' Graveyard for Desperate Musicians

The list of unwritten topics goes on and on. I could give you a longer fucking list of what I should be writing about, but three sentences in and I run drier than an old circus clown. Either I'm blocked or my inner editor says "it's just not interesting enough". See you next week. I'll have something insane for you by then.