Mike > Recent Status Updates

"Shinjuku police had arrested the owner of a club in Kabukicho known as The Mature Hot Wives Party Palace for managing prostitutes."

And that must have taken some real detective work...

I like how everyone in the Japanese underworld seems to have a nickname. The Cat. The Cobra. I wish people called me The Cat.

"]Montreal] was, and still is to my way of thinking, one of the four primary North American portals to the underworld, the others being San Francisco, Vegas and New Orleans."

Only a few chapters in, and I've already laughed out loud multiple times. Raw and very funny tales from the 70s rock-n'-roll road.

Saitama. A place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning "not hip, boring, unfashionable."

In other words, I'd been assigned to the New Jersey of Japan.

"Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf...my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination."

Opened this up on a whim yesterday to one of the chapters about Lou Reed, and...yowza, this cat can write! Whether any of his ravings would help you in the slightest bit to determine whether you might like the album he's talking about seems kind of beside the point.

He was watching a point of reflected light slide along the distant structure, a movement like osmosis or the sequential contraction of some sea creature's palps...he closed his eyes, not wanting to see the new buildings. But they were still there, in the darkness and the light behind his lids. They slid apart, deliquesced, and trickled away, down into the mazes of an older city. He slid down with them.

Might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm digging this a little more than what I've read of Claremont's run. Maybe 90s X-Men is more my speed.

This novel is 30 years old. It's probably the most common compliment to pay Gibson, but it's uncanny how similar the world of the novel feels to the one we live in today. Beyond that, this is so far easily the most fun I've had with one of his books.

"The climate," I said.
"The climate."
"The asteroid," I said.
"The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?"
"Famine, worldwide."
"Famine," he said. "What else?"
"Give me a minute."
"Never mind. Because this isn't interesting to me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this."
I didn't want him to stop. We sat drinking quietly and I tried to think of further workable prospects for the end of human life on earth.

The guard faced the edge of the screen but was looking nowhere, looking at whatever museum guards look at when a room stands empty.

"It's not that guy, is it?" Mary gestured with her thumb to the patrol car behind them.

"No," Sunny said. "It's somebody else. But it's over. I'm not going to see him again."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"Well, then you will."

"I'm so used to that look-alike crap that I was starting to think speed tasted like coffee."

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles...

Read the first chapter this morning, then tried to guess the publication date. Got it in one. Now it's possible that I had looked it up before and the year was still lodged in my subconscious, but also possible that this just has the most '78 vibes you can imagine. Panoramic LA novel with multiple characters drawn together by the antics of a mad freeway sniper. Pretty cool so far.

Read the first chapter this morning, then tried to guess the publication date. Got it one. Now it's possible that I had looked it up before and the year was still lodged in my subconscious, but also possible that this just has the most '78 vibes you can imagine. Panoramic LA novel with multiple characters drawn together by the antics of a mad freeway sniper. Pretty cool so far.

Read the first chapter this morning, then tried to guess the publication date. Got it one. Now it's possible that I had looked it up before and the year was still lodged in my subconscious, but also possible that this just has the most '78 vibes you can imagine. Panoramic LA novel with multiple characters drawn together by the antics of a mad freeway sniper. Pretty cool so far.

I tried to say "Thanks for bringing me home," but I sounded like a lobotomized parrot speaking Yiddish.

He said [over the phone], "There's a reward for not being a pain in the rectum. It's called breathing. You got the early Sun-Times?"

"No."

"Get one. Read page eighteen."

(I'm enjoying this, but I think Cormany missed a chance for a good smart-ass reply from our private-investigator protagonist: "What, you want me to read Ebert's latest pan?")

This may look like an ordinary late-80s neo-noir mass-market paperback. Maybe it is. But the spirit of the times is contained within. The Cubs eternally cursed. Baseball on the radio. Young people on the run. Characters who casually become cops, then musicians, then detectives. Black Beauty speed and '73 Skylarks. Nights at home when the only options for company were the telephone or dreams.

The Chicago Cubs being cursed for all eternity seems a significant, if outdated, undercurrent in the story. The main character is a Sox fan however, and listens to their games on the radio. Baseball on the radio...it was a different time. "After Memorial Day, Sox fans clean up on the Cubbies; sometimes it's so easy it isn't even much fun."

The Chicago Cubs being cursed for all eternity seems a significant, if outdated, undercurrent in the story. The main character is a Sox fan however, and listens to their games on the radio. Baseball on the radio...it was a different time. "After Memorial Day, Sox fans clean up on the Cubbies; sometimes it's so easy it isn't even much fun."

I read and enjoyed the first 60 or so pages of this in the middle of a night before a snow day back in February. Been sitting on my desk ever since. That's the kind of reading year it's been. But getting back into it, it feels like a punkier 80s update on Night Moves, one of my favorite movies. "I'm 35 and all I really want to do is sit in bed and play guitar. Can't find anybody to pay me for that, though."

"I kicked with the power and precision of a tubercular wino."

"It's always kind of consciencesome triflin' with another man's wife, y'know, and it ain't ever been healthy in Texas."