Bathroom Reads #18 (Finale): DOOM Books + Honorable Mention: WORD FREAKS

 

The majority of my friends are more than aware that I'm a big fan of the DOOM games, with the first one in particular being a giant obsession. Like a lot of teenage boys in the early 90s, I read up about it with rapt interest in all of the gaming magazines of the day, and when I got my first PC in 1998, one of the very first games I got was the ULTIMATE DOOM for Windows 95 edition. Great monsters, great level design, great MIDI music, just a classic game . . . I still rank it in my Top Ten Favorite Games of All-Time list even to today, and one of my annual traditions is replaying all four episodes of the first game in December (for whatever reason, in my mind I always associate DOOM with the holiday season, perhaps because I purchased it in that time frame back in 1998, and remember first playing it around Christmas time). Obviously, a game as influential and popular as DOOM has spawned a fair number of books, some of which I'll look at here today. 

MASTERS OF DOOM, by David Kushner, is a very interesting and captivating book that was first published in 2003 (I think I myself got it around 2007 or thereabouts). It covers not only the making of DOOM, but also the story of id Software itself, and does such a good job depicting what that company was like in the 90s that John Romero himself put off publishing his own memoir for the longest time, because he thought Kushner had done such a thorough job at it (his memoir, DOOM GUY, finally came out last year, and I highly recommend that book as well). 

Another book related to DOOM that I greatly enjoy is Dan Pinchbeck’s Scarydarkfast. Although put out by an academic publisher (the University of Michigan Press), and thus more scholarly in tone than Kushner's book, Pinchbeck’s book is extremely readable, and doesn't get super-bogged down in tedious/impenetrable academic-speak. I like how he adroitly sums the game up here: “In academic terms, DOOM is based around the core activity of lining up objects with the center of the screen and removing them by pressing the shoot button. You start in a complex environment, and you simplify it by removing agents and pressing all the buttons there are to press and collecting all the objects there are to collect . . . the game is all about simplifying the environment, with extreme prejudice.” In a number of brief chapters he traces the development of the First Person Shooter genre, looks at the games id Software created that paved the way for DOOM, briefly gives a history lesson of how id came to be, before launching into some slightly technical chapters analyzing the game’s development process, the DOOM engine (id Tech 1), the game’s code and integers, the game’s soundtrack, and how it was received by the press and public. Later chapters talk about the DOOM modding and multiplayer scenes, along with its ports and sequels (a lot of attention is especially devoted to DOOM 3), but to me, the meat of the book are the three long chapters in the middle, a “Shot-by-Shot” walkthrough/analysis of the game’s three episodes (though sadly, the underrated Episode Four only gets a brief mention).  A lot of the things and little details about the game that impressed me (like the "Crucifixion Room" in the "House of Pain" mission) were things that Pinchbeck was impressed with as well. 

For the record, my Top Three Missions from ULTIMATE DOOM are "Deimos Lab" (E2M4), "House of Pain" (E3M4), and "Gateway to Limbo" (E3M7). I'm also a big fan of "Against Thee Wickedly" (E4M6). 

HONORABLE MENTION ENTRY: WORD FREAK by Stefan Fatsis 

This is a book that, unlike the others I've covered in this series, I don't take into the bathroom with me on an annual basis . . . more like a biennial one, you could say. Despite my love for words, I'm a lousy SCRABBLE player and am not especially a fan of the game, but Fatsis' book is a fun read, and his depictions of some of the eccentric personalities found among the competitive SCRABBLE players is often very amusing to behold. 

* * * * 

Well, I guess this is the final entry for this era of my Bathroom Reads series. Obviously, should I add other books to my bathroom rotation roster in the future, there will be additional entries to cover those. Having finally read many of the books covered in this series "for real/officially" in 2024, I think in 2025 I might give some of those old books a break and maybe add some new blood to the roster. 

Bathroom Reads #17: LAbyrinth by Randall Sullivan

Despite the fact I was the first person in my household to purchase a rap CD (Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy, which I still rank in my Top 100 Favorite Albums), I've never been much of a rap/hip hop guy. Which is not to say that I'm one of those people who instantly dismiss the genre with a kneejerk "all rap sucks!" response (my diplomatic answer is usually along the lines of, 'I'm not going to say this is bad, just that I'm obviously not its target audience," which, incidentally, is also my usual response to most country music). I guess the way I feel about rap/hip hop is the same way that I feel about most "classic rock," which is to say, it's been around for so long now that it's pretty much a dinosaur genre (though inexplicably there are still people out there who prefer to remain thinking that it's still fresh/hip/cutting edge or whatever). Of course, like with most musical genres, I can still find certain acts or albums associated with the term to be enjoyable: aside from Public Enemy and some of the other groups linked to the "golden age of hip hop," there are a few modern acts I like as well, such as Danny Brown and Nicki Minaj. And when I was writing my novel Harlem Smoke I spent a lot of time listening to/researching many different horrorcore acts (like Insane Poetry), and I came to like certain aspects of that subgenre. 

The subject of today's post, LAbyrinth by Randall Sullivan (2002), is obviously linked to rap and hip hop music, what with its focus on Death Row Records, and the (still unsolved) murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. (which I vaguely recall hearing about during my high school days, but most of which went over my head because I wasn't really into rap culture at that time). I only have one song by Tupac on my computer ("I Just Don't Give A Fuck," which I got from the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas soundtrack box set), and one by Biggie ("Hypnotize"), but I still found this book interesting nonetheless. If memory serves I got it shortly after I began working at Barnes & Noble in 2004, which coincidentally was also the year that the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, so obviously the subject matter was of some interest to me at that time in my life. Sullivan does a good job of summarizing rap and hip hop culture, not only how it originated but also how it developed into "gangsta rap" in the late 1980s, and the same can be said to his history of the various L.A. street gangs. Aside from focusing on the murder of the two rappers and the possible links to Death Row Records, the book is also a devastating critique of the Los Angeles Police Department, which in the 90s was plagued with scandals, torn apart by racial conflicts, and incredibly corrupt. The main star of the book is the homicide detective Russell Poole, who comes off as a dedicated investigator obsessed with following the truth/clues no matter where they led . . . but when he discovers that certain Black LAPD cops are also working for Death Row Records, and becoming more criminal than the crooks they catch, he finds his investigation stymied both by his superiors (who are terrified of racial scandals) and by the liberal Los Angeles media (the line of text from the book which best sums up the story is this quote from Jan Golab: "You can't tell a story in which the good guy is a white detective and the villains are all black. That isn't allowed, even if it's true.") 

I guess this book inspired a film called CITY OF LIES, which I have not seen yet, but plan to next year. 

Bathroom Reads #16: THERE AND BACK AGAIN by Sean Astin + Joe Layden

 

My dad purchased this book when it was first published (in 2004, less than a year after the theatrical release of The Return of the King, to almost universally poor reviews: this one is representative for the curious: https://www.popmatters.com/there-and-back-again-2496241478.html), but I don't believe he ever actually read it, though I myself would sometimes flip through it... a number of years ago he asked me if I wanted it, so I said sure, and it ended up becoming one of those books I would skim through in the bathroom once a year or so (though this year I finally did read it for real). 

I actually don't have all that much to say about this one, other than it's mainly an actor's memoir (despite the fact Astin was only in his early thirties when he wrote it) dealing briefly with his early years in a bit of detail, but which is mainly concerned with his time spent during the production of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. It must be said that reading this book, one does not walk away with a very good impression of Astin as a person, as he comes off as very needy, self-centered, selfish, always needs to be the center of attention, and so on and so forth (he also does a lot of backhanded complimenting, where he'll talk about a person and praise them at length, then proceed to whine and complain about them). Basically, in some ways he embodies almost the exact opposite of all of the good traits exhibited by his character Samwise Gamgee in the movies. Which makes him, I suppose, a pretty good actor! I won't lie, for the longest time this book kind of soured me towards him, though he somewhat redeemed himself with an incredible performance in the second season of Stranger Things. . .  perhaps the lean years after the LOTR films humbled him somewhat. 

Bathrooms Reads #15: THE JORDAN RULES by Sam Smith

 

I am not a sports guy. However, living in a house as I do with my parents and most of my younger brothers (all of whom are very into sports), coupled with the fact that every afternoon I read the USA TODAY and PROVIDENCE JOURNAL sports pages at lunch (along with all the other sections, mind), added to how I sometimes listen to one of the local sports radio stations on my drives to work (though less so these days after they cancelled my favorite show a few months ago, in August of this year, specifically 93.7 WEEI's afternoon drive show JONES & MEGO WITH ARCAND, which played from 2-6 in the afternoons Monday through Friday), means that, through such background osmosis, I'm at least generally aware of what is going on in the world of sports and who some of the big names are. However, reading about sports or hearing people talk about it is one thing, but actually watching games is beyond my ken . . . I find most sporting events mind-numbingly boring, with one exception: I can, at the very least, watch televised basketball games without losing interest. 

My interest in basketball began sometime in the early 1990s, when my younger brothers and my dad started collecting basketball trading cards as a hobby (I myself collected such cards, though only for a short time). This interest in basketball cards led to an interest in basketball in general, and my brothers and I each decided to pick an NBA team to be our favorite team; I went with the Utah Jazz, mainly because at that time in my life I was obsessed with things that began with the letter "U," and in some ways it was a good pick because the Jazz were a very good team in the 90s, with some great players like Karl Malone and John Stockton (the latter of whom quickly became, and still is, my favorite male basketball player). My brother Tom was very into the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan in particular, and he eventually got the book THE JORDAN RULES by Sam Smith. I myself eventually became a fan of this book, and years later would get my own copy of it (pictured above). This interest in basketball reached its peak for me when I began writing a small series of basketball thriller novels in the mid-to-late 1990s (mainly BULLET GAMES in 1996 and THE HORNET QUEEN in 1997). 

THE JORDAN RULES (which, like some of the other bathroom books I've covered in this series, I finally read "for real" this year) is a fascinating look at the Bulls 1990-1991 championship run (in other words, covering the start of the first Bulls dynasty), funny and well-written, and I recommend it to fans of basketball in general, as not only does it provide a compelling portrait of both Jordan and his then-coach Phil Jackson, but is also a useful exploration of team dynamics, and how such a disparate group of men can come together, put aside their differences, and triumph (while on the subject, Smith's less well-known sequel to THE JORDAN RULES, THE SECOND COMING, which dealt with Jordan's return to the world of basketball after a failed attempt at becoming a baseball player, is also worth seeking out). Incidentally, some of the material covered in this book was used in the Netflix Michael Jordan THE LAST DANCE documentary back in 2020, which also saw an appearance by Smith himself. 

Bathroom Reads #14: GENERATION FRIENDS by Saul Austerlitz

Seeing as how earlier entries in this series covered books dealing with SEINFELD and FRASIER, it seems only natural to now turn to FRIENDS, which (along with the two previously mentioned TV shows) I place in the Holy Trinity of the great 90s sitcoms, that glorious decade and lost golden era where the sitcom reached its apotheosis and cultural zenith (though there are a few post-FRIENDS sitcoms that I also rank highly, mainly THE OFFICE [American version] and HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER). My fandom of this show is a running joke amongst some of my friends, but I do not exaggerate when I tie FRIENDS with GAME OF THRONES as my favorite TV show of all-time. My brothers and I began watching it in 1998, about halfway through season 4, and because by that point in time the show was syndicated we quickly caught up with what was going on via reruns. Actually, the first episode that my brothers and I ever saw was a rerun, 1995's "The One With Two Parts," which was aired as a repeat on February 19, 1998: the night we started watching FRIENDS. As to just why I like the show so much? That's a complicated question. Partly it's because, like the film REALITY BITES, the show serves as a time capsule for a decade I'm still somewhat nostalgic towards (having grown up as a teenager during that time period, I obviously view those as my formative years). Also, and simply put, it's just one of those sitcoms where the acting, the writing, the set design, and other factors too numerous to name seemed to magically fit together into a harmonic whole. Many shows strive to achieve that kind of perfect alchemy, but few succeed. FRIENDS was one of those success stories, obviously. In fact, unlike SEINFELD (which was almost the definition of a sleeper hit), FRIENDS was almost precision-designed to be a hit from Day One, and how that came to be is itself a very interesting story, which leads me to the book under discussion today. 

Although a fair number of books on FRIENDS have come out over the last couple of years, Saul Austerlitz's GENERATION FRIENDS, published in 2019, is one of the better ones. Although he did not interview any of the six core cast members, he did interview the showrunners/creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin Bright, and many of the various writers/directors/crew members/guest actors of the show, including director James Burrows, prop master Marjorie Coster-Praytor, Tate Donovan, Jessica Hecht, costume designer Debra McGuire, and many more (the writers in particular contribute a lot). At over 300 pages, it's fairly comprehensive, and is divided into four parts. Part One is 4 chapters long and covers how the show originated, the casting process (one of the most interesting chapters: Courtney Cox was of course the perfect Monica, but it's interesting to imagine an alternate universe where Janeane Garofalo, the showrunners' original choice for Monica, actually joined the show rather than turning them down, to focus instead on what by all accounts was a disastrous experience on SNL), the filming of the pilot episode, and so on. Part Two is 7 chapters long and covers seasons 1 through 3: some interesting chapters in this section include chapter 8 (which deals with how Monica's apartment and the Central Perk coffee house were designed, Rachel's iconic haircut in the early seasons, and how the characters' outfits/costumes were created), chapter 10 (which focuses on the initial contract negotiations), and chapter 11 (which captures some of what went on in the writers' room, and how certain episodes and jokes came about). Part Three is 6 chapters long and covers seasons 4 through 7, and some of its chapters focus on specific things like how the show was produced, an analysis of "The One With The Embryos" episode,  an entire chapter on the Monica/Chandler relationship (while on the subject, there are no less than 6 chapters devoted to the Ross and Rachel relationship, scattered throughout the book at various points), and the "Lyle vs. Friends" lawsuit. Part Four is 8 chapters long and covers the final three seasons. Here there are chapters dealing with the controversial Joey + Rachel pairing, another chapter on the show's complex contract negotiations (which makes for very intriguing reading), a chapter on the final episode . . . meanwhile the penultimate chapter covers what the show's creators and stars got up to in the years following FRIENDS, while the last chapter explores how the show attracted a new generation of Millennial fans long after it ended (and some of whom weren't even born when it first aired), and also analyzes the show's cultural impact on pop culture (both in America and abroad). 

Unlike some books in recent years that have come out on the TV show (such as Kelsey Miller's lightweight I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU), Austerlitz's book is less concerned about scoring points with the social justice crowd by griping about the show's "...deviations from contemporary liberal orthodoxy" (to quote Austerlitz's text) and more about just giving the reader a lot of behind-the-scenes information on how the show was made, so for that reason I would highly recommend this book, and it even taught me, a FRIENDS obsessive, some things about the show that I had not previously known (for example, in season 5 the writers wanted to introduce a big twist in which the whole gang would temporarily uproot and move to Minnesota). I also agree with the author's notion that, though in some ways predated by SEINFELD, FRIENDS was one of the first major sitcoms that realized that audiences had evolved and were capable of watching shows with story arcs that extended for entire seasons (a concept that some TV critics at the time seemed resistant to), and that the days of sitcoms being stand-alone shows where people tuned in for 30 minutes and quickly forgot about afterwards was in decline. 

Bathroom Reads #13: Misc. Band Books (Siouxsie & The Banshees, Bauhaus, Wire)

 

Siouxsie & The Banshees: The Authorised Biography (Mark Paytress, 2003) 

My Top Ten Favorite Bands/Musical Acts of All-Time list actually has 11 bands on it, because I tie Siouxsie & The Banshees and Nine Inch Nails as #1. I became a fan of the Banshees sometime in the spring of 1999, around the time of the start of my Goth period, when I purchased their second collection of singles Twice Upon A Time (which I would say is also one of the ten best singles collections of all-time). I quickly fell in love with their music and began collecting any albums from them that I could get my hands on. Around the same time I was getting into the Banshees I was also discovering the films of Alfred Hitchcock (mainly through film courses at college), and the two definitely seemed to go hand-in-hand: as I noted in my entry on Hitchcock earlier this year, the Banshees were very much inspired by his psychological thrillers, from naming the song "Spellbound" after one of his films to the way that the guitars of "Suburban Relapse" mimic the shrieking strings of the shower sequence in Psycho. Oddly enough, for a band as visually striking and photogenic as the Banshees were, there have been very little books about the band (one wishes for a lavish coffee table-sized book filled with photos). However, in the year 2003 a biography for the band was released, written by Mark Paytress (who also did the liner notes for the band's albums when Polydor reissued them from 2005-2014). 

In truth this book (which, like some of the other books I've covered in this series, I finally, "officially" read "for real" this year), is more like an oral history, in which long interviews with various people are cut-up and re-arranged to tell a chronological story, from the band's origins to their break-up in 1995 to their brief and final reunion tour in 2002. It also has a rudimentary discography, a list of all the gigs played by the Banshees (and Siouxsie's side project The Creatures), a foreword by Garbage's Shirley Manson, and an all-too-brief black-and-white photograph section. As one might expect, the majority of the quotes come from the core trio of Siouxsie Sioux, Budgie, and Steven Severin, but many of the former band members have their say as well, like Kenny Morris (the original drummer), Martin McCarrick (strings/keyboards), and of course, their many, many guitarists: John McGeoch, Robert Smith, Jon Klein, and John Knox (only original guitarist John McKay and John Carruthers aren't involved: and yes, the band had a lot of guitarists named John/Jon). Other people involved with the Banshees or who were part of that whole scene/their peers get some words in as well: super-fan Billy Chainsaw, tour manager (and later band manager) Tim Collins, Glen Matlock (The Sex Pistols), Marc Almond (Soft Cell), Phil Oakey (The Human League), Patricia Morrison (The Gun Club), Marco Pirroni, John Cale, and more (oddly enough, none of the band's producers outside of Cale are interviewed, not even Mike Hedges). It's a really entertaining and at times very funny book (Severin's quips especially tend to be amusing), and it really covers the entire spectrum of the band's career, focusing on the creation of all of the albums, memorable live shows, and so on. For fans of the band, I highly recommend it. 

Dark Entries: Bauhaus and Beyond (Ian Shirley, 1994) 

This book was published by SAF Publishing, who have done some very good music books over the years (see also Tape Delay: Confessions from the Eighties Underground by Charles Neal). I got into Bauhaus in the spring of 1999, around the same time (though slightly before) I got into Siouxsie & the Banshees. That was towards the end of my freshman year at Rhode Island College, and my interest in the band began when I saw a cute Goth girl wearing a Bauhaus T-shirt around campus, the image on the front being the iconic art for the band's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" single (historical note: this same girl did a weekly radio show on the campus' radio station called something like "Mistress Mayhem's S&M Hour," and which played a lot of Goth/Industrial/Darkwave music... I was a big fan of the program, and through that show discovered bands like Ministry and Die Form. Also of note was that the girl's first name was Karen, which inspired me to name the main female character in my Trinity fantasy series after her). The very first Bauhaus CD I got was the "greatest hits" one (Crackle), and like with the Banshees I quickly fell in love with them, though in truth, aside from their singles and their underrated final album Go Away White, it's only their debut album, In The Flat Field, that I listen to with any regularity... but what a debut album it is! As for Shirley's book, at under 200 pages it's a brisk but still informative read, and written in collaboration with all four of the band members. The first half of the book deals with Bauhaus, while the second half deals with Love & Rockets plus Peter Murphy's solo career. Like the Siouxsie & the Banshees book, I finally and formally "officially" read this one complete this year. 

Wire: Everybody Loves a History (Kevin S. Eden, 1991)

I am at best a casual Wire fan, mainly only familiar with their groundbreaking first three albums and also the albums of their second phase like The Ideal Copy and A Bell is a Cup... (the latter of which I rank in my Top Ten favorite albums of all-time). This is another oral history-type book (again from SAF Publishing) made in collaboration with the band's four members, and it also boasts a full discography (well, up to the start of the band's Wir era), gigography, and over 70 photographs spanning their collective history. It's a pretty entertaining book, and learning what some of their at times cryptic songs were actually about was really interesting. 

Bathroom Reads #12: DEPECHE MODE: A BIOGRAPHY by Steve Malins

I can't remember exactly when it was that I began to get into Depeche Mode, but I want to say it was probably around 2001 or thereabouts . . . I know it was while I was still in college. At the time I had been listening to a lot of aggressive electronic music of the Industrial/Power Electronics variety (Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Suicide and so on), along with bands that often fall into the Goth category (Bauhaus, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Switchblade Symphony, The Cure, and so on and so forth). But I was also starting to explore electronic music in general, in all its varieties, from experimental avant-garde stuff to synth-pop. Given my interest in electronic music and Gothic leanings, I suppose it was only natural that I would eventually investigate Depeche Mode. I do remember that the first album I ever got by them was BLACK CELEBRATION, which to this day still remains one of my all-time favorite albums. I also remain a big fan of the band, to the extent I place them right up there with my Top Ten Favorite Musical Groups/Acts. I think they just have that total package: a great sound, catchy songs, iconic visuals and striking album covers. Certainly they've been a big inspiration for me, both as a music fan and as a creator of electronic music myself. 

I think I got this book as a birthday gift from my parents in 2002. Unlike most of the other books I've covered in this series, this one I almost always take with me as a bathroom book to read when I'm on vacation. Why, I have no idea... maybe I see it as a good luck charm (incidentally, this year I also read it in an official context, from the first page to the last). Just glancing at the generic cover and the terse page count (under 250 pages) one might dismiss this book as just another cheap cash-in, but in fact Steve Malins interviewed quite a few people involved with DM, not only the essential trio of Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher themselves but also Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, ex-band members Vince Clarke and Alan Wilder, and other people associated with the band or the scene in general: Flood, Chris Carr, Anton Corbijn, Daryl Balmonte, John Foxx, Juan Atkins, Gareth Jones, Gary Numan, Andy McCluskey, Genesis P-Orridge, DJ Shadow, Stevo, and so on. And he does a pretty good job of covering the first 20 or so years of the band's existence: this book came out in 1998, and covers all of the albums from SPEAK & SPELL to the then-recently-released ULTRA. Through this book, I discovered other early Mute acts like Fad Gadget, DAF, The Normal, The Silicon Teens, and others, so it was an educational experience. A lot of attention is also paid to how Depeche Mode was received by the music press in their home country, be it via album/single reviews or live concert reviews. It would seem that, like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Bauhaus, and others, that Depeche Mode was another one of those British bands I liked that were pretty much mocked by the musical journalist establishment in their home country, which makes me think that in turn the music journalists of that era (1970s-1990s) were pretty clueless.  

In any event, I would recommend this book to fans of Depeche Mode and also lovers of electronic music in general. 
 

Bathroom Reads #11: HELTER SKELTER: THE TRUE STORY OF THE MANSON MURDERS by Vincent Bugliosi + Curt Gentry

In my first entry in this series I mentioned how, during my student days at Rhode Island College, I would often spend my breaks between classes at the campus library, browsing various books & subjects that caught my interest (such as Donald Spoto's Hitchcock study THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS). Some subjects at that time interested me more than others, serial killers being a good example, and I liked to investigate various books related to the Manson Family and their crimes, such as Ed Sander's THE FAMILY and also HELTER SKELTER, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. I'm not sure where this particular interest in the Manson Family began, but it might have had something to do with the influence Manson had on the Industrial music subculture (and alternative music in general) in the 1970s and 80s. Throbbing Gristle often evoked his name (see in particular their song "After Cease to Exist"), Whitehouse and the Come Organisation made a few references to him, he was the subject of the Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel song "DI-19026," Nine Inch Nails famously recorded their THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL album in the living room where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, Sonic Youth had "Death Valley '69," and so on and so forth. I actually have two copies of HELTER SKELTER: a mass market paperback version from the 70s that used to belong to my mother (and which she gave to me many years ago), and this more modern updated one that I got at work awhile back: unlike many of the other books I've covered in this series, this one I actually read all the way through in linear order this year, over a month of bathroom visits (well, it IS almost 700 pages long). 

Although I was very interested in the subject back in my late teens and twenties, serial killers don't really interest me all that much anymore, save for a chosen few: Jack the Ripper (perhaps the GOAT of the group), Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, the Zodiac Killer (maybe), and Jeffrey Dahmer are still of interest (along with, of course, Manson and his Family), and certainly I can think of many great fictional books on the subject (Alan Moore's FROM HELL, Colin Wilson's THE GLASS CAGE, Thomas Harris' RED DRAGON, Robert Bloch's PSYCHO, Poppy Z. Brite's EXQUISITE CORPSE, David Peace's RED RIDING QUARTET, Bret Easton Ellis' AMERICAN PSYCHO, to cite a few) along with movies and TV shows (SE7EN, ZODIAC, TRUE DETECTIVE Season 1) that revolve around the subject of serial murder. Hell, I've even written a few novels on the subject myself (the most recent one being 2019's HARLEM SMOKE). Oddly enough, given my general interest in the macabre, I've actually owned/read very few True Crime books: the only ones that spring to mind are John Douglas' MINDHUNTER, Ian Brady's THE GATES OF JANUS, Dave Cullen's COLUMBINE, and, of course, the subject of today's post, HELTER SKELTER. 

If True Crime books had a Holy Bible, that book would probably be HELTER SKELTER, which is, after all, the #1 True Crime bestseller of all-time (as the cover not so humbly proclaims). The most compelling murder cases are the ones where almost everything involved, even the smallest details,  take on mythic dimensions, and certainly one could say that about the Tate-LaBianca murders: the American flag draped over the couch in Sharon Tate's living room (this was referenced in Bret Easton Ellis' first novel LESS THAN ZERO), the whole weird Helter Skelter race-war philosophy and the links to the "White Album" of The Beatles, the high profile nature of some of the murder victims, Spahn Ranch, and so on and so forth. Bugliosi was the prosecutor of the Tate-LaBianca trials, and thus was privy to a lot of the juicy behind-the-scenes details that must have been a subject of great fascination to the reading public of that era (the book was published in 1974, four years after the Manson trial). The book is well-structured, starting with the discovery of the bodies, the search for the killers and their eventual arrest (and if Bugliosi's book is anything to go by, the police work was often slipshod and at times reached Keystone Cops dimensions of ineptness), the investigation into the killers' motives, the trial, and the aftermath. It's also very well-written; certainly the opening sentence is iconic ("It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon"). And the selection of photographs is very good as well. Reading this book has kind of got me interested in the whole subject again: perhaps I should give the Ed Sanders book another glance one day. 

Bathroom Reads #10: SECRETS OF THE FORCE by Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman

 

As befits someone who was born in 1980, I have a long and somewhat complicated link with the Star Wars franchise, which I suppose could be likened to an on-again, off-again relationship (these days, mostly off). As I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the first movie that I ever saw in theaters was Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, back when it was released in 1983, so obviously I was still very young at the time and, having not seen the first two movies, had no idea what the hell was going on... all the same, it still captivated me. Eventually I would see the first two movies as well, and Star Wars quickly became my number one obsession as a child, to the extent that Luke Skywalker was essentially my first pop culture role model. Of course, I read the comic adaptations, played the video and computer games, got the action figures and toy vehicles, you name it. However, as the 80s progressed, I started to get involved in other pop culture franchises (Masters of the Universe, Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nintendo), and my interest in Star Wars waned a little.

However, it was revived around the middle of the 1990s, when I read Timothy Zahn’s acclaimed Thrawn Trilogy novels early on in my high school era. This led me to read many of the other “Extended Universe” Star Wars novels and short story collections that were coming out around that time period, like The Courtship of Princess Leia, The Truce at Bakura, the Jedi Academy Trilogy, Darksaber, The Crystal Star, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and so on and so forth. The Shadows of the Empire video game for the Nintendo 64 was pretty cool as well, and I enjoyed collecting the Star Wars Topps Finest trading cards in 1996. For some odd reason, however, I never really got swept up in the hysteria for the Prequels: by the time of their advent I had just embarked on my Goth phase (though can you really call something a phase if it never ended?) and was far more interested in The Matrix, which I saw as darker and more hip. As a result, I never actually saw The Phantom Menace in theaters (though I did see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith at the time of their respective releases), and only saw bits and pieces of it over the years at random, like when it was playing on TV. It wasn’t until 2019, when some of my brothers and I rewatched all the Star Wars films in chronological order, that I finally saw The Phantom Menace in its entirety, from beginning to end.

In any event, following the completion of the Prequels films in 2005, I once again kind of lost interest in the franchise, though it was briefly revived around the time of the Disney Sequels trilogy... though that flame was quickly extinguished, as not only did it annoy me that the Extended Universe novels were suddenly no longer canon, but I also found the Sequels Trilogy frenetic (and at times incoherent), utterly lacking in inspiration, creativity, and vision, a product just tossed together by hacks with no story to tell and no unifying master plan: The Force Awakens, while extremely derivative and generic, was okay as far as such things goes and at least kept my interest, but The Last Jedi is easily my least favorite Star Wars film (with Rise of Skywalker a close second). To me, the definitive Luke Skywalker will always be the one we see in Return of the Jedi, and I consider the one we see in the Sequels Trilogy an imposter (to be fair, Mark Hamill has pretty much said the same thing). Luckily, in my own head at least, I do not consider these films canon. The real shame about all this is that some of the ideas that Lucas had for a third trilogy (and which he assumed Disney would make use of when he sold Lucasfilm to them) seem really interesting, and had they been used, things might have ended up very different.  

So much for the prelude. The main focus of today’s blog post is the book Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Wars, by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. I picked up this hefty tome in the summer of 2021, when it was first published in hardcover. Like the Game of Thrones book I covered in one of the previous entries of this series, Secrets of the Force is one of those increasingly popular “oral history” books, in which a bunch of quotations by a wide variety of people are arranged in chronological order to tell a complete story of the subject in question. Of all the bathroom reads books I’ve covered so far, this one can take the longest to get through, on account of its size: 550+ pages. And while I won’t claim it’s the BEST nonfiction Star Wars book out there (that prize would go to the three “Making Of” books written by Jonathan Rinzler that exhaustively cover everything you would ever want to know about the productions of the Original Trilogy), it still does a remarkably good job of taking information from a wide spectrum of Star Wars sources and distilling it down into one comprehensive volume. The book is divided into 4 parts and 16 chapters. Part One consists of one chapter and is essentially a prologue covering not only the formative years of George Lucas but also the transition of the movie industry from the ashes of Old Hollywood to New Hollywood (and how New Hollywood was eventually superseded by the “blockbuster model” pioneered by Jaws and the first Star Wars). Part Two, the longest part of the book, is made up of 8 chapters and covers the making of the Original Trilogy, with entire chapters devoted to such subjects as the creation of the special effects, how Star Wars was marketed, the creation of the Kenner toy line... even the much maligned Holiday Special gets its own chapter. Part Three of the book is devoted to the Prequel Trilogy and is three chapters, with each Prequel film getting a chapter of its own. Part Four of the book consists of four chapters, three of which deal with the Sequel Trilogy films, while the final chapter covers Star Wars in the television medium (oddly enough, the two spin-off films, Rogue One and Solo, do not get a chapter of their own, and are dealt with in a somewhat abbreviated and cursory manner).

As previously mentioned, because this book is an oral history it is made up of a number of diverse voices of people from a whole spectrum of different fields of interests: writers/authors, pop culture commentators, podcast hosts, fan boys & fan club enthusiasts, studio executives, producers, actors, voice actors, SFX technicians, magazine editors, directors, film historians, movie critics, comic book artists, animators, journalists, toy designers, advertisers, film composers, webmasters and stuntmen. Many of the names assembled would be familiar to most Star Wars fans, not only the actors associated with the films but also a number of other voices, people like Alan Dean Foster, Ralph McQuarrie, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand, Timothy Zahn, Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, Dave Filoni, Frank Oz, and so on. Frustratingly, the authors of the book do not give much information as to which of the voices involved they actually interviewed, and how many of the quotes are taken from preexisting interviews, press releases, promotional appearances, and so on (though in the Acknowledgments they do confess that Lucas was not one of the people they interviewed). Some of the voices assembled are more entertaining/informative than others; for example, Samuel L. Jackson’s barely suppressed glee about being able to play a Jedi Knight and hanging out with Christopher Lee and Frank Oz is extremely infectious, and Peter Holmstrom eloquently defends Return of the Jedi (which still remains my favorite Star Wars film and also a movie I would rank in my Top Ten favorite movies of all-time), and the Prequels trilogy (although his remark that “We wouldn’t have Marvel films if it wasn’t for George Lucas” is, perhaps, the most damning accusation one could level against the series, even if the man who said it thought he was saying something positive).

In some ways, the book serves not only as a chronological history of the Star Wars saga but also as a cautionary tale about what happens when an independent franchise becomes corrupted by big business. Although commercialism and merchandising has always been an important part of Star Wars, the George Lucas Star Wars films came from a place of great vision, and their genius was in taking universal prototypes and archetypes and, in placing them in the context of an epic sci-fi space opera/intergalactic fairy tale, made what was old seem new again (I also feel that Lucas’ idea that the Star Wars universe should look “used” and “lived-in” was a great one). John Kenneth Muir hits the nail on the head here when he states (in regards to the negative initial reception of the Prequel Trilogy): “But those fans should be asked a question now: would they rather have the prequels, with their creator’s integrity and vision behind everything, or would they rather continue to see the wholesale strip-mining of the saga at the hands of a big corporation that doesn’t really understand the magic of these films?” And Ray Morton, another of the more perceptive voices interviewed in the book, sums up the failures of the Disney Sequel Trilogy succinctly: “They managed to create three movies that reasonably approximated the imagery and tone of those initial three pictures. However, they left out one crucial ingredient: the vision. What the sequel trilogy shows us is that while others may be capable of making movies that simulate the original three movies, in the end, Star Wars without George Lucas just ain’t Star Wars.”

As for the Star Wars TV shows, I have nothing to say about them because I haven’t seen them and have very little interest in doing so, especially because it seems like there are 50 of them in existence at the moment. To me, things like the books or video games or whatever notwithstanding, I’ve always seen the franchise in filmic terms, and the idea of Star Wars TV shows just doesn’t grip me (I suppose if I had to see one it would be Andor, if only because it involves one of my favorite Star Wars characters, Mon Mothma, and also because it guest stars Anton Lesser, whose work I admired in Game of Thrones). In the early 2000s I recall being annoyed that to properly appreciate the Matrix films you had to read the comics and play the video games and watch the cartoons in-between the movies, and this “fill in the gap” style of multimedia storytelling going hand-in-hand with movie releases seems to have really infected the Star Wars franchise (sadly, Game of Thrones seems to be going the same way, with a seemingly never-ending series of projected spin-offs getting announced with each passing year). Sometimes maybe the gaps SHOULDN’T be filled and things should be best left to the imagination. And I think that over the last decade some kind of saturation point has been reached; in the old days a new Star Wars thing (and especially a film) was a huge event because it was such a rare thing, but now it’s no longer a unique event or a big deal, and that's kind of sad. 

On a related note, if I had to pick my Top Ten favorite Star Wars characters (outside of the core cast like Luke, Leia, Han and Vader)? #1, of course, would be Momaw Nadon, but on such a list I would also say Bossk, IG-88, Mon Mothma, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Gilad Pellaeon, Mara Jade... I’ve always had a soft spot for the Rancor as well.

Bathroom Reads #9: THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE BLACK ADDER by J.F. Roberts

 

I first became a big fan of the comedic talents of Rowan Atkinson in the spring of 1996, when some channel began broadcasting episodes of MR. BEAN to audiences in the USA... perhaps the channel was PBS? I know the first episode that I ever saw was "Tee Off, Mr. Bean" (the laundromat/mini golf one), and that at the time my mother and I had to watch them on the small TV in the kitchen because my other brothers and my dad were watching THE DANA CARVEY SHOW on the bigger TV in the living room. I told my brothers they were wasting their time with the latter program and should be watching MR. BEAN instead, and when THE DANA CARVEY SHOW was cancelled (very quickly, after a mere 6-7 weeks, if memory serves), they all gravitated to MR. BEAN as well and also became fans. This was a little over a year before the release of the first MR. BEAN movie, which of course made the character more of a household name in the States, so in that aspect at least, we were ahead of the curve. 

My interest in MR. BEAN has, over the years, led me to explore some other famous British sitcoms (though it should be mentioned here that my real interest in British comedy perhaps can be traced to seeing MONTY PYTHON & THE HOLY GRAIL in the early 90s), such as the immortal FAWLTY TOWERS, along with THE VICAR OF DIBLEY, FATHER TED and, naturally (what with my interest in Atkinson as an actor) BLACKADDER. Another thing that inspired me to give BLACKADDER a spin was my fascination in history, because each of the 4 main seasons of BLACKADDER is set in a different historical time period of England: the late Middle Ages, the Elizabethan Era, the Regency, and finally the trenches of World War I. History was (along with Art and English) one of the only subjects I was actually good at in school, and I love reading books on the subject, playing video games set in the past, watching TV shows and movies that recreate different historical eras, and so on. So it's no surprise that I became a big fan of BLACKADDER. I even greatly enjoyed the much maligned first series, which (while admittedly not as funny as the 3 series that come after it) featured some really beautiful costume work and sets. And the show certainly boasted an impressive cast: outside of Atkinson, one could also mention Tony Robinson, Tim McInnerny, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Brian Blessed, and smaller guest roles for everyone from Miriam Margoyles to Jim Broadbent to Rik Mayall to Robbie Coltrane. 

Perhaps the definitive text about BLACKADDER is the book that serves as the focus of today's entry, THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE BLACK ADDER by J.F. Roberts, published in 2012. An exhaustice chronicler, Roberts not only interviewed almost all of the actors who appeared on the show (including the man Atkinson himself, which was quite the coup), but also the various behind-the-scenes people who brought the show to life, including its creator (and main writer) Richard Curtis (who would later go on to co-create/co-write both MR. BEAN and THE VICAR OF DIBLEY, to say nothing of directing a number of very successful films), its other main writer (Ben Elton), its main producer (John Lloyd), various directors and crew members, even its musician Howard Goodall (who I first knew as the man behind the music for MR. BEAN: in fact, the first episode of MR. BEAN premiered around two months after BLACKADDER came to its end). 

Bathroom Reads #8: MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL by Adam Higginbotham

For most of my life I've had a  quite frankly morbid fascination with disasters, stretching back all the way to my childhood. Why this is, I have no idea, though perhaps it might have something to do with my youthful interest in the classic monster movies (I was one of those typical children who took delight in constructing cities in SimCity, only to destroy them with disasters afterwards). One subcategory of disasters I find especially compelling is industrial disasters, specifically those involving hazardous/toxic waste, and also the problem of the handling, storage and disposal of said toxic waste (on that note, I highly recommend Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which was a report that Sandia Laboratories composed for the American office of Nuclear Waste Isolation in 1993: you can read the PDF here: https://wipp.energy.gov/library/cca/CCA_1996_References/Chapter%207/CREL3328.PDF). Here, I can at least identify the fountainhead for that interest, and it was the explosion and meltdown of Reactor Number Four at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station that occurred on April 26, 1986. Growing up in the 1980s, I remember that this story was all over the news, and it was an event that I followed with much interest. Really, I suppose one could also say that my interest in all things related to the Soviet Union can also be traced back to the Chernobyl accident. 

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham, might just be one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books. I got this one early in 2020, when it had just been released in paperback, around the same time that I was watching the HBO Chernobyl miniseries (a miniseries that, while well-made and with great production values, plays very hard and loose with the facts, which is very ironic when you consider that its tagline was "What is the cost of lies?"). The author spent more than 10 years conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with many people involved in the accident, along with utilizing letters, unpublished memoirs, declassified documents, and other such material. The end result is a very well-researched and gripping read that chronicles not only the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath but also the terminal decline of the Soviet Union, and I highly recommend it. It's all here: chapters on the design and construction of the Soviet RBMK reactors, the events leading up to the disaster, the disaster itself (and the frantic around-the-clock attempts to prevent a second explosion/further meltdown), the construction of the Sarcophagus to contain the reactor's remains, the investigation into the cause of the accident (and the trial for those held responsible)... even the Elephant's Foot gets its own chapter. There's also a nice picture selection, and many helpful maps and diagrams (including a detailed map of the city of Pripyat). 

The book is very well-written. Consider this passage in the chapter on the erection of the Sarcophagus: "When Slavsky arrived to survey the project once more, on November 13, the Sarcophagus was all but complete - a terrible edifice of black angles, still and ominous, which perfectly expressed its purpose, like a medieval fantasy of a prison to hold Satan himself. It was an extraordinary achievement, a technical triumph in the face of horrifying conditions, and a new pinnacle of Soviet gigantomania: the engineers boasted that the structure contained 440,000 cubic meters of concrete, 600,000 cubic meters of gravel, and 7,700 tonnes of metal. The costs had risen to more than 1 million rubles - or $1.5 million - a day. As he gazed up at his masterpiece, a cathedral of brutalism in concrete and steel, it was said that tears welled in the old man's eyes." 

And although Higginbotham does a good job explain such complex matters as nuclear physics to the layman, the book never forgets the human heart of the struggle, and much time is spent with the plant technicians, firefighters, doctors and nurses, scientists, and soldiers who put their lives on the line (and in some cases sacrificed their health and/or life) to stop the disaster. When I think of the bravery of those men and women, many of whom knew they were marching off to their respective dooms, it's hard not to get a bit choked up. One of the best chapters in the book, "Inside Hospital Number Six," deals with the patients suffering from acute radiation syndrome, and the horrifying suffering and death that accursed those who were exposed to the worst of the radiation and fallout. It's all quite poignant, and one of my favorite passages in the book occurs at the end of the chapter: "By the end of the third week in May, the death toll from the accident had reached twenty, and Alexander Yuvchenko grew frightened. His white blood cell counts plunged to zero, and his remaining hair fell out. When will it be my turn? he wondered. Alone in their rooms, the most seriously injured survivors began to fear the darkness, and the lights in some wards were kept on constantly. A good Communist, Yuvchenko wasn't religious and knew no prayers. Yet each evening, he lay awake and pleaded with God to let him live through one more night." 

This year Higginbotham had a new book published, this one dealing with the Challenger explosion, another disaster that fascinated me as a child. I asked for it for my birthday next month. A potential future bathroom read? 

 

Bathroom Reads #7: KING PULP by Paul A. Woods

 

Today’s topic of discussion revolves around my fascination towards the film director Quentin Tarantino. I first became interested in Tarantino (both his life and work) sometime in the first half of 1997. Why? I’m not entirely sure. I know I had the hots for Uma Thurman at the time and I remember that back in the 90s her image on the famous Pulp Fiction movie poster was very ubiquitous (for example, the local video rental store we went to back in the day had a Pulp Fiction poster on display). And I remember some of my classmates talking about the movie in high school every now and then, which further stoked my interest. The thing was, at the time our parents were very strict about what kind of films my brothers and I could watch, the rule being that we could start watching more adult films when we were 18 . . . and I was around 16-17 when I became interested in Tarantino. In fact, I purchased the Pulp Fiction screenplay from a Waldenbooks at Lincoln Mall in June of ’97, around the time I had my 17^th birthday, the summer before I started senior year in high school. It seems weird to me now, but I was so obsessed with this director whose work I had never even seen that I actually read the screenplay some months before I saw the actual film, though in November of that same year (even though neither of us were yet 18) our parents relented and let me and one of my younger brothers finally watch the movie (fun fact: around the same time we also saw the well-cast Tarantino rip-off 2 Days in the Valley). That kind of opened the floodgates: soon enough I had also seen Reservoir Dogs, and in January 1998 my mom took one of my brothers and me to see Jackie Brown at the cinema (as it was still in theaters at that point, having only been released the previous December). I also began collecting some of his other screenplays, along with buying the CD soundtracks, and any book I could find dealing with Tarantino.

Earlier I mentioned how it was strange that my first exposure to Pulp Fiction was via the written word, but in one sense it was also appropriate, what with the literary flourishes that Tarantino brings to his films (indeed, I know a fair amount of fellow writers who admire Tarantino, and I suspect it might be for those aforementioned literary flourishes: the way his films are often divided into chapters like most novels do, his at times non-linear structures and use of flashbacks, things like that). I can’t say Tarantino was the first film director I idolized: as a typical 80s kid, at an early age I gravitated towards George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and in truth (as I've noted in the past on this blog) my earliest ambition was to be a film director. But with Tarantino, not only was there the added bonus that he also wrote his own films (which the writer in me admired), but he also had a cool/hip factor that, to me at least, was a new thing (I also think that, like Bret Easton Ellis, he’s far more intelligent/erudite than his inarticulate public image often suggests). Certainly he had a big impact on my life as an artist: before I read the Pulp Fiction screenplay, the books I was writing in high school up to that point were all plot, plot, plot: but with Tarantino’s films I saw that not everything you did in a work of fiction had to just advance the story forward . . . I realized that you could also have characters just hanging out and bullshittin’ with each other about pop culture. In a funny sort of way, even though my novel Harlem Smoke was conceived and marketed as my Lovecraft novel, in some regards it was also kind of a subconscious Tarantino-inspired project, in that a lot of the book is really just characters hanging out and shooting the shit (much like the first half of Jackie Brown, my favorite Tarantino movie): I even brought back the character of Iris Brant, the star of my 1998 novel Arthouse (which was one of the first of my post-Tarantino books). It was also through Tarantino that I got interested in indie films in general (and really, the 90s was a great period for indie films), which led me in turn to discover the work of the Coen Brothers and David Lynch (again, in 1998).

Today’s featured book in my ongoing Bathroom Reads series wasn’t the first book on Tarantino’s life and career I ever purchased: that would be Quentin Tarantino: Shooting From The Hip by Wensley Clarkson, which I got shortly after the Pulp Fiction screenplay, at the very same Waldenbooks. And yet, while I’ll still flip through the Clarkson book every now and then out of nostalgia, I don’t do it as an annual bathroom read like I do today’s book, which is King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino, by Paul A. Woods (first published in 1996, expanded in 1998: for the curious, the writer also did a book on David Lynch for the same publisher, which I can also recommend). I’m not quite sure when I got this book, but I believe it was at a Borders sometime in 1998. Bad cover art/unflattering photo of Quentin aside, it’s a decent enough summary of Tarantino’s 90s output, divided into 8 hefty chapters, with a generous selection of (mostly black & white) photographs. Chapter 1 deals with Tarantino’s early years and upbringing, his time working at Video Archives, his early screenwriting attempts, and so on. Chapter 2 deals with Reservoir Dogs, Chapter 3 revolves around True Romance, Chapter 4 concerns itself with his various movie influences (including a long and fascinating section on Italian exploitation movies), Chapter 5 is about Pulp Fiction, Chapter 6 tackles Natural Born Killers, Chapter 7 investigates some of his post-Pulp work (including Four Rooms and From Dusk Till Dawn: I confess I’ve yet to see the latter), while the final chapter is all about Jackie Brown. In other words, perhaps it is a bit outdated (though I think a third edition may have been released in 2005, covering the Kill Bill films), but still of interest to anyone interested in all things Tarantino.

Bathroom Reads #6: SEINFELDIA by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

 

In a previous entry in this series, I talked about my interest in 90s sitcoms, especially the NBC "Big Three" of FRASIER, FRIENDS and SEINFELD. The latter show is the subject of today's blog entry. Of the three aforementioned shows, I believe it was SEINFELD that we first latched onto, sometime around mid-season 5: the first episode we ever saw was "The Stall," so this would be sometime in 1994 (shortly after that we began watching FRASIER, then late into its first season, while FRIENDS we would not start to watch until sometime in season 4: by "we" I mean me and my brothers). By this point in time SEINFLED had become syndicated, so we were able to catch up with the past episodes we had missed very easily. One thing I remember about this time in my life was it was that pre-to-early high school period where we were still getting sent to bed at 9 p.m., which meant that our parents would tape new episodes of the show on VCR  and we'd watch it the following day: sometimes when I was falling asleep I could hear the show playing downstairs, and I can distinctly remember hearing (before watching) that season 6 episode where Kramer loudly passes a kidney stone while at the circus. I also remember that SEINFELD was very popular with my fellow students during my high school days, and how it would often be discussed in class the day after each new show aired. And certainly I remember the hysteria and media frenzy when the show announced it was going off the air in 1998. At that time in my life, I couldn't really appreciate the impact it had on the sitcom as a medium: certainly on some level I was aware that it was a very different type of show than the 80s sitcoms I was more familiar with (PERFECT STRANGERS, FAMILY MATTERS) in that it seemed to have zero interest in putting across a moral message, and also the complexity and intertwined nature of each episode's plotlines. I would come to appreciate all that years later, but back in the day, all I really cared about was that I found it funny and it made me laugh. 

I'm not quite sure when it was that I got Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's book SEINFELDIA: HOW A SHOW ABOUT NOTHING CHANGED EVERYTHING. It might have been shortly before the pandemic, or maybe shortly after it started: anyway, I got the book at work one night a couple of years ago. At around 300 pages with fairly large print it's a brisk and breezy read, covering how the show was conceived by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the early seasons where it struggled to find its footing, its inconceivable rise to become one of the most popular TV shows of all-time, and the effect it had on pop culture as a whole. In my opinion it only has one big flaw: while Armstrong interviews many people associated with the show (chiefly the writers, along with assorted network executives, or people with some link to the show, like the guy who played the Soup Nazi, or Kenny Kramer, who inspired the show Kramer), she didn't interview any of the show's four main stars or Larry David himself, so as a result the book, while affable in tone and very readable, can come off as a bit lightweight. But certainly it does a good job examining the impact the show had on 90s pop culture (and beyond). 

Bathroom Reads #5: FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON by James Hibberd

 

I began watching the GAME OF THRONES TV show in 2013, having purchased the DVD box set of the first season on a whim at the (now closed) Newbury Comics in Bellingham, Massachusetts (yeah, I had $60 to blow that day). I quickly became a big fan, not only of the TV show itself but also the book series that inspired it: shortly after I watched the first season I read the first book... then in the summer of 2013 I read the second book before watching the second season... then I read the remaining 3 books (in fact by the end of 2013 I had the entire 5 book series read) before watching season 3. At some point I got some of my younger brothers interested in the show as well, so I watched the first 3 seasons again (this time with them), and by the time we were done with that season 4 had just been released on DVD, so we caught that as well. By season 5 we started to watch the shows as they aired in real time (our dad subscribed to HBO for the two months or so they were on, then cancelled once the season was done, only to repeat the process the following year). At some point our parents also got interested so we watched the early seasons with them: as a result of all this I actually ended up seeing the first 3 seasons 3 times and saw seasons 4, 5 and 6 twice. It's a period of my life I'm quite nostalgic about: I remember, from season 5 on, how after each watching each new episode I would go onto various web forums and see how the fanbase had reacted to it, places like the Westeros forums and the (now sadly defunct) Watchers on the Wall site, along with reading reviews of the episodes from various websites that did such things, like ROLLING STONE and the A.V. CLUB. I also began to collect some of the other media that spun off from the show, such as the trading card sets and the CD soundtracks and also some of the associated books (while on the subject, I HIGHLY recommend GAME OF THRONES: THE COSTUMES by Michele Clapton, which is just a beautiful book). It's gotten to the point that a lot of my friends like to tease me about my obsession with the show, and it's hard for me to pinpoint just why I fell for it: I think some big things were the show's quasi-medieval look/feel and also the fact that it had a big ensemble cast: I like shows and books and movies with big ensemble casts (one reason why I've gravitated to THE OFFICE (American version) in recent years). And in all actuality it was a very well-made show, with (mostly) impeccable production values, great sets, incredible costumes... I remember how one of my friends at the time, the now sadly deceased Kevin Killian, once told me he was really impressed because the show really put its money on the screen. 

One fairly recent associated book is FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON by James Hibberd. Unlike some of the other books I've featured in this series, this book I read in an official context, when it first came out in the autumn of 2020, so as a result it shows up in my reading lists. It's one of those "oral history" pop culture books which I notice have become increasingly popular: in recent years I've also got one for the making of David Lynch's DUNE, DAZED & CONFUSED, and STAR WARS (the latter of which I'll spotlight at some future point). With such books the author interviews a bunch of people associated with the show or movie in question, then breaks the quotes up into a chronological order. Such books tend to be breezily readable and the different viewpoints/contrasting opinions offered up by the contributors in regards to the pop culture artifact on discussion can be interesting to observe. In regards to FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON, Hibberd was EW's official GAME OF THRONES writer, and over the years he visited the show's sets many times and spoke to many of the people involved with the show. Some of the material that appeared in his EW articles reappear here (yes, I collected the EW GOT issues as well), but there's also lots of new interviews as well, not only with many members of the show's cast but also the people involved in the making of the show, from producers to the showrunners to even George RR Martin himself. It's well illustrated with over 80 color photographs, and provides some highly interesting observations: for example, we find out the reasons why the book character Lady Stoneheart was cut from the adaptation (reasons I agree with, incidentally). I know some people have accused Hibberd of being a shill and a bit too fawning when it comes to the showrunners, but really, considering how much over-the-top vitriol that has been directed at the show by the toxic fandom since its controversial conclusion in 2019, it's nice to see someone with something positive to say about it (speaking as someone whose defense of the show on the A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE reddit forums is notorious: yeah, if you see someone on there defending the show with the handle James_Champagne, it's me... needless to say, I get downvoted a lot, but I like to think I'm a well-informed and articulate defender, at least). 

Bathroom Reads #4: THE BIG LEBOWSKI: THE MAKING OF A COEN BROTHERS FILM by William Preston Robertson

Sometime around 1997/1998, I became very interested in the world of indie films, mainly through my discovery of the work of Quentin Tarantino. Luckily, the 1990s was a great decade for indie films in general, and from Tarantino I went on to explore the work of other directors such as David Lynch, Mary Harron, and, of course, the Coen Brothers. The first Coen Brothers film I ever saw was FARGO, sometime in the spring of 1998, around the same time that this book, THE BIG LEBOWSKI: THE MAKING OF A COEN BROTHERS FILM had been released. As there weren't many Coen Brothers books available at that time (aside from the screenplays, that is), I naturally purchased a copy, even though at that point I still hadn't even seen THE BIG LEBOWSKI, or a few of the other Coen Brothers films that predated it (such as BLOOD SIMPLE and HUDSUCKER PROXY)... though by the autumn of 1998, around the time I started freshmen year in college, I had eventually caught up with all of their older work and, of course, THE BIG LEBOWSKI itself, which I believe I rented in August 1998, after returning home from a vacation in Montreal. 

This book was written by William Preston Robertson (and edited by Tricia Cooke, Ethan Coen's wife). Robertson, a friend of the Coens from their college days (and who also provided some voicework for their films: he did the voice of the radio evangelist in BLOOD SIMPLE, for example), decided to devote an entire book to detailing a typical Coen Brothers film production, and this was the result. After a fascinating introductory chapter providing some information on the origins and early life of the Coen Brothers, he then devotes the rest of the text to showing how THE BIG LEBOWSKI was made, starting from the concept, to how the script was written, to interviews with not only the Coen Brothers but also the cinematographer (Roger Deakins), the production designer (Rick Heinrichs) and the costume designer (Mary Zophres). It's a quick and breezy read (not even 200 pages long), and unlike some of the other books I've covered in these entries I can usually finish it off in a week of bathroom visits. There are also a lot of photographs, plus many examples of storyboard illustrations and sketches for the costumes. 

The funny thing is, though, I'm not even a super-huge fan of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and find the cult that has accumulated around it over the last two decades baffling. Don't get me wrong, it's still an enjoyable and well-made movie, very amusing at times and well-casted (and with a killer soundtrack to boot), but of the 10 or so Coen Brothers films I've seen I'm not even sure I would place it in their top 5. Perhaps the issue is that I find it a bit too self-consciously "zany" or "wacky" for my tastes (I have the same problem with RAISING ARIZONA incidentally) and I tend to gravitate more towards their darker or more somber works (BARTON FINK, MILLER'S CROSSING, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and so on... though I am super-fond of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, which I guess is also pretty "zany" and "wacky"). 

Bathroom Reads #3: GOODBYE 20TH CENTURY: A BIOGRAPHY OF SONIC YOUTH by David Browne

I purchased David Browne's GOODBYE 20TH CENTURY: A BIOGRAPHY OF SONIC YOUTH at the Barnes & Noble I work at back in the year it was published, which was 2008. I first began listening to Sonic Youth in college, maybe around the year 2001 or thereabouts, and for many years I considered myself a casual fan of the band at best, but over the last two decades they've grown on me, to the extent that this year I finally placed them on my "Top 10 Favorite Bands" list. One of the things that fascinates me about Sonic Youth (and which this book covers to some degree) is that they really weren't typical rock stars, in that they avoided excesses of sex and drugs, and followed a very frugal business model (the book mentions their interest in achieving modest record sales yet a fiercely loyal fan base, having creative autonomy, and maintaining longevity). Also, much like another artist that I covered in these installments (Alfred Hitchcock), the band were more observers than participants. The underground filmmaker Richard Kern makes the same observation in this book: he compared the band to being like Andy Warhol at the Silver Factory, saying that, in contrast to the freaky underground types they rubbed elbows with, outside of the chaos of their art the band were more like levelheaded businessmen with traditional/conservative middle class lifestyles: in this way, I can see a bit of myself in the band's approach to art and life (while on the subject, I also relate to their obsession with pop culture, and how it seems that the things they were into were either really super-mainstream and popular or super underground and obscure, with little middle ground: in some ways I myself am of the same aesthetic temperament). 

Browne (a former rock critic) does a very good job at writing a (nearly complete) biography of the band. Not only did he interview at length the four primary band members, but also many of their former band members, business associates, record label executives, and celebrity pals: everyone from Michael Gira to Lydia Lunch to Sofia Coppola to Chloe Sevigny. He also made the decision to divide the book into three parts, each dealing with a different era of the band's career. The first (and longest) part, "Rise," deals with the backgrounds of the different band members, the band's origins, and the recording of their earliest albums up to the classic DAYDREAM NATION and their signing with the Geffen record label: this section really captures the nihilism and grime of the early 80s NYC No Wave scene. Part Two, "Infiltration," mainly covers the first half of the 1990s and the peak of the band's brief flirtation with the mainstream: in some ways this is usually my favorite section to read, which is weird because I find much of the band's 90s output fairly weak (with a few exceptions). Part Three, "Refuge," covers the rest of the 90s and up to what was then the present day, concluding with the band releasing their second to last studio album (RATHER RIPPED) and transformation into "elder counterculture statesmen." 

Sometimes I do wish, though, that Browne had worked on the book a few more years before it was published. Had he waited until 2009, he could have included material on the band's final studio album, THE ETERNAL. Had he waited until 2011, he could have also written about the band's final concerts and eventual dissolution, which would have made his book then a complete history of the band, from beginning to end. As it stands now, it feels a bit incomplete, though of course, the year he had finished writing it (2007), he would have had no clue that the band would break up just four years later (and certainly at the time the band had no inkling about this themselves). Also, considering the bad blood that poisoned the band following Thurston Moore's affair with Eva Prinz (an affair which began, as far as I can tell, in 2010), perhaps the band would not have been as candid and forthcoming in their interviews with the author. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that Prinz had been in the Sonic Youth orbit for a number of years by that point, there's no reference to her in the book itself, save for an otherwise cryptic reference to former band member Jim O'Rourke's "problematic personal relationship at home." 

I've long felt that the mark of a good music book is that it makes you want to go out and relisten to the albums it covers after you read about them. When doing my annual readthrough of this book this year, I decided to relisten to all 15 of the Sonic Youth studio albums. Some of these albums I've heard many, many times... a few of them only a handful. In any event, and not counting their various side projects (THE WHITEY ALBUM), EPs, SYR releases or other offshoots, if I had to rank their albums from best to worst, it would probably be like this: 

1. Murray Street (2002)

2. Daydream Nation (1988)

3. Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994)

4. The Eternal (2009)

5. Evol (1986)

6. Sonic Nurse (2004)

7. Sister (1987)

8. Rather Ripped (2006)

9. Dirty (1992)

10. Washing Machine (1995)

11. Confusion Is Sex (1983)

12. Bad Moon Rising (1985)

13. A Thousand Leaves (1998)

14. NYC Ghosts & Flowers (2000)

15. Goo (1990)