The Rum Diary

Before Hunter S. Thompson gave birth to Gonzo Jonzo, he was just another 22-year-old in 1960 fleeing to Puerto Rico after wrecking his editor's car. After landing a job at the soon-to-fold El Sportivo magazine this boozy Caribbean respite provided him with all the material he would need for his sophomoric effort into the world of conventional fiction-writing, The Rum Diary.

Only for a true Thompson freak, the book is saved from its utter plotlessness by the characters he creates (or embellishes?) around protagonist Paul Kemp, a San Juan reporter who occasionally files stories while drinking and fighting around the humid commonwealth. Written in the late 50s and published in 1998 with the help of Johnny Depp, the release of The Rum Diary to American theaters has been long-awaited for those poor souls who chose to major in journalism after seeing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Like Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, the film is better than the book. Depp's subdued invocation of the Good Doctor's dialect is spot-on as he chases unfavorable leads and the promising Chenault (pronounced Sha-nelle), played by Amber Heard. There's even a scene where they have a long ménage à trois on a short pier with a candy-apple red 1960 Corvette.

The booze-imbued storyline leads to much fire-spitting craziness provided by Moburg (a perfectly scene-stealing Giovanni Ribisi) a rock-bottom burnout on a Hitler kick who stays with Kemp alongside second-banana Sala (an ever-wise Michael Rispoli) through the demise of their publication and the dissolution of their prosperity.

  
The Rum Diary is the perfect gift this holiday season for those who don't need another typewriter for Christmas.

The Inferno

There's a new book by Chuck Palahniuk that's set in Hell. Think The Breakfast Club and The Inferno twisted into one narrative. Madison Spencer, a thirteen-year-old daughter of liberal-secular-humanist celebrities who collect her siblings from impoverished regions of the world, finds herself in Hell after a serious weed overdose. Once there she meets a jock, a punk, a nerd and a slut. With them she goes on wacky adventures, one of which involves bringing giant she-demon Psezpolnica to climax with the severed head of her Hell-friend, Archer (the punk). Those little rascals.

The sights Hell has to offer: The Sea of Insects, The Great Plains of Broken Glass and the Giant Ocean of Wasted Sperm. Of the environment of Hell, Madison once said: "Hell is very much like Florida in that the resident bug life never dies." The currency of Hell is candy and all the operations are run by demon-bureaucrats who look lifted from a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch.

People Madison sees in Hell:

Norman Mailer

Kurt Cobain

Susan Sontag

John Lennon

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Madison learns a lot in Hell, like having a body mass index greater than .0012 and using the word "ain't" are damnation-worthy infractions. She also learns that the dead have many ways of sending messages to the living on Earth. For instance, if a soul is trying to tell you that you'll be dead before sunset, you will hear the song "You're the One That I Want" from Grease three times in the same day, seemingly by coincidence.

At a little over 240 pages, it's a hell of a good read. Ha!

The First Chill

Located under Georgia and Alabama lies a sleepy little state in the union that was colonized by New England in 1845. Because this sleepy little colony lacks the culture, heritage, hospitality and charm of the other southern states above it and the climate experiences the highest average heat of any other in the country the colonists who populate it do so for only the five coldest months of the year.

 But every year the residents of this colony, quaint as they are, wait longingly for the first morning of the Autumn season when they step out from their cozy little abodes to feel the first chills of winter, signaling the first waves of their seasonal flocks.

For the rest of the holiday season the simple residents of the warm, sleepy colony marvel with delight at the joyous clustering and spirited chirping of their visiting snow fowl in malls, restaurants, movie theaters, grocery stores and coffee shops. The darling residents gander curiously while their vacationers ruffle jolly plumage on highways, beaches, pontoon boats, tennis courts and golf courses.

Just as the curious residents of the warm little colony delight in the fluttering arrival of their annual gaggle in time for Christmas, so they despair when the time comes for their company to take flight back to their northern roosts.  Having nothing to do for the seven months until their yearly covey returns, the twee residents of the colony dawdle languidly without the knowledge of what a real bagel tastes like.

The Cat Named Guns

There's this orange cat that lives in a house built on farmland. This house is his second (maybe third) home. His age is indeterminate, but he spends most of his day doing nothing but lying around. He might sleep in the middle of an empty living room. He might investigate the happenings in the backyard of the house across the street (the one that doesn't get mowed regularly; whatever could be happening there). Or he might sneak up and gaze suspiciously at children waiting for a school bus at the bottom of the street for an hour. If nothing of the sort, he would probably go back to the house and sleep in some other, more interesting, empty room.

The people who live in the house think he is a perfectly acceptable little kitty. He's greeted with smiles and love and cutesy refrains of his name whenever he enters the room his people are currently occupying. When he's done being with his people, he leaves through a hole carved in a wall of the house provided for the comings and goings of him and the other kitties that live there. When Guns leaves, his people know that they have nothing to worry about, that he will soon return as surely as all the other kitties.

But one night not long ago, to the dismay of one of the people driving home after class, a dead orange kitty was spotted on the side of the road not far from the house. As all the people in the house came out to investigate the site of the accident it was concluded, after a few sad moments, that it was indeed their orange Guns who had perished.

Having many animals over the years had emotionally prepared the people of the house for a night such as this one. As the hole was dug in the backyard, they were careful not to strike the graves of the other animals who had once been residents of the house. After some solemn words were made for their good little cat, and his remains were peacefully laid to rest, the people went inside for their solemn shots of tequila, making melancholy jokes that their precious orange cat might stroll back inside after an hour's time like the heartbreak of the evening had never occurred.

These jokes proved strangely prophetic when later that night, as one of the people left their bedroom for a trip to the bathroom, their beloved orange cat was laying in the hallway looking back up at them as he would have done on any other unremarkable night.

The identity of the orange cat buried in their backyard is still a mystery.

Sonnet I

AM breaking fucking unrelenting,
Millions of boxes moving filthy miles
On roaring highways and waist-high mornings
For one but not all in all-changing styles.

Fat-noised the truth through galvanized salvage
Than with a better way to spend the day;
Out hacking off a crucial appendage
Clearly malignant, if it may so say.

Facial friends and vocal disagreers;
Of white static speech a black precedent,
A signal reaching the ionosphere,
A people for a dispatch never sent:

Most painful choices, the easiest, too.
My problem's not but a problem for you.

A New Companion: Part 2

My girlfriend, Billie, and I are getting an apartment. This is definite after a lot of driving around Palm Beach Gardens and knocking on the doors of almost every leasing office in the 33418 zip code. All were very nice inside and outside, and so were the leasing managers. They seemed to have everything we needed and answered "yes" to every question we asked them, except the one for which we didn't want the affirmative.

Us: "Do you have any pet restrictions?"
Leasing Manager: "For what kind of animal?"
Us: "A Doberman."

Quickly I lost patience with answering that question. I'm perfectly aware that a Doberman isn't the most popular dog breed for even the most ardent dog-lovers, let alone a young couple living together in an apartment for the first time, but that's one of the reasons I have chosen a Doberman to be our dog. One of the managers even asked us, with a tone usually reserved for evaluating one's sanity, "Why do you want a Doberman?!" All I could think to myself was, "Why don't you want one?"

There is nothing compared to the feeling of security that comes from a lovable, well-raised, enormous dog, and I haven't had that feeling since Rufus, our family's Bull Mastiff, died more than a year ago. All I want is for me and Billie to have that to come home to everyday, and that shouldn't be license for discrimination.

You know the part in "Fight Club" when the main character is asked to find his "power animal"? Well, my power animal is a female Doberman named Lilly Pulitzer. Society needs to understand that. I never had a friend who's had a Doberman, and I almost never come into contact with these dogs on a day-to-day basis, but I'm beginning to see why when I consider how unfriendly all four of the apartment complexes we visited were toward the fifth smartest dog breed in the American Kennel Club.

Earlier in the year we visited a Doberman breeder at her home in Hollywood, Florida who had a litter of six female Doberman pups and only one male. Billie was a little freaked out when she saw that all the pups had their ears taped up, each one with a different color of florescent tape. She said they looked like antennas, all flopping around on top of their little puppy skulls, the picture of adorability. We also met the mother of the pups and an nine-month-old female, fully-grown, named Jossie, whose doorbell-reactive barking was very good at letting you know you were in a house full of eight other Dobermans.

When I walked toward the kitchen, where Jossie and the puppy crates were separated from the rest of the house by a dutch split door, Jossie was right in front of the door, barking dutifully and never taking her eyes off me. I asked the breeder, "Can I pet her?" Her response to my question was, "Let's see."

I actually could. Not being a total idiot when it comes to large dogs, I gave her my hand, where she could see it, palm up and in front of her nose. This seemed to pass her Doberman test, and we were allowed access to the kitchen for puppy time.

I knew this was the fun part, so I sat down in the middle of the floor while the breeder opened all the surrounding cages while each puppy, one by one, ran toward me with wagging stubs and bouncing antennas. They pounced, played and chewed, the normal puppy shit, while Jossie stayed close to the breeder and the male pup stayed in his cage, apparently shy.

Before we were about to leave, as Billie was chatting with the breeder, one of the pups, with green tape on her ears, sat obediently at Billie's feet looking up at her, ignoring all the play in which her other seven sisters were engaged. When Billie noticed this quiet, expectant pup at her feet she was immediately heartbroken that we couldn't leave with her right then and there, calling her "our little green girl." That mental picture is still the fondest memory I have of that visit.

Meeting Dobermans and realizing that they are exactly as you would expect them to be is easy if you let those expectations arise out of the necessary research required when someone adopts a dog of any breed. You find out that a little education goes a long way, and get frustrated by the reactions of those who posses none of the required knowledge that they should when these dogs are a topic of important discussion.

Luckily an apartment complex does exist that respects our choice of dog. It's less than a mile from both of our jobs and we're moving there September 20th. After having learned that breeders prefer to whelp puppies in the winter, after the stifling Florida summers, I am telling everyone who cares to listen (and more who don't) that all I want for Christmas this year is a Doberman named Lilly Pulitzer.

Happy Birthday, Steve Albini!!!

Big Black - "Cables"

Today is the forty-eighth birthday of my favorite living musician. He is credited with fronting Big Black until his twenty-fifth birthday, Rapeman until around age twenty-seven, recording my favorite Nirvana album, In Utero, around age thirty-one and just being one of the nerdiest bad-asses (or most bad-ass nerds) in the punk community since then and through today.

Rapeman - "Trouser Minnow"

A journalism graduate of Northwestern University, Steve Albini is one of three people who inspired me to major in journalism. Today he divides his time managing Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago and playing in his current band, Shellac, with Bob Weston on bass and Todd Trainer on drums.

Shellac - "My Black Ass"

Have a great day, Steve Albini, and I bid you Godspeed on your continued journey to find new, more effective ways of crafting the most vicious noise ever forged from both a free and independent artistic (and sometimes journalistic) community.