What I Like About …

Vampires Suck!

I haven’t read the Twilight series, or seen any of the movies.  Still I know about the whole Team Jacob vs. Team Edward thing, evidence of a brilliant marketing campaign since as a 44 year old man I was not the target.  And I only watch time-shifted TV so I can avoid commercials.

I don’t know who wins in the books, but out here in vampireless and werewolfeless reality it looks like Jacob has kicked butt and taken names.

Actually, given names. According to the Social Security Administration’s annual counting of baby names Jacob was the most popular name for a boy in 2011, and Edward didn’t even pop up in the top 10. Or the top 50. Or top 100. And just barely cracked the top 150 at 148.

So, America has spoken: vampires suck, werewolves rule.

When I was a kid I loved Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Machine crew.  The fantastic nature of the crimes hit my desire for sci-fi, the mysteries for detective stories, and Shaggy for humor.

Now that I’m a grownup I love Dr. Who and the Tardis crew.  It has exactly the same mix of the fantastic, detective style-mysteries and a large dose of funny.

But there is one large difference, as pointed out in this comic: in Scooby-Doo the fantastic turned out mundane, and in Dr. Who the mundane turns out mysterious.

To me, this perfectly matches what we want at particular ages.  As a kid the whole world is mysterious and a little scary, and you’re constantly being challenged to figure new things out. How do those huge, heavy clouds stay in the sky?  Why won’t the troll in my closet stop making that creaking noise? What’s the real way to protect myself from cooties? It’s a little scary, but most of the time those fantastic experiences turn out to have perfectly simple explanations and we are able to go about our business. Scooby-Doo and his buddies showed us each week that even the scariest monsters in the world were just pathetic old men who could be taken down by some meddling kids.

As an adult even the mysterious is boring.  Thirty years ago a laptop connected to the Internet we could use to watch Dr. Who was miraculous, and now it’s $399 at Target. You can get a 3D printer for your house to make functional tools, something that would have been far fetched in a 1960s television show.  Within a couple years cell phones do more than tricorders! We’re surrounded by new, exciting, amazing phantasms and are bored with them.  Dr. Who assures us that there is still magic in the world, or at least aliens looking to kill us and steal our brains.

For a kid, you experience a lot of mystery that turns out to be normal -- just like Scooby-Doo's crew. As an adult you wish the mundane would become mysterious -- just like in Dr. Who.

Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore

I first encountered Moore through Lamb, a fictionalization of the Biblical Gospels as told through Jesus’ best friend Biff.  It’s an often ludicrous, sacrilegious, absurd, silly and hilarious story that I couldn’t put down.  I’m a big fan of the Bible and fictionalized accounts of Jesus, and was hooked on Moore from that point.

Many of his books are even more absurd than Lamb. Vampires and sea monsters and jesters and angels and more vampires and sea monsters wander in and out of these stories making bad choices, reacting to and creating absurd situations and generally being highly entertaining.

In his latest, Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art, Moore gives us the genesis of the greatest art in Western History since, well, before history. To explain how Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh and Renoir produced such astonishing art Moore invokes a twisted and immortal partnership between a misshapen caveman and a muse who arrived on Earth via an asteroid.

So, yea, it’s pretty much a Christopher Moore book.

But it’s also more straightforward, if such a thing is possible, and the most literary of Moore’s works to date.  The love story between Lucien Lessard and the muse is kind of sweet and straightforward.  Most of the painters are presented as people, plain old folk just trying to get by, who happen to be obsessed with painting.  And the majority of the novel, unlike other Moore books, is about how the normal people of the book deal with not knowing anything fantastic is going on.

That’s really what makes Sarce Bleu (and I’m sorry I don’t know how to make an accent for Sacre) different.  The caveman and muse are important characters, but the story is not from their perspective.  It is not the story of these enduring fonts of creative brilliance, or these supernatural beings.  Instead it is the story of a nice guy who owns a bakery, paints on the side, falls in love with a beautiful model and has to try to figure out the mystery of his lover.

Remove the pigment and the caveman and this is the story of any man who fell in love with a woman, who needs to discover what makes her so alluring while at the same time so damnably frustrating.  For all that Moore claims in the afterward that he just wanted to write a book about blue, it is a romance novel of the first order complete with happy ending.

That is also what makes it the same.  Two of Moore’s vampire books are sub-titled “A Love Story,” and Lamb is about the bro-mance between Biff and Jesus. It turns out that Moore is a pretender to the throne of absurdist urban/ historical fantasy, and in truth belongs on the shelf with Harlequins and Avon Books.

Except Moore does it better.

It took a week for me to finish, but it was well worth the effort and time to get through.  Sacre Bleu is the best book I’ve read this year.

Right now I’m reading Stuart Woods’ Unnatural Acts, but I’m not going to review it. It’s the sorbet that I read between meals, palate cleansing but not really a part of the literary meal.

Tomorrow I receive Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, and will do my next review on that.

OK, not really. It is on Ebay with an opening bid of 99 cents, and quickly rising.  Here’s the story direct from the Grand Master’s blog:

In 1977, Bernie Rhodenbarr made his debut in Burglar’s Can’t Be Choosers. In 1995, he had his seventh appearance in The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart. And eight years later, in late 2003, a woman in O’Fallon, Illinois, bought the original manuscript of Bogart.

Last fall, I’m sorry to report, she passed away. And last week her daughter got in touch, and we arranged that I’d find a new owner for the manuscript. I’ve just posted it on eBay, with a minimum opening bid of 99¢.

If you want to read it cheaper you can get a later copy of The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart on Amazon, but even that copy is rare — there’s only one left (more coming soon).

This video is wonderful. Bad guys Mom and Dad made a Spider-Man pinata for their four year old (I’m assuming the age) son to whack the heck out of, expecting him to slam it with joy and wallow in the muck of candy on the floor. It is the first step in their training to create a new villain.

But their boy had other ideas. He tried, really tried, to please his parents by engaging in violence against the superhero, but he just couldn’t become the evil genius they wanted. Instead, he shows his love for the web crawler and takes yet another step towards being a good guy.

Next step? Underwear on the outside.

h/t Rachel Maddow