Tuesday, May 29, 2012
JUNKFOOD CINEMA 36
Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; the Riddle of Steel…is that Shaq should not play superheroes. You’ve entered a mythic realm of swords and sorcery, of Tangos and Cashes, of Mikes and Ikes. Every week, our hero (read: pudgy misanthrope) battles a tremendous schlock monster – as well as the sinister threat of early onset heart failure. With his sharp words, he slices the beast open, spilling its flaws upon the ground before hoisting the entrails aloft in celebration. To commemorate this all-too-violent metaphor, a feast of one tasty snack food item will be prepared and set before you.
A couple weeks ago, the Alamo Drafthouse launched its Summer of 1982 series; a celebration of arguably the greatest season of the greatest year to ever…fall two years before I was born. Dozens of iconic films, both real people legit and JFC-approved, are being screened, including a certain sword and sandal epic that redefined swords, sandals, and indiscernible Austrian meat piles: Conan the Barbarian. We all remember Conan, he was the gentle oaf-beast who solved most of his problems by cleaving said problem’s head in twain while he struggled with words far less complicated than twain. He battled the Snake Cult and it’s malevolent leader Thulsa Doom (which translated into English from the ancient text means, “This is CNN”). We all remember that classic moment in which Conan is seated in the center of the banquet table, like a roided-up centerpiece, while his masters make him recite what is best in life. He boom-voicey responds:
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”
Great line, right? Well what many people don’t know is that it actually took Conan several attempts to get it right. The multiple, multiple blows to the head, during his gladiatorial undertakings coupled with the fact that lamentation is a four-syllable word, made it nigh impossible for him to totally recall this maxim. Sorry, that last joke was a raw deal. Just erase(r) it from your memory and we’ll terminate all further jokes in that vein until the end of days. Twins! We at Junkfood Cinema have managed to recover the original transcription of that moment originally lost to the sands of time and the winds of…we totally made it up. Here’s how it actually went down…
Red Hair: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your own potpourri, see Driven before two, and heal the inflammation of the ligaments.
Red Hair: (Embarrassed that his prized jock wad flubbed the actual words, but too embarrassed to admit it) Uh, yes! That’s right! Ummm, what else is best in life?
Conan: (Confusion washing over his beefy face) Dungeons & Dragons.
Red Hair: Ah yes, plundering dungeons and slaying dragons is sure to make a man of you. Huzzah!
Conan: No, I mean the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. I’m a third level wood fairy with a +2 battleaxe and–
Red Hair: Nevermind that Conan, nevermind. (Trying to figure out how to divert attention from the fact that his top warrior just said wood fairy). Now think hard, Conan, what is truly best in life?
Conan: Corn puppies.
Jeff the Barbarian: (visiting from out of town) Corn puppies?
Conan: Yes, they’re like corn dogs only they are smaller.
Red Hair: Yes, long live the…corn puppies. What about your enemies, Conan? What is best in life as it specifically pertains to your enemies?
Conan: (After a flash of recognition sparks briefly before cascading off his jagged face) Also antiquing.
Myron The Slightly Unpleasant: As hard as it is to find older things than our current old things, I’m inclined to disagree with that one.
Red Hair: (Launching the “Quiet, Please” spear at Myron) Uh, what else you got, Coney?
Conan: Prog Rock.
Vinnie the Mongol: But Conan, Prague hasn’t even been discovered yet.
Cody of the Plains: No, not Prague rock, prog rock, as in short for progressive rock. In other words, when he’s not smashing skulls, Conan here is keen on listening to Kansas and ELO.
Vinnie the Mongol: Oh, Prague and prog simply sound alike, and as we are speaking these things out loud, our confusion was unavoidable.
Cody of the Plains: Yes, this exchange would make absolutely no sense in written form.
Red Hair: (Exasperated) Conan, there’s got to be something else you remember as being one of the few tenets of what is best in life. There were so few in fact that we shouldn’t really be having so lengthy a conversation. Remember?
Conan: Of course.
Red Hair: And?
Conan: Finding an onion ring in your french fries.
Red Hair: Wow, really? Yeah, great, Cones. That is truly a gift from the gods. Anything else?
Conan: Leave-in conditioner, that new camel smell, and David Alan Grier.
Red Hair: Crom dammit, is it too late to get Red Sonja instead?
—
Junkfood Pairing: Cake-nan The Bavarian
I’m sure we can all agree that what is actually best in life is cramming sweets into our mouth holes until we go blind from diabetes. Almost as savage as Conan is his pastry-based cousin Cake-nan The Bavarian. Armed with his multiple layers of spongy, sugary vengeance and will-demolishing, liqueur-flavored cream, Cake-nan battles the forces of responsible eating habits and self-control.
MoreJunkfood Cinema is what’s best in life
BOILING POINT 25
It seems that we are living in a golden age of television. With shows ranging from Mad Men to Game of Thrones or Modern Family to Dexter, Breaking Bad, or anything else garnering epic amounts of hype, one might view Battleship or its ilk and come to the conclusion that TV is better than the movies. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair came to that conclusion, as did the folks at IndieWire (although Cole took a somewhat different stance).
Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how wrong it is. While there is certainly a lot of great television out there, the theater experience still trumps all. Television will never usurp the cinema just as crude sex robots will never usurp hookers.
When someone wants to describe a really great looking television show, they say it “feels like a movie.” No one ever describes great films as “being like television.” Television aspires to be film and in some instances, comes close. Film, safely perched on its tower, has no desire to be more like TV.
To address the question of whether television is really as good as everyone says it is right now, one must view television as a whole. There have never been more channels. A “basic” cable package comes with two hundred channels these days, 180 of which you’ll never use. Why? Because there’s a ton of crap on television. There is really, truly bad television everywhere. With that many stations, you’re bound to find a few winners. When 10% of 50 channels meant there were 5 good shows, it’s one thing, but 10% of 200 channels means there are 20 fantastic shows out there. Sounds about right.
Television done right has several benefits over film. First, it’s generally a lot cheaper, which goes a long way in the production world. Second, it’s a lot longer. A movie has between 80 and 120 minutes to give you a beginning, a middle, and an end. Within that time it must convey to you everything you need to know, think, and experience. A television program can stretch that out ten times longer, or more. The History Channel’s upcoming Hatfields & McCoys runs nearly 6 hours over three nights. Mad Men gets 546 minutes a season to work its characters in new directions. Game of Thrones has twelve episodes a season to wow you. If a television show has two boring episodes, it’s not really a big deal. You hold on. But if a movie bores you for 20 minutes, well, you feel like it’s a bad movie.
People who claim television is better than movies have just grown old or pretentious. I’m generalizing, of course, and calling names. But so what? There is this idea in the ether that the cinematic offerings of the world have dwindled. I say nay. Going to the movies is still fun. Going to the movies should be fun.
They’re two different mediums. Television is the long play. If Mad Men had been created as a movie, would it have done as well? Doubtful. It’s too short a period of time to play with the characters. Episodic television is better compared to movies – something like Law & Order: SVU, but even that has the benefit of years of backstory.
Comparing television to film is a rough trade. They’re different beasts. Not meant to be compared and contrasted, but for me, if you do that, film comes up the winner. Television takes a long time to tell the story and can take more risks. With movies, there’s an all-or-nothing attitude that demands consistent quality in order to be compelling. When a movie hits, it hits. It stays with you. Movies are far more powerful that television, especially in the short term.
What comparing film and television comes down to is the experience. There’s no question in my mind that seeing a movie is better. For one, if you include the theater experience, that’s pure magic. A huge screen, bombastic sound, an electrified and excited crowd. Always better than sitting on a couch in front of your TV. Movies still have spectacle around them. They’re still events. P
lus, they rarely leave you wanting. Most every episode of a television show teases you about the next one. A movie says “Here I am, here is every part of me.” And, okay, sometimes leaves the door too open for sequels.
Even ignoring the theater experience, a good movie is almost always better than a great episode of television. I love shows like Justified, but it’s rare for an episode to rise to the level of a film in terms of emotion or excitement. When a rare show comes along that does just that, like Game of Thrones, we lay upon it the best compliment you can give a television show: Man, it’s just like a movie.
So yeah, enjoy the television we have now. We’re experiencing a boom in home entertainment. But let’s not be ridiculous. Movies kick TV’s ass all over the place. The best shows strive to be like movies and in doing so, capture a little bit of that magic and win our hearts. But it was movies that opened our hearts in the first place.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
WILL THE REAL DAN HIPP PLEASE STAND UP
About 16 months ago we had this awesome post featuring his work, and when I got to visit his personal website and realized the amount of great content he produced in this past year I just had to post more of this great pieces. I really love this illustration style. I'd say it is quite simple, but you can see the guy is talented, because it is also amazingly wicked. Well, for much more of the work he did this past year, check out his website. I hope you enjoy these! Cheers. ;)
ANYTHING HAPPENS IN THAT FIVE MINUTES AND I’M YOURS.
IT'S HALFTIME IN AMERICA...
HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS.
HAIL TO THE KING, BABY.
...LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED.
IT'S SIMPLE. WE KILL BILL.
I'M HAPPY AS CAN BEv
PUT THAT THING BACK WHERE IT CAME FROM OR SO HELP ME…
IT WASN'T OVER...
FANTASTIC MR. FOX
HAPPY THANKSGIVING! LET THE WILD MARIO PARTY START!
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND WOODY
BETWEEN ASSEMBLIES
DRIVE
THE ADVENTURES OF FRODO AND SAM
THE FIRE RISES (DK4LIFE)
ASSEMBLY LINE
YOU’RE WAITING FOR A TRAIN… (or WHAT I THINK OF WHEN I WATCH INCEPTION)
HELLO, MY NAME IS...
WHY'D IT HAVE TO BE SNAKES?
UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START
ZOMBIE SURVIVALIST T-SHIRT
Friday, May 25, 2012
STONER LIT 101 - REQUIRED READING
In the spirit of 4/20, we’ve rounded up a variety of reading recommendations from authors whose credentials include (but certainly aren’t limited to): Rolling Stone writer, history professor, botanist, pot psychologist, sex columnist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, and a guy who recorded everything his dad said on Twitter and turned it into a #1 New York Times bestseller. Click through for their personal recommendations on reading material to compliment an “already confused and heightened state of mind,” or (warning!) keep you parked on a bus bench in front of Dairy Queen for two hours. If you’re especially susceptible to DQ marijuana time-warp scenarios, or if you don’t choose to observe this national holiday, there is suggested reading here that will allow you to experience “how awful it is to be high around cool people you don’t really know” without actually having to do so.
As many of the authors point out, smoking isn’t exactly conducive to reading, but there is no denying the lasting appeal of drug experiences — both as writing material and to individual book fiends, conjuring memories of reading on the porch for summer days without end and (failed) experimentation with The Anarchist Cookbook. If you have your own recommendations (or cautionary tales), or have ever tried to smoke the inside of a banana peel, we invite you, as always, to share in the comments.
Rob Sheffield, author of Love is a Mix Tape and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, recommends:
Spring, 1989: John Ashbery’s poem “Fragment.” That April a friend of mine (let’s call him Trimalchio) broke up with his girlfriend (let’s call her Petronia) and as a goodbye present she gave me this great big bag of weed, which she only did to make him mad, which worked, although Trimalchio ended up smoking much of it. I spent many hours that spring on the porch, in the sun or under the stars, listening to the Stylistics or the Jungle Brothers or Spacemen 3, reading poetry. Ashbery’s “Fragment,” from 1970, was a poem I already knew well and had read many times, but I thought I might pick up something new reading it through blurrier eyes. I did pick up something new, but then I do every time I read “Fragment.” Reading it took up a weekend in May, very pleasurably. Like the man said: “There was lots of time left, and we could always come back to it, and use it later.” The bag was finally emptied in the late summer of 1990, to the strains of the Jungle Brothers’ “Tribe Vibes.” Both “Fragment” and “Tribe Vibes” evoke that year for me. Thanks, Petronia. — Rob Sheffield
Amy Sohn, author of Prospect Park West and the forthcoming Motherland, recommends:
Candy by Terry Southern, Women by Charles Bukowski, A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole, Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, and The Anarchist Cookbook. Those are all in the spirit of the holiday though not specifically stoner literature. Candy puts 50 Shades of Grey to shame and is a miracle by an American visionary, a one-handed read that is also funny as hell. Women is completely subversive. A Confederacy of Dunces is a prior era’s Harold & Kumar. A brilliant hilarious character, many laugh-out-loud scenes, and a book whose pleasure is heightened by reading it stoned. When I was 15, The Anarchist Cookbook was how I learned to try to get high by scraping the inside of a banana peel, cooking it and smoking it. I didn’t get high and I had a lot of explaining to do when my mother saw the pan. — Amy Sohn
(2 votes for this one!) Ned Beauman, author of Boxer, Beetle, as well as Barbara Browning, author of The Correspondence Artist, recommend:
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. Covering similar ground to one of Louis CK’s best stand-up routines, this superb recent debut includes a very funny account of how awful it is to be high around cool people you don’t really know. —Ned Beauman
I just finished Ben Lerner’s excellent Leaving the Atocha Station, a book that opens in the fog of a hash spliff and continues through various other kinds of disorienting and mind-numbing matter, including the kind of inscrutable poetry Lerner both writes and loves (I’m with him). The self-medicated narrator manages to suck you into his anesthetized POV, from which he can only seem to communicate by moving his eyebrows around. You could roll yourself a spliff and read this book, or you could just read the book and get a similar effect. But seriously, it’s very good. — Barbara Browning
Benjamin Carp, author of Defiance of the Patriots and Rebels Rising and Associate Professor of History at Tufts University, recommends:
The history of cannabis in America reaches pretty far back, although Slater’s famous monologuein Richard Linklater’s great 1993 movie Dazed and Confused is no more than a stoner’s fantasy. While George Washington (and Thomas Jefferson) certainly grew hemp on their Virginia plantations, there’s no evidence that they ever smoked it. Readers can sample several biographies of Washington. I’d recommend a book that focuses on one of the most famous images of Washington, and the real story behind it: David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, which recounts Washington’s small but important victories at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey, in late 1776 and early 1777. Although marijuana doesn’t make an appearance, Fischer does discuss intoxicating substances: he dispels the myth that the Hessian soldiers who lost the Battle of Trenton were drunk from Christmas revelry, and he notes that the Americans celebrated their victory with rum (against Washington’s wishes).
Speaking of hard liquor… I’ve recently been reading classic tales of hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Historians and detectives have a lot in common — they both analyze evidence in order to build a case and solve a problem. Early on in the Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe analyzes some marijuana cigarettes taken from the body of a dead client. Inside one of the cigarettes he finds the business card of a “psychic consultant.” The timing of the novel is significant — the state of California and the federal government had only recently begun passing and enforcing anti-marijuana legislation. “Lots of tough guys smoked marijuana,” Chandler writes, “also lots of band musicians and high school kids, and nice girls who had given up trying. American hasheesh. A weed that would grow anywhere. Unlawful to cultivate now. That meant a lot in a country as big as the USA.” — Benjamin Carp
Zach Plague, author of boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, recommends:
God Jr. by Dennis Cooper.A super-depressed dad can’t handle the guilt of the car crash that killed his teenage son. He retreats into a cloud of pot smoke, developing twin obsessions with building a monument to his son in the back yard, and playing his son’s video game. Cooper’s descriptions of walking around in the game, finding golden coins and not knowing what to do with them, and talking to strange creatures is hilarious, weird, and dead-on. Instead of being depressed, smoking pot, and playing video games, you could just read this novel and hit all three at once.
And The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball. A pamphleteer makes up memories for an amnesiac that may or may not be his girlfriend. Every 20 pages this novel turns into a completely different novel. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube, or an MC Escher drawing, except cooler. Best part: you don’t really have to follow the plot, I guess. Just hang for one big twisty mystery, and enjoy the strange dark sentences that Jesse Ball spins. — Zach Plague
Tracie Egan Morrissey and Rich Juzwiak, authors of the forthcoming Pot Psychology’s How to Be: Lowbrow Advice from High People (a spin off theJezebel video column), recommend:
The thing about getting stoned is that, if you’re doing it right, you get too stupid to read words. Or if you can actually read them, they sound weird and they don’t make sense. While that can be its own sort of inane form of entertainment, it can also prove to be a real chore. Stick to pictures. They’re worth a thousand words anyway. The brighter, busier and more colorful, the better.Hair Wars — which documents “fantasy hair styles” — is perfect because the portraits are at once realistic and unbelievable, which is the kind of mind-fuck that compliments your already confused and heightened state of mind. — Tracie Egan Morrissey and Rich Juzwiak
Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife and the forthcoming One Hundred Names for Love, recommends:
One of my all-time favorite poetry books is Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, a collection of poetic sambas full of glorious phrase-making, mystery and magic, which positively throbs with sensuality. ”I have gone marking the atlas of your body/with crosses of fire,” he tells his sweetheart. Or: “You have deep eyes in which the night flails.” Oh, my. He wrote this collection when he was only twenty years old, and it contains the unique spell of young love, wrapped in earthy images of the body and surrealist flights of heady imagining. — Diane Ackerman
Justin Taylor, author of The Gospel of Anarchy and the short story collectionEverything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, recommends:
Raymond Carver’s “What’s In Alaska?” is a stoner classic. And pot plays a small but crucial role in the title story of David Gates’s collection, The Wonders of the Invisible World. Richard Holmes’ two-volume biography of Coleridge is maybe the best biography I’ve ever read. Now Coleridge was a lifelong opium addict and sometime drunk, so I guess it doesn’t really apply — on the other hand, a steady pot supply might have done him a world of good. Personally, I don’t endorse reading stoned, but if you were dead-set on attempting such a thing, you might try The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or some of the visionary fragments, though you might end up just freaking yourself out, though for all I know that’s the point. — Justin Taylor
Anne-Marie Kinney, author of the forthcoming Radio Iris, recommends:
Arthur Bradford’s 2001 short story collection Dogwalker has a certain lackadaisical weirdness that I think lends itself to the holiday. His stories frequently chronicle what could be read as stoner hijinks, from the discovery by a couple of ne’er-do-wells of a giant slug in an abandoned car’s glovebox to a sweet boy-meets-girl tale that begins with boy’s misguided attempt to carve girl’s initials into an apple with a chainsaw while it’s in her mouth. The stories get way loopier than that (the guy who accidentally has sex with his girlfriend’s dog, for instance), but the offbeat collection is held together throughout by Bradford’s guileless voice and clear-as-blue-sky prose. — Anne-Marie Kinney
Rupinder Gill, author of the forthcoming On the Outside Looking Indian, recommends:
From what I understand from movies, bong store ads and the poetry of Snoop Dogg, pot makes everything uproariously funny. Whenever I want to, as the kids say, “LOL,” I pick up my copy ofWhat I’d Say to the Martians by Jack Handey. It remains one of the best humor books on the market but unfortunately once everyone has read it, it will become harder for me to re-type pieces from it and hand them in as my own. — Rupinder Gill
Nicholas Money, author of Mushroom and Professor of Botany at Miami University (Ohio), recommends:
This is a difficult charge for a wine aficionado for whom pot is a distant memory of misspent lunchtimes in high school in the 1970s. Music obtained new depths, but I’m not convinced that THC enhanced contemplation of the written word. With this ancient familiarity, I offer the following thought experiment. I’m a biology professor and have been reading Darwin’s Originwith graduate students this semester: there are fourteen chapters in the first edition of 1859; we discuss one chapter every Monday evening and will end with a party on week 15. Our close reading and sharing of the book has been enthralling. The familiar has become fresh and more beautiful than I remembered. This wondrous book on the meaning and mechanism of life isn’t an easy read, but Darwin’s sense of awe in nature, and in his discovery, is evident in brief passages of marvelous poetry. How does The Origin work when mellowed with weed? Chapter 14 is the “Recapitulation and Conclusion” that ends with the famous sentence beginning, “There is grandeur in this view of life.” This would be a good choice for contemplation. A companion viewing of Haeckel’s illustrations of radiolarians in an online gallery might enhance the festivities. — Nicholas Money
Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan, recommends:
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. For a melancholy stoner, look here. “Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph,” the narrator tells us early on, and who hasn’t been there? Getting stoned and listening to music is more than just an escape for the protagonist: it’s a representation of his invisibility. “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ — all at the same time…. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind.’”
And Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Didion’s title essay is a catalogue of drug use in San Francisco in the late ’60s, but what makes it so remarkable is how little editorializing there is. In short vignettes, she lets the people she meets speak for themselves. “Juveniles and narcotics, those are your major problems,” a cop tells her. “I found love on acid,” someone says. “But I lost it. And now I’m finding it again. With nothing but grass.” The line between the “juveniles” and the adults is pretty hazy, and Didion even meets a stoned five-year-old, just one among many in her kindergarten. — Leigh Stein
Dylan Hicks, author of the forthcoming Boarded Windows, recommends:
I’ll say this about marijuana: I miss it. But one of the reasons I quit was that, as I required more and more of it nightly, my reading, unsurprisingly, became increasingly restless and scatterbrained, my interpretations falsely insightful or plainly backwards. I believe I was very stoned when, for instance, I discovered how deeply indebted Rimbaud was to the lyrics of Led Zeppelin. When really high, it was usually impossible for me to keep track of a plot, say, so I’d sometimes browse comic novels I’d already read — maybe Don Quixote or Infinite Jest — or fuzzily skim poetry, often by nineteenth-century Frenchmen. Coleridge is also good; that “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” seemed particularly suited to Minneapolis apartments. Probably more than anything, though, I turned to LP jackets. Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz is an ideal specimen: a gatefold sleeve for rolling the joint, liner notes by the great Martin Williams, a Pollock painting for endless staring, and gnomic Ornette quotes such as, “Let’s try to play the music and not the background,” which, even when sober, sound like words to live by. — Dylan Hicks
Mark Haskell Smith, author of Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup, recommends:
I recommend Pot Farm by Matthew Gavin Frank. The title says it all, really, and what better way to honor the spirit of the holiday than to read these ribald musings of acid-battered agrarian life and the demands of growing California’s largest cash crop. — Mark Haskell Smith
Kathleen Alcott, author of the forthcoming The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, recommends:
I gave up pot around the time I could legally vote, but I still remember fondly the moments (and joints) passed between friends and lovers on the beaches of Northern California, where I grew up; I’d often lay back by the bonfire and turn my cloudy mind towards literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s collection of short stories, Strange Pilgrims (much undervalued, in my opinion), features an ecstatic parade of impossible images and sweet meanderings that go hand-in-hand with the dreaminess of the drug, the THC-induced willingness to sit in a small corner of the universe. In “Light is Like Water,” two brothers drown in a sea of light composed of furniture and household minutiae frozen mid-air; “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” includes the protagonist’s quiet admirations of the impeccable woman who sleeps next to him at 30,000 feet, his deep happiness to simply guard her while she lays there unconscious. — Kathleen Alcott
Jenny Jones, author of the forthcoming The Big Lewbowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time, recommends:
The great American fairy tale The Wonderful of Oz by L. Frank Baum has all the incumbent ingredients: a fantastical world comprised of technicolor countries and populated by extraordinary creatures; a light and humorous surface with dark undertones; sparkly footwear; and the obvious drug reference of the Deadly Poppy Field. The lavish illustrations by W. W. Denslow whimsically flesh out this epic adventure that borders on hallucination. — Jenny Jones
Harry Crews often said that it was the writer’s job to “get naked,” strip away all the bullshit, and address the truth directly. He was a master at illuminating beauty through the excavation of ugliness and horror. His sense of humor was wicked and sharp yet there is great empathy in all of his work. He wrote 17 novels, a memoir, and countless essays. I learned something from every single one of his books but it is A Feast of Snakes that made me want to be a writer. Whether you are high or low, this novel will speak to you. I guarantee it.
Harry Crews died on March 28, 2012. His death is a great loss for readers and writers alike. I propose that at 4:20pm today, no matter where you are in the world, you drop what you’re doing and remember this great man. He was one of my heroes. May he rest in peace. — Katie Arnoldi
Justin Halpern, author of Sh*t My Dad Says and the forthcoming I Suck at Girls, recommends:
Blood Meridian, for sure. Basically every thirty pages one of the two following things happen: either the character of “The Judge” has a monologue where he opines on the nature of humanity or there’s an incredibly graphic display of violence. When you’re high, both those things cause your super baked brain to go in to overdrive and say stuff like, “I have to take, like, a walk or something.” Then two hours later you realize you’ve just been sitting in front of a Dairy Queen on a bus bench for longer than you can remember. — Justin Halpern
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