Monthly Archives: April 2008

Tim Robbins as Bob Roberts

Posted on April 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

My favorite political movie is Bob Roberts. It’s a movie about a folk singing conservative Republican running for Senate. Bob Roberts is played by Tim Robbins, the movie’s star, writer and director. While the song’s are fantastic, you’ll not find them on a soundtrack. Robbins has gone on record as saying he doesn’t want any of the music outside the context of the movie.

Essentially, Bob Roberts is a Mockumentary Satire of right-wing politics. It’s a lot of fun. If only because of all the truth hiding in the fiction. Recently I felt as if I were treated to a new installment of Bob Roberts when I heard Tim Robbins Keynote Speech to the National Association of Broadcasters.

Robbins has been an outspoken Democrat who before the Iraq War, stressed that we should keep looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. His speech recalls this in the same humorous way Bob Roberts would. It’s nice to see Robbins has lost none of his wit about this. I’d love to see a Bob Roberts/Stephen Colbert mock campaign run.

For those of you who haven’t heard the Tim Robbins speech yet, click here.

-Jack

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The Wheelman

Posted on April 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

What do you do if you’ve just written a book about the history of bank robberies and bank robbery techniques? Well, if you’re Duane Swierczynski, author of This Here’s A Stick Up, you write The Wheelman. The Wheelman is about a bank robbery that goes about as wrong as it can go.

 

One of my favorite movies is Red Rock West. I like it because throughout the entire movie Nicholas Cage’s character simply cannot catch a break. Even when it seems like things are working out, they turn out worse than before. However, compared to The Wheelman, Nick Cage’s character went through a walk in the park.

 

Lennon is the title character and an absolute pro behind the wheel. Unfortunately he doesn’t get to spend much time driving because he’s too busy being kicked, shot, burned, tortured, and dragged all over the underworld of Philadelphia. I really don’t want to say too much about the plot because it’s too much fun finding out what’s going to happen next.

 

The Wheelman reads like the absolute worst nightmare of any pro bank robber. Murphy’s Law will not cut it. This is Lennon’s Law: anything that can go wrong has gone more wrong than you thought possible. Unlike most novels of this genre, the characters barely have a chance to catch their breath. Most of the chapters are short quick jabs and then you’re suddenly hit with something you didn’t even see coming.

 

Since I’m currently working on a novel directly after writing a non-fiction book, I know that it takes different muscles to do it. I was glad to see that Swierczynski was able to make the transition so easily. His writing is still incredibly relaxed and fun to read. I felt like I should have had a drink in front of me the whole time, but I know I wouldn’t have had time to drink it because I was too busy reading the next chapter.

 

Swierczynski is definitely on my list of novelists I must read, right next to George Pelacanos, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy.

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Car Wreck #24

Posted on April 23, 2008 | Leave a comment

As I mention in Ruin Your Life, I’ve been in twenty-four car accidents. The last one was in December of 2006. This is what I wrote about it at the time:

 

Yesterday I got into my twenty-fourth car accident. I should point out I was only driving in five of those accidents so statistically you want me in the driver’s seat and not the passenger seat. Anyway, I was driving my 1994 Nissan Altima home and an 80s Subaru SUV was turning right in front of me. I put on the brakes a bit expecting him to turn but he didn’t. For some reason he stopped. I hit the brakes harder but it was too late and I hit him at a whole five miles an hour. We got out to inspect the damage and found his bumper was a tiny bit dented. My car on the other hand had the entire right side of the front of the car smashed in as if God punched it.

It just so happened that the accident happened right in front of a cop. He took a look at the damage and when he saw my car he said, “HOLY SH*T!” He couldn’t believe such a small incident could create so much destruction. Green radiator fluid was dripping on the pavement. My car was screwed.

Having experienced at wide variety of accidents from little fender benders to high speed accidents where people died, I think I can talk with some authority on car accidents. Despite what the automobile industry would like you to think, new cars with crumple zones, automatic seatbelts, and airbags are not the way to go if you’re going to get into an accident. What you want is big heavy American steel. You want a car built before the Reagan administration. You want a car built like a tank. If I’d had been in my 1978 Monte Carlo yesterday there would have been little if any damage to our vehicles.

Sure, they do all these crash tests to see which car is the safest, but look at the tests. They run the car into walls or cars with big flat surfaces on them. This is so each impact hits the bumper first before anything else. But the world isn’t flat. It’s jagged and unpredictable. The SUV I hit yesterday had a bumper that was higher than mine so it smashed in the front end as if it were paper. Speaking of paper, have you noticed how thin the material on most new vehicles is? You can pick up a fender with one hand. Try doing that with an old Ford Bronco.

I’m done with newer cars. My next car is going to be a Ford Galaxie 500. I’m tired of these new cars made of glass. My friend with his ’66 Impala had it right; the bigger the car, the closer to God.

NOTE: My next car wasn’t a Ford Galaxie (though I still want one). Instead it’s a 1989 Buick about twice the size of my old Altima.

-Jack

 

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Stupid-Proof

Posted on April 23, 2008 | 1 Comment

Yesterday a seventeen year old was hit by an Amtrak train about a mile from where I work. On the news people said that she was talking on her cell phone at the time and that the train blew its whistle and people tried to get her attention but that she was too wrapped up in her phone call to notice. They also said that perhaps there should be fencing to stop people from crossing the tracks.

 

Nevermind that thousands of people cross train tracks every day without getting hit by trains or that tax dollars could probably be spent better just about anywhere else. No, instead of doing things like paying teachers more money in order to properly educate people, why not instead spend that money stupid-proofing the world? Trains aren’t like lightning or earthquakes which can happen anywhere at any time. Trains are on tracks, they’re huge, and they’re loud. It’s also fairly common knowledge that trains don’t stop on a dime. And any four-year-old knows what train tracks look like. So it’s visually huge, audibly loud, and there are tracks showing exactly where a train will go when and if at train arrives. If the sight of a train, train tracks, and a whistle blowing does not stop you from staying on train tracks, what makes these people think that a fence will stop any given moron?

 

This of course is just an example of how we seem to continue to stupid-proof the world. Warnings on coffee cups that the coffee is hot, commercials with disclaimers telling us not to attempt whatever we see on television, hour-long TV dramas that have flashbacks to things we saw at the beginning of the hour are but just a few examples off the top of my head. It’s this stupid-proofing that’s allowing the world to fill up with so many stupid people. It used to be that if you were too stupid, you’d get killed, but now, a stupid person does something stupid and gets killed, and they want to fix it so it won’t kill more stupid people. I think it makes a lot more sense to just let the stupid take themselves out on their own.

 

Now I’m not proposing that stupid people need to die. That’s a little extreme even for me. What I’m saying is that if you do something stupid (such as get hit by a train), you should not expect any protection from the outside world. Like they say; if you’re gonna be dumb, you better be tough.

 

Also I’d like to point out before someone says I’m not respecting the dead or that they were almost hit by a train and they aren’t stupid or whatever else, let me confess that I too have almost been hit by a train.

 

When I was sixteen, some friends of mine and I decided to go down to the Nelson Bennett Tunnel. This tunnel is in Ruston, which is essentially North Tacoma. The Nelson Bennett Tunnel is a little more than a mile long and curved. This means that once you get a little ways inside it you cannot see either end of the tunnel. We had heard that in the time it takes to walk through it, only one train goes through. Luckily we were teenagers and thought to ourselves, “One train? Fuck that. We can handle one train.”

 

So we went into the tunnel and shortly afterward a train came through. First we heard it. Then we felt the ground rumble. Then we saw the damn thing. We all crouched against the wall as the train approached. Then something happened. It took a minute to figure out what it was. For a moment I thought we had been hit by the train and this was death. I eventually realized it was a sound. It was the train whistle and the sound had nowhere to go in the tunnel so it was so loud it felt like a physical force. A few moments after that, I thought the train had past and I moved to get up, but my friend Gabe stopped me and put his flashlight on the tracks. There were all these flatcars going by that I didn’t even see. He saved my life.

 

Now having told you that, I want to say that if I were to have been killed that day, it would have been because I was doing something stupid. Do I think they should have put up fences to stop us from going there? Well it doesn’t matter because now they have. Right now to get to the Nelson Bennett Tunnel you have to go over or around at least one fence. And you know what? People STILL go to the tunnel. Why? Because you can’t stop stupid. And since you can’t stop stupid, there’s no point in trying to stupid proof the world. It’s a waste of time and money. People are going to continue to do stupid things no matter what you do. And even if you succeed in stopping someone from doing something stupid, you’ve most likely only saved them long enough to do something else stupid.

 

Yes, I’ve done many stupid things in my life and I will do many more stupid things I’m sure. And yes, it’d be nice if I don’t die while doing something stupid, but if I do, let’s hope that everyone puts the blame on me and not anywhere else.

-Jack

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Casino Royale Review

Posted on April 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

Ask someone who James Bond is and they’re likely to tell you Sean Connery. And they’re not wrong. Almost no one will say Roger Moore and for good reason. Some people might say Pierce Brosnan. And now there are people who’d say Daniel Craig. (Yes, I know there were others, but that’s not what this is about.) James Bond has been reinvented so many times that I’ve honestly lost interest in the entire franchise. This is why it was only this past weekend that I saw the most recent incarnation of Casino Royale.

 

Given all the of the different actors who’ve played James Bond, I prefer to think that James Bond is just the code name that MI-6 gives whoever they designate as 007. So in my head, all James Bond movies take place in the same world and all previous Bonds were killed off screen. Anyway, whether you assume that or that this is just a fresh new universe for James Bond, the new Casino Royale is pretty good.

 

It starts off with a parcore chase that’s just fun to watch. I learned about parcore and in recent weeks and love the concept of it. Daniel Craig actually makes a good spy. He’s not all that cute and he actually looks like he would have no problem killing you which is something that’s been missing since the days of Sean Connery.

 

The plot is almost universal it’s been used so much, but they play with it a bit here and it’s good fun. This Bond movie probably reinvents Bond on the same level that Batman Begins reinvented Batman. It’s a good thing and it’s grounded in a much more realistic world.

 

Casino Royale is good. The problem is it’s just that. I had fun watching it and they did a good job with a lot of stunts and whatnot but really, at the end of the day, any of the Jason Bourne movies are better. Given that, I’m about as excited for the next Bond movie as I was for this one: I’ll likely see it when it’s free on demand.

 

The other major problem with Casino Royale is that they seemed to not know when to end it. The movie seemed to have three or four points where you’re expecting credits to roll but they don’t. This made the two and a half hour movie seem like three and a half hours. I don’t mind a long drawn out movie, but this one just wasn’t paced quite right.

 

Anyway, it’s still a hell of a lot better than the last few Bond movies so I’ve got to give it credit for that.

-Jack

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A Novel Concept

Posted on April 19, 2008 | 2 Comments

Last year I had the goal of publishing my ‘self-destruct’ book, Ruin Your Life. I had worked on it long enough and really wanted to have that little project completed. And now that it is (And you can buy it or download it for free by clicking the ‘Ruin Your Life’ tab above. Shameless plug over.), I’m working on the project for 2008: Write a novel.

Sure, I’ve written a book, some short stories, even a few feature length screenplays, but I’ve always specifically avoided the novel. My writing tends to be very terse and very dense. I’m not one for a lot of exposition or description. I’ve written short stories that would probably be full novels in another writer’s hands. So putting together a novel is going to be a bit of a trick for me.

And that’s why I want to do it. I’m not someone who wants to make something and then make a career out of selling variations of that same something. I’m not Kevin Smith (not that I don’t like Kevin Smith, but do you want to bet on whether or not his next movie will have a dick joke in it?). It’s not that I think of myself as some incredible creator who has to keep challenging himself to make new art. That’s not me either. It’s just that I tend to get bored with doing the same thing all the time so I like to switch it up a little.

I’m not going into this novel thing blind though. I won’t be spending a bunch of time starring at a blank computer screen. The key to writing anything of a good length and quality is having done the preparation for it. I wrote the first draft of one of my screenplays in six days. It’s not that I write fast, it’s that I spent the previous three months working on character profiles and plot outlines and scene descriptions. I knew the story inside and out. All I had to do was write it.

When I was younger, my favorite thing about writing stories was not knowing where they would go. I’d write something and while I was writing it, I’d come up with something that would surprise me. I loved that. So it took me a while to warm up to the idea of outlining. It wasn’t until I started outlining things that I realized that there were surprises and I was still having just as much fun.

That’s the most important part if you ask me. Sure, it’s great if you can make a few bucks off your writing, but if you don’t enjoy writing, you shouldn’t do it. Sure, I hope I can find a publisher for my novel once it’s done. And if you buy a copy, that’s great, but right now, I’m working on it because it’s one of my favorite things to do.
-Jack

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Falling Down

Posted on April 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

Back in 1993 I was in high school. A year earlier my future wife kissed me, though at the time I had no idea. It was just a random party where some girl kissed me. When I wasn’t being kissed by girls at party (which was pretty much any time except that one), I spent my time being a bit of a loose cannon. The sort that people just assume is going to ‘go postal’ one of these days.

So when the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down came out, I literally had a high school teacher who said, “This movie was made for you.” It’s about a guy who is stuck in a traffic jam in L.A. and just gets out of his car and starts walking. He wants to make a phone call so he goes to a convenience store to get change for the phone, but the guy says he has to buy something, so buys a can of Coke, but the guy behind the counter says it’s eighty-five cents, so that doesn’t leave enough for the phone call. Michael Douglas gets pissed off and ends up destroying the store. From there he takes on just about every section of 90’s Los Angeles that was driving any sane man nuts.

They were right. I loved that movie. I even bought it on Laserdisc. (Remember Laserdiscs?) The fun part was you could cut out almost all the scenes with the cops and just watch Michael Douglas beat the hell out of L.A. if you skipped chapters.

Falling Down was the movie I’d watch when I had a bad day. (This was before Grand Theft Auto.) Sure, I might want to go nuts, but this way I could vicariously get my aggression out without having to call a lawyer.

I’m of the opinion that this kind of ‘aggression self-therapy’ is important and healthy. I think that more often than not, the people who really blow are the ones who don’t have some sort of outlet.

We’ve all had those days where it seems like everyone and God is against you. Sometimes you wake up and the day just says, “I’m going to kick your ass.” And all you want in the world is for people who love you to tell you it’s all going to be okay and that you’re going to get through it, but since it’s a Bad Day that’s not going to fucking happen. It’s not that nobody loves you and nobody cares (though who knows? Maybe it is). It’s just your day to get hit with the shithammer.

-Jack

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Last Job

Posted on April 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

I just bought a box set of film noir DVDs and that coupled with reading that bank robbery book, made me think of an old short fiction piece I did a couple years ago. Enjoy.

Last Job

By Jack Cameron

It’s not enough. One more job. That’s what the rookies say. The say it to make them feel like this isn’t a way of life. It’s not like the movies. You see Al Pacino or DeNiro saying how they’re gonna do one more job and that’s it and then that’s the job that nails them. It’s not like that. Because every job is the last job.

A guy I know tells me about a sweet deal. Low risk. Low security. High reward. Un-fucking-heard of money. We’re talking instant retirement. But I know better. Jobs like that are like great sex. Once just isn’t enough. And like great sex, it’s almost impossible to turn down.

Setting up the crew is cake. A job like this for a guy like that and things just fall together. Only one hitch; the boss wants his son on the crew. He’s young and cocky, but he’s turns out to be as quick as I’ve ever seen anyone. Two weeks of planning and we’re ready. It’s a smash and grab job. We hit the armored car outside a grocery store of all things. The kid fakes a fainting spell right in front of one of the guards. The guard is momentarily confused but a moment is all the kid needs. Before the guard knows what happened, the kid has his gun. He gives out a smile as the rest of us hit the truck. No one gets hurt and we’re done in under two minutes. It’s a professional job all the way.

We drive a stolen car three blocks into an alley and switch vehicles. That’s when it all goes wrong. I hear the shot before I feel it. And I get this ‘Oh Shit!’ feeling as I look for the cop cars. The feeling gets worse when I don’t see any. Then I see the blood. A lot of people think that you fall down when you’re shot, but that’s a psychological thing. People fall down because they think they are supposed to. Simple physics will tell you that something as small as a bullet can’t knock a man down. And so I’m standing there like an idiot with a gut wound in the middle of the alley.

The gunfire continues. I walk two steps before my body stops working. I lean against a telephone pole and I suddenly realize I can’t see. I hear the car start and I know my crew is dead and that fucking kid is driving off with our money. I hear him laugh. And I laugh too. He thinks this is it. He thinks he’s made the Mother Load. And I laugh harder because I know….it’s not enough.

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Ever Thought About Robbing A Bank? Read This First.

Posted on April 15, 2008 | 1 Comment

If you’re like me, when you walk into a bank and wait in line, you might idly wonder what it’d take to pull a bank job and make the ultimate cash withdrawal. Maybe it’s just a fleeting thought. Maybe you’ve actually got the whole plan in your head for that one day you finally lose it all and just decide to go for it. Of course, also, if you’re like me, you’ll never go through with it simply because you’re smart enough to know that most bank robbers end up spending at least a little time in prison, and I’m not big on prison.

 

Still, bank robbery has a certain romantic appeal. Some of my favorite movies, like Heat and Out of Sight are about bank robbers. When I’m watching the news I’m always interested in the latest bandit and how they did it and how they screwed up. This is probably why I had so much fun reading This Here’s A Stick Up by Duane Swierczynski.

 

The first part of the book is a history of famous American bank robbers. There are many familiar names including Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger to name a few. Through this book, these names stop being just people you’ve seen in movies and become real people. Bad people, but people nonetheless. Swierczynski’s writing style is informal and fun and sounds a lot like a guy telling stories over a couple pitchers of beer. The difference is Swierczynski isn’t bullshitting you. He’s done enough research to scare your average FBI guy.

 

After learning the history of American bank robbery, the book gets into actual techniques in robbing banks. The book is so full of information that it was actually found in the getaway car of a bank robber in San Francisco. He tells you what to do, what not to do, and where to do it. He also tells you what to do if you happen to end up in a bank that’s getting robbed.

 

This is the sort of book they weren’t thinking about when they taught us to read. It’s a fun and informational book. You may be wondering why someone would write a book like this, but then again I wrote a book on ruining your life, so I get the appeal.

 

Once I finished This Here’s a Stick Up, that bank job plan in my head has been tweaked to a professional level and I’d be willing to bet it’d work out pretty good. Ultimately though, I think robbing a bank is a lot like group sex: it sounds like a nice idea in theory, but the logistics and consequences can be more trouble than their worth.

 

Now I’m reading another book by Swierczynski called The Wheelman. This one’s a novel, but you can see how his research has informed his fiction. I’m looking forward to more of his work and I’m glad he’s using his talent to write books rather than rob banks.

-Jack

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Why I Write

Posted on April 14, 2008 | 1 Comment

I knew that Ruin Your Life wouldn’t be a best-seller. It’s a book about quitting your job, drinking heavily, and going out with teenagers among other things. It’s the sort of book that even my own father would prefer not be in his house. I’ve written a book that tells you the absolute best ways to do all the bad things you’re not supposed to do. When they taught you to read, they weren’t thinking of a book like mine.

 

So why write it? If I knew going in that this book would not make me rich or impress my father and I’m already married so I don’t have any girls to impress, why the hell would I go to the trouble of spending hour upon hour writing the damn thing? This is something I’ve asked myself more than once. And not just about Ruin Your Life. Why is it that I feel the need to write everything I do when I could be spending that time playing with my son or having a few drinks or lighting things on fire?  I’ve spent entirely too much time thinking about this (See ‘Overthink’) and I’ve come to some conclusions.

 

When I was a baby, I cried a lot. And when I say ‘a lot’, what I mean is all  the damn time. I cried so often that in the days after my birth my mother was once given the wrong baby by the nurses because they just grabbed ‘the crying one’.  I stopped crying a lot right around the time I learned to talk. Then I started talking a lot and I haven’t really stopped.

 

Talking and telling stories are things I absolutely love to do. Most of the people who’ve known me a few years have heard some of my stories enough times they can recite them. But while I know a lot of people and those people might also tell my stories, I know that writing things down is the best way to get a bigger audience.  

 

I’m happy to say that enough of you have bought my book to make it actually a tiny bit profitable. You have no idea how happy that makes me. It’s one of the reasons I decided to offer my book for free online. (You can download it by clicking the ‘Ruin Your Life’ tab above.)  But that’s not my favorite thing about the book I wrote. My favorite thing is that there are copies in Iraq and at least one copy in a prison. The idea that people I’ll never meet are reading and enjoying my work is better than anything else. The other day someone told me that he let his sixty-eight year old grandmother read his copy of my book and she loved it on a level that genuinely bothered him. This to me is the definition of success and a perfect example of why I write.

 

But it’s actually bigger than that. One of the books I own is The Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs. It is one of 100 original copies. It was published in 1890 by the great-nephew of Bangs who found the manuscript in an old dresser. It is considered by many to be the best first hand account of being in the Revolutionary War. While there were thousands who fought in that war to form the United States, Isaac is one of the few who actually wrote down what was going on in his life and because of that, 232 years later I’m able to read what he went through. Writing is something that not only makes your voice available to people far away, it also makes it available to people who aren’t yet even born.

 

 

Ultimately the reason I write is simple: I write so you’ll read. Thanks.

-Jack

 

Note: If you’re interested in reading the Journal of Isaac Bangs, you can download it, here

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