(Because I make my way through so many books and movies for CCLaP, I regularly come across projects that are interesting enough unto themselves but that I simply don't have much to say about, or at least not enough to warrant an entire entry. I thought, then, that on occasional weekends I would gather up such "micro-reviews" and post them all in one large entry; they can also be found on CCLaP's main book and main movie archive pages.)

The Animatrix (movie; 2003)
Anthology: Written and directed by many

Hey hey, it's a weekday all-movie micro-review roundup today, mostly because I've been concentrating on book reviews this summer and so have a bunch of DVD reviews piled up on my hard drive and needing to get written down and posted. (In fact, I have seven full-length DVD reviews stacked up in the bullpen too, including such provocative titles as There Will Be Blood, Deer Hunter and Secretary; I'll be trying to get those interspersed a little more often within the book reviews over the coming weeks.) Anyway, that starts us today with 2003's The Animatrix, a series of nine short cutting-edge animated films from Japan, commissioned by the Wachowski Brothers after visiting that country and meeting many of the animators over there for the first time. And in fact, these were commissioned for a special purpose, as a sorta "sequel 1.5" for the juggernaut "Matrix" series of science-fiction films the Wachowskis wrote and directed back in the early 2000s; the videos on display here were all released between film two and three of the series, as a way of telling both expository and between-film stories as a supplement to fanboys, sometimes shown before other films in theatres that summer and also available at the Matrix website at the time, eventually re-run on cable's "Adult Swim" and then finally released as a unified collection on DVD. And since I don't have cable, and didn't have broadband internet either when these first came out, this was in fact the first time I had seen any of them.

And for what they aim to be, they're...pretty damn good, actually, certainly nothing that's going to be mistaken for deep or complex filmmaking but definitely several cuts in quality above most other short cutting-edge animation experiments out there. Now, understand that all nine films take on wildly different kinds of stories, even animation styles, and that liking one of them doesn't guarantee that you'll like them all; but this is a big part of its charm, I think, that it is effectively a big splashy introduction for most Americans to the infinitely varied schools of thought within Japanese animation, a subject which has been taken seriously as an adult topic over there a lot longer than it has here. I'm not sure how necessary they are anymore purely from a plot or story standpoint -- let's not forget, after all, that these were mostly commissioned to drum up continual excitement about the franchise in the lull between the second and third films -- but they for sure stand on their own as stunning experiments in grown-up cartooning, and since they are supplemental stories you don't even need to be that familiar with the Matrix mythology to begin with. Recommended in general, and particularly perfect fodder for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Out of 10: 8.9

Riverworld (movie; 2003)
Written by Stuart Hazeldine, from the novels by Philip Jose Farmer
Directed byKari Skogland

Oh, and speaking of movies that were better than I was expecting, let's talk a bit about 2003's Riverworld, produced by cable's Sci-Fi Channel from a series of notorious books by Philip Jose Farmer in the '70s. See, they have a pretty smart way of developing new shows over there at Sci-Fi, which I'm surprised other networks have been so slow to adopt themselves; they'll buy up the film rights to smaller yet revered SF books on a regular basis, then produce a two-hour movie or four-hour miniseries out of it, giving them the chance to expand it to a weekly series if it's popular but at least having a repeatable and sellable product at the end if they don't. (This is opposed to how the broadcast networks have done it for decades, by producing expensive pilots that will air only once to sometimes almost no audience, essentially trashed afterwards if not picked up as a regular series.)

In fact, Riverworld is one of the first adult SF series I ever read, back in junior high in the early '80s not long after the original novels came out; they were basically Farmer's chance to explore historical figures in an interesting and novel way, by placing them on this bizarre ur-planet where every single human being who has ever lived suddenly all exist at once, being fed and clothed regularly by mysterious high-tech devices but otherwise being left alone by whatever advanced alien species resurrected them all there, naturally forming new nations and kingdoms and with real figures from history doing all kinds of inventive things within the complicated milieu. (Just for one good example, Mark Twain/Sam Clemens is a regular character throughout the series, who ends up figuring out how to build that world's first steamboat.) It's a huge, sweeping saga, and of course no two-hour movie is going to do it full justice; and in fact, based on all the horrible reviews I'd seen online, I had really been embracing myself for the worst.

But it turns out this isn't the worst, not by a long shot indeed; if you ignore the fact that the story wildly veers from the novels on a regular basis, other than that this is actually a pretty good low-budget science-fiction movie, using CGI in an expensive but sparing way so to get the most bang for their buck. It didn't get picked up for a full series, it's important to note, and it most decidedly does not stand up to the absolute best that network has to offer (cough cough, Battlestar Galactica); it was certainly better, though, than some of the other dreck I've seen on that channel before (cough cough, Primeval), something at the end that I was glad I sat down and watched. It's probably got Farmer turning in his grave, but this is a surprisingly good option for those not married to the Riverworld Canon. (Oops, and it turns out that Farmer's actually still alive, 90 years old and still writing new work. Unbelievable!)

Out of 10: 7.7

Eragon (movie; 2006)
Written by Peter Buchman, from the novel by Christopher Paolini
Directed by Stefen Fangmeier

This is, like, based on some famous children's book or something like that, right? See, since I'm a fully-grown adult with no kids of my own, I barely know anything about children's literature these days; to be frank, I only picked this up because I stumbled across it at my local library one evening when bored, and saw a dragon on the cover and thought, "F-ck, two hours of dragons will entertain me tonight, even if it's horrible." Er, guess what? It's horrible. It's essentially the tale of a land where once roamed a mighty set of dragon-riding soldiers, eventually wiped out almost completely by the resident Bad Guy; ah, but turns out that exactly one dragon egg is left in their world, which through a series of circumstances lands in the hands of a good-looking teenage peasant boy. The dragon hatches, the two bond, and then there's some sort of mystical crap about this symbiotic relationship the two now have, and there's fire and there's sword fights and there's dozens of Lord of the Rings ripoffs and there's John Malkovich overacting his skinny white ass off, and blah blah blah I ended up falling asleep about halfway through, which is why it is only meriting a one-paragraph mention here on a random Wednesday night. I'm assuming the book is much better than this hacky mess, otherwise it would've never been made into a movie to begin with; and believe me when I say that you fans of the novel should just stick with it, and not bother with this muddled thing.

Out of 10: 3.3

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (movie; 2004)
Written and directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Matthew Hoffman and Mark Vicente

In these days when the price of producing a theatre-quality movie is dropping so dramatically (did you know you can now buy high-def videocameras in the US for $800?), we are starting to see a proliferation of high-profile movies that make you shake your head afterwards and go, "What the f-ck was that all about?" And we lovers of the underground arts should be applauding this, of course, because it means the explosive growth of the exact kind of trippy, personal, limited-audience projects that we adore so much; but of course, this also means the explosive growth of unwatchable crap too, with some films out there falling on both sides of the fence depending on who you're talking to. And thus should you consider yourself warned for the head-scratching What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? from 2004, a movie that not only defies simple explanation but also virtually guarantees a split audience, based simply on the way it's made.

See, it's partly a straight-ahead documentary about quantum physics; and in fact, if you just plucked out and strung together all the interview scenes with turtleneck-wearing ex-hippie professors, you'd have yourself a pretty good episode of the PBS science show Nova. But see, all this footage is then cut in with all these bizarre CGI effects and ponderous New Age musings, just a whole series of, um, "groovy" observations about Space and Time and Energy and Being that will have you and your stoned undergrad buddies talking long into the night, after getting back from the midnight screening of this at your campus theatre. But then it's not only these things, but also has a straight-ahead narrative film cut into it as well, one that believe it or not stars deaf Oscar-winning actress Marlee Freaking Matlin, playing not herself but rather a frustrated underemployed photographer in New York, who keeps having a series of strange experiences that just happen to mirror whatever the documentary parts cut with the scene are talking about too.

Yeah, I don't know -- I don't know how a film like this ever got made, and I don't know how you would go about trying to market and distribute a film like this in the first place. I'll tell you this, though, that the people who love this movie really, really love it, based on what I've read online; and that's my whole point, of course, that we live in truly exciting times artistically, since it's easier than ever to produce a high-quality film that will only appeal to a small group of people, but appeal to them with a burning passion. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? is one of those films; I recommend that you check it out if you get the chance, but I'm not saying that you'll necessarily like it.

Out of 10: 8.4

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
By Dana Thomas
The Penguin Press / ISBN: 978-1-59420-129-5

I confess, I know barely anything about the world of high fashion, and so of course especially know nothing about the highest end of it all, the so-called "luxury" brands like Prada, Gucci and Hermés that charge just insane prices for the stupidest little stuff (a hundred dollars for a handkerchief, five hundred dollars for a t-shirt), sold specifically to members of the nouveau riche with self-esteem issues and platinum credit cards. Ah, but see, that right there is part of the big problem with the luxury industry these days, or so argues Dana Thomas in her brilliant but unfortunately long-winded new exposé Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. You see, explains this veteran fashion journalist, back in the 1700s and early 1800s, the beginning of the Industrial Age when all these prestige brands were born, they became prestige brands precisely because it was...you know, prestigious stuff, objects that became known as "luxury items" precisely because they were truly luxurious; it's only in our modern (er, postmodern) times that the effort to even produce high-quality items has been dropped from these companies, when the "brand" part of "luxury brand" has suddenly become much more important than the "luxury" part.

For a whole variety of complicated reasons, Thomas successfully argues here, the entire luxury industry has recently become a dangerous shell game, something that now relies almost entirely on marketing and public opinion, on selling an idea rather than an actual product; sure, it made these companies just obscene amounts of money throughout the go-go '80s and '90s, but Thomas argues that it's a house of cards about to fall apart, that it was Americans' unending willingness to go into deep debt for no good reason in those years that essentially fueled that industry more than anything else. It's a highly intriguing theory to be sure, one that Thomas factually backs up over and over throughout the manuscript; it's just too bad that, you know, sometimes she takes forever to actually make her point.

Because that's the ironic thing, that my biggest criticism of Deluxe is actually Thomas' glowing credentials as a journalist; based in Paris for most of her adult life, she's been Newsweek's head fashion writer for a dozen years, the French correspondent for the Australian Harper's Bazaar, contributes regularly to such places as Vogue and The New Yorker, and was even a journalism professor for several years. This all comes shining through in the finished book, but that actually turns out to sometimes be a problem; this hard-news, magazine-based writer in fact sometimes has a difficult job figuring out how to trim her stories to make for a good full-sized book, with it sometimes coming off more as simply a collected series of magazine articles than as a cohesive 350-page manuscript. And in fact, part of this is the same problem I've noticed with a lot of fashion veterans who try writing something critical of the fashion industry, that they tend to simultaneously worship the very things they're being critical of, and in that annoying pink-hued "Sex in the City" way I find just so distressing and terrible. ("Oh, isn't it such a crime that the market's been so falsely manipulated, these companies can now charge $25,000 for a leather purse? And now, twelve pages on how those gorgeous little babies are made!")

Because make no mistake, Thomas has a devastatingly effective criticism to lay out here regarding the so-called luxury industry; that there is simply no luxury left in the industry, that a series of soulless marketing-oriented corporate executives have taken over and conglomerated all these companies over the last thirty years, turning the entire thing into an excuse to charge outrageous amounts of money for things that simply no longer cost very much to actually produce. And in fact this is the best thing about the book, is that Thomas' argument is just so unshakable and so backed up by numerous facts, laid out chronologically in a fascinating way that calls on history, economic theory, the emerging global marketplace and more. See, back in the early Industrial Age when all these companies started, it was impossible to mass-produce items of actual high quality; the only stuff that could be mass-produced in the 1700s and early 1800s was cheap crap, making the services of such artisan craftmasters as Mr. Gucci and Mr. Vuitton legitimately valuable, making their finely-crafted goods legitimately worthy of their reputation and price. That's how we come to have a luxury industry in the first place, after all; it was a legitimate need during a period of history when factories were able to churn out nothing else but cheap mass-produced crap.

And this worked fine for a long time; until the 1960s and '70s, in fact, when suddenly in our late Industrial Age you precisely did start seeing the mass output of items actually high in quality, coupled with an all-consuming countercultural revolution that suddenly made the entire concept of high fashion impossibly square and passé. It was this period that almost bankrupted many of these luxury companies, which is what allowed a series of European corporate conglomerates to swoop in and purchase them; and this just happened to occur a few years before Reagan and the sudden boom again in upper-middle-class Americans, a re-emergence of high fashion and an entire culture that almost religiously encouraged spending beyond one's means. These corporations realized that there was a ton of money at stake by selling these luxury goods to the teeming masses of middle-class Americans, all of them clutching Visa cards with insanely high credit ceilings; that's when you saw the rise of such "low-end" items as handbags and sunglasses, the proliferation of luxury goods in such previously unthinkable locations as malls and airports and Vegas casinos, the impeccable service and genteel elitism of the old big-city boutiques replaced by the gaudy blarings of tacky touristy "Total Consumer Environment" superstores.

This, Thomas argues, has then created a vicious cycle within that industry that these companies are finding harder and harder to break out of: that is, when you suddenly base your entire business plan on mere image, on mere public perception of your brand, on deliberately overcharging people for items not much higher in quality than at any other store, your entire strategy suddenly becomes one of high-volume sales, quick turnaround, flashier and flashier gimmicks in order to be the "hot item" among Hollywood celebrities for yet another six-week manufacturing cycle. And again, this worked fine for awhile, for the vast majority of the '90s when so-called "bling culture" first emerged (think Paris Hilton, think gangster rappers); but now you're starting to see a whole series of dents in that armor, things that chip away at this finely-designed haystack the industry had previously built. With the rise of luxury outlet malls, for example, suddenly the idea of instant hotness for a new item becomes even more important than ever; with so much of this stuff being manufactured now in China, suddenly the industry has a forgery crisis on its hands too. And not just forgeries, which is bad enough; these are the actual luxury goods that are being sold at the boutique superstores for tens of thousands of dollars, simply snuck out the back door of the factory instead of the front door and being sold off the back of a truck for a third of the price. That's the problem, Thomas so successfully argues, when you suddenly base your product line off of a logo alone, off of public perception alone, instead of the actual handmade exquisite craftmanship that built that public perception; now that these companies' actual products are just like anyone else's, they're subject to the same problems as everyone else's, even while being sold to the public in a dramatically different way.

If Deluxe had been 250 pages instead of 350, it would've blown my freakin' mind; as it is, I consider it still pretty good indeed, just with one too many tedious parts, parts that will appeal to existing fashionistas but almost no one else. And in fact, this is a general piece of advice I give to all magazine-journalist veterans, that a full-length book is simply a different creature, that there is a natural flow and rhythm needed in a large manuscript that can't be achieved simply by bunching together twelve magazine articles and calling it a day. That said, though, it gets a big recommendation from me today, an utterly fascinating look at how late capitalism combined with postmodernism has become the utter downfall of an entire industry we used to take for granted. This is exactly the kind of expansive, sweeping stuff I like to see journalists take on when tackling a full-length book; although flawed, I definitely suggest giving it a try anyway.

Out of 10: 9.0

Read even more about Deluxe: Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari

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(Over the next two years, I am writing an ongoing series of essays here that I call the "CCLaP 100," whereby I read for the first time a hundred books considered by many to be classics, and then write reports here on whether or not I think they deserve this title. For the complete list of books, as well as an explanation behind how the list was compiled, you can click here.)

The Sound and the Fury (1929)
By William Faulkner
Book #22 in this essay series

The story in a nutshell:
Published in 1929, right at the height of early Modernism's popularity, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury shares many of the same traits of other cutting-edge novels from the period; like Henry Miller's and Virginia Woolf's early work, for example, it too relies heavily on the then-new literary experiment known as "stream of consciousness," while like the work from that period by Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald it concerns itself mostly with the youth of the so-called "Jazz Age" or "Lost Generation," and how a rapidly changing American society was suddenly starting to see itself in the 20th century. So it might be surprising, then, to learn that the actual storyline of this book is quite a bit different than any of these others; instead of it being about jaded hipsters in big cities, Faulkner's tale is actually about a genteel family in the deep South, a highly dysfunctional family that is slowly falling into ruin among the spooky confines of their old plantation, a milieu that has become so popular over the years that it's now known as its own subgenre called "Southern Gothic."

Specifically, the story concerns the badly-fated Compson family, once big muckety-mucks in Mississippi during the antebellum years (i.e. the years before the Civil War), now a loose collection of misfits and losers trying to hold on to whatever little still remains of the family's squandered fortune and dignity. There is the pessimistic, defeated patriarch, for example, the alcoholic sociopath Jason Compson III; there is the cringing nerd and traditional dandy son Quentin; there is his brother Jason, bitter and miserly and ready to screw over anyone around him in order to secure his own financial future; there is their sexually promiscuous sister Candace (or "Caddy"), mother of an illegitimate child who is eventually shunned by the dupe who had been tricked into marrying her; there is the violent, retarded man-child Benjamin, deeply autistic and prone to physical attacks whenever his daily routine is interrupted in even the slightest way; and then there is Dilsey Gibson, the black matriarch of the former-slave, now-servant family that oversees and maintains the crumbling estate, pretty much the only sane one out of the whole bunch. The book itself, then, is an experimental look at a thirty-year period of this family and all the terrible, terrible, terrible things that happen to all of them; the novel is written in four parts, each from the viewpoint of a different character, each of them freely hopping back and forth in time without letting the reader know when it's doing so.

The argument for it being a classic:
Although living a fascinating life himself*, the main argument for The Sound and the Fury being a classic seems to be the actual book, not necessarily the author; because this is yet again another one of those revered books from the early Modernist period, one of those novels that fans call an unabashed masterpiece and shining example of the best this medium has to offer. Because the fact, fans claim, is that Faulkner actually succeeds at two wildly different things here, a microcosm for why his entire ouevre is so loved in the first place; he not only tells a powerful, dark, sweeping tale of history and culture, a withering look at a defeated people in the years immediately after they were defeated, but does so using a mastery over and playfulness of language that had barely ever been seen in literature before, certainly barely ever seen again. So in other words, argue its fans, it's what we call a "seminal" project, one of the first projects in a particular artistic medium to show what exactly can be done with that medium artistically, when the artist is determined and the audience savvy enough to follow along. As a result, then, it was books like these and the others mentioned above that finally led the general public to consider the novel format capable of legitimate art, of legitimate greatness, versus it mostly being thought of before these years as primarily a medium for mindless popular entertainment. (Think of how we today perceive videogames; that gives you a good idea of how most people perceived novels before the rise of early Modernism and authors like Faulkner.)

The argument against:
Of course, as I've mentioned here before, this entire series of developments can be flipped on its head if you want; you could argue, for example, that it was precisely authors like Faulkner and precisely books like The Sound and the Fury that ultimately ruined the novel format, that turned it into the elitist artsy-fartsy academically-obsessed pursuit it now is. It was these exact authors who first stood up in public and said that novels could be works of art too, just like any painting or epic poem; but the necessary second half of such a statement, of course, is, "And oh yeah, you're going to have to go to college and academically study these books, if you want to understand what we're arguing. That's what we mean, after all, when we say these books are legitimate works of art -- we mean that they're deep and complex enough that college students can actually analyze them, that professors can actually base entire classes off them." And thus slowly over the next 50 years, along with such things as the rise in popularity of literary awards, the explosive growth of American college graduates and the like, did all this morph into what's been the reality of the literary world since the rise of postmodernism in the '70s; a world where you must own a Masters of Fine Arts before most publishing companies will even take you seriously, a world where novels are becoming less and less relevant to the general population by the day.

My verdict:
So let me admit, I have a terrible confession to make today; that out of the 22 books I've now reviewed for this essay series, this is only the second I wasn't able to actually finish (the other being the 2,200-year-old Republic by Plato). And the reason I couldn't finish it, frankly, is exactly for the Modernist stream-of-consciousness style that it's so well-known for -- because frankly, although I think the style has its strengths when used with a light touch, I also think it's a hacky unreadable mess when delved into with too much gusto, exactly what so many of the early Modernists did in their misguided zeal to just do anything new they possibly could. For example, take this paragraph from the book that I picked out just a moment ago, literally by flipping to a random page:

"Tell and be damned then see what it gets you if you were not a damned fool you'd have seen that I've got them too tight for any half-baked Galahad of a brother your mother's told me about your sort with your head swelled up come in oh come in dear Quentin and I were just getting acquainted talking about Harvard did you want me cant stay away from the old man can she..."

Yeah, now imagine 300 pages of that. Although I applaud the early Modernists for embracing all the experimental things they did, for wanting so passionately to break out of that flowery, narrative mindset that so dominated the Victorian era right before theirs, I think it's also important to admit that many of these experiments have turned out to be clunkers over time, that the 75 years that have passed since that time period have given us lots and lots and lots of chances to hone and refine such literature. Now, I can see why some people go so nuts for this book like they do, because let's remember that there are still a ton of people who love Faulkner's work with the burning glare of a thousand suns; for example, I loved quite a bit just part 1 of The Sound and the Fury, narrated from the viewpoint of the violently autistic Benjy, because in that case his disability mixed with this experimental writing style meshes really well. A little of this stuff goes a long way, though, which is possibly why Faulkner is actually a lot more well-known for his short stories than his full-length novels; I could see this style, for example, being exactly perfect for a 30- or 40-page story, especially while imagining Faulkner later in life and more on top of his form**. This is just not the case, though, with The Sound and the Fury, or at least in my opinion; it's definitely a historically important work, and Faulkner definitely an author any smart book-lover should be acquainted with, but I'm just not sure I would call this particular novel a must-read for the entire general population. Although the author gets a "yes" from me today regarding the question of classics, the book itself unfortunately does not.

Is it a classic? No

The next four books scheduled to be read:
Next Friday: Beloved, by Toni Morrison
In two Fridays: Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
In three Fridays: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
In four Fridays: Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

Read even more: Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari | Wikipedia

*For those who don't know, Faulkner had one of those personal lives that have since become synonymous with romantically tragic artists; lifelong alcoholic, bitter screenwriter in 1940s Hollywood, tortured genius whose talent was not generally recognized until well into his later years. Also for those who don't know, the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award is not just named for him, but was actually founded and funded by him, using the money he received in 1949 for winning the Nobel Prize. It's for all these reasons and more that Faulkner's personal life is as famous and studied as his actual work.

**It's important to remember, of course, that The Sound and the Fury was one of the first novels of Faulkner's career; in fact, it was part of a whole series of early experimental novels that remained mostly obscure until 1931, when publishing the dumbed-down yet popular bestseller Sanctuary, basically as a naked ploy to finally make some decent money as a writer. As with any artist with a long career, it's important to remember that Faulkner's work changed over the course of his life; and this is unfortunately where I simply come up short as a critic today, in that I've never read any of Faulkner's late work so cannot compare it today with this earlier novel. It's a situation I hope to remedy in the coming years, which of course is what this essay series is all about in the first place.

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Bigfoot hoaxers: "It was all a joke that got disastrously out of hand"
The perpetrators of this week's Bigfoot hoax have finally resurfaced, giving an interview where they claimed the whole thing started as a simple joke, an excuse to make a funny video for YouTube and amuse their friends; that the whole started spiraling out of control only after being contacted by this Web marketing company, and being offered $50,000 for exclusive media rights. Man, what a fascinating set of developments this was this week, wasn't it?

Professional whore Jerry Seinfeld spreads his legs once again
Did you know that Microsoft is about to spend another $300 million on their new, completely disastrous Vista operating system? Not to FIX it, mind you; that $300 million is being spent on advertising trying to convince people to use it ANYWAY, including a tidy $10 million to full-time product whore Jerry Seinfeld to be their new spokesman. 300 million dollars to promote something that doesn't actually work to idiots who don't know any better; just stop and think about that a little later today sometime, and ask yourself why you still continue to hand money over to Microsoft.

Microsoft finally builds something cool; cool thing crashes within hours
Were you one of the people who tried to stop by yesterday and use Microsoft's cutting-edge new "Photosynth" service (in which you upload hundreds of photos of a physical space and Photosynth creates a 3D environment out of them)? Yeah, too bad the whole thing was down for eight hours because of excessive bandwidth, right? And these people want to run Yahoo?!

Enquirer: "Edwards hid his mistress in the Caribbean while affair story was breaking"
Okay, so first it comes out that John Edwards had an affair while running for President, and while his wife was battling cancer, and that most likely he illegitimately fathered a child too. Then it came out that the mistress got paid over $100,000 for barely any work, from public campaign money, and tens of thousands more of private "hush money." And now the National Enquirer is reporting that Edwards spent $50,000 to send his mistress to the Caribbean while the story was breaking, hiding out in a buddy's mansion down there at the same time Edwards was confessing all this to his wife. Man, what a f-cking scumbag!

Today's photo of the day is untitled, and is by a Flickr member named David O'Brien. David doesn't mention a single thing about himself over at his profile, including his age or where he lives; I did, however, enjoy this casual photo of his quite a bit.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

You know what really bugs me about arts publications sometimes? I'll tell you what really bugs me about arts publications sometimes; that after that one time they'll give some great, thoughtful, wonderful, exciting recommendation to a book or movie or whatever, they never have the excuse to go back and ever revisit that project again, to maybe look one more time at why it's so great and maybe drum up a little more publicity for it as well. This is such an important thing in the underground arts in particular, after all, precisely because there is so little money available for traditional advertising; sales among basement presses rely an unusually high amount on simple word-of-mouth, and that word-of-mouth many times starts precisely at websites like CCLaP, where I will sometimes post a review that gets a bunch of people all talking (and purchasing) at once.

I was just thinking about the subject last evening, in fact; I was reviewing some old essays here at CCLaP (but more on that in a bit), came across one and was reminded of a book from last year that was such an unexpected treat to come across, Michael FitzGerald's sadly overlooked gem of a generation-definer Radiant Days, originally coming to my attention simply because Michael's a CCLaP reader, and one of the first to take me up on my liberal review policy here. Michael's book arrived at my place with almost no fanfare last summer, soon after opening CCLaP to begin with; and right off the bat, it simply blew me away, becoming one of only two of the 50 contemporary books I reviewed last year to get a perfect score of 10. (And the other one was the Pulitzer-winning The Road by Cormac McCarthy, so you know I'm not f-cking around.)

You'll of course want to read my original review of the book at a certain point, either right now or after you finish today's essay, to understand in detail why I liked the book so much to begin with, why it's such an astounding statement about my entire generation and these entire times. But here's maybe the more interesting question -- what's happened since that review? Well, for one, Michael and I have become occasional correspondents; we're around the same age, after all, share a lot of the same experiences and attitudes, so of course enjoy talking with each other every so often. One of the things he told me, in fact, about what he liked the most about CCLaP's review, was how I found it both a "big" story and a "little" one, of how impressed I was that he could tell the individual stories of these unique characters but also tell the tale of an entire generation. According to what he was telling me, this exact kind of thing is mostly frowned on by a lot of people in the academic community, the exact delicate award-winning MFA holders with no senses of humor who I just don't like very much in general (there, I said it); I guess it's poo-pooed among a lot of that crowd to strive for something as large and vast as a generation-defining tale, to want to write a story that's not only delicate and character-oriented but also tries to tell something grand too.

And how funny that that community should think that, I realize now; because the essay at CCLaP I had been reading over last night had in fact been for F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, one of the first books I ever reviewed for the ongoing "CCLaP 100" series of essays about supposed classics. (I recently received a very nice email from a CCLaP reader about it, which is why I was checking it out for the first time in months and months.) And I realized last night, that even with Gatsby I had essentially argued the same thing that I had with Radiant Days six months previous; that both books tell not just interesting small tales about some unique, fascinating characters, but also give us a big clue of what those entire times were like, of how that generation of youth saw themselves, of what things going on in that time were influencing them the most.

And, I mean, c'mon -- Gatsby is one of the most read and well-loved novels of all time now! It's the literal book that coined the phrase "Great American Novel!" SHEESH! In fact, the more book reviews I write here, the more I'm realizing that all the best books throughout history all share this trait that is apparently so frowned-upon by a certain part of the academic community; all of these authors end up telling a tale bigger than themselves, in most cases precisely by not trying to write a grand tale at all, but simply wanting to be as universally understood as possible. As I mentioned in my original review, but maybe not as precisely, that's really the key to Radiant Days being so astounding; that exactly because FitzGerald keeps the storyline itself reigned in, because he keeps such a close eye on character like his mentors had been teaching him, he ends up with a sweeping, generation-defining tale like he does. What a sneaky lesson about the arts, huh? That those who yearn too much to tell a Grand Story will usually fail at it, precisely because they want it too much?

I was thinking about all of this last night, and I was thinking, "Geez, too bad I don't have an excuse to just get on the CCLaP website tomorrow and talk all over again about this remarkable novel, and how even though it's a year later you should still all be checking it out." And then I realized -- wait a minute. I own CCLaP. I can do whatever the hell I want. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! And since I had so much fun doing so today, I thought maybe I'd just turn it into a semi-regular feature, where every so often I look back again on a book that's a couple of years old, but that still needs your attention and support, that will still provide you with a phenomenal reading experience. Radiant Days is definitely such a book, and I hope all of you who have never heard of it will have a chance to check it out soon.

Read even more about Radiant Days: CCLaP's original review | Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

And by the way, what's McCain got against Dungeons & Dragons players?
And speaking of McCain, his campaign responded to this latest Solzhenitsyn plagiarism charge (see below) by calling the accusations "typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd." Pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd? What? I'm still trying to figure out what McCain meant by that one. (Via BoingBoing.net.)

Did McCain steal "cross in the sand" story from Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
John McCain has been getting a lot of attention this week for a story from his Vietnam days he related during an interview with a Christian preacher, in which supposedly one of his guards drew a cross in the sand and prayed with him during one of the Christmases he was a prisoner; turns out, though, not only is this a -very- similar story to one told in the '70s by Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but that McCain has gone on record before about what a big fan he is of Solzhenitsyn. Hmm.

EFF wins censorship lawsuit against Boston transit agency
Did you hear? Turns out the new fare cards for Boston's transit system can be hacked insanely easily, a fact that a group of MIT students were going to detail at a security conference last weekend; but the city managed to get an emergency gag-order against the group, which this week they tried to extend to six months. Our heroes at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, though, came to the rescue; yesterday they successfully convinced a judge to drop the entire injunction altogether, which means today you too can read all about how to get free bus rides in Boston due to governmental incompetence. (Via BoingBoing.net.)

That bizarre Bigfoot-hoax viral-marketing story just keeps getting weirder
You know already, right, that a group claiming to own the remains of Bigfoot had a press conference last week that generated an insane amount of attention from the mainstream press? And you know, right, that the whole thing turned out to be a hoax, done as a sneaky viral-marketing gimmick for a new website? Well, it gets even weirder; now the group is claiming they're the victims of a hoax too, that they didn't get to examine the carcass themselves until the press conference either, and that the "hunters" they paid for media rights (including an ex-cop) have disappeared with their money. Gee, what a surprise!

Americans just keep getting fatter and fatter and fatter and FATTER
A new report delivers news so bad it sounds surreal: that after years of weight-consciousness programs and a national obsession with dieting, last year the obesity rate in the US still went up in almost 40 states. J-sus C-rist, people, what's it going to take to finally get you fat f-cking tubs of lard to trim down a little? By the way, the link between obesity and poverty was proven again too: 7 out of the 10 states with the highest number of fat people are also in the list of top-10 poorest states. (And as a final regional insult, almost every one of those states is in the deep south.)

Today's photo of the day is entitled "Túnel," and is by Gustavo Gomes. Gustavo doesn't mention much about himself over at his profile, other than that he's from São Paulo, Brasil; ironically, this particular photo happened to be shot in London.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)

The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli
By Ginnetta Correli
Self-published (beatiescareli.com) / ISBN: 978-0-61521-384-2

Regular readers will know that I maintain about as liberal a review policy here at CCLaP as I possibly can; specifically, that I promise to review any book that any author bothers to take the time to send to me, even self-published ones, and in fact to give it the same thousand-word sometimes humorously devastating treatment that I give any other novel here at the site (an attitude which has occasionally gotten me flack from said self-publishing authors...but I digress). And in fact, after 15 months now of writing regular book reviews, around 165 of them now at last count, I've come to realize that it is precisely these tiny books that most keep me on my toes as a critic; because there are actually all kinds of delicate issues that come with reviewing such books, at least if you want to be known as a fair and insightful reviewer, issues a critic simply doesn't have to deal with regarding much better-known books published in much larger numbers. For example, it's unfair to just glibly toss off a poorly-written review of a self-published book on a day, for example, when you might be in a bad personal mood; because your review might very well end up being the only single one on the planet ever written about that book by a person not related to that author, and thus carry an enormous amount of weight with whoever in the future is interested in that book. But on the other hand, it's unfair as well to not acknowledge legitimate problems with such books, or to "pad it up" in order to cut that author a break; as I've said here before, that's basically the literary equivalent of asking your grandmother for a review, and getting in return, "Oh, my little babooshka has written a book! Oh, how adorable! I'm so proud of my little artist!"

And thus do we come to today's book under review, the darkly comic (comically dark?) coming-of-age tale The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli, a wife and mom in Las Vegas who has only been writing seriously now for three years, and who essentially self-published the tale by being the owner of the basement press that put it out. Because the fact is that when you acknowledge the circumstances behind the book and its release, when you cut the manuscript just a bit of a break, it's actually a pretty great novel indeed, a pitch-black and obsessively compelling combination of Judy Blume and Kathy Acker; but you could also be quite critical of this book as well if you wanted, and rightly so, precisely for the problems concerning editing and cohesiveness that dog so many self-published novels. Ultimately I think it boils down a lot to simply what kind of reader you are, what kind of book fan you are; if you're the type, for example, who enjoys well-done yet flawed stories that required a lot of extra work to even exist, the type who enjoys purchasing such books as a way of subtly telling that beginning artist, "Keep doing what you're doing, because you're on the right track," then this is definitely a book you'll want to check out. And if you're not, then I guess you're not, and I guess you can go back to your vindictive little troll-like comments over at Amazon about how all self-publishers should be lined up in front of a wall and shot.

In fact, as unusual a way as this might be to begin a book review, it might actually be most helpful to start with the promotional video Correli put out for Scareli, which those of you with Flash Player on your computer or device should be seeing at the beginning of today's entry, or can always stop by YouTube to see at a later time. This has become a staple of the self-publishing author recently, in fact, the "Promotional Video At YouTube" to go with the "Virtual Litblog Book Tour" and the "Obligatory MySpace Profile;" but in Correli's case, she actually uses the opportunity in a much better way than most authors do, putting together not so much a cutesy commercial for the book but rather a cinematic explanation of what it's about, done in the style of a movie trailer and featuring one creepy-ass soundtrack. It ends up exactly reflecting what I thought of the book in general, which is hard to get across in just words alone but that the video does a great job of capturing quickly; it is slightly childish, unsettling in a way that's hard to pinpoint, both realistic and surrealistic at the same time, kind of a fairytale or maybe a nightmare but also a much deeper thing than simply that.

The book's named after our long-suffering hero, who starts the story as a twelve-year-old constantly cringing under the rule of a truly insane set of parents, a sexually abusive father who constantly speaks in a cartoonish Italian dialect and a mother who's both schizophrenic and who refuses to take her meds. The novel itself, then, takes on the Vonnegutian form of tiny but related short stories (one page, two pages) written in a deliberately simple voice; Correli also starts by using the metaphor of television scripts, taking the stance that these are "lost episodes" of a bizarre '80s family show that never aired (hence the novel's title), although sort of slowly gives up on the idea over the course of the manuscript. And in fact, it's very deliberate that I mention Kurt Vonnegut in this case, because I kept thinking of that controversial, hard-to-classify author when reading Scareli; because the truth is that parts of this book become so simple at points, reflect this cartoonishly surreal viewpoint of a child in the middle of it all so much, it actually threatens to turn legitimately juvenile, not just affected juvenilia by a smart adult in the service of a literary goal. But see, there are lots of other moments when Correli turns that around, when like Vonnegut she offers up a scene of just such unexpected power and complexity, one that could only happen precisely by using deceptively simple language and words.

It's at once the most interesting thing about the novel and its most frustrating, which is why I say that like most self-publishers, Correli could've really benefited from having a professional editor working with her on it; because when she gets things right in Scareli she gets them really right, showing us a glimpse of the truly powerful and mature writer that Correli one day might become. But like many first-time novelists, although technically proficient, there is something within the grand scheme of things that Correli simply misses here; the novel doesn't exactly hold together as a unified project of decent quality, but rather like I said as a series of surprisingly great scenes that are padded liberally with the typical problems of beginning writers. As mentioned, a lot of it could've simply be solved with the help of a smart and judicious editor, one for example who could've gotten in there and cut the 75 most superfluous pages before publication itself; and this is simply a problem about self-publishing you either accept or don't, that you either naturally forgive in a tiny self-done project or naturally don't.

That's why I say that it's so important in my opinion to understand the context by which any particular book comes out, and that to get as much enjoyment out of books as possible you need to take the details of that context in mind while reading it. Because the fact is that if you wanted to, like I said, you could be quite harsh on Scareli for the exact things you can imagine a person could be harsh about concerning a first-time self-published novelist; or you can simply accept that authors under those circumstances face challenges that more well-funded, veteran authors don't -- including not only a lack of editor, proofreader and fact-checker, but even long interrupted stretches of time to write. If you accept this, if you forgive an author like Correli in advance for such things, like me you'll find a surprisingly sophisticated tale, with images that haunt the mind long after the book is over, the sign of a promising new author who now simply needs some time, some experience, and a good support staff. And isn't that a much more fun way to go about reading a book? Why even read books if all you're looking for are excuses to be cranky and pissy about them?

As you can tell, The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli is one of those occasional books I love getting the chance to review here; a virtually unknown one, definitely with its flaws but well worth your time, from a struggling writer at the beginning of their career who could really use your support. It comes much recommended today, but only for the patient reader who enjoys approaching books with an open mind.

Out of 10:
Story: 8.4
Characters: 7.8
Style: 9.0
Overall: 8.2

Read even more about The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Did you know that the Chicago 2016 Olympic committee is blogging each day from Beijing?
They are; here's the link. (Via GapersBlock.com.)

Web innovator Adrian Holovaty is on the cover of the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine
A friend of mine, web innovator and EveryBlock.com founder Adrian Holovaty, is the subject of a long and fascinating article in last week's Tribune Sunday magazine; you can read it online as well through this link. Well worth the time it takes to read this extra-lengthy profile.

Laurence Fishburne to join 'CSI' cast, admits that he's never actually watched the show
It's official: Hollywood veteran Laurence Fishburne will be joining the cast of 'CSI' next year, to replace the retiring William Petersen; and in a refreshingly honest anti-PR move, he admits during the press conference that he's never actually watched an episode of the show, and that he took the role simply as a professional opportunity (i.e. "I never thought I could make this much money doing television").

Today's photo of the day is entitled "1950's," and is by a Flickr member who goes just by "Alba RM" there. Alba is from Gijón, Spain, and is a prolific member over there; and yes, by the way, this is a self-portrait of the artist.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.

(Over the next two years, I am writing an ongoing series of essays here that I call the "CCLaP 100," whereby I read for the first time a hundred books considered by many to be classics, and then write reports here on whether or not I think they deserve this title. For the complete list of books, as well as an explanation behind how the list was compiled, you can click here.)

Gulliver's Travels (1726)
By Jonathan Swift
Book #21 in this essay series

The story in a nutshell:
To really understand the story behind Jonathan Swift's satirical masterpiece Gulliver's Travels, it's important to understand some of the things going on in England in the early 1700s when this was written (which I of course am simplifying for the sake of today's essay, and am probably getting a little wrong too in some of the details). For example, it was a time when Protestants and Catholics were still fighting pretty bloodily over which is the one true Christian faith; and this flavored everything from the prevailing domestic political parties (the Catholic Tories versus the Protestant Whigs) to which outside countries England was to officially ally with (the Catholic French versus the Protestant Dutch). And then at the same time, this was also when the Enlightenment was under full swing, in which the search for rational, scientific truths almost did away with the argument over religion in the first place; it was the time of "natural philosophers" (forerunners of modern scientists), of the Royal Society, of political theorists like Descartes and Locke arguing for a new, Greek-inspired, ultra-rational form of government (something successfully put into place just fifty years later in the US after its revolution, a failed experiment twenty years after that in the case of France and its own revolution).

Swift himself, then, was actually kind of in the middle of all this; he was an ordained minister in the Church of Ireland/England, a Tudor invention from the previous century that tried to be a nonviolent compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism; it was basically a middle-of-the-road way to look at life, created by Henry VIII and strengthened by Elizabeth I as a way to hopefully avoid the insanely bloody religious civil war that had erupted on the Continent previously over the issue*. And Swift was an Irish nationalist too, a higher-up in the King's Court back when it was Catholic-based and the Tories were in power; in fact, most of his personal friends were Tories despite him not being Catholic, in that the Tories were much more sympathetic to the Irish plight than the Whigs. Ah, but then when the Whigs did get back into power in the early 1700s, Swift found himself suddenly exiled from London and the machinations of the court, back in Ireland and tending over a rural church with a total congregation of 15. That's where Gulliver's Travels comes from, frankly -- it was mostly a result of Swift being bored and frustrated out there in the Irish countryside, feeling like he was missing all the important things going on over in London, writing a snotty little satire about it all as a way of making himself feel better, which then accidentally turned into a runaway bestseller when actually published in London under a fake name.

As such, then, the resulting book is both a general parody of the "either/or" mindset (as expressed through two-party politics, religious infighting, civil wars, etc), as well as a highly specific satire of the exact obscure political events going on that moment, expressed as four fictional voyages to far-off lands by Swift's eponymous natural-philosopher Enlightenment hero. In the first, Gulliver comes across a race of people a tenth the size of him, a race which tends to overblow the importance of every little thing he does, and who have been fighting a century-long civil war themselves over which side of eggs God wants them to crack first, the big end or the narrow end; in the second voyage he meets up with a race ten times bigger than him, which he ends up being disgusted by because of all their imperfections taking on such gargantuan proportions. In the third trip, then, Gulliver comes across a race of people even more rational than his fellow natural philosophers; so rational, in fact, that their entire society has come to a practical standstill, convinced as these people are (for example) that it's possible to build a house from the roof first down to the ground, if they only conduct enough experiments and take enough notes. And then in the fourth tale, Gulliver finally comes across a race that seems perfect, a society of man/horse hybrids with the perfect combination of intelligent savvy and animal instinct; the only problem, in fact, is that it's humans in their society that are considered the non-speaking beasts of burden who couldn't possibly ever be taught to think straight, a theory only strengthened when Gulliver gets to telling them about the various insane and ironic ways parliamentary government in 1700s England worked back then.

The argument for it being a classic:
There are a number of reasons this book should be considered a classic, argue its fans; just for one, its mere age should be taken into consideration, the fact that it's about ready to celebrate its 300th anniversary and is still being read for pleasure on a daily basis. Let's not forget, after all, that witty political satires were already a popular form of entertainment with the masses by the early 1700s, making Gulliver's Travels not exactly unique when first coming out; the fact that this one has stuck around as long as it has, versus the hundreds of others from that period that most of us never even realized existed, says something about Swift as an individual writer, and about this book as an individual manuscript. Because the fact of the matter, argue its fans, is that you don't necessarily have to know anything specific about the political events of those times to still appreciate and enjoy this book; Swift was such a master of the form, they say, that he wrote the stories in a way which can be immediately recognized by anyone in history in any situation, even occasionally adding scatological humor to great effect. (See, for example, the night the Lilliputian royal palace catches on fire, which Gulliver puts out basically by pissing all over it, a joke I think would even work on The Daily Show if used to this day.) This is not exactly a three-act novel as we know them today, but did mightily help pave the way for such a format; and given how sharp and precise Swift's observations about human nature were, it's also a book that can be appreciated simply on its own, not necessarily for whatever historical contribution it's made over the centuries.

The argument against:
The main argument against Gulliver's Travels being a classic seems to be one made with a lot of older books, that it has simply become too obscure and linguistically dated to be a "must-read" anymore with the general population. Let's not forget, after all, that this was written half a century before even the Declaration of Independence; there is still a pretty liberal sprinkling of "thee"s and "thou"s and whatnot in this manuscript, despite the Enlightenment rapidly starting to change all that in the literary arts in those years, and also of course with a lot of Words being Randomly Capitalized in the Middle of Sentences for No Particular Goode Reason At All. And besides, the critics argue, this book ain't exactly as universal as its fans say; especially when it comes to the last two stories, they say, it's not necessarily clear at all what Swift's point actually is, unless one already has a knowledge and detailed understanding of 1700s current events. No one's arguing its importance to posterity and history, I think, or at least I can't imagine how someone could possibly argue that in a serious way; it's just that this book is no longer that relevant to a general audience, with it maybe being better anymore to simply study this book instead of actually read it.

My verdict:
I'm torn today now that I've read Gulliver's Travels myself, because I can empathize with both of the arguments laid out above; I myself ended up enjoying it quite a bit, but also admit that I ended up skipping over huge expository sections, and that I also deliberately read up on the political issues of those times beforehand, so that I could keep up as much as possible while scanning the actual manuscript. Now, that said, one of the things its fans say is definitely true; that this is a much more general parable about the dangers of an either/or mindset, of a world where only two choices are available, than it is a specific tale about Whigs versus Tories. And this is what saves the book, I'm convinced, what makes it still read to this day versus the hundreds of other satires from the 1700s that no longer are, is simply Swift's sublime observations about the human condition in general; I have to confess, for example, I in particular found part 3 to be the most entertaining, the withering attack on do-nothing scientific nerds who will eventually lead us all to ruin. (I mean, how can you not love an obscure academe who has spent the last eight years trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, one of dozens of absurdist scientific experiments mentioned by name in this manuscript.) I guess, then, that ultimately I will fall on the side of the book and declare it a classic, but with a caveat this week -- that you couple your reading of it with a little homework, that you read up on the events that were taking place when Swift wrote this. It's not absolutely necessary for enjoying this book; it's the only way, though, that I think you can realistically argue for it still being a classic.

Is it a classic? Yes, but only with a little homework first

The next four books scheduled to be read:
Next Friday: The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
In two Fridays: Beloved, by Toni Morrison
In three Fridays: Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
In four Fridays: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad

Read even more: Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari | Wikipedia

*Yes, I know, the establishment of the Church of England was actually much more complicated than what I just mentioned. I know, I know.

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Inept protestor can't find historic throne he was going to chain himself to
Hawaii's James Kimo Akahi claims that he is the rightful heir of the Hawaiian kingdom, and had been planning on chaining himself to the historic old throne as a way of protesting its US statehood status the last half-century; but it turns out he'd never actually been to the royal palace before, and got busted before he could actually find the throne room. You're going to have to do a lot better than that, my friend, if you ever expect to be king.

Did the Olympics rig Phelps' swim meet to guarantee him historic gold medal and themselves much bigger ratings?
Um, no. They didn't. But here's a funny conspiracy website that claims they did. Did you know, by the way, that Omega Watches, the group that recorded that one one-hundredth of a second win, is also an official sponsor of Phelps? We're through the looking-glass here, people!

Did you know that Lucasfilm maintains a 12,000-page Star Wars Universe "bible?"
Did you know that the so-called "Star Wars universe" has grown so large, and that the Lucasfilm empire takes it so seriously, they maintain an internal electronic database on the subject that if printed out would equal 12,000 pages? Learn lots more interesting details in this LA Times piece about the concept of Star Wars as a literal money-printing factory.

NY Daily News: "Dear George Lucas -- please stop f-cking the cold dead corpse of 'Star Wars'"
Amen. (Er, they didn't actually say that, by the way.)

John Edwards' finance manager: "Um, yep, I paid his mistress hush money pretty regularly"
Poor, d-ck-swinging John Edwards! First he admits he had an affair while he was running for President and his wife was battling cancer; then it turns out his mistress got paid $114,000 to produce a handful of five-minute web videos, secretly from highly accountable national election money; now his national finance chairman has admitted that he also secretly sent private "hush money" to the mistress on a regular basis. AND there's an ethical conflict; turns out the guy is good friends with the mistress' lawyer, after first claiming they didn't know each other. Dear politicians: Why can't any of you seem to be able to keep your c-ck in your pants?

Today's photo of the day is entitled "Salk Institute for Biological Studies @ La Jolla, CA," and is by a Flickr member who goes only by the handle "mad-za." Mad-za barely mentions anything about himself there, either, other than that he's based out of Torino, Italy; this particular photo, as you can imagine, is of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, California.

Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.