What I'm Enjoying Right Now

FAMILY TREE - Chris O'Dowd is great in the Christopher Guest created show, recently on DVD, about a man whose great aunt dies and inspires him to set off to find out more about his family. Tom is recently single and dives headfirst into the project, assembling the pieces of his family tree on his wall like a detective would while working through a murder investigation. He learns that his ancestors weren't exactly the noble important people that he had hoped, but travels all over London uncovering facts and unearthing family secrets with his bumbling but well meaning best friend Pete. His sister uses a monkey hand puppet to help her express her feelings and they have an aging, racist, somewhat distant father who spends his day watching bad television comedies, and doesn't understand why his son is all of a sudden obsessed with their family, played by the always amazing Michael McKean. Like other Guest projects, this is a mockumentary with a crew following Tom around town and Guest populates the show with his regulars and tons of goofy gags, like a Sherlock Holmes-Star Trek mash-up TV show and a poster in a posh, regal theater for an upcoming show of Avatar: The Musical! featuring a line of singing, dancing blue people. There is also plenty of "archival" footage of the Chadwick family in action in their various pursuits including sack racing, two person horse costume racing, and self portraits. It's the perfect amount of sadness, nostalgia and dry humor and almost makes me want to learn more about my family but not quite.

WE'RE ALIVE - I recently just discovered that there is a whole world of podcasts that are basically audiobooks in episodic format. Ellery Queen does a good podcast with short stories each episode read by various authors and there are a whole host of shows that play old radio mysteries. Then there are shows like this that have a continuing story each episode, in this case a 20 minute each week, complete with an entire voice cast, sound effects and music. This show is about a small group of reservists who are called to respond to some kind of riot in Los Angeles that soon becomes too big to control and are forced to hole up with their unit and help survivors of the ensuing zombie apocalypse. It's not an entirely original story, as most stories of zombie apocalypses are pretty much the same, but this is fun and the change of format adds a little bit different experience.

FOLLOW HER HOME - This book is a revelation for me. I love Raymond Chandler stories, and his private eye Philip Marlowe, the wisecracking, tough as nails detective, roaming the dark streets and back alleys of Los Angeles in the 1940's. Steph Cha's first novel is a love letter to Chandler and Marlowe and she writes a character named Juniper Song who fancies herself a detective stalking the mean streets of LA on the tail of a femme fatale and a philandering lawyer. When she gets sapped within mere minutes of being on the job, she's almost giddy at sharing an experience that Marlowe has in almost every one of Chandler's books. Cha writes, in Juniper's voice, "I was thirteen when I first read The Big Sleep. I was smitten. It was my introduction to Marlowe, to hard-boiled detective fiction, to the very notion of noir, and I could not get enough. As I grew my last three inches, I went from book to book, consuming everything that was Philip Marlowe. I savored his words, studied his manners and methods. I carried him with me like an idol. Marlowe, the honorable, lonely detective - he was my hero, and playing the part appealed to me." My experience with Chandler and Marlowe is strikingly similar and I sometimes daydream about being dropped into Chandler's world and playacting as Marlowe or at least attempting in vain to be a fraction as cool as him.

In comics, I've been enjoying a few new series including HIT by Bryce Carlson and Vanessa Del Rey about the LAPD's battle with Mickey Cohen for the soul of Los Angeles. A clandestine hit squad of officers is tasked with taking down Cohen and his cohorts using any means necessary. It's a limited series, unfortunately, so there are only 4 issues of noir, shoot-em-up goodness. I've also been loving Greg Rucka's LAZARUS, set in the future where the battle of the 99% vs. the wealthy has grown to such epic proportions that there are a small handful of Families that control everything, with each family training one member tasked to protect the family, a Lazarus. The Carlyle family consists of spoiled, preening, entitled brats who resent their Lazarus, named Forever, and plot her demise while defending themselves from other families. Finally, another author I like with a new series is Victor Gischler, writer of novels with names like Shotgun Opera, The Pistol Poets and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, has a new series called KISS ME, SATAN about a werewolf trying to gain back his lost soul who gets caught in the middle of warring clans of werewolves and vampire hit squads. It's a fun take on a mob story and full of awesome action and great writing.