I intend to send out my latest Lame Excuse for a Book Catalog to regular customers via email this week. Lots of new small press books by the likes of Joe R. Lansdale, Jay Lake, Ted Chiang, Peter Straub, Joe Hill and Charles Stross, along with the huge, definitive, two-volume H. P. Lovecraft biography I Am Providence, a signed pristine first edition of Ender’s Game, etc. If you aren’t already receiving my catalog, drop me a line at lawrenceperson@gmail.com to receive a copy when I send it out.
New Lame Excuse Books Catalog This Week
December 14th, 2010Awesome Photography: Kawah Ijen by Night
December 13th, 2010Dwight saw this amazing gallery of photos and drew them to my attention. You look at them and go: “What is that, a picture of someone in World of Warcraft raiding Molten Core?” And the answer is: “No, those are sulfur miners in Indonesia working in an active volcano for $13 a day.” This is Pulitzer-worthy photography by Olivier Grunewald, and you should really take a look.
Sherry Black Murder Follow-Up #2
December 10th, 2010This story by Paul Koepp of the Deseret News, unlike the one I linked to yesterday, seems competently written, and sheds light on a few items that were previously unclear, namely:
- Suspect Lorin Nielsen pleaded guilty in April 2009 to theft, a third-degree felony, and theft by deception, a second-degree felony.
- He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, which means he would have been out on of jail at the time of Black’s murder.
- “Nielsen was booked into Salt Lake County Jail on Monday for a violation of his probation in the theft case. Detectives, however, would not say whether he is being investigated in connection with the homicide.”
- He was a member of “the Kearns Town ICP gang.”
Amazing how competent writing makes things so much clearer, isn’t it?
I’m not going to pretend to be an Internet Columbo, able to ascertain Nielsen’s guilt or innocence from a handful of news articles. But if he did kill Sherry Black, he’s too stupid (not to mention too evil) to live. Gee, you don’t think police might be able to connect the murder of a central figure (albeit an inadvertent one) in your last crime? Not only did it not take Sherlock Holmes to crack that case, it didn’t even take his dim half-brother Hiram, who works the fryolater at the Hildale Dairy Queen…
Follow-Up on the Murder of Bookstore Owner Sherry Black: Books and Mormons and Juggalos, Oh My
December 9th, 2010You may remember the post on the murder of bookseller Sherry Black I did last week. You may also remember the piece I did on Insane Clown Posse and their Juggalo followers a month or so ago. I never imagined the stories would intertwine, but police speculate that her murder may have something to do with the fact that Black unwittingly bought stolen books from 20-year-old Lorin Nielsen. Guess what band Nielsen was a fan of?
The relevant section:
In February of 2009, 20-year-old Lorin Nielsen was arrested and charged with stealing books from his father, a polygamous church president.
He sold them to Sherry Black for $20,000.
The books included a first-edition French Book of Mormon signed by John Taylor with a message to Parley P. Pratt.
For those without any particular knowledge of the history of Mormonism, both of those were big wheels in the early LDS. Pratt was a member of the first “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles” and Taylor was with founder Joseph Smith the night he was killed by a mob in a jail in Carthage, Illinois on June 27, 1844.
In total, the books were worth an estimated $45,000.
When the father confronted Nielsen about the theft, the report states Nielsen warned him that “if he got police involved he will set off a chain of events he’s not going to like because he is a member of a gang.”
Police reports state Nielsen was affiliated with an Insane Clown Posse, or Juggalos gang and had access to guns.
I’m inferring from the above that Lorin Nielson’s father is Wendell Nielsen, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Nielsen took over from convicted felon Warren Jeffs. (Recently Jeffs’ rape conviction was overturned, but he’s now facing sexual assault charges in Texas. It was big news in when Jeffs’ bigamist compound in Texas was raided by police. I must admit that my tolerance for polygamy as an “alternate life style” pretty much evaporates when you start marrying 12-year-olds. )
Never mind the fact that Juggalos are a “gang” in about the same sense that Deadheads or Parrotheads are a gang. Or that my (admittedly facile) understanding of Utah law is that it is not much more difficult to obtain “access to guns” if you’re not a felon than Texas. However, if this is the same Lorin Nielson, he probably is a felon (it says he was found guilty of theft and theft by deception, the date is about right, and the amount involved would certainly be enough to earn a felony conviction (assuming it wasn’t pleaded down), but because Utah is a closed records state, you can’t be sure that’s the case).
I mentioned before that bookstores are rarely robbed, because there are usually much richer targets available. Plus books are next to impossible to fence, because collectors are too small a community, word of stolen goods gets out really fast, and it’s almost impossible to find a place to sell anything worth stealing. But some of that early Mormon stuff goes for insane amounts of money. This case reminded me that fake documents were at the heart of the “White Salamander Murders” case. (Short version: A guy named Mark Hoffman was selling fake Joseph Smith documents that undermined official Mormon dogma to church leaders desperate to keep them off the market, then he went all mad bomber in an attempt to cover his tracks.)
So police believe, what? An insane Juggalo killed Black because they were pissed off because she cooperated with the police? Honestly I think there’s more wackiness in the FLDS side of story than the Juggalo side…
Movie Review: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
December 7th, 2010Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Kelly Masterson
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Michael Shannon
This is a “heist gone wrong” film that had gotten lots of great reviews, including from some of my friends. And having seen it, I can see why; it’s extremely well-done. (You would hope the guy who directed Network would remember a thing or two about making movies.) But I’m not quite as enthusiastic about this film as others, mainly because it’s sort of like Fargo, but without the laughs or Marge Gunderson. It’s like being in a car at the top of steep, icy hill that almost immediately starts sliding. And pretty much the entire movie is the characters sliding down that hill, with the only question being exactly how bad the crash will be. And the answer, after nearly two hours of watching them squirm, screw up and go blood simple, is very bad indeed.
The action unfolds in non-linear fashion, following first one character and then another. We see the heist go wrong in the first 10 minutes of the film, but its only later that we understand just how wrong it went, and how the consequences from it just keep getting worse.
The performances are uniformly excellent, while the script is interesting without being engaging; Hoffman’s character is so unlikable, and Hawke’s character such a weak-willed pushover, that we regard them less with sympathy than critical detachment. The direction is solid, but many scenes could have been edited; Lumet likes to watch his characters flail and squirm a bit too much, and this film could have easily been 10-15 minutes shorter and have more impact.
Whether you’ll enjoy watching it depends on how much you like watching that long, agonizing slide down the icy hill. And Marisa Tomei is still quite lovely (and, here, frequently undressed). But many viewers will find it an uncomfortable ride.
Books Read: Zoran Zivkovic’s Impossible Encounters
December 6th, 2010Impossible Encounters
By Zoran Zivkovic
Polaris, 2000
This is a short book of six stories by Yugoslavian Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic, each dealing with an impossivle situation (post-mortem, a conversation with God, a writer visited by his own character, etc.), and each of which feature, recursively, a book called Impossible Encounters. These are well crafted, but somewhat slight, and, as Bruce Sterling noted in his Nova Express review, somewhat stateless, existing in a world where “trains have no destinations, streets have no names, rivers and mountains have no histories, and characters have no ethnicities. It’s a very quiet world of used bookstores, family dining tables, and cramped university offices.”
I’m not sure I would want to read too many of these in a row, but they make nice “palate cleansers” between other fiction.
Since the Belgrade Polaris editions will probably be hard to come by, if you’re interested in reading these, they’re collected (along with several other Zovkovic books published by Polaris) in the PS Publishing collection Impossible Stories. I don’t have a copy of that for sale anymore, but I do have a copy of Impossible Stories II available if you’re interested.
Public Service Announcement
December 6th, 2010Just for the record, I would like to note that I am not a 53-year old homeless Florida would-be bank robber. I am also distinctly paler of hue.
Also, while I have never robbed a bank in the past, and have no plans to knock over a bank in the future, I assure you that if I did, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt it unarmed. After all, as Al Capone once noted: “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
MST3K Gamera Films Coming to DVD
December 4th, 2010According to this, a box set of all the MST3K Gamera films is in the works.
In celebration, here’s the Gamera Theme Song:
A Cavalcade of Craptacular Shark Cinema
December 3rd, 2010News that Venice is flooding (no, really), reminded me of something I sent around to all my friends before I put this blog up: The trailer for the totally cheestacular Sharks in Venice:
A movie that combines a bad Jaws rip-off with a bad Da Vinci Code/National Treasure ripoff, bad CGI, bad music, a bad Baldwin brother, and a bad Johansson sister. (Evidently Neil Connery was unavailable.) It checks it at an abysmal 3.0 on the IMDB; you almost have to try to get a ranking that low.
It actually looks worse than Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus:
Much less Sharktopus:
Got to admit that’s some groovy theme music, daddy-o. And before I started writing this blog post, I didn’t even know that Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus existed:
These are great times for bad shark movie aficionados…