Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 11

The Animals After Midnight- 1.99 on Kindle ALL WEEK!

Book number three in the Darby Holland Crime Trilogy

“This is a really good book full of bad people you’ll sorely miss as soon as you’re not reading about them anymore. Get started and you’ll get over it sooner.” — Thomas Perry, New York Times bestselling author of Nightlife.

“There is one Portland, Oregon that is marked by polite, gentrified civility, and then there’s its fever-dream, noir-drenched opposite, a dimension reached by walking out the back door of the Lucky Supreme, the Old Town tattoo parlor dreamed up by Jeff Johnson and overseen by master tattist Darby Holland, another mind-altering creation of Johnson’s.  In this universe, the good guys come from the side-show tents, the bad guys have escaped from the cages, and the mayhem is managed by a ringmaster with a surgeon’s touch and a comic’s timing.  Bravo.”—Les Standiford, NYT best-selling author of Last Train To Paradise

“The Animals After Midnight is the literary equivalent of Quentin Tarantino directing a season of Portlandia with the spirit of Charles Bukowski consulting.”—Dave Zeltserman, author of Small Crimes and Husk.

Darby Holland has a complex backstory, as shown in Johnson’s engrossing third novel featuring the Portland, Ore., tattoo parlor and strip club owner (after 2017’s A Long Crazy Burn). Early on, for example, the reader learns that Darby once drugged a real estate developer and sent “him off to die in Russia.” Now some of that checkered past has resurfaced. Darby returns home one night to find concrete evidence to buttress his suspicion that someone has been stalking him—footprints in the dirt outside his bedroom window. The search to identify his stalker turns deadly. Eventually, the trail leads to Midnight Rider Productions, which has been producing episodic documentaries. The company’s sadistic business model is to destroy a person’s life and film the resulting decline, which in at least one instance ends in suicide. Johnson lightens the heavy subject matter with odd subplots, including Darby’s journey into the woods to bury a friend’s nephew’s dead and frozen pet. Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased. (Feb.) PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The Animals After Midnight- 1.99 on Kindle ALL WEEK!

“This is a really good book full of bad people you’ll sorely miss as soon as you’re not reading about them anymore. Get started and you’ll get over it sooner.” — Thomas Perry, New York Times bestselling author of Nightlife.

“There is one Portland, Oregon that is marked by polite, gentrified civility, and then there’s its fever-dream, noir-drenched opposite, a dimension reached by walking out the back door of the Lucky Supreme, the Old Town tattoo parlor dreamed up by Jeff Johnson and overseen by master tattist Darby Holland, another mind-altering creation of Johnson’s. In this universe, the good guys come from the side-show tents, the bad guys have escaped from the cages, and the mayhem is managed by a ringmaster with a surgeon’s touch and a comic’s timing. Bravo.”—Les Standiford, NYT best-selling author of Last Train To Paradise

“The Animals After Midnight is the literary equivalent of Quentin Tarantino directing a season of Portlandia with the spirit of Charles Bukowski consulting.”—Dave Zeltserman, author of Small Crimes and Husk.

Darby Holland has a complex backstory, as shown in Johnson’s engrossing third novel featuring the Portland, Ore., tattoo parlor and strip club owner (after 2017’s A Long Crazy Burn). Early on, for example, the reader learns that Darby once drugged a real estate developer and sent “him off to die in Russia.” Now some of that checkered past has resurfaced. Darby returns home one night to find concrete evidence to buttress his suspicion that someone has been stalking him— footprints in the dirt outside his bedroom window. The search to identify his stalker turns deadly. Eventually, the trail leads to Midnight Rider Productions, which has been producing episodic documentaries. The company’s sadistic business model is to destroy a person’s life and film the resulting decline, which in at least one instance ends in suicide. Johnson lightens the heavy subject matter with odd subplots, including Darby’s journey into the woods to bury a friend’s nephew’s dead and frozen pet. Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased. (Feb.) PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Go http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com to read more about the last ride for Darby and Delia and the exciting film and television developments.

The Spicy Ginger Pickle With Fenugreek

Today I was working on a maddening document, a presentation of sorts. I’m not a computer guy, maybe the greatest irony of my life currently, considering how much I use them. Today I was using three computers at the same time, as well as a notepad to chart all the horrid shit I knew wouldn’t make it into my long term memory. But I took a break to make a batch of pickles. Why? Because, dear reader, the making of pickles is instructive and meditative at the same time. I’m hard pressed to think of an activity more in line with the presentation, one that might shed light on it. I’ll explain.

Years ago, this neighbor of mine, and angry and pitiful man (all angry people are pitiful) gave me a jar of pickles. I don’t know why. Maybe he was drunk. But he did, and to my astonishment they were pretty good. He’d made them himself, I learned, so I asked him to show me how. He did. Now, these were solid pickles- briny, well flavored, even robust, but in a recipe like that one there was not only room for improvement, there was room for… Innovation! Yes! So I began experimenting. Flash forward to four years later and I had my first batch of spicy pickles with ginger and fenugreek. It came down to seeds. Peppers. Just the right amount of salt, the right vinegar. The perfect cucumbers, neither fat nor skinny. Garlic. Fennel. Mustard seeds and cumin seeds. The list goes on and on. But that presentation is just like the new jars of pickles sitting on the counter right now. The presentation is a showbible, a product with lots of ingredients, all arranged for maximum flavor. It has to look good, it has to feel good. You have to be able to savor it. Anyway, consider. If you work at home, the kitchen is the best breakroom in the house. If nothing else, even if what you do in there sheds no light at all on the rest of your day, you’ll wind up with something good.

“On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally’s cellar.” -Thomas Jefferson

“I don’t believe in storks. I know they don’t deliver babies; they deliver pickles.” –Tracy Morgan

NASA To Build Padded Orbital Boner Chamber For The Rich

Occasionally, something big will happen but it seems vaguely lurid and somehow trifling so we skip right over it as news. This is one such item. NASA is adding a luxury hotel annex to the International Space Station, and no shit, it’s not only for the ultra-rich, but it looks like a padded room in a 19th Century insane asylum. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Axiom, the weirdos behind this venture, plan to glom this ghastly tumor to the space station in 2024. For an estimated 50 million bucks you’ll never get back, you can fly up and hang out in a banana yellow padded room. Wealthy pervs can ostensibly get it on with their bony chicks here, so I’ll bet it comes with suction squeegees for the ‘expansive’ windows. Fuckin’ yuck.

I visited the Axiom website and found many of my favorite descriptors, the ones I use when describing bullet holes in my crime fiction, but also the kind of language you might find in a pamphlet for a high end swinger’s beach orgy.  ‘Immersive’ and of course ‘volume’ dovetail with ‘superyacht’ and ‘luxury’ in a turbo disgusto grimoire of the damned, I- I’m close to speechless.

But make no mistake, dear reader, this is it. Sure, SpaceX is doing blab la bla, the Chinese are doing (yeah yeah) and even the French are (yawn) but now the writing is on the wall. A space hotel is coming, and its so tacky, so perversely blank, that it can be pointed at as an example of the worst possible future. Half the books I read as a kid were science fiction and I still read a smattering of it to this day. I am offended. There are many prizes in this world. The Oscar. The Nobel Prize. Powerball. But inventive minds need to rebel early on this one. ‘First Orbital Graffiti’, just off the top of my head.

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There it is. The yellow, that Safeway banana, isn’t coming though, but its there. If this ad is to be believed, redheads beware.

Zombieland: Double Tap, a movie review

What a fuckin’ masterpiece, and if you disagree, I double dare you to keep it to yourself. This is the Golden Age of Zombie, a time when the general population is so paranoid, so freaked out, so tragically aware of the maw of the machine, that the zombie reigns supreme in our pantheon of entertainment nightmares. Admit it, you’ve had at least one Zombie Apocalypse discussion this year already. Where you would go, what would you drive. How would you make Advil from tree bark when the dead rise, etc. It’s all a metaphor, this zombie business. Many people believe the ZA has already happened but the symptoms are seriously slow to manifest. Zombieland is different. Its cheery. A dysfunctional ad hoc family shooting their way through Armageddon while learning how to support and empower (in a comic way) one other. And the cast!

Zombieland newcomer surprise star Zoey Deutch is hysterical as the dingbat found hiding at the mall. Generally, when a ditsy blond is wearing pink sweatpants and chewing gum I’m thinking about her butthole the entire time I’m looking at her, so Zoey Deutch’s superb comedic timing and general prowess on the screen was, dare I say it, a double delight. She shines in a clever way, an almost show stealing talent only overshadowed by the great Woody Harrelson, who delivers the dirt in an Elvis inspired love scene storylog that brought tears to my eyes. Jesse Eisenburg didn’t die, I don’t know why I wanna beat that hipster like a bongo, and that was slightly disappointing, but a solid performance by Emma Stone, one where she shreds his weenie feelings, is as satisfying as hot bacon on a Sunday morning.

A gold star here for director Ruben Fleischer, who evidently campaigned hard for this movie and then delivered the goods in style. Lead writer Dave Callahan has penned some incredibly shitty stuff in his time, so my guess is the script was rewritten by boss radboy Rhett Reese (Deadpool). I give Zombieland: Double Tap a high score, and my only wish was that it hadn’t taken so long to make it. In a better world we would be on Zombieland: Quadruple Bonus Kill by now.

Every Bar On Lombard & Boston Dynamics

Let me tell you a terrible story, dear reader, about three young men who tried to summit the Everest of Portland drinking- the deadly Every Bar On Lombard Run. First, to set the stage. This was Portland circa 2002, when gentrification was a foul notion that still had boundaries in The City of Roses. Lombard in those days was twin to 82nd, where the people were predominately white, uniformly poor, and very often crazed with a heady mixture of shit beer, fast food delirium and pre Walter White meth. Charge that up with some heavy metal and we’re talking powder keg. But we went, and from bar number one, Tiny Bubbles, I knew, and I mean with utter certainty, that this would end in epic disaster. Why didn’t anyone try to stop us? More importantly, why didn’t we try to stop each other? Why did we go down this road to certain doom? For the same reason Mallory died on Everest? We did it because it was there? And it did end poorly. I dislocated my jaw. The car we drove (not mine) was never, ever the same. One of us, again not me, tore his favorite pants. We were almost killed half a dozen times. None of us were as bright in later years. We killed too many brain cells that terrible night.

Boston Dynamics and their unholy fucking robot dogs, their quest to design the first lethal robots for mass marketing, is eerily similar to the Lombard debacle. Why the fuck aren’t we trying to stop them? Why aren’t they trying to stop themselves? Are they doing it just because they can? Is this line of reasoning suitable for marauding 20 somethings the very same reasoning of engineers? I’m not going to mount an assault on Boston Dynamics. You aren’t either. The robot dogs are inevitable. Humanity has already left Tiny Bubbles on this one and the terrible game is well afoot. BUT, the moment I read of a single robot dog in Oregon, I’m buying a gun. I’m an anti-gun kind of guy, but this isn’t a gun designed to kill people, or even deer. No no. It’s a gun designed to kill small mountains. I’ll be purchasing a customized, one of a kind version of the gun above, but it will be a seven barrel shotgun. And I will kill any robot dog on sight. Will this matter in the end? Will my act of heroism be rewarded? Or will I live out the remainder of my days in a shack in Rio as Juan Pepe, hiding from the law and robot dogs both. Take a stand with me, dear reader. If you’ve never been to Rio, why, just look at the images your computer and imagine- beaches, cheap beer, dancing, and shells for your robot dog gun aplenty.

How bad can it be?

The Enduring Magic of Townes Van Zandt

Poncho & Lefty was the first song that ever came out of my computer. Not this computer. This is a new Macomplicatedasamotherfucker, but that one was one of the white, chunky laptops that used to heat up. I was aware that people listened to music on their computers, but I somehow suspected mine was too shitty. But there I was, one night in Dallas, about as alone as a guy can get, when I tried it out and there, warbling out of the tiny, overheated speaker was… Poncho & Lefty. I was so surprised that I listened to it five or six times, and forever after that ditty had a certain kind of magic for me.

That was the beginning of a heady time. I went on to do a guest spot at this truly terrifying biker place, the kind of tattoo shop you can brag about surviving, and then another one, and on all those morning I listened to Poncho & Lefty. It made me feel better. This song was written by a man who understood something vital. True he was a drunk, and much has been made of his bad side by weaker minds, but Van Zandt could also capture some part of the essence of a place and a time and convey it. The song always reminded me of this motel room where I spent one Christmas in Houston as a kid. I was maybe seven, maybe younger, maybe a little older. But there was a neon sign outside the window. It rained the whole time. The only food we had was from the Safeway across the street, and all of it sucked. But for some reason I remember that as a magnificent time. I think it was that neon sign, maybe the most festive thing I’d ever seen so far in my young life. The place formed my archetype of ‘MOTEL’ and somehow I heard it in Poncho & Lefty. MOTEL in my mind was a place of transience, freedom, even timelessness. There was no tomorrow in motel land. No yesterday. Only the moment.

I just watched a video, which I’ll post below, about the writing of Poncho & Lefty and I was stunned. The song was written in Dallas! Just outside of it, in fact, and… it was written in a MOTEL. Not a motel, a MOTEL. Check it out. And do yourself a favor, dear reader. Take a moment and breathe in the essence of where you are right now. What a rush.

The Curious Power Of Notebooks

Tattoo shops, especially in the 90’s, and most especially street shops, were not the kind of place to bring a laptop into (unless you were willing to fight to the death for it), so I wrote in notebooks. The second draft came when I entered it into the computer at home. A theme developed. Flash forward to my first book, Tattoo Machine, a memoir. At one point I found myself in Santa Monica with absolutely nothing to do, and on a whim I bought a skateboard. Shortly after I picked up a notebook and three mechanical pencils and boom, Tattoo Machine was born. I’d bomb through the streets on a thinking glide and when a passage came to me I’d stop and write at a park bench until the cops chased me away. I filled three notebooks like that, writing under streetlights. A few years later I wrote the first draft of Lucky Supreme on a bench (now in the back yard of a friend’s house) under the awning of a dry goods warehouse by the train tracks. Everything Under The Moon came together at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. So did Deadbomb Bingo Ray. The background was nice, but occasionally valuable as well.

In the last few days, some of the real value of this notebook approach has come to light again. I’m working on a television pilot based on one of my short stories and I have less than three weeks to finish it. In the guest room, my current writing area, there are SIX notebooks, all opened and marked and tagged, with all of the ideas and scribbled passages, valuable musings, snatches of dialogue, and associated ideas I can use for the final push. I can leaf through so many ideas at the same time and flag them, its like having six computer screens. With more than 80 notebooks from just the last few years, I’ve got a treasure trove. The dates cross into saved and archived emails (more than 25,000) to form a strange and valuable (to me) database.

Downside- notebooks are vulnerable. Sometimes you lose them. I once had a guy steal an embarrassing journal entry from a notebook of mine and then show it widely to his friends. He blamed this supremely unsavory act on his girlfriend, which only made it worse. I once spent a week transcribing a giant pile of haiku into a small and fetching notebook, and then I went on to paint pictures in it. I was almost done when I left it in a cab. Six or seven years ago, I lost an entire filing cabinet full of notebooks when I moved. But for all their trouble, I still love writing in notebooks. Give it a try, dear reader. We can all type faster than we can talk. Writing in a notebook slows everything down to the rhythm of speech (I like to think), and that might make a difference. Take the long way to THE END and see if it works.

Joker- a movie review

This movie did well. I’m not going to bother looking up all the nominations or the box office numbers because I don’t care enough. Todd Philips and Scott Silver managed to create a weak, watered down version of the Nolan brother’s Joker. Joaquin Phoenix is a fine actor, even superb at times, so it was a shame to see his talent squandered on a weak, tormented simpleton. It was also ripe to see his dopey bummer of a character associated with a dunce cap egg salad baby diaper version of Occupy Wall Street.

Is this a trend? To make movies for the lowest common denominator? Of course it is. We see evidence of that trend everywhere. If you dare, look up the first page of the longest running newspaper in your area from as far back as you can and compare it to what you see tomorrow. The news is written now for the Joker audience. The kids in the back of the class who like to smell their fingers. Dumb is big and getting bigger in tandem with the American beer gut (doh! I wrote that, what a dick). Want to check out the opposite of this trite little mockery of mental illness? Check out Parasite. Bong Joon Ho is nothing short of a genius. Todd Philips and Scott Silver, the writers (Philips directed too) would quickly point out Bong Joon Ho’s first name is Bong and high five each other, and that should tell you everything you need to know.

Yale Researchers Find Correlation Between Social Media Political Posts And Pornography

January 9, 2020. Yale University, Department of Psychology

Social media post that disparage a candidate have been linked to a strong preference for anal content in pornography, researchers report. Posts that support one’s own candidate without disparaging another have been linked to a healthy, well rounded sexual appetite. “We can’t say this surprises us,” reports lead researcher Dr. Gelson Verber, “but we were astonished at how accurate our findings were. Angry political posts and really hard anal, and we mean really, really hard, seem to go hand in hand. Five angry posts in one day? You have a backdoor devote. It’s the gushers you’re looking for. Seems obvious now, but it’s still surprising somehow.”

Researchers at The University of Waterloo have reached a similar conclusion after a survey of more than 10,000 students in a two years study. “We were stunned,” reports Dr. Rocco Hamm. “But the next step in this is of course to follow through and monetize this information. This could revolutionize modern online dating services. We’re talking money here. I don’t know about the people from Yale, but we need the dough.”

Post this if you’re having trouble with crazy political junkies with rabies on social media.