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September 26, 2007

Birthday

Today's mine....

...and also: Olivia Newton-John, TS Eliot, Marty Robbins, Will Self, Melissa Sue Anderson, Tracey Thorn, Jim Caviezel, Jane Smiley, Serena Williams, Johnny Appleseed, Anne Robinson of "The Weakest Link," and the godlike Bryan Ferry.

Posted by scottheim at 11:04 AM | Comments (5)

September 17, 2007

Midlake & John Grant

This past week, my great friend John Grant was here in Boston, opening for Midlake at The Paradise. The entire show was excellent. John was the lead singer of The Czars, and now he's performing new songs on his own. An example of one of his older songs (with The Czars) is below.

(Wanna John's amazing versions of classics from Connie Francis, Abba, Tim Buckley, Patsy Cline, Simon & Garfunkel, and others? Then check this out.)

And Midlake were fantastic. If you don't have their album The Trials of Van Occupanther, I can't recommend it enough--it was one of my top-tens of last year. Here's an example why:

Posted by scottheim at 12:41 AM | Comments (2)

September 12, 2007

The Return of the Weirdly Pale-Pink Novelist

Soooo... a couple of weeks back, I posted a link to The Olive Reader, the excellent weblog for my publisher Harper Perennial, and a section of a little promotional video they made for me. Well, now they've now posted two more pieces from that video interview on both their site and on YouTube. In the excerpt below--in which I'm unfortunately still looking as pudgy and pale-pink as a piglet--I give a somewhat stammering overview of the plot of my forthcoming novel.

(If that description sounded a little too vague, then how about this: below is the copy from the current Harper catalog, the words that will most likely be on the back cover of the eventual published book.)

WE DISAPPEAR. "A teenage boy is found murdered in a field near a small Kansas town—an event that sparks a dark obsession in a hard-luck woman named Donna. Recently widowed and battling cancer, she persuades her son, Scott, to help her find out more about “disappeared” people. Battling demons of his own—including addictions to methamphetamines and sleeping pills—Scott is barely holding on. Yet throwing himself into his mother’s desperate hunt offers a taste of salvation and helps him see past his own skin. Posing as writers, mother and son criss-cross the Midwest from small town to small town, interviewing families and friends of these disappeared. But Donna’s compulsion takes a dark turn when she kidnaps a teenage boy. Calling him Otis, she handcuffs him and locks him in the basement while Scott, his addictions growing worse, tries to cover up her crime. As his mother’s health deteriorates, Scott begins to notice eerie similarities between Otis and other missing teens, and even more, to his own childhood self."

Posted by scottheim at 11:00 PM | Comments (3)

September 09, 2007

Twelve First Lines (and One of Mine)

(1) "On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide--it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese--the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope." (Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides)

(2) "I wish I could eat the salt off of your lost faded lips" (Interpol, "Obstacle 1")

(3) “September 21, 1945... that was the night I died.” (Grave of the Fireflies)

(4) "Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up." (Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away)

(5) "I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl" (Björk, "Bachelorette")

(6) "Never having known a mother, her mother had died when Janey was a year old, Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father." (Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts In High School)

(7) "Have you ever seen so many gulls?" (The Birds)

(8) "'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast." (E.B. White, Charlotte's Web)

(9) "Babs, Babs, why isn't the egg man here? I'm starving to death for some eggs." (Pink Flamingos)

(10) "In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together." (Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

(11) "It doesn't matter if we all die" (The Cure, "One Hundred Years")

(12) "High school is like the training wheels for the bicycle of real life." (Ghost World)

(And, with absolutely no assumptions that mine is anywhere equal to any of these, I'll add this to the list):

"The little girls who found the body of the missing boy were not angels, although that is how the newspaper described them, the following morning, beneath the headline."

Posted by scottheim at 12:35 AM | Comments (4)

September 06, 2007

Go Novak Go

US Open: we've been totally glued to the TV. I'd like to see Venus take the women's title again... but it's hard for me to concentrate on that because of somebody else. Now that James Blake and Rafael Nadal are out of it, I'm rooting for my new favorite Novak Djokovic. Oh, and I also seriously think he's one of the 10 most stunningly sexy human beings on the entire earth. He possesses many of my idiosyncratically favorite attributes: he's tall & thin, has a big nose, deviated septum/breathing problems, thick eyebrows, speckly little moles, and he's a a total goofball, etc etc etc. Hot. Want more evidence? See below:

I love him.

Posted by scottheim at 07:00 PM | Comments (2)

September 05, 2007

Happy Birthday, Freddie Mercury

The first 45 I ever bought: sort of a cliche, I guess, but oh well:

Re: that song, and the album it's from. I'd probably seem ultra cool if I admitted that this album changed my life--and it did, sort of, but that was much later when I was 16--but ten years earlier, this one changed my life first. (And it probably had a lot to do with making me gay, too.)

The other obvious classic Freddie reference point:

I remember in The Book of Lists how there were always lists of people naming their "Top Ten Famous People I'd Invite to Dinner." People were always naming Einstein and Jesus Christ and Jim Morrison. Well, I think Freddie would be a hell of a lot more fun at dinner... he'd definitely be on my list.

Posted by scottheim at 12:07 AM | Comments (1)