Which is not to say that anyone with a microphone and a guitar should (although at times it’s sounds like many have and still are); as with movies and books, few people ever want to believe they’re just not that good at what they want to do. Most publishers, be they of music, movies, or books, want the general public to believe they act something like gatekeepers, which may be one of the biggest PR con jobs in the history of people making stuff up for other people to enjoy.

But the past ten years have been really good to music. Spectacular, even, with introductions to fantastic new bands and new releases from ones we hadn’t heard from in a lot of years. So good a top-ten list is tough, and again, filled with lots of CDs that very nearly make it but either way certainly deserve a mention as elevens. In no particular order:

–Tinted Windows (self-titled)–

In a decade of supergroups (Them Crooked Vultures, The Raconteurs, Monsters of Folk, etc.), Tinted Windows was among the best. Hanson was probably too pre-pubescent and subject of too much fangirl adoration for people to realize how insanely good they always were, musically, and it seems Taylor Hanson had much to do with that. Here, Taylor joins a guitarist from the Smashing Pumpkins and the drummer from Cheap Trick to record an album that’s basically pure, unadulterated, perfect pop music. When Tom Hanks demanded “Something happy, something poppy” from the Wonders in That Thing You Do, a CD like this would have satisfied his requirements.

–Norah Jones: Come Away With Me–

An easy choice, really. It won a go-jillion Grammys and sold a bajillion copies, but more than either, it’s a really good, quite CD that showcases Jones’ soft, subtle voice terrifically. Great rainy day Sunday sort of music.

–Snow Patrol: Final Straw–

Snow Patrol’s breakthrough CD in the US; they’d had some play in the UK and even knew Coldplay pretty well, with Chris Martin just handing them a song, but this is the CD where they came into their own. Eyes Wide Open and A Hundred Million Suns are terrific and build on the foundation Final Straw began.

–Audioslave—

The other great supergroup effort of the decade. I was in high school and college in the late nineties; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the first song I ever headbanged to, when I was in sixth or seventh grade or so (I remember doing so at the church-basement dances my Catholic school held). Lots of my friends were into Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine.

I wasn’t. I disliked both pretty intensely. I was into Milla, Bon Jovi, and the Refreshments, and the only thing I ever liked about Soundgarden was the bikini babe in its “Black Hole Sun” video (I though the song kinda sucked). I half-liked Rage Against the Machine’s music, itself, but then they’d start singing and it would be all frickin’ political and I was always like, dude, I don’t care about your political message. Just play me a good fucking song, how about? Their politics, though, always seemed to come first.

So Audioslave was like Soundgarden dropped the whiny angst and Rage Against the Machine dropped the quasi-political bullshit and had a baby together, and that baby came out with an intense guitar and the kind of high-pitched growl that sounded like cigarettes and bourbon, and holy Hell did that baby rock. I was sad to see them break up, because they had great chemistry and I think each side—that is, Cornell and ex-Rage—reined in each other’s tendencies to suck.

–The Magnetic Fields: i–

I saw the Magnetic Fields in concert once, because Neil Gaiman opened for them at the Bottom Line back in June 2001. My roommate had a couple of CDs and I picked up Charm of the Highway Strip, and I liked them, but I went mainly because Neil was reading. I continued to listen to their music, on and off, but it never really stuck until ‘i’, which lots of critics call a “concept album” I guess because all the songs begin with an ‘i’? I’m not sure. What I know is that “I Don’t Really Love You Anymore” and “I Don’t Believe You” are fantastic, and “In an Operetta” is wonderful, but really, the whole CD is terrific. Distortion continued the trend, but here, they were awesome.

–Lorraine A’Malena: Mirror Mirror—

Speaking of Neil Gaiman, Lorraine is the Fabulous, his assistant, and Malena played his assistant when he did a hosting gig for a horrorthon a couple years back, and this is the CD Lorraine and Malena made together. Lorraine and Malena are two very talented, very beautiful women with dark hair and wicked smiles, given to corsets, violins, and deliriously fantastic music like “Dark Sonnet” and “It’s Just Me and Eve,” both of which were written by Neil. It’s alternately clever, fun, dark, sinister, and charming, but it’s always very good.

–Dave Matthews Band: Everyday–

I didn’t like Dave Matthews Band until this CD came out. I’d wanted to; I loved “Ants Marching” when I heard it, and “Crash” has later become one of my favorite CDs (and is, song for song, music for music, better than this one), but this CD is one of Matthews’ tightest, and one in which concise songwriting is front and center. Dave had always been known for its jams, its loose playing, its relaxed atmosphere, but here, after throwing out most of a session produced with its longtime collaborative producer Steve Lillywhite, Matthews and the guys hired pop-rock-uber-producer Glen Ballard, probably best known as the guy behind the woman behind “Jagged Little Pill.”

It’s a marked departure, but it’s good, and this, along with finally attending a show, is what finally made me love DMB like I’d always wanted. It takes off with “When the World Ends,” a song that inspired my short story “How the World Will End,” but its songs are uniformly terrific: “The Space Between” is awesome, and “Why do I beg like a child for your candy?” (from “Angel”) is one of those poetically perfect pop music bon mots. And then it ends on the high note of “Everyday.”

–Rodrigo y Gabriela—

There isn’t much to say about this CD than that it’s guitar work like crazy, but that guitar work’s more than enough to earn it a spot. Because seriously, electric guitarists and their solos get so much credit we sometimes forget just how damned well an acoustic guitar can be played. The answer is: like this.

–Rob Dougan, Furious Angels–

Dougan is the guy behind “Clubbed to Death,” basically the signature piece of music from The Matrix, which has been used again in several other media over the years. It’s a great, dark, moody song full of atmosphere and longing and action, and it’s the centerpiece of a CD that varies widely, with the only thing consistent being quality. The title track, used instrumentally in the second Matrix movie, is just terrific, with startling lyrics and pain you can feel, but there are Tom Waits-ian drinking songs (wtf?), epic songs that sound like a cinema score, and lots of other good stuff here. The bonus edition includes a second all-instrumental CD; still phenomenal. Great value, great stuff.

–Michael Buble–

The first time I saw Michael Buble’s debut CD, I thought he was Justin Timberlake. I didn’t end up buying anything by him until his live CD a bit later, but this debut is fantastic: alternately swinging, rocking, and crooning, but always a lot of fun. It’s of standards, of course, including “Fever,” but it’s also got some Van Morrison and some Queen, and it reminds me of Sinatra and fedoras, which anyone who looks at my pictures can probably safely assume I enjoy a great deal.

How about now?

You should totally read the book before you go see it, and if you can get your hands on the audio version: listen to it. Gaiman reads it himself, and it’s brilliantly creepy and hauntingly charming in all the best ways.

So, last year, I’d planned to send my book out to a bunch of people, but life, as it so often does, got in the way, and in the end I only managed to send out a couple of copies. One went to Neil. I’d just kind of hoped he’d enjoy it. I’m not sure if I really expected to hear much back from him. I mean, the man’s always seemed busy enough to fill several people’s schedules. For the next, like, five years, at least.

But not long ago, I got the following in the mail:

Neil Gaiman says I rock?

Neil Gaiman says I rock!

I’ll be framing that bad boy, of course.

Incidentally and by the by, Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil’s Coraline is coming out in the next month or so. It may well be, so far, the first movie of 2009 I’m excited about. The movie’s website is here.

I didn’t have to do that this time around. This time around, NYU came to me with the same certainty as USC; all that’s left is getting in.

Which meant I felt I should familiarize myself with some of the work of some of the faculty members, the stand-outs of whom include E.L. Doctorow and Jonathan Safran Foer. Neither of whom I’ve ever read. Nothing against them, just never seemed like my thing; I’d rather read Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter and Joe Hill, most of the time. For me, the novels whose scope doesn’t stretch much beyond characters coping with ordinary lives have never really excited me so much. I’ve tried reading guys like Tom Wolfe and John Updike, and I generally feel decidedly meh about them. I hate to call it “serious” fiction, if only because it seems to imply that people like Gaiman and Rowling aren’t serious about writing and stories, and I think that’s foolhardy. I’d hate, too, though, to attempt to claim it’s all about marketing, because it’s really not.

Before this becomes a discussion of genre in fiction, though, let’s move on to the reading. Because the first book I picked up was Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

It’s his second novel, after Everything is Illuminated, which I started but never got far into because it felt both too gimmicky and like it was trying to be too clever by half but not at all succeeding; it’s about a writer named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to the Ukraine to explore his family’s history, and it’s interspersed with letters from his translator/guide or something, whose name I can’t recall, who speaks in busted English and names his dog Sammy Davis Junior Junior. For this, Foer received a giant advance and a breathless blurb from Joyce Carol Oates.

All at the tender age of, like, 25, or something.

(Me, jealous? Well, okay. Maybe a little)

But really, I picked it up originally because I was curious. Having always wanted to be a literary wunderkind myself (I’m probably now too old, alas), I had to see what the guy was doing that I wasn’t (I couldn’t figure anything out, myself). So, eventually, like, 20 pages in, I set it aside (because life’s too short for books you don’t like), filing it away as Not My Thing.

Can’t judge an author by a single work, though, and so now, several years after that fact, I picked up Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which concerns a young boy named Oskar whose father was in a meeting at Windows on the World on September 11th, 2001. The book ostensibly focuses on Oskar’s quest; early on, he finds in his father’s closet a key within an envelope on which is written “black,” and he sets out across New York to meet every person surnamed Black he can find and, hopefully, the lock the key fits.

I say “ostensibly” because it’s obviously not about the quest, as evidenced by the resolution thereof (which I’ll not spoil, but then again, which can’t really be spoiled if only because that’s not what it’s about); really, it’s about a boy whose lost his dad and coping with grief and loss. It’s at least partly about how we mourn; just about every character in the novel has lost someone, and each has learned ways to cope with the loss. Of course, really, it’s about more than that, too, not to mention less than that, because Foer manages something really difficult; he trusts his story.

Still, sometimes too clever. For example, the three pages that are all numbers because they’re supposed to be a long text message, but without spaces or punctuation (and yes, I reached for my cell to see if I couldn’t figure out what it said). Also, some of the text tricks, like when, at one point, a particular character claims to be running out of room, and so he makes his writing smaller and closer, until finally the text starts to overrun itself and becomes just all ink, margin to margin. Which correlates to the character’s words, I guess, except for the fact that it’s set in whatever typeface as the rest of the book, and shrinking a font doesn’t really so much correlate to writing smaller; if anything, I’ve always found that typing allows me more room on the page. And it’s not like the character in question didn’t have access to a typewriter . . .

Also, Oskar’s voice: still a bit gimmicky as the translator character from Everything is Illuminated.

All that said, though, I dug the novel. It might not have come together as successfully as it could have, nor been told in as linear a fashion as I’m used to, but I do give Foer credit both for his ambition and his attempts to follow it. Sure, it’s flawed, and it’s nowhere near perfect, but then again, it seems to attempt a lot more than most books do, and I think that does count for something. Who was it who said that man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for? Because this was sort of like that.

On a scale of infinite jest to excellent fancy, I think I’m going to give it a What the?, which I would hope would give both Foer and Oskar light boots.

I always liked when my favorite blogs won.

And I just thought I’d let you know, because who knows, maybe after all these years, I might even be someone’s favorite blogger. It’s really totally rad that I can somehow say I’ve had people reading my blog for years now.

You can find the balloting stuff here. I say go nominate your favorite blogs, whomever they may be. And if you want to nominate this here blog for, I don’t know, say, Best Written Weblog, or Best Kept Secret, maybe, I won’t argue. I’d probably even blush and stammer and shuffle my feet.

Really neat little vignette by Neil Gaiman concerning Hanukkah and Christmas and trees and Paganism.

Last month, I did an interview over at the Lulu Book Review with its proprietor, awesome author Shannon Yarbrough. In it, Shannon asked me about the dreams I mentioned in my essay about what I saw on September 11th, 2001; for a long while before that day, I’d had dreams of Manhattan falling in some way or other.

Now, I seem to be dreaming of water, and of cities falling into it. The ground beneath my feet has given way at least three times in the past . . . well, I don’t really know how long; it took dreaming about it last night to remember I’d dreamt of it before. And the title of this post is a bit misleading; it’s not inundation like a wave or a tsunami. It’s just giving way.

I don’t know where I am in the dreams. Part of me thinks Los Angeles if only because Los Angeles is the only city I associate with falling into the ocean. There was an amusement park-type setting last night, and maybe a Ferris wheel, which may or may not have been Santa Monica pier . . .

I wonder if it’s because I feel I’ve become unbalanced lately. In many ways. I’ve been teaching and grading and studying so hard I haven’t had nearly as much time to write as I would like. I feel like I’ve gone a bit overboard on politics, here in the blog, in the past couple of weeks, but then again I think that’s because so many of my feelings about the upcoming election are tied to my feelings about September 11th. I know that in many ways (and especially in recent weeks) Obama is just politics as usual (mainly, I think, because he’s playing to undecided voters), and I know many disagree that he is a good candidate, but something about him hits me in the same place watching WTC 7 crumble down hit me. Something about him gives me hope in those places that day deflated.

And yes, I realize that’s more an emotional response than anything, but then again, McCain makes me anxious in the same way those apocalyptic dreams always have.

And again: I didn’t mean to talk about politics here. I meant to talk about dreams and disbalance, because I know we’re all a little exhausted by the whole process by now.

I found out, last week, my grandmother passed away. I don’t know if that has anything to do with these feelings and dreams. She was actually a grandmother-in-law, through marriage (my uncle’s mother), but she was still often present in my childhood, whether as the first house on our annual Halloween trick-or-treating adventures or at my cousins’ birthday parties (three cousins, three parties per year). But I don’t actually remember the last time I saw her; I know it was at the local supermarket, but I’ve returned home less and less these past few years, and Jersey feels farther away than ever. I couldn’t go to her viewing/funeral, but I think what bothers me most about that is that I couldn’t hug my aunt and shake my uncle’s hand. She had a full life 88 years long, children and even grandchildren she watched grow up, and my mother told me it’s a blessing for reasons of recent health, but still, mum mum Kit is no longer around, and I’m a little sad about that. I don’t remember mum mum Kit with hair any other color besides white, pulled so taut back it became an old-fashioned facelift, voice full of old cigarettes and bourbon forgotten years before.

Anyway, I’m going to try to move back from politics. I’m going to also be trying to do some more writing. My real writing, that is, not blogs. That’s not to say I’m taking a break; this doesn’t feel like I’ve felt when I’ve realized I need to walk away from the blog for a while . . . it’s different, somehow. I’d meant to talk about Lulu, but I may be saving that for a couple of weeks just yet, as I’m still trying to figure out the best thing to do with my book.

Hope you’re doing well.

Because it’s a perfect day for a ride, ain’t it?

***

I should really just sell the damned thing. Manhattan just isn’t a place for such a beast, much less the Village. New York’s a walking town. A subway town. Sometimes a bus town, and some other times still a taxi town. It’s a bustling town and a jogging town, a drinking and dancing and staying-out-till-4-am town, and in fact it’s a different kind of town just about every minute for just about every person in it, but it’s not so much a driving town. There are too many cabs, too many long limousines with precious celebrity cargo, too many delivery trucks and big buses, too many Lincoln Town Cars shuttling CEOs to the office and back. The air is too bright and the sounds are too vibrant and the color is too loud to be shuttered away from the world by four windows and a growling engine, but still I keep the dilapidated duster.

I tell myself I keep it because I wouldn’t get much for it. The old lady who used to own it never did know much about anything she put a key into, and the engine’s hoarse in her memory. The duck tape on the torn cloth top; the old, nearly bald tires; the muffler that might as well not exist—selling it might cover a month’s rent or a fancy night on the City, but not much more.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

But I know the truth. I don’t keep it because selling it wouldn’t make enough; I keep it for days like this.

As soon as I woke up this morning, I knew you were going to call. You always do on the days when I wake to sunlight like glory streaming through my bedroom window. Golden hardwood floors, red brick walls. Sheets like eucalyptus. A good day to be alive. A good day for you to call.

And when my cell rings and it’s you, I answer it. We haven’t spoken in months, but we do so now like no time at all has passed.

“Good morning, sunshine,” you say.

“Indeed it is. I knew you’d call,” I tell you.

“Did you? And why is that?”

“Perfect day for a ride.”

You pause. As if you want me to believe you’re looking out your window. But I know otherwise. I know you’re fingering the knot on the checkered silk scarf already around your neck. The one you wear when we go for a ride. “It is, isn’t it? Do you want to go out?”

I know you use me for my car, but I don’t mind. You use all the boys, and none of us ever do. The supermodels who bicycle across town in the rain just to bring you chocolates and flowers, the schoolboys with deliriously fawning crushes, the older ad execs and producers and artistes who want to cast you and make you a “Stah, baby, make you a stah.”

But you and I both know you’re already a stah. A shooting supernova across all of Manhattan, and the entire city wishes on you when you streak on by.

You show up just like I knew you would. Giant, chunky, black shades. Your silk scarf over your short, smart, black hair. Your gingham farmers’-daughter shirt tied in the front and the daisy-dukes you painted across your hips and thighs. You look innocent, and that’s even more dangerous, isn’t it? You smile and greet me, throw your arms around me in an effusive hug I feel your chest in, and I’m sure you can feel me in it, as well, but if you do you don’t mention it.

And for that moment, just that one moment, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I’m certainly the luckiest guy on the lower East side.

“How’s the Baroness?” you ask as we walk down to the old yellow jalopy, even though you don’t need to. The Baroness is the same as she was the last time you rode in her. The same, in fact, as the first time you rode in her. The Baroness doesn’t change. And maybe that’s why you love her. And me. Us.

We fall right away into our familiar ritual. We put the top down. We drive to the first Starbucks we find, and you hold the two lattes because the Baronness is too old to have cupholders. We turn the radio up full blast, and the music cuts out twice as I attempt to start it. It’s an ugly old heap, but it gets us where we want to go, past Union Square and Saint Mark’s, past the NYU buildings where you teach beauty and truth. You may feel all grown up when you do so, all dressed up in your professional slacks and studied words, but you take off your scarf as we leave the City and the wind whips through your hair and you giggle like you’re six years old.

People watch as we leave the city, and I’m the envy of the entire city when you smile at the passers-by.

I know you use me for my car, but I don’t mind, because it’s mutual. I don’t mind because you remove your top as we drive farther into the green hills of the country outside the City, as we reach stretches of unoccupied highway that go for miles. And finally we are the only people in the world, and you climb atop me, and we ride, baby, we ride. It’s a perfect day for it.

~~~

Ever hear a song you just think there’s more to? That’s the story here: I heard the Magnetic Fields’ “Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” and I was like, “Man, that’s a short story.”

So I wrote it.

Here’s a rad video of the song:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhO1XlDFqxE]

The Magnetic Fields are, by the way, one of the most spectacularly awesome bands I’ve ever heard. Stephin Merritt is up there with Roger Clyne and Elvis Costello in terms of how well the guy writes a song, and I don’t think there’s a bad Magnetic Fields CD out there. Merritt is, of course, the guy who composed 69 Love Songs, a three-CD box set everyone except Merritt titters about the title of because he seems to simply believe the joke is so damned obvious it ain’t worth acknowledging.

I like that. There’s always something to be said for eschewing subtlety.

And Claudia Gonson? Magnetic Fields bandmate? Seriously, seriously awesome. She introduced me to Neil Gaiman when I went into total fanboy catatonia. I’m not sure I would have been able to speak otherwise.

So I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend, and if you’re not, I hope that helps make it a little more sublime.

And again, “Perfect Day for a Ride” is one of the stories in my collection, all proceeds of which I’m donating to the United Way NYC in honor of those we lost on September 11th and in the days following. So if you ain’t picked it up yet, now’s a good time to. And if you already have: thanks!

I’m going through the process as you’d expect; search the Internet and Writers’ Market and etc. for agents who are either actively seeking new clients or sound like they may be vaguely interested. And then I send a query, which looks pretty much as you’d expect a query to look: intro, synopsis, bio, and out. The intro gives me some trouble, though, because that’s where I mention the title, word count, and genre of my novel, and boyhow is that last characteristic ever a trouble spot. Many might think it’s easy: time travel automatically = science fiction.

But not so fast, I say.

Because I don’t feel like I wrote a science fiction novel. I don’t generally read science fiction novels. Science fiction is all wars among and treks across the stars, and it has a long and illustrious history I don’t feel a part of. Growing up, my choices for reading material were all Dean Koontz and Stephen King pretty much straight across the board, with digressions into Douglas Adams and Christopher Stasheff. Given that among my first experiences with Stephen King was a short story called “Strawberry Spring,” after which I read Different Seasons, I always had trouble thinking of him as a ‘horror’ writer. I never read It and never got to his straight-up horror until after I’d already read “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and “The Body.”

Try showing someone with no previous knowledge of their origins the movie adaptations of The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me and then explaining to them they were both based on books by a horror writer.

Because they certainly aren’t horror stories.

Admittedly, King is a bit of an exception; he himself is pretty much as much a genre as “horror”. People buy his books for his name, not for the genre.

Few people are going to buy The Prodigal Hour for my name, and you’re probably already reading this, anyway.

So far, I’ve been calling it a techno-thriller, but even that is a bit of a misnomer. It is thrilling (well. That’s the hope, at least), but character and plot work in pretty much equal measure, and it’s certainly not just about the thrills.

I sort of understand the requirement; it determines, basically, where your book is placed on bookstores’ shelves, which is key. I rarely venture to the scifi/fantasy shelves except to grab Neil Gaiman’s newest book, and again, I’m buying the name, not the genre.

I’m also thinking ahead. This one may be about time travel, but my next two big ones are about vampires and then werewolves, and both do things with those myths I’ve never seen nor heard done before. You can lump them all into science fiction/fantasy, I suppose, but I certainly wouldn’t, and I honestly think publishers and booksellers do more harm than good in categorizing books. Yesterday, Mitzi Szereto wrote about how publishers label books and how those labels can affect their sales, specifically related to erotica.

One of the things that’s gotten me thinking about this, too, are the writers who write stories that seem pretty categorically genre but whose books are not placed there. Lethem started out writing mostly weird science fiction tales. Crichton’s got Jurassic Park and Timeline, at least, not to mention Sphere and The Andromeda Strain. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones was narrated by a dead girl, while Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife seems like science fantasy.

And then there’s Michael Chabon. He just won a Hugo for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The Hugo is a major award so known for science fiction that, when a handful of fantasy novels won (including JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Gaiman’s American Gods), some controversy got stirred up.

I haven’t heard any such controversy about the award having gone to Chabon’s novel, which is mostly an alternate history set in the present (I haven’t read the book. I tried. Got about twenty pages in before I gave up on it). But Chabon is an author with both mass appeal and a Pulitzer under his belt, and, in fact, more so than controversy, the win has mainly stirred up discussion like here, where IO9 asks which mainstream authors its readers would like to see write science fiction.

Personally, I don’t want any mainstream authors to deign to write anything they don’t enjoy. Personally, I’d like someone to point out, hey, wait a minute, twenty of the twenty-five movies with the highest worldwide gross ever have been genre movies, and, arguably, science fiction or fantasy movies. The only exceptions are Titanic, Finding Nemo, The Lion King, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and The Da Vinci Code, the last two of which are certainly genre movies (adventure and thriller, respectively) even if not science fiction or fantasy.

Seems like it’s mainstream to me.

It’s like people expect good entertainment from all media until they hit books, and then some weirdo mechanism steps in and says that it must be “literature” to be any good while preventing the memory that the whole reason Shakespeare is awesome is because he wrote swordfights and fairies and witches so damned well into really exciting stories.

I don’t remember how I first encountered Supernatural; I’m sure it was an online discussion somewhere, but I don’t remember the specific pointer like I remember The Shakespeare Code. In fact, the first thing I remember about Supernatural is its Wikipedia page, which notes that its creator, Eric Kripke, cites Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and American Gods as influences.

That was really all I needed. I’ll state a caveat here in the interest of full disclosure: Neil Gaiman is the only person on Earth who has ever sent me into total fanboy catatonia. I had been 23 just a month when my best buddy trekked up to Jersey City from regions farther south so we could see Gaiman open for The Magnetic Fields at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village. I had been corresponding (roughly) with Neil for nearly a year by then on The Well, but still I couldn’t bring myself to say hello (it took an introduction from Claudia Gonson of the Fields to actual render me speechful).

I had, by then, read everything Gaiman had written except Sandman, and I was totally looking forward to American Gods (the copy on my bookshelf, just a few feet away, was the first one signed on the American Gods tour, and it was signed at the Borders WTC. It has, of course, become somewhat of a talisman in my life).

I wanted to love American Gods, but I’ll admit, back then, I didn’t; my visceral reaction was that it read very much like exactly the debut novel it was–a writer learning how to write a novel as he did so. While it has grown on me in the years since, I still think Coraline and Anansi Boys are better, novel-wise, than American Gods was (Anansi Boys is, I believe, one of the greatest novels ever: very nearly fully achieved and perfect for what it is. It seems like it understands, in a way some few books do, what it means to be, and quite successfully achieves it).

My point is that I’d been reading Gaiman for a few years by then, and that he’s one of two novelists I continue to both read and enjoy (the same I cannot say for either King, Koontz, Carroll, or Pratchett [the other novelist is Rowling]). Which was why, when I saw that citation of influences, I just had to check out Supernatural.

Supernatural: two slightly dysfunctional but also very cool brothers drive around in a vintage Chevy Impala while listening to Asia and hunting things that go bump in the night.

And if that’s not very nearly a perfect logline, I don’t know what is.

Over three (so far) seasons, Supernatural has followed the brothers Winchester, Sam and Dean, as they drive back and forth across the country hunting . . . well, just about everything for which a season does not exist. Vampires? Check. Werewolves? Check. Djinn, changelings, and killer clowns (though not from outer space)? Check, double check, and wait, let me confirm–yep, check all over again.

And I think it’s way better than it has any right to be. I mean, one of the brothers is best known for a recurring role in the Gilmore Girls while the other has the sort of suitably pouty lips directors hire make-up people to moisten every ten minutes, but hell if it ain’t Tiger Beat heartthrobs battling evil, and boyhow does it work.

Don’t get me wrong; there are a couple of things about the series that, ultimately, unfortunately, fall flat, the single biggest being that the series seems to have an undue amount of trouble letting characters stay dead. Perhaps this is a reaction on my end, in that both television shows I’m currently most into (Supernatural and Doctor Who) don’t seem to want to let anyone actually die. And, of course, there is some wriggle room in Supernatural; when you’re dealing so much with things that go bump in the night, you are, story-wise, generally allowing that things do bump in the night, and the things that bump in said night probably used to be alive in some way, which means that there is acknowledgement of the afterlife. Especially when you’re dealing with demons and Faustian bargains and a bunch of characters who care about people they love more than they care about themselves.

When people keep dying but keep not exactly staying dead, it reduces tension for the viewer. It makes suspense and danger (not to mention: death) not mean nearly so much. You stop worrying when a character seems about to die, because you think, well, no biggie, they can just bargain that out of the way.

In most cases, the stakes are at least changed (and sometimes raised), but still, I feel the creators stumbled a bit with all the dead-not-dead stuff.

Even still, I remain impressed by the adventures of the brothers Winchester. Most of the episodes are self-contained, which is a hallmark of the shows I love (e.g., Doctor Who and House, MD), with development over arcs contributing to but not overwhelming the self-contained nature of each episode (or two-parter). I’ve always been the sort who avoids anything in multiple parts each of which can’t be enjoyed on its own, mainly because I’ve always felt like I’m being strung along (part of the reason I’ve always enjoyed TPBs to single-issue comics. Fuck single issues. Fuck waiting a week (or worse) to find out what’s going to happen next [the Harry Potter series is the notable exception, but then again, reading Harry Potter is a bit like watching a season DVD all in a go]).

Which is the other nit I pick with Supernatural; apparently, renewal goes to the creators’ heads, as each season pretty much ends on a cliffhanger of some sort. There’s a way to pique interest to keep people watching (or reading) and there’s a way simply to infuriate them.

But Kripke and McG (who exec produces) manage to avoid trouble by consistently putting together terrific, clever episodes. Some of my favorite bits: the names the Winchesters use to pose as detectives (Landis and Dante, Page and Plant, Bachman and Turner); the way Dean Winchester is written; uber-hot chicks in just about every episode; and layers. I’ve watched straight through Season 3, and all the characters seem so fully realized; the highest compliment I can pay, I think, is that you believe these characters had lives before you started watching, and you believe they had lives after the screen goes dark. I tend to think that in addition to the cited influences, Stephen King’s canon casts a long shadow across, at least in terms of character dynamics and interactions, as well as humor and story (and that’s one of the single highest compliments I would pay. Say what you will about Stephen King’s writing [hey, I like it], but you can’t claim he’s not a great storyteller).

I worry about next season; three seemed a bit uneven, though I wonder if that was mainly because it was truncated due to the writers’ strike (a lot like House, MD).

(cross-posted to Mightygodking.com.)