Special to Theater of Giants: Baron Munchausen's Beat
by Dagrolord Del Oro
Nashville Predators’ star forward Radek Bonk thought he was fulfilling the wish of a dying child when he had teammate Vernon Fiddler drive Fiddler’s Hummer to Elm Street in Antioch- a tree-lined suburb of the Music City. Bonk is a native of the Czech Republic and freely admits ‘my English good is not’. It was in part the desire to improve his English that led Bonk- whom Predator teammates teasingly call ‘Yoda’- to his own Nightmare on Elm Street.
An interpreter for the NHL powerhouse Predators describes what happened thusly. “Radek volunteers regularly for Predators Community Outreach Programs such as Big Brothers and ‘Chat With A Predator’. Chat With A Predator if a very popular format that allows fans the opportunity for online conversation directly with members of the Predators Organization. Because of his limited English, Radek usually had help from one of his teammates, in case Radek had a question of language or grammar. Fellow Predator forward and good friend Vernon Fiddler was assisting Radek when Fiddler received a cell phone call. Owing to poor reception inside the building,. Fiddler explained to Radek that he was going outside to take the call.”
According to sources at NBC’s To Catch A Predator, 18 year-old intern and Alabama native Amanda Bellings was only a week on the job when she accepted the assignment to pose online as under-aged sweetmeat. Sources say that Chris Hansen himself had been very impressed with Bellings and considered her to be ‘one sharp cookie.’ A producer chose Bellings to be part of the Nashville, Tennessee To Catch A Predator assignment because Bellings was a Southerner herself and would seem to Nashvillians less like ‘a Goddamn Yankee.’ Bellings said she awas given the chat handle Sick_4BigStik and was told to log into Yahoo Chat Nashville Regional. Bellings said it was her job to pose as a decoy to ‘lure in’ child predators.
“I like tried really, really hard for like days,” Bellings said. “But like guys just weren’t interested. Even when I said that I was only 15 and that I really, really wanted to suck off their cocks and stuff, they kept telling me, ‘No way Jose, you’re probably a decoy for To Catch A Predator. LOL.’ I felt really, really awful. I told them I had like big boobies and would take it all the way up the ass, but still nothing. The guys would just type back stuff like ‘No way. Say hello to Chris Hansen for me. LOL.’”
“I was afraid Mr. Hansen would like fire me,” Bellings said. “So I like well you know got on Google. Sure enough, I found like a whole organization of predators. Boy, was I like surprised to find predators so blatantly organized! You know, with like their own chat server and stuff?”
“Radek was waiting for Vernon Fiddler to return from his cell call, when the instant message came in,” said the Predators interpreter. “You have to understand that Radek had previously been with Vernon on several hospital and home visitations to present very ill and dying children with gift baskets from the Predators Organization. When the message from ‘Sick_4BigStik‘ popped up, Radek responded as best he could. Radek actually thought by the manner in which the child was begging that the child was close to death. Radek wrote down the address the child gave him. Radek then located Vernon Fiddler in the parking lot and insisted that Vernon drive him right away to the child’s house. Vernon told Radek that they should wait until daylight, but Radek insisted that they must go right away.”
“The predator guy was so hot for my little cooze, he like drove over to see me right away,” Bellings said with seeming pride. “He was like tall and good-looking and I felt like you know kinda bad in a way. But in another way, the guy had seemed pretty damn proud to be a predator, and he’s like telling me his name is ‘Bonk’, if you can believe that. So I thought you know, like fuck Bonk and the Hummer he rode in on.”
“Radek and Vernon both went to the door together,” said a Predators spokesman. “They heard Amanda Bellings giggle. Belllings then told them she wasn’t expecting two Predators and to come inside and wait in the living room while she finished her shower. Radek and Vernon came in and took a seat. Vernon found Bellings flirtacious but disembodied voice odd and was calling the Predators Community Relations Director when Chris Hansen walked into the living room and melodramatically introduced himself.”
“It was a very unfortunate misunderstanding,” said NBC spokesman Blake Neiverquist. “NBC deeply regrets any alarum to Mr. Bonk, Mr. Fiddler, their families, the NHL, the Nashville Predators, the State of Tennessee, and to the City of Nashville. Chris Hansen will cover his own medical expenses and no charges will be pursued. Mr. Hansen and the producers of To Catch A Predator apologize to one and all. To Catch A Predator further promises to set in motion infrastructure that will keep such misunderstandings from ever happening again. Thank you.”
Monday, August 18, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Book Review: 'Occupational Hazards' by Jonathan Segura
'Occupational Hazards' by Jonathan Segura
Occupational Hazards
Jonathan Segura
Simon & Schuster, Jul 2008, $14.00
ISBN: 9781416562917
A $300 a-week beat reporter for Omaha's sketchy Weekly News-Telegraph, 'Occupational Hazard's' Bernard Cockburn is one of the more perversely satisfying anti-heroes of this or any other year. With first-person prose as lean as a marathon runner, freshman novelist Jonathan Segura adroitly serves us this slim but wickedly funny slice of noir. From the gate, we find the bitterly cynical Cockburn on-hand for a hostage negotiation with a deranged father holding his own 13 year old daughter at gunpoint. A quick transition or two later and we're at the dowdy headquarters of the Weekly News-Telegraph, where we meet Cockburn's publisher Manny Hertz. The improbably titled 'Chief of News and Marketing', Hertz proves himself worthy of the second half of his title and assigns Cockburn yet another thinly-disguised 'Advertorial'. Cockburn (pronounced Co-burn, a point Cockburn has to make repeatedly), has other fish to fry. Nevermind a drawer already full of unfinished exposés, Cockburn's instincts tell him a Downtown land deal has the lineaments of skullduggery. It seems a group of citizens bent on 'cleaning up' areas slated for redevelopment are not only vigilantes, but puppet-vigilantes at that. So, who pulls the strings?
Cockburn's investigation is soon awash in a sea of complications- it appears that a major advertiser of the News-Telegraph is somehow linked to the mounting body count. Bernard Cockburn will cause many readers to wonder aloud whether he's a bigger bastard or loser, but there's a quixotic element to Cockburn that should nonetheless keep the reader's sympathy solidly with him. Cockburn himself lives in one of the slums to be 'gentrified' by the very redevelopment deal he's investigating. As Cockburn sardonically sketches his world, we see that his bitter contempt extends to himself. Perhaps the only people Cockburn despises more than himself are power players. The only real distinction Cockburn sees between the street whores and bureaucrats he meets is point-of-purchase. I can think of few novels where bitter cynicism as the bastard step-child of disappointed idealism is revealed more convincingly than here by Segura.
Don't let that this is Segura's first novel have you assume that he is anything less than a scalpel-sharp raconteur. Segura endows Cockburn with an often howlingly hilarious, but always keen observational style. You may well find yourself vacillating between laughing your ass off and nodding your head at one of Cockburn's more profound observations. Cockburn, commenting on the desire of people to see their name in print says-
"Newspapers, see, are a gateway to fame, an institution dedicated to chronicling the feats of the extraordinary people who define our times. But the truth is that very few of us have something worthwhile to contribute. Every last one of us could just as easily blow off our heads tonight and leave nothing behind except a headstone that nobody visits, and the world will keep on turning without so much as a hiccup."
Later, we see Segura's ability to imply entire pages of back-story with astonishing brevity as Cockburn explains why he didn't listen for his girlfriend Allison's answer-
"I hang up before I hear the answer, because I know she's going to say no. Yeah, not only can I finish her sentences, but I don't even have to wait for her to start them."
Despite the moments of sharp wit, the relentless pace of this novel won't let you forget it's first and foremost noir. And grand noir at that.
Cockburn's life is laid out before us in vignettes of mocking mediocrity. Destiny has earmarked Cockburn for virtual non-existence, which Cockburn believes is revealed metaphorically by the City in which he lives and works. It seems Cockburn can't get through the day without being street-mugged by some new evidence of his own staggering insignificance. Between liberal applications of drugs and alcohol, Cockburn peels the layers of the Downtown redevelopment onion. Amidst Cockburn's bouts of flatulence and mild erectile dysfunction, Allison announces that she's pregnant. Cockburn's immediate reaction is to accuse Allison of a deliberate pregnancy. Ha. Everyone- including Cockburn in his more lucid moments- knows that Allison is more than Cockburn deserves.
Author Jonathan Segura has created in Bernard Cockburn a deeply complex character full of sneaky profundities and illuminating dichotomies. On the surface, Cockburn is engagingly reprehensible and estranged from the ethics of his profession. But the waters of 'Occupational Hazards' run much deeper. Not only does the outwardly deeply cynical Cockburn care greatly about the world he inhabits, he's willing to do much more than he'd ever admit to change it. When a deep, dark secret from Cockburn's past surfaces, and threatens Game Over, we come to know that Cockburn's not quite the punching bag he makes himself out to be. Cat and mouse will swap roles for us now and again. Settle in for the ride, it's worth the ticket.
Occupational Hazards
Jonathan Segura
Simon & Schuster, Jul 2008, $14.00
ISBN: 9781416562917
A $300 a-week beat reporter for Omaha's sketchy Weekly News-Telegraph, 'Occupational Hazard's' Bernard Cockburn is one of the more perversely satisfying anti-heroes of this or any other year. With first-person prose as lean as a marathon runner, freshman novelist Jonathan Segura adroitly serves us this slim but wickedly funny slice of noir. From the gate, we find the bitterly cynical Cockburn on-hand for a hostage negotiation with a deranged father holding his own 13 year old daughter at gunpoint. A quick transition or two later and we're at the dowdy headquarters of the Weekly News-Telegraph, where we meet Cockburn's publisher Manny Hertz. The improbably titled 'Chief of News and Marketing', Hertz proves himself worthy of the second half of his title and assigns Cockburn yet another thinly-disguised 'Advertorial'. Cockburn (pronounced Co-burn, a point Cockburn has to make repeatedly), has other fish to fry. Nevermind a drawer already full of unfinished exposés, Cockburn's instincts tell him a Downtown land deal has the lineaments of skullduggery. It seems a group of citizens bent on 'cleaning up' areas slated for redevelopment are not only vigilantes, but puppet-vigilantes at that. So, who pulls the strings?
Cockburn's investigation is soon awash in a sea of complications- it appears that a major advertiser of the News-Telegraph is somehow linked to the mounting body count. Bernard Cockburn will cause many readers to wonder aloud whether he's a bigger bastard or loser, but there's a quixotic element to Cockburn that should nonetheless keep the reader's sympathy solidly with him. Cockburn himself lives in one of the slums to be 'gentrified' by the very redevelopment deal he's investigating. As Cockburn sardonically sketches his world, we see that his bitter contempt extends to himself. Perhaps the only people Cockburn despises more than himself are power players. The only real distinction Cockburn sees between the street whores and bureaucrats he meets is point-of-purchase. I can think of few novels where bitter cynicism as the bastard step-child of disappointed idealism is revealed more convincingly than here by Segura.
Don't let that this is Segura's first novel have you assume that he is anything less than a scalpel-sharp raconteur. Segura endows Cockburn with an often howlingly hilarious, but always keen observational style. You may well find yourself vacillating between laughing your ass off and nodding your head at one of Cockburn's more profound observations. Cockburn, commenting on the desire of people to see their name in print says-
"Newspapers, see, are a gateway to fame, an institution dedicated to chronicling the feats of the extraordinary people who define our times. But the truth is that very few of us have something worthwhile to contribute. Every last one of us could just as easily blow off our heads tonight and leave nothing behind except a headstone that nobody visits, and the world will keep on turning without so much as a hiccup."
Later, we see Segura's ability to imply entire pages of back-story with astonishing brevity as Cockburn explains why he didn't listen for his girlfriend Allison's answer-
"I hang up before I hear the answer, because I know she's going to say no. Yeah, not only can I finish her sentences, but I don't even have to wait for her to start them."
Despite the moments of sharp wit, the relentless pace of this novel won't let you forget it's first and foremost noir. And grand noir at that.
Cockburn's life is laid out before us in vignettes of mocking mediocrity. Destiny has earmarked Cockburn for virtual non-existence, which Cockburn believes is revealed metaphorically by the City in which he lives and works. It seems Cockburn can't get through the day without being street-mugged by some new evidence of his own staggering insignificance. Between liberal applications of drugs and alcohol, Cockburn peels the layers of the Downtown redevelopment onion. Amidst Cockburn's bouts of flatulence and mild erectile dysfunction, Allison announces that she's pregnant. Cockburn's immediate reaction is to accuse Allison of a deliberate pregnancy. Ha. Everyone- including Cockburn in his more lucid moments- knows that Allison is more than Cockburn deserves.
Author Jonathan Segura has created in Bernard Cockburn a deeply complex character full of sneaky profundities and illuminating dichotomies. On the surface, Cockburn is engagingly reprehensible and estranged from the ethics of his profession. But the waters of 'Occupational Hazards' run much deeper. Not only does the outwardly deeply cynical Cockburn care greatly about the world he inhabits, he's willing to do much more than he'd ever admit to change it. When a deep, dark secret from Cockburn's past surfaces, and threatens Game Over, we come to know that Cockburn's not quite the punching bag he makes himself out to be. Cat and mouse will swap roles for us now and again. Settle in for the ride, it's worth the ticket.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
'The Two Trouser Jakes ' ('The Two Jakes'- 1990)
The Two Trouser Jakes
or...
Hey Jake, This Aint Exactly 'Chinatown'
Both writer Robert Towne and American film icon Jack Nicholson (as Jake Gittes) are back in 1990's 'The Two Jakes', but you'll find little else to remind you of Roman Polanski's brilliant noir masterwork 'Chinatown' (1974). To begin with, Nicholson as director is no Polanski, and writer Towne is no longer the spot-on Robert Towne of 1974. Nicholson reprises the role of Jake Gittes, now 20 years older, and the portly owner of a successful detective agency. Harvey Keitel is on hand as Julius 'Jake' Berman, a scheming Los Angeles developer who has hired Gittes, and his firm to follow his much younger wife Kitty. Berman believes Wife Kitty is having an affair. It appears Berman is right, and Gittes soon informs Berman that Kitty has arranged for an assignation with her lover at a skidrow B & BJ. Kitty is played by Meg Tilly, who is once again inexplicably miscast as an attractive woman. With Gittes and his henchmen audio-taping in the next hotel room, Berman breaks in on Kitty and her lover. To the vast annoyance of Gittes, Berman empties a revolver into Kitty's lover- Berman's partner Liberty Bodine. Rot-ro.
Tilly, with her eerily shining Down's Syndrome eyes and ridiculous child's voice, makes an unlikely femme fatale, and Keitel takes a role meant to be played wooden and renders it petrified. Madeleine Stowe is feisty, and gorgeous as Lillian Bodine- the sultry widow of Jake Berman's partner. Lillian thinks that Jake and Kitty Berman had contrived the affair to kill her husband so that Jake might then claim the beneficiary survivor status outlined in a convoluted partnership agreement. Stowe is brilliant as the dysfunctional Lillian, and as she worms her way close to Gittes to press her case, Stowe lifts an otherwise pedestrian film with her considerable screen presence. There's a incendiary scene in Gittes' office in which Lillian becomes hysterical, and Gittes is forced to console the grieving widow with Stowe in an obliging four-point stance murmuring... 'You're gonna make me do it. You're gonna make me do it."
'The Two Jakes' is no 'Chinatown', but even when every now and again the plot soils itself in horrifically grotesque fashion, Nicholson the actor has sufficient charisma to keep us munching popcorn. Also in the film is veteran character actor Eli Wallach as an attorney with the obligatory 40-weight patina. David Keith plays the vile detective Lt. Loach as beta foil to salted alpha dick Gittes. As an oil tycoon, Richard Farnsworth delivers his trademark Machiavellian huckleberry and Ruben Blades rounds out the cast as token Latino. Nicholson himself lends a credible narrative voice to the film- a sort of wistful, unrequited narcissism. If a bit unsteady at the directorial helm, Nicholson eventually skippers us to familar harborage- every so often the Past insists on kicking us in the ass...hard.
or...
Hey Jake, This Aint Exactly 'Chinatown'
Both writer Robert Towne and American film icon Jack Nicholson (as Jake Gittes) are back in 1990's 'The Two Jakes', but you'll find little else to remind you of Roman Polanski's brilliant noir masterwork 'Chinatown' (1974). To begin with, Nicholson as director is no Polanski, and writer Towne is no longer the spot-on Robert Towne of 1974. Nicholson reprises the role of Jake Gittes, now 20 years older, and the portly owner of a successful detective agency. Harvey Keitel is on hand as Julius 'Jake' Berman, a scheming Los Angeles developer who has hired Gittes, and his firm to follow his much younger wife Kitty. Berman believes Wife Kitty is having an affair. It appears Berman is right, and Gittes soon informs Berman that Kitty has arranged for an assignation with her lover at a skidrow B & BJ. Kitty is played by Meg Tilly, who is once again inexplicably miscast as an attractive woman. With Gittes and his henchmen audio-taping in the next hotel room, Berman breaks in on Kitty and her lover. To the vast annoyance of Gittes, Berman empties a revolver into Kitty's lover- Berman's partner Liberty Bodine. Rot-ro.
Tilly, with her eerily shining Down's Syndrome eyes and ridiculous child's voice, makes an unlikely femme fatale, and Keitel takes a role meant to be played wooden and renders it petrified. Madeleine Stowe is feisty, and gorgeous as Lillian Bodine- the sultry widow of Jake Berman's partner. Lillian thinks that Jake and Kitty Berman had contrived the affair to kill her husband so that Jake might then claim the beneficiary survivor status outlined in a convoluted partnership agreement. Stowe is brilliant as the dysfunctional Lillian, and as she worms her way close to Gittes to press her case, Stowe lifts an otherwise pedestrian film with her considerable screen presence. There's a incendiary scene in Gittes' office in which Lillian becomes hysterical, and Gittes is forced to console the grieving widow with Stowe in an obliging four-point stance murmuring... 'You're gonna make me do it. You're gonna make me do it."
'The Two Jakes' is no 'Chinatown', but even when every now and again the plot soils itself in horrifically grotesque fashion, Nicholson the actor has sufficient charisma to keep us munching popcorn. Also in the film is veteran character actor Eli Wallach as an attorney with the obligatory 40-weight patina. David Keith plays the vile detective Lt. Loach as beta foil to salted alpha dick Gittes. As an oil tycoon, Richard Farnsworth delivers his trademark Machiavellian huckleberry and Ruben Blades rounds out the cast as token Latino. Nicholson himself lends a credible narrative voice to the film- a sort of wistful, unrequited narcissism. If a bit unsteady at the directorial helm, Nicholson eventually skippers us to familar harborage- every so often the Past insists on kicking us in the ass...hard.
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