On Time Tuesdays: Bates Motel Drinking Game

It's only been two episodes but there are already a few patterns in Bates Motel. Since this show is shaping up to be delightfully nutty buckets, why not come up with a game to make the watching experience even more social?

On Time Tuesdays: Bates Motel

Last night, A & E aired the first episode of their new show Bates Motel. If it's not obvious already from the title, Bates Motel is an update (in more ways than one) of Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Psycho. The show looked pretty promising from the teasers and overall I was pretty pleased with the first episode. With such familiar subject matter, I was expecting Bates Motel to be, if not exactly predictable, at least a touch formulaic. There's definitely a lot going on in the show's world already, and it managed to be surprising and fresh even with such well known characters.

Building Stories: Choose Your Own Adventure for Adults

Towards the end of last year, I started to hear about a new "graphic novel" called Building Stories. The basic description is that it's about the lives of the residents in an apartment complex in Chicago, a seemingly straight forward work of literary fiction with pictures. However, Building Stories isn't quite so simple; it features not only a non-traditional narrative structure but a non-traditional physical one as well. The reason why I'm hesitant to classify Building Stories as simply a novel (graphic or otherwise) is because it's not just a single object that you can hold in one hand and read from cover to cover. There are a lot of covers, and lot of things without covers, in Building Stories. Author Chris Ware has put together his narrative through fourteen separate items contained in a larger, sturdy box rather than between two pieces of cardboard.

Oz the Great and Smarmy

For once I actually got out to a movie in a timely fashion--opening weekend no less! This so rarely happens lately, and I've developed a considerable list of movies that I need to catch up on once they hit Netflix. I think I will have to give up on sleeping if I ever want to watch them all. So how disappointing that one of the rare times that I actually saw a movie within a week of its release, it was such a disappointment, while I continue to miss out on a lot of really amazing films on the big screen.

Shows That Make You Hide Behind The Couch: The Awesome Rise of Horror TV

I am a horror fan. I've mentioned some of my scary literary faves already, but lately I've been getting most of my shocks on the small screen. When I was growing up, the only horror TV shows I remember were the occasional Stephen King mini-series (Rose Red has given me a yearning to visit the Winchester Mystery House someday), but in the last few years genre television has trickled down from networks like HBO and Showtime onto more standard cable channels like AMC and FX and now even onto network stations. Some of them are amongst my favorite shows on TV right now. Others are... less successful.

BASS 2012: "North Country" by Roxane Gay

I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, and am only holding out until March to get my hands on some more (I cannot resist the lure of Karen Russell, particularly after Michael Shaub called Vampires in the Lemon Grove "magnificent" and "flawless.") and I am loving it. I've never gorged myself on short fiction, but I've always enjoyed it. I think one of the things that really strikes me is that with good short fiction, I can get everything I get out of a good novel, but in concentrated form. Perhaps this is why, as a huge Stephen King buff, I love the novels but adore the short fiction. The last novel I read of his was Under the Dome, and I was massively impressed as usual by his talents as a world builder, but there is something to be said about a writer who can spend a few hundred pages setting up an elaborate literary ecosystem and can also do it in a single-serving chunk.

Currently I'm working my way through The Best American Short Stories 2012, which gets me out of my comfort zone a little since I'm not picking and choosing authors, or even subject matter--I pretty much go into the stories blind, with the exception of a couple that have since become title stories in anthologies of other works by their authors.

How I Gave My Teeth to Art

A little backstory about myself is necessary for this post: teeth freak me out. In coming days you'll see me post about horror films, shows, and books, but but the one thing that I really can't abide, and that will get me to avoid watching something, is stuff happening to people's teeth. I have never seen Marathon Man, and I never will. I shudder at the thought.

So recently, as I've been trying to get over my fears, I decided that there was no better way to work through this issue than by embracing my teeth and giving them up to be used in a work of art.