Dave's Fiction Warehouse

The well-dressed sod-buster   I never read any of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, nor did I ever make it through any single episode of the hit ’70s TV show. But that doesn’t mean I can’t shit-post about Netflix’s plan to reboot the series.  On the plus side, Netflix has nowhere to go but up. The original was an overlit schmaltz-fest that didn’t tug at the heartstrings so much as percuss them like Django Reinhardt. It wasted no opportunity to impart some simplistic and saccharine lesson. It was supremely inauthentic. For a gritty, realistic portrayal of family life on the frontier, it’s right up there with “The Brady Bunch,” which ended the same year “Little House” started. At least half of the budget appears to have been spent on Michael Landon’s hair and wardrobe. The pioneer life was one of constant toil, but the TV Chuck Ingalls was always freshly shaven and decked out in pressed business-casual shirts with coordinating suspenders. Did he need the suspenders? N...

  I magine if Bob Dylan had been blessed with Timothée Chalmet’s looks and singing voice. He could have been a big star. Haha. We were getting caught up on SNL episodes the other night and finally got to this one: Timothée (not crazy about that diacritic and double e) up there covering three of Dylan’s lesser-sung tunes: “Outlaw Blues,” “Three Angels” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” He did a pretty good job – just as you’d expect from someone who’s spent the last couple of years learning to ape Dylan’s style for “A Complete Unknown.” As SNL musical guests go, you could do worse. GloRilla, for example, who was on the week before. But I found something about it kind of off-putting.  There’s the shameless movie tie-in, of course, with Oscars only a month out. But then SNL’s stylish staging and video effects made it seem that Chalmet wasn’t paying tribute to Dylan so much as inhabiting the man’s persona. Here was Dylan 2.0 (in the parlance of our times), with a cuter face and clean...

Everybody loves the Super Bowl. Right? A nd so it comes to pass that I have actually lived in both cities represented by this year’s Super Bowl contenders. That’s pretty stunning! It last happened way back in, let’s see … 2023. I forget who I was rooting for then. When I lived in Philadelphia, of course I was a big Eagles fan. When I lived in Kansas City, it was Chiefs all the way. (In Jacksonville, I was a tepid fan of the Jaguars until it became kind of embarrassing.) See, when you live in a city with an NFL team, the mood of the whole metro area waxes and wanes according to the score on any given Sunday. It’s always better when a city is happy. It’s better when even a city’s noted assholes essay a certain bonhomie.  Now that I live in a City Without a Team, I’ve been making less of an effort. NFL football, for me, has always been about pretending some knowledge of the teams to ingratiate myself with those who did care: checkout clerks and waiters and certain relatives who always...

Mean Mr. Mustard Y ou know, I keep telling myself to lay off thinking or writing about this firehose of Trump-world fecal matter.  Focus on the positive, I think; appreciate all the beauty and grace of this world. Smile at passers-by in a non-creepy way that makes them think I appreciate their day-to-day struggles. Maybe play more video games or learn origami.  But every day it’s some new outrage, some mindless new assault that makes nobody’s life better and everybody’s life (except for the uber-wealthy) at least a little bit worse. The only guiding principle here is magnifying power for a certain elderly golfer (thanks, Jeff Tiedrich), and shielding said golfer from any challenge to his pointless, Nero-esque presidency. Not sure how we got here. There are hundreds of theories, most of them probably partially right. I’m really not sure how we get out of here. Trump’s been in office for less than a week and it already seems like stately halls of government are tumbling down aro...

W hen’s the last time you read a Western? I used to devour them: Luke Short and Max Brand, mostly. Quite a few Louis L’Amour. Some Zane Grey. The last one I read was probably by Elmore Leonard, who was the best in the genre before he moved on to crime fiction.   I got to thinking about Westerns a few days ago, when Alan LeMay’s 1957 novel “The Unforgiven” showed up as a Kindle Unlimited title. (My new Kindle came with a free trial.)  It’s about a family in 1870s Texas, beset by hostile Kiowa and racist neighbors and quite a bit of bad weather. The Zachary clan raises longhorn cattle by the thousands, which must be gathered and driven to market in Wichita every year. Hell of a way to make a living, since it’s supremely unprofitable and you can’t get good help.   But cattle drives do make a great setting for Westerns. In fact, it’s hard to think of many that don’t feature moving livestock in some way or other. Which now reminds me of Larry McMurtry’s excellent “Lo...

It's porn-bot Pac-Man! B luesky update: Still better than X/Twitter, just for the reduction in MAGA bile. But, really, it’s not going to save us. It was naive to hope, during the last few months, that it might.When you think about it, how can the disaster wrought by social media be cured by more social media?  Anyway I’m up to 320 or so followers now. Normally I’d be dancing in the street with those numbers. But the pie chart above tends to dampen my enthusiasm:  Porn bots. I get half a dozen a day, profile photos of sexy women who try to establish bona fides by reposting or liking three random things. Never-Trumpers like myself, who mostly just repost anti-MAGA memes. I don’t mind that, but at this point anything that makes me madder or sadder isn’t helpful. Finally, the tiny cohort of smart people who post interesting facts and photos, or who add some original perspective to the political cataclysm that is about to overtake us.  I suppose that last group is the reason ...

  J anuary 2025, the last days of democracy in America. So of course I’ve been bingeing ancient episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” It is a way to pass the bleak winter evenings when one has decided to unfollow the bleak winter news. About the show: I’m not kidding when I say ancient. It started in 1955 and ran for seven years, meaning most of these stories are about as old as I am. Like me, some of them have not aged all that well.  But some old things can seem better just by virtue of their age, can’t they? And ’50s TV shows have the rare distinction of looking better now than when they were new. That’s because of high resolution, big-screen TVs. When I saw my first episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (a rerun even then, of course) it was probably on a blurry 19-inch RCA. These days you can spot flaws in the sets and makeup that would have been invisible to viewers in the ’50s. Right now I’m on Season 3. Almost 200 episodes still to go! That’s another thing: Back the...