THE SHORT TEEN AND THE SEA

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
(Bloomsbury USA, $13.95)

Even if you think there's no room on your summer reading list for more titles, I humbly urge you to squeeze in Jim Lynch's 2005 novel The Highest Tide. It's a funny and unorthodox coming-of-age story set during the final stretch of summer. With August looming just around the corner, you couldn't pick a better time to read it. And at a brisk 250 pages it won't take up too much of your time.

Thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley is well under five feet tall, but he's so precocious that he can hold his own with top scientists in the field of marine biology. Miles lives in a house on the ocean in Olympia, Washington. When he's not re-reading the works of environmental goddess Rachel Carson, he prowls the beaches during low tide, searching for unusual marine specimens.

He becomes the center of a media circus when he discoveries a giant squid and other saltwater oddities. In simple but poetic prose, Lynch depicts Miles' increasingly strained efforts to balance his sudden fame with the challenges of teen life. Can he abandon the tidepools long enough to win the heart of the older bipolar girl he adores? Can he prevent his parents from splitting up? Is his prophetic elderly friend Florence right when she predicts that the highest tide in 50 years is about to hit, or is it the senility talking?

If The Highest Tide has a flaw, is that Miles is so perfect and likable that it's almost unbelievable at times. He's surrounded by fuck-ups, and the point of the story seems to be that he's the glue holding his family and his community together. Lynch still could have pulled off that theme, though, if he dared to paint his hero in a less-than-saintly light at times.

PARTLY SUNNY

Little Miss Sunshine
Grade: B-

A crowd favorite at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Little Miss Sunshine has so much going for it that it's hard to figure out why it's such an underwhelming viewing experience. Despite terrific performances and some genuinely hilarious slapstick, the film ultimately disappoints because it tries sooooo hard to be eccentric that it exhausts itself and surrenders to total predictability by the time it crosses the finish line. Co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris follow several days in the life of a nutty Albuqurque family that hops in an old yellow VW bus and drives to California so the 7-year-old daughter can act like a JonBenet Ramsay girly whore in a beauty pageant.

All the actors give it their best shot, with especially memorable performances from Alan Arkin as the perverted grandfather and a bearded Steve Carell as a gay suicidal Proust scholar. But in the end it all stinks of superficiality because Dayton and Faris are far more interested in magnifying the characters' cartoonish quirks than exploring more subtle aspects of their personalities.

I get the feeling that we're supposed to feel like we're part of the family by the time the sappy conclusion rolls around. I, for one, was happy to see the VW bus drive off into the distance without me on it.

BLUE CONFESSIONS

My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography and Prostitution by Aiden Shaw
(Carroll & Graf, $15.95)

Aiden Shaw has a ridiculous amount of experience under his belt.
The prodigiously endowed, HIV-positive British porn star has appeared in over fifty films with randy titles like Forced Entry, Grease Guns and Hand Jobs.
When he’s not hard at work at the Falcon or Catalina studios, he’s a Renaissance man of sorts. He composes music and performs in a band called Whatever, and he has published novels and poetry collections.
Heck, the writers of Sex and the City liked him so much that they named John Corbett’s character after him.
Shaw, 40, just published the memoir My Undoing. Given the fact that he’s naked on the front cover, he might as well have called it My Undressing. But don’t get too excited, boys and girls. In the photo Shaw’s treasure trail ends right above his package o’ plenty.
This revealing picture would probably ensure good sales even if the book sucked. Fortunately Shaw is a reasonably compelling writer who balances juicy tidbits about prostitution gigs and recreational drug use with weighty accounts of his psychotherapy sessions and his bout with paralysis after a car accident. Most of all he chronicles his ongoing struggle to find true romance in an industry that values cum shots over heartfelt relationships.
It must be said, however, that My Undoing is a real limp dick when Shaw spends long and tedious stretches cataloguing the mundane details of his daily life, such as doing laundry.
The most troubling aspect of the memoir is that Shaw does not seem particularly concerned about practicing safe sex despite his HIV-positive status. In one scene, he complies when an HIV-negative man at a party asks him to ejaculate in him without wearing a condom. Shaw lets himself off the hook by implying that such indiscretions are inevitable when booze, drugs and horny men join forces.
Shaw is candid and engaging throughout most of his memoir, but it’s hard to warm up to him when he dodges responsibility for such dangerous behavior.

EARS AND FEARS

Opening in theaters on August 4:

The Night Listener
Grade: B+

Fans of Armistead Maupin’s cheery Tales of the City series may be surprised to learn that the legendary gay author has a dark side. Inspired by events from his own life, his 2000 novel The Night Listener is a psychological thriller about a talk show host who strikes up a telephone friendship with a young male pedophilia victim who may or may not exist. Disturbing and complex, it’s a far cry from the bubbly queer shenanigans on Barbary Lane.
Patrick Stettner (The Business of Strangers) directed the new film adaptation of The Night Listener and collaborated with Maupin on the screenplay. After a sluggish start, the tense and unpredictable plot barrels along toward an inconclusive, but satisfying, ending.
The film’s biggest commercial draw doubles as its biggest artistic weakness. Some mainstream viewers will undoubtedly take a chance on this risky indie film because it stars Robin Williams. Though he’s obviously adept at comedy and he’s done well in seriocomic films like The World According to Garp and Good Will Hunting, flat-out drama is not his forte (House of D, anyone?)
I’d like to sing his praises for playing an unstereotypical gay role in The Night Listener, but his acting is so overearnest and bland that his character resembles a cardboard box more than an allegedly witty radio personality.
Stettner stages such a tightly woven drama, however, that Williams’ lackluster performance is more like a dull toothache than an impassable roadblock.
Williams plays Gabriel Noone, a radio personality in the process of breaking up with his longtime boyfriend. When a colleague gives him a book by a young boy, Gabriel begins a phone correspondence with the precocious author. Threatened by his friends’ suggestion that the whole situation is a hoax, he tries to determine if the boy really exists, or if he is just a figment of his adoptive mother’s imagination.
Sandra Oh (Grey’s Anatomy) and beefcakey Bobby Cannavale (Will & Grace) are compelling in supporting roles, but Toni Collette is the real standout as the troubled adoptive mother who may or may not be blind and crazy. Alternately brittle and tough, her inspired performance is completely convincing and moving, and it deserves an Oscar nod.

NEGOTIATING WITH THE HEAT

The 100 degree weather has sapped me of all desires except to lie on the tile bathroom floor with my cats and to use whatever's left of my deep-fried brain cells to read in one of two air conditioned rooms in my house. Fortunately I have two great books to keep me company: Margaret Atwood's Negotiating With the Dead (Anchor, $13) and Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black (Picador, $14).
Along with the short story master Alice Munro, Atwood is a a high priestess of Canadian literature. I've been a fan ever since I read her sci-fi feminist novel The Handmaid's Tale in high school. After several nominations she finally won the Man Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, and rumor has it that she has come very close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature several times.
Culled from a series of six lectures she gave at the University of Cambridge in 2000, Negotiating With the Dead is an erudite and funny book in which Atwood sounds off on the art of writing. She starts off with an autobiographical essay that details her early childhood reading habits and her teenage discovery that there was no going back after she discovered the addictive joys of writing.
That's as far as I've gotten, but I'm looking forward to sitting in on more of Atwood's master class on writing.

When British author Zadie Smith signed my copy of On Beauty at a reading last fall, she recommended that I try reading one of her favorite authors, Hilary Mantel (who is also British). I started off with the highly acclaimed memoir Giving Up the Ghost, which never fully engaged me though it sported some lovely writing.
Still, I was intrigued when I ran across her latest novel, Beyond Black, at a bookstore. A darkly comic tale of the occult, it depicts the relationship between an overweight clairvoyant named Alison and a mildly-second-sighted woman named Colette who serves as Alison's business partner.
Moments are flat-out hilarious, such as the scenes with Alison's foul-mouthed, sex crazed male spirit guide. But Mantel also has a knack for capturing her characters' lonely inner lives, resulting in a mix of melancholy and absurdity that feels really true to life.

ALL WET

Here's yet another dud from the 2006 summer movie season, opening in theaters this Friday:

Lady in the Water
Grade: C

M. Night Shyamalan follows up his critical flop The Village with a convoluted fairy tale about a Philadelphia apartment manager (Paul Giamatti) who tries to protect a visiting sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) from beasts who want to kill her before she can escape on the back of a giant eagle. Sound ridiculous? It is, and Shyamalan’s blend of sight gags, mysticism and horror is never convincing or even remotely magical. At least the evenly spaced jolts prevent boredom from kicking in.

RHYMESTORE FLOOZY

St. Patrick's Day is nine months away, but today I ran across some limericks I wrote a few years ago and decided to post them along with totally unrelated photos of some favorite household tchotchkes. In other words, this posting makes no sense whatsoever.

My handsomest neighbor is John
He adores peanut butter bon-bons
One got stuck in his throat
While he steered a speed boat
And he ended up killing a swan

I once new a girl named Priscilla
She resembled a balding gorilla
On Saturday nights
She flew heavenly kites
As she swilled amber vials of vanilla

Tess Gallagher’s daughter Laureen
Had a hot fling with her college dean
When the word got out
Tess started to doubt
That this slutty girl sprang from her genes

My pet is a scholarly leopard
Who admires the plays of Sam Shepard
When asked which is best
She replies True West
“It makes me feel salty and peppered!”

SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

Yesterday I went to a press screening of The Descent, a hit British horror movie that makes its way to U.S. theaters on August 4. It doesn't merit the comparisons to Alien that some critics have made, but you can count on it for a few electric-chair-strength jolts:

The Descent
Grade: B-

Director Neil Marshall’s claustrophobic tale about a nightmare cave expedition is a cut above recent horror fare like Hostel and Wolf Creek, but its IQ drops sharply when it suddenly shifts from being an adventure yarn to a bloody monster mash. A group of women takes on unchartered underground territory in the Appalachian Mountains, only to discover that a slimy band of creatures intends to eat them. The special effects team loses some serious ingenuity points by ripping off goblin designs from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

FAQS
(TLA Releasing, $19.95)

The gay indie film FAQS is not so much a movie as a manifesto. And it’s a really dumb manifesto at that.
With no subtlety whatsoever, it argues that all straight people suck and that they’re irreversibly programmed to bash queers or, at the very least, call them bad names. Over the course of 90 minutes there’s not a single queer-friendly straight character – and this is West Hollywood, not the Bible Belt.
FAQS is the malformed brainchild of Everett Lewis, a writer and director whose previous films include The Natural History of Parking Lots and Luster. Despite a lot of bad dialogue and crude character development, his does convey the powerful message that queers can band together to fight homophobia.
Lewis’s message is terribly muddled, however, bouncing back and forth between a pro-violence stance on queer activism and a “make love, not war” attitude that comes too late in the movie to balance out the militant content.
The cute but overly earnest actor Joe Lia plays India, a young man who flees his fag hating parents only to be exploited by a sleazy straight pornographer. One night he’s chased into a parking garage by gay bashers, and a black drag queen named Destiny emerges out of nowhere to rescue him with some daunting gunplay.
Destiny is a queer den mother of sorts. She invites queer kids to live with her under the somewhat disturbing condition that they parade around naked for two hours a day. Gay male viewers will be happy to know that this little house rule results in an extended full-frontal romp for Lia.
The plot clumsily evolves into a string of romances and conflicts that force Destiny, India, India’s boyfriend and other characters to evaluate how far they’re willing to go to protect themselves in the straight world.
Most of the actors are handsome and they’re clearly game for some boudoir action, but the sex scenes fall flat due to bad lighting and obscure camera angles.
It must be said that Allan Louis is fabulous as Destiny. His performance is stylish, smart and tough – in other words, everything the film is not.
The DVD features commentary by Lewis and Lia. The pair also participates in a Q&A session recorded at the 2005 Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

PEACHES FOR PRESIDENT !!!

Get thee to a record store bitches! Three years after her primo Fatherfucker CD, Peaches is back with the ingeniously titled Impeach My Bush. The former schoolteacher turned electronica trash queen serves up 13 yummy, ass-thumpin' tracks, starting off with the succinct political protest rant "Fuck or Kill." Other highlights include the dreamy vocals on "Downtown," and the bisexual free-for-all "Two Guys (For Every Girl)":

once you boys get started you'll be at it for hours/come on boys i know you're not damn cowards/just remember an ass is an ass/so roll on over have yourself a blast

She ain't Shakespeare, but at least she doesn't beat around the bush.

Has the summer heat put you in a mindless daze? Here's the perfect DVD for brain-dead viewing:

Slutty Summer
(TLA Releasing, $24.95)

With a lascivious title like Slutty Summer, you can’t blame a guy for getting his hopes up for lots of hot and nasty action. The opening scene lives up to this promise, showing two naked men sixty-nining on an apartment floor. Nothing else in the movie reaches this level of naughtiness, though there is a certifiably skanky seduction scene in a men’s rest room.
The film’s failure to live up to its title would be forgivable if the script weren’t so amateurish, and the jokes were actually funny. As screenwriter, director and star, the wooden Casper Andreas is not so much a triple threat as a triple dud. He stumbles on many of his lines, which is pretty mind-boggling when you consider that he wrote them himself. And by trying to make a silly sex farce a platform for serious discussions about men and fidelity, he succeeds only in giving the film a wildly uneven tone.
Andreas plays Marcus, a New York City writer who discovers that his long-term boyfriend has cheated on him. At his new restaurant job he meets up with several gay co-workers, including the promiscuous überfag Luke and a hot model named Tyler.
Tyler puts the moves on Marcus, and Marcus is most definitely tempted. But is it too soon for him to move on to a new relationship? And is Tyler even capable of monogamy? As Marcus grapples with his summer romance quandary, his nutty co-workers try their own luck at love.
If you’re in the mood for mindless entertainment or you just want to look at good looking men for 80 minutes, you could do a lot worse than Slutty Summer. Just remember to keep your expectations very low.
The DVD boasts several features that are better than the film itself. The piece de resistance is "Who's a Slut?", a hilarious short documentary in which cast member Jesse Archer takes to the streets and interviews random people about their sexual proclivities.

FROM TRASH TO TREASURE

I just finished reading Jennifer Saginor's horrible memoir Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion. It had some juicy bits in it, but for the most part it wasn't even fun enough to earn "guilty pleasure" honors.

Now I'm moving on to The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis. I've read that Davis is a fantastic and strange writer, so I'm looking forward to experiencing her weird-o world for the first time.

Portland will be even more bookish than usual this week because the local literary magazine Tin Hat is hosting a slew of readings, seminars and author interviews. I'm hoping to see an interview with Lorrie Moore (who wrote the awesome short story collection Birds of America), and possibly attend a seminar led by Anthony Doerr (author of yet another awesome short story collection, The Shell Collector). Doerr was at Bowdoin at roughly the same time as me, but I never met him to my knowledge.

Back to Playground. Here's the first draft of the review I'm working on:

Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion by Jennifer Saginor
(Harper, $13.95)

Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but is it okay to be petty about an author photo?
I normally don’t pay much attention to pictures of writers that adorn dust jackets or the lead-in pages to a book. But the mug shot of Jennifer Saginor for her potboiler Playground is so weirdly fascinating that I flipped back to it dozens of times to seek refuge from her wretched prose.
The fuzzy photo depicts a thirty something woman with straight blond hair. She wears sunglasses to deprive us of eye contact, and her hipper-than-thou sneer is anything but inviting.
She aspires to chicness, but Saginor looks so insincere that you can’t help but brace yourself for a bumpy 277 pages.
Playground is an unlikable book for sure, though it must be said that this poor man’s knockoff of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation delivers some moments of sheer guilty pleasure.
Saginor’s dubious claim to fame is that she spent much of her childhood cavorting at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Instead of doing typical late ’70s/early ’80s girlie stuff like listening to K-tel compilations and playing with Cabbage Patch Kids, she watched John Belushi have sex and started knocking back Quaaludes eons before she had her driver’s permit.
Her father, a famous physician known as “Dr. Feel Good,” was part of Hugh Hefner’s inner circle. Saginor ultimately blames her parents for exposing her to sex, booze and drugs at such an early age, dim-wittedly exonerating Hefner, as though he wasn’t responsible for cultivating this depraved culture in the first place.
“I realize that Hef’s the one person who never wronged me,” she writes. “He allowed me to be a child in his midst.”
The good news for queer readers is that Playground packs some serious lesbian heat, though the pedophilia overtones may make you feel morally queasy. One of Hefner’s girlfriends seduces the underage Saginor, resulting in a long-lasting but ill-fated sex fest.
I’m not sure if it’s to her credit or not, but at moments Saginor effectively captures the Reagan era with her spoiled rich girl attitude and her nostalgic references to Bananarama.
But in the end this book is so clichéd, fuzzily reasoned and self-indulgent that you can’t help but think that the awful author photo says it all.

NEW ON DVD:

Caché
Grade: A

Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) won the Best Director prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for this tense and disturbing film about a family under surveillance. Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil (The Closet) play a sophisticated Parisian couple whose tranquility bites the dust when they begin receiving psychotic drawings and eerie videotapes filmed from outside their apartment. The two leads deliver masterful performances, bringing their characters from a simmer to a boil as the ugly intrigue escalates. But with his insidious and undeniably effective way of shocking us when we least expect it, Haneke emerges as the the real star of the show.

ACID SKIES

Tonight - while tripping out on Lord of the Rings in the TV room - Drew and I looked out the window and saw that our neighborhood was under some kind of outer space weather siege. A pink, purple and gray sky conspired with flashes of lightening to give me one of the best drug-free drug experience I've ever had. We commemorated the occasion by lighting the $1.49 "Killer Bees" fireworks fountain we bought at Bi-Mart. Bzzzzzzzzzz.

The Devil Wears Prada
Grade: C+

As expected, Meryl Streep is gloriously bitchy as Miranda, an egomaniacal fashion magazine editor who scares the shit out of everyone who works with her. But Anne Hathaway - who was terrific as Jake Gyllenhall's wife in Brokeback Mountain - is a featherweight in the comedy department, outdone by her swanky wardrobe in her role as Miranda's lackey at the magazine. I kept hoping for this superconventional movie to turn into a biting satire of the fashion industry, but the barbs are few and far between, and not very sharp to begin with. The material begs for an ace satirist like Alexander Payne (Election).