Happy Holidaze!

Back in August I shot a couple of music videos for my favorite band, SPENCER THE GARDENER, as they played three concerts in Santa Barbara during the Fiesta. Their new album, BREAKING MY OWN HEART, just dropped, and so did the first of the videos. Check it out here:

And pick up that album, available on the link. It's great.

Michael Connelly's introduction to Earthquake Weather

Yes, Mike and I are friends and we work together on a lot of things. But he's the most honest guy I know, so I doubt there's a word of this he doesn't believe. It's worth reading as a beautiful piece of writing about Los Angeles, even if you are not interested my work.


                                                          THE BIG MIRAGE

   The City of Angels is supposed to be a desert. Los Angeles is a mirage created with water channeled and piped in from hundreds of miles away. Those palm trees aren’t supposed to be here. The lush green hillsides should be desolate and stark. In many ways that makes L.A. simply the world’s biggest set and it seems both telling and right that this is the place where we find Hollywood. Hollywood is the Big Mirage, a place where nothing and nobody is real, where faces and breasts and morals and motives are synthetic and always changeable. You don’t like this one? Then how about this one?

   Perhaps no writer knows this turf better than Terrill Lee Lankford. Perhaps no book has defined it better than this one – and, I might add, from the very first line: I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, but on any given night Los Angeles can do a pretty good imitation of either locale.

   That says it all. Lankford uses the crime genre as the frame within which he hangs his painting of a place in turmoil. It is not a thick, obvious frame. It is thin, just enough to be noted at the margins. The painting is a story set in a place turned upside down by nature. Lankford uses an earthquake to viciously awaken the inhabitants from moral slumber. He turns the city on its side and casts our protagonist Mark Hayes on a journey across the treacherous landscape. I have read all of the author’s books and this no doubt is the masterpiece – so far.

   This is an introduction, not an afterword, so this is all I’ll tell you in specific. You’re in for a great ride. You’ll learn things and you’ll question things. You will have emotional reaction and there is no more that you can ask of a writer.

   But now for full disclosure. I know Terrill Lee Lankford. To act as though I am some sort of objective observer of the written word would be false. I have palled around Hollywood and L.A. with him for more than fifteen years. We’ve been in movie studios together, police stations, bookstores – I once missed a chance to visit a crack house with him. (Research, of course.)

   We have even been in each other’s books – me in this one, Lankford in The Lincoln Lawyer. His “character” even made the jump to the screen with the movie adaptation earlier this year. But what drew us together many years ago and what still binds us as friends and colleagues now is the City of Angels and it’s so-hard-to-grasp ethos. It’s a love/hate thing from the writer’s perspective. Who wouldn’t want to write about L.A.? There are so many ways to live and so many ways to die. It is cultural mecca and meltdown, autopia and dystopia, it is contradiction after contradiction. It is palm trees in the desert and, believe me, all of this is pretty goddamn hard to get right on the page. I have always called Lankford the most cynical man I know. Read this book and you may agree. But in reassessing this book now so many years after reading it the first time, I have to add that he may be the most honest writer I know. In this book he proves it. He captures in these pages the real L.A. He goes beyond the mirage to the dark heart that beats beneath it.

   Let me spoil one paragraph by leaving you with this little cut from the book. Once again, Lankford says all that needs to be said.

We turned left on Hollywood Boulevard and I surveyed the ruins. Actually, it was hard to tell the difference from the way the Boulevard had looked before the quake. There was a little more yellow crime scene tape apparent, a few more broken windows dotted the landscape, and a couple of the buildings had been red tagged, but Hollywood Boulevard had been a disaster area for years.

   So too, then, has been the larger, more mythical place called Hollywood. It’s now time for the expert guide’s private tour.

-- Michael Connelly 

Coming Soon!

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...." Nacogdoches, Texas. June, 2011. Temperature: 106 in the shade. Humidity: drinkable.

Here I am on the set of CHRISTMAS WITH THE DEAD instructing my assistant, Blitzkrieg, to go get Zombie Santa out of his Winnebago and haul his ass to the set.

Hopefully the fruits of Blitzkrieg's labors will be finding their way to a DVD player near you very soon.

A few updates on CHRISTMAS WITH THE DEAD: After a longer post-production period than CLEOPATRA, we've finally finished the movie (I think). A trailer will be ready any day now and we have begun shopping for a proper distributor. If there are any honest ones out there within the sound of my voice, give us a call. (They are harder to find than hen's teeth.) 

We've been accepted by the Torino Film Festival in Italy and they are flying Joe Lansdale, myself, and our significant others out for the shindig, which should be a real blast. 

There is some other interesting news on the horizon, but, being superstitious, I'm going to hold off on discussing that until it becomes a tangible reality. 

It's been a very long road to travel with this film, but hopefully it will all prove worthwhile. I'm looking forward to releasing it into the wild very soon.

The Black Box

Coming soon to a bookstore near you:

I love TCM. And I love their promos, too.

The website

http://kingeddysaloon.com/#1

At the King Eddy Saloon last month

The legendary King Eddy Saloon in downtown L.A. has been sold and will close for renovations at the end of the summer. Get down there while the party is still happening. If it's good enough for John Fante, it's good enough for you.

Now available for free to members of Amazon Prime

http://www.amazon.com/EARTHQUAKE-WEATHER-ebook/dp/B0081TLORU/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336629909&sr=1-5

Finally...

EARTHQUAKE WEATHER is now available for your book shaped devices. Michael Connelly wrote an extremely generous intro to this book, which in itself is worth the price of admission. I'm bad at getting the word out on things like this so I hope all of you out there will share the link, spread the word, etc. If you can go to the links and hit LIKE I hear that helps drive people to the pages. I'd greatly appreciate it. I ran a half-assed contest to help select the cover last month where everyone who chimed in ended up a winner. Any of you (and you know who you are) who want me to send you a download of the book, please send your request to lankford2000@earthlink.net

Otherwise, here are the links to the pages:

For the Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/EARTHQUAKE-WEATHER-ebook/dp/B0081TLORU/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336605764&sr=1-5

For the Nook:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/earthquake-weather-terrill-lee-lankford/1100293440?ean=2940014401258


If any of you have read the book and enjoyed it, a good review would go a long way.

Thanks for your support!

Maurice Sendak, RIP

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

I guess something happened to these guys. Haven't heard from them in a while.

More reasons to love the Beastie Boys

Beastie Boy down....

Tonight in Nac!

From Joe Lansdale hisownself: Nacogdoches folk, don't forget the free showing of CHRISTMAS WITH THE DEAD at the Carmike at seven p.m. tonight, but you have to come early for tickets, between five and seven, first come first served, no saved seats.

Oh, and you have to be over 17 to attend this.

Connelly/Gould/The Long Goodbye

By special request from Jerry House

Below is an earlier cover we created for Earthquake Weather. For fear that it would not get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval we toned it down in later versions, but Jerry somehow sensed it was lurking somewhere and wanted to see it. So here it is.

So far the "contest" has generated very little buzz, so for those who did write in, know that you are all winners! Unfortunately the polling has come down 50/50 on which cover is best (including one off-line write in on FB). Maybe this one could inspire a new round of discussion. (Call this Cover #3 when voting.)

Hell, I may have to end up making this decision myself.

I hate that.

Let the games begin!

Okay. We're back. It's 2012. One last run at beating the Mayan calendar. Let's pull it together, people!

For the first post of the new year I'm running a little contest. My talented book jacket designer, JT Lindroos, and I have developed two possible covers for the e-book of my novel, EARTHQUAKE WEATHER, which will hit the e-stores in the next month or two. I'm torn as to which is better. I like 'em both, for different reasons. But I'm biased of course. So I'm putting it to a vote. Which cover do YOU like best and why? Or do you not like either one of them and think we should head back to the drawing board? Click on the images if you want to see them in more detail.

Here's cover #1:

Here's cover #2:

Which do you like best? Or do neither of them inspire you to give the book a look? In this brave new world of E-Bookery it pays to ask these kinds of questions.

I have another reason for doing this other than my inability to choose between these covers. I'm wondering how many of you are out there. And who is listening. The counter at the bottom of this page keeps going up, but very few of you stop in for a chat. So I'd like to take this opportunity to invite you in to be heard.

When the smoke clears and the decision has been made, I will put the names of all who responded into a hat and pull ten names out. Those ten will receive a free copy of EARTHQUAKE WEATHER sent to their book shaped device on opening day. Think about it. You could be saving enough money to buy a Quarter Pounder with Cheese (not including the tax). I look forward to your comments.