I Don't Even Own a Television

Throw us a bone, here, people, and don't unleash a pack of "IDEOTVPod has gone to the dogs" jokes, just because we've finally managed to collar a couple copies of Spencer Quinn's entirely endearing, even fetching novel Dog On It: A Chet and Bernie Mystery.

You'd have to be one sick puppy to be mean about this good-natured book about a moderately hard-boiled desert detective and his loyal pooch, who serves as our narrator, and trust us: if you come to say bad stuff about Spencer Quinn, you're barking up the wrong tree and will definitely end up in our doghouse.

 

Recommendations:

• Russian Doll, Netflix
• Stick It
• "Lost in the Woods with James Brown's Ghost" by Thomas Lake

Music:

• "Baby Ice Dog" by Blue Őyster Cult
• "Get at Me Dog" by DMX
• "Talking to the Dog" by Obits

What is the sound of a skull batting again and again at the hardest wall any coconut failed to crack? Why, it's the sound of your pals reading Harry Stephen Keeler's When Thief Meets Thief!

This legendary underground author works through his obsessions (skulls, coincidences) and takes us through a long tour of his racial attitudes—and one of those two things is, depending on your patience levels, fun/acceptable. The other is a firehose of awful. (This book comes with a content warning for racist slurs and attitudes, self-harm, and one very cartoonish act of violence against an animal, very little of which is discussed in the episode.) But, whether or not you can get past the difficult to digest subject matter, you can always confront the difficult to parse timeline, or just wallow in the difficult to understand prose. This one, it's safe to say, isn't like anything you've read before.

Extra bonus illustrations! If you want to see what it looks like when one tries to summarize the entire plot of a Keeler book, read this effort by William Poundstone. NOTE: it's like 2,500 words long. If you want to see what a Keeler-style "webwork" diagram looks like, feast your eyes! (Also from William Poundstone.)

   

Recommendations:

• Wandersong game
• L'Avenir / Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Music:

• "Skulls" by the Misfits
• "Thieves" by Ministry
• "Joker and the Thief" by Wolfmother
• IDEOTVPod Songs of Nudity and (Then) Carnality

It's real original yacht rock time over here, folks: Belly up to the groaning board and get ready to pig out, because the buffet we've got ready for you, courtesy of Jimmy Buffett, is called Swine Not! Buffett hams it up as our eyes glaze over, and the porcine puns have, lamentably, just begun.

It's a deeply inoffensive text, but Clsn spends the entire time peevish and grumpy, so that's fun, and we completely forgot to mention during the episode that there's a very, very real possibility that, in the world of Swine Not, Noah's Ark was a real thing. (It's true! Page 34!) If that's not enough, J. springs the biggest surprise the show has ever seen! If you're pining for some portions of porky plotting, hungry for some ungulates, or just in a mood to hear a LOT about a young boy's soccer season(s),adjust your chef's hat and get ready for a book that's nothing but ... truffle.

BONUS TEXT-ONLY SHOW SEGMENT! Imagine you're hearing the song "Rippin' It Off" right now. Uh, okay, what is this book-like object about some pig trying to find its way in New York City, ah, shall we say, reminiscent of? Yup, that's right: we've got a little bit of Charlotte's Web, a tiny bit of Babe: Pig in the City, and just enough of both to make us wish we were encountering those. And not, and I repeat, NOT, this.

 

Recommendations:

• The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran
• "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation" by Anne Helen Peterson
• "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts" by Linda Tirado

Music:

• "Pigs" by Aesop Rock
• "Burn Pigs Burn" by Pitchfork
• "Pigs in Zen" by Jane's Addiction
• ACTUAL CLOSING TUNE: "Idiot Control" from MST3k

In the far-flung future, faster-than-light "skipships" carry soldiers in "hibo capsules" and our hero "Scur" needs to save what human knowledge she can in everybody's titular ... Slow Bullets, and even if you're not already overloaded on made-up words and silly names, you'd be forgiven for muttering "hooo booooy" when you get to the part where Scur is on a spaceship and is puzzled and excited by the existence of a public address system.

It's the kind of science fiction where nobody has wireless, so most of the action consists of people carrying tablets and thumb drives around, the kind where religion gets a pretty savage sneering-at (so take THAT, belief systems!), soldiers cuss a lot (a LOT), and one quiet IT man can save the entire day, if only he can get people to listen to him.

All this spurs and stirs what might be our most digressive episode yet. There's much, much more than the usual amount of cape and cape-adjacent talk, and the moment where Clsn inexplicably can't remember the name of Peter Schilling is sure to have a central place in this year's Poddies podcast award show. Also! the long-awaited return of talking about Do Robots Do the Nasty (yes) and How.

 

Recommendations:

• "Born to Die" by Lana del Rey
• Sleep No More by P.D. James
• "Spending Eternity in a Japanese Convenience Store" by Forests

Music:

• "Around the Plynth" by Faces
• "Maggots" by Gwar
• Theme from Star Trek

For this holiday season, we've got a gift for you! It's a box with a cat in it—but you will never know if kitty lives and breathes or not, because this time around, we're schlepping up the hills and through the pages to get to Stephen King's mammoth Pet Sematary.

Semi-appealingly dickish young doctor Louis Creed takes us on a tour of Stephen King's Carnival of American Anxieties! Is my cat less of a man if I get him fixed? Am I? Is it okay if I like my son more than my daughter? Everybody cheats on their spouse, right? Can I just run away from my family? Is my cat super creepy all of a sudden? If I try to climb that fence, am I going to fall on a spike and ruin my balls? Should I tap ancient magic to create abominations in the face of all-conquering death?

It's all very relatable. Maybe. In any case, it's Stephen King, it's slow-building, and it's extremely, extremely gory. So grab your favorite shovel and get ready to bury what you can't let go, because it's long past time for us to take a trip through the works of our Maine man...

 

Recommendations:

• Detective Pikachu (Nintendo 3ds)
• The Girls, by Emma Cline

Recommended Music:

• "Chesterfield Kings", by Jawbreaker
• "Diamonds and Rust", by Judas Priest
• "Here Comes the Gravediggaz" by The Gravediggaz

Long nights, impossible odds, keeping your eye to the keyhole, that's what it's like to spend your nights within Nights at Rodanthe. Our first encounter with the redoubtable Nicholas Sparks has our home fires burning bright, with our tightest, least-digressive episode ever!*

An oft-told tale, this, in which a nice woman snaps her daughter out of a funk by telling her of her semi-tragic and fully doomed love story of years gone by. Hurricanes, estrangement, bad food, illicit, even forbidden, wine, these jam-packed Nights you won't soon forget. Probably. Anyway, this one's got more than just breakfast in bed, if you know what we're saying.

Head to the lighthouse and get ready to give us a hand with the storm shutters, but forgive us if you end up thinking that strong winds aren't the only thing that blows around here, because it's time to shake off your daze and enter the pulsing, dryer-sheet scented night...Nights of Rodanthe, that is.

Also! Bonus grumpiness and us coming as close as we ever will do to handling an often-requested book that we wouldn't check out with your library card. Also also! J. references Clsn's jam; Clsn possibly nearly completes the Plot in 60 Seconds challenge; food saftey and cooler packing is discussed at longer length than you'd expect.

*Note: Not guaranteed.** **Note: Not even particularly likely.

Feel a glory in so rolling on the human heart a stone entitled The Czar of Fear* as IDEOTVPod lives out a long-term dream and finally hops on the running board with the Man of Bronze himself, Doc Savage, as he and his Good Friends in Adventure go forth to right the wrongs of ... predatory capitalism. (Seriously.) (Evidently not every win ol' Doc racked up was a win of the perduring variety.)

When an industrial town upstate goes on strike to protest slashed wages by factory owners, and strikebreakers are driven mad by unseen means, when the radio programming you know, love, and depend upon, is broken in on by malevolent bells, when your city is overrun by masked men doling out intimidation and murder to the tolling of those bells, only one man, with five helpers, can save the day, widely escaping significant peril and narrowly escaping marriage, and that man, of course, was the dry run for The Rock (although he is described as looking more like John Cena, come to think of it), and that man is Doc Savage. Millionaire, surgeon, inventor, firecracker enthusiast, and not exactly a philanthropist, but somebody willing to make you a payday loan at a reasonable rate, Doc is a dude with a lot going on, and also this book has a lot going on. As Clsn stumbles through a story he can't really reconstruct, and as our own "Doc" Friedman lays out the principles undergirding that story, it may seem like "a lot" has become "jeez, too much", but if you're ready to soak in a tale where "'Judborn Tugg!' donged the Green Bell." isn't even one of the top ten sentences, then perhaps you're ready to infiltrate the Green Bells and confront the Green Bell, a sinister force who never needs to be asked to clap.

SPECIAL THANKS to Richard Fakelastname, who sent us a squall of these for our, and, we hope, your pleasure!

*No, it's not about Lee Ving.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, a heartwarming tale of fleet-footed deliverers of Native American corn, it's The Maize Runne—I'm being told that that's incorrect, and what we actually read was derivative semi-hit The Maze Runner, which doesn't really have anything to do with Thanksgiving. But we are thankful we only had to read it once. Also, it is pretty corny. And filled with turkeys.

Stuffed to the brim with moments like "what Thomas felt was an inevitable barf," and "despite the terrible crappyness of it all, Chuck smiled," this one's a veritable cornucopia of...uh...well, there's a lot of maze running, anyway. Well, a fair amount. More maze running than most books, that's for sure.

You'll need your running shoes, and your best underpants for a day of fast moving, and your graph paper (for mapping), so if you dare, and if you're swift enough, head for the Griever Hole and see if you can keep up with ... The Maze Runner.

NOTE: From now moving forward, we will be using bespoke little pieces of music of our own creation for our segment breaks instead of popular (and unpopular) tunes from other artists. There are many reasons for this, but most of them revolve around copyright law, and a general feeling of skeeziness about using other peoples' work without explicit permission to do so. Don't worry, though, we'll still provide a "suggested soundtrack" for you to listen to while you do absolutely anything but read this book.

Recommendations:

• Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter
• Marissa Brostoff, "Missing Time"

Suggested Music:

• "Wicked" by Korn
• "Run Like Hell" by Pink Floyd
• "Maybe I'm Amazed" by Paul McCartney & Wings

John Steakley's Vampire$ stakes out territory we have seen before, but nobody would dare bite this book's remarkable style. Pitting vampires against the Catholic church might have been done before, but never with belt buckles quite this big, nor blues guitar quite so searing!

We're heading to Texas, to clean out vampire nests one hometown at a time, and if we have to dress like dang-ol' crusaders to do it, then that's what we're by gxd gonna do. Polish up your skull ring(s) and get ready for some segments we haven't done in a WHILE, because it's time to confront the ancient evil most prevalent in smalltown Texas: guys in leather pants.

NOTE: we did miss a couple things, so before you run out to your local bookstore to camp out in front of its doors to demand your own copy of Vampire$, you should know that this paperback does feature: a deeply misogynistic "joke" about a sex worker; the phrase "outgunned and terrified police" working in a predominantly black neighborhood; and the following passage: "What women needed. What women craved. What they had to have. Release. Abandon. Wantonness. Penetration."

Not balancing this out, but still worth mentioning: there is an explicit moment where a character advocates no-platforming the vampire menace, which is pretty funny; there's also one of the first documentations of trolling we've ever seen, involving one character yelling at another "Hey! Tell me about your dick.". Definitely didn't see that one coming. Anyway, it's all a rich tapestry.

 

 

Recommendations:

• Hereditary movie
• Mandy movie

Music:

• "Fearless Vampire Killers" by Bad Brains
• "Possum Kingdom" by Toadies
• "Love Bites" by Def Leppard

It had to happen eventually: The world turns, the back issues pile up, and the opinions, the opinions just have to find release, and no place has more opinions per page than the oeuvre of Mr. Chuck Klosterman, as evidenced by the fairly representative collection hilariously named after a Led Zeppelin album, IV.

From the magazine rack to the record store, this Chuck Tract drops truth bombs you probably aren't ready to handle, so it's a good thing we're here with you to dilute the intensity of a middle-aged white guy strenuously telling you "That thing you already like? it's good, and you're good for liking it already." So dig out your Ratt tapes, dust off your remote, and get ready for a long, long episode discussing the living embodiment of the Onion article about the guy at the bar who's a little too into Stevie Ray Vaughn. If you're the kind of person who says "pop culture takes? HELL YEAH HOOK THAT SHIT TO MY VEINS", then this IV might just be for you.

NOTE: F Plus Live 7 (!) approacheth! Get you there!

NOTE TWO: We mention a couple of Scharpling & Wurster bits that probably encapsulate Klosty better than he does. Here are a few: Rock, Rot, & Rule (on absurd Record Store Dudepinions) (for which also see: The Music Scholar); Pudge (on endless fearful, trembling hedging, available maybe only on the Box Set); and Terrence from Billyburg (on an early sort of irony damage and inability to develop new interests after the age of majority, available here at May 27, 2013).

EDITOR'S NOTE [JWF]: While editing this show, I googled the lyrics to The Smiths' "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and discovered that neither "perhaps" NOR "maybe" are used in the song -- the actual is "but that joke isn't funny anymore." So, now that I've written this, I can safely assume that if you write in to correct us about this tiny piece of music trivia, you are not reading the show notes and that you are also probably Chuck Klosterman.

Recommendations:

• Read Like the Wind email list, by Molly Young
• "Merostomata" by Merostomata

Music:

• "You Talk Too Much" by Run-D.M.C.
• "Get in the Ring" by Guns N' Roses
• "There's Nothing Wrong with Hating Rock Critics" by of Montreal