Peter Bogdanovich will adapt Kurt Andersen’s novel, Turn of the Century, for the big screen.

Sunny news on a rainy day. I’m a big fan of the book, which was both amazingly current — no surprise, really, given Andersen’s history as one of the co-founders of Spy — and almost spooky in its prescience. I’m curious to see how Bogdanovich will be able to bring  all its parallel and intersecting worlds together in one movie. It’s going to be a difficult task welding all those various plotlines to the same narrative without sacrificing any of the kinecticism and energy that made the book so alive despite its heft. I’d almost rather this was in the hands of someone like Guy Ritchie, who can do backstory in fractions of a second. But then again, Bogdanovich coming down from the mountain to direct is probably what’s going to make sure this thing will actually get into theaters.

Either way, I’m happy.

Boise Weekly, the first place that ever gave me a regular paycheck to write, reviews Blood Oath.

Blood Oath is rife with intrigue, suspense and even a bit of horror. Cade and Barrows must deal with secret government organizations that even the CIA and FBI are unaware of, a traitor inside the White House and a scientist who has found the secret to eternal youth and who is creating the ultimate human fighting weapon. It all culminates in a taut political, action-packed page-turner.

Kind of a nice feeling.

I’ve been an insomniac since I was born; one of the stories my mother tells is how I stayed awake for almost three days after she brought me home from the hospital. So perhaps I’m sympathetic to the idea of the end of civilization caused by sleeplessness.

That’s the scenario envisioned by Charlie Huston in his new novel Sleepless. A new prion has emerged that’s killing 10 percent of the population, but not quickly. First, they lose the ability to sleep, and the rest of the world unravels pretty quickly. Twenty-four hour traffic jams clog La Cienega. The economy finally stops staggering under its crushing load of debt and collapses. Neighborhoods turn into armed camps as government shatters. The fire department stops coming. The police put concrete barriers and razor wire around their stations. Somehow, the Oscars manage to survive.

I’ve been a fan of Huston for a while, but this is an amazing departure. It’s as if, after cruising along at 30,000 feet, the pilot of your plane comes on the intercom and says, “Folks, this has been nice, but I think we’re going to take this up a notch.” And then cranks the stick back and turns your business trip to Houston into a shot into moon orbit.

The Sleepless, as they’re called, have changed all of everyday life, but everyone pretends not to notice. They can function for months, in incredible pain, but only losing their minds and their abilities at the very end. They shamble about all day and night, looking for any distraction. There are inevitable zombie comparisons. But there’s nothing terrifying about the Sleepless. They’re sad and desperate. Dreamer, the only drug capable of delivering sleep to them, doesn’t cure them. It only makes their final days a little more peaceful. And of course, there’s nowhere near enough to go around.

What’s most disturbing about Huston’s apocalypse (I’m going to go ahead and coin the term “sleepocalypse” here, although I’m slightly ashamed of myself for doing so) is how much of it is simply taken from the 24-hour news cycle. The book takes place in 2010. Right now. And aside from a few details, it’s all happening. Political deadlock. Incoherent rage. Escape into the wildly elaborate manufactured worlds of gaming and mass media.

Think I’m exaggerating? Well, there are people protesting about a giant corporation’s treatment of a multi-millionaire talk-show host while the idea of tax-funded health care somehow drives people to consider armed uprisings against the government. So yeah, maybe it’s not as close as I think, but it’s not that far, either.

What happens next is the answer to the question Jim Harrison posed, “when distraction becomes the center of our lives, what’s left?”

The people who have to find out are Park, a rookie LAPD officer tasked with finding the illegal sale of Dreamer, and Jasper, a former soldier and paid killer who’s turned his PTSD into something like art. Their paths intertwine through the broken landscape of Los Angeles, into nightclubs, gold farms, bomb craters and the virtual realms of a massive online game called Chasm Tide.

All of this imagination and action is nothing new for Huston (talented bastard). But what made this novel different for me was the development of the characters. Park’s wife has become one of the Sleepless, and he fears their infant daughter may be infected, too. Park is an anachronism — he lives by a strict moral code; the last Stoic. No one on the force wants to work with him because they see that the world is going down in flames. Park sees it too, but won’t bend. He believes he can save his family by saving the world, and it’s fascinating to watch someone so pure move through so much corruption.

Jasper, the aging mercenary, lives by his own code as well. He’s drawn into Park’s orbit when he’s hired to find a hard drive that has become a piece of evidence in Park’s investigation, and from the moment they begin circling one another, you know Park would lose against this man. Jasper has refined his world into a series of highly aesthetic, highly lethal mechanisms, a wholly manufactured collage of house, dress, art, and transport that is not so much a shield as a weapon. He’s both chilling and charming, and despite his casual disposal of human life, it’s easy to root for him. He’s not the sentimental cliche of a killer with a soft spot. He’s more complex, and sometimes he discovers his motives barely a step ahead of the reader.

The end of the world is a favorite theme for too many people today. (Latest example: Book of Eli, $32.7 million opening weekend. And in another parallel with Sleepless, the number one movie, again, was Avatar, a retreat into a virtual world that resembles a video game.) It seems like we literally cannot imagine how the world will survive. So we dream of how it will end, over and over again. But Huston manages to sidestep the familiar path to Armageddon, and instead finds the pieces of the world worth saving.

Sleepless is about how we live our dreams when we can’t close our eyes anymore. It’s amazing. You should read it.

USA Today’s Carol Memmott was kind enough to do a quick preview of Blood Oath in the paper today. You can read it online here, if you can’t bring yourself to haul your carcass to a newspaper box and plunk down 50 cents.

Also, Diana McCabe, who had to put up with me when we both worked together at the Orange County Register, has a short post about the book on her blog, Paranormal Romance. No spoilers. It’s way too early for that.

Grant Morrison, on why he doesn’t envy the president. Any president.

I tend to agree.

Geoff Boucher over at Hero Complex was kind enough to give Blood Oath some virtual ink today. You can get a look at the cover and learn some of the secret details hidden inside the book before it goes on sale May 18, 2010.

Ira Stoll, former VP of the failed New York Sun, is apparently offering a new business model for journalism. That’s right, for just a couple hundred thousand dollars, you can buy your own reporter:

You will “support a reporter to cover the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Congress, White House, or other beat designated by the sponsor in consultation with the editor.” Hoo boy. Though! For just $75K a year, you get to call and email Ira Stoll anytime you want, night or day.

Leaving aside the irony of something called the “Future of Capitalism” that requires donation from sponsors — because if you can miss that, then there’s just no way to make it obvious enough — I think Stoll is drastically overcharging. I worked as a reporter. Trust me, we can be had for much, much less. Seriously, like, a box of Krispy Kremes. Throw in coffee and you decide what goes on the front page.

After the long dry spell of summer, I’ve had a bunch of media dumped in my lap this fall. Suddenly I’ve got more to read and watch than my eyes can handle.

On the shelf right now:

• Blood’s A Rover, James Ellroy — Ellroy’s final chapter in the Underworld USA trilogy. Encyclopedic, profane, eloquent and remarkable. A landscape dominated by conspiracies. I was surprised how fast I was drawn back into the life of Wayne Tedrow despite the years since the previous book, The Cold Six Thousand.
• The Reapers, John Connolly — Technically part of Connolly’s Charlie Parker series, but Parker is basically only a walk-on in this story about his occasional sidekicks Louis and Angel, a gay couple who are also a hitman and a thief. We learn a lot more about Louis’ history, and we see a little of the shadowy government agency that first recruited and trained him into his life as an assassin. I was ridiculously pleased to realize I had missed this in my first blitz through Connolly’s novels, and would get another glimpse of Parker before Connolly gets back to the series again.
• Rough Country, John Sandford — The return of Sandford’s other Minneapolis cop, Virgil Flowers. In many ways, Flowers is the reverse image of Lucas Davenport, the star of Sandford’s Prey series. He’s essentially lighthearted, laid-back and easy-going. Compared to the darkness that drives Lucas, spending time inside Flowers’ head must be like a vacation for Sandford. Haven’t started this yet — the aforementioned media dump — but I’m really looking forward to it.
• Occult America, Mitch Horowitz — I read about this on Boing Boing, and for once, I heard about an event in L.A. before it happened. I listened to Horowitz speak at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. He was funny, interesting and extremely knowledgeable about the way the occult — the “hidden truths,” whether from astrology, alchemy or spiritualism — have become a mainstream part of American life. His book is even better, filled with windowpane prose that communicates his deep research in a lively, intelligent manner. He knows stuff even I’ve never heard of, and I’ve been digging in this same graveyard for a long time. He’s also a genuinely nice guy, who took time after the lecture to sign books and chat.

Of course, now that’s it’s fall, I’m also watching a lot of TV. Too much, probably. On the TiVo:

• “How I Met Your Mother” — I’m not exactly sure why I’m still watching this. Ted, the ostensible protagonist, has become kind of a douche, and the writers seem to want to spend as little time with him as possible. Lily and Marshall have apparently undergone some kind of 2-for-1 lobotomy. And Barney, the ultimate single man, is now hooked up with Robin. But occasionally, there are still moments of absurdity that make the show worth it. Like on this Monday’s episode, when Ted and Marshall were power-chugging Tantrum, an overcaffeinated beverage that can apparently cause color-blindness and fainting spells.
• “House” — They’re winnowing down the cast, which is fine by me. More time to watch Hugh Laurie work.
• “Venture Bros.” — See here.
• “The Simpsons” — More like an OCD ritual than an actual choice in my life, but this season has already had some high points.
• “Californication” — In Seasons 1 & 2, Hank had actual moral choices to make, complicated by the fact that he’s kind of a selfish horndog. Now, however, the show is veering into porn-like fantasy about a writer irresistable that three beautiful women almost physically assault him for sex. Not that I’m complaining.
• “30 Rock” — Still hilarious. Don’t care what anyone else thinks.
• “Cougar Town” — I’ll watch almost anything Bill Lawrence does, and the fact that I put this on the Season Pass manager proves it. Despite the title, it’s a very funny show. Courtney Cox has killer timing. She knows how a sitcom works, and she’s perfectly at home. Something I’ve noticed — her character, Jules, is basically J.D. from “Scrubs” in a different gender. But where J.D. was fey and often annoying, Cox makes her manic quest for whatever ball the episode has her chase believable. It’s not anything deep, there’s very little redeeming social value. But it’s funny. And of course, the supporting cast is excellent, which is pretty much what you expect from Lawrence’s shows.
• “Community” — Funny and slightly strange show about a lawyer who doesn’t actually have a college degree, so he’s forced to go back to a community college. What’s interesting about this is how it’s gone straight past the first, awkward stage of a sitcom where the show sticks to the premise like grim death, moving into the more interesting adolescence where they just follow the characters and let them do stuff. Oh, and hey — Chevy Chase is funny again. Really.

On the iPod: In between marathon repeats of “Happy and You Know It” and “Hey Julie” — my daughter’s two favorite songs — I’ve managed to listen to some of the artists my friends have suggested recently.

• Felice Brothers, “Frankie’s Gun,” “Wonderful Life” (An S. Duda recommendation)
• Elvis Perkins in Dearland, especially “Hey” and “Doomsday”
• Camera Obscura, “French Navy,” “Sweetest Thing”
• Wilco, Wilco (The Album) (I’m really late to this bandwagon, but now I get it, OK?)
• Coldplay, “Viva La Vida” (the best U2 song not performed by U2 in years)
• Andrew Bird
• White Rabbits
• Phoenix
• Bon Iver

Look at all that. I need to get outdoors more often. Or something.

I did a review of a new kids’ book about my great-uncle, Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, for my friend Ol’ Pedro at the OC Register.

Television is so much a part of our lives, kids probably think of it as something that comes with the house, like water from the kitchen sink. It’s almost like a natural resource, rather than something that was invented.

So Kathleen Krull’s got her work cut out for her in her book, “The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth.” She’s got to explain a world without TV to an audience that’s grown up with 500-channel, flat-panel 40-inch HDTVs and TiVo. I don’t know how I’m going to do the same thing with my 17-month-old daughter, and we’ve got the advantage of being related to the inventor.

You can read the whole thing here.

Thomas Pynchon — to whom I am very, very distantly related by marriage, which is one of the many fantastic benefits I owe to my endlessly wonderful wife — lived in Los Angeles while he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mark Horowitz of Wired argues that he’s the city’s greatest writer. That’s a little unfair, I think — you plunk Pynchon down in any city, he’s going to be the greatest writer there, alive or dead.

But more importantly, Horowitz also provides this detailed map of the L.A. locations used by Pynchon in his work, including the latest novel, Inherent Vice, which drops on the general public next week. (By the way, Skylight Books is staying open until midnight to release the book on Aug. 4. I cannot tell you how great it is that someone views a Pynchon novel with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for Harry Potter or a new Batman film.)

Anyone who visits all of the places listed on the map will receive a coupon for a free slice from the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple in Vineland, delivered by the Tristero postal service.

(Found via LA Observed.)

As I said earlier, I’m not at Comic-Con this year, which is why I’m sort of glad to see this report from Topless Robot: “everything kinda underwhelming.”

Unless, of course, you are a Twilight fan. In which case, you’d probably pass out from giddy delight. A lot of the old-school nerds are upset that fans of Edward and Bella are infringing on their turf. (See Topless Robot, above.) But there’s no question, really, what the big draw is this year, and what’s actually bringing the energy and enthusiasm to the con. (Not to mention actual girls, who have always been a minority at any gathering of comics geeks.)

Which leads me to the question: why has it taken until now for anyone to do a Twilight comic? And it’s manga-style, too. Yet another exhibit in how the comics industry is ignoring pretty much every demo except the aging fanboy.

And speaking of aging fanboys… (Yeah, nice transition there. Give me a break, I have real writing to do.) You can keep up with all the other nerd alerts coming out of SDCC by following my friends at Zap2It.com, or Dan at HitFix.com, Borys and James at the Hollywood Reporter, and Peter Larsen, AKA Old Pedro. It’s actually Peter’s first time at Comic-Con, so he’s losing his con virginity — intriguingly, by hanging out with thousands of adults who have never had sex. So if any of my fellow nerds see an 11-foot tall guy looking around like he’s lost, tug on his pantleg and help a brother out.

Yes, yes, I know: it’s Comic-Con. And once again, I’m not going. As it turns out, having a toddler cuts down on the time available to invest in nerd obsessions. Who knew? I am a little sad about that — I’ve been to Comic-Con almost every year I’ve lived in California — but not too much. I usually spend all my time among the vendors, buying far too much stuff. The last time I went, I ran out of vendors before I ran out of money, which was a first. The show — and comics geekdom in general — finally has the attention of the greater world, if not exactly the respect. That’s a good thing. But it does cut down on the number of surly, unwashed comics shop owners with stacks of dusty boxes, in favor of giant displays featuring Scarlett Johansson in a skintight leather suit as the Black Widow…

You know what? That’s all just fine.

But since I’m not at SDCC, I offer up a couple other facets of the geek world for your viewing pleasure today.

First, an interview at the Onion AV Club with Grant Morrison, the mad genius behind Invisibles, We3, Final Crisis, Seaguy, Marvel Boy, and a crapload of other comics. I saw Morrison speak at Meltdown Comics last month, and even when he’s just knocking ideas around, he usually comes up with an entirely new way of looking at things.

Next, on the other side of the continent from Comic-Con, an exhibit of stitch-related crafts dedicated to Star Wars. This is for my wife, who won’t recognize many of the characters, but will love to examine the knitting. You’re welcome, sweetie.

Finally, Get Your War On, the scathing comic strip, does battle with Jamba Juice, purveyor of urban hipster juice treats.

My science fiction twin, Kyle Smith, takes down Harry Potter in the pages of the New York Post. Smith says Potter is the perfect hero for Gen Y — dull, lazy, and entitled.

Harry, like many of his generation, is the Cosseted One from an early age. He’s told that he’s special, that he’s got awesome gifts, that those who don’t understand this are blind to the plain facts. Deploying his powers involves no more character or soul-searching than following a recipe.

Next week, he tells us what death threats written on Hogwarts stationery look like.

John Keel, longtime investigator of the paranormal and author of The Mothman Prophecies and many other books, has died.

In his decades-spanning career, Keel chronicled much of the weirdness that didn’t make the headlines. People might know names like “Bigfoot” and “Nessie,” or look to the skies for flying saucers, but Keel searched for the unknown parts of the unknown. He went to spots where our reality gets thin, and probed the cracks.

As far as his theories went, Keel seemed convinced that there weren’t actually wild ape-men in the forest, or aliens visiting the earth like a tourist spot. He studied history and myth, and found that the names have changed, but the phenomena have been with humans as long as we’ve been telling stories and writing stuff down. We’ve called them fairies, demons, angels and monsters, but they have always been there, out at the edge of the light.

Keel himself posited that there were beings on this planet, much older than us, who enjoyed toying with us. Occasionally, they show up, whether as a hairy monster or a silver-suited spaceman, just to play havoc with our lives.

He formed this theory after the events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which ended in the Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people. From his writing after that, he seemed fairly convinced that whatever these things were, they didn’t have our best interests at heart.

People can differ about the reality of the paranormal. I go back and forth on it myself, all the time. But Keel produced volumes of fascinating, challenging work that forever altered the way I look at the world. My writing would be a lot emptier and duller if I hadn’t been exposed to Keel at an early age, and if I didn’t go back to him often, looking for the strangest parts of the strange.

He introduced me to some amazing concepts. Now I get to play with them full-time, and I’m in his debt.

Michael Jackson isn’t the only one who died recently. I used to think journalism, the profession that paid for my beer and Big Macs for years, could be saved. This morning, I’m willing to call time of death.

This is why:

Washington Post sells access, $25,000+

According to Politico, here’s what happened:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

…The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it’s a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

The Post’s editor harrumphed and said he was shocked to discover the offer, and promised that no one from the newsroom would participate. He sounded exactly like the government and corporate drones I used to quote when they got caught.

If no one had written a story, I have no doubt the event would have proceeded as planned. In some ways, it’s the ultimate result of focus groups, marketing campaigns and “serving the demographic.” This, at least, removes all the bullshit. The Post, with this little flyer, seems to be saying, “Just tell us what you want us to write, and for the following prices, you can have it.” It’s like the value menu at McDonalds.

I’m not the dewy-eyed idealist I was when I started writing for money, but I still believe reporters have one basic duty: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And — Jesus Christ, I shouldn’t even have to type this — that does not mean joining the comfortable for cocktails and a fee at the end of the night.

There are other professionals who do that. They’re usually better-looking than journalists, and these days, probably more respected.

(Found via Matt Taibbi’s blog.)

Just heard from my editor this morning: Putnam has sold rights to Blood Oath to Heyne, which means the book will be published in Germany as well. That’s right, Burns verkaufen der Kraftwerk, baby.

Suddenly I’m sweating the grammar of the few German phrases I worked into the book. At the time, I was pretty confident in my high-school Deutsch, but now I’m reminded that Ich bin auslander and Ich spreche nicht gut Deutsch.

Yeah, I suspect the translator is going to earn her money on this one.

My friend Rick has some news that would ordinarily be welcomed by geeks everywhere:

The good news is, the executive producers of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” are considering making a movie that would relaunch the franchise.

Except for one thing:

The catch: Whedon, who created the character for a 1992 movie and re-imagined it for what would become one of the more fanatically loved TV series of the past couple of decades, isn’t involved at all, at least not yet. The HR says the Kuzuis and Vertigo principals Roy Lee and Doug Davison are talking with writers and “do not rule out” Whedon’s involvement, but they’ve not yet “reached out” to him.

Not like anyone needs me to tell them, but this is a colossally bad idea. Without the TV show, the “Buffy” movie would be a quaint, occasional feature on late-night TV. The only reason a franchise exists is because of what Whedon — who’s always been diplomatic, but clear about his disappointment in the movie — managed to do with the TV series. The quickest way possible to kill any goodwill among fans for all time would be to try doing it without Whedon.

Whedon, of course, will be just fine either way. He’s demonstrated his talent and ability over and over since the first Buffy movie. He could watch the whole debacle from the deck of his house made of bricks of hundred-dollar bills, drinking his martini made of finely blended hundred-dollar bills.

But the movie would be terrible, and an ugly, shambling mockery of the original idea. And that would be a pretty sorry stake in the heart of a show that reinvented the horror genre, and unleashed armies of ass-kicking blondes on the world.

Uh-oh. This search query brought someone to my web site a couple days ago:

“illuminati chris farnsworth”

This either means I’m the target of a conspiracy or involved in creating one. Maybe both.

Either way, it’s better than the people who arrive here looking for weird porn.

Every couple of months, I hear how “vampires are so over,” from various folks. Every vampire movie or TV show is supposed to be the last one, and audiences won’t tolerate another one. And then something like Twilight comes around and makes roughly a kajillion dollars.

It should be obvious, but vampires don’t stay dead. Sure, a bad story or weak production will eventually kill any movie or TV series, but there is a huge, dedicated fan base who will at least check out a new vampire concept.

Case in point: the CW has just picked up “The Vampire Diaries,” a new series about a teenage girl and the two brothers competing for her affections — both of whom happen to be vampires.

And while I was unforgivably away from the Internet all weekend, Fox also renewed “Dollhouse,” the TV show I recapped for HitFix, created by Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer.” This despite the anemic ratings and sometimes harsh reviews. (Um, yeah, that might have included me.)

Which goes to show: you do not bet against vampires, or their assorted friends and well-wishers.

(Of course, I may be biased.)

UPDATE: And more proof of the theory: Former “Moonlight” star Alex O’Loughlin’s new series has been picked up for fall as well.

Aside from work-related stuff — Legacy of Ashes, The Dark Side, and other lighthearted fare — I’ve been spending a lot of time at Alibris.com lately, searching out long-lost books I used to own. This was way before Amazon, when my local bookstore was the paperback section at the Payless (Kids, ask your parents). I don’t have these books anymore because my mom moved out of the house where I grew up while I was in college. She asked me — repeatedly — if I wanted to save any of the stacks of paperbacks and hardbacks I put in the pile for Goodwill. I said no, of course not. I was moving into the future, clearing out the dead weight of the past.

Yeah, I was kind of a moron that way.

So now I’m re-discovering some of the stories that were imprinted into my brain years ago.

Past Times by Poul Anderson. I got this as a birthday or Christmas gift when I was 12 or 13. It didn’t have anyone in a cape and mask on the cover, which was probably a slight prod in a more grown-up direction from whoever got it for me. Still, as you can see, there’s a guy with a rifle next to a dinosaur, so I still enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a collection of various time-travel stories from Anderson, who’s taken the concept further than any other single sci-fi author. The dialogue doesn’t always hold up — Anderson has to lay down a lot of exposition — and, just like everyone else, Anderson didn’t see the collapse of the Soviet Union coming. But the good parts still shine. He tosses out concepts and rigs up special laws of physics to make them work. Each one of these stories could be a movie in itself.

The Revenge of the Incredible Dr. Rancid and his Youthful Assistant, Jeffrey by Ellen Conford. This was in the library of my junior high, and for months, I was the only signature on the check-out card (Again, kids, ask your parents). It’s the story of a nerdy, skinny, short kid bullied and insulted by his classmates. He escapes into a notebook where he writes the adventures of his far more heroic alter-ego, who’s the assistant to a mad scientist. What surprised me was how much sympathy I had for the kid before he inevitably stands up to the bully at the end. Back then, I had the same contempt for Jeffrey that he has for himself — so much so that I didn’t even notice it at the time. When I first read this, I thought I identified with Jeffrey. Now I realize just how much.

Baal by Robert McCammon. Technically I’m not reading this yet, because it hasn’t arrived. But I still remember how just the excerpt on the back of the book in the store scared the hell out of me when I was 11 or 12. Now I’m finally going to see if it was really that terrifying.

And not from Alibris, but still taking up some shelf-space:

Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres. Ayres, the LA correspondent for the Times of London, chronicles his adventures as a very pale man in the land of eternal sunshine, determined to become a sleek, California demigod, even if he has to leverage his way into debt and disaster to make it happen.

Comics:

I’ve bought more Marvel comics in the last few months than I have in the past three or four years. I more or less gave up on Marvel after Avengers: Disassembled, and the abysmal Civil War — a clone of Thor? Really? — only confirmed that choice.

Then just the other week, I realized everything in my regular buy pile was Marvel. The sneaky bastards had sucked me back in. Look at the stuff Marvel is putting out right now.

Agents of ATLAS, Ed Brubaker’s Captain America and Incognito, Dark Avengers, Nova, The Age of the Sentry, Astonishing X-Men, Thunderbolts, and limited series like Terror Inc., about a decomposing zombie who fights terrorists. I’m not made of stone, people.

If you’re one of those wondering how we ended up in the current banking crisis, you should take a look at my friend Bill Heisel’s stories on mortgage provider IndyMac. Which, incidentally, was the bank that financed my first house. Now I’m even more glad we sold and paid off our loan before everything went pear-shaped. Bill outlines how federal regulators were asleep on the job, and how it ended up costing regular people millions of dollars.

This might serve as a reminder to those free-marketeers who bitch endlessly about government intervention. Unsurprisingly, some of those folks are the same ones spending billions in bailout cash now.

OK, so, say you’re a billionaire newspaper owner. You’ve tried firing people, you’ve tried hiring executives who barely know how to read a newspaper, let alone run one. And yet, you’re still losing money and readers every day.

The big question is, how do you get those readers back?

This should be obvious, but clearly billionaire newspaper owners are not too great at grasping the obvious. So I’ll use small words: you give people something they want to read.

I’m not talking about the soft-serve crap that comes out of focus groups, who invariably give the same responses every time (“Why can’t there be more good news in the paper?” “I would like more coupons.” “I can’t find Marmaduke.” etc.).

The business of a newspaper is to give people what they don’t know they want to read until they read it. This is why — stay with me here — it’s called news. If it were stuff people already knew — the stuff they talk about in focus groups — then it wouldn’t be news to them.

I admit, that might seem like flying without radar in the dark. But fortunately, there are a few things people always want to know.

And the big question is: am I safe?

Crime coverage is important, and it doesn’t get enough credit. There are some who look down on it as playing to the reader’s baser instincts. But think of it, instead, as a diagnosis of the health of the city. If a good number of people are getting shot in the head every day, then the patient isn’t doing well. The newspaper is the only outlet that can put the carnage in some kind of perspective. Otherwise, it seems like just more random brutality and blood.

The LAT’s Homicide Blog is probably the best addition to the paper in the last few years. (And of course, it was almost eliminated.) We’ve got neighborhoods in LA that are practically war zones. We’ve had 111 homicides in LA so far this year. We’ve got children being gunned down in their homes and on the streets.

And here’s what the LAT is currently pimping on its homepage: NASA satellite crashes near Antarctica.

You want to get readers back? Put this on the front page every day. Give one victim a face and a name, every day. Make people care as much about the real deaths in their city as the ones on Law & Order and CSI. Right now, we accept the body count as part of living here, as long as it never interrupts the rest of our lives. And most of the time, the newspaper never bothers us with the details.

That’s worse than sad. That’s almost criminal.

The New York Times has an online feature about how to save newspapers, which are dying, in case you didn’t know. (You probably didn’t know, because most of the angst over the loss of newspapers has been in newspapers, and people aren’t reading newspapers anymore… you see where this is going?)

Here in LA, we have an object lesson in how to destroy a newspaper going on right in front of us, so any advice would be helpful.

The NYT includes opinions from the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism (guy who helped train the current crop of journalists no one is reading), the former editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (newspaper facing bankruptcy), and Steven Brill (founder of Brill’s Content, a failed magazine about media).

Thank you, New York. You’ve been great. Moving on…

Keep listening to the same doctors if you want, but the patient is going to be a corpse soon if nothing changes. When I was an ink-stained wretch, the head honchos at the Orange County Register — which was pulling down 20 percent profit margins at the time — spent good money on a series of consultants to help us redesign the newspaper and keep it relevant for the 21st Century. Millions of dollars later, the Register has lost readers and advertisers, and has dropped from California’s third largest newspaper to fifth. The LA Times hemorrhages money as it tries to pay off owner Sam Zell’s massive debts, lurching from one publisher to the next, promising to increase local coverage while eliminating the local section of the paper, all under the direction of some guys who used to work in radio.

At this point, I think it’s my duty to step in. I may not be a consultant, and I have never worked for Clear Channel, but what the hell. How much worse can I possibly do?

So here’s the first step toward saving newspapers. Ready? You might want to write this down, Sam.

1. Stop fucking firing people.

Yeah, I know, there’s a recession on, and overhead, and circ numbers are in the toilet, and the banks…

Don’t care. Quit whining. Stop firing people.

You’re killing your franchise.

God, all you executives talking about reinventing newspapers and changing the paradigm and leveraging synergy and boldly going into the future… then you hit a rough patch, and you start tossing your engines as if they were ballast.

For years, newspapers have had a built-in cushion of profit. Consolidation and chain ownership left most of the major cities, and almost all of the small ones, as one-newspaper towns. Didn’t like it? Well, you were screwed. There was no place else to take your advertising dollar or your eyeball time in the morning.

Now, all those guys who worshiped the free market for years are facing competition for the first time, and they’ve decided — after careful study, and several meetings — they don’t like it.

So they fire the people who actually make the product worth buying: the people who build it, every day.

Outsource your classified department to India, and a year later, you’re scratching your head and wondering why everyone would rather use a low-grade interface like Craigslist than talk to “Bob” in Bangalore to pimp their garage sales.

Fire your award-winning reporters (because, as Sam Zell said, nobody’s ever been able to figure out how to profit from a Pulitzer) and a year later, you’re wondering why your circulation numbers are down and your street boxes are full.

Fire your pressmen and you’re left wondering why the paper looks like crap, with blurry photos and text.

Fire your ad people… By now even a newspaper exec should be able to pick up on the pattern.

Employees are not overhead. (Well, most of them.) You want to save your own asses? Start by treating the people who create your profits as if they matter. Because they do.

This is the first, most important step. More to come. But you cannot keep pretending there is no correlation between the staff cuts and quality of your product. If you do, nothing else will matter. No redesign will help, no consultant will save you.

One more time: stop firing people.

Or you’re screwed. Can’t put it any more plainly than that.

Coming up in part 2: OK, you’ve stopped the bleeding. Now, how to get your readers back.

Despite all the good news today, there are still a few sad notes. Prop 8 passes. Ted Stevens, convicted felon, re-elected. And Michael Crichton, dead of cancer at 66.

My whole life, Crichton has been the guy I’ve compared myself to when I really, really, want to feel like a loser. First article published in the New York Times at 12. Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, a lecturer in England a year out of college, then paid his way through Harvard Medical School by writing mystery novels. Where he graduated despite the fact he hated the whole thing.

So after that, he becomes a best-selling author, screenwriter and director, penning some of the most successful movies of all time, and creating one of the longest-running TV dramas.

Crichton received a lot of criticism for his wooden characters and his plot-driven narratives. But the guy had big ideas, and he had a talent for making them comprehensible to anyone. And most of the time, there was an essential core of humanity in his work, as he faced down all the massive changes caused by technology, and struggled to find a place for people in them.

My favorite book by Crichton — one of my favorite books, period — isn’t one of his novels, though. It’s a little-known (by his standards) collection of autobiographical pieces called Travels. In it, he relates, in deceptively simple language, what it’s like to live inside a brain that big.

Like any other smart guy, Crichton could be very loudly wrong at times — I couldn’t get through State of Fear because of its blogger-level anti-environmental politics. Likewise, that Japanese takeover of the U.S. didn’t happen, and gorillas have not yet learned to smash our heads flat with stone paddles.

But his most recent novel, Next, seems to be the most prescient, as it deals with the huge unknowns caused by our newfound ability to manipulate genes. Maybe nothing is as scary as what that could mean for us, but Crichton skipped the obvious monsters in favor of the smaller, and possibly more dangerous ones.

Now he’s gone, and there’s so much future left. The rest of us are going to have to pick up the slack, because we don’t have him to map out tomorrow anymore.