Much (though by no means all) of the stuff I talk about in this column comes to me free for review, often well in advance of the street release date. That means there are a lot of unfamiliar CDs and books and DVDs scattered around my workplace; it also means we get a lot of mail.

My kids thought that part was pretty exciting, when I first took the gig — until they got a load of the actual contents of most of those packages. “Hey, guys, who wants to watch this Rob Thomas DVD with Dad?” is kind of a non-starter, when weighing the options for a rainy Thursday afternoon.

Every now and then, though, a hit finds its way into our house. I got my advance copy of the lavish annual photo-book put out by the Ripley’s people (this year’s edition is subtitled Seeing Is Believing) literally months ago, and I’m only writing about it now — because it’s been the exclusive property of my seven-year old since its arrival.

In fact, he wrote his review before I did:

The main idea of this book is basically about gathering up ramdom facts and try to shock you with unbelivable sights. (note: seeing is beliveing) My favorite part is when a bus jumped over 15 motorcycles while on fire in reverseal to Knievel’s stunts!

He’s not wrong, you know. Oddity for oddity’s sake has been the Ripley brand for well on 90 years now. Though it’s been through many incarnations — a radio show, a newsreel feature, a museum franchise, and no fewer than three television series — “Believe It or Not!” began as a newspaper comic. Robert L. Ripley’s little daily panel was (and, in the hands of current artist John Graziano, remains) a masterpiece of concision, depicting strange and unusual people and events in a single striking image and a few well-chosen words.

Ripley himself was an unholy admixture of P.T. Barnum and that guy that does “News of the Weird,” with the draftsmanship of a Hal Foster thrown into the bargain. He remains a curiously underrated artist, even among comics historians — perhaps because of his extensive use of photo reference, perhaps because he increasingly handed off the art chores to assistants and ghosts as he grew more famous, or perhaps because he worked exclusively in his own singular form.

Whatever the reason, even the book series that still bears his name downplays that aspect of his life. You won’t find any of Ripley’s cartoons in Seeing Is Believing’s 240+ pages — which is why Sam and I had to draw our own — but what you will find are hundreds of color photos of crazy athletic feats, human oddities, outsider art, uncanny coincidences, cultural footnotes, and other credulity-straining phenomena, all rendered in that classic, breathless tone:

STRANGE FAMILY! The elephant shrews, or sengi, are a family of tiny, insect-eating African mammals that are more closely related to elephants than to shrews.

CAMEL GIRL! Ella Harper of Hendersonville, Tennessee, appeared in shows as “The Camel Girl” because her knees turned backward. Owing to this deformity, she struggled to walk solely on her feet and preferred to move around on all fours.

OLD SPRUCE! A spruce tree in Sweden has been sprouting new trees for nearly 10,000 years. Scientists think the tree took root in Dalmatia around the year 7542 B.C.

Selected items have a longer feature-style article attached, but for the most part the book reads just like this — like a Twitter feed from some slightly-more-wonderful world just alongside our own.

I’m not surprised that Sam glommed onto this book; the seven-year old version of myself would have devoured it, too. There’s something irresistible about this sort of miscellany. Leafing through such a book gives some of the same thrill of random discovery that you get when you’re surfing Wikipedia, looking for nothing in particular. When I was a kid I would pore over the Guinness Book of World Records, and I still get a little thrill every autumn when the new edition of the Old Farmer’s Almanac hits the shelves. John Hodgman lovingly skewered the format in The Areas of My Expertise, and captured the tone of facts and figures shading into anecdote, conveyed with the same earnestness. He ramps up the absurdity quotient — in Hodgman’s almanac, charts of the moon’s phases cross-reference not only the tides but the stages of werewolfism, and a survey of beard styles sits side-by-side with exposé of America’s secret hobo empire — but the essence of it, the free-floating oddities, shorn of context, adding up to singular worldview, comes straight from the models.

The Ripley books, like their spiritual descendants (and icons of my childhood) the People’s Almanac and the Book of Lists, are of dubious value as references; they’re thinly-sourced, and serve to perpetuate apocrypha and give new life to discredited old stories. The world of these books is full of mystery and wonder — just like the real world, of course, but in the crush of the mundane it’s easy to forget that. Seeing Is Believing’s emphasis on the weird and sensational is, in a way, a comfort; the message is that there is more to life than your workaday existence, that there is beauty and surprise all around you, if you look.

There’s a great repeated line in Warren Ellis’s recently-completed comics series Planetary, a line spoken by a “mystery archeologist,” an old-school globe-trotting adventurer who publishes his discoveries in a set of esoteric guidebooks — a figure not unlike the talented Mr. Ripley himself, now I come to think of it. “It’s a strange world,” he says; “Let’s keep it that way.” Exactly.

Seeing Is Believing is a wonderful stimulant for the mind, a snack tray for the imagination, a perfect vehicle for spending an evening around the kitchen table with paper and crayons in hand. Bottom line: if you have, are, or ever have been a child, this book should be somewhere within easy reach of your toilet.

Many is the pop star who harbors a dark secret beneath his wholesome façade. Michael Bublé’s is that he is an evil death robot from the future, sent back in time to annihilate mankind.

I’ll admit that I lack ironclad proof of Bublé’s status as a remorseless genocidal automaton, but there is circumstantial evidence aplenty encoded into his — its — latest release, Crazy Love. Careful listening can leave no doubt: This so-called “Bublé” is in fact a B.U.B.L.É. — a Binary-logic Undercover Bio-Life Eliminator, With The Accent On “Eliminator,” an emissary from some dystopian robocratic hell, and if he is not stopped he will bring humanity to extinction by ensuring that no one ever gets laid again.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this is the sheer arrogance of the plan. The mechanical entity they’re passing off as a big-band singer isn’t even a particularly convincing AI; performance clips and interviews suggest that the Bublé-creature would not pass the Turing test, let alone the more rigorous Voight-Kampff inventory. And this weakness extends also to the musical component of Bublé’s cover story. Without reading the filenames, compare and contrast these two performances of well-known pop songs. Can you tell which one is being performed by a computer?

It’s a trick question; actually, they both are. Hard to believe, I know. You’d never mistake the Eagles tune for the work of a human being — but the Stone Roses cover, which sounds so natural and organic by comparison, is actually “sung” by a tricked-out Windows laptop. Now, if a part-time programmer and DJ can cobble together an approximation of emotional connectedness and allow for proper phrasing (giveaway: Bublé consistently lags behind the beat, not out of any approximation of “swing” but because the algorithm cannot mesh the demands of the rhythm with the telltale over-pronunciation), and do it using only consumer software, the failure of the B.U.B.L.É. to conform to basic standards of believability bespeaks the dreadful contempt of our would-be robot conquerors for gullible humanity. To call these machine overlords “brazen” would be an understatement (and also painfully literal).

But what is the threat, you may ask? How is this extinction-level cockblock to be perpetrated? As is often the case, the mythic past predicts our sci-fi nightmare future. Consider: this Bublé entity — let’s face it, the ladies love him. And why shouldn’t they? (Aside from the whole destroy-the-human-race thing, I mean.) He has been designed and packaged specifically to win their affections. His essential ratio of swagger to vulnerability has been precisely calculated, and his raffishness quotient calibrated to tolerances of less than one-tenth of one picoRaff. In short, he’s as cute as a fucking button, all perfectly-engineered teeth and stubble, and he looks better in a suit than anyone this side of the Mad Men wrap party. He looks so good, in fact, that he makes it gaddam impossible for any flesh and blood bio-boy to measure up. As the legendary sculptor Pygmalion fell in love with the lifeless statue Galatea, as the youth Narcissus was transfixed by his own beauty, women invest the B.U.B.L.É. with an amorous importance, forsaking all others — an attraction that has no outlet.

Straight males, by contrast, hate the guy — perhaps sensing, even unconsciously, his inhuman origins and exterminationatist goals. Some few may misguidedly feign an interest in the Bublé-droid and its music, with the aim of getting into a girl’s pants — but such efforts are doomed to fail. The “romance” in which Bublé trafficks is puppy-dog stuff; it resists any attempt to advance beyond kissing and holding hands. It requires inhuman skill to take a swooner like “All Of Me” (download) and denude it of any hint of sex — but such is the Bublébot’s malign genius. Nobody’s getting’ lucky after an evening of this stuff; this is a prelude to an evening of cuddling. And cuddling’s all well and good, friends, but it doesn’t keep the population numbers up.

Of course, no sort of pop success is possible without the help of many collaborators — and in this case, the word has never been so apt. Chief among these musical Quislings is none other than David Foster; not content with merely badgering poor Terje into a nervous breakdown, the “Hit Man” has the entire human race in his assassinatory sights now, abetting Bublé’s musical mass-gelding by buffing the album’s sound to an appropriate gloss. How much did you get for your soul, Foster? What they offer you, to sell out your own species? Did they promise you a seat at the cold, steely right hand of power? (That would explain a lot, actually.)

Thanks in no small part to the assistance of Foster, Crazy Love — not unlike the B.U.B.L.É. itself — is a thing of seductive surfaces. But the truth will out; in navigating the human institution of the music industry, the AI betrays itself in small and telling ways. The marketplace demands that the artist take a hand in writing the songs, and so the machine intelligence does as machines do — hewing to a successful template. There’s probably no grounds for a plagiarism suit — you can’t copyright a rhythm, after all (if you could, the estate of Bo Diddley would be worth more than George Soros) — but the blatancy of the cop, the laziness and completeness of it, again indicates the Bublé-construct’s absolute disregard for human niceties.

In the end, paradoxically, that very contempt provides a glimmer of hope. Our future doom is not inevitable; the machines are overconfident, and their hubris has made them vulnerable. There is still a chance for humanity to beat back the B.U.B.L.É., but it will require a strong application of human-made music, music for and about sex and nothing but sex, music dedicated entirely to gettin’ it on. If anybody’s asking, I’ve got a suggestion to start with…

A Note on This Week’s Column: I’ve been sidelined by the Dreaded Deadline Doom this week, so there’s no new column, strictly speaking. But as a special treat — all right, to fill the gap in the schedule — I’m presenting here, for the first time, the very first How Bad Can It Be? ever written.

Jeff Giles first approached me about doing a column about a year ago — November 2008. We kicked around some concepts, knocking the premise into shape. To help me get a grip on it, I wrote a bunch of sample columns, including this one, about the then-current season of NBC’s The Biggest Loser. The start date for the column was eventually pushed back to January 2009, leaving this piece basically unpublishable — hopelessly past its sell-by date. And so it has sat on my hard drive until now. Hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain — the Secret Origin of HBCIB?, if you will.

As this was to have been the inaugural column, it begins with a statement of purpose — one I find worth revisiting now and then…

I will not cop to charges of snobbery; I find my pop-culture thrills wherever I can. I freely admit, though, that I’m selective. Any consumer of media has to be, I think. There are only so many hours in a day, and so much to fill them with. It’s not so much that I’m actively avoiding anything; it’s just that there’s so much good stuff out there that I’ve not yet experienced — Infinite Jest, “Trout Mask Replica,” Kurosawa’s Rashomon — that I’ve got to be choosy with the little time I have above ground. And because I write about media from the perspective of an enthusiast, rather than a critic, I’m not obliged to watch or read and listen to anything in which I would otherwise have no interest.

In practice, that means gravitating towards a comfort zone. It’s a big zone, as these things go — I’m a pretty well-rounded guy — but in the great spectrum of mass media, it’s a relatively narrow bandwidth. Now, I can and do often enjoy myself when I venture out of that zone; but I always do so with mingled feelings of hope and dread. Part of me wonders, “Am I going to hate myself for watching this? Will I wish I could have this hour back?” And another part of me thinks, “Hey, you never know. This could be a keeper. And really, after all — how bad can it be?”

This column aims to answer that question.

So you can see why it was with some fear and trembling that I tuned in the new season of The Biggest Loser (Tuesdays, NBC). The show is basically a Survivor-style competition; each season, a group of morbidly obese contestants is whisked off to a ludicrously lavish “ranch,” where they are divided into two teams. Each team is assigned a personal trainer, and through a regime of diet and exercise they work to trim down. Each week, there’s a weigh-in, and one contestant is eliminated. The eventual winner — the “biggest loser” — is the contestant who loses the highest percentage of body weight over the course of the program, and he or she is rewarded, as is usual, with a cash prize and an assortment of consumer goods. So far, so Mark Burnett.

What makes The Biggest Loser so car-crash fascinating is the simmering brew of emotional issues and class politics bubbling under the surface. These people aren’t just fame-whores, or even contestants playing a game — they are sick people who are clutching for a chance to get well. Received wisdom holds that you can never be too rich or too thin, and The Biggest Loser promises to deliver on both aspirations — but thinness itself is rapidly becoming a class aspiration. As Greg Critser points out in his book Fat Land (a critical text for understanding the obesity crisis), government subsidies and agribusiness consolidations have overturned historical precedent; in 21st Century America, a diet of pre-prepared, calorie-dense foods is actually cheaper and more readily-available than one of traditional staples. And so obesity becomes a socio-economic issue, with the poor gorging on sweetmeats that would astonish Henry VIII, while the rich pay big money to eat like peasants.

The emotional aspects are even gnarlier. This season, The Biggest Loser has rejiggered its formula; instead of individual contestants, we get overweight family units. The two starting teams consist of four husband-wife couples versus four parent-child pairs. I’m having a hard time imagining this is going to end well for any of them. One fat person on his own is a medical issue; two fat people in a family relationship are a stew of guilt, recrimination, and enablement. Put ‘em in a high-pressure environment, under the ever-watchful eye of the camera — that’s a recipe for entertaining television! (Or possibly manslaughter.)

Struggling with all this, I sit down to watch, and we meet the trainers and the families, most of whom have been supplied, through the magic of editing, with some sort of relatable backstory. Trainer Bob is working with the couples; he looks a little like the guy from The Soup, but with a three-day beard. Of the two younger couples, the Orange team are relative newlyweds who want to get their weight under control before they start having kids, while the Brown team seem mostly just to want to win the game; they’re clearly being set up as the villains. The Red team is a middle-aged couple who’ve left their three kids — including an autistic eight-year old — in the care of relatives, while they ship off to the fat farm. Somehow, I’m not as sympathetic towards them as I think I’m supposed to be. Trainer Bob seems an amiable doofus, like Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, until he starts snarling at his charges and calling them “bitch” while demanding push-ups in psychotic-gym-teacher fashion.

The parent-child teams are in the care of trainer Jillian. She’s got father-son cab drivers who come on like bit players from Gone Baby Gone; two sets of miserable twentysomething doormat daughters stuck living with their miserable overbearing moms; and a weepy girl who idolizes her father, a cop, who is so debilitatingly huge that he requires an oxygen tank about five minutes into the episode. Jillian is sexy ugly in a way vaguely reminiscent of Sandra Bernhard, and shows her deep emotional attachment to her team by screaming insults at them and smacking them upside the head.

The workout segments are the cheap thrill of the show; we get the sadistic spectacle of a toned, sharp-tongued quasi-dominatrix tormenting a pack of fatsos — for their own good! The rest of it, though, seems constructed primarily as a cross-marketing platform. We get a few perfunctory cooking tips, this week featuring chef Rocco DiSpirito, who of course has a TV show of his own; he briefly addresses the idea that healthy food must perforce be expensive, a throwaway moment that is as close as the show ever comes to addressing the class issues of obesity. And there’s relentless shilling for sponsor products, done with a blatancy not seen since the early days of TV, when Jack Benny would interrupt his own show to light up a Lucky.

The thing is, the damn show is two hours long, and even with the slack pacing, there’s a lot of time to fill and a lot of fake tension to build. And so the contestants are roped into idiotically contrived side bets and games. These segments are hosted by soap opera actress Alison Sweeney, smirking as she puts the teams through activities of dubious therapeutic value and questionable reward.

This week there’s a degrading debacle involving huge, color-coded Slip ‘n’ Slides, with the prize being a phone call home; for people struggling with a health issue related to their family dynamics, you can see where that may be counterproductive. The winner is the wife on the Orange team — that’s the couple getting ready to start a family, remember — and when she breaks down in tears while talking to her father, it’s hard not to imagine an unwholesome backstory. (But then, I have a vivid imagination.)

Then it’s back to more workouts, more yelling, more close-ups of sweaty fat people. My queasiness about The Biggest Loser, I think, reflects my ambivalence about the morbidly obese in general — an ambivalence heightened by the fact that I’m a big fat slob myself. But while I could surely stand to drop fifty pounds or so, I can still manage a five-mile hike without breathing hard, to say nothing of getting around the grocery store unaided. When I see folks at the market, too fat for the basic function of walking, tooling around in their electric carts, the thought occurs unbidden: You’ve crippled yourself, and it didn’t have to be like this. No one did this to you — you did it to yourself. In much the same way, you’re rooting for the contestants on The Biggest Loser, but watching them moan and perspire and weep, you can’t help thinking that, y’know, they brought this all on themselves.

But enough uncomfortable reflection: It’s off to the weigh-in, padded out over three (!) commercial breaks with fish-faced reaction shots and booming tympani. I’m unprepared for how much math is involved in this show. Immunity and the possibility of elimination are calculated on the total weight lost per team versus total starting weight; there’s also an over-under on the side wager, which automatically puts that team up for elimination. I wish I had a slide rule at this point. In the end, a bunch of people don’t do so good. Weepy Girl and Officer Porky have made a foolish wager early on, and lose badly; when all is said and done, though, the survivors vote to send the Car Talk guys home. Their reaction (paraphrased): “Meh, fuckit.” My reaction: roughly the same.

So how bad is it? Pretty bad. The ugly emotional explosions never arrive, which is a pity; they would have been a distraction from the deep and uncomfortable contradictions at the heart of the show. On the one hand, it The Biggest Loser Families wants to be empowering and heartwarming; on the other, it wants to serve up the red meat of entertainment — a suspenseful game, colorful challenges, and an endlessly-replayed clip of an old fat man falling off a treadmill.

And so the show constantly undercuts itself. Moments of naked calculation and strategizing — like the Brown team throwing a game on purpose because they “don’t want to be seen as a threat” — bounce up against tears and hugs played out against soaring strings; but the pathos ultimately feels unearned. When the Red team calls home and their autistic son — who seldom expresses emotion — tells them he loves and misses them, it actually makes them seem less sympathetic; after all, the reason they’re separated from him in the first place is because they’re off chasing cash prizes and a new RV.

Again and again, the games aspect is at odds with the goal of actually getting well — beginning with the fact that the players who are losing weight most slowly, who obviously would benefit most from staying in the program, are the very ones who get booted out. Jillian gets a lot of great reaction shots, looking convincingly disgusted at the way the producers contrive to set the contestants at each other’s throats; I think I know how she feels. There’s an ugly cynicism at the heart of The Biggest Loser franchise, in how it tries to have it both ways — purporting to help its contestants while simultaneously inviting the viewers at home to laugh at the fatties.

Bottom line: Watch at your own risk. It’s enjoyable enough, in a train-wreck kind of way, but if you’ve got a single spark of decency in your soul, you’ll hate yourself in the morning.

If you haven’t got a single spark of decency in your soul, of course, you can probably get your own development deal with NBC, if you hurry.

As I write this, the Dow-Jones is breaking 10,000, and the economy looks to be coming out of a slump — even though nobody’s hiring just yet. Most folks who still have jobs are hanging on by their fingernails, but the privileged classes are already talking about bonuses. A popular Democratic president is trying to pass meaningful health-care reform, and the postideological spoilsports of the Right are pitching a hissy fit. Holy crap, it’s 1993 again! And right on cue, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are back together!

To ease into this reunion thing — and to whet your appetite for new material — they’ve released a live album this week, culled from one hot night in Brooklyn late last year. It’s called Lost At Sea, but a better title might be Testing the Waters. Because, really, of all the 1990s bands that might make a go of it in this transformed pop landscape, I’ve gotta ask: the Squirrel Nut Zippers? C’mon.

All right, that’s not exactly a question. But still; it’s a mystery how these guys got big in the first place, let alone how they might have a comeback. The Great Swing Scare of the 90s remains one of those vaguely mystifying moments in the popular culture. Sure, yuppie scum have never lacked for any number of idiotic pastimes to separate them from their money — but really: A-line skirts? Lindy Hop lessons? What possessed us?

It’s been suggested that the irrational exuberance of the market engendered a cultural echo of the Roaring Twenties. Maybe. Or maybe it was yet another strategy for Generation X to defer adulthood. The fashions, the cocktails, the foxtrots and the Charleston — all comprised a reach toward the trappings of sophistication, without a full commitment to constructing a grown-up identity, responding to the dilemma How do I avoid turning into my parents? by embracing an idealized version of their grandparents; it was suddenly okay to wear a suit, as long as you did it ironically.

(Not coincidentally, the Swing Revival ended at about the moment that Gen Xers started having kids of their own; and so they transitioned to new ways of staving off adulthood, mostly by vicariously sharing in the childhoods of their offspring — signing up for Mommy and Me classes, watching Yo Gabba Gabba!, writing trend pieces about “kidults“ and “alternadads,” and coming no closer to swing music than their regular Saturday-night date with A Prairie Home Companion.)

Regardless of the sociological implications, the Swing Revival hinged on the music, and here — as with any such cultural moment — the quality was variable. You had some genuine, huge talents revealing an unexpected affinity for jump and jive (e.g., Brian Setzer), a whole lot of trend-hoppers (Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, I’m lookin’ at you), and the usual assortment of marching-band refugees looking for some way to put their horns to good use once the latest wave of ska fizzed out. The Squirrel Nut Zippers were probably the best of the bunch, and certainly seemed the most authentic.

It probably helped that they were from North Carolina. Pop fans have been conditioned by long experience to accept, and even expect, a certain level of eccentricity from Southern bands, and that’s generally worked to their advantage; let’s face it, the B-52s probably never would have made it as a going concern if they’d come out of, say, Detroit.

In the case of the Zippers, the mythic images of the South played into their particular gimmick. You could almost imagine them as a cotillion band gone horribly wrong, leaving bevies of traumatized debutantes in their wake as they rampaged from gig to gig. The sound was raucous and expansive; the manner was genteel charm ramped up to cartoon proportions. Frontman Jimbo Mathus came on like Foghorn Leghorn with a special emphasis on the “foghorn,” while man-faced ukulelist Katharine Whalen triangulated a performance style somewhere between Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, and Jessica Rabbit.

On record it sometimes came off as affected and shticky — how could it not? — but the band had a fierce live reputation. Lost At Sea shows that their powers are undimmed. The Zippers — in this incarnation, at least — emerge more as a rock band with horns than the Dixieland pranksters of the studio, with electric bass and nasty guitars to the fore.

The prominence of the electric guitar is the biggest revelation here, in fact. On “Good Enough For Grandad” (download) — a title that functions almost as a manifesto — big-toned, semi-distorted hollowbodies hold down the changes in the absence of a piano, and take swooping, stinging runs amid the blat of the horns. Dude’s no Brian Setzer, but it’s pretty smokin’ stuff.

The pace lags a bit at times — and frankly, a little of Whalen’s pitchy kootchie-koo act goes a lo-o-ong way with me — but when the SNZs are hitting on all cylinders (as on “Suits Are Picking Up The Bill” [download]), it’s downright compulsive; the high-energy drumming, the tag-team instrumental breaks, that manic good cheer of it all.

For many young professionals, the boom days of the 1990s ended too soon. Lost At Sea doesn’t, but unlike the dreary decade just past, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either. It remains to be seen, though, whether there’s a place for the Squirrel Nut Zippers in this brave new post-millennial economy. For a band so determinedly backward-looking, it would be an irony both cruel and poetic if they should end up on the nostalgia circuit.

After a couple of weeks of works that are not only shoddy but morally questionable, it’s almost a relief to review a film whose failures are totally aesthetic. And I’m here to tell you, the aesthetic failure of Dragonball:Evolution is indeed total.

Dragonball: Evolution, now out on DVD, is a live-action adaptation of the hugely popular manga and animé — that’s comic book and cartoon, for you filthy round-eye gaijin. If you haven’t heard of Dragonball, ask the nearest ten-year old. Actually, your best bet would be to invent a time machine, hop back about six years, and then ask the nearest ten-year old. At this point, the property is a wee bit past its peak, having finally wrapped up its forty thousand-issue run in Japan’s Shonen Jump Weekly and been collected into bound editions whose aggregate multimillion-page count has been responsible for the total deforestation of several South American nations. The market, to be blunt, may have reached its saturation point some time ago, and the whole product is starting to get a bit whiffy, like a tuna sandwich you’d think twice before eating. Dragonball: Evolution represents an attempt to breathe new life into the franchise, in the absence of new original material.

Like most quality entertainments for ten-year old boys, the Dragonball franchise is simple, ingenious, and ridiculously violent. The story, which originally began serialization shortly after the invention of the printing press (okay, 1985), concerns the fisticuffical trials of one Goku, a foundling of unknown origin, who is raised by a kindly old sensei and becomes the world’s greatest martial artist. The early volumes traffick in picaresque humor and highfalutin allusions to the Chinese novel Journey to the West, with Goku — who is improbably blessed with a furry tail — standing in for the traditional trickster-figure Monkey. But as the series moves on and Goku’s reputation grows, he faces off against a series of ever-more-powerful opponents with ever-more-ridiculous food-themed names, and for ever-higher stakes, and the series settles into a dependable formula of fight scenes, each of which takes approximately a thousand pages to unfold. The formula goes something like this:

1. Opponent A prepares to strike a blow, summoning his chi / spirit power / extraterrestrial mojo: much glowing and posturing ensues (change of hair color optional): 4 pages.
   
2. Cutaway to bystanders fearfully anticipating the unleashing of said force (use of the phrase “untold destruction” optional): 1 page.
3. Opponent A launches himself at Opponent B. Speed lines, rasping-metal sound effects, lens flare, etc.: 6 pages.
4. Contact: shockwaves, thunder-booming sound effects, slow motion, lots of yelling: 8 pages.
5. Collateral damage: buildings fall down, earthquakes, tidal waves, etc.: 4 pages.
6. Aftermath: cutaway to bystanders observing devastation (use of phrase “nothing could possibly have survived” optional): 2 pages.
7. Smoke clears: dramatic reveal of Opponent B, essentially unscathed. (gasps optional): 4 pages.
8. Reset: change partners and the dance continues.

Repeat until millionaire, with occasional brief interludes of plot.

It was with the adoption of this formula that Dragonball became your genuine worldbeater, and it has porioved extraordinarily durable, spawning three TV series and 17 (!) animated feature films. The live-action movie is basically a reboot, and there its troubles begin. Bringing such a long-running and beloved series back to zero in a new medium — introducing the relevant concepts to newcomers while still providing something new and novel to longtime fans, all while telling a complete, done-in-one story that nonetheless leaves the door open for a sequel — is an enterprise fraught with danger, even under the best of circumstances, and the roadside of cinema history is littered with the bones of those who’ve tried, from George Pal’s take on Doc Savage to Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The filmmakers her try to incorporate elements from both early and late in the series, awkwardly mashing the fairy-tale quest elements of the former into the apocalyptic sci-fi milieu of the latter, and adding extraneous new elements to appeal to Da Yoof. In this version, we first meet Goku (Justin Chatwin, shorn of a tail and with his emo-dude hair a pathetic shadow of manga-Goku’s exploded quiff) not as a child, but as an awkward high-schooler. He’s been raised by his Mr. Miyagi-lite “grandpa” — no mention is made that Goku is a foundling, even though no parents are in evidence — who teaches him martial arts but forbids him to fight.

Goku catches a rash of crap from the snotty jocks at his school, where swordplay seems to be on the syllabus — Ninja High School, 90210 — mocked not only as a coward, but also because Grandpa is a vocal proponent of ancient-astronaut theories and “prophecies.” Everyone thinks the old man is crazy, but — dun dun dahhhhhhhhhn! — turns out that your consensus reality is crazy, man, and the old man knows the score! The Earth is, for reals, endangered by the imminent return of a kelly-green, point-eared demon called Piccolo (James Marsters, not so much slumming as rolling all his possessions into a hobo bindle and taking up residence in the Dumpster behind a Bennigan’s), who, we are told, ruled the world with an iron fist “two thousand years ago.” You’d think Tacitus might have mentioned that, but go figure.

Piccolo, it is prophesied, will return when the seven mystical orbs known as dragonballs are all gathered together. The film changes its mind about this about halfway through, and we see that Piccolo has already returned, through means never explained, and the true power of the proximate dragonballs is to summon a magical dragon who will grant any wish. If the movie had been a half-hour longer, the dragonballs would doubtless have held some other secret entirely — the world’s greatest chocolate-chip cookie recipe, perhaps. Who knows? With this movie, all bets are off; we are in a strange land where logic and consistency are foreign currencies.

Anyway. Goku’s grandpa is custodian of one of the dragonballs, and he gets murdered by Piccolo’s minions — but not before reminding Goku to “Remember who you are” and “Be true to yourself.” (Once, just once, I’d love to see a movie with the message, “Abandon your bullshit sense of self. Change! Grow! Become someone else — someone better!”) Goku sets off to find the other dragonballs, joined by Bulma (Emmy Rossum), who’s kitted out with a big gun, a wandering accent, a motorcycle that folds up into a make-up mirror, and no discernible personality. For help, they turn to a horny old professor, played by Chow Yun-Fat. Waste no time lamenting the faltering career of James Marsters, friends; here’s the Cary Grant of Asia — the coolest actor in the world, once — reduced to bumbling around as third-rate comic relief in this piss-ant chopsockey flick. FUCK YOU, VAGARIES OF FATE.

This unappealing trio flails around looking for the plot, and finds it in a big showdown with Piccolo, in which Goku prevails by REMEMBERING WHO HE IS and BEING TRUE TO HIMSELF, as Mufasa smiles down from the sky. No, actually, the Chow Yun-Fat character is killed, and it looks for a second like he won’t have to do the sequel, but then Bulma and Goku get their hands on the dragonballs and wish the poor bastard back to life! PWNED!

But I didn’t care, and neither will you, no matter who you are. It’s impossible to say who the filmmakers thought they were making this movie for; newbies will be mystified, and initiates are likely to be both annoyed and bored. The new material doesn’t really deepen the movies themes, or even make it more accessible — it simply adds a sheen of mockable cliché to a mishmosh of ill-matched elements. It’s neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring

The acting, to be charitable, fails to elevate the material. Chatwin’s performance is so low-key as to be nonexistent. He projects all the dramatic presence of a Dane Cook, the gravitas of a Keanu Reeves, the raw charisma of a Rob Schneider. Most of the time, he just looks vaguely confused. (He’s not alone.) He’s only the beginning of this film’s missteps, though. The script is trite and dull, obvious and incomprehensible all at once. The sets and effects look hideously cheap and dated, even though it’s a 2009 release. Even the action scenes are no fun; aside from one bit early in the film, when Goku wins a fight without throwing a punch, letting his high-school rivals beat each other senseless, there’s no pop to the choreography, no sense of grandeur.

That timidity is perhaps the most disappointing thing about Dragonball: Evolution. The action in the comics and cartoons is never less than over-the-top; Akira Toriyama, like Jack Kirby before him, created new vocabularies for violence in his work; he’s perhaps the most important manga-ka of the last quarter-century, and his influence on contemporary action comics — not just in Japan, but around the world — is incalculable. The momentum is relentless, and the combat is never less than over-the-top. But even with its shiny special effects, the film can’t match the vigor of Toriyama’s brushstrokes. There’s more life and imagination in the two pages above than in the whole of the film’s running time. Characters fly across the screen, but the cinematic ideas stay stubbornly earthbound. It’s a moving picture that doesn’t move, that never even comes close to the manic, gleeful energy that Toriyama brings to his pages. For a movie that’s all about balls, Dragonball: Evolution seriously needs to grow a pair.

That Dan Brown was a terrible writer with a weakness for the sort of pseudohistorical conspiracy theories usually floated by college sophomores stinking of bongwater, we knew from his previous books. But what makes his latest The Lost Symbol truly annoying, as opposed to merely forgettable, is his use of so-called “noetic science” as a major plot point. Brown being inexplicably popular as he is, there’s already a ripple effect; BookScan indicates that Lynne McTaggart’s The Intention Experiment, which gets a mention in The Lost Symbol, is experiencing a spike in sales.

This is good news for Lynne McTaggart, who is, I’m sure, a lovely person — but bad news for those of us with fully-functional bullshit detectors. If noetics really is the next big thing, then we have reason to dread the water-cooler, these days, those of us who are interested in religion, or science, or both, and who resent the cheapening of both that comes of trying to fuse the two. Here’s Brown’s rundown on noetics — what we used to call “mind over matter,” back in the day:

[Katherine’s research] was a scientific tour de force — a massive collection of experiments that proved human thought was a real and measurable force in the world. Katherine’s experiments demonstrated the effect of human thought on everything from ice crystals to the movement o subatomic particles. The results were conclusive and irrefutable, with the potential to transform skeptics into believers and affect global consciousness on a massive scale.

“We have scientifically proven that the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought. …. The idea of universal consciousness is no ethereal New Age concept. It’s a hard-core scientific reality… and harnessing it has the potential to transform our world. This is the underlying discovery of Noetic Science.”

(Something about Brown’s prose always sound like he doth protest a wee bit too much.)

Now, Dan Brown knows a good idea when he steals one; the central conceit of The DaVinci Code was lifted wholesale from the conspiracy classic Holy Blood, Holy Grail. A couple of media sensations over the last few years have popularized the pseudo-science of noetics — the movie What the [Bleep] Do We Know!?, and the book The Secret and its spinoffs. It’s via one or both of these that noetic science most likely came onto Dan Brown’s radar. At least, it’s these two that I single out for blame and scorn today.

What the Bleep was a sleeper hit in 2004; it’s been described as a documentary, but it’s more of a manifesto, mixing talking-head commentary, SFX-laden representations of subatomic and biological phenomena, electronic music and dramatic interludes. It’s the same formula as Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking series Cosmos and its various PBS progeny — but populated wall-to-wall with quacks, cranks, grifters, and New Age wackadoos.

The dramatic sequences meander around the story of Amanda (Marlee Matlin), a photographer with an anxiety disorder, body issues, and bad luck in love. Her interactions with her kooky, free-spirit roommate and a series of mysterious strangers eventually bring her to wrestle with the classic big questions about life, love, and happiness.

The less said about these segments, the better, except to say that I felt embarrassed for everyone involved; but however clumsily scripted and horrendously-acted it is, Amanda’s story at least grapples honestly with the alienation and discontent of life. But whereas traditional systems of religious belief, in engaging with those issues, tend to emphasize the importance of the questions themselves — and of the way that pondering, itself, can reorient and stretch the mind — What the Bleep is relentlessly results-oriented. Not only do these eternal questions have answers, the film tells us — they all have the same answer: QUANTUM PHYSICS!

Why am I so miserable? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Why am I here? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Why is the world what it is? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Where does reality come from? QUANTUM PHYSICS!

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to use QUANTUM PHYSICS! as an argument-ender, you’d goddamn well better make a better case for it than the film does, otherwise it’s just New Age-speak for “the Will of God,” which cannot be questioned. Indeed, the film spent more time bulletproofing its ideas (“Well, you really can’t understand it,” says one talking head. “It’s very mysterious,” says another. “Nobody knows why it happens, but it does…” says a third. Shut up and don’t question, okay?) than it does actually explicating them — always a sign of a weak argument.

Here’s a fun drinking game for you. Watch this ten-minute clip of the film.

• Every time someone says something evasive, take a drink.
• Every time someone takes an unjustifiable leap of logic, take ten drinks. Just because.
• Every time Marlee Matlin sighs, take a drink.
• Every time an unsourced anecdote is presented as fact, claim to take a drink.
• Every time the words “QUANTUM PHYSICS!” are uttered, take a drink and do not take a drink, simultaneously.
• Every time someone says “We can’t explain it,” or some variation thereof, take a drink.
• Any time somebody actually explains something… never mind, it won’t happen.
• Any time somebody proposes a violation of Newtonian physics, untake a drink.

(You might want to have a priest and an ambulance handy.)

Are you dead of alcohol poisoning yet? Then YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT.

What these thinkers have done is to take Heisenberg’s axiom that “the observer becomes part of the observed system,” and, essentially, extrapolate that to “Your thoughts create your physical reality.” Now, getting from Point A to Point B requires, in this case, more than a leap of logic; logic must take a leap, a hop, and a running jump, then catch the crosstown bus for the airport and board the first plane to Crazyville.

Did I mention that the film was funded by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, which is run by a sixtyish hausfrau who claims to channel the spirit of a 35,000-year-old warlord from the lost continent of Atlantis? (Funny how Donovan never mentioned him.) And that most of the film’s “experts” are affiliated with the Ramtha school — some impolite people call it a cult — in one way or another? And that at least one of the talking heads has disavowed the film, claiming that selective editing make him appear to espouse ideas that he in fact disavows?

There’s some valid science here, but it is degraded by the distortions, half-truths, and inconsistencies. The film’s science and its philosophy are both hopelessly muddled and self-contradictory — at once simplistic and needlessly complicated. One of the first things the film does is dismiss out-of-hand the materialistic, mechanistic electrochemical model of consciousness. All well and good. But then it goes into the mind-body connection, and starts undercutting its own argument. There’s a major thread about “addiction,” in its various forms, being responsible for most human misery. It’s not a surprising stance for the makers to take — New Age spirituality, remember, grew largely out of twelve-step recovery and self-help programs — and there’s a good deal of material about the physiology of addiction, about neuropeptides and drugs rewiring the brain — all, as far as I know, good science, albeit horribly illustrated. Feast your eyes on this slice of nightmare fuel, and feel the dawning horror when you realize that this is someone’s idea of high hilarity:

But that science depends upon the very same electrochemical model of consciousness that the film has already explicitly rejected. There are other traditions of dealing with the same problems — the Buddhist concept of attachment, for instance — but which do so on a pure-spirit level. So why didn’t they lean on one of those instead? Because attachment isn’t a scientific concept, and addiction is. But therein lies the problem: instead of lending the rest of the film an authenticity-by-association, the good science of the addiction material only makes the rest of the film look weaker by comparison. They haven’t just shot themselves in the foot here: they’ve blown the leg clean off.

There’s a similar problem with the sequences on theology and religion. Our God-concept, they say, needs a major overhaul: the “big man in the sky meting out punishments and rewards in the afterlife” model is obsolete and limiting. Fair enough. But the filmmakers don’t seem to have the confidence that the argument will stand on its own, so they wrap it in cheap shots at organized religion, while demonstrating no real knowledge of current theological thought. to watch this film, you’d think we were still living in the fucking Burning Time; to present the Big Daddy idea as the current dominant model means ignoring the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Merton, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong — ignoring everything since St. Augustine, in other words (and great chunks of Augustine, for that matter).

And, y’know, people who obey the channeled spirit of a 35,000 year old Atlantean warlord ranting against the primitive superstitions of Christianity — well. Glass houses, and all.

Anyway. What’s going on here is what theologian Karen Armstrong describes in her new book The Case for God — religion letting science define its agenda even on its own turf, instead of insisting on the primacy of the practice of faith. Now, rationalism and the scientific method are invaluable tools for perceiving and understanding the universe — perhaps even the best tools — but they are not the only tools. Faith is uniquely suited for some tasks of perception. Science is primarily descriptive — it’s all about the how; religion concerns itself with meaning, or the why. And you need both, I think, to get a well-rounded picture of the world.

It’s a matter of matching the tool to the job at hand. Writing about music is, famously, like dancing about architecture — but applying the scientific method to religious questions is like putting a sonnet under a microscope; looking at scientific question through the eyes of faith is like psychoanalyzing a mountain. Per Richard Dawkins, “Why are we here?” is, from a scientific standpoint, not even a question worth asking. And he’s right, as far as it goes. I would venture further that “How old is the Earth, and what’s up with the dinosaur bones?” is not a question worth asking in a religious context.

But religious thinking — process-oriented, poetic, allusive — has become disreputable, even among the religious, and so they take up the hammer of scientific thought — results-centered, descriptive, concrete — and try to apply it to existential questions. Instead of pondering the origins and immortality of the soul, they’re trying to figure its weight in grams. Instead of contemplating the impact of loving thoughts on a single human life, they’re quantifying their effect on the formation of ice crystals. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

The DVD of The Secret, by contrast, is a bit more open about its mystical leanings, if no less embarrassing. Shot on cheesy video, largely lacking in the shiny production values of What the Bleep, The Secret looks like something you’d find late at night on The History Channel — not one of the classy World War II documentaries, but some “History of Sex” thing. There are fewer physicists in the roster of “experts,” and more authors and philosophers, and at least one whose occupation is listed as “Visionary.” (I’d love to see his business card.) It doesn’t make much of an effort to explain away its premise with subatomic particles or the like; it’s down with the magic. And while it pays lip service to personal fulfillment and all that jazz, it’s much more shamelessly materialistic than What the Bleep. Screw changing the world; The Secret is mostly about Getting Cool Stuff.

The Secret takes What the Bleep’s distortion of Heisenberg and extends it even further, into what it calls “The Law of Attraction” — the notion that human beings create their own circumstances by the power of (largely unconscious) thought — which it backs up with scanty anecdotal evidence. There’s no arguing with the premise that if you change your attitude, you can change your life, but The Secret gets cause and effect backwards. A better attitude doesn’t attract success to you — it gives you the strength to go out and find success. It’s self-actualization for people who want to duck responsibility. Ultimate credit or blame must go to the Universe, after all; all I’ve done is be clever enough to game the system. Anyone can do it.

And in both What the Bleep and The Secret, it’s presented in exactly such an obnoxious, triumph-of-the-will way — “Everyone is a god! Well, I am, anyway — me and the people who are clued in, who don’t buy into the paradigm propagated by the mediocracy, the ones who have the courage to stop being sheep and take the red pill!”

But what about those who aren’t clued in? Well, now, there’s the rub. Noetics, and the Law of Attraction, and the highly-selectively-defined QUANTUM PHYSICS! of What the Bleep do fail to qualify as religious expression, I admit, if we take as given that all religion must encompass compassion for the misfortunes of others. The “your thoughts produce your reality” model precludes any compassion; the poor, the sick, the developmentally disabled, the mentally ill — well, no one’s coming out and saying they deserve their fate, exactly. But they have chosen it. And so it is not my responsibility.

And so noetics moves from the realms of the pointless and misguided and into the arena of the truly reprehensible.

On one level, there seems little point in reviewing a Dan Brown book. He’s big enough now that he’s critic-proof, and my little barbs will penetrate his mighty armor of public adoration not one jot. But you know, sometimes criticism isn’t about influence; sometimes, it’s a matter of conscience. And on the matter of The Lost Symbol being a terrible book — abysmally written, ludicrously plotted, resting on a foundation of knuckleheaded historical speculation and flat-out pseudo-scientific wrongness — I will not be silent.

You don’t have to be a great writer, Lord knows, to achieve popular literary success. But has there ever been a worse writer than Dan Brown to ever become so successful? It’s a trick question, of course, because there’s never been a writer quite as successful as Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than all four Twilight books put together — more copies than the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fa chrissakes. J.K. Rowling has sold more books overall, but no single volume of the Harry Potter series has racked up Da Vinci Code numbers.

Besides, Rowling is — despite her huge and glaring flaws as a prose stylist and a systematic thinker — pretty good with character and mood. She’s still a terrible writer, but she’s a slightly more lustrous shade of terrible than Dan Brown. True fact, The Da Vinci Code is not a good book, and Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, carries on in the tradition. And if you haven’t read it and intend to, be warned: from this point on, I will be SPOILING like mayonnaise in a hot car.

I have a theory. It’s not a literary theory, but a theory of personality — Dan Brown’s personality, to be precise. See, I figure Dan Brown probably enjoys all the perks of being a writer (who wouldn’t?), but is not much interested in the craft of writing. The Lost Symbol is all plot and ciphers (one using the “pigpen” code from that one issue of Boy’s Life, another apparently created in MS Word with Zapf Dingbats), told with about as much verve or emotional heft as a Will Shortz back-page puzzle from the Times. Or maybe — and this is perhaps a better comparison — as Myst; the structure and lack of emotional affect make the whole enterprise feel like a video game. Stuff happens. Puzzles are solved. Move to a new location — a new level — and start the process again.

But there’s no sense of joy to Brown’s work, no sense that he’s having a good time telling stories and making stuff up. An editor of my acquaintance talks about “the delight factor.” Rudy Rucker calls them “eyeball kicks” — the little jolts that good fiction gives you on nearly every page — and I take him to mean kicks in both senses of the word; both of a violent jarring sensation, and of getting your ya-yas out. They’re both talking about the pleasures of a text — the shape of a well-made sentence turning in your ear like a key, or way a startling simile seems to fall from the sky, or the way a character can with a single action summarize both his charms and his vices. Brown gives you none of that.

The wondrous thing about writing fiction is that it gives you a chance to be someone else for a while, to walk around inside other people’s heads, to see the world as they do, to think as they do. An author of fiction, though a pacifist himself, might write a passionate defense of preemptive military action; an atheist might assume the voice of a believer, or vice-versa. You can stretch out, and try on attitudes and perceptions antithetical to your own. (In fact, if you’re playing fairly with your characters and your audience, you pretty much have to.) But there is one experience, one trait that cannot be successfully imagined from outside — and that’s smarts. You can’t convincingly write a character who is cleverer than you are.

And that’s a problem for Dan Brown. His hero, Robert Langdon, is supposed to be a brilliant scholar (in the fictitious discipline of “symbology,” which entails elements of comparative religion, art history, and cryptography, as the plot demands) as well as an internationally best-selling author, sought-after public speaker, beloved professor, and one-time All-American water polo champion. Now, Brown surely sells a lot of books, and for all I know he swims like a fish, but friends, I’m here to tell you: he’s no towering intellect.

This extract, from early in the book, first sounded my warning bells. Langdon — whose Harvard lectures are so popular that he has to teach his class in the Sanders Theater — is speaking about Masonic symbolism. One of the students opines that the whole thing sounds like “a freaky cult.”

Langdon feigned a sad sigh. “Too bad. If that’s too freaky for you, then I know you’ll never want to join my cult.”Silence settled over the room.

The student from the Women’s Center looked uneasy. “You’re in a cult?”

Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.”

The class looked horrified.

Langdon shrugged. “And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.”

OH SNAP! YOU GO, ROBERT! Freshmen beeyotches = PWNED!!!one!

(A note on usage, by the way: In the face of passages like that one, many reviewers resort to writing in a pastiche of Brown’s style. I won’t be going that far — the stuff is beyond parody, frankly — but for best results I recommend that all quoted passages be read to the accompaniment of this soundtrack.)

Anyway. That, right there? That’s a dumb guy’s idea of how smart people talk — a thunderously obvious “insight” served up as a blinding revelation, all with a faux-urbane attitude (after dropping that little bon mot, Langdon literally winks; Constant Reader, I threw up a little). Brown is constantly rigging the game, surrounding Langdon with dimwits easily-impressed by his genius, when in reality it’s hard to imagine a class of high-school freshmen being wowed by Langdon’s little pagan-day-of-Ra stunt, let alone Harvard students. Secondary characters emerge whose only purpose is to ask Langdon leading questions. For instance, there’s Inoue Sato, head of a special CIA investigative unit; here’s her half of the conversation stretching across pages 79 and 80 of the hardcover:

And why would Peter Solomon say that if it weren’t true?

Did he explain why Peter thinks you alone can unlock the portal?

In all of your discussions with Peter, he never once mentioned to you anything about a secret portal in Washington, D.C.?

I’m sorry? The man told you specifically what this portal leads to?

So you’ve heard of the secret he believes is hidden here.

Then how can you say the portal does not exist?

You’re saying the secret he believes is hidden in Washington is a fantasy?

And yet it’s still around?

So what exactly are these… Ancient Mysteries?

Dangerous in what way?

Tell me, Professor, do you believe such powerful information could truly exist?

Well, Terry, I’m glad you asked. You really are the best interviewer in the business, you know.

That sense of being able to out-think the characters (and the author) effectively kills a lot of the suspense of The Lost Symbol; for a thriller, it’s remarkably unthrilling. The villain’s true identity — which is supposed to be this huge, hairpin plot twist — was telegraphed from so far away that when the big reveal came, I was actually confused: Didn’t we find out who he was, like, fifty chapters ago? Then I realized that although, I the reader had worked it out some two hundred pages previous, the characters had not yet figured it out — further undermining the notion that they’re all exceptionally clever and capable individuals.

(That being said, Brown did pull off one very neat third-act reversal that I never saw coming, with a resurrection act as audacious as it is implausible. So, um, yay? I guess.)

In part, my confusion probably stems from Brown’s maddening repetitiousness. He seems to ascribe to Army training standard of communication: “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” If a plot point or event is at all important, it will be mentioned again, and often. It may be inherent — Brown himself admits he has a short attention span — or it may be by design, an acknowledgement that his books are designed to be read in short bursts during airport layovers and subway commutes; but for the reader who’s plowing straight through, it gets annoying quickly. At 500+ pages, The Lost Symbol is a long book in which comparatively little actually happens — the action takes place in a single 12-hour span — and even with the 2-page mini-chapters and micro-climaxes, a rigorous edit could have trimmed a hundred pages or more with no loss in readability. There are a lot of recaps and much that simply feels like padding. (Then again, it wouldn’t do for a beloved author to break a long silence with a slender little book, would it? You’ve got to make people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, after all, especially if it’s an audience that doesn’t otherwise buy many books — and you’ve got that multi-million dollar advance to justify.)

As for Brown’s much-vaunted research, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. He throws around esoteric terms and factoids, but without any sense that he really understands them or their significance. That was bad enough with the conspiracy-theory and pseudo-history of the previous books. But when he starts in with the mysticism central to The Lost Symbol, Brown demonstrates that you can’t just bluff your way through metaphysics. Here he’s talking about the Solomon siblings, old friends of Langdon’s. Katherine is a research scientist, while Peter is a scholar of religion and philosophy. They’re working together in a discipline called Noetic Science (of which more later):

Katherine and Peter had pooled their favorite texts here, writings on everything from particle physics to ancient mysticism. …. Most of Katherine’s books bore titles like Quantum Consciousness, The New Physics, and Principles of Neural Science. Her brother’s bore older, more esoteric titles like Kybalion¸ the Zohar, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and a translation of the Sumerian tablets from the British Museum.

By the way, if you think for a moment that Dan Brown has read all (or indeed any) of those books beyond the jacket flaps, I’ve got a painting in Paris I’d like to sell you. Peter is trying to convince Katherine that a lot of modern scientific theory is anticipated in the work of ancient sages. There’s a lot of hand-waving about Heisenberg reading the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, then this:

“I want to study cutting-edge theoretical physics. The future of science! I really doubt Krishna or Vyasa had much to say about superstring theory and multidimensional cosmological models.”

“You’re right. They didn’t.” Her brother paused, a smile crossing his lips. “If you’re talking superstring theory…” He wandered over to the bookshelf yet again. “Then you’re talking this book here.” He heaved out a colossal leather-bound book [The Complete Zohar]… “Thirteenth-century translation of the original medieval Aramaic.”

…Katherine studied the page. …[T]o her amazement, the text and drawings clearly outlined the exact same universe heralded by modern superstring theory — a ten-dimensional universe of resonating strings. As she continued reading, she suddenly gasped and recoiled. “My God, it even describes how six of the dimensions are entangled and act as one?!” She took a frightened step backward. …. “You’re saying the early mystics knew their universe had ten dimensions?”

“Absolutely.” He motioned to the page’s illustration of ten intertwined circles called Sephiroth. “Obviously, the nomenclature is esoteric, but the physics is very advanced.”

Also, check it out: how many Commandments are there? That’s right. Now, d’you want to seriously get your lid flipped? Okay. Go ahead and count your fingers. Both hands. Go on. I’ll wait. See what I mean? I know, right? How could they have known?

Now, admittedly, I’m no expert on the Kabbala, and my knowledge of the tenfold Sephiroth has been mostly picked up from comic books — but I know glib, opportunistic bullshit when I smell it, and this is a shitknife that cuts both ways; Brown is trying to use cutting-edge science to make ancient philosophy seem relevant, while simultaneously using ancient philosophy to make cutting-edge science seem spiritually important. But in order to find the lowest common denominator between the two disciplines, he’s got to dumb both sides of the equation down so far that the passage has the opposite effect, cheapening both physics and mysticism. (And again, note the weakness of the writing — the strained, clumsy imagining of how smart people talk to each other, and the attempt to make the material convincing by sheer force of emphasis, including repeated use of the “?!” typographical construction, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen in print outside of, well, a comic book.)

So what are the metaphysical underpinnings of the Lost Symbol, exactly? What shattering truth about human nature and forbidden knowledge sets this plot grinding into motion? For that, let’s take a look at a clip from 1978’s Circle Of Iron, a.k.a. The Silent Flute. The irritable poodle-haired muscleman is our hero, and he’s spent the whole movie questing for a mystical book that contains within it all the secrets of the Universe. This sequence is the big payoff. Sit back and tighten your hat, friends, because your mind, she is about to be BLOWN:

Dan Brown, God bless him, aims for that level of profundity. Indeed, there’s something almost touchingly credulous in his worldview — not just his childlike faith in the mass media’s ability to rouse the masses to action (In the book’s other main plot thread, the huge crisis that everyone is trying to avert is the uploading of hidden-camera footage of the Washington Freemasons lodge to YouTube, lest the sight of high-ranking U.S. officials play-acting with skulls and daggers spark a firestorm of anti-Masonic fury that could bring down the government. No, really, that’s the threat.), but the book’s apparent wholesale endorsement of Noetics — a “discipline” that strives to justify metaphysics by cloaking it in science, to the detriment of both.

A man’s free to believe what he wants, of course, but one likes to think that a writer of thrillers is necessarily a bit hard-headed, a bit bloody-minded. Not so Dan Brown. For an ostensible thriller, The Lost Symbol isn’t terribly suspenseful. The autrhor seems less interested in making us sweat than in educating us — even, God help us, in uplifting us. And thus the feel-good piffle of Noetics, which lies roughly on a level with Intelligent Design on the despicability scale. All that guff about weighing the body immediately after death to establish that the human soul has a physical weight, or that dying plants revive in the presence of prayerful thoughts? That’s Noetic science, in its crudest form — tailor-made for gullible chumps who believe everything they read in forwarded e-mails.

Or that they see in stealth-marketed propaganda films for daffy New Age cults. The notions behind Noetic Science have gone mainstream with the movies The Secret and What the [Bleep] Do We Know?, which is how I suspect they came onto Dan Brown’s radar in the first place. Those movies, and the pseudoscience they espouse, deserve a takedown of their own — which is exactly what they’ll get in the next column. Yes, friends, it’s a two-part exclusive How Bad Can It Be? hatestravaganza; my knives are out and sharp and I do hope you’ll stay with me. Trust me: Your mind = GUARANTEED BLOWN.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in popular culture, innovation engenders imitation. When something works, for whatever reason, elements of it will invariably show up in subsequent cultural product, sometimes as recontextualized bits and bobs, sometimes as entire setups with a fresh coat of paint and the names changed just enough to avoid a lawsuit.

What keeps the game fresh — what keeps the culture alive, really — is that the chain of antecedent is endless, and often indirect, and if you follow it long enough you come to some insight about the human condition. It’s easy, albeit reductive, to look at the current crop of vampires-in-high-school books and see them all as simply ganking Stephenie Meyer’s steez, for just so was Meyer influenced by Buffy, and Joss Whedon by the X-Men, and so on back into the mists of causality.

But the larger truth is that Meyer and Whedon and even Bram Stoker were all drinking from the same well, all telling the same human story — that our interpersonal relationships, the very thing that sustains us and gives our lives meaning, have always the potential to go horribly awry such that we use each other, we hurt each other, we drain each other dry; and that this horror is felt most keenly by the young, to whom it is new, and who have not yet mustered adequate defenses against it. In other words, nobody would have bothered ripping off the Twilight series had Meyer herself not been part of a larger cultural moment, if the books — their considerable flaws aside — didn’t strike some chord truer and purer than the brassy ka-ching of the cash register.

Here’s what this has to do with the new record by the UK group One Eskimo (their P.R. materials insist on spelling it One eskimO, but I have a rebel soul and will not be constrained by the orthographical conventions of The Man; also “One eskimO” looks really, really dumb); In itself, nothing. The eleven tracks on their debut are fair-to-middling triple-A singer-songwriter pop. It’s not particularly innovative, but neither does it derive so specifically from any single source as to constitute imitation per se. Frontman Kristian Leontiou, who hit the UK Top Ten with “Story of My Life” back in 2004, has the same package of sensitive-guy lyrics and steelwire voice as, say, James Blunt — though he never quite erupts into Blunt’s lethal honk — but that combination is common currency among a certain class of white Englishman, amongst whom it signifies something passing for “soul” (see also: Mick Hucknall), and does not in itself constitute evidence of a rip-off.

The music, though, is only half the story. Because One Eskimo is a full-on multimedia project, and the missing piece is the “visual album” that provides the band with cartoon stand-ins and the album with a storyline. And there, my friends, you’ve got the 800-pound Gorillaz in the room.

Is it a fair comparison? Hard to say. But it is, I think, a useful one; and, given that the very animation house behind Gorillaz also had a hand in One Eskimo’s visual album, it’s irresistible to ask. The Gorillaz project has certainly been innovative, not to mention massively successful, and it’s easy to imagine marketing executives pining for another one of those.

The larger cultural impact point here, of course, is one that’s been with us since the twinned births of recorded music and the moving picture. Music is just so goddamn big, too big and too wild to be adequately conveyed by conventional photography, too profoundly stimulative of the imagination to constrain with realism. And so animated cartoons have been a congenial fit with music, from the earliest Silly Symphonies to Fantasia and Yellow Submarine to a-ha; the medium allows for levels of abstraction, expression, and iconography unavailable to conventional representational film, bringing the emotional affect of the song front and center. Figures can stretch, transform, levitate, burst into flame, or crumble to fragments as the feelings of the moment demand. And, of course, cartoons make a perfect vehicle for the larger-than-life personas that musicians like to project — whether we’re talking stylized doppelgangers, or an out-and-out alter ego.

Gorillaz has taken the latter concept about as far as it can go, creating — with music videos and Jamie Hewlett’s artwork — a façade of fiction that never cracks. You’ll never see a Gorillaz video wherein the “real” Damon Albarn comes crashing out of the Paperverse to collapse tearfully in Dan the Automator’s living room. The Gorillaz characters have a vast and fully-realized backstory, dense enough to encompass a 300-page “biography.” One Eskimo doesn’t aim quite that high. In fact, judging by the website materials, they’ve barely aimed at all — because for the life of me, I can’t imagine who the target is…

Little Feather [is] a young woman Native whose tribe has given her a deep sense of joy and compassion for all things … She glides through life like a feather on a soft breeze. She loves to dance, to flow, and to move like music. To her, all things have a music of their own and she can dance to both a guitar or a quiet brook with equal joy.

Also, she loves you berry much.

Frankly, this stuff reads like the back-of-the-box text for My Little Pony; the animation, too, has a sweet, rounded edge, and looks to be pitched to young kids. But the record itself is straight adult contemporary — all Spanish guitar, piano, and polite trip-hop beats. “Simple Day” (download) sums up the One Eskimo sound, with its acoustic instrumentation, mellow and slightly melancholy sound, and concrete, observational lyrics. It’s pleasant and well-crafted, as is the animation. It seems almost a pity to point out that the one really adds nothing to the other. Whereas Gorillaz makes perfect sense because the outlandish bravura of the animation is matched by the gonzo energy of the music, One Eskimo just leaves me scratching my head, wondering what this is and who, exactly, it’s meant to be for — wondering who, precisely, heard this Dido-as a-boy disc and thought it needed the Banana Splits treatment.

One Eskimo is currently touring the States, and I hear they put on a pretty good show; perhaps not coincidentally, when they play live they leave their cartoon selves at home.

People love a contrast in proportions. That’s why so many great comedy teams consist of a fat guy and a skinny guy. And that’s why some entertainment stories have legs and some don’t. When a big-budget summer tentpole picture makes fistfuls of money, it’s of interest primarily only to the investors — it’s not a story of cultural importance. Same thing when a modest little indie movie underperforms at the box office; that’s business as usual. When your no-name indie quirkfest rakes in mad cash, though, it’s a heartwarming underdog story. And that’s nice. But when your super-ambitious would-be blockbuster goes down the hopper, maybe taking the studio with it — now that’s a story that people want to hear. Waterworld, Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar — these are films that have become legends, cited as cautionary tales by people who often haven’t seen a single frame of them.

Now, I have seen Delgo, to my sorrow — a movie which seems destined for a place in the same malefic pantheon — and while I have neither interest nor the expertise to discuss the financial implications of the movie, I do have to say: It’s ambitious, all right. Hugely so. You can see where all the money went. And you can also see exactly why it tanked. Delgo is a movie brimming with ideas, every one of them utterly boneheaded. It is that rare film whose aesthetic failure is nigh-absolute. There’s a horrified fascination to the spectacle, as you think of the smart, highly-skilled, well-intentioned people who made it, certain that they were leaving their mark on film history, that they were trailblazers, pioneers — and that the end result could be so fundamentally Wrong, in so many ways. All that hard work and talent, expended to create something so butt-ugly and unlikeable and morally dubious; forty million dollars to create a bold, exciting, immersive new world that looks like nothing so much as a series of screen caps from Fate. The sheer scale of the self-delusion is breathtaking.

The character designs above tell part of the story, here. There are four major races at play, but two exist only as undifferentiated hordes, like the Orcs in Lord of the Rings. The action, set in the mythical land of Jhamora, is driven by the invading Nohrin — there they are on the left, the ones with the dragonfly wings, bad chin beards and Judge Dredd-style body armor — and the aboriginal Lockni, the scaly types in the clay-dyed T-shirts and skinny jeans. It’s metalheads vs. hippies, in other words, and it ain’t subtle; the Lockni are “close to the earth,” and have an indigenous magic that lets them control the very stones. Hell, their leader is even named “Elder Marley,” which I’m sure the six ( ! ) credited screenwriters thought was very clever (SPOILER! It isn’t).

The Nohrin have relocated to Jhamora, the prologue informs us, because they’ve basically ruined their own homeland. “The land grew barren, depleted of essential resources,” the narrator (Sally Kellerman) tells us, and I stopped trusting the movie right there, two minutes in. Oh, the land just grew barren, did it? All by itself, now? Because that’s what land does, it just all of a sudden grows barren all of its own accord? Surely it’s not because somebody’s been engaged in generations of unsustainable land-management practices, or short-sighted development, or environmental despoilment, no; those essential resources, they just depleted themselves, and the land, it just… well, it just grew barren, is all. Well, now. That’s awfully convenient, isn’t it?

Self-serving propaganda aside, the Nohrin King Zahn (voiced, tragically, not by Steve Zahn but by Lou Gossett Jr.) “sent scouts to find a new homeland for his people.” The Lockni — sorry, “the humble Lockni [who] lived in peace” — roll out the welcome wagon, though I’m not sure why they’re so eager to buddy up with a mob who never learned what every animal knows, namely “Don’t shit where you eat.” Still, the Lockni try to be good neighbors, and the Nohrin swoop into Jhamora, bringing with them slash-and-burn agriculture, open-pit mining, and smallpox-infected blankets for all!

Well, no. But the Nohrin king does appoint his wicked sister Sedessa (voiced by the late Anne Bancroft and rendered as a mall-goth Bride of Frankenstein) as territorial governor, whereupon she promptly initiates her own Lockni Final Solution. The King — who, we are meant to understand, is a kindly, decent fellow — is naturally horrified, and orders Sedessa arrested, has her wings cut off, and exiles her. He is not, however, so busted up as to cancel the whole taking-over-Jhamora initiative; indeed, he carries through the relocation, institutes discriminatory segregation laws, and uses the Nohrin military to keep the peace.

Years pass, and Sedessa (and did you notice that “Sedessa” sounds a little like “sedition”? Is that a perfect name for a traitress, or what? Oh, Delgo, you so crazy), from her exile, plots revenge. Malcolm McDowell plays her catspaw in the Nohrin military, Colonel Raius (as in, “This fat paycheck will raius the bank balance of me, Malcolm McDowell, quite nicely”). The plot is eventually discovered by Val Kilmer, voicing the tough-talking, morally-conflicted Nohrin General Bogardus (a.k.a. “YouFuckingWishus”). To defeat Sadistica, DontBogartThatJointicus must join forces with the young Lockni hellraiser Delgo (Freddie Prinze Jr.) — hey, whaddya know, he is in this movie: I thought for a minute it was one of those nonsense titles, like Gerry — and his grating sidekick Filo, voiced, tragically, not by an actual sheet of delicious pastry dough but by the reliably-irritating Chris Kattan. Delgo, meanwhile, has fallen tepidly in love with a Nohrin princess voiced by Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Looking at the star power on display in that cast, I know what you’re thinking: What, Shelley Hack wasn’t available? They couldn’t get Adrian Zmed? Celebrity voice casting has been a part of animated features since the beginning, of course — the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Cliff Edwards, was a huge radio and recording star — but post-Robin Williams-in-Aladdin, things have achieved a singularity. It must be frustrating, being a voice actor in Hollywood. Not only do they get paid less than their visible counterparts; nowadays they’re losing work to slumming face-actors. The studios seem to have gotten it in their heads that every cartoon requires an all-star cast — even when the budget doesn’t allow for actual stars, thus defeating the entire purpose of hiring name actors in the first place. Casting a Tom Hanks or a Mel Gibson in an animated film puts bums in seats; casting a pleasant nonentity like Prinze or Jennifer Love Hewitt, not so much. Instead of hiring Chris Kattan and Eric Idle and then giving them nothing funny to work with, why not get, say, Tom Kenny or Charlie Adler for a fraction of the price, and at least be guaranteed a professional performance?

Anyhoo. The plot is uncovered, and Hippies and Metalheads learn to settle their differences to kick the asses of the Orc invaders, and they live happily ever after together in Jhamora. Seriously. That’s how it ends. Obviously, as apartheid parables go, Delgo is no District 9. Any questions about the inherent morality of the colonialist project are simply ignored. Colonialism itself is entirely blameless; the system is not at fault, only the actions of a convenient Few Bad Apples.

Delgo is aiming for uplift, of course, trying to send a message that groups can bridge their differences and work together for a common cause. But the noble Bogardus and the spunky Princess, even the righteous King, are inescapably oppressors — no less so than the murderous Sedessa. Oh, they’re not butchering Lockni personally, but that only adds hypocrisy to their sins; they get to reap all the benefits of privilege, while keeping their hands clean and their moral ground high. It’s maddening the way the film so thoroughly exonerates them, even eliding any hint that the Nohrin played any role in the environmental devastation of their homeland.

Delgo is a movie for white guys who will tell you, after three or four beers, that misplaced black anger is the real reason for the poor state of race relations in America. Why do they always have to bring up slavery? they will whine. It was a long time ago. None of us were even alive then. Besides, my grandparents came over after the Civil War. My family never even owned slaves. Why are they trying to make me feel bad for something that wasn’t my fault?

In the inevitable self-fellating DVD extras, the makers of Delgo harp on about the unique look of the film. And it is, indeed, unattractive in an utterly singular way. In that, Delgo is a movie of great depths. Beauty may be only skin deep, but ugliness goes right to the bone.

“I haven’t got much time,” Yancey tells me.

My head jerks so hard that the pencil falls out from behind my ear. “Jesus Fuck,” I splutter. “You’re fucking dying? Fuck, Yancey — ”

“Naaah,” she says. “I just haven’t got time. You know, for the book. Good thing it’s a quick read.”

She smirks. Last thing I need is Yancey giving me a hard time. But she’s a fictional character I created to act as an interlocutor for my review of Joe Pernice’s debut novel It Feels So Good When I Stop, so there’s not much I can do about it.

I start thinking about the day I finished It Feels So Good. It was a Saturday, muggy. The ceiling fan barely stirred the air. I was sprawled on the couch, and Elliott Smith was on the stereo. A bootleg. Something really obscure. Cassandra was in the kitchen, barefoot, cooking a pot of chili. She was wearing panties and a wifebeater with nothing underneath. There was a damp spot on the small of her back. She was chopping up two chipotle chilies; she liked it hot. If you know what I mean.

I closed the book and tried to imagine what Joe Pernice looked like. I’d heard of his musical projects, the Scud Mountain Boys and the Pernice Brothers, but I really only knew him from his novella Meat Is Murder. I’d liked that one, because of the way that it was about the record without actually being about the record. I wondered what his own music was like. His credentials as a listener were pretty impeccable. I set the book aside, then picked up my acoustic guitar and played a non-ironic cover of “Crazy Horses,” which reveals something fundamental about my character.

Cassandra brought me a bowl of chili and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t say anything, just smiled. Two hours previous, I’d had my tongue up her ass. The chili was chunky with beef and beans, and the white drifts of sour cream and cheddar were like the crests of waves breaking on a blood-red sea. This fucking chili was gorgeous. Pretty, even.

“Pretty fucking chilly” is also a fair description of It Feels So Good’s atmosphere. It’s set on Cape Cod, as autumn turns to winter, and it captures the bleakness of a tourist trap in the off-season, when there are no visitors to impress and the true emptiness of the place becomes oppressive. The time is the early 1990s. The unnamed narrator, after impulsively marrying his girlfriend, freaking out on his wedding night, and fleeing New York, ends up in an empty house owned by his erstwhile brother-in-law. He spends the rest of the book nominally trying to “get [his] shit in a pile” but effectively having a slow-motion breakdown, revisiting places he remembers from his childhood, reflecting on the missteps and fuck-ups that have brought him to his predicament; underemployment in a shitty college town, a half-assed musical career, periodic stabs at academia and responsibility. Mostly, though, he drifts, just letting things happen to him and hoping vainly for the best, maddeningly passive. He hasn’t even got the balls to be properly passive-aggressive; he’s Bartleby, minus the tragedy.

“You ever read this?” I call to Yancey. She’s getting dressed before we head out to the Smog show, and I’m passing the time by looking over her bookshelves. Lots of leftover college textbooks and anthologies that no human being ever read for fun. There’s a volume of Melville in my hand, one I’ve never heard of, called The Piazza Tales.

She pokes her head around the corner and squints at the book title. She shakes her head. “I liked the one with the big fish,” she says. Her hair is still wet. “It’s the queerest book ever.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Come on. Big white Dick bobbing out of the ocean, sperm everywhere, guys sharing beds. It’s a gay wet dream. And that’s a lot of seamen.” She shrugged. “What’s that one about?”

“Dunno,” I say. “It sounds like a cookbook for dyslexics.”

“And that,” says Yancey, “is how you do a fucking allusion.”

She turns away. I never know why she does shit like that. It’s because she’s a girl, I guess; and who the fuck can figure them out?

I start thinking about this time I was having sex with somebody. Yancey, maybe. Or Cassandra. It’s hard to tell. I was drinking heavily at the time, and also I seem to have become unstuck in time.

One time my band opened for Pigeonhed in this shitty little dive somewhere and afterwards Steve Fisk bought us beers and we talked about the music business. In my memory, Sweet Billy Pilgrim was on the jukebox, but that can’t be right. Wait, here’s a 2,000-word extract from my diary covering the event:

“Do you think it’s disingenuous for an author to have his characters pretend ignorance of something even as he flaunts his own knowledge of it?” Cassandra asked.

We were in the bathroom. She was shaving her legs in the tub and I was on the shitter reading the Phoenix. “Holy crap,” I said. “Foghat is touring again.”

“It bugs the shit out of me,” she said. “Like, if you’ve got a character who thinks she’s an avant-garde filmmaker, and she’s shooting with a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. And you’re waiting for the Sadie Benning namedrop, and it never comes.”

“I have got to get tickets for this,” I said. Cassandra was still talking. About something, I don’t know.

“And this is in a book that has some kind of name-dropping on every fucking page,” she said. “That’s bullshit. That’s like, you’re lead character does giant paintings of Marilyn Monroe, and somehow Andy Warhol’s name never comes up once.”

I reached for the toilet paper. What the fuck does disingenuous mean, anyway? “You know,” I said, “I think I’m gonna blow off your birthday party that we planned, with your boss and your rich parents — the one where you were going to announce your promotion and your pregnancy. I’m just gonna go to the Foghat show with Eddie, instead.”

She leaned out of the tub and reached over between my legs. “Marry me,” she said. Girls. Who can figure them?

Yancey and I are sitting in her pickup truck, which she drives because she is a salt-of-the-earth working-class person. Prince is on the radio, singing “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” The truck is rolling down a dead-end street. Yancey lights two cigarettes at once and smokes them both down to a nub in a single drag.

“Why the fuck are we listening to Prince, anyway?” I say.

Yancey shrugs. “Guy’s a fucking recluse, right? Never leaves his studio except to tour? So the odds are good he’s not gonna come traipsing down here and give us a five-page cameo.”

Her voice is throaty and her accent is strong. She talks like a plumber. A hot, messed-up, drunk plumber.

The truck is rolling faster. The road is uneven. “Would it explain anything if he did?” I say.

She shrugs again. She’s not holding onto the wheel. “I mean, 1999 came and went, and the world didn’t end. It was kinda disappointing.”

“All that apocalyptic dread, and nothing to show for it,” I say. The truck is lurching now, and I feel sick.

“And no more excuses, either,” she laughs. “You fuck up, you fail at being a grow-up, you try being a kid again and fail at that — after a while you’re counting on the world to end. And then it doesn’t, and where are you?”

The trees are a blur. My head is pounding. “Are we still talking about the same thing?” I ask.

And then the truck stops. Doesn’t end. Stops.