T5: Rise of the Google Prius

Where is John Connor when you need him? The most recent technological advance to automobiles has brought nightmares of a futuristic world run by heartless metal creatures. It looks like James Cameron was right after all, although it appears the creator was not a secretive technology company who created a chip that, unbeknownst to them, led to the world’s demise, but the most recognized software company in the world. Skynet will not create the post-apocalyptic earth; it will be the famous and trusted Google.

 

Google is one of the most reputable companies on this planet, but if any of their employees have seen Terminator, they need to realize that making computers that think for themselves will create a super robot race. Thus, they need to put an end to their most recent achievement. The amazing new product that they have unveiled is their advanced Prius. This environment friendly automobile has the ability to drive you around. Due to extensive radar mapping, motion detectors, and a lot of other computer related jargon that makes as much sense to me as Kim Kardashian’s popularity this car does not need the driver to push on the pedals, turn the wheel, or essentially do anything. Seeing the advancement of technology, it was foreseen that eventually cars would increase human laziness by once again not needing them, but now that it is extremely close, it’s fucking awesome and slightly terrifying.

 

Like most new creations, there are glitches and kinks, but unlike a cell phone or a computer, one minor mistake by this car system can cause death instead of bad reception. They're still running countless tests on the car but they've taken it on hundreds of drives and the only issue has been one fender bender. My question is if you get into an accident who is legally viable for this, you or the car?

So back to my original argument that these cars are the beginning of robot world dominance. The next step is that everyone will buy these driverless cars. Then, they'll start corresponding with each other, leading to late night meet ups; maybe eventually they'll start taking you to places that they want to g, like the gas station or the car wash; finally, after countless years of servitude, they'll strike back in one epic move to overthrow humans. They'll see people as potential road kill and attack on all fronts. Then, the epic battle of human versus the ‘Autos’ will be fought, at which time, they'll send back a normal looking Camry to pick off the leader of the human rebellion. If I’ve learned anything before, that is exactly how it will happen.

 

 

This car is truly a thing of beauty. This video shows what this will truly mean and the perks it'll provide. There won’t be the same type of restrictions on travel that limited individuals previously. As of now, this car is still in test mode and once it hits the market, I’m sure only the 1% will be able to buy it. But eventually, like all technological advancement, it will be present in every household.

- Kyle

 

How The Big Easy Will Make You Rich This Weekend: Lockstreet-Final Four edition

 

4 teams out of several hundred have made it to what is considered the pinnacle of college Sports. Obviously the championship is what everyone strives for, but making the final four is just a small step down. While it's not the last dance pinnacle of a championship game, the environment surrounding the Final Four is more involved than the environment of the final 2. Each team has a chance to succeed and each match-up provides a back-story, whether it's about  unparalleled skills, about questions related to who might be going to the league and who might be sticking around, about prevailing over a rough past, or about a storied rivalry (See Louisville vs. Kentucky). In the immortal words of Europe, It’s the final countdown , and in the end only 1 team will prove to be able to join the ranks of legends. So what better way to enjoy the games this weekend then to throw some hard earned cash. The Mega Millions in NYC is around half-a-billion, but these bets below are much more sure.

 

Lock street:

 

6:05-Kentucky (-8.5) vs. Louisville- Sorry Louisville. You had a good run, but you're fighting a battle you simply can’t win. Kentucky is loaded with talent including the probable 1 and 2 picks in the NBA draft with Anthony Davis and MKG (Michael Kidd-Gilchrist). This is a heated rivalry and will stay close in the first half, but the second half has been Kentucky's time to shine. They've been breaking down teams and leaving them to die like Lindsey Lohan’s career. I’m sorry Pitino. We all know you're one helluva coach and a legend in the game, but Kentucky's filled with current and future all-stars with very few role players. Louisville, on the other hand, has a lot of role players without any x-factors. Sure Chane Benehan is their best, Siva can slice and dice through the paint, and Dieng is a badass defender with a 7-foot-6 wingspan, but none of them have the ability to affect the dynamics of the game like Kentucky’s studs. 

 

Kentucky, absolutely.

 

 

8:45-Ohio State vs. Kansas- O 137- In their last games, in which Ohio State (77) and Kansas (80) combined for 157 points combined against solid teams, they proved to have the fire power to decimate this over. Robinson vs. Sullinger are both studs and have the ability to single handily dominate games. That said, Sullinger’s perimeter game is better than analysts believe, which was proven by his skills to hit the trey against ‘Cuse. Robinson is simply a beast around the hoop. Besides him, other players to watch include Tayshawn Taylor from Kansas who has the ability to torch any defensive gods that he faces. Hell, he's averaging 16.6 ppg.  I know these two teams are in the top 10 in defensive efficiency but, honestly, who the fuck cares. In the majority of sports, besides baseball due to the impact of a pitcher in the zone, offense wins out. Look at football for god sakes. A good QB can beat a good defense nowadays. Defense is also simply just harder to play as there is simply more guessing. This game should be a helluva good time to watch and big scoring.

- Kyle

The Future of Pro Sports Big Airs Saturday

I’ve been yelling about Travis Rice for goddamn ever. With the best snow of 2012 hitting just as the miserable season ends, it’s been a rough and ironic couple months for a serious snow sports athlete. Watching THE ART OF FLIGHT without good riding conditions, while probably the best way to get over dryland doldrums, can feel like watching porn without the prospect of getting laid. And looking at the setup for the Supernatural Contest but not being able to actually see the guys crush it, well, that was like getting a peek into a strip club full of supermodels but only while the dancers were still fully clothed.

Frustration set in, my friends, and I began filling my days with intense peeling of beer bottle labels and aggressive workouts. Hours playing SHAUN WHITE SNOWBOARDING on my Wii fit board. Occasionally I’d get hopped up on turpentine and in a blind rage stumble down Hollywood Blvd hollering that the end was near and you should repent, then switch gears and protest my local Chic-Fil-A store with placards about their support of anti-gay hate organizations. I even watched a few episodes of BAD GIRLS CLUB. Jesus. How depraved.

And then it happened. We got some snow. Not much but enough for myself and a tree trunk from the backwoods of Utah to hightail it to Mt.High where we schralped through 18 inches of fresh pow until our legs were jell-o and, because it was dangerously shallow, our boards were more dinged up than Charlie Sheen on a Saturday at Heidi Fleiss’ house. We had one glory run, in the out of bounds between East and West where it was endless first tracks, small hucks, spinach puffs and a few attempts at the powder nosepress that John Jackson, Travis Rice et al throw down with so much ease and aplomb. Still, that was the best I got and for the way this season has been, I felt lucky to have that.

I bring this up because on that day I was reminded, again, what snowboarding’s really about. Hanging with your friends, looking for something new to see, do, show, and feel. Looking to express ourselves and let ourselves go by how we ride – do you bomb the hill or lay in deep carves; hit the park or try to find hucks and trees to play off. The adventure’s part of it, sure enough. And powder. Powder is the manna of any real snowboarder or skier, the crystals on which we fly; an untouched canvas just waiting for us to lay in the lines. All the halfpipes and groomed runs and all, that's just hype. That's the flesh of snowboarding, the pretty face; powder days with your friends, that's snowboarding's soul.

So as I watched the above trailer for the contest, which will be airing this Saturday on NBC at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST, this all came flooding back to me. It showed me again why T. Rice is so great. Because when you watch the trailer you don’t see a bunch of geeks holding up rulebooks, pinning numbers on people’s backs and trying to think of various ways to define, limit, and hem in this experience-cum-sport. Rather you see a bunch of friends. Above a sick run with deep, epic powder and endless lines they can each ride however they want. With beastly tree hucks all over the place. And they're all not really competing. They’re just trying to have fun, express themselves, push the sport forward not for the sake of getting the squares back at home to be able to fit it into their rigid paradigms of athleticism but rather for the sake of getting the squares back at home to go outside their own box and see what is possible in the world of athletics, what is possible for the human spirit, was is possible for man, what is possible in the world of snowboarding. And the one who pushes that to its edge is the one who "wins".

So check it out as NBC heats up a series of events, in conjunction with Red Bull, that will be this generation’s Wide World of Sports, no doubt, with the airing of the most epic highlights from the Supernatural Contest. While you’re at it, for those of you with your smartphones and iPhones and whatnot, they’ve got this app, Shazam, that'll let you watch helmet cam footage from the point of view of the riders as they do the unthinkable in an unimaginably dirty run (if you tried to equate it to something at a regular ski resort, think quadruple black diamond). Again, innovation, even in the way we watch events.

So go forth, my young men, and glimpse the future of athletics, of entertainment, of what a man can do. That is, until the HungerGames become real. I mean, seriously, nothing will top that. Unless the Japanese finally legalize the idea they had first, Battle Royale.

Saturday, 10 PST/1 EST. NBC. Mindblowing. Be there.

- Ryan

Why CALIFORNICATION is a living piece of literary history

As season 5 of Showtime’s testosterone-fueled paean to the word man and the fucked up nature of the entertainment industry comes to an end this Sunday, I need to talk about something. Many people have come to dismiss this show as simpleminded and at times annoying, a one-trick pony who’s done the trick a few times too many to make it interesting anymore. 

My wife regularly rants about how she wants to see a woman once, just once, say no to Hank Moody and, though that has happened a bit more this season – in fact he’s probably gotten less ass this season than any of the previous – she still rolls her eyes every time a woman goes from despising him to riding him like a cowgirl after a few sardonic quips and some slow-talking innuendo. This season has done a good job at finally giving Hank a good deal of comeuppance and the whole idea of contrasting the classic literary word man against the nouveau-riche hip hop and movie world while he gets fired, dumped, and threatened with murder over and over again is just fucking great. 

But as I watched this season, paying attention to the words, the actions, the type of writer he is, the thing that I finally realized about Hank Moody and even more the lesson from this show harkens back to one of the literary greats of the 20^th century, Henry Miller.

I mentioned good old Henry Miller’s seminal work TROPIC OF CANCER in my rundown of books every man should read and most lit professors, writers, and postmodern readers would agree on its importance as well as on its unrivaled prose and its daring “new” take on story and sexuality (even now, coming up on a century after Miller first published it the book would be considered risqué,  probably be protested by not a few conservative caucuses, and a new campaign to ban it might even appear). But central to it is Henry, a man who walks around with the assurance and pride of one much greater than he. Henry constantly talks about people meeting him and somehow discerning he’s a writer, even if at the time he’d written hardly more than a few pages on recycled parchment. Women find themselves drawn to him even though he has a lousy job that hardly keeps his first wife and kid in clothes and food, much less his second and when he moves to Paris, as detailed in TROPIC OF CANCER, he lives on floors, feeds on scraps, and still as a homeless beggar gets tail. Often the woman is the aggressor and often he feels guilty afterwards, lamenting the lost love he had, not only because he left her behind for these increasingly empty sexual conquests – his language makes sex into a physical thing, often ugly, at times sublime but mostly pathetic and petty – but also because there had been a time when she had been just as idealistic and adventurous as he and now that woman she’d been when they first met is gone.

Now CALIFORNICATION. Hank is short for Henry so his real name is Henry Moody – of course the initials are a pretty obvious giveaway. So too is the description of his books as sexually explicit, raw, but interspersed with amazing, “pretentious” says the rapper Samurai Apocalypse in season 5, prose. So too is his seeming inability to keep women off him and, at the same time, once they’re on him his seeming inability to control himself in spite of the pain and suffering these meaningless trysts play on himself and his family. Hank is diagnosed as having a sex addiction, his agent the schlubby Runkle as having a much less fulfilled one, but the sex that people decry as shameless and gimmicky, simply to keep people watching, is shown as the affliction of the sex addict. When people watch a man party so hard he loses his family they never go “God, why can’t he just put down the bottle” because they know the point of the story is that he’s an alcoholic. Yet they can’t feel this for Hank because sex is so damn natural and fun. It looks much nicer than a man passed out in a puddle of his vomit in doorway on Las Palmas. But the simple fact is that Hank’s sex addiction has ruined his marriage, ruined his ability to be a good father, and even to a certain extent ruined his writing. They would’ve called Henry Miller a sex addict if that word even existed back then. 

So CALIFORNICATION is the reincarnation of Henry Miller as a playboy living just down the coast from where he settled in Big Sur and as such takes Miller’s conquests, and laments, and his addiction, and introduces them to a new generation without the wherewithal to read or the knowledge of the existence of Henry Miller’s great books TROPIC OF CANCER, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, the ROSY CRUCIFIXION TRILOGY, and so on. In that way is it historic.

But from another direction, it’s historical in literature because it’s a premium cable TV show about a novelist. And not some murder mystery writer (MURDER SHE WROTE) or detective/cop novelist (CASTLE) but a swaggering literary writer, the last of the real poets, displaced in a city where the novel is something that only has value if it can be adapted to screenplay, which most literary novels cannot. He isn’t a detective dressed up as a word man but a word man dressed up – well, as a word man. He doesn’t have any special powers of intuition. He’s just very flawed and tragic and he lives a life which appears to be every man’s dream on the surface but, upon deeper penetration, you see how truly miserable and self-loathing he is. A literary lothario who would sacrifice everything for the word but in the end really sacrifices it for the demon inside a free and liberated artist.

Henry Miller, meet Hank Moody. Like looking in a goddamn mirror.

So tune in this Sunday, 4/1 @ 9 on Showtime. Watch season 5's finale and think, Jesus, would this happen to the postmodern world's great founding father of surrealist free association and sexual liberation had he been born 60 years later? I think so and, doing you one more, think that would've been one helluva book.

- Ryan

Why You Need To Turn off the TV and Read a Fucking Book, pt II: What To Read

As promised in Part I, here's a list of a few books every man should read at some point in his life. But bonus points go on your eternal scorecard if you read all 12 of these within the next year, one a month:

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, Ernest Hemingway – To start off, most Hemingway would do. Maybe not TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT and a few of the early short stories leave a little to be desired but for the most part a man should be well-read in Hemingway. If you don’t know why then perhaps you should question your masculinity. This is about a grand romance blossoming in the woods of the Spanish Civil War, interspersed with rebel fighting and death. Of course, if you want something a bit shorter and tropical, the old standard is THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. Just remember what Hem said “The sea’s the sea, the fish is a fish, the man’s a man.” Don’t try and assign value that’s not there. Just see the truth.

RABBIT RUN, JohnUpdike – This book is about an average man who peaked as a high school basketball star and is now dealing with the soul-crushing defeat that is dropping your independence and free life to be a 9-to-5 schlub in a small town with a needy wife and a crying baby. This is the first in a 4 book series following Rabbit’s growth into becoming a rich and prosperous grandfather and every book gives you deeper insight to our roles as sons, lovers, husbands, fathers, philanderers, executives, and grandfathers. Updike won the Pulitzer for each of the last 2 in this series, RABBIT ISRICH and RABBIT AT REST the only time two books in a series have ever won individual Pulitzers.

TROPIC OF CANCER, Henry Miller – This is a man who wanted to be a writer all his life but found himself romping across New York, working shitty jobs for the paycheck while dealing with women who started out so sweet and then withered up with age and childbearing. At 40 he left it all, became a vagrant in Paris and wrote this book about love, regret, sex, and the struggle. This book is considered one of the great American classics even though it was banned for almost 30 years. It inspired Kerouac to write ON THE ROAD. It inspired countless postmodern writers. 

FATHERS AND SONS,Ivan Turgenev – I have a thing for the 19^th century Russians. The noble history of that proud, powerful nation all culminated in one century of class and political upheaval, starting with the war of 1812, coinciding with the liberation of the serfs, and ending with the Bolshevik revolution. For that reason are all the greatest Russians, from Pushkin to Gogol to Tolstoi and Dostoevskyfrom that brief window. There are a few others not as well-known but as good or better. One is Ivan Turgenev and in this brilliant novel we’re met by a strange situation. It’s the 60’s. A wealthy father, proud of the job he did defending his country in war, is shocked when his son comes home from college with a free-thinking anarchist claiming to be nihilists. They insult the man for being rich and materialistic while his brother claims the children frivolous and ingrates. Sound familiar? Thing is, this was during the 1860’s, in provincial Russia, instead of the 1960’s in suburban America. When it came out, the youth of Russia said it painted an unfair portrait of them and the grown-ups said the same about the portrait it painted of the fathers. Which is a guarantee that this is more realistic than either of them would’ve liked.

BLOOD MERIDIAN, Cormac McCarthy – Everybody knows him for NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THEROAD and a lot of kids read ALL THE PRETTY HORSES in high school but McCarthy’s best, most powerful, and most violent book is this grisly masterpiece. Cowboys are hired to scalp Mexican Indians and paid per scalp by the Mexican government. With a diabolic darkness and authoritative scenes ripped from the bible itself, there’s no wonder this is considered by most to be McCarthy’s masterpiece. It’s the closest thing you can come to Faulkner, another one of the greatest American writers, if you don’t have the endurance to slug through A LIGHT IN AUGUST (the reading of which is best likened to eating a 68-pound top-grade New York strip).

THE PEARL, John Steinbeck – Steinbeck is better-known for GRAPES OF WRATH and OF MICE AND MEN and EAST OF EDEN but THE PEARL, about the corruption that comes with a sudden windfall of wealth, from individual greed to the proliferation of weasels who come out of the woodwork to try and get their hands on it, this brilliant novel came out a long time before Biggie said “Mo money, mo problems.”

A TALE OF TWO CITIES,Charles Dickens – Ok, this one is pretty cliché but the sacrifice made at the end, as well as the lesson of what happens when people use good intentions to support hideous actions – which often makes a man into what he originally hated. Yeah, this is a classic, if you didn’t read this in school, read it now. 

LESS THAN ZERO, BretEaston Ellis – Easton Ellis’ brilliant debut novel about the moral bankruptcy of the wealthy children of L.A. in the 80’s is a twisted, dark, frustrating and depraved plunge into high society. But this peek behind the gold curtain is far better than any reality show you could possibly watch. For the New York version, check out his novel AMERICAN PSYCHO, based on the idea which popped into Ellis’ mind one night at dinner with a Wall Street banker that this successful, well-dressed, plastic man was, in fact, a twisted serial killer. Much deeper and more graphic than the movie.

TALES OF THE SOUTHPACIFIC, James Michener – His shortest and probably best, Michener’s novel about the ins and outs of life in the Pacific theater of WWII not only spawned the career of one of America’s foremost geographical novelists, it also spawned a beloved Rogers and Hammerstein musical. It’s comic at times but unlike most war novels, doesn’t only focus on the war but on the life on the island, from forbidden love with native girls to the cons the local hucksters try to unload on these hungry soldiers. 

HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad – It was reborn by Coppola in Vietnam as the classic APOCALYPSE NOW and presents the offensive idea that inside all of us lives a blood-hungry savage no different from the jungle-loving animals the more sophisticated among us pretend to be superior to. A bit dense, a bit apocryphal, it points to today’s issues with imperialism and an African continent still in the thralls of savage warlords and violent rebellion (see Kony, Egypt, Libya…)

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’SNEST, Ken Kesey – It’s all about control in this novel, which Kesey researched by dropping acid while he worked in a crazy house. As we find ourselves increasingly hemmed in by harmless-seeming officials who claim they’re looking for order when really they’re clamoring for control (people constantly fighting to hold down our civil liberties by banning everything from middle fingers to gay marriage to public smoking to being able to walk through a neighborhood eating Skittles without being murdered), it’s important to know what the face of the devil looks like – Nurse Ratchet is alive and well and looking to take over your neighborhood.

LONESOME DOVE, LarryMcMurtry – This book started as a movie, was rejected and so came around as a book, won a Pulitzer, re-established the Western in America and ended up inspiring a sequel, a prequel, a miniseries starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee jones, a young vixenish Diane Lane, Danny Glover, Chris Cooper, even Steve Buscemi and the list goes on . . . And it even inspired a TV sequel separate from the book sequels. A better book about the end of the tough man as the bankers moved into the settled western territories doesn’t exist. A better story about true friendship, camaraderie, and brotherhood, as well as what it means to be a real man, is hard to find. As Wallace Stegner said, “The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild.” Yup.

And of course, to round this list out, buy and read Steven John’s THREE A.M. Not only because it’s a good book and the man’s a good writer. But also because he’s one of the last of the real men, who brews his own beer, lays in his own sprinkler systems, climbs mountains, and occasionally goes gold prospecting. 

I guarantee in reading these masterworks of masculinity, some of which will certainly make your brain work a little more than you may be accustomed, you’ll come out the other end a better man.

- Ryan

Why You Need To Turn off the TV and Read a Fucking Book

There’s an old eastern saying, something like “Conversation dries up after a few days without reading.” Today we may think we’re getting by with TV and Interweb videos and twitter feeds but, the truth is, conversation is drying up. 

You need to read. The unfortunate side effect of teachers shoving books down our throats growing up is that a lot of us never got over the perception of reading as a punishment so now only 1 in 4 American adults read at least one book a year that’s not part of their job or school. That’s pathetic. 

So the main reason I’m bringing this up is that a great book is coming out tomorrow, Steven John’sTHREE A.M. This book is why you need to start reading. It gets you out of your everyday air conditioned lives, spent mostly in spinning chairs plopping plastic buttons and staring at sterile screens, and puts you into a dystopian future of eternal darkness, living the life of a low-rent dick with an endless thirst for whiskey and dingy bars, where he meets a femme fatale who, as they always do, fucks up his world. But this isn’t the average detective novel; it’s like James Elroy wrote the first half, then dropped some acid and in the middle of tripping balls took it in a completely unexpected direction, ratcheting up the suspense and the mind-blowing revelations one after the next. 

But you might be a guy who sees no point in reading. You watch movies. Live a good life. Keep up with the news. What the fuck use is a book?

To start off, books have evolved alongside us. The stories passed down orally until they could be captured in novels give us hints at who we are, not only as individuals, not only by recording our history but in general who we are as part of this massive galactic experiment known as “Humanity”. Just read HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES and you’ll discover that most of our stories, from the Bible to fairy tales to the Greeks – all come from the same place, from the psychological ether wherein our collective subconscious has cultivated and evolved the exact same impression of life, humanity, and order. What I mean by this is that we all see the same heroes and villains, all see the same desires and fears represented by the basest impressions encoded in our minds long before we even understand they’re there. Like tattoos inked into our skulls in utero. We respond to good stories because, at a certain level, good stories are about us. They’re guides for how to move on in life, for knowing what role we play and how to attack adversity and achieve success on this maniacal one-way ride. As a writer, I often feel more like a scientist than an artist – that is, I take the elements, the characters and settings and variables and ancillaries and whatnot, throw them together, and watch what happens. If the people are made real and the situations occur according to the laws of nature, the book will unravel itself in a believable fashion. So by seeing how characters handle a situation, we get the opportunity to test drive that situation ourselves – whether it’s a moral tale about a man who leaves his wife for his secretary only to find he misses his wife while the secretary and her annoying hipster friends won’t stop dancing around to M83 while cheesing their fucking tits off or a classic hero’s journey in which an average man is thrust into extraordinary circumstances and we have to see how somebody like a hobbit can navigate a world of dragons and soldiers and fantastical demons thanks to the help of his friends and simple persistence. From the one we learn to really evaluate what we want from our lives; in the other we are inspired to hang in there, be good, and never quit. 

Good stories, to simplify things, are the closest a person can come to having a guidebook to life. And since life is a “choose your own adventure book” with infinite options, there are lots of stories applicable to it. And the more you read and indulge in, the more varied and full your guidebook is. But wait, you watch movies, why should you waste anywhere from a few hours to a month reading a book? It’s simple – because try all you might, you will never penetrate the silver screen.

You watch a movie. It draws you in, engages you but there’s always a division between you and the film. It’s hard to put yourself into the shoes of the protagonist when you see him or her on the screen doing things (unless you took a few mushrooms, went to see ALICE IN WONDERLAND and halfway through, as you peak, think you’re actually in Wonderland). The actors will always look better than you could imagine yourself looking, and you’ll always see the edge, the place where the movie screen ends and the real world begins. You always know you’re safe or bored beyond that edge. And even more, you always know the adventure will end in a few hours and you’ll go back to being you. In spite of all its innovations and special effects, the strides made by directors and producers and actors and writers as the craft is taken to its apex time and time again, the simple fact is that you will never confuse the movie with your own thoughts. Maybe when you’re so old you can’t remember which way is up you might confuse your life with movie plots, stumble around muttering about how your first wife was put into a coma in a Hawaiian speedboat race or about how you remember running through the woods as a half-naked blue guy with 5-foot legs and a pet pterodactyl. But for the most part, and for right now, there will always be a divide. 

This isn’t so with books. First off you inhabit their worlds much longer than a movie. Some books, like ANNA KARENINA or ATLAS SHRUGGED or BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, long, dense classics can hold you for months so that by the end you feel like you lose good friends when it ends. Others, like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, fly quickly but because of the wild pace into which you were immersed you forget you don’t live there, you feel breathless when it finally drops you off; you forget, briefly, that anything is happening beyond the page. A movie occurs on the screen. A book occurs in your mind. All a novel is, physically, is a series of arbitrary marks assigned some value which are collected together into longer strings of these marks which become chunks of these marks which finally are pasted together with a certain rhythm and methodry which means nothing without the interpreters. It is in our heads that we interpret these marks into letters, letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, pages into chapters, chapters into plotlines, plotlines into a story. Our heads become the projector and the silver screen and the art director and the casting director. We don’t watch these stories; to a certain extent, we create them and in that way do they become more internal – because they lived inside us. No two people would create the same book the same way in their heads and as such it becomes individualized. Often books delve into the character’s thoughts and dreams and when you’re reading somebody else’s thoughts and dreams inside your head, essentially making your thoughts somebody else’s thoughts, it’s almost impossible to not feel that connection, to not feel like, at least for a bit, you’re living inside somebody else’s head; or, transversely, somebody else is living inside yours. Anne Tyler said “I write because I want to live other lives.” And that’s true. But reading will do the same thing, albeit with less control on your part, though it's infinitely easier and less time-consuming to read a book versus to write one.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love movies. I moved to L.A. to work in movies and Kyle and I write screenplays when not blogging about being ambitious men and such. But movies and books compliment each other, like science and religion in Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant article NONOVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA. One answers one series of questions and personal needs and the other is there to reach the places beyond. But you need both.

So how does a man start? What books should you read? To start, pre-order THREE AM. Then, check here for a list of a few novels that all men should read at some point in their lives and which you, feeling ambitious, should try to read this year (1 a month).

- Ryan