Nik's Unheralded Albums #5: "The Lost Boys" Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

When a soundtrack is at its peak, it evokes a movie but also kind of surpasses it -- you listen to the crashing cadences of Strauss for "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the jangly retro hits of the "Rushmore" soundtrack, and you find yourself reliving your favorite bits of the movie, but you also kind of create an idealized version of it in your head. It turns out "Top Gun" is actually a kind of terrible movie if you watch it today without the affections of nostalgia, but man, whenever I hear Kenny Loggins sing "Danger Zone," I'm 15 again and feel a spontaneous quiver of excitement, as a movie that's way better than the actual "Top Gun" ever was unspools in my brain.

Which brings me to "The Lost Boys," the 1987 teen vampire movie that chews up "Twilight" and spits it out in gory little pieces. An early work by "Batman & Robin" auteur Joel Schumacher, it's all smoke machines, hair-spray fashion and pouty angst, but it's still actually a heck of a lot of fun. And the soundtrack is a tasty slab of vintage '80s bombast and cheese, one I have a rather unaccountable affection for. Unlike a lot of the big '80s movie soundtracks it doesn't boast wall-to-wall hits like "Footloose" or "Dirty Dancing" did, and your biggest stars are INXS and Echo and the Bunnymen. (If they'd paid better, you'd have thought they could've gotten Depeche Mode and Sisters of Mercy to sing on this thing.)

But "The Lost Boys" soundtrack in its sunglasses-at-night sweep perfectly captures the glossy feel of the movie, which was Goth without the gloom, sexy without being nasty about it. Jason Patric, an evil pre-Jack Bauer Kiefer Sutherland and Jami Gertz brood a lot and the two Coreys provide comic relief. Bill from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" plays a vampire. It features one of the great cinematic closing lines. But it's glossy trash, of course.

Lou Gramm's screeching anthem "Lost in the Shadows" pops up several times in the movie -- I particularly like the breathy urgency he puts in as he sings against the beat. Gerald McCann's theme song "Cry Little Sister" is melodramatic and gaspy Harlequin romance Goth. The marvelous cover of The Doors' tune "People are Strange" by Echo and the Bunnymen nicely captures the movie's tone of parody mixed with menace. Another cover tune I've always liked here is Roger Daltrey's take on Elton John's "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me." (A song tailor-made for vampire flicks.)

Bodybuilder/sax man Thomas Capello's bizarre scene singing "I Still Believe" is so insanely homoerotic and over-the-top in the flick that it spawned a "Saturday Night Live" parody decades after the movie. (Seriously, why didn't someone tell the guy to put a shirt on at least during the filming of this scene?) But while you can't watch that scene without giggling, the actual song itself isn't terrible, in a Huey Lewis if he were a bodybuilder kind of way.

But sometimes a big slab of cheesy music from your youth is what you need. I haul out the Journey's "Greatest Hits" disc sometimes and still feel my blood start pumping when Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" theme music from "Rocky III" rings out. "The Lost Boys" soundtrack sold less copies than "Top Gun" and "Flashdance" did but in some way I'd call it the perfect '80s movie soundtrack -- very little irony, lots of bombast, and hooks that may leave you feeling a bit of guilty pleasure but still won't quite stop echoing around your brain.

Superheroes I love #9: The West Coast Avengers

This time out, rather than one particular hero, let's look at a whole team of them that I always had a thing for.
 
Who: The West Coast Avengers were the '80s "spin-off" Avengers comic, based in California and led by one of my favorite Avengers, loudmouthed but goodhearted archer Hawkeye. The team also included at its start Hawk's wife Mockingbird, Iron Man, Wonder Man and Tigra, all set up in a former Hollywood star's mansion and fighting crime on the West Coast -- which seemed quite a novelty at a time when 99% of comic book superheroes seem to live in Manhattan. Being a Californian myself, the WCA, as they were known, felt like "my" team. 
 
Why I dig: The West Coast Avengers were the underdogs of the Avengers franchise, lacking the big heroes (except for Iron Man, but his involvement seemed half-hearted) but scrappy and amiable. They'd battle bizarrely goofy villains like Master Pandemonium, whose limbs popped off at will; Razorfist, a guy whose fists were both replaced by large knives (which would seem to make daily life outside superhero battles rather unpleasant), or Cactus, who was, yes, a sentient walking cactus. Not exactly Dr. Doom.

The book had two key runs -- a colourful, high-action era written by Steve Englehart and drawn mostly by Al Milgrom, and a more modern, grim 'n' gritty take by John Byrne for a dozen issues or so. I also really love the original miniseries written by Roger Stern which introduces the team and is probably the best single story the book ever had; a team of novice and insecure Avengers move to California and end up fighting one of the world's strongest villains.
 
The ongoing book had its bumpy road, and charms  often mired in kitsch -- Wonder Man's almost uniformly horrible costumes, Tigra's bimbo supreme troubles, Hawkeye's hearty temper tantrums, the one-note approach to much of the characteristation. (The West Coast Avengers were generally a whiny lot.) Englehart is going for a very silver age tone, which makes the book look almost childish sometimes. The arguable highlight of Englehart's run is the twisting 7-part "Lost in Time" saga, which splits up the entire team over time and ends up juggling several different story threads at once in a fun tour of Marvel Comics history. The team expanded to include other interesting members or quasi-members like Thing, Firebird and Moon Knight.
 
John Byrne came along after the book had been puttering along for a few years and promised to do his patented "reimagining" and revitalize it. Now, I loved Byrne's work on the book at the time -- his art, bold and dynamic, was a huge improvement -- but read today, it's got problems. He relied on shock over sensible plotting -- the entire "Vision Quest" arc which systematically destroyed the long-running happy Vision and Scarlet Witch marriage, for instance, has left both once-beloved characters pretty much screwed up to this day. There's a lot of changes over his short run, and it's still exciting stuff to read, but Byrne failed to really follow through with any of it, with many subplots just trailing off. The shortened nature of his run over an editorial dispute on the book leaves it lacking. Yet a lot of the changes still echo more than 20 years later -- turning Scarlet Witch into a raving nutter, for instance, or the goofy fun Great Lakes Avengers.
 
I didn't really follow the WCA after Byrne left -- the few issues I've read after that were almost uniformly terrible. The book ended with #102 in 1994 and was replaced by the "This is why 1990s comics sucked" poster child book Force Works. But for a little while, West Coast Avengers was a fun superhero team book, not one that changed the world by any means, but its easygoing camaraderie and sense of fun make it memorable. And how can you not love a B-level superhero team who inspire an entire groovy rap album?
 

Movie review: Thor

It's strange for a 30-year comic book geek to admit, but I never really much cared for Thor. When I was in my younger avid collecting days there were only a few characters whose books I never bought, and one of 'em was Thor. The long hair, the bare arms, the high-faluting fancy talk? It all seemed too lame to me.

But yet Thor is a compelling character, which took me a while to realize -- a god who walks among men, caught between two worlds, and now that I'm less of a nerdy fanboy I've found some very good Thor comics such as the legendary ones by Walt Simonson and the sturdy originals by Lee and Kirby. The highly entertaining new movie "Thor" reminds me a lot of "Iron Man" -- it takes a B-grade hero who's been in far more mediocre comics than truly great ones over his 50-year history and distills it down to its essence.

"Thor" combines culture clash with smashing action and adventure and feels like something rather new among the current glut of comic movies. It's not a story of some humble nerdy type who learns to become a hero. It's got equal elements of Lord of the Rings-style fantasy and superhero action. It's a tale of a god who learns humility, wrapped up in lots of family drama dynamics and good old frost giant-smashing. It's got a good solid sense of humor and whimsy which you kind of need when dealing with Norse gods throwing giant hammers about, yet it knows when to pile on the serious as well.

What I liked:
I wasn't sure about casting relative unknown Chris Hemsworth as Thor, but he pretty much knocks it out of the park in a starmaking performance -- rather than having the character speak the typical mangled Elizabethan style that the comic did for years, he adopts a more general formal tone. The scenes where Thor is stranded, powerless, in a small New Mexico town are great culture clash fun.

A relentlessly scenery-chewing Anthony Hopkins makes for a logical Odin, while Tom Hiddleston does a very good turn as slippery Loki, although the script fails him sometimes with muddled motivations and character turns. Natalie Portman brings nice charm to Thor's earthly love interest Jane Foster, while director Kenneth Branagh ably balances big-action moments with smaller character beats that make this feel a bit less disposable than it might have.

And it's a pleasure to see a superhero movie that really embraces the cosmic scale -- one failing of, say, "Iron Man 2," is climactic battles that kind of disappoint. Here, we see giant armies of frost giants, a Thor/Loki throwdown that's quite epic, and the extraordinary Jack Kirby creation the Destroyer brought to vivid life.

What I didn't like:
Well as usual, the "3D" edition of the movie is a gimmick and not worth paying extra for -- I'm actively avoiding 3D versions of most movies when I find them, as the 3D films tend to be projected too dark, rarely utilize the format well and generally just a big hype.

The one thing about "Thor" that sticks with me is the general look of Asgard and the Asgardians -- I'm not quite sold on it, yet I'm not quite sure how I would've done it. They're all very shiny-armored and colourful, but I wonder if it would seem more "real" if Asgard looked a bit more lived in rather than like a lot of plastic models. Yet it is a god's realm, and who really knows how that's meant to look? As I've said before, it's a fine line between making Asgard look cool and having it look like a bad rock video. It's also a shame to see Rene Russo relatively wasted as Thor's mother, but so it goes.

Despite all the very solid acting talent and one of my favorite creators Joss Whedon at the helm of next year's giant "Avengers" movie, I'm still rather uncertain about it. Frankly the weakest parts of "Iron Man 2" and "Thor" are those where they try to awkwardly shove in a "shared universe" and twee cameos. (Although seeing ace archer and "Avengers" co-star Hawkeye, briefly, in "Thor" is pretty sweet, actually. Guess I'm still a comics geek after all.)

All the news that's fit to tweet

I've worked in journalism for 15+ years now, but rarely have I enjoyed the kind of immediacy I do with my new online job, where all it takes to disseminate your story to the world is a click of the button. This week has been a non-stop onslaught of breaking news -- the royal wedding, some Osama character you might've heard about, and an extraordinarily rare fatal tornado right here in Auckland yesterday.
 
For both the big global news stories of the last week I've been tasked with running a kind of NZ-centric Storify feed on the website of "vox populi," filtering Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more into a giant mass o' opinion that runs concurrently with the more hard-news stories. This sort of aggregation is a kind of reporting that would've been hard to imagine 10 years ago -- there's a massive, ever-sprawling pool now of rants and raves and viewpoints online, and it never ever stops. As I "live tweeted" the royal wedding I found it fascinating -- the flow of information is so fast on the Twitter/Facebook feeds that you literally have to just grab and run -- and it was also kind of dizzying, too. After 6 hours straight of reading the world's Tweets on Wills and Kate your brain does kind of turn into mush.
 
And then the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, met his logical end Monday and it was a whole other set of tweets and comments to gather up. This story was very different from the royal wedding and tended to arouse all kind of firm views. As a fence-straddler, I found myself kind of turned off both by the bloodthirsty patriotism and the sanctimonious moralizing from both extremes.

I agree, people who live in America have no idea how utterly awful the mobs shouting "USA! USA!" looks from overseas, but I also think that at this point in its history, America desperately needed a "win." It seems like dozens of my US Facebook friends are unemployed now, there's a cynicism in US society that never quite goes away, and this long-desired news gave the country something to celebrate, as tacky as some of the cheering may have seemed from afar. 
 
Both stories were strange to watch as an American living in New Zealand -- one dealt with the British monarchy and the possible future king of New Zealand, while one offered a very US-centric kind of catharsis that I don't imagine as many New Zealanders might have felt.

The Twitter/Facebook beast is something wholly new in journalism -- a never-ceasing flow of quotes without having to pick up a notebook. During President Obama's speech on Monday 4,000 tweets came per second. This quoteflow is the sort of thing that has newspapers and journalists questioning their relevance -- although I fall on the side of good journalism still being firmly necessary, as a way to filter through the impossibly dense voice of humanity online these days. By night's end I had 15,000+ hits on the Osama Storify feed -- a kind of instant gratification journalists rarely get.

Once upon a time the question used to be, how do I get the information? It's then moved on to how fast can I get the information? But maybe as the world continues to change every millisecond, the new question might be, where does the information stop?

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 2

Here we go again, as I slowly continue my bloody plunge through all seven seasons of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and now into the five seasons of the spin-off "Angel."
 
As we enter season 2, Los Angeles' vampire detective Angel and his allies in the fight against darkness battle evil on a variety of fronts -- most notably the resurrected Darla, Angel's former lover and his vampire "maker," a plot line that drives throughout the season.

Season 2, I thought, was a lot more consistent and enjoyable than the sometimes stumbling first season was. We feel that Angel Investigations has become more of a family, and that makes the ups and downs the "team" has this year feel more effective.
 
It's also good to see the characters grow and change -- Cordelia becomes far more responsible than the conceited teen she was on "Buffy," while Wesley shows new inner strength as he becomes the leader of Angel investigations. A couple of newcomers join the cast too -- former anti-vampire gang leader Gunn and the delightful Andy Hallett as Lorne the Host, who tends to steal pretty much every scene he's in.

I also really enjoy Julia Benz' nasty, scheming take on Darla, a far cry from her sweet and charming wife on "Dexter." Angel's tug of war with Darla continues throughout most of the season, although some of the episodes get a bit repetitive with the whole cat-and-mouse game.
 
While there's a lot of darkness in this series of "Angel" it's leavened by some goofy humour as well. The season finale series of episodes set in Lorne's home dimension of Pylea are an often-silly treat, kind of "Angel" goes "Army of Darkness.".
 
Best episode: There's a lot to pick from this season, but "Reunion" takes the Darla/Angel/Wolfram and Hart triangle to a new height, climaxing with the stunning scene where Angel basically lets Darla and fellow vamp Drusilla kill off most of the law firm. It's a good showcase for Angel's dark side (which is talked about a lot, but sometimes doesn't seem very convincing), and takes the story in genuinely surprising new directions.
 

Concert review: George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Auckland, April 23

What is P-Funk? It's a style of music, a state of mind, a sprawlingly ridiculous cosmology all shepherded by the fried brain of one George Clinton, who brought his outrageous Parliament Funkadelic gang to Auckland for a show last night at the Powerstation that was a non-stop three-hour celebration of funk, rock and the joy of letting your freak flag fly a bit.

Clinton's tangled musical legacy includes the bands Funkadelic (more rock than funk alone), Parliament (who are a free-wheeling party band) and a whole slew of spin-offs and side projects like funk star Bootsy Collins. I've been a fan of Parliament for a while -- a band guaranteed to cheer you up no matter how low you feel -- while I've only recently delved into Funkadelic's catalogue, an eclectic, beautiful and gritty mishmash of genres and sounds. I wasn't going to miss a chance to see Clinton's mad revue on a rare trip down under.

Admittedly seeing the P-Funk show is more of a nostalgia act today than I'm sure the P-Funk circus was at its peak -- Clinton is nearly 70 now and served more as the "grand conductor" and a genial stage presence rather than really funking out himself; his croaky voice these days sounded a lot more like Captain Beefheart. But the ever-shifting band itself -- by my count nearly 20 people, some old P-Funk hands, some new -- kept a tight hand, with the invaluable rhythm section keeping songs going no matter how far afield they went. Near-naked ladies and men danced and sang, joints were freely passed about, and pretty much everyone on stage took a turn singing a song. A three-hour-plus show bounced and rambled all over the place without a single real break, sometimes the groove only moments from falling apart entirely. The band masterfully tugged and pulled to keep the audience's energy up till well after midnight.


The P-Funk "hits" came out -- "Atomic Dog," "Cosmic Slop," "Bop Gun," "One Nation Under A Groove," a delightful "Give Up The Funk," and blended in with other more obscure Clinton tunes. It's the kind of show where Clinton's granddaughter came on stage in the middle of the jam "Flashlight" to deliver an impromptu risque rap, and it all kind of works.

The best moments were sheer transcendence -- A sprawling 15-minute or so take on "Maggot Brain" really got me. The song in a sense is just one massively anguished guitar solo but Michael Hampton's loving take on it was great. "Maggot Brain" is the kind of song that you either ride along with or find indulgent, but for the space my head was in Saturday night, I found it gorgeous and glittering. Last night's show nicely showed how Clinton's sound can spin from hard-rock crunch to dance-floor anthems at the drop of a hat.

At its best P-Funk is a music of ecstasy, a celebration of being alive for however long we've got. Clinton is one of the few musicians who can be said to have honestly created a genre all his own. Part hard rock, part R&B sway, part pantomime buffoonery and part magic, it's a sound that's well worth seeing live at least once to get the full experience. Now I just need a couple more naps to recover.

Summer 2011 Movie Preview Excite-O-Meter

It's nearly summer in US movie theatres (or winter in my part of the world), and all the blockbusters are lining up one after another. This is the comic-bookiest movie season we've seen in a while. Typically every year there's one or two big comic book flicks but this summer seems particularly high on the spandex and sequels. Here's a handful of this summer's biggest movies and how excited I am to see them on a scale of 1 (might watch 10 minutes on the telly one night) to 10 (I'm already waiting in line).

Thor
I always liked the concept of Thor far more than I did the comic books unless they were by Walt Simonson or Jack Kirby. And this first of this year's flood of comic book movies is the first one that feels fresh to me, rather than yet another sequel or standard origin story. You have Norse gods walking the earth, Anthony Hopkins in the role he was born to play as Odin, a spunky Natalie Portman, and director Kenneth Branagh, whose "Henry V" dazzled me with its Thor-like mix of pomp and grit 20 (!!) years ago. I'm not entirely sure the leading man Chris Hemsworth is up to the job here, but I'm quite intrigued by what I've seen so far. Hopefully it doesn't all end up looking like a bad Queen video, but I'd say this and "X-Men: First Class" are most interesting of all the summer's comic booky movies to me.
Excite-O-Meter: 9
 
Captain America: The First Avenger
And yet ANOTHER first-time superhero. It's unpatriotic, but I've never really been a huge Captain America fan, although Ed Brubaker has been doing some great comics the last few years with the character. So I'm not as psyched about this as I was about the first Batman or Spider-Man movie, say. But Chris Evans is very solid casting, and what footage I've seen is intriguing. Setting it during World War II could work, or it could come off as a bit hokey. I'll probably see it in theatres like I have most comic book movies since 2000, but I want to feel a bit more energy first.
Excite-O-Meter: 6.5
 
X-Men: First Class
Speaking of which, The X-Men franchise may be running low on steam, but I'm intrigued by this one. I like the decision to set it in the 1960s, giving it a kind of cool retro-Mod design, and both James McAvoy (as young Professor X) and Michael Fassbender (as Magneto) are excellent casting. I'm not too sure what the actual story is about, but "Kick-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn is at the helm, so I'll go see.
Excite-O-Meter: 8

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I love the old '70s movie series, barechested Charlton Heston and all, and this is an intriguing kind-of-not-really remake of the fourth film in the series, "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes," taking on how the apes came to rule the world. An interesting trailer is out which is a bit clunky (I like how someone described it as looking like a zombie movie but with apes), yet it's a far more intriguing plot than Tim Burton's frankly awful remake of the original. But are CGI apes really an improvement over awesome rubber masks?
Excite-O-Meter: 6
 
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 82
Y'know, I know I've seen all the Harry Potter movies, but honestly, I barely remember much of them past about part 4. They're all perfectly adequate adaptations, but somehow, they've never really risen to the realm of fine art for me ("Prisoner of Azkaban" is the one I remember the fondest). So I might see this eventually, but I have to admit there's no substitute for them old-media books for me really.
Excite-O-Meter: 4

Green Lantern
Another "second-tier" superhero makes it to Hollywood. This could go either way, really. I like the concept of Green Lantern, and I like Ryan Reynolds, who's been appealing in a variety of movies. The latest footage is pretty cool, going for a kind of "Star Wars" meets "Cops" vibe with some striking design work -- although Green Lantern's costume looks a little too heavy on the CGI for my liking. It'd be nice for a DC hero other than Superman or Batman to succeed on screen, but really I feel this could either soar as lighthearted "Iron Man"-like fun, or be a big miscalculated "Spirit"-scale flop.
Excite-O-Meter: 7 

Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon
It was kinda cool to see the big robots come to life in 2007, but it was a Michael Bay film, so there wasn't much to it. Never saw #2, and no interest really in seeing #3 either. I miss the clean if clunky designs they had for the robots on the old TV cartoons myself.
Excite-O-Meter: 2
 
Cowboys and Aliens
Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig in a movie that's about exactly what it sounds like. Steampunk mashups of this sort can be like "Wild Wild West," but it'd be nice if this was actually good. "Iron Man" director Jon Favreau is doing this, so there's hope, but gosh, it feels like the last time Harrison Ford really tried in a movie was back in 1997's "Air Force One," so I dunno....
Excite-O-Meter: 5
 
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
The first one was good fun, the second one went right up its own laboured and overcomplex mythology and lost all sense of fun, and I didn't even see the third one. I might check this out one day as it promises to be more self-contained, but really, Johnny Depp is kind of slumming it doing this for a fourth time.
Excite-O-Meter: 4
 
Cars 2
The boy will drag me to it, and I quite liked the first one even if I couldn't really swallow the idea of an entire ecosystem apparently built around anthropomorphic cars. Seriously, where are all the people? Did Lightning McQueen and his mates kill them all?
Excite-O-Meter: 6
 
The Smurfs
Ohgodno.
Excite-O-Meter: 0

It's Record Store Day 2011!

I zipped on down to Auckland's mighty Real Groovy Records for a couple hours today for Record Store Day 2011, celebrated worldwide as a way to help draw attention to the sadly struggling independent record store industry.

It's been a grim year for these kinds of places -- both the other two Real Groovy stores in New Zealand have announced closures (one thanks to the Christchurch earthquake), and I'll do anything I can to keep RG Auckland going strong by grabbing up some more music for the ever-escalating collection. (But honestly, I really needed those Dead Milkmen and Oingo Boingo discs. And that rare Rykodisc Big Star Live album I've been hunting for forever? Score!)

In the last 6 months I've been happy/sad, because I've grabbed dozens of CDs and books from huge clearance sales at Auckland stores -- the Borders chain for instance pretty much got rid of all their CDs so I picked up stacks of bargains back around Christmas. It's awesome for bargain hunting, but kind of grim in the big picture -- these sales offloading stock are because half these places are in receivership or bankruptcy, after all. I don't even know how many of the great book and music stores, corporate and independents alike, will be around in another five years.

Ever since I've been a little kid, one of my favorite pastimes in the world has been shelf browsing. Ask my parents -- when I was 7, my idea of a treat was being taken to the library. And to this day, I get a nice sense of peace and happiness simply browsing the shelves of bookstores and record stores, hunting around for whatever I might happen to find. It's like a treasure hunt, and while sure, I can download that book or record now I might be looking for, I'm just a stickler for the tangible sensation. There's a certain way an old book smells, for instance, which sounds kind of freaky fetishistic to say. I've got a million fond memories of browsing in book and record shops from New York City to San Francisco to Sydney. Real Groovy is one of the greats and a lot of fun to spend time at.

Anyway, Record Store Day is an awesome thing. Take a chance wherever you are today to remember the thrill of browsing the stacks, of finding that rare gem, of supporting these endangered places. I'm all for the digital world, but man, I'll never stop being a fan of musty old second-hand books and previously owned albums.

If the devil is six, then God is seven

So apparently I've been doing this blog thing for SEVEN YEARS as of today. Which is like nearly one-sixth of my LIFE. Good god. That's a lot of bloggery. Blogging is such a relatively recent phenomenon that there's no real determination of its life span yet. Do blogs live forever? There's probably not a blog out there much more than 10 years old at this point. Am I at the end of its life or the midpoint? If a blog falls in the forest does anyone hear?

I dunno. Like most people who've been doing this for more than a year or two I've had a love-hate relationship with the blog, sometimes, even going so far as to take a long hiatus last year. But I'll keep on keeping on at least until we develop the technology to beam my ramblings directly INTO YOUR MIND. Sure we've got Facebook and Twitter to play with as well, but can I go on about old Peter Sellers movies, concert reviews and mix tapes for 1000 words at a time on there?

Also, I've recently changed the url or address of this site to my own goshdarned name, so it's now nikdirga.com -- although the old address works just as well. I mainly wanted to scoop up my own domain so the thousands of speculators out there eyeing it don't steal it first. You also may need to update RSS feeds/bookmarks accordingly!

And as always, thanks to those of you who keep reading my occasional scribbles. Thanks!

My 5 favorite authors 50 and under

In the last few years, several of my personal pantheon of favorite authors have died -- notably John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom I'd followed religiously since college. Their time had come, they were in their 70s, yet it's still sad to see such lions leave us. But who will be the future Updikes and Norman Mailers in the iPad generation? Here's my 5 favorite current authors age 50 and under -- an age which might seem old to some, but frankly, I'm getting there, and most great writers don't really start cranking until well into their 30s at least. Keeping it to those under 50 leaves out a few of my most liked authors like Paul Auster, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Haruki Murakami or Jonathan Franzen (just over the cut at age 51).

David Eggers, 41
Eggers made his mark with the alternately funny and tragic inventive memoir of his youth "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," which went on to found the entire snarky, groundbreaking "McSweeney's" school of writing. But Eggers has gone on from just a kind of hipster icon to show amazing versatility, with the wry road-trip comedy novel "You Shall Know our Velocity!" and particularly the stunningly powerful journalism-based memoirs "Zeitoun" and "What is the What" which take the lives of real people -- a Muslim Hurricane Katrina victim abused by his own government, a survivor of Sudan's genocide -- and turn them into a story as powerful as any fiction. His work only gets better with each book.

David Mitchell, 42
Mitchell is a writer without borders whose sprawling books can take place just about anywhere. His first three novels, "Ghostwritten," "Number9dream" and "Cloud Atlas," are deftly created experimental interlocking narratives, using a variety of voices and techniques to tell his stories. "Cloud Atlas," for instance, cycles between a 19th century sailing ship to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, World War II Belgium, a noir California, contemporary England, and a futuristic Korea. Yet Mitchell has proved more than just a trickster with "Black Swan Green," a relatively straightforward tale of a lonely British kid growing up in the 1980s that had an amazingly distinct and honest voice. His latest, waiting to be read on my bedside table, is "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet," which swerves again into a historical epic of 18th-century Japan.

Michael Chabon, 47
Chabon crafts gorgeous, dazzlingly smart prose -- the effortless quality of his work probably reminds me more of John Updike than anyone else -- but unlike Updike's narrow suburban focus, Chabon is a pop-culture influenced magpie, who can tackle academic mid-life crisis drama ("Wonder Boys"), a comic-book influenced epic ("The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"), a florid pulp fiction homage ("Gentlemen of the Road") or a Jewish detective novel set in an alternate history ("The Yiddish Policeman's Union"). Chabon combines inventive plots with that fluid, elegant voice to make him consistently rewarding reading. He also writes some great nonfiction essays ("Manhood for Amateurs").

Jonathan Lethem, 47
Lethem is in some ways Chabon's doppleganger -- they both blend "literary" writing with "junk" culture influences like comic books and '70s soul records. But Lethem is a bit cooler in voice, more abstract than Chabon, with work that dips frequently into surrealism and sci-fi. His earlier books were science fiction with an uneasy twist, like "As She Climbed Across The Table," about a woman who falls in love with her own existential physics experiment. Reality always seems frail in Lethem's fiction -- his breakthrough, "Motherless Brooklyn," is a detective novel starring a Tourette's syndrome-afflicted gumshoe, and a book where language is subjective. Lethem's masterpiece to date is "Fortress of Solitude," a buddy-comedy tale of sorts of a lonely white kid and a streetwise black kid growing up in a vividly realized 1970s New York. Oh, and there's a magic flying ring involved.

Jasper Fforde, 50
I actually don't read a ton of hardcore science fiction/fantasy, but one author I'll let take me wherever he wants to is Fforde, whose "literary detective" Thursday Next series is one of the most madly inventive, witty worlds I've ever visited, a topsy-turvy universe where fictional creations are real and a complex hierarchy of rules delineate the crossover between realms. For a book lover, Fforde's books are full of easter eggs and clever in-jokes, but they also work well as a creative, twistily plotted adventure series. Fforde has also created fictional realms based on "realistic" fairy tales ("The Big Over Easy") and a world where society is determined by what colours you can see ("Shades of Grey"). Fforde's fiction is deeply allusive fantasy with a word-nerd bent, kind of like Lewis Carroll if he had an Internet connection.