The Advocate

Been a minute since my last post. Got caught up in the grind, as we all do from time to time. Forgot about the take back, clap back, but it's a long weekend and some things have not yet arrived, so here we find ourselves. There are times when I've got that itch, that restlessness, that skin-crawling tingle. The feeling that keeps me up at night doing chores no one has any business doing at 4 AM. The feeling that keeps me up listening to another Bon Iver album, sweating in my boxer-briefs, typing into the cyber-ether. My proverbial shout from the mountaintops to the bottom of the sea. I hope you don't mind this divergence into something a little more personal. There are times when my fingers must. When they have to. Have to type. Have to spin words like spiders must spin webs, like electronic daemons must crawl the interweb, trawling cyberspace until the end of time. Soon, I'm going to be a father. I am going to have a little girl. It could happen at any time. She...

So, my latest collection has FINALLY arrived for your reading pleasure! Available in Kindle, NOOK, Apple ibook, and other ebook formats, as well as traditional softcover from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , and Ingram. This collection has been a loooooong time in the making -- a lot of writing, editing, rewriting, reediting, scrapping, emotional upheavals, existential crises, and cash-strapped budgeting. But, after almost eight years of hard work, it's done. (Seriously, I could give GRRM a run for his money when it comes to the wait between books.) I certainly could never have done it without the support of my wife, my brother, and a lot of inspirational artists I know in real life as well as not in real life, including/especially Melanie Matranga who contributed the cartoon artwork for this collection. I also owe a big thanks to Amber, and all of the Dog Ear Publishing team who helped me turn this collection into the electronically as well as physically bound reality before y...

Okay, so a lot has already been written about how Pokemon Go has literally taken the world by storm, whether it's going to save our souls or destroy mankind as we know it. But, nonetheless, here's my two cents. Spend them how you will! First of all, I can't seem to find any goddamn Pokemon! I've been trying at the mall, at my office, at the supermarket, at the park, along the freeway, down sketchy alleyways in the dead dark of night wearing black leather. (Well, that escalated quickly.) But nope, I haven't found any. I'm still level 2 for crying out loud! Meanwhile, some people have already beaten the game! And here I am, can't even get a PokeStop or a Gym to respond to me half the time. Why? ...Why? WHY??? I blame my spoiled Gameboy-playing ass. I'm used to handhelds where I don't need decent WiFi or an LTE connection to catch some Pikachu. I'm not used to having to micromanage a battery pack, a GPS, and handheld camera to snag a Ratt...

Status update! Sad Bastard Poetry, my latest collection has completed it's proof pass phase and is approved for printing with Dog Ear Publishing!! I anticipate having a solid release date for ya'll soon. In the meantime, here's another sample of the original artwork I had commissioned for this collection, as well as the back-cover description to give you an idea of what you're in for: "Since the very first quasi-mythological scratchings of the written word, and probably long before it, people have been sharing stories of the tragicomic concept known as Love. Those heights, and depths, were plundered no more infamously than by a writer named Billy the Bard, also known as Willy the Shake and Old Bill (unless you count that incestuous paedophile E.A. Poe). His gratuitous impact sparked the name for this collection in which you will read about the grotesque, photographic, melancholic, eviscerating, and hilarious faces of Love in all its forms, from romantic and sweet, ...

Has there ever been an anime more perfect than the Space Opera meets Western meets Jazz solo known as Cowboy Bebop ? Rhetorical question. Obviously the answer is no. I started watching circa September 2, 2001, (merely a week, or so, before Nine-Eleven destroyed my nations uniquely American sense of invincibility) on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim . It was the first anime I ever seriously watched an anime. I think it may have been the first time I ever seriously watched anything . And fuck, the show was cool, in every sense the word was ever meant to evoke and invoke. As an awkward teenage boy, the gunfights, spaceships, and frenetic saxophone, mixed with tantalizing bits of fan service captured my imagination in a way perfectly designed to tap that angst and loneliness so pervasive amongst young White men . (Though, being Jewish, I wonder if I was less predisposed to devolve more towards sappy blog posts instead of violent mass murder.) It touched just the right nerve at just t...

(Credit: Kevin "Rashid" Johnson) If you're a fan of Netflix's  Orange is The New Black, then you know exactly what I'm talking about here. With the release of season 4  this sentiment has been brought to the forefront of a show that not only pushes the boundaries of television, but of our entire concept of social justice in a country simultaneously more progressive than ever and yet also more oppressive in sheer numbers than at any other time in history. But for me, the core of what OITNB has shown us over the course of this season is that, regardless of what you've done: y ou are still a person . Maybe you sold crack. Maybe you robbed someone. Maybe you even killed someone. That doesn't mean you are no longer human. That doesn't mean you deserve the kind of treatment we're seeing in America , courtesy of the prison-industrial complex, bigotry, and apathy. As seen through the eyes of prisoners, former prisoners, and investigative journa...

( Credit to playwright Ernest Hemmings. ) Whether you're talking 'bout President  Obama is spreading Ebola , Secretary  Hillary deliberately caused Benghazi , or the thought that Earth is, actually, as flat as the ass of pancake , conspiracy theories seem to reproduce like a rabbit-mouse hybrid in heat. I grew up amongst many of them through the 90's and early 2000's. From apples laced with razor blades to HIV-infected needles in the parks and playgrounds of the neighborhood, or on the handles of the local gas station pump. Others were less well-known, such as the Native-American ghosts that haunted our high school campus and killed the science teacher on back-to-school night. Or the mysterious oil-derricks hidden between Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa in a locked-down facility that, purportedly, housed a testing ground for experimental weaponry and post-apocalyptic machinery. Indeed, I've actually tread those very lines myself as a teenager, searching f...

I keep dropping knowledge bombs // Quick-like on villages of the bigoted and ignorant // From high-above the Ivory Towers and Golden Parachutes and Brick-Mortar Bunkers I fly // But when the firestorm has passed ashes are all I find // Of cognitive dissonance, of double-speak and lies // Spread across cyberspace like so much trash // Can't even find a single corpse to prove that falsehood was hit // Until the next village I see // Always the next // Crops up on my radar shooting flak at my wax wings // And back to bomb I go again, a toy soldier to the toddler What's the point in having all human knowledge // At your fingertips when you can't even comprehend it? // What's the point in having intelligence // If they never use it?

You are one of the People of the Book, a member of one of the tribes. Maybe of my own. You are a Speaker -- not for, not to, but of. About. Concerning in detail. You may even be a practitioner of the Left-Hand Path. (After all, sufficiently advanced and all that.) Or, should I misjudge you, then victim or usurper. We born from mud and clay are always defined in twofold order: by our blood and by our works. We are. You are and have become more so by your recent endeavours. And yet, you have attempted to penetrate what cannot be because it is not. No end. Transcendental as nonexistent. The flesh interface is a closed loop. Your portals will not take you where you are going. You will return, inevitably, and perhaps even with a brush of The Name on your skin, here again to the mud and the clay. Like the hand that draws the hand. We are the ink and oil bound upon the surface. The canvas encapsulates as it defies being so. Because it is blank. Still, you grasp the Deep Knowledge...

This might seem funny to you, but I got so badly spoilereded that I wanted to metaphorically punch this little old lady in the face. It all started when I decided to watch NYPD Blue on Amazon Prime because, hey, y'know, show-hole and all. Of course, this show aired between '93 and '05, so it's dated as I don't know what. But I like it! It's got good stories, funny characters, and great camera work. A couple of weeks later, I was just watching some random news story in the evening and this old lady, probably around my Bubbie's age, that the anchor was talking to about some such tragedy said she's never seen anything so sad since they killed Bobby Simone on NYPD Blue. BOOM. Bolt Upright. And I'm like, "WHAT. THE. FUCK? THEY KILLED BOBBY SIMONE? I'M ONLY ON SEASON 5. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY KILLED HIM? GODDAMNIT LADY." So I go to my Prime watchlist and fast forward through to the episode in question "Heart and Souls"  whic...

As you all may know, I consider myself something of a wordsmith and I wrote a book called "Distorted Orange Hidden County" about 8 years ago. (Still available from Wingspan Press, Amazon, and B&N.) Since then, I've been working on a second book titled "Sad Bastard Poetry." Well, after many years of work, cobwebbing, fund-raising, and random changes, my book is finally almost here! Currently it is completing its way through the proofing stages with Dog Ear Publishing. As a teaser, I've included the cover and back cover material for your viewing pleasure. The book will be available in softcover and e-book forms through Amazon, B&N, etc. It should be available for purchase hopefully sometime this Summer! If you're interested in fiction, poetry, or just want to support me in general, please pick up a copy and/or tell your friends when it's released. I'll be posting more about the book as we get closer! Thanks you all!

It has been a minute since my last post. Lots going on, from various family/personal medical issues to work shtuff to simply being effing exhausted by Lyfe. Y'know how it goes fellow cyberweb dwellers. However, in the midst of these circumstances comes along one pretty nifty happenstance. I am now the Guild Master of my World of Warcraft guild Asgard Warriors, Alliance Faction, Ysera server. Our old GM has, unfortunately, been AFKing, BRBing, and otherwise MIAing for some time lately, resulting in my previous Asst GM duties encompassing keeping a guild alive that is so casual we wear pajamas to the pharmacy. Seriously, we don't raid, we don't PvP, we don't roll dungeons together, or even sit in G-chat shooting the ish. We just co-exist in some sort of amorphous blob of gaming and relative ignorance. But not me! I have been making efforts to step up guild participation... with generally craptastic results. Until recently, when I instigated my generally bloodle...

Because Adult Swim in the early 2000s was so good, so revolutionary, and so unappreciated for its time that one can't help but wanna fanboy dick-ride it into the dust of hearty nostalgia.   I mean, we're talking the magical line-up to end all magical line-ups! We're talking Space Operas, Old Westerns, straight up Street Fighters, Mecha, Samurai epics, Post-apocalyptic Wastelands a la Mad Max, Historical Revisionary pseudo-homoerotic Pedagogy, Crime Thrillers, Nightmarish Acid Trips, Ancient Japan, Cyber Punk, Sci-Fi, Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi, Comedy, Dramedy, Romantic Fappery, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Demon Fantasy, Detective Mystery, and fricking Comic Books! And the best part? It was all late night. Meaning after the 'rents were asleep, after the ankle-biters were tucked, and when all the kids were out of the pool. It was a hidden gem amongst an endless cavern of coal in TV land. They even showed special full-length features that you couldn't find anywhere outside of Ja...

Definitely feeling that adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman spinoff character . I can only hope they make equally awesome tie-ins to Constantine as well as other amazeballs comic-book-based stories. I've always been about the sympathetic side to The Devil . Indeed, in Jewish mythology, Satan isn't really all that bad. In fact, he might just be part of the whole plan . Which is kind of how I've always thought of Lucifer Morningstar. Sure, the show may be a procedural crime drama on the surface. It may even be a little banal for The Devil to be all soft-kitty-purr-purr for some rando mortals, but there's a lot there beneath the surface ripening to my liking. More importantly, Tom Ellis is a damned bad (and by bad I mean good, in the most corrupting possible way) Satan. Oh, and that soundtrack. I'm just a sucker for those gut-bucket Blues.

It's not often that in our lil' slice of the sci-fi-fantasy pie you find art echoing life so eloquently, but here we are on the pseudo-eve of a long-awaited Warcraft movie and the plot is feeling... REALLY familiar. Let me breakdown it: the humans of the kingdom of Azeroth are finding their lands being invaded by orcs from a dying world called Draenor. The reason is that a minority of evil orcs have corrupted and ruined the orcs' homeland through the use of dark magics and partnerships with demonic forces. In fact, the portal connecting Draenor to Azeroth is partially the result of these factors. But most of the orcs are just trying to flee the devastation of their homeworld, seeking refuge and succor from a demonic corruption that is actually destroying their very racial identity from a noble, yet brutal community, to a cruel and bloodthirsty horde. Meanwhile, the humans of Azeroth are naturally horrified by these "invaders" to their lands. They are afraid ...

While the closet door is, purportedly, made of all kinds of wood, I've found it to be more often made of felt and ink. Yes, I'm talking about how "teh Gay Agenda" has subversively always been with us in all its awesome glory. (Also, this entire post is probably, generally, mostly, and likely nearly entirely NSFW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.) (My first gay friends) Bert & Ernie were my first, my best, and will probably always stand the test of time as the most influential subconscious idea of who gay people are to me. You say "oh, so and so is gay!" I say, "why the fuck are you gossiping about their sexuality you sick bastard?" And then I think of Bert & Ernie, just singing, laughing, and annoying the ever-loving shit out of each other. Because I have tangents, damn. Let's be honest: there is no way you can look back to Sesame Street and NOT realize that B & E were always the proverbial Adam & Steve for our generation circa 198...