Don't come around here no more

I am posting over at Tumblr and will not be posting here any longer. Blogger is quite nice but I like Tumblr through and through.

So, please join me at my new Phil Albinus blog.

Where'd I go?

My web site is down for some reason -- I may have to renew it, I think. I've been blogging quite a bit over at Tumblr and I love it. Great for quick posts and uploading photos. Check it out here: http://philalbinus.tumblr.com

Care to see what a big tree can do to an old garage? Savor the carnage and marvel at the fact that I was five feet from this mess when it happened. Boy oh boy.
http://philalbinus.tumblr.com/page/2

Books reviews, movie reviews and more are on the way. Maybe even some video clips. Stay tuned. Over and out.

A Tale of Two Birthdays

Alan Cumming and I share the same birthday and we both turned 43 on Sunday. I don’t think, however, that we celebrated the same exact way. Take it away, Page Six:

ALAN CUMMING knows how to party. The Scottish actor got so crazy at the Le Royale lounge the other night, he jumped on the low-hanging disco ball in the middle of the room and swung on it until it ripped from the ceiling. “He fell on his face,” said our witness. After picking himself up, Cumming grabbed the ball and danced around the club clutching it — and when he finally put it down, he sprayed the other partygoers with a bottle of Cristal champagne.
--January 27th

Happy New Year

Wow, it's New Year's Day 2008 and Regina and I made it to 9:30. Eat that, Williamsburg hipsters! Nora begged to stay up until midnight because she's at that perfect age when midnight seems magical on New Year's Eve. She now has bragging rights of staying awake on the last day of the year and she visited Disney's Magic Kingdom until 1 AM just a few days ago. She was exhausted and exhilerated at her late-night theme park jaunt. My daughter, the night owl.

This was a very good work year. A demanding publisher left to travel the world and I had one less source of stress in my life. I spent a year as special projects editor and kept truly busy on things that made money for the magazine. I am hoping that the news that there are no bonuses is exaggerated. The Waters brand made money, suits, so share the wealth. This isn't a charity. I have bills to pay, people! In brighter writing news, I also have a few ideas for books that I'd like to write and this might be the year of a Phil Albinus novel. Get to work, dude!

My family? The kids had a good, solid year. Nora is becoming a smart and lovely little lady before my eyes. There are moments when I can see the women she is going to become, a perfect copy of her mother. Matthew is learning more words and seems to be in the room a lot more. He is a wonder. Autism is emotionally and physically draining for family members but Matt provides such joy that he makes an often challenging life truly beautiful. Tim is a peach. He is speaking more and more and has the personality of a little devil. If he weren't so cute, Regina says, he'd be a bad headline. He makes me laugh more each and every day.

We had some wonderful trips this year. I hosted a breakfast briefing in Frankfurt. We bought a shiny new minivan. We got one more year out of my wife's Saturn as my station car but a new Toyota Corolla is beckoning. Rex the dog is the best couch potato on four legs. I read a million good books and listened to my new iPod Nano. Sea foam green -- you have a problem with that? My family is healthy and happy so life is very, very good indeed.

If this coming year is as good as the year that past, life will be quite nice. God bless us all.

The Ryan Disney Pics

Not just a medical researcher -- a true photographic whiz. Thanks, Ryan!

Sun On Christmas Break

I could get used to this.

Sun and Fun -- Florida, Baby!

Some more Orlando pics.

The Florida Sun Times

We spent Christmas in Florida. Sun, hot temps, fun times and a pool in our backyard! Can we stay one more week, please?

My video glory

What does a special projects editor do exactly? Glad you asked. Waters is starting a series of video roundtables, just like Slate, The New York Times and every other magazine or news source on the planet. Our inaugural effort was on complex event processing, a hot topic they tell me. All in all, not bad. And that moderator! Lock up your women folk. He on fire.

The Night Gardener

After a hard boiled diet of recent Elmore Leonard works -- Pagan Babies, Up in Honey's Room and The Hot Kid -- I've started a flat-out binge of crime novels. I devoured Michael Connelly's Echo Park and The Lincoln Lawyer in short order. Great pacing, solid research, good locales but the dialogue falls flat. Just doesn't have the snap of Leonard at his best. And after the gun play in The Hot Kid and Honey's Room, I wanted more action. I can see these 30s and 40s stories in my head and now I want to write one myself. Something about a bar in the northern suburbs that operates outside the law in the early 1950s. Smoke, whiskey, dames in lingerie and pistols at the ready.

Wanting more noir, I checked out George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener. Despite being centered around a hackneyed serial killer plot -- all the murder victims' names are palindromes, as in Eve, Asa and so on -- this one is officially under my skin. The sentences are heavier than most thrillers, the characters are fuller and sadder and the book's feel is damned realistic. I am hooked, and I want to finish it tonight but I also want to savor it. No higher praise for a book.

On deck: The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta, Soul Circus by Pelecanos, and a collection of early Dutch Leonard crime novels. Life is good.

Cleaning out the camera

My kids, in pumpkin form.



Matthew looks at the camera! Sadly, his brother and sister do not. One day...



A cool stream, straight from the LL Bean catalog.

Mmmmmm, unexplained bacn...

Conversation overheard at a local bar restaurant...

Dot com hipster dude: There's this new term. Have you heard, it's called bacon? It's just like Spam but it's Spam that you sign up for but don't read.

Oh, so that's all the e-mails I send to my Yahoo! account when I sign up to read a first chapter of a book I have no intention of buying. Need to view a hot video clip? Send them to Yahoo! and watch the clip in peace. Then just delete the e-mails.

But according to Google, it's called bacn.

One other great gem from the hipster conversation soon followed. The two guys were talking to a very attractive lady with one of those short spiky hair cuts from the late 70s and early 80s. Very New Wave. She was quite striking and I realize that the only way that haircut works is if you have very small facial features. Anyway, someone was talking about editorial content, like how working women can balance motherhood and a professional life.

Dot com hipster chick: Tell them to read Good Housekeeping.

Meow!

Into the woods

The summer temps made a disorienting return and since the country club -- another martini, Jeeves! -- is long closed, we took the kids for walks in the Rockefeller Preserve along the Hudson. Matthew couldn't take his eyes off the streams, Tim wanted to be carried and Nora wanted to get back to the TV. We loved the fresh air and we're heading back this weekend. What ho!

Fall book season, what?

No book dilemma here, move along. I've been on a tear reading some terrific novels and I'm almost scared to say anything out loud because it might spoil the good run. I've read a pair of Elmore Leonard books -- Pagan Babies and Up In Honey's Room and they rocked. Babies is a streamlined crime novel that Leonard could and sometimes has done in his sleep. Honey's Room is a sort of sequel to The Hot Kid and it's terrific. If Hollywood needs a great source for a film, look no further. A hero US Marshall is looking for escaped Nazi POWs while the war winds down. Intrigue, sex, and adults behaving like adults all make for a sordid tale. You can smell the gun powder and see the 40s lingerie on Honey and one seriously devious Ukranian refugee who is looking for some payback. Dennis Quad, call your agent.

I still have Fellow Traveler on my mind, even after reading the book that was supposed to be the literary event of the season. Philip Roth delivers his last Nathan Zuckerman novel and in the wake of bad reviews, it was okay. No fireworks, which is what critics expect after The Human Stain, American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater. A so-so novel disappoints after a spree of seminal novels, I guess.

Fellow Traveler is the tale of closeted gays in Washington DC during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Once again, Mallon turns back the clock and immerses us in a world where people behave in ways that we would find contemporary. terrific characters, wonderful historical detail and pure heartbreak in the way people live their lives with the decisions they made.

I'm now hypnotized by PG Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum. I knew the man was prolific but he makes Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King look indifferent to the written word. Pure joy, especially since I am reading this alongside What Ho, Jeeves. Heaven.

Not a bad run of good books, even if Joh Updike missed the Nobel yet again. There's always next year, I guess.

Icn Bein Ein Frankfurter

Still feels like a dream. I spent 48 hours in Frankfurt to moderate a breakfast briefing. I left JFK on a Saturday, landed on Sunday, did the briefing on Monday morning and left for home on Tuesday. I was in the house by 12:30 Tuesday afternoon. Throw in a beautiful blur of Singapore Airlines stews and it's a pleasantly jarring buzz.

Frankfurt was nice. It's sleek and modern and you have to hand it to German efficiency. The city works. There was a major thoroghfare outside my hotel and you couldn't tell. No horns honking, no brakes screeching. People drove in their small, sleek cars and seemed to conspire to move along together as a collective unit -- the opposite of New York, where it's everyman for himself. I loved watching SpongeBob Squarepants in the original German, along with an episode of the OC. Since it was late September, there was plenty of Oktoberfest footage and oompa bands and girls in drindl dresses. Lots of beer and good cheer.

I wished that I had the time and guts to explore the city more but the jet lag kicked in. I hit the main train station and bought Nora a souvenir and walked past the Burger King. I loved the sign for the Angry Whopper.

Spies like us

Finished Journey Into Fear after putting it down for a few weeks. This tight little thriller truly gathered steam in the second half and I should have stuck with it. Eric Ambler has a high rep as an espionage writer but he should be taught as a prose stylist. There is no flab to his writing whatsoever. Instead of assigning some navel-gazing novel to writing students, they should read one of his between war noirs and learn what can be coneyed in as few sentences as possible. No wonder modern day Alan Furst reveres the man, even mre than the more-respected and mainstream John Le Carre. By all means, read Journey and then pick up Epitaph for a Spy and A Coffin for Dimitrios.

Surge protector

Despite a so-so performance from Gen. David Petraeus, you have to wonder if he even had to testify. He didn't exactly sell the war to Congress this week but the Democrats do not have the votes to bring the troops home. The best they can do is to vote cut funding and there is no way they will ever do that, even if the mouth-breathers from The Daily KOS and MoveOn.org are screaming for a complete retreat. A vote to cut the funding would damage the Democratic party for a generation.

Bush's midweek address was muted and bluster-free. He is clearly talking about success and not victory these days and that may be the best we can hope for. His speechwiters have clearly wised up. Even with Petreaus' inability to convince Congress that the surge is working and America is safer, the preseident started the week with a gift. MoveOn.org paid for a full-page ad in The New York Times with a headline accusing the general of betraying the nation. Ah, red meat for the pro-war right, right on time. Nicely done, MoveOn-ers. Well played. Even John Kerry couldn't endorse this tripe.

Bush in Iraq and failure on the left

Okay, I like it when President Bush visits the troops in Iraq. I know that everyone thinks that these visits are a publicity stunts and hollow photo-ops and this is the closest he ever got to dangerous military service, but it works for me. Sue me. When he visited the troops years back on Thanksgiving, some lefty critics said he was photographed holding a plastic turkey. Of course, of course. The entire visit was as fake as that synthetic fowl because this is a phony war. Even the smiles are staged, maaaaaaaan. Whatever.

I am awaiting Gen Petreaus's report to Congress on September 11th about the success of the Surge. I bet he'll say that it has worked in some areas that show real improvement yet Iraq remains a dangerous and unstable place. He will ask for more time for the surge and some on the Left will bellow for his head. How can there be improvements if all the news is bad? Admitting any improvements might mean that the surge is working and that they just might be wrong in the long run.

The failure of democracy in Iraq and with it the entire Bush Doctrine is their gospel now. Failure is their only goal.

Owen, Owen, Owen

It's been a summer of some spectacular celeb meltdowns from Paris in Jail, Britney Goes White Trash, Yo and Lindsay Cokes Up and Crashes Her Car. All very entertaining and so far harmless -- of the three 'ladies' only Lindsay has any talent but has she done anything interesting since Mean Girls? Paris and Britney will go on and on, I am sure, but Lohan actually has to be insurable for a movie to get financing. Robert Downey Jr is a much better bet than LaLohan these days. .

But Amy Winehouse and Owen Wilson? Talk about a pair of despair. Winehouse is the smoky popstress with the ratty beehive and her slo-mo decline just sad because she has a nice set of pipes. Despite a killer record with a nice single -- Rehab -- she seems hellbent on the coke/heroin diet that has turned her into a cadaver recently. I saw one pic of her from a year or two back when she had some weight on her frame and she looked terrific. Rocking, even. Now, she is stick-thin, covered in bruises and looking like she is trying to fit into a balso wood coffin.

Then came word last week that the Golden Guy from the new wave of funny guys tried to commit suicide because of heroin use and depression. This one is just baffling. Wilson seemed smart enough to know that this is all a game and he was the master at it. He made funny movies that made people smile and when he entered a scene onscreen, he was Mr Good Time. Now, it's going to be hard to watch The Wedding Crasher, Zoolander or even watchable dreck like Starsky and Hutch without thinking this guy wanted to off himself when he was on top.

Amy and Owen, come back. It's not that bad, dammit.

I hate when that happens

So you're driving to the local convenience store while on a camping trip and a group of Amish girls kidnap you and throw you in the back of their horse-drawn buggy. It's one damned thing after another.