Dead Birds Has Spies
A Mitch Hedberg CD kept my wife and I laughing for several hours on a recent road trip, so for that, I thank Mr. Hedberg's ghost and now will leave the tributes to people who either have the time or enthusiasm or intelligence to write about such things at length.
I will also mostly ignore this piece, sent to me by one of my many friends who is trying to give ME a heart attack. On the one hand, I can sympathize with the author. My second book also received some critical attacks, and I began to feel desperate to the point of sending out embarassing emails. At the same time, those emails were never about keeping my book on the NY Times bestseller list. They were more about keeping my publisher from pulling the book off the shelves immediately. Besides, I'm constantly sending out embarassing emails. I actually am desperate for money and readers, all the time, and by some lunatic definitions, I'm successful. I guess one's perception of one's own failure is relative.
But really, I intended to write here about an odd Civil War-era horror movie called Dead Birds. I saw this on the last night of the South By Southwest film festival, and enjoyed it as much as I enjoy any horror movie, but I also saw its flaws. On the way out of the theater, I said to my friend, "That movie's backstory makes The Ring look like an episode of Diffren't Strokes."
Then, a week later, I get an email from the movie's writer, who had heard about my comment and wanted to know if he could use the quote in publicity materials. Of course I said yes. But I also wondered, in what universe will that quote help publicize a movie? And I also wondered how in the hell does something like that happen? Someone recognized me and then called my quote into the people who'd made the movie? Why was that news? You know, it's not like I get any of the actual benefits of celebrity, other than the occasional free drugs. This, then, is my destiny: Providing out-of-contest blurbs for experimental straight-to-video horror movies. I am the Ed Wood of literature.