scottheim

Audiobook version of Mysterious Skin was released yesterday from my publisher HarperCollins / HarperPerennial. It's completely unabridged (thank the lord--abridging an author's work is like a series of tiny papercuts to the heart). The award-winning voice actor Michael Crouch does the narration--the book was written in multiperspective, and Michael does a great job of inhabiting each of the characters without making it sound overly "actorly" or strained when a narrator changes. This has been a really exciting summer, with the new reissue of the novel (with a new Afterword by me) as well as the upcoming 4K Restoration edition of Gregg's film, so this comes as a nice bonus. It's a massive honor to still reach people with something I started writing 34 years ago.

John Steuart Curry, "Tornado over Kansas," oil on canvas, 1929

2 PIZZA SLICES AND A COCK

(d) Bomb Pop / Popsicle Dude Wipes

Five "Campsite" photographs by Adam Maclay, Christchurch, New Zealand, approximately 1905 to 1910. Oh, and hands off the guy on the right (holding a blanket) in photo #2; he's mine.

Three images from 1979, when Midwesterners decided that any band not sounding identical to Styx or Kiss or Ted Nugent therefore needed to be wiped off the map, or at least have their records ceremoniously burned in a huge bonfire at Comiskey Park in Chicago (which--surprise, surprise!--devolved into a riot). In 2-3 years that followed, The Knack's sophomore album would sell just 1/8th the amount of copies as their monumental debut; the most popular disco musicians would gradually drop off the singles and albums charts and "go underground" (although disco eventually got the last laugh on the stadium-rock cretins, when it got gloriously reborn inside the grooves of house music, Detroit techno, new wave, and even hip-hop); and oh yeah, Styx's next album release was the universally maligned KILROY WAS HERE, while Kiss (sporting new shag haircuts) tested the waters of the Deep Concept Album through an atrocity called THE ELDER, and Ted Nugent would become one of the biggest douchebags of the century, hating blacks and gays and Democrats and sometimes bragging in interviews about shitting his pants to avoid the draft. And come on, we KNOW what all this eventually is leading to. Photos: (1) Knuke the Knack sack, buttons, and T-shirt, 1979; (2) Record-burners in "Disco Sucks" T-shirts, Comiskey Park, Chicago; (3) More young whites at Comiskey about to blow up some black music

nine photographs of the dashing FRIDTJOF WEDEL-JARLSBERG NANSEN (1861 - 1930), Norwegian polymath (explorer, zoologist, writer, sportsman, scientist, and winner of the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, among other awards)

Spanish painter Rafael Romero de Torres (1865–1898)