Transformers and e-books ...

Saw Transformers. It's better than everything else Michael Bay's ever directed -- put together -- which means it's halfway not-bad. Fair's fair -- Michael Bay did direct one really nice bit once, in The Rock:

John Mason: Are you sure you're ready for this?
Stanley: I'll do my best.
John Mason: Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Stanley: Carla was the prom queen.

So it's not the Hill of Beans speech. But I saw Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon before I got completely clear that Michael Bay's name on a movie was a guarantee of awfulness -- so I skipped Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, and The Island, and no doubt I'm the better person for it. That one nice note in The Rock was, until Transformers, the high spot of the Michael Bay ouvre.

It turns out that Michael Bay was always supposed to be directing cartoons. Transformers isn't a great cartoon, but it's a pretty good one, the boy playing the boy can deliver a line, and the girl playing the girl was visibly a girl in ways that half the audience couldn't yet appreciate ... and the Transformers are genuinely cool in a way my inner small boy can still appreciate.

I'm the wrong generation for Transformers -- I was an adult when that cartoon hit -- the non-parent audience for that show was overwhelmingly male and under 35. I suppose I could take a moment to mock the grown men sitting in the theater for a Transformers movie ... except, you know, I'm there on opening night for the Speed Racer movie. So I should probably skip the mocking.

I'm waiting on a letter from the guy at Quietvision who was publishing Armageddon Blues, Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, The Last Dancer, and Terminal Freedom -- when I get it, I'm going to take the PDFs and make them availble for free download. Half a dozen people have asked me to put up a donate button on this blog -- once those books are available for download, anyone who wants to donate is welcome to. It's not a requirement, either explicit or implied: the downloads will be free. There's another book I'm going to make available which is a collection of short fiction and essays -- "A Freeway In My Back Yard." That'll follow a while after the other stuff and will also be free. Thereafter, one or two at a time, I'll PDF and make available whatever else I have floating around on my hard drive, until everything worth making public, is.

If someone can recommend a good file-sharing service that's easy to use (both for me and for downloaders) I'd appreciate it.