The Factual Opinion

HELLOWEEN SPOOKTACULAR 3: SPECIAL TREEHOUSE OF ENGINEER DENNIS MEMORIAL 666 SPECIAL

After the jump, you'll find the all new SPECIAL HALLOWEEN EPISODE of the Travis Bickle on the Riviera movie podcast. This Halloween, we discuss an American institution. 

Hey Joe! Where you going with those COMICS in your hand?

After the break, you can hear a new podcast with one heck of a line-up!

The barbed wire is the Jennifer Connelly.

After the break, you'll find the latest episode of the world's only movie podcast, Travis Bickle on the Riviera. With your hosts Tucker "Lara Flynn Boyle" Stone and Sean "Moira Kelly" Witzke.

It's The Matt and Joe Show!

After the break, the end of the beginning gives way to a new...beginning!

Pick one.

After the break, you'll find the latest episode of the world's only movie podcast, Travis Bickle on the Riviera. With your hosts Morgan "Sir Paul McCartney " Jeske and Sean "Sirhan Sirhan" Witzke

No Pictures: Kerry Howley's Thrown

Thrown
By Kerry Howley
Published by Sarabande, 2014

Although there's a few brief moments of beautiful, intoxicating contempt delivered upon the heads of sportswriters in this one, it's impossible to buy them outright--or at least, not to chalk them up as the venomous darts we aim at our closest rivals. Kerry Howley may not crave the claim, but if ever there was a book to be placed alongside the greats of fight lit, it's Thrown, a wonderful travelogue/fight diary told at a breakneck pace. Supposedly constructed out of journals full of notes intended as a graduate study of true experiences in philosophical phenomology, Thrown traces Kerry's "space-taking" immersion into the world of MMA fighting and her personal obsession with two fighters--the should've-been-a-contender Sean Huffman and Eric "New Breed" Koch, a young fighter at the onset of a potential-filled career. Like any smart writer schooled in contemporary profiling, Howley doesn't skimp on the documentation of perception, the little moments of weirdness that demystify one of the few sports still capable of mystification. It's that solidity of form--that awareness of what we need for these narratives to contain and compel us forward--that serves as Howley's truer focus though, one that seeks to pierce exactly what it is that's occuring in those shining moments when their bodies enact violence, when skin swells, splits, tears. In hands of lesser purpose, Howley's mention of how these men speak, the way they respond to request, the look in their eyes when they listen, their weird demands and weirder requirements--all of these things would be gloss upon the room, cheap minutatie to fill the mouth of the brains color commentary. In hers, the trivia becomes another bone, one that one of her fighters would use as handle. We find purchase just the same.

-Tucker Stone, 2014