Deep Focus is a new line of small but richly rewarding studies, the first one about a favorite film by a great writer, Christopher Sorrentino. They're cheap and hot little books perfect for reading at the bus stop, before a movie or concert, and especially along with a DVD of the flick being playfully examined. It's an exciting new attempt at film studies. And the fact that the first two authors are superb essayists and worth reading over and over, and the films are the kind you have to own and watch again and again, means Deep Focus has scored with the perfect $13.95 each gift this season for film and modern literature fans.

Jonathan Lethem's They Live is the first volume in the series, and the media-massaged author of novels The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City scribes a scene by scene, anarchist polemic via extended hobo punch out, delineation of the Reagan-era, rabble-rousing science fiction/horror classic by John Carpenter. (Carpenter is a dependable guy for shockingly intelligent genre films, from the original Assault on Precinct 13 to Escape from New York and Los Angeles to Vampires.) While dismissed by some as over-the-top B-movie shrill political paranoia, very few people who have seen it have ever gotten over the scene where wrestling star "Rowdy" Roddy Piper first discovers the ugliness of the alien race attempting holding us in submission to consumerism and resigned to the 9 to 5 world. It's everywhere and in everything, even makes the homeless bow to it, dispossessing all of us on a gratingly precise regularity, and like most great SF They Live is a timeless explanation for how the future is shaping the present. Like how the pernicious and opnely known but accepted MK-ULTRA program tried to create disassociation in people by the CIA back in the 1960s, so that mind control kills off the host in the personality of those they've experimented on, our created "core" values of greed and fear are against us. They Live is extremely (and to some, comically) blunt about how we are more programmed than we'll ever know, unless we dream something new in a very direct and violent way (symbolized by one of the most awesome one-on-one brawls in an alleyway in They Live than you'll ever find in another movie).

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For fans of local roller derby dominators Rat City Rollergirls (a team which is one of the very finest nationally and cram their regional tournaments with frothing fans every time), the book Down And Derby: An Insider's Guide to Roller Derby needs to be up on the shelf with the torn off band-aid backings, the beer-doused punk rock bootlegs, and the used-for-skeet skuffed DVD of Whip It.

Written by veteran NPR host Alex Cohen with WGA veteran and Blood And Thunder magazine scribe Jennifer Barbee, the new Soft Skull Press anthology of roller derby history, how to, and contemporary heroes is one of my favorite recent tomes. Due to appear and read at Elliott Bay Book Company (1521 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill) on Friday, August 27, at 7 PM, new and old fans of the woman-empowered sport shouldn't miss this appearance from these authors.

Down And Derby elegantly describes the savagery from the center of the California stomping grounds (and the celebrity of Toughie Brasuhn and Gerry Murray, just before the damage moved on to TV back in the day) to the dirt county sidelines ("If You Can't Be An Athlete, You Can Be An Athletic Supporter," with expert advice on how to get good tats and get on properly as a participating fan). As a dude who loved watching derby on the tube growing up in the 70s, it's a trip to see another wave of wonderful women like Kamikaze Kim and Tequila Mockingbird bounce their sisters around and go for the gold. Down And Derby discusses the various positions of the players, and is honest about why some aspects of playing rules and other duties really suck.

From "The Spandex Years" and "Deep In The Heart Of Texas" to portrayals in film and other media, this new book is great for both for nervous neophytes and old school bruisers. Come out and say hello to Barbee and Cohen and you might rub elbows (watch out! Ow!) with a few local Rat City ragamuffins too. Sweet.

Have you ever seen Eraserhead? In David Lynch's first B&W Surrealist mind-hump of a movie, there is scene with a little song the "Lady in the Radiator" sings in which the only lyrics are: "In heaven, everything is fine." It is a supremely affecting and menacing moment in an art film filled with them.

Josh Frank, co-author of Fool The World, The Oral History of a Band Called The Pixies, was a Twin Peaks fan growing up in suburban Potomac, Maryland when he first saw that perverse pageantry. He would later come to find out the otherworldly, upsetting tune was written by Peter Ivers, an experimental-pop musician and the catalyst-center of an early experiment in cable television's desire to blend challenging new rock music, insurgent comedy, and arty weirdness into a show called New Wave Theatre.

That show featured bands like the Dead Kennedys and Fear, among many others, and lived up to the strangeness of the movie Ivers wrote the song for, as well as his classically bizarre LPs Knight of the Blue Communion (1969), Terminal Love (1974), and others. Full of stark imagery mixed with improvisational madness, Ivers' own music was simply another element of this proto-punk Renaissance Man's adventures in acting, humor, TV scores (for Roger Corman flicks and even Starsky & Hutch), but most of all, his New Wave Theatre, which was a thinly veiled look at the real Los Angeles underground shot out on channels like USA to the heartland of America, rattling the minds of its children. It thrilled John Belushi and Harold Ramis, whose lives would be entwined with Ivers' own, as driven to excessive creativity as the former but with an ambitious heart to entertain wide-scale too like the latter. As status-quo karmic payback (if you believe in crap like that) Ivers was found gruesomely beaten to death in his art studio-loft-music space on March 3, 1983.

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When author Tony DuShane was a nervous young man struggling with being a Jehovah's Witness, his extremely religious father lost his mind and punched five holes in the wall above their living room couch. To hide these examples of his dad's breaking point, the already-disfellowshipped teenager plastered an Einsterzende Neubauten poster over the damage.

This is one of the minor scenes in a very funny, but also very mood-rattling novel by DuShane, whose "Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk" came out from Soft Skull Press on February 2nd. It's marketed as fiction, but due to the author's own past and the curiosity those of us outside the cult have about the goings-on of all those extremely well-dressed young men and women who thrust crappy end-of-the-world literature at us downtown, it probably wouldn't hurt to consider it memoir.

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She's a young woman in the big city writing a column about sex. She learns a lot with her friends, goes through scandalous relationships and ambivalent infatuations, learns to love what she thought she hates and vice versa, and confounds her own presumptions along this path. 

No, it's not Sex in the City, it's sex in the city. 

"Reverend" Jen Miller holds her own in the gnarly Lower East Side, engaged professionally in the competitive art scene in a variety of confrontative performing capacities, and also happened to found ASS Magazine. Oh yeah, she's also the curator at a Troll Museum.

So no prissy ladies and guys named "Big" get written about in her work memoir, Live Nude Elf, just out from Soft Skull Press. It's a collection of scribed "sexperiments" that has all the drama and humor of an adult TV show but involves being tied to a cross in the middle of a crowded orgy and visiting an opium den. Adult babies, Tantric immersion, and regular heartbreak are part of the curriculum, all begun when Miller began as a live nude girl at "Wiggles" (hence the title, but it's not the last time she drops clothes in public in this book).

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"Lost In The Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook," edited by Kay Bozich Owens and Lynn Owens, might be one of the best gifts you can give this holiday season.

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