Book News: Poker & Pop Culture Now Available!

Checking in again to let everyone know my book Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America’s Favorite Card Game is now out! No more preordering and waiting... order it today and you’ll have it right away.

I received some author copies a short while back, and earlier this week I got a copy of the e-book from D&B Poker as well. Here is a short video that provides a glimpse of both -- take a look:

Valerie Cross also wrote a nice piece about me and the book for PokerNews last week. Check it out: “Martin Harris Shares Inspirations for New Book ‘Poker and Pop Culture.’”

Right now you can order the paperback from Amazon, and I imagine the e-book version is going to show up there soon as well. Meanwhile both the paperback and e-book can be ordered at the D&B Poker site. In fact, if you get the e-book from D&B, we’ve added a special bonus “appendix” that includes a list of “The Top 100 Poker Movies” with summaries, memorable quotes, and links to the films’ IMDB entries. (The appendix won’t be included with the e-book if you get it on Amazon.)

Also coming in the near future will be an audio book. Last month I spent many hours in a studio recording the book, and before too long that ought to start showing up as well both on the D&B site and Amazon.

Here are some places online where I’ve found you can buy the book:

D&B Poker

Amazon

Apple Books

Books-A-Million

Barnes & Noble

Book Depository

Target

ThriftBooks

Poker & Pop Culture is also on sale right now at the D&B Poker booth at the World Series of Poker there in the halls of the Rio. I’ll be heading out there next week for a visit, and I’ll surely spend some time hanging out there at the booth, too.

As I say in the video (and have talked about here on the blog), the book provides both a history of poker and a history of how poker has been represented in American popular culture -- i.e., movies, television, music, fiction, drama, plays, literature, and so on. Thus the book not only tells you when and where and how poker has been played over the last two centuries, but also when and where and how poker has been portrayed, too, and how those portrayals have influenced opinions about poker and the game’s significance to America.

There to the left is a picture of the list of the book’s chapters. It took me a while to settle on this way of organizing the book, and in fact once I did I had this piece of paper posted by my desk -- kind of a way to keep that “bird’s eye view” before me as I wrote.

As you can see, each chapter covers a particular place where poker can be found, with that idea being applied broadly to refer to locations in history (e.g., the Old West, the Civil War, etc.), in media (movies, television, music), in society (business, politics), in time (the past, the future) and in literal locations (homes, clubs, casinos).

The book is roughly chronological, starting with poker’s origins and ending with discussions of the game in contemporary contexts. But what I’ve really tried to do is create a kind of “geography” for poker with each chapter highlighting a different place for the reader to visit where poker exists. That includes real places, made-up ones, and many combining fact and fiction.

It’s a pretty complicated story, really. One theme that emerges fairly quickly in the book is how poker occupies this very paradoxical place in America as a game both beloved and condemned. There are just as many examples in popular culture of poker being romanticized and celebrated as there are examples of it being censured and demonized.

I’m not really an unrelenting “cheerleader” for poker in the book, having chosen instead to try to be somewhat objective as I chronicle and interpret all of these examples of poker from American history and culture. That said, I think just by writing a book like this I’m obviously taking the position of someone who thinks the game is worth studying and of historical importance.

It’s definitely satisfying to have reached this point in the book-making process. Of course, there’s also that difficult sense of “letting go” while knowing I might have said more, or said things differently -- something akin to ending a poker session knowing that while you did your best, there were still hands in which you might have made different (and possibly better) decisions. (To mitigate that feeling, I hang onto the idea of a revised, expanded edition down the road.)

Thanks to those who have picked up the book already, and thanks in advance to those who plan to do so later. And to you, reader of Hard-Boiled Poker, who inspired me more than you realize to take this interest in the game and writing about it in this direction.

Another Reason to Not to Hate the Eagles

There’s a point somewhere during the first half of The Big Lebowski when the title character stops for a moment to lay down on his coveted rug -- the one that “really pulls the room together” -- and while getting high listen to some tunes on his headphones.

The song playing on his stereo is by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. As a devotee of all things Beefheart, I perked up the first time I saw the film in a theater nearly 20 years ago. I think by that point in the film we’d already been introduced to Lebowski’s love of CCR (whom he refers to simply as “Creedence”), but hearing the Beefheart helped shape his character in a slightly different way for me.

Later in the movie comes the much remembered scene in the taxi when after getting kicked out of the Malibu the driver is playing the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” There’s a pause in the dialogue and you can see Jeff Bridges starting to exhale loudly, acting a little petulant.

I knew what was coming.

“Jesus, man. Could you change the channel?” he whines, and the driver refuses to do so with surprising ferocity. But Lebowski can’t sit still. “I had a rough night and I hate the fuck!ng Eagles, man,” he says. The driver immediately pulls over and hilariously jettisons his complaining customer to the curb.

The Beefheart tune earlier had been a cue for me, helping me anticipate that even though with most things the dude abides, he wasn’t going to abide the Eagles’ warmed over, soft country rock. I knew this because I also like Beefheart, and I also don’t very much like the Eagles.

That said, even though I don’t own a single Eagles LP, I’m still kind of fascinated by the band’s story. I listened to FM radio a lot as a child of the ‘70s, pored over Rolling Stone and other rock mags, and still today find popular culture from that era endlessly fascinating.

I thoroughly enjoyed the sprawling 2013 documentary The History of the Eagles, which I found compelling all of the way through its three-plus hours. I even appreciate the talent and craft demonstrated by their six studio records from the ’70s, and kinda-sorta have to give props to the weird, spooky narrative and dueling guitars of “Hotel California,” an undeniably inspired slice of rock art.

But for whatever reason, there’s always been something about the Eagles flavor that has never been satisfying for me. Like Lebowski, whenever they come on I’m instinctively reaching to change the channel.

Like I say, though, I find the band’s story interesting, and since I’m also a sucker for any stories about poker turning up in contexts other than the usual ones, I comfortably stuck with Dr. Pauly’s new article “Life in the Fast Lane: Poker and the Eagles” all of the way to the end. The piece is over on the PokerStars blog, and is fun stuff for fans of ’70s music, interesting tales of home games, odd poker variants, analyses of poker-themed lyrics, and movie trivia.

And yeah, well, if you like the Eagles, it’s pretty cool, too. Not that I do... but now there’s one more reason why I can’t quite hate ’em with Lebowski-like intensity.

The invented game of “Eagle Poker” described in the article struck me as a little symbolic of the band itself -- a three-card game in which you bet on whether the third card’s value landed in between the other two. I say that because of the way the band always had multiple songwriters and candidates for “leader,” with Glenn Frey and Don Henley permanently occupying two of the top spots and various third men (Randy Meisner, Don Felder, Joe Walsh) kind of standing in between them as fellow front men-slash-rivals.

(The game also made me think of my still-in-development Beatles-themed poker variant, Sgt. Pepper.)

When you get a few minutes, go read the article, which you can check out any time you like.

(Trivia question: A five-suited, 65-card deck was produced during the first half of the 20th century. What was the fifth suit called? Click here to find out.)

Image: Eagles (1972), Eagles, Amazon.

Searching The Simpsons

Was alerted earlier today to this new website called Frinkiac which purports to have three million searchable screen captures from The Simpsons. Just enter a word or phrase and if there are any matches it quickly delivers the images and lines for you, complete with season/episode info and timestamps.

Indeed, it will likely find a match no matter what word or phrase you enter. After all, the show has been around for more than a quarter-century now, with nearly 600 episodes.

Entering the word “poker” brings back more than 50 moments from the show, although there are a number of duplicates in there. In truth, I think it amounts to about eight or so actual poker references total.

Here are three good ones, turned into “memes” with the click of a button:

Of all of the ones that come back, the only one I really remember is of Homer freaking out over one of Cassius M. Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker” paintings, which came up during one of the first “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween eps.

The scene with the painting was just one of those little interstitials between the episodes in the anthology show, in this case framed by Homer wandering through an art gallery. “We come now to the final and most terrifying painting of the evening,” Homer explains before delivering the above lines.

He goes on to say “We had a story to go with this painting, but it was far too intense.” Now that I think about it, there is something unnerving about dogs playing poker.

Anyhow, if you’re a Simpsons fan you might go crank up the Frinkiac and see what your searches turn up.

Images: Frinkiac.

Still the Same

Since moving to the farm a little over a year-and-a-half ago, Vera Valmore and I have finally gotten ourselves settled (more or less), having established various routines to help maintain everything while constantly dealing with new challenges, most having to do with repairs to the barn and/or frequently used equipment. I’ve never in my life spent so much time with hammers, wrenches, pliers, and screwdrivers.

It is no longer the case that everything is new to us. The routines are becoming more and more familiar, and while repetition can induce tedium, there is also a kind of pleasure that can come from it, too.

One practice we established early on was to keep a radio playing in the barn day and night. Don’t know if the horses care one way or the other about the music, but after dealing with a skunk who tried to take up residence in there we read that the noise helps keep them away. We still see skunks about now and then -- in fact, about a month ago we saw a troupe of five of them slinking across the back yard, closely bunched as though they formed a single, frightening-looking mega-skunk. But we’ve seen no Pepé le Pews in the barn, thankfully.

We started out playing a classical station, then at some point early on switched it over to the local classic rock one -- you know, the one that plays a rotation of a few hundred songs we’ve all been hearing for years and years. Some tunes I like, some I don’t, and quite a few I’m ambivalent about even if they manage to enliven in a dim way that nostalgic part of the brain that makes things that are familiar seem pleasurable.

I mean, I own exactly zero Bob Seger LPs. I feel like once I might have had a cassette of Against the Wind, but that was very long ago. If we were to apply the “VP$IP” stat from poker to him and his oeuvre, I voluntarily play Bob Seger -- my current VPBS -- exactly 0.0% of the time. Yet I know every note and lyric of at least a dozen of his songs, thanks to their inclusion on that endless loop of tunes I heard in my childhood and have continued to hear over the decades since.

If you ever listen to the “classic rock” station where you live -- probably in the car, I’d imagine, which for many of us the only place we are exposed to FM radio anymore -- you’ve probably heard some of the same drops my station includes in between songs touting their playlist as “timeless” and “the best music ever made.”

I suppose just by the evidence of playing music first written and recorded 40 years ago or more, the “timeless” claim is being aggressively proven by the mere fact of these stations’ existence. However, the argument about it being “the best music ever made” is obviously one with which many people -- especially those outside of the (now aging) target demographic -- would take issue.

(Speaking of, search online about “classic rock” and you soon learn the term “demographic cliff,” used in concert with the idea that the first audience for such music is dying out. As Mick Jagger -- who turned 72 over the weekend -- once sang, what a drag it is getting old.)

Something occurred to me this morning while feeding the horses to the accompaniment of Leon Russell’s “Tight Rope” and Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” though -- something that might help explain from where this “best ever” claim might be coming. Those of us who grew up listening to just a few radio stations or watching three television networks or going to the same few movies that played for weeks at a time in the local theater shared a lot of the same cultural experiences, with these various artifacts helping provide odd little touchstones that significantly shaped the way we learned how to relate to others, for better or worse.

Meanwhile now people experience popular culture much differently, in more fragmented ways that among other things can involve a lot more consumer direction (if the consumer desires such freedom of choice, that is). The phenomenon is more complicated than that, of course, but it starts to explain at least one difference between the present and the past, and also the source for that insistence by some that what came before represented the “best” cultural products “ever made.”

I guess the Seger song that best emblematizes the mass psychological experiment of “classic rock” is about has to be “Still the Same.” You know it, the one addressed to a gambler -- a poker player, presumably -- who “always won every time you placed a bet.” Of the gambler, Seger sings “you always said the cards would never do you wrong.” And like the old card player in “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers, Seger’s understands the importance of knowing when to walk away: “The trick, you said, was never play the game too long.”

But while he never plays a particular game too long, he’s more or less stuck in his role, not unlike a song being played over and over and over again. As the chorus explains, the gambler is a lot like those poker “lifers,” destined (doomed?) to keep “moving game to game.”

Because (the song concludes) -- like that playlist of “Dream On” and “More Than a Feeling” and “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Magic Man” and “The Joker” I can count on hearing every time I go back into the barn -- “some things never change.”

Mushrooms, Real and Imagined

We’ve gotten a lot of rain here on the farm over the last week or so. Recently a couple of these mushrooms have oddly popped up here and there, including that one pictured to the left. They look a little like teed up golf balls from afar, although this one is already approaching softball size.

They come up fast, too -- this wasn’t even there yesterday. When I bent over to snap the photo, I found myself thinking a little about mushroom clouds, and before long an associative-chain of YouTubing led me to rewatching a couple of TV films from the early ’80s that focused on the possibility of modern day nuclear war -- The Day After and Special Bulletin.

Both of these movies appeared on network television on Sunday nights in 1983, with Special Bulletin being shown on NBC in March and The Day After on ABC in November. I vividly remember watching them then, and I don’t know if I really had sat down to see either since.

Both are highly intriguing, with The Day After the more accomplished of the two. Both address the horror of nuclear weapons, with Special Bulletin also attempting some further commentary on news media with the entire movie being presented as a faux news broadcast, sort of like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio show from nearly a half-century before.

In fact, disclaimers are shown throughout Special Bulletin reminding viewers they are watching a “realistic depiction of fictional events.” Even so, just as happened with Welles’s broadcast, there were viewers calling stations who weren’t sure what they were watching wasn’t in fact real.

It’s impossible to watch these movies today without being mindful of the specific historical context of the Cold War as well as the recent Three Mile Island incident and other nuclear-related fears of the day. Chernobyl came a couple of years later, and that, too, weighs on the mind when viewing today. Nor can one watch them now without doing so through the memory lens of the real-life horror of 9/11, an event that resonates in various ways with both films.

In Special Bulletin, an activist group manages to steal plutonium, assemble a bomb, then take hostages in a docked boat in Charleston, South Carolina. Their demands include the turning over of all of the triggers for the nuclear devices located at the nearby naval base, part of a larger design to encourage the reduction of nuclear weapons generally. If their demands aren’t met, they’ll detonate their device.

At one point a couple of talking heads on the news broadcast bring up a poker metaphor when discussing the activists -- or “terrorists,” as they are tentatively described in the film -- and whether they’ve actually obtained plutonium or not.

The analogy they use is an obvious one. “I don’t believe the bomb is real,” says the doubter. “We’re witnessing an extraordinary kind of bluff -- a poker move, simple as that.” Then the other expert responds by declaring the first commentor “wishes to play card games with an entire city” before taking the position that the bomb might be real.

The Day After presents a different scenario, one depicting a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. turning the Cold War hot in a relative flash after a quick sequence of aggressive moves. Poker is not mentioned in that film, and the strategizing being employed by both superpowers is suggested in subtle ways that allows some ambiguity while focusing the viewer’s attention much more so on the effects of a massive nuclear strike on citizens.

Was curious to watch both films again all of these years later, and to remember how we were viewing them three decades ago. We’ve grown a lot more accustomed to becoming utterly absorbed by news and entertainment media today, but then it was something quite out-of-the-ordinary to experience. More than 100 million watched The Day After, and they reran Special Bulletin again later, too. The cultural impact of both films (and a handful of others with similar subject matter) certainly “mushroomed” and I suppose could be said still to exert some influence today.

I guess today, though, we’d say of their popularity that they really “blew up.”