When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot - Editor's Introduction

By Robert Levin

This is the title story for a book The Drill Press is now publishing, a collection of short fiction and essays by Robert Levin. It should be available by the end of November.

When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot is perceptive commentary on contemporary US society. It is also funny as hell, something that the US would be were it not such an overbearing juggernaut. Clearly juggernaut is what the people of the US want from their government, though they seem unhappy about paying for it either with their taxes or their offspring. How long a society given to such fantasia can continue in its present state is anyone's guess; certainly its collapse will not be funny in local time. For those living in it now, local time may as well be global time. Interesting time.

Levin's story is set in the new America where everybody's somebody. Mundane superheros of the big screen or concert stage, usually as dull-witted as the rest of the class and easily as boring, victims of luck, but everyone wants to be one. Easily fixed, however, by parents bearing geniuses, every one of them, or else austistics if not performing at genius standard. An entire generation so smart and talented they need never work at anything (interesting they are not all natural athletes, but perhaps athletic gifts are rarer than intellectual creativity or musical ability or other such trivialities). Born hucksters, brought up on self-delusion, expect more from them: more tulip mania, juvenile writing, mawkish acting and hideous music among other more serious catastrophes as these born masters take the stage after bypassing the tedium of learning, study, reading and of course, thinking, opting instead for video games and non-stop guitar whining, certainly education enough in the brave new world that the US has become.

Enjoy the ride. Levin has the ability to make such horror both telling and hilarious. That is a rare gift indeed. To cadge an almost forgotten liner note written of Pee Wee Russell's performance with Thelonious Monk at Newport, When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot is a funny snapshot blinking out from the belly of the juggernaut.

The editors

When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot was a storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story of 2004.

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