Unturning the Stone

For the last week or so I have been checking out the TV adaptions of Robert Parker's Jesse Stone novels. I have found them to be moody, engaging, and well produced. Tom Selleck shows restraint and professionalism as a small town police chief who is imperfect but doing his best to do his job and live his life. It is strange to see Selleck playing Stone after having recently revisited Magnum PI on DVD. Where Magnum was a fun pulpy romp, the issues and gravity of the Stone story lines tend more to abuse, small town power and the limits placed on those who enforce the laws in those communities. The setting for these films is breath taking and like any great noir plays as much a role as the characters who inhabit the landscape.

I have so far watched Stone Cold and Death in Paradise, and enjoyed both. I look forward to viewing the rest.

Filmography from Wiki

• 1. Stone Cold (20 February 2005)
• 2. Jesse Stone: Night Passage (15 January 2006) a prequel to Stone Cold
• 3. Jesse Stone: Death In Paradise (30 April 2006)
• 4. Jesse Stone: Sea Change (22 May 2007)
• 5. Jesse Stone: Thin Ice (1 March 2009)
  
• 6. Jesse Stone: No Remorse (2009)
  
• 7. Jesse Stone: Innocents Lost (2010)
  

FFB- You call It Madness

You Call it Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon by Lenny Kaye
If you know the name Lenny Kaye count yourself lucky, he is one of the short list of people who kept Rock and Roll alive in the early 70s. First by compiling the Nuggets compilation (a must own for any music fan) and then by playing with Patti Smith off and on since the early 70s. long the way he helped Waylon Jennings write Waylon: An Autobiography and penned today's riday Forgotten Book You call it Madness.

The Sensuous Song of the Croon tells the true story of Russ Columbo his strange death, and the age of croon that he was part of at the end of the 20s. Here is what Publishers Weekly (via Amazon) had to say about the book:
In this ambitious narrative of a moment in music history, Kaye, a musician and coauthor of Waylon, highlights the age of crooning in early 1930s New York City. Prohibition is coming to an end, the Ziegfeld Follies are on their last leg, but radio is stronger than ever, and three singers battle for attention: Rudy Vallee (the WASPy Yalie who sings through a megaphone); the drink-loving Bing Crosby; and the mysterious Russ Columbo. It's on the latter that Kaye focuses until Columbo's untimely death at the age of 26. Kaye takes a novelistic approach, a style that gets in the way of an otherwise good and detailed history. His present-tense narrative forces a sense of immediacy, and his literary attempts to bring the sounds and feel of the decade to life undermine his story ("Yoo hoo. Boo hoo. The double o of crooning. A circle squared. Times two, or should we say too"). But Kaye has done his research, and his characterizations of each singer are clever, with such insightful observations as "At the New York Paramount, Bing Crosby is riding out over the audience on a giant mechanical crane.... Russ doesn't have that luxury.... For him, seduction is serious business."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I read this one a couple of years back and found it to be challenging, but worth the effort. I really liked how I could see the parallels the age of croon had with the music world of today. It is one if a handful of books that I need to reread, and it inspire me to order a CD of Russ Colombo's recordings. Here is a link to an NPR about the book for anyone interested.

More on the Friday Forgotten Book Project can be found at Patti Abbot's Blog pattinase

Aug 2009 Reads

Here is a rundown of the books that I read this month:

Columbine by Dave Cullen
Tarot Card Book Mark: none ( I didn't think it tasteful considering the subject matter)
We all pretty much know this story don't we? or do we? This book is a journalistic look at the events that leading up to and the aftermath of the mass murders at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado in April of 1999. Two students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris attempted to blow up their school and kill hundreds of their classmates. The book was very well written, and unlike to many true crime tales did not wallow in the more sensational aspects of the crime. I think the most important things that I took away from this book were that 1) this wasn't a school shooting, it was a failed bombing that lead to a shooting 2) that it was mainly the Jeffco Sheriffs Department not telling the public and what they had learned that caused the media to run with so many erroneous stories in the immediate aftermath of the incident. If there are any lessons that parents, students, police, and the education establishment can take away from this book it's that you can not prevent everything, and preventing these events means taking an honestly look at your population and speak up when you think there is an issues. Also this book pointed out that as an institution you need to have plans to deal with this kind of event. Overall it was an excellent read that everyone who has a interest education, law enforcement, or the societal issues around upper middle class suburban life of Gen Y teens in the USA.

Killer's Payoff by Ed McBain

Tarot Card Book Mark: The Shell
The 6th of the 87th Precinct books. Cotton Hawes steps to the fore as the romantic lead in this installment. He sleeps with women, he carries the bulk of the story doing the the leg work and he solves the crime-- in this case extortion. It did not completely work for me, as part of the allure of the series is the ensemble cast and the lack of a womanizing, hard drinking PI type story. McBain writes in the intro to the 1993 edition that I was reading that he was under pressure to add those elements, and even though he did there is a level of snark that he adds to the scenes of Cotton Hawes acting like your typical pulp protagonist, as if to say you want this stuff you got it. One thought occurs to me, I have said before that it is going to be interesting to see how things play out with the changes in crime in policing that occurred as the series was written, it also strikes me that it is going to be interesting to see how the changes in publishing of crime novels play out as the series goes on. When the series started paperbacks were cheap quick reads that rarely passed the 250 page mark, but the 70s and 80s the expectation was that paperbacks would be later cheaper editions of Hard Covers, and would have to be longer and give the reader more material for their buck. All that said this was yet another enjoyable installment in the 87th Precinct series.

To Find Cora by Harry Whittington
Tarot Card Book Mark: The Glove
From Stark House Books
To Find Cora is the first of the three novels reprinted in this volume. It is the story of Joe a man who is tearing across the country looking for his wife Cora who he believes has run off with another man. He hears that a woman matching Cora's description has been sited and set out to check out the rumor. Arriving at a remote farm house, he finds not Cora but Vi and Hall. Hall is on the run after having embezzled a large amount of money from the company he works for and believes Joe to be a Detective who has been sent to find him. The story unfolds from this point, with and there are plenty of pulpy twists, turns and complications. The book has a small cast of main characters who are easy to keep track of and there is a big twist at the end, along with a just deserts kind of finally. I'm taking my time to read the three books in this volume, and am looking forward to the next two.

Passport to Peril by Robert B Parker

Tarot Card Book Mark: The Whip
Hard Case Crime book
First off, this is not the same Robert B Parker who writes the Spenser books. A tale of espionage set in 50s Budapest. A fun and smooth read. American John Stoddard buys a forged passport to travel to Budapest so he can look for his brother who has been missing since the war. He quickly finds himself in the middle of a the delivery of a list of people that several parties are interested in. There is a bit of James Bond, but a whole lot more of the classic outsider sucked into something he has no interest in plot. There are a couple of solid action set pieces, and some torture (not described). All in all this was classic pulp read and another worthy entry in the Hard Case Line.

Blood is a Rover by James Ellroy
Tarot Card Book Mark: The Gold
I am still reading this one, so I am going to with hold comment.

The Mourner by Richard Stark
Tarot Card Book Mark: The Earth
This is the earliest Stark book that I have read that shows signs of where Westlake was going later on. In this book Parker gets sucked into a plot to steal a statue from the functionary of a fictional Eastern European country. Things of course go wrong, and touches of humor surface. I could see the seeds of The Hot Rock which reportedly started out as a Parker book. I like the book a lot, but really wanted more of the Parker heist stories that featured in the first four books of the Parker series.

Note:
Tarot Card Book Marks? I have a really lame deck of Tarot cards that I pulled off a free cart at the Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library sale a couple of months back, and I started using them as book marks for giggles mostly. I just pull a card at random from the deck, make note of it, and when I am done it goes in the discard pile. Sometimes the card ends up to have a relation to the book in questions, sometimes not.

Blood is a Rover

I've been working my way though the latest Jame Ellroy Blood is a Rover. It's long, it's complex, and it's puzzling, all things that I like in a novel. I also like his style, the stripped down language, the crazy titled unfair world. It's filled with damaged people driven by guilt, fear, hunger and primal needs to scream at a chaotic world. I love that his writing makes me think in the same patter and that I can hear the voice of the charceters in my head, the only other writer who has done that in the last couple of years is Megan Abbot (who's latest is hovering around the top of my TBR pile).

In a lot of ways I am taking my time and savoring the book, it's been eight years since his last and I fear that it will be at least another five before we see fiction from him again. Sure I wish that he would come up with a Hard Case Crime style 200 pager, but I don't know how likely that is.

Anyway, one of the reading commitments I have made this year is to read at least one Donald Westlake novel each month, and as I watch the  days of august fall away I am finding my time cut short for the month, and have decided to take a break from Rover and read The Mourner by Richard Stark (a Westlake A.K.A. for those not in the know).

Friday Forgotten Film: Dudes (1987)

Dudes (1987)
"They Were Looking for the American Dream, They found the American Nightmare"

Here is the pitch,three young adults are heading west to LA from NYC, they are looking for a new life. Somewhere in the middle of Arizona they are attached by a gang, one of them is killed, and it is up to the other two to avenge their friend. Along the way they find out who and what they are, and are forced to grow up.

Now from that pitch you could have almost any kind of film. A Western, a Hard Boiled Noir, a coming of age tale, a thriller or a horror film. When I first saw the ad for this movie in a video catalog in 1988, I was sure that it was going to be a horror film-- something along the lines of The Zero Boys or The Hills Have Eyes. The poster was an ominously dark and garishly colored affair, two young men, a pink land yacht and a dark desert behind them-- I had to rent it, and I did.

What kind of film did it turn out to be? get this, a Punk Rock Western! yep, that's right a genre blend of crime, Punksploitation and the Western . John Cryer (Duckie from Pretty in Pink), Daniel Roebuck (Rivers Edge and US Marshals) and Flea (from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Back to the Future) are three punks in mid 80s NYC, they lives are going nowhere, they go to shows, work dead end jobs, drink and have minor adventures in the pre Gulliani blight of NYC. With nothing to loose they head west looking for the promised land of California. Along the way they pass though desert landscapes, help a Elvis impersonator with his stuck car and talk about their future in the land of sunshine. On their last night before reaching California they camp under a massive stone, only to be bushed whacked and one of them get's killed. It is from this point what might have been a film about NYC Punks finding their place in the LA Punk world turns into a revenge story with elements of the typical fish out of water story. They find that they appearance hampers their ability to follow their friends killers, and have to deal with being outsiders in a part of the country that was hostile to them.

I'm not going to make the case that this is a great film, it has it's moments. There is great scenery and a soundtrack that is almost perfect in relation to the film. Dudes might have played for a weekend in the theaters, but once I saw it for the first time, it was mine. It was everything that I was looking for in a film, it was about outsiders who took control of their lives, who stood up for themselves, and found purpose. It had adventure, crazy dreams, surreal shoot outs and just a little bit of romance. There is something also to be said about the connection between the myth of the American west, American Punk rock and the world of indie film making, all of them have the element of Do It Yourselfness, do what you have to do, and forge ahead as best you can in common. In a time when so many people seem to be sitting around crying that the jobs that have always been there are gone, and that the middle class life they felt they were promised has vanished a film like Dudes, with a message of finding your path and going for it might just be what the doctor ordered.

Don't You Forget about Me.

Don't You Forget about Me.

It's been a weird month for notable deaths, and I wanted to take just a moment to comment on a couple of them.

First John Hughes. I grew up in the 80s, came of age as they say, and the films that Hughes made did make an impact on me, then and again later on when I started to unpack their messages. I had to have seen all of them, if not in theaters then on video (everyone remember the old days of video?). At the time they were sold as being 'Real' and 'Honest' about teens and their issues. I have to applaud Hughes for dealing with issues that weren't addressed in other teen films of the time-- class being the biggest one-- but at the same time I can't help but shake my head at the underling message of conformity that was in many of those films. To me the best of the teen films (and I am not counting Ferris Buller which is a fantasy even if it contains many truths) has to be Some kind of Wonderful, which is really Pretty in Pink with the correct ending. The rest of his films are marred with things like Annie Potts finding happiness when she sells out in Pretty in Pink and the underling message of The Breakfast Club seeming to be that as long as the nerds do all the work they will be allowed to live with out getting picked on. No matter my issues with those films they are iconic and did mean something to me and my generation. As a writer I always wanted to know where those stories would end, and it's too bad that Hughes never was able to come back and tell that tale.

Second Billy Lee Riley, almost the last of the Sun Rockabilly crew. He was there, he was part of it, and even if he did not get the fame and fortune of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash or the last man standing Jerry Lee Lewis he was part of that scene and that era. His band, sometimes known as the Little Green Men, were basically the house band at Sun and Riley was a first rate singer and ax man. I have always had a fondness for his classic Flyin' Saucer Rock'n'roll, which might just have been part of the blue print for Horror Punk and Psychobilly down the road. If nothing else he was pumping out the kind of energy that weaves it's way through the history of real Rock and Roll, from Rockabilly to Garage Rock to Proto Punk, Hard Rock, Punk Rock, Heavy Metal, Power Pop and on into the world of Grunge and Hi Energy Rock and Roll--- all of which have now seemingly come under the umbrella heading of -- Garage Punk!

Lastly Willie Deville. 70s NYC punk icon who brought that punk energy to R&B (the real stuff not the warmed over disco the mouse has been selling as of late) and roots rock. Like many of his peers from the CBGBs days he never really got the mainstream attention he deserved, but the underground and of course the Europeans remembered him. It's only been in the last couple of years that his music, mostly the Mink Deville 70s era stuff, has been part of my collection, and while I am still discovering his work his passing just reminds me that we are watching his generation of musicians start to leave us (those who lasted out the 80s) and wonder who will be the next to go.

thoughts, comments, remembrances?

Friday Forgotten Book: The Chucklin' Whatsit?

Friday Forgotten Book: The Chucklin' Whatsit? by Richard Sala.

Some time in the late 90s artist and musician Tomb (aka Jackson Phibes) mentioned the comic artist and writer Richard Sala in a e-mail. I of course had to look up his work, as anything that Tomb was talking about had to be worth checking out. Sala's most current work at the time was today's Friday Forgotten Book The Chucklin' Whatsit?.

From Amazon.com:
Broom, hack writer turned detective by
necessity, is having a heck of a time figuring out why astrology
columnists are turning up dead, seemingly at the hand of the Gull
Street Ghoul, a killer from the city's past. The solution to the crimes
involves a strange organization named G.A.S.H., a shadowy masked man
named Mister Ixnay, and tiny outsider-art dolls called "whatsits."

What I like about the book is that it mixes the feel of outsider culture, pulp story telling and the comics medium with just the right twist. Sala has said that he is inspired by time spent in his grandfathers antique shop. The look of Sala's art has a Edward Gorey via The Hernandez Brothers look. I also like the fact that his characters are often dumb, short sighted or just make mistakes. I have become a fan of Sala's work in general, and look forward to each and every one of his new projects.