Hear ye, hear me

Looks like my print book The Last Three Miles will be available as a digital audiobook a few months from now. La Agent just worked up a deal with Audible.com. More to come.

Friday finds

Richard Mosse has an online portfolio of photographs taken at Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Iraq. The huge stone heads of Saddam shown above once glowered from the roof of the Republican Guard palace. 

Elmore Leonard on dialogue, literary genres, and ten tips for writing. Marcela Valdes on the new biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Elise Valmorbida on books about migrants and migration. Paul Muldoon on poetry past and present.

“Casey may be a Renaissance man, but in the 1970s he demonstrated an unsung talent for making children nearly soil themselves out of terror. For that, to some of us, he’ll always be truly medieval.”

Iggy Pop . . . Michel Houellebecq . . . Cafe Carlisle? Huh?

Beautiful, striking Japanese magazine covers from the early 20th century.

The late David Carradine once tried to get Ralph Bakshi to drop the idea of an animated version of The Lord of the Rings and go with a live-action epic, with Grasshopper as Aragorn. True story. 

“I played the tape of Tony Bennett and I with Count Basie in 1983, when I looked like some kind of animal caught in the headlights. I don’t even know what I was doing there, trying to sing ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).’ I couldn’t have swung if you put a rope around my neck at that time.”

Podcast alert

The podcast series Writing Excuses is the next best thing to having a bunch of writer friends who are always ready to drop by and shoot the breeze. The three-man team is skewed toward fantasy and horror writing, but the conversations are expansive enough to interest anyone interested in talking shop. For example, the current installment deals with Non Linear Storytelling, and the chatter takes off from Pulp Fiction as an example of how to use an out-of-sequence narrative to deliver a satisfying story. (Thanks to Fred K.)

On BBC 3′s Arts & Ideas, David Simon, ex-journo and creator of The Wire, my most favorite TV show ever, talks about his wrenching book The Corner, the precursor to The Wire, which is only now seeing publication in the U.K.

The Wednesday Westie

Isn’t-it-great-when-the-giants-dig-up-their-garden-and-make- fascinating-new-smells edition.

Don’t mess with Kris

I confess that I haven’t been paying much attention to Kris Kristofferson or his work over the years, but thanks to this Rolling Stone article about Kristofferson I’m going to buy every note of his music I can get my hands on. What sealed the deal for me was this anecdote from Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday concert, which took place in 2003 at the Beacon Theater:

Up from the basement came one of country music’s brightest stars (who shall remain nameless). At that moment in time, the Star had a monster radio hit about bombing America’s enemies back into the Stone Age.

“Happy birthday,” the Star said to Willie, breezing by us. As he passed Kristofferson in one long, confident stride, out of the corner of his mouth came “None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris.”

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” Kris growled, stepping forward.

“Oh, no,” groaned Willie under his breath. “Don’t get Kris all riled up.”

“You heard me,” the Star said, walking away in the darkness.

“Don’t turn your back to me, boy,” Kristofferson shouted, not giving a shit that basically the entire music industry seemed to be flanking him.

The Star turned around: “I don’t want any problems, Kris — I just want you to tone it down.”

“You ever worn your country’s uniform?” Kris asked rhetorically.

“What?”

“Don’t ‘What?’ me, boy! You heard the question. You just don’t like the answer.” He paused just long enough to get a full chest of air. “I asked, ‘Have you ever served your country?’ The answer is, no, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not. So shut the fuck up!” I could feel his body pulsing with anger next to me. “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about!”

“Whatever,” the young Star muttered.

Ray Charles stood motionless. Willie Nelson looked at me and shrugged mischievously like a kid in the back of the classroom.

Kristofferson took a deep inhale and leaned against the wall, still vibrating with adrenaline. He looked over at Willie as if to say, “Don’t say a word.” Then his eyes found me.

“You know what Waylon Jennings said about guys like him?” he whispered.

I shook my head.

“They’re doin’ to country music what pantyhose did to finger-fuckin’.”

“One of country music’s brightest stars,” by the way, was Toby Keith — the Jonah Goldberg of country music. It was 2003, remember: Dickhead Nation was in the ascendant and Keith was whoopin’ along with the rest of the rumpus room warriors all lathered up to start bombing brown-skinned people in Iraq. He’d had a hit with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” so Keith felt entitled to play pompous ass in the presence of Paul Simon and Ray Charles, who had recorded more classics than Toby Keith could ever hope to make, years before Toby Keith was even out of grade school.

That little encounter between Keith and Kristofferson is one of the most entertaining things I’ve read since “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in which Gay Talese described young writer Harlan Ellison facing down Ol’ Blue Mouth during an encounter at a night club.

Bootleg memories

 

It wasn’t such a hot time in many other ways, but 1975 was a great year to become a Bob Dylan fan. 

After a couple of years of being aware of Dylan’s somewhat forbidding artistic standing — I’d been reading Rolling Stone regularly for a couple of years, and his name was intoned with a reverence that God and Eric Clapton could only have envied – my teenaged self decided to buy the new Dylan, Blood on the Tracks, shortly after its January release.

Short of having 2001: A Space Odyssey be my first Stanley Kubrick film, I can’t think of a more overpowering introduction to a major artist. I won’t pretend that a suburban high school kid could relate to every aspect of an album composed by a mature man, a wealthy and fabulously successful performer mourning the collapse of a marriage, but I could certainly relate to the craftsmanship of the songs, the vividness of the imagery, and above all the glimpse into the mind of someone learning to stand tall with heartbreak. Those are good things to think about at any age.     

And yet there was more to come. The Basement Tapes, which Rolling Stone critics referred to the way Biblical scholars cited the Dead Sea Scrolls, appeared unheralded on a humid afternoon, and I could hardly get it home fast enough for the first listen. With fall came word of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and then in January Desire appeared. Is it any wonder Dylan remains the gold standard for songwriting, in my eyes and ears?

These posts by William T. Vogt Jr. about his encounters with the original Bob Dylan bootlegs — notably the legendary Great White Wonder – really take me back. Specifically, they take me back to the northern New Jersey burg of Fair Lawn, and a tiny no-name record store on Route 4 that was nothing more than a large walnut-paneled room with indoor-outdoor carpeting, a cash register, and a long bin of vinyl record albums that included — shhhhhh! — a pretty impressive selection of white-jacketed bootlegs.

There I did purchase my first boot, an acceptable Led Zeppelin concert recording called Bonzo’s Birthday Party that had a mimeographed picture of a pig popping out of a birthday cake. (It didn’t sound so hot, but it was hardly worse than The Song Remains the Same, which Zep for some reason was content to let stand as its only official live album for too long.) There also did I purchase my second boot, a fairly classy looking item called Joaquin Antique (walking antique, get it?) that contained, akong with an assortment of oddments, the original versions of five key songs from the original version of Blood on the Tracks. All of a sudden I was a music scholar, critically listening through clicks and pops to discover new — that is to say, old — incarnations of songs on their way to immortality. 

This was Bergen County, N.J. The only two movie theaters within walking distance were the Century Plaza, a twin theater next door to the Garden State Plaza in Paramus (where I had the magical experience of seeing my first James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice), and the Hyway Theater in Fair Lawn (where I had the equally magical experience of seeing Jaws on a night when literally every seat was occupied and the audience was completely in the palm of the director’s hand). So believe me when I tell you that a hole-in-the-wall record store along Route 4 that sold bootlegs was the next best thing to a portal into an alternate universe — a much more interesting one.

One day I walked into the hole-in-the-wall to buy some more boots, only to have the proprietor look away and say distantly that he couldn’t stock them anymore. So that was that, for the time being. There were other stores selling boots, and then CDs and the Internet and eBay and all the other avenues for distributing the things diehard fans want. Joaquin Antique resurfaced as Blood on the Tracks: New York Sessions, which set the original versions of the five songs in with the original release. I don’t doubt for a second that a double-disc Bootleg Series release is in the cards, either before or after Dylan shuffles off this mortal coil, and I’ll buy it the second it comes out. Right now, I’m just happy to have study material for exploring one of the landmarks of American popular music.    

As I’ve written elsewhere, most of the arguments against bootlegs simply don’t wash, particularly as applied to concert recordings. I also think that for all of the Eighties and most of the Nineties, Dylan has been better served artistically by bootleggers than by his own record company — or his own instincts, which caused him to hold back songs like “Blind Willie McTell” while releasing Down in the Groove. And while I don’t much like Dylan’s gospel period, I think if Columbia had granted his wishes and released Solid Rock as a live album, it would have won quite a few more converts.   

All I know is that when I heard there was another version of Blood on the Tracks in existence, I had to hear it, just as when I learned that there were actually scores of Basement Tapes recordings, I had to hear all of them. I’d prefer to hear them in authorized form, without a bunch of Band outtakes thrown in to foster the idea that those sessions were some kind of mutual give-and-take between Dylan and The Band, but for the moment Columbia and Dylan seem content to toss out collections of stray songs from movie soundtracks and other ephemera. 

I mean, put Tell-Tale Signs up against A Tree With Roots and tell me which collection does more justice to Dylan’s artistry.

Blue Monday (Fess lesson)

Wanna learn how to play piano licks like Professor Longhair? Of course you do. And here’s another New Orleans legend, Allen Toussaint, to show you how. That intro that knocked Toussaint’s socks off, by the way, is from “Big Chief.”

Painted Lady Day

The Painted Lady butterflies left home Sunday morning. “Home” in this case being a collapsible cylinder of mesh, with a floor of plastic and a cap of clear plastic up top. A butterfly breeder. 

We gave it to the Hellspawn for Christmas and mailed the order for the caterpillars sometime in January. Several weeks ago the caterpillars arrived in a plastic cup with tiny airholes. It was pre-loaded with nasty looking caterpillar food. The caterpillars must have liked it just fine, because after a few weeks they climbed to the top of the cup and turned into dangling chrysalides. We gently removed the cap, gingerly pushed a couple of paper clips through the airholes, and carefully mounted the cap on the side of the breeder.

A few days ago, the butterflies started popping out of their sheaths and flexing their wings. We plied them with orange slices and roses drizzled with sugar water, but it was clear we couldn’t keep them too long. So, Sunday morning we set the breeder in the backyard, unzipped the top and waited for the butterflies to emerge.

Here’s the first one to bid aideu, pausing on one of the laurels before setting off to make its way in the world.

Him with his foot in your mouth

In American Shaolin, his highly entertaining account of months spent studying martial arts with the actual Shaolin monks of China, Matthew Polly describes the monks’ puzzlement when he showed them videotapes of the old Kung Fu TV series. Watching David Carradine klutz his way through slow-motion routines, the monks demanded to know if this laowai — white guy — was deliberately making fun of the art with his shoddy technique:

The monks were used to highly fictionalized portrayals of the Shaolin Temple, so they weren’t bothered by the fantasy version of Shaolin in David Carradine’s Kung Fu. They were, however, shocked by the casting of David Carradine.
 
“How can he be a Shaolin monk?” Little Tiger asked. “He’s a laowai.”
 
“Actually in the story he’s half-Chinese, half-laowai,” I said. 
 
“He doesn’t look like a hun xui,” Little Tiger said. “Mixed blood.”
 
Deqing cuffed Little Tiger across the back of the head again. “Don’t use bad words.”
 
“The actor is a laowai,” I said. “He’s pretending to be half-Chinese.”
 
“That explains why his kungfu is so terrible,” Little Tiger said, as he ducked to the back row to avoid another cuff.
 
For the rest of the movie I ignored the slights to David Carradine’s kungfu skills, which were admittedly poor. (To be fair, however, he did capture that California New Age, faux-Zen blankness perfectly.) I was waiting for the climactic moment that nearly every American male who as alive in the early 1970s remembers: the scene here Carradine lifts a burning chalice to pass the final Shaolin test, permanently branding a dragon on one forearm and a tiger on the other. I hadn’t seen or heard anything like this legend since my arrival, but I had to know.
 
“Is this story true?” I asked. “Did that used to be the final test for Shaolin monks?”
 
“No,” Deqing said. “Why would we want to burn our arms like that? You might end up a cripple, never be able to make a fist again in your life. What kind of kungfu test would that be?”
 
“Americans have excellent imaginations, however,” Little Tiger offered as a consolation. “Don’t you agree, Deqing?”
 
“They make good movies,” Deqing conceded.

I mention all this not to disparage Carradine, who was in many ways an underrated actor when he wasn’t pretending to be a kung fu master — a man doesn’t get roles with Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman and Hal Ashby if he’s spent his years mastering the art of suck. It’s just ironic to think that while last week’s news stories about Carradine’s death inevitably brought out references to Kung Fu and martial arts, the same week saw the death of Shek Kin, a legitimate martial artist in his own right and a film icon for generations of moviegoers throughout Asia.      
 
As Jean Lukitch points out in this extremely knowledgeable and detailed appreciation, Shek made some 500 movies in a career that stretched from 1940 to his retirement in the mid-Nineties. Only a fraction of them are available on video, and with many of them — quickie chop-socky flicks with miniscule budgets — that’s probably just as well. With his crinkly brow and sneering mouth, Shek (sometimes identified as Shieh Kien) was invariably cast as “the evil kung fu master, scheming in a throne room dominated by a giant mural of a skull or demon,” though when given the opportunity to show some range, Shek always came through with some interesting character touches.   
 
Shek had the distinction of playing opposite the genre’s two bona fide international superstars: Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Shek’s turn as the Ginsu-fingered Mr. Han in Enter the Dragon was a memorable bit of villainy, and even though he was Lee’s senior by some thirty years, Shek held his own quite nicely while filming the climactic fight in the mirror maze.  

. . . later in his career, Shek showed he was able to effectively play against type, using his devilish smile and eyebrows to charm. In fact, over the decades “Bad Man Kin” changed into “Uncle Kin” for Hong Kong film audiences. He became the ideal “cool” grandpa. Jackie Chan played off this persona when he cast Shek as his comic nemesis in The Young Master (at top). By 1980, Chan could get a laugh from the local audience by obscuring Shek’s face in their first shot together: he prattles innocently to the “old uncle” before letting the audience see the sinister smile on Uncle Kin’s face.

Let it be noted that Polly also screened Steven Seagal’s Above the Law and Jean-Claude van Damme’s Lionheart. Though they were impressed by Seagal’s fierceness and Van Damme’s flexibility, they concluded that neither man as truly playing a hero because neither man’s character dies. I’ll leave it to you to discover their reasoning on this point.

Friday finds

I hope this doesn’t spoil your day, but the opening of the long-planned museum devoted to the Swedish pop group ABBA has been delayed for at least two years. ABBA fans will just have to console themselves by looking forward to a worldwide touring exhibit of ABBA-related paraphernalia, stocking up on ABBA hair-care products or ordering some ABBA stage costumes. Or they can rent out Muriel’s Wedding (above), the tale of how a young woman living in the Australian town of Porpoise Spit sets out to make her life “as great as an ABBA song.”    

Literary blogger starts her own Brooklyn bookstore. Go thou and buy books.

In memoriam, Steve Gilliard.

The new issue of The Biographer’s Craft is ready for your perusal. So, for that matter, is Ansible.

“. . . if he is your friend, you could call him to help you bury a body. He’d bitch about his aching back the whole time, but he’d still grab a shovel.”

It’s been a bad week for film actors associated with the martial arts. First David Carradine was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room, and now Shek Kin has passed on as well.

Biblical microfiction from Joe Z. Elisheva: “This angel sits here, silent, forever by my side. His head is bowed, but his eyes look up toward me, here as I lie on this soft stone bed of comfort. His wings, his feathers whisper without words in the gentle breeze that flows through this sealed room.”

Only a few hours left top hear Ian McMillan talk with poet Seamus Heaney.