The Wednesday Westie

How-much-is-that-Westie-in-the-window edition.

Dream projects: Quentin Tarantino

David Cronenberg (or David Lynch) and Junichiro Tanizaki. Spike Lee and Charles Mingus. Carroll Ballard and John Steinbeck. After three pairings like that, the next one should be obvious.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: Afterburn, by Colin Harrison.

Now that Quentin Tarantino’s done his men-on-a-wartime-mission-movie (Inglourious Basterds, out later this month) and his kung-fu-revenge-movie (Kill Bill) and his grindhouse-tribute-movie (Death Proof), maybe he’d like to take a crack at another heist-gone-wrong movie (or maybe a Mafia movie), this one with an A-list critical pedigree and a much wider focus: Colin Harrison’s 2000 thriller, Afterburn.

I certainly wouldn’t want anybody else casting the role of Christina Welles, an Ivy League dropout and math whiz doing time for her part in a Mafia-run truck theft ring. Paroled suspiciously early, Christina is trying to keep clear of mob boss Tony Verducci (who suspects her of cheating him out of several million dollars) and ex-lover Ricky Bocca (who feels guilty for her arrest and incarceration) when she runs into Charlie Ravich, a multimillionaire and former Vietnam POW who wants to father a child in order to keep the family line going.

Her parole had been so far off that she hadn’t allowed herself to think about what it would be like to live in Manhattan again. But now, after only a few hours, all kinds of things crowded her mind. She’d need money, that was certain. She had just over three hundred dollars in her prison account, and if she could somehow live on that for a couple of weeks, she’d be okay. She’d get a job and rent a room downtown, near First or Second Avenue. Start all over. No flashy moves. Be careful what she said to people. You could live on almost nothing if you had to. You spent every dollar carefully, that’s all. She wanted to walk along the streets, look in the store windows. She’d buy a small radio and lie on her bed and listen to WCBS-FM, the oldies station. She’d read magazines in the bookstore. She missed all the magazines, even the trashy ones. She’d go to the movies, sink into one of those seats with a Coke and some popcorn. She wanted to see a Jack Nicholson movie. Anything he was in. Yes. She wold take a bath, her first in four years. Watch the water go down the drain and fill it up again, hot as she could stand it. She’d watch the beautiful little babies in the park and think, Where has the time gone? She would try to find the next version of herself.

Harrison, like Tarantino, is incapable of self-editing. Long stretches of Afterburn read like what we old newspaper hands used to call a notebook-dump: instead of using his impressive research to tell the story, choosing the most pertinent details, Harrison packs the narrative with every scrap of information he managed to find. The novel tops four hundred pages but could have worked better and faster at three hundred.

But despite the longueurs, Afterburn works like gangbusters, and Harrison blends guilt, regret, sex, and high-finance with some of the most outrageous violence I’ve ever read, the last delivered by Verducci’s “go-to guy,” Morris, a former paramedic who puts his knowledge of the human body to some appalling uses. Tarantino may even want to play him, if only for the climax, in which a man must conduct an international business transaction under local anesthetic while Morris surgically dismantles the steel cage holding his spine together.

If Tarantino isn’t answering his phone, have my people call Steven Soderbergh’s people. This movie needs to get made, like, yesterday.

Books make it better

The optimism survey results are in and the numbers have spoken: reading books make you feel better about yourself.

While the official survey report zeroed in on the importance of a constellation live events like music concerts, theatrical performances, and speeches, the one “optimism booster” cited by more respondents than any other—88 percent—was “books.” Unfortunately, that’s not broken down by categories, so it’s not quite clear whether fiction or non-fiction lifts people’s spirits, so you should probably read a little of both, just to be on the safe side.

(Meanwhile, 56 percent of those surveyed say they feel optimistic after attending poetry readings, which was pleasantly surprising as we had not realized poetry readings were so popular—although clearly they should be!)

As a matter of fact, I have it on good authority that one book in particular does wonders for people looking to boost their self-esteem and overall sense of well-being. I conducted that survey myself, so you know the results couldn’t possibly be weighted.

Blue Monday (Vai-olins)

In the October issue of Guitar Player, guitarist Steve Vai talks about how he came to have two violinists in his touring band:

A lot of my music is pretty orchestrated and thick, so I decided to get a violin player — that’s something I’ve always wanted to do. But when I started auditioning them, I was scared to death, because most of the people who were coming in were these metal players who had awful intonation and didn’t understand how to read music. They just thought I was looking for shredders — which was about the furthest thing from the truth. And then, all the classical players who could read the music didn’t have any rock sensibility at all.  Once I turned my amps on, they all ran for the hills. I almost gave up and then Alex DePue came in the room and tore it up. I mean, this guy is the right balance of everything. He’s ferocious, he’s unbelievably respectful and professional, and he’s capable of playing impossible stuff.

Vai’s right. I thought it was impossible for anybody to get me to listen to this particular Yes song, but Alex DePue works the miracle:

But the story doesn’t end there:

After I found Alex, I kept getting calls from this woman in the Midwest named Ann Marie Calhoun. I told her, “Thanks, but we’ve already got our violin player,” and she was like, “Yeah, but I want to rock out. Please check out my tape.” So I did, and I was completely and utterly blown away.

Here is Ann Marie Calhoun playing alongside the Foo Fighters:

Here she is in a homier setting . . .

. . . and here she is with her brother, Joe Simpson, playing my most favorite Grateful Dead song ever:

Dream projects: Carroll Ballard

Pick a book that’s crying out to be adapted for film, then name the director best suited for the job. First up was David Cronenberg and Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi. Next came Spike Lee and Charles Mingus’ semi-memoir, Beneath the Underdog. And now . . .

CARROLL BALLARD: Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck.

Carroll Ballard is not a relentlessly productive filmmaker: in the thirty years since his first feature, The Black Stallion, was released in 1979, Ballard has directed only five other films. Ballard’s meticulous working methods and his preference for understatement are, to put it mildly, unfashionable in today’s film industry; his most recent movie, Duma, almost went unreleased, and was finally distributed to a handful of theaters only after Roger Ebert went to bat for it.

Except for The Nutcracker (an honorable attempt to find a non-cliched way of filming the biggest chestnut of the Christmas season), Ballard’s films deal in some fashion with mankind’s relationship with nature, whether the subject is the companionship between a shipwrecked boy and an Arabian racehorse (The Black Stallion), a motherless child who nurtures a brood of goslings and then must teach them to migrate (Fly Away Home), yacht-racers working to master the vagaries of sky and sea  (Wind), or a research scientist trying to understand the ways of wolves on the Alaskan tundra (Never Cry Wolf, based on Farley Mowatt’s proudly unreliable book). They are also sumptuously good-looking movies, often breathtakingly so — I date my lifelong fascination with Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography to the almost abstract beauty of the Mediterranean landscapes he captured in The Black Stallion. Along with his fine taste in cinematographers, Ballard brings an eye for the telling detail  and the crucial moment, honed during his early years as a documentary filmmaker.

A similar blend of artistry and documentary precision is at work in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row, set among the derelicts, prostitutes, lowlifes, eccentrics, and workers of the Monterey waterfront. The sort-of hero, Doc (loosely based on Steinbeck’s close friend Ed Ricketts), is a Renaissance man and Lothario who collects and preserves sea creatures from nearby tide pools for sale to laboratories. Cannery Row itself functions as a sort of tide pool in which exotic personalities survive, mingle, and sometimes prey upon one another, and Steinbeck observes from a rather chilly, above-it-all perspective.

In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay, the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again — quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress trees come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora’s emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong’s grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some part or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora’s — the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong’s for five quarts of beer.

Though there is already one film version of Cannery Row in existence — a weak 1982 adaptation directed by David S. Ward — the film that offers the best look at the Row in operation is Fritz Lang’s 1938 melodrama, Clash by Night, which opens with a documentary-like sequence showing the Monterey canneries coming to life as the fishing fleet comes in. It wouldn’t surprise me if the sequence influenced the Steinbeck passage quoted above.

The biggest problem with Ward’s 1982 film is that only about a quarter of it derives from Cannery Row. The rest comes from Sweet Thursday, the 1954 sequel which, following the badly flawed East of Eden, marked the beginning of Steinbeck’s decline. The Broadway-ready storyline — it was adapted as Pipe Dream, the least successful musical in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon — has Dora, owner of the local brothel, scheming with the colorful derelicts of Cannery Row to get the solitary Doc hitched up with a lovely young runaway. Aside from the shrewd casting of Nick Nolte and Debra Winger in the lead roles, Cannery Row is a sodden mess that replaces Steinbeck’s curiously poetic vision with stale sentimentality. (Ward is after all, the screenwriter behind the cuddly con men of The Sting.) Ballard couldn’t do worse if he tried; but he could certainly do much better.

Friday finds

Poems for Shark Week.

Is self-publishing a good route to landing a book contract? Check the numbers for yourself.

With publishing contracts, as with so many other deals, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

The Crooked Timber seminar on George Scialabba, all in one place for some quality reading time.

Harry Potter and the cheesy narrative lapses.

Which Hugo nominees would make good movies?

When Bob Dylan met Michael Jackson.

When Bat Segundo met China Mieville.

Dream projects: Spike Lee

The idea here is to pick a work of literature just waiting to be filmed, and pick the filmmaker who should do it. The first pick was David Cronenberg for a Junichiro Tanizaki novella. Today’s pick is . . .

SPIKE LEE: Beneath the Underdog: His World As Composed By Mingus, by Charles Mingus.

“Stormy” is a word frequently used to describe jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus (1922-1979); it also applies to his 1971 stream-of-consciousness memoir, which is literary equivalent to one of his more ambitious compositions. Just as “Pithecanthropus Erectus” alternates swinging passages of hard bop with chaotic free jazz interludes, Beneath the Underdog staggers through long rants and digressions, sometimes alternating passages of brilliant clarity with tedious accounts of sexual exploits and random digressions. As a factual account of a man’s life, Beneath the Underdog is at best dubious, but as a record of the thoughts and preoccupations of one of America’s greatest composers, it’s fascinating.

I don’t think a direct film adaptation of Beneath the Underdog is possible or even advisable, but the book would be a fine springboard for a biographical film about the man. After training up in the Forties with touring groups under Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Kid Ory in the Forties, Mingus emerged as a bandleader in the Fifties, forming a very loose, ever-shifting collection of musicians he called the Jazz Workshop. His career bridged the commercial decline of the big jazz bands and the rise of the boppers, just as his life spanned the overwhelming transformations of the civil rights era.  As Brian Priestley notes in his 1982 critical biography (still the best and most reliable work on the composer), Mingus was part of “the generation which came to maturity during and immediately after World War II, and which was no longer content to adopt either the seeming subservience of a Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated scorn of a Duke Ellington.” His rage over the slights dealt to him as a black man, combined with his readiness to joust with record companies and the music industry at large, often made Mingus a menace to his own career, as when he blew his chance to play in the orchestra of his composing idol, Duke Ellington. The account Mingus gives in Beneath the Underdog is self-serving, but the pain and humiliation of the setback is all there on the page:

This is the hero and this is the band you don’t quit, but this time you’re asked to leave because of an incident with a trombone player and arranger named Juan Tizol. Tizol wants you to play a solo he’s written where bowing is required. You raise the solo an octave, where the bass isn’t too muddy. He doesn’t like that and he comes to the room under the stage where you’re practicing at intermission and comments that you’re like the rest of the niggers in the band, you can’t read. You ask Juan how he’s different from the other niggers and he states that one of the ways that he is different is that HE IS WHITE. So you run his ass upstairs. You leave the rehearsal room and proceed toward the stage with your bass and take your place and at the moment Duke brings down the baton for “A-Train” and the curtain of the Apollo Theatre goes up, a yelling, whooping Tizol rushes out and lunges at you with a bolo knife. The rest you remember mostly from Duke’s own words in his dressing room as he changes after the show.

“Now, Charles,” he says, looking amused, putting Cartier links into the cuffs of his beautiful handmade shirt, “you could have forewarned me — you left me out of the act entirely! At least you could have let me cue in a few chords as you ran through that Nijinsky routine. I congratulate you on your performance, but why didn’t you and Juan inform me about the adagio you planned so that we could score it? I must say I never saw a large man so agile — I never saw anybody make such tremendous leaps! The gambado over the piano carrying your bass was colossal. When you exited after that I thought, ‘That man’s really afraid of Juan’s knife and at the speed he’s going he’s probably home in bed by now.’ But no, back you came through the same door with your bass still intact. For a moment I was hopeful you’d decided to sit down and play bu instead you slashed Juan’s chair in two with a fire axe! Really, Charles, that’s destructive. Everybody knows Juan has a knife but nobody ever took it seriously — he likes to pull it out and show it to people, you understand. So I’m afraid, Charles — I’ve never fired anybody — you’ll have to quit my band. I don’t need any new problems. Juan’s an old problem, I can cope with that, but you seem to have a whole bag of new tricks. I must ask you to be kind enough to give me your notice, Mingus.”

The charming way he says it, it’s like he’s paying you a compliment. Feeling honored, you shake hands and resign.

There are at least three reasons why Spike Lee should tackle a film about Charles Mingus. Lee’s filmic biography of Malcolm X is one of his best works, and I’d like to see him return to the jazz milieu he explored in Mo Better Blues.  Most of all, Lee would be unflinching about the ways racism distorted Mingus’ life and career. Unlike Clint Eastwood’s biography of Charlie Parker, Bird, which offered viewers some comic relief by devoting lots of screen time to Parker’s 1949 tour with Red Rodney — during which Parker presented Rodney, a white man, as “Albino Red” — Lee’s film would be gutsy enough to keep the racial theme as uncomfortable as possible. And there’s no question that the splendor of the composer’s music guarantees a monster of a soundtrack .

Laugh if you will, but I can picture Ice Cube playing Mingus. The rapper is a better actor than he gets credit for — his multilayered performance as Doughboy is the main reason anyone remembers Boyz N The Hood — and his glowering presence is a close match for Mingus at his most forbidding.

Margarita blogging

Maybe it’s the half-dozen margaritas I consumed this evening, but for me this passage is bursting with poetry.  If Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and W.S. Merwin got together to write a poem, they could hardly come up with something so filled with beauty and potential that it strains the skin of the air touching my eardrums:

The Bigsby vibrato added to Neil Young’s Les Paul (also occasionally available as a factory extra on a Les Paul) makes a very real contribution to his tone. Used to give lead lines anything from a jagged, angular irregularity to a bouncing, wobbly vibe, Young’s Bigsby also functions as a trigger into feedback, and is used to bend decaying notes to nail down the howl zone.

Of course, truly effective use of feedback is enabled by the right amp and the right amp settings. The first part of the equation is achieved by a surprisingly simple, petite piece of gear: a late-1950s tweed Fender Deluxe. This little beastie, with just two volume controls and a single, shared tone control, puts out a mere 15 watts from two 6V6GT output tubes, and carries just a single 12” speaker, but has powered Neil Young’s rock sound in stadiums and arenas around the world since he acquired it in 1967 (although the sound is fed through other, larger amps and its own monitoring system in order to be heard on large stages). A raw, hot little amp, the tweed Deluxe breaks up early, with a lot of tube-induced compression at most volume levels. Up past around 11 o’clock on the dial these amps really don’t get much louder, they just saturate more, issuing increasing levels of distortion tone. (Young’s Deluxe is reported as being rebiased to use larger 6L6 output tubes; the change wouldn’t increase its volume all that much, but would most likely fatten up the lows some and give the sound more body.)

The Deluxe’s hot, hotter, and hottest gain structure brings us to the second part of Young’s lead/feedback tone equation: the settings. In order to access the Deluxe’s varying degrees of overdrive, Young uses a custom-made amp-control switching device known simply as “the Whizzer.” Consisting of two parts, the foot controller and the mechanical automated switching device that physically turns the amps knobs, the Whizzer allows Young to stomp a footswitch on the floor to command the unit to twist the Deluxe’s volume and tone controls to any of a number of carefully determined preset positions. As such, and rather incredibly—if you’re familiar with the Neil Young overdrive sound—he uses no booster, overdrive, or distortion pedals to achieve his unhinged tone; just the little 50-year-old tweed Deluxe, and the Whizzer.

It may help you to understand if I explain that one of the happiest moments of my life was holding an Epiphone Les Paul Standard in my hands and knowing it was mine to take home. Years of cruising pawn shops had finally paid off, and after a setup at a reputable guitar shop, I had a beautiful ebony electric to take home and keep alongside my Epiphone Dot. I love it dearly.

My pledge to you, good people, is that if I ever score a serious book deal, one of my first acts will be to order a genuine Gibson Les Paul with a Bigsby tailpiece. I will make ungodly noises with it at inappropriate times of the day and night, and I will be glad to do so in honor of anyone who clicks on my Web site.

Promise.

The Wednesday Westie

Special-guest-Westie edition.

Dream projects: David Cronenberg

Since books and movies are my two most frequently blogged-about subjects, I’m going to spend the next several days combining the two in a semi-meme. More of a challenge than a meme. The point is to identify a work of literature that ought to be made into a film and point to the living director best suited for the job. I invite any and all lit-bloggers and film-bloggers to weigh in with their own choices and let me know so I can link to their posts. I’ve got books in mind for, among others, Spike Lee, Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and Carroll Ballard, but I’m going to get things rolling with a nightmarish dream project, an extreme choice for one of our best and most extreme filmmakers.

DAVID CRONENBERG: The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

In a review of Dead Ringers, a New Yorker critic described David Cronenberg’s storytelling mode as “debonair cruelty.” That’s a pretty good description of Junichiro Tanizaki’s blackly comic 1935 novella about a sixteenth-century Japanese warlord whose feats of valor on the battlefield are rooted in a bizarre erotic obsession  formed when, as a boy, he watched women preparing the severed heads of enemy soldiers taken as trophies in battle. In particular, his fixation centered on a young woman’s enigmatic smile as she prepared a “woman-head” for presentation. In order to experience the rapture of this vision once again, the budding warlord becomes the catalyst for a revenge plot that changes the course of a small, extremely bloody piece of history during the period of Warring States.

Tanizaki’s novella couches this tale in a parody of tediously didactic Confucian history — sort of the Asian version of Parson Weems — that upends the idea of ignoring a hero’s faults and listing only his virtues for moral instruction, and the lecturing tone gets drier and funnier as the exploits get ever more outrageous. Since just about every Tanizaki story except The Makioka Sisters (his best known work outside Japan) hinges on some kind of outre sexual obsession, the author is offering his readers an exceptionally shrewd self-parody as well.

The mingling of beauty, grotesquerie, and cynical humor in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi would be right up Cronenberg’s alley. He may have replenished his bank account with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, but we’ve already seen how commercial success only whets his appetite for extreme material. This is, after all, the man who followed relatively conventional genre films like The Dead Zone and The Fly with Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, then detoured for a Broadway adaptation (M. Butterfly) before heading right back to the edge with Crash. Watch the bondage scene in Dead Ringers, then imagine how Cronenberg would handle a scene like this:

When Hoshimaru arrived at the attic on the third night, an extraordinary head lay before the girl. It was that of a young samurai of twenty-one or -two, but, strangely, the nose was missing. It was an attractive face. The complexion was wonderfully pale, the freshly shaven places glowed, and the glossy black hair was as splendid as that which draped luxuriously over the girl’s shoulders and down her back. No doubt the warrior had been an extremely handsome man. His eyes and mouth were of classic form and there was a certain delicacy in the firm, well proportioned, masculine features. Had there been a fine, straight nose in the middle, the face would have been the epitome of the young warrior, just as a master dollmaker might conceive it. But, for some reason, the nose was missing, as if it had been sliced off with a sharp blade, bone and all, from the brow to the upper lip. A pug nose might not have been so sorely missed; but one would expect to find a sculpturesque protuberance soaring from the middle of this splendid face. Instead, that vital feature had been cleanly removed, as if scooped off with a spatula, leaving a flat, crimson wound. s a result the face was uglier and more comical than those of ordinary ugly men. The girl carefully ran her comb through the noseless head’s lustrous black hair and retied the topknot; then, as she always did, she gazed at the center of the face, where the nose should have been, and smiled. As usual, the boy was enchanted by her expression, but the surge of emotion he experienced at that moment was far stronger than any he had felt before. Juxtaposed with the mutilated head, the girl’s face glowed with the pride and the joy of the living, the embodiment of flawless beauty. And her smile, precisely because it was so girlish and unaffected, now appeared to be brimming with the most cynical malice, and provided the boy with a wheel on which to spin endless fantasies. He thought he would never tire of gazing at her smiling face. The fantasies it inspired were inexhaustible and, before he was aware of it, had lured his soul away to a land of ambrosial dreams where he himself had become this noseless head and was living with the girl in a world inhabited only by the two of them. This fantasy was very much to his liking. It made him happier than he had ever been before.

I’m imagining Cronenberg’s eye for color and texture at work among the silk robes, polished floors and bloody carnage. I’m also imagining the blend of lushness and austerity Howard Shore could bring to the soundtrack music. Until he broke the bank with The Lord of the Rings, Shore’s best and most challenging work was done for Cronenberg, and he needs another challenge. And I’d like to see the actress who could play Lady Kikyo, the tormented noblewoman whose wish for vengeance allows the hero to realize his deepest wish, and provides a closing tableau that would give the definitive answer to anyone who wondered if Cronenberg could manage to come up with anything wilder than Crash.

ADDENDUM: If Cronenberg doesn’t want the job, second choice would be David Lynch. From Blue Velvet to silk kimonos would be a natural evolution for Lynch.